Monroe County’s rugged terrain hindered commerce and communication during the 1800s. In the early 1870s Woodsfield businessmen, led by banker Samuel L. Mooney, promoted a narrow-gauge railroad to connect to the Baltimore and Ohio at Bellaire.

Narrow gauge railroads were popular during this boom era because they cost less to build and operate than standard-gauge lines and could traverse sharp curves and steep terrain. The Bellaire and Southwestern Railway was completed through Armstrong’s Mills and Beallsville to Woodsfield in December 1879, giving Monroe County a welcome modern link to the rest of the country.

Its initial success prompted its extension westward, and it was soon renamed the Bellaire, Zanesville, and Cincinnati Railway, reaching Zanesville via Caldwell in late 1883.

While it served a vital role in the Monroe County life, by 1886 the BZ&C had defaulted on its construction bonds and entered the first of many receiverships. Its 300 trestles and bridges were expensive to maintain; frequent landslides added to operating costs.

Original caption reads: The Woodsfield ceremony for the OR&W’s last run. Mayor Clyde Merskel is speaking from the top of the box car. A George Kampheffner photo. (Gerald Seebach Collection)

Only the coal and oil booms of the 1890s, along with convoluted financing schemes, kept the railroad operating into the 20th century; a benefit for the people of Monroe County if not its stockholders. Reborn as the Ohio River and Western (locally called the “Old, Rusty, and Wobbly”) in 1902, it continued to operate at a loss until the Great Depression. The Village of Woodsfield had staged a ceremony for the first narrow gauge train to arrive in town Tuesday December 2nd, 1879. Similarly, a ceremony was held on Memorial Day May 30, 1931 for the last train. Hundreds turned out. The BZ&C had lasted 52 years.

Source: www.pbase.com/gshamilton/image/68697306
www.narrowtracks.com/minibunch/articles_prototype/Views_Along_OR&W/2004-06-OhioBicentennialMarkerDedication.htm

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1. The Tallulah Falls Railway

Some of the things I learned at Biltmore would be hard to find in any text book published then or later — things, that as I look back over my 44 years as a forester, have proved fully as potent for good as any of the technical disciplines of the profession.

The good Doctor taught us the value of relaxation in good company, when with song and stein the whole school and faculty would make merry and stretch lusty harmony and a keg of beer well into a starry Saturday night. Such carryings-on made for an espirit de corps and a strong bond of brotherhood that somehow seems to have lasted all thru the decades that have gone by.

He possessed and passed on to us his love of the woods and all that in them is. To hunt and fish, he taught by word and deed, is the especial privilege of the forester and a soothing ungent for a soul often wearied and harassed by over much fire fighting.

He preached that an appreciation of the birds, the beasts and the fishes, the flowers, the glamorous smells of bay swamps and spruce thickets and the shape and texture of foliage covered hills were all a part, and often the larger portion of a foresters compensation.

A great forester, a masterful teacher and a strong and lovable character, our good Doctor Schenck can look back from his quiet home in Lindenfels and know that he lives not only in the affectionate hearts of his “boys” but as well in the forestry of America he helped in the borning.

Inman F. Eldredge
from a May 29, 1950 Reunion Speech to the Alumni of Biltmore Forest School, Asheville NC
Biltmore ‘06

In 1895, German forester Dr. Carl A. Schenck accepted George Vanderbilt’s offer to come to North Carolina to manage and restore his vast woodland properties.

Schenck oversaw thousands of acres dotted with several hundred houses and abandoned farms. In 1898, he established the Biltmore Forest School, the first forestry school in the United States, using Vanderbilt’s forests as a campus.

Photo caption reads: “Lecturing at the Fiber Plant. Canton, N.C. 1911. Class is in session for Biltmoreans at the Champion Fibre Company’s plant in Canton, North Carolina, 1911.”

Students in Schenck’s twelve-month curriculum split their time between classroom lectures and fieldwork. Combining theory with practice, the students gained experience in the physical side of forestry, including the care of nurseries, transplanting seedlings, timber selection, felling, logging, and sawing.

They also studied forest finance and economics, dendrology, botany, fish and game, and the machinery associated with forestry. The campus was located at the site of a sawmill and gristmill formerly owned by Hiram King, a leader of the Pink Beds farming community.

Schenck’s operation was quite successful in its first years, but Schenck had a falling out with Vanderbilt and left the estate in 1909. He established the school’s winter headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany. The Biltmore Forestry School was headquartered in the town of Sunburst, N.C. from 1910 to 1913. Sunburst is located on the Pigeon River, just west of Mount Pisgah.

