7

INSIDER & OUTSIDER,
QUARE WOMEN,
COUNTRY LIFE MOVEMENT

1910 was also the beginning of the "Country Life" movement. Established by the many surveys completed by the Country Life Commission, this movement took a hard look at rural education. It concluded that to be effective, the education must meet the people's needs and that urban models were not appropriate. One of the traits that had continually worked against the communal activity of education, was the "rugged individualism" of the mountaineer. The period preceding the Country Life movement had been characterized by what John C. Campbell, founder of the John C. Campbell Folk School, referred to as a period of over-developed individualism. In his famous quote we see another "truism" evolving about the mountains :

"If the question were submitted to an impartial jury as to what is the chief trait of Highland people the world over, the answer would be independence. Should one ask the outstanding trait manifested by the pioneer, the reply would be independence. Inquire what is the characteristic trait of rural  folk, particularly of the farming class, and independence will again be the answer. Put the query as to what is the prevailing trait of the American, and the unanimous verdict is likely to be independence. We have then, in the Southern Highlander, an American, a rural dweller of the agricultural class, and a mountaineer who is still more or less of a pioneer. His dominant trait is independence raised to the fourth power. Campbell, John C. The Southern Highlander and His Homeland,   1909.

See: Craft Revival: Shaping Western North Carolina, Past and Present at Western Carolina University.

O'HENRY

LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE

 So I went to a doctor .....

When we got to the house Amaryllis lugged out an encyclopaedia and sought a word in it. "The doctor said," she told me, "that you needn't call any more as a patient, but he'd be glad to see you any time as a friend. And then he told me to look up my name in the encyclopaedia and tell you what it means. It seems to be the name of a genus of flowering plants, and also the name of a country girl in Theocritus and Virgil. What do you suppose the doctor meant by that?"

"I know what he meant," said I. "I know now."

A word to a brother who may have come under the spell of the unquiet Lady Neurasthenia.

The formula was true. Even though gropingly at times, the physicians of the walled cities had put their fingers upon the specific medicament.

And so for the exercise one is referred to good Doctor Tatum on Black Oak Mountain -- take the road to your right at the Methodist meeting house in the pine-grove.

Absolute rest and exercise!

What rest more remedial than to sit with Amaryllis in the shade, and, with a sixth sense, read the wordless Theocritan idyl of the gold-bannered blue mountains marching orderly into the dormitories of the night?

O'Henry. Let Me Feel Your Pulse. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1910.  Illustrations by W.W. Fawcett.  First printed in The Cosmopolitan, 49.2, July 1910,

Note:  Cosmopolitan, 49.2, July 1910, p. 217-52, this small book was written at the end of O. Henry's life when he briefly lived in Weaverville, North Carolina and was married to his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Lindsay Coleman. In this black, but humorous work he tries to come to terms with his chronic alcoholism and the shadows of his physician father.

1927

HORACE KEPHART

Mount Kephart (el. 6217 feet/1,895 meters) in the Great Smoky Mountains,
looking west from Charlie's Bunion.
Photographed by Brian Stansberry, from the Wikimedia Commons.

OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS

Chapter III: THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS -
"For a long time my chief interest was not in human neighbors, but in the mountains themselves -- in that mysterious beckoning hinterland which rose right back of my chimney and spread upward, outward, almost to three cardinal points of the compass, mile after mile, hour after hour of lusty climbing  -- an Eden still unpeopled and unspoiled.

I loved of a morning to slip on my haversack, pick up my rifle, or maybe a mere staff, and stride forth alone over haphazard routes, to enjoy in my own untutored way the infinite variety of form and color and shade, of plant and tree and animal life, in that superb wilderness that towered there far above all homes of men. (And, I love it still, albeit the charm of new discovery is gone from those heights and gulfs that are now so intimate and full of memories).

