Tag Archives: Southern Appalachians

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH Harmful Settlement Schools Debate

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series: Blogs
DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH
Series 09: Biography
Series 17: Publications Related to PMSS

The “Harmful Settlement Schools” Debate

HARRY ROBIE “Resolved: That on Balance the Settlement Schools Were Harmful to the Culture of the Southern Mountains.”

Jane Bishop Hobgood Response to Harry Robie

John Deaton Response to Harry Robie

Vivian Sexton Flannery-Dees Response to Harry Robie

TAGS: Jane Bishop Hobgood; Harry Robie; John H. Deaton; Vivian Sexton Flannery-Dees; Pine Mountain Settlement School; settlement schools; Settlement Movement; Settlement Schools Southern Appalachians; rural education; Hindman Settlement; Red Bird Mission; Sidney Saylor Farr; Stuart Robinson; Glyn Morris; progressive education; Alonzo Turner; Katherine Pettit; Martha Burns; Arthur Dodd; ballads; environmentalism; Burton Rogers; Ann Cobb; cultural pluralism;

In 1991, Harry Robie, faculty in the English Department at Berea College (1985-1992), wrote an article about his research related to the settlement schools in the Southern Appalachians. [Published : Robie, Harry. “Resolved: That on Balance the Settlement Schools Were Harmful to the Culture of the Southern Mountains.” [Appalachian Heritage 19.1 (1991): 6-10.] This article was followed by a second article in which the Settlement Schools responded to the Robie thesis.

The two opposing articles created mixed responses among scholars but settlement school students waged a much more personal rebuttal. Their immediate angry and palpable emotional rebuttals constitute one of the most persuasive of the counter-arguments to the Robie “harmful culture” thesis.

The articles created mixed responses among scholars as it was evident that Robie had purposefully started a firestorm to try to drive home what he identified as a fragile romanticism associated with the rural settlement movement. But, the settlement schools and their students, particularly Red Bird Mission, Pine Mountain and to a degree, Hindman Settlement, pushed back against the Robie thesis.

Many of the administrators, teachers and particularly the former students of the settlement institutions responded swiftly to what Robie identified as the “harmful culture” thesis. Overwhelmingly, the response to Robie was oppositional. Robie was pleased. Most of the respondents declared their experiences were not as described by Robie in his articles. The resistance to the idea that the settlement school education was “harmful to the culture” of the southern Appalachians was particularly fierce from the Pine Mountain Settlement School students and staff.

“Me and kids.” Birdena Bishop and Jane and Jim Bishop. [bishop_06_005.jpg]

Three students, Jane Bishop Hobgood, John H. Deaton, [Pine Mountain] and Vivian Sexton Flannery-Dees [Hindman], were all educated within Robie’s perceived “harmful” environments. And, as they read and reread Robie’s thesis, they refused to position themselves within the framework that Robie described as “culturally harmful.” For them, the settlement school was a way of life that was enriching, nurturing and well-integrated with the Appalachian cultural elements they had experienced growing up and that had been emphasized at the settlement schools. Finding harmful elements in the sea of opportunities offered by the settlement schools was for the three students, an alien idea.

The clash of the former student perceptions with those of Harry Robie, was explosive with its language of anger and rebuttal, but it was also tempered with a nostalgic sadness and reflection on a culture that was slowly slipping away.

They nudged many to query, “Whose culture was it, anyway?” The cultural appropriation and/or clash that was described as a debate was not unique to just this southern Appalachian educational instance. While the argument resonated deeply with the students who had been schooled at Pine Mountain Settlement and Hindman Settlement in particular, it also touched the nerve of the other cultural appropriation debates that were taking place in the 1990’s. Appropriation, if it can be called that, is a human response to natural hazards that threaten a perceived way of life. This appropriation was and is not new, and today perceived human hazards, or appropriations, and strong diverse human responses continue at an even more rapid pace in the charged environment of Presidential election and other political elections.
Fueled by new social media and technological innovation, appropriation comes at us with a ferocity not just from our rapidly changing local environments, but from all corners of a changing world. Cultural isolation is near impossible for the “wired” and technological savy twenty-first century and is primed to become even more disruptive.

The idea of “Cultural studies” was a late-comer to the long tale and tail of the academic community. In England, for example, the work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, both of whom had working class origins, began to attract attention in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen sixties with their exploration of cultural studies. The authors moved away from the traditional educational cannon believing that the new popular culture and the growing mass communication technologies were changing the relationship of the masses to power and authority and also to one another. They founded the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which in the nineteen-seventies was directed by Stuart Hall, a Jamaican who has been characterized by some as the “God-Father” of multiculturalism. Stuart Hall was a disrupter, and one much more radical and far-reaching than Glyn Morris, the Director at Pine Mountain [1931-1941], who was arguably the most far-reaching Director of Pine Mountain Settlement. Yet, Hall was not as radical or as far-reaching as the current disruptive dialogs found within and without the two current Trump administrations.

Hall was someone who, like Morris, was more interested in “being alive during disruptive times,” than in doing battle or taking sides in a power struggle. This appears to have been the same approach taken by Harry Robie. The multi-cultural Stuart Hall saw the social changes surrounding him as a newly forming culture trying to “grasp at these changes, to wrap one’s head around what is newly possible….”