The Champion Fibre Company constructed the village prior to their beginning logging operations in the area. Reuben B. Robertson, manager of the company, offered the use of the facilities to Dr. Schenck and his students. Schenck was particularly excited about the location because it offered the students the opportunity of direct observation of hardwood and spruce forests, logging operations, sawmills under construction, different types of log chutes and flumes, splash dams in operation and an up-to-date pulp mill.

Schenck struggled to maintain the school as a traveling entity in America, but enrollment dwindled as new forestry schools emerged. Schenck’s final class, who numbered more than 300, graduated in 1913. Many became prominent and successful foresters for both federal and state agencies as well as private forest industries.

Sources:
www.biltmore.com/explore/then/forestry.shtml
www.lib.ncsu.edu/specialcollections/forestry/schenck/series_vii/forest_school/school_sunburst/school_sunburst.html
www.ncmarkers.com/Results.aspx?k=Search&ct=btn
www.foresthistory.org/Research/Biltmore_Project/Flowers.pdf

Carl+A.+Schenck Biltmore+Forest+School Biltmore Pink+Beds Sunburst+NC Champion+Fibre+Company appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

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1. Home and the school-house had both become too hot for me

Henry worked in the mines and owned a car of what age, make or model I am not sure. I do know there were no late models in the community until many years later. We did the maintenance on our old models, tied them together with baling wire, cleaned the spark plugs and breaker points regularly, took up the slack in the adjustable tie rod ends so the driver need not give the steering wheel more than a full turn on the curves.

Before starting on a trip the trunk or back seat of the car should contain a water pail, hand tire pump, jack, tube patches and glue, three quarts of motor oil, a gas can, assorted tools, wrenches, hammers and screwdrivers. In the absence of stop-leak for the dripping radiator, dump in a handful of cornmeal which is sure to stop the leak and maybe the whole circulation system.

The motor gets hot. Can’t hardly see the road for the steam boiling up. “You hear that noise out there? What is it? Sounds like a loose rod to me. I just tightened them all up last week. Guess I had better pull off to the side of the road, drop the oil pan and take out a few shims, it won’t take long and we will save the oil to put back in when we get done.”

Original caption reads: Letcher County, Kentucky. A road scene near foot of Pine Mountain.

Flat tires, motor overhauls and other repairs were common sights along our few winding and narrow highways of those days. Today’s motorist would probably take a dim view of such modes of travel. But to those of us who owned one of these ancient vehicles, the door was opened to the outer world.

We could go to Whitesburg or Hazard and return the same day or even a hundred or more miles to visit gone-away relatives or friends. I have made trips to Tennessee and Ohio in trucks at that time that I would now not trust to get to Blackey and back – a distance of five miles each way.

In the late 1920′s and early 1930′s the route by car from Letcher County to Pulaski County was from Whitesburg across Pine Mountain and down the Cumberland River to Pineville on 119 which was a graveled road at that time. Highway 25 was blacktopped and led to the Bluegrass region.

On the outskirts of Pineville the Hamptons pulled into a small filling station for gas from the hand operated pump. As Henry pulled away from the station with a full tank of 17 cent-per-gallon gas, Mint leaned from the open car window and above the roar of the motor issued this invitation to the startled attendant, “Come and go with us, we are going to Pulaski County to see Henry’s ma.”

In the 1920′s Uncle Tom Dixon, a brother of grandfather Wilburn, owned the part of Dixon Mountain which was across the road and opposite the cemetery.

In summertime anyone traveling along the rough and rutted dirt road through Dixon Mountain would most always come upon Uncle Tom seated by the roadside, leaning back against a huge chestnut tree, a big pile of shavings was around his feet – the result of much whittling as he eagerly awaited the next traveler. Uncle Tom was a great storyteller and philosopher and a firm believer in an unhurried lifestyle. A theory that I fully support.

source: Eastern Kentucky Mountain Memories, by Clifton Caudill, published by s.n., 1996; this excerpt from article in ‘The Mountain Eagle,’ at www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyletch/articles/dixon_mt_1920.htm

Clifton+Caudill Letcher+County+KY automobiles appalachia appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

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1. Last stop: the poorhouse

Beekeeping is an age old, and surprisingly little changed, ritual. Below right is a 1908 ad from the Beekeeper’s Review promoting a bee smoker. The beekeepers reading this ad would have been almost as familiar with the smokers, supers and frames we use today as they would’ve been with bee equipment from 75 years prior to their own time.

That’s because the really big innovations that moved bee culture from hunting to cultivating all clustered around the 1850s & 1860s.

