By Allen Hamrick
Grandpa sat in his rocking chair on the back porch, a logger from times past when axes and crosscut saws felled huge chestnut trees with logs so big only one could be hauled at a time on the train cars. His heyday was a time when it took teams of oxen, mules and massive 2000 pound Belgian horses to get logs out of the woods to the mill. Now, broken down from years of work, Grandpa had just his stories to tell. His grandson set nearby and asked him what he was thinking about. Grandpa re-lit the coals in his pipe as he looked off in the distance and as if he could see the past, but he said nothing.
A storm was rolling in over the mountains and a dark cloud appeared ominously over a distant mountain top. The grandson took notice of it and said, “Grandpa, it looks like it is going to be a bad one this time. Maybe we should go in the house.”
“Nah,” Grandpa replied. “It’s just Thunder cutting trees.”
The grandson looked at his grandpa as if he were senile. Grandpa said nothing for a minute and then began, “Son, you remember the story of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe? Well, here in the Appalachians, Paul Bunyan couldn’t hold an axe beside the greatest logger that ever lived, Thunder Freddy. He was bigger than life itself, reaching nearly as tall as his horse, a Belgian Roane that weighed nearly 2500 pounds, named Lightning, of course. Lightning was so big that they sometimes called on him to pull the steam engines up the hills when they just didn’t have the steam. At seven feet five inches tall, Thunder Freddy was a mighty man who could fell a 12 inch thick tree with one swing of his axe, an axe so sharp that you could not just shave with it but also split the hair of a mouse’s ear. They called him Thunder because once during the logging boom in the central Appalachians, he was given the task of clear cutting the acres of trees. Trees were falling for nearly an hour, and his axe was hitting the trees so hard that even the biggest tree shook from the blows with sound like thunder.”
The grandson listened to the story and was amazed at what he was hearing.
“Well, I’ll tell you what happened to him,” said Grandpa. “ It was sometime in the early years of logging in this country that there was a mountain top that was as difficult to get to as the moon; what wasn’t straight up was straight down. A mountain covered with rocks and vertical cliffs, but on top of it was one of the richest acres of trees in this state. The trees were big enough to build five houses from a single one. A mill could get maybe 10,000 logs from just one acre.”
“No one could get to them though so the logging companies asked Thunder Freddy if he could possibly do it and they would pay him well. Freddy said he would, and he asked the local blacksmith to reshoe his horse with special shoes that had teeth to climb with. It was a clear day when Thunder Freddy began his climb as other loggers and their families cheered him and his horse on; it was a big event for the local people. They had just got out of sight of the onlookers when the terrain got steeper. His horse’s shoes were striking the rocks so hard and fast that the sparks were like streaks of lightning, further adding to his name. The people could hear Thunder Freddy and Lightning grunting and climbing as they neared the top of the hill. The loggers were amazed that he was nearly to the top in such a short time.”
“Suddenly, out of nowhere, a dark cloud came over the horizon and rested on the top of the mountain they were climbing. The trees began to move with the wind, and the sounds of the two were drowned out with the storm. It began to thunder and lightning as the storm got worse, and people couldn’t tell if it was Thunder Freddy and Lightning or thunder and lightning causing the sounds. The trees continued their dance from the wind, and the loggers could faintly hear the neighing of a horse and someone singing. The storm became even greater, and all the onlookers had to get to safety. When the storm cleared, a fog moved over the mountain top and covered the trees for about three days. People went out and yelled for Thunder Freddy and Lightning, but they were never seen or heard from again. Rescue attempts were made to get to the top, but no one ever made it.”
“The trees remained standing for many years until new logging machines were built and the desire to get the money from the trees was too great to leave them there. Still there has been no sign from them, so people imagine that the storm and Thunder Freddy had a contest that still goes on today on mountain tops across the land.”
So, when you see the mountain top get covered up by a storm cloud, it just may be Thunder Freddy and Lightning back again. Many a grandpa and his grandson have watched the mountain top storm clouds closely and tried to and catch a glimpse of Thunder Freddy’s mighty axe.
