Category Archives: DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH

Dancing in the Cabbage Patch is a joyful and personal description of life at Pine Mountain Settlement School, Kentucky, seen through the lens of the author and those who worked at the school or those who lived nearby.  The narratives center on the main themes of farming, foodways, families, craft, people, and celebration and explore the years 1913 to the present. Like the dances of the region, the reflections here are broken into running topical sets that often relate thematically.

Dancing in the Cabbage Patch contains photographs, manuscript material, oral histories, artifacts, and external links largely derived from the PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL COLLECTIONS and family records. Tangible mementos of times past supplement the personal recollections and reflections of the author. The ruminations are mine alone. This Cabbage Patch of memories is pulled largely from the early formative years of my youth (1940s) when I danced as a youngster in this enchanted Cabbage Patch of Appalachia. My memories are nuanced by the later years of association with the School through my parents and friends, and as a member of the School’s Board of Trustees. No longer in my youth, my memories are both diminished and expanded by all that life has generously taken away and added in the intervening years spent in other geographies.

The fiddle tunes of words and often the ruminating dances shared here are, thus, mine alone. Music and dance are metaphors and not intended to necessarily represent the performance of the orchestra that is Pine Mountain Settlement School and its broader community. The personal songs and dances of the author are not intended to define the many dancers, ballads, and folk tales of the School or its Community, or any larger implied culture. Pine Mountain Settlement and the community people and the region are an ever-present orchestra, and this is but one dance among many that played here.

As a story of place, Dancing in the Cabbage Patch is written with the hope that some will identify with the feeling of dancing in their cabbage patch of memory and place. I am mindful that Dancing in the Cabbage Patch is a reflection on a region consumed by regional self-reflection. Many dances and songs will continue to be created as the history of Pine Mountain Settlement and its surrounding community evolves and changes with the many rich memories, voices, and talents yet to be discovered in this ever-changing world.

Across the world, other cabbages will be grown and somewhere a child may dance among them and sing and dream of lands across the seas, and stream their story in song and dance and later in 0’s and 1’s. Some will hold their stories close, but many will want to be singers, fiddlers, dancers, and storytellers… joy-makers of history and place. Appalachia is a story of place and a place of story. It is a storied cabbage patch place of memory.

Cows

Pine Mountain Settlement School
DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH
COWS

Cows

Ayrshire herd at Grapevine Knoll, Pine Mountain Settlement. [nace_1_052a.jpg]

THE COW

In the collection of the archive at Pine Mountain there is a curious and fanciful scrapbook of everything “cow”. Collected by Elizabeth Hench a member of the Pine Mountain Board of Trustees, the body of material celebrates the ruminating bovine. It is rich in images and quotables, as well as cartoons and paintings that capture moments all too familiar to those who share or have shared their lives with cows. Hench calls her scrapbook, “Joy Made History” and it features the Ayrshires that made up the large herd that became the pride of Pine Mountain Settlement School’s farm. But, that’s a later story. However, one particular fragment in the scrapbook collection caught my eye. It was a chapter removed from a little book of rural reminiscences called Bucolic Beatitudes by the author “Rusticus”. Published in 1925 by the Atlantic Monthly Press of Boston, the little book’s cow chapter was pasted inside the scrapbook. It was titled “Blessed Be the Cow.”

RUSTICUS

This one bucolic fragment by Rusticus calls up memories of the many cows I have known. The chapter charmed my imagination. It describes a chance communion of Rusticus with his milk cow, “Dolly” which changes his day of discontent to one of joy. Because I grew up with cows, it is not surprising to me that the mood change occurred when Rusticus made an unexpected bond with his “contented cow.”

Rusticus, as the author calls himself, had escaped a family gathering and small irritations on his farm by taking a walk. In the hot summer sun, he found a tree in his pasture and languished under its shade. Soon he was joined by the family milk cow, “Dolly” who also relished the shade of the tree. Dolly had ambled to the tree, and begun to chew her cud while curiously eyeing her owner. Both man and cow were soon prone on the grass not far from each other. Dolly chewed slowly on her cud and Rusticus ruminated on the relationship of man to animal as he stared at the contented cow. The following is Rusticus’ short description of their subtle communion

There being nothing else to look at, I looked at Dolly. She was chewing her cud. The slow rhythmic precision of her technique fascinated me. I particularly admired the sideways movement of the lower jaw. She stopped; a gentle genuflection of the neck was noticeable; and she resumed. I had never had a chance to observe a cow before and I made the most of it. I felt that I was seeing for the first time the noble dignity of her head, her broad fine brow, and above all the eyes, serene and beautiful.

Rusticus. Bucolic Beatitudes, Boston: the Atlantic Monthly Press, 1925, pp 58-9

Rusticus continues his observations until the cow stirred, got to her feet and started the path to the barn. It was milk time and a cow feels milk-time calling her. Man and cow ambled slowly to the barn where Dolly is the be milked by a farm hand whom Rusticus calls, “The Incomparable One”. The process of milking that Rusticus so carefully described in this little book is also documented in photographs taken at Pine Mountain in the early years of the School before the Ayrshire herd was begun. Though, I doubt that “The Incomparable One” would have ever shown up barefoot. ‘

Milking the cow in the barnyard at Pine Mountain Settlement School, c. 1918. mccullough_IV_135b

Dolly now in place … With hands and arms glistening from recent soapy ablutions, he [The Incomparable One] takes the pail and holds it to the sun. He examines every inch of it critically and with deliberate care … His examination complete, we go where Dolly waits. He takes his place on gently tilted stool; we stand to one side. He pulls his rolled-back sleeves an inch higher, his great firm hands are rubbed together and then the fingers flex in smooth preparatory exercises. He leans forward and gently touches each teat in turn. From each he pulls a tiny lactic stream and lets it fall upon the clean rye straw beneath his feet. This is not done because — as held by some — the first milk contains more impurities than the rest; it is a libation, a propitiatory offering to whatever god there be who presides over the destines of cattle and impecunious rural sentimentalists.

And now the upward glance. A little figure, each in daily turn, takes its place and Dolly’s swinging tail is gently held at rest. The pail is raised to its position between extended knees, and all is ready. I notice that the milker adheres to the proper school. I do not hold, myself, for a position with the forehead of the milker pressed against the bovine flank; rather I like to see the left knee gently touching the off hind leg. It is a satisfaction to see things done with a nice attention to detail.

An now we hear the first streams strike the bottom of the empty pail. The shrill staccato of their impact is the overture, soon muffled by the increasing flood. The cadence slows; we are in the full orchestral swing by now. The milker’s bowed head is slowly raised, and, as the white foam nears the top he looks aloft. He sways a bit on his tilted stool; his head moves gently back and forth like some inspired conductor carrying his musician through the difficult passages of a mighty symphony. And now the beat quickens, the little streams leap into the rising tide of foam with soft lisping sounds. A final volley; then a few soft notes, long-drawn, and it is done.

… ‘Half quart off to-night — the grass is getting dry,” he says.’


Rusticus. Bucolic Beatitudes. Boston:The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1925, p.64-66

The ritual described in this short passage from Bucolic Beatitudes, was repeated over and again on early small Appalachian farms of those lucky enough to own such a gentle bovine ruminator. But the chore of milking was most often accomplished by the woman of the household, not a man.

A humorous mountain ballad captures the load the Appalachian woman often endures in house and on farm. It also calls out the relationships that cows often make with the milker. Cows, like people come with attitude and some cows are not quite so cooperative or bucolic as Dolly. The following brief stanza from “The Old Man in the Wood,” that I sang as a child, describes what happens when the man of the household brags that he can “… do more work in a day, than his wife can do in three…”

THE OLD MAN IN THE WOOD

There was an old man who lived in the woods
As you can plainly see
Who said he could do more work in a day
Than his wife could do in three

“If that be true,” the old woman said,
“Why this you must allow:
You must do my work for one day
While I go drive the plow.”

“Now you must milk the tiny cow
For fear she shall go dry
And you must feed the three little pigs
That are within the stye
And you must watch the speckled hen
For fear she’ll go astray
And you must wind the reel of yarn
That I spun yesterday.

The woman she took the staff in her hand
And went to drive the plow
The old man took the pail in his hand
And went to milk the cow.
Tiny hitched, and Tiny switched
And Tiny cocked her nose
Tiny gave the old man such a kick
That the blood ran down to his toes….etc

After failing to complete all the other tasks he said of his wife

Yes, he swore by all the leaves on the trees
And all the stars in heaven
That his wife could do more work in one day
Than he could do in seven.


Jean Ritchie. The Swapping Song Book, Lexington: Univ. Press of KY, and collected by Pine Mountain Settlement School in the PMSS Song Ballads and Other Songs printed and published by Pine Mountain Settlement School.

Many of the nine Ritchie Family children attended Pine Mountain Settlement School and also nearby Hindman Settlement. Jean attended public school and the University of Kentucky later becoming a well known folk singer. See PMSS records for May Ritchie, Truman Ritchie, Patty Ritchie, Una Ritchie, Kitty Ritchie.