The “father of modern beekeeping,” Rev LL Langstroth, published “The Hive and the Honeybee” in 1853. In it he explained how his patented movable frame hive took advantage of the principles of Bee Space. That “magical space” is defined as “greater than 1/4 inch, but smaller than 3/8 inch”, and is recognized by the bees as OPEN space for occupation by bees only. Any spaces smaller or larger are subject to having comb built in them.

By utilizing this new finding, Langstroth was able to design a hive where the bees did not seal parts together by burr comb, hence allowing frames to be removed one by one, inner covers not sealed down to frame tops, and bee walk space on the tops of frames that had another hive body with frames on top of the lower hive body. A Langstroth hive filled with bees could be disassembled, each part inspected for status or disease, and reassembled without damage to comb or bees. This could NOT be done with any other “housing” for bees that existed in 1851!

The honey flavors of Appalachia draw from an amazingly broad list of nectar sources: alfalfa, apple blossom, aster, basswood, black locust, blackberry, buckwheat, Canadian thistle, clover, sweet clover, white dutch clover, corn, dandelion, goldenrod, Japanese knotweed, milkweed, paulownia, prickly ash, pussy willow, red maple, redbud, Russian sage, sourwood, starhorn sumac, sunflower, tree of heaven, tulip poplar, and witch hazel.

But don’t go looking in the supermarket for some such construct as “Appalachian Honey.” Commercial producers often mix honey imported from Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere to achieve the final “genuine pure natural honey” you see labeled in stores. Identifying the regional flavors in commercial honey is further complicated by the fact that apiaries break down their product into three general categories of white honey, extra light amber, or light amber, usually without regard to the nectar source (clover honey & orange blossom being two obvious exceptions.) Best to keep a few hives out back of the place and literally taste the micro-flora of your own little piece of Appalachia.

sources: “The Hive and the Honeybee” LL Langstroth, 1853
www.ams.usda.gov/fv/mncs/honey.pdf

http://tinyurl.com/2evare

LL+Langstroth beekeeping Appalachian+history Appalachian+culture history+of+Appalachia Appalachia

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1. Ahh-CHOOOOO !

O.k., I finally made a decision on Friday, February 10, 1956 and told Dee I would marry him. Now what? He wanted to go ahead and get my rings and give me the engagement ring on Valentine’s Day. The second order of business was for me to write Allen the dreaded “Dear John” letter.

We made a date to go downtown on Sunday afternoon to look at rings. While I was waiting for Dee to come get me, who shows up to visit but Allen’s parents. Uh oh, this was an awkward situation. Not long after they arrived, Dee came to the door. I just got up and left without any explanation. It was left to my poor mother to explain what was going on. They were very shocked, hurt and angry. Needless to say, that ended the friendship between them and my family. I was sorry that it had to be that way but some things just can’t be helped.

We picked out a set of rings at Kay Jewelers. We didn’t actually buy them. Dee went back on Monday and bought them. $250.00 – time payments, of course. That would be about $2,100.00 in today’s money. I haven’t priced any diamonds lately, but I don’t think a comparable set would cost that much today.

A funny thing happened that night at the supper table at Dee’s house. He had been having mechanical problems with his car for several days and he and his Dad had frequent discussions about what the problem might be. So, when he announced at the table that night that “he bought a set of rings today,” his Dad’s reply was “Son, I don’t believe I would have done that.” When Dee asked, “Why not, Dad?” Mr. Miller said, “Well, you’re liable to open that thing up and find the walls all scarred and worn out.” Dee almost choked laughing and could barely explain what he meant by a set of rings. That was a family story that got told many times thereafter.

Jean and Dee in 1956.

But there was no humor in my life that evening. I wrote Allen and told him all about Dee. Sometimes in books, movies and TV, the “Dear John” letter is a source of humor, but I can tell you there is nothing humorous about it. Not for the one writing it, and certainly not for the one receiving it. Allen had done nothing to deserve what I had done to him and writing that letter tore me apart. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I do know that it was one of the hardest things I had done up to that point in my life. I imagine his mother was also writing him that night.

February 14, 1956 (Tuesday) Dear Diary, Dee came over tonight and gave me my engagement ring and a box of candy. I sure do like my ring. Mary Glenn and Stanley came over for awhile and then Dee and I went up to Sherman Reservation. I love him.

Nothing much really changed for awhile after we got engaged. If Dee had been willing, I probably would have gotten married right away. He was more practical than I and said we needed to wait until he could save some money and he worried that he would not be able to support me on his meager salary. We tentatively set a date for around the first of August and hoped to have enough money by then to get a place to live and maybe go to Florida for our honeymoon.

I got two letters from Allen that he had written before I sent him “the” letter and after that, nothing. I tried to put him out of my mind, but the picture of him getting that letter kept popping up in my head.

