Further Afield: In the Footsteps of Ruby Williams on Jomeokee

by Carol Ann McCormick, Herbarium Curator and Priscila Arellanes Ramos, Herbarium student worker

In the past few months my husband and I have twice visited the monadnock known as Jomeokee, “Great Guide,” by the Saura people. Most of us know it as Pilot Mountain, and it’s close enough to our home in Alamance County to make an easy day-trip, yet far enough away to make it a real trip. “Towering over its surroundings at over 1,400 feet, Pilot Mountain’s distinct geographic features served as a beacon for both Native Americans and incoming settlers for centuries according to historian William S. Powell… The Saura tribe, along with other Native Americans in the Piedmont, used Pilot Mountain as a landmark to navigate their trade routes. As European hunters entered the region they benefited from the mountain’s guidance. In the eighteenth century, northern settlers traveled down the Great Wagon Road that passed along the mountain’s base. Pilot becoming a welcoming sight to traveling newcomers.”1

Autumn panorama sunrise view of the knob from Little Pinnacle at Pilot Mountain State Park in Pinnacle, NC.

As such a prominent natural landmark, I had assumed it had been among North Carolina’s first state parks. I was very wrong: Pilot Mountain was not preserved as a state park until 1968.2

While the land is now a state park, before that and for much longer, it was a local tourist attraction and often the site of a rollicking party scene. “That peak over there,” says Kathy Hunter, pointing toward Big Pinnacle, which is now closed to the public, “they used to have wooden steps that went up the side of it.” Hunter grew up on a nearby tobacco farm and now works by the entrance to the park, at Pilot Knob Inn. She remembers exploring the mountain around the time it became a state park in 1968 and just before the steps — which led up the vertical, 200-foot-high knob that caps the 2,200 feet of elevation — were removed. “When you got halfway to the top, you didn’t want to look down, and you didn’t want to look up,” she says, laughing. “You wanted to keep moving.”

The wooden stairs were built by W.L. Spoon, an engineer who purchased the mountain in the 1920s and developed it for tourism. “He approached the mountain as a kind of P.T. Barnum character,” explains Mark Farnsworth, a Pilot Mountain historian. “He was a showman and promoter.” Spoon built roads up the mountain and developed a picnic area at Little Pinnacle (the lower peak with an overlook). “He made an airstrip at the top and said it was the highest airport in the South,” Farnsworth says. 

But Spoon wasn’t the mountain’s first booster. In the middle of the 19th century, members of the Gilliam family owned Pilot Mountain, along with a hotel at its base, which they publicized nationally. “People wanted to see this curiosity of nature, a mountain that stands alone,” Farnsworth says. The Gilliams set up rickety-looking ladders for tours of the peak.  During World War II, a local Chevrolet dealer, J.W. Beasley, bought the property and turned it into a local hangout to see and be seen. To draw crowds and charge admission, Beasley built a swimming pool — with two diving boards and a slide — and a dance-hall pavilion, where campgrounds are now. On sunny weekends, some 100 folks paid 50 cents each (25 cents for kids) to take a dip in the pool. For another 50 cents, they could drive up the mountain, recalls Dean Gordon, whose grandparents were the caretakers of the property for the Beasleys. Bands played at night, usually beach music, and Gordon remembers sneaking out of the second floor of his grandparents’ house and wandering over to the Pilot Pavilion to listen…

The pool stayed open until Beasley’s widow, Pearl, sold the property to the state for a park.3

Our first visit in 2024 was on a rather hot day in early September, and we thought that the top of the mountain would offer not only interesting plants and good views, but also some cooling breezes. Alas, when we arrived at the Park at about 10:30 a.m., the road to the top was blocked as the upper parking lot was already full. We opted to explore a different part of the Park, so drove to a parking area at the junction of Pinnacle Hotel Road and Culler Road. We took the Mountain Trail westward, along the base of Pilot Mountain.  (The Mountain Trail is also one of the trails comprising Segment 7 of the Mountains to Sea Trail.4) There were no stunning views, but the walk was easy, slowly gaining only a bit in elevation, and the chestnut oak  (Quercus montana) forest was shady. While most of the forest was rocky and dry, we were glad to find a ravine with springs which offered not only lush cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) and royal fern (Osmunda spectabilis) to appreciate, but also some seepy pools for Luna to drink from and to lounge in.

