Her Homemade Desserts Sell Out Everyday

Hey friend, climb on in the backseat and ride along with us; we're going somewhere unique. At the edge of the town of Crossnore, NC, tucked into one of those tight mountain curves that scares the heebie-jeebies out of the outlanders, sits Jennifer Pinter's specialty dessert shop.

"When we opened the shop twenty years ago, all the locals laughed at us," said Jennifer. "Nothing had ever made a go of it in this curve, but I think that curve was a blessing for this place."

I can't argue. That curve becomes so sharp so quick that drivers find themselves almost at a stop. That's the first time you find yourself wondering if you went through a time tunnel, because sitting directly in front of you is the Linville River Mercantile and Bakery, and it just beckons you to pull over.

Now, friends, I must confess: the first time I was in Jennifer's parking lot, it was on a foggy afternoon, and when I walked through her doors, I was spooked. It looked like 1929, and I half expected Rod Serling to walk out of the back and say, "Welcome to the Twilight Zone." But the smell of Jennifer's freshly baked goods sent those thoughts scampering away.

Jennifer isn't just a baker, though. She's a designer, a collector, and a woman who's spent thirty-some years cultivating her sources. The whole place is intended to make you forget the constraints that today's lifestyle puts on us. If you love history and antiques, you'll want to pitch a tent and camp out in her store.

When I sat right down at the turn-of-the-century round oak ice cream table that rested four feet from a 1920s soda counter and saw a stack of fluted ice cream sundae dishes, my mouth started watering. I was about to make my order when I noticed a short hall that ended with a wall of mirrors. Pointing at it, I asked Jennifer, "Anybody ever think the hall is twice as long and run into themselves?"

Jennifer grinned. "One day a woman went down that hall and politely excused herself to the oncoming lady. When she got no answer, she came back and told me she'd just met the rudest woman in Avery County. The whole store was snickering, so I had to break the news to her."

But let's get to the reason we came: the baked goods. When she first opened the mercantile, the cooking was a side venture, and before she knew it, she had a full-fledged bakery. "Everything is made in that kitchen, every single day, and sells out by the end of the day," said Jennifer. And yes, you guessed it — this is the only place you can get her goods.

Cheesecake, key lime pie, coconut custard pie, pecan pie, and that's just on the top shelf. Look one shelf lower and you'll see a mouth-watering plantation pie, a sweet cream custard with chocolate, coconut, and pecans. Don't you dare reach for that cast iron skillet pineapple upside-down cake, or there's going to be a fight. Every day there's a cobbler, and the day we visited it was mountain berry — strawberry, blueberry, blackberry, and raspberry all together. Let me sum up the dessert case this way: Granny Smith, who's your mommy now?

Jennifer's clerk and friend followed us outside to tell us about the peanut butter tort. "This one is serious business," she said. "Chocolate cookie crumb on the bottom, a light peanut butter mousse with a little cream cheese worked in, and chocolate ganache over the top. It sells quick, so if you want one, you'd best come first thing in the morning."

My response was, "I'm not touching the stuff. It sounds like it could be illegal."

Before we headed back to the car, we stopped by Henry and Gloria's table. The Mercantile was their last stop before heading home to Florida. Jason asked Gloria to rate the place on a scale of one to ten; she looked him straight in the eye and said a twelve. His follow-up question — "What's your favorite part of the store?" — was answered with no hesitation. "Jennifer," she said. "She is the kindest, sweetest person and the best baker we've ever known." When somebody keeps coming from Florida to your place of business, year after year, you don't need my recommendation.

"The shop was gathering dust for a while after my husband died this past December," said Jennifer. "But I am ready to get back to our dream."

It's a dream that's been unfolding in that curve for twenty-plus years, so the next time you find yourself easing around that curve in Crossnore, pull in and sit at the ice cream table — or get the peanut butter tort — and tell her the ride-about guys sent you.

