Appalachian History

I am an average woman of the United States, a married women with two children and an income of—well, I’m not quite sure what it is, but I know it is not enough to live on as we ought to live. But, small as it is, our church has been trying to get me to budget (horrid word, isn’t it?). We have a person called by a disagreeable name, Stewardship Secretary, going around and giving lectures on how we ought to spend our money. It’s easy for her to talk about budgeting. She gets her money paid regularly, while I have to get mine in dribs, just as I can beg, scold, and wheedle it out of my husband.

I’m very economical, I can tell you that. I don’t keep account of every penny I spend. In the first place, you understand, we must have a roof over our heads, and rents are simply awful. It’s even worse if you try to own your own home and keep up insurance, repairs, and taxes and pay the interest on the money you borrowed to buy the house with. I cannot tell you offhand what we do pay for rent---sometimes more and sometimes less.

Then, there is food. We must have three meals a day, and you know how men are about food. I always say that none of my family shall ever be reported for being undernourished, with delicatessen shops so close. I can always send one of the children over at the last minute for anything I want. It’s hard to say exactly how much we spend on food---sometimes more and sometimes less---but I’m sure you can form a good idea from what I’ve told you as to just what we do spend.

And clothes! I’m a good manager, and I never expect to be a back number when it comes to styles. Cut off for clothes just about what most people spend, but remember that mighty few women get the good results I do for the money I put into clothes.

We spend practically nothing on amusements---nothing worth mentioning. The only thing we do is go to the movies, unless you’d call our trips in our car amusement. I think trips of that sort are a real necessity.

I am sure I give all the unaccounted-for part to the Church. The money goes somewhere, and I always give the children a penny or a nickel apiece for Sunday School---whenever we get up in time to start them off. You look as if you thought I ought to give more! Well, charity begins at home, I think.

---excerpt from ‘Short Pagaents for the Sunday School,’ by Laura Scherer Copenhaver, Doubleday, Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1929

Laura Lu Scherer Copenhaver (1868-1940) wrote fiction, poetry, and dozens of church pageants, many in collaboration with her younger sister, Katharine Killinger Scherer Cronk. One of Copenhaver’s poems, "Heralds of Christ," became a well-known hymn.

Copenhaver taught at Marion Junior College in Smyth County, VA and assumed positions of leadership in the Lutheran church and on the Marion social scene. Her father, Dr. John Jacob Scherer Jr., had served as pastor of Marion’s Lutheran church before moving on to the First English Evangelical Lutheran Church in Richmond, presidency of the state synod, and a place on the Inner Missions Board of the national church.

At the 1922 meeting of the Women’s Missionary Society of the United Lutheran Church, Copenhaver presented an address titled “Mountain Folk in the South” which spurred the organization to create a mission school near the lumbering community of Konnarock.

The Konnarock Training School aimed “to tram the mountain children into true Christian womanhood and manhood,” and provided elementary-level academic and religious education for Smyth County children who did not have access to other public schools.

At the Smyth County Centennial on May 27, 1932, members of Marion College, county high schools, and local citizens presented a historical play written by Laura Lu Scherer Copenhaver. Miss Smyth County, Eleanor Fairman, spun the wheel of time and scenes from local history were acted out.


sources: The human tradition in the New South, by James C. Klotter
http://openlibrary.org/details/MN41756ucmf_4
Smyth County, by Kimberly Barr Byrd, Debra J. Williams
http://www.dhr.virginia.gov/registers/Counties/Smyth/086-0027_Konnarock_School_1997_Final_Nomination.pdf
http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vawomen/2007/copenhaver.htm



Laura+Lu+Scherer+Copenhaver Smyth+County+VA appalachia +appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

We post a new episode of Appalachian History weekly podcast every Sunday. You can start listening right away by clicking the podcast icon over on the left side of your screen. If you'd rather grab the show off itunes for later listening, click here.

We open today's show with a dark chapter from Virginia history. For much of the 20th century, the social movement known as Eugenics---the belief that information about heredity can be used to improve the human race---dictated medical ‘treatment’ of society’s undesirables. 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.

If you’ve ever been through Dalton, GA you’ve probably noticed it bills itself as the bedspread capital of the world. In the early part of the 20th century vacationing families headed towards Florida on US Highway 41 found the roadsides in and around Dalton—‘Peacock Alley’---clustered thick with family stands hawking chenille bedspreads and quilts of all sorts. Big business came rolling in by the late 1930s. Dalton's B. J. Bandy was reputedly the first man to make $1 million in the bedspread business.

Next, take a ride with us on the longest running narrow gauge railroad in Ohio. The Bellaire, Zanesville, and Cincinnati Railway served a vital role in Monroe County life, but was constantly defaulting on its construction bonds and entering into receiverships. Its 300 trestles and bridges were expensive to maintain, and frequent landslides amidst the steep terrain didn’t help one bit.

And you thought your work week dragged on? Lucille Thornburgh went to work at age 16 in a Knoxville cotton mill that demanded 10-12 hour work days, 6 days a week. Thornburgh and seven of her coworkers weren’t willing to accept that treatment, and they drew up a union charter. In this oral history excerpt, Thornburgh tells you how Cherokee Mills workers joined textile workers across the South in a general strike known as the Uprising of 1934.

Jean Thomas called him the "first primitive, unlettered Kentucky mountain minstrel to cross the sea to fiddle and sing his own and Elizabethan ballads in the Royal Albert Hall in London." She presented to the American public a man she said spent his life in the mountains, never to come into contact with the modern world, still retaining vestiges of his English ancestry. Folks in Ashland, KY had a different view of the situation: they knew J.W. Day as an itinerant town beggar who made money not by performing ancient ballads, but by playing a mix of topical songs of his own composition. Pull up a chair; this story just gets more convoluted from there.

We’ll wrap things up with a look at the get-rich sales pitches of the Wilson Chemical Company. By 1937, two generations of Wilsons had perfected the art of what was then a most unusual sales technique. The company recruited young children nationwide via advertisements in comic books and newspapers to sell their White Cloverline Brand Salve door-to-door, stating in the ads that the salesperson could keep a certain amount of the profit or collect premiums listed in a catalog. An attractive offer to rural children in Appalachia during the Depression, when money was scarce.

And, thanks to the good folks at the Digital Library of Appalachia we'll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music from Pap’s Jug Band in a live 1940s recording of “Old Indians Never Die.”

So, call your old blue-tick hound up on the porch, fire up your corn-cob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian History.

It was Ohio's longest-lived narrow gauge railroad.

Monroe County's rugged terrain hindered commerce and communication during the 1800s. In the early 1870s Woodsfield businessmen, led by banker Samuel L. Mooney, promoted a narrow-gauge railroad to connect to the Baltimore and Ohio at Bellaire.

Narrow gauge railroads were popular during this boom era because they cost less to build and operate than standard-gauge lines and could traverse sharp curves and steep terrain. The Bellaire and Southwestern Railway was completed through Armstrong's Mills and Beallsville to Woodsfield in December 1879, giving Monroe County a welcome modern link to the rest of the country.

Its initial success prompted its extension westward, and it was soon renamed the Bellaire, Zanesville, and Cincinnati Railway, reaching Zanesville via Caldwell in late 1883.

While it served a vital role in the Monroe County life, by 1886 the BZ&C had defaulted on its construction bonds and entered the first of many receiverships. Its 300 trestles and bridges were expensive to maintain; frequent landslides added to operating costs.

