Tag: Qualla Boundary

19 Blue Ridge Mountains Trivia Answers

How many of the Blue Ridge Mountains trivia questions I asked in last week’s blog, https://janetswritingblog.com/2019/08/11/19-blue-ridge-mountains-trivia-questions/, were you able to answer?

#BlueRidgeMtnsOfNC #PostcardBook
The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina by Janet Morrison

I indicated that all the answers could be found in the vintage postcard book I wrote, The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. These trivia questions (and the answers supplied in today’s blog post) are my way of celebrating the fifth anniversary of the publication of the book by Arcadia Publishing on August 25, 2014.

Here are the questions and answers

1.  Why was Grandfather Mountain named a member of the international network of Biosphere Reserves in 1992?  Because it supported 42 rare and endangered species. Just on that one mountain!

2. What does Linville Falls in North Carolina have in common with Niagara Falls?  They are both caprock waterfalls, meaning the top layer of rock is harder that the underlying stone. Erosion causes the waterfall to migrate upstream over time. It is believed that Linville Falls was once 12 miles downstream from its present location.

3.  How did Edwin Wiley Grove make his fortune which enabled him to build the Grove Park Inn in Ashevile, North Carolina?  He sold Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic.

4.  What part did the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) play in the construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway during The Great Depression?  The men who were members of the CCC assisted with the paving and landscaping of the Blue Ridge Parkway. What a magnificent gift they left us!

5.  When George W. Vanderbilt purchased Mt. Pisgah in 1897, what grand plan did the mountain become part of temporarily?  The 125,000-acre Biltmore Estate. (It’s no longer part of the estate.)

6.  What groups of people were housed at Assembly Inn in Montreat, North Carolina in 1942?  290 Japanese and German internees.

7.  Jerome Freeman bought 400 acres of land in Rutherford County, North Carolina that included the Chimney Rock around 1870 for $25. How much did the State of North Carolina pay for Chimney Rock Park in 2007?  $24 million.

8.  What new breed of hunting dog was developed by a German pioneer family in the late 1700s in the Plott Balsams subrange of the Blue Ridge Mountains?  The Plott Hound, which just happens to be the official State Dog of North Carolina.

9.  What is an early 20th century feat of engineering on the Newfound Gap Road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park?  The road crosses over itself. This example of a helix is called “The Loop.”

10.  How fast can a black bear run?   30 to 35 miles per hour.

11.  It is illegal in Great Smoky Mountains National Park to willfully get within how many feet of a black bear?  150 feet.

12.  What is the name of the 57,000 acres of land purchased by the Cherokee in the 1800s and held in trust by the United States Government?  Qualla Boundary

13.  Is Qualla Boundary technically a reservation? No, a reservation is land that the United States Government gives to an American Indian tribe. The Cherokees purchased their land.

14.  Did the Cherokee people lived in tipis in the 1700s and 1800s?  No, they lived in houses.

15.  What forest contains one of the largest groves of old-growth trees in the Eastern United States?  Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest

16.  What hydroelectric dam was used in the 1993 Harrison Ford movie, The Fugitive?  The Cheoah Dam

17.  What is the tallest dam east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States?  Fontana Dam.

18.  One of the oldest postcards in my book is of Cullowhee Normal School in the mid- to late-1920s. What is the name of that school today?  Western Carolina University.

19.  Started in 1935, the Blue Ridge Parkway’s “missing link” was completed in 1987. What is the connecting one-fourth-mile long piece that filled the “missing link” called? The Linn Cove Viaduct.

How did you do?

How many of the 19 questions did you answer correctly? I hope you enjoyed trying to answer the questions and seeing the answers today. If you want to learn more about the mountains of North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, please ask for The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, by Janet Morrison, at your local bookstore, online at Amazon.com, or purchase it directly from the publisher at https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/. It’s available in paperback and as an ebook.

The contract I signed with Arcadia Publishing was for five years, so you’d better get a copy of the book while it’s still being published. I don’t know if my contract will be extended.

Since my last blog post

I’ve finally gotten into a rhythm for writing the scene outline according to C.S. Lakin’s template. It sounds backward to be writing the scene outline after writing the book, but the questions asked in the template, along with five questions I added after reading a couple of articles by Janice Hardy, are making every scene in the book stronger. It’s slow going, but well worth the time and effort.

Due to technical problems, I was unable to include images of any of the postcards from my book in today’s blog post.

Until my next blog post

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, @janetmorrisonbk. If you’d like to follow my business page on Facebook, it’s Janet Morrison, Writer.

