The Man Who Never Owned Skyland

Let me sell you a mountain. In eighteen fifty-four a Brooklyn couple bought better than twenty-one thousand acres of this ridge for four thousand seven hundred fifty dollars. A year later it went to a copper company for a million, of which seven thousand ever changed hands. So before there was any resort up here, there was a paper fortune, and the people who believed in it had already got nothing for their money. October of eighteen eighty-six, one of those investors sent his boy up to look over what was left. George Freeman Pollock, a teenager from Washington, climbed Stony Man in a cold wind and lost his head. "I raved and shouted and probably would have yodeled if I had known, at that time, how to yodel," he wrote. "Then and there I made up my mind to consecrate my life to the development of this, my father's land." He learned to yodel. He got a bugle and blew his guests to meals. He built Skyland out of pure nerve. The booklet promised a camp-fire "containing three hundred cords of wood burning at one time." He bought every rattlesnake the neighbors could catch, three dollars apiece, and Rosie Hoffner's father took them with a twine loop on a stick. When his hired hands got into the whiskey, Nelson Nicholson said, he bought up four or five rattlers and put them in the building. "He didn't miss no more whiskey after that and he didn't lock the door either." He wrote a book, too. George Corbin heard a snakebite story out of it and said, "That was another lie that was fixed up." And of how it told the hollows, "He made it ten times worse than it was." It stopped being funny about there. Pollock called his neighbors squatters. Diane Nicholson Smith, from one of those families, says most of them held deeds going back to the early eighteen hundreds, before he was born. He fought for the park like a man possessed, and spent his own money. The park brought the road, and the road brought crowds, and the meals ran late. Then the liens were counted. Sixty-seven thousand, one hundred seven dollars and twenty-two cents, against a place appraised under thirty thousand. The man who called his neighbors squatters, the park will tell you, never owned Skyland. Near four decades of work, and he came away with nothing. The Park Service director wrote that he'd never got a dollar and ought to have the use of his lodge at a reasonable rental. Superintendent Lassiter got it down to a hundred twenty dollars a year, and Pollock kept that home for the summers until he died, in nineteen forty-nine. I'd have paid that hundred twenty out of my own pocket to hear what he blew on the bugle the morning the first bill came.