9. RECLAIMING THE WILDERNESS

VANISHING FEUDIST

There are people all over the United States to whom the mere mention of the word mountaineer evokes a fantastic picture—a whiskey-soaked ruffian with bloodshot eyes and tobacco-stained beard, wide-brimmed felt cocked over a half-cynical eye, finger on the trigger of a long-barreled squirrel rifle. He is guarding his moonshine still. Or he may be lying in wait behind bush or tree to waylay his deadly enemy of the other side in a long-fought blood-feud.

Though there may be a semblance of truth in both, such pictures should be taken with a grain of salt. Illicit whiskey has been made in our southern mountains, as well as in towns and cities throughout the country. There were blood-feuds in bygone days but they have been so overplayed that scarcely a vestige of the real story remains recognizable. Few of the old leaders are left to tell the facts.

I have known well and claim as my loyal friends members of families who have been engaged in the making of illicit whiskey. I have known quite well many members of families on both sides in two of the most famous feuds in the southern mountains. These people were and are today my good friends and neighbors.

As recently as the fall of 1940, I returned to Morehead, the county seat of Rowan County, for a visit with the Martins and Tollivers. Strangely enough, upon the day of my arrival I found Lin Martin, son of John Martin, who killed Floyd Tolliver, up on a ladder painting the walls of the Cozy Theatre. This modern motion-picture theater occupies the site of the old Carey House where Martin shot Tolliver. Lin was standing in almost the exact spot where his father stood when he shot Floyd Tolliver. Most willingly he stepped out into the sunlight, paint brush and bucket in hand to meet and be photographed with Clint Tolliver, a son and nephew of the Tolliver leaders, whose father, Bud, was killed by the posse in the all-day battle on Railroad Street when the Tolliver band was wiped out. Clint was a nephew of Floyd Tolliver, slain by John Martin; he married Mrs. Lucy Trumbo Martin's niece, Texannie Trumbo.

While the men shook hands in friendly fashion, believe it or not, across the street in the courthouse yard under a great oak, past which John Martin was hurried to the safety of the jail, a blind fiddler was singing the famous ballad composed by a Rowan County minstrel, called the Rowan County Troubles. The sons of the feudists smiled blandly. Clint Tolliver is a Spanish American War veteran and Lin's brother, Ben, was a sharpshooter in the World War.

Both Lin Martin and Clint Tolliver say they have but one regret today and that is that they are too old to take up their guns to enlist in the United States Army. The men and their families are the best of friends and meet often at social gatherings.

So feuds die out, though feud tales persist. Old rancors live only in memory.

Today in Morehead, the county seat of the once Dark Rowan, there stands a modern State Teachers College on the sloping hillsides within sight of the courthouse and street where the Rowan County war was fought. One of the halls is called Allie W. Young, taking its name from the Senator whose influence brought about the establishment of the college. Young's father, Judge Zachariah Taylor Young, was once shot from ambush during the troubles.

This same county is the seat of a native art exhibit which has attracted nation-wide attention. It was started many years ago by a descendant of Mary Queen of Scots, Mrs. Lyda Messer Caudill, then a teacher of a one-room log school on Christy Creek. One morning a little boy living at the head of the hollow brought to school, not a rosy apple (there wasn't a fruit tree on his place), but clay models he had made in native clay of his dog, the cow, and his pet pig. Mrs. Caudill seized the opportunity to encourage the other children in her mixed-grade one-room school to try their hand at clay modeling. Later Mrs. Caudill became county superintendent of Rowan County Schools. Through her enthusiasm and efforts the plan has developed through the years and today mountain children of Rowan County have exhibited their handicraft in national exhibitions through the co-operation of the group of American Association of University Women of Kentucky with which Mrs. Caudill is affiliated.

SILVER MOON TAVERN

Over on Main Island Creek in Logan County, West Virginia, where Devil Anse Hatfield held forth in his day, another picture greets the eye today. Coal-mining camps are strung along from one end of the creek to the other. Omar, near where Devil Anse is buried, is quite a thriving town. It was here that Jonse, the eldest son who loved Rosanna McCoy, spent his last days as a night watchman for a power plant. Jonse's nerves were so shattered he jumped almost at the falling of a leaf and the company, fearing some tragedy might be the result from too sudden trigger-pulling, found other occupation for the Hatfield son.

Within a few yards of the spot where the home of Devil Anse burned to the ground stands today a rustic lodge garishly designed. Over the doorway painted in bright red letters are these words—

SILVER MOON TAVERN

Neighbors call it a beer j'int. Entering, you are greeted by the proprietor, a mild, pleasant fellow who asks in a slow mountain drawl, "What kin I do for you?" If you happen to be an old acquaintance as I am, Tennis Hatfield—for he it is who runs the place—will add, "Glad to see you. I've not laid eyes on you for a coon's age. Set." He waved me to a chromium stool beside the counter. "I've quit the law." Tennis had been sheriff of Logan County for a term or two. "This is easier." He flung wide his hands with a gesture that encompassed the interior of the Silver Moon Tavern. "Well, there's no harm in selling beer." He fixed me with a piercing look such as I had seen in the eye of Devil Anse. "What's more there's no harm in drinking it either, in reason. Young folks gather in here of a night and listen to the music and dance and it don't cost 'em much money. A nickel in the slot. We ain't troubled with slugs," he said casually. "The folks choose their own tune." He pointed to a gaudily striped electric music box that filled a corner of the tavern. With great care he showed me the workings of the moan box, he called it. "These are the tunes they like best." He called them off as his finger moved carefully along the titles: "Big Beaver, The Wise Owl, Double Crossing Mamma, In the Mood, and Mountain Dew. They just naturally wear that record out. Young folks here on Main Island Creek like Lulu Belle and Scotty. See, they made that record Mountain Dew." A slow smile lighted his face. "'Pon my soul all that young folks do these days is eat and dance. That's how come me to put the sign on the side of my beer j'int—Dine and Dance. We're right up to snuff here on Main Island Creek," he added with a smug smile. "But now Joe Hatfield over to Red Jacket in Mingo County, he follows preaching and he says a beer j'int is just sending people plum to hell. I don't know about that. There's never been no trouble here in my place. I won't sell a man that's had a dram too many. And if he starts to get noisy"—he lifted a toe—"out he goes! I aim to keep my place straight." He shoved his thumbs deep into the belt of his breeches. "Not much doin' at this time of day. The girls in school or helping with the housework; the boys in the mines. Don't step out till after supper. Then look out! The young bucks shake a heel and the girls put on their lipstick. Them that can't afford a permanent go around all day with their hair done up in curlycues till they look a match for Shirley Temple by the time they get here of a night. Times has surely changed."

A bus whizzed by and disappeared beyond the bend of the road.

"Times has changed," Tennis repeated slowly as his gaze sought the hillside where Devil Anse lay buried. "I wonder what Pa would a-thought of my place," he said with conscientious wistfulness. His eyes swept now the interior of the Silver Moon Tavern. "This couldn't a-been in Pa's young days. Nor womenfolks couldn't a-been so free. Such as this couldn't a-been, no more than their ways then could stand today." The son of Devil Anse leaned over the bar and said in a strangely hushed voice, "Woman, I've heard tell that you have a hankerin' for curiosities and old-timey things. I keep a few handy so's I don't get above my raisin'." He reached under the counter. "Here, woman, heft this!" He placed in my hands Devil Anse's long-barreled gun. "Scrutinize them notches on the barrel. That there first one is Harmon McCoy. Year of sixty-three," he said bluntly.

While I hefted the gun, Tennis brought out a crumpled shirt. "Them holes is where the McCoys stobbed Uncle Ellison and there's the stain of his gorm."

The gruesome sight of the blood-stained garment slashed by the McCoys completely unnerved me. I dropped the gun.

Instantly a door opened behind Tennis and a young lad rushed in. He took in the situation at a glance and swiftly appraised my five-foot height. "Pa," he turned to Tennis Hatfield, "you've scared this little critter out of a year's growth. And she ain't got none to spare."

Seeing that all was well he backed out of the door he had entered, and Tennis went on to say that his young son had quit college to join the army. "He'll be leaving soon for training camp. That is, if he can quit courting Nellie McCoy long enough over in Seldom Seen Hollow. 'Pon my soul, I never saw two such turtledoves in my life. She's pretty as a picture and I've told her that whether or not her and Tennis Junior every marry there's always a place for her here with us. A pretty girl in a pretty frock is mighty handy to wait table." Again the wideflung hands of the proprietor of the Silver Moon Tavern embraced in their gesture the shiny tables, booths, chromium-trimmed chairs, and the gaudy juke box in the corner.

In September, 1940, Tennis Hatfield's son, Tennis, Jr., joined the army. He was nineteen at the time.

The Hatfields and McCoys have married. Charles D. Hatfield, who joined the army at Detroit's United States Army recruiting office, is the son of Tolbert McCoy Hatfield of Pike County and is friend to his kin on both sides.

The two families held a picnic reunion in the month of August, 1941, on Blackberry Creek where the blood of both had been shed during the feud, and at the gathering a good time was had by all with plenty of fried chicken and no shooting.

Today on the eve of another war things are still quiet up in Breathitt County so far as the Hargises are concerned. Elbert Hargis, brother of Judge Jim Hargis who was slain by his son Beach, has passed on. They buried him, the last of Granny Hargis's boys, in the family burying ground behind the old homestead on Pan Bowl, so called because it is almost completely encircled by the North Fork of the Kentucky River.

To his last hour, almost, Elbert Hargis sat in the shadow of the courthouse looking sadly toward Judge Jim Hargis's store where Beach had killed his father, the store in front of which Dr. Cox had been assassinated. His eyes shifted occasionally toward the courthouse steps down which the lifeless body of J. B. Marcum plunged when Curt Jett shot him from the back. Again Elbert's gaze turned to the second-story windows of the courthouse from which Jim Cockrell had been shot to death one sunny summer day.

Ever alert and never once permitting anyone to stand behind him, with a gun in its holster thumping on his hip every step he took, Elbert Hargis must have lived again and again the days when his brother Jim directed the carryings-on of the Hargis clan. But if you'd ask him if he ever thought of the old times, there would be a quick and sharp No!, followed by abrupt silence.

Elbert Hargis is dead now. And a natural death was his from a sudden ailment of the lungs. He died in a hospital down in the Blue Grass where white-clad nurses and grave-faced doctors with a knowing of the miracles of modern surgery and medicine could not prolong the life of the aged feudist for one short second. The last of Granny Evaline Hargis's sons rests beside his mother, alongside the three brothers John, Jr., Ben, and Jim, and the half-brother Willie Sewell, whose death away back in 1886, when he was shot from ambush at a molasses-making, started all the trouble. In the same burying ground with Elbert is the vine-covered grave of Senator Hargis, father of the boys, who preceded his wife Evaline to the spirit world long years ago.

BLOOMING STILLS

A visit today to a United States District Court in most any section of the Blue Ridge Country where makers of illicit whiskey are being tried shows that the name moonshine no longer applies to the beverage. It got its name from being made at night. Now operations in the making are conducted by day, while only the transportation of the liquor is carried on after nightfall. Trucks and even dilapidated Fords with the windows smeared with soap to conceal the load are pressed into service. The drivers consider it safer to travel with their illegal cargo under the shades of darkness.

During the questioning of witnesses and offenders in court you learn that tips provided by law-abiding citizens are the usual means of bringing offenders to trial. In rare instances, however, members of a moonshiner's own family have been known to turn him in.

The process of capturing the moonshiner has changed considerably from that of other days. Then the revenooer (mountain folk usually call him the law) slipped up from behind the bushes on the offender and caught him red-handed at the still. In those days the men who were making had their lookout men who gave warning by a call or a whistle, even by gun signals, of the approach of the law while the moonshiner took to his heels, hiding in deep underbrush or far back under cliffs. Today these mountain men have learned not to run. For the officers of the law are equipped with long-range guns and with equipment so powerful the bullets can penetrate the steel body of an automobile. The method of locating the still has changed too since the airplane has come into use. Looking down from the clouds the flyer spies a thin stream of smoke rising from a wooded ravine. He communicates by radio to his co-workers of the ground crew, who immediately set out at high speed by automobile to capture the still.

It is estimated that of the 170,000,000 gallons of liquor consumed in this country in 1939, at least 35,000,000 were illicit and that for every legal distillery there are at least one hundred illegal ones. The southern mountain region has always lent itself admirably to the making of moonshine and for this reason has been a thorn in the flesh of U. S. Alcohol Tax Unit. During the year 1939, according to Life, it is estimated that more than 4000 stills were captured in the states of Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida.

However, it is not the moonshiner who reaps the richest revenue from corn whiskey, which he sells for ninety cents a gallon, but the bootlegger and others down the line who add on, each in his turn, until the potent drink reaches a final sale price of ninety cents a quart and more. The tax on legitimate whiskey is $2.25 a proof gallon which makes it prohibitive in a community competing with the moonshiner's untaxed product.

Through the southern mountain region Negroes frequently are employed by white men operating stills on a large scale, where many boxes are used for the fermenting mash. The fines and sentences vary with the output and number of offenses.

The mountaineer, on the other hand, who operates a small still usually is a poor man. When brought into court he pleads that he cannot haul out a load of corn over rugged roads miles to a market and compete with a farmer from the lowlands who is not retarded by bad roads. Or again, if he is from an extremely isolated mountain section, he offers the old reasoning, "It is my land and my corn—why can't I do with my crop whatever I please?"

If the federal judge is a kindly, understanding man he will listen patiently to the story of the mountaineer who has made illicit whiskey, and if it be only the first or second offense, a sentence of six months in prison is imposed. "But, judge, your honor," pleads the perplexed mountaineer. "I've got to put in my crop and my old woman is ailin'—she can't holp none. I've got to lay in foirwood for winter, judge, your honor, my youngins is too little to holp." Often the understanding judge replies, "Now, John, you go back home and get your work done up, then come back and serve your sentence." Rarely has the judge's trust been betrayed.

LEARNING

What with good roads, the radio, and better schools and more of them the scene is rapidly changing in the Blue Ridge Country.

The little one-room log school is almost a thing of the past. Only in remote sections can it be found. No longer is the mountain child retarded by the bridgeless stream, for good roads have come to the mountains and with them the catwalk—an improvised bridge of barrel hoops strung together with cables—spanning the creek has passed. The mountain mother's warning is heard no longer. "Mind, Johnny, you don't swing the bridge." Concrete pillars support steel girders that span the creek high above even the highest flood point. Education soars high in the southern mountain region. Instead of a few weeks of school there are months now, and what is more Johnny doesn't walk to school any more. The county school bus, operated by a careful driver, picks him up almost at his very door and brings him back safely when school turns out in the evening. Instead of the poorly lighted one-room school, there is the consolidated school built of native stone, with many windows and comfortable desks. If the mountain boy or girl fails to get an education it is his own fault. There is a central heating system and the teacher, you may be sure, is a graduate of an accredited college. The Kentucky Progress Magazine of Winter, 1935, gives a remarkable example of what is taking place in an educational way in the mountain region: "Twenty-nine well-equipped, accredited four-year high schools and two junior colleges now dot the five counties, Lawrence, Johnson, Martin, Floyd, and Pike ... seven high schools and one junior college have the highest rating possible, membership in the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.... The advent of surfaced roads has made successful consolidation possible in many instances."

Preceding the consolidated school an inestimable service has been rendered the children of the southern highlands by means of the settlement school. It would be impossible to discuss them all adequately, but of the outstanding ones of which I have personal knowledge are: that great institution at Berea, Kentucky, the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky; the Martha Berry School in the mountains of Georgia; the agricultural school of Sergeant Alvin C. York near Jamestown, Tennessee; and the John C. Campbell Folk School at Brasstown, N. C.

Under efficient guidance mountain boys and girls are taught to preserve the handicrafts of their forbears, knitting, spinning, weaving, making of dyes, and even a pastime once indulged in by boys and men—whittling. Idle whittling has been converted into not only an artistic craft, but a profitable one. Nowhere in the country is there to be found a finer collection of whittled figures, ranging from tiny chicks to squirrels, rabbits, birds, than those made by the mountain youths at the John C. Campbell Folk School.

Perhaps no greater service is being rendered mountain folk than that headed by Sergeant York in his agricultural school, because he is of the mountains and knows well the need of his people.

But even before the settlement school had been thoroughly rooted there was the Moonlight School of Rowan County, Kentucky, for adult illiterates. It was a great, a magnificent undertaking by a mountain woman—Mrs. Cora Wilson Stewart, born in Rowan County. She had been a teacher in the wretched, poorly lighted one-room log school. Becoming county superintendent, she set about to lead out of ignorance and darkness the adult illiterates of her county. Happily she had been preceded in such an undertaking by a pioneer teacher in rugged Hocking County, Ohio, in the days of the Civil War. There Miss Kate Smith, scarcely in her teens, who saw her brothers shoulder their muskets and march off to the Civil War, took upon herself the task of teaching, first, a bound boy, an orphan lad bound by the state to a farmer. The lad later became a stowaway in a covered wagon in which the young teacher and her parents rode west. This lad in his teens was only one of many adult illiterates taught by the Ohio woman and her plan proved that it could be done. That boy, William Wright, became a Judge of the Court of Appeals.

