NOTES – 1926

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 17: PUBLICATIONS PMSS
NOTES 1926
April and November

NOTES – 1926

“Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School”
April and November 1926


GALLERY: NOTES – 1926 April

…[W]ith the incoming industrial era, a desire for better…living and greater beauty of every-day life must be created, or the mountain people will be the victims of circumstance rather than open-eyed choosers of their way of life.

In this state the marriageable age is still set by law at twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, and dull lives have driven many undeveloped children to the only amusement they see within their reach, sweethearting …

TAGS: NOTES – 1926 APRIL: campus description, Native Americans, students,  workers, fees, schedule, cottage plan, housemother, poem, work program, industrial training,  academic ideals, Frances Parker School, Lincoln Memorial School, culture, recreation, swimming pool, religion, nursing, buildings, extension work, Medical Settlement, Line Fork, equipment, economizing, budget, Mr. Zeigler, Mrs. Hook, Elizabeth Hench, Mrs. James J. Storrow, Harriot Houghteling, Cloyd McAllister, Dr. Francis Sage Bradley

TRANSCRIPTION: NOTES – 1926 April

P. 1

NOTES FROM THE
PINE MOUNTAIN
SETTLEMENT SCHOOL

PINE MOUNTAIN * HARLAN COUNTY * KENTUCKY
Copyright, 1926, by Pine Mountain Settlement School

Volume II     APRIL, 1926    Number 5

A DEAR friend of the school has just written: “Ever so many people want to know what you are like today. Why don’t you print in the Notes the answer to the questions we ask you when we see you, and tell everybody what they would find if they made you a visit.” We are therefore devoting this issue of the Notes to some definite information and the interpretation of our ideals.

THE SETTING

A NARROW valley at the foot of Pine Mountain, every possible foot of it used for garden or playground, with the creek winding through, and buildings surrounding it. Some are on slight rises of ground, some cling to a steep hillside with entrances on two levels, some perch on benches of mountain itself. The walls of the bowl are Pine Mountain and the Kentucky Ridges, rising several hundred feet, and heavily wooded.

THE FAMILY

A COMMUNITY of a hundred young people, boys and girls over fourteen years of age, and in grades from the fifth up through High School, and some twenty-odd workers, who housemother, teach, supervise special industries, nurse, or the office, living together from August to May and providing among themselves all the labor, recreation, mental, social and spiritual stimulus to keep the family going and growing. The children this year are from six mountain counties, reflecting in the homes they come from all stages of development through which the Southern Appalachians are passing, from the super-rural to the small industrial town. Some are neighbors, some walk in forty miles from the country, some come on the railroad to the foot of the trail and cross Pine Mountain to get to the school. The workers are assembled from all sections of the country, usually through personal connections with people already here. Most of them are graduates of normal schools or colleges, though sometimes a worker of no special training proves invaluable because of her personal equipment. We believe that providing upstanding and inspiring teachers for our young people is our greatest obligation to them.

STUDENT OBLIGATIONS

AN entrance fee of $5.00, not refunded, and deposit of $3.00 which is returned if the student leaves with all debts paid. Book rental 25 or 35 cents a term, according to the grade of the student. Monthly tuition $2.75 a month, covering a large part of our academic expenses. Students unable to meet their cash charges, month by month, may stay through the summer to work out their debts.

All students work four hours a day to meet the cost of their food and laundry.

THE WEEK-DAY SCHEDULE

RISING bell, 5.30 a.m. Ten minutes’ work required before breakfast at 6. Dinner, 11.20, supper, 5. On Sundays we rise an hour later. The High School is in session from 6.45 a.m. till dinner time, the students working through…
[1]

P. 2

…the afternoon except for one free hour, given them to pursue their own special concerns and interests. Grades 7 and 8 are in session all afternoon, working in the morning, except for their free hour. Grades 5 and 6 have two short sessions, working before each, with free time after school. But some young people get up at 4.30, some at 3.30, to milk, get breakfast, collect the mail or make fires, and they are given a small cash payment. Their jobs are changed frequently so that nobody will suffer through loss of sleep. Free time after supper till study hour, which is supervised and part of the academic program of the school. Bedtime from 7 to 9, according to the age and physical condition of the child.

