Appalachian History

Mountain woods and meadows are full of toys for any child with eyes to see. Skipping stones across a creek or running alongside a fence, stick in hand, clacking the fenceposts---these pastimes are available any time of year.

But the summer meadow has always held special treasures. Two of the best just happen to grow cheek by jowl: the clover, endless provider of necklaces white or red, and the English Plantain.

Before the advent of the manicured lawn, in which the plantain is an unwanted guest, mountaineers viewed this marvelous plant through very different eyes.

“Plantain is a vulnerary (a wound plant), and in everyday use it is excellent for relief of stings and bruises, and an alleviant for nettle stings,” says Bill Church in Medicinal Plants, Trees, & Shrubs of Appalachia - A Field Guide. “Traditionally, leaf tea used for coughs, diarrhea, dysentery, and blood urine. Leaves applied to blisters, sores, ulcers, swelling; also used for earaches and eye ailments; thought to reduce heat and pain of inflammation.”

In addition to its medicinal uses, English plantain (also known as buckhorn plantain) helped keep backwoods aviary inhabitants chirping; the seeds are often eaten by songbirds.

This common European perennial has been naturalized worldwide; Native Americans from Massachusetts first noticed it seemed to spring up wherever the Europeans settled in the New World, and the nickname “white man’s foot’ or “Englishman’s foot” has stuck ever since.

But back to plants kids can make toys from. The plantain’s botanical name is ‘plantago lanceolata,’ and that ‘lance’ part has a special attraction for mountain boys at play, who prefer to call it the ‘shooter plant.’

If you’re going to fire one of these little devils at your buddies, you’ve got to select carefully. Look for a seed head that has NOT blossomed yet! It should be tightly formed and look like a bullet (photo #1).

If the seed head is long and rangy, it just will not pop off the stem when you go to shoot it (photo #2). Select a stem long enough that you can break it into two halves about 8-9 inches apiece (photo #3).

Fold the stem piece without the seed head in half, and thread the other piece through it (photo #4). As you can see, it reminds one a bit of the bow & arrow, and that’s exactly the way to shoot the seed head off. You have to squeeze the folded piece together tight enough so that the seedhead doesn't simply pull through it.

This is one of those childhood arts, like whistling with two fingers under your tongue, or riding a bike, that you simply have to learn by trial & error. No amount of written instruction, diagrams, or photos can ever replace that.





















sources: Medicinal Plants, Trees, & Shrubs of Appalachia - A Field Guide, by Bill Church, Lulu.com, 2006
www.childrenstories.ca/Stories/Ribgrass-Or-Whitemans-foot.html



appalachia appalachian+folk+medicine Appalachian+folk+toys appalachian+history English+plantain history+of+appalachia

Computer games haven’t always dominated the world of childrens’ toys. Two classic wooden folk toys, the whimmydidle and the flipperdinger, have been enjoyed by children for hundreds of years throughout Appalachia. These toys were handmade by people for their own use. Many of the designs for such folk toys were passed down from one generation to the next.

The gee-haw whimmydiddle, also called a ziggerboo (TN), geehaw (GA), hoodoo stick (Cherokees), and lie detector (OH), is mad of smooth twigs stripped of bark. Its two parts are a notched stick with a spinner – or whirligig – pivoted on one end, and a smaller rubbing stick. The object of the whimmydiddle is to make the whirligig spin smoothly to the right (gee) or left (haw), seemingly at your spoken command.

To do this, you must hold both parts lightly to produce maximum vibration. This vibration is set up when you stroke the rubbing stick rapidly back and forth across the notches. If at the same time, you let the tip of your index finger slide along the far side of the notches, the whirligig will twirl unfailing to the right. To reverseits direction, you simply bring your thumb to bear on the near side of the notches. With a little practice, you can switch contacts so inconspicuously that anyone who doesn’t know the trick will have a hard time guessing why the whirligig responds.

The Flipperdinger is a hollow-reed blower with a plug in one end, and a nozzle, made of a smaller reed, projecting from it just behind the plug. In one model, and acorn cup with its center bored out is cemented over the nozzle. In another, a little ‘basketball ring’ bent from copper wire is aligned with the nozzle about three inches above the tip. Both models come with a featherweight ball formed from cornstalk pith.

To work the first flipperdinger, you place the pith ball in the acorn cup and blow lightly but steadily into the open end of the larger reed. When done right, the ball rises slowly in a jet stream of air, hovers a few inches above the nozzle, and then as you ease off, settles back.

The other flipperdinger is harder to master. Here the pith ball has a wire thrust through it – one with a crook in one end. You hang the crook over the basketball ring. Then, with plenty of well-controlled lung power, you can unhook the ball, lower it through the ring, and finally, blow it back up again and replace the crook on the wire.

sources: http://www.wvculture.org/goldenseal/winter04/schnacke.html
Popular Science, Mar 1960, pp. 144-7
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1985/6/85.06.04.x.html

related post: "All I want for Christmas is a whimmy diddle"


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