February 25, 1956 (Saturday) Dear Diary, This morning Tommy Johnson called and said he and his girlfriend, Patsy were coming over today and could someone pick them up at the bus station. Mary Glenn and I went to a dance this afternoon at the Warner Park Field House then we went to the bus station to get them. This evening Dee and I took them to Rossville and Ringgold to get married.

Tommy (my cousin who lived in Nashville with Aunt Susie) and Patsy were eloping. Actually, I think everyone knew about it except Patsy’s dad who wouldn’t give his approval for them to get married. Rossville and Ringgold were, I guess, what you would call a “marriage mill” and a lot of people went there for a “quickie” marriage (even Dolly Parton got married in Ringgold). You had to get your blood tests in Rossville and then go a few miles to the courthouse in Ringgold to get the marriage license. Of course, there was always conveniently a minister or justice of the peace at the courthouse ready to perform the ceremony once you obtained the license.

Jean and Allen, October, 1954 - his first weekend at home after joining the Army in August, 1954.

The lab in Rossville was upstairs over a store on the main street. It was dark by the time everything was completed and just as we came down the stairs and exited the building, we were shocked to see police cars and policemen everywhere. This scared Patsy as her first thought was that her dad had discovered she was eloping and had sent the police to get her. But then we looked down the street and saw this big blur of white coming toward us. The Ku Klux Klan, waving their red flags of hate, were marching. That was the first and only time I ever saw that terrible sight.

They spent the night at my house and then Dee and I took them to the bus station on Sunday and they went home to Nashville. Their marriage lasted fifty-five years – until December, 2011 when Tommy passed away.

March 1, 1956 (Thursday) Dear Diary, Today after work, Mary Glenn and I went to the Tivoli and saw “Picnic”. When I got home I had a letter from Allen.

That letter from Allen sent me in a tailspin and almost brought me back to square one as far as he and Dee were concerned. I think I could have handled it if he had been angry and hateful about everything, but he was just the opposite. It was a sweet, loving letter in which he pleaded with me to wait until he came home to make a final decision about everything. Then I did a foolish, impulsive thing. I answered it and told him that if he could forgive me for writing that letter, that I would wait until he came home.

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1. A certain girl in the Senior Commercial room wrote the following

We open today’s show with author George A. Mosel’s appreciation of Steubenville, OH at the turn of the 20th century. “A town once meant as many things as there were people in it,” he observed. “A town was so many little things you have long forgotten— putting a pan of fudge out in the snow to cool; the itch of measles; the glow of pink candles on a birthday cake; the warm gooey taste of corn meal mush on a frosty morning; the sting of cold blisters, chapped hands, and arnica on a skinned knee. Such vagrant thoughts are like saving string, all the accumulated sounds, sights and smells you picked up along the way, piece by piece, bit by bit, some bright and smooth, some you wanted to save and some you’d just as soon forget, but all irrevocably tied together in an untidy growing ball and stored away in the back of your mind.”

We’ll pause in between things to catch up on a Calendar of Events in the region this week, with special attention paid to events that emphasize heritage and local color.

Blount County, AL bills itself the Covered Bridge Capital of Alabama, and to prove it has held a Covered Bridge Festival each October for over 25 years. The county boasts 3 remaining historic bridges: the Horton Mill Bridge, the Swann Covered Bridge (also called the Joy Covered Bridge or Swann-Joy Covered Bridge), and the Easley Bridge.

“One of my elections was contested,” explained Ruby Watts, a Judge Pro Tem in Knott County, KY in the mid-20th century. “They accused me of buying gingerbread and using other ways of influence on the voters.” Plenty of other mountain politicians bought gingerbread cakes from elderly women and distributed them to people in the hope of gaining a few extra votes. By doing this, candidates earned the goodwill of the gingerbread bakers and of the people who received a free piece of cake.

Northwest Georgia preacher Howard Finster (ca. 1915-2001) was an unlikely candidate for celebrity status on the post-modern art scene. Yet his eccentric outsider art paintings, sculptures, and constructions have been shown in prestigious museums and galleries around the world. He became something of a guru to thousands of academically trained young artists, ambitious collectors of outsider art, musicians, and others who made the pilgrimage to Pennville to meet him and to visit the two-acre Paradise Garden that he spent fifteen years building in his backyard.

We’ll wrap things up with a story of buried treasure. Just imagine how it must feel to be hoeing cotton with a long, hard day in prospect, and all at once begin to dig up clinking coins—and the deeper you dig the more coins roll out. It sounds like one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s stories; but such was the experience of Eva Watson and her sister, Edith Watson, and their cousin, Bertha Mae Torbett, who, together with their brothers, were hoeing cotton on the farm of Ransom Watson near Madisonville, TN in July of 1927.

