Part 49

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.