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     We open today's show with the story of how Blacksburg, VA got its first railroad, fondly nicknamed “The Huckleberry Train,” in 1904.  Local newspapers called the railroad "the Christiansburg-Blacksburg Railroad" or "the Virginia Anthracite Line." Blacksburg’s soil is preferred by plants of the heath family, such as the wild-growing lowbush blueberry, which had become gloriously profuse along the newly cleared railroad's right-of-way. It became popular in the summer to buggy out to the site, see how the building was coming along, and pick the berries. After several summers of berry picking, the railroad became connected in people's minds to the famous huckleberries.

     We’ll pause in between things to catch up on a Calendar of Events in the region this week, with special attention paid to events that emphasize heritage and local color.

     Next, listen in on two early 1930s letters written by one M.L. Lewis of Henderson County, NC, to his mother in Vonore, TN.  “I have just neglected to write as I should have,” he apologizes in the first letter. “And I think you all have been slow enough about it. You know how we neglect those things.” But his mother must have made quite a fuss over his lack of letters and/or calls just the same, for he opens the second letter with “I cannot think I am as guilty of not writing as you accuse me.”

     Maxine Broadwater was just 5 years old when she helped her brothers destroy the glass negatives so they could turn their late uncle's photography studio into a chicken house.  Luckily for us they didn't finish the job. Her uncle, Leo J. Beachy (1874-1927), is thought to have taken ten thousand photographs a year on five inch by seven inch glass plates of the people and places in his beloved Garrett County, MD between the years 1905 and 1927.

     “An interesting story is told of another Anderson man of long ago,” says Louise Ayer Vandiver in her 1928 book “Traditions and History of Anderson County”  “He was Walter M. Gibson, and lived near Sandy Springs. He was an adventurer, and it is said was once prime minister of the Sandwich Islands. Being banished during a revolution, he went to one of the South Sea islands, where he always claimed he was made King, but after a time was banished from there, too. Later he was imprisoned by the Dutch for attempting to investigate a revolution in Java.”

     We’ll wrap things up with a look at festival entrepreneur and organizer Jean Thomas, who billed her “The Traipsin’ Woman.” She had hosted Susan Steele Sampson, wife of Kentucky’s governor, the previous year at her first American Folk Song Festival, held at the Traipsin' Woman Cabin. Now, in August 1931, Jean Thomas found herself invited to the Governor's mansion in Frankfort to discuss the creation of an American Folk Song Society and an annual festival open to the public.  How did Thomas get to this point, and why did she call herself the “Traipsin’ Woman?”

     And, thanks to the good folks at the Digital Archive, we’ll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music from Buell Kazee in a 1927 recording of "The Old Maid."

     So, call your old blue-tick hound up on the porch, fire up your corn-cob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian History.

     It seems to be my curse, that whatever I tell someone will happen, doesn’t happen. Not that I’m pretending to be a psychic or some sort of soothsayer. I’m referring to plans, what I plan to do this summer (not work apparently), when will I graduate (I was off by a semester), what are you going to do with your life?

     That was the big question. My answer over the years has been everything from veterinarian to zoologist to publisher to editor, yet none of the above is likely to happen, the first two because I don’t have a corresponding degree and the second two because neither me nor Joe wants to live in New York. Instead I’ve become a sort of overqualified farm wife.

     My most recent misinterpretation of the future, however, had nothing to do with questions. It concerned a puppy. A lovable, border collie/German shepherd mix that one of Joe’s coworkers practically begged him to take. And as Joe still had a job for the moment, we agreed. Battling heat exhaustion and dehydration, we built half the dog lot yesterday. This was after, of course, we’d argued over the size and location of the lot and how best to haul the leftover fencing from my parents’. Thus, accomplishing that much, we felt triumphant. We’d even picked out a name. Then Joe called me this morning to inform me that his friend’s parents (to whom the puppies belonged) had given our puppy away. The man had, in fact, taken both the remaining puppies.

     So to everyone we told, scratch that. We’re not, in fact, getting the lovable collie/shepherd mix. At least I hadn’t gone shopping for him yet. Having a half-finished dog lot is one thing. Having a pile of puppy food, rawhides, and toys and no puppy to feed it to would be much closer to the distressing end of another.