The Carolina mountains have a character all their own. Rising abruptly fro a low base, and then rounding more gradually upward for 2,000 to 5,000 feet above their valleys, their apparent height is more impressive than that of many a loftier summit in the West which forms only a protuberance on an elevated plateau. Nearly all of them are clad to their tops in dense forest and thick undergrowth. Here and there is a grassy "bald": a natural meadow curiously perched on the very top of a mountain. There are no bare, rocky summits rising above timberline, few jutting crags, no ribs and vertebrae of the earth exposed. Seldom does one see even a naked ledge of rock. The very cliffs are sheathed with trees and shrubs, so that one treading their edges has no fear of falling into an abyss." Kephart, Horace. Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life among the Mountaineers,  New York, Outing Publishing Company, 1913,

CAMPING

Kephart -- VACATION TIME on urban and rural life

"To many a city man there comes a time when the great town wearies him. He hates its sights and smells and clangor. Every duty is a task and every caller is a bore. There come visions of green fields and far-rolling hills, of tall forests and cool, swift-flowing streams. He yearns for the thrill of the chase, for the keen-eyed silent stalking: or, rod in hand, he would seek that mysterious pool where the father of all trout lurks for his lure.

To be free, unbeholden, irresponsible for the nonce [for the time-being] ! Free to go or come at one's own sweet will, to tarry where he lists, to do this, or do that, or do nothing, as the humor veers; and for the hours,

'It shall be what o'clock I say it is!'

Thus basking and sporting in the great clean out-of-doors, one could for the blessed interval ,

'Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston-stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town."

This instinct for a free life in the open is as natural and wholesome as the gratification of hunger and thirst and love. It is Nature's recall to the simple mode of existence that she intended us for.

Our modern life in cities is an abrupt and violent change from what the race has been bred to these many thousands of years. We come from a line of forebears who, back to a far-distant past, were hunters in the forest, herdsmen on the plains, shepherds in the hills, tillers of the soil, or fishermen or sailors at sea; and however adaptive the human mind may be, these human bodies of ours still stubbornly insist on obeying the same laws that Father Adam's did.

...Some of our own people seem to get no satisfaction out of anything but chasing after dollars without let-up from year to year, save when they are asleep, or in church, or both. ...The charm of nomadic life is its freedom from care, its unrestrained liberty of action, and the proud self-reliance of one who is absolutely his own master, free to follow his bent in his own way, and who cheerfully, in turn, suffers the penalties that Nature visits upon him for every slip of mind or bungling of his hand. Carrying with him, as he does, in a few small bundles, all that he needs to provide food and shelter in any land, habited or uninhabited, the camper is lord of himself and of his surroundings. ...

'Free is the bird in the air,
And the fish where the river flows;
Free is the deer in the wood,
And the gipsy wherever he goes
Hurrah!
And the gipsy wherever he goes.'

There is a dash of the gipsy in every one of us who is worth his salt."

Kephart, Horace. Camping: A Handbook for Vacation Campers and for Travelers in the Wilderness, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927. pp.17-18, 21-22.

See also:  Horace Kephart: Revealing and Enigma at Western Carolina University.

1913

MARGARET MORLEY

IN THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS

Asheville

"To-day Asheville takes itself seriously as a city, and you are tempted to grant the assumption when you see automobiles driving through the streets as unconcernedly as in New York or Washington. Street-cars come from various directions to a sociable gathering in Pack Square, the heart of the city. These same cars take you to the confines of town, or up over neighboring mountain slopes to commanding view points. You go to Asheville to do your shopping and t see the world. There are imposing castle-like hotels there, modern and handsome houses on the residence streets, a great many small houses, and outlying districts where the cottages are occupied by colonies of negroes. Yet you can never make the mistake of supposing yourself in a real city when in Asheville, for you have only to lift your eyes to see the vast green forest pressing close about you and the mountains rolling away, peak after peak, to the far horizon. Besides, in spite of its urban airs there is the ever-conquering sun, shining on Asheville and drowning the mountains in its sweet Southern haze there is the balmy languor of the South and the mellow voice of the negro, to make you feel yourself in some secluded haven of rest, some happy escape from the turmoil and strife of a city, and this in spite of the census and the convenience of street-cars.

But to the native mountaineer Asheville is not only a city, it is the city. ... The hills of Asheville lie at an elevation of about two thousand feet, and are surrounded by mountains that stretch away in summits and ranges in whatever direction one may look. That beautiful form with the dome-like top, southwest of Asheville, is Mount Pisgah, and that ridge, a little lower and to the left of the summit, is the Rat. "Pisgah and the Rat!" -- The two names inexorably yoked together because the two shapes make one group, and the lower of them has a form so suggestive that there is no escape for it. They are so near Asheville as to attract immediate attention from the newcomer, who according to his temperament, is shocked or amused at his first introduction to "Pisgah and the Rat."

