The Art of Building Walls

KAREN RIELEY

Published in the Autumn 2019 issue of Carolina Mountain Life – pp. 100-101

Shannon Carmichael seems destined to have ended up in Banner Elk and the Eagles Nest community. His path through life—being raised in a Beachy Amish-Mennonite community in Ohio, earning a master’s degree in engineering management at Dartmouth, living in an off-grid cabin on Beech Mountain, and learning how to move large stones to build walls may seem incongruous. They are actually all in keeping with his respect for nature and simple living.

Highway 194 between U.S. 19E and Banner Elk offers a lush landscape interspersed with private homes, local businesses and the private airport for the Elk River community. The highway runs between Elk River to the south and Beech Mountain to the north.

About four miles west of 19E at Elk Park and three miles east of Banner Elk, on the north side of 194, low, serpentine stone walls suddenly appear on a well-maintained open hillside and wind their way up to a large, rustic-looking structure that is the gatehouse for one of the area’s newest living communities, Eagles Nest. The property is owned and being developed by The Waterfront Group founded by brothers Mark and Will Adkins.

As intriguing and striking as these walls are, they are just a hint of how walls are used throughout Eagles Nest. In addition to being eye-catching, the walls are used for erosion control and as guard rails.

“Steve Shields created the serpentine walls in the early days of developing the property,” Carmichael said. “The walls are made of blasting rock from clearing the land for development and are stacked by hand. Smaller stones will move with freezing and thawing and then have to be repaired, so they do better at the base of the mountain which is warmer. The bigger rocks are more stable and are better to use at 5,000 feet and higher.”

“We use a couple of different styles for the big rocks. Some of the walls have small stones with occasional large, vertical stones that have been flipped so that they show a flat face,” Carmichael said. “I purposefully stack other walls with large stones to make them look natural so that they blend into the surroundings.”

While a large team of people has been involved in stacking stones, building rail fences, landscaping and maintaining the property, Carmichael is responsible for the large stone walls. He operates excavators that have a hydraulic thumb and weigh 35,000, 22,000 or 11,000 pounds, depending on the size of the rocks and the space where he is trying to place them.

Shields hired him to work on the property, but Carmichael credits Mark Eggers, M & E Excavating, Banner Elk, N.C., for teaching him how to design, use the equipment and build walls out of large stone. “He’s the best there is,” Carmichael said.

Carmichael had lived on the property since 2011 in an off-grid cabin on 60 acres. “I had no electricity or plumbing,” he said. “I grew and prepared my own food and sold cheese and goat’s milk to local restaurants. I kept food cold in a canning cellar and little cave near the cabin, got water from a spring and used a headlight inside after the sun went down.”

As tough as that lifestyle may sound, for Carmichael it is the natural way to live. He was born on September 11, in a barn of a Grade A dairy farm in Holmes County, OH, which along with Lancaster County, PA, is one of the world’s two largest Amish communities.

“I didn’t have a birth certificate or Social Security card, so I don’t know exactly what year I was born, but I’m sure it was around 1972,” he said.  “My mom’s family is Irish and my dad’s Scottish,” Carmichael said. His father’s family lived in Carmichael, PA, in fact.

“I grew up in the Mennonite lifestyle, with electricity, but no phone or TV.” His dad owned gas stations, and crop- and dairy-farmed.

“I was actually raised by Esther, a lady in the Amish community, after my mother left us, until I was about 11,” Carmichael said. “Then, I took over taking care of myself and my father, doing my own laundry, cleaning and canning.”

He had planned to go to a local Mennonite College, maybe become a veterinarian and stay in the Amish community, until 1990, when he was 18 years old and his father died. “After that I just couldn’t stay there, so I decided to travel around and see the world.”

“My dad’s friend owned a company that built silos for the government,” Carmichael said. “The friend paid for my college tuition, because he needed an engineer who could climb 60 feet up to inspect the silos. I worked for his company for two years after I got my degree, but then he died, too, and I decided to quit.”

While Carmichael was in college, he enjoyed hiking the Appalachian Trail that runs through the school. In 1999, he hiked from Springer Mountain, GA, to 19E. He fell in love with the area and stayed. He’s had a variety of jobs—in the fudge shop at Grandfather Mountain, as part-owner and manager of Jackalope’s View and Archer’s Mountain Inn, and for eight years until he quit last year, as a bouncer for Beech Mountain Resort.

“It was hard to find enough work to live while the economy was struggling, particularly in this area,” Carmichael said. “There were 100 days in the winter when I worked with no days off, between working for the ski resort and Eagles Nest. I didn’t have a car, so I walked or skied four miles from my cabin to work and then back late at night in the snow. Now I’m making enough at Eagles Nest to work full-time doing what I love most.”

Today he lives in a trailer that Will Adkins remodeled for him near the maintenance area. “It’s a really nice place, but I miss living off-grid,” Carmichael said. “I was used to complete silence at night and couldn’t sleep at first.”

He’s teaching “rockling” to a small crew that works with him and builds the fencing, too. They hand-pick the rocks while they are out driving on the property and haul them around in massive trucks.

“The best compliment I get is, ‘Wow, this wall looks like it was always here,’” Carmichael said. “I hope I get to work here forever.”