Blog
Reading Time: 4 minutesYou 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. Today, there’s no sound at […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesYou 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. The person who carried the […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesChef 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 on their table when the […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesMy 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 headfirst into history—and sometimes coming […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesIt’s a quiet morning in Fries, Virginia, and the New River is doing what it’s always done—slipping past the banks with ageless calm. The cotton mill that gave the town its name and purpose is long gone, but you’d swear you can still hear the echoes. Not of the looms—they stopped decades ago—but of something softer: hikers crunching gravel on […]
Reading Time: 4 minutesWhen most people think of African Americans in the 19th century, two images dominate: Southern slaves or Northern abolitionists. But tucked deep in the hills and hollows of the mountain South, there lived thousands of men and women who didn’t fit either category. They were Freemen in Appalachia—Black Americans who were not enslaved yet not fully free—and their stories have […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesWe all say the same thing the first time we see the Blue Ridge Parkway: “The view is incredible.” The Blue Ridge Parkway, with its winding curves and postcard overlooks, offers some of the most stunning scenery in the eastern U.S. It’s the kind of road that makes you slow down, roll down the windows, and breathe a little deeper. […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesWe’re taught the Trail of Tears as an ending—a final march west, away from ancestral homelands. But what if it wasn’t the end? What if some never left? In 1838, under orders from the federal government, thousands of Cherokee men, women, and children were rounded up at gunpoint and forced to march nearly 1,000 miles to Indian Territory. Thousands died […]
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe Crooked Road isn’t just a mountain ramble. It’s a sound—a fiddle tune rolling through the hills, a banjo ringing against the Blue Ridge backdrop. It’s the laughter of dancers at a Friday night jamboree, the reverent silence after a ballad, the echo of generations who’ve carried these songs across porches, church pews, and festival stages. Music isn’t just played […]
Reading Time: 6 minutesEditor’s Note: The following is a fictionalized letter inspired by Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones) real-life words and activism. While this letter is imagined, the events it describes—the brutality of the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strike, the suffering of the miners, and the role of labor in America—are deeply rooted in history. An opposing perspective and commentary follow the […]