Like Morris and other leaders who passed through the Pine Mountain Settlement School, leadership, Hall’s writing in 1973 considered the idea of “culture” as a “site for ‘negotiation,'” [Hua Hsu, “Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies,” New Yorker, July 17, 2017]. Like his predecessors, Hoggart, and especially Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall spoke to similar cultural longing that one senses in the passionate letters of Jane Bishop Hobgood, John Deaton, and Vivian Sexton Flannery-Dees, settlement school students writing in the early 1980s. Hall in many ways captured the essence of the arguements that are at the heart of the Robie challenge.

Jane Bishop Hobgood in her response did not create a threnody, (described as a wailing ode or hymn of mourning composed as a memorial to an idea), but certainly the analogy of the mountain ballad is suggested. Jane Bishop Hobgood did not seem to believe that the “culture” she experienced was dying nor dead nor even harmed, but she saw it as under attack, though much of that culture had borrowed extensively across the centuries. She responded with an informed exploration of what she believed was a powerful and driving life experience during her educational years at the Pine Mountain Settlement School. Her’s was an experience she believed to be shared with the other respondents giving her argument the strength of a supported conviction that lingers even now in the descendents of the trio — Hobgood, Deaton and Flannery-Dees.

For most of the students who experienced Pine Mountain Settlement School, it would be near impossible to distance themselves from their lif-changing experience or to be introspective without emotion as the experience with the school was often so integral to the shape of their later lives. The response of many students to Robie was often not captured in writing, but, like Jane’s, John’s, and Virginia’s responses, other settlement school students were known to speak out strongly in oposition to many of his views with an equal amount of sincerity and anger. How could Harry Robie presume to declare that settlement schools harmed the Appalachian culture? He had not experienced the schools as a student? He did not grow up in hard-scrabble Appalachia. How could any student who experienced the hard scrabble of Appalachian life and then the settlement school be anything but deeply reflective and reflexive? Jane and John and Virginia refused to accept Robie’s view of settlement work. But, the question still remains. Did they really speak for all who attended the institutions?

A TURBULENT TIME

1937 was a difficult and turbulent time for Pine Mountain Settlement and for Glyn Morris, the Director of the PMSS School. Along with staff, he initiated a questionnaire to be sent to students who had attended Pine Mountain during its first three decades. Compiled by Everett K. Wilson, a teacher and counselor schooled at Antioch College in Ohio, and eventually an internationally recognized sociologist, Wilson’s questionnaire pried loose some of the answers that the School was searching for. One student, a member of the local Tolliver family, responded curtly to the survey. Tolliver’s response and other similar responses, suggests that memories do not always form one voice or reflect one reality. Tolliver wrote back to Wilson that the heart of the issue at Pine Mountain was that the School “hired too many old maids.” This was an early shot at what has become the greater gender debates we continue to engage in the twenty-first century.

[…instead of old maids…? [look up the exact quote, hw]

In light of other student responses, Jane Bishop Hobgood’s heartfelt ballad to Pine Mountain is not a piece of cynical fatalism, but a word-song that pays tribute to an institution that allowed its students to explore what it might mean to recreate self in a safe and supportive environment. She points out that while many of the “cultural tools” used at the School were English and European in origin, they were not narrowly defining. They played to the strengths of the shared familial heritages of the area and tugged at much of the familiar and pervasive regional ethos. The education of students like herself was elevated by the specialness of their perceived common heritages. This is something that some scholars have called an “internal colony, ” and can be associated with many institutions.

In her heartfelt response to Robie, Jane details how the settlement workers did not lock the students into the same rigid social trajectories that culture sometimes imposes on peoples throughout the world. She underscores the benign and positive influences of a multicultural education and gives no hint of cultural omission or domination or suppression in describing her settlement school experience.

Today, the massive migrations of peoples across the face of the earth have left trails of angst and scars from cultural clashes that dwarf the Appalachian experiences. As migrations and immigration increases so does the call to look more closely at the role of education in building emotional and educational bridges to future success. There has never been a unified viewpoint to regional or cultural studies and the trail of anger and misunderstanding stirred up by perceptions and solemn pronouncements was in the 1940s (the war years) long and emotional. Today the toxic trail of anger and misunderstanding is longer, louder and more damaging than the perceived assault on a way of life experinced at the settlement schools during war-time. The forced boarding schools for Native Americans, the lack of schools in immigration camps, and the current generations who will never have the support system to even think about an “education”, is difficult to even imagine.

When a way of life is threatened or demeaned it can evoke and stoke strong emotions in the identified self. When Robie made his pronouncement that the settlement schools were agents of “harm” it was perceived as a threat to a way of life and a rebuke to the school’s efforts and that of the teachers and their students. Robie’s “harm” appeared to negate the perceived inherent cultural gifts and well-intentioned exchanges. Robie, accordingto some, generated one of the most valuable debates in the history of rural settlement schools. The kernels of wisdom and perception found in the student responses paints a vibrant multicultural canvas of how education can shift cultural perceptions and sometimes, destiny.

On February 15, 1917 Cecil Sharp the noted English ballad collector, in an address to the prestigious Pen & Plate Club gathered in Asheville, North Carolina, said of his visit to Appalachia and his experience with the “… mountaineers of this section [Appalachia] …

I was deeply impressed with the native courtesy and chivalry or the Mountaineers. Their culture is hereditary, I found no such thing as ‘arrested development’; rather I should say I found arrested degeneration.

