Category Archives: DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH

Dancing in the Cabbage Patch Is a joyful and personal description of life at Pine Mountain seen through the lens of the author and that of my family’s involvement with the school. The narrative centers on four main themes: farming, foodways, families, people, and celebration, — all reflective of many generations of family whose roots are deep in the soils of Eastern Kentucky. The narratives explored by the writer cover the years 1913 to the present and are broken into running topical sets that relate thematically.

Dancing in the Cabbage Patch contains photographs, manuscript material, oral histories, artifacts, and external links largely derived from the PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL COLLECTIONS .and family records. These tangible mementos of times past supplement my personal recollections and reflections. The reflections and ruminations are mine alone. This Cabbage Patch of memories largely pulls from the early formative years of my youth (1940’s) when dancing in this enchanted Cabbage Patch of Appalachia. The memories are nuanced by the later years of association with the School as a member of the Board of Trustees. Those memories are seasoned by all that life has generously added in the years in other geographies

The fiddle tune and often the dance shared here, are mine alone. Music and dance are metaphors and not intended to necessarily represent the performance of the orchestra that is Pine Mountain Settlement School. The sometimes personal song and dance are not intended to define the many peronal ballads and folk dances, or the larger culture (if it is even a singular culture) Pine Mountain Settlement and the community people and region is the ever-present orchestra, but it is one orchestra among many.

As a story of place, the Dancing in the Cabbage Patch blog is written with the hope that some will identify with the feeling of dancing in a cabbage patch of memory and place. Dancing in the Cabbage Patch is also a reflection on a region consumed by reflection. There will be many dances and songs as the future is shaped at Pine Mountain Settlement and beyond. Across the world, more cabbages will be grown and somewhere a child may dance among them and sing and dream of lands across the seas, and stream their story in song and dance and in 0’s and 1’s. Some will hold their stories close, but many will want to be singers, fiddlers, dancers, and storytellers… the makers of history and of place. Appalachia is story of place and a place of story — and of history.

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH Weaving at PMSS 1930s-1940s

Pine Mountain Settlement School
DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH
Weaving at PMSS 1930s-1940s
Series: BY TOPIC – Arts & Crafts
Weaving

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH Weaving at PMSS 1930s-1940s

MARGARET MOTTER AND THE COLONIAL COVERLET GUILD

Margaret Motter was a worker at Pine Mountain Settlement School in the 1920s and 30s and again in the 1940s. She served as Principal and teacher from 1928 until 1938, and as the Publicity Representative and Head of the English Department from 1946 until 1949. She was a prolific writer and a clever and persuasive speaker. Associated with those skills, was her importance to the School as a fund-raiser. Many times she was asked to represent the Pine Mountain Settlement and to travel to distant cities to speak to special audiences that might find the programs at Pine Mountain worthy of support. Many times she managed to bring her favorite subject into the talk. In one instance she found the perfect audience for her interests and for those of Pine Mountain the Colonial Coverlet Guild of Chicago, Illinois.

Weaving had long been one of Miss Motter’s favorite crafts and she found many ways to integrate comments on the weaving program at Pine Mountain into her public speaking tours. When she shared her interests with the Colonial Coverlet Guild* in Chicago, Illinois, where she spoke on November 10, 1948, it was clear that her enthusiasm captured her audience. Miss Motter enjoyed this talk and so did her audience.

To accompany the talk to some 80 members of the Guild, she brought along many of the coverlets and weaving samples from Pine Mountain. She described the origins of the patterns, dyes, and some of the stories that came along with the individual pieces. She was able to build a picture of the community of mountain weavers. She described how for many years weaving was a household necessity for mountain families and how that skill had been adopted by the School as part of the curriculum to ensure the continuation of the craft. For many children in the community, weaving was even a new art as commercial fabrics began to dominate wardrobes by the turn of the century.

Motter emphasized how the art stayed with a number of the graduates from Pine Mountain and in some homes in the Pine Mountain valley, families established their own looms and weaving as a cottage industry to provide additional income for the family. Pine Mountain’s efforts to encourage weaving were shared by the organized cottage industry known as the Fireside Industries which broadly supported craft in the Appalachian mountains.

When Margaret Motter addressed the Colonial Coverlet Guild* she wrote out her talk in her unique abbreviated form and years later left Pine Mountain a copy of this talk and others, as well. Her talk is transcribed below. Many of the abbreviations have been expanded in this version and individuals are identified, where known. The talk is a window into weaving activity at the School and the role Miss Motter and others had in encouraging the continuation of this mountain traditional craft by integrating the craft into the Pine Mountain educational programs and offering it as a part of their Industrial Training program. Further, the focus on weaving was melded to the social outreach of the School and was used to engage the broader community and to stimulate the potential for economic independence for many women in the community. In many ways weaving and the values of the settlement movement were well paired.

TRANSCRIPTION OF MOTTER TALK

MESSAGE TO COLONIAL COVERLET GUILD
November 10th 1948
By Margaret Motter

Many of you are familiar I am sure with the institution and the dramatic beginnings of Pine Mountain Settlement School, but any sort of message about our school is incomplete without mentioning the name of William Creech, affectionately known as “Uncle William.” Here was a man with a 3rd-grade education but with great vision who dreamed for 30 years of a school that would “holp” his people.

When he gave his land (all he had) [not quite!] he wrote some men in his un-lettered hand which we treasure. I want to give you the closing paragraph to remind you of the ever-recurring challenge from Uncle William to carry on —

“I don’t look for wealth for them ….

So through the years Pine Mountain has been serving an isolated rural community as an extension, housing a secondary and a vocational high school and as a center of culture, and social and economic welfare.

Uncle William believed it was “better for folkes children to learn how to work with their hands…” In following this advice of Uncle William Pine Mountain has had from the beginning what we call a work program. Pupils pay $10.00 – $15.00 per month if they can afford it and work 2 1/2 hrs. per day and longer on Saturday. This work program serves a dual purpose. Children are made to feel the value of the education that they are earning thru work. [It] keeps [their] self-respect, values and dignity of work itself and besides, through the work program the school is kept going. The children learn over a period of years and do all kinds of work connected with homemaking, farming, and some trades or vocations. All work is done under supervision and changed every 9 weeks. Children have on [the] whole a fine attitude ….

“One thing I don’t like is learnin’ but I like what hit makes you be…….” [Comment by Brit Wilder one of the youngest students and the first to come to the school]

Now, a very popular part of our work program as well as an elective study during school hours is our weaving. I want to give you a few details about this department since you have been good enough to share in making this department function.

Our weaving room has recently been enlarged and we have space for more looms and better looms. We have by no means enough to meet the demand. We have 9 looms and one small one owned by the teacher. 6 of these were made at Berea, one at Pine Mountain after the Berea Style — 5 of the looms are 40″ and 4 are 22″-24″. Since 6 of the looms were at Pine Mountain before 1924, I guess it is not an understatement [page 3] to say they have not the latest improvements!

Weaving Room: Bess Taylor, Reba Blevins nace_1_061a.jpg

Weaving Room: Bess Taylor, Reba Blevins c. late 1940s. nace_1_061a.jpg

Our teacher informed me that a Swedish weaver told her we are doing very well indeed with the equipment we have. So you can see as time goes on we shall need to replace these older looms with better ones and to purchase a pair of badly-needed scales [?] for the weaving room.

I have brought you some samples of weaving done by our girls. We use rags from feed-sacks which are dyed at the school and woven into rugs. Old rayon stock and any kind of woven underwear can be transformed in the weaving room into lovely bags. We have a neighbor who does some spinning for us and [the] other yarns we buy.

I mentioned that our weaving is very popular. Some girls who learned to weave have been able to get a loom at home and have continued in their work. Two of the senior girls have been especially interested “in weaving and confided in the teacher that they hope they’ll get a loom as a graduation gift from their home folks. The girls love to weave a skirt to wear on May Day and have a chance to participate in the colorful “Weaver’s Dance”.

Weaving class in hand-woven skirts. Pearl Taylor, Ernestine Vitatoe, Bess Taylor, Jolene Lucas, Gladys Carroll, Reba Blevins, Margaret Slusher, Betty Huff — 1946. nace_1_022b.jpg

“Glorishears” Morris Dance — 1946. Shirley Holbrook and Delores Scott in lead. nace_1_021a.jpg

Weaving does go on in some of the homes (as I mentioned), i.e., sample curtain [cur. ?] material [mat.?] woven by one of our neighbors. [The] Swedish pattern sells for $1.95 a yard. I am reminded at this point of the way I happened to get one of my coverlets when I was at Pine Mountain in the fall of 1928. In the office welcoming children as they arrived — In came last years student with a younger sister by hand and [a] coverlet over [the] other arm. “I brung —–[?] “

Della Hayes weaving at Pine Mountain. Probably in Old Log, c. 1940s.

That coverlet was definitely a home product, brown from walnut hulls and dusty rose from madder. Just as lovely today as when I bought it and I love to think that little Della [Hayes] — now a successful nurse — had her start at Pine Mountain because her sister had learned to weave at our school and had a loom at home.

Walnut and madder dye weaving

[page 5] I am sure you are familiar with Dr. Allen Eaton’s book, Handmade in the Southern Mountains. [this should read, Allen H. Eaton. Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands], One of the colored illustrations shows a striped blanket that we call Pine Mountain Blanket #16. I have one of these made by a mountain woman who was taught to weave by our teacher — wool from her own sheep and vegetable dye used. This is the type of blanket we always use for our prophets in the Nativity Play. You can see that the weaving even goes into something special like that. *[Note: This same Pine Mountain Blanket #16 was used as a cover for the plaque which was un-veiled at the Pine Mountain Settlement School Centennial celebration in August 2013.]

P1050415

I say something special, Christmas at Pine Mountain is an occasion that one never forgets. With our sacrificial meals for our Charity Fund now we’ll have something to share with others; with our appealing drama of lovely carols in [Laurel House] dining room while decorated with garlands, wreaths, and tree; with our gay Mummer’s Play ; with our charming Nativity Play in the Chapel, it is an occasion for happy activity — [a] genuine pleasure. It has its effect upon children “Love and joy …” —“Hit’s peacefulest –” [Motter probably describes the change from the earlier celebrations of Christmas that were known for their liquor and guns.]