A happy ‘Dolly” cow being milked and fed. Where is the bucket? mccullough_III_096b

Cow tales abound in the Pine Mountain literature. And cow tails figure in many of the tales. When Tiny “twitched and Tiny switched” that was in reference to the switching tail used to dispense the many flies that often troubled the summer milk cow as well as troubling the milker. When Rusticus described the “little figure” coming to help the “Incomparable one,” he was, no doubt referring to some child assigned to this task. The photograph below, demonstrates the firm grasp of the tail which keeps it under control for the milker to progress.

Child tending cow to keep tail from switching on the woman milking. c. 1930s [nace_II_album_017.jpg]

FIRST, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COW

Not only is milking a challenge, first, in the early years, one had to find the cow. Before range laws were in place, cows roamed freely in Appalachia and in other places in the Country. The cows were generally fitted with cow bells to more easily locate them. The bells were not just auditory ornaments, they were a GPS system that children could use to correlate cow and sound. Before the cow could be milked it had to be found and brought in for milking and be secured for the night. The following story by a Pine Mountain School student (unnamed) describes the task of finding the cow — a chore that was often assigned —- like tail holding — to children.

AS I LOOK BACK

Oh, how I dreaded to see the time come just at sun set to hunt the cows, call up the dog and start up the hollow! How far it took, for the old belled cow was way up in the weeds and briars as far as she could get. I can still pant from climbing that steep hill knowing I would have to hunt for two hours maybe before I found them all. When I started from the house to get them, old Pide’s bell could be heard very distinctly but when she heard me coming not a tap of the bell would she make. Finally the dogs would find them all and down the hillside they would come with clouds of dust behind them, for they feared the sharp incisors that would clinch their legs. There was a reason why he never bit their tails; they were always too high in the air. Oh! how I dreaded to get to the gate with those cows for there were those pigs making their way like a terrific storm and we knew if they got out it would be another trip to the pasture field.

But sometimes we climbed up the cow pasture on our way to the Pine Knobb cliffs. There in the valley the house stands where the creek forks like a turkey’s foot. My mother and father are still living in it. Although on the cliffs we were a mile away, all that stirred around our house could be seen. Far, far away in other directions we looked into yet other valleys. At our feet were lovely tree tops where birds hopped from limb to limb and from one tree to another. When the sun hid behind the hills we started homeward. When we reached the big rock we would have to stop to satisfy our hunger from the store of walnuts we had gathered there. I’m sure our cracking stones are still in place. It was those times of fun we had cracking walnuts that made the thought of getting the cows, that never came by themselves, a little softer in my mind.

Anonymous. The Pine Cone 1937 Pine Mountain Settlement School newsletter.

And, that brings us back to Elizabeth C. Hench and her Joy Stock Company Limited Letters 1927-33. (People can ruminate just as can the cow.) The following is the last letter in her series of letters to those who so loyally supported the Ayrshire herd at Pine Mountain for many years. It is a fitting letter as it returns to the emotional contributions of cows to the world. Written near the end of the Great Depression, the letter is edgy with humor and anxiety.

The grand Ayrshire herd at Pine Mountain Settlement would last only a few years after the closure of the boarding school. When the expense and the labor to support the program and the new regulations regarding milk production came into play, the dairy herd became no longer viable. The last of the herd at the School was sold following the departure of the boarding  students.  The cow bells had been silent for many years and even the gentle communions with the cows of our ruminating neighbors became infrequent. Cows in Appalachia have now been replaced by the Dollar Store and mountain pastures now feed deer and elk that roam freely. But, neither deer nor elk will summer-nap with you under the same tree nor will they share their milk, or mellow your mood …

LETTER TO THE MEMBERS OF THE JOY STOCK COMPANY LIMITED 1933

Dear Stock-Holder:
Ordinarily I am as restless as a short-tailed bull in fly-time until I get the autumn cow letter off. But during the summer just past, to those of us in this section of the world, autumn, with its many days or rain, brought no terrors. As we oozed and mopped, we looked in vain to cows for relief. For, do you know, cows are weatherwise? Here are some of the signs:

1 — If a bull goes first to pasture, it will rain.
2 — If cattle lie down at once when they reach pasture, they want a dry bed before rain starts.
3 — If a cow licks a brick wall, rain will fall.
4 — If a cow lies down on her right side, rain will come soon.

But cows went placidly and contentedly on their way. What matter to them if springs went dry and creeks fell? The cow with the iron tail would supply them!

Contentment is so often spoken of as a characteristic of cows, that a quatrain I found does not ring true:

“The Worry Cow would have lived till now
If she had only saved her breath,
But she feared the hay wouldn’t last all day,
So she choked herself to death.”

Nevertheless, if the Joy Stock Company, Limited, and REJOICE, our cow, don’t have checks, we’ll be ready to sing The Tune The Old Cow Died On —

“There was an old man, and he had an old cow,
And he had no fodder to give her,
So he took up his fiddle and played her this tune:
‘Consider, good cow, consider,
This isn’t the time for grass to grow,
Consider, good cow, consider.'”

Those of us who have ridden along the main highways, have been enjoined by huge posters to roll our own, but how can REJOICE roll her cud without food?

If there be (notice the conditional tense) any of us whose incomes have not been slashed, and if there are any of us who can squeeze out a little money, let us send our checks soon.

From one who tries to keep the Milky Way
always visible at Pine Mountain,

[Signed] Elizabeth Hench

P.S. Did you realize that Amelia Earhart Putnam’s landing in Ireland was witnessed only by a herd of frightened cows?

https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=17147

SEE ALSO:

ELIZABETH C. HENCH Joy Stock Company Limited Letters 1927-33

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH The Dairy

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH Farm and Dairy Early Years

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH Farm and Dairy II Morris Years

ALICE COBB STORIES Howard Burdine Tail of Old Red

Mountains and Lucy Furman’s ‘Sight to the Blind’

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series: POSTS
Mountains and 
Lucy Furman’s Sight to the Blind

MOUNTAINS 

Lucy Furman’s Sight to the Blind is one of the most memorable early works written by a Settlement worker in the Appalachian Mountains. Her process of adapting to living in the mountains of Appalachia was both an inspiration and an education for women of similar interests – those who wanted to find purpose in their lives while challenging themselves in one of the most remote geographies of the United States at the time.

Lucy Furman arrived in Knott County in the Eastern corner of the Central Appalachians in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Her keen ear for speech and her equally observant sight have left her readers, one of the more honest accounts of life in the remote Appalachian mountains near Hindman, Kentucky. Her graphic depictions of the beauty of the physical landscape begin with the eye and ear of an “outsider” but it is soon clear that the term “outsider” meant little to Furman. The bifurcation of “insider” and “outsider” are often reduced in distinction by what some may broadly call our joined “human condition” – something that Lucy Furman knew all so well.  

In her writing, Lucy Furman weaves a panoramic picture of early rural mountain living with the briefest of narratives. In her novel, her literary eyes and ears are sharply focused on the life of one mountain woman, whose name is Aunt Dalmanuthy. It is Aunt Dalmanuthy’s “Resurrection” following cataract surgery on her eyes that gives the book its title. The novel is slim and brief in details, but broadly panoramic as seen through this story of “vision.” It is so much more than just another Appalachian hard-luck novel. It is an ode to mountains written in the early dialect of the region but rendered with reverence and remarkable accuracy.

First recorded in the Century Magzine in 1912 and then published in book form by Macmillan Co., the book immediately had a wide audience. The 1914  publication’s popularity was enhanced by the introduction written by the journalist Ida Tarbell, a well-known journalist of the day. Tarbell prepares the reader for the journey Lucy Furman has chosen to share. She maps out the terrain ahead by broadly outlining the remote social setting and appealing to women’s instinct for new adventure in the locked-down world of the early twentieth century.

The stature of Tarbell no doubt boosted the sales of Furman’s book,  but Furman’s small book, Sight to the Blind is for the author, Furman, a classic in Appalachian literature. Her small book was written just as Katherine Pettit, the founder of Pine Mountain Settlement School, and her colleagues from Hindman were working to establish a new mountain school in Harlan County, Kentucky. Furman knew Pettit and, like many who had met her through her role in the earlier founding of the Hindman Settlement (W.C.T.U School), Furman was intrigued by such bravery and applied to work with the early School at Hindman.

Lucy Furman, became a long-time employee of Hindman Settlement and a lifetime friend of Katherine Pettit and  Pine Mountain Settlement School. Settling in at Hindman, Furman soon became well-known for her intimate literary portraits of eastern Kentucky and particularly of her life at Hindman, the first rural settlement school in Kentucky.  First called the W.C.T.U Settlement, Hindman was established by Pettit and her wealthy Louisville colleague, May Stone, who shared many of the same founding principles as Pettit. The W.C.T.U name, or Women’s Christian Temperance Union, paid homage to the school’s primary benefactor. In Furman’s book Sight to the Blind, she captures the essence of the “temperance” mission and gives it an exclamation mark! Her W.C.T.U. admiration was, however, not shared by Pettit, who kept some distance from the tenants of the anti-alcohol manifesto of the W.C.T.U. organization. 

