Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 17: PUBLICATIONS PMSS
NOTES 1923
February and November

NOTES – 1923

“Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School”
February and November 1923

---

GALLERY: NOTES – 1923 February

“The more we saw of these [hand-woven] blankets, the more we knew that our weaving, when it was started must be in the mountain style.”

TAGS: NOTES – 1923 FEBRUARY: Fireside Industries, weaving, Oma Creech, Hindman Settlement School, Katherine Pettit, Harriet Butler, Southern Division of the Russell Sage Foundation, Mrs. John C. Campbell, clinics, infections, children, balance sheet

---

TRANSCRIPTION: NOTES – 1923 February

P.1

NOTES FROM THE
PINE MOUNTAIN
SETTLEMENT SCHOOL

PINE MOUNTAIN * HARLAN COUNTY * KENTUCKY
Copyright, 1923, by Pine Mountain Settlement School

Volume I     FEBRUARY, 1923   Number 8

OUR Fireside Industries department has been saved from extinction in this end of the country, an art compounded of many lesser arts. One more generation, and the dye recipes would have been forgotten, the spinning wheels would have been merely, “old truck,” as hand looms had already come to be. When we first came to Pine Mountain, the owners of large flocks of sheep, welcoming the economic change in their lives that the factories had brought, were sending off their wool to be spun and woven by machinery.

We could not be surprised that they were prouder of their fleecy new machine-made blankets, so easily acquired than they were of the old homespun striped ones, which had meant long hours of walking up and down at the spinning wheel, bending over the dye pot, and “trumping the treadles” of the loom. To us, these were more beautiful, with their many gay colors, all made from the bark and roots that grew nearby, and in their daring color combinations, reminding you that in their primitive arts, all people are kin. The more we saw these blankets, the more we knew that our weaving, when it was started, must be in the mountain style. We gathered recipes from every old woman who could remember something from her “young times,” and, whenever we could, we picked up a blanket.

Weaving has been going on at the school for over a year now, and every blanket, copied from some old pattern, is a handmade product. The wool is sheared, washed, carded and spun by hand, and colored by our children according to ancient recipes, from bark and roots, which our forestry boys have gathered by forestry regulations. Our brown from walnut, our hickory yellow, the soft pink of “spruce pine” and many others have come out with a fair degree of success. The story of the search for the famous blue of the Kentucky Mountain coverlet is a complete one in itself, and must wait for more space and another issue of the Notes.

Hardly a day goes by when some neighbor does not bring in her hanks of yarn to be counted and weighed. Up and down the creeks, women are proud of the pocket money they have because of their spinning. A stove catalog which came to one of them recently, sent in the School’s care, means that there is to be a real stove in some home which had been making the best of the old step stove, with the help, perhaps, of the fireplace.. Another of our neighbors, a young woman, not yet thirty, has had to have all her teeth out, and the money for the new set is coming from the wool she spins for us.

This year, two of our last year’s day pupils are weaving on their own looms at home. Allene, whose grandmother, Aunt Sis, sheared over 100 sheep twice a year, comes by her skill rightly, for Aunt Sis “dreamed out” many a striped blanket pattern and coverlet. She works at a brand-new loom, ordered from Berea. Her mother is calling to mind these days all the old-time secrets of the dye-pot, and helps Allene color the yarn that Hazel, the younger sister, spins at Aunt Sis’s old wheel. Uncle John spends his evenings by the fire, carting the wool that has come from Aunt Sis’s sheep. The little brothers make weaving quills for her, and her father, who keeps…

P. 2

…the general store and is postmaster, spends some of the hours when neighbors drop in to talk and trade is dull, in whittling out a beautiful rhododendron shuttle for her. A real family industry has sprung up, because Allene learned to weave at the School last year.

 Up the Creek, Oma, [Oma Creech] one of Uncle William‘s grand-daughters, a girl of thirteen, has had her father take down the old parts of Aunt Sal’s colonial loom, which she has saved all these years, hoping that the young people would take up weaving some day, even though factory-made cloth was increasingly available for them.” It was a great day when they set up the old gears and parts, reminiscing about the days when “maw took to weavin’. We’d have to go naked then, for all the notice she’d take of us, and we’d eat all the peach pie we wanted, for dinner.” Oma is buying, with her weaving money, a Victrola and records — the best instrument on the market, she insists, and good music.

