By Jim Stokely
In 1906, one of the most accomplished writers ever to live in Southern Appalachia moved with her husband from New York to the North Carolina mountains. Olive Tilford Dargan, born 1869 in south central Kentucky, and her husband Pegram Dargan bought a farm near the village of Almond, about ten miles southwest of Bryson City.
Olive was a playwright, and Pegram a poet; they were artists out for adventure and an authentic way of life. They halfway succeeded at farming, mainly because they employed dependable neighbors, but they ran into family troubles. Olive lost a premature baby, and Pegram was plagued by mental illness. In 1915, off the coast of Cuba, he succumbed to either a fatal capsizing or to suicide.
Olive Tilford Dargan, author. Photo courtesy of the Dargan Family Estate
Many in her situation would have thrown in the towel and returned to Nashville, where she had graduated from the George Peabody College for Teachers; or to Canada, where she had taught; or to Cambridge, where she had attended Radcliffe College. But Olive was just beginning the second half of her life. She wrote poems, then stories for numerous magazines, and more plays. She worked her farm alongside her tenants and bought adjacent land with income from her writing. She assimilated to mountain ways, closely observed people and nature, and in 1925 published Highland Annals.
A masterpiece of creative nonfiction, this sensitive collection of stories about Dargan’s interactions with her neighbors reveals their hopes and joys as well as their hardships and does not fail to include Olive herself as, mostly, a learner.
“We were on our way to see Uncle Nathe Ponder buried,” she writes. “Serena was as happy as she could be with decency, considering our solemn destination. Her laughter was pleasantly low of key, as if she were softly trying it out before subjecting you to the full flow that never came.
And Serena was infectious. I had set out with my mind intent on the going down of men into the grave; the passing of man himself, of earth, of suns, of systems, with no full-grown hope of any immortal salvage. Serena, pulsingly aware in a significant world, restored me to stature as a member of a community bent on giving due honor to one whose days had been spent with the vividness that amounts to virtue among a people who look to life for their drama instead of the stage and the morning papers.”
Olive Tilford Dargan died in 1968 at the age of 99 and is buried in West Asheville, where she lived for the last several decades of her extraordinary life. Learn more about her life and works at the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame website (nclhof.org).
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