The old timber mill at Bat Cave had been completely transformed.
Under the architectural direction of the Whitfield Memorial Foundation, the sixty-acre riverside property had been rebuilt into The Whitfield Center for Military History and Artisan Engineering:
A state-of-the-art public museum, vocational trade school, and historical restoration laboratory where fifty children of fallen service members and rural mountain youths attended free four-year engineering seminars every summer, learning how to build, weld, and restore the great industrial machines of the American century.
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On the wide flagstone terrace overlooking the roaring waters of the Rocky Broad River, eighty feet above the rapids, one hundred people were gathered beneath an American flag fluttering against the cloudless sapphire sky.
Sitting around the wide cedar picnic tables were veteran families, retired highway patrolmen, and dozens of neighbors from Kanuga Road, eating fresh-grilled mountain trout, buttermilk cornbread, and drinking cold apple cider pressed from our own heirloom orchards.
