Appalachian History

Shepherd Youth Killed
Accidentally By Father

Accident Occurred As
Father and Son Were
Out Hunting

Ashe County [NC] Journal, May 29, 1929--- Blaine Shepherd, a youth of the Crumpler-Grassy Creek section of the county, was shot and accidentally killed by his father Wednesday morning of last week. The accident took place near the mouth of Helton Creek about 8:30 in the morning.

The youth and his father, Grover C. Shepherd, who is a well known citizen of that community, had gone out squirrel hunting early in the morning, and were going through a densely wooded section of a nearby forest. Father and son seperated and Mr. Shepherd thought that his son had gone in an opposite direction.

1927 photo: James Wilburn Shepherd (at age 16), on the left, and Blaine is believed to be the boy on the right at about age 12.

Mr. Shepherd saw leaves shaking several feet from the ground and then saw a gray object nearer the ground, which he thought was a squirrel. He fired his gun and heard the youth scream. He ran to him and asked him where he was shot. The dying lad told him: "I'm shot all over." He died in about five minutes. Forty-eight shot hit him over the body, the main charge striking just above the heart.

The little fellow had climbed up an old tree lap about four feet above the ground, causing the leaves in the trees above to shake.

Robert Blaine Shepherd was born Dec. 28, 1915, and was 13 years, 5 months and 1 day old. He was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Grover C. Shepherd, both of who survive him. He is also survived by two sisters, Edith and Ralph Shepherd, and four brothers, Ralph, Mont, and Walter Shepherd, of this county, and Willborn Shepherd, of Detroit, Mich.

An impressive funeral service was conducted from Fairview schoolhouse where the Shepherd boy attended school. It was conducted by Revs. J.O. Spencer, S.C. Blackburn, J.C. Childress, Franklin Barker and William Blackburn. A large concourse of people attended the service.

Beautiful floral offerings were carried by Blaine's schoolmates. The youth was popular with his young acquaintances and all were grief-stricken over the tragic occurence.

Following the service, the body was laid to rest in the Shepherd cemetery near the schoolhouse.

The pallbearers were R.M. Phipps, J.E. Sexton, Keys Garris, Nola West, A.J. Blevins and T.C. Hurley.


source: www.danielprophecy.com/blaine.html


appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Ashe+County+NC Helton+Creek+NC hunting+accidents

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Labels: appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Ashe County NC, Helton Creek NC, hunting accidents

Today, it’s Tennessee’s largest historic district, at approximately 11,400 acres. During the Great Depression, the Cumberland Homesteads community came into being as part of a nationwide New Deal agrarian movement to create subsistence farm communities to aid out-of-work, rural residents. President Franklin Roosevelt assigned the homesteads project to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. Ickes, in turn, established within his department the Division of Subsistence Homesteads (DSH).

Cumberland Homesteads was one the first of 33 communities built by DSH between 1934 and 1938, and eventually consisted of 250 homes, a school, a park area, as well as a stone water tower and governmental building.

The DSH advisory committee identified three types of clientele and three types of proposed communities: Homestead colonies established for industrial workers and located in the out-skirts of cities or large towns; rural settlements in which small industries or branches of large industries can be established; and agricultural settlements.

The Cumberland Homesteaders, in the main, had not been subsistence farmers but were “displaced” and “stranded” workers—they were initially coal miners and only later textile mill workers and farmers. Coal operators of the time had drastically curtailed mining operations throughout the bituminous coal fields of Appalachia---production levels demanded by World War I had long since dropped---as the surplus of American coal continued to glut national and international markets.

DSH regulations denied participation in the homesteads to persons on relief rolls. The application for a subsistence homestead required that the successful applicant be an American citizen; living or normally living in an industrial center; over twenty-one years old; have an income sufficient to meet homestead payments; and not have an income sufficient to secure a loan for a home using orthodox financial instruments.

Caption reads: Mrs. Roosevelt addressing group at Cumberland Homesteads. Crossville, Tennessee, Oct-Nov 1935

Plans for Cumberland Homesteads intended to create 351 farms on lots ranging in size from 10 to 160 acres; the average homestead consisted of 16 acres. Areas determined unsuitable for farming remained timberland. Originally 8,903 acres were farm tracts; 1,245 acres were common land (grazing, woodland, cooperative enterprises); 11,200 acres were set aside for further development; and the cooperative association owned 5,505 acres.

Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia condemned the costly absurdities of electricity, refrigerators, and indoor privies for country people. Likewise, Senator Kenneth D. McKellar of Tennessee complained that the Resettlement Administration was constructing stone mansions and voiced his resentment that relief workers lived in houses better than he did. No matter; the houses wound up with indoor plumbing at the request of Eleanor Roosevelt, who had a special interest in these projects.

“After the Resettlement Administration began massive resettlement, the DSH projects seemed to be nonproductive, and the residents seemed to be beneficiaries of government largesse.

“Most of the homesteaders led lives indistinguishable from their contemporaries; furthermore, the government had provided the homesteaders with modern conveniences, tools, and equipment that their contemporaries had to purchase.

“It seemed to full-time farmers that the homesteaders “piddled” around in their gardens, while the resettled farmers actually had to do farm work.”

Clarence E. Pickett,
executive secretary of the American Friends Service Committee
Monthly Labor Review (September 1933): 1327-328.

Although each family received a section of land, the community was designed to function as a cooperative, including both agriculture and some industrial production. Eventually the cooperative ventures failed, plagued by rampant politicking both locally and at the Federal management level. Many families, confined by small lots, soil too poor to raise crops, and serious erosion problems, simply moved away.


sources: www.tdot.state.tn.us/us127s/library.htm
www.southernhistory.net/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=10381
http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=C171
www.cumberlandhomesteads.org/history.htm


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Labels: appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Crossville TN, Cumberland Homesteads, Division of Subsistence Homesteads

Hang down your head Tom Dooley
Hang down your head and cry
Hang down your head Tom Dooley
Poor boy, you're bound to die.

It's the most famous murder ballad in American folk music history. And chances are, if you know it, you know the version popularized by the Kingston Trio. Their recording of the song became a major commercial hit in 1958, selling over 6,000,000 copies. That hit single spawned a movie and helped spark the folk music revival of the 1960s. How did the song make its way to the Kingston Trio? Therein hangs a tale.

May 1st marked the 140th anniversary of the criminal execution of North Carolinian ex-Confederate soldier Tom Dula. Not Tom Dooley? Think of the written word opera pronounced opry, as in Grand Ole Opry. Standard regional southern Appalachian pronunciation at work. So the Kingston Trio simply transcribed the name as it sounded to them.

Dula was hanged for the murder of his lover Laura Foster. The two lived in the North Wilkesboro, NC area. Tom Dula was a wild young buck, running around with two or three women at the same time. Foster, according to the ballad, gave him syphilis. He inadvertently passed it on to Foster's first cousin, Mrs. Ann Melton. A third woman, a Pauline Foster, was in the background as well at the time.

