Appalachian History

It took the individual effort of each Jarvis, mother and daughter, over two generations to forge the Mother’s Day we recognize today. And it's a story with a twist, so buckle up!

Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, of Grafton WV, had attempted starting a series of Mothers' Day Work Clubs in Webster, Grafton, Fetterman, Pruntytown, and Philippi in 1858 to improve sanitation. She continued to organize women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides.

In the summer of 1865, Jarvis organized a Mothers' Friendship Day at the courthouse in Pruntytown to bring together soldiers and neighbors of all political beliefs. The goal was to work in conjunction with local doctors to provide health care to war veterans plagued by diseases such dysentery, small pox, and tuberculosis.

The event was a great success despite the fear of many that it would erupt in violence. Mothers' Friendship Day was an annual event for several years.

Ann Jarvis' daughter, Anna Jarvis, would of course have known of her mother's work. Much later, this second Jarvis started her own crusade to found a memorial day for women.

After her husband’s death in 1902, Ann moved to Philadelphia to live with her son Claude and daughters Anna and Lillian. Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis died in Bala-Cynwyd, west of Philadelphia, on May 9, 1905 at the age of 72.

Anna led a small tribute to her mother at St. Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church back in Grafton, where her Mother had spent 25 years teaching Sunday School, on May 12, 1907. Then on May 10, 1908, the first official Mother's Day celebration took place at both that church and also at the Wanamaker Store Auditorium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

St. Andrew's Methodist Episcopal Church Sunday School Room, 1911, Grafton, WV. Oval portraits on wall show Ann Jarvis (left) and Anna Jarvis (right).

John Wanamaker was one of the founders of today's modern day department store.  He no doubt recognized the profit possibilities of a potentially national event that could generate lots of gift sales, and he had the finances to push it. And as a former U.S. postmaster general, he had the political weight to advance it.

That same year, Elmer Burkett, a U.S. Senator from Nebraska, proposed making Mother's Day a national holiday at the request of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). The proposal was defeated, but by 1909 forty-six states, as well as parts of Canada and Mexico, were holding Mother's Day services.

Anna Jarvis devoted herself full time to the creation of Mother's Day, endlessly petitioning state governments, business leaders, women groups, churches and other institutions and organizations.  She did have her ticks: she incorporated herself as the Mother’s Day International Association, and claimed copyright on the second Sunday of May.

She finally convinced the World's Sunday School Association, a key influence over state legislators and Congress, to back her. In 1912 West Virginia became the first state to officially recognize Mother's Day, and in 1914 Woodrow Wilson signed it into national observance, declaring the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day.

By the 1920s, Anna Jarvis had become soured on the holiday’s commercialization. She and her sister Ellsinore ultimately spent themselves into poverty campaigning against the holiday.

In 1943, the 79 year old Jarvis, partially deaf and blind, entered a sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania. For reasons unrecorded, the Florists' Exchange, a trade association, picked up some of her bills, unbeknownst to her. And even after she told a reporter she was sorry she ever started the whole thing, she received thousands of Mother's Day cards each May until she died, in 1948.
 
"A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world,” she is quoted as saying in her New York Times obituary. “And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment!"

She never married and was never a mother.

 
Sources: www.wvculture.org/hiStory/jarvis.html
www.smithsonianmag.com/issues/2007/may/last-mothers.php
www.mothersdaycentral.com/about-mothersday/history/
www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070513/NEWS/705130403/1036


Ann+Maria+Jarvis Anna+Jarvis Mother's+Day appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Grafton+WV

Sunday Magazine--St. Louis Post Dispatch--May 9, 1926

OLD MAN WRIGHT RIDES INTO EXILE
So as to Git Away From Trouble, This Settler of the Hills--Fighter and Killer--Sits Astride His Mare and Goes Slowly Down to the Valleys.
By HARRY R. BURKE
Of the Post-Dispatch Staff

Pikeville, KY---Old Man Lige Wright packed his traps in the saddlebags and gingerly pulled himself across the back of his good bay mare. He rode out then through Osborn Gap and into Virginia slowly. For Old Man Lige Wright was doing the hardest thing he had ever done. He was running away from trouble.

Back of him was a lifetime of warfare. And ELIJAH WRIGHT was essentially a man of peace. He feared no one. He told no lies. And he paid his debts. There were notches on his gun--speaking figuratively--but that was Lige Wright's misfortune. The luckiest unlucky man that ever lived! Twice he had been condemned to spend his life in the penitentiary.

Once he had been sentenced to hang by the neck until he was dead. And in Virginia--whither now he was going--Elijah Wright had served to the full a life sentence for murder. For in the Commonwealth of Virginia, eighteen years in prison is, constructively, a life term. His debt to the Commonwealth had been paid in full.

Four years ago at the door of the penitentiary, the Commonwealth of Virginia had given Elijah Wright a suit of clothes and a bill and sent him out to face life's battle. And he had gone back to his native Kentucky hills to begin once again. There trouble had come upon him--trouble that was not of his own seeking, though the moon¬shine liquor that brought it on had been.

And now he was going into voluntary exile. It was not that he was afraid. In the old man's face you could read the fearlessness of an eagle. There was no man lived who could say that Old Man Lige Wright was afraid. He had leaped too often to meet death face to face.

His right hand, which gingerly held the reins as the bay mare ambled through the gap, was still stiff from a deep cut between forefinger and the stub of what at one time had been his thumb. This cut was a mark left by the butcher knife when he seized it as his enemy lunged that night last March.

And as he rode into exile Old Man Lige Wright thanked God that those enemies from behind had knocked him senseless with his own gun--taken while he wasn't look¬ing from his saddlebags, wounding him so sorely that he rode even now in a dizzy haze and sometimes saw double as images danced before his eyes. He thanked God that the blow had prevented him from seizing that murderous knife and turning it against the wielder.

Read the full story here


Old+Man+Lige+Wright Pikeville+KY Dickinson+County+VA appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Lillian Exum Clement was nominated as a Democratic candidate for North Carolina's House of Representatives two months before the 19th Amendment, granting the vote to women, was ratified in August 1920. The vote over her two male opponents in the primary was an astounding 10,368 to 41. She won the general election in November and, on January 5, 1921, took her seat in Raleigh, becoming the first woman in the South to hold legislative office.

"I was afraid at first that the men would oppose me because I am a woman," she told The Raleigh News & Observer on her first day in office, "but I don't feel that way now. I have always worked with men, and I know them as they are. I have no false illusions or fears of them. You may quote me as saying 'I am definitely for them.'"

Others soon followed. In Tennessee, in a special election on January 25, 1921, Anna Lee Worley was selected to succeed her husband. In 1922 Kentucky gained female legislators. In North Carolina, the next women to serve were Julia Alexander and Carrie McLean, both of Charlotte, in 1925 and 1927 respectively.

Exum, as she was called, was born in Black Mountain, NC, the sixth of seven high-achieving children of George Washington Clement and Sara Elizabeth Barnett. Exum is a coastal North Carolina town where the teenaged George had gone to work supervising railroad crews before finding his way to Black Mountain. Exum's family moved to Biltmore after her father procured a job as foreman on the Vanderbilt estate. The Clement girls benefited from the support of one of the leading women of that era, Edith Vanderbilt.

