NOTES – 1942

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 17: PUBLICATIONS PMSS
NOTES 1942
March and October

NOTES – 1942

“Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School”
March and October

GALLERY: NOTES – 1942 March

We are in special ways…already prepared to meet the emergencies which the World War brings with it, and in our plans we count largely on the independence and resourcefulness as well as the patriotism inherent in our young people.

TAGS: NOTES – 1942 MARCH: WWII, patriotism, Poor Fork Road, religion, needs, mountain culture, Christmas, Nativity Play, Mrs. Black Sol [Day] Brown, Red Sol Day, farm, floods, forest fires 

TRANSCRIPTION: NOTES – 1942 March

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NOTES FROM THE
PINE MOUNTAIN
SETTLEMENT SCHOOL

PINE MOUNTAIN * HARLAN COUNTY * KENTUCKY
Copyright, 1942, by Pine Mountain Settlement School, Inc.

Volume XV     MARCH, 1942    Number I

SINCE THE United States has become a declared part of the World War, there is doubtless in the minds of many of our friends, the question of how Pine Mountain will be affected. In fact we have even been asked if it will be necessary to close the school for the duration of the war.

It is to be expected that we shall not escape, and we do not wish to escape our part in the common responsibility. To the handicaps of difficult transportation and rural living under which we normally live will be added much higher costs and greater difficulty in getting supplies. The eighteen-mile road across Pine Mountain, and to Harlan town, seems stretch much farther now. Days when we walked or rode mules across the mountain are strongly in our mind.

And yet this adjustment to the demands of a war time is not too difficult, and not too different, because we in a part of the highlands which is still a frontier, with accompanying struggle and danger. Kentucky boys have always soldiered, and the Kentucky heritage is a spirit of endurance. Selective service was not necessary in Harlan County where there were volunteers to fill the quota.

Even in the comparative security of the school, boys and girls are accustomed to struggle with the unpredictable whims of nature. At a moment’s notice our children have been called out to fight forest fire, sweeping down to the very gates of the school grounds. Time after time a spring flood has carried a whole planting, and our sturdy bridges as well, whirling down Greasy Creek. Drought has again and again burned to death a whole summer’s labor, in the fields. Fire, flood, drought — these and countless hardships our children have borne with strength and good cheer, as stoically as their fathers have endured these things before them. Life in the mountains teaches children to be men and women, soldiers, philosophers.

Mountain people, too, are inherently patriots. Loyalty to “kinfolk and country” has been born in them as generation after generation have labored to protect their own flesh and blood, have battled barren hillsides to raise their meager crops, dug into the earth to win their living in coal mines, and assumed passionate possession of the nation. If we deplore an uncritical attitude towards government, a blind devotion which has grown out of loneliness and lack of education, we must still have deep reverence for the unquestioning loyalty with which the mountain man will devaluate his own life, when he understands that his country is in danger. Pine Mountain exists to instill content and meaning to this loyalty, but we recognize in the first place its sterling worth.

We are in special ways then already prepared to meet the emergencies which the World War brings with it,…

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…and in our plans we count largely on the independence and resourcefulness as well as the patriotism inherent in our young people. It will not be unusual or too hard to have rice and cocoa dinners, in order to send what is saved for defense. A committee of students and staff members are at work now planning a conservation program whereby we save our tin cans, scraps of paper, and economize even more than we had thought possible in the use of simple house, school and shop necessities. At the same time we are considering seriously the possible direct uses our plant may have for defense purposes.

Furthermore there is foremost in our minds the thought that these children must be adjusted not only to war demands, but to the peace which will follow, and the contribution they will have to make to it. Our task is to create and develop, in the very midst of this crisis, a vision which will see war as the cruel interval, and peace as the ideal norm for human life.

Since its very beginning we have understood that the justification for Pine Mountain is its usefulness as a permanent creative wellspring of democracy in our country, whether at war or at peace, and we are ever conscious that our school serves a people peculiarly fitted, by heritage and hard Spartan training, to value and contribute to a democratic form of government. We are determined that as long as there is a need for this school it shall continue, not only for the duration of the war, but as long, to quote UNCLE WILLIAM CREECH, “as the Constitution of the United States stands.“

*  *  *

“Christmas never comes around without I keep thinking and thinking about the Nativity Play in the Chapel!” One of our former students, now studying to be a nurse in Knoxville, Tennessee, said this to a worker last month.