HOME LIFE

THE cottage plan, whereby children live in six cottages, keeps us free from an institutional atmosphere, and gives each housemother a world of opportunity. In these little families the children learn the happy use of their free time; games, reading, singing, needlework come to be the recreation for the moment and to develop the resources of the child. In the dining room the housemother sits with her family and trains them in table manners. She has a hundred chances to teach them the pleasant ways of courtesy and hospitality, to give them the physical and spiritual nourishment a home should give. Of course a housemother of mountain children trains her young people with special reference to the general lacks of the mountains, and tries to build up habits of order and cleanliness in each of her charges. To the new students she must seem a surprising person, and doubtless they size her up as did an old friend in a comment on folks that made a distinction between day and night clothing: “Pears like you’re a heap of trouble to yourself!” For she insists on two baths a week and clean, mended clothes after each one; she requires the wearing of night-gowns and has a sharp way of catching you if you haven’t taken off your underwear at night; she objects to the use of a sleeve or a co’tail for wiping the nose, and won’t even allow a feller to wring it in the nice free out-of-doors. But she goes on her relentless way, seeing that teeth are brushed daily, shelves and lockers kept in order, dirty clothes washed, itch, lice and bedbugs warred upon, and behind the routine of this habit training shines the spirit of her intentions.

“Order is a lovely thing;
On disarray it lays its wing,
Teaching simplicity to sing.
____

Whoso makes a thing more bright
He is an angel of all light.
Therefore let me spread abroad
The beautiful cleanness of my God.”

She is taking a belated chance to spread abroad this gospel.

INDUSTRIAL TRAINING

WE believe that students must be taught the foundation arts of their environment, and teach classes in sewing, cooking, laundry, weaving (which may become for some girls a source of income as a home industry), carpentry and furniture-making. Even more important is the daily training they are getting, as they earn their board: doing the housework, cooking and serving the meals, making our furniture, caring for the dairy, working the garden, keeping our buildings repaired and painted, our grounds picked up and orderly. Our only hired helper is a woman in the laundry, who does part of this never-finished drudgery so as to release the children’s time for other things they need to know. So, all the work of our large family is accomplished, a highly complicated task in a country apart from markets, telephones and easy transportation. A day or so visiting the bird’s-nest homes up and down one of the creeks makes the new teacher or visitor understand why this part of our work is so heavily emphasized. Furthermore, with the incoming industrial era, a desire for better homes, better living and greater beauty of every-day life must be created, or the mountain people will be the victims of circumstance rather than open- eyed choosers of their way of life.

ACADEMIC IDEALS

In our academic department we may follow afar off, but nevertheless we derive our inspiration from such schools as the Francis Parker [School] in Chicago and the Lincoln in New York. Ours is not a stereotyped graded school, and although we work steadily day after day by our plan of study, we can vary it for the needs of the student. When the program will not furnish space for a much-needed course in home nursing and child care, the teachers will sacrifice a dozen recitation hours in a…
[2]

P. 3

…subject less important for these girls, and of course they cheerfully put in extra time with a handful of pupils who need special help in college preparatory subjects. The individuality of each child is worth while. The claims of those who wish to take their last year at Berea or Lincoln Memorial [University] and will find use for all the credits they make here are no more interesting to us than those of a seventeen-year-old girl who will probably marry within a year, and we decide with care in what class she will get the best that she can take. The school atmosphere is living. Classes and assembly periods are used for the development of the children’s initiative. The teachers infuse with life the local occupations of the school and community. Friends have seen to it that we have excellent supplementary material, in the books in our library and living rooms. We try never to economize by continuing to use a dull or antiquated text-book when we have found an inspired one. To provide the mental tools for everyday needs and to make our young people alert, open-minded, and full of zest for enlarging their horizons, is our aim.

CULTURE AND RECREATION

As many thrills as possible! The swimming pool, basketball with interschool games,country dancing and ballad singing, which latter two simply develop the inherited culture of the mountains, charades and dramatics, junior clubs, moving pictures eight or ten times a year, mountain tramps and picnics, such high days and holidays as Christmas and Hallowe’en splendidly celebrated, these are the enlivenments of our leisure. Many country children have known no amusement except shooting matches for a beef or a turkey, many mining camp children none but movies or a trip to the railroad station to see the train run by. In this state the marriageable age is still set by law at twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, and dull lives have driven many undeveloped children to the only amusement they see within their reach, sweethearting. We believe that good times have as great a part as new mental interests in postponing any serious love-making, and they furthermore furnish a treasury of resource for the new homes that will by and by be started.