With book-learning have come many broadening factors in the life of the southern mountaineer. His sons attend agricultural college, his daughters are active workers in the 4-H clubs. They return to the hillside farm to show their mothers how best to can fruit. The boys have learned how to improve and conserve the soil, how to save forests. The consolidated school has taught mountain children to mix with others. They have Girl Scout groups and Boy Scout groups; they learn self-government under trained leaders.

Above all, book-learning is swiftly wiping out the old suspicions and superstitions about the medical profession. Time was when there was but one doctor in all of Leslie County, Kentucky. Mountain mothers relied on the old midwife; infant mortality was appalling. Then came the Frontier Nursing School headed by Mrs. Mary Breckinridge. Her work is known throughout the breadth of the nation. The Frontier Nursing Service has the support of the leading people of the nation. Debutantes gladly give up a life of frivolity and ease to become trained in obstetrics and give their services to helping mountain mothers and babies. Its purpose was to combat the infant death rate in remote Kentucky mountain sections. The nurses ride on horseback and visit and care for mountain mothers. Mrs. Breckinridge herself was a nurse during the World War in France and went back to the Scottish Highlands—from which her kinsman Alexander Breckinridge came to settle in the Shenandoah in 1728—where she became a midwife.

Mountain folk usually are slow to take on new ways. But the wonders wrought through the Frontier Nursing Service they have "seen with their own eyes."

Learning has brought about a great change for the better in the life of the mountain woman. Once we saw her lank, slatternly, meek, stoic—mother of a dozen or more, obeying with patient fortitude the will of her man. We saw too the pitiable child-bride marrying perhaps a man three times her age because he could take care of her. There being so many in the family Pappy and Mammy were glad to be rid of one of their flock. Though both pictures were often as overdrawn as that evoked by a daughter of the Blue Ridge—a whimsical picture of a pretty maid in full-skirted crinoline with a soft southern accent—moonlight and honeysuckle, a gallant, goateed colonel paying court to her charm and beauty while he sips a mint julep. This picture and that of the snaggle-toothed mountain woman in bedraggled black calico can no more be taken for fact than that Jesse James is still holding up stagecoaches or that cowboys in high boots and leather breeches are daily wedding the rich easterners' daughters who have come West.

There are well-organized centers: weaving centers that market the wares of mountain women all over the nation; music centers and recreational centers. Women and their daughters are better dressed and certainly they give more care to their appearance than the mountain woman did when she rode to the county seat on court day with a basket of eggs and butter and ginseng on one arm and a baby on the other.

She still knits and crochets and hooks rugs—not from leavings of the family's wearing clothes—but from leavings she buys from the mills. She does not have to take her wares to the county seat—today she stretches up a clothesline across the front stoop, pins her rugs and lace on the line, and the passing motorist buys all that her busy hands can make.

The question is often asked: How does the mountain woman regard her right to vote? Generally she is unconcerned with the vote. But as time goes on, by reason of the many factors that enter into her new way of living, she is evidencing more interest, both in the county and state elections. Strangely enough, though the mountain woman went hesitantly to the polls, a Kentucky mountain woman, Mrs. Mary Elliott Flanery, of Elliott County, was the first woman to be elected to the legislature south of the Mason and Dixon line. She was self-educated and for a number of years was rural correspondent for newspapers, which experience perhaps gave her a broad understanding of political matters and the incentive to enter the field. Hers was a distinctive service to the commonwealth and particularly to her sisters of the southern highlands, inasmuch as she was first of her sex to actually voice before a legislature the problems and needs of the mountain woman.

Today with rural electrification the mountain woman ceases to be a drudge. She is on a par with her sister of the level land.

She no longer stumbles wearily to the barn after dark with a battered lantern, its chimney blackened with smoke. She has only to switch on a light and turn to milking. Or if her household has progressed to dairy farming, as many of them have, finding the sale of milk to the city creameries more profitable than raising vegetables, she has only to attach the electric devices and the cows are milked mechanically. She sits no more at the churn, one hand gripping the dasher, the other holding a fretful babe to her breast. Now that unseen juice, or 'lectric, comes along the wire and into the new churn and there! Almost before you know it there is a plump roll of butter.

The whole family benefits from rural electrification. The youngest girl of the household is not reminded of the irksome task of cleaning and filling the lamps, trimming the wicks. What if the single bulb swinging from the middle of the ceiling is fly-specked! It still gives ample light for the room. The hazard of the overturned oil lamp and the fear of burning the house down are gone too. "I'd druther have 'lectric than a new cookstove or a saddle mare," any mountain woman will tell you.

She is through with the back-breaking battling trough and the washboard. Her proudest possession and the greatest labor-saving device on the place is the electric washer. Carefully covered with a clean piece of bleach, it holds a distinguished place in the corner of the dining room when not in use. It is the first thing to be exhibited to the visitor.

But whenever progress brings, it likewise takes away.

The fireside gathering where the glowing logs provided light and cheer for the family circle, conducive to story and riddle and song, has almost reached the vanishing point. Instead, the young folks pile into the second-hand Ford and whiz off to town. They don't wait for court week, when in other days the courthouse yard was the market place of the hillsman. Though the old courthouse still stands as it did in early days, the scene has changed. There is one ancient seat of justice in the Big Sandy country within sight of the spot where the first settlers built their fort for safety against Indian attack, and over the door these words catch the eye—

READER, WHERE WILT THOU SPEND ETERNITY?

Young folks don't seem to give it much thought. Just across the road (it is paved now) the raucous sound of the juke box is heard playing I Understand, Hut Sut, You Are My Sunshine and Booglie, Wooglie, Piggy. The jitterbugs are at it early and late. They know all the hits on the Hit Parade. They know Frankie Masters' and Jimmy Dorsey's latest records and the newest step and shake. If they ever tire, which is rarely, there are booths and stalls where they may sip a soda, drain a bottle of coke, crunch a sandwich, a yard-long hot dog, a hamburger. Or, if he is real sophisticated and she "has been farther under the house hunting eggs than some have been on the railroad cars," he will cautiously draw his hip flask, when the waiter or proprietor isn't looking, and pour a snort of year-old or Granddad in the glass of cracked ice. Sure, you buy your cracked ice, what do you think this is? "Let's go on to the Rainbow," she suggests presently, when only cracked ice is left in the glass. "Rainbow? You got your rainbow right here in the juke box," he answers. "I don't mean no rainbow like's on the groan box, and you know it." Maybe they go, maybe they don't. But things are surely changing along the once quiet mountain trail. Now if the lad is real devilish he will try a slug in the juke box instead of a coin. Then the proprietor drops his beaming smile and asserts his authority. A young stripling or two may drop in, stagging it. One gets an eye on a pretty girl dancing with her date. But just let him try to cut in. "Can't you read?" With the proprietor's husky voice the intruder feels at the same moment the proprietor's firm hand upon his shoulder. "What's eatin' you? Can't you read, I say!" The owner of the big voice and bigger fist points a warning finger to the sign on the wall—

NO STAG DANCING

The stag isn't slow in being on his way. He and his pals pile into their car and head toward the next tavern.

The present generation of mountain youth may have lost their superstition but they will take a long chance on beating the pinball machine. They will play it for hours—until the last nickel is dropped in the slot because, "Yes siree, just last night at the Blue Moon I saw a fellow get the jackpot. Double handful of coin!"

A mountain girl once ashamed because her granny smoked her little clay pipe puffs a cigarette nonchalantly held between highly manicured fingertips. She will spend her last dollar for a permanent and lipstick. She would not be interested in the simple fireside games, Clap In and Clap Out, Post Office and Drop the Handkerchief. Such things are far too slow for her highstrung nerves these days.

However, community centers are trying valiantly to bring back square dancing and community singing. The effort is successful in some localities, particularly through North and South Carolina. Old-time singing school with the itinerant singing master has given place to singing societies that meet sometimes in the summer months on the courthouse square or indoors.

Religious customs, too, are becoming modernized. The foot-washing of the Regular Primitive Baptists, while it is still carried on in some of the mountain churches, lacks much of the solemnity and imposing dignity of bygone days. The church house itself is changed, which may account for much of the modification of customs. The log church is replaced with a modern structure of native stone. The walls are painted. There is a gas chandelier suspended from the ceiling. While there is still no elaborate, elevated pulpit, the floor of the front portion of the church where the faithful wash each other's feet is today covered with linoleum. The long spotlessly white towel used for drying the feet of the meek has given place to a brightly colored green and red striped bath towel (basement special, or such as are found on the counters of the five and ten). The singing, instead of being the solemn chant of the sixth century to which mountain folk for generations adapted the words of their traditional hymns, is in swift tempo, almost jazz such as can be heard at any point on your radio dial any day in the week.

The jolt wagon, with its rows of straight hickory chairs, carrying the whole family to meeting with a well-filled basket with victuals for all, is a thing of the past. At a recent foot-washing down in the Georgia mountains there was but one wagon in front of the little church. A string of automobiles of all sizes and makes was strung along the road for a mile.

The solemn funeralizing with its simple beauty is almost a thing of the past in the southern mountains. Today it is accompanied by the barking of the hot-dog vendor, "Get your hot dogs here. A nice ice cold drink of Coca-Cola here! Here's your Doctor Pepper! Cold orange drink!"

The decorations on the grave—once paper flowers made by loving hands—are garish factory-made flowers in cellophane covers. Mother's picture in the glass-covered box beside her headstone is gone long ago. The favorite hymn is sometimes sung and a few of the old-time preachers survive to weep and pray and sing and offer words of praise for the long-departed friend. The present generation do not speak of the funeralizing. Today it is a memorial. Strangely enough, however, only a few miles from the heart of the Big Sandy country, a memorial service was held for O. O. McIntyre for the second time on August 11, 1940. A twilight memorial it was called and his good friends and close associates came to hear him eulogized.

The mountain preacher of yesterday is passing fast. Then, his was a manifold calling. When he traveled the lonely creek-bed road with his Bible in his saddlebags, he was the circuit rider bringing news of the outside world to the families along the widely scattered frontier. He, like the mountain doctor, was truly counselor and friend. The people looked to him to tell of things that would be happening in the near future. They hung upon his every word from the pulpit. His reasoning in spiritual matters was sound and his eloquence impelling. His sermons often combined quotations from the early writers of England, passages from Shakespeare, true echoes of Elizabethan English, as might be expected considering his ancestry. Words flowed freely from his lips. The mountain preacher to this day has a natural gift of oratory. It has been handed down through generations. He needs only the spur and the occasion to burst forth. The mountain preacher, as some may imagine, was not always untutored or illiterate—of the type we sometimes encounter today in remote mountain regions. In early days he was quite often both preacher and teacher, such as William E. Barton, father of Bruce Barton, who after preaching in the thinly settled parts of Knox County, Kentucky, became the pastor of a Chicago church in later years. Some of the early roving preachers even studied theology in the great centers of learning both in America and Europe.

At one time, even as late as the last quarter of a century, there were strait-laced Baptist preachers (my own blood kin among them) who would not permit an organ in the church. But today it is quite the vogue for young evangelistic couples to hold forth with piano-accordion and guitar. "It peps up the joiners," the evangelist says. On the other hand, in remote churches, where preachers still hold that note-singing and hymn books with notes are the works of the Devil, these same fellows will play up the hysteria of the audience with the "Holy Bark," the "And-ah," "Yep, Yep," and the "Holy Laugh," chiefly at foot-washing ceremonies.

The number of young people, however, who cling to the custom of foot-washing is comparatively small. One reason may be that they are too busy with other things, or that they consider such practices old-fashioned.

MOUNTAIN MEN

Old Virginia had its Patrick Henry, the Blue Grass its Clays and Breckinridges, but the Big Sandy produced from its most rugged quarter as fine and noble timber as could be found throughout the breadth and width of the Blue Ridge Country.

Early in his youth Hugh Harkins came from Pennsylvania to settle in Floyd County in the heart of the Big Sandy. That was far back in the 1830's. He knew the saddlery trade but the young man preferred the profession of law. So acquiring a couple volumes on practice and procedure he began to study for the bar. He built himself an office of stone which he helped to dig from the mountain side and with every spare dollar he bought more law books and timber land. He died in 1869, but by that time his grandson, Walter Scott Harkins, had a thirst to follow his footsteps. The boy, even before he was old enough to understand their meaning, listened avidly to the speeches of his grandfather in the courtrooms of the mountain counties. And when Walter Scott Harkins was only a strip of a lad he rode the unbeaten paths to courts of law with his law books in his saddlebags. If the day were fair he'd get off his horse, tether it to a tree and climb high on the ridge. There with statute or law reporter in hand he would read aloud for hours. Again he'd close the book and with head erect, hands behind him, young Harkins would repeat as much as he could remember of the text. Often he waxed enthusiastic. He longed to be an orator. Sometimes thoughtless companions would jeer at the young Demosthenes, even pelt him with acorns and pebbles from ambush. But Walter Scott Harkins wasn't daunted by any such boyish pranks. He kept on orating.

In the meantime, as he rode the lonely mountain paths, he took notice of the fine timber, just as his grandfather had before him. He was admitted to the bar in 1877 and hung out his shingle at the door of his grandfather's office. Like Hugh Harkins, the grandson also began investing his earnings, meager though they were, in timber land.

One summer evening near dusk the young lawyer was riding toward the mouth of Big Sandy when he was startled to see in the distance a giant tongue of flame shooting skyward. At first he thought there was fire on the mountain but he soon discovered that the flame did not spread but continued in a straight column upward. He sat motionless in the saddle for a moment. By this time darkness had descended. The young lawyer was fascinated by the brilliant flame and determined to test its strength. Taking a law book from his saddlebags he opened the volume and, to his surprise, was able to read the small type by the light of the distant flame with as great ease as though an oil lamp burned at his elbow. Then he recalled the story of how Dr. Walker, the English explorer, had once read his maps by the light of a burning spring. Unlike the early explorer young Harkins determined to do something about it. The legal mind of the lad spurred his zeal to find the cause of the illuminating flame.

Walter Scott Harkins not only found the cause but he probed the effect with fine results. With the aid of other interested persons he acquired mineral rights of lands in the Big Sandy country which included the burning spring, the like of which in the next decade was to illuminate towns and cities and operate industries as far removed as one hundred miles.

Moreover Walter Scott Harkins lived to see more than 75,000 acres of his own forest leveled, whereby he piled up a fortune that could scarcely be exhausted even unto the fifth generation of Harkinses.

On the window of his law office in Prestonsburg, Floyd County, Kentucky, appears in letters of gold, an unbroken line of five generations of Harkinses who have followed the practice of law. Likewise the Harkins' descendants hold unbroken title to the largest acreage of timber land in the country. The virgin forest brought its owner more than $160,000 and the second growth is ready to cut.

Lumber companies bought 70,000 acres of forest and constructed their own railroads to carry out the timber. They calculated it would take about twenty-five years to cull out all the big timber and by that time there would be a second growth. Wasteful methods of lumbering, together with frequent forest fires and man's utter disregard for the future, have already brought about the necessity for reforestation in many mountain sections. As far back as 1886 out of the Big Sandy alone was run $1,500,000 worth of timber.

Rafts of logs carpeted the Big Sandy River and at its mouth was the largest round timber market in the world. With its row of riverfront saloons Catlettsburg, between the Big Sandy and the Ohio Rivers, was then called the wettest spot on earth. Through its narrow streets strode loggers and raftsmen. Theirs was talk of cant hooks and spike poles, calipers and rafts. "You best come and have a drink down to Big Wayne's that'll put fire in your guts." The boss wanted his whole crew to be merry, so the whole crew headed for Big Wayne Damron's Black Diamond.

Today the old riverfront lives only in memory. That part of the county seat is a ghost town. Timbermen and loggers gather no more for revelry at the riverfront saloon. And should you ask the reason, the old river rat will answer with a slow-breaking smile, "See off yonder—locks and dams! Can't run the logs through that!"

Forests that were felled a quarter of a century ago are once again ready for the woodsman's ax.

The present generation of timbermen look upon a very different scene. Their dim-eyed grandparents complacently beheld the push boat, that crude ark which was urged along the stream by means of long poles. It gave way to shallow drift steamers. And in turn the steamers were shoved aside for the railroad which was quicker. The boats, Red Buck, Dew Drop, once the pride of the river, soon went to anchor and deterioration.

The county seat changed as well. Once women came to do their trading there with homemade basket, filled with eggs, butter, ginseng which they swapped for fixings, thread, and calico. They motor in now to shop.

Typical of the changing scene is the town of Prestonsburg in Floyd County. It became a county seat in 1799 and was once called Spurlock Station. Today it is a thriving city with a country club. Daughters of once rugged farmers and struggling country lawyers now have a social position to maintain.

