NOTES – 1928

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 17: PUBLICATIONS PMSS
NOTES 1928
September and December
NOTES - 1928

Ethel de Long with mountain dulcimer, c. 1915. [pmss0005.jpg]

NOTES – 1928

“Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School”
September and December


You have come to love [Mrs. Zande] for her grace of speech, for her sympathy, for her humor, for her understanding heart. Nothing can compensate for her voice now silent, nor for her pen, quieted forever. – Antoinette Bigalow

GALLERY: NOTES – 1928 September

[NOTE: Image has not been found for page 5 of 1928 September issue.

TAGS: NOTES – 1928 SEPTEMBER: Zande family dedication, Mrs. Zande, Zande House, drawing, memorial funds, Mountain Girls’ Association, George Meredith, Carinthia Jane, Calvin Kendall, Thomas Balliet, Katherine Pettit, May Stone, Luigi Zande, Elena Zande, Harry Callahan, Angela Melville, Elisabeth Telling, poem

TRANSCRIPTION: NOTES – 1928 September

P. 1

NOTES FROM THE
PINE MOUNTAIN
SETTLEMENT SCHOOL

PINE MOUNTAIN * HARLAN COUNTY * KENTUCKY
Copyright, 1928, by Pine Mountain Settlement School

Volume II    SEPTEMBER, 1928   Number 9

[Image caption: “THE ZANDE HOUSE — PINE MOUNTAIN”]

To the Readers of the Pine Mountain Notes:
YOU, too, have known Mrs. Zande. You have heard her speak through these Notes. You have come to love her for her grace of speech, for her
sympathy, for her humor, for her understanding heart. Nothing can compensate for her voice now silent, nor for her pen, quieted forever. There has been in my world, and it may be in yours, but one Ethel deLong Zande. It is for this reason that I am glad to share with you a more intimate knowledge of her than perhaps some of you have had.

It was in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1901, that I first saw her, a radiant figure coming down High Street, dressed in white, vibrating with health and youth as if the whole world were hers, not for the asking, but just for the taking. “I am Ethel de- Long, come to be your assistant at the High…

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School.” From that hour to the hour when I last saw her in 1927, the day she came down to the gate at Pine Mountain School with her two children, Berto on one side and Elena on the other, to bid me god-speed as I started over the mountain, Ethel Zande has symbolized for me that most precious quality of all human life, natural, vivid, contagious joy. She was to the very end in love with life, with its poetry, its beauty, its poignancy, its sweet evanescence, its eternal youth.

I wish that in those Springfield days, just out of college, George Meredith, who knew so well her English counterpart, Carinthia Jane, might have known Ethel. He could have pictured her joy in the fields of Longmeadow where on sunny days we walked amid long grasses; her love of swimming down at South Dennis on the Cape where she took her family more than one summer, her ecstatic stillness in the presence of beauty everywhere throughout the length of that Connecticut Valley which for almost ten years was her home; her love of flowers, and shadows, and dawns, and sunsets. She was in those days

“. . . athirst and drinking up her wonder; Earth to her was young as the slip of the new moon.”

Though I often accompanied her on her walks over the Massachusetts hills, she more often went alone just as she used to do in her high school days among the Orange Mountains of New Jersey. It was partly the call of the mountains that took her to Kentucky, where both at Hindman and at Pine Mountain there was no more lovely sight along the Troublesome or on Greasy, as the mountain folk were used to say, than “Miss deLong mounted on her beastie and careening down the creekside.” When I last saw her at Pine Mountain she said to me, “I am glad my life has been lived in country-places,” and then she quoted to me her favorite lines from Stevenson,

“In the highlands, in the country places,
Where the old plain men have rosy faces,
And the young fair maidens
     Quiet eyes;
— For there, among the flowers and grasses,
Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
Only winds and rivers,
     Life and death.”

Spiritual realities were the essence of her being; she knew herself part of the eternal.