Both Laura and Ann were pregnant by Dula. When Mrs. Melton realized that her longtime affair would be exposed by the pregnancy, that the baby's health was seriously endangered, and that her own health had been compromised, all to her way of thinking because of Foster, she insisted that they—Dula and she—murder Laura Foster in vengeance.

As revealed in the case's court records, early one morning in 1866, Laura Foster took her best clothes and her father's horse and left for her rendezvous with Dula, who had supposedly gone to meet the justice of the peace so they could be married. Laura disappeared and Tom Dula fled Wilkes County.

The earliest known recorded version of the song was laid down on October 1, 1929 by GB Grayson & Henry Whitter. Whitter and Grayson met at a fiddlers' convention in Mountain City, TN in 1927. They teamed up, and by autumn of that year, Whitter had gotten them two record deals. They recorded eight songs for the Gennet label and six for Victor, among them 'Tom Dula.' Grayson & Whitter's recording of 'Tom Dula' is especially significant, since it was Grayson's uncle that tracked Dula in 1866.

The ballad of Tom Dooley tells us that Dula, fleeing the murder scene, was captured before he got to Tennessee by a sheriff named Grayson. Actually, Dula made it over the state line and worked for a week in Trade, TN, at the farm of Col. James Grayson, a member of the Tennessee legislature, in order to make enough money to buy a new pair of boots and continue his journey.

Dula was captured in Tennessee around July 11 by two North Carolina deputies, with the help of Colonel Grayson, and brought back to the Wilkesboro, NC, jail.

Folk music historians Anne & Frank Warner collected the song in 1938 in Beech Mountain, NC from a local banjo player and singer named Frank Profitt Sr. Frank's grandmother, Adeline Perdue, lived in Wilkes County and knew both Tom Dula and Laura Foster. Alan Lomax, of Library of Congress collecting fame, learned it from the Warners and sang it all over the country and on his radio shows. He went on to publish it in his book "Folk Song USA," and it’s THAT version that came to the attention of the Kingston Trio.

In 1962, a settlement was reached with the Kingston Trio that divided any subsequent royalties between Frank Profitt, Frank Warner and Alan Lomax.

The song lives on even today. Bobby McMillon, whose ballad singing was featured in the film ‘Songcatcher’ and who is the youngest recipient of the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award, performs it regularly. He went to school with relatives of Tom Dula.

Jeff and Gerret Warner, sons of Anne and Frank Warner, are continuing their parents' legacy. Jeff researched and edited for his mother’s book “Traditional American Folk Songs.” Gerret assembled and prepared its photographs, taken by their parents. The sons organized their parents’ notes, manuscripts and photographs, which now form the Frank and Anne Warner Collection at Duke University.

sources: www.cmt.com/artists/az/grayson_whitter/bio.jhtml
www.birthplaceofcountrymusic.org/node/207
www.wilkesnc.org/history/tomdula/
www.folkstreams.net/context,254
www.dailyyonder.com/tom-dula-murder-sold-10-000-guitars

Special thanks to Rosalie Friend for setting me on the right path with this story!


Tom+Dula Legend+of+Tom+Dooley Kingston+Trio Frank+Profitt Anne+&+Frank+Warner Alan+Lomax Grayson+&+Whitter appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

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Labels: Alan Lomax, Anne and Frank Warner, appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Frank Profitt, Grayson and Whitter, Kingston Trio, Legend of Tom Dooley, Tom Dula

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The Bristol Herald Courier
Abingdon,VA May 23, 1922

Miss Lucille WEBB has returned from an extended visit with friends in Austin, Denton and other places in Texas

Mr. and Mrs. D.A.F. CAMPBELL have as their guests during Stonewall Jackson College commencement Mesdames J.C. LEONARD, R.F. CULBERTSON, and J.H. SMITH, Miss Bonnie CAMPBELL, Mr. Harry R. CULBERTSON, J.C. LEONARD, Jr., and little misses Mara Elizabeth and Katherine CULBERTSON.


Dr. and Mrs. W.L. GANNAWAY are moving this week into the Gildersleeve property recently purchased by Dr. GANNAWAY

The many friends of Miss Eleanor DAVIDSON will regret to learn that she is quite sick at the home of her parents Mr. and Mrs. M.H. DAVIDSON

Miss Amelia SUTTON was hostess to members of the senior class of Stonewall Thursday evening. A very delightful time was spent

Mr. and Mrs. James W. BELL have returned from a very pleasant trip to Cincinnati, Ohio

Mrs. Mary M. DAVIDSON returned this week from an extended visit with relatives and friends in East Radford, Roanoke and Covington

Misses Freda SHARETZ, Susie CAMPBELL, Maria WINGFIELD, and J.S. BROWN, Jr. spent Sunday in Rural Retreat, the guests of Mr. and Mrs. J.E. BROWN, Jr.

Mrs. Roger S. WARREN is spending this week with friends in Richmond, Virginia

Misses Madge and Gay WHITE are attending the Pageant in Richmond this week

T.P. TRIGG, Jr. and W.W. TRIGG were called to Petersburg this week on account of the illness of their mother Mrs. T.P. TRIGG who is at the home of her daughter Mrs. Phillip ROPER

Mr. and Mrs. R.W. BELL and little daughter were weekend guests of Mr. and Mrs. A.A. MOCK at Damascus


source: www.rootsweb.com/~vawashin/Abingdon1922news.htm


Abingdon+VA Stonewall+Jackson+College Bristol+Herald+Courier appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

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Labels: Abingdon VA, appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Bristol Herald Courier, Stonewall Jackson College

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia, That whenever the Superintendent of the Western State Hospital, or of the Eastern State Hospital, or of the Southwestern State Hospital, or of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, shall be of opinion that it is for the best interests of the patients and of society that any inmate of the institution under his care should be sexually sterilized, such superintendent is hereby authorized to perform, or cause to be performed by some capable physician or surgeon, the operation of sterilization on any such patient confined in such institution afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy; provided that such superintendent shall have first complied with the requirements of this act.

Article One, An Act to Provide for the Sexual Sterilization of Inmates of State Institutions in Certain Cases, Commonwealth of Virginia. Enacted 1924.

Dr. Joseph S. DeJarnette, director of Western State Hospital from 1905-1943, was one of Virginia's leading voices in the 20th century social movement known as Eugenics---the belief that information about heredity can be used to improve the human race. For Americans who feared the potential degradation of their race and culture, eugenics offered a convenient and scientifically plausible response to those fears.

Between 1927 and 1979, the state sterilized 8,300 residents thought 'unfit' for general society, including blacks, Native Americans, the feeble-minded, the promiscuous and the poor.

Mendel’s Law -- A Plea for a Better Race of Men
Oh, why are you men so foolish-
You breeders who breed our men
Let the fools, the weaklings and crazy
Keep breeding, and breeding again? …

DeJarnette was very proud of this poem, and presented the full 5 stanzas publicly on several occasions. Nor was he alone in this position.