Mountain women are becoming class conscious! More's the pity.

COAL

It is often said, "Old mother nature must have laughed heartily at the pioneer, who in his mad rush to go west hurried down through the wide troughs between the mountains, hurrying on through the valleys, passing unheeded the wealth in forests on either side, the wealth in minerals under his very feet." But there came a time when the mountain men discovered the treasure.

Over in Johnson County, adjoining Floyd, where Walter Scott Harkins had an eye for timber, his young friend was being twitted for a different reason. "John Caldwell Calhoun Mayo," they'd string out his long name, "when you're cooped up in the poorhouse or the lunatic asylum, you can't say we didn't warn you to quit digging around trying to find a fortune under the ground."

But young Mayo, like his friend Harkins the lawyer, would only say, thumbs hooked in suspenders, "He who laughs last, laughs best."

Some of his youthful companions continued to poke fun but John Caldwell Calhoun Mayo turned them a deaf ear. On foot he trudged endless miles when he was a poor lad, or rode a scrubby nag along the Warrior's Path, always seeking coal deposits, pleading with landowners for leases and options on acreage he knew to be rich in minerals. He surmounted seemingly impossible barriers, even having legislation enacted to set aside Virginia land grants. He tapped hidden treasures, developed the wealth of the Big Sandy country that had been locked in mountain fastnesses for centuries. Through his vision, thriving cities blossom where once was wilderness.

The United States Geological Survey shows one eighth of the total coal area of the nation to be in this region; it supplies nearly one quarter of all the country's bituminous coal.

PUBLIC WORKS

Only in recent years has the mountaineer begun to forsake his cove, however unproductive the earth may be, for the valley and public works. Indeed mountain folk long looked down on their own who sought employment at public works, mines, lumber camps, steel mills. They decried any employment away from the hillside farm, because it meant to them being an underling. No mountaineer ever wanted to be company-owned. Leastwise none of the Wellfords of Laurel Creek. But Clate, youngest of Mark Wellford's family, lured by the promise of big cash money, decided to quit the farm and take his wife and little family down to the foothills. "There's a good mine there, pays good money, and there's a good mine boss on the job," so Clate was told. Some two years later Clate, a weary figure, emerged one evening from the company commissary. His face was smudged with coal dust. A miner's lamp still flickered on his grimy cap. He carried a dinner bucket and the baby on one arm. Over his shoulder hung a gunnysack that bulged with canned goods and a poke of meal. At his heels followed his bedraggled, snaggle-toothed wife, a babe in her arms and another tugging at her skirts. Her faded calico dress that dragged in the back was tied in at the waist with a ragged apron. There was a look of sad resignation in her eyes. Now and then she brushed a hand up the back of her head to catch the drab stray locks. She might have been fifty, judging from the stooped shoulders and weary step. Yet the rounded arms—her sleeves were rolled to the elbow—looked youthful.

Clate halted a few minutes to talk to another miner, a boy in his teens. "What'd you load today?" the younger asked after casual greetings. "'Tarnal buggy busted a dozen times, held me back," Clate complained, shifting the dinner pail and the baby. "Always something to hold a man back." "I'm figuring on going to Georgia," the young lad sounded hopeful. "Got a buddy down there in the steel mill. Beats the mines any day." He saw some young friends across the street and hurried to join them.

"Come on, Phoebe!" Clate called over his shoulder to his wife, "get a mosey on you. I'm hongry. And 'ginst you throw a snack of grub together it'll be bedtime. An' before you know it, it's time to get up and hit for the hill again." He plodded on up the winding path to a row of shacks. His little family followed.

The row of dilapidated shacks where the miners lived was clinging to the mountain side at the rear, while the fronts were propped up with rough posts. They were all alike with patched rubberoid roofs, broken tile chimneys, windows with broken panes. Rough plank houses unpainted, though here and there a board showed traces of once having been red or brown. Between the houses at rare intervals a fence post remained. But the pickets had long since been torn away to fire the cookstove or grate. There were no gardens. Coal companies did not encourage gardening. Miners and their families lived out of cans, and canned goods come high at the company's commissary.

A tipple near the drift mouth of the mine belched coal and coal dust day after day. When Phoebe—you'd never have known her for the pretty girl she used to be far back in the Blue Ridge—rubbed out a washing on the washboard, hung it to dry on the wire line stretched from the back door to a nail on the side of the out-building, she knew that every rag she rubbed and boiled and blued would be grimy with coal dust before it dried. What was she to do about it? Where else could the wash be hung? Once Phoebe thought she had found the right place. A grassy plot quite hidden beyond a clump of trees. She put the wet garments in a basket and carried them off to dry, spreading them upon the green earth. But no sooner had she spread out the last piece than a fellow came riding up. "What's the big idea?" he demanded, shaking a fist at the garments on the ground. And Phoebe, from Shoal's Fork of Greasy Creek, never having heard the expression, mumbled in confusion, "I'm pleased to meet you."

"Don't try to get fresh," the fellow scowled. "Don't you know this ground is company-owned? The big boss keeps this plot for his saddle horse to graze on. Pick up your rags and beat it!"

She understood from the gesture the meaning of beat it and obeyed in haste.

There was little room to stretch up a line indoors, though she did sometimes in the winter when the backyard was too sloppy to walk in. Clate Wellford's was one of the smaller shacks, a room with a lean-to kitchen. The others, with two rooms, cost more. Besides there were other things to be taken out of date's pay envelope before it reached him; there were electric light, coal, the store bill, and the company doctor.

"None of my folks have been sick. We've never even set eyes on the doctor," Clate complained to the script clerk on the first payday.

"What of it?" the script clerk replied. "You'd be running quick enough for the doctor if one of your kids or your old woman got sick or met with an accident, wouldn't you? The doctor's got to live same as the rest of us."

So the miner stumbled out with no more to say. Sometimes he'd vent his spleen upon his wife. "You wuz the one that wanted to come here! Wisht I'd never married. A man can't get nowheres with a wife and young ones on his hands." And the wife, remembering the way of mountain women, offered no word of argument.

When the owners of the coal operation came from the East to check up output and earnings they didn't take time to make a tour of inspection of the shacks. Certainly they had no time to listen to complaints of miners.

Lured by the promise of big money Clate Wellford, like many other mountain men, forsook the familiar life of his own creek for the strange work-a-day of the mining camp.

Back on Shoal's Fork of Greasy Creek there was always milk a-plenty to drink. Bless you, Clate knew the time when he'd carried buckets full of half-sour milk to the hogs. How they guzzled it! Here there was never a drop of cow's milk to drink. You got it in cans—thick, condensed, sickeningly sweet. Couldn't fool the children, not even when you thinned it with water. "It don't taste like Bossy's milk," the youngsters shoved it away.

What was more, back on Shoal's Fork there was always fried chicken in the spring. All you could eat. Turkey and goose and duck, if you chose, through the winter and plenty of ham meat. There was never a day date's folks couldn't go out into the garden and bring in beans, beets, corn, and cabbage. He'd never known a time when there were not potatoes and turnips the year round. The Wellfords had come to take such things for granted. But here in the coal camp you could walk the full length of the place from the last ramshackle house on down to the commissary and never see a bed of onions and lettuce. The shacks were so close together there was no room for a garden, even if the company had permitted it.

"That's company-owned!" the boss growled at Clate that time he was trying to break up the hard crusty earth with a hoe.

"I've got my own onion sets," Clate tried to explain. "My folks fetched 'em down."

"Who cares?" the company boss snarled. "What you reckon the company's running a commissary for? The store manager can sell you onions—ready to eat."

So the miner didn't set out an onion bed.

Again, Clate found some old warped planks outside the drift mouth of the mine; he brought them home and was building a pigpen. The mine boss came charging down upon him.

"What you doing with the company's planks?"

The frightened Clate tried to explain that he had supposed the wood thrown aside was useless and that he was making ready for the young shoat his folks meant to bring him.

"What you suppose the company would do if every miner packed off planks and posts that he happens to see laying around?" he eyed Clate suspiciously. "We'd soon shut down, that's what would happen. And as for meat. You can buy sow-belly and bologna at the commissary." There was something more. "If you want to keep out of trouble and don't want a couple bucks taken out of your pay, you better get them planks and posts back where you found them!"

The miner's shack was perched on such high stilts that the wind whistled underneath the floor until it felt like ice to the bare feet of the children. It took a lot of coal in the grate and the kitchen stove to keep the place halfway warm. The children were sick all through the winter. Now and then the company doctor stopped in on his rounds of the coal camp to leave calomel and quinine.

With the birth of her last baby, Clate's wife got down with a bealed breast after she had been up and about for a week. "I'm bound to hire someone," Clate told his wife. So he hired Liz Elswick to come and do the cooking, washing, and ironing and to look after the children.

Out on Shoal's Fork neighbor women came eagerly to help each other in case of sickness.

Though it was not much they had to pay Liz—she took it out in trade at the store, the makings of a calico dress, a pair of shoes—it was a hardship on the Wellfords. For Liz Elswick, like other women in a coal camp, never having handled real money, knew little of cost. Nor did she know how to supply the simple needs of the family. Phoebe was too ill to offer a word of advice, poor though it would have been. So, before long, Clate was behind with his store bill. Or to put it the other way around, for the company always took theirs first, Clate had nothing left in his pay envelope on payday.

Then, when he might have had a few dollars coming, something else would happen: shoes would be worn out, he'd have to buy new ones for the children couldn't go barefoot in the winter. He himself had to wear heavy boots in the mine in order to work at all, for Clate had to stand in water most of the time when he picked or loaded. Another time the house caught fire and burned up their beds, chairs, everything. Even though he had steady work that month he had to sell his time to the script clerk in order to get cash to replace his loss. A buddy in the mine was selling out his few possessions at a sacrifice because his wife had run off with a Hunkie. The Hungarian showed the faithless creature a billfold with greenbacks in it, promised her a silk dress and a permanent.

"Why don't you buy new furniture at the commissary?" the script clerk wanted to know of Clate. "There are beds and chairs, bureaus and tables. Get them on time."

"I can't afford it," Clate said honestly.

So, after much bickering, the company's script clerk offered to give the miner script for his time.

"My buddy has to have cash money," Clate argued. "He's quitting. Going back to his folks over in Ohio."

Clate found out that when he sold his time he got only about fifty cents for a dollar.

"What you think I'm accommodating you for?" the company's script clerk wanted to know. "I'm not out for my health. Course if you don't want to take it"—he shoved the money halfway across the counter to Clate—"you don't have to. There are plenty of fellows who are glad to sell their time."

There was nothing left for Clate to do. He and his family had to have the bare necessities, bed, table, chairs.

Soon he was in the category with the other miners, always behind, always overdrawn, always selling his time before payday. Soon he was getting an empty envelope with a lot of figures marked on the outside. Clate was company-owned! If he lived to be a hundred he'd never be paid out.

Though Clate Wellford and the other coal miners never heard the word redemptioner and indent, they were not unlike those pioneer victims of unscrupulous subordinates. Men in bondage like the sharecropper of the Deep South, the Okie of the West.

How different the children of the coal field looked to those along the creeks in the shady hollows of the Blue Ridge!

In the coal camps they were unkempt and bony, in dirty, ragged garments. They squabbled among themselves and shambled listlessly along the narrow path that led past the row of shacks toward the commissary. The path was black with coal dust and slate dumped along the way to fill the mud holes.

Why do they continue to live in such squalor and in bondage? Why don't they move away?

If a miner should decide to move out, he has no means of getting his few belongings to the railroad spur some distance from the camp, for he has neither team nor wagon. All these are company-owned. The company, which controls the railroad spur, also has control too over the boxcars that are on the track. Only the company can make requisition for an empty boxcar. If a miner wants to move he cannot even get space, though he is willing to pay for it, in a boxcar to have his goods hauled out.

He stays on defeated and discouraged.

If, however, he does quit one coal camp and get out he is unskilled in other labor and if he should try to evade his store and other obligations with one coal company, the office employees have a way of passing on the information to another operation. There are ways of putting a laborer on the blacklist.

But why should he try to move on? Word comes back to the miner from other buddies who have tried other camps. "They're all the same. Might as well stay where you are."

Behind every shack is a dump heap of cans, coal ashes, potato peel, coffee grounds, and old shoes.

Rarely was the voice of the miner's wife raised in song as she plodded through her daily drudgery. Now and then the young folks could be heard singing—but not an ancient ballad. Rather it was a rakish song picked up from drummers coming through the mining camps who sold their inferior wares to the commissary manager.

There was a church propped up on the hillside. But meeting usually broke up with the arrest of some of the young fellows who didn't try hard enough to suppress a laugh when the camp harlot went to the mourner's bench, or when some old creature too deaf to hear a word the preacher said went hobbling toward the front. Sometimes an older miner, who for the sheer joy of expressing a long-pent-up feeling, shouted "Praise the Lord!", was dragged out by a deputy sheriff, along with the young bloods, on a charge of disturbing religious worship.

The limb of the law usually knew who had a few dollars left from the week's pay. The law knew too that a miner preferred to pay a fine rather than lie in jail and lose time on the job next day.

There was no pleasant diversion around the coal camp for womenfolk and children, no happy gatherings such as the play party, a quilting, an old-time square dance. In their drab surroundings, little wonder men and women grew old before their time.

That was yesterday. Today there are model mining towns throughout the coal fields. Holden in West Virginia even has swimming pools and modern cottages for its miners. A miner can work on the side too—it is not uncommon to see signs over his cottage or barn door reading, "Painting and Paper Hanging," "Decorating." There are thrifty vegetable gardens, and miners' wives vie with each other in the product of their flower gardens. Holden is sometimes called the Model Mining Town of America. It has welcomed visitors from all over the land.

In Harlan, Kentucky, once the center of many stormy battles between miners and operators, the county crowned a Coal Queen on August 23, 1941, commemorating the first shipment of coal thirty years previously. The queen, a pretty eighteen-year-old high school girl, won the title from six other contestants, enthroned on a replica of the railroad car which hauled out the county's first coal. As part of the celebration a $1500 public drinking fountain was dedicated and speakers hailed the economic progress of Harlan County since 1911. Each day 1200 railroad cars loaded with coal leave the county.

It was an all-day program being sponsored by the Harlan Mining Institute safety organization in co-operation with the County Coal Operators Association.

Not only were mining officials present from many points but politicians as well were present, including Mrs. Herbert C. Cawood, Republican nominee for sheriff, a sister of the crowned coal queen.

BACK TO THE FARM

For those who do not have a hankering for work in the foothills and industrial centers there is today a greater incentive to go back to the farm or to stay there than ever before in the history of our country. For the young mountaineer there is the Future Farmer Association which not only trains him in soil conservation, guides him in what is best for his type of farm, or what stock he can best produce, but also holds out the spur of reward. It is a fine plan for promoting friendly rivalry and spurs the future farmer to excel his young neighbor. Each fall there is a great state fair in a leading city of each of the Blue Ridge states, where the young future farmers of America gather with their exhibits in livestock, poultry, exhibits of their own crops. There is even a revival of the prettiest baby contest so familiar to the old county fair of the long ago. However today the contest has expanded beyond mere beauty; there is a health baby contest. The grand champion rural child is given an award with much pomp, and to complete the spirit of friendly rivalry and to bring about better understanding and fellowship between country and town there is also a contest for the champion rural and city baby.

The mountain boy, because he is no longer isolated by rugged roads, meets his city cousin on common ground.

The scene has changed along the once rugged creek-bed road. In place of the saddle hung on a wall peg on the front stoop for passersby to view and perhaps envy, a new saddle once the joy and pride of the mountain lad, today there is a spare tire and there is an auto in the foreyard or in the garage, a garage which is often bigger than the little cabin itself.

The mountain farmer is being taught by skilled leaders to help himself.

Even if the mountaineer's farm is on a forty-five-degree slope there is hope for him today, thanks to the Farm Security Administration. A workable plan for soil rebuilding was the first step. To reclaim wet land the mountain man digs drainage ditches. Stone, heretofore hidden in the mountain side and unused, is now utilized for building barns and houses. On fourteen acres a man and his family, including a couple of grown sons and their families, can today raise a living and be comfortable. With a loan of $440 from the Farm Security Administration a once unproductive miserable farm can be made liveable and productive.

The farmer of the hill country is being trained to put to use the things at hand.

Second-growth timber is coming on and is conserving the productive qualities of the hillside soil which was drained away by ruthless cutting of timber a quarter century ago. Today the farmer is taught to treat his farm and pasture land with lime and phosphate, a thing unheard of in the early days. And the greatest of all his blessings today, the mountain farmer will tell you, is the good road.

Why then should he want to leave the mountains he knows and loves so well?

It was tried by the young folks, but finding themselves ill fitted for work at coal camps or steel and iron mills or factories or industrial centers, they returned eagerly to the hills, at least during the first five years of the thirties.

