Appalachian History

“Though downtown Cumberland has the appearance of an industrial city, there are unusual numbers of country people on the streets, since this is the metropolis of a very large rural area, and many of the cars parked along the streets are filmed with the dust and mud of country roads.

“Hill farmers, railroad and factory workers, western Maryland politicians, and businessmen drink Cumberland beer in the same popular barroom, a place with modern tubular furniture.”

from “Maryland, A Guide to the Old Line State,” by the Writer’s Program of the Works Project Administration in the State of Maryland, 1940.

By the time the WPA produced its guide, ‘Cumberland beer’ had been around at least 88 years. Bartholomew Himmler established Cumberland’s first beer brewery about 1852, on Knox and Hays Streets. The brewery was often called “Bartle’s Brewery,” short for Bartholomew.

Old German Beer promo poster. No date.

The Cumberland Brewing Company, one of two breweries to dominate the local industry during the 20^th century, was established in 1890.  It operated on North Centre Street until the late 1950s, producing such brands as Old Export beer and Gamecock Ale.

Former mayor and businessman Warren C. White opened its arch competitor, the German Brewing Company, in 1901 on Market Street.

The ad copy for a 1910 German Brewing ad strikes the modern ear as amusingly ludicrous in its suggestion: “Dr F.E Harrington, City Health Officer, who is fighting disease, says after making several analyses, that much of the city water is not fit to drink!  Why not avoid all risk and USE GERMAN BEER!  It is pleasing to the taste and good for your system.  Phone us and have a case sent home.  You’ll like it.”

Using German beer didn’t sound like such a patriotic idea by 1917. With the U.S. entering the First World War and the resultant anti-Teutonic sentiment, German Brewing’s directors thought it prudent to change the name to The Liberty Brewing Company.

This brewing company’s frequent name changes chart the political moods of the 20^th century quite handily. With the advent of Prohibition the name was changed to the Queeno Company, which produced ‘Queeno’ near-beer (“a non-intoxicating cereal beverage”), ice and soft drinks.

Beer brewing operations resumed under the once-more-named German Brewing Company in 1933, but at the start of World War II, so as to once more avoid offending the American people, the brewery changed its name and brand.

Workers at the Old German brewery in Cumberland, MD.

This time the company became The Queen City Brewing Co, brewers of The Original Queen City Beer. At the end of that war, the brand name was changed back to Old German, but the company name remained the same. At its peak, the Queen City brewery produced over 250,000 barrels of beer and ale a year in Cumberland, including its well-known Old German Beer Premium Lager.

Ultimately the two competitors became one: Queen City purchased Cumberland Brewing in 1958, and was itself purchased in the 1970s by Pittsburgh Brewing Company. The new subsidiary was the last surviving brewery in Cumberland before it closed its doors in 1976.

Sources: nps.gov/nr/travel/cumberland/history.htmwww.beercollections.com/Breweries/Maryland/Queen_City_Brewing.htm“The Big Book o’ Beer: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Greatest Beverage on Earth,” by Duane Swierczynski, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2004

times-news.com/archive/x1540454434

From April – June 1914 The Chattanooga News paid Emma Bell Miles $9.00 a week to write “Fountain Square Conversations.” The “Conversations” cleverly combined her naturalist’s knowledge and her social commentary. They featured birds and other creatures on the square conversing under the shadows of the human statues. Miles (1879-1919) is remembered primarily for “The Spirit of the Mountains” (1905), the first comprehensive study of Southern Appalachian culture. The following article ran June 27, 1914 as ‘Helter-Skelter Civilization’:

“Look at the city–at any city built by man! They, the great last word of the century, a tremendous expression of the human intellect, grow up wild, according to no plan or intention, allowing nothing for expansion, discommoding everybody, causing intolerable civic growing-pains, and utterly upsetting any adventitious efforts toward beauty or dignity of proportion in the whole.”

Emma Bell Miles painting. Courtesy Special Collections at Lupton Library/The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

“They might, at least,” agreed the White Pigeon, “take advantage of facilities close at hand for their own comfort. I see every day the waste of material and of opportunity in this ramshackle, helter-skelter civilization of theirs. It disturbs my rest at night when I think of the hundreds sweltering in trap-like rooms where the air is utterly still and seems to burn. They add to the heat of their closed-in dwellings by fires for cooking. How they must suffer!”

“Some of them go out in autos to cool off,” said the Sparrow.

“How many can do so?–one in fifty?–and how much intelligence do they display in joy-riding? Gliding through the open country, breathing the sweet evening scents from the fields, is one good way of resting the overstrained system; but a mad rush is another thing–the unrestrained impulse to speed that rests nobody, and leads to fearful calamities.”

