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8/28/08
Ray Hicks, keeper of the Jack Tales
Ray Hicks, born this day in 1922, was best known for his traditional storytelling and for preserving the original Beech Mountain 'Jack Tales' brought to western North Carolina by his ancestors. Ray, his grandfather Benjamin and his great-great grandfather Counce (Council) Harmon all carefully passed down these tall tales to the next generation. 
It seems Ray knew everything there was to know about living off the land and about his family's history. A lot of what he knew-- songs, jokes, and customs of the mountain people-- is in a new book by Lynn Salsi, seven years in the making: "The Life and Times of Ray Hicks-Keeper of the Jack Tales."
Salsi is also the author of "The Jack Tales" and "Young Ray Hicks Learns the Jack Tales." She has received the American Library Association's Notable Book Award, six Willie Parker Peace History Book Awards for her non-fiction books about North Carolina, and was named the North Carolina Historian of the Year in 2001.
We caught up with Lynn this week to get a sneak peek at what to expect from this new book.
Appalachian History: How conscious was Ray Hicks of his role in preserving oral storytelling?
Lynn Salsi: He was well aware that he was saving stories. That was the magical part of many conversations. Jimmy Neil Smith told Ray more than once he [Ray] was saving the art of storytelling. That was a point of pride with Ray. His appearances at the National Storytelling Festival further convinced him that what he was doing was important, and it was. So many scholars studied Ray's speech that he became aware that his accent, coupled with the old mountain way of speaking, was special. Many people traveled to his home just to hear him talk. He once commented that he wished his granddaddy Ben could have lived long enough to know that he [Ray] was making a little pay goin' off the mountain to talk.
AH: In today’s hyper-media culture, oral tales seem to be from another time altogether. Was Ray Hicks the last of his kind?
LS: There are scholars (meaning Ph.Ds in folklore) who have commented that it is a cliche to refer to Ray as such. In a way Ray was the future of storytelling because he was certainly a bridge to future storytellers like his son, Ted, and his cousins, Jerry Harmon (from Franklin, NC) who travels internationally telling Jack tales, and Orville Hicks, who is well-known around Boone. They are all fine storytellers and they tell about Jack. However, since storytelling's an individual art, there'll not be another Ray.
AH: As a transcriber of oral tales, how do you know which version to 'lock down' in print?
LS: Storytellers are unique performers who bring forth stories in their own way. I attempted to write down Ray's stories as often as possible. However, he never told the same story exactly the same way twice. That means that when I combine three versions and then take out redundancies and smooth out some transitions, the stories become my version even though they have the
same plot structure.
AH: You’ve written two books previously dealing with Ray Hicks and the Jack Tale material. How's this new book different?
LS: There are no stories in the book. There are references to many stories, however it seemed appropriate that the book should celebrate Ray's life as the most important story.
AH: Many people comment that the old Jack Tales are nothing but a re-hashing of the Brothers Grimm tales.
LS: I have thought alot about old stories and the way Ray told them. Most of them I have studied and compared to old European versions. However the people in the mountains were telling tales about Jack PRIOR to the Grimm tales (after two hundred years they could not be exactly the same as the early Hicks, Harmon, and Ward family members told them). It is amazing that the families were in the area of Valle Crucis intermarrying decades before the Grimms put together their book.
AH: How did Ray interact with audiences?
LS: Once I had my North Carolina Youth Touring Theater members at his house on a cold March day prior to traveling to England and Scotland where the youngsters (ages 9 to 16) performed in schools and with other play groups. After listening to Ray for at least two hours, one of the kids said, "Ray, we want to tell you a story." They jumped up in front of him and told him a Jack tale. He got the biggest kick out of them and later said, "Now, I hain't never heared that tale. Why don't ya' teach 'em one of mine."
After we returned from Europe, those same students performed with Ray. He sat in a chair and started the story and the students would pick up a line when a certain character came up. Some of those students are now grown. When I run into them, they usually mention the times they performed with Ray Hicks. 
AH: What prompted you to first think of a biography about Ray?
LS: After I won an American Library Association Notable Book Award for "The Jack Tales", I had people calling from AZ, NM, CA, CT, MI, IN, and KY asking questions. That got me thinking that there should be a biography about Ray Hicks. One day I started sorting my notes and since I am the type of person who sometimes has to doodle on the church program when the preacher is preaching, I'm good at writing long hand. Most people know that when Ray spoke he often digressed to make a point, to correct a thought, and/or to explain how the action related to something he had experienced. I wrote everything down.
AH: How’d you settle on the idea of writing the biography in the first-person voice?
LS: One day I thought I should get started, but the first three or four pages seemed to be pedantic. I set it aside to think about how to make the prose have some flow. I thought back to a book I wrote about the people who lived on the North Carolina coast and how, after interviewing my subjects, I was able to put the information into an essay form but in first person as though the people I had interviewed were talking.
I enjoy listening to how people speak and envisioning how their paragraphs might be coming together on paper. I think about their colloquialisms and work not to delete the tone and flavor of their voices. A couple of weeks after my first attempt I went back to my hand-written document and threw it away. I pretended that I was Ray Hicks telling a story. After two pages I knew I could do an essay in his voice, but a book was a different matter. I stopped 100,000 words later and I had a book.
I have a lot of things that could be added to the book, but no one had ever done a pure biography of Ray Hicks--just Ray in a book. His life was the Appalachian version of "Angela's Ashes." It begged to be written in first person. Since I have a master's degree in writing, I have ten or twelve writer friends I e-mail often. I told one of them that I was doing something really crazy and she said, "Certainly, you can do that. Don't you know that people are writing non-fiction in novel form and it's called creative non-fiction? At least you're writing non-fiction as non-fiction. It's just in a different form."
That's how I ended up writing a biography in the form of a memoir. I'm sure I'm not the first person to do something like that, but now that I look back on the experience, I wonder how I was able to sustain that first person train of thought for so many chapters.
AH: Did you have any trouble writing the book through a male perspective?
LS: Writing in a man's voice in this book gave me the courage to write a young adult novel about young men serving on a boat in Vietnam. It is a work of fiction, but I wrote it in first person in a male voice. I guess if Nicholas Sparks can write women's fiction, I can write a few books in a
male voice. Needless to say, after taking five years to write the book and two years for the University of Tennessee Press to go through all the publishing processes, I am eager to get some feedback. By writing in Ray's voice, I could more easily preserve mountain language.
AH: Did your publisher ‘rein in’ your use of dialect in order to sell the book better?
LS: If I had my way every word would be in dialect. However, it would be difficult to read. The editors at the University of Tennessee Press were outstanding in the way they helped me analyze the dialect that was essential versus words that needed to be written in standard English. The University of Tennessee Press was the perfect publisher for this material, because every one of the people working on the book, including Tom Post, the marketing director, understood the importance of the language, the history, and the man. The actual essence of the work shows that Ray Hicks, the famous storyteller, lived within the boundaries of his stories. I hope that readers will be awed about Ray's life and times.
AH: Thank you so much for joining us today!
appalachia appalachian+folktales appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Beech+Mountain+NC Jack+Tales Lynn+Salsi Ray+Hicks
8/27/08
America's only woman ironmaster
Nannie Kelly Wright (1856-1946) was probably the only woman ironmaster in America's history. Wright was the daughter of the famous riverboat commodore Washington Honshell, who helped form Cincinnati's White Collar packet line. She was said to be the second richest woman in the world during the early 1900's.
Wright hadn’t set out to become an ironmaster; she married into the business. In 1879 she wed Lindsey Kelly, who was serving one of two terms as an Ohio representative. His father, William Dollarhide Kelly, was an ironmaster, banker and farmer. In 1842, the elder Kelly had leased Etna Furnace, and in 1851, the Lagrange Furnace. By 1849, W.D. owned the land that is now owned by the Ohio Iron and Coal Company, and the Ironton railroad. In 1862 W.D. bought a five-year lease on the Centre Furnace at Superior, OH, and Lindsey took over its management the following year.
By 1891, Centre Furnace and the other Kelly holdings in real estate and finance were in distress. From 1894 to 1897 the iron industry in this country was practically at a standstill and stocks were worth about 15 to 20 cents on the dollar. Buyers at that price were scarce. Centre Furnace went into receivership.
Nannie Wright, a close observer of political and financial affairs, reasoned an upward trend was due. She paid the taxes and in 1899, using her own money, she bid on the furnace and 12,000 surrounding acres at auction, for $19,950.
Wright learned the iron business, renovated the furnace and the company houses provided for the employees, and began hiring workers when many were out of work. She conducted regular property inspections and made regular weekly trips to Cincinnati. Many times she would go down to the furnace and work along side the men. It was often rumored that when she worked down at the furnace, she dressed as a male (she denied this). Centre Furnace was one of the first companies to produce and ship iron by rail during the Spanish American War.
Wright's business interests revolved around Centre Furnace and the Kelly Nail & Iron Co. of Ironton. She served as director of the latter institution for years and was also financially interested in the Belfont Iron Works, Ironton Engine Co., and Ironton, Huntington, Cincinnati and Catlettsburg banks. 
Nannie and Lindsey had only one child, a son named Lindsey. The younger Lindsey had rheumatism, and as a child had spent time in Texas hoping for some sort of relief. He died in Cincinnati in 1904, only 20 years old. Lindsey had died the year before. The distraught widow began to travel frequently, and left the iron business in other hands for awhile.
