It's the first Saturday in November and you're a single girl at home watching television. Well, don't just sit there, go out and find a man! It's Sadie Hawkins Day!
According to American folk tradition, Sadie Hawkins' Day affords women the opportunity to ask out a man. Although not an uncommon practice today, when this method of dating was suggested in the latter part of the 1930s, it caused quite a stir. This event made its debut in Al Capp's "Little Abner" comic strip on November 13, 1937.
One of Capp's most memorable characters, a homely gal named Sadie Hawkins, got tired of waiting for men to come a'courtin. Her father, Hekzebiah Hawkins--a wealthy and powerful man, was even more concerned that Sadie would never leave home and would become an old maid. As Mayor of Dogpatch, he decreed "Sadie Hawkins Day" and held a footrace in which the unmarried girls pursued the town's most eligible bachelors. The prize for the women who caught their man was, of course, matrimony. Sadie, of course, with her big, fast-movin' feet, got hers.
This comical event soon jumped off the cartoon page and into the real world. The first Sadie Hawkins Day dance took place on November 9, 1938. By 1939, over 200 Sadie Hawkins' Day dances had been documented.
A wild bird in the house means someone’s going to die.
A dog howling three nights in a row means death is near.
If you get shingles all around your body, you’ll die.
If you sneeze, cover your mouth and say the Lord’s Prayer, or you’ll lose your soul out of your mouth and die.
If two women help a third one get dressed, the youngest of the three will die.
WV
“From the beginning of recorded history down to 1933 we have records of the belief in disease and death caused by the malevolent action of some devilish god or conjuring human.” ---Miller, Joseph L. "The Healing Gods or Medical Superstition." The West Virginia Medical Journal. 29 (1933), 465-478.
If you point at a graveyard, your finger will rot off.
Shingles are quickly cured by rubbing the eruption with blood from a black cat’s tail, which must then be nailed to a door until the patient is well.
Practically every southern Italian woman who I [Miller] attend in confinement, whether she was born in Italy or is of the second generation in the U. S. and a graduate of our high schools, has pinned to her breast, by the side of the scapulary of St. Anne, the patron saint of parturient women, a little bunch of gold or coral ornaments to ward off the evil eye." Many of these are heirlooms that have been handed down for generations. As soon as the baby is dressed they are transferred to it’s breast where they remain for several months, for the mothers all dread the evil "Jettatere di bambini," or fascinator of infants, These charms include a horn like the horn of a steer which has always been considered a most potent charm against witchcraft.
NC
Cover every horseshoe found in the road with “silver paper” (tin foil) and hang it over the door of the house to ward off witches.
A seventh daughter, born on Christmas Day, possesses witch-like powers.
If there are tangles in your hair early in the morning, the witches have been riding you.
If one dreams of a woman with disheveled hair it means that some member of his family will soon die.
If an owl appears on your place when someone there is ill, that person will die in two days.
VA
If a clock, long motionless, suddenly begins to tick or strike, it is a sign of approaching death.
A hunter’s wife will throw an axe at her husband to give him good luck. If he failed to kill game, his gun was spelled, and some old woman was shot in effigy.
Females bring bad luck to coal mines.
If you sweep under the bed of a sick person, that person will die.
If you let birds use your hair for nesting material, you will go crazy.
TN
At the stroke of midnight on Halloween, a lighted candle will reveal the future in the mirror’s reflection. Look above your left shoulder.
To prevent bad luck do not burn sassafras wood.
Don’t eat honey on the day a relative is buried.
Keep witches at bay by nailing a horseshoe to the bottom of one’s butter churn.
Dreaming of a snake means the dreamer will soon be killed.
OH
Death is foretold by the ringing of a bell that cannot otherwise be accounted for.
If you align your gravesite (beforehand!) north-to-south you’re a witch.
If there is a meeting consisting of 13 members, the first to leave will die within a year.
Sources: The Granny Curse, by Randy Russell, Janet Barnett Kentucky Folklore, by R. Gerald Alvey Seedtime on the Cumberland, by Harriette Louisa Simpson Arnow The Frank C. Brown Collection of NC Folklore: Popular Beliefs UCLA Online Archive of American Folk Medicine Never Seen the Moon, by Sharon Hatfield home.wlu.edu/~lubint/Touchstone/AppalachianFolkMed-Stone.htm 'Ghosts, Spirits, and Legends of Southeastern Ohio,' by Lawrence Everett Current Superstitions, by Fanny Dickerson Bergen, William Wells Newell, American Folklore Society
"The celebrated mountain lands, of which Mark Twain writes in the Gilded Age, lie in Fentress County; and the picturesque village he describes under the name of Obedstown is none other than its county site.
"The court-house, on the fence surrounding which the male population of the village were sitting, chewing tobacco and spitting at bumble-bees and such other objects of interest as appeared within their wide range, while they waited the arrival of the mail; and to which one of them referred, when he observed that, "if the judge is a gwine to hold cote,' he reckoned he would have to "roust" his sow and pigs out of the court-house, was the same in which this singular case was tried.
"It seems that an old man by the name of Stout, who lived on Obeds River, was arrested for bewitching the beautiful daughter of a certain man, named Taylor, who lived on the mountain. The defendant was treated with much rigor, and his person abused by the various experiments to which he was subjected, for the purpose of establishing his guilt.
Fentress County Courthouse about 1910.
"The guards had taken the precaution to remove the lead from their guns, and to load them with silver, which was considered the only metal to which a wizard is not impalpable.
"The accused was carried before Esquire Joshua Owens, a leading magistrate of the county, whom Judge Goodpasture knew intimately for many years afterwards. The prosecutor and many of his neighbors were introduced as witnesses on behalf of the State, and proved, in addition to the particular facts charged, that the defendant had frequently been seen to escape out of houses through the key holes in the doors; and that he had on divers occasions not only operated on the bodies and minds of human beings, and that at a distance of ten or fifteen miles, but also on horses, cattle and other stock.
"On this evidence the defendant was found guilty and bound over to the next term of the Circuit Court. When the grand jury met, General McCormick being of opinion the prosecution could not be sustained, refused to prefer a bill of indictment. The defendant was accordingly discharged amid great excitement, some of the mountaineers boldlv declaring that it would be better to live without laws, if such offenders could escape with impunity."
Source: A Genealogy of the Family of James Goodpasture, by A.V. and W.H. Goodpasture, Nashville: Cumberland Presbyterian Publishing House, 1897
My man ain't acting right He stays out late at night But still he says he loves no one but me But if I find the gal That's trying to steal my pal
I'll get her told, just you wait and see I feel so blue, don't know what to do Every woman in my place is bound to feel blue too Lord, I love my man better than I love myself I love my man better than I love myself
And if he don't have me, he sure won't have nobody else My man's got teeth like a lighthouse in the sea My man's got teeth like a lighthouse in the sea And every time he smiles, he throws his light on me His voice sounds like chimes, I mean the organ kind
His voice sounds like chimes, I mean the organ kind And every time he speaks, it's music to my troubled mind I'm gonna buy myself a graveyard of my own I'm gonna buy myself a graveyard of my own Gonna kill somebody if they don't let my man alone
Ida Prather Cox (1896-1967) was a vaudeville performer and a pioneering blues singer who, along with Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith, founded the female blues genre. Cox was born Ida Prather on February 25, 1896, in Toccoa, GA. She grew up in Cedartown, near Rome, and sang in church choirs as a child. Cox ran away from home when she was 14 to join travelling vaudeville shows such as Clark's Minstrels. She traveled the south in vaudeville and tent shows, performing both as a singer and a comedienne.
Sometime during this period she married a performing minstrel named Alder Cox(of the Florida Blossom Minstrel Show). When the popularity of vaudeville shows began to fade, she transformed herself into a formidable blues singer. She toured the country throughout the Teens and 1920s, eventually becoming a headliner, sometimes singing with Jazz greats like Jelly Roll Morton and with King Oliver at the Plantation Cafe in Chicago.
