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."