"The Virginia Beauty and My Johnny Appleseed" by Karen Jones Hall

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the belly of the cultivator

This Blue Ridge Mountains-loving North Carolina writer peels away the folklore and gets to the core of the story, grafting another legend onto the family tree, the apple of her family’s eye.

Karen Lynn Jones Hall, currently of Colfax, North Carolina, is an award-winning author of several books about community history in western North Carolina and southwest Virginia. Best known for Building the Blue Ridge Parkway, she received an award from the North Carolina Society of Historians for Granite: Once & Forever. She has a B.A. in Management and Ethics from John Wesley College and a B.A. in Chemistry from Salem College. She rejoices in family stories.