Original caption reads: The Woodsfield ceremony for the OR&W's last run. Mayor Clyde Merskel is speaking from the top of the box car. A George Kampheffner photo. (Gerald Seebach Collection)

Only the coal and oil booms of the 1890s, along with convoluted financing schemes, kept the railroad operating into the 20th century; a benefit for the people of Monroe County if not its stockholders. Reborn as the Ohio River and Western (locally called the "Old, Rusty, and Wobbly") in 1902, it continued to operate at a loss until the Great Depression. The Village of Woodsfield had staged a ceremony for the first narrow gauge train to arrive in town Tuesday December 2nd, 1879. Similarly, a ceremony was held on Memorial Day May 30, 1931 for the last train. Hundreds turned out. The BZ&C had lasted 52 years.


Source: www.pbase.com/gshamilton/image/68697306
www.narrowtracks.com/minibunch/articles_prototype/Views_Along_OR&W/2004-06-OhioBicentennialMarkerDedication.htm

In 1924, when I was 16 years old, I started workin' at the Appalachian Mill as a cone winder operator. Now on that machine, that was a long machine, it had about 50 spindles on it and I was windin' threads from a cone up to a spool. There wasn't a clock in the room. I didn't have a watch and I didn't know what time it was. So about 9 o'clock I thought it must be time to go home. That was the longest day that I can ever remember. And I remember, very definitely, eating my lunch at 10:30 because I thought it must be lunchtime. It wasn't lunchtime.

I still had to continue on until 12, until the whistle blew and most of us carried our lunch. And that was the shortest 30 minutes you've ever had, too. We would go outside the mill and sit on the steps and eat our lunch, but that was a long day. And when I started to thinkin' about that, "From now till 4:30, can I make it, can I make it?" But I did make it and, of course, each day that got a little easier, you know.

Did I know what I was doin' when I went into the cotton mill? No, I did not. It was just a way to, ah, help earn a living for the family. I had no ideas at all about, ah, ah, union labor. Now I had heard of the railroad strike in 1921, but there were—there wasn't any railroad workers living around where we were and there was very little in the papers about it. But I didn't know that they were even in the union. I thought they just quit work. I—I had no way of knowing anything about the labor movement.

It was the last thing in the world that my parents wanted, for us to go into cotton mills. They wanted us to all continue going to school. My mother had visions of us going to university and college and graduatin' and becoming doctors and lawyers and all that. And that was a dream that was never realized, because of the Depression there and there was no way.

My father couldn't make a livin' workin' in a butcher shop and in food markets around. And he had no other skills either. And my mother had been a—a cook and a dressmaker and they had no way of makin' a livin'. So it was up to us children to do that. We—we had to. We had to go to work.

Boys and girls at Bemis Cotton Mill in Bemis, TN, 1905.

The—at the Cherokee Spinnin' Company there in 1933, where I was still working as a winding machine operator, but the end of my machine was near a window and right around the corner from that was the weave shop. And I looked out there one day and here's all these weavers sittin' out there in the afternoon—it wasn't their lunch hour—they were sittin' out there on a pile of lumber, just sitting there. And we all—I told everbody to run to the window and looked at 'em and we all wondered, "What are—what are they doing?"

And we still didn't quite understand it, but I think now that they did gain something from that strike.

Oh, yes. That's—that's when we got the 8 hours. When the NRA came in, we got 8 hours then and our wages went up to $12.40 a week.

That was great, but you know what an argument here in Knoxville was and it was in all the newspapers. What—wasn't that gonna cause a crime wave or wasn't something gonna happen with those people with all that leisure time on their hands? In fact, a newspaper reporter—I don't think that's in my scrapbook anywhere, but a newspaper reporter came out to my house one day to ask, "What do you do with all this leisure time?" We—that was time that we hadn't had before and they were really afraid of it, that we had that leisure time. And then we were off on Saturday. See what a break that was there? We got the 40-hour week.

Lucille Thornburgh

----

In 1933, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Recovery Act, which included provisions that protected the right of workers to organize, Lucille Thornburgh and seven coworkers drew up a union charter. With the help of a local union organizer, they signed up all 603 employees at Cherokee Mills.

In 1934 Cherokee workers joined textile workers across the South in a general strike known as the Uprising of 1934. Knoxville workers remained out for eight weeks, but the strike collapsed following the sudden death of owner Hal Mebane, an event Thornburgh says workers interpreted in religious terms. When the workers returned, Thornburgh was blacklisted, and other mill owners refused to hire her.

In 1995 Thornburgh was featured in the PBS film Uprising of '34, which documented the general textile strike.


Source: Lucille Thornburgh interview, edited, from WORK 'N PROGRESS: Lessons in the History of American Labor at Archives, Library and Information Center, Georgia Institute of Technology www.library.gsu.edu/spcoll/Labor/wnp/wnpdocument/uprising34/uprising34.pdf

commentary by Connie L. Lester, Mississippi State University/Tennessee Historical Society/Tennessee Encyclopedia

Jean Thomas called him the "first primitive, unlettered Kentucky mountain minstrel to cross the sea to fiddle and sing his own and Elizabethan ballads in the Royal Albert Hall in London." She presented to the American public a man she said spent his life in the mountains, never to come into contact with the modern world, still retaining vestiges of his English ancestry.

James W. Day (1861-1942), from Rowan County and Ashland KY, went by many names in his life... known in childhood as Willie, then later as "Blind Bill Day" because he was blind. He often went by J.W. Day as an early adult, but after he was 'discovered' by Jean Thomas, who became his agent, he became best known by his stage name of Jilson Setters, the Singin' Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow.

The left-handed Setters played his fiddle for many years in the American Folk Song Festival held in Ashland, composed tunes such as 'The Rowan County Troubles,' a popular local ballad, and recorded on the RCA Victor label in the late 1920s. He also recorded in the 1930s for folklorist John A. Lomax, whose collection is now in the Library of Congress.

In February 1930 Jean Thomas, who said she was a circuit court stenographer, wrote "Blind Jilson: The Singing Fiddler of Lost Hope Hollow" for American Magazine. The article describes how Thomas arranged for an operation that gave him sight, and how he appeared on a radio broadcast from New York City. It ends: "Jilson Setters, whose Elizabethan ballads broadcast over a hook-up from coast to coast and relayed half way around the world, delighted millions last night…Jilson Setters is a modern survival of the ancient minstrel. Who knows but that his primitive turnes have paved the way for American grand opera."

In 1931 Thomas took Setters to London, where he performed in the Albert Hall at a folk song festival. On his return, Harvard professor George Lyman Kittering pronounced Setters' composition "London Town" 'a classic of American folk song.' By 1934 Thomas was affecting Elizabethan garb, and Setters had become the featured performer at the National Song Festival organized by Thomas under the umbrella of her American Folk Song Society, which included on its board Carl Sandberg and Ida M. Tarbell.

Thomas had first asked another Kentucky fiddler, Ed Haley, to take on the persona of a character she was creating, Jilson Setters. When Haley refused, Thomas turned to J.W. Day. He wasn't blind from birth as she'd said, but his sight had failed while he was young, and Thomas had arranged to have the cataracts removed from his eyes.

There's no such place in Kentucky as Lost Hope Hollow. Day was an itinerant town beggar who made money not by performing ancient ballads, but by playing a mix of topical songs of his own composition. And Thomas was not a circuit court stenographer, but a Hollywood scenario writer---albeit an amateur folklorist.

Accompanied by songwriter/guitarist Carson Robison, Day recorded ten traditional songs for RCA Victor in NYC in February 1928 using the Setters name. But there is no record of him ever appearing on live country music shows, or performing with other authentic Kentucky musicians on the radio. Jean Thomas had him under contract and wanted him to be represented as an Elizabethan relic, so too much exposure might have threatened the careful image she had crafted.

Maybe folk music fans didn't buy the image and therefore the records? Certainly Kentucky newspapers weren't paying him much notice.

