Avery County Civil War Trails & Stories
Sarah Malinda Blalock
Sarah Malinda Blalock and her husband, William McKesson “Keith” Blalock, lived in Coffey’s Gap on the Watauga and Caldwell County line in 1860. Keith Blalock was an avowed Unionist, but with the passage of the first Confederate conscription act imminent, he enlisted in the 26th North Carolina Infantry on March 20, 1862. He hoped to get close enough to the Union lines to desert. Malinda Blalock enlisted in the same day, concealing her identity as a woman and passing herself off as Sam Blalock, Keith’s younger brother.
Once in the army, Keith Blalock concluded that his plan would not work. To obtain a medical discharge (he already had a hernia), he stripped and rolled around in poison oak, developing a rash that made him unfit for service. He was discharged on April 20, as was Malinda Blalock after she revealed her true identity. They returned to the mountains where Keith recovered.
Unionist Haven
In 1860 Banner Elk was a small community in the mountains of Watauga County (present-day Avery County). Then called Banner’s Elk, it was named for the local Banner family and the Elk River. During the last years of the Civil War, an organized system of safe houses was operated here for escaped Union prisoners of war and refugees from Confederate conscription.
Local residents guided them through Blowing Rock, across Grandfather Mountain, and into Banner Elk, where other guides led them to safety in Kentucky and Tennessee. Daniel Ellis, Harrison Church, and Lewis Banner were among the guides, as were Keith and Malinda Blalock.
Iron for the Confederacy
During the Civil War, natural resources such as salt, lead, and iron were highly prized commodities in the Confederacy. The government relied especially on small rural iron works to manufacture cannons, swords, and firearms.
Ruben White first mined iron ore in this area in the 1780s. By 1860, the Cranberry Iron Corporation operated a bloomer forge on Cranberry Creek. Jordan C. Hardin ran the mine, and his father, John Hardin, was the local postmaster. In a bloomer, burning charcoal melted the iron from the ore. Workers used an iron bar to stir and gather the resulting mass, which was carried to the forge and hammered to drive out impurities, and then further hammered into flat bars of iron.