About the Author

Carol M. Bryson, in the process of performing deed research in the courthouses from Buncombe County to Cherokee County, North Carolina for her joint endeavors with her colleague and husband, David H. Bryson, Jr., in the surveying business and later, his law firm, could see nuggets of local history coming forth out of the records as she worked.  She gained insights into the everyday lives of local family forefathers from the recordings of their estate files and deeds.  In the records, she found the original names of the creeks and mountain tops.  A great desire to share the history came early in her career.  The meager beginnings of this book began back in 1973, when she would “save” tidbits of what she found to be part of the local history story of Cashiers and Glenville, into “history boxes,” thinking that someday when she would retire, she would put together a history of the areas she considered home and was becoming so familiar with.  Those history boxes grew and grew with information from the courthouse records, newspaper microfilms, and research excursions to the university libraries, and the archives of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.  A personal collection of local history books began to grow, including some that are out of print now.  A collection of old historical maps began to grow.  Besides being a draftsman and deed researcher, Carol was becoming a historian.

After eighteen years in the land surveying profession, Carol Bryson spent another nineteen years studying the records and researching land titles in the second profession of David and Carol Bryson, the real estate law profession, Carol Bryson continued to gain knowledge of the earliest local settlers and their descendants.  With an acute sensibility and a desire to bring out the truths of the written records, she studied and wrote chronologically to bring to life the communities’ growth from the earliest pioneers who came into Cashiers and Glenville, and to give insight into the influences of their backgrounds and heritage.  Carol writes with a vast knowledge of the local terrain, gained from her studies and from many family hiking excursions. Her descriptive words turn the land itself into a character.  A scholarly work began to develop, with a sprinkling of creative non-fiction and a dash of the folk life of the mountain local citizens of early Glenville and Cashiers.  The kindness shown to her and her husband by the descendants, and their love of the Glenville and Cashiers mountains, have inspired Carol to want to give back to them by writing this book, so that those descendants could know their history of the times before even their grandparents could remember.