FAYE TRAIL (Deaton) Alumni Reflections

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 09: BIOGRAPHY Alumni
Series 19: STUDENTS
Faye Trail, Student 1940s
FAYE TRAIL (DEATON) Alumni Reflections
1991 Rebuttal Letter to Appalachian Heritage

FAY TRAIL (Deaton) Alumni Reflections

Faye Trail Deaton Correspondence, 1991. [trail_faye_deaton_2.jpg]


TAGS: Faye Trail Deaton Record, Faye Trail Deaton, John Deaton, Harry Robie, cornbread, Sidney Saylor Far, Appalachian Heritage magazine, Berea College KY, settlement schools, 1940s, rebuttals, writing memoirs, autobiographies


FAYE TRAIL (DEATON) Alumni Reflections

 

TRANSCRIPTION

Image and transcription of a 1991 letter of rebuttal from former PMSS student (1940s) and alumna to editor of Appalachian Heritage.

Morristown, TN 37814
April 13, 1991

Sidney Saylor Farr
Editor, Appalachian Heritage
Berea College
Berea, KY  40404

Dear Ms. Farr:

Mr. Robie is wrong, wrong, wrong! His attempt to explain (and judge) settlement schools is like a Yankee trying to make cornbread, The willingness is there, the oven set and the skillet hot, but what comes out is (to a Southerner) strange and unpalatable.

Mr. Robie’s article will misinform a great many people who, not having first-hand knowledge of settlement schools, will believe it. I regret and resent that. His analysis does not in any way describe the school I attended, Pine Mountain Settlement School. Did Mr. Robie ever visit a settlement school? Talk to a former student or teacher?

I will not try, in a mere letter, to list all the benefits I was fortunate enough to receive as a boarding school student, but suffice it to say that I left there with broader horizons, Where else in the mountains of Kentucky during the Forties would I have heard the music of Mendelssohn, Shubert, Handel, Bach, and others in live concerts? Where else would I have been tutored by teachers with degrees from educational institutions such as Oxford? Princeton? Smith?

Pine Mountain Settlement school did not destroy the existing culture of the mountains, it respected it, encouraged it, enriched it. I left that good place with a new appreciation for myself and my heritage. Never again would the slur ‘Hillbilly’ have the power to sting, I KNEW who I was and from whence I came and was proud of it!

I am enclosing a book I wrote that chronicles my years as a boarding school student, After you have read it, please complete the address on the enclosed stamped envelope and forward it to Mr, Robie. I believe you will find it interesting and, perhaps, Mr. Robie will learn something about settlement schools.

Sincerely,

Faye Trail Deaton


 

See Also:
FAYE TRAIL Student
Biography

JOHN DEATON Student Biography

FAYE TRAIL Correspondence