     It’s as if the future looks at what I’m excited about and then adjusts itself otherwise. I have, therefore, resolved to stick to the past and the present during conversations and keep my plans to myself. It’ll be difficult. People, mostly those people you’ve only met once or twice that don’t know the meaning of small talk, like to pry, and I tend to share exciting, however unconfirmed, news with my friends and family. But from now on, I will only announce the new arrival of something once it’s in my possession, and to the question of what I plan to do with my life, I will answer, nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s a desperately honest answer, but I hope (not plan) it will incur better things, since the future is in a renovating mood.

     But then, this entire declaration concerns future action. It is, in fact, a plan, so you might as well disregard it.

     Ashely

   Click here to listen to the podcast.

   We open today's show with a guest post from blogger Cheri Daniels, of Georgetown, KY. Author of the Journeys Past blog, Cheri’s a professional genealogist, historian, researcher, gardener, writer, photographer, librarian, and bookworm extraordinaire! In “Looking at Anna,” she tells us “Even though I cannot remember meeting ‘Aunt Annie,’ as the younger generation called her, I remember her estate dispersal. We were allowed into a storage room full of shelves that were loaded with odds and ends.  Her life was scattered about the room in the form of tangible objects. If she could have been there, what stories could she have told us about each item? Were there family artifacts there that were rendered silent as we passed by and therefore left to be sold to a stranger?”

     We’ll pause in between things to catch up on a Calendar of Events in the region this week, with special attention paid to events that emphasize heritage and local color.

     On August 7, 1806 Polly Reaves, her 3 children, and 2 neighbors all confirmed a most unusual site in the sky above Chimney Rock in Western North Carolina. “She turned towards the Chimney Mountain, and discovered a very numerous crowd of beings resembling the human species, but could not discern any particular members of the human body, nor distinction of sexes; that they were of every size, from the tallest men down to the least infants; that there were more of the small than of the full grown, that they were all clad with brilliant white raiment; but could not describe any form of their garment; that they appeared to rise off the mountain south of said rock, and about as high; that a considerable part of the mountain’s top was visible about this shining host, that they moved in a northern direction, and collected about the top of Chimney Rock.”

     July. Hottest, most humid month of the year. So put on your highest boots, long pants, and a long shirt, and head for the woods. Because July is also black raspberry season, and you’re not going to find those sweet sweet delights any other way (oh, I guess you could plant a couple of rows in the garden, but where’s the adventure in that?)

     “Do you know that the first bathtub in the United States was made by a rich man in Cincinnati in 1852? It was built of mahogany and lined with tin, and the owner proudly showed it for the first time at a Christmas party. Of course he never used it. Next day the city papers denounced it as ‘wicked, undemocratic and vain.’ Then came the doctors who proclaimed it as ‘unhealthful and a menace to life.’” Dr. Johnson Archer Gray, the author of this statement in a Middlesboro, KY newspaper article about bathing history in America, was just one of the thousands of journalists and historians across America who were taken in by the most astonishingly successful journalistic hoax of the early 20th century.

     We’ll wrap things up with a brief 1939 profile of one Andy Orville Bozzel and his family, of Appalachia, VA. “He is now in the C.C. Camp and is receiving thirty dollars per month,” says Maude R. Chandler, who wrote this life history for the Works Projects Administration/Virginia Writers’ Project. “Of that amount twenty two is sent home to his parents. He got to go to the C.C. Camp by his mother taking him to the welfare office and asking that he be signed up. Since going to camp he is completely self supporting. He has been there only a short time. I received this information from his mother. His mother told me that she asked him if signed up to go to night school in Camp and he answered, ‘You know I did for I want more education.’”

     And, thanks to the good folks at Rounder Records, we’ll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music from Haywood Blevins in a 1976 recording of “Molly Put the Kettle on,” from a disc titled "Old Originals" and subtitled "Old-time instrumental music recently recorded in North Carolina and Virginia.”

     So, call your old blue-tick hound up on the porch, fire up your corn-cob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian History.