Permanent and enduring as the fabric and the colors of our blankets are, we believe that the most enduring result of this work comes in the children’s characters. They are having what is a rare experience in life today, the joy of conducting all the processes in the creation of a lovely thing. In our weaving room. This is what determines the atmosphere in which the children work, not the effort to commercialize our products and simply produce for an outside market. We shall never keep up the pace set by weavers who import their raw materials, because our whole emphasis is on the revival of the mountain processes of dying and weaving.

*****

PINE Mountain’s elder sister, the Hindman’s Settlement School, in Knott County, celebrated its twentieth birthday in May, and Miss [Katherine] Pettit, who was one of its founders, Miss Harriet Butler, who, for nine years, was the nurse, and Doctor [Grace] Huse went over to the five days’ reunion. It was hard to tell whether they were more impressed by the wonderful babies who are the grandchildren of that school, or by the variety of occupations in which the graduates are engaged. Every school in Knott County had been taught by a Hindman graduate in the preceding year, and the county school superintendent was an old Hindman boy. There were bankers, civil engineers, preachers, lawyers, prosperous businessmen, doctors, mine superintendents and farmers. It is a delight to congratulate Hindman on its twenty years of most successful work.

*****

MISS Marguerite Butler, our extension worker, is on leave for a year’s study of the folk schools of Denmark. She is working there with Mrs John C. Campbell, widow of the late head of the Southern Highland Division of the Russell Sage Foundation,” And author of  “The Southern Highlander and his Homeland.” Miss Butler expects to bring back many helpful ideas for her extension work in connection with the country schools.

*****

 THROUGH the friendship of Dr. J. A. Stuckey of Lexington, an eye, ear, nose, and throat clinic was held at the School in November. In addition to Dr. Stuckey and our own medical force of five, there were four other doctors and three nurses, including Dr. E. W. Day of Pittsburgh, who brought his house surgeon, his assistant and his head nurse. Can you picture the mule train that came over Pine Mountain bringing them all in, — a regular field hospital, with aneasthetics [sic], a suction pump, and other modern electrical apparatus?

For three days, our neighbors poured in for examinations and operations, thereby showing how this country, which. has always accepted its ailments as from the Hand of the Lord, and therefore not to be questioned, has come to see, through the work of our doctor and visiting nurses, that the Lord does not always intend people to suffer. They came by twos and threes on the family nag, or walking in from their home miles away, or in groups from the district schools. the schoolhouse became an examining station, the Boy’s House, the hospital. Three of our big boys acted as interns and were wonderfully quick and deft, one of them even being promoted to help with the anaesthetics.

For real statistics, let us give you these figures:
Examinations ………………………………..321
Eye refractions ……………………………….38
Operations under anaesthesia ……….83
Other operations  …………………………..35
[2]

P. 3

One little girl of twelve was brought to us, with her eyelids in fearful shape after five operations for trachoma. She was willing to have anything done, she said, but she wouldn’t “go to sleep” again, so she lay down on the table, her hands tightly clasped, and fully conscious of all that went on, let the doctor remove every one of her lashes and treat each little hole. A young woman rode in from Cutshin, and the doctors found that an eye must be taken out. They operated at once, taking out her tonsils and adenoids too,, and the woman stayed away from her nursing baby three days. Our old friend, Uncle John Fiddler, was brought up the creek on a stretcher with a “risin’ In his head.” He went home afoot later in the day, saying he would be back in the morning, but that it “strained his nerves” to be away from Aunt Louize overnight. “First hit was the lightnin’, and then hit was the thunder, and now they haint nary bit of misery left”, he said when his ear drum was lanced.

It is remarkable that such a clinic could be held at a school hidden away behind a hundred-and-fifty-mile long mountain, and we are proud and grateful for the distinguished service that was given.

*****

PINE Mountain children have not been allowed to go swimming in the creeks, because of possible infections. They are now trying to raise money for a swimming pool, to be filled with the overflow from our reservoir. By eating rice and cocoa every Friday every Friday, they have been able to save over $200 already, and have voted to continue this self-denial for the benefit of the fund, till the end of the year, when they will be within $250 of their goal, $860.00.