But, like Pettit,  Furman had a keen ear for the local mountain dialect and culture, and she also had a keen nose. She could tell when liquor was in close company and took some pride in ferreting it out. In Sight to the Blind, Furman uses all her senses in the novel to bring the reader as close as possible to time and place and people in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Those who have grown up in the area, as this author has, will quickly sense the reality, the language,  and the delight of that early time in the mountains that Furman recalls in her book.  Many still living near the waters of Troublesome Creek, or whose ancestors lived nearby, will, no doubt share Furman’s delight and the author’s despair in the habits of the rural community – habits that are a deep silo of literary fodder. The geography and the life of the area agreed fully with Furman and she remained for her lifetime.

THE STORY

In Sight to the Blind, Furman tells the story of a woman whose sight is impaired by cataracts and who rails about her dark world to anyone who will listen.  Her plaintive and sometimes raging invectives as the book opens are familiar territory to many who have had similar “quarrelsome” relatives or who welcome a venue to gripe about current status. Aunt Dalmanutha is especially quarrelsome and easily animated by the local preachers as well as the “do-gooders” from the settlement school (Hindman). With the preachers, Dalmanutha is especially cantankerous.  Who are they to think that her vision will clear if only she will open her eyes to God as the local preachers admonish. She takes issue with the criticism of compatriots for her ‘ornery life” which they blame on her impaired reception of their Christian way of life. Dalmanuthy is not one to go gently anywhere.

In relating the story of Aunt Dalmanutha and her family, the author reveals many of the classic struggles with faith found in the course of Appalachian mountain living in the first quarter of the twentieth century.   Furman graphically challenges some of the basic tenets of mountain preaching with what she experienced in her early urban Settlement Movement life. The local preachers, if any ever read her books, most likely saw her as “ornery” as Dalmanutha. The challenges described by Furman are the familiar challenges that ring throughout early rural settlement school literature and that today resonate so strongly with many women’s issues worldwide. It is this obstinacy of Furman that attracted the author and most likely inspired suffragist Ida Tarbell to laud the all-too-familiar worldwide women’s story, then currently playing out in the mountains of eastern Kentucky.

Ida Tarbell says in the opening lines of her Introduction to Furman’s  authorship of two novels

A more illuminating interpretation of the settlement idea than Miss Furman’s stories “Sight to the Blind” and “Mothering on Perilous” does not exist. Spreading what one has learned of cheerful, courageous, lawful living among those that need it has always been recognized as part of a man’s work in the world. It is an obligation which has generally been discharged with more zeal than humanity. To convert at the point of a sword is a hateful business. To convert by promises of rewards, present or future, is hardly less hateful. And yet, much of the altruistic work of the world has been done by one or a union of these methods. 

Harriet Butler, to whom Furman dedicated her book,  was one of the most beloved nurses at Hindman in its first years. She was later recruited to Pine Mountain Settlement to work with Pettit in her founding years in Harlan County.  Harriet helped to found the Big Laurel Medical Clinic, a satellite of Pettit’s newly founded Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County. In Furman’s story of Aunt Dalmanutha, Harriet Butler is clearly the nurse, re-named “Miss Shippen” in her book.

Furman’s precocious book captures the sentiments of local families for their mountain preachers, but through Dalmanutha and in Miss Shippen, Furman strongly questions the ” … cock-sure pride in the superiority of his religion and his cultivation,” seemingly taking a jab at the male preachers who often dominated life in the eastern mountains.

Back to the book, Dalmanuthy, urged by nurse Shippen to seek medical assistance in removing cataracts from her eyes, Dalmanuthy, is finally persuaded by Miss Shippen to pursue medical treatment for her eyes. She travels by train to a Bluegrass medical clinic, and there, the necessary treatment is successful. After many weeks in recovery at the home of her doctor, where she not only has her sight restored but is also given a new set of teeth and, more importantly, a “resurrection” in spirit, Dalmanuthy emerges a “whole” woman.

The story is a short one, but so very powerful in its literary comparison of the struggle of women to cope with Appalachian rural mountain life. The narrative places Dalmanutha as a strk contrast to the affluent life of women in the Bluegrass region.  On her return to the mountains, eyes wide open, she is Sight to the Blind personified. The dialect of Dalmanuthy, a woman who was severely impaired and poorly served by her environment due to the limited resources, is reborn powerful, eyes and soul now wide open to the world.  The physical limitations of her medical condition are removed, and with the new sight, she then recovers her self-reliance. She falls back into the well-known strong mountain reliance that some mountain women find, and some do not. But, is it enough for Dalmanutha?

The treatment to restore her sight was successful. But she is also reborn. As she travels back to her home in the mountains with her sight restored, she is quoted in the mountain dialect by Furman in what can only be called an Appalachian epiphany

‘But it were not till I sot in the railroad cyars ag’in, and the level country had crinkled up into hills, and the hills had riz up into mountains, all a-blazin’ out majestical in the joy of yaller and scarlet and green and crimson, that I raley got my sight and knowed I had it. Yes, the Blue Grass is fine and pretty and smooth and heavenly fair; but the mountains is my nateral and everlastin’ element. They gethered round me at my birth; they bowd down their proud heads to listen at my first weak cry; they cradled me on their broad knees; they suckled me at their hard but ginerous breasts. Whether snow-kivered, or brown, or green, or many colored, they never failed to speak great, silent words to me whensoever I lifted up my eyes to ’em; they still holds in their friendly embrace all that is dear to me, living or dead; and, women, if I don’t see ’em [the mountains] in heaven, I’ll be loesome and homesick thar.”

Furman, Lucy. Sight to the Blind, New York: McMillan Company 1914. With an introduction by Ida Tarbell.

Ida Tarbell speaks to this transformative event in her Introduction to the book

“A more illuminating interpretation of the settlement idea than Miss Furman’s stories ‘Sight to the Blind,’ and ‘Mothering on Perilous’ does not exist. … That to which we have converted men has not always been more satisfactory than our way of going at it.” 

“Our way of going at it” was, in Tarbell’s eye, better seen through the vision of women and not the men who handed down principles, good tidings, and doctrine, but governed by dire consequences from their pulpit and desk. Tarbell, Furman, Pettit, Harriet Butler, and many more women advocated for women to “settle among those who need them.” This was the ethos of the Mountain Settlement Movement that Furman and Tarbell felt at the beginning of the twentieth century and clearly nurtured in women who lived in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, there to mix and mingle with an ethos so often found in women living in other mountainous regions throughout the world.

THE MOUNTAINS

In Eastern Kentucky, it is impossible to ignore the mountains. They are both majestic and terrifying. They are sheltering and limiting walls of comfort. They are defined as dwelling places. They face one on getting up and one on going to bed. In Appalachia’s hollows, if the back is turned on one, another is in the face. It is not hard to imagine the dwellers of mountains all nodding their heads in agreement, smiling, or feeling a great lump rise in the throat when thinking about their/our mountains. But mountains defy ownership or specific worship. Go to the top of any mountain in the Central Appalachians, and mountains roll out like an ocean, broken only now by the yellow rock pushing its flat islands of recent surface mining along the horizon.

Mountains are jointly owned. Mountain dwellers hold as tightly to those mountains they can see as well as those they live near or below.  Sometimes even those that they cannot see, they know they are there. Those who live “in” the mountains are truly enfolded by the arms, the hollows, of mountains in Eastern Kentucky.

Distant view of 3 men tilling field; mountains & barn.[nace_II_album_085.jpg]

The students who attended Pine Mountain Settlement School and, later, even those students who came to visit in the environmental education programs, carried their own interpretations of “their” adopted mountains. In the early 1940s, a small poem written by a boarding student at Pine Mountain Settlement School described very specifically the mountains she preferred. The poem captures the disjoin of living in a town in the mountains and living “in” the mountains. The writer, Pine Mountain Settlement School student, Mildred Centers, captures the sense of mountain ownership.

I’m getting tired of this place. I don’t like being all crowded together.

I like the good hills. You know — where there is plenty of room for everyone and some to spare.

All I’ve seen are boulevards, streets, avenues, and building. All I’ve heard is the whirr of the motor and the rumble of machinery. And the people — crowded highways, jammed buses, workers packed in the street cars. the shrill voices of men, women, and children while going about daily tasks wear on me.

I like the hills. You know — the quietness, with only the chirp of the birds, the sigh of the breeze, the trickle of the brooks, the rush of the mountain stream. Best of all the quiet moonlit fields where paths lead from valley to valley.

I’d like to take a run up a long steep slope of some hill, find myself a seat on a stone, and whistle some good old mountain tune.

Mildred Centers. Pine Cone 1944  January.

