This story was excerpted from an workshop in Yancey County, North Carolina in September 2026 with Millie Lewis.

Have you ever heard about the buck house? That’s on the head of Ball Mountain, and that’s a very interesting story. There’s people- well, it was hundreds of acres of land, and They cut the timber and logged it, and put it on the railroad and took it to Tennessee. But how the man- all my life, I was told that the man won the Buckhouse in a poker game. He won all that land and all that in a poker game. Now, you go up Ball Mountain, and when you get to well, you’ll see a sign that says the Buck House, and there there’s a road, a little road that goes out. It’s just, just a drive way out. And he lives there. And then he has a studio where they make music. And you need to talk to him because his grandparents and his daddy and them, he was raised there at the Buck House. We used to go there and party after we were grown. You know, nobody lived there then. Several people owned it, and but it they had a. It was very interesting.