*****

CHILDREN’S hour at Pine Mountain comes between supper and study time, when the big hearth fires in the living rooms burn their cheerfullest [sic]. Visitors love to find a corner by the fireplace then. They have discovered that children who work their way through school are busy from daylight till dark and have no other chance to dance “Big Bald Eagle” for them, or sing them song-ballets. For a housemother it is a busy hour, a great opportunity to cultivate the resources of her children and to create family spirit. Many a boy who had no way of amusing himself, except by rough-and-tumble play, has learned without realizing that his housemother was doing anything. the fun of games or the fascination of books. By the middle of the year, the children have found a hundred ways to be happy.

At one house, you will find a dozen boys buried in books, while another dozen let off steam on the ropes or the punching bags, in the big sawdust floored playroom. In another house, the little ones are popping corn and a big boy is taking his leisure time to read in the encyclopedia all about Bismarck. Off in a corner, two or three children are doing a bit of detective work. Someone has missed an apple, and a core has been found on little Alafair‘s  shelf. How will they settle it, when Alafair, pressed for explanation, cries out triumphantly, “But when I eat an apple, they ain’t no core left!” In one living room, a housemother is snatching her only chance to unpack a dilapidated barrel which has been six months on the way, with three interested children. to help her. Imagine the commotion when mice jump out of the dejected finery! ” Don’t put that hat on, Virginia!” says one child. ” Don’t you know that folks that packs mice in their barrels will pack anything?”

When a house mother gets a chance just to watch and listen, how she revels in the conversation she hears! The two girls who aim to be teachers and are beginning Algebra, are putting in extra time on a problem, which after pages of figuring, comes out zero. “Zero! Well, I declare, that’s not fair! All that work for nothing!” And here are eight or ten in front of the fire, drinking in information and romance from the conversation of Vergil and Lindy:

Virgil — “I’m the king and Laurie Anne’s my queen.”
Lindy—  “Huh! Queens is lazy old things!”
Virgil —  “Well I didn’t get her to grub!”
Lindy — “Kings is lazy old things too. They’re so lazy that when they go a-hunting, they                         take someone to do it for them.”
Vergil — “When I go a-hunting, I carry a falcon to aid me. Bet you younguns don’t know                        what a falcon is!”
Lindy — “Do too; hit’s a chicken what sits on a feller’s arm in a book!”

And then the clock strikes for study hour.
[3]

P. 4

PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL, INCORPORATED
BALANCE SHEET, JUNE 30th, 1922

[See image of page 4 in the Gallery above for details.]

---

GALLERY: NOTES – 1923 November

“‘I have got a great deal of good from the Pine Mountain School since I have been here. My health is fully two-thirds better. When I came, I could only multiply by two, And now I can multiply by any number I wish to. And I can also find the area and perimeter of anything. I have also learned manners at the eating table in other places.’ Did he, perchance, decide that his health was two thirds better by finding his perimeter?”

“When school began in August, we found that thirty new children together were nearly 400 pounds underweight. In two weeks, regular rest and food had produced a gain of 157 pounds….”

---

TAGS: NOTES – 1923 NOVEMBER: feuds, water supply, Medical Settlement, Harriet Butler, Dr. Grace Huse, Marguerite Butler, John C. Campbell, J.A. Stucky, E. W. Day, Fiddler John, droughts, dolls, Health House at Line Fort Settlement, new students. Model House, Infirmary, L & N Railroad

---

TRANSCRIPTION: NOTES – 1923 November

P. 1

HE was twenty, short and slight, with a fresh childlike face and ingenuous blue eyes, and he wanted to go to school and get into the second reader but he had a problem to work out and he had brought his question to the school to help him settle it, someone had wantonly killed his brother. The code of his neighborhood was feudal; blood called for blood. But some dim idea of a new standard stirring in his heart had sent him tramping thirty miles for advice. “Had I ought to kill him? Paw says I have a bound to, but if I do, I can’t get to come to school. Most likely I will git in the pen for killin’ a man or if I don’t I’ll be feared of bein laywayed ever’time I step out. I allowed you fellers could holp me know what was right?”

