Wilburn Waters Monument.

Wilburn Waters Monument: Killed 120 Bears

Tuckerdale, North Carolina

Wilburn Waters (1812-1879) was a one-man wildlife exterminating machine, earning money from, and eating, the animals that he killed. He was praised by Appalachian farmers for single-handedly wiping out the wolf population along the North Carolina-Tennessee state line (It has never recovered). He lived alone, on a mountaintop, but would regularly walk miles to church and would not tolerate profanity in his presence.

Wilburn Waters.

Wilburn began killing bears in the 1830s and was nearly killed himself many times. Once, while hunting with a buddy, he shot a bear, straddled its body, then unexpectedly found himself riding the enraged, not-dead bear like a bucking bronco, holding onto its fur with one hand as it galloped for the edge of a cliff. Wilburn used his free hand to smash in the bear's skull with a tomahawk, then he and the bear skidded along the snowy ground and stopped with the dead bear's head hanging over the edge of the precipice. At the time, Wilburn was 60 years old.

Wilburn died in 1879 -- killed by nose cancer, not a bear -- and was buried in the family's hilltop graveyard, a remote spot that was probably visited more often by bears than people.

78 years later, in 1957, at the height of the Davy Crockett/Daniel Boone craze, a local pastor named M.D. Hart decided that Wilburn deserved his share of bear-killing fame. He rallied the local community, had a sign erected next to nearby train tracks pointing to the hilltop, then had a blocky DIY monument built over Wilburn's burial spot surmounted by a statue of a bear. It's an odd tribute, as if the bear is waiting to rip Wilburn apart should he ever rise from the grave.

Both the sign and the monument list Wilburn's final dead bear total: 120.

Despite Pastor Hart's efforts, Wilburn Waters was better at killing bears than attracting tourists. Photos from 1957 show that his grave monument was clearly visible on the then-treeless hilltop, but the trains stopped running in the 1970s, the adjacent road remains rural and lightly traveled, and 60+ years of vegetation have since hidden Wilburn and the bear from public view.