Appalachian History

The following is an excerpt from an unrehearsed taped interview with Mrs. Leora Rhodes Brooks Franklin (b. 1920), long time resident of Richmond, KY. The interview was conducted by A.G. Dunston, Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University, for the Oral History Center of EKU. Professor Dunston spent several years interviewing the black community of Richmond. He interviewed Mrs. Franklin in her home on October 9, 1992. This segment is midway through the interview.

AG: Oh, okay. Alright. Let’s see, I can’t think of anything else I need to dig into your past (laughter) . . . Listen, let me ask you this: Was there any problem that you can remember when
Richmond City Schools, when Richmond High became . . . when students became integrated? Was there any problem that you can remember?

LF: Yeah. It was a problem there then because it got so that the school . . . Well, let’s see, how can I put that. You know, a lot of times they say, well, we shouldn’t have taken that school away. But that wasn’t so. Because I took my daughter, my baby, my youngest daughter, I took her out.

Well, they had to teach so well when she went there in the first and second grade . . . well, she passed the second grade, and that year, they had the first and second grade together, and I, um . . . she was a B average reader and she went from a B average to a D average reader.

Well, that didn’t bother me because I said, well, she gets out of that class, that teacher, and I got the teacher, you know, the woman that I worked for, she got her a book because their books were raggedy. They just got second things, so that’s what they did. They didn’t, and I worked with the N.A.A.C.P. and all of this stuff. So, we went in and checked on the school.

They didn’t have hot water. They didn’t have toilet paper. They didn’t have doors on the bathroom . . . the girl’s bathroom. The men’s toilet looked like I don’t know what and the soap . . . they didn’t have no soap, and what they were doing . . . Now, they could get that up there, but they said that [they] didn’t know how to use it. The children didn’t know how to use hot water. I said, who in the world now doesn’t know how to use hot water. That’s what they . . . that’s what they said.

And, and, of course, everybody said, we ought to kept it. No, we couldn’t if we hadn’t ruined that. So, my kids went there until about the seventh grade, I believe. Sixth or seventh grade.
One of them was in the sixth and one was in the seventh.

Well, anyway, when they got up there, they thought that my youngest daughter . . . was changing the school . . . done something to it. [They thought that the daughter was having problems because she changed schools.] Now, they left before the school was closed, and they thought she wasn’t getting along with the people or was scared or something.

And, Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Willoughby, they got together and they watched her. When she went to get something off the board, she didn’t know what she was getting there and when they had problems on the board, she would miss them.

So, she called me up and I went up and she told me, she said this child has been crippled in her first or second grade of school, and [the teacher] said, “I was that way because I had to go live with my grandmother.” And, she said, “I thought it was her bringing her up here to school, but she gets along fine with the students and things,” but said, “I watched her until she couldn’t . . . anything I have on the board, she couldn’t get. She’d be so long getting it, she didn’t know what she was doing.”

And, she said, “I don’t know whether I can do anything about it or not.” Said sometimes it’s awful hard. But, that year was the year that they started remedial reading, and so Mrs. Willoughby, Hortense Willoughby, that was a wonderful teacher up there. So, she told me she said, “With you all’s income, I can’t get her in that class.” Said, “But I’m going to put her in it anyhow.” Said, “When it’s time for that,” said, “I’ll let you know and we’ll put her in there.”

You know what, they got her. She called me, and they put her in that class, and that child didn’t look back. She was a . . . she got on the honor roll.

AG: They just messed with her.

LF: Messed it up. Messed up. And, she went . . . she went right on and went right on through and didn’t have any trouble at all. But, we talked, we had a mother’s group that was connected with the school. You know how they have something like Parents-Teachers.