How easy it was for us to fortify him, we, whose great-grandfathers had left behind them his medieval code! We wondered if our reasoning would seem mere glib talk to him when he got back and undertook to tell his family his decision. Had the naive young fellow the resolution to oppose them, and would he ever come back to the privileges of the second grade?

In less than a week, he walked in, at dusk, carrying a gun longer than he was, an ancient weapon. “Here’s my gun: I’ve come to school and I want you to keep it for me.” He did not know its history; It had come into the family in payment of a debt, but how it stirred one’s imagination of dark and bloody days! Four notches on it, — it had killed four men.

Having left it, — sign and symbol of a rejected code, — in safe hands, he set himself to the work of the second reader with ardor, and got through into the fourth by spring. Next year, in the fifth, he wrote an artless composition that we still delight in.

I have got a great deal of good from the Pine Mountain School since I have been here. My health is fully two-thirds better. When I came, I could only multiply by two, And now I can multiply by any number I wish to. And I can also find the area and perimeter of anything. I have also learned manners at the eating table in other places.

Did he, perchance, decide that his health was two thirds better by finding his perimeter?

Fifteen minutes with him set one’s thoughts flying to lonely shut-in hollows and gave us that intimate sense of the isolated mountaineers’ life, which one usually gets through a sojourn by their hearth fires. He told of love powders “A heap of people believes in — dried frog’s legs all mashed up that sure will make the girl you love fall in love with you.” He beguiled his leisure time, just as the lonesome boy does at the head of the hollow. With clumsy craft, he made a banjo out of a tin can, and painted it a glorious bright green. All of us envy the possessor of that banjo, even though it was more grateful to the eye than to the ear. Once he told us of a home his father established in his young manhood, on new ground, up a creek where no one else lived. “When everything was settled, Paw went off to the public works for a job. he stayed about a month and then come home for Saturday and Sunday. Maw weren’t there, and there weren’t no fire. That made Paw mad, so he set out to make him one, and then he seed why they was gone. There was a copperhead lyin’ right on the hearth stone and one drapped off the fireboard and…
[1]

P. 2

…’most hit him as he was stoopin’ over. Well, he killed the snakes and then he went to his paw’s and found Maw and the young ‘uns and brung ’em back home. He fit snakes for three weeks and thought he had then all killed, and was a-fixin’ to go off to work next morning. That night one crawled under the kiver and bit him in the bed.” Then, in answer to a surprised question, “Why, no, Paw didn’t move away from that place. He kept right on a-workin’ and in a couple of years he had most of ’em killed out.”

This August, when school was about to open, instead of himself there came a letter.

All of your good friends are expected back to Pine Mountain by the time school begins. But I am sorry to say that I am not coming to school, which would be as good a thing as anybody could do. I am very thankful to you in all that ever helped me in school in many other ways. You may say that what little I went to school didn’t do me any good. But I can say being at Pine Mountain has hope me in many ways. it has hope me to be kind to others, and to think of others as well as myself. I am more able to meet people in the right manner anywhere that I may meet them. And if I ever have a home of my own, it will be much better than it would have been if I hadn’t been at Pine Mountain School. I will never quit being thankful to Pine Mountain School for its help it did me. If I ever can help the school I will, for I know there will be boys and girls that will get lots of help out of the school in many ways.

You can keep my old gun until I call for it. I don’t know when that will be.

It was norated [narrated] around aiming to marry. We wonder if he tried any of those love powders to help him in his courting. We miss him, his gentleness, his simplicity, his friendliness; but we are. Glad that in some tiny house under a hill where a gay tin banjo enlivens lonely evenings, he can multiply by any number he wants to, and has a grateful thought for Pine Mountain.

*****

TWO summers of drought, the greatest in the memory of this country, have made it necessary for us to provide another water supply for the Medical Settlement. For months, the only water available was brought in saddle pockets, four gallons a day, from a well over a mile away. This was bad enough for the family of workers and their needs, but it was intolerable for the doctor, trying to take care of patients with sores and “risin’s”. The creeks were almost too low to water the horses, and water for dish-washing and bathing was at a premium. And now a small reservoir has been installed at the base of a cleft rock, some distance up the hill from the Doctor’s House to collect the trickle which yields seventy-five gallons a day. A pipe brings the supply to the house, the doctor’s office, the playhouse and the barn, and thirsty children and grownups will stop at the gate to drink from the bubble fountain.