Retired Montgomery County Welfare Director Kate Bolton recalled with pride, "The children were legally committed by the court for being feebleminded, and there was a waiting list from here to Lynchburg." She added, "If you’ve seen as much suffering and depravity as I have, you can only hope and pray no one else goes through something like that. We had to stop it at the root."

"People as a whole were very much in favor of what was going on," recalled Howard Hale, a former Montgomery County supervisor, as he relived the period for a local Virginia newspaper reporter a half century later. "They couldn’t see more people coming into the world to get on the welfare. Everybody who was drawing from welfare then was scared they were going to have it done on them.

"They were hiding all through these mountains, and the sheriff and his men had to go up after them…They really got them up on Brush Mountain. The sheriff went up there and loaded all of them in a couple of cars and ran them down to Staunton so they could sterilize them."

DeJarnette’s testimony before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 about Virginia's sterilization policy convinced the court to uphold the Racial Integrity Law.

"Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit," he noted in 1938, "while the United States with approximately twice the population has only sterilized about 27,869 to January 1, 1938, in the past 20 years… The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the US should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the maximum."

Perhaps not surprisingly, Adolf Hitler’s 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases contained language that echoed the Virginia statute.

Despite the fact that the Racial Integrity Law was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1967, the state of Virginia nonetheless in 1972 named its new children's psychiatric ward at Western State the DeJarnette Center in memoriam for the institution's steadfast director.


sources: www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/image_header.pl?id=1335&detailed=0
www.newsvirginian.com/wnv/lifestyles/local/article/the_history_of_western_state_and_dejarnette_sanitarium/22137/
[Mendel's Law poem:]www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/library/wdc-lib/historical/eugenics/exhibit4-3.cfm
george.loper.org/trends/2000/Dec/96.html
www.waragainsttheweak.com/chapter1.php
www.lewrockwell.com/kirkwood/kirkwood37.html
campus.udayton.edu/~hume/Eugenics/eugenics.htm


Racial+Integrity+Law eugenics Adolf+Hitler Joseph+S.+DeJarnette Western+State+Hospital Montgomery+County+VA Brush+Mountain+VA appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

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Labels: Adolf Hitler, appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Brush Mountain VA, eugenics, Joseph S. DeJarnette, Montgomery County VA, Racial Integrity Law, Western State Hospital

Alabama’s oldest Baptist congregation will be 200 years old this year. Or not, depending on who you ask.  Elder John Nicholson led the first worship on October 2, 1808 at the home of James Deaton in Killingsworth Cove (now part of Huntsville.) And for 170 of those 200 years the congregants who’ve adhered to the tenets of the original Flint River Baptist Church of Christ (the “Primitive” Baptists) have been at odds with more modernized, or “Missionary” Baptists.

The church today known as Flint River Primitive Baptist Church for many years maintained close organizational ties with nearby Enon Baptist Church.  Formed in June 1809, Enon was initially to be known as the ‘West Fork of the Flint Baptist Church.’ At their second meeting, they decided the name was too cumbersome and renamed themselves 'Enon.'

But in 1838 the Flint River association declared non-fellowship with the modern missionary movement, its societies, auxiliaries and supporters (Enon topped the list). Those congregations that embraced new church practices such as mission boards, Sunday Schools, and musical instruments in the church became “New School” or “Missionary” Baptist. Flint River Baptist Church continued in the simplicity of New Testament worship, thus being called “Old School” or “Primitive” Baptist.

By 1840 Flint River withdrew all fellowship from Enon, which in 1893 changed its name to the ‘First Baptist Church of Huntsville, Alabama, a Missionary Baptist Church’, for advocating a perversion of the articles of faith.

The two churches tangled again in 1908, the centennial year of Flint River Church. The missionary Baptists planned a celebration claiming the years 1808 – 1908 as their anniversary dates. They sent out a leaflet in which they stated correctly that Flint River Church was constituted in 1808, but also stating that it ---meaning the Primitive congregation--- had been out of existence for many years!

First Baptist Church of Huntsville building, built 1895, on the corner of Clinton and Gallatin Streets.

“When Flint River Church saw this report she was justly offended,” huffs The history of Flint river Church/Flint River Association 1808-1955 “because she was reported dead, when she was yet alive, and had a continuous existence ever since her first organization and because a people who differed from her and opposed her in almost every particular claimed her as their ancestor and proposed to celebrate her organization in a manner that was highly offensive to her."

"Any attempt by the Missionaries to celebrate this year,” stated Flint River Church clerk B. B. Lawler in Primitive Baptist magazine, “is like a man wanting to celebrate his golden wedding when he has been married twenty years to one woman and thirty years to another one."

Both churches remain active today.  The First Baptist Church of Huntsville makes no mention of the 1908 centennial ruckus on their website.
 
Sources: www.archives.state.al.us/markers/imadison.html
www.flintriverpbc.org
www.fbchsv.org/aboutfbc/history.html
www.essentialbaptistprinciples.org/ebp_published_articles/baptist_history_misrepresented.htm


Flint+River+Primitive+Baptist+Church First+Baptist+Church+of+Huntsville Huntsville+AL appalachia +appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Baptists

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Labels: appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Baptists, First Baptist Church of Huntsville, Flint River Primitive Baptist Church, Huntsville AL

Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave is not only the largest known cave in the world; it has the distinction of being the oldest touring cave. Formal guided tours were started here in 1816. It remained in private ownership for the next 125 years and grew to become a prime tour attraction. And because Mammoth had showed the tremendous profit potential in cave tourism, it incited a cave war in the 1920s, at the dawn of the automobile vacation era.

Since the Croghan family controlled most of the land on the ridge where Mammoth Cave was located, would-be cave tour operators began to focus on properties on neighboring Flint Ridge, which was separated from the Mammoth Cave ridge by narrow Houchins Valley.

In 1921, a Louisville oil driller named George Morrison forced another opening into the Mammoth Cave system and set up shop on Flint Ridge, advertising the "New Entrance to Mammoth Cave." Before long the combat was on among Colossal Cave, Long Cave, Short’s Cave, Great Onyx Cave, Indian Cave, Salts Cave and Crystal Cave.

The search for new caves to commercialize became so dangerous and secretive that a cave exploring death was almost inevitable; it arrived in the person of Floyd Collins, who lost his life in 1925 in Sand Cave, searching for the first cave entrance on the 10-1/2 mile road from Cave City to Mammoth.

Mammoth’s rivals went to dastardly lengths to lure tourists to their underground cash cows. They placed misleading signs along the roads leading from Cave City to the Mammoth Cave. They diverted tourists with fake policemen, employed stooges to heckle each other’s guided tours, burned down ticket huts, and put out libelous and forged advertisements.

A typical strategy during the early days of automobile travel involved a representative of a private show cave --- a capper --- hopping aboard a tourist's car's running board, and leading the passengers to believe that Mammoth Cave was closed, quarantined, caved in or otherwise inaccessible.

By April 1928 the promise of tourist dollars drove two owners of adjoining caves to legal blows over property rights in Edwards v. Sims. L.P. Edwards had discovered a cave whose entrance, 3 miles down the road from Mammoth Cave, was on his property. He developed it into a tourist attraction---the Great Onyx Cave, and went so far as to build a tourist hotel near the cave’s mouth.

Edwards’ neighbor F. P. Lee suspected that part of the cave was located under his land. The cave was completely inaccessible to Lee – hundreds of feet below his land. He sued Edwards for trespassing, fully aware of the tourist dollars he stood to gain by it. Edwards argued that allocating ownership of part of the cave to Lee constituted an unmerited windfall.

The case dragged on for years, all the way to the Kentucky Court of Appeal. Final ruling in 1936: the surface owner had rights to a cave below his property, even if the only entrance to the cave was on someone else’s property. Sims was the name of the Edmonson County circuit court judge against whom Edwards filed an appeal.

Many of the Flint Ridge caves were later found to be an extension of Mammoth Cave and were eventually brought into the fold when it became a National Park (chartered in 1926 and opened in 1941). Even after Federal incorporation, agents for several commercial caves impersonated rangers and flagged travelers off the road before they could reach the national park. Some of the entrances used for today's tours are left over from that era when they were thought to be separate caves.


Sources: https://sercms.nps.gov/maca/historyculture/cavewars.htm
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/southeastern_geographer/v044/44.1algeo.pdf
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE6DF1039F933A1575BC0A96F948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
www.merrillandsmithproperty.com/display.asp?displayID=Sample2_Spr07.pdf



Mammoth+Cave Kentucky+Cave+Wars Great+Onyx+Cave appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

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Labels: appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Great Onyx Cave, Kentucky Cave Wars, Mammoth Cave

From 1951 to 1965 Dr. Thomas Jugarthy Hicks began to quietly offer babies for adoption from his Hicks Community Clinic in McCaysville, GA. Quietly, because the clinic he’d been running since the mid-1940s was not a licensed adoption agency. Hicks cared for the mundane health issues of local farmers and townspeople in the front of the clinic, while performing abortions, which were illegal during that period, in the back rooms.

Law or no law, he advertised his abortion services on phone booths, bus stations and bridges. Women came by bus, car and train to pay $100 to "fix their problem." A small airstrip was built in nearby Ducktown so the prominent could fly their daughters in from Atlanta and Chattanooga for an abortion.

His black market baby-selling ring, which may have ‘moved’ as many as 200 babies with no questions asked, relied on young, poor women from North Georgia and Eastern Tennessee. They’d come to him for an abortion, and he persuaded some to carry the babies to full term. The women would reside in the clinic for a few months, or the good doctor would provide a room for them at his farm, or in the New York Hotel in adjoing Copperhill, TN, or in his apartments in the telephone company building.

Hicks knew he could count on word of mouth to bring in the baby buyers. The Fannin County Courthouse records list 49 babies, for example, who went to Summit County in Ohio. All the fathers who bought them worked in the Akron tire companies, except for a Cuyahoga Falls doctor who bought two babies. All the sales were arranged by a West Akron Goodrich employee who bought four babies for herself. All of them paid up to $1,000 for a baby no one could trace back to its mother.

Hicks made sure the birth certificates listed the people adopting as birth parents. The doctor kept no known records of the birth mothers, who discreetly vanished.

Thomas Hicks was no stranger to shady dealings. After getting his medical degree from Emory University in Atlanta in 1917, he moved to Copperhill, TN, but lost his medical license and served time in federal prison for selling narcotic pain killers to a veteran working undercover for the FBI.

While incarcerated, he studied a lung disease that kept copper miners from living past the age of 40.

Once out, he was hired by the Tennessee Copper Co. to treat miners. The only problem was, he filed more claims than there were miners with the disease.

After he was fired from that job, he opened up the Hicks Community Clinic in McCaysville.

Once a baby was available, Hicks wasted neither time nor words with his prospective buyers. "You have 24 hours to come or I call the next person on the list," he's reported to have said to more than one client.

Hicks warned his baby buyers not to be picky. If you told Hicks you only wanted a boy or you wanted a girl, you could forget about getting a baby.

It may never be known how many illegal adoptions were conducted by Dr. Hicks, who was stripped of his medical license in 1964, but never jailed. He was, after all, a member of the Copperhill Kiwanis and the Adams Bible Class of the First Baptist Church (to which he donated a Wurlitzer organ). He was known to give free medicine to the very poorest in town. He made house calls to those who couldn't otherwise get to his clinic.

Dr. Thomas Hicks' abortion clinic was an open secret tolerated by a town that appreciated the bulk of his medical contributions. "He didn't perform any services that anyone didn't request,'' noted local resident Marlene Matham Hardiman, who once rented an apartment from Hicks.

The court papers disbarring him made no mention of the black-market babies. The abortion charges against him were dropped, and he continued practicing for a time thereafter.

Thomas Hicks died of leukemia in 1972 at age 83. His lawyer, nurses, wife and son are dead. His only living relative, a daughter, lives in seclusion in North Carolina.


sources:www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20124848,00.html
freepages.misc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~msroots/BMA/HICKS4.htm
query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE1DE103EF930A1575BC0A961958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
immigrantships.net/adoption/hicksbabies.html
chronicle.augusta.com/stories/012098/met_LG0411-9.001.shtml


Thomas+Hicks Hicks+Community+Clinic abortion illegal+baby+adoptions Mccaysville+GA appalachia +appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

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Labels: abortion, appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Hicks Community Clinic, illegal baby adoptions, Mccaysville GA, Thomas Hicks

South Carolinians have known about the mineral springs of Glenn Springs, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Spartanburg, for centuries. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, the place was known simply as a "deer lick." Cattle were continually straggling from their pastures seeking the swamp around the lick.

Its future as a resort destination began to emerge when John B. Glenn purchased the 500 acres on which the spring was situated for $800 in 1825, and constructed an inn for guests to come and enjoy the water. The popularity of his guesthouse was so high with lowcountry residents looking to escape the coastal heat that in 1835 fifteen investors, headed by a Dr. Maurice Moore, formed a stock company to buy Glenn’s property and build a large summer resort hotel on the site.

In 1877, Dr. John Wister Simpson of Laurens County, who like Dr. Moore had served in the South Carolina House of Representatives, bought the springs property from the stock company and relocated his family to it. His brother was then-Governor and later Chief Justice William Dunlap Simpson; small wonder that the site became the Governor’s summer headquarters.

Simpson willed his interest to sons Harvey, Paul, Casper, and Arthur, who during their tenure saw the resort become the state’s most popular. The resort passed into the hands of their children, and became the Glenn's Spring Company, later called simply Glenn Springs.

By 1894, the hotel was once again deemed too small to accommodate demand. Paul Simpson of Simpson & Simpson expanded the property to over 58,000 square feet, able to serve 500 guests. “The Hotel is fitted with Water Works, Sanitary Arrangements, baths on first and second floors and Electric
 Bells,” crowed an 1897 ad in the Spartanburg Journal. The signature feature of the hotel was the more than 580 linear feet of piazzas.

