‘Counting Souls’: Census Taking in Old Appalachia

Historical fiction of 'souls' in hollers and valleys  

A highland pasture 3500 ft (1000m) up the south slope of the Cataloochee Divide in the Great Smoky Mountains near Maggie Valley, North Carolina. Brian Stansberry/CC BY 3.0

Many people plan to write a novel upon retirement, but few individuals achieve such an apex. However, Donald Buchanan retired in 2016 from a 31-year career with IBM and set about writing his novel the next day. The plot for “Counting Souls” has essentially been percolating since he visited grandparents as a child in Cherokee County, N.C. There he learned that some of his relatives were counted as part of the 1830 census. “Counting Souls” focuses on a lawyer-farmer who is hired as a federal census taker for an area of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina where Cherokee people, settlers, plantation owners, and enslaved people lived.

While census taking in modern times requires a few minutes fill-in of a mailable card, census taking in 1830 involved information accumulated by visiting each individual and family. The book’s main character must leave his wife and two children and travel for six months to find all the living “souls” in the wilds the mountains, venturing into hollers and valleys, and making the arduous climb to remote peaks and pinnacles.

North Carolina Forebears

“Counting Souls” is, in some ways, a tribute to Buchanan’s ancestors’ way of life, especially his grandfather, a farmer who was satisfied to cultivate his land and never travel or drive an automobile. “To honor him, I had for years been doing genealogy. And, strangely enough, the 1830s census had my family members in it who lived in Macon County. It began to occur to me that whoever the census taker was at that time would have met every one of my ancestors. So, I wondered who that guy was.”