Jack’s Gap, is a favorite place to run up to. [pine tree and one figure on rock] mccullough_II_069c

The Geology of Mountains and “Dowbles”

“Pine Mountain is a long and unique ridge in the Central Appalachian Mountains that run through the Eastern section of  Kentucky. It extends about 125 miles from near Jellico, Tennessee, to a location near Elkhorn City, Kentucky. Birch Knob, the highest point, is 3,273 feet above sea level and is located on the Kentucky-Virginia border.” (Wikipedia) Pine Mountain Settlement School is positioned near the Eastern terminus of the long-tilted mountain chain.”

The geology of the long Pine Mountain inspired writers, whether as part of the local mythology or within the carefully delineated and many scientific tracts that have been written about the creation and evolution of its singular geology. Mr. Napier entertains us with his “Observations on Pine Mountain“ when he describes the mountain as “…one of nature’s mysteries to be thought over.” He described to Katherine Pettit his view of the creation of the mountain as the remnant of a large river that originated somewhere near Long Island and was gouged out by the force of the water. He describes the Dowbles that one can experience when the ridgeline is walked. Some “Dowbles have retained the water and are treacherous swamps on either side of the mountain. He continues

You still see the signs of great river been flowed north east. You will find swamps, even marshes with more or less water followin’ the old river bed in different places the marshes are so bad that cattle gets in there and dies in the mire if they are not found and helped out. And decayed shells to show they has been a large water course the width of the clifts on each side of the Dowbles shows it has been the banks of the great river. By examinen the rocks on Both Sides of the old river bed it is plain to be seen that river flowed north east. If you notice you will get all kind of water flowin’ out of that mountain and you get the best proof of this by the lime stone in the Pine Mountain. The same lime stone you find several hundred feet below. Elsewhere the upheaval has raised the limestone ledge on Pine Mountain from a level of the lime stone bed found in northern Ky. around Lexington and Winchester.

To read more about Mr. Napier’s observations of mountains and their “upheavals”, visit the following page. Geologists beware …  but there is no doubt that Pine Mountain is “… a mysterious mountain that needs to be thought through.”.

Mr. Napier, Observations on Pine Mountain, 1 page
Come for a visit.

Pine Mountain is a long, narrow ridge starting in northern Tennessee and extending northeastward into southeastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. Its southwestern terminus is near Pioneer, Tennessee, and it extends approximately 122 miles (196 km) to the northeast to near the Breaks Interstate Park in Kentucky and Virginia.

Stones, More Stones and Scalloped Potatoes

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Posts: DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH
Stones, More Stones and Scalloped Potatoes

STONES, MORE STONES AND SCALLOPED POTATOES

VII 63 Life Work Maintenance, Farm, Grounds part I

Building stone wall. VII 63 Life Work Maintenance, Farm, Grounds.

TAGS: DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH Stones, More Stones and Scalloped Potatoes; Pine Mountain Settlement School; Harlan County, KY; stones; scalloped potatoes; rocks; agriculture; farms; farming; foodways; cooking; Raven’s Rock; limestone; geology; lime; lime burning; kilns; quick lime; Perry County; accidents; horses; horseback riding; doctors; Dr. Alfreda Withington;

On June 8, 1920 Katherine Pettit wrote to Martha Van Meter, a nurse at the Line Fork Settlement, requesting her to purchase some grey shambray so she could mount her paper maps and preserve them. She goes on to ask Miss Van Meter “How are you on library and office work and filing and such things or do you rather dig and pile rocks as I do?” Miss Van Meter’s response is not known but the exchange suggests that rocks were a constant measure of how one approached work at Pine Mountain. The memo also signals  Pettit’s deep engagement with the land and its geography and geology.

ROCKS AND THE PINE MOUNTAIN RANGE

The geology of Pine Mountain is very complex. But one component is much in evidence. That is the stone. Limestone, conglomerate, shale, shist, coal, and sandstone are in abundance. From the bothersome creek boulders to the giant Rebel’s Rock, or the beautiful Raven’s Rock arch, stones in the region can charm and confound.

Kendall Bassett Photograph Album, c. 1928-1929. [pmss001_bas001.jpg]

BURNING STONES  –  LIMESTONE AND LIME KILNS

One stone in plentiful supply in the Pine Mountain geology is limestone. Limestone is in rich supply in the valley of Pine Mountain. Often limestones and other stones were troublesome and were carried from the fields where they had troubled the plow. But some stones could be a gift. Limestone, for example, was a gift to the soil and to the farmer. Limestone is a stone that can be burned. But unlike coal, limestone, when burned, produces rich by-products. The richest of these by-products is known appropriately as “lime.” It is an important nutrient for many crops in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and helps to neutralize the soil’s acidity.

While the burning of limestone for lime has consumed considerable forest throughout history, it is still well-known as a boost for tired soil. Today packaged in various fertilizers, it continues to be added to the soil to support crops and enhance grazing land. Before the importation of commercial fertilizers, however, lime was wrested from the stones of the surrounding mountains.

The history of lime-kilns goes far back in the history of the world and no doubt the practice came to the New World with our earliest ancestors and settlers. Until the advent of commercial fertilizers, the production of lime through lime kilns (the burning of limestone) was common throughout much of rural America. It was, however, not so common deep in the small valleys in Appalachia. The practice of burning limestone for fertilizer, according to some, was a practice that Pine Mountain Settlement brought to many in the local farming population, though the practice of adding lime was in practice before the School was founded.

The so-called “lime cycle” starts with the stone — technically known as calcium carbonate and carries the chemical compound symbols of CaCO3. The limestone is stacked over a fire fueled by wood or coal and layers of limestone and fuel are then alternated to create a sizable pile that will burn for 10 days or more. This “pile” generally reaches temperatures in excess of 1200 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat from the fire cooks off the carbon dioxide, CO2, and leaves a rich residue of carbonates (calcium oxide, CaO). This calcium oxide, also known as “quick lime” can then be applied directly to the soil, or better, can be mixed with water to de-acidify the soil.

Building the llime-kiln 23_campus_work_052

Stacking the lime-kiln 23_campus_work_050

The lime-kiln fired-up and producing lime for farm land 23_campus_work_051

Quick lime can also be used to make “white wash,” an insect retardant “paint” often seen on the base of trees, or on fences or around the base of wooden structures in early Appalachian homesteads. Even much later, well into the 1950’s and 1960’s, homes sported trees with their bases white-washed or old tires painted white and filled with flowers or foundation stones supporting a home, carefully painted white. An important early use was hygienic. Lime was a key additive used to keep insects and disease at bay in the many privies of the Appalachians. Both lime and wood ash with its high concentration of lye were also used as alternative disease retardants in the privy. Today, lime is still used in water treatment and sewage treatment along with ferrous sulfate.

When quick lime is mixed with other additives, it can also be a key ingredient to strengthen concrete or added to stucco for the same purpose and for its pure white nature. It can bolster or build strong walls or can be used in ‘pointing’ stonework. Much of the concrete at the school used some local lime in the concrete mix. Today, the practice of burning lime has been replaced by commercial lime that may be purchased in fertilizer mixes and other commercial amalgams. The forest can be heard celebrating this turn toward commercial lime.

Analyzing and creating some of the early pointing concrete is an art. Pine Mountain has been fortunate to have Bob Yap’s good eye and deep knowledge of restoration when addressing many of the issues found in the stone foundations and sidings of many of the Pine Mountain buildings that have broken down with time. Yap’s annual workshops are some of the most exciting workshops held at PMSS. While Yap’s skills range across many restoration skills including window restoration, roof flashing, siding, fine carpentry, and so much more, he also addresses the vital skill or re-pointing rockwork. See the Pine Mountain schedule of events and workshops for dates the next series of restoration workshops.

STONES AND MORE STONES

Stones in the Pine Mountain valley are everywhere present. They fill stream beds, sometimes tumble down mountains, pose major obstacles in the construction of roads and homes, or provide the central building material of the same. They are rockwalls, laid dry-stacked one on the other and stone mantles above the stone fireplace. They mark the well-traveled paths around the campus. They hide the infrequent copperhead snake and the quick-witted “red-britches” ground squirrel. Stones are in evidence at every turn at the School and they are still being added to the landscape in the dry stack workshops that have now become an annual offering at the School.

hook_album_2blk__036

From Mary Rockwell Hook Album. [hook_album_2blk__036]

But, there is a difference between “cliffs”, “rocks” and “stones”.

Stone at the School can be found in flagstone walks and simple stream stepping stones. Rocks are often referred to as residing deep in the woods, where they are natural monuments with trillium tops and gentle fern and lichen-laced sides. They are places to sit for a stream-side picnic or a personal reverie. At Pine Mountain, almost no one is without a stone — or some affection for a “rock.” The Playground rock beside Isaac’s Creek is one of the most iconic rocks at the School. The large rock (no one calls it a stone) is nearly encased in the root of a giant poplar tree and provides many nooks to play or sit, or cut hair.