Though her response to this external world of beauty marked her nature’s child, I found, in those Springfield days, that her deepest self was something quite other. She was most at home in the world of ideas. Here her rare powers of intellectual absorption, of discriminating judgments, of literary feeling found full expression. All her life she was a prodigious reader, finding both time and detachment, even when practical demands pressed most insistently upon her, for reading in history, science, art, philosophy. It was perhaps philosophy that she liked best in earlier days, history best in later days. She was reading at the time of her death Arabia Deserta. A book-mark at page 270 showed how nearly she had completed the volume when she laid it down the day before she died. This reading habit began early. When she was a little girl of eight or nine, sent on errands from which she did not return, she could often be found at the book-shop of a family friend, perched on a high stool, lost in some tome that she herself had pulled down from the high shelves.

To her teaching she brought all this wealth of intellectual interest. She was what the world is pleased to call a born teacher. All the delight of intellectual give and take which she found in conversation, in the writing and receiving of letters, in discussion and debate, she brought into her classroom. English was her department, first at the Easthampton High School, while she was still a student at College, then at the High School in Spring- field, and last, before going to Kentucky, at the High School in Indianapolis. In both Springfield and Indianapolis she worked under two of the best superintendents in the United States, both men well-known in the educational world, Dr. Thomas Balliet and Mr. Calvin Kendall. Professionally and personally these men were her admiring friends. In her ten years of teaching she prepared many students for college, and many more for the business and professional world. It was with something very like the pride and tenderness of an elder sister that she met them when they came back to her from College and from business with their eager stories of success and failure.

And yet all this time when the business of life was teaching English, she was thinking of art, of philosophy, of writing stories, of the social sciences, of physiology, of medicine.
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There was no subject not charged with interest for her, and no realm of work that she would not have dared with all the powers of her versatile intelligence. During these days her intellect went on many bewildering voyages, bringing home from every adventure poetry and erudition, knowledge and wisdom.

Not so her bodily self, for in the realm of material things her life was circumscribed. Not till 1924 when she came to Colorado following her first illness, had she been west of the Mississippi, and not during her lifetime did she visit any foreign land. The money she earned, she spent on others; her possessions were few. Her limitations she accepted without comment. The great factor that kept her life to one bent was a force in her stronger even than her intellect. It was a vision of life as a thing held sure and steadfast by human relationships. Here her soul walked a straight path.

At the age of eighteen, when youth clamorously demands freedom, she became “the man of the family,” to use her sister’s expression, the family at that time consisting of an invalid father, a delicate little mother, and a child sister. Unwilling to leave them behind, and unwilling to forego the cherished plan of a four-year course at Smith College, she proposed to set up a home at Northampton. Thither the family moved in the summer of 1897, from Montclair, New Jersey, where she was born and had always lived. By availing herself of loan funds, by tutoring from her sophomore year on, by teaching in the Easthampton High School during her junior and senior years, Ethel made her way through college, constantly inspired to this super-effort by the spiritual encouragement of her mother. An amusing incident capped her undergraduate teaching experience. Dr. Balliet, interested in securing Miss deLong as an instructor in the Springfield High School, and unaware that she was anything more or less than the usual full-time teacher, arrived at the Easthampton school late in June and asked to see Miss deLong at work. “Why, man,” said the principal, “You can’t see her today. She is in the midst of her graduating exercises at Smith College.” The next day Dr. Balliet summoned her to Springfield for the interview which gave her the position.

When she went to Springfield to teach, her family went with her. There the education and development of the little sister, Helen, became one of her delights. Her relation to her family had always been a high expression of what life essentially meant to her, something knit up very closely with people. While she loved nature with intensity, and books more than nature, she loved people essentially. With her family as the center, the circle of her sympathies included countless relationships. Rarely has anyone been gifted with greater capacity for friendship. Through and over all these relationships shone the steady light of loyalty, generous allowance for others’ points of view, of gracious hospitality, of self-forgetting love.

Another quality which impressed me as outstanding in her was her sheer practical ability to do a thousand things well, — things of the hands as well as of the mind. She was always a craftsman, whether the craft were making clothes, or bread, or rugs; whether laundry, or house-building, or speech-making. Many a time, when faced by a new problem whose difficulties to another must have seemed prodigious, I have heard her say: “I know, but I think I can swing it!”

This is Ethel deLong as I knew her in her young womanhood.