One of the teachers told us that they have other students grading their papers and all of that. And if the student don’t seem like they want to get anything, you just leave them alone, just pass them on. They don’t have to get it.


online at http://www.library.eku.edu/collections/sca/oralhistory/1993oh144.pdf

Annie Taylor could get away with anything she pleased at school. Her father Champ was feared in Catawba Falls, NC by every teacher who had ever tried to rein her in; he'd threatened to kill several, and had literally run one out of town. Then Annie crossed swords with Miss Daintry Graham one day in class, and got the whipping of her life. It wasn't long before Champ came in search of Miss Graham:

"I got me a piece of chicken wire and went out into the river to wade, because that was the most defiant thing I could think of. There was a fish in that river that I'd tried for days and days to catch, and couldn't. I decided to seine him up; and I did. I know now, and I didn't then, that he was a big-mouth bass and that he would have weighed approximately seven pounds. He was a whale of a fish. I strung him onto a forked alder stick.

"Then I heard Champ Taylor coming down that river, cursing at the top of his voice: 'Git in that road and git to running, I'm a coming and I'm a-going to cut you into shoestrings and strew 'em from here to Old Fort. Come out from under that bed and git to running.' I just calmly waded along, because I had buckled on a .38 by the side of me before I went into that river and I made up my mind that if that man bothered me I was not going to waste a bullet; that I was going to shoot about the third button of his shirt. I knew that I could hit it, too, because I'm that kind of a marksman.

"Anyway, he was raising Cain until he came down and got even with me. There were alder bushes along the creek and he couldn’t see me till he got right even.

"I said, 'Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, I want to show you my fish.'

"Well, I had decided when I got that fish what I was going to do, and I'd put a nice little bullet hole right through between its eyes. I held it up: 'Look, see my fish. This river makes so much noise, I've got to come further out.'

Rural One-Room School, P. R. Young and pupils, Transylvania County, NC, 1903, left half of photo.

"So I waded out nearer to him, and all the time my mind was going two ways. I was talking like somebody that had no sense, but my mind was saying: 'Don't shoot him unless he takes his hands off of that saddle. As long as he holds that pommel of that saddle, don't shoot. Don't shoot till he tries to come down; watch his hands, then aim for the third button on his shirt and just let one bullet do it all.'

"But I was talking. I said, 'Look at my fish. I had to put a bullet between his eyes, but I got him. Didn't take but one bullet. I got me five more in here,' and I waved the gun out and sashayed it around. I said, 'I've got five more shots in here, all ready, and I think I've got six more in my pocket. Yep, I can re-load if I want to.'

"You see, what I was doing was letting him know that I could blow him off of that mule if I wanted to. And I was letting him know that he'd better 'tend to his own business, but I was doing it in a very gentle way.

"I was giving it time for the idea to soak into his weak mind. Well, he didn't know what to do, for the last thing he expected was to see the teacher in a short dress, wading in the water, with a fish in one hand and a gun in the other hand.

"And the last thing he expected was one that could talk in a calm voice and that was just like a little girl so excited over a fish.

"Directly, when I saw that old Adam's apple begin to jump up and down in his old long throat; it began to go up and down before he could. . . he didn't know what to say, and I knew he was up a tree, and when I saw his shoulders sink, I knew right then that I had won. When his shoulders slumped, I knew right then that the day was mine.

"I said, 'Oh, you'll have to excuse me for being so enthusiastic over a fish. I've got to tell you something: you're the very man I wanted see.' I said, 'You know something, I had to whip your daughter today, because she went through these woods down here to meet those old wagon drivers, and I know that you and your wife want to raise decent children and you don't want any unexpected grand-children, and the proper procedure is to just keep those girls out of that road, and I told them I'd switch 'em if they went down there and they did, and I switched them.

"'More than that, I've got another supply of switches on hand, and if they don't mind me, I'm going to switch 'em again.'

"'That's right, Miss Graham, put the wood to 'em, and if you can't do it, just report it to me.'

"Big change in attitude, I mean. I wasn't letting him know that I'd heard all that cursing coming down the road. I was making him think that that water made too much noise, and that I couldn't hear him.

After that, I had no trouble."


