In the Southern Appalachian mountain communities of the post Civil War period, where newcomers — especially Northerners — were regarded with suspicion and often avoided, Amos Stackhouse was accepted, respected, and even loved.

Amos Stackhouse did not waste much time in Warm Springs, NC — he started and managed a barite mine, helped bring the railroad through the area, ran a logging company, formed the Stackhouse settlement, built houses for his workers and raised a family.

Follow the Stackhouse Quakers as they travel from early England to Pennsylvania to the Midwest, finally settling in Western North Carolina, where they have remained for 135 years. Read about the Stackhouse family’s sorrows, successes, agonies and adventures as they live through floods, fires, epidemics, world wars and the Great Depression.

Using extensive research, interviews and access to voluminous family records, journals and keepsakes, historian Jacqueline Burgin Painter has written an absorbing history of the Stackhouse family that examines through engaging narrative the impact the family had on Western North Carolina.

In her 488-page narrative, Painter describes not only the fortunes, loves and losses of a family, but also the details of day-to-day life in 19th-century Appalachia. Further covered is the Stackhouses' involvement with the growth and decline of neighboring Runion village, typical Appalachian logging operation (currently, its ruins, a hiking destination).

Filled with historical facts, personal accounts, maps, illustrations and both black-and-white and color photographs, The Stackhouses of Appalachia will appeal to anyone with an interest in this fascinating family as well as Madison County residents who simply want to know a little more about the place they call home.