Rob Neufeld

Columnist

On a little hill above Iron Duff Road, where the waters spill from the Great Smoky Mountains into the Pigeon River, not far from Interstate 40, rests a little Methodist church called Davis Chapel.

Here, in 1887, Zachariah Clingman Davis and his wife, Lora Jane Noland Davis, gave the land for the church, built by community members using local stone for the pillars and local wood for the frame and furnishings.

Zachariah’s dad, Francis McGhee Davis — Frank, to folks — settled there in the 1850s, built a big dairy farm after the Civil War and served as state assemblyman from 1874-82.

The place had a strong Scottish makeup, mixed with Welsh and transmuted by the Methodism of the Great Awakening.

The community got the name Iron Duff from an early settler, Aaron McDuff. When “Aaron Duff” was submitted to Washington as the name of a new post office in 1873, “the department,” according to J.S. Davis in a 1908 history of Haywood County, “struck out the word Aaron and substituted Iron in its place.”

At McDuff’s cabin, Davis related, “the early settlers would often meet to hear (him) tell stories and sing songs, and to hunt with him the deer and wild turkeys.”

Frank Davis’ great-grandson is Donald Davis, the nationally recognized master storyteller who told Joseph Sobol, in a 1994 N.C. Folklore Journal article, that his great-great-grandfather, Phillip Davis, had been a celebrated fighter, storyteller and musician.

In 1827, John Parris recounted in “Mountain Bred,” Phillip Davis engaged in a legendary “bare-knuckle battle of the giants” with Tom Frisby, of Big Laurel.

Phillip stood 6-foot-3, weighed 240 pounds and had hands like hams. He “wore a short stubby beard ... He played a banjo and he danced. He was a big-timer, a great yarner. And he loved fighting as a sport.”

The fight ended in a draw, with both men knocked out. Phil moved to Tennessee but then came back to Iron Duff to be buried in the Davis cemetery behind Davis Chapel.

Rolling in clover

Not long ago, I got a call from Julian Davis, another great-grandson of Frank. The chapel was heading toward extinction.

Two of its last four members, Joe and Dare McClure, who kept the church going with fundraisers in 1980s and '90s, died in an accident in one of Joe’s treasured antique cars last year.

Julian, who moved back to his family’s home in 1999 after his family’s move to Florida and, later, a long career as the director of psychology at Florida State Hospital, recalls summers in Iron Duff.

“One of the big events of the year for me,” the 95-year-old retiree says, “was coming up here in the summer with my family to visit my grandparents and live on the farm, which involved waking up hearing the rooster crow, rolling in clover, eating honey from the comb, playing in the creek and going to the chapel.”

Before automobile travel became common, people walked to Davis Chapel. Now, Julian Davis can only hope the chapel will be preserved — perhaps as a wedding and reunion venue — with its name retained and its windows perpetuated as memorials.

Backroom history

When we look back nostalgically at a provincial way of life, we find ourselves reconciling the golden haze on the meadow with bareknuckle fights in back lots and, to cite another instance, shady deals in backrooms.

“I have been sitting on this story for 45 years,” Jerry Sternberg wrote me, drawing my attention to his recent articles in Mountain Xpress about sin in Asheville before it was dubbed “Sin City.”

He directed me to his archive at gospeljerry.com, where I learned he’d waited to tell his story “until more of the ‘sinners’ have gone to that great Sodom and Gomorrah in the sky.” He hoped “that, unlike Thomas Wolfe, I will still be able to come home again.”

Sternberg began by telling about a preacher who went to visit a generous contributor to his church at his farm and found him at his still. The preacher lectured about the sin of drinking alcohol.

The farmer responded, “Preacher, likker ain’t for drinkin’ — it’s for sellin’.”

No names are attached to that story, so it may be apocryphal. As is the unattributed witticism, “as long as voters could stagger to the polls,” North Carolina “would remain a dry state.”

The battle between bootleggers and sheriffs becomes a cat-and-mouse folktale in our oral history, and Sternberg tells about a liquor runner named Willie who had to abandon his loaded car and run into the woods to escape revenuers.

Willie went home, removed his cork leg, walked to the courthouse on crutches and reclaimed his car, saying it had been stolen from him.

For his next story, Sternberg was an eyewitness, and he names names.

Around 1960, Sternberg relates, he was at a Junior Chamber of Commerce dinner dance in the basement of the Asheville Civic Center when a dozen of Sheriff Laurence Brown’s deputies arrested out-of-town guests for illegal possession of alcohol in that venue.

It was thought the raid was a retaliation against the JCC’s criticism of Brown for his tolerance of illegal slot machines in little stores and dives around the county. One of those operations had just seen a person killed.

“In a little beer joint on Riverside Drive,” Sternberg attests, a drunk “won a jackpot on one of the machines, and it didn’t pay off. He got into an argument with 'Birdeye' (Plemmons, the owner), who wouldn’t pay him, and the guy just picked up the machine and threatened to walk out the door.” Birdeye shot him.

The controversy, including the JCC embarrassment, led to the defeat of Brown in the next election of sheriff.

Sternberg’s most recent story exposes people in more than one way. It involves him arriving late at Alvin Ledford’s poker house on Merrimon Avenue and finding a scene that looked like “a really weird Roman bath.”

Two armed robbers had just left, taking not just money and valuables but also clothes, car keys and even one guy’s prosthetic leg.

Sternberg later thought he spotted the likely culprits at the Sky Club, a nightclub he co-owned with Odell Harris for a while.

“Drug dealers, professional shoplifters, bookies, gamblers and probably a couple of hit men would come and sit at their own table, accompanied by assorted pimps and hookers,” Sternberg wrote in a February piece. “I would occasionally sit at their table for a few minutes, listening to their conversation and feeling like Damon Runyon in Lindy’s in New York City.”

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature and manages the WNC book and heritage website The Read on WNC. Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler.