The King of the Blue Ridge

You ever meet a man who owned everything he could see? Three fellows rode up to Old Man Aaron Nicholson's place one day, in the hollow that carries his name, and asked how much land he had. He took a stick and pointed. "I own it from that point clear out just as far as your eyes would let you see." His grandson George Corbin told that on tape in nineteen sixty-nine, walking the old hollow with some park men, and he laughed telling it. He was fair, George said, and he never heard of him doing a thing to anybody. But Aaron turned out to hold five acres of real deeded land. King of the Blue Ridge, Pollock up at Skyland liked to call him. Five acres. George had a smaller kingdom, and it ran on apple brandy. One fall night he sent his partner, a crippled man, off to Luray for charred kegs, and fired up the still alone. Around nine or ten he heard horses' feet. He jumped for the creek, landed in cold water, and ran. The officer hollered halt and started shooting, and took the bark off a tree right beside him. "If you keep shooting," George said, "I'll just keep running." Getting caught meant a year in the Atlanta penitentiary. They broke up a seventy-five-gallon still and caught nobody. They'd been told a crippled man was running it. "If he's a cripple man," George said, "I'd hate to see one that wasn't crippled run." Inside a week he had another one going up the mountain. The revenue men weren't all strangers. Two of them, Pete and Paul, came out of the same family as the folks they were hunting. Robert Corbin said they "weren't worth the salt made out of biscuits," and he told how they had their own brother making it, hauled it off at night, and went out next morning to catch the other man. That's a family grudge talking, so weigh it. Nobody ever caught George. "If I kept it up, I would be caught, and I quit myself." A neighbor who never stopped made a fortune. "You never can see as far ahead as you can behind," George said. The park was another matter. He'd cut the logs for his cabin way up the mountain and hewed them himself, and raised the frame in a day. When the park came, he said, Superintendent Lassiter told him he could stay on. So he toted lumber down from the Drive on his back and started a lean-to. He hadn't finished when they said he had to move. "A low-down dirty trick," he called it. He'd borrowed five hundred dollars from Lee Judd at the store to finish that house. He said the government paid him five hundred dollars for everything he had. He handed it over to Mister Judd, and Judd said, "You've had such terrible luck, it doesn't seem right, I won't charge you no interest." The cabin's down there yet. In nineteen eighty-eight the government wrote it up for the National Register as an intact mountain cabin. He finished up in Falls Church. Evenings at that cabin, he said, before dark, the whippoorwills would light just outside and holler. "I ain't heard no whippoorwills since I been to Falls Church." He chuckled when he said it. If it's getting on toward dark, friend, roll your window down a little, for George.