It was in the year 1910, when she was just thirty-two years of age, that the call came to a new field of creative work. I refer to the invitation, while she was still teaching English in the Indianapolis High School, to become principal of the mountain school at Hindman, Kentucky, a settlement under the direction of Katherine Pettit and May Stone. To respond or not involved a momentous decision. Her spirit leapt at the high adventure, which touched her imagination and promised fulfillment to that humanitarian impulse which from childhood had been so strong in her. Therefore to forego this opportunity would be to deny one of the highest instincts of her nature. On the other hand, her mind faltered at the thought of relinquishing the special field for which she had trained herself, the social contacts she had made, all the values of that intellectual world into which her profession had taken her. Whatever the balance of values whereby she reached her decision, she never regretted it. Nor did her friends, ultimately; for even those who at the time were least reconciled now admit the…
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…higher wisdom that led her to be “not disobedient to the heavenly vision.”

As principal of the school at Hindman, she was not only an able administrator of the affairs of the school, but she was also a student of mountain conditions and needs. After three years at Hindman in this town settlement school, she founded, with Katherine Pettit, the country school with which she was connected for the last fifteen years of her life, this Pine Mountain School of our affections. Fifteen years of building into the mountain life of Kentucky this edifice made of the dreams-come-true of two devoted women! What eye can gauge its proportions, or what hand presume to set down its extent? I know only with what conscious purpose they made education in the Kentucky Mountains their contribution to the whole cause of education, with what power they created a unique school at Pine Mountain, with what joy they have lived their days among the mountain folk.

To her share in this mountain work Ethel deLong brought experience, understanding, and rare artistic appreciation. I think of the Pine Mountain School with the architectural distinction of its buildings, with its strong corps of workers, and its rare atmosphere of beautiful friendliness, as an example of creative living such as few people are given to experience, much less construct. The imprint of Ethel deLong Zande’s personality is upon it all. She made beauty everywhere out of simple materials, with unerring fitness to primitive surroundings. She attracted to the School visitors and workers of superior intelligence. She was a natural organizer, bringing office, and farm, and school into unified order after her ideal pattern. She was a good public speaker; in raising funds for this work she spoke at colleges and schools, church societies all kinds of groups, always winning friends and money. She was an inimitable letter-writer; often in response to one letter a thousand dollars came in to the school.

As I have personally followed the development of the work that is being done in the mountains of Kentucky, I have thought that there are two ways in which the Pine Mountain contribution is distinctive. One is the harmonious beauty of its atmosphere and life, which I have just mentioned. The other is the [rare] artistic revival in the school itself, of mountain folk-lore. The Pine Mountain School has become primarily the Appalachian center for the collection and preservation of the original ballads, and country dances as these were brought direct from England by the early settlers of the mountains. All the friends of the school have heard of these achievements, but only those who have lived in the mountains understand how difficult of attainment they are. It is not in the town centers, but only in the remoter places that this source material is to be found; and only when the atmosphere is made right can it be procured; for it is only in the confidence assured by such long and friendly living as you have found recorded year after year in these Notes, that the mountain people deliver spontaneously and freely their priceless gifts of songs and dances. Ethel de Long Zande, by keen appreciation of their speech, their customs, their singing, their dancing, and also by her own sympathetic rendering of them, has been largely the creator of this center for Appalachian folk-songs and dances. To hear her sing and play, her dulcimer across her knees, some ballad she had discovered in a mountain cabin of Appalachian America was to glimpse a fragment of old England. Here again we see her a real educator, analyzing the natural environment of the children with whom she worked; re-capturing for their assimilating all that was worthy in the life of their parents; making them proud of their inheritance; and so upon natural foundations building the future development of their lives.

As a last fulfillment came her own home life with husband and children. In 1918 she was married to Luigi Zande, and the next year her little boy Alberto, named after his Italian grandfather, was born. The little hillside house built by Mr. Zande for their home was always sweet and orderly within, full of pervading loveliness that one can never forget. Its stone terraces she and her husband made with their own hands. Flowers of her planting were always blooming. It was a home in which mutual love and happiness reigned.

