What do you think?
Rate this book
Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland
Across the Blue Ridge Mountains stretches a world both charming and complicated.
Jeremy Jones and his wife move into a small house above the creek where his family had settled 200 years prior. He takes a job alongside his former teachers in the local elementary school and sets out on a search to understand how this ancient land has shaped its people—how it shaped him. His search sends him burrowing in the past—hunting buried treasure and POW camps, unearthing Civil War graves and family feuds, exploring gated communities and tourist traps, encountering changed accents and immigrant populations, tracing both Walmart sidewalks and carved-out mountains—and pondering the future. He meshes narrative and myth, geology and genealogy, fiddle tunes and local color in his exploration of the briskly changing and oft-stigmatized world of his native southern Appalachians and particularly the mystical Bearwallow Mountain, a peak suddenly in flux.
Jeremy Jones and his wife move into a small house above the creek where his family had settled 200 years prior. He takes a job alongside his former teachers in the local elementary school and sets out on a search to understand how this ancient land has shaped its people—how it shaped him. His search sends him burrowing in the past—hunting buried treasure and POW camps, unearthing Civil War graves and family feuds, exploring gated communities and tourist traps, encountering changed accents and immigrant populations, tracing both Walmart sidewalks and carved-out mountains—and pondering the future. He meshes narrative and myth, geology and genealogy, fiddle tunes and local color in his exploration of the briskly changing and oft-stigmatized world of his native southern Appalachians and particularly the mystical Bearwallow Mountain, a peak suddenly in flux.
265 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 13, 2014
40 people are currently reading
782 people want to read
About the author
Jeremy B. Jones
2 books28 followersJeremy is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries (Blair, 2025) as well as the memoir Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland (Blair, 2014). Bearwallow was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction and was awarded gold in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book (IPPY) Awards in memoir. His essays have been published in Oxford American, Garden and Gun, The Bitter Southerner, and Brevity, among others. He also writes frequently for Our State Magazine. Jeremy earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and is a professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, in his native North Carolina. He also serves as the series co-editor for In Place: a literary nonfiction book series from WVU Press.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
February 15, 2016
After college Jones set out for Western Honduras, a small town set in the mountains as well, to teach young children there.
“I was in Gracias, leading fourth-graders through the cobblestone streets and across the snaking rivers, that I somehow found myself working back to Bearwallow. I began to see traces of home everywhere. ”
Even at the market in Gracias, he sees his old home.
“The men driving oxen down the mountain, the women cooking over wood stoves in the hollows of Celaque – that world felt like a history lesson of Appalachia, like I’d been dropped into an alternate-universe version of the world of my grandparents.
“Here I was in another world, somewhere that seemed to spring from the mind of Gabriel Garcia Marquez – a puma wandered into town from Celaque; butterflies swooned over the flowers on the playground as children burst wildly through; a toucan rested on a tree outside my classroom as we took a vocabulary quiz – and I could think only of my bear and my mountain.”
The children’s local folk songs had him digging out similarities in Appalachian tunes, the local ghost stories reminded him of stories of his ancestors. To live in the shadow of Bearwallow he returns to teach at his old elementary school alongside his former teachers in a single-wide behind the school in Edneyville. It doesn’t take him long to ride his mountain bike to the top of Bearwallow, his mountain.
“The trees breathed with the wind and water trickled down the mountain, but everything felt still, like I’d found some secret: a whole place forgotten.”
Jones is a storyteller, mixing his memoir with myth, linking the geology in these mountains with his genealogy, past with the present, banjos and the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s all a lovely, seamless wandering through place and time.
“I was in Gracias, leading fourth-graders through the cobblestone streets and across the snaking rivers, that I somehow found myself working back to Bearwallow. I began to see traces of home everywhere. ”
Even at the market in Gracias, he sees his old home.
“The men driving oxen down the mountain, the women cooking over wood stoves in the hollows of Celaque – that world felt like a history lesson of Appalachia, like I’d been dropped into an alternate-universe version of the world of my grandparents.