It is Asheville's position which has made it so long a favorite with those seeking these mountains for their pleasure. From its hills one looks away to peaks and ranges not too near and not too far, and one feels to the full that sense of elevation and of great sky expanse, which is so notable a part of the landscape of this region that the name, "Land of the Sky," once felicitously bestowed upon it, has clung to it ever since.

It would be tiresome to enumerate the mountains visible from the various hills of Asheville, one looks out upon so many, from the grand chain of the near Balsams on the west to the distant Craggy and Black Mountains towards the north, but one never gets tired of looking at them, and in these later days good roads lead away to parks and viewpoints, to the near and some of the distant villages, and to the artificial lakes now being made in increasing numbers to supply scenery and mosquitoes to the tourist; for the pleasure- seeking tourist has found the mountains, there is no escaping that momentous fact, and the mountaineer is everywhere waking up from his long slumber and beginning as it were to look about him.

There is so much that is interesting in Asheville and the country roundabout that it is easy to understand what Mr. Walker felt, for, like him, having once started, it is hard, even for a stranger, to stop "talking for Buncombe." Morley, Margaret. The Carolina Mountains, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913, pp. 134-137.

"The native people speak of the coming of winter as a calamity, and you, too, half dread the cold that is to pinch, and yet does not come. But one day it does come. The wind howls, the air is icy, and your blood chills. You fill the fireplace with logs, and resign yourself to the inevitable. But in three days you are out without a hat. How warm the sun, how delicious the air! And was there ever such color on the mountains! One has a rare surprise in this color of the winter mountains. They remain so warm and tender. They are drowned in light, and assume the marvelous pale blue which is unlike the blue of other mountains. But sometimes they are lilac, and blue in the shadows, or they are white and blue. They sometimes look white through the trees, a pure gleaming white with intense blue spaces, though there is no snow on them, only a shimmering light as though they were giving back the sunshine absorbed by them through the long summer. It is in the winter months that one gets that glow on the mountains, so tempting and so illusive to the painter's brush, when towards night you often see the southern slopes tinged with the pink of the wild rose, again warm lilac or deep red, while the sky and the earth that enclose them are sympathetic shades of blue and gray. It is nearing Christmas and Christmas berries are blazing in the thickets. Down the Pacolet Valley rustling canebrakes are green and gold, while golden sedge-grass spreads over slope after slope, its silky white plumes trembling in the breeze." Morley, Margaret. The Carolina Mountains, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913, pp.79-80.

When Spring Comes to the Mountains.

"It comes slowly, which is its unique charm. ...Here the spirit of the South prevails, and the spring gradually unfolds for three months, rising in a strong, slow tide that finally breaks over the land in a tremendous  flood of color and fragrance and song. ... Pale green creeps daintily up the ravines proclaiming the awakening of the tulip-trees. Budding hardwood trees everywhere mingle delicate shades of pink and yellow and silver-white, soft greens, and bronze-reds, with the dark green of the pines. The forest is transformed, it gives the impression of one wreathed in smiles. The tide of life is rising strongly though yet slowly ..." Morley, Margaret. The Carolina Mountains, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913, pp. 36-37

1913

RALPH FELTON

WORLD OUTLOOK

THE old man of the mountains who looked down with the same sniffing ennui upon Redcoats chasing Continentals, Union raiders chasing Rebs, Revenue Officers chasing moonshine, and the river chasing itself. Progress and industry are creeping into the mountains. The eagle-eyed marksmen are squinting over school books. Railroads are screaming up the valleys. Miners are honeycombing the vitals of the mountains. Mills spring up on the creeks.  His isolation invaded, his domain desecrated by outsiders, the old stone man would disintegrate in tears, or roll down and drown himself, if this were fiction. But in real life he'll probably go on sniffing at the factory smoke that some day will greet his nostrils.

New Plows for Old

Students come to the schools from miles around, in wagons, ramshackle buggies, on horse-back, or a-foot. They pay their tuition not only in money but in sorghum, turnips, sweet potatoes or by labor in the school.

Our schools teach not only boys and girls, but coves and counties. Whole towns spruce up and build better houses after the pattern of the mission buildings. Whole districts wake up and use better seed and breed better cattle. And under the guidance of the domestic science and hygiene work, a whole generation of better babies will rise to thank the mission schools for their being.