RELIGIOUS TRAINING

It is our wish to relate the children’s religious experiences to their every-day lives, to accustom them to quiet, worshipful service, to hold up the teachings of Jesus and to “bring them up in the nurture and fear of the Lord.” Much quiet training in the homes and in daily relationships is perhaps the most effective help we give them. There are regular Sunday School classes, mid-week and Sunday vespers in our chapel, and sermons from visiting preachers at frequent intervals. Mr. Zeigler, of Berea, comes to us twice a year for a week of preaching and of personal talks with small groups of young people who go to him of their own free will. The school is non-sectarian and makes no effort to recruit the membership of any one church, but strives to have its young people become followers of Jesus.

THE NURSE’S PROBLEMS AND HOW SHE MEETS THEM

THE building up of underweight children, by special food, tonics, rest periods.

The routine work of arranging for children to have their tonsils out, their teeth filled, their eyes examined and fitted for glasses. Clinics at the school take care of the bulk of the cases. Others are sent to Louisville, passes being furnished by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, and generous contributions of time and materials by the doctors themselves.

Hookworm treatments at the Infirmary for the greater part of the school every year.

Preventive work to stop colds, continual propaganda carried on with the aid of the housemothers to make the children get rubbers, wear hats in the rain, report colds promptly, etc. It is still a new idea in this country that a cold is contagious, and that it can be broken up, or better still, that it can be prevented.

Continual vigilance lest an epidemic of some contagious disease should get started. Emphasis on the importance of vaccination, inoculation and quarantine,  — another new idea.

Courses in personal hygiene, first aid, baby care and home nursing for our girls, many of whom will marry before they are twenty.

Treatment of thyroid cases in the school. This country is in a “goitre belt.”

In carrying out this program she works under the supervision of the doctor, who includes Pine Mountain in her rounds once a week. The emphasis of her work lies in teaching the building up of resistance to disease, the intelligent care of the body and the physical development of every child.
[3]

p. 4

EXTENSION WORK

Extension work is carried on partly from the school itself, but mostly from our two centers, the Medical Settlement four miles away, and Line Fork, seven miles away. The medical and nursing aspects of this work were those we tried to develop first, for there were tremendous needs to meet, enough to keep a doctor and two nurses busy continually. Much of their time goes to obstetrical work and child care, much to preventive teaching and public health work. The situations they relieve and the conditions they meet can be guessed at from one of the doctor’s experiences last summer in delivering twins by flashlight. Many operative cases are sent to Louisville, where surgeons take care of them free of charge. The people are coming to avail themselves more and more of travelling clinics. Domestic science classes are taught by other extension workers. There are Sunday Schools, clubs, playground activities, young people’s societies, and much home visiting. We are usually asked to provide the teachers for adjoining district schools, and often they make their home at one of our centers. One interesting part of our contract with the country school system is the week-end meetings we have monthly with all the country school teachers within a radius of ten miles. They come to the school for an exchange of experiences, discussion of their problems, and counsel with the most helpful speakers we can secure, so that a firm friendship is established.

BUILDINGS

The Laurel House, central dining-room building, with laundry and living quarters for 18 girls and 3 workers.
The Mary Sinclair Burkham Schoolhouse. Assembly Hall, used for Sunday School, meetings of all sorts, parties, plays and moving pictures. Five classrooms and Library.

Five dwelling cottages:
The Far House, home of 18 children and 4 workers
The Old Log House, home of I worker and 8 girls
The Big Log House, home of 3 workers and 16 children
The Boys’ House, home of 4 workers and 30 boys
The Farmhouse, home of 3 workers and girls.

