Chapter One
The Long Road
In the foothills of middle Tennessee there is a little village
called Difficult. Whatever hardship that place name was meant to
convey, it could not match the resigned lament of the nearby hamlet
of Defeated, nor the ache of lonesomeness evoked by a settlement
known as Possum Hollow. It was that kind of land, isolated and
unforgiving, if hauntingly beautiful, for the farmers and small
merchants who settled the region, families of Scots-Irish and
Anglo-Irish descent named Hackett and Woodard, Key and Pope, Gibbs
and Scurlock, Beasley and Huffines, Silcox and Gore.
For generations one old road, Highway 70, was the main road west
and the best way out, weaving through the hills of the Upper
Cumberland past the county seats of Carthage and Lebanon and across
the barrens of rock and cedar and flat cactus to the capital city of
Nashville. Albert Arnold Gore, then a young superintendent of
schools in rural Smith County, regularly drove that route in the
early 1930s to study at the YMCA night law school, and to loiter at
the coffee shop of the nearby Andrew Jackson Hotel, pining for a
brilliant ... read full excerpt from: The Prince of Tennessee: The Rise of Al Gore ebook
