The Drover's Road

John Parris
Reprinted with permission of the Asheville Citizen-Times

This bronze sculpture, entitled “Crossroads,” resides at the Vance Monument in Asheville, NC to honor the hog drovers that once used the Buncombe Turnpike.

Zachariah Candler stood in the door of his wayside inn and watched the dust boil up far down the turnpike. He knew the signs only too well. The Buncombe Turnpike, he mused, was beginning to resemble a parade out of Noah's Ark.

As the snail-crawling dust edged nearer, he caught the familiar cry "suboy! suboy! suboy!"

Then a barefoot boy came into sight, scattering shelled corn.

Behind came the first of a plodding, grunting drove of hogs bound for the South Carolina and Georgia markets by way of Asheville.

The year 1826 was proving to be a good year for the stock stand operators along the pike and Zachariah Candler figured close to 200,000 hogs had come this way out of Kentucky and Tennessee.

Why, only last month, he recalled, Hezekiah Barnard at Barnard's on the French Broad had fed 90,000 hogs, while David Vance at Lapland had boasted feeding 110,000 during the same period.

Here at Sandy Bottoms, Candler had sold some 2,000 bushels of corn, mostly to hog drovers, which, based on the required diet of 24 bushels daily for each 1,000 hogs, meant that he had fed around 80,000.

Between Hot Springs and Asheville there were some eight or ten stock stands, or wayside inns with stock yards, at two- to four-mile intervals.

They gave bed and board to the weary drovers and feed to his cattle, sheep, hogs, horses, mules and turkeys that made the Buncombe Turnpike a heavily traveled thoroughfare until long after the Civil War.

James Garrett had a stand about a mile below Hot Springs. John E. Patton ran the White House above Hot Springs. At the mouth of Laurel Creek was a stand kept by David Farnsworth. Samuel Chunn catered to the drovers opposite the mouth of Pine Creek.

At the lower end of what is now Marshall, but then was called Lapland, a stand was operated by Joseph Rice. At the upper end of the narrow village David Vance kept a tavern that was 150 feet long and huddled between the stage road and the mountains.

Samuel Smith accommodated all travelers and their belongings at the mouth of Ivy while Mitchell Alexander was the Boniface at Alexander's.

During the months of October, November and December there was an almost continuous string of hogs from the Tennessee line to Asheville.

It was not uncommon for ten to twelve droves, numbering from three hundred to one and two thousand to stop overnight and feed at one of these stands.

Each drove was "lotted" to itself and "corned" by the wagonload.

The wagon was driven through each lot with ten or twelve men scattering the corn, left and right and to the rear, literally covering the ground. The drovers were furnished large rooms which had immense log-heap fireplaces. They provided their own blankets. They would form a semi-circle on the bare floor, their feet to the fire, and thus pass the night.

Many of these innkeepers, such as Zachariah Candler, whose great-great-grandson, Dr. Charles Z. Candler, Jr., now lives at Asheville, kept little stores and bartered or sold everything on credit.

In the fall of the year they would advertise that on certain days they would receive corn in payment of store accounts.

The farmers would begin delivering frequently by daylight and continue until midnight, and their wagons would be strung out for a mile and as thick as they could be wedged.

The price allowed the farmers for corn on their store accounts was fifty cents per bushel.

The innkeepers would furnish it to the drovers at twenty to twenty-five cents "per diet," meaning per meal for their drivers, asking the whole in lame hogs at so much per pound, or a due bill from the manager of the drive to be paid as he returned home after selling his stock.

Cash was rarely ever paid.

The lame hogs were kept until a suitable time for killing when they were slaughtered and converted into bacon and lard.

The pig pelters were a colorful lot.

Sometimes they frequented taverns where they pulled long and hard from bottles and then whooped it up with a fiddle for hours.

Many drovers camped wherever night found them.

They usually made only about eight miles a day with their droves.

At the stops the drovers would spend their time talking politics and spinning yarns.

And they would listen to the cry of the fiddles telling of young love:

‘Twas in the merry month of May
When the green leaves they were buddin',
Seet William Gray on his death-bed lay
For the love of Barbry Allen.

The first drovers began moving their herds of hogs, cattle and horses out of Tennessee and Kentucky into the southern seaboard regions about the turn of the 19th century.

There were no stock stands at that time and they camped wherever night found them.

They kindled a fire, spread blankets on the ground and turned in soon after sundown.

The pigs roamed the woods, and morning found the pelters up early. An hour or more was spent daily hunting porkers that had strayed during the night.

Frequently a couple dozen or more strays were left behind, but the percentage of lost pigs was extremely low.

Thunder storms and swollen creeks were the greatest hazards to the drovers.

Like cattle, the hogs stampeded when there was thunder and lightning. They lost their reason and ran wildly.

Farmers who drove their own herds had less difficulty with the hogs than professional drovers.

Trained to come when called or when a conch shell was blown, thoroughly domesticated hogs behaved fairly well on the road.

Autumn and early spring were the best times for droving, since the cool weather not only made traveling easier but also reduced loss of weight.

The Buncombe Turnpike funneled great numbers of animals to Charleston and Augusta, and folks in Asheville got used to seeing the almost daily parade of hogs, cattle, horses and sheep passing through the center of town.

It may have been at David Vance's tavern here in Marshall that a drover, while quaffing a bumper of ale, started the legend that the first pegged shoes were made in the Madison County town, which lies in a narrow gorge of the French Broad River.

The story goes that because the town is so confined, cobblers found it impossible to stretch their thread to arm's length, thus ruling out sewn soles and forcing them to use wooden pegs which they could hammer in by striking up and down.

Such were the legends that grew along the Buncombe Turnpike when it was the drover's road.