1 50 2 https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/9b691cc265c6d3a982edc19d587be6c4.pdf 62e2e6c4fdfd18d23d01ba4faffa1362 PDF Text Text �Western North Carolina Since the Civil War Ina W oestemeyer Van N oppen John J. Van Noppen APPALACHIAN CONSORTIUM APPALACHIAN CONSORTIUM PRESS BOONE, NORTH CAROLINA 28607 �The Appalachian Consortium was a non-profit educational organization composed of institutions and agencies located in Southern Appalachia. From 1973 to 2004, its members published pioneering works in Appalachian studies documenting the history and cultural heritage of the region. The Appalachian Consortium Press was the first publisher devoted solely to the region and many of the works it published remain seminal in the field to this day. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities through the Humanities Open Book Program, Appalachian State University has published new paperback and open access digital editions of works from the Appalachian Consortium Press. www.collections.library.appstate.edu/appconsortiumbooks This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Original copyright © 1973 by the Appalachian Consortium Press. ISBN (pbk.: alk. Paper): 978-1-4696-3831-7 ISBN (ebook): 978-1-4696-3833-1 Distributed by the University of North Carolina Press www.uncpress.org �TABLE OF CONTENTS AUTHORS' PREFACE lV INTRODUCTION BY CRATIS WILLIAMS Vl PROLOGUE I 23 PART ONE: THE PEOPLE AND THEIR HOMELAND I. 2. On Main Traveled Roads Off The Beaten Path 25 59 69 PART TWO: A CHANGING SOCIETY 3· 4· 5. 6. 7· 8. 9· IO. I 1. Religion The Bar and The Forum That All May Live Public Education Church Related and Private Institutions of Learning Teacher Education From The Heart, The Hand, and The Head Literature The Lore of The Folk PART THREE: A DEVELOPING ECONOMY I2. I3. I4. IS. I6. 17. Hear That Whistle Blow! Agriculture Timber! From Indian Trails to Broad Highways Business and Industry In Pursuit of Pleasure SOURCES 7I 88 I03 I2I 5I I66 I84 I 20I 223 25I 253 269 29I 323 346 37I 414 INDEX 111 430 �AUTHORS' PREFACE Since its organization in 1952 and even before that time, members of the Western North Carolina Historical Association have searched zealously for history in their communities and in their counties. They researched old letters, records, account books, family histories, historic happenings. They have written county histories and presented papers before the historical association. They have sought the aid of the state Department of Archives and History. They have promoted the preservation of historic sites. Their contributions have been invaluable for a history of the region. Among the leading contributors have been Miss Cordelia Camp, Dean W. E. Bird, Mrs. Mary Jane McCrary, Dean D.]. Whitener, and Professor John A. McLeod. Journalists John Wikle, John Parris, George McCoy and his wife, Lola Love McCoy, and such writers of county histories as Judge Johnson Hayes, Clarence Griffin, Mrs. Sadie Smathers Patton, Mrs. Margaret Freel, Mrs. Nancy Alexander, Horton Cooper, Arthur Fletcher, and Mrs. Lillian Thomasson, provided information sifted out from local annals. The newspapers of Western North Carolina, especially the Asheville Citizen- Times, are to be commended for publishing anniversary editions and encouraging the people to be interested in their history and its preservation. Publisher George M. Stephens has been a promoter of the Carolina Highlands, publishing numerous books and pamphlets dealing with Western North Carolina history. January 27, 1963, a committee to promote a history of the Western North Carolina Highlands was appointed. It consisted of W. Ernest Bird, Miss Cordelia Camp, John A. McLeod, D. Hiden Ramsey, George M. Stephens, Glenn Tucker, and Daniel ]. Whitener, chairman. By late 1964 the present authors had been lV �Authors' Preface / v drafted to write the book. Interested members contributed financially to support the research, most generous of whom was Wendell Williamson of Asheville. Robert Conway of the North Carolina Department of Archives and History furnished a list of names of persons who were particularly interested in history, one in each county. We called upon the persons named, and they usually guided us around their counties to view the historic sites and distinctive features. Leroy Sossamon took us flying over the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In Brevard Mrs. Mary Jane McCrary took us into her home, as did Dr. and Mrs. Edward Phifer in Morganton. Several county-wide meetings of local historians were held. Informative ones were arranged by Worth Morgan of Forest City and Frank Rogers of Waynesville. Many members of the association took us to old residents who knew of historic events. They showed us letters, furnished newspaper clippings, some of which were undated and had no sources listed. John Wikle of Bryson City furnished an extensive file of his articles from the Asheville Citizen and the Atlanta Journal. Dozens of graduate students researched local topics, contributing useful information. Lawrence Groves, Thomas Corbitt, and Rosalie Sexauer Dorsey deserve special mention. We are grateful to members of the administration at Appalachian State University for released time for research, to the Office of Development for photographic assistance, and especially to John Dinkins, photographer. Our sincere appreciation is due Dean Cratis Williams who wrote our introduction, Mrs. Allie Hodgin of the Appalachian State University Library who aided us tirelessly, and Jack Van Noppen who reviewed the manuscript and helped organize it. Our greatest indebtedness is to Miss Myra Champion who encouraged and contributed more than words can tell to the completion of this book. Boone, North Carolina February 12, 1973 Ina Van Noppen John]. Van Noppen �INTRODUCTION The late Daniel]. Whitener, Chairman of the Department of Social Sciences and Dean of Appalachian State Teachers College, was commissioned in 1948 to prepare a history of Watauga County, North Carolina, for the Centennial Celebration of the formation of the county and the Sesquicentenial Celebration of the founding of Watauga Academy, the parent institution of Appalachian State University. Dean Whitener's experience inspired him to assume leadership in the forming of the Southern Appalachian Historical Association, which set about to build the Daniel Boone Outdoor Theatre in Boone and produce Kermit Hunter's Horn in the West, but he also saw the need for a carefully done history of Western North Carolina which he hoped ultimately to be able to write himself. Encouraged by both the Western North Carolina Historical Association and the Historical Society of North Carolina, Dean Whitener began gathering material and planning a history, but his heavy burden of administrative duties at the rapidly growing college and his wide range of interests and involvements in local and state civic activities did not leave time for him to engage in the field research needed for the kind of history he thought should be written. During the year prior to his scheduled retirement from his administrative position at Appalachian, Dean Whitener realized that the condition of his health was such that he would not be able to write the history he had dreamed of writing. He sought the advice of the members of the Western North Carolina Historical Association and his collegues at the college. He was urged to determine whether Ina W oestemeyer Van N oppen, a productive scholar and professor of history at Appalachian, might be willing to undertake to complete the history. Vl �Introduction / vu Ina Van Noppen, who had collected oral history, visited the sites of engagements along the route of Stoneman's Last Raid, and searched for materials in archives and libraries in preparation for her writing of Stoneman's Last Raid, had become interested in the history of Western North Carolina and the mountain people who live there. She had already discovered that, aside from a few county histories of uneven quality written for the most part by people little acquainted with the techniques of historical scholarship and often motivated by genealogical interests, little had been done, and no one had attempted a comprehensive history of the entire mountain region of the state since 1914 when John Preston Arthur published his History of Western North Carolina. Dr. Van Noppen, reluctant to undertake to do the assignment because ofher work in collaboration with her husband, John James Van Noppen, a professor of English at Appalachian, in the preparation of a biography of Daniel Boone, requested time for consideration of the request. Urged by the membership of the Western North Carolina Historical Association and encouraged by promises of such resources as might be available to it in helping to underwrite the publication of the book, Dr. Van N oppen agreed to write it provided she could work in collaboration with her husband. As the plan for the history developed, the Van Noppens began to see that it ought not to be the usual history of the political and economic progress of a region within a state but, rather a whole history, which would include a treatment of the differentiating qualities of the mountain people as well as their institutions, traditions, customs, folklore, arts and crafts, way of life, and the literature written about them and by them. Western North Carolina is the state's share of Appalachia, but no history of Appalachia has been written. Much has been written about the folklore of the mountain people, the economic problems which plague the region, and the nature of the people themselves, as well as their social problems, customs, old fashioned religious views, and political conservatism. The Van Noppens thought that a history should treat all facets in the lives of the people about which it is written. Hence, they have produced an economic, political, social, and cultural history which might well be taken as a model for similar histories of western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and eastern Tennessee, which, when taken together, might provide a base for a comprehensive history of a unique and fascinating people, the Southern Appalachians. �viii / Introduction Western North Carolina Since the Civil War is the product of eight years of research and writing. Not content to rely upon such sources as might be found in regional libraries and state archives, the Van Noppens sought out individuals in the mountain region who possessed primary sources, traveled over the mountains tram town to town and courthouse to courthouse in search of sources, sought documents and reports stored in state archives and the Library of Congress. John Van Noppen reviewed the literature about the mountain folk, visited living writers, studied the collections of ballads and folk songs, and read theses and dissertations written about the cultural heritage of the area. Together, the Van Noppens attended fairs and festivals and visited museums, libraries, and colleges in the area. They traced out the early roads through the mountains, studied the histories of the railroads, visited the forests and the national and state parks, examined the history and development of tourism, and sought out the seers and craftsmen, the educators and the religious leaders, the politicians and the developers who share in guiding the native mountain folk living in what has come to be known as North Carolina's vacation land through their transition from a highland rural and largely self-subsistent society to what is rapidly becoming an urban society. Ina Woestemeyer Van Noppen, a native of Bethel, Kansas, was educated at the University of Kansas and Columbia University. Soon after graduating from the University ofKansas, she began teaching history in high schools in Kansas City. After receiving the M.A. degree from Columbia, she taught for a time at the Woman's College of the University ofNorth Carolina at Greensboro. While working toward her doctoral degree at Columbia, she taught history at Penn Hall Junior College, where her husband John J. Van Noppen, was dean and a teacher of English. Later sh'~ and her husband taught at Hiram College and at Youngstown College in Ohio before going to Appalachian State Teachers College in Boone, North Carolina, in 1947. She is the author of The Westward Movement (1939), The South: A Documentary History (1958), and Stoneman's Last Raid (1961), for which she received the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Association. She and her husband collaborated in the writing of Daniel Boone, Backwoodsman (1966). An outstanding teacher ofhistory, Dr. Ina Van Noppen received one of the first distinguished teacher awards presented by Appalachian State University. �Introduction / ix John J. Van Noppen grew up in Madison, North Carolina. He holds degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Columbia University. After years of teaching in secondary schools and preparatory schools, including experience in Italy, where he became personally acquainted with Benito Mussolini, Dr. Van Noppen began a long career as a college teacher and administrator. He was an English teacher and Dean ofPenn Hall Junior College and Preparatory School at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Head of the Department of Education at Hiram College, and a teacher ofEnglish at Youngstown College in Ohio. He joined the English faculty at Appalachian State Teachers College, Boone, North Carolina, in 1947. He has engaged in extensive research on Archibald Henderson and George Bernard Shaw and collaborated with his wife in the writing of Daniel Boone, Backwoodsman (1966). The Van N oppens are world travelers, having conducted summer tours abroad for students and teachers for many years. While researching in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in preparation for their biography of Daniel Boone, they learned much of the ferments which sent English, Scottish, and ScotchIrish pioneers into Western North Carolina prior to the American Revolution. Among the descendants of these settlers are the Western North Carolina mountain people of today. Western North Carolina Since the Civil War, though a scholarly work, is published without the extensive footnotes which the authors painstakingly prepared. Aimed primarily at the reading public, particularly of Western North Carolina, the book is none the less of value to the historian and the student oflocal cultures. Moving slowly and often painfully out of their dark period of economic and social disintegration following the Civil War, the mountain people living in the isolated and insulated "lost provinces" ofWestern North Carolina had by 1900 begun their steady march of progress into contemporary times. Uneven at times and faltering as the state and the nation suffered through such social and economic upheavals as war, economic booms and recessions, and drouths, the people of Western North Carolina have made solid progress in improving education, local economy, communication, land use, and natural resources. Most importantly, they have clung to the traditions and nurtured the heritage that is uniquely their own. With pride in themselves and appreciation of the grandeur which lies about them, they have managed to preserve their own culture and conserve their own beautiful �x / Introduction homeland so rich in resources that the degree of poverty there is not comparable with that found elsewhere in Appalachia. As the Van Noppens have so aptly observed, Carolina mountain folk arc not "yesterday's people" nor is night likely to come to them, for they have become the shapers of their own destiny. Cratis Williams Appalachian State University Boone, North Carolina �PROLOGUE Extending from Rutherfordton on the south to Mount Airy and Fancy Gap on the north is an elevated region, the foothills, from I,ooo to 2,ooo feet above sea level. Beyond are lofty, mistshrouded and haze-creating mountains, the picturesque barrier of the Blue Ridge on the east, the magnificent Great Smokies and the scenic Unakas on the west. Between the Blue Ridge, which is the eastern Continental Divide, and the Unakas there is a high plateau with altitudes ranging from 3,500 to 4,000 feet. Grandfather Mountain 5,964 feet, is the highest and most spectacular peak in the Blue Ridge, but not as high as the Black Mountains farther south, where Mount Mitchell rears its lofty crest 6,684 feet above sea level. This elevated tableland encircled by the two great mountain ranges is traversed by cross chains that run directly across the country, from which spurs of greater and lesser height lead off in all directions. Among the transverse groups are the Black, Roan, Yellow, New Found, Pisgah, Balsam, Cowee, Nantahala, Cheoah, and Tusquitee ranges. Between these ranges lie valleys formed by rivers which flow through gorges near their headwaters, then widen out and continue through fertile valleys across the plateau, and narrow again, dividing the rampart into the Unicoi, the Great Smokies, the Iron, the Bald, and the Stone Mountains. Clingman's Dome in the Smokies is 6,642 feet above sea level, almost as high as Mount Mitchell. The Black Mountain range extends for twenty miles, and its sides are covered in places by almost impenetrable forests. Of the transverse chains, next to the Blacks in size and altitude are the Balsams. In general magnitude and length they are the most extensive of the cross ranges. Fifty miles long, this range has numerous peaks which average 6,ooo feet. I �2 / Prologue Geographically Western North Carolina, consisting of foothills, valleys, peaks, the crest of the Blue Ridge, the Great Smoky Mountains, and the transverse ridges, is about 250 miles long and up to ISO miles wide. It consists of approximately one-fifth of North Carolina's area but only one-seventh of its population. It has one county with sixteen persons per square mile, three with fewer than thirty per square mile, three with from thirty to thirty-nine per square mile, five with from forty to fortynine persons, and two with from fifty to fifty-nine, while for the entire state the population density is ninety-seven per square mile. Since I739 the subdivisions of the state have been known as counties, each serving as an administrative unit for the colony and later for the state. As new areas were opened they too were designated as counties; some of them were quite large, and later as the population increased other counties were formed by subdividing the existing ones. Rowan County, formed in I 7 53, was the parent of Western North Carolina although the present-day Rowan County is not in Western North Carolina. In I77I Surry County was created from Rowan and remained the westernmost one until Burke was also formed from Rowan in I777 and Wilkes from Surry in I778. In the southwest Mecklenburg was created from Anson and in I769 Tryon was formed from the westem part of Mecklenburg. In 1779 Tryon was abolished and its land divided between Lincoln and Rutherford counties; the latter is in Western North Carolina. Meanwhile four additional counties, later part of Tennessee, were formed: Washington in I777, Sullivan in I779, Greene and Davidson in 1783. They anticipated cession to the United States and in 1784 tried to create the State of Franklin, which did not survive as a state. Three other counties, Sumner, Hawkins, and Tennessee, were subdivided from the four before cession did take place in I789. The seven became part of the State of Tennessee which was admitted to the union in I796. In I8oo Westem North Carolina consisted of Surry, Rutherford, Burke, Wilkes, Buncombe (which had been created from lands ceded by the Cherokees), and Ashe counties. Ashe had been separated from Wilkes. As the Cherokees gave up additional lands Haywood County was established in I8o8, Yancey in I833, and Henderson in I838. From Rutherford and Burke came McDowell in I842, and from Buncombe and Yancey was formed Madison in I 8 5 I. In I 828 Macon was set apart �Prologue / 3 from Haywood, and in 1851 Jackson County was created from Haywood and Macon, the latter having surrendered the land evacuated by the Cherokees for the county of Cherokee in 1839. Further subdividing created Polk from Henderson in 1855, Transylvania from Henderson and Jackson, and Clay from Cherokee, in 1861, Swain from Jackson and Macon in 1871, and Graham from Cherokee in 1872. In the northwestern part of the state Caldwell was formed from Burke and Wilkes in 1841, Watauga from Wilkes, Ashe, Caldwell, and Yancey in 1849, Mitchell in 1861 from Yancey, Watauga, Caldwell, Burke, and McDowell. Alleghany was created from the eastern part of Ashe. The last county, Avery, was formed in 1911 from Mitchell, Watauga, and Caldwell. Upon examination of a map showing the counties ofWestern North Carolina one must conclude that they have very peculiar shapes. This is due no doubt to the mountainous terrain and to the necessity that people be able to travel from the farthest point to the county seat. In the eighteenth century immigrants poured through "William Penn's new port of Philadelphia" from the British Isles and Germany. With them they brought their skills, speech, ballads, dances, and folk customs. Many of the second and third generations came southwestward seeking land. Salisbury in the newlycreated Rowan County (1753) became the springboard into the West. In the 1750's Salisbury was like the hub of a wagon wheel. Settlers flowed in along the northern, eastern, and southeastern spokes. They paused briefly to rest their horses, repair their wagons (if they had any), and to buy needed supplies of salt, powder, lead, and tools. Many fanned out along the western spokes toward the beckoning beauty of the Blue Ridge. They plunged deeper and ever deeper into the wilderness, lured on by the prospect of cheap and still richer lands on which to build their homes. Soon they had settled all except the most mountainous parts of what are now Surry, Wilkes, Burke, and Rutherford counties. Intrepidly they disregarded the threat of Indian attacks and moved into the uncharted wilderness. Some lost their lives but many survived, the ancestors of presentday mountaineers. Men bearing the names of Alexander, Boone, Bryan, Robertson, Sevier, Shelby, Campbell, Clingman, �4 / Prologue Jackson, Davidson, Patton, Rutherford, Councill, Calloway, Howard, Horton, Gudger and Moore were among the advance guard. They cleared land, built primitive cabins, hunted, trapped, and fought the Indians. Their incentive was the passion for land where there were few taxes and no restrictions upon political and religious freedom. The extent of their migration may be seen from the fact that in I746 there were not one hundred fighting men in the North Carolina foothills; while in I753 there were three thousand. In I765 one thousand wagons passed through Salisbury going westward. During the Revolutionary War the Cherokee Indians made the fatal mistake of siding with the British. They were badly defeated and decimated by frontiersmen led by men like Griffith Rutherford and John Sevier. Their towns were burned, their women and children killed, and they were driven ever westward. During the Revolution many who fought the Cherokees saw the mountains for the first time, admired the beauty of Western North Carolina and were determined to return and settle as soon as the war ended. A law passed by the state legislature in I 777 provided the method of acquiring land. Each claimant took to the entry recorder a statement of location and approximate boundaries of the land he wished. The county surveyor then surveyed the tract and prepared two plots with descriptions of boundaries and acreage, which he transferred along with the warrant of survey to the secretary of state. The claimant paid the entry taker two pounds and ten shillings per one hundred acres. A husband was allowed to take six hundred forty acres for himself and one hundred acres for his wife and each of his children. For purchases in excess of his allotment the purchaser paid five pounds per one hundred acres, or one shilling per acre. Tracts of as many as I ,ooo,ooo acres were laid out and were acquired by speculators who disposed of the land in tracts of soo or rooo acres. Among the large landowners in the region before I8oo were Charles Gordon in Wilkes County, Robert and William Tate in Burke, David Allison, John Gray Blount, and William Cathcart in Buncombe. When the war was over the state offered land to servicemen in payment for their having served. The bold and dauntless pioneers pushed across the great mountain barrier into a natural wonderland with magnificent scenery, a cool climate, clear air, pure water, fertile valleys, and game in plenty. In this region men and women extended �Prologue / 5 a frontier civilization that became Western North Carolina, consisting ultimately of the twenty-four counties that are in the mountains or ascend the eastern slope of the mountains. Many of the settlers moved into the back country on foot and on horseback, bringing their household goods on pack horses. Among these goods were, in addition to rifle, axe, and hoe, clothing, blankets, bed clothes, bed ticks to be filled with grass, a large pot, pothooks, an oven with a lid, a skillet, a frying pan; a handmill to grind com, a wooden trencher in which to make bread, pewter plates, spoons, the iron parts of plows, a broadaxe, a froe, a saw, an auger, seed, and a few fruit trees. The historian John Fiske implied that the settlers of the mountains were descended from poor whites and indentured servants who migrated westward rather than compete with slave labor, that their ancestors had been herded into ships from the slums and jails of England. His opinion was true of only a small minority. He and others who held this opinion ignored the predominant Scotch-Irish and German origin of many settlers. John C. Campbell believed that the early mountain population was recruited chiefly from the poor but vigorous small farmers of the piedmont, few of whom owned slaves. A study of family names in the Southern Highlands by the Russell Sage Foundation revealed that of 497 names, one-third were English, one-third were Scotch-Irish, and fifteen per-cent were of German origin. Most of the families were descended from those living on the frontiers of Virginia and North Carolina in 1790. They were the same stock that later peopled the Midwest and the Southern states along the Mississippi, except Louisiana. According to S. H. Hobbs, the English in Western North Carolina contributed most to the civilization of the region. "Wherever the Englishman has gone ... he has carried with him the industrial, political, and intellectual customs of his native land. The English ideal of home life, the English industrial system, the English principles of politics and government, the English language and literature sooner or later became the dominant force wheresoever the Englishman set up his home." R. D. W. Connor characterized the racial strains of the population as follows: the English were law-abiding, commercially minded, and self reliant; the Scotch-Irish were democratic, liberty loving, and religiously minded; the Germans wer.e shrewd, economical, conservative, lovers of learning and ·religion. Although Connor was writing about the people of the state �6 / Prologue as a whole, these national strains made up the population of Western North Carolina and his description is apt. There has been a tendency to speak of the early settlers as though they were all alike, all of one class. This tendency has created a misconception. They were not a homogeneous group. Three classes came to the mountains: the prosperous settler class that came and bought good bottom land and perhaps thousands of acres of mountain land as well; those who bought land in smaller tracts from the first group or from the state; and those who came on foot or horseback carrying their few possessions, and who squatted on the land. Many of the prosperous people of the area today are descended from the settler class, although their prosperity did not result from agriculture. Their land was their most valuable resource, and scions of pioneer families are still realizing tremendous returns from land sales land that has grown amazingly valuable. On the other hand poverty for many resulted from the extinction of the game, over crowding, and exhaustion of the soil. As time passed many valleys, ridges, and coves had a population greater than they could support. Large families lived crowded in one or two-room cabins. As late as 1910 eighty per-cent of the population lived outside towns of one thousand population. As the original farms were divided among descendants holdings became smaller and smaller. The Civil War brought disunion and discord to Western North Carolina. Many people loved their section and their state, but they also revered the Union for which their ancestors had fought. Some favored the South, some the Union. Brother fought against brother and father against son. Neighborhoods split, families divided. Many heroic young men fought for the Confederacy; others fled through Tennessee and Kentucky to join the Union army. Numbers hid out in mountain caves and recesses to avoid conscription. Many of the latter two groups were opposed to slavery; others felt that the Civil War was a war of the planter class and they had no reason to fight for planter dominance of the state. There was no actual campaign in the mountains of North Carolina until 1865, but the mountain passes were of strategic importance. The Northern strategy was to divide the South into segments, and control of the passes would have contributed. �Prologue / 7 A number of roads crossed the mountains from east to west: the Western North Carolina Road across the Balsam Mountains; the great highway from South Carolina and Georgia crossing Saluda Gap, passing through Henderson, Buncombe, and Haywood counties; roads from Wilkesboro diverging in three directions: northwest into Virginia, west through Watauga County into Tennessee, and southwest through Morganton, crossing the Blue Ridge at Swannanoa Gap. Turnpikes supplemented the state roads, making it possible for wheeled vehicles to cross through some of the gaps, but there were many littleknown mountain paths where only experienced guides could find their way. The great mountain barriers discouraged invasion by hostile forces even though the area was divided in sentiment. Railroads to cross the mountains had been planned, but none had been built. During the war campaigns were fought all around the mountains but not through them. The salt works at Saltville, Virginia, were a target of several Union raids. Cumberland Gap was in Federal control in 1863; Chattanooga and Knoxville were captured by Union forces and the Shenandoah Valley and the gaps in the Virginia mountains saw considerable action. Braxton Bragg, Kirby Smith, and John Hunt Morgan led Confederate troops through the passes of the Cumberlands, and Union troops fought their way through Georgia's mountains from Chattanooga to Atlanta, yet North Carolina's mountains remained a formidable barrier. General U. S. Grant considered following up the victory at Chattanooga by sending so,ooo men through the mountain country, but after a ride of 175 miles, he abandoned the plan because of the bad roads. The Confederacy realized the importance of North Carolina mountain passes. Colonel William Holland Thomas of southwestern North Carolina anticipated such a campaign as that planned by Grant. He believed that Lee might wish to use the mountains as a stronghold where he could have an invincible base of operations. Confederate soldiers built roads over the passes through the Great Smoky Mountains, and they controlled the mountain passes toward Tennessee. Early in the war Thomas's Legion of Indians and Highlanders, the Eightieth and Sixtyninth North Carolina regiments, had guarded the bridges between Bristol and Chattanooga, but after the fall of East Tennessee, they fell back on the Smoky Mountains toward Waynesville and Webster. After East Tennessee became Union territory, the Fourteenth �8 / Prologue North Carolina Battalion (Woodfin's Battalion) was created. Originally three companies, it later had six. Its members were Western North Carolinians and its function was to defend the state's borders against invasion and pillage. After Woodfin's death James L. Henry was made Lieutenant Colonel and commander of the battalion. As Henry had only one eye the command was sometimes referred to as the "One-Eyed Battalion." It made raids into Tennessee and used the guerilla methods necessary in mountain fighting. In r864 the defenses of Northwestern North Carolina were very meager. Madison County was patrolled by a cavalry company; while Major Harvey Bingham had two companies in Watauga and a Captain Price had a small company in Ashe. These companies defended the counties against predatory bands from East Tennessee. Yancey and Mitchell counties were virtually undefended. The mountains sheltered fugitives from both armies, who hid by day and raided by night, often in bands of twenty or more. Many prisoners who had escaped from Confederate prisons made their way to the Union lines in Tennessee. Prisoners from Salisbury followed the Y adkin to Wilkes County, said to be the strongest Union county in North Carolina. The Confederates called it "Old United States." The Unionists sheltered and fed the escapees and guided them to Banner Elk where men like Keith Blalock and Harrison Church guided them to Tennessee. Those escaping from the prison at Columbia made their way across South Carolina, through Saluda Gap to Hendersonville and Asheville, where Dan Ellis guided them to Tennessee. One group of prisoners escaping by this route were hidden for four days by the girls of a family near Flat Rock. The father of the girls was a "rebel," the mother a "home Yankee," and the father never learned of the fugitives. Guides for the prisoners roamed the country "sacking" the fine houses and stealing money, jewelry, and silverware. In March r865 the Union army was ready to begin the final campaign of the war. Mobile, the last port in Confederate hands, was being attacked by General E. R. S. Canby. General George Thomas was sending out two powerful expeditions, one under Brevet Major General H. Wilson in Alabama, the other under M~or General George Stoneman toward Lynchburg. General Philip H. Sheridan's cavalry had completed its raid �Prologue / 9 through the Shenandoah Valley and had moved to White House on the Pamunkey. The armies of generals William T. Sherman and John M. Schofield were at Goldsboro. General John Pope was preparing for a spring campaign against Generals Kirby Smith and Sterling Price west of the Mississippi. Grant with the armies of the Potomac and the James confronted General Robert E. Lee, who defended Petersburg and Richmond. Very important was General Stoneman's raid through the mountains of Western North Carolina, Southwestern Virginia, and the piedmont of North Carolina in March and April 1865. General Stoneman, a West Point graduate stationed in Fort Brown, Texas, at the start of the war, refused to surrender to Confederate troops when his immediate superior did. He escaped with his command and continued to serve the Union army as a cavalry commander in West Virginia, under General George B. McClellan, and with the Army of the Potomac. In 1864 as a commander of the cavalry corps in the Atlanta campaign he was captured at Clinton, Georgia. Exchanged, he returned to command under General Thomas in East Tennessee. He conducted a destructive raid against Bristol and Saltville, Virginia, in December 1864. Early in I 865 he was ordered to collect horses and men to destroy the railroad between Bristol and Lynchburg. Participating in Stoneman's raid were three cavalry brigades under Brigadier General Alvan C. Gillem, with brigade commanders Colonel William J. Palmer, Brigadier General Simeon B. Brown, and Colonel John K. Miller. On March 28 General Stoneman notified General Thomas from Boone that he had captured the place, killing nine, capturing sixty-two, and that the raid was a surprise to those on his route. His raid was a surprise. A few weeks earlier, a few Union men had surprised and captured Camp Mast with one company of Home Guards. The other company of Home Guards were surprised by Stoneman. Colonel George Kirk of the United States Army had gathered a regiment of volunteers from the deserters, bushwhackers, and Union sympathizers. In January Kirk had created a diversion up the French Broad River and cleared the mountain region of deserters. Now Kirk barricaded the passes from Blowing Rock and Boone westward. On the day that Kirk arrived in Boone, Lee was evacuating Petersburg and Richmond and was moving toward Lynchburg following the Confederate defeat at Five Forks, and Grant feared that Lee �IO / Prologue might escape to North Carolina by way of the Richmond and Danville Railroad. Stoneman was supposed to prevent Lee's retreat to North Carolina by the railroad or his establishment of a bastion of defense in the mountains. At Boone Stoneman's command separated. Palmer's brigade went by way of Deep Gap to Wilkesboro; Brown's moved by way of Blowing Rock to Patterson's factory on the Yadkin near Lenoir. Here they found an adequate supply of corn and bacon, and Miller's brigade, following, destroyed the factory. The latter brigades joined Palmer's at Wilkesboro where they captured stores and horses and were forced to camp because the Y adkin River was in flood. On March 30 Stoneman's cavalry moved out ofWilkesboro. James Gwyn, whose plantation was passed, said that the raiders took only cattle and horses and that they did little damage. They went thence to Elkin and used up provisions but did not burn the factory or the cotton. September I, 1863, Gwyn had written that Union sympathizers had taken over Wilkesboro but that they would rue the day. They had been influenced by Parson Brownlow's Knoxville Whig and Holden's North Carolina Standard. Now Gwyn pointed out that Stoneman's men did not respect those calling themselves Union men. Gwyn saved some of his cattle by hiding them in the woods. At last the raid on the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad took place. The Union cavalry passed through Dobson and Mount Airy, crossing the Blue Ridge. It captured and burned a Confederate wagon train. Having reached Virginia the forces were divided. It is sufficient here to say that Stoneman's men destroyed the railroad successfully, then, returning to North Carolina they destroyed the Confederate prison at Salisbury (they did not liberate the prisoners, who had already been removed) and large quantities of supplies. Following this they began their return to Tennessee. We take up their activities again as they reached Lenoir on Easter Sunday, April 15. Meanwhile a Union scouting party sent to Asheville on April 4 reported that the roads were barricaded and that 2000 men under General R. B. Vance defended it. The Union commander Colonel Isaac M. Kirby had orders not to participate in a battle. He was engaged in a skirmish about four miles from Asheville and retreated. �Prologue / I I At Lenoir Stoneman's invasion had long been expected.* March 29 reports had come that Yankees were in the Y adkin Valley, on April 7 that Kirk with 300 men occupied Blowing Rock, and on April I3 that Salisbury had been "bummed." On April I 5 Stoneman's men rushed in and camped their prisoners on the grounds of St. James Episcopal Church.t Citizens were invited to feed the prisoners and to move freely among them. Major A. C. A very of a very prominent Burke County family had been captured by chance in Salisbury. In 1864 he had obtained permission to organize a regiment to protect Northwestern North Carolina. The regiment was never organized, but the local companies did become a battalion, and arms, ammunition, and equipment were sent to them by Governor Vance at the request of Major A very. A very had gone to Salisbury to obtain men to join him in an attack on Kirk at Blowing Rock when he was captured. He was taken as a prisoner to Tennessee, but Stoneman did not realize that he had captured Avery. People of Lenoir helped him to conceal his identity by shaving his beard and giving him the clothing of a relative, after which his own men did not recognize him. The Yanks liked the people of Lenoir but called it the "d - est little rebel town." At Lenoir General Stoneman left the command, returning through Watauga County to Tennessee. He reported that the tithing depots had furnished food and that captured horses had made his command better mounted than when it left Knoxville, and "this after crossing Stone Mountain once and the Blue Ridge three times, and a march made by headquarters since the 2oth of last month of 500 miles, and much more by portions of the command." Colonel Palmer was sent to Lincolnton and General Gillem to Morganton. James Gwyn reported of Morganton: "They tore everything to pieces at Uncle Avery's, held pistols to the ladies' heads, drove them out of the house and took what they liked." After Stoneman left the command the plundering and * In her Diary on March 30 Mrs. Ella (G. W.F.) Harper wrote of rumors that ro,ooo Yankees were in the valley, and that they had burned the factory. The next day she expressed fear that Tories would be raiding Lenoir, and that the furniture had been removed from their store for safe keeping. t Mrs. Ella Harper wrote in her Diary "Everyone cooking as much as possible for our poor famished prisoners." �12 / Prologue sacking of houses and mutilations of furnishings increased greatly. General] ames G. Martin with Palmer's Brigade (Confederate) of the 62nd, 64th, and 69th Regiments, a South Carolina battery, and Love's Regiment of Thomas's Legion defended Asheville. On April 24 General Gillem met General Martin under a flag of truce. He promised that if his command were furnished three days' rations it would not molest the country but would peaceably march through and proceed to Tennessee. "The almost starving country" furnished the supplies, but the Yankee army soon returned, terrorized the people, burned houses, and destroyed the armory and all the guns and ammunition they could find. A Negro garrison was left in charge of the town for a year and "burners roamed the countryside for miles around." General Gillem reported the complete surprise of the rebels at every point, and of the entire campaign he enumerated the captures: "25 pieces of artillery ... 2I that they were forced to abandon in Southwest Virginia ... 6ooo prisoners and I7 battle flags." The war was not over yet in Western North Carolina: a part of the "One-eyed Battalion" was in a skirmish as late as May IO. And James Gwyn of Wilkes County wrote in his diary May 4: "We have a quiet time now, our Southern armies are disbanded ... and terms of peace are said to be agreed upon .... All we dread here now is robbers & no doubt there will be plenty of them this summer." By the time that Gwyn wrote the comment about the robbers, depredations in Wilkes County had become a certainty. Fort Hamby came into being shortly after Stoneman and his army left Wilkes County March 3 I, I 86 5. The men who used it and terrorized the surrounding countryside were said to be deserters from Stoneman's forces and "home Yankees" who sympathized with them. Their leader was named Wade, and he was reputed to have been a major under Stoneman. Fort Hamby was not a military fort but a stronghold for the desperate band of criminals who occupied it. The houses belonged to disreputable women named Hamby. After having been occupied by Wade and his men, it was called Fort Hamby. There were two old-fashioned log buildings. The larger was two stories high and was the one used as a fort. The other, about �Prologue / I 3 Clark's N. C. Regiments cites May 1 o as the date of this skirmish PHOTO BY ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO . �14 / Prologue thirty feet from the fort, a single story, was used as a kitchen. These buildings were on the north side of the Y adkin near the mouth of Lewis Fork Creek on the top of a hill which overlooked the two streams. This strategic location gave excellent vision from both sides of the fort and made it easily defensible. The men of the fort, heavily armed with the latest type of Union rifles, roamed the countryside for miles about, plundering, robbing, terrorizing the people in Alexander, Caldwell, Wilkes, and Watauga counties. Without compunction they killed women and children. Elated by their strong grip on Wilkes, Wade's men made a raid on Caldwell County May 7; on the Sunday following Major Harvey Bingham and a few men surprised the fort. Wade begged for the lives ofhis men and time for them to dress. While the captors were off guard, the robbers seized their guns which had been concealed near their beds. They killed two of their captors, one the son of General Clark of Caldwell County. The others escaped, leaving the bodies of the two slain men. On Saturday May 13 Wade and his men went into Alexander County to kill Reverend J. B. Green, a former Confederate lieutenant. Forewarned, the Greens and their former slaves repulsed the raiders. On May 14 the second attack was made on the fort by some twenty men under the command of Colonel Wash Sharpe, Colonel C. W. Flowers, and Captain Ellis. James Polk Linney, sixteen, and James Brown, eighteen, were killed. On Tuesday some forty men from Alexander, Iredell, Caldwell, and Wilkes counties surrounded the fort, constructed breastworks and beseiged it during the night. About daybreak Wallace Sharpe sneaked up to the old kitchen at the rear of the house and set it on fire. Wade and the men in the fort came out in apparent surrender. Suddenly Wade bolted through the surrounding line and escaped. The four men who were captured- Beck, Church, Lockwood, and one other- were executed. The fort was burned. It is believed that Wade's band numbered about thirty, of whom about ten actually stayed at the fort with the other members of the band living nearby. With the destruction of Fort Hamby, Wilkes County saw the end of its Civil War strife. In Madison County during the Civil War great hostility was felt between those who favored secession and those who supported the Union. Augustus S. Merriman of Buncombe County was appointed solicitor for the Eighth Judicial District �Prologue / I 5 during the war, and his task of maintaining law and order was difficult. Once when some inhabitants (so-called Union sympathizers) seized the town of Marshall, plundered the stores and committed many acts of violence, one thousand Confederate citizens of Buncombe County formed a posse and hurried to Marshall to punish the marauders. Solicitor Merriman prevailed against this disregard of civil power, and the occasion passed without further incident. Merriman held his courts throughout the war, and persons who committed depredations were brought to trial, imperiling Merriman's life. When he ran for election to be a delegate to the constitutional convention of 1865, former members of Kirk's regiments threatened vengeance and Merriman lost. Later he was elected Judge of the Superior Court for the Eighth Judicial District and upon the convening of court in several counties violence was threatened. In Clay County hundreds of armed men awaited the beginning of an onslaught when the court opened. After a skirmish involving sixty to eighty persons, Judge Merriman directed the sheriff to select and swear in sixty trusted men from both factions, to see that they were armed, and to tell them to shoot the first man guilty of violence with intent to start a general disturbance. A similar occurrence happened at the court in Cherokee. As has been pointed out, many of the pre-war Whigs after serving the Confederate government became Democrats, but since the name Democrat was repugnant to them the party was called the Conservative Party. A Republican Party organization was formed in North Carolina in 1867. It consisted of some former Whigs, many small farmers who had not favored secession, Northerners who came to the state to participate in political affairs, and freedmen. It controlled North Carolina until 1870. From the beginning it was popular in Western North Carolina. Perhaps it is true, as a historian has remarked, that the Western counties did not suffer as much during the years I865-187o as piedmont and eastern counties where there were more Negroes to vote and hold office, but there were trying times. Republicans organized the Union League in the state to campaign for Republicans; and William H. Holden of Raleigh and Tod R. Caldwell of Burke County, Republicans, were elected governor and lieutenant governor respectively in 1868. Terrorist activities of members of such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan and editorial campaigns of newspapers against Holden's administration prompted the governor to call for two regiments of �r6 / Prologue volunteer troops as "detailed militia" to arrest the violence and disturbances which he and his advisers attributed to the Conservatives. George Kirk of Tennessee, leader of Union regiment~ in Western North Carolina during the Civil War, was choser to head one regiment. A circular written by Holden was circulatec in the western part of the state. It read: "Rally Union Men in defense of your state! Rally soldiers of the old N. Carolina 20 and 3d Federal troops! Rally to the standard of the old commander .... rooo recruits are wanted immediately, to serve six months unless sooner discharged. These troops will receive the same pay, clothing and rations as United States regulars. Recruits will be received at Asheville, Marshall, and Burnsville, North Carolina." The so-called "Kirk-Holden war" was part of the political campaign of r870 which did not include the election of governor, whose term had been fixed at four years by the constitution of r868. The election resulted in victory for the Conservatives in the legislative offices: five of the seven North Carolina members of Congress and majorities in both houses of the General Assembly. While the Republicans had controlled the General Assembly the issuing of $27,85o,ooo in bonds for railroad repair and construction was authorized, although only $17,66o,ooo were issued. The bond issues constituted a fraud participated in by some seventeen legislators led by George Swepson and lobbied for by Milton Littlefield. Most of the proceeds were not used for railroad construction. Of the bonds issued, $6,387,000 was authorized for construction of the Western Division of the Western North Carolina Railroad, Asheville to the Tennessee line, and $6r3,000 for the Eastern Division, Salisbury to Asheville. When the Democrats took over the General Assembly in I 870, they authorized a railroad investigation, the findings of which enabled them to impeach Governor Holden and convict him in March 1871 of high crimes and misdemeanors. Tod Caldwell became governor and was reelected in r 872. Upon his death Curtis H. Brogden of Wayne County, Lieutenant Governor, succeeded to the office. Although the Conservatives controlled the General Assembly, Republicans served as governors until 1876. Ku Klux activities subsided in the piedmont by r87r but they continued in several mountain counties, Burke, Polk, McDowell, and Rutherford in a very uncontrollable fashion. Meanwhile Congress had passed the Ku Klux acts and more �Prologue / 17 United States troops were sent into the state. Wholesale arrests were made, and 981 persons were indicted for "Ku Klux depredations" by a federal grand jury in Raleigh. Of the thirtyseven convicted, the most famous Western North Carolinian was Randolph A. Shotwell, Democratic editor of Rutherfordton. J. G. de R. Hamilton, editor of the Shotwell Papers, concluded, "Shotwell was the county chief in Rutherford County, having assumed the position at the request of leading men in the hope of checking the movement. He had never been on a raid and never ordered one and had sought to prevent ... raids. He was convicted on false evidence, fined $5000 and sentenced to six years in Albany." Shotwell was pardoned after two years. Hamilton found that the Klan in Rutherford and Cleveland counties had been used to cover "private vengeance, sheer lawlessness, and in certain cases the activities of certain republicans in violation of the United States Internal Revenue law concerning whiskey.'' The Civil War ended, but the bitterness between opposing factions lasted for years. The acrimony over Reconstruction was perhaps not as violent in Western North Carolina as in Eastern North Carolina, but the impact of both the war and the Reconstruction that followed it are still evident in the partisan rivalry that exists between Democrats and Republicans in the mountain counties. Moreover it is believed by many that those constituting the Democratic power structure in the state resented the fact that Western North Carolina was a divided region during the war, and that they have discriminated against those in the mountains by limiting appropriations that would aid the economy. Much has been written about the mountain people for the last hundred years or more. Perhaps the description by Randolph A. Shotwell of the people in Rutherford County in the late r86o's is as good as any. He saw four different groups: (r) families of wealth, intelligence, and cultivation - they were the ex-slave holders, who educated their children at distant schools, and owned large tracts of land; (2) those who lived in substantial frame or log dwellings and enjoyed "good living" although their members had little education; (3) log cabin dwellers who owned only a few acres and lived in one-room structures, with �I8 / Prologue little furniture, and who had in money no more than twenty dollars in a year, hunting and fishing supplementing the products of the garden patch to provide the family's food; (4) those who owned little or no land and who lived in complete ignorance of the outside world. Shotwell included in this group the illicit distillers who lived in the wildest woodlands and operated three-gallon stills in the most secluded places. For those who lived on the hills and in the coves, frontier conditions persisted and poverty was widespread, yet many descendants of the first settlers remained. They stayed because of the beautiful scenery and the healthful climate. The rolling hills, the green valleys, and the lofty mountains covered with laurel, rhododendron, hemlock, balsam, pine, oak, and chestnut made Western North Carolina one of nature's wonderlands. They loved their native area, its beauty and its freedom. Julius Caesar was right in writing "Mountaineers are always free." Life in the villages and towns of Western North Carolina was not very different from that of rural villages in other parts of the state. These people were not mountaineers as the term is usually used; neither were the gentry, those on large valley farms, to be considered mountaineers. Keeping in touch with kinfolk throughout the piedmont they participated in local government and the General Assembly, educated their sons for the professions such as law and medicine, and entertained in the Southern manner. When Arnold Toynbee wrote, " ... in the heart of our Western Society's 'New World' of North America, there is today a large and widespread population of English and Lowland Scottish origin, with a Protestant Western Christian social heritage, which has been unmistakably and profoundly barbarized by being marooned in the Appalachian backwoods ... " he could not have been referring to the farmers who developed the holdings at the mouths of the rivers and large streams, who built two-story log houses which as time went on they enlarged or replaced with fine brick homes, many of which are still standing in Caldwell, Burke, McDowell, Rutherford, and Polk counties. These families were large, and marriages were made to preserve the link between the households of mountain valleys and the piedmont. Most of the prosperous families had owned slaves. Dr. Edward M. Phifer made a study of the slaveholding families in Burke County. He found that in I 86o, "921 families engaged in farming, 548 of the families were landowners, 9 were listed �Prologue / I 9 " Magnolia," one of the elegant ante-bellum homes in Burke County as owning as many as 300 improved acres, 3 8% of the 548 landowners were slaveholders, I6o/o of the slaveholders owned only one slave each, 6o family heads owned Ioo or more slaves, 26% of the population was slave." He explained, "The ScotchIrish and German upcountrymen turned to legalism, already a component of their thought process, to justify the institution of slavery." Those who owned slaves were professional people, church officers, farmers, and merchants. A Methodist minister William Fullwood owned as many as nineteen slaves at one time, and in I 8so the Presbyterian minister at Quaker Meadows, John McKamie Wilson, Jr., had ten slaves. Many of the slaveholders had occupations unassociated with agriculture. The slaves worked in shops, engaged in household manufacturing, gold mining and railroad construction as well as agriculture. Slaves were considered a good investment, liquid assets, and some slaveowners are not known to have owned any land. Dr. Phifer's description of slaveholding in Burke County can no doubt be applied to the other counties ofWestern North Carolina. The Population Table shows how many slaves were held in each county in r8so. The leading families of I85o were still the dominant element in the population of I877. For the persons usually characterized as mountaineers, who �POPULATION TABLE Counties White N 1850 Free Negro 188o Slave White Colored 1950 Total 1960 Total 1970 Total 0 4' C) Alleghany Ashe Avery Buncombe Burke Caldwell Cherokee Clay Graham Haywood Henderson Jackson Macon Madison McDowell Mitchell Polk Rutherford Surry Swain Transylvahia Watauga Wilkes Yancey 8,096 II,6oi 5.477 s,oo6 5.493 5.931 5.892 s,6I3 4.777 I0,425 I6,I7I 3,242 10,746 7.908 Created in 1859 86 Created in 191 I 107 163 108 8 Created in 186I Created in I872 IS 37 Created in I85I I06 Created in I851 207 Created in I 86 I Created in I855 220 272 Created in I87I Created in I861 29 2II so 595 I,7I7 2,132 1,203 337 4I8 924 549 I,262 2,905 2,000 I29 1,142 346 4.967 13,478 519 958 18,424 I0,090 8,688 3.486 2,721 I,6oo 386 I43 212 484 1,385 749 668 457 1,899 503 1,143 3,273 2,067 549 517 409 I,923 325 7.796 3,I73 2,I23 9.787 8,895 6,594 7.396 I2,353 7,037 8,932 3,920 II,925 13,234 3.236 4,823 7.75I I7,258 7.368 8,155 21,878 13,352 124,403 45.518 43.352 18,294 6,oo6 6,886 37.631 30,92I I9,26I I6,I74 20,522 25,720 I5,143 II,627 46.356 45.593 9.92I IS,I94 I8,342 45,243 I6,306 7.6oo 19,100 u,6oo 132,400 54.900 5I,200 15,800 5,300 6,300 43.300 37.700 17,300 I4,500 I6,200 27,000 I3,500 II,300 44.810 48,8oo 8,ooo I6,6oo I7.300 45,IOO 13,300 8,134 19,571 12,655 145,056 6o,364 56,699 I6,330 5,I80 6,562 41,710 42,804 2I,593 IS,788 I6,003 30,648 I3,447 II,735 47.337 51,4I5 7,86I I9,713 23,404 49.524 12,629 ~ :;:: "' �Prologue / 2I lived in the more remote coves and valleys and on the steep hillsides, life did not change much, even after the tum of the century, because new means of transportation did not reach them. Dr. Benjamin Washburn, who grew up in Rutherfordton, and who after completing his medical training practiced medicine in the upper part of Rutherford County early in the twentieth century, in the South Mountains, wrote: "It seemed to me that to go from the lowland section of the county into the South Mountains, although the distance was only about thirty miles, was to pass into a different world - a world which showed stage-by-stage changes in civilization which had been going on in our Appalachian hills since the early years of the nineteenth century .... As I became better acquainted with the people I found it hard to realize that the South Mountain folks and those of the lower part of our county were descended from the same English and Scotch ancestors. This was all the more interesting because I was related to many of these mountain families, one of my grandmothers having come from this section." Washburn called the South Mountains "a picturesque section with simple, loyal, homeloving families." Cecil Sharp, an Englishman who came to the Appalachians to collect mountain ballads, found the people "leisurely, cheery, ... in their quiet way, ... with a very highly developed social instinct. They dispense hospitality with openhanded generosity and are extremely interested in and friendly toward strangers, communicative and unsuspicious .... They have an unaffected bearing and the unselfconscious manners of the well-bred." The one other group in the population of Western North Carolina was the Cherokee Indians. Following a treaty with the United States at New Echota in I835, for a money payment and land in present-day Oklahoma the Indians reluctantly ceded their remaining land in the East, and in I 838 their removal began. Many Cherokees opposed the treaty and some hid out in the mountains; while others stole away from the procession and returned to the mountains with numerous white families befriending them. In I839 there were about one thousand living in the Smokies. William Holland Thomas, a trader, went to Washington to negotiate permission for them to remain in North Carolina. With their share of the treaty money Thomas bought a tract of land in his own name since North Carolina had passed a law forbidding Indians to own land. The area situated on the Oconaluftee River became known as the Qualla Boundary. It contained about 50,000 acres. Other small tracts �22 / Prologue including one in present-day Graham County brought the total to about 65,000 acres. When after the Civil War Thomas lost all of his personal fortune, the federal government repurchased the land and in 1875 the Indian Office assumed direct control of the affairs of the band. Formal title to the Qualla Reservation and outlying tracts was granted to the Eastern Cherokees in 1876, and in 1889 they became a corporation under the laws ofNorth Carolina. The Cherokees have long been known as thrifty, hardworking people. A traveler through the Qualla Reservation wrote in I 892 that the village of Yellow Hills was "beautiful ... , neat, orderly, and picturesque. We have gone through the Qualla Cherokee Reservation, down its most populous valley, through its roughest and most picturesque scenery. Coming through, by way of their thoroughfare and by their churches, we have seen most of the population in their Sunday dress and holiday garb, men, women, and children. We have seen their houses and farms, and visited them at home .... This Monday mom, we have seen the native at work - the red man, actually at work - driving oxen, reaping, mowing, one actually running a reaper - shades of McCormick! We have passed by and seen a road-working party. Every Indian we have seen this morning has been at work. They are in their work-a-day attire and even in that they are well dressed." Chapter One, "On Main Traveled Roads," reveals a county by county view of the more or less normal lives, the places, and the leaders, I877-188o. Superior Court Judge David Schenck traveled from county to county, met the professional people, the hotel keepers, the leaders of the communities. Interwoven with his account are descriptions of the sports, the churches, the schools, to give a picture of the life of the substantial people of the region. Chapter Two, "Off the Beaten Path," describes the life and customs of the poorer mountain people who lived in the coves and on the ridges. They are the mountaineers of the stereotype created by the outlanders and writers of fiction. A traveler in the mountains would see a man who was tall, lean, emaciated, poorly dressed, and think that he was seeing a typical mountaineer. These accounts introduce topics whose histories will be narrated in subsequent chapters. �PART ONE The People and Their Homeland 23 ��CHAPTER ONE On Main Traveled Roads To a resident of one of the western counties, the holding of the superior court was of major importance, and the county government seemed more significant than the national one because to it they were more closely related. When a new county was created by the General Assembly that body would appoint a group of commissioners to select a site for the county seat, purchase the land (sometimes it was contributed by an interested landholder) and lay it out in lots, setting aside the amount needed for the courthouse and jail and selling the remaining lots to businessmen and householders. Thus the county seat developed into a service center for the county, with the usual businessmen: general merchants, tanners, millers, distillers, carpenters, cattle dealers, and in some cases a drug store. Churches and schools grew gradually, and one or more hotels were built to accommodate the judge, the lawyers, and the people from the outlying parts of the county during court week. Burke County, the parent of many western counties, has a rich and interesting history centering around its courthouse. It was the earliest seat of justice and law in Western North Carolina. For a while the Supreme Court of the state held its summer sessions in Morganton, the county seat. Colonel Lusk, an Asheville lawyer, when he was ninety-two in 1928, reminisced that there had been a time when Asheville was jealous of Morganton. Burke County's third courthouse, which is still in use, was begun in 1833 and was under construction for several years. It was made 25 �26 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland Burke County's historic courthouse ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. Aerial view of Burnsville, county seat of Yancey County today HUGH MORTON PHOTO �On Main Traveled Roads / 27 of native stone which was later covered with concrete. It served not only as a courthouse but as a center for every kind of gathering. For example, when a group of citizens and their slaves assembled in I 849 to join those who rushed to California to find gold, they met and left from this venerable courthouse. The English and the Scotch-Irish settlers and their descendants have always been proud of their system of law that was transplanted into the North Carolina mountains in the eighteenth century by their ancestors. This heritage of English common law and legal justice was centered around the courthouses. When highways came they were designed to run from county seat to county seat. The courthouse was to the county seat what the cathedral was to a medieval city: it expressed the hopes and aspirations of the people. It was the heart's core of the western counties, the shaper ofhuman lives and destinies. It was the center of government and authority. It brought order and system to wilderness Carolina. It was the focal point of the social life, the occasion when those from one cove could meet and gossip with their neighbors from other coves and ridges, whom they had not seen for months. It gave to the mountaineer who loved litigation the joy of indicting someone. With the limited opportunities for recreation and social experiences, trials and court cases gave excitement and spice to his life. Charles Dudley Warner and other writers have described how the people in the mountains would gather in the county seats for court week. They came to meet their friends and relatives, to buy and sell, and to barter their home-grown products for store-bought-goods, needed supplies of salt, coffee, medicines, and tools. As soon as their business was transacted, they gathered in front of the courthouses. They would chew tobacco, spit, dip snuff, and drink liquor. The towns would be full of their buggies, their covered wagons, which were really tents on wheels, used as conveyances and as beds. Often they were loaded with apples, produce, or barrels of hard cider. There were always several wagons near the court. Cider, ginger cakes, maple sugar, and whiskey were sold.* * "The A.S. Merriman Journal," North Carolina Historical Review, VIII, 300-330, gives the best account of court week in Western North Carolina, full of detail, such as the following: "Scores of women attend this court [Madison County] for the sole purpose of drinking and pandering to the lustful passions of dirty men." The judge had to order the whiskey wagons off the court house grounds so that court might proceed. �28 J Part I: The People and Their Homeland The administration of the law was not always just, but it was exciting. Spring and fall, court week was the magnet to draw all to the county seats. The judges and lawyers came on horseback or when possible in buggies- those who rode the circuit- "old pettifoggers, young shysters, and brilliant, neat attorneys." Alexis de Toqueville remarked more than a century ago that in the United States every major problem ends in a law suit. The law was so often used to subvert justice that many people doubted its fairness, yet most men believed that the law was good if men used it lawfully. The folklore of the law is that if a murdered man has called the murderer a bastard or a son of a bitch, the jury will often acquit the murderer. If his lawyer or the murderer convinces the jury that the victim brushed his hip or his coattail as if reaching for a weapon, he may be acquitted. If the lawyer can show that the victim has been intimate with the murderer's wife, the accused will be acquitted under the "w1written law." Mountain people are far more peaceful than writers of fiction would have their readers believe. There have been and still are "pockets of riffraff." But violence was not limited to the "riffraff." Some of the most prominent families in Western North Carolina numbered among their members those who had killed or had died at gun point. Dr. Robert B. Vance of Buncombe County, in 1827, defeated by Samuel P. Carson for election to the United States House of Representatives, remarked that Colonel John Carson, father of Samuel, had been a Tory during the American Revolution. Samuel Carson denounced Vance as a liar, and other bitter remarks led Carson to challenge Vance to a duel, which was fought in Tennessee. Vance was killed by Carson's bullet. William Waightstill Avery of Burke County, the eldest child of Isaac Avery, was a distinguished North Carolinian, but he shot and killed a legal opponent, Sam Fleming, in I 85 I. Earlier Fleming had horsewhipped A very, and although Fleming was unarmed A very shot him in the courtroom from a distance of five feet. A very was tried and acquitted on grounds of temporary insanity. The jury deliberated only ten minutes. This case illustrates the fact that a man could kill an unarmed man and be acquitted. This incident had little effect upon Avery's subsequent career. In 1852 he was again elected to the legislature and in 1856 to the state Senate and became its speaker. In I 86o he was chairman of theN orth Carolina delegation to the Democratic convention. In spite of his skill as a public speaker he was defeated as a candidate for Congress �On Main Traveled Roads / 29 Franklin, Macon County seat, surrounded by mountains HUGH MORTON PHOTO Brevard, Transylvania County seat HUGH M O RTON PHOTO �30 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland by Zebulon Baird Vance in 1858. He was active in organizing the Western North Carolina Railroad and became one of its directors in 1857. In r86o he was again elected to the state Senate. He later served in the Confederate Provisional Congress. He died July 3, 1864, of a wound received in pursuit of Kirk's raiders. Judge David Schenck held court between 1877 and r88o in most of the county seats in Western North Carolina. If we follow him around the circuit, we gain a rare view of a region about which he had experienced much concern. He wrote on December 29, 1879, "Since the 24th of August ... I have been toiling over the great mountains and the Circuit that I dreaded more than any other in the state has ended, and ended peacifully." He commented briefly on social activities, remarked about politics and leading citizens. He shared with his diary the scenic high points and the difficulty of travel in the mountainous areas. His remarks touched upon numerous people and places which will be dealt with at greater length in other chapters. Schenck was elected on the Democratic ticket - the first Democrat elected by the general public to preside over a superior court in theW estern District. The Reconstruction constitution drawn up and adopted in 1868 provided for popular election of judges (formerly they were chosen by the General Assembly). An amendment added in I 875 required their rotation from district to district. In 1876 the Democratic Party won almost complete control of North Carolina. At the beginning of the 1877 court sessions, Judge Schenck traveled from his home in Lincoln County to Newton by buggy. There he took a train to Morganton, arriving almost simultaneously with the new era since the railroad had been completed beyond Morganton to Old Fort. A county seat and a railroad town, Morganton was one of the centers of growth in Western North Carolina. Burke County had a population of 12,809, about three tenths Negro. It was one-third mountainous, the balance in rolling hills and valleys. W. C. Erwin, lawyer and promoter of the county to northern capitalists, called the area "a country that has fertile soil, hospitable people, magnificent scenery, a perfect climate, vast mineral wealth, abundant water power, great forests of pine and the hard woods, and immunity from droughts and blizzards and unseasonable frosts." Morganton had 861 persons. �On Main Traveled Roads / 3 r Upper class travelers in the 187o's shared the road Asheville was the center of trade for a large area �32 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland There were two hotels. Judge Schenck chose the Mountain Hotel, kept by Dr. ]. M. Hoppeldt, where the cooking was "equal to any I ever saw- steaks an inch thick, rare and so tender and juicy that it almost melts in your mouth." John Gray Bynum, a popular lawyer, was the judge's host for Sunday dinner - the menu, ham and chicken, all kinds of vegetables, and dessert of peaches, watermelons, and cakes of different kinds. As the Bynums took boarders, there were ten person at dinner. The judge was looking forward to winning other political honors, and he felt that his charge to the court on Monday made a good impression. The lawyers were Colonel Burgess S. Gaither, A. C. Avery,]. S. Bynum, Alfred Erwin, and S. C. W. Tate. James M. Gudger was solicitor. Cam Pearson, the clerk, was a Radical. Colonel Gaither was the "leader and father" of the Burke County Bar, and Major A. C. Avery was the leader of the Democratic Party there. Burke County had a number of fine old plantation mansions including Belvedere and Bellevue, both Erwin family homes, and Swan Ponds, built by Waightstill Avery, part of the house dating back to the late eighteenth century, and lived in by generations of A verys. Quaker Meadows is one of the most attractive farming areas in Burke County, and a number of ante-bellum brick houses remained, remnants of prosperous times before the Civil War. Many of these houses are still in a good state of preservation. If the judge had been interested in the economic life of the region he would have reported that the county had the following businesses: I 5 blacksmiths; 3 cattle dealers and 4,4ro head of cattle; 2 coopers; 5 distillers (licensed) ; 3 fertilizer agents ; I insurance agent; 2 livery stables; 2 lumber dealers; 8 flour and grist mills; 2 millwrights; I mine for asbestos; 6 or 7 gold mines; a Democratic newspaper, the Blue Ridge Blade; 4 tanners; 2 tobacco manufacturers; 2 watchmakers; 3 boot and shoe manufacturers; and six physicians. On the farms, 752 acres were planted in cotton, 58 acres in tobacco, 22,6I3 in corn, 8 in rice, 1,654 in rye, and ro,or6 in wheat. Of schools there were fifty-two for white children and fifteen for Negroes. In addition there were two academies and one college. Methodist churches predominated, with thirteen Methodist Episcopal South, nine Methodist Episcopal (northern), one African Methodist Episcopal, three Methodist Episcopal Zion, and one Methodist Protestant. The others were one Episcopal, three Presbyterian, and four �On Main Traveled Roads / 3 3 Baptist. In a later chapter all of these denominations will be discussed. In the northern part of Burke County were several tourist attractions: Hawksbill at the top of Jonas Ridge, and Table Rock, both of which attracted excursionists; Linville Falls, formed by a shelf of rock and a drop of ninety feet, from the base of which the Linville Gorge runs south about twelve miles between Jonas Ridge and Linville Mountain. This wild and rugged ravine never failed to charm the energetic souls who rode horseback llP its course. At Linville Falls the Franklins, descendants of John, brother of Benjamin Franklin, who have lived for generations at the falls, served as guides and also "took travelers" overnight. The last half mile of the trek to the gorge could be covered only on foot. The South Mountains fill the southern third of the county, and the Blue Ridge cuts across the northwest corner. The South Mountains create a "thermal belt" where frost is infrequent. They run nearly parallel with the Blue Ridge for about forty-five miles, extending through parts of Burke, McDowell, Rutherford, and Polk counties. They were sparsely settled but in some places were farmed to the very peaks. On a plateau three hundred feet higher than Morganton was Glen Alpine - a glen with four mineral springs- almost surrounded by mountains. Twelve miles from Morganton, seven miles from the railroad but with regular hack service, Glen Alpine Springs had a large hotel which attracted visitors, and for those who wanted to explore some of the peaks of the Blue Ridge it was conveniently located. The waters were believed to be healthful. Piedmont Springs, ten miles north of Morganton, was another resort. Following his two weeks in Burke County the judge was to hold court in McDowell County, and Major James W. Wilson, president of the Western North Carolina Railroad, furnished an extra train to carry the members of the bar to Marion on Sunday evening, the party consisting of Colonel Gaither, Major Avery, Solicitor Gudger, and Judge Schenck. The judge chose to stay at the Fleming House. Marion was a town of 372 persons, with businesses similar to those of Morganton. At the old Erwin mansion on the Catawba River three miles from Marion lived Major E. A. M. Erwin and his maiden sisters, �34 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland Misses Matilda and Mary Ann Erwin. Schenck wrote, "The ladies are the finest specimen of that splendid race of people who inhabited this luxuriant valley, but whose fortunes have been swept away by the desolation of a war leaving them little else than honor, grace, dignity, intelligence and the love of the Presbyterian faith to solace them in their misfortune. This family however have left them a fine farm and entertain sumptuously and delightfully." One of the most famous and handsome houses in McDowell County was the Carson House, situated on the banks of Buck Creek near the Catawba River. Built in 1810, for many years it had been a stopping place for Brown's line of stages that ran from Marion to Asheville. Since the Western North Carolina Railroad had been completed beyond Old Fort in 1877, the stage line had been discontinued between Marion and Old Fort, but summer visitors frequently made a night's stop at the Carson House before continuing northward toward North Cove and the Linville Gorge. Advertised rates at the Carson House were as follows: man and horse, $1.50 per day; single person, $7.00 per week; single person, $25 per month. J. L. Carson advertised, "Much attention has been paid to beautifying the grounds and the house has been well fitted up." Judge Schenck's political ambition was gratified by the interest and approval shown him in each county seat. He wrote of his reception in Marion, "The people as far as I heard were delighted and expressed themselves decidedly for me." The next stop on the circuit was Henderson County. To reach it the judge traveled by train from Marion to Henry's, the inn near Old Fort at the end of the railroad in I 877, and there he and the solicitor spent the night. The next morning they took the four horse stage coach for Asheville, had dinner there at three P.M., and continued on the same stage to Hendersonville, where they stayed at the Henry Hotel. Judge Schenck was an admirer of the mountain scenery. In Hendersonville some of the most prominent citizens called on him: William Miller, B. T. Morris, Captain]. M. Toms, and others. As he organized the court he noted that the Democrats were "satisfied." Although the officers of the court were Republican- C. M. Pace, clerk, and Jonathan Williams, sheriffSchenck was "constrained to say they are very good officers, especially the sheriff, who is a nice clever gentleman .... He is the first Radical I ever had any respect for, and he disclaimed �On Main Traveled Roads J 3 5 being a full blood, is only tainted enough to get office from the party." Colonel H. T. Farmer, who operated the famous old inn built in 1853 at Flat Rock (still serving the public in 1972 as the Woodfield Inn) sent for Judge Schenck to spend the night. Colonel Taylor took the judge out in his buggy, and on the way they drove around among the magnificent summer residences, about twenty-five of them, each in a park-like tract of from sixty to one hundred acres, that had been owned and occupied each year during the summer season by prominent South Carolina families. Flat Rock may well claim to be Western North Carolina's first resort center. The Saluda Mountains are a spur of the Blue Ridge and are the boundary between North and South Carolina. Hendersonville was built on a smooth bench of land about halfway up the Blue Ridge Mountains. Between Hendersonville and Saluda Gap were fine farms and orchards, especially of peaches and apples. Schenck returned to Asheville September 2, 1877, and registered at the Eagle Hotel, room 3 5· The Honorable Thomas Lanier Clingman was staying in room 36, just across the hall, and the two men spent hours together daily. Clingman had enjoyed a long political life and knew "most of the distinguished statesmen and politicians of this age." He had practiced law around the whole of the Western Circuit when there were only four lawyers of any prominence in the mountain counties and they all went the rounds with the judge. Beginning with membership in the legislature he went on to serve fourteen years in the United States House of Representatives and three and one-half in the Senate before the state seceded. The Eagle Hotel was operated by James Patton and was the stopping place for the stage coaches over the Swannanoa Gap and from Greenville, South Carolina. ]. H. Gudger's Buck Hotel, in the center of Asheville, was the coach stop for the stage that ran from South Carolina via Saluda Gap and Hendersonville. This route Judge Schenck found not very scenic, but it was nevertheless the most comfortable to travel. A third hotel, the Buncombe, was the choice of many because it was apart from the busiest section of town. There were five other less-known hotels. �36 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland Farmer's Inn, now Woodfield Inn ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. Asheville, the only city in Western North Carolina, had about 2,100 people and twenty-three attorneys. The sheriff, Levi Plemmons, was a Democrat, but the clerk, J. H. R eed, was a Radical. J. M . Gudger, the solicitor, accompanied Schenck on the circuit. The judge felt even before holding court in Asheville that his prospects there were flattering. Leaders Thomas D. Johnson, H. B. Carter, and C. M. McLoud gave him "every assurance that the bar here are for me and the people evidently are my best friends. If I get through successfully next week, I think all will be well.'' As was his custom in each county he served, Schenck made sightseeing trips in Buncombe, socializing with all he met. He wrote, "Beau Catcher, a small mountain which overlooks the little city of Asheville and commands quite a fine view .. . is the resort of the 'Beau Catcher' and the 'Beauty lovers' every evening, who drive there, ride there, and walk there and do their courting there. Old Folks are tolerated too, so I went up the other evening and witnessed from it a most glorious sunset. But old as I am, I admired the round limbs and tapering waists and merry faces of the girls more than the grandeur of the mountains in the distance . . . . Such is the frailty of poor mankind - a slave to woman, no matter how silly, if she has a pretty face and ankle." �On Main Traveled Roads / 37 Buncombe County had the largest population of any of the mountain counties, 21,209, of whom 3,487 were Negroes. There were thirty-four post offices and sixty churches, Methodist predominating. There were sixteen Methodist Episcopal South, ten Methodist Episcopal (northern), one African Methodist Episcopal, one African Methodist Episcopal Zion, eight Methodist Protestant, twelve Baptist and three Free Will Baptist, five Presbyterian in the U.S. (southern), one Presbyterian U.S.A. (northern), one Disciples of Christ, two Episcopal, two Missionary Episcopal, and one Roman Catholic, the only Catholic church in the entire area. Asheville had a public library on the fourth floor of the court house. Private schools were Asheville Female College (sometimes listed as the Female High School), Asheville Male Academy, Montanic Institute. Elsewhere in the county were Black Mountain High School, Weaverville College, Hominy Academy at Hominy Creek, and Leicester Academy. The Asheville Female Academy is said to have attracted students from Maine to Florida with its four year course. The businesses in Asheville were more specialized than in other towns. Thirty-four general merchants operated stores, but in addition there were two bakers, one restaurant, two booksellers and stationers, two photographers, two banks, one furniture store, three druggists, and three barbers. There were eleven wheelwrights, thirteen grist mills, six sawmills, two woolen mills, three millwrights, and one marble-working establishment, five lumber dealers and eleven carpenters and builders. Asheville had two tobacco warehouses, as in the late seventies most of the mountain counties were having a try at growing tobacco, the bright-leaf variety. The effort was abandoned in a few years and not until the late 192o's was burley tobacco introduced in the region. The two newspapers, the Asheville Pioneer and the Asheville Citizen, were weeklies. The Citizen (Democratic) had been published since r869 with Randolph A. Shotwell as its first editor. Calvin H. Wiley in his North Carolina Reader (1868), said, "Some of you will be surprised to find Asheville a place of much intelligence and refinement." The cosmopolitan air was created by those who had come there for their health. Rebecca Harding Davis, who traveled in the Southern Highlands during the 187o's wrote, "There is a sanatorium in the little town Asheville which �38 f Part I: The People and Their Homeland View of Asheville from Beau catcher Mountain, a favorite rendezvous of young Lovers Countless hogs and other animals were driven through Asheville to South Carolina markets. Other traffic had to give way �On Main Traveled Roads / 39 is becoming a Mecca for consumptives." In addition to the eight hotels in Asheville there were flourishing inns on all the turnpikes leading into town- Smather's at Turnpike, Alexander's at Alexander, and the Reagan House at Weaverville were all well known. Smather's Inn contained forty rooms. John C. Smathers had started it with ten rooms but his business had flourished. Here he furnished grain and roughage, a fenced enclosure for stock, with pasturage ; had a mill, a blacksmith shop, a carpenter shop, and served travelers, drovers, and their livestock. The inn was crowded with "hundreds and thousands of horses, mules, hogs, and cattle" driven on foot, and was a stopping place for stage coaches and private vehicles carrying tourists and business men. Alexander's had been in operation since the Buncombe Turnpike was completed in I 828 when James Mitchell Alexander of Asheville bought and improved a place on the right bank of the French Broad River, ten miles from Asheville, for a hotel and mercantile business. The hotel was in use as long as the turnpike was the highway for interstate travel. Another Alexander's was ten or twelve miles H ardy travelers stopped here on the ascent of the hig hest mountain in Eastern A merica �40 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland east of Asheville; it was a long-famed wayside house. This Mr. Alexander was characterized by one visitor as "a hale sprightly young man of eighty, who, like all other farmers in the mountains 'took in' travelers, gave them an excellent supper and comfortable beds, and sent them on the next day." The resorts Haywood White Sulphur Springs, Warm Springs (now Hot Springs), and Asheville complemented each other, guests stopping at one for a few days, then riding by stage coach to another. A popular horseback excursion route from Asheville ran up Reem's Creek to Weaverville and Elk Mountain. Weaverville had a college, one of the four in Western North Carolina. The Weavers were early comers, and it has been estimated that thirty percent of the early settlers in the valley north of Asheville were related to them. Adventurous visitors to Asheville made the ascent to Mount Mitchell. Leaving the main road to Marion at Alexander's, up the narrow valley of the North Fork, headwaters of the Swannanoa, the explorer would reach the foot of Mount Mitchell the first day. The night would be spent at Glass's, the roomy cabin of a family that accommodated strangers. The vehicles were left, the rest of the trip being made on horseback. A pack horse would be used to carry supplies for twenty-four hours: blankets, rugs, and food. From Glass's to the summit of Mount Mitchell was a very steep and difficult twelve miles of trail. A rest stop could be made half way up at the ruins of the once famous Mountain House which had been built many years earlier. Above that point were unending forests of balsam and fir, the latter growing in perfect cone shapes, their bases meeting in close thickets, giving the mountains their name, the Black Mountains. Along the trail great boulders and fallen trees heightened the adventure for the mountain climber. During the course of Judge Schenck's travels on the circuit he was accompanied part of the time by Mrs. Schenck and at other times by his daughter Lucy. They were ecstatic over the mountain scenery. The judge employed the owner of a nice carriage to take Mrs. Schenck and himself from Asheville to Burnsville, where he had a choice of two inns or boarding houses. He chose Sol W. Carter's hotel. The other was owned by the versatile G. D. Ray, who also owned a mica mine, a saw mill �On Main Traveled Roads / 41 Climbers camped overnight before the descent from Mount Mitchell at Ivy Gap, and a flour and grist mill in Burnsville. He was a druggist, a tanner, a general merchant, and one of the principal farmers in the county. Eight mica mines were being worked in the county and mica from the mine of G. D. Ray was exhibited at the World's Fair in Vienna. This sparsely settled county of 7,694 persons was a grazing area, and there were eight cattle dealers who bought up cattle from the farmers and had them driven to market in South Carolina or Tennessee, where there were rail connections. The Black Mountains run through the center of Yancey County, and while parts of this range were forested with heavy timber, other parts were in native grasses. About one-half mile from the summit of Mount Mitchell was a piece of tableland one-half mile wide, a natural pasture. The W estern North Carolina Land Company which advertised this �42 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland area for sale boasted, "Hundreds of cattle fatten here in summer. Herbs and flowers abound, as do wild fruits." The company was offering a site about half way up Mount Mitchell as "a terrace ideal for a sanatorium." The name Boon (as the family in that county spelled it at the time) was constantly in Judge Schenck's mind during the stay in Burnsville. The case of Thomas Boon who had been convicted of murder a year before had been appealed, and while he had not fired the fatal shot, the court found him guilty of aiding and abetting the murderer. Sam Boon, father of Thomas, appeared in court as a witness. Among the nine blacksmiths in Yancy County was Macdaniel Boon. In that family it was and has continued to be traditional for each generation to provide at least one blacksmith. Court closed in Burnsville in time for the judge to enjoy a fox chase with the Aliens. He borrowed a horse from his landlord and with three of the Allens and their six well trained dogs rode to the foot of Green Mountain. The trail was fresh and the dogs were sent in pursuit of "Reynard." The men rode around to an eminence from which they could hear the race. Schenck wrote, "In ten minutes after the trail was struck the pack was in full cry and the music glorious. They ran in a circumference of a mile or two around us where we could hear the 'cry' all the time. The race was 'fast and furious' for forty minutes when the fox was pressed so closely that he put into a cliff of rocks but out of this the Allens soon forced him to retreat by means of poles and as he jumped from [the] cavern the race was renewed with increased noise and speed, and continued for ten minutes longer until Reynard was overtaken and our chase was over." But a much more exciting hunt was about to occur. The telegraph line to Asheville had just been completed. From Marion Schenck had telegraphed for permission from a Mr. Murchison in Raleigh to have some sport on Murchison's Black Mountain lands, 1 3,ooo acres on the south side of the Black Mountain that had been posted to forbid trespassing. Murchison had bought the land at sheriff's sale that year for $2,200, to use as a timber and game preserve. (In 1909 it was sold for $225,000.) "Big Tom Wilson" had become a legend in his own day as a guide and hunter. He was now fifty-six years old. He lived nine miles south of Burnsville. Schenck,]. M. Gudger, Schenck's landlord Carter, and Wilson Allen of the preceding hunt, went �On Main Traveled Roads / 43 on horseback to Tom Wilson's, had noonday dinner, and were at the forks of the two Caney rivers two and one-half miles from Big Tom's by two o'clock. Mrs. Schenck and Mrs. Gudger followed to the Wilsons in a buggy and waited for the hunt to be over. The first day the party killed a big stag and had " a keen relish for another day's sport." At 8:30 the next morning Gudger and Schenck stood about 200 yards above the Forks, where they had a clear view as the other hunters climbed the mountain for a drive. Their wait was rewarded, for at ten o'clock a beautiful Big Tom Wilson, twenty years before judge Schenck met him, had become famo us for his discovery of the body of Elisha Mitchell, scientist and professor �44 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland doe came galloping down the stream. After killing the deer, wrote Schenck, "We had a general jollification and gathering up and after the hunters had hop passed the deer [tied the feet together and suspended it from a pole] the party fished for speckled trout and Wilson Allen killed two beautiful pheasants. Big Tom went to a mountain orchard and filled his hat and pockets with October peaches, large white freestones, and brought them down for the party to feast on". That night appetites were keen and the venison and trout and good corn bread were acceptable to all. After supper the party sat around the fire while Big Tom told yarns, bear tales, fishing tales, and adventure tales of all kinds. One of the tales was of how on the rugged cliffs of the Black he killed a small bear (125 pounds) and five raccoons. These, with a rifle weighing eleven pounds, he had to carry down the mountain. He "hoppassed" the "coons" on a grape vine and strung them around his shoulders, three on one side and two on the other. Then he tied the fore feet of the bear together and ran his head between, with the bear on his back. With his left hand he held the two hind paws to keep the bear's weight from choking him. In his right hand he carried the gun. Big Tom believed, and most southerners agree, that "coon" meat is the best of all wild game. (Big Tom was the mountain man who found the body of Dr. Elisha Mitchell for whom the mountain had been named.) At night the party slept "in true mountain fashion." A room with several beds was shared by the Gudgers and the Schencks. A tallow candle was the only light. After ten days' vacation Judge and Mrs. Schenck started to Bakersville in a "jersey" at seven o'clock in the morning, to hold court in Mitchell County. Heavy showers fell as their vehicle climbed over and around Green Mountain. ''The mud was deep and the road slippery, then the clouds rose and the rain stopped." The ford in the Toe River at Peterson's was dangerous because the water was so high. Peterson rowed the Schencks across in his "dugout" twenty feet long and two and one-half feet wide and made another trip for their baggage, while a boy drove the jersey across. Then at the edge of Bakersville the gray horse began to balk and the judge and his lady finished the �On Main Traveled Roads / 45 Here the Schencks and the Gudgers spent two nights journey on foot. At the Penland House dinner was eaten, clothes were changed, and at three o'clock the judge was charging the grand jury. The docket was small and the session of court uneventful. The judge was eager to continue his exploration of the mountains. Mitchell County is much smaller than Yancey and was part ofYancey, Caldwell, andWatauga until 1861. The Nollichucky River forms the boundary between Mitchell and Yancey counties, while on the east is the Blue Ridge and on the west the Toe (Estatoe) River which flows the entire length of the county forming a valley "rich beyond description." On Saturday, October 25, 1879, Judge and Mrs. Schenck set out with a caravan for Roan Mountain, with a horse and buggy provided by Major Jacob M. Bowman for the first five miles, after which they had to travel five on horseback. General Wilder, an iron capitalist of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a Union army veteran who owned the mountain, had built a twenty room lodge called Cloudland. Only a caretaker and his little daughter were at the lodge, but the nine guests were welcomed with a cheerful fire, coffee, and tea and sugar, to which they added the "snacks" they had brought along. From the Pinnacle �46 J Part I: The People and Their Homeland The only dry way to cross swollen streams Roan Mountain in early June is colorful with myriads of purple rhododendrons U .S. FOREST SERVICE PHOTO �On Main Traveled Roads / 4 7 half a mile from the Cloudland Hotel, 6,306 feet high, could be seen ranges of mountains in Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia, as well as the ridges and peaks of North Carolina. The Bluff, ten feet lower than the Pinnacle, is at the southwest end of the mountain, and from it one looks down on a dreadful abyss below, although in the distance were to be seen thriving farms and villages in Tennessee, and on Big Rock Creek was the "Iron Works" at Cranberry. Charles Dudley Warner, exploring a few years later, wrote about the large variety of flora on Roan Mountain: "There are many [plants] we are told, never or rarely found elsewhere in the United States .... The rhododendron [growing there] ... has a deep red, almost purple color." About one-fifth of the land in Mitchell County was cultivated. The usual corn, oats, wheat and rye were to be seen, and fifteen acres were in cotton. Seventy-seven acres were planted to tobacco. Bakersville had a stoneware manufactory and a newspaper, the Republican. Churches in Mitchell County were chiefly Methodist and Baptist. A very County had not been created, and Schenck went next to Watauga County, where Boone, the county seat, was the highest such seat of government east of the Rockies at that time. To Schenck the routine of the court was monotonous in the small village of two stores and two hotels. Colonel Folk from Lenoir conveyed Schenck in a buggy drawn by two good horses. He stayed at Bryan's Hotel, where he was fed speckled trout, buckwheat cakes, sugar tree syrup, and the best milk, "good enough for a king." With a Captain Todd he fished in Howard's Creek. They caught twenty trout, the "most beautiful and gamey of all fishes." The court lasted only from Monday to Thursday, and on Friday the judge wrote, "Lawyers, suitors, and witnesses are gone, leaving the town lonely and uninteresting." A week would intervene before the next court, in Jefferson, and he did not know how he could "make the time interesting." Charles Dudley Warner commented about the two "taverns" in Boone and concluded that they were necessary to accomodate judges and lawyers when court was in session: "The court is the only excitement and the only amusement. Everybody in the county knows exactly when the court sits and when court �48 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland breaks. During the session the whole county is practically in Boone, men, women, and children. They camp there, they attend the trials, they take sides; half of them, perhaps, are witnesses, for the region is litigious, and the neighborhood quarrels are entered into with spirit .... "This tavern, one end of which was a store, had a veranda in front, and a back gallery, where there were evidences of female refinement in pots of plants and flowers. . . . The front porch in the morning resembled a carpenter's shop; it was literally covered with the whittlings of the row of natives who had spent the evening there in the sedative occupation of whittling." On November 12, 1879, Judge Schenck went from Boone to Jefferson, twenty-two miles, in a carriage. He made his headquarters at the old George Bowers House, kept by Martin Harden, in "room no. 3, which was for many years known as the judge's room and had been occupied by almost all the antebellum judiciary." Ashe County is one-third larger than Watauga in area, and its population was almost twice that ofWatauga, but the county seat, Jefferson, was smaller than Boone. There was great interest in mining in Ashe County, and grazing was also important. There were thirty-eight cattle dealers. One brandy distiller and ten whiskey distillers were licensed. There was a Negro population of 966, and the county had three Negro schools, a large number for a mountain county. Judge Schenck's circuit did not include Alleghany, Wilkes, and Surry counties. While all of Alleghany has an elevation of over 2,500 feet (and the Blue Ridge passes along its eastern and southern border), it has no peaks of over 5,000 feet. Sparta, the county seat, had about roo residents in r88o. The population of the county was 5,486. Wilkes County lies south of Alleghany, with the crest of the Blue Ridge forming its northwest boundary. It is so large that it is sometimes called the "State of Wilkes." The population of 19,I8I seems to have been fairly well distributed in r88o. The county seat, Wilkesboro, had only a few hundred people. One hotel and one boarding house accommodated the court officials and lawyers. The parent county, Surry, once included present-day Stokes and Forsyth and all of the land to the west as well as what came to be seven Tennessee counties. Partitions dated from I 777 to I 850, after which Surry County had its present boundaries. Its mountains are in the �On Main Traveled Roads J 49 northwestern part, the crest of the Blue Ridge just skirting the corner of the county. On the south is the historic Yadkin River, along which lived some distinguished families. Surry County's best known spot was Pilot Mountain, which was in 1970 made a state park. Surry is hilly or mountainous, with swift streams that were utilized for water power. One industry, the Elkin Manufacturing Company, established in 1848 by the Gwyn family for making cotton cloth, was in r884 employing thirtyfive workers and producing daily five hundred yards of sheeting and five hundred pounds of yarn. While Dobson, population 95, was the county seat, Elkin and Mount Airy were the important towns. In the latter there were manufacturers of cotton goods, but the new line of manufacture was tobacco. The county processed almost a million pounds of the weed in 1883, and Mount Airy had five tobacco factories, with four more at other points in the county. Two newspapers were published in Mount Airy: the National Visitor and the Mount Airy Watchman. The mineral of Surry County was not yet being exploited, but an abundance of granite was to become in later years one of the important resources. Winter was coming on as Judge Schenck traveled fifty-five miles from Jefferson to Lenoir, over the Blowing Rock Gap. The first thirty-two miles were done in a two horse buggy with Colonel Folk. "The New River, a rapid mountain stream 125 feet wide," Schenck wrote, "was frozen over in many places, and Meat Camp Creek bore the weight of horses, buggy, and passengers. A night was spent at the home of Len. W. Estes, on the Blue Ridge. Mrs. Estes had the finest B.W. [buckwheat] cakes I ever ate. They were about nine inches in diameter, round as a plate and thick as your hand, and very light .... Estes has a beautiful mill pond, full of trout, and I have a special invitation to fish in it, which I hope to accept and enjoy." On Sunday Colonel Folk and the judge rode on to Lenoir, making the twenty-two miles by four P.M. "I am rejoiced to leave the high elevations and the dangerous roads of the mountains as the cold winter comes on," wrote Schenck. One civil case on the docket, Freeman v. Sprague, took from Wednesday to Saturday to complete. It dealt with the ownership of the Henry Hotel at Henry Depot on the Western �50 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland North Carolina Railroad west of Old Fort, and the lawyers employed for the plaintiff were E. H. Malone, J. C. Bynum, and Romulus Linney; for the defense, Burgess S. Gaither, George N. Folk, and D. P. Cilley. All of these names are those of well known families of the area. Colonel and Mrs. Clinton A. Cilley entertained Judge Schenck, the Joneses, and Colonel Pearson at tea. The Jones, Lenoir, Patterson, and related families were residents of attractive and stately homes Qn plantations near Lenoir. Kemp Plummer Battle wrote, "I state as a fact that the lovely and fertile country through which flows the upper Yadkin and its tributaries has been for years the home of a prosperous, high toned and harmonious people. . . . [It is] designated by admiring visitors as Happy Valley." Lenoir's newspaper, the Topic, one dollar per year, advertised that it was "published weekly in the liveliest town in the mountains." Schenck called Lenoir "one of the most literary and cultivated places in the state." Court ended after almost four months of "toiling over the great mountains," and Schenck went home to rest until March when he was next to travel to Asheville. That trip was made by train to Charlotte, thence to Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he missed his train to Hendersonville. Mr. Anderson, superintendent of the railroad, sent him to Hendersonville on an engine. "It was a grand ride over Tryon Mountain," he wrote. While holding court in Asheville the judge met Kope Elias, Esquire, of Macon County, his devoted friend. Upon hearing a report that some fine wild turkeys had been in a field nearby, Schenck and Elias borrowed a horse and buggy on Saturday and rode out to shoot turkeys. "It was seven miles, and the roads were desperately bad, and we just got to the 'blind' in time to hear the turkeys fly out of the field." The birds were seen again on Sunday. Monday morning "came wet and foggy, but by 6 o'clock Kope and I were in the 'blind.' I was armed with [a] double barreled breech loader, Kope with a muzzle loader. In about a half hour we heard one fly down from the roost and give a low call or two and in a few minutes we heard the gang, five in all, fly over the fence. I was to 'conduct the shooting,' so I whispered to take a position and keep a keen watch. Directly a large gobbler came running to the bait, and �On Main Traveled Roads / 5 I we could see his outlines through the dense fog about twenty-five steps from us, then another joined him, and I gave command to aim, then to fire. At the word I fired both barrels at my gobbler, full and square in the breast, as he had discovered our presence and was peering his keen eyes into the crevices of the 'blind' to see what we were. Kope fired one barrel simultaneously, and both turkeys fell. Kope's turkey, to our surprise and mortification rose up and flew into a thicket and left him feeling 'blank and cheap'." Later Kope's turkey was found dead where he had fallen from a tree. Schenck continued, "My gobbler weighed 17 pounds .... I preserved the 'tails' and 'wings' for fans, and stuffed the head, leaving the full breast of feathers attached. The beard is nine inches long." Schenck had very little to say about the court at Marshall in Madison County, which he conducted in March 1880. He rode to Marshall in a hack and stayed at Jack Gudger's hotel. He wrote of Madison County, "This county is now wild over tobacco. The raising of this weed has increased very greatly and is proving remarkably profitable. Lands are increasing in value, and labor is greatly in demand." Marshall had little room for more than the main street, "the mountains rising to a lofty summit, almost from the water's edge of the river." It had about I 50 people. Warm Springs to the northwest had hotels and boarding houses and was to become an even more popular resort after the railroad reached there. We next find Judge Schenck in Brevard. The French Broad River rises in Transylvania County and the judge marveled at "the fertility, wealth, and beauty of the valley." He enjoyed shooting pheasants there. These birds "come to apple orchards in secluded places to eat the tender buds." Court over in Brevard (he had nothing to say about the lawyers or the docket), Mr. B. D. Lankford, Esquire, was "kind enough to furnish me two good mules and drive me to Waynesville without charge." They admired the "magnificent valley of the Mills River" on the way. One night was spent at Turnpike Post Office at the Smathers Inn. Waynesville was not incorporated until I871, but to Judge Schenck it appeared "an old dilapidated town, dirty and dingy, �52 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland Downtown Marshall today squeezed in between the French Broad and the mountains HUGH MORTON PHOTO and in itself without attraction." Hence he chose a room at Major W. W. Stringfield's White Sulphur Springs near Waynesville, of which he wrote, " ... one of the lovely spots in this world, and capable of being made a paradise with capital. The mountain scenery is grand, the river or creek running in stone's throw is transparent as crystal, the spring is very fine, and there are no cleverer people in the world than the Major and his wife." The population of Waynesville was 225. Much interest was shown in agriculture, clubs and societies having been organized including the Haywood Agricultural Society. From Waynesville Judge Schenck proceeded to Webster, then the county seat of Jackson County, with Walter E. Moore, a young lawyer. The docket was short and court closed in two days; a "horse thief' and a "house thief' were both sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary. Jackson County as described by William Ernest Bird "is essentially medial within the extremely western subdivision of the mountain region. Its shape is that of an elongated oval bowl �On Main Traveled Roads J 53 with an irregular rim: the Blue Ridge on the southeast, the Smokies to the southwest, the Balsams to the northeast, and the Cowees to the southwest. It is divided for almost its entire length by the Tuckaseigee River." At the Cherokee town of Stekoa near present-day Whittier, Griffith Rutherford met the Indians in 1776 and drove them into the Smokies. In 1781 John Sevier defeated them a second time near the present town of Sylva. In 1796 the "Meiggs and Freeman Line" was established from the Smokies to South Carolina, limiting the Cherokees to the territory west of the line. Thus part of what later became Jackson County was available to white settlers, and near the Meiggs and Freeman Line certain men were permitted to operate trading stations: Foster's, Love's and East laPorte. In 1819 another treaty gave the State of North Carolina the entire Tuckaseigee Valley, and the land newly available was divided into districts, surveyed, and sold to white settlers. Thereafter the area went through the pattern of home, church, and school building common to each valley in turn. The most exciting natural landmark in Jackson County was Judaculla Rock, now a state shrine, a large stone on Caney Fork Creek which has inscribed in hieroglyphics a message that no one has ever been able to decipher. Legend tells of a super-human being named Judaculla of prehistoric times who carved the inscription to commemorate his activities in the area. In the southeast corner of Jackson County Confederate General and later Governor of South Carolina Wade Hampton had an estate at a very scenic point which later became the resort, High Hampton. Whiteside Mountain is one of the most spectacular mountains in the state. One side has a rock precipice I ,8oo feet high, giving the mountain its name. Franklin, with a population of 207, was the county seat of Macon County which had been formed in 1828. It became a cultural center for the southwestern part of the state, had a number of schools and academies, and was the home of the first normal school established in Western North Carolina. In 1875 another town, Highlands, was laid out in the southeastern part of the county as a summer resort. Settled chiefly by newcomers, it boasted a literary society, the Highlands Improvement Association, the Highlands Floral Society, the Highlands Temperance Union, and a newspaper, the Blue Ridge Enterprise. Both Franklin and Highlands had high schools. �54 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland Waynesville was described in the 187o's as a quaint, old-looking town. Life was simple and rural After Judge Schenck had finished the court in Franklin, he and his daughter Lucy who had joined him set out with Thomas Slagle as guide to climb the Nantahala Mountain Range. They were able to go by two-horse buggy to the gap, and there "took saddle" for the summit which was three miles farther. Near the summit was the famous "wine spring," which furnished water to drink with their lunch. On the way to Hayesville in Clay County the judge, Kope Elias, and Lucy stopped at Alexander Munday's at Aynone Post Office at the western foot of the Nantahala Range. Schenck had sent word to the host to have plenty of speckled trout ready, and he had "a most bountiful supply of this most delicate of all fishes." After dinner they crossed "Tusquitcher Mountain" (Tusquitee) to Hayesville. The road followed "cool crystal branches, with gushing streams at every turn, and grand forest of hemlock and wilderness of rhododendron on every side." One night was spent at the "cozy cottage" of one of the Shearer families on Tusquitee Creek. There was a little mill nearby, and water had been piped to the Shearer house and to the mill race. �On Main Traveled Roads J 55 �56 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland :..1.:: " .. The Schencks followed the Nantahala Gorge between Franklin and Hayesville ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO . Only two days were required for the session of court in Clay County, which h ad been part of Cherokee until 1861. The county's population was only 3,3 16. After the court closed the judge's party continued to Murphy, the road following the Hiwassee River for part of the way. They h ad time for sightseeing before the next session in Cherokee, and the judge wrote, "I spent the next week very pleasantly." He was able to take "several fine drives" to explore scenic attractions. Cherokee County was described by Chataigne's Directory as having "marbles of the finest quality and of various colors that compose whole mountains," but at that time m arble was not being mined. Kope Elias accompanied Judge Schenck on this trek on the Western Circuit in 1880, and they next traveled to Robbinsville, Graham County, spending the night at Dr. R. C. Washburn's at the head of Valley River. The docket was finished in a day and a half. Robbinsville was a hamlet of sixty-one persons, the �On Main Traveled Roads / 57 entire county's population numbering 2,335. Graham County was very young at the time of Schenck's visit, having been created in 1872. Some Indian families continued to live there on land purchased for them by William Holland Thomas. They subsisted by farming and hunting. A few white families had straggled in even before the Cherokee removal. The roads were poor, most of them lying at least at a thirty degree angle. Not until the lumbering industry started would people come to Graham County in any great numbers. The county seat of Swain County (now Bryson City) was then called Charleston. It was thirty-two miles from Franklin, to which the judge had returned after court at Robbinsville. The Little Tennessee River was high, and as the judge crossed it his buggy and valise filled with water. In Swain County law enforcement had been made a problem by a band of rioters and desperadoes led by members of the "Wiggins family." The judge sentenced about ten to jail for terms of from three to twelve months, and he sent them to the Franklin jail "for safe keeping." Swain County had a total population of 3,784, and its land was assessed at 78/: per acre. Charleston had 100 people. The main portion of the Cherokee Indian lands, the "Qualla Boundary" was partially in Swain County. Two other counties not included in Schenck's circuit were Rutherford and Polk. Rutherford was one of the more populous counties, much of its land lying in the piedmont, with a population of 15,208. In part of the county are the South Mountains. Inserted in the southwestern corner is little Polk County through which run the Saluda Mountains. Chimney Rock in Rutherford County was one of the tourist attractions, and the highest point is Pinnacle Mountain, 3,832 feet. The Broad River and the Second Broad flow through the county. In cultural life Rutherford and Polk had a head start, as they had begun to be settled before the American Revolution and they were always in touch with more highly developed areas. The Speculation Land Company promoted settlement and advertised, attracting purchasers. From I814-1845 Rutherford was the center of gold production for the nation, and Bechtler's mint north of Rutherfordton was allowed to coin money. The county began �58 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland the textile industry in I874 when an old wheat mill was converted to production of cotton goods. It employed fifty people until, within the year, it was destroyed by fire and not until years later were plans made for its successor. Its mill village of fifteen houses was probably the first in Western North Carolina. Polk County with 5,062 people and an area of only 234 square miles had I,646 acres devoted to cotton and 93 I in tobacco. A fine old home in Polk County was Green River Plantation built by ColonelJoseph McDowell Carson about I8oo. Inherited by Carson's granddaughter Mrs. Frank Coxe, it served as a country home, the Coxes spending most of each year in Asheville, where Mr. Coxe built the first charming Battery Park Hotel. Green River Plantation house still stands. Columbus, the county seat of Polk, had only 7I people in I 880. The southern and eastern portion of the county is a fine fine farming area. Within a few years after I88o, Polk County was to become attractive to both summer and winter residents (not the same groups) when rail connections with South Carolina were made. The route followed had been the Indian Trading Path, later a main traveled road from Kentucky and Tennessee to the South. �CHAPTER TWO Off the Beaten Path The distinctive mountain culture as described by vtsttors, missionaries, social workers, members of study commissions, and residents during the last hundred years, was to be found among the people off the beaten part. Edward King in The Great South, 1875, described a visit to a mountain cabin. He saw the housewife smoking a corncob pipe and warming her hands before an open fire. Rain dripped through the roof; the children were huddled together. There were few furnishings, but the barns were full and the family had a few sheep and goats. At that date the mountain people were not destitute, but the public schools were deplorable. He concluded that the people were relatively well off. A description of mountain life about 1880 by the great psychologist William James is so typical of outlanders' views that it is quoted at length: "Some years ago ... in the mountains ofNorth Carolina, I passed by a large number of'coves' ... which had been cleared and planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler had ... cut down the more manageable trees and left their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and killed. . . . He had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out .... He had planted the intervals between the stumps with Indian corn ... ; and there he dwelt with his wife and babe - an axe, a gun, a few utensils, and some 59 �6o / Part I: The People and Their Homeland pigs and chickens ... being the sum total of his possessions. "The forest had been destroyed; and what had 'improved' it out of existence was hideous ... without a single element of nature's beauty, ugly indeed seemed the life of the squatter ... beginning back where our first ancestors started and ... hardly better off for ... the achievements of ... intervening generations .... '' "Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, 'What sort of people ... make these new clearings?' 'All of us,' he replied. 'Why we ain't happy here unless we are getting one of these coves under cultivation.' I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearing spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil, and final reward." James, like many other writers and visitors to the mountains, had deplored the meagerness of the life of those who lived in the coves and on the ridges. The isolated mountaineers that he saw were poor, terribly poor, but they retained their pride, their self-respect, their independence, their individuality, and their zest for life. Many of their children left their mountain homes to "seek their fortunes" in the mill towns, the county seats, or the cities, but they always remembered nostalgically the experiences, the sounds, and the sights of their childhood: crossing streams by footlogs; washing wool in streams; carding, spinning, weaving; boiling clothes in a black iron pot swung from a tripod; salting sheep from a gourd; a mother churning milk and cooking the evening meal by the light of a fat pine stick; the father riding for the doctor by the flare of a burning torch or taking the corn to the mill on foot or on horseback; lograilings; house-raisings; corn huskings; the crushing of sorghum; the stomping, swinging, shuffling of feet; the voice of the caller and fiddle music at neighborhood square dances. Mountain sounds were those of the howling winds, the singing of birds, the tinkling of cow, horse, and sheep bells, the ringing of axes, the thud of mauls, the crash of falling trees, the sputter and crackle of open fires, the clank of the blacksmith's hammer, the hissing of frying meat and the whir of the spinning wheel and above all the sound of the human voice with all its varying �Off the Beaten Path J 61 A log cabin of the type lived in by the earliest settlers and the poorer mountaineers ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. later I G oing to the Mill - riding is better than walking j �62 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland intonations in talk and in the singing of hymns and old ballads. Other sounds came from the mass hysteria and jerkings at revival meetings, laughter, obstreperous cursing, crying at trials, kettles singing over a crane. Interesting smells were those of oak, cedar, pine burning, hominy boiling, sassafras steeping, com bread baking, ham frying, and woolen clothes drying before a fire. A small mountain settlement of the type that might be found in almost any county of the region was that on the North Fork of the Swannanoa River, described by Fred M. Burnett in This Was My Valley. The Bumets (earlier spelling) built their first log cabin there in 1762. In the valley, less than four miles long, closed in by mountains on all sides, lived at least fifty families. Here were "all the crafts- blacksmith shops where they built their own wagons, plows, knives, and tools. They tanned leather, made shoes, harnesses, and saddles. They carded, spun, and wove their own wool and made their clothes." From the peach and apple orchards came the fruit for their brandy. Wheat, com, and rye were also distilled. Their fields produced com, and every farm had poultry and domesticated animals. The community was almost entirely self-sufficient. After the crops were harvested in the fall, the men went on the first hunt, which would last from Monday morning until Saturday afternoon. Each man carried a sack of supplies such as com meal for fritters, flour for gravy, salt, coffee, a slab ofbacon, potatoes, and onions. The hunt would provide the meat. To the group of men who had known each other and hunted together all their lives, the hunt was a way of life, a prized experience. Mountain families have usually been patriarchal. In them the men have been dominant, the women subservient. The men made the decisions, did "men's work"; the women did the chores and the house work and often did not eat at the table with the men, especially if guests were present, but stood to serve men and guests. Women however generally were loyal to their men and not unhappy. They often referred to the husband as "The Mister" or "him." They usually would not go visiting or to town without his permission. The mountain man respected all women but was not chivalrous. He would not tip his hat nor offer his chair to an older woman. He would let his wife carry a child or other burdens. He would walk in front of her down the road or path. But he was scrupulous in teaching manners to his children. �Off the Beaten Path / 63 One of the simplest ofgrist mills An old mill that is still in existence ASH EVI LLE C ITIZEN -TIM ES CO . �64 J Part I: The People and Their Homeland Mountain musicfor a play-party game A mountain hunter �Off the Beaten Path / 65 The mountain man believed that everyone was equal in the sight of God and man. He resented condescension with fierce pride. There were no marked distinctions in the mountains. He was intolerant of anyone who tried to "get above his raisin'." He would balk at doing a "woman's work." He was ashamed to milk a cow, wash dishes, or make a bed, but he was quite willing to do the "hard work" of plowing, harvesting, felling trees, clearing land, sawing or chopping wood for cabin or fireplace. He was not lazy: he used great energy in his primitive methods of farming, in hauling his produce to market, in walking many miles over the hills hunting animals, birds, ginseng, or other salable herbs. During the three months of the growing season, men's work was regimented by the demands of their crops. That season was short because of frosts coming late in the spring and early in the fall. After crops were in and the land made ready for spring planting, the men could choose their activities until seed time. The more ambitious cleared land, split rails, cut firewood; others hunted, gambled, pitched horseshoes, attended shooting matches, drank liquor, and swapped yarns. Many made liquor; most drank. The drinking often made them quarrelsome. The mountain man had poise, self-confidence, versatility, was able to adapt to any kind of job. He was proud, "touchy," a jack-of-all trades, had learned to do almost everything for himself. He took education seriously because he had to work so hard to get it or because he was denied the opportunity. He could stand any amount of hard work, but he chafed at monotonous jobs. He was rash, precipitate, oversensitive, quicktempered. He usually resented all outlanders. Although the general level of cultural achievement had dropped because of isolation and the meagerness of opportunity, the mountaineer has been found to be a naturally capable, honest, intelligent, and efficient worker. He had an air of leisure, did not seem to be in a hurry, but he got things done that had to be done. It has been said that child-bearing, hard work, and hopelessness were the lot of mountain women. Sometimes that was true when a family was crushed by hopeless poverty. But women were the bulwark of mountain society. They held the homes together. They did the household chores, tended the livestock and garden, raised hemp and sheep and made the family clothing from hemp or from wool that they had sheared, thread they �66 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland had spun, and cloth they had woven. They cooked, cleaned, hoed the garden. Often they plowed; sometimes they even pulled the plow. They hunted herbs for medicine and greens for "sallets." In season the whole family would hunt ginseng, which sold for sixty cents a pound in 1848 (and for $9.68 green or $38.oo dried, in 1969). On Sundays the women often walked behind the horse, mule, or ox while the men rode to church holding what children they could. The women would put on their sunbonnets to work in the fields. They dried beans, corn, apples, peaches, pumpkins, and prepared kraut, pork, venison, and squirrel meat for winter. They made their own soap from the lye of hickory ashes and grease. They made their own candles and they dyed the cloth that they wove - linsey for underwear and dresses, jeans for men's clothing. Their dyes were homemade: indigo (blue), madder (red), maple bark (purple), hulls, roots, and walnut bark (brown). Dyes were also made from sumac berries and laurel leaves. While they worked or during their few leisure moments many dipped snuff. They had tin snuff boxes into which they dipped chewed birch sticks to rub the snuff on their gums. Snuff dipping was not a pretty custom, but it gave them satisfaction, and the women deserved any pleasure they could get. Other women smoked clay or corncob pipes filled with twists of home-cured tobacco. R. R. Smith, who engaged in mission work north and west of Asheville near the end of the nineteenth century, wrote, "In the summer and fall the women, wise like ants, store up food for winter ... drying and canning fruits and vegetables ... leather britches [long strands of dried snap beans hanging on the walls of the cabin], dry pumpkin ... cut in thin, spiral pieces put on sturdy sticks and hung in dry places .... Gourds were plentiful and made a cheap substitute for tin and earthenware. The small ones were used for drinking cups, the large ones for holding salt, sugar ... , the largest size for carrying water from the spring. Each family had a supply of remedies gathered from forest and field: boneset, goldenseal, burvine, catnip .... " These intrepid women had few conveniences and few pleasures. They faded early from hard work and child-bearing. But they took pride in their cooking, preserving, in their weaving and dyeing. A woman could weave five yards of linsey in a day. They liked company and often met for spinning, carding, reeling, knitting, and weaving contests. There was a quilting frame in many a mountain home. It was suspended from the ceiling and was about waist high. Patchwork pieces of brightly �Off the Beaten Path / 67 colored cloth had been gathered and saved. The quilting consisted of spreading cloth under a filler of cotton or wool, covering it with the patchwork which had been pieced together in intricate designs: sunburst, log cabin, crazy quilt, and others; and with tiny stitches sewing through all three thicknesses following a design that was repeated throughout the entire quilt. It was never a mountain custom to rely on hired help. When anything needed to be done that required many hands, the neighbors were "right neighborly." They used sickles to harvest small grain. When a man's crop was ripe, neighbors would gather to reap and shock it. A dozen or more men would cut through a field. Then they hung their sickles over their shoulders and bound back. Boys gathered the sheaves and old men shocked them. Corn crops were gathered and thrown in heaps beside the cribs. Neighbors came and husked the crop. Dr. C. D . Smith of Franklin said he had seen eighty to ninety men around his father's corn crib. Neighbors helped also in a barn or house raising or in a "rail mauling." This was a communal splitting of rails for fences. Neighborliness was more than a custom. It was a way oflife. Neighbors would help each other at grinding cane stalks, wheat threshings, or making molasses. They attended Methodist camp meetings, Baptist association meetings, community picnics, school commencements, circuses. All helped the sick. Some who were gifted in their knowledge of herbs were called "yarb" doctors. They and the "granny women" did much to maintain health. ::-..... W eaving was among the many responsibilities of the mountain woman. The loom is home-made �68 / Part I: The People and Their Homeland John C. Campbell wrote entertainingly of mountaineers as horse traders. He wished that he could live to see a horse trade between a Carolina mountaineer and a Connecticut Yankee. He affirmed that to the mountain man every business transaction was a horse trade and that he sought to get the better of his competitor. He gave his opponent credit for knowing as much as he did. Sometimes his shrewdness seemed like dishonesty to those who did not understand him. If one caught up with him he thought more of the trader's shrewdness. If one tried to deceive him, he would find him a shrewd judge of human nature. Horse trading took place anywhere, any time: at county seats on court days, at public speakings, at country stores, blacksmith shops, mills, and crossroads. The language of the mountain people a century ago has been said to be similar to that of the Elizabethan English. It was archaic, picturesque, figurative. There was too in the language quaintness which set it apart from that used outside the mountains. Not only had the language been preserved but the English and Scottish ballads and folk songs had survived also. Many have been changed greatly; others are remarkably close to the original versions. Their melodies have not only a touching beauty, but they are uniquely expressive of mountain character. They were preserved because of the isolation of the people. The folk speech of the mountain people had its dialectal individuality. Many studies of mountain dialect are available. A few examples are the following: fotch for fetch, ye for you, hit for it, antic for a comical person, preacher-parson, fotched-on Jurriner, granny woman, neighbor-people, tooth-dentist, play-purties, heer'd and afeard, mought, hyar for here, right smart for a considerable amount, right pert, consentable for willing, plague for tease, I wouldn't care to for I do not object, We got along plain for we did fairly well, Hit was thickety for It was not an easy passage, after preachin' has broke, sculp for scalp, shootin' iron for fire arm, skeerd, ourn, Jranticky (a combination of frantic and panicky), endurin' for whole, swallow a punkin' seed for get pregnant, galackers for pickers of galax leaves, sangers for pickers of ginseng, settin' up for courting. Until the coming of the roads and railroads, life in the mountains remained as it had been. These modes of access made marketing of produce possible; they were the opening wedge to the good life for the mountain people. �PART TWO A Changing Society Western North Carolina was never a land apart from the rest of the state, even in the earliest days, in spite of the mountain barrier. One of the first ties that existed was religion. Churches were established in the colony in the wave of protestant evangelical activity that followed John Wesley's lead in England and then in America. Camp meetings sprang up out of the work of orderly smallgroup gatherings, grew and spread ultimately into a "movement whose aspects and practices were completely free affairs of the uninhibited masses" -the Great Revival which reached Western North Carolina by the end of the eighteenth century. At singing-gatherings (which continue to this day) and camp meetings, pioneer people were given to use what may have been their first manufactured and mass-produced article, the folk-hymn or revival song. This article employed as its tune a folk-tune, as its text words composed by a spiritually-minded man, in the words of one of them, taking the "devil's ditties" to do the Lord's work. What happened to the simple folk-songs of a bye-gone era was symptomatic of change. New ways were built upon the old. They did not supplant the traditions of the past- the agriculturally based social system making prestige the property of the river-bottom gentry; the politics of heredity making power an establishment belonging to the prosperous few. The religious awakening was what first brought isolated men into a great participation with masses of men. Methodist Conferences and Baptist Conventions were loyally attended by delegates from the mountains, who usually rode horseback to an eastern meeting center. �70 / Part II: A Changing Society There had been highways of commerce too, tortuous wagon roads on which it was not unusual to see merchants' wagons drawn by as many as eight oxen, taking feathers, eggs, beeswax, medicinal herbs, apples, to the markets of the piedmont and returning with a full line of finished merchandise for the general stores. Travelers might ride in stagecoaches drawn by six beautifully matched horses like those that for a while went from Marion to Asheville. Those who were chosen to represent the area in the General Assembly and the United States Congress traveled thus. And one must not forget the taste that was developing in people for entertainment. In the smaller towns the only spectacles ofimportance to draw crowds, in these days before the motion picture, may have been politics and the courts, and it was only to towns that one could go for the latter. North Carolina's most widespread folklore, like the ballad "Tom Dula," has to do with criminal actions and legal proceedings which aroused great interest in the arena of the day, the courts. Tom Dula was defended in several trials by the famous lawyer and former governor Vance, and reporters came to little Wilkesboro from far off New York newspapers, public interest in the case being so great. An earlier trial, that of Frankie Silvers in Burke County and a still earlier one, that of John Lewis for the murder of Naomi Wise (the ballad is "Omie Wise") show the interest of an enduring nature that a great trial can arouse in an eager audience of common citizens. Not all trials were criminal cases, and not all courts were so well attended, but one must conclude that then the courts were more interesting and exciting than now. Nor were courts so far removed from the other great arena, politics. Other cultural institutions developed slowly. Only the well-to-do could afford to attend the academies and institutes that were usually located in the county seats, and for the masses the one-room school had to suffice until a state system of education for all developed. The changing s~iety in Western North Carolina could not have come wi<:hout the railroads and the highway system. The historian must arbitrarily choose the order in which different topics fall. Part II which follows traces the changing society; Part III will narrate the developing economy. Both took place simultaneously. �CHAPTER THREE Religion Many Western North Carolinians are traditionally fundamentalists who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, particularly of the Old Testament. Their beliefs are deep, strong, sincere, although not always have the believers transformed their creed into Christian living. It has been said that religion to Western North Carolinians is bred in the bone. It took various forms, depending somewhat on their national orgins but more on the opportunities offered and on evangelism in the particular locality. The denominational pattern existing in Western North Carolina after the Civil War had been determined many years earlier by the work of the pioneer ministers who had given unstintingly of their time and their lives. We might have expected that at least one-third of the people would be Presbyterians, if family traditions had prevailed, since that proportion were of Scottish descent. But Presbyterians did not engage in missionary work in the mountain area until near the close of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Baptist churches were easily established and many potential Presbyterians joined them. Baptist churches outnumber all others in Western North Carolina. Methodists, too, had a system for organizing new congregations and creating new churches, and their results in Western North Carolina were good. For example, a community of Presbyterians living in the Tuckaseigee Valley far away from their church were advised by the Presbyterian minister in Asheville to join the Methodist Church until they could obtain a Presbyterian pastor. 71 �72 / Part II: A Changing Society They became staunch Methodists and continued in that denomination. Baptist churches promoted democracy, and they also tied newly settled areas with the ones from which people had removed, thus helping to unify the population of the area and the state. The method was simple. A group of Baptists who had moved too far from their church to attend services would start a new congregation with the help of the parent church. After a period of recruiting enough members to carry on church discipline, the branch, called an "arm," would petition the parent church asking for the dismission of its members for the purpose of forming a new church. The mother church usually sent helpers to constitute the new one, and the minister of the mother church was responsible for the spiritual welfare of the "arm". A member of the new congregation might be chosen as their minister. He would be examined for his doctrinal views by a "presbytery" of at least two ministers. If they approved him, they would ordain him by "the laying on of hands" and by prayer. Thus new churches sprang up rapidly and at small expense. The minister was a self-supporting man. He was sometimes an illiterate one who would have to teach himself to read the Bible because he felt a "call" to preach or to "exercise his gifts" (of words). Thus a church might be the mother of a number of smaller ones. Baptist churches formed "associations" whose meetings were attended by the delegates chosen by each congregation. In this way they kept in touch with other communities. Judge Johnson]. Hayes's excellent history of Wilkes County traces the formation of each Baptish church in the county from 1771 to 1960. The earliest churches organized in the county, first part of Rowan, then Surry, and finally Wilkes, became members of the Strawberry Association of Virginia. In 1790 the churches in North Carolina in that association were dismissed to form the Yadkin Association, and in 1799 the churches from the Y adkin Association were permitted to withdraw to form the Mountain Baptist Association. By I 8 3 I the Baptist State Convention was in operation, and it founded schools and colleges, established a religious press, and produced an advanced type of scholarship. As the denomination grew in numbers and strength, missionary activities multiplied, and the Sunday School was introduced. Church members began to participate financially in support of missions and benevolent societies. A number of the churches �Religion / 73 objected. The Mountain Association by a majority vote in 1838 declared itself an anti-missionary body hostile to the "institutions of the day" and took the name "Primitive Baptist," a step which had already been taken by the Fisher's River Association in 1832 in Surry County, another former member of the Yadkin Association. The Primitive Baptist churches opposed the new system and refused to sit in conference with those who favored it. They expelled from their numbers members of such secret organizations as the Sons of Temperance and the Masonic order, fearing that these organizations might compete with the church for influence over the members. Primitive Baptists were opposed to a paid ministry or to schools and colleges for the education of men for the ministry, and while they were actually zealous in missionary efforts they disapproved of financial activities of churches in any form. Most of them objected to instrumental music in churches. The Primitive Baptist movement was felt in Surry and Ashe counties and in the portion of Wilkes County that later became Alleghany County. In r884 there were twenty-one Primitive Baptist churches in that area. The Missionary Baptist churches were expelled from the Mountain Association and formed new associations which supported Sunday schools and educational institutions. The Primitive Baptists seem not to have spread into the southwestern part of the state, but there another offshoot developed, the Free Will Baptists, who were also very rigid in doctrine but extremely anti-Calvinistic (the Primitive Baptists were Calvinists). The Free Will Baptists in Buncombe, Madison, Yancey, and Mitchell counties in r884 numbered sixteen churches. The Missionary Baptist churches in the United States split into two conventions over the issue of slavery, and most of the churches in North Carolina have been affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention since 1845. However, there were numbers of mountain people opposed to slavery, and when after the Civil War the Union League came into existence and Union sympathizers joined it, about one hundred of them in r867 formed the Mountain View Baptist Association. Its growth was slow. In r884 there were two of these Union churches in Alleghany County, and today there are four or five small associations in North Carolina and Virginia. To the south the French Broad Association was organized in r8oo with fourteen churches in North and South Carolina. These churches had been dismissed by Bethel, the mother association, to form the new group. By I 807 there were seven member �74 / Part II: A Changing Society churches west of the Blue Ridge. Each of these churches sent out arms and organized congregations. When the State Baptist Convention was organized, these churches in the western section found it difficult to keep in touch with its proceedings. Travel by horseback for such long distances to the meetings of the convention was arduous although the delegates were diligent in attending. In 1844 an appeal was made by delegates from the French Broad Association for a new convention. In 1845 at Boiling Springs Camp Ground near Hendersonville, the Western Baptist Convention was organized. Its aims were, "distribution of the Bible among the destitute, employment of Home Missionaries within her bounds, the sustaining of foreign, domestic, and Indian missions; also to educate poor young men called of God to the Ministry of the Gospel who may be approved by their churches." This convention served until 1895, and after r 86 5 its membership was limited to associations west of the Blue Ridge. It founded Judson College in Hendersonville and authorized the establishment of Mars Hill College in Madison County. Examination of the history of the Baptist churches in all twenty-four counties would be impossible here. Two counties that illustrate the steady increase in the number of Baptist churches are Wilkes and Cherokee. Records of Baptist churches in Cherokee County are available in Margaret Freel's Our Heritage: The People of Cherokee County, North Carolina, 1540-1955. The fifty-eight churches are divided between the West Liberty Baptist Association and the Western North Carolina Baptist Association, and in each association twelve churches have been established in the twentieth century, while sixteen were in existence in each before 1877. In Wilkes County the Baptist churches are listed by Judge Hayes in The Land of Wilkes. In the Brushy Mountain Association there are thirty-five churches, thirteen of which were constituted after 1900, indicating that missionary activity has continued and multiplied as the urban area around the Wilkesboros developed. In addition, thirteen Baptist churches in Wilkes County are in the Elkin Baptist Association, only two of which were established after 1900. The Stone Mountain Association had in 1960 twenty-nine churches. The Briar Creek, Elkin, and Stony Fork associations include some churches outside Wilkes County. Many of the churches now occupy modern brick structures with educational classrooms and heat and water facilities, and the minister is usually furnished with a house. �Religion / 75 The locating of Methodist Episcopal churches in the mountain counties was begun by English-born Francis Asbury, who became the first Methodist bishop in America in I 784. He crossed the mountains sixty times, carrying religion to the people along his route. He began the system of "itinerancy," and when it became impossible for him to attend all of the congregations he had founded, the office of elder, later presiding elder, was created. A Methodist circuit consisting of a large number of congregations was followed by a "circuit rider" who visited each "appointment" periodically. Often meetings were held in the homes. Because the life was strenuous, a Methodist minister would frequently serve only four or six montb as a circuit rider, after which he would "locate," and establish a church. By I8oo almost the entire area of Western North Carolina was divided into circuits in which were numerous "classes" presided over or taught by lay leaders except when the circuit rider was present. As time went on the churches were organized in "conferences," each conference into districts, and each district into circuits. The Holston Conference began in 1783 with sixty members and one preacher. By I824 there were I3,444 white members, I ,4I I colored ones, and forty-three preachers. It had three districts - Abingdon, Knoxville, and French Broad and twenty-five circuits with thirty-eight preachers besides the presiding elders. Among the circuits of the Holston Conference was the Waynesville Circuit and Echota Mission, under the leadership of the Reverend Ulrich Keener. It included all of Haywood and parts ofTransylvania,Jackson, and Swain counties. Most of the people in the charge were Cherokee Indians. The Black Mountain Circuit included the mountainous region of Buncombe, Yancey, and Burke counties. The French Broad Circuit also was mountainous. The life of the circuit rider has been described thus: "Traveling day after day, preaching in the houses of the people, in school houses, in little log meeting houses, and in the open air, mingling with the people in their homes, ... visiting the sick, comforting the dying, burying the dead, marrying the young, baptising the children, warning sinners, and reclaiming the backsliders - such was the life of the young preacher as he rode over the rugged hills." In I 824 a dispute arose in the Methodist Episcopal churches concerning the lack of opportunity for lay members to participate �76 / Part II: A Changing Society Typical of the hundreds if country churches is this in Jackson County, except that today many are being replaced by brick structures in church meetings. "Union Societies" were formed by those who wanted more democracy in their church. Starting in Maryland, the agitation spread southward, two conferences being formed in rural North Carolina of circuits of the dissenters who practiced lay representation. They objected to the episcopal form of church government of the main body of Methodists. These societies, which later called themselves the Methodist Protestant Church, multiplied slowly. In r884 there were eight Methodist Protestant churches in Buncombe County, one in Burke, and one in McDowell. Another division in the Methodist Episcopal Church occurred in r 846 over the right of a bishop to own slaves, and the Methodist Episcopal Church South was formed. The counties in Western North Carolina were in one of three conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church South: the Holston Conference, including Asheville, Burnsville, H endersonville, Waynesville-Echota Mission, and Franklin circuits; the North Carolina Conference, with Surry County, Jonesville, and Wilkes County; and the South Carolina Conference with Rutherfordton, Morganton, and Lenoir. Thus it was that Davenport College at Lenoir, when ready to accept students in 1857, was turned over to the South Carolina Conference. After the Civil W ar the Methodist Episcopal Church [North] �Religion / 77 started evangelistic actiVIties in the South, forming its own Holston Conference, of which the Asheville District had in I 866 I ,007 members. A new conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church was created in I867, the Virginia and North Carolina Mission Conference, including all of North Carolina except Watauga County and the area west of the Blue Ridge, which remained part of the Holston Conference, Asheville District. Much of the work was among Negroes. In I876 there were forty churches, thirty-one local preachers, and 3,500 members. In I 88o the Blue Ridge Conference was formed and at first all of North Carolina was included. Later it was reduced to thirteen counties west of the mountains. Branson's North Carolina Business Directory for I 884 listed eight northern Methodist churches in Buncombe County and two in each of Clay and Transylvania counties. In addition there were two types of Negro Methodist churches in the area: the African Methodist Episcopal Church which traced its founding back to Philadelphia in I8I6 of which there was one in Buncombe County, one in Burke, and one in Rutherford; the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion, organized in New York in 1796, of which there were two in Polk and one in Buncombe counties. Camp meetings played their part in extending the work of the churches. One of the famous locations was Turkey Creek Camp Ground at Leicester in Buncombe County. A tract of land was deeded by the Gudger family in 1826 to be used for meetings and religious services. It evidently had been so used even earlier, as Bishop Asbury wrote in his diary on September 27, 1806, "I rode twelve miles to Turkey Creek to a kind of camp meeting. On the Sabbath I preached to about five hundred souls." For over sixty five years camp meetings were held there. It was a typical camp meeting ground. The camp was laid out like a big square, in the middle of which was the "arbor" where services were held, covering one-fourth acre, with room to seat one thousand to fifteen hundred people, roofed over but with no side walls. The arbor was on a slope with the speakers' stand at the lower side, making it resemble an amphitheater. The rough wooden slabs which served as seats were later replaced with better ones. People who attended the meetings came to �78 J Part II: A Changing Society stay several days. They lived in "tents," which were really rough wooden sheds, surrounding the arbor and making the square. Some tents had two stories, the floor of the first story being dirt covered with straw. The beds were bunks built around the walls like a long shelf. The meetings usually began on Thursday and lasted until Monday or Tuesday. They were held in August, and Sunday was the big day. They furnished opportunity for people from different communities to get to know each other and for families that were separated to have reunions. Eventually the nature of the meetings changed. Horse traders and merchants invaded the camp ground to engage in their businesses, whence the meetings were discontinued. Since 1939 when the three large Methodist bodies, Methodist Episcopal, Methodist Episcopal South, and Methodist Protestant, became the Methodist Church, and later the United Methodist Church, laymen have participated in all matters, a victory for the Methodist Protestants. In 1966 the General Conference of the Methodist Church held in Chicago adopted a resolution to do everything possible to eliminate any structural organization based on race at the earliest possible date and not later than the jurisdictional conference in 1972. There had been in North Carolina the Central Jurisdiction which had consisted of Negro churches. In I 968 the Central Jurisdiction was abolished and the Negro Methodist churches became part of the conferences and districts in which they were geographically located. [The Winston-Salem District of the Western North Carolina Conference has been divided into Winston-Salem Forsyth and Winston-Salem Northeast districts. Mr. James C. Peters, a Negro, was appointed by Bishop Hunt as District Superintendent (the office formerly known as the Presiding Elder).] Of the 272,000 members of churches in the Western North Carolina Conference, about 12,000 are Negroes, and of the 750 active ministers, 56 are Negroes. The Presbyterian family of churches is third in membership in North Carolina, although its communicants number only about one-twelfth of the church membership of the area. There have been Presbyterian churches in Western North Carolina at least since I 786. The first three congregations west of the Blue Ridge are said to have been in Buncombe County: Swannanoa, Rim's Creek (Reem's Creek), and Cane Creek. In 1799 �Religion / 79 George Newton was called to Buncombe's churches to be minister. Leadership for these churches came from Virginia, where the Abingdon Presbytery was constituted in I786, to extend west about two hundred miles and eastward to the Blue Ridge. Church government in the Presbyterian church may be compared with civil government in the United States. Local self-government prevails in individual churches through elected elders and congregational meetings. Delegates are sent to the presbytery, a district organization of Presbyterian churches, to which the obligation of missionary work is assigned. The body corresponding to the state government is the synod, and at the top is the assembly, which has jurisdiction over all of the churches of the organization. The Holston Presbytery, organized in I827, included what are now Watauga, Mitchell, and Yancey counties. Meanwhile churches east of the Blue Ridge and in southwest North Carolina were members of the Concord Presbytery, far away in those days of slow travel. For a brief period of five years a Morganton Presbytery was in existence, but it was abolished in I 840. Extension of the church into the mountains was not vigorously sought. The Presbyterian Church, too, was split at the time of the Civil War, and the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America was established. In North Carolina it made no gains during the war; in fact, 2000 communicants lost their lives. After the war the southern church was named the Presbyterian Church in the United States, and the Presbytery of Mecklenburg was set off from that of Concord, but still little effort was made to establish churches in the mountain area, although a need to do so was recognized. When the Synod of North Carolina met in Charlotte in 1877 a report was presented, from which the following is quoted: "Scotch-Irish Presbyterians settled in the western part of the State. They rapidly increased, until at the time of the Revolution, they numbered three or four thousand. . . . At this time [I 877], after a lapse of a hundred years, they numbered 16,544 communicants in 214 churches, with II3 ministers. . . . We have failed to perform our whole duty. With our educated ministry, our intelligent, influential and wealthy members, we ought to have planted the Presbyterian Church in every comer of the State." In I 88o when the Synod met in Raleigh it was reported that of the ninety-four counties included in the Synod, twenty-nine had no Presbyterian churches, and twenty-four had only one each. In r884 Branson's Directory �8o / Part II: A Changing Society reported twenty-four Presbyterian churches in the counties of Western North Carolina. At that time there were just two evangelists in the state, and the Synod was spending only $2300 for evangelistic work. In synod meetings frequent discussions of responsibility for missions brought up the argument that mission work was the responsibility of the presbyteries, not of the synod. Finally, however, in 1893 the Reverend R. P. Pell was sent by the Synod as district evangelist to Watauga and Mitchell counties. At that time there was not a Presbyterian church in Mitchell County and there was only a very small one in Watauga County. Mr. Pell's report to the Synod the next year was, "Churches in charge, 4; mission points, 5; communicants 162; Sabbath schools, 4; pupils, 275, with seven teachers." Pell had traveled on horseback, in a buggy, and on foot and had held services in places hitherto unknown to the Presbyterians. In 1896 the Asheville Presbytery was formed, being set off from the Mecklenburg Presbytery. There were eleven counties, ten ministers, and one thousand communicants. The area lay west of the Blue Ridge and included Buncombe, Clay, Cherokee, Graham, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, Macon, Madison, Transylvania, and Swain counties. It was almost entirely missionary ground. In four of the counties there was still no Presbyterian church and in four other counties there were only 150 communicants. Two missionaries, Robert F. Campbell, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Asheville, and R. P. Smith, were sent out to investigate the destitution within the presbytery. Both men were natives of the mountain area and would be welcomed in the homes. They were directed to leave the railroads and telegraph lines and the larger valleys behind and to penetrate the secluded coves and highlands and report what they found. They spent three months preaching from house to house and in the woods, sharing the rude accommodations and plain fare of the people. They found numbers of houses without a lamp, a candle, a comb, a brush, a looking-glass. Many of the people had never seen a town, and the buggy of the evangelists was a curiosity. They found many families in which not a member could read a syllable and in whose homes there was not a word of print. An area of I 50 square miles had 400 children of school age and no school, church, or Sunday school. There were large areas in which there was no physician, and old women and quacks administered herbs and practiced their superstitious arts. Women �Religion / 8 1 and children did most of the work in these remote homes, and men were idle except when hunting, fishing, or running illicit distilleries. Campbell wrote, "In some regions a young man has reached the summit of his ambitions when he has learned to pick the banjo, owns a dog, and carries a pistol and a bottle of whiskey." Many persons told the missionaries that their parents had been Presbyterians, and Campbell concludes, "Th~ Presbyterian Church failed to feed and tend these scattered members of its fold, and the more aggressive Methodist and Baptist churches gathered them into their folds. God bless them for it." R. P. Smith wrote, "They never had a fair chance. Entrenched here for generations and far removed from the thoroughfare of a progressive world, the wonder is that they have done so well. After the survey of the summer, 1898, work of the Presbytery began in the areas where need was greatest. School conditions in Robbinsville were deplorable. Suitable buildings were lacking and teachers were incompetent. People grasped the opportunity for a good school. A two-room building was built, one room for school, the other for church services. Soon two additional rooms were needed, as the enrollment reached 3 50; Three teachers were engaged and a library of 300 books was installed. A pastor was employed and church and Sunday school started. People in the county said that this was the greatest influence for good the county had ever experienced. In Haywood County in a district where there had not been a public school in operation for two years, the Snyder Memorial Academy was built and it soon had an enrollment of 295 pupils. In Big Ivy Community in the Black Mountains, two churches were organized and in 1905 there were 150 members. Schools were established in connection with the churches, and an ex-moonshiner said the Presbyterian workers had done more to benefit that section than all the laws of North Carolina. In Haywood County an orphans' home at Crabtree was opened in 1904, with a day school attached for the benefit of the poor children of the neighborhood. During the first year twenty orphans were cared for and sixty-five children attended the school. From 1897 until 1904 E. Mac Davis was the pioneer evangelist of Madison County. He preached at thirty-eight points, distributed thousands of tracts and books, organized three or four churches and a large number of Sunday schools and mission �82 / Part II: A Changing Society summer day schools. A number of women and one man assisted him in the work. When he left the area he had two hundred members in his churches. Following Mr. Pell in 1895 were Edgar Tufts, L. E. Bostian, and E. D. Brown in Watauga County and L. A. McLaurin in Mitchell County. They were seminary students who worked during the summer months. In I 897 Edgar Tufts came back after completion of his seminary work to spend the rest of his life in Northwestern North Carolina. Greater than the desire to found churches was the determination to educate the boys and girls, to let them "know the good life." The Presbyterian Church set up a pattern that public schools might follow. It sent in strong personalities, if possible ones well acquainted with mountain life and character, to establish high schools, often in a county seat, with boarding facilities and dormitories. Even after the State of North Carolina authorized the counties to support high schools, many could not because of the lack of funds. The church schools' objectives included that of leadership training for the time when the state would maintain high schools. When that time came a number of the church schools continued to furnish living facilities for students who lived too far away to be day students. After school buses were put into operation, some of the high schools established by the churches were advanced to college level and are still functioning. At about the same time the Asheville Presbytery was formed, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (northern) began to dream that it would "make Asheville the center of Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism in the Southern Appalachian mountains." Young men and women were sent all through the mountains as leaders. Schools were attempted for children of all ages. The aim was not to organize Presbyterian churches but to send young people back to their communities to teach and live the Christian faith. The result was that few churches were formed. The schools have dwindled and much of the former school property has been sold. An exception is Warren Wilson College. Today the interest of the young missionaries has been transferred to the cities. The Protestant Episcopal Church, heir to the Anglican Church of colonial days, had small numbers of communicants in Western �Religion / 8 3 North Carolina congregations, but they were usually leaders in their communities and were often prominent in the state. An antipathy toward the Episcopal Church was evident in many parts of the area. Scholars have concluded that many of the Scotch-Irish had moved westward to avoid paying tithes to the established church and their disapproval has been passed on to their descendants. Perhaps that is the reason that more people did not affiliate with the Episcopal Church. At the end of the Civil War there were few of these churches in Western North Carolina and most of them were in the foothill parts of the counties. Those in the mountainous areas were established by South Carolinians who summered there. In I836 a chapel was built for Episcopal families at Flat Rock, called St. John's in the Wilderness. In I859 another church was completed near Fletcher, Calvary Episcopal Church. Miss Fanny Blake contributed thirteen acres and a building in which she conducted a school at Calvary Church from I859 until her death. Tradition has it that a band of Stoneman's cavalry command during his raid in I865 camped for a night in the yard of Calvary Church, and Stoneman was so impressed with the beauty of the church's interior that he ordered his men to take special care not to destroy anything in the House of God. Stoneman was not in the Asheville area during the campaign. The account may be true of part of his command. The story is that the next morning the cavalrymen were permitted to use pieces of the red church carpet for saddle blankets, and they rode away with "red carpet fluttering from their horses' backs." Another chapel was St. Paul's in the Valley which dated from I856. The first services were held in the carriage shed of F. W. Johnstone at Montlove, his summer home. James Stuart Hankie, of the South Carolina Seminary at Camden, served as pastor. Occasionally he preached on Sunday afternoons at the Baptist church in Cathey's Creek community. After Transylvania County was formed a church was organized in Brevard and services at St. Paul's were discontinued in I 884. The Diocese of North Carolina was organized in I 8 r 7 with the Reverend John Stark Ravenscroft as bishop. He was succeeded by Bishop Levi S. Ives, who visited Morganton, Asheville, and Hot Springs when he journeyed through the mountains to Tennessee to organize a diocese there. His interest in Northwest North Carolina was awakened, and in I842 he established at Valle Crucis a boarding school for mountain �84 / Part II: A Changing Society boys and a school of preparation for the ministry. A large farm was acquired and buildings were erected. William West Skiles came from the eastern part of the state to manage the farm and was ordained deacon. Eight candidates for the ministry were educated there. When Bishop Ives resigned Skiles continued his missionary work for ten years although the school stopped. Jarvis Buxton who helped Skiles at Valle Crucis started a school in Asheville. Later another Episcopal school, Ravenscroft, was founded there, and its director, Mr. Hillhouse Buell, established the mission in Brevard that developed into St. Philips Church. St. James Church in Hendersonville was organized in 1840 and consecrated in 1863. The rector, Thomas C. Wetmore, founded Christ School at Arden in 1900. Another St. James grew from a Lutheran church near Lenoir founded by Parson Robert Johnson Miller who later was ordained to the Episcopal priesthood. He had founded Lutheran churches in Lincoln and Burke counties as well. A small group of devoted missionaries held services in Watauga and Ashe counties, and their difficulties were brought home to Bishop Atkinson when he tried to travel from Lenoir to Watauga County on a visitation in 1878. He wrote, "On the afternoon of that day ... I set off ... but found the road so washed by the flood resulting from the heavy rains of the previous day and night, as to be impassable. I then attempted a more circuitous route, but the carriage in which I was travelling was overturned in a stream, which was ordinarily very shallow. I escaped with no more consequence than a wetting of myself and baggage, but I found that further progress up the mountain was impracticable, the road that wound its way up its ascent being washed away." Years earlier, Episcopal churches had been established at Morganton, Rutherfordton, and Wilkesboro through the efforts of Bishop Ives. St. Paul's Church in Wilkesboro had a devoted minister, Reverend Richard Wainwright, who served forty- two years beginning in 1855. He also served as superintendent of schools of the county for twenty years and conducted a private school for young men in his home. His daughter Mary Taylor started a school for girls in Wilkesboro in 1879 and conducted it until 1919, with an average attendance of twenty. Wainwright held services at Wilkesboro once a month, traveling on horseback to other places to hold services on other Sundays. As the number of Episcopal churches increased, a need was felt for a training school for the ministry, and Ravenscroft �Religion / 8 5 School in Asheville offered such work from the late 186o's until about 1890, during which time fifteen candidates for the ministry studied there. Dr. Buxton of Ravenscroft Mission started holding services for Negroes at Trinity Chapel, now St. Matthias. General and Mrs. James Martin drilled Negro classes in the catechisms and teachings of the church, and a day school was held there. The first Negro priest, S. V. Berry, came in 1874 from Western New York to serve at St. Matthias for eleven years. Interest in Valle Crucis was revived in 1893 and an associate mission was established. A school for mountain girls held there is discussed elsewhere. With several churches in Asheville, and small ones in Blowing Rock, Beaver Creek near Jefferson, and All Souls Church in Biltmore built by George Vanderbilt, the Episcopal Church was on sound footing by the close of the century. Other denominations have congregations in Western North Carolina. There are twelve Lutheran churches, five of which are in Watauga County. Two of the latter, Holy Communion and Mount Pleasant, date from 1842 and 1845 respectively. Several Catholic services were held in court houses in various county seats before the first Catholic church was built in Asheville in 1869. As in-migration of the managerial class occurred when industries moved into the area, Catholic churches have been established in the residential areas near the plants as well as in resort communities. Western North Carolina is now being called the "South's Summer Religious Capital." In the Asheville area in 1951 there were ten assembly grounds and in the entire region twentytwo religious conference grounds. The investments in the grounds and buildings amount to millions of dollars, and it was estimated in 1951 that each year the conferees spend almost $5,ooo,ooo. The total of expenditures in the area is larger more than twenty years later. Montreat, established first, dates back to 1897 when the North Carolina General Assembly chartered the Mountain Retreat Association. In 1905 the Presbyterian Church in the United States bought it as a summer conference ground. Since that time it has been used the year around. In 1913 the Montreat �86 / Part II: A Changing Society Normal School was established, the forerunner of MontreatAnderson College. In 1962 more than twenty-one conferences were held at Montreat in September and October alone. Nineteen different groups use the facilities for conferences. Ridgecrest is the second oldest. In 1907 an organizing committee for a Southern Baptist assembly bought 850 acres ofland selected by James M. Tucker of Asheville. He had been the principal author of the idea; he obtained the charter and sold the idea to the Southern Baptists. The Southern Railroad to Asheville passed through the grounds but there was no station, and the assembly grounds could be reached from the east only by a road up the mountain through Swannanoa Gap, which in rain or snow turned to mud. When a railway station was obtained, the stop was first called Terrell's, later Blue Mont, and finally Ridgecrest. The buildings on the assembly grounds have been built gradually until thousands of delegates may be accommodated at one time. In 1965 twenty-two conferences were held from June 10 to September 16. The grounds are administered by the Baptist Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. Lake Junaluska, the World Methodist Center, was established by a laymen's missionary movement of the Methodist Episcopal Church South in 1908. It now belongs to the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church. The World Methodist Council established its headquarters there and the World Methodist Building was erected in 1955. The assembly grounds were opened for conferences in 1913. The tract of 2500 acres contains a beautiful lake of 250 acres. Elmer T. Clark wrote that "Across the years the most famous personalities of Methodism have appeared upon its platform." Another Methodist center is at Hayesville, the Hinton Rural Life Center, dating from 1953 when Mr. and Mrs. Walter Moore deeded four and one-half acres of land and an unfinished hotel building to the Hayesville Methodist Church. With contributions from Mrs. H. H. Hinton, the Duke Foundation, the Annual Conference, and the Waynesville District, and with private gifts, the center was completed to be used by groups in the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the Methodist Church. It is the center for the Appalachian Development program of the Methodist Church, a laboratory school for ministers and students. Camps for boys and girls in conjunction with the conferences �Religion / 87 enable families to spend their vacations m the same general area. Other conference grounds include the following: Lutheridge, near Arden, by the Lutheran Synods in the Southeast; Cragmont, near Black Mountain, for Free Will Baptists of North Carolina, which occupies the old Crag mont Sanitarium; Blue Ridge, near Black Mountain, established by the YMCA of the South in 1906, which serves as headquarters for varied meetings and may be rented by any recognized educational, religious, or social group; Kanuga Lake, in the Hendersonville area, the assembly of the Episcopal Church of the two Carolinas; Bondarken, established at Flat Rock in 1963 by the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church for youth and adult programs for eleven southeastern states; Ben Lippen, a short distance from Asheville, owned by the Columbia (South Carolina) Bible College and used as an interdenominational Christian vacation center; Our Lady of the Hills, near Hendersonville, the assembly of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Raleigh, begun in 1956 and now used as a camp, convention site, retreat, and rest site; Christmont, for the Disciples of Christ, near Black Mountain. Others are Blowing Rock Assembly of the Southern Synod of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, started in 1945 by a gift from the family of Abel A. Shuford; Wildacres, near Little Switzerland, an experiment in the betterment of human relations, open to all denominations for conferences and workshops; the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, in Buckeye Cove, built to serve as a meeting place for ministers and church groups throughout the South who are unable to find space in any of the other conference grounds. Perhaps the most unusual of the assembly grounds is Fields of the Wood, of the Church of God. On the side of Burger Mountain near Murphy have been constructed a huge concrete cross, the largest altar in the world, a reproduction of the sepulchre from which Christ rose, a stairway with 320 concrete steps, each marked by tablets on which are carved Biblical teachings, and the Ten Commandments laid out in huge stone letters, with each letter five feet tall. �CHAPTER FOUR The Bar and the Forum* The law above all other professions offered its followers the opportunity for political power, public office, and prominence. A man often progressed from solicitor to superior court judge and thence to the state supreme court; or he might be elected to the General Assembly or to the United States Congress. Judge Richmond Pearson's law school, Richmond Hill in Yadkin County, which had ended with his death in 1877, was very popular and prepared more than a thousand young men for the legal profession, but many studied under Judge W. H. Battle at the state university, and others attended the schools of Dick and Dillard in Greensboro, Colonel George Folk of Lenoir, Judge John L. Bailey of Asheville, and A. C. A very of Morganton. There were other lawyers in the West who guided young men in the study of law. In some families it was a tradition that one son would follow his father in the legal profession. Some read law although they had no intention of practicing it. Such was Rufus Lenoir Patterson of the wealthy family of Happy Valley, Caldwell County, who became owner and manager of three manufacturing enterprises and whose cotton mill was burned by Stoneman's troops in the raid through Western North Carolina and Virginia in 1865. Lawyers still accompanied the judge and the solicitor from * The following chapter is not intended as a comprehensive treatment of lawyers and lawmakers in and from Western North Carolina. Rather, it illustrates the quality of the region's lawyers and lawmakers. 