toxawaytellit

When I was a kid Whetstone Gap was at Quebec. And that, friends, is pronounced Kwee (long e) bec, with the emphasis on Kwee. Same name for the mountain and the settlement. You wouldn’t expect us mountain people to pronounce it like the Canadians, now would you? So, if Whetstone Gap is at Quebec, why is Whetstone Gap Road at Lake Toxaway?

Good question. I don’t know the entire answer, but I learned a little about Whetstone Gap from an old timer, Virgil Owen. It was something I should have realized but didn’t. After all, I lived a year or two on Quebec Mountain. I knew about those little long rocks with the squared off edges….

Here is a map that shows the location of Whetstone Gap. This is from the USGS topo map for the Rosman quadrangle.  Note the Whetstone Ridge runs south-west and north-east. Along the Whetstone Ridge you will see Quebec Mountain near the West Fork of the French Broad River. Crossing the south side of Quebec Mountain is Highway 64.  Whetstone Gap is marked there. It is  located nearly at the top of the ridge, about a mile from where Highway 64 crosses the West Fork of the French Broad River.

Whetstone Gap at Quebec Mountain

I asked Virgil Owen, my old timer friend, why there was a Whetstone Gap Road at Lake Toxaway. Virgil told me he didn’t know, that somebody had made a big mistake, for the road at Lake Toxaway they were calling the Whetstone Gap Road was really the Head Gap Road.  Well, I had heard the coon hunters talking about Head Gap, but I didn’t know where it was. Now I knew.

Virgil went on to tell me that the gap just up the road from Head Gap, where Highway 281 North turns off Highway 64 was the Pole Cat Gap. I knew that because I had plotted the calls on an old deed for the Toxaway Falls property. One of the points mentioned in that deed was the Pole Cat Gap. Incidentally, at the time of that deed, Toxaway Falls was called the Bagwell Shoals, reflecting the name of Bagwell, the owner of the falls and the “improvement” above them.

Virgil didn’t explain why the pole cat’s name got attached to the gap at the “junction,” but he said Head Gap got its name by virtue of having five spring heads nearby. “You could throw a rock,” he said, “and hit five spring heads from Head Gap.” He told me where they were. The best I remember there were three on the north side of Highway 64. If you look carefully, you can spot at least two of these even today. You can not see those on the other side of the road.

When I asked Virgil how Whetstone Gap got its name, he looked at me like I was a dunce and said, “You ought to know. You lived down there. It’s the rocks, the little whet rocks. They cover the ground down there.” Well yes, I remembered the  little rocks, many of them perfect little rectangles. Most of them were smooth, as if they had once been in a river. And yes, they were scattered everywhere. I had not thought of them as whetstones, but that is what they looked like.

Christine Owen

Years later Christine Owen whose father Spurgeon Owen once owned most of the west side of Quebec Mountain hurriedly hunted me some examples of the rocks  I remembered. When I talked to her that day she said her father had carried one of these stones in his pocket and actually used it to sharpen his pocket knife. In the photo she holds a medium sized example and a large one. The large stone is not the best example, being imperfect, but it does show the parallel sides of these stones. The other photo of the hand holding a smaller stone is more representative of the size and shape of the Quebec Mountain whetstones, though it came from another location, and is not as smooth as the Quebec stones.

I always thought Virgil’s explanation about the names of the gaps was interesting and am glad to finally share it now.