Encouraged by her, Exum enrolled in the newly established Asheville Business School. She came to realize she could compete with the male students intellectually, and at age 14, went to work in the Buncombe County sheriff’s office while studying law at night. In February 1916 she passed the bar exam with top grades, and the next year hung out her shingle in the Law Building. She was the first North Carolina lawyer to practice without a male partner.

As a legislator (addressed by fellow solons as “Brother Exum”) she introduced seventeen bills including the measure for the secret ballot, the “pure milk bill” requiring tuberculin testing of herds, and a reduction in the abandonment period required for divorce from ten to five years.

Nineteenth century engraving of the State Capitol Building by J. & F. Tallis of London and New York.

She sponsored a bill to have the state assume control of a home for unwed mothers, garnering opposition (she was pelted with eggs and vegetables while speaking in its behalf in Asheville). Sixteen of her bills passed. Her bill proposing private voting booths for elections was defeated (some argued that other legislators opposed the bill because it would be impossible to bribe or intimidate voters if you couldn't see them cast their ballots).

In the summer of 1921 she married newspaperman E. Eller Stafford, necessitating a special bill to change her name in the short session. She did not seek reelection. At age thirty-one she died of pneumonia and was buried in Riverside Cemetery.


Sources:
“Brother Exum Takes Her Seat,” Asheville Citizen-Times, May 8, 1960, reprinted in Jack
Discovering North Carolina: A Tar Heel Reader , Claiborne and William Price, eds., 1991
Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, V, 419--sketch by Alice
R. Cotten, William S. Powell, ed.
Women State and Territorial Legislators, 1895-1995: A State-by-State
Analysis, with Rosters of 6,000 Women, by Elizabeth M. Cox, 1996
A Popular History of Western North Carolina: Mountains, Heroes, Hootnoggers, by Rob Neufeld, The History Press, 2007


Lillian+Exum+Clement Brother+Exum North+Carolina+politics Asheville+NC Biltmore appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history appalachia

"Bullets and ballots are not companions;" said Lizzie French in a famous 1912 speech to the Tenneesee Bar Association, "but ballots in the hands of people are supposed to be a substitute for bullets in the hands of hired agents...Thanks be to God that in giving women the crown of motherhood he made her the giver not the taker of life. Woman has no greater claim to the rights of the ballot than she is a producer not a destroyer of life."

Elizabeth Crozier French, born this date in 1851, was at the time the recently elected president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association, Inc. When the first woman in Tennessee history to address the organization took the podium, she delivered what many scholars believe today was one of her greatest messages stating her position on the state’s law forbidding women from voting. French was never one to sit still, and knew her best strategy as president of the state's suffrage organization would be to take her message straight to the Tennessee Bar Association.

As the daughter of an attorney and an out-spoken leader in the women's movement, French wasn't at all intimidated by the men seated in front of her. Her speech was put into the record of the Tennessee Bar Association as an "Address on Women’s Rights" and became a much quoted theme in the South's growing number of suffrage groups. French continued her work in Knoxville founding and serving as president of the Knoxville Equal Suffrage Society and becoming a leading member of the National Women's Party.

From this speech forward, Crozier began her all-out fight to see that the Susan B. Anthony Amendment - now more than 30 years old and regarded as a dead piece of legislation in Congress - was added to the United States Constitution.

The bill and the labors of women like Lizzie Crozier French were having some impact on women's rights in America. Some states had begun giving women greater control over their property, a few had made divorce easier for those in abusive relationships, and women were slowly gaining access to the courts in their ability to sue for damages.

Finally on August 25, 1919, Tennessee certified the ratification becoming the 36th state and making the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution the law of the land giving women the right to vote.

Lizzie C. French and the Suffragists across America cheered passage of the 19th Amendment, and French joined women across Tennessee in casting their first votes that following November. In addition, French went on to help found the Knoxville chapter of the League of Women Voters.

Lizzie C. French remained an active member of the Knoxville community and made a bid for City Council in 1923, but was defeated. Three years later the 75-year-old Lizzie C. French traveled to Washington, D.C. to help the National Women’s Party furnish a room in honor of the Tennessee suffragists and also secure introduction of a bill in Congress to benefit working women in America. On May 14, 1926, while still in Washington, D.C., the Tennessean quietly passed away.

Her body was returned to her hometown in Knoxville where she was laid to rest in the City’s Old Gray Cemetery – leaving behind a legacy that is still felt to this day.


Source: www.tennesseehistory.com/class/LizzieCroz.htm


Lizzie+French Tennessee+Equal+Suffrage+Association Knoxville+TN suffragists appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

"In this county Godfrey L. Cabot of Boston, MA has the largest carbon factory in the world, utilizing natural gas for the purpose," stated the WV Geological Survey about Calhoun County in 1911. "The product is wagoned to Creston where it is loaded on boats and shipped down the Little Kanawha River to railway connection at Owensport, the southern terminus of the Little Kanawha R.R. Mr. Cabot has another factory located at Creston in Wirt County."

The most widely used black pigment, carbon black is virtually pure carbon, made from the incomplete combustion of petrochemical oils of gases. It is widely used even today as a filler in the rubber industry and as a UV stabilizer in plastics. Distinct from soot, this substance, sometimes called lamp black, has been around for a long time. Prehistoric cave dwellers used it to draw animals on cave walls, and the Egyptian pharaohs used it as a pigment. Cabot and his brother Samuel saw similar applications for it.

The Cabot brothers didn’t begin their business in West Virginia. They first built a plant in Buffalo Mills, PA, that used natural gas to produce carbon black in 1882, and in 1884 Godfrey patented a carbon black production process that used stationary plates and rotating burners. In 1887 Godfrey bought out Samuel's interest in the business.

At about this time, a glut developed in the carbon black market; at the same time, new uses were being found for natural gas, which was the raw material for carbon black. Cabot's response was to purchase gas leases and drill on the sites, drilling his first successful gas well in Saxonburg, PA, in 1888. He continued, despite the glut, to buy up small carbon black factories as well, and by 1897 he was probably the largest producer in the industry.

In 1898, with the exhaustion of the Pennsylvania gas fields, Cabot moved his operation to West Virginia, where he acquired oil and gas leases, which he drilled successfully. By 1900 the new carbon factory---Cabot Station, in Grantsville---employed twelve men paid from $1.25 to $2 a day. The plant was producing 800 pounds of carbon black a day when it first opened, but that quickly increased to 1,400 pounds. Cabot continued to add gas sites in West Virginia, and built a natural gasoline extraction plant near Elizabeth, West Virginia, in 1914.

While the advent and spread of high-speed presses and similar applications greatly expanded Cabot's business, World War I demonstrated the potential for carbon black in the modern economy. It had been known for a while that carbon black could inhibit damage to materials caused by the sun; a few years before that war, the India Rubber Gutta-Percha and Telegraph Works Co. of Silvertown, England, began to manufacture automobile tires using carbon black as a stabilizing or reinforcing agent.