88 �The Bar and the Forum / 89 county to county on the circuit, a practice that has been discontinued now when travel is easy. Road conditions during the 187o's made the travel difficult. Colonel Clinton A. Cilley of Lenoir went one day to Morganton for court. His diary entry for that day read, "Left at seven, got beyond the crossroads and turned back by John's River. Went to ferry with Folk and Wakefield, Crossed at three, and walked to Morganton. Paid boy for carrying baggage, 6o¢." The distance was about fifteen miles. At another time going from Lenoir to Jefferson he spent two days on the road each way. He wrote, "Left for Boone 7:Io-toll2o¢. Got into Boone at 5:10P.M. Stay at Coffey's." The following day, "Left for Jefferson at 8 A.M. In at 4: r 5 -last ten miles it rained a good deal." On his return from Jefferson he had to pay 25¢ to have a log chopped from the road. The lawyers usually traveled on horseback, stopped at the same hotels in the towns and at the same wayside inns in the country, sometimes as many as ten or fifteen of them together at one of the country stopping places, and there they would try important cases in their discussions before the cases ever came before the court. The wit and humor of certain of the lawyers, the scholarliness of others, became well known. Isaac Avery commented· on Romulus Z. Linney of Taylorsville and Watauga County (he had a summer home on a mountain top in the latter): "Most men who read literature hold it in reserve as mere ornate punctuation or emphasis for every day speech, but Mr. Linney breathes composite literature at breakfast. In Congressional halls he has caused laughter by the use of colloquialisms which are his birthright, while in the back rural districts he has combined in furious speech Spencer, the Old Testament, Bill Nye, Blackstone, and the Constitution, and aimed them with telling force at an audience that was moved to weep blind tears." Many of the great statesmen of Western North Carolina in the Ante-bellum period had been Whigs who worked for roads and railroads to and in their region and for constitutional reform. Gradually most of them became Democrats or later Conservatives. Those who survived in 1877 were still the great lawyers of the area. David Lowry Swain, native of Buncombe County, lawyer, member of the state House of Representatives, governor at the age of thirty-one, and president of the state university for thirty-three years, died in r868. William Holland Thomas, great benefactor of the Cherokees and organizer of �90 / Part II: A Changing Society a legion of soldiers in the Civil War, who succeeded in getting laws for the cutting of roads from Jones Gap to Caesar's Head, Bakersville to Burnsville, Patterson to Valle Crucis and on to Jonesboro, Tennessee, Zionville to Mountain City, Cataloochee to Newport, Tennessee, Oconalufty through Soco Gap, from V alleytown over the Snowbird Mountains via Robbinsville, was ill and although he lived until I893 he was not able to participate in public affairs by I877. Thomas Lanier Clingman, former United States Senator, who deserted the Whig Party for the Democratic in I 856 over the slavery issue, was living in retirement in Asheville. Augustus S. Merriman became Judge of the Eight Judicial District in I865, was elected United States Senator in I872 and served from I873 to I879. Zebulon Baird Vance, the most spectacular and universally popular man born in Western North Carolina, after serving as war governor of the state, practiced law while the Reconstruction government was in power, was elected Governor in I876, and in I879 was chosen to succeed Merriman as United States Senator. Tad R. Caldwell of Burke County did not join the Conservative Party. He was the Republican lieutenant governor who was promoted to the governor's chair when Holden was impeached and removed from office. Caldwell was reelected to succeed himself, but he died in office in I 87 4· Burgess Sidney Gaither who had practiced law in Morganton since 1829, served in the state Senate, being elected president of that body in I 846, was solicitor of the Seventh Judicial District after 1848, and worked for the election of Bell and Everett of the Constitutional Union Party in I86o. Gaither was pronounced by Judge David Schenck the "leader and father of the Burke County Bar" in 1877. Of Nicholas W. Woodfin of Asheville, who had studied under Michael Francis and Governor Swain, it was said "There is no name in Western North Carolina more identified for the last thirty years- that is beginning with I845- with the material, industrial, and educational interests of that part of the State." Allen Turner Davidson also studied under Michael Francis and in 1845 was licensed to practice law in North Carolina. He established his practice in Murphy, seat of the new county of Cherokee, and traveled the circuit as far east as Cleveland County. The Davidson family was one of the best known in the area. They had come from Pennsylvania in I748, some settling on the Catawba River in present-day Iredell County, others in the Swannanoa Valley. In subsequent generations �The Bar and the Forum / 91 several had gone westward to Tennessee and to Texas. Allen T. Davidson left the law in r86o to become president of the Merchants and Miners Bank of Murphy. During the Civil War he served as an agent of the state commissary department, and after the war he practiced law in Asheville until r885. Among former Democratic leaders of the area, William Waightstill Avery had been killed during a battle with Kirk's raiders in Burke County in r864, but his brother, Alfonso Calhoun Avery, had a successful career as a judge and lawyer, living until I913.JudgeJohn L. Bailey who had been associated with Supreme Court Justice Nash in Raleigh, had moved to Buncombe County and conducted a law school until his death in 1877. Theodore F. Davidson, one of his students wrote, "I think his influence upon the Bar of the Mountain Circuit has been more inspiring and lasting than that of any other member of the profession." A new, younger group oflawyers was appearing in the courts of Western North Carolina in the 187o's and 188o's. In 1884 in the twenty-three counties there were r62 lawyers, many of whom are well remembered for their ability and wit. James Madison Gudger, Jr., and his brother Hezekiah A. Gudger, born in Madison County, were admitted to the bar, H. A. Gudger in 1871 and James M., Jr., in 1878. The latter served as a member of the United States House of Representatives, and Hezekiah was appointed Assistant Attorney General by President Cleveland in 1 89 3. Jeter C. Pritchard said of James M. Gudger, Jr., "[he] had a splendid legal mind and could prepare a case for trial with as much ease and facility as any lawyer I ever knew .... He was always at his best in a rough and tumble contest .... A lawyer who served in the first Cleveland administration was Edmund Jones, related to the Patterson and Davenport families of Caldwell County. He read law under Colonel George Folk and was licensed by the Supreme Court of North Carolina in r88r. His activity in the Democratic Party led to his appointment to a "responsible position in the Treasury Department." He also served five terms in the General Assembly. Kope Elias, born in South Carolina, studied under the Reverend Laban Abernethy at Rutherford College, then under Richmond Pearson. Admitted to the bar in r 870, he �92 / Part II: A Changing Society began his practice in Murphy, moving to Franklin two years later. "At one time he enjoyed the largest practice of any lawyer west of Asheville." He was admired by other members of the bar for his story-telling prowess. Three first cousins, grandsons of Colonel William Moore, pioneer whose homestead is now occupied by the Enka Corporation on Hominy Creek in Buncombe County, became eminent lawyers: Walter E. Moore studied under Dick and Dillard, practiced in Webster, Jackson County, and was made judge of the Twentieth Judicial District in I 926; Charles Augustus Moore studied law with Judge John Bailey in Asheville and practiced in Asheville, serving as Judge of the Buncombe County Criminal Court, 1887-1890; Frederick Moore studied law in Hayesville and at Chapel Hill. He was admitted to the bar in 1892, became a judge at age 29, and served ten years. Frederick's son, a resident of Haywood County, named for his grandfather Daniel Killian Moore, was governor of North Carolina from 1965 to 1969. Locke Craig wrote half a century ago, "For more than a century the Moores have stood in the front rank of the people of Western North Carolina." Theodore F. Davidson, son of Allen Turner Davidson, served in the Civil War, enlisting at sixteen. After the war he studied law under Judge Bailey and was admitted to the bar in 1867. He practiced law with his father in Asheville until 1882. He had become quite active in the Democratic Party, served in the state Senate, and helped to promote the completion of the Western North Carolina Railroad, of which he was made state director in 1879. He developed a great interest in history and collected a notable library. The Daughton brothers, Rufus and Robert ofLaurel Springs, Alleghany County, wielded great influence in state and nation. Rufus, the elder, studied law at the state university and opened his office in Sparta in 1880. In that year he was elected to the state House of Representatives, serving as chairman of the Finance Committee. Robert Lee Daughton, a farmer, was a member of the State Board of Agriculture from I903-1910, a member of the State Prison Board, served as president of the Deposit and Savings Bank of Wilkesboro, and in 1910 he was elected to the Sixty-second Congress where he served continuously until January, 1953. He was a member of the Ways and the Means Committee of the House of Representatives and became its chairman in 1933. �The Bar and the Forum / 93 Thomas C. (Tam) Bowie was a generation younger than the Daughton brothers but he belongs in the same tradition. Born in Louisiana, he came to Ashe County with his mother after the death of his father. His maternal greatgrandfather Elijah Calloway had served in the General Assembly at the age of twenty-one when there was no road to his plantation. Elijah walked from his home on the South Fork of the New River to Raleigh to assume his seat in the legislature, and he secured a bill to build a road from his home intersecting with the stage line from Jefferson to Wilkesboro. Elijah Calloway had the first brick house in his section, and the first house with glass windows. He was a Whig in politics. His son James studied medicine at Jefferson School of Medicine in Philadelphia and settled in Louisiana. After his father's death Tam attended a school at Moravian Falls in Wilkes County, North Carolina, went to Kentucky to work at coal mining on two occasions. He attended Mars Hill College and the University of North Carolina, receiving an A. B. degree in 1899. After a year of study at Yale University Tam returned to North Carolina and studied law at the state university. He was admitted to the bar in 1901. He served in the legislature in the terms of 1908, 1913, 1915 (when he was Speaker of the House) and in 1921 was chairman of the Committee on Roads when the state highway system was created. Governor McLean appointed him a special emergency superior court judge in 1927. He was called a "man with a golden tongue." Locke Craig, child prodigy who went to the University of North Carolina at age fifteen, moved to Asheville after completing his study of law, and set up a practice in r882. He participated actively in Democratic Party politics and in 1898 he campaigned for Aycock. He was in the General Assembly in 1899 and in 1901. In 1908 he ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for governor, but in 1912 he was elected governor. Most men were content to leave the legislative halls to those trained in the law. Now and again someone from a mercantile family sought and won political honors. James C. Harper, born in Pennsylvania, who moved to Caldwell County after a residence in Ohio in 1840 when the county was being formed, had laid out the town of Lenoir, practiced civil engineering, surveying, and draftmanship, merchandising and textile manufacturing, served in the state House of Representatives 1865-66, �94 / Part II: A Changing Society and was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1871. Almost a century later James T. Broyhill of Lenoir, associated with the Broyhill Industries, probably the largest family-owned furniture manufacturing concern in the world, represents the Tenth Congressional District. Richard Thurmond Chatham was chairman of the board of directors of the large Chatham Manufacturing Company in Elkin when he was elected to the United States Congress in 1949, and he continued to serve in both capacities until in 1955 he resigned from the chairmanship. He died just before his term in the House of Representatives ended in I957· The Democratic Party in North Carolina has from I 870 until today had a majority in the legislature with one brief exception- r895-190I- the Fusion period. The Fusion period involved the rise of the People's Party or the Populist Party, the fusion of that party with the Republican Party, the temporary overthrow of the Democratic party, and then the restoration of the Democrats to power. Most of the writers concerning the Fusion period have a Democratic bias. The violent political attitudes in the last third of the nineteenth century were the result of the Civil War and Reconstruction. As has been pointed out there were two parties, the Republican and the Conservative, later called the Democratic. The Conservative Party was composed of white men whose desire was to drive the Northern "foreigners" out and to return control of the state government exclusively to whites. The rivalry of the two parties, the Republican to maintain control and the Conservative to gain it, is the story of Reconstruction in North Carolina. The Conservatives captured the legislature in I 870 and the governorship in I876, and North Carolina was Democratic from I876 to I894, when the Republican Party and the Negro were again political factors. The Democrats had chafed under the Reconstruction constitution and had called a constitutional convention that met on September 5, I875. Instead of drawing up another constitution the convention wrote many amendments, two of which were of great importance: the residence requirement for voting would be ninety days rather than sixty, and any person convicted �The Bar and the Forum / 9 5 of a felony could be disfranchised; and the General Assembly was given power to modify, change, or abrogate county governments. The association of the Negro with the Republican Party gave the Democrats the lever by which to control the state. Former Whigs had formed and led the Conservative Party and they refused to use the name Democrat for eight years. But Zebulon Baird Vance and the Democrats defeated the Republicans in 1876 and Vance was hailed as "the redeemeer." The name Democrat became acceptable. The national issues in the r88o's centered around the regulation of railroads, currency fluctuation, tariffs, control of monopolies and agricultural demands by a vocal West. Prior to I 894 no efforts were made by the Democratic Party to foster social and economic reforms, for these were opposed by the industrial and railroad interests. Men in control of the Democratic Party in North Carolina were in alliance with the railroad and manufacturing interests. Many of these men had used the state between I 876 and I 894 to further their own business interests and were content to rest on their chief accomplishment - redemption of the state from Yankees and Negroes. Democrats thus failed to offer North Carolina a vitalized program. This evasion of issues was made possible by reminding the voters of Negro rule under the Republican Party during Reconstruction. From I876 for many years the question of the Negro in politics was the dominant issue in all party affiliations. Democratic election law, Democratic control of county governments gerrymandering, intimidation, manipulation and corruption had kept the party in control from I876 to I894. In I 890 the Democratic Party had two elements: a dominant conservative wing (pro-business, anti-reform) led by a few leaders who controlled the party, and a liberal, agrarian anticorporation wing with spokesmen like Walter Clark and Leonidas Polk. The liberal agrarian element grew in strength because of agrarian discontent and criticism of the railroads. The two farmers' organizations, the Grange in the early seventies and the Farmers' Alliance, which was organized in I887, made little impression in the mountains, but that section benefited from their influence. In the election of I890 the Alliance virtually captured control of the Democratic Party. "The 'Farmers' Legislature of I89I' ... increased the tax rate for public schools, established a normal college for white girls, and an agricultural college and a normal college for Negroes; �96 / Part II: A Changing Society increased the state appropriations to the University and state colleges; [established a School for the Deaf and Dumb in Western North Carolina] and provided state regulation for railways by forbidding rebates and rate discriminations and creating a railroad commission of three members elected by the legislature and empowered to reduce rates and eliminate the special tax exemptions and low assessments enjoyed by the railroads," summarized historian David Holcombe. Again the conservative Democrats c;,ontrolled the party in North Carolina in I894. They stood for laissez Jaire policies, no governmental regulation of railroads, and favoritism to business. It was a large party but it was governed by a few and was interested chiefly in self-preservation. The geography of North Carolina was significant in the development of the post-Reconstruction Republican Party. A few western counties were centers of Republican strength. Sectional hostility had been incited before the Civil War by a lack of just representation in the legislature and the contempt with which non-slaveholding white farmers were treated by the slave-holding oligarchy of the lowlands. After the Civil War many of the small farmers became Republicans. In gubernatorial elections seven mountain counties voted Republican in each election from I 876 through I 896: Ashe, Cherokee Henderson, Madison, Mitchell, Polk, and Wilkes. Nineteen other counties voted Republican during the same period -in other parts of the state. There were forty-seven counties in other parts of the state with from forty to forty-nine per-cent of the vote being Republican during this same period. This potential strength was often sufficient to challenge the Democratic Party at a given election. The Republican votes in the western counties were those of adult male whites, since the Negro population in each county was comparatively small. Because of the Republican counties and the small Democratic majority in many other counties, Western North Carolina was an important political region. It was not the sole determinant in state politics, but mountain leaders exercised importance out of proportion to the size, the population, and the wealth of the area. The resurgence of the Republican Party, I890-1900, was closely linked with the rise of the Populist Party as a result of agrarian discontent which projected the Farmers' Alliance into politics. The Populist Party was a protest against social �The Bar and the Forum / 97 and political grievances which the Democratic Party had done little to alleviate. Since the demands of the Alliance were intended to correct outstanding abuses, its entrance into politics was inevitable. Its leaders wanted it to work with both old parties rather than to form a separate political party. More was expected from the Democrats than from the Republicans in North Carolina since they were the party in power. In I 892 the Alliance split. The more conservative members remained loyal to the Democrats because of the fear of the Negroes and the Republicans. The more radical joined the Populist Party of the midwestern farmers. In I 892 the Populist Party held its first state convention and set forth a progressive platform. W. P. Exum, the party's candidate for governor, received a small vote in the western counties as did James B. Weaver, the Populist candidate for President, but the state as a whole cast a Populist vote which combined with the Republican vote exceeded that for the Democratic candidates. Seven mountain counties voted Republican as usual. In I 894 the Republican and Populist parties endorsed a cooperative ticket. This fusion ticket carried the election. The Democrats retained only forty-six seats in the House and eight in the Senate. The Populists gained thirty-six seats in the House and twenty-four in the Senate, and together the Fusionists elected their Supreme Court ticket and their State Treasurer, and captured control of both houses by a large majority. In Western North Carolina there were sizeable Republican and Populist gains. The legislature in I 895 set the maximum interest rate at six per-cent and provided for a four-month school term. The election of 1896 brought into office Daniel Russell, the only Republican governor in North Carolina, 1877-1973· He carried eleven of the mountain counties. Between I 897 and I 899 the Fusionists were in complete control of the executive, legislative, and judicial offices in the state. Local self-government for the counties was vested in boards of three county commissioners elected by the people. The Fusion period came to North Carolina because economic distress existed and political reforms were needed. The marriage was not permanent. The "white supremacy" campaign of 1898 defeated Fusion and by 1900 the Democrats were again in complete control in North Carolina. They decided to eliminate the Negro as a factor in North Carolina politics by an amendment �98 / Part II: A Changing Society to the constitution combining a literacy test and a grandfather clause provision to disfranchise the Negroes. Although the amendment carried, in only five of the counties of Western North Carolina did a majority of voters approve the amendment which was submitted to them in 1900: Alleghany, Buncombe, Burke, McDowell, and Rutherford. All except Alleghany had fairly large Negro populations. A law passed in 1899 gave the General Assembly the power again to elect county commissioners. During the period of Fusionist rule Jeter C. Pritchard, Republican of Madison County, was elected United States Senator to succeed Zebulon B. Vance who had died. In 1897 Pritchard was chosen by the General Assembly to serve a full six-year term, and when he was defeated for the senatorship in 1903 he was given federal offices, in 1903-1904 as Justice of the Supreme Court for the District of Columbia and from 1904 until his death as Judge of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fourth Judicial District. The two other United States Senators elected from Western North Carolina since 1903 were Democrats: Robert Rice Reynolds from Asheville, who was elected in 1932 and served until 1945; and Samuel James Ervin, Jr., of Morganton, who served first as a member of the United States House of Representatives to complete the unfinished term of his brother, Joseph William Ervin, who had died, and then in 1954 was elected to the United States Senate to replace Clyde Hoey, deceased. He had been a member of the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1937 to 1943 and again from 1948 to 1950. He still serves in the Senate. Five Republicans have been elected to the United States House of Representatives from Western North Carolina in the twentieth century. Edmund Spencer Blackburn, with a law office in Jefferson, served from 1901 to 1903 and from 1905 to 1907. Charles Holden Cowles of Wilkesboro, who acted as Blackburn's private secretary during his first term, was elected to the House in 1909. Richmond Pearson, son and namesake of the great Chief Justice and law teacher, served in the North Carolina House of Representatives from Buncombe County from 1885 to 1889, and during the four years 1895 to 1899 he was the Representative from the Ninth Congressional District. He was reelected in 1900 but did not complete his term as Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to a succession of diplomatic posts. From 1907 until Taft's inauguration in 1909 he was minister �The Bar and the Forum J 99 to Greece and Montenegro. Except for the leadership of the Roosevelt forces in North Carolina in the campaign of 1912 he did not participate in public life after 1909. Jeter M. Pritchard, son of Jeter C. Pritchard, was a prominent Republican who served in Congress from 1929 to 193 I. James T. Broyhill has represented the Tenth District since 1962. In 1960 nineteen of the twenty-four western counties voted for Nixon for President, although only four voted for Goldwater in 1964. Madison County voted Democratic for the Presidency in both 1960 and 1964. It seems to be anybody's guess how these counties will go politically. Even before a Republican governor was elected in 1972, the choice of the Democratic machine was no longer certain of winning the office. Victories ofKerr Scott in 1948, Terry Sanford in 1960, and Dan K. Moore in an election of great turmoil in 1964 indicate that the Democratic organization can no longer handpick its candidate. No longer is the county courthouse so completely the center of mountain social life but it has remained the center of political life - the seat of power and patronage. Crimes of violence have decreased, more amusements are available, and the coming of the automobile and of good roads has increased social intercourse. County agents, welfare departments, mental health clinics, and county libraries are often centered around the courthouse. The courthouses and the county seats have been the centers of coteries of power, the "courthouse rings," the political machines. Here in these little Tammany Halls the political bosses have dispensed patronage and determined in an autocratic manner the political destinies of the county. In Western North Carolina these political machines were Democratic and were kept in power by friendly Democratic legislatures. In a number of counties Republicans were in the majority but as long as the legislature appointed the county commissioners the county chairman of the Democratic Party had the power, not the Republican representatives in the legislature. He selected the candidates for the office of county commissioner. Often no teacher could obtain or hold a position without his approval. The Democratic legislature appointed the school committees, controlled many of the educational and welfare administrations, �100 / Part II: A Changing Society James Holshouser, elected in No vember 1972 the first R epublican Governor in North Carolina in this century and the _fifth W estern N orth Carolinian elected to that office since 1865. Holshouser is a native of Boone and has practiced law there except when serving in the General Assembly, since his graduation from the University of North Carolina Law School at Chapel Hill. PHOTO COURTESY OF WATAUGA DEMOCRAT and kept a Democratic minority in power. For example, in R epublican Madison County for years a Democratic county boss ruled the county as completely as Huey Long ruled Louisiana. Election of county officials has been restored to the people and recently members of county boards of education have been made elective officers. Over all the counties west of Asheville the Asheville and Buncombe County political machine had tremendous influence. From the end of the Civil W ar to the Depression of the thirties many of the counties were traditionally Republican. Because of the social program of Franklin Roosevelt the Democrats gained the ascendency. Weldon Weir, the city manager of Asheville, Coke Candler, chairman of the board of county commissioners, Lawrence Brown, the sheriff, and Don S. Elias wielded great power. The political adroitness of these m en was �The Bar and the Forum / 101 notable. Weldon Weir was credited with masterminding the fortunes of the Democratic Party in Asheville election after election. For decades Sheriff Lawrence Brown was political arbiter of the county. He built a strong political base by helping the needy and by persistently enforcing the law but used his powers dictatorially. Throughout the 1930's, 1940's, 1950's a third political figure allied with Weir and Brown was Don S. Elias, newspaper owner and financier. He was the third leg of political tripod. He was a statewide figure operating powerfully in local politics. As a newspaper man he often held the politicians in check and served as a balance of power. The political dynasty ruled by these men began to crumble in the 1950's. In 1958 Dave Hall of Webster with the backing of Judge Dan Moore defeated Weldon Weir for the congressional nomination, evidence that no longer did "Big Buncombe," dominate politics west of Asheville. Don Elias had supported Weir and the defeat proved that he was not invincible in the Twelfth District. The passing of Buncombe's dominance was further seen in 1966 when Congressman Roy A. Taylor lost Buncombe by 4000 votes but still won reelection. It had been a truism that to win in the district one had to win in Buncombe. Sheriff Brown's high-handed treatment of Jay Hensley, who had exposed the Democratic toleration of gambling in Buncombe County, and the seizure of liquor bottles at the state convention of the North Carolina Junior Chamber of Commerce after they had condemned Brown's actions aroused such indignation that in 1964 Brown was defeated by Harry Clay and Buncombe had its first Republican sheriff since the 192o's. In 1968 Weldon Weir retired at sixty-two, Coke Candler decided not to run again, Harry Clay was reelected, and the Republicans elected a member of the board of county commissioners. These events are indicative of the resurgence of historic Republican strength in the mountains. The Democratic Party has dominated North Carolina for one hundred years, but the Republican Party is a power to be reckoned with, particularly in Western North Carolina. The lawyers and the legislators, most of whom were lawyers, have profoundly influenced the laws and the politics of the region. Lawyers often dominate the political destinies of their �102 J Part II: A Changing Society towns and counties. They are frequently elected to the legislature or to Congress and they influence the laws that affect the region. Formerly the number oflawyers was small and the contributions of each could be evaluated as Arthur did in his Western North Carolina. Today the number of lawyers with potential political influence is legion and a full treatment of their history would require a lengthy book. �CHAPTER FIVE That All May Live From the time of the first settlement until after the Civil War, most medical needs in the mountains were attended to by granny women, herb doctors, and midwives. There were no railroads, few roads, and the efforts of the occasional doctor on horseback were truly Herculean. During and after the Civil War the movement of troops and the wandering of freedmen was accompanied by epidemic diseases, especially typhoid and smallpox. Out of the memory of the terrible experiences during the war, the state's doctors sought to provide better medical facilities and health measures. The State Medical Society, organized in 1800, given up in 1804, reorganized in 1848, had met annually except during the war. In r 8 59 it had persuaded the General Assembly to establish the requirement that before a new doctor might start his practice he must be passed by the State Board of Medical Examiners. During the trying years of Reconstruction, health measures were not among the issues considered important, but in r875 the legislature authorized the building of the Western Insane Asylum of North Carolina (now Broughton Hospital) at Morganton. It was estimated that there were at least seven hundred "insane" persons in the state who were not receiving treatment. The appropriation of $7s,ooo was made to provide a hospital for four hundred patients. As an economy measure fifty convicts were sent to Morganton to make bricks. The contractor for the bricks was responsible for clothing, feeding, and guarding the prisoners. When the institution was completed, it was already too small to meet the need of the western part of the state, and an additional 103 �104 / Part II: A Changing Society $6o,ooo was appropriated for another wing in I 877. One portion was set aside for those who could pay for their own care. In 1877 a group from the State Medical Society went to Raleigh to lobby and succeeded in getting created a state board of health (with an annual appropriation of $Ioo!). Another act made the county medical societies county boards of health. Two years later, after an intensive campaign by Dr. Thomas F. Wood, Secretary-Treasurer of the new State Board of Health, who sent out hundreds of letters at his own expense, a more effective public health act was passed. A nine-member board (composed of physicians and others, including one civil engineer) was provided for. The revised law had been backed vigorously by the State Medical Society. In the counties of Western North Carolina as late as 1883 only twenty doctors were members of the State Medical Society, and consequently there were no county boards of health to function. Typhoid had a serious incidence in the West, and diptheria abounded. New theories about the causes of these diseases- polluted water, insects, and direct contact- were known only by the few doctors who did attend the meetings of the medical societies or read their journals. In Western North Carolina the doctors had to travel many hours per day (usually on horseback because of the poor mountain roads) to visit the critically sick and to dispense remedies. Some mountain counties had more physicians in I884 than in I958; in I884 Ashe had 8, Clay 4, Graham 5, Mitchell 8, Swain 4, Yancey 6; in I958 Ashe had 6, Clay I, Graham 4, Mitchell6, Swain 4, Yancey 5. But a much smaller number of patients could be seen by a mountain doctor who had to travel to the sick than is possible today. An example was the father of Dr. Gainc Cannon, who practiced medicine in Jackson and Transylvania Counties and in the vicinity of Pickens, South Carolina. Cannon remembered: "Father had to do most of his traveling on horseback, carrying his medicine and instruments in his saddle bags. He rode long distances, and not only were the calls tiring and time-consuming, but he was also often paid poorly. Father could hardly make a call far over into Jackson County and get back the same day. And often he collected not a penny .... Sometimes those who were able to pay him wouldn't do it, even though he charged little. . . . Most of the time he was paid in things the family could eat - a country ham, potatoes, fresh vegetables, ... produce ... from the farms and orchards. �That All May Live / I05 Father couldn't carry much of that sort of stuff on his horse, along with his bulging saddle bags, so often a patient would bring it down to us, sometimes in a cart pulled by an ox." Such doctors had neither the time nor the money to attend meetings of medical societies or to buy medical journals. They continued to practice medicine as it had been taught to them years earlier. Meanwhile the moderately ill were cared for by "granny women," some of whom luckily had a surprising knowledge of herbs and their medicinal values; superstitious and injurious treatments were characteristic of many of them. The majority of the people did not enjoy good health. Chronic ailments were typical. Dr. Benjamin Washburn said that dyspepsia was found in almost all adults and children, caused from "eating thick, soggy corn pone, greasy vegetables, and too much salt pork." Bad sanitary conditions contributed to the typhoid, diarrhea, and other bowel ailments which were common. Other well-known diseases of the area, in the vernacular, were "pneumony fever," "side pleurisy," "joint rheumatism" "jumpin' toothache," the "bloody flux" (dysentery), and "gallopin' consumption." "Dew pizen," it was learned later, was a preliminary stage of hookworm disease. It caused mountain children to have a stunted, anemic condition. "Bold hives" might be scarlet fever or other childhood infections. Babies were usually delivered by ignorant midwives, and as a result many women suffered ill health all their adult lives. Dr. Washburn described medical practice in dealing with the abovenamed diseases in the South Mountain district in Rutherford County, where he began his practice in 1912. Diphtheria and tuberculosis were the great killers. They were so widespread at times that there were epidemics causing a reign of terror. Many children died of diphtheria and were buried in wooden boxes. Eight children died in one family. The philosophic resignation of the parents was expressed by saying "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." With diphtheria a child would be lumpy, listless, feverish. He might have a sore throat. The breathing would be obstructed by a swollen membrane, the pulse rapid, thready, and uncountable. About the sixth day the child would die of toxemia, the effect of the poison produced by the bacteria. Violent pain was usually followed by death. Fortunately, diphtheria is no longer the great child-killer that it once was. Medical science developed an anti-toxin that has almost wiped out the dread disease. �106 / Part II: A Changing Society Another serious epidemic disease, scarlet fever, would sweep through whole neighborhoods. It often affected the kidneys, the brain, the middle-ears, leaving some children deaf mutes. It was less often fatal than diphtheria and would run its course in a week or ten days. It is still dangerous but less prevalent than formerly. Measles was the most highly infectious of the epidemic diseases. It was usually not fatal but often went into pneumonia and complications. Smallpox was the only infectious disease the doctors really knew how to prevent. Vaccinations were used, but so crudely that infections often resulted. A healthy child who had a good "take" was used as the source of vaccine for other children. The doctor scratched a place on the arm until blood began to ooze, then dipped the lancet into the pus on the arm of the inoculated child and rubbed the pus in the scratched arm. Tuberculosis was the great and universal scourge. People believed that its spread was inevitable, the result of the Divine will, an act of God. Patients had a phthisical cough, a fever flush, an elevation of temperature, and they spat, usually on the floor. Isolation of patients was not usual, as the bacterial cause of the disease was not recognised. There was no effort at prevention by quarantine. Poor housing conditions caused the prevalence and virulence of tuberculosis to increase. Yet an area one hundred miles by fifty miles centering in Asheville was believed to have complete immunity from tuberculosis, and, as has been noted elsewhere, the town became a resort for tubercular patients. Surgery was practiced sparingly by mountain doctors because of the antipathy of the people to it. Compound fractures resulted in amputations because it was believed that if there was no amputation the patient would die of infection. Anesthesia was seldom used in the mountains, although elsewhere ether had been used since I 842, and chloroform since I 872. Whiskey was often given to dull the pain during an operation. The mountains were also believed to be safe from yellow fever. During a yellow fever epidemic in Florida in I888 hundreds of people fled from the state. Both Waynesville and Hendersonville welcomed the refugees, 260 coming to Hendersonville. Eastern towns grew alarmed and quarantined against persons coming from Waynesville and Hendersonville. The State Board of Health then forbade the coming of yellow fever refugees to North Carolina. �That All May Live / 107 Meanwhile, in the world at large between 1890 and 1910 the germ theory of disease was thoroughly established and the science of bacteriology developed. The State Board of Health turned its attention to providing safe water supplies and sewage disposal in towns and cities. Its system of disease control included quarantine, abatement of nuisances, and vaccination. A doctor in each county was employed as county superintendent of health. He was chosen by the county board of health, which consisted of all practicing physicians, the mayor of the county seat, the chairman of the county commissioners, and the city or county surveyor. The county superintendent of health performed post mortems for the coroners, registered vital statistics, and attended persons at jails and poorhouses. The education of the people of North Carolina for retention of their health really began with the campaign to eradicate hookworm disease. In 1903 Dr. Charles W. Stiles of the United States Public Health Service addressed the State Medical Society at Hot Springs on the prevalence of hookworm disease in the South. In 1905 Dr. W. P. Ivey of Lenoir, a member of the State Board of Health, read a paper to the State Medical Society titled "Uncinariasis (hookworm disease) in the Mountains of North Carolina." He recommended the holding of clinics, to be attended by doctors who did not attend the meetings of the medical societies, in the counties. He found the disease common in Caldwell County and he believed that other Western North Carolina counties "were wormy too." He ended his paper with the following lines: "Hear, gentlemen, my conclusion. Uncinariasis is among us .... It is a grievous burden .... It is a menace to the neighbors. It kills folks. It makes mental underlings, ... physical dwarfs. It curtails producing power. It steals dollars from our wealth. What are you going to do about it?" The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission spent $15,000 annually in North Carolina for a Bureau of Hookworm Eradication which was established in the state in March 1910. Dr. W. P. Jacocks directed the campaign, which lasted five years. A corps of doctors and microscopists worked in one county after another. First a member of Dr. Jacocks' team visited a county to sell the idea to the county commissioners and ask them for an appropriation. About six weeks later a field director arrived to conduct the treatment. The first week was devoted to advertising and education. Handbills were circulated, and posters were placed �ro8 / Part II: A Changing Society in public buildings such as post offices and stores inviting people to the lectures and demonstrations. An exhibit consisting of a set of large charts to illustrate the lecture showed the life history of the hookworm and the manner in which infection occurred, showed patients before and after treatment and diagrams of privies which would prevent soil pollution. Hookworm eggs and larvae were shown under the microscope. About five places in each county were designated for the holding of clinics, and at each a dispensary was held once a week for five weeks. A typical one, at Mill Spring in Polk County, was described by Dr. Washburn, who joined the campaign in 1913. Men, women, and children began arriving at the designated spot at 8 A.M. Approximately two hundred people came: in buggies, on horse back, and in wagons. Activities were varied. People who had been treated previously were examined to determine the extent of improvement, after which a lecture was given explaining how hookworm disease stunted the mental and physical growth of children. Then additional diagnoses were made and medicine (large capsules of thymol mixed with milk sugar) was distributed. The clinic was like an all-day picinic, and most of those who came in the morning stayed throughout the activities. They examined an exhibit showing how soil pollution, flies, dirty food, and contaminated water could cause hookworm disease. Typhoid, it was explained, was spread in the same way. About half an hour was spent by the crowd in singing, led by a volunteer with a tuning fork, while the microscopist prepared a report on specimens brought in. People had packed picnic lunches and the clinic recessed long enough for the meal. Other families arrived in the afternoon, and the clinic lasted until nearly five o'clock. One of the lessons taught in all of the counties was that the placing of privies over swift-running streams as was customary in the mountains, when homes boasted privies at all, caused pollution of water that could seep into the springs from which the drinking water was taken. Efforts were made to persuade county boards of education to provide safe drinking water and sanitary privies at each school. All but one county, Ashe, appropriated funds for the hookworm eradication campaign. Even in counties where the incidence of the disease was small, the educational value of the program was tremendous because through it people learned how to �That All May Live / 109 prevent other serious diseases. After the hookworm campaign ended in 1915, public health work was continued with the fulltime services of a county doctor in several counties, including two in Western North Carolina, Surry and Buncombe. Practically all of the 206 physicians in Western North Carolina in 1884 were general practitioners. Many of them were of well-known families that had furnished leaders in other professions as well. Moreover, it was not unusual to find two and even three doctors in a county with the same surname, of whom two were often father and son.* In many families it was a tradition for one son to be a physician. The doctors, in addition to the strenuous obligations of their profession, were often civic leaders: trustees of academies, members of local school boards, and of the county boards of health. Such a leader was Dr. James A. Reagan, physician and surgeon, who served as president of Weaverville College for three years from its incorporation as a college (1873) and who continued after that to serve as a trustee. Dr. H. B. Weaver of Asheville in an obituary to Reagan in 1910 described his public service: "In the heat and in the cold; up the rugged mountain sides . . . ; down the sunless valleys; in dangers seen and unseen he never faltered .... No matter from where the cry for relief came, ... he responded .... " As time passed many of the doctors opened parts of their homes or built special buildings in which they maintained clinics or hospitals. This practice continued in smaller communities until well into the twentieth century. It made possible surgery and more sanitary nursing conditions and saved many lives. Then there were physicians who were not native to Western North Carolina who came in after completing medical school because of an invitation by the community, such as Dr. W. C. Tate, who came to Banner Elk to conduct a small hospital already established, and Doctors Eustice H. and Mary Martin Sloop, * For example, there were doctors C. B. Roberts, R. K. Roberts, and Robert Roberts in Haywood County; drs.J. L. Egerton and Thomas Egerton, G. W. Fletcher and M. H. Fletcher, and Josiah Johnson and L. L. Johnson all in Henderson County; Latta Reagan and W. S. Reagan in Madison County, Oliver Hicks and Romeo Hicks in Rutherford County, to name only a few. �no / Part II: A Changing Society who founded a hospital in Crossnore. An example of Western North Carolina doctors who devoted much of their professional lives to public health work is Dr. Lewis Burgin McBrayer of Buncombe County. He was licensed in I 890 and conducted a surgical practice in Asheville until 1909, when he became city health officer. Sanitation, especially concerning water and milk supply, was emphasized during his administration. Meanwhile the State Medical Society had organized an association to combat tuberculosis, and Dr. McBrayer worked at Raleigh in 1907 with the General Assembly to get the State Sanatorium for Tuberculosis established. In 1914 he left the mountains to serve as superintendent of the Sanatorium for ten years. He played a part in getting another state tuberculosis sanatorium established, in Western North Carolina, and in setting up public health nursing. He was president of the State Medical Society in 1914, and from 1917 to 1937 he was its secretary-treasurer. The resolution passed by the State Medical Society at his death included these words: " ... his pioneering labors in this field [of fighting tuberculosis] won for him and for his state nation-wide recognition." When Dr. McBrayer became superintendent of the State Sanatorium for Tuberculosis he replaced Dr. ]. E. Brooks, who then (1914) came to Blowing Rock to retire. There was no resident physician in the village at that time, and although at first Dr. Brook's health did not permit him to do more than answer emergency calls, he eventually maintained an office practice in Blowing Rock. He was aghast at the opportunities that the tourist center offered for the spread of contagious diseases. Conditions were no doubt similar in most of the mountain villages, and the crowding in of summer visitors in the resort centers made the danger of epidemics even greater. Dr. Alfred Mordecai described the situation. Within the village the average family had a stable for the horse and one or more cows, a pigpen, a chicken lot, an outdoor privy, a spring, and a garden. No screens were used to keep the flies out of the houses. Garbage was thrown out to the pigs and chickens. While the larger hotels were situated on hills apart from the village center, they had their stables and "a retinue of stable boys and domestic servants, who were very prone to use the back lots and bushes instead of the surface privies provided for them." Diseases such as typhoid and smallpox were increasing in frequency. �That All May Live j II I Dr. Brooks began holding "fireside chats" with civic leaders, inviting one or more to visit with him to talk about community affairs. He pointed out the unsanitary conditions and what they might lead to. At "smokers," suppers and other meetings the local citizens were roused to action. Dr. Brooks brought such speakers as Governor Thomas W. Bickett, future governor Cameron Morrison, and James I. Vance, D. D., to speak on the subject of public health. Soon the fly breeding places were eliminated. A chamber of commerce and other civic organizations developed from Dr. Brooks's work. Tuberculosis was very prevalent in Watauga County and that part of the state, and Dr. Brooks launched a drive to control it. He believed that socio-economic conditions caused its spread, and he lectured in schoolhouses throughout the area, asking people to stop their promiscuous visiting with sick people whose illnesses had not yet been diagnosed and to provide their families with less crowded living conditions. An epidemic of smallpox in Watauga County in I9I4 followed by one of diphtheria in 1915 caused people at least to heed his advice about visiting. Dr. Brooks's services continued in Blowing Rock until his death in 1921.* A Philadelphia physician, Dr. Henry Norris, and Mrs. Norris, came several times to Rutherford County for Dr. Norris to hunt. They visited often at the Coxe estate, Green River Plantation. They made friends in Rutherfordton and came to realize that there was no hospital between Charlotte and Asheville at a time when travel was slow and difficult. In 1905 the Norrises decided to found a hospital in Rutherfordton. The buildings of a former military academy were purchased and reconditioned, and the hospital functioned there from 1906 until 1911, by which time Dr. and Mrs. Norris had built and equipped an excellent new facility. In 1907 Mrs. Norris organized a school of nursing at the Rutherford Hospital. Dr. Norris and Dr. Montgomery Biggs, and two nurses, all from Philadelphia, soon won a widespread reputation for excellence. Additional * Alfred Mordecai, "James Edwin Brooks, M. D.," Part II, North Carolina Medical journal Oune, 1958), 238-242, described intimately his association with Dr. Brooks. In a letter to Ina Van Noppen, Dr. Mordecai wrote, "I entered the practice of medicine in 1915 at Blowing Rock and sat in quite often at his [Dr. Brooks'] fireside chats .... I was so impressed by the work of Dr. Brooks that I later entered the field of Public Health in Western North Carolina.... I think he could be called the Father of Modern Sanitation and Health Education in Watauga County." �I 12 f Part II: A Changing Society equipment and space were added from time to time, and after the death of Dr. and Mrs. Norris a Committee of Friends of the Hospital raised funds in 1941 for a Norris Maternity Building. Its construction was delayed by World War II, enabling Rutherford Hospital to acquire a much larger building than had been anticipated. In 1946 Congress passed the Hill-Burton Act to give federal funds to communities to match local funds for the construction of non-profit hospitals. Thereupon the North Carolina Medical Care Commission was created to administer a combination of state and federal aid to counties that wished to build hospitals. Consequently in 1951 a new wing which doubled the bed capacity of the Rutherford Hospital was built and a completely modernized hospital was dedicated. Another new building, the Crawford Memorial Building for the School of Nursing, was dedicated in 1956 and conditions for teaching were improved through a grant from the Ford Foundation in 1957. The nursing education program was transferred to Gardner-Webb College at Boiling Springs, in 1965, with students doing their clinical work at the Rutherford Hospital. Grace Hospital in Morganton is another excellent institution of the same age as the Rutherford Hospital. Miss Maria P. Allen, a graduate of the Episcopal Hospital in Philadelphia who was serving as a visiting nurse in Burke County, wrote an article, "The Spirit of Missions," in which she explained the need for $3000 for a small hospital. The money was given by a generous woman in New York. The Reverend Walter Hughson, rector of Grace Episcopal Church of Morganton, established the hospital in 1906 in a frame building containing fifteen beds. Dr. E. W. Phifer, who had been in practice in Morganton for four years, generously contributed administrative services, and he and Dr. J. B. Riddle were the hospital staff. In 1918 Dr. W. H. Keller joined the two. In 1920 a new brick hospital was built, and staff and services have grown until in 1950 there were 120 beds and a staff of twenty-five specialists and generalists. A school of nursing was established in 1910 with Miss Maria Allen as its director. By 1950 about 230 nurses had graduated. In addition to their clinical experience in Grace Hospital student nurses were given a twelve week affiliation course in psychiatric nursing at Highland Hospital in Asheville and a twelve week course in pediatric nursing at Duke University Hospital. In 1959 Lenoir Rhyne College in Hickory engaged in a joint program to offer college degrees for Grace Hospital School of �That All May Live / I I 3 Nursing graduates. Subsequently the School of Nursing was discontinued; now Lenoir Rhyne's nursing students obtain their clinical training at Grace Hospital. Burke County has recently added a splendid new hospital. Before 1945 there were hospitals with seventy-five or more beds, outside the urban area of Buncombe County, only in Burke, Haywood, and Rutherford counties. Ashe, Macon, McDowell, Caldwell, Transylvania, and Jackson counties had more than forty hospital beds each, while Watauga, Avery, Cherokee, and Swain counties had hospitals with fewer than forty beds. Since then many new hospitals have been built. By 1958 there were 3.2 short-stay hospital beds per one thousand population in Western North Carolina, while for the state as a whole the average was 3.3 beds per one thousand. In addition, new public health centers were constructed between 1948-1958 with federal aid in all of the counties except Buncombe and Henderson. Nurses' training in the 196o's was largely taken over by the educational institutions, practical nursing courses being given by Wilkes Community College, Asheville-Biltmore Technical Institute, and Caldwell Community College near Lenoir. A two year course in nursing is offered at Western Piedmont Community College in Morganton terminating in the Associate of Applied Science degree, and a four year course in nursing given at Mars Hill College leads to the B.S. degree. The three hospitals in Western North Carolina in 1966 that still had hospital schools of nursing were Martin Memorial at Mt. Airy, Memorial Mission in Asheville, and Mountain at Fletcher. A very special institution in Western North Carolina is Western Carolina Center, located just outside Morganton. It is one of four state-supported residential centers for mentally handicapped children. A part of the North Carolina Department of Mental Health, it serves thirty-two western counties. In 1959 the legislature appropriated $4,500,ooo for its construction, and the first patients were admitted in 1963. The center's director, Dr. J. Iverson Riddle, stated that the Center provides diagnosis, treatment, and care for the mentally handicapped child by the use of the "multi-discipline approach to the total child." Regimentation is avoided and each child is treated as an individual who may return to his community and live a relatively normal life. Two hundred eighty acres of land with rolling hills and the South Mountains in the background form the setting �I I 4 / Part II: A Changing Society for the sixteen buildings, including residence cottages, academic buildings, diagnostic clinic, hospital for crippled children, infirmary, an additional children's unit of I20 beds, and workshop. The population consists of adults and children with an average age of eighteen. The capacity, 832 in 1970, will be increased constantly as new "cottages" are completed. Morganton has become one of the four regional health centers in the state. In 1959 the name of the North Carolina Mental Hospital (earlier the Western Insane Asylum of North Carolina) was changed to Broughton Hospital. The School for the Deaf, Broughton Hospital, and the Western Carolina Center are appropriately located in the same community. Many of the techniques used in teaching deaf children can also be used successfully with mentally handicapped children who have communication difficulties, and the psychiatric staffs at Broughton and Western Carolina Center can complement each other. The Mental Health clinics located in a number of the thirty-two mountain and piedmont counties served by the Center and by Broughton Hospital are associated with the two by an administrative staff. Also served is the Western North Carolina Correctional Center in Morganton, a new type of prison where rehabilitation rather than punishment is the aim. Related to the health of the people are water, air, and noise pollution and contamination of soils and foods from pesticides. There is today a world-wide concern over pollution of the environment. Man pollutes the air, water, and land with noxious fumes, sewage, noise, pesticides, and nuclear radiation. With the population explosion and the proliferation of manufacturing plants, pollution is being highly accelerated. The fouling of the world's land, air and water is the fastest-spreading disease of civilization. It is potentially one of history's greatest dangers to human life on earth. If present trends continue it will make all of the world's cities and most of the countryside uninhabitable. Toxic gases and "killer smogs," suspended over cities, contain sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, ozone, and carbon monoxide, and cause lung cancer and emphysema and can actually asphyxiate respiratory sufferers. These gases emanate from automobile exhausts, smokestacks, and incinerators. They can be reduced by fitting offending smokestacks with filters and electrostatic precipitators and by inducing factories to use low-sulfur fuels. �That All May Live J I I 5 Automobiles can be equipped with anti-pollution devices. As early as I932 Asheville citizens circulated petitions requesting smoke control. June 3, I932, the town council adopted an anti-smoke ordinance which was not entirely effective. A cooperative study in I963 by the City of Asheville, the Buncombe County Health Department, and the North Carolina State Board of Health found that Asheville still had a serious smoke and air pollution problem. In I964 it was found that air pollution was damaging trees and shrubs, and in I965 a federal grant of $23,945 was made to enable Asheville to study its air pollution problem. January I, I965, a two-year study was begun during which many industries installed or began installation of air-control equipment. Recommendations were made for (I) adoption of regulations by four county boards of health, (2) the establishment of air-monitoring stations, (3) education, (4) enforcement, (5) coordination of administration. In I966 clean-air rules were adopted for the Asheville area. In 1967 the North Carolina General Assembly added air pollution control to the water control program and created the Board of Water and Air Resources to study the problem, to devise means of control, and to supervise local air control programs. The Assembly offered tax benefits for air pollution abatemant facilities. A law was passed, to be administered by the North Carolina Board of Water and Air Resources. This law is not yet effective, as only after July I, I974, will industries face fines of $I,ooo a day. Even then there will be many loopholes, and it is feared that the state board will be unable to resist pressure from industries. June 25-26, 1968, upon request of Governor Moore, a conference on Appalachian Development was held at AshevilleBiltmore College (now the University of North Carolina at Asheville). In this conference all forms of pollution and programs of pollution abatement were discussed. It is evident that cities, towns, and industrial plants in Western North Carolina have air pollution problems. It is a hopeful sign that organized and concerted efforts are being made to ameliorate conditions on local, state, and national levels. If these efforts are to be effective, laws with teeth in them must be enacted and enforced. Penalties must be sufficiently severe to induce compliance by offenders. The magnitude of the air pollution problem may be perceived from the fact that the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare estimates that air pollution costs more than $r3,ooo,ooo,ooo annually. �I I 6 / Part II: A Changing Society Far older and much more widespread in Western North Carolina than air pollution is the problem of water pollution. The sharp increase in water pollution is alarming. "Every major river in the United States is grossly polluted. Even the lesser streams have been made slimy and foul by factories [and towns] that freely sluice their noxious wastes into any nearby flow .... We ctre pumping enough poisons into our environment - and into our bone and flesh - to threaten the survival of the species within two or three decades." This water pollution problem can be improved by the treatment and purification of sewage and industrial wastes. For almost one hundred years doctors in North Carolina have been concerned about water pollution. They organized and served on county boards ofhealth. They worked and educated to eliminate "privies" in thickly settled areas, to get communities to create water and sewer services, and to eliminate unsanitary conditions that might cause epidemics. In I89I "the State Board of Health was given responsibility for protecting streams used as sources of public water supplies from municipal sewage ... " but little attention was given to the pollution of other streams by industrial wastes. On August IO, I927, a conference was held at Canton, North Carolina, at the request of the State Health Officer of Tennessee. Present were Mr. Reuben Robertson, president of the Champion Paper and Fibre Company, officials of the North Carolina State Board of Health, and the district engineer of the United States Public Health Service. The meeting concerned possible measures for correction of pollution of the Pigeon River in the interest of protecting the water supplies of Tennessee from wastes emitted by the Champion Paper and Fibre Company. Thus as early as I927 water pollution was recognized as an interstate matter. In the earlier decades of this century conservationists were concerned about the preservation of the forests. By I939 the protection of forests and timber was under relative control. Industries were induced to come to the mountains, population increased, and the water pollution problem was magnified. Little effort was made to stop stream pollution by industrial plants until the present stream sanitation law was passed by the General Assembly in I95 I. The act created a Stream Sanitation Committee and required it to establish water quality standards �That All May Live J I 17 in keeping with "best usage," to study pollution of the state's waters, to classify the waters in the public interest, and to develop a stream pollution control program. Articles began to appear in the Asheville Citizen under such titles as "Problem of Stream Pollution," (1951), "TVA Claims Three Plants Pollute Streams in Western North Carolina" (1953), "Polluted French Broad Blemish on Western North Carolina Scenery" (1957), "Plan to Abate French Broad Valley Stream Pollution Drafted" (1958), "Fifty Towns and Industries Filed Plan for Pollution Control" (1960), "Good Progress in Cleaning Western North Carolina Streams (Champion Spending $J,OOo,ooo, Hendersonville $r,ooo,ooo, Enka and Buncombe County $7,500,ooo)" (1963), "North Carolina Has Spent over $2oo,ooo,ooo on Water Pollution in Fifteen Years" (1966), "State Water and Air Control Councils Appointed" (1967), "Twenty Projects to Stop Stream Pollution- to Remove Damage of Pesticides" (1968). The French Broad River Basin encompasses 2825 square miles in North Carolina and it is a major part of the Tennessee River system. The North Carolina portion of the basin contains the French Broad, the Pigeon, and the Nolichucky rivers and their tributaries. Studies were made in the 1950's of the pollution of the streams, under the auspices of the State Stream Sanitation Committee. The 1950 population was 247,290, of which twentyone percent lived in Asheville. There were eighteen public water systems in the basin serving an estimated population of 149,645 which used 2o,ooo,ooo gallons of water daily. There were thirty points of significant water pollution. Total wastes from these points had an estimated domestic sewage population equivalent of 1,096,280. Only a small percentage of the waste load received treatment before it went into the streams. The basin is rich in natural resources and scenic attractions. It has abundant water power and adequate water supplies to sustain an increased population and additional industries if stream pollution can be controlled. The smaller streams were relatively unpolluted; but the French Broad, Hominy Creek, Pigeon River, Nolichucky River, Tucker Creek, Davidson River, and the North and South Toe Rivers received excessive amounts of waste. The amount of wastes from cities and particularly from industrial plant is frightening, although many communities and the major industrial plants are making efforts to solve their �I I 8 / Part II: A Changing Society pollution problems. The Ecusta Paper Corporation, a branch of Olin Mathieson, in I955 emitted wastes equal to those of a city of 249,000. Part of these wastes were treated, part were not. Asheville drained the majority of its wastes into streams untreated or with only primary treatment. In Asheville and its suburbs are twelve sanitary districts. The wastes and sewage from these and from towns, plants, and schools all the way to Mars Hill, Marshall, and Hot Springs were discharged untreated into streams. In Haywood County the wastes of Canton, Clyde, Waynesville, and Lake Junaluska were discharged into the Pigeon River. In I957 the wastes discharged by the Champion Paper and Fibre Company were equal to those from a population of 624,000. Around Bakersville, Burnsville, Spruce Pine, tremendous amounts of water were used by the mining industry to separate the earth from the minerals. The resultant wastes going into the Nolichucky River extended for a great distance downstream and caused complaints from people living in Tennessee. In I959 all agencies of the Department of Conservation and Development were reorganized in a Department of Water Resources. One of this department's four major divisions, that of Stream Sanitation and Hydrology, is responsible for pollution abatement and control. The Department of Water Resources administers policies concerning stream pollution, ground water supplies, and surface water. The seven-man Board of Water Resources and the seven-man Stream Sanitation Committee have parallel responsibilities. The Stream Sanitation Committee has studied all of the state's sixteen major river basins. By I963 it had adopted "best usage" classifications for all basins and had issued pollution abatement plans for thirteen river basins, ninety-two percent of the state. In I957 the Department of Conservation and Development established a Division of Community Planning to help cities and towns with land-use planning. Resource planning is being conducted by the local Area Development Associations. These are beginning to be effective. The Western North Carolina Regional Planning Commission released its first economic study in I96I. Another study was that of Asheville Township which presented a twenty-year plan for physical development. In this plan "conservation easements" were recommended to induce industries to cooperate. �That All May Live / I I9 Using a grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission, the State Planning Office employed the firm of Rummel, Klepper, and Kahl (I968) to study selected growth areas along interstate and Appalachian Corridor highways. This company's report contained significant information. There are seventy community water systems in the North Carolina portion of Appalachia. Many are outdated or loaded to capacity. They must be enlarged and improved to provide for increasing population and additional industrial plants. Sixty communities now provide sewer services. Twenty-eight of these have satisfactory facilities, twenty-one have under construction or are preparing to construct the needed facilities, two are having financial difficulties, I I7 other unsewered communities need facilities. About $4oo,ooo,ooo for construction by communities will be needed. Of industries, eighty-one have significant water discharges into streams. Of these, sixty-four are providing adequate treatment, seventeen are not. Tourism, present and future, is the lifeblood of the economy of Western North Carolina. The area has the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, extensive fishing and wildlife, recreation facilities, and many summer camps. With its beautiful scenery and its enticing climate, the region has the greatest tourist and vacation attractions in Eastern America. But if tourists are to continue to come to the mountains, towns and plants must study their problems and provide waste treatment facilities. Daily in newspapers and on television there are articles and comments by public men about pollution control. A crusade against pollution was well begun by 1970. Pollution is often an interstate problem. Rivers rising in Western North Carolina flow into Tennessee, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. It was the complaint of Tennessee authorities in I927 that first caused North Carolina health authorities and the Champion Paper and Fibre Company in Canton to become concerned about pollution control. Nevertheless, progress was negligible for many years. Currently the people of Ashe and Alleghany counties are being asked to have acres of their richest farm lands inundated so that pollution wastes can be flushed from the New, the Kanawha, and the Ohio rivers in West Virginia. Local and state agencies must do their parts. The state must pass effective statutes and enforce them effectively. Strong federal laws must �I 20 f Part II: A Changing Society be enacted to control the major polluters: automobiles, factories, cities, and towns. A good example was the Water Quality Act of 1965, which provided for the adoption of water quality standards for interstate and costal waters by all the states. The federal government has the power through its control of interstate commerce, interstate relations, and its taxing powers. Penalties should be sufficiently high to induce compliance, and the statutes should be firmly enforced. Again it must be a uniformly applicable federal program; otherwise states that stringently enforce pollution control might find industries moving to states with less expensive programs of regulation. Furthermore federal funds must be made available, for many communities lack the needed finances to meet their needs. If the federal government will do its part, the State of North Carolina can cooperate through its Department of Conservation and Development, and its Boards of Water and Air Resources with their Sanitation Committees. Local communities and industries must cooperate and expend their own funds to meet their individual responsibilities. �CHAPTER SIX Public Education The great cultural progress made in Western North Carolina since is due largely to the improvement in its schools. The change was statewide and must be seen within the framework of state legislation and judicial opinion. Over half of the General Fund of North Carolina annually now is spent for public education. 1900 "I have visited several places in this Western North Carolina -and have found a kind and hospitable people wherever I have gone. Truly there seems a wide field open ready for the laborer in this portion of our State. Good teachers are wanted .... I am satisfied to cast my lot among this people and if my impressions remain what they are and my school flourishes- this will probably be my home for some time to come." So wrote George F. Dixon to his friend Calvin Wiley, past General Superintendent of Common Schools, indicating that Dixon was opening a subscription school in Watauga County in the year following the end of the Civil War. Such schools were springing up in the mountain region and across the state. The office of General Superintendent of Common Schools had just been abolished by the General Assembly. The county courts were authorized to apply any school taxes collected to subscription schools, which were to be permitted to occupy public schoolhouses to prevent the buildings from falling into decay from nonuse. Private (i.e. subscription) schools did spring up everywhere, but they I2I �122 / Part II: A Changing Society An early school, no windows, no stove, only a hearth for light and heat School terms were short, and boys and girls attended until well along in their teens �Public Education f 123 served only a limited number of children. This was a sad climax to the movement which had been hailed as the first effort of a Southern state to give serious attention to providing a system of public schools for the education of all of its white children. The Literary Fund, founded in 1826, which had been the state's contribution to the support of the schools, had been all but wiped out by the worthlessness of state and Confederate securities, and the Assembly ruled that any moneys remaining be placed in the State Treasury for general expenses. During the remainder of the century the state followed an exploratory pattern, revising the public school law each biennium. The groundwork was laid by the Constitutional Convention of r868, which consisted of eighteen Northern men, fifteen Negroes, sixty-four Radicals (Republicans), and thirteen Conservatives (Democrats). The convention adopted a resolution stating that " ... the interest and happiness of the two races would be best promoted by the establishment of separate schools." The most significant educational provisions of the constitution they wrote were these: "The General Assembly at its first session under this Constitution shall provide by taxation and otherwise for a general and uniform system of public schools, wherein tuition shall be free of charge to all children of the State between the ages of six and twenty-one years. Each county shall be divided into a convenient number of districts in which one or more Public schools shall be taught at least four months in every year; and if the county commissioners of any county shall fail to comply with the aforesaid requirements of this section they be liable to indictment." One of the Northern members of the Constitutional Convention, Samuel S. Ashley of Massachusetts, was elected Superintendent of Public Instruction in r868. He had been in the state only three years, having been sent by the American Missionary Association to conduct a Negro school in Wilmington. It was his responsibility to rebuild the public school system, and he wrote the school law of r 869 to implement the provisions of the constitution. The townships, new subdivisions of the counties provided for by the constitution, were to play an important part in his plan for the operation of the schools. The township board of trustees, elected annually by the registered voters, would receive yearly from the township school committee an estimate of the financial requirements for supporting a fourmonth term for all of its schools each year, and at the annual �I24 / Part II: A Changing Society township meeting would submit it for a vote. If the township voters failed to levy the tax, the committee would forward the estimate to the county commissioners, who were to levy the required taxes under penalty of indictment. The constitutional provision and the law to implement it were excellent, but in I87I the State Supreme Court ruled that such a levy by the county commissioners was not constitutional on the theory that schools were not a necessary expense. While the General Assembly could levy a tax without the consent of the people, so ruled the court, the county commissioners could not do so without the approval of the people. And so the plan failed before it ever got into operation. While the communities could vote a tax, the compulsory aspect of the law was annulled. Lacking the tax monies that were to have been levied by the communities under the constitution, funds provided for the support of public schools by the General Assembly were woefully inadequate. The school law of r867 provided that seventyfive percent of a poll tax of $1.05 would be used for schools and that an additional appropriation of $roo,ooo from the state treasury would be apportioned among the counties. The appropriation was not made in I 868- I 869, but by I 870 a special tax of eight and one-third cents on one hundred dollars valuation was levied to pay the $roo,ooo. Other sources of school funds were taxes on retailers and auctioneers, fines, penalties, forfeitures, and entries of vacant lands and swamp lands. Instead of providing for free public schools the General Assembly in I 87I levied a new statewide tax of six and two-thirds cents on one hundred dollars valuation and a twenty cent poll tax, to supplement the revenue from the existing provision that seventy-five percent of all county and state poll taxes, be allocated to the counties for the support of schools. The funds from these several sources were to provide fifty cents per month for each scholar in any "free school" that might be established. In communities where taxes to support schools were not voted, the "free schools" were often subscription schools. All children who could afford to pay tuition were expected to do so in such a union of private with public schools, and only students unable to pay were admitted free of tuition. Neighborhoods that took the initiative to start a school would receive the state aid, and those that did not would lose their share of the school money, although an amendment in 1873 �Public Education / I25 gave such districts the right to acquire credit for their share of the school money, to be used later. Ashley resigned as superintendent in I87I and was followed in office by a quick succession of other men, but the situation did not change. The incumbent superintendent in 1874 reported the policy thus: "The State does not go into the school districts and establish a school without any effort on the part of the people of the district. It rather aids the people to establish their own school." What the state's policy had created was a voluntary system in which each community could determine the kind of schools and the amount of schooling it wanted to have. Supervision of public schools was practically nonexistent from r865-188I, as there was no local official charged with their operation. An ex ojficio state board of education was provided for by the constitution of 1868. It consisted of the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, state treasurer, auditor, superintendent of public works, superintendent of public instruction, and attorney general. The county board of education was also ex officio, consisting of the county commissioners, with the chairman of the board of county commissioners as chairman of the board of education. This board was to supervise the public schools and to appoint one resident of the county of good moral character and of suitable attainments to be styled the "county examiner." He would examine all applicants for teachers' certificates at the county court house and issue certificates of three grades, to be valid only in the county where issued. Later each county was provided with a board of three examiners. In 1881 county superintendents were provided for, to be elected by joint meetings of the county commissioners and the county boards of magistrates. A law in I 885 required that separate county boards of education be elected by the two abovementioned boards. In spite of their lack of professional education, some of the teachers in the 187o's were engaging in professional activities. In 1872 a State Educational Association was formed at Wilmington. It met in Raleigh for three days in I873, "organized permanently," and adopted a resolution recommending the establishment of permanent county educational organizations. This organizational movement began to be felt even in the western counties, as in Henderson County, where an educational association was formed in 1874. The members at the Raleigh meeting in I 873 prepared a "memorial" to present to the General �I26 J Part II: A Changing Society Assembly stating the improvements needed in the public schools. In 1877 Governor Vance presented such a memorial to the General Assembly, asking that body to give its attention to education. The school law of 1877 included two significant provisions. One was to create two normal schools, the first at the state university for white students and the second at Fayetteville, for Negroes (the normal schools will be discussed later). The other provision was to permit any township containing a city of 5,000 or more inhabitants, upon the petition of one hundred "respectable citizens," to vote upon the levying of an annual tax for support of one or more graded schools in such township. Greensboro and Charlotte already had graded schools which had been established under clauses in their charters, but there was no township in Western North Carolina that could qualify in population for a graded school district under this law. In 1879, however, the General Assembly passed a law directing the commissioners of Buncombe County, upon the petition of one hundred "respectable citizens" who were freeholders of the city of Asheville, to submit to the voters the question of a special school tax. Not until 1887 did Asheville approve the plan, and even then "the opposition was keen and the proposal carried by one vote." The town had some excellent private schools and some of the most influential citizens disapproved of public schools. In I 879 Governor Vance became a United States Senator and Thomas Jordan Jarvis, Lieutenant Governor, succeeded to the office of Governor, to which he was reelected two years later. His six years were to be felt in Western North Carolina in the completion of the Western North Carolina Railroad, the establishment of the State Geological Survey, the Agricultural Experiment Station, and some improvement of the public schools. In 1881 he described to the legislature the current condition of the state's schools, stressing the need for additional normal schools and increased taxation. The assembly increased the tax rate to twelve and one-half cents per one hundred dollars valuation and the poll tax to thirty-seven and one-half cents. Until uniform schooling and compulsory attendance grew out of the state's increasing awareness of its responsibility for �Public Education / 127 education, the development of schools was not systematic. The opportunities for an education depended on many things: local initiative in providing the funds and buildings; efforts of individuals in founding academies and institutes, and of philanthropists and religious denominations as well; concern of teachers in supplementing the meager terms of the public schools; and ambition of parents which made them support local institutions where they existed and send their children away to school where they did not. In the mountain counties where money had always been scarce, the people of most districts made little effort to provide adequate schools. I. N. Benners, County Treasurer of Haywood County, in 1875 reported, "Our school system is a failure .... The people are too poor for more taxes, and will not vote to tax themselves; consequently there can be little more than a two months' school taught with the money provided by law." And from Rutherford County came the complaint, "If the people would submit to be taxed to aid the school fund our schools would soon be built up, teachers would be encouraged to prepare for teaching, and the whole community would take an interest in the work of education." The responsibility to provide separate schools for Negroes created two problems. Mitchell County was like several other mountain counties in that it had too few Negro children in any district to make a school; consequently it used its share of the money assigned by the state for the education of Negro children to provide one Negro school centrally taught. The other problem was the statewide opposition of many prominent persons to public support for education, persons who held that it was "robbery to tax one man to educate another man's children" and that the burden of educating the Negroes who paid such a small portion of the taxes was too heavy for the improverished South to bear. In contrast to the few schools maintained for Negroes, more and more schools for white children began eventually to operate, and, owing partly to the poor facilities for transportation, in Western North Carolina more than eight hundred public schools of the one-room variety opened their doors for an average term of from six to ten weeks. The township boards submitted to local demand for more schools. From Unaka Township, Cherokee County, came the complaint, "We find that every patron would like to have the school kept near his �128 / Part II: A Changing Society door." Thus the school term was necessarily shortened to make the available funds stretch to pay all of the teachers. In most of the public schools the term was brief. Often the regular term was held during the "dormant season" when there was the least amount of farm work to be done. It ended by or before Christmas. Following the free term, a subscription school was often offered to supplement the work already completed. Sometimes the same teacher would conduct the public school and the subscription school. As parents were required to pay the teachers in the latter, a limited number of children attended, and the teaching could be made much more effective than in the public school. Even adults sometimes attended the subscription schools. Another supplemental school sometimes held was the writing school, which lasted approximately ten days, during which teacher and pupils concentrated on penmanship. In Western North Carolina during the eighteen-seventies one of the greatest incentives to the establishment of better schools was the Peabody Fund, created in 1867 by George Peabody, American millionaire with a banking house m London. He gave$ 1,ooo,ooo to assist educational effort in the impoverished South, to which he added another $1 ,ooo,ooo in 1869. A later gift of almost $1 ,soo,ooo in Florida and Mississippi bonds was lost because those states repudiated their bonds. The fund was kept intact for thirty years by a board of trustees which decided how the income should be spent. No money was appropriated as charity aid to the indigent. It was "used for the promotion and encouragement of intellectual, moral, or industrial education among the young of the more destitute portions of the Southern and Southeastern states" ofboth races. The board gave only about twenty-five percent in any instance; the rest had to be raised locally. The purpose was to promote community responsibility for education and for the training of teachers. The two general agents of the board, the Reverend Dr. Barnas Sears, and after Sears' death,J.L.M. Curry, became well-known figures in the educational world of the South. Only a subscription school could qualify for aid from this fund because of the high standards. A Peabody School was required to conform to the following criteria: to have at least one hundred students, two teachers, a ten-month term, and an average attendance of eighty-five percent. In 1871 Mars Hill College, then a secondary school, received three hundred dollars, �Public Education J 129 and Montanic Institute in Buncombe County was allowed a like amount in 1874. Franklin and South Hominy schools each received $450 in 1874, and Asheville, Hayesville, Marshall, and Pigeon Valley $300 each. The following year Webster School, Roan Mountain, Pisgah, Waynesville, Reems Creek, Laurel Fork, Laurel Hill (Clay County), and Cheoah were allotted $300 each. By 1879 the Peabody Fund was distributing funds only to graded schools, of which Western North Carolina had none. But, in those days when state funds were inadequate, the incentive offered by the Peabody Fund had encouraged the operation of some excellent schools in the mountain area. Buncombe County in the 188o's had better than average schools, because of the availability of capable young women, residents of the districts who had studied in the good private schools. Children paid the usual fifty cents monthly tuition. The county had seventy-two districts for white children and sixteen for colored. In about two-thirds of the schools only the first four grades were offered, while most of the remainder provided seven grades. The Asheville Democrat in I 889 commented: "By now every district in the county has some sort of a house. Several of these ... arc not comfortable, while a large majority, if they were furnished with desks and other school furniture, would be considered very good school buildings. The popular size for building them at this time is 24 feet wide and 40 feet long by 12 feet high ... from floor to overhead ceiling .... This house requires six windows with twelve lights each 12 x I 8, three windows on a side. In the back of the room [is] ... a stage. Here the teacher examines his classes.... This house will hold, on the main floor, 40 desks and leave room for one three foot center aisle and two narrow aisles next to the wall. ... "Plain desks made of dressed boards cost 75 cents each .... The entire cost of the building [including desks] may be met with $330.00." Thirteen new county schools had been built that year. The county board furnished $1.25 per child, and the monthly tuition of not more than fifty cents sufficed. Mrs. Lillian Thomasson made a study of the records of J. S. Smiley of Swain County who was first a teacher in a subscription school, then county school examiner, and finally county superintendent for eight years. As superintendent he visited each school in the county and was paid for the number of days he worked. In 1881 he traveled two hundred miles in his visiting �I 30 / Part II: A Changing Society and spent seven days examining teachers and wntmg reports of which the following is typical: "First school visited was De Hart's District No.4 of Swain County August roth I88r. Framed house, but no blackboard. Teacher found sitting during exercises. 'Seraglio,' 'intaglio,' 'biliary' mispronounced by the teacher. No. of pupils in the district was no. present on the day visited 3 r. Seats in school house in district No. 4 very inferior slab benches not low enough to be comfortable." One of Smiley's earlier reports written when he was a teacher illustrates the split term necessitated by the farm season: "The Charleston [now Bryson City] School District No. I in Charleston Township began August I4, I 876, with a very promising attendance. We had forty before we stopped for fodder, and what added to the beauty of the school was the average age of the pupils which was only a fraction over ten years .... Since fodder our largest attendance was 25. All the children learned well." [signed] J. S. Smiley. Swain County had seventeen school districts for white children and one for Negroes during the eighteen-eighties. In the r883 session only thirteen schools were taught, owing to the shortage of teachers. About seventy percent of the children were enrolled, but the average attendance was only twenty-five percent, chiefly because of a whooping cough epidemic. In that year the tuition, $r.Io per scholar, plus the apportionment of school funds provided for a term of four and one-half months. An interesting contrast of a public school and a "subscription school" in Wilkes county was written by Lawrence D. Washington in his Confessions of a Schoolmaster. In the former, girls sat on the right, boys on the left, separated by a narrow aisle. Some had slates on which they "ciphered." Books in use had been in the families for perhaps two generations so that there was no uniformity of texts except for several of Webster's "Blue-backed Spellers." Children were dressed in homespun and their shoes were home-made of cowhide. A roaring fire was of little help because the door had to be left open to provide light. The room was windowless, with here and there a log sawed out for light. A plank hung to the wall with leather hinges was used as a writing desk by fire or six pupils at a time. No classes were held in arithmetic or reading. Instead, each child would go to the schoolmaster for help and recitation. At the close of the day came the only real class, a spelling match when the children stood in a row and "spelled down," competing for a "head mark." Some who could not read could spell by heart every �Public Education / 13 r word in the "Blue-backed Speller." In comparison, at Edgewood Academy Washington found double desks, blackboards, a large stove in the center of the room, and a carefully worked out course of study. The tap of a bell brought an orderly group of young people into the room in double file. Opening exercises consisted of a hymn, reading of a psalm, roll call, and then recitation by classes. There was instruction in penmanship, geography, reading, spelling, map drawing, and English grammar. The first state-managed educational institution in Western North Carolina was the School for the Deaf and Dumb in Morganton, created in a mood of social concern by the General Assembly in r89I. The School for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind at Raleigh which had been in operation since I 846 was too crowded to accept all who applied and was too far from the western counties to serve them adequately. The school at Morganton included dormitory, school building, and cottages for those who operated the farm and dairy. The course of study was that of the public schools of the state. The Oral Department was established for those who could acquire speech and speech reading; others were taught in the Manual Department: for boys, art and free-hand drawing, industrial training, printing and typesetting, wood-working, shoemaking, and farm and garden; girls were taught household work, sewing and dressmaking, and cooking. All were taught the academic subjects. The Report of the Board of Directors in 1900 included an appeal for the establishment of a school for the feeble-minded: "Many of the children could be treated and their conditions much improved, and some of them could be trained and to some extent educated, under suitable surroundings." In the 196o's such an institution was created in Morganton by the state - the Western Carolina Center. The state did not have a school system; the opportumt1es for schooling varied from county to county and from district to district. Near the turn of the century a new era began, when the Legislature (in 1899) appropriated $roo,ooo to be apportioned among the counties on the basis of population. The next session of the Legislature (r9or) appropriated the $roo,ooo plus a second $ IOO,ooo known as the "Equalizing Fund," to be distributed �r 32 / Part II: A Changing Society to the counties where it was needed in order to extend the school term to four months, as nearly as might be. An act was passed to allow cities and towns and special tax districts outside towns and even whole counties to vote taxes to extend the term to four months. The farmers' legislature of I89I and the fusion (Populist and Republican) legislature of I895 had established state responsibility for higher education for women, for teachers, and for Negroes, and had created the School for the Deaf and Dumb at Morganton. In I 898 the Democrats regained control of the legislature as a result of an intensive campaign against Negro suffrage. Active in the canvass were a group of young men including Charles B. Aycock and Locke Craig of Asheville, two future governors. Aycock became a party leader. The legislature in I899 approved a constitutional amendment similar to those passed by Mississippi and eventually by eight Southern states. It made literacy a qualification for voting, with the provision that persons whose direct ancestors had been entitled to vote on or before I 867 would be permitted to register to vote at any time within the next eight years (the Grandfather Clause), and to vote, provided they paid their poll taxes on time. Aycock worked closely with the legislature of I 899 that appropriated the aforementioned $Ioo,ooo to be distributed among the counties for school support. In the election of August 2, I900, North Carolina's voters approved the literacy test amendment and elected Aycock governor. Fortunately for the cause of educational progress, Governor Charles B. Aycock (I90I-I905) promised during his campaign in 1900: "If you vote for me, ... I shall devote the four years of my official term to the upbuilding of the public schools of North Carolina. I shall endeavor for every child in the State to get an education." He began his educational crusade immediately, offering his services as a speaker to groups of people who were promoting a local tax levy for schools. Meanwhile other forces were at work in North Carolina and the entire South to provide better educational opportunities. Beginning in I898 with a gathering at Capon Springs, West Virginia, composed chiefly of ministers, the Conference for Southern Education was held annually with John Ogden, Northern philanthropist, as president. A number of wealthy Northerners expressed interest chiefly in Negro education. In I90I the Conference met at Winston-Salem, and Aycock �Public Education / 133 welcomed the guests. The decision to wage a campaign for free schools for all the people in the South led to the formation of an executive committee called the Southern Education Board. It would be largely a publicity and propraganda agency and would not have large sums at its disposal. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who attended the Winston-Salem meeting, persuaded his father to make large gifts to Southern education (a total of $s3,ooo,ooo) and another board, called the General Education Board, was created to disburse the funds. Many of the same men served on both boards. Three North Carolinians on the Southern Education Board were Edwin A. Alderman, Charles D. Mciver, and Walter Hines Page. The work of Alderman and Mciver had attracted the interest of John Ogden, and in 1901 he invited the two to visit him at his summer home at Kennebunkport, Maine. As a result of this visit, the campaign of the Southern Education Board in North Carolina was launched with Mciver as chairman. Fortythree educational workers of the state gathered at Raleigh in February, 1902, to launch the campaign. Governor Aycock presided and organized the drive for better schools. The program included local taxation, consolidation of school districts, building and equipping better schoolhouses, longer school terms, and better salaries for teachers. Members of committees formed at the Raleigh meeting were to send weekly articles to newspapers of the state advocating the above program, and ministers were asked to preach one sermon per year on public school education. The public campaign was carried on by speakers who were provided funds by the Southern Education Board, and especially by the governor and the state superintendent of public instruction, who served in the campaign without extra pay. Superintendent Thomas F. Toon died in 1902 as a result of over-exertion in the campaign, and Aycock appointed J. Y. Joyner, professor at the State Normal and Industrial School, to the position, which he held until 1919. The private campaign, as described by Joyner in his Biennial Report for 1902-1903, 1903-1904, was carried by friends of education into their communities as they moved about among the people, around the church door, and on the public highway. When Aycock began his campaign, he believed that the only way to improve rural schools was by local taxes voted into effect by the people. The executive campaign committee consisting of the governor, Mciver, Toon, and later Joyner, �134 / Part II: A Changing Society A multiple teacher school, vintage 1906 concentrated its efforts on commumt1es that seemed eager to take action for better schools. As Aycock traveled and lectured he came to realize how great the need was for better schoolhouses. He had asked the legislature in 1901 to allow the principal of the Literary Fund to be loaned for the schools if the ~hoo,ooo appropriation were not paid in full. The request was not allowed; however, in 1903 the Literary Fund of approximately ~hoo,ooo was made a loan fund to finance the construction of school buildings. This fund had been provided for in the Constitution of I 868; worthlessness of the securities held in the original fund was known. The new fund consisted of the investment of proceeds from sources such as sale of swamp lands and of grants of land from the federal government, and grants and bequests from individuals. Until 1903 only the interest had been used. Under the new provision as much as one half of the cost of new buildings would be lent to any district, although no loan would be made to a district with fewer than sixty-five children of school age unless the size of the district was necessarily limited by scarcity of population or other unsurmountable barriers - an inducement toward consolidation. �Public Education / r 3 5 Some Western North Carolina districts experimented with consolidation. When Granite Falls in Caldwell County consolidated two districts, the average attendance of the two districts increased from fifty-four to one hundred-thirty. Six teachers were required where three had sufficed before, and the school term was extended from fourteen to twenty-eight weeks. The county superintendent wrote, "Consolidation has been a great blessing for this community. The effort has also been good for local taxation. Gradation and classification have been improved and a greater number of grades added." Wilkes County reported consolidating two schools, increasing enrollment from thirty-five to sixty-two and average attendance from eighteen to forty-six. One of the two teachers was eliminated, thus enabling the school term to be extended from twelve to sixteen weeks. Wilkes County had great need for consolidation, as it had seventy-four schools for white children and forty for Negroes in 1904, with fifteen additional districts that had no school houses. Compulsory attendance was experimented with under a law of 1903 for Macon County. In the one year of its operation the average attendance at public schools in the county increased twenty per cent and enrollment increased 34-4 percent. This was four times the statewide increase in enrollment and twice the increase in average attendance. Not until 1913, however, did the legislature pass a compulsory attendance law for the entire state. Joyner wrote in one of his biennial reports concerning teachers' salaries: "As long as the annual salary paid the teacher who works with the immortal stuff of mind and soul is less than that paid the rudest workers in wood and iron, less than that paid the man that shoes your horse or plows your com or paints your house or keeps your jail, the best talent can not be secured and kept in the teaching profession - the teaching profession must continue to be made in many instances but a stepping-stone to more profitable employments or a means of pensioning inefficient and needy mediocrity." In 1904 the average white teacher's salary in North Carolina was $29.05 per month and that of Negro teachers was $22.27, the average term for white children was seventeen weeks and for Negroes sixteen weeks. An examination of the table of teachers salaries and terms in Western North Carolina shows that while the schools in the western countries were keeping pace with others in the state in extending their terms, the average salaries �136 / Part II: A Changing Society were below those for rural schools in the state as a whole. It will also be noticed that salaries of Negro teachers were much lower than those of white teachers. Joyner believed that this differential was justified. He wrote: " ... their teachers are not so well qualified and have not spent so much money on their education, their expenses of living are much less, and therefore, they do not need and ought not to have as much per capita for the education of their children. [He continued, however] There is more real danger of doing the Negro an injustice in the apportionment of the school fund, even after considering all these things, by withholding his equitable part, than of doing the white race any injustice by giving him too much." Comparison of the education of Negro children in Western North Carolina with that in other parts of the state shows that a Negro child in Western North Carolina was as likely to be enrolled in school as one in other parts of the state but not as regular in attendance- due to the long distance he would have to travel, since there were fewer Negro schools. A study of the results of the two educational crusades, that begun in 1889 and the one of Aycock's administration, shows that they were effective in reaching the school population. Only four and sixtenths percent of white children of school age and thirteen and TEACHERS' SALARIES AND TERMS IN 1904 IN SOME WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA COUNTIES White Colored Term in Weeks City Counties Male Female Male Female White Alleghany $23.50 $22.27 $20.00 Buncombe 35.00 32.30 25·35 $2s.oo $36.00 Caldwell 28.63 23.78 22.14 19.37 Cherokee 24.00 30.38 30.38 26.25 Graham 28.94 19.!6 Haywood 28.75 28.00 25.00 20.00 Jackson 28.52 23.93 2!.00 22.50 Macon 25.96 23.17 2!.00 23.66 Madison 28.42 2).25 22.00 23.66 Polk 27.53 2).00 20.00 19.50 Surry 24.00 2J.90 22.50 20.00 15.00 15.00 Watauga 24.16 20.83 Yancey 24.79 18.64 rs.66 12.)0 * not available Biennial Report, 1904 SOURCE: Colored White Colored $36.oo 24.00 * 20 !7.66 16 r6 r6.8o 15.72 r8.72 17 15.20 r6.48 16 20 20 IS * * 14.86 16.oo 16 15 15.20 13·33 16 20 �Public Education / I 37 two-tenths percent of Negro children of the Western North Carolina counties were classed as illiterate in I904. In I922 Edgar W. Knight wrote an article concerning education in the Southern mountains for School and Society. He said that forty-five percent of the population was illiterate. This was not true of the young people who had benefited from the recently improved schools. He said that less than forty percent were in attendance, which was true only when applied to the entire school census, persons six through twenty-one years old. In I907 the General Assembly passed a law permtttmg any county board of education to establish and maintain for a term of not less than five months per school year one or more high schools. An appropriation of $40,785 was made to aid in establishing such schools. In Western North Carolina dormitories and mess halls were essential to the plan because of the long distances students must travel. Credit toward room and board was given to those bringing raw provisions from home, and private donations were invited from members of the communities because the state appropriaton was so small. By I9I I there were thirty-six rural high schools in the twenty-four counties ofWestern North Carolina (Avery County was created in I9II). Most of the high schools had a thirty-two week term, although one was in operation only seventeen weeks. Most of them offered only a two-year course, andjust five had more than one teacher, four others utilizing a teacher from the elementary grades on a part-time basis. Enrollment ranged from a low of seventeen to one hundred three at Hendersonville, which had a three-year course, three teachers, and a thirty-five week term. In I9I7 the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that high schools were part of the public school system and were subject to the requirements of the constitution, thus reversing the 1 87I decision of the court that schools were not necessary and that county commissioners could not levy taxes to support them. In I92I there were only six counties in Western North Carolina that did not have at least one accredited high school, Yancey, Mitchell, Graham, Clay, Ashe, and Avery. In the following year two high schools were accredited in Ashe County, one in A very, and one in Yancey. A good many of the accredited high schools were private ones, but there were sixteen graded schools in the �Hayesville High School. Public high schools began with the law of 1907 area, all publicly supported. City and town high schools were superior to rural ones. Of the eight in the twenty-four county area in 1922 five had four year courses and five had thirty-six week terms. Among the unusual schools founded by dedicated individuals for the improvement of mountain living, two examples are the Stearns schools of Columbus, Polk County, and Crossnore School, A very County. A wholesome combination of state and private support was to be found in Polk County beginning in 1891. Mr. Frank Stearns of Cleveland, Ohio, spent some time in Columbus, North Carolina. Charmed with the scenery and impressed with the native intelligence of the people and the lack of educational opportunity, he provided a two-story building for an elementary school. He purchased modern desks and supplemented the public school fund to extend the term to six months, with no tuition charge. A year later he built another two-room building for kindergarten and library. Four years later he bought land for a campus and had a new building erected to house a secondary school which was named the Central Industrial Institute. A board of trustees directed its affairs under a charter from the General Assembly. Thus all grades from kindergarten through high school were offered. A small tuition fee was required of students in the upper grades. Dormitories for boys and girls, a music department, and a library were all provided by Mr. Stearns. In 1916 the school district assumed �Public Education / I 39 responsibility for the school and voted bonds to build a new high school building which was named Stearns High School. A consolidated high school later replaced it, and the former school plant houses an elementary school. Dr. Mary Martin Sloop's work in Avery County began in the year that the county was formed, I9II. Daughter of a Davidson College professor, Mary Martin attended the Woman's Medical College of Philadelphia and hoped to go to Africa as a missionary. Instead, in 1908 she married Dr. Eustice H. Sloop, and in I 9 I I they began their career of social and medical work, first at Plumtree and then at Crossnore. Mrs. Sloop got a new one-room school built. Gradually additional rooms were added and boarding students were accepted. Money derived from the sale of old clothes contributed by people from all over the nation helped to finance the plant and the social work. At first, girls who were far enough along in their studies were sent to Edgar Tufts' school in Banner Elk, but eventually high school work was offered at Crossnore. In 1917 Crossnore School was chartered as a non-profit organization. Weaving was a major handicraft. Dr. Sloop said, "Our aim is to keep alive an almost forgotten art; to cherish in the young people of the mountains a reverence for the art; to provide a means of livelihood for women and girls as well as to furnish homes with beautiful and symbolic material." The weaving department operated under the SmithHughes Law. Crossnore is a public school as well as a craft school. The school property consists of 250 acres, some thirty buildings, living accommodations for some two hundred children and other buildings necessary for elementary and high school; the new A very County Consolidated High School has absorbed the high school at Crossnore. The county, the state, and the school provide elementary education for the children of the community and the boarding children. School busses bring in those who do not live at the school. The Garrett Memorial Hospital is at the edge of the school grounds. By 19I3 the Equalizing Fund was earmarked to lengthen all school terms in the state to six months or as long as the increased funds from a statewide property tax of five cents on the hundred dollar valuation would permit, and from that time on, efforts were made to establish the six months' term. In 1919 a new equalization plan based on the comparative wealth of the counties was adopted. A statewide revaluation of property was made in 1920, but the effects were undone by a special session of the �140 / Part II: A Changing Society legislature which ruled that county comm1ssloners might readjust valuations. During that decade constant readjustment of the amount of the fund was necessary because of changes in property values, at the same time that school costs were rising rapidly; from $8oo,ooo in 1919 the fund was increased to $5,250,000 in 1929. In 1925 the county tax rates varied from twenty-one cents per hundred dollars valuation to $r.o6 for the counties' part of the current operating expense. Twenty-two of the twenty-four western counties benefited from the Equalizing Fund. McDowell and Buncombe Counties, being industrialized, had increased their wealth and could have low tax rates, while agricultural property fell in value during the prolonged agncultural depression of the 192o's. By 1929 a number of rural high schools which had been built with funds from bond issues were threatened with having to reduce the length of their terms because revenues were not sufficient. In that year a "Tax Reduction Fund" of $r,25o,ooo was appropriated for these high schools. Blanford Dougherty, president of the Appalachian State Normal School as it was then called, is credited with having influenced the creation of the state funds for schools. In an address that he gave at the Lansing School in Ashe County he said: "I am one of those that believe that every child from the crest of the Blue Ridge, the Tennessee line, down through piedmont North Carolina, down ... to the sands of the sea, should have as good a chance as any other child, whether he lives in the city or in the country, whether he lives in the mountains or on the plains .... I submit ... that it is not right for this State to allow an 85q tax in Watauga County and a 29q tax in Forsyth County to run a six month's school if we claim, and are sincere in our claim, that we have a State system of education." This was not an unusual statement for Dougherty to make, as he had worked for what he called the "Gospel of Equalization" since 1912 and was a member of the State Equalization Board established in 1927. In 19 3 I the state abandoned equalization and put into use complete state support of public schools for a six months' term. This meant that North Carolina would have two school systems, a state six months' system and one of local control in counties where there was an extended term which varied from one to three months. The extended term was supported by local levies and the Tax Reduction Fund, which was continued and increased �Public Education / 141 by the General Assembly of 193 I. By that time the nationwide depression was causing greater difficulty in the support of schools. Counties were in default on their obligations and teachers were unpaid. Then in 1933 in North Carolina by increasing state school funds and decreasing costs, the principle of complete state support for an eight month term was established. Teacher loads were increased, salaries were reduced, fewer principals were allotted, and bus routes were redirected for economy's sake. Schools were to be supported completely by the state. All special tax districts, special charter or otherwise, were declared nonexistent and no taxes could be levied in said districts for school operating purposes except for courses in home economics, agriculture, and vocational subjects where such taxes were already being levied. (These courses were partially supported by the federal government under the Smith-Hughes Law.) City units with one thousand or more school population were allowed to continue as administrative units under a superintendent. Counties were to serve as administrative units under county superintendents, and they were to be redistricted with consolidation for convenience and economy. Administrative units were permitted by an approved election to improve the standards of the schools for a term of no more than 180 days. Management and control of school buses was to be by the state. Salaries for all personnel were lowered and rural supervisors were eliminated. All school expenditures were to be standardized by the state. Later as conditions improved permissive legislation allowed administrative units to vote special taxes. By 1943 the school term for the entire state was extended to nine months. The school law of 1933 was of tremendous benefit to the rural schools of Western North Carolina. Nevertheless, its effect on a city such as that of Asheville was catastrophic. From 1920 to 1924 during the city superintendence of W. L. Brooker great progress had been made by the schools of Asheville. Four new buildings were built after a bond issue of $sso,ooo was voted in 1920, and a new levy of ten cents on a hundred dollar valuation was approved by the voters. West Asheville was annexed and Asheville enjoyed a "boom". Again in 1924 a bond issue was voted, this one also for $sso,ooo, and in 1926 still another of $1,50o,ooo was approved. The superintendent of schools recommended that a new high school plant and a separate junior college building be erected. In 1929 when the high school was completed with the junior college housed in �142 / Part II: A Changing Society the same building, Asheville's schools were among the best in the state. Music and creative art, home economics, manual training, and physical education were offered in all of the school grades, and the high school had a commercial department. An administrative staff numbering eighteen persons served the system. Then came the failure of the Central Bank and Trust Company and other banks in the area, and the depression became acute. The junior college was discontinued and several school buildings were closed. The law of 1933 reduced the budget for the city school system from the $763,628 figure of 1929-1930 to $183,761 in 1934-1935. Such courses as manual training, music, and physical education which had been offered since 1905 were eliminated. Consolidation of the Public schools, an objective of the Board of Equalization established in 1927 and of subsequent legislation, was facilitated by the building of the "Scott Roads," HOW THE TAX EQUALIZATION PROGRAM HELPED TWENTY-TWO OF THE COUNTIES OF WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA TO MAINTAIN A SIX MONTH SCHOOL TERM County Necessary Rate Without Fund Actual 1925 Rate Total Reduction Alleghany Ashe Avery Burke Caldwell Cherokee Clay Graham Haywood Henderson Jackson Macon Madison Mitchell Polk Rutherford Surry Swain Transylvania Watauga Wilkes Yancey -75 ·7S !.42 .5S .SI ·93 !.5 I !.02 ·79 ·76 ·97 I.I9 .96 .So !.20 .6S .61 .62 .S2 !.02 I. I 5 ·75 -47 -54 .91 -54 .70 .60 r.o6 .90 .70 .65 ·73 .64 -72 -70 .90 .60 ·53 -55 .62 .So .66 -55 .2S .24 -51 .04 Source: Biennial Report, 1924-1925, 1925-1926. .1 I ·33 -45 .!2 .09 .II .24 ·55 .24 .10 .30 .OS .OS .07 .21 .23 ·49 .20 �Public Education / 143 paved secondary roads, during the administration of Governor Kerr Scott in the early 1950's. Subsequently most of the one to four-teacher schools passed out of use. School buses could then carry children to institutions having in most cases a teacher to a grade. The newest development is in the building of mammoth rural high schools serving from a half to a full county. An example is Tuscola Senior High School, which had 1,045 pupils and fifty-four staff members when it opened in 1966. Located on a hilltop overlooking Lake Junaluska in Haywood County, it was named for the one-room school that was once located near by. It replaced three high schools and received students from two additional schools as it serves the entire western half of the county. Its campus of forty-two acres is large enough to accommodate all of the activities associated with a modern secondary school, and it offers "rich programs suited to students with diverse interests, backgrounds, and abilities.'' Equalization did not apply to Negro schools as it did to those for white children. It is appalling that as late as 1924 there were in Western North Carolina only two graded schools for Negroes which included high school grades: Asheville, with 217 students, and Hendersonville, with 19. A beginning was being made in Jackson and Wilkes counties with county training schools. The "county training school movement" for Negro youth began in 191 r throughout the South in an effort to provide one good school in each county, to which capable students might go after finishing the work at a one-teacher rural school. The Slater Fund paid $soo to any county that would match it with $750 and run the school for ten months. While the schools were not high schools, their offerings were eventually extended to a four year term. By the 1933-1934 term there were ten Negro high schools in the twenty-four counties of Western North Carolina, but most of them were inadequate. There were thirteen teachers in the Negro high schools of Buncombe County, but most of the other counties had only one or two teachers in their Negro high schools. In 1921 the state set up schedules for teacher certification and salaries, but the Negro schedule provided salaries for Negro teachers that were much lower than for white teachers with equal preparation. Both Negro and white teachers were in most cases paid below the scale for some time to come. During the 1943-1944 term, equalization of salaries for Negro and white teachers was achieved, depending on certificates �144 / Part II: A Changing Society ~~ ~ ~ ....... "..,..,..,..., ............ -- ..... ~..,.,. Architect's drawing of a new consolidated high school- one of several modern educational plants in jackson County held. In counties where the number of Negro children was insufficient to justify operating a high school, provisions were made by the boards of education to send Negro students to nearby counties where high schools were in existence. Integration was the solution to the problem of the small number of Negroes in most of the counties. As new rural consolidated high schools were built after the U .S. Supreme Court's decision in 1954 in the case of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, integration of the races took place. In Buncombe County a gradual program of desegregation was adopted from the first through the eighth grade, and Asheville schools were largely integrated. In January 1970 the Asheville system established "busing" of students to achieve complete integration. Graham County, which has no Negroes, integrated Indian and white school populations in 1960. Yancey abolished its one Negro school in 1962, Jackson County its one Negro school and Madison County its three in 1964. In 1965 twelve counties closed the doors of their Negro schools and sent the students to other public institutions in the counties; Burke eliminated all of its six N egro schools in that year. Other counties followed until in 1970 there was only one all-Negro school, New Hope Elementary School, which was integrated in September, 1970. Since 1880 education has been provided for Cherokee Indian children. In that year the Friends Meeting of Indiana agreed to establish schools for the Eastern Cherokees, including an industrial school, and to operate them for ten years. In I 892 the federal government took direct charge of the schools and has operated them since that time. An elementary day school was eventually established in each of the townships, with an elementary and a high school at the Cherokee Agency. The last named included both boarding and day students. Although the Cherokees have a written language of their own, their alphabet having been �Public Education / 145 invented by Sequoyah, a member of the tribe, during the I 82o's, the English language is used in the schools. Cherokee children may go to public schools if they choose, and a scholarship fund enables many to go to college. During the 1950's the Board of Higher Education was created to coordinate the work of tax-supported colleges in the state. This board helped to establish a series of junior colleges and at the same time the State Board of Education founded a number of industrial education centers. In 1961 Governor Sanford appointed the Carlyle Commission on Education beyond the High School, with Irving Carlyle of Winston-Salem as chairman. Its recommendations were adopted by the General Assembly in 1963. The law provided for a system of community colleges, technical institutes, and industrial education centers under the State Board of Education but with local boards of trustees. This was just what was needed in Western North Carolina. The area had colleges and junior colleges, but they reached only a minority of the young people. There was no institution designed to teach the skills needed in the developing technological society. Because of the difficulties of travel, high schools had not been consolidated sufficiently to enable them to have the latest expensive equipment needed for effective vocational training. The new institutions were to operate on an open-door policy, admitting any adult and providing whatever training he needed. An epoch-making decision of the General Assembly in 1967 made four of the senior state-supported colleges "universities." Among these were Appalachian and Western Carolina colleges. East Carolina College, which had grown phenomenally since World War II, had asked the legislature for independent university status. The consolidated university consisted of institutions at Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Greensboro, and Charlotte. Governor Moore and the State Board of Higher Education opposed the granting of university status to East Carolina College and the alternate proposal that the three former teachers colleges be made regional universities. When the latter proposal came up for a vote the Senate added an amendment including the predominately Negro Agricultural and Technical College at Greensboro, and the measure passed. Now that Western North Carolina has two universities that will through the years develop liberal arts and professional training other than for teachers, the bright young people with the potential to become leaders �146 / Part II: A Changing Society Aerial view of a portion of the Appalachian State University campus HUGH MORTON PHOTO This view of a portion of the Western Carolina University campus shows its magnificent setting �Public Education J 147 will have the opportunity to complete their educations near home, at less expense and with less likelihood of their outmigration afterward. The regional universities are surveying their community service capability and are extending their programs, graduate and undergraduate, to meet the needs of the region. For instance, both Appalachian State University and Western Carolina University have established various colleges. Their colleges of business will each operate a Bureau of Business Research to supply information to industries and businessmen in Western North Carolina. Appalachian is creating a "Continuing Education Center," a laboratory for learning and living. It is expected to draw and hold persons seeking recreation and vacation programs of educational nature which will greatly extend the usefulness of the university to the region. It will emphasize folk culture, arts and crafts, music and drama. It will enable the university to serve creatively. Western Carolina University will have excellent highway facilities. It will be connected with the roads of the Appalachian Regional Development program and the Interstate system by a new four-lane "limited access" highway. As new industry has moved into the region the university has added two major in-service programs providing bachelors' degrees in business administration and health services. The university has been active for twenty years in regional planning and development of Western North Carolina. The University of North Carolina at Asheville is the newest state-supported liberal arts institution in the area. It has gone through a process of change since 1927 when a junior college was established by the Buncombe County Board of Education as a part of the public school system, the first public, tuition-free junior college in the state. County students were enrolled free of charge. Such courses as German, Greek, and creative writing were offered in addition to the curriculum usually found in a two-year college, and the student body grew to about three hundred. Meanwhile the College of the City of Asheville was established in 1928. Both operated until 1930 when the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that a junior college might be supported by the city only if no increase in tax was necessary for that specific purpose and if it could be operated without "impairing the efficiency of the elementary and high schools, and of the kindergarten schools ... forming a part of the public school system." The depression and the above ruling made �148 / Part II: A Changing Society necessary the closing of the College of the City of Asheville. The Kiwanis Club of Asheville urged in vain the consolidation of the two colleges. In the 1930's the county's junior college had to institute a tuition charge of $roo, and the name of the school was changed to Biltmore Junior College. A literary magazine called Bluets with Virginia Bryan Scheiber as adviser offered inspiration to students in creative writing, and it won frequent awards in the annual Columbia Scholastic Press Association contest at Columbia University. Works of such writers as Wilma Dykeman, John Ehle, Patty Sebartle, and Robert Campbell, Jr., appeared in Bluets. The dramatic groups won awards in the drama contests at Chapel Hill. The name of the college was changed again in 1936 to Asheville-Biltmore when the city began giving financial support. World War II caused the student body to dwindle. Fortunately the United States Navy set up a program that helped finance the college during those trying years. After the war the Seely estate was obtained for a scenic and spacious campus. In 1955 the North Carolina General Assembly voted an appropriation for Asheville-Biltmore College, which was increased two years later when it was decided to make it a state-supported community college. AshevilleBiltmore was the first institution to qualify under the community college act and state funds were made available for a long-range building program. A campus located nearer Asheville was deemed necessary, and the present site was acquired. A bond issue of $5oo,ooo was approved by the people of Asheville and Buncombe County in 1958 and the state allocated funds to build five buildings on a r6r.9 acre tract in North Asheville. An additional bond issue of $750,000 and a tax levy were approved in 1961, which were matched by state funds. The General Assembly in 1963 changed Asheville-Biltmore to a senior state-supported college. The legislature of 1969 made it a unit of the Consolidated University of North Carolina. Still educational levels in Western North Carolina are well below those of the state. Only 30.6 percent of adults 25 years and over in Western North Carolina have completed high school, compared with 40.8 percent for urban places and 32·3 percent for the state. College graduation was 9.8 percent in urban North Carolina, 7.6 in metropolitan Asheville, and only 5.5 percent in Western North Carolina. Interest in education is gammg momentum in Western North Carolina but the percentage of high school graduates attending college has �Public Education / 149 declined. There is a steady increase in those enrolling in technical institutes, business and nursing schools. In June, 1968, the State Planning Task Force submitted a report, Manpower Education in the North Carolina Appalachian Region. Conclusions drawn were these: "1. Public education must be re-oriented to the world of work and occupational preparation, which enhances traditional general and vocational education ... ; 2. Teacher education must be improved and more teachers provided in the schools . . . ; 3. Guidance education must be improved and more counselors provided ... ; 4· Noncurriculum services such as food, clothing, medical and dental care, psychological and social workers, must be increased and extended into new areas." The high schools that have vocational programs arc revamping their offerings in view of the employment needs of the area. New buildings are being funded by grants under the Appalachian Program. Among the courses being given are carpentry, auto mechanics, brick masonry, electronics, blueprint reading and drafting, mechanical drawing, poultry and livestock, and horticulture. Cosmetology and a number of homemaking courses are offered especially for girls. Arrangements are being made for the students to work in industry, agriculture, construction, or services during the summer months at the skills they have been developing during the academic year. Under Governor Terry Sanford the North Carolina Fund was created with grants from the Ford Foundation, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, and the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. Project areas of the state were outlined and each was invited to organize and construct a plan for community action. For example, four counties, Watauga, A very, Mitchell, and Yancey created W AMY and sent a program to the Fund authorities. Meanwhile the Economic Opportunity Act was passed and liberal federal funds were available. In this state the North Carolina Fund was designated to administer the program of the Office of Economic Opportunity. There were many facets to the program. One of the most significant was the Neighborhood Youth Corps, to help economically deprived youth of r6 to 21 years of age, to give them educational and vocational training and cultural enrichment. Fifty-three and two-tenths of the population of Western North Carolina have completed eight years or less of public schooling. These "dropouts" constitute one of the most serious problems, as �r 50 / Part II: A Changing Society most of them will never be anything but unskilled workers unless they receive special training. The technical institutes have cooperated with the Neighborhood Youth Corps to provide instruction in such skills as bricklaying, upholstering, drapery, basket-making, and other handicrafts. An optimistic report published by the Western North Carolina Regional Planning Commission in 1962 ended with these words: "If the people of the region work to clear away the obstacles to growth, make the best use of the region's resources, and take advantage of the outside forces working in their favor, they can look forward to a bright future for Western North Carolina." �CHAPTER SEVEN Church Related and Private Institutions of Learning Before 1900 only private schools and colleges offered the "higher branches" oflearning. They continued to exist after the passage of the law ofi907 providing that counties might establish public high schools, and many people favored them over the public high schools. Some of the private institutions had been designed to make secondary school available to mountain youth, and others were fashionable schools that appealed partly because of their location in scenic resort areas. The private schools were invaluable in supplementing the work of the infant high schools. Almost all of both types were for white students. Two exceptions were Allen Industrial Home and School for Negro girls at Asheville and Western Union Academy in Rutherford County. Many of these schools did not pass out of existence when the trend turned to public high schools. They exist in various forms today. Among people of Clay County there are still those who talk of a master teacher, John 0. Hicks, who organized and conducted the Hicksville High School, a private school, in I 8 so. He is credited with improving the quality of public school teaching in Hayesville and all of Clay County by his inspirational example. It is said in Clay County that its chief product has been people, and all in the county are proud of the products of Hicksville Academy. Perhaps they are proudest of all of one graduate, George Truett, born in Cherokee County in 1867. His 151 �I 52 f Part II: A Changing Society father moved the family to a farm near Hayesville so the children could attend the so-called "Hicksville High School." George Truett went on to study at nearby Young Harris College in Georgia and became a great Baptist minister. For years he was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. Among the honors that he won was that of serving as president of the World Baptist Alliance. Another of the best private schools in Western North Carolina during the 187o's was the East La Porte Male and Female Academy in Jackson County. There were three teachers headed by A. M. Dawson, a famous educator of that area, and the curriculum included arithmetic, natural philosophy, algebra, Euclid (geometry), grammar, geography, Latin composition, and reading. The catalogue for r878-1879 promised that although criticism and explanation would be furnished by the faculty, judicious care would be exercised lest "explanation may be made to stand in the vacancy occasioned by the student's want of study .... " Room and board, including fuel, lighting, and washing, cost five dollars per month and tuition varied from five dollars to twelve and one-half dollars per term of five months, to be determined by the course chosen. Some families sent their sons and daughters away to other states to be educated. Emory and Henry College, near Abingdon, Virginia, was a manual labor school where boys might earn most of their expenses. The Stonewall Jackson Institute at Abingdon was praised by Charles Dudley Warner. He visited at Worth's, a trading center in northern Watauga County where he spent the night. The daughters had attended the Stonewall Jackson Institute. The home had two pianos and "a bevy of young leadies whose clothes were certainly not made on Cut Laurel Gap. Books were scattered around the house- evidences of the finishing schools with which our country is blessed." It is a truism that each school was as good or as bad as its teachers. One great teacher who made his influence felt widely was Robert Logan Patton. A Western North Carolina boy, he earned his way through Phillips Academy at Exeter, New Hampshire, and Amherst College, spending ten years on his education after he was seventeen years old. He was well qualified to assume leadership on a state or national level in either education or the ministry, but he chose to preach chiefly at rural churches and to found academies. When he returned from Amherst in 1876, he was probably the best educated man in Western North �Church Related and Private Institutions of Learning / I 53 Carolina, and people in different communities urged him to come to them and found academies. He opened his first school at Table Rock in Burke County in August, 1876, and taught there three years, opened his Globe Academy in Caldwell County in 1882, one at Glen Alpine in 1889, another at Morganton in 1890, one at Moravian Falls in Wilkes County in 1891, then returned to Morganton to remain from 1892 to 1901. There were internals when he accepted other appointments, such as the pastorate of the First Baptist Church of High Point, but he always returned to his mountains. From 1910 to 1912 he served as superintendent of schools in Morganton, after which his health failed and he was obliged to retire. Even earlier than these academies were five so-called colleges in Western North Carolina, three of which were in operation or were being built when the Civil War started. Davenport College was founded in Lenoir, Caldwell County, by a group of far-sighted and prosperous men who wished to make their town a cultural center. They talked about a college for women, first approaching the Concord Presbytery, with which the Presbyterian churches in the county were affiliated, but it decided to locate its college at Statesville (Mitchell College). The Lenoir community had become so enthusiastic that the people would not let the college idea die. The South Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church South accepted the proposal of the Lenoir group. William Davenport, James C. Harper, W. A. Lenoir, Jas. Harper, E. W. Jones, and Uriah Cloyd were the most generous givers, although the list of donors was long. Named for the largest contributor, the college was completed in 1857 and was given to the South Carolina Conference, which kept it in operation until the last year of the Civil War. When General George Stoneman's United States Cavalry raid approached Lenoir after attacking Salisbury, the president, the Reverend A. G. Stacy, disbanded the school and moved the girls toward South Carolina. The troops occupied the college premises, plundered the library, destroyed the furniture, and "the place was left a wreck, despoiled of everything except that the buildings were not burned." The friends of the college, although improverished by the war, refurbished the buildings cheaply and classes were resumed. With a preparatory department and a college department it continued in operation until 1936 �I 54 J Part II: A Changing Society under the Western North Carolina Conference to which it had been transferred in I87o when the new conference was set up. After I893 both men and women were in the student body. In I938 it was merged with Greensboro College. Two other colleges originated as private schools but were turned over later to the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Rutherford College, founded in Burke County in 1853 by Dr. Robert Laban Abernethy, was first an academy called Owl Hollow School. Five years later it received its charter as Rutherford Academy, named in honor of John Rutherford, who contributed the land, and in I 86I the name was changed to Rutherford Seminary. In 1870 it became Rutherford College. In I900 it passed into the possession of the Methodist Church. A number of Methodist ministers were educated at Rutherford College. Soon after it began granting degrees Brantley York became a professor, remaining for five years. York had the distinction of having been the first teacher and the moving spirit of Union Institute, later Trinity College, now Duke University. Rutherford in its later years experienced financial problems, and in I933 it was merged with Weaver College to form Brevard College. For a while a public school was housed in the Rutherford College buildings, after which the property was sold to persons establishing the Valdese General Hospital. Weaver College, which was chartered in 1873, occupied grounds that had long been used by schools, the Salem Camp Ground. A building erected in I836 to entertain the Holston Conference served as a neighborhood school until 1854 when the Sons of Temperance built a larger house. A boarding school, the Masonic and Temperance High School housed there, served a large area until I862, reopening in I866. A fire destroyed the building in I 872, and the community rebuilt and expanded the school. Dr. James A. Reagan, physician and surgeon, was one of the founders and served during the first three years as president of the college, after which he continued to serve as a trustee. The college was chartered in I 873 with a local board of trustees as Weaverville College. A later president, W. C. McCarthy (1876-188o), is said to have procured sheep hides from neighboring farmers, which he tanned and used as diplomas. McCarthy wrote each diploma with a quill pen, in Latin. In I883 the property was deeded to the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and the Western North Carolina Conference supervised the �Church Related and Private Institutions of Learning / I 55 college work from that time. The educator who served longest at the school was Marion A. Yost, who taught Latin, Greek, and other subjects for thirty-five years and was for ten years, r888-1898, both a teacher and president of the college. Three degrees, Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science, and Master of Arts, were offered until I 896 when the last was dropped. From 1912-1934 the school was a junior college, and the name was shortened to Weaver College in 1912. Literary societies constituted the leading student activity. They were still flourishing in 1934 and were transferred with the college to Brevard College. Summer schools at Weaver had attracted teachers, tourists, and parents as well as regular students. When the transfer to Brevard was consummated thirty members of the student body and five faculty members made the move. Alumni of both Rutherford College and Weaver College are ardent supporters of Brevard College. It occupies the site of the Brevard Epworth School started at Brevard in 1895 by the Revered Fitch Taylor, aided by the Sunday schools and Epworth Leagues of the Western North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. After his death in 1909 the Woman's Home Missionary Society took over the work, and the school, which then became the Brevard Institute, was accredited by the North Carolina State Board of Education. It served a worthy purpose in making high school available to mountain boys and girls when public schools were not in existence. After operating thirty-eight years, however, Brevard Institute was no longer needed; with new trends in education and the availability of public schools, a junior college was needed. Effects of the depression had been hard on Rutherford College and Weaver College, and the North Carolina Conference decided to merge the two in one new institution. The women's organization that had sponsored Brevard Institute offered its school plant, free of debt, to the conference, and the offer was accepted. Brevard College continued the tradition of Methodist aid to education in Western North Carolina. Citizens of Brevard and Transylvania County donated hundreds of acres of land and reconditioned the buildings of the former institute. The institution opened in the fall of 1934 as a self-help junior college with the students doing practically all of the work on the campus and on the college farm and dairy. Two Baptist associations started colleges in the southwestern �I56 / Part II: A Changing Society part of the state before the Civil War: Mars Hill College in Madison County, first called the French Broad Institute and established in I 856 by the French Broad Association, was chartered as Mars Hill College by the General Assembly in I 859; and Judson College in Hendersonville was founded by the Salem Association and approved by the Western Baptist Convention in I858. Mars Hill was coeducational and played an important part in its community, a crossroads center on what for many travelers was the favorite passage through the Southern Appalachians. Because of the location the spot was of strategic importance during the Civil War and was held by the Confederacy in spite of the Unionist sentiments of many of the people of the county. The college closed in I863 because of a lack of male students, and while Confederate soldiers were quartered there fire destroyed two buildings. Additional destruction almost brought ruin to the college and forty years went by before the equipment equalled that enjoyed by Mars Hill before the war. In spite of poverty, apathy, and the bitterness of the Reconstruction period, the buildings were used for some type of educational activity after I 86 5. College work was reinstated in I 86 5 but the next few years were a time of struggle to obtain funds, to repair the one remaining building, and to keep a president. In I87I and I872 a "Peabody school" was run, after which the college was dormant until I878. For a few years an orphanage occupied the buildings, and for two years L. B. Lunsford conducted a private school there. In I878 the institution was reinstated as a high school, its work beginning with a primary department. The frequent changes of presidents ended with the coming of Robert L. Moore in I 897 to serve forty-one years. During that time the institution became an accredited junior college. Enrollment grew from I83 students, mostly local residents, to 970 from twenty-four states and three foreign countries. By I964 it had become a senior college. Accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools was granted in 1967. The music department was given membership as a senior college in the National Association of Schools of Music in 1960, and the department of business administration was made a member of the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business in the same year. The Building of Judson College was an ambitious undertaking, and it would have been completed on schedule if the �Church Related and Private Institutions of Learning J I 57 war had not come. The structure was of hand-hewn stone with handsome stone columns. The walls were finished by I86I but the roof was not completed until 1871. The trustees had to take a mortgage to pay the existing debt and continue construction. When the debt fell due a joint-stock company, the Western North Carolina Education Company headed by Pinckney Rollins, purchased the unfinished structure to keep it from falling into the hands of some other denomination. In I 878 work was resumed, one room was floored, and the free school of the township was taught there. In I 879 the coeducational Judson High School was held in the finished part of the building. The house was completed in October I 882, and the college began its session with five teachers. The name was changed several times during the construction period, from Hendersonville Female College to Western North Carolina Female College, to Judson Female College, and finally to Judson College. Although planned for women, it operated for twelve years as a coeducational college and graduated outstanding citizens. In I 892, the debt on the building never having been paid off, the company had to sell the property. The purchasers continued to operate a college there for two years, after which it was used as a high school. In 1903 Judson College was sold to the town of Hendersonville to be used as graded school building. A partial list of Baptist schools in Western North Carolina, compiled by John Preston Arthur, includes the following: Mars Hill College, Mars Hill; Yancey Institute, Burnsville; Mitchell Institute, Bakersville; Fruitland Institute, Hendersonville; Round Hill Academy, Union Mills; Haywood Institute, Clyde; Sylva Institute, Sylva; Murphy Institute, Murphy. All of these schools except Mars Hill College and Fruitland Institute have passed out of existence. Occupying the site of Round Hill Academy at Union Mills is Alexander Schools, Incorporated, a child-caring institution founded in I925 by J. F. Alexander. Open the year round, it is licensed to accept I 78 children. Since 1932 its academic work has been consolidated with the public school at Union Mills. Children in residence are ones who have been deprived of their homes by death or other circumstances. Modern and up-to-date buildings have been built by contributions from churches, laymen, and the Duke Foundation. Fruitland Institute is owned by the Baptist State Convention and is used during the academic year as a school for young ministerial students who do not have college �I 58 / Part II: A Changing Society training, and in the summers for assemblies and conferences. Methodists were always concerned about education in Western North Carolina before the public schools became effective. A list of some of their schools follows. Methodist Episcopal Church South: Asheville Female College, developed in I 856 from the Holston Methodist Female College established in I842; Hayesville College, Clay County, opened in I890 and in operation only one year, after which its assets were transferred to Trinity College; Tuscola Institute, Haywood County, founded in I855 by the Reverend William Hicks, followed by the Richland Institute (its site is now Lake Junaluska); Secondary School at Jefferson, established by the Mount Airy District, I9IO-I929; Brevard Institute, I895, given to the Woman's Board of Home Missions in 1905. Methodist Episcopal Church (North): Brown Seminary at Leicester, on Turkey Creek Camp Ground; Aaron Seminary, Montezuma, now Avery County, I890-I9I I; Fairview College, Traphill, Wilkes County, a private school accepted by the Conference in I 886; Etowah Institute near Brevard; Eagle Mills School at Eagle Mills, Wilkes County; Oberlin Home and School, ncar Lenoir, founded by Miss Emily Pruden in I885, name changed in I903 to Ebenezer Mitchell Home and School, moved to Misenheimer in I909 and named Pfeiffer College, now a senior liberal arts college (Miss Pruden established fifteen schools in North and South Carolina.); Allen High School, started by Mr. and Mrs. Louis M. Pease, given to the Woman's Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The Allen Industrial and Home School was established for mountain Negro girls about 1875 by Mr. and Mrs. Louis M. Pease, social workers from New York who had come to Asheville to retire. The couple purchased land, including an old livery stable which they converted into a home and school. After conducting the school for twelve years they gave the property to the Woman's Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (Northern) to be carried on as a mission school. In I 897 it was made a boarding school called the Allen Home School, now known as the Allen High School. It has become an example of excellence in secondary education for Negroes. For many years the curriculum included grades one through twelve, but as responsibility for the work of the grammar grades was assumed by the public schools, Allen High School limited �Church Related and Private Institutions of Learning / I 59 its offerings to grades eight through twelve. The present buildings were built in the 1950's, the school is accredited, and the graduates are accepted by colleges and professional schools. Two Presbyterian assemblies have participated in the educational progress of Western North Carolina. The Asheville Normal and Associated Schools represent the work of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern), now the United Presbyterian Church. Mr. and Mrs. Pease, who founded the Allen Industrial and Home School, were closely associated with the founding of the excellent Asheville Normal which functioned from 1892 until 1940. Their first school for white girls developed from the boarding house which they maintained in their home. Vacationing guests observed that the girls employed for household work were capable but uneducated, and through the influence of a guest, Dr. Thomas Lawrence, the Board of Home Missions purchased the thirty acre tract owned by Mr. and Mrs. Pease and employed the Peases to help conduct a school, to be called the Home Industrial School. It opened in 1887 and was soon filled to capacity with seventy boarding students and forty day students, ranging in age from five to twenty. The Asheville Normal and Collegiate Institute was established in 1892 on the same property, to educate rural school teachers. Thus it antedated both the Cullowhee and Boone training schools. The Home Industrial School and the Normal and Collegiate Institute were among twenty-five day and boarding schools throughout Western North Carolina established by the Woman's Home Mission Board of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. In I 920 all of these schools in and around Asheville were organized into a system called Asheville Normal and Associated Schools with Dr. John E. Calfee as president. Two other schools of the twenty-five mentioned above were Dorland-Bell School for Girls at Hot Springs and the Asheville Farm School for boys. Dorland originated in the home of Dr. and Mrs. Luke Dorland, who had been working since 1867 at Scotia Seminary, which he founded, a Presbyterian school for Negro girls at Concord. Coming to Hot Springs in 1887 to rest, the Dorlands invited some children into their dining room to learn to read and write. Soon a school developed, which in 1893 the Woman's Board of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. sponsored. Two �160 / Part II: A Changing Society miles away at a farm called the Willows a home for boys was established by the same group. The Bell Institute, a third school, merged with Dorland in 1918 to form Dorland-Bell. Eventually housed in a campus of eight buildings, the school was accredited as a high school, but the work was always broader in scope than that of the usual high school. Mrs. Maud Gentry Long of Hot Springs, an alumna of Dorland-Bell, wrote, "The friends of this school are investing their money not at 4 or 6 per cent but in the lives of the womanhood of our mountains." The school's stated purpose was as follows: " ... to help girls from remote mountain districts who are not within reach of a good school; to lead those to a vision of the possibilities of a rich, happy life in the country; to send back into the mountain homes young women who will know how to make healthy, happy Christian homes .... Our main interest is in the girl who will have no schooling after she leaves here." Meanwhile in 1894 the Asheville Farm School was established at Swannanoa. The first students were young men, rather than boys, who had had no opportunity for schooling. As the years passed and the elementary schools improved, the Farm School was able to advance its work and to be a high school. Its campus was to be the home of Warren Wilson College. Warren Wilson College dates from 1942 when the Presbyterian Board of National Missions combined the Dorland-Bell School and the Asheville Farm School on the campus of the latter. At first it offered four years of high school work and two years of college studies. Each student continued his academic program and also majored in a vocational field, such as agriculture, auto mechanics, business, construction engineering, homemaking, journalism, woodworking, carpentry, printing, and weaving. Each student contributed half of each day to his vocational program. When high school work became readily available, it was dropped at Warren Wilson and two additional years of college work were added, the first class graduating with the A.B. degree in 1969. Since its founding the college has been concerned chiefly with young people of limited financial means and superior promise. Every student works part of each day, and thus the college is maintained and the student cost is reduced. In Asheville the Normal and Collegiate Institute was discontinued in 1940 as the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. changed its emphasis in the Southern highlands and especially in Western North Carolina to the liberal arts concept. But it had played a mighty part in the drama of education in the mountains. The �Church Related and Private Institutions of Learning / 161 normal in 1925 began offering work to the four-year college level, leading to a degree, the Bachelor of Education, later the Bachelor of Science in Education. Asheville citizens supported the college by making contributions for new buildings. The normal was approved by the American Association of Teachers' Colleges. In 1930 the Home Industrial School was dropped. It was no longer needed. By 1936 the summer school of the normal enrolled r 500 students. President Calfee was able to influence numbers of noted professors to offer instruction in the summer school, and for several years Columbia University accepted credit earned at the Asheville summer school toward degrees at the former. This enabled Southern teachers to earn degrees at Columbia by doing much of their work in Asheville. Faculty members came from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Pennsylvania, the United States Naval Academy, Virginia, Duke, Tulane, South Carolina, North Carolina, and many other universities of the highest prestige in the nation. Students from as many as thirty-four states attended in a single season. The summer school grew to be the second largest one in the South with a faculty of ninety-nine. Merchants and business firms, the Chamber of Commerce, and the people of the community cooperated with the normal, all of them recognizing it as a definite asset in advertising Asheville. But with Dr. Calfee's retirement in 1937 after 21 years, the conditions changed. The Board of Missions ended its support of the Asheville Normal and Teachers College as it was finally called. Asheville citizens attempted to keep it operating under the name Asheville College, but available funds were not sufficient, and it closed after the summer school of 1944. It had served its purpose. The Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern) began at about the turn of the twentieth century to found some schools, largely through the initiative of interested people in the communities served. Such was the Westminster School in Rutherford County, established by some of the old families of the neighborhood, especially for boys, although a few girls were admitted. It was in operation from 1902 until 1923, offering work in twelve grades. Even the best of North Carolina's public schools at that time offered only eleven grades. Glade Valley School, near Sparta, was organized in 1910 as a coeducational boarding school. It is still in operation and is accredited by the Southern Association of Secondary Schools and Colleges and by the State Board of Education. In the northwestern part of the state the Southern Presby- �r62 / Part II: A Changing Society terian Church in 1897 acquired the services of Edgar Tufts. George McCoy, Asheville journalist titled an article describing Tufts' projects "What God and Edgar Tufts Did." Tufts had just completed his work at Union Seminary in Virginia when he came to Banner Elk to be pastor of a small church. Two years earlier during the summer Tufts and two other seminary students had worked in Northwestern North Carolina where two ladies were holding a small summer mission school. In I 897 Tufts invited some of the more advanced students to continue their studies in his home. In I 899 a two-room building was erected with contributions of work and materials by members of the community and aid from Tufts' friends to whom he had appealed for help. That school has grown into Lees McRae College, a junior college named for the two ladies who started the mission school, Mrs. Elizabeth McRae and Mrs. S. P. Lees. Tufts persuaded Dr. W. C. Tate to come to Banner Elk where he already had a small hospital in operation. In 1922 Grace Hospital was built, and in I933 a new and larger one replaced it, to serve twelve mountain counties. The latest hospital, built in the 196o's, is named the Charles Cannon Memorial Hospital. With money contributed by friends Tufts bought Lybrook Farm, a mile from the school, for an orphanage. It is named Grandfather Home because of its view of Grandfather Mountain. In 1924 after Tufts' death, the three institutions were incorporated as the Edgar Tufts Memorial Association, and the young Edgar Hall Tufts continued the work his father had started. Montreat-Anderson Junior College began in 1913 at the invitation of the Mountain Retreat Association to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S., to use its conference ground and buildings in Buncombe County for educational purposes. Nine synods participated in establishing the Montreat Normal School, which received contributions from the synods until 19 3 I. Dr. R. C. Anderson, President of the Mountain Retreat Association, served as president of the normal. Gradually the college department developed and was accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. In the early 1940's Montreat became a senior college, although it was not accredited as such. In the 1950's the high school department was dropped and in 1960 the college, which had been renamed Montreat-Anderson, retrenched, becoming a junior college again. Throughout its history it had been a girls' college, but is now coeducational. �Church Related and Private Institutions of Learning / 163 Four schools were established by the Episcopal Church for the education of mountain youth. They were Christ School at Arden in Buncombe County, Patterson School at Legerwood in Caldwell County, Valle Crucis School in Watauga Counf)', and Appalachian School at Penland, Mitchell County. Christ School and Patterson School are strong institutions today. Christ School was at first primarily an industrial, coeducational institution. The tuition could be paid in work. Carpentry, printing, telegraphy, bookeeping, and typewriting were taught along with academic courses. Some students walked as many as ten miles each way to and from school. The General Education Fund of the diocese and private donations supported it. Within a few years the student body was limited to boys, and as the public schools of the state improved, boys from other states were accepted, and gradually accommodations were increased. The school won accreditation as a first class school for boys. Patterson School was founded by Mr. Samuel Patterson, who gave the old Patterson family home near Lenoir to the Episcopal Church, Jurisdiction of Asheville. Patterson was interested in agriculture and improved farming methods, and agriculture as well as academic courses were taught. Income came chiefly from donations of friends and a diocesan loan fund. As time passed the purpose of the school was enlarged to prepare boys for college and business as well as for hometown industries. Appalachian School was founded by Dr. Rufus Morgan, one of the most notable characters who ever walked the mountains. When he was a mere boy he wished his parents to use the money that they would spend for Christmas presents for him to buy food for a needy family. Quite early he resolved to devote his life to helping the people of the mountains. During the summers he spent his time tramping and getting to know mountain people. When Morgan graduated from the General Theological Seminary in New York, Bishop Homer of the Episcopal Church purchased the Penland property in Mitchell County so that Rufus Morgan could start a school there. When he and his bride arrived at Penland in 1914 there were two buildings on the site which had been used earlier by Mr. Wesley Conley for his "Seven Springs Baptist Industrial School." Morgan began his program of erecting buildings, making roads, establishing water systems, planting crops, administering to the physical needs of the people, molding character, and raising the level of spiritual life of the people and giving himself �164 / Part II: A Changing Society to the community. This work established, Morgan left Penland in 1918. He was succeeded by Miss Amy Burt, who was joined in 1920 by Miss Lucy Morgan, whose name became nearly synonymous with the later Penland School.* Bishop lves' interest in Valle Crucis and his establishment of a school for boys there in 1842 has been mentioned. Bishop Cheshire revived interest in Valle Crucis in the 189o's, and a school for girls was built, although boys were admitted as day students. Fire destroyed one of the buildings in 1919 and two teachers lost their lives. During World War II the school was permanently closed, and the campus and buildings arc used for conferences. The John C. Campbell Folk School was named for the author of The Southern Highlander and His Homeland. Campbell believed that the folk schools of Denmark had much to offer as models for the mountain people of North Carolina. The school is a noble and continuing experiment in adult education, a workshop for creative living. Its 366 acres of peaceful, rolling dairyland in Clay County, eight miles southeast of Murphy, its craft school, its folk music and dancing are the fulfillment of a dream ofJohn C. Campbell. Its purpose is to help people to "do beautiful things with hands and minds, to be a workshop for life." Campbell died in 1919 before his school had materialized, but his wife made his dream come true. She went to Denmark to study. She sought to answer the question: how to keep an enlightened, progressive, and contented farming population on the land. Mrs. Campbell realized that agricultural improvement had to go hand in hand with enlightenment. Therefore the John C. Campbell School has taught its students improved methods of dairying and farming. They farm the 366 acres scientifically. The school has sought to make the farmers in its area self-sufficient and contented, to make them prosperous and creative, to give them "economic independence based on self-help." In 1925 the school was incorporated with the approval of the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers. The American Missionary Association (Congregational), the Board of National Missions of the Presbyterian church in the U.S.A., and the National Council of the Protestant Episcopal Church contributed toward * The Penland School was started as a handicraft department run in conjunction with the Appalachian School but with many adults participating. When the Appalachian School was discontinued Penland School continued to operate, and it purchased the land and buildings of Appalachian School. �Church Related and Private Institutions of Learning J 165 its support. The first classes were held in the winter of1927-1928. Subjects were simple field surveying, construction of model farm equipment, cooking and sewing, grammar, reading, writing, arithmetic of the most practical kind, lectures in history, literature, economic geography, health, daily music, agricultural science, bookkeeping, forestry, wood carving, weaving. The school did not give credits, but it sought to help young people to utilize fully their natural abilities and to make life in the country more interesting and rewarding. Students laughed, sang, danced, discussed, as well as worked. The philosophy of the school was to get students of the school to think and read and to let them work the rest for themselves. Annual dance courses were taught. Mrs. Campbell went to Massachusetts to see Cecil Sharp, the great English collector of songs and dances. He and she went through the country collecting folk tunes, songs, and ballads. The John C. Campbell Folk School still operates on the pattern of the Danish Folk School. It has some fifteen buildings used for school purposes, faculty homes, and dairying and farm outbuildings. The great part of the acreage is used for demonstration of scientific farming and forestry. An experimental school that does not fit into any pattern was Black Mountain College, founded in 1933 by a small group of faculty and administrators from Rollins College at Winter Park, Florida. They hoped to develop students who were able to "creatively meet the demands of our century." Major emphasis was placed on music, drama, creative writing, and the visual arts, painting, drawing, graphics, and architecture. Josef Albers, a former Bauhaus teacher, and his wife Anni were hired as the Visual Arts Department, and a place was won by their students of Black Mountain College that was significant in the world of modern art. With the resignation of Josef and Anni Albers the major emphasis of study changed to creative writing, and a literary review was produced. The college ceased to function in 1956, but the people who had studied there were reaching a stage of great influence in art and writing. While no degrees or credits had been offered, those students who had chosen to do further work were admitted to important graduate schools. �CHAPTER EIGHT Teacher Education ((And gladly would they learn and gladly teach." In the last fourth of the nineteenth century the General Assembly sought to improve teacher education by supporting normal schools and institutes. In I893 and I903 it began the support of the Cullowhee Normal and the Appalachian Training schools. As these schools evolved to become regional universities in 1967, they provided most of the teacher training for Western North Carolina. Legislation in I 876- I 877 provided for two normal schools, one at the state university and one for Negroes. President Kemp Plummer Battle of the university held summer normal schools until 1885. Although the plan of the General Assembly had been that only men would be accepted at the normal school in Chapel Hill, both men and women were enrolled. Some of the young men who were in attendance during the academic year, particularly Edwin A. Alderman and Charles Duncan Mciver, were persuaded to remain for the normal school where they were permanently won to the profession. Their work was to revolutionize the schools of the state. Teacher training as provided for by the Act of 1887 was carried on for Negroes at Fayetteville. To each of the two normal schools the state paid $2ooo and the Peabody Fund added $soo. Many books were contributed r66 �Teacher Education / 167 by publishers for use in the normal schools. The State Educational Association of 1872 formed at Wilmington must have passed out of existence, as in 1878 in Chapel Hill a North Carolina Teachers Association was formed, and again the organization of county associations was encouraged. Chapel Hill was a long way from the westernmost counties, and in 1879 only three Western North Carolina counties were represented in the student body of the normal. It was good news for the western counties when in 1881 the legislature provided for eight additional normal schools, four for white teachers and four for Negroes. To finance these, the state paid $500 to each and the Peabody Fund furnished $250 each. The one normal school in the mountains was at Franklin. Throughout the years that it was held, the majority of the members were from Macon County, and the county's schools came to be recognized as superior. When the normal in Chapel Hill was discontinued in 1885, four additional ones were created for white teachers, including schools at Boone and Asheville. The Boone Normal School was offered only two summers, after which it was transferred to Sparta, where in 1887 it was held from July 6 to 28. Charles Duncan Mciver, a young graduate of the state university who had attended the normal school at Chapel Hill, served as superintendent of the Sparta Normal, for which he received $125. His report of the Sparta school reveals some of the values and deficiencies of the normals: "Of the teachers who attended the Boone normal last year, not more than ten were at the Sparta normal. In fact there was only one teacher from Watauga County. Furthermore, from So to 90 per cent of the attendant teachers at Sparta had never seen any Normal School before. This indicates that the majority of teachers do not (often they cannot) go a great distance to attend normal schools. Small salaries and short terms render it, in many cases, impossible. Generally, too, these cases need Normal instruction more than any others. Normal Schools, or efficient County Institutes, should be brought within the reach of every teacher in the State. The locating of the school at Sparta this year is a move in that direction." The superintendent of the Asheville Normal School in the summer of 1887 was another of the bright young men who had attended the University Normal School, Edwin A. Alderman. Teaching arithmetic and reading in the Asheville Normal in 1887 was Philander P. Claxton. In that year Asheville voted �I 68 J Part II: A Changing Society to be a special charter school district with a graded school, and Philander Claxton was elected superintendent of the Asheville schools. A native of Tennessee, Claxton had studied at Johns Hopkins University, after which he had spent six months in Germany studying the school system. His biographer says that he brought enthusiasm and new methods and that he and his teachers indoctrinated Asheville for support of better schools. At teachers' meetings papers on Froebel, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi were read, and interest ranged from kindergartens and Greek education to psychology and methods of teaching special subjects. Mciver had referred to county institutes, which were being conducted in a number of the western counties. As early as 1878 Dr. Alexander Graham, superintendent of the Charlotte schools, conducted such institutes, with the aid of the Peabody Fund, and in 1881 the General Assembly passed a law permitting counties to hold institutes, really short normal schools, toward the support of each of which the state would pay $100. In 1883 Rutherford County held two such institutes, one for white teachers attended by thirty-five persons, and one the week following for Negro teachers. Polk County held a four-weeklong institute and Henderson County had a two-week one. The North Carolina Teacher, a magazine published privately in Raleigh, commented: "From these brief points you will observe that the mountains are alive to the great educational movement of the State." President Battle of the State University delivered two lectures at an institute in Sparta which caused him to write: "I have always been favorably impressed with the mountain people. The ordinary notion of their want of culture is a mistake. Some may lack the refined manners of the low counties but they are kind and hospitable and many are shrewd. Some of our ablest and most attractive orators were reared in the mountains." In 1883 a North Carolina teachers' chautauqua was suggested by the North Carolina Teacher. Again in 1884 in the February issue the idea was explored. The proprietor of White Sulphur Springs at Waynesville invited the teachers to spend a month there, and the Western North Carolina Railroad, newly completed to that point, offered low fares. The chautauqua was held beginning on June 16, 1884, and lasting two weeks. It differed from the normal schools in that there were no textbooks and no assignments. Colonel Francis W. Parker, who later became famous as founder and principal of the Chicago Institute, an �Teacher Education / 169 experimental school of the University of Chicago, was one of the speakers. The railroad offered a ticket that would permit teachers to attend the Franklin Normal School at the close of the chautauqua. Room and board for this vacation in the mountains cost six dollars per week at the hotel and from three to five dollars at homes in Waynesville. The North Carolina Teacher carried the appeal, "We want to give the pupils in our schools some idea of the State's gigantic system of internal improvements, as seen in the completion of the Western North Carolina Railroad, and the extension of the Ducktown Branch. The ride across the Blue Ridge Mountains reveals one of the most remarkable feats of engineering skill on earth .... As the train climbs up and winds around those great mountains, rising one hundred and sixteen feet to each mile traveled, often shooting through a dark and rocky tunnel and over the steepest of trestles the grandeur of the view far exceeds the expectation of the most brilliant imagination." Perhaps this was the first convention held in Western North Carolina by any group, and the enthusiasm of the members was great. Railroad officials cooperated, providing a special train for the group of one hundred teachers who boarded at Goldsboro and the additional one hundred who joined them at Raleigh. By the time the train reached White Sulphur Springs there were three hundred aboard. The train was divided into two sections to cross the mountains, and at one time the first section was passing over a portion of the road one thousand feet above the other section, causing much applause as the passengers experienced this wonderful sight. Both sections stopped for breakfast at the new Round Knob Hotel, and the party enjoyed the Round Knob Fountain which threw water nearly three hundred feet in the air. During the chautauqua provisions were made for recreation, and on the fourth day about seventy-five teachers rode horseback to the peak of Lickstone Mountain, with Wid Medford, celebrated bear hunter and mountain guide, to lead them. The next two annual sessions of the teachers' chautauqua were held at Black Mountain, after which a permanent building was erected at Morehead City, where subsequent chautauquas were offered. The county institutes had been held during the months of July and August, and attendance was optional. As many of the rural teachers had no education except what they received in the district schools, further training was essential. The State �170 / Part II: A Changing Society Round Knob, where the trains stopped for passengers to eat. Note the winding track ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. The fountain (geyser) at Round Knob �Teacher Education / 171 Board of Education in 1889 decided to select two competent men as institute conductors to carry on the work throughout the entire year, requiring the dismissal of school at the time of the institute in any county and making teacher attendance compulsory. The four thousand dollars hitherto appropriated for normal schools annually was now assigned to the support of institutes and other work for the instruction of teachers. The rules for holding institutes were made by the State Board of Education, while the board of education in each county was expected to provide a suitable place and to defray all local expenses, including the room and board of the conductor of the institute. The county superintendent was to assist the conductor and to help administer a permissiv~ examination at the end of the institute. Those who passed would receive three-year first-grade teachers' certificates which could be used in any county in the state. Edwin A. Alderman and Charles D. Mciver, both of whom had been superintendents of normal schools, were selected as institute conductors. They felt that "the logical approach to the southern educational problem was through the teacher and his training." Perhaps it was because of the influence of the two that the normals were discontinued and the state institutes were started. Not only were the institutes to serve as a pedagogical shortcut, reaching every teacher in the state, but Alderman and Mciver believed that "the gospel of education'' must be taken to everyone: parents, committeemen, and the public at large. It was impossible for two men to hold an institute in every county, and Dr. J. L. M. Curry, agent of the Peabody Fund, gave money to enable the State Board of Education to employ M. C. S. Noble, J. Y. Joyner, and E. P. Moses during July and August of 1889, and the same men plus Alexander Graham, John J. Blair, and E. L. Hughes in July and August 1890. In the western counties Negro teachers attended the same institutes as whites, the Negroes sitting apart in a place assigned to them. Mciver and Alderman divided the state, Mciver holding institutes from the foothills to the western boundary the first year, staying a week or two in each county. After working with teachers and trustees of schools he would hold at last a "Peoples' Day" in which he addressed the public in churches, warehouses, schoolhouses, on local problems and on public education. Emphasis was placed on "lack of uniformity in textbooks, want of interest on the part of parents and committeemen, the perpetual �172 / Part II: A Changing Society change of teachers and the inadequacy of records they left behind them, and the want of general supervisory power, ... the work of the county superintendent being largely clerical." The following year Alderman held institutes in the west. He outlined his and Mciver's purposes in these categories: I. To carry to the people definite knowledge of the educational work resting on the public schools; 2. To carry to the doors of the public school teachers, who could not seek it, definite instruction as to the meaning of teaching and the teacher's office, and training in scientific methods of teaching; 3. To make suggestions that would tend to perfect and increase the efficiency of the system. Among the points of concern emphasized by Alderman and Mciver in their reports concerning the institutes were the use of Webster's spelling book by about half of the schools, which produced children who could not read but who "spelled through" the speller; children who knew more or less grammar but could not write simple English decently; children who had "been over" arithmetic but "had no grasp upon the simple essentials of that science." The two criticized the bad schoolhouses and poorly trained teachers. Alderman wrote, "I find that only a small fraction of the teachers have had the advantages of any ampler training than that offered by the public schools ... [ ; ] professional training for their difficult work they have had but little. About twelve per cent of them have read a technical work on teaching." Alexander Graham who conducted institutes in the summer of I 890 gave in his report a glimpse of educational progress in the counties that he visited. He was pleased with the interest shown in education in Madison County. Thirty-seven schoolhouses had been constructed during the past six years, ten of them costing $1200 apiece, twenty-five costing $soo each; only two were built of logs. Yet only twelve teachers attended the institute. In contrast was the one held in Waynesville, where seventy teachers attended and visitors occupied all of the remaining space in the room. In Graham County the message of the institute, that "Every child has the same right to be educated as he has to be free; the one right is as sacred as the other," was opposed by some, one person being heard to remark, "Men who talk like that ought to be lynched." Thirty teachers attended the institute at Robbinsville in Graham County, and a group of four or five hundred Republicans and Democrats listened to Graham, but he was dissatisfied with the reception ofhis address. �Teacher Education / 173 Later when he visited Franklin he attributed his success there to the influence of the splendid normal schools that had been held in the town for so many years, and he lamented, "Oh, Franklin! if the mighty educational work which had been done for thee had been done in Robbinsville, it would have repented long ago." At Hayesville he addressed the Farmers' Alliance. The crowd was large and the interest was great. He called Clay "the banner county on education" and complimented the county on the establishment of Hayesville College and its influence, concluding, "I think they will have four more schools of high grade in Clay in the near future." [The college had 190 students, but it lasted only one year.] Clay County had a small population, and there were only eighteen white teachers, six of whom received three-year certificates during the course of the institute, an unusually large percentage to qualify for that honor. At Webster, Jackson County, eight certificates were issued and at Waynesville nine certificates were earned. Graham wrote, "I never met a nicer people or more earnest teachers, and I was struck with the absence of old teachers. I examined not more than three gray heads." In eight counties he addressed over four thousand people on education and free schools and issued fiftythree certificates. The institutes were almost like a great religious revival, and their influence was inestimable for the inspiration they gave in the movement for educated teachers in the mountainous portion of the state. In r 889 the county board of education of Jackson County held an institute at Webster, followed by a state institute in charge of Edward P. Moses, one of North Carolina's most dynamic educational leaders, superintendent of the Raleigh schools, who had taught at the summer normal school at Chapel Hill and had won some great disciples for the teaching profession. Among the teachers attending the institutes at Webster was Robert Lee Madison, who was to found a future state university in the mountains. A youth from Lexington, Virginia, Madison had come to Jackson County in December 1885 at the age of nineteen to teach in the Qualla community. By r889 he was serving in two capacities, editor of the newly-established Tuckaseigee Democrat in the new town of Sylva on the Ducktown Branch of the �174 / Part II: A Changing Society Western North Carolina Railroad, and teacher for the second year in the school at Sylva. This was a subscription school, the public money having been spent for "patent desks." The fortyodd students ranged in age from six to twenty-three, and the subject matter, from the ABC's to algebra, rhetoric, and French. Madison's stay in Sylva, he looked upon as "marking time," although he had abandoned his plan to study medicine and had decided that teaching was to be his profession. To prepare for his profession he had accumulated eight or ten first class books on the subject. A small group of his students volunteered for a class in practice-teaching which he had organized, and he dreamed of a permanent school for educating teachers. In July when Madison attended both of the institutes in Webster he was won by Moses as Mel ver and Alderman had been. Madison later reminisced: "As never before I became inspired. The effects of his [Moses'] mastery of the principles of education and of his stirring style and contagious enthusiasm for the sacred vocation of teaching were irresistible and convinced me more than ever that ... I must devote myself to teaching ... and find my work here in these delectable mountains." As the institute closed Moses was impressed with young Madison's examination paper, and after a talk with him offered him the principalship of a high school in Raleigh, but the offer was declined as the young man chose to stay in the mountains. Later that year Madison accepted an invitation to teach the rural Cullowhee High School in Jackson County. With forty public school children it drew only forty dollars a year from county funds and a few cents a year per capita from the state treasury, totaling just enough to pay a teacher $22.50 a month for a two-month term. Yet the patrons of the school guaranteed a salary of $400 for a ten-month year. The publicspirited community intended to have a good school. Boarding students from other districts were welcomed and were housed in the neighborhood at prices ranging from four to six dollars a month. Some of the "school-minded men" even put up little houses or "shacks" or allowed students to build such houses on their land, so they might "batch" and keep the cost at "the vanishing point." Enrollment grew rapidly to approximately one hundred and the school was obviously a success. The following year Cullowhee High School attracted students from neighboring South Carolina as well as from other counties and had a staff of three teachers including the principal, Madison, �Teacher Education / 175 a nmsic and art instructor, and a primary teacher. Commencement in I 890 was colorful, lasting three days. A sermon was preached by D. B. Nelson of Asheville and an address was given by Kope Elias, prominent lawyer of Franklin. Madison recalled: "Music for the occasion was furnished by the Cherokee Indian brass band of sixteen instruments played by Indian boys in uniform. Large crowds attended all the exercises and basket-dinner in abundance was served each day. Such was the lavish hospitality of the community that for three days, all visitors from a distance were housed and ted- and their horses too- without charge. Some near-by homes had as many as fifty for a single meal; and when the beds were all full, pallets of quilts were spread upon the floors, so that if accommodations could not be palatial they could at least be palletable." In I 8y3 Madison saw an opportunity to make his dream come true. The state was experiencing a momentum toward practical education as a part of a movement of the farmers in North Carolina as in many other states to organize for their common interest. In I 887 an influential Farmers' Alliance was fostered in the state by Colonel L. L. Polk and his periodical, The Pro~~;ressive Farmer. Farmers had serious financial problems during the eighties and nineties and they were convinced of the benefits to be enjoyed from better public schools and from colleges that could provide a practical education. Under the influence of a crusade for agricultural education the State Agricultural and Mechanical College was established near Raleigh in 1887. In 1890 a large number of farmers were elected to the legislature, and in 1891 the "farmers' legislature" established the Normal and Industrial School for White Girls and the Agricultural and Technical College for Negroes, both at Greensboro, and the School for the Deaf and Dumb at Morganton. In this rash of legislation for schools, Madison perceived an opportunity for an appropriation for a normal department at Cullowhee. He first proposed to Walter E. Moore, member of the General Assembly from his district, that he introduce a bill to establish a normal department in connection with some existing high school in each of the nine congressional districts in the state, providing $3000 to each, a total of $27,000. The state would have no capital outlay and all of the public schools in the state would benefit from improvement of teachers. When Moore replied that such a bill would have no chance to pass �176 / Part II: A Changing Society at that session, Madison asked him to introduce a bill providing $3000 for a normal department at Cullowhee. The measure passed with an annual appropriation of$1500, as one act in a decade of legislation for higher education. In 1895 a fusion legislature dominated by Republicans and Populists established a normal department at Slater Industrial Academy at Winston, for Negroes, which had been in operation for three years as a private institution named for John F. Slater, philanthropist. The school grew into Winston-Salem State Teachers College, and in 1969 the General Assembly designated it Winston-Salem State University. It and the Salisbury Normal School established in 1881 and abolished in 1903 were the only ones in the western half of the state for training Negro teachers, and they were too far away from the mountain counties to help the Negro teachers there. As salaries of Negro teachers were less than those of white teachers, the Negroes in Western North Carolina were almost invariably men or women with no preparation for the work. Biddle University at Charlotte, now Johnson C. Smith University, offered normal school work, but graduates of the university found employment in the cities where pay and living conditions were better than the rural schools offered. The law that created the appropriation for Cullowhee placed its normal department under the care and supervision of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, who had power to regulate it and to discontinue it if he found the department inefficient or unnecessary. The principal of the high school was authorized to confer three-year first-grade certificates valid throughout the state to graduates. Students preparing to teach were not required to pay tuition. By 1894 the appropriation began to pay dividends when twelve normal-course graduates went out to teach. The next year sixteen first-grade certificates were granted. In I 899 Principal Madison reported that seventy-six students representing seven counties were attending the normal school and that eighty had been granted scholarships for the 1900-1901 term. The department had furnished more than two hundred public school teachers, most of them teaching in the rural schools. He characterized the work of the department as a "unique and very necessary one." He admitted that the work of the Normal and Industrial College and of the Department of Pedagogy at the state university was of a much higher order than the �Teacher Education j 177 QUALIFICATIONS OF WHITE AND COLORED TEACHERS IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA, I9II-I9I2, IN SOME COUNTIES County 1St Grade 2nd Grade 3rd Grade Normal Training College Diploma White Ashe Buncombe Rural Asheville Burke Clay Henderson Rural Hendersonville Macon Madison Mitchell Wilkes Rural N. Wilkesboro Jackson Watauga 774 132 132 IS I4 54 36 4 4 4 86 44 53 r6 42 6 3 17 14 9 so 41 25 46 :l2 30 14 5 28 55 120 PER CENT OF TOTAL 16 37 7 3 3 55 5 6 4 12 6 5 4 10 2 44% 20% -4% 25% Colored Ashe Bunco me Rural Asheville Burke Clay Henderson Rural Hendersonville Macon Madison Mitchell Wilkes Rural N. Wilkesboro Jackson Watauga PER CENT OF TOTAL Source: Biennial Report, IO 8 IO I I 3 17 9 5 2 5 2 4 4 4 6 2 r6 10 2 2 2 3 52% 1910-1912. 4 0/ 10 �178 / Part II: A Changing Society Cullowhee institution was able to offer; but the two former were preparing teachers for academies, city schools, and some of the colleges. He wrote: "Our sphere, while an humbler one, most largely affects the great body of public school children outside of the towns. Our specific work is to prepare teachers for the rural and village elementary schools, and there is no other State institution, so far as we know, that is doing this to any appreciable extent .... It is just as necessary that normal instruction of teachers be provided for as that the term of rural public schools should be lengthened. 