2457 Clyde Blanton and August Angel cutting hair at large poplar on playground, 1930s. [IX_students_09_2457_001.jpg]

The stone steps of Boy’s House have long been a favorite photography venue for Board pictures, students, and solitary musing. A special stone pulled from the steps of the Creech cabin was crafted by Andy Dorsky, a talented stone carver, into a seat where visitors may view the cabin.

POTATOES AND ROCKS

Not all rocks are stones. Potatoes were a popular crop in the mountains, but rocks and potatoes do battle in the field. It is difficult to grow potatoes in rocky fields, thus all workers took on the task of clearing the fields of rocks and turning them into construction stones:

“Another piece of economy has been the application of the two-birds-with-one-stone theory to the loose stones on our cultivable ground. We have secured building material for two sanitary closets and a fine tool house by gathering wagon loads of obstructive stone from our potato fields. As to rocks, we still have more worlds to conquer and we shall use them for building and retaining walls, paving, and roads.”

Nov. 14, 1914, Letter to Friends from Ethel de Long

DRY STACK CONSTRUCTION AND SCALLOPED POTATOES

In recent years Pine Mountain has held several workshops in dry-stack wall construction. The sinuous wall along the road from the Office to the Industrial Building (Plant Center) is a good example of the work of dry-stacking.

P1050413

Stone wall along road from Office to Industrial Building. [P1050413.jpg]

While it may be a stretch to compare stacking potato slices to something like stacking a dry wall, the art of stacking can make all the difference in a random pile of rock and a random pile of potatoes. Both can become an aesthetic work of art, or a tumbling pile of mush.

Dry-stack rock work was a workshop offered at the School and it can be a valuable skill for both a gardener or a cook. Both take a good eye! Dry-stack rock work may be seen throughout the School campus. Many of the walls are early drystack, but many are also the new and repaired work of the dry stack crews in training. A recent preservation workshop that re-built the wall just east of the Office were possibly treated to a meal with scalloped potatoes. It is not known if the masons were rewarded with the scalloped potatoes, but the following recipe is one drawn from the records of the School and would go well with a day of dry stacking.

SCALLOPED POTATOES

Scalloped potatoes? They actually have much in common with stacked stones. Potatoes are often what cause a stone to be moved, removed, stacked, broken up, hated or other actionable scenarios. Like dry stacked walls, scalloped potatoes are laid into the pan one slice on top of the other. In the kitchen the idea is “light-weight” but in the field, it is an exercise in heavy lifting.

SCALLOPED POTATOES

3   LB potatoes
4   T butter
4   T flour
2   t salt
1/4  t pepper
2  cups milk

Pare and dice potatoes and put in a buttered baking dish, sprinkling each layer lightly with the flour, salt, and pepper. Pour milk and melted butter over the potatoes. Cover, bake in moderate oven for 60 to 90 minutes.

Recipe in The Pine Cone, May 1935

GALLERY OF STONEWORK AT PMSS see ROCKWORK

Stones were life-long labor for farmers at the School as well as in the community farms and gardens. Some areas were more troublesome than others. The barnyard seen here was slow to be cleared of these troublesome partners of most mountain soils. But when “clearing” was completed, the stones were ordered into a rough paving behind and in front of the barn where the mud and muck was an ever-present nuisance.

Barn. Early construction with stones littering yard. [II_7_barn_281.jpg]

LIke the barn, other locations benefitted from the rearrangement of stones.  Stones were often an advantage when they were re-arranged and sometimes even if they were not. Before they were used as paving stones in the barnyard where the soft earth could quickly become mired with manure and mud, the native stones, though lacking organization, kept the yard drained and the feet of livestock sore but dry.

HORSES AND ROCKY ROADS, TRAILS AND PATHS

The stories of negotiating rocky streambeds on the backs of horses or in wagons abound in the Pine Mountain Valley. Steep mountain slopes and laurel thickets offered poor trails and often the thoroughfares were the streambeds. One story stands out in the myriad of tales of rocky-stream mishaps. This tale of the fall of Dr. Alfreda Withington on a dark night medical call is particularly memorable. In her own words from her autobiography, Mine Eyes Have Seen (E.P.Dutton & Company, 1941) she describes the 1926 accident that began when she was called to treat a child who had been badly burned. Dr. Withington had stayed the night with the family. As she started the next day on the long trip back to the Medical Settlement at Big Laurel by horseback she had what she described as “bad luck.”

It was the next day when I was returning alone from this visit, that bad luck overtook me. As Maud [the horse] was going downhill she stumbled on a rock, falling and hurling me straight over her head, so that I struck almost squarely on my face. I remember the sensation of hurtling through the air and hearing a crash. Then there was a blank

A mountain woman was standing over me when I came to. I had an awareness that something was wrong; putting my hand to my nose felt it crunch, and it was bleeding terribly. I told the woman to give me my kit, and lying there I manipulated the grating bones, straightened them, and poked some gauze up my nostrils. Though faint from loss of blood there was nothing for me to do but remount and ride the four miles home.

The next day my face was swollen beyond recognition. I rode thirteen miles more to the railroad and took the night train for Louisville to consult a specialist. He said I could be thankful indeed that my malar bones were not smashed; a stiff hat saved them.

“What I do every Friday. M.K.. [Marian Kingman] Along Grease [sic] Creek, Pine Mountain, Ky.” [kingman_098a.jpg]

Dr. Withington’s tale was repeated many times over by staff at Pine Mountain and the community families whose only roadways were streambeds and rocky hillsides. Most could identify with her “bad luck” as they had either experienced it or knew someone who had. Dr. Withington was 65 years old when her accident occurred. She was slowed down for a while but she continued to ride in streambeds and along narrow ledges above streams in order to serve the many families needing medical attention for many more years. She left the stones of the Kentucky mountains in 1931, finally retiring at the age of 70,

SCENIC ROCKS AND HIGH PLACES

Indian Rock, Rebel’s Rock, Raven’s Rock, arches,. Sandstone cave…..

STONE SOUP

Besides scalloped potatoes, there is Stone Soup. Any soup may become “stone-soup” when a clean and dense stone is heated intensely and dropped into a soup pot. It acts like a slow cooker and it both cooks and maintains the warmth of a meal. The following is a pleasant winter stone soup made from stored and home-canned goods.

Vegetable Stone Soup

1 cubed onion, braised (or added directly to pot)
1 qt. jar of tomatoes
1 qt. jar of corn
1 qt. jar of green beans
3 cups of beef broth
1 tsp dry oregano
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper

One clean medium stone thoroughly heated. Place stone directly in soup mixture. Let cook for 1 hour. Patience. Re-heat stone, if needed. Serve with cornbread. and cold buttermilk.

To explore the many uses of stones and rocks at Pine Mountain a quick look at the built environment, of foundations, steps, walls, etc..  All will give a good overview of the value and required skills to utilize this building material. Buildings that are noteworthy for their rockwork are the Chapel, Laurel House II, and Draper Industrial Building. Rockwork, as seen in ROCKWORK at PMSS can also demonstrate some of the troublesome aspects of this medium.

PLAYING IN THE ROCKY, STONEY, BOULDER STREWN CREEK

Ann Angel Eberhardt, the other editor and voice on the Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections website (there are two of us) shared the following story. Ann is a cousin, a friend, a writer and a superlative sounding-board. Her father is the hair-cutter in the photograph above.  When she read this piece about stones …  she felt compelled to share some of her memories among the stones of Pine Mountain. I am sure other readers will have similar memories especially of the creeks of Eastern Kentucky. I asked if I could share her memories of visiting near the right fork of Mason’s Creek in Perry County.

Your article reminds me of those times my family would regularly visit Mom’s people, the Halls, in Viper in the summers of 1940s & early 50s. We cousins would spend most days setting up little “playhouses” on the huge boulders in the creek. Each of us would have his or her own boulder (stone?) and use twigs, pebbles, stones, discarded items, and anything else we could find to create our playhouses. One cousin even directed the creek in a way to have “running water.” There was a perfectly round hole in the rocky creekbed that we called “Indian’s washbowl.” It was probably formed by eons of circling pebbles that the creek water washed into it.

Sound familiar?

Helen Hayes Wykle

SEE ALSO:

FARM and FARMING Guide
FARM Guide to Resources
FARM LIME KILN Processing

ROCKWORK AT PMSS

Weaving, Natural Talents, and Natural Dyes and Becky Mae Huff

Pine Mountain Settlement School
DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH
Weaving and Natural Dyes and Natural Talents and Becky Huff

Weaving, Natural Talents, and Natural Dyes and Becky Mae Huff

Exhibit of weaving and woven craft. [norton_021.jpg]

WEAVING WOES

Weaving may look very easy. Back and forth, back and forth, and voila! a lovely “runner” for the chest of drawers. But neither life nor weaving is that simple. The most exquisite weavings come from those weavers with natural talents, diligence, and a strong sense of self-worth and a designer’s eye. Becky Huff was one of those weavers of both cloth and life. She was one of the first children to attend Pine Mountain Settlement School c. 1914.