While this may seem at first to be a somewhat back-handed compliment, what Sharp was alluding to was his profound racist belief in the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon” stock. But he was also commenting on the cultural and social deterioration of cultures not supported by their host countries. The British and sometimes brutish arrogance of culture bashing is not full-blown here, but suggests a trope that shows up on many assessments of the Appalachian region: Did imported cultures help or harm the people of Appalachia?

The many perceived threats, cultral, racial, social, educational, etc., perceived in Robie’s pronouncement were personal to Jane Bishop and to many of her fellow students, and as an affront to the “perpetrators”, the settlement schools themselves. The three students described experiences that screamed at the limited framing Robie tried to give to a collective historical and cultural and personal experience.

The resulting contestations and perceptions of the three students and the settlement schools as institutions reflect how individuals and institutions and the shared experience can yet transcend the pervasive stereotypes of identified cultures. The “harms” were not a part of the student’s shared perspectives and attitudes and the declared sense of place the schools shared with one another and with the students and the students with each other, but, continues to be a tight cultural bond. In fact, in the minds of some, Robie was waging a battle for Eden — a non-reality — a constructed paradise that would not face knowledge. Whether the “harm” was to a utopian perception or to Robie’s own lost culture, or a smoke-screen for debate, is difficult to untangle. But, the cultural discussion came at a time when “cultural pluralism” was being discussed in academe and when held-fast ideas were being pulled apart in lively debates. The right of each side to hold close their perception of “authentic” culture and the belief that the authentic culture has its own unique vision with its own scale of values, is understood by many Appalachian scholars to be an almost sacred right.

But, did Robie actually believe what he wrote or was he “baiting” an audience that he saw as endangered by culture changes? Was he aiming to “save the culture.” Culture is in constant flux and changes as rapidly as do visions and values. People are at once both subject and object in the fast moving stream of culture. The act of sharing is a political act and political acts are rarely balanced in the resulting sea of cultural pluralism. And, these seas are themselves often fragile seas that flow together with unpredictable tides of intolerance and anger against the dominant system — or, even the entire ecosystem. We have no difficulty in finding examples in today’s culture.

Sensing, perhaps, the brewing controversy surrounding cultural pluralism, Sidney Saylor Farr, then editor of Appalachian Heritage, called for responses to the Robie article in the journal. She did not have to wait long. The anticipated push-back came in the three essays from former settlement school students. Sidney Saylor Farr, herself an Eastern Kentuckian and a former student at Red Bird Mission School published the settlement school student rebuttals in issue #3 of the same Appalachia Heritage volume, “Those Settlement Schools: Harmful or Benign? Three Responses to Harry Robie,” in Appalachian Heritage 19.3 (1991): 45-52. The publication launched a broader round of debate, discourse, applause, and anger.

PUSH BACK – The Responses

Of the three contrarian student responses, Pine Mountain Settlement School’s Jane Bishop Hobgood‘s refutation stands out as one of the most articulate, deeply felt and vivid voices against Robie’s “harmful culture” thesis. Her role on the Pine Mountain Settlement School Advisory Council was particularly important as her settlement school perspective was both internal and external and extended over years and across related institutions (Hindman, Berea College and Warren Wilson College). She had been an integral part of tracking the progress of the School through her many years of association as a student, as a daughter of a Pine Mountain Settlement School worker [Birdena Bishop], as a Berea College graduate, and as a member of the Pine Mountain Settlement School Advisory Board. Her response, which she sent to Pine Mountain as well as to Appalachian Heritage magazine, was placed in the archive at Pine Mountain Settlement School and is reproduced and transcribed in full, in Jane Bishop Hobgood’s Response to Harry Robie.

Jane Bishop Hobgood’s response was soon accompanied by that of John H. Deaton, also a Pine Mountain Settlement School graduate and by that of Vivian S. Flannery-Dees a graduate of Hindman Settlement School.

The fires of the debate surrounding Robie’s cultural survey and the “harmful” settlement schools thesis still smolders but has been eclipsed by the current and growing national cultural debates that have unleashed current angers much less reasoned than that of Jane Bishop Hobgood and the other settlement school students. Further, the increasing tensions surrounding our current national identity is proving to be an extensive firestorm of debate and one that threatens the very constitutional fabric of the United States, not just the culture of the Appalachian region.

Cultural brawls today have erupted on a multitude of national and cultural borders, within our systems of worship, in our democratic institutions and in the major media channels and social media. Throughout the centuries in our multi-cultural nation “Cultural pluralism” has had a host of critics and many of those critics have now taken up a chant against cultural pluralism or for their own new —“ism —the “tribalism” of many names — their chosen identity. The language of criticism has evolved and new words have crept in, but the debates sound familiar. Today our cultural debate is rending the fabric of society at all levels and in all regions. It has spilled into all corners of our educational systems, work-place, communication networks, social networks, or, more noticeably the communication networks have spilled into all corners of our lives with their fractured and factionalized and frequently fictionalized debates.