To this day, though some have remained in the mill towns, it is not uncommon to hear the womenfolk—whose men have provided them with modern conveniences, a frigidaire, a gas range, an electric washer and iron, a spigot of running water—say, "Wisht I had back my cellar house, my cedar churn, the battling block to make clean our garments. All these here fixy contrapshuns make slaves of my menfolks at public works to earn enough cash money to pay for them." And again, "I'm a-feared of that 'mobile. I'd druther ride behint old Nell in the jolt wagon."

Recently a Harvard sociologist, Dr. C. C. Zimmerman, has suggested that, because the Appalachian and Ozark farmers are producing children in excess of the number "required to maintain a population status quo," they pull up stakes and settle in "declining rural New England."

However, those in a position to know, through long years of close contact with the southern mountaineer and his needs, point out that no resettlement or colonizing plan can be worked out until a better program of regional analysis is first accomplished. They point out that many a mountain farmer would not earn in a whole lifetime of toil enough money to make a down payment on "even a rundown New England farm."

Besides there is still in the makeup of the mountaineer that spirit of independence. He does not want to rent. He wants to own outright, even if his property is no more than a house seat. There are few sharecroppers in the southern highlands. A mountaineer would rather suffer starvation than be subservient. Though he may be illiterate he still remembers, because the story has been handed on by word-of-mouth, the suffering and mistreatment of his forbears across the sea.

To add to his security today there is the Tenant Purchase program for rehabilitation through the United States Department of Agriculture, and mountain men themselves are selected as members of the committee. It is a part of the FSA. The Big Sandy News, July 25, 1941, carries this story to the mountaineer: "The Tenant Purchase program provides for the purchase of family type farms by qualified tenants under the Bankhead-Jones Tenant Purchase Act. Farm Security Administration rehabilitator loans are available to low income farm families, ineligible for credit elsewhere, for the purchase of livestock, workstock, seed, fertilizer and equipment, in accordance with carefully planned operation of the farm and home. About 150 farm families in Lawrence county have already been helped by this program.

"The services of debt adjustment committeemen are available to all farmers, as well as to FSA borrowers. The committeemen will assist creditors and farm debtors to reach an amicable adjustment of debts based on the ability to pay."

In this particular section of the Blue Ridge, while some are looking to the soil, others have an eye on the waters above the earth. There is being revived the plan of twenty years ago for the canalization of one of the best-known and most important rivers of the Blue Ridge Country—the Big Sandy. As a means to that end there is an organization called the Big Sandy Improvement Association and, with a mountain man, Congressman A. J. May, to espouse its cause, things look promising for the project.

The mountain men and their city co-workers get together and speak their minds and exchange views at dinner meetings down in the Big Sandy Valley. A survey is being conducted to show to what extent a navigable river would aid industry, especially the coal business. Mountain men are joining their practical knowledge with the scientific knowledge of men of the level land who are putting the plan of canalization of the Big Sandy River before Uncle Sam for consideration and backing.

The people of the Blue Ridge mountains are learning slowly and surely to mingle and to work with others. That again is due to good roads.

Once there was the simple manner of making sorghum, whereby the mountain man paid for the use of the mill in cash or cane; today there is the Sorghum Association which helps the mountaineer market his product. There is even a Blackberry Association whose trucks drive to the very door and load up every gallon a family can pick.

Conservation is evident on every side and mountain people are realizing the benefits in dollars.

Where once timbering was carried on in an appallingly wasteful manner, reforestation under the guidance of trained leaders is under way. Camps of the CCC dot the whole southern mountain region and fruits of their efforts can be seen in the growing forests on many a mountain side. In Mammoth Cave National Park alone 2,900,000 seedlings were planted to stay gulley erosion in an area of 3,000,000 square yards.

Mountain boys who have entered CCC camps are rated high in obedience, deportment, and adaptability to surroundings. Some of them have never been away from home before. Many have been no farther than the nearest county seat.

Frequently the mother back home can neither read nor write but she shows with pride a letter from her son. "My boy's in the Three C's. He's writ me this letter. Read with your own eyes." You see her glow with genuine pride of possession as you read aloud—perhaps the hundredth time she has heard it—the boy's letter. The mother shows it to everyone who crosses her threshold there in the Dug Down Mountains of Georgia. There is another letter too. "Johnny's captain writ this one." She knows them apart even though she does not know A from B. "Johnny's captain has writ moughty pretty about our boy." So well does the old mother know the content of the letters she is ready to prompt if the visitor omits so much as a single word in the reading. And when Johnny came home, after his first months of service were ended, he was hailed as a conquering hero by family and neighbors alike. The mother was proudest of all. "Look at this-here contrapshun." From the well-ordered case in the boy's trunk she brought out a toothbrush. "He's larnt to scrub his teeth with this-here bresh and"—she added with unconcealed satisfaction—"he don't dip no more. 'Pon my honor he's about wheedled me into the notion of givin' up snuff. But when a body's old and drinlin' like I'm getting to be dipping is a powerful comforting pastime."

The mountain boy's older brothers and father too have come to understand co-operation. They can work with others. They know the meaning of WPA folklore. When the boss calls out jovially, "Come and grab it, boys!" they, who have never heretofore worked by the clock, know dinner time is up and they must start back to work. When the head of the work crew calls out "Hold! Hold! Hold!" they know a fuse of dynamite is about to be lighted to blast the rock from the mountain side and they hurry to safety. "Dynamite is powerful destructuous!" one tells the other, and they remain at safe distance until again the boss of the crew calls out "All right!" and they are back with pick and shovel.

The mountaineer has become a good steel worker, a dairyman in the foothills, a good mill hand.

The old folk, however, still cling to the old order of things. Once there was an old schoolmaster in the southern mountains who refused to give up teaching from the McGuffey Readers despite the fact that legislation had ruled out the old familiar classics. So persistent was he in his decision it eventually brought on a heart attack which caused his death.

Men of the hills have been quite baffled by CIO and other union cards. Young men first joining the CIO were heard to boast, "We can have anything we want. The CIO is going to buy me and my woman and the kids a nice, fine, pretty home. Pay all our bills if we get sick."

Only a few short years ago in a coal camp in West Virginia a mountain man, who was then working at public works for the first time, found himself haled into court at the county seat on some misdemeanor charge. When asked "Who is the President of the United States?" he unhesitatingly gave the name of the sheriff who had arrested him. So long had his family lived apart that he knew nothing of the workings of his own government and nothing about the various offices, high and low. Yet in the family burying ground of that mountain man inscriptions on the tombstones of his ancestors show that three of them served with distinction in the War of the Revolution.

Lest the coming generation forget the ways of their forbears and the America for which men struggled and died—the America of yesterday—the scene is being faithfully reconstructed in various ways in national parks. The boys of the CCC camps are having a very important hand in reconstruction and conservation.

Some years ago a nephew of Fiddling Bob Taylor of Tennessee met with several friends on hallowed ground in that State, not for a patriotic celebration but merely for the joy of roaming in the great out-of-doors. The ex-governor's kinsman, like his forbears, had been born on the site where in 1772 the first step was made in American independence by the Watauga Association. This autumn day these sons of those early patriots fell to talking of the country, its scenic beauty, its resources—particularly in the mountain region. "Fitting shrines set in the beauty of the great out-of-doors are the finest monuments to our patriots, it seems to me," said one. Another said, "The world's history shows that from the time of creation the successful men were those who really loved the out-of-doors. Abraham was a nomad whose home was wherever he pitched his tent. Moses sought the silence and solitude of Midian before God could speak to him. David was a shepherd boy on the Judean hills. Elijah dwelt in a cave. In the New World we see Washington, the surveyor, a lover of the out-of-doors; Thomas Jefferson, finding happiness and contentment in roaming the hills of Virginia; the immortal Lincoln, coming from the backwoods of humble parents; Theodore Roosevelt, cowboy on the plains of our western country."

With a smile Fiddling Bob's nephew turned to his friends. "Fellows, I'll wager there's not one among them from Abraham down to Teddy but would enjoy a canter over a good highway to take a look at the Blue Ridge Country. The most beautiful forests and parks in the world. Ought to link 'em up with a highway."

"Not a bad idea," chorused the friends, and they took another round of mint juleps to celebrate the birth of a thought.

"Ideas grow and thoughts travel fast," Fiddling Bob's nephew remarked some years later when setting out on a cross-country journey. "The Park-to-Park Highway grows annually and this Skyline Drive, which is a part of the plan, is one of the most alluring of all modern roads." Starting at Front Royal, the northern entrance to the Shenandoah Valley Park, it continues to Rockfish Gap near Waynesboro on the south, a distance of 107 miles. It is a broad mountain highway following the crest of the Blue Ridge, invading a world that was remote and known only to mountain folk. Today over its smooth, paved surface cars climb quickly to airy heights from which may be viewed innumerable vistas of the Piedmont plateau and the Shenandoah Valley. At strategic points parking overlooks have been constructed, from which are seen tumbling waterfalls, deep and narrow canyons, cool shady forests, open meadows, and wild flowers of every shade and hue throughout the summer. Autumn presents a boundless riot of color and winter a snowy, sparkling blanket pierced by tall green pines.

The Skyline Drive links with the Blue Ridge Parkway at Rockfish Gap which will at last connect the Shenandoah National Park with the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee.

"In case you don't know," Fiddling Bob's nephew likes to remind a stranger, "Shenandoah Valley Park was presented by Virginians to the nation in 1935 and more than three million dollars have been spent on the Skyline Drive alone—a drive that hasn't a parallel in America. Through this wilderness the Father of his Country once trudged on foot as a surveyor and looked down upon the beauty of the Shenandoah Valley from the lofty peaks of the Blue Ridge. His was the task to survey lands for the oncoming settlers. He had no moment to explore under the earth. That was the task of later men. Today for good measure, after you have beheld the breathtaking beauty from the heights, just travel seven eighths of a mile from Front Royal to the Skyline Caverns where you'll see the most unusual cave flowers that man has ever looked upon. Why"—Fiddling Bob's nephew puffs vehemently on his corn-cob pipe—"do you know that Dr. Holden, he's professor of Geology at VPI, says these Hellicitites, that's what he calls 'em, 'these weird, fantastic, and pallid forms' warp scientific judgment. And, friends, it's nature's work, these inconceivable structures hidden from the world for millions of years down under the ground."

He turned with a beaming countenance when we had emerged from the cavern of matchless wonders. "Young Americans don't have to study geography books these days. All they have to do is get a second-hand car, fill it up, and strike out on the Park-to-Park Highway. They'll get an eyeful and an earful too from native sons, and learn more about America than they can dig out of the dry pages of a book in a year. Why, right down there at Charlottesville there's Ash Lawn where James Monroe lived and meditated. His friend, Thomas Jefferson, set about building the place in 1798 while Monroe was in France looking after Uncle Sam's business. Even great and busy men in those days were neighborly. Thomas Jefferson did a good part by his neighbor James Monroe when he built that house, and the ambassador thanked him generously when he came back to occupy the place. The two used to roam the grounds together and spent many happy hours there. They visited to and fro; you see Monroe lived across yonder within sight of his friend's home. The great of the past take on reality when you actually set foot upon the ground they have trod. Places come to life when we see them with our own eyes. That's the purpose of these great highways, the Park-to-Park highways that connect the scenes of American history."

As the terrain changes there is a great variety in the scenes along Skyline Drive. Sometimes the road leaves the crest to tunnel through a rocky flank of mountain and you come unexpectedly upon sparkling streams tumbling down the mountain side to the valley below. The eye follows the cascade to the very edge of the drive. It disappears beneath the wide surface and reappears beyond a rocky wall, cascading down and down to fertile valleys below.

Virginians, and people of the Blue Ridge generally, count one of their greatest prides the restoration of the capital at Williamsburg through the generosity of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Old and young who pass through the graceful wrought-iron gates to the Governor's Palace thrill at the sight of the restored colonial capital named for King William III, a scene which all in all reflects old England in miniature, "as the state of mind of its citizens reflected the grandeur that was to be America." Here are the stocks in which offenders were locked while they suffered jibes from passing tormentors. Elegant coach-and-four remind the visitor of days of grandeur of Old Virginia when the FFV's were entertained at the royal palace. Across the way is the wigmaker's shop, and the craft house, displaying the Wolcott Collection of ancient tools and instruments. Here too is seen the Wren building, oldest academic structure in English America, "first modeled by Sir Christopher Wren."

Even a youngster of the Blue Ridge knows about Yorktown where Lord Cornwallis surrendered in 1781. "Here's where we fit and plum whopped the life outten the redcoats," we overheard a mountain boy from a mission school boasting to his companions.

Within a few short hours I had left behind Old Virginia and its reminders of colonial days and crossed into the Mountain State.

"There's plenty of beauty and culture in Old Virginia, I'm not denying that—" Bruce Crawford looked over his spectacles at his inquisitive visitor—"but there's just as much on this side of the Blue Ridge. We've got as many wonders under the earth as above it. And"—he turned now in his swivel chair in his quarters in the Capital to look far up the Kanawha River—among the many duties of this Fayette County man is that of letting the world know about his state—"I'm not forgetting Boone roved these parts. Trapped and hunted right here on the Kanawha. But what I started to talk about was not the hills, the rivers, and the caves, but the people." He spoke slowly, deliberately, this sturdy, well-groomed hillsman. Like Sergeant York of the Tennessee Mountains Bruce Crawford can, if need be, drop easily back into the dialect of his people. And he is an accomplished writer. "I don't care enough about it to follow the profession of writing," he said, and fire glowed in his gray eyes. "But as old Uncle Dyke Garrett used to say, 'I takened all I could a while back from furriners' so I cut loose and wrote my notions about it and it was published in the West Virginia Review. Take it along with you on your travels through the Mountain State and see if I've come near hitting center."

It seems to me he came mighty near hitting center and with Bruce Crawford's permission, here are his sentiments:

"In recent weeks two ignorant jibes were flung at the State of West Virginia, one by a Southern editor and the other by a Northern cartoonist.

"The editor, a Virginian, moaned that rude mountaineers had routed Democrats of the 'old Southern type' from the Capital on the Kanawha and that the Lost Cause was lost all over again. He was still sad because Senator Matthew M. Neely had been elected Governor on a platform to restore democracy to the Democratic Party, and government to the governed, in West Virginia.

"The cartoonist represented us by a stock hill-billy character with bushy beard and rifle in hand, gunning for someone around the mountains.

"Both editor and cartoonist have their heads in the sands of the past.

"West Virginians are Mountaineers by geography and tradition, and proud of it. Originally they were induced by wily Virginians to come into these mountains and form a buffer back-country against Indians, French and British. Here they grew sturdy, self-reliant and independent. They fought the first and last battles of the American Revolution, as well as the first land engagement of the war to preserve the Union. They were shooting for liberty while Patrick Henry was still shouting for it among appeasers of King George. A continental commander, it is told, refused to enlist more volunteers from the Colonies, saying he had plenty of West Virginians. General Washington, too, thought these mountaineers were tops, for in a dark hour of the Revolution he said: 'Leave me but a banner to place upon the mountains of West Augusta, and I will gather around me the men who will lift our bleeding country from the dust and set her free.'

"These mountaineers saved piedmont and tidewater Virginia from Indians, helped win the American independence, and made possible the opening up of Kentucky to the West. They then expected a fair deal from the Virginia Government, but they did not get it. So when Virginia seceded from the Union, they seceded from Virginia. And proudly they adopted the motto, 'Mountaineers are always free,' a sentiment so generally subscribed to that it appears over the entrance to our penitentiary.

"The slurs persist through ignorance.

"True, we have had all-out clan wars. We have had violent chapters in our industrial story, under state governments apparently considered benevolent by the Virginia editor. We tolerated waste of both human and material resources under wild individualism. But a new day has come, promising the greatest good to the greatest number, and we shall have much to advertise, as envisioned in Governor Neely's inaugural address when he said:

"'Fortunately impoverished land can be reclaimed; denuded areas can be reforested; unnecessary stream pollution can be prevented; and in our purified watercourses fish can be made to thrive.... For our posterity and ourselves, we must restore as much as possible of the matchless heritage which we wasted as improvidently as the base Indian who threw away a pearl that was richer than all his tribe.... If to West Virginia scenery, which is surprisingly diversified and transcendently beautiful, we add the lure of fully restored forests, fish and game, the State will eventually become a happy hunting ground for the sportsman; a paradise for the tourist; and the home of prosperity more abundant than we have ever known.'

"Progress toward these aims is being made under the direction of various heads.

"In addition to mining areas producing more soft coal than any other state, plus our varied manufactures, we have fertile valleys and slopes from which ... an increasing harvest is reaped. The State's diversity of activity should, in the fullness of time, make West Virginia the most progressive, the most socially balanced, and therefore the most truly civilized State in the Union.

"Our road system is being rapidly improved.... Many of our historic and scenic spots and recreational areas, hitherto locked in the uplands, are easily reached as more and more tourists travel pioneer trails on modern highways.

