Olive Tilford Dargan

In terms of literary prominence, Olive Tilford Dargan ranks second only to Horace Kephart among outlanders who adopted the Smokies as home.

Born to Kentucky school teachers who moved to Arkansas when she was ten, Olive was a child prodigy, crafting poetry at an early age, teaching other children by the time she was 14, and winning a scholarship to Peabody College where she earned a degree before reaching 20. In a life-shaping experience while at Peabody, Olive went camping in the Smokies. Enthralled by the region’s grandeur she vowed: “If I ever own a home, it will be in these mountains.”  

It took years with stints of teaching, graduate studies at Radcliffe, time in Blue Ridge, Georgia, where she began serious writing and marriage to Pegram Dargan, a Harvard-educated South Carolinian, but eventually that dream became reality. Like Olive, Pegram wrote, but his four poetry books enjoyed little success.

In 1906, the young couple bought a farm at Round Top, near the Swain County village of Almond. Purchase money came from    Dargan’s well-received dramas including “Semiramis, and Other Plays,” “Lords and Lovers” and “The Shepherd.” Moving from New York involved dramatic lifestyle changes, but from the outset Olive adapted well and gradually earned acceptance from clannish, “sot in their ways” neighbors. She wisely heeded their advice on mountain life and as a result, first in Swain County, North Carolina,  and later Asheville, North Carolina, became a beloved outlander. 

Even as she realized her dream of Smokies’ life, tragedy haunted Olive during this period. She lost a prematurely born daughter and various health problems plagued her. Adding to her burden, Pegram had serious mental and physical ailments. Cumulatively this resulted in “lost years” with little literary productivity. 

Eventually Olive traveled to England and brought the era of sadness and non-productivity to an end. Relieved for a time of caring for Pegram and a mountain farm’s daily demands, she completed The Mortal Gods and Other Plays, a nonfiction work The Welsh Pony, and a book of poetry on her early mountain experiences titled Path Flower and Other Verses. Meanwhile her marriage became increasingly troubled. Locals noticed Pegram’s cruelty, possibly     exacerbated by Olive outshining him on the literary front. She often escaped by venturing into nearby woods. In 1915 he was lost at sea off Cuba, presumably drowned although mystery surrounds the event. Some thought he committed suicide, having earlier agreed to a suicide pact with his brother. 

Following his death, Olive offered tribute to him in a slender collection of sonnets, The Cycle’s Rim, then squared her shoulders and put down meaningful mountain roots. She made numerous acquaintances and embraced her neighbors. Wisely realizing that living in happy harmony with them required major adjustments on her part, she adapted, in time becoming both a beloved benefactor and cherished friend. Olive plunged wholeheartedly into hardscrabble mountain life “mending fences, digging ditches, carrying rock, cutting poles, and other incredible things.” She told an editor of “inoculating peas, constructing pig-proof fence, and getting dirt on once dainty hands while mulling early and late over schemes to keep my tenants from starving.” Those tenants appreciated a woman who joined in back-breaking labor, which was their daily lot. 

During this period Dargan wrote stories and poems for national magazines, published a collection of lyric poetry, Lute and Furrow, and cooperated with Frederick Peterson on a selection of plays called Flutter of the Golden Leaf. This impressive outpouring of energy was a prelude to her magnum opus, From My Highest Hill. Although a staunch feminist whose personal political philosophy verged on communism, Dargan regularly used royalties from her writing to add to her existing land holdings. These acquisitions continued well into the Depression, with the final purchase coming in 1934. Then, after a devastating fire at her Round Top cabin, she bought a home in Asheville and began alternating residence           between it and Round Top. 