“Here I was in another world, somewhere that seemed to spring from the mind of Gabriel Garcia Marquez – a puma wandered into town from Celaque; butterflies swooned over the flowers on the playground as children burst wildly through; a toucan rested on a tree outside my classroom as we took a vocabulary quiz – and I could think only of my bear and my mountain.”
The children’s local folk songs had him digging out similarities in Appalachian tunes, the local ghost stories reminded him of stories of his ancestors. To live in the shadow of Bearwallow he returns to teach at his old elementary school alongside his former teachers in a single-wide behind the school in Edneyville. It doesn’t take him long to ride his mountain bike to the top of Bearwallow, his mountain.
“The trees breathed with the wind and water trickled down the mountain, but everything felt still, like I’d found some secret: a whole place forgotten.”
Jones is a storyteller, mixing his memoir with myth, linking the geology in these mountains with his genealogy, past with the present, banjos and the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s all a lovely, seamless wandering through place and time.
April 20, 2017
I loved this story, especially given that I grew up very close to Fruitland/Edneyville. And I met the author at a conference recently and he's a really nice guy. In this book he does a great job of weaving his personal story with history and descriptions of the natural setting.
February 5, 2025
It's a great book. Well written and an real look into life in the mountains of western NC. I happen to love the area of Bearwallow and consider Edneyville, Frutiland, and Hendersonville a second home and so especially loved reading more about the communities, the pull and push between "urban" and rural, development and preservation. This book might also speak to those interested in history, community, self-discovery, travel, and nature.
February 12, 2018
A couple of years ago my daughter and her husband moved to North Carolina and bought a home on the side of Bearwallow Mountain (NOT in the Grand Highlands up on top, which neither she nor I could possibly afford)! I visited them recently and immediately was attracted not only to the beauty of the area but the richness of Appalachian culture. So when she sent this book along, I lapped it up in two sittings. No doubt my immense enjoyment of Jeremy Jones' book results from a budding attachment to the area he's describing as well as to my general interest in writings about particular places to which one feels deep attachment. Anyway, I will go back to Bearwallow Mountain and no doubt will carry this book with me--who knows, maybe I'll even find the gold that his ancestor Abraham buried near an oak tree somewhere in the forest near Edneyville . . . gee, it would be nice if my reading habit finally became financially profitable!
October 14, 2017
"Although I'm living on land my family has claimed for over two centuries, I realize that the world around me-my mountains-is a far different country from that of my grandparents. I'm on the same land but in a different world, and I'm taken with, gripped by, the notion of returning to the lost country of my grandparents. To the Appalachia of yore."
I enjoyed this book on many levels. However, I felt like the author was trying to tell too many stories. His childhood in the mountains, returning to teach ESL students at his former elementary school, immigration, his time teaching in Honduras, his genealogy in the mountains of North Carolina and the changes or developments that have occurred and are occurring in the mountain community of his youth. The author was trying to tie all these threads of stories together and then to Bearwallow Mountain but it didn't always work. Especially, with the frequent jumping around from thread to thread.
One of the threads I enjoyed the most was when he was writing about the history of the mountains and the changes that have occurred and why they have happened. Is the development bad or just the natural passage of time? The way people have lived in and used the mountains has continually changed with each generation. When farming stops being profitable what are you to do with all the land? Sod farms instead of cattle grazing land. New housing developments instead of farms.
"So we use the land for its space, for its dirt, but not much more. It's as if we don't know what else to do. We've been sustained by the land since our people have been here and now that we don't grow anything in it, we sell the land itself for sustenance. We section it off and stick signs up and watch the developments clear trees and grow more houses in ten acres than had stood in a square mile. We develop."
I also enjoyed reading the several stories of the civil war that the author wrote about.
The author had heard there was an an anonymous grave of a confederate deserter at the foot of Bearwallow Mountain and went in search of it. He found the original worn headstone as well as a new, granite stone and a tattered confederate flag stuck into the ground. Ironically, it was the Sons of the Confederacy who donated the new headstone.