I hope you have a good book to read. I’m reading The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead and still listening to Resistance Women, by Jennifer Chiaverini.

If you’re a writer, I hope you have quality writing time.

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog. You could have spent the last few minutes doing something else, but you chose to read my blog.

Let’s continue the conversation

Feel free to let me know in the comments section below or on Twitter or Facebook how you did on the trivia questions. If you have any other comments or questions for me about the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains, I’ll welcome and try to answer them.

Janet

19 Blue Ridge Mountains Trivia Questions

August 25, 2019 will mark the fifth anniversary of the publication of my vintage postcard book, The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. To mark this milestone, I’m testing your knowledge of some of the interesting facts I included in the book.

#BlueRidgeMtnsOfNC #PostcardBook
The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina by Janet Morrison

The book covers the 23 westernmost counties in North Carolina and the three counties in eastern Tennessee in which a portion of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is located. If you have the book, you have my permission to cheat. That’s only fair to those of you who purchased my book. I’ll ask a few questions. You’ll find the answers in my blog post on August 19, 2019.

Although most of the original postcards are in color, they appear in black and white in both of the book’s formats. I tried to include pictures of several of the postcards in today’s blog post, but due to technical problems I was only able to post one vintage postcard image.

Here are the questions:

1.  Why was Grandfather Mountain named a member of the international network of Biosphere Reserves in 1992?

#GrandfatherMtn #GrandfatherMountain
Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina

2. What does Linville Falls in North Carolina have in common with Niagara Falls?

3.  How did Edwin Wiley Grove make his fortune which enabled him to build the Grove Park Inn in Ashevile, North Carolina?

4.  What part did the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) play in the construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway during The Great Depression?

5.  When George W. Vanderbilt purchased Mt. Pisgah in 1897, what grand plan did the mountain become part of temporarily? 

6.  What groups of people were housed at Assembly Inn in Montreat, North Carolina in 1942?

7.  Jerome Freeman bought 400 acres of land in Rutherford County, North Carolina that included the Chimney Rock around 1870 for $25. How much did the State of North Carolina pay for Chimney Rock Park in 2007?

8.  What new breed of hunting dog was developed by a German pioneer family in the late 1700’s in the Plott Balsams subrange of the Blue Ridge Mountains?

9.  What is an early 20th century feat of engineering on the Newfound Gap Road in Great Smoky Mountains National Park?

10.  How fast can a black bear run?  

11.  It is illegal in Great Smoky Mountains National Park to willfully get within how many feet of a black bear?

12.  What is the name of the 57,000 acres of land purchased by the Cherokee in the 1800s and held in trust by the United States Government?

13.  Is Qualla Boundary technically a reservation?

14.  Did the Cherokee people lived in tipis?

15.  What forest contains one of the largest groves of old-growth trees in the Eastern United States? 

16.  What hydroelectric dam was used in the 1993 Harrison Ford movie, The Fugitive?

17.  What is the tallest dam east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States?

18.  One of the oldest postcards in my book is of Cullowhee Normal School in the mid- to late-1920s. What is the name of that school today?

19.  Started in 1935, the Blue Ridge Parkway’s “missing link” was completed in 1987. What is the connecting one-fourth-mile long piece that filled the “missing link” called?

In case you’d like to take the easy way out and find the answers to all these questions in one book, you may order The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, by Janet Morrison, in paperback or e-book from Amazon.com, request it at your local bookstore, or order it directly from https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/. Time is short. I’ll supply the answers in my blog post next Monday, August 19.

The contract I signed with Arcadia Publishing was for five years, so you’d better get a copy of the book while it’s still being published.

Since my last blog post

I discovered that the links that I had on my blog to my presence on several social media networks were not working properly, except for the one to my Pinterest account. Therefore, I removed the links to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I’ll announce in a future blog post when those links are up and running again.

Until my next blog post

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, @janetmorrisonbk. If you’d like to follow my business page on Facebook, it’s Janet Morrison, Writer. If you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn, go to https://www.linkedin.com/in/janet-morrison-writer.

I hope you have a good book to read. I’m reading Searching for Sylvie, by Jean Kwok.

If you’re a writer, I hope you have quality writing time.

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog. You could have spent the last few minutes doing something else, but you chose to read my blog.

Let’s continue the conversation

Please don’t include any of the trivia answers in your comments. If you want to indicate how many of them you think you know the answers to, you may indicate that number or the numbers of the questions you think you can answer.