Debates such as that surrounding the harmful influence of settlement schools have escaped the boundaries once imposed by historical anthropology and have become the essence of life and death struggles of economic classes, political zealots, and wanana-be dictators, in many areas of the world. The Jane Bishop Hobgood Response to Harry Robie has served to remind us again of the fragility of this “Crooked Timber of Humanity” as Isaiah Berlin called it. He was paraphrasing Emanuel Kant who first said, “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built.”

Today’s culture wars are still being waged in the academic sector, the federal government, the press and in the publication of culturally contentious works such as J.D. Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy (2016), Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash (2016), and other much-debated monographs, such as Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, (2018) and the thoughtful work of Stephen Stoll in Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia ( 2017).

Cultural opposition proliferates in electronic blogs and other social media. “Regionalism,” whatever that is or was, has given way to what many describe as fractals that spin away from the Appalachian experience with a furiousity heightened by AI and other forms of collective information. Labels such as “regional colonialism” and “internal colony” and labels such as “tribalism,” whatever that is or was, … abound.

Today other imagined geographies and borders and their collective perceptions continue to proliferate. The arguments are now reshaping our political and judicial maps and in the process, we are creating new cultural landscapes that few seem to feel quite fit their personal inderstanding of “their” space. Gerrymandering, gentrification and “mediated media were, in the past viewed as inevitable harbingers of cultural shifts that ususally prompted defensive political responses. Today the knee-jerk reaction is more frequently the offensive weapons designed in the eras of Postmodernism and its spin-offs, the cultural war of “other”. What is ‘pure Anglo-Saxon” stock? What happens when a newscaster in New York refers to the “indigenous” people of South Carolina who hide behind their “culture”? Who are these “indigenous people”? What is this uniform culture the newscaster believes exists in South Carolina? In Louisiana? Appalachia? What was once a culture is now tangled in the political thickets of economic class, race relations, immigration, and ethnic and religious preference. What perception is to be understood as THE culture of a region? Of a people? The artist Blake has warned us

Robin Red-Breast in a cage
Puts all of Heaven in a rage

Harry Robie retired from Berea in 1992 and died in the small college town of Berea in 2009 at age 75. His passing was marked by the many sympathies and tributes received from his former students at Southwestern High School in Jamestown, NY, where he taught for many years and at Berea College where his students still cite his subtle journeys into our inner psyche. He was a man who stimulated ideas. He shook the tree of complacency and set many to thinking about their fragile relationship to their “culture,” and to their commonly held ideas and beliefs.

Jane Bishop Hobgood continued to live in Urbana, IL and slowly reduced her longer visits to the School as she struggled with dementia. On Jane’s last visit to Pine Mountain, this editor, also educated at Pine Mountain Settlement School, promised Jane that her vision and that of others who believe in the value of settlement schools to help shape the future of the Appalachian region, would not be silenced nor distracted by criticism. Nor would they be seduced or distracted by cultural wars such as that waged in the late eighties and nineties, and today by our political divides. An informed debate, a sense of place, passionate beliefs and clear thinking all have a place in our race toward prosperity and peace — those values were taught at Pine Mountain — and they continue. As Uncle William Creech said in a letter written in 1915, now commonly referred to as “An Old Man’s Hopes for the Children of the Kentucky Mountains,” Creech captures a universal dream for the people of the world. The land he deeded to found Pine Mountain Settlement School over one-hundred years ago, was to be used to pave the way for education, the door to opportunity.

“I don’t look after wealth for them. I look after the prosperity of our nation. I want all our young uns taught to serve the livin’ God. Of course, they won’t all do that but they can have good and evil laid before them and they can choose which they will. I have heart and cravin’ that our people may grow better. I have deeded my land to the Pine Mountain Settlement School to be used for school purposes as long as the Constitution of the United States stands. Hopin’ it may make a bright and intelligent people after I’m dead and gone.”

Pine Mountian has over 100 years of success in strengthening not just Appalachian culture (if viewed as a single entity) — or THE culture, but ALL cultures. Uncle William also said that he hoped that the settlement school would serve not just the local populations but would also influence “the people here and across the seas.”

The Pine Mountain Settlement School realized early on that culture today, has few boundaries and borders. Pine Mountain and other settlement schools had much to offer in the past and a deep dive into the missions of these institutions now reveals that they have even more to offer in today’s fragmented world. Pine Mountain is a school where access to a folk culture that educates and uplifts will continue to be promoted as an integral part of both the legacy and the future of the School. Rural settlement schools have always had a deep commitment to place, to the land and to the people of the Southern Appalachians. They are deeply committed to environmentalism and the responsible stewardship of land and resources including people. Those who experienced the rich education of the settlement school will always be mindful of the “world beyond the seas’ —- just as Uncle Henry would have wanted it and the settlement school experience will continue to be there as mountain doorways open every day to new ways to meet life’s challenges.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robie, Harry. “Resolved: That on Balance the Settlement Schools Were Harmful to the Culture of the Southern Mountains. “ Appalachian Heritage 19.1 (1991): 6 – 10.]

Deaton, John H, Vivian S. Flannery-Dees, and Jane B. Hobgood. “Those Settlement Schools: Harmful or Benign? Three Responses to Harry Robie.” Appalachian Heritage. 19.3 (1991): 45-52. Print.

