2016-08-16 05:00
Well, a cow had a little calf and I was going to milk them. Had her in the barn. I went to put her in with the calf to let it eat and I was going to finish milking. But when I went to put he… Read More
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Appalachian History Blog
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Folktales, anecdotes and quotes drawn from Appalachia. Emphasis on the Depression era.
2016-08-15 05:00
Scholars and archaelogists have been duking it out over the authenticity of the Grave Creek Stone since it first surfaced in 1838.
Local amateur archaelogists in what was originally called … Read More
2016-08-12 05:00
She was the only woman to take part in the negotiations that brought about the creation of Shenandoah National Park in 1935.
Addie Nairn Hunter, an accomplished, independent divorcee from Wa… Read More
2016-08-11 05:00
If butterflies are about this week, you can be sure you will find them on the heads of sweet Joe-Pye-weed (Eupatorium purpureum). This perennial herb, found in moist woods and fields through… Read More
2016-08-10 05:00
The Calvin B. Doteys, a wealthy and greatly respected family, had a very fine old home with spacious grounds on South Third Street. Old Mr. Dotey [ed. – newspaper articles of the era s… Read More
2016-08-09 05:00
Special thanks to Sonja Crone Eddleman of Williamston, SC, for steering me back to the wonderful old 19th century tales of the South from William Gilmore Simms:
The Occ… Read More
2016-08-08 05:00
If you’ve never been to Plum Grove then you wouldn’t know about that road. It’s an awful road, with big ruts and mudholes where the coal wagons with them nar-rimmed wheels… Read More
2016-08-05 05:00
Since my last annual report the Children’s Mission Home has moved its location; we are now located at No. 120 West Cumberland St. [in Knoxville, TN].For seventeen long years we were lo… Read More
2016-08-04 05:00
John C.C. Mayo (1864-1914) was born a poor mountaineer in Paintsville, KY, and by the time of his premature death at 49 of Bright’s Disease, had amassed a fortune in the neighborhood o… Read More
2016-08-03 05:00
“One night during a revival, we had a very heavy rain. Besides myself, only one other person showed up at the church, a young man. I read a scripture lesson, and had prayer before the… Read More
2016-08-02 05:00
“[My father] started one trend that horrified all the old friends. He put the kitchen on the front of the house. This was a thing unknown, inconceivable to the local populous. You didn… Read More
2016-08-01 05:00
Her schools earned plaudits from Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin Roosevelt. The Boys Industrial School motivated communities throughout the South… Read More
2016-07-29 05:00
Aunt Clarice was an excellent cook. I’m sure she and my mother got their special culinary education in French cuisine from their mother, Maria.
Since my Uncle Augie was a company man a… Read More
2016-07-28 05:00
One of the most venerable of Georgia pioneers was Col John W. Gray, who lived for seventy nine years at Adairsville, before that town, halfway between Chattanooga and Atlanta, was founded.
H… Read More
2016-07-27 05:00
During the July 27, 1941 race at the Daytona Beach-Road Course he suffered a crushed chest, broken pelvis, head and back injuries, and severe shock. He raced his two brothers and his sister… Read More
2016-07-26 05:00
“They brought their produce into town on wagons and they brought hallows to trade horses and all that kind of stuff and vegetables like string beans, tomatoes, corn, watermelons and al… Read More
2016-07-25 05:00
Men of advanced age are apt to think of the Good Old Days only in retrospect, but as a matter of fact, there is no comparison between the conveniences of life now, and those we enjoyed in 18… Read More
2016-07-22 05:00
It began as a coal and railroad center at the turn of the 20th century in an area fabulously wealthy in natural resources. The only way in and out of the town of five hundred hardy souls was… Read More
2016-07-21 05:00
July 22 will mark the 93rd anniversary of Nick Grindstaff’s demise. His gravestone reads: “Lived alone, suffered alone, died alone,” but in the 1870’s he was one… Read More
2016-07-20 05:00
The Florence [AL] Times Daily
Jul 23, 1937
Hartselle, July 27— Get out your “Stradivarius” and come to the Tennessee Valley and join the worm fiddlers.
A new industry has s… Read More
2016-07-19 05:00
From the divorce case between Walter E. McDaniels and Anna C. McDaniels, Knox County [TN] Fourth Circuit Court, filed July 1926
HIM: “Plaintiff met defendant in Philadelphia while stat… Read More
2016-07-18 05:00
So everything went along pretty calm, until Thursday of the third week. It clouded up to rain; the thunder cracked and the lightning flashed. Afternoon recess came and we were going strictly… Read More
2016-07-15 05:00
Part 1 of 2
Five miles out from Old Fort, up near Catawba Falls; that was my first school. No teacher ever stayed there five months. Usually, they’d stay five or six weeks.