She set out on her first world tour in 1898, took another in 1906 and a third in 1913. In all she crossed the Atlantic 14 times in years when it was the unusual rather than the ordinary. In London she was presented to the Court of St. James during the reign of Edward VII.
In 1906 Wright sold Centre Furnace to the Superior Portland Cement Co. In 1908, Nannie, age 55, married D. Gregory Wright, age 34. They divorced in 1919. During these years, Wright kept her stocks in Centre Furnace and other family holdings, but in 1923 she decided to sell many of them. She invested the profits but lost her home and most of her wealth in the stock market crash of 1929.
Despite such great losses, Wright was able to lead a comfortable life. She moved into the Marting Hotel in Ironton and by selling off such personal assets as jewelry and art managed to support herself until her death on September 12, 1946.
sources: Profiles of Ohio Women, 1803-2003, by Jacqueline Jones Royster, Ohio University Press, 2003
Nannie Kelly Wright, compiled and edited by Virginia S. Bryant, Lawrence County Historical Society, 1989
www.lawrencecountyohio.com/biographies/stories/WrightNannie.htm
www.lawrencecountyohio.com/families/k_p/kelly.htm
www.fs.fed.us/r9/wayne/success_stories/center_furnace.pdf
Nannie+Kelly+Wright Ironton+OH Lindsey+Kelly Centre+Furnace iron+furnaces appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history
8/26/08
The Grave Creek Stone - archaelogical gem or hoax?
Scholars and archaelogists have been duking it out over the authenticity of the Grave Creek Stone since it first surfaced in 1838.
Local amateur archaelogists in what was originally called “the Flats of Grave Creek” and is today Moundsville, WV reportedly found it during the first recorded excavation of Grave Creek Mound.
This burial mound was built in successive stages from about 250-150 BC by the Adena culture (~1000 B.C. to ~1 A.D.) This Woodland Period group had well-organized societies and lived in a wide area including much of present day Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky and parts of Pennsylvania and New York.
In addition to the Adena ornaments and remains found in the interior, the first of two vaults allegedly contained a small flat sandstone tablet inscribed in an unrecognizable alphabet.
In 1847, archaelogist E.G. Squier made quite a fuss over the "singular omission" of any mention of the tablet in Dr. James W. Clemens' first-hand, day-by day account of the excavation, which appeared in ‘Crania Americana’ (1839), by S.G. Morton. In 1858, however, anthropologist Wills de Hass managed to produce the manuscript original of Clemens' account, and demonstrated that Morton had merely taken it upon himself to eliminate the stone's discovery from the published version. Dr. Clemens in fact recorded the inscribed stone on the day of its discovery.
By 1868 the stone was in the collection of E.H. Davis, Squier ‘s partner in the Squier & Davis archaelogy firm, before most of Davis' collection was sold to the Blackmore Museum, now part of the British Museum. Davis made a plaster cast of the stone and deposited it in the Smithsonian Institution, but the original never made it to the British Museum.
Charles Whittlesey, a prominent soldier, attorney and scholar, writing in "Archaeological Frauds," (1876) cites Squier's finding that "Dr. Clemens, in his first account of the opening of the mound, makes no mention of this stone" but himself makes no mention of de Hass's correction of this misconception.
By 1876, there were 4 plaster casts of the stone, 1 wax cast, and 6 drawings, most made from inferior copies of the stone, and not the original. "If the Grave Creek find was free from suspicion as to its integrity,” noted Whittlesey, “it has undergone so many mutations from transcribers and translators that its value to ethnologists is gone."
The Ohio State Archaeological Society appointed a committee in 1877 to study the authenticity of the stone. Committee member Rev. J.B. MacLean "did not hesitate to pronounce its authenticity as incontestable.... Regardless of who found the stone or whether it was discovered inside or outside the mound, all professed witnesses agreed it had come from the mound.”
Whittlesey returns to the topic in an 1879 article, "The Grave Creek Inscribed Stone." “The characters on the stone, by whomsoever they were cut,” he declares, “are not alphabetical or phonetic. If they have any meaning and are not a mere jumble of characters they must be symbolic or picture writing. It is therefore of small consequence whether the stone is antique or modern, whether it is genuine or a fraud."
After Whittlesey's two articles the Grave Creek Stone was generally dropped from serious consideration by archaeologists, except as a textbook example of an established hoax. It was so thoroughly discredited that they even lost track of its whereabouts.
Wills de Hass was appointed in 1881 to head the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology's Mound Survey project, but was replaced after only a year in favor of Cyrus Thomas. It is not unlikely that this had something to do with his favorable position toward the Grave Creek Stone, whereas Thomas stood firmly in the skeptics camp. "What is in the published record is that DeHass got very little done,” said director John Wesley Powell. “He certainly was not a good field person."
DeHass mainly dropped from sight in archaeology, although he still maintained his interest in mounds and American archaeology, giving a few reports in the Anthropology section of the AAAS (magazine of the American Anthropological Society), and exploring a few ruins when he was named U.S. Consul in Yucatan. The stone was probably in his collection at the time of his death in 1910.
sources: www.wvculture.org/sites/gravecreek.html
www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/grvcrk.html
www.nps.gov/history/archeology/sites/Antiquities/activities/saabrwi.htm
appalachia Grave+Creek+Stone Wills+de+Hass Charles+Whittlesey Adena+mound+builders Moundsville appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history
8/25/08
Alarmed by the American Plutocracy
As we look over the country today we see two classes of people. The excessively rich and the abject poor, and between them is a gulf ever deepening, ever widening, and the ranks of the poor are continually being recruited from a third class, the well-to-do, which class is rapidly disappearing and being absorbed by the very poor.
“On one side of this gulf we see the people toiling day and night, in the fields, the mines, the factories, working for meager wages, scantily clad and poorly fed and when the year’s crop is gathered or the day’s wages are paid we see the products of the farms and the fruits of the toil transferred across this inseparable gulf and delivered to those who are on the opposite side.
“An inspection shows that they are well clothed and that they have every comfort and luxury. They live in splendid mansions, in gorgeous palaces. We see no farms, no mines, no mills, no factories, for the dwellers on this side of the gulf do not labor. Yet there is piled up all the products of the farms, the mines, the factories which came from the other side.
“A little study of the situation reveals the fact that the laws are such that this vast army of people on one side are compelled to labor and toil in poverty in order that the few dwellers on the other side may lead lives of idleness and luxury.
“One of these classes represents plutocracy, the other represents the great masses, the toilers of the nation.
“The greatest struggle of all the ages is the one now going on between these two classes. Plutocracy is endeavoring to widen and deepen the chasm while the people are trying to bridge it until there will be a common ground on which all can meet on an equal footing.
“The rapid concentration of wealth in the hands of a few is the most alarming sign of the times and unless speedily checked portends the decay of our national greatness. The danger is so imminent that thinking men everywhere are alarmed.
“I have an unwavering faith in the honesty and patriotism of the masses and believe that when the critical moment arrives they will exhibit the spirit of our ancestors when they declared what ‘all men are, and of right ought to be, free and equal.’”
The American Plutocracy, by Milford Wriarson Howard, Holland Pub. Co, NY, 1895
Milford Wriarson Howard (1862-1937) wrote three nonfiction books on political subjects. He was a member of Congress, 7th Alabama District when he wrote ‘The American Plutocracy.’ In 1894, he had run as a Populist following a bitter split in Alabama’s Democratic Party, winning in a violent race where threats were made against his family. Two years later he suffered a nervous breakdown but successfully ran for re-election, moving his family from Ft Payne to Cullman, AL, for their safety.
Howard was seriously considered as a candidate for governor of Alabama and the U.S. Senate, and was nominated for the presidency in 1908. He was unsuccessful in a third 1910 Congressional run. In 1927, Howard took his wife on a six-month trip to Europe, writing a series of articles about their trip for The Birmingham News. He interviewed fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in Italy, and the interview changed his political views, causing him to endorse fascism. His last book was "Facism, A Challenge to Democracy." published in 1928.
Credit is due him for the existence of Alpine Camp for Boys, the Master Schools for underprivileged children on Lookout Mountain, Sally Howard Memorial Chapel, and the Scenic Highway, which runs the length of Lookout Mountain. His dreams led to Comer Scout Reservation, DeSoto Park, and DeSoto Parkway.
sources: www.alabamaliterarymap.org/author.cfm?AuthorID=111
www.mentonealabama.org/Strayhorn/StrayhornLegends.htm
www.desotostatepark.com/lol-howard.htm
www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=10904378
appalachia Mentone+AL Ft+Payne+AL American+Plutocracy Milford+Wriarson+Howard Alabama+politicians appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history
8/22/08
The Red Neck Army marches to Blair Mountain
The Battle of Blair Mountain marked a turning point in the national movement to better the conditions of working people by demanding the legalization of unions. It was the largest armed labor confrontation in U.S. history, and it began on August 24, 1921.
The highway historical marker erected last April by the state of West Virginia in front of the United Mine Workers headquarters in downtown Charleston honoring him claims organizer Bill Blizzard had mobilized 7,000 striking miners; other estimates place the figure as high as 13,000.
West Virginia coal operators did all they could to oppose unionism. The main problem was that mine workers were forced to sign legally binding "yellow-dog" contracts (upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court) under which miners pledged not to join a union or risked forfeiting their jobs as well as the right to live in company housing. In exchange they were paid next to nothing, had no freedom of speech or assembly, and were killed with impunity by mine guards and local politicos in an atmosphere akin to a third-world dictatorship.