"When he arrived in Manhattan to sail his baggage consisted of one extra shirt, a quilt his grandmother had made, a gourd for a drinking cup, a corncob pipe and his fiddle wrapped in an oilcloth poke," said TIME magazine. "He came, he said, from Lost Hope Hollow and he was going to see the King. Ashlanders have since said that there is no such place as Lost Hope Hollow, that Jilson Setters' real name is William Day, and that he was never much of a mountaineer, but an oldtime beggar."

So anxious were various forces in American society to find something that represented their vision of what was really American that Setters was heralded as the genuine article. Thus, William Wolff, in a 1939 article entitled "Songs that express the soul of a people" in the left-wing The People's World, noted of Jilson Setters: "He has probably never heard of Marx or Lenin, but there can be no doubts about where his roots lay, as he sings."

One of the things that seems to have really set people off in Kentucky about Jilson Setters, says genealogist Steve Green in a thread at Ancestry.com, was when Jean Thomas got carried away with her remarks in the early 1930s about how Jilson Setters (who was traveling with her at the time) was disappointed he wouldn't be able to be back in his cabin in the Kentucky mountains to celebrate Old Christmas on January 6. Many people did not like her portrayal of eastern Kentucky as a backward place-- for some reason, they felt that the references to Old Christmas were ludicrous and were harmful to the image of the region.

In a slew of letters to newspaper editors around the state, they fervently declared that people in Kentucky celebrated Christmas just as it was everywhere else, on December 25. What's interesting is that most of the people who wrote in protest were unaware that there was in fact an "Old Christmas" that was indeed celebrated by some grassroots people. Nevertheless, the whole thing caused a brief public controversy, and along with Miss Thomas' continual claims about the supposed Elizabethan ancestry of mountaineers, it generated quite a few skeptics.


Sources: Constructing Country: Fakery and "Strictly American" Music, by Kevin Yuill, Reconstruction 8.4, 2008
Old-time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes, By Jeff Todd Titon
Creating Country Music, By Richard A. Peterson
Big Sandy, By Jean Thomas
Time magazine, Traipsin' Woman, Monday, Jun. 18, 1934
Steve Green on Jilson Setters thread at Ancestry.com---
http://boards.ancestry.com/localities.northam.usa.states.kentucky.counties.wolfe/1122.1120.1124.1125.1127/mb.ashx

By the time George Wilson Jr. became president of the Wilson Chemical Company in 1937, two generations of Wilsons had perfected the art of what was then a most unusual sales technique. The company recruited young children nationwide via advertisements in comic books and newspapers to sell their White Cloverline Brand Salve door-to-door, stating in the ads that the salesperson could keep a certain amount of the profit or collect premiums listed in a catalog. An attractive offer to rural children in Appalachia during the Depression, when money was scarce to begin with.

The money raised by selling the heal-all ointment actually went to the adult who recruited the children. The children, meantime, received points which could be spent on prizes. And oh, were the pictures of those wonderful prizes eye-catching! One could win yo-yos, dolls, baseball gloves, bats and balls. The more you sold the bigger and better the prize; "Daisy" air rifles, "Radio Flyer" wagons and even bicycles could be won. Through the eyes of that era’s children, this was a great opportunity to get toys they otherwise could not have.

There were plenty of adults who were quite willing to take advantage of that fact, and the children were ripe for the taking. By the mid-1930s 300,000 young salesmen had signed on, endeavoring to sell the salve to anyone with a door on which to knock. To aid sales the company provided its sales force a beautiful 8”x10” religious print to give away with each 25-cent can. In order to handle the large volume of requests for Cloverline, the Wilson plant soon had to open it's own postal substation at Cloverline Terrace, near its Tyrone, PA headquarters.

The lid of Cloverline Salve’s tin container had an art nouveau design motif around the edge with a green four-leaf clover in the center. "Apply freely, and repeat as often as needed for temporary relief of the minor irritations of the skin mentioned below." The petroleum-gel product promised to remove wrinkles, heal cuts and burns and give your skin a glowing complexion. If you got chapped skin, you rubbed it in, and if you had a cold, you rubbed it on your chest or your nose, and you rubbed it on any sores you had.

In 1967 the Wilson Chemical Company was dealt a crushing blow by the Federal Trade Commission, which decided that the Company's advertising method of luring young salesmen had to stop.


sources: www.tyronehistory.org/faq_WCCo.html
http://irvsukelele.blogspot.com/2006/09/on-child-labor-laws.html
http://mywilson.homestead.com/old_jules.html



Cloverline+Salve Wilson+Chemical+Company appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+culture history+of+appalachia,

Some of the things I learned at Biltmore would be hard to find in any text book published then or later — things, that as I look back over my 44 years as a forester, have proved fully as potent for good as any of the technical disciplines of the profession.

The good Doctor taught us the value of relaxation in good company, when with song and stein the whole school and faculty would make merry and stretch lusty harmony and a keg of beer well into a starry Saturday night. Such carryings-on made for an espirit de corps and a strong bond of brotherhood that somehow seems to have lasted all thru the decades that have gone by.

He possessed and passed on to us his love of the woods and all that in them is. To hunt and fish, he taught by word and deed, is the especial privilege of the forester and a soothing ungent for a soul often wearied and harassed by over much fire fighting.

He preached that an appreciation of the birds, the beasts and the fishes, the flowers, the glamorous smells of bay swamps and spruce thickets and the shape and texture of foliage covered hills were all a part, and often the larger portion of a foresters compensation.

A great forester, a masterful teacher and a strong and lovable character, our good Doctor Schenck can look back from his quiet home in Lindenfels and know that he lives not only in the affectionate hearts of his "boys" but as well in the forestry of America he helped in the borning.

Inman F. Eldredge
from a May 29, 1950 Reunion Speech to the Alumni of Biltmore Forest School, Asheville NC
Biltmore ‘06

In 1895, German forester Dr. Carl A. Schenck accepted George Vanderbilt’s offer to come to North Carolina to manage and restore his vast woodland properties.

Schenck oversaw thousands of acres dotted with several hundred houses and abandoned farms. In 1898, he established the Biltmore Forest School, the first forestry school in the United States, using Vanderbilt’s forests as a campus.

Photo caption reads: "Lecturing at the Fiber Plant. Canton, N.C. 1911. Class is in session for Biltmoreans at the Champion Fibre Company's plant in Canton, North Carolina, 1911."

Students in Schenck’s twelve-month curriculum split their time between classroom lectures and fieldwork. Combining theory with practice, the students gained experience in the physical side of forestry, including the care of nurseries, transplanting seedlings, timber selection, felling, logging, and sawing.

They also studied forest finance and economics, dendrology, botany, fish and game, and the machinery associated with forestry. The campus was located at the site of a sawmill and gristmill formerly owned by Hiram King, a leader of the Pink Beds farming community.

Schenck’s operation was quite successful in its first years, but Schenck had a falling out with Vanderbilt and left the estate in 1909. He established the school’s winter headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany. The Biltmore Forestry School was headquartered in the town of Sunburst, N.C. from 1910 to 1913. Sunburst is located on the Pigeon River, just west of Mount Pisgah.

The Champion Fibre Company constructed the village prior to their beginning logging operations in the area. Reuben B. Robertson, manager of the company, offered the use of the facilities to Dr. Schenck and his students. Schenck was particularly excited about the location because it offered the students the opportunity of direct observation of hardwood and spruce forests, logging operations, sawmills under construction, different types of log chutes and flumes, splash dams in operation and an up-to-date pulp mill.

Schenck struggled to maintain the school as a traveling entity in America, but enrollment dwindled as new forestry schools emerged. Schenck’s final class, who numbered more than 300, graduated in 1913. Many became prominent and successful foresters for both federal and state agencies as well as private forest industries.

