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Sit 'n' Whittle

Today I learned how to slow down appropriately since my last post was about how to step it up. It seems that my activity levels are right on track with the consistency of the tariff tossing markets and spring sometimes feels like that with the change of seasons.

We recently gave it our best effort on a recipe for the perfect weekender to slow down. Let me just first say that it's mostly about timing and swimming against the tide. Ginny had a couple days off for spring break and instead of following the herds to the beaches we ended up in the with an entire mountain valley almost to ourselves. We took our neighbors and their dog, who also happens to be friends with our dog, up to Lake Logan North Carolina. We were up here just a couple years ago for The Cold Mountain Music Festival1 and we had originally planned to spend the weekend of Helene last fall at the lake.

It's three hours in the car so we took the long way up and the quick way back, which is how I like to handle road trips. We drove up through Westminster, Walhalla, had a stop for Lunch at Lake Toxaway, and took a walk at the Devil's ( Tsul'kălû' ) Courthouse overlook to give us a pause from the winding roads.

We stayed in a pair of cabins at the Sit 'n' Whittle village - No Nook and Rhododendron. The cabins were built in 1930's by the owners of the Champion Paper Mill2 and the lake was created on the along the west fork of Pigeon River as a way to move timber. Champion made the paper for the US Postcards, Time, & Life magazines. Reuben Robertson named the lake after his wife's brother Logan Thomson since it resembled a Scottish Highlands loch from which his father had emigrated in the 1800s. The story of Lake Logan actually begins a generation earlier with the sale of a children's book publishing company that prompted the entrance into the paper business. In 1931 The U.S. Government acquired 93,000 acres of Champion timberland for the Great Smokey Mountains National Park and was awarded $3 million which I'd imagine was partially used to build the retreat.

The Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina acquired the property in the 1990s and opened in 2002 which is how I'm able to stay there. The Lake Logan website3 has a bit of the history but the most interesting is being published by the grandson of Mr. Robertson, a lawyer in Boston4 and has written a good deal on the family history5.

There was small creek behind our cabin which fed a seemingly man made pond that the dogs used for swimming more than the lake. We debated if it was used for raising trout or as a swimming pool. Went a-internet'ing when I returned and discovered we were both right via this photo of Billy Graham and Richard Nixon.

This led me examining the Nixon Graham relationship which, despite the insistence otherwise, were very much political in nature6. I also dug into the first person accounts on the debate about using federal funds used to build the park and the outcomes. It's cited that logging within the park reached its peak in the early 1900's and according to the National Park Service, 80% of the park had been was clear cut 7. My takeaway is rooted in the irony that here stood two men, both fervent anti-communist, in a retreat created alongside of The New Deal as the timber industry waned conspiring to use religion to muster minority votes. Although critics of Roosevelt called him a socialist and fascist, the New Deal was largely seen as the best emergence from the worldwide great depression. In 1934 Roosevelt said in his 'fireside chat' 8:

Sometimes they will call it 'Fascism', sometimes 'Communism', sometimes 'Regimentation', sometimes 'Socialism'. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.... Plausible self-seekers and theoretical die-hards will tell you of the loss of individual liberty. Answer this question out of the facts of your own life. Have you lost any of your rights or liberty or constitutional freedom of action and choice?

In response to some of the current policy-making, I often like to say that diversity, equity, and inclusion have never once threatened my personal freedoms. Given tomorrow is Liberation Day ( or dumpy tariff day, as I like to call it ), I think it's only a matter of time before Roosevelt's Federal Reserve suffers some sort of bureaucratic criticism as the scapegoat for failed economic policies. If anything, you can say that the New Deal led populism into the middle left instead of the far right. And so here we are with the old adage of history repeating itself. And for some appropriate symbolism, just over the hills was a fire we could see far off into the distance9.

And if you want to go deep into the deep state, the photo above is also from the Sit 'n' Whittle cabin. It's of Gladwyn Jebb ( center )10, who led the preparatory commission of the United Nations and served as the UN Secretary-General until 1946. There is a creek directly to the left in the photo where I spent a great deal of time just sitting on an old mill-stone and reflecting. So I did indeed get a chance to sit 'n' whittle over the weekend and luckily, here's what it looked like from my perspective11.



Footnotes​

  1. Cold Mountain - https://davidawindham.com/cold-mountain/ ↩

  2. Sit 'n' Whittle - https://southernappalachiandigitalcollections.org/browse/search/lake-logans-sit-n-whittle-exterior-9802 ↩

  3. Lake Logan - History - https://www.lakelogan.org/about/history/ ↩

  4. Peter Thomson Robertson - https://threereubens.com/ ↩

  5. Peter Gibson Thomson - Peter Robertson - https://www.themountaineer.com/milltownstrong/peter-gibson-thomson-a-mastermind-of-the-industrial-world-unabridged/article_e96517e4-e797-11ed-be4f-7bd8be9d002b.html ↩

  6. Nixon Library - White House Tapes - https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-tapes ↩

  7. Focus ON Dying Giants - National Park Service - https://www.nps.gov/grsm/learn/nature/dff209-focus.htm ↩

  8. The New Deal - Criticism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Criticism ↩

  9. Table Rock Complex Fire - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_South_Carolina_wildfires ↩

  10. Gladwyn Jebb - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladwyn_Jebb ↩

  11. Iris - https://davidawindham.com/iris/ ↩