Rumbling Bald delivered message to moonshiners

“The house faced Bald Mountain, 4000 feet high, a hill that had a very bad reputation some years ago [1874], and was visited by newspaper reporters. This is, in fact, the famous Shaking Mountain. For a long time it had a habit of trembling, as if in an earthquake spasm, but with a shivering motion very different from that produced by an earthquake.

“The only good that came of it was that it frightened all the ‘moonshiners,’ and caused them to join the church. It is not reported what became of the church afterwards.”

— From “On Horseback”  by Charles Dudley Warner (1885)

Warner’s droll observation considerably understates the religious response to Rumbling Bald — John Blythe provides the extraordinary details.