All this work has been done by a young fellow who ten years ago, when he came to Pine Mountain, was a little black-eyed boy, smiling up at us from the roadside. He learned his trade of carpentering at the school when our buildings were going up. And when the medical settlement was started, he was proficient enough to be put in charge of it. He vowed he would build the prettiest house on the creek, “better than anything they had at the school, even.” When his own five-room cottage went up, it was the talk of the creek. the new waterworks are his first experience at plumbing. No wonder his mother describes him as “full of manage-ment.”

The neighbors are much interested in this work, and some are, frankly, skeptical, not believing that a mere trickle of water could provide for the family needs. The young workman says,“Humph! Some folks think you must have a whole creek running through the kitchen!” But the toiling mother, who all this summer had to go down across the valley and half-way up the mountain for a bucket of pure water, now sends her least child to fill her buckets at the Medical Settlement.

St. Francis’ Cantical [sic] was surely written for the Medical Settlement: “Thanks be Our Lord for Sister Water; precious she is and holy, yet for our use in humble ways.”

*****

“MAY not some of the disorder of the day be due to the kind of toys that children have? A doll that may be undressed and put to bed in a correct nightgown or pajamas can never be a mistaken present for a little girl. A doll was brought into the house a while back, having hair of a peculiarly awful shade of pink; its eyes were wicked, they leered, and its only covering was a purple bow of gauze tied around the hips. It was ugly; it was evil and only fit for burning ….

“Let us not give our babies gollywogs. The best loved dolls among our own children…

P. 3

 …are of rag or some such material with soft stuffing that makes them good for cud- dling. They may not be pretty, but they are not inhuman.”

Reprinted from “Gems”, a monthly paper published in the interests of the order of S. Anne and of the Children of S. John’s House, Arlington Heights, Boston. We too, want to give our children lovable dolls, not gollywogs and kewpies.

*****

THE Health House at the Line Fork Settlement [See also: LINE FORK SETTLEMENT WORKERS Reports Publications Guide 1920-1941] was completed last summer, much of the lumber and labor being contributed by the neighbors. It is a little three-room cabin, covered with rough slabs without and carefully ceiled within, with home-made furniture as far as possible. There is a waiting room with an open fire. Miss [Anne Ruth] Medcalf, the nurse, does dressings, gives treatments, and weighs babies, in a tiny room where shelves and cupboards yield their contents in the handiest way. A home-made operating table unfolds from under a shelf when it is needed. The bathtub, given by friends in Michigan, is on its way to us. The first bath-tub on Line Fork! Much more successful work is possible, now that all the medical care and treatment is removed from the tiny bedroom of the settlement cabin where the nurse has had to work. The Health House was first used for a clinic, held by doctors of the State Board of Health.

*****

HIGH above creek and county road, looking over the School grounds and up and down the valley, is perched the little frame cottage which we call the Model Home. Its very situation is model; it has worlds of sunshine, nothing polluted drains through its grounds from above, and no valuable level land is taken up by the building. Its aim is two-fold; to use every convenient mountain way of household management which is hygienic and economical, and to introduce ways which may be easily copied by our neighbors.

Two girls from the school family, chosen every six weeks and greatly envied by their mates, live with a worker in the Model Home. The little family lives on a budget, keeping careful account of expenses, and shopping at the country store and the mail-order houses. There a model cow, a tiny barn, and a few chickens; and some day we may add a model pig or two.

A week-end supper party at the Model Home would convince you of the housekeeping possibilities of our girls. No hostess could be more at ease than Lavinia as she seats you and asks the blessing, or Martha as she rises to clear the table and bring in the dessert. The ware off which you eat is the plainest in the world; the table is bare, with oil-cloth mats; the chimney of the plain glass lamp shines and the wick burns clear. You couldn’t find better “light bread” anywhere, or potato chips, or preserves and cake and cocoa.

