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John Hassell Yeatts On September 30, 2000 the passing of a generation of Blue Ridge memories occurred in Prattville, Alabama. With a final sigh and a parting breath the existence we knew as John Hassell Yeatts ended. The community of Mayberry, not the fictionalized TV community, the real Mayberry located at Mile Post 181 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, had lost a special native son. A writer and a storyteller, his recollections of the construction of the Dan River Gorge dams enabled one to almost hear the bray of mules and the roar of dynamite on the depression era project. Listening to him tell of the Mayberry of his youth, one was transported back to a time of small mountain cottages with rose trellises and people who through their sheer goodness would forever imprint themselves into the memories of a small mountain boy. John Hassell Yeatts recalled those days of his childhood with a love for a place and the people he once knew as only an old man looking back can do. It was a time of gristmills and wagon roads and buckwheat fields and for those who lived there and knew the people, it carved a place in the heart that would never fade away. Born and raised in Mayberry, John left home to seek his fortune. In the 1950s, his travels led him to spearheading the effort in Virginia to quickly distribute the life saving Polio vaccine recently created by Dr. Jonas Salk. After his retirement in 1980 from the Alabama Department of Mental Health, he spent his summer leisure rambling over those gentle hills of Mayberry and remembering the people and places he had loved as a youth. Some of those memories are recorded in the books he authored; Remembering Old Mayberry, Tracks Across The Blue Ridge and The Legend of the Mourning Spring. As a youth, in the 1930’s, he was a vocal advocate to save a dilapidated old gristmill in danger of demolition. His compassionate cries for preservation and restoration were heard and his efforts, along with those of many others, resulted in the preservation of what is today, the most photographed site in the National Park system, Mabry Mill on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Mabry Mill was just up the road from Mayberry and John could not bear to see it torn down to make way for the Blue Ridge Parkway which was then under construction. Today his efforts to save Mabry Mill are all but forgotten, but I for one will never see a photograph of that timeless old mill with its wheel still slowly turning without seeing the face of John Hassell Yeatts. I’ll never stand in the grass beside the Parkway and watch while tourists take photos and children play along the raceway without thinking of a barefooted mountain boy who left his mark and will forever be romping through the fields of Mayberry and playing in the raceways at Ed Mabry’s old mill. The life and stories of John Hassell Yeatts will forever serve as a reminder of a mountain Camelot and the special people who once lingered there. His vision for a dilapidated old gristmill will capture the imaginations of millions of Blue Ridge visitors for generations to come as they gaze at this picturesque scene and get a glimpse of the past, as John Hassell Yeatts once knew it. His legacy is one of love for a place and the people he knew there and through his efforts future generations will know them too. No matter where his travels took him, he lived his life by setting his course on a horizon that always ended at Mayberry. His final journey was no different; it brought him home to the Yeatts Family Cemetery in Mayberry. There beside his brother, Coy Oliver Yeatts, his father, John Henry Yeatts, and other family members, he’ll spend eternity overlooking Kettle Hollow and the playgrounds of his youth; there is nowhere he’d rather be. |
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