Climb aboard the wagon to yesterday's Blue Ridge...

By Bob Heafner © 1996-2012

Online: December, 2012

The Mountain Laurel is an online journey into "the Heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains." Here you will meet people like Ella Boyd, a mountain midwife, and Henry Harris, who left home at age 13, to make his fortune in the rough and tumble coal fields of West Virginia.

These people and the times and places where they lived are as tightly woven into the American tapestry as Valley Forge and the Wilderness Road. The stories of their lives are a link to a bygone era and the memories they shared are a national treasure.

Close your eyes for a moment, imagine an old country store at a mountain crossroad with a counter worn smooth by years of hands and commerce. Feel the warmth and smell the wood burning in the pot bellied stove, hear the laughter of neighbors gathered 'round sharing a "tale."

In The Mountain Laurel we can travel together to a time before the chestnut blight swept through the Blue Ridge and killed the vast groves of American chestnut trees; before paved roads, electricity and tourists; all the way back to a simpler way of life. It was a time of grist mills, log cabins and family farms where we'll get to know the people and places in the "Heart of the Blue Ridge."