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�MOUNTAINS OFEXPERIENCE:
Interdisciplinary, Intercultural,International
Journal of the
Appalachian Studies Association
Edited by
Parks Lanier, Jr.
�The Appalachian Consortium was a non-profit educational organization
composed of institutions and agencies located in Southern Appalachia. From
1973 to 2004, its members published pioneering works in Appalachian studies
documenting the history and cultural heritage of the region. The Appalachian
Consortium Press was the first publisher devoted solely to the region and many of
the works it published remain seminal in the field to this day.
With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Humanities through the Humanities Open Book Program,
Appalachian State University has published new paperback and open access
digital editions of works from the Appalachian Consortium Press.
www.collections.library.appstate.edu/appconsortiumbooks
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. To view a
copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses.
Original copyright © 1989 by the Appalachian Consortium Press.
ISBN (pbk.: alk. Paper): 978-1-4696-3702-0
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-4696-3704-4
Distributed by the University of North Carolina Press
www.uncpress.org
�Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION, Parks Lanier, Jr
1
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: APPALACHIANS, PIONEERS
FOR THE NEW AGE, Marilou Awiakta
6
MOUNTAINS OF EXPERIENCE: INTERDISCIPLINARY
PREHISTORIC AND HISTORIC HUMAN ADAPTATION IN
APPALACHIA: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE,
C. Clifford Boyd, Jr
15
USED PARTS AND THE POETIC IMPULSE: MACHINES AS
ALTERNATIVE MEANS OF EXPRESSION, Ricky L. Cox
28
JANE GENTRY: A SINGER AMONG SINGERS, Betty Smith
35
LEGENDARY PLACES: THE LITERATURE OF THE GREAT SMOKY
MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK, James E. Byer
46
JESSE STUART'S ARCHETYPAL VISION OF APPALACHIAN CULTURE:
THE THREAD STILL RUNS TRUE, Edgar H. Thompson
55
ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS: APPALACHIAN LITERATURE AND THE
UNSUSPECTING STUDENT, Teresa Wheeling
64
MOUNTAINS OF EXPERIENCE: INTERCULTURAL
AGRICULTURE IN PREINDUSTRIAL APPALACHIA:
SUBSISTENCE FARMING IN BEECH CREEK, 1850-1880,
Paul}. Weingartner, Dwight Billings, Kathleen M. Blee
70
BICULTURALISM: A COMPARISON OF CENTRAL APPALACHIANS
AND THE INUPIAT OF ALASKA, Nelda Knelson Daley
81
APPALACHIAN CULTURE AS REACTION TO UNEVEN
DEVELOPMENT: A WORLD SYSTEMS APPROACH TO REGIONALISM,
Roberta McKenzie
93
111
�THE INFLUENCE OF THE SMOOT TANNERY ON THE ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT OF WILKES COUNTY, N.C. 1897-1940, Barry
Elledge
105
MOUNTAINS OF EXPERIENCE: INTERNATIONAL
MOUNTAIN FORAGERS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND APPALACHIA:
CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE "MOUNTAIN MAN"
STEREOTYPE, Benita ]. Howell
114
APPALACHIANISM AND ORIENTALISM: REFLECTIONS ON
READING EDWARD SAID, Rodger Cunningham
125
LLEWELLYN AND GIARDINA: TWO NOVELS ABOUT COAL MINING,
Laurie Lindberg
133
TRADITIONAL APPALACHIAN CULTURE AND TRADITIONAL
SCOTTISH HIGHLAND CULTURE COMPARED: A PERSONAL
PERSPECTIVE, Clyde H.Ray
IV
141
�1988 APPALACHIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION OFFICERS
Grace Toney Edwards
Loyal Jones
Parks Lanier, Jr
Carl Ross
Ellen Garrison
President
Vice President
Conference Program Chair
Newsletter Editor/Secretary
Treasurer/Membership Secretary
MEMBERS OF THE STEERING COMMITTEE
Grace Toney Edwards, Chair
Pat Beaver
Barry Buxton
Ann Campbell
Ellen Garrison
John Inscoe
Loyal Jones
Helen Lewis
Gordon McKinney
Carl Ross
Jean Speer
Eliot Wigginton
MEMBERS OF THE PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Parks Lanier, Jr., Chair
Doyle Bickers
Woodward Bousquet
Howard Dorgan
Wilburn Hayden
Roberta Herrin
Ronald Lewis
Karen Lohr
MEMBERS OF THE CONFERENCE LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS COMMITTEE
Richard Straw, Chair
Pat Cantrell
William Hrezo
Thomas Shannon
Peggy Shiflett
Melinda Wagner
Ron Willoughby
Douglas Woolley
�This page intentionally left blank
�Introduction
This first issue of the JOURNAL OF THE APPALACHIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION signals that our organization has come to maturity. Helen Roseberry, in
writing her introduction to the 1987 proceedings, spoke of how the goals of the
first, the 1978, ASA meeting continue to function "as any good foundation will."
Writing in 1986, Carl Ross noted that "we can see that there has long been a
reciprocal interaction between the Appalachian region and the larger American
society." Anne Campbell noted in 1985 discussions on "international perspectives
relating to Appalachia." Sam Gray in 1984 recalled how at the first meeting of what
became the Appalachian Studies Association Gurney Norman suggested our region is "intricately connected to distant regions and institutions." It was only
natural then, like the maturation of a seed well planted and well tended, that the
1988 Conference take as its theme "Mountains of Experience: Interdisciplinary,
Intercultural, International."
As we enter a new decade for the Appalachian Studies Association, we take
stock of our trials and tribulations, offer proof of the diversity and dignity of
highland life, and anticipate the experiments to come. The decision of the Steering
Committee to make a record of our "mountains of experience" a more consistent
one by establishing this JOURNAL was timely and judicious. Publication of the
proceedings of our annual conferences has been important in binding us together,
in making us truly an "association."
This JOURNAL will now make our excellent studies more accessible within
the region and far beyond it as well. It will be interesting to see in what far corners
of the world our voices will be heard.
The best a JOURNAL like this can hope to be is a representative sampling.
The life, the joy, the music, the laughter of the 1988 Appalachian Studies Conference at Radford University cannot all be conveyed here. It was our largest conference, both in members attending and members participating. Many of the best
things which occurred cannot be conveyed on paper. Not everything which has
been written can be included here. Realizing that, the Steering Committee has
recommended that a file of all papers submitted be kept, and that ASA members
be able to purchase papers which have not been printed. In this JOURNAL you
will find information on how you can obtain that material.
The best thing about our association is that there is plenty of room for all the
seedlings which have been nurtured these last eleven years and are coming to
harvest.
The 1988 Conference was ample proof not only that we work well but that
we work well together. In her keynote address Marilou Awiakta caught our essence: "Appalachians are that kind of people, because we remember how to survive, to abide. Our mountains have taught us."
Parks Lanier, Jr., Chair
1988 Program Committee
1
�THE FOLLOWING PAPERS are on file and available for purchase from the Appalachian
Consortium. Following each title is the number of pages, including title page, notes, bibliography, maps, tables, etc.
Anderson, William L. Direction of Current Research on the Cherokees. 11
Asbury, Jo Ann. A Pattern that Endures: Marilou Awiakta's Sense of Place. 11
Askins, Justin. Wendell Berry: The Solace of Dark Spaces. 11
Awiakta, Marilou. Appalachians: Pioneers for the New Age. Keynote Address. 13
Berlowitz, Marvin J. and Arthur Slater. The Negative Influences of Neo-Marxist Radical Social
Movement Theorists on the Role of Urban Appalachians in the Struggle for School Desegregation: A Case Study of Cincinnati. 28
Billings, Dwight B. and Kathleen M. Blee. Household Structure in a Preindustrial Appalachian Community: Beech Creek, Kentucky, 1850-1942. 22
., Kathleen M. Blee, and Paul J. Weingartner. Agriculture in Preindustrial Appalachia:
Subsistence Farming in Beech Creek, 1850-1880. 16
Blee, Kathleen M. and Dwight B. Billings. Household Structure in a Preindustrial Appalachian Community: Beech Creek, Kentucky, 1850-1942. 22
., Dwight B. Billings, and Paul J. Weingartner. Agriculture in Preindustrial Appalachia:
Subsistence Farming in Beech Creek, 1850-1880. 16
Blethen, H. Tyler and Curtis W. Wood. The Origins of the Normal School Movement in
Western N.C. 21
Borman, Kathryn M. and Elaine Mueninghoff. Expectations for Work Roles and Social Roles
in an Urban Appalachian School. 32
Boyd, C. Clifford, Jr. Prehistoric and Historic Human Adaptation in Appalachia: An Archaeological Perspective. 26
Byer, James E. Legendary Places: The Literature of the Great Smoky Mountains National
Park. 15
Chadwick, Thomas T. Presidential Voting in Southern Appalachia 1920-1952: The Impact of
the New Deal Realignment. 19
Conway, Cece. 'The Drunken Hiccups": A Tommy Jarrell Fiddle Song and A Distilled Life
Story. 15
Cox, Ricky L. Used Parts and the Poetic Impulse: Machines as Alternative Means of Expression. 15
Crissman, James. Changing Rules of Household Headship in the Rural West Virginia Family.
31
2
�Cunningham, Rodger. Appalachianism and Orientalism: Reflections on Reading Edward
Said. 15
Daley, Nelda K. Biculturalism: A Comparison of Central Appalachians and the Inupiat of
Alaska. 18
Dickerson, Lynn. Joel B. Lemon 1828-1910: Portrait of a Nineteenth-Century Botetourt (Va.)
County Farmer. 11
Elledge, Barry. The Influence of the Smoot Tannery on the Economic Development of Wilkes
County, N.C., 1897-1940. 17
Fisher, Steve. National Economic Renewal Programs and Their Implications for Economic
Development in Appalachia and the South. 34
Fleming, Dan B. Camelot in Appalachia: JFK in the West Virginia Primary of 1960. 11
Howell, Benita. Mountain Foragers in Southeast Asia and Appalachia: Cross-cultural Perspectives on the "Mountain Man" Stereotype. 14
Hyde, William. A Loss Keenly Felt: High School Consolidation and Community (in northwest
N.C.). 15
Inscoe, John C. Olmsted in Appalachia: A Connecticut Yankee Encounters Slavery and Racism in the Southern Highlands. 16
Johnson, Charles W. Walter Biggs' Painting of Mr. and Mrs. Joel B. Lemon. 12
Lang, John. The Shape of Love: The Motif of Sacrifice in Two Novels by John Ehle. 18
Lindberg, Laurie. Llewellyn and Giardina: Two Novels about Coal Mining. 14
Lovingood, Paul E., Jr. and Robert E. Reiman. The Structure of Total Personal Income in the
Southern Highlands. 18
McGowan, Thomas. The Blue Ridge Hand-Tied Canopy: Cultural Intervention and Family
Tradition. 12
McKenzie, Roberta. Appalachian Ethnicity as Reaction to Uneven Development: A World
Systems Approach to Regionalism. 20
Mueninghoff, Elaine and Kathryn M. Borman. Expectations for Work Roles and Social Roles
in an Urban Appalachian School. 32
Noe, Kenneth W. Internal Improvements, Slavery, and Secession in Southwest Virginia,
1829-1861: A Preliminary Survey. 20
Rasmussen, Barbara. Clay County, W.Va.: The Social Impact of Concentrated Land Ownership. 18
Ray, Clyde H. Traditional Appalachian Culture and Traditional Scottish Highland Culture
Compared: A Personal Experience. 8
3
�Reiman, Robert E. and Paul E. Lovingood, Jr. The Structure of Total Personal Income in the
Southern Highlands. 18
Salstrom, Paul. The Subsistence-Barter-and-Borrow System in Southern Appalachia's Traditional Life. 22
Simpkins, Karen Li. What "Community" Does the Arbor Preaching Celebrate?: Comparison
and Contrast of St. Mary's Loch, Scotland, and "Timber Trace," West Virginia. 28
Sinclair, Bennie Lee. So Silent a Spring in our Mountains: Defoliation and Burning of the
Milliken Forest. 8
Slater, Arthur and Marvin J. Berlowitz. The Negative Influences of Neo-Marxist Radical Social
Movement Theorists on the Role of Urban Appalachians in the Struggle for School Desegregation: A Case Study of Cincinnati. 28
Smith, Betty. Jane Gentry: A Singer Among Singers. 12
Spalding, Susan Eike. Old Time Square Dancing as a Reflection of Social and Economic
Changes in Upper East Tennessee. 14
Stamm, Henry E., IV. Valle Crucis: An Experiment in Episcopal Monasticism. 13
Stanwitz, Sandra L. Intercultural Factors Affecting Access to Legal Aid: Improving Appalachian Women's Lives. 14
Stevens, Elizabeth C. Appalachian Agriculture in the 1980s: Part-time Christmas Tree Growers in Avery Co.,N.C. 11
Thompson, Edgar H. Jesse Stuart's Archetypal Vision of Appalachian Culture: The Thread
Still Runs True. 16
Thorn, William H. Technique and Reality: The Jewel Photograph (of Joel and Eliza Lemon). 11
Tribe, Ivan M. "Thar's Gold in Them Hillbillies?": The Six Decade Experience of the Stoneman
Family as Commercial Appalachian Musicians. 17
Wallenstein, Peter. Civil War and Appalachia: Union Troops from East Tennessee. 15
Weingartner, Paul J., Dwight Billings, and Kathleen M. Blee. Agriculture in Preindustrial
Appalachia: Subsistence Farming in Beech Creek, 1850-1880. 16
Wheeling, Teresa. Across the Mountains: Appalachian Literature and the Unsuspecting Student. 13
Wolz, Lyn. The White Top Folk Festival as an Agent of Change in Traditional Song Repertories. 17
4
�Wood, Curtis W. and H. Tyler Blethen. The Origins of the Normal School Movement in
Western North Carolina. 21
West, Mark D. Regional Determination and Public Opinion. 95
5
�Appalachians: Pioneers For The New
Age
Keynote Address
by
Marilou Awiakta
Before beginning my speech, I should tell you that I already may
have committed an unpardonable sin for a Southerner—embarrassed you
in public. This afternoon Channel 7 TV interviewed me. I thought the
camera was off when the interviewer asked, "What do you think about the
stereotyping of Appalachian people?"
His question hit a nerve. I grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where
"outsiders" were in the majority and often said about us natives, "These
people don't have any culture. They don't articulate properly. They're
non-progressive, lazy, etc." What do I think of such disdain?
I managed to reply calmly. "Appalachians must name ourselves, tell
our own stories—define ourselves from the inside out. When stereotypers
assume the power to define us, they have control over us."
"And what if the stereotypers won't listen to reason?" I shoved my
fist up in the old battle-charge sign and yelled, "Go get 'em!"
The camera was on. If my outburst embarrassed you, I apologize.
But if I spoke what you're thinking, I'm glad. At this point in America's
history, Appalachians must uphold our values and proceed. Our country
needs us. Why that is so, is the subject of my talk.
A New Age is said to be coming—an age of harmony and peace. But
it's having a hard time getting here. Consider recent news on television:
The Iranian arms scandal. The Wall Street crash. Evangelists Jim Bakker
and Jimmy Swaggart preaching against sin in public—and practicing it in
private. If the New Age is to come, it needs the help of pioneers of grit and
gumption, who know how to connect to the land and to each other. Appalachians are that kind of people, because we remember how to survive, to
abide. Our mountains have taught us.
By "Appalachians" I mean the three major ethnic groups: Native
Americans, African Americans and European Americans, most of whom
have Celtic roots. We are all tribal peoples. Deep in our blood is the
memory of the sacred circle of life—the Creator, Mother Earth and all that
lives therein. In an age of fragmentation and disintegration, Appalachians
remember the ways of connection. We are fit pioneers for the New Age.
You may ask, "How did you come to this conclusion?" I did it the
mountain way—by thinking about it for 30 years. During that time I
6
�learned that acquired knowledge helps, but when you have your back to
the wall, it's heritage that brings you through.
My thought originates in the Native American tradition, which views
the Creator, nature and humanity as a circle—a web of life. To speak of
"Mother Earth'' and of all nature as our "relations"—brother, sister, and
so on—is neither romantic nor figurative. It is a literal expression of reality—we are all interconnected. If Mother Earth thrives, all thrive. If she
dies .. ."what goes around, comes around." In this circle, time is a continuum where past, present and future flow as one and where life moves in
harmony with the rhythms and cycles of nature. If you're saying to yourself, "But other Appalachians think this way too," then we are of one
mind.
The Cherokee advise, "Look at everything three times. Once with the
right eye. Once with the left eye. And once from the corners of the eyes,
to see the spirit—the essence—of what you're looking at." From here on,
let's follow that advice.
With your right and left eyes, look at the people who are here at the
conference. There are adults from many states. And for the first time, the
youth are convening with us. ... Or is it the first time? In ages past when
decisions of great moment were to be made, our ancestors responded in a
traditional way. If we look at this audience from the corners of our eyes,
we see an ancient pattern: the gathering of the clans.
Look at the conference program with two eyes only. Once Appalachia was defined primarily in terms of the white European male. But
presentations this year include both genders, as well as the three major
ethnic groups that inhabit our mountains. Looking at the program from
the corners of our eyes, we see a mending of the circle—a reweaving of the
web of life.
This conference is historic. I am honored to have been invited to
share thoughts about our heritage and the strength it has to see us
through. With that power sustaining us, we consider some of the harsh
realities of life in 1988.
An overwhelming concern is the threat of nuclear holocaust. I have
a sense of dejd vu about it because fear of it was real to me in the late 1940's,
when I was growing up in Oak Ridge. The Cold War with the Russians
was "hot." Because of its nuclear industry, Oak Ridge was a prime target
for attack. At school, scientists warned us about the deathlight, fireball and
fall-out. Disaster drills were more frequent than fire drills. In case of early
warning, the city had an evacuation plan. I was in my early teens—and
terrified I'd never live to grow up.
I asked Mother about it. She said, "Now, Marilou, if the bomb ever
drops, it's all over. There're only two major roads out of Oak Ridge. Think
of 75,000 panicked people trying to get out! We'd be better off to stay put.
If the worst does happen, we have faith that our family will come down
7
�on the Other Side and be together again. In the meantime, in case they
don't drop the bomb, you'd better go study your French!"
This—not the fatalism stereotypers tout—is the true meaning of Appalachian stoicism. It is the courage to face the world as it is and continue
your life with a measure of grace.
I kept studying. In 1956, through the University of Tennessee, one
of my dreams came true: a scholarship to the Sorbonne. Another dream
collided with it. The man, Paul, asked me to marry him instead, promising
he would take me to live in France one day. He did. That's how, in 1964,
I got to Laon and became an interpreter for the U.S. Air Force during the
NATO withdrawal. College courses had prepared me for the French language but not for its use in power politics. Heritage did that. I remembered
the mountain philosophy that later became the poem, "Trail Warning," in
Abiding Appalachia: "Beauty is no threat to the wary/who treat the mountain
in its way/the copperhead in its way/and the deer in its way/knowing that
nature is the human heart/ made tangible."1
My father had always said, "If you treat a bear like a dog, you'll wind
up with your face slashed—or worse." And Mother added, "It's the same
with people. Learn a person's nature. If you meet a 'copperhead,' give him
a wide berth. If you have to go in close, take a hoe!"
These and other Appalachian teachings stood me in good stead. As
years passed my conviction grew that the fusion of my Cherokee/mountain
heritage with the experience of growing up on the atomic frontier was, in
truth, a practical and inspiring heritage. In 1978, the fruits of my thought
were published in my first book, Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and
Atom Meet. The title poem is the crux of the book:
Ancient haze lies on the mountain
smoke-blue, strange and still
a presence that eludes the mind and
moves through a deeper kind of knowing.
It is nature's breath and more—
an aura from the great I Am
that gathers to its own
spirits that have gone before.
Deep below the valley waters
eerie and hid from view
the atom splits without a sound
its only trace a fine blue glow rising from the fissioned
whole and at its core
power that commands the will
quiet that strike the soul,
"Be still and know . . . I Am . . ."2
8
�Lifting our eyes to the hills has always been the primary source of
help for Appalachian people. But we have come to the point in history
where even the mountains themselves are in jeopardy. The following three
recent poems deal with greed as a destroyer of our Mother Earth and our
people, with stereotyping as a killer of the human spirit, and with what
many Native Americans still call "the other world"—a world that forces
us to cram the roundness of our lives into squares. Coping with these
disintegrating forces will require the energies of both elders and youth:
DYING BACK3
On the mountain
the standing people are dying back—
hemlock, spruce and pine
turn brown in the head.
The hardwood shrivels in new leaf.
Unnatural death
from acid greed
that takes the form of rain
and fog and cloud.
In the valley
the walking people are blank-eyed.
Elders mouth vacant thought.
Youth grow spindly, wan
from sap too drugged to rise.
Pushers drain it off—
sap is gold to them.
The walking people are dying back
as all species do
that kill their own seed.
WHAT THE CHOCTAW WOMAN SAID4
My husband is an alcoholic.
He went to the VA and he told them,
"My spirit is sick. I am dying."
They said, "You need tests. Go to the lab."
He came home.
6
�The last time he went they
sent him to a psychiatrist.
When my husband told him, "My spirit is
sick. I am dying/' the psychiatrist
said, "What do you mean by spirit?"
My husband came home. He'll never go back.
My only hope is to get him to a medicine man
but the great ones are in the West.
I don't have the money to take him.
The trouble is, most people look down on
us and our culture. It's harder on a man.
It kills his pride. For a woman it's not
as bad. We have to make sure the children
survive, no matter what.
If I stay with my husband, the children will
get sick in their spirits. They may die.
I have to leave him.
SQUARED
TIME SQUARED to the clock. LIFE SQUARED to television/
credit card/truck/car/train/jet—to cubicles piled in high rude rectangles. FILL IN THE SQUARE: name/address/telephone/sex/
age/race/occupation. STAY IN THE LINES . KEEP TO TIME
SLOTS: work/play /eat/sleep /love. Box 'em, label'em, stack 'em
up. COMPETE! Slash to the top of the pyramid. COMPUTE!
Compute! Compute! ("No, you can't have your veteran's benefits. The computer shows you 'dead.'") GET HERESY UNDER
CONTROL. The creation is clear-cut: God is God; nature is "the
other." Choose your side. WOMEN, SQUARE your shoulders,
starve your bodies straight. Curves are out. MEN, SQUARE
your hearts. Produce! Produce! Feelings don't raise the GNP.
The shuttle's SEALS are at RISK . . . ? LAUNCH it! Seven people
smeared across the sky translate to the TV monitor, "OBVIOUSLY WE HAVE A MAJOR MALFUNCTION."
OBVIOUSLY.
Via television millions saw Challenger and its astronauts explode and
scrawl a fiery hieroglyphic on the curved wall of space. A warning. "Humans have lost connection—with ourselves and each other, with nature and the
Creator." We do have a major malfunction. We've felt something seriously
10
�amiss for a long time. Now, in the blood of seven—a number sacred to the
Cherokee and mystic to many of the world's peoples—we have clear warning. To survive, we must set ourselves right and reconnect.
Some people continue to ignore the warning. Others join a growing
movement toward the whole, exploring new ways of healing the deep
slashes that sever us from relationship and hope. One way is to go back
to our homeground and find within it our deepest roots. In that spirit, the
clans have gathered at Radford this weekend—in the heart of the mountains that unite Appalachians of all ethnic backgrounds, mountains that
have taught generation after generation to face reality and abide in their
own souls.
The onslaught of industrialization is slashing "all our relations/' We
love our land. We don't want to be separated from it. But we have to earn
a living. If we don't adapt enough to the square world to survive, we will
die. If we adapt too much, we will not survive. What many of us want
most is to find somehow a way to live in the round, despite the strictures
of contemporary society.
Outsiders who look with two eyes only have stereotyped Appalachians as "primitive, backward, non-progressive, Bible-toting and, sometimes, crazy as loons." We have become too prone to ignore—or at the
very worst, to accept—stereotypers' definitions. If we view their words
from the corners of our eyes, in the light of our own interpretations, they
describe exactly the qualities needed to cope with the dilemma of disconnection. Pioneers of the New Age of harmony and peace have to be independent, sturdy, tenacious, ingenious, spiritually centered—and audacious. One might even say, "bodacious\" Are we Appalachians perfectly
suited for the task? Our mountains tell us that we are. They also tell us
that no individual or ethnic group can mend the circle and reweave the
web of life alone.
A great sign of hope comes from the Cherokee. Since April, 1984, the
vibrations of it have been traveling from Red Clay, Tennessee, through the
root systems of the ancient forests of Appalachia. It is the song of a people
who have kept faith with their traditional values and who have reunited
their nation at last.
With an ear to the ground, we listen. From the corners of our eyes
we see an ancient image emerging: Awi Usdi, Little Deer. A spirit messenger from the sacred circle, a spirit of reverence and justice.
From the heart of the mountain he comes, with his head held high
in the wind/Like the spirit of light, he comes—the small white chief of the
deer.
When one of his own is slain
he instantly draws near
and finding clotted blood on the leaves
11
�he bends low over the stain—
"Have you heard . . .
Has the hunter prayed words of pardon
for the life you gave for his own?"
If the answer be "No" then Little Deer
goes—invisible, fleet as the wind—
and tracks the blood to the hunter's home
where he swiftly pains and cripples his bones
so he never can hunt again.5
"From the heart of the mountain he comes" . . . to assure us that the
circle of blessing, like the circle of destruction, is eternal.
It did not seem so when the seven mother clans of the Cherokee met
in 1837 at Red Clay for the last council meeting. Within a year the people
were walking the Trail of Tears. Of the 17,000 removed to Oklahoma, 4,000
died along the way. Their nation and their web of life were in shreds. In
the dominant culture predictions abounded that in 200 years, there would
be no more Cherokee.
Tribal elders looked at the damage three times: "In the seventh generation," they said, "the Cherokee will rise again." As generations struggled to reweave the web, these words were passed along. During the fall
of 1986, the message went out: "The Eastern and Western councils will
reunite at the Red Clay Historical Area (near Cleveland, Tennessee), April
6-7, 1984."
What happened next cannot be scientifically explained. It can only
be evoked in terms of the spirit. The Cherokee consider Red Clay sacred
ground, hallowed ground. And there, from the heart of Mother Earth, a
magnetic energy began to emmanate. In the Four Directions of America
north, south, east and west—families prepared for the journey. Early in
April they set out for the gathering of the clans.
"We don't know what will happen," said Carol Allison, assistant to
Ross Swimmer, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
"We've told everybody—the media, the public—that this reunion is to be
dignified, an historic council meeting, not a 'drums and feathers' event.
But the more we tell them that, the more they want to come. It's still winter
in East Tennessee. What if people swamp the motels and others are left
milling around in the cold? We're estimating 20,000 people now, about a
third of them Cherokee."
What was pulling the non-Indians to Red Clay? Curiosity for some.
But for most it seemed to be what a man from Wisconsin said, "The
Cherokee have made it through this old world and managed to stay who
they are. My wife and I want to see it. We want our children to see it.
Because if the Cherokee can make it, we can too."
12
�On the eve of the reunion Paul, our son Andrew, and I stood on the
balcony of our motel in Cleveland. Although the driving rain had abated,
the mountains seemed frozen, their trees bare-limbed against dark clouds.
About five miles away were the council grounds. We knew that medicine
men had already come in private to perform the ancient ceremonies—
songs and dances to bless Mother Earth and call up her regenerative energies. The sacred ground was ready. But what would happen tomorrow?
The reunion will forever be in the present tense. From the beginning,
the sun is radiant. A benevolent and steadily rising wind carries the scent
of pine and new green. Among the knolls and planes of the council
ground, people flow around the traditional pattern of the web: the opensided council house in the center; the formal platform and receptacle for
the sacred fire on a nearby knoll; at some distance a circle of food and craft
tables and beyond that small meadows where children romp. There is a
feeling of connection and peace among the people and a murmur that is
lively and content. Good humor but no rowdiness. At the same time, there
is a look on the faces of many, the expression of those who listen inwardly
to another dimension and find it good.
At the ampitheater in the lee of one hill, all is quiet. On the grass
stage where the council is in session, Chief Robert Youngdeer of the Eastern Band raises his arms toward the surrounding woods, where trees are
tipped with fluttering new leaves. He says, "When we came to Red Clay
the trees were closed and cold. See in one day how the leaves have unfurled ..."
Looking upward, we in the audience feel his meaning:
See how Mother Earth has renewed herself
how the Cherokee have endured
how hope unfurls . . . invincibly!
We shall renew our strength
and mount up with wings . . .
Something extraordinary is moving among us. Governor Alexander
calls it "electricity/7 A reporter says, "An aura." Many who know the
legend say, "Awi Usdi walks among us ..."
I gather Little Deer's image, a healing medicine for bleak seasons I
know will come again, and weave it into the last great ceremony of the
reunion: the return of the sacred fire.
Signifying the presence of the Creator,/sun/spirit of the people, the
sacred fire has been kept burning since the beginning of Cherokee history.
On the Trail of Tears it was secretly transported to Oklahoma. In 1951, an
ember was returned to the Eastern Band in North Carolina. It, circling back
to Red Clay, is in the hands of the youth—the seventh generation. Ten
young men, bearing torches, have run in relay the 130 miles from Qualla,
13
�N.C. As word passes of their approach, young women in traditional ribbon
dresses clear a way for them among the crowd gathered on the West Knoll.
Then they stand as honor guards along the path, where spring grass ripples verdant and sweet in the wind.
The crowd is silent as the men run slowly toward the crest of the
knoll. There the torches are joined together and passed around to the
council members before coming back to the chiefs for the ceremonial lighting. The chiefs invoke the fire's ancient meanings and Youngdeer extends
its light to include the present when he says, "The flame stands for freedom and friendship between the whites and Indians. We hold neither
hatred nor malice in our hearts. We remember the past but look to the
future."
A powerful presence sweeps through the crowd. Because we have
gathered here with reverence and love, Awi Usdi is walking among us. A
peaceful power assuring all people that if justice and reverence prevail, in
the fullness of time, sorrow may be eased, wounds may be healed. And
within whatever morass we find ourselves, there is always a green path
that leads to the top of the hill, where the sacred fire burns for us all.
A New age is a-borning.
Appalachians can help it thrive.
We are one people.
Notes
1. Marilou Awiakta. Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet (Memphis, 1978). p.
37.
2. Ibid, p. 89.
3. Marilou Awiakta. Tennessee Conservationist (Jan./Feb. 1987). p. 12.
4. Marilou Awiakta. Now and Then. (Autumn, 1986). p. 23.
5. Marilou Awiakta. Abiding Appalachia, p. 18.
14
�Prehistoric and Historic Human
Adaptation in Appalachia: An
Archaeological Perspective
by
C. Clifford Boyd, Jr.
Abstract
Through the past millenia, a variety of cultures have entered the
Appalachians and have adapted to their rich and varied environment.
These cultures include prehistoric Native Americans who directly used the
raw materials of this region to produce their tools, and who subsisted on
a wide variety of native plants and animals still seen today. The early
European settlers added new layers of cultural complexity to the human
fabric of the Appalachians. Their language, metal tools, economic and
political systems profoundly and permanently transformed the contemporary Native American cultures, and formed the basis for the modern cultural adaptations to these mountains.
Archaeological analysis can provide a unique perspective on these
cultural transformations through its study of material culture and past
settlement-subsistence patterns. In this paper, the contributions of archaeology to the study of cultural adaptations in the Appalachians are outlined.
Examples of archaeological research on Native American and AngloAmerican settlement and subsistence patterns in East Tennessee, western
North Carolina and southwest Virginia are also discussed.
Introduction
For the past 11,500 years, humans have adapted to the environment
of the Appalachians. This process of adaptation has taken many different
forms at different times, and has involved the use of a variety of natural
resources. The young science of archaeology, through its emphasis on the
recovery, analysis and interpretation of the material culture remains of
past peoples, can provide a unique perspective on the problem of human
adaptation. This perspective is unique because it can address both the
synchronic (i.e., observations of a culture at a single moment in time) and
the diachronic study (i.e., observation of changes in cultures over time) of
human cultures.
15
�In this paper, both perspectives are used to examine change and
continuity in the use of space and of natural resources in upper East Tennessee, southwest Virginia and western North Carolina (Figure 1). Specifically, the Tennessee component of this tri-state study area encompasses
that portion of the upper Tennessee Valley north and east of the Little
Tennessee River. This includes portions of the Blue Ridge and Ridge and
Valley physiographic provinces of upper East Tennessee, and the Pigeon,
French Broad, Nolichucky, Clinch, Powell, Holston, and Watauga, as well
as the Little Tennessee River drainages. The North Carolina component
includes the Appalachian Summit area of the western portion of the state,
and primarily sites along the Watauga and New River drainages. The
Virginia component also primarily encompasses the Blue Ridge and Ridge
and Valley or Appalachian Valley physiographic provinces, and the upper
Powell, Clinch, Holston, New and Dan River drainages.
Since the measure of time is an important consideration for any archaeologist, I will begin this examination with a brief discussion of the
cultural and temporal periods represented in the archaeological record of
this study area. Then, I will embark on a more detailed discussion of
human adaptation and transformations in settlement patterns and material
culture through time.
Temporal Periods
The temporal periods represented in the archaeological record of the
study area, along with their corresponding dates, are depicted in Table 1.
While the Archaic and Woodland periods as presented here can certainly
be divided into early, middle and late periods manifesting distinctive artifact styles and other characteristics, this paper emphasizes changes in
16
�material culture as these relate to adaptation to the environment, rather
than the historical nature of stylistic change.
Evidence for the first human occupation and use of the study area
occurred during the Paleoindian period (Purrington 1983; Turner 1984).
These earliest Native Americans lived in small, nomadic bands, hunted
late Pleistocene megafauna (such as the mastodon) and foraged wild plant
foods. The characteristic tools of the Paleoindians were large stone spear
points with concave or "fluted" midsections. Paleoindian occupations are
almost exclusively identified by the archaeological recovery of these distinctive points.
The following Archaic period represented a long period of human
adaptation to an essentially modern post-Pleistocene environment. The Ice
Age megafauna disappeared, and Native American groups began to exploit modern wild animals (such as white-tailed deer, bear and rabbits)
wild seeds, and the nut harvest from deciduous trees like the oak, walnut
and hickory (Chapman 1975, 1977, 1981). Although the initial domestication of some plants occurred by the late Archaic (Smith and Cowan 1987;
Yarnell and Black 1985), dependence was still focused on wild food resources.
Some major technological changes occurred in this area during the
Woodland period. These included the widespread manufacture and use of
clay pottery, the development of the bow and arrow (during the late middle Woodland), and the introduction of maize as a domesticated food plant
(Boyd 1986; Chapman 1973; Chapman and Crites 1987). There is also evidence for population growth and more complex social organization. For
example, mound construction, which began during the latter portion of
this period (Keel 1976), certainly was the result of an organized, community effort on the part of the builders.
The Late Prehistoric period was a time of increasing cultural complexity and diversity in this region. As defined here, this period included
cultures that some would still define as "Woodland" (Hoffman and Foss
1980), and other societies with more elaborate sociopolitical systems which
in the southeastern United States have been called "Mississippian" (Griffin
1967; Smith 1986). These latter Native American cultures developed their
complex sociopolitical organizations through long distance trade and a
greater dependence on maize. Examples of such cultures include the Pisgah of the Appalachian Summit of North Carolina (Dickens 1976) and
Dallas in East Tennessee (Polhemus 1987). These groups showed an emphasis on religious ceremonialism in the form of mound building and the
production of specialized artworks, such as shell gorgets engraved with
rattlesnakes, sun discs, and other symbols. Increased intercultural conflict
is evidenced by the identification of wooden palisades and other defensive
features around villages.
17
�In other areas (like southwestern Virginia) Native American cultures
selectively expressed certain traits, such as a greater reliance on domesticated plants and the construction of palisaded villages. However, the absence of mound building and extreme status differentiation in their populations suggests a less complex social organization (Egloff 1987). Variety
and diversity in ceramic decoration and form also increased significantly
during this period (Boyd 1987).
The Protohistoric period began with the earliest contacts between Native Americans and the Spanish explorers Hernando de Soto and Juan
Pardo (Hudson et. al. 1984, 1985). During the subsequent two centuries,
many Native American cultures suffered extinction as a result of European-introduced diseases and warfare. Many Native American groups also
quickly became dependent on European traders for firearms and other
goods as a result of the European-stimulated trade in deerskins (Peebles
1983). Native American cultures competed with one another for these
lucrative trade contacts, and this competition often led to intertribal warfare. Dramatic population migrations, abandonment of previously occupied areas, disruption of social organization, and the amalgamation of
previously distinct tribal groups were common events. Thus, the most
distinctive characteristic of this period was the process of acculturation all
Native American populations were forced to undergo as a result of European contact.
Finally, with the Historic Period, European settlements and settlers
dominated areas formerly occupied and abandoned by Native American
cultures. While Native Americans (primarily the Cherokee) still lived in
the area, their continued survival was largely under the control of the
British (and later, American) economic, legal and military systems. In this
study area, European settlers introduced many elements of material culture from their native Britain, and continued to receive British ceramics
and other items from the colonial trade network.
TABLE 1. Suggested Chronology for the Study Area.
Temporal Period
Historic
Protohistoric
Late Prehistoric
Woodland
Archaic
Paleoindian
Dates
A.D. 1750 - present
A.D. 1540 -1750
A.D. 1000 -1540
1200 B.C. - A.D. 1000
8000 -1200 B.C.
9500 - 8000 B.C.
18
�Cultures existing during the major periods briefly reviewed above
each used and affected the natural resources of the Southern Appalachians
in different ways. Archaeologists can study the artifacts, structures, storage pits, wells and other features these earlier cultures left behind and
learn something about their adaptive use of space within the context of the
resources of the study area. In the second part of this paper, I will discuss
both inter- and intrasite settlement patterns as reflected in the material
culture remains from these temporal periods.
Settlement Pattern Variation Through Time
The study of settlement patterns is the study of how humans use
space. Archaeologists study this aspect of human cultures by locating and
analyzing archaeological sites and looking for patterns in their spatial distribution. An archaeological site is a location which contains the remains
of past human activity. It is important to realize that a site may or may not
be the actual place where these past activities occurred (Ammerman 1981;
Whyte 1984)—erosion, flooding and other natural forces can remove and
redeposit artifacts and bones together, forming sites which are natural and
not cultural in origin. However, for the many archaeological sites which
were actual loci of past human activity, we can study the organization of
space within the site (intrasite settlement patterns) and the organization
of space between sites of the same cultural group (intersite settlement
patterns) starting with the Paleoindian period.
Paleoindian settlement in the study area is poorly documented and
understood for a number of reasons. First, most of the recovered Paleoindian artifacts (the characteristic fluted points discussed above) are found
on the surface with no other materials in association with them. This
severely limits our ability to fully understand the use of space by these
people, particularly when we acknowledge that these artifacts have likely
been moved and redeposited from their original locations by natural forces
over the millennia, or remain deeply buried in river sediments (see Turner
1984). Second, the scarcity of these artifacts, particularly in the Appalachian Mountains (Purrington 1983; Turner 1984), suggests that major portions of the study area were only rarely utilized by these early human
groups.
In order to more fully understand the Paleoindian settlement pattern
in the region, researchers recommend a focus on the investigation of resource areas known to have been exploited by Paleoindian populations in
this and other regions. These include high quality cryptocrystalline stone
resources which provided raw materials for the production of stone tools,
and "locations having high potential for exploitable fauna and flora ..."
(Turner 1984:213) (such as salt licks, water holes and springs, and gaps or
19
�narrow valleys) which likely served as animal migration routes (Gardner
1980, 1983).
Evidence for exploitation of the study area in the subsequent Archaic
period is much more complete. Early Archaic sites are more numerous
than Paleoindian sites (Turner 1984) and indicate efficient exploitation of
upland zones in the upper Watauga Valley of North Carolina and the Great
Smoky Mountains (Bass 1977; Purrington 1983), and the use of floodplain
zones and local stone resources in the Little Tennessee River valley
(Chapman 1975, 1977, 1978). A wide range of habitats with diverse food
resources continued to be exploited throughout the Archaic period in the
Appalachian Mountains (Purrington 1983). In some areas, however, late
Archaic sites were primarily located in the main river valleys and
floodplains (Baden 1985; Bass 1977). The increased use of floodplain zones
in the late Archaic has been noted in western North Carolina, southwest
Virginia and East Tennessee, as well as other parts of Virginia and Delaware (Catlin et. al. 1982). This change has been interpreted either as an
intensive concentration on the explortation of riverine resources or as an
emphasis on the exploitation of quartzite outcrops and gravel bars for
stone for the production of large bifacial spear points (Bass 1977). For the
lower Little Tennessee River valley, Baden (1985) suggests that increased
exploitation of river terraces may be related to the expanding use of cultigens and early horticulture.