In June 1923 she made her first blues recordings, "Graveyard Dream Blues" and "Weary Way Blues," for the Paramount label. Mayo Williams, the Paramount talent scout who signed Cox, was instrumental in launching the careers of several blues artists, including Ma Rainey.
Cox met with immediate success and went on to record seventy-eight songs between 1923 and 1929, including "Cemetery Blues," "Handy Man," and her best-known song, "Wild Women Don't Have the Blues," which was identified by Angela Y. Davis as "the most famous portrait of the nonconforming, independent woman." As Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey achieved success and popularity, Paramount promoted Cox as the "Uncrowned Queen of the Blues."
During the 1920s, she also cut tracks for a variety of labels, including Silvertone, using several different pseudonyms, including Velma Bradley, Kate Lewis, and Julia Powers. She had a longtime musical partnership with female pianist Lovie Austin, and recorded several songs with Austin and Tommy Ladnier on trumpet. She was married to Texas piano man Jesse "Tiny" Crump during the 1920s and 1930s. They recorded together often for Paramount.
A savvy businesswoman, Cox served as her own manager. She produced all her own stage shows through her touring companies, Raisin' Cain and Darktown Scandals. She hired her own musicians. She wrote most of the songs that she recorded.
Although the music that Cox recorded was blues lyrically, her musical arrangements did not rely on the classic blues instrument, the guitar. In the early years she sang with a band that usually consisted of a piano, trumpet, clarinet, or cornet; and occasionally percussion, drums or a banjo.
Bessie Smith recorded Cox' "Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out,” and in 1934 Cox and Bessie Smith appeared together in the musical revue Fan Waves at the Apollo Theatre in New York City. She spent most of the rest of the decade on the road until 1939 when she performed regularly at the Cafe Society night club in New York City.
Also in 1939 Cox performed at Carnegie Hall in New York City as part of John Hammond's second presentation of From Spirituals to Swing. She sang "Lowdown Dirty Shame" and "'Fore Day Creep" before a sold-out, integrated audience. The historic concert introduced the blues diva to a crowd that was perhaps just beginning to appreciate the artistry and significance of black music.
From Collector's Classics LP CC56, from a session recorded by Ida Cox and her All Star Band in New York on October 31, 1939. Her All Stars included Hot Lips Page on trumpet and James P. Johnson at the piano.
By 1940 she'd made about a hundred recordings, (eleven alone for Vocalion and Okeh in that year and the prior under the name of 'Ida Cox and her Allstar Band' and 'Ida Cox and her Allstar Orchestra') with some of the best jazz musicians accompanying her, such as Johnny Dodds, Buster Bailey, Charlie Green, Tommy Ladnier, Kid Ory, James P. Johnson, Lester Young.
In 1945 Cox suffered a stroke when singing at the Moonglow Nightclub in Buffalo, NY. She lived in Chicago for a brief time before returning to Appalachia in 1949. She lived with her daughter in Knoxville, TN, and with her music career behind her, sang exclusively in her church choir until 1961, when she made one last recording, Blues for Rampart Street, at Radio City Music Hall in New York. The album featured an all-star band that included Coleman Hawkins, Milt Hinton, Roy Eldridge and Jo Jones. Cox died of cancer on November 10, 1967.
sources: www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-3175&hl=y All Music Guide to the Blues, by Vladimir Bogdanov, Chris Woodstra, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Backbeat Books, 2003 ‘A candle for queen Ida,’ Black Music Research Journal, by Thomson Gale, March 22, 2003 Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, by Cary D. Wintz, Paul Finkelman, Taylor & Francis, 2004 www.bookrags.com/research/cox-ida-1896-1967-sjpc-01/ www.redhotjazz.com/idacox.html
After her father died in 1904, Frances Miles Hagood (aka “Miss Queen") inherited his house in Pickens, SC. That same year she married Judge Thomas J. Mauldin, and the two of them remodeled the Hagood house from a simple farmhouse with a detached kitchen to a sumptuous Classical Revival dwelling. They added a detached law office building in the same style.
Judge Mauldin served as judge of the 13th Judicial Circuit of South Carolina from 1914 until his death in 1931. He graduated from The Citadel in 1891 and was admitted to the bar in 1892, but he taught for several years before entering the legal profession.
He was also editor of a local newspaper for a time, and during his lifetime was a Mason, a Shriner, a member of the Sons of the Confederacy, and a member of the Sons of the American Revolution. He and Frances helped organize the Pickens chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which held annual meetings on the grounds of the house for many years to honor surviving veterans of the Civil War.
Frances Hagood Mauldin remained a social leader of the community until her death in 1954, was active in the Daughters of the American Revolution, and was president of the South Carolina Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. Each June 2, the old soliders of the Confederacy met at their home for a parade and picnic.
The earliest section of the Hagood-Mauldin House was built about 1856 in Old Pickens Court House. The first owner, James Earle Hagood (1826-1904), son of wealthy landowner Benjamin Hagood, was a public official, lawyer, and planter of Pickens District. Hagood was a merchant until 1856, when he began his public career as Clerk of the Circuit Court of Pickens District, a position he held until 1868. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Hagood was made Commissioner in Charge of the Poor and a member of the Soldiers’ Board of Relief.
He loyally gave material to the cause of the Confederacy. Among his duties, he made several trips to and from the battlefields of Virginia, bringing home the sick and wounded soldiers as well as recovering the bodies of solider who had died in service, and ministering to the destitute and dependent families of the soliders in the field.
When Pickens District was divided into Pickens and Oconee Counties in 1868 Hagood was appointed to the Board of Special Commissioners which was authorized to select a site for the town of New Pickens (the present town of Pickens). He acted as Secretary Treasurer of that Board. He also served as Clerk of the Probate Court in the new county seat and as Clerk of the Board of Pickens County Commissioners (initially convened in 1868).
In that year, he had his house dismantled, the rafters and beams numbered, and moved to New Pickens. He was soon elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives and served Pickens County in the General Assembly 1869-1872 during the same period that he practiced law with partner Joseph J. Norton.
In May 1873, Hagood was appointed Clerk of the United States Circuit Court for the District of South Carolina in Charleston, serving in that capacity for 30 years.
Each room in the Hagood-Mauldin House was heated by a fireplace, and each fireplace mantel and trim has a different design and style. A traditional southern-style deep front porch is located on the west side of the house, with a low sloped roof and round spindle columns to form the entry. The cooking house was to the rear, separated from the main house. Several windows are triple-hung sash with cross lattice glass panels.
The Pickens County Historical Society acquired the house in 1987 from the estate of Mrs. Irma Hendricks Morris, and the home was opened as a fine arts museum in October of the following year. In 1997 the home was accepted onto the National Register of Historic Places.
Claude W. Hibbard was the first naturalist at Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park (June 1, 1934 to August 22, 1935). His job was to evaluate the area and record the types of wildlife he found in this region. Hibbard was to look at various habitats in this region and evaluate them to help determine what should be included in the new national park.
Journal Entry- Area 4 October 24, 1934
The day was spent in Strawberry Valley, which is a small valley along the Edmonson, Hart, and Barren County lines. This is a region in which intensive farming has been practiced, in that field after field has been turned into pasture. Due to farming and pasturing, much erosion has resulted. The day that I was in this valley, Camp #2 started their erosion work for planting.
The valley is made up of a series of sinks which is typical of all Hollows and Valleys south of Green River. In the Valley is a large natural pond which affords a permanent water supply for wildlife. A large blue heron was at the pond, and from the tracks, it had been a regular visitor.
Many killdeer were also around the pond. This is the ideal place for the study of shore birds during migration. Mammals were scarce only cotton-tail rabbits were observed. A few grey fox tracks, one opossum was observed and one skunk. Song birds were numerous in old fields and along the wooded slopes and ridges.
"Garnet Carter was an entrepreneur, and he developed 300 acres here on top of Lookout Mountain as a resort community in 1928," says Bill Chapin, Carter's nephew. "With the Fairyland Inn as the cornerstone of his development, he had plans to continue development with a world class 18 hole golf course. The golf course construction went slowly. Uncle Garnet decided that they needed some entertainment for their guests at the Inn. He came up with the idea of miniature golf."
