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From self-reliant settlements to company-built coal villages, these vanished communities speak to the complex history of the mountain South.
Photo Above: This property was the home of Velmer Bailey, the last occupant of Lost Cove.
Courtesy of Jeff Bryant
Some places are haunted, not by ghosts but by the memories of what once was. Historian Christy Smith is reminded of this each time she hikes into Lost Cove, North Carolina.
Perched atop Flattop Mountain, about a mile above the Nolichucky River in the rural reaches of Yancey County, Lost Cove doesn’t look like much. Hikers who make the nearly seven-mile trek will find nothing more than a few derelict homes, lonely chimney stacks, rusted farm tools and moss-covered headstones. But from 1864 to 1957 — the better part of a century — this mountain town thrived.
“In its heyday in the 1920s, about 100 people lived here,” says Smith, who first hiked into Lost Cove with her mother in the early 1980s. “There was a sawmill, a school and a church. People worked hard, but they lived full lives.”
Smith spent more than a decade combing through family records, oral histories and land deeds before publishing “Lost Cove, North Carolina: Portrait of a Vanished Appalachian Community” in 2021. The book traces the town’s origins to Stephen “Morgan” Bailey, a Union soldier who, according to family lore, traded $10 and a shotgun for 350 acres of prime hunting land from a Native American.
He was soon joined by fellow Union soldier John D. Tipton and other families from nearby towns. Together, the settlers scratched out a self-reliant way of life, hunting wild game, growing crops and harvesting timber.
“They were self-sustaining,” says Smith. “Nobody ever really went without. They took care of each other.”
By the early 1900s, the Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway stitched Lost Cove into the outside world. This allowed residents to visit neighboring communities, making it easier to peddle ginseng, hook-rugs and even moonshine for extra cash.
According to Smith, the moonshine-making conditions couldn’t have been better. Springwater was plentiful and a long-standing border dispute between North Carolina and Tennessee meant revenue agents had trouble asserting legal authority.
“Pretty much every family made moonshine,” she says. “It was a great source of income for them.”
But by the 1950s, life in Lost Cove began to unravel. The timber was gone and passenger trains had stopped running. The school only went through 11th grade, forcing students to travel long distances for their diplomas. And though locals petitioned the state for a road — just three miles long — the project was ultimately deemed too expensive for the county to justify.
“People thought a road would come and that they’d be able to stay,” says Smith. “But it never did.”
One by one, folks started to leave. The last sermon at Free Will Baptist Church was delivered in December 1957. On January 1, 1958, Velmer Bailey and his family — the last remaining inhabitants of Lost Cove — packed what they could carry and walked out.
“When they left, they thought they’d be back,” Smith says. “But no one ever returned.”
Today, the forest has swallowed most signs of life in Lost Cove. But the town’s story echoes far beyond Flattop Mountain. Across Southern Appalachia, similar towns once flourished, only to be undone by shifting industries, resource depletion and the slow march of modernity.
One such place is Elkmont, Tennessee — a town in the Great Smoky Mountains whose fate was shaped not by isolation, but by the complicated push and pull between preservation and progress.
Founded in the early 1900s by the Little River Logging Company, Elkmont began as a booming timber operation, says Candice Roland Candeto, senior curator at Tennessee State Museum.
“The industry built a railroad to move harvested logs out of the mountains and soon began transporting vacationers from Knoxville into the mountains for further profit along the same rail system,” she explains.
By the 1910s, the town had transformed into a fashionable summer enclave. The Appalachian Club and Wonderland Hotel offered lodging for vacationers who spent their days hiking, swimming, hunting and fishing. In time, many visitors built their own cabins, creating a thriving summer colony.
“I think we often picture a Smoky Mountain retreat as being serene and peaceful,” says Candeto. “I’m sure that could be found, too, but Elkmont at its peak would have been full of music, fireworks and laughter.”
However, that golden era didn’t last. In the 1930s, when the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was officially established, Elkmont’s summer residents were given a choice. They could sell their land to the government for its full value or sell at a discount for the right to continue using their cabins until their death.
“Most cabin owners could afford to take the lifetime lease, and did,” says Candeto. “But when they later wanted to bring electricity to their community, most changed their terms to a 20-year lease in order to guarantee a period of service for the electric company. The leases were set to end in 1972, then extended to 1992, at which point the National Park Service (NPS) determined that leases would not be extended further.”
Decades of debate followed. Preservationists pushed to save the cabins as historic landmarks. Others advocated for restoring the land to its natural state. Ultimately, most of the structures were demolished but 18 cabins in an area known as Daisy Town were preserved and stabilized by NPS.
This legacy makes Elkmont a unique kind of ghost town, says Candeto. “Its decline was, in many ways, intentional rather than a natural evolution.”
Further north, West Virginia’s New River Gorge tells a grittier story. Places like Nuttallburg and Kaymoor weren’t summertime retreats or isolated homesteads. These were company towns, built by industry, for industry.
Nuttallburg was one of the first to rise. Established in the 1870s by English-born entrepreneur John Nuttall, the town became a key hub for shipping coal to growing markets via the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway.
Kaymoor came slightly later. Founded in 1900 by the Low Moor Iron Company, Kaymoor’s operations were vertically integrated — coal was mined, processed and baked into coke all within the same site, then hauled up the mountain via a steep incline railway.
According to Dave Bieri, a ranger at New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, life in these company towns wasn’t easy. Workers endured long hours underground, often in dangerous conditions with limited safety regulations. Money was tight, too.
“Housing was provided at a cost to the miner and their family, but families were often forced to leave if the miner died,” says Bieri. “Also, miners were paid in scrip, so they could only redeem it in the company store. Each town had a company store, and anything they bought would be paid for with company scrip currency.”
Like many boomtowns tied to a single resource, the end came quickly. By the 1950s, the easily accessible coal was depleted.
“Today, with the more mechanized equipment we have, they would have been able to mine further,” Bieri explains. “But at that time, that was the most they could do while still being profitable.”
By the mid-20th century, both Kaymoor and Nuttallburg were abandoned. The NPS now manages the sites, working to stabilize structures, conduct oral histories and interpret the region’s industrial past.
At Kaymoor, a strenuous hike leads past the remnants of coke ovens, mine entrances and the ruins of worker housing. At Nuttallburg, visitors can walk among the best-preserved coal structures in the country, including a towering coal conveyor system, tipple and headhouse.
“These are industrial ruins, but they’re also memorials,” says Bieri. “They give us a tangible link to the people who once lived and worked here and allow us to preserve their legacy.”
That same spirit of remembrance is alive and well in North Carolina’s Lost Cove, where new efforts are helping protect what little remains. In May 2025, the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy (SAHC) purchased a 56-acre tract nestled between Flattop Mountain and the Nolichucky River. The property adjoins a 95-acre parcel the nonprofit acquired in 2012 and transferred to the U.S. Forest Service in 2017. Eventually, this newest acquisition will also become part of Pisgah National Forest.
For SAHC, the conservation work is both ecological and cultural. The tract helps safeguard wildlife habitat — including golden eagle migration routes — and preserves scenic views from the Appalachian Trail. But just as importantly, it ensures the story of Lost Cove won’t be lost to time.
“Lost Cove is proof of how self-reliant and self-sustaining Appalachian people have always been,” says Smith. “It’s a story that deserves to be remembered.”
The story above first appeared in our September / October 2025 issue.
