Cold Mountain

The mountain

Cold Mountain rises to 6,030 feet in the Shining Rock Wilderness, which lies on the north slope of the Pisgah Ledge in Haywood County. Wilderness Connect gives it as the top of the wilderness’s elevation range. The Geological Survey’s 1982 mineral survey of the wilderness agrees on 6,030 for Cold Mountain but puts Grassy Cove Top about ten feet higher.

The same survey describes the bedrock as sedimentary rock metamorphosed at high grade, probably Precambrian in age, mapped as mica gneiss, garnet-mica schist and migmatite, with pegmatite and quartz veins through them. The whole package, it says, rode more than a hundred miles west on the Blue Ridge thrust sheet.

The forest around it has been worked hard. By Wilderness Connect’s account, loggers cut the Shining Rock country between 1906 and 1926, and fires followed in 1925 and 1942. Shining Rock became an original part of the national wilderness system on September 3, 1964, a few months after the Forest Service had named it a Wild Area, and an act of 1984 added 5,100 acres. By the Transylvania County Library’s account, when the Carolina Mountain Club laid out the Art Loeb Trail in 1969 it meant to cross Cold Mountain, but the government did not own that ground, so the trail was rerouted and a spur added.

Inman

The mountain is famous for a novel, and the man behind the novel survives mostly in a muster roll. William P. Inman of Haywood County enrolled in Company F of the 25th North Carolina Infantry on June 29, 1861, at twenty-two. He was wounded at Malvern Hill in 1862 and in the neck at the Crater in 1864. He deserted in September 1862 and came back under pardon that November, then walked away again from a Raleigh hospital in 1864, was dropped from the rolls that November, and took the oath of allegiance at Knoxville in December. The records end there and say nothing of his death.

Family tradition says the Home Guard killed him a few miles from home. Local accounts put his grave either unmarked in the Bethel Community Cemetery beside his father or on a hillside above Big Stomp. Charles Frazier, a great-great-nephew, turned the story into the novel Cold Mountain, which won the National Book Award in 1997. His acknowledgments apologize for the liberties he took with Inman’s life and with the geography around the mountain.