Remembering Reece - June 2026

A few days ago I found myself sitting in a swing beside Wolf Creek at the Bryon Herbert Reece Farm and Heritage Center.  Located just below Vogel State Park, it provides an opportunity for visitors to learn about the most famous poet the mountains around us have produced as well as revealing what life was life on a family farm before mechanized and commercial farming came into existence.  As I watched the moving waters of the creek, I imagined Reece just behind me following a mule as the dirt opened up in fresh furrows before his feet.  He was a noted writer, but he always said about himself that he was a farmer first.  Indeed, it was the tension between the need to farm and the desire to write that gave birth to some of Appalachia's finest poetry.  

Had Reece indeed been there with me alongside Wolf Creek the other day, he would have been overwhelmed with the noise which has settled over a place he knew as one of silence and solitude.  Motorcycles and cars were roaring by on an asphalt highway in such numbers that he would have shuddered in disbelief.  By 1930 a road was opened through Frogtown Gap through which an occasional automobile would pass.  Most of the people in his Choestoe Valley were incensed when the name of the gap was changed to Neel Gap in honor of a highway engineer.  The noise and the intrusion of. progress would not have been a welcomed thing for a man who had learned to hear the many varied quiet and soft voices of the Creation all around him.  Those voices inspired him to write so many poems which reflected his immersion in a world that was still quiet and moving at a slower pace.

Byon Herbert Reece was one of those men who, as we often say, listened to a different drummer than the rest of us. The heartbeat of his word emanated from the mountains which are so often now taken for granted.  No matter how tempted he was to walk into a different and distant world, his heart belonged to the land which he farmed.  It wooed him as a persistent lover.  If the heart of the land called out to him, so did his heart call out to the land.  He lived between the beckoning of the farm and the beckoning of the pen and from that tension filled world he wrote words that enable us to see a world different than ours and, perhaps, even a better one.

Bill Strickland
Reece Society Board of Directors

The purpose of the Byron Herbert Reece Society is to preserve, perpetuate, and promote the literary and cultural legacy of the Georgia mountain poet/novelist, Byron Herbert Reece.  Jerri Gill Strickland, Chair.