The frequency of late Archaic sites in the uplands of the Blue Ridge
in Virginia also increases over that of the earlier Archaic and Paleoindian
periods. These sites are found in all environmental zones (hollows, saddles, ridges, upland basins, gaps, slopes and foothills) (Barber and Tolley
1984; Hoffman and Foss 1980). Hoffman and Foss (1980: 194-204) call the
late Archaic and the subsequent early portion of the Woodland period in
the Blue Ridge the "period of primary forest efficiency." They equate this
"florescence of occupation" to Joseph Caldwell's (1958) concept of the
development of an efficient, stable occupation of the woodlands of eastern
North America based on hunting, gathering and fishing.
By middle Woodland times (beginning about the time of Christ),
Native Americans in the study area began to live in more sedentary villages, and there was an increase in the exploitation of floodplain areas
(Bass 1977; Ferguson 1986; Purrington 1984). Although specialized exploitation of the uplands for hunting continued, the increasing frequency of
the floodplain sites certainly reflects a growing emphasis on the cultivation
of domesticated plants. Such plants as squash and gourd were already
being cultivated and maize was introduced by A.D. 200 (albeit in small
quantities) (Chapman and Crites 1987).
During the subsequent Late Prehistoric period in the Appalachian
Summit region of North Carolina, there was an increasing "nucleation of
communities on fertile soils in broad river valleys and the emergence of a
20
�hierarchy of communities" (Purrington 1983: 147), particularly between
A.D. 1300-1500 (Dickens 1986). This emphasis on the construction of large,
palisaded villages on or near lands with prime agricultural soils is also seen
in East Tennessee and southwest Virginia (Baden 1985; Hoffman and Foss
1980). Because of the scarcity of extensive floodplain soils along portions
of the New River and other areas of southwest Virginia, some sedentary
villages were located on less agriculturally productive marginal zones
(Custer 1984: 81-82). Although the uplands were less extensively exploited
for resources than in the earlier Archaic and Woodland periods, as hunting
territories for these sedentary populations, they still had an important,
specialized role in the total settlement system.
Changes in settlement patterns, particularly in western North Carolina and East Tennessee, are noted during the Protohistoric period (Dickens 1986; Schroedl 1986b). The nucleated settlements and complex sociopolitical organizations of the Late Prehistoric cultures in these areas
started to disintegrate, leading to a more dispersed settlement pattern and
less social stratification in the early Qualla and Overhill Cherokee in these
areas. These changes were possibly stimulated by European contact, environmental instability, or both (Dickens 1986: 85); however, this social collapse was less severe in the Appalachian Summit region of North Carolina
because agriculture was not as important as in areas with more extensive
floodplains. This flexibility in resource exploitation (i.e., dependence on
both wild and domesticated foods) was, in the long run, more adaptively
advantageous during this stress-filled period (Dickens 1986: 87).
The settlement pattern of the sociopolitically less complex tribal societies of southwest Virginia apparently did not change as drastically in the
Protohistoric period as in East Tennessee and western North Carolina.
However, abandonment of settled villages certainly occurred during the
last century of this period. Early historic accounts of the last half of the
18th Century by European settlers only mention contact with Cherokee or
Shawnee hunting parties (Egloff 1987).
As indicated by abandonment of previously settled areas, change in
Native American societies as a result of European contact was sometimes
quite dramatic. In western North Carolina, the Qualla Cherokee population moved .. /'from the northern and eastern portion of the Appalachians
toward the western and southern portions (Dickens 1986: 84)." Trade contacts with Europeans led not only to changes in Native American economic
systems and resource exploitation, but to technological and sociopolitical
change (Peebles 1983; Riggs 1987; Schroedl 1986a). Extreme factionalism
developed within many Native American societies such as the Cherokee,
wherein certain "progressive" or "Anglo-Cherokee" (Riggs 1987) groups
attempted to acculturate themselves into Anglo-American culture by
adopting Anglo-American names, behavior and material culture. Other
more "traditional" elements tried to maintain their aboriginal social and
21
�settlement patterns. However, with the forced removal in the 1830s of
most of the Cherokees and other "civilized tribes" to the western territories, Anglo-American material culture and settlement patterns became
dominant in the study area.
Criteria for site location in the early Historic Period by the earliest
Anglo-American settlers were comparable to those used by Native American agriculturalists. Based on a survey of early Historic Period sites in
Rockbridge County, Virginia, Adams and McDaniel (1984: 227-228) note
that many eighteenth century settlements were on floodplains. Many of
these sites also contained evidence for prehistoric Native American occupation (Adams and McDaniel 1984; Boyd and Riggs 1986). In the 1820s or
1830s, movement of occupations into hollows began to occur, with hollows
being intensively occupied in the last half of the nineteenth century
(Adams and McDaniel 1984: 227). Access to water sources, as well as
access to agricultural land was certainly an important determinant in site
location.
Building construction by the earliest Anglo-American settlers was
also adopted by some of the early Historic Native Americans. Log cabin
construction by the Historic Cherokee, for example, is well documented
in the enthnohistoric records of East Tennessee and western North Carolina (Riggs 1987; Schroedl 1986a).
Finally, the use of space around eighteenth and nineteenth century
historic sites was similar to that of previous Native American groups.
Prehistoric Native American villages are often identified by the occurrence
of trash (or midden) deposits around structures, or in a ring around a
central plaza area (Ward 1986). These deposits often contain broken pottery, stone tools and flakes, animal bone, charred wood, nuts and seeds,
and other debris. Often, large pits or features (which were dug for use in
food storage) were subsequently filled with debris after their intended
use. Similar "kitchen middens" and refuse dumps have been archaeologically identified around Historic Anglo-American structures. Many historical archaeologists have discovered that by excavating these middens, one
may learn a great deal about foods eaten, dinnerware and glassware used,
and even methods of food preparation of Anglo-Americans of varying
socioeconomic status (Boyd and Riggs 1986).
Stanley South (1977) has identified several Anglo-American disposal
patterns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Brunswick Pattern
is one in which the inhabitants discarded their refuse adjacent to their
homes. This deposit occurs usually at the back, but also at the front door.
This pattern is so distinctive that one can locate building entrances simply
on the basis of concentrations of refuse discovered during excavation. In
addition, the frequencies of artifacts recovered from these deposits can
suggest something about the activities performed by the inhabitants of the
structure. The Carolina Artifact Pattern is one in which the higher frequen22
�cies of kitchen artifacts (ceramics, cooking utensils, glassware) and bone
indicate domestic food processing and consumption. This pattern is most
common around kitchens or at the rear of a house. The Frontier Artifact
Pattern is one with a higher frequency of architectural items (such as nails),
indicating a non-kitchen area or, as the name implies, a more isolated
frontier habitation with reduced access to stores, trading posts, and associated amenities. As with Native American features which have ceased to
fulfill their original function, historic cisterns, privies and cellar holes were
subsequently used as artifact dumps, and as with Native American contexts, these features can tell us a great deal about the material culture of
the people who produced, used and discarded these items.
Summary
In conclusion, the study area is environmentally and topographically
extremely diverse. There are a number of river systems with varying
amounts of floodplain, and sometimes extreme uplands containing mineral and faunal resources. Preagricultural Native American peoples exploited all these environments for edible seeds and nuts, deer and other
wild game, and for raw materials such as quartz, quartzite and chert with
which to make stone tools. Later Native American cultures using agriculture in the mountainous portions of the study area were not as dependent
on this means of subsistence as were other groups living in areas with
broader floodplains more suitable for crop production. Still, larger village
sites and more intensive utilization of available floodplains occurred in the
Woodland through Protohistoric periods.
Exploration and settlement of the study area by Europeans introduced new socioeconomic, political and technological systems which profoundly altered the course of human occupation of the Appalachians.
However, early Anglo-American settlers, dependent on an agricultural
subsistence base, utilized space in ways similar to those of preceding Native American agriculturalists. They, too, selected floodplains and prime
agricultural soils as initial habitation sites and stored foods and deposited
refuse in similar patterns. Early Historic Native Americans, in turn,
adopted the log cabin structure by the mid 1700's.
This brief review of the prehistoric and historic culture history and
adaptation of human groups to a portion of the Southern Appalachians
illustrates several important points. First, archaeological investigations of
this region (through surface survey and identification of sites and more
detailed excavations of some of these sites) can uniquely document culture
change and continuity over millennia in cultures for which there are no
written records. Archaeology's reliance on the study of the material culture
of past peoples also enables the archaeologists to specifically identify and
interpret changes in the use of natural resources and the exploitation of
23
�space (settlement-subsistence patterns). Finally, the comparison of Native
American and Anglo-American adapative patterns can suggest some interesting continuties between these groups that may not be evident from
historical documentation.
Acknowledgements
The author sincerely thanks Dr. Melinda Wagner, Dr. Gerald
Schroedl and Donna Boyd for reviewing an earlier draft of this paper, and
for providing useful comments which greatly improved the quality of the
final product. Sheila Swart drafted the figure, and Carolyn Sutphin typed
the manuscript. As always, any errors or omissions are the responsibility
of the author.
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1976 Cherokee Archaeology. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville.
Peebles, Christopher S.
1983 Paradise Lost, Strayed and Stolen: Prehistoric Social Devolution in the Southeast.
Paper prepared for the Southern Anthropological Society Meeting, Baton Rouge, LouisiPolhemus, Richard R.
1987 The Toqua Site—40Mr6: A Late Mississippian Dallas Phase Town (2 vols.) Report of
Investigations No. 41. Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Purrington, Burton L.
1983 Ancient Mountaineers: An Overview of the Prehistoric Archaeology of North Carolina's Western Mountain Region. In The Prehistory of North Carolina: An Archaeological
Symposium, edited by M. A. Mathis and J. J. Crow, pp. 83-160. North Carolina Division
of Archives and History, Raleigh.
26
�Riggs, Brett H.
1987 Socioeconomic Variability in federal Period Overkill Cherokee Archaeological Assemblages.
Unpublished M. A. Thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee,
Knoxville.
Schroedl, Gerald F. (editor)
1986a Overkill Cherokee Archaeology at Chota-Tanasee. Report of Investigations No. 38. Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
1986b Toward an Explanation of Cherokee Origins in East Tennessee. In The Conference
on Cherokee Prehistory, assembled by D. G. Moore, pp. 73-80. Warren Wilson College,
Swannanoa, North Carolina.
Smith, Bruce D.
1986 The Archaeology of the Southeastern United States: From Dalton to DeSoto, 10,500
B.P. In Advances in World Archaeology, vol. 5, edited by F. Wendorf and A. E. Close, pp.
1-92. Academic Press, Orlando.
Smith, Bruce D., and C. Wesley Cowan
1987 Domesticated Chenopodium in Prehistoric Eastern North America: New Accelerator
Dates from Eastern Kentucky. American Antiquity 52:355-357.
South, Stanley
1977 Method and Theory in Historical Archaeology. Academic Press, New York.
Turner, E. Randolph
1984 A Synthesis of Paleo-Indian Studies for the Appalachian Mountain Province of
Virginia. In Upland Archaeology in the East: Symposium 2, edited by M. B. Barker, pp.
205-219. Cultural Resources Report No. 5. U. S. Department of Agriculture, U. S. Forest
Service-Southern Region.
Ward, H. Trawick
1986 Intra-site Spatial Patterns at the Warren Wilson Site. In The Conference on Cherokee
Prehistory, assembled by D. G. Moore, pp. 7-19. Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa,
North Carolina.
Whyte, Thomas R.
1984 The Watauga Impact: 35 Years of Lacustrine Influence on Archaeological Sites in
Northeast Tennessee. In Upland Archaeology in the East: Symposium 2, edited by M. B.
Barber, pp. 192-204. Cultural Resources Report No. 5. U. S. Department of Agriculture,
U. S. Forest Service-Southern Region.
Yarnell, Richard A., and M. Jean Black
1985 Temporal Trends Indicated by a Survey of Archaic and Woodland Plant Food Remains from Southeastern North America. Southeastern Archaeology 4:93-106.
27
�Used Parts and the Poetic Impulse:
Machines as Alternative Means of
Expression
by
Ricky L. Cox
Before I was old enough to drive, I dreamed often of driving a black
pickup truck up one of the hills that surrounded my home. It was always
the same truck, a '66 Ford with a short bed and Twin-I-Beam emblems on
the front fenders. Though I haven't dreamed that dream in many years,
the magic carpet feeling of gliding effortlessly over those confining hills
has stayed with me and long outlasted my desire for a black pickup. The
magic carpet was mine also in waking hours, for the world of books was
opening ever wider before my eyes. These pleasures did not seem incompatible then, but I see now a gulf between them, and though it is not of
my own making, I feel ever more strongly its presence as I move from one
world, that of engines and machines, to the other, that of literature. I seem
not quite to belong to either as long as I am associated with the other. But,
maybe the needs these things fulfill are similar in some not easily discerned way. Certainly, they are not the same, but as a means of exploring
ourselves and the worlds we live in, they have between them curious
parallels which suggest that in this context, the difference between them
is more one of form than of function.
Machines are not unique in this parallel relationship with literature,
but I have singled them out for two reasons. First, machines have been,
literally, vehicles of change in the Southern Mountains during the last
century, arguably more so than in most other parts of the country. Their
use in tapping natural resources in certain regions of Appalachia has made
of them unwitting accomplices to a terrible crime, while in other areas,
they have provided people with a means of sharing the benefits of industrial society without giving up physical ties to home and to the relative
self-sufficiency this has traditionally afforded. Second, I wish to reconcile
my fascination with machinery with my passion for words. As long as I
see the needs each of these fulfill as essentially different, I can not help
but compare them one against the other and choose one, and the world
to which it belongs, as the more worthwhile. My best option, then, is to
prove to myself that these interests are sprung from a single seed and that
their juxtaposition is in fact a balance rather than a conflict.
28
�In their broadest usage, both machinery and written language are
tools, forged and hammered out by countless hands and minds, honed
and refined to further the countless pursuits of mankind. Used strictly in
this sense, they offer limitless possibilities to the development of society,
but little to the growth of the inner man. In this use they have value only
to the extent they serve the purpose at hand and as yet, have no spark or
breath to give them life of their own. They begin to assume an intrinsic
value, only after they are turned to purposes not purely practical, the
most popular being diversion and entertainment. Herein lies the connection between my dreamed of truck and Tom Sawyer. Both could carry me
away, and although the linkage is stretched when the automobile becomes
real and Tom and Huck remain bound between the covers of a book, both
continue to fill a need for adventure.
While the images conjured up by a literary craftsman are much more
universal, and certainly safer, they may be no more satisfying to the reader
than are racing engines to those conversant with the language of V-8s and
4-barrel carburetors. On summer nights, when I was a teenager, I would
sometimes hear the local hotrodders out ripping around in their cars,
running at top speed, or perhaps autographing the hardtop in smoking
rubber. The noise they made, rising and falling as they passed through
hollows and screamed down long ridges, was a signal to my mother to see
that her children were not near the road. To my father, it may have been
a reminder of some foolishness he had outgrown. But to me, and others
who heard as I did, it was Grendel stalking the moors, daring me out to
chase him, and twist not his arm, but a four-speed gearshift. It was a
modern Minotaur, demanding a sacrifice. Having no wine-dark seas on
the shores of the Blue Ridge we live out our Odysseys on two-lane highways in weekly episodes. A poem by Parks Lanier, Jr., entitled "Hephaestus/7 marks this connection:
Smear the marble torso with axle grease
And stick it deep beneath some jacked-up car
On a Saturday morning when the sun
Is warm enough for him to stretch shirtless
And shoeless on the ground. Then you will see
How the mountain heirs of Phidias work,
Not in ivory or stone but in gears
And piston rings, the true lords of metal
Who comprehend a car with artist's eyes.
No assembly lines for them; they work alone
Or two or three at most to share their craft
And later test their strength on some straight road
That valleys out between ridge and river,
Perfect acropolis marked out by signs
29
�That say Prepare to Meet thy God, and there
In smoke and dust on wings of steel they do. (Lanier 26)
How well the need to escape our ordinary lives and become a vicarious or self-styled hero is met by fast cars or epic poetry depends upon
many variables in both the person and the chosen medium. Epic poems
don't need gas and excessive enjoyment of them won't cause your insurance to go up, but neither can they be driven to work on Monday morning.
The important thing is that both may satisfy the need each of us has to
visit from time to time the borders of our safe existence.
A psychologist might tell us that the need to escape reality stems, in
part, from a feeling of ineptitude in the face of an increasingly complex
existence. This psychologist might also suggest that the mastery of some
reasonably difficult activity may provide a needed identity along with a
familiar source of analogy and metaphor useful in assimilating experiences
outside the selected activity.
So it is that the writer finds pleasure in manipulating words and
phrases. A lifetime is not long enough to exhaust the possibilities for
improvement. The search for the ideal voice and style is as futile as it is
alluring, for there are always two elements to the equation, both everchanging. The man who lays aside his pen is no longer he who sat down
to write and the reader who is moved in the least must also be transformed
in some minute way.
Absorbed in his quest for perfection, the writer is unaware of his
counterpart in the basement garage next door. But are they not alike? Is
the mechanic not also intimate with the tools of his trade? He chooses a
camshaft as carefully as the poet chooses an adjective, knowing that it will
alter the music of his finished piece. Of each component part he knows the
individual qualities and function. They are to him as the parts of speech
to the writer for they give voice and tone to the completed machine, urging
from it fire and thunder or a smooth, silky hum. Pistons become guttural
verbs. Their solo voices are harsh, discordant explosions, but when multiplied by four, or six, or eight, or even sweet sixteen, their cadence quickened to four-thousand RPM, they sing a siren song that even Jim Wayne
Miller's Brier could not help hearing. He tells how
his mind throbbed and hummed
like pistons under the hood of a good truck
hauling his thoughts over a long open highway,
(23-25, Miller 35)
The power of this song is no accident, for the pieces of the ensemble
are chosen carefully, just as words and phrases are sifted laboriously by
the writer seeking the perfect balance. Indeed, these things may be sib30
�lings, for they wear each other's metaphors with style. Economy is important to the poet. He must squeeze a lot of mileage out of his words. The
writer of short fiction depends on quick acceleration and can haul but little
unnecessary luggage. The novelist is permitted to turn on the cruise control from time to time and has room for the neighbors and the in-laws.
From the writer's point of view, it may sound as if I am making a
case for machines as metaphor instead of medium. In one sense, I am, but
my point is that the abundance of appropriate metaphor between the two
points to a parallel relationship which is more than coincidental. Which
element of a metaphor is to be familiar and concrete, and which to be
imaginative depends upon the experience of the user. Metaphors should
not be thought of as one-way glass. Images, and the illumination they
bring with them, should move freely in both directions.
The automobile, as seen in the last paragraph, lends itself to such
interchange because it is a major element of popular culture and familiar
to everyone. But it-is by no means the only subject upon which the inventive hand and mind may turn themselves. In our factories we have machines of infinite variety. They weave fine, beautiful things and stamp out
thousand upon thousand of ugly, practical paraphernalia of industrial society, and in everything they do, building and tearing down, molding and
crushing, they are but incarnations of the nature of man and every aspect
they present is but a face of mankind. And though the builder may not be
conscious of such grand notions, he takes pleasure in his small fulfillment
of man's age old desire to make his physical ability to do, equal to his
mind's ability to conceive. The finished product is almost incidental, for it
is the making and doing, looking always for ways to do better that are so
attractive.
Machines serve to express a need for adventure and a desire to master the physical world with mechanical extensions of ourselves. These
things are in some sense poetic, yet they are inferior to written expression
in an important way. Because these things are immediate and firsthand,
their expression is inseparable from the actual event. To express, in this
direct way, a lifetime of creating things of iron and steel, I must spend a
lifetime. And though you stood beside me through all those years, if you
did not speak the language of gears and wheels, you might never have
heard my song at all. Without the writer's ability to compress long spans
of time, this means of expression is too impossibly long to share.
It is also impossibly short. Some say that the true fascination of speed
and power is that it provides an avenue to approach death and then snatch
oneself back at the last instant. Faster and faster we round the curve,
edging ever nearer to the sudden and awful knowledge that we have gone
too far. Without the writer's ability to stretch that tiny point in time and
examine it at length, we are compelled to live it over and over, staring
31
�wide-eyed at an instant, until satiated or dead, and in neither instance
does anyone else benefit.
Without a universal language, or the key elements of it, I am bound
to barter with hours and minutes and raw emotion. If you cannot pay in
kind we are separated forever. Written language provides a wonderful
fluid currency through which we may translate our separate experiences
into a common tongue. This is accomplished through symbolic representation after the manner of stocks and bonds or commodities. You don't have
to drive your hogs through New York City, nor must I route my corn
through there on the way to North Carolina, yet there is free exchange
between us.
The poet-mechanic has no such medium of free, universal exchange.
His language is exclusive at best, and at worst is unique to him. Without
a broader means of communication, a need may be expressed only by
satisfying it. What is wanted is a means to express recognition of the need
without having to repeat over and over the actions that fulfill it. The
missing ingredients, of course, are symbols. To the writer, this presents
no problem as the elements of his medium, words, have no function apart
from their use as symbols. Machines, on the other hand, have definite
intended functions which complicate their use as symbols and necessitate
the imposition of certain conditions.
Before a symbol may appeal to the broadest possible audience, the
bonds of time and space, which are essential to firsthand expression of the
poetic impulse, must be cast off. Otherwise, the object would have symbolic meaning only to the few who chanced to observe a particular event
at a particular place and time. The thing which most firmly binds a machine to a specific place and time is the function it was originally intended
to perform. It is required, then, that a distance be somehow achieved
between the machine and its original function. One way to do this is to
select as symbols machinery which no longer has a function to perform,
whether it has succumbed to, or outlived, the purpose for which it was
intended. The common name for these marvelous metallic metaphors is
junk.
Once the distracting clutter of regular practical function has been
raked away by time or accident, machines are free to reveal the countless
secrets entrusted to them by our next door neighbors and by nameless,
faceless people now buried in Chicago or Des Moines or Detroit. Embedded in the caked grease and faded paint are bits and pieces of people's
lives, for machines, like few other objects in American life, are repositories
of dreams.
The details are mostly gone, erased by time and distance, but the
outline of a grand story remains. There was once a man, or several men,
who wanted to build a machine to do more and better, a machine to make
farm work easier or transportation more accessible to the common people.
32
�Perhaps he wanted to get rich, too, but that is beside the point. After
many setbacks and disappointments, the dream becomes reality, and if the
first one is the only one, or the first of ten million, it and each successor
will carry with them a little of the mind and spirit that gave them substance. Emerson wrote of good books: "They impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads" (57). May it not be the
same with a truck, in whose proud lines and sturdy frame we perceive a
mind that moves as our own?
Most of these pioneers set their names to their work so that the hills
are now dotted with monuments to J.I. Case, John Deere, and Henry Ford.
Yet the great majority of the hands that made reality of grand visions
belonged to men now nameless, even then faceless, and the dream is
theirs also. A factory is built and men come to work to find or finance their
own dreams. At a county seat freight depot hundreds of miles away another dreamer waits, able at last to buy a piece of equipment he thinks
will help him finally get ahead. Their individual stories are lost, but some
hint of them clings to objects once so much a part of their lives. We might
search and question and fill in many of the gaps, but with no more than
stands before us we know that all these countless people lived and hoped
and worked for something better. Here is the proof, a rusted hunk of
dreams.
The dreams, perhaps, are visible only to another dreamer, but the
long days between are written plainly. There are dents and welded places
that tell of bad luck and sledgehammer persuasion. Cracked water jackets
and radiators remember some cold winter night and makeshift repairs
bespeak a flat broke native genius.
History is often most interesting as a backdrop to personal experience. The stories we cling most tightly to are about ourselves and those
dear to us. It is probable, then, that the most popular function of junk as
symbol, is junk as journal. Among the wealth of used parts found in
discarded machinery is a long life battery which can jump start a hundred
memories in an instant. In a culture described as oral, we must make use
of unconventional recording devices, things that bring to mind good
friends and good times, triumphs and tragedies, and a multitude of other
associations attached to things once a regular part of our immediate environment.
As symbols, machines lack the universality and clarity of words, yet
they enjoy an advantage in that they appeal directly to the physical senses.
The visual impact is obvious, as is the tactile, and usually a variety of
identifiable aromas may be stirred up by removing appropriate parts or
covers. You may learn, even, how old cars taste if you lay under one long
enough. The single missing stimulus is sound, and it may be the one
hardest to do without. Even though they may be eloquently mute, machines denied their voices are estranged from their primitive native
33
�tongue. I believe that the restorer of machines is keenly, though perhaps
not consciously, aware of this silence, and that as a poet at heart he sounds
his own voice by resurrecting one thought to be stilled forever. Able to
speak again, the machine tells anew the dreams once attached to it and
adds a new verse to its song, that of the latest dreamer who would hear it
sing once more. And for as long as it is able to speak, the reborn machine
will tell their many names over and over, though it be in a strange tongue
all men have hearkened to but none may fully comprehend.
It has been my intention here to present an aesthetic, as opposed to
cultural, perspective on discarded machines, but I feel compelled to make
an observation about the Appalachian affinity for broken, obsolete, or
worn out things. Certainly this may be construed as frugality, but I believe
that it represents also a wholeness in perspective that may be generally
lacking in this country. To say that junk is ugly because it is not pretty
indicates a difference of opinion, but to say that it is not pretty because it
is old indicates a basic difference in philosopy. A culture which hides from
itself the concept of growing old and can see no intrinsic value in inanimate
things which are no longer productive has blinded itself to the cyclical
nature of all things, manmade or otherwise. When we create a facade of
perpetual newness by banishing old machines from the landspace are we
not exercising the same rationale that banishes our old people to nursing
homes? They can not work; let us put them aside.
One day last fall, a friend of mine, James Bowman, was telling of
having just seen the film Deliverance for the first time. Early in the film, in
a scene set in a junkyard, one of the characters says something like, "I
always wondered where everything ended up." It occurred to Mr. Bowman that, among all the coming and going and hustle and bustle of modern life, it is good to know, now and then, where something ends up. I
think so too, and wonder if a poet might like that idea. If you see one
today, tell him about it.
References Cited
Bowman, James. Conversation with the author. Willis, Virginia, 1987.
Deliverance, John Boorman, Director; Warner Brothers, 1972.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 'The American Scholar/7 The Portable Emerson. New Edition. Ed.
Carl Bode. New York: Penguin Books, 1981.
Lanier, Parks Jr. "Hephaestus." Appalachian Georgics. Radford, Virginia: Unighorn Books,
1983.
Miller, Jim Wayne. "On the Wings of a Dove." The Mountains Have Come Closer. Boone, North
Carolina: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1980.
34
�Jane Gentry: A Singer Among Singers
A Biographical Sketch
Betty Smith
On October 6, 1987 an historical marker was erected by the State of
North Carolina in front of a house called "Sunnybank" in Hot Springs. It
read:
BALLADRY
English folklorist Cecil Sharp in 1916 collected ballads in the "Laurel Country/' Jane Gentry who supplied many of the songs lived here.
From Jane Gentry Cecil Sharp collected sixty four songs and ballads,
more than from any other person in this country. "Sunnybank" is a lovely
old house, now known as "The Inn at Hot Springs," which Mrs. Gentry
ran as a boarding house. The "Laurel Country," so named because of the
abundance of rhododendron, called "laurel" by the people who live there,
is that part of northwest North Carolina which borders on Tennessee.
This woman who "lived everyday as if it were her last" was described
as having "dozens of ballads at her command" and having the ability to
"roll out verse after . . . verse with no faltering or seeming effort." Her
youngest daughter, while a student at Duke University, said that her
mother had "a wonderfully retentive memory," and all these songs she
had learned by rote from her mother and from other folk-singers in her
community."1
This remarkable lady was the bearer of a tradition of songs, ballads,
tales, and riddles that came to her from her maternal grandfather, Council
Harmon. His descendants have carried on the richest and liveliest heritage
of Jack Tales in America. Jane Gentry was the first member of this extended family to be discovered by collectors and folklorists. She was a
major contributor to Cecil Sharp and provided the first texts of the Jack
Tales for Isabel Gordon Carter. Members of this family with such names
as Ward, Harmon, Hicks, and Presnell have made valuable contributions
of songs and stories. Ransom Hicks, Mrs. Gentry's father was also a member of this family.
Jane Gentry was born in Watauga County in 1863, the daughter of
Ransom and Emily Harmon Hicks. Ransom Hicks was a minister, a farmer
and a Federal soldier. About 1875 he moved his family from Watauga
County to the Meadow Fork section of Spring Creek in Madison County,
35
�some twenty miles from the town of Hot Springs. Jane Hicks married
Jasper Newton Gentry in 1879 and they built a home on Meadow Fork in
1880 near Keenersville Christian Church. Ransom Hicks was the church's
first preacher and Jane became the singing leader.2
Jane and Newt (as he was commonly called) Gentry reared nine
children, seven of them born while they lived on Meadow Fork. They
farmed the rocky hillside and Newt raised a tobacco crop every year,
taking it to market in Marshall in his wagon in the fall.
Although Jane Gentry had little education, she valued it and was a
"born teacher." She was described by her daughter, Nola Jane, as being
"a very unusual person who could always figure out things." The Gentrys
wanted their children to have as much education as they could get. They
moved the family to Hot Springs in 1898 so that the children could attend
Dorland Institute (to become Dorland-Bell School in 1918), a Presbyterian
mission school, for eight months of the year instead of three or four
months afforded by public schools. All nine children attended Dorland
Bell and eight of them graduated. Mrs. Gentry did laundry, cleaned faculty
rooms and paid tuition with apples, vegetables, and handwoven coverlets.3
The town of Hot Springs is located in a fertile valley on the French
Broad River, six miles east of the Tennessee border. It is surrounded by
the high crests of the Pisgah and Unaka Mountains and is bounded by
Pisgah National Forest. Because of the warm springs in the town it became
famous as a resort area as early as 1800. The Western North Carolina
Division of the Richmond and Danville Railroad was completed through
the town in 1882 and in time six passenger trains stopped every day. The
Mountain Park Hotel with its 175 rooms and ballroom, billiard room, bowling alley, tennis courts and golf course, as well as several boarding houses,
accomodated the tourists who came to Hot Springs, "The Healthiest Place
in America."4
The move to Hot Springs must have been quite an experience for the
Gentry family. They had always lived up a "holler" in a rural area, living
off the land, resourceful and self-sufficient. Hot Springs was a thriving
community at that time. However, there is no evidence that Jane Gentry
was uprooted from the mountain culture in which she had grown up. The
family was known to be "hard working" and "close knit," and continued
to be so.5
Irving Bacheller, a famous writer of that day, was a great admirer of
Mrs. Gentry. We cannot know how closely he adhered to her words, but
he did record his conversations with her and used them in his stories.
They certainly give an impression of how life was on Meadow Fork for this
young family. He quoted her as saying, "Often in plantin' or hoein' time,
Pappy an' me u'd work all night together in the cove. 'Bout the only chanst
we had to visit like we used to done. We'd have our suppers at midnight,
36
�an' go back an' scratch around on the slick mount'inside 'twil daylight
come an' the babies 'gun to holler. Nex' day I'd be kindly tired—I would.
I'd lay down on the bed 'twil I'd see some little feller come in with holes
in his breeches. Then I'd clomb out, an' pray, an' take up my burden.6
Those early years must have prepared her for almost anything. She
said, "I just saved every feather an' put 'em away in a poke that hung by
the fireplace. Never see no money. Saved everything else er I reckon we'd
'a' starved. All summer I'd kindly scratch up the sunlight an' save hit for
the dark days. Hit come handy when the childern got the measles an' I
got hit too. Helped me when one got the tyford fever. I 'member I had to
give her a teaspoonful o' milk every five minutes. When I'd go to sleep in
the night the spoon would drop out o' my hand an' wake me up an' tell
me to get up an' tend to my work."7
Mellinger Henry could have been describing Jane and Newt Gentry
when he wrote, "They still have in them the stuff of their pioneer ancestors
and are able to endure hardships without murmur and stubbornly wrest
a livelihood out of the mountain soil. Apparently this continuous life of
hardship has not made them bitter. Rather they have seemingly grown
richer in the eternal verities of human life. In doing so, they have acquired
qualities so rarely found in the human race. They have a sane and healthy
independence, a practical philosophy learned from Nature and severe environment, a kindly human relationship one to another, and an innate
culture that shows itself particularly in their fine courtesy."8
Jane Douglas, daughter of Maud Gentry Long, in commenting on a
description of the lives of her mother and her grandmother as being
"hard," said that neither one of them would have wanted that said about
them. She spoke of her mother as always being "on top" and "exuding
hope."9 Mrs. Gentry was invariably described as being "happy" and
"cheerful." By most people's standards Jane Gentry's life was not easy,
but there is not a trace of self-pity in remembrances of her.
She said: "Sometimes the neighbors would send for me to get the
blues tuk off 'em, an' I'd go an' pray with 'em, nurse the sick an' tell 'em
stories an' cheer 'em up."10 This attitude of neighborliness and hard work
continued when the family moved to town. Although Hot Springs attracted tourists and temporary residents, the local people agree that there
was little cash money and that people in the town raised most of what
they ate. They say that neighbors and families looked after each other.11
In 1905 Emma Bell Miles wrote, "Nearly all mountaineers are singers.
Their untrained voices are of good timbre, the women's being sweet and
high and tremulous, and their sense of pitch and tone and rhythm remarkably true."12 There are few people alive today who heard Jane Gentry sing.
Her songs were written down, tunes and lyrics, by Cecil Sharp and his
assistant, Maud Karpeles, but there are no recordings of her voice. Mr.
Bill Moore, who lives on Meadow Fork, called "Aunt Janie" a "singer
37
�among singers." He described her as a wonderful person and "the most
beautiful singer you ever heard." He also said that Maud Long was just
like her mother and "because her mother liked to sing so well, she went
and took music lessons and became a music teacher."13
Elizabeth ("Peggy") Dotterer, age 85, was a contemporary of Nola,
the youngest Gentry daughter. She has a remarkable memory and is generally accepted as the historian of Hot Springs. She was fascinated by Jane
Gentry's singing. She said, "I have never heard as good a ballad singer as
she was. She was a generation back more genuine than anyone else I have
ever heard. Maud Long was a good singer, but there was something pure
about Mrs. Gentry's singing. She was absolutely natural." Mrs. Dotterer
described Mrs. Gentry as "the sweetest, most cheerful, pleasant person
always . . . There was a special kind of atmosphere in her house. It seemed
natural for her to sing and tell stories. I was fascinated by her."14
Cecil Sharp talked of how this art form was woven into the everyday
life of the people, how some songs were even connected to certain
chores.15 Emma Bell Miles wrote, "Had I but words to say how these tunes
are bound with the life of the singer, knit with his earliest sense-impressions, and therefore dearer than any other music could ever be —impossible to forget as the sound of his mother's voice."16
In 1947 one of Jane's daughters, Maud Gentry Long, recorded for the
Library of Congress ballads, songs and tales she had learned from her
mother. The following was her introduction to the Jack Tales and Mrs.
Long's granddaughter, Daron Douglas said that her grandmother always
gave the same introduction whether she was telling them to one child or
to a group.
"I cannot remember when I heard the Jack, Will, and Tom tales
for the first time. For we grew up on them like we did the
mountain air and the lovely old ballads that my mother used to
sing to us.
"But the occasion for the tales is a very vivid memory: It would
be on a long, winter evening when, after supper, all of us were
gathered before the big open fire, my mother taking care of the
baby or else the baby was in the cradle very near to mother.
And she would be sewing or carding.
My father would be mending someone's shoes or maybe a bit
of harness. The older girls were helping with the carding or the
sewing. And all of us little ones would either have a lapful or a
basket full of wool out of which we must pick all the burrs and
the Spanish needles and bits of briars and dirt against the next
day's carding. For my mother wove all of this wool that had
38
�been shorn from the backs of our own sheep—raised there on
the farm that was in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains
in North Carolina—into linsey-woolsey, or hers and our
dresses, or into blue jeans for my father's and brother's suits,
or into blankets to keep us warm, or into the beautiful patterned
coverlets, to say nothing of all the socks and stockings and mitts
and hoods that it took for a large family of nine children. And
so she needed every bit of the wool that she could get ready.
And to keep our eyes open and our hearts merry, my mother
would tell these marvellous tales—the Jack, Will, and Tom
tales/'17
Mrs. Gentry was said to have had "back trouble" and to have been
"terribly bent over." In spite of this, "she never complained nor let it
interfere with her work. When I think of her," Peggy Dotterer said, "I
always think of 'busyness'. Her hands were always busy and she kept
everyone's hands busy. She never let anyone sit emptyhanded." The people who lived in Mrs. Gentry's boarding house, some of whom were teachers, always helped out. She wove, spun, tatted, knit, and crocheted, and
she was always teaching other people to do things with their hands. Said
Mrs. Dotterer, "I could go there and before I knew it I was peeling apples,
shelling peas, or stringing beans. And she would sing and tell stories while
we worked."18 Apparently for Jane Gentry songs and stories were not
performances. They were a natural part of her everyday life.
Richard Chase speaks of this practical application of the Jack Tales,
"That of 'keeping the kids on the job' for such communal tasks as stringing
beans for canning or threading them up to make the dried pods called
'leather britches'." Mrs. R. M. Ward tells: "We would all get down around
a sheet full of dry beans and start in to shelling 'em. Monroe would tell the
kids them tales and they'd work for life."19
Elmer Hall, in his proposal which resulted in Sunnybank being
placed on the National Register, said that Mrs. Gentry and Mrs. Long
"shared mountain food, songs, and tales with hundreds of students,
boarders, and travelers who passed through Hot Springs."20 Everyone
who remembered Mrs. Gentry recalled the long table filled with delicious
food. James Gentry, a grandson, spoke of how she "baked wonderful
bread. I could smell it baking down the street."21 And after supper there
would be songs and storytelling.
In 1916 Cecil Sharp came to Madison County. He was interested in
the songs and ballads of British origin. The "Laurel Country" proved to
be fertile ground for traditional music. He wrote of his experiences " . . . I
discovered that I could get what I wanted from pretty nearly everyone I
met, young and old. In fact I found myself for the first time in my life in a
39
�community in which singing was as common and almost as universal a
practice as speaking.22 But in any community there are those who know
more songs and sing them better. When Cecil Sharp came to Hot Springs
he was referred to Jane Gentry, and he made at least eight visits to listen
to her.
In 1923 Isabel Gordon Carter collected folk tales from Mrs. Gentry
and fifteen of these were printed in The Journal of American Folklore. She
told the collector she had learned the "Old Jack, Will and Tom" tales from
her grandfather who had learned them from his mother. At first she did
not take seriously the collector's request for stories. She had sung ballads
and songs for Cecil Sharp and other collectors, but no one had asked her
for the stories which she told to amuse children. But she kindly agreed,
saying: "Old Jack, Will, and Tom tales they are called. They're the oldest
stories that ever been in existence, I reckon. Old Grandpop aluz told us—
we'd hire him to tell us. Law, he could tell 'em!" 23
Before her death in 1925 Jane Gentry had a reputation as story teller
and singer which extended far beyond Madison County and Hot Springs.
A picture of Jane Gentry appeared in Wide World Magazine ca. 1923 with
the caption: "Mrs. Jane Gentry of Hot Springs, N. C. who is credited by
Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, the noted English authority, as knowing more folk
songs and old English ballads than any other person in the United States
and probably in the world. She can sing 67 ballads which have been
handed down to her from generation to generation by word of mouth."24
The local children knew her because she went to the school every
Friday afternoon and sang and told stories. She was often invited to The
Asheville Normal School to entertain with stories and ballads. Mary
Kestler Clyde in her book about The Asheville Normal School, Flashbacks
to Dawn, has written an account of a memorable concert by Jane Gentry in
the fall of 1920. She called it "Gentle Jane's Recital."
"Since she was a natural and humble storyteller, "Lady Jane"
captured and held our attention with a fascinating medley of
songs, stories, riddles, and tales from her own personal experience. She had reared a large family and had learned a rich lore
and a great deal of wisdom. Dozens of ballads seemed to be at
her command, all learned orally from her forebears and friends,
and all just seemed to be waiting on her tongue and humming
in her heart. Even in the long ballads such as "Barbara Allen,"
she could roll out verse after cumulative verse with no faltering
or seeming effort. Then to get her breath, she would toss off a
riddle and wait for an answer that seldom found voice from our
audience save for an occasional muted giggle."25
40
�Her program might have included such ballads and songs as "The
Golden Vanity/7 "The Daemon Lover/7 "The Cherry Tree Carol/7 "Born
in Bethany/7 "Edwin in the Lowlands Low/7 or "The Broken Token/7 She
would almost surely have sung such songs as ...
