Appalachian History

“They brought their produce into town on wagons and they brought hallows to trade horses and all that kind of stuff and vegetables like string beans, tomatoes, corn, watermelons and all that stuff. Bring down and set it right down there on that shelf on the trading ground. And they would sell and people would come and buy stuff just like you were going to the Farmer's Market. And all that produce was traded right there and once a month on the first Monday of the month they had what they called a Court Day.

Photo: Court Day in Franklin County, VA

“And that was the day that the farmers would come into town to trade horses, cattle, sheep or whatever they had that they wanted to trade or what they wanted to sell. And my father and his uncle they were horse traders. Out of all the peddlers he used to feed them baking soda in order to make them look like they were fat. Take them home and two days later he had a skinny little horse already.

"But there was all kinds of tricking in those times you know it. And then you would look at a horse to see how old it was and the first thing he would ask is how old is the horse. And they would say well he's four years old. Ray would look up and say "Uh, huh. He's more than four years old." He'd go, "He's about ten years old." He could tell by looking at the teeth.

"They would call it the Coat Round - the Coat Round they called it. And even back before then there was a lady who is living in Charlottesville right now. Her mother was sold off the block right down there on Water Street. Sold to somebody somewhere down the way. Rebecca McGinnis. You could still see them in the pavement not too long ago.

"One of the oldest flagstones in Charlottesville I believe. But anyway, her mother was sold off the block, you know, they put them on the block and they walked by and she looked like a pretty good old - just like the same as with a horse. You know, people had pretty good horses. They had good shoulder variety - good shoulders."

Walter A. Payne Sr.
Charlottesville, VA
Interviewed July 26 and August 22, 1994
Ridge Street Oral History Project
Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia

Source: www.vcdh.virginia.edu/afam/raceandplace/transcripts/payne.html


Walter+A.+Payne+Sr Charlottesville+VA Court+Day +Coat+Round appalachia +appalachian+culture appalachian+history appalchia+history history+of+appalachia

Twelve-year old William P. “Punch” Jones and his father, Grover C. Jones, Sr. were pitching horseshoes in Peterstown, WV one day in April 1928 when one of the shoes landed on an unusually beautiful stone. Believing the item to be simply a piece of shiny quartz common to the area, the family kept it in a wooden cigar box inside a tool shed for fourteen years, throughout the Depression. Punch Jones, meantime, worked his way through college during that time while his father struggled as a county school teacher to provide for his large family.

On May 5, 1943, Punch brought the stone to Dr. Roy J. Holden, a geology professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in nearby Blacksburg, Virginia. Holden, shocked at Punch’s discovery, authenticated the find as a diamond. The “Jones Diamond,” also known as the “Punch Jones Diamond,” "The Grover Jones Diamond," or "The Horseshoe Diamond," is an 34.48 carat alluvial diamond. It's the largest alluvial diamond, and the third largest diamond overall, ever discovered in North America.

Illustration: Crystalline Structure of a Diamond
Professor Richard Zallen
Virginia Tech Department of Physics

The bluish-white diamond measures 5/8 of an inch across and possesses 12 diamond-shaped faces. No other precious gems are known to have been found in West Virginia. Dr. Holden speculated that due to its “carry impact marks” and the size of the stone it had probably been washed down the New River into Rich Creek from a source in Virginia, North Carolina or Tennessee.

He sent it to the Smithsonian Institution, where it remained for many years for display and safekeeping. In February of 1964, the Jones family brought the diamond back and placed it in a safe deposit box in the First Valley National Bank in Rich Creek, Virginia.

When Grover died in 1976 his widow Grace and grandson Robert became owners of the diamond (Punch had been killed in World War II.) In 1984, Robert sold the diamond through Sotheby's auction house in New York to an agent representing a lawyer in the Orient, for $74,250. "I wish they'd a threw it in the New River sometimes," Grace Jones observed over all the controversy. She passed away in 1992.

Sources: www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/3402/diamond.html
www.mirolcentre.com/mirol/diamond/famous_diamond.html
dmme.virginia.gov/DMR3/dmrpdfs/vamin/VAMIN_VOL42_NO04.pdf


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“So many outside writers had come in and . . . and given such a terrible account of the people. They had put 'em down a lot in their articles that I didn't think this was true, because the people that I met were very intelligent and they were very civilized. They were not like they were pictured in these articles at all. And I thought that somebody ought to come through here and give the true picture of them.

Left: 1937 LIFE magazine article profiling Mary Breckinridge's Frontier Nursing Service, for which Mary Brewer worked at the time.

"And, you know, the Mary Breckinridge . . . the hospital. Mary Breckinridge, of course, was the first one, I guess, that put the people in this area on the map by going out and soliciting aid, and naturally most of their material was slanted toward the poorer class of people. They didn't tell anything about the fine homes that were here. It was always the little shacks on the hillsides and people going without clothing and half-starved and barefoot. So that most people in . . . outside of Kentucky, they got the wrong idea, and I . . . I thought that ought to be corrected.

“Well, in 1958, the . . . Berea College had asked me to do some research for the Ford Foundation. And I started out in the field, traveling with Rufus Fugate and Ruth Baker, who was a home agent at that time, and I began to find all these old people that had these interesting stories to tell me and I began writing them down. And it just grew and grew from that until I got a good collection and I thought well, it ought to be shared with others and I decided then to have it published. And Vernon Baker came to see me then. He knew that I had this material and said he was interested in publishing it. And he published it under the title Of Bolder Men, but it fell apart. It was just a disaster. [Chuckle]

“So I quit selling the book because it did fall apart. It wouldn't stay together. And then I decided there were so many requests for it that I would write it over again. And they decided to use it as a part of the centennial celebrations for Leslie County then. So I did it over for that purpose mostly, that it might be used for that. [A large part of it is sort of a genealogy] of people who live in Leslie County. I got the history from Leslie County by going to the courthouse and talking to old people who were here, you know, and knew the history of it. The first part of it is involved with the history and development of Leslie County itself, and . . . and the second part of it contains the genealogical history of about forty families.”

Part 1 of 2; tomorrow- one of the stories from "The Rugged Trails of Appalachia"

1978 interview with Mary Brewer,
author of "The Rugged Trails of Appalachia"
Oral History Project, Frontier Nursing Service, Kentucky Virtual Library
http://tinyurl.com/3axr6o

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