Daintry [Graham] Allison
(b. 1896 in Old Fort, NC)
Interviewed July 24, 1975
Southern Highlands Research Center
Louis D. Silveri Oral History Collection,
D. H. Ramsey Library Special Collections,
University of North Carolina at Asheville

“Psychologically, the wagon is the thing,” commented librarian Mary Lemist Titcomb of the project she is most remembered for. “One can no easier resist the pack of a peddler from the Orient as a shelf full of books when the doors of the wagon are opened at one’s gateway.”

Titcomb was referring to the bookmobile---the nation’s first--- that she had custom outfitted in 1904 to deliver books to the residents of Washington County, MD. The horse-drawn Concord wagon could display 200 volumes and store another 2,360 behind its shelves.

Titcomb (1857-1932) arrived in Hagerstown, MD in 1901 after having worked as a library organizer in Vermont for 12 years. She plunged energetically and efficiently into organizing the Washington County Free Library, which had been chartered in 1898, the first incorporated county-wide library in the country.

Titcomb held firmly to the belief that giving out books was but a small part of a library's purpose. “There is a great army of men and women,” she observed, “who use our public libraries to read because it gives them pleasure—because through books they are lifted out of all routine of every-day life, their imaginations are quickened and for the brief space that the book holds them in thrall the colors of life assume a brighter tint.”

This view of books’ power wasn’t as apparent to Hagerstown residents of her day as it may be to us; mandatory school attendance was still a decade away, so book learning was not in any way central to the culture yet.

The idea for a book wagon was an outgrowth of ‘deposit stations,’ which Titcomb set up in 1901 in remote area stores and Sunday Schools, each with 30-40 volumes. After 4 years she had 66 stations. She liked the thought that the wagon idea would further ‘cement friendships,’ and by 1903 had convinced the library Board of Trustees to approve & obtain a Carnegie gift of $2,500 in 5 annual installments.

Joshua Thomas, the library janitor, was the first wagon driver. A county native and Civil War vet, after the war he’d driven regularly through the area buying eggs, butter & produce for market, and so knew the roads intimately.

In April 1905 the first book wagon, driven by Thomas, made its maiden trip throughout the countryside of Washington County. During the new bookmobile’s first 6 months he made 31 trips, averaging 30 miles each trip, 3 times a week. Thomas routinely covered 500 square miles of backroad territory, and distributed 1,008 volumes during that time.

As to the books selected, the demand for best sellers was unknown among rural residents of that era, with the result that they chose a higher quality of literature.

Titcomb instructed Thomas that there should be “no hurrying from house to house, but each family must be allowed ample time for selections.”

The wagon’s initial design presented an unforeseen problem: it was painted black and did not have glass doors, and because of that was taken for the ‘dead wagon’ and was often urged to pass on by superstitious residents. A paint job and new doors quickly resolved the issue, however.

Drawn by Dandy and Black Beauty, the bookmobile wagon served the county for over five years with Joshua Thomas dispensing the books at each stop. But in August 1910, a freight train ran into the wagon as it was crossing the Norfolk and Western Railroad at St. James. The horses and driver survived; the wagon did not.

Bookmobile service went down for a year; the first round of Carnegie financing was exhausted, and by the time another $2,500 materialized (offered up by library board treasurer William Kealhofer) the horse drawn vehicle was deemed outmoded. The service resumed, but this time with a motorized vehicle.

Titcomb summed up her bookmobile vision thus: "No better method has ever been devised for reaching the dweller in the country. The book goes to the man, not waiting for the man to come to the book."


sources: http://www.whilbr.org/itemdetail.aspx?idEntry=232
http://webpages.charter.net/magicmoment/mary.htm
http://www.mdoe.org/hagerstown.html
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~mg128/docs/Streets.pdf
http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/educ/exhibits/womenshall/html/titcomb.html

"So you wonder why I have spent the last ten years of my life behind this meat counter," said Jack Gallup. "You think I ought to be doin' something better, do you? Well, I'll tell you. For one thing, I never would study in school and I dropped out at the end of the fifth grade; and another thing is, I have never been able to get any money ahead because I spent it on gasoline and liquor.

