As related by General J. W. Bowman, one of the first citizens of Mitchell county and descendant of a Revolutionary patriot, the summit of the Roan was the rendezvous for the mountain men of the Washington district and Watauga settlement, assembling for the march ending in the battle of King’s mountain. In Yancey county, visible from the Roan, and forty-five miles from Asheville, is a peak known as Grier’s Bald, named in memory of David Grier, a hermit, who lived upon it for thirty-two years. From posthumous papers of Silas McDowell, we learn the following facts of the hermit’s singular history. A native of South Carolina, he came into the mountains in 1798, and made his home with Colonel David Vance, whose daughter he fell in love with. His suit was not encouraged; the young lady was married to another, and Grier, with mind evidently crazed, plunged into the wilderness. This was in 1802. On reaching the bald summit of the peak which bears his name, he determined to erect a permanent lodge in one of the coves. He built a log house and cleared a tract of nine acres, subsisting in the meantime by hunting and on a portion of the $250 paid him by Colonel Vance for his late services. He was twenty miles from a habitation. For years he lived undisturbed; then settlers began to encroach on his wild domains. In a quarrel about some of his real or imaginary landed rights, he killed a man named Holland Higgins. At the trial he was cleared on the ground of insanity, and returned home to meet his death at the hands of one of Holland’s friends. Grier was a man of strong mind and fair education. After killing Higgins, he published a pamphlet in justification of his act, and sold it on the streets. He left papers of interest, containing his life’s record and views of life in general, showing that he was a deist, and a believer in the right of every man to take the executive power of the law into his own hands. While I was at the hotel a terrific thunder storm visited--not the summit of the Roan--but the valleys below it. It came after dark, and from the porch we looked out and down upon the world in which it raged. Every flash of lightning was a revelation of glory, disclosing a sea of clouds of immaculate whiteness--a boundless archipelago whose islands were the black peaks of the mountains. Not a valley could be seen; nothing but the snowy bosom of this cloud ocean, and the stately summits which had lifted themselves above its vapors. In the height of the storm, the lightning blazed in one incessant sheet, and the thunder came rolling up through the black awful edge of the balsams, producing somewhat similar sensations to those which fill the breast of a superstitious savage at the recurrence of an every-day storm above him.