Appalachian History

EVERY CREEK’S A STORY IN CLINTON COUNTY
Ridge hikes and crossroad chats yield a bumper crop of legends 
down near the Tennessee border.

By Howard Hardaway —Louisville Courier-Journal, no date, 1930s

The ‘New Era’ is Clinton County, Kentucky’s only newspaper. W. H. Nunn has been the publisher for a number of years. He tells a story on his predecessor of forty years ago.

“Tom Neat, of Adair County, was running for office in a district that included Clinton,” Mr. Nunn relates. “The editor of the New Era opposed him. Tom decided to beard the lion in his den. During a speech in the Albany Court House Tom called on the editor to stand up.

“Take your dirty little sheet and fight me,” Tom challenged. ‘It won’t amount to a damn, because I can stand on the court house steps and spit all over its circulation.”

Howard Hardaway, b. 1898, referred to himself as ‘The Old Hiker.’ “I’ve learned,” said the Louisville, KY native in a May 1959 interview with Alabama newspaper ‘The Florence Times,’ “that the most interesting places are not right on the road. On the back roads, at the little country stores where the road crews gather for a quart of milk and a moon pie, that’s where you find some real historians.”

His writing career started from his habit of going up to Canada each summer for a one-day hike. The Louisville Courier called him in and wanted him to write up some of his experiences. He averaged several pieces a year for the journal and some for other publications at the time of this interview.

Those same court house steps on which Tom offered to stand and spit were treated with indignity once by Uncle Marion Gibbons of the Duvall valley neighborhood. Uncle Marion, in a holiday mood, rode his horse up the steps and into the hall of the court house. This was a bit too informal. The presiding judge called Uncle Marion before him and assessed a $10 fine. The prisoner before the bar fished out his roll, peeled off a twenty, and handed it over to the judge.

“I’m afraid I haven’t change,” admitted the judge.

“Oh, that’s all right,” Uncle Marion waved it off. “Just keep the change. I enjoyed it all so much that I think I’ll go out and do it again.”

Albany has good fresh spring water. Down at one edge of town a large lake is formed by a sheet of water that gushes from below a broad shelf or rock. From the lower end of the lake the water flows by a flume to a flour mill. The water has also been used to generate electricity for town use.

East of Boiling Springs, where Clinton County thrust a long narrow wedge between Wayne County and Tennessee, “happy oak” used to stand on the State line. In days gone by, when one State was wet and the other dry, purveyors of mountain dew would meet their customers on the line at the oak tree. Should an officer of the law of one State be present, the lawbreaker would merely keep on the opposite side of the oak tree-out of the officer’s jurisdiction.

Passing northward through a mountain gap at Doc Powers’ place. I started down the valley of Koger’s Creek by a narrow trail that is passable only by horseback or afoot.

“There have been wagons up there,” I was told later, “but not for a longtime.”

And, yet people live up there, and apparently live very well. The farms up in the gap look well-tended and prosperous.In this neighborhood is a cave, a “bottomless pit,” known as Georgie’s Hole. No one knows the depth of the vertical shaft.

Georgie was the name of an old woman who lived hereabouts many years ago. Georgie and her husband “got their backs up” at each other. They couldn’t seem to patch things up.

One day, out in the pasture, Georgie is said to have maneuvered around so that she got her old man with his back to the hold. A quick shove – and Georgie was a willing widow.

Georgie’s Hole and its story has served as a warning to Clinton County husbands for 100 years to patch up differences quickly with the wife – or else stay away from bottomless pits.

Rolan, at the junction of Koger and McIver Creeks, was the scene of an exciting episode in the lives of two preachers of a century ago. These two preachers, having heard of certain cults or of individual prophets laying claim to ability to foretell events, including the exact date of the earth’s dissolution, became conscious of such a knowledge within themselves.

They traveled afoot, warning and exhorting. On the very eve of the fateful day they covered a wide territory and held numerous meetings. The last night caught them far from home, weary and footsore. Where Rolan now stands they found a haystack and climbed into it.