To his surprise the course was taken over by adults, who liked the fantasy setting and enjoyed the challenge of putting a ball through the miniaturized fairways. Carter soon began manufacturing courses for national distribution under the patented name Tom Thumb Golf to continue with the fairyland theme of elves and gnomes. By 1930 there were over 25,000 miniature golf courses in the U.S.
The earliest documented minigolf competitions were played in the United States. The first National Tom Thumb Open minigolf tournament was arranged in 1930, with a total cash purse $10,000 (the top prize being $2,000). Qualification play-offs were played in all of the 48 states. The final competition took place October 23, 1930 on Lookout Mountain. It attracted over 200 players representing thirty states.
Halloween's right around the corner. Are your premises safe against haints, furies and other such ornery spirits? Have you painted your front door blue? Has the neighborhood seen a sudden upsurge of bottles dangling upside down in the trees?
"She knew that there could be a spell put in trees, and she was familiar from the time she was born with the way bottle trees kept evil spirits from coming into the house -- by luring them inside the colored bottles, where they cannot get out again." ---Livvie by Eudora Welty
Glass 'bottle trees' originated in ninth century Kongo during a period when superstitious Central African people believed that a genii or imp could be captured in a bottle. Legend had it that empty glass bottles placed outside, but near, the home could capture roving (usually evil) spirits at night, and the spirit would be destroyed the next day in the sunshine. One could then cork the bottles and throw them into the river to wash away the evil spirits.
Furthermore, the Kongo tree altar is a tradition of honoring deceased relatives with graveside memorials. The family will surround the grave with plates attached to sticks or trees. The plates are thought to resemble mushrooms, calling on a Kongo pun: matondo/tondo [the Kongo word for mushroom is similar to their word to love].
And so, trees and bottles eventually came together.
This practice was taken to Europe and North America by African slaves. Thomas Atwood, in History of the Island of Domi (1791), made particular note of the bottle tree as a protection of the home through an invocation of the dead. Atwood writes of the confidence of the blacks "in the power of the dead, of the sun and the moon---nay, even of sticks, stones and earth from graves hung in bottles in their gardens."
While Europeans adapted the bottle tree idea into hollow glass spheres known as "witch balls," the practice of hanging bottles in trees became widespread in the plantation regions of Southern states and from there migrated north and inland into Appalachia.
Traditionally the bottles are placed on the branches of a crepe myrtle tree. The image of the myrtle tree recurs in the Old Testament, aligned with the Hebrews' escape from slavery, their diaspora and the promise of the redemption of their homeland.
Bottle tree colors can range from blue, to clear, to brown, but cobalt blue are always preferred: in the Hoodoo folk-magic tradition, the elemental blues of water and sky place the bottle tree at a crossroads between heaven and earth, and therefore between the living and the dead. The bottle tree interacts with the unknown powers of both creative and destructive spirits.
The bottles are placed upside down with the neck facing the trunk. Trees need not be thickly populated with bottles. Malevolent spirits, on the prowl during the night, enter the bottles where they become trapped by an 'encircling charm.' It is said that when the wind blows past the tree, you can hear the moans of the ensnared spirits whistling on the breeze. Come morning they are burnt up by the rising sun.
Today, the bottle tree has entered the realm of folk art. Companies now market bottle tree armatures meant to serve, once clothed with milk, wine, or milk of magnesia bottles, as colorful garden ornaments. The poor man’s stained glass window, you might say.
Sources: www.cullmantimes.com/features/local_story_171000245.html www.lovelycitizen.com/story/1257420.html Tradition and Innovation in African-American Yards, by Grey Gundaker, African Arts, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Apr., 1993), pp. 58-96 Alabama, One Big Front Porch, by Kathryn Tucker Windham, NewSouth Books, 2007
During the past year, I have had occasion to discuss the business situation with practically every business man in the City of Charleston and suburbs. Our very limited number of productive enterprises and our crippled coal industries are not sufficient. The trade balance is against us. What is the remedy? There is but one remedy-Production.
We must produce something that will bring in more money than we pay out, or we are bound to go broke. People and jobs are two things necessary to keep the wheels of business going. How are we going to get them? Make the jobs and the people will come.
Put some of (your) money into productive enterprises and the problem is solved.
INVESTIGATE, INVEST, BOOST, KEEP YOUR MONEY AT HOME AND BRING IN MORE.
Start factories, produce something that people will buy. Production is the very foundation of our existence. Without it, we are lost. Vacant lots, empty houses and idle factories do not pay dividends.
The Gravely® Motor Plow has been developed from an Idea to a commercial reality and a factory with a small production. We are getting orders by the carload. Today's mail brought orders for 31 Motor Plows. The number that we can sell is limited only by the number we can make. There are approximately twenty million people in the United States alone that need the machine. One salesman sold all we made last year in 90 days time.
The question is, does Charleston want a factory, something like the National Cash Register Company of Dayton, Ohio, Eastman Kodak Company of Rochester, and others that employ workmen by the thousands and make real business for the community or does it not? Our product SELLS, STAYS SOLD, AND REPEATS.
The Motor Plow is one of a number of things that will help to bring prosperity back, by bringing the money back and making jobs for men. Think it over.
Sincerely, Benjamin Gravely
Benjamin Franklin Gravely (1876-1953) had a dream: to build a tractor which would revolutionize gardening and lawn maintenance for the homeowner. He had a lot in common with his namesake. He was a tinkerer, someone who wanted to find a way to make things work better. Over the course of his lifetime, he filed 65 patents. Most of these were related to photography, which was his primary business, but he is best remembered for his farm and garden equipment.
Around 1920, Gravely first decided to build and market gas powered tractors commercially. Partly as a result of the above letter, he and several backers raised enough capital to purchase an old factory in the Dunbar, WV area that had previously been used for the manufacture of tires. The Gravely Motor Plow and Cultivator Company opened its doors two years later.
U.S. Patent 1,207,539 Motor Plow Application filed September 8, 1915 by Benjamin F. Gravely, Jr. of Charleston, West Virginia. Patent awarded December 5, 1916. This is the patent on which the Gravely Model D was based.
Even while working as a Charleston portrait studio photographer to support his family, Gravely had long tinkered with the idea of a power-driven push plow. As early as 1911, he was working on a rough design for his garden cultivator. It was a crude affair, powered by a 2.5 horsepower engine, and one belt driven wheel. It was a simple farm implement, made from his hand push cultivator and an old Indian motorcycle that had been given to him.
Gravely may have stumbled on to the cultivator idea by accident. Historians believe he was trying to invent a posthole digger, when it got away from him. It dug a furrow from one end of the garden to the other, before he got it under control.
Ben Gravely finally patented his one-wheeled cultivator for the small family farmer in 1916, and there was nothing similar to it. The first Model D tractor, rolled out in 1922, had 40 or 50 attachments.
Gravely tractors have been in production ever since the Dunbar factory opened. Today, the attachments will still fit tractors made years ago. Since the attachments are expensive -- sometimes thousands of dollars – owners are reassured that they can accumulate them over time.
That goes far in explaining the almost cultish loyalty surrounding the tractor. The Gravely Tractor Club of America conducted this year’s 12th annual Mow-In October 4 -5 at the West Virginia Farm Museum, just a few miles from Ben Gravely's farm.
Special thanks to Ed French for his input on this article.
Did Chicago mobster Al Capone ever set foot in Johnson City, TN? During the 1920s the town was nicknamed Little Chicago. A reference acknowledging crime ties to the north? Or nothing more than an expression of local pride in the railroads, three of which ran through town? Big Chicago was known as a railroad center long before Capone came along.
Speaking of railroads, Capone bought a house in West Palm Beach, FL not long before the famous St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, and Johnson City would have been a convenient layover town en route between Chicago and West Palm Beach in the days before regular air flight.