Sources:
www.biltmore.com/explore/then/forestry.shtml
www.lib.ncsu.edu/specialcollections/forestry/schenck/series_vii/forest_school/school_sunburst/school_sunburst.html
www.ncmarkers.com/Results.aspx?k=Search&ct=btn
www.foresthistory.org/Research/Biltmore_Project/Flowers.pdf


Carl+A.+Schenck Biltmore+Forest+School Biltmore Pink+Beds Sunburst+NC Champion+Fibre+Company appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

We post a new episode of Appalachian History weekly podcast every Sunday. You can start listening right away by clicking the podcast icon over on the left side of your screen. If you'd rather grab the show off itunes for later listening, click here.

We open today's show with the details on Kentucky’s cave wars of the 1920s. Mammoth Cave is not only the largest known cave in the world; it has the distinction of being the oldest touring cave. And because Mammoth had showed the tremendous profit potential in cave tourism, competitors mushroomed. And they weren’t very neighborly.

South Carolinians have known about the mineral springs of Glenn Springs, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains near Spartanburg, for centuries. You’ll enjoy the story of how it went from being a deer lick to, by 1931, providing the official water of the United States Senate.

Next, guest blogger Beth Kephart will share a personal view of her famous great grandfather, Horace Kephart. He did public good (his librarianship, his camp craft, his anthropological Our Southern Highlanders, his passion for preserving the Great Smoky Mountains). But he also did private harm (leaving a wife and their six children behind to live the life he knew would save him).

Are you a scrapbooker? If so you’ll be able to relate to Stewart A. Cody, who worked as the Jackson County, WV County Agent in the early 1900s. The West Virginia Historical Photograph Collection possesses 36 images which were pulled from a photo album of his dated 1912.

As County Agent, Cody spent a great deal of time with the local chicken farmers, and the captions of these 36 photos, taken as a whole, provide a detailed insight into the practices of that time.

Have you noticed the soundtrack on the new PBS series about Appalachia? Will Benson, Assistant Professor of Music at Tennessee’s Cleveland State Community College, has. We’ll sit in on his professional insights as he reviews the new companion CD to the series, titled “Appalachia: Music from Home.”

We’ll wrap things up with a look at the paintings and writings of Ruth Bear Levy. In her book about growing up in Lonaconing, MD, Levy (1898-1994) wrote about how "all the pastel colors could be rolled out of the tubes for the pink, green and brown syrups covering fruits and ices in the ice cream parlors." Mmmmm….that canvas looks good enough to eat!

And, thanks to the good folks at the Digital Library of Appalachia we'll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music from The Skirtlifters in a 1990 recording of the early 20th century classic “Lindy Lou.”

So, call your old blue-tick hound up on the porch, fire up your corn-cob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian History.

On May 18, 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, creating the TVA. The aim was to provide river navigation, flood control, electric power, employment and improved living conditions in the seven states cradling the Tennessee Valley region. Much of the public welcomed the TVA as one of the most visionary of FDR’s New Deal innovations. Displaced farmers and the region’s power companies were not among them.

“They started a new deal program that would help everyone and improve everyone's life. They formed a group called the Tennessee Valley Authority. These were the biggest idiots of all. They come strolling in here thinking they're all good giving people cheap electric power, but they don't think of the farmers.

“Where do you think they got their power from? They got it from the rivers. The rivers I used to irrigate my land with. But it was all gone then. They formed dams, and stopped up the water. My poor apples were gone then. My sisters still had their business, but they too were unhappy with what the TVA was doing to the farm that my father had started.

“That was it for me. I couldn't produce any more apples with those darn TVA people doing what they wanted with the water. I was then forced to move into town to try to get a factory job. I took all the money that I had, and all my clothes, and I was off to see what this New deal was all about.

“Wendell Wilkie, president of the Commonwealth and Southern Company, led the fight against the TVA. He had many followers, but there were also men that disagreed with him and they liked the idea of having the Tennessee Valley Authority.”

Michael Smith
Orchardist
Interviewed November 11,1934
Raleigh, NC
Source: http://www.ncsu.edu/ligon/am/teddy/tva.htm

“There is just one phase of this program to which we object most seriously, and that is the Federal Government spending the taxpayers' money for the erection of power plants which, as we feel, are not needed for the very simple reason that generally, throughout the country, there is an abundance of power capacity, and particularly in the Tennessee Valley region there is already an excess of capacity. We are at a loss to understand how the power generated at Government-built plants can be disposed of except to take the place of privately owned power plants now supplying that community.”

John D. Battle
Executive Secretary of the National Coal Association
Hearings before the Committee on Military Affairs
House of Representatives (74th Cong., 1st Sess., 1935)
Source: http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/coal.htm

Representative Joe Martin of Massachusetts stated that the TVA was "patterned closely after one of the Soviet dreams." As a subsidiary of the federal government, the TVA enjoyed numerous advantages that private power enterprises did not: from the onset it paid less than one fifth of the equivalent total Federal taxes paid by investor owned power companies. The authority did not pay any interest on funds appropriated to it from 1933 to 1959.

Not surprisingly, Wendell Wilkie’s Commonwealth and Southern, and various other power companies as well, filed a total of thirty four lawsuits against the TVA by 1937. Three of those challenged the very constitutionality of the act before the Supreme Court. The TVA remained intact throughout.

Between 1933 and the end of World War II, the TVA directors managed the biggest construction project on Earth, helping bring the people living in the region into the modern industrial and agricultural era. But not without a fight.


Sources: http://web.bryant.edu/~ehu/h364proj/fall_97/swain/Controversies.htm
http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/tva17.htm
www.spiritus-temporis.com/tennessee-valley-authority/
http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=T072
http://cog.kent.edu/lib/OlsonFairExchangePaper.pdf


TVA, Tennessee Valley Authority, Wendell Wilkie, appalachia, appalachian history, mountains

Stewart A. Cody worked as the Jackson County, WV County Agent in the early 1900s. The West Virginia Historical Photograph Collection possesses 36 images which were pulled from a photo album of his dated 1912.

As County Agent, Cody spent a great deal of time with the local chicken farmers, and the captions of these 36 photos, taken as a whole, provide a detailed insight into the practices of that time.

The greatest interest in poultry, Cody tells us, is shown by the farmers living in the 'runs' and 'forks.’ On a typical 'ridge' farm, the farm land is rougher and the farms are further apart. More incentive to raise poultry than crops.

Cody undoubtedly knew all the players countywide: from Mr. O. M. Stone in Cottageville, “the largest as well as the most profitable poultry farm in Jackson County,” on down to Mr. W. L. Ball, who built his poultry house out of logs.

The Stone’s residence was built from the proceeds of the farm’s egg sales. The two girls, Cody noted, “add $100 to the family purse by washing and grading the eggs.” Mr. Stone’s laying house number 2 held 300 hens, and was ten feet wide and 100 feet long, a bit wider and far longer than the average area laying house. It cost $125 to build.

O. M. Stone Feeding his Chickens

We learn that local farmers commonly used three types of poultry houses adapted to the county. The first, a ‘Tolman house,’ was a simple shed roof house with either a paper or tin roof and open front, with a packed dirt floor covered with sand. One caption gives the length and width as 7' x 30'; another is 10' x 31'. Mr. J. R. Backer’s shed roof house had a tin roof, and three openings in the front 2'10" x 7'4". The use of galvanized roofing on poultry houses as well as other farm buildings was general throughout the county. It seemed to have the preference over paper roofing with the majority of farmers.

Cody felt C.D. Rice’s two-storied poultry house was “worthy of being used as a model by others in Jackson County desiring this type of house.” The birds are fed on the first floor in the winter. The nests are also on this floor while the perches are on the second floor. Very often Cody found nests on the outside of the houses, “undoubtedly the preference of the hens.”