During the night, from some unexplained cause, the haystack caught fire. The glare and heat aroused one of the sleeping prophets. “Wake up, John!” he yelled. “The Judgment Day is come – and look where we are!”

Once back on the ridge trail, I passed a score of log or box houses along the boundary between Clinton and Wayne Counties and came to the narrow bridge of land where four trails cross. From here Duvall Creek flows off to the south while Gap Creek leads northward to Alpha on the Monticello-Albany Road.

Thanks to a short ride with the young schoolmaster at Savage, I got back to Albany just as supper was being placed on the table. An unexpected feature at the home where I found lodging was a big batch of ice cream made by the hand of the landlady’s son. I required one fish of it for every ten miles of walking; that is three.

My sixteen-hour day had me ready for the feathers before 9 o’clock.

sources: http://kykinfolk.com/clinton/everycreek.html
‘The Florence [AL] Times,’ May 3, 1959, Pg. 1, “Hiker Proves He’s Half the Man Grandpa Was,” by Lorene Frederick

It was the greatest disaster ever known to this Western Virginia mountain village.

On May 2, 1929, the unusually violent storm slammed into the little community of Rye Cove, VA in the mountains of Scott County.

During the storm a tornado directly struck the local two-story schoolhouse, with over 150 children and teachers inside. The building was completely leveled, and the debris caught fire from an overturned stove. Thirteen were killed. The dozens of injured were rushed by special train to the hospital in Bristol.

A. P. Carter, of the famous Carter Family, was in the next valley on the day of the storm. He rushed to Rye Cove to help with the rescue efforts. He was touched by the horror of what he saw and soon composed “The Cyclone of Rye Cove.” The Carter Family recorded the song that same year for RCA Victor.

“The Cyclone of Rye Cove”
Oh, give us a home far beyond the blue sky,
Where storms and cyclones are unknown,
And there by life’s strand, we’ll clasp with our glad hands
God’s children in a heavenly home.

Oh, listen today in a story I tell,
In sadness and tear dimmed eye,
Of a dreadful cyclone that came this way,
And it blew our schoolhouse away.

CHORUS:
Rye Cove, (Rye Cove), Rye Cove, (Rye Cove),
The place of my childhood and home,
Where in life’s early morn I once loved to roam,
But now it’s so silent and lone.

When the cyclone appeared, it darkened the air,
And the lightning flashed over the sky,
And the children all cried, “Don’t take us away,
And spare us to go back home.”

There were mothers so dear and fathers the same,
That came to this horrible scene,
Searching and crying, each found her own child,
Dying on a pillow of stone

Related posts: “You’ve been fooling me baby”
“It was daytime, but the sky was as dark as night”

sources: www.blueridgeinstitute.org/ballads/audio.html
scott.k12.va.us/rci/Transcript.htm

cyclone+of+Rye+Cove Rye+Cove+Va Carter+Family AP+Carter appalachia appalachian+mountains+history appalachian+history

I sought and received the forgiveness of my sins in August 1861, at a camp meeting at Bird’s Chapel, in Dade County, Georgia. My conversion was so definite – I may say, so sweet and so satisfactory -followed by so great peace – which I could never be made to doubt that I was reconciled to God. My consecration was so full as not to leave a hoof behind.

I immediately erected a family altar, and while it has been a rule of my life to keep up family worship, we have neglected it at times, to our great spiritual loss. Soon after my conversion or even before, I felt impressed that I should preach the Gospel and asked the church after a few years, for license to preach; and in October, 1870, the Quarterly Conference gave me the license.

Timidly, I undertook work as a local preacher. I always wanted to join the Conference and be a traveling preacher and spend my whole time in the work. But I did not join the traveling connection. I have done what I could as a local preacher.

In May 1876, Bishop Wightman ordained me as a local deacon at Russellville, AR. I have done some little supply work, and feel now that I should have joined the Conference, yet I may not be entirely to blame for not doing so. And now the day is far spent and I am in the evening of my life, and the results of my work are with the Great Head of the church. Amen.

