Smoke Hole Canyon

The cave that anchors the etymology sits on Smoke Hole Knob above the river — a circular chamber forty feet high and fifteen feet across, shaped, per the state's 2009 historical marker, like an inverted hornet's nest tapering to a natural chimney. Smoke stains blacken its roof; whether they came from campfires or curing racks is exactly the kind of question the record leaves open.

Higher up Cave Mountain, the so-called Big Cave — Cave Mountain Cave — was mined for saltpeter to make gunpowder from the colonial period through the War of 1812. Confederates reopened the works during the Civil War, which is where the canyon's politics become relevant: Smoke Hole families were overwhelmingly Unionist, and it was Unionist home guards who destroyed the saltpeter operation. The gorge voted Republican for generations afterward, which in that country amounted to a war memorial.

What the outside world wrote down about the Smoke Hole before World War II emphasized two things: that it was nearly impossible to get into, and that the people inside it were extraordinarily good at making untaxed whiskey. The reporting curdled into legend on schedule. Outsiders came to believe that Smoke Holers were uncivilized and violent, that entering the gorge uninvited was dangerous, and — the file's favorite entry — that revenue agents frequently disappeared there. No missing-revenuer case file survives to verify the tradition, but the tradition did the work anyway: it kept the place empty.

The counter-record belongs to H. M. Calhoun (1866–1933), a Franklin attorney and historian who spent years championing the Smoke Hole and its people against exactly that portrait — the community as a remnant of pioneer stock deserving study rather than a den of stills deserving prosecution. Between the revenue reports and Calhoun's briefs the actual community, a scatter of family homesteads inside the canyon, eventually thinned out; pieces of the gorge remain private land inside the National Recreation Area to this day.

The haunting file here is thin and the file says so — the canyon's real hold on the imagination was always geographic. What the reports amount to is this: figures seen in the river mist where no hiker should be, and the campfire corollary that the same fog that hid the stills still covers whoever ran them. It is the standard pattern for a place that spent a century being described by people who were afraid to enter it: the fear gets filed as folklore, and the folklore eventually wears the shape of ghosts.

Since 1965 the canyon has been part of the Monongahela National Forest's Spruce Knob–Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area, and The Nature Conservancy counts it among the most biologically rich places in the East — rare plant communities, big springs, and the Rock Break rapids where the river exits. The homesteads are mostly gone, the revenuers too. The mist still rises out of the gorge on its own schedule, doing a fair impression of smoke from a deep hole, which is all the name ever claimed.