During World War I the United States began using carbon black, and its superior properties became evident in improved tread wear and lower rates of tire failure. After the war, its use spread throughout the tire industry, providing a tremendous burst of growth to suppliers.

By the early 1920s, Cabot’s locus of carbon black production was shifted out of West Virginia, first, unsuccessfully, to Louisiana, and then to Texas. Meantime Cabot’s original factory in Grantsville—Cabot Station—was shifted to a compressor or pump station for natural gas by the Hope Natural Gas Company, which had purchased the property. Today the spot of the former world’s largest carbon factory in Calhoun County, WV is home to Cabot Recycling Center.

Sources: www.hurherald.com/cgi-bin/db_scripts/articles?Action=user_view&db=hurheral_articles&id=13737
www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/24/Cabot-Corporation.html
West Virginia Geological Survey: Wirt, Roane and Calhoun Counties, by Ray
Vernon Hennen, W. J. Latimer, F. N. Meeker, 1911, Acme Publishing Co., p. 27


appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Cabot+Station Calhoun+County+WV carbon+black+factory Godfrey+L.+Cabot Grantsville+WV lamp+black

Long before the well-endowed Hollywood starlet of the 1950's, there was a Dagmar car, built from 1922-1926 in Hagerstown, MD by the M. P. Möller Motor Car Company. This luxury sedan was named for the one of Dr. Mathias P. Möller’s daughters. The make's emblem was a pipe organ. The Danish industrialist by that point in his business career had made his first fortune manufacturing the instrument.  His organ company, in business from 1875 till 1992, was the world's largest builder of pipe organs for over three-quarters of a century.

Only a few hundred Dagmars were built over the course of six years at prices upwards of $6,000.00. By comparison, the autos produced by Ford and Chevrolet during the same era sold for approximately $500.00. Dagmar models included the Petite, which soon became known as the "Baby Dagmar." One of the most unusual features was its all-brass trim, instead of the more usual nickel.

In 1924, Möller presented a Dagmar to Ruth Malcomson, of Philadelphia, who won the Miss America title that year. Curvaceous fenders appeared on the Dagmar for the first time in the 1925 line---coincidence? Even so, Dagmar sales skidded after that high point; the last car Dagmar ever built was for Mr. Möller himself. It was an enormous 7-passenger limo that was shipped back to his native Denmark for his personal use.

With the 1923 purchase of a 250,000 square foot Hagerstown building originally built for the Crawford Bicycle Company in 1891, Möller entered the field of producing taxicabs and shifted the focus away from luxury cars. Over the course of the ensuing years, more than a dozen models of taxis and trucks were built. The taxi make was dependent on the design and specification of the large taxi companies that sub-contracted the manufacturing to Möller. The best known of his taxicab lines was the Luxor; others included the Blue Light, Super Paramount, Astor, Five-Boro and Twentieth Century.

These names were either chosen for the operating company, as with Five Boro, or simply because the promoters thought a stylish new name would increase sales. Möller vehicles became commonplace on the streets of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and numerous other cities. Growth of the car works reached a peak in 1927 with 125 taxis rolling out of the Hagerstown facility each week.

The only goods vehicle made by the Möller company was the Elysee panel delivery (produced from 1929-1932).  They were made in four models, the Band Box, Fifth Avenue, Courier and the Mercury. These were stylish vehicles intended for the delivery of high-class goods to wealthy homes.

During the early 20th century the Möller name in the auto industry truly commanded respect as being builders of upper end motor cars both private and public. Taxicabs and trucks remained the thrust of the firm until the death of Dr. Möller in 1937 at which point the company was closed.
 
Sources: www.coachbuilt.com/bui/w/woonsocket/woonsocket.htm
www.autopasion18.com/HISTORIA-MOLLER.htm
www.coachbuilt.com/bui/m/moller_mp/moller_mp.htm


M.+P.+Möller+Motor+Car+Company luxury+cars the+Dagmar Mathias+P.+Möller Hagerstown+MD Ruth+Malcomson appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history
 

It was the greatest disaster ever known to this Western Virginia mountain village.

On May 2, 1929, the unusually violent storm slammed into the little community of Rye Cove, VA in the mountains of Scott County.

During the storm a tornado directly struck the local two-story schoolhouse, with over 150 children and teachers inside. The building was completely leveled, and the debris caught fire from an overturned stove. Thirteen were killed. The dozens of injured were rushed by special train to the hospital in Bristol.

A. P. Carter, of the famous Carter Family, was in the next valley on the day of the storm. He rushed to Rye Cove to help with the rescue efforts. He was touched by the horror of what he saw and soon composed "The Cyclone of Rye Cove." The Carter Family recorded the song that same year for RCA Victor.

"The Cyclone of Rye Cove"

Oh, give us a home far beyond the blue sky,
Where storms and cyclones are unknown,
And there by life's strand, we'll clasp with our glad hands
God's children in a heavenly home.

Oh, listen today in a story I tell,
In sadness and tear dimmed eye,
Of a dreadful cyclone that came this way,
And it blew our schoolhouse away.

CHORUS:
Rye Cove, (Rye Cove), Rye Cove, (Rye Cove),
The place of my childhood and home,
Where in life's early morn I once loved to roam,
But now it's so silent and lone.

When the cyclone appeared, it darkened the air,
And the lightning flashed over the sky,
And the children all cried, "Don't take us away,
And spare us to go back home."

There were mothers so dear and fathers the same,
That came to this horrible scene,
Searching and crying, each found her own child,
Dying on a pillow of stone

Related posts: "You've been fooling me baby"
"It was daytime, but the sky was as dark as night"

sources: www.blueridgeinstitute.org/ballads/audio.html
scott.k12.va.us/rci/Transcript.htm


cyclone+of+Rye+Cove Rye+Cove+Va Carter+Family AP+Carter appalachia appalachian+mountains+history appalachian+history

The pack was expensive at 20 cents, but you got the first menthol-infused cigarette, ancestor to "Kools," "Salem" and others. Why was it called "Spuds?"

Lloyd "Spud" Hughes of Mingo Junction, OH gets the credit for introducing Americans to menthol cool smoking. Hughes wasn't long out of high school and working as a cashier in a restaurant run by his father, when he came up with the idea of treating tobacco with menthol. The possibly apocryphal story is his mother insisted he inhale menthol crystals for his asthma. He soon noticed that when he stored his menthol and cigarettes in a tin container, the cigarette was pleasantly flavored. Mentholation furthermore acts as a mild anesthetic, numbs the throat to the harsh elements of tobacco smoke and thus allows a deeper and longer inhalation.

At first he just smoked the cigarettes himself. Later, he offered them to the railroad and mill workers who frequented his father's restaurant. He patented his process, which treated tobacco by spraying it with a solution of menthol, alcohol, and the oil of cassia, and in September 1925 helped form the Spud Cigarette Corporation, Wheeling, WV.

