Appalachian History

"From some long-forgotten source, I heard that June beetles made a sweet sound while flying around. I loved music, and the method to acquire this living music box was to fasten a long thread to one of the bug's hind legs.

"Now, June beetles are about half an inch across and three quarters of an inch long. The ones in the South are dark green on the back side and have an armor-like covering over their undersides. They feed on fennel and are harmless.

"One day, I chased down a June beetle and brought it in. It was hard to hold. That bug clawed me with its sharp toes and rooted with its sharp nose. But I held on for dear life and persuaded Mother to tie a thread on its hind leg. She wasn't too anxious to oblige me, but finally the job was accomplished and I took my musical bug outside to test it out.

"The ground around the house was level, so I chose a spot where I could turn my bug loose. It gladly took off, and I ran after it, holding on tight to the thread. The bug made a pleasing sound that was music to my ears. The sound that June beetle made—along with the Jew's harp and harmonica—was the one source of music my young ears had ever heard.

"Soon the bug grew tired and sat down. I realized the thread might hamper its movements, so I waited while it rested. Still anxious to hear more music, I urged it to fly. As quick as lightening, the bug took off with me pounding along behind it. I was thoroughly enjoying the performance until the thread slipped off. With mixed emotions, I watched my music box disappear in the distance.

"I felt bad over my loss and set about repairing it. I found another June beetle, but somehow I didn't like this one quite as well as the first one. Just the same, I hurried into the house to have Mother tie a thread on its leg. This time Mother openly expressed her dislike for such activities. Nevertheless, with strong urging on my part, she tied the thread once again. I took the new June beetle outside and let it fly as I had the old one, but the knot in the thread was too loose and slipped off. This bug also flew away, heading due north. It didn’t slacken its speed for even a moment."

From a Parks family history compiled by Lillian "Lilly Ann" Parks Adams (1880-?), at Capitola, CA, 1949-50, when she was 70 years old. She was born in Wayne County, WV, which borders Kentucky and Ohio. The story is to the best of her knowledge as a four-year-old child, and from family retellings.

source: http://ftp.wi.net/~census/lesson43.html


June+beetles Wayne+County+WV appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Photo caption reads: "First car to Crow, W. Va. Walter Dudley and family of Glen Morgan, Permission Postmisstress at Crow. June 11, 1910"


appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history automobiles Crow+WV Raleigh+County+WV

On June 8, 1948, the town election in Clintwood, VA drew national and international attention when the voters elected an all-female town council and mayor. The Petticoat Government consisted of Mrs. Minnie "Sis" Miller, mayor, and Mrs. Ferne W. Skeen, Mrs. Buena H. Smith, Mrs. Ida M. Cunningham, Mrs. Kate Friend, and Mrs. Marion Shortt, town council.

Letters poured in from around the world wishing them luck and expressing amazement that an all woman government could be elected anywhere. The State Department featured the story in its Voice of America broadcast.

The idea shouldn’t have seemed so far-fetched. It had already happened twice before in US states.

In Oregon, women gained suffrage in 1912, eight years before much of the nation, and by 1916 the women of Umatilla, OR took control of city government through their electoral option. Mrs. C.G. Brownell held a card party and the women attending decided what roles each could take in city government.

They did not inform the men of the community and the elections proceeded quietly. Since candidates did not have to declare themselves, E.E. Starcher and C.G. Brownell confidently expected re-election. But the town of 198 people elected Laura Starcher as mayor, Lola Merrick as treasurer, Bertha Cherry as recorder, Florence Brownell, Gladys Spinning, Anna Means and Stella Paulu to council positions.

In her acceptance speech, Laura Starcher promised to provide Umatilla a progressive administration, replace failing electric street lights, install sewers, and clean up the town. The womens' administration accomplished Starcher's promises and more, installing warning signs at railroad crossings, adding a library to the community budget, and framing ordinances for speed limits, parking regulations, and fire protection.

By 1920, the women of Umatilla, "Having accomplished what they had set out to do four years earlier," bowed out of the political scene.

And in 1925, shortly after the 19th Amendment was passed, the voters of Winslow, AR elected an all female government consisting of Mayor Maude Duncan and Council members Lyda Cole, Florence Marley, Audie Crider, Bee Chervery, Daisy Miller, Etta Black, Martha Winn, Virginia C. Dunlap and Stella Winn. It worked so well that every single woman was elected to a second term.

By all accounts, Clintwood's Petticoat Government, which took the reins in September 1948, was highly successful. Miller's administration undertook many important improvement projects, including: clean-up campaigns, expanding parking in town, installing parking meters in the downtown area, purchasing a fire truck, organizing a systematic garbage disposal plan, and improving traffic hazards throughout town. Six of the women served only one term, however, Mrs. Ferne W. Skeen and Mrs. Buena H. Smith successfully sought re-election.

Sources:
www.ccrh.org/comm/umatilla/women.htm
http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mtnties/petticoat.html
www.oldstatehouse.com/exhibits/arkansas-women/organizations/petticoat_politics.asp


Petticoat+Government Clintwood+VA Dickenson+County+VA Minnie+Miller appalachian+politics appalachia appalachian+mountain+history appalachian+history

Listen to the Coon Creek Girls play "Flowers in the Wildwood"


On the evening of June 8,1939 limousines began to deliver the cream of Washington D.C. society to the East Room of the White House. President and First Lady, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were entertaining King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England and had arranged a command performance in their honor.

Music for the evening was provided by the finest representatives of American culture, including opera tenor Lawrence Tibbett, classical musician Marion Anderson, pop diva Kate Smith, and Alan Lomax singing Western songs. The evening also featured four energetic young women called the Coon Creek Girls, who would play traditional stringband music and accompany Bascom Lunsford's square dance group from North Carolina.

"Coon Creek Girls was a very happy time. As far as I know, we were the first all-girl string band," recalled band leader Lily May Ledford at Berea College during a 1980 solo performance there. "We startled the audience by being all girls — our sound was drowned out by the uproar of applause and yelling."

Ledford has been widely recognized in Kentucky and throughout the nation by scholars, musicians, and listeners who have unanimously credited her with bringing the musical culture of eastern Kentucky to the world. She was an inspiration to generations of younger musicians, including Pete Seeger.

Ledford learned to play on an old discarded fiddle formerly belonging to "Gran'pappy Tackett," who was a famous old-time fiddler of the Kentucky mountains, as was her father, White Ledford. She told the story of how she made her first fiddle bow from a willow switch and a generous portion of the tail of "Ole Maudie," "Gran'pappy's" white mare.

In 1936, at the age of nineteen, Lily May left Pinch-em-Tight Hollow, KY to begin her public music career in Chicago, where she joined the National Barn Dance. A year later she ventured on to Cincinnati, where she became a regular on musical promoter John Lair’s newly formed Renfro Valley Barn Dance.

It was here that Lair, an early promoter of women entertainers, encouraged Lily May along with her sister Rosie, Violet Koehler, and Daisy Lange to form the Coon Creek Girls. It was called that "so that people will know at once what kind of music they're going to hear," Lair said. The group made its broadcast debut on October 9, 1937.

