Work starts on first Bartram Trail addition since the 1990s

Posted by Jeff on Mar 23, 2015 @ 10:24 am in Hiking News | 0 comments | Last modified: March 23, 2015

It’s been nearly 20 years since Burt Kornegay first started looking into land along Hickory Knoll Road in Macon County, NC, but dirt is finally moving on the Bartram Trail Society’s vision of routing a piece of the long-distance trail away from the road and over the Pinnacle and George Gray Mountain instead.

“This had been years in the making,” said Kornegay, who was in the midst of his 12 years as president of the Bartram Trail Society when he bought the land. “This was going on even before these tracts of land came up.”

One of the tracts in question is a 3-acre parcel that came on the market in the 1990s, just as the North Carolina Bartram Trail Society was mulling over how to reroute the trail while avoiding the pieces of private land abutting Nantahala National Forest.

But the Society would need more than 3 acres to make its vision come true. Enter a mysterious 10-acre property in the same neighborhood. Connecting two sections of national forest, acquiring it would be a coup for the project.

After a little research, they found that the last owner was Nimrod Jarrett, a notable Macon County landowner in his day. But his day ended long ago; Jarrett died in 1871. No heirs could be located, so with Melvin’s help Kornegay put in a quitclaim deed on the land, selling it to the Bartram Trail Society for a pittance. After holding onto the land for years and advertising the quitclaim deed in local newspapers, the Society was finally able to sell the property to the U.S. Forest Service and move forward with plans for trail construction.

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