     I lost my job on Thursday. Peaches are still going, will be until mid-September, just without me. The owner decided to turn the morning shift over to another couple full time, which is fine. No hard feelings. It was just something to do for a few hours a week, anyway. The real disappointment came when Joe was laid off the following day. It was almost enough to make me believe in an angry God. Or at least some sort of vindictive imp.

     And, of course, in consolation people spoke to me of this suddenly benevolent God opening a door where another had closed. And it’s a nice, hopeful metaphor, isn’t it? Except that I don’t believe God has much use for doors, and even if he did, he wouldn’t have to close one to open another. Americans walk through doors all the time without shutting the one they just came through. That’s why most businesses have entrances that shut by themselves.

     No, I don’t believe in these life-changing doors. Life junctions are more like intersections, at which you sit, idling, for what seems like centuries waiting for traffic to clear so you can make a left turn. You know eventually a gap will open up and you can move forward. It’s inevitable. Even if you have to cut someone off to do it. 

     So I wasn’t worried about Joe finding another job—though I’ve pretty much given up on myself. I knew someone will hire him eventually, even if it has nothing to do with his degree. I was simply a little shell-shocked. Two major blows in two days is more than a little disconcerting.

     Luckily, Joe seems to have made a U-turn. His supervisor called to say he should return to work tomorrow, so our finances can stop holding its breath. But there remains the irritation that burrows into the mind of a driver who has to backtrack and find an alternate route because the road is closed. And all the while the traffic just keeps coming.

     Ashely

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     We open today's show with a look at the life of one Colonel John W. Gray of Adairsville, GA.  "He was a fine model of the pioneer type," declares this short biography in a 1912 issue of Confederate Veteran magazine. “He was over six feet tall and until the last was as straight as an Indian, as hard as a hickory knot, sinewy, active, clear minded and clear blooded. He was a fine example of a vanishing kind that cut their way through the frontier in the old days and faced bravely whatever was before them.”

     We’ll pause in between things to catch up on a Calendar of Events in the region this week, with special attention paid to events that emphasize heritage and local color.

     Northern Alabama’s Paint Rock River watershed drains into one of Appalachia’s most magnificent canyons, a 150-foot-wide bowl-shaped natural amphitheater that sits between 200-foot-tall limestone walls. The “Walls of Jericho” gets its name, according to local legend, from a traveling minister who found it in the late 1800s and declared it needed a biblical name to properly describe its splendor. Davy Crockett hunted the area after moving to nearby Franklin County, TN in the first decade of the 19th century. “I found this a very rich country, and so new, that game, of different sorts, was very plenty,” he noted in his autobiography. “Of deer and smaller game I killed abundance; but the bear had been much hunted in those parts before, and were not so plenty as I could have wished.”

     By the time he was 20 in 1941, Truman Fontell “Fonty” Flock of Ft. Payne, AL was regarded as one of stock car racing’s best drivers. He got a taste for fast automobiles as a teenager hauling moonshine in his car from Atlanta to Dawsonville, GA. Fonty once said that he would seek out the sheriff and get him on a chase because he had a faster car. Fonty would send off to California and get the best parts for his car, and the sheriff couldn’t keep up with him. The sheriff didn’t have the resources to get the parts to make his car keep up with Fonty’s.

     Next, in this 1957 interview, Captain Jesse Hughes, of Washington County, OH, describes his experiences working for a river circus up and down the Ohio River at the turn of the 20th century.  “At that time there was no such thing as an automobile, hardly. People had heard of them, but nobody had ever seen them hardly. [The circus manager] had a thing there on the boat that had four wheels on it and it was supposed to represent an automobile and boy there was a crowd around that thing all the time looking at it. It wouldn’t run. They had to pull it around when they wanted to move it and there wasn’t an engine or anything of that kind but it made a hit. Just goes to show how things were changed since that time.”

     We’ll wrap things up with a segment from author/journalist Rebecca Harding Davis’ 1904 autobiography, “Bits of Gossip.”  Davis relates the details of growing up amidst a stern religious atmosphere in Wheeling, WV. “While the ordinary life of these people was wholesome and kindly,” she tells us, “their religion, oddly enough, was a very different matter. The father of that day believed that his first duty toward his child was to save him from hell. The baby, no matter how sweet or fair, was held to be a vessel of wrath and a servant of the devil, unless he could be rescued.”

