Visiting Our Past: Ramsey's 1962 lectures served up history with a gamey taste

A few years ago, Jack Stevens began teaching local history at UNC Asheville's College for Seniors, drawing on talks delivered by D. Hiden Ramsey in 1962. Ramsey had been a legendary figure in state and local politics and influential in education and publishing. Stevens, just out of law school, attended every lecture.

Twenty years later, Stevens ran into Pat Bell Ramsey, D. Hiden's daughter-in-law, and asked whether there were notes of her father-in-law's talks. There were tapes — scratchy ones, which Stevens painstakingly transcribed and passed onto UNCA's Ramsey Library.

Articles on immigrant Scots' history in this column reminded Stevens of Ramsey's keen interest in this region's Scots-Irish legacy. Brought to light, Ramsey's lectures, delivered at then Asheville-Biltmore College, reveal how history gets passed along through its interpreters. When they're Scots-Irish-minded, like Ramsey, you can count on a toastmaster's style and a focus on anti-elitist, independent-thinking themes.

Ramsey had been rigorous in his research as well as vigorous. He tracked down the origin of every settlement's and first settler's name. "Outside of Swain," he stated, "there's not a single other county in Western North Carolina that ... derives its name from a Western North Carolina statesman."

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"Eastern politicians opposed the creation of new counties (in WNC) as a general rule," Ramsey explained. "They said, 'We'll let you create a county if you let us create a county.'" Eastern legislators were also wooed with the promise of immortality, as embodied in geography.

"Well, there are people you can't bribe with money," Ramsey commented, "but when you say I'm going to name ... a mountain or county after you, they capitulate."

Ramsey was skeptical about politics, the "nastiness" of which (his phrase) fed his sense of humor. He tells about Buncombe County's first justices of the peace, whose judgment was tested by the fact that guilty verdicts resulted in monetary compensation for them.

Electioneering in the early days had been a gentleman's sport only in the sense that one had to be a man who owned substantial property to vote. Otherwise, it was as gentlemanly as bear wrestling.

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Philip Hoodenpile, when he ran against Thomas Love for a seat in the N.C. House of Commons in the 1790s, ordered 4,000 gallons of "good proof liquor" from Haywood County — presumably to help him secure votes. Hoodenpile "was the first man in this section, or maybe anywhere, who won folks by fiddling in his campaign speeches," Ramsey noted.

First time around, Hoodenpile won, but the second time, Love had his counterpunch. "You know," Love had told a crowd, "Hoodenpile plays the fiddle with his left hand. And that's an insult to you. When he's playing before people he regards his equal, he plays with his right hand."

John T. Harper, a contemporary reporter, commenting on the liquor factor, added, "No wonder he could fiddle with his left hand. Any man who was full of this new elixir ought to be able to fiddle with his feet."

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This is history as conveyed by Ramsey. The humorous stories have a serious, subtle message.

Big history devolves from little history.

Take the early 19th century rivalry between Baptists and Methodists, who took advantage of Presbyterians' high-mindedness to cultivate backcountry converts with lay preaching. Ramsey related a story about Humphrey Posey, a Baptist minister, who successfully sued Parson Bob Brownlowe over an insult, and won his horse. Brownlowe removed himself to east Tennessee, where, Ramsey said, he "became a very rancorous Unionist, Governor of Tennessee, a United States Senator, a man with a genius for nasty speech."

"All of them were geniuses then," Ramsey reflected. "But he (Brownlowe) was the pluperfect genius."

Rob Neufeld wrote the local history feature, "Visiting Our Past," for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published Aug. 13, 2008.