By the summer of 1921 the "Red Neck Army" was outraged over the years of brutality and lawless exploitation. And so the miners picked up their Winchesters and gathered at Marmet (near Charleston) that summer morning, and from there began marching on Logan and Mingo counties -- the last two non-union counties in West Virginia. 
Blair Mountain, a 1,600-acre ridge located to the southwest, stood between the Armed March and their destination. About three hundred deputies and mine guards, under Sheriff Don Chafin, waited for the marchers in fortified positions in a fifteen-mile-long battle line along the crest, commanding the high passes. The coal companies paid Chafin some $32,000 per year to keep the UMW out of Logan County.
Frank Keeney, president of UMW District 17, met with Governor John J. Cornwell and General J. H. Bandholtz, and Federal troops were promised to the region. Keeney set out on the road to try and head off this violent confrontation.
"I've told you men God knows how many times that any time you want to do battle against Don Chafin and his thugs I'll be right there in the front lines with you. I’ve been there before and you know it. But this time you've got more than Don Chafin against you. You’ve got more than the governor of West Virginia against you [boos]. You’ve got the government of the United States against you!
"Now I'm telling you for your own good and for the good of the cause, you've got to do it. Break up this march. Go home. Get back to your jobs. You've got Uncle Sam on your side now, and he won't let you down. You can fight the government of West Virginia, but by God you can’t fight the government of the United States."
The appeal worked. The men grumbled but began to head home. Trains began arriving to take the miners home. It looked like a showdown wouldn't happen after all.
Then a rumor spread among the miners: They are shooting women and children at Sharples!
What had happened was that heedless of the truce between General Bandholtz and the governor, Chapin and his men had crept down from Blair Mountain intent on arresting the ringleaders of the miners. A shootout erupted and several miners were killed before Chapin and his men were driven off.
The miners returned to their march and the battle was on.
The following day the miners made a major push on the front line.
"Logan County deputies were driven down the hillside in a skirmish with an armed force from the other side of Spruce Fork Ridge, Captain I. G. Hollingsworth reported at 7 o’clock. Heavy fighting continued on two other sectors of the line during the afternoon and evening.
"'We intend to hold our lines with all the power at our command,' Colonel W. E. Eubanks [commanding officer of the militia] said. 'We have 1,200 men in the line and fighting is continuing in the Blair sector and along Crooked Creek.'"
The battle raged for nearly a week. Chafin called in reinforcements from other counties, and even offered prisoners freedom if they fought for the non-union defenders.
By August 30 the defenders had massed themselves at Craddock Fork of Hewett Creek and felt they were about to break through. At that point Chafin began contracting private airplane pilots at $100 a day to fly over the miners and drop homemade bombs on them.
The bombing was largely ineffective, but it made the event interesting enough that newspapers from around the country began sending war correspondents.
Several times the miners nearly broke through the defenses, but were driven back each time. Eventually President Harding intervened with a declaration of martial law, and sent 2,000 U.S. Army troops armed with poison gas. He also sent a fleet of bombers commanded by General Billy Mitchell, but they were never used except to drop a couple bombs in a demonstration of military potential.
The federal troops met with Bill Blizzard and gave the presidential order to desist. Blizzard spread the word and then high-tailed it out of there. The rest of the miners hid their guns on the side of the mountain and headed for home. It was no longer an army, just a bunch of tired and dirty men trying to get home. The undeclared civil war was over.
The union had suffered a crushing defeat. Between 20 and 50 people had been killed in the battle on both sides. An unknown number had been wounded, probably in the hundreds.
Blizzard and some of his colleagues were indicted for treason, but later acquitted during a trial in a Harper's Ferry courtroom. UMW organizing efforts in southern WV were halted until 1933.
Sources: The Battle of Blair Mountain, by Robert Shogan, Westview Press, 2004
www.wvculture.org/history/labor/blairmountain01.html
www.friendsofblairmountain.org/history/index.html
www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/6074/
www.glendale.edu/chaparral/apr05/blair.htm
Bill+Blizzard Battle+of+Blair+Mountain Logan+County+WV Mingo+County+WV Red+Neck+Army appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history
8/21/08
Picnic in a coal mine
Sometimes the official stories that make it into museum collections just don’t shed enough light on the complete context of an event. Take this photo, titled “Picnic in a Coal Mine, Mount Savage, 1889,
Photographed by Edgar S. Thompson.” The caption provided by the Maryland Historical Society gives scant background on this picture, and in fact may be misleading the viewer altogether.
It reads: “It must have been a very hot August afternoon when F.S. Deekins (under the table) and friends took refuge in a coal mine for a meal of peaches, plums, grapes and wine. The picture was taken by flash lighting. Several of the men are wearing caps with lamps. Are they miners, or cave explorers?”
How about “neither”? Why on earth would a miner, who’s already spent 6 days a week, 10-12 hours each day underground, take time on his one precious day off to spend yet MORE time in a coal mine? And take a look at these fresh scrubbed faces and clean pressed suits. They might be mine OWNERS, but they’re certainly not miners.
The Maryland Historical Society owns a collection of photographs known as the “Cover-Long-Deekens Collection,” donated by Margaret Lamar Deekens Cover and Loring Andrews Cover, Jr. Our “F.S. Deekins” appears once more in comments on the provenance of this collection: “Margaret’s father, Francis S. Deekens, was born in Australia, and came to the U.S. as a young man in 1881 via England, Canada, and France.
“A Cumberland business leader in real estate and insurance, he oversaw major real estate transactions and development in the region, and was a founder and president of the Real Estate and Securities Company (1903-ca. 1918). Earlier he worked in the mining industry, as chief clerk for the Consolidation Coal Co. at Frostburg (1885-1891), and as assistant vice president of the Union Mining Co. at Mount Savage (1891-1902).”
So now we know that the coal mine in the photo’s caption is owned by Union Mining Co, and it makes sense that as an assistant vice president, Deekens/Deekins would have had access off-hours to throw a party for his buddies. The photo caption states this event occurred in 1889. The provenance blurb, though, tells us Deekens worked for Union Mining starting in 1891. So maybe one of the OTHER people in the photo actually granted access.
An F.S. Deakins turns up in two Cumberland Times news reports from 1888, and is most likely the same person (the Frostburg location helps cement it):
CAVERN IN AREA
05 Jun 1888 A cavern was discovered on the Ridgeley farm and was explored by Walter Ridgeley and Mr Willard Everstine. The opening is at a place where a pond had disappeared and after a year became overgrown with brush. Two weeks ago when the brush was cleared, the entrance to the cave became apparent. The passageways are from 3 feet to 30 feet in height.
12 Jun 1888 Mr Ridgeley's cave is dubbed "Potomac Caverns" is explored and named by a party of 6 men; PJ Smith; Dory Smith; WC Devecomon; JT Taylor; JW Avirett; and FS Deakins of Frostburg.
It’s a fair guess that at least some of those same 5 companions from the Potomac Caverns trek appear the following summer in our sample photo.
The Cumberland Times articles spell our main subject’s last name as ‘Deakins.’ Deakins is an old family name in western MD, dating from Colonial times.
In 1787 Colonel Francis Deakins was appointed to “lay out the manors, and such parts of the reserves and vacant lands belonging to this state, lying to the westward of Fort Cumberland, as he might think fit and capable of being settled and improved, in lots of fifty acres each” (Laws of Maryland 1785-1791, page 351).
Now it’s possible that in 1888 in the same Maryland county there were in fact an ‘F.S. Deakins’ and an “F.S. Deekens,” and both were interested in exploring caves. But it’s a stretch. So did the F.S. Deekens mentioned in the “Cover-Long-Deekens Collection” provenance really come from Australia?
Note two shared facts about both the Potomac Caverns ‘exploration’ and the Mt. Savage photo: there are large groups, and both took place in the summer. To say that these people are cave explorers in any but the most casual, weekend amateur fashion is specious. In the photo no one is dressed for strenuous crawling or outfitted with ropes and petons, the way a serious cave explorer would be. No, these were private parties thrown in an unusual location.
Oh, and a secretive location as well. Why are there only 3 women to the 11 men in the picnic (12 counting the photographer)? This after all was late Victorian era, a time when proper women could be expected to socialize in a 'balanced' 50/50 gender environment or be frowned upon. Clearly the women aren’t the least bit uncomfortable about this---are they prostitutes?
And finally, our photographer, Edgar S. Thompson, is most likely the owner of the Edgar S. Thompson Steel Mill in Braddock, PA, 86 miles away from the Mt. Savage coal mine, and nice day trip away for a picnic in a coal mine.
sources: http://www.mdhs.org/library/MDF3.html
www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mdallegh/c-times/1888.htm
www.whilbr.org/garrettlots/index.aspx
Edgar+S.+Thompson F.S.+Deakins Mt+Savage+MD coal+mining appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history
8/20/08
To understand the Parkers you have to understand their Church
The Parkers of Lawrence and Pike County Kentucky grew with a community obligated to raise up their children in the "good old fashioned way."
Walter Parker (1911-1986) was known for his no-nonsense manner. He was a stern, strict father who demanded compliance with what he knew to be right. He'd often mete out physical punishment if a child (or grandchild) misbehaved. Some of his offspring believe he was a "mean spirited" man, others felt he did what he had to "keep everyone in line." The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
Walter spent much time socializing with church members. Walter and other Brothers of the Church would meet at his home to discuss aspects of doctrine, church business, and the behavior of its members. Walter's keen insights and witty comments of human behavior would often short-circuit growing tension between members. He was often heard telling them, and his children, they were confounded fools, admonishing them to "use their heads for something besides a hat rack."
