A mountain settlement consists of all who get their mail at the same place. Ours was made up of forty-two households (about two hundred souls) scattered over an area eight miles long by two wide. These are air-line measurements. All roads and trails "wiggled and wingled around" so that some families were several miles from a neighbor. Fifteen homes had no wagon road and could be reached by no vehicle other than a narrow sled. Quill Rose [a man] had not even a sledpath, but journeyed full five miles by trail to the nearest wagon road.
(from Our Southern Highlanders, by Horace Kephart)
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