For years she spent considerable time in both places, finding Beebread, her fictional name for Almond,North Carolina, a welcome retreat, especially during furor created by her novels on the violent Gastonia mill strike of 1929. Using the pen name, Fielding Burke, she roundly condemned mill owners in a pair of proletarian works, Call Home the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling, grounded in controversy-laden fact. Strongly sympathetic to the plight of the workers, these novels stirred considerable controversy. Dargan was deservedly labeled as a radical novelist, but she wrote from the heart and her concern for the plight of repressed, poorly paid workers was genuine. It was that compassion which endeared Dargan to those in her adopted highland homeland. Folks in remote Swain and Buncombe counties cared about the person, not their political persuasion or philosophical outlook. They judged according to personal experience, and by the appearance of her pseudonymous novels Dargan had long since passed muster.

Olive was, by all accounts, delightfully eccentric. My favorite example comes from the late Mary Ellen Maxwell, who grew up in the Almond community and as a child knew Dargan. Once the writer visited her home and asked the youngster to accompany her on a trip to Bryson City, North Carolina. Normally this was considered a treat, but not in young Mary Ellen’s eyes. The small girl pulled her mother aside, whispering: “Momma, please don’t make me go. She’s got her dress on backwards.”

On another occasion, while walking through downtown Bryson City, Dargan’s petticoat somehow fell off. Acting as if nothing was amiss, she stepped out of the undergarment, left it on the sidewalk, and continued on her way. Mountain folks loved such quirkiness, and being somewhat “quair” likely redounded to Dargan’s benefit in her relationships with them. Her compassion, strengthened by losing a child, blossomed into an ongoing love affair with local youngsters. She arranged needed dental work for them, regularly gave away “play purties,” financed nursing school studies for one young neighbor, and promoted educational opportunities for scores of youthful friends.

As her view of the mountain people evolved, Dargan plunged headlong into something she once vowed to avoid—writing about those among whom she lived. Therein lay the genesis of From My Highest Hill. Through a combination of exuberant eccentricity and simple good will, Dargan had gained the trust of her tenants and neighbors, something difficult for an outsider to accomplish with mountain folks. In the years immediately following the conclusion of World War I, she began writing a series of stories offering insightful impressions of mountain characters. After several appeared in magazines in 1925, she published eight profiles as Highland Annals. Rewritten and greatly improved, along with a new title, From My Highest Hill: Carolina Mountain Folks, features numerous black-and-white illustrations by famed photographer Bayard Wootten. Immediately recognized as a regional masterpiece, it poignantly captures on mountain folkways and life as lived in yesteryear’s high country

Dargan seldom gives full names, but her characters are real people, drawn from members of tenant families who lived on the land she owned, along with profiles, some of them composites, of others residing nearby. Her keen ear for dialect, reminiscent of writers born to mountain talk such as John Parris or Ron Rash, renders the language and those who spoke it in authentic fashion. Also, she shrewdly recognized that “mountain people are just like any other people. I don’t like the way some writers picture [them] as a peculiar type, for they are not.”

A treasure of local lore and a regional literary landmark of considerable note, From My Highest Hill belongs on the shelves of everyone—from scholars studying mountain mores to those simply anxious to understand mountain residents of a bygone era—who prizes authenticity and loves the Smokies. Dargan’s steadfast refusal to stereotype, romanticize, or indulge in any type of literary exploitation of the folks with whom she lived is an enduringly admirable quality. She may have been a flaming feminist, a socialist, and the sort of radical who set Joe McCarthy itching like he had cooties, but in the eyes of Western North Carolinians she was one of them—a caring, compassionate neighbor they cherished.

Although in her early 70s when From My Highest Hill appeared, neither age nor permanent residence in Asheville saw much diminution in the quantity or quality of Dargan’s writing. She completed her final poetry book, The Spotted Hawk, in 1958 before wrapping up a remarkable career with Innocent Bigamy and Other Stories when well into her 90s. Dargan’s ongoing love affair with the Smokies highlighted her 99 years, earned her a spot in the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, and gave her a unique place in regional literature. Unlike many outlanders, she adopted mountain folkways as her own. Her interaction with hill people, and the inspiration they provided, made Olive a far better writer. Through providing posterity a portrait of their way of living and exuberance for life, she repaid that inspiration in lasting fashion.