Growing up in Swain County, North Carolina, Nathan Dee Greene ate a lot of apples. The family had several trees of their own, but every fall, they bought bushels from the nearby orchard on Laurel Branch, across the Tuckasegee River from Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

“My mother would go all day, and she'd pick up the apples in a tote bag, and after school, I would go over and get them and sled them home,” said Greene in an archived interview. Now deceased, he was nearly 86 when he spoke with Nathan Somers in 2004 for the conversation now catalogued as part of Western Carolina University’s Oral Histories of Western North Carolina project . “At that time the roads in this community, there was only sled roads; it was very small and very narrow and therefore it wasn't big enough for a

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