. . ."The frog went a-courting he did ride, h7m, h7m. . . ."
. . ."Soldier, soldier, will you marry me? ..."
. . ."Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
. . ."We'll climb up Jacob's ladder.
. . ."Says the robin as he flew: When I was a young man I choosed two ..."
. . ."Had me a cat and the cat pleased me . . ."
She not only told the traditional tales learned from her family, she
related stories from her personal experience. She might give instructions on
how to court a man, or give an account of a conversation with a revenuer,
or tell about her trip to New York as a guest of the Irving Bacheller family.
Jane Gentry had a thirty year association with Dorland Bell School in
Hot Springs which began when her first child, Nora, started to school
there. For many of those years she lived next door to the school.
"She had befriended Dorland in a multitude of ways, since the time
her first children entered school there, eager to show her gratitude to the
Presbyterians. For the Yankee educators she had been a rock to lean upon.
If an emergency occurred in the kitchen or the laundry, she was willing
to lend a hand. If the Northern missionaries needed the raveling of a
Southern mountain mystery, she applied her age-old wisdom. If the teachers wanted a delicious mountain-style meal at reasonable cost, her inn's
board was bountiful. When a chapel program or subject course needed a
speaker, she was there in her forte, regaling the English ballads and stories
of her heritage for which she was sought by collectors. If times were blue
and drear, with nothing going right, Jane Gentry was reliable as a lifter-ofspirits. When Dorland had out-of-town guests, Mrs. Gentry was often
invited to dinner, bringing "life77 to the party with her poise and wit.7726
Irving Bacheller came to Hot Springs for a vacation. Subsequently,
an article titled "The Happiest Person I Ever Knew77 appeared in the
March, 1925 American Magazine. The short story tells of Bacheller7 s search
for a happy person among the talented, rich and famous. Then he met
Jane Gentry, whose back was bent because of spinal trouble, whose hands
were rough with toil, but "in her eyes and her voice was a singular quality
akin to the divine.77 He saw her often and took her to New York as a guest
in his home for a month and "always in her voice and look and manner
was the unmistakable note of happiness.7727 His interviews with Jane Gentry provided material for other short stories in books and magazines.
Known to be a wonderful story-teller, Jane Gentry was also the subject for stories, some of which she told and some of which were told about
her. The best known story is sometimes called "The Baby in the Briar
41
�Patch." Both Irving Bacheller and Mary Kestler Clyde included it in their
books. Their versions are very different, as one would expect them to be
in a story which has been learned from oral interpretation.
This is the story as told by Betty Rolfe, daughter of Mae, the Gentry's
fifth child. The story was told to Mrs. Rolfe by her aunt, Maud Long. Mrs.
Rolfe and her two young sons lived with Aunt Maud in Sunnybank for
several years.
"Grandmother and the two oldest, and I think it was Lalla who
was in the cradle had gone out to—she was hoeing corn out in
the field. And she had cut a birch bark—where the men had
been cutting wood, and you know how they split the bark off
the wood so it won't rot. Then they can use it for barns and
houses and whatever needed building. Grandmother had gone
to the field to hoe corn and she put the baby in the bark; laid it
down with its blanket and put it under the shade of a tree. And
she went off and started hoeing corn. She told the two girls to
look after the baby. And they got to playing and got a little off
from the baby. The sun came out and it got hot and grandmother worked right on until it came time to stop for lunch. She
went back to get her lunch and feed the children. In the meantime the sun had come in under the tree and closed up the birch
bark and the baby got restless and started squirming around in
there and when that happened, it started rolling down the
mountainside. They couldn't find the baby anywhere, so they
didn't know what had happened to the baby. So they ran and
got Grandfather and everybody started looking. They had
searched all over for quite a long time—four or five kids looking
by that time—scattered all over looking. Finally one of them
looked down and in a briar patch down—quite a way down the
mountain they saw this little log, and sure enough, the baby
was inside and almost closed up tight by the time they got to
it—but not a scratch on her. And that's the tale Aunt Maud told
me."28
Another story told by Tinha Anderson, daughter of Lalla, next to the
youngest Gentry child is called "The Ghost Story." It concerns a visit of
some relatives from California who came in late one night. Aunt Maud
prepared supper and then everybody went to bed. One member of the
visiting party was a baby who was put to bed in a cradle. In the night the
mother woke up and saw someone bend over the cradle, cover the baby,
and then go out onto the balcony. Some of the bedrooms at Sunnybank
open out on to a long balcony. She thought it was Aunt Maud and so she
went back to sleep. In the morning at breakfast she thanked Aunt Maud
42
�for covering the baby. Aunt Maud's reply was: "Oh, that wasn't me,
honey. That was Mama. She always looks after the babies in that room."
This happened several years after Jane Gentry's death.29
If Jane Gentry were to "return" she would certainly look after the
babies. She told Irving Bacheller that she took her sister's five children
when she "broke down" and raised her brother's children when he died
of typhoid fever. Bacheller quotes her as saying: "We loved the childern.
Good land, mister, when the last baby walked out o' my arms I felt kindly
cold an' lonesome. Babies are good company. Ye can visit with 'em. Ye
don't know what heaven is, honey, 'twil ye've held it in yer arms, year
a'ter year as I done."30 She was proud that in spite of sickness and injuries,
she never lost a baby.
The Ransom Hicks family left Watauga County and moved to Madison County ca.1875 when Jane was about twelve years old and her grandfather in his seventies. She probably saw little of her grandfather, "Old
Counce," after that. There were few roads and the trip would have been
long and difficult. However, she gave him credit for being her source for
the Jack tales, while she named her mother as the source of her ballads
and songs.
Mrs. Gentry was the daughter of a preacher, had close ties with a
mission school, and lived in an area where there were people who objected
to the "old love songs." Samuel Harmon, another of Council Harmon's
grandchildren who moved to Tennessee, realized that most of his songs
were indeed "devil's ditties," and that they were not tolerated by some of
his more strict neighbors.31 And yet we know of no prejudice against Jane
Gentry's songs and tales. Some say that she was so loved and respected
that when she broke up an illegal still she was not harmed and there was
no retaliation.32 Perhaps her neighbors knew her too well to see anything
"evil" in the songs she sang.
It also is not known if Mrs. Gentry censored her selection of songs
to suit her listeners. Daron Douglas, Maud Long's granddaughter, remarked as an introduction to "Young Hunting," that she had learned it
from Sharp's book because her grandmother did not sing it. She said her
mother had told her that Mrs. Long didn't sing the more explicit ones
about lovers. 33 Mrs. Long was an elder in the Presbyterian Church and
may have considered those ballads inappropriate for her to sing.
Something is known of "Old Counce" Harmon's problems with the
church. Richard Chase quoted some of his relatives, among them, Smith
Harmon, the postmaster at Beech Creek: "Old Counce sure did like to
have a good time. When he was younger he'd get read out of the church
ever' now and then. He'd behave for a while, and not make music, or
dance, or sing any love songs. But seemed like he loved the old music so
much he'd bust out again and get the church folks down on him once
43
�more. When he got to be an old man, though, they didn't pay him much
mind/'34
Jane Gentry's life with her great talent and her rich store of oral
literature came to an end the hot summer of 1925, the summer it didn't
rain at all. She had raised her children well. Among her descendants there
are grandchildren in their seventies who remember vividly the stories told
by their parents, both traditional tales and family stories; there are teachers
who have told the stories and sung the songs to children in classrooms;
there are young people who still sing the ballads. Maud Long's name
might be recognized for she was recorded by Artus Moser and Duncan
Emrich, and some would know Daron Douglas as a fiddler and ballad
singer. But there are many others who still cherish this tradition of marvelous songs and tales.
Notes
1. R. P. Harris, "Miss Gentry Collecting Folk Songs of Mountains Just Like Her Mother/'
Unnamed newspaper article, ca. 1925.
2. Interview with W. T. ("Bill") Moore, Meadow Fork, Madison County, August 29, 1985.
3. Letter from Nola Jane Gentry Yrjana, September 17, 1987.
4. "Land of the Sky," Pamphlet, late 1800's. Berea College Special Collections.
5. Interview with James and Dorothy Gentry, Hot Springs, N. C, July 23, 1985.
6. Irving Bacheller, "The Happiest Person I Ever Knew," American Magazine, March, 1924.
7. Ibid.
8. Mellinger Henry, Songs Sung in the Southern Appalachians, London: The Mitre Press, 1933.
p.xii.
9. Interview with Jane Long Douglas, Athens, Georgia, October 8, 1985.
10. Irving Bacheller, "The Happiest Person I Ever Knew."
11. Elizabeth B. ("Peggy") Dotterer, "Hot Springs," Lecture, Hot Springs, N. C., September
29, 1987.
12. Emma Bell Miles. The Spirit of the Mountains, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1975. (Reprint of 1905 ed.), p. 147.
13. Interview with W. T. Moore, August 29, 1985.
14. Interview with Elizabeth Dotterer, Hot Springs, N. C. January 25, 1988.
44
�15. Cecil Sharp, English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians, London: Oxford University
Press, 1973 (Reprint of 1932 ed.) p. xxv.
16. Emma Bell Miles. The Spirit of the Mountains, p. 170.
17. Maud Long, Jack Tales, Library of Congress Recording L-47.
18. Elizabeth Dotterer, Interview January 25, 1988.
19. Richard Chase, The Jack Tales, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1943, p.viii.
20. Elmer Hall, "Sunnybank: The Inn at Hot Springs/'
21. Interview with James Gentry, July 23, 1985.
22. Cecil Sharp, English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians, p. xxv.
23. Isabel Gordon Carter, "Mountain White Folk-Lore: Tales From The Southern Blue Ridge/'
Journal of American Folklore, March, 1927, pp. 340-370.
24. Wide World Magazine, ca. 1923, (Library of Congress Collection)
25. Mary Kestler Clyde, Flashbacks to Dawn, Vantage Press, 1983, pp. 59-61.
26. Jaqueline B. Painter. The Season of Dorland-Bell, Biltmore Press, 1987, p. 164.
27. Irving Bacheller, "The Happiest Person I Ever Knew/'
28. Interview with Betty Rolfe, Hot Springs, N.C., October 19,1987.
29. Telephone interview with Tinha Anderson, Atlanta, Ga., September 10, 1985.
30. Irving Bacheller, "The Happiest Person I Ever Knew/'
31. Mellinger Henry, Songs Sung in the Southern Appalachians, p.xvi.
32. Letter from Jeannette Armstrong, September 22, 1985.
33. Daron Douglas, Gathering to Honor Jane Gentry, Hot Springs, N.C., October 18, 1987.
34. Richard Chase, The Jack Tales, p. ix.
This paper is a part of a larger research project. The biographical data suggests issues which
are beyond the scope of this paper.
45
�Legendary Places: The Literature of the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
James Byer
When Horace Kephart prepared himself in 1904 for a sojourn in the
Great Smoky Mountains, he reports that he could find "in no library a
guide to that region/' no magazine article describing the land and its
people, "not even a novel or a story that showed intimate local knowledge" (Kephart, 13). Kephart himself made the first attempt at repairing
this deficiency when he published Our Southern Highlanders in 1913, and
his work was followed shortly by several other accounts of wilderness
experiences in the Great Smokies or of the lives of the mountain folk who
toiled there. It was the conception and creation of a national park, however, which inspired the production of a more varied and extensive literature, produced not only by natives of the region but by travellers who, like
Bartram and Guyot and Michaux of old, found themselves drawn by the
wonder of some of the oldest mountains and one of the richest repositories
of botanical species on earth. And like Bartram, Guyot, and Michaux, they
have left their imprints upon the landscape. In recording sensory impressions, the human and natural history, or the biological complexity of the
Great Smokies, they have made themselves a part of our imaginative conception of the land. In so doing they have helped us to see and to value
the wilderness while paradoxically making the wilderness more accessible
to our imaginations and therefore, in a sense, less wild.
In his book Man in the Landscape Paul Shepard shows that the original
impulse to establish national parks arose not because nineteenth century
Americans wished to preserve wilderness in its original state but because
they saw in the hot springs and geological formations of Yellowstone and
in the sheer cliffs of Yosemite the closest parallel the new world afforded
to the romantic ruins and the formal gardens of the Old World. The term
oark, in fact, as applied to Yellowstone, associates that landscape not with
a forbidding wilderness but with the inviting, carefully managed grounds
of an English or European estate, an association heightened by the fact
that the relatively dry climate of the west produces not the dense forest of
the Appalachian Mountains but instead many large meadows containing
well-spaced individual trees.
The concept of the national park as an area of outstanding scenery,
but not as a wilderness per se, was well established in the west before
attention was directed in the second and third decades of the present
46
�century to several possible areas of preservation in the east, including
present-day Acadia in Maine and the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia,
Tennessee, and North Carolina. When that attention was turned on the
Great Smoky Mountains, it found an area quite different both from the
national parks of the west and from the Great Smoky Mountains National
Park of today. In the first place, the denseness of the vegetation, particularly in the laurel slicks and rhododendron jungles, made it difficult to see
any resemblance between these natural areas and European parks. Indeed,
in this density there is something both imaginatively and literally threatening: one of the greatest dangers the hiker or explorer has always faced in
the Great Smokies is that he will simply vanish. As Ross Hutchins in his
book Hidden Valley of the Smokies observes, "It is not at all difficult to be
lost in these mountains; there have been many instances of people, including adults, completely disappearing. As recently as 1969, a small boy was
lost along the Appalachian Trail near the southern end of the Park and
was never found, even though he had been wearing a bright red jacket.
This is spite of a massive search carried out over many weeks(4). In the
second place, as such writers as Harvey Broome, Paul Fink, and Paul
Adams have documented, the Great Smoky Mountains in the first three
decades of the twentieth century were both more and less wild than they
are today. More wild, in that many of today's popular hiking destinations,
such as Mt. LeConte and a number of peaks along the State Line Range,
were much less accessible, reached by very primitive trails or by none at
all, but less wild, in that farms and settlements covered much of the park
that is today wilderness, in that logging operations with extensive networks of rail lines extended up many valleys, and in that even some of the
highest and most remote areas such as Spence Field above Cades Cove
were used as summer pastures by herdsmen.
The nature of the Great Smoky Mountains both as a densely forested
wilderness and as a comparatively heavily settled and logged area and the
changes that have occurred as a result of its designation as a national park
have greatly affected the literature which the park has produced. This
literature spans the period from the 1920's and 30's to the present and
ranges in genre from the scholarly history of Michael Frome to the personal
hiking diary of Harvey Broome to the keenly informed naturalist observations of Ross Hutchins to the environmental polemic of Edward Abbey.
This literature reveals over the past 50 or 60 years a growing understanding
of the importance of wilderness and its preservation at the same time that
it serves to humanize and to make less alien the very wilderness it celebrates. It has contributed, in other words, both to the name and to the
history of the Great Smoky Mountains.
In his journal for 1962 Harvey Broome meditates on a friend's opposition to the practice of giving names to mountains or other features of
wilderness landscape. Broome concludes: "Such a practice would impose
47
�a terrific curb on use. People would not be inclined to go to places that had
no names. Maps would be next to useless . . ."(238). Paul Shepard, in
explaining how language is necessary to man's control of his environment,
observes similarly: "The words mediate between the otherness, the incredible and seemingly chaotic diversity, the existential solitude, and our necessary construct of the world/' He adds: "An environment without place
names is fearful" (41). If Broome and Shepard are right, then literature and
wilderness would seem to be incompatible since to name is a primary
literary act and all literature and all recording of history are a form of
naming. Yet without the name, the history, and the literature, we would
have no conception of wilderness and no way of valuing it.
One means of humanizing the non-human and of creating a history
and a value for the wilderness is to associate the mountains with particular
individuals and to lend to those individuals an almost mythical stature, to
link them with values which the writer associates with the mountains. At
times one finds this linkage creating a kind of chain, connecting a man in
the present with one in the past who was closer to the "original" wilderness and the latter with one in the more distant past who was yet closer.
Michael Frome, for example, in his Strangers in High Places, the most scholarly, complete, and conventional of the "histories" of the Smokies, uses
this technique throughout. He opens his history by recalling a hike up the
Chimney Tops which he took one January day with Harvey Broome and
John Morrell, both old men who had hiked the Smokies all their lives, men
capable of recalling what it had been like in 1913 or 1918, and both with
impeccable conservationist credentials, Harvey a past president of the Wilderness Society, friend of Olaus Murie and William O. Douglas, and John,
a land buyer for the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association
which acquired parcels of land for the park. Although Broome was, as
Frome says, in anything but robust health, he was able to leave the
younger author gasping for breath, becoming for Frome an emblem of an
indomitable strength and courage drawn from intimacy with the natural
world. Frome develops even further this association of Broome with the
Smokies in his later essay called "When the Mysterious Owl Called in the
Great Smokies" published in the collection Promised Lcyid. There he recalls
Broome's death and a hike in Greenbrier Cove where Broome's ashes were
scattered by his wife, making him physically at one with the land with
which he had long been spiritually kin. As Frome eulogizes him, "He was
out there when the temperature dropped to fifteen below zero, and the
trees cracked and popped throughout the night, and the ice froze on his
eyebrows and eyelashes, and the water froze in his canteen. And yet
without complaint because this was, after all, part of experiencing the
natural world" (1O1).
In Strangers in High Places Frome also recounts the stories of other,
more distant, men, who are thereby even more easily converted into leg48
�end, men like Little Will Thomas, the white chief of the Cherokee, William
Bartram, the gentle botanist of unimaginable courage, Arnold Guyot, the
Swiss geologist who first charted the mountains. But perhaps the most
important of these figures for Frome is Horace Kephart—important because, like Frome, he was the outsider who came to know both the land
and its people intimately and because in a time when relatively few people
were concerned about conservation, Kephart recognized the danger of
uncontrolled logging in the Smokies and urged the establishment of a
national park there. It is Kephart who serves as the model for Frome and
who defines the role Frome strives to play. In one chapter Frome joins local
hunters for a bear hunt and in another he seeks out and wins the trust of
a moonshiner, in both cases closely paralleling chapters in Kephart's Our
Southern Highlanders. Thus Frome's history becomes not only a chronological account of human events but a linked series of human beings all related
in similar ways to the land.
Harvey Broome's journal Out Under the Sky of the Great Smokies also
creates a human history for the mountains by linking together a series of
outdoorsmen and conservationists, some native, some not, who are in
touch with the true values of wilderness. He describes a hike, for example,
with Wiley Oakley, the already legendary "roaming man of the mountains/7 who died in 1954 and whose jokes and tall tales had been recorded
in Laura Thornborough's 1937 volume The Great Smoky Mountains. Of similar importance in Broome's journal, although of greater national fame, is
Justice William Douglas, with whom Broome often hiked and camped.
Douglas, like Broome, suffered a childhood and adolescence plagued by ill
health, which he describes in Of Men and Mountains, and like Broome,
through his love of the outdoors developed strength and endurance. Similarly in the chapter on the Smokies in Douglas7 My Wilderness: East to
Katahdin, Broome figures as prominently as he does in Frome's Strangers
in High Places so that for Douglas, as for Frome and Broome, the significance of the land is mediated through the men who are identified with it.
Another way in which the literature of the park serves to humanize
the wilderness is through the memory of previous experiences in an individual's life. In a Romantic, almost Wordsworthian way the writer remembers the landscape as it was linked to his own life in the past. The result
is a poignancy which deepens the reader's sense of the land as having a
history because it is a fixed point in the history of the man. Broome's Out
Under the Sky of the Great Smokies is particularly rich in such memories, and
the further one progresses in the journal the more prominent do the
memories become. One can watch in these pages the history of man and
the land accrue over the years. Two quotations from the journal for 1959
will illustrate this quality well:
49
�We climbed on steeply and with some fatigue. But eventually
the massed laurel thinned out and broke into clumps. Broad
sods of grass appeared and we emerged upon Spence Field,
which I had first trod through an impenetrable fog on the Easter
weekend 37 years before (214).
By coincidence I met Marcovitch on the street today and he
recalled the trip to LeConte with "Prof" Essary in 1922. He
remembered that when we worked our way out to what is now
known as Myrtle Point, the top of LeConte was so untrailed
that we had to nick blazes into the trees to find our way back
to Cliff Top.
That was the best trip I ever had/ he said. He remarked on the
changes that have taken place—the roads, the lodge on LeConte—and finished, It'll never be like that again'" (212).
The land is not only connected to our history, it has its own history
as well. Partly that history is geological and occurs in geological time.
Several books—Frome's and Abbey's for instance—describe this geological
history—the formation of the mountains hundreds of millions of years ago
and their service as a refuge for botanical species during the last ice age.
But the surface of the land has a history too, and it can be observed in
much less than millions of years. In September of 1951, for example, a
once-in-a-century storm struck Mt. LeConte, dumping four inches of rain
in an hour and creating a savage flash flood. On Sept. 16 of that year
Broome surveyed the damage: "The destruction in the Alum Cave Prong
outdid all the rest. There was no semblance of the usual boulder strewn
creek bed. Gravel had been deposited evenly in what was the stream bed.
. . . The confusion of trunks and limbs was undescribable" (103). And
seven years later in 1958 Broome was still recording the devastation
wrought by the flood.
The creation of the national park made possible the observation of
another kind of process in the Smokies—the process of nature's healing
the scars left from the logging and farming of earlier years. For those who
can read, the surface of the earth, its texture and form, and the vegetation
it supports are a language and embody, just as words do, a history. A
virgin forest looks different from a second growth forest, not only in size
of trees but in species. A heavily grazed field feels different to the foot from
an ungrazed one. Broome and Hutchins are two writers who can read this
language. For example,
The even growth of the tulip trees around the Chimneys campground told the story of former occupation and open fields better than words (Broome, 235).
50
�Surface conditions in western Smoky have changed greatly
since the termination of grazing, now about a quarter of a century ago. During the grazing era the ground was tough, firm
turf. On this most recent trip, each time we left the trail I was
struck by the sponginess of the earth all the way from Double
Springs to Buckeye Gap (Broome, 278).
On the side of Clingman's we could see the converging bands
worn into the surface by the log skidders, now grown up in
briars and undergrowth. But the spruce and balsams were absent from those belts of use and grew only in the less disturbed
areas between. The broad outlines of man's doings could be
read at a glance (Broome, 267).
The appearance of the Great Smokies has changed radically since the
establishment of a national park. So too our ability to see, to understand,
and to value the land has altered, as has our conception of the purpose of
a national park. Books on the national park written early in its history,
such as those of Laura Thornborough and Elizabeth Skaggs Bowman are
filled with pride in the land that both authors knew well and with a desire
to share its natural beauty. Yet there is lacking in these books any sense
that the mountains are finite and mortal and can be as irreparably harmed
by the administrative exigencies of a national park as by the depredations
of a logging industry. Bowman, for instance, in describing the grandeurs
of a drive from Newfound Gap to Clingman's Dome, the highest point in
the park, along the crest of the main range, writes hopefully of the expectation that that road will be extended along the state line crest some 35 miles
further west, to Deal's Gap, thus bisecting the park lengthwise as was
done in the Shenandoah. This road plan, once a cherished goal of Tennessee Senator Kenneth McKellar, has not been even mentioned for decades
and is now as inconceivable as clear cutting on the sides of Mt. LeConte.
Another road plan, to cross the main range from Bryson City, NC, to
Townsend, TN, was a very real possibility about 20 years ago, but far from
being welcomed it was angrily attacked in the literature of the late sixties
and early seventies, and in fact was probably the reason for the existence
of some of this literature. Michael Frome, for instance, in his essay in
Promised Land, speaks of the conception of Strangers in High Places, which
he says was originally intended as a guidebook, but was redesigned as a
much more complete history and appreciation of the wilderness as a way
of participating in the transmountain road controversy. The Promised Land
essay is itself a more overt polemic against the highway as Frome cele51
�brates the leaders of the fight against the road, including one Rufus Morgan, 81 years old and a fifth generation mountain man.
Another polemic, more acerb but ultimately less successful, which
appeared at this time, was the text contributed by well known novelist and
naturalist Edward Abbey to accompany the photographs of Eliot Porter in
the Sierra Club book Appalachian Wilderness. Although Abbey lived for a
time in Western North Carolina and worked at what he calls the University
of Western Carolina, his text shows all the marks of being written on
assignment and his familiarity with the park restricted to one impressiongathering trip of a couple of days in the winter of 1970. His impressions
are therefore rather thin, being limited to a drive across the transmountain
highway (although he deplores automobiles) and two short walks to the
most popular tourist destinations—the two mile walk to Alum Cave and
the half-mile walk to the Clingman's Dome summit. A three and a half
mile walk to Charlie's Bunion proves a little too daunting for him—it's
thirty degrees outside and as he says, "No day for a walk to Charlie's
Bunion" (40). He fills the space his assignment requires with quotations
from the informative signs provided by the Park Service and with his
polemic against towns like Gatlinburg and against all roads in national
parks. He had made the same points before in Desert Solitaire, and in fact
the argument deserves to be made. Abbey's tone, however, is so uncontrolled and his persona so out of harmony with his argument that had the
road controvery not already been settled by the time his book appeared,
his book would probably have done more harm than good. After insisting,
for example, that roads have no place in national parks, Abbey happily
presses the accelerator: "Without any sense of self-contradiction, I drive
my own little car up into the mountains. The road is here, I might as well
make use of it, I've been taxed cruelly to help pay for it, I'd be a fool to
walk and let the other motorists blow their foul internal-combustion gases
in my faces" (37).
A far more persuasive document in the road controversy of the late
sixties is the last entry in Broome's journal, dated October 28, 1966, describing a Save-Our-Smokies hike from Clingman's Dome to Elkmont, a
total of seventeen miles. 576 had begun the hike; a remarkable 234 had
finished it. A few weeks earlier Broome had proven conclusively the existence of red spruce on Miry Ridge, part of the route of the hike and part
of the area that would have been seriously disturbed by the new highway.
These red spruce grew beyond what had been previously regarded as the
westernmost limit of the species in the park, enabling Broome to demonstrate that "the engineers for the proposed new road had picked the precise point where the northern conifers gave way to the southern hardwoods" (Broome, 283). If the road were built, "The rearguard of the last
ice age, along one of the great ecotones of the continent, would be wiped
out" (284).
52
�As a result of the diligent and determined efforts of many private
citizens, writers, and members of the Park Service, that road was never
built, nor in the last 20 years has anything comparable even been suggested. Jesse Helms now leads a lastditch struggle to build a road along
the north shore of Fontana Lake, but his success seems improbable. One
can now wholeheartedly agree with William Douglas when he remarks in
My Wilderness that in respect for wilderness values and in restricting the
encroachments of civilization the Great Smoky Mountains is "close to a
model" for national parks (180). And through a study of this national park
literature one can recognize and applaud the extent to which our understanding of the purpose of the national park has grown from the concept
of a managed "park" with an emphasis, as Broome says, "on scenery and
size" to a concept of unmolested wilderness with an appreciation for "the
complexity of the land organism" and "the infinitely interlocking animal
and plant worlds" (Broome, 169).
In describing how the landscape comes to have such significance for
us, Paul Shepard says: "Because the environment echoes dream and visionary forms, is dotted with named, sacred, anthropomorphic and specially remembered places, and comprises a ground of intermediate space
arrayed with plant and rock entities to which our apehood responds in
entangled and impulsive ways, we are always on the threshhold of legendary places" (46-47). For the best of these writers and for their readers, the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park becomes a legendary place, humanized through a history and a set of human associations yet ultimately
mysterious and strange, beyond our comprehending or possessing. As
Douglas writes, "This is a forest filled with so many wonders, one man
could not ever know them all, even if he saw it every season and examined
it from the fungi of the forest floor to the tops of the wild black cherries"
(161). Ross Hutchins does examine the forest almost this minutely and the
marvels he lays bare for us intensify the mystery. He finds things most of
us miss: the ant-spider, a spider which is antlike in body form and coloration; the ant-loving cricket, living within an ant's nest and feeding upon
secretions from the ants' bodies; the oil nut, a member of the sandalwood
family and parasitic upon the roots of rhododendrons. This wonder of a
book, focused on a mountain valley above Elkmont shows us how much
stranger than we ever thought the world really is.
The literature of the mountains gives names, records history, and
strives to know the unknowable. But it must ultimately confront the mystery, which is communicable only through symbol. For several the symbol
is an owl. For Douglas: the Smokies "mean the barred owl calling on a
moonlight night" (156). For Broome: " . . . I heard the truncated call of an
owl. That broken falsetto—whoo-whoo—is the wilderness articulate. Man
must not drive the owls to extinction; he needs these windows of sound
53
�and sight for a look into a world other than his own" (130). For Frome,
who, significantly, writes of an owl that cannot be identified or named:
During the night we heard a really beautiful owl call. I don't
know what kind it was, but it was a different kind of owl than
I've ever heard. . . . It could have been a saw-whet or a shorteared or something weird—it was not a great horned or barred
owl.
It was something mysterious that seemed to come out of the
wilds of Mount LeConte as the voice of the wilderness. . . . It's
calling to say it needs a place to be wild in (Promised Land, 112).
References Cited
Abbey, Edward. Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains. New York: Ballantine,
1973.
Adams, Paul J. Mt. LeConte. Knoxville, 1966.
Bowman, Elizabeth Skaggs. Land of High Horizons. Kingsport, TN: Southern Publishers, 1938.
Broome, Harvey. Out Under the Skies of the Great Smokies: Personal Journal. Knoxville: The
Greenbrier Press, 1975.
Douglas, William 0. My Wilderness: East to Katahdin. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961.
Fink, Paul M. Backpacking Was the Only Way: A Chronicle Camping Experiences in the Southern
Appalachian Mountains. Johnson City, TN: Research Advisory Council, East Tennessee State
University, 1975.
Frome, Michael. Promised Land: Adventures and Encounters in Wild America. New York: Morrow, 1985.
Strangers in High Places: The Story of the Great Smoky Mountains. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1966.
Hutchins, Ross E. Hidden Valley of the Smokies: Naturalist in the Great Smoky Mountains. New
York: Dodd, Mead, 1971.
Kephart, Horace. Our Southern Highlanders. New York: MacMillan, 1913.
Shepard, Paul. Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature. New York:
Knopf, 1967.
Thornborough, Laura. The Great Smoky Mountains. Rev. Ed. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee
Press, 1956.
54
�Jesse Stuart's Archetypal Vision of
Appalachian Culture: The Thread Still
Runs True
Edgar H.^
Thompson
Jesse Stuart was a natural-born storyteller so driven by the urge to
create, to share his world, that he had neither the time nor the patience
to hone his writing into great art. Still, in his fiction and non-fiction, Stuart
created an image, a perception, an archetype that I think captures the
essence of the Appalachian region. From my first acquaintance with his
work in high school to my subsequent reading of most of his writing, I
gained a sense of my cultural heritage that has never left me.
My life, however, has certainly not been a carbon copy of Stuart's,
nor have the lives of other readers whom his writing has touched. I have
never lived in a small cabin or shack; never ridden a mule anywhere.
However, there is something about his experiences, the themes and feelings that arise from them, that do ring true to me and I think to most
Appalachian people, whether from small towns or large cities or from the
highlands or the lowlands within the region. In this paper, I will explore
some of the themes and feelings that arise from Stuart's writing and relate
them to both the Appalachian culture and to the larger consciousness of
main-stream America.
TO WIN RESPECT BY BEING UNIQUE, BY OVERCOMING GREAT
ODDS
In the first two paragraphs of "A Ribbon for Baldy," Stuart's narrator
describes feelings that most native Appalachians have felt, usually with
great pain, at one time or another.
The day Professor Herbert started talking about a project for each
member of our General Science class, I was more excited than I had ever
been. I wanted to have an outstanding project. I wanted it to be greater, to be
more unusual than those of my classmates. I wanted to do something worthwhile,
and something to make them respect me.
I'd made the best grade in my class in General Science. I'd made
more yardage, more tackles and carried the football across the goal line
more times than any player on my team. But making good grades and playing
rugged football hadn't made them forget that I rode a mule to school, that I had
55
�worn my mother's shoes the first year and that I slipped away at the noon hour so
no one would see me eat fat pork between slices of corn bread. [179-180]
The italicized lines in the above passage [The added emphasis is
mine] reveal a tremendous sense of inferiority in relation to others. They
also reveal an equally powerful desire to somehow win respect, and to do
so by doing something unique, something to make "them," whomever
"them" might be, to recognize the spark, the genius, the human being
beneath the dress, the behavior, or the language that didn't fit the norm.
This feeling of inferiority described in Stuart's story reveals a very
real and never-ending conflict within many Appalachians. We typically
have not felt inferior to anyone. However, people from outside the region
have laughed at us and cast us in a negative light, suggesting that something about our background and experiences, our social context or milieu,
was lacking in relation to the rest of the world. We have been angered by this.
Sometimes we've kept our mouths shut; other times we've "set people straight."
No matter how we have responded to such inaccurate aspersions, many of us have
come to feel defensive about our backgrounds, at least when talking to "outsiders."
Part of this defensiveness may come from the geographic isolation that exists within
the Appalachians. The inability of people within the region to maintain contact
with the rest of the world, has created a sense of alienation, of being out of step,
though satellite televison has diminished this feeling somewhat.
Whatever its source, most of us have been made to feel inferior, or
at least defensive, about our backgrounds, and many of us still feel it.
Thus, when we read Stuart's description of his feelings about the upcoming science project, though many of us may never have worn our mother's
shoes to school, we know what he is talking about, since we too have felt
this way before. As a result, we eagerly read to see whether or not he is
going to succeed at the task he set for himself, which was to plant the
longest corn row in the world. It turned out to be approximately 23 miles
long, corkscrewing its way up and around Old Baldy. At the end of the
story, a picture of Stuart's narrator and a story about his corn row appears
in the local paper: "When the article and pictures were published, a few
of my classmates got a little jealous of me but not one of them ever laughed
at me again" [182]. Though the ending to the story is formulaic, we celebrate and cheer when he receives the recognition he so dearly wanted,
because we also want such recognition.
This feeling of wanting to win recognition and respect never left
Stuart, just as I suspect it has never left many of us. Such behavior is not
uncommon among Appalachian people, nor is it in anyway unique. For
example, I've been a magician, finished college in three years, and earned
a doctorate, among other things. What's your story? Being laughed at or
belittled does something to us that we never forget, though hopefully we
learn to deal with it. In the The Thread That Runs So True, Stuart's success
gives us added confidence to continue our own struggle.
56
�NATURAL KNOWLEDGE VS. BOOK KNOWLEDGE
Stuart's characters are more than just colorful in speech and dress.
They are smart. Some possess great school knowledge; others, like Stuart's
father, have great knowledge of the natural world. Both kinds of knowledge play important dual roles in Stuart's writing. He believed and respected both kinds equally. In his story "Testimony of Trees," Stuart
shares a good example of how natural knowledge can make an important
difference in people's lives.
Jake Timmons, a coniving land-grabber, conspires with the county
land surveyor to prove that commonly accepted line boundaries specified
in the deeds of several parcels of land are inaccurate. With the surveyor's
support, he has won 40 court cases and confiscated hundreds of acres of
property for himself. When Timmons challenges Mick Stuart, Mick decides
he isn't going to give in. He goes to West Virginia to get his uncle who has
previously been involved in many line disputes.
Uncle Mel turns out to be quite a character:
Carrying a double-bitted ax and a turkey of clothes across
his shoulder. . . . Uncle Mel was eighty-two years old, but his
eyes were keen as sharp-pointed briers and his shoulders were
broad and his hands were big and rough. He had been a timber
cutter all his days and he was still a-cuttin' timber in West Virginia at the age of eighty-two. [Ill]
Uncle Mel helps Mick, and a lot of other men to get their land back,
because he knows so much about trees. If a tree has been blazed or
marked, it maintains a scar on the outside bark as well as on the inside.
As a result, when Uncle Mel followed the description in the deed, he
looked at the outside of the trees for the outward scar and then chopped
into it to find the original blaze. By then counting the number of growth
rings from the original scar, he could substantiate that each tree was one
of the orginal trees described in the deed. Unless you had worked in
timber, you might not know this information. Book knowledge is important, but then so is natural knowledge.
This love of both book knowledge and natural knowledge still exists
in many people in this region. My colleague Bob Raines is a good example.
A professor of mathematics and education at Emory & Henry, he is a
superb teacher, writer, and speaker. He also loves the outdoors, rides
horses, knows wildflowers, and is a walking encyclopedia on Appalachian
lore. Such a combination of interests is not that uncommon in the region.
57
�LOVE OF THE LAND
Though Stuart himself went beyond what he called the dark hills for
a time, he finally had to return. It was among the hills that he felt at home,
at peace, in touch with who he was as a person. In his first collection of
short stories, Head of W-Hollow, the last line of his prose-poem introduction
summarizes his feelings about the Appalachian region, "a place under the
sun, walled in by the wind and the hills—nowhere for many—somewhere
for some" [5].
Often, people in the region become frustrated at the difficulties of
day-to-day living caused by geography. As a result, they loose sight of
what they have. In "This Farm for Sale," it takes Melvin Spencer, a real
estate agent who has a gift for writing descriptively about the places he
plans to sell, to convince Uncle Dick Stone that he has far more "wealth"
than he realized he had. Stuart, through the real estate advertisement of
Melvin Spencer, describes the Stone farm in such a romantic, alluring way
that only a fool wouldn't be attracted to the place.
Consider Spencer's description of the land:
This peaceful Tiber River, flowing dreamingly down the
valley, is a boundary to his farm. Here one can see to the bottoms of the deep holes, the water is so clear and blue. One can
catch fish from the river for his next meal. Elder bushes, where
they gather berries to make the finest jelly in the world, grow
along the riverbank as thick as ragweeds. [42]
Consider Spencer's description of the lunch that he had when he
visited the farm:
The proof of what a farm produces is at the farm table. I
wish that whoever reads what I have written here could have
seen the table prepared by Mrs. Stone and her two daughters.
Hot fluffy biscuits with light-brown tops, brown-crusted corn
bread, buttermilk, sweet milk (cooled in a freestone well), wildgrape jelly, wild crab-apple jelly, mast-fed lean bacon that
melted in my mouth, fresh apple pie, wild-blackberry cobbler,
honey-colored sorghum from the limestone bottoms of the Tiber, and wild honey from the beehives. [42]
The above passage almost sounds like Grandpa Jones on Hee Haw
describing "what's for dinner." Who, in their right mind, wouldn't want
to live in such a place? Uncle Dick quickly changes his mind after reading
Spencer's description: "I'm a rich man and didn't know it. I'm not selling
this farm" [43].
58
�Perhaps because the outside world seems to offer more in the way
of job opportunities and modern conveniences, or perhaps due to the
frustration over geographic isolation, at times some of us may have come
to believe that living anywhere else would be better than living where we
do, in the Appalachians. Stuart points out in this story that when we start
to feel this way, we really need to look around us. Maybe we have far
more going for us than we think.
Despite complaints about the isolated geography, the difficulty of the
terrain has, in fact, not only provided people with sustenance but also
provided them with their primary sources of recreation. Almost everything
people did in Stuart's part of Appalachia was done in relation to the land
and to each other. As Stuart put it in The Thread That Runs So True,
People had learned to play musical instruments to furnish
their own music just as they had learned to plant, cultivate, and
harvest their crops for their food supply. They depended upon
themselves for practically everything. [78]
When Stuart was teaching at Winston high school, the land was
almost another member of their family. Their learning, their lives were
lived close to and in harmony with the land:
I went with my pupils, their parents, and neighbors to
cornhuskings, apple-peelings, bean-stringings, square dances,
and to the belling of the bride when there was a wedding. . . .
There was somewhere to go every night. I couldn't accept all
the invitations. [78-79]
Such behavior is still common today. People visit each other frequently within the Appalachian region, depending on themselves, not
outside stimuli alone, for entertainment and social contact.
This love of the land is an enduring one that begins in childhood and
extends into old age. When Stuart's father was seventy years old and not
far from death, he took Jesse with him as they made their way to a small
clearing located on the highest point in W-Hollow. An Appalachian's love
of the land is probably best described by Stuart's father in "A Clearing in
the Sky."
"Fertile," he laughed as he reached down and picked up
a double handful of the leaf-rot loam. "This is the land, son!
This is it. I've tried all kinds of land . . . !
"But, Dad
" I said.
"I know what you think," he interrupted. Your mother
thinks the same thing. She wonders why I ever climbed to this
59
�mountain-top to raise potatoes, yams, and tomatoes! But, Jess/'
he almost whispered, "anything grown in new ground like this
has a better flavor. Wait until my tomatoes are ripe! You'll never
taste sweeter tomatoes in your life!" [128]
He goes on to tell Jesse that when you get to be his age, seventy years
old, "You go back to the places you knew and loved" [129].
