Appalachian History

There was a class that were ignorant and no-account. They never had much of a chance; you've got to say that for them. Once in awhile, one of them would sort of pull himself up by his bootstraps and make something of himself. He'd work hard enough and not give everything to his no-account relatives. But there was a class, and they were the poor white trash---well, up there above my grandmother's, the people who lived further up the mountain, they'd raise a garden, can the beans, then open the cans of beans instead of going out to the garden and picking them, because it was easier.

They'd kill a hog, eat every bit of it right away, never try to keep any of it. They just wouldn't go to enough trouble to have anything, because you could have things if you'd go to the trouble to. And the thrifty colored people and the people who tried to help themselves could make a very good living, take care of things by themselves. But you had to conserve, you had to be thrifty, and you had to go to extra trouble.

It just wasn't worth it for them, so they lived on the verge of starvation; they inbred---they had all sorts of deformities due to the inbreeding---and while they never had much of a chance---it wasn't that they never had a chance, it was just that they weren't willing to take advantage of a chance when it was given to them. And they had all sorts of devious ways to try to get things from other people. One man, for several years, worked in different sections of the country on the fact that his wife had just died. She always died under very bad circumstances which left him in dire need. He made a lot of money that way.

And they were always ready to sell their votes at election time---and they did very well at selling their votes---they'd get cows, and sometimes they'd pay as high as a hundred dollars for a vote, I've heard. When it was close, every vote counted, and they would go down and hang around the polling places until the end of the day, and regardless of the fact that the vote was by secret ballot, it was pretty well known how it was running by the end of the day, and then they’d just get higher and higher in the bidding for the votes.

There were some sheriffs who, if I could remember their names, I wouldn't---the one who sent his constituents candy boxes with five dollar gold pieces under each piece of candy---as I say, it’s not new.


Mrs. Mary J. Jones
(b. 1910 in Clifton, NC)
Interviewed June 7, 1976
Southern Highlands Research Center
Louis D. Silveri Oral History Collection,
D. H. Ramsey Library Special Collections,
University of North Carolina at Asheville
Online at http://toto.lib.unca.edu/findingaids/oralhistory/SHRC/jones_mary.html

The extremes of wealth and poverty do not now exist and have never been existent in Tazewell. There are many comfortably wealthy men in the county; and, perhaps, half a dozen millionaires. But, with a population of 27,840 souls in the county, as shown by the census of 1920, there are only 53 paupers here.

The paupers are of a class that are unable to work on account of the infirmities of age, or other physical causes, and mental deficiency. Fifteen are entirely dependent and are maintained at the county farm, while thirty-eight are partially dependent and receive aid from the public funds.

The county owns a valuable farm, situated one and a half miles east of the county seat, its estimate value being seventy-five thousand dollars. During the fiscal year which ended the 1st of July, 1919, the products of the farm amounted to $4,890; and the live stock on hand at that date was valued at $8,760. The annual expense for conducting the farm and maintaining the paupers is, approximately $6,000.

Friends at Wardell, VA, August 1911.

As long as present conditions continue society here will be contented and prosperous; and, apparently, it will be best for the county to remain, as it always has been, primarily an agricultural community. Adherence to this system will give comfort and security to the energetic worker, and will not furnish asylum to the idler.

God forbid, that Tazewell shall ever have a system with paupers at the base and idle rich at the top of the social scale. May its social system never be like that of modern England, of which Matthew Arnold affirmed: “Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, and brutalizes our lower class.”

Wealth, great wealth, is now collectively possessed by the people of Tazewell. What will they do with it? Under the spell of modern civilization, shall the rising generation be trained to place a negligible value upon the instrumentalities of civilization that were recognized and utilized by the pioneer fathers; and be taught that money, position, power, idleness, and luxury are the prime essentials of an advanced civilization? This is the gravest question the Christian world has to solve.

What part will the people of Tazewell enact in its solution? Shall civilization continue to advance here on definitely true lines, or retrograde into a refined barbarism? Shall we continue to teach but neglect to practice the great social and political truths of Thomas Jefferson, embodied in the Virginia Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence?


History of Tazewell county and southwest Virginia: 1748-1920, by William Cecil Pendleton, W.C. Hall Printing, Richmond VA, 1920