Part of the 1894 expansion involved the creation of The Glenn Springs Railroad to make hotel access easier. The two-car train ran from Becca Station (now Roebuck) via the Charleston & Western Carolina line from Augusta to Spartanburg (now CSX), to Glenn Springs.

The nine mile trip from Roebuck to Glenn Springs cost 75 cents for adults and 35 cents for children. Riders boarded a train in Spartanburg, took it to Roebuck, then boarded the train going to the springs. Finally hotel livery wagons delivered guests and their summer-long baggage to the hotel.

Glenn Springs water was not only enjoyed locally, but was bottled and shipped throughout the United States and parts of Europe. Beginning in 1931 Glenn Springs was the official water of the United States Senate. The resort had transformed from being the center of social activity for the upstate to attracting visitors from near and far. The original beautiful wooden building burned in 1941, but was never rebuilt. The hotel's chapel, built in 1908, still remains on the site.

The Glenn Springs Historic District, including the hotel site, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on November 4, 1982.


sources: Seeing Spartanburg: A History in Images, by Philip N. Racine, Hub City Writers Project, 1999
http://www.nationalregister.sc.gov/spartanburg/S10817742033/index.htm
http://www.spartanburgboyshome.org/
History of Spartanburg County, South Carolina, by John Belton O'Neall Landrum, Genealogical Publishing, 1997


John+Wister+Simpson John+B.+Glenn Dr.+Maurice+Moore Glenn+Springs+Hotel Spartanburg+SC appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

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Labels: appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Dr. Maurice Moore, Glenn Springs Hotel, John B. Glenn, John Wister Simpson, Spartanburg SC

Confederate Memorial Day is May 10. On May 12, 1909 the 4th Ohio Cavalry Association returned the Rifle Scouts' Civil War battle flag to the state of Alabama at the Elk's Theater in Huntsville. Note the presence of Tallulah B. Bankhead --not the famous actress, who was 7 years old at the time, but rather her mother.

Captain John R. Pitts of the 4th Ohio Cavalry Association presented the flag to Mrs. Charles G. Brown of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The following individuals are pictured: Mayor T. W. Smith of Huntsville; James Quinton (4th Ohio); Mrs. Virginia Clay-Clopton (UDC); Mrs. Helen Plaine (UDC); Joseph H. Goddard (4th Ohio); L. C. Bramkamp (4th Ohio); T. C. Lindsey (4th Ohio); W. W. Shoemaker (4th Ohio); William H. Henry (4th Ohio); Mrs. A. W. Newsom (UDC); Mrs. Charles G. Brown (UDC); Mrs. Cornelia Branch Stone (UDC); Mrs. Andrew J. Dowdell (UDC); Captain John R. Pitts (4th Ohio); Mrs. Thomas W. Palmer (UDC); Mrs. Bennett B. Ross (UDC); Mrs. Leopold Bashinski (UDC); Mrs. Tallulah B. Bankhead (UDC); Mrs. Clarence M. Tardy (UDC); Thomas Osborn (4th Ohio); M. H. Richardson (4th Ohio); C. N. Vaught (UCV); James R. Johnson; Mrs. Ellen P. Bryce (UDC); Mrs. Asa S. Rountree (UDC); Mrs. L. T. Pride (UDC).

4th+Ohio+Cavalry+Association United+Daughters+of+the+Confederacy Huntsville+AL civil+war+veteran

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Labels: 4th Ohio Cavalry Association, civil war veteran, Huntsville AL, United Daughters of the Confederacy

It took the individual effort of each Jarvis, mother and daughter, over two generations to forge the Mother’s Day we recognize today. And it's a story with a twist, so buckle up!

Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, of Grafton WV, had attempted starting a series of Mothers' Day Work Clubs in Webster, Grafton, Fetterman, Pruntytown, and Philippi in 1858 to improve sanitation. She continued to organize women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides.

In the summer of 1865, Jarvis organized a Mothers' Friendship Day at the courthouse in Pruntytown to bring together soldiers and neighbors of all political beliefs. The goal was to work in conjunction with local doctors to provide health care to war veterans plagued by diseases such dysentery, small pox, and tuberculosis.

The event was a great success despite the fear of many that it would erupt in violence. Mothers' Friendship Day was an annual event for several years.

Ann Jarvis' daughter, Anna Jarvis, would of course have known of her mother's work. Much later, this second Jarvis started her own crusade to found a memorial day for women.

After her husband’s death in 1902, Ann moved to Philadelphia to live with her son Claude and daughters Anna and Lillian. Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis died in Bala-Cynwyd, west of Philadelphia, on May 9, 1905 at the age of 72.

Anna led a small tribute to her mother at St. Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church back in Grafton, where her Mother had spent 25 years teaching Sunday School, on May 12, 1907. Then on May 10, 1908, the first official Mother's Day celebration took place at both that church and also at the Wanamaker Store Auditorium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

St. Andrew's Methodist Episcopal Church Sunday School Room, 1911, Grafton, WV. Oval portraits on wall show Ann Jarvis (left) and Anna Jarvis (right).

John Wanamaker was one of the founders of today's modern day department store.  He no doubt recognized the profit possibilities of a potentially national event that could generate lots of gift sales, and he had the finances to push it. And as a former U.S. postmaster general, he had the political weight to advance it.

That same year, Elmer Burkett, a U.S. Senator from Nebraska, proposed making Mother's Day a national holiday at the request of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). The proposal was defeated, but by 1909 forty-six states, as well as parts of Canada and Mexico, were holding Mother's Day services.

Anna Jarvis devoted herself full time to the creation of Mother's Day, endlessly petitioning state governments, business leaders, women groups, churches and other institutions and organizations.  She did have her ticks: she incorporated herself as the Mother’s Day International Association, and claimed copyright on the second Sunday of May.

She finally convinced the World's Sunday School Association, a key influence over state legislators and Congress, to back her. In 1912 West Virginia became the first state to officially recognize Mother's Day, and in 1914 Woodrow Wilson signed it into national observance, declaring the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day.

By the 1920s, Anna Jarvis had become soured on the holiday’s commercialization. She and her sister Ellsinore ultimately spent themselves into poverty campaigning against the holiday.

In 1943, the 79 year old Jarvis, partially deaf and blind, entered a sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania. For reasons unrecorded, the Florists' Exchange, a trade association, picked up some of her bills, unbeknownst to her. And even after she told a reporter she was sorry she ever started the whole thing, she received thousands of Mother's Day cards each May until she died, in 1948.
 
"A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world,” she is quoted as saying in her New York Times obituary. “And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment!"

She never married and was never a mother.