Click here to ride along with us and meet Jennifer at the Linville River Mercantile.

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From Nashville Back to Avery County: The Story of Fiddler Alan Johnson

If you find yourself in Avery County on a Sunday afternoon, stop on by the Pineola Inn and watch Alan Johnson sawing away on the fiddle. He may be the busiest musician in the High Country. Ask him how many bands he plays in, and he might say, "I don't know." 

When Jason and I sat down with him, it turned out this local fiddle player has a Nashville connection.

"I had a brother ten years older who wanted to play rock and roll, and a daddy who played the fiddle," said Alan. "So growing up there was every kind of music in the house. I picked up the fiddle around age nine and have never really put it down." Today he plays with the David Wiseman Band, the Johnson Brothers and a group known as Woody and the String Band.

But for many years, Alan lived and played in Nashville. "I moved there at age twenty-nine chasing a dream." Grinning, he says, "I handed out my card left and right; they called it the Nashville handshake. That's when you shake a person's hand and palm them your card. It took six months to get my first call, and I promise you, I was about ready to pack it in and come home.

But, for some reason, John Hartford, writer of Gentle on My Mind, was in Alan's corner. "He befriended me when I first arrived in Nashville," said Alan. "Almost exactly six months to the day I arrived in Nashville, the phone rang, and it was Hartford." He had called to make sure Alan hadn't given up. Within a week of that call, Alan had three gigs, and the rest is history. Alan smiled when reminiscing about how he and Hartford would often sit in Hartford's house playing their fiddles just for the pleasure of it.

"I am not the greatest fiddle player in the world," said Alan. "Those guys sit and practice all day long, the way a golfer hits a thousand practice balls a day. That's just not me." But Alan had a gift. When growing up, he heard something one of his heroes, like Doyle Lawson, played. He could instantly play it back note for note.

So why does a working Nashville fiddler end up back in Avery County playing at the Pineola Inn on Sunday afternoons? The best reason I can think of. A little boy missing his daddy. "When it came down to the music or the boy, there was really no contest," said Alan. It's been forty-six years since he picked up that first fiddle, and he's still playing. That sounds like a man at peace with the trade he made.

Watch the video to hear Alan tell the Hartford story himself, to catch a rare old clip of Alan and his family picking at the Hampton store years ago, and to hear what Avery County's fiddle player sounds like on a Sunday afternoon.

Watch our ride-about to meet Alan Johnson, Avery County's fiddle player.

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Back Home to the Blue Ridge Mountains

Here in the High Country, we tend to think of our young people leaving for the big cities like Charlotte or Nashville. Not Keith Harris; he headed for Wilmington, NC. This mountain boy ran off to a seaport and spent a career pulling guts and gonads out of fish. “Yes, it is a real thing and people that do it, love it,” said Marine Biologist Keith Harris.

Jason and I sat down with him to hear how he became a marine biologist. 

“It was a journey around my elbow to get to my thumb,” said Keith. “Thinking I wanted to play my trumpet for a living, I headed to UNC in Chapel Hill for a music degree. But my idea and theirs of a music degree didn’t mesh, so I checked into a journalism degree. Same problem, different degree, so I dropped out of UNC and went looking for something to do with my hands.” 

Keith found that opportunity on the coast of North Carolina working for the National Marine Fisheries. They sent him out every week riding on the local head boats that took between twenty and a hundred paying customers for a day of fishing. He was sampling what the folks caught, mainly by cutting out their guts and gonads for the people back in the office to study. 

At the same time, he was also enrolled in the Marine Tech program at Cape Fear Technical Institute and volunteered at the state aquarium at Fort Fisher. After graduating with a Marine Tech degree, Keith dreamed of working for the famous TV personality Jacques Cousteau. “There again ideas did not mesh,” said Keith. “I thought I would ride on the front of the boat, scanning or whales; Jacques’s idea was for me to work under the boat cleaning off barnacles.”