It is very likely that Chicago gangsters from the Capone mob came to Johnson City, Newport, Knoxville, Chattanooga and other Southern cities to make deals. One piece of circumstantial evidence that clearly puts Johnson City on this list: the town was one of the hardest hit places in the nation by a neural disorder called the "jake leg," which killed many and left others with a distinctive hitch in their stride.
Al Capone's FBI record and fingerprint samples.
The cost of whiskey was extremely high locally, running about $1.50 and up for a flask, while Jamaican ginger, medicinal alcohol and bay rum - all containing lethal denaturants that caused the jake - sold for well under $1.
Why was the cost of whiskey so high in an area of the country where moonshining flourished ever since the first whiskey taxes were levied in 1793? Supply and demand as ever determines price, and it appears that the price of whiskey was being driven up by outside buyers.
Capone was in the alcohol business, and East Tennessee was one of the centers where moonshine was made. While it is likely that he did business with local suppliers, the question remains whether the mob head would have purchased his product lines personally, or would have sent henchmen to do it. Either way, Capone covered his tracks well, leaving no known written records tying him directly to Johnson City. Recall that he was arrested not for his vast bootlegging operations or his speakeasy establishments, but for tax evasion.
The following contemporary newspaper account, while making no mention of Capone by name, describes Johnson City's reputation as a "wide-open city" with operating characteristics---thugs, high priced lawyers, judges on the take, hamstrung police---similar to Big Chicago. It specifically cites the liquor ring, rum runners and bootleggers as central to the problem:
"Will it require an atrocious murder? a series of holdups? a veritable reign of terror to jar the smug, self-satisfied citizens of Johnson City, Tennessee into a realization of what is going on within the city?
"TODAY JOHNSON CITY is overrun with criminals; would be criminals; thieves, thugs, gunmen, dope-peddlers, and other undesirables who working hand-in-hand with the liquor ring have so spread their evil influence that its effect has reached even into the juvenile element and more than a score of little boys are striving to emulate the lawbreakers who are apparently being ?glorified? in Johnson City and Washington County.
"Our very courts are apparently inoculated with the general tone of apathy; else they would hand out sentences sufficiently severe to make a would-be evildoer hesitate before perpetrating a crime. But the sentences are so light and it is apparently so very easy to escape the penalties of the law that the criminals scorn any fear of punishment.
"The police apprehend a criminal. Perhaps someone's life is saved. And then a skilled attorney, operating through the mazes and technicalities of the law and employing other aids, extricates his client from the toils of the law and he goes forth to commit another crime. Why is it that it is so hard to secure a jury in Washington County that is not unfriendly or apathetic toward law enforcement? And with each trial the maze of handicaps with which the police department is burdened, is increased.
"The dry organizations demand enforcement of the laws, but if the officers encounter resistance they dare not use force or they will be confronted with the penitentiary. If a felony is committed the public expects the officers to apprehend the offenders. But if shots are exchanged the officers are in danger of arrest for defending their own lives, or for carrying out their duty. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
"Even the Council and Commission seem to feel that the police department can get along with anything second hand or discarded. They are expected to run down rum runners yet the police patrol (car) cannot be operated and the other car is a dilapidated wreck. They are expected to quell riots, yet there is not a riot gun in Johnson City, and some of the officers do not even have revolvers."
---DO WE WANT A REIGN OF TERROR Johnson City Staff-News, October 20, 1926 Editorial by Editor Carroll E. King
“One of boyhood’s traditional toys has come of age. Jim Gasque, North Carolina sportsman, has proved that the ordinary slingshot, when properly made and used, can be an adult weapon of deadly accuracy at distances up to 30’ --- a range sufficient for stalking small game. He shoots regular No. 0 buckshot.
"His slingshots are made as shown, the dogwood forks being dried in a slow oven overnight after tying. Instead of inner-tube strips, he uses two rubber bands 1/16” thick, 5/8” wide, and 7½” or 8” long.
"When shooting, he takes a stance similar to that in archery, body at right angles to the target, feet apart, and weight balanced on both feet. Holding the shot cup at the right eye, he stretches the rubber by extending his left arm fully while aligning the target in the sights."
---Rubber Band Sharpshooter; How a North Carolina Sportsman Makes and Shoots His Slingshots, by Tom Cushing, Modern Mechanix, Aug 1946
Jim Gasque, an outdoor writer from Asheville, NC, authored Hunting and Fishing in the Great Smokies, a classic 1948 work that offers a period portrait of outdoor life in those mountains.
The book, re-released last month by the University of North Carolina, was the first nationally distributed book on fishing in and around the Smokies, although Horace Kephart, who also was a great fan of angling in the region, often wrote about it as well.
Filled with anecdotes, fishing and hunting stories, and recollections of legendary local sportsmen and guides, the book presents a social history of these activities before the founding of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934.
Gasque's guide covers trout fishing on well-known creeks like Cataloochee, Deep, and Hazel; smallmouth bass fishing on rivers like Oconaluftee, Tuckasegee, and others; and lake fishing on Fontana, Nantahala, Chatuge, and Santeetlah. Thanks to careful preservation by the park, the streams Gasque describes still draw sportsmen today.
"The techniques and few flies noted in the book are as deadly on trout today as when the information was penned half a century ago," says Don Kirk, author of Fly-Fishing Guide to the Great Smoky Mountains. "Gasque’s chapters on Cataloochee and Deep creeks are extremely insightful." The book offers a nuanced glimpse of the region just prior to an era of significant development and growth.
Gasque is best known for his only other book---Bass Fishing: Techniques, Tactics, and Tales.
Jenkins, KY didn't come into existence by steady settlement over a period of years. Jenkins was planned and built by Consolidation Coal Company [Consol] for men who came to mine its coal-- what was to become known as the best coal in Kentucky.
Mrs. G. C. Johnson: I came from Pikeville. My husband was here--he worked in the store. I came to Hellier by train and got off at 8 o'clock, and got on a hack -- a thing with four seats in it, driven by mules and had a driver. And it took until 5 in the evening to get here.
Photo caption reads: Two couples sitting on steps. Circa 1916.
We come up here right in the creek. I was the only woman on the hack and there was a big keg of beer. They had to bring beer in here for all those people. They had to have their beer.
On Cove Avenue are the oldest houses in Jenkins. They were built in 1911 when I first came here, and the architect and the head man in the office and the auditor and I all lived here on Cove Avenue. I lived in the first one. They all lived here until they began to build the houses around High Street, then they began to move off and move in those houses. Then they built the next row of houses right below and there wasn't any school or church or anything in that area, but the old Jenkins Hotel, where the Bradley-Johnson apartments are now. The hospital was the second building above that.
They hadn't started the dam when I came here and the water we had was from deep wells. You could let it set up over night and then roll the skim off of it and then they put in a dam and that was the first good water we had. The machine shop was where it is now. The recreational building was where the depot is now, just a boarded-up building, and they had all their recreations and preaching services here because there were no churches.
The store building was right between where the post office and the library is now. You see, the water comes out of the dam and goes under there and there was a branch, a little walk, where you could cross it. There were the office buildings. Where Dr. Perry is was a hill. They graded all that down before they built on it. After I came here, they began to build a sewer down Main Street. The railroad came in here in 1913. I left here in 1912 and had to go back to Hellier the way I came.
Consol had a saw mill. They had an ice plant right above where Wilfong's store is now. A little make-shift ice plant and the man that made the ice was Limon Goodson. That is where the Christian Church is now. It was a little make-shift bakery and they made bread. They would go in with a shovel and they would bring a dray--- a wagon with two horses--- over from the store.
That's the way they delivered their groceries. They would go over there and put a clean wrapping paper in the bottom and shovel it in with a shovel. There wasn't any bread wrapping or anything. That's where you got your bread. There wasn't any dairy at that time.
The superintendent at #1 mines when I worked there was Walter Shunk. He stayed there for about two years and then the fellow that took his place was A. B. Thomas. Then they had several different men until they got hold of another Thomas and he stayed here for five or six years, W. H. R. Thomas. When I came here, John G. Smith was manager of the whole thing. He stayed somewhere because his wife wasn't here.
