Let’s start with that next-to-last word of the headline.
If you visit Eastern Tennessee or Western North Carolina, you’ll immediately mark yourself as an outsider if you pronounce Appalachian as Ap-pull-lay-shun. It’s Ap-pull-latch-un to those who live there, with that last syllable dropping down hard as a stone.
Appalachia touches 13 states and extends from Northern Mississippi to Southern New York. Famous for its national park, the most visited in the United States, the Smoky Mountains is a sub-range of the Appalachians joining North Carolina and Tennessee. Many of the first white settlers who first made the Smokies home were Scots-Irish, hard-scrabble folks who built cabins and barns, and cleared the land for plowing. Logging eventually became a major industry, followed by mills that took advantage of the natural resources, swift streams, and cheap labor. With the coming of the railroad and automobiles, tourists traveled north—and still do—from places like Savannah, St. Augustine, and Charleston, seeking solace from the South’s summer heat in the cool uplands….