How Many Biscuits Can You Eat? was their first number at the White House soiree, featuring Lily May's outstanding five-string banjo, Rosie on guitar, Violet on mandolin, and Daisy on bass, with all four sharing the comical verses. They knew this piece was a favorite of Mr. Roosevelt and had performed it countless times back home in Kentucky and Ohio. Another FDR favorite, Get Along Miss Cindy was planned as well as an English ballad, The Soldier and the Lady, in honor of the royal couple.

Meantime John Lair, in order to get in to see the performance, had to pose as the the bass fiddle carrier for the group. Lily May said they laughed in the back of the limo as Lair lugged the big bass along, "Law, how times has changed, back home he's king, and we're the subjects you know, up here we're riding in the limo, and he's trailing along totin' the bass fiddle—that done us good!"

In 1939, after Koehler and Lange left the band, the Ledfords were joined by their other sister Susie. The high mountain harmonies of the group proved to be an exciting contrast to the sentimental home-and-mother styles of the period. The trio, singing and playing with the true family mountain sound, served as a musical standard for the old-time genre for years to come.

At a time when traditional music was being brushed aside by many in favor of bluegrass, swing, and smooth country crooning, the Coon Creek Girls stepped up to the mike with a fresh, energetic approach to tunes, songs, and instrumental styles that were as old as the hills.


sources: www.nativeground.com/cooncreekgirls.asp
www.wku.edu/kentuckyfolkweb/KYFolklife_Ledford.html
www.talentondisplay.com/renfrovalleyartists.html
www.nea.gov/honors/heritage/fellows/fellow.php?id=1985_05





appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountians+history appalachian+music Coon+Creek+Girls Lily+May+Ledford National+Barn+Dance Renfro+Valley+Barn+Dance

It was the centerpiece of the Montreal Expo of 1967: Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome, a vaulted structure made of lightweight materials that form interlocking polygons.

Nineteen years before that majestic statement, Fuller, an architect, author, designer, futurist, inventor, and visionary, had gathered a group of students together at Black Mountain College in Bunscombe County, NC to make the leap from theory to reality and construct the first full-scale geodesic dome.

Black Mountain College, established in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier and other former faculty members of Rollins College, was the first American experimental college boasting complete democratic self-rule, extensive work in the creative arts, and interdisciplinary academic study.

The faculty and students worked on a farm, did maintenance, served meals, and constructed buildings – no extracurricular activities or sports were organized as it was felt that there should be no distinction between work and play.

This independent, coeducational, four-year college was originally located in buildings leased from the Blue Ridge Assembly, near Black Mountain, N.C. In 1941 the college was moved nearby to property purchased by the college, and it remained at this location until it closed in 1956.

Josef and Annie Albers held central positions at Black Mountain from 1933-49. They arrived shortly after their previous home, the Bauhaus, had been closed by Hitler, and brought with them that institution's emphasis on working from first principles, or starting at zero.

It was Josef Albers who invited Buckminster Fuller, as well as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall to teach at the 1948 summer session. At the time they were all struggling and unknown artists.

Buckminster Fuller's project aimed to produce a dome with a forty-eight foot diameter, a height of twenty-three feet, and an area of fifteen hundred square feet. It was to weigh less than 270 pounds. The students measured long strips of venetian blinds and computed the tensile strength of each unit. Each strip was coded and the points marked where they would meet.

The class began to connect the points on the strips, but the dome collapsed to the ground when tension was applied during its attempted erection. Fuller had said in advance that it probably wouldn’t hold (the materials weren't right), but decided nevertheless to go ahead and complete the class project, blithely referring to the experiment's result as the supine dome.

As Fuller put it, "You succeed when you stop failing," a valuable lesson for the young students. The next summer, working with a slightly larger budget and aluminum aircraft tubing, Fuller and his class succeeded.

The structures slowly filtered into public consciousness and commercial use: Ford commissioned the first commercial one for Dearborn. The military used them widely as radomes for early warning radar.

One of the Black Mountain students, Kenneth Snelson, claims that Buckminster Fuller took credit for Snelson's discovery of the concept of tensegrity. Fuller gave the idea its name, combining tension and structural integrity. Geodesic domes are the most commonly known structures whose composition depends on tensegrity.

Fuller's dome idea was just the tip of his "comprehensivist" thinking. His worldview included everything from his three-wheeled Dymaxion car to a plan to stack hundreds of houses in airplanes and drop them on underprivileged areas. In other words, a cornucopia of global, revolutionary, and completely unrealized plans.


sources: www.bmcproject.org/ARCHITECTURE/CAMPUSES/LAKE%20EDEN/FULLER%201948.htm
www.ibiblio.org/bmc/bmcaboutbmc.html
www.villagevoice.com/news/9912,215261,4551,4.html
www.studio-international.co.uk/reports/black_mountain.asp
Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg, by Calvin Tomkins, MacMillan Publ, 2005


Buckminster+Fuller geodesic+dome supine+dome Black+Mountain+College Bunscombe+County+NC appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

This widow of the South accumulated at least 9 husbands & 10,000 pieces of glass! Chattanoogan Anna Safley Houston (1876-1951) single-handedly amassed thousands of pitchers, creamers, lamps, flasks, jugs, china, tea sets, platters and frilly art-glass baskets. Her collection of pitchers alone is thought to be the largest in the world. "Antique Annie," as she was called behind her back, kept the name Houston in honor of her favorite husband. None of her husbands were wealthy.

In 1904 Houston left her native Alabama to open a millinery store in Chattanooga. She had a brief stint as an antique dealer in the 1920's but ended up losing it in the Great Depression. Houston continued collecting glass throughout her retail career.

So what makes Annie so fascinating, a town character to the locals? Annie lived in a barn. After the Depression, the bank foreclosed on her home. Instead of selling her precious glassware, she let the house go and built a ramshackle barn in which to live and store her glassware. When there was a fire in the barn in the late 1940s, those valuable pitchers were used – bucket brigade-fashion – to pour water on the flames, and most of her possessions were saved.

During the last 15 years of her life she lived in virtual poverty, sleeping on a cot with only her dog for a companion. Annie Houston died of malnutrition --- her death certificate says obstructive jaundice--- rather than sell a single piece out of her collection to pay for treatment. Ironic that the glassware was worth a mint, yet its owner died a pauper rather than subject herself to letting go of the only company she kept. It is an art collection that she literally gave her life to preserve.

When, shortly before her death, she went before the city commission to try to give her collections to the city, she was laughed out of the room by commissioners, who thought she was trying to give them a lot of junk. Ultimately, the childless collector did make legal arrangements to leave her 50+ collections in trust to the people of Chattanooga. Today, a century-old Victorian home perched high above the Tennessee River in Chattanooga’s vibrant Bluff View Art District houses Annie Houston’s world.