I am not much over thirty, but I might have saved up enough money by now to start a small business of my own. I know the grocery business and I know the meat business from top to bottom. My uncle's store has a good trade and I do all the buying for the meat counter and stand behind the counter to cut it and weigh it. Particular people come in here and it's my business to please them.

In the course of time, you know, a man can learn anything if he puts his mind on it. I could have learned something out of books when I was in school, but I wasn't willin' to put my mind on it. I was interested in marbles and baseball and in playing pranks on the other boys and in deviling the teachers. A good lawyer here in Tucony once told my mother I'd make a good lawyer if I'd only study, but I wouldn't.

What little I know I've learned right here in this store. In sellin' meat I learned some arithmetic because I had to, and I've learned to speak fairly good English from educated people who came in here to trade. I've always kept my ears open, and that's easier than studyin' books and worth more; I never could see much in books.

I remember at least one thing I heard a teacher say. It was somethin' about paying too dear for your whistle. These people who get a book education have to pay too much for it. I may not be right but that's my way of thinkin'. Anyhow I wasn't willin' to pay the price. It may be worth it to some people but not to me.

Have I always lived in Tucony? Most of my life. I was born out in the country six miles from town on a farm my granddaddy bought when this was a wild country, and I had my fun fishin' and huntin' and trappin'. I went to school when I had to, and I worked in the cornfield when I had to, but my daddy had to lick me sometimes to make me do it. I reckon the way I lived out in the country is what makes me so strong and healthy.

When my daddy moved into town so my sisters could go to high school, I got a job as an errand boy in a grocery store, and I don't ever seem to be able to get away from groceries. When I was growin' up I got several other small jobs, but I didn't keep any of 'em long. I got to runnin' round nights with the boys and we used to drink and prowl about, and sometimes times we got into fights and landed in the cooler. It cost my daddy a lot of money to get me out of trouble, and it was at a time when he had mighty little money. I don't know why it is but when I get liquor in me I want to fight. I'm just a plain fool.

Finally my uncle took me into his grocery and put me behind the meat counter. I got drunk once in a great while and he always threatened to fire me but he never did. He's a queer old duck, but he's good-hearted. He hates to see money go out of his hands but he'll give a bunch of ripening bananas to some of his kin to help feed the chillun. Some people would rather give things to strangers than to their kin. Not my uncle. He abuses everybody who works for him, but he is good to them in many ways. He'll do anything for them except raise their wages; some of them have been with him a long time.

He and his wife work hard - she with her butter-making and he behind his counter or an the road looking after his branch stores in neighboring towns. He drives his own automobile and he goes like the devil was after him. He says time's money, and money is what he wants. Two or three times he has run his car off the mountainside and rolled over and over, but he's so tough he was back at work in a day or so. He growls and says he's nearly dead but he goes on. I once told him he wasn't fit to die. I expected he'd beat me over the head with a stick, but he only laughed.

Spencer Mull,
Brevard, N.C.
interviewed August 7, 1939 by A.W. Long
Folklore Project of the Federal Writers' Project
for the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA)
online at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/wpa/27060407.html

It's September; time to head back to school.

Here's an outdoor class being held at the Othello School in Cherokee County, GA, circa 1925. The teacher is believed to be Miss Corine Pace. Third student from left is Glenn Hubbard. This one room schoolhouse probably went out of use around 1938, and is no longer standing.

Happy Labor Day!

So everything went along pretty calm, until Thursday of the third week. It clouded up to rain; the thunder cracked and the lightning flashed. Afternoon recess came and we were going strictly on schedule: afternoon recess at two-thirty. I heard those wagons coming up the road and I saw these big girls: one of them was Mr. Taylor's girl and the other one was named Annie. And they giggled at each other, and shook their skirts and yonder they went through the woods to those wagon drivers.

I built up a pretty good head of steam after I pitched one inning for the ball team; I went and rang the bell. No girls appeared. The other children: "Miz Graham, didn't we have our fifteen minutes play period?"

I said, "No, we're going to have eight minutes of it the next pretty day. We have to get our lessons over with now, because it looks like it's going to rain and get the river up and wash away all of the footlogs. We have to hurry and get home before it rains. We have to have spelling."