Eventually, Keith enrolled at UNC Wilmington, earned a degree in Marine Biology, and continued working with the National Marine Fisheries Service, but in a more professional capacity. "That job found me diving and wading the Carolina coast collecting small, colorful native fish. The kind people press their noses to the aquarium glass to see, like little sargassum-weed fish, seahorses, and bright bottom-dwellers I pulled from local reefs. It was not the exotic job halfway around the world I had envisioned with Jacques Cousteau, but I loved working right off our own coast.”

Later, Keith moved from the Fisheries to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where he spent a lifetime doing hands-on work. They sent him to evaluate the environmental effects on the creatures living in the estuaries up and down the Eastern seaboard. When it came time to retire, Keith said, “Why, I have fun every day and I get paid for it.”  But like many of us with spouses, some votes count more than others. So, five years ago Keith and Fran packed up and moved back to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the whole story started.

Watch the video to hear Keith tell it in his own words — the aquariums, the head boats, and the long road from these mountains to the sea and back again.

Watch our ride-about to meet Keith Harris, the mountain boy who went to sea.

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Learn to Play Music or Leave the Family

Hey, Jason, what is Kid Rock doing in Pineola, NC? Cathy Sheely knows better, and so do we, but lots of folks are dead-certain David Wiseman is Kid Rock. Over the years, he has learned to just smile—and when people ask for an autograph, he tries to accommodate. But here’s the trick: he never reveals the name he signs! David’s lineage goes back to the original Sweethearts of Country Music, the legendary duo Lulu Belle and Scotty Wiseman.

Have I told you lately that I love you?" Whoa buddy, get that starry look out of your eyes — I was talking about one of America’s bestselling songs! That simple question, whispered by Lulu in Scotty's ear while he lay in a hospital bed, turned into their biggest hit. It was so popular it was later recorded by a few "lesser-known" artists like Gene Autry, Bing Crosby, The Andrews Sisters, and Elvis Presley. Legend has it the song has been sung on half the front porches in America.

David shared how Lulu (from Boone, NC) was paired with Scotty (from Spruce Pine, NC) back in mid-1934 on Chicago's The National Barn Dance. They fell in love on the air and were married by December of that same year. Together, they made seven Hollywood pictures—sharing the screen in one with an up-and-coming actor named Roy Rogers. But after all that fame and fortune, they came right back home to Three Mile Road in Avery County. Lulu even went on to serve two terms in the North Carolina House of Representatives!

Preserving the Legacy

They say you never know where an interview is going to go. We originally came here to talk to David and Cathy about their band, but the traditional music they inherited touches the very soul of High Country culture. What could be more American than hitting it big, coming home to serve your neighbors, and leaving a musical legacy for the next generation? (Oh, and in case you thought I forgot—yes, Scotty did buy the rights to Good Old Mountain Dew and reworked it into a major hit!)

Click on one of the links to our YouTube channel and learn more about the Wisemans' musical family, including David's cousin and the fiddler in their band, Alan Johnson.

Oh, in case you thought I forgot — Yes, Scotty did buy the rights to Good Old Mountain Dew and remixed it into a major hit.

Watch our ride-about to meet the Wiseman family and hear The David Wiseman Band.

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Retired and Living the Dream

As a child during the summer, Maggie Palmer, her brother, and their cousins played under the shade trees in her grandfather's cow pasture. They pretended to be Tarzan and Jane of the jungle as they swung from the long vines that dangled from the trees. Other times, while playing tag, hide-and-seek, or other popular childhood games, Maggie dreamed of building a house and living forever in that pasture. 

When she rode the back roads of Avery County to help her Grandmother Dellinger find an old log cabin for the Crossnore DAR Chapter to restore, another dream started to formulate. Someday she would rescue a deteriorating log cabin, move it to Grandpa's pasture, and stay in it forever. Several years later, her dream was enhanced again when her grandmother handed her a handful of flower seeds so she could start her own flower garden. Now she dreamed of living in a log cabin in her grandfather’s cow pasture surrounded by flowers she planted. 