Boy’s House Wassailers and Lords and Ladies — 1946. [Good King Wenselaus ?] [In Laurel House] nace_1_025b.jpg

Your share in our work is indeed heartwarming to the staff and the trustees. May we ask for your continued interest so that we may not fail to make Uncle William’s dream come true — I don’t want hit to be for this local. only —-” ——

*Swygert, Mrs. Luther M. Heirlooms from Old Looms A Catalogue of Coverlets Owned By the Colonial Coverlet Guild of America and Its Members – R.R. Donnelley and Sons : 1940 (1955).

See: MARGARET MOTTER Biography

FIRESIDE INDUSTRIES

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Through Pine Mountain’s efforts and the support of the broad-ranging Fireside Industries, a strong program of support for the Appalachian craft of weaving was developed and the practice was strongly revitalized in the 1930s and 40s. In many environments, during the 1930s and 1940s the idea of a “cottage industry” which is characterized by contracted work completed at home and then marketed through a central agency, was a developed and viable economic venture. In the case of Pine Mountain, the idea was not new and was not exploited by the school so much for commercial reasons, but was incorporated into the educational program and into their primary goal of building “community.”

The idea of weaving at home was not unique to families in the Pine Mountain community but with Pine Mountain’s encouragement, it began to follow the model put forward by the Fireside Industries which flourished at centers such as Berea College, long a source of inspiration and support for the School’s weaving enterprises.

Pine Mountain’s interest was also shared by many other rural settlement schools in the region, particularly in the early settlements institutions in Western North Carolina. What was unique at Pine Mountain was the early adoption of weaving and the measure of enthusiasm in the community for such work and the persistence of weaving as part of the educational program at the school.

Weaving has been an activity that has found a place at the School for over 100 years and more of its history. Through the enthusiasm of Katherine Pettit and her “kivers” and those like Margaret Motter, who followed her, Pine Mountain has maintained it’s interest this this unique craft and in the long family traditions attached to weaving in the Central and Southern Appalachians. This long mountain family history led to the introduction of weaving and dying in the first decade of the school and maintained it through the years.

Katherine Pettit’s Dye Book written by Helen Wilmer Stone, a staff member at Pine Mountain, is a classic in the genre of vegetable dying of fiber. Under Katherine Pettit, Helen Wilmer Stone, Margaret Motter, Florence Daniels, Abbie Winch Christensen, Becky May Huff, and others, weaving and spinning, and the use of native plants for dyes later found a place in the curriculum of the Pine Mountain and other schools as a vocational tract. When a more normalized curriculum was mandated by public instructions guidelines, weaving still remained as an elective at many of these schools, and often as an after-school program. Yet, in most schools and homes, weaving had gone away by the late 1940s. Few instructors could be found to maintain the craft in schools other than arts and crafts schools and the maintenance f the equipment was high.

Unlike many regions of the Central and Southern Appalachians in the 1940s, the Pine Mountain Valley had not fully abandoned weaving in some households. In many homes in the mountains, and in the Pine Mountain region particularly, many families still maintained their old looms and many of the unique patterns continued their persistence through many generations of family weavers. Some of the old patterns can still be found in mountain homes scratched out on rolled strips of cloth or on long scrolls of paper. Like some ancient runes, these patterns are family treasures.

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What Pine Mountain brought to the Fireside Industries or the “cottage industry” model, was a renewal or revival of the long-standing culture of eager mountain weavers. Margaret Motter moved this enthusiasm along by carrying examples of weaving with her on almost every talk she gave outside the School. Through Katherine Pettit’s early enthusiasm for collecting mountain “kivers” the attention to the beauty and skill of mountain weaving moved among the staff of the School like an aesthetic mantra. Workers discovered in weaving sophisticated and beautiful local craftsmanship that utilized skill, intelligence, and tenacity — qualities that the community weavers had in abundance. The education that occurred between the workers and the community was mutual — and it continues to be mutual today, even as the “community” of Pine Mountain has continued to expand outward to meet the demands of the industrial world and a more diverse public.

WEAVING IN 1949

A short piece written by Freshman student Mattie Mae Adams in the February 1949 PINE CONE, the student newsletter, describes a weaving experience at the School. 1949 was the last year the boarding school was in operation.

WEAVING

On my entrance to Pine Mountain I had a choice between science and weaving. I took weaving. At first I was afraid to weave. I was afraid I would make a mistake. It seemed hard for me to remember all of the names of the parts of the loom, and it was still harder to wind a bobbin. But it didn’t take me long as I have Miss Christensen for a teacher.

She started me off on a rug that she had already started herself. Afterward, I thought I wanted to make one for myself. Now we have started on our May Day skirts, which are very difficult, because I get my threads crossed and have to take them out. Then I have to re-wind a bobbin. The next thing I know I’m using the wrong treadles or mending a broken heddle. Broken threads are another difficulty. I have just mended a broken thread when I discover a mistake which has to be taken out. Then I usually take out two to that four.

Now all of these things don’t happen every day; but when one happens it seems as if they all happen at once. Even in spite of these hard tasks, I am glad I made the choice of weaving.

Mattie Mae Adams, Freshman

Ccropped image of weaving held in the Katherine Pettit Collection in the Bodley-Bullock House, Bodley-Bullock House. Sorority House for Transylvania College. 200 Market St, Lexington, KY 40507.

SEE ALSO:

KATHERINE PETTIT – WEAVING

BECKY MAY HUFF

FLORENCE DANIELS

ABBIE WINCH CHRSTENSEN

HELEN WILMER STONE

KATHERINE PETTIT DYE BOOK

WEAVING at PMSS BEGINNINGS

WEAVING DRAPER LOOM STUDIO

WEAVING AT PMSS SAMPLES I

WEAVING AT PMSS SAMPLES II

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH Dulcimers at Pine Mountain

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 30: Music
Series 32: Object Collections
DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH Dulcimers at Pine Mountain

TAGS: dulcimers; mountain dulcimer; musical instruments; Ethel de Long Zande; music; ballads; songs; Appalachian musical instruments; Appalachian music; Evelyn K. Wells; plucked dulcimer; bowed dulcimer ;

Ethel de Long with mountain dulcimer, c. 1915

THE MOUNTAIN DULCIMER

The mountain “dulcimer” is an oblong, box-like instrument, with in-curving sides, about two and a half feet long and eight inches at its greatest width. It has three strings of either gut or wire. One string is fretted, the other two are drone strings. The fretted string and the one next to it are tuned a fifth above the third string.

Angela Melville Album II - Part III. "E.K.W." [with dulcimer]. [melv_II_album_313.jpg]

Angela Melville Album II – Part III. “E.K.W.” [Evelyn K. Wells with dulcimer]. [melv_II_album_313.jpg]

The dulcimer is either picked or bowed. When it is picked, it is held on the knees, and the left hand plays the melody by passing a little stick up and down the keyboard over the fretted string, while the right hand plucks the strings. When it is bowed, the player holds one end in his lap and rest the other against a table, holding the bow in the right hand and passing the fingers or a stick up and down the keyboard with the left.

There are very few dulcimers left in the mountains now, but in the old days they were often found beside the fiddle and the homemade banjo. Now the fiddle, the banjo and the organ are taking the place of the old-fashioned instrument.

The theory of most scholars of the subject is that this instrument was brought into the mountains by some settler from the continent of Europe, because it is a well-known fact that the German zither of the 18th century is identical in shape, tuning and general appearance with the the mountain dulcimer. One of these zithers is displayed in the Crosby-Brown collection of musical instruments in the Metropolitan Museum in New York along with other 18th century instruments. This is supposed to be a descendant of the monochord of the middle ages.

There are two types of stringed instruments. the plucked instruments and the struck instruments. The former are psalteries, the latter dulcimers. Since the mountain dulcimer is plucked, it should belong in the class with psalteries, but the mountaineer, with his love of sweet-sounding names, has preferred to call it a “dulcimer,” and perhaps by this time he has acquired the right of possession.

[Source unknown. Pine Mountain Settlement School archive.]

As recorded in her letters, Ethel de Long Zande had her portrait made in New York City with a dulcimer in her lap. It is possible that the photographer was Doris Ulmann, who knew Ethel and photographed widely in the Pine Mountain region during the beginning years of the School.

In the following photograph by an unknown photographer, “Aunt Leah” sits and plays the dulcimer using a bow. As described by the anonymous author, above, this was a more uncommon form for playing the instrument, but it was nevertheless known by some community members in the early years of the School.

“Aunt Leah” using a bow to play a hand-made mountain dulcimer at Pine Mountain Settlement School. [pmss00024.jpg]

DULCIMERS IN COLLECTION

Dulcimer used by PMSS Girl’s Octet

Return to MUSIC AND DANCE

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH II Introduction

Pine Mountain Settlement School
DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH II
INTRODUCTION – Growing From the Soil

Land in the Southern Appalachians is precious soil. The people grow from the soil as surely as plants take root and spring upward towards sun. The people grow strong to work the soil and they bend as the soil pulls their tired bodies back to lay in peace within it. Yet, the cycle is more a dance than a dirge. The dance is the dance so many children and adults have today forgotten. It is the jitterbug of stream-beds and the waltz of wind-blown mountain tops. It is the courtly movement through rows of cabbages and corn. It’s the balanced step-dance across a foot-log. It is a dance that educates for wholeness; the kind of wholeness often found in the rhythm of rural country sides.

Dancing in the cabbage patch was part of the early education at Pine Mountain Settlement School. It was not an education just for children. It was the exercise of everyone who marveled at the cycles of life and the bountiful bloom of new crops as they re-shaped flat field and high hill. It was and is all that is intuited in the fragile relationship with the land. A dance in the cabbage patch is an exercise in the nourishment of both body and soul. It is a solo dance made joyful by the sharing.