Walter B. Hilton, a prominent Wheeling real estate and insurance man was president, and Lloyd was secretary/treasurer. Spud Cigarettes were made for this small company in Wheeling at Factory 12, WV by the Bloch brothers, manufacturers of popular Mail Pouch Tobacco. Spud Hughes sold his premium priced cigarettes (20 for 20 cents) from his car, door-to-door, in the Ohio Valley.

It wasn’t long before Woodford Fitch Axton, a Kentucky colonel and part owner and president of The Axton-Fisher Tobacco Company of Louisville, Kentucky, took notice. The Axton-Fisher Tobacco Co. made Clown Cigarettes, a modestly successful regional brand first sold in 1920. Axton saw the potential of Spud Hughes' invention, and in May 1926 offered him $90,000 for the name and patent. Hughes accepted. Axton Fisher hired a New York advertising firm to promote Spuds nationally---less irritating and suitable for sore throats due to colds!--- and sold stock in the company for the first time to finance expansion. By 1932 Axton-Fisher had promoted Spud Cigarettes into the fifth best selling brand in the United States.

With competition from Brown and Williamson's menthols Penquin in 1931 and Kool in 1933 the price of SPUD was reduced to 15 cents a pack in 1933. In 1944 Philip Morris bought Axton Fisher Tobacco Company; they continued to manufacture Spud cigarettes for domestic sales until 1963.

And what became of Hughes? He went on a two year spending spree, blew the $90,000 on cars and airplanes, and spent much of the rest of his life trying to invent another unique cigarette.


sources: www.tobaccoteds.com/news_24-May-2006.html
www.historian.org/bysubject/tobacco3.htm
www.cigarettespedia.com/index.php/BrandSpud
Come Up to the Kool Taste: African American Upward Mobility and the Semiotics of Smoking Menthols
by Sarah S. Lochlann Jain, published in 'Public Culture' Spring 2003, 15 [2]
http://goodhealth.freeservers.com/SPUD1.html


Spud+Hughes menthol+cigarettes Mingo+Junction+OH Bloch+brothers +Woodford+Fitch+Axton Axton-Fisher+Tobacco+Company appalachia appalachian+mountains+history appalachian+history

In 1879, just 3 years after Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated the telephone, the Behrens brothers established West Viriginia’s first telephone line, connecting two of their grocery stores in Wheeling. A year later, on May 15, 1880, the city established one of the first telephone exchanges in the country. A switchboard was set up in the basement of the People's Bank to serve 25 subscribers. Wheeling's original telephone technology only allowed customers to make local calls. Subscribers couldn't place a call to nearby Pittsburgh until a long distance line was strung in 1883.

During the early 1880s, switchboards and lines were installed in Parkersburg, Moundsville, and Clarksburg. By the turn of the century, much of northern West Virginia had been linked to the major cities of surrounding states.

Telephone technology developed more slowly in southern West Virginia. Although Charleston and Huntington had telephone exchanges by the early 1880s, long distance service did not begin until 1897. To accommodate southern West Virginia's growing population and expanding industry, Charleston became the hub of the state's communication services in the early 1900s.

Below left: Late 19th and early 20th-century telephones, including the tombstone (rear left), battery box wall model (rear center), and Strowger dial phone (right front). This group of telephones shows the changing design of instruments from the late 19th through the early 20th century. Note that the earlier telephones have no dials. Dialing a number only became possible after automated equipment was developed to make connections originally handled by human operators.

Almost all telephone operators were women. But not all women could be operators. To be an operator, a woman had to be unmarried, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six. She had to look prim and proper, and have arms long enough to reach the top of the tall telephone switchboard. Much like many other American businesses at the turn of the century, telephone companies unfairly discriminated against people from certain ethnic groups and races. African American and Jewish women were not allowed to become operators.

Because women were generally discriminated against, operators' wages were low. And operators seldom got the respect they deserved. The typical operator earned about $7 per week -- a small salary even in 1900. She worked ten or eleven hours a day, six days a week. If necessary, she also worked nights and holidays. An operator who got married was forced to leave her job. To many early telephone users -- most of whom were wealthy -- the telephone operator was just another household servant.

Photograph of a female telephone operator at switchboard by traveling photographer Albert J. Ewing, likely taken in southern Ohio or West Virginia, ca. 1900-1910.

Still, the operator was the heart of the telephone system. She watched over a switchboard containing up to 200 phone lines, listening in with her clunky metal headset. Her main job was to plug callers' phone lines into the phone lines of the people they wanted to speak to. But she often acted as the town's information source, too. Operators were also expected to inform customers of election results, streetcar breakdowns, storms, train arrivals, and much more.

In 1900, the life of the rural operator was very different from her peers in the city. The telephone was a big hit with the farm families who could afford one. But there were rarely enough calls to tie a rural operator to her switchboard. To help pass the time, some women attached long cords to their headsets. That way, they could walk around their homes doing chores while they waited for the phone to ring. Rural operators enjoyed a lot of independence.


Sources: pbskids.org/wayback/tech1900/phone.html
www.wvculture.org/History/timetrl/ttmay.html


telephones West+Virginia+telephone+history telephone+operators appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

"CONGRESSMAN TOM HEFLIN'S TILT WITH WOMAN SUFFRAGE LEADER FEATURES BARBECUE"
Montgomery [AL] Daily, c. 1915

"Congressman Tom Heflin has returned to his home from Wetumpka, AL where he delivered the principal address before the crowd of several thousand gathered to participate in the big barbecue held there yesterday. The congressman is glad to be alive today, for he escaped 'whole' after having a tilt with a woman on the platform, and in the presence of that same several thousand persons. Mr. Heflin brought about a very keen situation, when he followed Mrs. Bossie O'Brien Hunley on the platform, and politely told the audience that he had not liked the speech of that lady.

"Just imagine a mere man, telling a lady to her face and before her own audience that her speech was not liked. Well, Tom Heflin did it, and got away with it. Mrs. Hundley, who is one of the suffrage leaders of the state, a very charming and a very smart woman had an important part on the program. She addressed the big audience on "women suffrage" and made an appeal that the vote he given to her sex.

"Mrs. Hundley was followed on the platform by Congressman Heflin, who is known through the state as one of the strongest anti-suffrage leaders. Mr. Heflin thinks that the woman's place is in the home, where she molds public opinion by her own sweetness of character and where she raises boys to be real men, and men who are capable of giving woman-hood every advantage and at the same time, keep her from mixing up in the mire of politics.

"Mrs. Hundley knew Mr. Heflin's views on this question, and she had at some previous time challenged him for a joint debate, but Mr. Heflin had evaded the meeting. While addresses were made by Mrs. G. H. Mathis, of Gadsden, who a month ago thrilled a Chicago audience with her rccountal of farm work in Alabama; Mrs. Thomas M. Owen; Mrs. P. L. Matthews, and Mrs. Hundley. The feature speech on the program was scheduled to be that of Congressman Tom Heflin. Mr. Heflin followed Mrs. Hundley and prefaced his remarks by saying that he had enjoyed the speeches of Mrs. Owen and Mrs. Mathis, but not enjoyed that of Mrs. Hundley, and he turned, and smiled at Mrs. Hundley.

