In the Shadow of Cold Mountain – a moving account of John Wesley Hunter by his descendant Ric Hunter
Cold Mountain
COLD MOUNTAIN was a bestselling novel by Charles Frazier and a 2003 award winning movie of the same name. Ada (Nicole Kidman) and Inman (Jude Law) fell in love as the Civil War began to rage. Cold Mountain is the setting, in reality it is in the Appalachians southwest of Asheville, North Carolina. My relatives settled the land almost in the shadow Cold Mountain. As Ada and Inman were ripped from each other’s arms for Inman to fight for the confederacy, the same happened to my great-great grandfather and mother, John Wesley and Ananiah Honeycutt Hunter. This is their story and how I very nearly did not walk this planet.
A Hunter family history
When I was a child, my family and I would visit relatives on my father’s side in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina near the town of Burnsville, just north of Asheville. We also visited those on my mother’s side in Boone, farther to the north. Both are near the border with Tennessee, are nestled in the highest mountains east of the Mississippi, and hold my family’s DNA. A friend once said that most Americans are only one generation away from overalls. My father was raised owning one set of coveralls and shoes.
My grandfather on my father’s side, John Clifford Hunter, was born in 1899 in Yancey County, North Carolina. He lived on a twenty-seven acre farm with an old, abandoned mission church in front of his two-story, white clapboard home. It was along Jack’s Creek, so named for a hunting dog who by legend, was slain by a mammoth black bear in that creek. My grandfather’s father was John Wesley Hunter, Jr., who came from parents who could not read nor write, but settled the land known as Daybook on Jack’s Creek. Daybook came from the small post office which had a book people signed in those days for their mail.
The Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865)
John Wesley Junior’s parents were John Wesley Hunter, Sr. and Ananiah (Honeycutt), a wife six years his senior. In the early to mid-1800’s, you grew and harvested what you ate; you went hungry or begged for food. They never begged for food. They fed their four children, then ultimately five, by the fruits of their labor. John Wesley left his Ananiah and their four children in the summer of 1862, called the “Summer of Death” for the losses experienced by both the blue and gray. He left to defend his home from Union forces that could encroach from the northwest and enter the mountains of western North Carolina. Those Federal forces were executing the “scorched earth” policy of the time. He was a private in Company C of the 58th North Carolina Troops, a unit that distinguished itself many times during the Civil War. John Wesley Hunter died of fever (most likely typhoid) in Jacksboro, Tennessee on January 4th, 1863, six months after leaving Ananiah.
Since the war had begun in April of 1861, it was now more than a year that forces north and south had been at each other. I try to place myself in that time and place as a modern war fighter and twenty-seven year Air Force fighter pilot. I know the feeling of war and the undeniable fear one faces when looking death squarely in the eye. It is humbling to the most courageous, base to the strongest of us. The modern term for this kind of event is “seeing the elephant.” When Hannibal crossed the Alps on elephants, those in his way were trampled under elephants’ feet. Having studied the Civil War, there is no doubt in my mind that like Cold Mountain’s Inman, John Wesley knew he was going into a meat grinder when he joined the Confederate States Army. In his own way, he knew he would see the elephant.
I visited Daybook as a child and now live there as a returning believer in this beautiful, God-given mountain country. What I can see of that time in 1862 was a family that was torn asunder from sending its twenty-five year-old husband and father of four, to the front lines. Ananiah was to raise four children, the youngest was six months old, and unbeknownst to her or John Wesley when he mustered out, a fifth child was on the way. Let me take you back to what that must have been like.
In 1861 their home on Jack’s Creek would have been of logs with drafty chinking and few windows. Heat was provided by a fireplace at best and most cooking was done over that same fireplace. This was not a gas or electric heat, but one supplied from downing your own trees, cutting and splitting the wood and carrying it to the fireplace or stove many times a day in the bitter-cold mountain winters. Water was carried by a bucket from a spring nearby and a bath consisted of a few inches of heated water in the bottom of a large pail or small wash tub. A child probably shared that same water with one or more siblings. Food in the winter came from crops grown and harvested in the preceding summer with a hog slaughtered and hams cured in a smoke house. Sugarcane was converted into molasses and granular sugar and probably the only staples bought in town, some seven walking miles away over a very tall Green Mountain, were coffee, salt and gun powder.
None in the Hunter family owned slaves. John Wesley enlisted on June 16, 1862, after the crops were well on their way to harvest, then he marched west with Company C across the crest of the Blue Ridge to the foothills of Tennessee and then on to Jacksboro some 150 miles away from Daybook. Little did they know that within a year some would desert, most would be without shoes, wearing tattered remnants of uniforms, and bullet holes would puncture their 58th and Confederate battle flags. There, in Jacksboro, six months later John Wesley died of fever on a cold January day in 1863.
After much research, trial and error, and help from The Sons of Confederate Veterans, I found John Wesley, Sr’s grave in Jacksboro, Tennessee. It lies in the Delap family cemetery with many others, members of the 58th from western North Carolina, most from Yancey County, who died there that winter. It was nearly impossible to transport bodies home in the height of the conflict. All were initially buried with a fieldstone marking their graves with no inscriptions. According to the census, Ananiah died sometime after 1887 and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Peter Honeycutt Cemetery in the Daybook Community where John Wesley, Jr. and my grandparents, John Clifford and Ethel Hunter are buried. The cemetery is named after Ananiah’s father, Peter Honeycutt, an early settler of Daybook. My purpose in writing this some 150 years after my Great-Great Grandfather’s death is to remember the Civil War at this time, and codify my family’s history to further the work of my second cousins, Edgar and Bruce Hunter, whose exhaustive genealogical work gave us the foundation to pursue this family history.
I very nearly did not walk this earth and this is why. The reason my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father, his siblings, I and my cousins walked this earth is because of the love that John Wesley and Ananiah had for each other and the fact that they made love on or just before the night John Wesley, Sr. left for the war. I saw the dates of enlistment in Company C, death of John Wesley Sr., and birth of John Wesley, Jr. and connected the dots. I found a very interesting fact. They didn’t know at the time, but that night they conceived John Wesley Hunter, Jr., my great grandfather who was born three months after John Wesley, Sr. died. If not for the love that produced that child, I would not be here; neither would my children, nor anyone on that branch of my family tree.
It had snowed recently and I found myself in Jacksboro, some thirty-four miles northwest of Knoxville, Tennessee, on a clear but very cold, blustery day. It was 150 years to the day after John Wesley Hunter died. I wanted to experience a small sample of what he must have felt. As my studies told me, I imagined he existed in this bitter cold in a tent with a thin jacket and a blanket his only warmth. I arrive in a heated truck, down filled parka and wool hat. Even then, I get cold during the hour or so I walk the grounds. I see other Company C names that are familiar still today in my Yancey County of North Carolina. There are Phipps, Phillips, Greer, Jones, Crawford, Wilson, Presnell, Shepherd, Jones, McIntosh and others. I take photos of each memorial, they are all heroes. I see many died about the same time, most likely from a typhoid outbreak after being forced into close quarters and poor sanitary conditions. I pause and reflect on what I know of that time and my family. The war in a very short time took a strapping six-foot, healthy farmer, who existed off food we would today call “organic” and spring water, clear and healthy, then in only months turned him onto a ravaged hulk of a man. No cannonball shattered him and no rifle ball pierced his body.
Where Inman made it back to his beloved Ana before he died, John Wesley never made it back. I found him and I found Ananiah. They will now be united with a gravestone in Jack’s Creek’s Peter Honeycutt cemetery, in the shadow of Cold Mountain.
