You have to climb a steep and narrow road, past the moonshiners' shacks and dense rhododendrons and through the iron gates to get to the house on the mountaintop that Ruth Graham built after her husband Billy became too famous to live anywhere else. By 1954, after she caught her children charging tourists a nickel to take a picture of their old house and noticed Billy crawling across the floor of his study to keep people outside from catching a glimpse of him, she knew it was time to move.
So up the mountain they went, and now, decades later, the house looks as if it just grew there naturally, instead of being assembled out of pieces Ruth salvaged from older cabins and then put back together like Lincoln Logs. The Graham home is modest in style but had plenty of room over the years for their five children and the family dogs, not to mention the visitors who came by. Fellow preachers and Presidents,...