The third type was a T-shaped house, whose roosting room intersected a scratching room. Cody describes a scratching room that is 14'6" x 8', and observes nest boxes, home-made hoppers, and sliding windows in it. Joining this at the middle of the side is a roosting shed 12' x 40'. Mr. T. H. Snider’s T-shaped house held 100-150 pure-bred Barred Rocks.

Reading across the various captions gives us a sense of the average density of birds in Jackson County poultry houses: Mr. W.A. McMurray housed 35 fowls in a 10’x 12’ house, Mr. W.R Glovers housed 27 in an 8’x13’ shed, and Mr. C.D. Rice housed 150 in his 12’x 24’ space.

Cody must’ve come across an awful lot of tumble down chicken coops, for he notes in one caption “This farm [in Jackson Run] stands out from its neighbors because of its neatness. Notice the trim, white washed poultry house.” Frank McPherson’s small brooder house also stood out in Cody’s descriptions: it had a universal hover, a type of colony brooder “considerable above the average.”

And what about earnings from poultry farming? Mr. W. H. Melhorn and Mrs. Hartley each marketed a case of eggs during the spring months. C.D. Rice’s total income for 1913 was $259.25; T. H. Snider’s 1912 sales amounted to $104.87. Almost as an aside, Cody observes that farmers did not consider the value of the poultry manure as a marketable fertilizer. “This is a general condition in certain parts of the county,” he said.

We learn that farmers who lived within one or two miles of the country store would take their poultry to market pulled in a small wagon by hand, if they didn’t own a horse, or get one of the children to carry a pail of eggs in, often “hauled several miles in the hot sun over rough country roads.”

Abe Price was a major county merchant to whom the farmers brought their products. His store in Cottageville handled from ten to forty cases of eggs a week, in addition to several coops of chicken. The town of Evans was another central dropoff point for farmers.

Wholesale buyers such as H.E. Beegle, of Ravenswood, would purchase cases at Evans, then haul the still uninspected eggs by wagon 7 miles to the railroad. From there the cases were shipped 10 miles to the Ravenswood storage facility. Once candled, the eggs would be loaded to a refrigerated train car for shipment to Pittsburgh.


source: West Virginia Historical Photographs Collection/West Virginia University Libraries

In her book about growing up in Lonaconing, MD, Ruth Bear Levy (1898-1994) wrote about how "modern artists could create masterpieces out of the sights and sounds of Lonaconing," how a "painter could paint the shapes and dark and light contours of the area" and how "all the pastel colors could be rolled out of the tubes for the pink, green and brown syrups covering fruits and ices in the ice cream parlors."

The Garrett County native did not begin painting until later in life. Once she did start making pictures, she often drew from her memories of her hometown, primarily a Scottish mining community, during her turn of the century childhood.

In A Wee Bit O'Scotland: Growing Up in Lonaconing, Maryland, Levy depicted kids playing ball and jumping rope, her father's general store, interiors, people working, coal cars and scenic views of the Western Maryland countryside.

Ruth Bear Levy grew up playing ball with Hall of Fame baseball player Lefty Grove. They were childhood friends in Lonaconing. She always loved baseball and did a series of baseball paintings -- many inspired by Lefty.

Mine Mouths Open On The Hillsides, by Ruth Bear Levy, n.d. Oil Painting. 30 X 40 in. Reproduced in "A Wee Bit of Scotland: Growing up in Lonaconing, Maryland."

Her family was musical: her mother played the piano and Ruth played the mandolin. Her father's store was called "M. Bear's Daylight Clothing Store"; he served on the Lonaconing city council. Levy's paternal grandfather emigrated from Bavaria and settled in Frostburg. Ruth's father moved eight miles to Lonaconing where he opened his store and got married. Her maternal grandfather Eisenberg emigrated from Austria-Hungary and settled in Cleveland, OH and then in Cumberland, MD. He opened a store there with his three sons and became a founder of the Reform Jewish Temple.

Levy traveled throughout childhood to visit her three uncles in Baltimore and to tour Washington, DC, Pittsburgh and Cleveland with her family. Ruth Bear Levy eventually left Lonaconing for Baltimore in pursuit of a degree in English at Goucher College. In Baltimore, she met her husband, urologist Dr. Charles Levy, a Johns Hopkins graduate.

Levy wrote that it was not until after she was married for 21 years or more and her son returned from service in the Navy during World War II that she had met painter Herman Maril, whose work along with that of other important Maryland artists of the period is characterized in part by the use of pastel tones. She studied with Maril as a private student beginning in about 1954.

"I had never been interested in painting before," Levy wrote. "But now a childhood urge returned to express my most innermost feelings, to be productive, to record, and I began putting my thoughts on canvas under Herman's sensitive, skillful tutelage. Later I worked under Walter Bohanan's guidance. The pictures in this book are among the results."


sources: www.marylandartsource.org/artists/detail_000000106.html
http://whilbr.com/itemdetail.aspx?idEntry=2719



Garrett+County+MD
Ruth+Bear+Levy appalachia Saltville+VA appalachian+history

Please welcome guest blogger Beth Kephart. Kephart is an award-winning author of what is now ten books---memoir,poetry,corporate, fable, history, and literary novels for young adults---who is currently at work on a novel for adults.


He must have been short, my brother tells me. I saw a portrait of his face, full on, he says, for the first time. It was astonishing to see the photographs of his funeral—to see how many traveled so far to say a final goodbye.

Laura Kephart.

We are, my brother and I, forever looking for glimpses of our great-grandfather, Horace Kephart. Kephart has been glorified; he has been vilified. He did public good (his librarianship, his camp craft, his anthropological Our Southern Highlanders, his passion for preserving the Great Smoky Mountains). He did private harm (leaving a wife and their six children behind to live the life he knew would save him). He is mythical in some minds. He lived and breathed, actual and real, within my family’s memory.

The Kephart children.

I am a writer like he was; so is my son. I need the outdoor air, the rivers, the mountains to survive—hawks and hummingbirds, yellow finches, the bloom of transplanted irises. His blood runs through me—his melancholy, his joy. But all I have of him is the books he left behind, the photographs that others took, the rumors, the research, the artifacts tucked safely within the acclaimed space of George Ellison’s library. All I have is what my friend Ann McDermott says: I have a Bryson City friend who has something she wants to show you.

What do we ever have of those we never knew, who nonetheless have shaped us, and will shape those who live beyond us?

I haven’t climbed Mount Kephart, not yet. It’s a place I’ll someday take my son.

Please welcome guest blogger Will Benson (wbenson@clevelandstatecc.edu), Assistant Professor of Music, Cleveland State Community College in Cleveland, TN.

This is a extremely and rich diverse collection of Appalachian music. The opening track, Prelude: Mountains, is written by regional composer Kenton Coe. From the moment track one starts, it immediately puts the listener right the heart of the Tennessee/North Carolina section of the Appalachian Mountains. Listening carefully for every tone color of the U.T Symphony, I began to hear what sounded like scratching or clicking just under ninety seconds into the track. My first thought was, "Oh well, this must be a defective disc". To my surprise and delight, the first track immediately segued into the Seneca Indian Corn Dance. Apparently the sound I thought was a technical defect was actually the shaking of some sort of instrument with dried corn kernels inside.

The remainder of the CD takes the listener through the many different flavors of Appalachian music, including truly authentic performances of folk songs such as Jean Ritchie's raw performance of Pretty Saro, Dock Bogg's rendition of Coal Creek March on the banjo, and the Earl Monroe classic Nine Pound Hammer by the Midnight Ramblers. Perhaps one of the most stirring tracks on the whole CD is Ralph Stanley's performance of Gloryland. So many of his performances and recordings are considered some of the best in the history of bluegrass and folk music. Still, one has to give credit where credit is due. Ralph Stanley is Appalachia/Americana, case closed.