1924

IDYL DIAL GRAY

AZURE-LURE

Elia W. Peattie - THESE BE THE MOUNTAINS THAT COMFORT ME

"Immeasurably old are they,
Thes hills that 'round my valley wind;
Time has worn their peaks away,
And left them wise and humble and kind.
Once they were higher than Andean crest,
And bitterly white as the Arctic sea;
Now they are all in verdure drest:
These be the mountains that comfort me.

I've seen Vesuvius lift to the sun
The vine-clad slopes of her riven side,
I know how Jamaican mountains run
To lave their feet in the azure tide;
The Gothic Alps with glittering spires,
Aetna, Stromboli by the sea,
Though each with their beauty my spirit fires,
These be the mountains that comfort me.

Pike's Peak across the plain I've seen,
With the shivering joy of a great surprise;
The jewelled crevasses of Muir have been
Revealed to my astounded eyes.
I know how Greylock looks in Spring;
How splendid autumn Berkshires be;
But though their beauties I will sing,
These be the mountains that comfort me.

At dawn my mountains hear me pray,
At noon I turn to them for rest,
I laugh when I see them at close of day
Humped like elephants against the West;
And when 'neath the stars I look at these hills,
I know that I shall holpen be;
The troubled pool of my spirit stills --
These be the mountains that comfort me. "

Peattie, Elia W. "These Be the Mountains That Comfort Me," in Azure-Lure:  A Romance of the Mountains, Souvenir of Asheville and Western North Carolina, edited by Idyl Dial Gray, Asheville: Advocate Publishing Co., Carolina Souvenir Booklet Association,1924. [See Donald Peattie.]

1924

JAMES WATT RAINE

James Watt Raine, Head of the Department of English at Berea College, draws boundaries on the region using the geography first described in Lanman's and Clingman's accounts of the region and later expanded by John C. Campbell in his The Southern Highlander & His Homeland. (1921). To this geography, he adds a cultural context. Mountains, for him, are not just geographic boundaries, but are the context for a learned life-style.

THE LAND OF SADDLE BAGS

"The Appalachian Mountain chain extends along the Atlantic coast from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the low lying lands on the Gulf of Mexico. It is cut almost in half by the two river Potomac and Monongahela. The southern half of this mountainous country is the home of those people variously referred to as "Southern Highlanders," "Southern Mountaineers," or "Appalachian Mountaineers." They usually call themselves "Mountain People." Raine, James Watt.  In the Land of the Saddlebags, New York: Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1924. p.19.

"... In North Carolina alone there are twenty-one peaks higher than Mr. Washington; and in the whole of Appalachia there are nearly three hundred peaks over five thousand feet high, besides three hundred miles of saddles and ridges. These mountains of Appalachia are crowded so close together that there is comparatively little level land.

While this rough, broken steepness is, perhaps, the most noticeable physical feature of the country, the second characteristic is unquestionably its wonderful growth of forests. Here is the finest and largest body of hardwood timber in the United States. The mountains are green to their very summits, with a thick growth of trees and under-brush. There are few bare rocks or naked cliffs. And even the peculiar 'Bald' that is occasionally seen on the crown of a mountain is green with an excellent natural grass. There are usually many shades of green in the great variety of trees; and color is a winsome and peculiar quality of the landscape. In the spring the delicate tan fluff of the beeches, the red flowering of maples, the feathery white blossoms of the 'sarviss,' are succeeded by the redbud's blaze of purple that covers the whole hillside, which after a week's triumph is kindled into renewed freshness by the jets of white dogwood that flicker through it.

Higher up the mountain the delicate orange of the azalea startles us like tongues of flame, and a little later the waxy pink of the laurel, and the superb glory of the rhododendron stretches away for hundreds of enchanted acres. These have scarcely vanished before the covers are golden with the blossomy yellow of the chestnut, and we are lifted in Elysium by the fascinating fragrance of wild grape blossoms. As we climb one of these mountains from valley to summit on a summer day, we can find successively all the wild flowers of the eastern United States in a profusion unknown elsewhere. In the fall of the year the autumn foliage lights up these mountains with a many-hued magnificence of color that no other region can rival --- while above in the magic blueness of a mysterious sky, the ever-burgeoning clouds reflect all the silken tinting of the celestial hosts." Raine, James Watt. The Land of Saddle-bags: A Study of the Mountain People of Appalachia, New York: Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1924, pp. 21-22.