"Mrs. Hundley bit her lips, she did not know what was coming and neither did any one else. Congressman Heflin continued and intimated that there were only a few suffrage seekers among the womanhood of Alabama and said that he had recently told a friend that he would be willing to leave the question to a vote of the women of Alabama and that if a majority of the women would show that they wanted the vote, he might waive his objections.

"He had reached this point when Mrs. Hundley interrupted and asked if the speaker would yield to a question. She did it too, in real parliamentarian manner, and Congressman Heflin, who had been interrupted time and again on the floor of congress in a like manner, but never before by a small wee voice coming from a woman, knew that he was in the middle of a bad fix, so he acquiesced and Mrs. Hundley said that surely he knew that his position was not practical and that it would be impossible to hold any such election of women and that the constitution did not provide in any way for a referendum, and that the suffrage people of Alahama wanted to have the vote given to them by the men of the state. Mr. Heflin in resuming his speech after the interruption, side-stepped Mrs. Hundley's remarks, told a witty story and extricated himself from the situation and went on with his address, but never again during his remarks did he mention woman suffrage."


source: http://snipurl.com/2617n


womens+suffrage Alabama+politicians Wetumpka+AL appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

The western Algonquin called it the 'Mooskingom,' and to the Narragansett tribe it was the 'Mooshingung' ---"water clear as an elk's eye." The Muskingum River, which empties into the mighty Ohio River from the furthest point in Columbiana County, is at 112 miles long the longest river lying wholly within Ohio. And the last remaining mill on the Muskingum River is the Stockport Mill in the town of the same name.

In 1839, G.W. Sanburn laid out Stockport next to Windsor Village. Later on, Stockport and Windsor Village merged to be called the Village of Stockport, named after a town in England by Postmaster Samuel Beswick. Stockport became one of the most important shipping and trading points on the Muskingum River between Zanesville and Marietta.

The first mill at this site was built in 1842 and operated only a few years before it burned. A second mill was built in 1849 and operated for 54 years until it too caught fire and burned to the ground, around 2 a.m. on July 1, 1903. In 1906, the Dover Brothers began construction of the current mill. A local boy, Fred James, stated that it was built "plenty sturdy," which was proved true enough when the 1913 flood took out many other mills on the Muskingum but left the Stockport Mill standing.

The mill was powered by two 40-inch Leffel turbines used for grinding. In 1908, the mill began fulfilling a contract to supply the village with electricity for street lights. On April 6, 1928, the Suburban Power Company was given the light contract and hydroelectric operation in the mill was shut down.

The Stockport Mill produced Gold Bond Pastry Flour, Pride of the Valley (bread) Flour, and it also ground feed for livestock. The Stockport Milling Company shipped its products by steam packet boat and over the Ohio & Little Kanawha Railroad before the era of all-weather roads. The mill also functioned as a community hub where local farmers obtained supplies and shared news.

In 1942, Fred James and Ray Devitt purchased the mill from the Dover heirs for $4,000. They then sold it to the Farm Bureau and it was operated as the Landmark Mill with Dow Kasler as the manager. The mill operation ceased in 1997 and today the refurbished building houses a bed & breakfast.

sources: www.stockportmill.com/history.htm
stockportohio.weebly.com/village-history.html
Christopher Gist's Journals with Historical, Geographical and Ethnological…by Christopher Gist, ed. William McCullough Darlington, 1893, J.R. Weldin & co.
Ohio historic marker: http://www.pbase.com/gshamilton/image/31450643


Stockport+OH Stockport+Mill Muskingum+River appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

'Hickory chickens,' or 'dry land fish,' don't have anything to do with chicken, fish or hickory. They are morel mushrooms and they’re in season right about now. Look for 3 varieties throughout Appalachia: morchella esculenta, which can be found under old apple or pear trees when the oak leaves are about mouse-ear size; morchella angusticeps ('fat morel'), which can be found under oak, beech or maple forests, when the serviceberry is in bloom; and morchella crassipes, found on swampy ground near jewelweed.

All favor damp soil and decaying logs, and if you hunt after a spring rain when the sun has warmed things up a bit you’ll likely be rewarded. Don't count on help from die-hard 'shroom hunters, however! Not only is the morel's flavor prized above all other mushrooms, but it's notoriously difficult to cultivate commercially. And so hunters are loath to share their fields lest others clean them out first.

Watch out for false morels. 'True' morels have caps that are completely attached to the stem--while false morels in the genus Verpa have caps that hang completely free, like a thimble placed on a pencil eraser. One of the verpas, Verpa bohemica, is known to be mildly poisonous to some people.

Batter dipped and fried up, nothing compares to the 'sponge mushroom's mild oyster flavor (hence the 'dry land fish' label). Some folks shun the batter, and saute them plain with butter and onion. They can be dried (never frozen!) for the off-season months (they need to be soaked in water for a few hours to reconstitute them). Or just use them dried: they can be turned into powder with a rolling pin to make a wonderful morel "spice" that can be added to sauces.

Related post: Land fishing for Molly Moochers

sources: Firefox 2, ed. Eliot Wigginton, Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1970
http://www.mushroomexpert.com/morchellaceae.html


hickory+chicken dry+land+fishing sponge+mushroon morels appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Baseball pitcher Charles Louis (“Deacon”) Phillippi, of Rural Retreat VA, was drafted into the National League by Louisville in 1898, and began his baseball career with that team on April 21, 1899. On May 29, 1899 he pitched a no-hitter against the Giants in only his seventh major league game. In 1900, he moved to the Pittsburgh Pirates, where he spent the rest of his baseball career, through his final game on August 13, 1911.

His claim to fame is that he won the first game of the first World Series in 1903 against Boston’s Cy Young. Deacon is considered one of the greatest control artists of all times, averaging just 1.25 walks per inning per nine innings over his career. This record that has stood for over a century, despite the likes of Sandy Koufax, Nolan Ryan and Walter Johnson.

Phillippi was born on May 23, 1872, a son of Andrew Jackson & Margaret Jane (Hackler) Phillippi. Sometime around March 1875, the family left Wythe County and moved to Spink County, SD, near the town of Athol, where young Charles grew to manhood. His friends called him Charlie, but he got the "Deacon" nickname due to his humility and easy demeanor.

In 1896, he headed to Minnesota to play semi-pro ball for a team in Mankato. The next year he hooked up with Minneapolis of the Western League, where he pitched for two seasons, in the second of which he posted a record of 21-19. Then he got his chance in 1898 when he was drafted by Louisville. Deacon left his wife Ella and 3 children right around this time. Ella claimed she threw him out when he informed her he was going to become a Pro baseball player, which in those days was akin to joining the circus.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: Phillippi was 186-108 lifetime with a 2.88 ERA. He had five seasons with 20 or more wins. He completed 242 of the 288 games he started over his career, while triking out 929. He had his best ERA year in 1902 when he posted a 2.05 mark and a 20-9 record. Over a 4 year period (1900-1903), he pitched 1136.1 innings. He is near the top of the team's ALL-TIME pitching list in Innings Pitched, Wins, Strikeouts, Shutouts, and Completed Games.

