The Kelly Family Goes Camping, Part III

We arrived at Baileys [sic] store and mountain resort about five oclock. [sic] Mr [sic] Bailey found a camp spot for us out back of the barn by the iron spring. Bailey kept a little store and the post office and he had built a few small cabins and had a big house that served as a home and a part time hotel and dinning [sic] room. He had a small apple orchard of a few acres near the house and out by the barn a half acre of raspberries that were ready to pick when we got there. Mr. Bailey told us kids that we could pick all of the berries we wanted if we whistled all the while we were picking. I had just learned to whistle and I took this order pretty seriously but my big brother Horace, who was 12 years old and my sister Galdys, [sic] ten, thought Mr. Bailey was joking. My sister Gladys couldn’t whistle anyway. The whistling was soon abated and the berries began going down the little red lane. We had never eaten raspberries before.

Going back to the drive from Nate’s cabin. The road at that time, went by way of Doan [sic] Valley instead of along the crest of the mountain as it does today. We entered the lower end of the Valley through an apple orchard and drove up past Doan’s old log cabin, over a hill and into upper Doan Valley and then on the Bailey’s.

Mr. Doan had passed away some years before we passed that way in 1908, but he was an interesting character and many stories were told about the doings of batchelor [sic] Doan . He was a well-educated man and wrote poetry. He also wrote letters to the newspapers advertising for a wife but without any luck. The neighbors said that Doan never took a bath and never trimmed his beard which hung down below his waist and that he smelled like the pigs which he raised for a living. There were bears on the mountain at that time even some grizzely [sic] bears and they feasted on Doan’s pigs. He had a pig pen to keep them in at night but they ran loose during the day to feed on acorns. Doan was said to tell a story about how he awoke one night with the pigs squeeling [sic], looked out the door and saw a big grizzely [sic] walking away on his hind legs with a 100 pound shote under each arm. Doan shot the bear, pigs and all, with a shot gun and they all got away.
There were more people on Smith’s Mountain in the early days then [sic] there were in later years. The early pioneers who had crossed the plains by covered wagon had had enough of desert, rocks, and cactus…near a thousand miles of desert and when they found forests and plenty of water like home in Missouri or Kentucky they wanted to stay right there. And they did.

Besides Doan and Nate, there were several families that had settled on the mountain which gave their names to the valleys they occupied. There was a Frenchman who ran sheep in the long valley west of the big telescope and that was called French Valley. Then the Mendenhall family lived in the big Valley [sic] south of the telescope. They ran cattle and had five sons and four daughters and dominated the mountain for many years. Then there was the Louy Salmons family who lived in the big valley on the east end of the mountain. They ran cattle and for some years in the early days ran a resort hotel (one of those that could put up a party of 12 for a few weeks) at a fine overlook west of Doan Valley, now a part of the Doan Valley State Park. There were other short-time residents that lived on the mountain in those early days before 1900. The Mendenhalls [sic] told me about them and pointed to the remains of old log cabins as we rode the range. This was in 1946-47-48, the three summers when we ran cattle on the mountain in partnership with the Mendenhalls. These early settlers had taken up timber claims with some medow [sic] land attached but they soon froze out and the Mendenhalls bought them out. I have forgotten the names.