To understand the Parkers you have to understand their Church and its beliefs. The Old Regular Baptists were formed in 1854 to retain their "old fashioned Ways."
Old Regular Baptists are known for their community-based support. Preachers have outside sources of income, and do not require religious education to preach. Old Regular Baptists do not separate children in Sunday schools, but include them patiently in their 3-to-4-hour long, once-a-month services (the other Sundays are days to visit other Old Regular Baptist Churches).
Old Regular Baptists literally follow Jesus' admonitions. They continue to baptize church members in bodies of water, practice laying on of hands for the anointing of preachers, and foot washing for all members during annual communion.
Members are admonished publicly for un-Christian behavior including drunkenness, womanizing, or feuding. Through public acts of remorse, an erring Member may be "retained" or "restored" by and to the Church.
Church Minutes of the pre-Civil War era noted "disclusion" or being dismissed by the Church for various offences including lack of attendance, dancing, using foul language (usually spoken by women), beating of slaves (slaves, denoted as "Brothers" in church minutes, were also members of the white Baptist church), gambling on horseraces or elections, card-playing, gossip, and physical fights with another Church member.
Church members could, by means of a written letter of dismissal/dismission (akin to a letter of introduction), join another Old Regular Baptist Church. Each Church would, through the letter, vouch for the character of the Member, as the Brothers would jointly bear all responsibility for the behaviors of their church fellows.
Worship is conducted in plain churches. Members gather around 9:30 Sunday mornings. Services begin with hearty handshakes and a song sung a cappella by a member so moved to begin the service. The ancient hymns are sung in what is known as the lined-out manner. The member that has begun the song will, throughout the song, sing the verse before the congregation repeats the slow singing of that verse. Members are encouraged to personalize their worship through emotional, forceful singing.
Membership in an Old Regular Baptist Church required the members display public modesty, humility and strength of character. The physical rites of handshaking, baptism, feet washing and singing encouraged long-lasting friendships and emotional rites of healing among the members.
Although demanding, the church also encouraged emotional expression and offered a safe place to experience the joyful grace of living in the Spirit.
Source: http://files.usgwarchives.org/ky/pike/bios/parker368gbs.txt
Old+Regular+Baptist+Church Pike+County+KY Lawrence+County+KY Walter+Parker appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history
8/19/08
Yahoo--- Mountain Dew!
Mountain Dew’s Green Label Art bottles just released last week. Now there's a soft drink with a curious history.
There’s no dispute that a trademark application for a soda named Mountain Dew was filed on November 12, 1948 with the U.S. Patent Office by Hartman Beverage Co. of Knoxville, TN. After that the path of Mountain Dew to its current worldwide popularity breaks into a number of offshoots that parallel, intertwine, and circle back.
Brothers Barney and Ally Hartman, who had moved their business from Augusta, GA, to Knoxville in 1932, initially bottled a lemon-lime mixer they jokingly called Mountain Dew, a 19th century nickname for moonshine, for their own after-hours consumption. Ally Hartman claimed the recipe was his brother’s.
The Hartmans took an early prototype of their drink to a 1946 beverage convention in Gatlinburg, TN where they were assured by friends that their product, to them nothing more than a goof, could turn them a tidy profit. At the convention the brothers met Charlie Gordon, of Tri-City Beverage.
John Brichetto drew the first sketches of the original Mountain Dew bottle labels in 1948, depicting a character known as Willy the Hillbilly shooting at a revenuer fleeing an outhouse with a pig sitting in the corner. Below the illustration is the phrase “by Barney and Ollie”—as in FILLED by Barney and Ollie, a nod to the way a homemade jug of moonshine might be hand filled by the moonshiner. This labeling quirk was carried on until Pepsi Cola entered the picture many years later.
Charlie Gordon’s Tri-City Beverage first commercially bottled Mountain Dew in 1954. The Hartmans began selling Mountain Dew the next year, marketing it as a lemon-lime drink to be used as a whiskey mixer. Although they felt the Dew would be a big seller, it didn't catch on as they had hoped. In fact, it sat on retailers’ shelves, and generated little revenue.
Herman Minges, co-owner of a North Carolina Pepsi franchiser that became a Mountain Dew licensee in 1955, was over time able to greatly expand the regional reach and appeal of the product. He had met the Hartmans through Bill Jones.
In 1958, Jones - a well known soft drink supply salesman - acquired a company by the name of Tip Corporation, located in Marion, VA. Jones was not a wealthy man, and was forced to take on investors to further promote his venture. The first investors were Allie Hartman, Herman Minges and Pepsi Cola bottlers Richard Minges of Fayetteville, NC, and Wythe Hull of Marion, VA. Some of these first investors were long time friends of Jones, from the days he had spent as a supply salesman.
In 1959 Bill Bridgforth, manager of Tri-City Beverage, formulated Tri-City Lemonade to compete with SunDrop Cola. The following year he transferred the company’s moderately successful Tri-City Lemonade flavor into the green Mountain Dew bottles.
This “New Mountain Dew” was a hit in the East Tennessee area (except for Knoxville, where the Hartmans stuck with their lemon-lime Mountain Dew for a few more years). Its base flavor is still used in Mountain Dew today.
It was rumored that Bill Jones acquired the name for Mountain Dew at a 1960 dinner with Ally Hartman. Hartman was said to want to donate the recipe and name, on behalf of his deceased brother, to the newly formed Tip Corporation. Apparently Jones would not accept the gesture, and offered to purchase the dinner that evening for the rights to the name and recipe of Mountain Dew.
If this is to be believed, the trademark for Mountain Dew, one of today's most valuable brands, along with the recipe for the soft drink, sold for a mere $6.95 dinner check.
At the same time as Mountain Dew was making its way into the soft drink market, Pepsi Cola Company was launching its new lemon lime soda, Teem. The majority of Tip Corporation customers were Pepsi bottlers, and remained faithful to their parent company. They sold the new Teem, instead of Mountain Dew.
Jones decided to tweak the Mountain Dew recipe to give it a more orange flavor, so that the drink would not compete with Pepsi's Teem. Jones added a bit of orange flavor, which seemed to make the drink a stand-out among the other lemon lime sodas then on the market.
Meantime, in 1962 Pepsi Cola Bottling of Lumberton NC [Herman Minges’ company] introduced New Mountain Dew in the Columbus County, NC market.
On May 29 of that year Tip Corp. sold its first wholly-owned franchise as well as its first new flavor franchise to Pepsi Cola Bottling of Kinston, NC.
Soon other bottlers were demanding Mountain Dew concentrate. Within three years of its introduction, Tip Corp. was supplying 40 bottlers, and they were selling over 10 million cases of Mountain Dew a year. The large consumer beverage corporations started taking notice.
Richard Minges brokered the sale of Mountain Dew to the Pepsi-Cola Co. on August 27, 1964 from the Tip Corporation, for what remains a rumored $6 million dollar plus sale price.
Tri-City Beverages continued as an independent franchisee of Mountain Dew until 1966, when Pepsi purchased that company as well.
Mountain Dew quickly became Pepsi’s 2nd best selling brand, bested only by the flagship drink itself.
sources: www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/sep/16/drinking-in-history/
www.angelfire.com/tn/traderz/dew.html
www.oldandsold.com/articles33n/mountain-dew-104.shtml
www.associatedcontent.com/article/148383/a_history_of_mountain_dew.html
appalachia Tip+Corporation Tri-City+Beverage Mountain+Dew Barney+Hartman Ally+Hartman Hartman+Beverage+Co appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history,
8/18/08
Duke Power floods the Uplands of SC
The Cherokee name Jocassee means "Place of the Lost One,” and what a fitting description that is for the South Carolina lake that bears its name, and for its sister lake, Lake Keowee. In 1974, Duke Energy Corporation finished construction of the Oconee Nuclear Station on the Keowee River in Oconee County, SC. The construction project included these two man-made lakes. The largest is Lake Keowee, which was built at the station site. Lake Jocassee, built at a higher elevation to serve as a pump storage lake for hydroelectric power generation, covers 7,656 acres, impounding the waters of the Whitewater, Thompson, Horsepasture and Toxaway Rivers.
Artist's rendering of what would become Oconee Nuclear Station on lake Keowee in Oconee County.
There’s no question that Lake Keowee's 18,500 acres of water and 300 miles of shoreline have been a valuable source of energy and recreation in northwestern South Carolina. The lake provides a dependable water supply for Greenville and Seneca. The station's generators have a total capacity of 174,000 killowatts of electricity. And campers can enjoy the county-managed 155-acre Mile Creek Park, the 40-acre South Cove Park, and 44-acre High Falls Park (all leased from Duke).
Progress, as always, has a cost.
It was a post-World War II boom-time, for growth in population, housing, energy-use and consumption. No river with the downhill heft of Keowee would escape the dam builders' advances. It was also a time in which the economics of the family farm forced some uncomfortable compromises among those who had for all history, in the words of Fruber Whitmire, "lived at home." Growing one's living was a dying way of life; an infringing world ran on ready cash.
So the die was cast. Not many who lose a birthplace, a homeplace, a piece of sacred earth to a dam through eminent domain are going to bless Duke Power.