"While no one knows the dead boy's story, he likely was a confederate deserter who abandoned the war and his loyalty to the South, and was cut down by Edneyville men appointed to seek out and arrest Rebel deserters. So it's strange that his resting place in now adorned courtesy of groups fervently attached to the history and sacrifice of men and women to the confederate cause. He fled the confederacy, and the confederacy killed him for it. But here he lies in the woods with a fresh headstone and a Rebel flag"
I really liked so much about this book and probably would have loved it if it had not jumped around so much trying to pull so many disparate threads together into one book.
I enjoyed this book on many levels. However, I felt like the author was trying to tell too many stories. His childhood in the mountains, returning to teach ESL students at his former elementary school, immigration, his time teaching in Honduras, his genealogy in the mountains of North Carolina and the changes or developments that have occurred and are occurring in the mountain community of his youth. The author was trying to tie all these threads of stories together and then to Bearwallow Mountain but it didn't always work. Especially, with the frequent jumping around from thread to thread.
One of the threads I enjoyed the most was when he was writing about the history of the mountains and the changes that have occurred and why they have happened. Is the development bad or just the natural passage of time? The way people have lived in and used the mountains has continually changed with each generation. When farming stops being profitable what are you to do with all the land? Sod farms instead of cattle grazing land. New housing developments instead of farms.
"So we use the land for its space, for its dirt, but not much more. It's as if we don't know what else to do. We've been sustained by the land since our people have been here and now that we don't grow anything in it, we sell the land itself for sustenance. We section it off and stick signs up and watch the developments clear trees and grow more houses in ten acres than had stood in a square mile. We develop."
I also enjoyed reading the several stories of the civil war that the author wrote about.
The author had heard there was an an anonymous grave of a confederate deserter at the foot of Bearwallow Mountain and went in search of it. He found the original worn headstone as well as a new, granite stone and a tattered confederate flag stuck into the ground. Ironically, it was the Sons of the Confederacy who donated the new headstone.
"While no one knows the dead boy's story, he likely was a confederate deserter who abandoned the war and his loyalty to the South, and was cut down by Edneyville men appointed to seek out and arrest Rebel deserters. So it's strange that his resting place in now adorned courtesy of groups fervently attached to the history and sacrifice of men and women to the confederate cause. He fled the confederacy, and the confederacy killed him for it. But here he lies in the woods with a fresh headstone and a Rebel flag"
I really liked so much about this book and probably would have loved it if it had not jumped around so much trying to pull so many disparate threads together into one book.
September 15, 2025
Loved this one that focused on the author reconnecting with his home place up in Edneyville after teaching abroad in Honduras for a few years. It was fun to read a book where I’ve been to all the small communities named! And where Polk County is correctly written out (we locals all pronounce it Poke, IYKYK.) It’s also just beautifully written, and I identified with his words and his search for meaning amongst the stories and places of his ancestors, as well as his own boyhood. There’s a certain weight instilled in being from Appalachia that I feel often, and I think Jones understands that.
March 9, 2021
This is a book that grew on me. I started and stopped it several times but I kept finding myself going back to its pages. The writing is beautiful but it is a slow and meandering read. It is a good book to take your time to go through.
February 27, 2025
Bought this at a local WNC bookshop💖Reflective memoir that intertwines personal storytelling with the natural history & cultural significance of Bearwallow Mtn in WNC (an area close to my heart💚)
December 27, 2024
Sorry this one just didn't hold my interest.
December 4, 2017
This is an absolute delight! As a recent resident of this beautiful part of Appalachia, it was good to read this story of a native who left and has returned. Having read "Hillbilly Elegy" earlier this year, I found this a good companion book to that one. The former is more angry and political, but Mr. Jones' book is a love story to not only Bearwallow Mountain, but all that western North Carolina has to offer. It's also a cautionary tale of "development" or "community," as the real estate people present it. Mr. Jones, with his inviting writing style, takes the reader along with him wherever he goes - to school with his immigrant students, on his bike rides up the mountain, walking through the woods with his dogs, or experiencing his time in Honduras.
