How Panthertail Mountain Got Its Name

High above Lake Toxaway stands a brooding sentinel, before whose rugged face the years have swept like waves upon the ocean in unending succession since God called forth the dry land.[1] A silent witness, this granite monolith reveals no secrets; offers no counsel, tenders no judgment. Its cliffs and wild crevices make no distinction between hunter and hunted, and offer rude shelter to all. It was toward this refuge the great cat took its flight, pursued by the angry settlers whose calf pens he had raided.

If the wilds of Hogback Valley were formidable; John Green was more so. Part Choctaw, he was labeled “strange”; and no doubt he was. His origins and ancestry are unknown, but John himself left his mark on the pages of local history. When the merchant hunters from South Carolina came in the 1840’s to settle in the Toxaway River basin John was among them. He and his wife Nancy Fisher built a cabin in the place now known as Sutton’s Cove. It was there one cold and dark evening a hungry panther stole into their cowpens and killed a calf which caused quite an uproar. The couple and their dogs chased the animal to the top of the mountain where the dogs finally held it at bay. Nancy ran home to get the gun they had forgotten while John and the dogs held off the panther. When she returned the panther was dead. John had hurled a fair sized rock at it and stunned it; then held it by the tail while he crushed its skull with the lighter knot torch he and Nancy had brought with them.

John was a very successful hunter. His favorite hunting grounds lay to the northwest in the region of Panthertown Valley. A look at the map reveals many places in that vicinity that bear his name: Greenland Laurels, Greenland Creek, Little Green Creek, Big Green Mountain, and Little Green Mountain. John was one of the first settlers on the Toxaway headwaters and the very last one of his kind. By the time he died in 1897 investors were buying up the Toxaway River terraces in preparation for the construction of Lake Toxaway. The old days in Hogback Valley were coming to an end. A great door was closing in the halls of time and John had heard the creaking of its hinges. He picked out his burying place, away from Toxaway, way up high, on Flat Top Mountain between the Thompson and Whitewater Rivers near the old Bohaynee section. Today his grave overlooks the waters of Lake Jocassee.[2]

And the mountain that sheltered John Green’s cabin, under whose rocky crags the panther held out to the bitter end, still holds its secrets close to its heart, and says nothing. So it is up to us to tell the story of how Panthertail Mountain got its name.

Today it is common to refer to Panthertail Mountain as “The Panthertails”: Big Panthertail is visible from Lake Toxaway and Little Panthertail, which is a lesser elevation spur east of the main ridge, overlooks Slick Fisher Road in the neighborhood of Panther Ridge RV Park.

[1] Genesis 1:9

[2] The Land of Waterfalls, Jim Bob Tinsley, 1988