Trails in the mountain section of Pilot Mountain State Park ( https://www.ncparks.gov/maps/pilot-mountain-state-park-mountain-section-map/download?attachment )

 

As we found plants along the trail, Mark was checking sernecportal.org, an online catalog of herbarium specimens, to see which plants had been documented from Surry County. He was puzzled that so few plants had been documented, especially since Pilot Mountain is an obvious place for botanizing due to its unusual topography. I had to break the news to him that he’d been spelling the name of the county incorrectly, so he was only getting search results from others who’d made the same mistake! “The county was formed in 1771 from Rowan County as part of the British Province of North Carolina. It was named for the county of Surrey in England, birthplace of William Tryon, governor of North Carolina from 1765 to 1771,” according to Wikipedia.5   Why no “e” in Surry? I’ve yet to find an explanation, but Surry County, Virginia also eschews the “e”! Another common county spelling error is “Stanley” for Stanly County, North Carolina.  I made a mental note to search through herbarium specimen databases in search of “Surrey” and “Stanley” — and to contact curators so that records can be corrected.

Once we had the correct spelling of Surry County, we were able to discern that Pilot Mountain has been a favorite place for many botanists.  Many herbaria, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Herbarium (NCU), Duke University Herbarium (DUKE), and North Carolina State University Herbarium (NCSC), curate specimens collected from Pilot Mountain. (If a collector has a “collector bio” or Wikipedia page, you can click on their name to follow the link to more information.)

The first herbarium specimens collected on Pilot Mountain that I’ve found thus far dated from the summer of 1896. William Willard Ashe (1872-1932) graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1891 and spent most of his career in the United States Forest Service. In the summer of 1896, Ashe collected both Heuchera pubescens Pursh (NCU Accession # 356963) and Heuchera hispida Pursh (NCU Accession # 71415) at Pilot Mountain.  Both are rare plants in North Carolina.

Paul Otto Schallert (1879 – 1970) was a frequent visitor and collector of vascular plants, mosses, and lichens at Pilot Mountain starting in 1913 and continuing through 1929.

In 1925 two collectors associated with North Carolina College for Women in Greensboro collected specimens on what I suspect was a class field trip to Pilot Mountain. Lawson Edwin Yocum (1890-1977) and then undergraduate student Velma Dare Matthews made several herbarium specimens on Saturday May 9, 1925. Their specimens came to NCU as a gift from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2018.  This gift was of particular interest as the NC College for Women was fertile soil for women interested in continuing their botanical studies by becoming graduate students at Carolina. Botanists who got their start at NC College for Women include Alice Ruth Scholz Raper, Frances Katherine Foust Lombard, Velma Dare Matthews, Rebecca Ward Reynolds, and Rebecca Causey.

In the 1930s, Pilot Mountain became a frequent botanizing destination for Duke University botanists Henry J. Oosting, Hugo Leander Blomquist, and graduate student Donovan S. Correll.

Ruby Malinda Williams inventoried the flora of Pilot Mountain for her Masters Thesis at Duke University in 1942

By far the most prolific collector of vascular plants and mosses on Pilot Mountain was Ruby Malinda Williams. Most of her specimens — mosses (55 specimens) and vascular plants (286 specimens) — are curated by the Duke Herbarium. I enlisted the help of Carolina undergraduate, Priscila Arellanes Ramos, to complete the database records of vascular plant specimens in the Duke Herbarium collected by Williams at Pilot Mountain, while I completed records for specimens collected by other botanists throughout Surry County.6

Ruby Malinda Williams was born to Martha Anne Walker Williams (1877-1969) and John Wesley Williams (1871-1931) on 13 March 1911 in Rockingham County, North Carolina. The family lived in Reidsville and owned a grocery store. Ruby attended Greensboro College and was active in the Botany Club, the Mathematics Club, the Zoology Club, and served as the vice president of her class. She earned an A. B. from Greensboro College in 1931. She taught Chemistry at Durham High School in Durham County, North Carolina for 15 years.7

