Description
Lost Trails and Forgotten People: The Story of Jones Mtn.
Tom Floyd was one of the hikers in the 1960s who heard that a trail used to cross Jones Mountain. One day, while hiking near the Laurel Gap, he was warned by another hiker to stay off the mountain because it was wild and people had gotten lost. In the early 1970s, the author was one of the hikers on the Appalachian Trail who heard that a cabin had been discovered on Jones Mountain. Floyd first visited the mountain in 1976. That year, as the supervisor of trails for the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, he designed and helped build the trail to Bear Church Rock.
On his work trips to the mountain, he was intrigued by the old trails and roads that he occasionally came across. While exploring old traces near Cat Knob, he discovered faint blue blazes on trees, evidence of a trail-building era that he had not heard about. Then one night during a work trip, when all the sleeping spaces were taken at the Jones Mountain Cabin, Floyd climbed to a flat above the hollow, where he slept on the ground. The next morning, he awoke to discover two fieldstones marking a grave just a few feet from where he had slept. These events fed his curiosity and eventually led him to explore the mountain further and research its history. What started as a feature article soon became a book. Jones Mountain and the adjacent ridges and valleys are rich in history, part of the great drama that has molded the American continent. Here, the story of human events spans more than 250 years of recorded time, from the first settlements of the 1720s to a trail-building era of the 1970s.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, Indians occupied the Blue Ridge for 12,000 years. Most of Jones Mountain is today in Shenandoah National Park. In its remote valleys and wild backcountry are some forty old trails and traces. There are two sites of prehistoric Indian camps, more than twenty former homesites, old cemeteries, several distillery works, two old mill sites, four abandoned narrow-gauge railroad lines, old logging roads, former pasturelands and cultivated fields now grown over, and the site of a military encampment.
This book is the story of the mountain and the people who lived there, left their mark, and died there. The new edition (2004) corrects and updates the information based on subsequent interviews and adds an historic photograph.