This year, as every year, on the Sunday evening before departure for the holidays, the church was clothed with pine and laurel, and we gathered there with our neighbors from Greasy, Big Laurel, Line Fork, and far away Leatherwood Creek, for the sacred play, Pine Mountain’s most beautiful tradition.

As we waited in the half-darkness and the hush, for the grave words of the prophets, beheld the shepherds hovering over their fire, thrilled to the sudden light of the Star, and the angels’ song in the distance, we knew that not only our students and workers and neighbors were gathered into the little church for this blessed occasion. For there were with us all the hosts of children who have come here in years gone by. A restaurant manager in Boston, a salesman in New York, a doctor in Louisville, housewives and farmers all over the South, four boys in the army at Pearl Harbor, many young men in training camps — our children — had come back to share the hour with us. We rejoiced to feel that the strong spirit of peace which filled our lovely church was alive at that time in hearts far over the stricken world.

*  *  *

The question was “What part of your life at Pine Mountain will you remember longest — when perhaps you may have forgotten everything else?” The answer from nearly every member of the group was “I’ll never forget the church.”

From time to time one of our older students has delivered the talk in Sunday morning worship services. Clyde‘s theme was “It depends on where you are standing how things look to you,” and his text was “Judge not lest ye also be judged.” Row upon row of earnest and reverent young faces were turned to the boy in the pulpit, and in the perfect silence perhaps each one in his own way was turning this important thought into himself. Perhaps no one of the children was aware of the bearing it could have upon our whole great mountain problem, and yet it was deeply touching to hear so firm a plea for tolerance, expressed by a member of a group which has suffered so much from misunderstanding and neglect.

Later, when Clyde was asked why the worship service means so much, he said quickly, “It’s different — it’s…

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...quiet!” One from outside can scarcely realize the meaning our simple service has for the children who have known “religion” all their lives as a noisy demonstration of faith, sometimes even with a great show of handling poison snakes and coals of fire — and “church” as a place where men and women shout and dance and speak in “unknown tongues.”

Our church is significant too because it is an experience which the children help to create for themselves. It grows out of their planning, with the careful guidance of staff members, and their own questions about life and faith. Sunday morning sermon talks have been, as far as possible, direct considerations of questions asked by students.

It is only through such thinking together that our young people can make for themselves these quiet places of the heart where they may return through all the years to think tolerantly, deeply, about their problems. In such searching only can they remember, for instance, so difficult a truth as “It depends on where you are standing, how things look to you.”

*  *  *

The folk of our valley have reacted variously to news of the war, which has come to them sometimes slowly and indirectly. It was so in 1917, long after the United States’ entry into the war, when one of our neighbors said, “Is the U-nited States a-fightin’ the German-ees? We-ell! Word o’ that hain’t never reached Kingdom Come!” A few days ago Mrs. Black Sol Brown arrived at the school all breathless and barefoot to ask what was happening. (“Black Sol” is so named to distinguish him from his cousin “Red Sol” who has a red beard. “Black Sol” has a black one.) “I heered it said,” exclaimed Mrs. Brown, “that they was a town by the name of New York that got blowed up in the war. I was wondering if it was on this side of the water or on the other side, but I figured it must of been on the other side, else they would of been more notice took of the ex-plosion.”

When Ira Jackson came home to tell his little family on Turkey Fork about the “trouble,” his wife Sudie looked about wistfully at her bare cabin, without carpets on the floor, or curtains at the window, warmed only with an open fire, and said, “Well, there’s this one thing I know. We’re going to have to learn how to make sacrifices. We got to give up things for our country now.”

*  *  *

In early February the long vacation months began for the children of little grade schools scattered throughout the narrow valleys of our region. They have finished the seven-month term which started last July, and is as long a term as the already proportionately larger tax rate for education will support. While children of more fortunate sections continue to be trained for life months longer, in far better schools, the children of the highlands will have not even the slightly socializing benefit of the one-room school. Instead they must grow in upon themselves, and feed upon solitude, whiling away long uneventful blocks of time, with nothing to do during the short winter days that break between late risings and early settings of a winter sun.