So I marched the little children in and I had Fourth Grade spelling and we corrected the papers. No girls appeared. Fifth Grade spelling; no girls appeared. Then it was time for Seventh Grade, and they were Seventh Grade spellers, because I didn't have any Sixth Grade. Here they came in, just a struttin' and a giggling, and a shaking their skirts and a laughing and twisting.

I said, "Where have you girls been?"

"Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh."

I said, "Look a here, didn't I tell you not to leave this schoolground without permission?"

"Huh, I go where I please, when I please, and Pappy don't allow no schoolteachers to scold me."

Boy, believe you me, they'd just as well have lit that chip on my shoulder right then. I grabbed one of those dogwood switches and I went for her and I cut her shirtwaist on the bias. I don't know how I did it; but the switch did it. I was putting every bit of pep I had…now if those two girls had double-teamed on me they could have probably pitched me out of there. Maybe, I don't know. But, I whipped that girl.

Rural One-Room School, P. R. Young and pupils, Transylvania County, NC, 1903, right half of photo.

I just kept saying, "Sit down, sit down, sit down," like a needle in a broken record of a phonograph, "sit down, sit down." When I wore out one switch, the little children began running under the benches and trying to hide, because pieces of that switch were flying all over that room.

I reached for another dogwood switch, and boy, she sat down. I sat down, too. I waited until I could get my voice absolutely calm before I opened my mouth, because at St. Catherine's we had been taught, besides carrying a book on your head without dropping it, because you walked properly, that if you controlled your voice, you controlled the situation. That you could not control the situation and you should not speak until your voice was absolutely its normal self.

So I sat there about four or five minutes and got calm again. I said, "Now look a here, I told you girls not to go through the woods to meet those wagon drivers, and I'm going to stay up here these five months, and you're going to obey me, and everybody else is, that comes to this school, and when you don't, I'm going to give you a whipping, and you'd just as well know it."

I said, "Annie, come up here."

"You ain't a going to whip me like you done her!"

Annie came at me like a piledriver, sideways. She was going to knock me off my feet. I just very gracefully stepped aside and let her just about take the whole end out of that building, because she landed against it with every bit of power she had. All of the power that she had intended for me. She was a great, big, tall albino girl; one of the few albinos that I've taught: absolutely white hair, white skin, almost white eyes.

She flew at me like she was going to skin me. I just grabbed her and began to whip her and I repeated the same thing: "Sit down, sit down, sit down," because all teachers had been taught to treat them alike, and I said the same thing. Well, I didn't hit her but five licks until she sat down, and that gave me the right to quit.

I said, "All right. Now I want you girls to get ready to write your spelling, but remember that I'm boss here for five months."

So I gave out spelling, and when I dismissed that school every child cleared out every article that he’d owned that was in that building. Everything went home.

Finally, one little third grader that had charge of the home-made baseball and the home-made ball bat (that was all that we could afford then in the line of athletic equipment) was standing there knocking the ground with that ball bat. "Miss Graham," he said, "you know how to shoot. Now, I know you do. I done heard about it. Go over yonder to Mr. Kelly's where you board and get your gun. Champ Taylor will be down here directly and he'll want to cut you up with that old hawkbill knife of his, and the thing to do is to kill him."

Story continues here (go to p. 48)


Daintry Allison
(b. 1896 in Old Fort, NC)
Interviewed July 24, 1975
Southern Highlands Research Center
Louis D. Silveri Oral History Collection,
D. H. Ramsey Library Special Collections,
University of North Carolina at Asheville



Old+Fort+NC Daintry+Allison education+in+Appalachia one+room+schoolhouse appalachia appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

Part 1 of 2

Five miles out from Old Fort, up near Catawba Falls; that was my first school. No teacher ever stayed there five months. Usually, they'd stay five or six weeks.

All right. The regulations were that your dress had to come down to your ankle bone. That's what you had to wear while you taught. I made me three of those happy little items, and I wore them in time of school just like stage clothes, and then when I got out of there and went over to my boarding place, I put on my regular clothes, which barely covered my knee caps, and I dressed like I was clothed and in my right mind.

