Excerpt from The Men of the Mountains: The Story of the Southern Mountaineer and His Kin of the Piedmont; With an Account of Some of the Agencies of Progress Among Them

America knows least of what is most American. Melting-pot of the nations, with Europe's and Asia's dross thrown in along with their good metal, she is likely to forget, in all this conglomerate, the base of the alloy, which made the nation and which must yet preserve it. In the providence of God there has been saved to America a long wedge of that pure metal a golden wedge of Ophir. Stretching from North to South, scarce two hundred miles inland, are the mountains that formed the frontier of English America when America became a nation. These mountains are filled with the stock of the Revolution, a race with the primitive virtues that won our liberties, that extended our borders, that preserved the ideal of freedom in its great hour of trial.

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