The Infirmary, where the nurse, one other worker and two girls live. Wards for boys and girls and isolation room.
The Model Home, where one worker and three girls live, the girls changing every six weeks. The family does its own cooking, purchasing, laundry, and cares for a cow, working out the problems of mountain housekeeping as ideally as possible.
The Girls’ Industrial Building, with rooms for laundry, cooking, sewing and weaving classes.
The Workshop, where furniture is made and classes in woodworking for the boys are held. Blacksmith shop, potential garage and supply room.
Farm buildings: Tool house, poultry houses and barn. We have a flock of several hundred hens, a herd of ten cows, 6 heifers and bull, a pair of mules and a horse.
The Church. Given as a memorial. Used for Sunday meetings and midweek vespers. The Office.
The Pole House, — guest house.
Line Fork and Medical Settlement extension centers.

OTHER EQUIPMENT

A DELCO light plant.
A reservoir on the side of Pine Mountain, furnishing adequate water supply for all purposes, including fire protection.
A concrete-lined swimming pool, money for which was raised in great part by the children. The whole school family for one year saved the money of their regular dinner, once a week, by having a meal of rice and cocoa.
A playground and basketball court.

APOLOGIA

WHEN visitors are surprised at the pleasant atmosphere and the beauty of the place, we explain almost apologetically that we began our buildings with the determination to make them attractive and fitted to their surroundings even though we were limited to small sums. Once we were criticized for putting in “expensive casement windows”; as a matter of fact, our architect board member, Mrs. [Mary Rockwell] Hook, had pointed out that a pair of cellar sashes could make a delightful casement, costing even less than a double-hung window. The rhododendron and laurel we bring in from…
[4]

P. 5

the woods to plant around our houses may look expensive to a city or suburban dweller, but is just a bit of our own forest, and suggests to many a mountain visitor that one need not go far for “pretties.” Our stone and lumber were quarried and sawed on the place, our workmen have been neighbors, unskilled laborers learning their trade while they built. Our walnut trees have been turned into desks and tables and bookshelves in our own shop. And it is really cheaper to put oak on interior walls in beautiful broad panels than in narrow ceiling. It has been a delight to find that things need not be ugly because we are poor. We feel as if we were the victims of our virtues, however, when a twenty-four hour visitor says, “They must have plenty of money. Look how pretty everything is.” As individuals we were brought up not to “talk poor,” no matter how straitened our circumstances, and the policy seems a good one for an institution too. But you who support the school need to know that we watch every expenditure with hawk eyes, and must count every penny and then sometimes suffer the most acute anxiety over the completion of our budget. Don’t let appearances deceive you.

Budget. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $50,000.00
Income from:
     Annual subscriptions . . . $15,114.00
Regular unpledged
gifts. . . . . . 5,000.00
      Endowment Fund . . . . . . . . 3,470.00
                                                                     $23,584.00
Balance to raise every year. . . . . . . . . . .$26,416.00

     $5.00 provides food for 15 children for one day
     $10.00 pays for food and washing for one child for a month
     $15.00, added to his own cash payments, covers the cost of his tuition for a year
$25.00 provides for his home training for
one year
     $35.00 pays for his industrial training for a year
     $150.00 covers a full scholarship.

Special needs this spring:
$165.00 for text-books
$ 25.00 for subscription to our regular graded Sunday School lessons
$287.00 for garden seed, including seed potatoes and onion sets
$ 40.00 for additional fire extinguishers
$ 75.00 for infirmary supplies
$ 30.00 for scrubbing soap
$ 30.00 to repaint barn
$107.00 new insurance (We have secured a lower rate, and want to bring the amount of insurance carried closer to the replacement value of the buildings)

Material needs:
Wash cloths
Sheets for single beds
Holders
Individual towels, of unbleached muslin or crash, 14 x 14, with tape loop at corner
Aprons (We will send pattern)
Sewing and mending materials
Cotton dress patterns
Outing flannel
Unbleached muslin.

N. B. Please do not send us second-hand clothing or second- hand school-books.

THE OFFICE MAIL BAG

From Miss Elizabeth Hench, a trustee of the school since its beginning, who has been visiting us for two months:
“I am happy, happy in my visit. It has been a mental and physical stimulus to me. I feel you are proceeding along the right lines, industrial and personal habits first, intellectual afterwards. I think you are furnishing the right kind of religious stimulus, too. Beauty in surroundings I needn’t discuss, it is daily evident; you know how strong I am for furnishing the right atmosphere. I am proud to be a trustee of the school.”