We can dance alone, or we can grow the patch together. At one time Pine Mountain raised over 10,000 heads of cabbage in their central garden patch. Today, together, the cabbage patches are unlimited for us all if we can re-connect with the land.

The blog Dancing in the Cabbage Patch is structured into a series of essays about Pine Mountain and its Community. It explores the land of Appalachia, its farming, its foodways, and its celebrations. It is a history of a unique rural Appalachian settlement school that spans an existence of more than 100 years.

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The foundation of Pine Mountain Settlement School can be found in the early efforts of key visionaries in both the School and the community. Some of these unique individuals are described in their BIOGRAPHIES as compiled by the two authors of this blog. Other biographical notes may be discovered in the many stories told about each other. The biographies and stories are filled with characters whose lives may not at first appear visionary, but, on closer examination, these are folk who have led many seekers to both truth and fiction, and to a land little understood and often misrepresented.

Some seekers understood where they had been led, but others, clearly, could not shake their myths and prejudices. The Pine Mountain Valley, its land and its people is filled with a clear truth, a fantastical mythology, and a delightful romp through one of the most misunderstood regions of America. In summary, to explore Appalachia is to dive into a deep exploration of the truth tellers, the seekers and those oblivious to dreams, visions, and truth. It is a journey about the evolution of America and its vision of itself.

Read deeply, the stories from Pine Mountain carry echoes of self-will, absence of doubt, and a certainty that comes shining or struggling through these fragments of lives. As School and Community worked together to establish and to give continuity to one of the first rural settlement schools in the Central and Southern Appalachians they left a map for those seeking the meaning of democracy. Not soon to be forgotten are the narratives of the staff and community who helped to shape the vision we now hold of the early rural settlement movement and the foundations of our democracy. In the PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL COLLECTIONS ARCHIVE there are many paths to follow.

THE FOUNDERS

When William Creech gave his land in 1913 so that Pine Mountain Settlement School could begin its journey, he also gave to the School one of the most famous quotes associated with the institution. Katherine Pettit, a co-founder of the School, used Creech’s visionary words for “his people” to promote the institution. The wisdom of William Creech and the surrounding community and of those who came to “save” the community but found themselves for the first time, continues to resonate with many cultures and lives throughout the world. Most all of Pettit’s successors at the School have found this quote to be foundational.

An Old Man’s Hope for the Children of the Kentucky Mountains

I don’t look after wealth for them. I look after the prosperity of our nation. I want all younguns taught to serve the livin’ God. Of course, they wont all do that, but they can have good and evil laid before them and they can choose which they will. I have heart and craving that our people may grow better. I have deeded my land to the Pine Mountain Settlement School to be used for school purposes as long as the Constitution of the United States stands. Hopin’ it may make a bright and intelligent people after I’m dead and gone.

Uncle William and Aunt Sal stand in front of their old home while re-enacting their wedding picture. hook_007_mod.jpg

Uncle William and Aunt Sal donated 135* acres of land for the Pine Mountain Settlement School. [*This acreage varies in the historical record and often includes the donation of other land from community and lumber and mining companies and other families such as the Metcalfs and Wilders and others.]

In this photograph Uncle William Creech and his wife Sally Creech re-enact their wedding in front of their original cabin home in 1917. Now often referred to as “Aunt Sal’s Cabin,” it was relocated to the grounds of the Settlement School in 1926 and is now a central landmark of the School which is on the National Historical Register.

One of the founders of the School, Katherine Pettit (1868 -1938) was a Kentucky native. She began her work at nearby Hindman Settlement School which she also founded, and served as co-director at Pine Mountain Settlement School until her retirement in 1930. For the next five years she traveled throughout the world and continued to doggedly trudge throughout Harlan County urging farmers to adopt modern farming techniques. In 1932, she visited South America. In that same year, she received the Sullivan Medallion from the Univ. of Kentucky as the outstanding citizen of the state of Kentucky. She died Sept. 3, 1938 at the age of sixty-eight.

The co-founder, along with Pettit and William Creech, was Ethel de Long Zande (1868 -1928), a New Jersey native and Smith College graduate. She was recruited by Pettit to be the educational co-director of the School and to give academic guidance, fundraising and educational programming. Pettit knew de Long’s work as the two had served in similar positions at Hindman Settlement School where de Long worked with Pettit for two years. Ethel de Long was as powerful in her beliefs and will as was Pettit and William Creech but that did not prevent them from hiring a multitude of staff that carried the same strengths. Pettit and de Long and their staff provided basic education for children and training for mothers in health, cooking, and home care. In 1918 Ethel de Long married Luigi Zande, an Italian stonemason. She died much too early of cancer in 1928. Her short time at Pine Mountain solidified the joined vision the two other founders, Katherine Pettit and Uncle William Creech, and the three left a lasting legacy and an unmovable foundation for the School.

Another force that needs to be reckoned with is that of Mary Rockwell Hook. Mary Rockwell Hook,was recruited to Pine Mountain to serve as the lead architect for the buildings and the grounds of the school. Her work represents one of the first instances of women’s work in the architectural profession. A native of Kansas City, Kansas, and daughter of a banker, she was one of the first group of women to study in the renowned school of architecture in France, the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris. Her work represents a major milestone for women architects in America as she was by all accounts, she was among the first women to earn an architectural degree in the United States. It was Mary Rockwell Hook’s remarkable work that earned Pine Mountain Settlement School recognition as a National Historic Landmark in 1983.

Her architecture, like the people grew up out of the land and its organic presence always runs as a sub-text throughout all that is Pine Mountain Settlement School. Mary Rockwell knew the land and the people and she continued to work with the School until her death at the age of 101.

Work Shop For The Pine Mountain School Boys Industrial MSR5852_1 M.R. Hook South Elevation 1/4″=1′-0″ (early proposed plan)

Throughout the literature of Pine Mountain Settlement School one will see individuals acknowledged as “Uncle” and “Aunt” such-and-such. When used with the first names of community members, the familial designation was generally not a designation of a familial blood relationship, but one of endearment. It was used particularly within the staff and families at the School, but it was always a long-held title of respect and endearment in the Pine Mountain community. Following his donation of land for the school in 1913, Uncle William only lived six more years, until 1918. Aunt Sal lived on until 1925. Their passing was as though a near Uncle and Aunt had passed, and they had.

It was the generous donation of land by William and Sally Creech, the Metcalfs and others, and their advocacy and their vision that made the school on the headwaters of the Kentucky River, a reality. But it was community that was the bond that sustained it. When Uncle William and Aunt Sal gave the land they did so with the intent to create a school and they sought out supporters in the community and with the community convinced the two remarkable women to come to the remote valley in Harlan County to became the new Settlement’s directors. Pettit and de Long needed little persuasion and the community was ready for them.

BUILDING THE SCHOOL

In Pettit and de Long , William Creech found a congruence of goals and vision. Pettit and de Long took the educational challenge of Uncle William to heart and Uncle William held the two women close to his own heart and dream. Katherine Pettit, a member of the Lexington chapter of the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs, had, with May Stone, and the support of the Club founded Hindman Settlement School in 1900, and knew what she wanted in a school. Thirteen years later, more importantly, she knew where she wanted a school. Ethel de Long , who had worked for many years as an educator with Pettit at Hindman, was a pragmatic and articulate program creator but, like Pettit, she wanted to chart her own course and exercise some of her new ideas on education in the central Appalachians. Both Pettit and de Long were visionaries, as was Mary Rockwell Hook, but they were all also well connected to other forceful women and men. Their long chain of contacts gave them the foundation and support needed to launch the new settlement school.

The Creeches, Pettit, de Long, and Hook as well as others in the Pine Mountain community were a productive and dynamic combination. The quick formation of an Advisory Board provided the outside oversight, funding, and professional support needed to grow the institution. The founders of 1913 gave the school a solid financial through ferocious and smart publicity and funding appeals. And, they gave the institution a strong social base on which it could grow and flourish. And, grow it did. In 2013 the school celebrated its one-hundredth year as an educational institution confirming the promise and the wisdom of those early planners.

There are many institutional histories. This abbreviated one is only an introduction. To see other historical resources see the PMSS HISTORIES Guide.

Mary Rogers, wife of Burton Rogers, School Director (1949-1983), and founder of the Environmental Education program at the School, wrote THE PINE MOUNTAIN STORY 1913-1983 for the School’s 50th Anniversary. It remains the best source of history of the school.

: Mary Blagdon Rogers

Mary Rogers’ small booklet covers the institutional history from 1913-1983, and breaks the history into easily understood blocks of history. Her brief narrative history, illustrated with her own delicate drawings, is an eloquent statement describing the founding years of the institution, the boarding school years and the later Community School. It describes the founder’s plans for the School and the dedication to the founder’s ideas through the years. She says of Pettit and the School

” She [Pettit] had a deep love for the people, and concern for their needs. At Hindman she had already translated the work of Jane Addams and the urban settlement movement into a rural idiom. Now, her thoughts were turning to more isolated, as yet un-served, areas of the mountains.

Traditional schooling was a part of her plan, but she envisaged also a settlement serving a whole community in its economic, health and cultural development. A settlement would not attempt to substitute an outside culture for the indigenous. It would try to strengthen people’s faith in their own heritage, making use of both the mountain environment and their unique traditions as media for learning. It would help people to retain a secure sense of their own worth as human beings.

The new school must have sufficient acreage to supply the bulk of its own needs. It must be less dependent on the slow, unreliable transportation of supplies by ox wagon through almost roadless country.

EDUCATION FOR LIFE

Education was foremost in the mind of Uncle William, and education was at the center of the mission of the two women co-founders of the institution, and all three agreed that this education must be a pragmatic education. It must give the children of the school not only ‘book larnin’, but it must also give them “education for life.” Uncle William described this “education for life” as an understanding of farming practice and a respect for the land that would combine with traditional educational practice. Only then could the total education of the person occur.

Head, hand and heart at work in this early carpentry project by a student of the school.