"All these things now are being discovered, or soon should be, by the whole Nation. Ours is the Vacationland at the Crossroads of the East.

"Just as in other times of national peril the human and material resources of this region figured indispensably, so today its great strength will be used against the Hitler menace.... West Virginia, with its industrial development and strategic isolation from attack, may become the Defense Hero of a war in which states little and large have fallen before the juggernaut of tyranny. Again, as in the time of Washington, the Nation may look to these West Virginia hills, and plant here the oriflamme of freedom.

"Let us sing of the soft, folded beauty of the Alleghenies; of rivers roaring with primeval discontent and streams crystal-clear (save those running red from wounded hills); of Edenlike forests in Monongahela's million acres; of Ohio's fertile valley, placid and hill-bordered, where once 'warwhoop and savage scream echoed wild from rock and hill'; of clean-trimmed rolling landscapes of Eastern Panhandle, famed for history and old houses; of lovely pastoral valleys of the South Branch, Greenbrier and Tygart; of wild, boulder-strewn New River Canyon; of Webster's forest monarchs and her deep, cool woods; of the 'brown waters of Gauley that move evermore where the tulip tree scatters its blossoms in Spring'; of the green hills mirrored in starlit Kanawha; of white-splashing Blackwater Falls, awe-inspiring Grand View, enchanting Seneca Rocks, and the remote Smoke Hole region with its Shangri La inhabitants.

"Sing of our rhododendron and its dark-green, wax-like leaf and purple flower; of Mingo's mighty oak that weathered six hundred winters; of our highest peak, Spruce Knob, bony above the lush forest; of Cranberry Glades and their strong plants native to Equator and Pole; bracing altitudes, averaging highest east of the Mississippi.

"Sing a lay for the strawberries of Buckhannon, buckwheat of Kingwood, our lowly but uprising spud, tobacco at Huntington, and the wine-smell of orchards in Berkeley; for the horses of Greenbrier, Herefords of Hampshire, sheep on Allegheny slopes, deer in a dozen State Parks, and bears in the pines of Pocahontas.

"Sing of timber, iron and steel; of coal heaved by brawny miners into the bituminous bin of the Nation; of oil gushers and gas flow; of vitrolite and chromium, plastics and neon, rayon and nylon; of glass stained for cathedrals of Europe; of billions of kilowatts from coal, and potentially more water power; of fluorescent bulbs at Fairmont, and poisonous red flakes in the Kanawha sky from metallurgical plants—fire poppies blooming in the night.

"Sing of deeds and events of deathless renown; of Morgan Morgan and his first white settlement at Bunker Hill; of James Rumsey and his steamboat on the Potomac; of Chesapeake and Ohio's epic completion across the State in '73 to the tune of legendary John Henry's steel-driving ballad in Big Bend tunnel; of turnpikes, taverns and toll houses long abandoned; of our leaders, Negro and white, in business, industry, education, religion and government; of our stalwarts of union labor whose vision, social comprehension and courage helped to bring a new day for all; of our cherished democracy, flexible and self-righting in a world where popular rule is a rarity.

"I have catalogued in clumsy prose what a Thomas Dunn English or a Roy Lee Harmon could peel off in crisp, singing lines. Surely we have gifted souls who can illumine our story in song—the story of Mountaineers Always Free, of West Virginians always Mountaineers—for a better understanding by the country at large ... of this land of heroic past, exhilarating present, and promising future."

A journey through the Mountain State convinces the traveler that on her side of the Blue Ridge West Virginia offers as many wonders under the earth as above it, if one is not a claustrophobe. There's Gandy Sinks where my friends of the Speleological Society were trapped by a cloudburst on August 1, 1940; and Seneca Caverns, in Monongahela National Forest, once the refuge of Seneca Indians about twenty miles west of Franklin on U. S. Route 33, and six miles from Spruce Knob. Caves as unbelievably beautiful as the Luray Caverns of Virginia, where the great council room of the Seneca tribe remains as it was in the day of the redskins. There is even a legend about Snow Bird, the only daughter of Bald Eagle and White Rock, his wife. Inside the cavern, if you look carefully, there is to be seen the outline of the lovely face of Snow Bird on the great stone wall. There are a Wigwam, and an Iceberg, an Alligator, and the Golden Horseshoe and Balcony of the Metropolitan, all in natural stone formation.

West Virginia has developed 84,186 acres in its state-park and forest system. Sparkling rivers flow throughout the state. At the junction of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers where Daniel Boone once roamed there is a monument commemorating the battle of the Revolution between colonial troops and Indians. Here too are the graves of a woman scout, "Mad Anne" Bailey, and a Shawnee chieftain, Cornstalk. There are hundreds of miles of trails, safe underfoot, but flanked by as wild and rugged lands as ever infested by the Indian.

VALLEY OF PARKS

If Dr. Walker, the English explorer, should return to the earth today and visit the Big Sandy country near the point where he first entered the state of Kentucky, he'd be amazed at the sight which would greet his eyes. Cities have sprung up where once was wilderness. Yet one natural beauty of the country remains unchanged: the great gorge made by Russell Fork of Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy, breaking through the mountain at an elevation of 2800 feet—The Breaks of Big Sandy. Here in the days of the Civil War many thrilling episodes took place and through The Breaks a Confederate regiment trekked back to Virginia leaving behind a string of Democratic counties in its wake.

Recently added to Jefferson National Forest, another link in the chain of Park-to-Park highways, The Breaks of Big Sandy is the most picturesque and historic spot in eastern Kentucky. It is located on State Route 80, just thirty miles from Pikeville where many of the McCoys live peaceably today. Kentucky, with the mother state Virginia, is planning a better and broader highway to The Breaks, which will readily connect it with the Mayo Trail. And the native sons still dwelling in the hills, aided by their neighbors representing them in state and federal offices, are busily planning an improvement program for the area in which The Breaks are embraced.

Once the Dark and Bloody Ground, Kentucky today is fairly teeming with reawakening. Her people are hastening to bring from hidden coves things once discarded as fogey. "We aim for this generation to know how thrifty and apt their forbears were," is frequently heard from their lips. In historic Levi Jackson Wilderness Road State Park (U. S. 25), near London, there is an old cider press. Far back in 1790 William Pearl, one of the early settlers in Laurel County, made and set up the crude press for making cider, or brandy if he chose. The press rests on a stone base five feet wide. Happily, Pearl's great-grandson was wise enough to preserve the relic and present it to the park. Within the park also is Frazier's Knob, the highest point in the state of Kentucky. On the banks of Little Laurel flowing through the park one may see an old-time watermill in full operation. And if you have a bit of imagination you'll wait your turn and take home a poke of meal and have cornbread for supper.

Through this region—now The Valley of Parks—Boone blazed his famous trace and Governor Shelby built the first wagon road through the wilderness from infant Kentucky to Mother Virginia. Along the way a pleasant reminder of an almost forgotten past is that of the Wilderness Road Weavers busy at loom and wheel. They process cloth from wool and flax before your eyes and explain with care the art of making homemade dyes from herb and bark. An older woman pauses with shuttle in hand. "See the hollow tree off yonder, a mother and her babe hid there to escape the Indians. And the cabin over there with the picketin' fence around, that's our library now and we've got all sorts of curiosities there too." A visit within reveals the curiosities to be relics of early home arts and mountain industries.

Cumberland Falls, Kentucky's Million Dollar State Park, of 593 acres, was a gift of T. Coleman du Pont and family of Delaware; its chief attraction is the Falls, once called Shawnee, with the profile of an Indian plainly to be seen in jutting rock over which the roaring cataract plunges near Corbin and Williamsburg. In this once Dark and Bloody Ground there is amazing beauty; on July 1st, 1941, Mammoth Cave, the twenty-sixth National Park, was dedicated with imposing ceremonies, adding another link to the Park-to-Park plan. If it had not been for the saltpeter from this cave the Battle of New Orleans would have been lost, for from this mineral gunpowder that saved the day was made. So vast is one of its caverns, the Snowball Dining Room, 267 feet underground, that hundreds of members of the Associated Press held a dinner there in 1940. Mammoth Cave is reached by U. S. Highway 70, west from Cave City, and one hundred miles south of Louisville. The vast national park of which it is a part is watered by the Green River, known to early explorers.

Kentucky's most talked-of cave in recent years is that in which Floyd Collins lost his life in 1925. The tons of rock in Sand Cave under which he was trapped did not cause his death, however. Collins died of pneumonia. His body now lies buried in Crystal Cave, which was Floyd's favorite of all those he had spent his life in exploring.

One travels cross country from Crystal Cave to the Blue Grass on Russell Cave Road, along with some of the 45,000 other people who have come within a single year to see Man o' War, the most famous race horse of all times. "The Blue Grass region of Kentucky," says Prof. E. S. Good, head of the department of animal husbandry of the University of Kentucky, "is the premier breeding ground for light horses because of its ample rainfall, mild climate, abundance of sunshine and a soil rich in calcium and phosphorus, so necessary to produce superior bone, muscle and nerve."

Though mountain men are proud to own a good pair of mules and will praise the merits of this lowly beast without stint, they generally know or care little about blooded race horses. They take pride in less glamorous possessions. For instance, they are proud that in their midst the McGuffey Readers were still taught by an aged schoolmaster in defiance of legislation which barred the classics and that the little log school in which he taught is the first and only shrine in Kentucky to the illustrious educator, Dr. William Holmes McGuffey, who compiled the Eclectic Readers which gave the children of America a different, brighter outlook upon life back in those dark days of Indian warfare. The McGuffey Log School shrine stands not far from the mouth of Big Sandy River in Boyd County. Each year hundreds of McGuffey enthusiasts make a pilgrimage to the humble shrine of learning.

"We've got no end of fine sights to see." Mountain folk are justly boastful. "Down at Bardstown is the Talbott Tavern built 162 years ago, one of the first such taverns where travelers could tarry west of the Alleghenies. On the walls there are the marks of bullets left by the pistols of Judge John Rowan, who fought a duel with Dr. Chambers and mortally wounded him. There's Audubon Memorial State Park with all manner of paintings, books, and pictures left by Audubon, kin of a French King, who spent many a happy day roaming the hills of Kentucky and studying the ways of wild birds. And no country can claim a greater man than was born right here at Hodgenville, and even if we didn't have a memorial built out of stone to Abraham Lincoln he will live in our hearts as long as the world stands." The mountaineer who sings the praises of his native land eyes his listener attentively. "Bless you, folks are so friendly and kind of heart in Kentucky they even have a refuge for turkeys. There is a sanctuary for this native American fowl in the Kentucky Woodlands Wildlife Refuge just west of Canton. And to make sure the wild creatures do not starve there are vast unharvested crops grown on the cleared land and left for them to feed upon. Here too, if travelers will drive slowly along the wooded trails, they are most sure to come upon a startled deer, for there are more than 2000 roaming in the woodland."

Along with other traditions there survives in Kentucky the medieval rite of blessing the hounds which takes place usually on the first Saturday in November. In his clerical robes the Bishop of Lexington, in the heart of the Blue Ridge, performs the ceremony much in the manner of the prelates of ages past. With proper solemnity the bishop bestows upon each huntsman the medal of St. Hubert, patron of the hunt, while the gay-coated hunters stand with bowed heads and the hounds, eager for the hunt, move restlessly about the feet of their masters.

Across the Blue Ridge in the Carolinas fox hunting and horseback riding are sports as popular as in Kentucky. But above all the things in which the people of the Carolina mountains lead are their matchless handicrafts, weaving, spinning, and their skill in play-making.

Who hasn't heard of "Prof." Koch, Director of the Carolina Playmakers and of the group's plays? And the thing about the Playmakers which sets them apart is that they are chiefly of the mountains. Their plays are made out of the life of mountain folk. Archibald Henderson declares, "Koch is the arch-foe of the cut-and-dried, the academic, the specifically prescribed. All his life he has demanded room for the random, outlet for the unexpressed, free play for the genius." Nowadays he travels by caravan with his Carolina Playmakers from coast to coast that the world may see for itself what genius unrestrained can turn out. If one wishes to see them, in their own setting, which thousands of us do every year, there is The Playmakers' Theatre at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the first theater building in America to be dedicated to the making of its own native drama.

"This love of drama is in the blood of Carolinians," they themselves will tell you. "Get three of them together and before you can say Jack Robinson they're building a play. A folk play, each one with an idea, a situation. Why, right over to Kernersville in North Carolina the first little theater was born. And say, if you want to hear ballad singers, stop wherever you're a-mind to in the Blue Ridge in the Carolinas and keep your ears open. There's a fellow over on South Turkey Creek, little more than a dozen miles as the crow flies from Asheville, and you'll hear the finest singing of old-time ballads you ever listened to. Mostly menfolks like best to sing. Womenfolks turn to the loom, particularly in North Carolina."

A visit to the Weave Shop at Saluda convinces the visitor of the skill of mountain women. Fabrics of unbelievable beauty are turned out at handlooms and it is mountain women who lead in the work.

Much has been written on the subject of handicrafts but perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the diversified subject is Allen Eaton's Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands.

Through Allen Eaton's knowledge of handicrafts and his untiring efforts a great service has been rendered the mountain people of the Blue Ridge in marketing their wares. For he has been instrumental in organizing a handicraft guild which serves the entire southern mountain region. The co-operating units cover various phases of handicraft. The Shenandoah Community Workers of Bird Haven specialize in toy making, while The Jack Knife Shop of Berea College, the Woodcrafters and Carvers of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the Whittlers at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, embrace most every type of handicraft in their output which is the work of mountain boys and girls.

It was to mountain people that George Washington looked for hope and help in the hour of our country's need, and two later presidents held the same opinion. The mother and the wife of a president of these United States have done likewise.

One winter day more than a score of years ago a group of children huddled about the pot-bellied stove in a little log church in the mountains of Georgia. They had trudged through snow and mud and a cold, biting wind to reach this one-room church house. Though the older folk were eager to teach the children lessons of Scripture, few of them could read or write. A mountain child, like every other child, delights in hearing an older person read, whether it be a make-believe story or a real story from the Bible. "Wisht you could read the Word," an eager little girl this winter day said to the old woman who, though she could neither read nor write, was doing her best to explain from a small colored leaflet the meaning of the Sunday School lesson.

The story reached the ears of a lady not far away. After that she began reading Bible stories to the mountain children gathered at a little log cabin near her home. "Martha Berry didn't need eye specs to see how eager the children were for learning," one of her mountain friends remarked, "and then and there she began to ruminate through her mind a way to help them help themselves. 'Not to be ministered unto, but to minister,' that was what Martha Berry said from the very first and that is still the motto of the great institution that has steadily grown up from the humble beginning in a little one-room log house."

It is an unusual institution of learning with a campus equally unique, for in its 25,000 acres are a forest, a mountain, and a lake and more than one hundred buildings which were not only erected by Berry students, but built from materials also made by them. Here mountain boys and girls express the fine spirit of independence inherited from their forbears. Once they enter the Gate of Opportunity, they earn their education. The mountain boy, with his carpentry, brick-making, stock-raising, hand-carving, matches his skill in friendly rivalry with the girl, in her spinning and weaving, making dyes and canning fruits. In one year the girls canned 50,000 gallons of fruit grown within the boundary of the Berry Schools.

Boys and girls of the Georgia mountains need not despair nor be backward while the "Sunday Lady of Possum Trot" keeps open the Gate of Opportunity to the Berry Schools.

"There's a heap of change here in these mountains for our children. If a child's afflicted in its nether limbs, it don't need to lay helpless no more, a misery to itself and everyone else. There's the waters of Warm Springs and doctors with knowing that are there to help them on foot," a mountain mother told me last winter when I stopped at her cabin. "Take the night," she urged. "You can get a soon start in the morning, if you choose." I accepted her hospitality and she told me much of her early life there and of crippled children of the mountains who had been restored through bloodless surgery. Of one boy in particular she told who for long years had never walked a step until he had been brought to the healing salt waters. "He can drive a car now and climb a mountain on foot. He drove an old couple that had bought a new car all the way from Warm Springs plum acrost the State of Georgia and back again so's he could travel the Franklin D. Roosevelt Highway. It give him something to brag about when he got back home." The old woman lifted her eyes to the hills reflectively. "There have been a heap of people in this country who stood in the light of their afflicted children claiming it was the Good Lord's will that they were so and that it was a deep-dyed sin to try to change them. Some claimed it was a sin against the Holy Ghost to carve upon their crooked little limbs and shed their life's blood even though it might make them to walk. Folks with such notions as that are plum in benighted darkness. But times have changed and it's learning and good roads that make it. Nohow, there are doctors now with a heap of learning who can straighten twisted joints of crippled children and never shed their life's blood. Not nary drop!" The old woman's eyes widened with incredulity. "I've seen crippled children packed away on a slide plum helpless and come back home on foot as spry as a wren and never a scar on their flesh. They've got knowing ways off yonder to Warm Springs where the doctors and nurse women, to lend a hand, straighten out the twisted little bodies of many a crippled child. They do say it is a sight to the world how them little crippled fellers can cavort around in the salty waters in no time, playful as minner fish in a sunny mountain brook. And they never shed a drop of their life's blood. So you see there's always a way around a mountain if you can't climb over it. And by these new ways of learning the doctors and the nurse women are not breaking faith with the belief of mountain people. It's a great and a glorious gospel, I tell you!"