The Houston Museum of Decorative Arts collection is indeed so impressive that only 10% of the entire collection is shown at the museum, the rest being in the basement. There are literally millions of dollars of glass inside the walls of the museum. The rare glass collections include amberina, plated amberina, Pomona, peachblow, Burmese, cameo, Steuben, Tiffany, cranberry, satin, Quezal, Durand, sandwich and cut glass as well as more than 600 patterns of Early American pressed glass.

There is also a variety of lustre and a large collection of the rarest examples of Staffordshire, Mettlach steins, Rockingham-Bennington pottery, bottles and flasks, original Toby jugs, Meissen, and Rose Canton pieces, mostly in the Rose Medallion and Rose Mandarin patterns. The Houston museum features a room where the glassware hangs from the ceiling, much like it did in that barn.


sources: www.antiquetrader.com/article/Antique_Annie_was_Houston_Museums_eccentric_founder/
www.epinions.com/trvl-review-645E-2F49252E-3A5236FE-prod2
www.thehoustonmuseum.com/history.html


Anna+Safley+Houston Antique+Annie Houston+Museum+of+Decorative+Arts Chattanooga+TN appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

The annual Cherokee Gourd Artists Gathering convenes this weekend in Cherokee, NC. Gourd design today mainly encompasses the arts and crafts world of vases, pots, and plates, but it has a politicized function in Cherokee history. Highly stylized gourd masks have for hundreds of years been an essential part of the Booger Dance, a charged ritual of reaction against outsider intrusion.

Crafted from large gourds or carved from buckeye wood, the masks represent faces of foreigners, such as Africans, Germans, French, Chinese, or other Indian tribesmen.

The Cherokee also make masks of hollowed-out hornet or wasp nests to personify mean or evil whites, or whites consumed by a disfiguring illness such as smallpox. Dyed with vegetable pigments and decorated with bits of fur to suggest eyebrows, beards, and mustaches, the masks also have decidedly sexual connotations.

For example, a mask might feature a large pendulous gourd for a penis-like nose, surrounded by a base of opossum fur to represent pubic hair. These caricatures of genitalia represent a Cherokee belief in outsiders' obsession with sex.

In 1935 and 1936, anthropologist Dr. Frank Gouldsmith Speck observed performances of the Booger Dance at the Cherokee’s western North Carolina reservation and recorded what he saw.

The Booger Dance contains four distinct components, or "acts." In the first act, according to Speck, after about thirty minutes of social dancing, four to ten or more masked men stamp into the performance area, a room in a private residence, in a state of general mayhem.

They wear simple costumes of ragged European-style garb, sheets, and bed quilts, draped over their bodies and shoulders, and sometimes over the head. Some of the Boogers fall to the floor in feigned convulsive seizures; others mockingly strike and push at the spectators in hopes of clumsily manhandling the women and girls.

The Boogers chase the screaming and giggling females throughout the room, all the while underscored with music, obscenely gesturing by thrusting their buttocks to display gourd phalluses. Speck notes that these phalluses sometimes contain water, which when released obviously imply ejaculation. After completing this first sequence, the Boogers compose themselves and take seats on a board or bench near the wall.

The brief second act begins when the host ("the Driver," since he drives the action of the evening) heralds the strangers' arrival. In whispered Cherokee, the Driver asks the Boogers' leader his group's identity; the leader tells the Driver that they are from a "distant land and going 'north' or 'south'".

The Driver loudly broadcasts the leader's response and then asks what the Boogers want, to which they unanimously reply, "Girls!" More fumbling girl-chasing follows and the women respond with more squealing and giggling. The Boogers then impulsively demand a fight, but in their broken Cherokee they announce they want to dance, unwittingly punning the words "dance" and "fight," which differ in the Cherokee language only in the placement of accent.

At the beginning of the third act, and before the Boogers dance, the Booger leader whispers his mask name to the Driver, who loudly "translates" it. The Booger name follows one of two themes: names of foreigners, such as German, Frenchman, Black or Chinese; or descriptive and obscene names of private parts of the body, such as Black Buttocks, Sooty Anus, Rusty Anus, Big Phallus, and Her [Vagina] Has Long Hairs.

Speck writes that the Boogers then each dance a personal clown dance of "awkward and grotesque steps" resembling "a clumsy white man trying to imitate Indian dancing.” The Booger is a very real threat and not a diluted caricature for the Cherokee to digest more easily. The Booger is, for the Cherokee, a local symbol, corresponding to the universal symbol or archetype water, and it represents Chaos, Chaos capable of annihilating order but also of restoring order.

The Booger's name is taken for the first word of the song and each time the name is chanted, the audience erupts in applause and shouting. After the clown-dances, the Driver invites the Booger leader and his troupe to dance the Eagle or Bear Dance, dances of peace and honor.

The leader whispers his decision (the Eagle Dance, the usual choice) to the Driver and an intermission of five-to-ten minutes follows to prepare for the subsequent dance. The Boogers remain seated on their bench or rush outside for a break.

After the intermission, and before the peace dance, the singers chant a song demanding tobacco for their services. The Driver then fills and lights a pipe, taking a puff for himself. He offers the pipe to the drummer and the singers, who each take a puff. Once all of the musicians have partaken in the smoking ritual, the Driver puts the pipe away.

The Driver then places a deerskin on the floor before the Eagle Killer, whom Speck calls the dramatic star of the evening, indicating the importance of the Eagle Dance and of the eagle itself. The Eagle Killer, as his name denotes, killed the eagle to obtain the feathers essential for the Eagle Dance.

The Driver presents the Eagle Killer with symbolic gifts in honor of his deed. These gifts traditionally included a deerskin (for moccasins), tobacco (to calm the nerves), a knife, lead and powder (for livelihood), and buttons and pins (for the Eagle Killer's female relations). According to Speck, however, by 1936 five cents had supplanted the traditional gifts.

The fourth and, according to Speck, most important act of the Booger Dance proper then begins. The singers chant the song of the Eagle Dance and the Boogers move onto the floor with the Cherokee men who begin to dance the peace dance.

The dancers, impersonating eagles flying higher and higher to escape the hunter's arrows, circle gracefully with their arms outstretched, right hands clutching wands of seven eagle feathers, gourd rattles in the left. In ancient times, the Cherokee carried entire eagle tails, but as the birds became scarce they substituted wands of sourwood (believed to hold power against witches) holding feathers of the sacred number seven.

Cherokee women then join the Boogers in the Eagle Dance, one woman for each masked figure. As the women serenely dance, each carrying an eagle-feather wand in her left hand and nothing in the right, the Boogers advance upon them sexually.
They desecrate the purity of the dance, mocking the hospitality of the Indians, and, for Speck, symbolically mime the cultural "rape" of the Cherokee. They exhibit their gourd phalluses, obscenely bumping and grinding. Unperturbed, the women continue to dance with great dignity.

At the close of the dance, the Boogers boisterously bound for the door. The Boogers make one last grab for an unwary female, but fail to drag off their struggling victim. They run into the night, leaving the spectators in side-splitting laughter. The Boogers then return, sans masks and costumes, as well-behaved Cherokee men, and the social dancing and party continue.


