ABOUT PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL ARCHIVE
This growing digital record provides an in-depth look at the historical records of Pine Mountain Settlement School, its surrounding Appalachian communities, and associated materials contained in the School’s holdingsl. Located in Harlan County, in the southeastern corner of Kentucky, the remote School was founded in 1913 by Katherine Pettit, Ethel de Long [Zande], William Creech, and other community families in order to serve the educational and medical needs of the surrounding remote population of the Pine Mountain valley in Harlan County, Kentucky in Central Appalachia.
The on-site physical archive comprises over one hundred ten years of institutional records, publications, photographs, in-depth biographical records, furniture, crafts, and National Historic Register architecture. The digital archive, comprised of over 2000 pages describing the collections, often provides full text and image access to documents, biographies, crafts, genealogies, and student records (1913-1949). The extensive PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTIONS provide a rich visual journey through the School’s history (1913-2024). Currently, the digitization efforts strongly reflect the Boarding School years (1913-1949), and also selectively pull from the later (1950 –present) programming. The later collections are particularly rich in materials that describe the development of the ground-breaking Environmental Education program that began in the early 1970s. Also of note is the early childhood education program developed by Millie Mahoney that contributed to the national Head Start program planning process. The E.J. Carr Plant Center collection , a large botanical collection gathered by the self-taught botanist, that explores edible and medicinal plants in Appalachia and their identification and distribution of species in the region. These are but a few of the delightful surprises to be found in the over 2,300 published pages and over 60,000 images.
The Pine Mountain Settlement School’s archive is one of the largest on-site collections of history related to the rural Settlement School Movement in Appalachia. This digital archive currently represents the largest emerging digitally accessible record of a rural settlement school history. The three — the in-situ archive, the physical campus, and the surrounding community provide an in-depth record of the evolving rural Settlement Movement ethos in the Appalachian mountains and the amazing programs and communities they served. We are pleased to offer this record to the communities that built it and to support the pride those communities share in their long, unique, and exemplary history. ( Our Archival Mission )
OUR ARCHIVAL MISSION
The Pine Mountain Settlement School archival mission supports and draws from the institutional Pine Mountain Settlement School Mission Statement. It operates under the watchful eye of representative Trustees, many from Berea College. The Board of Trustees with the School’s Director, guide the institution’s strategic planning goals. The President of Berea College has been a member of the Board of Trustees since 1949.
Today the Pine Mountain Settlement School mission remains true to its long 113-year history and is focused on educational and social enrichment programs centered on the local community but serving the broader Appalachian region and beyond. Once a boarding school with a progressive education curriculum, Pine Mountain Settlement School’s recent educational programming has moved from residential education to multi-faceted offerings of short-term environmental, cultural, medical, social, agricultural, and arts and crafts workshops and educational programs for all ages. For the duration of its existence, the archive has not moved away from, nor will it move away from, a commitment to Pine Mountain as place and people. more …
OUR ARCHIVAL VISION
The Vision of the Pine Mountain Settlement School Archive is to create and to provide a voice that will encourage transformations in individual relationships with the cultures of the Appalachian region. By providing easy access to a unique and extensive body of archival material about the region, the Pine Mountain Settlement School offers an opportunity for an in-depth exploration of one of the earliest rural settlement schools within the region. As expressed and acknowledged in the Kentucky Educational Television program, The Rural Settlement School Movement, the essence of the movement is unique. The transformation of the people of Eastern Kentucky and the Southern Appalachians is a continuously unfolding and dynamic story. It is a story that has sometimes been misrepresented, romanticized, or only partially understood and described. By providing this digital archival access to include many full-text documents, we envision a deep, vibrant, and vital resource that will encourage exploration and collaborative dialogue about the hidden and sometimes contested history of rural settlement schools as well as its integral contributions to the Appalachian milieu. We envision broader dissemination of educational research materials across all public, private, and federal sectors interested in Appalachian cultures and lives. more …
The on-site and digital collections at Pine Mountain are complemented by the Settlement Institutions of Appalachia (SIA) materials. The SIA selective microform collection of the early Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections covering the years of 1913-1983 is held at Berea College, Berea, KY.. This digital collection duplicates, in part, that early attempt to provide access to the material for scholars. Not all material in the microform collection at Berea is represented in this online digital material. Likewise, not all the material in the digital collection here is found in microform at Berea.
Since 1949 Berea Presidents and faculty have served on the Pine Mountain Settlement School Board of Trustees as trusted advisors.
