Hannah Styles
hstyles@thesmokymountaintimes.com
Lance Holland spent around 20 years in the movie industry scouting out locations for popular feature films, but his true passion lies in local Appalachian history.
Lance and his wife Tina own Appalachian Mercantile in downtown Bryson City, where you can find local honey, photography, and homemade goods including the famous Friendswood Brooms made in Asheville. Recently Lance completed a history center in the back of the business adorned with maps, a research desk, computer and plenty of books.
His goal: to help carry on the mostly forgotten local history.
Lance has spent his adventurous life as a “jack of all trades,” working alongside George Clooney to work at Fontana Village Resort. He is also the author of Fontana and Nantahala, books about our area.
“I’ve done a little bit of everything from being a logger to making motion pictures,” he said.
Working on his last movie, Leatherheads with Clooney, Lance decided he no longer had interest in traveling for movies and wanted to be in the mountains where he loved. He began collecting more historical documents and kept a large collection for years that he is now getting together to continue to grow the history center.
After the closing of the historic Bemis Lumber Yard in Robbinsville, an auction was held to get rid of the office’s filing cabinets, furniture, and everything inside the cabinets went with them. Lance Holland and a friend approached the auctioneer and told him they would like to have the papers inside the cabinets to which he agreed to have them emptied and bid separately. Lance and his friend then bid $5 for tables full of papers from old timecards to corporate documents. The find Lance was most excited about old topographic maps.
At Appalachian Mercantile on Tuesday, Lance showed me a topographic map, which can be difficult for most people to read, with curved lines running throughout, he compared it to a raised terrain model map.
“See the terrain on this map, it shows the mountains and then the flat part is the lake. I can look at this topographic map and see the same thing. I can vision the terrain and I want to teach people to be able to do that too,” he said.
Many of the findings from Bemus Lumber Yard are now in the archives at Hunter Library at Western Carolina University.
Fontana Dam
The history center includes much information on the creation of Fontana Dam and the towns under the lake like Judson and Bushnell. Others were abandoned when added to the National Park like Proctor.
“I want this to be a place for anyone who maybe had family who lost their land to be able to come here and look at a map of what their families’ homes looked like,” Lance said.
Frank March has been working in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to identify former homesites with the Park.
“Frank has found over 2,000 homesites already and has been mostly working on the Tennessee side and we are working on the North Carolina side,” Lance said.
In 1990, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) lowered Fontana which allowed researchers to uncover a lot of what was leftover by the towns under the lake.
“They did an extreme drawdown about 170 feet, and it was a major surprise to everyone at the time,” Lance explained. “Robert Johnson and Charles Tichy, a TVA Historical Architect took a helicopter over the lake during the drawdown and took me along as a guide to get footage of what had been underneath, at the time we didn’t know it was a once in a lifetime opportunity,” he said, because the lake has never been lowered to that level again.
Lance showed a copy of the Fontana Project book at the history center, which was written by the TVA at the completion of Fontana Dam.
Lance said he used to give out the book to people in Fontana Village Resort but when he called to get more, they told him there were only three copies left.
“I called to order more copies and they said, ‘you’re just in time, we only have three left,’ and I said okay when will you get more in, and they said ‘we won’t, this is the last that will ever be made’ and I have a couple of these books but they are really rare now,” he said.
He even has the rough draft volumes of the book, which were given to him by a local after it was found in the basement of a family member.
At the history center, Lance can also scan 35mm slides, which is a rare commodity these days and said for those who have questions, if he doesn't know the answer, he can help get in touch with someone who does.
“If we don’t have it, we can find it,” Lance said.
Lance is at Appalachian Mercantile on Everett Street on Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday during the week and their hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
He recommends anyone with historical questions stop by when he is there so he can help them find what they’re searching for.
“We don’t know what people are interested in, so we want to get the word out about some of the things we have available and help people find what they are looking for,” he said.