Keowee - Micheal Hembree and Dot Jackson
Beneath the two lakes lay some of the most ancient and significant Native American and early European archaeological sites in the Southeast. Two hundred feet below Lake Keowee's surface sit Fort Prince George, an early British military outpost, and the Cherokee village site at Keowee--"land of mulberry groves,"-- which during the eighteenth century served as the capital of the Lowerhill Cherokee. Many other historic towns and buildings, such as Falls Creek Church, Estatoe, Sugartown, Mt Carmel Church, Jocassee Village, Camp Jocassee, and Keowee Church, felt the onrush of the Keowee River's dammed waters.
This was the home place of John Thomas Newton, circa 1917. The site is now under water due to Lake Keowee construction. Lake construction also required harvesting the wild timberlands in the lake basins, including some of the last stands of native old growth forest in the southern Blue Ridge Mountains. These lakes inundated some of the best bottomland in upstate South Carolina. When Crescent Land and Timber Company, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, finished the clearing operation in the fall of 1969, they had harvested 17.5 million board feet of pine sawtimber, 15 million board feet of hardwood sawtimber and 51,800 cords of pulpwood.
Duke Energy boasted that this was enough sawtimber to build 2,350 six-room houses, and that the pulpwood would load 2,250 railroad cars. Some of the yellow poplar trees that were harvested in the ancient forest of Jocassee were reported to be 200 feet tall, seven feet in diameter and over 200 years old.
Then there was the question of submerged cemeteries. State law prohibits damage or destruction of human remains. It is a felony, and conviction carries a maximum file of $5,000 and 10 years in prison. So suitable reinterment plots had to be found. "Old Pickens" was located at Robertson's Ford on the Keowee River, near where the nuclear station now sits. The only building remaining from Old Pickens is the old Presbyterian Church. There is a church yard with some of the original old tombstones, and next to that are the reinterred graves of Fannie Gibson, Joab Lewis, Isabella Baskin Reid, and a number of others moved to the site by Duke Power.
Other graves identified and claimed by relatives were moved to Martin Grove Wesleyan Methodist Church, Mount Carmel Baptist, Oconee Memorial Gardens Cemetery, Sunrise Cemetery in Pickens, and Stamp Creek Baptist Church Cemetery. (For a more complete list see http://sciway3.net/scgenweb/oconee-county/cemetery-txt/c997.txt)
The Duke Power Company Memorial Cemetery was established during the construction of Lake Keowee as a place where unclaimed graves could be reinterred. If a living relative could not be found to specify a new interment location, the unknown remains where buried here.
In the fall of 2007 Duke Energy hired a Georgia-based company to do an archeological survey of Lake Keowee that will encompass the shoreline, islands and undeveloped portions of lake access areas. “The region is rich in history, and we believe it is important to identify archaeological and historic sites within the reservoir,” said Joe Hall, manager of Duke Energy’s lake-use permitting.
Luther Lyle, chairman of Oconee County’s Arts and Historical Commission, called the survey a wonderful thing, but late in coming.
“The Cherokee were all up and down the river and a lot is already under water,” Mr. Lyle said. “There is a wealth of knowledge and information to be gained from what’s still above the lake. I think the mindset has changed since the lakes were put in and we realized how much we have lost.”
Sources:
http://sciway3.net/scgenweb/oconee-county/cemetery-txt/c997.txt
http://files.usgwarchives.org/sc/oconee/cemeteries/c061.txt
www.chattoogariver.org/Articles/1998S/OconeeS98.htm
Keowee: The story of the Keowee River Valley in Upstate South Carolina, by Michael Hembree, Dot Jackson, self published 1995
http://www.independentmail.com/news/2007/sep/14/duke-surveying-lake-keowee-archeological-historic-/
appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Duke+Power Lake+Keowee+SC Oconee+County+SC Oconee+Nuclear+Station Lake+Jocassee Pickens+County+SC
8/15/08
Gloria Swanson on location in WV
On August 17, 1925, screen actress Gloria Swanson, her husband and her staff arrived on a special train from New York.
They were in New Martinsville, WV to film "Stage Struck," a movie about a restaurant waitress who dreamed of a stage career and started on a showboat. The idea has been done a hundred times in films and was nothing new even in 1925. The famous Players-Lasky Co. was the producing company.
In the company of Miss Swanson were her husband, Marquis de la Falaise; Allen Dwan, director; Lawrence Astor and Ford Sterling, principals; William Palmer, engineer and a crew of 40. There were 65 bit players.
A large crowd greeted the company on its arrival at the Baltimore and Ohio station. The New Martinsville Band played and Miss Mildred McCaskey, representing the Woman's Club, presented the star with a basket of cut flowers. Dr. W. C. Adams of the Kiwanis Club was in charge of the reception.
At that time Capt. J. Orville Noll, steamboat operator, lived in a large house at the foot of Washington St., which was to be the home of the company while here.
Capt. Noll had also leased the Water Queen Showboat on which some of the picture was to be filmed. It was moored near the wharf.
The Noll home could not accommodate all of the personnel so many stayed at the Riverview Hotel and others stayed in private homes.
A small gas-driven launch called the "Tom" was also chartered and placed near the wharf for the use of the movie company.
Things were humming down in Brooklyn as the Phillips Lumber Co. transformed the old Clark estate, of Emich's Park, into a picnic ground where some movie shots were to be made. Workmen hauled lumber and built a huge dance pavilion.
It was a big week in New Martinsville. Filming began on August 18 and Gov. Howard Mason Gore visited the city on August 20. A special show at the Lincoln Theatre showing Gloria in "Manhandled" attracted a capacity crowd and Gloria made a brief speech. Visitors flocked to the city from Parkersburg, Wheeling and throughout the area.
Miss Swanson was showered with gifts ranging from a huge angel food cake given her by Rev. J. G. Baugh to dozens of flower bouquets given by various organizations.
Noll, in addition to renting the movie company his palatial home, and chartering the showboat and gas launch, also owned the excursion steamer Verne Swain and it was engaged in bringing tourists to the city from Wheeling.
On Sunday, August 23, the city was packed with people who had come from throughout the Ohio-West Virginia area.
Mrs. C I Longwell gave birth to a baby daughter which was promptly named Helen Gloria, for Miss Swanson. The Magnolia Serenaders played on the lawn of the Noll home. Chief of Police John Arnette and his patrolmen S. G. Combs, A. E. Coffield, N. S. Postlethwaite and Frank Leap breathed a sigh of relief as Gloria and her company concluded production and left for New York August 26 in a special train car.
There was but one mishap during the big event. Assistant Postmaster T. G. Allen, fell into the river from the wharfboat as he tried to get a glimpse of Gloria. He was rescued by the crew of the packer Helen E., which was tied up at the local landing.
The picture was not a success and led an executive of the Famous Players Co. to remark in later years:
"About the only people who made any money out of "Stage Struck" was that guy in New Martinsville who owned the hotel and showboat."
There have been two revivals of the picture made in talking film. Miss Swanson played in the silent version but did not play in either of the talking versions.
Source: New Martinsville Welcomed Swanson in 1925, News-Register, by Ralph Conley, Aug 17, 1966
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~wvwetzel/Gloria.htm
Gloria+Swanson Stage+Struck Hollywood+in+Appalachia New+Martinsville+WV appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history
8/14/08
The Sunday Lady of Possum Trot
Her schools earned plaudits from Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin Roosevelt. The Boys Industrial School motivated communities throughout the South to begin educating their young people in earnest, blazing a trail for the establishment of an agricultural and mechanical school in each of Georgia’s congressional districts. As a result of her 40 years of work in education, Martha Berry(1866-1942)---the Sunday Lady of Possum Trot--- is among Georgia's most prominent women of the first half of the 20th century.
In the 1890's, the young Berry had come back home to Floyd County from a finishing school in Boston. She often spent time reading and writing in an old log cabin on her family’s property. One Sunday, goes the story, she noticed that mountain children were peeking in to watch her. Inviting them in, she told them Bible stories. Week after week, more children and even adults came to listen to the Sunday Lady. Berry was taken with the bright youngsters, who had virtually no chance of obtaining an education. In 1900 she opened a small Sunday School in the old Possum Trot church near Lavender Mountain, painting scriptures on the walls to compensate for the lack of Bibles.
Soon she came to believe that these children needed a live-in school, not just a few hours of classes a week. But the state was poor, and mountain conditions made schools hard to maintain. So in January 1902, Berry, who came from an affluent plantation family, dedicated her family inheritance, 83 acres of land near Rome, GA, to be the site for The Boys Industrial School. The county supplied her one teacher for five months. Berry gave of her own money, and Elizabeth Brewster, a Stanford graduate and friend of Berry’s, worked with her for the first four years to help raise additional funds. 
Students at the Boys' Industrial School stand in front of an early dairy barn.
The students---there were 5 to begin with---did pay a nominal $50 yearly for boarding, but mainly earned their way by running a self-supporting farm and doing construction work. The first structure the students constructed, a two-story building with attached dormitory, cost $5,000.
Berry inspired fierce love & loyalty from her students. When one of her young charges from the early years died, his parents marked his tombstone: "He was faithful unto death; by request of Martha Berry." She named the gate leading to the campus The Gate of Opportunity and believed that every building on the site should have a spire, "to keep people looking up." And look up they did. One of the five original students at the Boys’ school subsequently graduated at the head of his class from the University of Georgia.
Martha Berry traveled widely, seeking support for her schools, and became an accomplished fund raiser. Among the largest donors were Andrew Carnegie and, later, Henry Ford. President Theodore Roosevelt, who held a dinner in the White House to raise money, encouraged her to build a girls school as well.