Throughout the one-hundred year history of the School, the adherence to an agrarian focus is central to the understanding Pine Mountain’s “education for life.” The pragmatic work engaged by all who passed through the School, emphasized education as a life-long process and one for which they, alone, were responsible.

“Education for life” demanded mindfulness throughout every day. Participation in farming, food preparation, community celebration, woodworking, environmental field work and more. It was an educational idea anchored in a classroom experience, but practiced in every action of the student. Even today, this hybrid approach, solidified by hands-on learning experiences, has proven to be one of the most effective learning strategies, .

An “education for life” is what the poet and writer Wendell Berry describes in his thoughtful series of essays, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural, (1970, 1972), He calls it a kind of “local life aware of itself.” He asserts that this “regionalism is the awareness that local life is intricately dependent, [not just ] for its quality but also for its continuance, upon local knowledge.” Berry dedicated his small book of essays to Ann and Harry Caudill, two Eastern Kentucky locals from Whitesburg, Kentucky, who were intensely aware of their place in the land and who educated many on the fragility of Appalachian land in Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1962). It is a book, in the words of Steward Udall, that is the “story of land failure and the failure of men,” but that in its fatalistic telling called the attention of the world to the lives of so many in the Central Appalachians.

Today as we move rapidly toward ecological and social disruptions, the need to remind ourselves of our responsibility to an “education for life” is even more critical. The education at Pine Mountain has always served up this idea. Pine Mountain Settlement School is a place and an idea that educates for life and that is committed to the literacy of historical community and how that history informs the living community. This commitment to education, both formal and informal, is essential to tying together the land and the people in a fundamental and sustainable eco-system.

In 2015 the mission statement was re-worded, but not dramatically altered when it admonished that the goal of the School was to enrich lives and connect people through Appalachian place-based education for all ages.

“Twenty years ago [1912] Kentucky ranked fortieth in Education among the states of the Union; today she is still fortieth,” reported the Kentucky Education Commission after a two-year study made of education in schools and colleges in the Commonwealth from 1932 to 1934. This was the pre-Depression era and it raised desperate appeals for ideas and help with a school system ravaged by a growing economic crisis. As part of their 1932 study, the state surveyed the students whose lives they were charged to improve. Pine Mountain was visited and queried about educational needs and programs. The surveyors found no shortage of students who were willing to closely critique their school and to make recommendations to their surveyors. Remarkably, the surveyors listened. The educational journeys described by the students served as a model for planning a new course for education within the state. The descriptions of those students are closely detailed in the nearly complete collection of student records held in the Pine Mountain Settlement School Archive Student Records.

In 2010 Kentucky’s ranking in a national survey was 34th in the nation. In two years the state jumped 24 places in the Quality Counts annual report as recorded in Education Week magazine. In 2013, under the Governance of Beshear the state placed an amazing 10th in the national rankings for K-12 education. Something is working. Attention to rural youth was part of the 2013 success.

The Rural Youth Guidance Institute, earlier called the Pine Mountain Institute, begun by director, Glyn Morris, in 1934 became known throughout the country as a progressive and successful educational model. The Pine Mountain students were “educated for life” and the Depression years in Appalachia and at Pine Mountain Settlement School provided some of the best lessons for that education. The 1930s had many teaching moments that few who experienced them, forgot — student or teacher.

The school still stands as a model for educators who want to “educate for life.” Today, particularly in the field of environmental education, Pine Mountain continues to lead the way in the state of Kentucky across all age groups. Today it educates multiple generations and promotes education as a life-long learning process. A brief 1934, article for The Pine Cone, a school paper written by Pine Mountain students, reflects on the state’s campaign to reform education for its students and where Pine Mountain students fit into that campaign. It demonstrates how the PMSS students were actively engaged in the 1930′ educational planning process

A somewhat unusual feature of this campaign was the enlisting of the services and sympathies of the students themselves by the state. The generous response of the Pine Mountain students to this appeal for comments was characteristic of the sense of community promoted at the school. The school, started twenty-one years earlier gave to the children a willingness to give of their energies that the cause of education may be advanced. They described the influence of Pine Mountain as a real education that “will help us work a little more skillfully, think a little more clearly and act a little more kindly.”

This exploration of farming, food and community engagement at Pine Mountain Settlement School found in the DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH series of essays is authored by one of Pine Mountain’s children, the daughter of one of the School’s farmers, Helen Hayes Wykle. The essays are offered as a contribution to the history of the institution and are filtered through the writer’s perspective. There are many other perspectives.

PHOTOGRAPHS

The photographs of rural life taken by various photographers, during the long history of Pine Mountain Settlement School found in this essay, are derived from a life lived close to the land. Within the faces of the students, the workers, and community families, especially in the children, can be found wonder, stubbornness, joy, fear, defiance, pride, and hope. It is those images combined with some of the personal narratives captured in letters, documents and autobiographies in the archival collection, that the many perspectives may be studied. In these often very personal and literal reflections, can be found a tall mountain of deep wisdom, peace,

humility, despair, determination, hope, anger, but, especially, joy. Yet, some who will view the photographs or read the workers letters about the community will only see the poverty and possibly the exploitation of the local population by “outsiders.” That is not what the school was or is about and on close reading, that is not what the archive ultimately will reveal.

The author John Berger reminds us in And Our Faces, My heart, as Brief as Photos (Berger, 1984) that time and space are inseparable. He cautions us that we must be careful of giving so much to the historical projection of time. He argues, “It is space not time that hides consequences from us.” In the Pine Mountain Valley it is “up Cutshin and down Greasy,” and Wellsley College and “between Hel-fer-Sartin and Kingdom Come,” and Boston and Turkey Neck Bend and New York and Fiesty and Rowdy, that we arrange and rearrangte our critical perspectives.

The words of those who knew and know the land best are sprinkled throughout the following narratives, but it’s the photographs, the images of land and people that most vividly detail the agrarian evolution of the community. The agricultural essence of the unique rural community on the north side of Pine Mountain as explored through the lives of those who worked at Pine Mountain Settlement School and those who lived near-by in the community, is as relevant today as it was when the first vision was shaped by the founders. These are pictures of an education —is in a constant reciprocal stream of teaching. In photograph and text the interactive life along the Pine Mountain range and at the Pine Mountain Settlement School is a reassertion of geographies of hope and how to move between our spaces. It is about finding a personal space in our society and the society finding a space for us.

Pine Mountain Settlement School today continues to be an experiment in rural settlement school practice as well as a model environmental education school. As the School moves beyond its 100th year, the community celebrates with the School. It celebrates the people, the place and an unwavering relationship to the land and to the lessons that may be learned from a close association with its geography in all its variants. People and place, student and land, farmer and field, ecologist and mountainside, are all tied to an educational vision and mission. Today, the school’s programs and its “education for life” ethos reveals an evolving vision and mission. Remarkably, it is a vision that remains fresh and inspiring. No matter where one enters the narrative about the School, the general aim is clear. It is to create critical minds and a sensitive eye when looking at how seasons pass, space evolves, and lives evolve and pass in the valley. It is a narrative that is both sequential and simultaneous, history and historical.

Today our polemics are animated by ideological conflicts, by rancorous politics, and an inability to discern truths. We often lose our close touch with both time and space. History melts our contexts into a sea of irrationality and speed creates a blur with no time for reflection. Often history only surfaces to support some argument or political position that has no verity. We tend to forget in the rush of our lives that there are many truths, many more generations to inspire, and many lessons to learn and many stories to tell that open the pages of our own unique place in time and space.

Many of those lessons are found in our relationships, in our historical and genealogical archives, while others may be found on a hike to some remote and quiet place like Jack’s Gap overlooking a slice of life in the long view. When we look out from high places on the expanse of mountains that stretch out below, the view may resemble a troubled sea. The deep green sea, interrupted by the silt, the growing tides of discontent, the green and brown of surface mining — but the air sits close upon that mountain fragrant with fresh pine and vibrant with sunrise and sunset. The trails of Pine Mountain wait to be explored.

Jack’s Gap outing. Arthur W. Dodd Album. [dodd_A_066_mod.jpg]

As we all reach for improvement in the quality of our lives, there are many reminders in the stories and images from Pine Mountain that tell us, like Uncle William, that life does not need the accumulation of wealth, so much as it requires the nurturing of the wealth that lives within us and that surrounds us all. As we look backward with intelligence at the 100 years of Pine Mountain Settlement School, we will hopefully be better prepared to move forward with inspiration and intention to a vital future wherever that future may find each of us. I suspect Uncle William is smiling as his dream unfolds and catches hold.

Helen Hayes Wykle

GO TO: DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH III – PLACE

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DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH III Place

Pine Mountain Settlement School
DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH
Pine Mountain Settlement School as Place
and the Physical Space of an Idea

LOG CABIN

Poem by Dora Read Goodale (1863-1953), from Mountain Dooryards, Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, IA, 1941.

Little bitty ……. hit mought so be,
But it doesn’t look that way to me;
Ever’ log in it once a tree
That aimed at the sky ; the chimley-herth
Once a piece of the living yerth
And old Kentuck; and shutter and sill,
Puncheons, ruf-boards, or what ye will
Hewed and rived by my pap’s pap
When he was young an full of sap
Ther’es Coy’s fiddle — I tell you what! —
Mammy’s churn, and the big black pot
For Monday’s wash; and the shot-gun thar
Over the door, that’s kilt a bar;
Porch out front, and a picket gate
With flowers a-blowin early and late —
Why, ever’ one of em’s dear, so dear,
If I’d done been in Heaven a year
I’d still want out, to get back here.

Dora Read Goodale

Dora Read Goodale came to Pine Mountain Settlement School to teach when she was forty-seven years old. She was born in 1866 in Mount Washington in the Berkshires. Her arrival at the school in the founding year of 1913 provided her with a unique perspective of the school and community. She came from a precocious Vermont family of writers and poets and brought those talents to her teaching at the school. Before she had reached adolescence she and her sister, Elaine Goodale [Eastman] had published extensively in national magazines and journals. and Dora, the younger of the two, continued writing poetry for most of her lifetime. Her last work at age 75 was Mountain Dooryards compiled while she was in residence at Pleasant Hill mission school, a Tennessee school, not unlike Pine Mountain. She served as the director of the Uplands Sanatorium in the late 1930s through 1941, a treatment center that was part of Pleasant Hill mission school.