"It is perhaps inevitable, but none the less unfortunate, that most of those who write about the Mountain People do not live among them. It is very easy to portray oddities instead of fundamental and vital traits. The outsider naturally notices peculiarities and describes them. [Here a reference to Harney's "A Strange Land and a Peculiar People." These are thereupon taken to be representative, when they may be decidedly exceptional. This does not mean that we should expect everyone to agree with our own observations. It is doubtless true that if a thousand outsiders who had observed Mountain People and Mountain conditions for over a year should be consulted they might not be at all unanimous about the dominant characteristics of the Mountain People." Raine, James Watt. The Land of Saddle-bags: A Study of the Mountain People of Appalachia, New York: Council of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1924, p 65..

OLIVE TILFORD DARGAN

HIGHLAND ANNALS

"Grandpap accrued to me along with a farm in the Unakas. When I learned that my inheritance lay, or rather rose, in the Unakas, it at once passed from prose to poetry. My hudred hills became tipped with song, bloom calling to bloom from Three-Pine Point to Sunrise Spur, and Blackcap answering from his hemlock shroud with a melodious shake that did no harm to his hidden acres of anemone and trillium. The laurel, polished as by the glance of a god, drew a richer green from its storehouse across a paltry breadth of sky, in the sun. The great chestnuts leafly defied the blight that was creeping to their hearts. And where the gray rocks pushed through the living emerald of the mountain walls, they too seemed listeningly alive, as if in wait for the key-word that would swing them open on Persia magnificent; though they needed to borrow no glamour of age from any part of the world. Unakas! Spenser, under English beeches, rustled his threefold coverlet of centuries, and began another dream -- dream of a region that was old to God before Helvellyn [third-highest peak in the English Lake District] rose or the Himalayas shone as the planet's crest."

Dargan would later re-work this entry in her 1941 book, From My Highest Hill,  and correct the geography from the Unakas to the "Smokeis." 

Re-worked manuscript of Olive Tilfor Dargan's  1925 Highland Annals, to which Dargan added the photographs of her friend Bayard Wooton.

From My Highest Hill

"Granpap had accrued to me with a farm that rubbed the southern knees of the Smokies, where they make their decisive quirk toward the setting sun. North of us the great range swung its most massive arc, but I was more fascinated by the line of peaks on the west, whose heads seemed to come and go with friendly inquiry.

"That fust 'un is Snowbird," said Sam. "Backin' it, furder off, is the Unikers." I wondered if Unikers was degenerate Unicoi, and turned to Uncle Jess Rose, the oldest of our old-timers.

"Back an' beyant 'em are the Unaykas," he said.

"Oh, the Unakas!"

"You kain't see 'em" said Sam, "lessen it's awful fair day, an' yer in the big pasture top o' the mountain. They're nothin' anyway but the same ol' Smokies drappin' south."

"They been called Unaykas since my gransir's day," said Uncle Jess, his eyes leveling their rods of brown fire on Sam from a face as Greek as Socrates'. When he said a thing was thus or so, so it was. In this instance I was glad to believe him. My newly adopted region was still unchristened, and I was casting about for a name. "Snowbird" was too cold for the warm, green slopes, and "Unikers" could never be revamped into Unicoi. The watered valleys and heights lying within the crescent bounded north and west by the curve of the Unakas and the Smokies should be Unaka land. With this decided, my inheritance was easily lifted from prose to poetry. The hundred circling hills became tipped with song. Bloom called to bloom from Three Pine Point to Sunrise Spur, and Blackcap answered from his hemlock shroud with a melodious shake that did no harm  to his hidden acres of anemone and trillium." Dargan, Olive Tilford. From My Highest Hill: Carolina Mountain Folks. Philadelphia, Pa.: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1941.pp.13-14

..."The full southern moon was savagely vivid that evening, devouring dreams as easily as it did the clouds that saluted too familiarly. When I started home I chose the "stovewood trail," a rear way softened by a lane of shadows. What trips the eye will halt the foot, and I paused for a second or less as I sighted a hemlock bough like laced jet against the moon. When I stepped forward again I was on new, untrodden ground, so quickly are worlds created for us, tenants insatiable.

