The Lost Mountain

Book One of the Series THE THREE LITTLE LIBRARIANS AND
THE BIG, BAD BROTHER
Copyright October 2008

[Part 1]

A few years ago, in a little community called Lost Mountain in East Tennessee, there were three little librarians.  Their names were Abby, Emilee, and Megan.  They were nine years old and went to a Southern Baptist Church called New Lebanon.  With a name like New Lebanon, one would expect to see cedar trees all around the church, like the cedars of Lebanon in the Bible, but around the church the only cedars were “scrub cedars” that people cut like weeds to keep them out of the way of the beautiful farm land. 

The farm land had rolling hills, neat fences, many ponds where cows could get a drink or a bath on a hot day, and three mountains that framed the church.  The mountains were called Stone Mountain, Fodder Stack, and Chimney Top.  Stone Mountain looked like the more famous mountain of the same name in Georgia and had a golf course on its fringes.  Fodder Stack was in the shape of stacks of corn stalks, fodder or food for the farm animals in winter.  Chimney Top was really shaped like a regular roof with one little bulge at the top. All three could be seen easily from the church, but no one at church had understood “Chimney Top,” until a beloved former pastor’s wife, Jean Peek, who had grown up in Holy Loch, Scotland, pointed out that chimney tops in the British Isles are often small and hardly more than a little bulge at a distance.

More than anything else, of course, the church was surrounded by grazing black cows, mostly Angus cows from Scotland that are good for beef, though there were also Holsteins from Germany and Charolais from France, which are good for milk.  In fact, the nearest town on the map near Lost Mountain was Baileyton, named for people from Great Britain.  Baileyton had three red lights, four city blocks, three churches inside its city limits, one school, one police department, one fire department, and about 500 people who voted there.  The saying was that there were about 500 people around there and about 5000 cows.

            “Abby,” Emilee said one day as the two girls were sitting on the church steps and drawing pictures of the mountains and cows, “I just keep wondering why this place is called Lost Mountain.  A mountain can’t just get lost,” she giggled.  

(The Three Little Librarians and the Big, Bad Brother is a fictional book based on true events and real characters.)