BEST YEAR: In 1903, he was 24-7 with a 2.43 ERA. He struck out 123, only walked 29, and gave up just 265 hits in 289 innings.

The World Series, as we know it today, was first played on October 1, 1903 between the National League Pittsburgh Pirates and the American League Boston Pilgrims at the old Huntington Avenue Ballpark in Boston. It was a 9 game series, which Boston won 5 games to 3. Star players in the series included Pittsburgh's Honus Wagner and Deacon Phillippi and Boston's Cy Young.

Phillippi pitched in five of Pittsburgh's eight World Series games against the Boston Pilgrims. He beat Cy Young in the first and third games. He beat Bill Dinneen in the fourth game. He lost to Bill Dinneen in the eight game, 3-0. Each player on the winning Boston Team received $ 1, 182.00. Because the Pirates owner willingly gave up his gate receipts, each player for the Pirates received $ 1,316.25. The price of a ticket was $ 1.50, and there were 16, 242 in attendance for the first game.

After the 1903 World Series, Deacon not only received his salary of $ 1,316.25, but he also received ten shares in the Pittsburgh Pirates.

In the old Federal League during 1912 & 1913, Deacon managed the Pittsburgh Team named the "Filipinos", named so after the Deacon himself. But the poorly organized and financed league collapsed, mainly because of the failure of the NY franchise to attract fans.


sources: www.serve.com/smythgen/Deacon/Deacon.htm
www.southdakotamagazine.com/editors_notebook.php?p=458
baseballcrank.com/archives2/2003/10/baseballpop_cul.php
www.baseball-reference.com/p/phillde01.shtml


Deacon+Phillippi Rural+Retreat+VA Wythe+County+VA minor+league+baseball appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

We caught up recently with Dr. Deborah Weiner, author of "Coalfield Jews: An Appalachian History." Central Appalachia's coalfields were home to thousands of Jews between the 1880s and 1950s. Dr. Weiner, research historian and family history coordinator at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, tells their story meticulously and movingly. Her book has been awarded the Southern Jewish Historical Society’s Book Prize; it was selected for the top prize from among 11 books published during 2003-06 throughout the nation.


APP HIST: The proportion of Eastern European Jews in your study area of Appalachia is dramatically high compared to, say, the German Jewish population. Baltimore wholesaler Jacob Epstein is a key linchpin in why that is. Can you discuss his role briefly?

Jacob Epstein came from Lithuania as a teenager and started out as a peddler. Before he was 20, he had earned enough to open a dry goods store in Baltimore, the Baltimore Bargain House. He decided to focus on wholesaling instead of retailing, because he saw great potential in selling to peddlers and small shopkeepers rather than selling directly to consumers.

Epstein was a commercial genius -- he advised peddlers to go out to areas that were attracting new industries, because he knew that that these areas would have a growing population and a growing need for consumer goods. So he sent many of his fellow Jewish immigrants out on the new rail lines that had just been completed into the coalfields. They began to arrive just as the first shipments of coal were going out, so they were really there at the dawn of the coal boom.

Many of the peddlers Epstein sent out decided to settle in the coalfields and open stores. They became the founding members of the Jewish communities that developed in southern West Virginia. So when people ask, how did Jewish immigrants manage to find their way into the mountains? I point to people like Jacob Epstein as my first answer. Once the "pioneer" peddlers settled down, they sent for their relatives, and Jewish communities grew from there.

APP HIST: 'Coalfield Jews' offers a very precise focus on the life and times of 3 generations of small town Jews in 11 counties in central Appalachia. You mention only in passing the existence of the region's larger Jewish communities in Charleston, Knoxville and Chattanooga, and leave the thriving Jewish community centered around Asheville out of the discussion altogether. Why did you choose the narrower emphasis?

WEINER: Appalachia is a diverse place and needs to be examined as such. Jewish life in a town like Logan, West Virginia, was not the same as Jewish life in Charleston or Asheville—both of which were (and are) quite different from each other. So you can’t really generalize about "Jews in Appalachia." Well you can, but you would probably end up over-simplifying things.

I suppose I could have compared the Jewish experience in Appalachian cities to their experience in smaller Appalachian towns, and pointed out the differences, but that would have been another sort of book entirely. I wanted to explore one particular sub-region in depth, because it enabled me to investigate a variety of issues in detail, rather than paint broad brush strokes.

I chose to focus on the southern coalfields because I find this particular part of Appalachia fascinating: the diverse mix of people that gathered in mining towns in the early 20th century, the boomtown environment, the domination of a single industry. By delving into how Jewish immigrants navigated this environment, I was able to look at a bunch of issues in depth. For example, how did Jews—who were merchants and had little to do with coal mining—interact with the coal economy? This led me to a discussion of how independent merchants competed with company stores.

I also was able to take a close look at how Jews fit into the social scene, which tended to have a rigid class structure imposed by the coal industry, combined with a multicultural atmosphere that tolerated diversity to a pretty amazing degree.

Limiting my study to the coalfields allowed me to draw connections outside the Appalachian region—to boomtowns around the world, to mining regions around the world. These kinds of places have been important to Jews in the diaspora, so the book sheds light on a particular kind of Jewish experience. At the same time, it provides a bit of an international perspective on Appalachia, even while dealing with the nitty-gritty details of life in these small towns.

That was an excellent question--it sort of gets to the heart of what I was
trying to do.

APP HIST: Thanks so much for joining us today!

Sweat flies, Russian hornets, sand hornets, and Japanese hornets are some of their common nicknames. Warm weather’s here, and that means they’re starting to come back. In both Appalachian and Ozarks folklore, news bees appear as omens to those wise enough to read them.

They have the peculiar habit of just hanging motionless in the air watching people as they do things. There are yellow news bees, which mean that good things are in the offing-- it's good luck if you can get one to perch on your finger--and black news bees, which warn of imminent death. The black news bees fly in the windows and out again, and fly straight for the nearest cemetery; they hover making a sound like a human being talking.

Those of scientific bent probably want to know that flower flies, many of which are called "hover flies," belong to the family Syrphidae in the order Diptera (true flies). The most commonly seen species of flower flies are brightly colored, bee-like flies with yellow and black markings. Although flower flies resemble bees, they can be distinguished by their wings: flower flies (like all flies) have only 2 wings. Bees have 4 wings.

The many species of hover flies in Appalachia are found in weedy habitats and gardens. Flower flies are often called "sweat bees" because of their resemblance to bees and because they often land on human skin to gather sweat. Flower flies cannot sting, but there are small black bees in the family Halictidae (also commonly called sweat bees) that will occasionally sting humans while they are gathering sweat.


sources: www.iras.ucalgary.ca/~volk/sylvia/TheBestiaryProject.htm
www.uky.edu/Ag/CritterFiles/casefile/insects/flies/syrphid/syrphid.htm#myths


news+bees hover+flies flower+flies appalachian+folklore appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

The Metropolitan Theatre in Morgantown, WV is one of that city’s best examples of Neo-classical Revival architecture. The 1,300 seat theatre opened on July 24, 1924 with "seven acts of vaudeville sent by the BF Keith Amusement Company from its New York Office." Over the years Gene Autry, Peggy Lee, Count Basie, the Andrews Sisters, Bob Hope & Bing Crosby, and Duke Ellington all graced its stage.