'As is the teacher, so is the school.' '' The curriculum was that of the secondary school with teacher training courses added. The academic instruction included spelling and defining, arithmetic, grammar, composition, English literature, elementary algebra, United States history, North Carolina history, civil government, political and physical geography, physiology and hygiene, physics, and elementary Latin. The professional work consisted of theory and practice of teaching, principles of education, history of education, psychology applied to teaching, lectures, and professional reading. From this beginning the school grew to be Western Carolina University, discussed earlier. A new building was completed at Cullowhee for the Normal department in 1904, most of the $7,500 required having been subscribed by private individuals. It was located in a wooded tract of about three and one-fourth acres contributed by David Rogers and named in his honor "Rogers Park." The demand for graduates was so great that it could not be met. A summer school was held in the summer of 1904 with a faculty of seven, including E. P. Moses. Teachers from Graham, Clay, Macon, Haywood, and Transylvania counties as well as from Jackson attended and Madison hoped to make the summer school a permanent feature of the school's work. He asked that the annual appropriation for succeeding years include funds for summer schools on a larger scale. He ended his report for 1904 with the assurance that the "patriotic legislators" would encourage in every way the work which "means so much in this promising, yet long-neglected section of our State." Madison remarked in the 1904 report that there were "demands for the establishment of similar institutions in other parts of the state," and he encouraged the legislature to continue and to enlarge provisions for training young men and women �Teacher Education / 179 for teaching in the rural and village elementary schools. This advice had already been acted upon by the General Assembly in 1903. In 1902 Principal Madison had met Blanford Barnard Dougherty, co-principal with his brother, Dauphin Disco, of the Watauga Academy in Boone. The two brothers had built the academy, 1899-1900, furnishing half the money from their own assets and cash. The rest was contributed by citizens in the area as a result of a fund-raising campaign that reached across the county, the gifts ranging from twenty-five cents to the $soo from Moses H. Cone, industrialist, who had a summer home in Blowing Rock. The total of the contributions was said to be near $1100. B. B. Dougherty had degrees from CarsonNewman College and from the state university, while Dauphin Disco Dougherty had his bachelor's degree from Wake Forest College, which the younger brother had also attended for one year. Both brothers had been teachers in academies and in Holly Springs College. Edwin A. Alderman had been president of the state university when Blanford Dougherty was a student there, and M. C. S. Noble had been Professor of Pedagogy. Both no doubt influenced the young man's interest in teacher training, as did his employment in the summer of 1899 holding institutes in eight counties along the Blue Ridge. Blanford Dougherty was county superintendent of Watauga County at the time the new academy was built, and from the beginning some of Watauga Academy's graduates became teachers. So when he met Robert Lee Madison in the summer of 1902 while both were serving as instructors in the summer school at Mars Hill College, he learned about Cullowhee's appropriation from the state for the support of a normal department. He plied Madison with questions about how to get state aid for teacher training, and by the end of the summer he had fixed his determination on turning Watauga Academy into a teacher-training school with state support. Captain Edward F. Lovill wrote a bill and Dougherty himself went to Raleigh to present his case- his first visit to the state legislature. He later told about his harrowing experiences. Governor Aycock, President Mciver of the Normal and Industrial College, the president of the state university, and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction were all against starting a new training school. Perhaps they remembered how ineffective the eight normal schools of the 188o's had been. After William Newland of Lenoir agreed to present the bill, he and Dougherty waited three weeks to get �I 8o / Part II: A Changing Society a hearing before the Committee on Education. That committee reported unfavorably, but a favorable minority report made it possible to place the Newland Bill before the General Assembly. Dougherty made an hour-long speech to a joint session, and the House passed the bill, but the Senate vote was a tie. Clyde Hoey, a senator from Cleveland County, the presiding officer in the Senate at the time, voted in favor of the measure and thus it passed. Henceforth Blanford Dougherty was to visit Raleigh during the sessions of every General Assembly until his retirement as president of Appalachian State Teachers College in 1954. The school, to be called the Appalachian Training School, would receive an appropriation of $I 500 for a building, when a like amount had been paid by private individuals, and an annual payment of$2ooo for teachers' salaries and maintenance. Tuition was to be free to all who would sign a pledge to teach two years in the public schools of North Carolina. Nowhere in the act was Watauga Academy mentioned. The board of trustees for Appalachian Training School, members of which were appointed in the law, were to open books for subscriptions to the building fund and to choose a site for the training school. Several communities in three counties competed for the new school and made offers of land, money, and buildings. Boone offered $1000 and the use of Watauga Academy, and the board of trustees voted to make Boone the permanent location of the school, with Watauga Academy serving as its first home. This school became Appalachian State University in 1967. Friends of Cullowhee in the General Assembly favored the passage of the Newland Act, and from 1903 until 1912 when Madison's first administration ended, he and Dougherty cooperated in winning support for the two training schools. (Cullowhee's name was changed in 1905 to Cullowhee Normal and Industrial School.) In 1908 the legislature voted to establish a third training school for teachers in the eastern part of the state at Greenville. A number of efforts were made from time to time to abolish both of the western schools and to establish one more centrally located in or near Asheville. The greatest threat came in I9II when Dr. George T. Winston, former president of the state university and the State Agricultural and Mechanical College, upon his retirement to Asheville became a spokesman for a training school in Asheville and introduced a bill in the General Assembly to establish in Asheville a western training school. Both Dougherty and Madison were in Raleigh �Teacher Education I 181 working against Winston's measure and it was rejected by the Appropriations Committee. Again an effort was made in 1915 when Governor Locke Craig, a resident of Asheville, in his gubernatorial address asked the General Assembly to establish in the western part of the state a school similar to the one at Greenville. Craig completely ignored the two existing training schools, but it was understood that he would have the new institution absorb the ones at Cullowhee and Boone. The lawmakers rejected the proposal by a slight majority. The trustees of the Appalachian Training School elected B. B. Dougherty Superintendent and D. D. Dougherty Principal. There were at the beginning four other faculty members, one of whom was Mrs. D. D. Dougherty. Three terms were held, a three-month fall term, a spring one of four months, and one in the summer of two months. The public school of Boone was incorporated in the training school and all between the ages of six and twenty-one could attend the free term in the fall. They might attend the other terms by paying a small fee. Students from a distance were given room and board at twentyfive cents per day. In the suburbs of Boone near the Watauga Academy a tract of four and one-half acres was purchased for $212.50, and a brick building (which continued in use until it was demolished in 1967 to make way for a new administration building) was erected at the cost of $7000, of which $3000 was contributed by three hundred people, many of them poor. The building consisted of four classrooms, a library, office, music room, art room, and auditorium. Three hundred twenty-four students attended during the first year, one hundred ninety being public school teachers. Fifty-one came from a distance and paid tuition. In 1907 the General Assembly provided for rural public high schools, but it was many years before such were established in Western North Carolina and the two training schools continued to offer high school subjects with the teacher training superimposed. In 1917 a State Educational Commission was created by law to investigate various features of public education. The commission was authorized by the statute to call upon any source for aid, and the General Education Board was asked for advice. The study of North Carolina's schools was placed in the hands of Dr. Frank P. Bachman, working in cooperation with Dr. Wallace Buttruch, president, and Dr. Abraham Flexner, secretary of the General Education Board. Concerning Cullowhee �I 82 / Part II: A Changing Society Boys and girls were segregated at Appalachian Training School. The building on the left was the original Watauga Academy Normal and Appalachian Training School, the report concluded that these were "of non-standard type which must for the present necessarily be of lower grade, that is, admit students who have less than a standard four-year high school course." This, the commission believed necessary because, they said, "only three counties in the western part of the state, Cherokee, Buncombe, and Haywood, had standard high schools." The recommendation of the commission was that henceforth both training schools leave all high school instruction to such high schools as should be established in the mountain sections and concentrate on normal school work for elementary teachers. The commission urged, "[These schools] should admit students who have completed the seventh grade of elementary schools and graduates of non-standard high schools, and give them a two, three, or four year course planned to meet the needs of elementary teachers. No graduates from standard high schools should be admitted; such graduates would go to Chapel Hill, to Greensboro, or to Greenville, or to private colleges offering courses in education . . .. Both schools are well located to serve their respective sections, and if properly developed and equipped should graduate at least 100 elementary teachers a year." �Teacher Education / I 83 During the next decade the histories of the two schools were roughly parallel, because legislative action applied to both of them. Cullowhee State Normal and Industrial School had been upgrading its curriculum for several years, and by the academic year I9I7-I9I8 it was offering two years of college work. In 1921-1922 the high school had separated from the college, although it remained on the same campus. Two years later a plan was inaugurated to have the high school absorbed by the local school system under the joint sponsorship of the normal school and the county board of education. The local public school after that time served as a laboratory and practice center for the college. Governor Cameron Morrison showed an interest in the two western schools and pledged his support for an increased appropriation and expansion of their programs. In 1921 the General Assembly made Appalachian a standard two-year normal. There, as at Cullowhee, the elementary and secondary schools would be sponsored jointly by the county board of education and the normal school. Physical plants and enrollments grew, and in 1925 the legislature granted new charters to both institutions and changed their names to Appalachian State Normal School and Cullowhee State Normal School. Enrollment continued to increase and the administrations of both began to plan ways to expand the usefulness of the normal schools to the areas they served. The tendency of normal schools in the nation was to expand to four-year college programs, as state requirements for the education of teachers were advanced. Consequently the General Assembly in 1929 again changed the names of the schools, to Appalachian State Teachers College and Western Carolina Teachers College. The two were now qualified to educate teachers for high schools and were admitted to membership in the American Association of Teachers Colleges, later renamed the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Eventually both were accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Their further development into multi-purpose universities was discussed in a preceeding chapter. �CHAPTER NINE From the Heart) the Hand) and the Head To create handicrafts that are beautiful satisfies a basic human need. Handicrafts arc creative, often emotionally pleasurable. They are popular, cherished by their collectors and purchasers. They recreate artifacts of the past and they become the art works of the present and the future. They are usually the product of the leisure time of their craftcrs. They are wonderful as an avocation. Their sale brings added money, like surplus value, to their creators, but it seldom brings in an income sufficient to enable their makers to lead a good life. Handicrafts are, however, the products of the heart, the hand, and the head. When people moved into the mountains, "took up land," built their cabins, made their homes, they had to be self-sufficient. For their necessities and to satisfy their creative urges they fostered and developed their handicrafts. They had to furnish their mountain homes or log cabins with wooden articles and furniture hand crafted from the native forest. They had to make their beds, tables, chairs - all of their furniture. These articles of wooden furniture were necessary, useful, and often artistic. Corn had many uses. Cornmeal was a useful food for people; corn fed livestock; corn shucks were used for bed ticks, to braid collars for mules and horses, to make mats for the cabin door-way and floor, and to make dolls for girls and toys for children. Chair covers were made from corn shucks, pipes from corncobs and reeds. �From the Heart, the Hand, and the Head / 185 Basket making required skill and ingenuity. Baskets were made of oak splits, willow switches, or wild honeysuckle vine. They were used for barter, and the art of basket making was passed on from father to son. Many mountain craftsmen made musical instruments: banjos, fiddles, .guitars, dulcimers, recorders, and shepherds' pipes. The instruments were necessary for the square dances or "play party games" or to accompany the singing of old ballads and carols. Potters' clay or kaolin was plentiful and there were a number of potteries in which churns, crocks, jugs, plates, pitchers, and dishes were made. Moist clay was held against the potter's kick-wheel and clay was shaped into the desired piece. These shaped pieces were then baked in kilns. There were iron mines and forges called bloomeries. In 1788 the North Carolina legislature passed a law granting three thousand acres of cultivable land to anyone who would build a forge and carry on iron making. These bloomeries were necessary for making iron for horse shoes, kettles, plows, the metal parts of wagons. Three early forges were in Buncombe County, and in 1820 mining began at Cranberry. The crude iron was processed at the mine into bars. The bars were then bound together and hauled by oxcarts to blacksmiths. The pioneer blacksmiths made kettles, cranes, and irons for fireplaces, axes, knives, nails, rifle barrels, and many farm tools. For generations members of the same families were famous blacksmiths and gunsmiths, like the members of the Boone family of Burnsville who have made artistic pieces of wrought iron. Daniel Boone VI of Burnsville did wrought iron work for the Williamsburg restoration and ornamental iron work for the Hound Ears Lodge. Many mountaineers raised sheep, and most women carded and spun the wool and wove the cloth for use in the house and for clothing for all members of the family. Many of them took pride in the beautiful bedspreads that they wove, and every woman wanted at least one fancy quilt. Pieces of colored cloth were woven, saved, and then pieced into the designs of these quilts, which were and still are made in many pretty patterns. The bedspreads or coverlets often called "kiverlids" were made of wool woven on to a flax or cotton warp. They were dyed into lovely soft colors with home-made vegetable dyes. With the coming of the railroads and the highways the mountain handicrafts declined. Cheap cotton cloth largely �I 86 / Part II: A Changing Society supplanted handwoven materials; and metal tools, utensils, and objects could be bought from hardware stores more cheaply and in greater variety than they could be made by village blacksmiths. Although mountain families had little cash, they bartered eggs, chickens, dried fruit, herbs, furs, cordwood, galax leaves for these "storebought" articles. Only a few women continued to weave. The old women forgot how to read "drafts" (pattern drawings) and to make the old familiar patterns. The art, the craft, the skill requisite for weaving cloth and designing quilts and coverlets were disappearing and being lost in North Carolina when in 1895 Miss Frances Goodrich was presented a forty-year-old coverlet as a gift. With the coverlet was a "draft" for the "Double Bowknot" pattern. Miss Goodrich, an Ohioan, and a woman companion were living in Brittain's Cove twelve miles north of Asheville and running a school there. These women were interested in the social and cultural welfare of the mountain people. Miss Goodrich was much impressed by the beauty of the coverlet. She sent it to friends in the North and asked if there would be a market for artistic handicrafts like coverlets, quilts, and hand-woven materials. When she learned that there was an avid market, particularly for woven items, she organized the women in the neighborhood. They located old looms and experienced weavers, especially the ones who knew how to do vegetable dyeing. Younger women began to learn to weave from the older ones, and the coverlets woven in the mountain homes and cabins found a ready sale. Miss Goodrich set up a roadside market near Marshall on the main highway leading from Tennessee to South Carolina. I-lere a man named Allan had had a stand for drovers during the turnpike days. He had pens for the stock and accommodations for the drovers. As a result Miss Goodrich chose the name the Allanstand Cottage Industries. An annual exhibit of Allanstand Crafts was held in Asheville, and in 1917 a permanent salesroom was opened in that city to show these products, particularly to the well-to-do visitors who were interested in creative crafts. This venture was so successful that the Allanstand Cottage Industries were incorporated. Except for a small dividend to the stockholders, the profits were to go to the craftswomen and craftsmen of the mountains. In 1931 Miss Goodrich gave the Allanstand Industries to the Southern Highlands Handicraft Guild. �From the Heart, the Hand, and the Head / 187 Miss Goodrich thus was a pioneer in popularizing and preserving mountain crafts. Her aims were to give paying work to women whose homes were too isolated to enable them to market their wares; to give these mountain women a new hope and a new interest; to save from extinction the old crafts and to produce artifacts of beauty and value. In addition to coverlets, bedspreads, quilts, the Allanstand Industries produced and sold table runners, mats, pillow and dresser covers. Mrs. George W. Vanderbilt was interested in mountain people. To aid some of them to secure economic competence, she established a school in Biltmore Village shortly after 1900. She employed Miss Eleanor P. Vance and Miss Charlotte Yale to teach the people carding, spinning, weaving, dyeing fabrics suitable for men's suits. The original intent was to secure the wool from the sheep on Biltmore Estate and to have the wool prepared for weaving in the mountain homes. The woven product was rough. Misses Vance and Yale went to the British Isles to study the production processes used there. As a result the wool for the Biltmore Homespun cloth was imported, and the Biltmore suiting fabrics, exceptional in beauty and wearing quality, were woven locally and with pride. The weaving department of the industries grew rapidly. It was under Mrs. Vanderbilt's personal care until it grew to such size that commercialization was needed. Mr. Fred L. Seely of Asheville bought the industries and moved the establishment and personnel to the site on Sunset Mountain near Grove Park Inn where it has remained. This weaving industry became the largest project of its kind in the world. In the summer of 1914 Rufus Morgan founded the Appalachian School. During the summer of 1913 he had visited every home in the neighborhood. In those homes he found rare old coverlets, blankets, Iinsey-woolsey, and jeans- all hand woven. In the smoke houses and outbuildings were the relics of handhewn looms and spinning wheels. These had been discarded when "store-bought" cloth became readily available. In the home of Aunt Susan Phillips he found a spinning wheel and a loom still being used for weaving. There were many pattern coverlets which she had woven before her eyes had given out. Because of Aunt Susan Phillips and Aunt Cumi Woody, Morgan decided to include hand work in his program of instruction. He wished to train the heart, the hand, and the head, and hand weaving fitted admirably into his scheme. On �188 J Part II: A Changing Society Demonstration of spinning and weaving at the Brinegar cabin on the Blue Ridge Parkway NATIONAL PARK SERVI CE PHOTOS one of his trips to Valle Crucis he found a comparatively young woman who was weaving the patterns and designs of her ancestors but was adapting them to the needs of the present day. This young woman, Mrs. Finley Mast, promised to teach Rufus Morgan's sister Lucy Morgan to weave. Miss Lucy was then a student in a Michigan teachers' college. Rufus Morgan urged his sister to come, to learn weaving from Mrs. Mast, and to teach it at Penland at the institution Morgan had named Appalachian School. Miss Lucy came. In 1923 she learned weaving and began to teach it, both to the girls in the school and to the older women in the community. There was a two-fold purpose in teaching the people to w eave: to perpetuate this native craft and to provide for the people a more abundant living. New efficient looms were taken to the homes of the mountain women and they soon wove "log cabin" rugs. Miss Lucy had to walk to each home to teach the women to warp, beam, and "thread up." By 1925 roads had been built and she could drive in her truck to the homes of the weavers. Next a weaving house was established, and it was difficult to furnish work for all who applied for it. Then Miss Morgan and Miss Burt (who had succeeded Rufus Morgan) had to market and sell the woven products. In 1924 there was a booth at the State Fair in which Miss Morgan sat weaving. The State Department of Vocational Education became interested and employed her as a vocational �From the Heart, the Hand, and the Head / 189 education teacher. She received federal assistance for vocational training for women and girls. Also $1400 worth of woven goods was sold at the Episcopal Church convention in New Orleans. She went to Chicago and studied for nine weeks under Mr. Edward F. Worst, learning very complicated weaving. Shortly afterward, in 1928, a pottery department was added to the Weaving Institute. "Proff" Koch ofChapel Hill (director of the North Carolina Playmakers) christened the organization "the Penland Weavers and Potters." In 1928, $2400 worth of goods was sold at the Episcopal convention and $r8,ooo worth during the year 1929. The Penland School was incorporated in 1929 as a non-profit educational institution. It has six large buildings and a number of smaller ones valued years ago at $240,000. In 1930 Miss Morgan learned to make pewter plates and acquired a set of molds. Next she exhibited these mountain products at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 and 1934. Here were sold all of the craft products that had accumulated during the depression years. The school course now includes weaving, ceramics, metal work, enameling, woodworking, and design. Students have come to Penland from every state in the Union and from sixty foreign countries. In Tryon the Mountain Industries operated by Mrs. George Stone, the "little lady of mountain industries," produce beautiful rugs, splint baskets, chairs, porch furniture, and homespun textiles. Mrs. Stone rendered a valuable service in creating a demand for the products of the crude looms and tools of mountain craftsmen. George Stone is manager of the Appalachian Hand Weavers. In I 9 I 5 Miss Eleanor Vance and Miss Charlotte Yale left Biltmore to start the Toy House in Tryon. They trained boys and girls to make toys from native wood: turning, carving, and painting them by hand. Miniature soldiers, animals, and groups were among their products. The Blue Ridge Weavers Shop was started by Mr. and Mrs. George Cathey. A hand weavers' shop sells the popular homespuns woven in Tryon. Another interesting handicraft industry was the Spinning Wheel founded by Miss Clementine Douglas, a native of Florida and a graduate of Pratt Institute in New York. Miss Douglas had taught in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in New York City, and for three summers had worked at a settlement school in Harlan County, Kentucky. In 1927 she came to Saluda, then to Asheville and set up at Beaver Lake a weaving industry which was appropriately named the Spinning Wheel. Work was done in �190 J Part II: A Changing Society The insignia of the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild The old draft of the "Lover's Knot" pattern discovered by John Goodwin. H ere it is called" Summer and Winter." This kind of draft, preserved in a f ew family archives has made possible the recreation of old w eaving patterns. Draft for Lover's Knot Coverlet ( Instructions to the weaver) "The two forward Shafts carries half the yarn, to put in your binding thread you mustt tread the two forward shafts, and the fourth back ones, and the blue to be put in by the draft it ought to be slaid low hang your treaddles, one after the other beginning with the forward shaft and wright hand treaddles." �From the Heart, the Hand, and the Head / The Lover's Knot, that has been traced to Scotland in the 1750's, is john Goodwin's most popular pattern 191 �192 / Part II: A Changing Society her loom room and in homes in the area. She visited the homes, superivising the work, taking materials and picking up finished pieces, and encouraging the weavers. She purchased an old log cabin in the Reems Creek community, had it moved, and made an attractive place for a salesroom. Subsequently she moved the Spinning Wheel industry to the Hendersonville Road a few miles south of Asheville, where a log house was used for Miss Douglas' home and attached salesroom. Later she sold the industry, and the new owners discontinued the weaving and ran the Spinning Wheel as a sales center for handicrafts. Today handcrafted articles from Western North Carolina are nationally known and handicrafts are flourishing. Penland, the John C. Campbell Folk School, and the Crossnore School still teach weaving. The fame of the Penland School is worldwide. Visitors come from many states and countries and all are inspired by the excellence, the variety, and the creativity of the craftsmen. Particularly noteworthy has been the woodcarving at the John C. Campbell Folk School. Mrs. Campbell and Mrs. Muriel Martin, director of handicrafts for twenty-five years, taught those in the neighborhood and at the school to "whittle with a purpose": to carve crowing roosters, laughing mules, flying birds, soaring angels, a four-foot high St. Francis, and the figures for Christmas creches. Penland and the John C. Campbell Folk School are production centers as well as schools. They offer short courses in crafts as well as year-round craft programs. In 1928 Mrs. John C. Campbell took the lead in organizing the Southern Highlands Handicraft Guild. More than twenty mountain schools and community centers interested in crafts were included among the charter members. This guild established standards for handicrafts and markets the products in selected craft centers. The V anderbilts are gone, but the Biltmore Homespun shops continue to weave beautiful fabrics for men's and women's suits. The Valhalla Weavers of Tryon weave cloth for suits and for neckties. At Penland Ronald Cruikshank directs the weaving of tapestries, knee blankets, and baby blankets. Among the outstanding and successful craftsmen of Western North Carolina are the Goodwin Guild Weavers. For six generations members of the family have been weavers of hand crafted �From the Heart, the Hand, and the Head / 193 designs and materials. In 1951 Mr. John 0. Goodwin, the head of the family, moved from Virginia to Blowing Rock. Mr. Goodwin has done field work in collecting 527 different handloom drafts since 1907. He sets up the looms to weave these designs that have been popular throughout American history and that are still prized by interior decorators. The looms are power operated, but skilled craftsmen are required to use the techniques of the operators of hand looms. Much of the weaving is done by hand and the weavers have to have hand loom weaving skill in order to maintain high quality and authenticity. Four hours are required to make a single-weave coverlet. The most popular product is a double-woven design, "Lover's Knot," which takes sixteen hours to weave. Mr. Goodwin copied the pattern and created his own "draft" before he became the possessor of a "draft" on yellowed paper that was over one hundred years old. Other creations are shawls, afghans, place mats, table cloths, and drapery materials. These are sold nationally and are cited by American Heritage for their authenticity. Under the North Carolina Fund for Watauga, Avery, Mitchell, and Yancey counties a program has been organized to encourage craftsmen of all four counties to make handcrafted products: toys, dolls, wood carvings, quilts, coverlets, furniture, wrought iron, and hand woven articles. The products of these craftsmen are ingenious and often beautiful. One of their most famous products is the Bader-Hofecker grandfather clock. Made of Honduran mohagany, it is lavishly inlaid. Both Glen Hofecker and William Bader are distinguished artists in wood. The Blue Ridge Hearthside Crafts Association, a cooperative, was organized to sell the products. It purchased two prestige shops, and operates as Creative Crafts. Special orders come to the various agencies for materials for historical restorations such as that of the Vance birthplace. Homespun and woven curtains were needed. There were draftsmen who could produce them - replicas of those in use I 50 years ago. President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson had spent their honeymoon at Arden, North Carolina. They became interested in mountain folk - in their welfare and in their crafts. In 1913 Mrs. Wilson ordered coverlet fabrics for the Mountain Room in the White House, which she was redecorating. Mrs. Elmeda Walker, who lived near Marshall, was chosen to weave the fabrics. �194 / Part II: A Changing Society Independence Hall in Philadelphia was being restored, and a request came to Penland School to weave many yards of green baize material for covering fifteen tables. The material requested was green homespun dyed with vegetable dyes. Since Penland did not have the equipment to produce material in such a quantity, Mrs. John Littlewood of Ashe County dyed and carded the wool. It was necessary that the cloth be forty-five inches wide. The Penland looms were made for thirty-six inch cloth. Therefore the Macomber Company in Massachusetts built a loom for forty-five inch material. Colonel John Fishback, Penland weaver, then wove the cloth on the wide loom. Mr. �From the Heart, the Hand, and the Head / 195 The Woodrow Wilson honeymoon cottage at Arden ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. John Mulcahy, specialist in charge of the restoration of Independence Hall, praised the material as being a true reproduction of that used when the Declaration of Independence was signed. The making of hooked and braided rugs is another profitable mountain craft. The rugs are made in the homes of individuals and groups and also in the handicraft centers like that in Boone. Rugs are often braided from loopers, by-products bought at the hosiery mills. Hooked rugs are made at Crossnore and by the Valhalla Weavers in Tryon. Block prints, silk screens, handknitted, hand-crocheted, and hand-fringed artifacts are made in many mountain homes. Richard Chase, the famous folklorist, collector of folk ballads and tales, author of the Grandfather Tales and the Jack Tales, rendered an invaluable service to the mountain folk of Watauga County. He taught them folk songs, folk dances, folk tales. Also he induced them to make folk toys and handcrafted articles. The money earned by Beech Creek folk for these toys and creations enabled many Watauga County people to lead richer, more creative lives and to enjoy greater economic well-being. Richard Chase has left the mountains but Jack Guy has taken the lead in continuing his work. There are mare than two hundred small woodworking shops in Western North Carolina and in East Tennessee. In �196 / Part II: A Changing Society Richard Chase, story teller ,folk singer, author, plays a fretless banjo ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO Wood carvers illustrate their work at the Asheville Crafts Fair ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO �From the Heart, the Hand, and the Head / 197 1961 they were organized into the Appalachian Woodworkers. They make chairs, desks, bookcases, clocks, bedsteads, tables, bowls, rolling pins, candleholders, and whittled or carved items. Ed Purdom of Macon County and B. H. Moody of Blowing Rock made all kinds of furniture and refinished wood furniture. They designed and made pieces to the customers' demands. They also made items that they believed would challenge their creative talents. Ralph Smith of Bryson City makes pleasing coffee tables. The Woody family near Spruce Pine have made chairs for I 50 years. They specialize in ladderback chairs. S. P. Mace of Mars Hill and John Barnes ofFranklin also make ladder-back and other types of chairs. A retired Baptist minister of Spruce Pine, H. M. Stroup, makes the cabinets for traditional grandfather and grandmother clocks of cherry, walnut, or mahogany. He imports the works from Germany. Many craftsmen specialize in making doll furniture. The miniature pieces are exquisite in both design and workmanship. John Councill has a woodworking shop at Sands near Boone. His craftsmen make small wooden items. Bowls, lamp bases, book ends, gavels are turned out on many a mountain lathe. Fruit such as grapes, apples, bananas are carved from poplar, pine, apple, buckeye, cherry, walnut, and birch - all native woods. Many carvers specialize in carving one item: a pig, a duck, a squirrel. Dulcimers, violins, banjos, guitars are still made by mountain craftsmen. Famous makers of dulcimers are Ed Presnell and the late Frank Proffitt. Odd S. White of Asheville has made violins for many years. When the village blacksmiths were no longer needed to make guns, tires, axles, hubs for wagons, most of them sought other occupations. In very few towns can one now find a blacksmith shop. In many a town, however, there is a machine shop like Gunter's in Spruce Pine. These machine shops can make or repair almost anything made of metal. Other smiths or families in which there have been smiths began to forge wrought iron objects like those used by the pioneers. Pewter pieces, plates, bowls, trays, candlesticks are made at Penland and by Dr. and Mrs. Ralph Morgan of Dillsboro. A number of artisans do beautiful work with copper and brass. Enameling is an antique art, and the products are popular. The enamel is applied to a copper base. The copper is worked into the desired shape, then finely powdered glass is sprinkled �198 / Part II: A Changing Society on the piece, after which it is fired in an electric kiln at I 500 degrees fahrenheit. Mrs. Joe Godfrey of Hildebran, who learned the art at Penland, is one of the gifted enamelists in Western North Carolina. Many of the mountain craftsmen make jewelry of silver, copper, wood, ceramics. Often these jewelers or gemologists work with the semi-precious stones that are found in the mountains. They cut and polish the stones and design gold, silver, copper settings for them. Stuart Nye of Asheville became famous for designing and making silver and copper jewelry in a dogwood pattern. He designed the first piece in 1933. Now the craftsmen in the industry he started continue to use this design and other flower shapes in metal. Pottery making is one of the oldest crafts known to man. Pots, pitchers, plates, dishes have been useful, well-nigh essential to man from the beginning of time. Quite early man learned to work with damp clay. Eventually he learned to shape it on a potter's wheel and harden it by heating, ultimately baking it in kilns. Fine clay from Macon County was ship,O~d to Josiah Wedgewood in England in 1767. The Penland Pottery existed in Buncombe County near Candler from 1831 until 1952. The Pisgah Forest Pottery near the old Penland Pottery makes pitchers, mugs and other pieces, specializing in a "cameo" design that looks somewhat like Wedgewood pottery. It was founded about 1900 by W. B. Stephen and his mother. Today it is operated by J. T. Case, the grandson of the founder, and by G. C. Ledbetter. The beautiful coloring, the delicate glazing, the decorating are all done by hand. Wood from the native forests is used for all the firing. Another highly successful pottery is that of Davis P. Brown, called the Brown Pottery, at Arden. Since long before the advent of the white man, the Cherokees have made pottery. They make and sell many kinds of dishes, pots, pitchers, vases that they have made. Lynn Gault is a noted potter of Brasstown. He and eleven other artists have banded together and commercially market their products in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Just a few miles from the North Carolina line at Laurel Bloomery in Tennessee is the Iron Mountain Pottery. This is highly successful and its products are prized by those who buy them. The industry has provided much needed employment to people of the area. Dolls have always been popular and doll makers in the mountains are often artistic. Mrs. Orus Sutton of Boone makes dolls �From the Heart, the Hand, and the Head / 199 Indian potters at Oconalujtee Village ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO Note the variety of shapes achieved by gifted mountain potters ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO �200 / Part II: A Changing Society to resemble their little girl owners. Many mountain craftsmen make dolls of corn shucks to represent the mountaineers as caricatured in fiction: long, lean, emaciated. Others make dolls with bodies of stuffed cloth, and heads and feet of dried apples. A lovely doll fourteen inches high and called the Mary Crossnore doll for Dr. Mary Martin Sloop is made by Miss Marian Brown of Crossnore. These dolls are exquisitely dressed and wear shoes made from kid gloves. A number of different kinds of hearth brooms are made and sold at various gift shops in the mountains. Other mountaineers make leather belts, purses, moccasins. Quite popular and widely sold all over the mountains at gift shops and fruit stands are wild fruit delicacies: jars of jellies, jams made of wild strawberries, raspberries, crabapples, wild grapes, and a conserve from pumpkin. The value of handicraft products made in North Carolina annually is over a million dollars. Above and beyond the money, the creation of these handcrafted articles gives unmeasurable joy and satisfaction, for who does not enjoy making things that are beautiful that he and others can enjoy? �CHAPTER TEN Literature Until shortly before the Civil War the literature about Western North Carolina was not different from that of the frontier. About I 8 58 there began the discovery of the region; and Western North Carolina became a rich field for journalists, writers of local color, folklorists, fictionists. These writers began to exploit the peculiar language, customs, manners, and humor of the mountain people. Visitors were impressed by the contrasts with low-country life and manners. Writers and tourists spread superficial accounts of mountain life. People seeing a run-down mountain cabin still say, "Look, there's a typical mountain home." By far the majority of the mountain people, however, live in comfortable homes. The minority live in shacks and suffer from penury and lack of opportunity. What is the hope for the "poor mountaineers"? Some advocates urge that the younger people leave the mountains and seek jobs in industrial plants in the lowlands. If so, they may well become badly adjusted slum dwellers and renters, and will often be recipients of welfare aid. Others advocate that industry be brought to the mountains so that hill people can live on their own land, drive into a neighboring town, work in a local factory, and operate their farms after working hours. This crisis of the spirit for the mountaineer in the face of the modern world has been largely neglected by the literature of the region to the present day. Our local literature, the subject of this chapter, is largely concerned with the past and the picturesque, with some mixture of the grotesque. Some of the best is strictly personal. 201 �202 / Part II: A Changing Society It is illuminating to consider the mountaineer as he has been treated by writers of fiction. Notable authors have written about Western North Carolina and mountain life, and foremost among them is Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe was both a Western North Carolina writer and a writer about his region. No one has written more graphically and more intimately about his land and his people, and no writer from North Carolina has ever achieved the fame and the respect accorded to Wolfe. Born October 3, 1900, he ever afterwards celebrated the beauty of October in "Old Catawba." His father, William Oliver Wolfe, was originally a Pennsylvanian, but his mother, Julia Westall Wolfe, was a mountaineer of mountaineers. She was related to the Westall, Penland, and Patton families whose members lived all over the mountains. Wolfe had an abnormally prolonged infantile relationship dominated by his mother. He was not weaned until he was almost four, and he had beautiful curls to his shoulder. His mother would not let them be cut until he was nine. In addition to being overly protective, she must have had an almost "insane nigardliness" and an insatiate love of property. Her stinginess warped the social attitudes of the sensitive boy. He was selfconscious also about the lower middle class status of his family. He lived with his mother at the Old Kentucky Home boarding house at 48 Spruce Street. His father, a stonecutter, lived in another house. W. 0. Wolfe had his faults, but he was a man with gargantuan appetites and a generous soul. There must have been a great contrast between the parsimony of Mrs. Wolfe and the open-handedness ofher husband. This dichotomy in the family possibly caused Tom to begin his search for a spiritual father whom he found in Maxwell Perkins. Tom's best writing is about Asheville and its people. They are seen through the tortured eyes of a sensitive boy. Wolfe's major works are Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and The River (1935), From Death to Morning (1935), The Story of a Novel (1936), The Web and the Rock (1939), You Can't Go Home Again (1940), and The Hills Beyond (1941). Only a part of Wolfe's work is about the mountains and his people, but he has given the most graphic account extant of family life and relationships among Asheville people. In Look Homeward, Angel and The Web and the Rock he described his boyhood, but perhaps the most complete account of mountain life appears in the fragment of a novel, The Hills Beyond, that �Literature / 203 "My Old Kentucky Home," where Thomas Wolfe lived ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO w as to be a history of North Carolina and of his family. The family is fictional, of course, but it resembles a mountain family . The narrative stops in 188o, twenty years before Wolfe's birth. He was revolted by the bleakness of his environment, and he was enthralled by trains because the sound of a train whistle w as a symbol of escape. H e had contempt for his mother's people, the m ountaineers, because they were the familiar and the known, but h e sympathized with their loneliness, the barrenness of their lives, and like them, he saw both the loneliness and the grandeur of mountain life, its beauty and its sordidness. His writings about the hillmen contain both ro mance and realism. H e admired their courage and their independen ce, but h e lam ented the fact that they were old and w orn out by middle age by their hopeless struggle against their environment. H e objected to the romantic stories of mountain life by writers like John Fox, Jr. The great mountain b arrier that " rimmed in life" w as the determining influence upon the destiny of the people. Wolfe w as a rebel against the superstition and romanticism of the South, but he admired the people for their courage and their pro ud history. �204 / Part II: A Changing Society His descriptions of his father, his mother, his brothers and his sisters arc so real that the reader feels like one of the family sitting before the fire and hearing tales of birth, death, ghosts, superstitions, and gossip - such tales as epitomize the literature and history of the mountain people. To Wolfe the mountain man was racially pure, clannish, isolated, a hard drinker, quick to fight, prone to violence, cruel, eager to engage in lawsuits, and a sharp, conniving trader. Wolfe remembered his mother's talk and her tales. He used with unerring skill the dialect formerly spoken by mountain people but now largely archaic. He described satirically the fundamentalism, Calvinism, puritanism, and primitive fatalism of their religion: their belief in a jealous and a wrathful God, in Hell-fire and damnation. They believed also that fiddle music and dancing were sinful. They had a false morality. A woman made her relatives swear not to let the undertaker see her unclothed; another said she would rather see her daughter dead than married to a drunkard. Divorced women were virtually outcasts. Wolfe believed that hill people should not become outmigrants, that those who left the hills were destroyed by the degeneracy, the immorality, the prostitution, and the poverty of life in the slums of cities. Not only were they exploited but they lost the freedom and the healthy amusements of the hillmen. Yet he described them unfalteringly as the "poor white litter of the hills"; as tall, gaunt, slatternly, with snuff juice rolling down their chins. They might be filthy, degraded, incestuous, infested with rickets and pellagra; but they had a pride, an independence, a virility, a zest for life. In his tales he recreated the life of a folk. Critics said that Wolfe was too verbose, too incoherent, too autobiographical, that his words burst like a pent up flood, but William Faulkner said he might have become the greatest of Southern writers. Certainly he was a man to "match the mountains," the greatest writer produced by North Carolina. He felt that literature was a transcript of life, and he sought to transcribe the life of his people: his family with their weaknesses and peculiarities, his Asheville neighbors with all their selfishness and materialism. He described the slatternly people gaping at strangers, the gaunt farmer, the dawdling Negroes, the fire and brimstone preachers, the resort-town cupidity of the citizens of Asheville, famed for its loveliness but ruined by pettiness and greed. He described the frenzy of the "boom" as a result �Literature / 205 of which everyone was going to get rich. But alas after the "boom" there was the "bust" and a desert of frustrated hopes and ambitions. He lamented the commercialization, the unsightly billboards, the fencing in of natural attractions, the cheap tourist honky-tonks, the bank president who became a convict, the mayor who misused city funds and committed suicide. Wolfe was called a "Judas Iscariot, a Benedict Arnold, ... Caesar's Brutus, the bird that fouls its own nest, ... a viper that an innocent populace had nurtured, ... an unnatural ghoul to whom nothing is sacred, not even the tombs of the honored dead, ... a vulture, ... a jackass, ... a baboon." Yet Thomas Wolfe did return to Asheville seven years after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, and he was welcomed with adulation. Today when his name is mentioned in Asheville, faces become rapt, eyes glow, shoulders straighten, for Thomas Wolfe was one of their own. The most distinguished figure ever to come out of Western North Carolina was Zebulon Baird Vance- governor, senator, fabulist. Thomas Wolfe created a character and family remarkably similar to Vance and his family. This character was Zachariah Joyner. Wolfe gave a realistic, tongue-in-cheek account of the settlement of the West and the political conflict between the East and the West. Old Catawba was of course North Carolina. The Hills Beyond is a fictional-historical analogy. Wolfe satirized the selfish control of state appropriations by the East, its claim to superiority on the grounds of birth, breeding, family, and its descent from the "lost colonists," pointing out that the state was more distinguished for its homespun quality than for its aristocratic ancestry. Zachariah Joyner, a country lawyer from the West, was elected governor in 1858. He attacked the "humbug aristocracy" of the East, asserting that most early settlers had come to eastern North Carolina because the English jails were full and to keep from being hanged. Wolfe asserted that under Joyner (Vance) the "representatives of privilege" had to bow before the rights of humanity, that they should stop thinking about where they came from and think about where they were going. He described the Joyner family, their ancestry, the patriarchal Bear Joyner, quoting myths, legends, stories about "Bear" and Zach. These anecdotes are typical of mountain humor that Wolfe learned in his youth. Many of them are in the folklore about Vance. Wolfe said that to the hillmen Joyner (Vance) was not only their Lincoln but their Paul Bunyan and �206 / Part II: A Changing Society Davy Crockett in one. He was a "living prophecy of all that they might wish to be," of what they might become. Wolfe satirized the mountain attitude toward liquor - that none was bad, that some was just better- and also the fundamentalist attitude that "gettin' drunk" was a cardinal sin- worse than murder. Bear Joyner said that one man had killed another. Zach was relieved; he had believed that the man had done something really bad like "gettin' drunk." He took a dig at mountain honesty and morality when Bear asked young Zach if he had watered the milk, sanded the sugar, fixed the scales. When Zach answered in the affirmative, his father said that they would then have family prayers. Speaking through Joyner, Wolfe wrote with great indignation of the desecration of the mountains by lumbermen, saying that "some vast destructive 'suck' ... some compulsive greed had been at work: the whole region had been sucked and gutted ... denuded of its primeval treasures." Then he showed his resentment of the disparaging treatment of the mountain people by "exultant Ph.D.'s," tourists, "consecrated school marms from the North," social service workers. He did not feel that the hill people should be subjected to the condescending efforts of uplifters and dogooders. Wolfe criticized lawyers and the law. Bear Joyner said that he would make a lawyer out of his son because he wouldn't work. Wolfe asserted that the lawyers and the courts were not used to uphold the law but to subvert it for "personal advantage and private profit." This is perhaps a nearly justified criticism of our legal system. Equally he despised the materialism of business men who devoted their lives to the pursuit of the almighty dollar and who objected to spending money for education because of resultant higher taxes. Wolfe admired the courage of mountain people but he felt that the veneration of the Civil War was useless and excessive. Finally in "the Battle of Hogwart Heights" he made fun of aristocratic pretensions. The Hills Beyond reveals Wolfe's great gifts as a satirist and a mountain humorist. There is much travel literature about Western North Carolina. Colonel William Byrd in 1728 described the beauty of the mountains. Colonel Henry Timberlake wrote his memoirs �Literature / 207 in 1765; William Bartram (1773), Andre Michaux (1792), and the Reverend Francis Asbury (1821) gave detailed accounts of their travels. James K. Paulding wrote Letters from the South (1817); J. W. McClung, Sketches of Western Adventure (1832), Joseph Pratt, Incidents of Border Life (1839). ]. G. M. Ramsey in his Annals of Tennessee (1853) wrote also of Western North Carolina. William Gilmore Simms, the famous South Carolina historical novelist, set parts of three books in Western North Carolina locales. James Weir's novels are also set in this region. Robert Strange in Eoneguski (1 839) wrote a novel of the Cherokees. This was the first novel written by a North Carolinian with scenes within the state. He felt that the history, customs, people of North Carolina could provide scenes and episodes, exciting, interesting, and suitable for fiction. This novel deals with the crossing of the mountains, the conflict with the Cherokees, and Andrew Jackson's fight with the Creeks. Calvin H. Wiley, first state superintendent of schools, planned three novels: Alamance, about the Regulation; Roanoke, about Eastern North Carolina; and Buncombe, about Western North Carolina, and he compiled a series of North Carolina Readers which were used in the state. Other early writers about Western North Carolina were Frances Hodgson Burnett with her Esmeralda and Lodusky; Constance Fenimore Woolson with her Up in the Blue Ridge and For the Mayor; and Mary Greenway McClelland, author of Oblivion. John Cairns, Jr., son of the proprietor of the Reems Creek Woolen Mills, was one of the nation's most eminent ornithologists. His articles were published in the best known scientific journals of the nineteenth century. The Fisher River Sketches of Harden E. Taliaferro preserve the way of life and the dialect used by the first settlers of Surry County and their descendants. These stories were enacted and told in the 182o's, written down in 1859. The "musters" were among the interesting occurrences described. Musters were semiannual, in May and November, and the old "Revolutionaries" were present: the "capting," "leftenant," "sarjent," and all the "ossifers." "They knowed a thing or two about military tacktucks." At the musters there was always plenty of "knockem- stiff" whiskey. On one occasion Hamp Hudson was supposed to supply the refreshments, but while he was distilling the brew �208 / Part II: A Changing Society his dog Famus fell into the mash tub and was distilled. When Hamp reported this to the musterers their faces fell, but after drilling they became so thirsty that they drank all of Hamp's "knock-em-stiff' - Famus or no Famus. Taliaferro described the picturesque dresss: the rawhide, stitched-down shoes, a "Iinsey" tow and cotton shirt to the knees, the dressed buckskin pants. People walked to meetin'; courtin' boys and girls would walk side by side, the girls carrying their shoes in a "redicule" until they got in sight of the meetin' house. The boys were barefoot. The young folks got together for grubbings, log-rollings, reapings, corn-huskings, wheat-threshings. The girls would have sewings and quiltings. On these occasions as soon as the work was done, the fiddle sounded and they danced and courted all night. For one young man to get the better of another in "sparkin'" was considered legitimate and was called "cuttin' out." Dick Snow wouldn't give up his courting Sally Tucker and said, "I never gins up a thing as long as there's a pea in the gourd." Sally's folks were "Methodises" and kept "arter" him to "git ligion." At the quarterly meeting he determined to "make his jack" and he went up with the mourners. The "circus rider" prayed over him "like he was beatin' tanbark off 'un trees in the daid of winter." Dick tried gettin' ligion a whole week, but then he backslid. Mountain youth married young. They married first and "scuffed for their fortuns" later. Fighting was a common occurrence. They "knocked with their fists, butted, gouged, kicked with their feet." Bullies kept their thumbnails long to "feel a fellow's eyestrings .... " In similar vein Taliferro described many customs of the frontier society. Rebecca Harding Davis gave personal and intimate descriptions of mountain life as she saw it in the late 187o's. She described Morganton as "caught on the shelving side of a hill." She traveled on the Western North Carolina Railroad from Morganton to the end of the completed line "in a chasm between two precipices." Later in 1 88o this railroad reached Asheville. At the end of the line there was a rough, temporary hotel where her party spent the night. She wrote: " ... the gorge swarmed with hundreds of wretched blacks in the striped yellow convict �Literature / 209 garb. After their supper was cooked (over campfires) and eaten, they were driven into a row of prison cars, where they were tightly boxed for the night, with no possible chance to obtain either air or light." The convicts lived in the most squalid condition, their labor was Herculean, and hundreds of them died that the railroad might be built and a gateway opened to the west. Mrs. Davis and her party spent the next night at Alexander's, twelve miles from Asheville. Alexander's was a noted stage stop. Mr. Alexander, "like all other farmers in the mountains 'took in' travelers, gave them an excellent supper and comfortable beds and sent them on the next day with a team of mules and a shackly old cart up the steep trail to the house of the guide, William Glass." They were on their way to ascend Mount Mitchell. Later they visited Waynesville, of which she wrote that they " ... found many such picturesque little villages as this hidden in these interminable ranges, perched on sunny peaks above the clouds, or nestling in gorges. . . . Half of their unpainted, weather-beaten houses are always empty, the inmates having apparently died, or gone farther into these sleepy wildernesses and then forgotten to come back .... There are always one or two families of educated, well-bred people. They have little money, but they feel the need of it less here than anywhere else in the States. They live in roomy wooden houses, the walls, ceilings, and floors frequently made of purplish fine-grained poplar; which no Persian carpet or tapestry could rival in beauty; they have no new books but they have read the old ones until they are live friends ... ; they dress in homespun, and sit on wooden benches, but knowing nothing of fashions or bric-a-brac their souls sit at ease and are quiet, and they never feel the void of an empty pocket." As Mrs. Davis's party approached Qualla their road "had been a cartway roughly cut along the sides of the mountains for about fifteen miles along the Tuckaseigee River, but the spring torrents year after year had washed it away, and neither white man nor Indian had ever laid a log to repair it." It was then called a bridle-road, and from the description one can see the need for roads in Western North Carolina: "[The] 'Nation' (the Cherokees) was hidden in isolated huts in the thickets among the ravines of the Soco and Oconoluftee hills. The 1500 Cherokees had ro,ooo acres under cultivation, no village, no school, no gathering place of any kind. Grass knee deep before the door of the little church. They were wretchedly poor. Only in 1875 were they given possession of �210 / Part II: A Changing Society the land on which they had lived for more than 500 years. After the party left the Indians, they came to a cabin: " ... built on the slope of the little river. It was a sample of the better class of mountain huts. The log walls gaped open in many places. Inside, they were pasted over with newspapers, the ceiling hung with hanks of blue yarn, red peppers, bunches of herbs, and Indian baskets filled with the family clothing. The hut was divided by an open passage into chamber and kitchen. One side of the latter was given up to a roaring fire of logs." Mrs. Davis quoted the woman of the house: " ... it's two months since I've seen the face of women, white or red. That's what ails the mountingsthe awful loneliness. Whar I was brought up, five miles from hyar, it would be a year that we'd not see a living face. But times is mendin' now. They hev Sunday school an' pra'r some'ars every two months. Us folks goes twenty miles to 'em. Go in the mornin', an' stay all day. Exercises lasts till noon; then we have dinner, an' in the afternoon we can see each other, and hear the news. Last pra'r was powerful big; they was nigh onto twenty folks thar." Mrs. Polly (their hostess) told them of conditions in the mountains. The people were pitifully poor and ignorant. There were some men of seventy who had never seen a wheeled vehicle. Mrs. Davis summed up conditions thus: "Near the Tennessee line their huts are often merely sheds. They cook in a pot, and sitting around it, eat out of it with wooden spoons. At night a couple of boards are lifted in the floor, and disclose a hollow in the earth beneath filled with straw, in which the whole family kennel together. In the morning the boards are replaced, and all cares of housekeeping are over . . . They are hospitable, honest, and, in their ignorant way, God-fearing. Their sole recreation is goin' to preachin' or pra'r two or three times a year when some itinerant missionary penetrates the mountains. Nothing could be falser than the sketches which have been given of them that confound these uncouth but decent people with the Pikes or swaggering ruffians of the West." Sidney Lanier, esteemed Southern poet, musician, writer of prose, stayed at Richmond Hill near Asheville, visited at Rugby Grange, Henderson County, the home of George Gustav Westfeldt, and spent his last days in the Wilcox house at Lynn, near Tryon, where he died of tuberculosis in I 881. There are �Literature f 2II memorials to him in Tryon and at Calvary Episcopal Church in Fletcher. His last poem, "Sunrise," was written in Lynn and dedicated to Westfeldt. Vivian Yeiser Laramore, poet laureate of Florida, spent many summers in Western North Carolina and wrote the "Ballad of the Silver Flute," praising Lanier as the "great poet of the South enriching the folklore of his land." Azure-Lure- a Romance of the Mountains, was a souvenier of Asheville and Western North Carolina edited by Idyl Dial Gray. In it one finds this excellent travel-poster description of the region: "In Asheville an azure sky and a brilliant horizon meet. Nature's artistry presents sparkling waterfalls, precipitous cliffsides, the colors of thousands of flowers, singing rivers, limpid lakes, bottomless pools, cloud-banked mountain-rimmed peaks and the bluest skies under heaven in this land of perpetual vacation.'' 0. Henry (William Sydney Porter) is associated with Asheville and Weaverville. He married Sara Coleman from Weaverville, an author, and he spent the winter of I909 in the home of Mrs. Porter's brother, John S. Coleman. He died in Asheville June IO, I9IO. Mrs. Frances Fisher Tiernan (Christian Reid) the popular novelist, wrote a book about Western North Carolina which she called The Land of the Sky. In this book she described the lovely mountains, the blueness of the skies, the beautiful, fertile valleys, the glorious sunlight, the cloud-shadowed ranges of mountains which reached the sky. As a result of her book the whole region has been aptly named "the Land of the Sky." Shepherd Dugger wrote War Trails of the Blue Ridge and The Balsam Groves of Grandfather Mountain. In the introduction to the latter he included a poem "The Land of the Sky" : Will you come to Grandfather, "The Land of the Sky," Where a banquet of glory is spread for the eye ... Where the mountains do rear their summits above The storm and the cloud to the regions of love.... Y e ones that are feeble, why linger and die, Come up to the beautiful "Land of the Sky .... " In I904 Horace Kephart came to Hazel Creek to write of the Southern highlands. He had been able to find little written about them, although he probably knew the novels of Charles Egbert Craddock, pen name for Mary Noailles Murphree, and those -of Constance Fenimore W oolsen. He became the Dean �212 / Part II: A Changing Society Illustration from "Christian Reid's" Land of the Sky, the book that gave the name to the mountain area of American Campers and wrote The Book of Camping and Woodcraft, which had its twentieth printing in 1960. He wrote for Adventure Magazine, Field and Stream, Sports Afield, Outing, and the Asheville Citizen. In 1913 Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders was published. T en thousand copies were sold of the first edition; in 1957 the seventh edition was published. The book contains authentic portraits of mountain life. Kephart described real mountain people, not caricatures; he wrote down the language and expressions really used by the people. In Bryson City on the old Bryson place there is a marker: "On this spot Horace Kephart, D ean of American Campers and one of the principal founders of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park pitched his last permanent camp. Erected May 30, 193 I , by Horace Kephart Troop, Boy Scouts of America, Bryson City, North Carolina." The tribute w as justified because Kephart had fought valiantly for conservation, writing article after article urging the preservation of the forests. He wrote: "When I first came into the Smokies, the whole region was one superb forest primeval. ... My sylvan studio spread over mountain after mountain ... and it was always clean and fragrant, always vital, growing new shapes of beauty from day to day. The vast trees met overhead like cathedral roofs.... Not long ago I w ent to the same place again. It w as wrecked , ruined, desecrated, turned into a thousand �Literature / 2I3 rubbish heaps, utterly vile and mean. Did anyone ever thank God for a lumberman's slashing?" There was an editorial in the Asheville Times: "His eloquent appeal should be the textbook of those who are interested in securing a national park for this mountain empire." John C. Campbell's The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921), published two years after his death by the Russell Sage Foundation, was prepared for publication by his wife, Mrs. Olive Dame Campbell. This book aroused national interest in the problems existing in the Southern mountains. Wilma Dykeman Stokely, born in Asheville in May 1920, is descended from old New York and North Carolina families. Bernadette Hoyle wrote in Tar Heel Writers I Know: "Being from the Middle South and the author of non-fictional studies of the region, she is thoroughly at home with both her setting and her characters" in The French Broad. Her novels are The Tall Woman, Look to this Day, and The Far Family. With James Stokely she wrote Neither Black nor White. The Tall Woman tells the story of the Southern mountain people. "It is neither quaint nor satiric, but it deals seriously with a community caught in eternal change and post-Civil War problems." Lydia McQueen is the tall woman. She was tall, not so much in stature as in character and influence. "The writing is skillful, and the lilt of the mountain speech of the time is musical to read." The novel is rich in detail and in atmosphere and at times has the flavor of some of the old ballads. Its theme is the erosion of both land and character by greed. The characters emerge "breathing, talking, living." The French Broad is a book that moves like a river. "It has the continuous, ceaseless, smooth-flowing style that moves relentlessly toward the sounding sea." Wilma Dykeman's Prophet of Plenty is a biography of Dr. Willis Weatherford. A fund-raiser extraordinary, he brought the nation's conscience to bear on the problems of the mountain people. In 1900 he was one of the few prophets of a new and hopeful South, which was "bogged down in poverty, dominated by Northern capital, suffering under discriminatory freight rates, plagued by demagogues, and fighting for its life after Reconstruction. There was one hope- education, education for leadership, for jobs, for citizenship." Weatherford gave inspiration and hope to Southern youth. He told them that �214 / Part II: A Changing Society regional competance depended upon industrial competence, that the human resources were the heart of the region's hopes. Weatherford built the Blue Ridge Assembly near Black Mountain and brought in brilliant leaders to meet the many eager young students. He became a leader of a region which had been bypassed by American life. His work, his faith, his ideas caught the imagination of governmental leaders and philanthropists and made those in state and nation see that this land of poverty could become a land of opportunity. His message to those in the mountains was to look to the young people, give them quality education and the region would grow great. He was a champion of all races, and he pioneered in the formation of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. For decades he was a leader on this commission and did much for race relations in the South. He obtained the money, selected the staff, and took the lead in gathering information for and publishing The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey (r962), financed by the Ford Foundation. This survey revealed conditions in the mountains and made recommendations for their amelioration. John Ehle, author of seven novels and three books of nonfiction by the time of this writing, winner of the Sir Walter A ward and the Mayflower Cup, is one of the ablest portrayers of mountain life and character. The Landbreakers (r964) was quite popular. The Road (r967) created a sensation and was included in Reader's Digest Condensed Books. The Road is almost a mountain epic. It tells the story of the struggle, the drama, the conflict, the almost superhuman efforts required to build the Western North Carolina Railroad from Old Fort to Asheville. The tribute to the convicts is deserved. Most exciting was the pulling of the engine over the mountain so that the 2,ooo-foot tunnel could be attacked from both ends. The completion of this link of the railroad was of vital importance to all in Western North Carolina. Fred Chappell wrote two novels, It Is Time, Lord and The Inkling. He described Canton, called it Withers, and the Champion Paper and Fiber Company he called the Defender Paper and Fiber Company. He says the stench of the paper mill can be smelled for miles. He asks, "What would the town do without the paper company?" and answers with "What is it doing with it?" His "Prodigious Words" appeared in Southern Writing in the Sixties. John Yount, born in Boone, wrote a novel, Wolf at the Door. A selection, "The Store," appeared in Southern Writing in the Sixties. It contains a good description of a boy �Literature / 215 going to a country store and peering at the candy through the greasy, flyspecked glass. "These are my mountains," said John Parris, who through Roaming the Mountains and My Mountaineers, My People showed his love for and appreciation of the people of Western North Carolina. He continues: "If you are born in the mountains, you can't put them out of your heart and soul. There is a peace and quiet that makes you feel closer to God .... " Parris was born in Sylva, November 23, 1914. He became a successful newspaper man and a notable author. Nothing in the mountains is an old or jaded story to him. Roaming the Mountains (1955) originated around the firesides and homelife of his family and his neighbors. Many of his tales he learned from his grandfather William Riley Tallent, who had a great zest for life. The titles of his chapters are indigenous to mountain life: "Hot Biscuits and Sourwood Honey," "The French Broad Is a Gypsy," and "In Huckleberry Time Courtin's a Pleasure." Parris does not write in dialect but he uses idioms and descriptive terms which create a colloquial feeling such as "He's a distiller of corn' likker, and brother, hold on to your hat," "He's the overlord of a one-room log cabin with a dozen mouths to feed and a passel of hound dogs in the yard," and "In the Carolina Highlands, June is a whip-poor-will." One of the significant writers born in Western North Carolina was Rebecca Cushman. She was an editor of the Southern Review and a special contributor to the Christian Science Monitor. She wrote Swing Your Mountain Gal, Sketches of Life in the Southern Highlands in 1934. This book is not fiction; it contains a series of sketches taken from mountain life. Each short narrative is a deft character portrait of the rugged but dignified mountaineer. The book makes a real contribution in that it is a spiritual interpretation of mountain life. Her mountaineer Guy Norman is a man who leaves one with a quickened consciousness of life. He is hospitable, unaffected, natural. He says: "We live jest plain .... Life's jest the way you hold it up .... If you've done that you're all right when you come to take your pillow .... " Margaret Morley wrote the challenging The Carolina Mountains in 1913. Muriel Sheppards's Cabins in the Laurel created quite a stir when it was published in 1935, many people in Mitchell County feeling that she exaggerated conditions there. �216 f Part II: A Changing Society One of the most authentic accounts of mountain life, people, customs, and fiction appeared in the 1,500 page doctoral dissertation of Dean Cratis Williams, "The Southern Mountaineer in Fiction." Dean Williams asserted that in the decades following the Civil War the mountaineer became a caricature in fiction. He became a type- uncouth, ignorant, violent, poor, a fundamentalist, a moonshiner, but hospitable and with feudal courtesy. Stock characters in mountain fiction are the feudist, the witch crone, a jealous mountain youth, an outlaw, a benevolent but illiterate landowner, an idealistic teacher, a hardshell preacher, a demagogue, a rich, heroic outsider, a beautiful but ignorant mountain girl, the corrupt and stingy justice of the peace or sheriff. The preacher and the sheriff find the teacher and education threats to the power structure or to their personal positions. Perhaps the greatest poet of Western North Carolina has been Olive Tilford Dargan. Born in Kentucky, she moved to North Carolina in 1906. She wrote five books of poetry: Semiramis (1906), a closet drama in iambic pentameter; Pathfinder (1914), lyrics about the North Carolina mountains; The Cycle's Rim (1916), fifty-three sonnets on the death of her husband, the prize-winning book as the best book of poetry of the year by a Southern writer; Lute and Farrow (1922), lyrics of the mountains; The Spotted Hawk (1958), which won the Roanoke-Chowan poetry a ward. In addition to her poetry she wrote two volumes of short narratives: Highland Annals (1925), and From My Highest Hill (1941). Under the pen name of Fielding Burke she wrote the novels Call Home the Heart (1932) and A Stone Came Rolling (1935). In 1962 her fifteenth book, a collection of short stories, Innocent Bigamy, was published. She lived most of her life in Swain County, but in her old age she resided at the Blue Bonnet Lodge in West Asheville. She wrote chiefly of the mountains and mountain people. James Larkin Pearson was born in the Moravian Falls section of Wilkes County, September 13, 1879. His people were very poor. There were few books in the home: a cheap Bible, a small almanac, a dictionary, and an old Methodist hymnal. Off and on he would attend the one-teacher free school. He taught himself the alphabet by reading circus posters and studying Webster's blue-back spelling book. When he was four years old he began reciting poetry. One cold winter day he and his �Literature / 217 father were riding in an old wagon. The father asked if he were cold. He answered: "My fingers and my toes- my feet and my hands- are just as cold as you ever seed a man's." His first poem was "The Vision" (1895). In 1897 he composed "The Song of the Star of Bethlehem" while he was clearing new ground. This poem was printed in the New York Independent and for it he received eight dollars. He became a typesetter and the editor of several small papers. In 1910 he began to publish a humorous paper, The Fool Killer, which he built up until at one time it had a circulation of fifty thousand copies a month. Pearson was admired by Upton Sinclair, who printed one of his poems in the New York Times. Later Sinclair printed "Fifty Acres," Pearson's best known poem. In 1953 Pearson was named Poet Laureate of North Carolina. He is the author of five books of poetry printed on his own press: Castle Gates (1908), Pearson's Poems (1924), Fifty Acres (1937), Plowed Ground (1949), and Early Harvest (1952). An anthology, Selected Poems of James Larkin Pearson, was published in 1960. Pearson wrote simply of "homey" things in a deeply lyrical vein. His poetry has quaintness, local color. One can get the flavor of Pearson from the following lines: from "Fifty Acres" I've never been to London, I've never been to Rome; But on my fifty acres I travel here at home. from "Here is Wisdom" Old Andy never went to school And never read a book. But he who takes him for a fool Will need a second look.... from "A Night in June" The June-bug roosted under a leaf, And the firefly winked at the cricket The bull-frog sang from the lily-pond To the owl in the ivy thicket. There of North were by Carolina. have been a number of anthologies and collections Carolina poetry. In these anthologies many poems Western North Carolinians about Western North The first such anthology, Woodnote.1·, or Carolina �218 f Part II: A Changing Society Carols, was compiled by Tenella (Mrs. Mary Bayard Clark). In this anthology was an anonymous poem, "Swannanoa." In I 883 John Henry Boner published a selection of poetry under the title Whispering Pines. This included "Hunting Muscadines on the Y adkin" and "The Cliff' about Pilot Mountain. In I 894 Hight C. Moore published Selected Poetry of North Carolina and in 1912 E.C. Brooks an anthology, North Carolina Poems. In 1941 Richard Walser edited North Carolina Poetry and in I948 North Carolina in the Short Story, in 1953 The Enigma of Thomas Wolfe, in 1957 The Picture Book of Tar Heel Authors, in 1959 Nematodes in My Garden of Verse and in 1963 North Carolina Poets. Carl Sandburg, the poet and Lincoln biographer, bought a 240 acre farm at Flat Rock, "Connemara," the former home of Christopher Memminger, Confederate Secretary of the Treasury. Sandburg was also a folklorist and a song collector. One of the versatile men in Western North Carolina is Leroy Sossamon. He is pilot, poet, bulldozer operator, newspaper publisher, owner of furniture stores, accredited teacher, owner of a steel construction business, a theater, Ford dealer, operator of a mercy airlift and commercial planes. Having graduated from Appalachian State Teachers College cum laude in I934, he taught English and French at the Presbyterian orphanage at Barium Springs. He bought one business after another, including the Bryson City Times, which he publishes. He is connected with the Sossamon Steel Company. He wrote Backside of Heaven, a book of poetry, and sold an edition of I I ,ooo copies. Henry Alexander Sieber, born in New York in 1931, spent his boyhood in the North Carolina mountains. Influenced by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, his poems carry a message of hope. He assumes that man because of his religion and poetry must not be defeated by life. Two of his books are This the Marian Year (1954) and Something the West Will Remember (1956). Lovers of Thomas Wolfe like the following lines: What right have you to say That Tom Wolfe of Asheville And Brooklyn, New York Didn't talk all the time All the time with God In Asheville and Brooklyn, New York. �Literature / 219 A unique Western North Carolina poet is Jonathan Williams. Born in Asheville in 1929, he operates an apple orchard near Highlands. He is a book designer, lecturer, publisher, poet, and operator of the Jargon press. His broadsides and book titles include the following: Garbage Letters; The Iron Face of the Sun's Child (1951); Red/Gray (1952); Four Stoppages (1953); The Empire Finals at Verona (1959); AmenJHuzzaJSelah (1960); In England's Green (1962). Williams's poems are included in "beat" anthologies because they are "way out." Miscellaneous poems about Western North Carolina and by Western North Carolinians were Zebulon Baird Vance's "The Little Patched Trousers," Martin V. Moore's "The Rivers of North Carolina," Reuben]. Holmes's poem "The Valley of the Ashe," and "Tom and Mollie" by the anonymous poet laureate of Mitchell County. Struthers Burt was a novelist, but he wrote a book of poetry, In the High Hills (1914). He felt that poetry should touch the intelligent heart. Elliott Coleman came to the Asheville School in 1928. He had published two books of poetry: Poems of Elliott Coleman (1936) and An American in Augustland (1940). Among dramatists associated with Western North Carolina are the following: Hatcher Hughes, Hell Bent for Heaven, and Ruint (Pulitzer prize winner); Lula Vollmer, Sun Up; Thomas Wolfe, The Return ofBuck Gavin; George Tedd,Jr., King Cotton's Children; Hubert Hayes and John Taintor Foote, Tight Britches; Hubert Hayes, The Red Spider, Blackberry Winter, and Smoky Joe; Mrs. Bertha Herter, The Harp of a Thousand Strings; Edward Richardson, Black Mountain, a play based on the ballad "Barbara Allen"; Anne Bridgers, co-author of Coquette, who had a summer home in the Reems Creek section; Cleves Kinnard, Common Clay. Kermit Hunter wrote Unto These Hills and Horn in the West. Ellis Credle wrote Down Down the Mountains (1934). He is a writer and illustrator for children. This was the first picture book of the Blue Ridge country. Lois Lenski wrote children's books like Blue Ridge Billy, which depicts mountain life and �220 J Part II: A Changing Society customs. Mary Hancock wrote Menace on the Mountain (1968), the gripping story of a boy who becomes a man while his father is away during the Civil War. Included is a fictional account of the capture of Fort Hamby from the Bushwhackers. This book was filmed for television by Walt Disney Productions. Miss Hancock's work has appeared in The Progressive Farmer, Extension, Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, Pageant, Catholic Digest, and the VFW Magazine. Richard Chase is a distinguished writer, ballad singer, and folklorist. For years he taught songs, dances, and traditional games to mountain children. He sang and collected folklore. He wrote widely and well: Old Songs and Singing Games (1938), The Jack Tales (1943), Grandfather Tales (1948), American Folk Tales (1948), Wicked John and the Devil (195 1), and Soncf!,S As Preserved in the Appalachian Mountains (1956). Croyden Bell and Thelma Harrington Bell wrote about animals and characters from Western North Carolina: Snow (1954), John's Rattling Gourd of Big Cove (1955), The Wonders of Snow (1957). Ruth and Latrobe Carroll moved to Asheville in 1950. They wrote and illustrated fascinating books for children: Peanut (1951), Salt and Pepper (1952), Beanie (1953), Tough Enough (1954), and later, Tough Enough's Trip, Digby the Only Dog (1955). The history of Western North Carolina has been the theme of only one previous book, by John Preston Arthur (1913). He also wrote an interesting history of Watauga County. Foster Sondley wrote a two volume history of Buncombe County. Other county histories are Clark Medford's accounts of Haywood County; Sadie Smathers Patton's writings on Flat Rock and Henderson County; Clarence Griffin's books on Old Tryon County and Rutherford County; Horton Cooper's Avery County history: Margaret Freel's work on Cherokee County and Lilian Thomasson's on Swain County, Judge Johnson Hayes' The Land of Wilkes; Nancy Alexander's Here Will I Dwell (Caldwell County); T. F. Hickerson's Happy Valley and Echoes of Happy Valley, which deal with life along the Yadkin from Lenoir to Elkin; and Arthur L. Fletcher, Ashe County: a History. Histories of colleges are John McLeod's From These Stones (Mars Hill College) and William E. Bird's Western Carolina College. 0. L. Brown's Blanford Bernard Dougherty contains much of the history of Appalachian State University. Dr. Edward Phif<"'r has written scholarly articles about ante-bellum life and conditio •. in Burke County. Glenn Tucker wrote High Tide at Gettysburg; �Literature J 221 Tecumseh; Vision of Glory; and Zeb Vance, Champion of Freedom. Works of Cordelia Camp include David Lowry Swain, Governor and University President; The Influence of Geography Upon Early North Carolina; and Governor Vance: a Life for Young People. She edited Some Pioneer Women Teachers in North Carolina. Ina Woestemeyer Van Noppen is the author of four published books in addition to the present one: The Westward Movement; The South: A Documentary History; Stoneman's Last Raid; and, with John J. Van N oppen, Daniel Boone, Backwoodsman: The Green Woods Were His Portion. Harley Jolley had published in 1969 The Blue Ridge Parkway. George B. Watts wrote The Waldenses of Valdese. Pamphlets by Fred B. Cranford, The Waldenses of Burke County, and by Ruth Royal Poovey, The Burke County Gold Rush, were prepared in conjunction with the Burke County Cultural Heritage Project, pursuant to a grant from the United States Office of Education. Con Bryan's Confederate Georgia, has passed through several printings. A number of other writers about this region are worthy of mention. Bill Sharpe's North Carolina: a Description by Counties and a New Geography of North Carolina contains much valuable information about Western North Carolina. The North Carolina Gazetteer by William S. Powell is indispensable in locating quaint-sounding places and the sources of their names. Julia Montgomery Street's Fiddler's Fancy (r955) is about the folk of the Toe River in Mitchell County. It contains a true rendition of mountain speech, folklore, and customs. Legette Blythe wrote Miracle in the Hills, the inspiring story of Dr. Mary Martin Sloop of Crossnore, and with Miss Lucy Morgan he wrote Gift from the Hills, the story of Penland School. He also wrote James W. Davis, North Carolina Surgeon. Davis spent his youth in Wilkes County. Jacob Carpenter of Three Mile Creek kept an interesting diary. Horton Cooper discusses it in his history of Avery County. Opie Percival Read, humorist, wrote The Captain's Romance (1896), The ]ucklins (1896), Odd Folks (1897), and a number of other novels. The ]ucklins is a romance about a schoolteacher in Western North Carolina. Maria Poole describes the pervasive superstitions that affected the lives of mountain people. Her novels, such as In Buncombe County, give a most damaging account �222 / Part II: A Changing Society of mountain character. She gives a graphic account of a revival meeting near Asheville. Rosser Taylor wrote Carolina Crossroads. Logan B. Logan produced Ladies of the White House. Mrs. Edith Erskine of Weaverville and Mrs Charlotte Young wrote several volumes of poetry. Martha Norburn Mead wrote Asheville the Land of the Sky. Bill Nye, the humorist, lived in Asheville, and his syndicated column appeared in the Asheville papers. Helen Topping Miller wrote The Splendor ofEagles, and George Bledsoe, The Shadows Point North, about the impact of summer tourists upon the mountains. Lewis W. Green has written a first novel, And Scatter the Proud, integrating six short stories about life in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The setting is on the crest of Big Lonesome, a mountain traversed by the Blue Ridge Parkway. The characters search for meaning in life. Green says: "The mountaineers asked of the outlanders only that their pride be unmolested, their self-respect honored, their dignity left intact. This courtesy they extended to all others." Alberta Pierson Hannum, (Look Back With Love) is full of sympathetic understanding and love of the mountain people and their lore of bygone days. Each chapter begins with an entry from the diary of Jacob Carpenter of Three Mile Creek. She also wrote The Gods and One, April Thursday, Avery County, and The Hills Step Lightly. The author is an Ohioan, but long a resident of the North Carolina Hills. Mrs. T. Henry Wilson (Dell B. Wilson) had published in 1969 The Gran4father and the Globe based on the Civil War exploits of Keith Blalock and his wife in the Globe-Grandfather Mountain area. Romulus Linney, a descendant of the "Bull of the Brushies," the noted lawyer whose namesake he is, wrote the novels Heathen Valley, about Valle Crucis, (1962); Slowly by Hand Unfurled (1965); and a play, The Sorrows of Frederick (1966). �CHAPTER ELEVEN The Lore of the Folk Booted and spurred and bridled rode he, A plume in his saddle and a sword at his knee. Back come his saddle all bloody to see; Back come his steed but never come he. Riding on the highlands, steep was the way Riding in the lowlands, hard by the Tay. Out come his old mother with feet all so bare; Out come his bonnie bride riving of her hair. The meadows all a-falling and the sheep all unshorn; The house is a-leaking and the baby's unborn. But Bonnie James Campbell nowhere can you see With a plume in his saddle and a sword at his knee. For to home came his saddle all bloody to see; Home came the steed, but never came he. The song that tells this sad story can today be heard and enjoyed by many people who have no idea of life in the country, let alone of life centuries ago in Scotland, because in some localities and in some families there have been men, and women, like Frank Proffitt, who like to sing old songs, and men and women who have wanted to preserve their songs or stories, or legends, or superstitions, so that many people might enjoy and profit from them. But what importance is there in a song that laments a Bonnie James Campbell that nobody can recall, except in this song, 223 �224 / Part II: A Changing Society aside from the possibility that he may have been the James Campbell who died in 1594 in the battle of Genlivet? There is no easy answer to this question. Frank Proffitt's answer may be as good as any when he explained the value of a traditional life in a letter quoted in the Carolina Farmer: "My folks was of the poorest but they was of the highest moral standards. Not knowing about books or letters, they stored in their memory all of the best of the old proven ways and was forever busy making things for useful and entertaining purposes." Proffitt's tradition was one of people who did not depend on others for values but who made their own standards out of what they had inherited and what they had. Ballads like "Bonnie James Campbell" were a part of the way of life of the people who came to Western North Carolina around the time of the Revolutionary War, and, depending on the locality, in the decades before and after. But they were not by any means the chief cultural tradition that evolved there. Religious activities came to play a very important part in the life of rural America, including Western North Carolina, and the region became the nearly exclusive doma~ of pentacostal and fundamentalist sects. As a result one of the chief cultural traditions that developed was the singing of religious folksongs in homes, churches, and at gatherings such as the camp meetings. But there was for everybody the necessity of living not just on Sunday but on all the other days of the week. The religious leaders were often interested in stamping out the "Devil's ditties" that were the abundant heritage of rural people from Medieval times, but the influences of this-wordly necessities and interests have helped preserve the secular materials to the present day, through the use of some excellent subterfuges, as well as out-right rebellion, on the part of the pleasure-loving, the hunting and drinking men, and the spirited and fun-loving youths. The austere fatalism and the visions of glory of many fundamentalist churches were not able to uproot the traditions of living pleasurably and vigorously. There seem to have developed separate traditions of entertainment. In addition to listening to old songs in the solitude of the home at a father's knee, in a mother's lap or at her side, or at the foot of a grandmother's rocker, there was also the music making, which as often as not involved either drinking or dancing or both. The oldest instrument whose use among the rural folk we may be sure of is the fiddle, and fiddle playing evolved �The Lore of the Folk / 22 5 traditions of its own, styles of performance that included the when and the where, and one of the most interesting wheres was perhaps the fiddlers' conventions, where champion fiddlers of several localities competed for recognition and sometimes prizes, after long spells of practicing on their neighbors at dances. When and how other instruments came to be added, in addition to the fiddles, to make the musical ensembles that are still nearly ubiquitous in the mountains is not certain. To the fiddlers' contests and conventions may be added singing conventions, where the singers of religious folk songs are known to have assembled, sometimes for the awarding of prizes for the best performances. Also rural customs in many places were annual hunting expeditions and shooting contests. The mountain folk are a sociable lot to this day, and while old customs fade, new ones are added. For the most part, the camp meetings are gone without a trace, but the "Singing on the Mountain" is reminiscent of the older religious singin' gatherin's. The modern mountaineer may go to the Asheville Folk Festival, to the crafts fairs held in Gatlinburg and Hiwassee, to the fiddlers' conventions that today are gaining in popularity and in the attention paid them such as the ones at Galax, Virginia, and Union Grove and at different times of the year in a host of communities. The annual hunts seem to be less prevalent, but the sportsman may go only short distance from his home to the nearest stock car race to be with a great enthusiastic crowd. Still, many people have the feeling that something has been lost, that nothing like the past will be seen again. Certainly the nature of community activities has changed. The Appalachian natives, like other pioneer groups, engaged in communal labor sharing, such as quilting, house-raising, and harvesting, and these customs have almost passed away. Just as important, perhaps, were the community entertainments, the play-parties and dances. The play-parties, even in communities where dancing was prohibited, were the harmless and hilarious gatherings of young people, and many of the games were ancient. The dances employed by the older folks were different from those observed in England by Cecil Sharp. These activities seem to have been superseded by institutions centering on the school, the church, and the chamber of commerce. Finally, some of the most perishable forms of folklore, the oral tales, the superstitions, the legends and fables have been subjected to the eroding influence of the media - printing, �226 / Part II: A Changing Society schooling, and electronic devices. But some very interesting tales whose progress from India over long centuries of oral transmission has been traced are still to be heard in the highlands. During the heroic age of Northern Europe there lived poets, in Scandinavia called scalds, in Anglo-Saxon England called scops and gleemen, who entertained and edified courts and kings with their songs. The inhabitants of England before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons were the Celts, and Celts also inhabited Ireland, Wales, and Brittany in France. Their poets, the bards, also sang heroic songs and at times had the gift of prophecy. The modem folksingers, in their tragic ballads, may be continuing a tradition that is descended from the influence of these early poets. The lyric songs and love songs of the Appalachian singer seem more closely related to the poets of Medieval Europe, its troubadours, minnesingers, and jongleurs. Since no one knows the origin of a song that is truly folk (by one widely accepted definition, folk songs are anonymous), some of the anonymous authors of folk songs might have been medieval poets. After centuries had passed since the earliest English ballad (in the thirteenth century) was written down, in 1917 Cecil Sharp, an English folklorist, and Mrs. John C. Campbell toured the mountains and were the first to make an important collection of both the music and the words of the ballads there. They visited White Rock, Allanstand, Alleghany, Carmen, Big Laurel, and Hot Springs in Western North Carolina- the Laurel country. They found that the mountaineers were direct descendants of original settlers from England and Scotland who had left their native lands in the eighteenth century and migrated to America. Members of their families had lived in this secluded region, some of them since the time of the Revolution. Because of the difficulty of keeping in contact with the outside world until the twentieth century, their language and customs had remained in some ways much the same as those of their ancestors in England and Scotland. Even in 1917 some of them had no markets, no surplus produce, and barter was their chief medium of exchange. Sharp and Campbell found that most of those in whom they were interested lived in log cabins and had few �The Lore of the Folk / 227 material comforts, but they were independent and self-sufficient. They were a leisurely, cheery people in whom the social instinct was highly developed. Sharp described them as physically strong and of good stature, usually spare in figure, their features as clean-cut and handsome, their complexions those of people with out-of-doors habits, with superb carriages and a swinging, easy gait. Mrs. Campbell and Sharp collected 450 tunes. Sharp commented that in England only the older people sang ballads but in the Appalachian Mountains ballads were sung by nearly everyone - young and old, that singing was as common and universal a practice as speaking. The fact has been forgotten that singing is the one form of artistic expression that can be practiced without any preliminary study or special training. Sharp believed that it was as natural for children to sing as it is to speak the native tongue. He found that mountain people had the "delightful habit of making beautiful music at all times and in all places." They were courteous and cooperative, and he had little difficulty in getting them to sing for recording. He learned to ask for "love-songs," which was their name for ballads. He found that mountain singers sang in very much the same way as English folk singers, "without any conscious effort at expression and with the even tone and clarity of enunciation with which all folk-song collectors are familiar." One peculiarity that he noticed was their dwelling "upon certain notes of the melody, generally the weaker accents." Most ballad singers sang without accompaniment, but occasionally they accompanied themselves on the guitar or the dulcimer. Many singers had extensive repertoires and none used printed song sheets. Some few, however, had written copies, usually made by children, which they called "ballets," a term used in England to apply to the printed broadsides. The Sharp-Campbell collection included fifty-five ballads, the first thirty-seven of which were in the Francis James Child collection of 305 ballads; the last eighteen were not known or were not included by Child. Sharp and Campbell included also sixty-seven other folk songs. The major forms of entertainment- song and story- are combined in the ballad, which is a narrative song. It tells a story without characterization and without comment or moralizing. The mood is merely suggested; the story is stripped to its bare �228 / Part II: A Changing Society essentials. Although any stage of a culture may produce ballads, they are most characteristic of primitive or isolated societies like the mountains of Western North Carolina in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or that of the English-Scottish border in the late middle ages. The difference between ballads and other forms of poetry is in the way they have been preserved in the memories of generations of common people who have learned them, sung them, and passed them on orally to others. The themes of ballads are those which appealed most to the common people, most of them concerned with universal human experiences: love and marriage, family relationships, struggle, death, and the supernatural. Usually ballad stories end tragically. Stories of domestic tragedies and ill-fated love affairs are common. A great many older ballads deal with the supernatural, particularly with stories of witchcraft, enchantment, demon lovers, and the return of the dead. In most American versions the supernatural elements are left out. Many ballads chronicle the raids along the English-Scottish border during the late middle ages. Others recount sympathetically the exploits of outlaws, notably those of Robin Hood and Jesse James. Some ballads are based on riddles, telling the story of someone who saved himself from imminent peril by answering riddles correctly, usually through his folk wisdom. A number of ballads are on religious themes, and many make frequent reference to religious tradition and ritual. North Carolina's distinctive contribution to American ballads is a series of brutal murder ballads which establish the standard form for that kind of ballad in America. A famous Western North Carolina ballad is about Frankie Silvers. Frances Stewart Silvers (Frankie) murdered her husband Charles Silvers at the site of the present Black Mountain Station on the Carolina, Clinchfield, and Ohio Railroad, the mouth of the South Toe River, on the night of December 22, I 83 1. She cut off her husband's head with an axe, dismembered the body, and tried to burn portions of it in the fireplace. The crime was discovered. She was tried, convicted, and executed (the first North Carolina woman to be so executed) at Morganton July I2, I833. Before her execution she left a poem lamenting her fate. Her crime and her execution have become the subject of a ballad. Another famous Western North Carolina ballad was that about the murder of Laura Foster by Tom Dula in January I 866. Zeb Vance defended Dula, but he was convicted. Charlie �The Lore of the Folk / 229 Davenport is reported to be the author of the following ballad, which enjoyed great popularity in 1959. This song's popularity was the kickoff of the modern "Folk revival." Hang down your head Tom Dula, hang Down your head and cry; You Killed poor Laura Foster and now you're bound to die. You met her on the hill side, God Almighty knows; You met her on the hill side and there you hid her clothes. You met her on the hill side there to be your wife; You met her on the hill side and there you took her life. Phillip Houston Kennedy's study of the printed collections of ballads found in North Carolina has revealed that in several ways Western North Carolina is distinctive in the repertoire of its singers (ballad collectors have found English ballads sung in every state) and also in the amount of collecting that has been done here. In the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore appear 399 mountain variants of ballads gathered by six collectors (the number of piedmont variants is 267, by three collectors; from the coastal region, I 37 ballad variants, by three collectors). Twenty-five of the twenty-seven mountain counties in his study were visited by collectors. He found the southwestern counties the most sparsely collected, but found Watauga county the foremost locality in the state for the number of songs collected there, and in general the northwestern section is the best represented. A further distinctive feature of the northwest is that the most unusual ballads in the Brown Collection came from there, including these examples: "Katherine ]affray" (Avery), "Robin Hood Rescuing Three Squires" (Watauga), "Queen Eleanor's Confession" (Avery), and "The Suffolk Miracle" (Yadkin). One unusual ballad from the southwestern section is "The Boony Earl of Murray" (Henderson). The rare ballads in the Cecil Sharp Collection were from the singing of a Mrs. Gentry in Madison County who was noted for her extensive repertoire of old songs. Fifty years ago ballad singers wandered through the mountains singing ballads for bed and board. Most people loved the ballads, but the Hardshell Baptists condemned them as "devil's ditties." They declared: "The devil rides on a fiddlestick." Many ghost tales were told and many ballads were sung before the winter fires of the mountaineers. The love-song ballads were also an inspiration for the love act. �230 J Part II: A Changing Society In Western North Carolina "the primitive melodic tradition of the ballads was preserved also in the strange chants and longdrawn funeral songs." The tunes, "mournful and beautiful," embodied the spirit of loneliness, sorrow, and resignation of the isolated mountaineers. The "infare," a heritage from the remote past described sometimes in the tragic love ballads of tradition, was a social event accompanying weddings. A couple married in the morning, had breakfast at the home of the bride. Then came the "infare" at the home of the groom. The frolicking included folk dances, and the groom supplied the whiskey, food, and sweets. In the evening after the bride and groom had retired came the "chivaree." The young people of the neighborhood, fun-bent, would come with outlandish noises, hoping to surprise and embarrass the newlyweds. Usually dancing and drinking followed, with the groom again furnishing the whiskey. Extensive study has been given to the musical traditions that include the tunes of the ballads and folk songs and of the instrumental music, which also reveals a kinship with old-world traditions. This study has revealed a melodic process traceable before the sixteenth century and bearing evidence of "the uninterrupted continuation of a long-lived and downright archaic tradition of music making among the unschooled people." The melodies of the folk can be shown to belong to some forty tune "families," consisting of melodic ideas which "have been subjected to conscious and unconscious variation, adapted to various uses, extended or contracted, but can be identified if a tune is examined completely .... " It is only a music scholar who is capable of revealing the basic melodic ideas in the countless variants and versions of the thousands of songs and the multitude of styles that exist in the American folksong tradition. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, III, Folk Songs, contains many of the popular mountain folk songs. This book has interesting illustrations, pictures of herb gatherers, and of sorghum boiling. Folk songs have merely an expression of sentiment rather than the action implied in a ballad. Included are the following: Courting Songs such as "A Paper of Pins;" Drinking and Gambling Songs like "The Lips that Touch Liquor Must Never Touch Mine;" Homiletic Songs: "The Wicked Girl" and "A Poor Sinner"; Play-party and Dance Songs such as "Oh, Pretty Polly," "Peg in the Parlor," "Turkey Buzzard," "Wish I had a Needle and Thread," "Too Young to Marry," "Pop Goes the Weasel"; Lullabies and Nursery �The Lore of the Folk / 23 r Rhymes like "Bye Baby Bunting," "The Frog's Courtship," "McDonald's Farm," "Scotland's Burning," "Go Tell Aunt Patsy"; Jingles about Animals: "Possum up a Simmon Tree" "The Old Gray Mare,"; Folk Lyrics: "Sourwood Mountain," "Pretty Sara," "0 ld Smokey," "Kitty Kline," "Charming Betsy"; Work Songs: "The Com Shucking Song," and "Old Blue." Religious Songs included are "The Cumberland Traveler," "Rock of Ages," "Pharoah's Army," and "Jacob's Ladder." Songs sung by Indians are "Ah, Poor Sinner," and "Cherokee Hymn." Among Western North Carolina collectors and singers have been Dr. I. G. Greer, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Frank Proffitt, "Doc" Watson, Dean Cratis Williams, Edith Walker, Pearl Webb, and Dr. Amos Abrams. Dr. Greer collected over three hundred ballads. At fourteen he could sing more than forty ballads. Lunsford and Proffitt could sing over three hundred from memory. At eighty Lunsford sang for ninety hours for recordings by the Encyclopaedia Britannica Corporation. These singers and ballad collectors awakened the pride of the people in their traditional music. Alan Lomax wrote, "The first function of music, especially of folk music, is to produce a feeling of security for the listener by voicing the particular quality of a land or of the life of the people. To the traveller, a line from a familiar song may bring back all the familiar emotions of home, for music is a magical summing up of the patterns of family, of love, of conflict, and of words which gave a community its special quality and which shape the personalities of its members. Folk song calls the native back to his roots and prepares him emotionally to dance, worship, work, fight, or make love normal to his place. . . . On the American frontier men worked and sang together on terms of amity and equality impossible in the Old World .... The common man, the individual, is everything in American folk song .... " Professor George Pullen Jackson has advocated the thesis that the white spirituals of the mountain people are the progenitors of the Negro spirituals. He believes that followers of John Wesley and other revivalists, seeking inspiring revival hymns, took popular folk tunes, wrote religious words for them, and used them in their revival meetings. This activity �232 J Part II: A Changing Society A family sings together constituted an American religious folksong movement. It began in New England and spread southward, until the whole South became the province of these songs. As the practice of singing these songs died out elsewhere, it survived in folk communities in the South. Only the fact of a wide-spread movement was new; in very early times singers had sung songs to folk tunes. Singing hymns to secular tunes has been prevalent for thirteen centuries. When Cecil Sharp asked mountain people for songs, they thought he wanted hymns. He had to ask for love songs to hear ballads. Nevertheless, a few religious songs, "The Cherry Tree Carol," and "Hicks' Farewell," are in Sharp's collection. Professor Jackson feels that Sharp missed the opportunity to be the discoverer of religious folk songs, that revival and camp meeting hymns used catchy folk tunes, and that many came from Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian hymnals. There are thousands of these songs. Many religious mountain folk believe these folk hymns to be the most beautiful music on earth. Thus the white spirituals are an important phase of mountain culture. �The Lore of the Folk / 233 Artus Moser wrote in 1969 that group singing of hymns from shaped note song books still occurs in many rural churches of Western North Carolina: "Singing conventions meet in the different communities, and go by such names as the North Buncombe Singing Convention, the Haywood Singing Convention, the Dutch Cove Old Time Singing, the Old Harp Singing in Transylvania County near Brevard." He also reports that singing schools, conducted by itinerant music masters, are still held in some communities. The singing school practice is intended to teach the rudiments of musical knowledge, and then all are encouraged to do as their elders do, to sing and enjoy. Professor Jackson believed that "the chief source of spiritual nourishment of any nation must be in its own past perpetually rediscovered and renewed" and that there is a national unity in the American folk song tradition. Jackson was a great pioneer in the field of folk studies in his rediscovery of early America's little known hymnals and tunebooks and the historical forces that produced them. They were first used by the Baptists, but the Methodists soon made the revival songs their own and became the great spreaders of white spirituals. These white spirituals are a much neglected body of folk music. They are far more numerous and their use was far more wide spread than the singing of ballads. Yet ballad collecting and singing have attracted the efforts of hundreds, while the collecting of gospel hymns based on folk tunes has been largely neglected. Southern country singing inspired Jackson, and he began to study the subject. "Fasola" (the name of three notes of the scale as the singing schools taught them) singing was based on the shape-note hymnals. These shape notes were musical helps that enabled the musically illiterate to read the notes and to sing. There were singing schools and normal schools for training singers. The Sacred Harp (I 844), one of the most famous hymnals, went through many editions, twenty-one by compilers in the Southern states. "Singing Billy" Walker's Southern Harmony had universal appeal in the South. It channeled the living stream of white spiritual songs into the present and preserved it. There are still Southern Harmony singings like the annual "Singing on the Mountain" on Grandfather Mountain. At the "sings," the leader holds the book in his left hand, beats time with his right: down, left, up, right. Sometimes he calls the beat audibly. If stanzas not in the book are sung, the �234 / Part II: A Changing Society leader "lines out" the hymns. The Christian Harmony (1805) was probably the first hymnal to record revival tunes; the Olive Leaf (1878) was among the last. Among the widely used hymnals were William Hauser's Hesperian Harp, the Social Harp by John Gordon McCurry, the Sacred Harp with B. F. White as chief compiler and E. J. King as co-author. There were many editions of the Sacred Harp from 1844 to 1879 and even two editions in 1911. The Original Sacred Harp, a later version, contained 609 tunes and 1226 names of authors and composers, 861 of whom were from the Southern states. Of these tunes "The Romish Lady," "Wicked Polly," "The Little Family," and other songs were based on old ballads. Millions of the shape note song books were sold. Many of the Scotch Irish elements in the "Fasola" folk songs and hymns were secular; many recalled historical events; many dealt with religious experience: bad men, bad women, biblical events, anti-drinking songs. Many of the spiritual songs were born in camp meetings. Watts and John and Charles Wesley brought religious hymnody nearer to the masses by endowing it with "personal emotion, spiritual spontaneity, and evangelism." The village, town, and city church folk slowly abandoned the South's indigenous songs. But the rural songs met the people's tastes, and they felt that "God's music" was sung in the country churches. This congregational singing used songs handed down by oral transmission. They were often derived from ballads, were "dressed-up folklore." The phrases, rhythms, harmonies, stereotypes of expression, whole melodies often passed from one channel to another. An ancient folk ballad might become a hymn tune and then the hymn tune might be the origin of a bawdy song. Hymns and camp meeting songs were often robbed from fiddlers, fifers, harpers, and frolickers. Over nine hundred published religious folk tunes sprang up in the mid-eighteenth century. The tunes were mainly secular folk airs used in hymns in the New Light and the Great Awakening. Many religious ballads are found in the old manuals of country singers. They are for individual singers, not groups. The sung story is the thing. The singer tells the story in the first person: the poor wayfaring stranger going over Jordan. They are similar to the old-world ballads in form. More significant than the ballads are the revival spiritual songs, for where one could sing by himself to secular words all could sing in a gathering to religious words. "Mountain songs," secular tunes with religious �The Lore of the Folk / 2 35 words, have persisted in the Southern Appalachians, but have generally passed out of existence elsewhere. Folk music is a constantly flowing stream. There are eddies and currents, survivals intact of ancient lore, and new modes of creation. Legends, yarns, folk tales, folk songs, ballads are as much a part of the life of a folk community as are its laws, customs, and ways of making a living. They tell a good deal about what the people admire and about what kind of people they really are. " And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him." The harp or lyre was an ancient instrument of widespread use. In Israel the young shepherd soothed the savage beasts with a harp. Representing the ancient traditions of the Celtic people, the harp is the symbol of the Irish people. The Appalachian mountains are the home of another primitive form of harp, a folk instrument that seems distinctive. The Appalachian dulcimer may be taken, not as the most wide-spread folk instrument, which it is not, but as a symbol of a folk tradition that has its roots in antiquity, but which has developed distinctive forms. It is properly a symbol, like the Irish harp to the Irish, of the best of a traditional culture. Attempts have been made to trace the mountain dulcimer to origins beyond the seas, with imperfect success. Some writers have even thought the instrument to be descended from the Harp of David. This conclusion seems hardly justified. Among many people who have voiced opinions on the subject, Jean Ritchie of the Kentucky mountains has been one of the most eloquent in the support of its native origin. In her The Dulcimer Book she makes detailed comparisons of the dulcimer with the Norwegian langeleik, the Swedish humle, and the French epignette des Vosges, all somewhat related to the medieval German instrument, the scheitholtz. She concludes that the instrument found in the Appalachians was "born" after years of experimentation, that it is "adequate, eloquent, refined, a complete statement of the mountaineer's life- its simplicity, sorrows, gaiety, beauty." An enthusiast about the instrument, Julia Montgomery Street describes the instrument thus: "The mountain dulcimer, with two to eight strings, most commonly three, big tuning �236 / Part II: A Changing Society pegs, fretted fingerboard, and curved neck [all these fitted to an oblong box played flat on the lap or on a table] has been known and cherished for generations throughout the Southern Appalachians, and nowhere else .... " She described the use to which it was put: " ... for a solitary singer or intimate family song fest, the preferred music was the melody of a sweet-singing, plaintive dulcimer. The tune-box was generally swept [played] by a girl or woman ... , " and it was either homemade or handed down. The relationship of the instrumental music of the Southern Appalachians to the custom of singing ballads is uncertain. The British ballads and the dulcimer both seem to be rarer than the native songs and the other instruments. Both seem to belong to the home. But many experts on the folksong tradition say it has been one of unaccompanied singing. Certainly, the instruments that are numerous and widely played are the fiddle, the banjo, the mandolin, the guitar, and today, the bass fiddle and electric guitar. The history of these instuments in Western North Carolina is an unwritten story, as much so as that of the dulcimer. There is of course no question about the fiddle. This is a nearly universal instrument throughout areas where Europeans live or have settled. Negro slaves in colonial times provided the music for the stately dances of eighteenth century planters, playing tunes they learned from the English. These tunes are still current in Western North Carolina, and many of them can easily be recognized as directly descended from songs heard in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, and even Germany, Scandinavia. The ages of the tunes suggest that the history of instrumental music parallels that of the ballads and folksongs. Further, the instrumental tradition was retained by the same cultural groups as was the rest of North Carolina and Appalachian folklore. The instrumentalists did not live in separate communities. How extensive, and how important is this music? These tunes are not limited to a couple of dozen only, "and they do not all sound the same, as some people have commented to me Uoan Moser] upon first hearing. Instead, it appears that there are as many as two hundred distinctly separate fiddle tunes along with many variants." But this music has yet to be given the attention of people who have an interest in preserving folklore. "There remains a vital body of material, yet to be explored, �The Lore of the Folk / 237 more alive today than ballad singing or any other oral folk art. . . . Published editions of this music are practically nonexistent." Cecil Sharp included only half a dozen "jig" tunes in his Appalachian collection. "Yet, if popular usage by the folk of today is any measure of the vitality of this material, then one must note that in North Carolina alone, for every festival or program of ballad singing produced today, there are half-a-dozen fiddlers' contests, at least." In fact, for a century these gatherings have been a traditional local event in many communities. Miss Moser believes that the instrumental music of Western North Carolina is part of a heritage that belongs to general European folk culture. The tunes themselves are part of a tune heritage that belongs especially to the ethnic groups that settled the region. These tunes are part of more than forty families of tunes, including song, dance, and instrumental music. "Though tunes show stylistic variations in certain areas, similar variations of widespread tunes turn up in area after area. The lack of localized versions may attest the age of the tune families (one of which goes back at least to the tenth century) or their small number. ... " But the tradition is not just an inherited one. It is perpetually creative of new materials along traditional lines: "This music is part of a cultural heritage which extends back as far as the ancient Morris dances and forward as far as modern ragtime and jazz. The tunes the fiddlers play include sword dance tunes which have been adapted to square dances, Scottish marches inherited from bagpipe melodies, waltzes of a more recent vintage, and tunes with a definite ragtime beat and tonal organization.'' The introduction of new instruments into the folk tradition was an important event in the development of a regional style of music. The fiddle, the one folk instrument that came to America with the ballads, was played to accompany dancing and for its own sake. At some point, probably after the introduction of the banjo and guitar, the fiddle became applied as an accompaniment to the voice, at the same time applying rhythms developed to make dance steps. At first exclusively a lead instrument among other instruments, in modern bluegrass, which developed from the "old timey" string ensemble, the fiddle is used as an accompanying instrument, and the banjo, guitar or mandolin take the lead part (or the singer). �23 8 f Part II: A Changing Society The banjo, an American invention in its five-string form, has in the mountain tradition developed distinctive styles. One feature of this distinctive style is the use of the short, fifth string, as a drone, sounded throughout the music, not always in harmony with the music. Another characteristic feature of the mountain banjo style is a system of changing the tuning to achieve different keys without moving the hand from the first position, and to play specific melodies. (This technique is also used with the fiddle, in which case it is called scordature, and has an old history.) Some authorities date the development as having been complete as early as the r88o's. The oldest method of picking the strings is variously named, but many people know it as "frailing." There are a variety of other styles of picking. In ensemble practice, the banjo was not known as a solo lead instrument until the bluegrass era launched it into national prominence as a solo instrument. The history of the guitar in America is not well recorded, but its popularity in Europe in the eighteenth century spread to this country in the nineteenth. However this may be, most mountain people say there were no guitars around until around r 91 o. The guitar in the "old timey" string bands was a background instrument until the recording era, when the possibility of melody playing was introduced from outside. Although the guitar is still used as an accompanying instrument, many individuals have become prominent as masters of a special, complicated style, also their varied influences can be heard in bluegrass styles. The bluegrass band is the modern version of the rural string band that developed into ensemble practice through the introduction of new instruments, the touring medicine show, political campaigning, the commercial possibilities of accompanying dances, playing on the radio, and making recordings. This tradition was at its heyday in the 1920's. The depression drove the practice back into the mountains, as the Nashville music industry develooed the "star" tradition. In the recent decades, the advent of bluegrass music as a modernized version of this older string band tradition signalized a rebellion against the commercialization that threatened to take country music away from its origin and into the city. The amazing feature of the mountain music tradition is that it embodies all the periods of its development, from the unaccompanied singing of ballads and the solo use of the fiddle �The Lore of the Folk / 239 A banjo picker ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. for dance music, through its modern manifestations. One of the best places for one who is not acquainted with the mountain traditions to encounter a great deal of what is still to be found of them is at one of the music conventions that have developed, mainly from the old fiddlers' contests, in Galax, Virginia (in August), in Union Grove, North Carolina (at Easter), and at Asheville, North Carolina (in July) . Each of these large gatherings has over forty years of its own history, but the custom of holding such gatherings is much older. An interesting account of the earlier, less enormous fiddlers' contests, was written by Louis Rand Bascom early in the century: "The convention is essentially an affair of the people, and is usually held in a stuffy little schoolhouse, lighted by one or two evil-smelling lamps, and provided with a rude, temporary stage. On this the fiddlers and 'follerers of banjo pickin' ' sit, their coats and hats hung conveniently on pegs above their heads, their faces inscrutable. To all appearances they do not care to whom the prize is awarded, for the winner will undoubtedly treat. Also they are not bothered by the note taking of zealous judges, as these gentlemen are not appointed until after each contestant has finished his allotted "three pieces." �240 / Part II: A Changing Society The 1955 Mountain Dance and Folk Festival held annually in Asheville, directed ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO by Bascom Lamar Lunsford At the Old Fiddlers Conventions at Union Grove about as much interest was shown in extemporaneous performances on the grounds as under the big tent. This is a scene from Union Grove in the 196o's PHOTO BY ROUNDER RECORDS �The Lore of the Folk / 241 The modern super convention has to some extent replaced these smaller and more local affairs, and blue grass has made inroads (but not the crooner style of commercial country music). At each of these the variety of entertainment is great, and it is greatest at the Asheville Dance and Folk Festival, where rank amateurs, commercial artists, dancing groups, solo ballad singers, and bands are all to be seen and heard. At the Union Grove Old Time Fiddlers' Convention, at Asheville, and at Galax Virginia's Old Time Fiddlers' Convention, the number of bands is in the hundreds, and the time which is consumed including all-night festivities is several days. Joan Moser recommends them to the interested: "The commercial exploitation of these is far less than that of the ordinary folk festival. The proceeds, for instance, usually go to local non-profit educational or charitable funds, and for this reason the music is less likely to be dressed up for audience appeal. It is performed in more traditional styles than is the case with more commercial and sensation seeking festivals. This is not to say that showmanship and artistic virtuosity are missing, by any means, but they do remain within the bound of traditional practice." Although each of the three festivals named draws crowds in the thousands and from far away, there are a multitude of the smaller, local schoolhouse variety of fiddlers' contests. To a city dweller or a resident of the suburbia of which so many Americans are a part, a remarkable feature of the mountain culture is the extent to which work and recreation coincide. Artus Moser describes the trait of community sharing this way: "They learned to cooperate and work together, sing together, dance together, as neighbors and friends. Some of the very old people will tell you with much conviction that they had more fun and pleasure when they were young than the modern young generation, ... " The square dance is the recognized dance of the mountain people. With it goes the mountain music of the fiddle, guitar, and the banjo. This music bears within itself its own unique musical form with its rapid jump from key to key and its expression of emotion. The square dance is the descendant of the minuet, the Virginia Reel, and English and Scottish folk dances. �242 / Part II: A Changing Society Square dance groups meet outdoors in the summer ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO The majority of the people were fundamentalists and puritanical. They thought that dancing where there was bodily contact was sinful. They condoned "play-party" games. The square dance was an exuberant amusement at these play-parties. It gave the energetic young people a means of enjoying their healthful animal spirits. M any years ago Bascom Lamar Lunsford of Turkey Creek (Buncombe County) organized the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville. It has been held every summer since that time. Ballad singers and musicians and square dance groups perform and compete. This competition has helped to maintain and to spread the popularity of square dancing. Then, too, there is music making for its own sake. These get-togethers might be at several t ypical places: at someone's house, out doors (often in the summer months), or at a store or filling station. These musical get-togethers involve considerable ritual: reverence for old players or listeners and deference to their tastes, tuning up (an endless and hair-raising process), taking turns at playing the lead (unless the fiddle player is elderly and august, in which case he may always play the lead), and usually drinking (depending on the presence of women). The �The Lore of the Folk / 243 drinking ritual might impose a different role on the fiddle player (who needs more concentration) than on the guitar player (who needs to loosen up and steady his rhythm). Under some circumstances drinking is always done covertly, behind the house or in a car. The rules are strict. Folk beliefs and superstitions have evolved from the folk wisdom of an isolated people who had to make-do with what they had and where they were. They used their herb remedies for illnesses, the omens and signs for planting and harvesting crops. They used practices that had worked, based upon their actual experiences. They believed in luck, magic, nature, witchcraft. These beliefs rooted in common sense needed to have added to them the results of scientific knowledge and investigation. When such results were unavailable, they relied upon themselves. Folklore is the seed, the plant, the natural growth by which legends turn into myths. It has long been an integral part of the lives of the mountain people. It was a product of their primitive lives, their simple pleasures, and their struggle to survive and make their lives as creatively rich and as pleasurable as possible. The folklore of Western North Carolina is rich with the stories, legends, ballads, games, songs, amusements, and occupations of the mountain people. Lacking books, theaters, amusements, they created an imaginative and indigenous way of life for themselves. Many of the folktales are based on pagan beliefs of other millenia, which have survived as oral literature. When primitive man could not understand death, sickness, lightning, and other nautral phenomena, he attributed them to malignant deities, such as witches and devils. To protect himself from these malignant forces he created benevolent spirits to save him from the forces of evil. Eventually these spirits became his gods. Finally the one-God concept evolved and the gods became God. Then even though man wished with all his might to believe in the benevolence of God, he still feared the devil, forces of evil, malignant spirits, and the consequences of a remorseles destiny. He blamed certain undesirable happenings upon fate, luck, chance, the influence of witches and other malignant spirits. Folklore is a characteristic of man's cultural heritage. Everyone is affected by it, but quite possibly the more simple, ignorant, isolated, �244 / Part II: A Changing Society Bascom Lamar Luniford and Obray Ramsey make mountain music. They are representative of numerous groups of banjo, fiddle, and guitar players who travel miles to enjoy their favorite pastime PHOTO BY AMERICAN MUSIC CONFERENCE and illiterate a person is, the more greatly he is influenced by folk beliefs. Folk tales like the ballads were handed down by oral communication and transmission. Like the ballad singer, the folk teller of tales "adopted not only the vocabulary and language but also the technique of high-pitched and nasal speech of the people, ... their soft drawl." These tales were a part of spoken culture until a literary man like Richard Chase came along, �The Lore of the Folk / 245 collected them, wrote them down, and thus made them available to a wider audience than could have heard the native fabulists. In the mountains of Western North Carolina there are many folk tales and legends. Concerning these one must ask the following questions: how interesting are they? how significant? how widely are they told? to what extent are they believed in Western North Carolina? One would say that the belief that if a corpse were touched by a murderer it would bleed afresh would be absurd. Yet a suspected murderer was given this test in Ashe County, North Carolina, and the legend is that the corpse bled. There are many legends about witchcraft. There was a witchcraft trial in North Carolina in 1920. Belief in ghosts was once involved to explain North Carolina's most widely advertised natural mystery, the Brown Mountain lights. These lights that can be seen over Brown Mountain from the Blowing Rock highway and elsewhere have been investigated by scientists and have been written about time and again. They were the subject of a mystery novel, Kill One, Kill Two by W. W. Anderson in 1940. The lights were investigated by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1913 and 1921. They have also been investigated by the National Geographic Society. The report of the Geological Survey scientists stated that they were reflections of automobile and train headlights. H. C. Martin asserted in the Lenoir Topic that they were reflections of the lights of Lenoir, Morganton, and Granite Falls. Hobart Whitman said the lights were really over Hickory, Morganton, and Valdese and that they merely appeared to be over Brown Mountain. Others have asserted that the lights were swamp fire or will-o-the-wisp, luminous reflections from phosphorescent substances. Many people have explored Brown Mountain and have found no cause of the lights. One evidence that the lights are reflections is that there was no legend concerning them before the twentieth century. There is a legend that the man in the moon is there for burning trash on Sunday. Many are the legends about forlorn lovers. The most appealing of these is about the beautiful Indian princess who, after the death of her lover, leaped from a cliff into the river. Thus the Estatoe River received its name. An interesting legend tells how the Indians obtained fire. They had no fire. Three old witches over the hill did. The Indians and their animal friends stole a firebrand from the witches. The animals passed it from one to another until it reached the Indian �246 / Part II: A Changing Society village. Henceforth the Indians guarded the precious fire day and night. This is reminiscent of the Greek myth about Prometheus. The story of the origin of the woodpecker concerns a stingy old woman. One day a wizard disguised as an old man came by as she was baking cakes. He asked for a cake. She promised him one but then decided each was too large to give to him. Because of her stinginess he changed her into a woodpecker. A flower legend is about a little girl who liked to look at the sun so much that she was changed into a sunflower. The fuchsia is supposed to belong to the devil. The purple bell that drops down is his bell, the red petals that turn up are hell flames. The trees bowed before Jesus, the aspen refused. Ever since, it has trembled in fear. The mistletoe was once a large tree. Its wood was used for the cross of Jesus. Now it is a parasite. At Clifton, Ashe County, legend has it that a witch woman, Lyla Weaver, bewitched a rooster and made a snake appear on the counter in the store, so terrifying the merchant that he gave her a bolt of cloth. In Watauga County Old Henry, supposedly a male witch, put a spell on his daughter-in-law. Her family kept a stoppered bottle hanging from the loft to obviate the curse. There is the belief that the only way to kill witches is to shoot them with silver bullets. It was believed in Todd, N.C., that under the spell of a witch crops will not mature or will wilt and dry up, that a witch could bewitch horses so that they would die after trying to climb trees and walk logs and fences, that when horses' manes and tails are tangled, they've been ridden by witches, that witches can't abide lye soap, that if you don't want soap bewitched stir it with a sassafras stick, that if butter won't congeal you should put a coin in the churn to attract the witch's attention so the butter will come. There are legends of famous ghosts in the mountains. Among the most widely believed are those about the Lineback ghost near Cranberry and the Polly-Place ghost near Haunted Spring, one mile east of the Watauga River. This ghost is like a soldier with brass buttons on his coat. In Watauga County a headless dog was seen near the Cove Creek schoolhouse. There is a legend that a traveler and his dog were murdered and buried under the schoolhouse. Ghostly lights have been seen from Big Laurel in Watauga County. Aunt Sally Simms of Pineola had a vision in which she saw the devil, his wife, and four children come into Billy's house. They danced, had music, and one of the �The Lore of the Folk / 24 7 hellcats sat on the forelog in the fire. She threw boiling water on it but it was not hurt. Then she saw a hand with a knife. Shortly afterwards Betty and a boy named Ralph were running away. Bill, Betty's brother, knifed and shot Ralph. In Wilkes County strangers are told of Guy-scoot-er sky, the wonderful steer with hind legs longer than his front ones for mountain climbing. Olive Tilford Dargan in From My Highest Hill quoted many sayings such as the following: "You can't raise a child that never falls out of bed. They die shure." "Fodder that has never been wet when made into a tea will cure fever." "A writin' spider means good luck." "To cure a baby's thrash get a strange man to lift his shoe to the baby's mouth, blow in the baby's mouth, say the three highest words in the Bible, or get a blackeyed man to give the baby a drink from his right shoe." "One must have a calm spirit if she puts up beans that will not spoil." She wrote of "yarb" medicines: mullein and shumake for a swelled throat, boneset for "agu," pokeweed for "rheumatiz" and spignet for consumption. For earache the remedy was warm rabbit oil poured into the ear. John Foster West recalled from his childhood in the Appalachians of North Carolina a lullaby: "Whatcha gonna do with the baby? Whatcha gonna do with the baby? Wrope it up in the tablecloth And throw it up in the stable loft. Whatcha gonna do with the baby? West recalled a toe game that the children liked : "Big toe: "This old sow say 'Let's go steal wheat.'" Second toe: "Where we git hit at?" The Third toe says: "Massa's barn" The little toe, when twisted, would say: "This little pig say, "Wee! wee! wee! I can't get over the doorsill.'" Many of our children's games had their origin in antiquity. "Jacks" was mentioned by Aristophanes. The Romans played "How many fingers?". "Blindman's Buff" and "odd and even" were Greek. "Prisoner's base," "Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley" were played in the Middle Ages. "Leapfrog" was mentioned by both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. "Anthony over," "Skip to my Lou," "Scissors-Paper-Stone," "Crack the Whip," "Upset the Fruit Basket," "Hide and Seek" have long been popular in the mountains. �248 / Part II: A Changing Society A rhyme about "hide and seek" is Bucket of wheat, bucket of clover, All not hid can't hide over. All eyes open, here I come. Many games involve practical jokes. In "Barnyard Chorus" only the one uninitiated gave the sound of the farm animals. In "Barber" a girl would tie a scarf around a boy's neck, invite him to be shaved and blindfold him. Then a little boy would kiss him. The blindfold would be removed, and the boy would be asked if that were not the quickest shave he had ever had. There were a number of battle games like "Capture the Flag" and many dramatic singing games like "Jenny Jones," "Old Crony," "Old Grumble," "Old Crummle," "Old Grumly" with onomatopoeic refrains like "chicky my chick my crany crow." A witch would catch all the children and send them home. An amusing guessing game was "Grunt, Pig, Grunt." A child would be blindfolded and then would have to identify which other child had grunted. Another guessing game was "Hackety hack on your back, how many fingers do I hold up?" In "Blindman's Buff" the blindfolded one had to catch and identify one of the players. In "Horns" a player would lose when he called the name of an animal that had no horns; in the "Twelve Days of Christmas" the player had to repeat all the gifts - the first one to omit any dropped out of the game. "Prisoners Base," "Fox in the Morning," "Rover, Red Rover, All come over," "Drop the Handkerchief," "Jacks," and "Mumble Peg" were widely played. There were so many hog drovers passing through the mountains that the children made up a "Hog Drover" game: Hog drovers, hog drovers, hog drovers, we air, A courtin' your darter so neat and so fair, Can we get lodgin' here, oh, here? Can we get lodgin' here?" The child playing the father would answer: "No ugly hog drover gets her for a bride." Riddles were a popular form of humor: On which side does a sheep have the most wool? The outside. The mountain people were fond of proverbs and picturesque sayings. They are part of the folk wisdom and imagination: for every fog in August there'll be a snow in winter; his wife throwed more out the back door than he could tote in the front; as quare as a biddy hatched in a thunder storm. Superstitions represent the primal stage of folklore. One superstition is about a white horse, an omen of good luck. If you see a white horse, kiss the right hand and stamp it twice on the left hand. Thus the white horse, like the first star of evening, is a wishing horse or a magic horse; �The Lore of the Folk / 249 one who eats a bear's heart will have supernatural strength; if you carry a lock of hair of a person you can control that person. Some superstitions concerning domestic pursuits are these: set bread to rise before sunrise; soap should be made in the dark of the moon; a seventh son of a seventh son has miraculous healing powers. Death and funeral customs include the following: if a pregnant woman drinks too much water, she may drown the baby; turn the bed tick before nine days and the mother will die; a ringing in the ears is the tolling of the death bell. There are many good luck omens, fetishes charms. Spittle, a rabbit's foot, a small piece of corn, a buckeye, knocking on wood, stump water are good luck charms. Folk ideas about bees are interesting: swarm in May, worth a load of hay. The principal sports, hunting and fishing, were subjects of folk beliefs: fish will not bite when the wind blows; hunting is good when the moon is in the south, when the air is still. "When the wind is in the east, the fish bite least; When the wind is in the west, the fish bite best; When the wind is in the south, the fish bite in the mouth." A folk hero is Junior Johnson, stock car racer and chicken farmer. The legend of Junior Johnson has developed in Wilkes County. Junior, the "charger," was the idol of the 17,000 people who would drive out Route 421 to the stock car races near Wilkesboro. On such a day the "good ole mountain boys" could hear gospel preaching and shouting on the radio. According to Tom Wolfe the South has preaching, shouting, grits, country music, old memories, traditions, clay dust, old bigots, new liberals, and the lust for racing. Junior was a "hillbilly" who learned to drive by running whiskey for his father, a copper still operator in Ingle Hollow. Junior grossed over $10o,ooo in 1963. Still the Wilkes boys in the apple shacks wake up in the night, hear a supercharged car roar, and say, "Listen at himthere he goes!" Junior became famous for his "bootleg turn" to avoid roadblocks, a 180° turn made by throwing the car into second, stepping on the accelerator, and skidding the rear end around. He was never caught in a car. Once he got through a road block by using a police siren and a red light in his grill. His admirers are usually in their twenties and wear mod clothes. Very few arc clodhoppers. Junior has a huge income, 42,000 chickens, a road-grading business, and a good job with Holly Farms. He is a hero a whole class can identify with. He stirs their imagination. What he is they would like to be. �This page intentionally left blank �PART THREE A Developing Economy March II, I879, Major James W. Wilson, the engineer in charge, wired the Governor: "Daylight has entered Buncombe County today: grade and center met exactly." The last shovelful of earth had been lifted, the rails were laid through the Swannanoa tunnel, and trains from Old Fort and the west met. The place they promptly named Terrell's. The year I88o marked the passing of an era and the ferment of a new one for the mountain counties. As the rails reached a county seat it experienced a little "boom." Lumber and tanning companies moved in, new uses were found for wood, wide-eyed tourists converged to experience the wonders that a few daring travelers had been describing for years. Small aggregations of local capital were thereupon invested here and there in furniture factories and textile mills. Telegraph had preceded the railroad by just a few months. The telegraph was the nerve system and the railroad the arteries carrying materials essential to the integration with national life that was beginning to evolve. The forests in r 880 were great unbroken stretches of never-cut timber, and the timber stands were interrupted only by the island places where men in farms, valleys, and towns made their stands against the wilderness sea of trees. As the fisherman is an intruder on the seas, so then men were invaders of the forests. To make a field or pasture it was necessary to kill trees, so men adopted the practice of burning or stripping a stand of trees to clear land - treating the forest as an 251 �252 / Part III: A Developing Economy enemy to be conquered. Of course most of the houses of men and their contents were won by toil from the forest. Still it was the enemy that was everywhere and eternal. With the railroads came the first lumbering concerns, and the forests were transformed into a marketable commodity, only awaiting the axe. But the farmer was not so immediately affected by the railroad in the 188o's, except that things probably got somewhat better for him with gradually improving markets and new markets for new crops, such as the tobacco crop, then in its infancy as an industry in Western North Carolina. A change in the weaving of people together into society was surely taking place. County seats grew as centers of influence only if railroads reached them, and in some cases towns were created by the arrival of railroads, the town-maker par excellence in America. North Wilkesboro eclipsed Wilkesboro, the county seat, because of the railroad. The railroad now visits West Jefferson, not Jefferson, the county seat. West Jefferson did not exist in 188o. The growth of towns brought change to everyone within convenient reach of one of these centers of culture. Branson's Business Directory for the year 1884 reveals the extent to which business and manufacturing, which today are concentrated, were diffused throughout the counties. Creston, which today is merely a community, was the largest town in Ashe County in 1884, while West Jefferson is today's largest town. Canton in Haywood County was wholly created by the arrival of the railroad in 1883. And while tourism had been practiced on a small scale and the area had been opened to the imaginations of outsiders by explorers like Francois Andre Michaux and his father Andre Michaux, with the arrival of the excursion train (still a phenomenon in the annual excursions run from West Jefferson to Abingdon, Virginia) a new era in entertainment opened up. In 1880 there were old men who had lived out their lives never seeing a wheeled vehicle. Of course a great gulf would continue to exist between what were to remain the stern, uncompromising terms of rural life and the possibilities opened up by the arrival on the scene of means of making men closer together- mass communication, mass transportation, mass production. �CHAPTER TWELVE Hear That Whistle Blow! The building of the Western North Carolina Railroad to Asheville opened a window to the outside world. The previously secluded mountaineers looked through "charmed magic casements" upon what was to them a "brave new world." As they sat in their cabins, with the winter wind blowing through the cracks, their fingers plucking banjo strings, they could hear the long shrill wail of the locomotive's whistle as the train passed Terrell's, now Ridgecrest, and started on the down grade to Old Fort. The mountain man with the banjo would pick up the tempo of his plucking until the rhythm of the strings matched the rhythm of the wheels. His voice would run into a melodic moan: "hear that whistle blow a hundred miles." The man and banjo, train whistle and wheels were like one being: racing, roaring, speeding, pulsating, vibrating on their way to the wonders of the world outside the mountains. The men would dream of getting out to Morganton, Raleigh, Washington, and New York. To the people of the mountains the railroad was more than just engine, passenger and freight cars. It was their means of escape, their ticket to adventure, to a new life, to opportunity and excitement. It became a way of life, breathing, walking, making love, dreaming. It became a symbol of freedom, of hope, of escape from bondage, the bondage of loneliness. It opened the door to the affluence of the outside world. It allured men with the bright and shining promises symbolized by the bright and shining rails. It represented romance as well as being 253 �2 54 / Part III: A Developing Economy an arterial system for carrying goods and services to market. The railroad made both transportation and communication easier. It carried the people and it brought the mail. Before the days of the railroad and rural free delivery, post offices were numerous, Buncombe County having thirty-four. The United States government contracted with individuals to carry the mail from town to town, and frequently the carriers combined hauling the mail with the operation of a stage coach line, sometimes even keeping a tavern at some place along the route for lunch stops or overnight accommodations for the passengers. Sherrill Inn, a saddle-bag type of house of logs at Hickory Nut Gap, was operated until after 1900. Bedford Sherill carried the mail from Salisbury to Asheville via Lincolnton and Rutherfordton. His four horse Albany type coach carried many notable passengers. Drovers also used the inn, often paying for the services in kind: turkeys, a hog, or a steer. After the Western North Carolina Railroad reached Marion in 1870, a number of stage coach lines furnished regular services to points in the mountains such as the Cloudland Hotel on Roan Mountain, and to Asheville, crossing the Swannanoa Gap and following the Swannanoa River. Stage lines also fanned out from Asheville in almost all directions. Tourists enjoyed the travel by stage coach and the bountiful board and rural accommodations along the various routes. . As early as 1827, when railroads in America were just plans on paper, Joel Poinsett of Charleston is said to have dreamed of a railroad to be built across the Blue Ridge Mountains, down the French Broad River, and on to the Ohio Valley. In 1833 he published a pamphlet advocating such a road. Meetings were held in Asheville, Charlotte, and Knoxville. Judge Mitchell King of the resort at Flat Rock was a staunch promoter, and through his influence some preliminary surveys were made by engineers, one of whom was connected with the College of Charleston. An enthusiastic engineer wrote: "On the table land of Buncombe, the very spirit of health will smile upon the enterprise, and it will be hailed with joy by a flood of migration from the south, which even now sends thousands to make a painful journey to this delightful region." More than fifty years passed before a railroad was ever built across the Blue Ridge. In 1852 the General Assembly of North Carolina, the railroad having been completed to Salisbury, chartered a Western North Carolina Railroad to have a capital �Hear That Whistle Blow! / 255 Hauling wood to build the Western North Carolina Railroad. The engine at the front is the little Salisbury that w as hauled over the mountain to expedite the digging of the Swannanoa tunnel ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO . of$3,00o,ooo, financed two-thirds by state funds and the remaining third by counties and individuals, to run from Salisbury to the Tennessee line. This was one of the many abortive plans of the next forty years to build a railroad through every western county. In I853 Tennessee chartered a railroad to run from Cincinnati to Paint Rock, expecting that North Carolina would build its link across to the South Carolina border. A second charter was issued in I855 for a Western North Carolina railroad, from Salisbury to some point on the French Broad River beyond the Blue Ridge, and further legislation provided for construction west through the valley of the Pigeon and Tuckaseigee rivers to connect with a point on a projected Blue Ridge Railroad on the Tennessee River. Another provision was for an extension through Madison County to Paint Rock, Tennessee. Surveys were made and the construction began. The road from Salisbury was completed to within a few miles of Morganton when the work was halted by the Civil War. Soon after the war the line was built to Morganton, in I 870 it reached Marion, and by I 873 it was at Old Fort. In I 870 East Tennessee achieved railroad connections with Atlanta and Mobile, and Buncombe County's lucrative trade from the passage of Tennessee livestock over the turnpikes was lost. Asheville needed a railroad desp erately, but the odds were �256 / Part III: A Developing Economy against her. The Western North Carolina Railroad now became a victim of financial difficulties. State aid through the sale of bonds was voted by the General Assembly, but the bonds did not sell for the expected amount because of lack of faith in the state's ability to repay the money. In r871 the Assembly split the Western North Carolina Railroad into the Eastern Division and the Western Division. Corruption in politics swept onto the scene. George W. Swepson, president of the Western Division, paid Milton S. Littlefield, a carpetbag lobbyist in Raleigh, to use his influence in getting votes in favor of the bonds. Littlefield was to have ten per cent of the money raised from their sale, and he spent money lavishly on the members of the Assembly. When an investigation revealed the fraud, Swepson and Littlefield fled the state. Later the Western Division was merged with the Eastern Division. Samuel McDowell Tate, Democratic businessman of Morganton, served as president of the Western North Carolina Railroad intermittently after the Civil War, being the choice of the stockholders but not of W. W. Holden, Republican governor in r866, r869-187r. Tate continued to act as director and as financial agent of the Eastern Division after 1871, and in I 873 he was appointed by the United States Circuit Court as temporary receiver, but after two months he was replaced by William A. Smith, Republican. The troubles ot the road were subjects of political maneuvering by both Republican and Democratic parties in 1874, and in that year Tate was elected to the state House of Representatives from Burke County. In 1875 a coalition was formed between eastern and western· Democrats. Tate submitted a bill by which the Western North Carolina Railroad would be purchased by the state and completed as planned. In return the western representatives would support the calling of a constitutional convention to abolish the local election of county commissioners and justices of the peace, the method that was brought into operation by the carpetbag constitution of r868. Henceforth the holders of these offices were to be chosen by the General Assembly. Thus officeholding by Negroes in the eastern counties could be controlled. Tate's bill was a clever device for getting the East to pay for the railroad. The western members were determined to have their railroad bill passed first. Objections were raised that the western congressional district included I /7 of the area of the state, r/8 of its population, but paid only r/IJ of the taxes. They were �Hear That Whistle Blow! / 2 57 answered by the argument that until people could sell their products and develop their resources they could not pay more taxes and that when rail communications were established with Georgia and Tennessee outside capital would be attracted to the western part of the state. The bill passed the Senate in 1875, and the state issued $85o,ooo worth of new mortgage bonds to be prorated among the various creditors. Western Democrats then supported the bill calling for a constitutional convention. Construction was resumed in 1877 and the General Assembly approved the expenditure of $7o,ooo annually for the work, provided the money was available. Five hundred convicts, most of them Negroes, were assigned to complete the construction. Utilization of convict labor was common in the Southern states at this time, and in North Carolina they had been used in making the cuts for the Spartanburg-Asheville Railroad under a law passed in 1872. Upon completion of the Western North Carolina Railroad to Asheville the prisoners were to be employed in building the lines to Paint Rock and Murphy. In I 877 the road was completed to Henry Station at the foot of the Blue Ridge. Grading had been done beyond that point and some tunnels had been worked on, but little progress had been made. From Old Fort to Swannanoa Gap was a rise of 891.5 feet between two points only three and four-tenths miles apart. Six tunnels ranging from 7 feet to 1,832 feet were needed, and the road was laid out to curve 2, 776 degrees, the equivalent of eight complete circles. All of the work was done by hand by unskilled convicts using pick, shovel, and mule-drawn scrapes and carts. The story of the completion of the road from Henry Station to Asheville is dramatic. For the first time in the South nitroglycerine was used for blasting cuts and tunnels. One cut 450 feet long became known as "Mud Cut." The convicts went down each day to dig the mud out with picks and shovels, but each night it filled with mud again. A dinky engine was used to carry the mud out of the cut. Finally the men and engine won. Another challenge came when the decision was reached that the Swannanoa tunnel must be dug from the western as well as the eastern end and that an engine would be necessary to take the mud and rocks from the tunnel. W. P. Terell, engineer of the little engine "Salisbury" directed the dragging of the engine over the mountain on wooden planks using block and tackle. Mules, oxen, and convicts dragged the engine three miles, �258 / Part III: A Developing Economy lifting it 900 feet in the process. The men laid planks, strained up the mountain over the planks, relaid the planks ahead of the engine, and started again. By taking the engine to the western end of the projected tunnel they cut in half the time required to dig it. The road had been surveyed to follow the courses of streams and thus secure a gradual rise. For an air line distance of three and four-tenths miles the road bed is nine miles. Major James W. Wilson, an original contractor for the work and after 1877 president of the Western North Carolina Railroad, completed the track to Asheville in October r 880. In that year A. B. Andrews became president of the line. By r88o the Democratic Party in North Carolina had come to regret having supported purchase of the Western North Carolina by the state. Construction of the line between Henry Station and Swannanoa Gap had been slow, and "Mud Cut" had been the butt of criticism by eastern newspapers that were preaching economy. Completion of the two extensions to Tennessee would require an increase in state taxes for years to come. Zebulon B. Vance, elected Governor in 1876, had been elevated to the United States Senate in I 879 and Lieutenant Governor Thomas J. Jarvis, promoted to the governorship, hoped to be re-elected in I88o on a platform of economy and of increased state support for public education. When William J. Best, head of a northern financial group, offered to buy the road, pay the state for the $85o,ooo mortgage, and pay $sso,ooo in first mortgage bonds plus compensation to private stockholders, Governor Jarvis called a special session of the General Assembly for March I 5. There was little opposition to the proposal, the bill being passed March 27. Best pledged that the road would be completed to Paint Rock on or before July I, I88r, and to Murphy on or before January I, I885. The new owners were to pay the state an annual rent for each convict employed on the project. Best's associates turned over their interests to the Richmond and Danville Railroad Company, a procedure which had been turned down by the General Assembly in I875· Thus the Western North Carolina Railroad became part of an important trunk line which in I894 was reorganized as the Southern Railway Company, but the dream that the mountain area would share a railroad to the state's Atlantic seaports was blasted. The building of the Western North Carolina Railroad from Old Fort to the crest of the Blue Ridge brought a new life and �Hear That Whistle Blow! / 259 The first Battery Park Hotel, luxurious in its day, on the site of Battery Porter, Civil War fortification ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. new hope to the people of the mountains but at a staggering cost: $2,ooo,ooo for eleven miles of track and the loss of some four hundred lives, almost all of whom were convicts, many having been convicted of such minor crimes as vagrancy and loitering because they had no means of support. Thus this epochal railroad building was yet another example of minority exploitation so prevalent in American History. Construction of the road to Paint Rock was completed in 1882 and through service to Morristown, Tennessee, was opened. The North Carolina part followed the French Broad, and vast amounts of rock had to be moved to provide a road bed. Nitro-glycerine was again used in blasting. It was manufactured near the mouth of Reems Creek and transported in one-gallon jugs in one-horse wagons driven by Negroes along the Buncombe Turnpike to the places needed. After the railroad reached Asheville, many wealthy Northerners came to the resort to spend a few days or weeks, and among the new hotels built for their accommodation was the Battery Park, occupying the site of Battery Porter, the Civil War fortification erected near Asheville. The Battery Park was luxurious, and the view from its many verandas was magnificent as the town was rimmed with mountains. Gay young people residing at the hotel took horseback excursions into the mountains. �260 / Part III: A Developing Economy Hotel at Warm Springs, later renamed Hot Springs. The hotel was enlarged to accomodate the crowds after the railroad reached the town ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. ,. lfWf - The railway station at Hot Springs, typical of the depots along the line Shortly after the completion of the road to the Tennessee line, the management of the hotel at Warm Springs enlarged the establishment, adding one hundred new rooms. "This improvement comprises a western extension, six hundred and fifty feet long, three stories high, verandas to every floor, extending the entire length of the new building, ... presenting a hotel outfit, for accommodation of such a throng of guests, unsurpassed by any Summer and Winter resort in the country." The hotel �Hear That Whistle Blow! J 26I accommodated one thousand guests and was said to be not infrequently full to overflowing. Next the Murphy branch was constructed. When the railroad reached Pigeon Ford, now Canton, in I88I the station there became the shipping point for livestock and a town developed. In I 8 84 when the road reached Waynesville a great celebration was held on April 4· People, many of whom had never seen a train, flocked into town as the first official passenger train came in. New settlements grew up along the line as the road pushed west. Waynesville became a famous resort. In I 879 a large hotel had been built, one-half mile from town, at White Sulphur Springs. Meanwhile a much talked-of road from Spartanburg to Asheville to connect with the one to Tennessee was progressing without state financial support. The legislature of I 8 55 had been railroad conscious. A charter was granted to the Greenville and French Broad Railroad Company to join a road in the course of construction in South Carolina. Not until I873 was work on the line in North Carolina begun in Polk County. This was to be the first railroad to cross the Blue Ridge in North Carolina. The line reached Tryon in 1877, but the route planned proved to be too expensive, necessitating a change, and the next few miles went slowly. It reached Saluda by a climb of six hundred feet in three miles at a maximum grade of more than 220 feet per mile in some places. The "Big Cut" about half way up the mountain was seventy feet in the center and even deeper on the upper side. Convict labor was used on the heavy grades. The town of Saluda was founded while the railroad was under construction and in 1881 it was chartered. It covered a square mile with the railroad in the center. The first train passed through Saluda in 1878. The town became a summer resort, principally for people from Columbia, South Carolina. They were charmed with the wide variety of wild flowers and other plant life afforded by the thermal belt in Polk County and by the mountain scenery. In I 8 85 the town of Tryon was incorporated to extend one-half mile in every direction from the intersection of Pacolet Street with the railroad. A hotel now known as Oak Hall had been built in 1881 and the town had already become a winter resort. These two towns in the same county had such different average temperatures that Tryon attracted winter residents and Saluda served as a summer retreat. The county began to attract more year-round residents. �262 J Part Ill: A Developing Economy In I 874 the planned consolidation of the two railroads was consummated under the name Asheville and Spartanburg Railroad Company, and it finally reached Asheville in 1886. Construction to Hendersonville had been completed by July 4, 1879. On that day notables from Charleston and Columbia were in Hendersonville. Crowds thronged the streets and people opened their homes to the visitors who had come by stage, horseback, buggy, carriage, oxcarts, and on foot. As one train approached from Charlotte and a special came from Spartanburg a cannon was fired and the crowd cheered. Speeches were made by famous men and the local band played. In the oak grove near the station barbecued meat and other foods were served, followed by more speeches. In 1894 the Hendersonville and Brevard Railroad was built. The engines were wood-burning, and fuel was obtained from place to place along the track. After three years' operation the company failed and the road was purchased by J. F. Hayes and associates at a receiver's sale and later was leased to the Southern Railroad. About 1895 Joseph H. Silverstein came to Transylvania County, and in 1901 he and a group of associates built the Toxaway Tanning Company, organized the Gloucester Lumber Company, leased a boundary of several thousand acres of valuable timberlands, and built a large band sawmill. Meanwhile J. F. Hayes, millionaire who came to the "Sapphire country" because of poor health, founded the Brevard Tanning Company, manufacturers of tannic acid, at Pisgah Forest. The tanneries made contracts with owners of tracts of chestnut trees to furnish chestnut wood and tanbark to be made into tannic acid, providing a new source of income from the forested land. However, these contracts were a source of great hardship to those furnishing the bark because the buyer's scales did the weighing and because the bark had to be free from mold and defects. It could be peeled easily only during the spring when rains were frequent and at that time mold was hard to avoid. Other lumber companies followed, and Brevard with three hundred people began to have its first boom. Town lots were selling for three hundred dollars, land in the French Broad Valley was bringing from $25 to $roo per acre, and mountain land from three to ten dollars. There were two trains daily into �Hear That Whistle Blow! I 263 the village. In 1900 J. F. Hayes built the beautiful Franklin Hotel in Brevard. In 1901 he built 540 acre Lake Toxaway in Transylvania County. Soon he erected a rso-room luxury hotel with electric lights, elevators, steam heat, and a power launch to carry guests around the lake. In Jackson County he built the Sapphire and Fairfield Hotels. He catered to the wealthy and it was said that 200 millionaires were guests during the first year of operation. Some of them invested in Western North Carolina developments. Among distinguished guests were the rubber magnate Edward Baccus, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs, Thomas Edison, R. J. Reynolds, the Dukes, and the Nunnally family from Atlanta. A band, dancing, boating, study classes for children were provided, and there was an electric car line to connect the resorts of Fairfield and Toxaway. By 1905 there were six trains a day through Brevard during the season, for a few years. By 1907 business was falling off. The Toxaway Company failed in I9II, Fairfield Inn burned, and the 1916 flood destroyed the dam, the hotel closed, and the wealthy guests went elsewhere. In the 1950's the dam and lak.e were rebuilt by a new company, Lake Toxaway Estates, and the company is developing an exclusive mountain-lake residential community, with a new Toxaway Inn as well as houses and boathouses around the lake, making this again a vacation paradise. As late as 1886 it was being written of Rutherford, one of the two oldest counties in the area, "Transportation is by wagon to the railroads of the adjacent counties, and thence to Charlotte, Wilmington, and Charleston." That of course applied to cotton and grain. The livestock went on the hoof. By r 887 Rutherfordton had its railroad. When the Carolina Central Railroad reached that town, a dream of thirty years was realized. Chartered in r 8 55 as the Wilmington, Charlotte, and Rutherfordton Railroad, it received aid from the state and from most of the counties through which it passed. Rutherford County voted bonds to pay for several thousand dollars worth of stock. The work went slowly, but during the Civil War construction was completed to Cherryville. By r88o it had reached Shelby, and by r887 trains were operating to Rutherfordton. General Wilder, who owned the Cloudland Hotel and most of Roan Mountain and had an interest in the Cranberry �264 f Part III: A Developing Economy iron mines, in the 188o's promoted a railroad project to connect the rich coal fields of Southwest Virginia and Eastern Kentucky with the South by a railroad across the mountains from some point on the Ohio River. A similar promotion had been made in the 183o's by Charleston men. This railroad was finally completed in 1915. The Charleston, Cincinnati, and Chicago Railroad Company, commonly called the "Three C's", was chartered by a special act of the Tennessee legislature in I 887 and under the general laws of that state in I 889. The Rutherford Railway Construction Company, chartered by the General Assembly in I 833 to construct a road from Rutherfordton to Pictured above in 1905 in Spruce Pine, N.C. during construction of C linchfield Railroad: mules and wagons at the Clinchfield depot , hauling for MacArthur Brothers, contractors for the construction of the C linchfield Railroad, which ended at Spruce Pine at the time of this picture. In the upper right-hand corner of this picture is a portion of the roof of the depot. Just beyond on the right are two warehouses. All materials and supplies for the job were shipped by rail to the end of the railroad at Spruce Pine until they could be hauled by wagon across the ridge. The warehouses stand where the lower street business houses were later. The four mule team in the foreground is across the location of what became the lower street. The back end of the wagon is about where Belk' s Store now stands. As the camera is pointed it would today take in all the area up to and including the Presbyterian Church and Baker's Resturant of today. Hardly visible near the extreme upper left hand is the edge of the small boardinghouse built by Taylor Phillips, which became Topliff Hotel, whic..h burned. Today's Mayland Market is on the graded-down site. Mr. and Mrs. Fred Sullins had a boarding house, barely visible. They charged 40 cents a day for room and board, including dinner to take on the job. Wages were $1.10 per day for 10 hours work. Roads were just rutted tracks. A 4-mule team could haul only about a ton and it took an expert to hitch up and drive the mules. �Hear That Whistle Blow! f 26 5 the South Carolina line or to Gastonia by way of Shelby, whichever would be the most practical, had started construction, as had the Rutherfordton, Marion, and Tennessee, chartered in 188r. The "Three C's" absorbed these lines, built the road from Camden to Rock Hill and on to Blacksburg. It was in operation by December 1888, and Rutherfordton was the northern terminus of the road from Camden, South Carolina, until the road between Rutherfordton and Marion was completed in 1890. In 1891 the company faced bankruptcy and the road was sold at auction. With the reorganization, four corporations were formed representing Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The North Carolina portion from Tennessee went forward gradually, reaching Spruce Pine in Mitchell County in 1902 from Erwin, Tennessee, and by 1905 it had reached Altapass. In 1908 the Carolina, Clinchfield, and Ohio purchased the road and pushed construction to Bostic, South Carolina, and then to Spartanburg by 1909. At that time there were only two buildings in Spruce Pine, on opposite sides of the Toe River. In 1915 the northern terminus was reached at Elkhorn, Kentucky. In 1924 a new company, the Clinchfield Railroad, leased the line for 999 years. The Clinchfield is unique in that it cuts through the mountain barriers. Three and one-half per cent of the entire mileage of 277 miles is inside the fifty-five tunnels one of which is 7,854 feet long. The road passes through a rugged mountain country for almost its total length. It was said to have been the most expensive railroad per mile to build, but it was of vital importance in opening the mountain country through which it passes. When the Asheville ;md Spartanburg was completed to Asheville, most of Northwest North Carolina was still without railroads. In 1882 the Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina, a narrow gauge road, reached Cranberry in Mitchell County, where iron mines had been worked for half a century. In I 89 5 the Linville River Railroad was begun, from Cranberry to Pineola, where three brothers named Camp, of Chicago, were engaged in producing lumber and tan bark. Not until 1917 did this railroad reach Boone, Watauga's county seat. In 1887 the Northwestern North Carolina Railroad, which operated between Greensboro and Winston and Salem and was owned by �266 / Part III: A Developing Economy the Richmond and Danville railroad, proposed to continue its line to Wilkesboro or to within a mile of the town if the county of Wilkes would buy $10o,ooo worth of stock. County bonds were approved by the voters and the road was completed by I 890. As there was no railroad in Watauga, Ashe, or Alleghany counties at that time, the new road to Wilkes County meant much to the people of the entire section. At the western terminus, now North Wilkesboro, not more than thirty people lived. The Winston Land and Improvement Company bought the two farms that comprised the area of the present town, and created the town, with streets, alleys, business buildings, a school, an opera house, a bank, and stores. Lots were sold at auction. In 1895 a tannery was started by C. C. Smoot and Sons, North Wilkesboro's first industry. Finally the Norfolk and Western obtained authority for its Virginia-Carolina Railway to construct a road in Ashe County to Jefferson and Elk Cross Roads (now Todd). The road was finished in 1914. An extension of the line was built privately by the Hassinger Lumber Company to transport logs from the Cowles Tract of timber land at the Ashe-Watauga county border to present-day Fleetwood, from whence the Norfolk and Western carried the logs to their destination, the Hassinger band mill in Virginia. After the timber had been cut the track was to have been removed, but a group of business men, chiefly members of the Moretz family, incorporated, bought the right-of-way, leased track and locomotives and extended the little branch to Deep Gap in Watauga County. The train carried, in addition to timber, grain, farm produce, and general merchandise for the company's store at Deep Gap and for the public. The entire railroad with its crew of two, George Burchett, engineer, and Raymond Luther, fireman, ran for six and one-half miles. From 1924 until the Norfolk and Western discontinued its service between Todd and West Jefferson during the depression, the little train carried on. The tracks were taken up in 1932. A number of similar railroads were built in the mountains, serving the needs of the localities until highways took their place. For example Clay and Cherokee counties constructed their own railroad from Andrews to Hayesville for hauling lumber and pulpwood, the Hiwassee Railroad, popularly called the "Peavine." A line from Pigeon River connected the Catalooche Valley with Canton. Livestock no longer had to be driven to market on the hoof, products of truck farmers could be marketed, �Hear That Whistle Blow! / 267 Aerial view of Spruce Pine in 1972, a town created by a railroad. Note the strip mines that mark the nearby mountains HUGH MORTON PHOTO a shrubbery and nursery business grew rapidly. The narrow gauge Chester and Lenoir Railroad which reached Lenoir in I 884 later was made a standard gauge road and was extended to Edgemont at the present Caldwell-Avery county line. Consideration was given to building the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina road from Cranberry to connect with it, thus providing transportation from Johnson City, Tennessee, through Caldwell County and on to Chester, South Carolina, one of the many nebulous railroad projects of the period. Twice the Carolina and Northwestern tracks were washed out by floods, 1916 and 1940. After the 1916 flood they were reconstructed, but by 1940 the line was discontinued, as was the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina between Cranberry and Boone after the flood. The I 9 I 6 flood was disastrous to all of the railroads in Western North Carolina between Marshall and Marion. The Southern Railroad suffered seventy-seven complete breaks between Statesville and Ridgecrest, and seven camps with from two hundred to seven hundred men each were established to rebuild the road. The Clinchfield between Marion and Altapass �268 / Part III: A Developing Economy was destroyed and was out of operation for over a month. All highway bridges over the Catawba were washed out, and only one road into Asheville remained usable, the one from Greenville, South Carolina. In Burke County two ferries were installed until the bridges could be rebuilt. There was pathos and humor, heartbreak and triumph in the songs of the railroad builders, the engineers and the convicts who so dauntlessly thrust the rails up the mountains, who dug the tunnels and built the bridges, who dragged the locomotive up the mountain so the tunnel could be worked at from both ends. All of this romance and travail John Ehle has graphically depicted in his novel The Road. The railroads were the entering wedge driven into the isolation of the mountains. About the railroad there grew up a folk lore and a balladry expressing the hopes and aspirations of the people. The Gospel Train became an image of fundamentalist thought. The "hell-bound train," an express train loaded with sinners and headed for hell on a downhill grade with no brakes and with greased rails, became a part of the folk tradition. Forty or fifty years after the coming of the railroad it was largely replaced by the highways and the trucks, the interstate systems, the throughways, and the parkways. But about them there has grown up no folklore and tradition equal to the romance that the railroad inspired. �CHAPTER THIRTEEN Agriculture The Handbook cif the State of North Carolina prepared by the Department of Agriculture (1893) furnished a description of mountain farms with its inventory of each county's resources and the use of its acreage. The counties still had most of their bnd covered with trees, many of which would fall to the woodman's axe when the railroad came. For instance, 7/8 of Graham, s/6 of Macon, 3/4 of Madison, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, and Surry were still forested. Another way of saying this was that Macon County included 39,000 acres of "improved" and 164,000 acres of "unimproved" land, Madison County 69,000 "improved" and 164,000 "unimproved." Farmers were advised that if they would clear their timber they would be richly rewarded and that after they had cleared the land and had taken two or three crops off it should be "suffered to lie at rest" whereupon grass would begin to flourish and fine stock might be produced. The northwestern counties of Ashe, Alleghany, Watauga, Mitchell and Yancey were especially suited to stock raising, and with cultivated grasses "a deep rich lawn" would flourish to the summit of the mountains. Ashe County had already become significant in cattle production, using the Devon or Shorthorn breed which was ideally suited to milk and beef production and work oxen for farm use. Only Buncombe County had more horses than Ashe, and Haywood was third in number of both cattle and horses. Watauga County ranked fourth in cattle and fifth in horses for the area. On every farm were a few hogs and sheep, the hogs for meat and the 269 �270 / Part III: A Developing Economy sheep for wool. They were scarcely counted as wealth, being valued at less than one dollar per head. Throughout the area at least three times as many acres were planted in com as in the next ranking crop, wheat. Com was important for household use for "pone" and for whiskey. It was the principal feed for horses and hogs. It could be planted in land that was full of stumps, and no expensive tools were needed for its cultivation. The school sessions were determined in mountain areas by "before and after fodder." Thomas W. Ferguson wrote in thinking back over those days, "the onearmed system of farming has been employed by ninety per cent of our farmers ... to the impoverishment of their soils. We plowed up our hillsides planting to permanent pasture. We plowed up every foot of our bottom lands ... planting them to corn and other depleting crops." Other cereal grains, oats and rye, were of less importance. Polk and Rutherford counties were planting about one-fourth as many acres to cotton as to com, and Burke had 752 acres in cotton in 1884. It was also experimenting with eight acres of rice. Certain trees were of great importance to the farm family. Chestnuts were gathered for household use and to be traded for necessities, and live stock and turkeys were fattened on the nuts that fell to the ground. The trees were cut for fence rails and posts. They were considered preferable to oak for their durability. So plentiful were the chestnut trees that Margaret Morley observed farmers chopping down trees loaded with ripe chestnuts in order to pick the nuts. With the coming of railroads, new markets were found for the chestnut tree. Early in the twentieth century the chestnut tree blight was noticed. A fungus, it was brought to the United States with a shipment of Asiatic chestnut seedlings, and it attacked American trees, probably first on Long Island. Carried by wind, birds and insects, the blight spread southward along the eastern slope of the Appalachians to southern Alabama and Mississippi. Efforts to stop it were of no avail. Although at first it did not cross the Blue Ridge, by 1924 Ashe and Watauga counties reported a ten percent rate of infection, and by 1940 approximately eightyfive percent of the chestnut trees in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park were affected. By 1965 the loss was complete. Maple sugar was a popular sweetening on mountain farm tables and was traded to local merchants for sale outside the �Agriculture / 271 Chestnut trees throughout the region died, a great economic loss ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO area. It is still being sold in small cakes as a delicacy at gift and craft shops. In the early spring when the sap started to run, the trees were tapped and small wooden spouts inserted, usually on the south side so the sun would strike them during the day and make the sap run faster. About fifty gallons of sap were required to make a gallon of syrup, and a tree would yield about a gallon or a gallon and a half of sap a day. Buckets were hung on the tapped trees, and every day during the sugar making process the sap was collected and taken to the big iron pot where it was boiled down. During this process the syrup had to be watched constantly to prevent scorching. The syrup was transferred to a smaller pot and boiled longer to crystalize into sugar. It was formed into small cakes for ease in handling. Sugar making was often a family diversion, an occasion for camping on high slopes where the sugar maple trees were growing. In the court house descriptions of acreages of land in the nineteenth century, a number of mountain-top tracts were designated as sugar �272 J Part III: A Developing Economy A sorghum mill extracts the juice, which is then boiled down in the iron pot camps. Some of these passed through the hands of a land speculator, William Lenoir of Caldwell County. For each area that he purchased he drew a plat and wrote a history in a notebook. In Ashe County he purchased and then sold a tract to William Horton May 15, 1842, which he designated as Nathan Horton's Sugar Camp. Widespread in the mountains was the making of sorghum molasses. In October the sorghum grower set up his mil~ to crush the juice from the stalks. His horse plodded around and around turning the mill until all the juice was extracted. The juice drained into large kettles or drums which were carried to the boiler, a huge iron pot in which the straw-colored juice was boiled down to the desired thickness so that "they" could be stored in crocks or jugs. Seven gallons of juice were boiled down to one gallon of molasses. Neighbors brought their own crocks and apples, com meal, or potatoes to barter for "them." Molasses was usually used in the plural. The rich and nourishing molasses was a welcome addition to the monotonous winter diet of the mountain people. Apple and cherry orchards grew wonderfully well in the mountains and were set out on most farms until they seemed native to the region. Apples were among the products carried by wagon to market in the rail centers, and many farms had among their various buildings apple houses where the fruit was preserved for family use and for sale later in the season. Almost every farm had its springhouse for keeping milk, meat, and vegetables cool. Prevalent also were smokehouses for preserving meat. Making whisky was an occupation of many mountaineers. �Agriculture / 273 The distillery was as important as the blacksmith shop or the grist mill. Zebulon Baird Vance sold a distillery to Colonel William Lenoir. Many would take their jugs to the still which they called "the grocery." During the Civil War the United States Congress placed a tax on whiskey and required distillers to obtain licenses. After the restoration of the Union, efforts were made to collect the tax in Western North Carolina, and mountain people did not look with favor upon the "revenuers." Violations were frequent. True, most of the counties had their licensed distilleries: Wilkes having fourteen, Burke, Polk, and Surry, five each in 1884. Yet the illicit "stills" became legendary during the 187o's, and words such as "blockaders," for those who marketed the product illegally, and "moonshiners," for those who produced their product at night to escape detection by the "Feds" (revenue officers) became a part of the vernacular. Randolph Abbott Shotwell spent some time at his brother's plantation in the valley of the Green River in Polk County, and he said that " ... having nothing to do, and nothing to read, it was easy to fall into the habit of partaking ... from the big brown jug, which is found in all dwellings in that region. Polk County at that time ... seemed overspread with illicit distillers. Every secluded ravine, every impenetrable brake, was apt to have a sylvan satyr. ... Many of these rusty 'stills,' as they are locally termed, might be concealed in a large barrel, and can, therefore, be quickly removed from place to place to avoid the revenue officers; though ... it was deemed safest by the majority of the distillers to send a few gallons, and a sum of money to the Revenue Headquarters for the district .... Most of the Revenue men grew rich in a wonderfully short period." On the occasion of a visit with a neighbor, Shotwell's host sent a Negro on horseback to "the still over the hill," with two bushels of shelled corn. The distiller sent back one gallon of whiskey, keeping one for toll. Whiskey was made from a fermented solution containing corn meal, sprouted corn, rye meal, and sometimes molasses or sugar. First the corn was spread out and watered to sprout it,. then carefully dried, and ground into malt and mixed with the other ingredients. The solution was cooked, producing a liquid called beer, which was then allowed to ferment, great care being exercised to prevent its becoming vinegar. Next the beer was "run" by being boiled. Attached to the cap of the still was a coil, a piece of copper tubing, the other end being �274 / Part III: A Developing Economy The "moonshiners" hid their stills, but the smoke often gave away their location placed in a container. As the beer in the still boiled the steam condensed in the coil and passed on to the container. This product, called "singlings," was put back into the cleaned still and the process was repeated, called "doubling." The result was whiskey. Its alcoholic content, "proof," was determined by the size of the bubbles formed on the surface when a small sample was poured into a vial. After the "doubling" the liquid was allowed to flow from the condenser until the whiskey in the container was of the desired proof, 100 proof (so% alcohol), or 8o proof (40% alcohol). When Carl A. Schenck, Vanderbilt's forester, tried to buy the holdings of the moonshiners in the Pisgah Forest, he found that they were the least likely to sell out of any of the residents: "These men in their own interests were most anxious to remain, because moonshining was possible only in the proximity of cold and remote mountain springs .... They had their liquor distilleries in the mountain coves, and shifted them from site to site to avoid discovery. They went about armed, keeping the others in awe and threatening death to any betrayer of their �Agriculture / 275 secret .... If the sheriff actually seized a still and took it home with him, he never fully destroyed it; he merely shot some holes through the copper kettle with his revolver and allowed the kettle to be stolen from his yard in the hope of seizing it a second time and getting a second reward from the federal government. Both the better element and the sheriff were afraid of the moonshiner." Brandy too was distilled from the fruit that abounded in the Southern Highlands, and "cherry bounce," as well, had a fame that was widespread. Cherry Mountain was some miles from Rutherfordton and the same distance from Morganton, Marion, and Shelby, from all of which towns there were frequent parties in the month ofJune each year. The top of the mountain lies within a thermal belt, so the fruit is rarely killed by frost, and the enormous quantities of cherries attracted visitors from all the surrounding country. Sometimes as many as two or three hundred young men, women, and children - whole families- met in the orchards on the same day, especially on Thursdays and Saturdays. "The meeting on Cherry Mountain on the second Saturday in June ... was largely attended; persons from Shelby, Marion, Rutherfordton, and other points being present. A good deal of Amos Owen's "cherry bounce" was imbibed by the crowd," reported M. L. White, Owens' biographer. Amos Owens owned Cherry Mountain, where the cherry trees grew three feet in diameter. His poplar, chestnut, and sourwood trees produced excellent blossoms for honey. From honey, cherry juice, and whiskey Amos made the cherry bounce. Amos served in the Confederate Army, after which he returned home and resumed his distilling without the required legal formalities. For over forty years he made whiskey, and during that time he served four years in prison, one for Ku Klux Klan activities and twice for moonshining. His biographer says that the judge, before passing sentence, chided: "Amos Owens, stand up, ... why will you persist in your lawless course? Look at me, I am sixty years of age, was never drunk, and have never incurred the woe pronounced against him that putteth the bottle to his neighbor's lips. What have you to say, why the sentence of the law should not be pronounced upon you?" Amos cocked one eye, cleared his throat, and with mock solemnity, said, "Well, Judge, you have missed a durned lot of fun if you hain't never made, drunk, nor sold licker." �276 / Part III: A Developing Economy Farmers were eagerly awaiting the railroads, and farm products changed as soon as transportation became available, even at a distance. When the narrow gauge Chester and Lenoir Railway reached Lenoir in r884, Watauga County farmers began growing a surplus of cabbage and potatoes; as early as I 882 it was reported that "on the turnpike at any given point a covered wagon or so is seldom out of sight." In r886, 8oo crates of cabbage and 3,ooo crates of apples were shipped from Lenoir. The following year during November and December the following were shipped: I 356 crates of apples, I078 crates of cabbage, 364 crates of potatoes, 657 sacks of chestnuts. Thirtytwo thousand feet of lumber were used to make the crates alone. It was reported that on one acre in Watauga County two hundred dollars worth of cabbage was raised. The great new crop of the area was tobacco, the bright leaf variety. Surry County led with 2,136 acres planted in r884, but mountainous Madison County was second with I ,626 acres, and Buncombe was third with 947 acres. Every county in Western North Carolina had at least one tobacco farm. Production per acre ranged from 200 pounds in Cherokee County to 503 in Madison County. Zeigler and Grosscup in I882 estimated Madison County's yield as equal to $250,000 or $200 per acre. W. W. Rollins of that county had sixty tenant farmers engaged in growing tobacco. "It is in tobacco that the Madison County farmer has found his Eldorado," Zeigler and Grosscup wrote. Uncleared land could be purchased for three dollars per acre, and a tract of one and one-half acres when cleared could be planted, cultivated, and harvested by a man and two small boys for a harvest worth $900. According to Nanny May Tilley the tobacco crop spread from Catawba County to Burke County in 1875 when J. K. Bobbitt planted the first crop. A warehouse was opened in Hickory in I88o by the Hall Brothers, who distributed pamphlets explaining tobacco culture and the advantages of the tobacco crop. One was the small bulk, which would facilitate transportation. In Buncombe County experiments in tobacco production had begun earlier, perhaps as early as 1854, but not until I878 did tobacco become an important crop. In r88o Asheville had four tobacco warehouses that handled 7,ooo,ooo pounds of the leaf, and Madison County had one warehouse. Alas, by the end of the century the crop had gone into eclipse in most of the counties. Some farmers who in the I88o's had twenty or �Agriculture / 277 thirty tobacco barns by 1896 had none. Various explanations have been offered. Tilley believed that the rank flavor of the mountain tobacco was unsuited to cigarettes, which had become very popular. The crop of the coastal plain was milder and in greater demand. Haywood County persisted in bright leaf tobacco culture until 1904, after which for a period of twenty years or so no more was planted. Then in 1923 burley tobacco was introduced in Haywood by Thurmond Haynes, who sold his crop in Greeneville, Tennessee. By 1925 every county in Western North Carolina except Alleghany, Ashe, Avery, Polk, and Watauga was growing burley tobacco on a commercial basis. Again Madison County became the leader, planting 2,500 acres in 1925. In 1929 Ott Tester, a former resident of North Carolina, brought from Tennessee plants which he planted in Watauga County, producing 8oo pounds per acre, which sold at 21.2¢ per pound. By 1958 Watauga County ranked sixth in burley production in Western North Carolina with a crop that sold for $1,04o,ooo. A tobacco warehouse and auction was opened in Boone in 1939. The problem in establishing a tobacco warehouse was to persuade the tobacco companies to send buyers. The Boone experience will illustrate. The project started through the activities of local leaders. Mr. S. C. Eggers became discouraged at having to haul his tobacco to Greeneville, Tennessee, to sell it. One morning he began taking pledges from Boone citizens, and within three hours he had $35,000 promised for the construction of a tobacco warehouse. Then came a time of tension. A committee consisting ofBlandord Dougherty, President of Appalachian State Teachers College, Harry Hamilton, E. F. Lovill, attorney, and Congressman Robert Daughton sought and obtained the promise of Will Reynolds of the Reynolds Tobacco Company to send buyers if the other tobacco companies would do so. After offering considerable resistance, Major Bullington of the American Tobacco Company reluctantly agreed to send buyers to Boone. The warehouse when completed was leased to the Hardy Brothers of Mullins, South Carolina. Through the influence of Robert Daughton a warehouse was established in Ashe County and eventually a second one was added. In 1958 Ashe County produced 2,218,ooo pounds of tabacco which sold for $1,426,ooo. Daughton's own county Alleghany has never produced as much tobacco as Ashe and Watauga. Buncombe and Madison counties were the leading �278 f Part III: A Developing Economy A field of tobacco, the money crop of mountain farmers ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. Tobacco is auctioned in large warehouses ASH EVILLE C HAMBER OF C OMME RCE PHOTO �Agriculture / 279 burley producers. In 1965 there were four warehouses in Asheville. Ashe County was third in production of burley and Yancey ranked next, followed by Haywood and Watauga respectively. Since 1940, acreage allotments have been in effect. In 1961 the average allotment for farms growing burley was six-tenths of an acre, and the harvest was worth $1 s,ooo,ooo. Allotments ranged from one-tenth of an acre to several acres. By 1958 TOBACCO ALLOTMENT DATA FOR 1968 County No. offarms Acreage Allotment Rank in state Burley Tobacco Alleghany Ashe Avery Buncombe Burke Caldwell Cherokee Clay Graham Haywood Henderson Jackson McDowell Macon Madison Mitchell Polk Rutherford Surry Swain Transylvania Watauga Wilkes Yancey County Burke Caldwell Surry Wilkes 540 2,535 247 2,946 14 !9 194 217 685 1,917 IIO 285 70 238 2,809 963 6 55 7 215 72 1,663 8 1,795 No. o_ffarms 265 J,062 930 218.73 1,046-56 !08.35 1,400.65 447 6.74 68.64 84-53 301.51 947-22 42-47 107.85 24-56 76.80 2,066.71 470-36 I.75 23-46 0.94 70.18 23.13 727.75 1.83 983.05 Flue-Cured Tobacco Acreage Poundage 822 ·48 682,635 405-96 9,287.81 16,790,906 I,30I.66 2,073,603 9 3 JI 2 21 20 15 !2 8 5 r6 10 18 13 7 24 I9 27 14 17 6 23 4 Rank in state 68 59 18 49 Source: "North Carolina Tobacco Report, 1967-1968," Bulletin of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture No. 191, May, 1968, pp. 22, 20. �280 / Part III: A Developing Economy several counties were producing more than 2,000 pounds per acre, Watauga County's 2,108 being the highest yield in Western North Carolina. In that year the highest prices were received in Buncombe and Madison counties, sixty-five cents per pound. In 1968 the yield in Watauga County was 2,626 pounds per acre. Burley is planted in a seed bed in early spring as is bright leaf tobacco, and the successive stages of work are similar for both varieties, but the curing is different. Plants are usually cut by whole stalks, allowed to wilt overnight, then staked in the field for two or three days for further wilting before being hung high in well-ventilated barns with the stalks head down to air cure. The latter part of November the leaves are stripped from the stalks, graded, and tied into "hands," several leaves together, and taken to market for auction. The money from the burley crop comes along just in time for taxes and extra winter expenses. Many of the farmers now work away from their farms and fit the chores connected with their tobacco crop into evening and Saturday work. Each ofthe counties in Western North Carolina in 1964 had hundreds of part-time farms, ranging from 128 in Clay County to 837 in Ashe County. From Buncombe's 2,471 farms, 1,o8o farm operatives work off their farms one hundred or more days each year. Figures are similar for Wilkes and Ashe counties. Tobacco is well-suited to part-time farming. Agricultural cooperatives had been organized by the Grange in the 187o's in some parts of the nation but not in Western North Carolina. Farm periodicals emphasized their benefits during the following decade. Wilkes County promoters discovered the value of these associations for agricultural development when in 1912 they organized the United Fruit Growers of Western North Carolina in the interest of growing apples commercially. In 1925 an editorial in the Winston-Salem]ournal read: "Nowhere in Eastern America are finer apples to be found than in the Wilkes County thermal belt. In a given area lying along the sides and top of the Brushy Mountains there is a strange atmospheric condition which wards off frosts and guards the young buds of fruit trees from cold while in a premature stage." The "thermal belts" and "verdant zones" on mountain slopes are suited to fruit production because they enjoy longer frost- �Agriculture / 281 free growing seasons than areas higher up the slopes and lower in the valleys. A thermal belt results from the drainage of cold air down a slope into a valley where it further cools by radiation or losing its heat to space. Thus there is a belt through the Brushy Mountains, the South Mountains, and on south through the Blue Ridge in Polk, Rutherford, and Henderson counties where above freezing weather exists between sub-freezing temperatures on both higher and lower elevations on the hillsides. One problem of apple culture is storage until the price is good. The Brushy Mountain Fruit Cooperative Corporation, organized in 193 I, and the Fruit Growers' Association, organized in 1936, were aided by the Carolina Refrigeration Cooperative Association which constructed storage facilities for apples and meat. Encouraged by the county agents, similar cooperatives were organized throughout Western North Carolina. While most of them were short lived, they led the way to specialized crops that were particularly adapted to the soil and climatic conditions. Henderson County in 1960 led the state in the production of apples, with 2oo,ooo bearing trees and about ro,ooo new ones coming into production each year. In 1962 the crop was valued at $2,8oo,ooo. The county had fourteen packing houses and three processing plants, the newest of which was constructed by the Western North Carolina Apple Packing Cooperative. More than r,soo people worked in harvesting and processing the crop. Apple trees will grow on soil unsuited to truck farming, another of Henderson County's specialities. Each year Hendersonville holds a five-day North Carolina Apple Festival, ending with a King Apple Parade on Labor Day. A queen and her court are elected and visiting queens from other festivals participate in the activities, which include folk music, square dancing, tours of apple orchards, and a coronation ball. North Carolina has 762 commercial apple orchards (ones with roo or more trees) of which 622 are in the mountain counties. Haywood and Mitchell counties also have extensive commercial apple orchards. Polk and Rutherford Counties are producers of peaches. Except in occasional years when late spring freezes ruin the crop, the mountain area produces almost one-fourth as many peaches as the sand hill counties of the piedmont. The Extension Division of North Carolina State University operates the Mountain Horticultural Crops Research Station �282 / Part III: A Developing Economy Burley tobacco is staked in the field to start the wilting process before hanging it in the barns to air-cure. Note the ever-present church ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO Apples grow well on the mountains. An orchard in bloom is a magnificent sight ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO �Agriculture / 283 in Henderson County. A staff of six scientists experiment with crops that will help all farmers in Western North Carolina to diversify their acreage. Such scientific studies are the culmination of efforts by federal, state, and local organizations to aid farmers in their methods of production and marketing. At first the farmers' organizations had little influence in Western North Carolina. They did not have much appeal to subsistence farmers. Their warehouse movement and cooperative idea, as mentioned above, were taken up where commercial farming was begun. In Buncombe County the Farmers' Federation was organized in 1921 by a group of farmers under the leadership of James G. K. McClure to purchase and distribute farm supplies and market products grown commercially. One warehouse was built, then another, until by 1928 there were eight warehouses operating in four counties. Sixteen trucks were acquired for wholesale and retail delivery service, thus relieving farmers of the necessity of doing their own trucking. When the Grange was revived in the South about 1930 a new interest in commercial farming developed. At the demands of some of the more progressive farmers, county boards of commissioners provided the matching funds necessary to employ the county agents of the Extension Service, and the men chosen for those positions came to be among the most important figures in their respective counties. County "farm bureaus" sprang up to work with the county agents, but as the members were largely the commercial farmers, the "hoe farmers" were scarcely influenced by the organization movement of the 1920's. The depression of the 193o's was not felt as much by the self-sufficient rural people of Western North Carolina as it was in industrial areas. The income of the former had always been very low, and their homes and farms lacked the conveniences of an urban or suburban society, but the farms were almost completely owner operated, and food and fuel were as readily available as they had ever been. By 1920 51.2% of the population of the United States had moved to urban areas, and since that time rural population has diminished until in 1969 the farm population was just 5.2% of the total. Although Western North Carolina remained comparatively rural, the trend was felt in the out-migration which between 1950 and 1960 amounted to 33% of the people �284 / Part III: A Developing Economy in Swain County and over 20% in ten other counties. As late as 1960 only twelve of the twenty-four counties had areas classified by the census bureau as urban. Much of the rural acreage was being retired from farming. In 1959 43% of the land in the twenty-four counties was included in farms while in 1964 only about 35% was included. At the same time farm size was increasing, the average acreage in 1954 being 62 while in 1964it was So. The numberoffarmsin Western North Carolina decreased from 52,161 in 1954 to 42,607 in 1959 and 29,955 in 1964. From 1954 when the area had 9,317 farms of less than ten acres, to 1964, the number of such farms had dwindled to 2,575; farms of r,ooo or more acres increased from So in the area in 1954 to 96 in 1964. With these changes farming had become more specialized and dairying increased, especially near the cities and towns. Buncombe County was second in the state in dairying in 1954, and Henderson, Haywood, and Ashe counties ranked high. By 1964 the leading producers of dairy products ranked in the following order: Buncombe, Henderson, Alleghany, Haywood, Macon, Madison, Ashe, Yancey, and Surry. Alleghany has risen to third rank. Cheese making had been experimented with in Ashe County beginning in 1915 at Grassy Creek. The Dairy Extension Service of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture was promoting the establishment of cheese factories in several counties in the western part of the state. A number of the factories were opened in Ashe County and considerable enthusiasm developed there before W odd War One and poor roads for transportation of milk and cheese combined to bring an end to the experiment. Eventually the Kraft-Phoenix Creamery established a large plant in West Jefferson, buying from Ashe County farmers about r ,5oo,ooo pounds of milk per month in the spring, summer, and fall, and 75,000 pounds per month in winter, for manufacture into cheese. Carnation, Pet, and Coble dairies also bought milk from the farms in Ashe County. Ashe County leads the state in the production of fine beef cattle, the quality of which was improved when the State Board of Agriculture purchased several fine pure-bred bulls which were leased to responsible breeders of beef cattle. Haywood is a close rival to Ashe in the production of high grade beef cattle. It has been known for the quality of its herds since the introduction of Durham or Shorthorn cattle in the r88o's. Robert Plott introduced Angus cattle and T. Lenoir Gwyn established a fine �Agriculture / 28 5 Pure-bred livestock fatten on the lush g rass of the mountain balds in Ashe and Alleghany Counties- scene along the Blue Ridge Parkway HUGH MORTON PHOTO breeding herd of registered Herefords, these two herds forming a foundation for the excellence of Haywood County's beef cattle. Later Guernseys were brought in from Wisconsin by by H. 0. Osborne to establish records in the production of milk and butter fat. The North Carolina Department of Agriculture operates two veterinary diagnostic laboratories in Western North Carolina, one at Murphy and the other at Waynesville, to aid �286 / Part III: A Developing Economy in the area's livestock production. Since 1908 the Mountain Research Station has been operated jointly by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and the North Carolina State University Experiment Station, first at Swannanoa in Buncombe County and since 1944 on a 354 acre tract in Haywood County. Research is conducted in dairying, with a modem milking parlour, a lounging bam, a forty-stanchion conventional bam, a calf bam, a dry-cow barn, and silos. Poultry research is carried on with automatic incubators, a modem egg-cooling room, a broiler house, a laying house, a breeding house, and a 3 r/2 acre poultry range. Efforts are made to find superior lines for broiler and egg production, and nutritional studies are carried on. Burley tobacco research is provided with three curing barns and a tobacco grading and pack house. Deaa W. Colvard, a native of Ashe County with degrees from Berea College and two universities, worked with the Extension Service in Western North Carolina. With W. B. Austin, a member of the State Board of Agriculture, he established the Upper Mountain State Farm Experiment Station in Ashe County. Colvard, now Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, served as first superintendent of the station in Ashe County. Since 1910 poultry and eggs have come to be an important item of farm production, with Wilkes County leading all others in the region, ranking second in the state in 1954. In 1919 a LEADING POULTRY PRODUCING COUNTIES IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA 1954 Wilkes Buncombe Clay Surry Henderson Caldwell Rutherford Cherokee Macon Watauga Haywood Ashe 1964 $4,108,ooo 1,620,000 686,000 642,000 491,000 482,000 435,000 420,000 404,000 $19,53 7,019 2,748,675 1,885,894 4,708,043 517,082 1,551,102 700,223 1,654,281 816,222 994,263 902,917 1,397,120 Source: County and City Data Book, 1965. �Agriculture / 287 World War One veteran T. 0. Minton began producing baby chicks by incubator and established Champion Poultry Farm, which became the largest one in the entire South, marketing both fryers and eggs. Other Wilkes County men became commercial producers, and the North Carolina Mutual Hatchery Association was organized. In 1954 Wilkes County's poultry and poultry products brought a return of $4,108,ooo. In that year Lovette's Holly Farms Poultry Company, one of the largest of its kind in the world, was organized. In 1960 it paid out to poultry growers about $1s,ooo,ooo. It has a national and an international market. There is a trend toward diversification of crops and emphasis on truck farming, but corn is still the principal field crop in Western North Carolina. Although the acreage has steadily diminished, the production per acre has increased remarkably. In 1925 Transylvania County produced an average of 25 bushels per acre, the highest yield in the region, and Burke County produced only 13 bushels, the lowest yield; in 1960 Watauga County had the highest rate of production, 65 bushels per acre, Transylvania County produced 59. I bushels per acre, and Burke 49 bushels. Rutherford County was lowest in the region with 40 bushels. Rural electrification, which brought new conveniences to the entire area resulted from the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Most of the activities of the TVA, which included social planning, educational experimentation, and relocation of families, did not greatly affect Western North Carolina. The Rural Electrification Authority of the federal government, formed in 1935, granted loans to rural cooperatives to furnish electric power to parts of the lower South. The state was stimulated to create the North Carolina Rural Electrification Authority to encourage the building of rural power lines. By 1951 85% of the farms in the state were supplied with electric power, and by 1961 the figure had increased to 97%- The areas not being served by the Duke Power Company, the Nantahala Power Company, and the Carolina Power Company, �288 / Part III: A Developing Economy Shocks in the field. Corn is grown on practically all mountain farms ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO or by locally owned establishments were provided with power purchased from the TV A by the cooperatives, which are owned by the consumers of the power. There are four TVA lakes in Western North Carolina: Hiwassee built in the late 1930's and three built during W odd War Two to step up power supply - Fontana, Appalachia, and Chatuge. Chatuge and Appalachia are on the Hiwassee River farther down than the Hiwassee Dam; Fontana is on the Little Tennessee between Graham and Swain counties. Santeetlah and Tapoco on the Cheoah River in Graham County were constructed earlier by the Tallassee Power Company, now Tapoco, Incorporated. The lakes were designed chiefly for hydroelectric power, but flood control and recreational use were also projected. Not all mountain residents appreciate the TVA for two reasons: vast acreages once under private development, in many cases owned by householders, were purchased at prices which the sellers found inadequate to purchase similar land elsewhere; and the production of power necessitates the drawdown of water in the lakes which sometimes curtails their recreational and aesthetic value. Nevertheless the TVA has participated in hundreds of demonstration projects such as farm and woodland manage- �Agriculture / 289 ment, fire prevention activities, reforestation, and forest products conferences. The TVA makes payments in lieu of taxes, which are transferred to the counties where its properties are located. Leaders in those counties frequently raise the objection to this practice that the same land under private development would be subject to much higher taxes and thus bear a greater share of the counties' fixed expenses. The impact of the TV A in the development of land and forest resources has not been as great as might have been expected, and residents of the counties concerned have mixed emotions concerning the project. Electric power is now available to all, but people feel that they have paid dearly for its use in giving up land that in most cases had been owned by their families for generations. They especially resent the fact that land in their counties today is selling for many times what they were paid for theirs. Regional planning agencies complain that the TV A has not exercised the wide scale influence envisioned for it - to improve all aspects of the life of the region. Community land and water development is receiving increased attention in Western North Carolina. A district is organized for a designed watershed. Aid is sought from such services as the Soil Conservation Service, Agricultural Extension Service, Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, county schools, county boards of commissioners, vocational agriculture teachers, the Soil and Water Conservation Committee, Farmers Home Administration, North Carolina Division ofForestry, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, utilities companies, lumber and pulpwood industries. More and more land is passing out of the hands of farmers and into the possession of promoters of various kinds. The fact that 2,598,ooo acres in Western North Carolina were included in farms in 1959 and only 2,pr,ooo in 1964 illustrates the changing nature ofland use in the mountains. The 272,000 acres had been diverted to other uses, such as golf courses, resorts, and industrial plants with accompanying suburban development providing homes for those who had migrated from farms to live near their work. Many farm families supplement their incomes by work related to the increasing year-round recreation development in the mountains: the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, ski slopes, lakes, camp sites, hunting and fishing sites, youth camps, and cottage and room rental. This kind of development offers the greatest promise of well-being to much of the area beyond the Blue Ridge. It is the culmination �290 J Part III: A Developing Economy of more than a century of effort to bring the poor in health, the summer resident, the tourist, the retired couple, to the mountains, and the more recent effort to attract and develop industry and to provide for participation in active sports. In 1970 in the coves and in the hills there are still those who scratch out a meager existence on their little farms. Their "cash money" comes from their fraction of an acre of tobacco allotment. Many farmers are prosperous. They use business methods, planned agriculture, scientific farming, the advice of county agents, the help of the United States Department of Agriculture and the extension services of North Carolina State University. They have tractors, planters, balers- modern machinery. They use the best fertilizers and contour plowing. They use every means possible to prevent erosion. Many make a business of breeding and raising beef cattle for the market, white-face Herefords and Black Angus. Others are highly successful producers of thousands of chickens and eggs. These commercial farmers are prosperous, highly respected and influential members of their communities. Their future is promising. The subsistence farmers need means to supplement their incomes. Local, state, and national agencies are working and planning to provide a better life for the people of the mountains. Great progress has been made. Consolidated schools and technical training are increasing the economic competence of the children of the mountain people. �CHAPTER FOURTEEN Timber! As settlers pushed into Western North Carolina, they found almost unbroken forest except on some of the mountain tops characterized as "balds," where there was only grass or shrubbery. Naturalists have estimated that in the mountains of North Carolina were as many as one hundred kinds of trees. In the highest forests, above four thousand feet in altitude, were black spruce and balsam. The oaks predominated in altitudes up to twenty-five hundred feet, and with them were mixed the shortleaf pine, the hickory, the black gum, and the red maple. Between twenty-five hundred and thirty-five hundred feet the oaks decreased and the yellow poplar, hemlock, birch, beech, ash, black walnut, and cherry predominated. Under the trees shrubs, principally rhododendron and mountain laurel, formed a dense growth. People told of walnut trees with a diameter of eight feet, and of wild cherry trees reaching a height of sixty feet to the first limb and with a diameter of four feet, as well as hickory, maple, ash, and yellow locust of prodigious size. Throughout the forests were countless numbers of the lordly and productive chestnut trees which furnished not only wood but food for man and beast. Although the forest was thought of as an obstacle to home building, it was the chief resource of the people. In a small way the early settlers were all lumbermen. Their principal tool was the axe, with which they marked their trails and chopped the trees for logs to build their cabins and for fuel. They girdled, cut, and burned the trees they wanted to get rid of. They were as apt to build their 291 �292 f Part III: A Developing Economy rail fences of choice black walnut as of pine or oak if the walnut was handier. They burned the woodlands so their livestock would have better pasturage. Primitive cabins gave way as soon as possible to more commodious double log houses, to which additional rooms were added from time to time, and a collection of log buildings served various purposes: as barns, corn cribs, spring houses, smoke houses. Porches were added to the houses, and in many cases weatherboarding was applied to the exterior and sawed paneling to the interior. The simplest way to make boards for this purpose was to select a tall straight tree near an open space in the woods, and to cut it with a cross-cut saw. The tree was then sawed into lengths of from three to four feet and each was split into boards of the desired thickness, by use of a froe, a long blade made of iron or steel. The froe was driven into the end of the length of wood with a maul or mallet. Much longer and smoother boards could be made by sawing them, but the process was slow. The log was mounted on a scaffold, and two men with a long saw, one man above the log and one under it, would take a slice from each side of the log until a square was formed. Then one end was marked into the desired widths, one-fourth being allowed for the kerf, the saw incision. Two men could saw about one hundred feet oflumber in a day. For making furniture or coffins this method was used. The lumber was sometimes sawed at combination saw and grist mills. As late as I 884 Alleghany County had nine of these mills and Buncombe County had fourteen. The two were operated by water power from the same dam, and frequently stores and carpenter shops were adjuncts, as at Alexander's mill on the French Broad. The water power was produced by mountain streams, small but steady, which filled the millponds. Such ponds, covering about an acre of land, had dams of log cribwork covered with rough boards. One sawmill had a millrace several hundred feet long which carried the water to the wheel. The wheel had pockets into which the water flowed from the race, turning an eccentric which had been attached to the wheel. The eccentric pushed up and down, operating a vertical frame in which a saw was affixed. The log and saw were put in place and the water did the work of cutting the smooth boards. Another water driven sawmill had a wooden shaft attached to the water wheel. At the end of the shaft was a crank assembly. The crank was attached to a long saw with the teeth all pointing downward. The log �Timber! / 293 A better log house ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. to be sawed was placed on a carriage with flanged wheels, which could be pushed or pulled on wooden rails. The men would push the carriage and log up against the saw, which went up and down, cutting the boards. Two men could cut about one thousand feet of lumber per day by this method. Steam sawmills were being introduced in Western North Carolina in the 188o's. Dr. J. B. Weaver had one in Asheville and both Noah Spainhour and R. L. McGhinnis owned steam mills in Lenoir, as did Edwards and Edwards in Hendersonville. Mitchell County had three, owned respectively by A. Job, and Baker and Buchanan of Elk Park, and J. B. Surles of Bakersville. The sleds so often used on hillside farms and on rough trails, the wagons, and many of the tools were made of wood. On the trails it was sometimes necessary to rough-lock the sleds to keep them from getting out of control. To do this, hickory saplings or log chains were wrapped around the runners to create friction. Wagons too were rough-locked by fouling the wheels so they could not turn, the vehicle being slid down the steep hill without accident. Small home tanneries provided the leather for shoes, saddles, and harnesses. Almost every community had a tannery, and most county seats had at least one saddle and harness maker. �294 / Part III: A Developing Economy The bark and wood of the chestnut yielded tannin, used in tanning leather. John T. Staton of Saluda, in Polk County, typified the village shoemaker. He was also a blacksmith, and when anybody died he made the coffin to bury him. Later tanneries offered employment to numbers of people. In the 188o's the supply of timber in Maine, Michigan, and other Northern forests diminished and lumbermen from those areas came to the Southern Appalachians, scouring the area for choice timber. There were still tracts of virgin forest in areas where no roads had been built and where the inhabitants were few. Such an area was the Pink Bed Valley at the headwaters of the South Fork of the Mills River, a tributary of the French Broad. Randolph Shotwell and a companion hunted in the Pink Beds in 1870. They spent a night with G. W. (Wash) Holden, who owned a fine bottom land on Hominy Creek, with farm, sawmill, and store. Mr. Holden escorted them to the Pink Beds, a trip of seven or eight miles of continual climbing followed by a descent into a valley by a slippery rock path, to the Hunters' Cabin. Erected for the use of hunters and cattle herders, it was a mere log hut, with a slab floor and a gigantic chimney, near the middle of the Pink Beds, a valley "two or three miles wide and twelve miles long surrounded by lofty mountains." Shotwell said the valley was fairly carpeted with a species of wild flowers of pinkish hue, above which grew immense beds of whortleberries studded with laurel blossoms and sweet-scented honeysuckle. Probably the pink blossoms were kalmia or mountain laurel; the "laurel" was rhododendron, and the "honeysuckle" was wild azalea. Shotwell described the forest timber which covered most of the valley as "lofty and vigorous beyond anything I have seen in Western North Carolina. A single trunk of a monster pine, I recollect as above five feet through at the distance of thirty feet from the stump." In I 896 the first forestry school was established in the Pink Beds. The name "Pink Beds" was given by the pioneers to the tract that still bears the name. Before settlers came, cattle were allowed to graze there in summers, the owners being farmers along the French Broad. In this secluded area the cattle would not stray far nor damage cultivated fields, and fences were not needed. When fall came the cattle were removed on the hoof, and most were sold in South Carolina and Georgia. In the �Timber! / 29 5 A timber sled used in skidding logs and for other hauling purposes on steep hillsides ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO winters when the cattle were gone, the deer came down from the ridges and the farmers again made their way to the Pink Beds, this time to hunt. Often bears were killed there too. No families lived there, and only a few rude cabins for shelter for hunters and drovers had been built. Later a few settlers did move into the area, the most prominent being Hiram King, who built a two-story frame house and operated a water-powered saw and grist mill. �296 / Part III: A Developing Economy The Pink Beds from the Blue Ridge Parkway Hiram King House in the Pink Beds - U.S . FOREST SERVICE PHOTO restored The lumbermen purchased large tracts of standing trees to be cut later, owners sometimes retaining their land, at other times selling outright. The price ofland shot up: one five thousand acre tract of land that had been offered for sale at $750 in 1879 brought $10,000 from the Carolina Spruce Company in 1911. Such land sales promised employment for mountain men as woodsmen. They were needed to fell and trim the trees and �Timber! / 297 to work as mill crews. One of the first markets was for railroad ties. Then after the railroads were in operation, lumber could be shipped to cities in regions where the supply had been exhausted. Sawmills began to multiply rapidly and steam saws became common. Generally no thought was given to a future crop, and the forests were damaged irreparably. One of the most difficult parts of lumbering was to get the logs from the mountainsides to the sawmills. In some places narrow-gauge railroads were built and equipped with Shay locomotives and McGiffert log loaders. The railroad line was laid beside a stream, gradually ascending the ridge. Where the terrain became steep, the track was laid back and forth across the hillsides, the trains alternately going backward and forward to ascend the grades. Sometimes splash dams were constructed of logs to accumulate sufficient water to float the logs down the mountain streams. When such a dam was opened the large flow of water thus released carried the logs to the mill. A boom was built in the Catawba River near Hickory by some owners of a band sawmill. They bought logs in the mountains and had them delivered by water to their boom, until it was broken by a flood and their logs floated down to the Atlantic Ocean. The men learned to fasten their boom securely at the riverbanks so that it would not break when the water rose. Early in the twentieth century a survey of the area between the Blue Ridge and the Unaka Mountains by H. B. Ayers and W. W. Ashe of the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Division of Forestry estimated that ten billion board feet of log timber had been destroyed in land clearing, five billion board feet had been used locally in the construction of farm buildings and fences, and only three billion board feet had reached a market. An additional drain of about I, 272,000 cords of small timber went into fuel each year. The residual stand of merchantable timber was being culled by loggers who took only the more valuable trees.