I COPIED AND PASTED THIS ARTICLE IN THIS EMAIL, THESE DAVENPORTS ARE NOT MY LINE, BUT THOUGHT THE STORY INTERESTING, THIS MAKES IT A LITTLE EASY TO READ , INSTEAD OF HAVING TO REGISTER FOR THE NEWSPAPER--- THANKS ELAINE This photo is provided by Colleen Davenport-Taylor, shows her at her family farm outside Saltville, Va., in 1962 with a brother in the background. Davenport-Taylor, now 61, is the daughter of the mountain man Homer Davenport, who died at age 91 in Oct. 2003. (AP Photo/Cal Woodward) SALTVILLE, Va. -- As a shepherd girl, Colleen Davenport would step outside her mountain cabin on a clear night and drink in a view that was all her own. "You can see all those valleys," she remembers more than 40 years later. "At night you look down through there and you can see the lights a-shining like diamonds down there in the dark." She might as well have been looking at the stars above. The town below was practically as foreign to her as the galaxy. "It was a pretty sight to see. You just was glad you weren't down there with them. I never cared much for towns." Three generations of Davenports lived on that mountain and came off it, at different times, for different reasons, and for the most part not willingly. In doing so, they helped close a chapter that once defined Appalachia and other remote reaches of the United States. It's about mountain men and their families who lived beyond the reach of fellow man, disdaining an outside world that considered them dirt poor if it considered them at all. The patriarch, Homer Davenport, a sinewy man with a shock of white hair and bushy beard, was a striking figure. In a photo of him crouching to pick apples, he looks like Moses. In other shots, he looks wild. Father of five boys and Colleen, 61, Homer pitched hay with a fork, milled wheat into flour, turned animal skin to leather in his tannery, boiled cane into molasses, raised fat turnips from the rich soil, shot a man dead who shot him, read to his children until he fell asleep in his stiff-backed chair, made a kind of bread from cattail roots. His health care plan was found in his garden and in the wild, where plants became remedies. And when he took a chunk out of his leg with a chain saw in his elder years and was talked into getting stitches, he blamed the sewing job, not the injury, for the bother he felt in his limb for the rest of his life. When he died in October 2003 at 91, the spray on his casket was made from the bounty of his land _ ferns, wheat, hickory nuts. As much as he wanted to be left alone, the modern world came calling. Once it was in the form of Peter Jenkins, a sojourner who crossed the country on foot, encountered Davenport and wrote about him in his book "A Walk Across America." Although a sympathetic portrait, the account brought unwanted attention, and for years all sorts of people trooped up to Red Rock Cove to see Homer Davenport and his family's rugged one-room cabin with an attached kitchen shed. "He brought in the outside world," said Ruth Davenport, Homer's daughter-in-law. "After him, it seemed they came in streams." Today his kin remember their years up on Red Rock Cove in an idyllic haze. Even the youngest, accustomed now to cell phones, e-mail and normal jobs, say they wish sometimes they could go back to that life of solitude and simplicity. ___ "My father was always on the land, he was raised on it and when he grew up that's what he wanted to do," Colleen said, sitting on the front porch of her modest old house a few miles from the Poor Valley farm where the Davenports lived when they weren't at Red Rock. "And of course my mother was raised on the land too so she was willing to do it with him. She had no problem being a farmer's wife. He bought the valley farm, which was around 100 acres. He bought it back in the '30s during the Depression and started farming it. He rented some pasture here and yonder." Then he purchased the upland acres, a steep 90-minute walk from the farm, and sent her there alone to tend sheep in her late teens. For months at a time, she lived in a tiny mountain cabin that sat on the property years before the Red Rock home was built. "At age 18 I didn't care anything about the rest of the world," she said. "I didn't want to get out into the rest of the world. It was not appealing. There was too much trouble. "At times I thought I'd want something better but when I went back up there to herd the sheep I knew there wasn't anything better. "I had a little garden. Every other day, until I got a milk goat, I'd walk down to the farm to get a gallon of milk, sit it in that cold mountain spring." The family needed to go to town for very little, not much more than clothes, baking soda, salt and canned condensed milk for baking. When Homer's wife, Marie, sold tobacco in the fall, she'd buy luxury items such as mixed nuts and tangerines. Life wasn't always peaceful. Caught up in a "love triangle," Homer gunned down a man who shot him in the side or stomach, Colleen said, relating an event from "before my time." She said her father, who had occasional brushes with the law, spent 18 months behind bars for the shooting. One year, her dad gave his daughter a birthday gift she cherished _ empty envelopes. "He had these little tiny envelopes, a whole stack of them somebody had given him. He brought them little envelopes and told me they were for my birthday. "I was so pleased, and I had a lot of fun with them. I'd put little things in them." She would stuff the envelopes with pictures she cut out from the Sears catalog. She left in her mid-20s, to marry, raise her own family and farm in the valley. ___ When Homer got too old to live at Red Rock, he moved down to the farm. His son Dusty, Dusty's wife, Ruth, and their young children relocated to the mountain, spending about seven years there. Unlike the Davenports, Dusty's wife had grown up with electricity, TV and the rest. Ruth said she didn't miss any of that. In October 1991, at age 41, Dusty dropped dead of a heart attack. "He worked all day that day," Ruth said. "It was a beautiful day, gathered apples, gathered pumpkins, we cut the last of the corn. I was cooking supper and I was talking to him through the opening there in the kitchen shed and he went on around the edge of the shed where I couldn't see him. "All at once the kids started laughing and I said what's going on, and they said Daddy's just carrying on, the way he always does. I went on with supper. I went out and looked at him and he had already turned blue." With Dusty's death, Ruth and her four children came down the mountain and moved in with her mother. "I haven't even had a garden since I lived up there," she said. Jessica, the eldest, was 12 when her dad died. She said of the mountain life, "I loved it. I would love to live at least somewhat similar even to this day." She and her sisters Summer and Beverly were up before dawn to milk the cows and penned the sheep at night. They remembered their little brother Cam, who was born at Red Rock, careering down a slope in an old bathtub and riding goats. Their mother home-schooled them even when they settled in the low country. Beverly, 4 when the family moved up, just shy of 11 coming down, said it was strange having neighbors all of a sudden. "We didn't even know how cruel people could be. We were totally shut off from everything that was bad. When we moved off, it was just like shell shock." They remembered the time at Red Rock when a church group came up, bringing provisions and toys. The group meant well but the family was quietly insulted. The Davenports felt rich. They could just have easily brought charity down the mountain, bearing fat turnips and onions for the washed masses below. ___ On the Net: Audio and photos are available at: http://wid.ap.org/series/roads/mountain.html