The Historic Toxaway Foundation is pleased to introduce
VOICES OF TOXAWAY, a new video series
featuring one-on-one interviews with guests that can provide historical insights
and a local perspective on the Historic Toxaway corridor.
An Interview With Exie Wilde Henson
March is Women’s History Month, and it seems only fitting that we begin the series with an entertaining and informative chat with Exie Wilde Henson, youngest daughter of Joseph and Ethel Wilde. Joe Wilde was a renowned photographer as well as a respected logging foreman in the area from around 1915 and into the 1920s, and with his wife provided many valuable services to the local community. For a time, the family resided at Lake Toxaway on the old Inman homestead, and Exie reflects fondly on her memories of that time.
The print interview below, originally published in the March 2010 issue of WNC Woman Magazine, is an excellent companion piece to our video interview. It is reprinted in its entirety here with permission of the author, Peggy Hansen. Peggy is the former owner of Highlands Books in Brevard and author of Transylvania Memories, a collection of oral histories.
Read or watch, or enjoy them both!
From Toxaway to the Amazon and Back Again
Strong women live in these mountains, and they come from strong, independent women before them. It’s a good bet that most women today would not survive long in a logging camp of one hundred years ago deep in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Primitive living conditions, disease, hard physical labor, and raising a passel of younguns in the wilderness would have most of us running for civilization.
Exie Wilde Henson grew up in the rural western part of Transylvania County in the 1930’s and 40’s, hearing stories of the lumber camps from her dad, Joe Wilde, and mother, Ethel Wilde. Raised and educated in Tennessee, Joe and Ethel Wilde moved to WNC in 1915 where they lived in the most primitive circumstances in what is now the Pisgah National Forest.
Joe Wilde remains famous as the early photographer of Transylvania County. His striking photos of loggers, hunters, and family groups can be found in several books about Western North Carolina. But during his lifetime, he was known as the man who could be counted on to help anyone in need. He frequently brought home people who were hurt, lost, hungry, or otherwise in need of help. “Everybody loved my mom and dad; they called him Uncle Joe and he was a friend to everybody.”
But it was Exie’s mother, Ethel Phillips Wilde, from whom Exie absorbed her devotion to serving others and making a difference in the world. With a father who was a professor, Ethel was a qualified teacher as well as a capable nurse. Both were skills that were desperately needed at that time in the backwoods of Transylvania County.
Fortunately for those of us who love to read about early times in our mountains, Exie has written the story of her parents, in fictionalized form, in two books, BEYOND THIS MOUNTAIN and MOUNTAIN SONG. She calls the books “reality-based fiction.”
She says that “almost every episode in both books starts with something that actually happened. But I had to weave a story around it, because I didn’t know all the details. But knowing my parents, and the way they were, I could weave an authentic story as to the way they would have behaved, and the results of their behavior. Because, I grew up with them in later years seeing this behavior.”
NOTE: The two novels have since been condensed into a single novel, LAUREL’S CHOICES, described this way: “Set against the backdrop of national and international historical events, this spirited, patriotic book showcases the indomitable American spirit . . . and the powerful truth that it is not our circumstances but our choices that determine who we become.” All three books are available on Amazon or at Highland Books in Brevard.
As she describes her mother’s life, Exie exudes love and admiration for the person who raised her to be the woman she is today. “Yes, today my mother remains the role model, the person that I would most like to emulate. When I was young, I knew there was a type of life to be lived — and I saw it lived by my mother — that I wanted above anybody else’s life. And so I call her life the whetstone on which my hunger and thirst to live is based, and my desire to live an abundant life, for myself and others. She’s the inspiration of that.”
The fictionalized stories begin in 1920, with flashbacks to 1915. Her mother appears in the book as “Laurel” and her dad as “Justin.” The book tells the story of their lives after moving to North Carolina, with fictional details created in order to write a novel. Many episodes in the books are actual events. These give us wonderful insights into their personalities and character, as well as showing us what life was like in that time and place.
The first logging camp where her parents lived was “near the Fish Hatchery, near that big John Rock” in the Pisgah National Forest (the Fish Hatchery is now known as the Pisgah Center for Wildlife Education). They moved to another logging site near the present-day Schenck Jobs Corps/Davidson River Campground. They also lived in a camp near today’s Pink Beds.
Logging camps provided only the crudest accommodations for the men and their families. Tiny, windowless shacks were plopped down for the duration of the logging work in one area; then the shacks were loaded onto the railroad cars and moved on to the next work location. Certainly the men worked hard. But the women may have had it even harder, as they tried to cook, sew, raise and teach their children with limited equipment, furniture and amenities.
Joe and Ethel Wilde had nine children; five were born while they lived in these primitive lumber camps. Exie is the youngest of the nine children, and says, “We finally moved out into a normal community and I got to be born in civilization!”