No matter where we as Appalachians go, there is always a longing
for the land and the people who populate it. The people and places that
Stuart describes may not be exactly like people and places we have known,
but all natives of the region are familiar with the kinds of things he talks
about. What native has not been to a pie social or a cake walk at one time
in their lives? Which natives have not eaten the meal of their lives at a farm
table? What native has not been at the top of mountain somewhere in the
region and been at peace just smelling the fragrances of wood, pine, and
wild flowers, celebrating the beauty of a sunset or sunrise, and wondering
about what might lie over the next mountain?
When I was in Vietnam, one of the first paintings I did for recreation
was a mountian scene. Images of the land and the people and the relationship between the two are powerful ones, and they create very strong
feelings within us. There are elements of mystery, suspense, and eternal
hope in such feelings, and in almost everything he wrote, Stuart captured
these elements. Through his description and attention to detail and nuance
of language, his writing stimulates these feelings about the land in us.
THE PEOPLE
Stuart's characters are certainly a colorful lot. For example, notice the
way people are dressed for the corn-shucking party in Hie to the Hunters:
As the men walked, ran, and jumped over the cornfield,
holding to their wives' and their lovers' hands, the handles of
their pistols above their holsters on their hips shone like polished silver in the moonlight. The red bandannas around their
necks, their red, brown, and gray shirts with stripes and checks,
and the gay colors of the women's dresses were autumn colors
like the leaves still clinging to the trees. It was a night filled with
brightness from the floor of the rugged earth to the tops of the
trees. [152-153]
Now most of us have probably not been to a social gathering where
the men wore guns in holsters, but we have been to events where everyone was colorfully dressed in clean, colorful, yet common, work clothes.
60
�The language and customs at this party are particularly noteworthy.
Notice how Stuart captures the peculiar idiom of speech.
"Now each man with his wife and each young man git his
partner/' Peg shouted. "Young couples, ye'll go to the bottom
of the slope and shuck the bottom shucks. Yer legs are young
and powerful. We older folks have climbed too many mountains/'
"Okay, Peg, we're ready," Slim Winters said as he took
Olive Kilgore by the hand. "We're ready and a-rarin' to go!"
[151-153]
It's not the dialect but the phrasing and the content of these interactions that is revealing. Many natives of this region, even if their regional
dialect has disappeared, will fall back into this kind of speech pattern on
informal occassions. For instance, haven't you heard educated people use
expressions like "a little skiff of snow," "falling weather," "He really
cleaned my plow," or "one brick shy of a load"? Such expressions, which
we accept as commonplace, are unique and reveal an Appalachian way of
looking at the world.
As hard as life sometimes was in Jesse Stuart's world, many of his
characters were humorous. In "Hot-Collared Mule" just simply dealing
with the difficulties of working with a mule who had to have its collar hot
before it would work were hilarious. It certainly wasn't funny to Mick and
Shan, as they were running themselves nearly to death to get Rock the
mule warmed up so it would work.
"Keep that mule a-goin'," Pa hollered as I passed by where he was
sitting on a log under the shade fanning himself with sourwood leaves.
"Run 'im until he's hot as blue blazes!"
"He's a-gettin' warmed up," I grunted to Pa as I passed him on the
second lap.
"Fetch 'im around agin and I'll tak 'im," Pa said. "Just be keerful and
don't do any hollerin'."
"All right, Pa," I grunted as I came in on my last lap. "It's your time
now."
"Hit'll be the last time one of us has to run this mule," Pa said as he
took the lines.
Pa couldn't run as well as I could, for he was older and his legs were
stiffer and his breath came harder. While I sat fanning, I watched him go
out of sight, running stiff-legged like a cold buck rabbit in the winter-time.
The twist of burley leaf was jumping up and down in his hip pocket as he
made the turn to climb the hill.
"Hit's a hard way to git a mule to work," Pa grunted as he passed
me going into his second lap.
61
�I was fanning fast as I could fan. I had cooled down some, but my
clothes were wet as if I had jumped into the river.
When Pa came around on his second lap, I didn't think he'd make it.
But he did. His face was red as a sliced beet, and his clothes were as wet
as mine were. But a sweaty foam had gathered under Rock's flanks and
his shoulders were wet around his collar.
"He's in shape to work now," Pa said as he dropped to the ground.
[88-89]
I have excerpted this passage slightly, but still, I can clearly see Mick
and Shan running that mule, getting the mule—not themselves mind
you—into shape to work. They weren't trying to be funny, but nevertheless, what they were doing was hilarious. Notice Stuart's straight delivery
of the facts. He lets the characters' language, their actual behavior, and the
situation itself communicate the humor.
THE THREAD STILL RUNS TRUE
I claimed at the beginning of this paper that Jesse Stuart's writing
reveals an archetype of Appalchain culture. If this is true, what is this
archetype and how is it revealed? Is it suggested through the feelings and
emotions that are stimulated in readers by his writing? Are the themes in
his writing peculiarly Appalachian? The answer to both questions must in
part be no. Even though the experiences he described and wrote about
took place in the Appalachian region, the feelings and emotions that arise
from his writing can be felt by anyone and ascribed to any culture. His
themes are also not uniquely Appalachian in character. People from other
cultures also love the land and possess a strong sense of and attachment
to place. People in other regions of this country and the world practice
customs and dress in ways that we consider quaint. Most human beings
who actively participate in life are driven to succeed and to overcome great
obstacles. The conflict between book knowledge and natural knowledge
certainly transcends this region.
The substance of Stuart's Appalachian archetype relies on more than
themes and feelings. As Stuart created his fictional world, or rather described the world in which he lived, i.e., the area in and around W-Hollow
in Kentucky, he accomplished something of great importance. Through his
careful attention to detail, his lively characterization, his ear for the language and idioms of the region, and his narrative power in both fiction
and non-fiction, he created a place, a context, a cultural milieu that provides us with a cross-section of life, as he saw it and lived it, during his
lifetime in the Kentucky hills. He captured for all time a way of life that,
in its detail, has essentially disappeared. To read his fiction is to enter a
world, magical in quality, that doesn't really exist anymore. Our imagination combined with our own experiences—which have taken place in simi62
�lar, yet different, situations or contexts—meld with Stuart's world or vision. The end result is an Appalachian world picture created during reading that is unique in structure.
Probst claims that:
literature should enable readers to find the connections
between their experience and the literary work. If it does so, it
may enable them to use literature, to employ it in making sense
of their lives. [34-35]
Jesse Stuart managed to foster such a link between his writing and
his readers' imaginations and personal experiences. The synergy created
by this link results, I think, in an archetype of both what readers and
natives of the region know and feel about Appalachian culture. It is a
common thread, first woven by our ancestors before most of us were born,
re-spun by Jesse Stuart, and re-created by us during reading. It is a thread
that still runs true.
References Cited
Probst, Robert E. "Dialogue with a Text/7 English Journal 77.1 (1988): 32-38.
Stuart, Jesse. "A Ribbon for Baldy." A Jesse Stuart Reader. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963.
178-182.
"Clearing in the Sky." Land of the Honey-Colored Wind. Ed. Jerry A. Herndon. Morehead, Kentucky: The Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1981. 124^130.
"Head o' W-Hollow." Head o' W-Hollow. Lexington, Kentucky: The University of
Kentucky Press, 1979. 3-5.
Hie to the Hunters. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950.
"Hot-Collared Mule/' Land of the Honey-Colored Wind. Ed. Jerry A. Herndon. Morehead, Kentucky: The Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1981. 88-97.
The Thread That Runs So True. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958.
'This Farm for Sale/7 Land of the Honey-Colored Wind. Ed. Jerry A. Herndon. Morehead, Kentucky: The Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1981. 3^44.
"Testimony of Trees." Clearing in the Sky. Lexington, Kentucky: The University of
Kentucky Press, 1984. 105-117.
63
�Across the Mountains: Appalachian
Literature and the Unsuspecting Student
ty
Teresa Wheeling
"My name's Alpha Baldridge," I said as I walked into the classroom.
"Ever since I married Brack I've been driven from one coal camp to another. I've lived hard as nails. There's lots of coal camps in eastern Kentucky, and I reckon I've lived in half of them." This was my introduction
to James Still's River of Earth, and my students didn't know what to do. A
few giggled, some fidgeted uncomfortably, others merely sat there, their
mouths agape. Soon, though, everyone was caught up in the story, following Alpha through her family's struggle with hunger, the death of her
baby, the death of her mother, and the birth of another child.
James Still created Alpha Baldridge and her family in 1940, and forty
odd years later, Still's characters are still alive, still growing, and still
affecting an ever wider range of readers, among them, my own freshman
writing students at Radford University. Appalachian literature has as
Wilma Dykeman says, "dealt with experiences as unique as churning butter and as universal as getting born" (18). Though it details the culture of
the Appalachian mountains, the region's literature has a universality
which enables students to make connections with their own lives, whether
they be from the mountains or urban Washington D.C.
My first experience teaching River of Earth was not an overwhelming
one. The response of my students, most of whom originated from urban
Northern Virginia and the coastal areas, was not staggering. Still, the few
native Appalachian students I had made vital connections with their own
experiences, and several of the others progressed from an immediate dislike of the novel to some kind of appreciation for what Still was attempting.
And so last year I assigned the novel again, this time determined to
do anything I could to see to it that the novel had an effect on them. At
first their reactions were the same as the previous year's. "It's so boring I
fall asleep when I try to read. I can't understand the language." All the
same, something was different, and the more I examine that difference,
the more I see that it was a difference in me, not my students. The year
before I had felt I had to defend the novel and my heritage; I had felt
threatened by unflattering comments directed at the novel and the way of
life it represented. Even after years of soul searching and trying to understand what it meant to be Appalachian, I was still falling for the stereotypes. I was still defending "us" against "them." No wonder I often felt
64
�like I was pulling teeth when we discussed the novel in class. My students
weren't stupid; they knew I had created opposing teams.
Then as I was preparing my syllabus last year I found a quote by Jim
Wayne Miller. "This is the function of the writer—," he said, "to help us
see, and see into, our place, our experience, our lives in the world" (20).
At that moment I realized what I was after. I didn't want my students to
judge the people in River of Earth or their lifestyle. I didn't want them to
dwell on the differences. I didn't want them to say, "Those people have
nothing to do with my life." I wanted to push them to find similarities,
strands that bound them together with the people in the novel, strands
that bind all of us together as human beings.
And so, in early March I plunged ahead once again. One of the
novel's themes is the conflict between Still's husband and wife, Brack and
Alpha Baldridge. The best starting point, I thought, would be to engage
the students in that conflict. Through much of the novel Brack gives food
and shelter to his uncle and cousins who abuse the family's sacrifice by
grumbling about what they have and taking far more than their share.
Alpha is appalled by Brack's actions, for they are depriving her three
children and infant son of the food they need to survive, and as a last
resort she burns the house, the only way she knows to ensure that Brack's
kin will leave. To highlight this struggle, I walked into class on the first
day of discussion dressed as Alpha. My students were, as I said earlier,
unsettled at first, but Alpha quickly captured their attention.
After hearing Alpha's side of the story, it was time for the students
themselves to wrestle with the issue which confronted Brack and Alpha.
Was Brack right to share the family's food and shelter with others and in
doing so endanger the lives of his own children, no matter how noble his
intentions? Did Alpha overstep her bounds when she burned down the
house? Was it possible to say that either character was right or wrong, or
was it simply a case of two people struggling for survival, each handling
the situation in the way he thought necessary? Such was the task of the
students as they drew from the coffee mug slips of paper which would
determine which side of the argument they were to defend. Then, lined
up facing each other on opposite sides of the room, the battle began. One
group slithered to the back to relieve themselves of the burden of arguing,
leaving those who were more intense in front to fight it out. It quickly
became apparent that Brack and Alpha would each have one principal
proponent, while the others defended their champion's points. At times
the argument became vicious, and one student refused to say anything in
class for a week because many in the class took issue with her relentless
argument for Alpha's point of view. When the argument was over and
hurt feelings soothed, one thing was clear—Still's characters had become
more than words on paper to these kids. They were real people, people
worth arguing about, people worth caring about.
65
�Seeing their reactions in class, I was even more curious to see how
my students would respond in writing, both in their response logs and
critical essays. Again, I saw that Still had struck a chord. Though the
Baldridge family's lifestyle was far different from that of my students, they
had found a way to connect with the novel. "All this time I've snided off
all this Appalachian 'stuff/" responded one student in her log. "Well if
this is what it's like, bring it on! I expected the book to be some dumb
mountainy thing. I'd eat my words in a heartbeat. I love it. I cried with the
family when things were hard and when the baby died. Are all of James
Still's novels this good? If so—look out library, here I come" (Leftwich).
The authenticity of Still's characters as human beings was backed up
by my students' ability to draw parallels between the Baldridge family and
their own relatives. Sarah wrote:
In many ways, the Baldridges with their strength and feeling of family togetherness help me to see my own family
through different eyes, through eyes of courage, respect, and
oneness. I realized after reading River of Earth, how special and
important my family is to me. And I think that each of them,
the Baldridges, helps to make up each one of us. I see parts of
Alpha, Brack, Grandma, and the others, in my mother, my
father, my brothers, and mostly in my -grandfather, "pop." I
feel more closely bonded with my family and that I have a better
understanding of them since I read James Still's River of Earth,
(Atkinson)
Several students from the Appalachian region were able to draw
more detailed parallels, for example, this young man from the coal fields
of southwestern Virginia.
My grandfather stayed in my mind as I read the novel.
He was a working coal miner all his life, but the coal mines
being as unstable as they were, and still are today, left him
unemployed a great deal of the time. As far as I know he never
had another job, when the mines closed down he farmed and
occasionally logged, making barely enough to keep food on the
table. When my grandmother and grandfather were married
they lived in a twelve by twelve one room cabin with four other
family members. My grandmother has told me about her just
sitting and crying all day long because there was no food, and
they had no land to farm. (Hayes)
I was especially interested in Timmy's response because he showed
an understanding and deep appreciation for the hardship his grandparents
66
�endured. I think Timmy realized that his grandparents' perseverance
helped make it possible for him to attend college instead of spending long
days in, as he once called it, "that endless black hole in the ground."
Linda, a middle-aged student also from Southwest Virginia, found
similar comparisons:
Just as Brack seemed to be a "born coal miner/' my Father
seemed to be a "born farmer." He never worked in a government-sponsored job; he was always his own boss and strove to
make a better life for his children and my Mother. Mother feels
sad when she remembers how hard my father worked, how
many joys he passed to his family yet died before he could see
the fruits of his labor. (Nye)
Ironically, the response that showed most eloquently and passionately the effect of Still's writing came from Murdock, a native of the Eastern Shore.
Being a person who grew up never hearing the word Appalachian, much less about its people, places, or culture, I
placed the book down with a sense of being allowed through
the author's eyes and words to actually step into another world
alien and unknown, and through the course of the story learned
about the mountain people as if I had actually lived there. . . .
In many ways my people were similar to the Mountain
Folks in that they were proud, and somewhat secluded people
who lived off of the land around them, in that while the boys
were trained to help their father's father, and their own so that
they could take their place when the time came, the girls were
raised to be homemakers, and tempered to support their men
when fishing was poor, and crabs hard to find. Until as late as
the 1940's to be raised in a fishing family meant that a fisherman
you would be, and a pride was held in knowing that your labors
(sometimes fatal) went to feed thousands of people, most of
whom never knew you existed, or for that matter cared. It was
a hard life with days starting before the sun, ending hours after
dark. Many times the men would place nets and crab-pots in
the murky bay for four days straight, returning only long
enough to send off the fish, and get supplies for the next trip.
My own grandfather would sit with the children, and he would
tell us of things that happened while out on the Bay, while he
would carve a duck-decoy from a piece of drift-wood. I have
seen his hands scarred from the razor shells of clams, and the
spikes of horseshoe crabs. I remember his face wrinkled like a
67
�piece of sail, and the texture of his skin rough from years spent
in the salt air of the Bay, that murky-blue mistress that greeted
him at birth, fostered him through life, and ultimately advanced
him to his death. He was no mighty sailor like those he would
tell us about, nor was he a mighty fisherman like those he
worked under. My grandfather was just a man, a proud one,
but a man all the same who worked hard to survive, and meet
much of his labor with pain, and finally death. I was of the later
generation, and wasn't brought up in the ways of my grandfather, and I regret not knowing more of that man and of his life.
To James Still I owe a debt that I cannot repay because through
his story, and living with his people through his book I have
been given a greater insight into my own heritage, and a deeper
respect for it, and for its people. . . . (Hodges)
That River of Earth could evoke such a response is a credit both to the
power of Still's writing and to the universality of Appalachian literature.
Though I was pleased with the writing the novel had prompted, my
students' most invigorating response to River of Earth came in another
form. In addition to teaching the novel in class, I was also in the process
of writing my Master's thesis, a dramatic interpretation of Still's story.
Because I needed to see and hear the characters in action, I asked for
volunteers from my classes to put together a small production of the play.
Even I was amazed at what happened. Five of the six people needed
volunteered the first time I asked, and only one needed to be enticed with
the promise of a grade before consenting to take part. Watching that play
come together was a wondrous event, one I'll never forget. There was, of
course, the normal horsing around, for example, the soap bubbles which
mysteriously appeared in Alpha's churn during one practice, but as the
weeks wore on I was impressed with the commitment with which each
student attacked his or her role.
The cast list sounds like a cultural and geographic who's who.
Christi, a native of Roanoke, Virginia who never knew she was Appalachian before reading River of Earth, brought life to Alpha, and though a
woman of the eighties, she seemed to draw strength from the hardship
Alpha had endured. For a short time Tim, a heavy metal rocker, became
Brack, a coal miner doing the best he could to feed his family. Stacia, a
native of Maine, worked hard to capture the innocence of the novel's
young narrator. Matt, who has spent most of his life moving between
Indiana and Richmond, took on the perspective of the narrator in later
years, a young man reflecting on his childhood in the mountains of Kentucky. Billy, a punk rocker who sported a mohawk until several weeks
before the play's performance, was drawn to Jolly's devil-may-care attitude
and lighthearted humor.
68
�The evenings we spent in Young Hall were long. Memorizing several
pages of dialogue in an unfamiliar dialect wasn't easy; it was difficult to
remember to say "seed" instead of "saw," "heered" instead of "heard."
Although the dialogue surely didn't sound like James Still's intention, that
wasn't important. It was important that the Baldridge family had come to
life, regardless of the dialect in which they were portrayed. Still's characters had spoken to these students not in any dialect, but in a universal
language, a language expressing the feelings and emotions we all share
as human beings. A month and a half before, most of those students had
never heard the word Appalachian, but on that night the words they spoke
and the feelings they portrayed transcended any region. On that night
my students took their final steps across the mountains.
References Cited
Atkinson, Sarah. "River of Earth, A Story of Familyhood." Unpublished essay, 1987.
Dykeman, Wilma. 'The Literature of the Southern Appalachian Mountains/7 Mountain Life
and Work 40 (Winter 1964): 7-18.
Hayes, Timmy. Unpublished essay, 1986.
Hodges, Murdock. Unpublished essay, 1987.
Leftwich, Christi. Reading response log, 1987.
Miller, Jim Wayne. "Jim Dandy: James Still at Eighty/' Appalachian Heritage 14.4 (Fall 1986):
8-20.
Nye, Linda. "River of Earth Analysis." Unpublished essay, 1987.
69
�Agriculture in Preindustrial Appalachia:
Subsistence Farming in Beech Creek,
1850-1880
by
Paul]. Weingartner, Dwight B. Billings, and Kathleen M. Blee
Beech Creek, a neighborhood first defined and studied by James
Brown (1950/1988) in 1942, is situated in the hills of eastern Kentucky in
the heartland of Central Appalachia. In his ethnographic account of Beech
Creek, Brown described isolated portions of East Kentucky outside the
coal mining districts as being still engaged in the subsistence oriented
farming which had been characteristic of Appalachia nearly a century before. He comments that, "Then, as now, the Mountains had an economy
of subsistence farming" (1950, p. 36). Brown also described Beech Creek
as a relatively isolated area, noting that entry into the neighborhood was
only possible by maneuvering over harsh terrain and up a dried creek bed
either on foot or by pack animal. Linking the reality of geographical isolation to the state of the local economy, Brown claimed that, "the effect of
geographic isolation was increased by the region's economic self-sufficiency which made contact with other areas relatively unnecessary and
infrequent" (1950, p. 37).
Although Brown's work on Beech Creek focused on kinship structures and social stratification, the first chapters of his ethnography provide
a historical account of eastern Kentucky and Beech Creek in the mid to late
nineteenth century. Brown's account incorporated what Beech Creek inhabitants themselves were saying about their ancestors and vividly described what the life of the region's earlier inhabitants had been like. The
information contained in these chapters and the rich genealogical information which Brown obtained from the inhabitants of Beech Creek provide
the starting point for our work.
The value of ethnographic information must not be understated. In
other interest areas of social history, abundant primarily historical sources
such as church and court records, personal diaries, and business logs
facilitate historical reconstruction. Social historians have been able to rely
upon such sources in writing detailed accounts of New England farm
families and their agricultural relations of production, for instance, which
suggest new directions for Appalachian scholars (Billings, Blee, and Swanson, 1986). Many social historians of the Appalachian region, however,
find their work made more difficult by the shortage of such sources, in a
70
�region with predominantly oral traditions. In the absence of such sources,
ethnographies of rural community life in preindustrial Appalachia often
provide valuable historical insights (Billings and Blee, 1987). But many of
the accounts that provide us with the views of the Appalachian farmer,
such as the literature of local color writers from the late nineteenth century, have almost exclusively been written by persons who were not from
the region and have been subject to exaggeration and distortion. Shapiro
(1978) suggests that many writers erred in stressing the "otherness" of
Appalachia as a region set off from modern life. Some such accounts, as
in Pearsall (1959), document the production methods of Appalachian farmers with the effect of imposing an inferior status on them while excluding
the socio-economic realities that they faced. These accounts often speak
of subsistence production but offer little or no evidence as to its actual
extent or its mix with commercial farming.
Our particular approach in writing a social history of agriculture in
Beech Creek is one which intersects primary data on agricultural production and demographic change with Brown's research on the Appalachian
rural community and other recent literature on the Appalachian region.
We attempt to avoid the negative stereotypes and condescending notions
of the literature of the pejorative tradition by relying on Brown's ethnography—one which is the result of Appalachians talking about their ancestors—as a secondary source of information about Beech Creek during the
preindustrial era. To supplement Brown's text, we utilize primary historical data compiled from US censuses and Kentucky tax rolls.
The question we have chosen to ask in this paper—whether or not
Beech Creek farmers were producing at a subsistence level—is one that is
often asked by social historians of Appalachian communities. Until recently, however, the answers researchers have given have been based
mostly on the speculative writings of a variety of authors. No one has
shown definitively that Appalachian farmers were primarily subsistence
oriented producers or that market relations were based on a kinship network because of the conscious choices of producers and consumers as others such as Hahn (1985) contend. In fact, some recent accounts, such as
Dunn's (1988) study of Cades Cove, Tennessee, posit commercialized
farming as the predominant form of nineteenth century agriculture in the
mountains. By integrating data from historical records with what Appalachians say about their past and their ancestors, we hope to be able to
provide a more informed account of preindustrial agriculture and its characteristic social relations of production practices in Beech Creek.
This paper is a preliminary description of our current research. First,
we describe the methods we have used to create data sets from the manuscript records of the US Census. Secondly, we illustrate a particular
method we used for calculating the level of agricultural production in
Beech Creek in 1880. This method estimates whether individual farm units
71
�were producing at merely a subsistence level or on a level at which production exceeded the consumption needs of farm families. Lastly, we integrate
the information generated from these methods with what Brown has said
about preindustrial agriculture in Beech Creek.
In his ethnographic study "Social Organization of an Isolated Kentucky Mountain Neighborhood" (1950), the isolated rural neighborhood
of Beech Creek and the surrounding neighborhoods of Flat Rock and Laurel were define^1 by Brown not only in terms of geographical proximity but
by the specific nature of relational ties which "connected" the farm families
in a social grouping: "By 'neighborhood' (Brown) meant a 'real social group
. . . a group of individuals . . . bound by some ties or bonds . . . which unite
them into one social group in life and not only on paper7" (Brown, 1950,
p. 142).
In reconstructing the Beech Creek community for the years 18501880, we employ a historical method that includes farms in the Beech
Creek area based on the sequence and proximity of farms enumerated on
the agriculture census schedules for the respective years. The method does
not capture first hand observations of real life social ties but it does assume
that proximity on census pages reflects geographical and, consequently,
social proximity. The genealogies traced by Brown in 1942 were the starting point for this data collection. Names of the ancestors of Beech Creek
inhabitants were found listed on the population schedules for the census
years of 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880. Those persons (and their neighbors)
who were listed as heads of households and who were designated as
"farmers" were then located on agricultural census schedules for the corresponding years. When exact matches resulted, the names of farmers and
information about their farms were included in the data sets for each year.
Additional names and farms were also included in these data sets
according to the following method advanced by Daniel (1978). The enumeration pages of agriculture schedules for each census year are read
starting with the names of families who were directly matched from the
population census. Assuming that the census takers walked up and down
creek beds, from farm to farm, while soliciting census information, names
which were listed on the census pages between the names which were
directly matched are also included. Although this method includes more
families than actually existed in what was later defined as Beech Creek by
Brown, a rigid definition of Beech Creek is not important because we are
primarily tracing family groups rather than merely a geographic area.
The agriculture data sets created by this method for 1850, 1860, 1870,
and 1880 contain information on land, cash value, and production yields
for 56 farms, 59 farms, 133 farms, and 86 farms, respectively. We have
used these data sets to generate information concerning average cash value
of farmland and farm production, average size of farms, average numbers
of livestock, and average yields of crop production over time in Beech
72
�Creek. (Table 1 contains a partial account of this information for the census
year 1880.)
TABLE 1
LAND, CASH VALUE, and PRODUCTION YIELDS
BEECH CREEK, KENTUCKY, 1880
VARIABLE
MEAN
NO. OF FARMS REPORTING
Unimproved Acres
Improved Acres:
filled acres
acres of pasture
160.1
21.3
14.0
51
Cash Value of Farm
Value of Machinery
and implements
Value of Livestock
Value of All Farm
production
Value of Forest
products
$460.77
$ 22.35
83
79
$140.95
$150.50
82
80
$ 67.28
76
1.4
1.9
11.6
14.4
47
72
50
46
251.3
39.2
36.9
2.6
74
37
25
38
Horses
Milk Cows
Swine
Sheep
Indian Corn (bushels)
Wheat (bushels)
Oats (bushels)
Dried Beans (bushels)
65
82
Total Number of Farms: N = 86
Preliminary research tells us how much each farm unit produced,
what the value of that production was, what the value of the farm itself
was, and how each of these variables changed over time. This information
alone, however, does not provide information relative to the topic of subsistence. Hence we searched for a method whereby we could determine
whether Appalachian farmers were producing at a subsistence level or at
a level which resulted in surplus. Tentatively, we are suggesting the use
of a method adopted from two historical economists, Roger Ransom and
Richard Sutch (1977) that relies on data available in the Agriculture Census
73
�of 1880 to determine whether or not the particular farmers in that year
were producing a surplus. This method utilizes data on crop yield, crop
acreage, number of livestock, number of farm laborers and family members and informed estimates on seeding requirements, the corn-equivalence of crops based on nutritional information, and reproduction requirements for livestock, farm laborers, and family labor. It requires that the
total production of all basic food crops be converted into corn-equivalent
units and that the requirements for reproducing the farm unit be deducted
from this amount. The result indicates either a level of production below
subsistence or one at above subsistence, e.g., a "surplus."
Similar methods have been used by other researchers with substantially different emphases. As suggested by Ransom and Sutch, many studies have de-emphasized the extent of food production while exaggerating
the farm unit's consumption (see, Gallman, 1970). In their research, Ransom and Sutch suggest estimates that are more "conservative" in order to
exaggerate production and de-emphasize the amount consumed by the
farm unit.
We are using the revised estimates of Ransom and Sutch in this
project to provide empirical evidence of whether or not each productive
unit in Beech Creek was producing at or above a subsistence level. Subsistence, in this analysis, is thus defined as the level at which the production
unit, the farm, can reproduce itself. Calculations which yield a zero or
non-negative sum indicate production at or above subsistence level for
particular farm units. We consider a farm unit to be capable of sustaining
itself if the production of the unit exceeds the estimated required consumption. In using the conservative estimates of Ransom and Sutch, we have
thus biased analysis in the direction of exaggerating production and deemphasizing consumption. Therefore, the likelihood of a zero sum or nonnegative sum resulting from the calculations is increased.
The calculation of surplus in corn-equivalent bushels is as follows:
The estimated seeding requirement percentages provided by Ransom and
Sutch are multiplied by the number of acres cultivated of a particular crop,
and this product is subtracted from the total outputs of eleven essential
grains and food crops produced. This net output is then converted to
corn-equivalent units by multiplying it by estimated corn-equivalent conversion ratios also provided by Ransom and Sutch. This product is then
aggregated and equals the total net crop production (TNGP) in cornequivalent units The product of the feed allowance in corn-equivalent
bushels for five basic farm animals (horses, oxen, mules, milch cows, and
sheep) and the actual number of each on the farm, the total livestock
consumption (TLC), is then subtracted from this total. Likewise, the product of the necessary requirements for reproducing the farm laborers and
family members and the actual number of each on the farm, the total unit
consumption (TCU), is subtracted from this difference. The resultant dif74
�ference, the surplus food residual (SFR), is the surplus in corn-equivalent
units produced by each farm in 1880.
Having described these methods, we now turn to an integration of
Brown's work with the information provided by the data from 1880. Brown
described Beech Creek as having been isolated from national and international economic markets by self-sufficiency. Though Brown characterizes
late nineteenth century agriculture in Beech Creek as small scale production oriented toward sustaining the farm unit, he also indicates that small
surpluses were produced.
In determining levels of production, we attempted to differentiate
between crops that were used to sustain the farm unit and those which
may have been produced for market. In looking at the historical record of
Beech Creek farming, therefore, we concentrate on crops that were produced to sustain the farm. (These averages and totals are listed in Table 1.)
In 1880, production was focused on diversified staple crops. Indian
corn was produced by seventy-six of the eighty-six farm units and average
production was of 247 bushels produced on an average of thirteen acres.
Corn was used as a staple crop for feeding the farm family and other
persons on the farm and also to feed livestock, although open grazing was
probably more important for the latter. Wheat production was less common among Beech Creek farmers—only thirty-seven out of eighty-six produced the crop. Of these thirty-six producers, an average of 39 bushels
was produced on an average of seven acres. Another feed grain, oats, was
produced by twenty-six farmers. These farmers produced an average of
37 bushels of oats on an average of six acres. Other crops that were specifically grown to feed the family were beans and potatoes: thirty-eight farmers produced an average of three bushels of dried beans, and irish and
sweet potatoes were produced by ten and eleven farmers, respectively, at
an average of 13 bushels and 26 bushels.
Tobacco was also produced on a small minority of farms: four farms
produced the crop, three of which produced less than forty pounds and
one which produced 300 pounds. Wool was produced on 46 of the 86 farms
at an average of 19 pounds per farm. There was no cotton produced in
Beech Creek. Further research is required to determine the significance of
these crops to the local economy.
Almost all the farms had some sort of livestock. Most common were
milk cows and swine—milk cows were present on 73 farms with an average of two per farm and swine were present of 51 farms with an average
of twelve per farm. Forty-six farms raised sheep with an average of 14
sheep per farm. Barnyard poultry are also found: 81 farms raised poultry—
averaging 23 birds per farm—and produced an average of 47 dozens of
eggs.
Work animals were also kept. The most common were horses, mules,
and working oxen: forty-seven farms had at least one horse per farm;
75
�twenty-one farms had at least one mule; and eighteen farms had an average of 2 working oxen. The average value of livestock on 84 farms was
$142.38
All but two farmers indicate that they utilized at least one acre of their
farm in 1880 for crops. The average tilled portion of 84 farms was 21 acres.
Fifty-two farms indicate an average of 14 acres of cleared pasture and 66
farms had an average of 160 acres of woodland. The value of the land on
85 farms averaged $473.81, however, the lowest land value was $4 indicated by one farmer and the highest value was $2000 indicated by three
farmers. Only thirteen of the 85 farms were valued at more than $1000
while 64 of the farms were valued at or less than $500. Despite an egalitarian ideology, Beech Creek farms were stratified by differences in landownership and the wealth in 1880 just as they were when Brown first observed
them in the 1940s. The average value of all farm production on 82 farms
was $148.11 with no farm exceeding $500 in total farm production value.
This information indicates production level amounts and values of
Beech Creek farms in 1880 but it does not provide sufficient information
to determine the social significance of such amounts and values. Intuitively, it is obvious that there is a difference between producing 10 bushels
of corn and producing 200 bushels, but how can this difference be made
significant in determining what effect producing either 10 bushels or 200
bushels of corn had on respective production units. How are the effects
of differential production to be ascertained? At this point we turn to the
method of calculating surplus food residuals.
The case of Charles Barker illustrates the utility of our methodology.
In 1880, Barker, at thirty-four years old, was the owner of 103 acres, of
which 19 were cultivated, 9 were in pasture, and 75 were woodland. The
value of his land, buildings, and fences was $500. With his wife Nancy,
who was twenty-one years old, and four children, he produced indian
corn, wheat, beans, and rye. The Barkers had two horses, one milk cow,
and several sheep. The value of these animals was $200. Including the
production of fifty dozens of eggs and fifty pounds of butter, the total
value of all farm production for the year, consumed, sold, or on hand, was
$100.
To calculate the production of surplus, the known variables are: 200
bushels of corn produced on 12 acres; 12 bushels of rye produced on 4
acres; 25 bushels of wheat also produced on 4 acres; 2 bushels of dried
beans; 2 horses, 1 milk cow and 7 sheep; and the six family members. The
corn-equivalent ratios for wheat, rye, and dried beans are 1.104, 1.05, and
.946 respectively. The seed allowance for indian corn is .125 bushels per
acre; for wheat, 1.5 bushels per acre; and for dried beans, .08 per bushel
yield. The feed allowances for the animals are 35 bushels per horse, 5 per
milk cow, and .25 per sheep. Lastly, there is a 15 bushel per family member allowance for the reproduction of labor. With this information, then,
76
�the calculation of the production of surplus in corn equivalent units for
1880 on Charles Barker's farm can be represented:
Total Net Grain Production =
(200-. 125(12)) + 1.104(25-1.5(4)) + 1.05(12-1.5(4)) + .946(2-.08))
= 227.5 bushels
Total Consumption of Livestock =
35(2)+ 5(1)+ .25(7)
= 76.75 bushels
Total Consumption Of Unit
15(6)
= 90 bushels
Surplus Food Residual
227.5-76.75^90
60.75 bushels
With these calculations we have established that the production on
Charles Barker's farm exceeded the amount needed to sustain the farm
unit by almost 61 corn-equivalent bushels. According to our definition of
subsistence production, then we would conclude that this particular farm
was producing at a greater than subsistence level of production.
An example of a farm not producing at a subsistence level is that of
Joseph Andrews. Andrews, who in 1880 was 46 years old, lived with his
wife, Nancy, 45, their eight sons, one daughter, one daughter-in-law, and
a niece and nephew, on 742 acres of land. 650 of these acres were woods,
32 were pasture, and sixty were used for crops. The total value of the land
and buildings was $1750. Andrews produced just two crops: corn and
wheat. In 1880, he produced 500 bushels of corn and 65 bushels of wheat.
Andrews had 3 horses, 1 mule, and two oxen on the farm, as well as 2
milk cows, 40 sheep, and 15 pigs. His livestock was worth $400. Including
200 pounds of butter and 100 dozens of eggs, total farm production was
valued at $300. When the surplus food residual is calculated for Andrews,
we find that his farm was producing at below the subsistence level by 34
bushels.
We have calculated the surplus food residual for 84 farms in 1880 to
determine the average total net grain production, the total consumption
of each farm, and how many farms were producing at or above a subsis77
�tence level of production and how many were producing below subsistence. The average surplus food residual for 84 farms is 82 corn-equivalent
bushels. 29 farms were producing below subsistence level and 55 were
producing above subsistence level. The average total consumption of livestock is 65 corn-equivalent bushels. The Andrews case illustrates that even
though the historical record may show high value, an abundance of land
and livestock, and what appears to be high production, when the consumption level of the farm unit is considered, actual production was often
less than at a subsistence level. The importance of this method, then, lies
in its consideration of not only the objective production amounts obtained
from the census records but also of the necessary consumption of the farm
unit. When consumption is used as the second variable in the equation
that indicates subsistence level of production, the information concerning
production becomes more relevant to the topic of subsistence.
Social historians of the Appalachian region have begun to understand
the significance of the manuscript census records in light of the available
ethnographies of the region's rural communities in the preindustrial era.
The agriculture census schedules from 1850 to 1880 provide a wealth of
information about agricultural production on individual farms in many of
the region's areas, including Central Appalachia. When this information
is utilized in conjunction with the economic methods of Ransom and
Sutch, levels of production can be assessed which indicate whether or not
farms are producing at or above the level at which the farm unit can sustain
itself, the subsistence level. The use of all three of these types of information—ethnographies, census records, and data generated from the methods of Ransom and Sutch—is extremely important in presenting a more
informed description of agriculture in preindustrial Appalachia.
How did so many farm families that remained in Beech Creek survive
below the level of subsistence in the late nineteenth century? Pruitt, in a
study of 18th century Massachusetts which found 38% of all farms falling
below the standard for self-sufficiency, suggests that 18th century New
England farms were integrated into networks of production, cooperation
and exchange that made "subsistence possible on farms that were not
sufficient" (1984:349).
A similar inter-household economic subsistence network clearly operated in 19th and early 20th century Beech Creek. Some farm households
supplemented below-reproduction level farm production with the proceeds of hunting, fishing and trapping, sources of food supply not measured in the Ransom and Sutch equation, yet we speculate that the major
factor in their survival was the kin network.
Although census manuscripts do not record kinship relations beyond
that of households, we believe that we will be able to show that the
strength of family groups that Brown documented in 1942 was rooted in a
pattern of interdependent subsistence from the previous century. Family
78
�and kin relationships made possible the reproduction of marginal and
below-subsistence farms through inter-household strategies of survival.
Case by case examination of the census materials reveals numerous examples of young household heads producing at the edge of subsistence (or
below) but living up or down creekbeds near households headed by fathers and brothers, both producing a surplus. Extra-household strategies
of cooperation, which the original Beech Creek researchers found to be so
important for understanding the migration experience and urban adjustment of rural Appalachians as they relocated in Midwestern cities after the
Second World War (Schwarzweller, Brown, and Mangalam, 1971), seem
already to have emerged as an essential feature of nineteenth century
Appalachian family life.
Bibliography
The authors would like to recognize James S. Brown for his initial work on Beech Creek. The
authors also thank Gaye Holman, Jack Thigpen, and Jane Bagby for their help in collecting
the data and Cecil Tickamyer for his assistance with computer programming. Data collection
was supported with a grant from the Economic Research Service of the USDA. Requests for
reprints of this article should be addressed to: Paul J. Weingartner, Department of Sociology,
University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, 40506.
Billings, Dwight B., and Kathleen M. Blee, "Household Structure in a Preindustrial Appalachian Community: Beech Creek, Kentucky, 1850-1942." Forthcoming.
Billings, Dwight B., Kathleen M. Blee, and Louis Swanson, "Culture, Family, and Community in Preindustrial Appalachia." Appalachian Journal 13:2 (Winter 1986).
Brown, James S., Beech Creek: The Social Organization of an Isolated Kentucky Mountain Neighborhood. (Berea, Kentucky: Berea College Press, 1988).
.. "Social Organization of an Isolated Kentucky Mountain Neighborhood/' Phd Dissertation. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1950).
Dunn, Durwood, Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community, 18181937. (Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1988).
Gallman, Robert E., "Self-sufficiency in the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South."
Agricultural History 44 Qanuary 1970).
Hahn, Steven, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the
Georgia Upcountryf 1850-1890. (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).
Pearsall, Marion, Little Smokey Ridge: The Natural History of a Southern Appalachian Neighborhood.
(Birmingham, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1959).
Pruitt, Bettye Hobbs, "Self-sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth Century
Massachusetts." William and Mary Quarterly, 41:3 (July 1984).
79
�Ransom, Roger and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Schwarzweller, Harry K., James S. Brown, and J.J. Mangalam, Mountain Families in Transition:
A Case Study of Appalachian Migration. (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1971).
Shapiro, Henry, Appalachia On Our Mind. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North
Carolina Press, 1978).
Smith, Daniel Scott, ''A Community-Based Sample of the Older Population From the 1880
and the 1900 United States Manuscript Census." Historical Methods, 11:2 (Spring 1978).