On Thanksgiving Day 1909, Berry did open a girls’ school, with a dormitory built by the boys. Early classes aimed to teach everything connected with homemaking, such as sewing, nursing, and gardening. In 1926, the complex became a junior college, and in 1932, Berry College, a four-year college.
And the original Possum Trot church building? Three rustic school rooms were added in the 1930s, and the grammar grades were moved there from the log-cabin area on the main campus. Today the building is used for staff housing at Berry College. The college has continued its founder's focus on providing students with a comprehensive education of the head, the heart and the hands. Her motto still endures: "Not to be ministered unto, but to minister."
sources: http://ngeorgia.com/ang/Martha_Berry
www.berry.edu/oakhill/aboutmarthaberry.asp
www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2621&hl=y
www.christianitytoday.com/workplace/articles/ourhighcalling/ladypossumtrot.html
UNIQUE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT PUT TO THE TEST AT POSSUM TROT; Miss Martha Berry's Industrial School for Country Boys in Georgia and Its Possibilities., NY Times, April 23, 1911, Magazine Section, Page SM9
www.gawomen.org/honorees/long/berrym_long.htm
appalachia appalachian+history appalchian+mountains+history Berry+College Boys+Industrial+School education+in+Appalachia Martha+Berry Rome+Ga
8/13/08
Dining in style in the FFV
It was the Chesapeake & Ohio’s first luxury passenger train - the Fast Flying Virginian, or F.F.V. It debuted on May 11, 1889, shortly after the Ohio River Bridge between Covington, KY and Cincinnati opened, and it ran daily between New York, Washington, and Cincinnati. Any Virginia aristocrat of the era would’ve instantly recognized C&O’s not-so-veiled reference to the "First Families of Virginia.”
The F.F.V. was electrically lit and was the first C&O train to provide dining service. The C&O laid over two diner cars every night at Hinton, WV. The railroad company served meals on a schedule both on this train and later on its other luxury trains The George Washington and The Sportsman.
The F.F.V.’s two diner cars were only on the trains during meal times, which for westbound trains would have been just after the 7:30 AM departure from Hinton. No doubt there were plenty of grumbling stomachs among passengers who’d been on the train for 24 hours since boarding at New York City’s Pennsylvania Station!
Laying the diners over at Hinton permitted the C&O to service eight trains (4 east and 4 west) with seven diners, and permitted the diner crews to sleep at night off the railroad.
The two diners were stored on a short siding near the station and next to an icehouse; they were iced via its top loading bunkers. The diners were switched in one car ahead of the train’s rear.
This F.F.V. breakfast menu from May 1900 offers up meals for a dollar that include such choices as: Baked Apples and Cream, Broiled Sea Fish, Sirloin Steak, Spring Lamb Chops, Shirred Eggs, and Saratoga Chips (we know this 1853 kitchen innovation from Saratoga Springs, NY as potato chips).
Wilbur Wright may very well have eaten from this menu in September 1900, when he traveled on the F.F.V. transporting most of the components of the first Wright Flyer out of Cincinnati en route to Kitty Hawk, NC.
Wright would’ve also known the train that carried him to Old Point Comfort, VA, as "the Vestibule Limited." His train consisted of a "…combined car, day coach, dining car, Pullman sleepers and observation car, assuring all the creature comforts, and affording unobstructed views of the magnificent scenery along the route."
The May 1900 menu mentions that “Our table water is from the celebrated Healing Springs of Virginia.”
“The Healing Springs of Bath County, VA are a short distance north of the Chesapeake & Ohio R.R.,” according to Appleton's Illustrated Hand-book of American Summer Resorts, “and are unrivaled by any others yet discovered in Europe or America. The waters of this spring are stated to be almost identical in their chemical analysis with the famous Schlangenbad and Ems waters of Germany. 
Illustration caption reads: "Delightful meals are served in these attractive L&N 'PanAmerican' diners." Circa early 1920s. The PanAmerican was comparable to the F.F.V.
“Their temperature is uniformly 84 degrees Fahr., and the water is regarded as highly beneficial in cases of scrofula, chronic thrush, obstinate cases of cutaneous disease, neuralgia, rheumatism, ulcers of the lower limbs of long standing, and dyspepsia, in some ‘hopeless cases’ of which it is said to have worked cures.”
By 1948 travelers on a "coach budget" could order more humble fare in the F.F.V. diner car. They'd find Stewed Prunes with Cream (30¢), Breakfast Figs in Syrup (35¢), a Jelly Omelet (65¢), or two Poached Eggs on Toast (50¢). The Griddle Cakes with Syrup were 45¢ (a dime more with honey); as were French Toast with Marmalade. Milk Toast (25¢), RyCrisp (10¢), and Doughnuts (10¢) were also on the menu. Coffee and tea came by the pot (20¢), and milk by the bottle.
Eastbound F.F.V. service was discontinued in 1962, and on May 12, 1968 the F.F.V. made its final run.
sources: http://www.cohs.org
www.centennialofflight.gov/wbh/train/trainstory.htm
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3943/is_200402/ai_n9393522
http://members.cox.net/wsimonton/steam.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3943/is_200603/ai_n17185636/pg_14
Appleton's Illustrated Hand-book of American Summer Resorts, 18th edition, D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1893
Fast+Flying+Virginia FFV Chesapeake+and+Ohio+Railroad Hinton+WV appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history
8/12/08
He deserted the Confederate AND the Union armies
John Denton fought for the Confederate Army, but deserted it. Then he joined the Union Army, but deserted it even faster. And that was just the beginning of his troubles.
Denton volunteered for Company B (Monroe County, TN), 3rd Tennessee Regiment of Confederate Volunteers in Knoxville, TN on May 23, 1861 and fought at Manassas. We know he was still present for duty as of February 1862, but on May 7, 1863 he switched sides and enlisted for three years at Lebanon, KY in Company D, 11th Tennessee Cavalry, Union Army Volunteers.
That didn’t last long. By July Denton was listed as a deserter from Camp Nelson, KY. The following month’s muster rolls reported Private John Denton absent from recruiting duty.
"While on leave (from Union Army) in Monroe County he was captured by a band of Confederate guerillas or bushwackers from the area,” begins a letter found in Cocke County, Tennessee’s Stokely Memorial Library.
“They stripped Uncle John, tied a rope around his neck, threw it over a tree limb and pulled him off the ground until he about choked. They'd let him down and then repeat the process. While this amusement was going on word came that a Union patrol was in the area.
“Two men were assigned to take Uncle John deeper into the woods and shoot him. When they arrived at a rail fence Uncle John managed to push one of his guards over the fence and knock the other one down and run away.
“Instead of hiding in the deep woods he managed to get to a lightly wooded section and cover himself with leaves while the search for him went on in the more heavily forested area. Subsequently he managed to get to the cabin of a couple of Union women whose husbands were gone away to serve in the Union Army. They dressed him in women's clothes, put a bonnet on his head and managed to smuggle him through the lines.
“Some time after the war, knowing some of his captors, they being from the same area, he killed a couple of them and was sent to prison for a few years until pardoned."
On April 10, 1864, Denton, his brother Charles, their cousin William Click, and another associated family member, Pink Gentry, murdered Patrick T. Trotter. The men hung Trotter by the thumbs and severely beat him, before shooting him in the presence of his elderly mother.
Several months later, on the 4th of July, brothers William Riley and David Burton Curtis had headed home on leave from the Confederate Army. They arrived just in time to discover one of the women in their family being raped by bushwackers. The attackers had the element of surprise in their favor, and they shot and killed the two brothers before they even got past the front porch.
Family members "dressed in women's clothing" waited across the river for the escaping offenders. Jackson Denton, Grief Ragsdale, and William Hartsell were later charged with this murder, but historians think John Denton also may have been involved.
John & Charles Denton were arrested by Union troops on October 3 in Roane County, but by February 1865 they’d been released at Knoxville. In May 1866 the two brothers, William Click and Pink Gentry were indicted for their role in Trotter’s murder; that September the sheriff was directed to arrest them and bring them to court. The ensuing trial was moved to Blount County, where the two were convicted of 2nd degree murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
However, they filed an appeal with the Supreme Court over the change of venue, the conviction was overturned on a technicality, and the case was sent back to Monroe County for further disposition in 1869.
After numerous delays and postponements, Charles and John Denton were brought to trial in 1872 in Monroe County and found guilty of 1st degree murder. They again filed an appeal, but it never transpired. John Denton went to prison from 1873 till 1880. His brother fled to Missouri and apparently was never apprehended.
John Denton filed for a government pension in late summer of 1890, but was rejected in 1891 because he’d served less than the required 90 days of service, and because he did not have an honorable discharge.
He died on Aug 12, 1912.
Sources: Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Tennessee, by Thomas Harvey Coldwell, Tennessee Supreme Court, publ. S.C. Mercer, 1870
www.flickr.com/photos/21734563@N04/2198268918
http://members.aol.com/atsissie1/page/index.htm
http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/DENTON/1997-08/0871781476
www.gentryjournal.org/archives/jgg0307.htm
Monroe+County+TN John+Denton civil+war+veteran appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history
8/11/08
The Lost Provinces
North Carolinians for many decades thought of them as the Lost Provinces. Prior to the early 20th century, Ashe, Alleghany, and Watauga counties were hemmed in and separated from the rest of the state by the Eastern Continental Divide--- average elevation 2,500 to 3,000 feet--- which forms their eastern and southern borders. Lowlanders joked that the only way to get there was to be born there. Commerce and society were forced to circulate between these three counties and Grayson and Smyth Counties, VA to the north, and Johnson and Carter Counties, TN to the west.