ABOUT THE COLLECTIONS
INDEX TO SERIES AND GUIDES
FULL INDEX TO COLLECTIONS
STILL NOT FINDING WHAT YOU WERE LOOKING FOR? Alternatively, you can utilize the GOOGLE search box located below to look up specific topics using their search engine.
REQUESTING PERMISSION FOR THE USE OF MATERIALS IN THE COLLECTION
Work is ongoing. Any for-profit use of archival material requires permission from the Pine Mountain Settlement School. Appropriate citation of the borrowed material is requested and if not indicated, please see the following USE AGREEMENTS, citation guidelines, and details for requesting permissions..
If you wish to DONATE material, please see DONOR AGREEMENT AND DEEDS OF GIFT.
COLLECTION USE AGREEMENTS AND ACCESS GUIDELINES
PUBLIC USE OF MATERIAL FROM THIS ARCHIVE (Non-Commercial)
COMMERCIAL USE OF MATERIAL FROM THIS ARCHIVE
ORAL HISTORY RELEASE AGREEMENT
ORAL HISTORY ASSOCIATION – PRINCIPLES AND BEST PRACTICES
CITATION OF MATERIALS:
Any PUBLIC use of material must properly cite Pine Mountain Settlement School. Suggested: “[Identification of Item],” [Collection Name] [Series Number, if applicable]. [date], Pine Mountain Settlement School, Pine Mountain, KY. [date accessed]
COLLECTION DONATIONS
If you hold material related to Pine Mountain Settlement School and wish to DONATE them to the School, please contact office@pinemountainsettlementschool.com or (606) 558-3571 to discuss your donation and the DONOR AGREEMENT. We are, of course, always delighted to accept monetary donations to the institution.
THINKING OF VISITING OR STAYING AT PINE MOUNTAIN?
To learn more about the School’s current workshops, community interaction, annual events, and over-night stays, go to PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL MAIN PAGE – where you will find information about visiting the campus, lodgings, programs, and donating to the School.
RECENT ARCHIVAL ADDITIONS
GRACE M. ROOD – STORIES of “AMAZING GRACE”
Her stories of the working life of a nurse at Pine Mountain Settlement School, “Amazing Grace” GRACE M. ROOD and her jeep, entertains, vents, and reflects on her adventures serving the rural community and the School. As an early graduate of the Johns Hopkins nurse-training program, she first served as a nurse in rural India where she learned to be self-sufficient. The messages in her life are truly AMAZING.
Discover the true joy of expressing admiration, affection, and love on Valentine’s Day, — and every day, by reading WWII-era letters between OLIVE COOLIDGE and her fiance, Robert Butman, while she served as a worker and nurse assistant at PMSS,
The letters, from a large family collection, were recently donated in digital form by Marcia Butman, the grandniece of Olive Coolidge. Work on organizing and archiving the Coolidge collection and adding it to the PMSS Collections website continues to be underway.
Then see —
WHAT’S NEW Latest Digital Additions – Lists of pages that have been recently updated or newly published on the PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL COLLECTIONS website.
WHAT’S NEW! – Archive of former previews of promoted pages and posts, 2015-2021.
ARCHIVE Past Digital Additions 2020-2021
ARCHIVE Past Digital Additions 2022
ARCHIVE Past Digital Additions 2023
COMMENTS and CONTACT
Comments and feedback directly on the website are not enabled. Users may contact the editors through the Pine Mountain Settlement School Office.
office@pinemountainsettlementschool.com or (606) 558-3571.
We welcome your identification of people and activities on our site and, particularly, corrections to the record. And, we always welcome the addition of materials relevant to the history of the School.
ABOUT OCR TEXT
Some of the texts included in this site have been automatically generated using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. In some cases, these texts have not been manually reviewed or corrected. OCR enables the searching of large quantities of full-text data, but it is not 100% accurate. The level of accuracy depends on the print quality of the original publication and its condition at the time of creation. Publications with poor-quality paper, small print, mixed fonts, multiple-column layouts, or damaged pages may have poor OCR accuracy.
STATEMENT REGARDING PRIVACY
Please read OUR PRIVACY POLICY and contact our office if you believe we have violated your rights to privacy in our online archival resources.
The manuscript collections and archival records in the Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections may contain sensitive and/or confidential information derived from historical archives that may be protected under federal and state right-to-privacy laws and regulations. Researchers who wish to publish and users who may share material from the Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections are advised by this notice that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in some collections within the Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g. may be a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy if facts concerning an individual’s private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person for which Pine Mountain Settlement School assumes no responsibility.