I had four children. Williams was my first husband's name. He worked at the store. He worked for $45 a month and we paid $4.50 for house rent and coal.
Consol would pay their expenses to get in here and then after they went back to work, they would pay them back. The Elkhorn Hotel was located in Mudtown and I can't think what the name of the one where the Bradley-Johnson apartments are now. I lived on this hill, you know, where the Griffin house was and I would carry soup to the hotel and they kept the dining room door locked until they got a meal on the table and when they would unlock that door, it sounded like a stampede of horses. Food was scarce and so was a place to board.
Anyone that had an extra bed was supposed to keep somebody. I kept Harry Moore and Jimmy Hughes for ever so long. They used outlaws and anything they could get. There were a lot of foreigners that couldn't speak a word of English, and an interpreter would come in to tell the clerk what they wanted.
Photo caption: Recreation building interior, circa 1916. Sign on column says, "Please don't spit on the floor."
I had one friend that said she spoke seven languages. Her brother had a store here then and there used to be a store they called Begley's about where Ransom Jordan's garage is. He owned about three acres in there and they wouldn't sell it to the company and they had their own little store. The company didn't want the people to buy there either.
These fellows came in and they were trying to jew her down. But they turned around and spoke in another language, "now we can get that down at Begley's cheaper." But she knew what they had said. When her brother came in, he said, "I feel like slapping you. If you would keep your mouth shut, you would learn a lot." She spoke their language and they didn't know it. They had said that to each other, and she thought it was too good for her to keep so she told them what they said.
Interview with Mr. and Mrs. G. C. Johnson
The History of Jenkins, Kentucky Compiled In Honor Of The Sixtieth Anniversary Homecoming Celebration 1912‑1973 Sponsored By The Jenkins Area Jaycees Elizabeth Wassum Dramczyk, ed. Charles Dixon, project chairman
Oh, Lady Margaret she sat in her high chambers. She was sewing her silken seams. She lookit east and she lookit west And she saw those woods grow green.
So, picking up her petticoat Beneath her harlin gown, It’s when she came to the merry green woods, There she let them down.
Oh, she had not pulled one nut, one nut, One nut nor scarcely three, When the highest lord in all the countryside Came a-riding through the trees.
--opening of Lady Margaret, a traditional Scottish Traveller song told by Duncan Williamson; transcribed in 'Scottish Traveller Tales'
Who are the Scottish Travellers (a small contingent of whom emigrated to Appalachia in the late 19th century)? In the Old Country, this nomadic group has pitched its bow-tents just on the outskirts of villages and earned money there as tinsmiths, hawkers, horse dealers and pearl-fishermen for at least 500 years.
Caption reads: Tinsmith at work in drainpipe section in one of the flourishing shops in the Shenandoah Valley. Photo John Vachon, 1941.
In Scotland, they developed regular routes and sold goods, repaired carts and pots and pans, and worked the horses or land as they went from one side of that country to the other. In Appalachia the men are still itinerant in the sense that their work takes them away from home for many months at a time, but they have a home base where the women and children stay during the school year.
The Travellers never bank their money but spend it quickly, or keep large amounts of cash on hand, or they turn it over into silver and gold and carry that with them. They don’t trust banks or governments, so they fend for themselves.
Scottish Travellers devised two languages. One was Cant, a combination of Scottish Gaelic, English, Romany and Arabic. The other language is a version of Gaelic unique to the Travellers alone called Beurla Regaird.
These languages are guarded. They are taught only in the community, taught from birth, and those who marry outside the community do not teach their new families the language. In fact, to marry outside the community is to die to your family.
Scottish Travellers in America do intermarry with other groups from time to time. Most frequently, when they marry outside the Travellers, they marry Melungeons, Gypsies, or mixed blood groups such as Redbones, Brass Ankles, the Guineas of WV, or Lumbees.
Photo caption reads: "Jockey" Street, near the courthouse. Here is where mountaineers and farmers trade horses and mules. Campton, Wolfe County, Kentucky. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott, 1940.
Scottish Travellers are and were known as storytellers, entertainers, humorists, and musicians. Scottish Travellers have a word in the Cant language – conyach. Conyach describes the state when who you are, and what you are doing, merge into one. It’s a highly sought after state when one is the singer, dancer, or storyteller at a ceilidh.
In a traditional informal ceilidh, family and friends got together after dinner and the dishes were done, and there was that little bit of time between then and time to go to bed, and they sat and visited with each other. And they talked, and sometimes they got to telling stories or singing together.
Stories were often told that were hours long. They could be drawn out over several days, told in parts every night. Common stories included the Jack Tales that we now associate with Appalachia, but were originally from the British Isles. They exist both in Gaelic and the Scots tongues.
Usually at the ceilidh, songs would be sung about local people. This was a form of social control. You could spread gossip, make fun of someone, express admiration or love for someone, spread bad news about someone, or ruin the reputation of someone, just by singing a song about them, or inserting their name into an already existing song.
Travellers share a love of words in songs & stories. Also — a desire to constantly move on. They tend to travel before a birth so that the children have the right to be in more than one country. They tend to be drawn to thrown away people, or outcasts, the broken, or the hidden. They are known for passing through quietly, not making a noise unless they are wanted, needed. You might move on an hour or so down the road or you might move to another country. That is the way of the Travellers.
sources: Scottish Customs: From the Cradle to the Grave, by Margaret Bennett, Polygon, 1992 http://patrickmead.net/ Scottish Traveller Tales: Lives Shaped through Stories, by Donald Braid, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2002 www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/754640/posts?q=1&&page=1 The Thistle and the Brier, by Richard Blaustein, McFarland, 2003
Traditional dancing in Appalachia includes several types: step dancing, set dancing, and couple dancing. Step dance traditions include clogging, buckdancing, flatfooting, and the Charleston. Set dances, involving two or more couples, include four couple squares, big set (ring) dances, reels, country (contra) dances, and play parties. Couple dancing, often referred to as "round dancing," includes the two-step and waltz.
Square dancing, one of the oldest forms of American folk dancing, evolved from several different Old World group dances, mainly the English country, or contra, dance and the French quadrille.
In the American version of square dancing, four couples form a square and dance to music from an accordion, banjo, fiddle, and guitar.
An old-fashioned Southern "square", sometimes called "running set"-- English musicologist Cecil Sharp coined the term while describing dancing in eastern Kentucky in 1916--, can accomodate as few as four or as many couples as want to crowd in. The formation is really a big circle with any number of couples. (There are, of course, a body of Southern squares that are done in 4-couple sets.) Most commonly, a Southern "running set" type of square dance is structured in two parts: First the major circle and then the minor circle. With all hands joined in one big circle around the hall, one or more introductory big circle figures are danced.
Square dance, Skyline Farms, AL, 1937. Photo by Ben Shahn.
The big circle then breaks up and each couple joins with an adjacent couple to dance some little circle figures. The movements are not so much geometrical figures but little pantomimes: "Birdie in the cage and three hands around" (a girl steps into the center, the other three circle around her); "Around that couple and take a peek" (the active couple tries to look at each other behind the backs of of the inactives, who try to hinder them); "Chase a rabbit, chase a squirrel, chase a pretty girl around the world" (the man pursues his partner around the other couple); to name just a few.
The little circles can be spaced in a major circle around the hall, as in a Sicilian circle; or they can be scattered all over the dance floor. The couples move on to join a new couple and repeat the little figures; progression may occur several times. To conclude, all rejoin in a large circle and dance a finishing big circle figure. An American addition to square dancing is the caller.
Ladies do and the gents you know, It’s right by right by wrong you go, And you can’t go to heaven while you carry on so, And it’s home little gal and do-si-do, And it may be the last time, I don’t know, And oh by gosh and oh by Joe. —(Ernest Legg, WV)
Ernest Legg’s calls were featured on a number of 78s recorded by the Kessinger Brothers in 1928.
