Our Southern Highlanders

When a neighbor hears that William Jennings Bryan has returned from a trip around the globe, he says, “I see they give Bryan a lot of receptions when he kem back from the other world.” In Horace Kephart’s mountains, the rest of America may as well be another planet.

In the early twentieth century, the Great Smoky Mountains were a vast, little-known realm in the heart of the South. Kephart goes beyond the familiar image of the rifle-carrying mountaineer to meet a people whose homes and customs lie hidden beyond the tourist roads—and who call every outsider a “furriner.” Here, the old ways endure not as quaint legend but as the consequence of a landscape that has kept generations apart from the nation’s onward rush. Why has this neighboring world remained so strange to the country around it?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.