Well, (again looking back) the war was now over, the South subdued and our entire Southland almost all devastated, the people poor and discouraged. I am at Lavergne, Tennessee, on the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, sixteen miles from Nashville, in a great country – with only $500.00, which we have saved in the last year. I have been at work for the United States government at pretty good wages; have traded, run the blockade from Nashville, and sold to Negroes such little things as I could get out of Nashville undetected. My wife and my two girl babies compose my family.

My brother, George, who lived in Arkansas, was with us. He persuaded us to return with him to Arkansas. So about the 15th of July 1865, we hired a man to take us to Nashville – gave him $5.00 for the trip. At Nashville we got aboard a steamboat, and went down the Cumberland River to Smithland, thence down the Tennessee River into the Ohio, thence down the Ohio to Cairo, Illinois. We there took the big boat, “Ben Stickney,” and ran down the Mississippi to Napoleon, where we took the Glide No. 3, for Little Rock, Arkansas. At Little Rock we purchased a wagon and team and moved overland to Polk County, arriving at my father’s farm on August 1st.

Our people were all poor now and in a hard shape financially. So we had to begin at the bottom with only a few dollars in cash, and our living to buy. I did not like Arkansas, and thought I would go back to Tennessee, but George always influenced me, and we stayed. So we are here yet.

View of Eagle Mountain in Polk County, AR.

I got hold of a few hogs, a pony, a cow, a bull-tongue plow, a sprouting hoe – and went to work. I would turn the pony out on the grass with a bell on. We would hunt him in the mornings. We had no bedsteads except scaffolds pinned to the wall. We lived three miles from Shady Grove Church and schoolhouse. There we went to church, where the Rev. W. Wakely baptized me and received me into the M.E. Church, South.

I worked hard and saved as much as possible. We lived a rather hard but happy life. We were 150 miles from a railroad and market. That first fall I went to Center Point and bought two bales of cotton, and took it to Little Rock. Sold it for 36 cents a pound. Bought a few supplies – a barrel of salt for $6.50, a pair of cotton cards at $2.00, some little Oznaburge at 60 cents a yard, a little coffee at 60 cents a pound. I was gone three weeks on the trip.

I began to get acquainted, and secured a little school to teach at a little log cabin where the village of Silver Center now is. Wade Hilton had a little water mill just down on the creek. Sometimes we could get some corn ground and when the creek was low, he could not grind. The next nearest mill was on Big Fork, ten miles away. We would go down there and stay all night. Maybe we would get a peck of meal and maybe not. We would grit the corn and make hominy, but we would scrape about some way to keep from starving.

There was not a steam mill in the whole county, a county that was sixty miles long and fifty miles wide. There were not more than three hundred voters in the whole county. How is that for neighbors?

Game was plentiful. Anybody could kill a deer if he could shoot. I could not see them until they had left me. Cattle could be bought cheaply. We would dry the beef and it would answer for meat and bread. Acorns were plentiful and the hogs would thrive on them. We did not feed the cattle. They would live through the winter on the range.

Was I what you would call a pioneer? No, there were then old settlers. I could name a few of them, but there is not need. I write these little details down to impress on you boys some of the troubles and trials through which the older generation has gone in order that you may be a little happier and a little better.

An Autobiographical Sketch of My Life, by John Thornton Miller
Miller lived from 1839-1923
online at www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gadade/biographies/miller.htm

Even fancy upscale restaurants in New York City are crazy for ramps these days: this past April 17, Momofuku’s official Twitter feed sent this out:

ramps are back and in full effect for lunch + dinner at ssäm bar. ramp brine martini on tonight’s menu…

Ramp. Brine. Martini.

Well. For folks in the Unicoi County, TN town of Flag Pond, all the food world notoriety has yet to overshadow the age-old reality of ramps, potatoes, bacon grease, and black iron. Every spring, members of that town’s Ruritan Club knock the dirt off their shovels and spades, and tune up their sturdiest four-wheel drives. They’re headed up: Flag Pond’s elevation is 2038 feet, but ramps are typically happiest at elevations of 3,000 feet and higher.

New video from East Tennessee State University on the Flag Pond, TN annual ramp festival.