But then came high school graduation, enrollment at UNC, marriage, and a whole new life off the mountain. After adventures in the newspaper business in Rutherfordton and McDowell Counties, Maggie became a reporter for the Asheville Times. Later, she was Asheville’s Channel 13, WLOS news anchor. 

After learning that her mother had passed away, she also learned she had been bequeathed eleven acres of mountain land. Would you be surprised to learn it included the cow pasture? As she neared retirement, all her dreams about that pasture came roaring back. But by that time, most of the old log cabins in Western NC had vanished. As fairy tales go, when Maggie attended a Palmer family reunion in Cleveland County, cousin Jim Palmer grabbed her by the arm and said, “Come with me.” He walked her to a log cabin hidden way off the road; it was on the edge of deteriorating. The owner, a cousin living in Pennsylvania, had no interest in saving the cabin. “Maggie,” said Jim, “Nobody wants it, you're the only one I know who could save it.” Today, that cabin resides in Grandfather Dellinger’s cow pasture, surrounded by flowers, and so do Maggie and her husband of forty years, Zack Allen. 

As Jason and I drove through the woods to get to their home, Jason said, “When you reach the end of that driveway, the whole scene looks like it walked straight off the cover of Country Living Magazine.”

About thirty years ago, Maggie and Zack had that cabin moved to the mountains, found a flat spot, and had a foundation bulldozed out. Maggie explains in the video that their kitchen was a separate building that once housed her great-grandfather's thresher and seed corn. And the grounds are her own labor of love. Her cousin John showed up on the Fourth of July twenty years ago to help them dig and landscape a fish/lily pond in front of the cabin's front door. “The daylilies,” explains Maggie, “Came from Mr. Weatherman over in Spruce Pine, a man who went to school with my father. He planted and tended a hillside of them in remembrance of his wife until he died at age one hundred.” When Maggie stands in her yard amongst all her flowers and says, “I want to be just like Mr. Weatherman,” you believe her.

She's also an author, but here she gives full credit to Zack. “I write the book and find the pictures,” she says, “and he makes it beautiful.” Together they've put out five or six books — histories of local families like the Dellingers of Altamont, a book for their church's hundredth anniversary, a book on an old mountain mill, and a reprint of the Christian Harmony, an early shape-note songbook. “I am especially proud of the book, Eggtown and Other Stories,” said Maggie. “It is a book of Zack's columns.” Watch the video to step inside the cabin, hear the whole story of how it got here, and maybe catch Zack breaking out the banjo.

Some places you visit; this one you get drawn into, and you don't much want to leave.

Watch our ride-about to meet Maggie Lauterer and see the cabin she saved.

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The Remarkable Avery County Cooperative Extension Office

When Ken Walters suggested Jason and I document the duties of Jerry Moody and his staff at the Avery County Cooperative Extension Office, it quickly brought back memories of my failed tomato crops — that is, if two tomato plants a year can be called a crop. “Ken,” I said sarcastically, “all the green bled out of my thumb many years ago. I don't think Jerry can help me.” That said, as we interviewed Jerry, we learned he is a man with many irons in the fire. In fact, he may be the busiest person in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

For more than a century, Avery County was known for apples, cabbages, potatoes, and ornamental shrubs. But during the 1960s, the county's agricultural economy began shifting, and Fraser Fir trees led the way. Today, North Carolina produces about 25 percent of the nation's annual Christmas trees, and Avery County farmers produce close to a million of those trees. But don't let the Christmas tree statistics fool you — the county still grows those other crops, and Jerry has a whole team of agents and technicians helping him coordinate the different programs they administer.