Cobb, Ann. Kinfolks & Other Selected Poems. Hindman, Ky: Hindman Settlement School, 2003. Print.

Hobgood, Jane B. “Walter Crane.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. 6.4 (1981): 30-32. Print.

Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America: with a New Preface. New York, N.Y: Penguin, 2017. Print.

Morris, Glyn. Less Travelled Roads. New York: Vantage Press, 1977. Print. Chapter 11, Part 1

Ritchie, Jean. (1955). Singing Family of the Cumberlands. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak. [Reminiscences.]. Pp. vi. 282. Oxford University Press: New York.

Vance, J D. Hillbilly Elegy. , 2016. Print.

Wells, Evelyn K. The Ballad Tree: A Study of British and American Ballads, Their Folklore, Verse, and Music, Together with Sixty Traditional Ballads and Their Tunes. London: Methuen, 1950. Print. Chapter 13

Whisnant, David E. All That Is Native & Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Print.

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH II Introduction

Pine Mountain Settlement School
DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH II
INTRODUCTION – Growing From the Soil

Land in the Southern Appalachians is precious soil. The people grow from the soil as surely as plants take root and spring upward towards the sun. The people grow strong to work the soil, and they bend as the soil pulls their tired bodies back to lie in peace within it. Yet, the cycle is more a dance than a dirge. The dance is the dance that so many children and adults have today forgotten. It is the jitterbug of stream-beds and the waltz of wind-blown mountain tops. It is the courtly movement through rows of cabbage and corn. It’s the balanced step-dance across a foot-log. It is a dance that educates for wholeness; the kind of wholeness often found in the rhythm of the rural countryside.

Dancing in the cabbage patch was part of the early education at Pine Mountain Settlement School. It was not just an education for children. It was the exercise of everyone who marveled at the cycles of life and the bountiful bloom of new crops as they re-shaped the flat field and high hill. It was and is all that is intuited in the fragile relationship with the land. A dance in the cabbage patch is an exercise in the nourishment of both body and soul. It is a solo dance made joyful by the sharing.

We can dance alone, or we can grow the patch together. At one time, Pine Mountain raised over 10,000 heads of cabbage in its central garden patch. Today, together, the cabbage patches are unlimited for us all if we can reconnect with the land.

The blog Dancing in the Cabbage Patch is structured into a series of essays about Pine Mountain and its Community. It explores the land of Appalachia, its farming, its foodways, and its celebrations. It is the history of a unique rural Appalachian settlement school that spans an existence of more than 100 years.

_________________________________________________________

The foundation of Pine Mountain Settlement School can be found in the early efforts of key visionaries in both the School and the community. Some of these unique individuals are described in their BIOGRAPHIES as compiled by the two authors of this blog. Other biographical notes may be discovered in the many stories told about each other. The biographies and stories are filled with characters whose lives may not at first appear visionary, but, on closer examination, these are folk who have led many seekers to both truth and fiction, and to a land little understood and often misrepresented.

Some seekers understood where they had been led, but others, clearly, could not shake their myths and prejudices. The Pine Mountain Valley, its land and its people, is filled with a clear truth, a fantastical mythology, and a delightful romp through one of the most misunderstood regions of America. In summary, to explore Appalachia is to dive into a deep exploration of the truth tellers, the seekers, and those oblivious to dreams, visions, and truth. It is a journey about the evolution of America and its vision of itself.

Read deeply, the stories from Pine Mountain carry echoes of self-will, absence of doubt, and a certainty that comes shining or struggling through these fragments of lives. As the School and Community worked together to establish and to give continuity to one of the first rural settlement schools in the Central and Southern Appalachians, they left a map for those seeking the meaning of democracy. Not soon to be forgotten are the narratives of the staff and community who helped to shape the vision we now hold of the early rural settlement movement and the foundations of our democracy. In the PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL COLLECTIONS ARCHIVE, there are many paths to follow.

THE FOUNDERS

When William Creech gave his land in 1913 so that Pine Mountain Settlement School could begin its journey, he also gave to the School one of the most famous quotes associated with the institution. Katherine Pettit, a co-founder of the School, used Creech’s visionary words for “his people” to promote the institution. The wisdom of William Creech and the surrounding community, and of those who came to “save” the community but found themselves for the first time, continues to resonate with many cultures and lives throughout the world. Almost all of Pettit’s successors at the School have found this quote to be foundational.

An Old Man’s Hope for the Children of the Kentucky Mountains

I don’t look after wealth for them. I look after the prosperity of our nation. I want all younguns taught to serve the livin’ God. Of course, they won’t all do that, but they can have good and evil laid before them and they can choose which they will. I have heart and craving that our people may grow better. I have deeded my land to the Pine Mountain Settlement School to be used for school purposes as long as the Constitution of the United States stands. Hopin’ it may make a bright and intelligent people after I’m dead and gone.

Uncle William and Aunt Sal stand in front of their old home while re-enacting their wedding picture. hook_007_mod.jpg

Uncle William and Aunt Sal donated 135* acres of land for the Pine Mountain Settlement School. [*This acreage varies in the historical record and often includes the donation of other land from community and lumber and mining companies and other families such as the Metcalfs, Wilders, and others.]

In this photograph, Uncle William Creech and his wife, Sally Creech, re-enact their wedding in front of their original cabin home in 1917. Now often referred to as “Aunt Sal’s Cabin,” it was relocated to the grounds of the Settlement School in 1926 and is now a central landmark of the School, which is on the National Historical Register.

One of the founders of the School, Katherine Pettit (1868 -1938) was a Kentucky native. She began her work at nearby Hindman Settlement School, which she also founded, and served as co-director at Pine Mountain Settlement School until her retirement in 1930. For the next five years, she traveled throughout the world and continued to doggedly trudge throughout Harlan County, urging farmers to adopt modern farming techniques. In 1932, she visited South America. In that same year, she received the Sullivan Medallion from the Univ. of Kentucky as the outstanding citizen of the state of Kentucky. She died Sept. 3, 1938, at the age of sixty-eight.

The co-founder, along with Pettit and William Creech, was Ethel de Long Zande (1868 -1928), a New Jersey native and Smith College graduate. She was recruited by Pettit to be the educational co-director of the School and to give academic guidance, fundraising, and educational programming. Pettit knew de Long’s work as the two had served in similar positions at Hindman Settlement School, where de Long worked with Pettit for two years. Ethel de Long was as powerful in her beliefs and will as were Pettit and William Creech, but that did not prevent them from hiring a multitude of staff who carried the same strengths. Pettit and de Long and their staff provided basic education for children and training for mothers in health, cooking, and home care. In 1918, Ethel de Long married Luigi Zande, an Italian stonemason. She died much too early of cancer in 1928. Her short time at Pine Mountain solidified the shared vision of the two other founders, Katherine Pettit and Uncle William Creech, and the three left a lasting legacy and an unmovable foundation for the School.

Another force that needs to be reckoned with is that of Mary Rockwell Hook. Mary Rockwell Hook was recruited to Pine Mountain to serve as the lead architect for the buildings and the grounds of the school. Her work represents one of the first instances of women’s work in the architectural profession. A native of Kansas City, Kansas, and daughter of a banker, she was one of the first group of women to study in the renowned school of architecture in France, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her work represents a major milestone for women architects in America, as she was, by all accounts, she was among the first women to earn an architectural degree in the United States. It was Mary Rockwell Hook’s remarkable work that earned Pine Mountain Settlement School recognition as a National Historic Landmark in 1983.

Her architecture, like the people who grew up out of the land, and its organic presence always runs as a sub-text throughout all that is Pine Mountain Settlement School. Mary Rockwell knew the land and the people, and she continued to work with the School until her death at the age of 101.

Work Shop For The Pine Mountain School Boys Industrial MSR5852_1 M.R. Hook South Elevation 1/4″=1′-0″ (early proposed plan)

Throughout the literature of Pine Mountain Settlement School, one will see individuals acknowledged as “Uncle” and “Aunt” such-and-such. When used with the first names of community members, the familial designation was generally not a designation of a familial blood relationship, but one of endearment. It was used particularly within the staff and families at the School, but it was always a long-held title of respect and endearment in the Pine Mountain community. Following his donation of land for the school in 1913, Uncle William only lived six more years, until 1918. Aunt Sal lived on until 1925. Their passing was as though a near Uncle and Aunt had passed, and they had.

It was the generous donation of land by William and Sally Creech, the Metcalfs, and others, and their advocacy and their vision that made the school on the headwaters of the Kentucky River a reality. But it was the community that was the bond that sustained it. When Uncle William and Aunt Sal gave the land, they did so with the intent to create a school, and they sought out supporters in the community and, with the community’s support, convinced the two remarkable women to come to the remote valley in Harlan County to become the new Settlement’s directors. Pettit and de Long needed little persuasion, and the community was ready for them.

BUILDING THE SCHOOL

In Pettit and de Long, William Creech found a congruence of goals and vision. Pettit and de Long took the educational challenge of Uncle William to heart, and Uncle William held the two women close to his own heart and dream. Katherine Pettit, a member of the Lexington chapter of the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs, had, with May Stone and the support of the Club, founded Hindman Settlement School in 1900, and knew what she wanted in a school. Thirteen years later, more importantly, she knew where she wanted a school. Ethel de Long, who had worked for many years as an educator with Pettit at Hindman, was a pragmatic and articulate program creator, but, like Pettit, she wanted to chart her own course and exercise some of her new ideas on education in the central Appalachians. Both Pettit and de Long were visionaries, as was Mary Rockwell Hook, but they were all also well connected to other forceful women and men. Their long chain of contacts gave them the foundation and support needed to launch the new settlement school.

The Creeches, Pettit, de Long, and Hook, as well as others in the Pine Mountain community, were a productive and dynamic combination. The quick formation of an Advisory Board provided the outside oversight, funding, and professional support needed to grow the institution. The founders of 1913 gave the school a solid financial foundation through ferocious and smart publicity and funding appeals. And, they gave the institution a strong social base on which it could grow and flourish. And, grow it did. In 2013, the school celebrated its one-hundredth year as an educational institution, confirming the promise and the wisdom of those early planners.

There are many institutional histories. This abbreviated one is only an introduction. To see other historical resources, see the PMSS HISTORIES Guide.

Mary Rogers, wife of Burton Rogers, School Director (1949-1983), and founder of the Environmental Education program at the School, wrote THE PINE MOUNTAIN STORY 1913-1983 for the School’s 50th Anniversary. It remains the best source of the history of the school.