Sources: “Returning to the Sacred:
An Eliadean Interpretation of Speck’s Account of the Cherokee Booger Dance,” by William Douglas Powers, The Journal of Religion and Theatre, Vol 1, No 1, Fall 2002
http://www.rtjournal.org/vol_1/no_1/powers.html
http://www.chattoogariver.org/index.php?req=booger&quart=F2003


appalachia Dr.+Frank+Gouldsmith+Speck Cherokees Booger+Dance Eagle+Dance Cherokee+NC appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

It's June, and what better place to hold a June wedding than next to a roller coaster? Chester, WV in the early 20th century didn't have 6 amusement parks to choose from, the way nearby Wheeling did. But what it lacked in quantity, it made up in quality. The grounds of Rock Springs Park, close to the Ohio River, could accommodate 10,000 people, and included a carousel, dance pavilion, bath house, lake and large swimming pool. People would come by excursion boats, trains, or automobiles. This amusement park opened in 1898, though the area had long been used for picnics and family outings.

Rock Spring's sumptuous landscaping enticed the park's owner, Mr. C.A. Smith, to build a well appointed new home in 1905 on Pyramus Avenue, overlooking the park. There were often crowds of over 20,000 people at some of the larger picnics. On special picnic days or important holidays, the park had giant fireworks displays. And the free ice cream given away at the Golden Star picnic made that event especially popular.

The back of the photo reads "Public Wedding, Rock Springs Park in 1908."

In the early years, the park was home to three roller coasters. The roller coaster behind the couple is the 'World's Great Scenic Railway,' a wooden coaster operated in the park from from 1907 to 1926. On this ride, the cars were powered up spiral tracks inside the station before beginning a mile-long descent through the forests of the park. Shortly after the scenic railway was erected, it was blown down by a great windstorm and had to be rebuilt. Renamed the 'Cyclone,' this basic out & back style coaster was designed by Harry Baker, opened again in 1927 and scared the bejesus out of its riders until 1970.

After more than seven decades of operation, the park was closed to make way for new approaches to the Jennings Randolph Bridge on U.S. Route 30. On Labor Day 1970, the last crowds departed. In June 1974, more than 1,200 people attended a farewell dance at the park before it all became a memory.


sources: www.wvculture.org/HISTORY/parks/rockspringspark01.html
http://www.wonderfulwv.com/sub.cfm?month=june07&fea=2
http://members.aol.com/somekick/rocksprings.html
www.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/wv/hancock/history/smith.txt



Chester+WV Rock+Springs+Park amusement+parks appalachia +appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Representative Joseph Crockett Shaffer(R-9th District, VA) had been a member of the 71st Congress for only 3 months when the De Priest incident made national news. It was June 1929, and First Lady Louann Hoover had refused to invite black Congressman Oscar De Priest’s wife, Jessie Williams De Priest, to the White House to have tea with the spouses of other Republican Congressmen. After De Priest (R-Chicago) publicized the snub, Mrs. Hoover invited Mrs. De Priest to the White House in a highly symbolic event that marked the first time an African American woman had ever been entertained by a First Lady in the official resident of the President.

Racist editorials in both Northern and Southern newspapers called the invitation a social scandal and vilified Mrs. Hoover and the De Priests, but a threatened boycott by Southern legislators’ wives collapsed. Some southern newspaper editors accused Mrs. Hoover of 'defiling' the White House. The Texas legislature went so far as to formally admonish her.

In late June, under the De Priest auspices, a musicale was given at Washington Auditorium to which were invited all Republican members of Congress. With Congress adjourned and Washington DC therefore 'empty,' white invitees had a good excuse to decline. In the crowd of 3,000 only a dozen white faces appeared, of which only one, that of Illinois Representative Richard Yates, belonged to a House colleague. Congressman De Priest announced that he would give another musicale the following winter to test the sincerity of his Republican friendships on the race issue.

Shaffer, refusing the De Priest musicale invitation, warned De Priest: "You are now embarking on a perilous course which will, if you continue, disturb relations which have long been amicably settled in the South."

President Hoover, in his memoirs, said that "the speeches of southern Senators and Congressmen… wounded [Mrs. Hoover] deeply."

Despite this, Hoover, when he left office in 1933, sent Shaffer a personal letter stating "Before leaving this office I wish to express to you the appreciation I have for the devoted public service you have given these past years..."

Virginia's 9th Congressional District

The De Priest incident and Shaffer's response to it may have irrevocably damaged his career: He was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection the following year. He was reappointed United States Attorney for the Western District of Virginia in 1931, but resigned after only a year in office.


sources: www.whitehousehistory.org/04/subs/images_subs/primary_1929.pdf
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,732570,00.html?iid=chix-sphere
www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/depriest-oscar-1871-1951
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
educationforum.ipbhost.com/lofiversion/index.php/t3391.html


appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Herbert+Hoover Joseph+Crockett+Shaffer the+De+Priest+incident Wythe+County+VA

Shepherd Youth Killed
Accidentally By Father

Accident Occurred As
Father and Son Were
Out Hunting

Ashe County [NC] Journal, May 29, 1929--- Blaine Shepherd, a youth of the Crumpler-Grassy Creek section of the county, was shot and accidentally killed by his father Wednesday morning of last week. The accident took place near the mouth of Helton Creek about 8:30 in the morning.

The youth and his father, Grover C. Shepherd, who is a well known citizen of that community, had gone out squirrel hunting early in the morning, and were going through a densely wooded section of a nearby forest. Father and son seperated and Mr. Shepherd thought that his son had gone in an opposite direction.

1927 photo: James Wilburn Shepherd (at age 16), on the left, and Blaine is believed to be the boy on the right at about age 12.

Mr. Shepherd saw leaves shaking several feet from the ground and then saw a gray object nearer the ground, which he thought was a squirrel. He fired his gun and heard the youth scream. He ran to him and asked him where he was shot. The dying lad told him: "I'm shot all over." He died in about five minutes. Forty-eight shot hit him over the body, the main charge striking just above the heart.

The little fellow had climbed up an old tree lap about four feet above the ground, causing the leaves in the trees above to shake.

Robert Blaine Shepherd was born Dec. 28, 1915, and was 13 years, 5 months and 1 day old. He was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Grover C. Shepherd, both of who survive him. He is also survived by two sisters, Edith and Ralph Shepherd, and four brothers, Ralph, Mont, and Walter Shepherd, of this county, and Willborn Shepherd, of Detroit, Mich.

An impressive funeral service was conducted from Fairview schoolhouse where the Shepherd boy attended school. It was conducted by Revs. J.O. Spencer, S.C. Blackburn, J.C. Childress, Franklin Barker and William Blackburn. A large concourse of people attended the service.

Beautiful floral offerings were carried by Blaine's schoolmates. The youth was popular with his young acquaintances and all were grief-stricken over the tragic occurence.

Following the service, the body was laid to rest in the Shepherd cemetery near the schoolhouse.

