History
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series. Imagine a winter morning in 1910. You step outside before dawn and pull the kitchen door shut behind you, listening for the latch to catch. The cold doesn’t creep in gradually. It smacks you in the face. Snow lies crusted across the yard, firm in some spots, hollow in others, and your boot finds yesterday’s path…
An installment in our Appalachian History & Culture series A weather report for Galax, VA, might call for scattered showers, but drive a few miles toward Pipers Gap or down into a Carroll County hollow and you’ll see how quickly that forecast unravels. One ridge catches the rain. The next stays dry. Along the Blue Ridge escarpment in Patrick County, a…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series. The sheriff knew where the trouble was coming from before anyone notified him. Raised voices carried down a company road cut into the hillside. A family was loading what they could onto a wagon. A company foreman stood to the side, arms folded, eyeing them closely. Two armed…
An installment in our Appalachian History & Culture series The body lay in the front room, washed and laid out, the clock stopped. Folks came and went through the day and into the night, chairs pulled close to the walls to make space. Someone moved quietly between rooms with a tray of funeral biscuits, pressing…
An installment in our Appalachian History & Culture series If you grew up around Appalachian households, you probably learned early that belief didn’t need an audience. It didn’t announce itself or ask for an explanation. What we now call Appalachian faith and folk practice showed up in how the home was arranged, in what sat…
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 & Culture series If you grew up in the mountains, you’ve probably heard someone talk about “witching a well.” Before water lines reached the high ridges, families leaned on neighbors who claimed they could read the ground with a forked branch. Whether folks believed every detail or not, the…
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…