April 11, 2021
Largely aimless. While the book has some wonderful segments and the writing is often beautiful, the narrative lacks a gravitational center.
I was put off by the discrepancy between his extended focus on indigenous life in Honduras without fully developing the historical indigenous world in Appalachia. As a result, he tends toward presenting his forbearers as the first *meaningful* inhabitants of the land and waxes poetic on his family history rather than fully telling the story of the mountain.
Many of the chapters feel like the rough drafts of loosely connected vignettes or blog posts by a talented writer. Probably should have been a collection of essays. There’s potential, but it needs refining.
I was put off by the discrepancy between his extended focus on indigenous life in Honduras without fully developing the historical indigenous world in Appalachia. As a result, he tends toward presenting his forbearers as the first *meaningful* inhabitants of the land and waxes poetic on his family history rather than fully telling the story of the mountain.
Many of the chapters feel like the rough drafts of loosely connected vignettes or blog posts by a talented writer. Probably should have been a collection of essays. There’s potential, but it needs refining.
May 25, 2019
If a book is rated on how much one enjoyed the time spent reading it, this book merits a ten. I could feel the PULL , I could visualize the many times I had been on 64 east of Hendersonville I could feel joy emanate from the youngsters in the author's class. Most importantly his appreciation of his heritage and each environment he finds himself placed is evidenced throughout.
December 4, 2015
Jeremy Jones writes with poignant, lithe, prose. He may be looking at one spot on the mountain, but he's looked at it from every ridgeline, from every cove, from every prone position in the field. What we're left with is the multi-faceted experience that is our lives.
January 20, 2024
writing itself was nothing to write home about but the CONTENT?????? entranced me, inspired me, filled me… Loved it
July 26, 2024
I picked this book up at random when my library featured it. I loved it.
A thoughtfully written memoir of both his personal history, his ancestors and the mountains of western North Carolina. He did a beautiful job of tying in the things he was experiencing at the time with his exploration of his ancestry, but also going further back to the indigenous people who claimed those mountains long before his people did.
I really enjoyed how he viewed his time in Honduras through the lens of his upbringing, and then the reverse when he went back to North Carolina. His thoughts/views on the events of the past and the current time are nuanced - no event or people is all black or all white, all good or all bad. While nostalgic for the past, he also realizes that change is inevitable.
I enjoyed his writing style as well, although it took me maybe 30 pages to get into the book. There was some humor and the book overall invited you to take your time and meditate on what he was writing about.
I hope he has (or will) continue writing.
Some quotes I liked:
"Within my blood runs a man disillusioned with war and regional loyalty and another who followed orders earnestly and surely. A man who shot and a man who was shot." - pg 50
"I've come upon this land more than two hundred years later. My twentieth-century trees managed their way into the world after the days of the timber trains. My trees are new trees for a new world." - pg 185
A thoughtfully written memoir of both his personal history, his ancestors and the mountains of western North Carolina. He did a beautiful job of tying in the things he was experiencing at the time with his exploration of his ancestry, but also going further back to the indigenous people who claimed those mountains long before his people did.
I really enjoyed how he viewed his time in Honduras through the lens of his upbringing, and then the reverse when he went back to North Carolina. His thoughts/views on the events of the past and the current time are nuanced - no event or people is all black or all white, all good or all bad. While nostalgic for the past, he also realizes that change is inevitable.
I enjoyed his writing style as well, although it took me maybe 30 pages to get into the book. There was some humor and the book overall invited you to take your time and meditate on what he was writing about.
I hope he has (or will) continue writing.