By 1930, shortly before Katherine Pettit’s retirement, she {Pettit} tried to recruit Becky back to Pine Mountain as one of Pine Mountain’s most talented weavers.  She had been trained by Pettit and others and was an expert weaver, dancer, and institutional historian. Pettit wanted her to come back to the school and mainly resurrect the weaving program but there were other assignments. The letter, a full pleading page from Katherine Pettit, lays out the generous terms of employment if “Beckie” [Becky] would return to Pine Mountain to develop a weaving program, teach a few dance classes, and possibly perform several other tasks as required, she would be housed, salaried, and back among friends.

It is uncertain where the plea originated, but clearly it points to Katherine Pettit trying at the end of her life to bring back the craft on which she founded the School headed by one of her favorite students. But it was also more than that. Becky had been there with her as a child in her first years at the School in 1914 and forward.  Becky, while remembering those Pine Mountain first years to her family noted that as a child she was charged with bringing Pettit her breakfast each morning. Pettit and many others also remember Becky as the sister of Almon Huff. Almon was one of the students killed when the new School House caught fire and burned to the ground, killing Almon,  three other students, and one teacher. Miss Pettit and Becky shared many memories.

Pettit’s letter was written as she was preparing for retirement and her final days with the School. Pettit continued to center weaving at the height of the Depression — at the center of a  era unlikely to want to spend precious dollars on craft.  Her actions are difficult to asses — to explain her belief in a market that could balance the full throttle of Depression with craft sales and a School charging ahead into a new educational mode that did not place craft on the front line. In some ways Pettit’s plea captures the tension, desperation, and confusion of the 1930s across the country.— The Great Depression is still bearing down on the country following the 1929 crash, unemployment is rising and unstable, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff passes, the Dust Bowl is ravaging the agricultural centers of the country, and poverty is everywhere, and Pettit wants to teach weaving.

The country was desperately searching for solutions as Americans desperately searched for work.  The new discovery of the planet  Pluto diverts attention for a brief time as the newly abandoned populace looks to the planet and wishes they could escape there. But there are no easy answers. Somehow, this all sounds all too familiar.

The Smoot-Hawley Tarriff initiated during the early years of the Depression — the economic down-turn was a disaster.  It raised import duties on over 20,000 goods by roughly 20% to 50–100% in some cases. While it aimed to protect agriculture, the farmers of America and related industries tanked, and the Great Depression ravaged the country as so well described by Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.  As a result of Smoot-Hawley the  country’s trade partners retaliated, and the trade battles caused a 66%  decline in world trade for nearly five years and the retaliatory tarriff on the USA — on Harlan County and its coal. The tariffs set off the Great Depression, and in an area that could little afford further declines in its near-poverty living standards.

Did Katherine Pettit win Becky back to Pine Mountain? Was this the end of the weaving program? Read on. See BECKY MAY HUFF Student Staff

THE LETTER    (Katherine Pettit to Beckie Huff)
April 2, 1930

My dear Beckie [Becky].

I have been wondering what you’re going to do about your job next winter? Miss Gaines  [RUTH B. GAINES] says that you are expecting  to come here. Although I have not received any word in reply to my last letter. Asking you definitely about it. Now, won’t you tell me very definitely? if you would like to come to take charge of the [weaving] department. Although I will not be here. Miss Gaines will be here to carry the ideals and standards that we have set. I should like to know if you are interested in our plans for this department and if you will help me to carry them out. Will you fill out the enclosed questionnaire that I may have it for our files as we require it of all our workers.

Did you know that, Mrs. Wilmer Stone is just getting published her [Katherinde Pettit book ] book on vegetable dyes. I saw an exhibition of her weaving. In Knoxville last week, where there were many very beautiful things, and hers was the most beautiful. Again, she told me if you could  do so next year, she would be so glad to have you come to North Carolina and teach you all she knows about vegetable dyes as many people think she is wonderful at that.  It seems to me it would be a great chance for you. Miss Ruth B. Gaines thought that you would also be interested in helping out with the country dancing, gymnastics, and singing games. Mrs. [John C.] Campbell, and Miss Butler have offered to take any people who worked in the mountains there for 10 days and let them have special instructions from their [John C. Campbell’s] Danish gymn teacher, and if you go to Miss Stone in Saluda, NC. would you not like to go to Mrs. Campbell’s [John C. Campbell Folk School] while you are there, for those special lessons?

We have a chance to get a wonderful weaving teacher — 35 years old. She would like to have a permanent job, and if you know positively you do not want to take this job, we shall certainly take her, for we are so anxious to get it [weaving] on a permanent basis. Run year by year by the same person. Now, Beckie May, if you are likely to get married within a year or so, as most young girls do, we want to tell us very frankly so that we may know how to plan for the future of this department. Miss Gaines is so eager to have you come and I think you could have an awful good time living at Laurel House with her and Emily.

Saturday is Aunt Sal’s Day, and all her family and friends are coming here for dinner with us in her little cabin and to see her great-granddaughter weave on her loom the same kind of a blanket that her great-grandmother taught her. Now I wish you could be here for such an interesting occasion.

Woman weaving at “Old Loom.” [nace_II_album_020.jpg]

Now tell me about yourself and what you had been up to all this time and if you really think this is what you want to do next year? Are you coming to see us as soon as school is out …
p.2
… and will you be here for our Mayday and pageant of olden days? Miss Bolles is coming soon, and I wish you could be here all the Spring with us as we dance.

Yours sincerely.

Miss Becky May Huff
Methodist School
Olive Hill, KY
KP/B

1930 saw the initiation of  the  high-school boarding program just one year before the arrival of Glyn Morris and his Progressive Educational agenda that set a new course for the School from 1932- 1940 and just two years following the death of Ethel de Long Zande on 1928 from cancer.

Pettit’s letter captures the void left by Ethel de Long’s death and the uncertainty of the world between the Wars, the Coal Wars raging on the other side of the mountain, and the slowly healing Great Depression. It was one of the most fragile times at the School as it struggled to find its educational direction.

Becky Huff

Going and Coming Back I

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Post: DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH
Going and Coming Back I

Going and Coming Back I

A personal reflection on Appalachian migration.

“The effect of mass migration has been the creation of radically new types of human beings: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves — because they are defined by others — by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves.”
Salman Rushdie

“It seems to me from my personal experience that there is kindness everywhere in different proportions and more goodness and tenderheartedness than we read of in the moralists.”
                           Elizabeth Barrett Browning

These may seem strange companions in a discussion of migration — Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth Barrett Browning — yet they both share an understanding of our deeper selves as that self is forced to change locations. Change reaches into the core of what makes us human regardless of the change and our origins. Migration can tear at our core in ways we are still coming to understand. In Appalachia migration has been a constant theme that runs throughout its history and our conversations. So is the idea that others can redefine us as “migrants”.  The word “migrant” can make us defensive and not just because we are perceived as “something else” from “somewhere else.”  It is much more complex.

GRANDFATHER

My grandfather was always on the move, going and coming from somewhere else but always returning to there —to Appalachia. He didn’t have a car. He was left to the many devices of journeying. Neither did he have a career that kept him moving up the staircase of advancement in the ways we understand advancement today. He simply moved. That was his advancement. He changed his location and with it, he changed his sense of self. Though he mined coal for much of his life, we never knew many of the other jobs he worked into and out of in his goings and comigs. But we knew him because he was always coming back and he was always full of stories.

“Papaw,” the Appalachian term of endearment, or not, — for the fathers and grandfathers of children growing up in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, was always going and coming back. He kept the flow of life in the household unsteady, but he also kept it animated by expectation. When he returned, the household filled with somber but expected and at times unspoken conversations. Where did you go? What did you do? Who did you meet? What was it like living … there? Did you miss us? Silence. The silence in the house dictated by our grandmother Daisy, whom we affectionately called “Daa”, was palpable. Our questions and the non-answers often hung in the air with their weight of deep anxiety. But the silence was always temporary. When the house filled with family, with the sons, the wives, and their sons and daughters, the voices and laughter, stories filled the rooms. The memories of family, together, flowed like healing waters over all the unspoken answers to Papaw’s going and coming. Our Daa, his wife, kept him in her wary view and could silence his answers with just a gaze. He had gone one too many times.

DAA

When we gathered, Daa often filled her table with fried chicken, cornbread, ham slices with red-eye gravy, fried oysters, pickles, mashed white potatoes from the garden, cole-slaw, and fried sweet potatoes — crisp with hard sugar edges. We playfully juggled for chicken legs, yearned for four-legged chickens, and made jokes about the “toot” which Daa always left on the bird. No one got enough sweet potatoes, and we rarely had room for the blackberry cobbler, but we ate it anyway.