And, thanks to the good folks at the Berea College Southern Appalachian Archives, we’ll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music by the McLain Family Band in a 1976 recording of Beaumont Rag.

So, call your old Plott hound up on the porch, fire up your corn-cob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian History.

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1. Listen Here: Appalachian History Weekly posts today

MAY 7 AND 8, 1942
Huntsville AL

Concerning CHILDERSBURG BAG-LOADING PLANT
TALLADEGA COUNTY, ALA.

Late in November of 1940 information was given out that some 27,000 acres of land in Talladega County bordering the Coosa River north and west of the small town of Childersburg (515 population in the 1940 census) were to be taken as site for a powder plant. The location was tentatively outlined in January and agricultural agencies, both Farm Security and Extension workers, were set to work warning people to vacate this property.

Because no certain information as to the location of boundaries could be obtained, the actual work of relocations did not get under way until the last of January and February. By the time Farm Security had made its original survey a good number of families had moved, both from the area finally taken and from land around it.

After this survey had been made, and after 80-odd families had been moved from land finally not included in the area, an accurate boundary line was established. While no official confirmation was made of the original territory marked out on maps used in the area, all indications pointed so clearly to its being taken that farmers in this territory decided to move while there was still time to find a new place, and to make another crop.

Original caption reads: Local family moving off of government reservation to make room for bag loading plant development. May 1941

The section of land finally taken was one containing much river land. Some of this 14,000 acres was good farm land, ideal for large farm operations. Most of it was poor, carelessly operated by Negro tenants, or lying out. Of the farm operators, almost 30 percent were receiving Farm Security aid. When the final area was chosen, 210 families were displaced.

The survey revealed that the area contains very few owners who will be financially able to relocate without some assistance. The number of cash renters, sharecroppers, and cotton renters constitute the largest group in this area.

Note these things: While 39.2 percent of Talladega County’s total number of farm operators are colored, 72.3 percent of the farm operators in this section were colored. Note also the comparatively large number of Negro landowners. In the county 22.3 percent of the Negro operators are landowners. In this section almost 32 percent were landowners.

In other words, about one-fifth of all Negro farm owners in Talladega County were in this section. Their holdings were small. The bulk of the land was owned in large tracts either by white resident operators or absentees. The comparatively small number of nonfarm workers is significant, especially since so many of these displaced families have gotten their first taste of “public works money” at the powder plant. Will they want to go back to this kind of marginal living again?

This was a section of old plantation holdings that had gradually been abandoned or partially abandoned by the old families who held on to them. In it, along the river and in the low places, were a few very small communities of Negro landowners who supplemented their farming income with fishing, hunting, and working for white men who came to enjoy these sports.

The average of all grants for moving totaled $37.50, which again reveals how little these people had to move.

Here, then, is a group of dislocated people who know almost nothing except farming, and of that the cruder kind. Some few of these were making a new beginning and, where they could get some of the better land, were succeeding on a very moderate scale. Some few were making a fair living from the game and sportsmen, whom the very desolation of the place had brought to the area. Only a few are going to make alone the readjustments life in a new place will call for.

Original caption reads: Local family moving off of government reservation to make room for bag loading plant development. May 1941

Few [Farm Security Administration loan] applications for next year have come in. The county supervisor expects many to come in during the next few weeks, because the powder plant job is “turning off” men at the rate of 300 to 600 a week. The full tide of applications will not come, he said, until late February, when many farmers (especially Negroes) who have had their first taste of public works wealth will suddenly realize there is little hope of getting more such work and will want to farm again.

Farm Security will, he said, get more than its share of these people because they have broken their relations with their old landlords, sometimes without ceremony, and in the middle of crop season, and will not be able — or will not want to — go back again.

About 90 percent of the Farm Security Administration borrowers have gotten at least a few weeks of work on the [bag loading plant] project. E. E. Wilson, county FSA supervisor for Talladega Countv, knew of only two who had paid back loans with defense-earned money (one paid $150, another $250). The rest have wasted some of the money. But not as much as people think. We’ve had practically a crop failure in here for the past 3 years. These people have gone without, all that time. They’ve had other debts and they’ve had to buy clothes and something to eat and some of the other people they’ve owed have put the kind of pressure on them [the FSA] can’t.

Source: www.archive.org/stream/nationaldefensem32unit/nationaldefensem32unit_djvu.txt

Talladega+AL Farm+Security+Administration military+installations appalachia appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

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1. It is to be regretted that our people have taken so seriously to cotton farming

“They started a new deal program that would help everyone and improve everyone’s life. They formed a group called the Tennessee Valley Authority. These were the biggest idiots of all. They come strolling in here thinking they’re all good giving people cheap electric power, but they don’t think of the farmers.