The 1920s view of the Settlement School reveals the cleared areas and the site of the institution within the steep mountainous terrain. The wide-angle view is deceptive, as the closeness of the mountain is missed in this panoramic view. Lower left is Old Log, the oldest building on the site. The Tool Shed is to the middle left and the Office sits to its right. Deep in the valley is the Burkham School House II and to its right is Old Laurel House. The Barn sits high on the hill above the Office. The Infirmary (now Hill House), Practice House, and Farm House were not yet built, nor were the Swimming Pool and the Draper Industrial Building. Big Log is hidden in the middle distance of the photograph. The Chapel is to the far right side and beyond, hidden by the dark knoll is Far House I. What stands out in this photograph is the large swaths of cultivated farmland.

Aerial view of Pine Mountain Settlement School c. 1941. Westwind is just under construction as the white patch to the right of the photograph. Again, cultivated fields stand out against the heavily forested area around the school. Today, most of the fields are overgrown with young timber and the cultivated land has been reduced to the central areas of the campus at the middle of the photograph. Photo, Arthur Dodd.

Pine Mountain Settlement School is nestled in the long valley on the north side of the Pine Mountain, a long continuous mountain chain on the Cumberland Plateau in the Southeastern United States.

View down the Pine Mountain valley from the Westwind hill. c. 1920s.

The Cumberland Plateau encompasses some ten thousand square miles and contains nearly twenty counties in the eastern corner of Kentucky. Pine Mountain Settlement School is in Harlan County, in the far southeast corner of the state where it borders on Virginia and Tennessee. The mountains in this area represent the most majestic in the state, particularly Big Black Mountain which faces the Pine Mountain range on its South side.

Harlan County was named for Major Silas Harlan, a commander in the Illinois Campaigns of 1779, and was the sixtieth county added to the state. It was formed from parts of Knox and Floyd counties. The county was one of the highest, most mountainous, and most remote of the state’s 124 counties at the time of its formation and it remains remote in many ways, even today.

The history of Harlan County is dominated by a history of coal. Most all the mountains in the region contain coal that was formed when the ancient bog and vegetation of an inland sea was compressed into peat and then into coal over a period of millions of years. Pine Mountain, one of the mountain chains formed when the earth buckled and thrust upward has coal but is not coal-rich as the coal seams are too difficult to mine. due to their quasi-vertical angle. This long “thrust-fault” mountain chain, some 150 miles long, parallels the tall Cumberland range to the south which is certainly coal-rich. Within this range is the “Big Black” mountain, at 3,300 feet, the highest mountain in the state.

When the Pine Mountain chain was formed, it thrust upward along the 150 miles in a continuous line running east to west. Pine Mountain Settlement School sits on the north side of this east-west thrust-fault and below the watershed point on the mountain for two rivers, the Kentucky and the Cumberland.

An amusing story is told of a local community member who had a unique perspective regarding how the mountain could have come to be so tilted. He asked Alice Cobb, a school worker, if she knew, “Why Pine Mountain was such a “quare” shape with so many big loose rocks scattered around.” Miss Cobb started to respond with her short interpretation of the geology of a “thrust-fault” when the man continued. “Well people about here thinks that when Christ was crucified the earth trembled and shook so it knocked Pine Mountain plum over on its side. And, that’s why.” And, “on it’s side,” it is. It is the gentle side, the slope, that forms the backdrop to the Settlement School though the mountains sit so close together, that the long slope is pressed up against everyone who lives in the valley.

As streams pushed their way through the early plateau, they created multiple steep valleys with meandering creeks and rivers. These many waterways eventually wound their way as large tributaries to the Missouri and the Mississippi further west. Harlan County and specifically the Pine Mountain range above the settlement school is the source of three of Kentucky’s major rivers; the Cumberland, the Kentucky and further north, the Big Sandy river.

The Cumberland River runs westward and southward through the length of Harlan county and has its head-waters on the south-side of the Pine Mountain range. Isaac’s Creek or Isaac’s Run, which runs through the campus of the School is the essential headwater of the Kentucky River as it begins its journey.This stream on the north side of the Pine Mountain range soon forms Greasy Creek and then joins the Middle Fork of the Kentucky and then on to the main Kentucky river.

State historian, Thomas D. Clark, told the story of this important state tributary in 1942, in a book titled, The Kentucky. Clark asked John A. Spelman, III, an art teacher at Pine Mountain Settlement School, to illustrate the book with his linoleum block prints. The Kentucky was one in a series of books written for The Rivers of America Books, edited by Stephen Vincent Benet and Carl Cramer. The Kentucky remains the definitive work on this beautiful river and a rich source for information on rivers and culture in the eastern part of Kentucky. Pine Mountain retains many Spelman original blocks that echo the rich work he completed for this important book. Over 100 wood, linoleum and metal engravings capture the unique style of the talented artist. Many linoleum block prints of John A. Spelman III are found throughout Pine Mountain school publications created in the late 1930’s and the early 1940’s.

Author Thomas D. Clark says of the Middle Fork of the Kentucky

“… the middle one [stream] scampers along through the Big Laurel to Greasy Creek and then to an arbitrary point where temperamental map makers finally decide to imprint the name “Kentucky.” Perhaps nowhere else in America does a stream drain a more genuinely rural or isolated area. In some respects, the valley of this fork comprises America’s human museum. Here the great westward movement eddied and then stood still. If it be true, as some sociologists have assured us, here are to be found America’s “contemporary ancestors.” Human life has changed little from what it was when the first settlers forced their way through the great pass at Pound Gap or wandered upstream from the “three forks.” [Clark, p.9-10]

While Clark’s narrative written in 1942, captured life along the creeks of the north side of Pine Mountain, and a familiar refrain that has been echoed by many writers of the region, Spelman’s block prints capture the visual romantic wildness of the mountains in the area.

Spelman left another remarkable set of prints in which he captured the elegance of mountain cabins and the patterns of the mountain farm in his published work, At Home in the Hills: Glimpses of Harlan County, Kentucky Through the Media of the Linoleum Block and the Woodcut. Published in the Pine Mountain Print Shop in 1939, it was this sensitive work that caught the attention of Thomas Clark when he went looking for an illustrator for his classic, The Kentucky.

Spelman says in his introduction to At Home in the Hills

Where else can one find houses that so grow out of the soil, chimneys with so much unconscious beauty in their lines, roofs and wall spaces with such “at-oneness”? Time and the weather have done much toward their decay, but so have they colored these houses and barns to a mellowness that it makes them at one with the hills upon which they stand.

The Harlan County region has always been difficult to access and to assess. The remote geographic area saw only limited settlement in the early years of pioneer exploration as most families pushed on to the fertile Bluegrass region. In fact the mountain area of Eastern Kentucky remained isolated far longer than many other more accessible areas of the Appalachian chain of mountains. This geographic isolation of the north side of Pine Mountain in Harlan County has been a point of discussion of all who have sought to study the area and even today it continues to challenge visitors as they are asked to assess their visits to the School or are asked “How do you get there?” Whether the isolation of the area brings to mind Shangrila or geographic determinism, it is a topic in most any discussion of Pine Mountain Settlement School.

SETTLEMENT

Settlement of the region by pioneers, largely European in origin, came early in the nation’s history. The first exploration, completed by Dr. Thomas Walker in 1750, rapidly opened the area to hardy settlers. Immigrants mostly gleaned from England, Scotland, Ireland and the German Palatinate diaspora, eagerly homesteaded the mountainous area as pioneer farmers joining the Native Americans and a small number of African Americans who were found throughout the area.

Coal Tipple, c. 1940. Arthur Dodd, photographer]

COAL

When coal was discovered in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, a wave of immigrants came from Europe and then Eastern Europe to work in the coal-fields. Italians, Austrians, Russians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Czechoslovakians and Polish men entered the mining work-force in Harlan County in large numbers. African Americans shifted from share-cropping and from inner-city life to join the coal mining labor force in many of the larger coal camps. Coal accounts for a large population of African Americans in Harlan County, particularly in the International Harvester and United States Steel mining camps of Benham and Lynch where the labor force was well paid and housing and schools were well supported.

While conditions were better in the larger coal camps, not all labor was equal. Kentucky’s eastern coalfields have been both a source of wealth and a deplorable example of labor exploitation. The region holds land of extraordinary resources and extraordinary environmental degradation. The history of the settlement school at Pine Mountain, found in its farming, foodways and festivals, a large and important theme for mountain living, but coal always runs as a sub-theme in all that was and is Harlan County from the mid-1920’s forward. King coal has often stood in contrast to, and sometimes challenged the environmental sensitivity of the School. This was particularly true in the opening years of surface mining. Today coal mining is both a significant monetary asset and a gross environmental liability for the region. The lack of a diversified economy throughout the Appalachian coalfields has always presented a land of competing values and contrasts.

Authors who have written about the region have all approached the quandary of coal from different perspectives. Dr. Thomas Walker in his important The Kentucky (1942) devotes one page to the topic. “Coal” does not show up at all in the index to Henry Shapiro’s Appalachia on Our Mind (1978), one of the most comprehensive overviews of the Appalachian region. David Whisnant, however, challenges the conundrums head-on in his All That is Native and Fine (1983). The two works reveal the gap that continues to perplex scholars as they confront the agrarian and industrial nature of the region. Whisnant engages the coal story and citations for coal-related subjects are many, including coalfields; coal industry; coal miners, etc.. Whisnant’s book recounts one of many conflicting stories of coal and its role in the life of eastern Kentucky, but it is a perspective that resonates with some and rankles many but that remains important to the debates that surround the role of coal and coal camps in the development of the settlement schools of the region.