: Mary Blagdon Rogers

Mary Rogers’ small booklet covers the institutional history from 1913 to 1983, and breaks the history into easily understood blocks of history. Her brief narrative history, illustrated with her own delicate drawings, is an eloquent statement describing the founding years of the institution, the boarding school years, and the later Community School. It describes the founder’s plans for the School and the dedication to the founder’s ideas through the years. She says of Pettit and the School

” She [Pettit] had a deep love for the people and concern for their needs. At Hindman she had already translated the work of Jane Addams and the urban settlement movement into a rural idiom. Now, her thoughts were turning to more isolated, as yet unserved, areas of the mountains.

Traditional schooling was a part of her plan, but she envisaged also a settlement serving a whole community in its economic, health, and cultural development. A settlement would not attempt to substitute an outside culture for the indigenous. It would try to strengthen people’s faith in their own heritage, making use of both the mountain environment and their unique traditions as media for learning. It would help people to retain a secure sense of their own worth as human beings.

The new school must have sufficient acreage to supply the bulk of its own needs. It must be less dependent on the slow, unreliable transportation of supplies by ox wagon through almost roadless country.

EDUCATION FOR LIFE

Education was foremost in the mind of Uncle William, and education was at the center of the mission of the two women co-founders of the institution, and all three agreed that this education must be a pragmatic education. It must give the children of the school not only ‘book larnin’, but it must also give them “education for life.” Uncle William described this “education for life” as an understanding of farming practice and a respect for the land that would combine with traditional educational practice. Only then could the total education of the person occur.

Head, hand, and heart at work in this early carpentry project by a student of the school.

Throughout the one-hundred-year history of the School, the adherence to an agrarian focus is central to the understanding of Pine Mountain’s “education for life.” The pragmatic work engaged by all who passed through the School emphasized education as a life-long process and one for which they, alone, were responsible.

“Education for life” demanded mindfulness throughout every day. Participation in farming, food preparation, community celebration, woodworking, environmental field work, and more. It was an educational idea anchored in a classroom experience, but practiced in every action of the student. Even today, this hybrid approach, solidified by hands-on learning experiences, has proven to be one of the most effective learning strategies.

An “education for life” is what the poet and writer Wendell Berry describes in his thoughtful series of essays, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (1970, 1972). He calls it a kind of “local life aware of itself.” He asserts that this “regionalism is the awareness that local life is intricately dependent, not just for its quality but also for its continuance, upon local knowledge.” Berry dedicated his small book of essays to Ann and Harry Caudill, two Eastern Kentucky locals from Whitesburg, Kentucky, who were intensely aware of their place in the land and who educated many on the fragility of Appalachian land in Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1962). It is a book, in the words of Steward Udall, that is the “story of land failure and the failure of men,” but that, in its fatalistic telling, called the attention of the world to the lives of so many in the Central Appalachians.

Today, as we move rapidly toward ecological and social disruptions, the need to remind ourselves of our responsibility to an “education for life” is even more critical. The education at Pine Mountain has always served up this idea. Pine Mountain Settlement School is a place and an idea that educates for life, and that is committed to the literacy of historical community and how that history informs the living community. This commitment to education, both formal and informal, is essential to tying together the land and the people in a fundamental and sustainable ecosystem.

In 2015, the mission statement was reworded, but not dramatically altered, when it admonished that the goal of the School was to enrich lives and connect people through Appalachian place-based education for all ages.

“Twenty years ago [1912] Kentucky ranked fortieth in Education among the states of the Union; today she is still fortieth,” reported the Kentucky Education Commission after a two-year study made of education in schools and colleges in the Commonwealth from 1932 to 1934. This was the pre-Depression era, and it raised desperate appeals for ideas and help with a school system ravaged by a growing economic crisis. As part of their 1932 study, the state surveyed the students whose lives they were charged to improve. Pine Mountain was visited and queried about educational needs and programs. The surveyors found no shortage of students who were willing to closely critique their school and to make recommendations to their surveyors. Remarkably, the surveyors listened. The educational journeys described by the students served as a model for planning a new course for education within the state. The descriptions of those students are closely detailed in the nearly complete collection of student records held in the Pine Mountain Settlement School Archive Student Records.

In 2010, Kentucky’s ranking in a national survey was 34th in the nation. In two years, the state jumped 24 places in the Quality Counts annual report as recorded in Education Week magazine. In 2013, under the Governance of Beshear, the state placed an amazing 10th in the national rankings for K-12 education. Something is working. Attention to rural youth was part of the 2013 success.

Read more here: Kentucky Ranks 10th in National Education Survey 2013

The Rural Youth Guidance Institute, earlier called the Pine Mountain Institute, was begun by director Glyn Morris in 1934 and became known throughout the country as a progressive and successful educational model. The Pine Mountain students were “educated for life,” and the Depression years in Appalachia and at Pine Mountain Settlement School provided some of the best lessons for that education. The 1930s had many teaching moments that few who experienced them, forgot — student or teacher.