It is sad to contemplate the limits of these valleys, mirrored in the wistful eyes of a mountain child. Perhaps we who can measure the more abundant opportunity outside, read into his eyes this inarticulate yearning. But it is nonetheless there, and nurtured by barriers which shut out winds of social intercourse that should blow freely for every child today.

We should like you to share the experience of one of our staff members, who describes a trip with the Pine Mountain school bus over the narrow winding road it follows daily, down Laurel Creek. He writes, “Turning sharply away from Pine Mountain at the breaks of Laurel, the road winds high above the creek, yet far down from the top of the mountain. Down, and farther down it winds, around sharp curves, underneath jutting cliffs and precariously balanced rocks, past rhododendron thickets and towering trees, always with the valley and the creek sharp below. Finally, after many…

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…turns, we round a bend to find a group of half a dozen children huddled together under an overhanging cliff which tries to shut off the wind. It is frosty and cold, but the boys have no extra coats over their faded jeans. The youngest girl wears an overcoat too large for her. Some of this sorry little crowd have come from the home below — the first house we have seen for several miles. Its grey logs are weather-beaten; smoke curls from the chimney. Today, with no leaves on the trees, it looks more barren and lifeless than ever. Even the hogs have taken to cover under the floor.

“The children crowd eagerly into the bus. They are shivering, and silent, but there is a shy dignity, an unastonished look in their lovely little faces that makes one wish for some way to be found so that the road which they travel may be made more smooth.”

What will happen to these six children? The general pattern of their lives is inevitable and clear. One out of every two (perhaps more, perhaps all) must leave the little home in the valley and travel to distant places.

But how did this come about? It is as simple as it is startling to realize for the first time what has happened here, and everywhere in the hinterlands.

The grandfather of these children is a splendid old man, a patriarch, living on another creek. There, years ago, when the timber was high and plentiful, he raised a fine flock of sheep. There was wool and mutton, and a good living. There was also a good family — ten stalwart boys and girls. Some moved farther up the creek to what land was left. Poor though it was, they knew of nothing else to do. Theirs was a feeling for the land, for the trees and animals, for freedom to plan the day and live one’s own life. Then, because the burden of living became intolerable, some had to leave the creek. The others who stayed were barely able to scratch a living from poor and poorer land. But their children cannot escape the truth their fathers refused to recognize. They will have to go. Where? To what? With what equipment, and what training?

They will have a rugged self-reliance born of poverty and hard work, but this cannot be sold on a market where some kind of skill is required. They will know how to endure hardship, but the hardship of a cold city is a different kind from that of home, poor as it was. If the future is to be as the past has been, too many of these lovely little faces will become aged before their time, perhaps cringing, or apathetic, or even crafty with the growth of shrewd mental processes which leap hurdles over which they have no learned skill for doing honest labor to carry them.

In the last issue of the Notes we spoke about some of the problems which we face. This is another and a very great one. Thus it is with all these children in mind — the children who must inevitably leave the mountains — that a large part of our program must be planned. True, we cannot touch them all. But the school stands as a symbol of a kind of opportunity, a recognition and wrestling with a problem, and it is providing leadership in a continuous process of solution. We can never be too grateful for the sound philosophy with which this school was started, and by which our evolving program becomes a progression in a direction pointed for us by the founders of Pine Mountain. Uncle William Creech spoke more wisely than perhaps even he could know, when he said,“Hit’s better for folkses characters if they larn to do things with their hands.”

*  *  *

PINE MOUNTAIN NEEDS:

Subscriptions to — American Girl, Time, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Life Magazine, Popular Science.
Sheets, towels, pillow cases, wash- cloths.
An X-ray machine for the Infirmary.
Money to buy hymn books — The Student Hymnary, — A. S. Barnes and Co., N. Y.

…[W]ith the school nearly thirty years old and with a wealth of written [historical] material at our disposal, we seem well fortified to begin planning a somewhat detailed history of the school for publication.