For us, coming home was a celebration of family and the wealth of the table. We, the family and the cousins, repeated this ritual many times in the early years of growing up. Our visits were frequent because we never lived far from our grandparents. We traveled from Pine Mountain Settlement to Coxton, a coal camp in Harlan County, Kentucky, where our grandparents spent most of their lives; first, as residents of several coal camps and later in a house they bought near the Coxton coal camp on the road to Evarts. Our coming and going was across the county of Harlan, or up and over the steep  Pine Mountain to the valley where my family lived, at Pine Mountain Settlement, a beautiful little community nestled between two steep mountains and beside gentle Isaacs Creek, the headwaters of the long and beautiful Kentucky River. 

GOING IT ALONE

Papaw left home many times, but the most telling time was when he left — really left Daa and their boys. She had just been diagnosed with tuberculosis. In a coal camp, tuberculosis was held to be a slow death sentence. Daa still had young boys at home — five of them. According to apocryphal tales told by cousins, Daa had told someone that Papaw, when he left, said he had to go because he did not want to stay and watch her die.

Given the common prognosis, his expectation that she would die was not unrealistic, many tuberculosis cases in the camps ended in death, but it was cruel to have said it out loud. Daa had been diagnosed with tuberculosis.  During those years many tuberculin cases ended badly. But, this going away seemed most cruel if that was what he said, and if that was why he left. Some of us never accepted this story, but clearly, Daa never forgave Papaw for his thoughtless words, whatever was said, and silence often sat in the house like a deep fog when the two were together. 

If he said all those things, it did not enter into his grandkids ‘ heads as cruel as it now sounds.  We could not get enough of his tall tales. His awful prognosis for Daa did not come through in his stories and his love of his grandchildren. Both grandparents, it seemed, feared being alone in the later years of their lives.  Whether it was fear of being alone, or the threats of the labor wars in the mining camps that had led to his departure, Papaw left during the strike years of the 1930s. These were the troubled years that brought silence to later conversations.  Daa, even in her anger, filled up those years with empty places that were only grasped when reading family letters and the snippets of stories shared by the sons. But, during those years, the family held together.   Pine Mountain Settlement was part of that glue. Daa was angry but pragmatic. Her sons were resolute and creative. They never gave up trying to entice him back home. Daa was clever, and she found ways to carve out pieces of her dreams. It all would finally work out she believed.

The 1930s in Harlan County were not easy years, with strikes and union unrest, and violence. Daa’s “disease” could easily have been fatal, and so could so many other diseases of the day. A random bullet could have instantly broken the tight bonds of mother and children. Bad things happened in coal camps, but they could have been much worse. In many ways, Papaw’s prognosis was just as stark as that of Daa tuberculosis. Black lung ended the lives of most miners, and the unpredictable cave-in of a deep mine could crush the life from a man in an instant. Union thugs could target whomever they did not like, and disease could randomly kill anyone. When Papaw left to take jobs in Detroit and the industrial north, or to Colorado, or wherever he went in his mysterious departures,  I always believed that he knew he was saving his life and the life of the family. The industrial factories had their own labor strife and workplace dangers, but dying was not generally a common outcome in Pawpaw’s mind. When he left, I am sure he aimed to be lucky for later.

But Daa, with her lung disease, her tuberculosis, needed luck right away. Dr. Clark Bailey, a doctor in the town of Harlan, and a Pine Mountain Board of Trustees member, had diagnosed her disease early on, had found a sanatorium in Louisville where she could possibly be cured. Dr. Bailey learned of an experimental treatment of the deadly disease practiced in the Louisville program. Through Dr. Bailey, Daa had also learned about Pine Mountain Settlement School, a progressive and affordable boarding school for mountain children, and with his help, she started the process of enrolling her sons. Though Daa had only an eighth-grade education, she had been called on from time to time to teach in the coal camp school and later served as postmistress. She knew the value of an education, and she aimed for schooling for her boys.

When she learned from Dr. Bailey of the Pine Mountain program and that the sons could earn their education through a work program, she planted the seed of that idea in her sons. The older sons could pay their way through work and also earn money in the summer to help pay for their younger brothers to attend the boarding school and, later, perhaps, save funds for their mother’s care. The plan, as it turned out, was a good one and Daa’s tuberculosis was slowly  healed, the boys went to school, and Papaw was for a time not deep inside a mine. But, the wound of abandonment, the going away and Papaw’s long migration history, was not so easily healed.

WAR AND MIGRATION

In the mountains of Appalachia, wars also created migrants in the sense that many young men left the mountains and never returned, or if they did return, they carried with them the changes wrought by new and brutal experience but often romantic tales of far-off battles in far-off places. Papaw’s brother fought in the Boxer Rebellion and also in the Spanish American War and when he returned he brought the romance of far-away places. All but two of Daa’s five sons fought in WWII. One of the two sons died from a coal camp disease — chronic diarrhea. Another became a farmer. Daa cried when her sons went to war but her “babies”, as she called them even into adulthood, went anyway. Going to war was a noble and necessary act for the country and the sons adopted those noble ideals. They took on the journey to war with relish and looked forward to the chance to travel, to adventure and to do something that would stamp them with the noble entry into manhood.

But not all noble ideals end well. When Uncle Silven, Daa’s oldest son went to fight in France, he returned to the mountains, in a coffin nearly five months after his death. His service was lauded throughout the community and within the family and by his wife, Alline. His body returned from the distant and foreign war to the war being waged in the coal camps as mines ramped up to support the war effort. His death filled the house with grief. His coming back brought foreign lands to the mountain family, and all the myths of exotic lands exploded with his death.

Silven’s story has been repeated many times over by Appalachian families and their mountain sons. The heroes, the wounded, and the families of the killed in action, like Daa’s family, shared how they were so proud of their heroes as they filled the rooms with tears. Silvan had been missing in action, and throughout the long five months it took to determine his fatal end, Daa wrote stacks of letters. When his death was confirmed, she shed tears of relief and of grief. Daa’s family and other mountain families then came face to face with another kind of tangled emotion, that of displacement.

Hidden behind the pride and the grief that war brings, was a growing distrust in the minds of some; a great fear of going away and the dangers it carried. Noble or not, the scars of displacement, of leaving home, were deep in the mental fabric of many Appalachian families. Who they were before the war and where the families found themselves following the war, were not the same.

When Uncle Silven went away, he went, not for family, but for some larger community, the nation, freedom, a cause, that we knew was somehow ours as well. We knew we also shared in his death because he fought for us, but we knew that his death was among many noble deaths and that we should be proud. We also knew that his going away had killed him. It was a permanant going, a departure on two levels of our imagination and understanding. The soldiers who went to war and who came back either dead or alive created a community, a neighborly, a psychic and an emotional silent conversation on the displacement in families.

GOING TO WAR

When Silven’s body came back home, the conversations in our family and those families who had experienced similar losses turned children into adolescents and adolescents into adults. Daa’s other sons, her “babies,” were now determined to go to war, to also fight in the war. Daa’s fears were palpable all around her. She talked of nothing but their safe return until they were all back home. Her mind during those years was as displaced as a migrant’s must be. Her neighbors and our neighbors and their neighbors went to war, and the conversations revolved around the places of those war’s battles — past and future. Men sat on crates in front of the local post office and told tales of wars — past and future. The Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, and WWI. It was those conversations that prepared the next generations for war, for the long journey to some foreign country where, like Achilles, they would challenge an unknown enemy. It was not remarkable that my brother and my cousins, my friends went into the military to prepare for future wars. Later, the conversations around Daa’s table were ever more expansive as conservations began to “migrate” toward the wars in the world. We all became experts on the subject of war and the “enemy” and foreign lands.

While the elderly grieved war’s loss and the young stood lonely and confused on the edge of that large landscape of death and destruction, and noble causes, we all followed the conversations with them as our own romantic notions. Later, when my brother went to war in Viet Nam and survived his many supply flights and sorties into Da Nang airbase, we stopped holding our breath and proudly watched him advance in his military career. Yet, we still understood that we were preparing and training for the next war and that war and migration were joined in creating new ideas and new places where those ideas would grow, but also where men die. It was a painful growth. We knew that what we were and what we would become was somehow tied to the outcome of wars and displacement — and migration. As Daa’s grandchildren grew up, as we grew up, the coming and going to Daa’s house seemed to grow, as well. Transportation changed, and travel became easier. Still, we always carried the memory that going was a kind of war that never ends and that coming back would have an end — and could be an end — a finitude.

.POST-WAR

Our family continued to gather after the war, in the times of peace between the wars. In the 1950s we still gathered around the dinner table to tell stories. It remains a time of my best memories of going and coming back. The fried chicken was still shared with tall tales of the earlier war in the South Pacific, Navy training, guns, ships, airplanes, the sandy beaches of the Solomon Islands, the training for the Navy, and bravery. The boys waited for the stories with the eagerness of juveniles looking for heroes, and adolescents looking for the crisp edges of fried sweet potatoes. The girls listened with polite reverence, often admiration, and some sorrow — at least this one did.

