Before there was a workshop, there was a pocketknife. And before there was a years-long waitlist, there was a teenage boy on a porch in Grayson County, Virginia, scraping curls of wood off a slab of spruce. Wayne Henderson didn’t have a band saw or a luthier’s bench, just a pocket knife and good instincts….
You might not recognize the Mennonite family that lives a few blocks over. The clothes are modest, sure, but not old-fashioned. The car’s parked in the driveway. The kids play outside after supper. Like other Mennonites in Appalachia, their lifestyle isn’t what sets them apart. Lifestyle is simply a reflection of their convictions. They’ve been…
It’s native. It’s sweet. It grows along half the rivers in Appalachia. And still, most folks in pawpaw country have never tasted one. Maybe you’ve passed it a hundred times: growing low along a creek, hidden beneath the canopy. Or maybe you’ve caught a whiff in late September: something tropical and overripe, like banana pudding…
The banks of Chestnut Creek have a way of rearranging themselves when no one’s looking. One year, the bed is gravel. Next, it’s mud and willow roots. Paths vanish. Stones shift. Try to mark a spot on the map, and nature will soon erase it. Maybe that’s why no one else ever found the Chestnut…
You could hear the shop before you saw it. A steady rhythm of clinks and taps echoed from the open door—tin snips biting into metal, hammers flattening seams, the soft hiss of solder melting into a joint. Inside, the tinsmith bent over a worn bench lit by lamplight, sleeves rolled up, hands blackened with soot….
You can still hear them sometimes—those old voices. They live in stories passed across porches, handed from generation to generation, without being written down. Before people thought to call themselves storytellers, they just told. And someone else remembered. Back in Gaelic lands, those voices had a name: Shanachie. Shanachie was the memory-keeper of the clan….
Chef Jacques Pépin said that our food reflects our history. Around here, that’s not theory—it’s fact. Southern cooking isn’t just something passed down. It’s something that kept folks alive. It remembers what people went through, and it doesn’t let much go to waste. If you want to know who someone is, ask what they put…
My friend Vanessa Cole writes a history newsletter which graces my inbox regularly. Recently, she wrote a series of articles about how Southern families “made do” during the Civil War. It was so entertaining and informative, I asked her if I could reprint it here, and she kindly agreed. Vanessa has a way of diving…
In the mountains of Virginia during the Revolution, justice didn’t always wait for courtrooms. Sometimes, it showed up with a rope and a warning. That’s how the phrase “lynch law” got started—right here in Southwest Virginia. The lead mines near what’s now Wytheville were essential to the Patriot war effort. They produced the bullets. No…
The British called it a gentleman’s war. That might’ve been true in the drawing rooms of Philadelphia or London. But out here—in the rolling hills of Botetourt (pronounced “baa-tuh-taat”) County, Virginia—it was anything but. That’s where you’d find John Wyatt, bending over hoop iron with his cooper’s hammer, trying to feed his family while the…