GALLERY: NOTES – 1942 October

TAGS: NOTES – 1942 OCTOBER: Glyn A. Morris, Morris review, Arthur Dodd, William D. Webb, August Angel, Latham Hatcher, Evelyn K. Wells, history, funeral, Johnnie Holcomb, Alice Cobb, Lloyd Holcomb, Cindy Ellen, Sol [Day] Brown, Mrs. Ethel deLong Zande, Miss Katherine Pettit, Youth Guidance Institute, religion, Citizenship Committee

TRANSCRIPTION: NOTES – 1942 October

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NOTES FROM THE
PINE MOUNTAIN
SETTLEMENT SCHOOL

PINE MOUNTAIN * HARLAN COUNTY * KENTUCKY
Copyright, 1942, by Pine Mountain Settlement School, Inc.

Volume XV   OCTOBER, 1942    Number II

EARLY last spring Rev. Glyn A. Morris, Director of Pine Mountain, volunteered as Chaplain in the army, and left for service on May 15th, on leave of absence for one year. Mrs. Morris joined him three weeks later, in Joplin, Missouri. Mr. Arthur Dodd, Principal of the School, and for ten years a worker here, was asked by the Board of Trustees to assume leadership until August 1st, when Mr. William D. Webb came to Pine Mountain as Acting Director. Mr. Webb for the past year has been under appointment by the American Board of Congregational Foreign Missions to serve in Southern Rhodesia, in Africa, but of course is unable to sail because of the war. With him are Mrs. Webb and their two children, Dorothy and David, aged nine and seven years. The Webbs come from a wide and thrilling background of teaching, in New York State, the American University of Beirut, Syria, and the University of Shanghai, China. Mrs. Webb is a nurse by profession, and Mr. Webb holds a Masters Degree in Rural Educational Administration from Cornell University. The children, who were both born in Shanghai, are attending the Creech community district school in our neighborhood.

The friends who have followed Pine Mountain through so many hard readjustments in the past, will share with us now another new experience. We realize the great loss the school will suffer in Mr. Morris’ absence. We realize also that in making such a sacrifice for the interests of this country, Pine Mountain has moved farther in the direction of the idealism determined by its leadership from the beginning, and has contributed to a national emergency in the most effective way possible.

Since Mr. Morris’ departure, those of us who carry on have been increasingly aware of the fine piece of constructive organization to which we belong. It is tribute to the devoted work of this decade that the school stands unshaken, in every department equal to the crisis of a change of administration.

Finally we are grateful for the tact and graciousness with which the Webbs have come into our fellowship. In a community so small, and in many ways so self-sufficient, it is very difficult for a new personality to enter at the head. The spirit of the past ten years’ leadership has strengthened us to accept and welcome the new, and the good will of the new acting administration has made the welcome easy for us. Pine Mountain, braced by the same pioneering spirit which came with Katherine Pettit and Ethel de Long in 1913, faces the future with confidence — “business as usual.”

* * *

In printing the October Notes at Pine Mountain, the School adjusts again to war times. Our printing instructor, Mr. August Angel, resigned during the summer to join the air force and we are still without a successor to him. However four of the oldest students…

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…who have studied with Mr. Angel for several years have undertaken the printing of the October Notes, the most ambitious printing job which is done at Pine Mountain. Once more therefore the Notes come to you from our own press, the work of students as before, but this time without professional supervision.

In June, 1941, when Mr. Morris had completed ten years of service at Pine Mountain, he wrote for the Board of Trustees a review of his period of administration. Of course so brief a report can touch only a few of the high spots of those crowded years, but it seemed fitting to print a part of it now, because this summer in some ways has marked the end of an era in the school’s history. It is inevitable that the war, and the period after the war, will see many changes. We do not of course look to any sort of breaking up of our way of life. Mr. Morris’ leadership has been one of remarkable foresight, and Pine Mountain is probably better able than many institutions of its kind to adjust to a new world without loss, or regret. The following record is then a picture of some of the steps by which the school has been prepared for today, and whatever it may bring.

“I have been lightly tempted to join the corps of writers of personal memoirs about life in the country by adding an account of ten years in a little valley quite off the beaten path. It would include such experiences as fighting forest fires with the entire School on the fire line; intimate acquaintance with tragedy; seeing the grounds flooded twice; coping with drought; assisting at major operations; preaching at local funerals; baptizing babies; running a tractor at night on the farm; seeing two of our buildings burn to the ground while we stood helplessly by; and the numerous problems of caring for 120 children in a community which must make its own electricity, mine its own coal, provide its own recreation and much of its own mental stimulation.