Flag Pond’s Scots-Irish, German, and Cherokee ancestors have sought the wild mountain leek, or wati to the Cherokee, for generations. They eat ramps for renewal — according to legend, ramps thin down slow-flowing blood. Their pungency energizes bodies grown accustomed to cold-weather inactivity.

And after months of wintertime restlessness, ramps reconnect mountainfolk to the earth, and to each other.

Flag Pond’s 28th annual Rurirtan Ramp Festival takes place May 11, when the long-abandoned Flag Pond School gets a scrub-down in prepartion for 1,000 visitors. Members of the club staff a line of black iron skillets and stir ramps into fried potatoes.

“We have people from several different states come,” says Ruritan club member Charles Harris. “We’ve never changed our menu. You get ramps and potatoes. Of course, if you ask, we’ll give you three or four raw. Soup beans, coleslaw, cornbread, a drink, and a dessert. And streaked meat. It’s one of the biggest things that happens in Flag Pond.”

With school consolidation in Unicoi County, many residents missed the opportunity for regular visits with their neighbors. That’s one reason the Ruritan Club started the festival, in the mid-1980s.

The gathering also raises the ramp to a much-deserved level of respectability. From stories of getting sent home from school for having ramp breath, Unicoi Countians move very quickly to anecdotes about ramps and hot-shot chefs, starched linen tablecloths, and the cost of the wild mountain leek in New York City markets (“This year we started at $17 per pound,” says specialty food purveyor John Magazino of NYC’s Baldor.)

The Ramps & Ruritans video shown here is a delightful half hour documentary which follows Flag Pond’s Ruritan club members from their digging excursions in the hills straight through to the final May dining extravaganza. It was produced last year by East Tennessee State’s Office of University Relations and the Center for Appalachian Studies in partnership with Flag Pond’s Ruritan Club. Even if you’ve grown up with ramps, there’s probably a nugget of ramp lore teased out by this video that you may not have encountered before. The ramps diggers talk about such things as the male and female stalks of the plant — one stalk’s white, the other pinkish — and the need for both in a ramp field. There’s an emphasis on taking care not to disturb the plant’s deep roots (ramps rise from a rhizome, or in some species, a stolon).

“This is branch lettuce,” says club member Mary Waldrop as the camera zooms in on a delicate plant growing adjacent to a ramps cluster. “It grows near a stream normally, and older people used to gather branch lettuce and ramps in the early spring of the year. They would take them home and wash them and chop them up into bite-sized pieces, then make cornbread, and they would fry bacon to get the hot grease, and they would put it over the ramps and branch lettuce. They called it ‘killing’ the ramps and branch lettuce.”

The production values on ‘Ramps & Ruritans’ are straightforward. No fancy overhead tracking shots or aerials, minimal lighting, lots of handheld shots while tramping through the woods. Sandwiched between the location footage in the ramps woods are tight headshots of Flag Ponders discussing their own ramps experiences. And these production decisions are absolutely appropriate to the breezy folk style of the telling. Well worth the $12 asking price.

‘Ramps & Ruritans: Tales of the Revered and Reeking Leek of Flag Pond, Tennessee’ is available online at the East Tennesse State University Store. 

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 the curious story of Myrtle Corbin. Corbin was known far and wide in the late nineteenth century as the Four-Legged Woman. While at a glance one could plainly see four legs dangling beyond the hem of her dress – only one pair belonged to her; the other set belonged to her dipygus twin sister.

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.

The two diplomatic letters, or ‘talks,’ as he called them, did not nearly express the Bloody Fellow’s true feelings about the state of affairs between the white settlers of the Cumberland and his own Cherokee people that September of 1792. But as a chief of the Five Lower Towns, it made tactical sense for him to extend the language of peace to Tennessee’s Governor William Blount.

We’ll wrap things up with a look at a game called ‘Bank Night,’ played at over 5,000 cinema theatres during the 1930s & 40s, including the Metropolitan Theatre in Morgantown, WV. States eventually realized that Bank Night was a clever evasion of their lottery laws, and came after theatre owners to end the practice.

And, thanks to the good folks at the Berea College Southern Appalachian Archives, we’ll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music by Jake Krack in a 2006 recording of Texas Gals.

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