One story in the Whisnant book describes the early relationship of the coal industry with Hindman Settlement, Miss Pettit’s former home. He recounts that early in the history of Hindman Settlement School when Miss Pettit was still with the institution, the secretary, Miss Eve Newman, secured some $25,000 in preferred stock from the Elkhorn Fuel Company which over the years yielded a continuing revenue stream for the school. John C. Campbell in a letter to John C. Glenn of the Russell Sage Foundation in 1913 noted that less than a decade after the founding of Hindman Settlement School (1909) some 76% of the school’s endowment was stocks and contributions from the local coal companies. While this large investment in coal stocks was an early revenue stream for Hindman, Pine Mountain found it difficult to establish similar early ties to coal.

Katherine Pettit, when she came to Pine Mountain, reluctantly pursued both coal companies and logging companies for donations but was rebuffed in her early attempts to wrestle donations from both coal and timber companies working in the local area. Her initial efforts to secure contributions from the Kentweva Coal and Lumber Company and its President, Mr. Merritt Wilson, were largely unsuccessful, as were her efforts to stop the Company from running a narrow-gauge rail line to haul virgin timber through the heart of her new campus to distant mills.

Ron Eller’s book, Miner’s, Mules, and Millhands (1986), a well researched classic resource on Appalachian life, also looks closely at coal and its impact on eastern Kentucky and other coal areas. It provides a balanced, documented, and clear assessment of the many sides of mining, mines, and miners. The story of coal and the Pine Mountain valley is a complicated one but the story of Pine Mountain Settlement School yields a history that largely placed the school outside the influence of the coal industry, but not its impact. Though the initial purchase of land for the school involved a land swap with the coal and lumber company, Kentweva, the competition for land and resources in the narrow valley has steadily waxed, waned, and waxed over many cycles at the School. Again, isolation played a key role as the north side of Pine Mountain has no coal and the area is too remote for much change. It is, as recorded in a Settlement School survey taken in the late 1930s, “Some Shifting Aspects of Our Problem,” that the School was “16 miles, 6 hours from [the] Railroad.” Further, it noted that the “mines produce a large shifting element that is perpetually on the move, and therefore a very difficult class to help.” This antipathy toward the populations of coal camps and mining communities shifted during the late 1930s and 1940’s when the need to help the youth from the large mining population centers became dramatic and youth from mining camps comprised a significant percentage of the School’s population.

For nearly half a century the school moved forward without significant contributions or endorsement from coal companies that came and went in the region. Dis-entangled from any financial relationship to coal, the school became a voice for individuals, organizations, and institutions that began to question the serious environmental issues associated with the coal industry. By the l970’s both the environment and the social fall-out of the coal industry became a national issue and when Johnson launched his “War on Poverty,” the coal region came under the scrutiny of not just the Nation, but of the whole world.

When Uncle William said that he wanted the School to be a lesson even for those in other lands, he would not have imagined what valuable lessons many of those would be. Over time, the school slowly became the conscience of the region with regard to mineral and gas extraction and the School began to openly oppose any entity that would damage the environment, the economic security of the region’s people, or the health of both land and the people. This vocal advocacy which continued from the 1970’s onward was seriously challenged in 2000 when it was clear that the coal industry was quickly beginning to encroach on the rights of the school and was showing little concern for its operational environment and its modeling of environmental education.

The encroaching surface mining in the area threatened the image of the school as an environmental center and threatened the pristine scenic views of the school, its watersheds, and its unique flora and fauna. Fearing an ever-growing coal appetite and a fledgling gas exploration and facing an expanding degradation of the environment, Pine Mountain took action and filed a petition on November 13, 2000, with the Kentucky Department for Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement to declare the surrounding 5,226 acres around the school as unsuitable for all types of coal mining operations. This so-called “Lands Unsuitable …” petition pointed out that the School had recently received status as a National Historic Landmark site and that as a national treasure it would suffer irreparable harm from continued mining in the immediate area.

Robin Lambert, Executive Director of Pine Mountain Settlement School (1999 – 2001), said

“As trustees for a National Historic Landmark which provides a unique resident outdoor environmental education experience to over 3,000 school children each year, and which has been a cultural and educational resource to this community for over 85 years, the Board of Trustees of the School believes that the permanent protection of the School property, the spring-fed water supply, and the view-shed, from mining impacts, must be our first priority.”

As reported by the Kentucky Resources Council, Lambert stated,

“The process for designating lands as unsuitable for mining was intended by Congress to protect those lands where simply mitigating mining impacts on the environment would not be enough.”

The 32-page petition, endorsed by the school’s Board of Trustees, with strong support from environmentalists, historians, and friends, was successful in its effort to curtail proximate mining and to protect both the environmental mission and the physical environment of the institution for future generations.

These actions were specific to the immediate threat to the institution and were not intended as an indictment of the responsible coal industry and the many labor benefits that responsible mining operations brought to the region. Many of Pine Mountain’s boarding school children and, later, the children within the community, had strong ties to coal mining and their families were often wholly dependent on the industry for their livelihood. The tensions of these conflicting interests can still be felt in the community, but the School pulled from these experiences one of its most important educational missions, that of raising awareness of the human impact upon the environment.

Today, strong ties to coal is still the reality in Harlan County and the surrounding region. Coal is “King” and “Black Gold” rules both the economy and the cultural mind-set of the region. But, as coal again turns its back on the people of the region and as the industry declines — some say its last decline — the people and the state are looking for other economically sustainable livelihoods.

It is the juggling of diverse perspectives, the commitment to civil response, and the environmental realism of Pine Mountain Settlement School that makes it so very important to regions such as eastern Kentucky that are being devoured by insensitive corporate interests and by equally insensitive personal greed. This ravenous appetite for mineral and other resources is now world-wide and the dangers to the environment and to people is great. Conflicting views arising from mineral extraction is an international reality that is being played out in nearly every corner of the world today as resources become scarce, and as industries lose their social compass and populations grow. Clearly, a strong environmental voice, education in our schools regarding our relationship and responsibility to vital resources such as land and water, and civic responsibility, is fundamental to everyone’s survival, not just those who live in eastern Kentucky. Learning how to live as a community of diverse interests but one that shares concern and respect for the common good is vital to the survival of us all.

William Creech reminded Pettit and de Long in his letters that he wanted the school to be a benefit not just to the community, to “their generations as yet unborn, but to the whole state and nation and to folks across the sea if they can get any benefit out of it.” Pine Mountain still has this international perspective and continues to bring residents from throughout the country to work in the environmental education programs at the school. Pine Mountain invites foreign visitors to the school to experience the beauty and peace of the valley, while taking from the visitors, their multiple world views. This has always been the history of the institution — that it both shares its lessons and learns from the lessons of others.

As the region continues its struggle with the dominant coal economy and consciousness, and now with the rapid decline of that industry — again — It is not only Pine Mountain School, but the many social, religious, and educational institutions in the area that are struggling with what James Still, noted Appalachian author, called “a handful of chaos.”

James Still used this phrase in his sensitive portrait of an Appalachian family in River of Earth (1940). Caught in the chaotic transition from a simple life close to the land, many families were challenged to sort out a largely agrarian life-style against all that an evolving industrial economy promised.

In Still’s novel the family obliquely debates their future as they roam in search of the eggs of a guinea fowl in the pennyrile near their home.

“This would make the finest hayfeed ever was,” Mother said. “Just going wasting.”

Father kicked the lush growth where it caught the top hooks of his brogan.

“I hain’t started eating grass yet,” he said.

“There’s not a beast on the place to be cutting it for, and it’s the truth.”……”If we had us a cow her udders would be tick-tight,” Mother said.

“It would be a sight the milk and butter we’d get.”

“Won’t have use for a cow at Blackjack,” Father said. “I hear the mines are going to open for shore. They’re stocking the storehouse, and it must be they got orders down from the big lakes. This time of year they come, if the’re coming a-tall.”

Mother picked up the baby, holding him stiffly in the crook of her elbow.

“Where is the big lakes standing?” Euly [their son] asked.

“A long way north. It’s on reckoning how far, ” Father said. “There’s ships riding the waters, hauling coal to somewheres farther on.”

“I had a notion of staying here,” Mother said, her voice small and tight. “I’m agin raising chaps in a coal camp. Allus getting lice and scratching the itch. I had a notion you’d walk of a day to the mine.”

“A far walking piece, a good two mile. Better to get a house in the camp.”

“Can’t move a garden, and growing victuals.”

“They’ll grow without watching. We’ll keep them picked and dug.”

“I allus had a mind to live on a hill, not sunk in a holler where the fog and dust is damping and blacking. I was raised to like a lonesome place. Can’t get used to a mess of womenfolks in and out, borrowing a dab and a pinch of this and that, never paying it back. Men tromping sut on the floors, forever talking brash.”

“Notions don’t fill your belly nor kivre your back.” [responded the Father]

Few authors have captured as starkly the lives of families caught up in the economic conflicts of the industrialization of eastern Kentucky, as does Still in this classic novel. The mining and timber exploitation of a region that was largely agrarian, fractured the lives of the rural families in the region. James Still heard their stories first-hand for he spent almost all his life within the folds of the hills of eastern Kentucky on Wolf Creek in Letcher County. He knew the lives of his neighbors and he heard their voices and sensed their dreams and he listened, closely. Very closely.

Land cleared for mountain subsistence farming.

Pine Mountain continues to listen, as well. As Pine Mountain looks back on its one-hundred-year history it can take pride in its strong protection of the land; its commitment to the people of the region; and its understanding of the pragmatic life-style, the dreams and the work-ethic associated with labor close to the land.

Farming, food, community celebrations, and a strong commitment to the preservation and conservation of the natural resources of the southeastern Appalachians, eastern Kentucky, and Harlan County, are integral to the on-going ethos of Pine Mountain Settlement School. The activities associated with these core elements are part of the “educating for life” that continues to hold a fundamental place in its framework for the future. As the School has evolved and re-shaped itself to the twenty-first century and as it has adjusted to increasingly rapid cultural surges forward, it shows every evidence of doing so with a solid foundation and values just as solid.

