DEAR FRIEND Letter 1939

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 17A: Publications – Publicity and Fundraising
“Dear Friend” Letter from Glyn Morris 1939

DEAR FRIEND Letter 1939


TAGS: mountain community, Southern Highlands, pack horse library service, Infirmary, mothers-to-be, Glyn A. Morris


GALLERY: Dear Friend Letter 1939, page 1

DEAR FRIEND fundraising letter written by Glyn Morris, 1939, Page 1. [1939GlynAMorristoFriend1.jpg]

TRANSCRIPTION: Dear Friend Letter 1939, page 1

Page 1 [1939GlynAMorristoFriend.jpg]

PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL, INC.
Pine Mountain, Harlan County, Kentucky
Director, GLYN A. MORRIS
Treasurer, C.N. MANNING, Lexington, Ky.

Dear Friend:

“Hit’s not many that comes by here,” a mother of three small children wistfully told two Pine Mountain teachers who had paused for lunch on the sunny bank of the creek across from her home. It was far up the very head of the hollow where Stony Fork has its beginning, and she had come from her cabin asking if she might sit with them. For the present this home is too far away from us for our girls to call there, one of so many homes in the Southern Highlands where they must wait, “as mountains long have waited,” biding eternal time.

Here in its niche Pine Mountain reaches out to make brighter the scattered homes of the neighborhood. Even in this far away cabin the books which the little lad reads so eagerly are brought each week by a Pine Mountain girl on horseback to a place not too distant but that he may get them.

It is difficult to measure the area of Pine Mountain’s influence, for it touches people in so many different ways. For little four-year-old “Bee,” having been cared for by our girls in the hospital for two months because she fell into an open fireplace, it is to heal her burn and to teach her to say, “goodness gracious” instead of “God-a-mighty,” or that Nancy is her step-mother and not her “pappy’s woman.”

For most of the thirty-one mothers, who in the past year were given confidence by our girls to come to the Infirmary for the first time to have their babies, that influence meant care and rest which gave them renewed strength, and at a cost so little to us and to you.

GALLERY: Dear Friend Letter 1939, page 2

DEAR FRIEND fundraising letter written by Glyn Morris, 1939, Page 2. [1939GlynAMorristoFriend2.jpg]

TRANSCRIPTION: Dear Friend Letter 1939, page 2

Page 2 [1939GlynAMorristoFriend2.jpg]

For the man, once a boy here, who recently said, ”you can never realize what Pine Mountain has meant to me”, we can only conjecture what he means. It is enough to know that somewhere amid the pressure and insecurity of life in a coal camp, he finds that his short stay at Pine Mountain is helpful, and he is glad.

But most of all, perhaps, Pine Mountain gives guidance and direction to boys and girls, and especially to those like Chad whose talent is not with books. Through his stay of three years, the uncertainty and shyness born of solitary places is giving way to poise and assurance by his awareness of an unfolding skill, carefully nurtured, around which teachers have planned his work. And now, only sixteen, he shows the boys and girls in a near-by school how they too may use their hands for creative purpose and pleasure.

We are not unmindful of the mighty problems in other parts of the world. Yet here in the mountains there are many places where the thinly spread public resources do not reach. Proportionately more is spent, yet there is only one tenth as much public money available for each boy and girl as there is in the states of the North Atlantic Seaboard.

Your gift, as it helps some boy or girl here at Pine Mountain, will even now reach out through many of these to touch the lives of still others.

”Hit’s not many that comes by here ….” Won’t you continue to help us?

Faithfully yours,
[signed] Glyn A. Morris

Accounts payable $4,666.74
Cash on hand 1,578.82
Deficit $3,087.92

Ten Dollars will feed a student for one month.
We need blankets, sheets, and towels.


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