Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 09: Biography – Staff/Personnel
Series 03: Histories
Series 10: Built Environment
TOPICS: Science
WELLS RECORD 17 PMSS Contributions to Outside World 1913-1928
TAGS: Wells Record 17 PMSS Contributions to Outside World 1913-1928 ; Evelyn K. Wells ; Pine Mountain Settlement School ; policies ; Mary Rockwell Hook ; Margaret Mccutchen ; Katherine Pettit ; Ethel de Long Zande ; conservation ; architecture ; land use ; traditions ; Old Log House ; Fireside Industries ; Uncle William Creech ; Running Set ;
The following is a transcription of Evelyn K. Wells’ Record #17, listing Pine Mountain Settlement School’s contributions to the outside world in the years from 1913 to 1928.
SOME CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD
Elsewhere you will read of Pine Mountain’s steady fostering interest in native folk-lore, and of the visitors who have come and found things here that they have taken away. We are proud of the Wyman-Brockway ballad collections, the second volume of which is dedicated to Uncle William Creech, and of the book on the Running Set dedicated to the Pine Mountain School. In 1919 at the instigation of Mrs. Zande [Ethel de Long Zande] the Child Welfare Commission of Kentucky made an exhaustive study of Harlan County conditions. $500.00 was specially raised by the School for this purpose, because we felt the phenomenal industrial development of the county was worth studying. That same year Miss Marguerite Butler, who was doing extension work at the time, made a survey of this section for the Interchurch World Movement. Mrs. Zande at various times wrote articles on mountain manners and idiom.
In the spring of 1925, Frances Johnson, a school girl, browsing about under the cliff by Old Log House always called “The Indian Cliff“, unearthed a real Indian skeleton, and geologists and entomologists from the University of Kentucky came and excavated for days, finding several Indian skeletons, and taking one back, wired, for the University Museum. In August, 1925, Dr. Irwin Abell of Louisville came to take moving pictures to illustrate a paper he was writing for a Medial Society, called “Kentucky Past and Present,” finding in our locality instances of the old type of education, (—the log schoolhouse) and staging at the School a hookworm clinic of the previous decade. In the summer of 1927, Clifford H. Pope of the American Museum of Natural History in New York spent two weeks with us, hunting the mountain sides for a rare species of salamander, the Aneides Aeneus, and carrying back to New York with him a hundred specimens and their eggs.
To mountain fiction and drama we have contributed through the tales of Percy MacKaye, who spent the summer of 1922 at Pine Mountain, and John Fox Jr., who came twice in the early days. And name is legion of the botanists, writers, artists, educators, social workers, students of rural conditions, who have stopped briefly with us, or written to ask if they might use the School as a place to study. The policy of not taking summer boarders, so necessary in a place where food was hard to raise and the main job of training the children had to be kept constantly in mind, has prevented the School’s being even better known.
SEE ALSO:
EVELYN K. WELLS GUIDE TO ADMINISTRATIVE CORRESPONDENCE
EVELYN K. WELLS, GUIDE to EXCERPTS FROM LETTERS HOME 1915-1923
EVELYN K. WELLS 1915 EXCERPTS FROM LETTERS HOME
EVELYN K. WELLS 1915 EXCERPTS FROM LETTERS HOME – Horseback to Hindman
EVELYN K. WELLS 1916 EXCERPTS FROM LETTERS HOME
EVELYN K. WELLS 1917 EXCERPTS FROM LETTERS HOME
EVELYN K. WELLS 1918 EXCERPTS FROM LETTERS HOME
EVELYN K. WELLS 1919 EXCERPTS FROM LETTERS HOME
RECORD OF PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL 1913-1928 [INDEX] (Early in-depth history of Pine Mountain Settlement School)
2. Introductory
3. Year by Year [Construction, Workers, Gifts, Children, Events, etc.]
10. Academic
11. Health
12. Extension Work
15. Athletics
16. Dramatics
17. Some Contributions to the Outside World
18. Religious Life
19. The Road
22. List of Workers
[22 sections of Pine Mountain Settlement School History gathered by Evelyn K. Wells from 1913 to 1928]
EVELYN K. WELLS PUBLICATIONS
Wells, Evelyn K. The Ballad Tree: A Study of British and American Ballads, Their Folklore, Verse and Music, Together with Sixty Traditional Ballads and Their Tunes. New York: Ronald Press, 1950. Print.
[See Bibliography below for a listing of additional publications.]
EVELYN K. WELLS “A Little True Blue American,” Over Sea and Land: Our Southern Mountains, November 1920, p. 140.
EVELYN K. WELLS TALKS
EVELYN K. WELLS PMSS Harvard University talk, on Folk Music. July 21, 1955.