In her research for the novels, Exie interviewed, in addition to her older brothers and sisters, a woman who had been a cook at one of the early logging camps. Exie exclaims, “Can you imagine cooking three meals a day, for 20 men, 20 hard-working men, in primitive cooking conditions? She got up at 4:00 in the morning, made biscuits (from-scratch biscuits!), gravy, ham, bacon, grits and coffee. Then by the time she got cleaned up from that, it was time to get lunch going. Then the same after lunch, time to start supper! I got a great deal of insight from her on how much food it would take to feed 20 hungry men.”
One of her best sources of information about the early logging days came from Preacher Thea Rose. “He was one of the best-loved preachers in Transylvania County. He is fictionalized in these books. He came from a moonshiner’s family, then worked all his life in the logging camps. He told me how it really was with the jobs that the loggers did.
“Peggy, do you have any idea what knot-bumpers were? I’ll have to translate for you. First the lead choppers were the men who would go in and chop a wedge in a tree the way it needed to fall. The cutters were the men with the crosscut saws who cut the tree down. Now to the knot bumpers: they were the men who cut the limbs off the tree and made it into a log! Bet you didn’t know that!
“Then, the swampers were the boys who would wet down the trail for them, or clear the trail, for the horses or oxen to pull the logs out. And the teamsters, to drive the horses; and then the loading crew. Did you know there were so many different jobs? And I remember my dad, even though he was a logger cutting down a tree — and they needed the lumber — he still had such a respect for the trees and the undergrowth. He would cut in a way that would not break the undergrowth. And they did replant some trees, according to the forestry school.”
Joe Wilde had learned photography in the army, and it was his lifelong passion. He chronicled the men and labor at the lumber camps; then, after Joe and Ethel moved to Lake Toxaway, he continued to photograph families and children. He never had a studio, but always took his pictures outdoors. Most of his subjects are posed in front of a lush background of rhododendron or mountain laurel.
The family moved to Lake Toxaway when Exie was almost three years old. “I grew up at Lake Toxaway, looking at that range of mountains. There were five mountains, across the lake bed where we played. Of course, there was no lake there then, it had washed away and dried up.” (The Lake Toxaway dam broke during the floods of 1916, and all of the water drained over the falls. It remained an empty lake bed until the 1960’s when a new dam was constructed.)
“Those mountains created an arc of security somehow for me, because I was just a little girl. I could just look up at that ridge of mountains, making a kind of arc around me, and I thought, ‘This is home; this is security.’ But you know, mountains also kind of want you to cross them! They wanted to give me a little vision of what’s on the other side. Part of it is just in me, who I am.”
Exie said, “Dad always did photography, no matter what else. That helped bring in some income. But during the depression, people didn’t have money. They would pay him with goods. Like a ham; or, one time — he rode horseback around the mountains — he came home with a little goat tethered to the horse! We didn’t particularly want a goat, but we got one. He did photography, but also farming. With a big family, he had to farm. Those are the ways he made a living for us.”
“And my mother was always helping people. When I was growing up (this was after the logging camps), she was always bringing people to our house who needed help. When I was five, she was asked to teach at the CCC camp up in the forest, she and Miss Sadie North, a well-known lady in Brevard. There was some kind of building where they taught these young men. Some of them couldn’t read and write, or do the math. It’s not like they were getting a full curriculum, because they had to work. But they did give them so many hours a day where they could come to school. She had never learned to drive, so she had to find other means of transportation.”
“For her next job, she was asked to go into the remote homes and teach the adults to read and write. There were lots of people who lived too remote to go to school. When they came in to the courthouse to sign documents, they still put an “X” there. That was in the 30’s. This is the time that I write about in the second book, MOUNTAIN SONG.
“She was a good choice to go to these homes, because if a complete stranger appeared on the doorstep to say, ‘I have come to teach you to read and write,’ she would not have been accepted. The reason it was a good choice is that they knew my daddy from the pictures. He had gone to their homes to take pictures. They knew him, and he had helped them. If he saw a great need, he would go take care of it. So my mother was already known when she came to teach them, and she was accepted.
“Those are the things she did, and sometimes she got into their homes and found health problems, and she went back and told the superintendent that she needed to take care of these problems before she could start teaching. So there was malnutrition, some babies had rickets; she discovered many things that needed to be taken care of from a health standpoint.
I remember once she worried about babies sleeping with their parents, and the baby could have been hurt, or actually smothered. I remember she would ask them to take a drawer out of the bureau, and fix a bed for this tiny infant. It was sort of like a little bassinet. I helped her, and got a shoebox, padded it, got my little doll and put in it. Then she could show the mother how to do it. I can remember helping her with that.”
Exie credits her mother with the many lessons about life that she has internalized. She says, “I saw my mother’s great desire for people to have an education, to learn to read and write. She taught adults; sometimes they didn’t want to learn, but she convinced them!