“Where do you think they got their power from? They got it from the rivers. The rivers I used to irrigate my land with. But it was all gone then. They formed dams, and stopped up the water. My poor apples were gone then. My sisters still had their business, but they too were unhappy with what the TVA was doing to the farm that my father had started.

“That was it for me. I couldn’t produce any more apples with those darn TVA people doing what they wanted with the water. I was then forced to move into town to try to get a factory job. I took all the money that I had, and all my clothes, and I was off to see what this New deal was all about.

“Wendell Wilkie, president of the Commonwealth and Southern Company, led the fight against the TVA. He had many followers, but there were also men that disagreed with him and they liked the idea of having the Tennessee Valley Authority.”

Michael Smith
Orchardist
Interviewed November 11,1934
Raleigh, NC
Source: http://www.ncsu.edu/ligon/am/teddy/tva.htm

“There is just one phase of this program to which we object most seriously, and that is the Federal Government spending the taxpayers’ money for the erection of power plants which, as we feel, are not needed for the very simple reason that generally, throughout the country, there is an abundance of power capacity, and particularly in the Tennessee Valley region there is already an excess of capacity. We are at a loss to understand how the power generated at Government-built plants can be disposed of except to take the place of privately owned power plants now supplying that community.”

John D. Battle
Executive Secretary of the National Coal Association
Hearings before the Committee on Military Affairs
House of Representatives (74th Cong., 1st Sess., 1935)
Source: http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/coal.htm

Representative Joe Martin of Massachusetts stated that the TVA was “patterned closely after one of the Soviet dreams.” As a subsidiary of the federal government, the TVA enjoyed numerous advantages that private power enterprises did not: from the onset it paid less than one fifth of the equivalent total Federal taxes paid by investor owned power companies. The authority did not pay any interest on funds appropriated to it from 1933 to 1959.

Not surprisingly, Wendell Wilkie’s Commonwealth and Southern, and various other power companies as well, filed a total of thirty four lawsuits against the TVA by 1937. Three of those challenged the very constitutionality of the act before the Supreme Court. The TVA remained intact throughout.

Between 1933 and the end of World War II, the TVA directors managed the biggest construction project on Earth, helping bring the people living in the region into the modern industrial and agricultural era. But not without a fight.

Sources: http://web.bryant.edu/~ehu/h364proj/fall_97/swain/Controversies.htm

http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/tva17.htm

www.spiritus-temporis.com/tennessee-valley-authority/

http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=T072

http://cog.kent.edu/lib/OlsonFairExchangePaper.pdf

TVA, Tennessee Valley Authority, Wendell Wilkie, appalachia, appalachian history, mountains

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1. Some of our adventures in the Tennessee Valley

Throughout the 30s, 40s and 50s she continued raising her 11 children and four of her grandchildren at the family farm in Gallia County, Ohio. With no means of transportation, Grandma Gatewood would simply walk two, three, four or five miles for her visits.

Then in 1955 at the age of 67, Grandma Gatewood made a journey that gained nationwide attention. Seeing a “National Geographic” article about the Appalachian Trail, and discovering that no woman had ever hiked its entire length, Grandma Gatewood decided to set out on an adventure. Amazingly, she made her arrangements and started in Maine on the hike without as much as a word to her family about her plans.

Unfortunately this first try ended abruptly when her glasses were accidentally broken, forcing her to return home. “I thought it would be a nice lark,” she said, adding “It wasn’t.”

But finally, in 1957, she successfully hiked the trail all the way from Maine to Georgia, and if that wasn’t enough she hiked it again in 1960, and then again at age 75 in 1963, making her the first person to hike the trail three times (though her final hike was completed in sections).

Gatewood never carried more than 20 lbs of gear and food during her hikes. She simply did not believe in expensive state of the art paraphernalia. “Most people today are pantywaist,” she observed. Grandma G. traveled light, toting simply a blanket, plastic sheet, cup, first aid kit, raincoat, and one change of clothes. Her footgear was also plain, just an old pair of tennis shoes: “Head is more important than heel.” And there were no freeze dried hiker meals for her. Her hiking diet consisted mainly of dried beef, cheese and nuts, supplemented by wild food she would find along the way.