In the very recent years, Mrs. Zande’s letters have been full of children — her own children, Berto, and Elena, four years Berto’s junior, and the children of others, Clara, Addie, Fair Annie. The last walk that I had…
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…[Angela Melville], the Associate Director, will live there, carrying on much of its lovely tradition. An anonymous gift of music for the Chapel makes the library Mrs. Zande had begun to collect, rich with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and others whom the children have begun to love. In one transept is set a memorial brass, given by the Montclair Pine Moun- tain Association. It reads:

In Memory of the Radiant Leadership and Inspiration
of
Ethel deLong Zande
in this School 1913-1928
Whatsoever things are true
Whatsoever things are honest
Whatsoever things are pure
Whatsoever things are lovely
Think on these things.

A special fund is making available for the School Library the ballad collections, the literature on folk dance and song, the Shakespeare and Schubert songs she always let us use. Her own books go to her little daughter, and we have their counterparts. The great seven-branched candle-stick which Simeon has always lighted with proper solemnity in the Christmas play, an enlarged photograph of a Morris dancer, and Miss Elisabeth Tell- ing’s etching of Uncle William Creech at eighteen, are other purchases being made with this money.

The Ethel deLong Zande Memorial Fund was started most appropriately with $5.00 from James Madison Callahan, one of the family of seven whose fortunes you have followed since they first came to us in 1916. He wrote from Cincinnati, “Her friendship was like a mountain peak, never to topple over.” The fund has grown quietly, without solicitation till it now amounts to several hundred dollars. We hope it may in the same way grow to at least $3,000.00, an endowed scholarship. Mrs. Zande always felt that with any memorial gift for endowment came an assurance of future stability for the School that was more than financial.

The Mountain Girls’ Association, a group of high school girls who organized “to finish high school, not to go with boys who drink, and not to marry till they are eighteen,” are hanging in the Library a picture of Mrs. Zande playing the dulcimer. The frame is made by one of our boys. On May Day, when the School, gathered together and looking its prettiest, danced all afternoon as a culmination of the year of English and Mountain folk-dancing, the children brought us a collection of $20.00 in memory of Mrs. Zande, for the Cecil Sharp Memorial Fund. The building far away in London which is to house the library of Mr. Sharp and be a center for all matters of English folk-lore, thus has its contribution from the Appalachian children who are the peculiar heirs of these treasures, given because they associate them with her.

Small things, all of them, a few books, a picture or two, a hillside cottage, a few hundred dollars in our endowment fund, — inadequate perhaps in an age when playgrounds, foundations or hospitals commemorate inspiring lives, but to us on this side of Pine Mountain they are spontaneous indications of the special value of material things, and of the facets of her many-sided personality.

Pine Mountain was built by friends and neighbors at her inspiring and is supported by you who have written us this spring from France and England and China and every corner of this country, from embassies in foreign countries and Park Avenue apartments, and from city settlements and old ladies’ homes and business offices; from Yale and Smith and Wellesley, and from district schools in the mountains. “I thought of her secretly as a friend, though I never met her.” “I heard her speak just once, but feel I have lost a personal friend.” “We believed in the school first because it was hers, and later because of what it had become through her.” “Uncle William and the children were more real to me than my own neighbors.” She brought you our people with the veneer of appearances removed that you might see their essential qualities. She helped bring into being a school where their children might thrive in an atmosphere of beauty and kindness and freedom. And to us, she brought you. Pine Mountain’s greatest strength comes from Mrs. Zande’s greatest gift, the warmth of friendliness lying beneath her power to stimulate and inspire and create, which has carried so many of us to new levels of life.
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The Marchbanks Press, New York


GALLERY: NOTES – 1928 December

A Gentleman came to our house
He would not tell his name
He said he’d come a courtin’
Although it were a shame …. Although it were a shame …

TAGS: NOTES – 1928 DECEMBER: Creech family, Uncle William’s and Aunt Sal’s Day, Aunt Sal’s song, Uncle William’s song, Bertha’s essay, clubs, geography, Uncle William Creech, Aunt Sal Creech, Mrs. Martha Burns, “Little Log” house, dairy, Miss [Marguerite] Emerson, student survey, Harlan Kiwanis Club, campus, insurance 

TRANSCRIPTION: NOTES – 1928 December

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NOTES FROM THE
PINE MOUNTAIN
SETTLEMENT SCHOOL

PINE MOUNTAIN * HARLAN COUNTY * KENTUCKY
Copyright, 1928, by Pine Mountain Settlement School

Volume III     DECEMBER, 1928    Number 1

IT WAS a beautiful September day, with a branch or two on the mountain suggesting what the glories of October would be. The Joe-Pye Weed, called by our neighbors “Queen of the Meadow,” stood in military clusters, tall and colorful, on the cleared lower slopes of the mountain. And it was Uncle William‘s and Aunt Sal‘s Day at Pine Mountain, with a “working” on their little cabin, now their permanent memorial on our School grounds.