All right… Read More
2016-07-14 05:00
Jackson County, AL has the highest concentration of caves, springs and sinkholes of any county in the United States. Tucked in among the Paint Rock River watershed’s underground splend… Read More
2016-07-13 05:00
A great many people in Ekeyville owned their own small boat, a skiff or johnboat. The johnboat is a flat bottomed affair with one set of oar locks and square in the stern. The skiff comes to… Read More
2016-07-12 05:00
July. Hottest, most humid month of the year. So put on your highest boots, long pants, and a long shirt, and head for the woods. Because July is also black raspberry season, and you’re… Read More
2016-07-11 05:00
Lewis ‘Hack’ Wilson had already led the National League in homers four out of the previous five years at the beginning of the 1930 season, the year he made baseball history. It… Read More
2016-07-08 05:00
Logan News [Logan, WV], July 8, 1976— The Sunday after his election as sheriff in 1920, Don Chafin, “the King of Logan County,” agreed to have his photograph taken at his h… Read More
2016-07-07 05:00
Citizen (Berea, Ky.)
Thursday, July 7, 1910.
“Keep Busy”
It is not money that is the root of all evil. It is idleness. Idleness leads to poverty, Idleness invites disease. Idlene… Read More
2016-07-06 05:00
It’s tent revival season throughout Appalachia – the region that invented the tent revival.
The first camp meeting took place in July 1800 at Gasper River Church in southwestern… Read More
2016-07-05 05:00
He never wore shoes much and chewed tobacco inveterately. He grew 3 sets of teeth during his long life, he claimed. And when he died on July 5, 1922, his oldest child was 99 years old and hi… Read More
2016-07-04 09:40
The post Happy Independence Day! appeared first on Appalachian History.
You Might Also Like:Happy Independence Day everyone! Read More
2016-07-01 05:00
Not far from the towns of Boone, Blowing Rock, and Asheville, deep inside Humpback Mountain below the Blue Ridge Escarpment, lie Linville Caverns, North Carolina’s only publicly access… Read More
2016-06-30 05:00
The Blue Ridge Parkway is the longest (469 miles), narrowest national park in the world and is the most visited unit in the US National Park system. The parkway runs from the southern termin… Read More
2016-06-29 05:00
University of South Carolina
Columbia, S.C.
June 29, 1889
O.P. Temple, Esq
My dear Judge
I have read with great interest every word of the Knoxville Journal, concerning John Sevier, etc. The… Read More
2016-06-28 05:00
“Uncle George Wynn did all the thrashing on the east side of the road that goes through Burke’s Garden, north and south. John D. Greever did all the thrashing of wheat on the wes… Read More
2016-06-27 05:00
One of the first geologic explorers of North Carolina’s Black Mountains, Elisha Mitchell, gave his name to the region’s highest peak, the one that claimed his own life on June 27… Read More
2016-06-24 05:00
“I stayed [at the Little Fox Creek place] eleven years, in the midst of the Thomas and Gibson tyranny, ere we decided we could not bear with their ways of doing any more, so we kind of… Read More
2016-06-23 05:00
We know him today as Dean Martin, world famous crooner and pal of Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. But he was born Dino Paul Crocetti, in Steubenville, OH, the son of Italian i… Read More
2016-06-03 05:00
About the year 1756, Col. Peter Randolph, Col. [William] Byrd [III], Mr. [John] Campbell, and other persons, were sent upon an embassy by the Governor of Virginia to the Cherokee country, in… Read More
2016-06-02 05:00
“It is related that the late J.J. Jones, during the palmy days of the seventies (1870s) when the virgin soil in that Red Belt section was at its best, and before erosion had marred the… Read More
2016-06-01 05:00
When the U.S. Army came to what is now Oak Ridge, TN in 1942 with the Manhattan Project, one thousand families on 56,000 plus acres had to be moved. Half of those acres were in Roane County… Read More
2016-05-31 05:00
By the time George Wilson Jr. became president of the Wilson Chemical Company in 1937, two generations of Wilsons had perfected the art of what was then a most unusual sales technique. The c… Read More
2016-05-30 09:49
The post Happy Memorial Day! appeared first on Appalachian History.
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2016-05-27 05:00
“Coal is like layers in a layer cake. And where you’ve got it cut by erosion by the valleys, why, it’s just in fingers, and these fingers went miles and miles back in there… Read More
2016-05-26 05:00
Post News
Kingsport, TN
May 26, 1977
APPALACHIA, VA—Miss Georgia got aboard the Virginia and Southwestern train headed for Daniel Boone (then known as Albert Yard.) The year was 1907… Read More
2016-05-25 05:00
Fort Payne [AL] Journal
May 28, 1941
Mr. Driskill’s ancestors on his father’s side were three Irishmen who settled in Maryland. His mother’s ancestors were English. Charles… Read More
2016-05-24 05:00
George A. Meyers, former president of the Celanese textile plant union Local 1874, former president of the Maryland-DC CIO and former chairman of the Maryland Communist Party is shown in a J… Read More
2016-05-23 05:00
This widow of the South accumulated 9 husbands & 10,000 pieces of glass! Anna Safley Houston (1876-1951) single-handedly amassed thousands of pitchers, creamers, lamps, flasks, jugs, chi… Read More
2016-05-20 05:00
Some of the things I learned at Biltmore would be hard to find in any text book published then or later — things, that as I look back over my 44 years as a forester, have proved fully… Read More
2016-05-19 05:00
Today, Holzer Medical Center-Gallipolis is the largest employer in Gallia County, OH with 1,123 people on the payroll.