* Severe erosion of hillside farms, evidence of fires on eighty per cent of the forested areas, and widespread damage from open range grazing of livestock were reported. One * Rebecca Cushman, "Seed of Fire," book-length typescript, tells of an interview with Granville Calhoun who had represented the Whiting Lumber Company in Swain County. The company, chartered in Delaware, was officially named the Graham County Land and Transport Company. Calhoun told Miss Cushman about lumbering on Hazel Creek, now a part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the influence of the lumbermen on the Hazel Creek community in which he had grown up. �298 / Part III: A Developing Economy authority wrote, "Present conditions in the commercial and industrial world and in the Southern Alleghanies point to the rapid destruction of the virgin woods." Asheville and the surrounding area provided a market for much lumber because of the prodigious growth following the completion of the railroads to the town. During the 188o's country estates were being built near Asheville on a grand scale. Senator Vance selected a small plateau on the North Fork of the Swannanoa River and built a house in the style of an English manor, of wood sawed nearby at the Burnett Mill. The rooms were paneled in native woods: the library in wild cherry, the dining room in black walnut and oak, and the living room in curly poplar. The Burnetts knew of only one curly poplar tree standing. It was five feet in diameter, and was growing four miles above the wagon road. They cut the tree in fourteen foot lengths and skidded it, one end on a sled drawn by a team of oxen, down to the upper end of the wagon road. The house was begun in 1880 and finished in 1886, although the landscaping of the grounds was not complete until I 890. The estate contained fifteen hundred wooded acres. Materials such as mantels, windows, and decorations were ordered from New York and were hauled the eight miles from Black Mountain in wagons, often ox-drawn. Senator Vance named the place Gombroon. In 1878 Richmond Pearson, son of Chief Justice Richmond Pearson, inherited a large tract of land high on the west bank of the French Broad River. He named it Richmond Hill after his father's home and law school in Yadkin County. Ten years later the Richmond Hill house was built on a fine site overlooking Asheville. Although the exterior of the frame house was not remarkable for its beauty, the interior was fine. The walls of the rooms on the first floor were paneled, the entrance hall in oak, the library in walnut, the dining room in cherry, and the drawing room walls were hung in pink silk damask. Pearson served as a member of the United States House of Representatives and then as United States Minister to Persia, Greece, and Montenegro. He was an avid collector, and the house is a repository of paintings and art works from various parts of the world. George Washington Vanderbilt, grandson of Commodore Cornelius and youngest son of William H. Vanderbilt, was in �Timber! / 299 Biltmore House , Vanderbilt mansion ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO his early twenties when his father died and he inherited the bulk of his fortune. Earlier, on his twenty-first birthday his father had doubled the $r,ooo,ooo left the boy by the old Commodore. He had built up a large library of his own on the second floor of the family's Fifth Avenue mansion, and he spent much of his time in second-hand bookstores adding to his treasures. He had a wide knowledge of modern French literature, was thoroughly acquainted with the paintings in the family art gallery and with the distinguishing characteristics of their artists, and was a nightly visitor at the opera. In the late r88o's George Vanderbilt purchased fifty-odd farms and some ten country places heretofore owned by impoverished Southern landed aristocracy, and as might be expected, the house and grounds that he developed were an exquisite work of art. Richard Morris Hunt, the New York architect who had designed the Fifth A venue mansions of the V anderbilts, was chosen to make the plans. Hunt had studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and many of the mansions that he designed were in the style of the French chateaux, as Biltmore House, Vanderbilt's mansion, was to be. Frederick Law Olmsted, known as �300 / Part III: A Developing Economy Great stairway in Biltmore House ASHEVILLE C HAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO the first and greatest of American landscape architects, moved to the Biltmore grounds to create the most beautiful and elaborate country estate in America. The site selected gave the mansion a superb setting and a breath-taking view. Indiana limestone was used for the house, and a three-mile extension of the railroad was built to carry materials to the location. Hundreds of craftsmen were brought from Europe and from other parts of the United States to cut the limestone and to do the elaborate carvings. A thousand workers were employed for five years in building the mansion, during which time Vanderbilt traveled widely in Europe acquiring paintings, tapestries, statuary, porcelain, and antiques for his 250-room house, which was opened at a Christmas party in 1895. The banquet hall seventy-two feet by forty feet with �Timber! / 301 a seventy-five foot ceiling was designed for a magnificent set of tapestries. The library, which has twenty-thousand volumes, is enriched with a ceiling painted by Pellegrini for an Italian palace. Vanderbilt was still a bachelor. In I 898 he brought his bride to Biltmore. The former Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, she was a member of the distinguished New York family of Stuyvesants, and she had lived during her girlhood with an aunt in Paris, where Vanderbilt met her. She soon endeared herself to everyone on the estate and to the mountain people nearby. When Vanderbilt planned his estate, there was a little railroad station called Asheville Junction on the banks of the Swannanoa. The post office was called Best, and the village consisted of a few ramshackle houses. Part of the land was below water level. Vanderbilt decided to change Best into a model village. Olmsted planned the village, but first more than 40,000 cubic feet of earth had to be used to fill in the part that was below water level and often flooded in the spring. Buildings first erected were the Estate Office, All Souls Episcopal Church, a new railway station, and the Plaza Building, which housed eight stores, and had five apartments on the second floor. The church was of Norman French architecture, but the houses were of English stucco and timber style. The aim was to make Biltmore resemble an English village. The houses were eagerly sought after, and they were rented for from eight to twenty-five dollars a month. Workers on the estate kept up the streets and the grounds, and the rent paid for all the services. The village was incorporated in 1903 and had a mayor and commissioners. Upon Mr. Vanderbilt's death in 1914 the village was sold to George Stephens. In 1929 it was taken into the city of Asheville. A hospital and dispensary, now incorporated as Biltmore Hospital, was founded by Vanderbilt. His daughter, Mrs. John Francis Amherst Cecil, continues to aid the institution. When Vanderbilt bought the fifty farms the forests had been exploited until there were none left on the Asheville market. The trees had been killed by incessant forest fires set by the owners to improve the pasture in the woods. Most of the lands in the bottoms along the Swannanoa and French Broad rivers had been abandoned and were covered with sedgegrass. Olmsted planned a model farm, an arboretum, a game preserve, and an example of managed forestry, the first in the United States. The �302 / Part III: A Developing Economy well-to-do young Gifford Pinchot was employed as forester. He had turned down offers to go into his maternal grandfather's office with the practical certainty of a fortune because he chose to study forestry, principally at the French Forest School at Nancy in Lorraine (his paternal grandfather was French). He had just recently returned to America when George Vanderbilt and Frederick Olmsted decided to put forestry into practice on Biltmore Estate. As Pinchot's father and Olmsted were old friends, the young man was invited to take charge of the forest. Millions of acres ofland east of the Mississippi were as devastated as those at Biltmore. Reclamation of these North Carolina forests could serve as an object lesson to the nation. When Pinchot began his work at Biltmore, the destructive logging at the hands of the former owners had "been done with an eye single to immediate returns and wholly without regard for the safety of the forests, and fires had been permitted to burn unchecked. There had been much injudicious clearing of upper slopes, which, after a few years of unprofitable cultivation, were generally abandoned to erosion." Pinchot made a study of the 7280 acres, describing every bit of the forest, using squares of from five to seven acres, and then divided the forest into compartments, for each of which he mapped a plan for improvement cuttings. He planned to harvest all of the old trees that were going back, giving the young growth room and light to develop. He had to train native lumbermen to fell timber where it would do the least harm to the young growth, an idea that was contrary to their usual practice of cutting out of the way all of the young growth that would interfere with cheap and easy logging. Each tree to be cut was marked by Pinchot. The cutting began near Biltmore House, and because the wood there was very poor it was simply sawed into cordwood length and left for another gang to split into cordwood and unsalable brush. The wood was then hauled to the railroad to be shipped. A sawmill was soon acquired by Biltmore Forest, and a little later, as the crews moved into more heavily forested areas, they lumbered for saw logs. Drays or "go-devils" (sleds) were used to skid the logs to the roads, where they were loaded on wagons and hauled to the mill, a small portable circular one with a fifty-two inch saw and a twenty-horsepower steam engine. The smaller pieces of the logs were made into shingles. One of Pinchot's responsibilities was to prepare a Biltmore Forest exhibit for the Chicago World's Fair. Olmsted was in �Timber! / 303 A monarch of the forest ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. charge of the magnificent landscaping of the fair grounds. The value of managed forestry was to be sold to the public, the first exhibit of its kind ever made in the United States. It showed by enlarged photographs what the forest had been like and what had been done to improve it. The division into compartments and the plan for each compartment were shown by maps. A pamphlet written by Pinchot was distributed free of charge to visitors to the fair and to newspapers, and much friendly comment was received. Pinchot wrote, "The attempt to treat Biltmore Forest systematically derives a certain interest from the fact that it is the first practical application of forest management in the United States." He listed seventy varieties of trees found on Biltmore Estate, with both common and scientific n am es. An account of expenditures and receipts from the lumber showed a profit, despite the expense of building roads from the sawmill to the rollways, necessitating a road gang to keep the roads in order. After the World's Fair exhibit was completed, Vanderbilt sent Pinchot to look for land higher in the mountains for his �304 / Part III: A Developing Economy game preserve. Under consideration was the Pink Beds, a tract of 20,000 acres, part of which Vanderbilt purchased. Parts of the tract were by that time owned and occupied by farmers. Pinchot recommended the purchase and then made several trips to look over 8o,ooo acres adjacent to the Pink Beds, a region of steep slopes, sharp ridges, and narrow valleys, with a high percentage of mature timber. Vanderbilt purchased the land and named it Pisgah Forest. Located in Buncombe, Transylvania, Henderson, and Haywood counties, it was rich in virgin forests because of inaccessibility, and Vanderbilt hoped to practice forestry there at a profit. As the yellow poplar trees on Big Creek, directly under Mount Pisgah, were mature and going down-hill, Pinchot recommend cutting them and sawing the lumber at the mill in Biltmore Forest on the bank of the French Broad River. About this time Pinchot became restless and decided to open an office as a forestry consultant in New York. His replacement as Vanderbilt's forester was Carl A. Schenck, a young German who had just completed a course under Sir Dietrich Brandis, a distinguished German forester who "might be called the 'Grandfather of American forestry,' although he never visited the United States." Olmsted, Pinchot, and other Americans interested in forestry were greatly influenced by Brandis. Schenck arrived at Biltmore in 1895 and remained in the United States until 1914, although he never gave up his German citizenship. He had much to learn because the theories he had been taught did not coincide with conditions in Biltmore and Pisgah Forests. During his first months at Biltmore he lived with the Olmsteds in their summer residence. They helped him with the English language and with the affairs of the estate. Schenck's first responsibility was lumbering and marketing the yellow poplar trees in Big Cove Creek, which resulted disastrously. He had a splash dam constructed to his regret. It proved impractical. Bad for the lover of nature was the destruction wrought by the logs as they swept down the stream. Laurels framing the bank of Big Creek were devastated, and the moss covering the rocks was washed away. The beauty of Big Creek was de. strayed, the fertility of the cove was reduced by the acceleration of drainage, and a loss of thousands of dollars was incurred. The lower part of the Mills River through which Schenck's logs must pass to reach the French Broad and continue to the sawmill was lined with small farms, and many of the logs washed �Timber! / 305 ashore onto the fields. The owners were furious and lawsuits resulted. Vanderbilt had to pay damages to the farmers to get his logs. Schenck was convinced that the building of permanent roads into forests of marketable trees was the only satisfactory means for transportation of logs, and many roads were built during his regime as forester. Another of Schenck's disappointments resulted from his effort to restore old fields to forestry by producing seedling trees. He hoped to grow the seedlings by planting acorns and hickory nuts, five bushels to the acre, in shallow furrows made with a bull-tongue plow and covered with dirt of another furrow. Hundreds of bushels were planted with no success. Rodents ate most of the seeds. Sedgegrass crowded out the few that grew. Forestry apprentices had come to Biltmore to work under Pinchot and Schenck, engaging in nursery work and in constructing trout ponds and a fish hatchery. They worked without renumeration so eager were they to learn forestry. In addition, rangers were employed, four at Biltmore Forest and three at Pisgah Forest. They were responsible for the progress of roads, nurseries, logging, wood cutting, and for prevention of forest fires and of trespass. Both Pinchot and Schenck had many dealings with the mountain people because Vanderbilt's purchases were in the higher altitudes, on the ridges and slopes, to which access was necessary through the many interior holdings, usually of small farmers in the narrow valleys. Pinchot wrote of the owners: "They regarded this country as their country, their common. And that was not surprising, for they needed everything usable in it - pasture, fish, game - to supplement the very meager living they were able to scratch from the soil of their little clearings, which often were no clearings at all, but mere 'deadenings,' filled with the whitened skeletons of trees killed by girdling." "By immemorial custom and by law, the cattle and the long-legged hogs ran free over ridge and slope and bottom. You had to fence them out, not to fence them in. These people dwelt and slept mostly in one-room cabins .... An open fireplace was cookstove and furnace, with a kettle hanging from a crane." Glass was rare, and windows were closed by solid board shutters. Homespun was the common wear. One of Schenck's most valuable apprentices was Overton Price, whose mother was a Westfeldt and who lived at Rugby Grange, one of the better-kept old Southern estates of the area. �306 / Part III: A Developing Economy He knew the language of the mountain people, the country, and the native trees. Later Price studied in Germany and returned home to become Pinchot's secretary. In I900 Pinchot founded the Society of American Foresters, with fifteen members, four of them Biltmoreans, of whom Price was one. His treatise, "Practical Forestry in the Southern Appalachians," for the Yearbook of the Department cif Agriculture in I900 was prophetic of the importance the outside world would soon attach to the mountain area. He placed the emphasis on sound business measures and practical forestry and on producing repeated crops of merchantable lumber. Three considerations were pointed out: not only is the timber valuable, especially black walnut, cherry, hickory, white oak, and poplar; but the forests control the drainage basins of the rivers; moreover, the Southern Appalachians have a great future as a health and recreation resort because there is no equivalent great forest region within easy reach of so large a number of people. Because of the number of young men who wanted to learn forestry and the absence of a forestry school in the United States, Schenck started one in I 897, and in I 898 he published a school catalogue. He advertised the curriculum as a one-year course in practical forest management with emphasis on field work. A school room was built in the Pink Beds for summer use, but in winter the lectures were given at Biltmore Forest. Those who finished the course found ready employment. Schenck in I908 sent out invitations to foresters all over the nation to come to a forest fair in Biltmore Forest. The invitations were in the form of a fifty-six page booklet in which his plantings in each of sixty-three tracts were described. The cost was listed as were the successes and failures of each plantation or tract. Tracts were labeled and numbered, and persons attending were shown these sixty-three extensive efforts at scientific forestry. This fair was to be a visual demonstration. Schenck's booklet was informative, inspiring, and humorous. A sample excerpt indicates the extent of his efforts and those of the Biltmore foresters and illustrates how these efforts provided guide lines for continued practical forestry: "Tip No. 2. The plantation marked No. 2, of Long Ridge, covers forty-five acres of steep slopes which were cleared some sixty years ago; abandoned for farming some thirty years ago; covered in I 89 5 with sedgegrass, and cut by deeply eroded gullies on the side facing the East. In 189 5 Mr. Vanderbilt desired the entire hill to be planted �Timber! / 307 in hardwoods. It was my wish to show him (and to all America) that forest planting could be done ... at an expense of $s.oo an acre." On this plantation he sowed bushels of chestnuts and hickory nuts and set out on the north slope I I ,ooo yearling chestnut oaks, ailanthus, black cherries, and hickories. On the west slope where the sedge was heavy he planted some 20,000 Douglas firs, sugar maples, white and black walnuts, black cherries, and white oaks. The cost of planting and work was $241.06. Some of these plantings did well; others did not. He did additional plantings in I898, I899, and I900, after which time the plantation did well. He stated that Long Ridge, which had been a nasty scar on a hillside, was now flourishing, and added, "Nowadays it is a joy for me to crawl through this plantation! I feel like the Lord on the Seventh Day of creation when I am crawling." Each of Schenck's sixty-three "Tips" dealt with similar efforts and eventual successes. Many foresters came to his forest fair, and from it they learned valuable lessons about conservation and successful forestry. The whole tenor of the pamphlet indicates Schenck's love for his trees and his work. This fair must have been one of the finest actual demonstrations of forestry ever presented to interested foresters. In April I909 Vanderbilt discharged Carl Schenck as forester, and forestry at Biltmore came to an end for almost forty years. Although the Biltmore Forest School had no endowment or support from public funds, it was self-supporting from tuition fees, and Schenck was financially independent. His decision was to operate the school on a field study basis, using land owned by lumber companies in North Carolina, in the Adirondacks, in Michigan, and in Oregon for working fields. In addition he took his students to Europe for two to three month periods to show them the results of sustained-yield European forestry. And so the forestry school continued to operate until I9I4. Meanwhile several forestry schools had been established by American universities, and state boards of forestry were on the increase. Under Schenck's influence Governor William W. Kitchen of North Carolina issued a proclamation in I909 placing all woodlands situated above contour line two thousand feet under increased fire protection. Schenck's contribution to the state and the nation was to emphasize the importance of privately owned forests, properly managed and protected to enable them to continue producing merchantable timber. The private lumber �308 / Part III: A Developing Economy companies regarded him as a friend. Reuben Robertson of the Champion Fibre Company offered Schenck its Sunburst village for the forestry school headquarters. Sunburst was a model village built to house woodworkers, the buildings of which were not being used. Schenck accepted the offer, and he and his forestry school surveyed the whole territory near Canton. The Champion Coated Paper Company was an Ohio concern incorporated about 1896 by Peter G. Thomson who had obtained from the Champion International Paper Company of Massachusetts a license to make paper, coating it on both sides at one operation. Great profits were made, but Thomson owned no forests, and he was buying wood from his competitors in Ohio. He needed a supply of spruce for making pulp. The spruce forests in the Smoky and Balsam mountains were the finest in the United States. In 1905 the Champion Fibre Company was organized, and from 1906 to 1908 it built its plant at Canton, North Carolina. Thomson borrowed over $3,00o,ooo during the panic of 1907 to complete the paper and pulp mill. Long known as the Ford of Pigeon and its post office known as Pigeon River, the place had only a few houses when the Western North Carolina Railroad reached it. The name Canton was bestowed by the General Assembly in I 894. The town had been the terminus of the railroad for two years and had developed accordingly. By 1906 it had about four hundred people, but after the Champion Paper Company went into operation it attracted workers and their families and by I 9 I 6 there were around six thousand people living in Canton and two thousand more in the surrounding area. Mr. Reuben Robertson, Thomson's son-in-law, was sent to Canton on a fifty-day assignment to make the plant a successful one, and he remained for the rest of his life, more than fifty years. Tanning was a sideline to the chief purpose of the company, paper making, yet the tannic acid made there paid for the wood. A process developed by Oma Carr, a chemical engineer, was applied to chestnut chips to make pulp after the tannic acid had been removed from them. The wood was reduced to small chips and subjected to treatment in boiling chemicals which dissolved the resinous material in the wood, leaving only the fibre. After washing, screening, and bleaching, it was formed in a sheet on a revolving cylinder covered with wire cloth, �Timber! / 309 passed between rollers to wring out the water, then heated over steam cylinders for drying. Wound on reels in continous rolls as it appeared from the machine, it resembled cardboard or blotter. This product was shipped to Hamilton, Ohio, to be coated. At first, chestnut wood was essential to the plant for production of tannic acid, and Robertson said that the company came to North Carolina first for the spruce and second for the many chestnut trees. The chestnut blight which appeared about 1920 was of cataclysmic importance to the industry. Spruce was difficult to obtain because it grew only in the highest altitudes, and after Schenck's survey revealed the great extent of pine forests available a process was developed to make a bleached kraft out of pine. Champion made the first white paper of pine. The company purchased lands, often tracts with nothing ready for immediate harvest, but with "good forest reproduction on them." It also purchased wood from the farmers and from the national forests. The contracts with farmers contained a clause stating that they could be cancelled if the wood was not handled in accordance with sustained yield principles. It was essential for the company that the forests be maintained for perpetual yield. By 1916 the Champion Fibre Company employed over one thousand men and was worth ten million dollars. Fifteen carloads of products left Canton daily. In addition the farmers had a cash crop and the lumbermen a market for their waste products. Supplies such as coal, lime, alkali, and sulphur were supplied from Tennessee and Virginia. After the days of the Forestry School at Biltmore, no forestry program was carried on there until 1946, when the Champion Paper and Fibre Company (the name had been changed) made a contract with the estate to cut mature trees and do scientific thinning in certain areas. Max Dillingham, forester in charge, was a joint employee of the estate and the company. Natural reseeding was carried on from seed trees in natural regeneration. Of the 12,000 acres then in the estate, about 8,500 were in forest land. Suitable trees were cut for sawwood and were sawed at the sawmill on the estate and sold through a broker. Some forty employees worked on the operation, under contract, using their own equipment. All trees were marked before cutting, and all brush and limbs were scattered evenly over the forest floor. Champion built and maintained its own roads. Firewood was �3 ro / Part III: A Developing Economy cut for the estate greenhouses and sawdust was used in the barns, so there was no waste. The Champion Paper and Fibre Company has had enlightened policies concerning the preservation of forests and the use of the "sustained-yield" principle in its harvesting of and purchases of timber and wood. It has made progress in solving its problems of air and stream pollution. Report No. 5, Pollution Survey of the French Broad River Basin made by the State Stream Sanitation Committee (1957) criticized the company for discharging industrial waste into Pigeon River. The company spent $3,ooo,ooo in 1962 and 1963 to develop a primary treatment system. Afterwards it began work on a secondary treatment system. Mr. Vanderbilt in the early 1900's sold the timber rights in Pisgah Forest to the Carr Lumber Company for twelve dollars per acre, the contract to extend over a twenty-year period. During the twenty years the Vanderbilt estate netted about $870,000. Vanderbilt held that "private ownership of any resource necessary to the general welfare carries with it the moral obligation of faithful stewardship to the public." He said: "I have stuck to forestry from the beginning and I shall not forsake it now. For me to impair the future usefulness of Pisgah Forest in order to somewhat increase present revenues, would be bad business policy. But apart from that, it would be bad citizenship. As I see it, no man is a good citizen who destroys for selfish ends a growing forest." Vanderbilt might have received a much higher price for the timber if he had waived restrjctions as to methods of cutting under this sale, but he required that the methods of practical forestry be followed. Overton Price wrote: "Pisgah Forest, its mountainous slopes clothed in an unbroken mantle of protective tree growth, is his monument. He transformed it by nearly a quarter of a century's efficient fire protection from a forest characterized by scanty young growth, thin humus covering, and impoverished soil, as the result of an injury it had received in former years from excessive grazing and recurrent fires, to one whose silvicultural condition is probably unequalled in the Southern Appalachians." Although managed forestry was first applied in America at Biltmore Forest, the United States Government had shown an �Timber f / 3 I I interest in forest conservation for many years. In 1876 the Division of Forestry had been established in the Department of Agriculture to gather statistics and disseminate information on forestry. Proposals that the United States retain in the public domain the timberlands that were still owned publicly were made but not acted upon until I89I when the Forest Reserve Act was passed and President Harrison, on the advice of Arnold Hague of the U. S. Geological Service, set aside the Yellowstone Park Timberland Reserve of over a million and a quarter acres. This was the first U. S. Forest Reservation. The act did not provide for the practice of forestry or for protection of the forests. It merely withheld the land from sale or homesteading. President Cleveland added 2I,279,840 acres to the Forest Reserves. Subsequent legislation outlined the duties and responbilities of those administering the reserves. Theodore Roosevelt became President of the United States in I90I, and upon the advice of Hoke Smith, Secretary of the Interior, Gifford Pinchot, :md F. H. Newell, author of the act of 189I providing for the reserves, he transformed forestry and irrigation into issues of national consequence and won for them a high degree of public acceptance. In his Annual Message, December 2, I 90I, he wrote: "The fundamental idea of forestry is the perpetuation of forests by use. Forest protection is not an end in itself; it is a means to increase and sustain the resources of our country and the industries which depend upon them." At that time the Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture was renamed the Bureau of Forestry with Gifford Pinchot as its head. In 1905 the Forest Reserves were transferred to the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Forestry, and renamed the United States Forest Service. The Forest Reserves were renamed National Forests. So far, none of the legislation applied to the hardwood forests of the Southern Appalachians, where there was no land in the public domain. Efforts had been made to get the federal government to preserve portions of these forests. In I885 Dr. Henry 0. Marcy, a Boston physician, read before the American Academy of Medicine in New York, a paper concerning the advisability of securing a large reservation of the higher ranges of the mountains of North Carolina as a national park for the benefit of invalids. He said its advantages "would be of value incalculable to millions yet unborn." Other proposals for a national forest in the Appalachians were made, and after Theodore Roosevelt visited Asheville in I902 there was a movement in �312 / P.::rt III: A Developing Economy Congress to have the United States purchase lands in the Appalachians for parks and reserves. Destructive floods had occurred in the streams draining the Appalachians. These could be brought under control if the slopes were properly forested. A fundamental difference developed between the operation of the National Forests and the National Parks. In the latter the virgin forest is preserved; while in the former, controlled lumbering is practiced. The efforts to establish a national park are discussed elsewhere. Here the emphasis will be on National Forests, which were provided for by the Weeks Law in 191r. By the year 1910, the Forest Reserves had been increased to 25,605,700 acres, all west of the Mississippi River. The forests were yielding a revenue, one-fourth of the gross of which was distributed to the states in which the forests were located, while the nation appropriated $3,908,240.32 for operation. It seemed logical that Congress could appropriate money to purchase forest lands east of the Mississippi. Mr. James S. Whipple, Forest Commissioner of New York, explained: "Without forests we can have but little water. A study of this natural reservoir proves the importance and imperative necessity of preserving our forests. Let us examine it: The trees are part of it; the leaves on the trees are part of it; the twigs, old logs, limbs, and fallen limbs are part of it. All of these catch, delay, and hold back the raindrops as they fall. If you will observe the conditions of the forest floor you will notice that between the trees there are little basins in the ground, caused by the roots of the trees holding up the soil. These basins catch and hold the rain. Then underneath it all, formed from decaying leaves, twigs, limbs, and logs for a thousand years, is a black mold called humus. Thus humus has greater power to take up and hold moisture than any other known vegetable or animal matter. . . . [All of these are] parts of this perfect reservoir, built on nature's plan, detaining, holding, and keeping back the water, allowing it to soak into the ground to feed the little springs, thence the creeks, and keep the water flowing slowly from the hills all the year round. "On the other hand, when the forest is cut away, the basins are broken down, all obstructions to the flow of water are removed, the humus is destroyed, and nature's reservoir is swept away, allowing the water to run quickly into the larger streams, causing destructive floods. Many times great damage and sometimes unhealthful conditions follow. When the storm is over, the flood subsides, the water is soon gone, and dry creek- �Timber! / 3 1 3 beds appear." Federal purchase of forests in the Appalachians had been endorsed by three Presidents but had been opposed by Senators from the Northwest and by some Southern Senators who were adherents of strict states rights. The Weeks Act, passed on the fifteenth of February, 1911, authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to recommend for purchase lands he believed necessary for the regulation of the flow of navigable streams at prices fixed by the National Forest Reservation Commission. The seller of a tract was allowed to reserve the timber and mineral rights, but all cutting of timber and all mining must be done under the rules and regulations established by the commission. The act provided that after the purchase of tracts small areas that were included which could be used for agriculture without injury to the forest or the stream flow and not needed for public purposes were to be offered for sale as homesteads in tracts not to exceed eighty acres, and jurisdiction over such land would revert to the state in which it lay. An amendment later substituted the exchange of land for actual purchase. The terms of the exchange are based on need of a national forest for a particular tract which is privately owned, and desire of an individual to acquire a tract not essential to the national forest. These exchanges are not on an acre for acre basis, and a farmer might receive a forty-acre tract in exchange for a much smaller one. Thus small individuals holdings not originally sold to the government have been acquired. Since 1897 timber sales have been permitted in forest reservations, now National Forests, to residents of adjacent areas; this practice has been important. Residents in the mountains are permitted to engage in lumbering in the National Forests. To illustrate, a farmer who owns a sawmill and who desires to increase his income during the months that are unproductive on the farm may apply to a ranger for permission to cut certain trees that are overmature (no longer growing rapidly enough to make it worthwhile to save them) to make way for vigorous young stock. The farmer may know of such a group of trees. The ranger measures the trees to determine their stumpage value, based on the difference between their sale value and the cost of producing it less a proper allowance for profit and risk. If the amount due the government is less than $soo the ranger is not required to advertise the timber for sale, and a contract may be drawn up. Amounts involving a payment of over $soo must be advertised. The purchaser may pay cash, or he may �314 / Part III: A Developing Economy arrange to make payments as he markets the lumber. The plan encourages conservation as the farmer wishes to be able to continue purchasing timber from the National Forest. Under the Weeks Act National Forests were created in the Appalachian region of North Carolina, the Pisgah in 1916 and the Nantahala in 1920. The headquarters are in Asheville. The purchase of Vanderbilt's holdings in Pisgah Forest was approved in 1914 after his death although he had favored the sale. Mrs. Vanderbilt asked five dollars per acre, which was less than the average price of other tracts already acquired. Her feeling in the matter was expressed in a letter to the commission: "I wish earnestly to make such disposition of Pisgah Forest as will maintain in the fullest and most permanent way its national value as an object lesson in forestry, as well as its wonderful beauty and charm; and I realize that its ownership by the Nation will alone make its preservation permanent and certain. Accordingly I have decided to make as large a contribution as I can, in order to help bring this result about." It must be remembered that Vanderbilt had already realized twelve dollars per acre for the timber rights sold to the Carr Lumber Company. The Weeks Act was passed under the power of the United States to preserve the navigability of streams and their watersheds. A subsequent act, more far-reaching, provided for the purchase of land for the practice of forestry, even where navigability of streams was not in jeopardy. Purchases of additional tracts were made and continued to be made until in 1966 there were 878,ooo acres of land in national forests in the twenty-four counties of Western North Carolina. Of this, 48o,ooo is in the Pisgah National Forest, the balance in the Nantahala National Forest. A much greater percentage of land is in commercial forests, most of which are being managed today in accordance with the example furnished by the Forest Service. A survey conducted in 1966 showed that 14% of all land in the twenty-four counties is in National Forests, while 71.5% of all land is in commercial forests. In 1967 Macon County had the largest acreage of national forests, 148,016; Transylvania was second with 87,466. The other four leaders were Haywood, 67,454; Burke, 47,409; Buncombe, 3 1,874; Swain, 16,148. In 1916 President Wilson proclaimed the creation of the Pisgah National Game Preserve, the first concrete wildlife management program for Western North Carolina. Recognition of the multiple-use principle already practiced was achieved in the "Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act" of �Timber! / 315 1960. The act named the basic renewable resources (water, recreation, wood, forage, and wildlife) for which the Forest Service is responsible. Once acquired, the National Forests have been utilized in as many ways as possible to provide for the recreational needs of the American people. The Forest Service almost at once set aside the Pink Beds as a site for a federal deer propagation program. Fawns were caught and reared there and then transferred to begin herds in North Carolina and other states. Trout were also propagated for restocking mountain streams. In I 96 I, the fiftieth anniversary of the Weeks Law, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman gave instructions to designate the Pink Beds "The Cradle of Forestry in America." Consequently a visitor center has been created near the site of Schenck's School of Forestry. It contains displays illustrating the multiple use of forests. Visitors may then follow nearby trails for a view of the region as it was during Schenck's regime. The Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are administered by four staff members and numerous associates at the Asheville headquarters, heading the four facets of modem forestry: water, timber, wildlife, and recreation. In the Nantahala National Forest ten rivers rise: the Nantahala, Cheoah, Tuckaseigee, Hiwassee, Valley, Cullasaja, Little Tennessee, Chattooga, Whitewater, and Toxaway. They feed large river systems, the Tennessee and the Savannah. The area receives as much as seventy inches of rainfall per year, and in some places it reaches one hundred or more inches. Near Franklin, at the headwaters of the Little Tennessee River, is the 5400 acre Coweeta Hydrological Laboratory, the only study area of its kind in the Eastern United States. There the soil is as deep as thirty inches, and observations are made of the effects of timber cutting, logging, fire, woods grazing, and land clearing on the flow and quality of the water and the silt content of streams. The aim is to develop methods of forest management to obtain better and more abundant water supplies. At Bent Creek Experimental Forest near Asheville, studies have shown that forest soil stripped of its trees absorbs less than one-fifth of an inch of rain in an hour, while properly managed forest land absorbs up to four inches of rainfall in an hour. Nantahala National Forest contains 650 million boardfect of saw timber and 400,000 cords of merchantable pulpwood. In I956 the income from the sale of timber was $3 I7,000. Twentyfive per cent of all income from the sale of forest products is �316 / Part III: A Developing Economy Deer preserve ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. paid to the state to be used for schools and roads in the counties in which the forest is located. An additional ten per cent is appropriated to the Forest Service for improvement of roads and trails in the forest. The timber operators who purchase timber in the Nantahala National Forest had in 1956 an annual payroll of $696,ooo, and year-round employment was provided for five hundred people. As the volume of forest products increases the above figures also increase. In 1937 the State of North Carolina and the United States Forest Service signed a cooperative wildlife agreement, which has been revised from time to time. The purpose is to protect wildlife, to plant fish in the streams throughout the forests, and to regulate fishing and hunting, and a license for either must be obtained from the state. State game, fish, and sanitary laws apply except in special game-management areas inside the forest, which in the Nantahala Forest are Fires Creek area north ofHayesville, Wayah Wildlife Management area west ofFranklin, Standing Indian area at the head of the Nantahala River, and the Santeetlah area northwest of Robbinsville. In these the number of hunters and the hunting periods for wild boar, bear, and deer are restricted to maintain a sustained game production. �Timber! / 317 A mountain angler on Lake Logan near Waynesville HUGH MORTON PHOTO A cook-out in a camp ground of the Pisgah National Forest U.S. FOREST SERVICE PHOTO �3r 8 / Part III: A Developing Economy Hiker on a trail in a national forest U .S. FOREST SERVI CE PHOTO Special fees are charged by the state to hunt and fish in the Cooperative Wildlife Management areas. Twenty-three hundred persons per year are permitted to hunt bear and wild boar with dogs in North Carolina. Applicants pay the required fee and engage in a public drawing for the right to hunt. Hunt fees are refunded to those who lose out in the drawing. There are 1200 miles of trout streams in the N ational Forests in North Carolina, constituting fifty per cent of the trout streams in the state, and brook, rainbow, and brown trout are present there. The Pisgah Forest Fish Hatchery in Transylvania County twelve miles from Brevard furnished nine- to ten- inch trout for the streams and lakes of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the Cherokee Indian Reservation, the Pisgah and N antahala National Forests, and public trout waters in eight counties ofWestern North Carolina, and eggs are shipped to fish hatcheries in other states of the Appalachian area. A laboratory trains hatchery p ersonnel. Forest fire control has been so effective in the N ational Forests that the average loss in the Nantahala is now one-third �Timber! / 319 of one per cent. Towers and observatories at high points, w ith observers always on the alert and with telephone and radio service and roads and trails for the purpose, enable the fire fighting crews to put out most of the fires within the first hour after they start. For those who like to camp or to hike, there are twenty-nine recreation areas, twenty of which have camping facilities and well-marked trails. In some areas the United States Forest Service rents sites on an annual basis for families wishing to build their own cabins. Typical of the camp sites is the J ack R abbit Recreation Area on Chatuge Lake in Clay County , where camping, picnicking, boating, and water skiing are possible. The North Carolina Wildlife Commission and the United States Forest Service provided a boat launching ramp. Said to resemble a Swiss Alpine lake, Chatuge has been called the crown j ewel in TV A's system of beautiful lakes. Each of the one hundred camping sites has a table, a tent platform, and a fireplace. Fifteen miles away is the Fires Creek Wildlife Management Area, where campers may fish and hunt during the legal T he Linville Gorge W ilderness A rea ASHEVI LLE C H AMBER OF COMMER CE PHOTO �320 f Part III: A Developing Economy Inviting trail in the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area U .S . FOREST SERVICE PHOTO season. Twenty-six miles of developed trails lead to the rim of the mountains. In 1937 the 2000-mile Appalachian Trail for foot travel was completed. Extending from Maine to Georgia, in North Carolina it winds over Roan Mountain, follows the boundary between the Pisgah N ational Forest and the Cherokee National Forest (in Tennessee), through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and into the Nantahala and Chattahoochee (Georgia) National Forests. Three areas of unusual beauty are preserved within the National Forests. They are Roan Mountain, Linville Gorge Wilderness, and Joyce Kilmer M emorial Forest. The first and second have been known by tourists for generations. Roan M ountain, on the North Carolina-Tennessee line, is in late �Timber! / 321 Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in Graham County- marker ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO Vista ofJoyce Kilmer Memorial Forest from Snowbird Mountain Lodge U.S . FOREST SERVICE PHOTO �322 j Part III: A Developing Economy June blanketed with blooming purple rhododendron, with here and there beautiful stands of fir and spruce trees. Cloudland Hotel closed about 1917, and in 1940 the United States Forest Service purchased the area. Five thousand acres are managed for recreational use, although no camping facilities are provided. The Linville Gorge Wilderness has been admired by visitors since it was visited by the French botanist Andre Michaux in I 802. No road has ever been built along this stretch of the Linville River because its banks are so rugged, with Linville Mountain on its right and Jonas Ridge on its left. The latter is unique in its strange rock formations that are visible for miles- Hawksbill, Table Rock, and the Chimneys. Travelers on foot and on horseback have for years gone to Wiseman's View on Linville Mountain for the panorama of the gorge and Jonas Ridge. Along the riverbank and throughout the gorge are an abundance of wild flowers and shrubs of great variety. Camping is permitted in the Linville Gorge Wilderness but no facilities are furnished. However, about five miles from Wiseman's View, at Linville Falls, a campground is provided. In Graham County in the Nantahala National Forest is a 38oo acre tract of virgin wilderness with trees hundreds of years old, some measuring twenty feet around the base and more than a hundred feet high, and a great variety of shrubs. It is designated the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in honor of the poet-soldier who lost his life in France in World War One, whose poem "Trees" is loved by the American public. The trees are here for all to admire and enjoy. They enable both travelers and residents, the city pent and the people of the wooded hills, to get close to the heart of nature - to feel like nature's noblemen. Let it be the resolve of all who live in or come to the mountains that when a tree is cut a tree must be planted. �CHAPTER FIFTEEN From Indian Trails to Broad Highways In I879 there began in North Carolina a movement that was to make possible the most far-reaching reform in the history of the state. This was initiated by the Mecklenburg Road Law. Prior to that time all road work had been done by the free-labor system called the "labor tax" under which every able-bodied man was obligated to give a certain number of days' work per year for the upkeep of roads. The new law applied to three counties, Mecklenburg, Forsyth, and Stokes, but it was available to any county by action of the county commissioners if requested by a petition of a specified number of voters. It provided for a combination of free-labor and tax support for construction of roads. The law was repealed two years later and then was reenacted. A new principle had entered the minds of the legislators and of the people of the state. Since I 867 various experiments with road building had been tried. First, the township justices had been made responsible for administering the state road laws and appointing road supervisors for their districts. The constitution as amended in I 875 assigned road control to the county commissioners, who were chosen by the township justices appointed by the legislature. However, in I 880 the General Assembly in special session restored the township trustees' responsibility for roads. In I 887 the "chain-gang law" authorized the counties to assign to road work convicts with sentences of less than ten years. Meanwhile the practice of requiring every able-bodied man to work on the public roads continued. The roads remained as bad as before. 323 �324 / Part III: A Developing Economy Two professors at the state university, State Geologist ]. A. Holmes and William Cain, a civil engineer, in a report to Governor Thomas M. Holt in I893, wrote: "The problem of better public roads, especially in the midland and western counties, perhaps outranks in importance all other industrial questions now before the people of the State." Holmes and Cain recommended that all public roads be constructed and kept in repair as far as possible by men employed and trained for the work. They emphasized that railroads could in no way substitute for roads. "Every citizen should be within easy reach, over a good public highway, of the railroad, the county seat, and the nearest market town." It was the contention of the two professors that the state lost $Io,5 I9,ooo annually because of bad roads in the middle and western counties. The figures were broken down as follows: "Loss on account of the cost of feeding, and loss of time by the I34,000 country mules and horses in the middle and western counties, during four weeks of impassable roads: $I ,6oo,ooo; "Loss, on account of bad roads, of the time and maintenance of 2Io,ooo country horses and mules, I05,000 wagons and harness, and wages of 105,000 teamsters, during one month: $3 ,948,ooo; "Loss on account of bad roads, of the services and expense of feeding 25,000 town horses, and services of I2,000 teamsters, and wear and tear on I2,500 wagons and harness, all of which could be saved by having good roads and streets: $4,53I,ooo; "Wasted in working public roads in taxes and labor: $440,000; Total: $10,519,000." They maintained that the state could save this amount annually by installing a system of good macadamized roads. Rural Free Delivery (RFD) which was experimental with a law passed by Congress in 1893 was impractical in Western North Carolina because of the poor roads, although by 1898 it had become a permanent feature of the postal service. In I 899 a Good Roads Association of Asheville was organized, the first in the state. The private macadam roads on the Vanderbilt estate had demonstrated what might be done with public roads. The association under the leadership of Dr. C. P. Ambler built one mile of macadam road from Asheville to Biltmore and campaigned for better roads in Buncombe County. It cooperated with neighboring counties in holding meetings, and a similar association was formed in Hendersonville. In I902 a North Carolina Good Roads Association was formed to work �From Indian Trails to Broad Highways / 325 Post offices were usually in stores or homes ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO . out a formula to help the counties acquire better roads through federal support, extended use of convicts, instruction in road building, and a course in road building to be offered at State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts and at the state university. Meanwhile some efforts were made by individuals or corporations to attract the tourist trade to areas not served by railroads, requiring them to invest private capital for roads. Mr. S. T. Kelsey, one of the founders of Highlands in Macon County, was employed to make a survey for a projected railroad that was to follow the Blue Ridge through the Carolinas �326 / Part III: A Developing Economy and Virginia. He was impressed with the scenic possibilities of the area which became Linville. Kelsey interested his friend Donald MacRae of Wilmington, who in turn sent his son Hugh to look over the valley. A corporation was formed to purchase land and lay out a resort village. As the location was remote and travel would be difficult, the company constructed the Y onahlossee road in I 890 and I 89I along the southern slope of Grandfather Mountain from Linville to Blowing Rock with a branch road leading to the top of the mountain. The main road was twenty miles long and from ten to fourteen feet wide, and the cost of building was about $IO,ooo. Kelsey surveyed and supervised the construction of the project, employing local workmen. Joe Lee Hartley, who worked on the two-year projec!:, described the task: "We had bush crews and log crews, shovel and mattock crews. There were some 300 men working on the road .... I walked five miles to work for 300 days. When we got the road about half way done, up there around the side of the Grandfather, we had a shack under the rocks." In their I893 report Holmes and Cain called the road "an excellent one for summer travel ... through one of the most beautiful and interesting portions of the mountain region of North Carolina." The Good Roads movement grew in popularity and a Southern Appalachian Good Roads Association was organized in I909. Two years later the Southern Railway and the Atlantic Coastline Railway entered the campaign. Their officials believed that good roads would encourage production and result in more balanced marketing. A Good Roads Train was operated in the mountains by the Southern Railway in I9I I. It contained three coaches, one of which contained working models and road building equipment, with explanations of how to build and maintain good roads, and one a stereopticon and screen showing good and bad roads. Railway officials and experts from the United States Office of Public Roads gave lectures in Marshall, Asheville, Waynesville, Sylva, Hendersonville, Lake Toxaway, Brevard, Rutherfordton, Marion, Morganton, North Wilkesboro, and Mount Airy. The automobile had come into use on North Carolina roads and streets, and a license fee of five dollars per auto was �From Indian Trails to Broad Highways / 327 Copy of photo made by Donald McRae of the Linville-Blowing Rock hack on the HUGH MORTON PHOTO Yonahlossee Road at Wilson Creek in the 189o's imposed in 1909, of which three dollars was returned to the county in which it was collected. In 1911 the General Assembly authorized construction of the Central Highway to extend from Morehead City to the Tennessee line, to follow the railroad. Work lagged and the road was not completed until 1921. The plan was to improve roads already constructed, making them thirty feet wide from ditch to ditch and with no grade over four and one-half percent. Buncombe County already had a good road from Swannanoa Gap on the east to the county line on the west, a combination of macadam in some places and sand clay in others. Sand clay roads were cheaper to build than macadam and a county could build more miles with its money. Sand clay roads required constant attention, but they could be kept up by just a few men. When the Central Highway Committee attempted to inspect the entire route in 1912, its members had to begin the tour in Haywood County, Madison County's roads not being in �328 / Part III: A Developing Economy condition for travel even in midsummer. A scenic highway to be known as the "Crest of the Blue Ridge Highway" was being surveyed in I9II, from Marion, Virginia, to Talullah Falls, Georgia, where it would connect with a good road to Atlanta. It was to enter North Carolina in Ashe County via Beaver Creek and Elk Cross Roads, where there was a good dirt road as far as Boone. The next thirty-five miles, to Linville via Blowing Rock, would utilize the Y onahlossee road. From Linville to Linville Falls the road was under construction, although there was not yet any surfacing material and it would get very heavy in winter. Tourists would be expected to stop at Linville Falls to see the gorge and the falls. From that point the road would proceed close to the summit of the Blue Ridge on an entirely new route with beautiful scenery. The highest point on the highway would be Stepps Gap, approximately 5,500 feet, only 1,200 less than Mount Mitchell. Thence it would pass through the heart of the Black Mountains where there had never been any roads. The road was to lead through Asheville to Hendersonville and Brevard, then pass the resorts of Lake Toxaway, Lake Sapphire, and Fairfield Lake to Highlands, and on to Talullah Falls. At Asheville the proposed road was to coincide with one already constructed to the top of Sunset Mountain. This five mile macadam road had been constructed by Dr. E. W. Grove as an exclusive automobile route, there being a separate road to the summit for carnages. The scheme for the scenic road originated with Dr. Joseph Hyde Pratt, State Geologist, and the survey was made under the auspices of the North Carolina Geological and Economic Survey by students of the University of North Carolina during their summer vacation. T. F. Hickerson, a member of the party, reported that they spent ten days "very pleasantly at Dr. C. P. Ambler's summer home before starting the survey at Bull Gap, ten miles east of Asheville. There were no wagon roads between Bull Gap and Stepps Gap near Mt. Mitchell, . . . there were scarcely any trails that could be traveled in safety with a horse." The section surveyed averaged 5,000 feet in altitude. The camp equipment, including seven tents, ten folding cots, clothes and two double blankets for each person, a stove and cooking equipment, tablewear, and rations, had to be packed on mules or portaged a distance of about seven miles over the steep and rough trails. �From Indian Trails to Broad Highways / 329 In 1912 a portion of the road between Linville and Altapass was constructed under the direction of Dr. Pratt, with one hundred men. The Appalachian Highway Company had been chartered to build the road, and people along the route were giving the right-of-way and were encouraged to buy stock. The portion between Altapass and Pineola was completed before work was stopped because of W odd War One. The surface was of sand, clay, and gravel. A toll road, it was expected to entice more tourists to the area, to have them stay longer and visit the inns along the scenic route. Locke Craig, an Asheville man, became governor of North Carolina in 1913. He designated two days in November of that year as "Good Roads Days." These were declared state holidays on which every able-bodied citizen was asked to strike a few blows for progress. They were part of a series of Good Roads Days in different states. Governor Craig went to his home county and, donning overalls, worked as a common laborer with the other citizens. The first new road in North Carolina to be built by state convicts was a seven mile stretch over Hickory Nut Gap of a road which was projected to run from Asheville to Charlotte. The General Assembly had provided for the upkeep of the road after its completion, although it was to be turned over to Buncombe, Henderson, and Rutherford counties for administration. The county commissioners of each county were to appoint a commissioner to have charge of upkeep and maintenance of the road. Sol Gallert of Rutherford County had prepared the bill authorizing state aid, and R. R. Williams of Buncombe County presented it. The bill required that five thousand dollars be raised locally for dynamite and tools. The Coxe Estate in Asheville gave one thousand, the town of Edneyville voted a bond issue and gave fifteen hundred, and private citizens subscribed $5,76r.6o. Gallert said, "I look to see the time when these hills will be the playground of America, the road lined with homes of summer visitors and the hills and valleys dotted with the homes of our mountain people." He estimated that the people of Rutherford and Buncombe counties had up to that time expended $soo,ooo in turnpike tolls "in the eternal damnation of their souls through cursing at being stuck axle deep in the mud, broken poles, and having to lead their horses up a wretched road they were paying the privilege of driving over." �3 30 / Part III: A Developing Economy Governor Craig when he opened the road officially on November seventh, 1915, declared, "I believe the most favored spot on earth is here in the glorious mountains of North Carolina. It is a land, an inheritance for us, with its marvelous climate, pure water, its brooks and streams and rivers, where we have no flies or very few of them, because a fly cannot live on these rocks; no malaria and no diseases save those we can ourselves get rid of." The state university began in 1914 holding annual good roads institutes at Chapel Hill, with lectures, conferences, and exchange of experiences. Only three of the counties of Western North Carolina were represented at the first instituteMadison, McDowell, and Rutherford. Many arguments as to how to raise money for the needed roads arose at the institutes. Practically all were agreed that the chain gang must continue, but equipment and materials were costly, and gradually the idea that bonds should be sold came up for debate. The question was who should issue the bonds, county or township, both practices being in use from place to place. In 1913 the General Assembly passed several laws permitting specific townships to sell bonds for road building, and one general law was passed which authorized townships to sell bonds upon receipt of a petition of voters by the county commissioners. With the responsibility left to local initiative, the building of roads was to continue to produce a hodge-podge of good roads near the county seats and very bad ones in outlying portions of each county. Governor Craig appointed a State Highway Commission in 1915, and the legislature appropriated $ro,ooo as its budget, to be used in advising the counties about road building. A breakthrough in federal aid for highways came in 1916 with an act to be administered by the United States Department of Agriculture. In order to participate, a state had to have an organization to raise half the funds to construct and maintain Federal Aid Roads. The next year the State Highway Commission was authorized to serve in this respect. Counties' responsibility for roads was still emphasized, and they were to furnish most of the state's half of the necessary funds for the new roads. The General Assembly now authorized expenditure of automobile license fees as a maintenance fund for a state highway system. Eighty-seven of the state's one hundred counties set up projects, and by January 1920 sixty-seven miles of road were completed in spite of the interruption caused by �From Indian Trails to Broad Highways / 33 I Hub-deep A casualty of travel on mud roads World War One. The objective was a system of roads from county-seat to county-seat. Roadbuilding in the mountains presented problems, but the railroads helped. During the winter of 1919-1920 District Engineer H. E. Noell was assigned the construction of a road over the mountain that had given the railroad builders so much trouble, from Old Fort to Ridgecrest. The old road was passable only in dry weather. It wound around the mountain as the railroad did. At times the Noell party had to take a train from Old Fort to Ridgecrest and work downhill toward Old Fort. Later Noell was assigned construction and maintenance work in Yancey, Mitchell, Avery, Burke, McDowell, Henderson, Polk, Rutherford, and Cleveland counties. His headquarters were in Marion, and to reach Avery County he had to travel eighty-five miles via Morganton, Lenoir, Blowing Rock, and Linville. On one occasion a team of two large horses was hitched �332 J Part III: A Developing Economy Fording the Swannanoa to his old Ford car to pull him out of the mud, and when they could pull no more an extra team was added. To work in the northern part of A very County he had to travel from Marion on the Clinchfield Railroad to Johnson City, spend the night, and catch the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina train (the narrow gauge line known as "Tweetsie") to Cranberry, travel over the project perhaps by horseback, return to Cranberry for the night, back to Johnson City for the next night, take the Clinchfield to work in Yancey and Mitchell Counties, where he used car or horseback, then to Marion by train. Until that time in most of the highway construction in Western North Carolina Asheville had been the hub, and the outlying areas in the mountains that had no railroads were still dependent on turnpikes. As late as 1915 Watauga County marketed its produce by covered wagon down the Blowing Rock-Lenoir Turnpike, a toll road which Watauga County �From Indian Trails to Broad Highways / 333 residents had the right to use free of toll. For other travelers on the turnpike a three-horse wagon cost sixty cents, and a car, seventy-five cents. Mrs. Gwyn Barlow, who kept the toll gate, said, "After they'd haul the mountain produce to Lenoir, they'd fill their wagons with supplies for the mountain stores. Often the wagons mired up hub deep." North Wilkesboro was another gateway to the so-called "Lost Provinces" of North Carolina: Watauga, Ashe, and Alleghany counties. The railroad into Ashe from Abingdon, Virginia, had been built by the Norfolk and Western only to tap the lumber resources of the county and did not connect with any other North Carolina point. Ashe County had closer relationships with Virginia than with other points in North Carolina. When Cameron Morrison of Charlotte ran for governor in 1920 he spoke at Wilkesboro, promising support for roads throughout the state. The "Lost Provinces" were unwilling to support any movement for internal improvements unless they would benefit, and Morrison was campaigning on a program of good roads, a state system with county upkeep. Later he devoted half of his inaugural address to the subject. The 1921 session of the General Assembly established the state highway system. Men from Northwestern North Carolina played a prominent part in the legislation, with support from both Democrats and Republicans. Chairman of the House Committee on Roads was Thomas C. (Tam) Bowie of Ashe County, and Rufus A. Daughton of Alleghany County was the leader of Democratic support for the bill. Newspapers called him the "Grand Old Man of North Carolina Politics." Both Bowie and Daughton had served in the legislature for a long time and were from the "Lost Provinces." D. D. Dougherty of the Appalachian Training School in Boone was the intermediary to secure Republican support for the measure because Frank Linney, State Chairman of the Republican Party, lived in Boone. A public hearing was held on the Daughton-Connor Bill (Bowie's name was added later), and twenty speakers were heard, one of whom was Dr. Mary Martin Sloop of Crossnore School, whose speech was acknowledged by the Greensboro Daily News as the best speech of the evening. She had long �334 / Part III: A Developing Economy Road scene near Webster Family travel engaged in mission work and knew "the horrors of the red clay road." In the House Bowie made the opening speech. Mr. Blaine Coffey (Republican) read a telegram from Frank Linney asking him to vote for the bill. In recognition of the priority of the needs of Western North Carolina, Miss Exum Clement of Buncombe County, the only woman member of the House, �From Indian Trails to Broad Highways f 335 was invited to preside at the third reading and passage of the Doughton-Conner-Bowie Bill, which passed 102 to 14. The Senate approved thirty-two to six, and a new era was about to begin. The act differed from Governor Morrison's proposal to continue county responsibility for roads. The law was amended many times by subsequent General Assemblies. The state assumed control of 5,500 miles of hard-surfaced and other dependable highways running to all county seats and to all principal towns, state parks, and principal state institutions and linking up with state highways of adjoining states and with national highways into national forest reserves by the most practicable routes. Special emphasis was placed on the development of agriculture, and the commercial and natural resources of the state. The law permitted the state to assume control of the state highways, to repair, construct, reconstruct, and maintain said highways at the expense of the entire state and to relieve the counties, cities, and towns of the state of this burden. The law of 1921 authorized a bond issue of $5o,ooo,ooo, a one cent a gallon tax on gasoline to retire the bonds, and an increase in the price of automobile licenses. A new highway commission was provided for with at least three Republican members in a total of ten in addition to the chairman. Each commissioner was to represent a highway district. Governor Morrison appointed Rufus A. Daughton of Sparta, John C. McBee of Bakersville, and J. D. Stikeleather of Asheville as members for the western districts. In addition to mapping out and beginning construction of new road proposals, a number of roads already begun were completed rapidly under direction of the commissioner. Among these was the Central Highway, which in Western North Carolina passed through Morganton, Marion, Asheville, and Marshall, first designated as State Route 10 and later as U. S. 70 Highway. Mountain terrain challenged the highway commission and the engineers. Surveyors often had to use ropes and ladders, and roads were built "over rocky mountains, under rocky mountains, and around rocky mountains." Sometimes a route chosen was not the most direct and least expensive one. J. G. Stikeleather of the Ninth Division in routing Highway US 64 between Franklin and Highlands decided on an expensive scenic route along the Cullasaja River. Federal aid was denied for the more expensive route, but the state built it. �336 / Part III: A Developing Economy Frank Page, Chairman of the State Highway Commission, reported in 1924 an appraisal of the 1921 law. "It does not have to be argued to them [the people] that roads have a civilizing influence, that through these means of communication the "Lost Provinces" of the northwest, beyond their impenetrable mountains and two days' journey from the capital of their state, have been brought within seven hours of respectable speed. . . . The whole state is knit together in this net of highways." By 1927, $us,ooo,ooo in bonds for road building had been authorized, and road building continued. Four years later the state assumed responsibility for maintenance of all of the secondary roads. The counties gave up equipment and prisoners and the state established thirty prison camps for highway workers under command of the State Highway Commission. Only one county in Western North Carolina, Buncombe, had been operating chain gangs during the nineteen-twenties. However, eleven of these counties had leased their convicts to other counties that used chain gangs. Prior to 1931 the State Highway Commission hired convicts from the counties for work on state highways and assigned convicts from the state prison to such work. North Carolina's laws had given the judge the option of sentencing a convicted man to the county roads or to the state prison, in case the sentence was for a term of less than ten years. Highway construction continued during the 1920's and 1930's with exciting new links being dedicated. For instance, in 1926 a new highway from Cowee Mountain Gap to Franklin was opened with a barbecue attended by hundreds of people from Macon and neighboring counties. Before the road was built most people in Macon County did their trading in Georgia or South Carolina, traveling via the Talullah Falls (Georgia) Railway. Persons wishing to go to Raleigh would take the train to Franklin, travel to Cornelia, Georgia, and change to the Southern Railroad to Greenville and Spartanburg, South Carolina, and then back into North Carolina. Travel by mail hack from Franklin was on a dirt road requiring seven hours between Franklin and Dillsboro. The hack left Franklin at four o'clock A.M. At Dillsboro the traveler took a train to Murphy or Asheville. Most persons in Franklin read newspapers published in Georgia or South Carolina because they arrived sooner than the North Carolina papers. �From Indian Trails to Broad Highways / 337 Chimney Rock, a natural phenomenon on the Hickory Nut Gorge R oad ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. Work on the projected "Crest of the Blue Ridge Highway" had been halted when the United States entered World W ar One and was not resumed after the war. During 1933 a plan was made to connect the Shenandoah National Park with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park by a parkway along the crest of the mountains. Harley Jolley who wrote the history of the Blue Ridge Parkway gave Robert L. Daughton, resident of Allegh any County and member of the United States House of R epresentatives, much of the credit for the plan. At first the intention was to make the road self-liquidating by imposing �338 / Part III: A Developing Economy Civilian Conservation Corps worked on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The young men were given a chance to better their education. Note that in the 1930's the CCC was U .S. FOREST SERVICE PHOTO integrated tolls on the users; however, North Carolina had the objective of removing all tolls from its highways, ferries, and bridges, and Governor J. C. B. Ehringhaus was opposed to a toll road. A sum of $4,00o,ooo from the funds allotted under the National Recovery Act was set aside for the building of the road as a "make work" project. (It is estimated that when complete the Blue Ridge Parkway will have cost $96,ooo,ooo.) A spirited rivalry concerning the route developed between North Carolina and Tennessee. Boosters in Tennessee wanted the parkway to cross through the northwest part of North Carolina into Tennessee and pass through the mountainous area to enter the Great Smoky Mountain National Park from the north. North Carolina's promoters, many of them residents of Asheville, wished the road to be confined to Virginia and North Carolina, to enter the park from the southeast. Secretary of the Interior Ickes finally, after a two year delay, chose a route that led directly south from Roanoke to the North Carolina line following the crest of the Blue Ridge to a point near Mount Mitchell, thence toward Asheville and by Waynesville to the park. The states of Virginia and North Carolina purchased �From Indian Trails to Broad Highways / 339 CCC men learned to use power tools. U .S. FOREST SERVICE PHOTO the right of way and a scenic easement of four hundred feet on each side of the projected road at a cost of about $2,ooo,ooo each and presented the land to the federal government. Actual construction of the road was awarded to private contractors, but they were expected to employ as much local help as possible. Work such as planting and stabilizing the construction slopes, controlling erosion, and building fences was done by men in CCC camps established along the route and by emergency relief crews of men who lived nearby. Three utility areas and ten recreational areas were constructed in North Carolina. Much of the land through which the parkway passed was far from improved roads, and living conditions there had always been primitive. The opportunity to earn thirty cents an hour was new to this isolated population. Governor Ehringhaus asked Secretary Ickes to give priority to areas where need for employment was greatest and where �340 / Part III: A Developing Economy A mountain wonderland HUGH MORTON PHOTO the most scenic areas were located, and Ickes agreed, so the work was carried on piecemeal. Negotiations for the right to build the portion through the Cherokee Indian lands were the subject of controversy for five years. Eventually the state paid the Cherokees a price agreeable to them and agreed to build a state road for them from Soco Gap to the village of Cherokee, and the right of way was obtained. After World War II that stretch of the road was completed. The portion that will run along the southeast side of Grandfather Mountain, now under construction, remains the last unfinished link in the original project. Congress assigned the Blue Ridge Parkway to the National Park Service for maintenance and management. Designed for non-commerical use, the parkway offers an opportunity for quiet, leisurely driving and enjoyment of natural scenery which annually attracts millions of tourists. In I 970 it was used by I 2, 789,724 persons, and it had become one of North Carolina's most important tourist assets. �From Indian Trails to Broad Highways / 341 In spite of the state take-over of secondary roads in 193 r, their condition had not been much improved when Kerr Scott became governor in 1949. The new chief executive was a farmer who had known the problem of the dirt road all his life, and he asked the legislature to approve a secondary road bond issue of $2oo,ooo,ooo and a one-cent-a-gallon increase in the gasoline tax to retire the bonds. The state constitution required that a proposal for a bond issue of that size must be approved by a referendum, and opponents believed that the voters would turn down the issue. But the people did not reject a proposal that would get them out of the mud. Cities and counties with good railway connections voted overwhelmingly against the bond issue but rural counties won the election. Additional highway legislation was made essential during the Scott administration by the increasing number of times per week the rural folk visited their nearby towns following the improvement of secondary roads. The constantly increasing number of motor cars and trucks caused city streets to be incapable of handling the traffic. The Powell Bill, so called because State Senator Junius K. Powell's signature led on the bill as it was introduced, provided state funds for municipalities. Appropriations are based on population and non-state highway system street mileage within each city and town. Congress in 1954 provided for an Urban Planning Assistance Program to finance overall economic development of counties and towns, and subsequently the General Assembly passed the legislation necessary for state participation. These two acts led to area-wide studies to develop municipal thoroughfare plans, and several cities and towns in Western North Carolina engaged in long-range community planning which included traffic handling. Among the first to do so were Asheville, Morganton, Brevard, Mt. Airy, and Marion. The State Department of Conservation and Development created a community planning division to cooperate with smaller municipalities in developing their plans. Scott, near the end of his four years in office, summarized his success in road building: " ... when I leave the governorship less than a month from now, North Carolina will have more than doubled the mileage of paved roads it had four years ago. New hard-surfaced roads will total 14,810 miles. That's 179 more than the 14,631 miles paved in North Carolina in all the years previous to 1949. 0 0 ." �342 / Part III: A Developing Economy VOTE ON THE ROAD BOND ISSUE, 1949 County For Against Surry Watauga Ashe Caldwell Wilkes Alleghany Burke Rutherford McDowell Polk Yancey Jackson Madison Cherokee Mitchell Macon Avery Clay Swain Graham Henderson Haywood Transylvania Buncombe 5.479 5.344 4.575 3,097 8,397 1,496 4,484 2,740 2,157 I ,588 4.351 3.794 3.738 3.449 2,788 2,374 2,039 I,29I 1,820 1,402 1,722 5,097 1,748 5,658 965 269 243 1,620 407 322 r ,586 3,229 737 323 54 393 262 296 85 546 251 52 155 II I 2,130 933 762 8,529 Source: Waynick, North Carolina Roads, p. 59. In 193 I when the state assumed jurisdiction over the secondary roads there were 54,000 miles of such roads in the state. In 1961 the length had been increased to 58,ooo miles, of which approximately forty-five per cent were paved. Yet the western counties had only twenty-eight percent of their roads paved. Roads are added to the state highway system by the Highway Commission after petitions have been presented by the citizens, if the said road meets the requirements set up by the commission. Such addition is made on the basis of priority rating. Governor Dan Moore in 1965 asked the General Assembly to approve a $3oo,ooo,ooo bond issue for a highway program. It did. As required by the state constitution the bond issue had to be adopted by referendum, and the issue received the overwhelming approval of the people of the state, 245,194 of the 320,000 votes cast. Working for the road bond program was �From Indian Trails to Broad Highways / 343 the Governor's Committee for Better Roads, only four members of which were from the twenty-four counties of Western North Carolina. The governor no doubt knew that these counties would favor the proposal. The bill as passed by the legislature divided the funds into three parts: for primary roads, secondary roads, and cities and towns. Funds for secondary roads were to be allocated on the basis of the number of unpaved roads in each county. The State Highway Commission had in 1961 set up a fifteen-year plan for road construction contracted for on a basis of competitive bidding. No longer were highways to be built by prisoners or free labor, although prison camps remained and inmates were employed for highway maintenance and improvement. After 1916 the United States furnished funds for highway building but not for maintenance. Most of this money was acquired by a four-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax. The funds were available for primary, secondary, and urban roads, to be matched by the state with equal funds. Roads in Western North Carolina that were continuous through several states were designated as United States Highways: 70 (the old Central Highway); 64, which from Morganton dipped southward through Rutherford, Henderson, Transylvania, Macon, Clay, and Cherokee counties; 19 and 23, which passed through northward from Asheville to the Tennessee line and westward from Asheville; 25 along the old Buncombe Turnpike; 74 from Charlotte, which terminated at Asheville on the west; 421, 321, and 221, all of which met in Boone, 221 connecting with Ashe and Alleghany on the way to Virginia; and 21, which passed through Surry County. These were primary roads and were frequently improved and sometimes shortened in mileage. Yet many of their miles were narrow, hilly, curving, and slow. Almost half of the federal aid funds now are being allocated to the interstate highways, a new series of national and defense roads on which the United States has been working since 1941. It was originally hoped that the system would be completed by 1972. The roads are four-lane divided highways for the cost of which the federal government pays ninety per cent. When completed they will serve several counties in Western North Carolina. The most important of them for this area is Interstate 40, which begins in Greensboro and passes through Burke, McDowell, Buncombe, and Haywood counties. It will eventually reach Los Angeles, and it is to be connected with Atlanta by �344 / Part III: A Developing Economy Interstate 26, with which Interstate 77 has a link through Surry County on a route through West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina. Interstate 77 connects with Interstate 40. The Appalachian Region Development Act passed by Congress in 1965 was described by Governor Moore as "the most successful program yet devised to help people help themselves." The priorities were established by the states participating, and Governor Sanford named twenty-nine counties in Western North Carolina to take part. The states initiated their own programs. The plan was one of fundmatching, and in North Carolina the emphasis was placed chiefly on roads, four lane corridors to swing out from the Interstate 26 and 40 interchange at Asheville to provide new and improved access to the market areas of Atlanta, Chattanooga, ROADS IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA, 1961 Paved Mileage Alleghany Ashe Avery Buncombe Burke Caldwell Cherokee Clay Graham Haywood Henderson Jackson McDowell Macon Madison Mitchell Polk Rutherford Surry Swain Transylvania Watauga Wilkes Yancey Unpaved Mileage Total Mileage 44·8 94.0 52-7 420.3 260.5 r88.r 102.7 58.2 45·0 146·7 18o.r 83.0 !82.4 I I !.7 102.9 62.5 II4.0 370.7 238.0 74-3 9!.7 87.6 234·0 76.4 345·1 581.4 188.9 539·0 367.1 358·3 350.0 143-9 !24-7 287·7 468.2 349·4 25 !.5 423-5 405.! 200.7 250·4 549-7 619-3 !09.0 2!7·9 364.7 859-9 200.8 389·9 675·4 24I.6 959-3 627.6 546·4 452-7 202.1 !69·7 434-4 648·3 432-4 433-9 535-2 509.0 26J.2 364·4 920.4 857-3 183.3 309.6 452·3 1,093-9 272.2 Source: North Carolina State Highway Commission, Secondary Roads Maintenance Improvement Construction, January I, 1962. �From Indian Trails to Broad Highways / 345 and Cincinnati. Progress has been slow. By June 1968 two by-passes had been constructed, one around Waynesville and the other around Weaverville. Counties not touched by the interstate system are Alleghany, Ashe, Wilkes, Watauga, Avery, Mitchell, Yancey, Madison, Cherokee, Clay, Jackson, Graham, Transylvania, Swain, and Rutherford. The Appalachian highways if built as planned will serve Cherokee, Graham, Swain, Clay, Macon, Jackson, and Madison. The fifteen-year plan of the State Highway Commission (1961) classified its trunk and feeder roads on a basis of first, second, and third priorities. Alleghany, Ashe, Watauga, Avery, Mitchell, and Yancey counties were placed on second and third priority lists, with no immediate plans for widening or straightening many of their roads in the near future. Although the section has a long way to go before its road problems have been solved, anyone would probably agree with John Harden, historian of North Carolina roads: "Hardly any instrument of organized society is so vital to the people as the highway. It is the link between country and town, the route to the marketplace, the way of knowledge and education, the artery of commerce, the call of adventure, the measure of civilization.'' In North Carolina, the "Good Roads State," roads have been all of these things. In fact, Western North Carolina owes practically all of its progress since 1921 to its roads and its schools. But the mountain region has always been discriminated against by the legislature because lawmakers from the east have dominated the state government. Money begets money, and improved mountain highways will pay tenfold dividends from the vast numbers of tourists who will come to this region of beauty and recreation. �CHAPTER SIXTEEN Business and Industry "R eader ... fix your mind on a Southern 'gentleman' .... Observe the routine of his daily life. See him rise in the morning from a Northern bed, and clothe himself in Northern apparel; see him walk across the floor on a Northern carpet, and perform his ablutions out of a Northern ewer and basin .... " So Hinton R. Helper follows this Southern gentleman through a day in which everything he uses is of Northern manufacture. Helper's diatribe against the South (1857) for allowing the North to do all of the South's manufacturing could not have been directed against Western North Carolina where most of the furniture and textiles were of home or local manufacture. For example, as early as r 820 cabinet makers in the part of Wilkes County that became Caldwell County had establishments that made furniture for people on order, serving a wide area. One employed six men. And for a number of years before the Civil War some German cabinet makers had a factory in Asheville and produced from mountain woods fine work which they carted around Western North Carolina and the neighboring states to sell. It brought a high price from the well-to-do customers along their routes. If mountain people did change to "store-bought" household goods after the railroads came, they later reversed to partial self-sufficiency as may be perceived from this parody on Helper from the Asheville Citizen in 1963, concerning Haywood County: "Mr. Average citizen in Haywood finds products of his native county on every hand. As he awakes in the morning, flips on 346 �Business and Industry / 347 the light- that ... is made in one of the largest hydro-electric plants in the East; lifts his head from a foam rubber pillow; shifts his weight to the edge of a companion product, foam mattress; slips his feet into a pair of Haywood slippers; pulls back the drapes made in Haywood. His pajamas were no doubt made on looms with vital hard rubber parts made in Haywood. He finishes dressing, getting garments from drawers of furniture made in his native county. In the dining room he sits down at a breakfast suite made not too far up the street from his home. He makes a few hurried notes in his memo pad- paper Haywood made - and obliges the wife by writing another note for the milkman to leave more milk in plastic coated cartons, all made in Haywood. Now into his $25 shoes- soles made in Haywood, he is on his way to work .... Between the house and garage his chest swells as he surveys the thick carpet of grass on his lawn- result of Haywood made fertilizer. The car hums. The fan belt turns the water pump circulating water through the radiator hose- both items Haywood made .... He is greeted at the office by his auditor who hands him an encouraging profit and loss sheet for study. Needless to say the finer paper is also Haywood made. The burley in his cigarette could have come from one of the r,Soo farms producing burley in the county. At lunch, a hot roast beef sandwich followed by apple pie with ice cream reminds him that these products are perhaps part of the $7 million farm income for the county. As Mr. Average Citizen retires for the night, he gets to thinking ofhow Haywoodmade products played important roles in his life throughout the day. Drifting off into deep natural, restful sleep, he is heard to mumble: 'Haywood- the State's Best Balanced County. Yes, sir, and about the most self-contained.'" The history of economic enterprise in Western North Carolina falls into four categories: individual enterprise, investment of outside capital in the area, large-scale locally-owned businesses, and consolidation of locally-owned industries by outside companies which are often holding companies and operate in a number of states. The one form of business that all in Western North Carolina became accustomed to was the general store. Such stores were distributed throughout the counties. In the nineteenth century �348 J Part III: A Developing Economy supplies for the most remote stores came from wholesalers who were retailers as well. The supply merchant sent wagons pulled by oxen and loaded with mountain produce to one of the nearest large towns. The wagons returned with merchandise to sell or trade at retail and also to provide rural merchants with their stocks. Fred 0. Scroggs of Hayesville has the account books, in beautiful penmanship, of Nelson Strange, his greatgrand-father, who was a merchant at Brasstown and Hayesville, Clay County. His invoices show that he sent wagons to Gainesville, Athens, and Augusta, Georgia, and to Maryville, Tennessee. Nelson Strange had six slaves whom he freed when they grew older. He paid a local blacksmith $67.50 to make one of the wagons for the long journeys. Among the items sold that were on the account book in the year I 86o were these: coffee, vials of oil, vials of drops, vials of peppermint, candles, castor oil, snuff, tobacco, nails, sets of plates, calico, skein silk and ribbons, vials of Godfrey's syrup, pens and envelopes, turpentine, preserve dishes, flannel, wool, worsted, brush and blacking, borax, coffee mills, plow lines, pen stocks, sugar, sets of knives, cigars, silk handkerchiefs, tumblers, brimstone (sulphur used to preserve fruit), sheepskin, fry pan and spoon, bridle and bit, 6oo fish hooks, spelling books, shirts, pepper, rice, court plaster, soap, paper of tacks, paper of needles, cinnamon, roping, pair of combs, bell, suspenders, cravats, and powder and shot (by the pound). A shoemaker made shoes on order in the store. Among the items traded by the people to the merchants, none were more important than crude botanicals used for drugs. The catalogue of G. W. F. Harper of Caldwell County for 1876 offered for sale the botanicals that he had taken in trade, which he described as "crude medicinal herbs, roots, barks, seeds, flowers, etc. Goods neatly and compactly pressed in bales of 200 to 500 pounds each, and furwarded in prime order .... " The produce book of the G. W. F. Harper store for the same year shows that in September, October, and November, the largest sums paid to individual customers totaled respectively $59.60, $44.28, and $143.18. The items included the following: burdock, mint, hellebore, flax seed, butterfly, beeswax, butter, beth root or purple trillium, blood root, lob seal, Indian turnip, catnip, may apple, skull cap, lion's tongue, feathers, dried fruit, eggs, bitter root, boneset, seneca, star root, angelica, ginseng, sassafras bark, lady slippers. The most valuable item was ginseng, for which the store paid one dollar per pound. �Business and Industry / 349 Collecting medicinal herbs ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. Calvin Josiah Cowles of Elkville and later of Wilkesboro, Wilkes County, developed a thriving root and herb business in that county in mid-nineteenth century. He traveled annually to Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, D. C., to do business with northern merchants. Later Arthur Cowles moved the root and herb business to Gap Creek in Ashe County.* J. D. Cameron's Handbook of North Carolina for 1893 claimed that North Carolina provided the largest supply and the greatest variety of herbs for botanic medicines gathered in the United States. At that time the Messrs. Wallace of Statesville gathered herbs from the entire state, employing three hundred agents in contracting for them and collecting them, chiefly in the mountains. "On the Atlantic slope of the Blue Ridge," Cameron wrote, "there are said to grow no less than 2,500 varieties of plants used in the Materia Medica. . . . The yearly business of the Wallace firm reaches nearly 2,ooo,ooo pounds in leaves, bark, and roots." At that time ginseng h ad advanced from one dollar to between two to three dollars per pound. This field of business still survives. In 1970 the Wilcox Drug Company of Boone is the largest crude botanical drug company in the South, sending out trucks to buying depots and stores * Calvin Cowles' store records contain accounts of customers in northern cities. One for r857 included sales of skins: bear, mink, otter, oppossum, muskrat, raccoon, gray fox, rabbit, mole, and pole cat. �3 so / Part III: A Developing Economy to collect the herbs. It cleans, processes, and ships crude botanical drugs: cherry bark, ginseng, passion flower, witch hazel bark and leaves, and deer tongue. One million pounds of these herbs are shipped each year. Associated with the drug company is the Appalachian Evergreen Company which ships holly, hemlock, and galax leaves to all parts of the world. More than 2000 people derive part of their income from the sale of these products. Other crude drug firms in operation in 1970 are the Blue Ridge Drug Company in West Jefferson and the Greer Drug and Chemical Company in Lenoir. Except in Asheville there were few stores other than general stores in Western North Carolina in the nineteenth century. A few county seats boasted a hardware dealer, a fertilizer store, and a drug store; a few businesses were specializing in farm implements, and there were nurserymen in four places. Investment in land for speculation has characterized the history of Western North Carolina from the beginning, when tracts larger than could possibly be developed were acquired. In 1796 a Philadelphia financier, Tench Coxe, purchased for himself and associates more than soo,ooo acres in Buncombe, Rutherford, and Mecklenburg counties. As the counties were divided so were the lands originally belonging to Coxe and his associates who were called the Speculation Land Company.* In 1819, 399,090 acres of the land were deeded to Augustus Sackett of New York, and the company became the New York Speculation Land Company. Sackett advertised land for sale and employed James Dyer Justice as his agent. Men in succeeding generations of the Justice family represented the company until 1920 when G. W. Justice and Judge Fred McBrayer bought the remaining land, approximately 10,000 acres. Throughout the hundred years as land had been sold the mineral rights had been retained by the company, an item of importance when gold was being mined in Rutherford County. From time to time other companies were organized for the purpose of buying and selling Western North Carolina lands. * Tench Coxe probably never visited his lands, but another Tench Coxe was admitted to the bar in Buncombe County between I804-I8I2. Coxe created artificial towns and advertised them. Papers of G. W. Justice contain much of Coxe's advertising. �Business and Industry / 351 Such was a company of Pennsylvanians that acquired I 30,000 acres in six separate tracts which they advertised in the North. The Baltimore Commercial, June 3, 1876, contained this description: "This part of the State is the land of corn and cattle, clear streams, speckled trout, bouyant spirits, 'stalwart men and bonnie lasses.' The mountains of Western North Carolina are fine grazing lands to their very tops. . . . This beautiful western country ... as a summer resort is justly admitted to be the Switzerland of America." An example of individuals who dealt in land on a large scale was Calvin J. Cowles of Wilkes County who owned at one time I4,000 acres in Western North Carolina chiefly in Wilkes, Alexander, Ashe, and Caldwell counties and advertised his land resources around the nation. The Cowles papers in the Southern Historical Collection at Chapel Hill contain many details of his land business. Mining was promoted by S. C. Kerr, State Geologist, who devoted extensive study to the mineral potential of Western North Carolina, and outside capital was attracted for extracting the deposits. Nothing like the gold fever, which had called large numbers of people to Burke, McDowell, and Rutherford counties from I 829 to I 8 33 and produced gold estimated at from $6,ooo,ooo to $I6,ooo,ooo worth of the metal, occurred again, but mining was an important enterprise in the area in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The North Carolina State Exposition in Raleigh in I884 exhibited minerals and the Authorized Visitors Guide listed the state's mines by counties. The following counties had iron mines: Alleghany, 3 ; Ashe, 4; Cherokee, 6; Mitchell, 2; Watauga, 2; and Yancey, I. There were gold mines in Ashe, I ; Burke, 7; Caldwell, 5; Clay, 5; Cherokee, 4; Jackson, 3; Macon, II; McDowell, 5; Polk, 6; Rutherford, 4; Watauga, 2; Yancey, r. Copper was mined in Alleghany, I ; Ashe, 8; Haywood, I ; Jackson, 9; Madison, I ; and Watauga, 3. The mica mines were Ashe, 2; Haywood, 2; Jackson, 3; Macon, 4; Madison, I ; Mitchell, I I; Watauga, 2; Yancey, IO. There were also scattered sulphur, silver, lead, corundum, and asbestos mines. The Cranberry iron mines in Mitchell County had been worked since the early I 82o's and were the most famous ones �352 / Part III: A Developing Economy in the state. The East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad was built from Johnson City to Cranberry to facilitate the transfer of the raw ore to the North. Mitchell and Yancey counties produced most of the mica used in the United States. L. M. Warlick appealed to Thomas Settle, Congressman, to prevent the placing of mica on the free list of the tariff law that was being considered in 1893. He pointed out that the chief competitor was India where miners worked for from five to seven cents a day while in North Carolina they earned from seventy-five cents to one dollar per day. A mica mine in Mitchell County, the "Clarissey", was three hundred feet deep and the mica at that depth was said to be as fine grade as that taken from the top. A half interest in the mine sold about r883 for $IO,ooo. Another mine near the Clarissey had, up to r886, produced $IO,ooo worth of mica. Zeigler and Grosscup believed mica to yield more money than any other metal in Western North Carolina in the r88o's. The Ray mines near Burnsville in Yancey County were considered the best in the area, but both Mitchell and Yancey were mining large quantities to be used for stove fronts and mica washers. Mica continues to be extracted. For example the Deneen Mica Company, Inc., employs forty-five people and ships its product all over the nation and to foreign countries for use in roofing, oil well drilling, and other fields. The Spruce Pine Mica Company, which employs about sixty persons, produces much mica for electronic equipment. However it imports practically all the raw mica used from Brazil and India, certain African countries, Australia, and Argentina, because local production of fine mica is so small. The raw mica must be split to a thickness sometimes of r/2 thousandth of an inch, without scratching. Workers in Spruce Pine for several generations have engaged in this painstaking work. Mica furnished by this company was used for some of the parts in Telstar and for the Apollo satellite program. Feldspar, a byproduct of the mica mines, was for years piled up as waste, but as time passed it became more valuable than mica. The Feldspar Corporation, which has its principal office in Spruce Pine, has plants in three other locations, two outside the state, all completely mechanized. The Spruce Pine plant employs 170 persons and produces feldspar, sand, and mica. It is the largest producer of its kind in the world. Each plant maintains a research laboratory. It is claimed that a fully automatic �Business and Industry / 353 Mica mining from an open pit near Spruce Pine NATIONAL PARK SERVICE filter plant to eliminate stream pollution returns the copious amount of water used in the process of froth flotation to the river free of contaminants. The Ore Knob copper mine in the southeastern part of Ashe County had been worked since the middle of the nineteenth century, but a well-planned and systematic operation was established after the Civil War and the mine became one of the best-known in the state. A fall in the price of copper caused the owners to shut it down in the r88o's. Efforts to reoperate the mine were made unsuccessfully from time to time. During the I950's the mine reopened but it closed in I962. The copper ore reached by the present shafts was exhausted. From Mitchell to Cherokee counties there are extensive deposits of kaolin. In Jackson County near Dillsboro and Sylva extensive works were established in the r88o's to refine the material before sending it to New Jersey to be made into porcelain and pottery products. The Harris Clay Company, founded by Charles). Harris in r888, is in operation today, the single producer in North Carolina, having bought out its competitors. In I960 the Harris family sold the company to C. P. Edwards, III, but it is still under the name Harris Clay Company. It employs �3 54 / Part III: A Developing Economy 103 workers, owns hundreds of acres of land in Mitchell County from which it will extract kaolin, and sells to General Electric for the making of electric porcelain, to the Syracuse China Company, and the Shenango Pottery Company. Electric power for the mountain area was at first provided by individual promoters. Asheville had a steam plant that produced electric current for street lights and for the street railways. Hydroelectric power in Asheville was first furnished when William Trotter Weaver of Buncombe County saw the potential of the French Broad River, acquired a location five miles from the city and developed it. A granite dam was built and power was produced for Asheville businesses and industries. Mark Killian, who had a flour mill and a wagon works, built the first water power electric plant for Waynesville about 1903. Then in 1905 J. B. Sloan and others in Waynesville erected a power plant on the Pigeon River that furnished power to the community for twenty-five years. These two examples could be repeated in various county seats in the annals of the early twentieth century. Electricity was essential to the growing educational institutions. The first electricity provided for Cullowhee Normal and Industrial School was made (1909) by use of a gasoline engine. A few years later a local corn-and-wheat mill at the river was purchased and a new electric generator was installed, which provided all of the electric power used on the campus until 1939. At Appalachian Training School in 1915 a dam of heavy timber, ten feet high, was built on the South Fork of New River and a power house was erected on the bank, to produce electricity for the school and later for the town. Boone's electrical needs are still supplied by the university-owned New River Power and Light Company. In time municipal power plants were created in Elk Park, Avery County; Bryson City, Swain County; Franklin and Highlands, Macon County; and Andrews, Cherokee County.* On the Broad River in 1926 Dr. Lucius B. Morse and associates created Lake Lure by a dam across the Rocky Broad River * Most county seat towns built power plants for electric lights. Elkin built a municipal plant in 1926, with a dam on Elkin Creek. It was sold to the Southern Public Utilities Company which also moved into North Wilkesboro and Mount Airy. �Business and Industry / 355 and built a power house for the resort, as years earlier the dam that created Lake Kanuga had been used to furnish power for the summer residential community. The next stage in the development of electrical power came when the Duke Power and the Carolina Power and Light companies absorbed existing companies and built huge dams and power plants in Western North Carolina. The Carolina Power and Light Company built a plant on the French Broad, and on the Pigeon River they built one of the largest power plants in the state. Duke Power Company created Lake James in 1916-I923 from the North Fork of the Catawba and the Linville rivers and from smaller tributaries of the two. It covers 65IO acres and has a shoreline of approximately 150 miles. In 1963 another plant was added which is eleven percent hydroelectric, 89 percent of its power being generated by steam. The Tallassee Power Company built the Cheoah and Santeetlah plants for industrial power to be used in Tennessee. Then came the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and also the North Carolina Rural Electrification Authority (REA) to stimulate the building of rural power lines. The Nantahala Power and Light Company built Nantahala Lake in Clay and Macon counties in 1942, with a shoreline of thirty miles and an area of 1605 acres. The dam is used for generation of electricity. The topography, the volume and the even flow of streams, the physical settings for power sites, and the abundant rainfall evenly distributed throughout the year make the mountain region ideal as a source of water-generated electric power. The mountain streams are capable of developing tremendous amounts of cheap and abundant water power, one of the area's chief assets. North Carolina ranks first among the Southern states in potential power. Western North Carolina's first cotton mill, the Elkin Manufacturing Company, has been mentioned. Surprisingly it was spared by Stoneman's raiders in 1865. In Buncombe County John Cairns, a native of Scotland, came to Reems Creek in I 868 and started a woolen mill. It had sixteen looms and 8 12 spindles. Farmers brought their wool to the mill and exchanged it for material to clothe their families. Three types of cloth were made: jeans, a rough weave; a hard finished material for suits; �356 / Part III: A Developing Economy and a soft material for women's dresses, skirts, and coats. The mill operated until 1914 when it was converted to a grist mill and made flour and meal until 1954. In 1869 J. F. and W. A. Moore started the Green Hill cotton mill at Mt. Airy, with twenty-one looms and 1000 spindles. It could produce 700 yards of sheeting and 250 pounds of warp in a day. In 1877 at Elkin two new mills were started in I 877. The Gwyn ville Woolen and Flouring Mills with 240 spindles was put into operation by L. L. Gwyn and Alexander Chatham. It could produce roo pounds of wool rolls and I oo pounds of spun yarn per day. The Elkin Valley Mills with two looms and 240 spindles was started for woolen manufacture. It also had a flour mill attached. The Gwynville Mills has grown into the Chatham Manufacturing Company, one of the very large woolen mills, a leading producer of blankets, upholstery material, woolen suitings and apparel fabrics. Chatham purchased Gwyn's interest in 1890. Alexander Chatham was succeeded by Hugh, Thurmond, and Hugh Gywn Chatham, II. Mrs. Hugh Gwyn Chatham II was a Morehead, and in 1957 Chatham acquired the Leaksville Woolen Mills, the oldest continuous woolen mill in the South, founded by John Morehead in 1853. The Chatham plant covers 120 acres, has soo,ooo square feet of floor space, and employs 2500 people. When Chatham prospers, Elkin prospers. Mt. Airy has nineteen textile, hosiery, or apparel firms among its fifty-seven manufacturers. Surry County has become an industrial center, with textiles its leading product. In the 188o's a number of villages had individuals who did wool-carding, to relieve home weavers of that step in the home manufacture of textiles: Weaverville, Robbinsville, Waynesville and Pigeon Valley, Flat Rock, and Dysartville (McDowell County). Before the Civil War a group of four enterprising men, Samuel Patterson, Edmund Jones, James C. Harper, and James Harper, of Caldwell County started a cotton factory in the village of Patterson. It supplied warp for home looms in the area and was powered by the waters of the Y adkin River until it was burned in 1865 by Stoneman's cavalry. In 1872 it was replaced by a second mill, this time with eighteen looms, 960 spindles, and a capacity to produce 6oo yards of sheeting per day, 250 pounds of cotton yarn, and 150 pounds of wool yarn, its three products. A second cotton mill was founded in 1883 by P. G. Moore and N. H. Guy. Within a few years a number �Business and Industry / 357 of thriving mills were in operation in Caldwell County: the Lenoir Cotton Mill (1901); the Hudson Cotton Manufacturing Company (1904); Dudley Shoals Cotton Mill at Granite Falls (1906); Falls Manufacturing Company (191 5-19I6); Southern Manufacturing Company (I922-I923); the last three founded by D. H. Warlick; Whitnel Cotton Mill (1907), established by ]. 0. White and J. L. Nelson for whom the community of Whitnel was named; the Moore Mill at Valmead; the Steele Cotton Mill ( r 9 I 8) ; by T. H. Broyhill and R. L. Steele; the Caldwell Cotton Mill at Hudson by R. L. Gwyn. Meanwhile in Rutherford County Simpson Bobo Tanner and Raleigh Rutherford Haynes, with a number of associates, built cotton mills along the Second Broad River. In I 887 Tanner and J. S. Spencer of Charlotte and others including Haynes organized the company and built the Henrietta Mills of which Tanner served as general manager. In I892 Haynes built the Florence Mill in Forest City, of which he was president until he resigned to give his full attention to the Cliffside Mills in 1901. Meanwhile in 1896 the Caroleen Mill, of which Haynes was a large stockholder, was built. Later S. B. Tanner and his son K. S. Tanner built the Spindale group of mills and the town of Spindale. The establishment of mills in Rutherford County gave the farmers a sale for their cotton, the employees a livelihood, and so benefited the merchants and the economy of the county in general. Forest City, in lower Rutherford County, grew into a very attractive city. It was earlier called Burnt Chimney for a chimney which survived a fire at the small crossroads community. A village had started there, was incorporated in I877, was largely destroyed by fire in I886, and was rebuilt. The name was changed by law in I 887 to Forest City. Three years later a cotton mill was constructed but it failed in I 89 5. In I 897 the Florence Mill with I2,200 spindles gave new life to the town, a mill village housed workers from other parts of the county, and the name Forest City became more appropriate. Banks, newspapers, civic clubs and service organizations cooperated in making Forest City a model city. Haynes had a railroad built to connect the mills at Avondale and Cliffside with the main line from Charlotte and Wilmington. The presence of railroads was essential to the development of the textile mills in Rutherford County. From I900 to I930 there was a new type of growth for the textile industry in the South, a great migration of Northern �3 58 / Part III: A Developing Economy industries because of Southern encouragement, low production costs, nearby raw materials, and non-union cheap labor. The South profited greatly from this influx but the workers were often exploited. In 1927 the average annual earnings in North Carolina were $691 compared with $966 in Massachusetts, $1053 in Rhode Island, and $1029 in New Hampshire. Southern workers survived not because of the low cost of living but because of their low standard of living. Except for rent, living costs were higher in the South than in the North. Women and children worked in the mills sixty-six and even seventy-two hours per week. Longer hours and lower pay gave Southern mill owners an advantage over Northern ones. The usual age for beginning work was fourteen. While most of the mountain people owned the land on which they lived, it was necessary for them to leave their homes in order to work in the mills. The companies built cheap houses, often poorly constructed and cold, unpainted, high on stilts above the ground, for the mill villages. Stores were operated by the companies, often charging exorbitant prices but offering credit. In 1910 Carroll Baldwin of Baltimore built a plant and mill village near Marion because of available labor and railway transportation. A good many Marion citizens bought stock in the company, but a controlling interest was retained by the Baldwin family, and following World War One conditions became very bad. Miss Sally Baldwin who had inherited the control lived in Baltimore and knew nothing of conditions at the mill. Workers labored in two twelve-hour shifts, sixty-six hours per week, in unsanitary surroundings. Tubercular employees spat on the floor. The dust-covered floor was swept while the workers were on the job, but it was never scrubbed. Workers' diet consisted of corn meal, bread, greens, salt back, very few fresh vegetables, no fruit, little fresh meat or milk. The incidence of pellagra was high. There was a song, I'm going to starve. Everybody will, Cause you can't make a livin' In a cotton mill." In 1929 the stretch-out system was instituted; workers had almost no rest periods. Twenty minutes were added to the twelve-hour day. Workers were earning from $5 to $13 a week. They decided to strike. Employees at the nearby Clinchfield Mill joined the Baldwin strikers. They were helped to form a �Business and Industry / 3 59 union and a charter was granted by the United Textile Workers (UTW). As the local had no welfare funds to tide the strikers over the period of unemployment, aid was sent from several organizations outside Marion. Money sent from Northern states was used to buy food. During the strike the workers turned to mountain activities, carving and whittling, building furniture; they had a string band with twelve pieces with a number of two and three piece combinations and soloists. They composed songs about their suffering; old tunes with new words covered every phase of the strike. Many workers were removed from their homes because they had participated. The strike lasted from July till September when an agreement was reached. Hours were to be reduced and wages were to be increased as the company saw fit. There was to be no discrimination against strike leaders. Those who had been discharged were to be reinstated. The Baldwin company was faithless. Another strike resulted. Six strikers were shot, four in the back. Those accused as killers of the strikers were acquitted on December 21, "so they could go home for Christmas," according to one member of the jury. Several union leaders were convicted on charges brought against them by the mill. Alfred Hoffman, an organizer of craft unions who came in after the strike had begun, was fined $1000 and sentenced to jail for thirty days for his activities in Marion. Labor conditions have improved, but wages are still less than in the North. Marion has other textile mills, the Clinchfield Manufacturing Company, the Cross Cotton Mills, the Washington Mills, five hosiery mills, two knitting mills, and at nearby Sevier, the American Thread Company. Marion is served by the Southern and Clinchfield railroads. Valdese has an unusual history. It was an experiment in colonization by a European colony planted near the close of the nineteenth century. It was developed by a group of Waldenses who had for centuries refused to accept the dogmas of the Catholic Church and instead worshipped as they believed the early Christians had. Migrating to an area of narrow valleys and steep mountains in the Cottian Alps in Savoy, now Italy, they were able to eke out a living in spite of persecutions in 1476, 1555, and 1686. In the seige of 1686, made by the Duke �360 / Part III: A Developing Economy of Savoy at the command of King Louis XIV of France, many W aldenses were massacred. Little groups that managed to escape to Switzerland procured financial aid from King William III of England. Using guerilla tactics and weapons purchased with money from England, they were able to regain possession of their valleys. Persecution did not end until I 848 when they were granted full religious liberties and freedom of conscience by the King of Savoy. The population increased so rapidly that the small area that had long been their home was unable to support them, and groups began to migrate to the Western Hemisphere, going to Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Missouri, and Utah. Thus it was that Marvin F. Scaife, president of the Morganton Land and Improvement Company, who learned about the crowded conditions in the Waldensian valleys, offered to sell the Waldenses roo,ooo acres of land in the mountains of North Carolina for $so,ooo, to be paid over a twenty year period. The two farmers who were sent to decide whether to accept the offer rejected the wo,ooo acres offered to them, and they were taken to examine various sites until they selected a ten thousand acre tract between Morganton and Connelly Springs, about which they were not enthusiastic because of the poor soil of sand, clay, and rock. Twenty-nine Waldenses and their pastor Doctor Charles Albert Tron arrived in Burke County in I 893. A corporation was formed with a board of directors consisting of six Waldenses and three American members of the Morganton Land and Improvement Company. A loan from the land company enabled the Waldenses to purchase simple tools to clear the land and put in a crop. Dr. Tron returned to Italy and briefed others on conditions in the new colony. Eight Waldenses from Utah and 128 additional settlers from Italy arrived near the end of I 893. Extreme hardships and poverty marked the first year in North Carolina. In the spring a hosiery mill was arranged for, to be operated by John Meier, superintendent of the Oats Hosiery Mill in Charlotte, in a two-story bam constructed by the W aldenses. All employees were to be Waldenses unless the demand exceeded the supply of workers. In I 894 Dr. Tron arrived from Italy and arranged to return 5000 less desirable of the Io,ooo acres contracted for and a reduction of the debt from $25,000 to $r5,627.33· This included the cost of sawmill, livestock, tools, and other items. After rude homes, a store, and two schools had been provided, a surplus of lumber was available for sale. Times continued to be critical and in �Business and Industry / 361 I 894, after the experience of about eighteen months, the corporation was dissolved and the Morganton V•nd and Improvement Company agreed to take back the land and resell it in tracts of from forty to eighty acres to individual Waldenses at five percent interest. The transaction left a debt of $1,500, which Dr. Tron personally paid. In order to pay for their land W aldensian young people found paying jobs. When Meier moved his hosiery mill to Newton and then to South Carolina, a number of workers went with the mill and sent back their meager earnings, learning the trade and at the same time helping to save their fathers' lands. The stones that had to be gathered to make the lands suitable for farming furnished material for warm, sturdy buildings. The stone church was finished in 1897 at a cost of about $6,ooo, workmen having contributed their labor at a pay rate of five cents per hour. In 1901 John and Francis Garrou, Waldenses, started the W aldensian Hosiery Mill, encouraged by W. C. Erwin and A. M. Ingold of the First National Bank of Morganton. By 1939 this mill employed 475 persons. In 1914 a cotton mill, the Valdese Manufacturing Company, was started by John Louis Garrou. By 1937 it employed 200 persons. In 1913 another hosiery mill was opened, followed in 1915 by the Waldensian Bakery, which by 1940 had 140 employees and thirty-five trucks and was one of the great bakeries of the Carolinas. In 1927 several small hoisery mills were incorporated as the Alba-Waldensian Hosiery Mills. By 1938 Valdese was known as the "fastest growing town in North Carolina." Notable in the economy of Western North Carolina is the furniture industry. Furniture factories were established in the foothill towns because of their nearness to the supply of forest products and because of the labor supply. A number of companies bought forest tracts and on them have begun practices of conservation and scientific forestry. Unusual is the fact that until recent years virtually all of the furniture factories were owned by Western Carolinians. Lenoir is the center of the industry in the area. Caldwell County has a tradition of furniture making. In 1878 Henry Reichert advertised the opening of a furniture factory at Powelltown near Lenoir in which he would produce �362 / Part III: A Developing Economy "furniture of every description at the lowest prices and on the best terms for cash or barter." He also offered coffins for sale. In I 889 the Lenoir Furniture Factory was organized, the first one in the town. It was owned by G. F. Harper,]. M. Bernhardt, and C. L. Bernhardt. Meanwhile in 1889 A. W. Britt and a group of associates from Ohio moved to Asheville, purchased a small furniture factory known as the Avery and Erwin Company, and a lumber mill, both of which they operated until 1895. Hard times during the depression of the 189o's struck their project, it was reorganized as the Skyland Furniture Company, and in 1898 it went bankrupt. The furniture industry during the 189o's was attempted in a strip of eighteen counties reaching from Alamance to Haywood, with a number of efforts being made in Marion. In 1896 Thomas Wrenn founded the Catawba Furniture Company with sixtyfive workers in partnership with Henry W. Fraser, a former textile manufacturer. The Marion Furniture Company was organized by D. R. Raper who sold stock to the town's people in public sales. In Lenoir in 1907 Dr. A. A. Kent, F. H. Coffey, and others established the Kent-Coffey Manufacturing Company to make dressers, chiffoniers, and wash stands. The largest furniture organization in Caldwell County began in 1905 as the Kent Furniture and Coffm Company, with T. H. Broyhill, Dr. A. A. Kent, and associates as owners. Broyhill bought his share of the stock by furnishing lumber from his sawmill. In 1912 Broyhill bought the stock of the other owners and the name became the Lenoir Furniture Company, then the Broyhill Furniture Company. In 1919 Broyhill was joined by his brother]. E. Broyhill and the firm grew to occupy six plants and to be the fourth of the big five in the furniture industry in the nation, and is probably the largest family-held furniture enterprise in the world. Other prosperous furniture manufacturers are Caldwell Furniture Company (1909), Lexington Mirror Company (1912), Fairfield Chair Company (1921), Hibriten Chair Company (1930), Spainhour Furniture Company (1943), Hammary Manufacturing Company (1943), Kincaid Furniture Company (1946), Blowing Rock Furniture Industries (1946). In 1964 the Kent-Coffey, Spainhour, and Blowing Rock companies were purchased by Magnavox, starting the break with the home-ownership tradition. Employment in Caldwell County furniture plants exceeded 5000 in 1966. �Business and Industry / 363 Lenoir and Caldwell County had a population of 54,723 in I967. There were in I960 seventy industrial plants with an industrial employment of I I, I 52. Broyhill had four plants in Caldwell County. There were twenty-four furniture factories with seventeen related industries. The largest furniture companies were Broyhill, Flair, Fairfield, and Caldwell. Other major industries are the Alba-Waldensian Hosiery Mills, the American Efird Mills at Whitnel, the Burlington Industries at Rhodhiss, Blue Bell, Polk Manufacturing Company, and Hemlock Manufacturing Company. Drexel Enterprises in Burke County is the third largest furniture industry in the United States. Most of the Drexel plants are in Western North Carolina. Others are in High Point and in Kingstree, South Carolina. Western North Carolina leads the world in the production of case goods. In I903 Samuel Huffman founded Drexal Furniture Company. He was succeeded by his son Robert. The company has nine plants with over 5000 employees and is the largest producer of bedroom and dining room furniture. In I96I Drexal acquired the Southern Desk Company and in I963 Heritage Furniture Company, the best upholstering firm in the South. The I93 I sales of $2,ooo,ooo have increased twenty times. Drexel has now been acquired by the Champion Paper and Fibre Company. The Henredon Furniture Industries of Morganton, Grand Rapids, and Spruce Pine make beautiful and expensive furniture. Net sales in I96I were $u,405,750 and in 1968, $24,375,265. Net earning in I968 were $3,889,864. Property, plant, and equipment are valued at $20,228, 759· The three enterprising founders of the company were T. Henry Wilson, Ralph Edwards, and Donnell Van Noppen. Burke County with the towns of Morganton, Valdese, Hildebran, Icard, and Glen Alpine is one of the region's oldest and most prosperous counties. In addition to furniture, textiles, and hosiery, there are Union Carbide and machine and iron works. In I950 the population was 46,34I, in 1960, 52,70I and by 1970 it had reached 60,364. Morganton in 1960 had I2,ooo people, and in that year I2,5I3 persons were employed in the county. Brevard, the home of Olin-Mathieson and of a DuPont photographic plant, has grown and prospered as these industries �364 / Part III: A Developing Economy have prospered. In 1915 Harry H. Straus made endless belts for cigarette machines. In 1934 he began to use the fiber of seed flax, a plant grown for use in linseed oil. In 1936 he built a factory to use flax fibers for cigarette paper. Since the majority of cigarettes are manufactured in North Carolina and since Western North Carolina rivers have waters with low mineral content, Brevard was an ideal place for manufacturing cigarette paper. Frenchmen were brought over to teach the workers. Mountain people learned so rapidly that in six months the Frenchmen were gone. September 2, 1939, the first cigarette paper was produced at Ecusta. In 1949 Olin built a cellophane plant at Pisgah Forest. Olin-Mathieson was formed in 1954 from the union of Olin Industries and the Mathieson Chemical Corporation. This corporation controls also the Winchester-Western Arms Company and the Squibb Pharmaceutical Company. It produces cigarette paper, cellophane, chemicals, metals, packaging, pharmaceuticals, sporting arms and ammunition. Its annual sales exceed $7oo,ooo,ooo. At Ecusta and Pisgah Forest lightweight printing paper, cigarette paper, endless belts, cigarette filters, and cellophane packaging are manufactured. In 1966, 3000 people were employed compared to 350 in 1939. In 1939 the population of Brevard was 3000, in 1967 it was 5000, and in the Brevard trading area there were 8500. In 1965 Olin-Mathieson had a payroll in Brevard of$18,ooo,ooo. In 1964 the DuPont company established at Brevard a photographic products plant to make medical x-ray films. It had previously built there in 1958 a plant to make silicon for electronic devices. In 1967 the DuPont plant put $4,500,000 into the Transylvania County economy, and its payroll and purchases were $5,167,644· The company spent $39,00o,ooo in 1967 to increase its facilities. American Enka, an American branch of a Dutch corporation, was established near Asheville in 1928. Its growth is one of the success stories of American industry. In 1930 the company produced 6,ooo,ooo pounds of viscose process rayon yarn. Soon thereafter it developed high-tenacity rayon yarn for automobile tires. In 1940 Enka produced 23,00o,ooo pounds, provided jobs for 3000, and had an annual payroll of$5,ooo,ooo. In 1948 a new plant was built at Lowland, Tennessee, with an original capacity of 2o,ooo,ooo pounds of filament rayon. This production has quintupled and Enka entered the nylon market, first with nylon staple fiber and later with the more popular filament yam. Enka was the first United States producer �Business and Industry / 365 Enka Corporation, 1965 of fine denier nylon 6. In 1958 there was a large expansion at Enka, North Carolina, which doubled the capacity of fine filament nylon. In 1962 the company began to produce heavy denier yarns for the carpet, tire, automotive, and home furnishing industries. The North Carolina plant production of this yarn has increased from 2,ooo,ooo to 45,0oo,ooo pounds a year. In 1965 another plant was built at Lowland, Tennessee, and the two plants now produce 6s,ooo,ooo pounds a year. In 1957 rayon staple fiber production was begun and a complete line of viscose rayon products was manufactured for use in apparel, home furnishings, carpets, industrial fabrics, and for blending with natural and manmade fibers. Now 10o,ooo,ooo pounds of these fibers are produced annually. In 1958 Enka acquired the Rex Corporation and William Brand and Company, manufacturers of wire and cable. In 1955 a new research center was built. An addition was made in 1963. Enka in 1966 had over $215,00o,ooo invested in plants, annual sales of$201,332,ooo, paid $57,607,000 in salaries, wages, and fringe benefits. Production increased from 6,ooo,ooo pounds in 1930 to 375,00o,ooo pounds in 1966, of rayon, nylon, and polyester fibers. Enka ranks (1966) 324th in sales among the 500 largest United States corporations, �366 / Part III: A Developing Economy 259th in invested capital, and 327th in net profits. In 1965 there were 9000 employees on the payrolls of the entire corporation. Then a $9o,ooo,ooo plant expansion created more than a thousand new jobs. Prior to the real state "bust" Asheville grew rapidly. From 1930-1960 the rate of growth declined. The growth rate of Western North Carolina also declined. From 19 30- I 960 Asheville had a net out-migration of ro,ooo and the Western North Carolina region a net of 71,ooo. In Asheville since 1960 tremendous progress has occurred. Migration trends have changed and Asheville had a net in-migration of 5000, but for the region as a whole out-migration is still continuing at a reduced rate. In 1965 it was predicted that Asheville would have a population of 69,100 by 1970 and 147,500 by 1980 and the metropolitan area 196,roo. In 1960-1964 only four counties- Haywood, Transylvania, Henderson, and Buncombe -had wages above the state average and only Haywood and Transylvania were above the national average. Seventeen of the region's counties increased at a rate above the nation as a whole; but in only five counties did the dollar value of the increase surpass that of the nation. In 1960 the average weekly earning in manufacturing was $73.78, eighteen percent below that of the nation. Areas which have a majority of manufacturing employment in capital-intensive industry - industry which uses more capital relative to laborreceive higher than average wages. AVERAGE ANNUAL WEEKLY EARNINGS 1964 U.S. Ashe Avery Buncombe Burke Cherokee Clay $!02.97 64.J8 58.50 85.II 76.28 59·83 56-92 Graham Haywood Henderson Jackson McDowell Macon Madison 77-51 12J.JI 83-76 70.J9 75-40 64-96 67.69 Mitchell Polk Rutherford Swain Transylvania Watauga Yancey 60.21 68.28 75.63 60.79 ro8.99 65-34 73-37 In Asheville fifty percent of the manufacturing work force are employed in above-average wage industries, but wages have been seventeen per-cent below the national average because productivity was lower. Many industries have recently come; the workers lacked experience. While the value per man hour productivity was for the United States $7.08, for Asheville it was $5.70, and for Western North Carolina other than Asheville, �Business and Industry / 367 $4.66. It for high soon be technical is important to attract industry that has a potential wages. The handicap of inexperienced workers will overcome if the state and communities will supply training for such industries. North Wilkesboro is the leading commercial center of Northwestern North Carolina. It has prosperous furniture factories, cotton mills, hosiery mills. The first industries in the county were the North Wilkesboro Brick Company, the C. C. Smoot and Sons Tannery, and the Wilkesboro Manufacturing Company, which made building materials. These developed during the 189o's. Forest Furniture (1901), Oak Furniture (1903), which employed 300 men when it burned in 1954, Meadows Mill Company (1908), which builds grist mills, Home Chair Company of Ronda (1919), American Furniture (1927), Carolina Mirror (1936), Peerless Hosiery, a Durham corporation, Blue Ridge Shoe Company (1960), and the Holly Farms Poultry Company are the county's largest industries. Mount Airy, the northern gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the leading urban area in Surry County, has a population of 7200, a contiguous population of 2 5,ooo, and a retail shopping area of 50,000. It has fifty-seven manufacturers employing over 9000 workers with a payroll of about $42,ooo,ooo. In addition to the nineteen textile, hosiery, or apparel firms, Mt. Airy has eight furniture or allied industries, and nine concrete or granite companies are located in or near the city. The world's largest open-faced granite quarry, covering eighty acres, has long been famous. Industrial growth in Mount Airy has shown an increase of 2300 new jobs in the last five years. Boone is the only urban community in Watauga, Avery, Ashe, and Alleghany counties. The leading industries have been encouraged to come into the area by community leaders. The International Resistance Company (now TRW), Shadowline, the Blue Ridge Shoe Company, and the Vermont-American Tool Company are the chief employers. Some locally-owned concerns have been in existence for many years. The North State Canning Company makes and cans kraut, utilizing one of the successful farm products. A similar operation in Ashe County is Beaver Creek Foods, Incorporated, which cans green beans, providing employment and a market for the beans grown in the area. There are twenty-six plants processing food and �368 / Part III: A Developing Economy tobacco products in Western North Carolina employing more than twenty persons each. Most vital to the economy of Watauga County is Appalachian State University which has over six hundred employees and an annual payroll of more than $2,ooo,ooo. More important are the thousands of young people who have earned their education at the school, enabling them to serve the area, the state, and neighboring states where they are recognized as excellently prepared teachers. A shot in the arm to Watauga County has come from the enterprises of the late Grover Robbins and his brothers Harry and Spencer Robbins. In 1957 they started Tweetsie Railroad, a popular tourist attraction. Next they developed Hound Ears, and a few years later they acquired control of the Beech Mountain project which was already under development. An airport has been constructed, and the 5600 foot gondola-equipped ski slope, one of their seven ski slopes, is the highest in Eastern America. There will be four golf courses and four thousand homesites. There is a construction payroll of $r ,ooo,ooo. The Robbins Brothers after acquiring Beech Mountain created the Carolina Caribbean Corporation. It operates Beech Mountain; The Reef in the Virgin Islands ; Land Harbors of America, a deluxe camping site; and numerous other real estate developments. Its tourist attraction, The Land of Oz, is highly successful. Fourteen of the counties have populations of under 20,000. Thirteen have fewer than fifty persons per square mile. Jackson County is one of these and will illustrate the importance of attracting industries. W estem Carolina University at Cullowhee has in addition to its faculty hundreds of other employees. Next to the university the backbone of the economy of Jackson County is the Mead Corporation. Mead's paperboard mill began operations in Sylva in 1928 when chestnut wood was still available. It came to Westem North Carolina because of available lumber, and it pioneered paperboard production from chestnut chips. In 1966 its payroll in Sylva was $2,2oo,ooo for 258 employees. The company's headquarters are in Dayton, Ohio, and in 1967 it had a total of 21,000 employees and sales of$633,092,360. Also important in Jackson County are knitwear, blanket, and quilting plants of the Ham Corporation. Jackson is one of fifteen counties in our study having fewer than five manufacturing industries each that employ one hundred or more �Business and Industry / 369 persons. There is not a single county that has not at least one such industry. Ten counties had fewer than woo employed in manufacturing, and each of ten had combined annual payrolls of less than Jackson County's $3,665,000 in 1963. In 1947 three counties had fewer than one hundred each employed in manufacturing; in 1963 Alleghany had 1,118, Madison had 639, and Watauga 896 so engaged. Clay County lost 23% of its population by out-migration between 1950 and 1960, and in 1963 it had ninety fewer employed in manufacturing than in 1947. Other counties experiencing out-migration of more than sixteen per cent during the decade 1950-1960 were McDowell, Rutherford, Wilkes, Watauga, Yancey, Ashe, Avery, Alleghany, Cherokee, Macon, Madison, Mitchell. Out-migration has been discussed before. Because of its incidence the following counties have a larger percentage of people over sixty-five than all but four other counties in the state: Alleghany, Ashe, Buncombe, Cherokee, Clay, Henderson, Macon, and Polk. Many of the ambitious young potential leaders have been drained out of their home counties because of lack of economic opportunity. In only three of the counties is the rate of natural increase in the population as large as that of the state as a whole. An encouraging observation is that while in most of the counties the nup1ber of manufacturing establishments remained nearly the same in 1963 as in 1954, the number of persons employed increased materially: Alleghany County 509 to III8, Ashe 540 to 1917, Avery 336 to 484, Buncombe II,071 to 16,450, Burke 8,291 to 12,345, Caldwell 9041 to II,550, Madison 154 to 639, Swain 362 to 665, and Watauga 172 to 896. These figures indicate that the increase of the gross national product of the United States has been reflected in this area. Economists estimate that for every one hundred new factory jobs there are seventy-five other jobs created in real estate, finance, insurance, utilities, transportation, communications, and local government (especially schools). It is possible for Western North Carolina to continue industrial expansion and to develop new products, and every effort is being made by the planning organizations to utilize the opportunities and services offered by the state and federal government for the purpose. Another excellent prospect for the area is in the development of its recreational and tourist facilities, and in this respect Western North Carolina has a positive advantage. �370 / Part III: A Developing Economy As late as 1937 the livelihood of the Eastern Cherokees was earned chiefly by growing a variety of crops on small plots: making sorghum from cane, filling their cellars with food for the cold winters, picking wild huckleberries and strawberries for market. Over 5000 acres of forest were being held as a common property. Any member of the tribe was permitted to market an assigned number of trees, for which he paid a percentage into the common fund. Simply furnished mountain cabins were the homes of the majority of the families, but there were those who lived in sparsely settled mountain sections in smaller cabins; ' while in the valley were many modem homes. Since World War Two the Eastern Cherokees have been changing from an agrarian to an industrialized people. Hundreds are employed by White Shield of Carolina, manufacturers of quilted goods; Cherokee, Inc., makers of one hundred forty Indian arts and crafts products; and the Vassar Corporation, which makes hair nets and other accessories for women's hair. In 1963 a group of professional and business people organized Cherokee Area Industries, Inc., to stimulate industrial and commercial growth. They purchased land for development of an industrial park. The first company to lease a portion of the park was Mountain Maid Company, employing thirty-five people. In 1955 the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, Inc., was created, continuing a reservation crafts program begun in the 1930's. This cooperative markets items made by the Indians in their homes, the profits being divided among the members. �CHAPTER SEVENTEEN In Pursuit of Pleasure Before the coming of the railroads and roads into the mountains the usual visitor made his way laboriously to a hotel or boarding house in a scenic spot, and there he stayed for the duration of his vacation. Such a hotel was completed at Blowing Rock in I 885. It had an ideal location at the crest of the Blue Ridge. Fascinating nature trails were about the only diversion offered the guests after they arrived. The trip up the mountain from the railway station in Lenoir was made by hack or surry that met the train, and on days when the weather was fine the ride could be exciting. Blowing Rock was then deemed to be the ideal tourist attraction in Northwest North Carolina. It was still a straggling village two miles long approached by the turnpike from Lenoir. From the turnpike one could see Jonas Ridge, Hawksbill, Table Rock, Pilot Mountain, Grandfather Mountain. Blowing Rock's 4200 foot elevation provided an ideal summer climate. There were post offices in the village and at Green Park at the top of the ridge. From the "rock" itself one could often look down on a sea of mist, see the clouds rise and then see the peaks emerge from the snowy billows: the Roan, the Grandfather, the Bald, the Yellow, and the Black Mountains. The beetling crag, the Blowing Rock, is a great spur that hangs over the "Globe" or valley of the John's River. It catches the currents of air sent up from the depths. These currents will blow back hats, handkerchiefs, and light objects thrown from the rock. The Green Park Hotel near the Blowing Rock was built between the springs of the New River which flows into the Ohio and 371 �372 / Part III: A Developing Economy Hugh Morton on one of the crags of Grandfather Mountain PHOTO COURTESY OF HUGH MORTON �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 373 the Y adkin which flows into the Atlantic. The Green Park was quite modern in 1 896 with fireplaces in all of the rooms and hot and cold baths. The Blowing Rock Hotel one and one-half miles north of the Green Park had nine hundred feet of piazzas, a telegraph, a livery stable, and a ball room. The village of Blowing Rock also had the Watauga Hotel, the Brady House, and the Stewart House. With the completion of the Y onahlossee Turnpike to Linville along the side of Grandfather Mountain, guests at Blowing Rock could ride to Linville by a hack operated regularly by the Linville Improvement Company. There at Eseeola Lodge they might tarry a few days. Linville had a nine hole golf course, and Grandfather Mountain invited exploration. Grandfather is the most rugged and picturesque mountain in Western North Carolina. Its craggy peaks when seen at a distance have the rough features of a Grant Wood type of American pioneer or grandfather. The mountain had been a landmark for the pioneers. Daniel Boone hunted on its slopes. Scientists have claimed that it is one of the oldest rock formations in the world. Some geologists have asserted that it is two billion years old. To climb to the top of its peaks has always been a challenge to rugged tourists. The Linville Improvement Company had vision when it built a road to the crest of Grandfather Mountain. The turnpike that ran to Linville continued to Cranberry, a station on the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad. The highest mountain in Eastern America is Mount Mitchell, one of the Black Mountains. Above five thousand feet it bore spruce trees. About 1912 its spruce was purchased and lumbered, also the spruce at the head of Cane River. Lumbering and fire destroyed most of these rare spruce forests. All was soon gone except near the top of Mount Mitchell. In 1914 George T. Winston pleaded with the people of the state to preserve the forest on Mount Mitchell: From out of the primal sea I rose on high Above the clouds I kissed the sunlit sky, My rock the oldest in the rock-built earth; When I was born, it was the great world's birth. Long million years my crumbling sides did yield, To rain and frost and wind, a fertile field �374 / Part III: A Developing Economy For widening Piedmont plane and ocean shore. Now nature kind assails my life no more; At last in verdure soft and warm I'm clad, Mid sapphire skies my emerald peaks are glad, But hark! What frightened terror, new and dire! "Tis human greed for gold! "Tis axe and fire! 0 mighty State, prevent this deed of shame, This great dishonor keep from thy great name. Under Governor Locke Craig North Carolina purchased twenty acres near the top for a state park the first to be established. An association was formed to erect a monument to Dr. Elisha Mitchell, geologist who lost his life on the mountain. General Julian S. Carr of Durham, capitalist and philanthropist, was the leader of the movement. In 1917 Governor Bickett employed a forest warden to protect the park from fire, to advise tourists, to repair trails, and to look after the state's interests. In 1919 nature lovers noted that there were black bears, deer, wolves, panthers, "boomers," "rough grouse," and snow birds on Mt. Mitchell. Interesting trees were the Frazer balsam, yellow birch, mountain ash, service (called locally "sarvis"), red spruce, red cherry, hemlock, maple, oak, and white pine. Among the shrubs observed were the rose rhododendron, the handsomest of the species, the great rhododendron, mountain laurel, blueberries, currants, gooseberries, red raspberries, hobble bush, and hackberry. Flowers and herbs mentioned by naturalists were wood sorrel, trillium, clintonia, woodland aster, sharp-leafed wood aster, yellow meadow lily, St. John's wort, boneset, meadowparsnip, grass of Parnassus, Oswego tea, saxafrage, purple turtlehead, trumpet weed, black cohosh, Indian pipe, Indian turnip, galax, tweyblade, and many kinds of fern. A lumbering railroad had been built to get the logs down the mountain, and when lumbering activities ceased, the Mount Mitchell Railroad was put into operation to the "Top ofEastern America." It ran from the Mt. Mitchell station on the Western North Carolina Railroad to the summit of the peak. A 1917 advertising brochure described it: "Switchbacks cunningly constructed by an unexcelled feat of engineering, make the ascent gentle and pleasant .... Mount Mitchell Railroad zigzags [up] the mountainside, spans mountain gorges and ravines and climbs almost to the tip of the majestic monarch of them all. ... " Other high mountains that made up the scene as the passengers rode up the mountain were Mt. Celo 63 57 feet, the Black �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 37 5 The Blowing Rock Mt . Mitchell Excursion Train ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. �376 / Part III: A Developing Economy C)k hiohwa.y i"~cen1c plen~or- the}fotor Rgad . . . . . . __ _r Mt. Mitchell Motorway ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. Trillium, one of the most beloved of mountain flowers ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 377 Brothers 6620-6690 feet, and Balsam Cone 6645 feet. Train fare was $2.50 for the round trip. The route of the Mount Mitchell Railroad passed through Montreat, the Presbyterian Assembly's summer home. The passengers rode up the mountain in the morning, took lunch at Camp Alice at the station near the peak, then went on foot to the top, where Elisha Mitchell is buried. Camp Alice had a large dining hall, and there were cottages and a tent colony for those who wanted to spend the night to watch the sunrise. After a brief trial the railroad proved to be impractical, and a cinder-surfaced road was built for about twenty miles from the town of Black Mountain to Camp Alice on Mount Mitchell, with a rise in elevation from 2700 to about 6700 feet. The opening of the Mount Mitchell Motor Road was celebrated by a large party, guests of the Mount Mitchell Development Company officials. They assembled at Black Mountain, went to a reception on the mountain, had dinner there and returned for a reception at Blue Ridge. This was a one-way toll road for automobiles, with the cars traveling up the mountain until a certain hour in the morning, allowing them time for the ascent before the downward traffic began in the afternoon. Among the strict printed regulations was the one that "no colored person will be admitted over the road except those going as drivers, nurses or attendants, accompanied by employers." The speed limit on the road was fifteen miles per hour. At last in 1940 a free road was opened to Mt. Mitchell. The route left highway U. S. 70 ncar Marion on state route 104, thence to Buck Creek Gap intersection with the Blue Ridge Parkway, then to the intersection with the former Mt. Mitchell toll road. From that point the former toll road had been widened and was being offered free under the supervision of the Pisgah National Forest, the state, and the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Brevard, Cashiers, Highlands area has been called "the land of waterfalls." The natural beauty of the area is enhanced by dozens of rippling streams and cascading waterfalls: Looking Glass Falls, Connestee Falls, Dry Falls, Bridal Veil Falls are a few. Outstanding is Whiteside Mountain, said to be the highest granite cliff in Eastern America. Lake Toxaway, Cashiers, Highlands, High Hampton are beautiful resort areas, a paradise �378 / Part III: A Developing Economy for vacationers and summer residents. A number of prominent South Carolinians built summer homes in Cashiers Valley before the Civil War. One of the best known estates was High Hampton, the home of Wade Hampton, and another was that of Captain S. P. Ravenel of Charleston. Charles Jenks came to the area in 1872 to operate the corundum mines in Macon County, North Carolina, and Rabun County, Georgia. The mines closed in I 873 and Jenks went to Highlands to regain his health. While he was there he was associated with two men who came from Kansas in 1875 to plant a town, Captain S. T. Kelsey and C. C. Hutchinson. They purchased land from ]. W. Dobson. Kelsey was a builder of towns. At Highlands he built roads, erected buildings, advertised the resort. In I 890 the population was about 3 so. As a summer resort it was peopled chiefly by people from South Carolina. In 1887 Jenks and a group of New York and Massachusetts electrical and mechanical engineers formed the Western North Carolina Mining and Improvement Company. They purchased four hundred acres on the top ofHogback Mountain, later called Mount Toxaway. Jenks built a clubhouse for the company at the top and a wagon road leading to it. Subsequently he purchased for the company 2300 acres of woodland and trout streams along Horsepasture River and the Panthertown head of the Tuckaseigee River. The company was renamed the Sapphire Valley Company. The key to the mountain region is Asheville in the lovely valley of the French Broad. It is set in an amphitheater of hills and affords splendid views of Mt. Pisgah and the mountainrimmed horizon. Just east of Asheville the peaceful Swannanoa unites with the French Broad. The elevation is 2250 feet and the climate is mild and dry. From Asheville the valley runs eighteen miles north and south. It is known as the Asheville Plateau. At the North Carolina-Tennessee border, twenty-five miles northwest of Asheville, a high ridge blocks the northern end of the valley. Thirty miles south the Blue Ridge Mountains form an escarpment. The tallest peak near Asheville is Mt. Pisgah. The French Broad influences the wind directions, which are generally from the northwest except in September when they are from the southeast. The annual precipitation is thirtyeight inches, quite low for North Carolina. The growing season �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 379 consists of a freeze-free period of 195 days. Floods occur at about twelve year intervals. Snowfall has varied from .7 inch in I93I-I932 to 40.6 inches in 1959-1960. The mean annual temperature is 56°. In I 793 Asheville was just a trading post called Morristown. Incorporated in I797 it was renamed Asheville for Samuel Ashe of New Hanover County. It was still a sleepy little village with a population of 2610 at the coming of the Western North Carolina Railroad (I88o), but it had had a varied history. A year earlier the first telegraph line had been built into the town and a public library had been opened. "Judge" Edward Aston, mayor of Asheville, had publicized the town as a health resort by letter-writing and by mailing out thousands of circulars throughout the nation and European countries telling of Asheville's advantages as a resort for those who suffered from lung trouble. The location seemed designed for man's happiness, with grand and majestic views. After I 880 capitalists and health seekers poured in. The Swannanoa Hotel was opened. A four story brick building with "fire plugs on every floor," it had Asheville's first bathroom. George Willis Pack stayed there and had the bathroom built, walled in, and lined with zinc. Famous visitors were Zeb Vance, Bill Nye, and James Whitcomb Riley. On a balcony overlooking the street a band played a concert every afternoon, and each night there was dancing in the ballroom. The Swannanoa rivaled the older Eagle Hotel which also had a band. Excursion trains ran from Salisbury to Asheville on Saturdays carrying young people to the dances. Asheville became a mecca for those suffering from tuberculosis, and prominent doctors recommended it; others came and established sanitariums. Its health assets were "a healthful climate, pure air, good water, unsurpassed scenery and congenial people." By 1890 its population had quadrupled to Io,ooo. Dr. Gatchell, a native of Wisconsin who wrote the circular that "Judge" Aston mailed out in such quantities, established the first sanitarium for consumptives in Asheville. In I 875 Dr. J. W. Gleitsmann, a German by birth, came to Asheville from Baltimore and established the Mountain Sanitarium for Pulmonary Diseases. He wrote and read before the American Public Health Association a paper "Western North Carolina As a Health Resort." The paper was circulated widely - about 64,000 copies. Mr. Fred A. Hall came to Asheville in 1883 with tuberculosis. He recovered and became a prominent citizen. �38o / Part III: A Developing Economy Lower Falls on Cu/lasaja River NATIONAL PARK SERVICE PHOTO Looking do wn North Mills River from Kramer's V ista near Bent Creek Gap U .S. FOREST SERVICE PHOTO �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 38 I Looking Glass Rock, Pisgah National Forest U .S. FOREST SERVICE PHOTO Sliding Rock Falls, Pisgah National Forest U.S . FOREST SERVICE PHOTO �382 / Part III: A Developing Economy S wannanoa Hotel A sheville ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO . His case history and recovery were written of and published in the Boston Medical Journal. As a result many others came seeking health. Asheville became first a summer resort. Soon thereafter many visitors came for the winter because of the clear air and the mild climate. In 1885 the city authorities began to clean up sanitary conditions which were detrimental to the city as a health resort. A new city code was adopted in 1887, in which were these provisions : " [The commissioners may] lay a tax ... [annually] on all dogs, and on swine, horses and cattle running at large within the town ... ; [they] shall possess the power to prohibit cattle, horses, or hogs from running at large in said town." A sanitary chief and a sanitary inspector w ere appointed. All citizens became increasingly conscious of Asheville's natural advantages as a health resort and did everything possible to promote this phase of the city's life. Soon other sanitariums were established. Among them was the Winyah Sanitarium started by Dr. Karl von Ruch. Many cases of tuberculosis were treated in hotels and boarding houses as well as in sanitariums. So widely and favorably known did the Asheville area become for its beneficent climate and for diseases of the throat and lungs that the United States Government shortly after World W ar One built at Oteen a hospital for the treatment of veterans of the armed services who had contracted tuberculosis. M an y w ho cam e to Asheville for visits and cures remained and becam e enthusiastic residents. They built homes, invested money, began �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 383 Kenilworth Hotel ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO. industries, and thus contributed to the city's growth. Following World War One about three thousand persons were treated annually for tuberculosis. Residing in the city were perhaps an equal number of newcomers who were not under the care of physicians. Each of these persons spent freely in the city. It was estimated that the tubercular patients spent three million dollars annually. In the 1920's governmental agencies began to realize that good public health was a social obligation. Federal, state, and local governments built hospitals and sanitariums. As a result Asheville and other popular health resorts were less frequented. By 1928 most of the sanitariums around the city were forced to close and the number of patients from other places became neglible. Although Asheville then ceased to be a health resort, it became a most popular retreat for tourists and retired persons. This was true, to a degree, of all parts of Western North Carolina. Chambers of Commerce, privately owned resorts, and organizations all over the mountains published handbooks, pamphlets, brochures which stressed the scenic beauty, the recreational facilities, the invigorating climate, the pure water, and the beautiful streams of the region. Organizations were formed to promote the tourist season- the summer months. To a great degree the economy of the region came to depend upon the number of tourists and summer visitors. Even more important than the tourists are the thousands of people who have built summer homes, second homes, or vacation homes in this delightful land. �384 / Part III: A Developing Economy Asheville is said to have had more and better hotels than any city of the same size in the United States. The Battery Park mentioned earlier attracted numbers of very wealthy visitors. Kenilworth Inn, a big rambling hotel was built in r 891. The Southern Railroad and George W. Vanderbilt owned stock in the company. It was then one of the finest hotels in the South and had 250 rooms. Fire destroyed it in 1909 and the rebuilding was started in 1913 at a cost of $r,24o,ooo. Of English design, it was a show place advertised as "the Healthiest and Most Delightful Resort in America." With beautifully landscaped grounds it stood on a hill overlooking Asheville and the Biltmore Estate. It became a sanitarium in 1930 under Dr. William Ray Griffin and Dr. Mark A. Griffin and was used for patients with mental and nervous disorders. Grove Park Inn, built by E. W. Grove, wealthy drug manufacturer, in 1914 on the western slopes of Sunset Mountain was the epitome of elegance and comfort. At least five Presidents have stayed there, and it has housed a full complement of wealthy visitors. This hotel is still serving as a convention center of strong appeal. During the 192o's Grove had the gracious Battery Park hotel razed and the hill lowered. A new Battery Park rose on the site, one that was in keeping with the technology of that decade. A block away the George Vanderbilt Hotel and a new convention hall attracted large gatherings. In addition to the hotels, Asheville had more than one hundred boarding houses, among which was one at 8r Charlotte Street built about 1870 for Fanny Patton. It was closed in 1960. Burned once, it was rebuilt. It and the Patton House next door were the first Asheville houses to have running water. Aunt Charlotte, who belonged to the household, was highly indignant and wanted to know if Thomas (Captain Patton) hadn't taken leave of his senses "bringing the privy in the house." There was a fireplace in every room. There were wardrobes but no closets. An old Negro servant named Margaret but called "Cookie" was asked by a northern lady if she remembered the Civil War. She answered: "Course I does; that was when them Y ankces came down here and took all us folks had." Extravagant praise for Asheville is to be found in the advertising brochures which have been broadcast since r88o. Hinton A. Helper wrote one titled "Nature's Trundle Bed of Recuperation for Tourist and Health Seeker," in which he claimed: "The climate is not excelled by any in the world. The soil is �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 3 8 5 rich and the lands productive. . . . The timber lands are the best in the South. The mineral wealth is inexhaustible. The manufacturing facilities are unsurpassed." One bulletin recounted the economic growth from 1880 to 1890. Its author stated that in 1880 the assessed valuation was $904,428, while in 1890 it was $4,956,ooo. In 1889 $8I9,000 worth of real estate was sold and I 84 buildings were erected. The C. E. Graham cotton mill employed 250 and the Asheville Furniture Company had ninety employees. A brochure of I 899 designed to attract industry cited the different business establishments: one large tobacco factory, two icc factories, three planing mills, twenty-six carriage and wagon makers, the largest cotton factory in the South, two laundries, machine shops, foundries, a roller flour mill, the largest tannery in Western North Carolina, the largest bottling company in the state, three greenhouses, two daily and four weekly newspapers, one cornet band, two literary clubs, a lumber business, four tobacco warehouses, two military companies, the Asheville Club, social and golf clubs. An Asheville guide of 1904 praised the Kenilworth Inn, Theobald's Cafe, Candy Kitchen, and Ice Cream Parlor. Mentioned favorably were Clarence Worrall's Art Institute and Bon Marche, which it called an outstanding store. A new auditorium was built on the site of one burned in I903 and a new library was built on Pack Square. The Biltmore Estate was open to the public on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. A Brochure described "Zealandia," the residence of Mr. Philip S. Henry of London. It had been so-named by Captain J. Evans Brown who lived in New Zealand. Praised also was the Mineral Springs Hotel run by Mrs. R. Cathey at Skyland, North Carolina. The population by 1900 had climbed to 14,694, and in the metropolitan area were 27,000 people. There were ten miles of brick paving, one and one-half miles of stone paving, one and one-half miles of macadam, seven miles of brick sidewalks, twenty miles of sewerage, fourteen miles of electric railway, and the assessed valuation was $6,ooo,ooo. A Road and Tour Book of Western North Carolina for I916 indicated further growth: thirty-eight miles of paved streets, population of 34,000, seventy-five miles of sidewalks, I25 miles of macadam roads, an assessed property valuation of$15,ooo,ooo, a public library of I3,ooo volumes, a municipal swimming pool, six banks, three hospitals, forty churches, 250,000 visitors annually. �386 / Part III: A Developing Economy The most extravagant promotional publication to that date was Azure Lure published in 1924. The assessed valuation of Asheville property was $8o,ooo,ooo and the population of 50,000 enjoyed sixty-four miles of paved streets. The booklet emphasized the availability of water power, with II7,500 developed horse power and I,067,000 horsepower undeveloped. Western North Carolina had fifteen golf courses, a small number indeed, but golf in 1924 was in somewhat the same position that skiing occupies today. One of the cataclysmic events in the history of twentiethcentury Western North Carolina was the "boom and bust" in Asheville. First came the highly-inflated Florida real estate boom in the 192o's. Many fortunes were made- on paper; then the boom collapsed. Before its collapse, high-powered real estate promoters moved to Asheville and Hendersonville and generated the enthusiasm that caused the runaway inflation in real estate that resulted in the boom and the bust. In I 92 5 Thomas Wolfe visited Asheville and wrote to Aline Bernstein that he had just returned from "Boom Town" where everyone was talking about the progress and prosperity of Asheville. He had drunk their com whiskey and listened to their glowing talk of how they would soon be millionaires, of how Asheville would have roo,ooo people by 1930. Yet, by 1926 Wolfe was writing his sister regretting that while his mother had lost money in Florida real estate he was consoling her with the idea that Asheville would have a certain assured growth. He aptly added that a few near-swindlers and near-thieves would clean up but that the admiring boobs would lose their shirts and that Asheville would never be the national capital. In You Can't Go Home Again he described Asheville as being no longer a small town. Its streets were teeming with life. The look on people's faces was frightening: madness, frenzy, the eyes glistening with excitement. People were intoxicated by speculation in real estate- the idea of getting rich quickly, suddenly, overnight. Real estate men were everywhere. Everyone bought real estate - barbers, lawyers, grocers, bootblacks, janitors. The rule was to buy, always to buy. Whatever one bought and at whatever price, he felt he could sell it the next day at a great profit. All of this buying was "on time," always "on time," and the profits were paper profits- the millionaires, paper millionaires. In November 1930 the roof fell in. In the New York Times �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 387 "New" Battery Park Hotel, 1920's ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES CO . appeared a report from the Asheville Citizen, November 20, 1930, describing the closing of eight banks in Western North Carolina, most of them in or near Asheville and Hendersonville. These failures resulted from the closing of the Central Bank and Trust Company, Asheville's largest financial institution with combined assets of its banking and trust departments of $52,645,191.43· Coincident with its failure, three Hendersonville banks closed: the First Bank and Trust Company, the American Bank and Trust Company, and the Citizens' National Bank. Also closing were the Biltmore Oteen Bank, the Bank of Leicester and the Clay County Bank. On the same day the Raleigh News and Observer listed twenty-seven state banks that had closed in 1930 in Western North Carolina. The depression enveloped the nation, but in Asheville it was a gigantic bust. John Mitchell, Chief State Bank Examiner, blamed the closing of the Western North Carolina banks on the real estate boom. The banks had lent money on real estate at inflated values to such an extent that they could not meet the demands of their depositors. Catastrophic for Asheville was the failure of the Central Bank and Trust Company. For seventeen years it had been perhaps the most progressive financial institution in Western North �388 / Part III: A Developing Economy Carolina and it had done much to aid the region. Jonathan Daniels in Tar Heels: A Portrait of North Carolina (New York, 1947) attributed the origin of the boom to George W. Vanderbilt and E. W. Grove. He felt that they had corrupted the people of Asheville and raised false hopes. His accusations and implications are unjust. Vanderbilt may have been a feudal lord but he aided Western North Carolina. So did Grove. Wolfe regretted that Grove tore down the picturesque old Battery Park Hotel and replaced it with a modern building of brick, concrete, and steel. Most people have thought that his Grove Park Inn was magnificently picturesque. Vanderbilt's estate and contributions antedated the twentieth century. Grove Park Inn was built in 1912. The bank failure, the collapse, the bust did not come until 1930. Even then it was not a completely local affair. The stock market crash had occurred in October, 1929, the depression was becoming accelerated, twenty-seven other Western North Carolina banks had already failed in 1930. Probably all of these failures happened because of the failure of Caldwell and Company in Nashville, a gigantic Southern financial institution. As a result of the failure of the Central Bank and Trust Company, its president was sentenced to prison and later Asheville's mayor committed suicide. During the 189o's Warm Springs (in Madison County), which had been a health resort since 1779, was renamed Hot Springs, and a remarkable hotel was built there, the Mountain Park. It was a handsome rambling structure, in every room of which the sun shone. It had a large lobby, spacious parlors, onefourth mile of verandas. It had elevators, steam heat, toilets, fireplaces, an orchestra, a music hall, billiard parlors, bowling alleys, a golf course, tennis courts, and riding horses. Nearby were the famed springs, which contained many mineral elements. There was a spring house for drinking water and a bath house in which baths were built in the springs themselves. During the years when health-seekers believed in the efficacy of mineral waters, Hot Springs was one of the most popular resorts in Western North Carolina. Thousands came who were not ill. They came because of the good food, the dances, the pleasant company, and the recreational attractions of the hotel. After the United States entered World War One as many as twenty-eight hundred German prisoners were interned in �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 389 the hotel. They had been members of crews of German ships caught in American or allied ports and waters at the time of the entry of the United States in the war. They gave band concerts