The pallbearers were R.M. Phipps, J.E. Sexton, Keys Garris, Nola West, A.J. Blevins and T.C. Hurley.


source: www.danielprophecy.com/blaine.html


appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Ashe+County+NC Helton+Creek+NC hunting+accidents

Today, it’s Tennessee’s largest historic district, at approximately 11,400 acres. During the Great Depression, the Cumberland Homesteads community came into being as part of a nationwide New Deal agrarian movement to create subsistence farm communities to aid out-of-work, rural residents. President Franklin Roosevelt assigned the homesteads project to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. Ickes, in turn, established within his department the Division of Subsistence Homesteads (DSH).

Cumberland Homesteads was one the first of 33 communities built by DSH between 1934 and 1938, and eventually consisted of 250 homes, a school, a park area, as well as a stone water tower and governmental building.

The DSH advisory committee identified three types of clientele and three types of proposed communities: Homestead colonies established for industrial workers and located in the out-skirts of cities or large towns; rural settlements in which small industries or branches of large industries can be established; and agricultural settlements.

The Cumberland Homesteaders, in the main, had not been subsistence farmers but were “displaced” and “stranded” workers—they were initially coal miners and only later textile mill workers and farmers. Coal operators of the time had drastically curtailed mining operations throughout the bituminous coal fields of Appalachia---production levels demanded by World War I had long since dropped---as the surplus of American coal continued to glut national and international markets.

DSH regulations denied participation in the homesteads to persons on relief rolls. The application for a subsistence homestead required that the successful applicant be an American citizen; living or normally living in an industrial center; over twenty-one years old; have an income sufficient to meet homestead payments; and not have an income sufficient to secure a loan for a home using orthodox financial instruments.

Caption reads: Mrs. Roosevelt addressing group at Cumberland Homesteads. Crossville, Tennessee, Oct-Nov 1935

Plans for Cumberland Homesteads intended to create 351 farms on lots ranging in size from 10 to 160 acres; the average homestead consisted of 16 acres. Areas determined unsuitable for farming remained timberland. Originally 8,903 acres were farm tracts; 1,245 acres were common land (grazing, woodland, cooperative enterprises); 11,200 acres were set aside for further development; and the cooperative association owned 5,505 acres.

Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia condemned the costly absurdities of electricity, refrigerators, and indoor privies for country people. Likewise, Senator Kenneth D. McKellar of Tennessee complained that the Resettlement Administration was constructing stone mansions and voiced his resentment that relief workers lived in houses better than he did. No matter; the houses wound up with indoor plumbing at the request of Eleanor Roosevelt, who had a special interest in these projects.

“After the Resettlement Administration began massive resettlement, the DSH projects seemed to be nonproductive, and the residents seemed to be beneficiaries of government largesse.

“Most of the homesteaders led lives indistinguishable from their contemporaries; furthermore, the government had provided the homesteaders with modern conveniences, tools, and equipment that their contemporaries had to purchase.

“It seemed to full-time farmers that the homesteaders “piddled” around in their gardens, while the resettled farmers actually had to do farm work.”

Clarence E. Pickett,
executive secretary of the American Friends Service Committee
Monthly Labor Review (September 1933): 1327-328.

Although each family received a section of land, the community was designed to function as a cooperative, including both agriculture and some industrial production. Eventually the cooperative ventures failed, plagued by rampant politicking both locally and at the Federal management level. Many families, confined by small lots, soil too poor to raise crops, and serious erosion problems, simply moved away.


sources: www.tdot.state.tn.us/us127s/library.htm
www.southernhistory.net/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=10381
http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=C171
www.cumberlandhomesteads.org/history.htm


Cumberland+Homesteads Division+of+Subsistence+Homesteads Crossville+TN +appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Hang down your head Tom Dooley
Hang down your head and cry
Hang down your head Tom Dooley
Poor boy, you're bound to die.

It's the most famous murder ballad in American folk music history. And chances are, if you know it, you know the version popularized by the Kingston Trio. Their recording of the song became a major commercial hit in 1958, selling over 6,000,000 copies. That hit single spawned a movie and helped spark the folk music revival of the 1960s. How did the song make its way to the Kingston Trio? Therein hangs a tale.

May 1st marked the 140th anniversary of the criminal execution of North Carolinian ex-Confederate soldier Tom Dula. Not Tom Dooley? Think of the written word opera pronounced opry, as in Grand Ole Opry. Standard regional southern Appalachian pronunciation at work. So the Kingston Trio simply transcribed the name as it sounded to them.

Dula was hanged for the murder of his lover Laura Foster. The two lived in the North Wilkesboro, NC area. Tom Dula was a wild young buck, running around with two or three women at the same time. Foster, according to the ballad, gave him syphilis. He inadvertently passed it on to Foster's first cousin, Mrs. Ann Melton. A third woman, a Pauline Foster, was in the background as well at the time.

Both Laura and Ann were pregnant by Dula. When Mrs. Melton realized that her longtime affair would be exposed by the pregnancy, that the baby's health was seriously endangered, and that her own health had been compromised, all to her way of thinking because of Foster, she insisted that they—Dula and she—murder Laura Foster in vengeance.

As revealed in the case's court records, early one morning in 1866, Laura Foster took her best clothes and her father's horse and left for her rendezvous with Dula, who had supposedly gone to meet the justice of the peace so they could be married. Laura disappeared and Tom Dula fled Wilkes County.

The earliest known recorded version of the song was laid down on October 1, 1929 by GB Grayson & Henry Whitter. Whitter and Grayson met at a fiddlers' convention in Mountain City, TN in 1927. They teamed up, and by autumn of that year, Whitter had gotten them two record deals. They recorded eight songs for the Gennet label and six for Victor, among them 'Tom Dula.' Grayson & Whitter's recording of 'Tom Dula' is especially significant, since it was Grayson's uncle that tracked Dula in 1866.

The ballad of Tom Dooley tells us that Dula, fleeing the murder scene, was captured before he got to Tennessee by a sheriff named Grayson. Actually, Dula made it over the state line and worked for a week in Trade, TN, at the farm of Col. James Grayson, a member of the Tennessee legislature, in order to make enough money to buy a new pair of boots and continue his journey.

Dula was captured in Tennessee around July 11 by two North Carolina deputies, with the help of Colonel Grayson, and brought back to the Wilkesboro, NC, jail.

Folk music historians Anne & Frank Warner collected the song in 1938 in Beech Mountain, NC from a local banjo player and singer named Frank Profitt Sr. Frank's grandmother, Adeline Perdue, lived in Wilkes County and knew both Tom Dula and Laura Foster. Alan Lomax, of Library of Congress collecting fame, learned it from the Warners and sang it all over the country and on his radio shows. He went on to publish it in his book "Folk Song USA," and it’s THAT version that came to the attention of the Kingston Trio.

In 1962, a settlement was reached with the Kingston Trio that divided any subsequent royalties between Frank Profitt, Frank Warner and Alan Lomax.

The song lives on even today. Bobby McMillon, whose ballad singing was featured in the film ‘Songcatcher’ and who is the youngest recipient of the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award, performs it regularly. He went to school with relatives of Tom Dula.