     And, thanks to the good folks at the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the Donald C. Davidson Library, Univ of California/Santa Barbara, we’ll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music from Ernest V. Stoneman and his Dixie Mountaineers in a 1928 recording of “The old maid and the burglar.”

     So, call your old blue-tick hound up on the porch, fire up your corn-cob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian History.

     Yesterday, we attempted the impossible, and while it isn’t perfect, it’s at least done. We cleaned the shed.

     The shed wasn’t the equivalent of a messy garage. Garages are filled mostly with boxes of things, sometimes a car or two, maybe some trash. But they are mostly well built, and unless you keep the door open, stay relatively free of vermin. This is not so of the shed. It is old, with holes along the roof instead of actual vents, and for the last ten years has been inhabited by termites, wasps, and squirrels. The shed-filling was not in boxes, but rather chucked in corners, piled in heaps, and simply left in the floor under several thick layers of chewed foam, plastic bags, and trash. Much of it, in fact, was trash: blown light bulbs, dried tubes of various pastes, empty cleaning products, moldy clothes, split shoes, bird nests. But cleaning the shed wasn’t only impossible because of the trash, but also, because of my and Joe’s cleaning habits.

     I do most of the cleaning in the house, partly because I spend a lot of idle time at home, partly because I believe in an attempt at organization. I’d like someone to come into my home and say, “well, at least she tried.” But it’s mostly because Joe doesn’t believe in cleaning until he needs to get to something or the corners where he piles things start having regular avalanches. In fact, the only reason he wanted to clean the shed was to get the gun cabinet, which was stuck in the corner behind piles of trash and stuffed with trash itself. But since the shed is his family’s mess, I let him take the lead, which left me mostly in the way, which in turn led to quarrels about the meaning of “trash” and stumbling over what he calls organization, until, finally, we could see the floor and Joe could get to the gun cabinet. Objective achieved. Never mind that what Joe doesn’t call trash is still in precarious piles on top of raised platforms you might call tables if you could see them alone and in the light.

     I’ve always been told, in regards to relationships, that you can’t change people. And after the experiences I had with dating in high school, I came to believe it. So I didn’t go into this marriage thinking Joe would learn what organization meant. We dated for four years before marrying; I knew better. He has surprised me a bit, though, mostly concerning what he calls “food,” which is expanding, thanks to the fact that I cook and he’s starving when he gets home. So perhaps what the shed adventure, and previous dating experience, proves is that what you can’t change is the way a person’s mind functions, what it calls problems and how it solves them—my need for some level of organization and Joe’s need to avoid it.

     But like the shed, while our marriage isn’t perfect, while there are things piled in corners where they shouldn’t be, it’s functional. At least until the next time Joe decides he needs to something.

     Ashely

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     We open today's show with a look at the impact of African American builders in Appalachian Tennessee. The architectural landscape of Tennessee’s rural areas, small towns, and large cities is comprised of hundreds of historic buildings designed and built by African Americans, but one East Tennessee county is quite out of the norm in this regard.  Established in 1794 along the North Carolina border, Sevier County has never featured a large black population; however, black builders constructed nearly every important late nineteenth and early twentieth century private and public building in the county.

     We’ll pause in between things to catch up on a Calendar of Events in the region this week, with special attention paid to events that emphasize heritage and local color.

     West Virginian Dr. Patrick W. Gainer dedicated the balance of his life to a personal crusade to revitalize folk traditions, and to elevate the image and self-esteem of the Appalachian people at a time when derogatory stereotypes flourished.  His Appalachian folklore course at West Virginia University, where he taught in the English Department from the end of WWII till his retirement in 1972, was perhaps the most popular class ever offered on campus. In this next segment, we’ll listen in as Dr. Gainer sings “The Devil’s Questions.” The devil asks the maid difficult questions, which she must answer satisfactorily or be carried off to hell. When she answers the questions wisely, the devil disappears.

