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.
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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.
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