Wednesday, September 17
1:30 PM – 2:15 PM
Ashe County Public Library
This event is free and open to the public, no registration required.
Join us for a reading with Timothy Silver with time for audience Q&A.
Tim Silver is professor emeritus of history at Appalachian State University where he taught American history for 37 years. As a college professor, he authored three books, including Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) which won the 2003 Old North State Award for the best work of non-fiction by a North Carolina author. He is co-author of An Environmental History of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), a book selected as a 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Tim retired from Appalachian State in 2021 and now works as a free-lance writer of creative non-fiction. Death in Briar Bottom is his first book since leaving academic life and his first foray into the true crime genre. An avid outdoorsman, Tim spends his spare time hiking, biking, camping, and flyfishing in the Appalachian mountains. He and his wife live in Boone, North Carolina.
On July 3, 1972, twenty-four hippies from Clearwater, Florida, set up tents and settled in for the night at Briar Bottom, a public US Forest Service campground in western North Carolina. The impromptu campout was a pit stop for the group on their way to a Rolling Stones concert in Charlotte. Early that evening, they drank beer, smoked marijuana, and listened to rock music as they anticipated the good times that lay ahead. Near midnight, the county sheriff showed up with six deputies, allegedly responding to a noise complaint. They were armed with pistols and five sawed-off 12-gauge shotguns, one of which discharged, killing a young man named Stanley Altland. To this day, no one has been held responsible for the tragic incident, though it happened in front of over a dozen eyewitnesses.
Timothy Silver writes the true story of Altland’s death and its aftermath, using archival research, interviews with surviving Clearwater campers, and newly unearthed FBI files. A mix of true crime, southern history, and personal storytelling, this book shows how, in the dark of night at a remote mountain campsite, the killing of an innocent man epitomized the suspicion of young people and violence toward the counterculture that gripped the nation in the early 1970s.
