The highest peak in the eastern United States, Mount Mitchell towers 6,684 feet over its home in Yancey County, North Carolina. It has borne silent witness to great scientific and personal achievements, tragic loss of life, heated debates, and a host of controversies both great and small. Once considered forbidding and remote, it claimed the life of its namesake, Elisha Mitchell, when he fell to his death in an attempt to firmly establish the mountains height. In the early 1900s, entrepreneurs constructed a railroad, opening its old-growth forests to massive deforestation. This devastation...

This is the place. As Heriot Clarkson sat on his mule atop Grassy Mountain in June 1909, he looked out over a sea of mountains extending to the horizon in every direction, his dreams before him. Here was the spot for a retreat from the summer heat of the piedmont and coastal plain where simple living and nature's beauty would combine to create an idyllic
community. But the story doesn't begin there. Hardy Scotch-Irish settlers moved into these same mountains some two centuries earlier, admiring the same views and putting down permanent roots. Images of America: Little Switzerland...