Some quotes I liked:
"Within my blood runs a man disillusioned with war and regional loyalty and another who followed orders earnestly and surely. A man who shot and a man who was shot." - pg 50
"I've come upon this land more than two hundred years later. My twentieth-century trees managed their way into the world after the days of the timber trains. My trees are new trees for a new world." - pg 185
June 23, 2021
When you think of the words "Appalachian people," what comes to your mind? For me it is oftentimes poor, backwards, non-social people who live in solitude and have little education. This book will educate you, as I believe the year the author spent reflecting educated him. Bearwallow by Jeremy B. Jones is a "personal history" of a young man who grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, namely the Appalachian Bearwallow Mountain, in North Carolina. His family settled there over 200 years ago, and growing up, it was a place that he wanted to escape. He and his wife did this when they took teaching jobs in Honduras. Being in the poor mountain region in Honduras reminded Jeremy of Bearwallow and the "pull" drew them back home where he takes up a job teaching along side the same teachers he had years ago. While there, he digs into his family's history. He learns about "buried treasure, POW camps, Civil War graves, family feuds, gated communities, tourist traps, changed accents, immigrant populations, and wonders about the future." I love how he goes back and forth comparing his Honduras experience with his Bearwallow experience. His stories from his grandma are great. And it's a plus that he has learned how to play the fiddle. For a non-fiction read (not usually my favorite), this is a good book.
October 12, 2021
Memoirs are hard, especially when they weave between the personal and the researched, the micro- and macrocosm. But this book hits a great balance. The research and history support the understanding and exploration of the writer's personal experience. And that experience is quite varied. In this we look at the history of the Appalachians from the first peoples until now, immigration/migration, ownership/stewardship, belonging and being "other," language, the divisions of the Civil War, modernization/preservation to tradition... and all within the borders of the writer's own life, place, identity, and time. The book does it with nuance, accepting that we can never really know the full story, and accepting that everything is transient- depending on which timescale we use to observe it. And it does all this without sentimentality or nostalgia. A substantial feat. Big props to the writer for daring to explore the intersection of such a broad range of factors, and big props to the editor for helping the experience for readers be accessible, smooth, and organic.
November 28, 2022
As a native North Carolinian, I was pleased to find an author around my age and with similar thoughts. I first read Jones’ work in a collection of “letters to a stranger” where he wrote to a trucker on I-40 that he followed through the mountains during a snow storm. I could have written a very similar letter myself. (Actually, he didn’t write this one but I am too lazy to delete it…he wrote one about being in Honduras, imagining simple life with a local woman then realizing he had similar opportunities on his family’s 200 year old acreage near Bearwallow Mountain.)
Jeremy’s approach was endearing and thought provoking, intelligent but humble. I constantly wanted to read more, to see another angle of his mountain life, but also didn’t want it to end. It may not be the most exciting book that I have read, but it turned my mind to my roots, “our roots”, my state and the vastness of my ignorance of the beauty and history around me. It gave a small shock of resurrection to that place within me that yearns to write and to have something important to say.
Jeremy’s approach was endearing and thought provoking, intelligent but humble. I constantly wanted to read more, to see another angle of his mountain life, but also didn’t want it to end. It may not be the most exciting book that I have read, but it turned my mind to my roots, “our roots”, my state and the vastness of my ignorance of the beauty and history around me. It gave a small shock of resurrection to that place within me that yearns to write and to have something important to say.
November 15, 2023
Lovely book.
Reads in that perfect spot that is informative and story telling without sounding academic or pretentious. The writing is enjoyable and the threads that link the chapters are smooth.
Loved the mountain connections between North Carolina and Honduras. Loved the musings on mountain folk--Jones accepts, supports, and connects with them and makes it easy for readers to do so as well.
Reads a little slow in parts like when he's biking and describing the land (maybe it's on purpose as the ascent on bike up those mountains must also be a slow process, even for seasoned bikers??)
Purchased on a trip to find Mayberry / Mount Airy, so I liked the local perspective
Reads in that perfect spot that is informative and story telling without sounding academic or pretentious. The writing is enjoyable and the threads that link the chapters are smooth.
Loved the mountain connections between North Carolina and Honduras. Loved the musings on mountain folk--Jones accepts, supports, and connects with them and makes it easy for readers to do so as well.
Reads a little slow in parts like when he's biking and describing the land (maybe it's on purpose as the ascent on bike up those mountains must also be a slow process, even for seasoned bikers??)