The theatre hosted both live acts and films. Owner George Comuntzis installed a $50,000 "Mighty Wurlitzer" organ in 1928 to provide accompaniment for that era's silent films. The Met was one of a handful of theatres around the country to show films on a pre-release basis, so that production companies could gauge response. As an "index town," Morgantown was privileged to see new movies as early as 60 days prior to national release.

The Met was the first theatre in northern WV to install Vitaphone sound systems, and one of the first theatres in the country to install air conditioning.

The theatre also sponsored games that were played on the screen for cash from the mid - 1930s to late 1940s. One such game was "Wahoo," a spin game projected on the screen in which a button would be pressed by those in the audience causing the spin; the jack pot increased by $25/week, and, when the spin stopped, the Comuntzis paid whatever percentage (l00%, 50%, 25%, 10%) showed on the screen.

"Bank Night" was another popular game; those entering the game daily signed a journal opposite a number, which was placed in a large drum. On "Bank Night" a number would be drawn for each $500 increment in the jackpot, and if the winner was in the audience, he or she received the cash immediately.

Bank Night caused quite a controversy nationwide, in fact. "According to figures released last week, gross box-office receipts for the cinema industry in 1936 were a billion dollars, $250,000,000 more than last year," reported Time magazine on Jan 11, 1937. "A contributing reason was undoubtedly 'Bank Night'—currently a weekly fiesta at 5,000 of the 15,000 active U. S. cinema theatres.

"Bank Night is a copyright scheme invented by a onetime Fox booking agent named Charles U. Yaeger, who leases it to theatres for from $5 to $50 a week depending on their size. What it amounts to is a clever evasion of state & municipal lottery laws whereby, by registering his name at a theatre, a patron becomes eligible to win a substantial prize if he is present at the theatre on 'Bank Night'— when the prize is awarded to the holder of a lucky ticket after a drawing on the theatre stage.

"Since Bank Nights started in 1931, Inventor Yaeger's enterprise has grown from a two-room office to a Denver building and a chain of theatres. [Bank Night is] perpetually under fire from state and municipal authorities who hope to find some way in which to bring it under local lottery laws. In Topeka, Kans., the Supreme Court ruled that Bank Night as practiced by certain Fox Theatres was illegal. In Albany, N. Y., the Court of Appeals ruled Bank Nights legal."


Sources: www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,757281,00.html
www.wvculture.org/shpo/nr/pdf/monongalia/84003631.pdf


Morgantown+WV bank+night The+Metropolitan+Theatre appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

The city of Middlesboro, Kentucky, was established in the late 1880s by Scottish born Canadian Alexander Alan Arthur and his British backers in the American Association Ltd. They were drawn to the area by the promise of iron ore deposits in the Cumberland Mountains. Arthur purchased 80,000 acres of land and built his city in the Yellow Creek Valley of Kentucky.

The exact year in which the golf course opened is not definite, but 1889 is the earliest year that golfing has been confirmed. That makes the course the oldest continuously played course in the United States and the second oldest course in the nation. The course has had several names over the years. The original name was Kentucky Golf Club, later Middlesboro Golf Club, and the current name of the Country Club of Middlesboro.

In the early years there was no clubhouse. The 1st tee was located at what is now the corner of 25th Street and Worcester Avenue and headed west to Cirencester Avenue and then on to the remainder of the course that is still played today. In the 1920s the course moved west to accommodate the growing need for residential housing.

In 1889 30 men and women were members at the country club. Each paid the annual $2 membership fee. Of course, in the 1880s there were no golf carts. Golfers carried their own bags or used caddies. Some of the first caddies were Henry Sandifer, Ed Slusher, Mark Colgan, Paul Colgan, Arthur Rhorer, Ed Sampson, and Arden Kennedy.

By 1893 the boom in Middlesboro was over and the Baring Brothers Bank in London cancelled Arthur's funding. The course continued to be used sparingly until 1921 when Judge Joe Bosworth Jr. helped reorganize the club and started on a plan of growth. The officers of the Club in 1921 were R.E. Howe - President, F.P. Scales - Vice-President, J. M. Milles - Secretary, and E.P. Nicholson - Treasurer.

In 1921 there were 150 members, and that was also the year the original clubhouse was constructed. In 1924 Middlesboro Country Club played host to the Kentucky State Amateur Championship.

For many years Middlesboro Country Club was also the home of one of the few Par 6 holes (660 yards) in the country. Number 7 was shortened to add flood control but remains a very challenging hole that few can reach in 2.


source: www.middlesborocountryclub.net/history.htm


Middlesboro+Country+Club Middlesboro+KY Alexander+Alan+Arthur Kentucky+Golf+Club appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

When Bessie Smith sang the blues she meant it. Smith (1894-1937) was the greatest and most influential classic blues singer of the 1920s. Dubbed "The Empress of the Blues," Smith embodied the blues feeling, while her songs, drawing from her sordid lifestyle, rang true with rural and urban audiences alike.

Smith was born on April 15, 1894, in Chattanooga, TN. She spent her early years living in a one room shack in a small area of Chattanooga known as Blue Goose Hollow. These living quarters were shared by both of her parents and all of her siblings, which at the highest count could have been as many as seven.

Her father, a part time Baptist minister, died when Smith was an infant and by the time she reached the age of nine her mother Laura and at least two of her brothers had also passed away. Smith’s sister Viola moved the family into a tenement apartment in a section of Chattanooga known as Tannery Flats. She supported her sisters, brothers, and her own daughter mainly on the small wages she earned from taking in laundry, and was apparently very strict when it came to her siblings.

The family income was minimally supplemented by the odd jobs that Clarence, the eldest brother in the Smith family, took. By 1904, Clarence left town to join the Moses Stokes traveling show and his support left town with him.

Despite the abject poverty that consumed Bessie Smith's childhood, she is noted as having completed school at least to the eighth grade. During this time Bessie is also said to have started her entertainment career. Standing on the corner singing, accompanied by her younger brother Andrew on guitar; their preferred location was in front of the White Elephant Saloon at Thirteenth and Elm streets. They collected spare change that people passing by threw at them.

After hearing his sister perform at an amateur night at the Ivory Theatre, Clarence arranged an audition for Smith with the Moses Stokes Company, and she was hired as a dancer in 1912. She became friends with an older Moses Stokes veteran, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, who was called the Mother of the Blues and likely exercised some influence over the young singer.

Rainey is largely credited with moving the blues away from its traditionally male, country sounds to the more classical, city and women's style that is associated with the Harlem Renaissance, today. Smith had her own voice, however, and owed her success to no one. If anything, Ma Rainey taught her stage presence.