Government Documents:
United States Census Office. Tenth Census of the United States, 1880. Vol. 1 (Population) Washington Government Printing Office, 1884.
Tenth Census of the United States, 1880, Vol. 3 (Agriculture) Washington Government
Printing Office, 1884.
80
�Biculturalism: A Comparison of Central
Appalachians and the Inupiat of Alaska
by
Nelda K. Daley
Abstract
Biculturalism is a term used widely to discuss the conflict between
Appalachian and dominant culture and is found often in the writings of
Appalachian scholars. This term is not used widely by other subgroups in
the United States such as Native Americans, Blacks, and Hispanics. The
term is used extensively by the Alaskan Eskimo. In interviews with native
people of the Inupiat, a subgroup of the Inuit, at Point Barrow Alaska
during the winter of 1987 the term was frequently used to describe their
efforts to accommodate themselves to the impact of the petroleum industry
on their native culture which is based on hunting and gathering.
Several parallels between the development of coal in Appalachia and
oil in Alaska lead to comparisons of how biculturalism played an adaptive
role. Both regions were isolated with little or no infrastructure. Both regions maintained a subsistence barter economy with marginal participation in a monetary economy before development of an extractive single
industry economy. Both regions had gone through periods of boom and
bust and there has been little attempt at encouraging a diversified economy
or an indigenous professional/middle class. In both cultures education
tended to be brought to the region by "missionaries" who denigrated the
indigenous culture and encouraged outmigration of the "better" students.
Although there are similarities in economic development and both
groups now identify themselves as bicultural, biculturalism has developed
somewhat differently in the two regions. These similarities and differences
will be explored in the paper.
Introduction
In interviews in Central Appalachia, especially southwestern Virginia, and Barrow, Alaska, the term biculturalism was used or eluded to
by informants who felt that 1) they wished to preserve values of their
subculture that differed from dominant culture and 2) they needed to
accommodate dominant culture in order to survive and prosper.
These two groups, mountaineers and the Inupiat, at first glance appear to be very different. Central Appalachia is a fertile ecological niche
81
�while Barrow on the Arctic north slope is frozen tundra that is virtually a
dessert. Mountaineers are western Europeans, except for the black population, and therefore physically indistinguishable from other Americans. The
Inupiat are Inuit and considered part of the mongoloid grouping with
features that clearly distinguish them from whites. Central Appalachians
are not an indigenous people but in migrants who drove out Native Americans. The Inupiat are Native Americans who have been dislocated by
whites.
Closer analysis show some significant similarities. Both areas were
developed by outlanders and in both cases the primary development occurred around a single non-renewable resource, coal in Central Appalachia
and petroleum on the North Slope. There are also parallels in how these
resources were developed. Both regions were isolated before development, Central Appalachia by the mountains and Barrow by the cold, with
little or no infrastructure. Both regions had developed a subsistence barter
economy with marginal participation in the monetary economy. Through
development both regions had gone through boom and bust cycles and
there had been little attempt by developers at encouraging a diversified
economy or an indigenous professional or middle class. Both cultures had
developed a set of values which are strikingly similar, emphasizing selfreliance, operation and sharing (Lewis, Kobak. and Johnson, 1978; Chance,
1966). These values are at loggerheads with the values of competition,
individualism, and self-achievement brought into the regions by developers. In both mountain and Inupiat cultures education tended to be brought
to the area by "missionaries" who denigrated the indigenous culture, substituted dominant white values and encouraged outmigration of the "better" students.
The response of both Central Appalachians and the Inupiat to development and to the assault on their culture has been to develop ways of
"acting" dominant while thinking and feeling in ways that preserve their
culture. Unlike Blacks and Native Americans who also behave in bicultural
ways. Central Appalachians and Inupiats identify themselves as bicultural.
This biculturalism has developed somewhat differently in the two regions
and the similarities and differences will be explored below.
Biculturalism Defined
Lewis, Kobak, and Johnson (1978) use the term biculturalism to illustrate the tension during the process of development between mountain
values of equality, noncompetitiveness and family-neighborhood solidarity and dominant culture values of competitiveness, individualism, and
self achievement. Relying heavily on Memmi's The Colonizer and The Colonized (1965) they point to the family and the church as two refuges where
mountain culture is maintained.
82
�The tension occurs according to their view as missionaries follow
developers into an underdeveloped region. As Mrs. Campbell pointed
out: "suddenly the retarded frontier was rediscovered by two classes:
those who saw the natural resources and sought them regardless of the
interests of the natural owners: and those who with missionary zeal
rushed in to educate and reform" (1925;8). As Lewis, et al. and Memmi
indicate these educators and reformers tended to see indigenous culture
as backward, arrested, primitive, and they tended to denigrate the culture,
pushing to replace it with the culture of the colonizer. This denigration
included all phases of the indigenous culture from arts and crafts to language to norms and values. Education tends to stress not only formal
learning but also stresses resocialization and enculturation into the "right"
culture, the culture of the missionary educator.
As Lewis, Kobak, and Johnson point out the tension between the
family and the school create a dualism, indigenous culture at home and
dominant culture in public. This biculturalism is a source of great
unresolved stress because it causes the native to act in ways that denigrated his own "true" self.
The family encourages biculturalism. The schools create a
duality—a world different from the family environment. Branscome speaks of the "annihilation of the hillbilly" by the institution. Many mountain youth remember the shaming process
when they had to deny their "mother tongue7" reject their music and religion.
.. . Mountain children are taught early to act properly in
public and hillbilly at home. Mountain people learn to deal with
medical, welfare, educational, government institutions and
speak their language and use their techniques. They learn to use
institutions, outsiders, etc. selectively. But the strain is great.
The mountain person is taught how to use the hillbilly stereotype for his own protection and to confound, aggravate, harass,
and thwart the colonizer. (They leave the program planner wondering why that didn't work.) One example is the stereotype of
the laziness, dependency, and irresponsibility which the Appalachian has learned to manipulate effectively in order to sabotage the colonizer's attempts to organize the mountaineer into
pseudo participatory democracy rituals which further splinter
Appalachian solidarity. (Lewis, Kobak, and Johnson. 1978:134135)
Biculturalism as defined here is a learned adaptive behavior in which
the person maintains their native culture, away from the eye of the outlander but tends to enact cultural stereotypes of himself when dealing with
83
�members of the dominant culture. The conclusion drawn by Lewis, et al.
with regard to biculturalism is ambivalent. They quote Memmi's point that
in order to preserve indigenous culture the native must cut himself off,
live in cultural isolation which leads to a situation in which the culture
"hardens, petrifies, and degrades its own life in order to save it"(1978;136).
On the other hand Smathers is quoted as pointing to enacting stereotypes
as "resistance strategies" which could further the saving of Appalachia
(1978,136). In the extended quote above biculturalism sounds much like
the shucking and giving of whitie or Uncle Tomming done by Blacks to
conceal one's real abilities.
Since this article the view of biculturalism and the ambivalence generated by it has been modified by at least one of the authors. Sue Ella Kobak
has indicated that she now sees biculturalism in more positive terms,
namely a combination of the cooperative sharing values of the mountains
with the technical skills and competencies offered by the dominant culture
(Conversations, 1987-1988). For example mountain young people who
seek higher education frequently go into the helping professions. This
allows them the professional status and selfachievement approved by
dominant culture while maintaining a commitment to others, a mountain
value. Further, these professions tend to allow them to return to their
communities, i.e. back to their kin and to the land, as both one of their
own but also someone who can help. These young people can become
professionals while "not getting above their raising." On the other hand,
biculturalism can create some negative combinations. When the personableness of mountain culture gets combined with a desire for acquisition
of material goods and an elite status, traits of the dominant culture, a very
manipulative personality can emerge. Whether positive or negative, this
revised view of biculturalism does not see the indigenous person as
"shucking and jiving" to conceal their "true personality" but rather combining aspects of both cultures to create a "new" character.
It is this latter use of biculturalism that was found among the Inupiat.
Biculturalism was seen as a very positive and desirable ability, one to be
encourahed. It was seen as adaptive rather than as a resistance strategy
and a strategy that allowed for the preservation of Inupiat culture while
being able to use what was usable from white culture and technology.
Chance (1966) in discussing how greater contact between whites and
Inupiat will impact on Inupiat leadership stresses biculturalism (without
using the term).
. . . the leadership role becomes complex. In addition to
being technically proficient at the appropriate tasks, initiating
and directing action, and showing consideration for followers,
the Eskimo leader must have an overt awareness of the conflict84
�ing patterns and values of white and Eskimo culture and be able
to deal effectively with them.
This requires not only sufficient command of English, but
an adequate understanding of those aspects of white society
that have a bearing on community life in the north. . . . [but]
. . . he must be careful not to identify himself too closely
with his white counterpart for fear that community members
will believe he no longer is representing their needs and interests. The leader who ceases to share the norms, objectives, and
aspirations of the group ceases to be a leader. Nor may he be
authoritarian or aggressive in his actions for this goes directly
against Eskimo values. (Chance, 1966:63-64).
These differing views of biculturalism reflect slightly different events
in economic development in the two regions as well as differences in the
ecology of the regions. Below we will explore some striking cultural parallels and then turn to important differences to see how biculturalism has
evolved in the two regions.
Parallels
Appalachian and Inupiat cultures contain values that are very similar.
These values revolve around self-reliance and individualism, sharing, cooperation and the family as the basis of society and community. Lewis
describes Appalachian culture as follows:
The main aspects of the culture that were fought for and
were the hardest to change were mainly patterns of relationships which can be described as basically non-competitiveness.
Family members and neighbors depend on each other, but it is
a dependence which also encourages independence of "let the
other fellow alone." People help each other in time of need; they
share the load; but this help is not imposed nor organized and
leaves room foe independence and individuality.
. . . To keep a sense of equality and noncompetitiveness,
a "local success" or ambitious hillbilly almost has to leave his
family and neighborhood and live with the colonizers. In his
small neighborhood he will be sabotaged and people won't help
him. He will be put down as not neighborly and "out for himself."
. . . Equality is still important. Mountain people resist experts, titles, and people who put on airs or get above their
raising. (Lewis, Kobnak and Johnson, 1978:133-134)
85
�Jones confirms these values by pointing out that Appalachian society
stresses self-reliance, neighborliness, familialism, and personalism. He
points out that we "do not want to be beholding to other people" (Jones,
197:102), but at the same time it was a compliment to be "clever," i.e. "to
be hospital, quick to invite you in and generous with food" (102). Further,
"we will go to any lengths to keep from offending others" (102) and have
a sense of "responsibility to one another that extends to cousins, nephews,
nieces, uncles and aunts and to in-laws" (102). Finally, "we know that he
[man] fails, often, and we are not disillusioned when he does . . . These
beliefs keep us at peace with ourselves. We don't pretend we are something we are not" (103). Jones also points out that Appalachians have a
keen sense of place and a strong identity with the land. In speaking of his
sense of locale he says "and this place is tied in my mind along with my
family and with the people I knew in the growing process" (103). As Eller
points out the "essence of community life" was familialism (Eller, 1982:33).
This society then was one that stressed a sense of equality, that no
one was better than anyone else and that he who was most capable at a
given task made the decisions as to what action to take. A sense of social
class and lines of authority are foreign to this society.
Chance (1966) identified very similar values among the Inupiat. He
points out that there as a "strong current of individualism" in the culture
which "stressed respect for the thoughts and feelings" of others (73). This
individualism was combined with "self-reliance, self-confidence and generosity" (74). Child rearing practices stressed the need for co-operation and
that wishes were more likely to be fulfilled if the child was not "lazy" (75).
Children soon learned that family members were highly
dependent upon each other for many of their comforts and conveniences in daily life .. . Achieving manhood, the adult continued to maintain a strong sense of identification with members
of his own kin group and as such, was more likely to subordinate his own personal interests to the welfare of the group . . .
it is easy to understand why the "poorest" Eskimo was a person
without kin, the individual who had no one to turn to in time
of need. (Chance, 1966:75)
Like the Appalachian the Inupiat stressed equality and leadership
was based more on ability than authority. The leader of a whaling expedition had:
no clearly defined authority over others, for his role as
leader was determined by his own personal qualities and skills.
Except within the family orders and commands were not ex86
�pected from others, and the authoritarian bull met with great
resentment (Chance, 1966:74).
The Inupiat also have a strong sense of place and resist mobility, a
quality frequently seen as problematic by whites (Chance, 1966; Stabler,
1985; Whittington, 1985).
Similar disruptions occurred to both the Appalachian and the Inupiat
with the development of the non-renewable resource, coal and petroleum.
Both moved from a barter economy to a wage economy. Males moved into
the wage economy as unskilled labor. During boom times, 1880-1926 in
Appalachia and 1970-1986 in Barrow, work was plentiful and wages adequate to good. The development of a diversified economy did not occur
however and was not encouraged. No indigenous educated middle class
was encouraged and the main employer of educated indigenous people
was the public service sector of government (Eller, 1982; Whisnant, 1980;
Page, 1986; Stabler, 1985; Whittington, 1985).
These economic changes had very similar impact on the culture
which is best summarized by Whittington in writing about the Eskimo.
He points out that removal from the land and native subsistence patterns
in effect mean cultural displacement as well. Native economy is based on
a culture which places high value on the oollectivity, stress communal
sharing, has no clear sense of private property, and has a reverence for the
land.
The wage economy implies individualism, competition
and inegalitarianism, while the native culture espouses collectivism, consensus, and egalitarianism. Similarly, where the native social structures see authority in terms of a functional division of labor based on ability, the wage economy implies that
power and status are determined by income. (Whittington,
1985:68)
Eller (1982) points to a very parallel problem in Appalachia and the development of coal. As the mountaineer moves from agriculture to company
towns he also looses his sense of identity with the land. As taxes and land
prices soared, opportunities for mountaineers to acquire homes near coal
mines diminished. "This lack of home ownership sorely disturbed many
mountain residents . . . whose family and culture tied him to the region"
(Eller, 1982:196). Dependent on company town facilities and paid in scrip
that could only be spent in these towns the mountaineer became a tenant
in what once was his. Further, the towns created living conditions foreign
to mountain culture. Disposal of refuse was a problem, child and spouse
abuse increased as did divorce. Illnesses uncommon in the mountains as
87
�well as malnutrition also increased. A generation of children were raised
removed from the land yet unable to leave (Eller, 1982:232-234).
Differences
Despite these parallels there are some significant differences between
mountaineers and the Inupiat. The primary difference was in the definition given them by outlanders. Inupiat men who define themselves primarily as hunters and outdoorsmen found that unskilled day labor could
be combined with traditional subsistence activities of hunting and whaling
Secondly, the extreme conditions of the Arctic made whites dependent
on the survival skills of the Inupiat. Inupiat men are seen as hard working
and industrious by whites and the men have made efforts to adapt to white
ways such as accommodating themselves to white work schedules
(Chance, 1966:92).
Eller on the other hand points to the mountaineers resistance to the
ways of outlanders.
The tendency of mountain laborers to take off during certain times of the year to participate in farm activities and traditional customs was especially irritating to the mine operators . . .
Absenteeism, however, was only one way that the mountaineers rejected the industrial norms of the mine managers.
By ignoring work schedules, mining routines, and other innovations which worked at cross-purposes with their traditional way
of life, they sought to maintain their individualism and freedom
from authority. (Eller, 1982:167)
Coal barons felt that mountain men might make good hunters and guides
but were useless as a reliable labor force. Immigrant labor was preferred
and blacks and mountaineers were seen as shiftless and unreliable.
Inupiat men had made some essential and inevitable compromises
in order to adapt to the white system. As Chance points out the Inupiat
are quite pragmatic and accept or reject an idea or technology based on
their view of its usefulness. Mountain men were more resistant to these
compromises.
The Present Situation
Currently among the Inupiat there has been a decline in the high
wage but unskilled jobs in construction traditionally held by Inupiat men.
As capital improvement projects decline and a cutback to maintenance
jobs occurs, there are fewer jobs available and at lower wages. Those jobs
88
�that are available tend to be in the service sector of the government. These
jobs are indoor jobs, require advanced levels of education, and are work
that women have traditionally held in white culture (Worl and Smythe,
1986). These jobs are seen by the men as incompatible with their hunting
schedule (Kruse, 1986) and incompatible with their definition of themselves as hunters (Interviews, 1987). Women are now the main wage earners with 60 percent employed fulltime, year round in white collar jobs
(Worl and Smythe, 1986). Women have moved into these positions because their work in offices is compatible with traditional subsistence activities such as skin sewing and such activities have been abandoned to some
extent by the women (Worl and Smythe, 1986; Kruse, 1986). These traditional activities conferred less status on the women than did hunting on
the men and was less central to their identity. More women have become
well educated and have been encouraged by whites to take these service
occupations that are traditionally female.
The Inupiat women of Barrow see themselves as bicultural, use the
term, and believe that biculturalism is the hope for the future. They admit
that the men are less enamoured of biculturalism and link the men's lack
of enthusiasm to their identity as hunters. Professional Inupiat women
plan to encourage Inupiat children to go to university and return to Barrow
systematically replacing whites in the schools, in the scientific installations
and in the professions. (Interviews, 1987). To that end the North Slope
Borough was incorporated and Inupiat language and culture are encouraged in the schools. However, very serious efforts are being made to get
Barrow children into the University of Alaska and keep them there. Currently, nearly 50 percent of all Barrow High School Graduates enter university.
This biculturalism and the role of women in its latest development
has created some problems. Men are still the primary political leaders but
still define themselves as hunters. They resist this new biculturalism and
see many of the activities of the women as unimportant and/or undercutting their authority. There have been problems of family breakdown, alcohol and drug abuse, and spouse abuse. The women through the mother's
club established the Arctic Women in Crisis which is staffed half and half
by white and Inupiat women. The white staff fully intends to turn the
project over to the Inupiat women (Interviews, 1987). However, these
facilities and the staff positions as well as positions in the government
service sector are dependent on huge government expenditures. As petroleum profits decline and reserves are used up, as capital improvement
declines, less revenue will be generated. If the men, the government leaders, decrease funding in these areas because they see them as "white"
activities that are irrelevant to Inupiat culture, the role of the women will
deteriorate and biculturalism will deteriorate. In interviews in a small
southwestern Virginia community (Interviews, 1986) it was clear that men
89
�in the community had not only experienced a long period of unemployment but were also demoralized. The community had a high illiteracy rate
and there was low motivation for men to seek employment. Many of these
men defined themselves primarily as outdoors men and hunters and saw
little value in acquiring skills or education for jobs that did not exist (Shifflett, 1977; Carawen and Carawen, 1982). The women in the community
had worked in the local sewing factory and when that burnt down worked
with the local development commission to develop both jobs and education. The development commission itself, an incorporated non-profit corporation, had been developed by the local women's club to deal with local
community needs. Although the goal of the commission was not to help
women, in fact it was women who took advantage of and benefited most
from the commissions projects. It was primarilv women who enrolled in
the GED and AA programs, obtained degrees, and worked with the commission to develop jobs. Women then were the most likely to be bicultural,
to acquire the skills and knowledge that make them competitive in the
labor force. Men, on the other hand, were more likely to act out the stereotypical roles of a "hillbilly or redneck/' Men were referred to as "real go
getters" which meant they were willing to give up time from their outdoor
activities to "go get her [the wife] from work." They tended to be less
interested in the educational programs and were less involved in the development commission. Local male political leaders had in fact actively
worked against the commission (Interviews, 1986).
This community also had experienced some serious dislocations.
Family breakdown was common as well as alcoholism and spouse abuse.
Further, the development commission had not been able to generate jobs
for the women commensurate with their education nor had economic diversity occurred. The main goal of the commission to establish a community owned sewing factory would generate over 100 jobs but these jobs did
not require higher levels of education.
Unlike the Inupiat these mountain women have not found a ready
market for their education and skills. If these women are to find employment commensurate with their education, if they are to continue to develop, they will have to outmigrate. In effect, they will cease to be bicultural, giving up their commitment to family and the land.
Summary and Conclusion
There are some clear parallels between mountain society and Inupiat
society with regard to values, patterns of development and the impact of
development on those values. Both societies have utilized biculturalism to
deal with those changes. In both societies it was the men who were initially
bicultural. However, Inupiat men were not negatively stereotyped by
white culture while mountain men were.
90
�Inupiat men could more easily combine their traditional activities
with wage labor than could mountain men. For Inupiats biculturalism was
functional while it was not for mountain men. However, for both societies
as job opportunities declined and/or shifted, men's motivation to be bicultural also shifted. Inupiat men have decreased their investment in white
culture while mountain men have acted out dominant culture's stereotypes.
Women in both societies are currently more likely to benefit from
biculturalism. However, for both groups the conditions that support this
biculturalism is fragile. Among the Inupiat it depends upon continued
government funded white collar and professional jobs. Among mountain
women it depends on the development of jobs commensurate advanced
education.
The future does not look good. Feelings in Alaska are that as oil
revenues decline, the Inupiat villages will disappear. Mostly likely these
women will migrate then to urban areas in southern Alaska where it will
be impossible to maintain traditional Inupiat culture of co-operation, sharing, selfreliance and family solidarity linked to the land as noted by Whittington. The same is true for mountain women unless job opportunities
expand which does not seem likely (Caudill, 1986). These women will
migrate to urban areas outside the region and their mountain ways, so
similar to the Inupiat, will also disappear.
Biculturalism may be a transition adaptive strategy. As development
based on non-renewable resources and a single industry economy fluctuates, so does the need for biculturalism. In the final analysis it appears
that the indigenous culture is absorbed by dominant culture.
Bibliography
Carawen, Guy and Candle Carawen. 1982. Voices from the Mountains. University of Illinois
Press.
Caudill, Harry. 1986. Comments, conference entitled Appalachia: The Land and The Economy
The University of Kentucky, Lexington.
Chance, Norman A. 1966. The Eskimo of North Alaska. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Eller, Ron. 1982. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers. The University of Tennessee Press.
Jones, Loyal. 197 . "Appalachian Values/7 In Ergoode and Kurhe, Kendall/Hunt.
Kruse, John A. 1986. "Subsistence and the North Slope Inupiat: The Effects of Energy Development/' in Steve J. Langdon (ed.) Contemporary Alaskan Native Economies. University
Press of America.
Lewis, Helen M., Sue Easterling Kobak, and Linda Johnson. 1972. "Family, Religion, and
Colonialism in Central Appalachia or Bury my Rifle at Big Stone Gap," in Colonialism in
91
�Modern America: The Appalachian Case, Lewis, Johnson, and Askins (eds.), Appalachian
Consortium Press.
Memmi, Albert. 1965. Colonizer and Colonized. Grossman.
Page, Robert. 1986. Northern Development. McClelland and Stewart.
Shifflett, Peggy. 1977. Women in Appalachia. Unpublished Masters Thesis.
Stabler, Jack C. 1985. "Development Planning North of 60: Requirements and Prospects/7 in
Michael S. Whittington The North. University of Toronto Press.
Whittington, Michael. 1985. "Political and Constitutional Development in the N.W.T. and
Yukon: The Issues and Interests," in Michael Whittington (ed.) The North. University of
Toronto Press.
Whisnant, David E. 1980. Modernizing the Mountaineer. Appalachian Consortium Press.
Worl, Rosita and Charles W. Smythe. 1986. Barrow: A Decade of Modernization. U.S. Department of the Interior, Technical Report 125.
92
�Appalachian Culture As Reaction To
Uneven Development
A World Systems Approach to
Regionalism
Roberta McKenzie
Introduction
The region called Appalachia in the United States has been defined
over the last half century as a culture apart from mainstream America
(Billings, Blee, Swanson, 1986). Such perceptions of Appalachia as different from the rest of society has fostered not only volumes of research on
the nature and causes of this difference, but a reactionary literature to the
negative implications of many analyses.
Since the advent of a coal-boom inspired infrastructure in World War
II, the historically isolated mountain region has been percieved, in the
extreme, as harboring descendants of criminals who were responsible for
their own "backwardness" and poverty (Raitz and Ulack, 1984:336). A
softer, and in some ways more exploitive, image of Applachians is that
they were simply behind and needed to "catch up" to the modern world.
Two important themes, one pervasive during the 1970s, and a second one
which has been developing recently, are intellectual responses to the explanations of Appalachians as possessing a culture that is out-of-step with
the rest of society: 1) The application of the internal colonialism model to
the situation of Appalachians, and 2) the question of an emerging Appalachian ethnic identity. In general, the internal colonial model has been
applied to explain the conditions of Appalachian development as due to
uneven capitalist relations between the region and the rest of the country
(Walls). The question of "Appalachianness" is explored here as a reaction
to these uneven relations and to the definition given to Appalachians by
outsiders.
The World System and Social Order
World Systems theories are anchored in the premise that the components of the world, i.e., nation-states, governments, groups and individuals, are integrated politically and economically within a system. Whether
93
�this notion arises from a perspective which equates internal dynamics with
the capitalist mode of production (such as Wallerstein, Feinberg, Frank)
or from a view that there are diversified systems in ideological as well as
economic conflict (Krasner, etc.), the basic contention is that the peoples
of the world interact on an institutional level and that these relationships
are often uneven. Imperialism and colonialism are concepts which delineate the exploitative nature of these relationships. Smith (1981:5) defines
imperialism " . . . as the effective domination by a relatively strong state
over a weaker people whom it does not control as it does its home population, or as the effort to secure such domination/' Colonialism is the forced
entry into and domination of a region by outsiders and is characterized
by cultural and social restructuring and by "racism" (Lewis, 1978:16). In
most analyses of such relationships investigators deal with the colonization of a nation or region by a foreign culture (Hechter, 1975:30). The
internal colonial model is used to analyze a "peripheral" or underdeveloped area within the national boundaries of a "core or highly-industrialized
area (Hechter, 1976; Lewis, 1978; Walls, 1976). This model was particularly
important in Appalachian studies during the 1970's.
In an external colonial situation, less advantaged groups may adopt
an ideology in opposition to racist perceptions of their dominators in order
to claim economic and political rights. Nationalism since the nineteenth
century was forced reaction to the spread of capitalist relations (Nairn,
1977:27). The movement for Scottish separatism within the British Isles,
Nairn (1977:126-128) argues, was a "neo-nationalistic" response to "relative deprivation." "Neo-nationalism arises at a different much later point
in the same general process [of capital expansion] . . . at a far more advanced stage of general development" (Nairn, 1977:128). Likewise, Beers
(1979:202) examines ethnic activism in France in the dual framework of
internal colonialism and relative deprivation. "While internal colonialism
explains the preservation of ethnic regions, rapid economic development
and its attendant rising expectations explains the extra-electoral ethnic
protests of the present time" (Beers, 1979:217). Hechter (1975) takes a
similar view, using the internal colonial model to define nationalism as
ethnic reactions to domination from the core. The question to be asked is
whether or not there can be detected such a tendency among the people
of the Appalachian region and what it indicates about institutional relationships. Specifically, is identification with a group a cultural manifestation of the political and economic conditions of a capitalist world economy?
Internal Colonialism
As stated before, colonialism and imperialism are related and sometimes interactive processes. Melizia (1973:130) claims imperalism is not
just a capitalist phenomona: "Broadly speaking, imperalism refers to a
94
�complex set of unequal relationships—economic, political and cultural,
where the strong take advantage of the weak/' He (Melizia, 1973:132-134)
delineates three types of economic imperalism: 1) Unequal real wage distribution between metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions; 2) Unequal
amounts of profits on same production processes across regions; and 3)
unequal market relations.
British expansion in the nineteenth century was still characterized
primarily by imperialism that was both a consequence and a motive of
British economic policy (Smith, 1981:35). The political dimension of imperialism developed due to competition among Western powers that forced
projections into other regions (Smith, 1981). Thus imperialism predicated
on capitalism may be seen as an antecedent or previous state of colonialism. "Imperalism was particularly apt to become colonialism in those areas
where the native political organization was unable for local reasons to
exercise its authority effectively" (Smith, 1981:85).
While overt imperialist expansion and colonialism are no longer part
of European and American international policy, the legacies of the processes are still very much a part of the economic world order and colonial
relations persist (Smith, 1981). One of the manifestations of these relations
is the racial basis of differentiation among groups. This carries over from
the colonial justification for dominating and administering to an "inferior"
populace. Thus colonialist relations are not only characterized economically and politically, but ideologically. "Colonialism, racialism and racialist
ideology are the products and component parts of the capitalist system"
(Klaus, 1980:454).
"One of the defining characteristics of the colonial situation is that it
must involve the interaction of at least two cultures—that of the conquering metropolitan elite and of the indigenes" (Hechter, 1975:73). Indigenous
culture is denigrated and results in the native's will being undermined to
resist the colonial regime (Hechter, 1975:73). Ultimately this translates into
the "culture of poverty" perspective that the indigenous culture is responsible for its own backwardness. Regarding Appalachia: "Generally, such
explanations tend to identify subcultural traits (or behavior) and compare
these against some 'norm' usually the larger American culture" (Raitz and
Ulack, 1982:341). Thus, the denigration and appropriation of culture is
indicative of such an exploitative situation as the appropriation of resources.
Lewis (1978:16) borrows Blauner's rather straightforward distinction
between classical colonialism and internal colonalism. In the former, the
colonizers move in; in the latter, the colonized are brought into the situation as well. Otherwise, relationships between the dominant group and
the subordinate group differ little between the two situations. Internal
colonialism occurs in the uneven development of state territory settled by
different groups (Hechter, 1975:9). "As a consequence of this initial fortui95
�tous advantage, there is crystalization of the unequal distribution of resources and power between the two groups" (Hechter, 1975:9). This results in a diversified industrial core and a complimentary dependent periphery (Hechter, 1975:9).
Emergent Ethnicity
Hechter (1975:28) applies the internal colonialism model to the relationship between the Celtic regions of the British Isles to England as a way
to explain the "survival of traditionalism within a sea of modernity/7
"From the seventeenth century on, English military and political control
in the peripheral regions was buttressed by a racist ideology which held
that Norman Anglo-Saxon culture was inherently superior to Celtic culture" (Hechter, 1975:342). When one group is denied access to high prestige roles which the superordinate group reserves for its members this
"contributes to the development of distinctive ethnic identification in the
two groups" (Hechter, 1975:9). Further, . . . "to the extent that social stratification in the periphery is based on observable cultural differences, there
exists the probability that the disadvantaged groups will, in time, reactively assert its own culture as equal or superior to that of the relatively
advantaged core" (Hechter, 1975:10). The specific form of a culture is incidental to the function culture performs in maintaining social order (Hechter, 1975:35). In this way, an ethnic group is defined by cultural traits
(Hechter, 1975:35). This definition is inadequate to explain social change
and the maintenance of cultural differences between groups in close, continued contact (Hechter, 1975:35). For Hechter (1975:37), cultural distinctions can be deliberate and purposeful: "It is clear that culture maintenance
in the periphery can be regarded as a weapon in that it provides the
possibility of socialization, as well as political mobilization, contrary to
state ends." Ethnic solidarity is an instance of political mobilization that
can result when individuals see inequality as a pattern of collective oppression (Hechter, 1975:41-42).
Another way to view ethnicity which may be concommitant to Hechter's (1975) perspective is to see it as a psychological "anchor" for personal
identity in a changing world (Obermiller, 1977), an in-gathering of human
resources for group economic and political participation (Isaacs, 1975:
Glazer, 1983; Eisinger, 1978), or as developing from both processes. Ethnicity becomes more of a rational "option" (Eisinger, 1978). "Rather than
viewing it as a primitive holdover, the optionalists conceive of ethnicity
primarily as a strategic possibility peculiarly suited to the requirements of
political and social mobilization in the modern large-scale state" (Eisinger,
1978:90). However, this may be taken further: " . . . as more groups choose
the option of exploiting ethnicity for political mobilization—as American
blacks have done most recently—other groups feel compelled to use eth96
�nicity as a defensive response" (Eisinger, 1978:93). It is necessary for survival.
To put this into a simpler framework, the emergence or salience of
ethnicity may be seen as based on interactions between distinct groups
within facilitating circumstances: " . . . ethnic distinctions do not depend
on an absence of social interaction and action, but are quite to the contrary
often the very foundations on which embracing social systems are built"
(Barth, 1969:10). In this way, ethnicity is more of an instance of active
participation distinctly different from anthropological definitions which
are based primarily on cultural and geographic distinctions. However, this
fact—anthropological definition, that is—may be a part of the process. In
other words, pushing a group into a particular definition may spark a
reactionary self-definition.
Appalachian Underdevelopment
The cultural definitions of Appalachia are generally limited to the
coal-rich Central Plateau in parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee,
and North Carolina even though the mountains range from upper New
York to central Alabama. "Appalachia was not recognized as a distinct
sociocultural region until the latter part of the nineteenth century" (Raitz
and Ulack, 1984:18). It was delineated first by the "local color movement,"
then cultural regionalizations and governmental regionalizations (Raitz
and Ulack, 1984:26). Even sociologists and anthropologists perpetuated
an image of a traditional, isolated society that ran counter to mainstream
America.
Pearsall (1959:127) described the folk culture of Appalachia based on
fieldwork done in 1949-50:
"Through continued isolation, the world of the Southern
frontier became a folk world of small isolated, homogenous societies with a simpler and almost self-sufficient economy. In
such societies there can be little occupational specialization or
differentiation of roles beyond those of male and female, adult
and child."
However, even then, Pearsall (1959:137) noted the tendencies for
missionaries and social workers from the outside "to lump the entire
mountain population together, seeing 'quaint' folk traits but also seeing
'appalling' characteristics of a rural lower class." What seemed to be happening was both a process of definition of Appalachians and explanation
of their society that was centered in the region and concentrated on Appalachian resistance to outside influence.
97
�In the 1970's, along came an upsurge in studies on the Third World
that charged that the age of colonialism is still affecting the political processes and social organizations of Third World countries. This view was
"borrowed" to some extent and applied to the Appalachian region as "victim" of uneven capitalist relations to counter the culture of poverty definitions. Whereas the prevailing view in the mid-century was of a traditionalist subcultural "remnant," political and economic interpretations of Appalachia began to replace these views in the 1970's (Billings, Blee and
Swanson, 1986:154).
"The internal colonialism model has emerged from a background of
the history and theories of colonialism and imperialism, and is most directly related to the theories of neocolonialism and dependency that have
been developed in the post-World War II period" (Walls, 1978:234). The
model is attractive because of its powerful analysis of the destruction of
indigenous culture by the dominators (Walls, 1976:238). Caudill (1965),
Walls (1976:237) claims, while not naming it outright, was using it when
he outlined the relationship between the coal boom and the discovery of
Appalachia: "When the construction gangs laid down their tools . . . the
vast, backward Cumberland Plateau was tied inseparably to the colossal
industrial complex centering in Pittsburgh, and a dynamic new phase in
the region's history had begun" (Caudill 1965:93).
In a similar fashion, but with a different tone, Eller's (1982:xviii) later
analysis of Appalachian history discussed the penetration of the industrial
North and the disparaging attitudes toward Appalachians as a tendency
in core/peripheral relationships:
"Blaming the victim, of course, is not a uniquely American
phenomenon. Rather, it is a misreading that takes international
form. French intellectuals talk about the Alps and Spanish intellectuals talk about the Pyrenees in much the same simple if
condenscending way as urban Americans talk about Appalachia. Ironically, it was during the same years that the static
image was emerging as the dominant literary view that a revolution was shaking the very foundations of the mountain social
order."
The nature of the "invasion" of the Appalachian region was a negative one, bringing " . . . bitter civil war followed by vicious exploitation of
timber and mineral resources" (Pearsall: 1959:61). Pearsall (1959:58) noted
the encounter with the outside left Appalachians not only negatively defined but in a negative economic position.
Along with the coming of railroads, towns and expanding industrialization, " . . . there emerged in Appalachia a constructed political system
based upon an economic heirarchy" (Eller, 1982:xxi). Those in economic
98
�and political power exploited the region's natural wealth (Eller, 1982:xxi).
Behind this transition in political culture lay the integration of the region
into the national economy and the subordination of local interests to those
of outside corporations (Eller, 1982:xxi).
To get down to a specific instance of outside exploitation and the
application of the internal colonial model, Gaventa (1980) analyzed a small
coal town in Central Appalachia. He (Gaventa, 1980:52-53) described the
appropriation of resources as " . . . the industrial colonization of ... valleys of the Cumberland Gap region ..." which was undertaken by the
American Association, Ltd.—an English company incorporated in 1887.
Further, Gaventa (1980) contended the valley's apparent disinterest
in contesting their unequal treatment was due to past experience, a phenomena not unique to America. "As much of the under-developed area is
owned and dominated by a British-based corporation, an understanding
of the situation involves examining the contemporary role of the multinational in the affairs of a local community, as well as the means through
which protest may emerge against landholders who are corporate and
absentee" (Gaventa, 1980:viii-ix.)
The mechanisms by which the multinational, American Association,
Ltd., maintained its hold on the community was three-dimensional (Gaventa, 1980:13). The first dimension of power is a straightforward conflict
with emphasis on who prevails in decision-making: the second dimension
is a "mobilization of bias," the institutionalization of systematic rules in
favor of certain groups (Gaventa, 1980:13-14). The third, or "hidden" dimension of power is descriptive of colonial relationships:
"Their [mechanisms of power] identification, one suspects, involves specifying the means through which power influences, shapes, or determines conceptions of the necessities,
possibilities and strategies of challenge in situations of latent
conflict. This may include the study of social myths, language
and symbols, and how they are shaped or manipulated in
power processes" (Gaventa, 1980:15).
This is tied, then to the the ideological aspect and leads to the appropriation of culture, a process which ranges from new place names in an
area that reflect outside influence to the control of socializing agencies such
as churches and schools (Gaventa, 1980:62).
The evidence of a colonial relationship between Appalachia and the
rest of the United States "cannot be disputed" according to Lewis
(1978:24). Uninvited coal interests controlled the region from outside and
impacted the cultural patterns (Lewis:24). Especially supportive is ."..the
fact that racism exists to perpetuate this pattern ..." (Lewis, 1978:24).
Additionally, Lewis (1978:17) claims the domination of the region is based
99
�on technological superiority and the "broad-form" deed. These deeds were
instituted during the early industrialization of Appalachia and ceded to
coal operators all minerals and rights to remove them any way necessary
(Lewis, 1978:17018). Much of the evidence of colonialism is centered
around the broad-form deed (Raitz and Ulack, 1984:344-345), the legality
of which is still being contested.
Melizia (1973:130) claims a scientific application of the imperialism
concept in examining statistics in a non-metropolitan region of Central
Appalachia. Despite a lack of statistical support for unequal wage, values
of capital and trade between core and perhipheral areas, he (Melizia,
1973:132-136) switches to a logical argument: "The region appears to continually suffer from a net drain of economic surplus to other areas without
making gains in relative income or productivity growth."
However, Walls (1976:232), while contending that Central Appalachia "is a peripheral region within an advanced capitalist society,"
claims internal colonialism must be carefully defined to be more than a
"catchword" (Walls, 1976:235) and that Lewis' application is "strained"
(Walls, 1976:237).
The establishment and maintenance of dominance over others is a
pervasive process in America extending to all ethnic and working-class
cultures in advanced capitalist societies (Walls, 1986:239). Walls (1976:234235) says, internal colonialism is popularly useful to counter exploitative
situations or to justify what he calls "regional or ethnic chauvinism." "The
model suggests the need for an anticolonial movement and a radical structuring of society, with a redistribution of resources to the poor and the
powerless." (Raitz and Ulack, 1984:343). Thus, the internal colonial model
not only raises the question of ethnic reactions but might be viewed as
founded on an agitation for an Appalachian "identity movement."
Billings, Blee and Swanson (1986:155) argue that ethnographic accounts of Appalachia that concentrated on traditionalism looked at communities outside the industrialized regions of coal extraction. "What Pearsail [1959], Stephenson [1968] and to a lesser extent, Brown [1950], frequently saw as antiquated behavior were traces of a social logic and a set
of values distinct from those of more advanced capitalist societies but
nonetheless shaped by economic rationality" (Billings, Blee and Swanson,
1986:156). Whereas Billings, Blee and Swanson (1986:157) see the colonial
model as somewhat reactionary to these accounts, what would be more
appropriate, they (Billings, Blee and Swanson, 1986:168) conclude, is a
" 'second oppositional challenge'" to Appalachian exceptionalism: "that is
an historically-based understanding of unique cultural trends and power
relationships.
100
�Appalachian ethnicity?
If the internal colonialism model is a valid perspective on Appalachian underdevelopment and accepted as the basis for ethnic momentum,
then two more questions must be asked: First, what are the specific economic and political links to colonialism? Some of this has been explored
in defining relationships between the dominant and subordinate groups.
A second question, to be explored briefly, is who among the Appalachian populace will define themselves as uniquely Appalachian?