The mountains sat about me, cloaked sages waiting my indiscretions. Like the breath of a hidden sea the valleys whispered upward with the life that stirs by night; smaller wings that dart fearlessly when the birds are asleep; and lithe, furry dwellers that come out, more softly than swimmers, to thread the channels of shadow.

And beauty lay everywhere; on the laurel shedding a vapor of light, on the laps of orange fungi with their creamy apron cascades; on the roots of trees and the rocks that fed them endurance. Blue mosses, pale lichens, grasses with heads of mauve and pearl, gleamed in the unsubdued strips of gold. I looked above me for escape from magic,  and where two walls of cloud parted watched a mist wind gravely about a star then creep to a solemn peak and hang there like a comic beard. ..."

GEORGE HOLCOMB PROSSER

"Wrecked Automobile," E.M. Ball Collection, GP249, D.H. Ramsey Library Special Collections

GEORGE HOLCOMB PROSSER COLLECTION

George H. Prosser was an "outsider" who brought his family to the mountains to find work a the newly created Enka plant in Candler, North Carolina. For most of the years that he lived in the western North Carolina mountains, he sympathetically struggled to understand the people and the life of the mountains. He did so with a keen eye to cultural nuance and good humor. His poetry, written in the style of the popular Edgar Guest, captures the tension of insider and outsider, but it is remarkably in-tune with the mountains he and his family came to love. He captures a simpler life just on the cusp of becoming an automobile age and as a new life-style began to change recreation, mobility, industry and cultural interactions of those living in the mountains.

                    NORTH FORK

Now, Pisgah Forest has good roads,
To famed North Fork they go,

And tourists passing do not pause
'Twould stop the traffic flow.

 

We made that trek when roads were tracks
That wheels had cut thru years,

We forded streams and rushed high banks,
Our cars in lowest gears.

 

We'd been in there the week before,
The fishing sure was fine,
The neighbors said we should come back,
At huckleberry time

 

'Twas raining as we crept along,
And at a slippery bump,
The Studie stuck, it could not go,
Where Bill's Ford crossed the hump.

 

The women and the kids got out,
To help, or give advice,
Bill and his boys got set to push,
The mud was slick and nice

 

I poured the gasoline to her then
A heading up the track
As I tore up that slippery slide
To stall and then slip back.

 

Oh, Jack was Just a nipper then,
And sure he could push far,
But in the mud his bare foot slipped
Beneath the rolling car.

 

They dragged him out, washed off the mud,
I'll swear my heart had stopped,
But bones were whole and kid? are tough,
My fears were just a flop.

 

We finally made that red clay slope,
To camp beside a barn,
And round the campfire thanked our stars,
We all were safe from harm.

 

Next day we fished and loafed along
That splendid mountain stream,
The kids went wading, women talked,
And kept the camp quite clean.

 

The huckleberry folks came in
To Shining Rock  they'd been,
And they were loaded heavily,
As I have ever seen.

George H. Prosser, George H. Prosser Collection, D.H. Ramsey Library Special Collections, UNC Asheville.

1929

ELOISE BUCKNER EBBS

CAROLINA MOUNTAIN BREEZES

WESTERN CAROLINA 

Oh Western Carolina, “Fair Land of the Sky.”
Where verdant hued mountains rear lofty heads high,
And the birds and the bees ever sing their glad song,
To cheer and encourage the whole summer long.  

Where the sweet cooling breezes from mountains and streams
Softly blow day and night, and make pleasant our dreams,
And the beautiful flowers and the gay butterfly,
Brightly paint every vista that greets the tired eye.  

Where health-giving springs from green mountain-sides pour
In melodious welcome as though to implore
Those wearly and ill with flushed lips parched and dry
To come and drink health in “The Land of the Sky.”  

Where in autumn the fruits shower down on the ground,
And the corn and the pumpkins, and wheatfields abound,
And old mother earth unlocks storehouses rare,
And spreads here a feast with which none can compare.  

Our mountains supply all man’s needs: rain or shine,
 From milk for the babe, to his last bed of pine,
Then here would we live, and oh here let us die,
In Western Carolina, “Fair Land of the Sky.”