“If more autos traveled tortoise,” said the Sparrow, “there wouldn’t be so many turning turtle. But let me tell you that some folks have learned how to sleep. More and more beds are made in the open air as old superstitions are overcome, superstitions about malaria and night air no less than about ghosts and wild beasts that might get you if you don’t watch out. There are families in the suburbs who eat on one porch and sleep on another almost year round.”

“There ought to be plenty of such families right in town, too,” said the White Pigeon.

“Oh, yes; that proves what I said, or began to say,” declared the Gray Pigeon. “That Man is capable of planning well enough for his own individual needs, but has never learnt to think collectively; for the good of all. Now, above these same sleepers, just over their heads, in fact, there are acres and acres of cool open space where hundreds might sleep in comfort under the stars if they only would, lifted clear of the noise and dust of the streets, continually filling their lungs with a sleeper’s deep draughts of life-giving oxygen, and never missing the lightest breeze that stirs the night.

“But these broad roof spaces that might be such a blessing every night through the hot months to tired throngs of toilers, remain an undiscovered country, an utter desert. No one ever makes the slightest use of them, except when I walk across the gravel with which they are covered and choose a few for my crop.”

“Not all cities so neglect this opportunity,” said the White Pigeon. “The Swallow tells of splendid roof developments in some parts of the country. There are roof gardens, and hospital tents, and even schools for anemic or tubercular children of rich and poor who would perish in the ordinary confined schoolroom.”

“Well, sometime it will be so here,” said the Gray Pigeon. “Sometime when property becomes too valuable to let an inch of space go to waste. Overcrowding will go on as it has elsewhere, till the growing pressures causes an upward burst, and then the Overhead Country will be discovered, utilized, improved, and made the most of in all sorts of ways, to the benefit of everybody who lives or works in the crowded portion of the city.”

sources: http://www.phoebeclaire.com/miles/fsc32.htm

http://community.berea.edu/appalachianheritage/documents/pdf/fall_2005/emmabell_miles.pdf

“As one alights from the train at Hazard and gallant Captain Bocook the conductor waves an ‘adieu’ with a smile thrown in for usury, the first word heard above the bustle and din is ‘D-Y,’ ‘D-Y,’ ‘D-Y,’ and that stands for the most popular, best known, most influential, wealthiest and most progressive man in Hazard or Perry County or perhaps Eastern Kentucky; it stands for David Yancey Combs, prince of landlords, liverymen, big general merchant, real estate dealer, land owner, coal mine operator and then some.

“All day long and sometimes all night long ‘D-Y,’ ‘D-Y,’ ‘D-Y,’ is iterated and reiterated, for everybody including the children know and like D. Y. Combs, whose popularity would put him into Congress if he’d say the word.

“So busy is he, and so engaged in conversation with here and there little coteries, that I found it difficult to get a line on him for a little sketch and it was only after I found his aid de camp, Hon. Andrew Jackson Conyers, that I found some data for this brief biography of a man so prominent and so careless of the fame I have to thrust upon him.

“David Yancey Combs was born – of course – had to be born somewhere – fifty years ago at the mouth of Carr’s Fork of the famous Combs lineage – was born a Democrat, and despite the fact that Perry County is overwhelmingly Republican, D. Y. was twice elected Sheriff; and by saving grace of his Rabelaisian humor preserved the best of order, but he cared nothing for official life and today all of his great love is centered in a little midget – Little Mary his granddaughter, aged about three, while Mrs. Combs, or “Ma” as even the boarders call her fondly, divides her affection between Little Mary and Beryl, aged about five years, the boy; and “in him is the abridgment of all that is pleasant in man,” to quote from Thos. Hood.

“D. Y. is a money maker–possesses the Midas touch–and there is not a corpuscle of the miserly in his two hundred pounds of superb mountain manhood, but upon the contrary he is the soul of generosity and hides his charity while dispensing it in many ways, not letting his left “fist” know what his fine right hand doeth.

Hazard, KY Main Street in 1913, showing Lexington Boosters arriving. D.Y. Combs Hotel is the building with the white door, to the far left of the photo.

“For many years having been extensively engaged in lumber and timber and logging he became known far and wide, and when D. Y. drops into Lexington or Louisville, he can’t transact any business till the glad hand and the jest and the news and little social amenities are rushed through.

“While D. Y. is all we have mentioned he is prouder of his farming operations than all else and he raises stock of all kinds, and b’gosh he loves a hoss.