On the design of the Appalachian Trail: “For some fool reason, they always lead you right up over the biggest rock to the top of the biggest mountain they can find.”

sources:
www.answers.com/topic/grandma-gatewood
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandma_Gatewood

http://www.hockinghills.com/i_grandm.htm

Grandma+Gatewood Appalachian+Trail Appalachian+History Appalachian+Culture History+of+Appalachia

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1. Benton MacKaye proposes the Appalachian Trail

Martin, a member of the Southern Highlands Craft Guild, was the son of a regionally renowned fiddler, Marcus Lafayette Martin, and was part of a family of noted artists from Swannanoa, NC. His woodcarvings are representative of both the southern handicrafts revival and the arts & crafts revival that swept the southern highlands in the late 19th to mid 20th century.

Example of an arts and craft revival style Appalachian mountain banjo made by Edsel Martin in 1970; black walnut.

Ed Dupuy interviewed Martin on Jan 22, 1965 at his home in Swannanoa. Dupuy’s 1967 book “Artisans of the Appalachians” contains an essay on Martin that is based on this interview:

Dupuy- Edsel, how did you get started at this sort of work?

Martin- My father did this work, and I think his father did, too. But I think it just sort of growed on us boys. This grew up with us.

d-Your father made violins and dulcimers; what else did he make?

m- I’ve seen him do some pretty good carving. Not figure carving, just stars, and arrowheads, and all sorts of things. Odds and ends, something different.

d-No doubt you got your start from him. It rubbed off on all you boys.

m- We were all brought up by ourselves. My mother and father separated; all of us four stayed and lived together. This was all we had to do, you know, to occupy ourselves. And this is what we come up with.

d-As far as you can remember, how long have you been at this sort of thing?

m-Wall, I’ve done a little of this as far back as I can remember. It was actually about 1946, maybe a few years earlier than that, when I began to put these on the market. Earlier, we just didn’t think of making any money at it, we did it just for pleasure.

d-Are you the youngest of the brothers?

m-I’m the youngest; the others are Wade, Fred, Pepper and Wayne. Wayne carves at Gatlinburg.

D-You have just lived and grown up here all your life?

m-I was born in Gastonia. I’ve lived here just about all my life. My dad was from out in Cherokee County.

d-What were some of the first things you began to make with your hands?

m-I carved some Indian door stops and stuff of that type. Door stops; and I modeled some out of clay.

d-Have you any idea how many dulcimers you have made?

m-Oh, I guess probably 175. We sold about thirty alone last year.

d-I notice one of these is made out of walnut and one is made out of cherry. Does one wood make a better dulcimer than another?

m-Well, I don’t know, Ed. You can make two just alike, and they won’t sound alike, even out of the same wood, you’d get a different tone.

d-This is patterned after the old ones, isn’t it?

m-Yes.

d-This will have four strings?

m-Yes.

d-Haven’t I seen some with just three strings?

m-Yes, they make them with three strings.

d-In beginning a dulcimer from scratch, what do you begin with?

Handcarved washerwoman sculpture of white pine, about 9” tall, made 1968.

m-You get a pattern for the back and the front, and the tail piece, get it straightened out and line up and glue that one first. Then you set your sides and wait for them to dry. Then you set your top and the other two pieces to make the finger board.

d-This scroll on the neck, that is entirely hand carved? That’s very much like a fiddle scroll.

m-Yes. I like to put something in them so they don’t look like any old thing. I’ve seen some violins that had some lions heads on them.

d-Even these pegs are hand carved; what would they be made of?

m-They’re made of maple; hard maple. I cut ‘em with the grain.

d-Does the thickness of the wood have much to do with the tone?

m-That one is a quarter inch, but I’m going to hollow it out. Pull in from the inside and roll it from the outside. The thickness of the wood does make a difference. You get it too thick and it won’t ring right.

d-This finger board, these are metal frets that are set in here?

m-Yes.

d-What were the old original strings made off? Were they steel or were they all gut?

m-I’ve read literature, Ed, where they were hammered out some way.

d-They were drawn through a die, I expect. Have you any idea how long people have been making dulcimers?

m-As far as I can trace it back, was the third chapter of Daniel in the Bible; I believe it was King Nebuchadnezzar. That’s as far back as I want to take it. It pleases me that it goes back that far. And carving goes back as far as Joseph, where in his carpenter shop he told Jesus how to carve wood with the grain.

d-Can you play a dulcimer?

m-Yes, I play a dulcimer pretty good.

Source: Hunter Library Digital Collection/Western Carolina University: http://wcudigitalcollection.cdmhost.com/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/p4008coll2&CISOPTR=2955&REC=1

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1. The Family Bible

OLD MAN WRIGHT RIDES INTO EXILE
So as to Git Away From Trouble, This Settler of the Hills–Fighter and Killer–Sits Astride His Mare and Goes Slowly Down to the Valleys.
By HARRY R. BURKE
Of the Post-Dispatch Staff

Pikeville, KY—Old Man Lige Wright packed his traps in the saddlebags and gingerly pulled himself across the back of his good bay mare. He rode out then through Osborn Gap and into Virginia slowly. For Old Man Lige Wright was doing the hardest thing he had ever done. He was running away from trouble.