Bessie Smith’s heavy, throaty vocals were balanced by a delightful sense of timing. Her live shows were a blend of comedy and drama in song. She played on the road for eleven years before recording her first song in 1923. That record sold 780,000 copies, but only made her $125.

During her heyday, she sold hundreds of thousands of records and earned upwards of $2000 per week, which was a queenly sum in the 1920s. She routinely played to packed houses in the South as well as the North and Midwest. Alberta Hunter, a contemporary blues singer of Bessie Smith's, said of Smith, "I don't think anybody in the world will ever be able to get as much hurt into one song." There are some artists who don't have to do anything other than walk out on stage to create electricity in the air, and Bessie Smith was one of them.

sources: www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mainHTML.cfm?page=albertson.html
www.southernmusic.net/bessiesmith.htm
www.nps.gov/history/delta/blues/people/bessie_smith.htm
xroads.virginia.edu/~ug97/blues/bsa.html


Alberta Hunter, appalachia, appalachian history, mountains Bessie Smith, blues, Chattanooga TN, Ma Rainey

My mother was a great sassafras drinker. And every spring we had to have sassafras along with our poke salad (that was a wild green). The mountain people particularly gathered a lot of wild greens to supplement their diet, because most people back in those days lived mostly on cornbread and peas. My mother used to enjoy going into the mountains and picking the wild greens. They have a thing called (and I like it today—they cultivate it, by the way, in Tennessee and Virginia) highland creeces. Oldtimers called them creecy-greens.

Eula McGill
born Resaca, GA 1911
February 3, 1976 interview
Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Interview G-0040-1.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0040-1/G-0040-1.html

To some Appalachian farmers, it was simply an aggressive weed tree cluttering old fields. Others believed its wood could prevent chicken lice, and so used it to build chicken houses and chicken roosts. But sassafras’ most famous attribute has always been the healing properties of the springtime tea –a spring tonic- made from its roots.

The Cherokee people utilized sassafras tea to purify blood and for a variety of ailments, including skin diseases, rheumatism, and ague (the tree is sometimes called an ‘Ague Tree’). "The country people of Carolina crop these vines (Bigonia Crucigera) to pieces," said William Bartram in Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians food traditions, "together with china brier and sassafras roots, and boil them in their beer in the spring, for diet drink, in order to attenuate and purify the blood and juices." The Cherokee would also make a poultice to cleanse wounds and sores, while they’d steep the root bark to treatment diarrhea or for 'over-fatness.'

They emphasized that the tea should never be taken for more than a week at a time. They didn’t know about safrole, though they knew its long term effects. The bark of sassafras roots contains volatile oils, 80% of which is safrole. Commercially produced sassafras was pulled from the American market in the early 1960s after experiments showed that safrole caused liver cancer in rats and mice.

Early white mountain settlers, perhaps influenced by the vine/brier/sassafras concoction described above, made a beer by boiling young sassafras shoots in water, adding molasses and allowing the mash to ferment.

The varied leaf shapes are the Mitten Tree’s trademark—in fact, its Latin name was once Sassafras Varifolium. Today Sassafras Albidum ranges widely over the eastern United States (only two other species of sassafras exist elsewhere in the world: one in central mainland China, one in Taiwan).

‘White sassafras' grows along roadways in thick clusters, usually from three to six feet tall. It has roughly the same characteristics as ‘red sassafras,’ however the bark does not turn pink to red when the root is damaged.

The red variety is the species that is most prized. Generally found on hills and ridges, it sometimes grows in mountainous areas to a height of thirty or more feet. The American Forestry Association's National Register of Big Trees lists a 77-foot champion in Owensboro, KY.

According to H.L. Mencken's The American Language (1936), the word sassafras traces back to 1577 and is of Spanish origin, probably deriving from the Spanish term for saxifrage.

Native Americans in Virginia pointed out 'wynauk' to British settlers, and in 1603, a company was formed in Bristol, England to send two vessels to the New World, principally with the intention of bringing back cargoes of sassafras bark. Thus, sassafras was one of the first, if not the first, forest products to be exported from what is now the mid-Atlantic states.


sources: Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians food traditions, by William Bartram, 1789, From "Transaction of the American Ethnological Society," Vol. 3 Pt. 1. Extracts
everettarea.org/tales/v01/v01c30.htm
foodreference.com/html/artsassafras.html
inpaws.org/Marion%20Jackson%20Trees/Sassafras_albidum.pdf
The singular sassafras, by Henry Clepper, from "American Forests," American Forestry Assn 1989
http://ohiodnr.gov/Portals/18/publications/pdf/wild%20edible%20plants.pdf


sassafras spring+tonics Cherokee+herbs safrole mitten+tree wynauk appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

In the decade after the Civil War the new Air Line Railroad connecting Charlotte and Atlanta was laid through upcountry South Carolina. Two Confederate veterans saw an opportunity to create a new town at the junction of the older Blue Ridge Railroad and the new line, a town which because of this location would serve as an ideal marketing and shipping point for cotton grown in the low country.

And so Col. Joseph Norton and Col. Robert Thompson founded Seneca, SC (named for a nearby Cherokee village) on August 14, 1873, and Governor Wade Hampton signed the charter for the town on March 14, 1874.

During the cotton harvest, wagons bringing cotton would line up for blocks from the railroad station. A passenger terminal, several hotels, and a park were built near the railroad tracks.

If you walk down West South 1st St from the Seneca Presbyterian Church to Poplar St (now called Bruce Hill Blvd) you’ll be smack in the middle of “Silk-Stocking Hill.” Six of its houses were built by the Gignilliat family.

George Warren Gignilliat (1853-1926) and his brothers were among the pioneer merchants who came to Seneca and made large contributions to the development of the town. He’s one of the owners of the Seneca Oil Mill & Fertilizer Co. He also started Charles N. Gignilliat & Sons, Cotton Merchants, based in Seneca and Spartanburg.

The Gignilliat family (an ancient Swiss family of wealth with roots dating back to the 1400s) had already been in the state for close to 200 years. It is one of the notable group of Huguenot families, the founders of which, said Dr JGB Bulloch of Washington DC, "either as gentlemen, planters, soldiers, lawyers, statesmen, &c., have added luster to the Commonwealth of South Carolina."

Jean Francois Gignilliat came to America in late December of 1688 before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, where he received from the Lord Proprietors of the Carolinas a grant of 3,000 acres as the ‘first of the Swiss nation to settle in Carolina.’ He & his wife purchased an additional 4,500 acres.

Today, the Gignilliat Park Middle/High Academy and the Gignilliat Community Center stand today as reminders of this powerful family’s continuing impact on Seneca.

sources: www.clemson.edu/caah/cedp/senecatour1.pdf
www.seneca.sc.us
www.sciway.net/city/history/seneca-sc-history.html
The Beville Family of Virginia, Georgia, and Florida, and Several Allied… by Agnes Beville VaughanTedcastle, 1917 private printing (manu. Owned by the University of Wisconsin – Madison)


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