Heroic Women of the Southern Highlands

Heirloom Memories Heroic Women of the Southern Highlands Mabel Chappell Orr (as told to Mary E. Lynn Drew) Like Abraham, I started not knowing where I was going. I was so excited that I never thought to look at a map. I wired the school superintendent, Mr. Harve Moody, and asked how to get to Robbinsville. He replied, "Take the train to Topton, then take the mail car to Robbinsville." This was a very daring thing for a girl of nineteen to do, just out of what is now East Carolina University. It took me that day and night and most ofthe next day to get to Asheville. The conductor on the train said that Topton was a rough place and would be dangerous even to get off the train there. He saw I was determined so he said that I should at least spend the night in Asheville so that I would get to Topton in the daylight. I left Asheville early the next morning, and as we got further up the mountains it got rougher, and I became more frightened. Being from the fladands of Perquimans, North Carolina, I had never see anything like it. Some places along the way they dropped some of the cars and put an engine on the back and there was an engine on the front and some ofthe curves were so deep I could see both engines at once. We got near Old Fort and that fountain—we'd pass it on one side and then we'd pass it on the other side and we must have passed it three or four times. Ofcourse we went through a couple of tunnels and of course I had never seen anything like that, either. The road to Robbinsville was ten miles of unpaved road and was so crooked you could look down the mountain, WAY down there. I found later that they were right about Topton. It was wild. Not wild animals, wild people! They'd get drunk and come into town and hurt and kill each other. Why do people get drunk, then ride into town? I taught at the Santeetlah School. It was across the river near the present location of the Santeetlah Dam. The school had a reputation for driving their teachers off. There were some people who would brag about how they ran the teacher off—they seemed to think it was funny. Mary E. Lynn Drew, Hayesville, North Carolina, is editing twenty-six articles in an oral history series entitled "Heroic Women of the Southern Highlands, " She says Mabel Orr was ninety-three in December 1997. 42 There was one family especially that said they had whipped the teacher and run her off. I had no trouble because the difficult ones had moved on. My boarding place was about a mile and a halffrom the school. Just a nice walk up the creek, which was beautiful. I had to cross two swinging bridges. I had twenty-four pupils, grades one through seven. I expect that I learned more than they did that year. I had never met such kind, friendly people. I taught the women to embroider, and they taught me to quilt. In later years quilting became a great hobby for me. Many times when I was worried or troubled, I could quilt and everything would straighten out. When the world's fair was in Knoxville, Tennessee, Gwen Patterson and I went to the fair and demonstrated quilting for Graham County. I felt that was quite an honor. After my first year of teaching, I went home not expecting to come back, but I did. I taught at the Highlands School. I had forty-eight pupils, entirely too many for one teacher. At the end of that year I married Tillman Orr. He always said God sent me up there to straighten out his life. We had been going together since I first arrived. He had been working in Akron, Ohio, and came home on vacation. When he met me he didn't go back because he was afraid ifhe did somebody else would get me. Our first housekeeping was at the Santeetlah Dam site in 1926...