Jeff and Gerret Warner, sons of Anne and Frank Warner, are continuing their parents' legacy. Jeff researched and edited for his mother’s book “Traditional American Folk Songs.” Gerret assembled and prepared its photographs, taken by their parents. The sons organized their parents’ notes, manuscripts and photographs, which now form the Frank and Anne Warner Collection at Duke University.

sources: www.cmt.com/artists/az/grayson_whitter/bio.jhtml
www.birthplaceofcountrymusic.org/node/207
www.wilkesnc.org/history/tomdula/
www.folkstreams.net/context,254
www.dailyyonder.com/tom-dula-murder-sold-10-000-guitars

Special thanks to Rosalie Friend for setting me on the right path with this story!


Tom+Dula Legend+of+Tom+Dooley Kingston+Trio Frank+Profitt Anne+&+Frank+Warner Alan+Lomax Grayson+&+Whitter appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

The Bristol Herald Courier
Abingdon,VA May 23, 1922

Miss Lucille WEBB has returned from an extended visit with friends in Austin, Denton and other places in Texas

Mr. and Mrs. D.A.F. CAMPBELL have as their guests during Stonewall Jackson College commencement Mesdames J.C. LEONARD, R.F. CULBERTSON, and J.H. SMITH, Miss Bonnie CAMPBELL, Mr. Harry R. CULBERTSON, J.C. LEONARD, Jr., and little misses Mara Elizabeth and Katherine CULBERTSON.


Dr. and Mrs. W.L. GANNAWAY are moving this week into the Gildersleeve property recently purchased by Dr. GANNAWAY

The many friends of Miss Eleanor DAVIDSON will regret to learn that she is quite sick at the home of her parents Mr. and Mrs. M.H. DAVIDSON

Miss Amelia SUTTON was hostess to members of the senior class of Stonewall Thursday evening. A very delightful time was spent

Mr. and Mrs. James W. BELL have returned from a very pleasant trip to Cincinnati, Ohio

Mrs. Mary M. DAVIDSON returned this week from an extended visit with relatives and friends in East Radford, Roanoke and Covington

Misses Freda SHARETZ, Susie CAMPBELL, Maria WINGFIELD, and J.S. BROWN, Jr. spent Sunday in Rural Retreat, the guests of Mr. and Mrs. J.E. BROWN, Jr.

Mrs. Roger S. WARREN is spending this week with friends in Richmond, Virginia

Misses Madge and Gay WHITE are attending the Pageant in Richmond this week

T.P. TRIGG, Jr. and W.W. TRIGG were called to Petersburg this week on account of the illness of their mother Mrs. T.P. TRIGG who is at the home of her daughter Mrs. Phillip ROPER

Mr. and Mrs. R.W. BELL and little daughter were weekend guests of Mr. and Mrs. A.A. MOCK at Damascus


source: www.rootsweb.com/~vawashin/Abingdon1922news.htm


Abingdon+VA Stonewall+Jackson+College Bristol+Herald+Courier appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia, That whenever the Superintendent of the Western State Hospital, or of the Eastern State Hospital, or of the Southwestern State Hospital, or of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, shall be of opinion that it is for the best interests of the patients and of society that any inmate of the institution under his care should be sexually sterilized, such superintendent is hereby authorized to perform, or cause to be performed by some capable physician or surgeon, the operation of sterilization on any such patient confined in such institution afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy; provided that such superintendent shall have first complied with the requirements of this act.

Article One, An Act to Provide for the Sexual Sterilization of Inmates of State Institutions in Certain Cases, Commonwealth of Virginia. Enacted 1924.

Dr. Joseph S. DeJarnette, director of Western State Hospital from 1905-1943, was one of Virginia's leading voices in the 20th century social movement known as Eugenics---the belief that information about heredity can be used to improve the human race. For Americans who feared the potential degradation of their race and culture, eugenics offered a convenient and scientifically plausible response to those fears.

Between 1927 and 1979, the state sterilized 8,300 residents thought 'unfit' for general society, including blacks, Native Americans, the feeble-minded, the promiscuous and the poor.

Mendel’s Law -- A Plea for a Better Race of Men
Oh, why are you men so foolish-
You breeders who breed our men
Let the fools, the weaklings and crazy
Keep breeding, and breeding again? …

DeJarnette was very proud of this poem, and presented the full 5 stanzas publicly on several occasions. Nor was he alone in this position.

Retired Montgomery County Welfare Director Kate Bolton recalled with pride, "The children were legally committed by the court for being feebleminded, and there was a waiting list from here to Lynchburg." She added, "If you’ve seen as much suffering and depravity as I have, you can only hope and pray no one else goes through something like that. We had to stop it at the root."

"People as a whole were very much in favor of what was going on," recalled Howard Hale, a former Montgomery County supervisor, as he relived the period for a local Virginia newspaper reporter a half century later. "They couldn’t see more people coming into the world to get on the welfare. Everybody who was drawing from welfare then was scared they were going to have it done on them.

"They were hiding all through these mountains, and the sheriff and his men had to go up after them…They really got them up on Brush Mountain. The sheriff went up there and loaded all of them in a couple of cars and ran them down to Staunton so they could sterilize them."

DeJarnette’s testimony before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 about Virginia's sterilization policy convinced the court to uphold the Racial Integrity Law.

"Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit," he noted in 1938, "while the United States with approximately twice the population has only sterilized about 27,869 to January 1, 1938, in the past 20 years… The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the US should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the maximum."

Perhaps not surprisingly, Adolf Hitler’s 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases contained language that echoed the Virginia statute.

Despite the fact that the Racial Integrity Law was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1967, the state of Virginia nonetheless in 1972 named its new children's psychiatric ward at Western State the DeJarnette Center in memoriam for the institution's steadfast director.


sources: www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/image_header.pl?id=1335&detailed=0
www.newsvirginian.com/wnv/lifestyles/local/article/the_history_of_western_state_and_dejarnette_sanitarium/22137/
[Mendel's Law poem:]www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/library/wdc-lib/historical/eugenics/exhibit4-3.cfm
george.loper.org/trends/2000/Dec/96.html
www.waragainsttheweak.com/chapter1.php
www.lewrockwell.com/kirkwood/kirkwood37.html
campus.udayton.edu/~hume/Eugenics/eugenics.htm


Racial+Integrity+Law eugenics Adolf+Hitler Joseph+S.+DeJarnette Western+State+Hospital Montgomery+County+VA Brush+Mountain+VA appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Alabama’s oldest Baptist congregation will be 200 years old this year. Or not, depending on who you ask.  Elder John Nicholson led the first worship on October 2, 1808 at the home of James Deaton in Killingsworth Cove (now part of Huntsville.) And for 170 of those 200 years the congregants who’ve adhered to the tenets of the original Flint River Baptist Church of Christ (the “Primitive” Baptists) have been at odds with more modernized, or “Missionary” Baptists.

The church today known as Flint River Primitive Baptist Church for many years maintained close organizational ties with nearby Enon Baptist Church.  Formed in June 1809, Enon was initially to be known as the ‘West Fork of the Flint Baptist Church.’ At their second meeting, they decided the name was too cumbersome and renamed themselves 'Enon.'

