Blue Ridge Country

Part 1

Produced by Mark C. Orton, Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

AMERICAN FOLKWAYS

EDITED BY ERSKINE CALDWELL

BLUE RIDGE COUNTRY

JEAN THOMAS

DUELL, SLOAN & PEARCE . NEW YORK

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COPYRIGHT, 1942, BY JEAN THOMAS

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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To My Brother

DOCTOR GEORGE G. BELL

A once itinerant "Tooth Dentist" who became the first Republican county judge in more than a quarter of a century at the mouth of Big Sandy and whose unique sentences have become legendary throughout the Blue Ridge

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APPALACHIAN RITUAL

Emerald nobility Reaching to the sky, Makes the eye a ruler Fit to measure by.

In the spring an ecstasy Lies upon the hills-- Purpling with new red-buds, Ruffling colored frills.

Make an early ritual For the mountain side; Pine and beech are spectators, White dogwood a bride.

Give a pair of ivory birch For a wedding gift, All the mountain side a church Where wild flowers sift

Velvet carpet-petals down To the edge of hill and town, Showing wild-grape fringes through Opal cloud-thrones dropped from blue.

Now the summer like a queen Does her mountain home in green; With a season for a bier Some old majesty lies here.

Autumn gold is swift and fleet With a wing upon the feet, Rushing toward a winter breath Pausing for immaculate death.

In such economic bliss And a swift parenthesis-- In immortal mountain trails, There are resurrection tales.

All the while the mountains know Sudden death is never so.

--Rachel Mack Wilson

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CONTENTS

Part 2

1. THE COUNTRY AND THE PEOPLE 3 THE LAND 3 THE PEOPLE 10 BLAZING THE TRAIL 16 THE MOUNTAINEER 40 2. LAND OF FEUDS AND STILLS 46 HATFIELDS AND MCCOYS 46 PEACEMAKER 55 TAKING SIDES 72 MARTIN-TOLLIVER TROUBLES 91 FAMILY HONOR 105 3. PRODUCTS OF THE SOIL 112 TIMBER 112 WOMAN'S WORK 117 4. TRADITION 122 PHILOMEL WHIFFET'S SINGING SCHOOL 122 RIDDLES AND FORTUNES 135 THE INFARE WEDDING 151 5. RELIGIOUS CUSTOMS 155 FUNERALIZING 155 OLD CHRISTMAS 158 FOOT-WASHING 161 NEW LIGHT 164 6. SUPERSTITION 168 BIG SANDY RIVER 168 WATER WITCH 169 MARRYING ON HORSEBACK 172 DEATH CROWN 177 A WHITE FEATHER 178 7. LEGEND 180 CROCKETT'S HOLLOW 180 THE SILVER TOMAHAWK 186 BLACK CAT 189 THE DEER WOMAN AND THE FAWN 194 GHOST OF DEVIL ANSE 199 THE WINKING CORPSE 203 THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN GABLES 205 8. SINGING ON THE MOUNTAIN SIDE 210 OF LAND AND RIVER 210 FEUD 216 LEGEND 218 TRAGEDY 228 PATRIOT 239 9. RECLAIMING THE WILDERNESS 248 VANISHING FEUDIST 248 SILVER MOON TAVERN 250 BLOOMING STILLS 255 LEARNING 258 MOUNTAIN MEN 269 COAL 273 PUBLIC WORKS 274 BACK TO THE FARM 283 VALLEY OF PARKS 301 WHEN SINGING COMES IN, FIGHTING GOES OUT 317 VANISHING TRAIL 327 INDEX 331

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BLUE RIDGE COUNTRY

1. THE COUNTRY AND THE PEOPLE

THE LAND

High mountain walls and bridgeless streams marooned the people of the Blue Ridge for centuries, shut them off from the outside world so that they lost step with the onward march of civilization. A forgotten people until yesterday, unlettered, content to wrest a meager living from the grudging soil, they built for themselves a nation within a nation. By their very isolation, they have preserved much of the best that is America. They have held safe and unchanged the simple beauty of the song of their fathers, the unsullied speech, the simple ideals and traditions, staunch religious faith, love of freedom, courage and fearlessness. Above all they have maintained a spirit of independence and self-reliance that is unsurpassed anywhere in these United States of America. They are a hardy race. The wilderness, the pure air, the rugged outdoor life have made them so: a people in whom the Anglo-Saxon strain has retained its purest line.

The Blue Ridge Country comprises much of Appalachia, happily called from the great chain that runs along the Atlantic coast from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. It is a well-watered region having numerous streams and rivers throughout, being drained by the Cumberland and Tennessee as well as by smaller, though equally well-known, rivers--Big Sandy in northeastern Kentucky, which flows into the Ohio, and the Yadkin in North Carolina, which eventually reaches the Atlantic Ocean.