 
Sources: www.wvculture.org/hiStory/jarvis.html
www.smithsonianmag.com/issues/2007/may/last-mothers.php
www.mothersdaycentral.com/about-mothersday/history/
www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070513/NEWS/705130403/1036


Ann+Maria+Jarvis Anna+Jarvis Mother's+Day appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Grafton+WV

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Labels: Ann Maria Jarvis, Anna Jarvis, appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Grafton WV, Mother's Day

Sunday Magazine--St. Louis Post Dispatch--May 9, 1926

OLD MAN WRIGHT RIDES INTO EXILE
So as to Git Away From Trouble, This Settler of the Hills--Fighter and Killer--Sits Astride His Mare and Goes Slowly Down to the Valleys.
By HARRY R. BURKE
Of the Post-Dispatch Staff

Pikeville, KY---Old Man Lige Wright packed his traps in the saddlebags and gingerly pulled himself across the back of his good bay mare. He rode out then through Osborn Gap and into Virginia slowly. For Old Man Lige Wright was doing the hardest thing he had ever done. He was running away from trouble.

Back of him was a lifetime of warfare. And ELIJAH WRIGHT was essentially a man of peace. He feared no one. He told no lies. And he paid his debts. There were notches on his gun--speaking figuratively--but that was Lige Wright's misfortune. The luckiest unlucky man that ever lived! Twice he had been condemned to spend his life in the penitentiary.

Once he had been sentenced to hang by the neck until he was dead. And in Virginia--whither now he was going--Elijah Wright had served to the full a life sentence for murder. For in the Commonwealth of Virginia, eighteen years in prison is, constructively, a life term. His debt to the Commonwealth had been paid in full.

Four years ago at the door of the penitentiary, the Commonwealth of Virginia had given Elijah Wright a suit of clothes and a bill and sent him out to face life's battle. And he had gone back to his native Kentucky hills to begin once again. There trouble had come upon him--trouble that was not of his own seeking, though the moon¬shine liquor that brought it on had been.

And now he was going into voluntary exile. It was not that he was afraid. In the old man's face you could read the fearlessness of an eagle. There was no man lived who could say that Old Man Lige Wright was afraid. He had leaped too often to meet death face to face.

His right hand, which gingerly held the reins as the bay mare ambled through the gap, was still stiff from a deep cut between forefinger and the stub of what at one time had been his thumb. This cut was a mark left by the butcher knife when he seized it as his enemy lunged that night last March.

And as he rode into exile Old Man Lige Wright thanked God that those enemies from behind had knocked him senseless with his own gun--taken while he wasn't look¬ing from his saddlebags, wounding him so sorely that he rode even now in a dizzy haze and sometimes saw double as images danced before his eyes. He thanked God that the blow had prevented him from seizing that murderous knife and turning it against the wielder.

Read the full story here


Old+Man+Lige+Wright Pikeville+KY Dickinson+County+VA appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

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Labels: appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Dickinson County VA, Old Man Lige Wright, Pikeville KY

Lillian Exum Clement was nominated as a Democratic candidate for North Carolina's House of Representatives two months before the 19th Amendment, granting the vote to women, was ratified in August 1920. The vote over her two male opponents in the primary was an astounding 10,368 to 41. She won the general election in November and, on January 5, 1921, took her seat in Raleigh, becoming the first woman in the South to hold legislative office.

"I was afraid at first that the men would oppose me because I am a woman," she told The Raleigh News & Observer on her first day in office, "but I don't feel that way now. I have always worked with men, and I know them as they are. I have no false illusions or fears of them. You may quote me as saying 'I am definitely for them.'"

Others soon followed. In Tennessee, in a special election on January 25, 1921, Anna Lee Worley was selected to succeed her husband. In 1922 Kentucky gained female legislators. In North Carolina, the next women to serve were Julia Alexander and Carrie McLean, both of Charlotte, in 1925 and 1927 respectively.

Exum, as she was called, was born in Black Mountain, NC, the sixth of seven high-achieving children of George Washington Clement and Sara Elizabeth Barnett. Exum is a coastal North Carolina town where the teenaged George had gone to work supervising railroad crews before finding his way to Black Mountain. Exum's family moved to Biltmore after her father procured a job as foreman on the Vanderbilt estate. The Clement girls benefited from the support of one of the leading women of that era, Edith Vanderbilt.

Encouraged by her, Exum enrolled in the newly established Asheville Business School. She came to realize she could compete with the male students intellectually, and at age 14, went to work in the Buncombe County sheriff’s office while studying law at night. In February 1916 she passed the bar exam with top grades, and the next year hung out her shingle in the Law Building. She was the first North Carolina lawyer to practice without a male partner.

As a legislator (addressed by fellow solons as “Brother Exum”) she introduced seventeen bills including the measure for the secret ballot, the “pure milk bill” requiring tuberculin testing of herds, and a reduction in the abandonment period required for divorce from ten to five years.

Nineteenth century engraving of the State Capitol Building by J. & F. Tallis of London and New York.

She sponsored a bill to have the state assume control of a home for unwed mothers, garnering opposition (she was pelted with eggs and vegetables while speaking in its behalf in Asheville). Sixteen of her bills passed. Her bill proposing private voting booths for elections was defeated (some argued that other legislators opposed the bill because it would be impossible to bribe or intimidate voters if you couldn't see them cast their ballots).

In the summer of 1921 she married newspaperman E. Eller Stafford, necessitating a special bill to change her name in the short session. She did not seek reelection. At age thirty-one she died of pneumonia and was buried in Riverside Cemetery.


Sources:
“Brother Exum Takes Her Seat,” Asheville Citizen-Times, May 8, 1960, reprinted in Jack
Discovering North Carolina: A Tar Heel Reader , Claiborne and William Price, eds., 1991
Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, V, 419--sketch by Alice
R. Cotten, William S. Powell, ed.
Women State and Territorial Legislators, 1895-1995: A State-by-State
Analysis, with Rosters of 6,000 Women, by Elizabeth M. Cox, 1996
A Popular History of Western North Carolina: Mountains, Heroes, Hootnoggers, by Rob Neufeld, The History Press, 2007


Lillian+Exum+Clement Brother+Exum North+Carolina+politics Asheville+NC Biltmore appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history appalachia

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Labels: appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Asheville NC, Biltmore, Brother Exum, Lillian Exum Clement, North Carolina politics

"Bullets and ballots are not companions;" said Lizzie French in a famous 1912 speech to the Tenneesee Bar Association, "but ballots in the hands of people are supposed to be a substitute for bullets in the hands of hired agents...Thanks be to God that in giving women the crown of motherhood he made her the giver not the taker of life. Woman has no greater claim to the rights of the ballot than she is a producer not a destroyer of life."

Elizabeth Crozier French, born this date in 1851, was at the time the recently elected president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association, Inc. When the first woman in Tennessee history to address the organization took the podium, she delivered what many scholars believe today was one of her greatest messages stating her position on the state’s law forbidding women from voting. French was never one to sit still, and knew her best strategy as president of the state's suffrage organization would be to take her message straight to the Tennessee Bar Association.