From Mrs. James J. Storrow, of Boston.
“I think often of my visit to you, and am always impressed with the true taste of everything at Pine Mountain. There was no false note.”

From Miss Harriot Houghteling, of Chicago, prominent in Dr. Grenfell’s work:
“The whole experience was to me a glowing illustration of beautiful and faithful service.”

From Cloyd N. McAllister, Dean of Berea Normal School:
“The work you are doing is unique, of high grade, and producing great results.”

From a student who was obliged to withdraw before Christmas:
“I am sorry I can’t get to finish this year,…
[5]

P.  6

as I was getting along so well in school and liking it over there, but mother is not able to do the work. I have had so many people say, ‘Well, I have never seen so much change in anyone in my life as there is in Melvina since she has been to Pine Mountain.’ I will give Pine Mountain the praise for having such a good school for boys and girls.”

From Dr. Frances Sage Bradley, of the Children’s Bureau.
“We reached home yesterday after a most delightful visit. Adjectives seem bromidic, inadequate to express the extent and quality of well-being that one feels after such an experience. It is more than enjoyment, more than satisfaction and pride in seeing a group of people throw themselves so completely into the breach between the lack of opportunity of yesterday, and a carefully adapted program for meeting the needs of today.

“I love the spirit of youth, of joyousness with which both workers and children attack the business of the hour. This leaven of ginger, or unadulterated play, and of beauty with which you surround them, robs duty of its irksomeness, and daily routine of becoming deadly monotony. The picture you are crystallizing in their minds of life as it may be lived in the mountains will blend their pioneer heritage with modern achievement into invaluable citizenship. Uncle Sam owes you a debt of gratitude. Your children are to be congratulated, and so are you.”

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
Miss Katherine Pettit
Mrs. Ethel de Long Zande

The School is endorsed by the National Information Bureau, 215 Fourth Avenue, New York
[6]

The Marchbanks Press, New York


GALLERY: NOTES – 1926 November

When we [and the archaeologists] stopped digging [under the Indian Cliff], parts of nine skeletons had been unearthed, all buried in the sitting posture….

TAGS: NOTES – 1926 NOVEMBER: Katherine Pettit, Ethel de Long Zande, Indians, Indian workshop, cave, archeology, Dr. Funkhouser, Dr. Miller, Mr. Victor Dodge, skeletons, lyrics, funeral song, Adrian Metcalf, Old Log, Indian Cliff, cabin, grounds, William Creech Memorial Fountain, settlers, playgrounds, cooking class, workers, Singing Willie Nolan, ballads, Gabes Branch, Uncle William, Aunt Sal, Mr. Zande, list of workers, Mathy Grove, Mr. Browning, garden, canning

TRANSCRIPTION: NOTES – 1926 November

P. 1

NOTES FROM THE
PINE MOUNTAIN
SETTLEMENT SCHOOL

PINE MOUNTAIN * HARLAN COUNTY * KENTUCKY
Copyright, 1926, by Pine Mountain Settlement School

Volume II     NOVEMBER, 1926    Number 6

IT IS our good fortune at Pine Mountain that our historic background may be seen by the least imaginative eye. Anybody can see for himself a home such as his pioneer grandfather lived in; anybody, when he is plowing, may turn up an arrowhead. Anybody can sit under a cliff where Indians made the arrows, built fires, ate bear meat, were buried. We ourselves have shared the ardors of archaeologists and museum makers, for we have unearthed and treasured bits from the lives of Americans who lived here long before us.

There was a tradition that Indians raced their ponies in our valleys, and many flints and arrowheads, even stone hammers, found as we cultivated the garden, made us sure that Indians had worked here. But the finding of a real home of theirs was a thrilling experience for us.