“When we arrived at Pine Mountain in June, 1931, we walked across the mountain from the highway. The road was hardly passable, and we took the ‘nigh’ cuts. The logging train at that time was making a trip once in two weeks and school supplies came that way. The Poor Fork Road, just previously graded, was not yet surfaced. There was not a school bus in the County, and only four of the present nine four-year high schools were in existence.

“During these ten years we have seen progress in some areas of mountain life, better communications, radios, modern appliances; but we have seen some areas grow steadily worse, sometimes because of these very innovations. The pressing immediate problem of providing schooling has been met in varying degrees. But in spite of the fact that even high school opportunity is much more available than ten years ago, the basic problems of over-population, low standards of living, isolation, and in our own county the rapid impact of a new industrial culture on a rural area unprepared for it, still remain.

“During these years the School has seen steady physical growth. Two large buildings have been finished and a third is nearing completion. A milk house has been built, and a small cottage above the Infirmary. A concrete base has been placed around the barn, the herd improved, a metal silo built and metal stalls erected. Boys House has been remodeled, and an organ add- ed to the church. A stage has been added to the School House, and the library remodeled. An outdoor theatre has been built, the reservoir repaired, and several hundred dollars’ worth of fire-fighting equipment purchased.

“There has been a growth in the school contact with the community people through our students’ regular visits in many of the homes, and their work in the schools.

“Another addition to our extension service is the Pine Mountain Youth Guidance Institute. This had its beginning in August, 1935, when members of the Pine Mountain staff met with Dr. [Orie] Latham Hatcher, President of the Alliance for Guidance of Rural Youth,…

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…to plan ways whereby our own School resources might be made more effective. During the second Institute some of the County teachers were invited to spend one day. This meeting, dealing as it did with practical helps to teachers on their immediate problems, was the basis for succeeding Institutes and attracted increasingly larger numbers of interested people.

“We have aimed to make religion a natural force and to have our church services as nearly like ideal conditions outside as possible. There is a student choir, and for the past three years a student committee has assisted the pastor in the choice of subjects for sermons, and helped to interpret the religious needs of the students.

“We have learned much from our experience as we have tried to extend the principles of democracy into all areas of school life. A student government of a limited nature, started in 1932, has evolved into a Citizenship Committee touching much of the School’s life, and has changed from a group of students who felt charged with the need for protecting fellow students’ rights, to a group which emphasizes citizenship as a responsibility which when met, entitles one to privileges.

“In 1931 the School offered the usual sixteen units necessary for college entrance. We felt that much more attention should be given to a curriculum for students not planning to go to college, and from 1934 on, the curriculum was gradually revised in terms of local needs, to include more practical training and to give less emphasis to grades and credits. It does not seem that the quality of the academic work has suffered, but that the program has merely been brought more nearly in line with the needs of the students. (Pine Mountain is accredited, grade A rating.)

“We have tried to make constant adjustments in boy-girl relationships. We have been led to believe that the relationships at Pine Mountain are rather wholesome because the freedom and safeguards here are those which we believe would be found in a well managed and understanding home. In this wholesome relationship we owe much to the heritage of folk dancing which belongs to Pine Mountain — a traditional activity which of course has value in other ways as well.

“As time makes us more sensitive to the problems of the area and deepens our understanding of the extent of the work already done before 1931, we grow in our appreciation of the founders of the School, Miss Pettit and Mrs. Zande. Surely Pine Mountain could not have continued without the strong foundation already laid both within the School itself and in the hearts of its many friends outside.”

* * *

In 1929 Miss Evelyn K. Wells, School Secretary from 1915 to 1928, prepared a history of Pine Mountain, which in manuscript now provides some of our most thrilling reading matter about the school, besides being priceless as record. Since 1928 the office has kept fairly complete statistical reports. Now, with the school nearly thirty years old and with a wealth of written material at our disposal the Notes from 1919 to the present time, the superb letters of Mrs. Zande, Co-Director with Miss Pettit until 1928, recent articles written by Mr. Morris, and the historical notes as they stand we seem well fortified to begin planning a somewhat detailed history of the school for publication.

