The Old Store at Grassy Creek
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A Community, a River, and the Salamander That Saved Them By Julie Farthing
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here is a place where the land rolls upward towards the clouds then gently down again like waves in an ocean. Lush land, carpeted with acres of Christmas trees and gravel roads that meander by centuryold barns and a crystal clear stream that sparkles in the sun. The place is Grassy Creek, North Carolina, named for the tributary that flows into the North Fork of the New River in Ashe County. You can literally throw a rock across the state line into Virginia. Established in the late 1700s by the affluent Greer family, its landscape was once dotted with plantation homes, schools, stores, churches and a post office. Other families were soon drawn to its beauty—with surnames of Jones, Cox, Pierce, Young, and Hash, just to name a few—and later buried in cemeteries scattered on the rolling hills and fertile bottom land that made this region the perfect spot to set down roots. And then there is the river. The New River, wide and shallow, sometimes lazy, sometimes swift. At 300 million years old, it is hardly new, believed to be the second oldest river in the world behind the Nile. Its pristine waters flow north, one of only a few rivers in the U.S. that does so, traveling 320 miles until it joins the Kanawha River in Charleston, West Virginia. The even older mountain ranges that the New River
80 — Spring 2023 CAROLINA MOUNTAIN LIFE
traverses contain mineral-rich soils resulting in a wide diversity of rare plants and aquatic species, one of them being the star of our story: Cryptobranchus alleganiensis, better known as the “hellbender.” These mottled brown and gray salamanders with their slimy, wrinkled skin, eel-like tail and flat head with beady eyes are probably why early settlers would say “it was a creature from hell where it’s bent on returning!” Also called the Allegheny alligator snot otter, and devil dog, it is the largest salamander species in North America. In the 1970s, Grassy Creek, the New River and the hellbender were on the brink of destruction when the Appalachian Power Company proposed a dam that would flood over 40,000 acres of the New River Valley. Elizabeth Underwood, Director of the New River Conservancy, headquartered in West Jefferson, explains the importance of the community banding together to save the river and ancestral land listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. “At the time we were the National Committee for the New River to preserve the headwaters from being flooded by the dam,” says Underwood. “In 1976, The Old Store at Grassy Creek was on the Registry, and that was a pivotal point because the dam would have flooded buildings in
the historic district. And of course there were the endangered species—including the salamander. This was a big reason for the political advocacy generated by so many people through the states of North Carolina and Virginia, and so ultimately Gerald Ford signed the National Wild and Scenic Status for this section of the river to the Virginia line.” The historic store Underwood refers to first opened its doors more than 120 years ago when agriculture in Grassy Creek was at its height. In 1976, when the community was fighting a big corporation, current owners John and Kathy Chefas were planting their first Christmas trees in Hart, Michigan. A decade later, John was traveling with his brother through Ashe County in search of the popular Fraser fir trees. When he stumbled across Grassy Creek, he fell so in love with the land that he bought the original Greer farm, where John and Kathy soon relocated their Hart-T-Tree Farms operation. Today they manage the business along with their daughter, Carrie McClain, who explains how her father saved the old store which had sat vacant for decades after many of Grassy Creek’s younger generations sought work in larger cities. “He was going to knock it down, it was in such disrepair,” McClain says of the old general store. “When he discovered it was