If you climb to the top of a peak in Dug Down Mountains, a spur of the Blue Ridge that dwindles to a height of 1000 feet in southeastern Alabama, and take a look at the state—provided the binoculars are strong enough-you'll see why there's a saying down in that country to the effect that "Alabama could sleep with her head resting upon the iron-studded hills of her mineral district, her arms stretched across fields of food and raiment, and her feet bathing in the placid waters of Mobile Bay."

This Cornucopia of the South is not sleeping, however; she is on her feet and bestirring herself and aware of her almost limitless resources.

"She could dig beneath her surface and find practically every chemical element required in the prosecution of modern war.... She could fire her guns with 7,529,090 pounds of explosives produced annually in her mineral mines.... In her hour of victory, she could declare herself the Queen of the Commonwealth, mold her diadem with gold from Talladega, and embellish it with rubies from the bed of the Coosa that drains the Dug Down foothills of the Blue Ridge."

In short, her native sons like to boast, "Alabama could isolate herself from all the world and live happily forever after."

And lest they forget the past, the first White House of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis lived and ruled, still stands, a grim reminder of the old South.

How amazed the pioneer dwellers of the Blue Ridge would be if they could stalk down the mountain side and take a look at what Uncle Sam has been doing the past eight years! Strange words too would fall upon their ears, modern-made to suit modern things. What with good roads and autos, hotels have sprung up thick as mushrooms; so have motels. There's the Zooseum, combining living curiosities and relics. Pleaz Mosley got together in a corner of his farm a lot of Indian relics, petrified oddities, and a few rare varmints, a five-legged calf and a one-eyed 'possum, and housed them in a shack down by the new road that cut through his bottom land and drew sightseers day after day.

"But Pleaz's Zooseum can't hold a candle to the curiosities down in the Holston and Tennessee River country," his neighbors say. "Looks like they just naturally turned loose the briny deep in that country. When they started in on the job old Grandpap up and spoke his mind. Said he, 'Sich carryings on is destructuous of the Master's handiwork and I don't countenance it.' He'd set there by his log fire in his house all his endurin' life. The fire had never went out on that hearth since he was borned and he told the goverment he didn't aim the embers should die down whilst he lived. Well, sir, to pacify the old man they up and moved him, house, log fire and all, up higher in the mountains and him a-settin' right there by the fire all the time. Now he can look down to them mighty waters and them public works with his door open and never jolt his chair away from the hearth."

If Daniel Boone could retrace his steps along the Holston and Tennessee Rivers perhaps he would gape, too flabbergasted to utter a word. Or he might ask in dismay, "What's become of my elbow room?" The country he once roamed with gun and dog has been transformed into a mighty flooded area to make way for the world's largest project of its kind. At first much was said back and forth about the Tennessee Valley Authority. Some viewed it with a dubious eye, called it names—a New Deal experiment, a merchant of electricity, a threat to private ownership of business, or again merely a new series of letters in alphabetical government, the TVA. To isolated mountain folk who came to look as time went on, it was the plum biggest public works they had ever set eyes on.

Eight years after it was begun—by the middle of 1941—with war threatening the civilized world, the TVA has become a defense arm.

Uncle Sam at once cast his discerning eye down Tennessee way and his National Defense Advisory Committee designated the TVA as one of its defense industries, and an appropriation of $79,800,000 was granted the Authority, and a call from the defense power program went out for TVA "to add to its system of ten multi-purpose dams the Cherokee Power Dam on the Holston River, to build another near the Watts Bar Dam and to advance work on the Fort Loudoun Dam on the Tennessee River."

"About the only things unchanged are the caves under the earth and the forests, I reckon," an old mountaineer observes. "They won't never dig away them Great Smoky Mountains, I'm satisfied, though they've got a roadway on the very top from Newfound Gap Highway to Clingman's Dome. And they've got what's left of the Cherokees scrouged off to theirselves in Qualla Indian Reservation."

Wise and far-seeing men have looked to the preservation of much of nature's beauty through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which embraces Little Pigeon Gorge, and Chimney Tops, which command a breathtaking view of the surrounding country.

"My grandfather journeyed miles on foot over these mountains," a young man told me one day when I tarried at the Mountaineer's Museum in Gatlinburg on U. S. Highway 71. "Look over yonder is Le Conte, the Grand-pappy of Old Smoky Mountain as we say here in Tennessee." He turned about in the other direction. "And off there the rushing waters of Little Pigeon turn an old-time mill wheel."

Leaving the alluring sights of Little Pigeon I turned the nose of my antiquated car toward U. S. Highway 25E to visit Cudo's Cave. It is electrically lighted and bright as day. A cave that appears to be an endless chain of rooms. Within are all manner of rock formations, a Palace, a great Pipe Organ, even a reproduction of Capitol Dome not made by mortal hand; Petrified Forests, Cascades that seem to be covered with ice, and a Pyramid said to be eighty-five million years old. And in the midst of these ageless wonders the names of Civil War soldiers carved on the stone walls.

"If all this had been on top of the earth," my mountaineer guide declared, "destructuous man would have laid it waste long ago. Look about," he urged. "There's every sort of varmint by the Master's Hand, from a 'possum to an elephant, and even the likeness of the American flag."

Outside the caves which lie under three states, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, you look down upon the town of Cumberland Gap to the right of which are remains of Civil War trenches.

"There are wonders no end to be seen around this country," mountain people say, "and things maybe never thought of anywhere else."

Perhaps that is not an unlikely statement, considering the stirring event a few years ago that took place at Dayton, Tennessee, when Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan argued the question of evolution pro and con. Or when you know that at the little town of Model across the Tennessee River from Calloway County, Kentucky, a quiet minister by the name of James M. Thomas, prints his little paper from his own handmade type on his own handmade press. It is a tiny paper called The Model Star and it reaches the far corners of the earth. Most of its content is of a religious nature, though there are a few advertisements. While it brings the minister little in financial return he finds his recompense in the enthusiasm of readers scattered from Pitcairn Island to Cairo, Bucharest, and Shanghai.

Tennesseans have a way of doing unusual things. And they are a religious people, especially those who have spent their lives in mountain coves. There's Sergeant York. He admits he sowed his wild oats in his youth. "We drinked and gambled," he says, "and we cussed and fit." But when this giant mountaineer's eyes were opened to the evil of his ways, after the death of his father, Alvin C. York forsook his old habits once and for all. When the World War came he declared himself a conscientious objector. His church—the Church of Christ in Christian Union—held that war was a sin. York had a terrific struggle deciding his duty between God and patriotism. He loved his God. He loved his country. He made every effort to obtain exemption because he firmly believed it a sin to fight and to kill, even for the sake of one's country. But for all that, he could not gain exemption. Whereupon York went alone into the mountains and fervently prayed for guidance. When the voice of God pointed the way he followed, with the result that all the world knows.

"You might call my escape from death purely a matter of luck, but I know different," he says. "It was faith in God that kept me safe. I prayed that day alone on the mountain and asked Him to bring me back home alive and well and He did. I knowed He would. That's what faith in God will do for a man."

Alvin York is a true mountain man. He seeks neither praise nor self-glory. Upon returning from the World War he spurned a fortune in pictures and vaudeville appearances, refusing steadfastly to commercialize his war record. And with the same determination he declined to sell out to small politicians who tried to use him when he undertook to raise funds to start a school for mountain boys and girls. Knowing the need of the young people of his Tennessee mountains, York has made his life purpose to give them "a heap o' larnin'." This he has continued to do year after year through the York Agricultural School near Jamestown, Tennessee. Mountain folk call it Jimtown. Now there's a highway running through the town called York Highway.

Sergeant York likes to sing. He "takened lessons in Byrdstown," and being especially fond of singing hymns, he acquired the name of "The Singing Elder." He teaches a Sunday School class and did even before he went to war. He admits smilingly that his fight with "small politicians" who wanted to use him and his war record was a worse battle than that of the Argonne Forest. Alvin York married his childhood sweetheart, Gracie Williams, upon returning from war, and the Governor of Tennessee performed the ceremony at Pall Mall where the mountain hero was born. He is the father of seven children. For some time he served as project superintendent at a CCC camp in the Tennessee mountains. He is president emeritus of the school he founded and has written his life's story in a simple, straightforward way, with never the slightest hint of boastfulness.

When it came to putting in parts of official records and commendation of his heroism, Sergeant York did so reluctantly. "But it has to be put in, I reckon." He finally had to give in.

Sergeant York's achievement, capturing single-handed 132 Germans, killing 20 others, and destroying 35 machine-gun nests stands unparalleled.

This tall, red-headed, freckled mountain man says modestly that he always was a pretty good shot and that he kept in practice by hunting in the Tennessee mountains, shooting turkeys and going to shooting matches that required a pretty steady nerve to hit center of a criss-cross mark.

"I'm happiest here in the Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf," says the Singing Elder, "here in Fentress County just across the Kentucky state line, once the happy hunting ground of Creeks and Cherokees. Hit's the place I love best with my family, my dogs and my gun. Hit's where I belong."

Looking backward, history shows that mountain men, such as Alvin York, have always led their countrymen in time of war, as I have pointed out earlier. In the Civil War the southern highlands sent 180,000 riflemen to the Union Army. In the Spanish-American War they rushed to the defense of our country. In the World War, Breathitt County, known for its fighting blood, had no draft quota, so many of her valiant sons hastened to volunteer. Though mountain people have suffered the stigma of family feuds, they have lived to see old rancors forgotten. Hatfields and McCoys, Martins and Tollivers shoulder their muskets and march side-by-side when they have to defend their native land.

The Big Sandy country is still filled with patriots. In Floyd County, the father of eleven sons is not worried about the draft, according to the Big Sandy News, November 15, 1940: "Frank Stamper, Prestonsburg Spanish-American War veteran, isn't worried about the draft 'catching' any of his eleven boys, six of whom are of draft age. Five of the bra' laddies already are infantrymen in the U. S. Army—enlisted men. The sixth, Harry, from whom the family has not heard in nine years, may also be in the army now, and not subject to conscription later. Two of his sons—Everett of Jackhorn, Kentucky, and Avery of Ronda, West Virginia, were in the World War as volunteers, and when you take in consideration that Mr. Stamper himself was a volunteer in the Spanish-American War, it makes the adult population of the family about unanimous in the matter of patriotism. The five sons in the army now are: Frank, Jr., Paul, Damon, John and Charles. Mr. Stamper is the father of twenty-seven children, seventeen of whom are living."

WHEN SINGING COMES IN, FIGHTING GOES OUT

Mountain folk, especially those who have had the misfortune of being mixed in troubles (feuds to the outside world) believe earnestly that "when singing comes in, fighting goes out." "Look at the Hatfields and McCoys," they say. "They make music together now at the home of one side and now at the home of them on t'other side. They sit side-by-side on the bench at the Singing Gathering down on the Mayo Trail come the second Sunday in June every year. Off yonder nigh the mouth of Big Sandy, across the mountains which once were stained with the blood of both families. What's more, Little Melissy Hatfield and Little Bud McCoy even sing together a ballad that tells of the love of Rosanna McCoy for Devil Anse's son Jonse. And their elders sing hymn tunes long cherished in the mountain church, whilst tens of thousands gathered on the hills all around about listen with silent rejoicing over the peace that has come to the once sorry enemies."

To be sure, there is the singing of folk songs handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. When the mountain people are asked the origin of their music, the usual reply is "My grandsir larnt me this fiddle tune," or "My Granny larnt me this song-ballet."

Since mountain people have brought their music out of the coves and hollows for the world to hear through their Singing Gathering and Festivals, the nation is fast becoming aware of the importance of folk music in the life of Americans today. Great singers have taken up the simple songs of our fathers. "Wipe out foes of morale with music," says Lucy Monroe, New York's "Star Spangled Banner Soprano," director of patriotic music for RCA-Victor, when she sang on September 11, 1941, before the National Federation of Music Clubs in New York. "Let's make certain that when the present crisis is passed, music will have done its full job of defense," she said enthusiastically. The singer urged federation members to become soldiers of music. "Let us enlist together to form a great army of music!" she urged. Miss Monroe was commissioned by Mayor LaGuardia to devote her efforts to the cause of music for the Office of Civilian Defense. Whereupon she outlined a four-point program: 1. To visit large plants and industrial centers connected with defense work to give musical programs and to suggest that the plants begin each day's activities with playing the Star-spangled Banner—to tell the men what they are working for. 2. To conduct community sings in large cities. 3. To collect phonograph records for the boys in army camps, establishing central depots in every locality in the country. 4. To give talks, with song illustrations, on the history of the United States of America in colleges, high schools, women's clubs, and music clubs.

Though some may see folk song, the basis of all music, endangered by motion pictures, Kurt Schindler, authority on ancient European customs and collector of folk music in other lands, believes the danger lies in another direction. "The young students, the modernists, in their great desire to keep up with the times wish to kill the old things."

All the forces working in America to preserve folk song should share Kurt Schindler's fears. The press is cognizant of the farflung effort throughout the land. The Atlanta Journal (September 19, 1928) says, "The collection and preservation of mountain folk music is a singularly gracious work and one of rare value to history. Collected in its natural environment, it is perforce authentic both in tune and idiom, and sincere collectors are not content with this alone—they complete the record by tracing the songs to their origins. Such is a most gracious work and one which lovers of beauty, whether music or in legend or in local history, throughout the South, would do well to imitate."

Far removed from the metropolitan area where great singers interpret the simple songs of our forbears and urge the necessity of their preservation, an untrained mountain minstrel is lending his every effort to aid not only in conserving but in correlating as well the folk lore of the Blue Ridge Country. He is a kinsman of Devil Anse Hatfield and lives just around the mountain from where the old warrior lies buried. "Sid Hatfield never was mixed up in the troubles in no shape nor fashion," anyone can tell you. "He'd not foir a gun if you laid one in his hand. But just give him a fiddle! Why, Sid Hatfield is the music-makinest fellow that ever laid bow to strings. What's more he puts a harp in his mouth and plays it at the same time he's sawin' the bow. I've seen him and hear-ed him, many's the time."

And so have thousands of others. For Sid Hatfield spends his spare time, when he's not working for the Appalachian Power Company in Logan County, West Virginia, making music first at one gathering, then another. Sid's repertoire is almost limitless. He plays any fiddle tune from Big Sandy to Bonaparte's Retreat. And when it comes to the mouth harp, Sid just naturally can't be beat. "I love the old tunes," he says, "and they must not die. You and I can help them to live. Let old rancors die, but not our native song."

To that end he has become a prime mover in a folksong and folklore conservation movement called American Folkways Association. "There are a lot of McCoys," he says, "who can pick a banjo and sing as fine a ditty as you ever heard. There's Bud McCoy over on Levisa Fork. Never saw his betters when it comes to picking the banjo. We've played together a whole day at a stretch and never played the same tune twice. We just stop long enough to eat dinner and then we go at it again. Bud's teaching his grandson, Little Bud, and he's not yet five year old. Little Bud can step a hornpipe too. Peert as a cricket!" A slow breaking smile lights Sid's open countenance. "Reckon you've heard of our Association," and, not giving anyone time to answer, Sid is off on the subject nearest and dearest to his heart. "We've got the finest Association in the country. Got a nephew of Fiddling Bob Taylor in our Association and by next summer we aim to hold a Singing Gathering down in his country—the Watauga country in Tennessee. Folsom Taylor, that's his name and he's living now in the far end of the Blue Ridge in Maryland. He helped us with the Singing Gathering we held in the Cumberlands in Maryland this past summer. We've got another helper down in Tennessee. His name is Grady Snead. He was in the World War and about lost his singing voice but he's not lost any of his spirit for mountain music and old-time ways. Why, every summer ever since Grady got back from the war he's gathered his people around him in Snead's Grove—he owns quite a few acres down in Tennessee—and they have an old-time picnic and they have hymn singing and ballad singing and fiddle music. This past summer our Association joined in with them at the Snead picnic and you never saw the like that day in Snead's Grove. People thick as bees and pleased as could be. We started off a-singing a good old-fashioned hymn all together and that put everybody in good heart. Never saw such a picnic in all my born days. There's nothing like a good old-fashioned all-day picnic to make friends among people and then mix in a lot of good old-time music. That's what Americans were brought up on and that's what they're going to live on more and more through these troubled hours and as time goes on."

That day at Snead's Grove, Sid Hatfield told them about the Association and how already different organizations had united with it. He told of a preacher over in Maryland who had joined in whole-heartedly. "He's adopted the great out-of-doors for his temple in which to worship with song and prayer. Robinson is his name. Reverend Felix Robinson, as fine a singer and as fine a preacher as you'd ever want to sit under."