“Having leased his fields of the best coal to large coal operators, it is believed that everybody’s D. Y. is destined to be in the near future one of the richest men in these rich fields, but nobody believes that he will dress in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day, for D. Y. doesn’t care a snap for all that sort of thing, being as plain and simple as the proverbial old shoe.

“Six feet, commanding, active, filled with health, and everyone at once becomes en rapport with him. Dark and tanned and swarthy, with shining jowls and merry dark eyes sparkling, a voice winning in strength and music, dark hair close cropped, clean shaven, with here a jest, there a bow to some of the reclusive set, then a magnetic touch of his index finger under the dimpled chin of a blushing or laughing sweet sixteen, this man of magnetism makes his rounds scattering joy and fun and sunshine.

“In moments of repose there is an interesting touch or suggestion of melancholy; a momentary reminiscence or a faint adumbration that D. Y. might carry his burden too, but he does it debonairly and masterfully.

“Once in a conversation when he was off his guard and didn’t know that I was a newspaper man, he said that a new enterprise which I had mentioned, he was not asked to take stock and to my surprise he said rather low: “I’ve got a little bunch of enemies.” I was astonished and now that I know him still better it causes me not only surprise but wonder. What boots it a little bunch of enemies when compared to the friendship of children?”

—from “The story of Hazard, Ky. – The pearl of the mountains,’ by Louis Pilcher, Citizens Print. Co., 1913
online at www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyperry3/Pearl_ofthe_Mountains.html

Louis Pilcher had a long and varied career as a newspaperman behind him by the time he wrote ‘Pearl of the Mountains.’ Here’s a short bio on his earlier years from ‘A history of Jessamine County, Kentucky: from its earliest settlement to 1898,’ by Bennett Henderson Young:

‘The Nicholasville Democrat,’ an eight column folio, was established in June 1888. At that time it was the property of Louis Pilcher, the present editor and proprietor, and his brother Thomas Fielding Pilcher. After a short time a job printing plant was established. For eight years its office was in the old historic building, erected by Judge Wake Thomas F Pilcher and his brother. Louis Pilcher assumed the management of the paper.

The former assisted in establishing the ‘Lexington Argonaut.’ He did his first newspaper work on the ‘Lyceum Debater,’ afterward on the ‘Central Courier,’ and was for five years the correspondent of the Cincinnati and Louisville dailies.

He was one of the promoters of the ‘Lexington Advertiser.’ Later he edited the ‘Nicholasville Star.’ In 1895 he established ‘The Coming Nation,’ which absorbed the ‘Illustrated Kentuckian,’ and these two were merged into the ‘Argonaut.’

He afterward founded the ‘Blue Grass World’ and then returned to his present position as editor and proprietor of the ‘Nicholasville Democrat.’

Mr. Pilcher has had a wide experience as a newspaper man. In the Cleveland campaign he did work on the ‘Louisville Courier Journal,’ paragraphing and producing comic articles with Donald Padman. He was horn in Nicholasville on July 11, 1855 opposite where the newspaper office now stands.

We post a new episode of Appalachian History weekly podcast every Sunday. Check us out on the Stitcher network, available on mobile phones, in-car dashboards and tablets worldwide. Just click below to start listening:

We open today’s show with guest scholar Dr. Darren Reid, of Scotland’s University of Edinburgh. In this excerpt from his podcast ‘The Adventures of Daniel Boone,’ Dr. Reid examines the fact that Daniel Boone’s autobiography was ghost written by a man named John Filson. “Have you ever considered how Filson might have altered or embellished the stories told to him?” Dr. Reid asks us. “Might he have edited or altered the material in order to make it more exciting, or perhaps to push a personal or political agenda on the public?”

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, guest author Hilda Downer, an Appalachian poet who teaches English at Appalachian State University, considers why it is that Appalachian bluegrass musicians often put rattlesnake rattles in their instruments. “Usually, the explanation provided by mandolin players is that ‘Bill Monroe did it this way,’ “ she explains. “Why did Bill Monroe do it that way, though? One account is that Monroe believed the rattle settled the dust in his mandolin, providing a deeper clarity of sound.”

Guest author Matt Ravenscroft began teaching Historical Methods Research at Mountain Ridge High School in Frostburg, MD in 2011. By the end of each year’s class, his students have created a full-length DVD documentary on some aspect of the area’s history. “Has the Historical Research Methods class helped students further along in their careers?” Well, Ravenscroft tells us, “I did have one student apply to the Air Force Academy, and when he was being interviewed the people who select the cadets didn’t ask him about any other class except Research Methods. They were very pleased with what we had done to record the oral histories of local veterans.” The student was accepted into the academy.