His staff operates a germplasm collection of heirloom apples so that a few years from now, if a person wants to grow a Red Sheep Nose or a Summer Banana apple, they can take a graft off one of the county's trees and grow their own. For Avery County children who do not have a safe environment for learning and playing in the summer, the extension office coordinates nine weeks of a 4-H Day Camp called WOW.

Have you ever heard the term agritourism? Well, it is a real thing here in Avery County. It lets a tourist experience some of the county's most spectacular high-elevation scenery during a hayride on a private farm. Whether it is a choose-and-cut Christmas tree farm or a U-pick apple orchard, it will be an experience you will not soon forget. You will probably be offered a glass of fresh apple cider — but if not, swing by the extension office's annual Apple Cider Pressing event and they will help you press your own. And if pressing apples is too sloppy for you, head over to Apple Hill Farm in Banner Elk and watch them shear an alpaca.

Are you old enough to remember when people touched produce before they purchased it? News flash, you still can. If you go to one of our tailgate markets you can squeeze produce to your hearts content. They start in early summer and rotate through every major Avery County once a week. But the biggest agritourism event of the year is the Avery County Fair, held every September at the fairgrounds in the Heritage Park Complex, adjacent to the Extension Office.

OK, click on the photo or the link below and join us on our ride-about to watch as Jerry Moody gives us a tour of the Heritage Park Complex.

Watch our ride-about to Heritage Park with Jerry Moody of the Avery County Cooperative Extension.

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MEET KENNY LINDAHL, THE BARBECUE MAN OF LINVILLE

In this article and the YouTube video that accompanies it, you will meet Kenny Lindahl. He is not from the High Country, but now that he is here, he's not leaving. He started life in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and at age fourteen began hanging around commercial kitchens. Twenty-five years ago, Kenny married a woman from Whiteville, North Carolina, moved there, and opened a restaurant. “That's a tough way to make a living,” said Kenny. “So when I needed to clear my head, I would ride my motorcycle up to the High Country and spend a couple of nights.”

Now, I know Whiteville, and it is a traditional down-east North Carolina town. Like all good Southerners, the people in Whiteville love family reunions. But no decent down-east family reunion would be caught without a whole smoked pig waiting on a grill to be picked apart — and it would be customary (mandatory, really) for it to have been basted all night in a vinegar and pepper sauce. That left Kenny with no choice but to learn how to smoke pork the traditional down-east way, low and slow. So he devised his own technique and created his own recipe.

The centerpiece of our visit was his smoker. I lived in eastern North Carolina for twenty years and have seen many pig cookers, but this one tops anything I can remember seeing — two whole pigs fit inside. It has a clever design: two doors on opposite sides of the firebox and two smokestacks result in smoke being evenly distributed across the meat. The craft of smoking that makes an outstanding pork dish lies in controlling the temperature. Kenny's rule: “The first two or three hours are for smoke. After that you back off to a slow, low 225 degrees and hold it there. Keep feeding wood the whole time and you'll over-smoke the meat, turn it bitter, and kill it. Slow and low, that's the whole religion.”

I asked Kenny what he'd set in front of me if he invited me to supper. “It's pulled pork, baby back ribs, and extra-gooey fried macaroni and cheese — dipped in beer batter and frozen, then dropped in the fryer so you bite through a crisp shell into creamy pasta. Smoked baked beans. Sweet, fluffy hush puppies. And slaw, shaved fine and made sweet, on purpose, to cut the bitter of the vinegar.” Now, as the old saying goes, I'd walk a mile for that dinner.

Listen to Kenny tell how “many of my friends' homes went down the river entirely. That's a hard thing to come back from.” Yet Kenny's answer was to rebuild, get his kitchen certified with the county, and start cooking again. He is throwing a grand-opening pig picking for the whole neighborhood in September, and we will be there for a follow-up video. Click on Kenny's photo and watch the video to see that two-ended smoker up close.

Watch our ride-about to meet Kenny Lindahl, the barbecue man of Linville.

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