     It’s tent revival season throughout Appalachia – the region that invented the tent revival.  The first camp meeting took place in July 1800 at Gasper River Church in southwestern Kentucky. A much larger one was held at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August 1801, where between 10,000 and 25,000 people attended, and Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist ministers participated. It was this event that stamped the organized revival as the major mode of church expansion for denominations such as the Methodists and Baptists, who were newly converted by the teachings of John Wesley.

     Long before it became the brand of a search engine, the creature whose uttered cry gave it a name haunted Kentuckians. Daniel Boone told tales of "killing a ten-foot, hairy giant he called a Yahoo," says John Mack Faragher in a 1992 biography of Boone. The Yahoos are hairy man-like creatures in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, one of Boone's favorite books.  But it appears Swift did not simply make up the name ‘yahoo’ for his novel.  “The natives are greatly terrified by the sight of a person in a mask,” says Australian Aboriginal Words in English (1835), “calling him 'devil' or Yah-hoo, which signifies evil spirit."

     We’ll wrap things up with a profile of Mrs. Augusta Robinson of Castle Hill, VA, who was interviewed in 1955 by the Lexington Gazette for their ‘Past 80 Club’ column.  She wasn’t famous or rich, but her observations on social customs and mores of the area during the late 19th and early 20th century are priceless to us.  She courted her husband for 7 years before marrying him, for example, and was of a generation that transitioned from cooking over a fireplace to cooking on a stove.

     And, thanks to the good folks at the Digital Library of Appalachia, we’ll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music from Frank George in a 1970 recording of the classic dulcimer/fiddle tune “Grandfather Clock.”

     So, call your old blue-tick hound up on the porch, fire up your corn-cob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian History.

     I used to think naps were for toddlers and senior citizens. Or at least other toddlers. I stopped taking naps when I left infancy because otherwise my mother said I didn’t sleep at night. But after a fitful night’s sleep and a long morning of haircuts and refiling paperwork at the courthouse and killing time before Joe was due at work because we got up earlier than we needed to for once and bathing Spartacus, who is supposed to like baths but doesn’t, when I peeled the angry iguana off my back and sat down on the bed, I didn’t get up. I took a nap.

     Spartacus stayed for about fifteen minutes before he scraped his scaly belly off my chest and went back upstairs to his heat lamp. But I slept about an hour. And after the grogginess of awakening, which was about as thick and persistent as the fog in Charleston, wore off, it felt pretty good. I may not sleep well tonight, but I don’t sleep well at night anyway (My brain doesn’t turn off. Maybe it was the lack of naps as a toddler), so I don’t feel like I’m losing that much.

     But it was a fluke that I was able to take one today. Most days, I’m too busy. In fact, I think the only reason naps have been connected with toddlers and senior citizens isn’t that they need them more than young and mid-life adults but rather that they are the only ones with time to take them. Mom and I have been having this discussion recently. With three dogs—one quite vocal—a cat, and a snoring husband, Mom doesn’t get much sleep. She’s been on zombie mode for the past three years or so, and if it continues much longer, Joe, with his zombie phobia, might not want to visit her with me anymore (Just kidding, Mom, I love you.). But because of the animals, the snoring husband who would like a meal when he comes in from work, housework that I’m not there to do anymore, and her job, she doesn’t have time to take a much-needed nap. It’s one of the downfalls to American life.

     In Mexico, they have siestas around lunchtime, though admittedly it’s becoming less widely practiced. American work ethics are seeping southward. But in France, they still observe a two-hour lunch break from jobs and classes. Not exactly a nap, but a respite, nonetheless. Unless American work ethics have gotten to them as well. That’s entirely possible, especially in the big cities. But the point is that the concept of adult naps isn’t unheard of. It’s just been rooted out and replaced with caffeine and energy drinks and sleeping aids at night. That’s progress for you. Too bad I don’t care for any of those, and neither does my mother. I dislike the taste of energy drinks and coffee. I don’t even like soda that much. And I don’t go to bed early enough to take sleeping pills, which are supposed to last about eight hours. I’m not sure I can call medically induced sleep, sleep, anyway. It’s more like a coma that you’re most likely going to awake from in eight hours.