In many of the studies of colonialism, boundaries set up by conquerors that gave no attention to existing social allegiances and the unequal
treatment of and partitioning of resources to the existing groups were
faciliting circumstances for ethnic allegiances. A similar process occurs in
internal colonialism, however, it may work to dispel ethnic tendencies
among certain segments of the indigenous population. Groups in the urban areas within a peripheral region, those who are quicker to adopt
"modernization/7 are viewed differently from the most rural populace.
Hechter (1975:122) explores this in Great Britain: " . . . the docility of late
eighteenth-century Wales and Scotland was achieved by the co-optation
of regional elites, rather than the direct intervention of the state." Likewise, Gaventa (1980), found middle-class elites less resistant to changes
in the social order.
An essay by Lewis (1967:7) that predates the development of her
internal colonial model charged: "The coming of coal-mining did not open
up the mountains. It facilitated three subcultures." One of these subcultures, located in the mountain settlements, was traditionally-minded and
presented a solid front to outsiders. This was necessary, she maintains,
for security and adjustment in the face of change. She predicted then an
eventual breakdown in segregation with full integration of the mountaineer into main stream capitalist culture. "Instead of reticent and retiring,
he will become blase, gregarious and sophisticated" (Lewis, 1967:16).
For Obermiller (1977:148,345) . . ."the key issue in urban Appalachian
studies is ethnicity . . . Many Appalachians in the cities and mountains
need the opportunities afforded by ethnic recognition."
What Billings and Walls (1980:137-138) conclude is that ethnic politicalization and reactions to prejudice are salient to urban Appalachian migrants. "Hillbilly stereotypes cause some migrants to disavow their Appalachian origins, but they also function to pull the group together" (Billings
and Walls, 1980:127). There exists in Cincinnati, Ohio, an Urban Appalachian Council and an Appalachian Identity Center (Billings and Walls,
1980:127). Returning migrant professionals may also be more ethnically
"aware" such as scholars and professors involved in Appalachian Studies
in many universities and colleges in the region. On the other hand, Billings
and Walls (1980:178) say "Appalachia" is not as an important symbol of
101
�identity as are other affiliations. Further, these authors call for a reassessment of Appalachia that synthesizes the traditional subculture view and
outside domination (Raitz and Ulack, 1984:346). This could take the form
of assessing the difference between "hanging on" to culture and being
culturally defined.
Finally, one last point is raised that ties culture to capitalism in a
most direct manner. When Stephenson (1984) returned in the 1980's to
Shiloh (1968) where he had studied the extension of modernity in mountain culture, he found what he called "culture-brokering." The elites of
Shiloh were "commodifying" the place (Stephenson, 1984) by selling it as
a traditional community offering escape from the alienated metropolis
(Stephenson, 1984).
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1984 Appalachia: A Regional Geography: Land, People and Development. Westview Press: Boulder.
Smith, Tony
1981 The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain, and the Late-industrializing
World Since 1815. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Stephenson, John B.
1984 "Escape to the periphery: Commodifying place in rural Appalachia." Appalachian
Journal, ll(Spring):187-200.
1968 Shiloh: A Mountain Community. University of Kentucky Press: Lexington.
103
�Thompson, Richard H., and Mary Lou Wylie
1984 'The professional-managerial class in Eastern Kentucky: A preliminary interpretation/7 Appalachian Journal, 11(1-2):105-121.
Walls, David S.
1978 "Internal colony or internal periphery: A critique of current models and an alternative formulation/7 Colonialism in Modern America. Lewis, Helen Matthews, Linda Johnson and
David Askins (eds.). The Appalachian Consortium Press: Boone, North Carolina.
1976 "Central Appalachia: A peripheral region within an advanced capitalist society/7
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare. 4(2):232-246).
104
�The Influence of the Smoot Tannery on
the Economic Development of Wilkes
County, N. C. 1897-1940
Barry ^
Elledge
Ronald Filer's book, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, is considered by many to be a definitive work detailing the industrialization of the
Appalachian South. Although mainly focusing on the development of the
timber and coal industries, Eller makes brief mention that the abundant
tanbark gave rise to a thriving tanning and leather industry in western
North Carolina, with nearly 1200 people working in that industry at the
height of the industry's activities in 1916. Major tanneries, he notes, had
been erected at Morganton, Brevard, Lenior, Asheville, Marion, Hazelwood, Waynesville, Andrews, and Murphy.1
Eller omits the biggest and perhaps the most important tannery of
them all: the C. C. Smoot and Sons Tannery at North Wilkesboro. This
tannery operated from 1897 until crippled by a flood in 1940, and was
frequently cited as the largest of its kind in the South. The Smoot Tannery
is considered by local authorities in Wilkes county to be of singular importance in the industrialization of that County.2 As this paper will show, the
Smoot tannery made a huge initial contribution to the economic growth
in northwestern North Carolina.
In 1914 the local newspaper described the tannery as embracing 25
buildings in all, with the largest 42 x 465 feet.3 The tannery maintained its
own steam plant, electric power plant, and water works. The tanning
industry was slow to mechanize, but evidently the Smoot tannery was
state of the art. It was not until about 1880 that tanners began to use
machinery, and even then it was primarily confined to steam power for
bark crushing and grinding and the generation of electricity.
THE PROCESS OF TANNING
A brief description ot the tanning process provides a better understanding of the total economic impact of the tannery. The Smoot tannery
used the conventional tanning procedures of that time. Tanning a hide
required four basic operations: 1) the preliminary washing and soaking to
clean the hides; 2) a long soaking in lime water to loosen the hair, followed
by scraping the skin to remove the hair and loose flesh; 3) tanning by
105
�soaking the hides in a solution of a tan liquor consisting of water and
tannin; and 4) the drying, finishing, and oiling of the hides to a durable
and attractive leather. The entire process of tanning normally took several
months.4
Unslaked lime was the conventional agent used to open the pores of
the hide so the hair could be easily removed. The lime was shipped in by
railroad car. The lime vats for soaking hides were made of wood or masonry and about five feet square. After removal from the lime vats, the
hides were taken to the beam room, where the worker placed a hide upon
a broad wooden beam and scraped both surfaces free of hair and surplus
flesh, with the hide being washed several times as necessary. The hides
were then taken to "the yard" for immersion into the vats containing the
tanning solution. When completely penetrated by the tannin, which could
take several weeks, the hides were removed to the "loft," where they were
dried, brushed, smoothed by mechanical rollers, oiled, cut into sections
and made ready for shipment.
During the lifetime of the Smoot tannery, the end product was sole
leather intended for the manufacture of shoes. The Smoot tannery tanned
only cattle hides, and contrary to some local beliefs, local hides from the
area were an unimportant trade for either the tannery or local farmers. The
hides, a byproduct from the meat industry, arrived by the boxcar load,
previously salted and rolled up at the packers to retard spoilage. The
normal source was midwest meat packers, but hides from South America
were also commonly used. Typically tanners sought hides where they
could find them and where prices were lowest.
Unloading the hides was done by hand labor and was a dirty and
odious work, as was the immersion and removal of the hides from the
lime vats. This work was typically done by the black employees of the
tannery, with whites shunning this work, hoping for an assignment further up the tanning process. Many of the jobs involved the handling of
bark and wood, since the tannery purchased and stored huge quantities
of chestnut wood and chestnut oak bark.
The chestnut wood and bark were ground and crushed by a large
steam-powered grinder called "the hog." It made a fearsome racket during
operation that reportedly could be heard all over town. The tannic acid
was then leached from the crushed material in the extract plant, a freestanding building. Later, as the local tanbark supply dwindled, some wood
and bark rich in tannin were imported, such as kuebracho from Argentina,
cutch from the Philippines and Borneo, myrabalams from Ceylon, and
wattle bark from South Africa.5
106
�THE FLOODS
The tannery demand for tanbark and chestnut wood resulted in local
residents cutting and selling large quantities of these materials. In addition, the railroad provided access to markets for the region's vast timber
resources. The denuding of much of the timbered landscape, plus the
logging trails, accelerated the runoff following rains and contributed to two
major floods.
The first major flood came in June 1916. The tannery lay in the
floodplain very near the Yadkin river and was heavily damaged by the
flood waters. The second major flood came in August 1940. The flood
waters crested six feet higher than in 1916. Damage from flood waters was
again extensive; however, damage to the tannery was also heavy from a
fire caused by the chemical combustive reaction of the flood water penetrating a rail car of unslaked lime. The tannery elected not to repair the damage
to the facility and sold the property to local interests for alternative uses.
Apart from the fire and flood damage, the future of the tannery was
in doubt before the 1940 flood. The supplies of chestnut wood and tanbark
were nearly exhausted by this time. The chestnut blight had spread
throughout the Appalachian forest in the twenties and thirties, killing
nearly all the chestnut trees. The dead trees could still be sold for tan
wood, but were mostly gone by 1940. The extract plant managed to continue operations until 1945, then it too closed for good.
THE ECONOMIC IMPACT
The tannery presence had the obvious direct effect of providing many
jobs through direct employment and a considerable injection of cash income through the payroll; there was also much indirect employment
spread over a wide area for those who cut and sold tanbark. A total assessment of the tannery influence must also include its contribution to the local
tax base, to local population growth, to purchases from the local economy,
to pollution and environmental problems, and to the business and social
climate in the community. And, like any enterprise, there was a beneficial
multiplier effect from the money injected by the tannery into the community as portions of that money were spent and respent again in the normal
spending patterns of a money-based exchange economy.
Since the tannery changed ownership in 1925 and later closed for
good in 1940, most company records have long been lost or are in private
hands and unavailable for study. It is therefore impossible to provide
precise data on the financial impact of the tannery. The following account,
however, was given in the local newspaper shortly before the 1940 flood
abruptly halted operations.6
107
�"Employees numbered 155 men, the payroll was $150,000 per year,
over $12,000 was paid yearly for city, county, and state taxes. These and
other local expenses total over $325,000 which is largely spent in the local
community. The capacity of the tannery was listed as 600 finished hides
per day, or 24,500 pounds per day. Normally one rail car of leather was
shipped each day. The extract plant had a capacity of producing 45,000
pounds of 25 percent tannin extract daily. The extract not used locally is
shipped in tank cars to other tanneries. Five tank cars were available for
this purpose. The tannery purchased three million cubic feet of chestnut
wood, 4,500 tons of chestnut oak bark, and 500 tons of hemlock bark
yearly. The chestnut wood purchases were valued at $90,000, the tanbark
at $55,000."
It is commonly accepted by local residents that the tannery was the
economic backbone of Wilkes county during its operation. The facts support this notion only during the initial years of the tannery, but not during
its latter years; other industries developed rapidly after 1900 and, collectively at least, exerted a stronger economic presence than the tannery.
Furniture manufacturing became strong, e.g. the Forest Furniture in 1901,
the Oak Furniture and Turner-White Casket in 1903, Home Chair in 1919,
and the American Furniture in 1927, and rapidly added to the industrialization and payrolls of the area. The Wilkes Hosiery Mill, established in
1918, became a major employer and the first industry to offer employment
for women. The Carolina Mirror Company, established in 1936, offered the
highest industrial wages in the area at the time and became a major competitor for the local labor force. Concomitantly, the service industry, including banking and finance, insurance, transportation, and communications developed during this interval. By the time the tannery closed in
1940, the economy had grown and diversified to such an extent that the
closing did not have a devastating impact on the economy. And as the
economy continued to grow, especially after World War II, the loss of the
tannery jobs was quickly recovered through the expansion of other enterprises.
Clearly the tannery made a rather dramatic initial impact, but one
that waned over time, certainly in the relative sense if not absolutely. The
exact impact is examined in some more detail, although the paucity of
records hampers the effort.
Direct Employment. Direct employment by the tannery is easiest to
account for; but even this is a matter of dispute. Judge Hayes, as cited in
the Land of Wilkes, claims employment was " . . . up to 200 men," a figure
not corroborated elsewhere. The last newspaper account of the tannery
cited employment of 155; earlier accounts vary from 125 to 150. This range
is corroborated by those who worked at the tannery or are knowledgeable
of it.
108
�Direct employment evidently was relatively steady over the life of the
tannery, even suffering little from the depression of the thirties. Census
data for 1900 gives 377 as the "average number of wage earners" in Wilkes
County; the tannery probably accounted for one third of these jobs. In
1940, the census gives 12,081 as "employment" in Wilkes; tannery employment of 155 would account for less than two percent of this. Interestingly
enough, there is no record of labor strife during the lifetime of the tannery;
historically the local labor force has shown an indifference if not hostility
toward organized labor and few outsiders that might have been sympathetic to labor unions were brought in for employment.
Indirect Employment. There are no extant data on indirect employment, and such information was probably never collected; yet indirect
employment of those cutting and selling chestnut wood and tanbark probably equalled or exceeded direct employment. Tanning required huge
quantities of chestnut wood and tanbark for the tannic acid, and the tannery depended on local and regional people to cut and supply these materials. For every man employed at the tannery, probably three or more were
at work harvesting tanbark from time to time as a supplemental activity.
It is through the indirect employment that the tannery may have made its
greatest impact on the region, where the boundaries of the affected region
extended beyond the county boundaries, for there were at least two bark
buying stations removed from the tannery—one along the railroad line in
Thurman and another in Mt. Airy, a distance by rail of approximately 40
and 60 miles, respectively. Cash was paid on delivery. A good guess is
that hundreds of men at one time or another were involved in cutting and
hauling tanbark. An early publication of the Yellow Jacket Press in 1906
reported that sometimes as many as 300 wagons a day would be lined up
at the tannery to sell tanbark.7 This picturesque view of the tannery's early
impact is still fondly recalled by some of the county,s elder residents.
The importance of the tanbark market is also illustrated by the newspaper account in 1940, cited earlier. The purchases of chestnut wood and
tanbark totaled $145,000, virtually the same as the payroll ($150,000). In
previous years, when the supplies of wood and bark were more plentiful,
and more men were working the land and forests as a livelihood, the
tanbark market was probably even more important. It is worth noting that
chestnut wood could be harvested and sold anytime. It was crushed by the
tannery and used in its entirety. Harvesting chestnut oak bark was a seasonal activity; the bark could be easily cut and peeled from the tree only
in the springtime when the sap was rising. The timing was ideal for many
farmers, being a slack time prior to crop planting; moreover a coincidental
benefit also occurred, as the bark harvest resulted in more cleared land
that could be pressed into cultivation.
Income. No company payroll data for the tannery still exists. One
former employee interviewed recalled being hired in 1907 at ten cents per
109
�hour, with a standard workday of ten hours. It is not unreasonable to
assume that ten cents per hour was the initial wage when the tannery
opened in 1897. There is much anecdotal evidence regarding the "dollar
per day" as a standard during this time. Another former employee interviewed recalled being hired in 1926 at thirty cents per hour. The last
newspaper account of payroll as cited above suggests a wage range probably between 40 to 50 cents per hour. These wage rates appear to be typical
for the times and location, and the tannery appears to have adjusted its
wage rate upward as necessary to remain competitive as diversification in
the economy asserted more competition for the labor force.
Although the wage rates were low by national norms and slightly
below state averages, they were accepted without serious complaint by
men who were initially grateful for any kind of steady cash job. Employees
were mostly hired from the local labor force; the opportunity cost for most
of these men was the income or product they could produce from working
their small subsistence farms. Large families were still common, and some
industrial workers were able to continue life on the small farms much as
before while generating a dependable cash income by holding a job at
"public works."
The tannery paid its employees every two weeks. If initial employment of 125 is assumed with a 50 hour week and ten cents per hour, the
payroll would be $1450 every two weeks and about $38,000 for the year.
This amount was probably matched, and exceeded by, the purchases of
chestnut wood and tanbark. Undoubtedly in the early days this represented the largest single infusion of steady cash into the community. As
this income was spent and respent in the multiplier chain, it encouraged
the fledgling markets previously hampered by a lack of currency for spending and built these and new markets into a modern exchange economy.
Data from the Census of Manufacturers in 1900 lists the total payroll
in Wilkes County as $80,384; the tannery would have accounted for approximately half of this. In 1940, the census data show a total payroll of
$1,431,241; the tannery payroll of $150,000 represents less than eleven
percent of the total.
Population. The tannery had a slight, but in no way major, impact on
population growth. Most of the employees were hired from the local labor
force; a few, including some blacks, came from surrounding areas. There
are some reports, not completely corroborated, of a nearby house operated
by the tannery for its transient laborers. There is no evidence at all of a
major immigration of non-locals to provide tannery labor. In 1890, the
population of Wilkes County was 22,675; with no major employers this
provided a large labor pool for the tannery to draw from. By 1940, the
population had grown to 43,003, a 90 percent increase from 1890.
There is little to suggest that the tannery contributed to population
growth; the population of the state increased by 120 percent over the same
110
�time period, and besides, except for the initial spurt provided by the tannery, most of the industrial growth in Wilkes was provided by other industry. A slight impact on population was provided by the tannery management. While the production workers were mostly local, management was
not. The Smoots, as owners and managers, relocated their families from
Alexandria, Virginia. About six other men in top supervisory positions also
relocated from the Smoot tannery in Alexandria or from other tanneries
in West Virginia. These families became permanent residents and contributed socially, politically and economically to the new town.
The Local Tax Base. As the first major industry in the county, the
tannery provided a major contribution to the local property tax base for the
town and county. There were no local income taxes, and the state income
and sales taxes were not initially imposed. Property tax rates were low,
especially at first, as there were few government services. The tannery
initially provided its own water, sewage system, electricity and security.
As the city and county grew, government services expanded, but the tax
rate remained low because the tax base was rapidly expanding. There is
every indication that the tannery was a good citizen and paid its taxes, and
made an important early contribution to the development of education and
other government services.
Local Purchases. The importance of the tanbark purchases has been
shown earlier. Otherwise, most of the materials used by the tannery were
imported from outside the immediate area: hides as byproduct of the meat
industry; coal for the steam plant, lime for the soaking vats, and small
amounts of imported wood and tanbark from South America and Asia.
In the course of ordinary business operations, the tannery made local
purchase of office supplies, building materials, tools, and repair services.
These purchases were never a major part of total expenses, and made only
a slight contribution to the local economy.
Pollution and Environmental Problems. Some pollution was an unavoidable byproduct of the tanning process. There was the noise from the bark
grinder, smoke from the steam plant, polluted water from the soaking and
tanning vats, disposal of the hair and surplus tissue from the hides, and
the smell of the entire operation. And, in the larger sense, part of the
deforestation that contributed to the flooding was due to the harvest of
tanbark.
Strangely enough, the contribution to flood conditions may have
been the most serious of these. Local residents were unconcerned about
the other problems, or bore them gladly as a necessary cost of industrialization and transition to a modern economy. The noise of the bark grinder
is remembered, but not as an intolerable nuisance. Nor is the odor recounted with disdain. The smoke was dispersed from the 150 foot high
smokestack. The polluted water from the vats was discharged directly into
the river or allowed to seep over ground to the river; either way there are
111
�no recorded complaints and the river probably suffered much less from the
tannery than from the discharge of raw sewage from towns along its banks
before sewage treatment plants were built. As for the hair and residual
tissue from the hides, there was briefly a time when the hair was cleaned
and dried and sold as stuffing for automobile seats. At all other times, this
material was dumped in a field behind the tannery and allowed to compost. It was made available to farmers who were willing to haul it away;
as farmers learned its value as a useful soil amendment to be spread over
their fields it was viewed as an asset rather than a pollutant.
The Business, Social, and Cultural Climate. As the first major industry
utilizing an organized and disciplined labor force that took advantage of
specialization and division of labor, a modern corporate structure and
management team, the reliance on markets and the use of credit and
financial services, the tannery played a major role in creating and fostering
an entrepreneurial and commercial climate that served other enterprises
that followed. This kind of climate was cited by Rostow8 as crucial in
producing a self-generative process of continual economic growth. That
the tannery had a significant part in this process is beyond dispute.
Beyond the cultivation of a favorable business climate, the tannery's
presence was also felt. The Smoot family and the families of the rest of the
management team became an important part of the social, political, religious, and cultural fabric of the town. The perspective provided by these
families and others who took an active interest in seeing the town grow
played an important role in shaping the new town. In contrast to much of
coal-mine Appalachia, the outside capital was provided by entrepreneurs
who adopted the area as their home.
Conclusions
The economic development of Wilkes County matches the stages of
growth described by Rostow, with the opening of the tannery initiating the
take-off period of sustained growth. There is no mistaking its large size
and early economic impact, but with the tannery now closed since 1940,
there may be a somewhat romanticized local view of the importance of the
tannery. Judge Hayes, in his history of the county, observes that, "It is
utterly impossible to estimate the enormous influence and financial assistance that one concern has meant to Wilkes County/'9 Even allowing for
some possible exaggeration, this does not deny the importance of the
tannery in the initial stages of economic growth in Wilkes County. Like
much early economic development, the tannery exploited a natural resource, wood and tanbark, but helped create a modern economy based
on specialization, division of labor, and exchange. The impetus of the
tannery helped give rise to other industry, but also created competition
and higher wages for the labor force. The popular view in the county of
112
�the tannery as the backbone of the economy is accurate initially but does
not give adequate allowance for the emergence of other industry that soon
surpassed the tannery's influence.
NOTES
1. Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers. The University of Tennessee Press.
1982, p. 122.
2. Johnson J. Hayes, The Land of Wilkes. Wilkes County Historical Society, Wilkesboro. 1962,
pp. 185-186.
3. C. P. Waters, Resources and Progress of Wilkes County. 1914: as quoted in J. Jay Anderson,
Wilkes County Sketches, monograph printed by Wilkes Community College, Wilkesboro,
1976, p. 58.
4. Peter C. Welch, Tanning in the United States to 1850. The Smithsonian Institute. Washington,
1964, pp. 15-35.
5. Personal knowledge of Mary Smithey, as quoted in Absher (ed.), The Heritage of Wilkes.
Wilkes County Genealogical Society, 1982, p. 36.
6. The Journal Patriot, Special anniversary issue of June 27,1940.
7. Don Laws, Views of North Wilkesboro. 1906, as quoted in J. Jay Anderson, Wilkes County
Sketches, op. cit., p. 59.
8. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth. Cambridge University Press. 1968, pp. 4-10.
9. Johnson J. Hayes. Op. cit., p. 186.
Other resource material:
I have greatly beneh'tted from interviews with the following people:
J. Jay Anderson
Annie F. Winkler
Joe Colson, tannery employee, 1907 to 1940 George Brown, tannery and
extract plant employee, 1926 to 1945
Edward Smoot Finley
Mary Sink Smithey
113
�Mountain Foragers in Southeast Asia
and Appalachia: Cross-cultural
Perspectives on the "Mountain Man"
Stereotype
Benita Howell
When and how did Appalachia become identified as a distinctive
region, a "strange land inhabited by peculiar people"? In his massive doctoral dissertation, Gratis Williams (1961) catalogued the ingredients of the
mountaineer stereotype as they emerged from nineteenth century travel
accounts and local color fiction. He found that a consistent image of cultural primitivism, based on "branchwater" Appalachians, persisted well
into the twentieth century. Williams argued that this stereotype reflected
a real deterioration in living conditions which created a distinct lower class
of Appalachians in the decades following the Civil War.
Henry Shapiro (1978) later took up the question of why Appalachia
preoccupied affluent urbanites in the latter part of the nineteenth century,
and why "branchwater" Appalachians in particular fascinated these consumers of local color literature. Shapiro suggested that Appalachia's emergence as a distinctive region followed upon a growing recognition that
"the strange land and peculiar people" were out of place in the new industrial culture of modern America. Life ways which had appealed to a romantic nostalgia for the frontier past became a challenge to modernization and
progress-problems to be solved and deficits to be remedied through home
missions work, secular education, community development, or cultural
revival.
Both of these accounts explain the emergence of the Appalachian
stereotype in the late nineteenth century by appealing to particular events
in American history—the Civil War and its aftermath of devastation in
Appalachia, industrial growth and urbanization in the North, and Reconstruction in the South characterized by continuing sectional and sectarian
rivalries within religious and philanthropic organizations. But explanations phrased in specific historical terms don't account for the Appalachian
stereotype's perplexing resistance to the facts.
Why, for example, was the "branchwater mountaineer" made stereotypic representative of the region as a whole, although he was not numerically in the majority, was not particularly visible in the towns and resorts
114
�frequented by outsiders, and was not culturally, socially, or economically
dominant within the region? Why, towards the end of the nineteenth
century, did many scholars and popular writers assert that Appalachians
represented a separate genetic stock from other Americans, whether pure
Anglo-Saxon, Highland Scots, Scots-Irish, or English poor white, even
though there was ample evidence that the region had received settlers
from diverse stocks and sent its share of settlers west to become middle
Americans? And why have affluent, educated Appalachians themselves
become the primary purveyors of the stereotype, whether in casual comments about "holler folk" or in fiction?
As an anthropologist, I would like to propose that we look beneath
the particular events of late nineteenth century American history in our
attempts to account for the Appalachian "mountain man" stereotype. If
we view the Appalachian case in a broader framework of cross-cultural
comparison, it appears to be one instance of a more general and fairly
widespread phenomenon in which distinctive economic adaptations provide the basis for stereotyping and ethnic labeling. In fact, the Appalachian
"mountain man" stereotype has a close parallel in pervasive distinctions
between primitive highlanders and civilized lowlanders which have long
organized ethnic relations in Southeast Asia.
This cognitive and symbolic contrast quite possibly has been central
to ethnic group relations in Southeast Asia ever since the first millennium
A.D., when Hindu commercial states began incorporating mountain foragers and shifting cultivators into trade networks. The object was to obtain
forest products for international maritime commerce which linked Southeast Asia with the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and China (see Coedes
[1968], Hall [1966], Meilink-Roelofsz [1962], and Simkin [1968]). Karl Hutterer (1974), interpreting archaeological sites dating from roughly 10001600 A.D., found evidence of trade between the coast and interior groups
in the Philippines. Chinese records indicate that a large percentage of
Philippine trade goods consisted of forest products such as bees wax,
abaca, sandalwood, rattan, civet, and animal hides. Presumably coastal
traders did not have access to inland territories and lacked the environmental knowledge to procure these items themselves, so they traded with
foragers and swidden farmers of the interior but did not culturally incorporate these peoples into the emerging coastal states. Spanish records indicate that such trading networks definitely were in operation when the
Spanish arrived in the Philippines. Hetterer argues that evolution of lowland societies into commercial states entailed deliberate maintenance of
foraging and swidden adaptations among peoples geographically situated
to supply the prized forest products. Lowlanders depended upon and
subsidized the foraging lifestyle but at the same time labeled it primitive
and inferior.
115
�Ethnologists observing interethnic relations in the European colonial
period and in contemporary nation states of South and Southeast Asia
have documented continuing symbiotic and often exploitative relations
between foragers, peasants, and traders. Thus it appears that long-standing stereotypic contrasts between "civilized" lowlanders and "backward,
primitive" highland foragers have become ingrained in South and Southeast Asian folk notions of culture and ethnic identity (e.g., see Lehman
1967). Culture traits which signal "backwardness" bear an uncanny similarity between Asia and Appalachia.
In the Philippines, for example, Negrito peoples known collectively
as the Agta carried on a nomadic, foraging lifestyle in which they traded
with middlemen or agents from the coast. John Garvan (1963), an IrishAmerican amateur ethnologist who studied the Agta in the 1910s, noted
that Filipinos circulated many erroneous rumors about them. The stereotypic Agta had a monstrous, ape-like appearance (p. 11), was dirty and
diseased (p. 12), subject to drunkeness (p. 54), immodest, promiscuous
and incestuous (p. 81), and prone to violence and theft (pp. 157-161).
Most puzzling to Filipinos was the Agta preference for an independent,
nomadic lifestyle. Agta resisted Filipino efforts to engage them in longterm wage work or share-cropping relationships, but they did on occasion
appear in farming villages to exchange work for rice, garden produce, or
metal implements as well as supplying forest products—lumber, bark
cloth, "rattan, honey, bees wax and whatever else might be desired" (p.
79). Garvan described how the Filipino partners in trading relationships
took advantage of Agta ignorance of the market value of their products,
exercised debt peonage, or sometimes posed as government officials and
extorted trade goods from Agta (pp. 159-163). In response, Garvan wrote,
the Agta "has no need and no desire for any relations with the government. He fears taxes. He fears schools. He fears the police and he fears all
kinds of things ..." (p. 158).
Jean Peterson (1978) has described more recent relationships between
Agta foragers and pioneering peasant farmers, whose encroachment into
Agta territory has brought many more outsiders into personal contact with
Agta and reduced the primary forest available for Agta foraging. These
newcomers have continued to establish patron-client trade relationships
which use an idiom of friendship but at least potentially leave the Agta
open to debt peonage and other forms of exploitation. While Peterson
observed a surface cordiality in relations between rural villagers and
"their" Agta, the same old stereotypes persisted (pp. 6^-66). Villagers
were disturbed by Agta sexuality, their crude! humor, and their children's
undisciplined behavior. Stories of Agta violence and savagery continued
to arouse fear, particularly among townspeople who had little personal
contact with Agta. Negrito origins of the Agta have given Filipinos familiar
with American racial prejudice an additional basis for stereotyping. Peter116
�son was told, 'These Agta are just like your niggers. They're lazy, thieving, and dirty. It's right in their blood and you can't teach them anything"
(p. 79).
Physical difference reinforces but does not account for Agta stereotyping, however. The same stereotypic characterizations have been applied to other highland peoples of South and Southeast Asia who are
racially indistinguishable from their lowland neighbors. Lowland Malays,
for example, have stereotyped tribal groups of the interior of Borneo and
the Celibes as backward, dirty, stupid, and savage (Lasker 1944: 37-40).
Yet there is a strong possibility that the lowland Malays have their origins
in the very tribes which they denigrate. Using ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources, King (1985) has reconstructed a multi-level system of ethnic
stratification based on trade between interior and coastal Borneo. Punan
foragers (similar in lifestyle to the Agta but not Negrito) and Iban Dayak
shifting cultivators supplied trade goods to the Maloh. The Maloh were
wet-rice cultivators who also served as middlemen in trade with lowland
Malays. Maloh were distinguished from Dayak people not by language or
race, but by their economy and more hierarchical political organization.
The Malay controlled catchment areas upstream, while coastal trade was
in turn controlled by Chinese and Buginese from the Celibes. King found
that the "Malay" commercial center had in fact been formed as recently as
1815 by Dayak (or Maloh) who converted to Islam (pp. 59-62), and he
suggested that Punan nomads who settled and planted rice became Dayak
(p. 206).
King's findings fit a pattern often reported for Southeast Asia in
which contemporary boundaries and distinctions between lowlanders and
more primitive highlanders have been demarcated and maintained
through the use of discrete ethnic labels. Economic specializations form a
framework for different lifestyles which, along with particular cultural
behaviors such as religious affiliation, serve as ethnic markers. The use of
ethnic labels implies a separate historic origin for each group so labeled,
but physical similarities, linguistic affiliations, and historical data such as
those reported by King tend to invalidate such claims. Moerman (1965),
Lehman (1967), Dentan (1975), and Rousseau (1975) all have shown that
tribal identifications are notoriously confusing in Southeast Asia precisely
because "tribes" are not genetic and cultural units at all, but reflect an
ongoing process of ethnic labeling and manipulation of ethnicity. Cunningham (1987) has recently shown how similar processes of constructing
ethnicity have occurred repeatedly in the history of the British Isles.
If the mountain foragers of Southeast Asia do not really constitute
separate ethnic groups, what is the basis for their being treated as if they
were separate? Both Hutterer and King imply that forager to swidden
cultivator, to wet rice cultivator, to commercial trader represents an evolutionary sequence of development. If this were the case, then contemporary
117
�foragers would represent survivals of a truly primitive hunting-and-gathering adaptation, the "contemporary ancestors" of other Southeast Asians.
More recent work by Carl Hoffman (1984), however, suggests that it is
equally plausible that these groups, like Appalachian pioneers, went into
a mountain forest environment, adapted to its requirements, and in the
process shed some cultural baggage and took on the appearance of being
more primitive than they actually were.
Hoffman studied a number of different Punan groups in Borneo and
concluded that the Punan (the name can be translated as collectors or
forest dwellers) do not constitute a homogeneous cultural or linguistic
unit. Rather each Punan group is paired with neighboring swidden farmers who share linguistic and other cultural similarities such as burial customs with their Punan trading partners. Punan appear to constitute a
distinct ethnic group only because of behaviors directly associated with
their forest collecting. Conventional wisdom had it that foragers, isolated
and enclosed within complex societies, could continue their primitive
hunting and gathering lifestyle only by resorting to trade with cultivators
who supplied them with garden produce, metal tools, and other trade
goods, but Hoffman's findings turn this reasoning upside down. Hoffman
proposes that, rather than being descendants of aboriginal foragers, the
Punan are Dayak who have moved into the primary forest to specialize in
collecting raw materials to supply the long distance trading networks. The
Punan hunt and gather in order to subsist during their commercial collecting activities in the primary forest, rather than using trade to cushion an
inefficient, maladaptive, outdated lifestyle.
In South Asia as well as Southeast Asia, forest foragers have been
stereotyped and labeled as distinct "tribes," sometimes incorporated into
the bottom levels of the Hindu caste system, sometimes left entirely outside of it. After examining ethnographic data on the Kadar, Birhor, Chenchu, Vedda, and Nayadi, Richard Fox concluded that social scientists
as well as agricultural neighbors erred in viewing these groups as "cultural
left-overs or fossils from pre-literate times" (1969:140). Fox argued that
their spatial and sociological isolation from Hindu culture, like their primitiveness, had been exaggerated. He wrote: "Far from depending wholly
on the forest for their own direct subsistence, the Indian hunters-andgatherers are highly specialized exploiters of a marginal terrain from which
they supply the larger society with desirable, but otherwise unobtainable,
forest items such as honey, wax, rope and twine, baskets, and monkey
and deer meat" (p. 141). Fox also explained the often noted social fragmentation of these groups—the mobility of individuals and loose structuring
of communities—as an adaptive response to the demands of competitive
foraging in which each household tried to maximize its gain (p. 142). Thus,
according to Fox, fluid social organization, a trait often denigrated and
118
�interpreted as savage by foragers' lowland neighbors, is actually one more
indication that these groups are "professional" rather than true primitives.
Brian Morris (1977, 1982) has provided new ethnographic data on
another hill tribe of India, the Hill Pandaram, utilizing ecological and economic rather than evolutionary perspectives to account for their foraging
adaptation. Within this framework, Morris focuses on Hill Pandaram contacts with the outside world rather than assuming them to be isolated. The
Forest Department of India has largely taken the place of independent
traders in the old commercial system, but Hill Pandaram are still collecting
for trade, and not for trade with local villagers alone, but to supply urban
markets (1982:3). As in Southeast Asia, the distinction between country
people of the plains and forest people of the mountains has cognitive and
symbolic importance. Morris reports that outsiders from the plains feel
awe and apprehension in the mountains, that they fear the mountains as
an alien environment. These feelings lead to stereotyping of mountain
people (1982:44). Before Morris met the Hill Pandaram, he learned from
villagers that they were "lacking affectionate ties, sexually promiscuous
to such an extent that incestuous relations between close kin were frequent, and lazy and stupid, unable even to discern what their own interests were. Villagers would even say they had no religion or culture"
(1982:2). Morris later observed: "they are treated as social inferiors by
almost everyone with whom they have dealings. .. . They are commonly
said to live like animals and to lack any notions of decent behavior."
(1982:42) "Welfare and other government officials seem to view the nomad
life of collectors as somehow 'primitive' and are largely dedicated to making them a sedentary community. Local people in general despise their
nomadic, apparently carefree and promiscuous life and their comparatively recent adoption of textile clothing." (1982:45) While Morris observed
Hill Pandaram behaving with the subservience villagers expected of them
when they visited villages to trade, they were more independent in the
forest and able to preserve a large measure of their independence by limiting their contact with outsiders. Because the Hill Pandaram were living in
a government Forest Reserve, their hunting and clearing of swidden
patches technically were "illegal" activities; this fact colored their dealings
with forest wardens and commercial and meant that their attitudes toward
the authorities were similar to those of the Agta.
Without belaboring the point further, it should be obvious that
stereotyping and labeling of mountain foragers as distinct "primitive" ethnic groups is a fairly consistent phenomenon throughout South and Southeast Asia. As Bruno Lasker observed:
Not many years ago (the Moi of Indochina) were reported as
wearing few clothes, as not being overclean, as building their
houses on stilts or in trees, and as being altogether "savage."
119
�The Annamites who now make up the dominant native population of most of Indo-China say of the Moi much the same things
that Filipinos say about Ifugaos . . . coast Malays about the
Dyaks [sic] of central Borneo, Burmans about Kachins—the
same things that Greeks said about the barbarian tribes of
Macedonia, Romans about Britons.... Always these more
primitive peoples are hunters who if they go in for agriculture
at all do only a little of it, afraid to take root in an area from
which at any time they may be ousted by superior force. Always
the "superior" people call them savages and deny that they
have any culture or religion (Lasker 1944: 22-23).
Lasker's pointed comparisons with Europe can profitably be extended to Appalachia. Consider the core themes of the Appalachian
stereotype catalogued by Williams. While the mountaineer described by
travelers before the Civil War resembled the heroic American frontiersman
in his self-reliance, love of liberty, and rugged individualism, Williams
observed that post-Civil War fiction increasingly emphasized negative
traits—lawlessness, violence, ignorance and disdain for education, suspiciousness of outsiders and outside interference, sordid living conditions,
sexual aberrations (pp. 77-123). Williams concluded that the "backwoods
frontiersman" theme in Appalachian stereotyping was progressively supplanted by two more negative characterizations, the cultural primitive and
the buffoon, each a savage in his own way and lacking the nobility of the
pioneer frontiersman (pp. 1600-1603).
As appears to be the case for at least some South and Southeast Asian
foragers, Appalachian mountain men left more settled, "civilized" communities to enter the mountains, not to farm, but to hunt, trap and forage.
Williams makes it clear that early travelers consistently commented on
encountering hunters who devoted little effort to farming, readily moved
away from populous areas, bartered goods and exchanged labor but resisted regular wage work (see Williams' comments on Toulmin and
Michaux [pp. 188-189], Paulding and Featherstonhaugh [pp. 201-203], and
Lanman [pp. 226-229]). Lanman observed a vigorous, profitable trade in
ginseng in 1848 (Williams 1961:229). Both Muir (Williams 1961:264) and
Lane Allen (Williams 1961:292-297) identified hunting as an inducement
to settlement of the mountains, though by the time of their travels they
encountered fewer active commercial hunters than old men who had been
hunters in their youth. Muir and Lane Allen also commented on the commercial importance of ginseng and other medicinal roots, even after the
Civil War. Two more travelers, Buckingham and Olmstead, (Williams, pp.
216, 237) indicated that livestock raising was by far the most significant
agricultural activity in the mountains during the 1840s and 1850s. This
activity was compatible with other uses of the forest environment since ^
120
�was based on the animals ranging freely and consuming acorn and chestnut mast.
It is generally accepted that the eighteenth-century "long hunters"
who were the vanguard of white settlement in rugged sections of Appalachia dealt commercially in hides and pelts; they did not spend winters
roughing it in station camps to put meat on their families' tables. Family
traditions of early settlers verify travelers' observations that hunting continued to be important, so much so that hunters actually moved away from
settlements in good farming areas in their pursuit of game. For example,
descendants of Jonathan Blevins sometimes express their chagrin that old
Jonathan sold valley land in Wayne County, Kentucky around 1820 in
order to move into the rugged gorge of the Big South Fork in Scott County,
Tennessee, but they explain that Jonathan felt compelled to seek out more
remote hunting grounds when increasing settlement made game scarce in
Wayne County (personal communication, Oscar Blevins). Having moved
away from settlements, to hunt and trap rather than to farm, these men
and their families could supplement their income by taking advantage of
other commercial activities afforded by their backwoods environment,
such as collecting medicinal roots, tanbark, nuts, beeswax and honey, and
raising hogs on forest mast.
In the early nineteenth century, backwoods hunters and foragers
were viewed positively as pioneers opening up the old Southwest and
claiming it for settlement. The rugged lifestyle of the pioneer was adventurous and ennobling, a powerful symbol of the American experience. But
as Shapiro suggests, once Appalachian mountaineers were no longer on
the physical frontier, their persisting frontier lifestyle required explanation. Just as Hindus, Filipinos, or Malays viewed their foraging specialists
as primitives who had failed to make an evolutionary transition into civilization, other Americans viewed Appalachians as "contemporary ancestors" who had failed to modernize, failed to make a transition from subsistence into commercial farming because they had chosen poorly or been
pushed into land ill-suited to farming.