The caller--someone who calls out the dance steps in time to the music--was a completely American invention. At first dancers memorized all the steps for a particular dance, but eventually the dances became so complicated that it was necessary to have someone yell out cues so that dancers didn't have to remember so many steps. The caller didn't just call out "do-se-do your partner"; a good caller also came up with colorful sayings or witty lines that he would say in between the cues such as "Don't be bashful and don't be afraid. Swing on the corner in a waltz promenade." A caller might also come up with new dance steps and routines.
Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennesse and Virginia have all seen fit to make the square dance their ‘folk dance’ State Symbol. North Carolinians prefer clog dancing receive that designation, and West Virginians and Kentuckians haven’t included any sort of dance as a state symbol.
From the Interesting and Eventful Life of T.H. Gold of Bedford
By invitation the editor of The Leader was a guest Sunday of the venerable Mr. and Mrs. T.H. Gold of Bedford.
David Stansbury, who Mr. Gold says was one of the best men he ever met, wanted a hand to help mow with a scythe in the meadow. Could Tom Gold mow? He would try. Mr. Stansbury told Tom Gold that another hand would be present to mow. Stansbury broke the information confidentially that the hand aforesaid had the reputation of soldering[sic] on the job, and he would like to have young Gold crowd him a little to get a good day's work out of him.
Next morning Tom Gold was in the meadow bright and early, with his scythe in perfect condition. It was then that Gard Neer appeared, climbed over the fence, whet his scythe, gave a look at the meadow and then took the lead to split it in the middle. Tom followed. Mr. Neer never stopped.
Faster and faster he went, and Tom exerting every muscle to catch up. Catch him he couldn't. He couldn't keep in speaking distance. Reaching the farther side, Mr. Neer whet his scythe and was backswathing his way back long before the struggling Tom had gotten across. Tom whetted his scythe and was desperately trying to make a good finish. It was no go. Gard Neer was a bear cat, beside whom Tom was a helpless novice.
At 10 o'clock, when young Tom Gold was doing anything but crowding his companion, so wet with sweat that there wasn't a dry thread on him, he chanced to look back and there lay David Stansbury bursting his sides in the cut grass with laughter. Mr. Gold didn't tell us so but we have a suspicion that Mr. Gold now thinks he had been coached to push one of the best mowers in Rutland Township. If so, it was a naughty trick on the part of David Stansbury, but Mr. Gold enjoys it to this day all the same.
People with an abnormally strong sex drive were said to suffer from white liver. The folk medicine record contains scant information on this folk illness, because openly talking about sex was taboo in the past. The earliest and most complete description of white liver comes from Vance Randolph's study of folk culture in the Ozarks: "When a lively, buxom, good-looking woman loses several husbands by death, it is often said that her inordinate passion has 'killed 'em off,' and she is referred to as a white-livered widder.
Usually it is only a figure of speech, but there are people who actually believe that a 'high nature' is correlated with white spots on the liver, and that this condition has often been revealed by post-mortem examination." A belief in North Carolina has it "that if a person married three times, his liver would automatically turn white," but no contextual information is provided.
A recent study by the author found that the term white liver was, and to a lesser extent still is, as Randolph observed, used as a figure of speech in Southern Appalachia to jokingly or disparagingly identify someone as sexually deviant, but for some the term also referred to a genuine sexual disorder.
Informants interviewed for the study described individuals with white liver as having an abnormally powerful sexual drive that incapacitates or kills a spouse or significant other by literally draining them of their vitality through incessant coitus. A related belief conveyed by some informants was that those afflicted with white liver not only had an insatiable sexual appetite but also had bad blood and transmitted a fatal infection to others.
A social worker shared a story about his first encounter with white liver while working for the Department of Public Welfare in Wise County, VA in the late 1950s. A woman came into his office one day seeking help for her daughter, who had just recently married.
The woman said she was concerned about her daughter's husband losing his job, adding that he had missed a lot of work because her daughter was "wearing him out." Unsure of what she was talking about, he pressed further, and the woman told him that her daughter had the white liver. He eventually surmised that the woman was talking indirectly about her daughter having a voracious sexual appetite. Flummoxed about what to do, he sheepishly recommended cold shower therapy and consultation with a physician.
Attributing the death of a man to an oversexed wife raises several questions about sexual mores in the past. Were women labeled ill by others because they openly admitted to enjoying sex with their husbands during a time when sex was not to be enjoyed? Were these women, and perhaps women in general, viewed as sexual predators, either by men or by other women?
source: Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia, by Anthony P. Cavender, UNC Press, 2003
Always keep Grit from being pessimistic. Avoid printing those things which distort the minds of readers or make them feel at odds with the world. Avoid showing the wrong side of things, or making people feel discontented. Do nothing that will encourage fear, worry or temptation... Wherever possible, suggest peace and good will toward men. Give our readers courage and strength for their daily tasks. Put happy thoughts, cheer and contentment into their hearts. ---Dietrick Lamade, Grit publisher from 1882-1936
Future baseball Commissioners Happy Chandler and Ford Frick did it. Poet Carl Sandburg and singing cowboy Gene Autry did it. Astronaut/U.S. Senator John Glenn, Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Harlan Sanders, and actress Loretta Lynn all did it. They sold door-to-door subscriptions to Grit newspapers when they were kids.
Dietrick Lamade started out as a 23-year-old assistant press foreman for the Williamsport, PA newspaper The Daily Sun and Banner. In December 1882, the newspaper began a Saturday edition titled Grit, which included local news items, editorials and humorous tidbits. Lamade set the first headline for the new edition.
Lamade was born Feb. 6, 1859, in Goelshausen, Baden, Germany, the fourth child of Johannes and Caroline Lamade. When he was 8, the family immigrated to the United States. Less than two years after the family settled in Williamsport, Johannes Lamade died, leaving Caroline to care for nine children. The older children went to work to help support the family, and young Dietrick apprenticed at a local German weekly newspaper. He spent the next 10 years working in newspaper offices and printing plants.
In 1884, the young man seized the opportunity to help revitalize a small weekly newspaper, The Times. However, the man who purchased the paper became ill and put the physical plant on the market. At the same time, Sun and Banner staff were planning to end Grit.
Lamade persuaded two men – the editor of Grit and a printer – to join him in a partnership to purchase the good will and reputation of Grit as well as The Times’ printing plant. They intended to launch Grit as an independent Sunday newspaper.
No one seems to know how the name 'Grit' came to be—perhaps because sheer grit was how the newspaper survived those early years. After the first year, Lamade had had seven partners, and the newspaper maintained a mountain of debt, even though circulation continued to increase.
Convinced that small-town thinking and values were the bedrock of American liberty and freedom, Lamade filled Grit with useful information and stories that stressed the good humor, patriotism, religion, and family values of rural Americans. In Grit they found a reflection of their interests and their world. Over time, Grit also offered features that appealed to its readers.
Lamade knew that local readership would not be sufficient to keep the new publication going, so he began traveling the region searching for sales agents and news correspondents.
During one of his trips in 1885, Lamade sold his partners on the idea of a contest – still legal in those days – in which readers would send in coupons for chances at winning various prizes. The drawing was held Thanksgiving 1885, with three out-of-towners and two local subscribers winning the five grand prizes. When the dust cleared, Grit had 14,000 subscribers and $400 in the bank – with all bills paid. The partners gave themselves a raise, from $12 a week to $15.
About 1891 Lamade started using newsboys, and in later years girls also, to sell Grit directly to the public – and the newspaper began to expand to small towns across the country. Newspaper sales taught generations of young salespersons industriousness, responsibility, and resourcefulness.
Grit's influence kept growing throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Eventually it would become one of the first newspapers in America to feature color photographs and fictional supplements. At the paper's 50th anniversary in 1932, the paper reached approximately 400,000 people across the nation. Lamade retired from the paper a few years later in 1936. What had started as a one-room business with six employees now employed 200 people.
Dietrick Lamade died October 9, 1938.
