Appalachian History

When asked what brought him to this community, Joe Raines said the Lord had sent him here as a pest on the Maynors and Williames for their meanness. That is the only reason Joe ever gave for coming to Cirtsville, WV. However, he came, and once here, he proceeded to make the most of the generosity of the people of the community.

He established a circuit of enough homes that he would spend a night with so it took him two weeks for him to cover his route. If Joe was delayed in making his rounds, the people became worried about him and began to inquire about his whereabouts.

Joe liked to fish and spent many hours fishing in Paint Creek. Next to Dr. Billy Feazell, Joe was said to be the best fisherman to ever fish in Paint Creek. After fishing all day Joe would take his string of fish to the home he was going to spend the night with. He would dress them and give them to the cook to fry for supper.

Cirtsville, WV. No date. Collection of Carol Sue (Lively) Beavers.

Joe was always welcome whether he had fish or not. He was not a lazy man and always had some kind of project underway, but it was usually something that was of no benefit to him or anyone else. His first project in the community was a school. There was a small building at the foot of Spruce Mountain that was vacant and Joe took it over for his school. Some of the people paid a small fee and enrolled their children in Joe's school. A few of them learned to read and write and a little arithmetic. Joe's school lasted two months. All his pupils were tired of school and quit going, so the Raines School closed.

Joe was the slowest man I ever saw. The method used to speed up someone who was dragging behind was to say: "Come on, you are as slow as Joe Raines."

Another project Joe tried that was hard work and very little profit was to gather up surplus from the gardens and haul it to Mount Hope and sell it. Then he would take the money he received for the products and buy such items as soda, soap, matches, and other things that the farmers needed and bring them back and sell them to the people who had given him the garden products.

One summer he used a wheelbarrow to transport his products. Another summer he used a small wagon which he pulled himself. Each year in April he would leave Cirtsville and go to Sandlick and spend a month with the Sandlick people, but he would return to Paint Creek by May 1.

Another visit that Joe made every summer was to the Tollison Stover home. This place was on Lick Run of Coal River. The route traveled was to go to the top of Spruce Mountain, then take a footpath along the Lick Run ridge. It was a good half day's journey for any man, and at the speed that Joe traveled, it took most of the day.

So on this occasion Joe started early in the morning, and it was late afternoon before he arrived. He was tired and hungry. The girls of the family were good cooks and they were all glad to see Joe again. They prepared a good supper for him. Among the things that they had were biscuits, butter, and honey. That was Joe's favorite food. Joe just could not quit eating honey and hot biscuits, so he overate. A short time after supper he began to feel pain in his stomach. Joe's remedy for all ills was Japanese oil [ed- this is the liquid portion remaining after the separation of menthol from Japanese peppermint oil]. He is the only man I ever knew that could drink Japanese oil full strength from the bottle. Joe took several swigs of Japanese oil but it did not help.

The pains continued to get more severe so Joe decided to go to a higher power. Joe went to prayer and his prayer was: "O Lord, I need your help. If you don't help me Lord, I am going to die, Lord, I know you can help me. I know you have the power to help me but the H--- of it is, will you." Joe's prayer was answered. He recovered from the honey colic but from that time on, he put a limit on the amount of honey he consumed.

Joe stayed with the people of Cirtsville until he became too feeble to make his rounds and he was taken to the poor house at Shady Spring where he died. He made his boast that he lived in Cirtsville for 40 years, and had as much to eat and was as well dressed as anyone else, and had never done any useful work.


Okey R. Stover
Upper Paint Creek, WV
b. 1895
online at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ggracie/okey16.html

In that back country in the 1870's money was very scarce. Just how scarce we people of this day can hardly realize. Most trade in the store was exchange of goods for farm produce - eggs, butter, poultry, hides, feathers, ginseng, yellow root, etc. In order to get some real money Father went to the county seat, Sandy Hook (then called Martinsburg), and bid in a pauper.

The county had no poor farm those days and so the county officials let the paupers out to live at the homes of whoever of responsibility made the lowest bid for the pauper's keep. I do not remember the amount Father was to receive for keeping this pauper but it was pitifully small.

The pauper's name was Steve Hacker. He was of fine physique, about 6 feet tall and muscular. He had a reputation of being a bully in the vicinity where he had lived, but had had an accident which left him paralyzed from his waist down. Having no one or property to support him, and not being able to work, he was adjudged a pauper.

At the time he came to us he was maybe 30 years old and a handsome man – black hair and eyes and dark complexion.

Though for a time we got along very well with Mr. Hacker, his having lived an active life up to his accident, the quiet of his confinement to his bed and chair palled on him, so naturally he wanted out and was restless and cross toward us children when he didn't get out. When helped to his feet he could stand and with a crutch and a cane - sometimes two crutches - he could walk a little by dragging his feet.

