Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 09: BIOGRAPHY – Staff
Marian Kingman, Teacher, School Pianist 1928-1932
& Member, Board of Trustees 1955 – ?
Marian Kingman (1900-1999)

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TAGS: Marian Kingman, education, students, teachers, Margaret Motter, Harriet Crutchfield, home economics, domestic science, cooking classes, piano-playing, ballad singing, folk dancing, Chapel, vespers, The Mikado, Laurel House, sleeping porches, Berea College, Trustees

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MARIAN KINGMAN Staff

Teacher, School Pianist 1928-1932
Member, Board of Trustees 1955 – ?

“Congratulations in this year of 1996 on your 96th natal day….” began an article in the spring 1996 issue of Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School celebrating Marian Kingman’s birthday. In this tribute, the School fondly remembered Miss Kingman long after her years there as teacher, pianist, and trustee.

MARIAN KINGMAN: At Pine Mountain

Born in Illinois on February 25, 1900, Miss Kingman arrived at Pine Mountain in 1928 to teach home economics (domestic science) sharing the same four years with Miss Margaret Motter and one year with Miss Harriet Crutchfield. The 1996 article goes on to quote from a February 1930 issue of Notes that describes a day in Miss Kingman’s life:

Until the seven months district schools close at the end of January, each Friday Miss Kingman mounts her nag and rides down toward [I]ncline to hold her cooking class for girls in one of the neighbor’s kitchens. The district school allows girls two hours out of the school day to attend. In November [1929] we visited the class and it was a real adventure.

Six little girls, ranging in age from nine to fifteen came that day and a young matron, an old Pine Mountain girl, was taking her turn at being hostess to the class. She sat by the fire rocking her baby son, while the little girls, one of whom had walked four miles to come, bustled about her kitchen, so business-like in their clean aprons and so interested in what they were doing. The dishes to be made that day were creamed cabbage with white sauce, and stuffed potatoes. While the cabbage was boiling and the potatoes baking, Miss Kingman dictated the recipes and everyone wrote laboriously in their oilcloth-covered notebooks.

This year the children have learned to make canned beans, canned corn, baked apples, scrambled eggs, poached eggs, candied sweet potatoes, potato soup, cinnamon buns, corn chowder, and floating island.

Sitting around the oilcloth-covered table in the kitchen afterwards, eating up the class product, as is the pleasant custom, we found that not one of the six little cooks had ever before eaten creamed cabbage or stuffed potatoes. Yet there is not a family which does not possess these raw materials.

As the little girls washed and dried dishes and swept out the room leaving everything spick and span, we were reminded of the fairy tale in which the cobbler had elfin help in his labors…..

Miss Kingman was also well-known as the school pianist, playing for a variety of gatherings, such as assemblies, ballad singing, folk dancing, Sundays in the Chapel, and choir vespers. The students who sang in the School’s production of “The Mikado,” a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, were accompanied by her skilled piano playing. She even spread her love of music to the sleeping porches at Laurel House, serenading the girls to sleep with “a little night music.”

MARIAN KINGMAN: After Pine Mountain

Although Miss Kingman began a teaching career at Berea (KY) College in 1932, she continued her connections with Pine Mountain, often bringing her classes to Pine Mountain to make curtains and provide other enhancements to the interiors of the School’s buildings.  She also reflected on her work at Pine Mountain in an essay presented to the Berea College faculty on December 13, 1940, titled “Home Conditions in the Mountains.” In the 20-minute lecture, she touched on many of the personal observations of life in the valley surrounding the School. Her talk opens with the following comment 

Home conditions in the mountains”! What a vast subjet to cover in fifteen or twenty minutes! When I began to think of this paper, I wondered how I, or anyone, could put into words the composite of physical social, econoic and spiritual forces which are part and parcel of every single home whether it is at the head of an isolated hollow or on the main street of a mining town. A home is so much more than a little plot of land with a house on it — it is that, plus the people, the human beings. Out interest here tonight is those human beings, what factors in their home background have been and are beneficial and constructive and upbuilding, what factors are detrimental to the optimum development of each human being.

Marian Kingman re-joined the Pine Mountain community as a member of the Board of Trustees in 1955 and following that became an important and engaged honorary trustee. Her commitment to Pine Mountain was, essentially, life-long.

Miss Kingman lived out her final years in the Highland Farms Retirement Community at Black Mountain, in North Carolina where she joined her sister Helen and also many other Bereans who chose the mountainous retirement complex for their last years. She died on April 16, 1999.

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A visual record of her years at Pine Mountain may be seen in the Marian Kingman Photograph Albums listed below.

Full transcript of letter to Miss Kingman:

  ??

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See Also:

MARIAN KINGMAN Philosophy of Pine Mountain Settlement School 1977

MARIAN KINGMAN WRITING Home Conditions in the Mountains 1940

MARIAN KINGMAN PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM [Full pages, Parts I – IV]

MARIAN KINGMAN ALBUM INDIVIDUAL PHOTOS – PART I
MARIAN KINGMAN ALBUM INDIVIDUAL PHOTOS – PART II
MARIAN KINGMAN ALBUM INDIVIDUAL PHOTOS – PART III
MARIAN KINGMAN ALBUM INDIVIDUAL PHOTOS – PART IV