Appalachian History

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 story of the nation’s first bookmobile. Maryland librarian Mary Lemist Titcomb custom outfitted a horse-drawn Concord wagon in 1904 to deliver books to the residents of that state’s Washington County. It could display 200 volumes and store another 2,360 behind its shelves. “Psychologically, the wagon is the thing,” said Titcomb of the project. “One can no easier resist the pack of a peddler from the Orient as a shelf full of books when the doors of the wagon are opened at one’s gateway.”

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.

Their scientific name is morchella esculenta, but to mushroom fans in Appalachia they’re dry land fish (yes, they do taste fishy when fried up) or molly moochers. Elsewhere in North America the hard-to-find morel mushroom is also known as a yellow morel, common morel, sponge mushroom, or honeycomb morel.

In 1895, German forester Dr. Carl A. Schenck accepted George Vanderbilt’s offer to come to North Carolina to manage and restore his vast woodland properties. Schenck oversaw thousands of acres dotted with several hundred houses and abandoned farms. In 1898, he established the Biltmore Forest School, the first forestry school in the United States, using Vanderbilt’s forests as a campus.

“One bootlegger on North Mechanic Street had a box-like platform built out of a second story window over Wills Creek,” says Cumberland MD resident Herman J Miller in a 1978 oral history discussing Prohibition in that town. “If a raid should occur, the operator would just pull a rope and the bottom would drop out and the contents would drop down to the rocks below, for this is where he kept his whiskey. When the glass bottles hit the rocks, the bottles would shatter, and thus, no evidence.”

We’ll wrap things up with a cautionary folktale from Kentucky. An old miser takes great pleasure in hoarding up heaps of gold coins. But one day he discovers the gold has vanished.

And, thanks to the good folks at Juneberry78s.com, we’ll be able to enjoy some authentic Appalachian music by the Roanoke Jug Band in a 1929 recording of Stone Mountain Rag.

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

She entered her first music contest in Canton, N.C., when she was still playing her “cheap 10 cent banjo,” Samantha Bumgarner told a Sylva [NC] Herald reporter years later.

“And here I looked up and saw all these fine banjos coming in from Asheville. I wanted to leave, but they wouldn’t let me. I tell you I was so nervous I didn’t know I was hitting the strings. … But I won that contest. And I’ve been winning them ever since.”

Samantha’s father Has Biddix played the fiddle, but had not been keen for his daughter to take up that instrument, still in the late 19th century nicknamed by some “the Devil’s Box.” Samantha recalled that she did “sneak” the fiddle out to practice on her own. Has allowed her to have a banjo, at first home-made— “a gourd with a cat’s hide stretched over it and strings made of cotton thread waxed with beeswax”—later replaced by the aforementioned cheap store model.

It took awhile for the promising young musician to gain widespread recognition, though. She was 37 years old when Columbia Phonograph Company took notice of her and invited her and Eva Smathers Davis to New York City to record for them.

Bumgarner was probably the first Appalachian banjo player of either sex to cut a commercial record. In April 1924 she and Davis recorded 10 songs for Columbia, playing frailing-style banjo on six of the tunes, including “Shout Lou” and “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss.” Columbia billed them as ‘quaint musicians’ in their subsequent promotional ads two months later in ‘Talking Machine World’ magazine. “The fiddle and guitar craze is sweeping northward!” it cried. “Columbia leads with records of old-fashioned Southern songs and dances.”

The Columbia playlist:

Big-eyed Rabbit (Samantha Bumgarner & Eva Davis)
Cindy in the Meadows (Samantha Bumgarner & Eva Davis)
Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss (Samantha Bumgarner)
The Gamblin’ Man (Samantha Bumgarner)
Georgia Blues (Samantha Bumgarner)
I Am My Mother’s Darlin’ Child (Samantha Bumgarner & Eva Davis)
John Hardy (Eva Davis)
Shout Lou (Samantha Bumgarner)
Wild Bill Jones (Eva Davis)
Worried Blues (Samantha Bumgarner)

Her recordings were made only one month after OKeh records had produced tracks by Fiddlin’ John Carson and his Virginia Reelers, considered the first “hillbilly” recordings to be commercially marketed in the United States. Thus not only should Bumgarner be considered the first “banjo-pickin’ person” to record and reach a mass audience, but one of the earliest Southern mountain musicians to make it to the studio as well.

Record label for Big Eyed Rabbit, on Columbia Records, by Bumgarner/Davis. Columbia 129-D (81710). Archie Green Collection (#20002), Southern Folklife Collection/Wilson Library/University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill

Although she never received critical acclaim, Bumgarner was obviously an inspiration for other women in the Southern mountains, who would emerge a decade later as some of the nation’s most popular entertainers.