As this narrative, Dancing in the Cabbage Patch, continues, it shares one story of Pine Mountain Settlement School. There are many. The essays are dialogues intended to contribute to and invite dialog regarding the most recent re-visioning processes at the School and more extensively in the eastern Kentucky region. The narrative seeks to show how re-invention and the processes associated with it pay homage to and derive strength from historical commitments. Like the warp of a loom, the narrative threads of history at the School continue to be a pragmatic and a demonstrably foundational dialog. The personal narratives continue as an unbroken warp within various communities of interest. The long narrative of the first one-hundred years is foundational to the next one-hundred. Farming, food, celebration and a profound environmental awareness are shared experiences that are understood at a very basic level by the institution and the community, even as that community continues to grow and change.

In its new form this electronic narrative looks to the past, but it also looks forward with hope that the guiding principles of the school, “… will make a bright and intelligent people …” as Uncle William hoped. Pine Mountain Settlement School is only one-hundred years down the road, but if the first century of the journey is any measure, the next many centuries will be even more exciting and rewarding if the values and the vision of all stake-holders can be shared and learned. It is ironic that coal sits as a fundamental contributor to the digital revolution. The coal-fired plant fueled the electronic frontier and continues to do so today. That Appalachia has been one of the last stops on that frontier, makes the coal relationship even more ironic. It seems fitting that Pine Mountain calls these inequities to our attention and that we remind the lords of industry that their empires were built on the backs and resources of this unique region.

Farming, food, various celebrations, and conscious environmentalism, still serve to help sustain the school and its community, but it is the people, seen in many of the images in this web, or more accurately, weft, that gives hope for the coming centuries. The resilience, determination, intelligence, and work ethic of the people in both the school and the community suggest that the future is bright and that the people of the valley of the Pine Mountain and beyond will continue to dance in the cabbage patch.

Just how Pine Mountain continues its commitment to community, how it protects and nurtures the land, how it expresses it joys and sorrows and how the people will respond to pressures outside the valley and the region, cannot be known. But, is is very likely that farming, food, health, celebrations, and environmental education will continue to be integral to the settlement school mission and to the lives of those living in surrounding as well as virtual communities of interest. It is also clear that those communities of interest are now, not just local, but are expanding rapidly to the global.

Friends & Neighbors - VI-51 - Capturing a snapping turtle

Capturing a snapping turtle, children at Big Laurel, 1960’s. Friends & Neighbors – VI-51 –

Farming, food, community celebrations, and conscious environmentalism have all become quite complicated by our modern life-styles, but as we all struggle to sort out how we will manage the “new-normal,” it may be instructive to look to the lessons found at Pine Mountain Settlement School and to imagine them practiced in a wider context.

Students participating in the Environmental Education program at Pine Mountain, 2010

Circle dance of students and staff on playground at Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1920’s. pmss001_bas098

Children dancing on the playground at Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1990s.

How do we manage our resources? How do we treat our neighbors? How do we educate our children to respect nature? What lessons are there in working with our hands as well as our minds and hearts? What is literacy? Reading? Math? Computer skills? Visual literacy? Civic responsibility? How can we eat healthy? How can we grow responsible crops? How can we exercise, intelligently? How important are aesthetics to our well-being? How can we help to shape our life-style into quality of life? How can we better respect our natural environment? Speak out when our water resources are in peril? Stop the removal of our mountains? What does it mean to have quality of life? These are short questions with life long answers. To seek answers to these questions and more, is the discovery of “educating for life” found at Pine Mountain School and in the surrounding community. In many ways it is the coming to a place and the discovering of it again, and again.

GO TO: DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH – IV – FARMING THE LAND

BACK: DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH I – ABOUT

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH I About

Pine Mountain Settlement School
DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH
ABOUT I

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH About

Dancing in the Cabbage Patch is a personal reflection on the history of one of the oldest continuing rural settlement schools in America.

BEGINNING

Founded in 1913, Pine Mountain Settlement School is located in the mountains of eastern Kentucky in Harlan County. It is one of several rural settlement schools influenced by the urban settlement movement but distinct from that movement by its agrarian emphasis. Rural settlement schools were born in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. The push into the mountains of “Community work,” following the Reconstruction era, brought many ideas and workers from the urban settlement houses and centers to the largely decentralized agrarian communities of the Southern Appalachians where the Settlement Movement was melded into a new framework. In remote communities in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia a robust rural settlement school movement took hold at the beginning of the twentieth-century.

A region of ridges and hollows, the long chain of mountains that comprise the Southern Appalachians are rich in natural resources but during the early twentieth-century the people who had settled the area were believed to be outside the capacity to join the accelerating industrial development of the country’s major cities. The reasons were many and were not, necessarily unique to Eastern Kentucky. In particular, the people lagged in their development in many areas; social, economic, educational, and industrial skills, compounded by their isolation. One of the objectives of the rural settlement movement in the Appalachians was to provide industrial training for people tucked away in the most remote corners of the region and to prepare them for the looming impact of industrialization on their lives.

Modeled on the urban settlement movement models but modified for their rural setting, the early rural settlements movement programs were initiated to ease the rural communities into the mainstream of America’s burgeoning industrialization by integrating the familiar into the growing changes. But, paradoxically, the rural movement also sought to retain and promote some cultural artifacts of their isolation. By adopting elements of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the so-called Country Life Movement, the rural settlement work focused on nurturing pride in local folk arts, music and dance unique to the isolated region. While honoring the unique regional arts, crafts, music and dance, that built strength into the unique community, the rural settlement sought to educate and prepare the community the growing industrial tsunami that was overtaking the region. The people knew how to build strength of community through their heritage, but they were less able to adjust to the rapid and rapacious cultures that accompanied lumbering and mining.

The workers who came to Central Kentucky to found the early settlement institutions fervently believed that an amalgam of local cultural wealth and improved education and medical assistance could insulate the people and the region and enable their navigation of the perceived social ills of rapacious and rapid mechanization.

Workers in the early settlement schools danced an uneven course between their familiar cultural patterns and those they perceived to need “discovery” again within their remote communities. Many of the settlement workers imposed their own adaptation of a perceived culture that only needed to be “awakened.” The community danced around the unfamiliar adaptations while gleaning from the mixed educational support and the reinvigoration of old skill sets and in the process, a new sense of self began to evolve for both natives and settlement workers.

For example, the communities around the rural settlements of eastern Kentucky danced the “Running Set”, a fast-paced, energetic dance that generally had only the human voice to call out the moves. It was a dance that echoed their lives. Recreation had to be experienced quickly, guided by visual and auditory direction, for the patterns that shaped the lives of the mountain people were the demanding and changing seasonal life of subsistence farming. The “folk dance” of the new workers looked back to the more elegant English Country Dance style. It was a unique blend and not as disparate as it might appear. When the English Country Dance authority, Cecil Sharp, came to Pine Mountain Settlement in the 1930s he helped to cement the two cultural styles.

Further, many of the settlement workers who came to the isolated valleys and hollows of Eastern Kentucky promoted the region’s isolation as a salvation from the evils of the industrial world by adopting a modified Arts and Craft Movement ethos. Others found a better balance through the introduction of many of the tenants of Progressive education, particularly through programs of civic-minded industrial training combined with a standard educational framework. Pine Mountain Settlement School in its early years, chartered a course somewhere between the two educational directions.

In the region, many social service agencies, as well as church and charitable organizations developed institutions modeled on the early urban settlement movement instituted in Chicago by Jane Addams and in other major urban areas by idealistic leaders. The leaders in the urban centers proposed to guide the people out of poverty and illiteracy by modeling a progressive presence in the community. Of the rural settlement institutions Pine Mountain Settlement School, a uniquely non-sectarian institution introduced a powerful Settlement Movement model that adapted to the rural environment. What evolved in the formative years was a rich educational model that married traditional education to local culture and added a strong industrial training component. Further, they added health and social services for the community, reaching out to more than just students but also to their families. Today, that model still has its proponents and it is still a model that changes lives and is remarkably fresh. In the urban centers the settlement house movement was slowly diluted when the workers began to remove themselves from the communities of interest and established “centers” of service staffed by professionals who were no longer integrated, or living within the community of service. When compared to contemporary trends in education and social services whether urban or rural, the de-centralized model may be argued to be an isolating move for mutual education and a step backward in direct service.

The following topical essays contained in “Dancing in the Cabbage Patch,” reflect a personal reflection and a journey centered on the experience of being born and raised in the rural settlement school environment of Pine Mountain. It has not been written to reflect the views of the current institution but to trace through a personal reflection — a lived experience of some of the highlights of Pine Mountain Settlement School during its 100-year history.

It has been said that when one has had such a profound maturation and is wrenched from that life, that it allows for a second sight. To be able to return to a place and to see it for the first time is a rare gift but a tenuous one filled with some doubt in any a perceived clarity of vision. This essay explores that personal ambiguity.

FORWARD

Perhaps overly romantic and nostalgic, the words “pastoral” and “bucolic” have often been used to describe Pine Mountain Settlement School. These words are most frequently used in the description of farmlands. Yet, in eastern Kentucky, generally, the farmland has often been described in disparaging terms, particularly by visitors to the region. “Subsistence farming,” poverty, “hillbilly hollars,” outliers, “outsiders,” etc.. Why these disparaging remarks? Why this eagerness to draw a difference, especially between rural and urban? The answers are complex.

The general perception of the land’s importance to what comprises Pine Mountain Settlement School, in fact, stands in direct contrast to the observations of many of those who have written about Eastern Kentucky. The descriptive adjectives used for many Appalachian farms and the surrounding mountains — and, sometimes its people, often reads “ravaged,” “uncultivated,” “disorganized,” “unkempt,” “scraggly,” “impoverished,” dirty, and other pejoratives that disparage any perception of beauty. Why is Pine Mountain “bucolic”, “lovely”, “peaceful”, “Shangri-La”, “natures majestic garden” and on and on? Again, the perceptions and the reflections are complex.

Farming practice has always been central to the life of the Pine Mountain Settlement School and its surrounding communities. Planning for the school was built upon the desire of William Creech to teach good farming practice as well as to educate students in an educational curriculum consistent with that offered to youth in other parts of the country. He saw these two objectives as joined in a reverence for the land and its people and progressive in its experimentation.