As the daughter of an attorney and an out-spoken leader in the women's movement, French wasn't at all intimidated by the men seated in front of her. Her speech was put into the record of the Tennessee Bar Association as an "Address on Women’s Rights" and became a much quoted theme in the South's growing number of suffrage groups. French continued her work in Knoxville founding and serving as president of the Knoxville Equal Suffrage Society and becoming a leading member of the National Women's Party.

From this speech forward, Crozier began her all-out fight to see that the Susan B. Anthony Amendment - now more than 30 years old and regarded as a dead piece of legislation in Congress - was added to the United States Constitution.

The bill and the labors of women like Lizzie Crozier French were having some impact on women's rights in America. Some states had begun giving women greater control over their property, a few had made divorce easier for those in abusive relationships, and women were slowly gaining access to the courts in their ability to sue for damages.

Finally on August 25, 1919, Tennessee certified the ratification becoming the 36th state and making the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution the law of the land giving women the right to vote.

Lizzie C. French and the Suffragists across America cheered passage of the 19th Amendment, and French joined women across Tennessee in casting their first votes that following November. In addition, French went on to help found the Knoxville chapter of the League of Women Voters.

Lizzie C. French remained an active member of the Knoxville community and made a bid for City Council in 1923, but was defeated. Three years later the 75-year-old Lizzie C. French traveled to Washington, D.C. to help the National Women’s Party furnish a room in honor of the Tennessee suffragists and also secure introduction of a bill in Congress to benefit working women in America. On May 14, 1926, while still in Washington, D.C., the Tennessean quietly passed away.

Her body was returned to her hometown in Knoxville where she was laid to rest in the City’s Old Gray Cemetery – leaving behind a legacy that is still felt to this day.


Source: www.tennesseehistory.com/class/LizzieCroz.htm


Lizzie+French Tennessee+Equal+Suffrage+Association Knoxville+TN suffragists appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

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Labels: appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Knoxville TN, Lizzie French, suffragists, Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association

"In this county Godfrey L. Cabot of Boston, MA has the largest carbon factory in the world, utilizing natural gas for the purpose," stated the WV Geological Survey about Calhoun County in 1911. "The product is wagoned to Creston where it is loaded on boats and shipped down the Little Kanawha River to railway connection at Owensport, the southern terminus of the Little Kanawha R.R. Mr. Cabot has another factory located at Creston in Wirt County."

The most widely used black pigment, carbon black is virtually pure carbon, made from the incomplete combustion of petrochemical oils of gases. It is widely used even today as a filler in the rubber industry and as a UV stabilizer in plastics. Distinct from soot, this substance, sometimes called lamp black, has been around for a long time. Prehistoric cave dwellers used it to draw animals on cave walls, and the Egyptian pharaohs used it as a pigment. Cabot and his brother Samuel saw similar applications for it.

The Cabot brothers didn’t begin their business in West Virginia. They first built a plant in Buffalo Mills, PA, that used natural gas to produce carbon black in 1882, and in 1884 Godfrey patented a carbon black production process that used stationary plates and rotating burners. In 1887 Godfrey bought out Samuel's interest in the business.

At about this time, a glut developed in the carbon black market; at the same time, new uses were being found for natural gas, which was the raw material for carbon black. Cabot's response was to purchase gas leases and drill on the sites, drilling his first successful gas well in Saxonburg, PA, in 1888. He continued, despite the glut, to buy up small carbon black factories as well, and by 1897 he was probably the largest producer in the industry.

In 1898, with the exhaustion of the Pennsylvania gas fields, Cabot moved his operation to West Virginia, where he acquired oil and gas leases, which he drilled successfully. By 1900 the new carbon factory---Cabot Station, in Grantsville---employed twelve men paid from $1.25 to $2 a day. The plant was producing 800 pounds of carbon black a day when it first opened, but that quickly increased to 1,400 pounds. Cabot continued to add gas sites in West Virginia, and built a natural gasoline extraction plant near Elizabeth, West Virginia, in 1914.

While the advent and spread of high-speed presses and similar applications greatly expanded Cabot's business, World War I demonstrated the potential for carbon black in the modern economy. It had been known for a while that carbon black could inhibit damage to materials caused by the sun; a few years before that war, the India Rubber Gutta-Percha and Telegraph Works Co. of Silvertown, England, began to manufacture automobile tires using carbon black as a stabilizing or reinforcing agent.

During World War I the United States began using carbon black, and its superior properties became evident in improved tread wear and lower rates of tire failure. After the war, its use spread throughout the tire industry, providing a tremendous burst of growth to suppliers.

By the early 1920s, Cabot’s locus of carbon black production was shifted out of West Virginia, first, unsuccessfully, to Louisiana, and then to Texas. Meantime Cabot’s original factory in Grantsville—Cabot Station—was shifted to a compressor or pump station for natural gas by the Hope Natural Gas Company, which had purchased the property. Today the spot of the former world’s largest carbon factory in Calhoun County, WV is home to Cabot Recycling Center.

Sources: www.hurherald.com/cgi-bin/db_scripts/articles?Action=user_view&db=hurheral_articles&id=13737
www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/24/Cabot-Corporation.html
West Virginia Geological Survey: Wirt, Roane and Calhoun Counties, by Ray
Vernon Hennen, W. J. Latimer, F. N. Meeker, 1911, Acme Publishing Co., p. 27


appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Cabot+Station Calhoun+County+WV carbon+black+factory Godfrey+L.+Cabot Grantsville+WV lamp+black

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Labels: appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Cabot Station, Calhoun County WV, carbon black factory, Godfrey L. Cabot, Grantsville WV, lamp black

Long before the well-endowed Hollywood starlet of the 1950's, there was a Dagmar car, built from 1922-1926 in Hagerstown, MD by the M. P. Möller Motor Car Company. This luxury sedan was named for the one of Dr. Mathias P. Möller’s daughters. The make's emblem was a pipe organ. The Danish industrialist by that point in his business career had made his first fortune manufacturing the instrument.  His organ company, in business from 1875 till 1992, was the world's largest builder of pipe organs for over three-quarters of a century.

Only a few hundred Dagmars were built over the course of six years at prices upwards of $6,000.00. By comparison, the autos produced by Ford and Chevrolet during the same era sold for approximately $500.00. Dagmar models included the Petite, which soon became known as the "Baby Dagmar." One of the most unusual features was its all-brass trim, instead of the more usual nickel.

In 1924, Möller presented a Dagmar to Ruth Malcomson, of Philadelphia, who won the Miss America title that year. Curvaceous fenders appeared on the Dagmar for the first time in the 1925 line---coincidence? Even so, Dagmar sales skidded after that high point; the last car Dagmar ever built was for Mr. Möller himself. It was an enormous 7-passenger limo that was shipped back to his native Denmark for his personal use.