Darrell Scott leads the list of contemporary performances through his presentation of Banjo Clark. That is not to say that this performances is void of ties to the past, but folks who know Darrell Scott know that he has a wonderfully soulful voice and musical style that makes any song sound new.

Not having seen the PBS documentary from where this compilation is derived, I am at a bit of a disadvantage of getting the full effect of connecting the music to specific graphic images and/or inverviews from the documentary. However, the variety of songs, voices and instruments on this CD create a wonderful representation of the music of our region. I recommend it to anyone wanting to understand our musical heritage.

We post a new episode of Appalachian History weekly podcast every Sunday. You can start listening right away by clicking the podcast icon over on the left side of your screen. If you'd rather grab the show off itunes for later listening, click here.

We open today's show with a look at the strange world of Myrtle Corbin, who was born in Tennessee and raised in Blount County, AL. She was married to the same man for 40 years, and raised 4 healthy children on their farm together with him. Oh, and she had 4 legs.

You learned about the Gold Rush in school, didn’t you? San Francisco even named its football team after the Forty-Niners. But THAT gold rush happened 21 years after America’s first gold rush got underway, in Georgia’s Lumpkin County. Georgia gold fever burned till the close of the nineteenth century, and Dahlonega attorney Wier Boyd placed himself in the midst of the myriad legal dealings that resulted.

Next up, meet Edsel Martin. He liked to refer to himself as the 'mountain misfit of North Carolina.' That understates the case just a tad. He was in fact a widely celebrated instrument maker, musician and artist whose work can be found in the Smithsonian Institution and the North Carolina Museum of History. In this piece he’ll tell you a bit about how he makes dulcimers.

If you were bold enough to take a car trip over Letcher County Kentucky’s Pine Mountain in the 1920s, you’d need to make sure you had a water pail, hand tire pump, jack, tube patches and glue, three quarts of motor oil, a gas can, assorted tools, wrenches, hammers and screwdrivers. We’ll let local resident Clifton Caudill show us how to do the driving.

Life ran smoothly for Walter Phillips, his wife and six kids after the family moved from New Jersey to Cranberry, NC, where Walter became a foreman with the Cranberry Iron & Coal Co. But then Walter died unexpectedly at the age of 44. His widow died only two short years later, leaving the six children stranded. Walter’s son Thomas Jay Phillips, in this excerpt from his autobiography, explains how the young ones got out of that terrible jam.

We’ll wrap things up with a close look at the 1887 ad copy for Thompson's Bromine-Arsenic Springs Water. Yes, arsenic. This Saltville ,VA company was confident that their product was “the only combination of the kind ever discovered in this or any other country, and is destined to become the most extensively used natural mineral water in the world.”

And, thanks to the good folks at the Internet Archive we'll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music from Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers in a 1926 recording of “White House Blues.”

So, call your old blue-tick hound up on the porch, fire up your corn-cob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian History.

1887 ad for Thompson's Bromine-Arsenic Springs Water ---

Thompson's Bromine-Arsenic Springs Water is offered to the public as a gift of nature for the alleviation and cure of many of the ills to which the human family is subject. Wherever it is known it has the unqualified approval of physicians in the treatment of impurities in the blood.

Its constituents.

Bromine and Arsenic commended it to the most favorable consideration of sufferers from Eczema, Scrofula, Cancerous Affections, Primary and Secondary Syphilis, Ulcers, Tumors, Boils, Erysipelas, and Diseases of the Lungs, Kidneys, Womb and Bladder, and it builds and repairs these organs and wasted tissues of the system. Through its action in purifying the blood it imparts health to the skin and gives clearness to the complexion.

Its analysis by Dr. H. Froehling (whose reputation as a chemist is second to no one in this country) is a sure guarantee of its correctness, and any educated physician will testify to the value of the ingredients which are so happily blended in this water.

It is the only combination of the kind ever discovered in this or any other country, and is destined to become the most extensively used natural mineral water in the world.

It is put up in cases of one dozen half-gallon bottles each, and sold at $6.00.

Address all orders to
Lewis W. Burwell
General Manager, Saltville, Va.


source: www.newrivernotes.com/nc/heal1887.htm



medicine+in+appalachia blood+tonics appalachia +Saltville+VA appalachian+history

My father died suddenly at 44 years of age and is buried in a little grave yard, just outside of the town he helped to build among the people he loved. His grave is marked by a stone of Tennessee granite, on which is this description: “Erected to the memory of Walter Phillips by the employees of the Cranberry Iron and Coal Co.” At the time of his death there were six children, four girls and two boys. I was 14 years old and next to the oldest. The youngest was only a baby.

When my mother investigated, she found herself with a few hundred dollars and a large family. And while we had never wanted for anything, she was faced by a problem that, as I look back, must have seemed insurmountable. I’ll never forget the evening where she called us all together, including the old colored couple who had been with us for eight years, and explained our situation. And I can still see tears rolling down the faces of Old Mammy and Uncle Henry when she told them we would have to get along without them.

They assured her they would never leave us, but would get outside work and help with the expenses and still take care of the house and babies. “Greater love has no man shone.”

Walter Phillips emigrated from Cornwall England in the late 1860s, settling first in Jefferson Township, NJ. He worked as an iron ore miner in various mines of western NJ. In 1882, he was part of a surveying group sent by the investors of the Eastern Tennessee/Western North Carolina railroad then being built to Cranberry North Carolina. He moved with his family to Cranberry and was a foreman with the Cranberry Iron & Coal Co. (a division of the Eastern Tennessee/Western North Carolina Railroad) from 1882 till 1887.

The company, (Cranberry Iron and Coal Company) at a Director’s meeting voted to give her an allowance each month for a year. This was enough to live on and keep the family together, which was manna from heaven.

During that year my mother, who was a good cook, with the help of old colored Mammy, started to serve dinners to the members of the company’s staff and to excursion parties from Johnson City. I went to work in the company’s store and got 50 cents a day so that at the end of the first year, we thought we were ready to go on our own.

The company stopped their help with the understanding that we could draw on them if we got in trouble. My mother was determined to go it alone without any help.

By the end of the second year (1889) we were on the ragged edge. She had cut everything down to the minimum, with our clothes almost gone and no relief in sight, except to ask for help. This my mother refused to do. Two months later she died, just did not have the strength to carry the burden of sorrow and disappointment.

After eight years of happy family life, without a thought or care for the future. In two short years our house of cards had fallen and we were six orphans. The oldest 17 and the youngest three years. Mother lies beside my father on the hill on the edge of town.

Cranberry Iron Works, 1895.

When our true financial situation became known, people in droves who claimed they had been helped in one way or another by my father, offered their help. Our pantry was filled and old Mammy and Uncle Henry almost caused a civil war when some good friends wanted to separate the children and have them live with different friends. Finally one gentleman, a good friend of my father, who lived in a nearby town had himself appointed our guardian.

That was agreeable with old Mammy and Uncle Henry as long as they were able to keep us together and take care of us. Later Mr. Charles H. Nimson, who I think was president of the company, came down from Philadelphia, and when he was told about our troubles he came to see us and insisted on knowing the name of some relative in New Jersey.

We finally found some old correspondence of my mother’s that she had, with the name of her brother and his address in Dover, New Jersey. He told us not to worry, we could get what we needed at the company store without money and old Mammy and Uncle Henry were put on the company’s payroll. And it was arranged that Mr. Wm. E. Ellis, who was our self appointed guardian, would see that we were properly taken care of.