In general the region includes three parallel chains, the Cumberlands, Alleghenies, and Blue Ridge. Like a giant backbone the Blue Ridge, beginning in the southwest portion of Old Virginia, continues northeasterly, holding together along its mountainous vertebrae some eight southern states; northeastern Kentucky, all of West Virginia, the eastern part of Tennessee, western North Carolina, the four northwestern counties of South Carolina, and straggling foothills in northern Georgia and northeastern Alabama. The broad valley of the Tennessee River separates the mountain system on the west from the Cumberland Plateau which is an extension of the West Virginia and Kentucky roughs.

Throughout its vast course the Blue Ridge is not cut by a single river. A narrow rampart, it rises abruptly on its eastern side south of the Potomac to a height of some two thousand feet, cutting Virginia into eastern and western, and descends as abruptly on the west to the Shenandoah Valley. Similar in topography in its rough, broken steepness to the Alleghenies across the valley, it consists of a multitude of saddles or dividing ridges many of which attain an elevation of six thousand feet. As it extends south, rising from the Piedmont Plateau, it grows higher. In North Carolina alone there are twenty-one peaks that exceed Mt. Washington's six thousand feet in New Hampshire. Contiguous to the Blue Ridge there is another chain between the states of North Carolina and Tennessee, which to Carolina mountaineers is still the Alleghenies. However, the United States Geological Survey has another name for it--the Unakas. It is higher as a whole than the Blue Ridge to which it is joined by transverse ranges with such names as Beech and Balsam and a sprinkling of Indian names--Cowee, Nantahala, Tusquitee. It differs, too, in physical aspect. Instead of being in orderly parallel tiers the entire system, unlike the Blue Ridge, is cut by many rivers: the Nolichucky, French Broad, Pigeon, Little Tennessee, Hiawassee. The parts so formed by the dividing rivers are also named: Iron, Northern Unaka, Bald, Great Smoky, Southern Unaka or Unicoi. Though many of its summits exceed six thousand feet, the chain itself dwindles to foothills by the time it reaches Georgia and crosses into Alabama.

If you flew high over the vast domain of the Blue Ridge, you would view a country of contrasting physical features: river and cascade, rapids and waterfall, peak and plateau, valley and ridge. Its surface is rougher, its trails steeper, the descents deeper, and there are more of them to the mile than anywhere else in the United States.

The southern mountaineer has to travel many steep, rocky roads to get to any level land, so closely are the mountains of Appalachia crowded together. It is the geography of their country that has helped to keep our highlanders so isolated all these years.

This region has the finest body of hardwood timber in the United States. Black walnut is so plentiful and so easy for the carpenter to work that this wood has been used freely for gunstocks and furniture, and even in barns, fences, and porches.

White and yellow poplars grow sometimes six to nine feet in diameter. "Wide enough for a marrying couple, their waiters, and the elder to stand on," a mountaineer will say, pointing out a tree stump left smooth by the cross-cut saw. The trunks are sixty to seventy feet to the first limb. Chestnuts are even wider, though sometimes not so tall. White oaks grow to enormous size. Besides pine, and the trees common generally to our country, these southern mountain forests are filled with buckeye, gum, basswood, cucumber, sourwood, persimmon, lynn. The growth is so heavy that there are few bare rocks or naked cliffs. Even the "bald" peculiar to the region which is sometimes found on the crown of a mountain belies its name, for it is covered with grass--not of the useless sage type either, but an excellent grass on which sheep might "use" if they chose to climb so high.

The lover of beauty finds delight in these mountains from the first daintiness of spring on through the glorious blaze of wonder that is fall in the Blue Ridge. Beginning with the tan fluff of the beeches, the red flowering of maples, the feathery white blooms of the "sarvis," on through the redbud's gaiety and the white dogwood's stark purity, all is loveliness. The enchantment continues in the flame of azaleas, which is followed by the waxy pink of the laurel and the superb glory of the rhododendron. These have scarcely vanished before the coves are golden with the fragrance of grape blossom.

The beauty of the woodland is a paradise for birds. Early in the spring the spotted thrush wings its way through leafy boughs. The cardinal in his bright red coat stays the year round. Neither snow nor winter wind dulls his plumage or stills his song. His mate, in somber green, sings too, but he, unmindful of southern chivalry, attacks her furiously when she bursts into song; ornithologists explain that jealousy prompts the ungallant act. The oriole singing lustily in the spring would seem conscious of his coat of orange and black. These are the heraldic colors worn by the servants of Lord Baltimore. The nightingale and the whippoorwill sing unpretentiously in the quiet of eventide. The blackbird makes up for his somber dress in good deeds. He destroys insects on leaf and bark. The eagle still finds a haven of safety in giant trees and hollowed trunks.

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