This is a country where girls and boys marry young. Little homes spring up every year, where mere children are bravely trying to provide for their own children as best they can. This summer four of our girls married. One, to be sure, hesitated long before deciding, because she was afraid she couldn’t put into practice Pine Mountain ways, and keep house and babies clean. It is never too soon to give our girls all we can in the way of standards of cleanliness, wise planning and taste. So the furniture of the Model Home is plain pine and oak, made in the shop by our boys. The kitchen sink is of wood, painted with many coats; the kitchen utensils are simple and stout and few in number. There is a cellar under the porch. The steep hillside is terraced for the vegetable garden. Screencloth is at the doors and windows. The sanitary privy is so simple that anyone could copy it. And we have feather beds covering the thin cornshuck mattresses. A neighbor of ours once said, “I wouldn’t have a bed like the ones up at the school that you can’t boil every March. I just take my feather tick, and shake the feathers down to one end and tie a string around ’em, and boil out the other end, and then I shake the feathers down into the clean end and wash out t’other.” The girl who lives in the Model Home will have fire-screens in her own home, and her babies will not tumble about on the floor unprotected from sparks and “fire-coals”. Gourds, a string of red peppers, a fern dish and other mountain pretties, homespun blankets of gay colors on the beds, unbleached muslin curtains at the windows and cupboard doors, make you realize that the clever, tasteful housekeeper uses what is at hand to decorate her home, instead of “fotched-on”…

*****

P. 4

…ornaments. A frieze of bright pictures gives liveliness to the neat newspapered walls.

But if the neighbors and the girls find the house full of suggestions for themselves, what we gather from them is equally valuable. We may plant seeds that will bear fruit, but we are also gathering the fruit of their generations of inherited experience in making the best of life in the mountains. Already one of our neighbors has bought lumber in the right quantity to build a house like the Model Home.

After all, however, the important thing is that it is a home. The little lady from the Maine farm who is living with the girls this winter, knows how to bring significance and joy into the cleanliness and order that prevail. “Teaching simplicity to sing” might be their motto. At the Model Home, honest labor does indeed bear a lovely face.

*****

FIFTY new children in school, fifty per cent of the school family to be assimilated into our life. Fifty physical examinations by the nurse, who goes quickly through the routine of weighing and measuring, turning back lids to look for “sore-eyes”, asking questions about exposure to measles or “the choking disease”, examining tonsils. Fifty children for the doctor to go over, testing their vision and running to earth any obscure troubles. Fifty children who, when they are a bit used to our ways, spend a week-end in the Infirmary “takin’ treatment” for hookworm. Sometimes treatment produces a sharp attack of homesickness and the little patient runs away in the gray of the dawn “because that woman was aimin’ to starve him.”

What shall we do with diseased tonsils? Parents often hesitate to give their consent for the operation: “No, I don’t aim to let him go, he’s always been the puny one in the family”. “No, I couldn’t bear for my young‘n to be put to sleep (with ether)”. Sometimes the consent comes in by letter, with the added request to “have Willie adzemade for pinisitis”. The consent once elicited, we are sure of transportation to Louisville for the children, for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad has for years with unreserved generosity sent us passes for children needing hospital treatment; but who will take them down, children who never went to bed on a train or saw a city before? And who will care for them afterwards, when they may not stay in the hospital and yet cannot leave the doctor’s care, and who will ship them safely back to us? Yet we welcome the letter from the hospital that tells us a bed is free for a Pine Mountain child, for in spite of difficulties, we must send them down.

When school began in August, we found that thirty new children together were nearly 400 pounds underweight. In two weeks, regular rest and food had produced a gain of 147 pounds, and now only six children are on the rest list. Pinched faces have begun to fill out, sluggish ways to change to healthy activity, and three-bite servings of such strange dishes as macaroni and cheese, or rice pudding, to grow to generous platefuls as appetites increase. The ancient sturdy stock reasserts itself quickly, when it is given a chance.

*****

WHO shall say that the story of Lohengrin lacked any element of the dramatic for small Esiedire, even though he had it second-hand and not from across Metropolitan footlights? He was overheard handling the intricacies of the story in a masterly way, and ending up thus: “An’ Lohengrin, he went off down the river in the boat, an’ in place of that-thar goose come up Elsie’s little brother, an’ he run an’ grabbed her ’round the neck, an’ says, “Howdy, Sister!”
[4]

---

Previous:
NOTES – 1922
Next:
NOTES – 1924

See Also:
MEDICAL Guide
WEAVING ARTS and CRAFTS WEAVING Guide

Return To:
NOTES Index

---