Montraville, Episodes in an Early Appalachian Life

Ron Griswold | Opus 209p, hardcover, $24.99, ISBN 978-1624-29426-6

Griswold’s first book is a fictionalized history of the life of

Michael Montraville Weaver, founder of the town of Weaverville in North Carolina. Montraville is the last child of John and Elizabeth Weaver, early settlers in the mountainous regions of

Western North Carolina, named after Elizabeth’s favorite character in Susanna Rowson’s famous novel Charlotte Temple. In the absence of a school nearby, Montraville grows up learning from his parents and the Bible, plus friends like Red Bird, the son of a Cherokee chief. Ordained a Methodist preacher and married to Jane Baird, life seems set for the hardworking Mont, but he discovers that the future holds unexpected challenges, chief among them the Civil War and its aftermath.

Griswold blends research with fiction to bring life to the past, though the balance of storytelling and history often leans toward history, with much attention paid to the context and texture of Mont’s life rather than scene-driven drama. Occasionally, Griswold shifts away from the title character, as in passages following Mingo, a slave who has escaped his bondage, which broadens the novel’s purview. Mont considers himself a benevolent slaveholder—one providing Christian teaching and “more reward and less punishment”—but Griswold’s thoughtful depiction makes no excuses for the historical crime.

Readers eager to immerse themselves in complex history as it was actually lived will find much here that fascinates and resonates, such as the incident of Mont taking on a church elder and popular preacher after the latter’s attempt to force himself on Easter, an attractive slave girl. Also engaging is Griswold’s portrayal of the unrelenting efforts of John Weaver and Mont in maintaining cordial relations with the Cherokee and the continual injustices meted out to the Native American population. This is an illuminating, often arresting read that examines, with persuasive power, the drift of life and mind of a Carolina landowner navigating the bumptious end of the eighteenth century and the dawn of the next.

A thoroughly researched novel about the life and times of the founder of Weaverville, North Carolina.

Great for fans of Robert Hicks’s The Widow of the South, Nancy E. Turner’s These Is My

Words.