History
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series. You’re sitting at the table with a box of old photos. Some are loose. Some are stuck together. A few have curled at the corners. You recognize faces, but not always names. You know they’re family, but you can’t always say how. You turn one over,…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series. Scroll through enough social posts, and you’ll see the same Appalachian stereotypes repeated: Poor. Backward. Uneducated. Stuck. The wording shifts, but the judgment stays the same. It’s often delivered with confidence and very little curiosity. Yes, hardship was real. Poverty was real. Options were limited. Work was hard,…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series. The phrase “catching a song” once had a literal meaning in the Southern Appalachians. A singer shared a tune, someone else listened closely, and the melody passed from one memory to another. Nothing was written down. The old songs stayed alive only as long as someone could remember…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series If you spend enough time with Appalachian family history, you notice the spaces where names should be. Old Bibles with half-filled pages. Photos with faces nobody can place. Stories that trail off when someone asks a question that a generation never answered. The gaps feel small…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series Morning comes early because it has to. The stove takes time. In the quiet of Appalachian isolation, the path to the spring is slick with dew, and the cow bellows until the gate latch lifts. A wagon trip into town must wait for the creek to…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series In the gray stillness before dawn, Mae pulled her daughter’s coat tighter and brushed snow from the girl’s cap. The chill settled in deep this far up the valley, where wind rolled off the ridges and cut through every layer of wool. Along the tracks, families…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series The drive between Mount Airy, North Carolina, and Hillsville, Virginia, takes about twenty minutes today. Route 52 winds up and over Fancy Gap Mountain, a two-lane road that climbs up to three thousand feet before landing in Carroll County. The pavement is smooth, the grades are…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series Across the Atlantic The ship pitched hard in the swells of the North Atlantic. Below deck, young Johann Dahle gripped the rough wood of his bunk and tried to steady his thoughts. He was twenty years old, a soldier-for-hire from Hesse, one of the small German…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series In 1938, the Blue Ridge Mountains still held pockets of people far from any public library. Roads were rough, mail was slow, and a borrowed book might pass through several hands before finding its way back to a shelf. Into this gap came the Packhorse Librarians:…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series A baby born blue was nothing new on Troublesome Creek. Neighbors had seen it before. The midwife knew the color would fade in a few days for some, but not for others. For certain families in this corner of eastern Kentucky, blue skin wasn’t a sign…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series. 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,…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series 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…