Blue Ridge Parkway Overlook at Groundhog Mountain, Meadows of Dan, VA
July 2025: Vol 2, #7
Howdy, and welcome to the July 2025 Blue Ridge Tales newsletter edition. This month, I’ve been thinking about what slips away—and what gets passed down. Not in books or archives, but through use. Tinware that outlasts the trade. A memory baked into the way someone seasons beans. A story told by heart because that’s how it was kept. These aren’t heirlooms behind glass. They’re what people made do with, made by hand, and kept alive because they needed to.
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. Today, there’s no sound at …
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. The person who carried the …
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 on their table when the …
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 headfirst into history—and sometimes coming …
Well, that's it for this edition. I hope you enjoyed it. If you would like me to cover a particular topic, drop me a line at the address below. And don't forget to "like" our Facebook page.