Then Sid put down his fiddle and his mouth harp and drawing from his coat pocket a crumpled paper, he began again. "My friends, I want to read you this piece in the Chicago Daily News. This is the place to read it. We ought to be warned about what can happen in this country to our music, by what has happened to some of our people. Though maybe sometime it's been for the best. This piece was writ by a mighty knowing man. His name is Robert J. Casey and he flew from Chicago for his paper the Chicago Daily News to hear with his own ears the music of the mountains from the lips of mountain singers at Traipsin' Woman cabin on the Mayo Trail the second Sunday in June, 1938."

There was a moment's breathless silence over the great gathering there in Snead's Grove. The look of fear and apprehension gave way to that of eagerness and hope as Devil Anse Hatfield's kinsman read with quiet dignity:

"'One breathes a sigh for the Hatfields and McCoys who maintain the Democratic majority in cemeteries along the West Virginia line. One voices a word of commendation for the Hatfields and the McCoys who drive taxi-cabs in Ashland or run quiet, respectable and legal beer parlors in Huntington. And looking from one group to the other, one realizes that something has happened to the hill country.

"'A person of imagination standing on the tree-shaded porch of the Traipsin' Woman cabin up in Lonesome Hollow probably still can hear echoes of "the singing gathering" which only a few hours ago demonstrated the essential durability of the hill folks.... Where a day or two ago there was only a neutral interest in such proceedings, now people are talking of Elizabethan culture preserved completely for a matter of centuries by people who lived on the wrong side of the tracks, just a few rods from the fence of the rolling mills.

"'There is a tendency in some quarters to look upon the sing-festival as a permanent and predictable community asset. But that is because the sophisticated and urban population is ignoring the present status of the McCoys and the Hatfields, as for many years it has ignored the crack-voiced "ballet" singers and the left-handed virtuosi in its own backyard.'"

Sid Hatfield paused in his reading to say a few words on his own. "There is one, not calling any names, who discovered a forgotten England in the Kentucky uplands." He turned again to read from the paper. "'One who set down the words of the amazing ballads and studied music in order to capture the changeless arrangements for psaltery, dulcimer and sakbut, who has no such illusions. The music of the hills today is a thin echo of tunes that were sung on the village greens in Shakespeare's time. Tomorrow it will be gone!'" Sid Hatfield's voice lifted in warning. "'And with it will vanish the early English idiom of the hill folks—their costumes, their customs, their dances, the singing ritual of their weddings. Pretty soon there aren't going to be any more hill folk—if indeed, there are any now.

"'"The Hatfields and McCoys, they were reckless mountain boys," whose history is now as stale as that of the Capone mob. Their feud, which ... threatened to provoke a civil war between two states, gave rise to the general belief in the lasting endurance of the hill dwellers. A race must be hardy as the ragweed when it could not be exterminated even by its own patient effort. The tenantry of the flatlands might be excused for believing that a special Providence intended it to survive, despite poverty, malnutrition, bad housing and wasting disease forever and ever.

"'And so it might have survived, for the hill people had "the habit of standing." They had set a precedent of fertility and hardihood and the will to live for a matter of centuries.... But there had come influences over which not even the carefully nurtured stubbornness of 300 years could prevail.... The railroad and the concrete highway and the automobile and the black tunnels of the coal mine.

"'... The day of isolated communities and isolated culture in the United States is already past.... The hill folk have been known to the flatland people chiefly for feuds and moonshine. Perhaps tempers are no less quick, but it's less trouble to get to court and have grievances adjudicated according to law. And the music is going—and the traditional dances. It is one of the defects of all educational systems that they make it easier for a person to forget by removing the necessity for his remembering.'"

Sid Hatfield again voiced his own observations. "Time was when old folks could recall every word of hundreds of ballads." He turned once more to read from the newspaper in his hand. "'... and every note of a music whose disregard for melodic rule made it exceedingly difficult to remember. Now, when such things can be written down, no "grandsir" will bother to repeat them to the youngins and the youngins will get their music from the radio. By that time there will be no doubt that Queen Elizabeth is dead.'"

Devil Anse's kinsman surveyed his listeners. "My friends, we've got a-bound, me and you and you," he singled out a lad here a man, a woman there, "to put our shoulders to the wheel and save our old ways and our old music."

Then he told about the American Folkways Association and its purpose. "We aim to unify efforts to conserve and cultivate the traditions and customs of the Blue Ridge Country where conditions are ideal for a renewed emphasis on living a simple and natural life ... to preserve the past and present expressions of isolated peoples in the Southern Appalachians which are untainted by any form of insincerity or make-believe. There is growing interest among city-bred people in the folk-ways, and through research and actual experiences, they are learning to appreciate the simple folk-life that is still intact."

Sid, like Devil Anse, understands crowd psychology, though neither calls it by that name. Sid had the attention of his hearers and he told them more. "We're getting our eyes open more every day to the boundless treasures in America. People all through the Blue Ridge don't aim to stand by and see things disappear because new ways have come in. They've started all sorts of gatherings and festivals to keep alive the things that mean America!"

With quick gesture he enumerated upon his fingers as he named some of them: "There's the Forest Festival held in October at Elkins, West Virginia, with a pretty mountain maid for its Queen; the Tobacco Festival in Shelbyville, Kentucky, that pays homage to the leading product of the Blue Grass country, next to the race horse, of course; there's the Mountain Laurel Festival at Pineville, Kentucky, in May, glorifying the beauty and profusion of the mountain flower; the Virginia Apple Blossom Festival in April in the Shenandoah Valley at Winchester, Virginia—a wilderness of blossoms that has made beautiful a once lonely valley; the Rhododendron Festival in Webster Springs, West Virginia, in July, that vies in charm with a like event in Kentucky; the Sweet Potato Festival in Paris, Tennessee, that pays tribute to the yam; the American Folk Song Festival in the foothills of Kentucky. Then there's the Snead Picnic that our good friend Grady Snead has been carrying on every summer ever since he got back from the war across the waters; there's the Mountain Choir Festival over in Oakland, Maryland, in the month of August, when hundreds of mountain boys and girls gather together to sing hymns and old ballads too; there's the Arcadian Folk Festival and the Poet's Fair and the Arcadian Guild all bunched together at Hot Springs National Park and McFadden Three Sisters Springs where down in the Ozark Country folks welcome the advent of 'the Moon of Painted Leaves' and pattern new dreams in the valley of pastoral fancy, listen to the Pipes of Pan, meet old friends, and make new ones in a sylvan environment, where poetry slides down every moonbeam. Every sort of gathering right where it belongs, where it was cradled through all these long generations."

Sid paused a moment for second wind. "When we look about we're bound to own this is a mighty changing world. Time was when the mountain people rode to the gatherings in Brushy Hollow in jolt wagons. They kept it up a while, loading the whole family in the jolt wagon. But times have changed.... A body has to sort o' keep up with the times, like Prof. Koch. Bless you, he loads his whole pack and passel of boys and girls in a bus and packs them hither and yon 'crost the country to show out with their play-making. The Carolina Playmakers just naturally fetch the mountain to Mohammed." Sid flung wide his hands, brought them slowly together. "To get all such folks to work together that's why we formed the American Folkways Association. What's more we've got us a magazine to tell about what we've done and aim to do—the Arcadian Life magazine, with our good friend Otto Ernest Rayburn as editor, 'way down in the Ozarks." Sid Hatfield smiled pleasantly. "There's no excuse for folks not being neighborly nowadays. No matter where they live, what with good roads and the automobile—we've just got a-bound to be neighborly. To sing together, to make music together, to show out our crops and our posies and our handiwork together. Here in Snead's Grove today is the third time we've bore witness that our Association is not just a theory. We made our first bow in the Kentucky foothills in June, the second in Maryland in August, and now in Tennessee. In October we aim to join hands and hearts and our music in Arcadia under the Autumn moon."

That day in Snead's Grove in Tennessee they wanted Sid Hatfield to keep right on but taking a squint at the sun sinking in the west, he said in conclusion, "I've got a long ways to travel back to the West Virginia mountains but I hope we'll all be together again here in the Grove next summer, this day a year, the Lord being willing."

VANISHING TRAIL

Perhaps it is merely the result of evolutionary process, economic rather than intentional, that man has wiped out many reminders of the past; that the forest primeval has passed to make room for blue grass, tasseled corn, and tobacco; that forts and blockhouses gave way to the settler's log house encircled by a garden patch; that the windowless cabin has gone to make room for the weather-boarded frame of many rooms and glass windows; that the village has vanished for the town—the industrial center.

The Wilderness Trail broken first by mastodon, then panther and bear and frightened deer, has been transformed into a modern highway. The Shawnee Trail along which Indians lurked and tomahawked white men has become Mayo Trail, taking its name from a country schoolteacher. He was a far-seeing man, who stumbled sometimes hopelessly along the lonely way, when he needed help to bring out of the bowels of the earth the treasure in coal he knew to be hidden there. Mayo Trail is an amazing engineering feat that connects mountains with level land. Limestone Trail in Mason County has left along its course only a vestige of vegetation to remind us it was once the path of buffalo and Indian. To motorists hurrying onward it is merely U. S. 60 that leads to another city.

The rugged, unbroken path once pursued by the lad Gabriel Arthur, a Cherokee captive, called on Hutchins Map in 1778 the "War Path to the Cuttawa Country," uniting today with the Wilderness Trails, has become the open gateway to the West. Boone's Trace, or Boone's Path, leading from Virginia through Cumberland Gap, to the Ohio River, still is called Boone's Path. Since 1909 it has been a national motorway, being a part of the Dixie Highway which runs from Michigan to Florida. It was over this same path that Governor Duncannon of Virginia built the first wagon road in 1790. During the Civil War the region of the Gap was fortified and occupied by Confederate and Union soldiers in turn. Later, in 1889, the first railroad entered the Gap. Today Skyline Highway—U. S. 25 and 58—leads from the saddle of the historic Gap to the top of Pinnacle Mountain, commanding a view of six states, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama.

And the scene has changed.

Spring has come to the Blue Ridge. The hum of industry echoes along once lonely creeks, through quiet hollows. We see no more the oxcart lumbering, creaking laboriously along, higher and higher up the rugged mountain side. The latest model motor glides swiftly over the smooth surface, winding its way upward and upward. Off yonder the TVA has harnessed the waterpower of the Holston and Tennessee, made a great valley to burst into a miracle of man's genius. Modern industrial plants steam along the banks.

Good roads, the automobile, schoolhouses, the airplane have wiped out all barriers between mountain and plain. The Blue Ridge casts a long, long shadow across blossoming valleys. The mountaineer of yesterday with his Anglo-Saxon speech of Elizabeth's time, his primitive plow and loom, has vanished before the juggernaut of progress. But the children of the hills are blessed with a rich, a priceless heritage in tradition, song, and love of independence that will not die as long as mountains stand and men of the mountains survive to defend and preserve it.

INDEX

Abingdon, Virginia, Declaration of, 31-32 aborigines, 8 adventurers, 15 agriculture, 112-21, 283-89 Alabama, 310 Alamance, Battle of, 28 Allegheny Mountains, 4 American Folk Song Festival, 241 American Folkways Association, 320-27 animal life, 8 Appalachia, 3-4, 5 "Appalachia," by Martha Creech, 210 Apple Blossom Festival, 326 Arcadian Folk Festival, 326 Arcadian Guild, 326 Arcadian Life, 327 art exhibit, Kentucky, 250 Arthur, Gabriel, expedition of, 17-18, 328 Ash Lawn, 293 "Ashland Tragedy, The," by Peyton Buckner Byrne, 228 Athiamiowee Trail, 9 Atlanta Journal, 319 Audubon Memorial State Park, 304

Bailey, "Mad Anne," 300 ballads, 132, 152, 154, 159, 210-47, 249, 306; and music, 43-44; patriotic, 239-47 Baltimore, Lord, 7, 12 Bankhead-Jones Tenant Purchase Act, 286 baptism, 60-61 Baptists, 161-64, 268; Regular Primitive, 161-64, 266 Bardstown, Kentucky, 304 Barker, George A., "Norris Dam," 245; "Skyline Drive," 215 Barton, Bruce, 268 Barton, William E., 268 beliefs, women's, 120-21 belting a tree, 113 Berea College, 259, 307 Berry Schools, 259, 307-10 Big Bone Lick, 8 Big Meeting, 57, 71 Big Sandy Breaks, 301 Big Sandy Improvement Association, 287 Big Sandy News, 286, 317 Big Sandy River, 4, 18, 19, 48, 116, 271, 304; canalization, 287; superstition, 168 "Big Sandy River," by D. Preston, 211 birds, 6-7 black cat, legend of, 189-94 Blackberry Association, 288 blessing the hounds, 305 blindness, conjured, 180-85 block houses, 22 blue grass country, 303 Blue Lick, 35 Blue Ridge Mountains, 4 Blue Ridge Parkway, 292 boats, river, 272 books, 16, 29, 34, 306 Boone, Daniel, 19, 21, 22-39, 295, 302; capture by Indians, and escape, 35-36; death and grave, 39 Boone, Mrs. Daniel, 24-25 Boone's Trace (Trail; Path), 33, 328 Boonesborough, 35, 37, 39; Battle of, 36 Braddock, General, 23 Breaks of the Big Sandy, 301 Breathitt County, Kentucky, 73, 74, 75, 79, 88, 316 Breckinridge, Alexander, 13, 261 Breckinridge, Mrs. Mary, 261 Bryan, William Jennings, 314 Bryans, trek with Boone, 29-30 Buckley, Noah, 169-72 Buffum-Dillam feud, 88-91 "Bundles for Britain," by Jilson Setters, 242 Burchett, Luke, "Jennie Wylie," 219 Burning Spring, 21, 26, 270 Byrne, Peyton Buckner, "The Ashland Tragedy," 228

CCC, 288, 290 CIO, 289-90 Callahan, Ed, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82 Campbell, John C., Folk School, 259, 307 canalization, river, 287 candy pulling, 143-44 "Captain Jinks," 147 Carolina Playmakers, 305-06, 326-27 Carter, Nannie Hamm, "It's Great to Be an American," 239 Casey, Robert J., 322 cat, black, legend of, 189-94 Catlettsburg, Kentucky, 116, 271-72 Caudill, Mrs. Lydia Messer, 250 caverns, 186, 292, 300, 303, 313 Cawood, Mrs. Herbert C., 283 Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 306 Charette, Missouri, 38 Cherokees, 18, 32, 312, 328; legend, 186-89 Chicago Daily News, 322 Child, lost, finding of, 170-72 Christmas, Old and New, 158-61 "Church in the Mountains," by Jessie Stewart, 222 church music, 268 churches, new, 266 cider press, old, 302 Civil War, 47, 55, 72, 231, 310, 313, 316, 328 Civilian Conservation Corps, 288, 290 claims, land, 32 climate, 7, 41 Clinch Valley, 30 coal mining, 250-51 coal mining and miners, yesterday and today, 273-83 "Coal Queen," 283 Cockrell, James, 74-81 Cockrell-Hargis feud 73-88 Collins, Floyd, 303; ballads of, 235, 237 Confederacy, White House, 310 Congress of Industrial Organizations, 289-90 conjuring, 180-85 conservation, 288 Constitution, first American, 29 "convicts," early, 16 corn, grinding of, 112-13 Cornstalk, Chief, 300 corpse, winking, legend of, 203-05 country dances, 148 County Coal Operators' Association, 283 courting and song, 122-34 cow, poisoned, 174-75 Craft, Uncle Chunk, 72-73 Crawford, Bruce, 294-99 Creech, Martha, "Appalachia," 210; "The Robin's Red Breast," 218; "Woman's Way," 226 Crisp, Adam, "Floyd Collins' Fate," 237 crocheting, 120-22 Crockett's Hollow, legend of, 180-85 crops, 112-21 croup, curing, 171 crown, death, 177-78 Crystal Cave, 303 Cudo's Cave, 313 "Cumberland," origin of use of name, 20 Cumberland Falls Park, 302-03 Cumberland Gap and Mountain, 4, 20, 26, 30, 33, 46, 313, 328-29 Cumberland Plateau, 4, 19 Cumberland River, 3, 19 customs, religious, 155-67 Cuttawa country, 17, 19

dancing, 145-50; modern, 264-65; wedding, 153 Darrow, Clarence, 314 Davis, Esther Eugenia, "West Virginia," 214 Davis, Jefferson, 310 Dayton, Tennessee, 314 death, omens of, 177-79 death crown, 177-78 "Death of Mary Fagin, The," by Bob Salyers, 232 Declaration of Abingdon, Virginia, 31-32 Declaration of Independence, 34 deer woman and fawn, legend of, 194-99 Delisle, map, 19 Dillam-Buffum feud, 88-91 dipping snuff, 289 divining rod, use of, 169-72 Dixie Highway, 328 doctor, mountain, ballad of, 223 doctor, wizard, 190 doctors, 173-74, 261 Donegal, Lord, 12 "Downfall of Paris, The," by Coby Preston, 246 drives. See highways Dug Down Mountains, 105, 310 Duke, Effie and Richard, ballad of, 234 Duncannon, Governor, 328 Duquesne, Captain, 36

