The Carson House and The Old Fort Mountain Railroad

Part history, part fiction, part satire, in the comic tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, and Joseph Heller, The Carson House and the Old Fort Mountain Railroad are two works connected by two generations of characters that turns history on its ear. Both stories are fictional accounts of two major events in McDowell County in Western North Carolina where the author resides. The Carson House stage play depicts the years 1798 to 1820, while the story of building the railroad up Old Fort Mountain begins in 1865 and moves quickly to 1876.
Although, both stories include major historical characters, such as: John Carson, Samuel Carson, Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stonewall Jackson, and John Brown; the main characters in the story are relatively minor or unknown in history. Kadella is a house slave who claims to be a princess, and Sally, one of John Carson's daughters, of which little is known. The Old Fort Mountain novella is told primarily through the voices of four African American convicts brought in to build the railroad, a runaway slave, a northern abolitionist who worked for the underground railroad, a Civil War deserter, and a young Mexican immigrant.