But in 1838 the Flint River association declared non-fellowship with the modern missionary movement, its societies, auxiliaries and supporters (Enon topped the list). Those congregations that embraced new church practices such as mission boards, Sunday Schools, and musical instruments in the church became “New School” or “Missionary” Baptist. Flint River Baptist Church continued in the simplicity of New Testament worship, thus being called “Old School” or “Primitive” Baptist.

By 1840 Flint River withdrew all fellowship from Enon, which in 1893 changed its name to the ‘First Baptist Church of Huntsville, Alabama, a Missionary Baptist Church’, for advocating a perversion of the articles of faith.

The two churches tangled again in 1908, the centennial year of Flint River Church. The missionary Baptists planned a celebration claiming the years 1808 – 1908 as their anniversary dates. They sent out a leaflet in which they stated correctly that Flint River Church was constituted in 1808, but also stating that it ---meaning the Primitive congregation--- had been out of existence for many years!

First Baptist Church of Huntsville building, built 1895, on the corner of Clinton and Gallatin Streets.

“When Flint River Church saw this report she was justly offended,” huffs The history of Flint river Church/Flint River Association 1808-1955 “because she was reported dead, when she was yet alive, and had a continuous existence ever since her first organization and because a people who differed from her and opposed her in almost every particular claimed her as their ancestor and proposed to celebrate her organization in a manner that was highly offensive to her."

"Any attempt by the Missionaries to celebrate this year,” stated Flint River Church clerk B. B. Lawler in Primitive Baptist magazine, “is like a man wanting to celebrate his golden wedding when he has been married twenty years to one woman and thirty years to another one."

Both churches remain active today.  The First Baptist Church of Huntsville makes no mention of the 1908 centennial ruckus on their website.
 
Sources: www.archives.state.al.us/markers/imadison.html
www.flintriverpbc.org
www.fbchsv.org/aboutfbc/history.html
www.essentialbaptistprinciples.org/ebp_published_articles/baptist_history_misrepresented.htm


Flint+River+Primitive+Baptist+Church First+Baptist+Church+of+Huntsville Huntsville+AL appalachia +appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Baptists

Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave is not only the largest known cave in the world; it has the distinction of being the oldest touring cave. Formal guided tours were started here in 1816. It remained in private ownership for the next 125 years and grew to become a prime tour attraction. And because Mammoth had showed the tremendous profit potential in cave tourism, it incited a cave war in the 1920s, at the dawn of the automobile vacation era.

Since the Croghan family controlled most of the land on the ridge where Mammoth Cave was located, would-be cave tour operators began to focus on properties on neighboring Flint Ridge, which was separated from the Mammoth Cave ridge by narrow Houchins Valley.

In 1921, a Louisville oil driller named George Morrison forced another opening into the Mammoth Cave system and set up shop on Flint Ridge, advertising the "New Entrance to Mammoth Cave." Before long the combat was on among Colossal Cave, Long Cave, Short’s Cave, Great Onyx Cave, Indian Cave, Salts Cave and Crystal Cave.

The search for new caves to commercialize became so dangerous and secretive that a cave exploring death was almost inevitable; it arrived in the person of Floyd Collins, who lost his life in 1925 in Sand Cave, searching for the first cave entrance on the 10-1/2 mile road from Cave City to Mammoth.

Mammoth’s rivals went to dastardly lengths to lure tourists to their underground cash cows. They placed misleading signs along the roads leading from Cave City to the Mammoth Cave. They diverted tourists with fake policemen, employed stooges to heckle each other’s guided tours, burned down ticket huts, and put out libelous and forged advertisements.

A typical strategy during the early days of automobile travel involved a representative of a private show cave --- a capper --- hopping aboard a tourist's car's running board, and leading the passengers to believe that Mammoth Cave was closed, quarantined, caved in or otherwise inaccessible.

By April 1928 the promise of tourist dollars drove two owners of adjoining caves to legal blows over property rights in Edwards v. Sims. L.P. Edwards had discovered a cave whose entrance, 3 miles down the road from Mammoth Cave, was on his property. He developed it into a tourist attraction---the Great Onyx Cave, and went so far as to build a tourist hotel near the cave’s mouth.

Edwards’ neighbor F. P. Lee suspected that part of the cave was located under his land. The cave was completely inaccessible to Lee – hundreds of feet below his land. He sued Edwards for trespassing, fully aware of the tourist dollars he stood to gain by it. Edwards argued that allocating ownership of part of the cave to Lee constituted an unmerited windfall.

The case dragged on for years, all the way to the Kentucky Court of Appeal. Final ruling in 1936: the surface owner had rights to a cave below his property, even if the only entrance to the cave was on someone else’s property. Sims was the name of the Edmonson County circuit court judge against whom Edwards filed an appeal.

Many of the Flint Ridge caves were later found to be an extension of Mammoth Cave and were eventually brought into the fold when it became a National Park (chartered in 1926 and opened in 1941). Even after Federal incorporation, agents for several commercial caves impersonated rangers and flagged travelers off the road before they could reach the national park. Some of the entrances used for today's tours are left over from that era when they were thought to be separate caves.


Sources: https://sercms.nps.gov/maca/historyculture/cavewars.htm
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/southeastern_geographer/v044/44.1algeo.pdf
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE6DF1039F933A1575BC0A96F948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
www.merrillandsmithproperty.com/display.asp?displayID=Sample2_Spr07.pdf



Mammoth+Cave Kentucky+Cave+Wars Great+Onyx+Cave appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

From 1951 to 1965 Dr. Thomas Jugarthy Hicks began to quietly offer babies for adoption from his Hicks Community Clinic in McCaysville, GA. Quietly, because the clinic he’d been running since the mid-1940s was not a licensed adoption agency. Hicks cared for the mundane health issues of local farmers and townspeople in the front of the clinic, while performing abortions, which were illegal during that period, in the back rooms.

Law or no law, he advertised his abortion services on phone booths, bus stations and bridges. Women came by bus, car and train to pay $100 to "fix their problem." A small airstrip was built in nearby Ducktown so the prominent could fly their daughters in from Atlanta and Chattanooga for an abortion.

His black market baby-selling ring, which may have ‘moved’ as many as 200 babies with no questions asked, relied on young, poor women from North Georgia and Eastern Tennessee. They’d come to him for an abortion, and he persuaded some to carry the babies to full term. The women would reside in the clinic for a few months, or the good doctor would provide a room for them at his farm, or in the New York Hotel in adjoing Copperhill, TN, or in his apartments in the telephone company building.

Hicks knew he could count on word of mouth to bring in the baby buyers. The Fannin County Courthouse records list 49 babies, for example, who went to Summit County in Ohio. All the fathers who bought them worked in the Akron tire companies, except for a Cuyahoga Falls doctor who bought two babies. All the sales were arranged by a West Akron Goodrich employee who bought four babies for herself. All of them paid up to $1,000 for a baby no one could trace back to its mother.