From Carolina Mountain Breezes, by Eloise Buckner Ebbs,  1929       

So goes a poem by Eloise Buckner Ebbs about her native land. Born and raised in western North Carolina, Eloise, was educated at the Denominational School (Mars Hill College) and married a childhood sweetheart. The formative years of her life are recorded in a semi-autobiographical novel she wrote at the end of her life in 1928-29 and in which this poem appears. In the novel she describes the trials and tribulations of her sister Ruth, her own courtship and marriage and a mixture of factual and fictitious events. The novel, Carolina Mountain Breezes, was intended to “give the mountaineer’s viewpoint.”  She believed the native people of western North Carolina had been poorly represented by “outsiders” and she wished to place before the reader the “true and honest people” of the mountains.  Given her strong sense of place and her fervid defense of the local, it is curious that in her preface to the novel she gives inspirational credit to Margaret Morley, among others. She says “…I found it very hard to separate my own thoughts from those of others, as all had become rather a part of me.” (Introduction) This is a testimony to the influences that commonly shape us all. Our attitudes and perceptions are tied to the many experiences we have had, the books we have read, and the images we share in our minds. Those who live in the mountains, are shaped by the Mountains and it is this common geography that ties our history together and that permeates the literature of those authors who have either lived here or have passed through the terrain. These writer's voices are both unique and universal in their understanding of what it is to be both of and in mountains.

FRANCES LOUISA GOODRICH

MOUNTAIN HOMESPUN

Frances Goodrich came to the mountains of western North Carolina for the first time in late 1880. She was invited to the area by Florence Stephenson who had possibly met Goodrich at the New York City Mission Training School and the Industrial Education Association which trained women to become involved in mission social services. Stephenson was in Asheville to run a craft school called the Home Industrial School. Goodrich had trained in art and had been admitted to the Yale Art School as a student,  where she received a certificate of completion. She moved to New York to continue her studies under George H. Smillie, a well-known landscape artist. Goodrich achieved modest success as an artist, but by the 1890's she had changed her focus to social service and it is this direction that absorbed her efforts for the remainder of her life. 

Just what prompted Frances Goodrich to choose the mountains of North Carolina may never be known completely, but her transition into the settlement movement was consistent with the founding principles of that movement and she was not alone in choosing the "poor mountain whites" as her "exceptional population." During Reconstruction, many schools in the South were begun by northern missionaries who wished to raise the educational level of the freed slaves.  The work of these early mission educators that had started with slave populations was soon directed to another needy population, that of the mountain dweller in the deep Appalachians. Luke Dorland, L.M. Pease, and others had established schools in the Asheville area and it was in one of those schools, the Asheville Home Industrial School for Girls (1877) that Florence Stephenson had begun her work. The Asheville schools were residential programs that were established to bring rural children into comprehensive and intensive learning environments where the educators believed the best learning would take place. The Asheville Home Industrial School and later the Dorland-Bell School would form the basis for "farm schools." The farm schools were similar in nature to the urban environments of the settlement schools, but brought a strong environmental component into the residential programs.

When Frances Goodrich came to the mountains to work as a volunteer in a small day school run by Evangeline Gorbold, the year was 1890. She traveled to the rural area near the small settlement of Riceville, approximately nine miles from Asheville and there described both the mountain journey and the mountain setting of the school.

"Well has Western  North Carolina been called the "Land of the Sky." Up and up we are drawn by the straining engine, amid the gorgeous scenery of autumn, where gold and amber and tints of red abound, where everything seems to glow with an opalistic flame, from the common weed by the wayside to the loftiest peak of the circling mountains. One view vanishes behind us as another, still more entrancing, suddenly evolves itself from the near distance, until the night settles down and we emerge into an open elevated valley, encircled by the dark crests of the lofty peaks of the Blue Ridge, and Asheville is reached.

...To understand the place to which the day school workers go, you must imagine a valley shut in on all sides by mountains covered with a thick growth of oak and walnut and pine. A few cabins and farm houses scattered along the road which runs through the center; not enough dwellings in sight to account for the ninety or more children said to be within reach of the proposed school, though a crowd of little faces peeps at you from every cabin door. You must climb over the mountains on either side, follow the different "prongs" of the creek, and thread many a path through the woods to the out of the way cabins before you find where all the children are to come from." [Introduction, p.18-19.]

Goodrich, Frances Louisa. Mountain Homespun. A facsimile of the original, published in 1931, with a new introduction by Jan Davidson, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1989.

Goodrich, Frances Louisa. Mountain Homespun, New Haven: Yale University Press ; London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931. 

Craft Revival: Shaping Western North Carolina Past and Present at Western Carolina University Special Collections