Sources: www.grit.com/grit-history.aspx http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Lamade__Dietrick.html www.explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=469 10,000 Famous Freemasons from K to Z Part Two, by William R. Denslow, Harry S. Truman, Kessinger Publishing, 2004
Millie and Christine were born into slavery on July 11, 1851 in the town of Welches Creek, NC. The girls were joined at the spine and their owner, a blacksmith named Jabez McKay, was not sure what to do with the girls. Their parents, Monimia and Jacob, had previously sired seven children but clearly the twins would be of little use to McKay due to their bizarre appearance and sickly constitution. Eventually McKay opted to sell the eight-month-old girls and their mother to Carolinian showman John Pervis for $1000.
Pervis began exhibiting Millie and Christine immediately but within four years the girls were sold to showmen Joseph Pearson Smith and Brower and then kidnapped. The kidnappers exhibited the twins privately, mostly to members of the medical community, for over three years while Smith and Brower frantically searched for their investment.
They eventually located Millie and Christine while they were on exhibit in Birmingham, England. The law became involved in the situation and, as slavery was illegal in England, the girls were released into the custody of their mother. She, however, had no idea how to proceed with the girls in a foreign country and as a result she gave custody and 'ownership' back to Smith.
While Smith continued to exhibit Millie and Christine, he found the public was not very interested. At the time, the anatomical novelty of conjoined twins simply was not enough to capture public attention. Smith decided to develop Millie and Christine as a performing act. Furthermore, he endeavored to make the girls as extraordinary in skill as they were in appearance. To that end, he and his wife tutored the girls in music and languages. Millie and Christine were taught etiquette, social graces and were given music lessons. It came to pass that the girls developed impressive singing abilities and their singing prowess soon became the focal point of their careers.
As The Two-Headed Nightingale the conjoined girls started to gain a remarkable reputation. While Millie was a contralto and Christine a soprano, the girls were able to blend and harmonize their voices in incredibly appealing ways. By 1860, Millie and Christine were on the cusp of stardom.
In 1862 Smith died. The girls were willed to his son Joseph Jr. and it was Joseph who catapulted the girls to stardom by using a clever bit of showmanship.
Throughout much of their life, Millie and Christine were often considered one person. Due to their shared body, it was often unclear if the girls were legally and physically a single being or individuals. The girls themselves often referred to themselves in the singular, using ‘I’ in the place of ‘we’. Joseph Jr. saw opportunity in this confusion and opted to advertise the girls from a new perspective.
The girls became Millie-Christine, a girl with two heads, four arms and four legs.
The concept of such an incredible phenomenon drew immediate crowds and Millie-Christine enjoyed immediate and world-wide popularity. Furthermore, it was the singing of The Two-Headed Nightingale that quickly gained predominance over appearance and Millie-Christine eventually performed for European royalty, including the Prince of Wales and Queen Victoria. Millie-Christine became renowned for singing, playing the guitar and piano in unison and dancing the waltz in front of thousands of people in the greatest halls and venues of the world.
Soon, the Emancipation Proclamation came into effect and Millie-Christine was free. During the course of her career, Millie-Christine earned more than $250,000.
Millie-Christine preformed until the age of fifty-eight. Once retired, Millie-Christine became Millie and Christine once again. The sisters built a home in Columbus, NC where they lived quietly until their passing on October 8, 1912. Millie went first, succumbing to tuberculosis, and her sister followed seventeen hours later.
They were sixty-one, the oldest conjoined twins on record.
Appalachian writer James Still (1906-2001) moved to Kentucky after he was grown, and stayed, finally living in Hindman but keeping his original cabin, located between the waters of Wolfpen Creek and Dead Mare Branch, on Little Carr Creek, where he wrote most of his books, poems, and articles.
For 40 years Still gathered sayings from the local people, which he almost did not allow to be published--- he said it is hard to show in writings "changing inflections on one syllable to give [a sentence] two radically different endings."
Finally he did allow them to be published. His comments from the preface may give us some idea why:
"The first notebook entry was recorded some forty five years ago. Most of the participants are dead. Save for their gravestones, this is the only record for some that they lived and laughed and wept and had opinions like the rest of us. I have long tried to speak for them. Here they are speaking for themselves."
"I don't want or expect Appalachian speech to be like any other. It has its own individuality, its own syntax. To be unlettered is not necessarily to be unintelligent. It's a rare day when I'm out and about that I fail to hear something linguistically interesting."
There are 23 Wolfpen notebooks, 6x4 inches wire hinged.
"I can't name the exact year I started jotting down things they said in notebooks. I did it only for my own eyes. You might say they were written to inform stories and poems to come, yet I never thumbed through looking for an idea or a quotation. The purpose of the notebooks was to cover every facet of life in my community as well as all of the county and the counties adjoining.
"The period covered is roughly 1931 to 1965. The setting-down, I mean. I did come to believe they might in future be of interest to folklorists and social historians."
From "The Wolfpen Notebooks," by James Still---
"I want everybody to stop calling me 'Little Old Nasty Thing.'" Judy Gibson (age 4)
"These shoes I’m wearing were so tight when I first bought them I had to wear them a while before I could put them on." Willie Stewart
"If you see some pore little underly children, give to'em, do for'em." Martha Burns
"I paid Huck Francis a dime to see his picture show. Huh. It wasn’t nothing but shadows on the wall." Uncle George Childers
"My Daddy, when he died, I couldn’t hardly give him up. We used to hunt together and fish together and work in the fields together. My brothers, they went to school and became doctors and teachers and made something of themselves. I didn’t know what an education was. Now my brothers are shut up in schoolhouses and offices while I’m out here in the sun where I want to be." Okla Thornsberry
"Yeah, bless your soul, sure as Sunday morning. I'm scared to death of dying. We all dread that stinking death." Frank Hicks
"Do you remember the little Bosley girl in last year's first grade? Had long yellow hair, never smiled. Well, she died last summer. She started bleeding and nobody could stop it. There was no funeral and no casket. They just wrapped her in a quilt and buried her." Edith Orick
"Death is not a strange thing amongst the people." Preacher 'Tater Bill' Smith
"Some years back when I was the nurse at the Knott County Health Office I accompanied Dr. John Wes Duke in his visits to schools and assisted him in inoculating students against typhoid fever. I recall one school up in the head of a long hollow where he said everybody was akin to everybody else. When we had finished he spoke to them, 'Children, I have something to talk to you about. All of you look like a bunch of dried apples. Your stock is running out. Now here is my advice. When you grow up, and get into your head to go sparking, don't go up the creek, and don't go down the creek, go over the mountain.'" Sylvia Auxier
sources: www.kentuckystewarts.com/RowanCounty/JamesStillAppalachianwriterdies.htm The Wolfpen Notebooks: A Record of Appalachian Life, by James Still, University Press of Kentucky, 1991
Harry C. Gibson, June 8, 1876; April 19, 1938; Carried First Rural Mail in the United States; October 1, 1896.
"He was so anxious to deliver mail, he started a few weeks before the official starting date," explained Thomas 'Buddy' Owens, Jr., retired Charles Town, WV postmaster, in a 1996 Postal Life interview.
"Imagine what it must have been like," recounts Owens, "a lean rider galloping on horseback from farm to farm, placing a letter or newspaper in a cigar box, lard pail or other creative receptacle at the end of a long lane. The roads, worn with wagon-wheel ruts and mud from a summer rain, or nearly blocked by thigh-high snowdrifts, challenge man and horse as they deliver the day's correspondence."
Rural Free Delivery (RFD) service began as an experiment on October 1, 1896, at Charles Town, Halltown and Uvilla, WV. Charles Town happened to be the hometown of then-Postmaster General William L. Wilson. Wilson is credited with launching RFD, though in his personal diary, he mentions RFD only once, in just one sentence: 'Talked to Marche about the experiment in Jefferson (County).' (Col. Thomas) Marche was one of his assistants.