From the other side of the mountain, from the logging camp at the head of Big Laurel, and from their homes nearer to the school, came the Creech family to be the guests of the school at dinner and at the celebration afterwards, when we faced right about in the dining room to enjoy an hour together talking about these two old friends so dear to our school. Sons and daughters were all here, as were many grandchildren (nine of them and one “great” are with us in school) and two “great-grands,” little Cora and the baby Charles William, who prattled gaily all through the celebration. Their father, Grant Creech, a teacher on the other side of the mountain and an old Pine Mountain boy, gave the speech of the day, telling how the firmness of his grandfather’s character, and his gentleness, had impressed his youthful mind.

Many of the old family jokes were told. Bill, the son, now himself a grandfather, braved the family chuckles by telling the “Bill Stump” story, an amusing tale which included the disciplining by Aunt Sal of her recalcitrant son in the corn field. “Henry‘s crying hole,” brought more laughter. “Maybe we saw one traveller a week, sometimes in two weeks, in those days.” It seems that Henry, when he resorted to his hole in the logs to cry, did not want to see even that scant number of his fellow-men and when he got sight of them through a chink he did his best to bring the house down on their heads! But the best tale of all was told by one of the sons-in-law. His wife, Polly, the eldest of the daughters and a handsome woman yet, seems to have been attractive to the swains of forty years ago. “There were many rowdacious chaps around and all after,” said her husband. “Uncle Will at last got tired of it, so he ran ’em off with his shot- gun.” “And how about you?” said we. “Oh, he invited me in!”

It was a joyous hour of reminiscence; an effort to preserve for the present generation of Pine Mountain students some of the charm of that pioneer family life, and to give them an idea of the environment and circumstances which formed those sturdy lives to whom school owes so much. That Pine Mountain children today appreciate Uncle William is evidenced by the essays which the high school students wrote during the week before the celebration. One of those read on the occasion is printed below. A group wrote an “Uncle William’s Song” which was sung to to the tune of the old Welsh ballad “The Ash Grove.” We sang also “Aunt Sal’s Song,” which was printed for you in the “Notes” of March, 1922. Eleven years ago we first heard her sing this whimsical old ballad of the embarrassed suitor, and we wish you might have enjoyed the merry twinkle of her bright eyes as she sang it. As she had forgotten its name…
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we re-christened it with hers, and we hope it may go down to posterity under its new title, for surely it never had a singer better suited to give just the right turn to its whimsies.

After dinner, we wandered down to their little cabin and thought, as Henry showed us his “crying hole” still visible in a chink in the logs, of how much had come forth of constructive value for this community from that little home. With renewed courage for the future, we remembered Uncle William’s ideal for his school: “I don’t want it to be a benefit only for this locality, but for all of Kentucky; for the whole United States if they want it; for the whole world if it can get any good out of it.”

***

Bertha’s Essay
UNCLE WILLIAM

Long ago when this valley was nothing but a backwoods, there lived a man by the name of William Creech. He had very little education but he carried in his heart a longing, “a heart and craving that our people may grow better” as he expressed it. There was very little in his surroundings to encourage him, but he was urged on by the desire to do something to make the lives of his fellow beings happier and more worth while.

His opportunity came in 1913 when he heard of two women, Miss Katherine Pettit and Miss Ethel de Long of Hindman, who were interested in the Kentucky Mountain people. He sent for them and when they came he deeded one hundred and thirty six acres of his land to the Pine Mountain Settlement School, “as long as the Constitution of the United States stands.”

These women and others caught Uncle William’s vision and worked faithfully for fifteen years to realize his dream. Now instead of the lonely, forested little valley you see the quiet and peaceful buildings that have been the home of many of the mountain boys and girls who would never have gotten an education if it had not been for this school. I am sure that we never pass through the grounds without offering our most sincere thanks to the one who made all this possible.