Just outside our cultivated ground, on the north side of the valley, a beautiful cliff, small, but an “edition de luxe” of a cliff, tempts adventurous children to scale its ledges. Under its deep overhang, sheep and hogs sheltered before we built fences. Many young explorers have dug up the dirt there for bits of flint, and we called it the Indian workshop. One Sunday afternoon, when two or three children were playing there, a little girl said, “I’ve brung a mattock; I aim to dig me up an Indian.” And when the others had laughed at her and scattered to climb the cliff by every possible way, she set to work, turning over the dirt close to the sloping back wall. When she came upon big flat rocks, she pried them out and rolled them off just to see what was under them. A moment after, the other children heard her shout, “Come here! I’ve shore found an Indian!” She had dug up a skull. The excited group helped her get out the other bones of this skeleton, and found another skull. When grown-ups got the news they advised a halt till expert aid could be summoned; so the children relinquished their pursuit and waited till the real archaeologists from the State University, Dr. [William D.] Funkhouser and Dr. [Arthur M.] Miller and Mr. Victor Dodge, came to take charge. The mattock and the hoe then gave place to the kitchen fork, the toothbrush, and the sifter in the hands of a gentleman with infinite patience, and we humbly watched while the experts in zoology and geology analyzed soils and told us just where these early inhabitants had built their campfires and roasted their meat. Happy were those of us who went off with a treasure in our pockets, a bear’s claw, a deer’s horn, a raccoon’s tooth, or a bone needle, salvaged from the ashes of those ancient fires.

When we stopped digging, parts of nine skeletons had been unearthed, all buried in sitting posture, some with the bones of the turkey wings, that had been placed beside them for their last journey, still near by. Two of the skulls were of a very early type. There was one of an old man who had had trouble with his teeth. A tiny baby’s skull, whose milk teeth had never cut through the jaw, showed that the cliff was at times more than a hunter’s or warrior’s lodge. There were at least two layers of graves, so it seems that for several hundred years, perhaps only at intervals, the Indians lived there.

P. 2

When our friends had wired one skeleton to take to the University, and we had picked out representative bones for the biology collection, we buried the rest where they had lain so many hundred years, singing the old-time mountain funeral song:

“Been a long time travellin’ here below,
Been a long time travellin’ away from my home,
Been a long time travellin’ here below,
To lay this body down.”

It is to be said that many of our pupils and neighbors got no thrill out of this discovery, but wanted the dead left in peace, and were truly horrified at their first acquaintance with the Howard Carters of this world.

Withdrawn only a little from the daily paths of the school, the cliff is in most ways unchanged since the Indians’ time. It still gathers the sunshine and seems to make it warmer, and treasures the murmurs of the creek below; fronting it, the line of Pine Mountain still stretches on to Praise-the-Lord. But today one passes an idle hour there, with no weather ear out for the stirrings of game or a band of enemy hunters. Such concerns belong to a time long past.

The next home this valley knew was the pioneer settler’s. We have logs hewn over a hundred years ago, for Adrian Metcalfs barn, in our Old Log House, but a real pioneer cabin is being raised again a few hundred yards from the Indian Cliff and against the Pole House Hill. The children of Uncle William and Aunt Sal Creech have given us the very cabin Uncle William built for his family when he made ready his new home in the wilderness. Sixty years ago he hewed the logs with the help of other pioneers who had come over the mountain ahead of him, and were to be for many years his nearest neighbors, six and eight miles off. The house was taken down this summer and moved to the school grounds. We raised the walls in the old way, at a “working,” where men lifted the logs on their shoulders and notched them with the axe, to fit each its place. The roof will be of hand-riven white-oak shingles, and the floor of old hand-split board puncheons. Already the room is alive for us. There is the hole hewed in the back, with the wooden shutter on leather hinges, that let in light for Aunt Sal’s knitting when the cabin door had to be shut, and here, the “wide cracks you could fling a cat through.” All Uncle William’s children can point out Henry‘s “crying place,” a hole near the chimney, where the little boy, one of eleven in a one-room house, withdrew into himself, when he had anything to cry about. Here seven of Aunt Sal’s children were born, and eight were raised; here she spun and wove for them, baked and “briled” over the fireplace, rallied, scolded, loved, created a warmth of home in the poor room that drew everyone to her.

