An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series. Payday at the Window Payday in a coal camp didn’t look much like payday in town. Miners lined up outside a small office window near the tipple. Sometimes the pay envelope held paper notes printed by the company. Sometimes it held small metal tokens stamped with the mine’s name and a dollar…
An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series. The trees were cut weeks ago and left where they fell. Oak, poplar, chestnut. Thick trunks lying crosswise in a field that needs to be planted. One man can clear brush. He can trim branches and split smaller lengths for rails. He can’t move logs that size alone….
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 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 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 Blue Ridge Travel series. From the pull-off near Rocky Knob, Rock Castle Gorge lies open below the Blue Ridge Parkway. Ridges step down into the valley where families once farmed and built their homes. Most visitors see only the view, not the community that once filled the hollow. When the Blue…
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…