     Perhaps I just wasn’t blessed with good sleeping genes, unlike Joe, who can fall asleep in ten minutes as long as the lights are out. Maybe I’m doomed to become a zombie like my mother. But I hold out hope that when I’m old and retired, assuming I can find a job to retire from, I can enjoy the ability to sleep whenever I like. It’s the only option left.

     Ashely

Click here to listen to the podcast.

     We open today’s show with the story behind the founding 
of the Western Maryland Hospital. “In 1888, a group of 
Cumberland women, realizing their duty to fellow citizens, 
hit upon the plan of establishing an old folks’ home, in that 
way to be of service to the older men and women who did 
not have the comforts of a private home,” says the ‘History 
of Allegheny County Maryland,’ by James Thomas. “Several 
wards were admitted to the home, and the institution was 
doing excellent work, but it was noted before long that 
Cumberland was without a hospital.” 
     We'’ll pause in between things to catch up on a Calendar 
of Events in the region this week, with special attention paid 
to events that emphasize heritage and local color. 
     South Carolinian James Levoid Bryant liked to play the 
part of the hobo, traveling around the United States on trains 
during the Depression, sometimes getting into mischief. He 
was young, he was popular, he was adventurous. The train 
yards had detectives who regularly kicked the stowaways 
off the trains, so riding in that style meant continually looking 
over one'’s shoulder. Nor was that the only railway danger just 
waiting for a careless young man. 
     Long ago, goes the Cherokee myth known as ‘The Removed 
Townhouses,’ the people on Valley River and Hiwassee heard 
voices of invisible spirits in the air calling and warning them of 
wars and misfortunes which the future held in store, and 
inviting them to come and live with the Nûñnë’hï, the Immortals, 
in their homes under the mountains and under the waters. “If 
you would live with us,” said the spirits, “gather everyone in your 
townhouses and fast there for seven days, and no one must raise 
a shout or a warwhoop in all that time. Do this and we shall come 
and you will see us and we shall take you to live with us.” If only 
the people had listened. 
     Feedsack fashion officially got its start in 1924. Oh, thrifty 
farm wives nationwide had known for years that this common 
cotton bag— fondly nicknamed chicken linen, ‘pretties,’ or hen house 
linen— was a great source of utilitarian fabric for dish cloths, diapers, 
nightgowns, curtains, pillowcases and more.  But in the 2nd quarter 
of the 20th century manufacturers came up with a fresh way to 
turn this fact to their additional advantage. Plain sacks were a 
commodity, but by offering sacks in various prints and solid colors 
manufacturers could differentiate themselves from the competition. 
     Author Wilma Dykeman (1920-2006) pioneered and popularized 
the concepts of Appalachian Studies and Appalachian Literature. Her 
focus on the role of the mountain woman in her family and the 
community is perhaps reflected best in her novels “The Tall Woman” 
(1962), “The Far Family” (1966), and “Return the Innocent Earth” 
(1973). In this next segment, we'’ll listen to an excerpt from “The 
Tall Woman.” The main character, Lydia McQueen, wants to build a 
school for the children in her valley, but one of the men in town, 
Ham Nelson, opposes the idea.  
     We'’ll wrap things up with a look at New Straitsville, OH, 
considered by many Ohioans the Bootleg Capital of the state during 
the Depression. Its population of enterprising ex-coalminers concealed 
dozens of illegal moonshine stills in the area’s hollows and abandoned 
mineshafts, selling it to a nation desperate for a stiff drink. Moonshiner 
Jim Thompson shares a tale with us of how he was turned in to the 
Feds by someone he thought was a trustworthy business partner. “Old 
Henry Spencer sure was somethin’,” he concludes,”–told on his own brother 
and brother-in-law and lost a barrel of his own mash just to save his 
skin.”  
     And, thanks to the good folks at Juneberry78s.com, we’ll be able 
to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music from Gwen Foster in a 
1927 recording of “Black Pine Waltz.” 
     So, call your old blue-tick hound up on the porch, fire up your 
corn-cob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian History.