In September we had the pleasure of entertaining the Harlan Kiwanis Club and their wives. Judging by their words and faces they enjoyed every minute of their day here, in spite of the fact that we kept them walking hard for two hours in an effort to show them everything. Up Pine Mountain they went to see the reservoir which gives us our water supply; along the lower bench to the Charlotte Hedges Memorial Chapel, the Zande Memorial House, and Far House, down the Snake Path to Uncle William’s and Aunt Sal’s cabin, and up the First Kentucky Ridge to the Country Cottage where Miss [Marguerite] Emerson trains her girls in home-making on a scale that approximates what they would have to handle should they marry and “set up” for themselves; then to the Infirmary, Barn, Chicken Yard, and Mrs. [Martha] Burns adorable one-roomed pole house called “Little Log.” Mrs. Burns who presides over the dairy is quite accustomed to the envious remarks of the workers who visit her in this charming doll’s house, perched half way up the barn ridge, under tall oak and poplar trees. Then they visited the Mary Sinclair Burkham School House, with its beautiful library, and as many residence cottages as there was time for, winding up with a basket ball game on the playground.

When the toot of the logging train sounded down Greasy, we escorted our guests to the little freight platform built on the edge of our grounds, which we dignify by the title of “The Junction.” The school owes much to the officials and men of the Inter-Mountain Coal and Lumber Company for the service their little train gives us. It is a friendly, neighborly train which will stop to “shoo” someone’s cow off the track, or to pick us up on the mountain. No tickets are sold but the service is the kind that cannot be paid for. You ride in the freight car and talk about the crops or election or how the school is coming on; and are thankful when your seat is a sack of feed or a bale of fragrant hay and not a box of dynamite sticks being hauled over for use in the coal mine. Behind your car trail the open trucks which, on the trip back to the railroad, are piled high with logs — poplar, oak, chestnut and some walnut, bass, birch, pine, and soft and hard maple — the forest leaving its quiet creeks for high adventure in the outer world.

When this School was established sixteen years ago, the thought uppermost in the minds of its founders was to give the opportunity…
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of education to children from isolated creeks who were “lost to knowledge.” During the last decade the rapid growth of an industrial civilization in close juxtaposition to our intensely rural, road-less and otherwise under-privileged community has created an added problem which even the barrier of Pine Mountain itself cannot shut out.

Geographically, Pine Mountain School is on the north side of the mountain which gives it its name. To the north, north-east and north-west of us, for forty miles, lies a country of valleys so narrow that they are more deserving of the name ravines. Often the only “bottom” land is the creek bed into which the almost un-navigable dirt and rock road turns so naturally and frequently that one feels justified in referring to the creek as the “road.” These narrow creeks are largely settled by the descendants of those who took up many acres from the Government in the early days, their holdings now down to a few hundred acres or much less; and where the lumber companies have come in and bought the land their right is only that of squatters. A poor heritage and a laborious one, where the necessity of sustaining life has driven men to see the vision and to produce the fact of corn fields on slopes of forty-five or more degrees, from which a bare living after arduous toil is wrested from the land, the best land being long since worn out. Here and there one of the neighbors becomes the local merchant, erecting a small and invariably unsightly frame building on the forks of a creek, and supplying the community in a radius of three to six miles with anything from mule shoes to political opinions. Many of these local store-keepers also run a corn mill, water or engine turned, to which on Saturdays neighbors take their corn, in “pokes” thrown over the mules which they ride to have it ground into coarse meal.

On the north side, we are isolated, road-less, with seven months’ district schools, still poor but better than they were ten years ago, with no market reasonably available even had we the knowledge to enable us to get more out of the soil. The beauty of the hills enfolds us, but cuts us off from direct contact with the outside world, save as a logging railroad is put in to the head of a creek to take out the timber, to give temporary work to fathers, husbands and brothers, and to be taken up again when the timber is gone, leaving bare hillsides and no permanent improvement of the community save here and there perhaps a better house built by one of the men who worked on the job.