Archibald D. Murphey (1777-1832), a lawyer and judge remembered for his vision of how the state’s internal affairs could be improved, was far ahead of his generation in his comments about the region’s transport: “The roads have been badly laid out; they are badly made, and the population in many parts is too weak to keep the roads in even tolerable repair. All these roads should be made at the public's expense.”
The idea of getting state aid in building roads finally took hold in 1887. Up to then citizens worked on the roads on a rotating basis. A road out of Ashe County to meet the Wilkes road system was impractical at that time because of the sheer difficulty and cost of such a road. Instead county officials decided to build, with the help of state convicts, a road from Jefferson, past Healing Springs, to the nearest railway terminal, in Marion, VA.
The upper New River Valley continued to remain extremely isolated into the early part of the 20th century. In 1911 the Blowing Rock Turnpike began construction. It effectively connected the High Country with Lenoir and its prosperous network of farmers' markets and railroad depots. The Blowing Rock Turnpike not only served cars but horsedrawn wagons and could be used, free of charge, for Watauga County residents bringing their goods to market.
The High Country’s first railroad appeared in1914. It connected Ashe County with Abingdon, VA, to facilitate the region’s short timber boom. The first narrow gauge railroad line rolled through in 1918, and followed the pattern: it came not east from the Piedmont but rather from Tennessee to the west. 
Photo caption reads: First train in West Jefferson, NC. January 2, 1917
Beginning about 1920 Ashe County undertook a local road building program, during which approximately $1,500,000 in bonds were issued. The expected number of resulting county roads never materialized, however, due to the high prices at which contracts were let for the construction of these roads, and the fact that most of the county projects were later taken over by the state.
North Carolina's 1921 General Assembly finally established the state highway system. Early on there was official recognition of the need to "rescue the hillbillies." Frank Linney, D.D. Dougherty, and Mary Martin Sloop were prominent High Country influences in the political scramble to develop roads. The Assembly approved a $50 million road bond, paid for by a one-cent tax on gasoline, and the brand new Highway 16 finally connected the central piedmont with Ashe County.
Robert Doughton, of Alleghany County, U.S. Representative from 1910 to 1953, was a key player in creating road access into the region. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee from 1933 to 1953, he was the major force in promoting the construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which further opened the former Lost Provinces to jobs and tourists.
sources:www.mountaintimes.com/history/1920s/roads.php3
www.mountaintimes.com/history/1911s/roads.php3
www.ecu.edu/cs-lib/ncc/goodroads.cfm?RenderForPrint=1
www.ncmuseumofhistory.org/collateral/articles/s04.travel.railroads.car.planes.1920s.pdf
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05252006-153954/unrestricted/ENTIRETHESIS.pdf
www.newrivernotes.com/nc/asheed1.htm
The Papers of Archibald Murphey, Vol. 2, William Henry Hoyt, Editor (1914)
appalachian+history Lost+Provinces Robert+Doughton Ashe+County+NC Alleghany+County+NC Watauga+County+NC Archibald+Murphey appalachia appalachian+mountains+history,
8/8/08
World's largest display of the 10 Commandments
It's an important part of the local religious landscape.
That's probably the easiest way to sum up Fields of the Wood in Murphy, North Carolina. If you leave my hometown of Cleveland, Tennessee, headed east on U.S. Transcontinental Highway 64, you'll go through Polk County (the southeastern most county in Tennessee) and then cross over into North Carolina. And, soon, you'll see the turn-off to Fields of the Wood.
Fields of the Wood was started by Bishop Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson in the early 20th Century. He was a preacher from Indiana who came to Western North Carolina to pass out tracts to the mountain people. He and a few of his followers decided they wanted to start a church, one that would be the true way to Christ. So, one day, he hiked up one of the local mountains and prayed. When he returned, he claimed God had showed him what kind of church it should be. And, thus, the Church of God of Prophecy was born.
Fields of the Wood in 1945. Note form of the two tablets outlining the 10 Commandments center of photo.
When his church formed, Bishop Tomlinson decided its birthplace would be a good place to mark. The church bought 210 acres, including the mountain where Tomlinson went to pray, and it was named Fields of the Wood.
The centerpiece of the park is the world's largest display of the Ten Commandments. The letters are 5 feet tall and 4 feet wide. When Bishop Tomlinson died in 1943, the letters were spelled out in lime. In 1945, the letters were upgraded to white-painted concrete.
Since Tomlinson died, the park has developed. Now, it includes the world's largest altar, an 80 foot concrete structure where Tomlinson prayed. There is also the world's largest New Testament; it's 30 feet tall and 50 feet wide. And, the park holds the world's largest cross, measuring 115 feet wide and 150 feet long.
Original caption: Brother Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson prays at the site of his June 13, 1903 prayer in Fields of the Wood.
In addition, the park includes: Prayer Mountain, Psalms of Praise, puppet shows, the Solid Rock Café, the 1 Fold 1 Shepherd Marker, the Arise, Shine Marker, the Baptismal Pool, the Bethlehem Star, the Chapel, the Duck Pond, the Golgotha replica, the Gospel Theatre, the Hidden Treasures Gift Shop, the replica of Joseph's Tomb, nature trails, a pavilion, and picnic areas.
Meanwhile, the Church of God of Prophecy has grown to over 700,000 members in 115 countries.
There's something about the park, though, that bugs me. Heaven forbid I come between anyone and what gets them through the night. But, the whole Ten Commandments thing makes me wonder.
The premise of the church is to "find the true way of Christ." But, the Ten Commandments listed are not the happy ones; they're the "Thou shalt not" collection. In Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is, he says, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
But, those aren't listed in the world's largest display of the Ten Commandments.
And, at the Last Supper, Jesus said, "This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
I didn't find that there, either.
But, hey, what do I know?
TWH
[Sources: http://fieldsofthewoodbiblepark.com
www.westernncattractions.com/fieldsof.htm
www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2613]
Church+of+appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Ambrose+Jessup+Tomlinson God+of+Prophecy Fields+of+the+Wood Murphy+NC
8/7/08
The Chief Vann House
It calls into question the definition of civilization.
Hollywood and pop culture would have you think that Native Americans are poor, uneducated, lazy, shiftless relics of a bygone era who can't handle their firewater and are dependent on the federal government for a hand-out. But, one look at the Chief Vann House and all of that goes out the window.
The Chief Vann house is located on Spring Place Road, three miles west of Chatsworth, Georgia, at the intersection of Highways 225 and 52-A. It is one of the oldest remaining buildings in North Georgia, featuring beautiful hand carvings, a 12 foot mantle, and a cantilevered 'floating' staircase that left me speechless, when I first saw it as a kid on a school trip. It is one of the few buildings in the Southeast Tennessee/North Georgia area that I would feel comfortable in calling a mansion.
In the 1790s, Chief James Vann, a half-Scots/half-Cherokee leader and instrumental force in the Cherokee Renaissance, created the largest and most prosperous plantation in the Cherokee Nation, covering 1,000 acres of what is now Murray County. He was "feared by many and loved by few." But, at the start of the 19th Century, he was one of the richest men in the Western Hemisphere and a member of the Cherokee Triumvirate. He was responsible for bringing in the Moravian missionaries, to teach the children Christianity. In 1804, he finished building his 2½ story Federal-style brick home that has been called "the Showplace of the Cherokee Nation."
Chief James Vann had three wives and five children. After he was murdered in 1809 for killing his brother-in-law in a duel a year earlier, his eldest son, Joseph, inherited the mansion and plantation, and eventually became even wealthier than his father. In 1819, "Rich Joe" entertained and lodged President James Monroe at the house.
After the Georgia Gold Rush, Joseph hired a white man to run the plantation, unknowingly violating a new Georgia law forbidding whites from working for Cherokees without a permit. The Georgia Guard tried to take over the house. Spencer Riley claimed he won the house in the Land Lottery of 1832 and the Vanns were caught in a struggle between Riley and the Guard. Col. Bishop, of the Guard, threw a smoldering log on the cantilevered steps and smoked Riley out of the house.
The Vanns were eventually forced out of the house in March, 1835. That November, Col. Bishop imprisoned John Howard Payne (the composer of Home, Sweet Home) for 13 days on the grounds, charging him with sedition for supporting the Cherokee over the state of Georgia.
The rest of the story, though, is that Chief James Vann also owned approximately 200 slaves. According to the house's tour guide, the house had two rooms in the basement. One served as a wine cellar. The other served as a torture chamber for misbehaving slaves.
And, this brings us back to our original issue-- what does it mean to be civilized?
Two hundred years later, it's still a beautiful house. It is filled with items that scream refinement. You cannot walk through the house and claim the Vanns were barbarians.
But, they owned other people. And, when those people didn’t act like they wanted them to, they tortured them.
And, I've got a problem with that.
I try to tell myself, "He was a man of his time." I walk around the house and I say to myself, "This wasn’t just a mansion; it was early 19th Century siegecraft."
But, I can't get past the irony, that underneath the house was a universal symbol of refinement and opulence, as well as a universal symbol of tyranny and evil.