There was one man in there that tore up the school every year. People put a chip on my shoulder and they just as well put a rich pine on there when I first went in there. "Don't you talk to his children."

Now I'm not going to call that man's name. I’m going to call him Champ Taylor, because that wasn't his name. "Don't you scold Champ Taylor's children. You be good to them. Kinda pet 'em along. Maybe he'll let you stay the five months. We like you; we like this school. We don't want you to have to go away."

"Well, what does Champ Taylor do to the other teachers?"

"He comes with his old hawk bill knife and makes them run back to Old Fort, and they have to get out of here. Why, that there man last year, the last time they sent a man in this school he was the third teacher they'd sent, and he had to leave his suitcase back there in my back bedroom where he boarded here, and leave out of here and have the man that runs the river barn in Old Fort come back up here and get it; Champ Taylor had him on the go."

They said, "He had to run out of here in the dark."

Rural One-Room School, P. R. Young and pupils, Transylvania County, NC, 1903, left half of photo.

And people would say to me, "Miss Graham, when Champ Taylor gets after you, air you gonna run? Watcha gonna do? He don't let no teacher say in here no length of time."

I said, "Oh, I don't know. I'm no good at running. Maybe I'll have to wait and see what I'll do. I just don't know, but I'll meet that situation when it comes."

Right up the road above the school house there was a sawmill. The year before that, four of the bigger girls had got pregnant with illegitimate children, supposedly by those wagon drivers that were comers and goers, and they were driving wagons out of there to haul that lumber to Old Fort for sale, for shipping on the railroad.

I laid the law down the first day of school. I said, "Now, let me tell you: nobody's going off of this schoolground after you get here until time to go home. You've got to wait until three-thirty before you leave here. Nobody is going to that road to talk to these old wagon drivers, and if you do, I'll thrash you."

We thought a switch was good for everything but the toothache, then, and we didn't hesitate to use them. I had three, already dried, that my Committeemen furnished me, and put them up in the schoolroom; up in one corner. They were dogwood. So we weren't "Woodman spare that tree" people then. Things went along calmly.

Teachers had to spend one night in every home that sent them children. I wondered what I'd do when it came to going to Champ Taylor's, but I figured that if that was part of the prescription, I'd take it. So I began to visit every Tuesday night and every Thursday night, but mostly on Tuesday night, because on Monday I walked up there from Old Fort, and on Friday I walked back home those five miles after teaching all day, so visiting was confined mostly to Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

I divided it up and made my list, so that the children knew when I was coming to each home. They kept saying, "Are you going to Peachy Carson's house?" That's another name I've changed. "Teachers never did go up to Peachy Carson's. They don't stay here long enough to get up there. Peachy lives in the very last house, way up Carson's Flats.

Peachy, by the way, had a beautiful peaches complexion. One of the most lovely that I ever saw, but here hands were terrible. She hoed. She had the awfullest corns on her hands. They felt like somebody's that played golf eighteen rounds every two hours.

But Peachy could pick up a hundred pounds of cottonseed meal and just toss it into a wagon as easy as I could pick up ten pounds of sugar. Peachy's house was way back. Well, I didn't know whether I was going to get to Peachy's house or not, but I firmly resolved that I'd go there, and I left it for next to the last place. Champ Taylor's was the last place on my list. I was going there last of all.

End of part 1
Continues tomorrow


Daintry Allison
(b. 1896 in Old Fort, NC)
Interviewed July 24, 1975
Southern Highlands Research Center
Louis D. Silveri Oral History Collection,
D. H. Ramsey Library Special Collections,
University of North Carolina at Asheville



Old+Fort+NC Daintry+Allison education+in+Appalachia one+room+schoolhouse appalachia appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

Some would consider her the founder of Adult Literacy Education in the United States. Cora Wilson Stewart (1875-1958) was an elementary school teacher and county school superintendent in eastern Kentucky's Rowan County who, in the fall of 1911, decided to open the classrooms in her district to adult pupils.