To get him outside took someone's time, which was not always convenient, and when out he seemed to try to get in some situation that would require help, and then got angry if the help was slow in coming. This did not help matters any.

One day because help was slower than he wanted it in coming he threw his heavy cane with an iron tip at brother Jack, but Jack was alert and dodged it. Jane and I soon learned to keep out of his reach, for he would strike our heads with his knuckles or cane when Father and Mother were not present.

One day the family left Jane and me with Mr. Hacker and went to the cornfield to work - a very unsafe thing to do. We played around out of his reach until about the middle of the forenoon, when in some way Mr. Hacker managed to get on his feet and reach his crutches, and drag out to the yard gate, and through it and on a few steps to the little creek that ran by, and out to the deepest place, and then deliberately fell backward in the water and called to us to call the folks to come and get him out. Jane went and called them and Jack and Morgan Brickey came and lifted him up and helped him to the house and dressed him in dry clothes.

The next year one of our neighbors bid Mr. Hacker in, and he remained in our neighborhood until his death several years later. He became a changed man and left a neighborhood of friends when he died. What a pity that men like that cannot, or could not then, have work that they could use their physical and mental energy.


The Journal of William Franklin Mason
(b 1872, Horton Flats, Elliott County, KY)
Online at http://files.usgwarchives.net/ky/elliott/mason/mason29.txt

We need to be less aware of the picturesque, amusing or distressing differences, and more keenly conscious of the kinship of the mountain people with their kind elsewhere and everywhere. Otherwise we shall bring to noble effort in the mountains a certain disabling attitude that is fatal to success.

And so over against the types we find in the pages of Craddock, Fox, Kephart, and the rest, let us set the mountain people as they are related to the civilization of which they are a part. I therefore urge upon your attention the fact that they are not more poverty-stricken, nor more lawless and violent, nor more unorganizable than the democratic mass in rural North Carolina.

In the first place and quite contrary to popular notions, our mountains are not a region of widespread poverty. In per capita rural wealth Alleghany is the richest county in North Carolina. Among our 100 counties, five highland countines, Alleghany, Buncombe, Ashe, Henderson and Watauga, rank 1st, 5th, 6th, 13th and 14th in the order named, in the per capita farm wealth of country populations; and two more, Yancey and Transylvania, are just below the state average in this particular. The people of these counties are not poor, as country wealth is reckoned in North Carolina. They dwell in a land of vegetables and fruits, grain crops, hay and forage, flocks and herds. It is a land of overflowing abundance.

A view of West Jefferson, NC circa 1920.

It is not easy for such people to feel that they are fit subjects for missionary school enterprises. As a matter of fact, they need our money far less than they need appreciative understanding and homebred leadership. Their wealth is greater than their willingness to convert it into social advantages. They need to be shown how to realize the possibilities of their own soils and souls. Mountain civilization, like every other, will rise to higher levels when the people themselves tug at their own bootstraps; and there is no other way.

It is true that three of the poorest counties in the state in per capita country wealth are Graham, Cherokee, and Swain---counties set against the steeps of the Great Smokies. They rank in this particular 92nd, 94th, and 96th respectively; but their poverty is duplicated by that of Moore, Brunswick, Carteret and Dare---four counties in our coastal plain. The rank of these eastern counties is 93rd, 95th, 97th, and 98th in the order named. The two poorest counties in North Carolina in per capita farm wealth are in the tidewater region, not in the mountains.

Approaching the poverty of our mountain people from another angle, let us consider indoor pauperism in 11 mountain counties that maintain county homes or poor houses. The 1910 census discloses an average rate for the United States of 190 almshouse paupers per 100,000 inhabitants. In North Carolina the rate was 96; in these 11 highland counties it was only 79. Six of the mountain counties make a far better showing than the state at large. Buncombe with a rate of 125 and Watauga with a rate of 139, the two highest rates in the region, make a better showing than all the North Atlantic and New England states, where indoor pauper rates range from 153 in New Jersey to 447 in Massachusetts.

But we may make still another and better approach to the subject of poverty in our mountains by examining the outside pauper rates; better, because outside help is less repugnant to the feelings than residence in the poor house. In 1914 the state rate for outside pauperism was 234 per 100,000 inhabitants. In 12 highland counties the average rate was 205. Seven of the counties have rates far smaller than the state average, ranging from 35 in Mitchell to 184 in Cherokee; three are just below state average; and only two, Buncombe and Clay, are near the bottom.

It ought to be clear that poverty in the mountains of North Carolina is actually and relatively less than elsewhere in the state. Here both indoor and outside paupers in 12 counties in 1914 numbered only 559 in a population of 209,000 souls.


---excerpt from “Our Carolina Highlanders,” by E.C. Branson, professor of Rural Economics and Sociology, University of North Carolina, in the July 1916 UNC Extension Bureau Circular No. 2
www.archive.org/details/ourcarolinahighl00bran

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