Back of him was a lifetime of warfare. And ELIJAH WRIGHT was essentially a man of peace. He feared no one. He told no lies. And he paid his debts. There were notches on his gun–speaking figuratively–but that was Lige Wright’s misfortune. The luckiest unlucky man that ever lived! Twice he had been condemned to spend his life in the penitentiary.

Once he had been sentenced to hang by the neck until he was dead. And in Virginia–whither now he was going–Elijah Wright had served to the full a life sentence for murder. For in the Commonwealth of Virginia, eighteen years in prison is, constructively, a life term. His debt to the Commonwealth had been paid in full.

Four years ago at the door of the penitentiary, the Commonwealth of Virginia had given Elijah Wright a suit of clothes and a bill and sent him out to face life’s battle. And he had gone back to his native Kentucky hills to begin once again. There trouble had come upon him–trouble that was not of his own seeking, though the moon¬shine liquor that brought it on had been.

And now he was going into voluntary exile. It was not that he was afraid. In the old man’s face you could read the fearlessness of an eagle. There was no man lived who could say that Old Man Lige Wright was afraid. He had leaped too often to meet death face to face.

His right hand, which gingerly held the reins as the bay mare ambled through the gap, was still stiff from a deep cut between forefinger and the stub of what at one time had been his thumb. This cut was a mark left by the butcher knife when he seized it as his enemy lunged that night last March.

And as he rode into exile Old Man Lige Wright thanked God that those enemies from behind had knocked him senseless with his own gun–taken while he wasn’t look¬ing from his saddlebags, wounding him so sorely that he rode even now in a dizzy haze and sometimes saw double as images danced before his eyes. He thanked God that the blow had prevented him from seizing that murderous knife and turning it against the wielder.

Read the full story here

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1. He answered the call, not by a natural death

We open today’s show with the story of how colonial Virginia governor Lord Dunmore decided to settle the western boundary line dispute with Pennsylvania by forcibly taking possession of Pittsburg, or Fort Pitt, and attaching it to the colony of Virginia. When challenged by Pennsylvania, Dunmore admitted that the land had indeed once belonged to Pennsylvania, but asserted it was lost to that colony because she allowed the French to take possession of it, and that when Great Britain recaptured it, in the French and Indian War, the title was vested in the crown, and that, as Virginia was a Crown Colony, the title passed to that colony rather than to Pennsylvania, which was a proprietary government.

We’ll pause in between things to catch up on a Calendar of Events in the region this week, with special attention paid to events that emphasize heritage and local color.

“I was 10 years old when the First World War stopped,” says Guysville, OH native Emma Barnhill in her oral history conducted with the Countdown to Millenium Oral History Project. “I had an uncle over there in the war. It was rough, they was in those trenches y’know, and things. My mother made taffy and sent it to her brother for Christmas, and he got it, he said and then he sent me a piece to read in church and I knew two verses. ‘In Flanders field the poppies rose,’ and something about crosses rows on rows, but I remember that.”

Benton MacKaye was the first person to propose the idea of an Appalachian Trail, which he did in October of 1921. He grew up in Shirley Center, Massachusetts, reading the work of American naturalists and poets and taking long walks in the mountains of Massachusetts and Vermont. MacKaye sometimes claimed that the idea for the trail was born one day when he was sitting in a tree atop Stratton Mountain in Vermont.

“Did you ever wonder why you came home from the carnival empty handed?” asks writer Sam Brown in this June 1930 article from Modern Mechanix. “Remember how you tried to ring the bell by hammering the catapult or how you tossed ring after ring trying to win a cane? Swindled? Well, maybe! Listen how the operators gimmick their games so that you can’t win. It may save you money or help you win.”

We’ll wrap things up with the story of how the post office came to Pine Mountain, KY. The great difficulty in attracting one was that most of the locals could neither read nor write; mail is after all a form of written communication. One man, William Creech (1845-1918), took it upon himself to tackle the issue. He made a first attack on the problem by urging each of his neighbors to send off to both of the leading mail-order houses for their catalogues. If the son-in-law of the family had a different name, Creech asked the farmer to send it off twice. Whenever the necessity arose, which was often, he wrote the cards of request himself.

And, thanks to the good folks at Juneberry78s.com, we’ll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music by Uncle Jimmie Thompson in a 1926 recording of Lynchburg.

So, call your old Plott hound up on the porch, fire up your corn-cob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian History.

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