Then on the south side of Pine Mountain, which may be crossed near our school by wagon in summer on the well-graded dirt road built ten years ago through the cooperation of this School with the County, what do we find? Slightly wider valleys whose dividing hills bear within them coal veins now opened up that will not be exhausted for generations; camps and towns increasing in number, bringing in large foreign populations, a program for road building, and all the hustle and bustle and crudities of a frontier industrial development. Mixed in with this we find men and women and children who a decade ago were “head of the hollow” folk.

In an effort to find out just what proportion of our children here at Pine Mountain School were coming from these very opposite environments, on the first day of school we gave them a questionnaire to answer. The replies tell you more graphically than many words could just what our problem is. Where the numbers do not agree, it means that that particular question was not answered by all the children:

Children living on the north side of Pine Mountain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Children living on the south side of Pine Mountain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
                                                                                                                        ___
Children living in the country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
”           ”       ” towns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  21
”           ”       ” camps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
___
Parents living on their own land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  45
”            ”     in rented houses or on
rented land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  20
___                                 
Occupations of fathers:
Logging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
Miners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Farmers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
R.R. employees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
Salesmen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   1
Storekeeper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   1
Baker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   1
Theater operator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   1
Post master . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   1
Veterinary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1
One mother keeps a boarding house.
No father . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
[3]

P. 4

Five children who gave farming as their fathers’ occupation added “and storekeeping.” This means keeping a country store. Mr. [William] Browning, our own farmer, feels that each of these forty farmers undoubtedly puts in some time at public works during the year, thereby adding to his small income.

These figures show that a small majority of our children come from the north side or intensely rural section, but the industrial coal field is sending us nearly half; that a big majority are truly country children even counting the new mining towns as “towns;” that the parents are still largely farmers, though logging, mining and railroading are industries in which perceptible numbers are engaged. One fact brought out by the questionnaire is that renting follows the industrial development of the country.

The other questions given the children covered such points as why they had come to Pine Mountain, and how they had learned of the School; the high school group was asked what plans they had made for their lives after leaving Pine Mountain. Most of the children learned about the school from former students, or “have always known of it.” This remark occurring frequently makes us realize that the years are gathering around Pine Mountain.

Of eleven high school boys, eight came “to learn more,” “because it is a better school;” to two of these the fact that they could largely work their way through was important, and “cheapness” was mentioned by four others, but always in conjunction with some other reason for coming. In one case we were interested to note that this was the scenery! Five out of these eleven had no plans for their future. Three were going to college, one to take further schooling, one wanted to be a mining engineer, one did not answer the question.

Of the thirty high school girls, thirteen intend to teach, nine have determined to go on to college, two want to be nurses; one to be a typist, one to be a bookkeeper, one “will get me a job,” one said she had a plan but did not give it, and two confess they have no plans. Fourteen girls came because Pine Mountain “is a better school,” “gives more training,” “a chance to learn more about nature here in the mountains.” Another, from a mining town, is drawn by “the beautiful buildings and scenery.”

Forty seventh and eighth grade students also answered this questionnaire. Twenty-four of them came to Pine Mountain “to learn more,” “to learn a trade,” “I can learn more than schooling,” “to learn industrial work,” “to learn what I couldn’t learn any other place,” “because you learn to work,” “I came to learn other things than books,” “to learn, to know, to understand, to get real things so I can help others as they have helped me.” One boy pleasantly remarks “I like the ways of Pine Mountain,” and another, we are grateful to note, thinks Pine Mountain “a nice place for any boy or girl to be!”

It would seem from these answers that the quality and cost of schooling, and the fact that Pine Mountain gives industrial as well as academic training, are all factors which bring the children to this school “to get real things.” Comments on the beauty of the buildings show that these silent teachers speak loudly, and give us faith that many Pine Mountain children will go out from here with a definite realization that architecture to be suitable to environment and so beautiful, is not necessarily either expensive or beyond their attainment.

A girl here for her third year sums up for us: “My father and mother wanted me to come the first year, and then I found that Pine Mountain teaches so many things that I would not have gotten in public school that I was glad to come the second and third years.”

***

In December and January we have to renew about half of the three-year insurance policies on our buildings. The total amount to be raised for this purpose in these two months is $1400.00. This is a large sum to find over and above ordinary running expenses. We will be grateful if any of our friends want to help us to meet this necessary expense.
[4]

The Marchbanks Press, New York


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