Even while Asian forest foragers continued to plan an important role
in supplying essential raw materials to the lowlands, "civilized" Asians
misinterpreted the true nature of their economic role in the larger society
and the origins of their "primitive" lifestyle. Differences between foragers
and farmers were exaggerated and fixed in stereotypic contrasts and characterizations. Thus it should be no surprise that similar stereotypic contrasts and characterizations emerged to explain Appalachian foragers at a
time when their economic contributions to the larger society were in fact
dwindling in importance. Demand for buckskin decreased, fashions in
furs changed; transcontinental railroads made it feasible for huge livestock
and meat packing operations in the west to supply eastern markets; improved technologies and larger scale factory production resulted in substi121
�tution of synthetic chemicals for tanbark and new drugs for the old pharmacopoeia. Simultaneously, industrial America made incursions into the
mountains. It took only a quarter century for industrial-scale timbering
virtually to eliminate the primary forest. Mining also was destructive of the
habitat necessary for commercial hunting and forest collecting. All that
remained for commercial foragers was subsistence-level enterprise, and
there was less and less land available and suitable for that purpose.
To local color writers who began to develop the "cultural primitive"
stereotype of Appalachia in the 1870s and 1880s, their subjects seemed to
be clinging to savage lifeways borrowed from the Indians (see Cunningham 1987 for extended discussion of this point). They seemed unable or
unwilling to modernize and too ready to isolate themselves in the mountains. In fact these Appalachians had experienced and were still in the
throes of an economic upheaval that rendered their old hunting and foraging specialization useless in the regional and national economy and deprived them of their livelihood. We know that many valley farmers and
townspeople recovered from the aftermath of the Civil War and took advantage of new economic opportunities created by industry. It seems plausible that hunters and foragers who did not perceive their situation and
adjust quickly became the chronically poor, apathetic "branchwater" Appalachians who were stereotyped in increasingly negative terms toward
the turn of the century. Given their economic plight, it is hardly surprising
that these Appalachians experienced worsening material conditions and
cultural disintegration; but these conditions unfortunately provided added
impetus for stereotyping which blamed the victims of modernization for
not modernizing and exaggerated the boundaries separating them from
other Americans. Thus writers of local color fiction took up the task of
describing and rationalizing cultural differences and reaffirming the appropriateness of boundaries between lowlanders and Appalachians (beautiful
but uncultured daughters as well as mountain men). Attempts were made
to establish historical ethnic origins for these cultural differences in order
to further set the group apart as "other" Americans. Appalachians who
identified with the wider society, much like Dayak people who became
Malay, joined outsiders in their fascination with the primitives who lived
upstream.
In an article entitled, "If There Were No Malays, Who Would the
Semai Be?" R.K. Dentan, an anthropologist who studied the Semai of
Malaysia, described with perplexity how his quest for them always led him
further into the hinterland. People in the village of Jinteh "chuckled at the
word Semai, saying 'That's what outsiders call us here, but the real Semai
live in the mountains/" Had Dentan been Appalachian, he'd have understood immediately that Semai is the Malay equivalent of hillbilly.
122
�Bibliography
Coedes, G.
The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. Honolulu: East-West Center Press.
Cunningham, Rodger
1987 Apples on the Flood: The Southern Mountain Experience. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Dentan, R.K.
1975 "It There Were No Malays, Who Would the Semai Be?" in Pluralism in Malaya: Myth
or Reality, ed. Judith Nagata, pp. 50-64. Laiden: Brill.
Foster, Brian L.
1974 "Ethnicity and Commerce" American Ethnologist 1:437-48.
Fox, Richard G.
1969 "Professional Primitives: Hunters and Gatherers of Nuclear South Asia" Man in
India 49(2): 139-160.
Garvan, John M.
1963 The Negritos of the Philippines, ed. Hermann Hochegger. Vienna: University of Vienna
Institute of Ethnology.
Hall, D.G.E.
1966 A History of Southeast Asia. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Hoffman, Carl L.
1984 "Punan Foragers in the Trading Networks of Southeast Asia" Past and Present in
Hunter Gatherer Studies, ed. Carmel Schrire. New York: Academic Press.
Hutterer, Karl L.
1974 "The Evolution of Philippine Lowland Societies" Mankind 9(4):287-299.
Lasker, Bruno
1944 Peoples of Southeast Asia. New York: Knopf.
King, V.T.
1985 The Maloh of West Kalimantan: An Ethnographic Study of Social Inequality and Social
Change Among an Indonesian Borneo People. Dordrecht, Holland: Foris Publications.
Lehman, F.K.
1967 "Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems" Southeast Asian
Tribes, Minorities and Nations, ed. Peter Kunstadter, pp. 93-124. Princeton University
Press.
Meilink-Roelofsz, M.A.P.
1962 Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago. The Hague: M.
Nijhoff.
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�Moerman, Michael
1965 "Who Are The Lue: Ethnic Identification in a Complex Civilization" American Anthropologist 67: 1215-1230.
Morris, Brian
1977 "Tappers, Trappers, and the Hill Pandaram" Anthropos 72:225-41.
1982 Forest Traders: A Socio-Economic Study of the Hill Pandaram (London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology 55). London: Athlone.
Peterson, Jean Treloggen
1978 The Ecology of Social Boundaries: Agta Foragers of the Philippines (Illinois Studies in
Anthropology 11). Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Rousseau, J.
1975 "Ethnic Identity and Social Relations in Central Borneo" Pluralism in Malaya: Myth
or Reality, ed. Judith Nagata, pp. 32-49. Leiden: Brill.
Shapiro, Henry D.
1978 Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American
Consciousness, 1870-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Simkin, C.G.F.
1968 The Traditional Trade of Asia. London: Oxford University Press.
Williams, Cratis D.
1961 The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction, Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University. (University Microfilms facsimile, 1973)
124
�Appalachianism and Orientalism:
Reflections on Reading Edward Said
by
Rodger Cunningham
Here is a pair of quotations from a sociological work published in the
1960s,
[They] so far have demonstrated an incapacity for disciplined and abiding unity. They experience collective outbursts
of enthusiasm but do not pursue patiently collective endeavors,
which are usually embraced half-heartedly. They show lack of
coordination and harmony in organization and function, nor
have they revealed an ability for cooperation. Any collective
action for common benefit or mutual profit is alien to them.
(Said 309-10)
Thus, [he] lives in a hard and frustrating environment.
He has little chance to develop his potentialities and define his
position in society, holds little belief in progress and change,
and finds salvation only in the hereafter. (Said 310)
These are not from Jack Weller or any of his fellow soldiers in the war on
mountain backwardness. They come from the pen of the Israeli author
Sania Hamady and appear in a book titled Temperament and Character of the
Arabs. I am quoting them, with the occasional noun left out, from Edward
Said's Orientalism, published in 1978. I had not read Orientalism when I
wrote Apples on the Flood, but I greatly wish I had, for what I have just
quoted is only one example of the striking parallels between, on the one
hand, Western views of the Muslim East as analyzed by Said, and on the
other the terms in which Appalachia has been viewed by scholarship and
journalism since its first "discovery."
Other clear parallels lie close to hand. Just as Orientalism is, in Said's
words, "a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism" (27), so stereotypes of Appalachians have strong affinities with stereotypes of blacks and
Indians—and in each case, the resultant prejudice is the only halfway
respectable outlet for such stereotyping in "enlightened" American society
today. The student of Appalachia is also struck by such things as
Chateaubriand's judgment that Orientals represented "civilized man fallen
again into a savage state" (Said 171); or the American textbook which
125
�stated of the Middle East, "Few people of the area even know that there
is a better way to live" (287); and in general the fact that, as Said puts it,
"for no other ethnic or religious group"—I'm sure we can think of an
exception—"is it true that virtually anything can be written or said about
it, without challenge or demurral" (287). Again, when Said speaks of Islamic orientalism's "retrogressive position when compared to the other
human sciences" (261), we need only think of how articles on Appalachia
from the turn of the century were used as the basis for serious studies in
the 60s, while books and articles from the 60s retain a popular and even
an academic currency today which would be thought scandalous in the
study of any other group. Or again, when Said speaks of the importance
of travel accounts in establishing the image of the Orient (99), and the
disappointment of later writers that the reality was different (100),and
when he examines the use of such accounts to construct a picture of a
" 'cultural synthesis' . . . that could be studied apart from . . . economics,
sociology, and politics" (105), the student of Appalachia is on familiar
ground. And finally, when Said invokes the assumption "that no Oriental
can know himself the way an Orientalist can" (239), we might well think
of Rupert Vance's praise of how Jack Weller "came to know these people
better than they know themselves" (Vance v).
And in both cases, the Oriental and the Appalachian, the underlying
phenomenon is the same: a discourse of power, a way of seeing and
talking about things which is conditioned by domination and which tends
both to perpetuate itself and to perpetuate that domination. It is a way of
organizing perceptions into a closed self-referential system which takes
on a life of its own, shaping assumptions and perceptions even among
those who are unaware of any motivation to oppress. My editors made
me severely prune the use of the word "discourse" in Apples on the Flood,
but obviously this is one of the main themes of the book. As Said says, "It
would be wrong to conclude that the Orient"—or Appalachia—"was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality" (5)—pace
certain crude and ill-digested forms of cognitive dissonance theory. It is
simply that one may legitimately take as an object of study not that reality
but what is said about it, since the latter constitutes a "regular constellation
of ideas" (5) which goes on "despite or beyond any correspondence, or
lack thereof, with a 'real'"(5) region of the earth. It is a matter of how
"texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear
to describe" (94)—can "produce evidence that proves their validity" (239)
in what has been called a "near bewitching self-verification" (M. McDonald
in Chapman 206).
These qualities of discourse reflect a particular relationship between
the author and the subject of the discourse. Since discursive relations are
power-relations, in each case the powerful one of the pair is the writer, the
other the written-about (cf. Said 308). The one is active, the other passive.
126
�Hence the one is allowed to change without altering its basic nature, while
the other is seen as static, as never really moving beyond some "classic"
period (cf. Said 79 etc.). And in each case, therefore, the victim is then
blamed for the static nature which is an artifact of discourse in the first
place; the victim is seen as an example of "arrested development" (Said
145) in a scheme based on the dichotomy "advanced/backward" (207).
Hence in each case, finally, the marginalized member of the opposition is
neutralized symbolically as well as physically—deprived of self-explanatory power as well as physical power.
In this essay, then, I wish to explore the nature of this relationship
in detail with respect to the parallel cases of Orientalism on the one hand
and to our own concerns as Appalachian scholars on the other. I shall do
so by examining two authors discussed by Said as part of the "Orientalist"
phenomenon—authors who also had a large effect on perceptions of Appalachians' "Celtic" or Atlantic ancestors, cousins, and analogues. The latter
form another group whose relations with "the West" have been
problematic ever since "the West's" birth. The authors I wish to discuss
are Bede in the eighth century and Ernest Renan in the nineteenth.
Bede, called "the Venerable," was born in the English kingdom of
Northumbria in 673 and died there in 735. He wrote both on a "Celtic"
Christianity which in his time was resisting assimilation to the Western
Church in Britain and also on an Islam which was rolling that church back
on the continent. Said mentions Bede only twice, and in Apples on the Flood
I also have little to say about him; but as a common father of both sets of
"Western" attitudes, he is worth a closer look here.
Bede stood at the beginning of Western civilization. He championed
it at a time when it was still in the process of being synthesized out of the
remains of Western Roman civilization and the culture of those Germans,
including the English, who were Rome's former enemies, new overlords,
imitators, and would-be preservers. Bede was born only three-quarters of
a century after Christianity had come to the English from Rome. Just
eleven years before his birth, the Synod of Whitby had mandated the
union of the older churches of the British Isles with the Roman Church,
but many areas were still in resistance in Bede's time and for long afterward. Bede, then, was separated by only a few generations from Germanic
paganism and by only a few miles from "Celtic" schism. Furthermore, in
his lifetime Islam conquered North Africa and Spain, and was barely
turned back in the middle of France two years before his death. On his
deathbed he prayed the Psalms in Latin, but among his last words were
five lines of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse about the unknowability of the
soul's fate after death.
Thus in Bede's time, Muslims and "Celts" were both near, powerful,
and threatening; and in consequence, he inscribes them both in a rhetoric
of the adult, the male, and the negative. The Arabs to him were "sons of
127
�Ishmael, whose hand is against every man" (Bede 347). Ishmael was, of
course, the rejected son of Abraham, as Isaac was the accepted son and
the ancestor of the Jews, hence of the "true Israel" of the Church. The
Arabs indeed claim descent from Ishmael, while reversing the legend.
Thus the quarrel between Christianity and Islam is imaged forth by Bede
as a strife between siblings of different and disputed status but of equal
manhood. As for the British Christians, their greatest sin in Bede's eyes is
not any of their deviations on the date of Easter, the form of the tonsure,
and so forth, but rather their refusal to send missionaries to the English—
that is, to take on the duty of instructing their younger brothers in the
wishes of the Father. It was for this reason, says Bede, that God allowed,
indeed appointed, the heathen English to slaughter the Christian Britons
(Bede 103-04). Since they have abdicated their fraternal duty and their
paternal authority, their very existence is denied them, and their enemies,
even when pagan, can be described in terms of Israel (Bede 92).
In all this it is significant that both Muslims and "Celts" are defined
as schismatics—not as independent realities but as versions of the perceiver's reality (cf. Said 71-72). Thus, on the one hand, they are denied a
reality of their own: their perceived reality is constituted by the more
"basic" reality of the author of the discourse, namely Western Roman
Christianity, which is thus discursively privileged above its neighbors.
And, on the other hand, these marginalized neighbors appear all the more
threatening, since they represent alternative modes of being which must
thus be defended against with redoubled force. As R.D. Laing says, "The
more one attempts to preserve one's autonomy and identity by nullifying
the specific human individuality of the other, the more it is felt to be
necessary to continue to do so, because with each denial of the other
person's ontological status, one's own ontological security is decreased,
the threat to the self from the other is potentiated and hence has to be
even more desperately negated" (Laing 52).
Romano-Germanic Western civilization never really recovered from
the trauma of Islam (cf. Said 59-60)—nor, as I have held elsewhere, from
the threat of alternatives presented by Celtic/Atlantic civilization and its
descendants—not even when "our" civilization rose enormously in power
and complexity and came to dominate first the Atlantic world and then the
Near East. The nineteenth century was of course the high noon of Western
dominance, and it was also the high noon of the articulation of still-prevailing attitudes toward both "Celts" and Muslims. During this period another
man who also wrote about both was Ernest Renan; and as with Bede, his
writings on both groups possess striking parallels with each other, as well
as instructive comparisons and contrasts with the attitudes of a millennium
earlier.
Renan, best known for his iconoclastic Life of Jesus, was a "Celt"
himself, a Breton. He wrote in a day when both "Celts" and Muslims were
128
�perceived as remote, weak, and non-threatening (or no longer physically
threatening). Thus, in contrast with Bede, he describes both groups of
Others in terms which are feminizing, infantilizing and quasi-positive;
that is, in both cases he deals in terms conditioned not by overt boundarydefense, but by the kind of projection and appropriation which typifies
those in a position of unquestioned superiority and which masks aggression in the terms of acceptance.
Renan perceives both Muslims and Celts, then, in terms of childhood. He sees the Celts in terms of his own personal childhood in Brittany,
and of his mother in particular (cf. Chapman 82-83). He also sees Islam in
terms of an "unaging 'gracious childhood'" (Said 306), and he sees Semitic
languages as "a phenomenon of arrested development in comparison with
the mature languages and cultures of the Indo-European group" (Said
145). Thus Renan constructed his feminized, infantilized "Celt" and "Oriental" from the part of the universe which was left out of his own adult
male nineteenth-century rationality. In what Said calls "Renan's . . . peculiarly ravaged, ragingly masculine world of historical learning" (147), he
felt a nostalgia for his mother's home (Renan in Chapman 83) and for
whatever he could associate with it. But this was that sort of nostalgia
which is not only compatible with, but contingent upon, the disappearance
of its object, "Alas! It is also condemned to disappear, this emerald of the
western seas!" (Renan in Chapman 85: my translation).
Thus we see two ways in which, in two historical moments of the
West, two of its neighbor cultures have been dealt with on the level of the
sign. In both cases, the threat presented by the alternatives is symbolic
before it is physical, and in both cases the threat is neutralized semiotically
before it is physically. In Renan, as in Bede, "Celtdom" and Islam represent alternative possibilities of being. In the intervening eleven centuries,
however, the relations of power had fundamentally changed, as had the
degree of self-definition of the West. These Others were not strong but
weak, and therefore they were regarded not as adults but as children.
Thus they were semiotically represented not as schismatic but as archaic:
not as illegitimate offshoots but as arrested earlier forms—not as rejected
brothers but as contemporary ancestors. And they were dismissed from
consideration not by calling for crusades (these having long since succeeded) but by a quietly regretful acknowledgment that the archaic must
yield to the progressive as childhood to adulthood. Thus the power-relation which assures the victory of Western might is paralleled by a discourse-relation privileging a Western rationality which constitutes, in the
Derridean sense, its opposite numbers in Near East and Far West. This
discourse, in Said's words, "failed to identify with human experience,
failed also to see it as human experience" (328).
Yet it must not be forgotten that around, beyond and above the
necessities of discourse, there are the possibilities of dialogue. Beyond the
129
�dichotomous vision of negations, there is the synthesizing and esemplastic
vision which unites contraries. The two types of vision may even occur in
the same individual, as in another example I would like to examine.
Another writer who dealt in images of both the "Celt" and the Oriental was W.B. Yeats, whom Said quotes three times, but in two sharply
different contexts. Yeats bought into "Orientalism" and used it in his poetry and his occult writings much as he constructed elitist mystifications
out of his own nation's history. The Appalachian poet P.J. Laska gives us
a telling image of Yeats
in the streets at night,
when he walked in dreams
from the mansioned gardens of the rich
to the statehouse chambers,
stumbling over bundles of rags
which he took for wondrous spirits
when he heard them groan. (Laska 163)
This strikingly dense image captures the essential problem with Yeats'
attitudes toward the Other. This master of masks indeed mistook the garment for the body; and, having done so, he must needs perceive the real
cry of the self as a sending from some fantasticized other world. The same
image was used in a more unpacked form by Frantz Fanon: "The culture
that the intellectual leans toward is often no more than a stock of particularisms. He wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead he only
catches hold of their outer garments. And these outer garments are merely
the reflection of a hidden life, teeming and perpetually in motion" (Fanon
223-24).
There was a valid core in Yeats' identification with Ireland: and yet
the very energy of the identification was turned away by a mystifying
discourse in order to strengthen defenses against the truly threatening
aspects of the reality he touched. Thus, for example, though he knew the
name of an ancestor who had fought at the battle of the Boyne, he always
asserted that the latter had fought for King James and the native Irish,
while in fact he had been on the other side, as one would expect from
Yeats' Protestant background. This falsification of self-identity can stand
for a whole array of failures of clear vision—a whole structure of mystifications beclouding the facts of oppression in this case and in many others.
Thus far for Yeats' romantic use of the imagery of his oppressed
neighbors. But Said also quotes Yeats in quite another context. To wit, he
Cites Yeats' line "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" in appealing for
a recognition of "the human ground . . . in which texts, visions, methods,
and discourses begin, grow, thrive, and degenerate" (110). The line is from
"The Circus Animals' Desertion," a poem from the end of Yeats' life in
130
�which he repents of a career in which "Players and painted stage took all
my love, / And not those things that they were emblems of" (Yeats 185).
Thus Yeats himself, speaking in dialogue with his own self and in the
name of his own genuineness, points the way to a particularism, an attention to the individual and concrete. Thus the heteroglossia of his poetic
practice transcends the hieratic, monological discourse of his visionary
theories.
We have seen then that Said's work on the image of the Near East
bears important and fertile correspondences with the work which many
of us have been trying to accomplish in the study of Appalachia and of the
images by which this region has been interpreted. And there are parallels,
too—or we may hope there are—in the careers of Said's ideas and of our
own. Writing a decade ago, Said complained that Orientalist discourse
went essentially unchallenged in the journalistic and even the academic
worlds. If this is no longer quite so true as it was then, the difference is
largely due to Said's own efforts. He lamented that the official discourse
of Orientalism was rarely broken into by native voices answering Orientalist scholarship with scholarship from the inside. One could have said
much the same thing about Appalachia at that time. But the same year
that saw the publication of Orientalism marked the appearance of Helen
Lewis' anthology Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case,
which (though it has hardly attained the same degree of attention in the
"outside world") has meant a great deal to the self-definition of Appalachia
on the part of native scholars and students and to the delineation, from
the inside, of the problems facing the region—thus breaking the nearmonopoly of external and/or elitist views on the "problem of Appalachia."
In both the Near Eastern and the Appalachian fields, these pioneering
works have stimulated a great deal more such native analysis: and as a
result, it is no longer quite so true in either case that virtually anything can
be said without challenge.
Said's writing is sometimes said to be tendentious, axegrinding, and
overdrawn. But often the real object of his critics' indignation, I feel, is
that he is angry at all: and considering what he has had to put up with
intellectually, professionally, and personally, that anger is hardly surprising. Again, the position his critics call "overdrawn" is one hardly drawn
at all before his time, and certainly not with such learning and cogency.
Personally, I like the quality of his anger, which is a function of his engagement, an engagement which energizes his work as I hope my own engagement does mine. In both cases, if what we say is personally colored, then
I think it is so in an entirely positive sense—not as a projection of private
resentments, but as a rational search for historic roots which can then be
worked forward from again in a quest for solutions. On the flyleaf of my
own copy of Apples on the Flood I have written a quotation which Said
reproduces from Antonio Gramsci, "The starting-point of critical elabora131
�tion is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself as
a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an
infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative
at the outset to compile such an inventory" (25). This expresses precisely
what I was trying to do in writing Apples on the Flood; and I hope that what
both Said and I are grinding is not an axe but a lens—a lens for the
examination and, as Raymond Williams says, "the 'unlearning' of 'the
inherent dominative mode'" (Said 28).
References Cited
Bede. A History of the English Church and People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price. 1955. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1968.
Chapman, Malcolm. The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture. London: Croom Helm: Montreal:
McGill-Queen's UP, 1978.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York, Grove,
1968.
Laing, R.D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. 1960. Harmondsworth,
Eng.: Penguin, 1965.
Laska, PJ. "Contrary to Appearances, Belief in the Master Race Is Not a Condition of Greatness in Poetry/7 New Ground. Ed. Don Askins and David Morris. Jenkins, Ky.: White
Oak, W.Va.: Southern Appalachian Writers' Co-operative: Whitesburg, Ky.: Mountain
Review, 1977. 162-63.
Lewis, Helen Matthews, Linda Johnson, and Don Askins, eds. Colonialism in Modern America:
The Appalachian Case. Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1978.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.
Vance, Rupert. Introductory note to Jack Weller. Yesterday's People, Life in Contemporary
Appalachia. Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1965. v-ix.
Wallace-Hadrill, J.M. Bede's Europe. Jarrow, Eng.: G. Beckwith, 1962.
Yeats, William Butler. Selected Poems of William Butler Yeats. Ed. M.L. Rosenthal. New
York, Macmillan, 1962.
132
�Llewellyn and Giardina, Two Novels
About Coal Mining
by
Laurie Lindberg
Nothing in the definition of regional literature as "an accurate representation of the habits, speech, manners, history, folklore, or beliefs" (Holman:373) of a particular geographical area suggests that a regional work is
somehow second class, less valuable than a work with a more general or
an indefinite setting. Yet we've all heard the term used as a pejorative,
that writer is only a regional writer; that novel only a regional work.
The local color movement may be what initially gave regional literature a bad name. The works of popular local color writers such as Mary
Murfree were characterized by sentimentality, by an emphasis on the grotesque or eccentric in character, and by a focus on obvious peculiarities
with little insight into what went on below the surface of a people or place.
Such local writing seemed to be the work of an outsider who invited other
outsiders to observe and be amused by the peculiarities of the inhabitants
of a specific locale.
Local color and regionalism are both forms of literary realism, but
there is an important distinction between them. Whereas local color emphasizes the particularities, the idiosyncrasies of a group, regional writing
points out "in the local and the particular . . . those aspects of the human
character and the human dilemma common to all people in all ages and
places" (Holman:373). Good regional literature has an application far beyond the region it claims to describe.
Two works that represent regional writing at its best are Storming
Heaven, by Denise Giardina, and How Green Was My Valley, by Richard
Llewellyn. The two books differ in a number of ways. Storming Heaven was
published only last year; How Green Was My Valley appeared in 1940, almost fifty years ago. Storming Heaven is narrated by four speakers in alternating chapters, so the reader views the events of the story from a variety
of perspectives; How Green Was My Valley is unified by having a single
narrator and thus a more focused point of view. Giardina's coal fields are
in Appalachia, mostly Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia; Llewellyn's
valley is in South Wales.
Yet even the most casual reading of the two works reveals striking
parallels. One explanation for the similarities is that both books accomplish
what fine regional literature always does, they present what is universal
in the human character and the human condition by means of particular
133
�characters in particular places. In that sense these books compare to all
literary works that comment on what it means to be human in a specific
time and place. There is another explanation, however, both books capture
a way of life and delineate characters that have been significantly shaped
by a mountainous land and by those who seek to profit from the coal that
lies beneath it. Although thousands of miles and an ocean separate the
Welsh valley in Llewellyn's book and the Appalachian coal fields in Giardina's, the regions as described in the two novels have much in common.
Land ownership is a basic issue in both places and in both books.
Land means security, prosperity, power for those who own it. In the case
of the Morgan family in the unnamed Welsh community of How Green Was
My Valley, ownership of a house and land means stability. Gwilym and
Beth Morgan are able to establish their house as a home for six sons and
three daughters over a period of thirty years because the property it stands
on is theirs. In the end, however, even land ownership means nothing
when the land surrounding the Morgans' is sold to the coal company,
which promptly begins dumping slag on the hillside above the house.
Huw, the youngest of the Morgan sons and narrator of the novel, describes the destruction of his home and land by the slag,
The slag heap is moving again.
I can hear it whispering to itself, and as it whispers, the
walls of this brave little house are girding themselves to withstand the assault. . . . But the slag heap moves, pressing on,
down and down, over and all around this house which was my
father's and my mother's and now is mine. Soon, perhaps in
an hour, the house will be buried, and the slag heap will stretch
from the top of the mountain right down to the river in the
Valley. (101)
Huw Morgan is forced from his home because the coal company owns the
land above his on the mountain.
In Storming Heaven land ownership is a life-and-death matter whenever a coal company wants a tract of land which the owner is unwilling to
sell. When persuasion and intimidation fail, the companies are not averse
to using stronger measures; for example, after the grandfather of one of
the novel's narrators, CJ. Marcum, refuses to sell his property, he is
murdered and his widow and grandson forced off the land. CJ. remembers, "Mamaw and me heard a shot. We ran and found him toppled over
into one of the hives .. . shot once through the head. Sheriff come around
in three days and nailed the notice to vacate on our cabin door" (16).
Families that have farmed their land for generations find themselves
homeless, without ground to raise the produce and livestock that have
sustained them, dependent on relatives for shelter. Loss of land means
134
�loss of security, even in the face of death. As Carrie Bishop, another of the
book's narrators, remarks, "I feared we would lose the Homeplace some
day. I tried not to think about it. ... But if there was no place of my own
to be, no ground where my bones could be laid beside my kins', would I
not be the most miserable creature in God's world?" (141) Both in Appalachia and in South Wales, land is a commodity precious for many
reasons, but especially for its power to mark the difference between a
sense of belonging and a sense of homelessness.
We see in both novels that when the coal companies take over the
land, mining becomes the primary, sometimes the solitary, source of income in an area, and the hazards of mining become a fact of life for those
who must go down into the mines as well as those who wait and worry
above. The Welsh woman Beth Morgan is bravely matter-of-fact when she
sends her husband and sons off to the colliery each day, but she never
loses sight of the dangers they face. When her son Ivor is killed in a roof
fall only days after the birth of his son and her husband reminds her that
"The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away," Beth refuses comfort and
kindles her anger over his loss. When her husband dies under the coal
some years later, it signals the end of more than her marriage; it signals
the end of her faith, "'God could have had him in a hundred ways,' she
said, and tears burning white in her eyes, 'but He had to have him like
that. A beetle under the foot. . . . If I set foot in Chapel again, it will be in
my box, and knowing nothing of it'" (492-93). The necessity of death she
can accept, but the thought of death in the mines is almost too ugly for her
to endure.
In the West Virginia mines of Storming Heaven, the naturally hazardous job of underground mining is presented as even more hazardous
because of the carelessness and criminal neglect of the owners. Vernie
Lloyd protests when her husband wants to take their sons into the mine
with him, but to no avail. Like Beth Morgan, Vernie is a wife and mother
terrified for her men; unlike Beth, she reacts to the constant fear by detaching herself from her family. She becomes cold and distant, withdrawing
from those she loves in order to protect herself from hurt. After the man
with whom Rondal works is crushed to death in a roof fall; she tells her
son, "I done lost you. Coal mine will get you sure. You're bound to git kilt.
I seen it coming" (39-40). The anger that Beth Morgan turns against God
Vernie Lloyd turns against her men—but in neither case can the mother
protect herself or those she loves. Beth loses her oldest son and her husband in cave-ins, while Vernie's husband and youngest son are killed in
an underground explosion. For the women in coal country, whether Wales
or West Virginia, mining means horrible fear and grief.
The men are afraid, too, but their fear seems to be blunted by early,
regular exposure to the hazards of their occupation. Leaving school at the
age of ten to join his daddy in the mines, Rondal Lloyd tries to quell his
135
�initial fear of the darkness and confinement by reminding himself of the
other children who must work in the mines to help support their families.
But he remains afraid when he is underground, "I tried not to think of the
mountain pushing down on us. . . . The air was still and our breathing
could not move it. The mountain pressed down, uneasy at the violation
of its entrails" (35). Rondal leaves the mine, swearing not to return, but
his desire to improve conditions for his father and brothers by starting a
union brings him back. Eventually his fear eases to become what he describes as a "disregard for danger and even a mocking sort of courage.
(He) would look up after the powder had blown and dare the son of a bitch
roof to come down" (89). He comes to uneasy terms with the mountain.
Huw Morgan, like Rondal Lloyd, learns to deal with his fear of the
mine, but he never forgets the sense of menace he feels when underground, and he shares Rondal's conception of the mountain as a creature
violated. Watching his father die under tons of coal and rock, Huw feels a
keen awareness of the earth as an entity exploited by men,
. . . The Earth bore down in mightiness. . . . There is patience in the Earth to allow us to go into her, and dig, and hurt
with tunnels and shafts, and if we put back the flesh we have
torn from her and make good what we have weakened, she is
content to let us blood her. But when we take, and leave her
weak where we have taken, she has a soreness, and anger that
we should be so cruel to her and so thoughtless of her comfort.
So she waits for us, and finding us, bears down, and bearing
down, makes us a part of her, flesh of her flesh, with our clay
in place of the clay we thoughtlessly have shovelled away. (49)
Although Llewellyn does not emphasize as Giardina does the role of
mine owners and operators in mandating irresponsible and unsafe mining
practices, both authors deal at length in their works with the dangerous
nature of a miner's work and the various ways people have of coping with
their fear.
Another reality of life in a coal community is pollution, the damage
done to the earth, air, and water by mine owners whose only concern is
profit. The slag that eventually swallows up the Morgan house first shows
its destructive nature down in the Valley. Surveying the site after some
time away, Huw notices first of all the advance of the slag heap,
Big it had grown, and long, and black . . . on both sides of
the river. The green grass, and the reeds and the flowers, all
had gone, crushed beneath it. . . . The river . . . banks were
stained, and the reeds of their dirtiness, ready to die of shame,
136
�they seemed, and of sorrow for their dear friend, the river.
(103^04)
The waste products of the local mining operations, carelessly discarded in
order to save time and money for the owners, slowly but relentlessly
destroy the once beautiful Welsh Valley.
In the hills of West Virginia, the same process of destruction takes
place. The child Rondal has never known the creek any different from the
way it is now, "black with mine drainage and raw sewage," but his Daddy
recalls an earlier time when "The creek was clear as glass, and we used to
git trout outen it, and bullfrogs. . . . Now the creek won't run clear til
kingdom come, I reckon" (24). Contamination of water in the coal camps,
where the operators have built the privies too close to the water supply,
results in an epidemic of typhoid. As the local nurse, Carrie Bishop treats
the victims and presses for new sanitary facilities at the camp. According
to the absentee owners, however, there is "no money in the budget for
such frills," so the people continue to sicken and die. The condition of the
air, too, is deplorable. When Carrie first comes to Vulcan coal camp, she
comments on the quality of the air: "Clouds of black bug dust whipped
through the streets, and when the wind was right, the sulphurous fumes
from the burning slag heap above Hunkie Holler choked the air in the
narrow bottom" (102). A coal operation wherever it is located invariably
means pollution of the environment.
A coal operation also seems to mean dissatisfaction with working
conditions and wages, and all too often violence is the result. Both Giardina's and Llewellyn's books focus on the causes of the miners' discontent,
the efforts made to resolve differences peacefully, and the strikes and
violence that occur when these efforts fail. In How Green Was My Valley,
most of the mine owners are Londoners; in Storming Heaven, the owners
live in New York or Boston. In both cases the absentee owners thrive while
the miners struggle to survive.
Interestingly, in both books the community leader who encourages
miners to fight for better wages and safer conditions is a minister. When
reminded that his business as a man of God is the spiritual welfare of his
congregation, the Reverend Mr. Gruffydd justifies his involvement in mining politics: "My business/ shouted Mr. Gruffydd, 'is anything that comes
between man and the spirit of God. . . . Let it not be forgotten that the
Lord Jesus drove the money-changers from the Temple" (154). We see Mr.
Gruffydd as a man who respects authority and teaches his parishioners to
do likewise—until authority is proven to be unjust; then he counsels the
formation of an orderly society, a union, to negotiate for justice. Mr.
Gruffydd encourages the men to state their grievances boldly and to fight
for their rights, and he helps them to keep up their spirits through the
desperate days of hardship and strike, foregoing his own meager salary,
137
�collecting clothes and food for the families most in need, and presiding
over the funerals of those who starve to death.
The Reverend Gruffydd has his counterpart in West Virginia in Albion Freeman, who goes into the mines in order to carry his message as a
preacher to the men. Albion persuades the operators to allow him to hold
Bible study meetings during dinner breaks in the mine, and prayer meetings at his coal camp home in the evenings. The superintendent recognizes
the importance of religion in the peoples' lives and thinks that a minister
will encourage the miners to accept their lot. Instead, Albion reads to them
from the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, preaching that the children
of Israel should be delivered from their oppressors, that the first shall be
last and the last shall be first. Albion and his flock study the United Mineworkers along with the Bible. Albion, like the Reverend Gruffydd, suffers
along with the strikers, as hungry and cold as they. He preaches faithfulness to a just cause and faith in a God who will one day see his people to
the Promised Land.
The goal of both Albion Freeman and Merddyn Gruffydd is to inspire
their congregations to believe in themselves, as well as in God. The gospel
they preach is not patience and submission, but battle for the glory of
God. Even coal miners, they dare to claim, are entitled as children of the
Lord to a decent life, which can be made possible only by humane working
conditions and a fair share of the profits which the owners would prefer
to hoard.
The owners and operators who would deny these rights to their
employees are certainly motivated by avarice, but perhaps by something
else as well—prejudice against the very people whose work has made
them wealthy. In the first place, miners perform physical labor, which
immediately lowers them in the eyes of the "upper" classes. After all, how
much respect can be due a bluecollar—in this case, black-collar—worker?
Also, the nature and setting of the work itself is hardly likely to lend the
miners status. Coal miners spend their working lives underground in
holes, like rats or moles, and even when they emerge into the light, they
carry blackness with them. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then the
miners and their families who live in the coal camps spend a large proportion of their time far from God. The work which makes their employers
rich lowers the status of the miners, enabling the Boston owners of a West
Virginia coal camp to refuse to improve sanitary conditions there, claiming
that the typhoid is "caused by the filthy habits of the miners and their
families" (105). A teacher at the National School in Wales can tell Huw
Morgan, "Your dirty coal mining ways are not wanted here" (189), and a
jealous housekeeper can refer to Huw's sister as a "slut" who is "fouling"
her husband's home because she is a coal miner's daughter.
Not only by virtue of their association with coal mining, however, are
the people in South Wales and Appalachia scorned by outsiders. The na138
�tives of both regions have been victims of stereotyping in their respective
countries, and both novels illustrate the damage that such stereotyping can
do. To the teachers brought from the city to educate the children in the
West Virginia coal camps and to the mine owners from Boston, the people
of Appalachia are hillbillies—dirty, backward, and stupid. To the Londoners who own the collieries in South Wales and to the teachers in the school
across the mountain from Huw Morgan's home, the Welsh people are
savages—dirty, backward, and stupid.
Criticism of a regional group often focuses on its dialect, and we see
in Storming Heaven and How Green Was My Valley how the distinctive
speech of a region earns its people contempt. The voices that we hear in
both books are rich in regional accents, colorful with slang expressions and
vivid figures of speech, so that we as readers are all the more dismayed
to see how the speakers are made to suffer for their speech. Carrie Bishop
is an amazingly feisty woman, but even she is defensive about her Appalachian dialect. When she must ask the help of two New York reporters in
moving Rondal over Blair Mountain following his serious injury, one of
the reporters mimics Carrie's accent. Although Carrie needs his help too
much to show resentment, his mockery makes her self-conscious and defensive about her speech, even in a life-and-death situation.
In How Green Was My Valley, dialect becomes a crucial issue when
Huw Morgan enrolls in the National School established by the English.
The Welsh language is considered "jargon" by the teachers there, and as
such it is forbidden. Being an older student, Huw usually remembers to
speak only in English, but some of the younger children at the school who
cannot remember are at the mercy of a cruel teacher who claims that
"Welsh was never a language, but only a crude means of communication
between tribes of Barbarians" (356). In order to impress upon his students
the superiority of English over Welsh, Mr. Jonas uses a device known as
a cribban,
A small girl came through the door . . . with sobs to rend
the heavens and shake her little bit of ribbon off.
About her neck a piece of new cord, and from the cord, a
board that hung to her shins and cut her as she walked. Chalked
on the board, in the fist of Mr. Elijah Jonas-Sessions, "I must
not speak Welsh in school." (348-49)
Huw flies at Mr. Jonas in a rage and beats him soundly, with the result
that he is expelled from school. We see that anti-Welsh prejudice has been
institutionalized in Wales, where the people are taught that their language
and culture are inferior to those of the British, just as people in Appalachia
have been taught to be ashamed of the dialect and culture that set them
apart from the American mainstream.
139
�A final similarity between the two books is a tone of regret, of sorrow
over irrevocable loss. Huw Morgan mourns the destruction of his valley
and the Welsh community that had once prospered there in peace and
harmony. Although he takes some comfort in the thought that the people
and land he loved will live in his memory, the fact is that the once beautiful
Valley and a way of life have been destroyed. Nothing can restore them.
In Appalachia, too, Carrie Bishop learns the hard lesson "that there
are forces in this world, principalities and powers, that wrench away the
things that are loved, people and land, and return only exile" (61). Loss is
natural, of course, and inevitable in a changing and imperfect world, but
the kind and degree of loss suffered by the people in these mining regions
after the coming of the coal industry is neither natural nor inevitable. As
Rondal Lloyd remarks, "Progress is always at somebody's expense" (118).
Giardina's and Llewellyn's novels about coal mining communities make
us aware of the cost of progress—and lead us to conclude that the price
paid in human suffering and wasted resources is certainly too high.
These novels are only "regional" works, but they speak to people
everywhere of what it means to be human. The characters in Storming
Heaven and How Green Was My Valley struggle against enormous odds,
suffer grievous pain and loss, and in spite of everything maintain a measure of dignity and pride. Giardina's and Llewellyn's books are "regional"
books that make a universal statement.
References Cited
Giardina, Denise. Storming Heaven. New York, W.W. Norton, 1987.
Holman, C. Hugh. A Handbook to Literature. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980.
Llewellyn, Richard. How Green Was My Valley. New York: Macmillan, 1940.
140
�Traditional Appalachian Culture and
Traditional Scottish Highland Culture
Compared: A Personal Perspective
fy
Clyde H. Ray
Traditional Appalachian culture and traditional Scottish Highland
culture have many similarities, shaped by a similar mountain geography
which has determined their respective social systems, their folklore and
poetry, and their isolation from and relationship to an outside world.
