| George Masa | |
| Birth Name: | Shoji Endo |
| Birth Date: | 1885 |
| Birth Place: | Japan |
| Burial Place: | Riverside Cemetery (Asheville, North Carolina) |
| Occupation: | Businessman Photographer |
George Masa (1885 – June 21, 1933), born Shoji Endo and raised near Shizuoka, Japan,[1] was a businessman and professional large-format photographer. He lived and worked in the United States.[2]
Masa arrived in the United States in 1901. In 1915, he settled in Asheville, North Carolina. After initially working for the Grove Park Inn as a bellhop and valet, Masa left the inn to take a position as a photographer in February 1919. He founded Plateau Studio (a business he later sold, which is still in operation today).[3] His customers included some of the town's most affluent citizens such as the Vanderbilt, Grove, and Seely families.
Masa came to love the mountains of western North Carolina and advocated their preservation, often at his own expense. Using his photographic equipment and an odometer he crafted from an old bicycle,[4] Masa meticulously catalogued a significant number of peaks,[5] the distances between them, and the names given to them by the local settlers and the Cherokee. He was a friend of Horace Kephart,[6] and the two of them worked together to ensure that a large portion of the Great Smoky Mountains would be established as a national park. Masa also scouted and marked the entire North Carolina portion of the Appalachian Trail.[7]
Masa died in 1933 from influenza. He had desired to be buried next to his good friend Horace Kephart near Bryson City, North Carolina.[8] However with no surviving family or estate, his burial was organized by his local hiking club, and they did not have the necessary funds to do so. Instead, he was buried in Asheville's Riverside Cemetery.
One year after Masa's death, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was officially established.[9] In 1961, Masa Knob, a peak of 5,685 feet[10] in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, was named in Masa's honor.[11] It stands, appropriately, adjacent to Mount Kephart.
Interest in Masa's life was revived by documentary film-makers more than 60 years after his death. Bonesteel Films released a 90-minute documentary about George Masa in 2003.[12] Also, the fourth episode of Ken Burns's documentary about "" features Masa (entitled "Going Home," covering the period between 1920 and 1933), which was initially broadcast on September 30, 2009.[13]
In September 2024, Smokies Life published George Masa: A Life Reimagined, a comprehensive biography written by Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel. After conducting groundbreaking research in the US and Japan, McCue and Bonesteel tell the fascinating story of an immigrant who endured scrutiny from the Bureau of Investigation, harassment from the Ku Klux Klan, and the collapse of the economy, his business, and his health—all while making it his life’s goal to champion conservation in Southern Appalachia.[14]