About:
The HideOut is the Blue Ridge Mountains on the backside of the Beech Mt Ski Resort on Dark Ridge Rd at 3000 ft elevation surrounded by mountains, 1.5 miles up Dark Ridge Rd at the top and the intersection with Beech Mt. Rd it is 4000 ft. We are in a secluded quiet and safe community with about a dozen homes in a one mile radius.
One mile from the Tennessee line, 2 miles from the Compression Falls TN, 13.6 miles from the Elk River Falls NC, 17 miles from Watauga Point Recreation area on Watauga Lake TN, 8 miles from Beech Mountain Ski Resort, 13 miles from Sugar Mountain Ski Resort, 21 miles from Grandfather Mountain and 28.6 miles to The Linville Caverns. The closest towns are; Elk Park NC 8.5 miles, Banner Elk NC 9, Newland NC 13, Roan Mountain TN 14 Boone NC 21, Hampton TN 23, Elizabethton TN 28 and Spruce Pine NC 30,
You will be free to hike my trails and explore any part of my property except the house and outbuildings. The pond’s are full of Rainbow Trout and BlueGill fish that are like pets. You can feed the fish but no fishing.
History:
Dark Ridge HideOut; Is a 20 acre parcel with the house and barns, it is where I grew up and helped my parents with the farm chores. It is also where my dad grew up, the current main house was built in 1905 and my dad was born in it that same year. There are two big barns; one tobacco barn and a combination cattle and tobacco barn built almost entirely just by my parents. They built the cattle/tobacco barn in the early 1940″s and after the only other original general barn fell due to age, heavy snow and a freak high wind gust in 1962.
Then they built back the current replacement barn that would be just for hanging tobacco. All of the wood for both barns was harvested and sawed into lumber from Hemlock trees on this property with a portable sawmill. My parents and grandparents lived off of the land here, which originally consisted of over 100 acres in the late 1800’s, but it was 82 acres when I was born and until it was divided in 2005 when I got the main homeplace part while caring for my mother for the last 7 years of her life until she passed at age 96 in 2007.
There were four main fields; two for cow pasture, one meadow to grow hay “now is growing Christmas trees”, and the main one on my part now, “where all crops were grown” which is now where most of the camp sites are. Some of my chores was to go to the pasture “morning and evening” and bring the milk cows in for milking, and do the milking every day before and after school, feed the hogs and chickens, gather the egg’s in the evening, let the chickens out in the morning “on my way to the cow pasture” and close the chicken house in the late evening after they all went in to roost to protect them from critters like opossums, raccoons and wildcats.
We lived almost entirely off of the land, It was a family effort to raise crops for food and income, like corn, oats and hay to feed the cows and a horse to farm with. Tobacco was the main yearly cash crop but we also raised boxwood to sell. We raised other crops like beans, corn, cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes and a garden with a variety of other vegetables. We had fruit trees and berries, like apples, cherries, raspberries and blackberries.
My mother canned everything that she could, and we had a cellar for food storage until the basement under the house was completed. There we had shelves for the canned food and bins for storage of potatoes and apples to last through the winter. We had a coal stove for heat and a wood cook stove in the kitchen. My mother made her own dresses with a Singer sewing machine manually operated by rocking a foot pedal, and the ladies in the community would have quilting parties to make quilts and gossip. During the war years; my parents raised sugarcane and made molasses as a necessary replacement for sugar. Because of the war, there was a sugar shortage. Making molasses was done by harvesting and stripping the cane stalks then squeezing the juice out of the stalks by feeding it into a grinder being turned by a horse tethered to a pole that was walking in a circle around it then boiling it then into molasses. The boiler was usually a stainless steel vat approximately 1’x3’x6′ ; it would sit on a foundation of rock or brick designed to feed wood in the front and vent out the back.
There was usually one cane grinder and boiler shared by several families in the community to use one at a time, during the harvest season. It was a community party event that was repeated many times as families would take turns using the equipment. By having the events one at a time they could help each other. It would last sometimes for a few weeks until everyone was finished. The season started when the first family who’s crop was ready, they would get the caine grinder and boiler and start to process their molasses, they would spread the word. Some would come to help because they would get help in return with their crop, some would help to get some of the molasses if they didn’t have their own, some came for the campfire party atmosphere and to make music.
As each one finished the next family “who’s crop was ready” would get the equipment and process their molasses. The process started early in the morning and lasted all day and lasted into the night until that run was finished, then started another run the next morning, repeated every day until completed.
The molasses had to be continually stirred and skimmed, so making a party out of the event was a benefit, the more people at the gathering the more there was to take a turn stirring and skimming. That era ended when the war ended before I was born, a few people continued the tradition. I grew up hearing about the molasses boiling “party” events of the past. So when I moved back home and caring for my mother until her passing at age 96 in 2007, I utilized her knowledge of the process and raised a crop of sugarcane and I found a local resident who still had an original caine grinder, “it had been modified to be driven by a tractor pto” and boiler “that I was able to borrow” and I had my own molasses boiling “party” event with the community residents participating and reminiscing. We had as many as 50 honeybee hives and we robbed the hives twice a year.
One year we collected over 800lbs of honey, We also taped maple trees the last week in February, collected sugar water “sap” and boiled it down into maple syrup. So I guess we had a sweet life! We had cows for milk, butter and buttermilk. We had steers for beef, and hogs for ham, bacon and sausage, chickens for eggs and roosters for Sunday dinner with the preacher.
For us the three meals of the day was called; breakfast, dinner and supper.