and enjoyed their stay in the beautiful surroundings. On one occasion when it was rumored that they were to be transferred, some of them poisoned the drinking water hoping to be made ill to prevent their being removed. They used too much poison and some of the prisoners died. After medical opinion developed that the benefits derived from the waters of the springs resulted from hydro-therapy, and that the treatment could be given in any medical institution, the decline in numbers who came to Hot Springs resulted in closing the famous hotel. Near Hot Springs is Lover's Leap about which there is the legend of the Indian maiden Mist-on-the-Mountain, the daughter of Lone Wolf. She loved an Indian brave named Magwa. Another brave, the jealous Tall Pine, killed Magwa and the maiden leaped off the cliff. About that time Tall Pine was killed by a panther. Not far away is Douglas Lake, made by one of the TV A dams. And some seven miles away is Paint Rock, famous in Indian legends and a landmark on the first wagon road through the mountains. On the cliffs are strange markings, now almost indecipherable, which gave the rock its name. Formerly a ferry was used to carry people across the river to connect with the railroad. Hot Springs, the town, has a beautiful location. It is completely surrounded by mountains, is on an attractive river, and Spring Creek flows through the town. It should attract many tourists, but since the closing of the hotel it has withered on the vine, had few tourists, and ceased to grow. Nearby above Spring Creek is a camping and recreation area operated by the National Park Service in Pisgah National Forest. Here picnicking, camping, swimming are enjoyed. Western North Carolina's attraction for tourists was enhanced by the building of the Blue Ridge Parkway. It has been the scenic route for millions of visitors from Northeastern United States to this region, and these guests have been an inestimable boon to the economy of the region. The travelers have fanned out to adjacent resorts. Today's tourists are from diverse elements �390 / Part III: A Developing Economy Lovers Leap, French Broad River, near Hot Springs of the population. Many of the earlier generation of tourists were well-to-do middle-aged people who stayed one, two, or three weeks at a resort hotel or "took the water" at a mineral spring. They sought rest and relaxation. Often they were society's elite. Those in this group still come but they are a small minority. Now the worker with a weekend or a week's vacation comes and brings his family, or a number of men and families come for a weekend of golf, or skiing. In some of the older resort towns as in Blowing Rock the two groups clash. The long-time, established summer residents resent the intrusion or invasion by the tourists. They close their facilities to them. Linville and Blowing Rock golf courses have become virtual private clubs and have limited play by non-members. But the local businesses cater to all who come. Every effort is being made to get those who come to stay longer. Tourists are given the most courteous attention, and amusements with family appeal are provided. Tweetsie Railroad between Boone and Blowing Rock and Ghost Town at Maggie Valley have appeal for all members of the family, although they were designed for the children. Horn in the West and Unto These Hills interest the whole family. Beech Mountain has chair lifts, fishing, riding, hiking, in addition to skiing and golf. It features a Disney Land type of amusement �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 391 park, the Land of Oz, to which people ride by chair lifts. Daughton Park on the Blue Ridge Parkway contains six thousand acres, a lodge, picnic area, camp ground, twenty miles of trails, scenic Wildcat Rocks and precipitous bluffs. Nearby is the Brinegar Cabin where one can see hand-weaving demonstrations from May to October. The park was named for Congressman Robert Daughton from Alleghany County. At Blowing Rock the denim manufacturer, Moses Cone, had enjoyed a summer mansion located on Flat Top Mountain in an estate with 3750 acres and two beautiful man-made lakes. He died in 1908, and his will specified that after the death of Mrs. Cone the estate would become the property of the State of North Carolina. A few years after Mrs. Cone's death in 1947 the state transferred the estate to the federal government to be used as part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The mansion is used as a museum and sales center for mountain handicrafts of the Southern Highlands Handicraft Guild. The woven coverlet given to Miss Frances Goodrich which awakened her interest T weetsie Railroad, tourist attraction ASHEVILLE C HAMBER OF COMMER CE PHOTO �392 / Part III: A Developing Economy Brinegar Cabin on Blue Ridge Parkway before restoration NATIONAL PARK SERVICE PHOTO Brinegar Cabin after restoration NATIONAL PARK SERVICE PHOTO �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 393 in hand weaving and started the revival of weaving in North Carolina is on display there. More than twenty miles of unpaved roads on the estate are reserved for pedestrian, horseback, and carnage use. Nearby, also on the Blue Ridge Parkway, is the 4000 acre Julian Price Memorial Park. Price was formerly president of the Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company. The park has some of the most attractive camp sites in Western North Carolina, and it offers fishing to campers. Cataloochi at Maggie Valley and Blowing Rock Ski Lodge (now Appalachian Ski Mountain) near Blowing Rock were the first of the North Carolina ski resorts. Another is Hound Ears in the Shull's Mills and Foscoe area of Watauga County on the side of a mountain, the pinnacle of which resembles the hanging ears of a hound dog. Each year sees new ski slopes put into use, and around them residential communities develop. Between two of the peaks of Grandfather Mountain Hugh Morton, descendant of Hugh McRae, has built a mile high swinging pedestrian bridge and at one end is a reception center large enough to house a small convention. Each year since 1956 there has been a gathering of the Scottish clans from a wide area, and Highland Games are held on the mountainside on a weekend in July. Events on Saturday consist of highland dancing, piping, track and field events. On Sunday after a worship service and lunch the champions put on an exhibition, followed by a "Highland Shoot," an archery tournament. Kilts and bonnets are worn for the weekend making it a colorful occasion. Thirteen clans, the Bums club of Charlotte, and the Saint Andrews Societies of Charleston, Savannah, New York State, and Washington, D. C. are the sponsors. Since 1926 on the fourth Sunday in June has been held the "Singing on the Mountain" on the slopes of Grandfather. For twenty-three consecutive years there was no rain on this date, and mountain folk considered the fact almost miraculous and attributed it to the beneficence of God. The annual sing is looked forward to and visited by thousands of religious people and about as many who are just curious. Some thirty thousand were present in 1957. On the day of the singing people travel to Grandfather as they did to camp meetings a few decades ago. "Grandfather Mountain is a symbol of the eternity of the hills." People gather to hear the words of many preachers and to sing the songs that they love. The singing is also a social event. Whole �394 / Part III: A Developing Economy One of the first ski slopes, Appalachian Ski Mountain ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO Chalet above the slopes Chairlift at Beech Mountain �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 395 Bagpipers on Grandfather Mountain at Highland Games HUGH MORTON PHOTO On the Parade Grounds at the Highland Games HUGH M ORTON PHOTO �396 / Part III: A Developing Economy Singing on the Mountain HUGH MORTON PHOTO Ground breaking for final link of Blue Ridge Parkway by Governor Dan Moore HUGH MORTON PHOTO and Assistant-Director of the National Park Service �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 397 An overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway families, old friends, and kin, separated by mountain ranges and hours of travel gather there to visit and to share their picnic food with each other. This event, the largest mountain sing in the Southern highlands, uplifts all who attend. Uncle Joe Hartley who helped to build the Y onahlossee Turnpike in I 89 I started the Grandfather singing in I924 when I25 members of a Sunday school had a picnic on the slope of the mountain. After the picnic they had some "beautiful singing." Few people who enjoy the 507,I 59 acres, the I200 species of plants, the I 30 species of trees, the 52 species of fur bearing animals, the great natural beauty, the hiking, driving, camping facilities of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park realize the tremendous and long-continued efforts by many enthusiasts �398 / Part III: A Developing Economy View to the south from Clingman's Dome parking area, Great Smokies HUGH MORTON PHOTO before the park became a reality. The first campaign was by a dedicated band of Asheville people and their supporters. October 29, 1885, in an address before the American Academy of Medicine, Dr. Henry 0. Marcy, of Boston, advocated securing "a large reservation of the higher ranges as a park." By I 892 destruction of the forests was a cause of concern and Charles S. Sargent with an editorial in Garden and Forest was the first to present in print a plan for a national forest. A year earlier (1891) Joseph A. Holmes, state geologist of North Carolina, had suggested to Gifford Pinchot a great national forest for the Southern Appala- �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 399 chians. The Biltmore Forest experiment no doubt influenced both Holmes and Pinchot. In I893 the North Carolina General Assembly passed a resolution in favor of establishing such a park. It was presented to the House by Congressman John S. Henderson in I 894, but Congress was not yet concerned. "The first organized association for national legislation to set up a federal park in the Southern Appalachian Mountains was begun by Dr. Chase P. Ambler of Asheville ... in I899." He presented the idea to his friend from Ohio, Judge William R. Day. Day suggested that an Asheville organization be formed which, assisted by the Asheville Board of Trade, would work for a national park. Ambler, George H. Smathers, and Senator Jeter C. Pritchard sought to interest the Southern press, doctors, lawyers and other groups to get them to address petitions to Pritchard asking him to use his influence to have a Congressional committee appointed. It was agreed that twenty to forty thousand acres could be bought for one dollar an acre, and that immediate action was imperative to preserve the forests, the game, and the fish because lumbermen were destroying the forests and tanneries were killing the fish. In I 899 the Asheville Board of Trade organized a Parks and Forestry Committee which obtained the aid of newspapers of North Carolina and neighboring states in giving publicity to the movement. It was soon realized by George Vanderbilt and others that there was a need to include parts of North Carolina, Tennessee, and adjacent states in a great eastern national park. Therefore letters were sent to governors, senators, representatives, and influential people in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia asking them to assemble in Asheville November I I, I 899, to organize an association for the promotion of a national park and forest reserve. Forty-two of those statesmen, editors, and industrialists came and organized the Appalachian National Park Association with the object of obtaining a national park in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Efforts of the press, Congressmen, and interested citizens were exerted toward that end. Five thousand booklets telling the story of the movement were printed. January 4, I900, Senator Jeter Pritchard introduced in the Senate the petition from the Appalachian National Park Association. Reasons for urging Congressional action were the natural beauty of the region, the superb forests, the necessity of preserving the headwaters of many mountain rivers, the healthfulness of the climate, and the �400 J Part III: A Developing Economy central location for the East, the South, and the Midwest. Much support came from scientists and those interested in forestry. Needless to say, the efforts failed. The nation was not sufficiently educated to the idea of this national park. After the passage of the Weeks Law in I 9 I I the Forest Service established a Smoky Mountain purchase unit and began obtaining options for the purchase of land belonging to the Little River Lumber Company, but the purchases were not completed because of World War One. The publication of the now famous books by Horace Kephart and Margaret Morley created favorable opinion for preservation of the forests in the Smoky Mountains. Meanwhile Hugh McRae offered to sell the Grandfather Mountain area to the federal government for a park. A bill introduced in I9I7 for its purchase failed to pass. Between I922 and I923 other bills were introduced, proposing purchases in various locations. There were at that time nineteen national parks and not one was in Eastern United States, where two-thirds of the population lived. The successful park movement grew out of the efforts in Knoxville of Mrs. Willis P. Davis. In 1924 Dr. Herbert Work, Secretary of the Interior, appointed a committee to study the establishment of one or more national parks in the Southern Appalachians. A southern Appalachian National Park committee and commissions in Tennessee and North Carolina were created to promote the park and to have a part in selecting its site. Harlan P. Kelsey, a member of the Southern Appalachain Committee, and E. C. Brooks, President of North Carolina State College, were active workers. In I925 Congress authorized the Secretary of the Interior to ascertain boundaries for three parks: the Shenandoah, the Mammoth Cave, and the Great Smoky Mountain, and to receive offers of land and money for their creation. Congress appropriated no money for the projects. Then the work of the North Carolina and Tennessee commissions began in earnest. State Senator Mark Squires of Lenoir, chairman of the North Carolina commission, and Colonel David C. Chapman of the Tennessee commission deserve credit for selling the idea of the park to their respective states. The Tennessee legislature voted $273,557 to purchase the 76,507 acres from the Little River Lumber Company, and the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce guaranteed one-third of the price. Proponents of the Grandfather Mountain-Linville area and lumbermen in North Carolina opposed the location of the park �In Pursuit ofPleasure / 401 in the Smokies. The latter called forth the wrath of Horace Kephart: "Why should this last stand of splendid, irreplaceable trees be sacrificed to the greedy maw of the sawmill? Why should future generations be robbed of all chance to see with their own eyes what a real forest, a real wildwood, a real unimproved work of God is like ... ? If cut ... it would be a drop in the bucket .... Let these few old trees stand! ... There is no use talking about conserving the Smoky forest by turning it into a national forest after the lumbermen get through with it .... The only question is: Shall the Smoky Mountains be made into a national park or a desert?" By 1926 only $soo,ooo had been raised in North Carolina, and most of that had come from the area near the park. Statewide support had not been given. On April 22, 1926, a bill for the creation of two national parks became law. North Carolina and Tennessee authorized bond issues to meet the states' obligations for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Additional funds were needed, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., established the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Fund of $s,ooo,ooo to make the park possible. North Carolina and Tennessee acquired 158,799.21 acres and deeded the tract to the federal government on February 6, 1930. Effective work in developing the park began in 19 3 I, and on September 2, I 940, President Roosevelt dedicated it. Eighteen million dollars, it was estimated, were needed for further development. After man's exodus when the land for the park was purchased in 1926, there remained ghost communities along the Little Tennessee and Tuckaseigee rivers and on Hazel Creek, which rises deep in the Smokies and runs for twenty miles to Fontana Lake. It is fed by eight large streams and receives the flow from the watershed of what was once the largest virgin forest in Western North Carolina. Once the forest was alive with game, the streams with fish. Around 1850 settlers came to Hazel Creek and built log cabins. The slopes were excellent for cattle and sheep, and hogs fattened on the forest mast. People lived off the land, with an abundance of game. Granville Calhoun, pioneer, entrepreneur, railroad builder, miner, jack-of-all-trades, lived through the entire cycle of human "development" of Hazel Creek. His family were among the early settlers. The first employment for people on Hazel Creek was offered when the Johnson and Harris Lumber Company cut timber and floated the logs down to their mill. A series of dams built across the creek held �402 / Part III: A Developing Economy the logs until the water was high enough to float them. In I 909 W. M. Ritter built a logging railroad and set up a large double hand-mill which employed four hundred men. Each side of the mill turned out one million board feet a month. From I9I I to I928 Ritter cut 2IO,ooo,ooo board feet from this one creek and was called the "hardwood king of the world." In 1890 copper was discovered on Sugar Fork Creek and the Adams Mining Company mined copper from 1900 to I905. In 1926 when the states of Tennessee and North Carolina bought all of the land from the people and turned it into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, owners were reluctant to sell. A fair price was paid for the mountain and forest land, but what the sellers received was insufficient for them to buy equivalent property near towns like Bryson City. They took their money and began sorrowfully to look for new homes. For them a way of life was gone forever. Hundreds had to leave their snug mountain retreats, but only death will take from them their memories of the "good old days." John Wikle wrote in the Asheville Citizen "The bear goes unharmed and the deer play undisturbed; where bare-footed children once hoed corn, now bears wild blackberries. Where once stood a great sawmill there is only a mass of vines and trees; there is only a ghost hid in the trees where once people lived." Hazel Creek now looks as it did in I850 when the first man came. The people who once lived and reveled in a virgin paradise are now the poorer inhabitants of nearby towns. But the park will regain and retain the primeval beauty of the region. The holdings of the lumber companies were acquired without difficulty except for the 92,800 acres owned by the Champion Fibre Company, almost one-fifth of the national park. This company owned the core of the virgin timber, the slopes of New Found Gap, part of Clingman's Dome, all of Mount Le Conte, the Chimney Tops, the Three Forks, Greenbrier Wilderness, and Mount Guyot. Reuben Robertson, president of the company, argued that the spruce on the company's holdings was essential to its continued operation. Eventually Champion agreed to sell all of its land in the park for $3,00o,ooo. The company began buying its spruce in Canada, shipping it to Canton at less expense than if it had built a railroad to the crest of the Smokies to get out the timber. Eventually the federal government bought additional land. In I933 President Roosevelt allocated $I,550,ooo from Civilian Conservation Corps funds for land purchase, and by 1935 the �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 403 400,000 acres set by Congress as a requirement had been met. The two states had contributed $4,095,696, the United States $3,503,766, and the Rockefeller Memorial Fund $s,o6s,ooo. Another gift of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., of $roo,ooo made it possible for the National Park Service to purchase 1000 acres in the Linville Falls area. The Linville Gorge had already been purchased by the Forest Service as part of the Pisgah National Forest. The combined falls and gorge are now certain to be preserved for posterity as a "wild area." Camping facilities have been provided at the falls. Together the falls and the gorge provide one of the most breathtaking experiences possible for weekend visitors or one-day picnickers. The Blue Ridge Parkway's last link is now being built the length of Grandfather Mountain along a route between the crest and the former Yonahlossee Turnpike, now Highway 221, creating a strip of national park where many hoped to locate the national park of the Southern Highlands. Millions of people come to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park each year. They hike along its winding mountain trails, pitch their camps in its forests, and view some of the most luxuriant plant life in Eastern America. "More than 650 miles of horse and foot trails wind along crystal clear streams and waterfalls, past giant trees, ... through the wild beauty of spring flowers or autumn colors, and into high mountain meadows." The park offers guided nature walks along many of the trails. There are also many self-guided nature trails. The famous Appalachian Trail enters the park at Davenport Gap and traverses it for seventy-one miles, leaving it near Fontana Dam. One can hike the seventy-one miles in six to eight days, sleeping in trailside shelters. The park has some six hundred miles of streams that add beauty and can be fished for rainbow and brook trout. It can be lovely during any of the four seasons but it is probably the most beautiful during the latter half of October when there are clear days and cool nights and the coloring of the leaves presents a panorama of almost unbelievable colors. Many social and residential communities have been created, some of them organized as private clubs, others because of common interests. Among such communities near Hendersonville are Pleasant Estates, the Highland Lake Club, with clubhouse and cottages open to the public, and Laurel Park; several clubs in �404 J Part III: A Developing Economy Tryon; Hound Ears Club and Lodge; and the Carolina Caribbean Club at Beech Mountain. In addition, several communities and real estate developments have club-like restrictions; among these are Linville and Little Switzerland. A prototype of these, a club that was successful for several years was Kanuga, near Hendersonville. In the first decade of this century George Stephens of Asheville organized it after studying similar clubs in the Adirondacks, on Long Island, and in Wisconsin. A group of Charlotte businessmen bought the tract of one thousand acres and divided it into lots fifty feet by two hundred. Each of the two hundred carefully screened members received a lot, which he could not sell without the permission of Stephens and the trustees. Dues were a sum of$ I 50 for ten years. The cost of the houses built by the members was restricted to a minimum of $400 and a maximum of$2500. Running water was piped from springs on the mountain, and a dam provided a lake and a source of power for electricity. The resort opened in 1909 and was used for only six years. The flood of 1916 washed out the lake and destroyed the buildings. In 1927 the Episcopal Church bought the site for a summer conference ground. Little Switzerland was started by Judge Heriot Clarkson about 1910. The original purchase was for eleven thousand acres. A company was formed; inns, camps, and homes were planned. It was to be an attractive and exclusive colony with no lots smaller than one acre. A water system was installed and lots were sold to interesting and distinguished people. The altitude of Little Switzerland is 3 478 feet and it has a beautiful setting and magnificent views. The Switzerland Inn, owned by Mrs. Ida Clarkson, was run in connection with six cottages and a Swiss chalet. Twelve miles of scenic roads, two beautiful waterfalls, flowers and mountain shrubbery, and unsurpassed scenery have been the chief attractions. When the Blue Ridge Parkway was planned to traverse the crest of the Blue Ridge it had to pass through Little Switzerland property. Judge Clarkson objected, saying it would take three miles of the company property two hundred feet wide. Nevertheless the parkway was built to bisect the property and it has added beauty and distinction to Little Switzerland. This unique development runs for five miles along the parkway and extends one-half mile in width. There are many attractive homes on the spacious lots. Geneva Hall is the community center and nearby are camps Glen Laurel and As You Like It. �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 405 Soon after World War One, camps for boys and girls were established throughout the mountains. At first these were rugged, designed to allow the campers to experience primitive conditions. Often they were operated by local people who had no experience or training for the work. No standards for sanitation and healthful conditions had been established. But within a few years the Southern Camping Association and the American Camping Association were organized, and they carried on regular inspection of member camps. Their seals of approval were sought by camp operators and were looked for by parents in selecting camps. In addition to the many excellent privately owned camps there are a number of boy and girl scout camps. One of Transylvania County's eighteen camp communities is more than a camp. It is the Brevard Music Center, started as the Transylvania Music Camp by James Christian Pfohl in 1944. An annual music festival has been held since 1946. Now the Transylvania Music Camp is the summer home of the Brevard Music Center. It has 250 student campers, more than 165 faculty and staff members. Nine regularly performing musical groups present five concerts weekly during the summer. Improvements at the center include an additional forty acres, twenty-seven new buildings, and a new auditorium built of redwood and stone. The Music Center attracts outstanding young musicians, and there is a faculty member for every two students. Tryon, an "unspoiled paradise," has an exquisite setting. Lofty mountains rear their peaks four to five miles away. About them Mrs. Ella W. Peattie wrote the poem "These Be the Mountains That Comfort Me." The mountains provide shelter from the cold north winds. The mean temperature for January, the coldest month, is 43 °, the mean summer temperature 74o. Nearby are the charming Pacolet Valley, the crystal-clear Pacolet River, and 175 acre Lake Lanier. Sydney Lanier lived near Tryon for several years before his death in 1881. In 1896 Tryon was visited by the vice-president of the Southern Railway Company who helped to popularize the town. William Gillette, actor and playwright, built an attractive home, now the Thousand Pines Inn. Other prominent people came for the winter and many built homes. They formed the Tryon Riding and Hunt Club, the Tryon Country Club, and made the area a fashionable riding and hunting country. An annual steeple chase and a horse and hounds show are held. There are also an annual spring �406 / Part III: A Developing Economy festival and a tilting tournament. Attractive hotels are the Mimosa, Oak Hall, Oakwood, Edgewood, Thousand Pines, and Pinecrest. Two of them are open all year, the others only in winter. Prominent visitors have been John Burroughs, Fanny Hurst, Edward Waldo Emerson, Admiral Robert W. Peary, the Reverend Charles G. Sewell. Tryon is an artists' colony, and it has been for half a century a handicraft center. The Western North Carolina Associated Communities (WNCAC) grew from a drive that began in Asheville. In May 1946 the Asheville Chamber of Commerce invited public officials, leaders of civic organizations, and leading citizens from twenty-three western countries to attend a dinner meeting and discuss coordination and cooperation among the communities on regional matters. No organization developed from that meeting, perhaps because "personal acquaintance and confidence ... could not be stretched this far." Just about a month later, some eighteen people, all from communities west of Asheville, met together at Dillsboro in Jackson County in a meeting to explore promotion of tourist business, roads, and other matters of mutual interest. At this second meeting the Western North Carolina Associated Communities (WNCAC) was organized. Eleven counties were represented, plus Western Carolina College, the Cherokee Indian Reservation, and Fontana Village resort area. A projects committee recommended seven particular jobs to be launched by the WNCAC: I. To develop the North Carolina side of the Smoky Mountains National Park; 2. To establish a museum for preservation of historical materials of the mountain region; 3· To attempt to secure more adequate accommodations for tourists; 4. To assist in the completion of the Bryson City-Fontana Road; 5· To initiate a historical outdoor drama; 6. To work toward the completion of the Blue Ridge Parkway; 7. To encourage the organization of a Chamber of Commerce in each community of the WNCAC region. The organization of the Cherokee Historical Association and the production of the drama Unto These Hills are accomplishments of WNCAC. The play, poignantly concerned chiefly with the removal of the Cherokees, provides seasonal incomes for one hundred seventy persons and attracts tourists to the area. The organizers of WNCAC began talking about such a drama in 1946, and in 1950 the first performance was given. The inspiration came from "The Lost Colony," the symphonic drama by Paul �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 407 Green which has been performed on Roanoke Island throughout the summer each year since 1937. As the purpose of WNCAC was to present a drama concerning the Cherokee Indians, the cooperation of a local committee from Cherokee was essential. Kermit Hunter was asked to write the drama. Then the Cherokee Historical Association was formed to build a theater and produce the play. On March 24, 1948, the historical association was incorporated as a non-profit organization; officers were Harry E. Buchanan of Hendersonville, chairman, Percy Ferebee, vice-chairman, Mrs. Molly Arneach of Cherokee, secretary, and Joe Jennings, treasurer. Funds were recruited by pledges from people and organizations of eleven counties, the drama was written, and the Mountainside Theater with access roads was built. Contributions were made by Indian Service employees and the Eastern Band of Cherokees, traders at Cherokee, and the Catholic Church. A total of $29,286.75 was raised, to which the North Carolina General Assembly was persuaded to contribute $35,000 in 1949. Veterans who were engaged in building trades classes at Cherokee High School contributed much labor, and many others worked throughout the year 1949. From the first performance on July I, 1950, the drama was a success. Then the Cherokee Historical Association turned its attention to the Tsali Institute, a non-profit organization for the historical and anthropological study of the Cherokee Indians. It built a full size Indian village of about the year 1750, Oconaluftee, toward which the North Carolina General Assembly appropriated $25,000. Mud huts and primitive cabins in which Indians engage in native crafts exemplify the life of the Cherokees. The Museum of the Cherokee Indian is another product of the Association. It brings together artifacts that trace the complete history of the Indian, especially the Cherokees. New developments for the Eastern Cherokees are the various governmental service agencies such as a twenty-five bed hospital, a forestry division, an agricultural and soil conservation service, a water and sewer facility, the Neighborhood Youth Corps of the United States Department of Labor, and a community action program under the Office of Economic Opportunity. The Boundary Tree Enterprise, tribally owned, includes a lodge and motel and a building housing the showroom of the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual. Most of the motels, craft shops, restaurants, and filling stations are owned and operated by Cherokees. �408 / Part III: A Developing Economy "Chiefing"- Cherokee Indian wearing a Plains Indian war bonnet to attract tourists Friends of the band have deplored the resort to "chiefing" which has been practiced by some of the men and boys. They wear the feather headdress of the Sioux Indians of the Great Plains during the tourist season and stand in front of gift shops in Cherokee to attract customers. They charge twenty-five to fifty cents to allow the curious to take their pictures and then entice the people into the shops where the handcrafted products such as baskets, pottery, and headwork are sold. The United States Department of the Interior estimates that five million tourists visit Cherokee annually. Their purchases and the services they require are an obvious boost to the economy of the Cherokees and the region. The reservation has been called �Itz Pursuit of Pleasure / 409 by the Department of the Interior the model Indian reservation of the country. It is a unique example of cooperation by the federal government, state government, associated communities and a particular community. Two years after the opening of Unto These Hills, some of the leading citizens of Boone including Mrs. J. B. Stallings, Mrs. Leo Pritchett, Stanley Harris, D. J. Whitener and Mrs. Charles Cannon of Concord organized the Southern Appalachian Historical Association. This organization engaged Kermit Hunter to write an outdoor drama Horn in the West. The "Horn" was the call of the west, of the untamed wilderness and of freedom. It is the story of the westward movement and the struggle of a group of colonists for independence and freedom from oppression, unjust taxes, and legal injustice. It involves the movement of the people across the mountains and their clash with the Indians. Daniel Boone is a heroic character in the play, but his deeds were not performed by the real Daniel Boone as he was in Kentucky at the time the drama is supposed to have taken place. The play is gripping, picturesque, exciting. It is great entertainment. It has verisimilitude: that is, although the narrative is fiction events could have happened as they are created for the audience. The setting for the drama is a unique outdoor theater that seats 2400 people. Kermit Hunter explained the nature of his outdoor dramas as art forms of three types: folk art built upon the manners, customs, beliefs, and ideals of an earlier America; commercial art, to provide dividends (tourists spend an average of $15 per day per person); fine art, to portray scenes, characters, and ideas based on fundamental and timeless truths and to give the audience inspiration. Horn in the West is produced in the Daniel Boone Theater on a tract of land purchased by the town of Boone. Two other attractions are to be found there. One is the Daniel Boone Native Garden, created by the Garden Club of North Carolina to preserve and permit people to enjoy the native shrubs, flowers, and trees of the area. The other is the Tatum House, the actual log house occupied by generations of the Tatum family and described by Charles Dudley Warner in On Horseback. It was moved to these grounds and is furnished authentically as a museum of rural life of the nineteenth century. �4IO j Part III: A Developing Economy The Zebulon B. Vance birthplace in the Reems Creek area of Buncombe County is a historic site administered by the State Department of Archives and History. The site includes the dwelling house and six farm buildings. One other log building will be added. The restoration includes the original chimney, two original fireplaces, paneling, flooring, rafters and foundation rock taken from the old house. The dwelling contains many pieces of furniture, weaving, tools, pots, artifacts used by pioneers in the eighteenth century. The Vance house was built not long after the Revolution, but it is associated with Zebulon B. Vance, the state's Civil War Governor, Senator, soldier and orator who attained "more honors than any other man in the State's history." There is also a visitor-center-museum which has an exhibit room, a lecture room, an administrative office, and rest rooms. In McDowell County the Carson House is being restored as a museum of history to "illustrate life in the Upper Catawba Valley a hundred fifty to a hundred years ago." Built about I 8 IO, the house served as the first court house when the county was created in 1843, as a stage coach stop and a fashionable inn, and during the Civil War as a "small exclusive school for girls." "As eastern America searches desperately for recreational outlets for its tens of millions, Appalachia becomes infinitely more important as a preserve for people than as a site for new industries." Among the cherished heritages of mountain people are the folk tales, the ballads, and the folk dances. Greater effort should be made to preserve and to popularize these. Tourist facilities are far different from what they were fifty years ago. The highway and the automobile have been responsible for the change. Formerly tourists were content to stay in rustic, fairly crude inns, lodges, hotels. Now people drive as far and as fast as they wish, and they will drive to where the most luxurious and attractive hotels and motels are to be found. The prices are much higher, of course, but people are willing to spend money freely for pleasure and luxuries. Far more "first class" motels are needed. The 1950's and 196o's have been years of the most rapid tourist development. An area endowed with supernal beauty and a delightfully cool summer climate had to be developed and advertised. Some attractions there were, but many were added, including winter sports. Roan Mountain in rhododendron time, the Moses Cone Estate, Mount Mitchell, Grandfather �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 4 I I Zebulon Baird Vance birthplace before restoration ASHEVILLE CITIZEN-TIMES C O. Vance Birthplace after restoration ASHEVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PHOTO �412 / Part III: A Developing Economy Mountain, Linville Falls, Wiseman's View, and the Great Smokies should be on the itinerary of most travelers to the mountains. The Kerr Scott Dam and Reservoir, a federal construction, provides flood control of the Y adkin and its tributaries and recreational facilities. It is one of several projected dams for the Y adkin River system. Two new state parks are being developed, Pilot Mountain in Surry County and Stone Mountain in Wilkes County. The present trend is toward larger and more exclusive resorts. The Robbins brothers were highly successful in developing Hound Ears. It appears that they are even more successful with Beech Mountain. The Morton-McRae family who own Grandfather Mountain have developed Invershiel, a residential community in Scottish style. They have built a beautiful new golf course and lake at the foot of Grandfather Mountain. Around the lake and golf course they are selling home sites. Dr. Thomas Brigham and Mr. and Mrs. George McRae who helped start the Beech Mountain project are now developing Sugar Mountain. A group of Winston-Salem men and the L. A. Reynolds Construction Company have developed Seven Devils, a resort and residential area with ski slopes, a lake, homesites, golf and tennis. Roaring Gap, in Alleghany County, a resort chiefly of people from Winston-Salem has been enjoyed for many years. Nearby the High Meadows Golf Club and Ski Slope have been added recently. Today the area from Tryon to Franklin is a "golden strip" filled with summer and retirement homes and resorts. Skiing and other winter sports have been introduced. Many of the homes are luxurious and are owned chiefly by people from elsewhere. In Jackson County, for example, 2500 of 8ooo property owners are from outside the state. Among the fine inns in that area are High Hampton, Sapphire Valley, and Highlands Inn. In 1960 the total expenditures of all travelers in North Carolina were estimated at $4o8,ooo,ooo. Out-of-state travelers spent $245,ooo,ooo, North Carolina people $163,ooo,ooo. There was an increase in travel expenditures over 1959 of 4-5°/0 , over 1948 of 167%. Including local trade engaged in by travelers the amount spent in 1960 was $81o,ooo,ooo. From these figures one can readily see that "the travel business in North Carolina is a vast industry .... The travel dollar flows into a wide range of industries." The travel industry in the mountain region in 1960 brought in $58,8oo,ooo. This was 14.4% of the state total and �In Pursuit of Pleasure / 413 Richard Nixon at the Roan Mountain Rhododendron Festival, 1958 HUGH MORTON PHOTO I 0.4% of retail trade and service receipts. The total receipts of businesses that serve travelers, including local trade, was $I02,8oo,ooo. Western North Carolina's travel business is invaluable and extensive, but the region that contains the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park should have a greater share of the state's travel business. The roads from the North and Midwest passing through North Carolina must be improved. More broad highways and interstate routes are needed. Northwestern North Carolina does not have more than a few miles of four lane highways. Two Winston-Salem journal editorials stressed the position of Western North Carolina: "We need to tell the rest of the world about all that this area offers, and we need to tell our own people (like motel staffers, service station attendants, waitresses). We need more popular entertainment. We must convince wives that they should accompany their husbands on business trips here, and we must persuade them- and all visitors- to stay longer. . . . The fact remains that . . . recreational open space is fast becoming the most precious commodity in America. All that remains is some determination of how best to use this land for the good of all of us." �SOURCES Much of the information consisted of oral history from lengthy interviews (some of the elderly persons are now deceased) : D. Hiden Ramsey, Asheville Bascom Lamar Lunsford, Turkey Creek James Larkin Pearson, North Wilkesboro Dr. Benjamin Washburn, Rutherfordton Dr. Alfred Mordecai, Greensboro and Blowing Rock Granville Calhoun, Bryson City John McLeod, Mars Hill W. Ernest Bird, Cullowhee Willis Weatherford, Blue Ridge J. Walter Moore, Hayesville Mrs. Maude Gentry Long, Hot Springs Worth Morgan, Forest City Leroy Sossamon, Bryson City Mrs. Marian Ingram, Robbinsville Mrs. Lillian Thomasson, Bryson City Miss Cordelia Camp, Asheville Mrs. Mary Jane McCrary, Brevard Mrs. Nancy Alexander, Lenoir Patton Phillips, Graham County Gordon Winkler, Boone S. C. Eggers, Boone Miss Myra Champion, Asheville Mrs. Carrie Winkler, Boone James Patton, Chapel Hill Clark Medford, Waynesville Cratis Williams, Boone George M. Stephens, Asheville Dr. Edward W. Phifer, Morganton Robert Conway, Dept. of Archives and History W. H. Plemmons, Boone, formerly of Asheville Mrs. Janice Whitener, Boone James Stroup, Spruce Pine Rush Wray, Burnsville Daniel Boone, VI, Burnsville Thomas W. Ferguson, Ferguson Mrs. Annie Winkler, North Wilkesboro John Wikle, Bryson City Lynn Gault, Brasstown W. B. Stephen, Pigeon Forge Woody Brothers, Spruce Pine Edith J. Cornell, Boone Mrs. Lexine Baird, Mars Hill Harley Jolley, Mars Hill Fred 0. Scroggs, Hayesville Robbins Brothers, Watauga County Mrs. A. P. Kephart, authority on camping Rufus Morgan, Franklin Jason Deyton, Spruce Pine John Foster West, Wilkes County and Boone Miss Doris Sparks, historian of Patterson School Mrs. Elizabeth McKibben Williams, Waynesville John 0. Goodwin, Blowing Rock Jack Guy, Beech Creek Richard Chase, Beech Creek Don Lineberger, Brevard Mrs. Daisy Feagan, Columbus Weimar Jones, Franklin Col. Paul Rockwell, Asheville Alonzo Shields, Murphy �Sources / 4 I 5 The administrative staffs of the Rutherford County Hospital, Grace Hospital at Morganton, Western Carolina Center, officials of Enka, Mead, and other companies, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Forest Service were interviewed. Questionnaires were sent to twentyfour school superintendents concerning integration. Visits were made to these schools: John C. Campbell Folkschool, Crossnore, Penland, Western Carolina University, Caldwell Community College, Warren Wilson College, and Tuscola High School. PRIMARY SOURCES, PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED Bannerman, Arthur M., "The Historical Background of Warren Wilson College," The Owl and the Spade, XXI (Oct., I944). Barringer, 0. L., "An Automobile Trip to Blowing Rock," Country Life Oune, I9IO). Battle, William James, "A Mountain Tramp from Black Mountain to Highlands and to Blowing Rock," UNC Magazine 1886-188g, VIII, Nos. 2 and 4· Battle, William, Memories of an Old- Time Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, I945). Branson, Levi, North Carolina Business Directory (Raleigh, I884). Butler, Marguerite, "A Dream Come True," Mountain Life and Work, VII, No.3. Campbell, Robert F., Mission Work Among the Mountain Whites in Asheville Presbytery (Asheville, 1898). Chataigne's North Carolina Directory and Gazetteer (Raleigh, r884). Cilley, Clinton A., Diary, I875-I885, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Library, Chapel Hill. Cowles, Calvin Josiah, Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Library, Chapel Hill. Cozens, S. D., "An Orderly Entrance Into Town," Fijieenth Pennsylvania Cavalry (Phila., I9o6). Davis, Rebecca Harding, "By-Paths in the Mountains," Harper's New Monthly Magazine (I88o). Doak, Henry Melvil, The Wagonauts Abroad (Nashville, 1892). Erwin, W. C., "Catawba Valley and Highlands," Pamphlet in the W. C. Erwin Collection, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Library, Chapel Hill (see also the Erwin Papers in this file). Ferguson, Thomas W., Home on the Yadkin (Winston-Salem, 1957). Ford, Willis, "Penland Goes to the Fair," Mountain Life and Work, IX (3), I9-2I. Guyot, Arnold, "Notes on the Geography of the Mountain District of Western North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, XV, 25I-JI8. Hamiltom, J. G. de Roulhac, cd., The Papers of Randolph Abbott Shotwell (Raleigh, I 9 3 I). �416 / Sources Harper, G. F. W., "Produce Book, 1877-1878," Southern Historical Collection UNC Library, Chapel Hill. Harper, James C., Diary, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Library, Chapel Hill. Hodges, Luther, Addresses and Papers, James Patton, ed. (Raleigh, 1962) James, William, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," Essays on Faith and Morals (New York, 1896). Kephart, Horace, "Land of the Eastern Wilderness," World's Work (April, 1926), 617-32· King, Edward, "The Great South. Among the Mountains ofWestern North Carolina," Scribner's Monthly (March, 1874). Lenoir, William, Papers, # 426. Southern Historical Collection, UNC Library, Chapel Hill. McClure, James, "Ten Years of the Farmers' Federation," Mountain Life and Work, VII (April, 1930), 23-25. Madison, Bobert Lee, "Experiences of a Pedagogue in the Carolina Highlands," series of articles, Asheville Citizen-Times (April 23-August IJ, 1938). Mason, Henry McGilbert, "Memoir of a Southern Appalachian Mountaineer," typescript. Merrimon, A. S., "The A. S. Merrimon Journal," North Carolina Historical Review, VIII, 300-330. Mordecai, Alfred, "James Edwin Brooks, M.D." North Carolina Medical journal Oune, 1958). "Notes from the John C. Campbell Folk School," Mountain Life and Work Oan., 1928). Pinchot, Gifford, Biltmore Forest, An Account of Its Treatment and the Results of the First Year's Work (Chicago, 1893). Booklet distributed at the World's Fair. Pinchot, Gifford, Breaking New Ground (New York, 1947). Schenck, Carl Alvin, The Biltmore Story (St. Paul, 1955). Schenck, Carl Alvin, The Forest Fair in Biltmore Forest (Asheville, 1908). Schenck, David, Diary, Vol. 8, "Jottings on the Circuits," typed from the originals given by Paul W. Schenck, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Library, Chapel Hill. Settle, Thomas, Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Library, Chapel Hill. Seven Months a Prisoner: or Thirty-six Days in the Woods (Indianapolis, r868). Simpson, George L., Western North Carolina Associated Communities (Cherokee, 1956). Sloop, Mary M., and Le Gette Blythe, Miracle in the Hills (New York, 1953). Smith, H. P., Some Results of Mission Work in the Mountains of North Carolina (Asheville, 1898). The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Qfficial Records rif the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C., 1897). �Sources / 417 Warner, Charles Dudley, On Horseback: a Tour in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee (Boston, I888). Washburn, Benjamin E., As I Recall (New York, I960). _ _ _ _ A Country Doctor in the South Mou11tains (Asheville, 1955). _ _ _ _ A History of the North Carolina State Board of Health, I877-1925 (Raleigh, 1966). _ _ _ _ Rutheiford County and Its Hospital (Spindale, 1960). Washington, Lawrence D., Confessions of a Schoolmaster (San Antonio, 1939). West, John Foster, "Folklore of a Mountain Childhood," North Carolina Folklore, XVI (November, I968), No. 3, I66-I69. Western North Carolina Land Company (Philadelphia, I 874), also I 876 and I 883 editions). Wiley, Calvin H., Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Library, Chapel Hill. Zeigler, Wilbur G., and Ben S. Grosscup, The Heart of the Alleghanies or Western North Carolina (Raleigh, r883). OFFICIAL REPORTS, DOCUMENTS, AND GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS Acts Relating to the Western North Carolina Railroad (n/d) a bound reprint of all acts, I852-r88o. The Applachian Trail, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. This is one of hundreds of brochures published by the U.S. Forest Service concerning the facilities and opportunities offered the public in the the National forests, which may be obtained from the Asheville office of the service. Ayres, H. B. and W. W. Ashe, Southern Appalachian Forests. (Washington, I905). U.S. Geological Survey, Professional Paper No. 37. Biennial Reports of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, I 887-1888 to the present. All of these were searched for data concerning the public schools. Cameron, J. D., Handbook of the State of North Carolina (Raleigh, 1893). "Cherokee Indian Agency," U.S. Department of the Interior, mimeographed. Clark, Walter, ed., Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War 1861-1865 (Raleigh, 1927) 5 vols. Clark, Walter, Ed., North Carolina State Records. Connor, R. D. W., North Carolina Handbook, (Raleigh, I9I3)County and City Data Book, various issues by the U.S. Census. Documents of the Sessions of the North Carolina General Assembly, 1871, 187 2, 1879. Investigations of fraud and corruption. Educational Publications of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Valuable source of data throughout the entire period. First Biennial Report of the Commissioners to Build the Western Insane Asylum of North Carolina at Morganton, N.C. (Raleigh, 1876). �4 I 8 / Sources Holmes, J. A., and William Cain, North Carolina Geological Survey (Raleigh, 1893). Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina Passed by the General Assembly at Its Session of 1876-1877 (Raleigh, 1877). North Carolina Agricultural Statistics: Tobacco, Featuring County Estimates, 1925-1968 (Raleigh, 1968). North Carolina Constitution. North Carolina Board of Health, Biennial Reports. North Carolina Board of Higher Education in North Carolina, Reports. North Carolina Department of Water and Air Resources, annual reports. North Carolina Geological Survey, Mineral Industry of North Carolina (Raleigh, 1901ff. Economic Papers nos. 4, 6-9, II, 14, 15, 23, 34, 49, 55, 6o). North Carolina Tobacco Reports, 1967-1968, Bulletin of the N.C. Dept. of Agriculture, No. 191 (May, 1968). Page, Roger J., The Code of the City of Asheville (Asheville, 1887). Parker, John M., III, Residual Kaolin Deposits of the Spruce Pine District (Bulletin No. 8, N.C. Dept. of Conservation and Development 1946). Pickett, George, "Report," N. C. Department of Air and Water Resources at Governor Moore's Conference in Asheville, 1968. The Power Situation in North Carolina, N. C. Dept. of Conservation and Development, 1924. Pratt, Joseph Hyde, Good Roads Days. (Ec. Paper No. 35, Raleigh, 1914). _ _ _ _ Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the North Carolina Good Roads Association (Charlotte 1912). _ _ _ _ Proceedings of the Good Roads Institute (Raleigh, 1914). _ _ _ _ and Miss H. M. Berry, Geological and Economic Survey, Economic Paper No. 44 (Raleigh, 1917). Public Education in North Carolina, a Report by the Educational Commission (1920). Report of the Board of Directors, State School for the Deaf and Dumb, Morganton, I 89 5. A Report from Western North Carolina University: Story of Twenty Years Progress (Cullowhee, 1969). State of North Carolina Wildlife Commission, Official Regulations. Trees, The Year book of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture (Washington, D.C., 1949). Weather and Climate. Bulletin No. 396, Experiment Station (Raleigh) MASTERS' THESES AND DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS Allen, Roscoe J., "A History and Development of Education in Wilkes County North Carolina," thesis, University of Tennessee, 1952. Bowlick, C. A., "A Study of the Cranberry Ore Belt," thesis, Appalachian State University, hereinafter cited as ASU. �Sources / 419 Cotton, W. D., "Appalachian North Carolina, a Political Study ... ," doctoral dissertation, UNC, Chapel Hill, 1954. Gardner, Anne Cofield, "Social Organization and Community Solidarity in Painttown," thesis, UNC, Chapel Hill. Hartman, Vladimir E., "A Cultural Study of a Mountain Community in Western North Carolina," doctoral dissertation, UNC, Chapel Hill, 1957· Holcombe, David, "The Western North Carolina Railroad," thesis, Wake Forest University. Jolley, Harley, "The Blue Ridge Parkway: Origins and Early Development," doctoral dissertation, Florida State University, 1964, recently expanded and published by the University of Tennessee Press. Jones, Perry, "The European Wild Boar in North Carolina," thesis, ASU, 1959· Kuhlman, Clarence E., "Municipally Owned Electric Utilities in North Carolina," doctoral dissertation, UNC, Chapel Hill, 1941. Penley, Larry, "A Baptist People and the Events Leading to the Formation of the Three Forks Association," thesis, ASU. Perritt, Lytton Gladstone, "Growth and Development of Electric Power in the Carolinas," doctoral dissertation, UNC, Chapel Hill. Plemmons, William H., "The City of Asheville," thesis, Duke University. Schaff, W. R., "The Growth and Development of Education in Caldwell County," thesis, UNC, Chapel Hill, 1926. Sparks, Doris, "The History of Patterson School, Caldwell County," thesis, ASU, 195!. Thomas, David Nolan, "The Early History of the North Carolina Furniture Industry, I 880-1921, doctoral dissertation, UNC, Chapel Hill, 1964. Ward, Francis Ehl, "The East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad," thesis, ASU. Williams, Cratis, "The Southern Mountaineer in Fiction," doctoral dissertation, New York University, Ann Arbor Microfilm. Wooten, Samuel R., "A History of Richmond Hill Law School," thesis, ASU, 1963. PERIODICALS Abrams, Amos, "Frank Proffitt: A Legend A-Borning," North Carolina Folklore, XIV (Nov., 1966), No. 2, p. 19. Argow, Keith, "The Cradle of Forestry in America," journal of Forestry, LXII (1964), reprinted from American Forests (May, 1954). Armstrong Anne W., "The Southern Mountaineers," The Yale Review (Spring, 1935). Ashe, W. W ., "Creation of the Eastern National Forests," American Forestry (Sept., 1922), 521-25. Ashe W W., "Linville Gorge, A State Park for North Carolina," Parks and Recreation (Jan.-Feb., 1923), 235-90. �420 / Sources "Ballads and Songs of Western North Carolina," Journal of American Folkiore, XII (April, May, June, 1909), 238. Bell, Marshall, "Hon. Cope Elias, a Memorial Sketch," Report of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the North Carolina Bar Assn., 60-62. The bar association reports contain obituaries of deceased lawyers. Burnett, Edward Candy, "The Hog Drivers' Play Song and Some of Its Relatives," Agricultural History, XXXIII, 161. Canby, Henry Seidel, "Top of Smoky," Harpers, (March, 1916), pp. 580583. "Backwinds of the Blue Ridge," Blackwood's Magazine (Dec., 1912). "An American Backwater," Blackwoods Magazine (Sept., 19II), pp. 355-66. Buckley, S. B., "Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee," American Journal of Science and Arts, XXVII (March, 1859). Carter, L. L. "Appalachian Highlands," Travel Magazine (Sept., 1909). Chapman, Marston, "American Speech as Practiced in the Southern Highlands," New York Century Magazine, CXVII (1929), 617-623. Connor, R. D. W., "The Peabody Educational Fund," South Atlantic Quarterly, V, 169-181. Cope, James, "Mountaineers of Western North Carolina," Mountain Life and Work, I (Oct., 1925), No. 3, 9-11. Eaton, Allen, "The Mountain Handicrafts," Mountain Life and Work, VI, No. 2, 22-30. French Broad River Basin Pollution Survey Report, State Stream Sanitation Committee, N. C. State Board of Health, 1957. Fuller, Raymond, "All-time American Stock," Mentor, XVI (7), 15-16. Griffith, Robert W., "Industrial Development of Western North Carolina," The Southern Tourist (March, 1926). Guild, Curtis, Jr., "The Appalachian Forests," American Forestry, XVI (1910), 69. Gwaltney, W. R., "Capture of Fort Hamby," The Statesville Landmark (6, 19, 1903). Harmon, George D., "The North Carolina Cherokees and the New Echota Treaty of 1835," North Carolina Historical Review, VI Ouly, 1929), 237-253· Hatcher,]. Wesley, "Glimpses of Apalachian America's Basic Conditions of Living," Mountain Life and Work, XIV Oan., 1939). Holliman, Harvey, "A Factory in the Sky," Mountain Life and Work, X, 29. Traces Enka from the start to 1940. Huffman, Alfred, "The Mountaineer in Industry," Mountain Life and Work, V Oan., 1930), 5-7. Hunter, Kermit, "The Outdoor Historical Drama," North Carolina Historical Review, XXX, 218-222. Kennedy, Philip Houston, "Present Status of Ballad Collecting and Geographical Ballad Distribution in North Carolina," North Carolina Folklore, XIII, r -2, 67-82. �Sources / 42 I Kirke, Edmund, "On the French Broad," Lippincotts Magazine (Dec., 1840). Knight, Edgar W., "Education in the Southern Mountains," School and Society Ouly 29, 1922), 13 pages. Loehr, Rodney C., "Saving the Kerf: the Introduction of the Bandsaw," Agricultural History, XXIII Ouly, 1949), 168-172. Maunder, Elwood R. and Elwood Demmon, "Trailblazing in the Southern Paper Industry," Forest History, V (1961) 6-12. Mooney, James, "Folklore of the Carolina Mountains," Journal of American Folklore (April-June, 1889). Moser, Joan, "Traditional Music of the Southern Appalachians: Traditional Fiddle Tunes," North Carolina Folklore, XII (Dec., 1964), No. 2, p. 2. Myers, John, "The Mountaineer in Industry," Mountain Life and Work, VI Ouly, 1930), 7-11. North Carolina Medical journal. All volumes were examined for data concerning the western counties. Phifer, Edward W., "Saga of a Burke County Family," North Carolina Historical Review, XXXIX, three installments. _ _ _ _ "Slavery in Microcosm: Burke County, North Carolina," Journal of Southern History, XXVIII, 137-165. "Picturesque America on the French Broad River," Appleton's journal (1870-71). Pinchot, Gifford, "How Forestry Began in the United States," Agricultural History, XI Oan., 1937), 255-265. "Pisgah Forest Purchased," American Forests, XX (1914), 425-429. Pratt, H. H., "Southern Appalachian Forest Reserve," Elisah Mitchell Scientific Society journal (December, 1905), 156-64. Price Overton W., "George Washington Vanderbilt, Pioneer in Forestry," American Forests, XX (1914), 419-425. _ _ _ _ "Practical Forestry in Southern Appalachians," Yearbook of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture (1900). Rambo, M. G., "The 'Submerged Tenth' Among the Southern Mountaineers," Methodist Review Ouly, 1905), 565-75. Randolph, H. S., "The Asheville Farm School," Mountain Life and Work (October, 1932), 16-20. Reece, W. Todd, "Mores of Mountain Music," North Carolina Folklore, VIII (Dec., 1968), No. 2, 36-37. Schantz, 0. M., "Beyond the Haze in the High Smokies," Country Life in America (Aug., 1926), 6o-6r. Sharp, Paul F., "The Tree-Farming Movement: Its Origin and Development," Agricultural History, XXXIII (April, 1949), 41-45. Sheppard, Muriel E., "Forgotten Valley," South Atlantic Quarterly, XXXIII (1934), 63-82. Shurtleff, A. A., "A visit to the Proposed National Park Areas in the Southern Appalachians," Landscape Architecture, Oan., 1926), 67-73. Smiley, David L., "Educational Attitudes of North Carolina Baptists," North Carolina Historical Review, XXXV (1958), 316-27. �422 / Sources Smith, Charles Dennis, "The Appalachian Park Movement, I885-190I," North Carolina Historical Review, XXXVII, 58-65. Smith,]. R., "Farming Appalachia," The American Review ofReviews (March, 19I6), 329-36. Street, Julia Montgomery, "Mountain Dulcimer," North Carolina Folklore, XIV (Nov., 1966), No. 2, 27. Tieran, Frances Fisher (Christian Reid), "The Mountain Regions of North Carolina," Appleton's journal, (March, I877). Watkins, Floyd C., "Thomas Wolfe," South Atlantic Quarterly, I (195 I). Wilds, ]. T., "The Mountain Whites of the South," Missionary Review (Dec., I 895). Woolson, Constance Fenimore, "The French Broad," Harper's New Monthly Magazine (April, I 875). GENERAL WORKS, REGIONAL, COUNTY, AND LOCAL HISTORIES Alexander, Nancy, Here Will I Dwell (Lenoir, I956), A History of Caldwell County. Allen, W. C., History of Haywood County (Waynesville, 1908). Allen, Martha N., Asheville and Land of the Sky (Charlotte, I960). Alley, Felix A., Random Thoughts and Musings of a Mountaineer (Salisbury). Anderson, Robert Campbell, The Story of Montreat from Its Beginning, I8971947 (Montreat, I947). Annual Eastern National Park to Park Guide (Asheville). Arthur, John Preston, Western North Carolina: A History from 1730-1913 (Raleigh, I914). Awle, Wm. Cicero, Centennial of Haywood County and Its County Seat (Waynesville, 1908). Baker, Gladys, The County Agent (Chicago, 1939). Barrett, John, North Carolina As a Civil War Battleground (Raleigh, I960). _ _ _ _ The Civil War in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, I963). Biltmore House and Gardens, pamphlet published by the Biltmore Company. Biographical Directory of the American Congress (Washington, D.C. ). Biographical History of North Carolina (Greensboro, ). Bird, William Ernest, "Geographic and Historical Backgrounds of the Cullowhee Area," paper read to the joint meeting of the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association and the Western North Carolina Historical Association, Cullowhee, July 22, 1960. _ _ _ _ The History of Western Carolina College: The Progress of an Idea (Chapel Hill, I963). Black Mountain College: The Visual Arts As Practiced at Black Mountain College. Program of an exhibit with historical sketch, Carroll Rice Museum (I966). Blythe, LeGette, Mountain Doctor (New York, I964). �Sources / 423 Boswell, Martha Gash, "Notes on Transylvania Railroad," Transylvania Souvenir Program, r86r-1961 (Brevard, 1961). _ _ _ _ "Brevard's First Boom," Ibid. Boyd, C. R. Resources of Southwest Virginia (New York, r88r). Brooks, James E., Green Leaf and Gold (Raleigh, 1962). Brown, Cecil Kenneth, The State Highway System of North Carolina, Its Evolution and Present Status (Chapel Hill, 193 r). _ _ _ _ , A State Movement in Railroad Development (Chapel Hill, 1928). Brown, Frank C., Collection of North Carolina Folklore, gen. ed., Norman I. White (Durham, 1952), 7 vols. Brown, Hugo Victor, A History of the Education of Negroes (Raleigh, 1961). Brown, 0 Lester, Blanford Barnard Dougherty: A Man to Match His Mountains (Boone, 1963). Buckingham, James S., Slave States of America (London, 1842). Burkhead, L. S., A Centennial History of Methodism in North Carolina (Raleigh, 1876). Camp, Cordelia, David Lowry Swain: Governor and University President. (Asheville, 1963). _ _ _ _ , Governor Vance: A Life for Young People (Asheville, 1961). _ _ _ _ , "Handicrafts in Western North Carolina Highlands," typescript. _ _ _ _ A Thought at Midnight (Asheville, 1969). The Asheville Teachers College. Campbell, John C., The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (New York, 1921). Campbell, Olive Dame, and Cecil Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (New York and London, 1917). _ _ _ _ , Southern Highland Schools Maintained by Denominational and Independent Agencies (New York, 1921). Carolina and Northwestern Railway, People's Own Line (Richmond, 1877). Cathey, Cornelius 0., Agriculture in North Carolina Before the Civil War (Raleigh, 1967). Centennial History of Clay County, North Carolina, 1861-1961 (Hayesville, 1961). Chase, Richard, Gran4father Tales: American-English Folk Tales (Boston, 1948). The Cherokee Indian, Qualla Indian Reservation. Booklet. Chunn, Ida, Descriptive Guidebook to North Carolina Mountains (New York, r88r). Clark, Elmer T., Methodism in Western North Carolina (Lake Junaluska, 1966). Cohen, John, "Introduction to Styles in Old-Time Music," New Lost City Ramblers Song Book (New York, 1964). Connor, R. D. W., Rebuilding an Ancient Commonwealth (Chapel Hill, 1930). Cooper, Horton, History of Avery County (Newland, 1963). Co-operative Study of the City of Asheville- Buncombe County, North Carolina State Board of Health Conference (Jan. 30-Feb. 5, 1963). �424 / Sources Corbitt, David Leroy, The Formation of the North Carolina Counties 16631943 (Raleigh, 1950). Crabtree, Beth G., North Carolina Governors, 1585-1958 (Raleigh, 1958). Craig, D. I., A History of the Development of the Presbyterian Church in North Carolina and of Synodical Home Missions (Richmond, 1907). Cranford, Fred, The Waldenses of Burke County (Morganton, 1969). Croffert, W. A., The Vanderbilts (New York, 1886). Crouch, John, Historical Sketches of Wilkes County (Wilkesboro, 1902). Cushman, Rebecca, Swing Your Mountain Gal (Boston and New York, 1934). _ _ _ _ "Seed of Fire," book-length typescript, many photographs. North Carolina Collection, UNC Library, Chapel Hill. Dabney, Charles William, Universal Education in the South (Chapel Hill, 1936). Daniels, Jonathan, Tar Heels (New York, 1947). Davidson, Donald, The Tennessee (New York, 1948). Davidson, John Mitchell, "Sketch of the Davidson Family," typescript in North Carolina Room, Pack Memorial Library, Asheville. Davidson, Theodore F., "Reminiscences and Traditions of Western North Carolina," paper read before the Pen and Plate Club of Asheville. De Long, Mrs. Roy J., "Food Preservation in Early Transylvania County," Transylvania County Centennial Historical Program (Brevard, 1961). Dorland-Bell Schools Bulletin. Drane, Brent S., Chestnut and the Chestnut Blight (Raleigh). Dugger, Shepherd M., The War Trails of the Blue Ridge (Banner Elk, 1932). _ _ _ _ , The Balsam Groves of Grandfather Mountain (Philadelphia, 1909). Dykeman, Wilma, Prophet of Plenty (Knoxville, 1966). _ _ _ _ and James Stokely, Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of Will Alexander (New York, 1962). Eaton, Allen, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (New York, 1937). Edmonds, Helen G., The NeJ?,ro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 18941901 (Chapel Hill, 1951). Ehle, John, The Road (New York, 1967). Electric Power in a Finer Carolina, Carolina Power and Light Co. pamphlet. Feasibility Study, Continuing Education Center (for ASU) (Helen, Georgia, 1969). Fiftieth Anniversary Rededication and Open House of Grace Hospital, Morganton, May 13, 1956, contains historical sketch. Fiske, John, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors (Boston, 1897). Fletcher, Arthur, A History of Ashe County Qefferson, 1963). Fletcher, J. L., A History of the Ashe, North Carolina, and New River, Virginia, Baptist Associations (Raleigh, 1935). The Floods of 1916. Southern Railway Co. (1917). Freel, Mrs. C. S., "Fort Butler and the Cherokee Departure for the Indian Territory." Address. �Sources / 42 5 Freel, Margaret, Our Heritage: The People of Cherokee County, North Carolina. Frome, Michael, Strangers in High Places (Garden City, New York, 1966). Gibson, Henry H., American Forest Trees, ed. by H. Maxwell (Chicago, 1913). Glea Alpine Springs, (advertising pamphlet, 1879). Gray, Idyl Dial, Azure Lure: A Romance of the Mountains (Asheville, 1924). Griffin, Clarence W., History of Old Tryon and Rutherford Counties, 17301936 (Asheville, 1937). _ _ _ _ , History of Rutherford County, 1937-1951 (Asheville, 1957). _ _ _ _ , Western North Carolina Sketches (Forest City, 1941). Gulick, John, Cherokees at the Crossroads (Chapel Hill, 1960). Hale, P.M., In the Coal and Iron Counties of North Carolina (Raleigh, 1883). _ _ _ _ , Woods and Timbers of North Carolina (Raleigh, 1890). Harden, John, North Carolina Roads and their Builders, II (Raleigh, 1966). Hayes, Johnson, The Land of Wilkes (Wilkesboro, 1962). Helper, Hinton Rowan, The Impending Crisis of the South (New York, 1857). Henderson, Archibald, The Conquest of the Old Southwest (New York, 1920). Henredon Furniture Industries, Inc., Annual Report, (1968). Henry, Mellinger E., Folk-Songs from the Southern Highlands (New York, 1938). Herring, Harriet L., Passing of the Mill Village: Revolution in a Southern Institution (Chapel Hill, 1949). Hickerson, Thomas Felix, Echoes of Happy Valley: Letters and Diaries, Family Life in the South, Civil War History (Chapel Hill, 1962). _ _ _ _ , Happy Valley (Durham, 1940). Hobbs, Samuel H., Jr., North Carolina Economic and Social (Chapel Hill, 1930). Holder, Rose Howell, Mciver of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1957). Hollingsworth, Jesse G., History of Surry County, or Annals of Northwest North Carolina (Greensboro, 1935). Holmes, J. S., Mount Mitchell and Mount Mitchell State Park (1919). Housley, Jay, Brief History of Tapoco and the Great Smoky Country (Tapoco Lodge, nfd). Hoyle, Bernadette, Tar Heel Writers I Know (Winston-Salem, 1956). Illick, Joseph S., Tree Habits: How to Know the Hardwoods (Washington, D.C., 1924). Illustrated Guidebook of the Western North Carolina Railroad (n/d). Jackson, George Pullen, Another Sheaf of White Spirituals (Gainesville, Florida, 1952). _ _ _ _ , White Spirituals of the South Uplands (Chapel Hill, 1933). _ _ _ _ , Spiritual Folk Songs of Early America (New York, 1937). Jefferys, Grady, Crossties Through Carolilw (Raleigh, 1969). Jenkins, Mark, Historical Sketch of Calvary Episcopal Church (Fletcher, 1958). Johnson, Gerald W., The Making of a Southern Industrialist (Chapel Hill, 1952). Johnson, Monte, "The Presbyterian," Religion in the Appalachian Mountains (Berea, 1955). �426 / Sources Judson College Catalogue, 1890-1891. Kephart, Horace, National Park in the Great Smoky Mountains (Asheville, 1925). _ _ _ _ , Our Southern Highlanders (New York, 1922). Kerr, W. C., Western North Carolina (Raleigh, 1883). King, Edward, The Great South (Hartford, 1875). Knight, Edgar W., Public School Education in North Carolina (Durham, 1916). Koch, Frederick H., Smoky Mountain Road (Chapel Hill, 1939). Leach, MacEdward, The Ballad Book (New York, 1933). Lefler, Hugh T. and Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina: The History of a Southern State (Chapel Hill, 1954). Lewis, Charles Lee, Philander Priestly Claxton: Crusader for Public Education (Knoxville, 1948). Lomax, Alan, The Folk Songs of North America (New York, 1960). Long, W. Ray, An Historical Sketch of Linville (n/d). Lovvorn, R. L., Health and Health Services in the Southern Appalachians (Raleigh, 1959). McCrary, Mary Jane, The Goodly Heritage (Brevard, 1959). _ _ _ _ , "Transylvania County, 1861-1961" Transylvania County Centennial Historical Souvenir Program (Brevard, 1961). McLeod, John, From These Stones (Mars Hill, 1965). McNelley, Pat, ed., The First Forty Years: John C. Campbell Folkschool (Brasstown, 1966). Malone, Dumas, Edwin A. Alderman, a Biography (New York, 1946). Manpower Education in Western North Carolina (Washington, D.C. 1968). Mead, Martha N., Asheville in the Land of the Sky (Richmond, 1942). Mead Corporation, Progress Report for Employees: Forty Years of Progress in Sylva, North Carolina, (Typescript, n/d). Medford, W. Clark, Land of the Sky (Waynesville, ). _ _ _ _ , Mountain People, Mountain Times (Waynesville, 1963). Miller, Leonard P., Education in Buncombe County (Asheville, 1965). Milling, Chapman J., Red Carolinians (Chapel Hill, 1940). Montreat-Anderson College Catalogue, 1913 through 1966, shows the history year by year. Moore, Hight C., Patton: Southern Highlander. A Biography of Reverend Robert Logan Patton (n/d). Morgan, Lucy, and LeGette Blythe, Gift From the Hills (New York, 1958). Morley, Margaret, The Carolina Mountains (Boston and New York, 1913). Noble, M. C. S., A History of the Public School of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1930). Mount Mitchell Railroad (Asheville, 1918). Mountain Research Station. Pamphlet distributed at the station. Niles, John J., Songs of the Hill Folk: Twelve Ballads from Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina ( 1934). North Carolina Good Roads Association, Road Maps and Tour Book (1916). Nowell, Elizabeth, The Letters of Thomas Wolfe (New York, 1956). Nowell, Elizabeth, Thomas Wolfe (New York, 1960). �Sources / 42 7 Orr, Oliver H., Jr., Charles Brantley Aycock (Chapel Hill, 1961). Pace, Herbert E., Fifty Years Ago Around Saluda (Saluda, 1957). Parker, Haywood, Folklore of the North Carolina Mountaineer (Asheville, 1906). Parris, John A., My Mountains, My People (Asheville, 1957). _ _ _ _ , Roaming the Mountains (Asheville, 1955). Patton, Sadie Smathers, "Madison County," unpublished typescript. _ _ _ _, "Mills River Baptist Church: the History of the First Hundred years," typescript. _ _ _ _ , "Pages from the History of the Speculation Lands in Western North Carolina," typescript in North Carolina Collection, UNC Library, Chapel Hill. _ _ _ _ , ·Sketches of Polk County History (Hendersonville, 1950). _ _ _ _ , The Story of Henderson County (Asheville, 1947). Pearson, James Larkin, Fifty Acres and Other Poems (Wilkesboro, 1933). Pearson, Thomas, Richmond Hill Museum (Asheville, 1959). The 191 6 Pictorial History of Haywood County, special industrial and resort edition of the Carolina Mountaineer and the Canton Observer. Reprint. Plyler, Alva W., "The Early Circuit Riders of Western North Carolina," address before the Western North Carolina Conference Historical Society (Asheville, Nov. 14, 1917). Pomeroy, Kenneth B., andJames G. Yoho, North Carolina Lands (Washington, D.C., ). Population and Economic Analysis of the Asheville Metropolitan Area and the Western North Carolina Region That It Serves (Asheville, 1966). Powell, William S. Higher Education in North Carolina (Raleigh, 1964). Preslaw, Charles]. ed., A History of Catawba County (Salisbury, 1954). Price, Charles L., "The Railroad Schemes of George W. Swepson," East Carolina College Publications in History, I (1964), 32-50. Price, R. M., Holston Methodism (Nashville, 1908). Pringle, George H., Inventory of Assets of Jackson County, Jackson County Chamber of Commerce, (n/d). Proceedings of the North Carolina Teachers Assembly, Haywood White Sulphur Springs, June 16-July r, 1884. Putnam, John F., The Plucked Dulcimer of the Southern Mountains (Berea, 1957). Richmond and Danville Railroad, Excursion Guide to Virginia and North Carolina Health Resorts (r883). Richmond and Danville Railroad, Summer Resort (1884). Richardson, Frank, From Sunrise to Sunset (Bristol, 1910). Roberts, Bruce, The Face of North Carolina (Charlotte, 1960). Robertson, Archie, Slow Train to Yesterday (Boston, 1945). Sage, Frances and Margaretta Williamson, Rural Children in Selected Counties in North Carolina (Washington, D.C., 1918). Sawyer, Harriet Adams, Souvenir of Asheville or Skyland (St. Louis, 1892). Scarborough, Dorothy, A Songcatcher in the Southern Mountains (New York, 1937). �428 / Sources Scheer, Julian, Tweetsie, The Blue Ridge Stemwinder (Charlotte, 1958). Sharpe, William, A New Geography of North Carolina, 3 vols. (Raleigh, 1954). _ _ _ _ , A Complete Guide to the Mountains of North Carolina (Raleigh, 19 53). Sill, James B., Historical Sketches: Diocese of Western North Carolina (Asheville, 1955). Small, John K., Flora of the Southeastern United States, 2nd ed. (New York, 1913). Smathers, G. H., The History of Land Titles in Western North Carolina, (1938). Smith, A. D., Western North Carolina Historical and Biographical (Charlotte, 1890). Smith, R. P., Experiences in Mountain Mission Work (Richmond, 1931). Smith, Harvey L., Society and Health in a Mountain Community (Chapel Hill, 1961). Sondley, F. A., "Colonel Allen Turner Davidson," address, 1922. _____ , History of Buncombe County, 2 vols., (Asheville, 1930). South, Stanley, Indians of North Carolina (Raleigh, 1959). Southern Railway, Flood of July, 1916: How the Southern Railway Met an Emergency (1917). Spencer, Cornelia Phillips, The Last Ninety Days of the War in North Carolina (New York, 1866). Spilman, Bernard W., Ridgecrest- Past, Present, Future (Ridgecrest, 1928). Stephens, Eleanor B. What We Can Do (Asheville, 1962). Stevens, William, Anvil of Adversity (New York, 1968). Stillwell, E. H., Notes on the History of Western North Carolina Part I: A Handbook and Syllabus (Cullowhee, 1927). Strange, Robert, Eoneguski, or The Cherokee Chief (1839). Taliaferro, Hardin E., "Fisher River Sketches," Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1859); reproduced, 1955. Thomasson, Lillian Franklin, Swain County, Early History and Educational Development (Bryson City, 1965). Tiernan, Frances Fisher (Christian Reid), The Land of the Sky (New York, I 876). Tilley, Nannie Lee, The Bright Leaf Tobacco Industry, 1860-1926 (Chapel Hill, 1948). Tindall, George B., The Emergence of the New South (Baton Rouge, 1967). Toynbee, Arnold J. The Study of History (New York and London, 1947). Van Noppen, Ina W., Stoneman's Last Raid (Boone, 1961). Walser, Richard, The Enigma of Thomas Wolfe (Cambridge, ). _ _ _ _ , Nematodes in My Garden of Verse: A Little Book of Tar Heel Poems (Winston-Salem, 1959). _ _ _ _ , North Carolina Poetry (Richmond, 1951). _ _ _ _ , Poets of North Carolina (Richmond, 1963). Warren Wilson College Catalogue, 1969-70. �Sources / 429 Watts, George B., The Waldenses in the New World (Durham, 1941). Way, William W., Jr., The Clinchfield Railroad (Chapel Hill, 1931). Waynick, Capus, North Carolina Roads and Their Builders, I (Raleigh, 1949). Weatherford, W. D., Life and Religion in Southern Appalachia (New York, 1962). Western North Carolina Regional Planning Commission Report (r96r). White, M. L., The History of Amos Owens of Cherry Mountain (Polkville, 1901). Whitener, Daniel J., A History of Watauga County (Boone, 1949). Wilburn, Hiram C., Cherokee Landmarks Around the Great Smokies (Asheville, 1966). Wiley, Calvin, North Carolina Reader, No. III (New York, 1868). Wilgus, D. K., Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (New Brusnwick, 1959). Wilson, Mary Moretz, "Nineteenth Century Education in Watauga County," typescript. _ _ _ _ , "The Deep Gap Tie and Lumber Company," typescript. Wolfe, Tom, "The Last American Hero," The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby (New York, 1963). Wolfe, Thomas You Can't Go Home Again (New York, 1934). _ _ _ _ , The Hills Beyond (New York, 1941). Woodward, Van, Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge, 1951). Yates, Bowling C., "Culture Study of the Pink Beds, Cradle of Forestry in America," address to the Western North Carolina Historical Assn., Ouly 24, 1964). �INDEX Aaron Seminary, I 58 Abernethy, Rev., Laban, 91, 154 Abrams, Dr. Amos, 231 Alderman, Edwin A., I33, 166, 167, 171, I74, I79 Alexander's Inn, 39 Alexander, James Mitchell, 39 Alexander, Nancy, 220 Alexander Schools, I 57 Allanstand Industries, I 86, 226 Alleghany County, 3, 20, 48, 73, 92, 98, I 19, 136, I42, r66, 169,277,279,284,285,292, 333. 337. 344 Allen High School, I5I, I58-159 Allen Industrial Home, see Allen High School Allen, Maria, I 12 Allen, Wilson, 42, 44 Anderson, Dr. R. C., 162 Anderson, W.W., 245 Andrews, 266 Anesthesia, use of, ro6 Appalachian Regional Commission, 119 Appalachian Regional Development program, I 4 7 Appalachian School, 163, 164, 187 Appalachian State Normal School, see Appalachian State University Appalachian State University, 140, 145, 146, 147, I79-18J,2I8,220,277, 354,368 Appalachian Training School, see Appalachian State University Apple culture, 280-281 Arden, 84,87, 163, I93. I95. I98 Arthur, John Preston, 220 Asbury, Bishop Francis, 75, 77 Ashe County, 2, 3, 8, 20, 48, 73, 84, 93, 96, !04, 108, II], II9, 137. J40, 142, 177, 194, 220, 245, 253. 266, 269, 270, 272, 277. 279, 280,28~285,286,]]3, 342, 34~ 353 Asheville, 8, 10, 16, 34, 35, 36, 37, 58, 70, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 91, 92, 100, I06, IQ9, III, II5, IJ7, 1 I8, 126, 127, 141, 142, 143. '44. 148, 151, 158, 159, 167, 177, 181, I96, 198, 204,208-209, 2II, 214,220,222,225,239, 241,253,254,255,268,276,279, ]26, ]28, 366,378-388 Asheville-Biltmore College, see UNC at Asheville Asheville-Biltmore Technical Institute, 113 Asheville Farm School, I 59, 160 Asheville Female College, 37, 158 Asheville Male Academy, 57 Asheville Normal and Associated Schools, 159 Asheville Normal and Collegiate Institute, I59-I6I Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, 87 Avery, Major Alphonso Calhoun, II, ]2, 33, 88, 91 Avery County, ], 20, 47, I IJ, I29, 137, IJ8, IJ9, I42, I48, 149, I 58, '93, 220, 229, 277, 279, 3JI, 332, 342, 344 Avery County High School, 139 Avery, Isaac, 28, 89 Avery, William Waighstill, 28, 32, 91 Aycock, Charles Brantley, 93, IJ2, IJ6, 179 Ayers, H.B. and W.W. Ashe, report, 297 Bader, William, 193 Bailey, Judge John L., 88, 91, 92 Bakersville, 44, 4 7, 90, 29 3 Ballads, 226-230 Balsam Mountains, 1, 7, 53 Banner Elk, 8, I39, I62 Baptist, 32, 37, 7I, 72-74 Baptist, Free Will, 37, 73, 87 Baptist, Missionary, 73 Baptist, Primitive, 73 Battery Park Hotel, 58, 259 Beaucatcher Mountain, 36 Beaver Creek, 85 Bechtlcr's Mint, 57 Beech Creek, I 9 5 Bell, Croydon and Thelma Harrington, 220 Bellevue, 32 Belvedere, 3 2 Ben Lippen, 87 Benners, I. N., 127 Berry, S.V., 85 Bethel Baptist Assn., 73 Biltmore, 187, 298-301, 302, 307 Biltmore Forest, 302, 306 Biltmore Junior College, see UNC at Asheville Biltmore Village, 8 5 Bingham, Major Harvey, 8, I4 Bird, Dean William Ernest, 52, 220 Blackburn, Edmund Spencer, 98 Black Mountain, 37, 87, I69, 298 Black Mountain College, I I 5 Black Mountain Range, I, 40, 4I Blake, Fanny, 83 Blalock, Keith, 8 Bledsoe, George, 222 Blount, John Gray, 4 Blowing Rock, 10, 85, 1 ro, 179, 197, 326, 3JI, 373. 375 Blowing Rock Assembly, 87 Blowing Rock-Lenoir Turnpike, 372 Blue Ridge Assembly, 87 Blue Ridge Hearthside Crafts Assn., I93, I94 Blue Ridge Parkway, II9, 337-340, 389 Blythe, Legette, 221 Board of Health, State, I04, I06, 107, II6 Board of Water and Air Resources, I I 5 Bonclarken, 87 Boner, John Henry, 2I8 "Boom and Bust," Asheville, 386-388 Boon, Samuel, McDaniel, and Thomas, 42 Boone,47-48, 167,195,267,277,367-368 Bostian, L. E., 82 Bowie, Thomas C. (Tam), 93, 333 Bowman, Jacob M., 45 Brasstown, 198 Brevard, 51, 83, 84, 155, 158,262,263,326, 328, 363-365, 377-378 Brevard College, 154, 158 Brevard Epworth School, see Brevard College Brevard Institute, see Brevard College Briar Creek Baptist Assn., 74 Brinegar Cabin, I88, 39I, 392 430 �Index / 431 Brittain's Cave, 186 Broad River, 57 Brooker, W. L., I4I Brooks, E.C., 2I8 Brooks, Dr. J. E., I IO-I r 1 Broughton Hospital, 103, I I4 Brown, Davis P., I<)8 Brown, E.D., 82 Brown, Frank C., 229 Brown, James, I4 Brown, Lawrence, 100-101 Brown Mountain Lights, 245 Brown, 0. Lester, 220 Brown Seminary, 158 Brown, Brigadier General Simeon, 9 Broyhill, James T., 94,99 Brushy Mountain Baptist Assn., 74 Bryan, T. Conn, 22I Bryan's Hotel, 47 Bryson City, 57, 130, 218 Buck Hotel, 3 5 Buell, Hillhouse, 84 Buncombe County, 2, 4, 14, 20, 28, 36, 37, 73, 77, 78, 79, 80, 89, 98, IOO, IOI, I09, IIJ, II7, 126, 129, I36, I40, I43, I44, I47, I62, I63, 182, I85, I97, 220, 232, 254, 276, 277, 279,280,283,284,286,292,304, 3I4, 329, 334.342,343.344.365-366 Buncombe County Health Department, 115 Buncombe Hotel, 3 5 Buncombe Turnpike, 39 Burchett, George, 266 Burger Mountain, 87 Burke County, 4, II, 16, I8, 20, 25, 30, J2, 33, 77, 84, 90, 91, 98, 113, 142, 144, 153, 177,220,268,273,276,279,287, JI4, 33I, 342,343.344 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 307 Burnett, Fred M., 62, 29R Burnsville, Hi, 40, 42, 90, 157, 185 Burt, Lucy, 164 Buxton, Jarvis, 84, 8 5 Bynum, John Gray, 32 Bynum, J.S., 32 Caesar's Head, 90 Cain, William, 324, 326 Cairns, John, Jr., 207 Caldwell County, 3, q., I8, 20, 45, 88, 93, II3, I35, 136, 142, 153, 163,220,272,279, 342, 344. 346 Caldwell Community College, II3 Caldwell, Tod R., I6, 90 Calfee, John E., I 59 Calloway, Elijah, 93 Calloway, James, 93 Camp, Cordelia, 221 Campbell, John C., 68,213 Campbell, Olive Dame, 192, 213, 225, 226, 227 Campbell, Robert F., 8o;8I Camp Meetings, 77 Camps, summer, 405 Candler, Coke, 100 Cannon, Dr. Gainc, 104 Canton, II6, 118, 119,252, 26I, 266,308 Carolina Power and Light Co., 355 Carroll, Ruth and Latrobe, 230 Carson House, 34, 4IO, 4II Carson, Col. John, 28 Carson, Col. Joseph McDowell, 58 Carson, Samuel P., 28 Carter, H. B., 36 Carter, Sol W., hotel, 40, 42 Cashiers, 377 Catalooche, 90, 266 Catawba River, 90, 268 Cathcart, William, 4 Cathey, Mrs. George, 189 Catholic churches, 37, 85, 87 Cattle, 284-286 Civilian Conservation Corps, 338, 339 Cecil, Mrs. John F. A., 301 Central Bank and Trust Co., 142 Champion Paper and Fibre Co., rr6, 119, 308-3 IO Chappell, Fred, 214 Charleston, see Bryson City Chase, Richard, 195-196, 220, 244 Chatham Manufacturing Co., 94 Chatham, Richard Thurmond, 94 Chatuge Lake, 3 19 Chautauqua, teachers', I68-r69 Cheoah Range, 1 Cherokee, town of, 53, 340 Cherokee County, 3, 15, 20, 56, 74, So, 90, 96, II3, 127, 136, 142, I5I, I82, 220, 276, 279, 286, 342, 344 Cherokee Historical Association and related activities, 408 Cherokee Indians, 4, 21, 22, 53, 57, 89-90, 144-145. 175.209, 340, 370 Chestnut trees, 270-271 Chimney Rock, 57, 337 Christmont, 87 Christ School, 84, I63 Church of God, 87 Church, Harrison, 8 Cilley, Col. Clinton A., 89 Civil War, 6-I2 Classes, social, 6, 70 Claxton, Philander P., 167, 168 Clay County, 3, I 5, 20, 54, 56, 77, So, I04, 129, 137. I42, I5I, I 58, 173, 177. I78, 279. 280, 286, 319, 342, 344. 348 Clay, Harry, 101 Clement, Miss Exum, 334 Clinchfield Railroad, 264-265 Clingman, Thomas Lanier, 35, 90 Clingman's Dome, I Cloudland Hotel, 45, 47, 254, 263 Cloyd, Uriah, I53 Clyde, II8 College of the City of Asheville, see UNC at Asheville Columbus, 58, 138 Colvard, Dean W., 286 Cone Mansion, 39I Cone, Moses H., I79 Connor, R.D.W., 5 Conservation and Development, Dept. of, I I 8 Conservation, state agencies, 188 Conservative Party, see Democratic Party Constitutional Convention of I 868, 123 Cooper, Horton, 220, 221 Cooperatives, 280-281, 283 Corn production, 287-288 Cotton manufacturing, 355-361 �432 / Index Counties, formation of, 2-3 Court week, 27-28 Cowee Mountains, r, 53 Cowles, Arthur, 349 Cowles, Calvin Josiah, 349, 351 Cowles, Charles Holden, 98 Coxe, Frank, 58 Crab Tree Orphan's Home, SI Cradle of Forestry, 3 r 5 Craig, Gov. Locke, 92, 93, 132, r8r, 329 Craigmont, S7 Cranberry, 47, rS5, 246, 263, 265, 267, 351, 352 Credle, Ellis, 2 r 9 Crest of the Blue Ridge Highway, 328-329 Crossnore School, I3S, I92, 195, 221 Cullowhee, 174, I75, 176, 178, 179, r8o, r8r Curry,]. L. M., 128, 171 Cushman, Rebecca, 215, 297 Dargan, Olive Tilford, 216, 247 Davenport College, 76, 153-154 Davenport, William, I53 Davidson, Allen Turner, 90, 92 Davidson County (now Tennessee), 2 Davidson, Theodore F., 91, 92 Davis, E. Mac, 8 I Davis, Rebecca Harding, 37, 208-210 Deaf, School for the, 96, I 3 I, I 32 Deer Preserve, Pisgah National Forest, 3 I 6 Democratic Party, IS, I6, 30, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, roo, 123, 132, 333 Dillsboro, I97, 336, 353 Diphtheria, I05 Disciples of Christ, 37, 87 Distillers, illicit, IS, 272-275 Dixon, George F., I2I Dobson, 10 Doctors' fees, r 04 Dorland- Bell School, I 59, r6o Dougherty, Blanford B., 140, r 79, r So, r 8 r, 277 Dougherty, Dauphin Disco, I79, ISr, 333 Doughton Park, 391-392 Daughton, Robert, 92, 277, 337 Doughton, Rufus, 92, 333, 335 Douglas, Clementine, rS9-192 Dramas, outdoor, 390, 406, 409 Ducktown Branch of the Western North Carolina Railroad, I 69 Dugger, Shepherd, 2I 1 Duke Power Co., 355 Dula, Tom, 70, 22S-229 DuPont Co., 364-365 Dyes, for cloth, 66 Dykeman, Wilma (Stokeley), 2I3-2I4 Eagle Hotel, 3 5 Eagle Mills School, I 5 S East La Porte, 53 East La Porte Male and Female Academy, 152 Ecusta Paper Corporation, I IS Edgewood Academy, IJI Eggers, S.C., 277 Ehle, John, 148, 2I4, 268 Electrification, rural, 287-2S9 Elias, Don, IOO-IOI Elias, Kope, 51, 56,91-92, 175 Elkin, 49, 94 Elkin Baptist Association, 74 Ellis, Dan, S Enka Corporation, 92, 364-366 Episcopal Church, II, 32, 37, S2-S5, S7 Equalization Board, 142 Equalizing Fund, IJI, I39, I40 Ervin, Joseph William, 98 Ervin, Samuel James, Jr., 98 Erwin, Alfred, 32 Erwin, Major E. A. M., 34 Erwin, W.C., 30 Etowah Institute, I 5S Evangelical activity, 69, 7I Evangelical and Reformed Church, 87 Fairfield Lake, pS Fairview College, I 58 Family life, mountain, 62 Fancy Gap, I Farmer, Col. H. T., 35 Farmers' Alliance, 95, 96, 97, 173, 175 Feldspar, 352-353 Fiddlers' conventions, 224-225 Fields-of-the-wood, 87 Fishback, Col. John, r 94 Fisher's River Baptist Assn., 73 Fiske, John, 5 Flat Rock, 35, 83, 87, 2IS, 220, 254 Fleming, Sam, 28 Fletcher, Arthur L., 220 Flowers, Col. C. W., I4 Folk, Col. George, 47, 8S, 91 Fontana, 288 Ford Foundation, II2 Fort Hamby, I2-I4 Fourteenth North Carolina Battalion, "One-Eyed Battalion," 8 Frances, Michael, 90 Franklin, 53, 56, 57, 92, I29, 167, 173, 175, 3 I 5, 336 Franklin Family, 33 Freel, Margaret, 7 4, 220 French Broad Baptist Assn., 73, 74 Fruitland Institute, 157 Fullwood, William, 19 Fusion Period, 94, 97 Furniture Industry, 36I-363 Gaither, Col. Burgess S., 32, 33, 90 Gault, Lynn, I9S General Education Board, 133 Gillem, Brigadier General Alvan C., 9, II, 12 Glade Valley School, I6r Glen Alpine, 33 Glen Alpine Academy, 153 Globe Academy, 153 Goodrich, Frances, I86-187 Good Roads Associations, 324 Goodwin Guild Weavers, 192-193 Goodwin, John 0., 190-191 Gordon, Charles, 4 Graham, Dr. Thomas Alexander, r68 Graham County, 3, 20, 22, 56, 57, So, I04, 136, 142, 144, 172, 17S, 279, 2SS, 322, 342, 344 Granite Falls, 135, 245 Granny women, 66, 103, 105 Great Smokes, see Smokies Grandfather Home, 162 �Index / 433 Grandfather Mountain, I, 393, 397 Grange, 95, 280 Gray, Idyl Dial, 2II Great Smoky Mountains National Park, II9, 212,270,337.397-403 Green, Rev. J. B., 14 Green, Lewis W., 222 Green River Plantation, 58, I I I Greene County (now Tennessee), 2 Greer, Dr. I. G., 231 Gudger, Hezekiah A., 91 Gudger, Jack, 5I Gudger,J. H., 35 Gudger, James M., 32, 33, 36, 42,91 Guy, Jack, 195 Gwin, James, 10, I 1 Gwinville Mills, 356 Hall, Dave, ror Hamilton, Harry, 277 Hamilton,]. G. deR., 17 Hampton, Wade, 53 Hancock, Mary, 220 Hankie, James Stuart, 83 Hannum, Alberta Pierson, 22 Happy Valley, 88 Harper, Ella, 20 Harper, G. W. F., 348 Harper, James, I 53 Harper, James C., 93, I 53 Harris Clay Company, 353-354 Hartley, Joe Lee, 326 Hawkins County (now Tennessee), 2 Hayes, J. F., 262-263 Hayes,JudgeJohnsonJ., 72, 74,220 Hayesville, 54, 56, 86, 92, 129, 138, 151, 173, 348 Hayesville College, I 58 Haynes, Thurmond, 277 Haywood Agricultural Society, 52 Haywood County, 2, 20, 40, 52, 75, So, 92, 113, II8, 126, 127, 136, 142, 143, 157, 158, 178, r82,220,252,269,277,279,284,285, z86,J04,JI4,326,J42, 343,344,346-347, J66,J67 Haywood Institute, 157 Haywood White Sulphur Springs, 51, 52, 169, 261 Helper, Hinton R., 346 Henderson and Brevard Railway, 262 Henderson County, 2, 20, 34, So, 96, IIJ, 142, I77,220,229,279,28I,28J,284,286,J04, J29,JJI,J42,J44, 365-366 Hendersonville, 8, 35, 74, 84, 87, ro6, 137, 143. I 56, 177. 262, 281, 324. 326, 328 Hickerson, T. F., 220, 328 Hickory Nut Gap, 254 Hicks, John 0., 151 Hicksville High School, also Hicksville Academy, 151 Hicks, Rev. William, 158 Highlands, 53, 325, 328, 378 Hill-Burton Act, II2 Hinsley, Jay, IOI Higher Education, Board of, 145 High Hampton, 53 Hinton Rural Life Center, 86 Hiwassee, 225 Hiwassee Railroad, 266 Hobbs, S. H., 5 Hoey, Clyde, 98, r8o Hofecker, Glen, 193Holden, G. W. (Wash), 294 Holden, Gov. Wm. H., 15, r6 Holmes, J. A., 324, 326 Holshouser, Governor James, roo Holston Methodist Conference, 75, 76, 77 Hominy Academy, 37 Hominy Creek, 37, 92, II7 Hookworm disease, 107 Hookworm eradication campaign, 107-109 Hoppeldt, Dr. J. M., 32 Horse Trading, 68 Hospitals, establishment of, I09-II5, 139, 154, r62 Horton, Nathan, 272 Horton, William, 272 Hot Springs, 40, 83, II 8, I 6o, 226, 260 388-389 Hughson, Rev. Walter, II2 Hunt, Richard Morris, 299 Hunter, Kermit, 219 Hunting, 42-44, 51, 62, 64 Jackson County, 3, 20, 52, 53, 75, So, 92, 104, IIJ, 136, 142, 143, 144, 173, 174, 177, !78, 263,279.342,344.353.368 Jackson, George Pullen, 231-232 Jacocks, Dr. W. P., 107 James, William, 59 Jarvis, Governor Thomas Jordan, 126, 251, 258 Jefferson, 48, 49, 85, 93, 98, 266 Job., A., 293 John C. Campbell Folk School, 164, 192, 165 Johnson, Thomas G., 36 John's River, 89 Johnstone, F. W., 83 Jolley, Harley, 221, 337 Jones, Edmund, 91 Jones, E. W., 153 Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, 320-pr, 322 Joyner,]. Y., 133, 135, 136, 171 Judaculla Rock, 53, 55 Judson College, 74. I 56- I 57 Justice, G. W., 350 Justice, James Dyer, 3 50 Kanuga Lake, Episcopal Assembly, 87 Kaolin, 353-354 Keener, Ulrich, 75 Kelsey, S. T., 325, 326 Kephart, Horace, 2II-2I4 King, Edward, 59 King, Hiram, 295-296 Kirby, Col. Isaac M., ro Kirk, Col. George, 9, 16, 30, 91 Kirk-Holden War, r6 Knight, Edgar W., 137 Ku Klux Klan, 15, r6, 17, 275 Lake Junaluska, 86, r r8, 143 Lake Sapphire, 328 Lake Toxaway, 263, 328 Land Law of 1777, 4 Language, mountain, 68 Lanier, Sydney, 2I0-2II Lankford, B. D., 51 �434 / Index Laurel Fork, 129 Laurel Hill, r 29 Laurel Springs, 92 Lawyers, ror -102 Lees-McRae College, r62 Lees, Mrs. S. P., 162 Leicester Academy, 37 Lenoir, IO, II, 76, 88, 89, 93, 94, 107, 113, 153.158,199.267,276,293.331 Lenoir Rhyne College, II3 Lenoir, W. A., 153 Lenoir, William, 272, 273 Lenski, Lois, 2 I 9 Lewis Fork Creek, I 3 Linney, Frank, 333 Linney, James Polk, 14 Linney, Romulus, 222 Linney, Romulus Z., 89 Linville, 326, 33 I, 373 Linville Falls, 33, 328 Linville Gorge, 33, 34, 319 Literary Fund, 123 Literary Fund, new, 134 Littlefield, Milton, 16, 256 Little Switzerland, 87 Little Tennessee River, 57 Littlewood, Mrs. John, 194 Log cabin, building of, 59, 61 Lomax, Alan, 23 I Love's Trading Post, 53 Lovette's Holly Farms Poultry Co., 287 Lovill, Captain Edward F., 179, 277 Lunsford, Bascom Lamar, 231,240, 242, 244 Luther, Raymond, 266 Lutheran Church, 85 Lutheridge, 87 Lynn, 210 McBee, John C., 335 McBrayer, Judge Fred, 350 McBrayer, Dr. Lewis Burgin, I ro McCarthy, W.C., 154 McCoy, George, r62 McDowell County, 2, 3, r6, r8, 20, 33, 98, 113,140,299,330,331,342,343,344 McGhinnis, B.L., 293 Mciver, Charles Duncan, 133, 166, 167, J7I, 174. 179 McLeod, John, 220 McLoud, C.M., 36 McRae, Donald and Hugh, 326 McRae, Elizabeth, r62 Madison County, 2, 8, 14, 20, 51, 73, 74, 80, 8r, 91, 96, 98, 99, roo, 136, 142, 144, 172, 177,220,269,276,277,279.280,284,320, 330, 342, 344 Madison, Robert Lee, 173-180 Marion, 33, 34, 40, 70, 265, 267, 275, 326, 332 Marshall, 14, r6, 51, II8, 129, 193, 326 Mars Hill College, 74, 93, 113, 128, 156, 157 Mars Hill, town of, r88, I 57, 199, 220 Martin, General James G., 12, 85 Martin, Muriel, 192 Mast, Mrs. Finley, I 8 8 Mead Corporation, 368 Mead, Martha Norburn, 222 Measles, 106 Medical Society, State, 103, 104, 107 Medford, Clark, 220 Medford, Wid, 169 Medicinal herbs, 66, 105, 348-350 Meiggs and Freeman Line, 53 Men, mountain, 62-65 Mental Health, Department of, I I 3 Merriman, Augustus S., 14, 15, 90 Methodist church, 71, 75-78 Methodist circuits, 75, 76 Methodist districts, 75, 77, 86 Methodist Episcopal, African, 37 Methodist Episcopal (northern), 32, 37, 76 Methodist Episcopal, South, 32, 37, 76-78, 86 Methodist Episcopal Zion, 32, 37 Methodist Protestant, 32, 37, 75-76, 78 Mica, 352 Miller, Helen Topping, 222 Miller, Col. John K., 9 Miller, Robert Johnson, 84 Miller, William, 34 Mills, 6r, 63, 292, 293 Mills River, 51, 294 Mining, 351-354 Minton, T.O., 287 Missionary Baptist, 73 Mitchell County, 3, 8, 20, 44, 45, 73, 79, 80, 82, g6, 104, 127, 137. 142, 149. 177. 193. 269,279.331,332,342,344.352,353.354 Mitchell, Dr. Elisha, 44 Mitchell Institute, I 57 Montanic Institute, 37, 129 Montezuma, 158 Montlove, 83 Montreat, 8 5 -86 Montreat-Anderson College, 86, 162 Moody, B. H., 197 Moore, Charles Augustus, 92 Moore, Governor Daniel Killian, 92, 99, 101, 115, 343 Moore, Frederick, 92 Moore, Hight C., 218 Moore, Robert L., 156 Moore, Mr. and Mrs. Walter, 86 Moore, Walter E., 52, 92, 175 Moore, Col. William, 92 Moravian Falls, 93 Moravian Falls Academy, 153 Mordecai, Dr. Alfred, II o, I II Morgan, Lucy, 164, r88, 189, 221 Morgan, Dr. and Mrs. Ralph, 197 Morgan, Dr. Rufus, 164, 187, r88 Morganton, 7, II, 25, 30, 33, 76, 83, 84, 88, 89,90,98, 103,112,114,131,132,153, 20~ 245,253,255,275.32~ 331 Morganton Academy, 153 Morley, Margaret, 215-216, 270 Morris, B. T., 34 Morrison, Governor Cameron, 183, 333 Moser, Artus, 233, 241 Moser, Joan, 236 Moses, Edward P., 173-174, 178 Mount Airy, I, ro, 326, 367 Mount Mitchell, r, 40-41, 373-374, 375-377 Mountain Baptist Assn., 72-73 Munday, Alexander, 54 Murchison's Black Mountain land, 42 Murphy, 56, 87,90,92, 157,164,258,285 Murphy Branch of the W.N.C. Railroad, 261 Macon County, 2, 20, 53, 8o, II3, 135, 136, 142,167,177,178,198,269,279,284,286, �Index 3!4. 325. 336, 342, 344 Murphy Institute, r 57 N antahala Gorge, 56 Nantahala National Forest, 314, 3I5, 3I6 Nantahala Range, 1, 54 National Forests, 3 I0-3 I6 Neighborhood Youth Corps, I49-I50 Nelson, D. B., I75 New Echota, Treaty of, 2I New Found Mountains, I Newland, William, 179, 180 New River, 93 Newspapers, 32, 37. 47, 53, 1 I7, 129, 245, 346 Newton, George, 79 Noble, M. C. S., J7I, 179 Nolichucky River, 45, I I7, rr8 Normal Schools, I66 Norris, Dr. amd Mrs. Henry, I I I North Carolina Fund, I49 North Carolina Methodist Conference, 76 North Carolina State Board of Health, II5 North Wilkesboro, r 77, 266, 326, 333, 367 Nursing education, r 1 l - 1 r 3 Nyc, Stuart, I98 Oberlin Home and School, 158 Oconaluftee River, 2I, 90, I99 O'Henry (William Sydney Porter), 2rr Old Fort, 30, 34, 214, 253, 257, 331 Olin Mathieson, I68, 363-364 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 299, 302 "Omie Wise," ballad, 70 Ore Knob Copper Mine, 353 Osborne, H. 0., 285 Our Lady of the Hills, 87 Out-Migration, 366, 369 Owens, Amos, 275 Pace, C. M., 34 Page, Frank, 336 Palmer, Col. William J., 9, I I Parris, John, 2I5 Patterson, town of, 90 Patterson Mill, I o Patterson, Rufus Lenoir, 88 Patterson, Samuel, 163 Patterson School, I63 Patton, Robert Logan, I 52- I 53 Patton, Sadie Smathers, 220 Peabody Fund, 128-129, I66, 167, r68 Peabody, George, 12~ Peabody Schools, 128- I 29 Pearson, Cam, 32 Pearson, James Larkin, 2I6-2I7 Pearson, Judge Richmond, 88, 9I, 298 Pearson, Richmond, son of the judge, 98-99, 298 Pease, Mr. and Mrs. Louis M., 158-159 Pell, Rev. R. P., So, 82 Penland, I63 Penland House, 45 Penland Pottery, r 98 Penland School, 164, I89, I92, 194, I97, 221 Phifer, Dr. Edw. M., rS-19, rr2, 220 Phillips, Aunt Susan, I87 Pigeon River, II7, II8, I29, 255 Pilot Mountain, 49 Pinchot, Gifford, 302-304 f 435 Pineola, 26 5 Pink Beds, 294 Pisgah, I29 Pisgah Forest, 262, 304 Pisgah Forest Pottery, I98 Pisgah National Forest, 3I4, 315, 3I7 Pisgah Range, I Plemmons, Levi, 36 Plumtree, I 39 Polk County, 3, 16, r8, 20, 33, 57, 58, 96, 136, !38, I42, !68, 26!,269,270,273,277. 279. 28I, 331, 342, 344 Poole, Maria, 22 I Populist Party (People's Party), 94, 96, 97, 132 Poultry and eggs, 286-287 Powell, William S., 22I Power, electric, 3 54-355 Power plants, municipal, 3 54-3 55 Presbyterian church, 32, 37, 7I, 78-82 Presbyterian, U.S., 79 Presbyterian, U.S.A., 37 Presbyteries, 79, So Presnell, Ed., I97 Price, Overton, 305, 306, 3 ro Pritchard, Jeter C., 91, 98, 99 Pritchard, Richard M., 99 Proffitt, Frank, 197, 223, 224, 23 I Purdom, Ed., I97 Quaker Meadows, I9, 32 Qualla Boundary, 2 I, 57 Qualla Reservation, 22 Quilting, 66 Radical, sec Republican Ravenscroft, Bishop John Stark, 83, 84 Ravenscroft School, 84-8 5 Ray, G. D., 40 Read, Opie Percival, 22 r Reagan House, 39 Reagan, Dr. James A., I09, I54 Reconstruction, I 7, 30, 90, 94, 95 Reed, J. H., 36 Reem's Creek, 259, 355 Reid, Christian (Frances Fisher Tiernan), 2II, 2I2 Republican Party, IS, I6, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, IOO, IOI, 123, I32, 333 Reynolds, Robert Rice, 98 Richland Institute, I 58 Richmond Hill Law School, 88 Riddle, Dr. J. B., I 12 Riddle, Dr.]. Iverson, I I 3 Ridgecrest, 86, 253, 267, 33I Roan Mountain, r, 45, 47, 129, 320 Robbins Brothers, Carolina Caribbean Corp. 368 Robbinsville, 56, 57, 8I, 90, I72, I73. 316 Robertson, Reuben, 308 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., I33 Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, ID7 Rogers, David, 178 Rutherford College, 91, 154 Rutherford County, 2, r6, 17, r8, 2I, 33, 57, 98, III, II3, I27, I42, I5I, I6I, 263,264, 269, 270, 279, 281, 286, 287, )29, 330, 33 I, 342,344 Round Hill Academy, 157 Round Knob, I69, 170 �436 / Index Rutherford, Griffith, 4 Rutherfordton, r, 2I, 57, 76, 84, r II, 254, 263, 265, 275. 326 Saluda, 261 Saluda Gap, 8, 3 5, 57 Sanford, Governor Terry, 145, 149 Sanitation Committee, State, II7 Scarlet fever, ro6 Schreiber, Virginia Bryan, 148 Schenck, Carl A., 274, 304-309 Schenck, Judge David, 22, 30-57 passim School of Forestry, 306-308 Scott, Governor Kerr Scott, 143, 341 Scroggs, Fred 0., 348 Sears, Dr. Barnas, 128 Sebartle, Patty, I48 Second Broad River, 57 Sevier, John, 4 Sharp, Cecil, 21, I65, 225, 226, 227, 232 Sharpe, Bill, 22 r Sharpe, Wallace, 14 Sharpe, Col. Wash., I4 Shotwell, Randolph A., 17, 37, 273, 294 Shuford, Abel A., 87 Sieber, Henry Alexander, 218 Silva Institute, r 57 Silvers, Frankie, 22S Silverstein, Joseph H., 262 Ski resorts, 393-394 Skiles, William West Slagle, Thomas, 54 Sleds, 293, 295 Sloan, J.B., 3 54 Sloop, Dr. Eustice H., 109, r 39 Sloop, Dr. Mary Martin, 109, 139, 200, 220, 333 Smallpox, ro6 Smather's Inn, 39, 5 r Smathers, John C., 39 Smiley,]. E., 129,130 Smith, R. P., 66, So Smokies, Great, 53 Snowbird Mountains, 90 Snyder Memorial Academy, Sr Social and Residential Communities, 403-404, 412 Sondley, Foster, 220 South Carolina Methodist Conference, 76 Southern Education Board, 133 Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, 190, 192 Sossamon, Leroy, 2rS South Hominy, 129 South Mountains, 21, 33, 57, 113 Spainhour, Noah, 293 Sparta, 4S, 92, r6r, r67, r6S Speculation, land, 350-351 Speculation Land Company, 57 Spruce Pine, 191, 264, 267 Stacy, Rev. A. G., 153 Stearns Schools, r 3S Stekoa, 53 Stephen, W. B., 198 Stephens, George, S7, 301 Stikeleather, J.D., 33 5 Stone, Mr. and Mrs. George, r S9 Stoneman, Major General George, S-12, S3, I 53 Stone Mountain Baptist Association, 74 Stone Mountain Pottery, r9S Stony Fork Baptist Association, 74 Strange, Robert, 207 Stream Sanitation Committee, State, rr 6 Street, Julia Montgomery, 22I Strike at the Baldwin Mill, 35S-359 Stringfield, Major W. W., 52 Stroup, H. M., 197 Sullivan County (now Tennessee), 2 Sumner County (now Tennessee), 2 Surry County, 2, 20, 4S, 72, 73, 76, 109, 136, 142,269,273,276,279,284,286,342,344 Sutton, Mrs. Orus, 19S Surles,]. B., I93 Swain County, 3, 20, 57, 75, So, 104, II3, I30, I42,279,2S4, 3I4,342, 344 Swain, Governor David Lowry, 89 Swannanoa, r6o, 286 Swannanoa Gap, 7, S6, 257 Swan Ponds, 32 Swepson, George, r6, 256 Sylva, 53, 157, 174, 326, 353, 36S Table Rock Academy, 153 Taliaferro, Hardin E., 207-20S Tallassee Power Co., 3 55 Tanning,262,266,293-294 Tait, S. C. W., 32 Tate, Robert, 4 Tate, Dr. W. C., r62 Tate, Samuel McDowell, 256 Tate, William, 4 Taylor, Rev. Fitch, 155 Taylor, Roy A., roo Teacher qualifications, 177 Teacher salaries, 135, 136 Technical institutes, 145 Tenella (Mrs. Bayard Clark), 218 Tennessee County (now Tennessee), 2 Thermal Belt, 2So Thomas, Col. William Holland, his legion of Indians and Highlanders, 7, 12 Thomas Col. William Holland, 21, 57, S9-90 Thomasson, Lillian, 129, 220 Thomson, Peter G., 30S Tobacco, 51, 276-2So Todd, 246, 266 Toe River (Estatoe), 44, r 17 Toms, Captain]. M., 34 Tourism, 371-397 Toynbee, Arnold, IS Transylvania County, 3, 20, 51, 75, 77, So, 83, 104, 113, J42, I 55, 178, 279, 287, 304, 314,342,344.363-365.366-367 Trap Hill, r58 Travel expenditures, 412-413 Truett, George, I 5 I, I 52 Tryon, I89,2II,220,26I,405 Tryon County, 2, 20 Tuberculosis, 105, r ro Tuckaseigee River, 53, 71 Tucker, Glenn, 220, Tucker, James M., S6 Tucker River, II7 Tufts, Edgar, S2, r 39, r 52 Tufts, Edgar Hall, r62 Turkey Creek Camp Ground at Leicester, 77 Tuscola High School, 143 Tuscola Institute, r 5S �Index / 437 Tusquitee Creek, 54 Tusquitee Range, I TVA, 287-289, 355 Typhoid, 104 Unakas, I Unicoi Mountains, 1 Union Grove Fiddlers' Convention, 225, 239, 240 Union League, 15 United Methodist Church, 78, 86 University of North Carolina at Asheville, II5, 147-148 Valdese, 245, 359-361 Valle Crucis, 83-84, 85, 90, 187 Valle Crucis School, 163 Valley River, 56 Valley Town, 90 Vance, Eleanor P., 187, 189 Vance, Dr. Robert B., 28 Vance, General R. B., IO Vance, Zebulon Baird, 30, 70, 90, 95, 98, 126, 205-2o6,z58,273,298 Vance, Zebulon B., birthplace, 410-41 I Vanderbilt, George Washington, 85, 298-307, 310 Vanderbilt, Mrs. George Washington, 187, 301 Van Noppen, Ina Woesterncyer, 221 Wages in industry, average, 366-367 Wainwright, Mary Taylor, 84 Wainwright, Rev. Richard, 84 Walker, Elmeda, I93 Walser, Richard, 218 W AMY, 149, 193 Warm Springs, see Hot Springs Warner, Charles Dudley, 27, 47, 152 Warren Wilson College, I 6o Washburn, Dr. Benjamin, 21, 105 Washburn, R. C., 56 Washington County, 2 Washington, Lawrence D., 130 Watauga Academy, see Appalachian State University Watauga County, 3, 7, 8, I 1, 14, 20, 45, 47, 48, 77, 79, So, 82, 84, 85, 89, II3, 121, 136, 140, 142, 149, 152, 167, '77, 179, 193, 229, 246,266,269,270,276,277.279,280,286, 287, 3}2, 333, 342, 344 Watson, Arthel L. ("Doc"), 23 I Watts, George R., 221 Waynesville, 51, 52, 54,106, II8, 129, 169, 173, 261,285, 317, p6, }38, 345. 354 Weatherford, Dr. Willis, 2 I 3-214 Weaver College, 37, 109, 154-155 Weaver, Dr. H. B., 109 Weaver, Dr.J. B., 293 Weaver, William Trotter, 354 W caverville, 40, 222, 345 Weaverville College, see Weaver College Weaving, 66-67 Webster, 52, 92, IOI, 129, I73, 174, 334 Weir, Weldon, 100, ror West, John Foster, 247 Western Baptist Association, 74 Western Carolina Center, I 13, II4, 13 I Western Carolina University, 145, 146, 147, 173-180, 183, 354, 368 Western Insane Asylum, sec Broughton Hospital Western North Carolina Associated Communities, 406-407 Western North Carolina Conference (Methodist), 78 Western North Carolina Correctional Center, r 14 Western North Carolina Land Company, 41 Western North Carolina Railroad, 16, 3o, 34, 51, 92, 126, 169, 174. 208, 214, 254. 255. 256, 258, 308 Western North Carolina Regional Planning Commission, IT 8 Western Union Academy, 151 West Jefferson, 252, 266, 284 West Liberty Baptist Association, 74 Westminster School, 161 Wetmore, Thomas C., 84 Whiteside Mountain, 53 White Sulphur Springs, Waynesville, see Haywood White Sulphur Springs Whittier, 53 Wiggins Family, 57 Wilcox Drug Company, 349-350 Wildacres, 87 Wiley, Calvin, 37, 121, 207 Wilkes Community College, II3 Wilkesboro, 7, ro, 48, 74, 84, 92, 93, 98, 266 Wilkes County, 3, 4, 8, 12, 14, 20, 48, 72, 74, 76, 93, 96, 130, 135, 142, 143, 153, I 58, l 77, ~20, 249. 266, 273. 279, 280, 286, 342, 344, 346 Williams, Deon Cratis Williams, 216, 23 r Williams, Jonathan, 34, 219 Wilson, Major James W., 33, 251, 258 Wilson, Dell, 222 Wilson, John McKarnie,Jr., 19 Wilson, "Big Tom," 42-+4 Winston, Dr. George P., I Ro Wiseman's View, 322 Wolfe, Thomas, 202-206 Wolfe, Tom, 249 Women, mountain, 65-67 Woodfin, Nicholas W., 8, 90 Woody, "Aunt Cumi," 187 Woody family, 197 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 207 World Methodist Center, 86 Yadkin Baptist Association, 72 Yale, Charlotte, 187, 189 Yancey County, 2, 3, 8, 20, 41, 45, 73, 79, 104, 136, 137, 142, 144, 149, 193,269,279, 284,331, 3}2, 342,344.352 Yancey Institute, 157 Yellow Fever, 106 York, Brantley, 154 Yount, John 214 �The rhododendron of Southern Appalachia, like the mountain people, developed from hardy stock. Both have come to grips with thin topsoil as well as cold winters and warm summers. Man and plant are proudly independent and evergreen. Design by Sherry Waterworth Dept. of Art Appalachian State University �about the authors ina faye woestemeyer van noppen (1906-1980) and john james van noppen iii (1906-1975) were professors of History and English, respectively, at Appalachian State Teachers College from 1947 to 1972. Ina taught history and was one of the campus’ earliest female professors with a doctorate. The Van Noppens co-wrote Daniel Boone, Backwoodsman: The Green Woods Were His Portion (1966) and Western North Carolina Since the Civil War (1973). Ina won the 1962 Thomas Wolfe Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Association for her Stoneman’s Last Raid. In 1973, the couple also won the 1973 Thomas Wolfe Award. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Appalachian Consortium Press Publications Description An account of the resource This collection contains digitized monographs and collections from the Appalachian Consortium Press. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Appalachian Consortium Press Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Appalachian Consortium Press Date Issued Date of formal issuance (e.g., publication) of the resource. June 1, 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <a title="Digital Scholarship and Initiatives" href="http://library.appstate.edu/services/digital-scholarship-and-initiatives" target="_blank">Digital Scholarship and Initiatives</a> Publication Digital Publisher Digital Republication Appalachian State University Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Western North Carolina Since the Civil War Description An account of the resource <span>No region has undergone more dramatic changes in the last century than Western North Carolina. Published in 1973, </span><em>Western North Carolina Since the Civil War</em><span> takes a look at mountain people in Western North Carolina and their uniquely structured economic, political, social, and cultural systems. The Van Noppens specifically explore different qualities of the mountain people such as their institutions, traditions, customs, and arts and crafts. Beginning with a dark period of social and economic disintegration after the end of the Civil War, the study traces the mountain peoples' lives from isolation to economic booms all while maintaining their traditions and cultural heritage.</span><br /><br /><a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=16HEVXp_k47cq3Up21GTY8PP15OvDuDL_" target="_blank">Download EPub<br /><br /></a><a title="UNC Press Link" href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469638317/western-north-carolina-since-the-civil-war" target="_blank">UNC Press Print on Demand</a> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Van Noppen, Ina Woestemeyer Van Noppen, John J. Subject The topic of the resource North Carolina--History--1865- North Carolina, Western--History Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Appalachian Consortium Press Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1973 Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant North Carolina Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF E-books Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed" target="_blank">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a title="UA 76 Appalachian Consortium records" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/9" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> UA 76 Appalachian Consortium records </a> Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. <a title="Appalachian Consortium Press Publications" href="https://omeka.library.appstate.edu/collections/show/82" target="_blank"> Appalachian Consortium Press Publications</a> Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1970s Civil War economics history Politics social issues WNC https://omeka-test.library.appstate.edu/files/original/21590601c7602863c245e838e46c1d0d.pdf 23db45688728d3d35b21e0667cf0b9b3 PDF Text Text ���UI ��JO mm «tw ����IN THE OF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv The of - I. . . . . .1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 The E. II. M. The M. and .................. 9 - of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33 and in Eller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 of on In . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 to Sir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 III. of ...............111 in - . . . . . . . . . 113 �Table The Big . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 . . . . . . . . . 161 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 IV. ............... the .....................211 Our . . . . . . . . . . 229 Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . 251 and ........ of Defense . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 The in - TV A ....... of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .295 V. the N. A for . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .307 A of or a . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 an . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 the of .............. ............365 ���the It is a to are care, it is of an The No the is a to No the in the in a of in to all fVi inof to That conlay are exof of the the of on Boldly, the ills of Ills and of on we can of by to on to the to The in to nore of the of to the the in is of all by in an for to to it is an is the can to ig- to a in TV.? £ N. of ��OF of the In this for the can be It is a for has of the of to the of the to or we to and a the the the of of the and Inof It to Is in the the and the or of that: "Hillbillies" are cents an acre. They for fifty Apathetic, won't try to situation. Poor health, lems. The the the prob- of the or culture. the a in the A world. as to the to of the to of the as of the of the ad™ as �2 Colonialism in Modern America Lack of adequate capital and programs to stimulate growth result in a lagging regional economy. There are too many people for the resources. Lack of incentives for investment and lack of skilled labor place the area in a poor competitive position. These explanations lead to programs to improve transportation, supply inducements for development, facilitate migration, provide technicians and agents who will encourage modernization and bring in more industries. The perspective which we select examines the process through which dominant outside industrial interests establish control, exploit the region, and maintain their domination and subjugation of the region. Appalachia is a good example of colonial domination by outside interests. Its history also demonstrates the concerted efforts of the exploiters to label their work "progress" and to blame any of the obvious problems it causes on the ignorance or deficiencies of the Appalachian people. We believe that there are peoples all over the world who have experienced this sort of "development" and consequently live in conditions similar to those found in the mountains. Thus, they can easily identify with the process described in this book as the colonization of Appalachia. Just as exploitation is not new, the attempt to understand and explain that process as Colonialism is also not new. Richard Drake in his comments on regional historiography (Jack and Clio in Appalachia. Appalachian Notes, Volume 4, No. 1, 1976, pp. 4-6) traces the use of the Colonialism interpretation to writers in the Labor Movement in the 1890's and the Populist Movement. In the 1930's in the midst of labor unrest in the region, such writers as Theodore Dreiser and Malcolm Ross focused on the outside ownership and exploitation of the area (Malcolm H. Ross, Machine Age in the Hills, New York: Macmillan, 1933, and National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932). Drake saw the colonial interpretation continued through the reform movements which arose in the 30's and crystallized in such leaders �Introduction 3 and organizations as Don West, Myles Morton, and the Highlander Folk School. The value of the Internal Colonialism Model lies in its ability to bring into focus issues of decision-making and control of everyday life that tend to be ignored in the analysis of area problems and consequently in public policy formulation. The other models describe many of the problems and conditions that are the result of domination and exploitation, but they fail to address these things as causal factors. As social scientists, we are seeking causes rather than descriptions (or justifications). Although we attempt to cover the Appalachian area and show that the exploitation takes many forms—from coal mining in West Virginia to tourism in North Carolina, from TVA development in Tennessee to educational development in Kentucky —there is a greater emphasis on the development of coal resources in Central Appalachia. Part of this is because the picture is so much clearer and the process more blatant in the coalfields. Partly it is due to the location of the editors. We feel that the colonial process can be used to explain many areas and situations throughout America where technological, industrial society has controlled the resources and people. We do not claim that we have presented the last word or that further analysis is not needed. We simply feel that this collection of articles presents a more realistic picture of Appalachia and its problems than can be garnered through the other perspectives. Some may reject this type of analysis as producing despair and depression since the "enemies" or causes of the problems are seen as giant, multinational corporations in league with irresponsible government bureaucracies which are almost unbeatable forces. We regret this unintended result but feel it better to know the real source of the ailment than to waste effort treating the symptoms. There are frustrations and limitations in the use of the Colonialism Model. We may be guilty of stretching some of the analogies to compare the region with colonies dominated by another country. A very real difference is the ability of the dominated country to eventually throw the invaders out. Even in fantasy, if Appalachia could put up fences, take over resources, and operate them by the people of the area, one ques- �4 Colonialism in Modern America tions whether it is better to be dominated by homegrown enterprises than by New York or Philadelphia based corporations? Some of the younger scholars of the area who grew up using and documenting the Colonial Model are beginning to suggest that we need more sophisticated means to better understand the types of economic and political systems which place certain geographic regions or social classes in situations of dependency and powerlessness. The conditions found in the region are seen by these scholars as products of an advanced industrial, capitalist system. The articles by David Walls and Tom Plaut represent this new thrust to develop improved analytical approaches out of the Colonial Model. The way we define problems determines how we think about solutions. The Colonial Model implies that solutions to Appalachian problems lie in the radical restructuring of society with a redistribution of resources to the poor and powerless. But we need more research on how this can be done. How can structural change come about to develop a just society? We need a model which explains and examines the relation between economic power, political power, and cultural systems, how they change and how people's perceptions of their situation are formed and changed. Can political power be used to control economic power? We hope this exploration of one model can cause the development of a more precise theory which will lead to more understanding and solutions to the problems associated with living in a colony. We have divided this anthology into five sections. The first deals with a delineation of the Colonial Model and its application to Appalachian history and experience. The second section explains how the great wealth of the natural resources within the region came into the hands of "outsiders," men and corporations from places like Pittsburgh, New York, and London. Although coal is the resource most often used to demonstrate the process of resources theft, other profitbearing enterprises such as timber, cotton, and tourism have left their tragic mark on the people and the land. We have sought articles which would reflect the great breadth of the resources extraction process. Section III documents the ways in which outside interests �Introduction 5 sought to establish their enterprises in the region and the lengths to which they went to politically disarm and culturally discredit those who opposed them. The story told is not so much one of outright deception and swindles (although there were plenty of them) as it is a subtle and deadly process by which a people were convinced of their own worthlessness and thus, in many cases, gave up efforts to defend themselves and their ways of life. Section IV shows how the region has become increasingly vulnerable to the cultural and economic definitions, interests, and developmental whims of the larger society. It covers a wide range of activity from media, education, and music, to industrial domination of the political process and the Federal domination of the planning process. The final section is devoted to extending and improving the Colonial Model with an eye to having scholarly analysis lead to proposals for corrective social action. We are very grateful to the many contributors who so generously gave permission to use their articles, to the Appalachian Consortium Press who agreed to publish the collection, to Borden Mace who patiently encouraged us to complete the project, and to Don Anderson, Ron Eller, Tom Plaut, and staff at Mars Hill College who assisted with the final selection and organization. We wish to thank Ron Heise, who began the arduous task of editing, Eve Tackett, Susie Jones, Reva Shelton, and Wilma Coates, who provided the secretarial skills. The coeditors Don Askins and Linda Johnson completed the selecting, editing and organizing. Helen Matthews Lewis The River Farm Dungannon, Virginia ��HI sji SJf JO sf pUl 3I|J jo *W 3JB 3lp JO JOJ ai{i jo 9sn pui ^ 3tp f 0 dip JO B SB aip oj 1H1 "• ��by M. and E. Is a great In an of in of g reat poverty, In an has an in and a the to of of and of in a of to the In the of an a a the on the of a of the greedy Or is nf the M, is a & Is a nf in Ed is an in the at of �10 Colonialism in Modern America it just a ease of a region or area being "behind the times"? Before attempting to analyze the causes of these conditions, we will give a brief history and description of that portion of Appalachia which we are considering. Inside Central Appalachia That part of Appalachia with which we are concerned is the portion of the Allegheny-Cumberland mountains in which bituminous coal mining developed. Portions of southwest Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southern West Virginia form this area and are referred to by the Appalachian Regional Commission as Central Appalachia. The area was late being settled. Until the Revolution it was an area to pass through or skirt around. The area was inaccessible and offered few advantages to the farmer in comparison with the fertile fields of the Blue Grass. It was covered by extensive forests, the soil was poor, and there was little level land. Those seeking good farming went into the Blue Grass, the Tennessee valleys, or the West. There was a period of virtual isolation (80-100 years) in the 19th century. The early settlers and their families developed a way of life based upon subsistence agriculture and a social organization based upon kinship. It was a sparsely populated area of small landowners with isolated and dispersed settlements up and down the streams, since the bottom lands provided the only acreage suitable for intensive use. The land was rugged, the soil thin and unproductive, and the slope so steep as to justify the phrase "perpendicular corn fields." The traditional mountain culture which developed in this period has been described by John C. Campbell (1921), Horace Kephart (1913), and more recently by Jack Weller (1965) and Leonard Roberts (1959). Many changes occurred in the late 1800's and early 1900's with the coming of lumbering, railroads, and coal mining to the area. The first load of coal was shipped from southwest Virginia in 1892 and from Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1911. There were large and rapid population increases in the coal mining counties. The population of Wise County, Virginia, rose from 9,400 in 1890 to 47,000 in 1920. Individuals and families �The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case 11 migrated to the coal counties from the nearby farm counties of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. Some foreign born people were recruited into the coal fields, and Negroes from the South were contracted as laborers. To house and serve these workers and their families, the mining companies, lumbering interests, and railroads built "encampments" for the newcomers. These "camps" or "colliery towns'' were complete with company owned houses, stores, theaters, clinics, hospitals, churches, and schools. In addition to modifying the traditional residency patterns of the local population, a new class of people came to the area with the large coal companies. Chemists, engineers, doctors, and managers were brought into the area as representatives of urban culture. Most of them lived in the commercial and political centers which grew up at rail centers, courthouses, and trading villages. All of these changes resulted in a new system of social stratification hitherto unknown in the traditional mountain society. Until World War II three different social systems existed side by side in the coal fields of the Southern Appalachians: (1) the original rural mountain settlements, characterized by a pattern of isolated residence and subsistence farming; (2) the coal camps, primarily composed of homogeneous work groups which were socially segregated and economically dependent upon a single extractive industry; and (3) the middle class towns, which were socially and economically tied to eastern urban centers (Lewis 1969). After World War II, rapid and far-reaching changes occurred in the coal fields. Mechanization of the mines reduced the camp population to at least one-half the original. Between 1950 and 1960 there was a 62 percent drop in mining employment in the eastern Kentucky coal fields and a population loss during the 1950's equal to 41 percent of the 1950 population (Brown 1962). The 1960's showed a continuation of the outmigration from the area (Brown 1970). Despite the tremendous out-migration from the area, the rapid technological changes in a one-industry area left a large number of unemployed miners and destitute families. Along with mechanization the companies began either selling the coal camps' housing to individual miners or destroying the camps. Not only was there a decline in workers and camp population but the ownership of automobiles also made it �12 Colonialism in Modern America possible for the workers to commute to work. Despite the decline in mining employment, coal production has remained high and has boomed in the 1970's. This, however, has not altered some of the basic problems of poverty, unemployment, poor health, and meager education. In order to analyze the nature of the Appalachian problems, we will review two models which have been used to describe and explain the social conditions of the region. In an attempt to understand some social phenomena, social scientists often construct models of that phenomena. By constructing a model, we are able to evaluate better the framework used by a particular researcher and compare one model with another. Thus, after surveying a number of competing models of some phenomena, we may conclude that one model better explains or predicts that in which we are interested. Or we may be able to combine one model with another so that our understanding is increased. Models may be constructed in a number of ways. We do not have the space here to review strategies for model construction, but we can say something about types of models. Models may be general or specific, working or non-working. General models apply to a wider range of phenomena than do specific models. For example, the model of the atom shows a general configuration of atomic structure and does not apply to any one atom; on the other hand, a model of a Rolls-Royce automobile applies only to that specific automobile. A working model replicates the action of that which it represents, and it operates on the same principles or "laws," thereby helping us to explain or understand the process of interrelationships among the various parts that make up the model. Like a photograph, the non-working model "freezes" the action which it represents. The dimensions of models can be combined so as to produce a general working or non-working model, or a specific working or non-working model. If we are to evaluate the merit or effectiveness of a model, we must look for a model that is both general (explains more than just one thing and refers to a class of phenomena) and working (operates in accordance with the principles ruling that which it represents). In the remainder of this chapter we will review two models of Appalachia to determine what value they �The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case 13 have in helping us understand the questions we posed earlier. These models have not always been overtly formulated by persons writing about Appalachia. We have taken the liberty of formulating two models; The Culture of Poverty and the Colonialism models, which are representative of dominant perspectives held by those interpreting Appalachia. Perhaps the most widely assumed model applied to Appalachia is the Culture of Poverty model. Valentine (1968) describes this model as a "Difference" or "Deficiency" model. This model involves describing the sub-culture of the Southern Appalachians and comparing it with the Greater Society. The accounts describe the customs, values, and style of life in a socio-historical tradition. A number of studies have assumed such a model (Weller 1965; Pearsall 1959, 1966; Stephenson 1968; Ford 1965; Ball 1968; Lewis 1968). These studies vary in the degree to which they emphasize the traits as "positive" or "functional" adaptations or as "pathological," disorganized, defeating value systems (Ball 1968). Some emphasize the subcultural traits as obsolete as indicated by such terms as "Yesterday's People" (Weller 1965), "Contemporary Ancestors" (Williams 1966), or "Arrested Frontier Culture" (Cressey 1953). Lesser (1970) finds that most sub-cultural descriptions emphasize only the dramatic and destructive traits of Appalachia (e.g., traditionalism, fatalism) and emphasize the Appalachian people as passive and apathetic carriers of their culture. Henighan (1970), in comparing Weller and Stephenson, finds that Stephenson emphasizes a more "positive" view of Appalachian values. Stephenson (1968) uses the term "contentment" as contrasted to Weller's (1965) term "fatalism." In an insightful essay, Roach and Gursslin (1967) evaluate the usefulness of the Culture of Poverty model. They suggest that much of the confusion about the culture of poverty is not with the notion of poverty but with the idea of culture. Most researchers begin with the assumption that such a sub-culture exists and then proceed to fill in its description. But culture is more than just description; culture refers to a set of normative patterns that emerge through a group's coping with its environment. Furthermore, the content of this culture must be transmitted from one generation to another. Much of the descriptive material about Appalachia has emphasized a somewhat stilted �14 Colonialism in Modern America rudimentary set of normative regulations with little concern for the content of what is transmitted from one generation to another. The assumption is that middle-class or dominant American values are not transmitted in Appalachia. A more pointed comment on the Culture of Poverty model concerns the purpose served by the model. "If the purpose is explanation, what is to be explained: group life, personality processes, deviant behavior, the origins of poverty, or the perpetuation of poverty?'' (Roach and Gursslin 1967, 386). If we are concerned with the causes of poverty, we must view it differently than if we are concerned with the effects of poverty. In the former case, we are concerned with the factors which led to those behaviors described as belonging to those in the culture of poverty. In the latter case, we want to know how these behaviors are transmitted from one generation to another. Description answers neither of these questions. There is little question about poverty in Appalachia. If we use income as a criterion, we find that the area of Appalachia which we are dealing with has a mean income of less than onehalf that of the remainder of the United States. If we use health as a factor, we find that only five of the 60 counties have infant mortality rates lower than the national average; in 34 counties the rate is 20 percent higher than the national rate. The tuberculosis rates in some parts of the area are 10 times the national average. And in 25 percent of the counties there are fewer than 30 physicians per 100,000, as compared with 139 per 100,000 in the United States as a whole. If we use education as a criterion, we find educational attainment is significantly lower than the remainder of the United States. Seventy percent of the adult population have completed fewer than eight years of schooling. If we turn our attention to housing, we find that the rate of construction is only two-thirds that of the national average, and only 33 percent of the housing is sound and is equipped with plumbing. Thus, by almost any standard, the level of living in this area is sub-standard, i.e., at the poverty level. None of the studies using the Culture of Poverty model tell us why these conditions prevail. And none of these studies inform us why these conditions cause certain values, norms, or behaviors among the people. One could dismiss all of this as nothing but academic folly if it were not for the fact that those �The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case 15 persons and agencies concerned with relieving the above conditions often accept the Culture of Poverty model. They focus on the values of the Appalachian and say that these must be changed. This is almost like saying that one needs to stop the bleeding when an artery is severed. However, the application of a band-aid to such a wound disregards the cause of the bleeding in very much the same way that programs designed to change values often disregard the roots of such values. We do not advocate discarding the Culture of Poverty model when such models (1) make clear what it is they are studying, (2) are concerned with both cause and perpetuation, and (3) do not confuse description with analysis. An alternative approach to the Culture of Poverty model is the Colonialism model. This model has also been called the Exploitation model (Valentine 1968). Lesser (1970) and other so-called radical critics of the Culture of Poverty model follow this approach. Lesser states: "Essentially, their [Culture of Poverty proponents] argument is that the under-development of the region is a function of Appalachian character rather than the exploitative conditions institutionalized in the region/' With the Exploitation model, however, one describes the Appalachians as a subsociety structurally alienated and lacking resources because of processes of the total economic political system. Those who control the resources preserve their advantages by discrimination. The people are not essentially passive; but these "subcultural" traits of fatalism, passivity, etc. are adjustive techniques of the powerless. They are ways by which people protect their way of life from new economic models and the concomitant alien culture. Lewis and Knipe (1970) emphasize certain of these values among Appalachians as reactions to powerlessness; they describe the socio-economic situation as "peasant-like." There has been a growing interest in using this model to describe the social and economic conditions of the Southern Appalachians and to declare the region a Colonial Empire. Harry M. Caudill, in Night Comes to the Cumberlands, calls the Appalachians "the last unchallenged stronghold of Western colonialism." This is not a new claim. C. Vann Woodward (1951) characterizes the whole South as a colony suffering from absentee ownership and economic exploitation. Woodward �16 Colonialism in Modern America places the Southern Appalachian colonialism in this context: As the 19th Century drew to a close and the new century progressed through the first decade, the penetration of the South and the Southern Appalachians was begun by Northeastern capital and is continuing at an accelerated rate. The Morgans, Mellons, the Rockefellers sent their agents to take charge of the region's railroads, mines, coke furnaces and financial corporations. (Woodward 1951) A systematic account of colonialism has been undertaken by Blauner (1969). In reference to the American Negro he makes a distinction between classical colonialism and internal colonialism. The basic difference between these two is that in classical colonialism the colonizer moves in from outside, whereas in internal colonialism the colonizer brings in those colonized. He defines classical colonialism as *'domination over a geographically external political unit, most often inhabited by people of a different race and culture; when this domination is political and economic, the colony exists subordinate to and dependent upon the mother country" (1968, 395). Blauner further distinguishes colonization as a process and colonialism as a system of relationships that exist between those dominating and those in a subordinate position. It is the process of oppression rather than differences in political and economic structure which is most important. Blauner suggests four components of the colonization complex. First, colonization begins with a forced, involuntary entry. Those in the dominant position are not invited guests. Second, the impact on culture and social organization is greater than we would expect through cultural contact and acculturation. There follows, soon after the entry of the colonizer, rather rapid modifications in values, orientation, and the way of life of the colonized. Third, colonization involves a relationship by which members of the colonized group tend to be administered by representatives of the dominant group. And fourth, there exists a condition of racism, "a principle of social domination by which a group, seen as inferior or different in terms of alleged biological characteristics, is exploited, controlled and oppressed socially and psychically by a superordinate group" (1969, 396). �The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case 17 If these relationships characterize the colonization process, what accounts for the colonized being colonized? Blauner suggests that the main source of domination comes from technological superiority. Those being colonized have resources, natural or human, which are useful to the colonizer. If these resources can be harnessed, the technological superiority of the colonizer is further enhanced, thereby increasing the degree of superiority. Thus the resources of the colonized perpetuate the colonization process. The Colonialism model shows somewhat more promise when applied to the Appalachian situation than the Culture of Poverty model. Blauner makes it clear what he is studying^ domination. He accounts for the cause and perpetuation of the condition, and because he is concerned with processes he goes beyond mere description. The question now is what information do we have to substantiate the applicability of this model in the Appalachian case. If the model "fits," we should be able to show how colonialism came to the mountains, how it is perpetuated, and, finally, what consequences it has had upon the local culture. Colonialism and Country Folks We have already touched upon the beginnings of coal mining in the Southern Appalachians. When the outside colonizers came to the Appalachians in the latter part of the 19th century, they found a society approximating an Asian or African country in its economic foundations. The outside speculators bought land, mineral, and timber rights from illiterate, simple mountain farmers. One important consequence of mining was that it did not open up the mountains. The isolation of the area went beyond just physical isolation; it now included social isolation. The inability of the indigenous population to cope with those representatives of the coal industry and the many fraudulent land deals that were made with the local people stand as bold evidence of antagonistic relationships.1 A survival of this early relationship is found in the "broad form" deeds that have been supported by the Kentucky courts. These deeds included "all minerals and metallic substances and �18 Colonialism in Modern America all combinations of the same," and they give the unconditional right to remove them by any method "deemed necessary or convenient." This stipulation has allowed companies to strip or surface mine land in the face of strong opposition by the land owners who had sold only the "mineral rights" many years before. The state has used the broad form deeds to support positive legal action against landowners who have attempted to block mining operations. Several cases have made the news in the past few years. Widow Combs placed her body in front of the dozers and ended up in the Knott County jail. Conspiracy charges were brought against Appalachia Volunteers and Southern Conference Education Fund workers who helped Jink Ray and other local landowners successfully stop stripping operations. Although many writers on Appalachia speak of the outside control of the wealth, the degree and extent to which this is true has been only slightly and sporadically documented. There are no systematic, thorough studies of the land and mineral ownership of the region. This "oversight" itself might be considered "evidence" of the protection which is provided colonizers. Even the Appalachian Regional Commission, after a number of years of data collection and analysis of various aspects of Appalachian poverty and economic potential, has only lately turned its attention to the Central Appalachian area, first with a study of capital resource and a proposed study of land and mineral ownership and taxation (Appalachian Regional Commission 1969). One must go to the "radical" student or "movement" publications or to the Bureau of Mines statistics to find any studies or documentation of such things as coal production. Kirby (1969), in a study of the tax records of eleven major coal producing counties in eastern Kentucky, found that 31 people and corporations owned four-fifths of east Kentucky's coal. It is estimated that 70 to 80 percent of the southwest Virginia minerals is owned by four or five large corporations. And David Walls (1969, 15) lists seven firms which produce one-third of the coal in Central Appalachia. More interesting is the fact that many of these "independent" companies are linked in corporate structures. One study (Barkan and Lloyd 1970) for a two-county area in southwest Virginia found a tightly linked chain of railroad men, industrialists, and financiers who own and benefit from the timber �The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case 19 and mineral wealth of the area. Diehl (1970) has traced some of the interconnections of ownership in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. These connections extend in some cases beyond the borders of America to such places as South Africa and to such diversified industries as electronic equipment, chemicals, oil, banks, and auto manufacturers. The absorption of coal companies by fuel and energy industries reflects the major changes in dominant industries in the United States in general. The early coal companies were controlled by shipping and railroads; later they were dominated by the steel and automobile manufacturers. Beginning in the 1960's and the "Energy Era," fuel and electrical powers began their present domination. Another indication of outside control of the area is seen by looking at taxation and economic development. David Brooks talks of the role of the coal industry in regional development.2 He points to the limited ability of mining to provide economic development in a region. Unlike manufacturing or industries in which materials are fabricated or value is added through a production process, mining processes add little value and do little to stimulate other types of economic activities. Since mining is immobile, fixed in space, and limited to its one product, and since the work is arduous and dangerous, it must develop means of attracting or controlling labor. It is advantageous for coal mining to operate in isolation without competing companies. The characteristics of mining lead to a oneindustry area with labor tied to the one industry and little development outside the extraction of the minerals. This also leaves no development when the minerals are gone (McKelvey 1968). Without intervention, mining itself tends to develop certain exploitative or colonial characteristics. Resources generated by coal mining for the local area are meager. In other industries surplus is used for capital investments, which creates new corporations, associations, and other businesses, and develops a middle-stratum of technicians and specialists. This does not happen with coal mining. Except for wages paid to workers and local taxes paid to the area, coal mining offers little. At one time large numbers were �20 Colonialism in Modern America employed in the mines of the area. In 1932 there were 705,000 miners; in 1940 there were 439,000 miners; and today there are only 132,000 miners (Coal Data Book 1968). The mechanization of coal mining and the resulting decline in mining employment in the Southern Appalachians in the 1950's resulted in a wholesale migration from the area and a high degree of unemployment which continues into the 1970's. In Virginia there are still 8,862 miners in a six-county area. Coal mining is still the main source of employment, accounting for approximately one third of the total labor force. The coal companies paid $56,361,577 in wages in 1968. During the same year, the area produced 36,865,703 tons of coal which, if valued at $4.50 a ton, would total $165,956,000 (Virginia Department of Labor and Industry 1968). The total taxes paid to the area are not known. But one can draw some conclusions from the records of one company. This company in 1967 employed 448 men and mined approximately 2,500,000 tons of coal in four mines. Wages, if all the men worked full time, would have been approximately $3,240,000; royalties to the corporation owning the mineral rights to the land @$.142 per ton would amount to $360,000; and 40 cents a ton to the United Mine Workers' Health and Welfare Fund would amount to $1,000,000. The landholding company and the mining company paid $207,533 in county taxes in 1968. This amount represents taxes on land under development, land not under development, buildings, and equipment. In addition to the four mines, land was leased for stripping, augering, and several truck mine operations. The total outlay for wages, royalties, and taxes was $3,807,533. The value of the coal at $4.50 per ton was $11,128,000. This leaves a difference of $7,320,467. The amount of taxes paid, although small in comparison to gross income, represents 13.5 percent of the tax income for the county in which the company has its operations. Despite their resources, the coal mining counties generate a smaller proportion of the total revenue than the counties in the rest of the Appalachian area. The corporation having the mineral rights mentioned above is probably the most profitable in America. According to its 1968 Annual Report it netted 64 percent of gross and paid dividends of 40 cents out of each dollar received (Penn Virginia Corporation Annual Report, 1968). Harry Caudill (1968) reports the same corporation as netting 61 percent of gross and �The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case 21 paying 45 cents on each dollar received in 1964. He compares it with General Motors which reported a profit of 10.2 cents from each dollar received and paid a dividend of five cents. Caudill claims that this corporation is characteristic of other mineral-owning corporations in the area. Depletion and depreciation allowances give coal companies a very favorable position. Depletion for coal mined is based on the cost of the mineral properties and estimated recoverable tonnage. In some cases the depletion allowances is greater than the taxes on the minerals and the land. Although the original purchases of most of the mineral lands were made before 1900 at 30 cents to $1.00 an acre, the depletion is figured on the last price paid. When lands change hands, even through a subsidiary, the new cost is the basis for the depletion. This is figured as the percentage of the cost of the land which is mined during the year. Kirby (1969) points out that this is an incentive to sell. An acre bought for 50 cents can be sold in a year of mining for $5,000, thereby increasing the cost depletion allowance considerably. Another concession to coal companies is the tax on mine equipment and machinery. In Virginia they are taxed at only 10 percent of their value, while the equipment of all others, belonging either to individuals and/or businesses, is taxed at approximately one-third of its value. Here also, resale to subsidiaries can make this even lower for coal companies. A leasing company can sell a $100,000 machine to a mining company which it controls for $10,000; then the mining company will pay tax on 10 percent of that or $1,000. Caudill (1966) reports a similar situation in Kentucky. Through resale to subsidiaries, mining machinery worth $75,000 is valued at $3,000; taxes are less than a miner pays on the automobile which he drives to work to operate the machine. Blizzard (1966) reports taxes low in West Virginia because of the influence of the coal industry. West Virginia has a gross sales tax regardless of profit or loss, but coal companies do not pay on sales made at out-of-state markets, thus excluding most of the coal sales. Machinery and supplies used for coal mining are also exempt from sales tax. In line with the general tendency of colonists to be exploitive, we find that public spiritedness on the part of coal operations is rare in the area. Coal companies in Virginia are �22 Colonialism in Modern America suing the counties, claiming that assessing 'land under development" at a differential rate is in fact a form of severence tax on mined coal which is unconstitutional. Most of the remarks concerning civic responsibility made by coal company representatives sound like turn-of-the-century rugged capitalism. When asked about decaying coal camps, burning slag heaps, or disabled and unemployed miners, coal company executives are heard to say that they have no responsibility to the area or the people. Their responsibility is to mine coal as cheaply and efficiently as possible and to make a profit for the company and the stockholders. They provide employment and housing when needed and get food stores when necessary to hold employees; they continue these as long as they are necessary to keep workers or are profitable to the company. Even one of the most public-spirited executives of a large mining company said that the decision to begin strip mining was made because it was "the logical thing, cost wise" (Trillin 1969). This same executive has been quoted in the Mountain Eagle and with great candor in the NET film Rich Lands, Poor People: "If there is something wrong with what we are doing in Eastern Kentucky, then there is something wrong with the country." The condition of racism associated with the Colonialism model is well illustrated in Appalachia. Memmi (1967) points out that it is not only the colonizers but the colonized who go into businesses that engage in this practice. In the region one finds that the smaller independent coal operators are even more conservative in their political and economic ideology than the outsiders. The Independent Coal Leader claims to represent the small operators; its contents reflect a general negative evaluation of the local population who are unemployed. It has also taken rather dramatic stands against any individual or organization attempting to question the coal industry and its practices. Most of these small operators are dependent upon the larger companies for leases or money for equipment or coal sales facilities. A number of local millionnaires have emerged in the area through strip mining, the selling of equipment, and truck mining. It is interesting to observe how many of these persons make their money and then retire to Florida. Perhaps Florida serves as the "homeland" for the native who joins the colonists. The natives who become colonizers of their own people must protect themselves by giving an even more disparaging �The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case 23 evaluation of the people than the outsider. While the outsider may become interested in the ways of the natives—collecting quilts, mountain folk tales, and music—and speak with appreciation about mountain culture, the native exploiter is more likely to denigrate his own, to speak of laziness and "sorriness," or to speak negatively of a "certain class" of people, especially those on welfare or those who are unemployed. The native colonizers recount stories of the untrustworthiness and unreliability of their workers. Since these small operators often pay even less than minimum wages, they find themselves in competition with welfare programs. This is not a new pattern. General John Daniel Imboden was one of the earliest "developers" of the area. In 1880 he bought 47,000 acres of mineral lands in Wise County, Virginia. Later, he bought 21,000 acres for only 35 cents an acre for "certain gentlemen of large means" who were officials of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (Henson 1965). A list of property made in May, 1880, reveals that Imboden and his son owned one-sixth interest in over 100,000 acres in Wise County. Imboden purchased land, built the railroad into the coal fields, and later was a lobbyist in North Carolina for the coal interests. After a stint at the state capital in Raleigh he wrote about the elegant people he was meeting. He said he told them about Wise County and "how nice it was. . . and interested them so much that when our road is built they are coming out to see for themselves. They think it must be delightful to see and mingle with such primitive people" (Henson, 7). One test to determine whether colonization exists is to see whether the colonists utilize the same services they provide for the colonized. The colonizers generally distrust such services in Appalachia, especially local doctors and local hospitals. Local medical personnel are mistrusted because they provide services for miners or country people and therefore inadequate service for they, too, are opportunists or exploiters. A local hospital administrator resents the fact that members of the local board travel 100-300 miles eastward to see "good doctors" or obtain "good medical services" because the "coal camp doctors" are not as good. Other local services and professionals who stay in the area are denigrated. The opinion is that they are no good or they would go elsewhere. Fannon (1963), in "Dying Colonialism," an essay about the native's attitude toward available medical �24 Colonialism in Modern America services, points to the native's distrust of local medicine, and sees it as an agent of the colonists. Perhaps the judgment is true. The fantastically poor medical service provided in the early days of coal camps in the Appalachians has been documented (Boone 1947). Today, coal company doctors often refuse to admit the existence of pneumoconiosis or "black lung," and one company doctor was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates and succeeded in getting the disease removed from the Workman's Compensation. Company doctors are said by many miners to be reluctant to report injuries or to diagnose pneumoconiosis in order to protect the company's insurance rates. But they are likely to diagnose it when the person is seeking employment in order to keep the company from "getting stuck" with an already disabled miner. To continue with examples of conformity between the realities of Appalachian life and the Colonialism model would be pointless. It cannot be disputed that the coal interests came into the region "uninvited," that cultural patterns changed as a result of this intrusion, and that the area is controlled by representatives of the industry. The fact that racism exists to perpetuate this pattern has been illustrated. Since these conditions exist, it would appear that any recommendations for change should take these factors into consideration. Changing the values of Appalachians will not change the system of colonialism nor will knowledge of the situation. Both Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski suggest that we must know something about those who were to benefit from Western colonialism (Harris 1968, 514-567). But they are careful not to question the motives of the British colonizers. Unfortunately, much ethnography has been carried out under colonial conditions; and, in a way, the anthropologist has become as much a colonizer as those having economic and political interests in an area. We tend to study those who resist the least, and colonized peoples are powerless to resist our intrusion into their culture. While the anthropologist often becomes the native's advocate, he may not wish to upset those conditions which enable him to continue his research. "Moderation, compromise and civil service decorum are the ethical bases for the aspiring 'practical anthropologist' " (Malinowski 1945, 161). �The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case 25 Future Prospects In looking at the two models we find differences in responses to the conditions in Appalachia. Those who follow the deficiency or difference approach (the Culture of Poverty model) work to help and change people. Their object is to change the values of the poor and assimilate them into the middle class or the "greater" culture. Various programs of social work, education, and psychiatry are designed to change attitudes, to motivate, and to assimilate. Those who follow the exploitation or colonialism model emphasize the need to change the structure of society. They advocate the redistribution of goods and resources to give power to the poor. If colonized peoples always rebel, then we must wait and see what happens in Appalachia. Blauner (1967) attributes the revolt of Blacks in America to their colonized position, and Moore (1970) uses the same model to explain the rebellion of Mexican-Americans. Tom Gish, editor of the Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky, talks about colonialism, outside exploitation of the wealth, and the various government programs for amelioration. Although outside corporations still exploit the resources, he feels that the period of blatant colonial control and local domination is past. The coal companies can continue to mine the minerals through control over a few politicians, state courts and lawyers, and they can control labor through collusion with the United Mine Workers. In the meantime, they can ignore and leave behind the many social problems resulting from technological change: illness, injury, powerlessness, and deprivation. These will be handled, along with polluted streams and devastated land, by federal government programs. The early war on poverty programs tried to create political action; such action was frightening to the local power structure and to the corporate interests. These programs have been co-opted or dropped. The focus is now on economic development, assistance, and control. Regional offices of Health, Education and Welfare, of Labor, of the U.S. Corps of Engineers, of the Office of Economic Opportunity, of the Departments of Agriculture and Interior funnel in programs of "assistance" through regional economic planning and development organizations. Gish finds these regional organizations developing more and more like the Office of Indian Affairs, i.e. to control the natives. Perhaps this type of action is a latter stage of colonialism in which those who are left-over, �26 Colonialism in Modern America the land and the people, are now wards of the government, living on an Appalachian Reservation. NOTES ^Warren Wright, Burdine, Kentucky, has researched early titles and land transfers in parts of eastern Kentucky. He finds many cases of fraudulent and illegal leases and ownership. ^David Brooks, former chief economist, Bureau of Mines, in talks to the Appalachian Seminar, Clinch Valley College, January 1970. �The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case 27 REFERENCES CITED Appalachian Regional Commission 1968 Research Report No. 8, Preliminary Analysis for Development of Central Appalachia. Washington, D.C. 1969 Research Report No. 9, Appendix C, Capital Resources in the Central Appalachian Region. Cheechi and Co., Washington, D.C. Ball, Richard A. 1968 "A Poverty Case; The Analgesic Subculture of the Southern Appalachians" American Sociological Review, 33:6 (December), 885-895 Barkam, Barry and R. Baldwin Lloyd 1970 "Picking Poverty's Pocket" Article One, 1, 2 (May), 21-29 Blauner, Robert 1969 "Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt" Social Problems (Spring), Vol. 16, No. 4, 1969, 393-408 Blizzard, William C. 1966 "West Virginia Wonderland" Appalachian South (Summer) Boone, Joel T. 1947 A Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Interior Brown, James S. 1962 Eastern Kentucky Resource Development Project, Lexington, University of Kentucky 1970 First Look at the 1970 Census Mountain Life and Work (JulyAugust), 4-8 �28 Colonialism in Modern America Campbell, John C. 1921 The Southern Highlander and His Homeland New York: Russell Sage Foundation Caudill, Harry 1962 Night Comes to the Cumberland^ Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1966 "Poverty and Affluence in Appalachia: How Absentee Ownership in an Extremely Rich Land Produced a Remarkable Poor People" Appalachian South Pipestem, West Virginia (Spring) 1968 "Appalachia: The Dismal Land" In Jeremy Larner and Irving Howe, ed., Views From the Left New York: William Morrow, 264-273 Cressey, Paul F. 1949 "Social Disorganization and Reorganization in Harlan County, Kentucky" American Sociological Review, XIV, 3 (June), 389-394 Diehl, Richard 1970 "Appalachia Energy Elite: A Wing of Imperialism?" People's Appalachia (March) 1970 "How International Energy Elite Rules" People's Appalachia (April-May) Fanon, Frantz 1967 A Dying Colonialism New York: Grove Ford, Thomas R. 1965 "The Effects of Prevailing Values and Beliefs on the Perpetuation of Poverty in Rural Areas" Problems of Chronically Depressed Rural Areas North Carolina University: Agriculture Policy Institute 1965 "Value Orientations of a Culture of Poverty: The Southern Appalachian Case" Working with low-income families, American Home Economics Association, Washington, D.C. Harris, Marvin 1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory New York: Thomas Y. Crowell �The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case 29 Henigham, Richard 1970 Remarks at People's Appalachian Research Collective Conference Huntington, West Virginia Henson, Edward L. 1965 General Imboden and the Economic Development of Wise County 1880-81 Historical Society of Southwest Virginia (February 6-8) Kephart, Horace 1913 Our Southern Highlanders New York: MacMillan Kirby, Richard 1969 "Kentucky Coal: Owners, Taxes, Profits: A Study in Representations Without Taxation" Appalachian Lookout 1,6 (October), 19-27 Knipe, Edward E. and Lewis, Helen M. 1969 "The Impact of Coal Mining on the Traditional Mountain SubCulture: A Case of Peasantry Gained and Peasantry Lost" A paper read at the annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society, New Orleans, Louisiana Lesser, Roger 1970 "Culture: Toward Tomorrow's People" People's Appalachia, No. 1 (March) Lewis, Helen M. 1968 "Subcultures of the Southern Appalachians" The Virginia Geographer 3,1 (Spring), 2-3 McKelvey, V. E. 1968 "Appalachia: Problems and Opportunities" Mineral Resources of the Appalachian Region, Geological Survey Professional Paper 580, Washington, D.C. Malinowski, B. 1945 The Dynamics of Culture Chicago: An Inquiry Into Race Relations in Africa, P. Kaberry, ed., New Haven: Yale University Press Memmi, Albert 1965 The Colonizer and the Colonized Boston: Beacon �30 Colonialism in Modern America Moore, Joan W. 1970 "Colonialism: The Case of the Mexican-Americans" Social Problems 71,4 (Spring), 463-472 National Coal Association 1968 Bituminous Coal Facts Washington, D.C. 1968 Coal Data Book Washington, D.C. Pearsall, Marion 1959 Little Smokey Ridge Alabama Press 1966 University of Alabama: University of "Communicating With the Educationally Deprived" Mountain Life and Work (Spring), 3-11 Penn Virginia Corporation 1968 Penn Virginia Corporation Annual Report Roach, Jack L. and Gursslin, Orville R. 1967 "An Evaluation of the Concept 'Culture of Poverty5 " Social Forces 45,3 (March), 383-392 Roberts, Leonard W. 1959 Up Cutshin and Down Greasy Lexington: University of Kentucky Stephenson, John B. 1968 Shiloh: A Mountain Community Kentucky Lexington: University of Trillin, Calvin 1969 "U.S. Journal: Kentucky, the Logical Thing, Costwise" New Yorker (December 27), 33-36 Valentine, Charles A. 1968 Culture and Poverty Chicago: University of Chicago Press Virginia Department of Labor and Industry 1968 Annual Report �The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case 31 Walls, David 1968-69 Research Bulletins - issues of Appalachian Lookout Prestonsburg, Kentucky Weller, Jack 1965 Yesterday's People Lexington: University of Kentucky Williams, Jonathan 1966 "The Southern (June), 47-66 Appalachians" Craft Woodward, C. Vann 1951 Origins of the New South University Press Horizons, X-XVI, 3 Baton Rouge, Louisana: State ����33 II: of of the of by as it has is the in in of the the A of in at the as a and the points to the in the and the in and development. ag- of the in of left out of due to the in the for the He of a and es by the in "The in of by on for the life is a the the be of in a to Sir of of the is the of the lie the of the in of the of the Si in "The the U.S. is for the has the of He the and out the for in a re- of to in �m �IN AT A D. Kller ern and the off of our most a set the of the of the as the As to a to the the to the for the and and the of the in of the as Jr., and of the and in as a the in for of the in a as "a the by a of in at fit a of ffe is tit at has for alfor the a a of the at fit of of �36 Colonialism in Modern America the process of American historical growth. To the urban middleclass readers of Cosmopolitan, Harper's, and Atlantic Monthly, the apparent persistence of pioneer-like conditions in the mountains seemed to reflect not merely the normal patterns of rural life but "an earlier phase of American development preserved, like a mammoth in ice."3 Because metaphor was more interesting than reality, the Appalachian present came to be linked with the American past, and eventually the analogy was accepted as fact. By the turn of the century, according to historian Henry Shapiro, the idea that Appalachia was "a discrete ethnic and cultural unit within but not of America" had become a convention of the popular mind.4 For Americans of the Progressive period who had witnessed the passing of the western frontier, Appalachia became "the frontier we have left within," and the mountaineers were "our contemporary ancestors."5 Succeeding generations have periodically rediscovered and reinterpreted the region in the context of their own day, but the static image has remained the standard perception of mountain life. In 1913, for example, Horace Kephart found "our Southern highlanders. . .still thinking essentially the same thoughts, still living in much the same fashion as did their ancestors in the days of Daniel Boone. The progress of mankind from that age to this," he claimed, "is no heritage of theirs."6 James Watt Raine traveled the "land of saddlebags" in 1924 and again in 1942, and a decade later North Callahan made a similar journey into what he believed was the "happy" but "static society" of the Smoky Mountain country.7 With the outbreak of the war on poverty in the 1960's, the mountaineers became simply "Yesterday's People"—part of that "other America" of which Michael Harrington wrote.8 More recently, the rise of the new ethnicity and the counterculture movement have brought attention to the mountain people as just plain "down home folk," and a flourishing minor industry has developed to fabricate such oddities as dulcimers, quilts, log cabins and "Maw's Moonshine Hunie." Of late we have also seen the introduction of courses in Appalachian studies and the proliferation of symposia aimed at diagnosing the "unique" qualities of mountain life. But this revival of interest has done little to alter our traditional views. According to one well known student of the region, Appalachia can still be seen "as a vanishing frontier and its people as frontiersmen, suspended and isolated, while the rest of the country moves across the twentieth century. "^ Marooned on an island �Industrialization and Social Change 37 of hills, the mountaineer has seemed shut off from the forces which have shaped the modern world. He has lived, we are told, in a land "Where Time Stood Still."10 Arnold Toynbee may have offered the most callous assertion of this view when he suggested that the mountain people of the South were little better than barbarians. "They have relapsed into illiteracy and witchcraft/' he wrote. "They suffer from poverty, squalor, and ill health. They are the American counterparts of the latter-day white barbarians of the Old World —Rifis, Albanians, Kurds, Pathans, and Hairy Ainus." But whereas these latter seemed to be the belated survivals of an ancient barbarism, "the Appalachians/' Toynbee argued, "present the melancholy spectacle of a people who have acquired civilization and then lost it."11 Cast in the static role, mountain people have thus rarely appeared as conscious actors on the stage of American history, and almost never on center stage. They are acknowledged to exist somewhere in the background, as subjects to be acted upon, but not as people participating within the historical drama itself. As a result, our efforts to explain and deal with the social problems of the region have focused not on economic and political realities in the area as they evolved over time, but on the supposed inadequacies of a pathological culture which is seen to have poorly equipped mountain people for life in the modern industrial world. Having overlooked elements of movement and change that have tied the mountains to the rest of the American experience, we have blamed the mountaineers for their own distress, rather than the forces which have caused it.12 Blaming the victim, of course, is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Rather it is a misreading that takes international form. French intellectuals talk about the Alps, and Spanish intellectuals talk about the Pyrenees in much the same simple if condescending way that urban Americans talk about Appalachia.13 Indeed, all over the world the terms applied to rural people by urban people have implied either contempt and condescension, or—and this is the opposite of the same attitude— a romantic admiration for the simple, hardy virtues of rural life.14 Since the Southern mountains were among the most rural areas of eastern America, the Appalachian people have suffered exceedingly from this type of urban provincialism. �38 Colonialism in Modern America Ironically, it was during the same years that the static image was emerging as the dominant literary view that a revolution of dynamic proportions was shaking the very foundations of the mountain social order. In Appalachia, as in the rest of the country, the decades from 1880 to 1930 were years of transition and change. What had been in 1860 only the quiet backcountry of the Old South became by the turn of the century a new frontier for expanding industrial capitalism. The coming of railroads, the building of towns and villages, and the general expansion of industrial employment greatly altered the traditional patterns of mountain life and called forth certain adjustments, responses, and defenses on the part of the mountaineers. This transformation varied in scope and speed, but by the end of the 1920's few residents of the region were left untouched by the industrial age. The effects of this transition were large. For one thing, mountain agriculture went into serious decline. While the size of the average mountain farm was about 187 acres in the 1880's, by 1930 the average Appalachian farm contained only 76 acres, and in some counties the average was as low as 47 acres.15 This decline was universal throughout the region but was most pronounced in the coal fields and other areas of intense economic growth. Significantly, while the total number of farms increased during these years, the total amount of land in farms actually decreased almost twenty percent as a result of the purchase of farm properties by timber and mining companies and for inclusion in national forests and parks.16 Farm productivity and income also changed. While farm production had been the major (and usually the sole) source of income in 1880, by 1930 most mountain farms had become part-time units of production, and the major source of income had shifted to non-agricultural employment—mining, logging, carpentry, and other forms of public work.17 In Knott County, Kentucky, for example, the income per farm from farming in 1930 averaged only $215, while the income per farm from non-farm enterprises averaged over $342.18 In 1880 the mountains had been a major producer of swine in the South, but by 1930 swine production in the region had declined to only 39 percent of its former level.19 Such data suggests that the traditional image of the pre-industrial mountain farm must be altered, and that the small, marginal farm usually associated with �Industrialization and Social Change 39 the stereotyped picture of Appalachia was in fact a product of industrialization—that is, a more recent development not associated with the purported isolation of the region. Along with the decline of agriculture came subtle changes in demographic relationships as well. Whereas mountain society in the 1880's had been characterized by a diffuse pattern of open-country agricultural settlements located primarily in the fertile valleys and plateaus, by the turn of the century the population had begun to shift into non-agricultural areas and to concentrate around centers of industrial growth. Between 1900 and 1930, the urban population of the region increased four-fold and the rural non-farm population almost two-fold, while the farm population itself increased by only five percent.20 A few of the burgeoning urban centers were destined to be temporary communities, such as the big timber towns of Sunburst and Ravensford in the Great Smoky Mountains, but most were permanent structures which had a lasting impact upon mountain life. It is important to point out, moreover, that the majority of these new industrial communities were company towns. In fact, over six hundred company towns were constructed in the Southern mountains during this period, and in the coal fields they outnumbered independent incorporated towns more than five to one.21 This rising urban population provided a base for the emergence of a more modern political system in the mountains, one increasingly dominated by corporate interests and businessminded politicians. Where the traditional political order had relied largely on kinship, personal contacts, and a broad-based party structure, after the turn of the century the level of citizen participation declined, and the average farmer or laborer became isolated from the political process. As early as the 1890's, industrialists such as Stephan B. Elkins in West Virginia and H. Clay Evans in Tennessee had begun to gain control of the political organizations in the mountains and to turn the powers of state and local government toward the expansion of commerce and the exploitation of the region's natural resources.22 As a result, there emerged in Appalachia a contracted political system based upon an economic hierarchy—those who controlled the jobs also controlled the political system, and those who controlled the political system used their power to exploit the region's natural wealth for their own personal gain. This loss of �40 Colonialism in Modern America local political control naturally distressed many mountain people and plunged the region into prolonged industrial violence and social strife.*3 Behind this transition in political culture lay the integration of the region into the national economy and the subordination of local interests to those of outside corporations. Nowhere was this process more evident than in the concentration of large amounts of mountain land in the hands of absentee owners. Beginning in the 1870's, Northern speculators and outside businessmen carved out huge domains in the rich timberlands and mineral regions of Appalachia. By 1910 outlanders controlled not only the best stands of hardwood timber and the thickest seams of coal but a large percentage of the surface land in the region as well. For example, in that portion of western North Carolina which later became the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, over 75 percent of the land came under the control of thirteen corporations, and one timber company alone owned over a third of the total acreage.24 The situation was even worse in the coal fields. According to the West Virginia State Board of Agriculture in 1900, outside capitalists owned 90 percent of the coal in Mingo County, 90 percent of the coal in Wayne County, and 60 percent of that in Boone and McDowell Counties.25 Today, absentee corporations control more than half the total land area in the nine southernmost counties of that state.26 The immediate effect of this concentration of land holding was to dislodge a large part of the region's population from their ancestral homes. A few former landowners managed to remain on the land as sharecroppers or tenant farmers, and occasionally a family continued to Hve temporarily on the old homeplace, paying rent to absentee landlords.27 But a great number of the displaced mountaineers migrated to the mill villages and mining towns where they joined the ever-growing ranks of the new industrial working class. In the Cumberland Plateau, less than a third of those employed in 1930 remained in agriculture. The rest had moved to the mines or into service related jobs.28 Uprooted from their traditional way of life, some individuals were unable to reestablish permanent community ties, and they became wanderers drifting from mill to mill, from company house to company house, in search of higher pay or better living conditions. Most dreamed initially of returning to the land after a few years of public work, but the rising land values which ac- �Industrialization and Social Change 41 companied industrial development soon pushed land ownership beyond the reach of the average miner or mill hand. Caught up in the social complex of the new industrial communities, many mountaineers found themselves unable to escape their condition of powerlessness and dependency. By coming to a coal mining town, the miner had exchanged the independence and somewhat precarious self-sufficiency of the family farm for subordination to the coal company and dependence upon a wage income. He lived in a company house; he worked in a company mine; and he purchased his groceries and other commodities from the company store. He sent his children to the company school and patronized the company doctor and the company church. The company deducted rent, school, medical and other fees from his monthly wage, and under the prevailing system of scrip, he occasionally ended the month without cash income. He had no voice in community affairs or working conditions, and he was dependent upon the benevolence of the employer to maintain his rate of pay. Socially, if not physically, the working class mountaineer was more isolated in his new situation than he had been on the family farm, for industrialization introduced rigid class distinctions into the highland culture.29 Traditional status distinctions had always existed, but there were few economic differences within the rural population. With the coming of the industrial age, however, the dichotomy between employer and employed became overt. In the company town the miners lived in small dwellings in the hollow near the tipple, but mine superintendents often built palatial structures high on the hillside overlooking the town. 30 Surrounded by elegant trees and well-kept grounds, these homes clearly defined the operator's social rank. In some communities the railroad track literally divided the town in two, separating the more substantial residences of the managing class from the miners' shacks. The social gap between the classes increased, moreover, as managers and professional personnel developed life styles and formal institutions different from those of the working class. By 1930, therefore, most mountaineers whether they remained on the farm or migrated to the mill villages, timber towns, or coal camps, had become socially integrated within the new industrial system, and economically dependent upon it as �42 Colonialism in Modern America well. To say the least, this dependence was not on their own terms—that is to say, it was not a product of mountain culture but of the same political and economic forces that were shaping the rest of the nation and the western world. The rise of industrial capitalism brought to Appalachia a period of rapid growth and social change which those who hold to the static image have chosen to ignore. The brief prosperity brought on by the bonanza that was capitalism broadened the mountaineer's economic horizon. It aroused aspirations, envies, and hopes. But the industrial wonders of the age promised more than they in fact delivered, for the profits taken from the rich natural resources of the region flowed out of the mountains with little return to the mountain people themselves. For a relative handful of owners and managers the new order yielded riches unimaginable a few decades before; for thousands of mountaineers it brought a life of struggle, hardship, and despair. Considered from this perspective, the persistent poverty of Appalachia has not resulted from the lack of modernization. Rather, it has come from the particular kind of modernization that unfolded in the years from 1880 to 1930. Earlier in this paper I quoted at length from Arnold Toynbee. I would like to end with a quotation from a native mountaineer who found another kind of barbarism at work in the Southern mountains. Writing in The Hills Beyond, Thomas Wolfe lamented the tragic changes that had come over his beloved homeland in the years after Reconstruction. "The great mountain slopes and forests of the section," he wrote, "had been ruinously detimbered; the farm-soil on the hillsides had eroded and washed down; high up, upon the hills, one saw the raw scars of old mica pits, the dump heaps of deserted mines. . . It was evident that a huge compulsive greed had been at work: the whole region had been sucked and gutted, milked dry, denuded of its rich primeval treasures; something blind and ruthless had been here, grasped and gone. The blind scars on the hills, the denuded slopes, the empty mica pits were what was left. . . . Something had come into the wilderness, and left the barren land. "31 �Industrialization and Social Change 43 NOTES author is indebted to the Rockefeller Foundation for research support on this subject. ^See Henry David Shapiro, "A Strange Land and Peculiar People: The Discovery of Appalachia, 1870-1920*' (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1966), pp. 250 ff., and Gratis Dearl Williams, "The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1961), pp. 1605 ff. 3 Henry David Shapiro, "Introduction" to John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (Lexington, 1969), p. xxvi. ^"Shapiro, "A Strange Land and Peculiar People," p. v;see Shapiro's forthcoming monograph Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1977). ^Woodrow Wilson, "Our Last Frontier," Berea Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 2 (May, 1899), 5; William Goodell Frost, "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains, "Atlantic Mo nthly, 83 (March, 1899), 311. ^Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders (New York, 1913), p. 211. 7 Jarnes Watt Raine, The Land of Saddle-Bags (New York, 1924); James Watt Raine, Saddlebag Folk (Evanston, 1942); North Callahan, Smoky Mountain Country (Boston, 1952), p. 74. °Jack E. Weller, Yesterday's People: Life in Contemporary Appalacchia (Lexington 1965). ^Gratis Dearl Williams, "Heritage of Appalachia," address to the Southern Appalachian Regional Conference (May 13, 1974) reprinted in The Future of Appalachia (Boone, 1975), p. 128. �44 Colonialism in Modern America and Nancy Roberts, Where Time Stood Still: A Portrait of Appalachia (Boone, 1975), p. 128. 11 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (New York, 1947), II, 312. l^See Dwight Billings, "Culture and Poverty in Appalachia: A Theoretical Discussion and Empirical Analysis," Social Forces, 53 (December, 1974), 315-23; Stephen L. Fisher, "Folk Culture or Folk Tale: Prevailing Assumptions About the Appalachian Personality" (unpublished paper delivered at the Appalachian Symposium in honor of Gratis D. Williams, Appalachian State University, Boone, N.C., April, 1976); David S. Walls, "Three Models in Search of Appalachian Development: Critique and Synthesis" (unpublished paper, May, 1976, College of Social Professions, University of Kentucky, Lexington). 1* Roland Barthes, Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), pp. 74-76. 14 Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture (New York, 1960), p. 38. .S. Department of Interior, Census Office, The Tenth Census: 1880, Agricultural Statistics, Vol. Ill; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Agriculture-. The Southern States, Vol. 2, Part 2. *"U.S. Department of Agriculture, Miscellaneous Publication No. 205, Economic and Social Problems and Conditions of the Southern Appalachians (Washington, D.C., 1935), p. 16; Lewis Cecil Gray, "Economic Conditions and Tendencies in the Southern Appalachians as Indicated by the Cooperative Survey," Mountain Life and Work, Vol. 9, No. 2 (July, 1933), 9. *'U.S. Department of Agriculture, Publ. No. 205, Economic and Social Conditions, pp. 3, 16. y, "Economic Conditions in the Southern Appalachians," p. 10; see also W. D. Nicholls, "A Research Approach to the Problems of Appalachia," Mountain Life and Work, Vol. 7, No. 10 (January, 1932), 5-8 and U.S. Department of Agriculture, Publ. No. 205, Economic and Social Conditions, pp. 41-57. 1°U.S. Department of Interior, Census Office, The Tenth Census: �Industrialization and Social Change 45 1880, Agricultural Statistics, Vol. Ill; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Agriculture: The Southern States, Vol. 2, Part 2. , "Economic Conditions in the Southern Appalachians," p. 8; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Publ. No. 205, Economic and Social Conditions, pp. 120-121. . Congress, Senate, Report of the United States Coal Commission, Sen. Doc. 195, 68th Cong. 2d. sess., 1925, Table 14, p. 1467; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910: Population, Vols. II and III. 2^See John Alexander Williams, "The New Dominion and the Old: Antebellum and Statehood Politics as the Background of West Virginia's 'Bourbon Democracy/ " West Virginia History, 33 (July, 1972), 322; Gordon Bartiett McKinney, "Mountain Republicanism, 1876-1900" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1971), p. 170. 23 See Gordon B. McKinney, "Industrialization and Violence in Appalachia in the 1800's" (unpublished paper delivered at the Appalachian Symposium in Honor of Gratis D. Williams, Appalachian State University, Boone, N.C., April, 1976). "North Carolina Portion of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Showing Individual Ownership," Western Carolina University, Archives, Hunter Library. Virginia, State Board of Agriculture, Fifth Biennial Report of the West Virginia State Board of Agriculture for the Years 1899 and 1900 (1900), p. 371. D. Miller, "Absentees Dominate Land Ownership," in Who Owns West Virginia? reprinted from the Herald-Advertiser and the HeraldDispatch (Huntington, 1974), pp. 1-3. 2' James Lane Allen, "Mountain Passes of the Cumberlands," Harper's Magazine, 81 (September, 1890), 575; Herbert Francis Sherwood, "Our Racist Drama," North American Review, 216 (October, 1922), 494; Campbell, The Southern Highlander, pp. 87, 314. ™U.S. Department of Agriculture, Publ. No. 205, Economic and Social Conditions, p. 3. �46 Colonialism in Modern America Edward E. Knipe and Helen M. Lewis, "The Impact of Coal Mining on the Traditional Mountain Subculture," in J. Kenneth Moreland, ed., The Not So Solid South: Anthropological Studies in a Regional Subculture (Athens, Georgia, 1971), p. 28. H. Gollenwater, "Cultural and Historical Geography of Mining Settlements in the Pocahontas Coal Field of Southern West Virginia, 1880 to 1930" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Tennessee, 1972), p. 87; R. H. Lyman, "Coal Mining at Holden, West Virginia," The Engineering and Mining Journal, LII (December 15, 1906), 1171. 31 Thomas Wolfe, The Hills Beyond (New York, 1941), pp. 236-237. �by Rev. Jack It be at six to the The of me an ago 1P*OUP sponsoring their if in all to of six in the in a we In of the so Ever}7 in a on did I doing. "We to us, you," the Its to is the to us us we is we to us to be we get we too. it is for us, get to go Ate. 2 if Jw Is a a/ tie at He for i» /or �48 Colonialism in Modern America I suspect that America has several such colonies within her borders. Appalachia is its most prominent one. A colony, as I understand it, is a group of people with land and resources which are owned and/or controlled by persons other than themselves, and whose resources and productive capacities are used for the advantage of those who control them. Appalachia is simply our American example of how we use colonization powers in the economic realm all over the world. We strip an area and its people of their wealth under the guise of "developing" them, saying all the time of course that without this development look where they'd be. Yet in essence, we are robbing them of their wealth, impoverishing their people, controlling their economy, politics and people, meanwhile growing rich and powerful in the process. Minerals, Timber & Recreation Appalachia is indeed such a colony—a mineral colony, if you will—providing the energy to run the generators, steel mills, power plants, air conditioners, and can openers for an affluent nation while remaining poor itself. Appalachia is also a timber colony, a recreation colony, and an oil and gas colony. In Central Appalachia, coal is king. There are estimates that over one trillion dollars worth of this black gold has been mined from east Kentucky alone. But in this area, according to the 1960 census (the last one for which these figures are calculated), 6 of the 10 poorest counties in America lie. Perry County, where I live, the fifth highest coal-producing county in the state, can afford to pay only 14 percent of its public school bill. Letcher County, the third highest coal producer, can afford barely over 8 percent of its costs for the education of her children. Based on the 1970 census, in Pike County, the highest Kentucky mountain coal producer, the per capita income is little more than 40 percent of the national per capita, and other mountain counties range from that high point to 18 percent of the national per capita. �Appalachia: America s Mineral Colony 49 And, lest we think that coal makes everybody poor, note that Pikeville, Kentucky, a town of fewer than 5,000 people in the heart of the coal fields, has 38 millionaires living within its limits. Other county-seat coal towns have their share of the wealthy also. The Cadillacs and Continentals and Imperials are common vehicles in the mountains—along with the pickups and the refugees from the junk piles that are the vehicles of the common folk. What has happened in this spiny backbone of Eastern America, that while everyone else has shared the wealth of production, mountain people have been exiles from the American dream? How is it possible that this rugged land and its people have been by-passed, even though they exist within 600 miles of the giant industrial complexes of the North and Mid-West and are so directly connected with their productive capacities? Reduced to Ruin Answer: Appalachia is a colony which America has exploited. It is used, stripped of her wealth, raped and reamed and reduced to ruin, while those who gain their wealth from her invest their profits elsewhere and live elsewhere. Let's look at some of the factors involved. First, Appalachia lost the resources which might have made her rich. Before the turn of the century, giant hardwoods up to six and eight feet in diameter covered the hillsides. Timber agents from the cities were sent to purchase this rich resource to feed the voracious maw of an expanding economy. At this time, when ours was generally a money economy, the Appalachian person still lived in a barter society. He grew what he needed; he made what he needed; he traded for what he needed. So, when timber agents came to buy the trees on his mountains, he was offered 25 to 50 cents a tree for them, trees which on the present market would be worth several thousands of dollars. Perhaps he had a whole mountain side of them—1,000 or more, worth $500 maybe—more money than he had ever seen at one time, and more than he thought he'd ever need. He sold the trees, even helped get them out and floated down the river. The wealth that might have served his own economy went �50 Colonialism in Modern America instead to make someone else rich. Many fortunes were made in timber in Appalachia, and several large foundations now spread their beneficence back to the region in small amounts for its impoverished people. Granted, our economy runs on the basis of getting the best bargain you can. The Appalachian man wanted a bargain, too, as did those who bought the timber. The advantage lay with the outsider. He alone knew what the trees were worth and what money was all about, while the mountain man often did not. The same thing happened with the coal. Five to seven mineable seams of coal underlie much of Central Appalachia. The mountain people who owned the land and minerals did not use the coal. They did not know how much was there or how to get it out. They did not know what it was worth. When coal and land agents came to buy the coal, offering fifty cents to five dollars an acre for it, again the mountain man, who was probably poor and hurting for some ready cash, quickly sold it. Besides, he was a farmer using the surface of the land for his living, and when he was assured that he could keep the surface, that all he was selling was something underneath, he made the bargain. Again, that which might have made the people in the mountains rich now belonged to someone else. He sold for no more than five dollars an acre coal which was really worth a thousand dollars or more! What is more, he also lost the control of those surface rights. For years he paid taxes on that land surface only to find that mineral rights take precedence over surface rights, and strip mining 70 years after the deed was signed proved this fact. He found, too, that oil and gas prospectors could rip up his land, or that pipes could be laid over it. Thus, the mountaineer lost control of all his property. Out-Of-State Control I have some figures for Kentucky. The great majority of Kentucky's coal, over one million acres of it, is owned by out-ofstate companies. These are land companies, oil, steel, railroads, gas producers, utilities and other corporate giants with stockholders and commitments all over the world—Kennecott Copper, National Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Occidental Petroleum, Con- �Appalachia: A merica rs Mineral Colony 51 tinental Oil, Norfolk and Western Railroad. The director of the Area Development District where I live (Hazard, Kentucky) has often told me that no development is possible for our area until the coal industry is willing to relinquish some of its rights and powers in land ownership and control. The coal companies and the industry, by its very nature, discouraged education of its people at the very time when across America the drive for universal education came into its own. So, when mines shut down and those men tried to find work elsewhere, no one would have them. Educational attainment levels among adults in Appalachia are four years below the national average—another toll exacted from Appalachians people. Harry Caudill, author of Night Comes to the Cumberland, tells of the annual contributions of the Penn-Virginia Coal Company to a Philadelphia art museum. Philadelphians no doubt pride themselves on having such a fine beneficent citizen-company in their midst. But why doesn't this company do something for the communities and people and area from which their wealth came? It was this company which, according again to Mr. Caudill, returned some 60 percent profit to its stockholders a few years ago. Come visit the community in Kentucky sometime which bears the name and stamp of this company, and see if you would like to live there! Mine Unsafely Beyond these brief remarks is the long, brutal tale of mine unsafety: the playing with death by companies anxious for coal, and the playing of politics with the federal laws and regulations and inspectors. Even the United Mine Workers union has its history of betrayal and promises broken. Coal is an industry with a black past, and everything it touches seems to be blackened. The third factor to consider is the neglect of government in Appalachia. It is almost as if this were a forgotten area of the states involved, or as if these people and this land and this society were of some lower form of life different from the rest and not deserving of the same level of services which the rest of the states get. It was not until the year 1956 that the state of Kentucky assumed responsibility for the education of her children in the �52 Colonialism in Modern America mountains. Previous to that time, churches and other outside groups provided the education for them. When I moved to east Kentucky in 1965, for nearly 700,000 people living in those mountains there was not a single psychiatrist, psychologist, or psychiatric social worker. It didn't mean that our people had no mental illness—only that they toughed it out. Nor was there any work with retarded children, youth or adults, in spite of the fact that our retardation rate is over double the national rate. Hospital beds were less available than elsewhere. There is one doctor across the nation for every 630 people. In the area of Hazard seven years ago, there was one doctor for every 10,000 people, and the administrator of the Appalachian Hospital called it a "medical disaster area." In terms of roads, again neglect. In this year, 1973, there is not yet one major modern highway across Southern Appalachia, while across the Rockies, which are real mountains in comparison, there are many. Little Federal Help Even the federal government shows a picture of neglect. Fewer dollars per capita flow into Appalachia for education, welfare, construction of public facilities, and recreation than into other areas across the nation. Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the federal agency whose mandate it is to bring to life the valley of the Tennessee River, has for years felt that in doing so it had the right to destroy other valleys in Appalachia in order to get coal for cheap power to its people and industries. The worst offenders in eastern Kentucky in terms of the wholesale destruction of the land and people and streams have been the companies supplying TVA power plants, companies supposedly hewing to the line of their reclamation policies. Just last May, Senator Fred Harris came to visit eastern Kentucky strip mines, to meet with people, and to hold a hearing. One of the environment control and reclamation men from �Appalachia: America's Mineral Colony 53 TVA was there. He read a fine statement of how TVA had such high standards for land reclamation. Senator Harris exploded. "No man has the right to do to another man what I have seen today. But what is worse, I find that an agency of our own government is doing it," he said. Perhaps it is not right to say that government at all levels has also exploited the mountains and their people. But, it is right to say that government has allowed this exploitation, encouraged it, and approved it. And no agency of government has lifted its voice to change it. The record of the Corps of Engineers in the mountains is not bright in their dealings with people needing to be relocated because of dams. People have been offered a low sum for their property by the Corps and then told if they think it is not enough to take the matter to court. Most mountain families, too poor and inexperienced to hire a lawyer and go into courts, take the route of accepting the low offer. The fourth factor is the worst for us: The church has exploited, too. In Appalachia, as elsewhere in the world, the church has pretty much put its stamp of approval on the "status quo" of exploitation. At one of our Orientation Seminars for new pastors, Harry Caudill said: "You church people put schools all through this area. Rich folk in Pittsburgh and New York reached down in their pockets to make schools for our children, yet daily these children looked out their windows and saw the wealth which was leaving here in those coal cars, but nobody ever asked why. And out of those schools came some of the most reactionary and socially insensitive leaders we have in the mountains today." Harry Caudill is caustic sometimes. Maybe he was judging yesterday by today's sensitivities. But there is much truth to what he says. The church and its leaders have seldom been among those who have stood up to be counted against exploitation. The people in the church have not been the seers and the prophets, in spite of the Gospel in their hearts. A leader in a southeast Kentucky housing group told a group of Orientation pastors that she no longer attended church. She said: "If I could ever find a people there who cared as much for the people around them as they did for the Kings of Israel I might go back." �54 Colonialism in Modern America I don't want to overdraw this. There are churchmen in the mountains, lay and clergy, who are at the forefront of the struggle for justice in the hills, but mostly we are a pretty quiet and peaceable group who do not ripple the waters much. Jim Branscome a Berea college graduate, former director of "SOK," an anti-strip mine group, and now at Highlander Center, says that he feels one of the worst things about the Appalachian institutional church and its colleges is that they remove what anger there is in the souls of those they capture. "Our colleges and churches," he says, "are in the business to contribute to the preservation of society without opposing it, without training their people to place a question mark alongside everything that society does, thus blaspheming both education and Christ. They have contributed to one of the most fundamental dilemmas of modern civilization: It is without the preserving aspects of opposition." As the church, we must hear what this young man is saying to us. The charge that can be laid most at the door of the church is cultural imperialism. We have come into Appalachia and have tried to make its people into patterns made by the rest of the country. For example, the Presbyterians have a series of churches across the region with a Madison Avenue architect's idea of what a mountain church should look like—log cathedrals with stained glass and organs that match the culture about as well as evening dresses and high-heeled shoes. Rather than affirm the mountain person for what he was, we looked down at him and tried to make him something else closer to our own expectations for ourselves. On occasion I receive letters from people across the nation, asking if it isn't about time now to quit these many government programs with high expenditures in Appalachia. After all, we've done them long enough. Since the region does not seem to respond, let's spread our American charity somewhere else. Let's make it clear, however, that these federal dollars spent in Appalachia are not charity! They are justice—belated justice at that—giving back to this region a tiny portion of the wealth it has produced for our country. And, lest we think it to be such munificence (that word means just a whole lot), remember that �Appalachia: America s Mineral Colony 55 the expenditures of the Appalachian Regional Commission in the 13-state area which contains over 18 million people in the first 7 years of its existence have totalled less than we spent in Viet Nam in one month at the height of the war. The church must keep our nation's "feet to the fire" about Appalachia. Somehow we must cry aloud for justice, and do justice, and teach justice in our midst. Somehow we must help each other kick off the paternalism that so easily besets the church. Somehow we must do all we can to empower Appalachian people themselves, so they can have a piece of the decisions about their own destiny. There must be a new burst of energy by the church for the health of the Region. Jack Weller, author of Yesterday's People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia, is minister at large for the Presbyterian Church, Transylvania Presbytery. He lives in Hazard, Kentucky. �This page intentionally left blank �THE IMPACT OF RECREATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ON PIONEER LIFE STYLES IN SOUTHERN APPALACHIA by the pioneer as of it for to of a the the is life on is of of & or we is of the At the of by the in the it is life life first or we to the is has to the we are by the in a to the to to to of life as a on in the a is is an is of the the in Iff iwtf we for tbff the 23 at �58 Colonialism in Modern America tion that effective preservation of the Appalachian pioneer life style must demand a human continuance, a cultural transfer from parent to child, automatically excluding those who would become mountaineers by purchasing second homes or retirement homes within the Appalachian region. And though we applaud the efforts of those who would preserve Appalachia by making records of the ballads and the folklore, by creating craft centers for the teaching of spinning, weaving, needlecraft, and woodwork, we must distinguish clearly between cultural repositories and living cultures. Who the original pioneers were in the Southern Appalachian realm is not absolutely known, for ancient peoples had been in the area long before the Cherokees came. But the Cherokees likely pioneered in introducing a different and more advanced existence. They were probably the first farmers, though they were still highly dependent on hunting and gathering. A new pioneer element came in the form of the European hunter and trapper, closely followed by the permanent home-building, subsistence-seeking English farmers (along with some Scotch, Irish, French, and Germans), who with their more extensive clearing and cultivation of the land came in conflict with the land-use practices of the natives who were still highly dependent on hunting for their subsistence. There was much in the Appalachians to appeal to the European pioneers. Some alluvial bottomland was to be found in almost every valley, and the soils there were deep and fertile. The slopes were covered with some of the world's best hardwood forests which sheltered a variety of game and provided, in addition to the needed timber, supplies of fruits, nuts, berries, and medicinal herbs. Sparkling clear streams fed by an abundance of permanent springs provided excellent fishing. Small pockets of iron ore were widespread, along with constantly available wood for charcoal, and the multiplicity of forges and furnaces is reflected in names of communities throughout the region. (Graham's Forge and Laurel Bloomery are two nearby southwest Virginia examples.) And the almost complete isolation from the main paths of movement in the Mountain South demanded a high degree of self-reliance, whether in meeting economic needs or in maintaining effective social and political control. The European life style established in the latter part of the �The Impact of Recreational Development On Pioneer Life Styles 59 18th century, like that of the Cherokee whom the Europeans replaced, represented a remarkably good adaptation to the natural environment in which they both lived. Though there were excesses in pioneer land use, such as clearing slopes of timber which was not effectively usable for agriculture or removing trees for fuel which would now be worth small fortunes as cabinet woods (they were weeds to them,for there was no existing market), there was established an essential ecological balance between man and the land which was maintained fairly effectively up until the early part of the present century. And though the population growth was constant, the high birth rates were largely offset by a high death rate and by an outmigration which has increased greatly in this century. Life in the Southern Appalachians remained so unchanged and unchanging up to the present century that Cecil Sharp, an English folklorist visiting the region in 1917, suggested that a fence should be built around the whole province to keep outside influences from altering the culture. Mr. Sharp's concern was timely, for already other pioneers were at work, and this work would alter the landscape in profound ways, undermining in the process the economic framework by which the mountain people lived. These were the corporate-based coal mining and lumbering operations which brought the first easy means of access to the region, the branch railroad lines, designed to remove the rich extractive products found in abundance. And while the overall impact of these operations has left and is leaving this land in a deplorable state, much has already been written about these developments; consequently, we wish to focus our attention on what is a more present danger to mountain life and culture, a danger which has the possibility of becoming even more totally destructive. The new pioneer in the mountains is the developer of tourist and recreational facilities, and of the more modern invaders, he appears to have the most disturbing influence on the traditional way of life. Like the exploiter of coal and timber, this multifaced monster is also corporate in nature with controlling interests based largely ouside the mountain. And like the earlier invaders, he paints a glowing picture of the economic progress he will bring to the areas affected. The unrevealed story is the fact that the long-range economic benefits (which may still be substantial) go to local business interests associated more or less directly with him. For the majority of the people the �60 Colonialism in Modern America economic impacts are more negative than positive. During the major building period construction jobs become available; but after facilities are completed, more or less permanent jobs (often seasonal) are available as clerks, waiters and waitresses, cooks, and maintenance personnel.1 Total employment by recreational developments is never large and wages are low, lower generally than in other economic activities, and lower here than in other parts of the country. Locals not associated with the developments often seek to improve their income by selling farm produce to slightly expanded local markets; and others may start turning out local craft items such as quilts, bedspreads, and a variety of toys and trinkets. The primary direct economic impact is and has been to introduce a job orientation no longer directly associated with the land and to shift the local economy farther away from the self-sustaining pattern of the past. This effect in itself is not bad except that it serves to undermine the spirit of independence so long characteristic of the mountain people and places them in a position of almost perpetual subordination to the outside dominated financial manipulators, more firmly cementing the status of inferiority imposed upon mountain people by the rest of the nation. The imposition of a more complete money economy with mass produced products available has led to the abandonment of many crafts and traditions followed in the past.2 The water-turned grist mills have all but disappeared, and local farmers no longer try to meet basic food needs from the farm. The wooden churn, a standard household item a generation ago (for then all farm households supplied their own butter), is an item of value now only in the antique shops. Most home orchards have been allowed to deteriorate or disappear, and even the family garden is often limited to the more basic items. The introduction of improved communications and effective advertising has created a town-centered social focus to replace farm or hamlet oriented activities of the earlier period. In the past each rural community regularly held barn dances, quilting bees, corn huskings, molasses makings, and numerous other activiteis which served as strong human-based social outlets. Now, the lure of the town with its theaters, sports activities, and overabundance of tourist traps draws locals as well as visitors into the city limits. To suggest that all of this was caused by the recreational developer would obviously be to stretch a point, but the leisure-time activities which are development centered have helped shift the interests of natives away from the home, farm, and local community. Locals who got together to �The Impact of Recreational Development On Pioneer Life Styles 61 pitch horeshoes now spend their weekends around the town. Far more profound than the creation of alternative economic outlets for mountain people or Appalachian life styles has been the alteration of the human mix caused by recreation complex developers. Tourism of the earlier period in Appalachia generally demanded little land, most of which was in the towns or on the town margins. Those of the more recent period demand vast acreages, incorporating second home developments into new major recreational complexes with ski slopes, golf courses, fishing streams, swimming pools, hiking and saddle trails, and even such unmountaineer-like attractions as racquet clubs. Some examples of new North Carolina developments were reported in January, 1973, by the Asheville Citizen* Included were the "un-city" development of Connestee Falls (Realtec Incorporated) encompassing 3,900 acres, with sales to date of over 13 million dollars; Wolf Laurel, a 6,000-acre resort featuring a central core of authentic rebuilt native log cabins and including in addition to homes and homesites, a rustic inn, a golf course, an excellent restaurant, and ski slopes; and Arrowhead Hideaways on Flattop Mountain, a 1,000-acre development just begun in 1972. Research into the control of major tourist and recreational complex developments tells something about where the profits go. In the writer's home country of Watauga and Avery counties in North Carolina, the massive Beech Mountain and Land Harbor developments are controlled by the Carolina-Caribbean Corporation with home offices in Miami. Peter Barnes and Larry Casalino in a book entitled Who Owns the Land have found among the major developers the names of DuPont, Continental Oil, General Electric, IT&T, Standard Oil, Gulf Oil, CBS, Eastman Kodak, and Firestone.4 And the number of land purchases seems to be growing geometrically with each year. One corporation, the General Development Corporation, is reported to control more than 200,000 acres of land (slightly less than an average-sized Virginia county). And most disturbing to a native Appalachian is the fact that the area of most rapid takeover is the relatively unspoiled and most culturally distinctive parts of the mountain South. Purchasing operations are economic blitzkriegs. Buyers from these large corporations move into rural mountain areas and suddenly offer prices for land which unsuspecting natives find difficult to refuse. The prices offered �62 Colonialism in Modern America are in truth inflated in comparison to the value of the land in its traditional subsistence or semi-subsistence farm use (which, for most, form the base of their understanding of land values). Many sell; then they find that land values overall have gone up radically, so they either must give up their former way and become menials for the developer or, as is often the case, they leave the community altogether. Even those who are determined to retain their land find that its value has become so inflated that it is no longer practical to use it for farming, so either they become developers themselves or they sell to the developer.5 The effect on the human population over recent years has been to replace the natives with "new" mountaineers—mountaineers without a real attachment to the land whose demands or expectations have tended to be in conflict with rather than in harmony with the mountain habitat. Their automobiles, motorcycles, and the service vehicles required to meet their more elaborate demands clog the mountain roads and disturb the rural quiet with the roar of their engines. Their ski slopes have cut huge slashes in the natural cover of the most attractive mountains, and the most appealing trails and associated vistas suddenly become off-limits to the people who have always lived here. In fairness to the private recreation-residential developers, they see their role as that of making more effective use of land that had little economic value before, not realizing that through their massive developments they are working to destroy most of the characteristics of appeal in the mountain setting. Their cluttering of the landscape with broad highways, ski slopes, parking lots, shopping centers, right-of-ways for the likes of Tweetsie, and buildings ranging from Swiss chalets to pink fairy-tale castles, is making the physical landscape no longer alluring. Those elements of the mountain culture which provided the human appeal are often retained only as museum pieces in settlement schools or as show-place remnants such as in Cades Cove, Tennessee. And once gone, Appalachian culture cannot be recreated even by the most gargantuan human efforts. It might be noted that the federal and state governments have paralleled the private developer and often have cooperated with him in the onslaught against the mountain man and his culture. Cooperation between the Appalachian Regional Commission and the state of West Virginia removed several thousand acres of the most beautiful part of West Virginia from private control and created the multi-million dollar Pipestem recreation complex. The result �The Impact of Recreational Development On Pioneer Life Styles 63 is a lodge and combination of tourist cabins which the average West Virginian, certainly one native to the Pipestem area, could not possibly afford to use; and moreover, according to Don West, a native of Pipestem, the concession to operate the complex did not remain in the hands of West Virginians but was given to a Chicago firm. In 1931, Margaret Hitch ("Life in a Blue Ridge Hollow") noted that the development of the Shenandoah National Park had resulted in a displacement (against their will) of the local people, forcing them to move elsewhere! She commented that 4 'within another decade a new era will have begun and the day of the Blue Ridge mountaineer will have passed."6 We might note that more than a decade has passed since her prophecy was made and the mountaineer is still around, but the forces which are seemingly seeking the eradication of him and his culture push relentlessly forward. The development of the Mt. Rogers National Recreational Area represents another giant stride toward that end. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of acres involved in the original purchase, it was recently announced that the Forest Service intends to purchase an additional 23,000 or so acres. In physical and human terms it means the removal from private hands of parts of three of the most attractive mountain valleys in southwest Virginia, converting them into a complex which would greatly exceed that of the Pipestem development noted above. And as in the case of Pipestem, no preference will be given to local or even Virginia concerns in the granting of concessions to operate within the area. In this case the government goes the private developer one better in that the land desired can be condemned at prices representing only a fraction of its worth for recreational purposes and even less than fair value in terms of present use.7 It is inappropriate to suggest that the land-purchasing agents for government-owned recreational developments are intentionally being unethical or dishonest. What does appear to be the case is that they are attempting to purchase land at what might have been a fair price at the time the original land purchases were made for the National Recreation Area several years ago. Prices of all Appalachian land have increased tremendously since that time, and if the land must be claimed, the price should reflect the going rate at the time it is sold. Perhaps more appropriately, �64 Colonialism in Modern America the seller should be paid enough to assure his acquiring of living conditions equal to those he is forced to give up. Unless this is assured, the Forest Service or those representing it are not dealing ethically or honestly with the people. One of the more compelling arguments which could be used by those who would develop Appalachia as a major recreational center for the nation is the concept that land should be used in such a way as to provide the maximum benefit for the greatest number of people for the longest period of time. And certainly the displacement of a few hundred people by the recently proposed Mt. Rogers acquisition or even the displacement of the few thousands (or perhaps ten thousands) by recreation complexes throughout the mountain South is much overshadowed by the growing millions who use the region for rest and relaxation. However, there are other principles involved which have been dear to the hearts of Americans from the beginning of the nation: the principles encompassing the rights of the individual to own land and to the pursuit of happiness. These individual rights are on trial now more than at any time in American history, and in reality it is not the question of the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. For the recreational complexes that are now being created are luxury complexes which only a privileged few (the 15 to 20 percent who own the bulk of the nation's wealth) can really afford to enjoy. And if the individual rights of the masses continue to be violated for the benefit of these privileged few, then the whole principle of individual freedom is in question. With regard more specifically to the culture impacts of the recreational developments in Appalachia, the more profound tragedy is that the last and most appealing islands of pioneer Elizabethan culture in the world have become the victims of that most infectious of American diseases, so-called "progress." There are still others who would suggest that the recreation developers are in reality doing more to preserve pioneer life in Southern Appalachia than the natives themselves by taking land which is subject to overcrowding and poor use by the natives and putting it to more productive use. They point out that pioneer styles are preserved in the rustic external structure of the second homes or vacation cabins, in the replica rail fences and water wheels, and in the much promoted mountain music festivals. But �The Impact of Recreational Development On Pioneer Life Styles 65 when one goes beneath the surface, the life style of the secondhome or summer-home owner is not a life style resembling in any way that of the mountaineer he replaces (notwithstanding the frequent exhortations of roadside advertisers for those passing through to become "mountaineers" by buying lots on English Mountain). His "cabin" with the rustic exterior of the earlier mountain home will be equipped with every appliance, including electric heat. And though he may wear the battered hat and overalls of the much caricatured mountain man, he would be hard pressed to hand tool a baby crib or cut his grass with a scythe. Nor would his wife be likely to know how to card or spin or hand weave a piece of cloth from the homespun. And philosophically the gap becomes broader, for generally the newcomer (outlander) is material oriented and accustomed to manipulating man and the land for profit; on the other hand, the mountain life style, though not shiftless as many would suggest, focuses primarily on meeting the basic human needs of food, clothing, and shelter. The new mountaineer must constantly be doing something, from moving the rocks in his rock garden to replacing the natural foliage with that of his choosing (often clashing horribly with the natural landscape), much to the amusement of the native who without benefit of training in meditation can spend hours on end in contemplative observation of the wonders of nature around him. It is probably true that most mountain people are fatalistic, particularly with regard to the natural events which affect their lives, and death is and has been viewed simply as a natural occurrence, even the death that he sees occurring around him. The Appalachian mountaineer is a product of a cultural heritage which is Elizabethan in origin but which has been modified by the human and physical environment in which he has lived for so long. This is reflected in his speech, his folklore, his ballads, his attitudes toward man and the land, and the harmonious relationship that exists between him and the natural setting he occupies. To assume that he could remain an unchanged element in the mountain setting with communicative inroads penetrating the region on all fronts is not realistic, and no one native to the mountains would want it to be that way. However, it is of major concern and within the realm of possibility that certain desirable Appalachian traits be retained by keeping those born Appalachian as the dominant element within the mountain �66 Colonialism in Modern America region. Also, by developing and encouraging among them (or us—for I am one of them) a pride in their heritage, something of their rich past may be retained or even strengthened. Though many assume, perhaps correctly, that it is too late to protect Appalachian culture from the devastation wrought by massive recreational developments, there is still some hope that at least important remnants of Appalachian culture may be preserved. However, the very nature of the native's personality seems to work against it. It would appear that effective local and regional land planning would be the best avenue, but the highly independent mountain people see this as a socialistic invasion of their individual rights, not recognizing that the basic purpose of planning and zoning would be to protect them against those who have exploited them in the past and will likely continue to do so in the future. From the perspective of the native looking at his native land, the following are offered as possible approaches to the problems we have noted. (1) More extensive wilderness areas should be set aside with the absolute exclusion of developmental enterprises while at the same time assuring those peoples living within such areas the right of continued occupation. (2) Regional and local planning agencies, in establishing zoning ordinances, should seek to assure that conditional use permits be required for all major recreational, commercial, and industrial developments. Public hearings for any such proposed development should be required. (Exclusion might include family or individually operated shops, service stations, home businesses, etc.) (3) Zoning regulations should be established which would require all developments to be cleared by a responsible environmental protection agency. This is particularly needed in all areas of massive minerals exploitation, massive industrial development, massive housing developments, and in many types of recreation developments (such as in areas where ski slopes are planned). (4) Zoning regulations should be established which would �The Impact of Recreational Development On Pioneer Life Styles 67 protect good farmland against the economic developer seeking to follow the path of lowest cost. (5) Lot size limitations should be established in all areas being developed. This action would work against the messy clustering of business establishments in narrow valleys and along roads which can handle only limited traffic. (6) Rigid controls over size and placement of billboards, glaring roadside lights, and other manifold roadside promotion devices should be established. (7) There should be a reappraisal of priorities for land use in the entire Appalachian region, with serious consideration given to development of legal devices which would provide protection of the native population against the multiple onslaughts of corporate interests. First in order would be the provision of a publicly supported legal aid system to counter that which corporations are able to employ. Such a provision is desperately needed now by those whose property is being condemned by the Forest Service in the Mt. Rogers National Recreation Area, for they do not have financial resources to fight the actions in the courts. (8) There should be legal provisions against the replacement of scenic mountain roads with "drive through" super highways directed toward benefitting the outside visitor. (9) Broadly, a more conscious effort should be made to protect and preserve the rights of the individual against the desires of big business and big government whose primary aim with regard to the Appalachians appears to have been the making of its natural beauty and resources more effectively exploitable by interests which come from outside, and who, by comparison with the natives, can afford to pay well for services provided. �68 Colonialism in Modern America NOTES *At a recent hearing relative to acquisition of additional land for park development by the Forest Service, people in the Helton Creek area adjacent to the Mt. Rogers National Recreational Area asked an official what economic benefits would come to the local people by an expansion of the area. After pondering the question a moment he replied, "Well, the campers coming in are going to want quite a bit of wood for their campfires." ^There have been a number of efforts to revive the traditional crafts, but craftsmanship gained earlier by a youngster at the foot of a craftsman father cannot be regained just because a market develops. Crafts schools have been established, but these are seen regionally as museums of the past rather than as vocational institutions where young men and women can develop economically valuable skills. There are a few true craftsmen operating in the tradition of the past, but these make up a very insignificant part of the total Southern Appalachian population. ^ Nancy Brower, "Recreational, Residential Developments Had a Big Year," Asheville Citizen, January 28, 1973. ^Peter Barnes and Larry Casalino, Who Owns the Land? Center for Rural Studies, Berkeley, California, 1972. ^There are numerous examples of tourist-recreational-residential impacts. The writer's sister bought 100 acres of land overlooking Boone, N.C. in the 1950's for $7,000.00 and sold 80 acres of it three years later for $10,000.00. The DuPont Corporation which now controls the 80 acres is selling homesites for $5,000.00 and up. The 20 acres still in the former owner's control is now valued at more than $80,000.00. Alfred McNeill, who lives well outside the Boone-Blowing Rock focus of development, reported in the summer of 1973 that his rough mountain land had gone up in sale value from less than $100 an acre in 1960 to a present value of more than $1,000 an acre. Like many others he would prefer to continue to farm but now is beginning to wonder how long he can continue in the face �The Impact of Recreational Development On Pioneer Life Styles 69 of increasing land values and associated increases in taxes. "Margaret Hitch, "Life in a Blue Ridge Hollow," Journal of Geography, Vol. XXX, November 1931, 308-322. 'The largest number of people to be displaced will be in the Helton Creek area of Smyth County. The writer recently visited the community and talked with a number of the local residents whose land is being sought. Some have already sold at what would appear to be less than fair market value, and far less than what they will have to pay for comparable living situations, and certainly only a fraction of the real value of the land in the light of the recreational development now planned. Charles Blevins owns 8l/2 acres, much of it good bottom land, and has a good frame house on it along with a number of other outbuildings. The small farm provides essentially all his food needs and a head or two of cattle for sale. The price offered by the Forest Service was $7,300, which would appear to be about one-third replacement value, discounting, of course, the esthetic worth of the mountain setting. There is a fish pond on the place for which Mr. Blevins had recently been offered $12,000. Mr. Blevins also reported that he had sold one acre of hill land within the last year for $1,000. In talking with others in the valley it would appear that the going rate offered by the Mt. Rogers land appraisers is around $200 an acre. There are few acres anywhere within the developing Appalachians with land values less than $1,000 an acre. �This page intentionally left blank �1973 Sir of 56 Sir O, it is To it is a to it a /or Act II, As a are no of the as the The In the of the of Ltd., a is the for of the are are "strip the and deof the are to fif us it of a in of the in May 16, 1) on �72 Colonialism in Modern America The American Association, Ltd. controls about 65,000 acres—over one hundred square miles—of coal-rich land in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee. This region is famous for a sad paradox: human misery and abject poverty atop and amidst some of the world's most abundant mineral deposits. The explanation is regrettably simple. Appalachia is a colony. The people there do not own the wealth. Large outside corporations like the American Association do. And the prime, almost exclusive, concern of these corporations has been to exploit the region at the lowest possible cost to themselves. Most of your company's holdings—about 50,000 acres—lie in the isolated "Clear Fork Valley" in Claiborne, Campbell, and Bell counties. Clear Fork is one of the most populated remaining valleys in the coal areas of Central Appalachia, with about 500700 households in the communities of Fonde, Pruden, Hamblintown, Clairfield, Buffalo, and Straight Creek. Your company owns perhaps 85 percent of the valley there. In this remote valley, the American Association has displayed corporate profitseeking at its worst. It has permitted wanton and destructive "strip mining''—mining by blasting and scraping away the surface instead of tunneling into a coal deposit. Once-beautiful mountains are now scarred and gouged; foliage is razed; streams are clogged and filled with acid and filth; the inhabitants are endangered by landslides, floods, and polluted water. The difference between what strip mining is doing to the land in Appalachia and what B-52 bombers have done to the land in Southeast Asia is one of degree, not of kind. And while carting away over 2.2 million tons of coal per year, leaving the region that much poorer, and in ruin, the American Association and the companies to which it leases have virtually ignored the needs of the residents there. They have avoided their fair share of the local tax burden. They have presided over the destruction of job opportunities. They have even blocked the efforts of the local citizens to better their own lot. Idealism and good intentions—spiced, albeit, with a goodly dose of empire and profits—propelled your firm into Appalachia in the early 1890's. Backed by capital from Britain's Baring Brothers, the American Association founded a town called Middlesboro (after a British counterpart) in the state of Ken- �Ralph Nader Letter 13 tucky and set out to make it the booming iron and coal capital of the southern United States. The venture was to strike a bold new phase in British enterprise and in Anglo-American relations. "This is but a transfer of British business to American soil/' proclaimed American Association founder Alexander Arthur on November 11, 1890, to visiting dignitaries in the newly-resplendent Middlesboro Hall. He went on: I would say that America needs this place and our Anglo-American money, experience and push. Our mines, ovens, furnaces and works you have seen; these comprise our plant. We have also the sinews of body and of money and stand ready, clean-cut, and vigorous, for a generation of progress and success in manufacture, arts, and sciences. Come and join hands with us in the great enterprise which is worthy of the noblest efforts of us all, native or foreign born though we may be. [emphasis supplied] But misfortune, greed, and highly questionable dealings soon shipwrecked the hoped-for "noblest efforts." The financial panic of 1893 dried up the venture's British backing; Middlesboro was sold at auction, and 80,000 acres of mountain and valley land were mortgaged to the Central Trust Co. of New York for $1,500,000. Then a strange thing happened. The Central Trust filed to recover on the mortgage in 1894, and one J. H. Bartlett was appointed Special Commissioner to conduct the sale. Mr. Bartlett let the property go for but $25,000—about thirty cents per acre. The buyer was, of all people, an agent of the American Association, Ltd., a newly-formed corporation with essentially the same membership as the American Association, Inc. Shortly thereafter, Mr. J. H. Bartlett became General Manager of American Association, Inc. The American Association, Inc. said later that the land had been worth well over one-half million dollars at the time of the sale. This strange transaction did not go unnoticed. Creditors of the American Association, Ltd. sued the new American Association, Inc. in Claiborne County for "fraud/ 1 claiming it had "paid nothing for said property." But the records of this suit went up in flames with the Claiborne County Courthouse. And researchers could find no trace of the suit at the Bell County Courthouse. �74 Colonialism in Modern America The Association had acquired its Appalachian Coal empire through means its founder Mr. Arthur and you might not wish to label a "transfer of British business to American soil." Most records of the era are either missing or else were burned with the county courthouse. But the region is alive with tales of how American Association agents tricked, threatened, or forced uneducated mountain people into giving up their valuable coal land for fifty cents to a dollar an acre. Said one mountaineer recently: The American Association said the land was worthless and that they would give my daddy a dollar an acre and we could live on the land and pay rent and they would pay the taxes. We didn't know it but we were standing barely 4' from a seam of coal when the American Association was talking to us. Local residents say that when the property records burned with the Courthouse, the American Association used the chance to claim property that wasn't theirs. At first, self-interest bound the American Association, and the coal operators to which it leases, to a sort of uneasy truce with the people of the region. The companies needed men to dig the coal out of the large deep mines. So they had to provide these men and their families with a pkce to live and at least a minimal level of human services. Usually this level was indeed minimal. The miners and their families lived often in indecent conditions and worked in hazard-trap mines. And they were virtual serfs to the companies that employed them and owned everything around them^their home, their credit at the company store, health care and recreation in the company town, even "justice" at the company-controlled courthouse. In the 1930's your company, along with others, tried to keep these miners from joining a union that could stand up for their rights. Yet, despite all this, the need for able, willing bodies to mine the coal made the American Association and its cohorts show some concern for the region and its people. But the cord that had kept this uneasy truce together has broken. Mining coal no longer requires people. In fact, people just get in the way. Your company has expressed the desire to rid the area of residents. It will no longer repair homes, and it �Ralph Nader Letter 75 plans to tear them down in the near future. Yet there is little other housing or even property on which to build housing. Depopulation has replaced paternalism as official corporate policy. "The people would be better off, and we would be better off, if they would be off our land," said Mr. Alvaredo E, Funk, the American Association's General Manager in Middlesboro, Kentucky. It began in the 1950's, when a coal market slump forced many coal operators to close down. Medium-sized independent operators, like those that lease much American Association land, were especially affected. Employment in the region dropped sharply. In 1952 there were 1,230 coal mining jobs in Claiborne County; but in 1958 there were but 282. Your company made no effort to provide other sources of employment for the men thrown out of work. Since the 1950's, the market for coal has revived. More than revived. It is positively bullish. But bullish for the American Association and other coal owners and operators, not for the people of the region where you get the coal. Automation and strip mining have cut drastically the need for miners. At the single large deep mine left on your property, that of Consolidation Coal, 350 men with modern machinery turn out about as much coal as 1,500 men produced at nine mines in 1948. And men are even more dispensable in strip mining. In Claiborne County alone, 200 men can now blast and bulldoze out almost as much coal as 1,500 deep-miners could dig in 1948. Today with the need for local labor gone, a sort of undeclared warfare has broken loose. The companies to whom you lease are making an unchecked assault upon the land, and in consequence, on its people. Is it hyperbole to compare your company's presence in Appalachia to a war zone? Consider the evidence. 1. Environmental Destruction Irresponsible strip mining on your lands in Tennessee �76 Colonialism in Modern America harkens dismally of the laying-waste-to-the-land strategies of bygone generals. As you know, a strip miner literally blasts away the sides or top of a mountain. He then bulldozes the debris over the side, and shovels out the coal. The process is fast, cheap, and destructive in the extreme. Landslides block roads and railways, destroy homes and farmlands, and imperil human beings. The blasting alone has cracked the frames and foundations of homes. Streams, choked with silt and debris, flood at the slightest rainfall, leaving harmful deposits on scarce fertile soils. Acid ancj mineral substances pollute the water and endanger the area's water supply. "We are afraid to go to sleep when it rains. We just stay up all night," says one Tennessee resident whose property these floods have ruined. In the Clear Fork Valley, some people must boil their water and add chlorine to it to make it safe to drink. And the Campbell County Highway Department has had to spend thousands of dollars clearing a single road after continual landslides. Is this the experience of people in peace or in war? Your company, the American Association, currently hosts more strip mining operations than does any other landowner in Tennessee. On your Claiborne County property alone, strippers laid waste to about 3,000 acres before the State passed a law in 1967 requiring that the land be restored. Since then, 1,400 more acres on your land have been stripped, and the reclamation is questionable at best, despite the new law. 2. Tax Evasion While their mineral wealth is literally carted out from under them, the people of this region pay, in measurable and immeasurable ways, for this destruction. State and local governments have to clear the roads after landslides and both roads and bridges after illegally overweight coal trucks have beaten them apart. The people pay for this through taxes and through their own efforts to undo the damage to their homes and property. Yet not only do they get little or nothing, not even jobs, in return, but your company also avoids its duty to pay taxes to meet the costs of local government. �Ralph Nader Letter 77 In the United States, local governments depend mainly on property taxes. Especially in Appalachia, where coal is the major form of property wealth, owners like the American Association are expected to pay their share. But it hasn't worked out that way in Claiborne County. Your 44,000 coal-laden acres there represent 17 percent of the county's land area and perhaps 90 percent of the county's coal reserves. Yet in 1970 your property taxes provided only 3 percent of the county's property tax revenue. That year your company claimed to the State Board of Equalization—the board of appeals—that 40,000 acres of its coal-rich land were worth but five dollars per acre. Yet in that one year alone you garnered more in royalty payments from the mining companies to which you lease. Complaints by local citizens led the Tennessee Board of Equalization to require that coal properties be assessed more accurately. But the figures your General Manager Mr. Funk then supplied the state were dubious at best. Local citizens charged that Mr. Funk's suspicious figures gave your company an almost one million dollar underassessment. The State Board seems to have borne out these claims when it tripled values Mr. Funk reported for properties now leased to Consolidation Coal. Still, the strip mines on your land are greatly underassessed and undertaxed. Two companies mining your land under lease appear to have escaped taxation altogether, while others seem to have kept all their mining equipment off the tax rolls. As late as 1972 your coal-rich Claiborne County lands that were not being mined were still assessed at only $25 an acre, less than the least expensive farm land in the county. 3. Housing As the major employer in the Clear Fork Valley, and as owner of most of the land, the American Association once provided most of the housing as well. But now that it no longer needs the people, it seeks to get rid of them. It is your company's declared policy to tear down its houses in the valley and not to build new ones. The houses your company still rents, it won't repair. Nor will it compensate tenants who make their own repairs. And the leases it grants are usually for only thirty days, if it grants a lease at all. And the tenant may be evicted �78 Colonialism in Modern America without cause or reason. "I've seen barns in better shape. . . .Why, I've worked farms where people wouldn't keep their animals in barns the shape of these houses," one tenant said recently. Meanwhile, strip mining destroys those homes and the land on which they rest. Residents count forty-two houses that have been stripped away in the small Rock Creek Hollow alone. And your company has turned its back on both the immediate distress and the long-run needs of people whose homes are thus destroyed. In 1955 on American Association property, water broke through an old "slag" pile, surged down and destroyed the community of Valley Creek. Two children were killed. Your company offered meager compensation. Just last year your company did not take preventive action when a landslide from a strip mine on your land threatened homes and lives in the community of Buffalo Hollow until local citizens hired an attorney and Granada Television filmed the slide for broadcast in Britain. Even the belated efforts you have taken—which have had little success—are of small comfort to people who have had to evacuate homes on your property before the invading army of bulldozing strip miners. Or to residents such as Lewis Lowe, who now faces perennial flooding along Clear Fork Creek. Or to the people endangered or blocked in by the landslides on such places as Duff Road. Your manager, Mr. Funk, stated in "The Stripping of Appalachia," a Granada television documentary: "We're ploughing back our share into the development of Appalachia." Ploughing, indeed, there is aplenty. But apparently the only "development" is on a minor part of your holdings in Cumberland Gap across the giant Cumberland Mountain from Clear Fork Valley. Here one finds a new Holiday Inn for tourists, and here a marina and golf course are planned, as your May 19, 1971, Statement to Shareholders puts it "to attract the wealthier citizens of Pineville and Middlesboro." What of the less wealthy residents of your 50,000 or more acres in the isolated Clear Fork Valley? They could move elsewhere, one might reply. After all, your Statement to Shareholders the following year applauds your contribution to the local housing supply. "We have continued," �Ralph Nader Letter 79 it says, "our policy of building houses on plots of land owned by us. . . ." But these too are across the Cumberland Mountains. In the isolated valley, housing is scarce because your company owns most of the land and is tearing down its houses. There are very few "ekewheres" for people who wish to remain on the land where they and their parents were raised. And jobs and living conditions in the distant cities are very uncertain. 4. Preventing Local Self-Help To keep the area under tight control, the American Association has blocked the efforts of local citizens to help themselves, to provide for their own jobs and housing. These people have formed a community development organization, the Model Valley Development Council, to better the lot of the valley and its residents. Several years ago, when the Council approached your company to buy land for a small factory, your company would consent to sell or lease only a single small tract. It was covered with slag and refuse from an old mine, and the Association would let it go only if the local people themselves cleaned up the shameful mess. In 1972 the American Association refused to sell or lease land for the people to build homes. Last autumn, American Association General Manager Funk would not consider making just one-half acre available for the community to build a health clinic. Since then (and after wide showing of the Granada T.V. documentary) Mr. Funk has suggested you might lease—but not sell—some land. But the people are still waiting. Meanwhile your company won't even let them cut trees for wood to repair their homes. The mere control of so much of this area's land and wealth sets your company athwart any growth or local self help there. The county government is reluctant to provide services like sewers and roads because the population is sparse—sparse largely because of American Association policy. Lack of these services in turn keeps new builders away. And potential industries shun the almost total dependence on your company that setting up in the region would involve. Your company won't help these people. And it won't let them help themselves. �80 Colonialism in Modern America The American Association's seventy-year occupation of this forgotten portion of Tennessee has resulted, then, in what? Surveys in the valley have shown unemployment at about 30 percent. About 20 percent of the households live on less than $1,000 per year; another 20 percent make less than $2,000. ($9,400 per year was the average family income in this country in 1969.) Homes are being destroyed and land and water are being ruined. Prospects for employment are grim. Prospects generally are grim, with your company looking ahead to 25-30 more years of strip mining and then timber cutting after that. Does this picture suggest the presence of a responsible citizen or of a greedy aggressor? And what will the picture be in twenty-five more years?—not in the small portion of your land north of Cumberland Mountain where you are building playspots for the rich, but in the depressed Clear Creek Valley where most of your holdings lie? The bloom indeed has faded from the hopes your countrymen held for the American Association venture in Kentucky and Tennessee. How different the response of two English people viewing the enterprise at the outset and now. Visiting the area of 1891, Sir James Kitson, then-President of the British Iron and Steel Institute, could boast: I think we all, as Englishmen, rejoiced to see a town which was being developed with so much sagacity, so much judgment and energy; that was being developed under English auspices and with British capital. Eighty years later your countrymen were holding their heads a bit lower. After watching the Granada television documentary on your holdings in Clear Fork Valley, a Middlesex, England, woman felt impelled to write a small local Tennessee newspaper: I write to tell you how ashamed I am that an English-owned company can so indiscriminately cause so much havoc to a small community. . . .My feelings after watching a recent television programme on the subject were ones of total horror. You must realize that I am an English woman of absolutely no importance, but nevertheless, would like �Ralph Nader Letter 81 to use the good offices of your newspaper to apologize for the desecration caused by an English company, on land in a country that has always had very close ties with my own. . . . It is true that the American Association is just one small part of your nearly L220m ($500,000,000) secrecy-enshrouded corporate empire, of which Investor's Chronicle magazine said: "What is quite unknown is how the empire is controlled, how the various companies relate to each other." This empire spans from Australia and Thailand to Canada and the West Indies and includes pursuits so diverse as racetracks, rubber plantations, and equipment for hairdressing salons. But the policies of the American Association spell the fate of the people and culture of the Clear Fork Valley. And they are now causing embarrassment to people of your own country. You have shown charitable instincts in many ways. You have served as officer or director of six hospitals. In 1953 you were on the Executive Council of the Lord Mayor's National Flood and Tempest Distress Fund. Until 1948 you were VicePresident of the League of Mercy. Now you can apply this same sense of responsibility to the corporate realm. What can you do? Such steps as the following, which you could set in motion at once, could begin to change your company from a hostile aggressor to a more responsible constructive citizen. 1. First, and most important, you should personally visit the region, for at least several days, to see firsthand what your company's policies have done. You should meet with local residents to hear their views and to discuss your company's past actions and plans for the future. 2. Your company should inventory and begin to correct the damage strip mining on its land has done. Especially urgent is the need to correct damage to homes, farms, roads, and water supplies. �82 Colonialism in Modern America 3. You should require all companies to whom the American Association leases to restore carefully and completely the property on which they mine and to repair any damage they do to the people or the region. 4. You should also require these companies to cooperate fully with tax officials and to provide them with the information necessary to set fair and equitable property tax assessments. Such information should include lease agreements, royalty rates, and survey and estimates of coal reserves. 5. As a symbol of your desire to compensate the people of the region for the valuable land your agents tricked or threatened their forebears into selling, you should donate some of your 50,000-odd acres for community development. 6. You should keep in good repair the housing you rent to local people. And you should extend to them fair and adequate lease protection. 7. You should stop refusing to sell land to local groups seeking to build industry or housing. 8. You should instruct your General Manager, Mr. Alverado E. Funk, to negotiate with local citizen groups a fair and equitable compensation for all the property taxes which the American Association has avoided in the past. 9. You should, in the future, consult with these citizen groups about changes in your company's policies in the area. Such steps will help get your company out of its social red ink in Appalachia. But what of the many other companies you control? Are they too laying waste forgotten corners of the world? There is a larger lesson to be learned from your destructive Appalachian venture. It is simply to apply to social problems on the corporate level the old adage "To foresee is to forestall." It would be a signal act of corporate foresight and responsibility for you to set up now a special committee to monitor the social impact of all the businesses you control. This committee should comprise both people from within your enterprises and repre- �Ralph Nader Letter 83 sentatives of outside groups who speak for important social concerns. It should have the full authority of your office and should report directly to you. "Come and join hands with us in the great enterprise which is worthy of the noblest efforts of us all" proclaimed the sanguine founder of the American Association, Alexander Arthur. While the standard since then has fallen miserably, it is not too late to hoist it up again. In fact, the decline, like adversity, could be sweet. It could occasion an ascent to a truly higher standard of corporate action and accountability. Will you exert your "noblest efforts" to that end? Or will your neglect be the occasion of a mobilized citizenry recovering their future through resurgent legal and political action? Sincerely, Ralph Nader �This page intentionally left blank �THE FOREST SERVICE AND APPALACHIA by SI has of has Is an by In the on the of oil, to and the a hut the the of of of the in (TV A) a In or of are the U.S. of the /I Georgia Kentucky North Carolina North Carolina 1,153 962 706 Nantahala 753 (c) % SI ff n» last in has «»rf the in �Colonialism in Modern America 86 State National Forest Acreage Square Miles Tennessee Virginia Virginia West Virginia Cherokee * 614,107 George Washington * * 1,003,874 J ef ferson * * * 621,473 Monongahela 831,329 960 1,615 971 1,299 TOTALS 8,419 5,388,598 This is an area larger than the states of Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined! On the local level, the amount of national forest land in many counties in the Southern mountains is staggering. Within the Appalachian areas of West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Georgia, there are 37 counties in which the Forest Service owns over 20 percent of the land. In 14 of these counties, more than 40 percent of the land is in national forests: State County Acreage Georgia Georgia Georgia Georgia Kentucky North Carolina North Carolina North Carolina Tennessee Tennessee Virginia Virginia Virginia West Virginia Rabun Fannin Union Towns McCreary Macon Graham Clay Polk Unicoi Bath Craig Allegheny Pocahontas 235,520 262,160 197,760 106,240 267,520 330,880 184,960 136,320 278,400 118,400 345,600 215,040 285,440 603,520 NF Acreage 143,580 106,602 95,593 56,559 154,288 149,369 111,065 59,975 150,870 52,049 171,996 115,051 138,070 285,474 % NF 61% 42% 48% 54% 58% 45% 60% 44% 54% 44% 50% 54% 48% 47% From the point of view of the U.S. Forest Service, its concentration of land ownership in the Southern Appalachians is *Includes 327 acres in North Carolina. """Includes 100,386 acres in West Virginia. ** "Includes 961 acres in Kentucky and 18,245 in West Virginia. �The Forest Service and Appalachia 87 highly desirable; it is, in fact, something it has been working toward for a long time. Its basic strategy in the Southern mountains is set out in its official publication, Guide for Managing the National Forests in the Appalachians. The guide states in part: The concept of the Appalachian Greenbelt is possible because of the unique physiographic characteristics of the area. It is a mountainous green oasis in the Eastern United States from which flows a continuous supply of renewable resources and which provides the large surrounding population with a place to recreate in a natural setting. . . .Summer mountain temperatures are generally 10° lower than the adjacent plains. This factor makes the mountains a highly desirable retreat for city dwellers and other nearby residents. * As this statement makes clear, the national forests are seen by the Forest Service as a resource to be used primarily by the "large surrounding population" of "city dwellers and nearby residents." This includes, of course, the urban population of the Eastern Seaboard. No one can argue that residents of the Eastern cities probably need to "recreate in a natural setting" from time to time. But it is also necessary to remember that there are some 10 million people living in the so-called "Appalachian Greenbelt!" What about us? Well, we're pretty much out of luck, according to the Guide for Managing the National Forests in the Appalachians: Population losses within the Greenbelt can be attributed to the fact that this area can only sustain a limited number of people year-round. Many of the narrow mountain valleys are unsuitable for industrial complexes. Plans for economic development must recognize the limitations of the area so that over-emphasis on the wrong type of activities does not occur. The Forest Service is obviously not looking after anyone's interest except its own here. To write off industrial development for Appalachia because of its "narrow mountain valleys" is like saying that Pittsburgh can't support industry because of its many residential neighborhoods. In fact, Appalachia is for many reasons—raw material, electric power, access to population centers, �88 Colonialism in Modern America transportation, labor force—well suited for industrial growth. By ignoring the facts, the Forest Service is actively undermining the efforts of the ten million people who live in the mountains for economic, political and social self-development. But the Forest Service is not reacting to the needs of Appalachian people in its planning for Appalachia. As the Guide for Managing the National Forests in the Appalachians makes clear, it is motivated by a very different perspective: Pressures on the forest resources and environment within this mountain region come from many users. As long as population growth continues, pressure for products and services from the National Forest lands will grow. Unless definite limits are set for the protection of the environment and use of the resources within the Greenbelt, population pressure will bring about their impairment and eventual destruction. . . .This influence area for the Greenbelt stretches far outside National Forest boundaries. Total planning must consider the overall emphasis area. The problem with this comment is that the population pressure the Forest Service is talking about comes from outside the mountains. After all, population is not growing in Appalachia; the mountains have been losing folks steadily for years. This attitude makes as much sense (especially since the Forest Service is actively encouraging people to use the national forests) as saying that an Indian reservation is threatened by overcrowding because large numbers of tourists want to visit and camp there. The emphasis of the Forest Service on the needs of people outside the Southern mountains has, on occasion, been the root of conflict with local Appalachians. One incident is worth noting as an example of the extremes these conflicts sometimes reach. As reported by the Atlanta Constitution: Vernon McCall was "the weakest one in the community" of Balsam Grove, a village in the heart of Pisgah National Forest. Vernon, according to Mrs. Leonard Griffin, "is a sick boy. He has epilepsy and he's disabled." On February 22, men of the U.S. Forest Service broke �The Forest Service and Appalachia 89 into Vernon's trailer house, dragged out a bed and a few other belongings, and then dug a hole with a bulldozer, rammed his home, his lean-to, his pig pen and his little barn into it and buried the whole thing. Having erased every trace of his home, they planted pine seedlings over it. ... The Forest Service claimed the government owned the land, not Vernon, and they had been trying to get him off it since 1968. But the community lawyer said no legal action had been taken to evict Vernon, and local authorities proceeded to charge Forest Ranger Dan W. Hile with willful injury to personal property. . . . Meantime Vernon, who is 40, has rented a new trailer, and scratches out a living on welfare and what he can make picking and selling ivy. And the seedlings the Forest Service planted over his old trailer have died. What makes all of this so intolerable is that the people of Appalachia are the ones who actually pay for these national forests. Anyone who knows the area is familiar with the irony of high taxes on the one hand and low public services on the other—a situation common to many Southern mountain counties. It has often been noted that in the coal counties this is partly the result of the undertaxation of coal lands. What has not been recognized is that in counties with national forest lands the tax-exempt status of these lands has undermined the tax base and increased the tax burden on local property owners. The following report examines the effects which the national forests in Appalachia have had on the ability of mountain counties to govern and finance themselves. Federal Lands and County Finances One of the direct and measurable effects of national forest holdings in Appalachia is the loss of local property tax revenue. At the end of 1972, Forest Service holdings totaled 5,388,598 acres in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Being Federal property, these lands are exempt from state, county, and city/town taxes. While it is difficult to estimate the exact extent of the tax loss, it is probable �90 Colonialism in Modern America that, based on average values for land and effective tax rates in the counties involved, the Appalachian national forests cost local governments nearly $10 million a year in lost tax revenuesrevenues that would go to support schools, roads, health programs, welfare, and other public services. This tax loss has not often been recognized—partly because the Forest Service in its intensive public relations campaigns emphasizes the financial gain to counties from national forest lands. This type of publicity never mentions the fact that these lands are tax exempt; or that they had previously been on county tax digests; or the amount of revenue lost to counties when the lands passed from private to Federal ownership. But the fact is that in 1972 the total Forest Service payments to Appalachian counties were only $734,641.08—less than 14 cents an acre and well under 10 percent of what the property taxes alone would have been if the land were still in private hands. The small sums that are paid by the Forest Service to local counties come from its so-called "25% Fund," authorized by the 1911 Weeks Act. This act, in effect, authorized the national forest system by providing for the Federal government to purchase lands necessary to protect the flow of navigable streams, including their watersheds. The 13th Section of the Weeks Act (36 Stat. 961-963) provides: Twenty-five per centum of all moneys received during any fiscal year from each national forest into which lands acquired under this Act may be divided shall be paid, at the end of such year, by the Secretary of the Treasury to the State in which such national forest is situated, to be expended as the State legislature may prescribe for the benefit of the public schools and public roads of the counties in which such national forest is situated.^ The income from national forests comes mostly from the sale of timber "on the stump," although a certain amount also comes from other fees and from special permits such as those for mining and recreational areas. Unlike the national forests of the Western United States, which produce valuable old-growth sawtimber, the Appalachian national forests have in the past produced trees suitable only for pulpwood. As any mountain landowner will tell you, selling pulpwood on the stump is no way to �The Forest Service and Appalachia 91 bring in money. If cut selectively, mountain land will make five to ten cords of pulpwood per acre; if clearcut, it will make ten to twenty cords. The going price for Forest Service pulpwood on the stump in Appalachia is about $2.00 a cord. Selectively cut land can be logged again in about ten years; clearcut land, in about thirty. Thus, on an average yearly basis, the "income" from an acre of national forest land in the Southern mountains is between 66 cents and $2.00. Aside from the low revenue which this gives to counties, the problem with this system is that it makes "25% Fund" payments—on which counties must depend to help finance roads and schools—completely dependent on an arbitrary factor: how much wood the forest service decides to cut that year. This produces a not-so-subtle pressure on local government to approve the high rates of timber-cutting the forest service would like to set and locally-hated practices such as clearcutting. For example, during the recent struggle over proposed Forest Service clearcutting in the Cohutta Mountains in Fannin County, Georgia —one of the proposed areas in the Eastern Omnibus Wilderness Bill—petitions were circulated which read: We cannot afford the loss of revenues that are presently being returned to our county governments by the Forest Service from timber sales. We do not wish to retire our forests from production when we know that the local people will have to pick up the additional tax load; neither do we want the added tax to discourage local population growth, because this is already a problem for our rural areas." In fact, since timber-cutting revenues in any national forest are lumped together each year before distributing to counties, Fannin County would have received 14.4 percent (its proportionate share of Chattahoochee national forest acreage) of 25 percent (the Weeks Act formula) of whatever income clearcutting the Cohuttas produced—3.6 cents of every dollar of timber cut! Because the "25% Fund" payments are based on revenue from timber cutting, payments per acre vary widely from state to state and even among national forests within the same state. In Georgia, the Chattahoochee National Forest, which is located within the Appalachian area of the state, made payments to �92 Colonialism in Modern America counties of 26.7 cents per acre in 1972. Counties in Georgia's Ocoee National Forest, however, which lies in the state's pulpwood belt, were paid $1.39 per acre—more than five times what the Appalachian counties received. Payments vary even more widely from state to state. In 1972, average payments were 41 cents in Georgia (this includes the high payment received for the Ocoee National Forest); 21 cents in North Carolina; 17 cents in Kentucky; 15 cents in Tennessee; 5 cents in Virginia; and 11 cents in West Virginia. By comparison, the average payment per acre was $1.03 in California; $2.16 in Louisiana; $1.40 in Mississippi, $2.12 in Oregon; $1.01 in South Carolina; $1.23 in Texas; and $0.95 in Washington. The average payment per acre for all national forests in all states was 58 cents. The average payment per acre for all Appalachian national forests was 13.5 cents, less than one fourth the national average! Two other ways of looking at this situation help make clear just how discriminatory it is: (1) If counties in Appalachia had received "25% Fund" payments at the national average rate of 58 cents/acre, they would have received $3,125,868 instead of $734,641. (2) If all the revenue produced by the National Forests was divided among counties on the basis of their proportionate share of National Forest acreage, the Appalachian counties would have received $12,503,472 in 1972—seventeen times what they actually got. Another way of trying to evaluate the fairness or unfairness as well of the constitutionality of the way in which national forest revenue is distributed is to look at it in terms of payment per person to affected counties. After all, "25% Fund" payments were earmarked by the Weeks Act for support of roads and schools, the two items which usually make up the bulk of a rural county's budget. Since the national forest funds are Federal payments, it stands to reason that they should be distributed on an equitable basis. In the 37 Appalachian counties which have 20 percent or �The Forest Service and Appalachia 93 more of their area in national forests, payments per person in 1972 ranged from a low of 9 cents per person (Smyth County, Virginia) to a high of $5.01 per person (Rabun County, Georgia). The average figure was 93 cents per person. Compare this with payments per person made in Western counties with similar populations. These figures ranged from a low of $101.14 per person (Curry County, Oregon) to a high of $437.53 per person (Skamonia County, Washington). It doesn't take much imagination to see what Federal subsidies of this size could mean to education in revenue-starved Appalachian counties. A further problem caused by the fact that national forest payments depend on timber-cutting revenue is that counties are not able to predict the amount of revenue they will receive in any year. For example, in 1969, during the period of greatest clear-cutting in the Monongahela National Forest, counties received 25.9 cents. In Pocahontas County, West Virginia, this meant that income from national forests in the county dropped from $73,050 in 1969 to $33,931 in 1972, a loss of $39,119. For a county with a population of 8,640, this is a tremendous revenue loss. As rates per acre dropped between 1969 and 1972, other counties experienced similar losses. Throughout the Appalachian region, despite the fact that national forest acreage increased 3 percent in the three years from 1969 to 1972, the amount received from the Forest Service decreased $159,070. Of all regions in the country, Appalachia is one of those which can least afford this type of revenue loss. The loss of this amount of revenue may not seem significant to some people who are used to urban budgets. But it is important to realize that—partly because of the lack of growth due to lack of land—the Appalachian counties in which the national forests are concentrated are among the smallest and poorest counties in the nation. According to 1970 census data, the average population of the fourteen Appalachian counties with over 40 percent national forest land is less than 9,000. Their average rate of poverty in 1970 was 29.2 percent—more than twice the average for the United States as a whole. Not one of these counties had a poverty rate less than the national average. In the thirty years prior to 1970, these counties combined lost 13.2 percent of their population, and only one of the fourteen gained population in this period. �94 Colonialism in Modern America These counties are affected not only by revenue loss, lack of public services, high poverty incidence and outmigration rates, but—to add insult to injury—by local property taxes that are significantly higher than those in counties without national forest lands. Looking again at the fourteen counties with over 40 percent of their land held by the Forest Service, the effective tax rate* for these counties is on the average 15 percent higher than the average effective tax rate for the state.** This situation is especially apparent in Tennessee and Georgia. Polk County, Tennessee, for example, with 54 percent of its land held by the Forest Service, has an effective tax rate of $1.38 per $100 compared to a state average rate of $0.90. Of 75 Tennessee counties with single tax rates, Polk County has the fifth highest rate. In Georgia, Fannin County, which is 42 percent national forest land, has the highest tax rate of all counties in the state—higher than the non-municipal rates of Fulton (Atlanta), Muscogee (Columbus), Bibb (Macon), Richmond (Augusta), or Chatham (Savannah) counties. This situation has not gone unnoticed politically. The Commissioner of Roads and Revenues of Fannin County has made a summary statement of local attitudes toward the problem: Fannin County does realize a good many benefits in ways that encourage people to live here, but must also tolerate some serious circumstances. . . .The U.S. Forest Service now owns some 106,000 acres of land within Fannin County and this deprives the county of approximately $150,000 per year in tax revenue. A large portion of this land has progressively been acquired from private land owners who had formerly been paying taxes. This process has resulted in a steady undermining of our tax base. This example, combined with the tax rate we pay in Fannin County, creates a constant hardship on a lot of * "Effective tax rate" figures combine millage rates with assessment rates to reach a figure which can be compared with others on a tax rate per $100 of true property value basis. **In fact, the actual tax rates for these counties exceed comparable rates for rural counties by more than 15 percent, since the state figures include urban and metropolitan counties. �The Forest Service and Appalachia 95 our people who still own a fair amount of taxable property. Every time a piece of property falls into the hands of the Forest Service, the tax revenue formerly received from it is gone for good, and the remaining property owners must share this loss in revenue. . . .They purchase private land as it becomes available with our Federal tax money, and use it, in fact, to undermine the local tax sources where our local revenue must come from to support our local government. . . . We can no longer ignore the seriousness of these problems. There must be some compatible adjustment when land is acquired and results in a revenue loss.^ Responding editorially to the above remarks, one of the local newspapers, The Blue Ridge Summit-Post, wrote: The increase in taxes will no doubt place a great deal of strain on the working man's pocketbook. . . .Our tax rate in the past has been in no way below average standards, yet we, as a county, have profited little from the revenue obtained from it. We see as one of the reasons for our county's tax problem that great land speculator and wild real estate dealer, The Forest Service. We feel that the state and Federal governments should find a means of returning some of the revenue on this untaxed land to the county, where it belongs. Federal preservation of forest land is a good thing; we believe in some land control; but taxes are taxes, and Fannin County is having to strain the wrong pay check. Our residents work hard for their living, and carrying the load for the Forest Service is not helping the situation. We suggest some type of revenue return to the county on the part of its greatest landholder, The Forest Service.8 The Politics of National Forests The U.S. Forest Service itself has at different times taken different positions on the effect its policies have on local counties. Its usual position is that the "25% Fund" payments are a tremendous benefit to local governments. Their public relations �96 Colonialism in Modern America campaign to convince local, state, and national political figures has been so effective that a preliminary draft of The Last Stand: The Nader Study Group Report on the Forest Service stated: They [local residents] also receive generous public service benefits from National Forest timber cutting. To compensate counties containing National Forest land for their small amount of taxable property, the federal government pays them 25 percent of the receipts from National Forest timber sales within their bounds to support construction of public schools and roads.^ To term the token payments which the Forest Service makes to local counties "generous public service benefits" is, to say the least, not particularly accurate (the statement has been deleted from the final report); but the example does show the tremendous extent to which Forest Service public relations has been effective. At other times, the Forest Service has downplayed the "25% Fund" and emphasized other benefits from National Forests. One Forest Service spokesperson has stated: Without any doubt, the many other contributions to the economic development of the Appalachian Region made by the National Forests far outweigh the 25% return to the counties. It is not practical to place a monetary value on many of these contributions. I refer to such things as: -Recreation use plus hunting and fishing. . . .In a National Survey of Fishing and Hunting by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1965, they placed an economic value on a fishing man-day of $5.60 and a hunting man-day of $6.03. It would be higher today. So, you can see that this item alone would exceed the value of the 25% fund which is used only on schools and roads in the counties having National Forest lands. --Watershed protection benefitting local areas as well as down stream flood protection. -Employment of people maintaining and administering National Forests plus those employed to harvest timber which we have grown, etc. -Construction and maintenance of roads and �The Forest Service and Appalachia 97 bridges which would otherwise have to be maintained by the counties or state. ® The inaccuracies in this statement are highly misleading. The "economic value" of fishing and hunting involves money spent at local stores which is useful, but not to be confused with county income from taxes which is spent on education, health, and welfare. Clear cutting on national forest lands has destroyed many watersheds and increased hazards of flooding. Forest service employees are paid out of money appropriated from the Federal budget, which comes from taxes paid by local residents. No one is "employed" by the Forest Service to harvest timber; the wood is sold on the stump to woodcutters and timber companies. Most of the timber on national forest lands was not "grown" by the Forest Service; it was there when the land was acquired from private landowners. Few of the clearcut areas in the Appalachians have even been reforested. Nationally, the Forest Service is 733,000 acres behind on reforesting clearcut lands.11 As for road maintenance, this year alone the Forest Service closed 60 miles of roads in the Chattahoochee National Forest out of a total of 1,392. And the damage done to county and state roads by overloaded trucks carrying timber from the national forests is a direct cost to local government and a hazard and inconvenience to local residents. The fact is that other benefits do not "outweigh the 25% return to the counties"; they do not begin to compensate for the loss of tax revenue. In fact, the Public Land Law Review Commission in its 1970 report to the President and Congress concluded: While benefits are national, the geographical distribution of the Federal lands makes their burdens regional and local, and, in general, Federal ownership of public lands provides no distinguishable benefits to state and local governments in lieu of the benefits they would receive if the lands were privately owned. The Forest Service has also argued on occasion that one third of the United States is owned by the Federal government and that it would be impossible to make payments for all these lands. But there is a difference between many of the western national forests which have always been public lands and the �98 Colonialism in Modern America national forests in Appalachia, which have been bought up since the passage of the Weeks Act in 1911. Before 1911, none of the land now in the Appalachian national forests was owned by the Federal government; all of it was owned privately and was subject to local property taxes. The acquisition over the past 62 years of so much Appalachian land by the Forest Service has meant an increasing destruction of local tax digests, especially in those 37 Appalachian counties where between 20 percent and 61 percent of the land has passed into Federal hands. It is clear that the national forests are not contributing nearly as much as the Forest Service claims to the economic growth of the counties where they are located. The evidence suggests that the opposite is true. The loss of tax revenue has produced a scarcity of public services, including education and health care. The control of so much land by the government has artificially driven prices up for mountain land. Because of the demands for summer homes, recreational development, and land speculation, farming is no longer economically possible in many places. These conditions have helped encourage many young people to leave the area and have prevented many who have left from coming back. Whatever benefits the Appalachian national forests provide to the nation as a whole, for the residents of mountain counties they mean higher taxes and decreased public services. In effect, the people of Appalachia are being taxed to provide recreation and relaxation for people from other wealthier areas. No one can deny that there is a national need for recreation; but that does not make it right that mountain people should have their taxes raised and their public services cut back so that well-to-do tourists can enjoy themselves at no cost. There are several Federal precedents which strongly suggest that the Forest Service's way of doing business in Appalachia is neither desirable nor necessary. A startling comparison comes when we contrast payments made to counties by the Forest Service with those made by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). In 1972, for example, TVA paid $252,766 to Polk County, Tennessee, in lieu of taxes on the 3,418 acres it owns in the county—$66.05 an acre. The Forest Service paid the county $22,612 for 150,870 acres-15 cents an acre. To put it a little differently, the Forest Service owns 44 times as much land in Polk County as TVA; but TVA paid the county 11 times as much! �The Forest Service and Appalachia 99 TVA's responsibility to counties where it has operations, however, is very different from the Forest Service. The Tennessee Valley Authority Act provides: TVA's payments to the respective states shall not be less than the higher of (1) the average of state, county, municipal and district property tax levied by them on purchased power property and on the portion of TVA land allocated for power use for the last two years such properly was in private ownership or (2) $10,000. TVA pays directly to counties amounts equivalent to the former county and district taxes derived from power properties purchased as such by TVA and from reservoir lands allocable to power. . . .These direct payments to counties fully replace tax losses which result from the transfer of such properties to public ownership [ed. emphasis] .1* The TVA Act is not the only Federal precedent for the principle of full income replacement to counties. Public Law 81-874, commonly known as the "impacted areas" program, provides under Section 2, "Reduction in Local Revenue by Reason of Acquisition of Real Property by the United States": A school district may be eligible if (1) the property was acquired by transfer and not by exchange since 1938; (2) the assessed valuation of such property represents 10% or more of the assessed valuation of all realty in the district at time or times of transfer; and (3) the acquisition has imposed on the school district a substantial and continuing financial burden. Maximum entitlement is the product of the applicant's current expense tax rate applied to the estimated assessed valuation of the Federal property (exclusive of improvements since transfer date).14 In fiscal 1969, a total of 106 school districts in the United States received Federal tax replacement payments under this provision. The total paid to these districts was over $3Vz million. It is obvious that it is way past time for the U.S. Government and the Forest Service to begin full compensation to Appalachian counties for tax losses caused by national forest holdings and perhaps to compensate these counties for their �100 Colonialism in Modern America losses in past years as well. This has been recognized by two recent studies. The Last Stand: The Nader Study Group Report on the U.S. Forest Service states as one of its final recommendations: To reduce local pressure on the Forest Service and members of Congress to increase National Forest timber cutting, Congress should abolish the practice of returning 25 percent of timber sales receipts to the counties in which the timber is cut. It should replace these payments with the more equitable and dependable federal aid to impacted areas (now granted to states containing nontaxable Defense Department property) to all counties embracing National Forest land, regardless of the amount of timber cutting.* ^ A much stronger statement has been made by the Public Land Law Review Commission. In its official report, One Third of the Nation's Land, the Commission states: The legislative history of the acts providing for the sharing of receipts from forest products and oil and gas, as well as other leasable minerals, clearly reflects that the payments to the states and local governments were intended as compensation for the fact that the lands in question would no longer be available for private ownership and property taxation. . . .Since the ad valorem tax system has been the foundation for the financing of programs providing municipal services, the Commission believes that all landowners must share in payment for these services. This should not exclude the Federal government as landowner, except where the federally owned land is being used for facilities, such as in the case of post offices, to furnish services to all the people throughout the country . . . .If the national interest dictates that lands should be retained in Federal ownership, it is the obligation of the United States to make certain that the burden of that policy is spread among all the people of the United States and is not borne only by those states and governments in whose area the land is located. Therefore, the Federal Government should make payments to compensate state and local governments for the tax immunity of Federal lands. . . .We find further that any attempt to tie �The Forest Service and Appalachia 101 payments to states and local governments to receipts generated from the sale or use of public lands or their resources causes an undue emphasis to be given in program planning to the receipts that may be generated. " There are a number of other Forest Service practices which often conflict with local needs. One is the charging of fees to use recreational areas in the national forests. These fees range from $1.00 to $3.00 a day, or $10.00 for a "Golden Eagle" passport which allows entry to certain areas for a year. These fees may seem reasonable to tourists, but they are out of reach for most poor families. As a result, local residents are often not able to afford recreational facilities built by the Forest Service in their own counties. One North Georgia mountaineer, commenting on the Forest Service's plan to build campsites in the Cohutta Wildlife Refuge, one of the few wilderness areas left in the Eastern United States, said: There's a lot of old mountain people beside me who aren't going to take kindly to the idea of getting a permit to go onto land they call home.*' Many Southern mountain residents are also concerned by the rate at which the Forest Service is still acquiring land. A recent example of this process occurred in 1971 in Bland County, Virginia, in the Jefferson National Forest. One Virginia resident and forestry student who has been in close touch with the situation wrote: Consolidation Coal Company owned 46,000 acres of land in the county, containing relatively small amounts of semi-anthracite coal. Consol sold the land (finding the coal too poor to be profitably mined), amounting to one fifth of the county, to the U.S. Forest Service, which has incorporated it into the Jefferson National Forest. Combined with the county land already controlled by the Forest Service, it will put nearly a quarter of the county's real estate under government ownership. Large opposition to the land sale was expressed by Bland County residents. By the government owning one-quarter of the county, local revenues will be severely hurt. When Consolidation Coal owned the land last year, the com- �102 Colonialism in Modern America pany, a subsidiary of Continental Oil, paid just 14 cents an acre in taxes, amounting to a total of $6,800. The Forest Service pays no taxes, but will pay a small compensation of $3,600—or just eight cents an acre. The $3,200 loss, opponents say, could destroy the Bland County budget, which has had severe fiscal problems for some time. Most of the biggest supporters of the land sale were nonresidents and outside agencies, including various sportsmen^ clubs. The Bland County Board of Supervisors voted against the land deal twice last year. But a new Board of Supervisors has now voted in favor of the sale, yielding to the heavy pressure by outside groups. So now the land is destined for tourist and recreational development by the Forest Service. Just how this will benefit the residencts of Bland County, only time will tell.18 Appalachian working people are also critical of the ways in which timber sales are conducted. These sales are carried out by sealed bid. However, the Forest Service requires the posting of a cash "bid bond" with each bid. On a recent sale in which the minimum bid permitted was $2,297, the required bid bond was $300, a hard amount for self-employed woodcutters to come by. "Performance bonds," sometimes in the total amount of the contract price, are also required. These rules have the effect of making it extremely difficult for the small independent woodcutter to bid successfully on Forest Service timber. The contracts thus go more often than not to the large timber corporations. Of the Forest Service practices, none is more deeply resented than their use of condemnation proceedings to acquire homes and farms for national forests. Because of past abuses of its condemnation powers, the Forest Service's power to condemn land for National Forests was removed by Congress in 1964. This power is retained, however, in the case of national recreation areas. The pending Eastern Omnibus Wilderness Act (S.316) would restore condemnation powers to the Forest Service in the proposed Eastern Wilderness areas. One develop- �The Forest Service and Appalachia 103 ing national recreation area is located in the Jefferson National Forest in Southwest Virginia. One organizer who has been working with local residents to save their homes and farms from condemnation has written: The Mt, Rogers National Recreation Area, as defined by Congress in 1966, covers 154,000 acres in five counties of southwest Virginia. These counties are: Washington, Smyth, Gray son, Carroll and Wythe. The National Recreation Area (the Forest Service's equivalent to a National Park) is to be developed to accommodate, by present plans, an estimated five million tourists a year by 1990. To do this, the Forest Service has begun acquiring lands for campgrounds, livery stables, lakes, ski slopes and other recreation facilities. Some of the land has been openly bought from residents who, according to the Forest Service, are "willing sellers.'* While the Forest Service claims that condemnation proceedings are necessary to acquire land efficiently, many residents resent this practice and point out abuses of it. The central issue, as many local residents see it, is not simply whether or not there should be a National Recreation Area, but rather the fact that the people are having no say in the plans and developments of their communities and homes. ^ This lack of local input into Forest Service planning is a complaint heard frequently in Appalachian counties where the national forests are found. Traditionally, the Forest Service has carried out its plans without consulting local government or citizens. Lately, in response to public pressure from many sources, it has taken to holding 'listening posts" at which local residents are asked to present their opinions. These ' 'listening posts," however, have generally been held after the Forest Service had already prepared written plans of action for the areas in question. There is also evidence that the hearings are not taken into serious consideration. At a recent hearing in North Georgia, over 90 percent of the witnesses spoke against Forest Service proposals. These proposals would have included clear-cutting vast areas of the Cohutta Wildlife Refuge, despite the fact that this �104 Colonialism in Modern America area has been proposed as a Wilderness Area in the Eastern Omnibus Wilderness Bill. Yet, when a transcript of the hearing was requested, the Forest Service replied that it did not plan to transcribe the tape they had made of the hearing. It is difficult to see how a hearing could be a legitimate part of a public planning process when the only record of it is a tape recording in a Forest Service office. This type of practice led one county official to react in a letter to the Forest Service: After attending your meeting at Etowah on the Hiwassee Unit, I came away with the feeling that the Forest Service has already drawn up a tentative plan. If this is the case, I think in the interest of saving time and effort, the Forest Service should present their plan and then have hearings before it is adopted. . . .The U.S. Forest Service [has] never attempted to work with local government on future plans for U.S. Forest Service lands within their political subdivision. Conclusions It is evident that Appalachian people are bearing an unfair share of the cost of maintaining a national forest system and are getting very few of the benefits. If the national forests in the Southern mountains are to benefit Appalachians as well as other Americans, some changes in Forest Service policy must be made. The following are recommendations which, based on the facts set out in this study, are necessary to achieve this goal. (1) The Forest Service should make payments in lieu of taxes to all counties in Appalachia (and elsewhere) where national forest lands are located. These payments should be equal to the amount of ad valorem tax these lands would produce if privately owned. (2) Until such a system is adopted, all income from the national forests should be redistributed to the counties in which these lands are located in proportion to the share which each county has of the national total. Such a system would provide each county in Appalachia with national forests approximately sixteen times its current payment. It would also remedy the gross inequalities in distribution of national forest revenues �The Forest Service and Appalachia 105 which now exist among different national forests and states. The present system is a gross violation of the equal protection provisions of the U.S. Constitution and should definitely be challenged in the courts. (3) To avoid destruction of county economic bases, a limit should be set on the amount of land the Forest Service is permitted to own in any given county. (4) Admission to Forest Service recreational areas should be free to residents of counties where these areas are located. (5) The Forest Service should be required to hold public hearings before closing any national forest roads and to show cause before taking action. Procedures should be established through which local citizens, without undue difficulty or expense, can stop such proposed Forest Service actions where they are definitely not in the interest of the local community. (6) Any Forest Service plans for land acquisition, recreational development, road construction, logging, subcontracting, mining, land swaps, special use permits, and other uses of the national forests should be subject to the prior approval of an elected county committee. (7) The Forest Service should be absolutely prohibited from using condemnation proceedings to acquire any owneroccupied farms or homes in national forests, wilderness areas or national recreation areas. Where such lands have been acquired by condemnation, they should be returned without cost to the previous owners. (8) Timber tracts should be bid off in small enough lots so that small independent woodcutters can compete. Bid bonds should be abolished and a different system established to guarantee performance that would not discriminate against individual woodcutters. It should be required that 50 percent of all national forest timber be sold to independent woodcutters, cooperatives, or small wood companies which are located in the county where the boundary of timber is located. This will help reduce abuse of the current bid system by the giant timber corporations. �106 Colonialism in Modern America (9) Where the process of removing national forest timber damages county or state roads, the Forest Service should be required to pay for their maintenance and repair. (10) Clearcutting, a process which destroys timber, land and water resources, should be totally prohibited on national forest lands. (11) County and town governments should have the right to acquire national forest lands through eminent domain proceedings to build public facilities such as schools and hospitals. The situation as it now exists in the Southern mountains violates the letter, and certainly the spirit, of equal protection laws. It is grossly unfair that the financial burden of providing recreation for the Eastern United States should fall so heavily on some of the poorest citizens in the country, yet this is exactly what is happening. It is ridiculous to spend millions for campsites in communities which lack funds for schools, hospitals, health care, transportation, water systems, sewage disposal, and housing; yet this is what is happening. A number of Appalachian writers have suggested that the Federal government sees Appalachia mainly as a support area for the Eastern Seaboard, providing coal, minerals, electricity, timber and recreation to people outside the mountains. It is possible that in the minds of some economic and political planners, such as the Forest Service officials who wrote the Guide for Managing the National Forests in the Appalachians, the Southern mountains exist in the future as one vast Federal holding to be harvested by the coal corporations, the energy conglomerates, the timber and tourist industries. Mountain people are living on top of some of the greatest natural resources in the United States. History teaches that when poor and working people stand in the way of harvesting such resources, they and their interests will usually be moved aside. On the other hand, the national forest lands in Appalachia could become a real resource to mountain people by providing jobs, land for public facilities, and the revenue for badly needed service programs. Even more, these lands, which have been taken from Appalachian people, could some day be returned to them to live and work on: lands which their grandparents �The Forest Service and Appalachia 107 settled and cleared and which their children are being forced to leave. �108 Colonialism in Modern America NOTES *Guide for Managing the National Forests in the Appalachians, pages 7, 33. 2 Guide, page 8. $ Guide, pages 7, 8. ^The Atlanta Constitution, May 12, 1971. *The Principal Laws Relating to the Establishment of the National Forests and to Other Forest Service Activities, page 45. "Undated petition beginning "We, the undersigned are against S.316, H.R. 1758, Wilderness Study Act H.R. 2420 and such Eastern Wilderness bills. . . .," author's possession. 7 Blue Ridge Summit-Post, Blue Ridge, Georgia, October 11, 1972. 8 Ibid. ^The Last Stand: Service, pages V-l 3. The Nader Study Group Report on the Forest * ^Letter from W. W. Huber, Chief, Division of Information and Education, Southeast Region, U.S. Forest Service, dated January 18, 1971. ll The Last Stand, pages III-9. Third of the Nation's Land: A Report to the President and to The Congress by the Public Land Law Review Commission, page 238. 13 "TVA Power: Payments in Lieu of Taxes," TVA Information Office, Knoxville, Tennessee, November, 1972. �The Forest Service and Appalachia 109 14 "Administration of Public Laws 81-874 and 81-815: Nineteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Education," Office of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Washington, D.C., June 30, 1969. 15 The Last Stand, pages VI-37. 16 One Third of the Nation's Land, pages 4, 236, 238. l^U.S. Forest Service "Listening Post" on Cohutta Mountains Unit, Chatsworth, Georgia, August 1, 1972. 18 Letter from Dave Tice dated January 22, 1973. 1 ^Letter from Dave Tice dated February, 1973. 2®The McCaysville Citizen, McCaysville, Georgia, September 23, 1971. ����Ill 111: The five the the and set up son and the in the In the of Sue the life the and the and and it in the of to the velopers in by Theft" He the the the of and the the use of the of in "The at of be- the of in "The Big of the the of to in "Property, powerlessness. the cure to the of of control. in the by He to to to se- Rag" by de- by in to the of for the the life in in and to for the to the the to ��IN or AT BIG MY by or and has of or Dix is an in "the unIn reof it—"neo-colonialism," to the to nt tbe to at the A Asso is a of on Reis A at in an tbe is a in in tbe a of tbe at is fit St. �114 Colonialism in Modern America the two most resistant aspects of traditional mountain culture, the family structure and religion, to see in what ways they resisted or adapted to the process or how they were used as instruments of colonial domination. Central Appalachia—which is made up of eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, southwestern Virginia and northeast Tennessee—was the most isolated part of the Southern mountains. Except for a few outposts, the area was not settled until after the Revolutionary War. Mrs. John C. Campbell describes the area and its early settlement and characterizes the people living in the mountains as descendants of colonial English, Scotch-Irish, and German stock, "the advance guard of the great migration to the west who were seeking land, liberty, game." Many settled and remained in the area from the pure chance of a ''broken axle" but more stayed from choice. The population spread back up among creek and branch, wherever a little bottom land was to be found, fresh game or new springs of clear water. Traditions brought from lands across the sea blended with customs and prejudices bred by the frontier existence and were maintained during a relatively long period of isolation following the original settlement. (Campbell 1925, 9-13) Whether mountain culture should be properly described as a culture transmitted unchanged from the founders or an adaptive culture which developed in response to the isolated mountain conditions, descriptions do convince us that there was in the area at that time a society and culture different from the mainstream American way of life and certainly different from that of the outsiders who came into the mountains with industrialization. Since the outsider noted peculiarities, emphasized differences, and described the oddities, it is very hard to find reliable and clear descriptions of early family structure or religion in the mountains. Raines (1924,X) in his book The Land of Saddlebags states that uwhile the rest of the nation has grown far from our revolutionary ancestors, the Mountain People have been marooned on an island of mountains, and have remained very much the same as they were at that time." �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalachia 115 A sociologist visiting the hills of Kentucky in 1898 (Vincent 1898) describes a society based upon hunting and subsistence agriculture and a social organization based upon kinship. There were isolated mountain families living up coves and hollows with strong ties of kinship built upon three or more generations of intermarriage. Brown (1952) describes the traditional mountain family structure as a ' 'family group/' conjugal families living in family kin groups which formed small neighborhoods. The kin relations were extensive and complex, and neighborhoods acted as mutual aid societies. The groups were isolated, stable, self-sustaining, localized groups. Although the family was described as strongly patriarchal with a highly differentiated division of labor between men and women, there were many family cooperative activities in work, recreation, and visiting. Men and women had to substitute for each other; and both needed to be strong, resourceful, and selfsufficient. Women's work was an integral part of the total operation, and although her work was hard, it was also hard for everyone in the family. There was an equalitarian simplicity in the terms used by husband and wife: "the woman" and "the man"; or "my woman" and "my man." It was a life which stressed both independence and cooperation. The family and also the individuals had to be self-sufficient and independent and must not depend on others for help; one must be prepared to manage somehow by himself, but when he could, he helped. To be a good neighbor on a friendly, equal basis, "accommodating," was very important. Visitors to the mountain home frequently remarked on the lavish hospitality, generosity, uncompetitiveness, openness, directness, and simplicity of the mountain people. They were described as free from self-consciousness, dignified, quiet, reticent, and courteous. The early church was characterized by writers as separatist, immersionist, hardshell, strongly Calvinistic, anti-missionary; the people were literal interpreters of the Bible, rejecting infant baptism and placing emphasis on experience. Vincent found theological discussions popular in the family,and he felt these satisfied the appetite for metaphysics and offered opportunity for intellectual exercise and discipline (1898, 18). The church or meeting house served as a gathering place; �116 Colonialism in Modern America the monthly or less frequent meetings were an opportunity for sociability and a time to hear a preacher and have funerals preached. It served more as an occasional gathering place than an ongoing organization, although in the ' 'settlements" the church served through monthly business meetings the function of a civil court, sanctioning the behavior of the members and disciplining those who fought with neighbors, abused their brothers, used rough language, or retailed ardent spirits (Henson 1972). There was little church machinery; and the mountain values of simplicity, equalitarianism, and democracy were reflected in the ceremonies of footwashing and laying on of hands. The insistence on untrained ministers who were given special authority only through the spirit also reflected an antielitest bias in mountain society. Services were informal, congregations could sing down the preacher, people could wander in and out of services, but every preacher was given a chance to preach. Rhythm and eloquence and emotional ecstasy were admired and encouraged in the preacher. This emotional extravagance has been thought by some to be contradictory to the portrait of the stolid, impassive, dignified mountain man; but perhaps this unselfconscious ability to display emotion was in keeping with an unsophisticated, straightforward approach to life. Mrs. Condon (1962, 88) reports that the Presbyterian church grew slowly in Harlan County because people thought the members were distant, cool, and unfriendly. Though the area experienced gradual alterations between its settlement and the turn of the century, the biggest changes for the area came about 1890 as a result of the railroad, lumbering and coal mining, and the missionaries. Mrs. Campbell writes that at the turn of the century "suddenly the retarded frontier was rediscovered by two classes: those who saw the natural resources and sought them regardless of the interests of the natural owners; and those who with missionary zeal rushed in to educate and reform" (1925, 9). Mrs. Campbell, herself one of the missionaries, points to the "natural" alliance of exploiters and missionaries who came together to the hills. John Fox, Jr., a writer of romantic novels and a member of a coal-developing family which came into the mountains at the turn of the century, supports this natural alliance: The railroad comes first as an element of civiliza- �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalachia 117 tion, but unless the church and the school in the ratio of several schools to each church quickly follow, the railroad does the mountaineer little else than great harm. Even with the aid of these three, the standards of conduct of the outer world are reared slowly. A painful process of evolution has been the history of every little mountaintown that survived the remarkable mushroom growth which, within the year of 1889-90, ran from Pennsylvania to Alabama along both bases of the Cumberland. (1901, 209-10) The process of colonization as it occurred in the Central Appalachians generally followed these stages: 1. Gaining entry: invasion and securing of the area or resources 2. Establishment of control: removal of opposition and resistance to prevent expulsion of invaders 3. Education and conversion of the natives: change the values and social system of the colonized 4. Maintenance of control: tion political and social domina- THE FIRST STAGE: Gaining Entry The invasion was well planned and well executed almost before the natives knew what had happened. A well-trained force of lawyers, surveyors, geologists, and land buyers came into the mountains and millions of acres of mineral and virgin timber lands passed into the hands of development companies at from 30 cents to one dollar an acre. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt, just out of Harvard, abstracted titles and surveys in Harlan County for his uncle, Warren Delano (Condon 1962). Vanderbilts, Fishes, and other big financiers from the Northeast visited the mountains to help secure mineral rights and building rights and make arrangements for the railroads. Thomas Nelson Page of Richmond, Virginia, in a speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1910 urging them to give money for missionaries in the mountains, describes the coming of the �118 Colonialism in Modern America exploiters: When the outer world has reached them, it has mainly been to trade upon their ignorance and rob them of what should have been their wealth. There are lands which were bought of them for a few dollas an acre, which are bonded now as many thousands, and the justification for such legalized robbery at the hands of predatory wealth is that which is as old as Cyrus—that is was of more use to the taker than to the lawful holder. It is small wonder that they are suspicious as to the advances of civilization where the advance couriers are the land agent and the coal prospector—little wonder that, when evictors come under color of ancient patents to drive them from the lands which their fathers have held for generations, they should break out in feuds and violences. (66-67) In the early days there were few to criticize the methods. In 1924 Raines describes the situation as follows: The mountain people are suffering from the ruthless exploitation of large financial interests. These foreign juggernauts may have secured their coal and timber lands for a song, but taking money from those that have no special use for it is not a fatal damage. The deadly sin is the thrusting of a ferocious and devouring social system upon an unprepared and defenseless people. (236) Others interpreted the invasion as something akin to manifest destiny: "It is a region of vast resources that has been blocked out of the wild by a great people and held in trust, as it were, for the modern capitalist to develop and utilize. Its people are beginning to see the dawn of a new day" (MLW, 1-1-1925, 2-3). In the process of entry, both the missionaries and the industrialists were amazed by what they found. They sought to understand and to categorize the mountain people and culture. Letters were sent home, reports were sent to church boards, and newspaper articles were written about the development. Picturesque stories appeared in magazines. Some were horrified at the illiteracy, the lack of schools and medical facilities, and the �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalachia 119 limited diet; they were appalled by the lack of roads, the isolation, the lack of conveniences, and the hard life of the women; they were intrigued by the songs, beautiful weaving, quaint language, marriage and funeral customs, and unorganized church meetings; they were admiring of their courage, honesty, directness, and lack of sophistication. But always the mountain people were compared with "back home": the educated and professional middle-class, the urban homes and situations from which they came. The biography of one of the early missionaries, Rev. Murdoch of Buckhorn, relates his first trip home after seeing the mountains (May 1946): His heart and mind bursting with things to tell his Brooklyn friends. They were jotted down on a folded piece of paper. A kind of vivid moving picture of the crowded months since he left them. There was the mother who watched over her son to keep him from using profanity while shoeing his horse; children chewing tobacco, other children going barefooted in the snow; the rich veins of coal laid bare along the creeks, destitute families in rickety cabins, burial without ministers, whole districts without schools, the silent forest at the head of Squabble Creek, the flowers and birds along the trails, the character sketches of some of the people he had met in his travels. Such terms as arrested development, retarded frontier, remnant, a distinct relic, a peculiar people, survivals, ancestors, backward, and limited outlook were commonly used. Mrs. Campbell writes that a conventional world was charmed with its picturesqueness and startled by its illiteracy and disregard for law. "It could not understand how people could at once be a feudist and man of integrity and responsibility in his neighborhood. How they could be illiterate, yet have a real and deep culture. Personal experiences led to undiscriminating generalizations on the 'finest of Anglo-Saxon blood' and the 'off-shoots of degenerate refugees and criminals/ No people have ever played more completely the mixed role of villain and neglected hero in the public eye" (1925). John Fox, Jr. played a large part in stereotyping the moun- �120 Colonialism in Modern America tain culture for the outside world and justifying the imposition of power and control over a native people. He, like most of the newcomers, was both admiring and denigrating. He describes the Southern mountaineer as truthful, honest, courageous, hospitable, peaceable, and a man of law—yet known for his moonshining, his land-thieving, and his feuds. But he goes on to blame the Civil War, the revenue service, and the "system of land laws that sometimes makes it necessary for the mountaineer of Kentucky and Virginia to practically steal his own home" for making the mountaineer a "criminal" (1901, 209). The invasion brought in the outsider and opened up the mountain culture to view, and the mountaineer became aware of himself as different. He began to compare himself with the newcomer and learned to judge himself as inferior. Jean Ritchie (1955) describes the development of the schools and its effect on her family: The settlement schools and the railroad began to bring the ways of the world to us in a kind of steady trickle. . . .The settlement schools [brought] in levelcountry people who settled among us and whose ways of doing things, whose very speech and actions, helped us to see that there was a different kind of life than the hard one we knew. (pp. 225ff.) An editorial in Mountain Life and Work (April 1925) criticizes "unauthorized characterization by professional writers and unscientific reformers which built up among the mountaineers what the psychologists call an inferiority complex. It has found expression in the humble submission to outside invasion and in the eager acceptance of small favors and paltry benevolences." ESTABLISHMENT OF CONTROL John Fox describes, either naively or arrogantly, the process whereby the newcomer gained control and subdued the native population. In an article entitled "Civilizing the Cumberland" (1901,209ff.), he describes how in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, the "sternest ideals of good order and law were set up and maintained with Winchester, pistol, policeman's billy, and whistle through a unique experiment in civilization." A volunteer police �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalachia 121 guard, a private army, manned by the young newcomers, was organized. Fox describes it as a police force of gentlemen: "aristocrats and pultocrats," American and British, lawyers, bankers, real-estate brokers, newspaper men, civil and mining engineers, geologists, speculators and several men of leisure. All were college graduates (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, University of Virginia) "who had come into the mountains of Virginia to make their fortunes from iron, coal and law." They were first organized to put down a strike of mountain workers at a newly established brick plant in the Gap. Fox then relates that they became precision troops who guarded jails against mobs, cracked toughs over the head with billies, lugged them to the calaboose, and appeared as witnesses against them in court the next morning. They turned a mountain crossroads town where mountain boys frolicked and fought into a quiet, respectable outpost of high society. Since the developers wrote most of the history, there are few accounts of native opposition in the record. John Fox does mention that there was considerable hostility and dislike for the newcomers, and he mentions that fighting clans tried to make the "furriners" leave the county. He says that the strike of mountain workers became a confrontation between the newcomers and the mountaineers, and the opposition of the local people was readily discouraged by the newly formed guard. He relates how the newcomers were harassed, the guard mocked by the mountain "toughs," and the townspeople frightened and inconvenienced by the "wild jayhawkers from old Kanetuck" who were accustomed to coming to the Gap to sow wild oats and fight with the boys from Wise and Lee counties. He also reports that with the organization of the guard and the establishment of town ordinances which outlawed drinking, shooting, and yelling, all this was changed and mountain people were practically prevented from entering town (except as "meek sheep"). "It arrayed the town people against the country folk. . . but with each element of disorder there was a climax of incidents that established the recognized authority of the guard." The hanging of a local bad man, Talton Hall, became a ceremonial display of power, thereby showing the legal conquest of the mountains through a confrontation with and defeat of the family-clan system. "Never had a criminal met death at the hands of the law in that region." The badman was a Kentucky �122 Colonialism in Modern America feudsman and his clan was there to rescue him from the gallows. The guard won, and Fox points out that it showed "that a new power had come in the little band of 'furriners,' high-spirited, adventurous and well born, who had taken matters into their own hands, and subdued local lawlessness" (p. 25). The guard extended its "benign influence" throughout the area, and other boom towns formed similar organizations. After that, the natives, "the easy-going, tolerant good people, caught the fever for law and order." This early show of force and organization of political control made it possible in later years for the owneroperators to rely on the local authorities to protect their interests and maintain the needed law and order. After that, natives did most of the policing, and not until the unionization of the mines did the outsiders again have to take up guns to protect their interests. The establishment of control may not have been quite as rapid or efficient in other parts of the mountains, but the pattern was much the same. The technological superiority of the newcomers made conquest inevitable. The shrewd manipulation of the machinery of law made the newcomer the supporter of law and order while the native became an outlaw. Since the newcomer wrote the history, the colonizer is "adventuresome" while the native is "tough." Raines was to write later: "The Mountain Man that attempts to redress the injustice of the law by using the rifle is no more guilty in his lawlessness than is the millionaire corporation that uses shrewd lawyers instead of rifles" (1924, 144). EDUCATION AND CONVERSION OF THE NATIVES The role of the missionaries and educators was an important one: to make legitimate the exploitation, to eliminate some of the worst abuses, and to educate and change values so that the people would accept the new ways. John Fox recounts another incident of resistance to the newcomers and the use of religion to win over the natives. He reports that when the first printing press was taken to a certain mountain town in 1882, a deputation of citizens met it three miles from town and swore that it should go no farther. An old preacher mounted the wagon and drove it into town. �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalachia 123 There are other reports of resistance to the missionaries, and some ministers were run out of communities and their churches burned. The preachers and church boards soon found that women were more welcome, especially if they had any skills such as teaching or nursing, for the mountain people were eager to acquire teachers and health workers who could most effectively reach the people. A former missionary reported that women were sent in to "pave the way" for the ministers. She rode horseback all over eastern Kentucky without fear of any harm, whereas the preachers would be run out. She started schools and clinics, but she knew that she was really there to pave the way for the preacher to save souls. In a report in 1915 of the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers (an inquiry into their needs, and the qualifications desired in church, educational, and social service workers in the mountain country), one churchman writes: I place first [in needs] academic schools rather than Sunday schools for the reason that the former have the stronger appeal and are less liable to sectarian objections and denominational opposition. In this kind of school it is possible to successfully mold the character of the young and to prepare them for more efficient lifework. Through the young, it reaches out into the home and social environment of the parents. Next in importance, I place the Sunday school. It is a more plastic and adaptable agency for reaching the young and adult mountaineer than church services. Its approach is more immediate and acceptable. Well organized and tactfully conducted, the Sunday school's religious and social enterprises can come in closer touch with the homelife and social habits of children and parents, (p. 11) Jean Ritchie relates the story of the arrival of a strange woman into Hazard in 1895, driving a wagon and traveling ahead of the railroad: Folks couldn't rightly make out why she had come all that weary way up into Perry County; she had no people here that anyone could see. . .she was friendly, "nice-spoken," "a little bit nosey," "visited nearly every family," "stayed the night," "would pitch in and help," �124 Colonialism in Modern America and sometimes she'd come right out and rail at them over doing something a wrong way or a hard way and show them a better way. Miss Pettit had such a way about her that she got by with it. After several years of summer visiting, Miss Pettit returned with tents and other women and started teaching school. They held classes on how to cook, sew, mend, darn, and take care of sick folks. They read the Bible and talked about the evils of drink. The Women, as they were called, developed both Hindman and Pine Mountain Settlement schools. Jean Ritchie relates a story about her grandfather which was told by the Women and published in books describing the development of the settlement school. It is a story which has its counterpart in other parts of the mountains and takes on the nature of a legitimizing myth. It relates how a mountain man came to support the Women and their school and to claim them as saviours for his people. He walked long distances across the mountain; and he said: "I growed up ignorant and mean; my offspring was wuss; my grands is wusser, squandering their time drinking and shooting; and what my greats will be if something hain't done to stop the meanness of their maneuvers, God only knows. Women, I am persuaded you air the ones I have looked for all my lifetime. Come over on Troublesome, Women, and do for us what you air a-doin' here" (p. 227). Another missionary, Alice Lloyd, from Boston, came to a Presbyterian Mission, Hope Cottage, on Troublesome Creek. Another old mountain man, Abisha Johnson, went to Hope Cottage and begged Alice Lloyd to teach his children to live "not liken to the hog but unliken the hog" and gave her 150 acres for a school on Caney Creek. Many other women made similar treks. Deaconess Binns of the Episcopal Church came to Nora, Virginia, on the first train that ran on the line to teach in the schools and start Sunday schools. In 1905 an Englishwoman, Miss Toddy Collins, who became known as the Angel of Happy Hollow, walked across Big Black Mountain from Kentucky to Roda, Virginia, a mining camp, to begin a church and a school, preach funerals, make coffins, and mother the sick. The Women were usually welcomed by the coal operators who provided houses and buildings �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalachia 125 for churches and schools. An Iowa minister came to Beverly, Kentucky, which he described as u the wildest part of the Cumberlands." Following the gleam "to this neglected place where lawlessness and ignorance reigned," he built schools and churches and became known as the Shepherd of Red Bird Mission (MLW, January 1929, 17). The missionaries were sincere and dedicated to educating mountain people, nursing the sick, caring for orphaned children, and assisting families in many ways. They also had a profound effect upon family life. Jean Ritchie reports that families moved closer to the settlements to be able to send their children to the schools. The Women made a great impression on the people with their stylish clothes, the pretty furniture, and the nice way they talked. Jean Ritchie and her sisters were impressed: "What if I could grow up to be like that. . . .It was like the whole world was opening up like a blossom" (pp. 230-231). One story is typical of how a community sought their help: "At the request of the community, who were asked in a public meeting to vote on it, a church famous for its high standards was induced to begin work there. It sent a well-trained, consecrated woman as full-time religious worker. A congregation was organized and a school with several teachers. Every year a fresh crop of young people go out from the community to the mission schools to train themselves for worthwhile service" (MLW, April 1929, 13). The missionary and settlement schools were successful in educating a whole generation of teachers and middle-class leaders for the mountains. In a brochure about Konnarock Training School in Virginia, Mr. Kenneth Killinger says: "These schools lead and train youth in Christian womanhood and manhood, developing Christian leaders who will ultimately raise the spiritual, social, educational, cultural, and economic standards of the mountain people." The training at some of the schools was so successful that an educated native, an extension worker for the University of Kentucky, could look back at his people and state that through Junior Club work he was finding that what was really wrong was "laziness or we may call it, lack of industry" (MLW, July 1925). �126 Colonialism in Modem America The missionaries worked on two levels, which insured their influence in the development of the education, health, and social service systems. First, they came as direct representatives of the church and started a denominational church school, or they started Christian schools of no particular denomination in order to avoid direct conflict with local preachers. Second, the missionaries would work in the already existing school system for no pay, as did Deaconess Binns of Nora, Virginia. Deaconess Binns worked for the school board for 35 years for a dollar a year. Thus, her efforts to start a Sunday school and various recreational programs for children met with community approval. It was through this method that an Episcopal church was started and maintained until her death in 1968. All the schools and missions offered various other services besides the rudiments of education. People in the communities quickly learned that they could go to these missions to receive health care and free used clothing and to leave orphaned children, etc. These and other services had been taken care of in the past by the family and community. Now, missionaries with much better facilities were able to "show-up" the meager efforts of the past. In their eagerness to be accepted by the community, many missionaries were overgiving, which placed people in dependency relationships, since missionary help was the only alternative to the hard life of the past. There was another side to the training. The mountaineer became overwhelmed and ashamed of his culture. Fox was to relate that as religious and educational agencies work on the mountaineer "he is cowed by the superior numbers, superior intelligence of the incomer and he seems to lose his sturdy selfrespect" (p. 50). Raines reports that more than 200 schools, orphanages, academies, and colleges brought in by church boards had been established by 1924 (pp. 176-77). He points out that most were boarding schools which provided greater opportunity to mold the habits and thoughts. The schools included household and garden chores, religious training, and constant supervision. He describes the curriculum in what he calls the "brought-on, nonindigenous schools." Most of the cultural people coming into the moun- �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalachia 127 tains to teach unconsciously use the same methods and the same materials to which they were themselves accustomed. . .which are poorly adapted to the super-rural conditions in the mountain area. They either urge the mountain pupil away from the mountains or overwhelm him with hopeless discouragement. In either case, they unfit him to remain at home. (p. 181) It was these schools which developed a dual society where children had one relationship and identity at home and one at school. The schools, books, and teachers represented another world, another history, and another literature. Some of the teachers attempted to preserve certain aspects of mountain culture such as crafts and music. Jean Ritchie reports that "if it hadn't been for the settlement schools, many of the old mountain songs would have died out when the ways of the world came in on us. But the Women loved our music and plays so that they became a regular part of the life around the two schools" (Pine Mountain and Hindman, 231). Other teachers, however, found no singing and a complete lack of suitable good songs in the mountains (MLW, July 1925, 3). One teacher found children singing "I've Been Working on the Railroad/' an "obviously unchildish song," and only two out of 23 students knew "Annie Laurie." This teacher brought in a progressive music series and promoted such operettas as "The Windmill of Holland" and "The Quest of the Pink Parasol." Such denials of mountain culture made native children ashamed of their heritage. Churches and missionaries gave some support to certain harmless aspects of native culture. This fact served to soften the impact and ameliorate some of the abuses of the system, the denigration of mountain culture, and the development of feelings of inferiority by mountain people. The churches and schools, however, taught the values of organization, planning, hard work, and thrift. They made the industrial process legitimate by blaming the ills of the system on the mountaineer himself. He must learn to be more "cagey" (not so gullible and taken in by the land sharks); he must learn to be more thrifty and hard-working, more respectful and cooperative with the mine operators. Although some of the missionaries saw clearly the exploitation, they still had great faith in progress and the benefits �128 Colonialism in Modern America of industrialization. The superintendent of mountain work of the Presbyterian Church wrote in MLW, January 1929, of the tremendous multiplication of industries, some of them of gigantic scale and from alien sections and nations. He saw a need for the states to provide safeguards against the exploitation of their population, for "only as church and state move hand in hand will industrialization become an unqualified blessing." Some were more critical. Perry Davidson, writing in 1926 in MLW, says: Coal, the chief material wealth of the section, is now owned by outside capital. It is doubtful if any of the profits accruing from the exploitation of this natural wealth will be reinvested in the welfare of the mountain people. No great agricultural prosperity is to be hoped for. The timber is gone. This narrows prospects, but let's not despair. And this is his solution. Maybe there is oil below the coal, and if it is struck the native will not let the "furriner" outwit him next time. (January 1926, 10) In an industrial round table of the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers in 1926, the group agreed that the industrializing of the mountain resources had been deadening to the constructive instincts and had inhibited the forming of habits of thrift and a feeling for conservation. This group hoped to obtain the cooperation of the heads of companies in working out remedial programs. The consensus was that the employers have hearts and that they vaguely realize the evils of their industrial system but do not know what to do about it. The feeling was that if they were approached in the right way they would welcome counteractive influence. Another Episcopal missionary, who earlier worked among the Indians of Canada before coming to his mountain post, worried about the fact that mining was not constructive and that recklessness took the place of thrift, the miner did not learn to save. "While the accumulation of money is neither the most desirable thing or the only desirable thing, it is a good indication �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalachia 129 of a man's habits, and a man who tries to save a little can be depended upon to fight temptation against slackness of life and conduct7' (MLW, January 1926, 22). Some few missionaries thought the church should be more vigorous in warning the mountain people of the danger of large corporations and also in preserving parts of the native culture. One missionary who came as early as 1876 wrote with appreciation about the mountain people: They need the inspiration of the outside world without its greed and corruption. . . .they are closer to an original type of American manhood than any other section of our country. They should not be changed in their fundamental characteristics. . .they need to be warned of the danger of disposing of their large mountain holdings for a song. Corporations and trusts are a constant menace . . . .they threaten the mountaineers by transforming them into a servile class. (An Inquiry, 20) The missionaries saw the family and church as problems to be resolved (Tadlock, 3). The superintendent of mountain work of the Presbyterian church found the native church non-progressive and without any activities other than monthly preaching by uneducated ministers with an emphasis on doctrine unrelated to life. "But industrialism has brought its nucleus of Christian people, pastors, evangelists, church and independent schools which are centers of religious progress. . .with modern church programs, efficient pastoral leadership (MLW, January 1929, 20-23). Even those ministers who admired the primitive, simple, real worship found the lack of organization of the churches a drawback; services were not regular enough and preachers were ineffective and inefficient. Here again, the outsider judged the family and churches as needing to be better organized—or disrupted—if the native was to be fully integrated and assimilated into modern society. The missionaries formed themselves into an organization called the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers which began publication of a magazine Mountain Life and Work. In the first issue (April 1925, Vol. 1-1) a statement of philosophy, A �130 Colonialism in Modern America Program for the Mountains, was included. It summarizes well their attitudes and programs: First the program for the development of mountain resources by mountain people: . . . .Northern and Eastern artisans and capitalists are our friends and we invite them among us but we must not permit them to crowd us out and take away our heritage and birthright. There is no insinuation that this heritage and birthright are being dishonestly taken from us. They are simply slipping from our hands because of our inability to hold them. We can hold them only through education, skill and efficiency. These three acquirements must become our possession if we would develop the mountain resources. The program for "The perpetuation of Mountain Home Life Along the Lines of Our Own Best Traditions" emphasized the development of God-fearing homes where education is encouraged and love reigns; homes wisely planned. . . .the creation of beauty. . . .building upright character. . . .conveniences to relieve the drudgery of wife and mother. . .the precepts and examples of law abiding citizens are held in reverence and everything derogatory to peace and order and neighborly good will is discouraged. In the program for "A Religion that Functions Actively in the Life of the People" churches should work at a common task and jealousies and competitions should be forgotten. The churches should promote unselfish devotion to the welfare of neighbors and the cause of Christ. There was a need for a religion felt in politics and business and to motivate the civic life of people. . . .patriotic enforcement of law by ballot box and community backing of public officials. . . .election of God-fearing, country-loving officers who will do their duty. Training the youth that bravery and heroism are not expressed by intimidation, revenge and killing, (pp. 20-21) Throughout the program, the emphasis is on the need for education, skills, efficiency, planning, law and order, material conveniences, fear of God and a sense of duty, all very helpful values for the new society. �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalachia 131 THE CHURCH AND FAMILY RESISTS Both the family and church became defensive and reverted inward in order to protect members from the sudden influence which came with the development of industrialization. Some of the characteristics and "problems" ascribed to children and families today by psychiatrists, educators, and social workers can possibly be traced to this process whereby the family tries to preserve traditional mountain culture and resist or adapt to the colonization process. In outline one can point to the following reactions and ways through which the family system has resisted colonization: 1. The family and kinship group became a refuge for its members. 2. The family became more resistant to certain changes and developed sabotage techniques. 3. Used as a refuge, the family resulted in overprotection of children. 4. The family and family groups in neighborhoods became defenseive, exclusive, and closed. 5. The family and family groups became the center for "underground" mountain culture. 6. The family and family groups encouraged biculturalism. Each of these reactions will be discussed briefly. Some of these conclusions can be documented from other reports and studies of family and children in the mountains, but many of these remarks are highly impressionistic observations based on our experience growing up, being educated, teaching, living, and working in the area. 1. The family becomes a refuge. In studying the families in the Southern Appalachians and Appalachians in the cities, researchers have continued to find the society familistic, kinship ties strong and viable, loyalties to kin taking precedence over �132 Colonialism in Modern America "civic" responsibilities, kin groups acting to ease migration problem and to provide a home base for the returning migrant (Brown 1971; Ford 1965; Pearsall 1959; Coles 1971). In the coalfields, where there are few alternatives for employment, the family offers the only alternative means of support. If one "can't take it" any longer, he will be accepted back home and cared for until he has the strength to go back into the mines, locate a new job, or migrate to (or reenter) the city. Rather than being destroyed by industrialization, the family and family ties remain or perhaps in some cases become stronger as the family requires more commitment on the part of members. The Appalachian is expected to be loyal and help members of his family whether he likes them or not. This family loyalty can also be used against the family. Industries soon learned to use family loyalties to minimize criticism of industrial operations. One will not endanger a relative's job or criticize a situation in which a kinsman is involved. Mine operators, for instance, have learned to hire through families to find loyal workers; they also hire from a number of families to cut down on criticism of strip mining within a community. 2. The family becomes resistant to change. Family members restrain their members from taking social action. There is little revolt or conflict since one is afraid to disrupt the only remaining refuge. A number of persons have commented on the permissive mountain mother, and some have suggested that she is afraid to discipline her children for fear of a disruptive conflict. Many school social workers and nurses have commented on mothers who say they can't make a six-year-old go to school, eat proper food, or go to the dentist. This has a contradictory aspect in that the child is taught to rebel against certain institutions such as health and school. The child seems to be trained by the mother to be "willful," and the mother seems to take pride in a child who cannot be controlled. This serves to cut down conflict within the family and also keeps the child at home as he rejects the institutions. 3. The mother frequently becomes overprotective. She holds the child close and makes him feel guilty about leaving home or developing new ideas. Memmi remarks that this is a problem in other colonial situations. "The soft warmth of clan �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalacbia 133 reunions is satisfying and one is afraid to leave it." Looff (1971) in his book Appalachians Children agrees with Memmi (p. 99) that the "young remain glued to family which offers warmth and tenderness and clutches and emasculates him." 4. The family and neighborhoods become more exclusive and closed. Early visitors—including industrialists, missionaries and tourists—found great hospitality, open goodwill, as well as the beginnings of cautious suspicion. The mountain people learned to distrust. Semple (p. 610) reports that people were beginning to resent the coming of "furriners" among them on the grounds that outsiders came to spy upon them and criticize and "tell-tale" as they put it. A cautiousness toward outsiders has been encouraged in the family. "Listen and don't talk" is widely used as a protection. One can also put down an outsider's idea, with, "You are not one of us. You don't understand." This is a form of defensive racism, and the burden of understanding is placed not upon the Appalachian but upon the good shepherd in wolf's clothing who desires to "help" mountain people. This can lead to the family's becoming oversensitive to criticism, more negative, more unchanging and traditional in approach to problems. 5. The family becomes the bulwark against the loss of native culture. Memmi points out that what is saved may be meagre or it may go underground since the colonial falsifies history, extinguishes memories, and devalues native culture. Since he stresses differences, he is always compared with something "better"; therefore, the native becomes ashamed of his heritage and draws less and less from his past, which results in a "present orientation" according to Pearsall, Weller and Ford. The Appalachian takes on the myth perpetuated by the industrialist that there was nothing here until coal came in to develop it. The main aspects of the culture which were fought for and were the hardest to change were mainly patterns of relationships which can be described as basically non-competitiveness. Family members and neighbors depend on each other, but it is a dependence which also encourages independence or "let the other fellow alone." People help each other in time of need; they share the load; but this help is not imposed nor organized and leaves room for independence and individuality. �134 Colonialism in Modern America The family also develops ways of holding down conflicts, "talking things over," and face-saving games. Disputes must be settled amicably; therefore, certain things are never mentioned and certain behaviors are ignored. Equality is maintained through treating all children the same and providing them with equal inheritances wherever possible (Brown 1952). The only consistent exception is "baby," and if land is passed on to only one child, it will more often be the youngest, who in exchange stays home to care for parents. To keep a sense of equality and non-competitiveness, a "local success" or ambitious hillbilly almost has to leave his family and neighborhood and live with the colonizers. In his small neighborhood he will be sabotaged and people won't help him. He will be put down as not neighborly and "out for himself." Perhaps this explains why the local success seems to become more exploitative than the outsider. He goes against his rearing, he is punished, and he retaliates and must find his support from the outsiders. Equality is still important. Mountain people resist experts, titles, and people who put on airs or get above their raising. 6. The family encourages biculturalism. The schools create a duality—a world different from the family environment. Branscome speaks of the "annihilation of the hillbilly" by the institutions. Many mountain youth remember the shaming process when they had to deny their "mother tongue," reject their music and their religion. Memmi (p. 108) says the colonized turns away from his music, the plastic arts, and, in effect, his entire traditional culture^the consequence of which is ambiguity. Smathers talks of two routes the educated mountaineer can take: cultural schizophrenia or cultural transvestitism (biculturalism). Mountain children are taught early to act properly in public and be hillbilly at home. Mountain people learn to deal with medical, welfare, educational, governmental institutions and speak their language and use their techniques. They learn to use institutions, outsiders, etc. selectively. But the strain is great. The mountain person is taught how to use the hillbilly stereotype for his own protection and to confound, aggravate, harass, and thwart the colonizer. (They leave the program planner wondering why that didn't work.) One example is the stereotype of �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalachia 135 laziness, dependency, and irresponsibility which the Appalachian has learned to manipulate effectively in order to sabotage the colonizer's attempts to organize the mountaineer into pseudoparticipatory democracy rituals which further splinter Appalachian solidarity. The mountain church also went through similar reactions. Briefly, the church also became defensive: the native minister reacted against his characterization as ignorant and uneducated by making lack of training and education positive values. Local preachers attacked the incoming trained clergy for their "high laming" and accused them of being lacking in "spirit." The church resisted the social consciousness which was being promoted by outside religious institutions; therefore, the church became more fundamental and rigid in doctrine. It saw the establishment churches as supporting a system, political and economic, which was destroying a way of life. Its best defense was to become less worldly. Few outsiders felt comfortable in the primitive Baptist services; therefore, keeping their services expressive became a good protection. The church maintained equalitarian rituals and strict rules of behavior which set them apart. Mountain people still do not belong to Presbyterian, Episcopal, or town Methodist churches unless they have become middle class professionsals or successful businessmen. Other churches (which became more popular with younger Appalachians) developed in the area, including Free Will Baptist and Pentecostal churches. In these churches, foot-washing is still maintained as part of the ritual; the services are informal; there is still shouting and expression of religious fervor; and preachers still "preach." They now have Sunday schools, sing more popular gospel songs, and even train and pay their preachers; but the city churches are still shunned as coal operators' churches, too fancy and elegant for plain country folk. But while helping to preserve certain aspects of indigenous culture, the native church refused to become involved in politics or to be critical of the economic exploitation of the area; this fact has worked against change in the status quo. Memmi (pp. 99, 101) finds that in a colonized situation both religion and the �136 Colonialism in Modern America family serve as refugees and save the colonized from the despair of total defeat. He feels that the native society gets in a bind; in order to preserve or save the collective consciousness, it must shut itself off, live isolated. In so doing, it hardens, petrifies, and "degrades its own life in order to save it." This appears to be only partly true in Appalachia. The church and family still reflect and teach basic mountain values of equality, non-competitiveness, and family-neighborhood solidarity. These positive and viable aspects of the expressive church and the solidary family may be powerful allies in and the basis for a revitalization movement in Appalachia. Mike Smathers suggests that "resistance strategies" should be considered as positive strategies for the future saving of Appalachia. Those committed to the liberation of Appalachian people might well study the ways in which the mountain family and church have continued to resist the institutions in order to give help to controlling the new "developers": federal government, tourism, and T.V. The new missionaries, the new professional planners, educators, and community organizers might well look at their roles in the new development to see how they also may be aiding and legitimizing the further destruction of Appalachia. �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalachia" 137 REFERENCES CITED Blauner, Robert 1969 "Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt/' Social Problems (spring) Vol. 16, No. 4, 393-408. Branscome, James 1971 Annihilating the Hillbilly, Huntington: ment Press. Appalachian Move- Brown, James 1952 "The Farm Family in a Kentucky Mountain Neighborhood," Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 587, Lexington, Kentucky (August). Brown, James S. 1971 Mountain Families in Transition, Penn State. Burlage, Rob 1971 "Developers and Colonizers" in David Walls and John Stephenson, Appalachia in the Sixties, Lexington: University of Kentucky. Campbell, Mrs. John C. 1925 "Flame of a New Future for the Highlands," Mountain Life and Work (April, pp. 9-13). Caudill, Harry 1962 Night Comes to the Cumberland, Boston: Little and Brown. Coles, Robert 1971 Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers, Children of Crisis, Vol. 2, Boston: Little and Brown. Condon, Mabel Green 1962 A History ofHarlan County, Nashville: Parthenon. �138 Colonialism in Modern America Conference of Southern Mountain Workers 1915 The Southern Highlands: An Inquiry into their needs and qualifications, desired in church, educational and social service workers in the mountain country. Diehl, Richard 1970 "How International Energy Elite Rules," People's Appalachia (April, May). Dix, Keith 1970 "Third World Pillage," People s Appalachia (April, May). Egerton, John 1966 "Alice Lloyd: The College That Can't Be," Louisville Courier Journal, October 23, 1966, pp. 7-12, 26, 27. Ford, Thomas R. 1965 Value Orientations of a Culture of Poverty: The Southern Appalachian Case. Working with low income families, American home economics association, Washington, D.C., pp. 57-69. Fox, John, Jr. 1901 Blue-grass and Rhododendron, New York: Scribners. Henson, Edward L., Jr. 1972 Gladeville and the Mountain Stereotype 1856-1860, Virginia Cavalcade (spring, 21:4, 30-35). Lesser, Roger 1970 "Culture: Toward Tomorrow's People," People's Appalachia, No. 1, March. Lewis, Helen M. and Edward E. Knipe 1970 The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case, paper read at American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, San Diego, California, November 22, 1970. Looff, David H. 1971 Appalachia's Children, Lexington: University of Kentucky. Mahy, Gordon G., Jr. 1946 Murdoch of Buckhorn, Nashville, Tenn.: Parthenon Press. �Family, Religion and Colonialism in Central Appalachia 139 Memmi, Albert 1965 The Colonizer and the Colonized, Boston: Beacon. Mountain Life and Work 1925-30 Files of back issues, Conference of Southern Mountain Workers. Page, Thomas Nelson 1910 The Mountaineer of the South, American Monthly, June 1910. Pearsall, Marion 1959 Little Smokey Ridge, University of Alabama. Raines, James Watt 1924 The Land of Saddle-bags, New York: Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada. Ritchie, Jean 1955 Singing Family of the Cumberlands, New York: Oak Publications. Semple, Ellen Churchill 1901 The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: Anthropology, Harper, VI, 588-622. A Study in Simon, Rich 1972 "An Historical Sketch of Migration in Appalachia," People's Appalachia, Vol. 2, No. 3, July. Smathers, Mike 1972 Talk at rural sociology meeting on Appalachian Research, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, August 25. Tadlock, E. V. 1929 Coal Camps and Character, January, 1929. Vincent, George E. 1898 "A Retarded Frontier," American Journal of Sociology, IV, 1-20. Weller, Jack 196 5 Yesterday's People, Lexington: University of Kentucky. �This page intentionally left blank �PROPERTY, COAL, AND THEFT by If I had to I to (l the in t is si a very ? " a n d i f "murder" I 1 to the to dehis is to is to be prive a a to of his of Why, not to the "Wftdtf is property?" "theft" to be is I I am the of the first? a ... In is We can by the •'A ' ' of lit " of this at the "/» Is I, JVo, 2 in ts of of the o/ tit �142 Colonialism in Modern America berland Mountain and lying on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee. Here one finds the results of corporate exploitation at its worst. Once a booming mining area, automation and strip mining have left 30 percent of the population unemployed. Mountains are gouged by the relentless blade of the bulldozer and blasts of dynamite. Streams are filled with silt and flooding; timber and wildlife are destroyed. Not just land, but a way of life is eroding. Thousands have had to leave to find homes and jobs in the cities of the North and to make way for the strippers. For those who remain, houses are poor, and incomes for over 70 percent of the population are less than $4,000 annually. Within that same valley in Bell County, Kentucky, and Claiborne County, Tennessee, approximately 85 percent of the land—50,000 acres—is owned by a single company, the American Association, Ltd., of London, England. From its land, over 2.2 million tons of coal a year are carted away, mostly to Georgia Power and Duke Power. And from the royalties on that coal, thousands of dollars a year are exported to the company's London headquarters. Yet, there in the midst of England's "Wall Street" the wealth may scarcely be noticed. The chairman of the company's board of directors, Sir Denys Flowerdew Lowson, a former Lord Mayor of London, controls an estimated 88 such companies around the globe; and he personally is listed as chairman of 40. The American Association is one of the smallest of his concerns. To the people of Clear Fork Valley, however, the company represents tax evasion, destruction of land and jobs, and the denial of the future; to Sir Lowson, however, the company's listed value represents a piddling one half of one per cent of his estimated personal wealth. It is no misnomer that one of the American Association's parent companies should be named London Foreign and Colonial Securities. But its English nature should not detract from its similarities with the other absentee property owners of Appalachia. By looking at the historical development of this microcolony in Clear Fork Valley and the meaning of its colonial control in the modern day energy demanding world, we can learn something of a situation common to much of central Appalachia. And by understanding the micro-colonial relationship, we can learn something not only about Clear Fork but also about the �Property, Coal, and Theft 143 relationship of other regions to the energy conglomerates. The Making of a Micro-Colony It is an irony of history that many of the first settlers to come to the mountainous areas in and around Cumberland Gap were the rebels. In the Appalachians they found a place to escape the rapid industrialization of England and of Europe and to establish a new way of life, free from the exploitative social relations which they had known before. As Jack Weller describes in Yesterday s People, some of the settlers came from the Levellers movement in Britain, where they had challenged the power of their English landlords, and they came "in rebellion against a form of government that imposed its rule from the top."8 Yet their freedom in the frontier mountains was changed in the late 1800's when coal and iron ore were discovered and demanded to feed the new wave of westward industrialization. In the Cumberland Gap area it was a young Scottish-Canadian capitalist, Alexander Arthur, who foresaw the Gap as an iron, coal, and steel center to feed the rapidly growing South. Backed by capital from Britain's Baring Brothers, a company was formed, the American Association, Ltd., which in turn transformed the Yellow Creek Valley of Kentucky into the booming coal town of Middlesborough, named after its British counterpart. Rarely has there been such a colonial boom. Between 18881892 over 20 million dollars of British capital poured into the area. Railroads, furnaces, industry, hotels, streets, and lavish halls were built. Thousands of people—many from England, others from the east, some from the south—poured into the area. The town was quickly dubbed by its promoters and others as "The Magic City of the South," and in 1892 its magic was valued on the British stock exchange at over 40 million dollars. Founding Father Alexander Arthur, who came to be known as the "Duke of the Cumberlands," proclaimed to a group of investors on November 11, 1890, "This is but a transfer of British business to American soil."9 And, indeed, soil they had acquired—an estimated 80,000 acres in the Yellow Creek, Clear Fork, and other valleys, all rich �144 Colonialism in Modern America with coal and timber. The most famous historical account of the development of the area, Wilderness Road by Robert Kincary, simply states that the company acquired the land within a few months. In fact, modern day courthouse deeds show perfected titles. But there is more to the story. Residents describe, still with anger, how the agents tricked, threatened, or forced the uneducated mountaineers to give up their land. Some mountaineers, not knowing or even caring about the value to the industrial world of the wealth beneath them, "Voluntarily" sold the land for 50 cents or one dollar an acre. An entire mountain, from which Consolidation Coal now supplies the American Association almost $200,000 yearly and Georgia Power over 1,000,000 tons of coal yearly, was reportedly traded to an agent of the company for a hog rifle. Other mountaineers were victims of legal tricks. One method, oral history reveals, was to have someone jailed and then offer to post bond in return for his land. Where there was resistance, force was used. Residents tell stories of how the company men would burn their fathers out if they wouldn't sell. And though many of the courthouse records of this era have been burned or have disappeared, it is not uncommon for a local Appalachian to look out from the front porch of his companyowned house and remark, "See that mountain? They stole it from my daddy." "Property is theft," but to endure, theft has to be legitimized. In Middlesboro, as in the modern era, the tools of legitimacy were the concentration of power in the hands of a few and an ideology of boom and progress to attract the support of the many. Certainly, the American Association had the power in the boom town. It retained controlling interest in everything—banks, industry, railroads, even the Four Seasons Hotel in which were hosted the recreational shenanigans of the rich. One is reminded quickly of modern plans for development of Appalachian playgrounds. Anyone who had or who wanted any part of the economic benefit of the new society was dependent on the will of those few who controlled it. With the dependency on the economic controllers, though, also came a supporting ideology of progress, civilization, and re- �Property, Coal, and Theft 145 sponse to social need. Arthur proclaims it this way: I would say that America needs this place and our AngloAmerican money, experience and push. . . .We have also the sinews of body and of money and stand ready, cleancut, and vigorous, for a generation of progress and success in manufacture, arts, and sciences. Come and join hands with us in the great enterprise which is worthy of us all, native or foreign born though we may be. ^ The New York Times and other publications applauded the development. For Harper's magazine it represented "a summing up of the past and a prophecy of the future. . . .the last of the mountaineers passing away before the breath of civilization."11 Like other traditional colonialists, the virtues of this "civilization" were unquestionably better than the past, somehow less-than-human, ways of the "natives." The imagery from the same Harper's article demonstrates this equation by the colonizers of progress with economic boom, of human dignity with the material gain: As I stood one day in this valley, which has already begun to put on the air of civilization with its hotel and railway station and mills and pretty homesteads, I saw a sight which seemed to complete the epitome of the past and present tendencies there at work. . . . . . . .creeping slowly past the station—so slowly that one knows not what to compare it to unless it be the minute hand on the dial of the clock—creeping slowly along the Wilderness Road toward the ascent of the Cumberland Gap came a mountain wagon, faded and old, with its dirty, ragged canvas hanging motionless, and drawn by a yoke of mountain oxen which seemed to be moving in their sleep.. . . On the seat in front . . .sat a faded, pinched and meager mountain boy. . . .His stained white face was kindled into an expression of passionate hunger and mental excitement. For in one dirty claw-like hand he grasped a small paper bag, into the mouth of which he thrust the other hand, as a miser might thrust his into a bag of gold. He �146 Colonialism in Modern America had just bought with a few cents he had perhaps saved no one knows how long some sweetmeat of civilization which he was about for the first time to taste. . . . So it is easy to see how for the American Association the combination of monopoly and ideology fused tq portray it not as a colonizer or controller but as a conscientious and necessary contributor to the social good. A Scribner's Magazine article in 1890 reflects this social view. The American Association ''leases its mining and other properties but does not and will not sell them. This fact is evidence of the interests which it has and will always have in the prosperity of Middlesboro." The company controls the coal commerce from "the raw state of the earth's bed until the final and finished result is in the hands of the consumer. . . .To this parental character of the American Association " the article concludes, "and to the comprehensive protection with which it pursues the course of industry is largely due the prosperity of Middlesboro. "12 For those to whom the economic dependency brought rewards, the ideology of progress brought responses of loyalty appropriate to the "parental character." In 1891 local newspapers report that a three-hour mass meeting was held to express appreciation to the officers of the American Association. Held at the Opera Hall, it was the "largest and most enthusiastic meeting" ever witnessed and one at which quite a number of "the fair sex graced the scene."13 For those mountaineers who did not accept the new ideology, such progress meant the intrusion into and colonization of their culture. But their protests and situations were ignored, justified as a "social cost," or pitied by those who saw them as "left out of the mainstream." The literature of the city's development says little of its effect on the mountain people. But one 1905 account describes the colonization of the free life of the mountaineer in rationalities frighteningly similar to what one might hear today: The Association have between 200 and 300 tenants of mountain people and are on the best of terms with them. The Association has not always treated them fairly and justly, but has gone out of its way to assist and to encourage; they have responded by being true friends, �Property, Coal, and Theft 147 assisting the Association in protecting its property. It is much regretted that these people have not yet got the advantage of schools and churches to which they are entitled.14 The Yellow Creek and Clear Fork valleys had been colonized. Through the power of property the propertyless had been made the powerless. Not only is property "theft" but it is also the ability to legitimize itself: to make colonization acceptable. But the glory of the Magic City of the South didn't last long. Money from London dried up. The American financial panic of 1893 hit the hills of central Appalachia. A 1911 issue of the Middlesboro newspaper describes in retrospect: "It may be doubted if ever in the history of boom towns there had been so great a collapse." The properties in the town of Middlesboro were auctioned off and the 80,000 acres of land were mortgaged to the New York bank and a Mr. J. H. Bartlett was appointed auctioneer. At that point, the American Association changed its name from Limited to Incorporated yet retained essentially the same shareholders. In the auction, an agent for the "new" company bought back for $25,000 what had been mortgaged for $1,500,000 only a few months before. Shortly thereafter, J. H. Bartlett became general manager of the American Association, Inc. The strange transaction did not go unnoticed. Creditors of the American Association, Ltd. sued, claiming "fraud," rigging of federal courts, and perjury. The outcome of the suits is undetermined; the records went up in flames in one courthouse and seemed to have disappeared from the dockets in another county courthouse. Though the company had lost its property, it hadn't lost the power to steal it again. Middlesboro as a company town was gone, but the company had regained 80,000 acres of surrounding coal-rich mountain land, and on that property it could continue to control its colony. A Modern Day Colony It was last summer and Lewis Lowe looked out at his small �148 Colonialism in Modem America one-half acre of land located along the Clear Fork Creek, now covered with strip mine silt deposited on it from the latest flood. For the last few years, he hadn't been able to farm much on his land. "Strip mine mud. . . .nothing will grow on it," he said angrily. And today he was thinking of leaving, of moving out of the mountains where he had lived the close to seven decades of his life to an unknown town somewhere. "You'd think we were animals or something, the way they Ve treated us . . . .the strippers and the Association." His life represented much of what had happened in the eighty or so years since the Middlesboro bust. The coal mines and company towns had come to the Clear Fork Valley. For 46 of these years, along with hundreds of others like him, Lewis had worked "from sun up to sun down, worked in almost every mine around, I did." Then, though, it was other companies, those that leased from the Association, that were the "villains." They owned the stores, ran the mines, built the houses, extracted most of the profits, and supplied the Association handsome royalties. These companies needed the labor of the men like Lewis; and though exploitative in the many slave-like ways of the coal camp era, they provided jobs and camouflaged the controlling palm of the behind-the-scenes, landowning American Association. But in the 1950's came the coal slump. For a variety of reasons, the deep mines closed down as they did in much of central Appalachia. In its relentless, ugly way came reminders of who it was that still possessed the property upon which the companies had operated. In 1952 there were 1,230 coal-mining jobs in the county; by 1958 there were only 282. The American Association no longer had the need for men on its land, and, therefore, it no longer provided the employment that had subdued the recognition of the colonizer. Most of the men had to leave the valley to try to find work in the cities of the North; the American Association made no attempt to provide or even to allow alternatives. Lewis had wanted to stay and did until the company told him one day in the dead of winter that he, his wife, and six kids would have to leave in three days. The strip miners were coming in, and they used bulldozers. People got in the way. Twice Lewis was evicted, forced to leave the land that he had tilled with �Property, Coal, and Theft 149 his hands and labor. The home, the garden, the spring that through his work had come to be his now were to be shoved aside by the bulldozer. He didn't get any compensation; after all, they said, it was the company's land. Finally, in 1960 he had found and saved the money for the small place where he now was and had tried again to create a peaceful home that he could call his own. But now, the stripping had caught up with him again, and he was thinking of giving up, of leaving for good. Here in the life of a single miner comes a human example of what is meant by "property is theft," for Lewis Lowe was propertyless, and those who had the property had controlled, manipulated, and finally defeated his will, expression, and pride as a human being. Here also in Clear Fork Valley in a larger sense is an example of the insidious power of absentee corporate ownership that is the murder of Appalachia. We have already witnessed the fundamental form of theft. In the valley today over 2 million tons of coal a year leave to provide over 10 per cent of Georgia Power's fuel, all from the land of this single London based company. Much of the coal is deep mined from a single Consolidation Coal mine, owned in turn by Continental Oil. The rest comes from strip mining by only a few profitable firms, mines which were originally owned by a set of mountain elites but which have now been acquired by the energy conglomerates. Royalties on all the mining, from 20 cents to $1 a ton, are carted away to offices off Bank Street in the financial district of London. We have recognized this form of inequity, and most of America today has accepted the ideology that legitimizes it. But there are other forms of theft in the colonial relationship which grow from that inequity of property that inevitably means the inequity of power. Consider several examples. Property Tax Evasion. Traditionally (and theoretically) the normal social mechanism for sharing or redistributing wealth is taxation. For local governments, property taxation is the major source of revenue, and, supposedly, property is taxed at an equal rate so that those with large amounts of valuable property pay more than the owners of small amounts of less valuable property. But it hasn't worked that way in the Clear Fork Valley. �150 Colonialism in Modern America There the American Association owns 17 percent of the land surface of Claiborne County and perhaps 90 percent of the county's coal reserves. Yet in 1970 its 44,000 acres provided only 3 percent of the local revenue. Even after citizens' challenges demanded that the law be enforced, the situation remained similar. Vast areas of untouched coal reserves were being appraised at $25 an acre, less than the least expensive farmland in the county. And Claiborne County is no exception. In 1971, the nine land companies that controlled 35 percent of the land surface and approximately 85 percent of the coal reserves in Tennessee's five major coal-producing counties accounted for less than 4 percent of the local revenues. In West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia—despite laws to the contrary in every state—property taxation has failed to reap the benefits of the immense property wealth for local government.15 These are the counties that need local revenues the most yet get the least. Consequently, the amount of money they have available for education, health, welfare, housing, and for the means and services of human development is far less than the national average. The local small non-mineral holders pay an unfair share of taxes; they pay for loss of services; and they pay in innumerable other ways for the destruction caused to their roads, streams, and lives as the wealth is carted away. Property means not just poverty for the property less; it means the power of the colonizer to avoid traditional forms of sharing that property. Theft of revenue means more than a loss of money; it means in Appalachia the denial of the basic services and means for building independent local communities. Strip Mine Theft. The American Association hosts more strip mine operations than does any other landowner in Tennessee. Almost 5,000 acres of its land have been laid waste by the devastation of bulldozers and dynamite. In central Appalachia itself an estimated 600,000 acres of strip-mined land have been left unreclaimed.16 And as in the Clear Fork Valley, it is on the property of the absentee owners, who escape the consequences, where most of the stripping is done. To many outside of the mountains, stripping is viewed as an �Property, Coal, and Theft 151 environmental issue, and indeed it is. The strip miner literally blasts away the sides or top of a mountain; debris is bulldozed over the side, and the exposed coal is shoveled out. While the process is fast and highly profitable, it leaves the mountain a gaping sore; ecological cycles are upset; timber may take several hundred years to recover; streams are filled with silt and acid. Reclamation, though ostensibly possible, is expensive and rarely carried out in the mountains. It is, as some have put it, "like putting lipstick on a corpse." To many Appalachians, though, stripping is more than an environmental issue. It is an economic one. Folks look back to the days of the deep mines when there was work, and to that deep mining many would like to return. * We've been deprived of our livelihood," says J. W. Bradley, a former deep miner and now a leading figure in the anti-strip-mine effort. "The strippers came in under falsehoods and stole our jobs from us," he says. And, in fact, the Report of the President's Council on Environmental Quality in March, 1973, observes that if stripping in the mountains were stopped today, there would be jobs for three times as many men in Appalachia in deep-mining and probably at higher wages. But for mountain folks the destruction of stripping is the destruction of something even more basic. For people who have always lived close to the land, who have built their lives and their communities around the freedom and confines of the mountains and the streams, stripping is the symbol of destruction of a way of life, a culture. "Every time we see a bulldozer go into the mountain, it's like someone has stabbed a knife in our heart," explained one mountain woman to a group of city folks. Stripping, economically presided over by the absentee property owner, is theft of both a means and a way of life. Theft of Alternatives. As if the theft of wealth, of taxes and services, of a means and way of life were not enough, another most insidious theft is the denial of alternatives to the Appalachian. The carving up of the mountains by a few owners means that others have no choice in building their futures; they are subject to the will of the large landowners. In Clear Fork Valley it isn't enough to say that Lewis Lowe can go elsewhere; there aren't any elsewheres, at least in the �152 Colonialism in Modern America mountains. There in the valley, Alvarado E. Funk, the General Manager of the American Associaton, has announced a policy of depopulation: 'The people would be better off, and we would be better off, if they would be off of our lands," he said. And, because of a lack of jobs or homes, or because of the destruction wrought upon them by the land-use practices of the corporate owners, people are forced to leave. In the valley people are trying to hang on and to provide alternatives. A non-profit community development council has sought for five years to provide the alternative by building new industry and homes. Yet for five years they have been denied any land upon which to build. Just last year the American Association would not even consider freeing one-half acre of its 50,000 acres in the Clear Fork Valley for a clinic. Nor are many other industries interested in coming in. Also, large blocks of land kept unused deny smaller landowners services such as roads and sewers and the chance of their own development. The outmigration of thousands of people from the mountains over the last twenty years hasn't been a matter of choice for most. They've moved to make way for the bulldozer, and now there's talk of having more of them move again to make way for recreation, to allow folks to escape the now overcrowded mountains. Theft takes many forms. Here in the Clear Fork Valley it is not only what is done but what is not done, not allowed, that prevents possibilities of new industry, developments, futures by and for the Appalachian people. What then is the modern day colony? It is theft by the property owner of the resources, of taxes and a base for community services, of a means and way of life, of the possibilities of choice for the colonized propertyless. As was true in the 1890's it is either ignored or rationalized to the rest of the nation by an ideology, the need for energy, or the need for the South to grow, to "catch up." But hidden beneath the ideology is the dependency of the propertyless on the property of others and threat of destruction of a land and a people. In Appalachia, the corporate property holder, like the slave owner, holds the power to deprive "will and personality," a power of "life and death." In Appalachia, property is theft. �Property, Coal, and Theft 153 Energy and the Nation: The Making of a Macro-Colony? The colonization of people by the energy conglomerate extends to others in America, outside the Appalachians. One ought to be able to learn about the nature of social thievery and the process of colonization from history. In the development of the energy industrials and in the "boom" in the South today are signs of a macro-colony, parallel to the development and boom of Middlesboro, the micro-colony of the 1890's. The first similarity is that the energy conglomerates or their representatives, particularly the oil industrials, are buying up all the land and minerals they can get in Appalachia and the West. Jim Ridgeway's new book The Last Play gives a good account of the recent major transactions: Consolidation Coal by Continental Oil, Island Creek Coal by Occidental Petroleum, Peabody Coal by Kennecott Copper, etc. There have been countless others on a smaller scale. And in some instances the form of barter is similar to that of the 1890Js: One company offered an Indian tribe in Montana a health clinic in return for several million dollars worth of minerals. Not only are these few corporations gaining vertical control, but they are developing horizontal alliances—with the landowner, with the fuel company, with the energy producer. Like the American Association in the 1890's, control is being gained by a few from the product to the final good of electricity. Other industries in the South and the nation are becoming dependent upon the energy conglomerates for their own economic strengths and futures. A second similarity of the energy boom is that this dependency on the economic concentration in the hands of a few is supported, even concealed, by a prevailing ideology: the demand for energy for progress and growth and defense, the fuel crisis, etc. The United States has only 6 percent of the world's population yet already uses some 46 percent of the world's energy. Yet we have no suggestions for cutting back on the use of energy, only the need for more and more fuel. Not only can the fear of an "energy crisis" be invoked, but with the capacity to advertise, to create demand and to control supply in the same hands, the ideology can be self-sustaining—and profitably so to the sustainers. �154 Colonialism in Modern America Thirdly, like those riding the bandwagon of the Middlesboro boom, the combination of dependency and ideology have brought support of emotional loyalty from the general American consumer. The boom has been a quick one; the sequence of events in the last year alone has been dazzling. All the major weeklies—Time, Newsweek, Business Week—have declared a fuel crisis. Time magazine sponsored a conference to consider solutions to the crisis to which several dozen representatives of the energy conglomerates, Nixon's key energy advisors, and two environmentalists were invited. Shortly thereafter, Nixon's famed "energy speech" declared the need for more tax loopholes, for relaxation of environmental controls, for more social thievery to "solve" the "crisis." Generally not wanting to interrupt growth or in the belief that their lights would grow dim, the American public accepted the steps, or others like them, as necessary. And, like in the Middlesboro boom, little attention is given by the press or the public to the destruction of a land and people back in the mountains. In cases where the plight is noticed, the colonization and depopulation are justified as "necessary social costs." Attempts at correction aim only at "allowing4* the Appalachian to join the already overcrowded and mountaindirected mainstream. The analogy of the energy boom to the boom of the Magic City in the 1890's is not meant to say naively that energy sources and use are not major social problems. They are. But it is meant to show that the present ownership of energy resources and the supporting ideology of "energy crisis" can be used to disguise social thievery from the urban public as well as from the mountaineer. Consider the following three examples. Labor. Georgia Power's union and race policies brought to our attention by the "Georgia Power Project" or Shell's response to demands of its refinery workers for better working conditions show that in the name of "energy crisis," workers can be exploited. As in the coalfields, the demands of labor are discounted as minor compared to the national needs for energy supply. The Consumer. The growing monopoly within the energy industry means that prices can be increased for the consumer without bringing any benefit back to the coal fields. Usually, �Property, Coal, and Theft 155 for instance, it is the function of the Federal Power Commission to control price increases of electricity. But hidden within their code is a provision known as the ''fuel-release" clause. Essentially, this clause means that wherever the price of fuel (coal) increases, the consequent price of power (electricity) can be passed on to the consumer, no questions asked. The effect is obvious: if a large stripping operation on American Association land raises the price of coal to Georgia Power, then Georgia Power can raise the price of electricity to the public. The extra cost is born by the consumer, but the profits don't go back to the people of Clear Fork Valley or to reclaim their mountains. They go to increase the wealth of the already wealthy few who own, produce, and supply the coal and power. The "Energy Crisis." Energy companies justify strip-mining destruction by claiming the need for cheap fuel to supply the consumer. Yet, only approximately 10 percent of Appalachia's coal can be stripped; the rest must be deep mined if it is to be recovered. Moreover, stripping "for the cream" damages the mountain in ways that will make far more expensive and dangerous the deep mining required for "the rest of the milk/' While the Appalachians are being destroyed, the consumer is being duped. The lack of a rational fuel policy today means that he will have to pay extra costs tomorrow. Someday, as was the case in Middlesboro, the quick, cheap profits will be over. But while the companies will retain their control, the consumers who accept the credibility of their colonizers will have to pay for and suffer the losses. Yes, just as we could see in Middlesboro the founding of a micro-colony out of which have grown ever more insidious forms of thievery, we can see in the modern boom for coal, energy, and "progress," the building of a macro-colony whose similarities to its predecessor ought to sound a warning: property is theft and not just in Appalachia. In the current context, it becomes chief collaborator with other energy industrials in theft from labor, from the consumer, from the future, and from others throughout the nation as well. A Bit on De-colonization There is a difference today in the Clear Fork Valley as �156 Colonialism in Modern America there is in the rest of the mountains to the time of the 1890's, however. People are resisting and a movement is building. The movement takes many forms. In the Clear Fork Valley, citizens have begun to challenge for the first time the American Association and its London holders. Some gains have been won, including the acquisition of some of the company's property with which the local community development council can build a fresh future growing from within rather than controlled from without. In the five major coal-producing counties of Tennessee, Save Our Cumberland Mountains, a grass-roots organization of some 200 people, has in the past two years begun to challenge forcefully the tax evasion, strip mine destruction, and economic and political controls exercised by the large land companies in their areas. Led by J. W. Bradley, SOCM, like many other groups throughout the mountains, is an attempt by the people of Appalachia to regain control of their land and their lives. Whether expressed through working for union reform, fighting strip mining, developing community-controlled industry, or demanding welfare rights, people are angry. Organizations are building. There are those who have compared the mood in the mountains today to the pre-dawn of the civil rights movement—waiting for a spark, a leader, or the right combination of social events that make such movements happen. Those who learned from the failures of the 1960's, though, know that such movements must come from within, must be led and fought by Appalachians, and cannot be fought from the outside. Just as the 1960's provided for non-blacks in the South a brutal awakening of consciousness to the meaning of the statement "slavery is murder, 7 ' perhaps from the 70's the South can come to recognize that in Appalachia "property is theft." Just as the murderers of the slaves aren't necessarily in Mississippi, the colonizers of Appalachia aren't necessarily in Appalachia. Perhaps with this recognition we can see that whether we are mountaineers, workers, or consumers, urban folks or rural folks, we face in the energy conglomerate the same thieves. And if there can come that understanding, there can also come the hope that a movement for decolonization of Appalachia will spark a �Property, Coal, and Theft 157 struggle for radical change of structure and of ideology in the rest of the South and the nation. �158 Colonialism in Modern America NOTES ^Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, First Memoir - Quoted in Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Stewart Edwards, ed., Elizabeth Frazer, Trans. London: Macmillan and Co., 1969, p. 124. 