The Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times has a profile of Georgann Eubanks, author of the 2007 book Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains. This apparently involves much more than an extended discussion of Cold Mountain: Thomas Wolfe, Carl Sandburg, Margaret Mitchell, Anne Tyler, and more all lived there for some stretch of time. Donna Campbell, who took photos for the book, has a brief essay about attempting to locate Sandburg as a kid:
One night in 1961, poet Carl Sandburg was on CBS television talking about his biography of Abraham Lincoln. Then, right there in our living room, he talked about how much he loved the mountains of North Carolina ! My daddy was thrilled. And the next summer, when we loaded up in the Rambler station wagon and headed for the mountains, my four siblings and I heard a lot about Mr. Sandburg, how he won the Pulitzer Prize, how he wrote about the working man. We would be camping right in his neighborhood, our daddy told us, and we might even see the great writer in the grocery store. It rained the whole weekend we were in Flat Rock. We drove down a few roads looking for what might be the place. Then the fog came in on its little cat feet. So we played a lot of Monopoly in our tent. We never saw Carl Sandburg.