“Her primary strength came from her relationship to the Lord. Because of this, she was able to meet life’s challenges for herself. She helped so many people, in so many ways. Her secret was her relationship with the Lord, and drawing strength from him when she needed it to live in her circumstances which were not optimum!”
Exie’s own life could also be written into a fascinating and inspiring novel. In her desire to emulate her mother, and to devote her life to helping others, Exie herself became a teacher and married a preacher. “I have had numerous challenges. A minister’s family has constant challenges, and I learned from my mother how to adapt to my circumstances.”
During her long marriage to Gene Henson, they have lived in five states, Canada, Germany, and spent seven years in mission work in Brazil. She calmly states, “We lived for three years in the Amazon Basin. There was nothing easy there, everything was from scratch. We had a normal house, but everything else was very difficult. So I just realized that this is my reality, this is what is, I will deal with what is. I will deal with it as creatively and as helpfully to other people as I can. I know for sure that I learned this from my mother, that I saw her doing the very same thing.”
Exie home schooled their two daughters, ages six and nine, while living in this primitive area. The mission board provided the curriculum from which she taught them. She says that the girls did well, and they have wonderful memories from that time period. She taught them in the mornings, and they attended a local school in the afternoons in order to make friends and learn Portuguese.
“Where we lived was two degrees south of the equator. It probably hovered around 95 degrees year round, with six months wet, six months dry. Gene travelled regularly into the jungle by Piper Cub airplane, jeep, horseback, or canoe. I took care of the home, helped in the churches and the Baptist School we were responsible for, and home schooled the girls.
“One memory I have is that the fish man would come by most mornings and I would leave the girls’ classroom, go outside and check the fish to make sure it was fresh before I bought it. There were no grocery stores, and getting food was difficult. I had to go to the different farms to get eggs and other food. It was an underdeveloped area. I had to boil and filter all our water.”
“We had macaws and sloths in the trees in the yard. The macaws were beautiful bright shades of blue, red, and yellow. They chattered all day long, and stripped the bark off of the trees. Also boa constrictors! Our little daughter, Rebecca, took me out into the woods to see the fort she had built, and there was a boa constrictor stretched out across the trail!”
She says that she married a man very similar to her father. Gene was also fond of bringing home strangers who were in need of help. “But, see, I already had that in my past. It’s not easy when your husband brings five men into your house to spend the night in Brazil! I had to go into the bedroom and get my bearings, and have a talk with my mom, and the Lord! I’d say to myself, ‘Mom, how did you do all those things and make it look so easy?’ But I did learn those things, and Gene and I worked at it as a team, just like my mom and dad did.”
When asked what drew her back to the mountains after 30 years away, she replies, “What drew me back? A happy childhood. My family. The people in the community, the type of people they were. And, just the absolute mystique of the mountains. The mountains are in my soul.
“And I just love the mountain people. Everywhere I’ve ever gone, and we’ve lived in wonderful places with wonderful people, I have compared (in my mind) the people among whom we worked and with whom we lived. And what I saw in these people that I grew up with, is the plain, down-to-earth honesty, the strength, the neighborliness, the sense of community.”
Exie says that she probably thought about writing down her family’s history in some form for 20 years. But, being a teacher, mother, and preacher’s wife, she simply couldn’t get to it until she retired. But she gathered information from her family members and friends for many years.
“History is primarily about people. I started realizing sometime in my young adulthood how unique my parents were, and I wanted to put it down in a historical context. I wanted to record their lives and how they handled that era of history in which they lived.
“And so the biggest impetus for me, frankly, was not history per se, but how they dealt with history as it was for them. It’s very important for young people today to have an understanding and appreciation for the people who built this country and for those who have gone before and helped us to come to where we are now. They need to have a context for the history of our world and our nation, as well as our local history.
“I started off needing to tell what an impact my parents made on the era of history in which they lived. I loved putting my books within the context of history — the two world wars, the depression, and especially,” she says emphatically, “the women’s right to vote!”
Her deep faith is evident when she writes, “The premise of my novel is a strong belief that it is not our circumstances but our choices within our circumstances, empowered by God’s adequacy, that determine who we become; and that the very circumstances that could have destroyed us become, instead, the pathway to our fulfillment — our destiny.”
The lessons Exie absorbed from her mother have made her into the strong and independent woman she is today. Her love of teaching, her joy in serving as a preacher’s wife, and her devotion to her children and grandchildren, would make her mother very proud.
Not only did Exie follow in her mother’s footsteps, but many of their children and grandchildren are also pursuing careers in service-oriented professions such as teaching, mental health counseling and home health nursing.
Exie says, “The Bible talks about generational blessings. That’s what we have seen in our family. It’s the natural consequence of seeing a life before you that you want to emulate.”