Ms. Williams earned a M.A. in Botany at Duke University in 1943. She did field work at her study site, Pilot Mountain, during 1941 and 1942. The title of her 1942 Masters thesis was, “A phytosociological survey of the vegetation on Pilot Mountain, North Carolina“.8 In 1944, Ms. Williams and her thesis advisor, Dr. Oosting, co-authored “The Vegetation of Pilot Mountain, North Carolina: A Community Analysis” published in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club.9

The vacuum left in academia by young men serving in the military during World War II created space for capable women to earn graduate degrees. Ruby Williams was a classmate of both Dr. Catherine Keever and Dr. Elsie Quarterman who earned A.M. degrees at Duke in 1942 and 1943, respectively.  I wonder if Ruby Williams would have gone on to pursue a doctoral degree in botany if she had not been diagnosed with brain cancer, which ultimately took her life in December of 1961 at age 50.  Ruby Williams is buried in Greenview Cemetery in her hometown of Reidsville in Rockingham County, North Carolina.

“Pilot Mountain from the northeast. Hickory Flat is shown extending across the mountain about half way to the top; Grindstone Ridge, on the right; and the long southeast ridge, on the left.” Figure 2, page 6 in Ruby Williams’ thesis. Photographer: Jake A. Gardner, ca. 1942

Mark, Luna, and I headed back to Pilot Mountain on a chilly morning in mid-November. Alas, yet again the parking lot at the top was full! According to staff at the visitor center, on a nice weekend day one must arrive at the Park by 9 a.m. sharp to secure a parking spot at the top. The top lot was set to re-open at 12:30 p.m., but we were unwilling to wait that long, so we decided to walk the Grindstone Trail from the visitor center to the the top. We achieved our goal of lunch with a view. We were serenaded by a raven (Corvus corax) and Luna took a short nap in the shade of Table Mountain pines (Pinus pungens) while we enjoyed our trail lunch of fruit, cheese, bread and hot tea.

Luna (R) and the author (L) enjoying lunch, ravens, and sunshine on Pilot Mountain. Photo by Mark Peifer, November 2024

I will admit I’d grown rather emotionally attached to Ruby Williams while cataloging her specimens and learning about her life. I particularly enjoyed reading the portion of Ms. Williams’ thesis devoted to the recent history of Pilot Mountain (pages 12-16). It’s a shame that Jomeokee, Pilot Mountain, was not preserved as a state park during Ruby Williams’ lifetime, but I take solace in knowing that her work to document its flora was an important step to its preservation as a place for ravens to nest, for plants to flourish, and for people to forest bathe. I encourage you to follow in Ruby Williams’ footsteps in 2025 and let the Great Guide lead you to happy trails.

Ruby Malinda Williams, 1931,  in “Echo,” yearbook of Greensboro College (page 103)

SOURCES

1. NorthCarolinahistory.org: An Online Encyclopedia, “Pilot Mountain” (by Jonathan Martin), https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/pilot-mountain/   (accessed 5 January 2025).

2.  Wikipedia contributors. “List of North Carolina state parks.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 Aug. 2024. Web. 5 Jan. 2025.

3. Borden, Jane. 2020.  Middle Mountains: Pilot Mountain. Our State.  https://www.ourstate.com/middle-mountains-pilot-mountain/# (accessed 5 January 2025).

4.  Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. undated. Segment 7: Pilot Mountain State Park to Hanging Rock State Park. https://mountainstoseatrail.org/segment/7/  (accessed 5 January 2025).

5.  Wikipedia contributors. “Surry County, North Carolina.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 20 Nov. 2024. Web. 23 Nov. 2024.

6. SERNEC Data Portal. 2025. http//:sernecportal.org/index.php. Accessed on January 05.

7. McCormick, Carol Ann and Priscila Arellanes Ramos. 2024. Ruby Malinda Williams, 1911-1961. The Collectors, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Herbarium. https://ncbg.unc.edu/2025/01/06/ruby-malinda-williams/

8.  Williams, Ruby Malinda. 1942. A phytosociological survey of the vegetation on Pilot Mountain, North Carolina. A.M. thesis, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

9.  Williams, R. M., & Oosting, H. J. (1944). The Vegetation of Pilot Mountain, North Carolina: A Community Analysis. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 71(1), 23–45. https://doi.org/10.2307/2481485