When we were very young the stories lingered in our heads, and we went home and got our play guns and loaded them with caps and shot each other in mock battles of cowboys and Indians. We tuned our radios to the Lone Ranger and the Hi-Ho of Silver. I know we all thought of Silven in his casket, but it still did not stop us from romanticizing war and playing with guns. My brother and I were young and the Viet Nam war and his fatal air crash on Mt. Rainier were thirty years or more away. I had not yet migrated to California but my brother was soon in Utah majoring in aeronautical engineering and chasing forest fires in old Navy planes. We both still practiced the ritual of going back home every chance we got. Strange, the physical power of stories and the ritual of coming back. Neither of us could think of never going back.

Early on, the conversations of war had filled the imaginations of all the young-uns at our family table and those conversations had gradually given more meaning and nuance to the idea of going and coming back. Our going had punched a hole in the fabric of our isolation. As we grew, the coming back of our family members had made many of us wonder what was beyond the small world of our goings and coming back across a county, a mountain, a country, a world. The fragile fabric of family, forever held tightly together by the conversations across Daa’s extraordinary table. While we knew the lives that were ripped apart by war and the stories we heard, we then imagined and we then lived pieces of those family moments. As our younger generation aged, and our coming back to share stories and to listen to the voices of our relatives sometimes left us insecure, excited us, educated us, it prepared us for our own adventures to come. As we got older, we started to find that the stories sometimes conflicted with our growing understanding of the world and our loyalties to people and place. The stories, old and new gave us restless ideas. The coming and going and all the tales spun from those brief migrations fractured some of our loyalties and made some stronger. Our stories unsettled us just as surely as did our physical departures into our multiple worlds.

In my mind, I knew that my own migration and the migrations prompted by the war years of WWII had some common threads. The early war years were times of massive going and coming back for many families like ours in the Appalachians and across the country. The displacements were upending and made our younger generation restless. Going meant that our lives were fragile but it also meant we were brave. It meant that some of us would die in faraway places and some would come back with their mighty tales of adventure. But we all migrated. We a left “home”. Some near and some far. Our family, like so many others, was pushed and then pulled back time and again, and again.

THE STORIES OF LEAVING

Papaw did not fight in any war, but war had raised the mystery of the going and coming back of Papaw to another level. It had made travel mysterious and set the imagination in flight. Now older, I hunger for new tales and new outcomes. I still want to know the adventures of Papaw while he was away. I still want, MYSELF,  to travel….. to go away and come back filled with stories. Now, I still want to hear the spirit of adventure in his tales like those we heard from the Uncles. But the memory of the gaze of my grandmother and the tension around the dinner table that always froze those conversations haunts me and gives the going a weight that I cannot fully understand or shake off.

Papaw’s stories of what he did in his personal war were never fully told by him. He came back, not as a hero, but as one who left his family behind. He did not have the stories to give honor to his departure or his return. His valor in coming back was never celebrated. But, I have never doubted its valor on another level. In some sense, he never came back because his migration had been a permanent fracture with Daa, but he came back for family. He came back before he ever started — to a place where he was not welcomed. His migration was the migration of an idea. He held fast to his idea that a better life was out there. Daa was firmly rooted in place. It was the ultimate battle of going and coming back. I like to believe that his going away was brave, but his return was heroic.

The icy stare of our loving Daa, our powerful grandmother, ended many of my grandfather’s stories before they began. Anything that might give credence to “That Man” and his adventures was censored by Daa. The going and coming back of Papaw would remain a mystery and that was that. For the grandchildren, Papaw was imaginary travel writ large. His untold stories of goings and comings would remain mysterious and compelling. Papaw’s life was, for me, a grand idea. It was the idea of a “better life”. Daa’s life was anchored to one place to which everything returned. That was her “better life.” Now I deeply believe that a “better life” is our own. 

Many, many families in Appalachia have stories that revolve around going and coming back and are fueled by dreams of a “better life.” My family story is only one. War certainly filled many conversations in the cyclical migrations that constitute war’s outcomes. But strangely, it was the going of Papaw that pulled most strongly on my imagination. Many Appalachian fathers went away alone. It was not uncommon. But, a more common way of going was the whole family that packed up and went away together. It is the kind of going where place is abandoned. This going and coming back of Papaw’s mysterious travel — somewhere in the North, was the journey that was so very hard for many Appalachian families to process. It was a journey not to exotic places like Iwo Jima or France or the jungles of Batan. It was to Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago and Detroit, and other centers of industrial production. It was this form of migration that was clearly a going — that took families and individuals from Appalachia away from the “home-place” and constructed the fabric of what we generally consider as the Appalachian family migration. It fractured many families or it made them stronger.

MIGRANTS

Today migrant families are spread throughout the world. What some of these migrant families shared with Papaw was not the journey itself, but a perception of a lack of responsibility to a place. Going North when the mines failed was a journey of faith as much as it was a journey of necessity. But the journey to an urban environment puzzled those who stayed behind. To not have land to work, to not pull your existence from inside the earth, to own your own earth, was to lack responsibility. The shift in lifestyle that came with the move to urban centers during the 1930s-1940s was monumental. The life of the Appalachian family would no longer be bound to the soil, and the context of the stories around the communal table would develop toward a new framework and a new conversation of “place” and deeds.

When the migrants came home from the urban North the telling of stories now had to capture for family and relatives left behind, their new and unfamiliar landscapes. They had to introduce new words, new traditions, new lifestyles, all often so alien that their descriptions, their stories were intrusive. The stories of migrant families became stories of urban survival, of bullying, of discrimination, of playing in streets and alleys. These were poignant stories tinged with unspoken longing for corn fields and mountains and rivers — for “their people. In many ways, these new stories fractured the bonds of families unless the story could be woven into the quilt of the extended family that had stayed put.

In Harriet Arnow’s novel The Doll Maker, going was an inventory of things to be missed, a litany of stories about hoeing corn, feeding the livestock, freezing in hard winters, walking barefoot in a creek. In Arnow’s novel, the migrants took their patchwork quilts, their “crazy quilts”, their heritage seeds for a garden, a string of shucky beans, their courage …. their fatalism. When they came back, the stories changed among their own. At their core, the celebrations of return were pure fatalism. Their life as a migrant was a violent story of being ripped from nature’s familiar arms, the enfolding of mountains, and the warm bosom of the family. As a family, they had been to “war.” Coming back was often a rant against the new environment or false boasting of wealth and the excitement of cities. Migration in hard times became a mantra writ large and passed along in the rich oral tradition of Appalachia. It is the dinner at Daa’s house.

Even deeper, the going became an all too familiar series of stories told over and over by those who experienced migration or those who witnessed migration’s impact on the extended family unit. Their stories became fusions of the stories told by migrants throughout the world. Their stories were war stories as well as economic sagas. A thousand times over, their stories were at their base the stories told by migrants from Mexico, Venezuela, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, the Rohingya of Indonesia, and so many more. We are a world awash with the psychic trauma of displacement — of having to come and now having to go.

Environmental disasters have added to the displacement saga. What distinguishes the Appalachian migrant from those now filling temporary camps throughout the world is the fact that most of the world’s migrants will not have the advantage of going back. War has obliterated “home.  Today’s immigrats will become immigrants in a state of permanent displacement. Their displacement is our terror, the terror of never coming home. It is millions of stories with no family table to return to.

For every family going to Cincinnati, to any new city, to find work, to survive, to build a future, there are hundreds more on the move throughout the world. But, migration is not always immigration; a going and staying. Like Papaw’s going, migration is most like a yo-yo, – a constant motion of families. In Appalachia, going is often a continuous loop of going and coming back but it is bound together by a return to a common culture. For most of the Appalachian migrants, the departure was not a permanent exile — it was deeply believed to be temporary. The migration and the new place were malleable, and so were the people to some degree. For Appalachian families, the migration was a constant recreation of communities of support balanced against the need to stay connected to home, to the rural familiar. Coming back, in some cases, could take years, as it did in my case from far across the country. Or, coming back could be only the old stories around a new and permanent table in the new “home.” Most times, coming back was ritualized. It was part of being a family from the Appalachian mountains. It was required.

Living as a migrant is to adapt but to also retain with longing a hunger for the fmiliar. It is in its low moments to be reminded to never “get above your raisin’ and never forget because it is in your bones. It is foodways raised to the level of a sacrificial offering. It is a form of  barter, not money. It is the noble dream carried in the back pocket billfold and the voice of ancestors in the head. For the migrant in the city, the physical state was dirt, crime, monotony, an urban prison where the walls of tall buildings replaced mountains and space made no sense.  For most families from Appalachia who experienced leaving for urban centers, their going required a coming back … a return to the cathedral of nature and the true familiar community where the memories could be refreshed or restored. When the migrants could not soon go home again, they pulled the vision of home from their dreams and were bolstered and awash in memories of themselves at home; they sought out other like-dreamers and formed centers of Appalachian life in their new cities. Today’s migrants from all over the world are like those Appalachian dreamers. In its essence, it is us all. Migration is not about “other.” It is about us.

SEE:

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH  Coming Back and Going Some More