Hazel Creek A Novel

This captivating story takes place in the Hazel Creek Valley of the Great Smoky Mountains wilderness during 1924 and 1925, as Nathan and Callie Randolph, with their five unique daughters, wrestle to maintain their farm, forests, family, and faith against an unforgiving wilderness and an evil lumber company manager seeking by every means possible to pilfer their land and clear cut their virgin forest. A cast of colorful characters, including independent and earnest mountaineers, a murderous lumber company manager, Cherokee Indians, a band of gypsies, desperados, lumbermen, moonshiners, revenuers, a world-famous writer, civil war heroes & and even a flesh-and-blood Haint & collide in a gripping struggle of good and evil during an eruption of violence while our heroine, fifteen-year-old Lauren Abigail Randolph, has to grow up and save her family’s farm while preserving her own faith. This important story, based upon almost ten years of research and five years of living in the area, attempts to capture the speech, life, ways, and beliefs of the mountain folk in a time in our history that marked a crucial and irreversible turning point in mountain communities of the Southern Appalachians. With the march of the industrial age, especially industrial lumbering, the roaring twenties, the Prohibition, the increasing momentum for a national park, and the onslaught of a modern world, trains, and radio communication, the traditional life and ways of the mountaineers in general, and the Randophs in particular, were about to change forever.

Walt Larimore has been called one of America’s “best-known family physicians.” He was awarded the 2004 Christianity Today Book Award for coauthoring Going Public with Your Faith and has been a Gold Medallion Book Award finalist three times. The author of the popular Bryson City Tales series, he lives in Monument, Colorado.