Purchased on a trip to find Mayberry / Mount Airy, so I liked the local perspective
June 22, 2018
This book was not necessarily what I was expecting when I first saw it on the shelf, but I really enjoyed it. My family isn't from the mountains, but we are from the foothills, and I enjoyed reading the similarities and differences. It was also surprisingly educational on history, which I wasn't expecting but thoroughly enjoyed.
I've come across mention of the Bearwallow trail a few times before and, while it was somewhere on my to-do list, after reading this book I want to go visit ASAP.
Not to mention how much I love the cover art.
I've come across mention of the Bearwallow trail a few times before and, while it was somewhere on my to-do list, after reading this book I want to go visit ASAP.
Not to mention how much I love the cover art.
December 9, 2025
The author tried to do too much with one book. He can write a beautiful sentence; he can well describe short action scenes; his digging into history was appreciated. But to weave these elements together into a coherent book is something else again. I hope to read that book in the future. This one was too airy, like cotton candy. I'm real good at figuring out family trees, relationships, multiple names for the same person - but I lost patience with the genealogy.
(I'd hoped to allow for one additional star since this is my land too. But I didn't want my bias to prevail.)
(I'd hoped to allow for one additional star since this is my land too. But I didn't want my bias to prevail.)
May 16, 2017
Adding this book to my every growing list of Appalachian reads. As someone who loves reading about this area, his writing did not disappoint. This memoir of a year when he returns home after living in Honduras is a study of his family's history in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I enjoyed the multi-faceted look at those who have inhabited that land. Jones is another author I will follow, and I hope he will write more.
June 6, 2017
As someone who lives in the area and is fascinated by history, I enjoyed this. The reflections of life in Honduras with life in Appalachia were an interesting thread. I found the book to be a readable memoir with depth of research about the area sprinkled in reminiscent of much of Bill Bryson's works. Overall, it was a mildly entertaining read but didn't seem to really go anywhere. I got the impression that I was reading a book full of daily or selected blog entries.
July 7, 2017
I would have read a book entitled Bearwallow even without meeting the author, but I did meet him at a book fair at the local community college. I didn't know at the time how many ways our lives crossed from common friends to places, including Bearwallow. He describes the fight over water at Grand Highlands, and I was one of the participants in that fight.
The book is an introspective look at one's sense of place, and the author has deep roots in an area that we both know.
The book is an introspective look at one's sense of place, and the author has deep roots in an area that we both know.
September 13, 2023
I've signed up for a course offered by the Wilma Dykeman Legacy covering four memoirs involving Western North Carolina, my new home. This is the first one and it combines a history of the area with the life so far of a young man who was raised in Bearwallow, went away to teach English in Honduras, and returned to teach in Western North Carolina. He does a good job of combining the three with rich descriptions of the culture and the scenery.
April 17, 2025
I’m a sucker for mountain stories and history. I’ve seen signs for Fruitland out on the interstate but never ventured to check it out. Bearwallow is an area I’m not very familiar with, but now, I long to see it in real life. Jones has a way of blending the history of the area, as well as his life, that makes me want to know more. More about Edneyville, the changes, and how their lives are now that he and his family are back. Look forward to more of Jones’ future writings!
July 25, 2020
A great story of searching for oneself by researching and learning about ancestors. Great connections Between Bearwallow Mountain and Honduras. The author had excellent vision into how the area of Bearwallow developed over many generations of his family. Thanks for sharing your search and your knowledge!
August 13, 2020
A great memoir/ history/ culture walk through the NC Blue Ridge Mountain. The author was born and raised there... left and then returned. Chatty style, interesting, good descriptions. I enjoy picking up local written books on my travels and this was a rewarding one indeed. More than I expected.
May 2, 2018
This is a gorgeous book about the mountains, home, hospitality, and what it means to be defined by your place in this world. There were passages that took my breath away at the truth in them. And the last sentence had me in tears.
June 16, 2025
Jeremy Jones is a great writer! This book about his short return to Bearwallow area, where he grew up, is so descriptive and interesting. He has a gift for giving his reader the words that make one SEE the experience. A very good read, but got a little too long.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews