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Fire!

Asheville, NC
July 25, 1923---Fire down at the Emporium Department Store just outside of Pack Square. Photo looking towards Biltmore Avenue (south).


Ashville+NC firefighting appalachia appalachian+mountains+history appalachian+history

She wrote 1500 hymns

She wrote about 1500 hymns in all, over a 37 year period. In her lifetime her songs were translated and sung in Africa, India, China, and Korea. Her best known songs, 'Nearer, Still Nearer,' and 'Let Jesus Come Into Your Heart' (both penned 1898), and another, 'Sweet Will of God,' (1900) can still be found in hymnals today.

Born in Pennsville, OH on April 15, 1862, Leila Naylor Morris grew up in Malta and McConnelsville, OH. She was quite young when her father died, so her mother started a millinery shop to support the five children. There young Leila learned to knit, sew, crochet and darn. When she started piano lessons she practiced at a neighbor’s house because the family could not afford an instrument.

"When I was ten years old I was led to give my heart to God. It was not a form of giving my heart to God. I knew then that I needed a Savior. Three different years I went forward to the altar and prayed and prayed, until a man came and laid his hand on my head and said 'Why, little girl, God is here and ready to forgive your sins'." Leila began playing the organ for prayer meetings when she was just 12 years old.

In 1881, Leila married Charles H. Morris. She transferred her membership to her husband’s church, the Methodist Episcopal Church. The Morrises actively supported their congregation. Leila served as a choir member and a leader in the Sunday school, the Epworth League, and the missionary society.

Until she was thirty Leila thought she'd be spending the rest of her life sitting behind a sewing machine making dresses for women in McConnellsville. But ten years after she got married she became interested in writing gospel songs. Her husband said that she always kept a pad of paper handy so that if she got the inspiration for another hymn she could write it down. She composed her work in the Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, where she'd learned to play the organ. This congregation was formally established in McConnelsville in 1826 and is that town's oldest denomination.

Many well known hymns, including "Sweeter As the Years Go By," "Nearer, Still Nearer," and "Let Jesus Come Into Your Heart," were composed in Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church by its organist, Mrs. Leila Morris.

Evangelists quickly began using Leila's songs. Many would visit in her home when they were in Ohio. If Leila was attending a camp meeting or revival service, she often would be invited to sit on the platform. Leila relished the opportunity to be in these services because she frequently was inspired to write songs after returning home from the meetings.

In 1913, Leila's eyesight began to fail. For awhile she used a twenty-eight foot black board that had the music staff lines on it that her son made for her. Within a year she was completely blind. Despite her lost sight she continued to write gospel songs with the help of devoted friends. She would simply remember the songs until her daughter Fanny came for an annual visit. Leila would dictate dozens of songs as her daughter wrote them down, both words and music.

Leila's daughter Mary and her husband were missionaries to China. "A great many persons have said [Mary] should be at home with her blind mother. . . . I have been so happy to receive her letters in which she tells of being able to give a message for the first time to those darkened minds and hearts. I think you will agree with me that this is the best thing I have ever done."

Leila Naylor Morris died on July 23, 1929.


sources: www.preparingforeternity.org/hymn_stories/let_jesus_come.shtml
www.morgan.lib.oh.us/Morgan_County_History_Stories.doc
www.whwomenclergy.org/booklets/satisfied.php
The Complete Book of Hymns: Inspiring Stories about 600 Hymns and Praise, by William J. Petersen, Ardythe Petersen, 2006, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.



Leila+Naylor+Morris Trinity+Methodist+Episcopal+Church McConnellsville+OH appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

The (accidental) discovery of a lifetime

Leo Lambert (1895-1955), though trained as a chemist, was an avid cave enthusiast. He was the first person to explore the Tennessee Cave on Mount Aetna (now known as Raccoon Mountain Caverns), and at one time managed the Nickajack Caverns in Marion County, TN. He moved to Chattanooga because his fiancée Ruby Eugenia Losey moved there with her family; they were married in 1916.

It had been 11 years since the Southern Railway had built a railroad tunnel along the face of Lookout Mountain and through some portions of the mountain for one of its lines, a construction project that had permanently sealed a well known natural opening to Lookout Mountain Cave.

Given his knowledge of Tennessee caves, Lambert surely would have been aware of the cave’s colorful history: used first as a campsite by Native Americans, later a hideout for outlaws. During the Civil War, the caverns were used by both Confederate and Union troops. Many soldiers wrote their names and units on the walls. Southern Railway had left in its wake a business opportunity. Lambert decided in 1923 to drill open the cave and become a tour operator.

He formed Lookout Mountain Cave Company and purchased land above the cave. He planned to make an opening further up the mountain than the original natural opening and transport tourists to the cave via an elevator.

In 1928 Lambert selected a site for an elevator shaft into the original cave and began drilling. Midway into drilling the 400-foot elevator shaft, on December 28, a worker operating a jackhammer discovered a void in the rock and felt a gush of air. A small crevice was opened, about 18 inches high and five feet wide.

Lambert and other corporate officials immediately decided to investigate it and spent 17 hours on this first exploration trip. A passage opened into a falls cave. They came back with a description of a cave with beautiful formations and an amazing 145-foot waterfall, located 260 ft inside Lookout Mountain. The falls flow into a landing pool which drains into the Tennessee River. On his second trip Lambert was accompanied by his wife Ruby. On this trip he named the waterfall - after her - Ruby Falls.

Lambert decided to develop both caves and to offer two cave tours. After 92 days of work, day and night, the elevator shaft reached the original cave. The elevator was installed, paths were prepared, and the original cave opened to the public in 1929. The entrance building, Cavern Castle, looks like a 15th century Irish castle. It was constructed from limestone excavated from the elevator shaft. Development continued in the new cave and in 1930 the second tour to Ruby Falls was opened to the public.

At first the two caverns were shown on separate tours, but the popularity of the falls far exceeded that of the lower cave and that trip was discontinued in 1935.

After years of financial struggle during the Great Depression, the Lookout Mountain Cave Company declared bankruptcy. New ownership launched an aggressive advertising campaign, based on roadside signs, and made Ruby Falls into what is today one of Chattanooga's major tourist attractions.

Ruby Falls is the largest underground waterfall open to the public in the United States. It and the larger Lookout Mountain Caverns complex have been designated a National Historic Landmark.


Sources: http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=R060
www.rubyfalls.com
www.showcaves.com/english/usa/showcaves/RubyFalls.html
www.lookoutmountain.com/pages/fun_sites.html



Chattanooga+TN Ruby+Falls Leo+Lambert Lookout+Mountain+Cave appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

The full force of an ardent Southern temperament

“I don’t know anything else. You see, I was born in North Georgia, in Dalton, the town that has figured in my books as ‘Darley,’” explained novelist Will N. Harben to a reporter in a 1905 interview. “So that while I am not one of the people about whom I write—for there is the sharpest line drawn there between the townspeople and the true countrymen still, my childhood and most of my life was spent amid such scenes as I have attempted to portray. Those people and the customs and conditions of their lives are as real to me as your own family life is to you. I cannot help writing about them, because I am thinking of them all the time.

“I get more and more out of it the further I go. And the deeper I go into the lives of these simple people the more I find to wonder at and admire and the deeper I want to go. It is an absorbing study, and my thoughts are so much bound up in it that my life is passed not so much in New York as in North Georgia. You have no idea of the depth of emotion of which these people are capable. You might know them a long time and never guess at the passion slumbering deep down in their souls until some chance occasion revealed to you the storm of feeling that had been sleeping concealed from all the world.

“They are a taciturn people, little given to demonstration, making light alike of their sufferings and their pleasures, but feeling with the full force of an ardent Southern temperament all the time. And their pride, especially their family pride – it is astounding. They are a clannish people, and you would be amazed to find the social distinctions which they observe among themselves. In their way these distinctions are far more fixed and more potent than those of the outside world. They have much ambition, but it is often asleep---lulled into content by the easy life that has been followed by generation after generation. Of course, in the towns this is not so true, and once the ambition of one of these North Georgians is aroused it is a mighty force.

“Yes, we have plenty of moonshiners, and among them are some of the best people there. But you cannot convince those people that they are doing any wrong. They really believe they have a perfect right to make whisky if they wish to, not only a moral right, but a legal right. You see, their sense of justice is absolute, and they believe they are fully within their rights as citizens. They are good people, too; kind, hospitable, and generous. I know them, because I have dealt with them.

“A keen sense of humor is one of their chief characteristics. It is the shrewd humor in these characters that make them so lovable. A group of North Georgians never comes together without this trait becoming apparent. Their conversations overflow with a canny mirth that is irresistible.

“[Abner Daniel] is a type only, a very common type in North Georgia. You can meet possible Abner Daniels sitting around on benches and cracker boxes all through this region. I have listened to the conversation of such men by the hour.”

Will Harben (1858-1919) was one of the most popular novelists in America during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In his thirty books and numerous short stories Harben portrays the mountaineers of his native North Georgia with authenticity and color, though his reputation today suffers from his use of a sentimental romanticism demanded by readers of his day.

“Abner Daniel (1902) made a wide appeal, North as well as South, and really laid the foundation stone of Mr. Harben’s reputation as a delineator of character,” commented critic Annie Booth McKinney in the Library of Southern Literature. “Crude, whimsical, sarcastic, yet good-natured, droll, witty, human, Abner Daniel stands quite apart, and it unlikely that his creator will ever surpass this creation. No one can read carefully any of his stories and fail to be impressed by their underlying sincerity, or fail to rejoice in the crisp humor that seems to be as much a part of old Abner and Pole Baker as the blue is of the sky.”


Sources: North Georgia’s Quaint Folk as a Novelist’s Type, Vivian M Moses, NY Times, August 13, 1905, http://snipurl.com/31fos [query_nytimes_com]
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1233
Library of Southern Literature By Edwin Anderson Alderman, Joel Chandler Harris, Charles William Kent, 1909, the Martin & Hoyt Company


Dalton North+Georgia Will+N.+Darden appalachian+authors appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Was it murder? Or a heart attack?

"I went up to Wise that night along with my cousin and not meaning no harm,” testified Edith Maxwell at her murder trial. “Along in the evening Raymond Meade came along and said he would give me a lift back to my house in Pound. There was some more people in the car with him but we let them out down the road a piece and Raymond Meade says to me: 'Let's go to the Little Ritz and get something to eat.' "

"The Lonesome Pine Girl," accused of killing her father Trigg on July 20, 1935, attracted the attention and support of newspaper, magazine, and radio reporters, as well as women's organizations, across the United States and Canada. Her nickname is a reference to a well known 1908 John Fox novel, The Trial of the Lonesome Pine, that portrayed the lifestyle of mountain residents in a rather one-dimensional manner.

So
 popular was the tale with the American public that a third production of it--
this one in sound and color--was being filmed, with considerable publicity,
even as Edith Maxwell faced the first of two trials in the Wise County, VA courthouse.

The media coverage the case received for nearly 
two years rivaled that given to the Scopes "monkey trial" of the 1920s. By the end of Maxwell's ordeal, even Eleanor Roosevelt had gotten involved.

Why the national spotlight? The Maxwell case was a clash between modernity and tradition, between "women's rights and reason against bigotry and fanaticism.” On the side of bigotry and tradition was the "code" of the Virginia mountains, where women and children had to obey and submit to the father, even when he physically abused them.

Edith had left home for two years of teacher's college, highly unusual for a young woman of her circumstances. After attending Radford State Teachers College (later Radford University), Maxwell reluctantly returned to Pound, where she associated with the "bright young set," tested the boundaries of acceptable behavior, and became frustrated by the limitations of small-town life.

Raymond Meade tried to get her to drink some liquor, Edith continued in her November 1935 court testimony, but all she took was some potato chips and a glass of ginger ale. She told him it was getting late and she had better be starting for home because she was going blackberrying next morning. When she got home around midnight her little sister, Mary Catherine, warned her: "Your bed covers is in Pappy's room but don't go in there. He's drunk and he's going to run Ma out of the house tomorrow." But Edith went in anyhow. Pappy woke up.

'I'm goin' to whip you," he said.

"Pappy, don't you do it," said Edith.

Pappy chased her out of the bedroom and grabbed a carving knife. "Pappy, don't you cut me," said Edith.

"I'll show you I can whip you," said Pappy.

Edith fell to the floor and fumbled for a pair of old high-heeled shoes she had given her Ma. She flailed out with one of them. Pappy fell back. Edith, half-naked from the fight, caught up a covering, ran out of the house. She could hear Pappy moaning: "Jesus, Jesus, why can't a man whip his own child?" Trigg was soon dead, allegedly from the beating Edith gave him.

The prosecutor tried to show that Edith was a fast filly who had saddened her honest mountaineer father with her late hours and citified ways. But he could not shake her story of the fight. It was further corroborated by Edith’s 11-year-old sister Mary Catherine who, when twitted by the prosecutor for forgetting certain details, leaned out of the witness chair and yelled: "And you wouldn't remember so good either if you had been as scared as I was that night with Pappy a-yellin' and a-cussin' and Edith a-tryin' to outrun him!"

Edith, argued her lawyers, had exercised no more than her "God-given right of self-defense." But that did not impress the jury, which, after less than an hour's deliberation, returned a guilty verdict.

Despite expert medical testimony that Trigg's wounds could not have caused his death and that he had probably died of a stroke or heart attack, rumor and innuendo were enough to send Edith to jail for five years of a 25 year sentence.

She was pardoned by Gov. James H. Price in December 1941 – thanks, in part, to a letter written on her behalf by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Upon her release, Edith changed her name to Ann Grayson and eventually made a new life for herself in Jacksonville, Fla., after marrying Otto Abshier, the owner of an Indianapolis trucking company.

The day after Trigg Maxwell died, his wife Ann, along with their daughter, had been indicted, but never brought to trial. Was Trigg Maxwell hit by Edith? Or was it Ann? Or was he hit at all?


Sources: www.blueridgecountry.com/FavoriteArticles/EdithMaxwell_MA06/index.html
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/VALib/v52_n2/reviews.html
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,848229,00.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3686/is_199512/ai_n8723473
www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=14615437&BRD;=1283&PAG;=461&dept;_id=158544&rfi;=6



appalachia Radford+State+Teachers+College Eleanor+Roosevelt Edith+Maxwell womens+suffrage Wise+County+VA John+Fox+Jr appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

He'd seek out the sheriff and get him on a chase

During the July 27, 1941 race at the Daytona Beach-Road Course he suffered a crushed chest, broken pelvis, head and back injuries, and severe shock. He raced his two brothers and his sister in the July 10, 1949 race at the same course, the only NASCAR event to feature four siblings. And years later, after all the track dust settled, he died on July 15, 1972. You could say July tended to be an eventful month for NASCAR pioneer Truman Fontell "Fonty" Flock.

The Ft. Payne, AL native delivered moonshine as a teenager on his bicycle, and a few years later he was making trips in his car from Atlanta to Dawsonville, GA hauling moonshine. Fonty once said that he would seek out the sheriff and get him on a chase because he had a faster car. Fonty would send off to California and get the best parts for his car and the sheriff couldn't keep up with him and loved to tease him. The sheriff didn't have the sources to get the parts to make his car keep up with Fonty's.

He ran some of the semi-organized races before World War II broke out, winning a 100-mile race at Lakewood Park in Atlanta in 1940. By the time he was 20 in 1941, Flock was regarded as one of stock car racing's best drivers. After running the dirt tracks in Georgia for a couple of years he made his way to Daytona Beach, Florida searching for the high speed excitement of the Beach-Road courses.

He got plenty of it and more in the July 27, 1941 race mentioned above, where he landed the pole position alongside Roy Hall. Flock took a narrow lead in the opening lap, but the relentless Hall was nipping at his heel all the way down the long but narrow blacktop backstretch. As the pair wheeled into the South turn, the cars banged together. Flock's Ford darted to the high side of the corner, climbed the outer edge of the track and spiraled end-over-end and side-over-side into a clump of palmetto bushes. The seat belt had snapped in one of the early turnovers and Flock's limp body was flopping around inside the car. Flock was rushed by ambulance, to the Medical Center in Daytona Beach. He lived, barely.

Five months after Fonty's wreck the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and auto racing was banned until 1945. Fonty missed the 1945 and 1946 seasons because of his injuries and the '47 season was well under way when he was healed enough to race again. Despite the late start he was crowned the champion of the 1947 National Championship Stock Car Circuit, the forerunner to NASCAR. He finished second in the 1948 NASCAR standings and won the 1949 Modified title. Flock won 34 races in a few more than 100 starts.

During the early 1950s, Flock drove mostly in Grand National events. He finished second in the point standings in 1951, fourth in 1952, fifth in 1953, and tenth in 1955. Fonty quit NASCAR early in the 1954 season and campaigned in a Midwestern stock car series. He returned to NASCAR in 1955 and won three races, including a March 26, 1955 event that gave Chevrolet its first NASCAR Winston Cup victory in a 200-lap, 100-mile dirt-track race at Columbia (S.C.) Speedway.

He had established an insurance agency in Nashville and raced only part-time beginning in 1954.

In 1957 he entered only the beach-road race at Daytona, though he also drove in the Darlington 500 as relief for Herb Thomas, who'd been injured in a practice crash. The car was in bad shape: it blew a tire on the sixth lap and got hit by two other cars. On the 28th lap, the car escaped his control and spun at the entrance of turn three. Split seconds later, Bobby Myers and Paul Goldsmith smashed full-bore into the idle Flock. Flock and Goldsmith were seriously hurt. Bobby Myers was killed instantly. Flock announced his retirement from a hospital bed.

Fonty Flock was inducted into both the Georgia Automobile Racing Hall of Fame Association and the Talladega-Texaco Walk of Fame in 2004.


Sources: www.gonascargo.com/drivers/fonty-flock.php
www.decadesofracing.net/FontyFlock.htm
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/fonty-flock.htm
www.legendsofnascar.com/Fonty_Flock.htm
www.livinglegendsofautoracing.com/drivers_pages/drivers_flock.html


Fonty+Flock NASCAR Ft.+Payne+AL appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Lying on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening

Listen to Eleanor Steber sing intro to 'Knoxville:Summer of 1915'


She was the most celebrated American soprano of the 1940s and 1950s. She went on from there to become head of the voice department at the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1963 to 1972, to teach at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, the American Institute of Music Studies in Graz and at her alma mater, the New England Conservatory of Music.

But one of Eleanor Steber's most important contributions to the world of opera was to commission and bring to life a 16-minute song that luxuriates in the calm of an earlier America, a contented, rocking-chair America.

By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May god bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a while I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

Knoxville: Summer of 1915

Composer Samuel Barber adapted the text for his vocal work from the introduction to A Death In The Family, James Agee's Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography. It is a rhapsodic childhood memory, summertime in Tennessee, enjoying the family, sitting on the porch, watching life in the town go by your street, an idyllic time unaware of the war raging in Europe. "That was exactly my childhood in Wheeling, West Virginia," said Steber, who premièred Knoxville with Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony in 1948.

Steber's father, mother and both sets of grandparents were part of Wheeling's large German-American community, in which music played a major role. After winning the Metropolitan Opera Auditions in early 1940, Steber returned to Wheeling for a concert in the Virginia Theater on May 1, a concert that was repeated the next evening in Madison School auditorium.

For this homecoming concert, West Virginia Governor Homer Holt came from Charleston to join all the local dignitaries honoring her. This was the first of sixteen annual homecoming concerts which she presented in Wheeling. Throughout her long career she never forgot Wheeling, where she was born July 17, 1916.


sources: http://www.wvculture.org/HISTORY/journal_wvh/wvh52-10.html
http://www.pictures.eaglefreeenterprises.com/famous_west_virginians.htm
http://www.virginia.edu/music/pressrelease/06-07/cuso100706.html
http://wheeling.weirton.lib.wv.us/people/hallfame/1980steb.htm



Eleanor+Steber arts+in+appalachia Wheeling+WV James+Agee appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Which of them REALLY invented 'Dr Pepper'?

The town boomed when the railroad came through in 1856, and so in 1872 a former Confederate surgeon named Dr. Charles T. Pepper started a soon-to-be-thriving business dispensing patent medicines in a brick pharmacy in Rural Retreat, VA. He also spent time mixing mountain herbs, roots and seltzer into a fizzy brew.

One local story goes that the doctor's daughter fell in love with Wade Morrison, Pepper’s assistant. The doctor wasn't too pleased about that, so he sent her off to school. And he fired Morrison. "This story is probably not true,” says Mary Kegley, author of Wythe County Bicentennial Book, "because within the time frame, Dr. Pepper's daughter would only have been around 5 at the time Morrison left.

"Dr. Charles T. Pepper also had a son, Louis or Louie, an optometrist who was also known as Dr. Pepper," Kegley continues. "He worked part time in his father's drug store and also claimed to have developed the formula for the drink."

Morrison meantime moved to Texas and set up a pharmacy of his own, the Old Corner Drug Store at Fourth and Austin streets in Waco. He went on to fame and fortune, taking credit as the creator of the best-selling American soft drink we know as Dr Pepper. Charles T. Pepper got neither fame nor fortune out of the bargain.

The Dr Pepper Museum site credits Charles Alderton, a young pharmacist working at Wade Morrison's drug store, with being the inventor of the now famous drink. The Old Corner Drug Store customers called the drink a "Waco" soda, and it became quite popular at the soda fountain. Morrison began selling batches of the mix, drugstore to drugstore in 1885, and promoted it as a tonic until 1891, when he opened a bottling plant. When he began marketing the syrup to area drugstores, Morrison renamed the drink after his old boss in Rural Retreat. Or not.

"Dr Pepper is named after Dr. Charles T. Pepper, an 1855 graduate of the University of Virginia Medical School," concurs James A. Ball, the Sr. V.P. Corporate Communications for Dr. Pepper/Seven-Up Companies Inc. of Dallas. "Who practiced medicine at his pharmacy in Rural Retreat, VA in the late 1800s. The entire history of Dr Pepper was published in 1995 by author Jeffrey Rodengen. His book, authorized by me, is entitled The Legend of Dr Pepper/Seven-Up."

Not everyone associated with the soft drink business agrees with that view.

"What we found was that according to the US Census, Morrison lived in the town of Christiansburg, VA and worked as a pharmacy clerk," says Milly Walker, the Collections Manager/Curator for the Dublin Dr Pepper Bottling Co. Museum in Dublin, TX. "In that same census on the next page (if I remember correctly) is another Dr. Pepper and he has a daughter, Malinda or Malissa, who is only 16 to Morrison's 17.

"If you understand that the census takers walked from house to house, you can tell they were near neighbors. This makes much more sense to me than Dr. Charles T. Pepper, 40 miles away in Rural Retreat. There is not one piece of evidence that Morrison ever worked for Dr. Charles T. Pepper in Rural Retreat, VA," she says.

The remains of Dr. Charles Taylor Pepper rest with those of his wife and several children in Mountain View Cemetery overlooking the town he lived and worked in. He died in 1903 in his 73rd year. And his pharmacy? Despite its brush with greatness, it never became a tourist draw. It finally closed in 1994. "Nowadays, if you're not big business, you're not in business," said W. Baynard Barton 3d, Rural Retreat's last pharmacist.


sources: "Delve into Dr Pepper's Origins in Rural Retreat" The Virginian-Pilot, September 1, 1996
"Rural Retreat Journal; Store Closes, and a Way of Life Is Just a Memory" NY Times April 16, 1994
http://www.wythevilleva.com/drpepper.htm
http://www.houstonpress.com/2008-06-05/news/boot-legging-dr-pepper/2
http://www.freenewyork.net/dpfaq.html
http://www.wiw.org/~chris/drpepper/


Charles+T.+Pepper Wade+Morrison Dr+Pepper Rural+Retreat+VA appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

But the nights belonged to youth

"[After the end of the Spanish American War] Mt. Savage resumed its gay pleasures, which led to many courtships. There was nothing better to further this cause than a long bicycle ride.

"The Sunday afternoon ride up to Allegany, pushing up Moss Cottage Hill; stopping at Paul's Store to buy peppermints and licorice candy; resting in the shade of the big oak trees along the straight; sometimes watching the gypsies in their bright costumes camped there; sometimes having their fortunes told; speeding homeward before supper.

"The swift wind carrying a marriage proposal over his shoulder, but her keen ears caught it despite the noise.

"… But the nights belonged to youth. The day's events were only to warm up for the square dance at night. How we helped big sister pull the corset strings tighter and tighter. One would die if one's waist was over 18 inches. Mother helping to button up the blouse in the back and sister fluffing out the ruffled front and all the girl friends collecting at our house and admiring each others’ clothes.

"This evening of fun was only equaled by the Saturday night dance at Locust Grove. The fiddlers tuning up and the figure caller strutting around and announcing 'the first dance is free Ladies and Gentlemen.' How disgusted the young ladies and men were to see all those kids crowding on the floor taking advantage of the free dance.

"The daring young man who swings his girl completely off her feet and she didn't mind too much because she had on her new ruffled petticoat. The Saturday night fights over the best looking girl. The insects danced just as merrily around the torches stuck on polls and nailed to the locust trees. And the music! Has there ever been anything written to better dance to than Oh Dem Golden Slippers or Climbing Up De Golden Stairs?

From a speech written and presented to the Homemakers Club by Mary (Miller) Bowen, wife of William Anthony Bowen of Mt. Savage, Allegany County, Maryland. April 29, 1953

source: http://files.usgwarchives.org/md/allegany/history/local/mtsavage.txt

In 1994, square danc
ing was designated the Maryland State Folk Dance. This dance integrates the Morris and Maypole dances of
 England, ballroom dances of France, Church
 dances of Spain, and folk dances of Australia, Ire
land, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Poland, Russia. Square dancing has been a popular 
Maryland folk tradition since 1651.

Source: http://snipurl.com/2y0a7 [www_msa_md_gov]


square+dancing Allegany+County+MD Mt+Savage+MD appalachia +appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Yeahoh, Yahoo or Bigfoot?

Long before it became the brand of a search engine, the creature whose uttered cry gave it a name haunted Kentuckians. Daniel Boone told tales of "killing a ten-foot, hairy giant he called a Yahoo," says John Mack Faragher in a 1992 biography of Boone. The Yahoos are hairy man-like creatures in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, one of Boone's favorite books. Boone and his explorer companions, it should be noted right from the get-go, threw around many of the terms used in that book rather liberally.

“[Boone] was encamped with five other men on Red River,” Theodore Roosevelt relates in his Daniel Boone's Move to Kentucky (1897), “and they had with them for their amusement 'the history of Samuel Gulliver's travels, wherein he gave an account of his young master, Glumdelick, careing [sic] him on a market day for a show to a town called Lulbegrud.’

“In the party who, amid such strange surroundings, read and listened to Swift's writings was a young man named Alexander Neely. One night he came into camp with two Indian scalps, taken from a Shawnee village he had found on a creek running into the river; and he announced to the circle of grim wilderness veterans that ‘he had been that day to Lulbegrud, and had killed two Brobdignags in their capital.’ To this day the creek by which the two luckless Shawnees lost their lives is known as Lulbegrud Creek.”

Folktale scholar Hugh H. Trotti suggests that Boone's tall tales may be the origin of some of the Bigfoot tales in North America. Could the term "Yeahoh" used for such a creature in the following story simply be a corruption of Swift's “Yahoos”?

Once upon a time they's a man layin' out, and he went to a cave. And he was layin' out in there and the Yeahoh come and throwed a deer in to him -- something would come every day and throw a deer into him, and leave out. On time that Yeahoh come and got down in there wuth him and not long after that she had a kid. Then one time he took a notion to leave her and he would go to leave and she wouldn't let him go. She'd make him come back. A-finally he got out and he got on a ship going to cross the waters. And he got started and rode off and left her. And she stood there and hollered and screamed after him. And when she seen he'd got away from her and she couldn't go, why she tore the baby in two and throwed one half in after him.

---Told by Nancy McDaniel of Big Leatherfoot Creek, Perry County, KY to folktale collector Leonard Roberts, who published it under the title "The Origin of Man" in South From Hell-fer-Sartin (1955).

So okay, if Kentuckians heard it passed down from Boone, who got it from Swift, how did Swift learn of Yahoo tales? Or did he simply spin them from his imagination? One possible clue: though Nancy McDaniel’s tale is told in the hills, it mentions ships and “crossing the waters” as the escape route for the captive human.

Tales of women shipwrecked or marooned on an island populated by monkeys or apes, fed and housed by a dominant monkey and forced to cohabit and bear it offspring, before escaping and seeing their hybrid children murdered by the irate simian parent, may have arisen in early 16th century Portugal, and also exist in similar forms in the Americas and across Asia. The idea of a “semi-human” was also floating through scientific circles in the first half of the 18th century: in 1758 Carolus Linnaeus theorized that a form between man and ape existed, which he named Homo troglodytes.

Linguist Richard Stoney carefully states that Swift, a lover of wordplay, drew from many language sources, each of which refer to various personality facets of the Yahoos. But he also turns up the following morsel published in Australian Aboriginal Words in English (1835): “The natives are greatly terrified by the sight of a person in a mask calling him 'devil' or Yah-hoo, which signifies evil spirit."

And from the 1844 edition: "They have an evil spirit, which causes them great terror, whom they call 'Yahoo' or 'Devil-Devil': he lives in the tops of the steepest and rockiest mountains, which are totally inaccessible to all human beings, and comes down at night to seize and run away with men, women or children, whom he eats up, children being his favourite food...The name... of Yahoo being used to express a bad spirit, or 'Bugaboo', was common also with the aborigines of Van Diem[e]n's Land [Tasmania]..."

The tribes mentioned here are located in the region around Botany Bay (near Sydney and slightly westward), site of the first British settlement in Australia in 1788. Gulliver’s Travels was written in 1726. Did the aborigines, like early Kentuckians, absorb Swift’s tale from the new colonists and make it local, or did Swift, to create his characters, draw on much older aboriginal folktales, possibly passed along to him by seafarers pre-dating Cook? The debate continues.


Sources: Curious Legend of the Kentucky Mountains, by Leonard Roberts, Western Folklore, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jan., 1957), pp. 48-51
The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures by John Matthews, Caitlin Matthews, 2006, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.
www.geocities.com/sanskritpuns99/yahoo1.html
www.nationalcenter.org/BoonebyRoosevelt.html
www.geocities.com/ruritanian_muglug/monkey-spouse.pdf
Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer, by JM Faragher, 1992, New York: Henry Holt & Company
Did fiction give birth to Bigfoot?, by HH Trotti, 1994, SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 18(5): 541-2.


Daniel+Boone Yeahoh Yahoo Nancy+McDaniel Perry+County+KY appalachia appalachian+mountains+history appalachian+history

Time to put a berry basket to good use

Wild berry picking was once a common summer activity throughout Appalachia, and before the advent of Styrofoam or plastic containers the homemade bark berry basket was just the thing to haul your treasures out of the woods with. No point in going home to fetch a bucket when you can just peel some bark off a tree with a penknife and whip up your own container on the spot.

Last week was the ideal time for making a traditional berry basket, for two reasons. First, the woods throughout Appalachia are full of raspberries, huckleberries, and blackberries. Second, the best time to strip bark from a tree to make said basket is during the main sap flow that peaks under the new moon in July—July 3 this year.

So you’ve been out fishing all morning, following the creek up into the mountains. You’re catching a few of them native speckled trout, but after a while the stream gets too small. So you call it quits and head up to the ridge for the long walk home. There you run into the biggest patch of ripe huckleberries that you’ve ever seen! You’d love to haul some of them berries home, but you ain’t got nothing to carry ‘em in….Well, if you knew how to make a berry basket, you’d just find you a young tulip poplar tree, make a poplar bark basket and tote them berries home, buddy!

—Paul Geouge, as quoted by Doug Elliott, in Primitive Ancestral Skills, edited by David Wescott

Typically, the berry basket is scored on the bottom in a cats-eye shape, and then folded upwards. The bark of tulip trees (Liriodendron tulipifera) is ideal to form baskets, and the inner bark of hickories (genus Carya) is best for lacing. You can also use basswood (Tilia americana) for both container and lacing. Sew up the sides with strips of bark, and add a handle made out of bark, vines, or a split piece of wood.

Bill Alexander, a member of the Tennessee Basketry Association and an authority on this type of basket, writes of another use of the bark basket in that group’s January 2008 newsletter: "Harold Hurst said that on English Mountain in Sevier County, Tennessee that his Uncle Ruphart Williams would take him out hunting for wild honey bees. He said; 'We'd go out and hunt bees' to rob the wild honey. They would look for bees watering in a stream and follow them to the wild bee tree. He said they would 'Pull the bark off of a poplar and lay it out while it was green and cut it and shape it' [to make a basket], and 'We'd put the honey and cones in 'em."

People considered these baskets disposable, so very few examples of them survive in museums or private homes.


sources: http://tn-humanities.org/community/articles/ki.php
www.tennesseebasketryassociation.com/TBA%20Newsletter%20Jan%2008.pdf
www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/1979-05-01/Make-a-Mountain-Bark-Basket.aspx



berry baskets, Bill Alexander, Tennessee Basketry Association, picking, appalachia, applachian history, appalachian mountains history

The 3 Wonders of Appalachia

The World Heritage Committee (WHC), meeting in Quebec this week, on Monday added 8 natural sites and 19 cultural sites to UNESCO's World Heritage List of cultural, natural, and mixed properties that have "outstanding universal value." This brings the total to 905 sites listed: 697 cultural, 182 natural, and 26 mixed properties, in 145 states parties. It's a good time to take stock and reflect on just how appreciated the three World Heritage List sites in Appalachia are, not just in the region, not just in America, but worldwide.

World Heritage sites are acknowledged to belong to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory on which they are located. Here in America the WHC has identified 20 such sites (including two sites jointly administered with Canada), starting in 1978 with the Mesa Verde National Park, most administered by the National Park Service.

The inscription of these 20 American properties as World Heritage Sites formally recognizes the respect they hold in the world community. They are linked today through the contemporary successor to the ancient list of the Seven Wonders of the World - the World Heritage List.

The three Appalachian sites that make the list are: Mammoth Cave National Park (1981), Great Smoky Mountains National Park (1983), and Monticello and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (1987).

The mere mention of the above names on the World Heritage list evokes our nation's heritage and the universal human values we stand for. Thomas Jefferson's designs for Monticello and the University of Virginia are recognized worldwide as exceptional examples of Neoclassical architecture. The earth's longest underground passageways at Mammoth Cave, and the astonishing variety of flora and fauna (more than 3,500 plant species) found in the Great Smokies, amaze millions of visitors annually.

But making the WHC list is more than just a pat on the back and a plaque on the wall. Through the World Heritage Fund, the WHC can provide countries requesting assistance with studies, advice, training, and equipment in order to eliminate problems, restore damaged areas, and set up safeguards.

The Secretary of the Interior, through the National Park Service, is responsible for identifying and nominating U.S. sites to the list. Proposed U.S. sites must be either federal property, such as national parks, or sites already designated as national historic landmarks or national natural landmarks. Properties not owned by the Federal Government are nominated only if their owners wish to do so and pledge to protect their properties in perpetuity.

The WHC program was founded with the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, which was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO on November 16, 1972. Since then, 185 states have ratified the convention.


Sources: nps.gov/oia/topics/worldheritage/worldheritage.htm
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list
ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/ebooks/records/7151-1.html



World Heritage Committee, List, Mammoth Cave National Park, Great Smoky Mountains Monticello, appalachia, appalachian history, mountains history

Defendant is amused at the plaintiff’s charges that he was not in love with her

From the divorce case between Walter E. McDaniels and Anna C. McDaniels, Knox County [TN] Fourth Circuit Court, filed July 1926


HIM: “Plaintiff met defendant in Philadelphia while stationed there and defendant became seemingly, and very sincerely in love or infatuated with plaintiff. Shortly after meeting defendant at Philadelphia, he was transferred to Norfolk, VA, his home station, and defendant, without the knowledge of plaintiff, followed him to Norfolk.

“Plaintiff was not in love with defendant, to the extent of considering a marriage with defendant, as defendant was of a foreign nativity to wit; an Italian, but she was so persistent in her intercessions to induce plaintiff to marry her, that plaintiff in a moment of weakness, he consummated the contract and married her, though sincerely and truthfully plaintiff was not in love with defendant, but after he had married her he determined to treat her right and perhaps would learn to love her, and brought her home to Knoxville, TN and after plaintiff brought her home to his mother’s home where he had always lived with his mother, sisters and bros.

“Soon after he brought her home, she began to exhibit that defiant spirit, as dictatorial as old man Musselino himself; she became a demon and devil incarnate, and without any just excuse or case, she made the life of not only the plaintiff, but all the family a hell on earth and kept the entire family in a constant uproar all the time, and never spoke a kind word all the time, and she became so violent, that she assaulted plaintiff every time he came into the home.

“Defendant believed in ruling by brute force, and demonstrated her belief by often assaulting plaintiff, without any just excuse or case. Plaintiff has had to leave home on various occasions in order to prevent defendant from doing him great bodily harm, threatening to kill him and has chased him on the streets when she would fly into a fit of anger, and he believes that she would have killed him if he had not gotten away from her.

“On more occasions than one, she threatened to poison him, and on one occasion she threw a knife at him, and stuck the knife in his leg. And said she intended to kill him, and said that if she did not get to poison him she would stab him through the heart, when he was asleep.

“Plaintiff knew that she meant to kill him or do him some great bodily harm, and was forced to leave home, her conduct was so cruel and inhuman toward him, that it is not safe to long cohabit with her and be under her dominion and control. Plaintiff was forced to again enlist in the US Navy to protect himself.

“She shows plainly that she is an Italian, is possessed of a wicked and malignant heart and that she is fatally bent on mischief, and is unforgiving like most of foreigners.”

HER: “It is true that she and the plaintiff were married in North Carolina in December 1924, and that they came to Knoxville to live in February 1925, at which time the defendant came to the home of the plaintiff’s parents where she lived until conditions became intolerable there.

“At the time she came to the home of her Mother-in-law she had been in Norfolk, VA and at that time the plaintiff transferred from land duty to sea duty as a sailor in the Navy and went to sea, leaving the defendant in destitute circumstances and taking the last money from here that she had, and left this defendant absolutely penniless.

“This defendant’s Mother-in-law, who is Mrs. Estella McDaniel of Knoxville, sent this defendant the sum of twenty dollars to come to her home in Knoxville and out of this sum, the defendant paid her room rent and board bill in Norfolk and came to Knoxville on the balance. It is true that the plaintiff and this defendant met in Philadelphia, the plaintiff then being a sailor in the US Navy.

“This defendant is amused at the plaintiff’s charges that he was not in love with her and that she was in love or infatuated with him and made violent love to him and inveigled or induced him in a moment of weakness to marry her. These charges are absolutely false and untrue.

“As a matter of fact, this defendant at that time was but an eighteen year old girl, and the plaintiff was a man six years older than herself and as he says in his bill, a man schooled in the ways of the world, having sailed the seven seas and well able to take care of himself, being a man of average intelligence.

“These charges in his bill are a reflection upon himself rather than upon this defendant, but the defendant deems it proper to state the facts because said charges as well as all other charges in his bill are wicked and untrue. Walter E. McDaniels took the initiative in this courtship, and was a most persistent and effective lover, and proposed marriage and urged the same for a long time before this defendant consented thereto.

“She did go to Norfolk VA after he had transferred to that point from Philadelphia, but went at his insistence and request and at his expense, he coming from Norfolk to Philadelphia to get her, and took her back to Norfolk with him.

“Plaintiff says he was never in love with this defendant; if that is true he married her under the grossest misrepresentation because she was in love with him at that time, her affections having been won by his persistent favors and attentions and promises, and the only consideration of this marriage was that of what she deemed an honorable love.”


Source: Volunteer Voices/Digital Library Center/University of Tennessee/Knox County Archives/ Knox County Fourth Circuit Court/http://idserver.utk.edu/?id=200700000001595/



divorce+cases Knoxville+TN Knox+County+Court appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

You hurd of the oald Virginia land grant

A Letter written by Isaiah [Zade] Greer, July 8th 1912
Pike County, KY

this badly dun cold & dark, but you can draw it of it is true. we have had some Sickness. Sabra 31 days that she was not On a cheer better now we air about commun for our age We have plenty do doo but wood like to talk to sum north caroline a week so if can't cum you must write Levi had a bad soor on his neck I think unto death it is 3 inches across.

J.J. Greer past this life on the 3 of February leaves Fanny lonly I must write Lotta We have not saw hir in a long time Tel hir write to Barbra and give all the nuse that she had good and bad We air in sum trubble Phillip you hurd of the oald Virginia land grant that have lawing Pike Co. for 2 months Six Hundred 66 thousand acres all west side of the river but 200 acres is clean seep Tha is more than I cood write in a week so I will close for this time
Isaiah and Barbra Greer fair well.

Virginia Land grants were issued for services rendered to the governor and to the colony. To stimulate colonization, a headright system offered fifty acres to any person who paid his own transportation to Virginia. Any individual or entrepreneur who paid transportation costs for one or more persons could obtain fifty acres per person. Many headrights went unclaimed because of Virginia's high mortality during the early years of colonization, and some were claimed many years after the headright was awarded.

The Virginia Act of 1781 granted bounty land to veterans. The individual who received a warrant may have claimed the land himself or may have sold his warrant to someone else. Many Virginia land grants applied to Kentucky County, VA, which later became Kentucky. Approximately 10,000 Virginia Land Grants were filed, the last in June 1792.


Sources: www.lib.byu.edu/fslab/pdf/researchoutlines/Virginia.pdf
www.genealogyforum.com/gfnews/february99/gfn9902w.htm
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ncashe/research/greer.html



appalachia Virginia+land+grants Kentucky+County+VA Isaiah+Greer Pike+County appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

World's oldest man -- Kentuckian John Shell

He never wore shoes much and chewed tobacco inveterately. He grew 3 sets of teeth during his long life, he claimed. And when he died on July 5, 1922, his oldest child was 99 years old and his youngest only seven. Other men in the mountains lived to advanced ages, but none ever came close to John Shell.

John Shell's father Samuel, a gunsmith of Dutch descent, and his wife Mary Ann Fry Shell, moved according to one account from Pennsylvania through the Shenandoah Valley to settle in East Tennessee, where John was born in 1788 near the Roaring River. Other accounts state that both parents were born in the Carolinas. All their known children were born in Tennessee. John's mother lived to great age; she is believed to have been 102 years old when she died in 1877.

The Shell family moved on to Kentucky, settling first on Poor Fork and later moving over the mountain to Laurel Creek/Greasy Creek in the part of Harlan that became Leslie County in 1878.

The town was originally called Licking Creek by early hunters because of deer licks there, when it was still part of Virginia. The name was later changed to Laurel Creek, justified by the laurel thickets that abound there. Then one day, John Shell shot and wounded a bear on the mountain at the mouth of Shell's Fork on the Laurel. The bear ran off the mountain and fell into the "Blue-hole".

The water was so deep that John could not get his bear out. The bear, in time, began to decompose. Its accumulated fat created a greasy scum that rose to the surface of the water for some time. People downstream then renamed the tributary to suit its aspects. It is called Greasy Creek to this day. Yes, John Shell had quite the reputation as a storyteller.

Harlan became a county when Shell was 12 years old, he stated, and that he had stood on a tree stump and shouted the news to the people. This took place in 1819, which would place his age at the time of his death at 115, not 134 years old. In his early years he helped defend the settlement of Harlan against a flaming-arrow Indian attack.

John recalled the earthquake which rumbled through Kentucky in 1811, saying that it came in December, early in the morning and lasted for two days, shaking the dishes from the table and pictures from the walls. He could call to mind when the stars fell at night long in bunches and one after the other in 1837 or 1838. And John remembered seeing Daniel Boone had killed many bear, deer and wild turkeys.

"Uncle John" Shell, 131 years old, at the Bluegrass Fair, Lexington, in 1919. First time he had seen anything but the backwoods of Leslie County. He died two years later at an actual age of 113.

Only about three or four families lived in the mouth of the Clover Fork in that era, but one of them produced Elizabeth Nance (or Nantz), whom John married in 1844. Their union in turn brought forth Mary Ann, William, Nicholas, Sarah, John, Martha, Elizabeth and Alijah. They are thought to have had twelve children total.

There was the matter of getting a living. Shell was a gunsmith, a miller, a wainwright, and a blacksmith. He made knives, axes, hammers, spinning wheels, looms, and whiskey.

When the Civil War broke out, Shell rode all the way to Virginia to fight for the Confederacy. "When John Shell arrived in Virginia and finally got to see Robert E. Lee to enlist to fight for the Confederacy,” relates Shell descendent Naomi A. Middleton Taylor in a family history, “Robert E. Lee said to him, 'Sir, I admire you for riding this far. But sir, I cannot take you because of your age.' John Shell was disappointed. You see, he was 74 years old."

After the death of his first wife and after he was well over one hundred years old, John married Elizabeth Chappel and had one son by her, Albert James Shell. She died when the child was three years old.

John and Albert went to the Kentucky State Fair in 1919 as guests of the governor and John was displayed as the oldest man in the world. Many folks at the fair doubted his claim of age. He became ‘biling mad,’ stormed home and found a tax receipt which showed he had paid taxes in 1809.

He argued that he must have been at least 21 years old at the time to have done that. Harlan County tax lists, however, show that he first appears in 1844 which would place his birth date at 1822, not 1788.

At the time of his last appearance in the lowlands, ‘Uncle John’ weighed 130 pounds and was 5 feet 5 inches tall. It is said that he was breaking a horse to ride on his last day and that he fell off and hurt his back. He died that night.

Many Shell descendants live in the Harlan area to this day.

Sources: Oldest Man in World is Buried in Kentucky, "New York Times", July 11, 1922 http://snipurl.com/2u2j0
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~seky/folfoot/014.html
Author details life of 134-year-old ancestor, Richmond woman writes book about her long-lived family member, "Everyday People" column, 'The Palladium-Item' by Rachel E. Sheeley, http://snipurl.com/2u2mm
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyborn/familyphoto259.html


Harlan+KY appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history John+Shell

Happy 4th of July to all!

July 4, 1918 parade in Wheeling, WV.


Wheeling+WV appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

America’s Roadside Evangelist

Before there were interstates, when everyone drove two lane roads at leisurely speeds, Burma Shave signs were posted all over the countryside in farmers' fields. Five small red signs with white letters, about 100 feet apart, each containing 1 line of a 4 line couplet......and the obligatory 5th sign advertising Burma Shave, a popular shaving cream.

Appalachia had them, sure. Appalachia also had a roadsign painter for God by the name of Henry Harrison Mayes (1898-1986). Mayes, a Kentucky coal miner, began his roadside mission in 1917. Feeling that his life had been spared after a mining accident, Mr. Mayes decided to serve God by sharing the Good News with passing motorists. Mayes used money he made as a free-lance sign painter to support his advertising crusade, an effort that resulted in crosses being erected in forty-four states. All the while Mayes continued to work, full time for 43 years, for the Fork Ridge Coal Company in the mines of Mingo Hollow.

REMEMBER: IF YOU GO TO HELL IT'S YOUR FAULT

ADVERTISING GOD SINCE 1918

REGENERATION, SANCTIFICATION, HOLY GHOST BAPTISM

Mr. Mayes fashioned crosses by using homemade wooden molds and hand mixing and pouring concrete crosses in his backyard. After producing a substantial inventory he hoisted his artwork on his truck and set out for well traveled areas. Without permission, he would dig a hole on property near the highway and set his massive cross in place.

Mayes was known in his hometown of Middlesboro as the Sign Man or the Cross Builder. He lived near the valley’s center in a cross-shaped house, the ten commandments displayed on his front gate, with Jesus Saves painted in huge letters across the roof. He kept its lawn filled with cross-shaped signs. He created a massive cross of electric lights which to this day hangs about ten feet from the ground along a mountain at the base of the town's main avenue.

In Harrison's later life he became somewhat of a local celebrity riding his bicycle (which he called his "Jeep") in parades with a huge sign on it reading "GET RIGHT WITH GOD" and "ADVERTISING GOD SINCE 1918." He sometimes wore a white dress coat that had 278 crosses drawn on it with a ballpoint pen representing the number of denominations of churches he was aware of at the time.

Henry Harrison Mayes eventually attracted the attentions of Newsweek, Life, and Foxfire 9. He constructed and erected his concrete crosses for some sixty years. Many of his original crosses no longer exist because of highway expansion programs, traffic accidents, and natural erosion. Today, some of his items are on display in the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, TN. And his first bicycle can be seen at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville, TN.


