"Vale of the Cross," or Valle Crucis, was named by the second Episcopal bishop of North Carolina, Levi Silliman Ives, who noted that three creeks flow together here in the shape of a cross. Like Crossnore, Valle Crucis was adopted by outsiders with a missionary zeal to improve living conditions among mountain folk.
The Episcopal Diocese set out in 1844 to build a mission and a school for boys in Valle Crucis, where at the time only a single cabin belonging to a miller stood. Today the Episcopal Church runs the Valle Crucis Conference Center at the site of the historic mission school.
The story of this mission served as the inspiration for Romulus Linney's widely reviewed novel Heathen Valley, first published in 1962 and reissued in 2004. Linney is now best known as the author of some three-dozen plays for which he has earned two Obies and two National Critics Awards for Best Play of the Year, including his 1987 adaptation of Heathen Valley for the stage. As a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Linney also won both the Award in Literature and the Award of Merit Medal for Drama. Heathen Valley, the first of his three novels to date, presents a dark and sometimes brutish portrait of the years in which the church struggled to gain a foothold in the spiritual lives of Watauga County residents.
Devoted readers of horror novelist Scott Nicholson (also discussed in Tour 15) will recognize the nearby Church of St. John the Baptist, consecrated in 1862, as the church pictured on the cover of the 2002 mass-market paperback version of Nicholson's first novel, The Red Church. This brisk and keenly felt novel was a Bram Stoker Award finalist. Nicholson, who was born in Mooresville, North Carolina, has lived in a number of towns across the state and now makes his home in nearby Boone, where he studied creative writing at Appalachian State. St. John's is now used only for weddings and occasional services
Novelist and poet Isabel Zuber also had St. John's in mind when she was writing her family saga, Salt (2002). In an interview Zuber explained: "The Salt area is around Mabel, North Carolina, which is named Faith in my book. It is less developed than some other parts of Watauga County (at least for now) and much of it is lovely. The church that Anna and Nell walk to near Valle Crucis (St. John's) is still there. John's barn in the community I called Faith also still stands, as well as the house where Roland picked up the mail."
Born in Boone, Zuber served as a librarian at Wake Forest University for many years and still makes her home in Winston-Salem. She earned Virginia Commonwealth University's First Novelist Award for Salt. Her poetry collections are Oriflamb (1987) and Winter's Exile (1997).
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