Eaton, Allen, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, 306 education. See schools electrification, rural, 263-64 Elizabeth, Queen, 10, 43 Evans, Lewis, map, 19 evolution trial, 314 excise laws, hatred of, 11, 43 explorers, 16

Fagin (Phagan), Mary, ballad of, 232 fairs, state, 284 families, large, 285-86 family honor, 106-11 Farm Security Administration, 284, 285, 286, 287 farming, 112-21, 283-89 "Fate of Effie and Richard Duke, The," by Coby Preston, 234 "Fate of Floyd Collins, The," by Jilson Setters, 235 fauna, 8 feather, white, 178-79 festivals, 325-26 feuds, 45-111; ballad on, 216; vanishing feudist, 248-55. See also family names fighting and singing, 317-27 Flanery, Mrs. Mary Elliott, 262-63 flora, 5-6, 56 "Floyd Collins' Fate," by Adam Crisp, 237 Foley, Ben, 105-11 Foley, Jorde, 105-11 Foley Sods, 105 folk festivals, 325-26 folk lore, and conservation of, 320-27 folk singing, 317-27 Folk Song Festival, 241 Folkways Association, American, 320-27 foot-washing, 161-64, 266, 268-69 Forest Festival, 325 forestry, 288 forests, national, 300, 301 Fort Boone, 39 fortunes and riddles, 135-50 fox hunting, 305 Frank, Leo M., ballad of, 232 Franklin D. Roosevelt Highway, 309 Frazier's Knob, 302 Frontier Nursing School, 261 Fugate, Chester, 74-75 funeralizing, 155-58, 267 furs, 17, 19, 22 Future Farmer Association, 283

games, kissing, 144 Gandy Sinks, 300 Garrett, Aunt Sallie, 55-72 Garrett, William Dyke, 55-72, 201, 202, 295 Gentry, Pol, legend of, 189-94 geography song, 128-29 Georgia Warm Springs, 308-10 Good, Professor E. S., 303 "Good Shepherd of the Hills," 55-72 Great Kanawha River, 37 Great Meadows, and Battle of, 23, 26 Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 292, 312-13 Green River, 19, 303 Greene, General Nathanael, 19 Greenup (Hangtown), Kentucky, 231

Hamm family Eisteddfod, 239 handicrafts, 306-07 Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, by Allen Eaton, 306 Hangtown (Greenup), Kentucky, 231 Hargis, Beach, and murder of father, 79, 82-87 Hargis, Elbert, 254-55 Hargis, Judge James, and murder by son, 75-87 Hargis-Cockrell feud, 73-88 Harkins, Hugh, 269-70 Harkins, Walter Scott, 269-71 Harlan, Kentucky, 283 Harlan Mining Institute, 283 Hart, "Honest" John, 15 Hart, Nathaniel, 32 Hatfield, "Devil Anse," 46-67, 250; anecdote of, 62-63; conversion and baptism of, 63-67; ghost, 199-202; statue of, 199-202; stories told by, 49-54 Hatfield, Jonse, 251 Hatfield, Levisa Chafin, 46-72; grave, 200 Hatfield, Sid, 320-27 Hatfield, Tennis, 251 Hatfield burying ground, 199-202 Hatfield-McCoy feud, 46-72 Hatfields and McCoys, reunion, 254-55; singing together, 317-27 haunted house, legend of, 205-09 Hedrick, Ray, and his "haunted house," 205-09 Henderson, Archibald, 305 Henderson, Richard, 32, 37 Hennepin, Louis, 18 Henry, Patrick, 30 highways, 291-93, 309, 315, 328, 329 hill people, tribute to, 322-25 "hill-billies," 41-42 Hindman Settlement School, 259 Hodgenville, Kentucky, 304 Holden, West Virginia, 282-83 Holston River, 17, 33 home industry, 117-19, 262, 306-07 honor, family, 107-11 horses, race, 303-04 hospitality, 42 hounds, blessing of the, 305 house with the green gables, legend of, 205-09 hunters and trappers, 17 Huraken and Manuita, legend of, 186-89 Hutchins, Thomas, map, 19, 228 hymns, 66, 67, 70-71, 157-58, 162-63

illiteracy, 40; adult, school for, 260 improvements, modern, 263-64 Indents, 15 independence, spirit of, 286 Indians, 9-10, 13, 15, 17, 18, 21-22, 28, 30, 33, 35; legend, 186-89; picture language, 9-10; ways and customs, 9-10 industry, home, 117-19, 262, 306-07 infantile paralysis, 308-10 infare wedding, 151-54 Ireland, English invasion of, 10-11; oppression of, 11-12 "It's Great to Be an American," by Nannie Hamm Carter, 239

Jack Knife Shop, 307 James I of England, 10 James, Frank, 49, 51-52 Jefferson, Thomas, 293 Jefferson National Forest, 301 "Jennie Wylie," by Luke Burchett, 219 Jett, Curt, 74-81, 88 John C. Campbell Folk School, 259, 307 Jones-Wright feud, 73

Kentucky, art exhibit, 250; beginning of colonization, 32; first white man in, 18; past, commemoration of, 301-02 Kentucky Progress Magazine, 259 Kentucky River, 18, 19, 33, 35 Kentucky Woodlands Wildlife Refuge, 305 Kernersville, North Carolina, 306 killings, 42, 43 kissing games, 144 Koch, "Prof.," 305-06, 326-27

labor, coal-mine, yesterday and today, 273-83 land claims, 32 Land of Saddle-Bags, The, by Dr. James Watt Raine, 16, 34 land-purchase program, 286 land reclamation, 284 Lawton, John and Dessie, story of, 58-59 learning. See schools legends, 180-209, 218 Levi Jackson Wilderness Road State Park, 302 Levisa River. See Louisa River Limestone Path, 9, 328 Lincoln, Abraham, 304 Little Theatre, 305-06 Logan Wildcats, 47, 55 logging and loggers, 5-6, 112-17, 270, 271-72, 288; superstition, 168 London bombing, ballad on, 241 Louisa (Levisa) River, 21, 46 "Love of Rosanna McCoy, The," by Coby Preston, 216 Loyal Land Company, 19-21, 49 lumbering. See logging lynchings, 74, 96-97

Main Island Creek, 250 Mammoth Cave and National Park, 288, 303 Man o' War, 303 Manuita and Huraken, legend of, 186-89 maps, and making of, 18-19, 328 Marcum, James B., 74-81 marriages. See Weddings Martha Berry School, 259, 307-10 Martin-Tolliver feud, 91-104, 203-05; end of, 249 May, A. J., 287 Mays, John Caldwell Calhoun, 273 Mayo (Shawnee) Trail, 301, 317, 322, 328 McCoy, Harmon, 46 McCoy-Hatfield feud, 46-72 McCoys and Hatfields, reunion of, 254-55; singing together, 317-27 McGuffey, Dr. William Holmes, Readers, and shrine, 128, 289, 304 McIntyre, O. O., 267 McNeely, Reverend John, 70 Mecklenburg, North Carolina, Resolutions, 22, 34 medicine, 261 Meeting, Big, 57, 71 meetings, religious, 155 memorials, 267 men, mountain, 269-72 minerals and soil, 8 mining, coal. See Coal Model Star, The, 314 Monongahela National Forest, 300 Monroe, James, 293 Monroe, Lucy, 318 Monticello, Virginia, 293 Moonlight School, 260 "moonshine," 43, 46-111, 248, 255-58; origin of, 11 Morehead, Kentucky, 249-50 Morgan, General John Hunt, 72 Morgan's Riflemen, 34 Mosley, Pleaz, Zooseum, 311 mound builders, 8, 9 Mountain Choir Festival, 326 "Mountain Doctor," by Jilson Setters, 223 Mountain Laurel Festival, 325 "Mountain Preacher," by D. Preston, 221 "Mountain Singers," by Rachel Mack Wilson, 228 "Mountain State" (West Virginia), 294-300 "Mountain Woman," by John W. Preble, Jr., 225 mountaineers, the, 40-45 Mountaineer's Museum, 313 mountains, 4-5 murders, 42, 43 museums, 311, 313 music, and ballads, 43-44; church, 268

Neely, Matthew M., 295, 297 neighborliness, 44-45 Nelson's Riflemen, 34 New Light, 164-67 "Norris Dam," by George A. Barker, 245 North Carolina, settlement, 21-22, 26-29 Nursing School, Frontier, 261

"Oh, Brother, Will You Meet Me!" 157 oil, 270-71 Old Buffalo Path, 9 "Old Time Waterfront," by Coby Preston, 213 omens of death, 177-79 oratory, 155

paleontology, 8 Paris, downfall of, ballad on, 246 Park-to-Park Highway, 291-93 parks, national and state, 288, 291, 292, 302-03, 304, 312-13 parkways. See highways Partlow, Deborah, story of, 60-61 paths. See trails patriotic ballads, 239-47 Pearl, William, 302 Pennsylvania, Proprietors of, 13 people of the Blue Ridge, 10 petroleum, 270-71 Phagan (Fagin), Mary, ballad of, 232 physicians, 261 picture language, Indian, 9-10 Piedmont Plateau, 4 pig, bewitched, 189-94 Pilot Knob, 26 Pinnacle Mountain, 329 pioneers, 10 play-game songs, 145-48 play-making, 305-06 Playmakers' Theatre, 306 poems, mountain, 210-47 Poets' Fair, 326 "Pop Goes the Weasel," 148-50 poteen, 11, 43 Powell Valley, 30 preachers, mountain, 267-69 Preble, John E., Jr., "Mountain Woman," 225 Preston, Coby, "Old Time Waterfront," 213; "The Downfall of Paris," 246; "The Fate of Effie and Richard Duke," 234; "The Love of Rosanna McCoy," 216 Preston, D., "Big Sandy River," 211; "Mountain Preacher," 221 Prestonsburg, Kentucky, 272 Primitive Baptists, Regular, 161-64, 266 products of the soil, 112-21 progress, gains and losses by, 264-69 Proprietors, Pennsylvania, 13 public works, 274-83 purchase, land, program for, 286

quilts, 120-21; poem on, 226 quitrents, 13-14

race horses, 303-04 Raine, Dr. James Watt, The Land of Saddle-Bags, 16, 34 rainfall, 7 Rangers, 21-22, 27 Rayburn, Otto Ernest, 327 reclaiming the wilderness, 248-329 reclamation, soil, 284 "recorder, the," 43 redemptioners, 15 Reffitt, Aunt Lindie, 135-43 reforestation, 288 Refuge, Kentucky Wildlife, 305 Regular Primitive Baptists, 161-64, 266 Regulators, 27, 28 religious customs, 155-67 rent system, 13-14 reptiles, 7 Revolutionary War, 34; battle monument, 300; commemorating, 290 Rhododendron Festival, 326 riddles and fortunes, 135-50 river boats, 272 river improvement, 287 rivers, 3-4 roads, improvement of, 286, 287 Robertson, James, expedition of, 27-29 "Robin's Red Breast, The," by Martha Creech, 218 Robinson, Reverend Felix, 321-22 Rockcastle River, 18 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 294 Roosevelt, Franklin D., Highway, 309 Roosevelt, Theodore, The Winning of the West, 29 Rowan County, Kentucky, 92, 250-51, 260; art exhibit, 250 "Rowan County Troubles, The," 249 rug-making, 262 rural electrification, 263-64 Russell, Captain William, 29 Russell Cave Road, 303

"Sad London Town," by Jilson Setters, 241 Saint Valentine Day charm, 136-37 salt licks, 8 Saltpeter Cave, 186 Salyers, Bob, "The Death of Mary Fagin," 232 Sand Cave, 303 Schindler, Kurt, 319 schools, 258-62. See also names of schools and colleges Scopes trial, 314 Scotch-Irish, 10-14, 31 Seneca Caverns, 300 "Sergeant York," by Jilson Setters, 243 Setters, Jilson, and his ballads: "Bundles for Britain," 248; "Mountain Doctor," 223; "Sad London Town," 241; "Sergeant York," 243; "The Fate of Floyd Collins," 235 settlers, 10 Sewell, Willie, 73 Shawnee (Mayo) Trail, 9, 301, 317, 322, 328 Shawnees, 18, 19 Shelby, Isaac, 302 Shenandoah Community Workers, 306 Shenandoah National Park, 291, 292 Shenandoah Valley, 4, 13 showboat, 116-17 silver mine, lost, legend of, 186-89 Silver Moon Tavern, 251-55 silver tomahawk, legend of, 186-89 singing and songs, courting, 133-34; folk, 317-27; Gatherings, 317-27; geography song, 128-29; mountain, 210-47; mountain, poem on, 228; play-game, 145-48; school, Philomel Whiffet's, 122-34; societies, 266 Skyline Caverns, 292 Skyline Drive, 291-93, 329 "Skyline Drive," by George A. Barker, 215 Smith, Kate, 260 snakes, 7; use in religious services, and bites, 164-67 Snead, Grady, and his picnic, 321, 326, 327 Snow Bird, legend of, 300 snuff, dipping, 289 soil, and minerals, 8; products of, 112-21; reclamation, 284 Songs. See singing and songs Sorghum Association, 287 sorghum making, 118-19 Spanish-American War, 316 "speakings," 155 Speleological Society, 300 Spring, Burning, 21, 26, 270 Spurlock Station, 272 Stamper, Fred, 317 Stewart, Mrs. Cora Wilson, 260 Stewart, Jessie, "Church in the Mountains," 222 stills. See "moonshine" superstitions, 168-79, 180, 181 surgery, primitive, 173-74 Sweet Potato Festival, 326 Swindle Cave, 186

TVA, 311-12 taffy pulling, 143-44 Talbott Tavern, 304 Taylor, Fiddling Bob, 290 Taylor, Folsom, 321 tenant purchase program, 286 Tennessee, 311-17; first permanent settlement, 26 Tennessee River, 3, 4, 19 Tennessee Valley Authority, 311-12 Theatre, Little, 305-06 Thomas, Reverend James M., 314 timber. See logging Tiptons, the, legend of, 180-85 Tobacco Festival, 325 Tolliver-Martin feud, 91-104, 203-05; end of, 249 tomahawk, silver, legend of, 186-89 topography, 8 tradition, 122-54 trails, 9-10, 17, 19, 20, 26, 33, 39, 273, 328 Traipsing Woman cabin, 322-23 Transylvania, and Company, 32-35, 36-38 trappers and hunters, 17 trees, 5-6; belting, 113. See also lumber turkey refuge, 304-05 "Twa Sisters," 152

Unaka Mountains, 5

Valley of Parks, 302 Valley of Virginia, 17 "Vauxhall Dance," 50 Virginia Apple Blossom Festival, 326 Virginia reel, 148-50 vote, women's, 263

WPA, 289 Walker, Dr. Thomas, expeditions of, 19-21, 46, 49, 270, 301 Warm Springs, Georgia, 308-10 Warrior's Path, 9, 17, 19, 20, 26, 33, 273 Washington, George, 23, 34, 292, 296 Watauga Association, 29, 290 Watauga country, 25; settlement of, 26-29 Watauga River, 32 water-witch, 169-72 watercourses, 7 Weave Shop, 306 weavers, Wilderness Road, 303 weddings, infare, 151-54; on horseback, unlucky, 172-77 Wellford, Clate, 274-83 wells, finding, 169-72 West Virginia, 294-300 "West Virginia," by Esther Eugenia Davis, 214 West Virginia Review, 295 Whiffet, Philomel, singing school, 122-34 whiskey, 11, 43. See also "moonshine" white feather, 178-79 Whittlers, 307 whittling, 259 wilderness, reclaiming, 248-329 Wilderness Road Weavers, 302 Wilderness Trail, 33, 39, 328 Wildlife Refuge, Kentucky, 305 Williamsburg, Virginia, 294 winking corpse, legend of, 203-05 Winning of the West, The, by Theodore Roosevelt, 29 witch, legend of, 189-94 witchcraft, 180-85 wizard doctor, 190 woman, mountain, 262-64, 272; poems on, 225, 226; work, 117-21, 263-64 woman suffrage, 262 "Woman's Way," by Martha Creech, 226 Wood, Colonel Abraham, 17 Woodcrafters and Carvers, 307 Works Progress Administration, 289 works, public, 274-83 World War, 316, 317 Wright, Judge William, 260 Wright-Jones feud, 73 Wylie, Jennie, ballad of, 219

Yadkin River, 4 York, Sergeant Alvin C., 295, 314-16; ballad of, 243; school, 259, 315 York Highway, 315 Yorktown, Virginia, 294 Young, Judge Will, 88 younger generation, the, 264-66

Zimmerman, Dr. C. C., 285 Zooseum, Mosley's, 311