It must be granted that defining such similarities between two traditional cultures 3000 miles and over two centuries apart is a delicate and
challenging exercise. Certainly, no one would confuse the McGregors of
Dark Hollow in Haywood County with the 18th-century tacksmen of a
Scottish chieftain, nor is there a likelihood that the spirit of the Bonnie
Prince will step lightly from a laurel thicket on Roan Mountain. History is
the art of alteration, as well as preservation. People, both as social units
and as individuals, are made up of many contradictions, illusions, deceptions, and misconceptions. Political, religious, and social differences between the Highlanders of Scotland and America are too numerous to delineate. And to translate a Burns poem into Appalachian dialect is as major
a transition and challenge as it would be to translate it into standard
English, with the same deplorable results.
Nor is it impossible that a hypothetically equally good case could
probably be made for comparing Sioux tribal society with the Basques of
Spain, or Scotch-Irish history with the national experience of the Zulu. But
the truth has many forms: the commonality of experience, geography,
society, and economics, wherever it is to be found, does not negate, but
rather confirms a common human experience. This confrontation of a common bond, a common experience, perhaps even a common fate between
the two traditional highland cultures of Appalachia and Scotland is the
focus here.
Keeping these restrictions well in mind, some common similarities
between the two cultures nevertheless are definable. In both the traditional
Highland and the Appalachian experience, territorial control revolved
around a dominant extended family unit. Historically, the clan chief and
the Appalachian patriarch both had similar responsibilities for the people.
Both had an almost mystical right to their position by right of inheritance
or tradition. Among their people, blood relationship and custom took
141
�precedence over other social or political ties. A noted European anthropologist expressed the idea succinctly: "for to be of the same blood is to
possess the same vital principle and in this sense all who are of like blood
make one single living being. It is in this that the clan relationship really
consists/'1
A rich oral history and tradition provided a basis of continuity with
both peoples. Both cultures placed importance on genealogy and family
tradition. Directed to meeting the social and economic needs of a predominantly rural people, family institutions and allegiances were stronger in
the absence of the larger social, political, and corporate institutions of a
more industrial world. Both have been affected by similar elements of
change—roads and transportation, media, education, relocation of population, and economic development. And both provided a rich military resource for their respective nations.
It must never be forgotten that the Appalachian and the Highland
extended family unit comprised the basic social unit of their respective
peoples. Indeed, many Appalachian families are at least in part descendants of Highland families, and the family was the one vitally important
avenue by which accustomed traditions and patterns of human behavior
were conveyed from the old world to the new. A closer inspection of both
social units demonstrates the same wide relationship of the individual
members. For example, most Highland clans had (and still have) subsidiary branches of membership called "septs"—families related to the clan
either by residing in the same territory or by blood connection along maternal lines. The MacDonalds had well over 100 septs not bearing the name
of MacDonald but considered to be an integral part of the clan. Conversely,
many extended Appalachian families also contain many members not
bearing the family name but considered to be part of it, referring to those
members as cousins or as relatives, rather than septs. It was through the
family and not through any social program or restoration project that the
culture was preserved. And it is through the family that even when relocated, whether to Nova Scotia or the Over-the-Rhine community of Cincinnati, that both cultures retain their Highland or Appalachian identity
It is obvious enough, even to the most casual observer, that both
cultures developed a distinctive attire, music, dance, dialect, and folklore.
It will not be the purpose of this paper to examine the many similarities
or derivations in these areas, each of which is deserving of a separate
paper of its own. But it should be noted that both cultures have also
experienced a somewhat similar fate from the intrusion of a curious, but
not always understanding or sympathetic outside world. Both have been
stereotyped, caricatured, and over-romanticized. Both have been exploited
for economic gain from both within and without. Both have been directly
affected by an alien culture: the Highlanders by the English, the Appalachians by the mainstream American. Today, the most public display of
142
�both cultures is in similar types of social gatherings directed in part toward
the outside observer: the Appalachian Folk Festivals on the one hand and
the Highland Games and Ceileahs on the other.
And we would be less than honest if we did not also note that some
of the most destructive elements of cultural exploitation resided within
both cultures, and some of the most effective preservers of its traditions
were found outside its limits. Perhaps the worst enemy of the traditional
Highland culture was not to be found among the troopers of the Duke of
Cumberland, but rather among the Highland chiefs themselves, who
aided and abetted the worst excesses of the enclosure movement. And
many an informed admirer of the most intricate and delicate modulations
of Appalachian art and music has never climbed a ridge steeper than
Beacon Hill in Boston. In both cultures, the enemy was found to be within
as well as without.
The forces of rapid and irreversible change have operated in similar
fashion on both the Scottish and the Appalachian highlander. The improvement of transportation—whether it was the building of Marshal
Wades roads over the central Highlands in the 18th century or the improvement of major interstates in the Appalachia of the 20th century—has
had the same mixed effect on the traditional culture of both regions. It is
not only that traditionalism thrives in an isolated and parochial environment. Transportation provides rapid accessibility to social and cultural
elements from the outside world as well as encouraging outmigration of
the native people. Education, when it assumes a national perspective,
tends to replace traditional values with those of a more rapidly changing
world. Expanding media tends to impose a more standard, if wider, perception of an individual's place in the greater society. Any utilization for
its own ends. It would be rash to place any value judgment on the universal end result of both trends, equally rash to determine whether improved
social service is adequate compensation for a loss of identity and a sense
of place. In the absence of final definitive judgment, there must remain
only perception of what can be perceived: depressed economy, farmland
rapidly reverting to wilderness, a proliferation of lodges and second-home
development for vacationers from London or Atlanta. John Prebble, who
is an Englishman, states that by the 19th century, the lowlander had inherited the hills and the tartan is a shroud.2 To a disturbing extent, the Appalachian quilt serves much the same purpose.
For these reasons, the future for both the Highland and Appalachian
traditional cultures appears to be a mixed one. Both will have to endure
continued exploitation as entertainment resources for an audience increasingly middle-class, cosmopolitan, economically powerful, and indiscriminately the same. In this role, the man behind the bib overalls or in the
tartan is less noticed for what he is than for what he seems to be—someone
to be entertaining, to be observed, certainly to be photographed, but not
143
�really to be taken too seriously and to be kept somewhat separate from the
greater mainstream or national society about him. The past collective efforts of society to eradicate or to civilize the Appalachian and the Highlander have been largely replaced by one of curious paternalism which,
however subtle in application, can be yet insensitive and injurious to the
fierce pride of a people with strong ties to land and identity. As we have
seen, the people, the land, and the identity are all alike imperiled by
undirected, even misdirected social and economic change.
But on the other hand, both traditional cultures—where they exist—
continue to value their respective and common heritage. Both resist any
connotation that their culture is inferior to economic concerns or to the
more cosmopolitan and urban culture of the nation at large. Perhaps both
will ultimately continue to value tradition more than innovation, knowing
that there is something there, behind the sad, defiant cry of the pipes and
the mountain fiddles that the family of man needs, knowing that, without
it, there is the vague, lingering disquietude of incompleteness perceived.
Notes
1. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Primitives and the Supernatural.
2. John Prebble, The Highland Clearances.
144
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HERRIN, ROBERTA
EAST TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY
BOX 22, 990A
JOHNSON CITY, TN 37614
615-929-6682
HINES, PERCY
ARCHIVES AND HISTORY
13 VETERANS DRIVE
ASHEVILLE, NC 28805
704-298-5024
HOLLIMAN, MARY C
POCAHQNTAS PRESS
2805 WELLESLEY COURT
BLACKSBURG, VA 24060
703-951-0467
157
�HOOPER, ROSE
WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA TOMORROW
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-227-7492
HORN, ROBERT W.
ALEXANDRA, VA 22314
HORTON, JAMES H.
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-293-5448
HORTON, JANE S.
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-293-5448
HOWE, BARBARA J»
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY
DEPT. OF HISTORY
MORGANTCWN, WV 26506
HOWELL, BENITA
7225 WELLSWOOD LANE
KNOXVILLE, TN 37909
615-974-4408
HOWELL, THOMAS
7225 WELLSWOOD LANE
KNOXVILLE, TN 37909
615-974-4408
HSIUNG, DAVID C.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
ANN ARBOR, MI 48105
313-747-1545
HUNTER, HELEN R
3167 VENTNOR ROAD SE
ROANOKE, VA 24014
703-344-5093
HUNTLEY, JOY
157 MORRIS AVENUE
ATHENS, OH 45701
614-593-7524
HYDE, WILLIAM
CENTER FOR APPALACHIAN STUDIES
UNIVERSITY HALL
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-4089
HYLTON, CAROLYN
PIKEVILLE COLLEGE
BELFRY, KY 41514
353-8123
HYMES, VIRGINIA
UNIV OF VIRGINIA-CHARLOTTESVILLE
ANTHROPOLOGY DEPT
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA 22903
804-979-5381
INSCOE, JOHN
UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA
250 WEYMANDA CIRCLE
ATHENS, GA 30606
404-542-2053
158
�JELEN, TED G.
ILLINOIS BENEDICTINE COLLEGE
POLITICAL SCIENCE
LISLE, IL 60532
JOHNSON, BETH
MAXMEADCWS, VA 24360
699-6365
JOHNSON, TAMMY
PUCEVILLE COLLEGE
PIKEVILLE, KY 41501
JOHNSON, JR, CHARLES
UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND
MODLIN FINE ARTS
RICHMOND, VA 23173
804-289-8272
JONES, ANN
CARSON-NEWMAN COLLEGE
1886 CARSON NEWMAN
JEFFERSON CITY, TN 37760
475-3166
JONES, LOYAL
BEREA COLLEGE
APPALACHIAN CENTER
BEREA, KY 40404
606-986-9341
JONES, PEGGY
PIKEVILLE COLLEGE
PIKEVILLE, KY 41501
JOYNER, NANCY L.
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-227-7264
JUDKINS, BENNETT
BELMONT ABBEY COLLEGE
DEPT OF SOCIOLOGY
BELMONT, NC 28012
704-825-3711
SHERRY
BEREA COLLEGE
C P 0 1315
BEREA, KY 40404
606-986-9341
KEEFE, SUSAN
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
ANTHROPOLOGY DEPT
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-6384
KEGLEY, GEORGE
TINKER CREEK LANE
ROANOKE, VA 24019
703-366-4607
KESSLER, CLYDE
ASA
106 P T TRAVIS AVE
RADFORD, VA 24141
639-5076
KING, KATHERINE
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
524 CALHOUN
RADFORD, VA 24141
731-3228
159
�KIBBY, CHARLIE 0
924 W OUTER DRIVE
OAK RIDGE, TN 37830
483-6005
KLINE, MICHAEL
m HERITAGE CENTER
W CU
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-227-7129
LANCASTER, PAUL
VIRGINIA TECH.
BLACKSBURG, VA 24060
703-961-5861
LANG, JOHN
EMORY & HENRY COLLEGE
EMORY, VA 24327
703-944-3121
LANIER, PARKS
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
BOX 5917
RADFORD, VA 24142
703-831-5269
LAPRESTO, BRIGITTE
PIKEVILLE COLLEGE
399 HAMBLEY BLVD
PIKEVILLE, KY 41501
606-432-5970
LAPRESTO, CRAIG
PIKEVILLE COLLEGE
399 HAMBLEY BLVD
PIKEVILLE, KY 41501
606-432-5970
LAWSON, GARLENE
PIKEVILLE COLELGE
PIKEVILLE, KY 41501
LEADBETTER, JENNY
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
WILLOW WOODS APTS.
RADFORD, VA 24141
731-0316
LEARY, SAM
APPALKIDS
ROUTE 1 BOX 373
RADFORD, VA 24141
703-639-0656
LEFLER, LISA
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
P 0 BOX 179A
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-293-3100
LEFTWICH, CHRISTI
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
RADFORD, VA 24141
731-4845
LEWIS, HELEN
HIGHLANDER CENTER
ROUTE 1 BOX 270
DUNGANNON, VA 24245
703-467-2240
LEWIS, JOHN
BEREA COLLEGE
CPO 2298
BEREA, KY 4 4 4
00
986-9341
160
�LEWIS, RONALD
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY
HISTORY DEPARTMENT
MORGANTOWN, WV 26506
293-2421
LIGHTFOOT, W E
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
ENGLICH DEPARTMENT
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-2337
LINDBERG, LAURIE K.
PIKEVILLE COLLEGE
PIKEVILLE, KY 41501
432-9379/2342
LINEWEAVER, DEBBIE
NEW RIVER COMMUNITY COLLEGE
DRAWER 1127
DUBLIN, VA 24084
674-3600
LITTLE, PAT
SOUTH MAYO TRAIL
PIKEVILLE, KY 41501
LITTRELL, ROBERT A.
LINCOLN MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY
EWING, VA 24248
703-445-4595
LLOYD, JAMES B.
UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE
KNOXVILLE, TN 37916
615-974-4480
LOHMANN, ROGER A.
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WRK
MORGANTOWN, WV 26506
LOHR, KAREN
APPALACHIAN CONSORTIUM
A SU
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-2064
LOOPE, GLYNN
CENTER FOR PUBLIC SERVICE
COLLEGE AVENUE
WISE, VA 24293
LUSHKO, RENE
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
P 0 BOX 1794
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-293-3100
MABBS, DENNY
ROUTE 1 BOX 332
OCOEE, TN 37361
615-338-2200
MCDONALD, FREDERICK
WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WRK
KALAMAZOO, MI 49008
MALONEY, MICHAEL
APPALACHIAN PEOPLES SERVICE ORGANIZ
4139 KIRBY AVENUE
CINCINNATI, OH 45223
513-541-0064
161
�MANN, RALPH
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER
2814-16TH STREET
BOULDER, CO 80302
443-5435
MARSHALL, DARVIN
ROUTE 1 BOX 228
ST PAUL, VA 24283
703-395-2582
MARSHALL, GANELL
ROUTE 1 BOX 228
ST PAUL, VA 24283
703-395-2582
MARTIN, E LEWIS
NEW RIVER COMMUNITY COLLEGE
SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT
DUBLIN, VA 24084
703-674-3600
MARTIN, LEAH
APPALHDS
306 THIN OAKS
PULASH, VA 24084
703-980-7486
MARTIN, MILES
SUNY
1 BLAIR AVENUE
PLATTSBURGH, NY 12901
518-561-0844
MARTIN-PERDUE, NANCY J
UNIV OF VIRGINIA-CmRIOTCESVILLE
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA 22904
804-924-3855
MAUDE-GEMBLER, CYNTHIA
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PRESS
ACQUISITIONS EDITOR
SYRACUSE, NY 13244
MAXEY, DEREK
VIRGINIA WESTERN COMMUNITY COLLEGE
VINTON, VA 24179
929-4744
MCCLANAHAN, HUD
WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY
BOX 6191
WINSTON-SALEM, NC 27109
919-724-5550
MCCLURE, PAUL
NORTH GEORGIA COLLEGE
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
DAHLONEGA, GA 30597
404-864-3391
MCCOMBS, DOROTHY
V P I & SU
UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
BLACKSBURG, VA 24060
961-5069
MCCRUMB, SHARYN
V PI
ROUTE 1 BOX 109
NEW CASTLE, VA 24127
961-7528
MCCULLOH, JUDITH
UNIV OF ILLINOIS PRESS
54 EAST GREGORY DR
CHAMPAIGN, IL 61820
217-244-4681
162
�MCCUTCHEN, GENE
UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE
1914 ANDY HOLT AVE.
KNOXVILLE, TN 37996
MCGRIFF, JAMES H.
UNION COLLEGE
POLITICAL SCIENCE
BARBOURVILLE, KY 4 9 6
00
MCHQNE, CHRISTIE
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
401 8 HELDER
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-227-4235
MCKEE, GENIA
BEREA COLLEGE
C P 0 1315
BEREA, KY 4 4 4
00
606-986-9341
MCKENZIE, ROBERTA
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
424 LINDEN WALK #1
LEXINGTON, KY 40508
606-252-8676
KCKINNEY, GORDON
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
HISTORY DEPARTMENT
CULLQWHEE, NC 28723
704-227-7243
MCNUTT, JOHi
JANES MADISON UNIVERSITY
SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT
HARRISONBURG, VA 228Q7
568-6974
MEADOWS, RICK
WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY
P 0 BOX 7870
WINSTON-SALE!!, NC 27109
919-723-5607
MELTON, SARA E.
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
DUBLIN, VA 24084
703-674-5863
MILES, CELIA H
ASHEVILLE-BUKCCMBE TECH
3 CELIA PLACE
ASHEVILLE, NC 28801
704-254-1921
MILLER, DANNY
NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY
2624 JEFFERSON AVE
CINCINNATI, OH 45219
606-572-5619
MILLER, JIM WAYNE
WESTERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY
IWFAC 272
BOWLING GREEN, KY 42101
502-745-5904
MILLER, JUDY K.
ABINDQN, VA 24210
703-628-3760
MILLER, SMJ.TB M
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
APPALACHIAN STUDIES
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-2550
163
�MILLER, WILBUR R.
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
AT STONY BROOK
STONY BROOK, NY 11794
MITCHELL, GLENN
WARREN WILSON COLLEGE
701 WARREN WILSON RD
SWANNANOA, NC 28778
704-298-3325
MOBBS, REBECCA
ROUTE 1 BOX 332
OCOEE, TN 37361
615-338-2200
MOORE, DALE
JAMES AGEE FILM PROJECT
316.5 E MAIN STREET
JOHNSON CITY, TN 37601
615-926-8637
MQREFIELD, JOHN
EAST TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY
ROUTE 2 BOX 303
ERVIN, TN 37650
615-743-8143
MORETZ, RAY
UNC-CHAPEL HILL
ROUTE 2 BOX 514
BOONE, NC 28607
704-264-1989
MOSER, ANN
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
ROUTE 2 BOX 251
BLUE RIDGE, VA 24064
703-977-1579
MOSER, JOAN
WARREN WILSON COLLEGE
312 WILSON COVE ROAD
SWANNANQA, NC 28778
298-8971
MOSER, MABEL
311 WILSON COVE ROAD
SWANNANOA, NC 28778
704-298-7640
MOSIER, P*UL
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
502 TYLER APT F
RADFORD, VA 24141
731-4204
MOSSER, REVONDA
712 JOAN CIRCLE
SALEM, VA 24153
703-389-0560
MUENINGHOFF, ELAINE
UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
CINCINNATI, OH 45255
513-732-5262
MULCAHY, RICHARD
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY
DEPT. OF HISTORY
MORGANTOWN, WV 26506
MURRAY, CHARLES M
UNION CHURCH
C P 0 2332
BERA, KY 4 4 4
00
606-986-3725
164
�MURRAY, MARY ANN
BEREA COLLEGE
C P 0 2268
BEREA, KY 40404
606-986-9341
McGOWAN, THOMAS
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
NC FOLKLORE SOCIETY
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-2323
McGRIFF, JOHN
UNION COLLEGE
BARBOURVILLE, KY 40906
606-423-2469
NELSON, KEN
MAYLAND COMMUNITY COLLEGE
P 0 BOX 547
SPRUCE PINE, NC 28777
704-765-7735
NEWELL, MARTY
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
NORTH FORK UNIT
WHITESBURG, KY 41858
606-633-0108
NOE, KENNETH
BEREA COLLEGE
BEREA, KY 4 4 4
00
606-986-7854
NORDEEN, ELIZABETH
MARSHALL UNIVERSITY
ROUTE 1 BOX 422
CHESAPEAKE, OH 45619
304-696-2357
NORRIS, MONICA
APPALACHIAN CONSORTIUM
A SU
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-2064
O'DELL, JAMES
GREEN RIVER WRITERS
ROUTE 3, BOX 2
HODGENVILLE, KY 42748
802-358-9970
O'DELL, MARY
GREEN RIVER WRITERS
ROUTE 3, BOX 2
HODGENVILLE, KY 42748
502-358-9970
OBERMILLER, PHILLIP
NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY
5137 SALEM HILLS LN
CINCINNATI, OH 45230
513-232-2669
ODUM, SALLIE
BEREA COLLEGE
BEREA, KY 4 4 4
00
616-986-9341
OLIVER, SCOTT
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
NORTH FORK UNIT
WHITESBURG, KY 41858
606-633-0108
OGLE, VIOLET
PIKEVILLE COLLEGE
PHELPS, KY 41553
165
�OLSON, ERIC
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
APP COLLECTION
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-4041
ORR, JOAN
MUSEUM OF THE CHEROKEE INDIAN
PINEY GROVE APT C
CHEROKEE, NC 28719
704-497-4447
PABON, ALBERTA
P 0 BOX 1272
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-293-9066
PALMER, LOUIS H.
TRYON, NC 28782
704-863-2129
PARKER, AUDREY
ROUTE 5 BOX 658
BOONE, NC 28607
704-262-1844
PARKER, CLINTON
APPALACHIAN CONSORTIUM
A.S.U.
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-2070
PECK, THELMA
CUMBERLAND MT COMMUNITY SERVICE
ROUTE 2 BOX 541
HONAKER, VA 24260
873-7313
PERDUE, JR, CHARLES
UNIV OP VIRGINn-OlARI^TTESVILLE
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA 22904
804-924-3855
PERRON, JAMES
UNC-CHARLOTTE
333 S EASTWAY DRIVE
TROUTOAN, NC 28166
528-9847
PETERSON, THOMAS
ROLLINS COLLEGE
WINTERPARK, FL 32789
305-646-2818
PEYTON, BILLY JOE
WSWP-TV
BECKLEY, WV 25802
PHILLIBER, WILLIAM
ROUTE 2 BOX 145
ACCORD, NY 12404
914-687-7175
PLUMLEE, STEPHEN W.
MICHAEL BLACKWOOD PRODUCTIONS
251 W. 57TH STREET
NEW YORK, NY 10017
PORTER, JULIA D.
1601 SPRING GARDEN, #516
PHILADELPHIA, PA 19130
166
�POTEAT, JOEL R
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
A V SERVICES
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-4080
PRATT, ELLIOTT
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
P 0 BOX 1508
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-586-2827
PREECE, ANNA
PIKEVILLE COLLEGE
PILGRAM, KY 41250
395-5679
PUDUP, MARY BETH
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERISTY
REGIONAL RESEARCH
MORGANTOWI, WV 26506
304-293-2896
PURDY, RITA S
VIRGINIA TECH
211 WALLACE HALL
BLACKSBURG, VA 24061
703-961-6770
RANDALL
APPALODS
P 0 BOX 212
HIWASEE, VA 24347
703-980-5854
QUINN, CAROLYN
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
1090 CHESTNUT DRIVE
CHRISTIANSBURG, VA 24073
382-0091
QUINN-CARO, EDIE
WHITE PLAINS, KY 10605
914-949-7170
QUINNETT, JOHN
ROUTE 3 BOX 13W
BRYSON CITY, NC 28713
488-3724
RAINEY, HARLAN H.
6026 WESTCHESTER DR
COLLEGE PARK, MD 20740
RANDOLPH, JOHN H.
FORT NEW SALEM/SALEM COLLEGE
SALEM, WV 26426
304-782-5245
RANKIN, TOM
EMORY UNIVERSITY
556 GRANT STREET S E
ATLANTA, GA 30312
404-523-4931
RASMUSSEN, BARBARA
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY
224 WILSON AVENUE
MORGANTOHN, WV 26505
304-293-2421
RAY, CLYDE
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-227-7492
167
�READY, MILTON
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROUHA
DEPT OF HISTORY
ASHEVILLE, NC 28804
REID, HERBERT
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
LEXINGTON, KY 40506
606-257-2709
REID, MOSIE
BLUE RIDGE PARTWAY
VINTON, VA 24179
890-6926
REIHMAN, ANN
EMORY & HENRY COLLEGE
247 PLEASANT VIEW DR
EMORY, VA 24327
628-2651
REIMAN, ROBERT E
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
GEOGRAPHY & PLANNING
BOONE, NC 38608
704-262-2651
RICHMAN, L K
VA HIGHLANDS COMMUNITY COLLEGE
247 PLEASANTVIEW DR
ABINGDON, VA 24210
703-628-6094
RILEY, JAMES A.
PIKEVILLE COLLEGE
HUMANITIES DEPT.
PIKEVILLE, KY 41501
ROBERTS, SAM
TENNESSEE WESLEYAN COLLEGE
DEPT. OF RELIGION
ATHENS, TN 37303
ROBERTSON, DOT J.
SIX MILE, SC 29682
803-868-2591
ROBINSON, BETH
WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY
P 0 BOX 6865
WINSTON-SALEM, NC 27109
919-761-5695
ROGERS, ANNE
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
ANTHROPOLOGY DEPT.
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-227-7268
ROGOSIN, DONN
WSWP-TV
111 WHITE AVENUE
BECKLEY, WV 25801
304-255-1501
ROSEBERRY, HELEN
EAST TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY
BOX 22, 300A
JOHNSON CITY, TN 37614
615-929-4392
ROSS, CARL A
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
APPALACHIAN STUDIES
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-4089
168
�ROSS. CHARLOTTE
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
410 PINNACLE DRIVE
BOONE, NC 28607
704-264-8989
RUDOLPH- DEBORAH
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
805 EAST KING STREET
BOONE, NC 28607
704-262-1440
SALSTROM, PAUL
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY
HISTORY DEPARTMENT
WALTHAM, MA 02154
617-891-84%
SAUNDERS, CYNTHIA
ROUTE 1 BOX 185
WILLIA, VA 24380
703-789-7278
SAWN, PATRICIA
426 E 12TH STRET
BLOOMINGTON, IN 47401
812-333-6276
SCANCARELLI/ JANINE
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
LEXINGTON, KY 40506
606-257-6987
SELLERS, BETTIE
YOUNG HARRIS COLLEGE
YOUN HARRIS, GA 30582
404-379-3111
SEMDNES, KARON
HOLLINS COLLEGE
ROANOKE, VA 24019
703-563-1466
SHARP, GEORGE W.
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
RADFORD, VA 24142
703-731-6903
SHARP, SHARON
FREELANCE EDITOR & WRITER
P 0 BOX 3345
BOONE, NC 28607
704-264-6870
SHEEPPARD, GWEN
WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA TOMORROW
WAYNESVILLE, NC 28723
704-227-7492
SHEPPARD, TRACIE
PIKEVILLE COLLEGE
DELBARTON, WV 25670
SHIFFLETT, PEGGY
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT
RADFORD, VA 24142
703-831-5857
SHIRLEY, PATRICIA
1431 CHEROKEE TRAIL
KNOXVILLE, TN 37920
615-573-5081
169
�SHOOK, JANE
APPALACHIAN CONSORTIUM
A SU
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-2064
SHORT, EVA
APPALKIDS
ROUTE 1 BOX 122-D
DUBLIN, VA 24084
703-674-1260
SIMMONS, KIM
WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY
REY STREET
WINSTON-SALEM, NC 27109
SIMPKINS, CHRIS
NEW RIVER CC
DUBLIN, VA 24084
674-3607
919-724-5039
SIMPKINS, KAREN LI
MARSHALL UNIVERSITY
DEPT. OF SOCIOLOGY/
HUNTINGTQN, WV 25701
304-696-2793
SINCLAIR, BENNIE LEE
CLEVELAND, SC 29635
803-836-8489
SLUSHER, ALICE
ROUTE 2 BOX 613
FLOYD, VA 24091
703-789-7311
SMALLEY, LORRAINE
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
P 0 BOX 1174
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-293-3498
SMITH, BETTY N
475 BLUFF ROAD
HOT SPRINGS, NC 28743
704-622-3381
SMITH, DIXIE
W V WRITER'S
1025 GREENLAND
CHARLESTON, WV 25309
304-766-8002
SMITH, JEFF
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
ANN ARBOR, MI 48104
313-763-1460
SPALDING, SUSAN
EAST TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY
BOX 19180A
JOHNSON CITY, TN 37614
615-929-5348
SPEER, ALLEN
LEES-MCRAE COLLEGE
BOX 128
BANNER ELK, NC 28604
704-898-5241
SPENCER, DEBORAH
1223 HANEY
SOUTH BEND, IN 46613
219-232-3330
170
�SPRAGUE, STUART
MOREHEAD STATE UNIVERSITY
U P 0 846
MOREHEAD, KY 40351
606-784-7416
STAMM, HENRY E
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
ROUTE 1 BOX 196-A
BANNER ELK, NC 28604
704-898-9265
STANWITZ, SANDRA
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
MAXMEADOWS, VA 24360
699-6365
STARNES, BOBBY
HARVARD EDUCATIONAL
13 &PPIMI WAY
CAMBRIDGE, MA 02138
617-495-3432
STEELE, PAUL
P 0 BOX 3485
RADFORD, VA 24143
703-639-6383
STEELE, ROBERTA
P 0 BOX 3485 FSS
RADFORD, VA 24143
703-639-6383
STEVENS, BERNICE A
ROUTE 3 BOX 963
GATLINBURG, TN 37738
615-436-4512
STEVENS, ELIZABETH
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
BOX 747
VALLE CRUCIS, NC 28691
704-264-7986
STINTON-GLEN, KATHY LEA
BALL STATE UNIVERSITY
1409 W WASHINGTON
MUNCIE, IN 47303
317-282-0976
STINGEL, RENATE
PHCEVILLE COLLEGE
PIKEVILLE, KY 41501
STIPES, KAREN
BLACKSBURG HIGH SCHOOL
BLACKSBURG, VA 24060
STITZEL, JUDITH
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY
CTR. FOR WOMEN'S ST.
MORGANTOWN, WV 26505
STONE, CONSTANCE
1549 WANAGA WAY
SALEM, VA 24153
703-389-1923
STONE, JAMES W.
DAVIS & ELHNS COLLEGE
SOCIOLOGY DEPT.
ELHNS, WV 26241
171
�STRAW, RICHARD
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
BOX 5764
RADFORD, VA 24142
703-831-5873
STURGILL, CAROLYN H.
APPALSHOP, INC,
WHITESBURG, KY 41858
606-633-0108
SULLIVAN, KEN
W.V. DEPT. OF CULTURE AND HISTORY
CHARLESTON, WV 25314
304-348-0220
SUTTON, DAVID
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
CTR. FOR APPALACHIAN
BOONE, NC 28608
SUTTON CAHOON, JAME
QUINN PUBLISHING COMPANY
231 UPPER HERRON RD
WEAVERVILLE, NC 28787
704-645-5770
SWART, SHEILA
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
1207C CLEMENT ST.
RADFORD, VA 24141
TAUL, GLEN E.
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
CHRISTIAN APPALACHIA
LANCASTER, KY 4 4 6
04
606-792-3051
TAYLOR, JOHN C
UNION COLLEGE
BOX 463
BARBOURVILLE, KY 4 9 6
00
606-546-4151
TAYLOR, JOHN C .
UNIONCOLLEGE
DEPT. OF HISTORY
BARBOURVILLE, KY 40906
TENNEY, NOEL W.
FORT NEW SALEM/SALEM COLLEGE
SALEM, WV 26426
304-782-5245
THOMAS, NORMA
EAST TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY
BOX 22, 450A
JOHNSON CITY, TN 37614
615-929-6690
THOMPSON, DEBORAH
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
P 0 BOX 566 DT5
BOONE, NC 28607
704-262-4089
THOMPSON, EDGAR H
EMORY & HENRY COLLEGE
NEFF EDUCATION CTR
EMORY, VA 24327
703-944-3121
THOMPSON, JIM
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
P 0 BOX 2545
CHRISTIANSBURG, VA 24073
382-8450
172
�THOMPSON, NANCY
335 ELLISON AVENUE
BECKLEY, WV 25801
252-7679
THOMPSON, PAULINE
APPALACHIAN CONSORTIUM
100 ORCHARD DRIVE
BOONE, NC 28607
704-262-1979
THOMPSON, RENIA
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
CHRISTIANSBURG, VA 24073
382-8450
THORN, WILLIAM
UNIVERSITY OP RICHMOND
1601 WILMINGTON AVE
RICHMOND, VA 23227
804-353-9363
TIMM, PAT
UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
4450 ERIC AVENUE
CINCINNATI, OH 45227
271-9539
TIPTON GRAY, AMY
CALDWELL COIMUNITY COLLEGE
1000 HICKORY BLVD
HUDSON, NC 28638
704-728-4323
TITON, JEFF
BROWN UNIVERSITY
MUSIC DEPARTMENT
PROVIDENCE, RI 02912
TRESTAIN, CHARLENE
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY
305.5 GRAND BLVD
BOQNE, NC 28607
704-264-0247
TREVINO, DIANA
7304 SCQTTWOOD AVE
CINCINNATI, OH 45237
513-761-9195
TRIBE, DEANNA L.
OHIO COOPERATIVE EXTENSION SERVICE
017 STANDPIPE ROAD
JACKSON, OH 45640
TRIBE, IVAN M.
RIO GRANDE COLLEGE
McARTHUR, OH 45651
614-596-4201
TRIGGS, KATHLEEN
HARPERS FERRY, WV 25425
304-876-3641
UNDERWOOD, SHIRLEY
KNOX COUNTY SCHOOLS
ROUTE 12
KNOXVULE, TN 37918
615-521-2413
TUCKER, JOHN
WALSWORTH PUBLISHING CO.
MARCELINE, MO 64658
816-376-3543
173
�WAGMAN, GENA D.
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY
DEFT. OF ENGLISH
MORGANTOWN, WV 26506
WAGNER/ MELINDA
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
APP STUDIES PROGRAM
RADFORD, VA 24142
703-831-5159
WALLENSTEIN, PETE
V P I & SU
HISTORY DEPARTMENT
BLACKSBURG, VA 24061
703-961-5331
WALLER, ALTINA
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
DEPT, OF HISTORY
PLATTSBURGH, NY 12901
518-564-5220
WALPOLE, MATTHEW
APPALACHIAN STUDIES
A SU
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-4089
WARN, SUEANNE
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
P 0 BOX 1174
CULLOWHEB, NC 28723
704-293-3498
WATSON, STEVE
P 0 BOX 753
RADFORD, VA 24141
831-5349
WAUGH, LTT.T.TAM J.
WOMEN'S CENTENARY RESEARCH
200 CLARK HALL
MORGANTOWN, WV 26506
WEAVER, HANK
CTR. FOR APPALACHIAN STUDIES
A.S.U.
BOONE, NC 28608
704-262-4041
WEAVER, JOSEPH
ALLEGHANY COMMUNITY COLLEGE
CUMBERLAND, MD 21502
301-724-7700
WEBB, JEANETTE
APPALKIDS
ROUTE 1 BOX 53
PULASKI, VA 24301
703-980-1348
WEBB, JIM
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
NORTH FORK UNIT
WHITESBURG, KY 41858
606-633-0108
WEBB, VAUGHN
BLUE RIDGE INSTITUTE OF FERRUM COLL
FERRUM, VA 24088
703-365-4417
WEDDINGTON, MERETTA
PIKEVILLE COLLEGE
PIKEVILLE, KY 41501
174
�WEINGARTNER, PAUL J.
UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
LEXINGTON, KY 40508
WEINSTEIN, SHARON
NORFOLK STATE UNIVERSITY
ENGLISH & FOR. LANG.
NORFOLK, VA 23504
WELCH, ROB
EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY
BOX 332A RR 2
BEREA, KY 40403
606-986-1042
WESLEY, CHARLES
SAVE THE CHILDREN
BOX 319
BEREA, KY 40403
606-986-3901
WESSINGER, CARROLL L.
LUTHERAN CHURCH IN AMERICA
WYTHEVILLE, VA 24382
703-228-4861
WEST, HARK
P 0 BOX 325
CHAPEL HILL, NC 27514
919-929-7436
WHEELING, THERESA
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
ROUTE 2 APT 88
RADFORD, VA 24141
703-731-1519
WHITE, BLAIR
EAST TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY
BOX 22, 300A
JOHNSON CITY, TN 37614
615-929-4392
WHITE, DENNIS
APPALSHOP, INC.
WHTTESBURG, KY 41858
606-633-0108
WIGGINS, EUGENE
103 JONES CIRCLE
DAHLONEGA, GA 30533
404-864-6439
WIGGINS, GENEVIEVE
TENNESSEE WESLEYAN COLLEGE
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
ATHENS, TN 37303
615-745-7504
WIGGINS, JEAN
103 JONES CIRCLE
DAHLONEGA, GA 30533
404-864-6439
WILLIAMS, DAVID
AUBURN UNIVERSITY
1318 WRIGHT'S MILL
AUBURN, AL 36830
821-9864
WILLIAMS, DEAN
CENTER FOR APPALACHIAN STUDIES
P 0 BOX 9
TODD, NC 28684
919-877-5803
175
�WILLIAMS, MAX
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
MT. HERITAGE CENTER
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
WILLIAMSON, J V
APPALACHIAN JOURNAL
UNIVERSITY HALL
BOQNE, NC 28608
704-262-4072
WILLIS, JENNIFER
WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY
P 0 BOX 7854
WINSTON-SALEM, NC 27109
919-724-2571
WILLOUGHBY, J. RONALD
RADFORD UNIVERSITY
RADFORD, VA 24141
703-831-5441
WINGFIELD, PATSY
CITY OF SALEM SCHOOLS
ROANOKE, VA 24015
387-2503
WOOD, CURTIS
WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY
MOUNTAIN HERITAGE
CULLOWHEE, NC 28723
704-293-7129
WOOD, SHARON
FLOYD HIGH SCHOOL
ROUTE 1
COPPER HILL, VA 24079
651-8353
WORKMAN, JERRY
SAVE THE CHILDREN
BOX 319
BEREA, KY 40403
606-986-3901
WORKMAN, MICHAEL E.
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY
MORGANTOWH, VA 26505
293-3867
WRIGHT, TONYA
PIKEVILLE COLLEGE
JENKINS, KY 41537
639-8407
YARROW, MIKE
ITHACA COLLEGE
407 HANCOCK STREET
ITHACA, NY 14850
607-272-4943
YORK, J T
STONEVILLE HIGH SCHOOL
2600 DUCK CLUB ROAD
GREENSBORO, NC 27410
919-288-7285
YOST, GREG
WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY
BOX 7683
WINSTON-SALEM, NC 27109
919-722-7654
YOUNG, RHONDA
APPALKIDS
ROUTE 1 BOX 302-A
DUBLIN, VA 24084
703-674-8754
176
�ZAHORIK, PAMELA
EAST TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY
P 0 BOX 21130A
JOHNSON CITY, TN 37614
615-929-6738
ZIPSER, ANDREW
ROANOKE TIMES
ROANOKE, VA 24010
983-3352
ZIPSER, ANDY
ROANOKE TIMES
P.O. BOX 2491
ROANOKE, VA 24010
177
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Appalachian Consortium Press Publications
Description
An account of the resource
This collection contains digitized monographs and collections from the Appalachian Consortium Press.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Appalachian Consortium Press
Publisher
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Appalachian Consortium Press
Date Issued
Date of formal issuance (e.g., publication) of the resource.
June 1, 2017
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
<a title="Digital Scholarship and Initiatives" href="http://library.appstate.edu/services/digital-scholarship-and-initiatives" target="_blank">Digital Scholarship and Initiatives</a>
Publication
URL
https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469637020/journal-of-the-appalachian-studies-association/
Digital Publisher
Digital Republication
Appalachian State University
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mountains of Experience - Interdisciplinary, Intercultural, International - Volume One
Description
An account of the resource
<span>This volume of the </span><em>Journal of Appalachian Studies Association</em><span> includes contributions from various disciplines by Parks Lanier, Jr.; Marilou Awiakta; C. Clifford Boyd, Jr.; Ricky L. Cox; Betty Smith; James E. Byer; Edgar H. Thompson; Teresa Wheeling; Paul J. Weingartner, Dwight Billings, and Kathleen M. Blee; Nelda Knelson Daley; Roberta McKenzie; Barry Elledge; Benita J. Howell; Rodger Cunningham; Laurie Lindberg; and Clyde H. Ray.</span><br /><br /><a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HcLL3ujtcXmCAlxEoc-qYMyIofF-_Jo4" target="_blank">Download EPub<br /><br /></a><a title="UNC Press Link" href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469637020/journal-of-the-appalachian-studies-association/" target="_blank">UNC Press Print on Demand</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Appalachian Region--Social life and customs
Appalachian Region--In literature
Appalachian Region--Social conditions
Appalachian Region--Economic conditions
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Lanier, Jr., Parks
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1989
Language
A language of the resource
English
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Appalachian Consortium Press
Alternative Title
An alternative name for the resource. The distinction between titles and alternative titles is application-specific.
Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association
Coverage
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Appalachia
Format
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PDF
Periodicals
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Rights
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<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed" target="_blank">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed</a>
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
https://www.geonames.org/12212302/appalachia.html
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a title="UA 76 Appalachian Consortium records" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/9" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> UA 76 Appalachian Consortium records </a>
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
<a title="Appalachian Consortium Press Publications" href="https://omeka.library.appstate.edu/collections/show/82" target="_blank"> Appalachian Consortium Press Publications</a>
Scripto
Transcription
A written representation of a document.
Appalachian Studies
conference
scholars
selected papers