News Release

Photo note: To download photos, see end of release.

Injury ended football career, jump-started
a life-long love of books, nature and writing

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL – Not many major-college football players go on to become writers and even fewer write books about nature, but George Ellison of Bryson City, N.C., has done both.

After captaining his high school team in Danville, Va., and earning All-State honors, Ellison played for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Tar Heels, including captaining UNC’s freshman team. A wrenching knee injury, however, put a painful orthopaedic cap on his promising college career in 1962 and sent him in a new direction.

In June, the History Press of Charleston, S.C., published Ellison’s latest book, Mountain Passages, subtitled Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. So far, it’s the History Press’s most successful book of 2005. "Mountain Passages" already has undergone a second printing.

"My injury in the Ohio State game diverted my attention to my studies, and I became a lot more serious about the academic side of college," said Ellison. "Since I always wanted to be a writer, I became an English major and then did graduate work at South Carolina and later taught at Mississippi State."

The former star athlete now makes his living writing, teaching and lecturing about his beloved mountains and their people, past and present. He and his wife of 43 years, Milton, N.C.-native Elizabeth, live in a cabin in a 46-acre cove surrounded on three sides by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. An accomplished artist, Elizabeth Ellison painted the cover illustration and decorative drawings for his new book and shares a studio and office with him in Bryson City, N.C.

"I’m continually intrigued by the manner in which the natural and human histories of any given region overlap and eventually commingle," the author wrote. "That process is ongoing, of course, anywhere one chooses to reside, but in no place I’ve experienced or read about is there a richer context than here in these mountains."

"Mountain Passages" collected columns he originally crafted for the Smoky Mountain News, a regional magazine published in Waynesville. He also writes a column for the Asheville Citizen-Times. In three sections, the book presents a cornucopia of facts and musings about nature, the Cherokee and European settlers.

In the natural history section, he discusses water flowing through the seeps, springs, branches, creeks and rivers that have played such a big part in mountain life. The word "creek" may come from the Norse word "kriki" meaning a bend or nook. And some researchers, he wrote, believe that waterfalls appeal to so many in part because they generate negatively charged air molecules which make people feel better physically and emotionally.

Other topics include vibrant autumn foliage, plants, birds and the bison that roamed the Smokies in great numbers before whites arrived and declined precipitously thereafter. Ellison also discusses with mixed emotion the destructive wild European boars that were imported and prospered readily in the wild after escaping their large enclosure.

Ellison describes how much of a herd of 60 to 100 got out in the course of a hunt-gone-wrong in the early 1920s:

"…The boar, however, turned out to be more than the hunters or dogs bargained for. Only two were killed, and at least a dozen dogs were killed, or severely maimed. Some of the hunters were forced to take refuge in trees to escape the charging beasts. Overly excited by the baying of dogs and shouts of hunters, the boar simply tore they way through the fence and escaped into the nearby mountains."

In one essay, "The Lay of the Land," the author explains balds, roughs, slicks, woolies and laurel hells as well as other topographical features like benches, butts, knobs, leads, spurs, gaps, hollows, scalds and sags. Throughout are such evocative place names as Bearwallow Bald, Mollies Butt, Ballhoot Scar Overlook, Blowdown at Thunderhead Mountain, Crooked Arm, Deepglow Gap and the Boogerman Trail.

In the second section, Ellison concentrates on part of Cherokee history -- how they caught fish, frightening and semi-obscene booger masks, witch lore, the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, Indian caves, warfare, plants they gathered for food and medicine and how Geronimo almost moved to North Carolina.

The third part, "Mountaineers," describes a pioneering movie, "Stark Love," made in the mountains in 1927, Thomas Wolfe, an odd duel, jails, weather, the hermit David Grier, fly fishing, fire towers and unusual people. One of the latter was Civil War veteran, moonshiner and feisty storyteller Quill Rose. When asked if moonshine improved with age, Ellison wrote that "Rose became incensed and emphatically denied it, citing his own research: ‘I kept some for a whole week one time and I could not tell that it was one bit better than when it was fresh and new.’"

Ellison will sign copies of "Mountain Passages" at Barnes & Noble at New Hope Commons in Durham on Friday (Sept. 16) at 7 p.m. and at Books-a-Million in Burlington on Saturday (Sept. 17) at 12:30 p.m. On Sunday (Sept. 18) at 2 p.m., he will also read from his writings at McIntyre’s Books at Fearrington Village.

The writer’s return to Chapel Hill is only partially literary. He has been invited back to his alma mater to participate in the football team’s annual Lettermen’s Day ceremonies on Saturday in conjunction with the UNC-Wisconsin game.

- 30 -

Note: Ellison can be reached at (828) 488-8782.

Photo url: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/alum/ellison_george.JPG 

History Press contact, review copies: Brittain Phillips, (866) 223-5778
News Services contact: David Williamson, (919) 962-8596