Source: My Life: A Recollection from Thomas Jay Phillips I at www.johnsonsdepot.com/crumley/images/tour3a/tjphillips.pdf



Cranberry+Iron+Works Avery+County+NC orphans appalachia +appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

Myrtle Corbin was known far and wide in the late nineteenth century as the Four-Legged Woman. While at a glance one could plainly see four legs dangling beyond the hem of her dress – only one pair belonged to her, the other set to her dipygus twin sister.

Born in Lincoln County, TN in 1868, the girl with the incredibly rare condition spent most of her childhood in Blount County, AL. The tiny body of her twin was only fully developed from the waist down and even then it was malformed – tiny and possessing only three toes on each foot. Myrtle was able to control the limbs of her sister but was unable to use them for walking and she herself had a difficult time getting around as she was born with a clubbed foot. Technically, the 'Four-Legged Woman' only had one good, usable leg.

Myrtle became an exhibit at thirteen. Her first promotional pamphlet (Biography of Myrtle Corbin, 1881) describes her as "gentle of disposition as the summer sunshine and as happy as the day is long."

Myrtle was a popular attraction with P.T. Barnum, and later with Ringling Bros. and at Coney Island. Her popularity was likely linked to her showmanship – she would often dress the extra limbs with socks and shoes matching her own and this gave her a truly surreal appearance. Myrtle was so popular that she was able to earn as much as $450 dollars a week, a handsome sum in that era.

Myrtle's younger sister, Willie Ann, married Hiram Locke Bicknell in 1885. Hiram's brother Dr. James Clinton Bicknell proposed to Myrtle shortly afterward, and the two were wed in June 1886.

It's clear that James Bicknell married Myrtle for love, and not for money, for upon their marriage he insisted she leave show business. It was then that other aspects of her bizarre anatomy became evident. It seems that her twin sister was also fully sexually formed – thus Myrtle possessed two vaginas.

James, Myrtle & daughter Lillian in 1915.

In the early 1890's, James & Myrtle moved their family from Blount County, AL to Johnson County, TX, settling near and finally moving to Cleburne City. The farming couple lived happily and over time produced a brood of eight children, half of whom died in infancy. The 1900 census for Johnson County states that Myrtle was the mother of five children, only three then living. The 1910 census for the same county states that she had had eight children, four then living. The surviving Bicknell children were Nancy Estelle, Francis Clinton, Ruby, and Lillian J.

It has been rumored that three of Myrtle's children were born from one set of organs and two from the other. Whether this is true or not, it is medically possible. In 'Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine,' by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle it was observed that both vaginas menstruated – thus indicating both were possibly sexually functional.

We don't know the specifics of the Bicknell family's economic situation, but it must have deteriorated severely. Showpeople like Myrtle came out of retirement simply because they needed the money. Just so, the Four-Legged Girl from Cleburne, TX was back in the business appearing at Huber's Museum in New York in 1909 at age 41.

The family no doubt intended this new turn of events to be temporary. But then 1910 turned into 1915: Dreamland Circus Sideshow, Coney Island. Riverview Park, Chicago. Myrtle worked the circuit and Myrtle made money. It had been more than 20 years since she last exhibited. She appears to have finally stopped exhibiting around 1915.

In 1928 Myrtle developed a skin infection on her right leg. When it failed to heal she finally went to a doctor in Cleburne. He diagnosed her as having erysipilas - a streptococcal skin infection. These days, a simple round of antibiotics would have eliminated the problem and Mrs. Bicknell would be on her way. Unfortunately, Myrtle lived in those days.

On May 6, less than a week after being diagnosed, Josephine Myrtle Corbin-Bicknell was dead.


sources: http://thehumanmarvels.com/?p=118
www.phreeque.com/myrtle_corbin.html
www.quasi-modo.net/Myrtle_Corbin.html
Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, by Robert Bogdan, University of Chicago Press, 1990



Myrtle+Corbin Blount+County+AL four-legged+woman appalachia +appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

Edsel Martin (1927-1999) liked to refer to himself as the 'mountain misfit of North Carolina.' That understates the case just a tad. He was in fact a widely celebrated instrument maker, musician and artist whose work can be found in the Smithsonian Institution and the North Carolina Museum of History.

Martin, a member of the Southern Highlands Craft Guild, was the son of a regionally renowned fiddler, Marcus Lafayette Martin, and was part of a family of noted artists from Swannanoa, NC. His woodcarvings are representative of both the southern handicrafts revival and the arts & crafts revival that swept the southern highlands in the late 19th to mid 20th century.

Example of an arts and craft revival style Appalachian mountain banjo made by Edsel Martin in 1970; black walnut.

Ed Dupuy interviewed Martin on Jan 22, 1965 at his home in Swannanoa. Dupuy's 1967 book "Artisans of the Appalachians" contains an essay on Martin that is based on this interview:

Dupuy- Edsel, how did you get started at this sort of work?

Martin- My father did this work, and I think his father did, too. But I think it just sort of growed on us boys. This grew up with us.

d-Your father made violins and dulcimers; what else did he make?

m- I’ve seen him do some pretty good carving. Not figure carving, just stars, and arrowheads, and all sorts of things. Odds and ends, something different.

d-No doubt you got your start from him. It rubbed off on all you boys.

m- We were all brought up by ourselves. My mother and father separated; all of us four stayed and lived together. This was all we had to do, you know, to occupy ourselves. And this is what we come up with.

d-As far as you can remember, how long have you been at this sort of thing?

m-Wall, I’ve done a little of this as far back as I can remember. It was actually about 1946, maybe a few years earlier than that, when I began to put these on the market. Earlier, we just didn’t think of making any money at it, we did it just for pleasure.

d-Are you the youngest of the brothers?

m-I’m the youngest; the others are Wade, Fred, Pepper and Wayne. Wayne carves at Gatlinburg.

D-You have just lived and grown up here all your life?

m-I was born in Gastonia. I’ve lived here just about all my life. My dad was from out in Cherokee County.

d-What were some of the first things you began to make with your hands?

m-I carved some Indian door stops and stuff of that type. Door stops; and I modeled some out of clay.

d-Have you any idea how many dulcimers you have made?

m-Oh, I guess probably 175. We sold about thirty alone last year.

d-I notice one of these is made out of walnut and one is made out of cherry. Does one wood make a better dulcimer than another?

m-Well, I don’t know, Ed. You can make two just alike, and they won’t sound alike, even out of the same wood, you’d get a different tone.

d-This is patterned after the old ones, isn’t it?

m-Yes.

d-This will have four strings?

m-Yes.

d-Haven’t I seen some with just three strings?

m-Yes, they make them with three strings.

d-In beginning a dulcimer from scratch, what do you begin with?

Handcarved washerwoman sculpture of white pine, about 9” tall, made 1968.

m-You get a pattern for the back and the front, and the tail piece, get it straightened out and line up and glue that one first. Then you set your sides and wait for them to dry. Then you set your top and the other two pieces to make the finger board.

d-This scroll on the neck, that is entirely hand carved? That’s very much like a fiddle scroll.

m-Yes. I like to put something in them so they don’t look like any old thing. I’ve seen some violins that had some lions heads on them.

d-Even these pegs are hand carved; what would they be made of?

m-They’re made of maple; hard maple. I cut ‘em with the grain.

d-Does the thickness of the wood have much to do with the tone?

m-That one is a quarter inch, but I’m going to hollow it out. Pull in from the inside and roll it from the outside. The thickness of the wood does make a difference. You get it too thick and it won’t ring right.

d-This finger board, these are metal frets that are set in here?

m-Yes.

d-What were the old original strings made off? Were they steel or were they all gut?

m-I’ve read literature, Ed, where they were hammered out some way.

d-They were drawn through a die, I expect. Have you any idea how long people have been making dulcimers?

m-As far as I can trace it back, was the third chapter of Daniel in the Bible; I believe it was King Nebuchadnezzar. That’s as far back as I want to take it. It pleases me that it goes back that far. And carving goes back as far as Joseph, where in his carpenter shop he told Jesus how to carve wood with the grain.

d-Can you play a dulcimer?

m-Yes, I play a dulcimer pretty good.