We’ll wrap things up with a letter written by a former Chattanooga resident, one George A. Barrows. It captures perfectly the gold fever that swept the region and the nation shortly after the yellow nuggets were discovered in Alaska’s Yukon. News reached the United States in July 1897 at the height of a significant series of financial recessions and bank failures, and held out hope for adventurers willing to try their luck. In this letter Barrows describes the mishaps that struck when he lit out for the gold fields.

And, thanks to the good folks at Berea College’s Southern Appalachian Archives, we’ll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian harmonica music by Sam Smiley in a 1991 recording of Old Red Rooster.

So, call your old Plott hound up on the porch, fire up your corncob pipe, and settle in for a dose of Appalachian History.

Hollow, an interactive documentary about the people and issues of McDowell County, WV, launches June 20 – West Virginia’s 150th statehood celebration day.

The immersive, online experience is the brainchild of West Virginia native Elaine McMillion. She worked with a team of  designers, programmers, journalists, filmmakers and community members to combine video portraits, user-generated content, data, grassroots mapping and soundscapes on an HTML5 site and an accompanying community tool to tell the story of those living in boom-and-bust areas.

Elaine McMillion

McMillion got the idea for the project in 2009 when she  read ‘Hollowing Out The Middle,’ and learned more about youth exodus, brain drain and the many dying communities across America. Growing up in West Virginia, she was very familiar with the many places that are often tagged as “ghost towns.”

“I knew that although these places had lost their populations there were still people committed to staying there with interesting stories to tell,” McMillion said.

The hands-on approach gave community members the opportunity to get involved with the filmmaking process. Various locals, from ages 9 to 65, participated in capturing stories and their environments for Hollow. Fifteen of those short community-shot films will accompany filmmaker documentaries featuring nearly 30 residents.

Working with the residents of Appalachia allowed for them to take back their stories, which are so often controlled and told by outsiders. “For many years we have been defined by an outsider perspective, which often oversimplifies and stereotypes us,” McMillion said. “I wanted to collaborate with the people of McDowell to collect stories and get a more authentic view of their day-to-day challenges and dreams for the future.”

McMillion hopes individuals across the nation, not just in West Virginia and Appalachia, connect with the stories featured throughout the site.

“While in a meeting with Wendy Levy (director or New Arts Axis) she said, ‘This project makes West Virginia feel like the rest of America,’ as she explored the site,” McMillion said. “That is exactly what we are trying to do – bring the stories of Southern West Virginia into the homes of people all over the world. These are universal stories of defining home and displacement that people all over can relate to. The participants of Hollow are all very talented and exceptional individuals who are active in their communities — they break stereotypes.”

And with a community at the center of the project, the Hollow team strives to make on-the-ground impact through storytelling and collaboration.

“By creating an online experience, Hollow shares a new image and story of McDowell County through the participation of community members, generates widespread awareness of issues surrounding small towns throughout our nation and across the world and encourages conversation and efforts to plan for the future,” said Jeff Soyk, Hollow art director.

“We’re like the backyard of the nation – Southern West Virginia,” said Marsha Timpson, a participant of Hollow and executive director of Big Creek People in Action in Caretta, WV. “Your front yard’s for looks. You got your pretty flowers and your pretty bushes, and, you know, that’s what you want people to see. You don’t want them to see your backyard – because back there’s where all the work gets done. So I don’t really mind being the backyard. I do mind being ignored.”

On June 20, along with the launch of the online experience, The New York Times OpDocs will feature “The Backyard,” which features Timpson and other residents from McDowell County. And until launch, Hollow team members are urging Instagram users to share images that represent home for them with the hashtag #hollerhome. These images will populate a portion of the online experience.

The Hollow experience will be live at www.hollowdocumentary.com. Screenings will be held in McDowell County on Saturday, June 22 at 9 p.m. at the Martha H. Moore Riverfront Park in Welch, and Sunday, June 23 at 7 p.m. in at Big Creek People in Action in Caretta.

Additionally, the Hollow team invites residents to share their stories and explore the site from 3 to 6 p.m. at the McDowell Public Library’s computer labs on June 22 and from 3 to 6 pm on Sunday at Big Creek People in Action’s labs. Hollow team members will also be sharing a booth with West Virginia photographer and author Betty Rivard, at the north side of the Capitol all day on June 22. Starting on June 24, Digiso will host a storytelling booth in Charleston allowing residents to share their stories from small towns in West Virginia.

The project is supported by Tribeca Film Instiitute and the West Virginia Humanities Council.