Postmaster General John Wanamaker, a predecessor of Wilson's, first suggested Rural Free Delivery in 1889, but it took several years to convince Congress to allocate funds. Wanamaker traveled throughout rural America, speaking to the Grange and Farmers' Alliance clubs about this service that had been enjoyed by city dwellers since 1863. Congress finally authorized a $10,000 grant in 1890 as a test for the free delivery system in 46 small towns and villages. The move was controversial because of the expense involved.
"Four other routes also officially began October 1, 1896," noted Owens. "Harry Gibson, Frank Young and John Lucas left Charles Town on horseback that morning. Keyes Strider left on horseback from Halltown Post Office, and his cousin Melvin Strider delivered mail from the Uvilla Post Office. Melvin Strider was only 15 years old. He couldn't even collect a paycheck until he turned 16, and he rode his bicycle. Mind you, these routes were all around 20 miles long."
The number of RFD routes grew quickly. By June 1900, there were 1,214 RFD routes, serving an estimated 879,127 people in nearly every state. Six months later the number of routes had increased to 2,551. These provided mail service to almost 2 million Americans. Rural Free Delivery became a permanent postal service in 1902.
Once the Post Office Department designated a RFD route, the local postmaster was responsible for hiring a carrier who would travel the route delivering and receiving mail.
Early rural letter carriers made their rounds by whatever means they could. For most that meant by horseback or by buggies and wagons. During winter months, rural carriers who faced bad winter weather, and could afford to buy another vehicle, used horse-drawn sleds. Unlike city carriers, rural carriers were (still are) responsible for purchasing their own vehicles. Those who used horses to draw their wagons or sled were also responsible for purchasing, feeding and stabling the animals.
The only exceptions were a few experimental routes on which postmasters arranged for the purchase and use of special wagons that required two carriers to operate. The specially-designed two-person wagons allowed one carrier to drive the wagon while the other processed mail along the way. Each of these wagons had a bell that announced its arrival.
They were used on an experimental basis in large counties, beginning at Westminster, Maryland, in 1899 and continuing to Carroll County, Maryland, Frederick County, Maryland, Washington County, Pennsylvania, Jackson County, Missouri, and Newton County, Georgia. The wagons did not prove as useful as first thought and were discontinued by 1905.
One difference between city and rural carriers was that the RFD carriers brought the post office to their patrons. Each RFD vehicle functioned as a miniature post office on wheels, with carriers able to receive and postmark mail and sell stamps, money orders, and other postal supplies.
Rural Free Delivery not only improved communications for rural residents, but was a shot in the arm for the U.S. economy, stimulating road and bridge development, and all kinds of economic growth.
sources: Horse-Drawn Mail Vehicles, by James H. Bruns, Polo, Illinois: Transportation Trails, 1996 National Rural Letter Carriers Association, RFD News, Chicago, NRLCA, 1903 http://snipurl.com/416xh [Smithsonian Institute/National Postal Museum] www.usps.com/history/plife/pl091096/american.htm www.rfdtv.com/Shows/WhatDoesRFDStandFor.asp
So we lived at a . . . we was renting off of a . . . some people that owned a . . . a lumberyard there. So on Friday evening I went out to this man that run . . . owned it and run it there, him and his brother. I said . . . I said, "I'd like . . . I'd like to have a job. I liked to work tomorrow," you know, on Saturday. He said, "What could you do?" I said, "Well, I believe I could do a whole lot." I said, "I'd do it right smart."
And he said, "Well, you come out in the morning." I . . . I went out the next morning and they had a big boxcar . . . boxcar load of lumber. Just big two by eigh-. . . sixes, eights, tens, you know. They just had room to shove me up in the top of it to start poking it out, you know? He had two men working on the ground.
So I shoved that out to them boys that day and they . . . they . . . men they were, and they stacked it and all like that. I went in that evening and he . . . he told me to come in. He said, "Clarence," he said, "what are you going to do with this money?" I said, "Well,"--Mr. Frye was his name--I said, "I'm going to buy me a pair of shoes." He said to his secretary, he said, "Write him a check for two dollars and a quarter."
And he gave me a check for two and a quarter. He said, "Now, Clarence, don't say nothing about this." He said, "My men out there, on-. . . I only pay them a dollar and half a day," see. That was back in the hard times. That was during the Depression, and I took the check and gave it to my mother. We lived right there close. She went to town, bought me a pair of shoes for two dollars and nineteen cents, and that was . . . you know, you only got one pair a year, you know. And so we lived . . . we lived there.
Clarence R. Wells, b. 1911 interviewed July 16, 1991 Family Farm Oral History Project University of Kentucky/ ID ff122_3.1
Kentucky and Tennessee are today the leading sorghum syrup-producing states, and neither are shy about the fact. Gray, TN hosted the Appalachian Sorghum Festival last weekend, and over in Morgan County, KY the locals of that district celebrated their own Sorghum Festival simultaneously. And North Georgia’s Sorghum Festival, in Blairsville, GA comes up Oct 11-12.
A poor-soil brother of the corn family, sorghum grows all over the United States and as far north as Canada. To mountain folk, in the days when they knew sugar only in liquid form, there just wasn’t any other sweetening like it. Sorghum meant a rich dark-brown molasses, just right for corn bread and unbeatable for hot-cakes. It is still used for seasoning beans and for making cookies. A sorghum “run-off” was the most enjoyable event of the old-time farm year. Sorghum—the ‘sugar plant’---was mostly a small farm product, but during the Civil War years about sixty million gallons of it were manufactured. Today sorghum has been bred into a dry soil plant for livestock feeding.
The beers mentioned in early American writings were in no way similar to beer as we know it---and such was southern molasses beer, made from sorghum. A first distillation of fermented sorghum juice, molasses beer was found on the tables of most mountain farms, often as a substitute for milk, and was taken by small children at every meal.
The typical Kentucky family had two acres planted in sorghum. Most of it was for syrup, part went for cattle fodder, and the seeds fed the chickens. The sheet metal pan for cooking the syrup was similar to New England’s maple sugar pan, but the horse drawn sugar mill originated in the South. Northerners usually preferred to do their “farm squeezing” with wooden screw type presses.
Sorghum Festival 2008 at Ketner's Mill TN.
Squeezed sorghum juice exuded from the mill through a burlap strainer and into a barrel. It was then transferred to the cooking pan. As the juice began to boil, it was paddled and cleared of impurities, turning from green to muddy and finally to clear brown. Four gallons of juice produced about one gallon of syrup; as a substitute for store bought sugar, sorghum was an easily grown crop with very little waste.
Unlike today’s sugar with its nutrients refined away, primitive sorghum syrup was not as good to look at, but it at least contained food value. Sorghum joined corn as one of the staffs of early farm life; it even found its way into paints and dyes.
source: Once Upon a Time: The Way America Was, by Eric Sloane, Dover Publications, 2005
Some of America's most famous entertainers of the 1930s era, because they were African-Americans, were barred from staying in Cumberland, Maryland's mainstream hotels. Such notable musicians as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and others often stayed at the Davis Tourist Home while on tour. These stays were often a week at a time when their bands came into town to play the Cadillac Lounge, Crystal Park, and other venues.
The Davis Tourist Home was located at 329 Frederick Street. The 14-room house contained a kitchen and dining room on the first floor, and was operated by John (1898-1959) and Towanda Davis (1902-2001), and then by Mrs. Davis upon John's passing.
The Davis Tourist Home also had a contract with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to provide overnight housing for the black railroad porters and dining-car employees who had to layover while working the Capitol Limited from Chicago to Washington. Each employee brought an official written authorization from the B&O to the Davises which allowed their stay at the Home.
sources: www.whilbr.org/itemdetail.aspx?idEntry=3175&dtPointer=0 Cumberland Daily News, September 26, 1935
According to American folk tradition, Sadie Hawkins' Day affords women the opportunity to ask out a man. Although not an uncommon practice today, when this method of dating was suggested in the latter part of the 1930s, it caused quite a stir. This event made its debut in Al Capp's "Little Abner" comic strip on November 13, 1937.
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