Source: Hunter Library Digital Collection/Western Carolina University: http://wcudigitalcollection.cdmhost.com/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/p4008coll2&CISOPTR=2955&REC=1



Edsel+Martin Swannanoa+NC instrument+makers woodcarving Appalachia appalachian+history

Relatives of the gone-away families often visited if they owned a car or could get a ride with someone who did have one. Susan's son Henry Hampton (by a former marriage) and wife Mint lived with their children in the Carcassonne community.

Henry worked in the mines and owned a car of what age, make or model I am not sure. I do know there were no late models in the community until many years later. We did the maintenance on our old models, tied them together with baling wire, cleaned the spark plugs and breaker points regularly, took up the slack in the adjustable tie rod ends so the driver need not give the steering wheel more than a full turn on the curves.

Before starting on a trip the trunk or back seat of the car should contain a water pail, hand tire pump, jack, tube patches and glue, three quarts of motor oil, a gas can, assorted tools, wrenches, hammers and screwdrivers. In the absence of stop-leak for the dripping radiator, dump in a handful of cornmeal which is sure to stop the leak and maybe the whole circulation system.

The motor gets hot. Can't hardly see the road for the steam boiling up. "You hear that noise out there? What is it? Sounds like a loose rod to me. I just tightened them all up last week. Guess I had better pull off to the side of the road, drop the oil pan and take out a few shims, it won't take long and we will save the oil to put back in when we get done."

Original caption reads: Letcher County, Kentucky. A road scene near foot of Pine Mountain.

Flat tires, motor overhauls and other repairs were common sights along our few winding and narrow highways of those days. Today's motorist would probably take a dim view of such modes of travel. But to those of us who owned one of these ancient vehicles, the door was opened to the outer world.

We could go to Whitesburg or Hazard and return the same day or even a hundred or more miles to visit gone-away relatives or friends. I have made trips to Tennessee and Ohio in trucks at that time that I would now not trust to get to Blackey and back - a distance of five miles each way.

In the late 1920's and early 1930's the route by car from Letcher County to Pulaski County was from Whitesburg across Pine Mountain and down the Cumberland River to Pineville on 119 which was a graveled road at that time. Highway 25 was blacktopped and led to the Bluegrass region.

On the outskirts of Pineville the Hamptons pulled into a small filling station for gas from the hand operated pump. As Henry pulled away from the station with a full tank of 17 cent-per-gallon gas, Mint leaned from the open car window and above the roar of the motor issued this invitation to the startled attendant, "Come and go with us, we are going to Pulaski County to see Henry's ma."

In the 1920's Uncle Tom Dixon, a brother of grandfather Wilburn, owned the part of Dixon Mountain which was across the road and opposite the cemetery.

In summertime anyone traveling along the rough and rutted dirt road through Dixon Mountain would most always come upon Uncle Tom seated by the roadside, leaning back against a huge chestnut tree, a big pile of shavings was around his feet - the result of much whittling as he eagerly awaited the next traveler. Uncle Tom was a great storyteller and philosopher and a firm believer in an unhurried lifestyle. A theory that I fully support.


source: Eastern Kentucky Mountain Memories, by Clifton Caudill, published by s.n., 1996; this excerpt from article in 'The Mountain Eagle,' at www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyletch/articles/dixon_mt_1920.htm



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We post a new episode of Appalachian History weekly podcast every Sunday. You can start listening right away by clicking the podcast icon over on the left side of your screen. If you'd rather grab the show off itunes for later listening, click here.

We open today's show with the wrenching story of Thomas Jugarthy Hicks. From 1951 to 1965 Dr. 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.

Outlaws Frank & Jesse James were notorious nationwide in the years following the Civil War. You’d think once they were caught the full weight of justice would have come crashing down on their heads. You’d have to think again. Step into Huntsville Alabama’s courthouse as we follow Frank James’ trial.

Next up, guest blogger Cindy Gladden Tuttle of Salem, VA shares a personal view of her grandmother, Texas Gladden. The elder Gladden was a mid-20th century American folk singer best known for her traditional Appalachian ballad style of singing.

You’ve got to be impressed by the determination of Noble County diarist Fulton Caldwell. He stayed at it for 37 years daily, giving us a glorious peek at the day-to-day life of a SE Ohio farming community in the late 1800s.

The congregation of Buffalo Ridge Baptist Church started lining-off their hymns in 1776. They were the very first Baptist church in Tennessee, and they’re still going strong today. We’ll take a pew seat in some of the canning factories, tents, and log cabins that services have been held in over the years.

By the end of her career, Lily Strickland’s compositions were being performed by the New York Philharmonic, the Charleston Symphony, and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. You’ll hear the story of how this native daughter of Anderson, SC got her musical start playing the pipe organ in the local Episcopal church.

It’s May, and that means strawberries are in season! We’ll wrap things up with the myth of ‘How the strawberry came to the Cherokee people,’ as retold by Barbara Shining Woman Warren. First Man and First Woman have a fight and she storms out. The strawberry turns out to be the thing that gets them back together, with a couple of amusing twists along the way.

And, thanks to the good folks at the Internet Archive we'll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music from Vernon Dalhart in a 1924 recording of “Wreck on the Old 97.”

So, call your old blue-tick hound up on the porch, fire up your corn-cob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian History.

In the beginning of the world, ga lv la di e hi --- Father to us in heaven living--- created First Man and First Woman. Together they built a lodge at the edge of a dense forest. They were very happy together; but like all humans do at times, they began to argue.

Finally First Woman became so angry she said she was leaving and never coming back. At that moment First Man really didn't care. First Woman started walking westward down the path through the forest. She never looked back.

As the day grew later, First Man began to worry. At last he started down the same path in search of his wife. The Sun looked down on First Man and took pity on him. The Sun asked First Man if he was still angry with First Woman. First Man said he was not angry any more. The Sun asked if he would like to have First Woman back. First Man readily agreed he did.

The Sun found First Woman still walking down the path toward the West. So to entice her to stop, the Sun caused to grow beneath her feet lovely blueberries. The blueberries were large and ripe. First Woman paid no attention but kept walking down the path toward the West.

Further down the path the Sun caused to grow some luscious blackberries. The berries were very black and plump. First Woman looked neither left nor right but kept walking down the path toward the West.

At last the Sun caused to grow a plant that had never grown on the earth before. The plant covered the ground in front of First Woman. Suddenly she became aware of a fragrance she had never known.

Stopping she looked down at her feet. Growing in the path was a plant with shiny green leaves, lovely white flowers with the largest most luscious red berries she had ever seen. First Woman stopped to pick one. Hmmm…she had never tasted anything quite like it! It was so sweet.

As First Woman ate the berry, the anger she felt began to fade away. She thought again of her husband and how they had parted in anger. She missed him and wanted to return home.

First Woman began to gather some of the berries. When she had all she could carry, she turned toward the East and started back down the path. Soon she met First Man. Together they shared the berries, and then hand in hand, they walked back to their lodge.

The Cherokee word for strawberry is ani. The rich bottomlands of the old Cherokee country were noted for their abundance of strawberries and other wild fruits. Even today, strawberries are often kept in Cherokee homes. They remind us not to argue and are a symbol of good luck.


source: 'The First Strawberries,' retold by Barbara Shining Woman Warren
http://www.powersource.com/cocinc/articles/strwbry.htm



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