Many plan to write a novel upon retirement but few achieve that goal. Donald Buchanan, however, retired in 2016 from a 31-year career as a corporate real estate manager and set about writing his novel the next day.
The plot for “Counting Souls” had essentially been percolating since Mr. Buchanan was a child growing up visiting grandparents in Cherokee County, North Carolina, when he learned that some of his relatives were counted as part of the 1830 census in Macon County, North Carolina. The novel focuses on a lawyer-farmer who is hired as a federal census taker for an area of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina where Cherokee people, settlers, plantation owners, and enslaved people lived.
While census-taking in modernity requires a few minutes of filling in and mailing a card, census-taking in 1830 involved visiting each individual and family to gather information. The book’s main character must leave his wife and two children and travel for six months to find all the living “souls” in the wilds of the mountains, venturing into hollers and valleys and making the arduous climb to remote peaks and pinnacles.
In some ways, “Counting Souls” is a tribute to Mr. Buchanan’s ancestors’ way of life, especially his grandfather, a farmer who was satisfied to cultivate his land and never travel in or drive an automobile. “To honor him, I had for years been doing genealogy. And, strangely enough, the 1830s census had my family members in it who lived in Macon County. It began to occur to me that whoever the census taker was at that time would have met every one of my ancestors. So, I wondered who that guy was,” he said by phone.
Through extensive research, Mr. Buchanan learned that the 1830 census taker was a man named Thomas Love Jr., whose family had fought in the Revolution and had been given land grants in North Carolina and Tennessee. Besides the characters of Thomas Love and Isaiah (a former Monticello slave tasked with running the farm while Love is taking the census), many other characters in “Counting Souls” are named for real people that Mr. Buchanan learned of through his research.
Yet, the novel is anything but a staid history book. Mr. Buchanan’s writing style is “sense of place,” a term instigated by 19th-century writer Henry David Thoreau. In essence, the prose conveys the setting in such a way that readers can imagine being there.
“I’m a huge lover of nature and the natural, so throughout the novel, even when terrible things were happening, I tried to temper that with the idyllic surroundings of the beautiful North Carolina mountains,” Mr. Buchanan noted.
During his census-taking journey, Love meets a variety of appealing, prickly, and heinous “souls” along the way, befriends a Cherokee tribal member, empathizes with a mother alone in the wilderness, and allays the concerns of plenty who are suspicious of government census-taking. Primarily, however, Love is a history lover, and when he meets Revolutionary War veterans, he is as fascinated as we might be to meet a survivor of World War II, the Korean or Vietnam War.
When he is invited into a family’s home on July 4, 1830, and learns that the home’s owner served, Love tells the man, “It’s an honor to be sittin’ here with a Revolutionary War veteran on Independence Day. … I can’t believe I’m sittin’ in the parlor of a man who … fought under Washington.”
After six months of “counting souls,” Love spends several full days making three copies of the information about the 5,332 individuals in the census-taking area he was assigned. Those census records are preserved for us to view today. Thankfully, there were people like Love willing to risk comfort, and even life, to document for future generations the early years of our United States of America.