Farming at the School has a very long history and one that has been integrated into almost every program of the institution for over one-hundred years. While Pine Mountain Settlement has never been strictly a “farm school” it has had a long association with the production of food that nurtures body and mind. It also draws from “farm schools” developed around the same time as Pine Mountain. Nature and nurture have always found a partnership in these schools and were and are regularly celebrated in a variety of ways.

COMMUNITY CELEBRATION

Like farming, the celebratory events at the School play an integral role in the history of the institution. Like the cycles of agricultural life, community celebrations help to establish the ebb and flow of life at the School and map it to the rhythm of the community. Many annual events such as Community Fair Day, celebrated in the Fall and harvest time; the Nativity Play at Christmas marked the reflection afforded by winters seclusion; May Day in the Spring and the school’s former annual Spring Dogwood Breakfast celebrated the rebirth of living things and the nurture they promise. All have their origins in a celebration of the seasons and are generally accompanied by food or by displays of the produce from local farming.

The celebrations, pageants, and plays are remembered fondly by many students who attended the school and many of these memories were or are associated with agrarian practice or with a foodway, or agricultural rhythm. These events were also linked to long traditions that the workers romanticized and tied to Anglo-Saxon heritage, pioneer life, the Pilgrims, self-sufficiency, and a myriad of other partial truths.

May Day c 1920 – young children dressed in greenery for the celebration.

Whether performed for entertainment, for educating, or for the celebration of special people, event, time or place, the festivities at the School provided an opportunity for a connection with both the past and the future of the institution.

In the surrounding community past and present are equally revered but future rarely intruded into daily community conversation. Like dreams, the future was held close like some shining city on the hill or in the hereafter. Today, the community of promise seems even further away in conversation and practice as celebrations have steadily declined and as economic despair has increased. The tightly woven fabric of the community began to tatter in the tangled ideals of the War on Poverty and in the reality of an economy that failed to diversify.

Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, Robin Hood’s adventures, the Mikado, HMS Pinafore, the Cooperative Store skits, the Kanagawa play, Halloween, the carrying in of the Yule Log, the simple dialog of the Nativity Play — all gave early students the opportunity to don costumes and assume other personalities and to imagine themselves in other lives, other countries and other times. “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace …” was found written on the wall of a humble mountain cabin. It is a quote from the Bible, but it is also a well-known quote from the annual Nativity Play at Pine Mountain.

The early institutional celebrations allowed the staff workers to gather and renew their friendships on the campus and were celebrations that brought the school and the community together in cooperative celebration. What was carried away would be or could be life-changing.

PHOTOGRAPHS AND PUBLICATIONS

The PHOTOGRAPHS from Pine Mountain document and celebrate many of the events at the School and the community while also capturing some of the most compelling images of institutional and community life in early rural Appalachia. There are intimate portraits of Appalachian families at work and at play. There are scrapbooks by settlement school workers who gathered their visual memories and left them for the school to ponder their aggregation. There are official collections of promotional photographs that sought to convey a particular image of the institution for calendars and brochures. There are many overlaps and duplicates in the images across the many collections. Sharing was always part of Pine Mountain’s culture. And, there are many months and years of lives in the photographs and mementos gathered in the scrapbooks, travelogues, and albums. The photographic images also capture the essence of the School as it grew and changed.

Music and dance, folk craft, mountain vernacular architecture, clothing, farm techniques and implements, food and food preparation, and many more themes may be found in the photographs and publications that were created over the life of the School and shared within the institution and with the communities of interest Some of the most compelling images are those of the workers and students as they danced … and danced … and danced some more.

As the educational programs changed and grew and as the current Environmental Education programs evolved, the photographs and publications about the School capture the shift in the scale of farming, the use of the land and the growing awareness of the preciousness of the natural environment. In today’s technological world this preciousness is even more compelling. The photographs and publications are celebrations of the people as well as of the land. Together, the land and the people provide what many call a “sense of place.”

FOODWAYS

Perhaps nowhere is the sense of place captured better, or traced more intimately than in the transition of food-ways at the institution. Change may be observed in the narratives and the photographs when annual events were either down-sized or were, in some cases eliminated. The relationship between the land and the foodways of the people who shared the land may be clearly seen as food, events, and farming intermingle and wax and wane.

For example, May Day and Dogwood Breakfast, two spring-time events were eliminated from the annual calendar shortly after the closure of the boarding school in 1949. After the closure of the boarding school the intimate community of the School began to fragment, as workers lived off-site, the tasks of the school became overwhelming with no students to crew the many jobs. The focus on agriculture declined. The many changes at the School reflected a shift in the general sense of community in both the central institution and also in the community at large. The numbers of staff at the school declined over the years and many workers came for short stays or had little knowledge or connection to the historical campus. Foodways changed as the more processed food was easily attainable and preparation of locally harvested food diminished.

In the community, the events in nearby urban centers such as Harlan, or other urban centers such as Hazard or Cumberland, or even distant Lexington, began to pull families away from the immediate community life of the Pine Mountain Valley. kingman_092b The isolation of the region was slowly but dramatically altered by roads, particularly THE ROAD, Laden Trail, across Pine Mountain, which the Settlement School sponsored with Harlan County and the State of Kentucky. Though the road was slow in its construction, it radically changed live in the isolated valley. New roads opened the region for an ebb and flow of new cultural ideas and life-styles.

Soldiers returning from WWI and especially WWII, shifted the cultural climate even more. Film, television, and today multimedia and digital media and other entertainment and communication tools continue to contribute to the fracture of community cohesion. The reliance on immediate communication can now be acutely felt at the school as visitors roam the campus for “hot-spots” to keep in cell-phone contact with family, friends or business. Visitors often feel both in place and out-of-place … caught between past and future in the remote location.

ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAMMING

With the full implementation of the Environmental Education program in the 1970s, older programs at the school shifted from a focus on hands-on agricultural management of the campus land resources to an educational understanding of the broader concepts of the total natural environment and its cooperative management. The farm became garden and the devolution to subsistence farming could not be missed on those who remembered the farming years. Quickly, the new environmental consciousness of the 1960s and 1970s aligned with K-12 educational science standards found in the public school curricula and environmental education programs began to evolve. Pine Mountain School quickly realized the importance of its history and geography to the new environmental movement and began to give formal shape to its educational program.. Pine Mountain saw its opportunity to be a leader in the field of environmental education and was, in fact, one of the first such programs in the state of Kentucky. Today, the environmental programs at the School remain a model of environmental education while keeping pace with the growing national educational environmentalism and awareness. Global warming and other man-made environmental crises are giving special urgency to environmental education and not just to K-12. Throughout the world there is a growing struggle to find ways to address the complexity of environmental education for everyone.

Yet, Pine Mountain will always carry an environmental lesson. Whether “jitterbugging” in the local streams, or waltzing across a ridge-top, or learning to tango with a rapid thunderstorm, the dances with nature at the School have proven to be endless and sustainable and educational.

HEAD, HANDS, HEART AND EYES OF THE PHOTOGRAPH

PHOTOGRAPHS have always been important to the School. What the photographers at Pine Mountain selected to photograph documents the change in the community as well as larger cultural shifts. While the photographs capture the essence of the lifestyle of the age, they also suggest the personal interest of the photographers as they experienced their cultural context. The visual record, the photograph and certainly the individuals in the photograph, capture what the local culture saw as it looked back at the many cameras and photographers. The tensions are almost palpable in the distance between camera, subject, and photographer. Both palpable and frozen, the many images taken at the school and in the community graphically capture photographer, image and subject as they instantly interact — their gazes joined, the landscape stilled and quiet, a thousand questions unanswered — just as it is in one blink of life.

Visitors from Viet Nam in the classroom at PMSS, 1950s. [pmss_0037]

Photographs are remarkable vehicles for primary source information and their visual content opens for the teacher, researcher, and the viewer a variety of windows into other times and other lives. The potential contributions of Pine Mountain Settlement School’s photographs to Appalachian cultural research are extraordinary. One has to wonder if the young boy in the photograph above might have ended up in Viet Nam in the 1970s and what would he remember of this early encounter?

Community family near PMSS. [Friends & Neighbors – VI-51 ]

Mary Rogers, wife of Burton Rogers, one of the Directors of the School, wrote in the “Preface” of the Pine Mountain Album – 1913-1963, prepared for the 50th anniversary of the School:

“Most of us are so busy trying to do what must be done today, and planning ahead to what needs to be done tomorrow that we have little time to look back to the things which happened yesterday. But we are celebrating an anniversary, the 50th anniversary of Pine Mountain Settlement School, and so we will turn to the past — get out the old album and look at the pictures.

It’s a funny thing, looking at old pictures. They don’t show the things that matter most: Uncle William’s craving that his people might grow better; Miss Pettit’s dedication to bringing help to the mountains; Mrs. Zande’s high standards and loving understanding of people; Mr. Morris’ dynamic energy; the different gifts brought by hundreds of workers over the years.

Nor do they show the important things in a student’s life: the moments of courage; the hours of service; the growth in understanding; the vivid enjoyment of life; the deepening love for a place and its people; and sometimes the realization that the source of all things is the Love of God. All the same, let’s look at the pictures, some faded and old-fashioned, but taken because someone wanted to “keep” something from the past, and let us try and read into them the things for which they stand.”
Mary Rogers, 1963

Another fifty years and more have now been added to the visual history of the School. Together, the photographs, the documents, the scrapbooks, the books and the vast natural and built environment of the school form a rich educational environment and classroom that is unexcelled in the Central Appalachians. In 2013 Pine Mountain celebrated its 100th Anniversary. One-hundred years of “Dancing in the Cabbage Patch.”

GO TO:

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH – ABOUT

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH I – GUIDE

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH II – INTRODUCTION

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH III – PLACE

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH IV – FARMING THE LAND 1913-1930

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH V – FARM & DAIRY I – EARLY YEARS

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH V – FARM & DAIRY II – MORRIS YEARS