With the 1923 purchase of a 250,000 square foot Hagerstown building originally built for the Crawford Bicycle Company in 1891, Möller entered the field of producing taxicabs and shifted the focus away from luxury cars. Over the course of the ensuing years, more than a dozen models of taxis and trucks were built. The taxi make was dependent on the design and specification of the large taxi companies that sub-contracted the manufacturing to Möller. The best known of his taxicab lines was the Luxor; others included the Blue Light, Super Paramount, Astor, Five-Boro and Twentieth Century.

These names were either chosen for the operating company, as with Five Boro, or simply because the promoters thought a stylish new name would increase sales. Möller vehicles became commonplace on the streets of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and numerous other cities. Growth of the car works reached a peak in 1927 with 125 taxis rolling out of the Hagerstown facility each week.

The only goods vehicle made by the Möller company was the Elysee panel delivery (produced from 1929-1932).  They were made in four models, the Band Box, Fifth Avenue, Courier and the Mercury. These were stylish vehicles intended for the delivery of high-class goods to wealthy homes.

During the early 20th century the Möller name in the auto industry truly commanded respect as being builders of upper end motor cars both private and public. Taxicabs and trucks remained the thrust of the firm until the death of Dr. Möller in 1937 at which point the company was closed.
 
Sources: www.coachbuilt.com/bui/w/woonsocket/woonsocket.htm
www.autopasion18.com/HISTORIA-MOLLER.htm
www.coachbuilt.com/bui/m/moller_mp/moller_mp.htm


M.+P.+Möller+Motor+Car+Company luxury+cars the+Dagmar Mathias+P.+Möller Hagerstown+MD Ruth+Malcomson appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history
 

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Labels: appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Hagerstown MD, luxury cars, M. P. Möller Motor Car Company, Mathias P. Möller, Ruth Malcomson, the Dagmar

It was the greatest disaster ever known to this Western Virginia mountain village.

On May 2, 1929, the unusually violent storm slammed into the little community of Rye Cove, VA in the mountains of Scott County.

During the storm a tornado directly struck the local two-story schoolhouse, with over 150 children and teachers inside. The building was completely leveled, and the debris caught fire from an overturned stove. Thirteen were killed. The dozens of injured were rushed by special train to the hospital in Bristol.

A. P. Carter, of the famous Carter Family, was in the next valley on the day of the storm. He rushed to Rye Cove to help with the rescue efforts. He was touched by the horror of what he saw and soon composed "The Cyclone of Rye Cove." The Carter Family recorded the song that same year for RCA Victor.

"The Cyclone of Rye Cove"

Oh, give us a home far beyond the blue sky,
Where storms and cyclones are unknown,
And there by life's strand, we'll clasp with our glad hands
God's children in a heavenly home.

Oh, listen today in a story I tell,
In sadness and tear dimmed eye,
Of a dreadful cyclone that came this way,
And it blew our schoolhouse away.

CHORUS:
Rye Cove, (Rye Cove), Rye Cove, (Rye Cove),
The place of my childhood and home,
Where in life's early morn I once loved to roam,
But now it's so silent and lone.

When the cyclone appeared, it darkened the air,
And the lightning flashed over the sky,
And the children all cried, "Don't take us away,
And spare us to go back home."

There were mothers so dear and fathers the same,
That came to this horrible scene,
Searching and crying, each found her own child,
Dying on a pillow of stone

Related posts: "You've been fooling me baby"
"It was daytime, but the sky was as dark as night"

sources: www.blueridgeinstitute.org/ballads/audio.html
scott.k12.va.us/rci/Transcript.htm


cyclone+of+Rye+Cove Rye+Cove+Va Carter+Family AP+Carter appalachia appalachian+mountains+history appalachian+history

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Labels: AP Carter, appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Carter Family, cyclone of Rye Cove, Rye Cove Va

The pack was expensive at 20 cents, but you got the first menthol-infused cigarette, ancestor to "Kools," "Salem" and others. Why was it called "Spuds?"

Lloyd "Spud" Hughes of Mingo Junction, OH gets the credit for introducing Americans to menthol cool smoking. Hughes wasn't long out of high school and working as a cashier in a restaurant run by his father, when he came up with the idea of treating tobacco with menthol. The possibly apocryphal story is his mother insisted he inhale menthol crystals for his asthma. He soon noticed that when he stored his menthol and cigarettes in a tin container, the cigarette was pleasantly flavored. Mentholation furthermore acts as a mild anesthetic, numbs the throat to the harsh elements of tobacco smoke and thus allows a deeper and longer inhalation.

At first he just smoked the cigarettes himself. Later, he offered them to the railroad and mill workers who frequented his father's restaurant. He patented his process, which treated tobacco by spraying it with a solution of menthol, alcohol, and the oil of cassia, and in September 1925 helped form the Spud Cigarette Corporation, Wheeling, WV.

Walter B. Hilton, a prominent Wheeling real estate and insurance man was president, and Lloyd was secretary/treasurer. Spud Cigarettes were made for this small company in Wheeling at Factory 12, WV by the Bloch brothers, manufacturers of popular Mail Pouch Tobacco. Spud Hughes sold his premium priced cigarettes (20 for 20 cents) from his car, door-to-door, in the Ohio Valley.

It wasn’t long before Woodford Fitch Axton, a Kentucky colonel and part owner and president of The Axton-Fisher Tobacco Company of Louisville, Kentucky, took notice. The Axton-Fisher Tobacco Co. made Clown Cigarettes, a modestly successful regional brand first sold in 1920. Axton saw the potential of Spud Hughes' invention, and in May 1926 offered him $90,000 for the name and patent. Hughes accepted. Axton Fisher hired a New York advertising firm to promote Spuds nationally---less irritating and suitable for sore throats due to colds!--- and sold stock in the company for the first time to finance expansion. By 1932 Axton-Fisher had promoted Spud Cigarettes into the fifth best selling brand in the United States.

With competition from Brown and Williamson's menthols Penquin in 1931 and Kool in 1933 the price of SPUD was reduced to 15 cents a pack in 1933. In 1944 Philip Morris bought Axton Fisher Tobacco Company; they continued to manufacture Spud cigarettes for domestic sales until 1963.

And what became of Hughes? He went on a two year spending spree, blew the $90,000 on cars and airplanes, and spent much of the rest of his life trying to invent another unique cigarette.


sources: www.tobaccoteds.com/news_24-May-2006.html
www.historian.org/bysubject/tobacco3.htm
www.cigarettespedia.com/index.php/BrandSpud
Come Up to the Kool Taste: African American Upward Mobility and the Semiotics of Smoking Menthols
by Sarah S. Lochlann Jain, published in 'Public Culture' Spring 2003, 15 [2]
http://goodhealth.freeservers.com/SPUD1.html


Spud+Hughes menthol+cigarettes Mingo+Junction+OH Bloch+brothers +Woodford+Fitch+Axton Axton-Fisher+Tobacco+Company appalachia appalachian+mountains+history appalachian+history

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Labels: appalachia, appalachian history, appalachian mountains history, Axton-Fisher Tobacco Company, Bloch brothers, menthol cigarettes, Mingo Junction OH, Spud Hughes, Woodford Fitch Axton