Appalachian History

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.

James Henry Neel Reed, known as Henry Reed, was born on April 28, 1884, in Monroe County, WV,  a rural county lying along the Virginia border in the Appalachian Mountains of southeastern West Virginia. Reed grew up in Monroe County as a member of a large extended family.

His father and at least one uncle were musical, and at least two older brothers played music as well. An early photograph reveals him playing banjo with his older brother Josh. But to judge by his stories about his early life and the sources of specific tunes, his early musical influences seem to have come not so much from his immediate family as from the surrounding community.

Josh and Henry Reed, ca. 1903. Henry Reed, age 19, plays banjo and his older brother Josh plays fiddle. Photograph from the collection of James Reed.

He spent virtually his entire life in the region where he was born, but he moved around a good deal within it. As a young man he lived for a time in the coal-mining counties of southern West Virginia, but he did not care for work in the mines and eventually came home. For shorter periods he worked as far away as Pittsburgh, PA.

On December 11, 1907, he married Nettie Ann Virginia Mullins, and they settled in Glen Lyn, VA, in Giles County, just across the state line from Monroe County. Glen Lyn is a town built around a coal-fired power plant operated by Appalachian Power Company. The plant lies on the New River, just before the river crosses from Virginia into West Virginia, and it is fueled by coal unloaded from trains that run eastward through the New River Valley from coal-producing areas of West Virginia.

Reed played from time to time for local dances and more often in home music sessions. He was known not only as a fiddler but as a banjoist who finger-picked the banjo with all his fingers and as a harmonica player who could play all the notes of complicated dance tunes on the harmonica.

He had a reputation for always welcoming visitors and providing food and a place to sleep as well as good music and good company, and the Reed home became something of a convening place within the Glen Lyn community.

Henry Reed’s influence had been primarily local, but Reed’s tunes are now in wide circulation among younger American fiddlers. Perhaps the most widely circulated of them all is “Over the Waterfall.” Though the tune has an interesting history and a number of musical cousins, all contemporary versions of “Over the Waterfall” come from Henry Reed; it is but one of many cases where Henry Reed was the narrow neck in the hourglass of tradition, through which tunes were guided back out into the wider currents of circulation.

The overwhelming majority of the tunes in Henry Reed’s repertory were learned by ear and retained by memory. They are part of folk music tradition that preserves individual melodies in careful detail and calls them up from memory to play again and again. In practicing such a tradition, one thinks of oneself as reproducing tunes largely as one heard them, and the effort to preserve tunes intact is in many cases quite successful.

It is possible to trace a number of tunes in Henry Reed’s repertory to the late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century in the British Isles or the United States. The Upper South has been as a region less attached to printed music than the northern United States, where tunebooks and manuscripts have flourished since the early nineteenth century.

Nevertheless, some Henry Reed tunes can be documented in Virginia in the 1830s, thanks to the existence of George P. Knauff’s important collection Virginia Reels (1839), compiled while Knauff was a music master in Farmville, VA. The book includes many of the tunes in Henry Reed’s repertory.

Memory is central to the fiddling tradition of the Upper South, yet memory alone cannot account for either what was retained or what was changed in Henry Reed’s repertory. Creative musical design was a central element in the performance of his music. Henry Reed varied the sensuous surface of the tune both rhythmically and melodically in each rendition.

The variation was the result of both unconscious and conscious improvisation, and it had as its motive both the need for instantaneous solutions to the problems caused by preceding variations, and the desire to create a pleasing musical texture that sparkles from subtle change while glowing from the shapely constancy of remembered grace.

Thus to praise Henry Reed’s art is to pay tribute both to the strength and character of the tradition from which he drew and to his more personal creative accomplishments within the matrix of that tradition. His music is a testimony to his own artistic sensibility and simultaneously to the fertile ferment created by the coming together of the musical imagination of three continents to fashion the fiddle tunes of the old frontier.

excerpt from ‘The Art and Influence of Henry Reed,’ by Alan Jabbour, FOLKLIFE CENTER NEWS, Summer 2000 – Volume XXII, Number 3
American Folklife Center – The Library of Congress