<p>A Visit to Runion A Ghost Town of Western North Carolina is a narrative and pictorial history of a sawmill village dating from the late 1800's until 1925. The coming of the railroad brought northern investors to the mountains to purchase timber and mining rights. Putnam was the first sawmill and logging operation established in this location but it went into bankruptcy and sat idle for five years. Harriet Betts (Arrow Shirt Factory) of Troy, NY purchased the mill, the railroad and additional acreage for the timber and founded the Laurel River Logging Company putting her son Anson Betts in charge. They doubled the size of the original mill, converted the mill to electric and expanded the railroad. They built a church/school, provided family housing for their employees that at one time numbered 1200 people and even had a baseball team that played their games on an island in the French Broad River. Southern Railroad put in sidings and built a depot and changed the original name of Putnam to Runion. After the flood of 1916 and WW I the mill went into decline and changed hands many times before closing in 1925. In 1991 the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service purchased the Runion site and it is listed in the Pisgah National Forest division as the Laurel River Trail, #310, a 3.6 mile hike.</p>

A VISIT TO RUNION A Ghost Town of Western North Carolina

Jan C. Plemmons

War War I Veterans of Transylvania County, NC An article appeared in the Brevard News April 2, 1920 asking the soldiers of World War I to share their war experiences and a photograph for a souvenir book. No record can be found of such a book having been printed. Ninety-three years later a book honoring World War I soldiers of Transylvania County, NC is available. Jan Plemmons, compiler, has taken a slightly different format than the proposed 1920 book. There will be no "bloody war battles " presented, only information about the soldiers and "interesting" facts of the United States' participation in the war. The very first challenge for this publication was to identify the subjects who were in the military between April 6, 1917 and November 11, 1918. There is no source for ONE COMPLETE list. The list of 470 individual soldiers was compiled from many sources. The primary source of the soldiers' records came from the World War I Service Record Cards (SRC). Congress ordered the Adjutant General of the United States to provide each state with a statement of service from the War Department for each individual who served in the U.S. Army during the war. Unfortunately, there is not a Service Record Card for each soldier. Additional lists were created from the 1930 Census that collected military service data, Frankie Monteith's Transylvania County, North Carolina Cemetery Survey, and the World War I files in the NC Room,Transylvania County Library. The final source of names came from Brevard News (present Transylvania Times) articles printed between 1917 and 1919. The men were thoroughly researched using the birth records, death certificates, marriage records, census records, discharge papers, obituaries, Transylvania County, NC heritage books, the Internet and personal accounts of people who knew them.

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Books by Jan C. Plemmons

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jan C. Plemmons. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A VISIT TO RUNION A Ghost Town of Western North Carolina

I'm in the Army Now