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Hooper
Bald - A History
The 5,429 foot high Hooper Bald
is named for Dr. Enos (or Ennis) Hooper (1796-1872), the first active
doctor in what is now Graham County, North Carolina. When he was 45 years
old Dr. Hooper brought his family from Monroe County, Tennessee, and
settled in the Snowbird section around 1840, soon after the Indian Removal
Act forced most of the Cherokee to leave the area. Enos, his wife
Margaret, five sons, and three daughters lived on West Buffalo Creek and
took up several thousand acres of land that had been opened up to
settlers. On June 1st 1853 Enos paid $60.00 to the state of
North Carolina for 300 acres of land that included the bald itself, where
the Hoopers started raising cattle and ponies. They became famous for
their own breed, called the "Hooper Pony." It was a good horse
for riding and working with cattle, and they sold them all over the
country. Dr. Enos Hooper was also the first cattle herder in the area. He
grazed his cattle on the lush grass on the bald and people started calling
it the Hooper Bald.
Life changed when all the Hooper
boys went off to fight in the Civil War. When they came back times were
very hard. Although they owned 13,000 acres of mountain land from
Robbinsville to the top of the Unicois at the Tennessee state line, they
were broke and needed money. They
borrowed $1,200 from a man in Tennessee and put up the land for security.
They couldn't pay him so they lost much of it, but they were able to keep
their homesteads and continued to raise cattle. One of Enos’ sons, Riley
(or Rial) was the father of Sim Hooper, who brought the first Angus cattle
into Western North Carolina. The
Sim Meadows is named for him.
Dr. Hooper continued his
practice as a doctor until his death in 1872 at the age of 76, the same
year that Graham County was formed from Cherokee County. Enos had many descendents, some of whom sold their shares of
their land inheritances back to the government when the Nantahala National
Forest was established, but others kept their land on the mountain and
many of Enos Hooper’s descendents still reside in Graham County.
By the early 1900’s the Great Smoky
Mountain Land and Timber Company held much of the land in the Snowbird
area, including a section on the south side of Hooper Bald Mountain.
In 1908 this timber company sold an expansive tract to the Whiting
Manufacturing Company. Whiting was a Michigan based company that logged
the forestlands of this area for some time during the early 1900’s.
George Gordon Moore of St. Clair, Michigan was an agent for
Whiting, and during this transaction Whiting agreed to a 100-year lease to
Moore of 1600 acres of mountain land on which to establish a European type
shooting preserve for the entertainment of wealthy clients and friends.
Arrangements were made for English Capitalists to fund the project.
Moore selected for his location the remote section of Hooper Bald.
Three years were spent in preparation
before the operation could begin. No small task was the construction of a
road to the Bald. The road could be used by the ox wagons, but it was
always necessary to have from one to three teams of oxen attached to each
wagon depending on the load it was carrying. A clubhouse was constructed
of logs, 90 feet long and 40 feet wide, containing ten bedrooms, two
baths, a kitchen, and dining room. The lobby was 45 x 20 feet. Telephone
lines were strung across the Snowbird Mountains from Marble. There was a
lower house that served as home for a caretaker - a four-room cabin with a
porch all the way around. As caretaker and keeper of the preserve Moore
hired a local, Garland “Cotton” McGuire.
Huge enclosures appropriate for its various
occupants were constructed, including a 600-acre boar enclosure and an
enclosure for buffalo over a mile in circumference. It is said that
twenty-five tons of double-strand barbed wire was hauled in by wagon to
fence the various game lots. The wild boar lot was built of huge chestnut
rails, nine rails high.
In 1912 the selected game animals began to
arrive in wooden crates by railroad in Murphy and Andrews. Captain Frank
Swan, a retired State Guard Cavalry officer, vividly recalled serving as
master of the ox wagon train in transporting all the animals into the
Hooper Bald refuge. The first animals were moved in from Murphy by wagon
trail pulled by oxen over Hanging Dog Mountain. Others were moved in later
from Andrews over the Snowbird-Unicoi Hardwood Railroad to Little
Snowbird, then transported by ox wagon train from there to Hooper Bald.
The moving process was a large-scale operation with many unique hardships
extending from early spring until the close of summer.
The eleven sows and three boars, purchased from an agent in Berlin,
Germany, were said to have come from the Ural Mountains of Russia. Each of
the hogs weighed between 50 and 75 pounds.
Finally all constituents of a modern
sportsman's preserve were present on the Bald. The repertoire included
eight buffalo, fourteen young wild boar, fourteen elk, six Colorado mule
deer, and thirty-four bears including nine huge Russian brown bears. Two
hundred wild turkeys and ten thousand eggs of the English ring-necked
pheasant were brought in. Additional turkeys were purchased by Moore and
scattered about the mountain in an effort to get them started.
However, the location proved to be too
remote for the genteel Englishmen or anyone else and Moore himself soon
became disenchanted with the Hooper Bald project and moved to Monterey,
California. By the mid 1920's only Cotton McGuire, the respected old man
of the mountains who had been hired as keeper of the preserve, remained.
The Snowbird Mountains proved ideal for
wild boar, and the boar discovered early that they could root their way
out of the split rail enclosure to freedom any time and would come and go
at will. The relocated animals found the extreme
conditions favorable and immediately began to proliferate. In the early
1920s the population in the lot was estimated at 100 hogs, but many others
were living free. A hunt with dogs was conducted in the pen and only two
hogs were killed. The rest
escaped in the frenzy, joining those already living in the dense
wilderness. Today the Russian blue boar population continues to grow in
spite of hunting and the encroachment of civilization.
The big bear learned to climb out of the
stockade to search for food. Local poachers soon exterminated the turkeys.
The buffalo did poorly, eventually being driven to Andrews and disposed
of. The Elk thrived and even multiplied, but ultimately were sold, too.
It was while working on the mountain that
Cotton McGuire met Mabel Hooper, a daughter of Sim Hooper who himself was
a grandson of Enos. The two
were eventually married and after George Moore’s final departure,
Mcguire was given the lease. Cotton
and Mabel stayed on the mountain, living and starting a family in the
caretaker’s house. They
farmed and raised cattle, and Cotton continued to host hunting and fishing
parties in the lodge. The
house was later lost in a fire and the Hoopers were forced to reside in
the lodge for a while, but as their children reached school age they too
left the mountain. The lease
reverted back to the logging company.
During the 1930’s and ’40’s a few
local farmers would still take livestock to the bald to graze, but small
farmers have become fewer and fewer, and that practice has all but ceased.
Without these grazers, trees have started to encroach back into the
grasslands at the bald.
At some point the Snowbird logging tract
passed from Whiting to the Bemis Lumber Company and logging continued near
the mountain, but eventually Bemis held a public sale and the land was
sold to private owners. The
old lodge had fallen into terrible disrepair by this time and was
bulldozed off the side of the mountain to make room for a new residence.
Even though it was in a very remote
location Hooper Bald remained a popular destination for hunters and
hikers, but only reachable by vehicle with a rugged four-wheeler or
motorbike. But in the
1990’s the construction of the Cherohala Skyway made the mountain easily
accessible to everyone, passing within less than a mile from the bald.
Only land on the south and east sides of the mountain are privately
owned today. Most all of the
areas to the north and west are now in the Nantahala National Forest.
The bald itself is split between the two.
There are a few private homes on the mountain, on inherited Hooper
land, and on tracts purchased from Bemis.
With its curvy steep runs, the Cherohala has become very popular
with motorcyclists in spring, summer, and fall, but in the winter months
Hooper Bald can still be a very remote, desolate place.
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