No one ever makes any apology for calling this striking mountain peak by its real name- Tater Hill. For it was never a potato hill, potatoes being mere ornaments for the skill of French chefs. The first man to see the charm of this lonely spot was one Chapley Wellburn. Adams occupied about three hundred acres of his grant, and when he locked horns with H. M. and W. N. G. Wellburn, through his grantee, John H. Bingham, about the year 1902, over the entire four hundred acres and other lands also, he won three hundred of them handily. It developed in the trial of that suit that one Flannery, meaning not necessarily that he had no family, but that he might have been almost any Flannery, claimed the land in the flatwoods tinder Tater Hill, but left about 1849, after which a man named James, but whether John James or James John is not known, came and brought a pack of hounds with him.
Hounds have to eat.
So do wolves. In the duel to see which should eat the other, the wolves won. James thought his turn might come next, either to eat or to b.e eaten, so he returned to Alexander County, whence he had come, which, sad as that fate might be , was better than furnishing the funeral baked meat for a lupine holiday. But he built a rock wing to his four-room dwelling, which still stands and in which he spent many happy days. In declining it, he said that he would not give up his spring rambles in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes for any office within the gift of the American people.