Roan Mountain

Susan Shelton, originally of Elizabethton, Tennessee, says the exact origin of gritty bread is a mystery in her family.

Her great-grandparents made it in the late 1800s in the Carter County, Tennessee, community of Cove Creek near Roan Mountain.

The bread itself is ground fill corn mixed with a little baking soda and buttermilk until it made a thick batter poured into a pan that was preheated with lard and bacon grease.

It doesn't rise, and so it's basically two crusts put together with a little gummy stuff in the middle.

We were anywhere trout could be found.

We spent a lot of time up in Roan Mountain and we just trout, trout, trout, trout, trout.

And we cooked everything we caught.

Sometimes we didn't get to cook anything, but that was rare.

She said that's the only thing that's different.

Rufus was sitting on his pack at the top of a bald on Roan Mountain in June of 1987, waiting on the sun.

Roan sits on the Tennessee line above Bakersville in Mitchell County.

The top of it is a run of grassy balds, open meadow at 6,000 feet with nothing on it but grass, rhododendron, and wind.

Eventually, Confederate lines weakened enough for the four officers to continue west.

Crossing Roan Mountain and moving through Carter County, Tennessee, they finally reached Union forces near Knoxville.

Their journey was over, but the story did not end there.

The officers were taken to Washington, D.C., where Captain Andrew Benson personally recounted their escape to President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.