Dr. Charles Elmer Holzer (1887-1956) came to Gallipolis in 1909, as a r… Read More
2016-05-18 05:00
A GREY HUNTER
Cumberland [MD] Evening Times, May 18th & 19th, 1881
“Jack Chadwick lived in the wild country near Negro mountain with his mother and little brother Jesse. He was a g… Read More
2016-05-17 05:00
Alabama’s oldest Baptist congregation will be 208 years old this year. Or not, depending on whom you ask. Elder John Nicholson led the first worship on October 2, 1808 at the hom… Read More
2016-05-16 05:00
Edsel Martin (1927-1999) liked to refer to himself as the ‘mountain misfit of North Carolina.’ That understates the case just a tad. He was in fact a widely celebrated instrument… Read More
2016-05-13 05:00
The Appalachian League was born in 1911 with teams in Asheville, N.C.; Bristol, Va.; Cleveland, Tenn.; Johnson City, Tenn.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and Morristown, Tenn. That first version of the… Read More
2016-05-12 05:00
Confederate Memorial Day is May 10. On May 12, 1909 the 4th Ohio Cavalry Association returned the Rifle Scouts’ Civil War battle flag to the state of Alabama at the Elk’s Theate… Read More
2016-05-11 05:00
Alice Jane Meek (1877-1961) could trace her roots to members of pioneer families in Eastern Kentucky. Her resourcefulness emerged early when, amid serious competition, she wooed and wed a te… Read More
2016-05-10 05:00
To see Mrs. Augusta Robinson walking over town from Castle Hill, which she does most everyday, where she makes her home with her daughter’s family, one would never believe she is old e… Read More
2016-05-09 05:00
Sunday Magazine–St. Louis Post Dispatch–May 9, 1926
OLD MAN WRIGHT RIDES INTO EXILE
So as to Git Away From Trouble, This Settler of the Hills–Fighter and Killer–Sits… Read More
2016-05-06 05:00
Here’s a selection from Kentuckian Sarah Ann Jackson’s ‘My Journal for 1835.’ The diary was found between the walls of an old house in Laurel County, KY, but there is… Read More
2016-05-05 05:00
Report on Oconee County Chain Gang
Mr. Newton Kelly Foreman: Visited July 11 1918
by Assistant Secretary Broyles
Convicts present: 16, 3 of them being trusties. All negroes. Camped about th… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
There’s one [memory of working for the Frontier Nursing Service] that really does stand out rather a lot. We weren’t supposed to go outside the five mile limit. That was our limi… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
The following excerpt is from ‘The Hammons Family: A Study of a West Virginia Family’s Traditions,’ based on oral history field recordings from the early 1970s. After a sho… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
Lillian Exum Clement was nominated as a Democratic candidate for North Carolina’s House of Representatives two months before the 19th Amendment, granting the vote to women, was ratifie… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
Surpluses of the main US farm products had been piling up in storage bins since the early 1920s, and President Roosevelt used the Agricultural Adjustment Administration starting in 1933 to t… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
The post Happy New Year! appeared first on Appalachian History.
You Might Also Like:Happy New Year! Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
Please welcome guest author Jeanne Rountree of Gainesville, GA. Rountree is the author of the Teach. Love. Inspire. blog. She is an English teacher and teacher leader a… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
From the 1927 divorce case filed by James R. Seawall against Dorothy Elizabeth Seawall in Knox County Fourth Circuit Court, Knoxville, TN: “After their marriage, and in the year 1923… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
Please welcome guest author Rita Quillen. Quillen’s new historical novel ‘Hiding Ezra’ (Jan-Carol Publishing) has just released. We’re pleased to be able to offer up… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
On April 2, 1931, world famous New York Yankees sluggers Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were struck out by a 17 year old female pitcher named Virnett ‘Jackie’ Mitchell in Chattanooga… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
“My parents were share croppers. My mother and dad separated in, I guess it may have been ’36 that they separated, and my daddy continued to work on the farm, and my mother went… Read More
2006-06-07 11:16
One of the first whites to settle in Marshall County, AL was John Gunter (1765-1835), a Scotsman who migrated from North Carolina after the Revolutionary War. Gunter came to the great bend o… Read More
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