2 Schmidt-Bleek, F., "Towards a More Beneficial Use of Coal," Appalachian Resources Project, University of Tennessee, 1972. ^Gaventa, Ormond, Thompsen, "Coal, Taxation and Tennessee Royalists," unpublished study for the Vanderbilt Student Health Coalition, 1971. 4 Kirby, Richard, "Kentucky Coal: Owners, Taxes, Profits," a study in Representation Without Taxation," for the Appalachian Volunteers, March 11, 1969. ^McAteer, Davitt, "Profile of West Virginia as a Colony," unpublished study, 1971. ®Dun's Review and Modern Industry, April, 1965, p. 40. 'Capital Resources in Central Appalacbia, prepared for the Appalachian Regional Commission by Checchi and Co., Washington, 1969. ^Weller, Jack, Yesterday's People, University of Kentucky Press with the collaboration of the Council of the Southern Mountains, Inc., Lexington, 1966, p. 11. ^Speech by Arthur, November 11, 1890, published as a pamphlet by the American Association. The other historical material comes from cited works or from my own research in local newspapers, courthouses, library records, and interviews. �Property, Coal, and Theft 159 11 Allen, James, "Mountain Passes of the Cumberland," Harper's Magazine, copyright by Harper and Brothers, 1890, p. 8. ^"Southern Lands: November, 1890. Middlesborough, Ky.," Scribner's Magazine, 13Recounted in The Middlesboro Daily News, August 19, 1965, pp. C-22. 14 Tipton, J. C., The Cumberland Coal Field and Its Creators, Pinnacle Printery, 1905. 15por f ur ther information, see "Property Taxation of Coal in Central Appalachia," A report for the Senate Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations from Save Our Cumberland Mountains, Inc., prepared by John Gaventa. ^Schmidt-Bleek, Appalachian Resources Project. References are provided only for direct quotes from other printed works. �This page intentionally left blank �THE BIG STEAL by as the the to Jr. the lies the of the the has the "frontier." I as a to it, of a of the of to of his of ffo In the are the at the of the in of It is of the to for the Of (if a a it in the mediate the as on the a for the be of to in the in the in the no imto the in of tiff i « in of iff Iff fi �162 Colonialism in Modern America to stock-raising, and later to the precious mineral rushes. The riches of the timbered hills were by-passed, the coal strata and other minerals were at first unknown, and few, then as now, appreciated the aesthetic qualities of the Cumberland atmosphere. We can therefore say, with a degree of assurance, that southeast Kentucky was settled, very thinly and for an abnormally long period, by a rather distinct social type. We may not here take time for much observation or comment or proof, but it is the significant and apparent fact that the Daniel Boone "type" was of necessity the earliest settler. (Isolation carried forward the character process; organized industrial rapacity preyed on what it found and completed the process of southeastern Kentucky society.) It is noticeable that not even Boone tarried in the mountains when he came leading groups in from North Carolina, but he pressed on toward central Kentucky. The few who came and stayed generally followed Boone's trail from North Carolina, coming in through southwestern Virginia; lesser numbers came from Pennsylvania and western Virginia. A few came in directly from Europe; one of my great-grandfathers came directly from Ireland, and a great grandmother came from Holland. I would but make the point in regard to all these: The mountains typed them all to a degree which it may well be doubted is known in its singularity anywhere else in the States. When I credit this result to the mountains, I mean to signify the national isolation, the personal loneliness, and—if a metaphysical idea may be permitted in a sociological thesis—the natural atmosphere of the Cumberlands. In 1964, after a period of about four years of research in local history, in the state judicial system, and in the region's sociological aspects, I mapped a section of Pike and Letcher counties, a section perhaps five miles in length and comparably much narrower. This mapping was aimed at coal-title research and at a history of the development of the coal empire. It was quite interesting for me to find the first land patent ever granted in the mountain hollow where I was born and had grown up, interesting to attempt to fit these records of 1832 to the easier work of the following decades. I mapped many of the patents of the 1840's, and each decade's history grew more discernible as I found and located the natural objects (for authenticity), both on paper and on the ground. �The Big Steal 163 I discovered that shortly after the Civil War a little flurry of interest in the awareness of the mineral wealth was manifested, unbelievably, by a trio of local people. These men established leases or options of record on hundreds of acres near Jenkins. These leases, of necessity, could but expire and cease to be of legal import; railroads and capital were still far in the future. Twenty-five years of subsequent isolation brought the history to 1890 when, for the Elkhorn Valley of Pike and Letcher Counties and the Shelby Valley of Pike County, the speculators came in a rush.1 R. M. Broas from New York organized the first mass-buying venture. Whether he was buying for himself or as a direct agent for those to whom his "titles" were transferred eleven years later, I have not discovered. He was fairly well furnished with money by the standards of the day. From records of Pike Circuit Court and from material in the Appellate records (Northern Coal and Coke Co. v. C. S. Nield, et al.) it appears that he had "about 20 corps of engineers (surveyers). . . .besides abstractors and attorneys examining titles." His daily payroll was asserted to be four hundred dollars, which perhaps reveals why he chose to deal in leases rather than fee purchases or outright mineral severance deeds. One dollar per acre was paid to consummate the transactions by consideration, and provisions for paying two more dollars per acre "when and as mined" were written into the documents. Not only did this dollar per acre permit Broas to reach twice or thrice as far in acreage grasped, the question of taxation, either on the surface or on the dormant mineral reserve, was left to the lessor. Although any unbiased arbiter could easily perceive that such a lease, granted for a period of 999 years, was an open contravention of Kentucky statutes on "perpetuities," the leases were upheld then in the subverted court system and were more definitely upheld as late as the 1950Js when Pike Circuit Judge Jean Auxier ruled that in all effect the leases were "deeds." This occurred in the face of the mountain court record books wherein the documents had been listed as "leases" for sixty years. At once the Court of Appeals upheld Auxier, and since the substance of the perpetuity statutes had already been voided, there was a sophistry truth in the reasoning. The law against "perpetuities" had ruled that no instrument, in general, was valid that did not provide consideration that could be utilized by �164 Colonialism in Modern America the grantor in a reasonable time, presumably his lifetime. Here was a lease consideration wherein the lessor's grandchildren to the point of economic infinity could not obtain consideration, and then only as the coal was mined (i.e. perhaps ten dollars one year for the mining of five acres and ten dollars in the next century for five more). Nor was the injustice to such grantors the only reason for denial of such transactions; public policy was very much at stake. A wealthy corporation could thus, at a minimal expenditure, tie up and obviate hundreds of thousands of acres or other resources in opposition to the state's or the nation's need. In reference, however, to the removal of public resources and public necessities from the normal availability to the public, the perfect illustration is supplied in the thousands of unsightly shacks and broken men with broken families visible to those who merely pass through southeast Kentucky while the denuded hills, though despoiled, still hold plentiful means of subsistence and self-respect for men who are trained for no other work. But the Broas leases still stand, 16,500 acres of them in Pike and Letcher counties. By my computations, Broas' agents obtained leases for prospecting and mining, generally on the standard form partially described heretofore, 5,167 acres in the head of Shelby Valley between May and August, 1890. These leases comprised part of the area mapped, where the titles were fully or partially abstracted in my research project. Condensing all the material upon which this report is based to the smallest amount of space, I believe it worthwhile to indicate the outstanding facts of just two days of the Broas activity: May 12 and May 15. The following instruments were executed in Shelby Valley (all but one) and show on May 12: Jacob Sanders and Mahulda (leased) 471 acres—coal only—her signature by mark; William Vanover and Sarah—313 acres—coal—signed by marks of both lessors; Wm. Vanover, Jr. and Dicy—182 acres—coal—her mark; James and Mary Elkins—147 acres—coal—her mark. On the 15th: Isaac and Elizabeth Belcher—177 acres—coal—both lessors' marks; James and Sarah Estep—272 acres—coal—her mark; �The Big Steal 165 Reuben and Bethena Johnson—207 acres—coal—both signatures by marks; Richard and Elizabeth Branham—191 acres—coal—her mark; G. H. and Dove Belcher—70 acres—coal—her mark. It will be noted that not one of these wives was able to affix a handwritten signature to the Broas leases; it must not be assumed that the five husbands who apparently did were able to either read or write. It is a pathetic fact that men then were proud of being able to sign their names, and any facsimile was of course a legal signature. From further research related to valid titles, I was able to establish as fact that but three of the men were able to read and write from among the eighteen lessors above, but three were legally competent. And that is, I would suggest, a fairly representative figure for the mountain society of that date. The instruments above were duly acknowledged by a local notary, but the witness required for all instruments signed by illiterate grantors was the agent of Broas, certainly not a disinterested party. Incidental to the lease executions, the agent drew and the notary took acknowledgment of two quitclaim deeds between certain of the parties designated, and with one most interesting citizen whose activities are yet furnishing spice to the odors of Pike Circuit Court. A quitclaim deed from William and Sarah Vanover to James Estep was witnessed by Morse, the Broas agent, and signed by the marks of both grantors. This deed gave Estep "color" upon which to base the lease he was executing; Morse was accepting a dubious lease and helping to bolster it up by a quitclaim brazenly drawn on the same day. The other quitclaim was drawn to the enterprising mountaineer I mentioned above; this instrument quitclaimed a property of description too vague to be located to the benefit of one Denny Vanover, who as his numerous remaining nephews assured me, would "make you a deed to anything; just point out what you wanted." I understood, and my future research indicated that I properly understood, that had Denny lived in New York City he would have sold the Brooklyn Bridge perhaps fifty times. Morse did not take Denny's lease that day; I doubt that the survey, which was to enclose 3 52 acres acquired through him, was yet completed. It was a more delicious fact, still apparent �166 Colonialism in Modern America after eighty years, that Denny owned but 100 acres in the center of Three Mile Creek, and that under a "cloud" when he happily leased Broas the entire left fork of Three Mile Creek, 352 acres. I had the honor and pleasure of placing these facts in Pike Circuit Court for the benefit of the present owner of the so-called surface, who, should he be able to find an attorney of integrity in the noble old Common-wealth, may be recognized as the owner in fee, able to purchase a quarter million dollars worth of chewing tobacco. (I would not wager highly on his chances; the case has lain dormant for four years, stalemated by his inability to find counsel and the court's uneasiness about dismissing the material I inserted in his counter claim.) (Bethlehem Minerals Company vs. John Johnson, Civil Action 7288, Pike Circuit Court.) The color (i.e., color of title, which I mention above in regard to the Broas leases) is an important element in the policies and operations of the coal companies. "Color" means no more than suggestions of title; it may be the flimsiest of title ground upon which to take a stand—such as a quitclaim, as above, from a person who obviously has no right or even a claim to transfer. If the receiver of such an instrument can make any showing of accepting it in good faith and as having some element of value for him, he can use it as "color of title." And there is no criminality ordinarily in giving a quitclaim deed, certainly when rendered to a person of average intelligence and competency; the grantor merely passes whatever right he has in any subject matter to a grantee, without professing any right or giving any warranty. Such a deed could give title to a fortune or might not be worth the ink in its writing. Under Kentucky law, I can quitclaim my interest in this college for a thousand dollars, if to a competent grantee, and no criminal charge will lie to the instrument. And what is the interest of the mining companies in such deeds and others insufficient as to valid title? This: The illegal mining of a tract of coal under color of title means that at worst the operating company will be forced to pay but standard royalty, usually around twenty-five cents per ton, which would have been but good business for it in the beginning; it may never be called to account, which is better yet. But without color of title, a company would be responsible for all coal extracted and liable at the then present market price at the pitmoutb. One of the many interesting angles of the Bethlehem-John Johnson Case is that the company must now mine the coal on the merits of its �The Big Steal 167 case; its title has been challenged and color cannot avail if the landowner successfully maintains his title in court. Let us consider for a moment the relation of the Big Steal (in eastern Kentucky) to lawful execution of deeds and leases. In Corpus Juris Secundum the commentary reads: More inadequacy of consideration is not a ground for the cancellation of a conveyance of minerals or mineral rights, but where a gross inadequacy of consideration is shown, and also weakness of mind, illiteracy, and inexperience of the grantor, and where misrepresentations have been made by the grantee, courts of equity may grant relief by way of cancellation. A mineral conveyance may be cancelled where the minds of the parties failed to meet on the amount of the purchase price. (Sec. 163, P. 350, Vol. 58) The pertinent citation reads: In case of fraud, overreaching or other circumstances justifying equitable relief, court will readily cancel transactions by which speculators procure from indigent and illiterate grantors for nominal considerations, conveyance of ... mineral rights in farm land which has been made subject of oil and gas leases to reputable oil companies. (Durbinv. Bennett, D.D. 111., 31 F. Supp. 24) Though I am somewhat doubtful of the existence of any "reputable oil company/7 it is clear that this federal principle would tear the Big Steal all to Hades, even at this late date. I have demonstrated the degree of illiteracy in the Broas lessors. How indigent were they? It is very likely that some of them lived on dirt floors. What about the considerations? Much has been made of the position that the rediculously low prices were then reasonable, that a dollar then was worth ten, even twenty, today. The essential element in the case is inadvertently given by Appellate Judge E. C. O'Rear, serving the mineral interests on the Frankfort appellate bench as he had served them in the very buying of that subject matter on which he sat Not seeing the application of all he wrote in a lengthy opinion sustaining a Pike County Judas (who had ordered that the validity of the Broas leases should not be SPOKEN AGAINST), O'Rear said: �168 Colonialism in Modern America These conditions have attracted and will doubtless for some time continue to attract investors and speculators. Another natural consequence is that prices for such properties will be advanced under present improved conditions, very considerably over what was even a high price for the same properties a few years ago [Emphasis mine]. (NCC v Nield, Pike Circuit Court) Contrary to his own words in an earlier portion wherein he opined that Broas had purchased with mere hope in the "future," the eminent jurist is recognizing that the speculators already know the value of a southeastern Kentucky dollar, that it is but waiting on the completion of the rail line to climb like a rocket, and this is what justice must compute the consideration on. This factor alone takes us back to the Corpus Juris commentary: "A mineral conveyance may be cancelled where the minds of the parties failed to meet on the amount of the purchase price." (Of course, none of this law nor those facts matter, but they furnish us with a sociological study.) One other factor remained in the list of possibilities toward cancellation; it was the question of misrepresentation. An earlier but near relative of that same Auxier who ruled against Pike County in the Broas situation of the 50's prepared sworn evidence in an early move against the Broas transactions to the effect that part of the consideration of the leases had been Broas' assurances that the railroad would arrive in five years and then mining, hence payment, would forthwith begin. Misrepresentation of another type, a humorous and pathetic type, was the lessee's solemn covenant that all gold found in the leaseholds would remain under title of the grantors. In spite of all these factors which alone or cumulatively warrant cancellation, we would do the mountain people an injustice to assume that they supinely submitted to the Broas steal once it became a matter of public knowledge. Efforts were made to break the leases in court, attempts were made to return the dollar-per-acre payments, and some lessors openly resold to willing grantees over the Broas documents of record. (The leases were truly void for a half-dozen legal considerations which are offered in the above, but the corporations had conspired with state government as an initial move; in the entire history of the Big Steal only one significant ruling has been awarded the landowners: i.e., lateral and subjacent support which I hope to discuss briefly. In that �The Big Steal 169 time, only Governor Breathitt of the 1960's has established a record among his predeeessers of openly standing with and for the people and that only in the latter half of his term.) Let us consider the prospects of a newly-arrived speculator or buying agent, one who is in the first wave into the mountains and is "in on the ground floor." If he is from the North or East, as I imagine all were, he has never seen such a country, such potential, for even the steep hillsides may be propitious. (Coal would be dumped directly into rail cars.) Only on the West Coast could the value of the timber stands be surpassed, though the lumber men had arrived earlier, seeking only the very best of the best types. The black walnut and yellow poplar had been cut heavily, and the best of the white oak is gone, but the eye could not from any distance perceive the difference. There are no roads worthy of the name; wagons can be used, or sleds, but the creeks are forded, not bridged. Through the decades of isolation only the creek bottoms are cleared and some of the "cove" fields. The timber grows down to the creeks, hanging over the paths and wagon trails. The tentative earlier prospecting had quickly established an important truth; no great care need be exercised in buying. The coal was there, everywhere; the only difference would be in grade, and none of it was worthless. So one could buy freely as to site. Buy from site to adjoining site future mining fields by accretion. But buy anywhere as opportunity offered to make the capital reach as many fools as possible. Here was a people who had known but six-month or sevenmonth schools as the annual custom. But this means less than we might expect. The severe winters could cut that time to four or five months, and distance was very much a factor in attendance. Many families did not even choose to send their children, though others were more than willing. Short-term "writing schools" sometimes supplemented the regular term; these might last as little as ten days. Eighth grade students could teach, and I suspect that in earlier days anyone who could read and write was eligible. The mental capacity of the people thus ranged from an understandable illiteracy to a vicious stupidity in some cases. �170 Colonialism in Modern America (There were the exceptions; I have learned of men who could plot land surveys and there were men who left the mountains and returned as doctors and lawyers. These exceptions were probably rare indeed earlier than 1890.) But the buyers found a general atmosphere of geniality; they were expert in breaking down the innate suspicion. They addressed the victims by their first names; they placed themselves inside the obligations of hospitality, for many, even among the violent types, considered themselves responsible for the safety and feelings of a guesteven if he was sleeping on a cornshuck mattress and being fed cornbread and salt bacon. For these mountain people to see a hundred dollars in cash at one time was a life experience; and in addition to the lack of education, they were and are yet exceptionally naive. As much as they may distrust outsiders in general, they have the strangest veneration for education (even if hidden under hostility). At that time, it is to be doubted that a single one knew the implications for the future in the mass selling; many thought the coal existed in only one seam; some thought it existed only in certain places. I have written all this in regard to the buyer and his advantages to illustrate his one great disadvantage, that which has been a burden on the back of the industry up to this date, and that which would have changed the regional social system had not the industry prepared for its potential troubles by aligning with state government and maintaining either an alliance or a rapport unto this very day. The industry's problem was this: There were no legal means of obtaining titles to the great coal strata. There was comparatively little population; this was good in a way for the region was uopen." But relative to population, there were but few settlers per lineal mile on the creek systems; there were even fewer claimants of property, for incredible as it may sound, this region has always had a "renter" class, even when land warrants and patents could be obtained for a pittance; sympathetic county surveyors would come to the farm, survey one line and geometrically calculate the other three, back to the starting point, to lighten the cost of the patentee. But there were those who had never obtained land. I have concluded that it was seldom indeed that this class stayed on one location long enough to perfect a title by residence. These who were later called "renters" did not then necessarily have to rent; they were often squatters, moving from one creek to another as the whim or necessity moved them. �The Big Steal 111 Furthermore, many of those who considered themselves to be landowners were definitely not. The mountaineers honored each others' deeds (in general), but these were often based on original squatting or arbitrary claims, and the continuity that would have perfected preemption or adverse possession had often been broken to spoil the possible or pending title. Even when absolutely valid patent titles had been obtained, men would sometimes abandon them and others might obfuscate the record by patenting over the same lines, unwittingly or knowingly breaking the patent laws. But titles, as far as corporations are concerned, must be obtained through individuals, through title holders. So the industry knew its problem in advance, knew that only in a region so deprived and isolated could it hope to grasp and maintain such a tremendous chunk of the national wealth. The entire governmental system was subverted to maintaining this national swindle, and on the local level the two parties took on the aspects of two bloated swine fighting in the swill trough, careful never to turn it over—for who knows but what we might win next election. From the Court of Appeals down to the average police court, the judiciary became a class of parasites whose only necessity for a show of legal knowledge lay in the cases wherein two non-political people had suits of private nature, and both were evenly matched as to influence and access to money. Returning directly to the Broas leases and other sources of title, I sought to make the point that titles may only be obtained where they exist, and for the massive purposes of the industry there were no massive title sources. It was realized from the first that continual title improvement must be a goal and remain an integral part of operations for years. Many of the Broas lessors were again contacted and induced to sign outright mineral conveyances by mere payment of the two-dollar-per-acre contingent consideration. These new conveyances were the notorious forms known synonymously as the Northern Coal and Coke form, the Mayo form, the broad form, or the long form; and the mineral grantees at this phase also picked up all minerals on the properties in addition to the coal and obtained the rights which the cooperating Court of Appeals said were tantamount to outright control of the surface. (In all honesty, no other factors of law being considered, this was essentially true.) But none of these acquisitions affected the basic title situation which was �172 Colonialism in Modern America based on the ability of the original or the new grantors to give sound titles. However, in the next two decades, many of the instruments became valid as some of the grantors perfected their suface titles by fifteen years of various forms of possession, validating the mineral conveyance by the same token. Various means were used by the industry to aid and encourage specific landowners to improve their titles, though the companies had to work here in privacy for fear of exciting a public or an individual interest in the possibility that the landowner had a better mineral title than the operators themselves did. THIS IS STILL THE BASIC FACT OF TITLE RESEARCH IN THIS REGIONREGARDLESS OF ALL THE PURPORTED SEVERANCE OF MINERALS FROM THE SURFACE, NO SEVERANCE IS VALID UNLESS EXECUTED BY ONE WHO HAD A VALID TITLE IN FEE. An invalid or false severance can be made valid if the grantor in question later develops or obtains for himself a good title to the property in question. IN THE AREAS I HAVE MAPPED AND ABSTRACTED, I WOULD ESTIMATE THAT THE MINERAL INDUSTRY HAS A FIRM TITLE TO ABOUT SIXTY PERCENT OF THE TERRITORY IT HAS MINED OR IS MINING. And this figure would be less had there not been a continual program of shoring up weak spots, obtaining various statute concessions, and an increasing percentage of buying in fee. I could cite incredible instances, however, if space permitted, where large tracts are awaiting exploitation on title grounds which can reflect nothing but that desperation in the thirty years after 1890 to get some sort of a document from any sort of a person to cover the accretive surveys of Broas and his successors. In the head of Shelby Valley I found a mineral deed to a large acreage, granted by an uncle of mine to Consolidation Coal Company; the amazement of the present "surface owners" equalled my own, for as I had suspected and as they knew, his uncle, deceased for several years, had never in life had the slightest claim on the property in question. And not only was he a good respected citizen, he was certainly too sensible to have executed such a deed in the face of his immediate neighbors. I can cite a variety of similar instances in a radius of five miles, but I am trying to deal with trends rather than examples. Incidentally, this acreage had already been obtained as a Broas lease; the new or later document showed clearly that Consolidation was foreseeing possible difficulty with the leases. �The Big Steal 173 So, while the Land and Property Departments at Jenkins, under the long chain of operating names of Consolidation Coal Company and Bethlehem Mines Corporation, schemed and drew and redrew its maps and watched over possible future sore spots, the industry maintained or tightened its grip on the state judiciary and the political systems. In the history of Kentucky mining, only one circuit judge has proven his integrity and openly fought for justice.2 This is Courtney C. Wells of Hazard, Perry County, now in private practice. In BLUE DIAMOND COAL COMPANY v. NEACE, Perry Circuit Court, Judge Wells, having been already overruled by the Court of Appeals in a strip-mining case reversed for the operator, had to instruct a jury in a second one. Facing the fact that our honored appellate statesmen had ruled that only such stripping as was "arbitrary, wanton, or malicious" was forbidden or compensable, Wells gravely stayed inside their logic and told the jury: The Court instructs the jury that the plaintiff, Blue Diamond Coal Company, had the right to the use of the surface in the prosecution of its business of mining, for any purpose of necessity or convenience, unless this power was exercised oppressively, arbitrarily, wantonly, or maliciously, and if you believe from the evidence in the case that the plaintiff in the prosecution of its business of mining, exercised this right of power in an oppressive, arbitrary, wanton or malicious manner, and the defendant's property was damaged thereby, then the law is for the defendant and you should so find. It was a foregone conclusion as to how a mountain jury would react to these instructions, and Wells, knowing that the Frankfort rogues would overrule him again, added a judicial opinion to the appeal record, flatly asking the Court to reverse its ruling and overturn the Buchanan v. Waton precedent upon which Kentucky stripping was based. Of course, all he established was his integrity, while that eminent jurist who was once promoted here for governor, the Right Honorable Judge Palmore, really put the appellate position in the proper perspective: "The mere exercise of a right to mine in a particular fashion cannot of itself be classified as arbitrary, wanton, or malicious. It is the manner of the mining operation, as distinguished from the fact of its being carried on, that determines liability for damages."3 �174 Colonialism in Modern America And to show that he was capable of more than sophistry and that Kentucky law is what "this Court says it is—this week" (a direct quote from one of the seven Judases), he wrote some of the most astounding words seen in American jurisprudence: . . . .we are obliged to point out that Buchanan v. Watson does not upset any existing law, but applies the old principles to a new fact situation, AND RIGHT OR WRONG, it would be a grave matter indeed for this court by overrulling it now to upset property interests which have since been invested in reliance upon it. (Emphasis mine) It would be hard to find plainer English to say that Kentucky's Court of Appeals would not overrule the mineral industry's prize precedent for any reason, and a franker confession that the Court is a base for the interests "relying upon it" could not be stated. �The Big Steal 175 NOTES *A few notable severances had been executed earlier than 1890 by Virginia Mining and Improvement Company, (Probably less than a halfdozen, in the late 1889's.) ^It would be well for me to note that two other judges have voiced opposition to the mineral-political-judicial combine. John Chris Cornett of Knott Circuit Court has twice denied the right of the operators to destroy the surface without compensation to the surface owner. Judge Edward Hill, formerly of Floyd County, now a Judge of the Court of Appeals, dissented in the latest appellate case which reversed Cornett in Martin et ux V, Kentucky Oak Mining Company et al. In the dozen or so mining counties with circuit judges having a four (six?) year term of office, these three legalists form a tiny and significant minority during a period spanning eighty years. ^Lateral and Subjacent support is required for the surface owners under Kentucky law. From the early days it has been illegal to remove all the coal under any area without leaving pillars (blocks) of coal to support the surface; the coal companies must expressly buy the right of total removal, i.e., breaking the surface. This is from a state judiciary that later permitted the entire destruction of the surface. �This page intentionally left blank �THE LAND DEVELOPMENT RAG by This the by in North by in to It on the velopers' shovels. The the of the people in the and of for to conAver}7 to fall under the deof this is to docuto be the the up en™ of Is centers." to by iy the is a a in (c) and for to om �178 Colonialism in Modern America ed by gently sloped mountains to a cacaphony of strip-development/fast-food chains. The land grab has boosted land prices so that farmers can't afford farmland and has intruded a culture of affluence on farmers who are left to work as greens-keepers and domestics, to commute to industry towns, or to sell and move out. Developers say North Carolina farmers are simply following a national pattern of leaving the farms since World War II. But the national decrease in farm acreage harvested was 10 percent during the past decade, while the decrease in Avery County was nearly 40 percent. In more developed Watauga, it was a whopping 50 percent. Farmers admit that it's been getting more difficult to stay on the farm every year because of rising prices, but the financial blow caused by tourist resorts makes farm life almost impossible. The seasonal beauty of the Blue Ridge and Appalachian chains attracted corporate developers, many of whom had already splattered the Florida coast with beachfront resorts. They saw a quick profit to be made in an area with four tourist seasons, low tax rates, accessibility to the Appalachian Development Highways, and a 60-year history of exclusive, small resort communities. They came, they saw, they bought. While the turnover of land to outsiders has been sizeable, the boom was initiated locally, in the early Sixties, by Hugh Morton and the Robbins brothers, who recognized the profit to be made in major land development. Morton, called a "conservationist before the word was invented" by one of his salesmen, subdivided a portion of the 7,000 acres of his family's land to create expensive resort subdivisions. Morton's and the Robbins' developments would have 6,000 people living on delicate mountain land. The Robbins' Hound Ears development charges $20,000 for a half-acre lot with covenants to build $50,000 homes; and the Morton family's Invershiel, a Scottishdeco community, charges $50,000 for two-acre lots with architectural covenants to build Scottish manor houses. The most exclusive and expensive development is Grandfather Mountain Golf and County Club. Morton and Oklahoma Oilman John Williams carved a suburban vacation complex into Grandfather Mountain and demand $20-30,000 per acre, $6,500 for country club membership, $600 annual dues, and $80,000 to $250,000 �The Land Development Rag 179 homes. Corporate developers like Carolina Caribbean and Sugar Mountain, as well as a flock of smaller subdividers, have capitalized on Morton's cue and created a land grab to build moderately priced resorts modeled after his exclusive mountain retreats. The developers scalped the mountains from Avery County to Watauga's Boone to make room for a string of resort complexes, then pocked the roadsides with billboards which advertise "kicks in the sticks" images for urban tourists. The choice of a second home depends upon the size of your pocketbook. The most exclusive, like Hound Ears and Grandfather, are self-contained units which offer everything from golf, tennis, and skiing to restaurants and the requisite country store. Further down the road, Beech, Sugar, and Seven Devils hawk cheaper versions, and trapped in between are hurriedly-built places like Adam's Apple and Mill Ridge, with poorly built houses, some below the water flooding, and a single ski slope which runs virtually down onto the highway. The secluded and exclusive resort complexes appear to taunt the neighboring communities where some residents live in substandard housing with outdoor plumbing, no running water, and a per capita income of $1,500 for farming families. Developers claim that their construction primed Watauga's and Avery's economic pump. But the facts speak differently. True, some people have profited from the spectacular land grab, but most people are hurt by the apparent and hidden costs of land speculation. And the buying was spectacular. Realtors turned land over three and four times in as many months, inflating the prices according to what other speculators or vacationers would pay. One realtor bought 300 acres at the base of Grandfather Mountain for $30,000 and sold less than of a third of the land the following month for $156,000. Land that once cost $250 an acre sold for $2,500 and up. Farmers couldn't resist the money and sold their land. Those who held out demanded prices they didn't dream possible and got them. "I asked $80,000 for my back 40 acres, and some fellow from Florida paid it," said one man who saved his farm by selling his mountain land. Other farmers were pressured to sell or swap their land, leaving the developers with huge tracts for subdivision. Beech Mountain quarter-acre lots cost 820 times the original buying price, and land prices in the rest of Avery County were boosted �180 Colonialism in Modern America 401 percent in five years. (During the same period, farmland prices in the nation as a whole increased on the average from $115 to $194 per acre, or 60 percent.) According to a North Carolina Public Interest Research Group study, by 1975 outside speculators owned 164 percent more land in Watauga County and 47 percent more in Avery County than they did in 1970. Land boom threaded everybody's conversation, and realtors thought they'd never see the bottom of the money barrel. Hard Times But the recession hit the developers hard, and salesmen aren't showing anybody house lots anymore. "When the economy is strong people buy luxury items like second homes—in a recession we're the first item to go," said a developer. Most of the less exclusive resorts face bankruptcy, and several larger developers like Beech Mountain have gone under. The history of bankrupt Beech Mountain challenges the assumption that the only reason for the failure of resort developments is that they've fallen victim to national recession. Beech's and Sugar's near bankruptcy demands an examination of the assumption that the development of recreation communities is a positive means for farming communities to sustain themselves. In her master's thesis, Robin Gottfried judged that "unless more and more homes are constructed in subdivisions, scattered lots or new recreation communities—the [economic] flow of benefits stemming from new construction will cease. If nothing else fills this gap, [the community]. . .could face a serious crisis."1 Beech owes $10 million more than its $25 million assets to a string of banks which includes North Carolina National Bank, Northwestern Bank, and Tri-South Mortgage Investors Trust of Atlanta. Former Beech President Roger Hard said Beech could have stayed afloat if the government had granted $8 million in tax-payer money to correct water and sewage violations and if bankers lent an extra $500,000 to prepare its ski slopes. But federal dollars cannot be used to build sewage plants for private industry, and the lenders said no. Beech's collapse is also due to more than the recession. �The Land Development Rag 181 According to court-appointed trustee Ralph O. Hutchinson, an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) into Beech Mountain activities showed a 'Very relaxed attitude toward cost control, poor management and a complete lack of development and operational planning/' He also said that the investigation uncovered some ''irregularities in the use of corporate funds." Because of its financial and management shenanigans, Carolina Caribbean, Beech's corporate father, was suspended from the exchange. Beech, like other resorts, "ran the financial numbers game to stay afloat," says President Hard, who was brought in by Carolina Caribbean to bail out Beech and is now attempting the same at neighboring Sugar Mountain. Hard says the resort developers put up tremendous amounts of front money to build ski slopes, lodges, and restaurants to attract people to the mountains in the first place. Then overhead costs for water, sewage, and operating expenses were borrowed on short term notes while the lots and houses were sold long term. "It's a cash flow problem," he said. "A purchaser buys a $10,000 lot but makes only a $1,000 down payment while it costs us $7,000 to prepare it." "The $7,000 didn't include soft costs which added to our immediate obligations," said Hard. Nearly 75 percent of Beech's operating expenses were for salesmen, advertising, enormous salaries, and hefty expense accounts. "The original corporate owners should have put land sales money into escrow to build equity for land development; but they borrowed loans upon loans based on nothing but paper until the business operated only on financial device," said Hard. Banks and Real Estate Investment Trusts couldn't wait to press money into the developers' hands. They loaned 100 percent money at five and six points above prime for paper collateral. "It just didn't work," said Hard, who couldn't issue a 1975 annual report because of Beech's faulty bookkeeping. Hard says he's a little more successful with his Sugar Mountain rescue, but he pays himself a month's salary in advance "just in case." Sugar is delinquent in all of its normal trade accounts. What Hard did was arrange with Sugar's lenders to defer payment on loans of $10 million which are currently secured by corporate real estate. The bank couldn't refuse to wink at Sugar's debts. Hard showed the lenders that they would lose $500,000 more by �182 Colonialism in Modern America foreclosing than by placing a moratorium on his old debts with no principal or interest. He says if he stabilizes his credits, pays current bills C.O.D., and borrows $2 million more, he'll make money in five years. "This time," says Hard, "we're going to change Sugar Mountain from a semi-private to a public resort." Hard plans to halt land sales, push the ski lodge and convention business, and create a weight-loss camp. Opening the doors to the public invites criticism that local people who can afford to use the ski slopes are caught in an economic ping-pong game. When times are bad for the resorts, local residents are welcome. When times are good, they're excluded. "We want to generate traffic through the resort to sell houses," says Hard. "When the second home business gets built out again, the slopes won't be able to handle local people—there won't be room. So we'll have to close the local people out." Hard Sell Developers say the resorts meet urban dwellers' recreational demands. "Mountain retreats are what the people want," said a realtor. But carnival marketing techniques of large resorts like Beech and Sugar indicate that this particular form of recreational demand is produced by the developers. "The whole thing is created," admitted a former salesman for the Beech sales team. "Developers create the value, the impression, the atmosphere— and then sell it with emotional appeal." Professional sales teams are trained to invent what people think owning mountain land is: country living with suburban familiarity. Beech's well-rehearsed dog-and-pony show tactics begin with a deluge of telephone calls made to randomly-chosen people in "prime target areas." When enough people agree to participate in a free tour, chartered planes whisk the targeted clients to a mind-boggling weekend of loose money and fast talk which intimates that the last quarter-acre of Appalachia might be sold before they got off the plane. The sequence of well-controlled events leaves little room for thought. "If they think twice about buying—they'll change their minds," said a salesman who admitted that most people hadn't thought of buying land before the sales team called. Free meals, free lodg- �The Land Development Rag 183 ings, and the developers' idea of mountain culture are part of the package. "At Beech," said the salesman, "pretty little girls dressed up in Indian costumes drive buyers around the golf course and deposit them in briefing rooms where the benefits of purchasing a lot are described." Then they're released to the salesmen. The salesman's job is to generate enthusiasm to sell land. "Salesmen drive people to the top of the mountain and literally cry about its beauty," said a man who did it. The procession to the mountain resembled an army convoy. Jeeps carried the buyers to pre-selected lots, the man in front and the woman in the rear. Two-way radios connected salesmen with each other and with general headquarters. Several jeeps would converge on a lot at a prearranged time. Sales were flashed onto the jeep radios. If a tourist wavered, the salesman radioed his indecision in code to headquarters who radioed the lot number of other jeeps. Bidders for the unclaimed lot would crowd the frequency. "What's important is to create a sense of urgency," said the salesman. After paying $8,000 to $10,000, what does the client get? "Not much," according to a salesman. "The clients lose, too. Resort facilities aren't built to last. They're simply paste-up jobs to sell as much land as quickly as possible." Developers often build the minimum to sell lots and then leave the property owners to worry about maintenance and other problems like fire protection. Purchasers find themselves having to maintain security, water and sewage systems, golf courses, ski slopes, and roads not built to anyone's standards except the developers. "Nothing was built to last," repeated the salesman; "it was built to show that it had been done. We've butchered some of the prettiest mountains you've ever seen." Fancy Doctors and Salty Roads Resort developers say they're good for the county because they spend money locally and pay taxes. But laid off resortconstruction workers are trying to revitalize their neglected farms, and female-oriented domestic jobs are seasonal and lowpaying. "We've increased the tax base immeasurably," said the vice-president of Grandfather Mountain Company. If this were �184 Colonialism in Modern America the ease, then tax rates should have decreased or county services increased. In fact, not only have land values skyrocketed with each tax assessment, but Watauga's property rate increased by 46 percent last year. Also, high density resort communities overload a town's services and facilities. As for county-provided services for those increased tax dollars, local citizens say they get little and are second priority for the services that the county does provide. County services have not increased since the resort boom. Road maintenance typifies an unequal provision of services. North Carolina's roads are state maintained. Snow removal is a primary maintenance function. Both Avery and Watauga counties are included in a "bare pavements program" which salts 165 of the 400 miles of paved roads at the first snowflake. Highway officials salt the most trafficked roads: All ski roads get first priority. Farm roads, often impassable in winter months, are not priority. Several Valle Crucis farmers said the school bus couldn't take their children to school during last winter's weeklong storm because of the bad roads. But skiers could reach the slopes. Local maintenance workers, who once looked favorably on ski resorts, said they use one-third of the state's entire snow removal equipment to clear Avery and Watauga counties, but their own roads remain blocked. Road salting is rotting cars and polluting people. The highway department dumps 6,000 tons of sodium and calcium chloride on the winter roads. Truck farmers say that since the salting began they've had to buy a new pick-up every two years because of corrosion. When the snow melts, salt percolates into the soil and drains into water systems. A district highway engineer said, "I daresay there's people who've got salt in their water systems right now." The reason the highway department uses salt instead of neutral sand is that "salt clears the roads cleaner and faster to the ski areas. We have to use so much of it anymore, it's cheaper." The district engineer said he wished the state would put more money into road maintenance instead of expanding the highways to draw tourists, but he plans to build a $9 million expansion of the 5.3 mile tourist-used road from Boone to Blowing Rock, Watauga's only wet city. A coverall-clad realtor wondered why they "just don't move the liquor to Boone instead of �The Land Development Rag 185 building a $9 million four-lane." Seasonally overcrowded hospitals force local people to bear the costs of new hospital-expansion bonds. The hospital at Banner Elk serves the resorts at Beech and Sugar Mountains, Seven Devils, and Grandfather Mountain, as well as Avery County residents. Hospital Administrator Juanita Shoemaker says, "It's simple to understand. We've had to expand the hospitals along with the developments." Mayor Charles Cannon agreed. "During ski season and hang-glider days, the emergency room is full." Shoemaker says the emergency room was a nightmare during Beech's first ski season. "Evetyone worked weekends and nights to set broken legs and bones." A record 11,000 people used the emergency services that year while local residents complained that their children's illnesses often went unattended. Hospital administrators are unsure of the number of out-of-county patients because second home dwellers use local addresses for hospital admittance. Even so, nearly 30 percent of the patients at Cannon are not from Watauga or Avery Counties. When Beech Mountain collapsed, the total number of local patients at Cannon increased by 17 percent. Boone's hospital is a highly specialized and expensive medical complex—a magnet which has tripled the number of its specialists in the past five years. Last year, the hospital board voted to purchase additional equipment and build a new wing to house the specialists. Local people judge they would be better served by community clinics engaged in preventive medicine and primary medical services instead of the highly specialized and expensive medicine available at the hospital. "We need regular doctors, not fancy medicine," said a woman who can't easily commute to the centralized hospital because she doesn't have a car and there's no public transportation. Deeds and foreclosures descended like a paperwork avalanche on the county sheriff's office. The sheriff blames the rise in drug arrests and breaking and entering on second homes. "Robbers thrive on second home developments and tourists bring in drugs," he said. Some of the resorts maintain their own security, but the deputies routinely patrol the resorts and if there's an arrest to be made, "It's our baby." During the past 10 years, the sheriff has tripled his force and he says with the extra seasonal work, "It's not enough." �186 Colonialism in Modern America Volunteer fire departments suffer more than the police. With old and minimal equipment, the volunteers must douse fires in developments whose roads are sometimes so narrow that the truck can't squeeze through to the burning house. Rev. Campbell, who heads the Foscoe Fire Department, says the problem is more than firefighting, since the "closest thing we have to community action are the volunteers. Helping developers out cuts into our efforts to stop them from destroying our land." Some resorts, like Grandfather and Hound Ears, contributed money to local fire departments for extra equipment. "They've bought allegiance, round-the-clock protection, and lower insurance rates," said Campbell. County officials agree that they spend proportionately more time meeting tourist demands than attending to local residents. "Tourists are a different class of people. They expect more service," said one official. The problem of service is both attitudinal and financial. Summer people pay taxes but aren't interested in specifically local issues like education. Therefore, their tax dollars become proxy votes to ensure that their interests are honored. Also, Watauga's government has invoked a spate of regulations to prevent future land abuse, which means more tax dollars must be spent on enforcement. Cutting Up the Mountains Developers have destroyed much of the ecologically fragile farm and mountain land. One of the worst problems is erosion caused by steeply graded subdivision roads. At Hound Ears the grades run as high as 20 percent—8 percent higher than the law allows. A county planner has said that some of the Hound Ears land as well as that of Seven Devils should never have been touched by a bulldozer. Not one lot has been sold in some smaller subdivisions, but hundreds of roads scrape through the mountains. The planner estimates that 11,000 recently subdivided lots sit on Watauga's roadripped mountains. At Beech Creek, a developer graded a zig-zag through the mountain's steep north face. Because the winter sun doesn't hit the north slope, the slick wet roads washed away after the first winter, leaving the developer with a several thousand dollar loss and the mountain with an eroded skin. The planner estimates that hundreds of road miles like Beech Creek were abandoned without the first �The Land Development Rag 187 house ever being built. "There's no way to stop that road building—all we can do is require permits to keep the stone stabilized." Road erosion scrapes the mountain clean of its protective vegetation, causing floods and runoff. When the slope is scalped, rain water runs off without being absorbed by the streams and lakes. In a monograph for the Economic Development Agency, Ray Derrick estimates that after a one-inch rainfall, 28,000 gallons run off a one-acre dirt slope. This causes sedimentation, flooding, and the lowering of the water table. Robin Gottfried, in her master's thesis, says that sedimentation is a major effect of resort construction which bares the mountains of their natural vegetation for ski slopes, access roads and second homes. And at developments like Hound Ears, more trees than necessary are cleared so each lot owner can have a mountain view. Bacterial pollution in the rivers and streams has increased dramatically because the developments do not adequately provide for disposal of refuse and human wastes. Small developers can't afford the expensive treatment plants, while larger resorts like Beech were placed under a federal building moratorium because their sewage facilities are not adequate. Community Planner Tom Foxx says that even if the waste is treated properly, the effluents—treated chemical wastes—kill fish. "What we're going to have around here is pure dead water." At Sugar, septic tanks are on one-half acre lots. A local joke is that when Sugar Mountain people flush their commodes, the water table rises in the valley. But the people living at the base of Sugar in the Norwood Community aren't laughing. They resent the developers who caused them to lose their farms and peaceful valley. Most of the 30 farming families left in the hollow depended upon prized farmland for their food and clear streams for their water. All that has changed now. Sugar Mountain Corporation built its golf course adjacent to their land. Access roads to the resort traverse the natural water flow and eliminated some streams. While the remaining streams must absorb all of the water, Norwood people are flooded each spring. The farmers say they can no longer harvest a garden since the water floods their crops and destroys everything in its path. One farmer tried to sell his land, but nobody wants to buy property that is flooded each spring. �188 Colonialism in Modern America Another farmer said the streams won't hold a lizard now because they're polluted from Sugar's wastes. Every fish in the creek died, and the water became undrinkable even for the cows. Not only is sewage running down the stream beds, but the mountains themselves are crumbling into a mud and rock mixture which dams the streams. Sugar contractors laid tiling on the access roads to keep them from washing away. The tiling reroutes storm water directly onto Norwood gardens. "Before Sugar Mountain came here," said one woman, "we didn't have a drop of floodwater. Now it runs into my living room, kills the vegetables, and rises as high as the top of the pick-up's wheel base." But Sugar executives refuse to respond to the Norwood people. The woman whose garden was flooded called Sugar's executives to explain what was happening to her community as a result of Sugar's development. The executives did not assist Norwood, but Sugar's maintenance people did throw old wood, junk tires, and metal scraps against her fence which sits about 20 feet from the resort's golf course. "Early on," said the woman, "they tried to buy us out—now I reckon they're going to try and run us out." Noise from the snowmaking machines crashes into the valley late at night. "When they're making the snow you can't sleep. I never heard such a racket in all my life," said one woman. The ski-doos and trail bikes add to the racket and scare the animals. "It's not so peaceful any more." she said. Invading the Culture Like the problems at Norwood, the effects of tourism and resort development cannot all be measured by cost-efficiency analyses. Mountain living is packaged and huckstered so that business-filtered remnants of mountain culture can be purchased at tourist shops which capitalize on Al Capp myths of corn pone, white lightnin', and geehaw whimmeydiddles. "The new shops make you think hillbillies are old-withered-up people who just sit and make those whimmeydiddles all day long," said a young man who returned home to Watauga after completing college. "We aren't someone's vacation fantasy. What the Florida people �The Land Development Rag 189 and developers don't understand or care about is that their actions keep us from living the way we want/' Shopkeepers who long served their communities with food, farming equipment, and such have learned they can make more money by catering to free-spending tourists and second home dwellers. Richard Mast, county precinct captain and son of the former owner of Mast's General Store, described the changes in his family's recently sold store. "The new owners raised the prices so that local people can't afford to shop there any more and now what was once a community supply store and meeting place is a curio shop which sells pottery made from organic dirt and three-dollar baloney sandwiches which you have to make yourself." The new owners of Mast's store, also the oldest Exxon station in the United States, plan to build an 85-seat delicatessen, with funds provided by Exxon, to commemorate the Bicentennial. One burley tobacco grower wondered what use a high-priced restaurant would be to working farmers. Local community associations have been taken over by second-home dwellers. In Mast's Valle Crucis community, monthly get-togethers and pot luck dinners once provided a forum for community discussions. Second-home people flooded the summer meetings, elected one of their own as chairman, and cancelled winter meetings because they wouldn't be able to attend. Angry farmers labeled them the "Valle Crucis Cut-up," boycotted the meetings, and are forming a new community group. Mast says Valle Crucis is being torn apart. Local landmarks are also being torn apart. Dutch Creek Falls has been a Valle Crucis playground for as long as anyone can remember. Two years ago, the falls were bought by an attorney who is building a house on a platform he erected directly over the water. To make room for the house and equipment, the attorney scraped the area clean of its trees and brush. He also hung a no trespassing sign on the land. "The first thing those outsiders do is hang up a no trespassing sign," said a woman whose grandmother's name is carved on the Dutch Creek Elm. "Land that was used for hunting and shortcuts isn't ours to use anymore, and there are so many signs you need a plat to tell where you can go," she said. "I used to love this land, but now I'm ready to move out." �190 Colonialism in Modern America Politics As Usual Despite any evidence to the contrary, development agencies like the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which are supposed to assist communities like Valle Crucis, actually pave the way for the current brand of tourism and recreation development. During the past nine years, the ARC has sunk a half million dollars in studies to evaluate the economic and social benefits of tourism and resort trade in Appalachia. Most of the studies warned the Commission to stay away from investments in tourism. ARC's preliminary study on the impact of tourism in Appalachia warned the ARC that the resort industry is one of "low pay and seasonal in nature." Later, a Spindletop Research Project confirmed the earlier conclusions and added that the tourist business creates a "service class of an entire body of people." The single study which supported tourism was sponsored by the Department of the Interior, whose primary concern was to alleviate urban congestion. The conclusions of ARC's own studies describe resort investment as a "poor financial risk and deterrent to mountain life." In 1974, the ARC released a film documenting bulldozed mountains sprayed with resort developments and quick-snack shops. Its public relations director said the film was made to "sensitize the region's people to abuses of tourism and resort development." But the bankrupt developers found the way to their governor's ear, and ARC's sensitizer was filed with the rest of their mountain of tourism studies. A new $100,000 study was called a "significant document making the case for public assistance to the troubled resort industry" by North Carolina's Secretary of Natural and Economic Resources, James Harrington, a former Sugar Mountain executive. The Twin Sentinel flatly disagreed with Harrington in an editorial which called "the ARC attempt to reinflate the resort balloon at public expense, the height of folly." Some critics call the problem of resort development more a matter of structure than of judgment. One observer said, "The ARC serves the narrow interests of specific industrialists under the guise of community development." The ARC implements its development programs through its development district, called �The Land Development Rag 191 Lead Regional Organizations (LRO). The LRO Board consists of mayors and county commissioners—no directly elected members. In the overall economic development program for Watauga and Avery counties, LRO Director Carl Tuttle wrote that the "tourism industry should be the single sector of the economy to make the largest gain." To make sure the prophecy is fulfilled, the LRO does not court small factories which would employ farmers during off-season because such development might interfere with the "scenic quality" required by resort developers. Even though Watauga's factories are generally cut-and-sew, low wage, labor-intensive, predominantly employing women, farming families agree that they provide a steady income which allows them to keep their land. Tuttle's new development plans support tourism and resort interests at farmers' expense. In his 34 recommendations for community development, Tuttle directly supported resorts while making not a single recommendation to assist the 950 farmers who live in Watauga. H. C. Moretz, director of the five-county community action program (WAMY), suggests that the reason the LRO pays no attention to farmers is that there are no farmers represented on the multi-county planning body. "Oh, they'll tell you that elected officials who sit on the LRO board represent all the people but the fact is that farmers and poor people have no direct access to it. Elected officials who sit on the Board are either small businessmen who financially gain by tourist trade or they're politically tied to realtors and developers." Farming is pretty well written off by the chamber of commerce and county commissioners. When asked about the demise of farming in Watauga County, the chamber of commerce director—who works for Tweetsie Railroad—said, "Don't get hung up on agriculture." But farmers and some planners are hung up on agriculture. Tom Foxx, chief planner with the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources & Community Development, says, "We must scrutinize whether public taxpayer dollars should be further used to subsidize the resort business." Foxx, paid by the state to provide local planning and management services, is at odds with LRO planners who ignore farmers. "The initial impact of resorts on tax revenues was positive," said Foxx. "Now the services required to sustain the developments, higher taxes, and land prices �192 Colonialism in Modern America are not worth the additional dollars collected." Foxx says resorts will increase their demand for services. "What we're doing is providing an inordinate amount of services to attract skiers and don't have money left for people who've lived here all their lives." Foxx has his first opportunity to stop taxpayer assistance to resort developments in a current thrust by Sugar and Beech Mountains to win federal-state-ARC financing of a water and sewage treatment plant. Sugar's President Hard figures that a government bailout is the only thing that will save the resorts from certain bankruptcy. Hard wants an area-wide $10 million waste treatment plant to serve Sugar, Beech, and the town of Banner Elk. Without Banner Elk's participation, the resorts are not eligible for federal largesse. Banner Elk's mayor says, "We need a sanitary district to relieve developers from having to operate their own sewer and water facilities." But the mayor privately fears that a sanitary district consolidation might be the first step toward resort rule. He's right. To obtain the necessary federal money, 51 percent of the property owners must sign a petition. Two categories of property owners live in the farming-resort communities: one is a freeholder—property owner, and the other is a resident freeholder—resident property owner. Since Beech and Sugar's resort owners greatly outnumber permanent Banner Elk citizens, freeholder voting status would plunge long-time residents into an automatic minority. The developers are looking down the road and want to incorporate the sanitary district into a township. Then they would be eligible for federal funds, revenue sharing, and state aid. "What we're planning is incorporation but it's not good to publicize the fact; it's too political," admits Sugar's publicity director. Since the developers want legalized liquor in dry Banner Elk, the first confrontation is likely to force a difficult change on the community. Hard says he doesn't want to lose control of sewage facilities or a power base. "If we create a city and give up control, we'd be creating a monster in Banner Elk that could kill us." Farmers near Banner Elk say their farms are more likely to be killed than the resort business. Valle Crucis and Matney �The Land Development Rag 193 residents, who live in the shadow of the resorts, approached Foxx and his planning board to stop developers from encroaching on their communities. They asked the zoning board to prohibit resort-type developments in their townships. But Foxx couldn't do much. "We could zone them residential—that allows golf courses and subdivisions—or industrial." North Carolina state law makes no provision for agricultural zoning. Foxx says alternatives for agricultural developments do exist, but the state never passed enabling legislation and officials aren't interested in lobbying for farm legislation. "The destruction of farming is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Officials read statistics of declining farm land and decide that farmers don't want to work the land any more. Then they assist developers which increases the farmers' problems, and go back and read the statistics," said Foxx. The county could provide incentives to maintain farmland as farmland and commit non-farm land to nonurban types of development. "If a 100 acre tract of land was not used for 20 years, it doesn't have to be taxed. Five-acre conservancy zones could be designated to prevent large developers from tearing up farmland and ecologically fragile wood-land. Nearly 50 percent of the county would fit into this type of zone," explained Foxx. But developers and county officials aren't interested in land preservation because high growth development brings in money. After the tourism boom, said Foxx, "Farmers lost the right to decide how they will use their land." Land Use Planning and the Small Farm Foxx believes the county can stop unchecked growth with the tools of land-use planning and regulatory ordinances. The Watauga County Planning Board recently imposed regulations to stop the developers' worst abuses: excessive subdivisions, building violations, erosion, and flooding. But regulations must be enforced to be effective, and even then they don't halt development—at best they slow it down. Government-controlled land-use planning has its own set of problems. Who will control land-use decisions? Will land planning create more uncontrolled growth or will it be structured to encourage cooperative development? Resort developers are against government intervention and call the free enterprise �194 Colonialism in Modern America system "its own plan." 'The value and use of land will be determined, rightfully, by the open market," said realtor Randy Phillips, who tripled his land investments in one year. Phillips says government control and planning raise the costs of development. County planners say strict government control will inhibit destructive growth and direct future land development so that it will benefit all county residents. Farmers generally want nothing to do with government control because, as one farmer said, "The right to private property is inviolate." But the developers' easy money gives them a higher right than the farmers. Whether government control or laissez-faire, farmers are locked out of the decision-making process and excluded from growth plans. "Maybe we ought to build land and market cooperatives which would benefit our kind of people instead of those scalawags who cross state lines to destroy our land," said a Watauga County farmer. "Maybe," he said, "we ought to ask ourselves if this growth thing is good for us." "Whither growth?" is a question never asked by developers or government planners. Developers think of land as a commodity and not as a resource. The government says the land resource should be developed for its optimum use. While the private developers and government planners appear to be at odds over what generally amounts to environmental issues, both eliminate farmers with their growth plans. The only real question is "how fast the elimination." The contradiction of specialized growth is implicit in the system of development. While the federal government does not have an overall land use and growth policy, grants for highway construction, sewer lines, water systems, and the like define land use. Government-paid definition is encouraged by some developers who, like Hard at Sugar, define land's highest use by its highest profit. Since growth agencies like the Appalachian Regional Commission only invest in projects with the greatest dollar return, private developers and government policy complement each other. Senator Morris Udall agrees when he says the politics of land use has given special interests "the upper hand." State planning is little better than federal planning. Special interests are acutely evident in North Carolina's defeated Mountain Area Management Act which was introduced in the 1974 N. C. Legislature. The act called for a 15-member mountain commission to oversee a comprehensive state-local plan which �The Land Development Rag 195 would designate specific areas of environmental concern and enforce orderly development through a system of permits. The political nature of the bill is evident; timber and utilities are exempted from regulation. The opposition, according to an article by Joy Lamm in Southern Exposure, called the bill "politically tied." "The state government is mistrusted by past action, condemnation powers would destroy an already weak tax base, lack of local input ensures that development would be tied to a small group of individuals and there is no provision for class action suits." County-controlled zoning fares no better in the test of planning by special interests. Zoning defines land use by the dollar. Foxx says the LRO planners predicted that "between 1970 and 2020 agriculture will drop from the present level of approximately 6,000 people to about 3,000 and then will stabilize at this reduced level." uWhat planners don't understand is that implementing policies like zoning for special interests will cause their statistics to come true/ 7 said Foxx. But many farmers don't intend to bow to statistics. "The land is our frontier," said a farmer, "and we're planning to get up a posse." The posse is forming slowly and deliberately. "To survive we need a cheaper way to buy supplies, and markets to sell our produce," explained a farmer whose wife took a cut-and-sew job and whose children help cut their burley tobacco. "What we've done is organize a Farmer's Market to sell some of our extra crops." The market was created as an economic alternative for farmers who don't have outlets for their vegetables. Most of the 80 farmers who sell their produce through the market own small farms worked primarily for family consumption. Now the market allows them to sell their excess and plant additional crops in anticipation of a cash market. "Last year," said one market regular, "I made $3,000 during the selling season. It certainly helped out." The market costs $2 to join and a flat 50 cents fee per selling day. Food stamps are accepted by sellers who undercut supermarket prices by ten cents per item. Quality control is sometimes a problem since the group doesn't set standards, but most of the vegetables are graded by the growers. "We can't let bad quality vegetables slip in because we'll lose our customers. We're still in the organizing stages about things like that," said one of the planners of the market. �196 Colonialism in Modern America One farmer thought organizational problems stemmed from the fact that the market was conceived and implemented by nonfarmers and picked up by the New River Resources Conservation Development Committee. "It may never have gotten started without outside help, but we must make decisions about the market's future." The consensus is that farmers must have an outlet for their crops and access to equipment. Market members say they should be more tightly organized and focus on one issue at a time. "The first thing we need is a permanent facility so the vegetables won't wilt in the sun and we can sell refrigerated cheese and meat," commented one market organizer. "Then we should buy a truck to deliver produce regularly to shops." Cutting production costs is high on the issue list. Common purchases of grading or spraying machines would reduce expenses and create greater purchasing power for the entire community. "After that we can think about farmingsupport industry like canneries, mills, and supply stores," said a farmer who has been nearly wiped out by the tax increases and the rapidly increasing prices of equipment. "We've got the problems of all small farmers in the country and the added affection of resort developers," he said. Agricultural extension agents could be helpful, with the organizational experience they've gained from the 20-year-old cooperatives which sell specific items like sheep and cattle to large eastern markets. Their wool and cattle cooperatives generally involve larger farms, but the county agent said, "If a man has one cow and it meets our standards, he can sell it through us for a better market price than on the open market." The cooperatives, like the Farmer's Market, return more money per pound to the farmers than the open market while saving customers money. Looking down the road, market organizers see several phases of action which must occur simultaneously. The first is a transition to high yield, not so labor-intensive specialty crops. "The problem is that we're not competitive with mid-western farms. Our mountain land is not suitable for mechanized farming, so we have to go with things like cabbage or burley tobacco." Second, a combination of crops would prevent farmers from being wiped out if one crop didn't make it. Third, a more tightly organized Farmer's Market, with capital and equip- �The Land Development Rag 197 merit shared by the participants, would free money for other things. Fourth, outlets must be found for the produce. "Community Development Corporations like Chicago's Fedco and the Cooperative League in Washington, D.C. would be direct connections for our produce." Fifth, farming-support industries like cooperative canneries, supply stores, and mills would increase the markets, return money to the community, and allow farmers to grow more. "If we get this underway, we wouldn't have to work for the resorts or cut-and-sew places/' said a woman who works as a maid for Sugar. And finally, the resort developers must be forced through community organization and county government to halt their farmland gobbling and ensure a more equitable use of tax dollars. "The Farmer's Market is a way to get a handle on all these problems, but we've a long way to go," said a market member. Some tax and land plans could be implemented through the, Farmer's Market. The "circuit breaker" system rebates taxes to farmers if property taxes exceed a fixed percentage of income. If no taxes are paid, a rebate is paid by the state treasury. In Michigan, the circuit breaker is tied to state and local planning. The Internal Revenue Code, in occasional cases, is used to preserve farmland. Section 501(a)(3) governs the rights and responsibilities of certain non-profit corporations. Groups have incorporated themselves, gained non-profit status from the Internal Revenue Service, and donated land or money to an incorporated land trust. The trust is committed to maintaining the land as farmland and leases the land back to farmers. Because of the non-profit aspects of the trust, the land is not taxed and the donor receives tax advantages from the transaction. The problem, of course, is giving up the land to the corporation. In California, the Northern California Land Trust intends to use its land base as a vehicle to help migrant farmers live and produce on their own land—land owned by the trust but theirs to work and pass on to their children. Land banks are another land planning device. In British Columbia and on Prince Edward Island, the land bank system allows the state to purchase farm land. Instead of a retiring farmer selling his land to a corporation, the state buys his land and leases (or sells) it to another farmer. �198 Colonialism in Modern America The problems caused by corporate developers are not new to the mountains. Company towns used to mean coal towns which served the interests of the coal operators. Now a new set of corporate strip miners are disturbing the land and organizing labor around their resort-oriented needs. Mountain people are again going to be forced to fight for the right to decide how to use theor own land. County officials say that planned land-use regulations will block future over-development. They have hired professional planners to carry out what they perceive the public will to be. Who decides what that will is, and how conflicting demands on land-use will be accommodated in a rational land-use policy are decisions which cannot remain in the hands of the owners of the company towns if farming is to survive. NOTE ^Yolande DeB. McCurdy (Robin Gottfried), "An Ecosystematic Analysis of the Vegetation of Hanging Rock State Park, Danbury, North Carolina," MA in Ecology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1976. �by "You an to the local businesses, set up schools and other institutions which to do the job and and You an to in their 'place,' It's On the I a all of us. As to for are I for me old 1 can get the are on in to in of you is to by as I to On the the it's a to its or in of in I are I of my to at i» in fit is A a He is the of �200 Colonialism in Modern America heard, and felt, over the past four years. Tremendous changes are coming to the mountains—whether we want those changes or not. I hope some of you are already aware of these changes and I hope you are determined to participate in these events so we can all begin to influence the people who rule this country; for I came here today to talk about taking political and economic control of our country. Before I talk about how people might begin to take power, I want to say a few words about Berea College and about the changes which I feel sure all of you are experiencing as you spend time at this place. For those who are from Appalachia, who love it, and who want to remain, I'm sure each trip back home is a hard one; for the more formal education we get the more we tend to be isolated from the old ways and from our own people. Perhaps we need to examine why this isolation takes place, for I don't believe it is an accidental thing. If I understand Berea's aims today, you students before me are the cream of this year's crop. You are the best-read, most likely to succeed in the Berea Way, of those thousands who applied to come to this lonely and sometimes barren ridge. Those of you who stay here for four years and obtain a degree can be expected to go out and become teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers—the people who help to keep this country prosperous. Those of you who have successful careers and stay in the mountains can be expected to become leaders of Appalachia. I hope not, for I believe we have too many leaders in Appalachia already. There are too many now who believe they know what is best for the area and for the people. Most of these so-called leaders or experts are trained as I am trained, and as you will be trained, to think only as middle class people with middle class values and middle class ways. Because of this, I would say that many of Appalachia's problems result from the fact that its leaders are middle class and formally educated. Let me explain further. Back home, wherever that is, and probably within sight of this building, an older culture is dying before our eyes. The physical changes are the most obvious; the old cabins, nestled in a quiet cove with surrounding chicken coop and barn, are almost �Education and Exploitation 201 gone. For the expanding middle class their way of life differs little from that of middle America. The differences which still exist are mental ones: nostalgic memories stirred by church hymns or traditional music, the old friendships built before mills and roads brought a new way of dealing with one's neighbors. But for the working class, the unemployed, the subsistence farmer, the people who barely get by, the old ways and values are still a living thing; and the relationships based on an agrarian society are not so easily discarded despite the invasion of roads and schools and TV sets. Our real problem in Appalachia is not whether the old culture will die—only time will decide that now—but whether mountain people can begin to find ways to deal directly with the political and economic forces which are at work in Appalachia and in the rest of the country. If Appalachians problems are to be solved, it will be done because we understand our past and because we begin to find out who really controls this country. We need to know who really has economic and political power in Appalachia. America began to move away from Appalachia with the utilization of the steam engine, the building of the railroad, the opening of the West, and the coming of the automobile. Because the terrain was rugged and difficult to penetrate by modern means of transportation, it was easier for businessmen and speculators to go west, to gain their tremendous profits in the drive toward western seashores. But Appalachia was not forgotten for long. It was too rich, too valuable, and too close to the existing centers of industry in the Northeast. By the late 1890's the robber barons who made their fortunes in rails, steel, textiles, and coal began to turn their attention to new areas in their search for raw materials and cheap labor. Appalachia, in all its unspoiled splendor, was close at hand, for the area had huge attractive reserves of coal, timber, and water. Rail lines, which had paralleled the major ranges and opened up the broad river valleys years before, began to penetrate the deeper regions of the mountains. In these rugged hills, the oldest in the world, the robber barons found tremendous riches. In eastern Kentucky alone, thirty-three billion tons of coal would eventually be surveyed. Over the steep slopes from New York to southern Georgia were stands of magnificent virgin �202 Colonialism in Modern America timber, perhaps the most luxuriant growth of hardwood timber on the American continent. It was a land of great beauty, a wilderness island in the midst of America's industrial push west. And just as the early pioneers and land speculators devised ways to steal this land from the Indians, the northern industrialists began to devise ways to steal it from our ancestors. The opening up of Appalachia in the quest for raw materials and cheap labor was not unique. Across the Atlantic in their corporate offices European businessmen began to look for more markets for their wares. The targets they chose were Asia, Africa, and Indochina. The race was on across the world. For as industrial production rose to new heights, new markets were needed to supply raw materials, cheap labor, and more profits. The first industrial incursions into this region were tenuous ones, but over a period of time they were successful. My family, and yours, helped to make them that way. In the coal mines, lumber camps, paper mills, and textile sweat shops of the Southern mountains, our ancestors helped to develop this region with their labor and their lives. My folks worked for the paper mills and textile plants. Your families may have worked in the mines or mills. No matter. The results are the same. They worked for it, but we don't own it. Today, if we look across the region, we can see the process still going on. The names may differ from the past—U.S. Steel, Ford Motor Company, Standard Oil, Mead Corporation, American Enka, Eastman Kodak; the names may differ, but the process remains the same. The people who labored to build this country do not own it. Neither do their descendants. We are a people with some material benefits, but we are still at the beck and call of the rich 10 percent of our population who still control 90 percent of the capital wealth. And one percent of that 10 percent actually controls how all the wealth is spent. Impossible in a democracy? Yes, it would be impossible if we lived in a democracy. But we don't. Much of this is probably not new to you. I didn't come here to bore you with facts but to ask some questions which I think you will all face very soon. My questions have to do with what we can do to change these facts, if you think they need to be changed. Historically, people who wanted change in this country have �Education and Exploitation 203 worked with the people who are most obviously oppressed: with the union movement, with Black people, and with other oppressed minorities around the country. But so far all of these attempts to build a national movement have failed because people have been bought off, leaders have been killed, or the present system has found a way to meet the immediate needs raised by the protestors. Let's look briefly at some of these attempts. In the late 1800's the labor movement in this country developed along two radically different lines. The first branch was the traditionally-oriented trade unions or guilds, established along authoritarian lines and interested in obtaining immediate material benefits for their members. They wanted a larger piece of the pie, and they were willing to live alongside the bosses if they could get some pie. Out of this group came the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The other branch was quite different. The best known was the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as the "Wobblies." It was the most militant union industrial America had ever seen. It called for one big union of working people and for the workers to control and own all phases of production. It wanted no bosses. "This land is ours," the union said. "We built it, we should control it, lock, stock and barrel." Its tactics were the boycott, the strike, the lock-out, and, if necessary, industrial sabotage. "If we can't have it, it won't exist," was the cry. And as the union chapters spread across the land, they became a threat which could not be ignored. Eventually the strikes were defeated, the leaders jailed or killed, and the members blacklisted from any jobs. By the early 1920's the Wobblies were finished as an industrial power. Yet today many of their ideas are echoed in the demands for community control of police and schools and industry. The Wobblies failed and they were destroyed, but their ideas live on. In the 1930's with the Great Depression, a militant mood began to build again in the country. Big business and the federal government were forced to take action to overhaul a collapsing system. With the reorganization of the federal government and the reforms pushed through by Roosevelt, the last militant drive of the labor unions ended in defeat. The reforms were just �204 Colonialism in Modern America enough to satisfy people and to keep them from tearing the whole thing down. With the National Labor Relations Act and the right to collective bargaining given to the unions, the last attempt to build militant unions ended. FDR's recognition of labor's right to organize was a short-term boom for the unions; but in the long run it meant that the unions could be controlled, channeled, and directed by big business through the courts and through arbitration and contracts. FDR's ploy to save the system by changing a little part of it succeeded. The American trade unions, already rigid and authoritarian, bought a larger piece of the pie and none of the action. Mountain people—in Detroit, Cabin Creek, Blair Mountain, Gastonia, Elizabethton—fought for their unions during this time. Yet today these unions have sold them out. In the 1950's and 1960's Black people began to build a movement which had potential for a national coalition of poor people. Instead of just calling for more material benefits, Black people called for liberation from psychological oppression and then for economic equality. Organizations such as the NAACP, CORE, and SCLC began the fight. It was brought to a new level by the demands of SNCC and later the Black Panthers and other Black groups. And just as the Wobblies were attacked, so were Black leaders. Over the past few years we have seen Black leaders killed, jailed, or driven into political exile because of their beliefs and because they were willing to stand up for their beliefs. In the mountains things were no different. In the early 1960's a group of poor mountain people was formed in eastern Kentucky known as the Appalachian Committee for Full Employment. It was composed of unemployed miners who were trying to force their union and the coal operators to pay them full union wages. During the same time that Black people were demanding social and economic equality, poor mountain whites were making many of these same demands of the federal government. The methods chosen by the government to deal with both groups were the same—the War on Poverty. For in the same way the government bought off militant people in the 1930's, the War on Poverty was established to keep this country's poor quiet. The results can be seen around the country where federallyfunded projects have attempted to check, channel, and thwart �Education and Exploitation 205 the drive of America's poor for political and economic rights. Where the government has been unwilling or unable to step in, the large private foundations have provided financial backing, knowledge, and, most importantly, guidance. But while these programs have often diverted people's attention from some basic needs to the more easily controlled tasks of grants, paperwork, red tape, surveys, etc., the basic alienation of the American poor remains—along with their desire for drastic change. The reasons the poverty programs failed could be held to faulty reasoning: It's not really possible to save this system by reforming it. It might have failed because of a lack of will power on the part of most Americans. But I would say the program failed because of lack of trust. No government in history has paid its own people to overthrow it. Many poor people, either instinctively or consciously, realized this and never trusted the motives and designs of the federal bureaucrats and politicians who run the program. This has been especially true in the mountains where people are traditionally distrustful of any government. Part of this distrust is based on years of being on the bottom and seeing all kinds of promises but very little action. Poor people, because of their economic experiences, look for action—not talk. In order to survive they must become experts in judging people's motives and designs. They may not always make the best decision for themselves in the long run; but they are usually accurate in judging who has the power and who will use the axe, if and when it falls. What does all this mean to you people as students at Berea College? I think it has a lot to do with you, for many of you will probably end up being the people who will attempt to control the lives of Appalachia's poor folks. Earlier I talked of how the northern industrialists came into Appalachia and began to exploit its natural wealth and cheap labor. That trend continues, and it will continue for the foreseeable future unless there is an abrupt shift in how people act in the mountains. It's not enough to simply own a region if you cannot control it and then exploit it. In order to do this, you need people �206 Colonialism in Modern America in the middle who will do the dirty work. You need an educated class willing to run the local businesses, set up schools and other institutions which train people to do the job and keep their minds and mouths shut. You need an educated class to keep poor people in their "place." Around the world wherever empires are built, you can see the same process at work. An educated class is built from the native people—a class whose loyalties are not to their own people but to the people who own the region. These educated people, the middle men, are paid well with material benefits, money, status, and power. And they rule with an iron fist. Once such a system is established, it's not necessary for the rich folks to pass down orders to their stooges. The stooges already know what their self interests are and they will protect them at all costs. But where do you recruit an educated class and how do you train them? It's my belief that Berea College and other colleges in Appalachia have fulfilled this function since they were established. Berea College was founded by missionaries who believed they had a divine purpose to bring enlightenment and education to this rugged land. But education in our society means control, not freedom. It means a way of transferring values from one group to another so that the first group can keep the second under control. The missionaries, or their supporters, ended up by controlling the people they were trying to save from eternal damnation. This was true in India with the British, in Latin America with the Spanish, and in Appalachia with our own missionaries. By setting up an educated class of native people who are trained to be doctors, lawyers, teachers, and social workers, a larger society can control a smaller one or one without political power. How does Berea help in all of this? I think it's fairly evident. By training the people who have functioned best in mountain schools, Berea helps to insure a steady supply of people who will take over the reins of power when the existing local leadership dies. By teaching students a new set of values, values based on the dominant middle-class American society, this college insures that people can be co-opted and bought off like most other people in this society who are formally educated and �Education and Exploitation 207 middle class. This system will always allow a few people to fight their way to the top, for those few are needed to control those who are on the bottom. Remember this fact, and remember it well, fellow Bereans: We got where we are by climbing over the backs and bodies of our brothers and sisters who now work in the mills, mines, and factories, who fight in Vietnam, or who sit jobless at home and wonder what tomorrow will bring. I don't know what your reaction is to these thoughts. I don't mind anger. I hope you do have some kind of reaction. I also hope you don't feel guilty if you find some truth in what I say. Guilt is the traditional means of escape for the American liberal who rushes out into the cold world to help poor folks, whether poor folks want help or not. The problem is not with poor folks. The problem is with the rich folks in this country who control the wealth and then control us. And part of the problem is with the middle class who help to perpetuate this evil, racist system which we now have. We have the potential as a people to build a democratic society in this country. If we want to build a democratic society we must begin to figure out how the present system works. Then we must begin to build a new society which will serve people, not exploit them. ��lOtflNOD JO 3DNVN31NIVW 3H1 �nI• �IV: of a In the and trol of and Is the the of in and the act to of the and and and the the the the and In the In of and as the Jim of art. the to the is to the to is or re- pressed. Jr., A In of and the the and and the the ity" the of and of the the In and the and . .". a and his the the In 'The at to and and In and the "Coal the to of in the of of a of a of re™ �210 as a Phil to the the in in the TV A it has in the the an the the to of and of and to • . * • ''' ; r f~ "" Y ' �It* ��by James G. Branscome on of to the and has to be the Its a on the the a all a to the a on TV. All of on If the on the to his be an TV In the Jy a his of of taste." of the fe) a to he the or on This by a in of Fit is a �212 Colonialism in Modern America boycotts and perhaps even throw dog dung at Eva Gabor as she emerged from her studio. They might even go a step further and deal with that hillbilly maligning patriot, Al Capp. But with this, as all things Appalachian, silence. America is allowed to continue laughing at this minority group, because on this America agrees: Hillbilly ain't beautiful. The treatment given by the media to Appalachia is only one example of the massive failure of America's institutions for over a century to meet the needs of the people of the region. From government at all levels to churches, private welfare agencies, schools, colleges, labor unions, foundations, newspapers, corporations, ad infinitum, the region has received an unequal share of exploitation, neglect, unfulfilled promises, and misguided assistance. This is not to deny that America is interested in Appalachia. It has been interested for some time, in the peculiar American way, in Appalachia's worth to industry, of course; only erratically has it been interested in the plight of the people. General Howard of the Freedman's Bureau is said to have convinced Lincoln that he ought to try to do something for the poor mountaineers after the Civil War. The New Deal brought the then rather progressive Tennessee Valley Authority to one part of the region, but TVA's recently developed capacity to burn lower-grade strip-mine coal brought the hellish human and material waste of that process to Central Appalachia. John Kennedy and his brother Robert both professed an interest in the hillbilly and his vote; and eventually, under Lyndon Johnson, their interest was translated into the Appalachian Regional Commission, a unique political and economic development agency. But, as Harry Caudill remarked, its assignment was "one of the most awesome tasks since Hercules cleaned the Augean stables." It is especially Herculean when one applies some good American economic analysis: The agency was given about onetwentieth of the amount of money it takes to fight the Vietnam war for one year and told to use the amount over a six-year period to correct almost two hundred years of abuse to areas of a thirteen-state region! Now, for the riddle: If 80 percent of that money was spent on highway construction, how interested is America in the nineteen million people who occupy the territory the Commission described in 1964 as "an island of poverty in a sea of affluence"? This is not to deny that the Commission has �Annihilating the Hillbilly 213 had a positive influence on the region. Given the parameters in which it had to work, it has made many investments in public facilities and increased the accountability of state governments to their Appalachian sections. If Congress extends the program and significantly increases its funding for human resource programs, the Commission may be able to bring to the Appalachian poor some of the services even ghetto residents have come to accept as normal. There are some big ifs in this, not the least of which is the critical question today about the relationship between institutions and people: // an institution today had unlimited funding and unlimited maneuverability, could it bring to people the services they need without destroying the kind of life they want to live? If the ability of institutions to respond to people's needs is judged on the basis of the Federal government's enforcement of the Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, then the answer to this question is NO! Loud and Clear. The death of 78 coal miners in Farmington, West Virginia, in November, 1968, led to the passage of that act, which is the strictest mine safety legislation ever to get through Congress and be signed by a President. The public outrage over Farmington gave government one of its few opportunities to wrestle successfully with the powerful American coal-oil conglomerates. But something did not work: Either there is no will or there is no desire by the bureaucracies (the institutions) of the Federal government to go to the mat with the conglomerates. Perhaps their interests are so inseparable that no contest is ever possible. In any case, since the disaster more than 700 miners have been killed in the mines, and more than 10,000 have been crippled or injured. There has been no public outcry to avenge the deaths of these men. Moreover, the Social Security Administrations's own Bureau of Disability Insurance provides some statistics to indicate how the bureaucracy of one fundamental institution—governmentdeals with one crisis that the 1969 Act sought to meet: compensation for miners disabled by "black lung" contracted after long years and long hours inside the mines. The national average of claims under the black lung provisions of the act processed by the Bureau of Disability Insurance is 43 percent. However, only 22 percent of the claims from eastern Kentucky and 24 percent of those from West Virginia had been processed by early November, 1970. And 52 percent of the processed claims of West �214 Colonialism in Modern America Virginia miners have been denied; 71 percent of Kentucky miners have been denied. The figure for claims denied for the rest of the nation is only 20 percent. If one reflects on the fact that in the past seventy years there have been 101,000 mine deaths, a number larger than the total of miners now working in Appalachia, and double the number of Vietnam deaths, then an inability of the government to enforce regulations, which are mild by international comparison, strikes one as not speaking well for the capacity of political institutions to use the very arena of action which is theirs by democracy's mandate, or for the American public's capacity to care for anything more than the dramatic, never the substantial. And with the death of thirty-eight men in the Finley mines near Hyden, Kentucky, on December 30, 1970, the nation was once again reminded about the plight of miners in Appalachian coal pits. The President of the United States himself announced that he would have visited the scene of the disaster—if it had not been for "the bad weather." (Yet no airports in the region were closed.) The more important visits (those of inspectors from the Bureau of Mines) had not been made on schedule some few days before the disaster in order to check correction of violations of the 1969 act cited on earlier visits. It was the same old refrain: New priority guidelines for violations under the new act had just come down from Washington to the bureau's regional office in eastern Kentucky, necessitating a new schedule of visits; the office itself was short-handed because some of the inspectors had taken "Christmas leave"; the mine operators complained that some provisions of the act were a peril to the safety of miners and mines; no one, not even the inspectors, understood all of the provisions of the act, etc., etc. In any event, the Finley mines were permitted to operate up to the disaster on December 30. They did so in large part because an inspection required under the 1969 act was subjected to the administration of a bureaucracy which, perhaps unwittingly but in fact, vetoed the will and intention of the Congress and the President and—if representative government is still taken seriously—the will of the people. Thirtyeight men were dead. And the litany of charges: Families of the dead miners were exploited by funeral operators, insurance claim men, and government officials; cover-ups and doubledealings and politics were involved in the "hearings" to inquire into the disaster; illegal "prime-cord" and "dynamite" had (had �Annihilating the Hillbilly 215 not) been used in the mines; an inspector "who didn't want his name used" said a simultaneous explosion ten times the legal limit was set off when the men were killed. The complete failure of the American corporate structure to accept even a charitable responsibility for the region that it has raped so successfully is hardly arguable. Since men like General Imboden in the late nineteenth century went before the state legislatures to argue that "within the imperial domain of Virginia, lie, almost unknown to the outside world and not fully appreciated by their owners, vaster fields of coal and iron than in all England, maybe, than all Europe," the American corporate community has wrenched resources estimated at a worth of nearly one trillion dollars from the mountains. While these companies pay some of the highest dividends of any company in the world to their already wealthy shareholders, the communities in Appalachia where those resources originated survive on a subsistence economy, if "survive" is the proper verb here. Often more than half of the money in circulation comes from state and federal welfare coffers. This fact alone tells us something about the American Way, if not the American Dream. Three months after the June 30, 1970, deadline for reducing the amount of hazardous dust in the mines as required by the 1969 legislation, 2800 of the 3000 underground mine operators had not complied. These same companies have continually opposed severance taxes on coal and medical benefits for the more than 100,000 disabled miners who suffer permanent lung damage from poorly maintained mines. Apparently when these corporate institutions of American free enterprise become incredibly wealthy, they cannot be expected to have the conscience even to allow government to pay for the damage they have caused. Somewhere that "pursuit of selfish interest accruing benefits to all" went astray in Appalachia. It has always been asserted with pride that America takes great interest in its children. "Dr. Spock" has been a best-seller for over a decade. But his "child-dominated" society has interest only in certain children. Of the more than 925,000 poor children under six in Appalachia, as estimated by the office of Economic Opportunity, only about 100,000 receive cash benefits in their homes from Aid to Dependent Children or other similar welfare programs. The national participation rate of children in Head Start programs decreased three percent between 1967 and �216 Colonialism in Modern America 1969; the Appalachian participation decreased 15 percent. The greatest decrease in Appalachia, significantly, was in full-year programs, those regarded as most beneficial to poor children. What other group in the country received the benefits from the cutbacks in Appalachia is unimportant here; that "hillbillies" were not on the priority list is obvious. In the area of prenatal and infant care, the situation in Appalachia is even more alarming. Examinations of children in several areas of the region have shown that as many as 70 percent have "parasitic infestation" (the euphemism for "worms"), one of the causes contributing to Appalachians unusually large number of retarded and "slow" children. "Worms" abound in the miserable shacks and grassless yards American free enterprise has put aside for the hillbillies. If the Appalachian infant mortality rate were reduced at the same rate as East Germany's in a fiveyear period (as reported by the World Health Organization), the lives of more than 1,000 children a year could be preserved. In certain areas of the region, as a matter of fact, the situation worsened over a decade. In Lamar County, Alabama, for example, the infant mortality rate rose from 32.5 percent to 40.9 percent in ten years. The rate in Hancock County, Tennessee, rose from 21.4 percent to 42.2 percent in the same time period. While increased attention to child development at the national and regional level promises to better the situation, for many the help comes too late. Perhaps if it were possible to estimate the number of mountain children who would be alive and healthy if Appalachia had received and retained a more equitable share of the nation's wealth, certain institutions could be persuaded more easily to invest in saving children. Until the case is made, however, we all labor under the curse of the prophets and the admonitions of the poets (increasingly, it seems, the only sane people) that the final judgement on civilizations and their institutions rests on how well they treat their children, who are—in appeal at least—the "least of these." The Appalachian child who makes it to school does not find the institution America has charged with equipping youth with basic "survival" skills any better prepared to meet his needs. The inability and unwillingness of local government to tax the property and extractive resources of large corporations have resulted in an educational system in Appalachia that can only be compared with that in the so-called "underdeveloped" nations. Add to �Annihilating the Hillbilly 217 this the fundamental resistance of middle-class teachers to acknowledge the unique cultural heritage of the Appalachian youth, and you have a laboratory for studying one of the classic historical struggles between a nation intent on erasing a minority from its midst and a people intent on preserving their identity and lifestyle at any cost to themselves. In an Appalachian school, the middle-class aspiring teacher is just as insistent that the student be aggressive, obedient, and joyless—in short, everything that his culture tells him he is not—as is the teacher in the Bureau of Indian Affairs school on a reservation. No wonder, then, that as many as 65 percent of the students drop out of school before graduation, a figure 25 percent higher than the national average. Responding to the fiscal needs of the Appalachian educational system alone is overwhelmingly beyond the capacity of government agencies as they are presently funded. In 1967, for example, the Office of Education estimated that the construction needs of the thirteen Appalachian states represented over 42 percent of the total school construction needs of the entire country. It would require the additional expenditure of $363 million annually just to raise the per pupil expenditures of Appalachian schools to the national average. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, designed to increase the amount of funds available for the teaching of disadvantaged students, will spend more money on an equal number of students in the schools of Westchester, New York, where the number of poor students is about three percent of the student body, than it will in a county in Appalachia where more than half of the student body is poor. Talent Search, a special college recruitment and placement program funded by Congress for high-risk students, spends only 3.8 percent of its money in Appalachia as compared to the 10 percent the region deserves. Simply to make the Appalachian educational system equal in educational resources to the nation would require a political miracle at a time when no miracle workers are to be found. While Appalachia is heavily populated with institutions of higher learning supported by various religious denominations and state governments, the region's students are no better served than in the secondary institutions. Neither is the region's need for professional and para-professional manpower. No institution of American society, in fact, is more divorced from Appalachia than the higher educational system residing within it. �218 Colonialism in Modern America Forced by accrediting agencies, visiting boards, and hundreds of other pressures to maintain a facade of "academic excellence" and "a sound liberal arts education," usually with Christ thrown in somewhere, the church-supported schools spend little time thinking about the community below their own mountainside. Their emphasis on admitting Appalachian students is so small, their tuition so high, and pressure so intense from church supporters outside the region to admit their sons and daughters, that most of these colleges have an inordinately high percentage of students from states like New Jersey. Certainly to these colleges, "Christian" education has nothing to do with serving the victims of Caesar's educational system. The "open door" policies of state universities are often, in actuality, "revolving doors" for the Appalachian student. Once the student is admitted and the fees collected (either from him or the state), the more aggressive and well-trained student from another section of the state or nation, and the freshman composition teacher, can be expected to send the Appalachian student scurrying home. In January, 1968, the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges summed up the record of their members in the region as follows: "To maintain quality they raised student charges substantially, turned away qualified students, limited enrollments, and refused urgently needed public services." The regional universities and colleges place little emphasis on promoting a regional consciousness on the part of their students. In fact, there is not at present a single Appalachian studies program in the region which could begin to rival the offerings in Far Eastern studies or astronomy. One, Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond (which in reality is in "Blue Grass," not "eastern," Kentucky), prides itself on its training and research in law enforcement and police work. All this continues and intensifies a channeling process begun by the elementary teacher to send the Appalachian student—ashamed of his background and ill-equipped to meet the needs of his region—into middle-class society outside the region. The sixteen-year prpcess of credentializing that the student has been subjected to, becomes finally a ticket to the world of Dick and Jane, Support-Your Local-Police, and the affluence of America built at Appalachian expense. So a region that needs more than 200,000 college graduates—a minimum of 5,000 physicians, many thousands of �Annihilating the Hillbilly 219 nurses, teachers, businessmen, government leaders, ad infinitum— finds no help in another of America's institutions. The young Appalachian left behind by the higher educational system is destined to be the object of a number of complicated channeling devices. The male youth, if he can pass the examinations, is eligible for one of the more obvious youth channeling programs in the country, the Army. Selective Service does not maintain records on Appalachians as a group, but the number in the service is estimated to be higher than their percentage in the population because the armed forces represent the only opportunity available to many young mountain men to be assimilated into mainline America. Recent Department of Defense figures report that West Virginia led the nation in per capita Vietnam deaths. Twenty-five West Virginians per 100,000 population had been killed, compared to seventeen per 100,000 nationally. For the youth who seeks opportunity and training in some special opportunity program, such as the Job Corps, the fate may not be a great deal more encouraging. Because of the Job Corps' resistance to establishing a center especially for Appalachian youth, the mountain youth are sent to camps, both within and outside the region, where the population may be largely urban and black. Combining his unfamiliarity with urban life and blacks with his affinity for home and family, one can easily understand why the Appalachian youth drops out of the program in equal frequency with his Indian counterpart. Even if he lasts the program out, according to Joint Action in Community Service (the agency that contracts with the Job Corps to place and counsel graduates), it is very difficult to find him a job or to locate a person or agency willing to assist him in the mountains. For the youth who has not dropped out of school by the ninth grade and who has no prospect of attending college, vocational training represents the only channel open to him. Many find it a wicked channel indeed. Three years ago the Education Advisory Committee of the Appalachian Regional Commission reported that half of all vocational training programs in the region consisted of agriculture and home economics—areas in �220 Colonialism in Modern America which there were almost no job openings. Since that report the Commission and the states have required all 235 vocational programs which they have funded to teach job-relevant skills. While only half of the schools are now open and no thorough evaluation has been reported, it is expected that the schools will be better than their predecessors. As late as 1968, however, the West Virginia Commission on Higher Education reported that only about 18 percent of the students in that state had access to vocational training. Given the fact that post-high school vocational training is still not available to the majority of Appalachian youth, this major channel of supposed opportunity still has a long way to go to overcome the serious handicaps it has represented in the past. And with improvement, vocational education's role may be to channel all the so-called disadvantaged students into neat slots, thereby diminishing not only the student but vocational education as well. Additionally, so long as vocational school graduates must leave the mountains to find jobs, the region will remain a loser. It is already estimated that 900,000 high school graduates will have to leave the region to find jobs in the 1970's. They will thus become the people the cities do not want and the people the region cannot afford to lose. The fact that a mountain youth takes advantage of the opportunity to finish high school and apply to college does not guarantee that the tentacles of the system will let him go. For instance, one of the high-risk students I taught in the Upward Bound program at Berea College applied and was accepted in the fall at that college. During the preceding spring he was approached by a recruiter for the FBI who gave him a hard sell on the benefits of working for the Bureau in Washington. He dropped the idea of college and is now a low-paid clerk at FBI headquarters. Since this incident I have checked with school personnel in other areas of the region and found that intensive recruitment of high school graduates in rural areas is now carried out by the FBI and other government agencies which are not finding recruits for their clerk and typist posts in urban high schools. The law, it seems, has a long arm and no qualms about modern forms of impressment. Most high school dropouts (except those who marry and somehow find work or welfare payments) and unemployed high �Annihilating the Hillbilly 221 school graduates eventually end up being forced to migrate to find work. In West Virginia, for instance, 70 percent of the young people leave before they reach the age of 24. Usually referred to as "migrants" instead of more accurately as economic refugees, these youth join the more than 3,000,000 other mountaineers who have preceded them to northern cities such as Cincinnati, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Detroit since World War II. If they have a skill and happen to move during a period of relative economic prosperity or are willing to accept a job run by the stopwatch and a minimum-wage employer, as many do, their chances for survival are good. If, on the other hand, they have to move in with kin in the "back home" ghetto, the situation is different. The unemployed and unassimilated mountain youth finds himself in a bewildering ghetto that defies description and usually comparison with the ghetto life of other minorities. He also finds that in the city there is one thing more unacceptable than a black man—a hillbilly, a ridgerunner, a briarhopper. For the first time in its history America has recognized him as a cultural minority. If he ends up in juvenile court for stealing hubcaps, he is offered leniency with his promise to go "back home." Judges make this offer to youth whose families may have been in the city for three generations and can only consider themselves Cincinnatians or Chicagoans. If the mountain youth enters school, studies show that its foreign nature drives him out faster both psychologically and physically than it does his black migrant counterpart. For the mountain youth who is unable or unwilling to assimilate into the life of the city, there is little help from the social service agencies which understand much more about blacks than they do about him. He is thus not only without help, but, perhaps more appallingly, he is without an advocate in a city that he does not understand and that does not understand him. One group of Appalachians who are consistently overlooked and underserved by the institutions of the region is the blacks. As a matter of fact, both government and the so-called "private" welfare agencies refuse to acknowledge the existence of blacks in Appalachia. While the percentage of blacks in the region as a whole is low, about eight percent, they make up the entire population of many small isolated hollows and ghost coal towns abandoned by the corporations and welfare and poverty �222 Colonialism in Modern America agencies. Because the backbreaking jobs that brought black imports into the region are gone and because of the discrimination and competition with the majority of poor white people for jobs and welfare funds, their existence is a poor one indeed. As yet no agency report or journalist has documented the presence and needs of these people, let alone described the culture of a minority group in the midst of another cultural minority. America's unwillingness to deal with the Appalachian as he asks to be dealt with is probably no more baffling than America's seeming obsession with studying and understanding his unusual life-style and values. Even before the Russell Sage Foundation published John Campbell's The Southern Highlander and His Homeland in 1921, writers and sociologists were making forays into the mountains alternately to praise, condemn, and collect the mountain culture. The studies are still being made today in the midst of the technological revolution that is, for all practical purposes, making "Middle Americans" all alike. The conclusions of modern studies do not differ from those made in the last century. The Appalachian is different: He is existence oriented and independent, has close family ties, is fatalistic, cares for his elderly, ad nauseam. If, as Robert Coles and others have written of late, the Appalachian has a life-style and a culture that America would do well to listen to, if not opt for, why has America failed so miserably at times to meet his needs? Part of the answer is obviously that Appalachia has been in the main a colonial territory for America within her own boundaries. The life-style of the region served well the need of the mining and lumbering corporations for a subjugated people willing to be peasants in their own land. Even after the bloody struggles to unionize the mines, the capacity of America's institutions (including its labor unions) to contain the people's struggle remained intact. What on the surface appear to be quaint people whose character can be explained away by their isolation and independence may, in fact, be more accurately described as the historical reaction of the people to colonialism. What on the surface may strike Jack Weller, author of Yesterday's People (published jointly by the University of Kentucky and the Council of the Southern Mountains), as ignorance, �Annihilating the Hillbilly 223 that keeps people from taking polio shots even when they are offered free transportation, may, in fact, be better explained by Frantz Fanon, a physician himself, who argues (in The Wretched of the Earth) that the Algerians resisted "modern medical techniques" as long as the French were in control of them but adopted the new practices immediately when they felt themselves to be in control I have seen parents who had refused to have their children vaccinated at the public health clinic willingly have them vaccinated when it was "our" medical students who were giving the shots. One has to understand how the medical profession in Appalachia operates to appreciate fully this phenomenon. He has to sit with a young father in the mountains and hear the story of how his pregnant (now deceased) wife was turned away from the hospital because he did not have the hundred dollars that the doctors demand as a down payment for those who do not have medical insurance. It is these same compassionate physicians who, rather than reform their own practices to meet the needs of people, have turned the Medicaid program into a thriving business. The potential earnings from the health support programs is so great that a recent government report on physician manpower in Appalachia suggests that it is one of the most lucrative enticements to get doctors into the region—another colonial characteristic. A largely overlooked article in the Louisville Courier-Journal in the spring of 1970 describes how doctors and pharmacists have turned Medicaid recipients in eastern Kentucky into addicts and junkies. It repeats reports from law officers and nurses who had seen "whole families lying around in a stupor" and "glassy-eyed teenagers and small children wobbling or passed out along the roadside" because they took narcotics prescribed by their physicians. One eastern Kentucky pharmacist admitted that 65 percent of his business came from Medicaid dues. "The poor people are substituting pills for faith," he explained. He went on to describe why the abuses are allowed to continue: "It would cost the pharmacist a great deal in time away from work to keep a check on abuses. They are just too busy." By and large, American institutions can be said then to have held no respect for the mountaineer other than for his use as an object. Richard Davis notes in his recent book, The Man Who Moved a Mountain (Fortress Press), that large metropolitan �224 Colonialism in Modern America newspapers used the notorious Allen feud of the second decade of this century in Hillsville, Virginia, to interpret the Appalachian to their urban readers. Said one: The majority of mountain people are unprincipled ruffians. They make moonshine, 500 horsepower, and swill it down; they carry on generous and gentle feuds in which little children are not spared, and deliberately plan a wholesale assassination, and when captured either assert they shot in self-defense, or with true coward streak deny the crime. There are two remedies onlyeducation or extermination. Mountaineers, like the red Indian, must learn this lesson. Another editorial in a northern newspaper on the same event went on to conclude: The Scotch-Irish mountaineers are more ignorant than vicious, victims of heredity and alcohol, and now that their isolated region has been invaded, must change or perish. One of the often overlooked aspects of the outsiders' fetish for Appalachia has been the premises that underlie their own prescriptions for the people's future. One finds in Jack Weller's influential writing, for instance, comments such as these: There is little in the mountain child's training that would help him develop self-control, discipline, resolution, or steadfastness. Thus the way is prepared for future difficulties in the army or at work. Since the culture inadequately prepares its members to relate to "outsiders," there is a great need for "bridge" persons, who can help the suspicious and fearful to respond more positively to persons and institutions which will increasingly be of help and resource—doctors, psychiatrists, clinics, hospitals, government in the form of agency officials, policemen, public health nurses, welfare workers, and recreation leaders. The mountaineer's suspicion of these persons limits his use of them in crisis occasions, when, in fact, their purpose is to be of assistance in many ways at other times. He needs help in �Annihilating the Hillbilly 225 understanding that government and other institutions cannot be run in person-oriented ways but must be conducted in great measure on an impersonal objective basis. He needs help in seeing that a certain amount of bureaucratic organization is a necessary thing, and that a government does not exist for an individual person's benefit (Yesterday's People, pp. 157-158). Responding to the Appalachian culture, outsiders are sometimes incapable of interpreting the evidence because of their own training in research procedures. One (while, of course, repeatedly enjoining his readers that he is passing no judgment on the culture) describes mountain music and literature as "regressive looking/1 "nostalgic and melancholy," over all, "repressive." Thomas Merton, on the other hand, after hearing some mountain music for the first time at the Abbey of Gethsemani, gave the correct interpretation and exclaimed, "It's apocalyptic!" Perhaps the only fair hearing the culture of the people of Appalachia will receive is from persons like mystics and contemplatives who do not assign ultimate importance to the things that the modern state and today's seminarians have blessed as divine. The churchmen, educators, welfare agents, independent dogooders, journalists, and novelists, and the institutions which pay their salaries—that is, those who have made an extraordinarily good living trying to "understand" the mountain man—have studied the Appalachian not to learn from him but rather to "teach" him, to "school" him, to "doctor" and "save" him by making him into what they already are: Middle America, assimilated into the America of the television and Holiday Inn—the America which Tocqueville and Faulkner warned was founded by those who sought not to escape from tyranny but to establish one in their own image and likeness. Only in Appalachia, for example, have the mainline churches come upon a "Christian" religious expression which stands four-square against what they expect religion in America to "do." The rejection of the Christian Century by Appalachia has baffled and annoyed the mainline churches, their agencies, theologians, and sociologists. And because the church in mainline America is unable to understand the church in Appalachia, it has so far been unable to assimilate it. It has failed, in other words, to make it over into another of the agencies of social �226 Colonialism in Modern America welfare alongside HEW, Social Security, the Council of the Southern Mountains, the Commission of Religion in Appalachia, the Home Mission Board, etc. The mainline churches have tried to obliterate the Appalachian churches with demands for expressions which are "progressive," "rational," "contemporary," and "relevant." What more haunting and, in many instances, disgusting examples of the philosopher's ambiguity of "reason" or the theologian's "original sin" could be asked for? The liberal churchmen, Catholic and Protestant, insist that the snake handling of the mountain man must come to an end (as must the "emotionalism" and "irrelevance" of the black church). And all the while the mainline, liberal church ignores the more dangerous "snake handling" which defines their efforts to "save" "yesterday's people"—a phenomenon described precisely by Thomas Merton in "Events and Pseudo-Events: Letter to a Southern Churchman." The answer to the question of why mountain culture must be destroyed is to be found in the fundamental truth about the technological society: The techniques which undergird all our institutions are assimilating all of us into, as Jacques Ellul puts it, "a society of objects, run by objects." Institutions in the technological society—and this means not only those of the state and its welfare bureaus, but the do-good agencies which include churches, schools, and colleges—can respond only by and with the techniques of the impersonalized, bureaucratic means, procedures, and formulas. Technique cannot discriminate between right and wrong, justice and injustice. That is why the same technique that gives (and takes away) the health card to an ailing miner assimilates the pious mountaineer into the fivepoint grading system and the Uniform Sunday School Lesson. The meaning is clear. Institutions working in Appalachia today can work for only one end: the extinction of the Appalachian people. The extent to which these institutions have so far failed in the venture is the extent to which this people and culture have successfully resisted the formidable pressures of the institutions of contemporary technological society. Why institutions—political and private, church and business, industrial and charitable—have responded and can respond to the Appalachian the way they have tells us something very important about power and powerlessness in the technological society. �Annihilating the Hillbilly 227 For those of us who believe that the struggle is for the soul of man in the technological society, the resistance of Appalachian culture against assimilation into middle America demands earnest, indeed prayerful, attention. The struggle of the mountain man against the institutions of the technological society is the struggle to deny his right to define any man by his relationship to Middle America. The struggle—whether one believes that it comes out of resistance informed by left-wing Protestantism or opposition to colonialism and genocide—has implications for all who question not only the possibility but the quality and character of any resistance to the totalitarianism of the technological society. �This page intentionally left blank �by In an in for he in the I his has he a the old the and he a as is an for our is the In in a for the as 0/ £/.?£ us of in as [in by The of has as to of to a as it art of to , . .In an in his as a capacity, to his in the he his be it is the be to of the the de^ of in j€ ins iff oW m o» �230 Colonialism in Modern America And it was precisely this ideal state of things that I found existing in the mountain communities. So closely indeed is the practice of this particular art interwoven with the avocations of everyday life that the singers, unable to remember a song I had asked for, would often make some such remarks as "Oh, if only I were driving the cows home I could sing it at once."* Sharp's book contains hundreds of beautiful tunes and poetic texts, but there was more. He looked only for English material and so passed over the vast amount of fiddle music brought from Scotland and Ireland, the banjo learned from Negro slaves, and the powerful Regular Baptist church singing, which apparently originated in the mountains and may have come from the Cherokee. The people who made this music were, like their music, individualistic, democratic, and self-sufficient. We don't need to be romantics to see in the mountains of 1916 a free and independent people to whom this stable culture gave the strength and vitality to stay that way. Today, living in the ruins of that culture with that independence only a memory, it would be good to try to analyze what happened to it. People's culture comes from the way they live and in turn feeds back into that way of life. If you change one, the other must change with it. So as Appalachia was turned into a colony—as people stopped being independent farmers and started working for wages—the old music was cut loose from its place and quickly began to decay. Cecil Sharp's co-worker Maud Karpeles observed: It is surprising and sad to find how quickly the instinctive culture of the people will seem to disappear once they have been brought into touch with modern civilization . . .and the singing of traditional songs is relegated almost immediately to that past life which has not only been outgrown, but which has no apparent bearing on the present existence. What is not as obvious, though, is that our mountain culture was exploited in its own right, picked apart and ruined just as surely as our forests and coal seams. Old time music was �Our Own Music 231 removed from its roots and nearly destroyed. It had been freemade by many and shared by all. Now it was put in packages and sold. It is striking how this process went hand in hand with the opening of the coalfields. Coal brought cash and jobs to a region that had seen little of them before, and it also brought goods that the cash could be spent on. Why is it that the new drives out the old? Why did people move off the farms to the coal camps? Why did they begin to buy clothes rather than make them? or buy phonographs instead of fiddles? I can't answer that—but these things happen. The modern era of folk music recording began shortly after World War I when Ralph Peer of Okeh Records went to Atlanta with portable equipment. A record dealer there offered to buy 1000 copies if Peer would record the singing circus barker "Fiddling John" Carson. "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" and "The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Going to Crow" were cut. According to Peer, "It was so bad we didn't even put a serial number on the record, thinking that when the local dealer got his records that would be the end of it. We sent him 1000 records. That night he called New York on the phone and ordered 5000 more sent by express and 10,000 by freight. When the national sale got to 500,000 we were so ashamed we had Fiddling John come up to New York and do a re-recording of the numbers." (From folklorist Harry Smith in an introduction to a collection of early recordings)^ Soon many mountain musicians began to make records. Commercial music was not so exclusive then as now. A company might record and press 1000 records and sell them in the singer's home area. Much rare and beautiful music of varied style and good quality was recorded in this way.3 One variety in particular, the string band style, for instance, of Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers,4 gained quite a following; and instrumental music began to crowd out quiet unaccompanied singing. As time went on, musicians began to tailor their songs to records, and in some ways this music seemed more fitting than that transplanted from barns and living rooms. The Carter �232 Colonialism in Modern America Family from Scott County, Virginia, became the first recording "stars" in the area. Their "Wildwood Flower" is today the most widely known instrumental piece in the Southern mountains. Other stars followed: Mainer's Mountaineers, Charlie Poole, eventually Jimmie Rodgers, "the Singing Brakeman." In 1925 the Grand Ole Opry went on the air, certainly the best-loved radio show in history.5 Week after week superb entertainers like Uncle Dave Macon and Arthur Smith came into thousands of homes, entertaining families that ten years earlier might have been at barn dances or telling ghost stories around the fireplace. And aspiring musicians now had an opportunity. Ten years earlier they had looked no further than the barn dance for an audience. The lives of the listeners were changing profoundly too. As many people moved into the coal camps, country traditions like square dances and husking bees began to wither. Working in the mines left little leisure for fiddling. Musicians by the hundreds quit playing and fell out of practice. A few became professionals and worked at radio stations (still today the first step up for professional musicians). Food was bought, not made, and so was music, and gradually the record came to define where music was and what it was. For the first time young musicians imitated new styles while older ones began to feel awkward and old-fashioned. Then came the Depression with desperate poverty and brutal oppression that smothered most of the mountain music. Traditional culture—the wholeness of mountain life—was gone. The old music had no context, little meaning or social place. Traditional songs died by the thousands; record companies and promoters controlled popular taste, and hungry musicians tried desperately to please them. Mountain people's music, like their labor, was bought and sold in the market. II. By the 1920's the mountains had, for better or worse, become part of the American economic system. In 1929 the system went abruptly from better to worse, and in the mountains worse was only the beginning. FDR saw "a third of a nation �233 Our Own Music ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clad"; in the mountains it was a third of a third of a third that was not so destitute. Social and cultural life, like economic life, went to pieces in this crisis. In some places miners, their families, and neighbors turned to militant labor organizations; and outside organizers who arrived in these communities found people singing about their situation. Topical singing is not new in the Southern mountains. Indeed, almost all mountain folk music was "topical" in that it related directly to everyday life. When economic or political forces were felt, they too were reflected in songs. An early 19th century song describes unemployment: They've got a brand new machine Prettiest thing you Ve ever seen Hand me down my peg, my peg, my peg and awl Peg a hundred shoes to my one My shoe pegging days is done Put up my peg, my peg, my peg and awP The Civil War, which deeply split the mountains, produced a large number of songs. Here is a white abolitionist song from east Kentucky that I learned from my grandmother: We 're Stolen Souls From Africa7 Freely Were sto-len mer in droves, souls from - Af - n - ca, i Like hogs and sheep, - ca. suf - fer from the heat, en trans - por - ted - dure to we're— marched_ the cold. �Colonialism in Modern America 234 Similarly when coal mining arrived, singers responded with a large body of music. One of the most widespread was the following: Dream of the Miner's Child® A min - er was leav - ing his home for his work, When he heard D J J] G scream; He went to D "Dad-dy, C I've had the side such to - day,_ of the Dad-dy, please don't lit-tie girl's bed, a dream. Oh, Dad - dy don't work A7 a-way, For I in the D dreams have so of - ten come true, go She said, Chorus _ for child_ G G G mines C his lit-tie Oh, Dad-dy, dear nev - er could live with-out you." And one of many songs to come from Claiborne County, Tennessee, in the 1890's was this one: Way back yon-der in Put them work - ing Ten-nes-see, in the mine_ they leased the con-victs a - gainst free la - bor out, stout. Free �235 Our Own Music Buddy Won't You Roll Down the Line9 la - bor re-belled while the lease was roll down dar - lin' the line, a - gainst in it, to ef - feet they made 'em bud dy won't you com-ing down the win it took some rise and roll down the line. time, But shine. Bud-dy won't you Yon-der comes my line. Bud-dy won't you come down the line, bud-dy won't you j j> i J roll down the line, Yon-der comes my dar - lin' com-ing down the line. My opinion is that just as coal mining subtly forced people off their land, commercial recordings and radio forced them away from their music. But for two generations or so, mountain musicians commented extensively on the changing society around them, leaving us with a lot of good music and a good example.10 Two songs, both composed by Kentucky miners' families in the depth of the Depression are the following: �Colonialism in Modern America 236 Which Side Are You On Come all Cm . Cm Villl dwell. you good Fm tell, j. of Of how the good Chorus VJl \j/JVII43 Which side work — are you - ers, good Cm old news to you un - ion has come in Gm on, I'll Gm here to Cm which side are you on? The Allan Song morn-ing, hear the whis - tie blow, Grab my po - ta - to can and a-way I go. Which Side Are You On was written by Florence Reese, a miner's wife in Harlan County, while her husband, an organizer for the National Miner's Union, was hiding from the gun thugs who would have killed him if they could. The Allah Song was written by my cousin Bill Maloney who worked in the Allais Brothers' mines near Hazard. Mrs. Reese's song was learned by NMU organizers who taught it to people in New York and elsewhere. The song took on a life of its own and popped up in the deep South in the 1960's as a freedom song. It is sung widely by people who have no idea it originated in Kentucky.11 My cousin's song was posted at the Allais mines (Allais would have fired the author had he known who it was), but it has not gone much beyond the family. I happened onto it at a family gathering near Jackson. �237 Our Own Music This brings up an interesting question: What was the function of topical music in this period? Were such songs sung only in living rooms? At rallies? By men at work or on strike? On marches and picket lines? The question needs to be studied some more, to say the least. My own idea is that if the miners did not sing as much as the civil rights fighters of the 60's, they still had a musical time of it. A lot of their movement was in small isolated fights in remote areas not visited by outsiders, and most of the musicians were not professionals. But I think that if research were done, a large number of mining songs would be found, many in the nature of protest. Two more examples include The Coal Black Mining Blues, which was written in 1932 by Nimrod Workman of Chattaroy, West Virginia, and was more or less unknown until Nimrod issued a record in 1972. How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live was recorded in 1931 by Blind Alfred Reed of Pipestem, West Virginia, and has become somewhat widespread through recordings by the New Lost City Ramblers. The last two stanzas were added quite recently by Hazel Dickens and Alice Foster. Coal Black Mining Blues Intro ® 3 got the I went blues, I blues to my place, I got the blues,-Lord. Lord, coal black I peeked in, slate and the wat-er got the blues, I got the blues,_Lord, Lord, min - ing blues. up to my chin, I coal black _ min got the ing blues. �238 Colonialism in Modern America How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live There once was a time when ev-ery-thing was cheap, puts a man to - sleep; f eel _ like ma -king our will, When we But now pay_ our gro»cer-y Tell me how can a pri - ces near - ly bill, we just poor, man stand such times and live? How did it happen that one song was recorded and the other not? How many more like these have been lost? It is worth stopping at this point to look at the ways songs are learned and spread around. Most of the well-known songs from the coalfield struggle of the 1930*s come from one east Kentucky family^Sarah Ogan Gunning, her sister Aunt Molly Jackson, and their brother Jim Garland. All three were active in the NMU and worked closely with outside organizers for that body. And it was through these organizers that the songs were spread to people who felt they were important. In 1937 and 1938, researchers from the Library of Congress "collected" the family's music and from then on it has been part of our heritage. So getting a song around is a risky business if the song happens to advocate union organizing or the abolition of strip mining, or some other controversial matter. In the 1930's the distribution network for such songs consisted of a few organizers and folklorists—no music publishers, no records, no radio, magazines, or newspapers. None of these things had existed in 1890 either; but then every song stood on its own, and a piece could travel if it was its nature to do so. But when radio came along and excluded industrial music, a powerful form of censorship was established.12 And it's still with us, to be broken only by already famous singers of exceptional ability like Merle Travis (Sixteen Tons) or Loretta Lynn (Coal Miner's Daughter). �Our Own Music 239 I think that situation can and should be challenged. Music is too important to be left to the businessmen. III. Most music heard in the Southern mountains today comes via radio, records, and TV from commercial musicians in Nashville. It's good music. It ought to be: The best musicians in the South have left home and gone to Music City to make it. And it really is the people's music now, widely known and loved. Alone among major forms of entertainment, country music is made by working people of the mountains and the South, the same people who listen to the music. Alone among entertainment forms, it talks directly about people's lives, often about the singer's own background. Dolly Parton must have been speaking for a lot of people when she wrote: No amount of money could buy back from me The memories I have of then No amount of money could pay me To go back and live through it again The good old days when times were But after saying this, I want to bring up some criticisms I have of the music industry, since they bear on the question of people making music. Mostly, I resent its turning music into a commodity, made in Nashville much as cars are made in Detroit. In other words, production and distribution are controlled by a relatively small group of people who try to make money from it. This has bad results: 1. One style (the "Nashville sound") is made dominant over all others, like fiddle music, old ballads, or children's game songs. People should choose their favorite style, true, and should have a choice. The extreme diversity of musical styles heard in the mountains fifty years ago was a very good thing, and I wish it hadn't been lost. 2. Only professional musicians are heard. Nashville's musical standards are so high (and its equipment so expensive) that most people feel like musical idiots next to them; so they shut up and listen. �240 Colonialism in Modern America 3. The flood of material overwhelms most institutions that provide for face-to-face music-making. Square dances are all but gone; only the churches have been able to shelter a large amount of handmade music. Records and radio are where it's at. Amateurs almost always imitate professionals; original songs are rarely heard. 4. A few (a very few) people decide what music is going to sound like. The producer, not the singer, decides whether to put trombones in a love song or when to change keys. I think some producers are tone-deaf. Only a real superstar will have artistic control over what his/her records will sound like. It depends, in most cases, on what the producer thinks will sell. So while the music talks about average people, it is many steps removed from belonging to them. 5. It perpetuates a form of control over people. There is a kind of sameness to most C & W music, especially in subject matter. It says that love, marriage, divorce, religion, and beer are important; it says by implication that strip mining, black lung, boring or dangerous work, cruddy schools and health care are not so important. There are exceptions (see below), but when it comes to politics, C & W is mostly pretty conservative: endorsing the flag, the war, and women who know their place. People's history and their past and present struggles are mostly ignored.15 Since C & W largely dominates what people hear, it helps define how they look at themselves and their lives. I think it encourages them to be placid, which I think is bad. IV. Country music was always a stepchild of the music industry; its writers and artists, often underpaid, were not in the trade association (ASCAP) which controlled most material. So when ASCAP went on strike in 1941, industry executives latched onto country music as programming. It immediately went nationwide and, to everyone's surprise, proved quite popular. A war story relates that Japanese soldiers, trying to insult Americans during battle, shouted "To hell with Roosevelt, to hell with Babe Ruth, to hell with Roy Acuff." In the boom years following 1945, commercial country music got to be truly bigtime.16 �Our Own Music 241 Homemade music continued to decay. It carries on among old singers, particularly in the Blue Ridge and in eastern West Virginia. But most often people sing material that has already been recorded and standardized (if not written) by an established musician. Some songs of Jimmie Rodgers or Roy Acuff, in fact, are so widespread they are practically "folk music." For a while, anyway, it looked as though old-time music was headed for the museum. As late as 1964, a group called Friends of Old-Time Music was arranging New York concerts for musicians unknown in their own communities. Why this decay? I wish we could figure it out. Maybe with some study, we could. Part of the answer, I think, is in a conversation I had with two old fiddlers in Pike County who haven't played in twenty years. The reason, they said, was "all this fighting"—the well-known fact that you can't have a social event in east Kentucky without twelve fights, three arrests, and considerable property damage. The mountain have always been a rough place (my grandfather died minus two fingers afid plus several bullets and uncounted scars), but it seems that what we experience now is different—so disruptive and self-destructive that a lot of social life is simply impossible. This may have something to do with our political and economic history. Frantz Fannon, writing of black communities, detailed how oppressed people can turn their violence on each other; it seems to me that the mountains have experienced this. Where our own music has survived, it has been in very private settings (living rooms) or in very structured ones (churches, bluegrass festivals). And the form that has most flourished, bluegrass, is very structured and set in a strict audience-performer pattern. In the last ten years, however, something has happened that has led large numbers of young people into old-time music. Today you can hear thirty or forty at a time playing Old Joe Clark or Flint Hill Special, 50,000 people come to the Old Time Fiddler's Convention in Union Grove, N.C., and even more go to Galax in August. Bluegrass festivals (like Ralph Stanley's annual at McClure, Va., on Memorial Day) are crowded. Magazines like Sing Out! and Bluegrass Unlimited carry music and articles to thousands of enthusiasts. County, Rounder, Folkways and other record companies offer old-time music from old recordings and present-day pickers. Guitars and banjo sales are at an all-time high as picking and singing spreads like wildfire. �242 Colonialism in Modern America Just one thing. A good many of the folks now enjoying mountain music have never even seen a cow, let alone a mountain. The "folk revival" of the 60's, plus the general frustration of life in America, has made the music of the mountain past seem extremely inviting to people (mostly young) from both the flatlands and hills who haven't seen much of it before. What does this mean? A fair number of kids have decided (not unreasonably) that the Appalachian Region is Paradise Lost; this fact has given West Virginia a fair number of communes and short-lived organic restaurants.17 The "revival" has meant some income for good musicians, including former recording artists like Clarence Ashley and Dock Boggs. And it has meant some truly wonderful music made by people ("authentic" hillbillies as well as outsiders) who have bothered to seek out old-timers and learn from them. The Fuzzy Mountain String Band, for example, started playing hoedown music in college in North Carolina, and now they make what I call some of the best music anywhere. There is a good and a bad side to all this. The kind of exploitation of "quaint" mountain people that gives us Gatlinburg can also destroy old-time music. Fiddlers' conventions aren't meant to hold 50,000 people. It brings hero-worship and "stardom" to music that wasn't designed for it. The majority (colonialist) culture has largely absorbed and nearly destroyed our subculture ("L'il Abner" and "Beverly Hillbillies"18), and even their dropouts can be a tidal wave. They have no culture of their own and don't adopt mountain culture (even if they could); therefore, they offer mountain music no context or place. So they too may be mining the mountains, taking what they want, and leaving wreckage behind; or they may be here just in time to keep the old music alive and growing. Or both. So mountain people deserve to ask: Which side are you on? How deep does (or can, or will) this revival go in the mountains? It is hard to say. But we can see that musicians face the same questions of insiders-outsiders or us-them, that organizers, politicians, and everyone else has to deal with. Like earlier adventurers I guess we will see some musicians who go one way, some another, and some who try to stay in the middle. Despite the music industry's takeover, there is one small but �243 Our Own Music important area where mountain people keep control of their own music: topical music made by people who feel the need for songs to comment on some immediate aspect of their lives. A lot of it has been written in the last ten years or so; it goes along with the many movements that have stirred the mountains recently. Much has been "hidden" by being known only to a few people near the singer. Gradually, however, an increasing number of songs are getting passed around, some even recorded. A superb collection of them is to be published soon, edited by Guy and Candie Carawan. Music like this seems to do two things: comment on social forces, struggles, and so on; and to be in some way part of the struggle. Songs that describe or comment on things are the easiest and most common. Composed and sung by individuals (though they may express the feelings of thousands), they can be extremely powerful in poetry and music. Here is Hazel Dickens' black lung song: Black Lung He's had more 1 hard I The mines He's luck was his lived a than most first hard love but life_ men ne - ver and hard could stand,. his friend. - he'll die, m Black lung's done got him, his time is nigh._ �244 Colonialism in Modern America Songs that are directly part of a struggle are not as common in the mountains as in, say, the civil rights movement. This is partly because there is not much tradition of large groups singing together except in church. Union struggles and picket lines, however, have inspked some good singing. A popular union song inspked by an old spkitual, with some new verses from the Pikeville, Kentucky, hospital strike of 1972-74 is the following: We Shall Not Be Moved fr*r We E r shall not »n r be, we shall not be moved, We C moved, Just like a shall not be, G tree that's pknt-ed by the wa - ter, we shall not be D ' I We G shall not be moved. And a song by Michael Kline that has been sung at many antistripping rallies is this one: Strip Away, Big D-9 Dozer Strip a - way D 7 home— I'm J> j- D - 9 G j. Do - zer, C a - get-tin' mad - der as you're get - tin' G bu-ry my big G home. Well, I looked up -r co-min' for to D bu- 'ry my G clos - er, Corn-in' for to C a spoil bank and what did D I see?_ �245 Our Own Music Com-in' for to bu-ry C my home— D push-in* down my The Is - land Creek Coal_ Corn-pan - y G trees,— Com-in' D^ for to b u - r y my G home. We are all so used to judging music by commercial standards that it is worth looking briefly at what this kind of music can do that Nashville doesn't. It can spread and popularize ideas and information and counter propaganda. If well grounded in people's culture (new words to an old tune, for example), it can break through the censorship of the media and travel everywhere. In the South the "freedom songs" became a part of many people's lives, an important source of strength for their hard fights. I hope we can manage to call on some of the same forces. In the past, "topical" songs contained practical instructions for resistance, as in songs that told slaves how to escape or miners to "keep your eye upon the scale." And finally is the simple fact that people singing is a very moving experience, a powerful force that needs to be turned loose again. A song that tries to do some of these things must be really well based in people's lives. The singers of the IWW made it a point to use only familiar tunes (since they couldn't make records and most folks can't read music). Some modern writers (like Hazel Dickens) are making new tunes that sound old and familiar. A song won't travel unless it says what folks want it to and in their own language. I think it should also remind people of the surroundings that they associate with music, like churches or beer joints. A song that sounds like an old gospel tune is easier to listen to than one that sounds like an art song. One more song, one that covers a lot of territory, including a practical lesson in songwriting is this one: Fountain Filled With Blood **€P There_ T*1 J is J J | a foun-tain r j' J j~?l i j n nn r*i filled with blood, The blood of our moun-tain men so brave, Men who worked to-geth-er in the black coal pits. Men who dug each oth-er's �246 Colonialism in Modern America graves. Men who dug each oth-er's graves, Oh, God, men who dug each oth - er's_ graves. Men who worked to-geth -er in the black coal pits, men who dug each oth-er's grave. Anyone interested in this kind of music should also consider a little about ways of spreading it. Long-play records can cost as little as a dollar each (at least before the energy crisis); songbooks are cheaper still. Music festivals have become established in some communities, and smaller local gatherings are happening also. Books are appearing and a magazine is being talked about. Local radio stations are occasionally open to local musicians if approached personally. Cable TV is a largely unexplored area, with local programming already being made in some areas. Who knows? If enough pressure is brought, maybe even Nashville would open up a little. The old traditional way of life in the mountains is gone. What is important now is not to try to bring back an old-time culture with old music and the old ways of doing things but to build on the old to make new ways of doing things, ways that we control. We need to preserve what old-time music is left so people can go on enjoying it. We need to have our own music which we make and control ourselves, instead of taking everything Nashville sends us. We need to encourage each other to make music, to sing, write, and play songs. We need our own ways of distributing music—including record companies, radio and TV stations that respond to all kinds of local music instead of trying to discover stars. Old-time mountain music belongs to everyone. So should new-time music. �Our Own Music 247 NOTES IA beautiful and moving picture of this sort of thing is Jean Ritchie's autobiography, Singing Family of the Cumberland* (1955). ^Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-record set issued by Folkways. It consists of an astonishing variety of traditional music originally recorded on 78 rpm records from 1925-30, with such legendary musicians as Dock Boggs, Mississippi John Hurt, Uncle Dave Macon, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Carter Family, and dozens of "unknowns." One session with this set is worth several thousand pages of description of our musical heritage. ^Without trying to be scholarly, I can distinguish seven distinct styles of traditional mountain music, most of them now going if not gone: 1. Fiddle tunes. Hundreds of tunes came from Scotland and Ireland; hundreds more were made here. The fiddle was the first and the most widespread country instrument, its music with endless regional and personal variations. Dozens of "fiddlers' conventions" are held each year in the mountains, primarily outside the coalfield. Most of the best fiddlers, however, are old now. 2. Banjo music, which deserves an article to itself, as do banjo players like Dock Boggs and Roscoe Holcomb (who Bob Dylan says influenced him greatly). 3. Shape-note hymn singing, now almost extinct except in northern Alabama and western Kentucky. 4. Gospel music, both the quartet style and the "holiness" style of congregational singing like "I'll Fly Away." 5. Regular Baptist singing in the "lining-out" manner, a powerful, stirring music that seems to be absolutely unique to the South- �248 Colonialism in Modern America ern mountains. 6. Ballad singing, both accompanied and unaccompanied. Many ballads were preserved in the mountains long after disappearing from England and Scotland. Many more were made here. 7. "Social music"— songs and lyrics for parties, dances or whatever ("Old Joe Clark"). Not to mention stories, dances, and games, and children's songs. ^"Other string bands included such as Dr. Smith's Champion Horsehair Pullers, the Henpecked Husbands, the Moatsville String Ticklers, and the Fruit Jar Drinkers (who still play on the Grand Ole Opry). first performer on the Grand Ole Opry was Uncle Jimmy Thompson, 80, who fiddled while his niece played piano. After an hour George D. Hay (the Opry's founder) asked if Uncle Jimmy was tired. "Why shucks," he said, "a man don't get warmed up in an hour. I just won an eight-day fiddling contest down in Dallas, Texas, and here's my blue ribbon to prove it." See George D. Hay, A Story of the Grand Ole Opry (1953). "From Hobart Smith of Saltville, Virginia, who has been called "America's greatest folk instrumentalist." ^From Mrs. A. R. Graham of Cynthiana, Kentucky, who learned it as a girl in Magoffin County, Kentucky. 8 Treated at length in Archie Green's book Only A Miner (1972). 9 Also discussed in Green's book. The story of the Coal Creek Rebellion is worth at least a footnote. In the 1880's Tennessee miners tried to organize in the Knights of Labor. To block this, Tennessee allowed coal operators to lease the labor of convicts as scabs. The miners organized, and in 1891 fought a series of battles in which they burned stockades and helped the prisoners (mostly black) to freedom. Tennessee sent militia and quelled the "disturbance" but the convict labor system was soon abolished and the miners organized the mines under the UMW. Other songs from Coal Creek (now called Lake City) are on Hedy West's record Old Times and Hard Times. l^Besides Green's book, coal mining music (up to 1945) is the subject �Our Own Music 249 of two excellent books by George Korson, Coal Dust on the Fiddle (covering the bituminous industry) and Minstrels of the Mine Patch (covering the anthracite field). Both books were commissioned by the UMW. 1 *Mrs. Reece has lately been singing this song at the UMW strike of Duke Power Company's mine at Brookside in Harlan County. The miners there think it is still quite relevant. l^In the 30's record companies did issue some records of protest music. In those hard times no one ignored anything that would sell. The New Lost City Ramblers have issued on LP of recorded industrial music, called Mo dern Times. the reason so many stars sing of being poor but happy is a nostalgia for their own past. It takes a strong person to become a star and stay common— not many can. l^A country -we stern song is indeed lucky to last ten years; some old tunes and ballads have already made it past 400. I think a lot of young mountain musicians, feeling oppressed by the closed, competitive aspect of C&W, turned to the relative freedom of rock— at some cost, I suspect, of cutting away from their own roots. "Country rock," at any rate, is popular now, and Goose Creek Symphony is the favorite band of many people I know. 15 There is only one black star in Nashville, Charley Pride, though "country music" is shot through with things derived from black music. DeFord Bailey, a harmonica player who may have been the first musician ever recorded in Nashville, was the only black star of the earlier days. 16 See Bill C. Malone, Country Music USA (1968), 186-88, 206, 208- 38. A note on terminology. When record companies started producing music for rural audiences they didn't know what to call it. In 1925 Ralph Peer recorded a nameless string band from the Blue Ridge who called themselves "hillbillies." He named them the "Original Hillbillies" and the music became "hillbilly music." (Similarly, black singers were marketed on "race records.") Later, after World War II, as commercial hillbilly became popular and respectable, the industry looked for a more dignified name and settled on "country music"— a little odd, since by then it was all made in the city. The term "country and western" and the cowboy suits Porter Waggoner et al. wear onstage stem from the work of "western" singers like Tex Ritter and Gene Autry, who sang popular "cowboy" songs in the 30's and �250 Colonialism in Modern America 40's. When traditional music was discovered by city musicians of the 60's, the "hillbilly" music of the twenties received still another name and became "folk music." same feeling among their elders leads to long-lived developments and National Forest land grabs. original Beverly Hillbillies were a group of "cowboy" singers who broadcast from Hollywood from 1928-32 and were quite popular. �A Donald He tain in it has had. he he) mC a the "cultural" to he in and he has his a his of the in the his list of in he in to his of the The an is the at in his in of of fit ffe ft a on of in at for Gap, in the of to The Vir™ his as an a a of o/ t/Ji? M o o re Jr. still to as is the mounthe �252 Colonialism in Modern America Fox's national popularity (his books are readily available in paperback editions while those of James Still are out of print) and the general consensus that would agree with William Cabell Moore call for a reappraisal of his depiction of the mountain people to whom he is supposed to have been such a good friend. Undoubtedly, Fox's novels and stories have influenced the nation's view of its Appalachian minority, so we turn to his fiction to evaluate the cast of that view. Fox's first bestselling novel, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, is structured on a set of contrasts that characterize his work: the Mountains vs. the Bluegrass, Melissa Turner (mountain girl) vs. Margaret Dean (bluegrass relative), Chad in the mountains vs. Chad in the bluegrass, and so on ad infinitum. Without exception, the thrust of these contrasts is denigratory in relation to mountaineers and laudatory in relation to the bluegrass aristocracy. In The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come Fox characterizes mountain society as pyramidal in structure and divided into three classes. At the top he locates "the valley-aristocrat"—those farmers of the rich river bottoms who occasionally own slaves and are "perhaps of gentle blood" (italics mine). In the middle are the free-settlers, "usually of Scotch-Irish descent, often English, but sometimes German or sometimes even Huguenot," who dwell in "rude" log cabins along tributary creeks. At the bottom are the poor white trash, "worthless descendants of the servile and sometimes criminal class who might have traced their origin back to the slums of London"; these last exist in "wretched cabins at the head of the creek or on the washed spur of the mountain above" and function as "hand-to-mouth tenants of the valley-aristocrats." Although the typography of the region conceivably could have resulted in some such economic stratification as Fox indicates, one must demur at his essentially racial classifications. Surely there were some Scotch-Irish and Germans among those "valley-aristocrats," and perhaps now and then one could have traced his ancestry back to the London slums. In Fox's social theorizing, however, man is a product of the interaction of "blood" and environment-, hence, in order to account for the "semi-barbarous" condition of life he discovers in the mountains, Fox posits an inferiority of blood-line which is compounded by the rigors of the environment. Even those �John Fox, Jr., A Re-Appraisal 253 "valley-aristocrats" like Joel Turner or Judd Tolliver, who had perhaps the initial advantage of "gentle blood," are little more than genial barbarians, notable primarily for their physical prowess and characterized mentally and culturally as possessed of an ignorance and child-like simplicity that reduces them to the level of clowns. The less fortunate, in terms of blood-line, may be either well-meaning or villainous, but they invariably lack the mental capacity to rise above their environmental limitations. The physical destitution in which they exist mirrors a corresponding mental, spiritual, and cultural destitution. The children of such people, "thin, undersized, underfed, and with weak, dispirited eyes and yellow tousled hair" or "round-faced, round-eyed, dark, and sturdy" grow "large-waisted and round shouldered. . .from work in the fields." They sit uninterested and restless through the "blab schools" and quit, their minds untouched and unenlightened, to take their place in the generations of degeneration. Rare indeed is the mountain child who shows himself "erect, agile, spirited, intelligent." Chad, one of these rarities who eventually takes his rightful place among the bluegrass aristocracy, derives his superior qualities apparently from the twin advantages of his mother's having been "a lawful wife" and his grandfather's having worn a "wig and peruke." Melissa, the true mountain waif of unknown parentage, must perish because her mother was so uncircumspect as to get herself bedded before she was wedded. Fox's bias against mountain people is underscored when he comes to speak of the Bluegrass as it is with his curious blend of romantic mysticism and naturalistic determinism. Chad is introduced to the Bluegrass by an itinerant cattle dealer and the schoolmaster, who tell him of a "faraway, curious country" where the land was level and there were no mountains at all; where on one farm might be more sheep, cattle, and slaves than Chad had seen in all his life; where the people lived in big houses of stone and brick—what brick was Chad could not imagine—and rode along hard, white roads in shiny covered wagons, with two "niggers" on a high seat in front and one little "nigger" behind to open gates, and were proud and very high-heeled indeed; where there were towns that had more people than a whole county in the mountains, with rock roads running through �254 Colonialism in Modern America them in every direction and narrow rock paths along these roads—like rows of hearthstones—for the people to walk on—the land of the bluegrass—the "settlements of old Kaintuck." And there were churches everywhere as tall as trees and schoolhouses a-plenty; and big schools, called colleges, to which the boys went when they were through with the little schools. The contrast here, although couched in language comprehensible to a child's mind, suggests the materialistic and racist value-base on which Fox's attitudes and judgments are founded, attitudes which preclude any sympathetic understanding of the mountain culture he found in Jellico and Big Stone Gap. This bias is much more explicitly stated in a chapter of The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come entitled "The Bluegrass.*' Fox begins the description with the epithet "God's Country!" and continues to characterize Bluegrass Kentucky as the land that seems "to have been the pet shrine of the Great Mother herself." She fashioned it with loving hands. She shut it in with a mighty barrier of mighty mountains to keep the mob out. She gave it the loving clasp of a mighty river, and spread broad, level prairies beyond that the mob might glide by or be tempted to the other side. . . . In the beginning, such was her clear purpose to the Kentuckian's eye, she filled it with flowers and grass and trees, and fish and bird and wild beast, just as she made Eden for Adam and Eve.. .And when the chosen peoplesuch, too served her purpose—the Mother went to the race that obstacle but strengthens, that thrives best under an alien effort to kill, that has ever conquered its conquerors, and that seems bent on the task of carrying the best ideas any age has ever known back to the Old World from which it sprang. The Great Mother knows!. . .And how she has followed close when this Saxon race—her youngest born—seemed likely to stray too far—gathering its sons to her arms in virgin lands that they might suckle again and keep the old blood fresh and strong. (My italics throughout) �John Fox, Jr., A Re-Appraisal 255 The aristocratic and racist elitism manifested in this passage explains easily enough Fox's lack of sympathy for the mountaineers he wrote of. The mountaineer, it is implied here, is one of that inferior breed which has succumbed to the mighty barrier Mother Nature erected "to keep the mob out"; hence, he is hardly worthy of serious consideration, for the true bearers of the living heritage are "the chosen/' whose manifest destiny it is to "plant their kind across a continent from sea to sea" and move on "through the opening eastern gates of the earth." When Fox descends from the heights of such mystic racism to describe the state of civilization in the Bluegrass, his idealization of circumstances contrasts markedly with his comments on mountain society: The land was a great series of wooded parks such as one might have found in Merry England, except that worm fence and stone wall took the place of hedge along the highways. It was a land of peace and of a plenty that was close to easy luxury—for all. Poor whites were few, the beggar was unknown, and throughout the region there was no man, woman, or child, perhaps, who did not have enough to eat and to wear and a roof to cover his head, whether it was his own roof or not. If slavery had to bethen the fetters were forged light and hung loosely. This Edenic vision reveals clearly where Fox's sympathies lie, if not his understanding. One can understand why Fox, imbued with such romantic illusions about his birthplace, consistently depicted mountain people as incapable of developing to a state of civilization. When civilization comes to the moutains, it is imposed forcibly upon the native populace, as was the case of the Big Stone Gap Guard, a group of Harvard and Yale graduates self-appointed to bring "law and order" to the rude savages in their mountain fastness; or it is achieved by the exceptionally gifted native who leaves the region for one of the national cultural centers, as June Tolliver does in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. In either instance, an outside influence provides the catalyst which the mountaineer is unable to initiate for himself or his society. �256 Colonialism in Modern America The mountaineer's debility, in Fox's critical view, is attributable in part to inferior ancestral stock, and in part to the malign effects of the mountain environment. Fox holds firmly to the degeneration theory of mountain societal development, as is evidenced in the history of Chad Buford. The original Buford was a "fine old gentleman in a wig and peruke"; after three generations of mountain isolation, the Buford line has eventuated in Chad, a supposed "woods-colt," orphaned and at the mercy of the viciousness or generosity of whomever he meets. Although the potential inherent in his blood-line raises him head and shoulders above his peers, the disadvantages of his environment prevent the full realization of that potential. In comparison with his counterparts in the Bluegrass, his achievements are inferior indeed. However, when Chad is exposed to the cultural and material advantages of the Bluegrass, his progress is amazingly rapid, soon equalling or surpassing his counterparts in level of attainment. The same theme is more explicitly developed in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine through the characters Jack Hale and June Tolliver. Through years of exposure to the mountain environment, Hale, who comes to the mountains as the representative and harbinger of approaching civilization, gradually loses his civilized refinements and takes on many of the brutish qualities of Fox's mountain inhabitants. June, the little mountain lass who loves him, in the meantime undergoes the opposite process of development as a result of her exposure to the civilizing influence of New York society. In Fox's view, environment is the ultimate determinant of character, and the status quo of mountain society as he describes it precludes any progress toward what he recognizes as civilization, i.e., the cultured societies of New York and the Bluegrass. In spite of much that has been written to the contrary, John Fox, Jr., who achieved a degree of fame and fortune through the literary exploitation of the Appalachian mountaineer, reveals in his fiction little love for either the mountain people or the mountain milieu. His view was always that of an outsider who was examining a quaintly curious but inferior breed with whom he could scarcely sympathize, much less empathize. The potential viciousness of such a view has since become concretely demonstrable in the sacrifice of the people and the area he so befriended to the rapacious progression of �John Fox, Jr., A Re-Appraisal "Saxon" civilization. 