Hicks made sure the birth certificates listed the people adopting as birth parents. The doctor kept no known records of the birth mothers, who discreetly vanished.

Thomas Hicks was no stranger to shady dealings. After getting his medical degree from Emory University in Atlanta in 1917, he moved to Copperhill, TN, but lost his medical license and served time in federal prison for selling narcotic pain killers to a veteran working undercover for the FBI.

While incarcerated, he studied a lung disease that kept copper miners from living past the age of 40.

Once out, he was hired by the Tennessee Copper Co. to treat miners. The only problem was, he filed more claims than there were miners with the disease.

After he was fired from that job, he opened up the Hicks Community Clinic in McCaysville.

Once a baby was available, Hicks wasted neither time nor words with his prospective buyers. "You have 24 hours to come or I call the next person on the list," he's reported to have said to more than one client.

Hicks warned his baby buyers not to be picky. If you told Hicks you only wanted a boy or you wanted a girl, you could forget about getting a baby.

It may never be known how many illegal adoptions were conducted by Dr. Hicks, who was stripped of his medical license in 1964, but never jailed. He was, after all, a member of the Copperhill Kiwanis and the Adams Bible Class of the First Baptist Church (to which he donated a Wurlitzer organ). He was known to give free medicine to the very poorest in town. He made house calls to those who couldn't otherwise get to his clinic.

Dr. Thomas Hicks' abortion clinic was an open secret tolerated by a town that appreciated the bulk of his medical contributions. "He didn't perform any services that anyone didn't request,'' noted local resident Marlene Matham Hardiman, who once rented an apartment from Hicks.

The court papers disbarring him made no mention of the black-market babies. The abortion charges against him were dropped, and he continued practicing for a time thereafter.

Thomas Hicks died of leukemia in 1972 at age 83. His lawyer, nurses, wife and son are dead. His only living relative, a daughter, lives in seclusion in North Carolina.


sources:www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20124848,00.html
freepages.misc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~msroots/BMA/HICKS4.htm
query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE1DE103EF930A1575BC0A961958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
immigrantships.net/adoption/hicksbabies.html
chronicle.augusta.com/stories/012098/met_LG0411-9.001.shtml


Thomas+Hicks Hicks+Community+Clinic abortion illegal+baby+adoptions Mccaysville+GA appalachia +appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

South Carolinians have known about the mineral springs of Glenn Springs, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Spartanburg, for centuries. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, the place was known simply as a "deer lick." Cattle were continually straggling from their pastures seeking the swamp around the lick.

Its future as a resort destination began to emerge when John B. Glenn purchased the 500 acres on which the spring was situated for $800 in 1825, and constructed an inn for guests to come and enjoy the water. The popularity of his guesthouse was so high with lowcountry residents looking to escape the coastal heat that in 1835 fifteen investors, headed by a Dr. Maurice Moore, formed a stock company to buy Glenn’s property and build a large summer resort hotel on the site.

In 1877, Dr. John Wister Simpson of Laurens County, who like Dr. Moore had served in the South Carolina House of Representatives, bought the springs property from the stock company and relocated his family to it. His brother was then-Governor and later Chief Justice William Dunlap Simpson; small wonder that the site became the Governor’s summer headquarters.

Simpson willed his interest to sons Harvey, Paul, Casper, and Arthur, who during their tenure saw the resort become the state’s most popular. The resort passed into the hands of their children, and became the Glenn's Spring Company, later called simply Glenn Springs.

By 1894, the hotel was once again deemed too small to accommodate demand. Paul Simpson of Simpson & Simpson expanded the property to over 58,000 square feet, able to serve 500 guests. “The Hotel is fitted with Water Works, Sanitary Arrangements, baths on first and second floors and Electric
 Bells,” crowed an 1897 ad in the Spartanburg Journal. The signature feature of the hotel was the more than 580 linear feet of piazzas.

Part of the 1894 expansion involved the creation of The Glenn Springs Railroad to make hotel access easier. The two-car train ran from Becca Station (now Roebuck) via the Charleston & Western Carolina line from Augusta to Spartanburg (now CSX), to Glenn Springs.

The nine mile trip from Roebuck to Glenn Springs cost 75 cents for adults and 35 cents for children. Riders boarded a train in Spartanburg, took it to Roebuck, then boarded the train going to the springs. Finally hotel livery wagons delivered guests and their summer-long baggage to the hotel.

Glenn Springs water was not only enjoyed locally, but was bottled and shipped throughout the United States and parts of Europe. Beginning in 1931 Glenn Springs was the official water of the United States Senate. The resort had transformed from being the center of social activity for the upstate to attracting visitors from near and far. The original beautiful wooden building burned in 1941, but was never rebuilt. The hotel's chapel, built in 1908, still remains on the site.

The Glenn Springs Historic District, including the hotel site, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on November 4, 1982.


sources: Seeing Spartanburg: A History in Images, by Philip N. Racine, Hub City Writers Project, 1999
http://www.nationalregister.sc.gov/spartanburg/S10817742033/index.htm
http://www.spartanburgboyshome.org/
History of Spartanburg County, South Carolina, by John Belton O'Neall Landrum, Genealogical Publishing, 1997


John+Wister+Simpson John+B.+Glenn Dr.+Maurice+Moore Glenn+Springs+Hotel Spartanburg+SC appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Confederate Memorial Day is May 10. On May 12, 1909 the 4th Ohio Cavalry Association returned the Rifle Scouts' Civil War battle flag to the state of Alabama at the Elk's Theater in Huntsville. Note the presence of Tallulah B. Bankhead --not the famous actress, who was 7 years old at the time, but rather her mother.

Captain John R. Pitts of the 4th Ohio Cavalry Association presented the flag to Mrs. Charles G. Brown of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The following individuals are pictured: Mayor T. W. Smith of Huntsville; James Quinton (4th Ohio); Mrs. Virginia Clay-Clopton (UDC); Mrs. Helen Plaine (UDC); Joseph H. Goddard (4th Ohio); L. C. Bramkamp (4th Ohio); T. C. Lindsey (4th Ohio); W. W. Shoemaker (4th Ohio); William H. Henry (4th Ohio); Mrs. A. W. Newsom (UDC); Mrs. Charles G. Brown (UDC); Mrs. Cornelia Branch Stone (UDC); Mrs. Andrew J. Dowdell (UDC); Captain John R. Pitts (4th Ohio); Mrs. Thomas W. Palmer (UDC); Mrs. Bennett B. Ross (UDC); Mrs. Leopold Bashinski (UDC); Mrs. Tallulah B. Bankhead (UDC); Mrs. Clarence M. Tardy (UDC); Thomas Osborn (4th Ohio); M. H. Richardson (4th Ohio); C. N. Vaught (UCV); James R. Johnson; Mrs. Ellen P. Bryce (UDC); Mrs. Asa S. Rountree (UDC); Mrs. L. T. Pride (UDC).

4th+Ohio+Cavalry+Association United+Daughters+of+the+Confederacy Huntsville+AL civil+war+veteran