Sources: http://arnoldmiller.com/faith.htm
http://kywordman.wordpress.com/category/appalachia/
http://smithdray.tripod.com/hmayes-index-7-1.html


Henry Harrison Mayes, roadside crosses, Middleboro KY, Museum of Appalachia, appalachia, appalachian history, mountains history

The buck flies would just eat you up

"My parents farmed. Well, it's a good life, but it's a hard life. They raised cattle, sheep, and hogs for a living. [Their farm] had a lot of...... It wasn't much level land, it was more rolling hills and pasture was in... It was sorta rough land. This farm had four springs on it and it run by gravity. We had it piped into the house. The creek run through the farm and these springs had water that came out to the creek.

"The house had fourteen rooms. It had up stairs and a front stairs, and a back stairs and it had eight fireplaces in it, and it was the old Dr. Bishop's house. We got electricity when I was about about fourteen, fifteen years old when we got electricity. We didn't have a phone. We had an old-time phone that you cranked it. Each one would have a different ring and you would ring maybe one ring would be one neighbor and you would ring two rings would be another neighbor. It was an old-time phone and it was on batteries.

Photo caption reads: Joe Compton's last horse.

"We had a dairy barn and a sheep barn. We used to raise lambs, and we had a big chicken house, and we had chickens. Rhode Island Reds. We raised baby chicks and we had baby pigs and all of that. Out from the house. You didn't want them too close.

"The dairy barn was across the road. The milking parlor was built out of stone, big rock and the dairy barn was built with weathered board planks. We had several cows. We'd milk cows and made our spending money. We had Jersey and Holsteins. We fed them corn and skim milk. We had a cream separator and we would take the cream off that milk and then you after you a five or ten gallon can you would take it to the freight station and ship it off to Fairmont Creamery Company and you would take the separated milk and feed your hogs. I always helped with the milking. Everybody had a milk stool and a bucket.

"We raised corn and wheat and hay. We had a corn planter and we always hooked up two horses to plant it. I didn't like hoeing corn. The buck flies would just eat you up. We cut that corn by hand if we wanted to make silage we cut it by hand and put it on a wagon and brought it in, and then they chopped it at the silo or if you wanted to shuck the corn, you would cut it and put it in shocks and then you would go back the last of October or the first of November when it got a little damp and shuck out that corn and haul it in.

[What was your favorite job on the farm?] "Go swimming.

"The government had to have everything government inspected before you could sell it. The eggs had to be candled and the meat had to be government inspected and you couldn't sell them. It's changed so much you have to be a big farmer to make a living because a little farmer can't hardly make a living."

Blanche Compton
b. Clearfork, VA 1921
interviewed by granddaughter
Jennifer Belcher on Feb 15, 1997
Bland County [VA] History Archives
http://www.bland.k12.va.us/bland/rocky/gap.html


appalachia, appalachian farming, history, mountains Blanche Compton, Bland County VA, Clearfork VA

Prohibition comes to Alabama. Again.

On July 1, 1915, statewide prohibition went into effect in Alabama, for the second time, five years before the federal prohibition amendment was ratified under the Kilby administration. Between 1907 and 1915, all but two Southern states enacted prohibition laws.

Prohibition was a bitter issue in Alabama politics. "Prohibition in the South is a failure, not only because it does not prohibit, but because it is breeding a defiance of law and has set up in the place of licensed saloons illegal dispensers of liquor," fumed the United States Brewers' Association in their 1911 yearbook. "Not only has prohibition, as a general rule, failed to improve conditions that existed under the local-option system, but it has wiped out the reforms accomplished under the latter plan and has nullified the good effects of regulation wherever it existed."

During the tenure of Governor Emmet O'Neal (1911-1915), prohibition forces controlled the legislature, which passed a bill to reinstate prohibition, submitting it to the governor on his last day in office. O'Neal ignored it, and after the inauguration, newly elected Gov. Charles Henderson promptly vetoed it.

"Both houses of the Legislature, within a few hours after Gov. Henderson had vetoed the bills and asked that the prohibition question be submitted to voters at a special election, voted on his proposal and repassed the bills by overwhelming majorities," said the NY Times on Jan 22, 1915. "The prohibition measures re-enact the prohibition law repealed in 1911 after it had been in force two years. Under the 1911 local option law all but eight of the sixty-seven counties have voted dry."

Henderson was personally opposed to prohibition, and later vetoed a law against alcohol advertising. Despite his personal disagreement with them, Henderson upheld and enforced both of these laws.

Prohibition didn’t seem to slow whiskey production; 386 illegal stills were seized in Alabama in 1915. The "bone dry" law of 1915 stood till 1933, when the twenty-first amendment to the Constitution, repealing prohibition, was ratified.


Sources: www.archives.state.al.us/govs_list/g_hender.html
The Year Book of the United States Brewers' Association, by United States Brewers' Assn., 1911


appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history Gov+Charles+Henderson Gov+Emmet+O'Neal prohibition+in+AL

Daring young men in their flying trapezes

By the end of his long career, John Paul Riddle (1901-1989) had received the British Empire award and been inducted into the Kentucky Aviation Hall of Fame and the Florida Aviation Historical Society. But on July 4, 1923 the Pikeville, KY native and ex-Army airman was busy flying his Jenny under the town’s Middle Bridge and barnstorming his way across the countryside.

They were the most exciting daredevils of their day. Stunt pilots and aerialists--or "barnstormers" as they became known--performed almost any trick or feat with an airplane that people could imagine. During the 1920s, barnstorming became one of the most popular forms of entertainment. It was the first major form of civil aviation in the history of flight.

Two main factors helped barnstorming grow in America after the war--the number of former World War I aviators who wanted to make a living flying, and a surplus of Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplanes. During that war, the United States had manufactured a multitude of Jennys to train its military aviators; almost every U.S. airman had learned to fly using a Jenny.

Consequently, when the federal government priced its surplus Jennys for as little as $200 during the postwar period (they originally cost approximately $5,000 each), many of the servicemen, who were already quite familiar and comfortable with the JN-4's, purchased their own planes. These two factors, coupled with the fact that there were no federal regulations governing aviation at the time, allowed barnstorming to flourish during the postwar era.

On any given day, a pilot, or team of pilots, would fly over a small rural town and attract the attention of the local inhabitants. The pilot or team of aviators would then land at a local farm (hence the name barnstorming) and negotiate with the farmer for the use of one of his fields as a temporary runway from which to stage an air show and offer airplane rides to customers.

After obtaining a base of operation, the pilot or group of aviators would fly back over the town, or "buzz" the village, and drop handbills offering airplane rides for a small fee, usually from one to five dollars. Pilots could make terrific money for a day’s work. John Paul Riddle, for example, was flying from Pikeville to Cincinnati one day, when he ran out of gas and landed in a polo field, instantly attracting the usual curious crowd. Once refueled, he started taking folks up for rides, making a quick $150 for his efforts.

The advertisements would also tout the daring feats of aerial daredevilry that would be offered. Crowds would then follow the airplane, or pack of planes, to the field and purchase tickets for joy rides.