Read my book or read my blog post next Monday for all the answers.

Janet

10 Things I Learned about Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Although the name of my vintage postcard book is The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, one of the chapters is about the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Qualla Boundary. One of my blog posts in August was about the Eastern Band Cherokee Indians. Their land is the Qualla Boundary.

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The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, by Janet Morrison on a shelf at Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar in Asheville, NC in August, 2016.

 

In today’s post I want to share 10 things I learned about the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as I did the research to write my vintage postcard book.

1. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is located in Swain and Haywood Counties in North Carolina and Blount, Sevier, and Cocks Counties in Tennessee.

2. A gap is a low point in an Appalachian Mountain ridge. Gaps are called notches or passes in other parts of the United States.

3. A new gap in the Smoky Mountains was discovered in 1872 more than a mile from Indian Gap. The newfound gap was aptly named Newfound Gap.

4. Although Clingmans Dome is the highest peak in Great Smoky Mountains National Park at an elevation of 6,643 feet, Mount LeConte is the tallest mountain from base to summit in the Great Smoky Mountains. Mount LeConte’s elevation is 6,593 feet, and it rises 5,301 feet from its base to its peak.

5. When a grassroots effort to raise $10 million to save the Great Smokies from logging came up short, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. donated the $5 million needed.

6. President Franklin D. Roosevelt allocated $1.5 million in federal funds to purchase the last of the land wanted for Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

7. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1940.

8. It is illegal to willfully get within 150 feet of a black bear in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

9. Newfound Gap Road (US-441) tunnels under itself at one place, forming a helix.

10. Much of the forest in Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been ravaged by the balsam woolly adelgid, an insect imported from Europe.

Want to know more about the Great Smoky Mountains? Look for my vintage postcard book, The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. It can be purchased online from Amazon or at some wonderful independent bookstores. If your favorite bookstore does not have the book, please ask them to order it from Arcadia Publishing and The History Press. It is also available for e-readers.

mountain-trip-aug-16-004
The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, by Janet Morrison, (center of photo) as displayed at Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar in Asheville, NC.

I was delighted a couple of weeks ago to find my book still prominently displayed at Battery Park Book Exchange and Champagne Bar in Asheville, North Carolina. This fabulous bookstore is located in the Grove Arcade Building, an iconic 269,000-square-foot downtown Asheville destination built in 1929. An image of a matte-finish postcard of the building is included in my book.

I hope you’re always reading a good book.

Until my next blog in a few days,

Janet

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The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

Writing The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina was educational for me and I hope it is for its readers. Today my blog post is a list of 10 things I learned about The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians as I did the research for that vintage postcard book.

Mt. trip Dec.11-14,2014 037
My book on the shelf at Battery Park Book Exchange & Champagne Bar in Asheville, NC.

  1. The legal name for the Cherokee people in North Carolina is The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
  2. Because “Native American” can refer to anyone born in America, The North American Indian Women’s Association recommends using the term American Indians.
  3. The Great Smoky Mountains lay in the middle of the Cherokee Indians’ territory in the mid-1600s when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto arrived.
  4. In the 1820s, a Cherokee by the name of Sequoyah invented the Cherokee syllabary, making the Cherokee one of the first American Indian tribes to have a written language.
  5. Cherokee women have always had much power within the tribe, owning property, and administering justice.
  6. Descendants of the Cherokee Indians who hid out in the mountains to avoid the 1838 forced march to Oklahoma known as the Trail of Tears lived on a land trust called the Qualla Boundary.
  7. The land the US government gives to an American Indian tribe is a reservation. The Cherokee do not live on a reservation. The Qualla Boundary is 57,000 acres of land purchased by the Cherokee Indians in the 1800s and held in trust by the US government.
  8. A papoose is a type of bag or apparatus for carrying a child. It is offensive to the Cherokee for others to call one of their infants a papoose.
  9. The Cherokee Indians never lived in tipis. They have always lived in houses.
  10. Cherokee Indians have played a ball game called ani-tsagi or anetso for hundreds of years.

Want to know more? Look for my vintage postcard book, The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in your local bookstore or online. It was published by Arcadia Publishing in 2014.

Janet's Bk Trip to Mts. 12.14 003

You can help me get the word out about Janet’s Writing Blog by telling your friends about it and by sharing it on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. According to WordPress, my blog has been seen by people in 10 countries!

Until my next blog post, I hope you have a good book to read. If you are a writer, I hope you have productive and rewarding writing time.

Janet