The story of Gatewood’s battering at the hands of her husband did not emerge for more than a half-century, when a newspaper reporter, Ben Montgomery, told her story in “Grandma Gatewood’s Walk,” a book published in 2014.

Montgomery worked for The Tampa Bay Times in Florida, and Gatewood was his great-great-aunt. In his research for the book, her surviving children spoke with him and entrusted him with her journals, letters and scrapbooks.

In that material he found stark references to what she had withheld from news interviewers: that her husband had nearly pummeled her to death several times. During one beating, she wrote, he broke a broom over her head. Her children told Montgomery that their father’s sexual hunger had been insatiable and that he forced himself on their mother several times a day.

In 1937 she left him and moved in with relatives in California, leaving behind two daughters, ages 9 and 11, who were still at home. She was confident that her husband would not beat the girls, and she could not afford to take them with her. In a sorrowful letter to her daughters with no return address, she wrote, “I have suffered enough at his hands to last me for the next hundred years.”

But unable to bear being away from them any longer, she returned after a few months. Back in Ohio her husband would not let her out of his sight. She later wrote that in 1938, he beat her “beyond recognition” 10 times.

“For a lot of people the trail is a refuge,” Brian B. King, a publisher of guidebooks and maps for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, said in a telephone interview. “But seldom is it a refuge for something as bad as that.”

Emma Rowena Caldwell was born on Oct. 25, 1887, in Gallia County, Ohio. Her father, Hugh Caldwell, a farmer, had lost a leg after being wounded in the Civil War and turned to a life of drinking and gambling. Her mother, Evelyn (Trowbridge) Caldwell, raised the couple’s 15 children, who slept four to a bed in the family’s log cabin.