When the Moonlight Schools opened on September 5, 1911, adults were taught at night in the one-room schools in which children were taught by day. They were called "moonlight schools" because classes were held on nights when the moon cast enough light for students to see the footpaths and wagon trails they often followed for miles to reach the school. Teachers volunteered their time to teach at these schools.

Original caption reads: "'Gladys Thompson's Moonlight School'"; adults and a few children sitting or standing in a room with a potbellied stove, pictures of horses and Abraham Lincoln are hanging on the wall".

"It was expected that the response would be slow, but more than 1,200 men and women from 18 to 86 years of age were enrolled the first evening," said Stewart of the initial 50 schools in the program. "They came trooping over the hills and out of the hollows, some to add to the meager education received in the inadequate schools of their childhood, some to receive their first lessons in reading and writing.

"Among them were not alone illiterate farmers and their illiterate wives, sons, and daughters, but also illiterate merchants or storekeepers, illiterate ministers, and illiterate lumbermen. Mothers, bent with age, came that they might learn to read letters from absent sons and daughters, and that they might learn for the first time to write them."

Stewart later called this first night "the brightest moonlit night the world has ever seen."

Stewart was convinced that adults should not use the same materials as children to learn to read, so she developed for adult students The Rowan County Messenger, a newspaper with short sentences and lots of word repetition. In teaching writing, she concentrated first on teaching adults to write their own names, believing that this was a vital way of developing what we would today call self-esteem.

In 1912 the enrollment reached nearly 1,600 and the movement had spread to 8 or 10 other counties. Of these 1,600, "300 entered the school utterly unable to read and write at all, 300 were from those who had learned in September, 1911, and 1,000 were men and women of meager education."

In 1914-15, it was estimated that 40,000 Kentucky adults had learned to read and write in moonlight schools. A Carrollton, KY woman wrote Stewart in 1914: "I wish to thank you for the Moonlight Schools. I have been going six nights and have learned to read and write. I am forty-three years old and have written my first letter to my mother, the next to you . . . Yours, Amanda McKinney."

In 1915 Stewart published the Country Life Reader: First Book and the next year she published the Country Life Reader: Second Book. Both books featured functional materials from adult's daily lives:

"This is dirty and ugly. The house needs paint. The porch is falling down. A lazy, shiftless family lives here."
"How do you know that?"
"I know it from the house. Lazy, shiftless people live in dirty, ugly homes."
From Country Life Readers by Cora Wilson Stewart (1915)

"Dear Friends," she wrote on the last page of the first reader. "This little book was written especially for the dear boys and girls of the moonlight schools, not the youngest, perhaps, but the finest school children on earth . . . The preparation of this book has been truly a labor of love. If you have received any benefit from it, the author is fully repaid. "Yours sincerely, Cora Wilson Stewart"

Alabama and Mississippi adopted Stewart's idea, and by 1916, adults in 18 states had been enrolled.

Cora Wilson Stewart was born in Farmers, KY and attended Morehead Normal School (later Morehead State University) and the University of Kentucky. Stewart began teaching in 1895 at age 20. During World War I she was concerned with Selective Service findings that some 700,000 men were totally illiterate, so she developed The Soldier's First Book to teach military recruits to read. She was the first woman president of the Kentucky Education Association and in 1926, she was named director of the National Illiteracy Crusade.

From 1929-1933 she was named chairperson of President Hoover's Commission on Illiteracy. She was active in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs as well. Stewart was also a delegate to the 1920 Democratic Convention in San Francisco, and was nominated for President of the United States.

Stewart's private life was not as successful as her public one. She spent her last years in a home for the elderly in Tryon, NC, alone, with only enough resources to live. She had been married three times -- twice to the same man. Her only child had died in infancy. Glaucoma had left her blind.

She died in December 1958 at age 83.


