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Visiting Our Past: The bag lady of Swain County was a literary light Rob Neufeld, Visiting Our Past
In the late 1930s, children in Almond saw an old lady walking around town carrying bags and muttering to herself.
She was the celebrated playwright, poet and novelist Olive Tilford Dargan, who had come to Swain County, the place of her former farm, after feeling a Red Scare chill in Asheville over her allegedly proletarian novel, “Call Home the Heart.”
She had written it under a pseudonym, Fielding Burke, but a publishing insider had leaked her identity.
Dargan’s bag contained gifts for the children. The muttering they heard was poems she recited in the act of composition.