It was our hope to have the history printed and bound by the Pine Mountain press, but since we have not now a professional supervisor, there may be considerable delay, and greater expense than was expected. It will be a long, varied and fascinating task, of which you will hear more, and often.

In the meantime will you help us by sending to the Pine Mountain office some of your own choice memories of Pine Mountain, with permission to use them if they fit into the historical records? Especially we should like those intimate folksy tales which workers and visitors over the years are remembering now, every time they open a letter or a folder from Pine Mountain.

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Will you send them, then, along with your suggestions and your questions, to Pine Mountain, in care of Alice Cobb? We are eager for you to share the writing of Pine Mountain’s history, as you have long and generously shared the making of it.

* * *

On a July morning, three year old Johnnie Holcomb, from Axhandle Creek, was carried to rest with his grandmother, in the old graveyard up above the schoolgrounds. Time and again in the past years we have followed the trail through the blackberry thickets, climbed two rail fences, crossed rotting trestles over the creek, to sit in tall grass among the old gravestones, or stand on wet and rainy days, and hear the last halting words spoken at the graves of our friends.

The day was unusually bright (most days this summer have been full of rain), but the group which gathered about the tiny open grave small. There were Lloyd Holcomb, the very young father, and Sudie his wife, a former Pine Mountain girl, Tressie’s Ule, who is getting ready to be a preacher, Cindy Ellen and Mallie, who came to lead the singing, Big John Holcomb, the grandfather of little Johnnie, and Bertha, Lloyd’s oldest sister, who was called home from Berea College. Of course the Sol Browns, who always come to any gathering, were there, and several others.

Johnnie lay in a white coffin, a pink veil spread over his round sleeping face. Quietly the little family knelt before their dead, and there was scarcely any noisy grieving. Quietly the young preacher raised his hand, and opened the Bible to read a passage from the book of Samuel, about David’s little lad.

“Johnnie won’t come back,” he said simply. “But you’ll go to him sometime.” We were sure that the words brought healing to those stricken folk. “Why did the Lord take Johnnie?” He asked it wonderingly of everyone gathered about, and then at once answered his own question. “Because He loved him of course. He needed Johnnie up there in the land. of cloudless day. And He didn’t want Johnnie to suffer the way folks does that grows old on earth. He didn’t want this little one to have griefs and burdens that was too heavy to bear. He wanted Johnnie, all sinless and pure, to come and be a angel in the garden of everlastin’ joy and love and peace. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven!”

At the end Cindy Ellen and Mallie sang a duet “When He cometh, when He cometh, to make up His jewels.”

The wind stirred in the pine trees. In the grass around us beetles went scurrying, sunshine came in sprinkles and lighted up a spider web, which grew larger second by second. A bird sang somewhere steadily, serenely. Below in the valley the little cabins stood, here and there, silent as death itself. Laurel creek wound a shining noiseless way. We felt very close to the heaven which preacher Ule described.

One had assurance that old hatreds, if there were any, old jealousies, gossip, were forgotten in a springing sympathy, quick and wholehearted as the sudden anger which has destroyed so many lives in the mountains. It was beautiful to feel in that hour the softening of hearts grown calloused, perhaps, with care, to touch close to the quick of life, to sense the mountain person’s deep-lying love and tenderness for all that is young, all that is sick, all that is bereft.

WHAT PINE MOUNTAIN NEEDS

Sheets. Our reserve supply of bed linen, as many of you know, was entirely burned with old Laurel House, and the slender supply left in the other houses has worn out. Some of you have sent us sheets, and we are grateful. But now we need more. We can use any size, and we can use old and worn sheets. Mending and splicing and cutting down are Home Economics projects.

Dishes. The Home Economics girls need conventional china, not necessarily complete sets, to use in serving their special practice luncheons, dinners and teas.

Subscriptions to Time, and Sunday New York Times.

Towels, washcloths, pillowcases.

Previous:
NOTES – 1941
Next:
NOTES – 1943

See Also:
EDUCATION
EDUCATION Guide
EVENTS CHRISTMAS at Pine Mountain Settlement School GUIDE
GLYN MORRIS GUIDE to Talks Writings and Publications
YOUTH GUIDANCE INSTITUTES Guide by Year

Return To:
NOTES Index