The school still stands as a model for educators who want to “educate for life.” Today, particularly in the field of environmental education, Pine Mountain continues to lead the way in the state of Kentucky across all age groups. Today, it educates multiple generations and promotes education as a life-long learning process. A brief 1934 article for The Pine Cone, a school paper written by Pine Mountain students, reflects on the state’s campaign to reform education for its students and where Pine Mountain students fit into that campaign. It demonstrates how the PMSS students were actively engaged in the 1930′ educational planning process

A somewhat unusual feature of this campaign was the enlistment of the services and sympathies of the students themselves by the state. The generous response of the Pine Mountain students to this appeal for comments was characteristic of the sense of community promoted at the school. The school, started twenty-one years earlier, gave the children a willingness to give of their energies that the cause of education may be advanced. They described the influence of Pine Mountain as a real education that “will help us work a little more skillfully, think a little more clearly and act a little more kindly.”

This exploration of farming, food, and community engagement at Pine Mountain Settlement School, found in the DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH series of essays, is authored by one of Pine Mountain’s children, the daughter of one of the School’s farmers, Helen Hayes Wykle. The essays are offered as a contribution to the history of the institution and are filtered through the writer’s perspective. There are many other perspectives.

PHOTOGRAPHS

The photographs of rural life taken by various photographers, during the long history of Pine Mountain Settlement School, found in this essay, are derived from a life lived close to the land. Within the faces of the students, the workers, and community families, especially in the children, can be found wonder, stubbornness, joy, fear, defiance, pride, and hope. It is those images combined with some of the personal narratives captured in letters, documents, and autobiographies in the archival collection, that the many perspectives may be studied. In these often very personal and literal reflections, can be found a tall mountain of deep wisdom, peace,

humility, despair, determination, hope, anger, but especially joy. Yet, some who will view the photographs or read the workers’ letters about the community will only see the poverty and possibly the exploitation of the local population by “outsiders.” That is not what the school was or is about, and on close reading, that is not what the archive ultimately will reveal.

The author John Berger reminds us in And Our Faces, My Heart, as Brief as Photos (Berger, 1984) that time and space are inseparable. He cautions us that we must be careful of giving so much to the historical projection of time. He argues, “It is space, not time, that hides consequences from us.” In the Pine Mountain Valley, it is “up Cutshin and down Greasy,” and Wellsley College and “between Hel-fer-Sartin and Kingdom Come,” and Boston and Turkey Neck Bend and New York and Fiesty and Rowdy, that we arrange and rearrange our critical perspectives.

The words of those who knew and know the land best are sprinkled throughout the following narratives, but it’s the photographs, the images of land and people, that most vividly detail the agrarian evolution of the community. The agricultural essence of the unique rural community on the north side of Pine Mountain, as explored through the lives of those who worked at Pine Mountain Settlement School and those who lived nearby in the community, is as relevant today as it was when the first vision was shaped by the founders. These are pictures of an education — it is in a constant reciprocal stream of teaching. In photograph and text, the interactive life along the Pine Mountain range and at the Pine Mountain Settlement School is a reassertion of geographies of hope and how to move between our spaces. It is about finding a personal space in our society and society finding a space for us.

Pine Mountain Settlement School today continues to be an experiment in rural settlement school practice as well as a model environmental education school. As the School moves beyond its 100th year, the community celebrates with the School. It celebrates the people, the place and an unwavering relationship to the land and to the lessons that may be learned from a close association with its geography in all its variants. People and place, student and land, farmer and field, ecologist and mountainside, are all tied to an educational vision and mission. Today, the school’s programs and its “education for life” ethos reveal an evolving vision and mission. Remarkably, it is a vision that remains fresh and inspiring. No matter where one enters the narrative about the School, the general aim is clear. It is to create critical minds and a sensitive eye when looking at how seasons pass, space evolves, and lives evolve and pass in the valley. It is a narrative that is both sequential and simultaneous, history and historical.

Today, our polemics are animated by ideological conflicts, by rancorous politics, and an inability to discern truths. We often lose our close touch with both time and space. History melts our contexts into a sea of irrationality, and speed creates a blur with no time for reflection. Often, history only surfaces to support some argument or political position that has no verity. We tend to forget in the rush of our lives that there are many truths, many more generations to inspire, and many lessons to learn and many stories to tell that open the pages of our own unique place in time and space.

Many of those lessons are found in our relationships, in our historical and genealogical archives, while others may be found on a hike to some remote and quiet place like Jack’s Gap overlooking a slice of life in the long view. When we look out from high places on the expanse of mountains that stretch out below, the view may resemble a troubled sea. The deep green sea, interrupted by the silt, the growing tides of discontent, the green and brown of surface mining — but the air sits close upon that mountain, fragrant with fresh pine and vibrant with sunrise and sunset. The trails of Pine Mountain wait to be explored.

Jack’s Gap outing. Arthur W. Dodd Album. [dodd_A_066_mod.jpg]

As we all reach for improvement in the quality of our lives, there are many reminders in the stories and images from Pine Mountain that tell us, like Uncle William, that life does not need the accumulation of wealth, so much as it requires the nurturing of the wealth that lives within us and that surrounds us all. As we look backward with intelligence at the 100 years of Pine Mountain Settlement School, we will hopefully be better prepared to move forward with inspiration and intention to a vital future, wherever that future may find each of us. I suspect Uncle William is smiling as his dream unfolds and catches hold.

Helen Hayes Wykle

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