257 �This page intentionally left blank �ON by N. and in of the the is is on at its of to of of the ion§? for at for for to the River, The are of the exist. As no an in the in the to be of: 20 of are c May of He is the of fit on fof of a to and is the on " of the He is a of ami a �260 Colonialism in Modern America old, most of them built before World War I. They are in varying stages of decline. Some of them are not much more than postoffice addresses. The old frame two-family houses are settling unevenly. Some have collapsed altogether. Others, considering their age and the haste with which they had been built, are in surprisingly good shape. As a general rule, if a house is freshly painted you can assume that a working miner lives there. The population of Buffalo Creek has fluctuated with the times, declining when the industry declined, recovering when the industry recovered. In 1970, coal had its best year since 1947, and a rosy glow of optimism suffused National Coal Association predictions for the future. Big companies opened new mines along Buffalo Creek and stepped up production in their old ones. When coal comes up out of the ground, the impurities that come with it are separated out in preparation plants^tipples, as they are more commonly called. The coal rolls away in long, black trains; the impurities stay behind, and something has to be done with them. They have a way of accumulating with staggering speed: A ton of raw coal generally contains up to 25 per cent of extraneous material, and a good-sized tipple, handling the production of several mines at once, will separate out thousands of tons of waste every day. Miners have different names for it—"gob" or "slag" or "culm"; but whatever you call it, it still has to be piled somewhere. In the crowded hollows of West Virginia, finding places to pile slag is a problem of major proportions. As a general rule, no engineer is ever called in to consult on the best and safest locations. Instead, the company superintendent simply hunts around for some vacant space convenient to his tipple, and the slag is dumped there, either by trucks climbing up a mountainside and dumping down the slope, or by an aerial tramway strung between peaks and dumping in the middle. Whatever system is used, the slag is piled up until it is higher than the dumping spot, and then a new pile is started. FACING THE GOB Since 1946 a tipple has been in operation at the head of Buffalo Creek. The plant was built by the Lorado Coal Mining Company, a mostly local outfit that sold out to the Buffalo Mining Company in 1964. Buffalo Mining, in turn, sold out in �The Pittston Mentality 261 1970 to the Pittston Company, which is headquartered in New York and is the largest independent producer of coal in the United States. All this time the tipple continued in operation. And all this time it grew. Originally designed to process coal from a single mine, it was expanded periodically as new mines were opened nearby. By 1972 Pittston was operating a total of eight mines in the Buffalo Creek vicinity—five of them underground, three of them stripping jobs. The coal from all eight was processed in the single tipple. On an average, the tipple operated six days a week, two shifts a day; it handled about 5,200 tons of raw coal daily, and shipped out about 4,200 tons of cleaned coal on the long Chesapeake and Ohio trains. That meant that every day a thousand tons of gob, more or less, had to be dumped. Three tributaries run into Buffalo Creek near the Pittston tipple. From 1947 until about 1955, the refuse was dumped along the hillside a few hundred yards upstream from the tipple, but by 1955 the available space was mostly exhausted and the tipple began dumping a little farther away, across the mouth of a small hollow where the Middle Fork tributary meets the creek. At first the gob pile grew slowly. It had to, because most of the hollow behind it was occupied by miners living in company houses. But when production at the tipple increased, the growing gob pile began to menace the houses, and the miners were forced out. The houses were abandoned (some of them were knocked down for the lumber), and the gob was dumped where they had stood. The families moved away, some of them out of West Virginia entirely, some of them only a few hundred yards to vacant houses in the small community of Saunders, which stood facing the gob pile at the intersection of Middle Fork and Buffalo Creek. SAUNDERS WAS GONE The gob pile grew, and grew, and grew more swiftly as the tipple kept expanding production. At first this grotesque black mountain was only an eyesore. Later, it became a source of air pollution and a fire hazard. Gob piles may be nothing but waste; but much of that waste is flammable, and a combination of compaction and oxidation can result in spontaneous combustion. Once a fire gets going deep within a gob pile, extinguishing it is nearly impossible. The fire smoulders, sometimes bursts �262 Colonialism in Modern America into open flame, fouls the sky with acrid smoke, and occasionally produces an explosion. The Federal Bureau of Mines has spent millions of dollars in research on the problem, but the end result is that hundreds of gob piles are smouldering in the Appalachian coalfields right now, and nothing is being done about them. The gob pile at Middle Fork began burning years ago and kept on smouldering. As the dumping continued, another problem arose. Tipples require vast quantities of water in the cleaning-separating process, but water can be a scarce commodity at times in West Virginia. Partly to provide itself with a reliable year-round supply of water, and partly to comply with new state regulations governing stream pollution, Buffalo Mining began to build a series of settling ponds in 1964. Previously the contaminated wash water had simply been sluiced directly into Buffalo Creek, despite the objections of people who liked to fish there. The ponds were created by building retaining dams in the most immediately convenient location: on top of the huge Middle Fork gob pile. By that time the pile had reached stupefying proportions: as high as a 10-story office building, 600 feet across, stretching back into the hollow more than a quarter of a mile. Sweeping down through the pile and wandering across the top, the waters of Middle Fork ran sluggishly to join the main stream of Buffalo Creek. Damming the water was a relatively easy task, using the material closest at hand: mine waste. No civil engineer in his right mind would permit the construction of a dam from such materials (as many a civil engineer would later confirm), but no engineer, it now appears, was consulted. In operation, the settling ponds not only contained runoff water from the hills but refuse-filled water piped from the tipple. The solid refuse would settle out and clear water could be piped back to the tipple. The first of the ponds impounded a relatively small volume of water, however, and it silted up within a couple of years. A second dam was built in 1967 slightly farther upstream. When the tipple was operating full blast, it required 500,000 gallons of water a day, pumping back between 400 and 500 gallons of waste-filled water every minute. Some of the water would seep out through the porous dam, but the waste settling to the bottom—500 tons every day—rapidly filled the pond, and a third dam was built in 1970. Again, no engineering was involved—just truckloads of mine waste, a bulldozer to push �The Pittston Mentality 263 them around, and prestol A dam grew across the hollow, built of nothing but junk and standing on a foundation of slime and silt and dead trees. The trees were there because nobody had bothered to cut them down. It was simpler and faster just to dump on top of them. In West Virginia, February means snow and rain. February meant it this year, as always. In Logan County, there were heavy snows and flash floods; but they were, as the state meteorologist would later point out, "nothing uncommon/' At the head of Buffalo Creek, the waters rose behind Pittston 's makeshift dam. Early on the morning of February 26, Pittston's local mine boss, Steve Dasovich, sent a bulldozer operator up the access road to the dam with instructions to cut a drainage ditch to relieve the pressure from the swollen lake. The access road winds around a mountainside with the dam out of sight much of the way. When the bulldozer operator finally came around the last bend and looked through the rain at the dam, he saw with a sudden, terrible shock that it wasn't there. The dam was gone, and 21 million cubic feet of water and an immeasurable mass of mud and rock and coal wastes were charging through the narrow valley of Buffalo Creek. From where he sat on his suddenly useless machine, the bulldozer operator could look down toward the little town of Saunders^a town consisting of nothing more than a church and some two dozen houses. Now it consisted of nothing at all. Saunders was gone, eradicated completely. Beyond Saunders, the valley curved away out of sight, but the air was filled with the terrifying sound of the flood bearing down on the 15 communities in its path. FATHER OF STRIP-MINING There are no slag heaps on Park Avenue, and no floods will ever wash through the offices of Joseph P. Routh unless the island of Manhattan sinks into the sea. Thirty-five floors up in the Pan American building, the chairman of the Pittston Company has a commanding view. When he looks down to the street below, he can see Brinks armored trucks moving the wealth of America from place to place. The trucks belong to Joe Routh. A good deal of the money does, too. �264 Colonialism in Modern America Routh is 79 now, and he has been making money longer than most men have been alive. He was already a power to be reckoned with when the Pittston Company, which then operated a dozen anthracite mines in Pennsylvania, stumbled into bankruptcy during the Depression. A friend at Manufacturers Trust suggested to Routh that he take over the company and lead it out of the wilderness. The bank sweetened the offer with a $10-million loan—essentially unsecured, since there would be no way to recoup the loss if Pittston went under—and Routh moved in. Anthracite, he concluded, was a dying industry. The future lay in the vast bituminous fields of Virginia and West Virginia. He unloaded most of Pittston's properties in Pennsylvania and began buying up tracts of coal in central Appalachia. At a time when coal prices fluctuated wildly, he had discovered that the best way to tear loose a chunk of coal in time to take advantage of favorable trends was to strip it from the mountainsides rather than go through the difficult, two-year-ormore process of engineering and constructing a deep mine. By 1950, when strip-mining was still an infant industry in Appalachia and conservationists hadn't the foggiest notion of the plague to come, one of RouthJs companies, Compass Coal, was profitably tearing the hills of Harrison County, West Virginia, to shreds. Since there were no state or federal reclamation requirements, no money had to be spent on binding up the wounds. It must have been the best of all possible worlds, unless you lived near one of Routh*s mines. He, of course, didn't. Routh kept himself busy with other conquests, picking up coal companies in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia, buying up trucking companies and warehouses in New York, enlarging his oil-distributing operations, hatching long-range plans for a giant refinery on the Maine coast. Money flowed from Routh's various holdings into his Manhattan office in a never-ending stream, and Routh bought Brinks, Inc., to carry the cash in his own armored cars. AN ACT OF GOD Despite abundant evidence that he was in no danger of going soft, Routh decided in 1969 to bring in a new president. He looked around for a man to match his own toughness and �The Pittston Mentality 265 found one—a 53-year-old native of West Virginia named Nicholas T. Camicia who had already made a mark in the industry as a notable scrambler. "The coal industry is run by men who got where they are by not being nice," says one former federal official in a position to know, "and when Camicia smiles, you can hear his jaws making a special effort." Routh liked him fine. But Camicia already had a good job when Routh approached him about taking over Pittston. Routh reportedly told him to write his own ticket, possibly remembering his own reluctance to sign on until Manufacturers Trust gave him the $10 million to play with. Camicia did, in fact, write his own ticket, putting his signature to a contract that has never been publicized but makes fascinating reading in the archives of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The contract runs until 1976 and guarantees Camicia not only a minimum salary of $100,000 (increased now to $134,000), but it stipulates that a deferred salary of $25,000 will be set aside each year, compounded, and paid out to him in 120 monthly installments whenever he quits or gets fired; if he reaches retirement age before that happens, he also qualifies for a hefty pension. The contract also appears to have included some highly attractive stock options; SEC records show, for example, that Camicia picked up 7,200 shares, worth approximately $270,000, for a price of $78,000—less than a third of their market value. That wasn't all. Camicia was living comfortably in an exclusive Chicago suburb when Routh signed him up; in return for agreeing to move to New York, Camicia got Pittston to buy his house for $90,000 and furnish him, cost free, an equivalent home within commuting distance of Manhatten. He went to work for Joe Routh, reportedly satisfied with the terms of his employment. If ever there was any doubt that Routh and Camicia were a pair of industry touchdown-twins, it was dispelled early in 1970 when Pittston signed a contract with the Japanese steel industry. The Japanese wanted a long-term contract and were willing to make concessions to get a reliable supply of American coking coal. By 1970 Pittston had gained control of a third of all the available commercial metallurgical coal in the United States, and no one could offer more reliability than Routh and Camicia. They would not offer it without certain stipulations, however. The contract they signed with the Japanese called for Pittston to �266 Colonialism in Modern America deliver 140 million tons of coal over the next 10 years at a reported average of $15 per ton, which is about twice the going rate elsewhere. Pittston's directors were so happy last year that they boosted dividends twice and voted themselves a three-for-one stock split to boot. The company now has more than 50 mines working with nine more under development, and there is no end to the good times in sight. Is everybody happy? No. Federal mine inspectors in Appalachia are not pleased with Pittston's safety record; they never have been particularly pleased with it, but the past couple of years have been especially bad. Nine miners lost their lives in 1971 in Pittston mines (two of them in the newly acquired Buffalo Mining division), another 743 were seriously hurt, and the company's accident frequency rate was one of the highest in the coal industry. The record in 1970 was even worse: 18 dead. Investigators found that in a solid majority of the fatal accidents bad management practices (rather than personal carelessness) were to blame. "The company appears to be sincere in its desire for health and safety throughout its mines," one inspector wrote. "This desire/* he added drily, "is not always fulfilled." Not always. All told, some 98 men have been killed in Pittston's mines in the past decade, and a 1963 explosion in which 22 men died still ranks as one of the worst of recent disasters. Three or four thousand men have been seriously injured or maimed in the company's mines since 1962, and the U.S. Public Health Service estimates that as many as 5,000 Pittston miners may have developed pneumoconiosis during that time. The profit margin of the new Japanese contract is a reported 24 per cent, almost three times the normal profit margin in the coal industry; you can't help marveling at how much of that money will be going back to the disabled derelicts living out their lives in Appalachia after destroying themselves to help make Joe Routh a millionaire for the third or fourth time. Pittston's stockholders don't have to concern themselves with such things, because they don't hear about them. The company's handsome four-color annual reports talk about money, not about people. There are pictures of freshly painted oil storage tanks, spotless armored trucks, gleaming computer banks—and aerial pictures of the long, black coal trains winding �The Pittston Mentality 267 their way through seemingly virgin Appalachian valleys. The pictures are taken with care: On the inside back cover of the 1971 report there is a color shot of lovely hills and hollows with a sturdy complex of mine buildings prominent in the foreground. "Aerial view of the Lorado Mine of newly acquired Buffalo Mining Company," the caption reads. Beyond the mine, railroad tracks stretch away, disappearing behind a hill. If you could see beyond that hill, you would see the massive, smouldering gob pile that stood at the head of Buffalo Creek and on top of it the jerry-built dams that Pittston used with its preparation plant. But those things are not part of the picture, not part of the annual report. As far as Pittston's stockholders are concerned, they never existed—not until the morning of February 26, when suddenly the dams collapsed and the burning gob pile erupted and all hell broke loose. Helicopters were still thrashing back and forth between Buffalo Creek and the nearest hospitals when reporters began calling Pittston's New York headquarters to find out what the company had been doing to cause such a monstrous disaster. Camicia and Routh weren't available, wouldn't answer the telephones, wouldn't return calls. Finally, Mary Walton of the Charleston Gazette flushed out a Pittston lawyer who insisted on remaining anonymous but was willing to give the company's point of view. "It was an act of God," he said. DASOVICH'S YARDSTICK " 'Act of God' is a legal term," Robert Weedfall remarked when he heard about Pittston's explanation of the flood. *'There are other legal terms—terms like 'involuntary manslaughter because of stupidity' and 'criminal negligence.' " Weedfall is the West Virginia state climatologist, the man who keeps track of basic acts of God such as rain and snow. He was in a better position than anyone else to know whether there could be any possibility that Pittston's dam had collapsed from natural causes, and he was convinced that it had not—could not have—not by any stretch of the imagination. There had been heavy rainfall in Logan County during the week of February 26 and considerable flooding. But it was nothing uncommon for February, Weedfall said, and he had the statistics to prove it. When reporters called him they were impressed with his conviction. Pittston officials �268 Colonialism in Modern America had called, too, looking for ways to document their private theory of divine intervention. Weedfall wasn't much help. Nor were the technical specialists of the Department of the Interior who arrived from Washington and, in the aftermath of the disaster, poked and probed among the ruins in search of clues. The U.S. Geological Survey sent a crew, as did the Bureau of Mines; the Bureau of Reclamation summoned a former chief of its Earth Dams Section from retirement. The investigators examined the remains of the dam in microscopic detail, interviewed Pittston workers and company officials (who would not talk to reporters), and pieced together a convincing account of what had happened and why. None of the investigators showed any doubt that the dams had been badly engineered. Fred Walker, the retired Bureau of Reclamation expert, went further and refused to use the word "dam" to describe the structures. "Locally these barriers are called dams, but to me this is unacceptable nomenclature," he wrote. "These structures were created by persons completely unfamiliar with dam design, construction, and materials, and by construction methods they are completely unacceptable to engineers specializing in dam design." West Virginia law, Walker noted, "requires permits, approval of plans, and inspection during construction for impoundments more than 10 feet deep. I was unable to find that such requirements had ever been complied with/' Suggesting that similar potentially disastrous situations could be found elsewhere in the coalfields, Walker commented scathingly that "fortunately most of these barriers are built in valleys that have small watersheds above them, as apparently little if any consideration is given to the flood hazard involved." Pittston's consideration of the flood hazard at Buffalo Creek seems to have begun at 4 p.m. on Feburary 24—exactly 40 hours before the so-called dam collapsed—when Jack Kent and Steve Dasovich drove up to survey the situation. Kent was superintendent of Pittston Js stripping operations in its Buffalo Mining division; Dasovich was superintendent of the tipple. The water was rising behind the newest of the three dams. A federal mine inspector had driven past on the previous day and recalled later that the water seemed to be about 15 feet below the top; now it was within five or six feet. According to the Bureau of �The Pittston Mentality 269 Mines report, Kent and Dasovich "agreed that neither the dam nor the rising water presented danger of collapse or flooding at that time." The report makes clear that they were concerned only with the possibility of water overflowing the dam; they seem to have been untroubled by the possibility that the dam might simply give way, even though it was settling visibly in places—and even though part of it had given way almost exactly a year earlier during the rains of February, 1971. (It had been under construction then, with not much water backed up behind it, and there was little damage.) Kent stuck a measuring stick into the sludgy surface of the dam, with the top of the stick about a foot below the top of the dam. It was raining; Dasovich and Kent decided to keep an eye on things. Kent was back at the dam 24 hours later to check his measuring stick. The water was up about a foot and a half. Rain was still falling. Kent, who lives in an imposing home a few miles below the dam, decided to start checking the water level every two hours. He found that it was rising about an inch an hour. At 3:30 a.m. on February 26, peering at the stick with the aid of a flashlight, Kent saw to his alarm that the water was rising faster—two inches an hour, maybe more. An hour later the level was up three inches more and the measuring stick was almost covered. Kent telephoned Dasovich and asked him to come take a look. By the time Dasovich arrived the stick had disappeared entirely and the water was only about a foot below the top of the dam. According to the Bureau of Mines investigators, Dasovich decided to cut a ditch across the dam; he had some drainage pipe on hand and intended to use it to relieve the pressure. He called some of Jack Kent's strip-mine bulldozer operators at home and told them to go to the stripping operation—some three or four miles away—and bring their machines to the dam. Kent, meanwhile, made some calls, too: "He telephoned several families in the Lorado and Saunders area after his 4:30 a.m. examination/1 Bureau investigators reported, "and advised them of the rising water and the possibility of the dam overflowing." Three hours before the dam broke, in other words, the disaster had been foreseen by someone in a position to do something about it. A telephone call to the state police—who could have traveled the entire length of Buffalo Creek by 7 a.m. ordering a general evacuation—might have saved more than a hundred lives. But the �270 Colonialism in Modern America call was never made. And the drainage ditch was never dug, because the dam had given way before the bulldozers arrived. WALKING IN SOUP You can find Jack Kent at home—his house is on high ground and survived the flood untouched—but he doesn't like to talk to reporters. His eyes tell everything; there is no need for words. Dasovich seems to have disappeared entirely. He was in a nearby hospital after the flood, being treated for shock, and nurses said later that he was hysterical and blamed himself for the tragedy. Still later he was reported to have been admitted to a private psychiatric clinic—still later, released. The Federal investigators have not yet talked to him and some of them, knowing now what they do about the dam, see no need. "He knows what was up there," one of them said. "He'll always know what was up there." Other men knew, too. In the community of Saunders there was general concern about the safety of the dam; and on the night of February 25, most of the families who lived nearby decided, on their own, to take refuge in a schoolhouse five miles down the creek at Lorado. The decision saved their lives; the schoolhouse survived the flood, but when the families returned to Saunders to look for their homes, there was nothing to be found. No homes, not even the foundations; everything was gone, everything except an appalling sea of slowly settling, black, foul-smelling sludge. Off and on during the night, in the last few hours before the dam broke, miners went up to have a look at it. There were rumors spreading that it was going to go, but no one really seemed to know. Dasovich reportedly was telling people that things were under control. About 6:30 a.m., according to the federal reports, a miner saw ominous signs of what was coming. "The dam was moving like a bridge moves under heavy traffic," he remembered later. "Water was coming through the dam. . . not much, but it was causing the lower lake to fill up fast." By 7:30, according to another eyewitness account, "The top of the dam was moving back and forth. . . .the dam was settling down and shoving forward." Trying to walk anywhere in the vicinity of the dam was "like walking in soup—it had gotten real, real �The Pittston Mentality 271 juicy, buddy, all the way down. I got in the car and got the hell out of there." The top of the dam was lower on one side than on the other, apparently from foundation settling, and now the top was slumping still further with a momentum that could not have been stopped by an army of bulldozers. One of the several federal reports theorizes that the water level rose quickly during the night, not just because rain was falling, but because the dam had been collapsing slowly into the lake for several hours. But even while the rain continued, the tipple went on pumping its 500 gallons a minute into the sludgy lake behind the dam. 30-FOOT FLOOD Whatever happened in the night, it was morning now, and there was enough light to see what was happening. Apparently no one saw the actual moment when the dam finally gave way. It seems to have happened very fast—the dam settling until water was running across the top, the water cutting a cleft into the dam, more water hurrying through, and then complete and total collapse, and millions of gallons of water and hundreds of thousands of tons of sludge streaming across the top of the slag pile at the beginning of catastrophe. The water cascaded into the burning section of the slag heap and erupted in a volcanic explosion. Men were coming off shift at the tipple and saw what was happening; they saw a mushroom cloud burst into the air from the explosion, saw mud and rock thrown 300 feet into the sky, saw the windshields of their pickup trucks covered with steaming mud. They raced back up the road and tried to use the telephone at the tipple to send out a warning, but the line was already dead. The tipple was safe—it was upstream, up another fork of the creek, out of the path of the destruction—but the men were cut off from the main stream of Buffalo Creek and there was no way they could help anyone. They could only watch as the water and sludge crested over the top of the exploding gob pile and burst into the valley, "boiling up like dry flour when you pour water on it." The flood traveled at first at a speed of at least 30 miles an hour—in a solid wall 20 or 30 feet high. People who saw it �272 Colonialism in Modern America coming as they headed up the Buffalo Creek road barely had time to throw their cars into reverse, turn around wherever there was room, and head back downstream, leaning on their horns, flashing their lights, trying to warn other people who had heard the explosions but still did not know what was happening. There was very little time to do anything. It takes a few seconds to collect your wits when you see a wall of water bearing down on you, especially when you live in a valley where there are only a few exits—hollows running at right angles to the main valley. For most of the people who died, it was like being in the barrel of a gun and seeing the bullet coming. There was nowhere to go. That so many people did escape is something of a miracle. Nearly 5,000 people lived in the path of the flood. Probably a thousand were caught up in it, battered, left shaken, and sometimes badly hurt, but alive. From the wreckage of 16 communities, the bodies of 118 people have been found. There are others still missing; the final toll may be close to 150. THE ONLY LIFE THEY KNEW What happens after a disaster of such magnitude? There are inquiries, of course, and inquiries are under way in West Virginia. But in Appalachian affairs, the official response tends to have a common theme. After the Farmington mine disaster killed 78 miners, it was an Interior Department assistant secretary who said brightly: "We don't know why these things happen, but they do." After the 1970 mine explosion that killed 38 men in Kentucky, it was a newly installed director of the Bureau of Mines who said: "We can almost expect one of these every year." While the search for bodies was still continuing in Logan County, West Virginia's Governor Arch Moore was already defending the Pittston Company: The sludge-built dam had served a "logical and constructive" use by filtering mine wastes that would otherwise have gone unfiltered into Buffalo Creek. It didn't seem to matter much how the thing was built. The state legislature chose not to investigate, instead leaving to the governor the selection of an official commission which would be told to report back by the end of summer. "It's easy to say that the dam shouldn't have been there," Moore said at one point. "But it had been there for 25 years." He was technically wrong, of course, but the inference seemed to be that if a hazard simply �The Pittston Mentality 273 exists long enough, it has a right to be left alone. And by the same token, the Governor made it painfully clear that he would ask the same treatment for the problems of West Virginia. The real tragedy, he said, a tragedy greater even than what had befallen the people of Buffalo Creek, was the unflattering coverage of West Virginia in the national press. In fact there had been precious little of that. The flood had been on page one for two or three days, but it was eclipsed by the President's tour through China (from Shanghai, where he learned of the flood, Nixon sent an expression of regret, concluding from a distance of many thousands of miles that it was a terrible "natural disaster" and promising speedy federal aid); and within a week it would be forgotten, dismissed as one of those things. Time, for example, observed that the people of Buffalo Creek would have been well advised to live elsewhere, but they had stayed on in the shadow of the smouldering gob pile presumably because "that was the only life they knew." PASSING THE BUCK TO GOD The Interior Department, meanwhile, explained through Assistant Secretary Hollis Dole that there was, in its opinion, no federal responsibility in the matter, despite the fact that regulations within the 1969 Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act specifically cover the construction and use of gob piles and retaining dams. There were no indications that the government would move to take action against Pittston unless it was prodded by an outraged Congress; on Capital Hill there was no outraged Congress to be found. There would be room for doubt, in any event, about the kind of action that the Department of the Interior would take even if it were forced to do something. The department is reluctant to think of itself as a regulatory agency, or as a federal cop, and among all of the subordinate agencies within the department, the Bureau of Mines is a standout example of one that has refused to grasp the idea of representing the public interest. The problem might not be serious if a system of countervailing power were in operation—if, for example, the people of Buffalo Creek could have counted on the United Mine Workers to represent them against the overwhelming resources and �274 Colonialism in Modern America indifference of the Pittston Company. There had been scattered efforts along Buffalo Creek to protest the slag heaps and the sludge dams—petitions had been circulated, attention had been demanded. But the effort never went anywhere, and it never went anywhere partly because no powerful organization, like the union, chose to push it. The union hasn't pushed much of anything in some time except perhaps the fringe benefits available to its ranking officers. The result is that on one side of the equation there is a powerful industry deeply dedicated to its own interests; on the other side there is, most of the time, nothing at all. And in the middle, where there should be an evenhanded government agency, there is instead the Bureau of Mines, an organization so encrusted with age and bureaucracy that it will not even support its own inspectors when they try to do their jobs. They had, for example, been trying to do their jobs at Pittston's mines, trying to cut down the number of men killed in needless accidents. Over the past year they had slapped thousands of violation notices on the company. The idea is that the notices will cost money; get fined often enough and hard enough, the theory goes, and you will become safety-conscious in the extreme. It hasn't worked that way. Thanks to a highly complex assessment system set up in Washington by a former lobbyist who is now in charge of the Bureau's fines-collection operation, Pittston has been able to defer, seemingly indefinitely, any payment for its sins. Specifically, over the past year inspectors had fined Pittston a total of $1,303,315 for safety violations. As of April 1, the company had appealed every one of the notices it had received and had paid a grand total of $275 to the government. Meanwhile, on Buffalo Creek, the investigations continue, the reports are compiled, the survivors try to plan a future; the mines, only briefly disrupted by the raging flood, are back at work, and the long trains roll. One month after the disaster, Pittston set up an office to process claims—without, however, accepting liability. The company's official view is still that God did it—and if, by any chance, God should pass the buck back down: "We believe that the investigations of the tragedy have not progressed to the point where it is possible to assess responsibility." It's possible that such a point will never be reached. Who was responsible, for example, for deciding to spend $90,000 �The Pittston Mentality 275 to buy Nicholas Camicia's house, but not to spend the $50,000 that it might have cost—according to one of the federal reports— to build a safe dam at the head of Buffalo Creek? There are sticky questions like that rising in the aftermath of the disaster, questions that will be hard to answer. "There is never peace in West Virginia because there is never justice," said Mother Jones, the fiery hell-raiser of West Virginia's early labor wars. On Buffalo Creek these days there is a strange kind of quiet, a peacefulness of sorts, but it is not the kind that comes with justice. This article was published by The Washington Monthly, May 1972. Reprinted by permission. �This page intentionally left blank �OF By A For 1116-B Charleston, E. Virginia . .. to his as a as as an he to His of to his his in as of the he of a Inc., of the lie his he but he of Trans- in of of to in He as a as by fit of n»ii • *y a in lt i lt i . �278 Colonialism in Modern America Island Creek Coal Co., Director of Civic Affairs for Monsanto, Director of West Virginia Life Insurance Company, director of Huntington Federal Savings and Loan Associates, and President of Cecil H. Underwood Associates, in which venture he was joined by David Francis, president of Princess Coal Company. By contrast, William Marland forgot whom the governor commonly serves. During his term he made the error of recommending a severance tax on coal; he finished life as an alcoholic cab driver in Chicago. . . . CASE STUDY: THE BUILDING OF STATE ROUTE 99 Route 99 cuts a swath through the tops of the beautiful high mountains which mark the southern edge of the Coal River Watershed. The road is only 10.016 miles in length and runs from a junction with State Route 85 in Boone County, slightly north of Kopperston (an Eastern Gas and Fuel Company town in Wyoming Co.), and east to Bolt in Raleigh County. At some unspecified future date there is supposed to be an extension of the road which will turn Route 99 into a major east-west artery connecting Logan and Beckley. The road is made of six inches of asphalt poured over 12 inches of crushed rock—extremely sturdy construction, even for a mountain road. Both firms which built the road obtain more of their money from strip mining than they do from construction. They gouged a tremendous cut for the road with explosives and heavy equipment. This left towering high walls, often on both sides, of bleak rock. Driving over the road, one is not surprised that it cost over $5,200,000 to build initially. However, it is surprising to find that there is almost no traffic on the road, since the State Department of Highways insists that the first criterion used in the building of a road is whether the road will pay for itself in terms of the gas tax taken in by vehicles using the road. A quick check of the state road map shows no sizable town on or around the road and almost no one who will be served by the road as a through route. Why then was this particular road built? The highway department and other officials have offered various reasons. Former Governor Smith suggested that the entire area was going to be a scenic recreation area, but both sides of the road are lined with some of the most devastated countryside imaginable, scarred by �Coal Government ofAppalachia 279 the stark slashes of the 40 strip mines in the area. The central office of the Department of Highways offered a different and far more plausible explanation. Although unsure who it was that made the decision, one high ranking official did point out that the road has * "opened that area up." Acknowledging that almost no one lived in an area to use the road as a through highway connecting any urban centers, he nonetheless allowed as how it was important to open areas up to people to live in and industries to develop. Just which people and which industries the area has been opened up for becomes obvious when the history of the road and the surrounding area is examined. Kopperston is a model company town built near the mouths of many large underground mines by the Koppers Company; it is now operated by Eastern Gas and Fuel Associates, one of the giants of the coal industry. Building such towns is expensive, however, and no such plans were made in connection with the development of the Harris mine, another giant underground operation which opened near the current junction of Route 99 and Route 85 about the same time the road was built. Eastern's new mine employs over three hundred miners, a quarter of whom live in the eastern part of Boone County and Raleigh County. Before Route 99 was built, the only way for these miners to get to work was to drive far north of their homes to Seth and then across or far south along Route 1 through Glenfork and Oceana, then north again. The more than eighty miners who lived east of Bolt live on a road pattern designed for access to Beckley, the seat of Raleigh County. Near Beckley, Eastern was in the process of closing down several worked-out deep mines. In order to keep its miners, it had to find some way to get them to the new mining site. Route 99 provides a perfect connection for people in eastern Boone County and the Beckley region to get to the Harris Mine and back. It serves almost nothing else, or nothing else which existed before it opened that part of Boone County up. Now it serves more than 40 strip mines which are in operation along its length and at one end of the road. At the same time the plans were finalized for building the road, Eastern Coal and Appalachian Power Company jointly indicated an interest in building, with Federal assistance, a rural New Town at what is now the eastern end of Route 99 near �280 Colonialism in Modern America Bolt. As work on the plans for the new city at Fairdale advanced, it became clear that the type town Eastern had in mind was not the type that would obtain federal approval. Initial inquiries were discouraging enough to prevent formal application from ever being made, and the idea of the city was put silently to rest. The major problem was Eastern's nervousness whenever mention was made of attracting other industries into the town. Eastern wanted the town to be housing for its workers. Eastern had been seeking a company town which would not cost Eastern anything, one for which the state and the federal governments would pay. Officials then serving in the highway department were delighted when they first heard that a new city was under consideration for Fairdale. Their joy stemmed from the fact that the plan to build that city (of which they had known nothing when Route 99 was laid out) would serve as an excellent justification for a previously unjustifiable project. They were no doubt even more disappointed than Eastern when the plans never advanced beyond the talking stage. Since the owners of the land over which Route 99 was built are large land companies which hold the land until it can be profitably mined, it is not surprising that they were quite willing to grant the state permission to enter their land and construct the road—even before the price of the land was negotiated and the land bought. As of late 1970, the land (upon which the road lay) had still not been purchased, and the case was slated for adjudication. Their willingness to allow the state on the land becomes understandable when maps of the area are examined. State road maps of the region before the route was completed show no mines along Route 99. The area, now stripped so completely, was almost inaccessible before it could be reached by 99. The highway department personnel who reported on the use of the road always mentioned the semi-trailers carrying explosives and equipment to the strip mines' cutting face in addition to the miners going to and from those sites and the large underground sites further to the west. Most of the land being stripped and most of road right-of-way were owned initially by Eastern Gas and Fuel Associates. It is now owned by Pennva, a giant land-holding subsidiary of another giant coal producer, Pittston Corp. �Coal Government ofAppalachia 281 Another major beneficiary of Route 99 was stripper and road builder Leo Vecillio of Beckley. Vecillio and Grogan, Inc. is the construction firm which built most of Route 99. Ranger Fuel (Leo Vecillio, President) operated 21 strip mines along the road and also 20 mines in Pond Fork now made accessible to them by Route 99. Ranger Fuel marketed its coal through Eastern Gas and Fuel Associates. In 1970, Ranger was also sold to the Pittston Corporation. Nor have expenditures stopped after 1966-1967, when the road was cut and graded through the mountains. In 1970, another contract was awarded to Black Rock Contracting, Inc. of Charleston to pave the road, which theretofore had not received a permanent blacktopping. That added an additional 1.4 million dollars to the figure of 5 million previously spent. The original 5,000,000 dollars used to build this impressive stretch of two-lane road came from a bond issue passed initially to be used on the federal interstate system. If the money had been used for that purpose, it would have been matched by $45,000,000 in federal dollars and could have built over 30 miles of four-lane interstate. The use of the funds on a project which could not qualify for any federal matching money (the Appalachian Regional Commission's money at the time would not go to roads serving only mines) was not illegal. The legislature had provided that the money could also be used for the public roads of the state (a provision intended for any excess of funds after spending on interstates), but it was at least improvident to spend it on a solely state-financed road which in reality cost the state not 5 but 50 million dollars in lost road-building ability. Shortly after the road was contracted for, the federal government, stung by the cost of its military adventures in Southeast Asia, ordered a freeze on interstate building. This freeze was based on the amount of money which the states had previously spent on the program. Thus the Route 99 fiasco continued to hurt the state over the next few years. A delegate from Wyoming County bemoaning the costly construction of Route 99 for special interests pointed out that the policy still continues. In his county one road was being built from Pineville to a new Bethlehem Steel Mine five miles away. �282 Colonialism in Modern America Another road from Pineville to Baileysville was being widened to better serve the Keppler mines. "It's certainly sad that the only way we can get any roads in southern West Virginia is when it benefits the coal operators," the delegate observed. "The people can cry for roads, but the only time they ever seem to be built is when the coal companies need them." ("Roads for Coal Firms Only Pattern Ripped by McGraw" Sunday Gazette-Mail, 28 June 1970.) �THE IN TVA by INTRODUCTION On in his he he 18, 1933, and an in D. the pen Act. of the TVA this act of a and in by in the of of the to the by the In his of of a he TVA the the bill he be a the his the of the as the of be a of TVA to be It to be in the is a he to the a of /or �284 Colonialism in Modern America less federal agencies. It was, the president said, to be a near contradiction as a federal agency: "a return to the spirit and vision of the pioneer/' based in the region it was to serve, concerned with the complexities of national development, but also an agency that "touches and gives life to all forms of human concern." It was, in short, a mere first step in a national experiment where—if it succeeded—"we can march on, step by step, in the like development of other great national territorial units within our borders." Even though it was favored several times by the Supreme Court, and beat government-inspired conspiracies like DixonYates of the early 50's, even though it successfully defeated one of the toughest onslaughts ever organized by private power trusts, and even though it made a remarkable record of achievement imitated world-wide, the TV A idea never sprouted successfully in any other area of the country. A. The Early Record of TVA Few people who have had a course in modern American history need a recitation of the good deeds by the agency in the early days. It tamed the nation's fifth largest river, turning the once flood-prone 650 mile giant into the world's most controlled river. It planted eroded land and invented fertilizers and gave them away. It turned poor farmers into skilled workers, employing at the height of World War II 40,000 people, most of them trained by the agency. Unique even today among federal agencies, it allowed its employees to join unions. When the companies defeated the United Mine Workers* first large organizing drive in the southern coalfields in Fentress County, Tennessee, and then blacklisted the miners, the agency hired more than 200 en masse in 1934. It sold its power only to cooperatives organized and controlled by the people. It did other things, and, importantly, it won the confidence of the people. When the private power companies built "spite lines" into TVA territory, the farmers chopped down the poles. In 20 years the agency built 20 dams. In 1953 the total dam system had cost $24.5 million and averted potential flood damage estimated at more than $51 million. In 1952 alone the navigation system had saved barge shippers probably $10 million, �The Federal Government in Appalachia*. TVA 285 at an expense of $3.5 million. Since 1933 it had reforested 212,000 acres of land and produced 295 million seedlings in its nursery. Over the same period 68,000 farmers had allowed their farms to be TVA test demonstration areas to educate them and their neighbors about new farming techniques. Per capita income had risen from 44% of the national average in 1929 to 60% in 1952. Manufacturing employment opportunities had increased 20% faster in the valley than in the nation. As impressive as the statistics are, they fail to convey the sheer magnitude of the project in a seven state area of 201 counties, the size of New England. The concrete, rock, and earth laid in the path of the river and its tributaries were 12 times the bulk of the Great Pyramids. The volume of water behind its dams would cover the entire state of Illinois to a depth of eight inches. But more important, and surprising, an agency that had a vague mandate to "sell the surplus power not used in its operations" had by its twentieth year become the nation's largest utility, selling power at the lowest prices to a people who in 1933 had almost no knowledge of the electric age. By 1953 the agency's customers—one in 28 farms in the valley had power in 1933—were consuming twice as much power as their national counterparts. TVA's wonders were not accomplished without sacrifices, however, and there were many less than admirable aspects to the agency even in the early days. To build its dams the agency forced the removal of 125,480 people. It has bought or condemned two million acres of land, creating in the place of occasional flooding a giant permanent flood. In the early days, board member Harcourt Morgan, a former president of the University of Tennessee, turned the agency's farm program into little more than mimicry of the policies of the land grant colleges and the extension services. The agency made its peace with the Farm Bureau, even though that organization had advocated that instead of a TVA, the government should sell its $90 million investment in the Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals to Henry Ford for $5 million. Ignoring its reputed commitment to civil rights, the agency built separate facilities at its dam sites for blacks and whites. (Even today, among the top 37 staffers who meet regularly with the board, only one is a black and one a woman. In the memory of re- �286 Colonialism in Modern America porters who have attended the meetings since they were forced open in 1975 in response to press pressure, the black has never spoken at a meeting and the woman has spoken up only once, when the agency was moving to abolish the home economics division of which she is a part.) But despite the scars, most people agreed with Henry Steele Commager in 1950 that the agency was "the greatest peacetime achievement of twentieth century America." B. The Turning Point From almost the first meeting of the three board members in 1933, the agency was torn over its direction. Arthur Morgan's "human engineering/' his seeming willingness to compromise with Wendell Willkie (then head of the southern power trusts), and his undocumented charges of "evasion, intrigue, and sharp strategy" against Lilienthal and H. A. Morgan, led to his dismissal by Roosevelt in 1938. With Morgan gone, Lilienthal, who believed the agency would live or die by the power program, was victor. His successor as chairman, Gordon Clapp, launched the agency in 1949-53 into building seven coal fired plants—the largest in the world—to meet the power demands on the system. Had it not been for the cold war and the Atomic Energy Commission, which by 1955 was consuming a full half of TVA's output at its Oak Ridge and Paducah uranium enrichment plants, the agency would have had the largest surplus capacity of any utility in the world. To stave off the Eisenhower administration's Dixon-Yates conspiracy and other efforts to reduce its effectiveness, the agency began saluting its contribution to defense above all its other efforts. In that climate, a new generation of leadership—far more cautious, technically oriented, and politically conservative—moved in to make policy at TVA. This new generation saw cheap power as the means to trump all opposition. By the middle 1950's TVA had set a pattern for its future coal purchases, concentrating them in western Kentucky where low grade, high sulfur coal fields were being developed by independent coal firms. Armed with long term contract offers, technical equipment at its plants that would allow the burning of low quality coal, and no hesitancy in purchasing non-union �The Federal Government in Appalachia: TVA 287 coal, TVA's coal buyers, with direction from then General Manager Aubrey J. Wagner and Board Chairman Herbert D. Vogel, set out to guarantee that fuel prices would remain low. Operating against a slumped coal market and a rapidly declining United Mine Workers (UMW) union, the TVA revolutionized the steam coal market. As the nation's largest buyer and with skillful use and re-use of competitive bidding to lower the price of coal proffered to the agency, TVA helped to bankrupt operators in the southern Tennessee, east Kentucky, and other central Appalachian coal fields. Union-organized deep mines, especially those with strong locals that deprived operators of sweetheart contracts from the increasingly corrupt UMW, found themselves unable to remain in business. Not so Appalachian and western Kentucky strip mines. Small strip mine companies like Kentucky Oak Mining of Hazard, Kentucky, found TVA a willing accomplice in granting long term contracts and providing technical assistance in machinery design and mining procedures. In the early 1960's when the "Roving Pickets" movement was shutting down the eastern Kentucky coal fields and violence was causing concern even at the White House, few coal miners realized that the reason for the sweetheart contracts, the withdrawal of the UMW hospital cards, and the starvation economy was in part the steam coal policies that TVA was pursuing quietly in Knoxville. With Kentucky Oak Mining bringing strip mining, a process little practiced until then, to eastern Kentucky on a vast scale, no deep mine could possibly compete with its prices, which were frequently as low as $3 a ton. Meanwhile, in western Kentucky and eastern Tennessee, TVA was building mine mouth steam plants on or near strip mines and signing long term contracts for millions of tons of coal. The prices for the western Kentucky coal, albeit of lower quality, were far below what it cost Appalachian producers to mine coal. With the long term contracts, which amounted to loan guarantees at most financial institutions, the western Kentucky producers opened mines in thick seams, mined with shovels that dwarfed anything ever seen before on the American landscape, and sealed the doom of the independent Appalachian deep mine companies. In the name of cheap fuel, the agency was laying the groundwork for the horrors that now haunt it and its region. �288 Colonialism in Modern America C. A Bitter Harvest When President Kennedy called together his advisers in the early days of his administration to determine how to deal with the disturbing reports that were coming from Appalachia, especially eastern Kentucky, he found them ill-prepared to come up with solutions or, in fact, able to comprehend that what was happening was related in more than a small way to policies being made by a government agency in Knoxville. At one point he sent an aide from his office with an order to find 100 doctors before winter to go to eastern Kentucky; the aide found none. As the administration made other decisions related to the mountains, it ignored the role that TVA had played in the havoc and could play in the solution. In 1961, Kennedy named Aubrey Wagner to the TVA board and appointed him chairman in 1962; in 1963, he named Wagner to the President's Appalachian Regional Commission that was to study how to solve poverty in the mountains. There is no evidence that Wagner or anyone else was ever questioned about, or did themselves question, TVA's role in creating the coal market slump that had brought on the unemployment and the union busting in the mountain coalfields. The UMW leadership, having failed even under Lewis's leadership to get TVA to change its policies, had already turned to Cyrus Eaton to get him to buy up TVA suppliers with union money. By the early 1960's the union was as interested as the Chamber of Commerce in trying to discredit media reports of poverty in eastern Kentucky. TVA's bitter harvest would come home in other ways. By 1974 TVA was buying 37 million tons of coal a year to fuel its 12 steam plants which were producing 80% of its power. A full 72% of the coal was coming from Kentucky, one-half of it strip mined. Disturbingly also, for an agency that once saw itself as "democracy on the march," a full 83% of the coal was now being supplied by a dozen firms, all of them owned by oil or metal conglomerates. In that year, the giants turned on their friendly benefactor. Prices more than doubled. Suddenly TVA's cheap power was no longer so cheap. Giant TVA suppliers like Island Creek, chaired by the once friendly Senator Albert Gore and owned by Occidental Petroleum, demanded a $3 a ton profit guarantee, with a 50-50 split of profit over $6 a ton. TVA signed. Mapco (Mid-America Pipeline Co.), owner of Webster County Coal Corp., raised its price from $8.50 per ton to over $30. TVA �The Federal Government in Appalachia: TV A 289 signed. Mr. Wagner condemned the price increases and damned publicly the increasing energy concentration. This was taken seriously in some quarters, but knowledgeable observers saw a clear connection between past agency policy and the prices. The Mountain Eagle, of Whitesburg, Kentucky, revealed that two coal companies owned in part by Ashland Oil had defaulted on a $25 million TVA loan guarantee made in secret by the TVA board in 1970. In rapid fire fashion, other puzzling coal deals by TVA came to light: (1) it had selected Peabody Coal Co., the world's largest, to open a new deep mine on TVA property in western Kentucky and had agreed to equip the mine and pay Peabody a guaranteed fee per ton, despite the fact that in 1971 Peabody had the worst deep mine safety record in the industry; (2) in 1974 it had signed contracts worth $58 million with a company it was alleging in federal court had defrauded it on past contracts; (3) it was accepting truck loads of rock, mud, and slate disguised as coal at its Kingston Steam Plant, taking action to stop only after repeated exposures of the practice in the media; (4) it had made a secret bid of $1 billion to purchase Peabody. These actions were only a part of a disturbing pattern that began to emerge publicly in the early 1970s. In a June 17, 1974, speech, Wagner told the National Coal Association that portions of the Mine Health and Safety Act "should be eliminated" in the interest of production. But TVA's coal purchasing practices were bothering in other ways too. Because of its policy of buying low heat (approximately 11,000 BTUs per pound as opposed to national utility average of over 12,000 BTUs.) and high sulfur coal, a combination TVA claimed was cheap, the agency was in trouble with the nation's air cleanup program. The Environmental Protection Agency told the agency either to find low sulfur supplies (at least lower than the 4.5% sulfur coal it buys from some suppliers) or install �290 Colonialism in Modern America scrubbers. TVA refused to do either. Wagner called scrubbers "a billion dollar pig in a poke," and launched TVA on a program of building tall stacks at its steam plants to disperse, rather than clean up, its sulfur dioxide emissions. EPA officials, mindful that TVA emits 14% of all utility sulfur dioxide nationally and 52% of the poison in eight states of the South, refused in 1974 to compromise further its stand on constant controls. Aware that failure to clean up TVA would mean a license for private utilities also to defy the law, EPA took its stand in federal courts, where in 1976 it got final word from the Supreme Court that TVA's compliance program violated the clean air laws. The end result of TVA's reliance on its traditional suppliers and low quality coal is that it now finds itself unable to buy enough low sulfur coal to comply with the law. In an October 1976 bid opening, the agency received no significant bid from old suppliers for low sulfur coal and got few worthy offers from other suppliers. Chairman Wagner now claims the reason is that suppliers are holding coal off the market for higher prices. State Representative Lewis McManus, the former speaker of the West Virginia House of Representatives, and a critic of TVA for failing to buy low sulfur coal in his state, says the reason is that the agency will not negotiate with that state's small producers. TVA general manager Lynn Seeber rejoins that the agency has to buy by competitive bidding. McManus points out that the TVA board declared an "emergency" in 1973-74 and re-negotiated most of its long term contracts at higher prices with the conglomerate suppliers. Alone of utilities, it is now negotiating on an "emergency basis" for low sulfur coal. TVA's new trump is nuclear power. It has more nuclear capacity planned than any utility in the country. In March 1975 its Brown's Ferry plant was knocked out for over a year by a worker using a candle to check for air leaks in a cable room. In December 1976 a fire caused by an electric heater destroyed the building that would have been used for start-up operation in 1978 of the Sequoyah nuclear plant. Mr. Wagner says nuclear power is safer than highway driving, cheaper than coal, and that the agency has no intention of backing away from its present nuclear emphasis unless coal power becomes cheaper. And while it pursues the nuclear commitment, the agency is now testing low sulfur coal from Montana as a possible source of supply for its Shawnee steam plant; it is doing so despite the fact that the �The Federal Government in Appalachia: TV A 291 coal is non-union, low BTU, and higher priced than quality low sulfur deep mine coal being purchased by private utilities in Appalachia. D. Economic Status in the TV A Region The Tennessee Valley watershed covers 40,910 square miles of land in seven states and 125 counties. About half the counties overlap with ARC territory in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky, and Mississippi. The TVA power service territory covers the same states but includes 170 counties, making the total counties covered by TVA 201, with a population over 6.7 million. The combined TVA territory covers 80,000 square miles. When TVA was founded in 1933, personal income in these 201 counties was 45% of the national average, or about $168 per capita. In 1974, the figure was $4,262, or 78% of the national level of $5,448. That compares with the southeastern U.S. level (excluding Florida) of 84% of the U.S. level, or $4,602.! In 1933, 62% of the region's jobs were in agriculture; in 1973, 6%. Manufacturing jobs in 1933 accounted for 12% of the work force; in 1973, 33%. Total manufacturing jobs in the valley increased 73% from 1960 to 1973, or 18% faster than the national average. Much of the industrial growth occurred in resource development areas related to TVA's activities, but the direct correlation is not possible to measure. While federal appropriations to TVA have averaged $65 million a year since TVA was founded, the Valley's receipt of federal expenditure ($10,822 per person) is still far below the national average ($16,759 per person) over the period of 19341970; and only one-tenth or less of the Valley's receipts of federal monies were for TVA. The TVA power program is financed from current revenues and from a bond ceiling set by Congress at $15 billion, approximately 3% of the national debt. Since the self-financing reforms of 1959, TVA has paid back to the Treasury all but about one-fourth of the total federal investment in the power system. TVA's only demand on the U.S. Treasury is the approxi- �292 Colonialism in Modern America mately $135 million a year current budget which supports nonpower projects like the National Fertilizer Development Center at Muscle Shoals, Alabama (the Center holds patents on threefourths of the world's fertilizer formulas), a tributary area development program, flood control, and industrial development. The TVA region lags far behind the nation in earnings per worker when compared with the national average on an industrygroup basis. In the region 36% of the workers earn less than $8,000 per year; nationally 16% do. The number of TVA region workers earning between $10-$12,000 per year is 29%, compared with a national percentage of 44. Part of the explanation is that the region has a larger share than the nation of lowwage paying industries. For example, 27% of the valley workers are employed in apparel and textile industries compared with 3% nationally. A 1974 TVA economic outlook report concluded: "The new manufacturing job holders in the TVA region have not yet become the average consumers or owners of wealth of either the Southeast or the nation." One area in which the TVA region clearly outstrips the nation is in the growth of energy-intensive industry. Industries in the first quartile of electric energy use per employee grew at a rate of 4% in the period 1959-64 in the region compared with a decline of 0.3% in the nation. From 1964-74, the same industries grew at a rate of 4% in the region compared with a 0.8% rise in the nation. The growth is unquestionably tied to the fact that TVA rates are at an average 40% below the national average. In the growth of wood-using industries over the past decade the TVA region leads both the nation and the Southeast, the nation by nearly 3 to 1. TVA estimates that 44,000 jobs have been created in manufacturing plants located at major terminal points on the Tennessee River. The agency itself currently employs over 25,000 people, most of them in construction trades. E. Conclusion TVA brought many benefits to its 201 counties. Its cheap power brought havoc to some of those counties and hell to other �The Federal Government in Appalachia: TV A 293 parts of Appalachia. While pursuing this policy the agency has raised the incomes in the TV A region to around 75% of the national average, about the same figure as for all of Appalachia. The agency now is its own chief argument against spreading TV As across the land, and its reform is a necessary first step in making sense of national energy problems and economic problems of the Appalachian South. NOTE figures used in this section were supplied by the TVA Department of Information, Regional Research Department, and the Power Division. �This page intentionally left blank �OF by a a is, the for of the for of of the be to It no be to of the in the a at the fo) to the for for of by but the of the ' Tie the if can for the as as is the in the of or its air can by of has the of has 24, the pp. an Hf Jwi In �296 Colonialism in Modern America ingredient has been missing, good intentions have often failed to produce effective regional action. In many places, certainly in Appalachia, regional mechanisms have tried to operate in a vacuum of citizen awareness and support. The questions raised by the spread of regionalism are as important for the local populations involved as they are for the ultimate success of regionalism itself. Who determines where and how a regional body shall have authority? What is the role for citizens in such determinations? To whom are regional board members accountable, and how are they chosen? How are the agency's criteria and funding priorities set? To give such questions anything less than full attention is in itself poor planning. Appalachia has long been a programmer's guinea pig, the testing ground for a wide array of federal and state efforts. It is significant, therefore, that alarms are ringing in Appalachia, where a small but apparently growing number of people perceive regionalism as a threat to their ability to control local affairs of daily importance. They say that power over such basics as schools and garbage disposal has passed from their own hands into the murky authority of something called a regional agency or district. Appalachia became a testing ground for regionalism in the early 1960's when conditions there had become economically so critical that President Kennedy realized something had to be done about a situation which local and state governments appeared unwilling or unable to correct. The result was a commission charged with producing effective ideas and designing a mechanism by which to implement them. The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) was formally and fiscally delivered by President Johnson in 1965. From the beginning ARC billed itself as a "unique federalstate partnership," relying upon gubernatorial support and strategy. Also from the beginning, residents of the area predicted long-range ineffectiveness for the new creature, because it chose to ignore what many felt to be the keys to any lasting economic and social independence for Appalachia: local control and use of the region's vast natural resources, the rape of which had been responsible for much of the area's plight in the first place. The governors and such key Congressional figures as Sen. �Hidden Traps of Regionalism 297 Jennings Randolph wanted no part of that kind of activity, accordingly, the ARC has specialized in the political safety^ of bricks and mortar. At the same time, no broader example of regionalism has been operating in the country these past eight years. Appalachian regionalism has been on both the multi-state and substate level. As for the former, policy and spending decisions are supposed to be based on regional criteria. That is, the governors of the thirteen Appalachian states supposedly view needs on a multi-state, regional level first and consider their own immediate economic or political needs second. The theory is fine, but it hasn't worked out. "All you have is thirteen guys, some of whom see their governors maybe twice a year, sitting around the table trying to bring home their own slab of bacon," says one former high ARC official who feels the experiment is lost. At the substate level, ARC has leaned heavily on its "coordinated investment strategy" of concentrating investments in those areas showing "the greatest potential for future growth," as opposed to the Economic Development Administration's criterion of greatest need. Programs are to be assessed on the prospect that expenditures of money and effort in a given area will spread the results beyond the immediate application. This has meant lumping towns and counties into "growth centers." And growth areas have been translated into political action by creation of the "local development district" (LDD). These bodies are formed so that each will contain at least one "growth center." Often that is their only unifying factor, with some notable cases of bad grouping (foothills with mountain counties, coal with non-coal, high population with low). In any case, it is through the LDDs that ARC follows its coordinated investment strategy. Some planners see that strategy, and the LDDs which go with it, as a national model. But as a model it has received scant scrutiny. For one thing, while some ARC officials sincerely believe that the investment strategy has worked to alleviate Appalachian poverty, statistics from that part of the region which prompted the Appalachian Act in the first place—the mountainous central area—belie any claims of marked improvement. And many observers of the eight-year operation say that investments have �298 Colonialism in Modern America not been placed in areas of real potential growth but in those of real potential votes for the governor and Congressmen who announce each ARC grant. Recent moves by ARC's new executive director to reassert the role of the states in all ARC operations will, some disgruntled ARC staffers feel, further stifle whatever creativity and innovation there may have been by making the motive for funding political advantage rather than real need. Critics make the same basic assessment of the LDD approach. It is through the LDDs that most nonhighway ARC dollars flow; it is from the LDDs that ARC professes to hear the voice of the local people. There's the rub. People in the mountains have become sharply attuned of late to possible threats to their way of life, and many see the LDDs as a major curb to their influence on governmental decisions at the local level. They object to the LDDs as an intermediate layer of government standing between them and the control levels for state and federal moneys. They know who sits on LDD boards—and who doesn't. The contradiction is blatant: ARC views the LDD as the indicator of local will because it includes all the major elected officials in a development district; but some local citizens call the LDD an impediment to local will precisely because of that makeup. They contend that it's hard enough to deal with their own "courthouse gang"; merge six or eight or ten of them together in a single LDD and "you simply just don't have a chance," as one LDD observer put it recently. If this, then, is to become a national model, some basic problems need to be solved. Who represents whom and how and according to what guidelines? No one has thought much about such questions, it having been assumed that, since the need for multi-jurisdictional cooperation was critical, getting something started came first. Therefore the tough questions have yet to be answered. How much constituted authority should the new regional mechanisms be given? And from what source should such power proceed? What matters will best be dealt with regionally, and what is more wisely left in local hands? In short, are these new bodies in any way more or less accountable to the wills of the resident population than the original governments whose function they are complementing or in some cases* replacing outright? �Hidde n Traps of R egio nalism 299 In parts of Appalachia the matter has moved past theory. In western North Carolina, for example, a community observer sees the LDDs as little more than power-structure collectives, with vested interests parading as "elected officials" and "civic group representatives." They equate progress with profit, he says, and the effect of it well may be far afield from what wellintentioned backers of regionalization have in mind: "If the planners keep going, the effect will be to practically disinherit the small farmer who might have moved here generations ago to live out his time or escape service in the Civil War or whatever. And that citizen will be the last person to sit on the development district board." The composition of board members tends to support the fear that LDDs in Appalachia are, at best, staffed from the top down. Even where representatives of the poor or of minority groups do sit on the board, they are generally so outnumbered that they fall silent. Besides, matters handled by LDD boards are often more within the scope of the banker than of the dirt farmer or auto worker. It is thus no surprise that the long-range planning or other actions of such boards often reflect a bias toward a corporate, "free enterprise" model of developmenteven where such a model is sadly inadequate or worse. That's the most basic concern. Even though the majority on a board may be elected officials, they were not elected to serve on that board by that board's jurisdictional area as a whole. A new kind of political chemistry begins to operate when officials elected from different areas come together to make collective decisions for which they cannot be held individually accountable. People in Hill County did not elect their fiscal court judge to vote on matters involving eight other counties; and they surely did not authorize those nine other county officers to vote on affairs which affect Hill County. Perhaps even worse, regional board decisions have often become legislation by the lowest common denominator of what everyone can agree upon. Because of the establishment-affiliated membership of most regional agencies, the criteria thus become what is politically and economically palatable to all vested interests involved. Proponents of regionalism argue that such has often been the case with local government, and they are right. A key difference remains: At the local level, aroused citizens had �300 Colonialism in Modern America the ultimate level of the ballot box; on the regional level they don't. Aside from basic questions of accountability, the lack of direct citizen involvement is not in the interests of regionalism itself. A regional board can make unnecessary mistakes simply because no one was there to spot an obvious blunder in the early stages. Citizens do show up at city council or fiscal court meetings when an important matter is at hand. But regional bodies are remote and little understood, so the interest isn't generated. Decisions of potentially major effect may thus be developed in a vacuum—a situation that is bad for the regional agency charged with problem solving, and far worse for the citizens living with the problem. Once again, the premise that some regional cooperation can establish or improve needed facilities was and is sound. It is shortsighted to talk about a one-county garbage landfill when a larger and better one could be built to serve several counties at far less cost to the individual units. But it has proved to be equally shortsighted and wasteful to attempt any such regional effort without the real participation and consent of the several constituencies involved. Indeed, results can be downright disastrous. In one eastern Kentucky LDD, the board unanimously and enthusiastically backed a plan for a regional sanitary landfill. The state had ordered the closing of all open burning dumps, so something had to be done. But bureaucratic bungling and shortsightedness in assessing local situations resulted in only one landfill being opened to serve all eight counties, and that one isolated, expensive to use, and known to turn into a quagmire entrapping even the most hardy of mountain pickups. When the failure became obvious, local residents wanted to know whom to get mad at. And they heard their county judge— himself the chairman of the landfill board at the time—saying it wasn't his jurisdiction; it was the problem of the regional garbage authority. And who was that? That was established under the auspices of the development district. The what? The development district. Well, could the judge get something done? Folks are just dumping their garbage into the creeks because there's no other place to put it. Sure, the judge promised, I'll raise the �Hidden Traps of Regionalism 301 problem at the next district meeting; we're all concerned about the problem, but we have to work it out together. The garbage mess, as it became known, proved to be the tip of the iceberg of anger. The same development district had endorsed land-use studies for each of its counties. In one of them, residents rebelled at the suggestion in the plan that they move out of their precious hollows and off their hillsides to areas where such "blessings" as sewer and water could be provided. They made it clear that they liked their hollows, had no desire to move away from them unless it was their choice, and in short wanted no part of any regional land-use plan. Mass-meeting pressure forced the county fiscal court not only to drop the land-use plan but to abolish the county planning commission for good measure. Nonetheless, the LDD itself soon came out with its own district wide land-use plan. People again expressed concern, but this time they really didn't know where to focus it. Planners argue that no one unit of government is forced to accept a regionally drafted plan or program. That may be true in theory, but federal and state trends deny it in fact. There is, for example, something called the A-95 procedure of the federal Office of Management and Budget. The stated purpose of the A-95 Memorandum is to foster multi-jurisdictional cooperation in order to assure maximum benefits from an array of federal programs included under A-95's coverage. A-95, says OMB, simply seeks to encourage consistency based on solid planning. Under A-95, each state which so chooses establishes "clearing houses" to review and comment upon all applications for assistance from federal agencies included under A-95. LDDs, for example, have become the A-95 bodies in most Appalachian states. The application goes to the clearing house, which then invites parties it feels appropriate to comment upon the application, and within thirty days the clearing house itself comments. Only then is the application, with comment, passed to the federal agency. Technically, that agency can ignore an unfavorable A-95 review, though under a new revision of A-95 it must now tell the clearing house why it chose to do so. Under the same revision, A-95 still remains noncompulsory; that is, states don't have to adopt the procedure. In fact, however, the increasing trend is to �302 Colonialism in Modern America require the kind of regional review called for in A-95 whether or not it has been formally adopted. A-95 decisions are supposed to be based on grounds of consistency and soundness of planning. But again, good intentions can be offset by realities. Many of the same questions heard in Appalachia about LDDs are being raised there and elsewhere about the A-95 bodies of review. Just who sits on the A-95 board, and who should? If the clearing house doesn't possess the overall plan upon which it is supposed to peg its decisions, on what is the review based? Vested interests of the board members? Personalities or politics of the applicants? If there is a plan, who developed it, and with whose active advice and concurrence? Were all segments of the population included in the planning effort? The questions comprise the list of what makes political units responsive to needs. A-95 raises other basic questions of civil rights. For example, a city with 600,000 people has the same voting power on that A-95 board as a suburban member with 20,000. Aside from one-man, one-vote, the same problems of board composition that arise with LDDs apply here. They are perhaps even more critical with A-95 boards, since both civil rights review and environmental impact determination are left to the auspices of the A-95 body in key areas. Jim Draper, formerly of the Georgia Council on Human Relations, has argued with OMB that A-95 boards "have neither staff nor philosophic inclination" to give minority or low-income people a fair shake. "Moreover," he said, "in many cases there is no representation of these interests on A-95 bodies' boards of directors. Thus, inclusion of such considerations [as civil rights or environment] as criteria for review becomes utterly meaningless—the painting over of rotting wood." Is this, then, a hopeless quagmire, with the potential value and real need for regionalism clouded by equally real inadequacies of accountability and responsiveness? ARC, for example, might well have become a viable and creative institution if it had followed the advice of many of its initial Appalachian backers and dealt with the real problems of basic economic inequity in Appalachia. Instead, it chose to go with the governors, with the entrenched political systems of thirteen states. Some good has resulted, such as ARC health programs, but had the key seg- �Hidden Traps of Regionalism 303 ments of the Appalachian population been sought out and included both at the federal-state and the substate levels, a more lasting and accountable mechanism might have made more than a dent in the problems. ARCs survival might then rest on real accomplishment rather than political muscle. It is certainly not too late to learn lessons from the experience of ARC, its LDDs and such other manifestations of regionalism as A-95. And the need to learn is pressing, since regional plans are likely to spread in ways and to places which will directly affect many more people. Maybe it is necessary to separate regionalism at the urban level from efforts in rural areas where, particularly in the South, the word is that regional government is the government in a growing number of places. Maybe the geographical closeness and heavy populations of urban areas make regional efforts there more viable. Or maybe rural areas with their much more limited financing and resources are the places for real regional concentration. It's going on, in any case, in both parts of America. Some obvious steps could be taken to insure at leas; the possibility of accountability. For a start, districts should be developed according to common realities, according to economic and social factors which might produce a certain jurisdictional cohesiveness. To combine units sheerly on the basis of geography (the north fork of the river) or politics (that's a Congressional district there) is shortsighted if the real goal is to use common facilities for the common solution of common problems. Representatives to a development district should be elected on a one-man, one-vote basis specifically to that post by the people of each constituent unit. At present, elected officials are automatically placed on the boards on the assumption that they represent the will of the people. If special elections were held to fill slots in the regional creation, not only would the special abilities needed by said office be brought out but public attention to and interest in the process might be developed. Such concern does not now exist, except in the negative sense when a district has overstepped its bounds. If regional cooperation is to become a reality, it must begin with the most basic kind of involvement for the population^and that is the vote. Other specific steps can be taken to assure that these new �304 Colonialism in Modern America bodies of government bear at least a resemblance to our traditional concept of democratic institutions. These include hearings and public notification of review matters; A-95 does not require such notice. Out-reach offices staffed by local residents to serve as centers for complaints or suggestions is another obvious step. Without such action, and others like it, any future efforts to broaden the power and scope of multi-jurisdictional authorities will obscure even further the role of the American citizen in the affairs of his government. Hearings may be held this year on a bill by Sen. Joseph Montoya (D., N.M) uto establish a national development program through public works in investment" (S.232). In introducing it last year, Senator Montoya noted that "the inspiration for the approach taken in this bill" is the ARC. He added that the bill "builds on one of the most successful features of the Appalachian program, the strengthening of state and local governments and making them an integral part of the decision-making process on public works investments." The bill would do that by fostering the establishment of "area development districts" nationwide. Public works investments would be made only in those areas which have demonstrated a regional outlook based on sound planning in seeking the money. Significantly, a main witness at last year's Montoya bill hearings (the bill died then for lack of action) was ARC States' Regional Representative, John Whisman. Whisman's credentials as an ardent backer of national regional development go back well over a decade. Concepts developed by him to deal with eastern Kentucky's late 1950s tragedies—multi-county efforts, relying on local elected officials to reflect the people's will— eventually translated into ARC and, Whisman has said "hopefully will go national as well." The Montoya bill may well be the vehicle. Testifying last year, Whisman acknowledged that ARC has perhaps not accomplished what it was supposed to do—provide economic opportunity for Appalachians. Indeed, he said, the problems may well have gotten worse in the 1970's. So what should we do? "To meet these new characteristics of our problems, we need to establish new institutional arrangements in society." He added: "The purpose of the regional development approach" is not primarily "to solve the problems of economic �Hidden Traps of Regionalism 305 lag or unemployment or poverty. Rather, the basic purpose is to solve problems of all kinds, mobilizing our know-how and our funds at all levels of government in a partnership that can forge new and effective solutions." If that is the purpose, what Whisman is effectively talking about is a basic reconfiguration of government. In acknowledging that problems of poverty remain rampant in ARC's Appalachia, he contends that what we really need are new "institutional arrangements/' which, of course, is what ARC was supposed to be in the first place. That reconfiguration is now coming upon us, and we simply have not thought through carefully enough its ramifications upon all strata of society, particularly upon the low-income groups and minorities who themselves are already saying they see it all as a new threat. They may be right. The burden of proof is on the backers of regionalism to prove them wrong. ��RETHINKING THE MODEL ��307 V: A the but A be a to the of an can be a of In a by He points as a of a or ery?" In all the is a and in an of of the In the the the to the of of life of or of us are He the to to the to the if the of of re™ �lf^.:^« f^'.x �A A N, has as a the the to in as the for do of the in the is the is a is is P on the in- be an be a the It of u the as in to has of to be the At the to is the the the in his up to his air to dards. no ii» is aff 24, at �310 Colonialism in Modern America The Japanese have been after the coal, some million and a half tons a year, enough to load 30,000 50-ton railroad cars, or 80 such cars per day. In school we learned that long ago when there were colonies, they shipped raw materials to their mother country and in return provided a market for the mother country's manufactured goods, an arrangement that worked mostly to the advantage of the mother country. The mother country's superior technology and resultant lower costs soon destroyed the colony's traditional native industries. So we ship coal to Japan and in return buy her finished products: steel, cameras, radios, tape recorders, machinery, ships, cars, and motorcycles—a classic colonial relationship. Of course, we can produce some of those finished products ourselves, but they are not competitive in quality or cost. The developing relationship between the U.S. and Japan, I'm postulating (perhaps prematurely), is much like the old relationship between India and Britain, with the Japanese playing their role with far more subtlety than the British. The British ran India with a system of indirect rule, whereby native political institutions were brought into the British structure and under its control. Natives were used to keep other natives in line, and the natives themselves paid for their own policing. In Africa and Asia, the British were successful at this, and in a number of cases were able to keep control after the nominal independence of the countries involved. This is what is often called neo-colonialism. It should also be pointed out that generally in India, Britain did not loot the country directly, but let the wealthy natives keep their wealth and prestige, and did not directly interfere with the country's social structure. Japan's dominance of the United States began at the end of World War II. She got the U.S. to finance the rebuilding of her industrial plant, and, perhaps more importantly, she got the U.S. to forbid her to rearm. This amounted to an agreement by the U.S. to assume the role of defending Japanese interests. Not only do the natives pay for and provide the manpower for their �Appalachia; A Colony Within A Colony? 311 own policing, they also provide both the funds and the manpower to police the mother country's developing neo-empire. We have a mutual security treaty with Japan. We provide the security and they provide the mutual. Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society is of great help in understanding why Japan has been able to neo-colonize the U.S. Technique is more than tools and machinery to Ellul. It encompasses everything which is done for the sake of greater efficiency. Since there is only one best or most efficient way of doing something, technique is totalitarian. Since maximum efficiency is the goal, an aristocracy of technicians arises to determine the one best way. "Planning in modern society," Ellul says, "is the technical method."1 The Japanese have developed an integration of government and the corporate economy, through joint planning and coordination, which most nearly approaches ElluPs model of an advanced technological society (either corporate or socialist): (a) take a firm hold on the economy, (b) manage it on the basis of exact mathematical methods, (c) integrate it into a Promethean society which excludes all chance, (d) centralize it in the frameworks of nation and state (the corporate economy today has no chance of success except as a state system), (e) cause it to assume an aspect of formal democracy to the total exclusion of real democracy, and (f) exploit all possible techniques for controlling men. Insofar as American leaders (corporate and government) realize the gap between Japanese technique and their own, they will move to centralize control and institute planning to a far greater degree than we have yet experienced. Again, all planning is totalitarian. To be carried out, a plan requires at least the threat of coercion. If a person or family is allowed freedom of decision, there is no plan. There are still some significant obstacles in the U.S. to technical progress. The governmental system of checks and balances between Congress, the President, and the courts is inefficient. So is the partial freedom of state and local government from federal control. Corrupt politicians are inefficient, as are a �312 Colonialism in Modern America free press, anti-trust laws, and the ability of citizens to sue government and corporations to block "progress." Thus a small, efficient, tightly controlled, formally democratic island country can effectively exploit a larger, looser, less efficient, more really democratic, continental country. It's the British in India all over again, on a more sophisticated level. Appalachia as a colony within a colony stands in relation to the "advanced," urban areas of the U.S. as the country as a whole stands to Japan. Government and business in the region are less efficient. Non-economic considerations like family and friendship often get in the way here. Short-term profit has yet to give way to efficiency as the basic goal of the economy (or even life), reflecting a rudimentary stage of technology. Some human activities remain valued which are not economic (reducible to a money value), and man, in this "backward" area, remains something more than producing, consuming, economic man. Most strategies for change in Appalachia have been technological strategies, designed in one way or another to "develop" or "modernize" the region. All involve planning by experts. Opposition to these plans, be they for resort development, clear-cutting, dam or road building, for education, health, welfare, or economic development, is seen by the planners as irrational meddling. The plan is rational, be it the plan of the government agency or the plan of radical intellectuals. The complete identity, rather than the resemblance, between corporatism and planning ought to be noted. Corporatism is adapted to a traditional, cultivated, bourgeois mentality; planning to an innovating, proletarian, pseudoscientific mentality. But the attitude of the two is fundamentally the same. And, speaking objectively, the result, insofar as the real structure of human society is concerned, will be identical.^ People are to be manipulated into supporting the plan. Councils, boards, legislatures and the Congress ideally should function as a democratic veneer, which is necessary to give people the illusion that they have some control. �Appalachia: A Colony Within A Colony? 313 True technique will know how to maintain the illusion of liberty, choice, and individuality; but these will have been carefully calculated so that they will be integrated into the mathematical reality merely as appearances. "Development," however, may no longer be possible in Appalachia. The standard of living of middle-class America is now beginning to decline. This is due in part to the new colonial relationship with Japan (i.e., inflation resulting from our having to pay for having fought Japan's war in Vietnam, intense pressures on raw materials markets leading to higher prices, etc.). More fundamental is the fact that the industrial nations of the world are beginning to realize that the natural resources of the world are limited. Donella and Dennis Meadows in The Limits to Growth describe a dynamic model of the world, considering population, industrial output per capita, food per capita, natural resources, and pollution as basic factors. The model is programmed into a computer using historical data from 1900 to 1970 and then projected until the year 2100, assuming "no major change in the physical, economic, or social relationships that have historically governed the development of the world system."5 The result is what the Meadows call overshoot and collapse: Resources are used up; food production rises until all the land is worn out; industrial output rises rapidly and then declines because of starvation. By 2050 industrial output per capita and food per capita are both less than half of what they were in 1900. After numerous other model runs simulating all of the popular remedies to the pollution-population-energy-etc. crisis, the Meadows conclude that the only way to prevent the disaster of overshoot and collapse is to immediately stabilize the world by stabilizing population, setting capital investment equal to capital depreciation, introducing extensive recycling of resources and improved pollution control devices, and increasing the lifetime of all forms of capital. This equilibrium state is sustainable far into the future with an average which is half the present average U.S. income.6 It is thus impossible, considering population growth, arable land, and the finite limits of the earth's resources, to extend the levels of consumption of energy and material goods of the �314 Colonialism in Modern America American suburban middle class to the "poorer" sections of this country, let alone to the majority of the world's people who live in "under-developed" countries. The suburban middle classes are precisely those who have been most reduced to producingconsuming, economic men, valuing themselves through money and not likely to give it up. The Meadows maintain that only through long-term planning can the equilibrium model be attained and disastrous collapse avoided. The sooner this planning begins (and the mandatory implementation of it), the less overtly authoritarian it can be. Since the model shows overshoot before the collapse, it is too late to do anything once the crisis is widely perceived. That is, you don't realize that the river is badly polluted until the fish are dead. Then it's too late to do much about those fish. As long as major decisions in the world are made by those whose primary concern is that their industrial enterprises and national economies shall continue to grow, nothing will be done to move toward equilibrium. To return again to Ellul: "Anything and everything which technique is able to produce is produced and accepted by consumers"7; and "everything which is technique is necessarily used as soon as it is available, without distinction of good and evil."8 Most books about Appalachia tell us that the white settlers of the region were drawn largely from the prisons of England and Scotland and were rough bitter victims of the enclosure movement that was destroying medieval society in Britain. Some were debtors, some thieves, and some may have been Luddites. Trampled on at home and then again in the coastal plains of America, these outcasts went west to the mountains and stayed there to escape civilized society. They wanted no part of the civilized free market, wage labor, law, or class system. They valued most their freedom and independence. They were more than economic men and did not have to prove themselves through wealth. But they survived. There are only two economic systems, according to Ellul. The first exploits technique (efficiency, the one best way, economic man, etc.), while the second "ascribes the chief place to nature."9 This second orientation resembles what some middle-class writers about Appalachia (with technologized �Appalachia: A Colony Within A Colony? 315 minds) have called fatalism. This understanding of the limits of man and the nature of the world, whether religious or not, is more in touch with the reality of the world as reflected in the Meadows' model than is "non-fatalistic" technological understanding which presumes that man can and should control nature. Since the Industrial Revolution, westernized man has had to choose between freedom and wealth. Most have not understood the choice and have thought both were possible. Many have not perceived their loss of freedom. The first settlers knew from bitter experience and chose a real independence. There are many families in the mountains today who remember the old ways of surviving and are relatively free of technological values. They are people for whom economic activity is still a means and ihe end of life. A strategy for survival in the Appalachia region in the face of the interrelated energyfood-population-pollution crisis would seek to support these families and help them protect themselves from "development." The consequence of all "development" programs is to diminish the independence (hence the ability to survive) of the mountain family. All, no matter how well meaning and whether in health, education, economic development, or whatever, leave the family more dependent on outside institutions and more at the mercy of experts. Many of the social programs of the '60's (welfare rights, Head Start, medicare, etc.) had the unintended effect of luring people into an increasingly manipulative, totalitarian system and robbing them of their dignity and values. "No matter how liberal the state, it is obliged by the mere fact of technical advance to extend its powers in every way."10 Appalachia is a colony of technological society, first American and now also Japanese. Within the next 50-70 years, technological society will become increasingly totalitarian and manipulative. It quite possibly will collapse. Self-sufficient families and communities, knowing that nature (God) is greater than man, can survive and retain their independence. Suburbanites, thinking that man can conquer nature (God), being expert in one or two fields and unknowing and dependent in most areas of life, unable to buy gasoline, electricity or food with their money, may perish in great numbers. �316 Colonialism in Modern America Colonialism is an attack upon the land, the culture, and the soul of a people. The three are tightly bound. Losses in one affect the others. Families and communities can resist (passively or actively) or give in (gradually or quickly), disintegrating into a collection of individual consumers of mass-produced identities. Seeing Appalachia as a colony is much more than seeing who controls the profits from the coal mined in the region. It is rather seeing a process of robbing people of their family, community, land, independence, and soul^robbery by people who mean well, and who know that they do it for your own good. �Appalachia: A Colony Within A Colony? 317 NOTES 1 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York, 1964), p. 184. 2 Ibid.t p. 186. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.,p. 139. 5 Ibid., p. 124. 6 Ibid.t p. 165. 7 Ibid., p. 93. s lbid., p. 99. 9 Ibid.,p. 186. w lbid., p. 235. �This page intentionally left blank �A OF AN OR by S. a to In the of the the In of of can be In policy to the was of and the of an as as the for the In In the the and of and the of as an to be My as a of the of by Is in the of is to the a an in the I to J S, is 011 the of « of the of He the �320 Colonialism in Modern America sible grounds for a synthesis, and argue for the alternative formulation suggested above. The Subculture of Poverty Model The subculture of poverty model identifies the internal deficiencies of the lower-class subculture as the cause of the problem. Oscar Lewis is the social scientist most closely identified with this model, and the most widely read exposition of the model applied to Appalachia is JackWeller's Yesterday's People, which borrows an analytic framework from Herbert Cans.1 The subculture of poverty model suggests remedial programs of education, social casework, and clinical psychology. Studies of Appalachian culture in these terms include works by psychiatrist David Looff, social worker Norman Polansky, and sociologist Richard Ball.2 The work on Appalachia in the subculture of poverty tradition has a very limited validity at best because of three problems that the authors fail to confront: deficient research methodology, a blurring of community and social class diversity in the region, and a lack of historical perspective and specification. The methodological approach in the works of Weller, Looff, and Polansky, for example, imports sociological or psychiatric categories and focuses on the pathological. They overgeneralize from problem families to the culture of one or more social classes. They fail to distinguish between the traditional Southern Appalachian subculture and a contemporary subculture of poverty. The limitations of these scientific, clinical classification systems are particularly evident in comparison to the work of such writers as Robert Coles, John Fetterman, Tony Dunbar, and Kathy Kahn, whose humanistic method uses their subjects' own words to characterize Appalachian life-worlds.^ Their descriptions of individuals and families manage to capture the strengths as well as the shortcomings of mountaineers and the diversity of personality types within some common subcultural themes. These accounts of the contradictions in the lives and outlooks of mountain people bear out Helen Lewis' suggestion that many Appalachians are in fact bi-cultural; they take part in the traditional subculture in family and neighborhood life, and in the mainstream culture through employment, formal education, media entertainment, and contact with public agencies. �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 321 The subculture of poverty model in general has been subjected to devastating criticism.4 In the Appalachian case, sociologist Dwight Billings has shown the model to be of little value in explaining the lack of economic development in the mountain section of North Carolina and the contrasting industrialization of the piedmont, for example. Ironically, it was just when the distinctiveness of the Southern Appalachian traditional subculture was fading that the subculture of poverty model was popularized and applied to the region.5 For all the controversy generated in the debate over the subculture of poverty, this model had less policy impact on Appalachia than one might expect. The model did help to rationalize such national programs as Project Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the great expansion of social services that took place in the 1960's. But the subculture of poverty model was not a major influence on the state and federal planners who devised the Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965. The Regional Development Model Although the literature on development includes disciplines from social psychology to social ecology, the most influential stream derives from neoclassical economics as amended by central place theory.6 The resulting regional development model is concerned with providing economic and social overhead capital, training people for skills for new industrial and service jobs, facilitating migration, and promoting the establishment or relocation of privately-owned industries through a growth center strategy. A modernizing elite is seen as the agent of the developmental process. The major attempt to apply the model within the United States is the work of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and its associated programs. Niles Hansen is probably the best-known academic proponent of this approach.7 The Appalachian regional development advocates have an academic base in the Departments of Sociology, Economics and Agricultural Economics at West Virginia University, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Tennessee, and such related applied research institutes as the Appalachian Center at WVU, the Center for Developmental Change at UK, and the Appalachian Resources Project at UT. More significantly, this model has a political base in the multi-county Local Develop- �322 Colonialism in Modern America ment Districts established under the ARC program. The LDDs serve primarily as a mechanism for arriving at consensus among regional elites. Through the dual federal-state structure of the ARC, the interests of regional and national elites are reconciled. With its emphasis on mainstream economic theory and the technical aspects of development, the regional development model lays claim to being a scientific, value-free, and non-controversial approach. As such, it is an effective means of providing additional resources to the region without affecting the existing structure of resource control. Actions taken by regional and national planners are defended as technical decisions, rather than political choices among alternative courses of development. The most important decisions are the "non-decisions": the questions that are never raised and the subjects that never make the public agenda.8 Examples include public ownership of the region's natural resources and worker or community-owned and controlled industry.^ The Internal Colonialism Model The issues of power and privilege in Appalachia are never faced squarely by the subculture of poverty and regional development advocates. In reaction to this obvious shortcoming, radical academics and activists looked for a model that emphasized inequality and exploitation. They hit upon the internal colonialism model for reasons that had more to do with the focus of the New Left in the late 1960's—imperialism abroad and oppression of racial minorities at home—than the appropriateness of the model to the Appalachian situation. As the Appalachian radicals apply the internal colonialism model, it has been used to examine the process by which dominant outside industrial interests established control and continue to prevent autonomous development of the subordinate internal colony. The model suggests the need for an anti-colonial movement and a radical restructuring of society with a redistribution of resources to the poor and powerless. Dependency and Neocolonialism The internal colonialism model has emerged from a back- �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 323 ground of the history and theories of colonialism and imperialism and is most directly related to the theories of neocolonialism and dependency that have been developed in the post-World War II period. Dependency theory has been developed primarily by radical economists and sociologists concerned with Latin America, while the theories of neocolonialism and imperialism have been more concerned with Asia and Africa, or the Third World as a whole.10 A vital contribution of the dependency model is the notion of the "Infrastructure of dependency," the structures internal to the dependent country including industrial organization, patterns of urbanization, and social classes. In the exposition by Suzanne Bodenheimer, two examples of the infrastructure of dependency are the patterns of dependent industrialization and the formation of clientele social classes. Characteristics of dependent industrialization include foreign domination of the most dynamic sectors of industry, increasing competitive advantage for foreign monopolistic enterprises over local firms, and the introduction of advanced, capital-intensive technology without regard to resulting unemployment. Clientele classes have a "dual position as partners of metropolitan interests, yet dominant elites within their own societies." They may include not only the industrial bourgeoisie but also the state bureaucracy and other sectors of the middle class when their positions are tied to foreign interests. The infrastructure of dependency is thus "the functional equivalent of a formal colonial apparatus," but insofar as it is internalized and institutionalized "much more difficult to overcome."11 Internal Colonialism The success of the anticolonial movements in the Third World following World War II has undoubtedly contributed to the popularity of referring to a variety of exploitative situations within both developing and advanced industrial countries as internal or domestic colonialism. Through conceptual confusion or carelessness, internal colonialism has been used to designate situations of stratification by class, race, ethnicity, or geography, alone or in various combinations. It is also used to describe absentee industrial ownership, although this is a characteristic feature of uneven and polarized capitalist development.12 In- �324 Colonialism in Modern America eluded among such internal colonies have been the U.S. South, northern New England, the northern Great Lakes region, the Southwest, the "Celtic periphery" of England, southern Italy, and so on. 1 ^ One explanation may be that the vocabulary of colonization is more comfortable than that of class conflict, and regional or ethnic chauvinism is more acceptable than talk of socialism. Internal colonialism is a useful concept if defined in a rigorous sense rather than used as an all-inclusive catchword. Two precise definitions with varying degrees of restrictiveness are advanced by Pablo Gonzalez-Casanova and Pierre van den Berghe. Gonzalez-Casanova seeks to distinguish internal colonialism from a class structure with a geographic or racial aspect: Internal colonialism corresponds to a structure of social relations based on domination and exploitation among culturally heterogeneous, distinct groups. . . .It is the result of an encounter between two races, cultures, or civilizations, whose genesis and evolution occurred without any mutual contact up to one specific moment. . . . The colonial structure and internal colonialism are distinguished from the class structure since colonialism is not only a relation of exploitation of the workers by the owners of raw materials or of production and their collaborators, but also a relation of domination and exploitation of a total population (with its distinct classes, proprietors, workers) by another population which also has distinct classes (proprietors and workers).^ In short, the Gonzllez-Casanova definition requires a dual class structure: two class systems, one dominant and the other subordinate, each of which may be differentiated to a greater or lesser degree. This appears to be a useful minimal definition of internal colonialism, although it is broad enough to include a variety of dominant-subordinate group relationships. The most restrictive definition of internal colonialism is developed by van den Berghe in a recent work. His view, in part a reaction to the overly broad use of the term, is worth quoting at length: In my opinion, the concept of internal colonialism, when �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 325 so diluted, loses all of its use for purposes of social science analysis. I shall therefore propose to treat internal colonialism as an ideal type with the following characteristics: 1) Rule of one ethnic group (or coalition of such groups) over other such groups living within the continuous boundaries of a single state. 2) Territorial separation of the subordinate ethnic groups into "homelands," "native reserves," and the like, with land tenure rights distinct from those applicable to members of the dominant group. 3) Presence of an internal government within a government especially created to rule the subject peoples, with a special legal status ascribed to the subordinate groups. . . 4) Relations of economic inequality in which subject peoples are relegated to positions of dependency and inferiority in the division of labor and the relations of production. Such a definition of internal colonialism excludes mere regional differences in economic development, mere class differences in the system of production, and, a fortiori, differences based on age, sex, slave status, caste, sexual behavior (e.g., homosexuality), physical handicaps, and countless others. The usefulness of the concept to understand the situation of a group is a function of that group's approximation to the characteristics of the ideal type. For instance, in the United States, internal colonialism describes the position of Amerindians quite well, of Chicanos somewhat, of blacks poorly, of Appalachian whites hardly at all, and of women, old people, homosexuals and convicts only by the most fanciful stretch of the academic imagination. This is not to say that some of the groups excluded from my definition of internal colonialism may not be as badly or worse off than the denizens of the internal colonies. Their position is fundamentally different, however, and, hence, the internal colonial model is a poor one to understand their predicament. Internal colonialism is but one of many ways of getting the short end of the stick.-^ Gonzalez-Casanova's criterion of a dual class structure appears to include points one and four of van den Berghe's ideal type. �326 Colonialism in Modern America The latter would also require territorial separation and a special governing unit for full correspondence to the internal colonialism model. I find it most useful to adopt a definition between Gonzalez-Casanova and van den Berghe, thus requiring economic exploitation, a dual class structure based on ethnic differences, within one or more distinct geographic regions. In other words, I would place internal colonialism as a special case within the theory of dependent capitalist development. Internal Colonialism Applied to Appalachia I can find no use of the colonialism analogy to the Appalachians prior to the early 1960's. During the unionization battles of the 1930's, the Left press emphasized themes of exploitation and class conflict along classic Marxian lines in their articles about the Appalachian coalfields.16 Only after the internal colonial model had been applied to blacks did writers on Appalachia begin to speak in terms of colonialism. In his best selling 1962 study Night Comes to the Cumberlands, Harry Caudill makes only a passing reference to colonialism; by 1965 he begins to use the internal colonial designation.17 The theme was quickly picked up by activists and radical intellectuals in the Central Appalachian area, particularly the group associated with the Peoples' Appalachian Research Collective and its journal, Peoples' Appalachia. Helen Lewis and her associates have attempted a detailed application to Appalachia of Blauner's model of the process of internal colonization of black Americans. I find the application of Blauner's model of internal colonialism, broad as it is, to Appalachia to be strained at some key points. The parallel to "forced, involuntary entry" by the colonizers is nowhere near as strong as the case of enslaved blacks from Africa or the conquered Native American tribes or the Mexican people of the Southwest. In the elaborated version of his argument, Blauner distinguishes between "colonized and immigrant minorities" and suggests that the circumstances of entry of white European ethnic immigrant groups is different in character from that of blacks and possibly other people of color in the United States. The situation of Appalachian people is clearly a third variant if they are to be treated as a minority at all; the mountaineers were an early settler group established for �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 327 sixty to a hundred years before the expansion of industrial capitalism into the region. Blacks and immigrant ethnic groups have played an important role in the development of the Southern Appalachian coal industry, particularly in West Virginia, but the focus of the Appalachian internal colonialism theorists has not been on such groups.18 The deception and fraud used in Appalachia by the vanguard of land, timber, and mineral agents do not appear to differ in kind from those techniques used generally by capitalists and their agents throughout the country in the period of industrial expansion. On the question of "administration by representatives of the dominant power/' the application of Blauner's internal colonialism model to Appalachia suffers from his emphasis on "police colonialism/' the direct application of force by members of the dominant group. Blauner has not put enough emphasis on the neocolonial mechanism of an indigenous stratum of officials ruling in the interests of the dominant group. Helen Lewis suggests that the study of such local elite groups in the mountains is of great importance,1^ but this conclusion and suggestions of what mechanisms to look for flow more readily from the more general dependency model than from the narrower internal colonialism model. The parallel to "racism as a principle of social domination" really breaks down in the Appalachian case. There may be prejudice against "hillbillies," but it is essentially based on bias against the lower classes, not all the people of the region.20 There is no parallel to the dual class structures required by Gonzales-Casanova's definition of internal colonialism. Mountaineers are able to "pass" into mainstream America both through migration and, for some, through integration into the business elite in the mountains. 21 White Appalachians generally have a potential for social mobility not matched by racial minorities. The traditional Appalachian subculture may be becoming a museum piece, but this is a situation far from white Appalachians as a group being accorded the near-caste position of some racial minorities in the United States. Applying an additional characteristic of internal colonialism from van den Berghe's definition, I can find no evidence of "an internal government within a government especially created to rule the subject peoples." The Appalachian Regional Commis- �328 Colonialism in Modern America sion is not a functional counterpart of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The people of Appalachia have no distinct legal status distinguishing them from other residents of the United States, as Native Americans do in some instances. Appalachia appears to provide a very poor fit to any strict definition of internal colonialism. Cultural Hegemony and Capitalist Domination Much of the attraction of the internal colonialism model, including its application to Appalachia, derives from its powerful analysis of the destruction of indigenous culture in the process of establishing and maintaining domination over the colonized group. Religion and education can play a major role in the destruction of traditional culture. The missionary movement in Appalachia can be seen as aiding, often inadvertently, the process of domination, as Lewis, Kobak and Johnson have described. James Branscome and Mike Clark have brought this analysis up to date by examining the effect of schooling on Appalachian culture in the current period. These arguments hit the mark, but is cultural domination a distinctive feature of internal colonialism rather than class exploitation? A common and understandable misconception, derived in part from the stress on economic determinism in vulgar Marxist analysis, is that culture plays an insignificant part in the structure of class domination under capitalism. The colonial model is seen as distinctive by Blauner for its emphasis on this ignored area: ". . .the colonial attack on culture is more than a matter of economic factors such as labor recruitment and special exploitation. The colonial situation differs from the class situation of capitalism precisely in the importance of culture as an instrument of domination."22 Orthodox Marxism has been particularly weak in its analysis of culture, and Blauner misses the importance of ideological hegemony in the establishment and maintenance of capitalist domination. For the beginnings of an adequate theory of the role of culture in capitalist societies we must turn to the Western Marxist tradition and such writers as Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School theorists. The concept of cultural hegemony derives from Gramsci and emphasizes the obtaining of consent rather than the �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 329 use of force in the perpetuation of class structures. Gwynn Williams provides a useful summary of Gramsci's notion of hegemony: "an order in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit all taste, morality, customs, religious and political principles, and all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connotation."2^ xhe destruction of indigenous culture may be more conspicuous in the colonial situation, but a comparable process works to erode all ethnic and working-class cultures in advanced capitalist countries, a process which has perhaps advanced furthest in the United States.24 A few radical economists have attempted to avoid the problems of the colonialism analogy by returning to a traditional Marxian analysis of Appalachia in the context of capitalist exploitation and have suggested the fruitfulness of a longitudinal study of the removal of surplus value from the region over time. But this focus on economic relationships loses the valuable emphasis of the internal colonialism model on the role of cultural domination and the contribution of the dependency formulation on the * Infrastructures of dependency." Perhaps the best formulation of a research project from the perspective of radical economics has been made by Richard Simon, who reviews the historical development of the West Virginia economy in the context of dependency theory, suggesting relationships with the social and political structures of that state and with the introduction of federal government programs in the 1960's.25 It is time to synthesize the best of the models so far put forward and develop a more accurate and comprehensive theory of poverty and underdevelopment in Central Appalachia. Appalachia within an Advanced Capitalist Society It is tempting to characterize the subculture of poverty, regional development, and internal colonialism models as, respectively, conservative, liberal, and radical models of barriers to social change. While this would contain a substantial amount of truth, the description would be misleading in one respect. From a perspective that I will develop briefly here, the three models are not, strictly speaking, mutually exclusive alternatives. �330 Colonialism in Modern America Interpreted in terms of a framework developed by Jurgen Habermas, they represent different dimensions of social existence. A Framework for Synthesis For Habermas, there are three fundamental conditions or media through which social systems are maintained: interaction, work, and power or domination. All human societies use these means to resolve the problems of preserving life and culture. Corresponding to each of these media are the human "interests" in mutual understanding, technical control, and "emancipation from seemingly 'natural' constraint."2^ A solution to the problems of Appalachian poverty and underdevelopment would have to be concerned with each of the three modes of culture, technique, and domination. Habermas' distinction provides a basis for viewing cultural adaptation, technical development, and redistribution of power as potentially complementary aspects of social development. Our models, therefore, are not merely three selected from a long list of possible models of poverty and underdevelopment. They represent fundamental dimensions of social life and may well be exhaustive of the possible alternatives if stated in a sufficiently general form (which none of the three current models are). The subculture of poverty model can thus be seen as only one part of a broader framework of explanations rooted in the tradition of cultural idealism. Affirmative cultural approaches toward Southern Appalachia, exemplified by William G. Frost and John C. and Olive D. Campbell, are the obverse side of the coin from the pejorative tradition. Although they come to opposite conclusions about the virtue of the traditional mountain subculture, they are contending on the same turf. The regional development model, from this synthetic perspective, is seen as resting within the contemporary technocratic image and ideology of science. As John Friedmann points out, the regionalism movement of the 1930's, as personified by Howard Odum and others, was rooted in cultural idealism. The new regionalism of the 1960's, embodied in the ARC, discarded this grounding in favor of the technical reason of neoclassical economic theory.27 The internal colonialism model is, similarly, one component of a broad range of theories that contribute to a critique of power and domination. �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 331 This synthetic view helps explain why writers widely considered to be champions of a certain model of Appalachian underdevelopment also draw on other models. Caudill, for example, is best known for his description of the Cumberland Plateau as an example of colonialism, but in Night Comes to the Cumberland^ he also paints a pejorative picture of the subculture of the eastern Kentucky poor. In one essay Caudill appears to embrace many aspects of the developmental model, while in his most recent work he has re-emphasized a genetic explanation. From the other side, Weller is best known for his subculture of poverty characterization in Yesterday's People, yet he has recently described Appalachia as "America's mineral colony."28 Such examples can be viewed as cases of inconsistency, confusion, or conversion. They can also be seen, at least in part, as attempts to grapple with the complexity of analyzing the problem of Appalachian development. To suggest that a dialectic of mutual interaction takes place among the modes of culture, technique, and power is, of course, not to argue that each of our three models of Appalachian underdevelopment is to be taken with equal seriousness. I have suggested that the history of the Appalachian region is best understood in the context of industrial capitalist development. The internal colonialism model raises important questions about wealth, power, and domination without offering a satisfactory characterization of the situation of Central Appalachia. My synthesis of the three models leads to the conclusion that Appalachian poverty and underdevelopment need to be placed within a broader critique of domination. From this perspective, Central Appalachia must be analyzed in the context of advanced capitalism in the United States. In some instances (analyzing the role of the Japanese steel industry in providing capital for opening new coal mines in the region, for example), we may have to expand our horizon to the framework of the world capitalist system. In a recent work Habermas formulates a model of advanced capitalism, which he characterizes by two features: the "process of economic concentration"—the growth of national and multinational corporations—and the "supplementation and partial replacement of the market mechanism by state intervention."2^ Habermas goes on to analyze advanced capitalist societies in terms of their economic, administrative (state), and legitimation �332 Colonialism in Modern America systems and the resulting class structures. Applying a similar analysis will contribute to a deeper understanding of the position of Central Appalachia. The Economy There is growing agreement among economists critical of neoclassical theory that a three-sector model is necessary to characterize the advanced capitalist economy in the United States. John Kenneth Galbraith delineates the market system, the planning system, and the state. As a rough demarcation, Galbraith's planning system consists of the largest "one thousand manufacturing, merchandising, transportation, power and financial corporations producing approximately half of all the goods and services not provided by the state/' Making up the market system are the remaining twelve million firms which produce the other half of the non-state output of goods and services.30 The market system includes farmers, small retail and service establishments, construction and small manufacturing firms, and the arts. Whereas the workings of the market system bear some resemblance to the model of competition embodied in classical economics, the planning system is oligopolistic and its stability depends on the intervention of the state. James O'Connor has developed a similar model with a much deeper analysis of governmental activity. O'Connor also divides private capital into two sectors: a competitive sector (roughly parallel to Galbraith's market system) and a monopoly sector (somewhat smaller than Galbraith's planning system). O'Connor's state sector includes two categories: "production of goods and services organized by the state itself and production organized by industries under contract with the state."31 Approximately one-third of the labor force in the United States is employed in each of these three sectors. The monopoly and state-contract sectors tend to be capital-intensive industries, while the competitive and state service sectors tend to be labor intensive. As a consequence, wages tend to be high in the monopoly and state sectors and low in the competitive sector. Unions tend to be strong in the monopoly and state sectors and weak in the competitive sector. Both product and labor markets tend to be unstable and irregular in the competitive sector, a circumstance which has fostered the development of segmented labor mar- �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 333 kets.32 State sector expenditures, in O'Connor's model, are divided into two categories, social capital and social expenses, with social capital being of two kinds, social investment and social consumption. This distinction between social investment and social consumption roughly parallels Niles Hansen's distinction between economic and social overhead capital. Social investment, in O'Connor's terms, "consists of projects and services that increase the productivity of a given amount of labor-power and, other factors being equal, increase the rate of profit." Examples include government-subsidized roads, railroads, and industrial parks. Social consumption "consists of projects and services that lower the reproduction costs of labor and, other factors being equal, increase the rate of profit." Social consumption expenditures fall into two categories: goods and services consumed collectively and social insurance. Examples of the first include school, recreation and medical facilities, and the second, Social Security, workman's compensation, unemployment insurance, and health insurance. Most of the programs developed through the Appalachian Regional Commission are thus in the areas of social investment and the first, or collective, category of social consumption. Finally, social expenditures "consist of projects and services which are required to maintain social harmony—to fulfill the state's legitimization' function. They are not even indirectly productive." O'Connor includes welfare and military programs in this category.3 3 This model of the advanced capitalist economy in the United States has some obvious implications for an analysis of the Central Appalachian region, particularly in regard to the coal industry. The coal industry is unusual, though not unique, in having both substantial monopolistic and competitive sectors. Manufacturing and mining industries are generally concentrated in the monopolistic sector, while the competitive sector is primarily composed of small factories and services. The coal industry thus offers an opportunity for a comparative study of these two sectors within a single industry. Topics for investigation include relative rates between the two sectors of capital investment, wage levels, productivity, technological innovation, unionization, and influence on the legislative, administrative, and judicial institutions of the state that affect the coal industry. Contrasting business ideologies between the two sectors need to �3 34 Colonialism in Modern America be explored. Since Central Appalachia contains the largest concentration of firms in the competitive sector of the coal industry, it is a particularly appropriate location for a study of the two sectors. The Role of the State The institutions that compose the state, to take Ralph Miliband's definition, are the executive, the legislative, the administrative (civil service bureaucracy), the military and police, the judiciary, and the subcentral governmental units. This system is part of a broader political system, which includes political parties, pressure groups, and a variety of other institutions not defined as political, such as corporations, churches, and mass media. A crucial question is the relationship between the state (and state elite) and the dominant economic class. Miliband recalls that "it is obviously true that the capitalist class, as a class, does not actually 'govern.' One must go back to isolated instances of the early history of capitalism, such as the commercial patriciates of cities like Venice and Lubeck, to discover direct and sovereign rule by businessmen."34 Contemporary analysts of the role of the state in advanced capitalism, including Miliband, O'Connor, and Nicos Poulantzas, 35 emphasize the relative autonomy of the state system. From their viewpoint, the familiar statement of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels that "the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" has been vulgarized. As Miliband comments, "The notion of common affairs assumes the existence of particular ones; and the notion of the whole bourgeoisie implies the existence of separate elements which make up that whole. This being the case, there is an obvious need for an institution of the kind they refer to, namely the state; and the state cannot meet this need without enjoying a certain degree of autonomy."^ But the summary statement of Marx and Engels is still too abbreviated; the state reflects not simply the common interests of the whole bourgeoisie but a compromise between those interests and the interests of subordinate classes. The balance of the compromise depends in part on the level and extent of political struggle by the subordinate classes. �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 335 In a recent work that draws on Miliband, Poulantazas, and O'Connor, Ian Gough develops the role of state expenditures as concessions to working class struggles. The expansion of social services and social insurance since the Depression of the 1930's has meant that an increasing amount of the compensation of the labor force has come in the form of social wages. Indeed, "the strength of working-class pressure/* he writes, "can roughly be gauged by the comprehensiveness and the level of the social benefits." Although such programs are tailored and modified to accommodate the interests of the dominant class, Gough notes: It is essential to distinguish their concrete historical origins from the ongoing function they play within that particular social formation. Social policies originally the product of class struggle will, in the absence of further struggle, he absorbed and adapted to benefit the interests of the dominant classes. On the other hand, whatever their particular function for capital at any time, the fact that social services are also an integral part of the real wage level of the working class means that they are fought for in much the same way as money wages, in economic and political class struggle.^ In a similar fashion, the class distribution of the burden of taxation also affects the real wages of the working class. This recognition of the importance of social services, income transfer programs, and tax policy helps us understand and situate such social movements in the Central Appalachian region as the Black Lung Associations and their fights for workmen's compensation, clinical treatment programs, expanded benefits from the UMWA Health and Retirement Funds, and the severance tax on coal. It also illuminates the role of the federal bureaucracy and judicial system in the reform of the UMWA and its Health and Retirement Funds, the struggle for mine safety and health, and the expansion of a variety of benefits from social security to food stamps to community mental health services. The Legitimation System Habermas argues that formal democratic institutions which �336 Colonialism in Modern America allow universal adult voting in elections may obtain sufficient "diffuse mass loyalty" in the absence of substantive participation in public policy formulation if two conditions are present: "civic privatism" and an ideology that justifies elite rule. Civic privatism involves a withdrawal from the public realm into "career, leisure, and consumption." Both the "theory of democratic elitism" favored by mainstream American political science and the mystique of technical expertise promoted by theorists of public administration serve to legitimate the absence of public participation in political decision making.^ 8 Among the working class in Central Appalachia, legitimation of the political system appears to be weak at the level of specific institutions yet remains strong at a diffuse level ("patriotism"). Cynicism about public officials abounds, with ample justification. The retreat to privatism is possibly facilitated by the extended family systems, which may provide sources for satisfaction even in the absence of substantial material comforts. Yet agencies of government frequently seek legitimation through a rhetoric of democratic participation. For example, TVA's claims of "grass roots democracy" disguised a policy of conceding the farm and related rural development programs to the local agricultural elites in exchange for a free hand for federal planners in public electrical power generation.^ 9 xhe ARC uses the Local Development Districts as the "local building blocks" of a program of federal-state cooperation. In Central Appalachia, such claims have seldom received an affirmative embrace from the working class, but they have met with acquiescence more often than active opposition. The Class Structure A common rhetorical excess is the description of the class structure of Central Appalachia as polarized into the wealthy and the poor. For Harry Caudill, there are "two Appalachias. . .side by side and yet strangers to each other. One, the Appalachia of Power and Wealth,. . .headquartered in New York and Philadelphia, is allied to mighty banks and insurance companies. . . .The second Appalachia is a land devastated. . . .Its people are the old, the young who are planning to leave and the legions of crippled and sick."40 The reality, of course, is far more complicated. The question is not merely one of polemical �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 3 37 license. Any strategy for social change must make a thorough assessment of the potential interest in change of the various class groupings in the region. It is generally agreed that advanced capitalism has led to a proliferation of class and occupational groupings between the classic proletariat (the industrial working class) and the bourgeoisie of monopoly capital. The expansion of service industries with its accompanied increase in grey-collar and white-collar employment has been one aspect of this increase. The development of what Galbraith calls the "educational and scientific estate" is another. Despite the increased level of average per capita income, the distribution of shares of income and wealth has changed little in the past forty years. The "myth of the middle class" has been dispelled by careful analysis of confusing census occupational categories, and the continuing existence of a "working-class majority" has been established.41 In Central Appalachia, the expansion of state expenditures has helped create sizable intermediate class groupings of public workers (in education, local government, and public services) and workers in industries heavily subsidized by public funds (health services particularly). Unionization efforts have been made recently among municipal and hospital workers. These elements of the "new working-class" have taken their places alongside such long-established groups as coal miners, workers in small factories, small farmers, country merchants, county-seat retailers, bankers, professionals, independent coal operators, and managers for the nationally-based coal companies in the monopolistic sector, in addition to household workers, the welfare poor, and others outside the standard labor force. The class structure is obviously complex, and its changes need to be analyzed over time, particularly in relation to changes in the coal industry and the growth of state expenditures. Radicals must learn to paint portraits of the region in which a variety of working people can recognize themselves. The Internal Periphery In a market economy, certain regions within a country will experience economic rise or decline in response to such circumstances as demographic changes, technological advances, and the �338 Colonialism in Modern America depletion of resources. On this the theorists of regional growth, urban hierarchies, and uneven capitalist development are agreed. As the core-periphery distinction is presently used by several schools of economic thought, it seems reasonable to me to apply the term peripheral to such regions within advanced capitalist countries as Appalachia which share many of the characteristics of underdevelopment, poverty, and dependency found in the peripheral countries of the Third World. Certainly the term is a more appropriate analogy than internal colony, which, as I have illustrated, should be restricted to a special case. Immanuel Wallerstein has recently begun developing a more rigorous theory of the relationship of core and peripheral countries in the capitalist world economy and has elaborated an important intermediate case, that of the semi-peripheral countries (a distinction that corresponds in part to the levels of development within the Third World countries).42 In Wallerstein's view, the semi-peripheral countries perform two important functions for the capitalist world system, one political and one political and economic. The political function is to avoid a sharp polarization into rich and poor countries that would foster an alliance among the poor nations. The intermedite sector develops a third set of interests based on its aim of making it into the core. The political-economic function of the semi-periphery is to provide an outlet for capital investment from core countries in low-wage industrial production. The analogy between peripheral countries in the world system and peripheral regions within core countries obviously should not be pushed too far. As John Friedman points out, there are important differences between regions and countries, and between poor countries and poor regions in rich countries.4 ^ The most important difference is that countries have a relatively greater degree of closure in their boundaries. Through the use of tariff barriers, control over investments, and other means, countries can achieve a relative degree of insulation from the world economy. Constitutional and political limitations on the restraint of commerce prevent any state within the United States (much less multi-state regions without separate political authority) from following similar policies of restricting trade, investment, or population movements. These qualifications noted, Wallerstein*s three-tiered system �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 339 may find an analogue within advanced capitalist countries. Regionalization and regionalism, the economic and ideological manifestations of peripheral status, may well join the racial, ethnic, and sexual aspects of the division of labor as functional barriers to class polarization of conflict over inequality.44 The possibility of attaining semi-peripheral status may preclude a strong alliance of one region with another worse off. We see evidence of this in the successful move of the Northern and Southern Appalachian regions to standard semi-peripheral status within the United States while Central Appalachia remains behind. Given the general "fiscal crisis of the state," the federal government seems reluctant to commit resources to the elimination of regional inequality—the elevation to semi-peripheral status of all internal peripheral regions. The executive branch has resisted attempts of the Congress to expand the Title V regional commissions in the manner of the ARC. Peripheral regions remain functional for the system of advanced capitalism in the United States much in the way that poverty in general has positive functions. 45 Conclusion Analogies are valuable in social analysis insofar as they summarize and illuminate certain features of the subject under investigation. In this sense the analogy between the situation of Central Appalachia and that of colonized countries has been stimulating and fruitful. It has focused attention on the acquisition of the raw materials of the region by outside corporate interests and on the exploitation of the local work force and community at large resulting from the removal of the region's natural resources for the benefit of absentee owners. But analogies, while providing insights into some aspects of reality, can obscure or distort others. A loose analogy is no substitute, in the long run, for a precise theory that can lead to more detailed investigations. In this sense the internal colonialism model applied to Central Appalachia needs to be superceded by a model of peripheral regions within an advanced capitalist society. The question is more than academic. At issue are the goals and strategy of a movement for social change. Writers using the internal colonialism model have been ambiguous about what solution is appropriate for Appalachian problems. Taking the �340 Colonialism in Modern America term "colony" in its strongest sense, that of a suppressed nation, would prescribe an Appalachian nationalism aiming at secession and an independent nation-state. No one has proposed such a solution, although a weaker version—a state of Appalachia—has been mentioned.46 Nor have many seriously suggested that the region would be better off if all the coal companies were owned by the local elite of "hillbilly millionaires"—a sort of bourgeois decolonization—instead of the national and international energy corporations, although an exclusive focus on absentee ownership might lead to that conclusion. If the heart of the problem is defined as private ownership of the coal industry, then the possibility of public ownership, perhaps even limited to a regional basis, is suggested.47 If the problem is defined as capitalist relations of production generally, then the alternative—some form of socialism—takes on a dimension that goes far beyond the nationalization or Appalachianization of the coal industry alone. It is this challenge of defining socialist goals and strategies that is presented by the model of peripheral regions within an advanced capitalist society. �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 341 NOTES ^Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez (New York: Random House, 1961), pp. xxiv-xxvii; Jack E. Weller, Yesterday's People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1965); and Herbert J. Cans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of ItalianAmericans (New York: Free Press, 1962). H. Looff, Appalachians Children: The Challenge of Mental Health (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1971); Norman A. Polansky, Robert D. Borgman, and Christine DeSaix, Roots of Futility (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1972); Richard A. Ball, "New Premises for Planning in Appalachia," Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 2 (Fall 1974), 92101. ^See Robert Coles, Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers, especially Chs. 5, 6, 9 and 12, and The South Goes North, Ch. 6 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972); John Fetterman, Stinking Creek (New York: Dutton, 1967); Tony Dunbar, Our Land Too (New York: Random House, 1969), Part II; Kathy Kahn, Hillbilly Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972). A good contrast of the two approaches is Mike Maloney and Ben Huelsman, "Humanism, Scientism, and Southern Mountaineers," People's Appalachia, 2 (July 1972), 24-27. The methodological basis of the humanistic approach is sketched in John R. Staude, "The Theoretical Foundations of Humanistic Sociology," in Humanistic Society: Today's Challenge to Sociology, ed. John F. Glass and John R. Staude (Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear, 1972), pp. 262-270. ^"In addition to Charles Valentine's Culture and Poverty, see Jack L. Roach and Orville R. Gursslin, "An Evaluation of the Concept 'Culture of Poverty,' " Social Forces, 45 (March 1967), 383-392; the comments on Valentine in Current Anthropology, 10 (April-June 1969), 181-201; and the essays in The Culture of Poverty. A Critique, ed. Eleanor Burke Leacock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971). ^Dwight Billings, "Culture and Poverty in Appalachia: A Theoretical �342 Colonialism in Modern America Discussion and Empirical Analysis," Social Forces, 53 (December 1974), 315-323; and Thomas R. Ford, "The Passing of Provincialism," Ch. 2 in The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, ed. Ford (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1962), pp. 9-34. *>On regional development theory, see Harvey S. Perloff et al, Regions, Resources, and Economic Growth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, I960); E. A. J. Johnson, The Organization of Space in Developing Countries (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970); and Harry W. Richardson, Regional Growth Theory (New York: Halstead, 1973). An Appalachian application is Mary Jean Bowman and W. Warren Haynes, Resources and People in East Kentucky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963). See also H. Dudley Plunkett and Mary Jean Bowman, Elites and Change in the Kentucky Mountains (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1 973). 7 On the ARC, see Donald Rothblatt, Regional Planning; The Appalachian Experience (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1971); and Monroe Newman, The Political Economy of Appalachia (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1972). Niles M. Hansen's works include Rural Poverty and the Urban Crisis (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970); Intermediate-Size Cities as Growth Centers (New York: Praeger, 1971); an edited volume, Growth Centers in Regional Economic Development (New York: Free Press, 1972); and Location Preferences, Migration and Regional Growth (New York: Praeger, 1973). idea of "nondecisions" is developed in Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), Ch. 3, pp. 39-51. See also Matthew Crenson, The Politics of Air Pollution: A Study of Non-Decisionmaking in the Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971); and Roger W. Cobb and Charles D. Elder, Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda Building (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1972). ^For an example of an alternative approach see John G. Gurley, Capitalist and Maoist Economic Development," in America's Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian-American Relations (New York: Vintage, 1971), pp. 324-356. Some proposals for a socialist regional development strategy for Appalachia are outlined by Richard Simon and Roger Lesser, "A Working Community Commonwealth," Peoples' Appalachia, 3 (Spring 1973), 9-15. On the community development corporation and its potential for Appalachia, see Brady J. Deaton, "CDCs: A Development Alternative for Rural America," Growth and Change, 6 (January 1975), 31-37. �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 343 l^See the articles in Readings in U.S. Imperialism, ed. K. T. Farm and Donald C. Hodges (Boston.- Porter Sargent, 1971); in Dependence and Under development, ed. James D. Cockcroft, et al. (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1972); in Structures of Dependency, ed. Frank Bonilla and Robert Girling (Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Institute for Political Studies, 1973); and in the special issue on dependency theory of Latin American Perspectives, 1 (Spring 1974). A good review essay is the editors' introduction to Latin America: The Struggle with Dependency and Beyond, ed. Ronald H. Chilcote and Joel C. Edelstein (New York: Schenkman, 1974), pp. 1-87. l^Susanne Bodenheimer [Jonas], "Dependency and Imperialism: The Roots of Latin American Underdevelopment," in Readings in U.S. Imperialism, ed. Fann and Hodges, pp. 62-64. -^Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times (1923; Boston: Beacon, 1967). *^See, for example, Joe Persky, "The South: A Colony at Home," Southern Exposure, 1 (Summer/Fall 1973), 14-22; Andre Gorz, "Colonialism at Home and Abroad," and Lee Webb, "Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Vermont," both in Liberation, 16 (November 1971), 22-29 and 2933 respectively; Geoffrey Faux, "Colonial New England," The New Republic (28 November 1972), pp. 16-19; Dale L. Johnson, "On Oppressed Classes," in Dependence and Underdevelopment, ed. Cockcroft, et al., p. 277; and Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975). Gonzalez-Casanova, "Internal Colonialism and National Development," in Studies in Comparative International Development, 1 (1965), 27-37; rpt. in Latin American Radicalism, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz, et al, (New York: Random House, 1969), quote from pp. 130-132. * ^Pierre van den Berghe, "Education, Class and Ethnicity in Southern Peru: Revolutionary Colonialism," in Education and Colonialism-. Comparative Perspectives, ed. Philip G. Altbach and Gail P. Kelly (New York: McKay, forthcoming). Van den Berghe traces the origin of the term internal colonialism to a pamphlet by Leo Marquard, South Africa's Colonial Policy (Johannesburg: Institute of Race Relations, 1957). , for example, three excellent collections of articles in pamphlet form: The West Virginia Miners Union, 1931: As Reported at the Time in "Labor Age"; Harlan and Bell, Kentucky, 1931-2, The National Miners �344 Colonialism in Modern America Union: As Reported at the Time in the "Labor Defender"; and War in the Coal Fields, The Northern Fields, 1931: As Reported at the Time in the "Labor Defender" and "Labor v4^"(Huntington, WV: Appalachian Movement Press, 1972). l, Night Comes to the Cumberlands (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), p. 325; "Misdeal in Appalachia," The Atlantic Monthly (June 1965), p. 44; see also his "Appalachia: The Dismal Land," Dissent, 14 (NovemberDecember 1967), 718-719. Kenneth R. Bailey, "A Judicious Mixture: Negroes and Immigrants in the West Virginia Mines, 1880-1917," West Virginia History, 34 (January 1973), 141-161; and Paul Nyden, Black Coal Miners in the United States (New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1974). her review of Plunkett and Bowman, Elites and Change, in Social Forces, 53 (September 1974), 139-140. 2^A classic example of such bias is Albert N. Votaw, "The Hillbillies Invade Chicago," Harper's Magazine (February 1958), pp. 64-67. An excellent study of the hillbilly stereotype is Clyde B. McCoy, "Stereotypes of Appalachians in Urban Areas: Myths, Facts, and Questions," a paper presented at the Conference on Appalachians in Urban Areas," sponsored by the Academy for Contemporary Problems, Columbus, Ohio, 28 March 1974. ^Success through migration is class biased, however; see Harry K. Schwarzweller, et al., Mountain Families in Transition (Univ. Park: Pennsylvania Univ. Press, 1971), Chs. 6-9, pp. 121-205. Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 67; a revised version of his article "Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt" appears as Ch. 2. For an application of the model to the Chicano population, see Joan Moore, "Colonialism: The Case of the Mexican-American," Social Problems, 17 (Spring 1970), 463-472. Another valuable discussion is Jeffrey Prager, "White Racial Privilege and Social Change: An Examination of Theories of Racism," Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 17 (1972-73), 117-150. For a critical view of the model, see Donald J. Harris, "The Black Ghetto as Colony: A Theoretical Critique and Alternative Formulation," The Review of Black Political Economy, 2 (1972), 3-33. An interesting change of viewpoint is evident in Robert Allen, who in Black Awakening in Capitalist America (New York: Doubleday, 1969) made extensive use of the internal colony model; see his review �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 345 "Racism and the Black Nation Thesis," Socialist Revolution, No. 27 (January-March 1976), pp. 145-150. Another view that emphasizes class over colony is Gilbert G. Gonzalez, "A Critique of the Internal Colony Model," Latin American Perspectives, 1 (Spring 1974), 154-161. Williams, "The Concept of 'Egemonia' in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci: Some Notes on Interpretation," Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (October-December 1960), 587. For some of Gramsci's writings, see The Modern Prince and Other Writings, trans, and ed. Louis Marks (New York: International Publishers, 1957); or Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971). LukacY classic is History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (1921; Boston: MIT Press, 1972). On the Frankfurt School, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); and his "Some Recent Developments in Critical Theory," Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 18 (197374)? 27-44. 2^On the role of the schools in maintaining capitalist hegemony, see Joel H. Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon, 1972); Martin Carnoy, Education as Cultural Imperialism (New York: McKay, 1974), especially Chs. 5-8, pp. 233-370 on the United States (although I would speak of education as cultural hegemony rather than internal colonialism, as Carnoy does); and Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976). On the derogation of working-class culture, see Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Random House, 1972). Keith Dix, "The West Virginia Economy: Notes fora Radical Base Study," Peoples' Appalachia, 1 (April-May 1970), 3-7; Emil Malizia, "Economic Imperialism: An Interpretation of Appalachian Underdevelopment," Appalachian Journal, 1 (Spring 1973), 130-137; Richard Simon, "The Development of Underdevelopment in West Virginia," an outline of a dissertation in progress dated 12 April 1973, also distributed as "Land History: Development of Underdevelopment in West Virginia," a Peoples Development Working Paper of the Regional Economic Development Commission of the Council of the Southern Mountains, Summer 1973. 2 %ee particularly his Frankfurt inaugural address of June 1965, published as "Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective," in the appendix to Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. �346 Colonialism in Modern America Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 301-317, quoted phrase from p. 311; and the brief explication of Habermas in the epilogue to Joachim Israel, Alienation: From Marx to Modern Sociology (1968; Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1971), pp. 343-347. See also his essay "Technology and Science as 'Ideology,' " in Toward a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon, 1970), pp. 81-122; and Trent Shroyer, "Toward a Critical Theory for Advanced Industrial Society," in Recent Sociology No. 2: Patterns of Communicative Behavior, ed. Hans Peter Dreitzel (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 210-234. Friedmann, "Poor Regions and Poor Nations: Perspectives on the Problem of Appalachia," Southern Economic Journal, 32 (April 1966), 465-467. "Jaded Old Land of Bright New Promise," in Mountain Life & Work, 46 (March 1970), 5-8, rpt. in Appalachia in the Sixties, ed. David S. Walls and John B. Stephenson (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1972), pp. 240-246. His genetic and subculture of poverty arguments are apparent in Night Comes to the Cumberlands, pp. 1-31 and 273301, but are strongly emphasized in his latest work, A Darkness at Dawn: Appalachian Kentucky and the Future (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1976). Jack Weller, "Appalachia: America's Mineral Colony," in Vantage Point, No. 2 (1973), a now discontinued tabloid issued by the Commission on Religion in Appalachia in Knoxville. ^"Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans, Thomas McCarthy (1973; Boston: Beacon, 1975), pp. 33-41; quote from p. 33. ^Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose (1973; New York: Signet, 1975), pp. 42-43; quote from p. 42. O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's, 1973), especially Ch. 1, "An Anatomy of American State Capitalism," pp. 13-39; quote from p. 17. Labor Market Segmentation, ed. Richard C. Edwards, et al. (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1975). ^O'Connor, Fiscal Crisis of the State, pp. 6-7, and Chs. 4-6, pp. 97169. Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society; The Analysis of the Western System of Power (London: Quartet, 1973), Ch. 3, "The State �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 347 System and the State Elite," pp. 46-62; quote from p. 61. * *]sjicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, trans. Timothy O'Hagan (1968; London: New Left Books, 1973). Poulantzas draws heavily on the neo-orthodox structural Marxism of Louis Althusser. For the dispute between Poulantzas and Miliband, see Miliband, "Poulantzas and the Capitalist State," New Left Review, No. 82 (November-December 1973), pp. 83-92; and Poulantzas, "The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau," New Left Review, No. 95 (January-February 1976), pp. 63-83. See also Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975). ^Miliband, "Poulantzas and the Capitalist State," p. 85n; the statement by Marx and Engels is from The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Part I. 3^Ian Gough, "State Expenditure in Advanced Capitalism," New Left Review, No. 92 (July-August 1975), pp. 53-92, quotes from pp. 75, 76. ^"Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, pp. 36-37; and his "The Scientization of Politics and Public Opinion," in Toward a Rational Society, pp. 6280. See also Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967). 3 ^Philip Selznick, TV A and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (1949; New York: Harper Torch books, 1966). 40 Caudill, "O, Appalachia!" Intellectual Digest (April 1973); rpt. in Voices from the Hills, ed. Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose N. Manning (New York: Ungar, 1975), pp. 524-525. See a similar collapsing of a complex stratification system to a dichotomy in Roman B. Aquizap and Ernest A. Vargas, "Technology, Power, and Socialization in Appalachia," Social Casework, 51 (March 1970), 131-139. 41 See Richard Parker, The Myth of the Middle Class: Notes on Affluence and Equality (1972; New York: Harper Colophon, 1974), for a division into poor, lower middle, upper middle and rich classes; Parker waffles and helps perpetuate the myth he attacks by not terming his "lower middle class" the working class. A more thorough analysis is done by Andrew Levison, The Working Class Majority (1974; New York: Penguin, 1975). A good collection of articles is The Worker in "Post-Industrial" Capitalism: Liberal and Radical Responses, ed. Bertram Silverman and �348 Colonialism in Modern America Murray Yanowitch (New York: Free Press, 1974). For a thoughtful exploration from an orthodox Marxist perspective, see Judah Hill, Class Analysis: United States in the 1970s (Emeryville, CA: privately printed, 1975). An excellent analysis is presented in Erik Olin Wright, "Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies," New Left Review, No. 98 (JulyAugust 1976), pp. 3-41; also available as reprint 219 from the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin at Madison. ^"^Immanuel Wallerstein, "Dependence in an Interdependent World: The Limited Possibilities of Transformation within the Capitalist World Economy, "African Studies Review, 17 (April 1974), 1-26. ^Friedmann, "Poor Regions and Poor Nations," pp. 467-470. "For a view of race, ethnicity and other such status-groups as "blurred collective representations of classes" in the world system, see Wallerstein, "Social Conflict in Post-Independence Black Africa: The Concepts of Race and Status-Group Reconsidered," in Racial Tensions and National Identity, ed. Ernest Q. Campbell (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 207-226; see also his "Class-Formation in the Capitalist World-Economy," Politics and Society, 6 (1975), 367-375; and "The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16 (September 1974), 387-415. ^Herbert j. Cans, "The Positive Functions of Poverty," The American Journal of Sociology, 78 (September 1972), 275-289. On the Title V Commissions, see Ch. 5 in Martha Derthick, Between State and Nation: Regional Organizations of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1974), pp. 108-133. first proposal for something resembling a special legislature for the Southern Appalachians is made by George S. Mitchell, "Let's Unite the Pie!" Mountain Life & Work, 27 (Spring 1951), 19-20; he suggests an "annual representative meeting and a permanent staff. . . .Such a representative body ought to be. . .an annual assembly of all the mountain members of the state legislatures. Possibly the Members of Congress from the Mountains might be a sort of Upper House." D wight Macdonald proposes a state of Appalachia in "The Constitution of the United States Needs to be Fixed," Esquire, 70 (October 1968), 246; but it would be formed by lumping together the present states of West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee as part of an overall consolidation of states for the purpose of obtaining larger administrative jurisdictions. The proposal has no relation to a policy �Internal Colony or Internal Periphery? 349 of overcoming the exploitation of the mountain region. Nor does the reorganization scheme of geographer G. Etzel Pearcy, which would form a state of Appalachia more appropriately from sections of southern West Virginia, southwestern Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southeastern Ohio; see the article by Lee Harris from The Los Angeles Times rpt. as "A Plan to Reshape, Rename and Reduce U.S. States to 38," The Courier-Journal & Times (Louisville), 2 September 1973, p. E5. 47 Gordon K. Ebersole brought the idea of the Public Utility Districts from the Northwest to the Appalachians; see his "Appalachia: Potential. . . With a View," Mountain Life & Work, 42 (Winter 1966), 10-12. Harry Caudill picked up the idea and gave it wide publicity; see his "A New Plan for a Southern Mountain Authority," Appalachian Review, 1 (Summer 1966), 6-11. Ebersole and Caudill were key leaders in the Congress for Appalachian Development. An issue of The Appalachian South, 2 (Spring and Summer 1967) is largely devoted to articles on CAD. On the history of CAD, see David Whisnant, "The Congress for Appalachian Development," Peoples' Appalachia, 3 (Spring 1973), 16-22. �This page intentionally left blank �OF by s. in field A to an of in the the est A of an by In of in" the for its by tell of the to is, c< You tell us to get /or tils at on a the the to on a Such is the local on the a of by the the by the ask it." "NO is on the of the will do �352 Colonialism in Modern America These three examples, all current, can be matched by other vignettes from people all over Appalachia. They are representative of the process of social change that has been in evidence in the mountains since the mass cutting of timber began almost a century ago. They are part of a process which has cost much of the region its ability to provide a decent life for its people and which has been documented by previous selections in this volume. The fact that by 1930 Appalachia had become an area where many people could not lead a life comparable in economic terms with the middle class American norm has resulted in social scientists and others seeking causes and models of causes for the "poverty" of the region. These models have been presented and criticized in the previous article by David Walls. In brief, a "deficiency model" blamed the mountaineers and their allegedly homespun "yesterday's people" culture for the announced "problems" of the region. Repeated incidents like the ones reported above and consequent outrage, together with a genuine love and respect for the people around us, led to the development of the colonial model as a dialectical response to the deficiency model. This model places the blame not on the people but on the external profit seekers who removed the region's vast wealth to Pittsburgh, New York, and Philadelphia, leaving an impoverished region behind them. Walls also mentions the "development model," used especially by government agencies (and attendant state university research centers) who are in the development business and who find the region to be a good target for their efforts. I would extend this model beyond the government to include other groups and people who have an agenda to act out and find the mountains a good arena for the performance. William Goodell Frost, president of Berea College at the turn of the century, found the mountaineers to be underdeveloped in education and thus set out to develop them in this area. His example was followed by the establishment of scores of "settlement schools" throughout the region. Presbyterians, Methodists, and other denominations found the mountaineers suffering from an underdeveloped faith and thus labelled the region fertile ground for their missionary movement.1 Walls points out the strengths and limitations of each model �Extending the Internal Periphery Model: The Impact of Culture and Consequent Strategy 353 and then combines them into his synthesis, which is a model of the region as an "internal periphery of an advanced capitalist system." The internal periphery model draws on the works of Galbraith, James O'Connor, and Jurgens Habermas to describe the region as essentially a resources preserve, complete with "native" leadership that serves the needs of the advanced industrial, resources, and recreation-hungry society that surrounds it. It is a helpful model in that it accounts for the external manipulations and the steady removal of wealth from the region as well as the internal quiescence and cooperation of a "dependency infrastructure" that facilitates the process. Thus it takes into account a wide range of cultural and socio-political phenomena. Yet, the internal periphery model, as I now understand it, does not do what Walls would like it to do: help us arrive at "the goals and strategy of a movement for social change." I would extend the internal periphery model by emphasizing that it posits, at least implicitly, the existence of two cultures: that of the "exploited" area and that of the "advanced capitalist" system that surrounds it. By culture I mean what Sir Edward Tylor defined as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society," and their world view or Weltanschauung.2 As Walls, Helen Lewis, Roger Lesser, Stephen Fisher, and others have pointed out, there is a great deal of literature on the culture of Appalachia, whether defined as a "culture of poverty" or as the "folk culture" of "Yesterday's People." But what about the culture of the other side: the "advanced capitalist region"? This has not been discussed, quite probably because it is part of what Alfred Schutz calls the "world-taken-forgranted" of the academics—even those outraged by the rape of the Appalachian region. We too have been socialized by the institutions of the advanced capitalist system. We accept the value system of a rationalist, achievement-oriented, "scientific" culture and are well conditioned members of the social system that inflicts so much pain and disorder in both internal and external peripheral regions. Culturally, we turn out to be the very people we've been warning each other about. We have been �3 54 Colonialism in Modern America blind to our own folkways and thus have been unable to define them and assess their impact on social change. Thus, we, and the rest of the world along with us, are inheritors of a change in cultural orientation so well described by Max Weber many years ago that it ought to be quoted at length here: Until about the middle of the past century the life of a putter-out was, at least in many of the branches of the Continental textile industry, what we should to-day consider very comfortable. We may imagine its routing somewhat as follows: The peasants came with their cloth, often (in the case of linen) principally or entirely made from raw material which the peasant himself had produced, to the town in which the putter-out lived, and after a careful, often official appraisal of the quality, received the customary price for it. The putter-out's customers, for markets any appreciable distance away, were middlemen, who also came to him, generally not yet following samples, but seeking traditional qualities, and bought from his warehouse, or, long before delivery, placed orders which were probably in turn passed on to the peasants. Personal canvassing of customers took place, if at all, only at long intervals. Otherwise correspondence sufficed, though the sending of samples slowly gained ground. The number of business hours was very moderate, perhaps five to six a day, sometimes considerably less; in the rush season, where there was one, more. Earnings were moderate; enough to lead a respectable life and in good times to put away a little. On the whole, relations among competitors were relatively good, with a large degree of agreement on the fundamentals of business. A long daily visit to the tavern, with often plenty to drink, and a congenial circle of friends, made life comfortable and leisurely. The form of organization was in every respect capitalistic; the entrepreneur's activity was of a purely business character; the use of capital, turned over in the business, was indispensable; and finally, the objective aspect of the economic process, the book-keeping, was rational. But it was traditionalistic business, if one considers the spirit �Extending the Internal Periphery Model: The Impact of Culture and Consequent Strategy which animated the entrepreneur: the traditional manner of life, the traditional rate of profit, the traditional amount of work, the traditional manner of regulating the relationships with labour, and the essentially traditional circle of customers and the manner of attracting new ones. All these dominated the conduct of the business, were at the basis, one may say, of the ethos of this group of business men. Now at some time this leisureliness was suddenly destroyed, and often entirely without any essential change in the form of organization, such as the transition to a unified factory, to mechanical weaving, etc. What happened was, on the contrary, often no more than this: some young man from one of the putting-out families went out into the country, carefully chose weavers for his employ, greatly increased the rigour of his supervision of their work, and thus turned them from peasants into labourers. On the other hand, he would begin to change his marketing methods by so far as possible going directly to the final consumer, would take the details into his own hands, would personally solicit customers, visiting them every year, and above all would adapt the quality of the product directly to their needs and wishes. At the same time he began to introduce the principle of low prices and large turnover. There was repeated what everywhere and always is the result of such a process of rationalization: those who would not follow suit had to go out of business. The idyllic state collapsed under the pressure of a bitter competitive struggle, respectable fortunes were made, and not lent out at interest, but always reinvested in the business. The old leisurely and comfortable attitude toward life gave way to a hard frugality in which some participated and came to the top, because they did not wish to consume but to earn, while others who wished to keep on with the old ways were forced to curtail their consumption. And, what is most important in this connection, it was not generally in such cases a stream of new money invested in the industry which brought about this revolution—in several cases known to me the whole revolu- 355 �356 Colonialism in Modern America tionary process was set in motion with a few thousands of capital borrowed from relations—but the new spirit, the spirit of modern capitalism, had set to work.-* Weber elsewhere documented the rise of the "spirit of capitalism" in the rationally oriented bureaucracy in which the human element was bent to the needs of the stated directions and goals of the agency.4 Other social theorists have noted other aspects of this process: Tonnies saw the move from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft (from intimate, small community to impersonal, complex society) accompanied by a shift in the ways people viewed and treated each other. The shift is from Wesenwille, which can be described as a spontaneous, emotional and committed base for interpersonal relations in which a humanistic communal will encompasses rational thought, to Kurwille, where rational thought and calculation regulate social dialogue according to the use-value each party perceives in the other.5 Durkheim noted the disintegration of "moral" community and the consequent anomie, social disorder, and increase in suicide rates.^ Mid-century sociology had showed the individual outcome of this trend in Mills' "Cheerful Robots," Reisman's "Other Directed Man" and Marcuse's One Dimensional Man: With the technical progress as its instrument, unfreedom— in the sense of Man's subjection to his productive apparatus—is perpetuated and intensified in the form of many liberties and comforts. The novel feature is the overwhelming rationality in this irrational enterprise, and the depth of the preconditions which shapes the instinctual drives and the aspirations of the individuals and obscures the difference between false and true consciousness. For, in reality, neither the utilization of administrative rather than physical controls (hunger, personal dependence, force), nor the change in the character of heavy work . . .compensate for the fact that the decisions over life and death, over personal and national security at places over which individuals have no control. The slaves of industrial civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery is determined by. . .the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument, as a thing. ^ The reality of the historical rationalist trend in what is now �Extending the Internal Periphery Model: The Impact of Culture and Consequent Strategy 3 57 the culture of advanced capitalism is attested to by the rampant efforts to escape it or to discover human essence within it through movements such as youth culture, TM, EST, the Moonies, and Eslin. Fritz Pappenheim and Philip Slater join Mills, Marcuse, Fromm, and Reisman in the assertion that in the advanced capitalist system, human beings are held captive as employees of large impersonal bureaucratic organizations that thunder about the countryside in pursuit of what Karl Mannheim has termed their own "functionally rational" goals:8 The U.S. Forest Service exists to enlarge and maintain a complex forest system. The U.S. Park Service exists to create and maintain recreation facilities. AMAX exists to extract coal in what its executives feel is the most efficient manner possible with existing technology. What could be more "American" or more in line with a technology-intoxicated Protestant Ethic? What could be more devastating to the Appalachian Region? But it is also devastating the managerial technocrats in charge of the devastation, who define themselves in terms of their bureaucratic place and assigned position and mission within a bureaucratic hierarchy. Douglas Heath's longitudinal studies of "highly successful" American males indicate an inverse relationship between high intelligence scores (on the culture-bound tests of the rationalist, advanced capitalist culture), and the ability to be outgoing, supportive, and "mature" in personal interactions. Wives of some of these men called them "robots." One interviewee said "I've been married to him ten years now and still don't know what he really feels."9 One of the products of Western industrial culture has been the complex organization which in turn creates its own values, quasi-community, and its own kind of man. Recent essays by Richard Couto, John Gaventa, and Stephen Fisher, et a/.,10 draw upon the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann to suggest that the inability of Appalachians to make their interests and �358 Colonialism in Modern America needs known in the larger policy arena is in some measure due to the fact that their social reality is determined by the defining institutions and mechanisms of the larger, dominating, advanced capitalist society.11 According to this argument, the media, educational systems, and government agencies define the Appalachians to themselves and to others as LiP Abners and Snuffy Smiths—people incapable of responding to the complex issues of the "modern" world. In being socialized to accept this definition of reality, Appalachians' ability to respond to issues and struggle for their interests is limited; they become quiescent even when they "seemingly have every reason to rebel."12 But Appalachian history is full of rebellions and rebels: of men and women who demand, in Camus' terms, that their existence be recognized. From mine wars to roving pickets, Mother Jones to Widow Combs, Black Lung and Brown Lung movements, Appalachians have fought domination to a degree which has required the dominating culture to foster the sort of violent stereotype of the mountaineer depicted in the film Deliverance. So the people whose reality is defined by the mechanisms of the dominant culture may well not be the residents of the "internal periphery" but of the dominant culture itself—people who, rather than defining and experiencing themselves as people, see and struggle to be "planners," "sound businessmen," "GS13s" or other reifications of human endeavor which abnegate a sense of common humanity. This is the process that creates monsters. Adolph Eichmann was an expert only in rail transport and Robert McNamara was a systems specialist. They were both organization men and good examples of Modern Man in the twentieth century: They killed people with tact, efficiency, and, most astoundingly, with some measure of well meaning. Part of the problem Appalachia faces then lies not in its own culture but in the Weltanschauung that accompanies the advanced industrial social system of large complex organizations in both the public and private spheres. As perhaps is true of the everyday view of the world in most predominantly rural parts of the world, the way Appalachians construct and live in the world around them makes them vulnerable to the outside predator. My own field observation in a coal �Extending the Internal Periphery Model: The Impact of Culture and Consequent Strategy 3 59 fringe area in West Virginia and an agricultural area in Western North Carolina has found people busy and relatively content in lifestyles they find to be meaningful. The focus of their everyday life rests upon a network of people and problems physically and socially close to them. Lengthy daily discussions with one farmer in Madison County, North Carolina, over a period of five weeks revealed continual concern with family matters and his tobacco crop. He knew that a neighboring farm had been sold to Florida real estate speculators and subdivided and already sold to people mostly from New Jersey. He was not aware that in the past ten years 25 percent of the land in the county had been purchased by out-of-state people for second homes and that the Federal government held another 23 percent. He knew "land has gone high as a cat's back" but did not give any indication that he saw the implications of this increase on the future of farming or out-migration patterns in the area. This man's world view and orientation (whether it be a function of class or regional location or a combination of these variables) made him as insensitive to the implications of real estate speculation as VISTA volunteers were to the social structure and strengths of the communities they came to "help." Supporters of the colonial model have tended to shy away from discussion of any possible limitations of mountain culture because advocates of the deficiency approach have made such devastating use of "culture of poverty" models in their efforts to "blame the victim."13 But it is fair to say, I think, that although the ways of life in rural Appalachia are rich and meaningful, they have been no match for the rationalist's, efficiencyoriented culture of advanced capitalism that has come into their territory. This sort of cross-cultural clash has not been limited to Appalachia; it has been a global phenomena recorded in the ruins of Mayan libraries and observatories, the beylik lands of Algeria, and the temples of Indo-China. Rationalism with its attendant social structure has levelled, bleached, and bled out a rich variety of human ways of being that have stood in its path. Mike Clark, in trying to explain this phenomenon to students in Ohio last summer, turned to a speech by Chief Seattle, a leader of the Sequamish Indians, given in 1954 to mark the transfer of ancestral lands to the Federal government: �360 Colonialism in Modern America "How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. . . We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it he moves on. He leaves his father's graves behind; he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to he bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. [Emphasis mine.] He will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert. I do not know. Our ways are different from your ways. The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. But perhaps it is because the red man is a savage and does not understand. . . ."^ "Some savage/' commented Clark. But if Chief Seattle could have compared notes with Marcuse, he might have better understood that when social institutions reduce men to commodities, men live only in the world of commodities—of things to be bought, sold, and used like sheep or beads or farmland. They have been deprived of the very qualities which would have enabled them to hear and understand the chief's concerns and world. In summary, the internal periphery synthesis can be extended to incorporate the concept of two cultural traditions in conflict, with the historical record indicating that the social systems of complex organizations and attendant Weltanschauung ultimately prevail It is our profound wish that it will not continue to do so, that some sense of humanistic balance and purpose can be introduced into the process of social change that inundates us. Walls concludes his paper with the assertion that the internal periphery of advanced capitalism model leads us to "socialist goals and strategies" for a presumably humanistic "movement for social change." But in adding the dimension of cultural orientation to his model, the posited struggle appears not to be �Extending the Internal Periphery Model: The Impact of Culture and Consequent Strategy 361 between the "isms" as much as between community and increasingly centralizing, mass bureaucratic definitions of reality, control of life, and planning. The wide range of application of socialist concepts—from Sweden to Stalin, China, Cuba, Algeria, and Tanzania to Cambodia—indicate that socialism can come down on either side of this dichotomy. Of course with capitalism there is no question; centralization historically has proved to be one of its major dynamics. But the history of socialism requires us to be more specific; the diversity of its historical record indicates we cannot accept it on the basis of its stated humanist objectives alone. The addition of the cultural orientation perspective to the internal periphery model requires us to begin to articulate some goals in terms of quality of life and the strategies for achieving those goals. At the same time, we can attempt to block or substantially modify proposals for the development authored by the impersonal bureaucratic structures of the advanced capitalist system that would continue the process of degradation and disintegration of Appalachian life and culture, the process that reifies human beings and human relations into things or commodities. There is a growing history of successful opposition to development schemes of both public and private agencies. In the late sixties, for example, the Upper French Broad Defense Association rallied the citizens of Western North Carolina to block a TVA project which would have flooded 11,225 acres and dislocated 600 families. In another case, articulate opposition in public hearings in Tennessee resulted in the blockage of an AMAX Coal Company plan to strip mine 10,000 acres on the Cumberland Plateau.15 These victories were won by people who changed formerly legitimizing "public hearing" rituals into real forums where some collective evaluation of proposed projects and their social costs and benefits could take place. (There have also been defeats. I am reminded of a young surveyor who literally was run out of Randolph County, West Virginia, for speaking out in a public hearing in opposition to the construction of a coal washing facility on the Cheat River.) But the point is that we have the basis of a strategy here—to force participation in policy making �362 Colonialism in Modern America into what previously have been legitimizing rituals or democratic pretense for private, elitist, and closed planning systems. Secondly, we have to see "officialdom" as people who are judged and judge themselves in terms of the functional goals of the bureaucratic structures for which they work. Their sense of self worth, their income levels, status and life chances are in good measure tied to whether their agencies get that land, build that dam, or strip that coal. We thus cannot appeal to their "better natures," because to do so implies that they commit a sort of sociological suicide and resign from their perceived organizational communities. They are in good measure beyond reach; they are Heath's robots in action. At best we can try to redefine their interests for them; more likely we will have to oppose them. Third, we should get on with the difficult process of defining the kind of life that is meaningful in the most profound sense of the term. (There is enough of the anthropologist in me to feel that we're dabbling here in a matter that extends well beyond our mental capabilities. Men like Levi-Strauss, Paul Radin and Stanley Diamond who delve into such things begin to sound like "primitive" shamans after a while—somewhat akin to Chief Seattle). But minimally and from a frankly humanistic and decentralist perspective, we can say that people should have a right to create and see the products of their creation, that they should not be separated from one another by overspecialization of task or great differentiation in wealth or status and that they should have community, a place of belonging and membership, where in collective association they can determine their future. Elements for such a Utopian vision can be found still in some "traditional" rural mountain communities, as George Hicks discovered in his study of Celo, N.C.16 Celo stands almost at the foot of Mt. Mitchell where today one finds NO PARK PLEASE bumper stickers thick as galax. �Extending the Internal Periphery Model: The Impact of Culture and Consequent Strategy 363 NOTES ^David Walls, "On the Naming of Appalachia," a paper submitted to the Appalachian Symposium honoring Gratis D. Williams, April, 1976. ^Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture (New York: 1958), I, 1. Harper and Row, ^Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), pp. 66-68. 4 H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 196-240. ^Ferdinand Tonnies, Fundamental Concepts of Sociology (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), trans. Charles P. Loomis, American Sociology Series, Kimball Young, ed. (New York: American Book Company, 1940), pp. 194-195. An excellent discussion of these concepts can be found in Fritz Pappenheim, The Alienation of Modern Man (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1959), pp. 69-77. ^Emile Durkheim, Suicide (New York: The Free Press, 1951), note especially pp. 256-259. ^C. W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York, Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 171. David Reisman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denny, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 32-33. "Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948). "From correspondence and conversations with Douglas Heath. His findings have recently been published in D. H. Heath, Maturity and Competence: A Transcultural View (New York: Gardner Press, 1977), pp. 177- �364 Colonialism in Modern America 178. Gaventa and Richard Couto, "Appalachia and the Third Face of Power," a paper presented at the 1976 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, September, 1976. Jim Foster and Steve Robinson and Steve Fisher, "Class Consciousness and Destructive Power: A Strategy for Change in Appalachia," a paper presented at the 1977 annual meeting of the APSA, Washington, D.C., September, 1977. L. Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1967). * ^Robinson, Foster and Fisher, p. 1. *^See William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Vintage Books, 1972). 14 "Mike Clark, "How Can You Buy or Sell The Sky," as reprinted in The Mountain Eagle, Whitesburg, Kentucky, June 23, 1977. 15 Dave Whisnant, "The TVA Story: How Green is Your Valley." Elements. Also, see "Fact Sheet: AMAX in Tennessee, 1976," a mimeographed pamphlet jointly produced by Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM) and Concerned Citizens of Piney, Spencer, Tennessee. ^George L. Hicks, Appalachian Valley (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976). ���in of the for and to to by the of of for Is a the are to of the In to the of ed., I. 1970. for on as et al., D. K. T. and C. a as a on 1972. iw 17. 5. 1971. for I, 0/ De™ 1974, A on C. 77:? e York, �366 Colonialism in Modern America Some of the classic works on neo-colonialism which remain important statements on the nature of colonialism and its effects on those who are colonized are suggested below. These have been very influential in the development of the research included in this reader. Frantz Fanon, Dying Colonialism, New York, Grove Press, 1967. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1967. Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1969. Dominique O. Mannoni, Prospero and Calabani, The Psychology of Colonization, New York, Praeger, 1956. Albert Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, Grossman, 1965. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: Imperialism, London: Nelson, 1965. The Last Stages of Pierre Jalee, The Pillage of the Third World, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1968. Vladimir Lenin L, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, International Publishing Company, 1965. Those interested in more reading on the Appalachian case are referred to the notes and bibliographies included with each of the articles in the reader. In addition to the application to Appalachia, the colonialism model has been applied to other regions on sub-groups in the United States. Some of these are: Joe Persky, "The South: A Colony at Home," Southern Exposure, I, Summer/Fall, 1973, 14-22. Andre Gorz, "Colonialism at Home and Abroad/1 and Lee Webb, "Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Vermont," �Suggestions for Further Reading and Research 367 both in Liberation, 16, November, 1971, 22-29 and 29-33 respectively. Geoffrey Faux, "Colonial New England," The New Republic, 28, November, 1972, 16-19. Robert Blauner, * "Internal Colonialism and Ghetto Revolt/' Social Problems, 16, Spring, 1969. A similar application to a sub-region of Great Britain is Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1936-1966, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975. More recent analyses and reinterpretations of historical materials have relied heavily on the neo-colonial perspective. Important examples of these are: Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: Slaves Made, New York, Pantheon, 1974. The World the Edwards Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Monthly Review Press, 1973. Basil Davidson, Africa in History, Macmillan, 1974. William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire, Random House, 1969. Further research and continued rethinking of the model are important to provide tools for analysis of the process which affects and changes our lives. Without a clear analysis of the dynamics of the social changes which are reshaping and, in many cases, destroying peoples and cultures throughout the world, we are helpless to direct or actually participate in these changes. ��369 O th e r B o o k s Pit hed a n r D is t nh u te d b y ". . a? right good people^" by by David Artisans/Appalachia/US A y Arts and Crafts of the Cherokee, by L. Leftwich B b y C h a rl o t te T. hy of So u th ern A la ch ia, Speech, by M. Dougherty, by ttducator, J. by Down to Earth—People of Murray /• /f i71 ;;g Virgin ia s Mi Fo rc'sf s, b y K a r i n W u e r t z -S c h ae f e r s /Mo M w to i«, b y H ck Laurel Leaves, an of the by by Am berg o/ fl?e Ground, (LP by the by of the Great Smokies by Carolina Club Carolina Club 'Round the Mountains, by Sy mp o si M m o n Tro n f f to I? it a t R rcb a nd Ma me n t Pro �in Ta II Ta le s fro m Tea ch ing M S m o k y, by C. I -1 o ta in C h Ma n: To wa rds a Po u H da of Un de rs ta n by N. "That D-—d Brownlow/' a Saucy Malicious Description of William Brownlow, Knoxville Editor Stalwart Unionist, Wb o R o se fr o m a Co rife de m t e Ja il t o B e co me O n e o f t h e A1 o sf Pa m o M s Pe rs o n in t h e Na t io n, De n o u n c e i f I) y h is I: ie s a s Vic to us Harsh, Praised by his Friends as Compassionate Gentle, Revived by Steve Humphrey, a 20tb Century NewspaperFormer Associate f: if it or of the K no x mile journal, Deof the Whig. of Forestry in America, by Carl Alvvin Schcnck The by The Good Life Almanac, The Smokies Guide, by Th e S o u th ern A la c h ia n lie The in Fact Fiction, by Gratis D. by Dr. J. The To wa rd 1984: Th e Fu tu re of A Conference Proceedings Trains, Trestles & Tunnels: the la c h ia, Southern Railroads of the Southern Appalachians, by by Vo ices fro m the / , by R o J, Its a. n d Am b Its N. M to 1380, by Blackmun the Civil War, by Drs. Ina W. and John J, Noppen CATALOG ��ABOUT THE AUTHORS Often referred to as the leader of inspiration in Appalachian studies, HELEN MATTHEWS LEWIS linked scholarship with activism and encouraged deeper analysis of the region. Lewis shaped the field of Appalachian studies by emphasizing community participation and challenging traditional perceptions of the region and its people. She has served as the director of the Berea College Appalachian Center, Appalshop's Appalachian History Film Project; and the Highlander Research and Education Center. She is co-author of Mountain Sisters: From Convent to Community in Appalachia. She has retired to Abingdon, Virginia. DONALD ASKINS, an Alabama native, taught at Clinch Valley College in Wise, Virginia, before becoming the first Executive Director for the Appalachian Coalition, whose main focus was the elimination of strip mining. He is responsible for taking the aerial photographs of the mining operations in this collection in 1977 through 1979 as documentation of the effects of strip mining. Later, he pursued a criminal law and was elected Commonwealth attorney in 1991 until 2000. He retired to Clintwood, Virginia in 2000. He passed away at his home in Clintwood on March 30, 2015. LINDA JOHNSON was the co-coordinator of the Grace House Learning/ Training Center in St. Paul, Virginia. She passed away in 2002. �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Appalachian Consortium Press Publications Description An account of the resource This collection contains digitized monographs and collections from the Appalachian Consortium Press. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Appalachian Consortium Press Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Appalachian Consortium Press Date Issued Date of formal issuance (e.g., publication) of the resource. June 1, 2017 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <a title="Digital Scholarship and Initiatives" href="http://library.appstate.edu/services/digital-scholarship-and-initiatives" target="_blank">Digital Scholarship and Initiatives</a> Publication Digital Publisher Digital Republication Appalachian State University Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case Description An account of the resource <em>Colonialism in Modern America</em><span>&nbsp;is a series of essays exploring the economic and social problems of the region within the context of colonialism. It is a relatively simple task to document the social ills and the environmental ravage that beset the people and land of Appalachia. However, it is far more difficult and problematic to uncover the causes of these tragic conditions.</span><br /><br /><a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=1CYRVyt8r0G3pKKBsO57lff_fyaCHuviq" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Download EPub<br /><br /></a><a title="UNC Press Link" href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469642048/colonialism-in-modern-america" target="_blank" rel="noopener">UNC Press Print on Demand</a> Subject The topic of the resource Appalachian Region--Economic conditions Appalachian Region--Social conditions Colonies--Case studies Social systems Abstract A summary of the resource. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lewis, Helen Johnson, Linda Askins, Donald Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Appalachian Consortium Press Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1978 Language A language of the resource English Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource PDF Essays E-books Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed</a> Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. https://www.geonames.org/12212302/appalachia.html Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a title="UA 76 Appalachian Consortium records" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/9" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> UA 76 Appalachian Consortium records </a> Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. <a title="Appalachian Consortium Press Publications" href="https://omeka.library.appstate.edu/collections/show/82" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> Appalachian Consortium Press Publications</a> Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1970s Appalachia colonialism economic economics history social Social Systems