Sources: Statistics of Land-grant Colleges and Universities, by United States Office of Education, Office of Education, United States Govt. Print. Off., 1913
Cora Wilson Stewart and Kentucky's Moonlight Schools, by Yvonne Honeycutt Baldwin, University Press of Kentucky, 2006
www.womeninkentucky.com/site/education/c_stewart.html
www.kentuckystewarts.com/WilliamG/CoraWilsonStewartArticle.htm



appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Cora+Wilson+Stewart education+in+Appalachia Moonlight+Schools

Her schools earned plaudits from Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin Roosevelt. The Boys Industrial School motivated communities throughout the South to begin educating their young people in earnest, blazing a trail for the establishment of an agricultural and mechanical school in each of Georgia’s congressional districts. As a result of her 40 years of work in education, Martha Berry(1866-1942)---the Sunday Lady of Possum Trot--- is among Georgia's most prominent women of the first half of the 20th century.

In the 1890's, the young Berry had come back home to Floyd County from a finishing school in Boston. She often spent time reading and writing in an old log cabin on her family’s property. One Sunday, goes the story, she noticed that mountain children were peeking in to watch her. Inviting them in, she told them Bible stories. Week after week, more children and even adults came to listen to the Sunday Lady. Berry was taken with the bright youngsters, who had virtually no chance of obtaining an education. In 1900 she opened a small Sunday School in the old Possum Trot church near Lavender Mountain, painting scriptures on the walls to compensate for the lack of Bibles.

Soon she came to believe that these children needed a live-in school, not just a few hours of classes a week. But the state was poor, and mountain conditions made schools hard to maintain. So in January 1902, Berry, who came from an affluent plantation family, dedicated her family inheritance, 83 acres of land near Rome, GA, to be the site for The Boys Industrial School. The county supplied her one teacher for five months. Berry gave of her own money, and Elizabeth Brewster, a Stanford graduate and friend of Berry’s, worked with her for the first four years to help raise additional funds.

Students at the Boys' Industrial School stand in front of an early dairy barn.

The students---there were 5 to begin with---did pay a nominal $50 yearly for boarding, but mainly earned their way by running a self-supporting farm and doing construction work. The first structure the students constructed, a two-story building with attached dormitory, cost $5,000.

Berry inspired fierce love & loyalty from her students. When one of her young charges from the early years died, his parents marked his tombstone: "He was faithful unto death; by request of Martha Berry." She named the gate leading to the campus The Gate of Opportunity and believed that every building on the site should have a spire, "to keep people looking up." And look up they did. One of the five original students at the Boys’ school subsequently graduated at the head of his class from the University of Georgia.

Martha Berry traveled widely, seeking support for her schools, and became an accomplished fund raiser. Among the largest donors were Andrew Carnegie and, later, Henry Ford. President Theodore Roosevelt, who held a dinner in the White House to raise money, encouraged her to build a girls school as well.

On Thanksgiving Day 1909, Berry did open a girls’ school, with a dormitory built by the boys. Early classes aimed to teach everything connected with homemaking, such as sewing, nursing, and gardening. In 1926, the complex became a junior college, and in 1932, Berry College, a four-year college.

And the original Possum Trot church building? Three rustic school rooms were added in the 1930s, and the grammar grades were moved there from the log-cabin area on the main campus. Today the building is used for staff housing at Berry College. The college has continued its founder's focus on providing students with a comprehensive education of the head, the heart and the hands. Her motto still endures: "Not to be ministered unto, but to minister."


sources: http://ngeorgia.com/ang/Martha_Berry
www.berry.edu/oakhill/aboutmarthaberry.asp
www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2621&hl=y
www.christianitytoday.com/workplace/articles/ourhighcalling/ladypossumtrot.html
UNIQUE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT PUT TO THE TEST AT POSSUM TROT; Miss Martha Berry's Industrial School for Country Boys in Georgia and Its Possibilities., NY Times, April 23, 1911, Magazine Section, Page SM9
www.gawomen.org/honorees/long/berrym_long.htm



appalachia appalachian+history appalchian+mountains+history Berry+College Boys+Industrial+School education+in+Appalachia Martha+Berry Rome+Ga