A Hermit of the Smoky Mountains?

Saint Paul the Hermit, Jusepe de Ribera, ca. 1638

Dig into obscure documents from 19th century America and you’re liable to find intriguing accounts of hermits. I’ve investigated the stories of several Southern Appalachian hermits and will continue to update those accounts. 

For now, let me introduce yet another eccentric with a scruffy beard and a scholarly bent. If the newspaper reporter is correct in placing him in “South” rather than “North” Carolina then it does narrow down the possibilities for precisely where he might have lived. Northern Oconee County? Pickens County? Or perhaps the Dark Corner of Greenville County? In any event, it is curious that the reporter alluded to the “Smoky Mountains of South Carolina.”

My initial research has yielded no information beyond the newspaper article itself but I won’t give up.  As usual with these tantalizing stories, you wish the writer could have told us more than he did.  Our hermit, on his way home from an Atlanta book- run, garnered attention and perhaps more than he would have wished, as he passed through Gainesville, Georgia. That’s all we know. At least for now.

Macon Telegraph [Macon, Georgia] April 5, 1897

QUEER OLD HERMIT.

Gainesville Visited by a Recluse From the Mountains of South Carolina.

Gainesville, Ga., April 4. — A very queer and curious specimen of humanity passed through this city the other day. A brief sketch of him and his life — the ideal life of a hermit of the woods — may prove interesting reading.

He gives his life as one of entire solitude, living aloof from the world out in a small hut over in the Smoky Mountains of South Carolina, but says that he is known far and wide all over this country. It was with much difficulty that he could be induced to speak at all, but when he had been given a good meal and had been taken to a warm cozy fireside and had a few pennies stored away in his old trousers' pocket, which were collected from the curious crowd about him, he threw off his mantle of faked dumbness and proceeded to narrate quite an interesting history of himself, his trials and successes is his area of travel.

He looks like a model Georgia cracker but converses as a wise old sage. He says that he is no tramp, but a true, honest and upright man, and that his only pleasure in life consists in living the life of one banished from society, away from a precise and an exacting, cruel world.

He has been on a trip to Atlanta for the purpose of purchasing a few needed books, for he could procure them there a few cents cheaper than elsewhere. He is now on his return trip carrying with him forty pounds of literature swung in a sack across his back. With his huge bundle of books, his large, long walking staff, his gray, grizzly and tangled beard, and his peculiar and cute manner, he presents quite an attractive and curious sight.

He told of his Irish parentage, being born in Dublin, Ireland, of his early childhood and his progress along these lines. He told of his love affairs and his marriage, his wife's sad death, and of his trials and successes as a school master and professor, told of being connected with several notable institutions of learning. He told of his service in the army, and of his privations in the service. He told how the people had treated him in his travels, of his life as a hermit with his home In the woods, no one he could call his friend, no one that cared what became of him, with only his walking staff, his book and the sad, fearful silence to keep him company, but he has accustomed himself to these things and cares not for them. He can stare the whole world in the face and not twitch a muscle.

Having told all this he joked a bit in a dry, cynical manner, and, warming up to his subject, he displayed a little of his oratorical powers in a short address. He spoke of ancient Rome, of the old heroes, quoted fluently from Shakespeare, touched on infidel religion. mythology, philosophy, geology, etc., and seemed to be personally and familiarly acquainted with all these things, he is surely a "diamond in the rough” and shows by his discourse that he is a smart and learned old individual, but owing to his total banishment from society, he appears uncouth and talks quite strangely at times.

The man is certainly an interesting, odd old character, and would furnish food for entertaining study.

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See also, “A Gathering of Hermits”

https://heartofthecowees.blogspot.com/2024/09/a-gathering-of-hermits.html