A STRANGER FROM THE WEST
© 2025 Terry Harmon
My great, great-grandfather, Eli Presnell, was a woodworker. Because he only had hand tools to use, this was a time consuming undertaking, but he did a good job and reportedly made the prettiest furniture. He also fashioned a handmade turning lathe that was said to have made the shavings fly, and he used it to make many chairs. But in the late 1880s, he would create something previously unknown to him.
According to family lore, one day in 1885, a “stranger from the west” (some say a Kentuckian) on horseback rode through the district where Eli and his wife were living in the Beech Mountain area of North Carolina. The stranger needed lodging, and the Presnells offered their little mountain home. When the stranger unpacked his horse, he brought a dulcimer into the house. Eli was taken by what he heard and saw. Before the stranger left, Eli asked to examine the instrument and make a tracing of it, and he was soon making one his own.
He crafted it of hand-tooled yellow poplar (shaped like the ones today except for about a quarter inch overhang on the top and bottom), and he gave it to his son Ninevah when he was old enough to take care of it. Ninevah played it for years and eventually passed it on to his granddaughter, who, as a child, used it as a snow sled!
This dulcimer was, perhaps, the first one made in present-day Watauga County, North Carolina, and it may have been the forerunning pattern for those later made by other craftsmen here, including Eli’s grandsons, Leonard Glenn and Iris Harmon, and by their cousins, Edd Presnell and Stanley Hicks.
Although the origins of the Appalachian dulcimer are not well documented, it is believed to have been adapted from a German instrument that made its way down the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia in the middle of the 18th century. Its use was never widespread, but it nonetheless became something of a symbol of mountain culture. And its introduction to these particular mountains may very well have been due to that “stranger from the west.”