TWH
[Sources: http://www.gastateparks.org/info/chiefvann/; http://ngeorgia.com/ang/Chief_Vann_House_Historic_Site; http://chieftainstrail.com/sites/chief_vann_house.html; http://www.northga.net/murray/vann.html; http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2726]
Chief+Vann+House +Cherokee+leaders Chatsworth+GA James+Vann Murray+County+GA appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history
8/6/08
The Poor Man's Stonehenge
Sometimes, you see something and it's so far removed from what you expected, that all you can mutter is, "Huh?"
That was my reaction, the first time I hiked back through the woods, to see "The Wall" at Fort Mountain State Park, atop Fort Mountain, just east of Chatsworth, Georgia. It’s part of the Chattahoochee National Forest, close to the Cohutta Wilderness area, at the southwestern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The park and mountain gets its name from a mysterious stone wall that's been sitting on top of the mountain since before the Cherokee moved into the region. It's built without mortar and made from large non-native rocks. It’s 855 feet long and varies from 2 to 6 feet in height. It runs east to west and lines up with the Winter Solstice. And, the Native Americans who were there before the Cherokee claimed it was built by moon-eyed people.
Feel free to cue up "The Twilight Zone" music.
I'm a lifelong military history buff and I can't, for the life of me, see any defensive application to the structure. It's sitting in the middle of the woods. That's just not how forest fighting is done.
It has what looks like pods, for lack of a better term, kind of like stone foxholes. Or, maybe they were used as a base for beams for a larger structure. One theory is that honeymooners spent the night in the pods.
I don’t know.
The whole thing baffles me and everyone who visits it.
The best archeological guess is that it was built between 500 B.C. and 1500 A.D., with the highest probability that it was built around 500 A.D. One leading theory is that the moon-eyed people were followers of Prince Madoc, a Welsh adventurer who showed up in Mobile Bay around 1400 A.D. and presumably moved north. Some petroglyphs support the legend, but apparently there is nothing conclusive, yet.
And, it just sits there, mocking us, defying everything we think we know about pre-Columbian history. It sits quietly, serenely, not really caring whether we figure it out or not.
That's why I call it The Poor Man's Stonehenge. It's just as mysterious. It raises just as many questions. It's just as mesmerizing. It just hasn't had the hype.
It's one of North Georgia's best kept secrets, in more ways than one.
TWH
[Sources: http://www.gastateparks.org/info/fortmt/; http://ngeorgia.com/ang/Fort_Mountain_State_Park]
The+appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Chattahoochee+National+Forest Poor+Man's+Stonehenge Fort+Mountain+State+Park
8/5/08
The Scopes Monkey Trial
It was 1925 and the world was coming unhinged.
Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx had gotten people to thinking. Albert Einstein had turned science on its ear. Sigmund Freud had brought up topics previously considered taboo. White kids were starting to pay attention to black kids' music, that thing called Jazz. The temperance folks' noble gesture had turned into the best thing that ever happened to organized crime. The War to End All Wars hadn’t. The Lost Generation was hanging out on the Left Bank of the Seine.
And, Little Chucky Darwin had dropped a bomb on the world that was, at the same time, profound and beautiful. After thousands of years of recorded history, it had finally dawned on him that things adapt to their surroundings.
Well, duh.
The problem behind all of these new-fangled ideas was that it meant a shift in power. If you were on the up-side of that power curve, life was good. But, if you were on the losing end, the only thing left to do was fight.
And, that’s what put Dayton, Tennessee on the map.
Dayton is just northwest of Cleveland, my hometown, across the Tennessee River. And, in 1925, as a publicity stunt and boon for tourism, the locals engineered for John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, to teach evolution in his classroom, in direct violation of the Tennessee law prohibiting it. It drew a tsunami of press coverage and national attention, as two of the top lawyers of the day argued the role of science and religion in schools and, by extension, public life. Clarence Darrow argued for science; William Jennings Bryan argued for religion. 
William Jennings Bryan (seated, left, with fan) and Clarence Darrow (standing, center, with arms folded) at an outdoor courtroom during Scopes trial in Dayton, TN.
Rhetorically, Darrow kicked Bryan to the curb. But, Darrow also knew he was playing a game rigged against him. So, Darrow stooped to conquer. He asked the jury to find his client guilty, so the thing could be appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court. And, sure enough, a year later, the court overturned the lower court's ruling and dismissed the case.
Science won the day.
In the trial's wake, we now have the stage play Inherit the Wind and Dayton has a conservative college, Bryan College, named after the loser-- William Jennings Bryan.
But, as you've probably noticed, the debate permeating the Scopes Monkey Trial has not gone away. The Religious Right, which is neither, has repackaged creationism as Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design contends the world is too complex to understand and, thus, a conscious being (translation: the Angry Sky Dad of the Old Testament), must be behind it.
Well, the universe may be too complex for fundamentalists to understand, but the rest of us are making pretty good headway with science.
See, religion and science are not in opposition to each other. Religion addresses a who question and science addresses a how question. The who question may be answered by the Divine Sugar Daddy of the New Testament or Ahura Mazda or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Brahman or the Tao, to name a few. But, science addresses the nuts-and-bolts issues of how the creative force (whoever/whatever it is) did the job.
The short version of the impact of the Scopes Monkey Trial is that it all boiled down to power. Unquestioningly, the Bible holds some of the greatest wisdom ever shared with mankind. But, when fallible mortals twist that wisdom into a tool for social control, people suffer. When the few use religion to scare the masses, to threaten people with eternal damnation if they don’t tow the line, bad things happen. When leaders reward people for not thinking and questioning long-held assumptions simply because they’re long-held assumptions, our future generations are doomed.
But, for one brief shining moment, common sense prevailed. The ability to use those lovely bio-computers between our ears was recognized. And, on a hot summer day, just across the river, we got the chance to get to know ourselves a little better.
TWH
[Source: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htm]
Scopes+Monkey+Trial Clarence+Darrow William+Jennings+Bryan Dayton+TN appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history John+Scopes
8/4/08
Last Cherokee council before Trail of Tears
Hi, everybody. While Dave's on a much-needed vacation, I'll be pinch-hitting for him here at AppalachianHistory.net. I'll be doing a piece each day this week, about a place near and dear to my heart-- Southeast Tennessee. Some of the topics may be familiar to you; some may be brand new. But, either way, I hope you have fun getting to know my Southern Appalachia, my neck of the woods.
Today, I thought I'd start us out with a discussion about one of the most significant events in Southeast Tennessee history and the park that has sprung up as a result of it.
Red Clay State Historic Park sits in the southwest corner of Bradley County, Tennessee, just north of the Tennessee-Georgia line. And, it was at Red Clay that the Cherokee nation held its government-in-exile, its last councils, before embarking on the Trail of Tears.
Until 1832, the capital of the Cherokee nation had been at New Echota, Georgia, about an hour’s drive south of Red Clay, on Spring Place Road. But, a variety of factors caused the State of Georgia to outlaw the assembling of Cherokees in Georgia, except for the purpose of signing treaties that gave away their land. The discovery of gold in Dahlonega, just a couple of counties over, was not among the least of those factors.
Anderson and Meacy Hooker, the author's paternal great-grandparents. She's a full-blooded Cherokee.
So, from 1832 to 1838, the Cherokee nation held eleven general councils at Red Clay, with attendance upwards of 5,000 people. Various factions within the tribe argued the fate of the Cherokee people. But, in the end, the Cherokee nation split.
And, that's where Red Clay gets personal for me.
I could tell you about "Cry of the Owl," the play about the last council meeting. It premiered with the park's opening. I was in it.
I could tell you about my prior girlfriends who I've taken on the hiking trail at the park. But, let's not go there.
No, Red Clay gets personal for me because, in a very tangible way, the Cherokees never left Red Clay. The official story is that the western band of the Cherokee made the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma and the eastern band stayed in the western Carolina mountains, forming what is known today as Cherokee, North Carolina. But, then, there are the rest of us.
Harriet Frazier Walker, the author's maternal great-grandmother, a
full-blooded Cherokee.
I don't know a native-born Southeast Tennessean who isn't at least partially Cherokee. On my father's side, my great-grandmother was Meacy Louisy Kanzada Jane Hughes Hooker and she was a full-blooded Cherokee. On my mother's side, my great-grandmother was Harriet Frazier Walker and she was a full-blooded Cherokee, too. Doing the math, that makes me a quarter Cherokee. And, I'm as proud of that heritage as I am the remaining English on my father's side and the remaining Scots-Irish on my mother's side.
And, my lineage isn't that unique for this area. In fact, it's rather common.
So, we're left with a really nice state park. It covers 263 acres. It has a natural landmark, the Blue Hole Spring, which feeds into Mill Creek, which feeds into the Conasauga River and Coosa River systems. It has a picnic pavilion that holds up to 100 people. It has a park-ranger station, where you can learn more about the Cherokee nation and all the stuff that went on at the park.
And, Red Clay State Historic Park holds an irony. It's a tribute to those who left and a reminder for those of us who didn't.
TWH
Sources: http://tn.gov/environment/parks/RedClay/
http://state.tn.us/environment/parks/RedClay/features/historic.shtml]
appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Red+Clay+State+Park Trail+of+Tears Blue+Hole+Spring Conasauga+River Coosa+River Cherokee+nation
8/1/08
Time for a little R&R!
I'm taking a little vacation next week, folks. But I'll tell you what, I'm leaving you in the capable hands of blogger Tim Hooker, who runs the very delightful Sushi Tuesday blog out of Cleveland, TN. If he can't get you through the worst dog days of August, well then you'll want to get a new dog or a new calendar. Please make him feel at home while I'm out goofing off!
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