We shall preserve it as a landmark of the past, a cherished fragment of pioneer days. Aunt Sal’s loom and wheel and reel will be set here again. The old beds will stand in the corners. On the porch the stone hand mill, where the daily bread was ground, will idle the years away. Some of her kettles and pots will find familiar places by the hearth. A plum tree and apple trees, from her yard, a “bubby bush,” a rose, slipped half a century ago from Uncle William’s father’s place, hollyhocks and “pinies” and Aunt Sal’s favorite wood lilies will be planted in the dooryard. It will be as nearly as possible like the home those beloved, old people created in the wilderness, even though, as time goes on, there will be few to remember Uncle William, sitting by the hearth and telling of his hunts for bears’ and deer’s meat, of those yearly expeditions after salt to far-off Goose Creek, of the “sang”-gatherings when they dug up ginseng enough to trade for the year’s supply of coffee and ammunition. Especially on April the 13th and October the 30th the old house must be warmed and opened for the birthdays of the two who lived here, so simply and graciously, who thought and talked so largely that many boys and girls can bless them. May it keep alive for us not only the pioneer’s way of life, with its hardships and simplicities, but the warmth of two rare personalities, their fine achievement as human beings,-Uncle William and Aunt Sal Creech.

***

THE grounds and equipment of our school center, the playground, around which the schoolhouse, the boys’ house and the industrial buildings are grouped, are at last adequate and fast becoming beautiful. We could never spare from cultivation more than a bit of level land for playground in this hilly country, so new ground had to be…
[2]

P.  3

made by changing the course of the creek and filling in a bit of swampy ground with sawdust from a hitherto useless pile in the mill yard. Now the playground is twice as large, and there will even be room for a tennis court. The schoolhouse has a new two-story, colonial porch, and is now complete according to the original plans, able to serve its purpose adequately and to hold its own with our other buildings in appearance. The roads and paths have been built up from mud and mire with cinders and concrete.

The Uncle William Memorial Fountain, built of rough stones, every one of them interesting and beautiful enough to study, has appeared in a little triangle of green grass in one corner of the playground. Water comes from the nose and mouth of a strange, stone face, found up on Pine Mountain by Mr. [Luigi] Zande years ago. Stone seats flank the basin, where the boys from Boys’ House near by love to spend their free time. A bronze tablet, with the inscription, “In Memory of William Creech, 1847-1918, Patriot, Soldier, Benefactor, Founder of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, April 1913,” is set in the stonework. The water, made to flow up through the stone and down into a basin, with such ingenuity and beauty, is a miracle to our neighbors and a constant fascination to our children. Their whole experience is with creeks and wells and faucets, not with fountains.

All this work has been done by student labor. Mr. Zande and his boys, using every minute of good weather, have filled in new ground and built stone walls and ditches and worked over the lovely fountain. It has been the dream of years and the work of months, but at last we have a dignified and beautiful playground, with room enough for a hundred children to play, where we can have inter-school events and gather five hundred people together for the community fair or for the Fourth of July.

***

ELEVEN very clean, little girls, in gingham aprons probably furnished by your sewing society (or if not, won’t you perhaps some time send us some?) come trudging in every Tuesday morning from their homes on Gabes Branch, or Little Laurel, or “The Waters of Greasy Creek” for a cooking class. It is like turning back the calendar a dozen years to visit their class, so shy are their manners, so old-fashioned their speech, so amazed are they at water faucets and sinks. Their course includes instruction in proper dishwashing and the serving of food, to say nothing of pretty table manners while they eat it. Oh, yes, they told us, when they first came, they could cook; they could make biscuits and corn bread, and fry eggs, and fry “meat” (fat pork) and fry “taters” and fry chicken; but the cocoa and various forms of eggs, the well boiled and mashed potatoes, and gingersnaps and cereals they have learned to cook this year, to say nothing of the information about [vitamins] and calories and the proper food for children, are all becoming a part of home life in those little homes from which they come.

***

A DIGEST of our annual financial statement will be sent as usual, later in the year, to any who ask to see it.

***

WORKERS returning to Pine Mountain say, “It’s a wonderful place to come back to!” Miss [Katherine] Pettit, who has just returned from a trip around the world, dreamed of for thirty years, said that in one day after her arrival three workers said to her, “You may have seen wonderful things, but nothing more interesting and thrilling than what is right at Pine Mountain.” The atmosphere in these opening weeks of school has no heavy perfunctoriness, as of a grind dutifully undertaken, but is charged with freedom and a sense of possibilities ahead. Of course, our students themselves are neither sophisticated nor jaded with luxuries, but there is among the workers a happy unanimity of aim, an inspiring feeling that “Eden ain’t all built yet,” and each one can have a whack at shaping it. Some of this may be due to our youth — elaborate red tape and ready-made system haven’t had time to grow, here — but we hope that, as the school grows older, it may never lose its young heart, its sense of the adventure of life and education, of the world, full of a number of things, offering treasures to us all.
[3]

P. 4

OUR list of workers shows the stability and permanence contributed by those who have seen us through a number of years, and the right amount of young blood and new ideas that come in with new workers.

THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE (Here since the beginning)
Miss Katherine Pettit
Mrs. Ethel deLong Zande

THE ACADEMIC FACULTY
Miss Harriet Wood – 5th year
Miss Mary Work – 3rd year
Mrs. Emily Hottenstein – 2nd year
Miss Sallie Burger – 2nd year
Mr. McClellan Eversole – 2nd year
Miss Constance Wheeldon – 2nd year
Miss Mary Ann Smith – 1st year

THE INDUSTRIAL FACULTY
Mr. Luigi Zande14th year (Also superintendent of buildings)
Miss Anna Wulf2nd year
Miss Florence Daniels2nd year

THE HOUSEMOTHERS
Miss Ruth B. Gaines13th year (Also in charge of kitchen department)
Miss Bessie V. Gaunt5th year
Mrs. Louise Browning6th year
Miss A. W. Christensen3rd year
Miss Alice Ratliff – Ist year
Miss Rachel Davis
3rd year

THE FARM
Mr. W. B. Browning – 7th year (Previously a student here for one year)

DAIRY AND POULTRY
Mrs. Martha Burns – 3rd year

MODEL HOME
Miss Marguerite Emerson – 1st year

ASSISTANT TO MISS GAINES
Miss Emily Hill – 6th year (Previously a student here for five years)

NURSE
Miss Eva Heney3rd year

OFFICE
Miss Evelyn K. Wells – 12th year (On leave)
Miss Caroline HeinzIst year
Miss Emily Jones – Ist year

EXTENSION CENTERS
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Stapleton1st year
Dr. A. B. Withington3rd year
Miss Anna Brockschlager – 2nd year
Miss Anna Krauss – 2nd year
Miss Sallie Belle Whitis – 1st year

***

AN EXPERIENCE that comes to us all too rarely these days is a visit with such an old-fashioned ballad singer as Singing Willie Nolan, who can “sing you song ballets all night, and never the same one twice.” For some recent visitors from England he produced a ballad from the back of his mind which he had not thought of for twenty-five years. “I just ree-collected hit as I was a-comin’ down the branch this morning.” There it was, as unchanged and lovely as it must have been hundreds of years ago, — probably the better for having been forgotten by him for so long. Not a word was missing as he led us through the twenty-three verses of the lamentable story of Little Mathy Grove and Lord Daniel’s Wife.

Holiday, holiday, on the very first day of the year, year,
On the very first day of the year,
Little Mathy Grove went to the church, the Holy Word for to hear, hear,
The Holy Word for to hear.”

We took down the words and the tune, and flew to our English and Appalachian collections. We found that Singing Willie’s version of this famous ballad, once known through the length and breadth of England and Scotland as Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, was as full as any that could be found, more complete than any collected in our mountains, that we know of. Our English visitor, himself a collector of note in his own part of the world, said, “I had only to close my eyes to believe myself back in Somerset, listening to one of our finest traditional singers. He has the same vowel sounds, the same intonation, the same purity of diction.” And to Mr. Nolan he said, “I’ve come two thousand miles to hear real singing like yours.”

***

OUT of Mr. Browning‘s garden this season have come all the summer’s vegetables and green things, and celery and cabbage and winter roots will keep us going through the coming months. And by the time the apples are canned, we shall have put away nearly two thousand half-gallon jars of food for the winter, most of which we have raised ourselves.
[4]

The Marchbanks Press, New York


Previous:
NOTES – 1925

Next:
NOTES – 1927

See Also:
BIOGRAPHY – A-Z
BIOGRAPHY PMSS Workers Guide 1913 to present

BUILT ENVIRONMENT Guide
EDUCATION Guide
EVENTS Guide to Past Events
INDIAN Cliff Dwelling
MEDICAL Guide
RELIGION Guide

Return To:
NOTES Index