Click here to listen to an MP3 of Big Eyed Rabbit, by Bumgarner/Davis

***
Yonder comes a rabbit,
Fast as he can run,
If I see another one,
Gonna shoot him with a double-barrel gun.
Gonna shoot him with my gun.
***
Yonder comes a rabbit,
Slippin’ through the sand,
Shoot that rabbit, he don’t care,
Fry him in my pan,
Fry him in my pan.
***
Chorus:
Rockin’ in a weary land (x2)
or Big-eyed rabbit’s gone, gone (x2)
***
Yonder comes my darlin’,
How do I know?
Know her by her bright blue eyes,
Shinein’ bright like gold,
Shinein’ bright like gold. (Tommy Jarrell/Plank Road String Band).
***
Bob Woodcock (Pa.) supplied this verse (a coney is an old English term for a rabbit-Coney Island=Rabbit Island):
Coney on the island, coney on the run,
I’ll get that rabbit in my pan, I’ll shoot him with my gun
***

sources: www.oldtimeherald.org/archive/back_issues/volume-8/8-2/full-banjo-on-her-knee.html
www.knoxville.com/news/2009/mar/29/bumgarner-plucked-out-prominent-place-in-music/
www.amoeba.com/blog/2009/03/eric-s-blog/samantha-bumgarner-fiddling-ballad-woman-of-mountains.html
MP3 from Archie Green Collection, Southern Folklife Collection/Wilson Library/University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill

In honor of National Bookmobile Day, April 17.

“Psychologically, the wagon is the thing,” commented librarian Mary Lemist Titcomb of the project she is most remembered for. “One can no easier resist the pack of a peddler from the Orient as a shelf full of books when the doors of the wagon are opened at one’s gateway.”

Titcomb was referring to the bookmobile—the nation’s first— that she had custom outfitted in 1904 to deliver books to the residents of Washington County, MD. The horse-drawn Concord wagon could display 200 volumes and store another 2,360 behind its shelves.

Titcomb (1857-1932) arrived in Hagerstown, MD in 1901 after having worked as a library organizer in Vermont for 12 years. She plunged energetically and efficiently into organizing the Washington County Free Library, which had been chartered in 1898, the first incorporated county-wide library in the country.

Titcomb held firmly to the belief that giving out books was but a small part of a library’s purpose. “There is a great army of men and women,” she observed, “who use our public libraries to read because it gives them pleasure—because through books they are lifted out of all routine of every-day life, their imaginations are quickened and for the brief space that the book holds them in thrall the colors of life assume a brighter tint.”

This view of books’ power wasn’t as apparent to Hagerstown residents of her day as it may be to us; mandatory school attendance was still a decade away, so book learning was not in any way central to the culture yet.

The idea for a book wagon was an outgrowth of ‘deposit stations,’ which Titcomb set up in 1901 in remote area stores and Sunday Schools, each with 30-40 volumes. After 4 years she had 66 stations. She liked the thought that the wagon idea would further ‘cement friendships,’ and by 1903 had convinced the library Board of Trustees to approve & obtain a Carnegie gift of $2,500 in 5 annual installments.

Joshua Thomas, the library janitor, was the first wagon driver. A county native and Civil War vet, after the war he’d driven regularly through the area buying eggs, butter & produce for market, and so knew the roads intimately.

In April 1905 the first book wagon, driven by Thomas, made its maiden trip throughout the countryside of Washington County. During the new bookmobile’s first 6 months he made 31 trips, averaging 30 miles each trip, 3 times a week. Thomas routinely covered 500 square miles of backroad territory, and distributed 1,008 volumes during that time.

As to the books selected, the demand for best sellers was unknown among rural residents of that era, with the result that they chose a higher quality of literature.

Titcomb instructed Thomas that there should be “no hurrying from house to house, but each family must be allowed ample time for selections.”

The wagon’s initial design presented an unforeseen problem: it was painted black and did not have glass doors, and because of that was taken for the ‘dead wagon’ and was often urged to pass on by superstitious residents. A paint job and new doors quickly resolved the issue, however.

Drawn by Dandy and Black Beauty, the bookmobile wagon served the county for over five years with Joshua Thomas dispensing the books at each stop. But in August 1910, a freight train ran into the wagon as it was crossing the Norfolk and Western Railroad at St. James. The horses and driver survived; the wagon did not.

Bookmobile service went down for a year; the first round of Carnegie financing was exhausted, and by the time another $2,500 materialized (offered up by library board treasurer William Kealhofer) the horse drawn vehicle was deemed outmoded. The service resumed, but this time with a motorized vehicle.

Titcomb summed up her bookmobile vision thus: “No better method has ever been devised for reaching the dweller in the country. The book goes to the man, not waiting for the man to come to the book.”

sources: Western Maryland Regional Library

http://webpages.charter.net/magicmoment/mary.htm

http://www.mdoe.org/hagerstown.html

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~mg128/docs/Streets.pdf

http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/educ/exhibits/womenshall/html/titcomb.html

Spring migration from its wintering grounds in Colombia and Venezuela started back in early April, and by now the Cerulean Warbler has flown across the Gulf of Mexico, passed through Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia, and is continuing north and northeast.

During breeding season, this warbler builds its nest and forages high in the canopy of older and mature deciduous forests (up to 3,500 feet). The species prefers large tracts of forest consisting of a variety of hardwood tree species and relatively little undergrowth.

The Cerulean Warbler – ‘dendroica cerulea.’

Click here to listen to the song of the Cerulean Warbler.

Until the middle of the 20th century ‘Dendroica cerulea’ was common throughout much of eastern North America, and was most abundant in the central Appalachian Mountains. But today the Cerulean is America’s fastest declining migratory songbird.

Faced with habitat loss in both their wintering and breeding grounds, populations of the species have been steadily declining for decades; showing as much as a 70% drop since the 1960s, and the trend continues downward. This beautiful blue denizen of mature deciduous forests has suffered following widespread deforestation for agricultural and energy development.

Within the Cerulean Warbler’s historical breeding range, over 50% of forests have been cleared, and 40 to 50% of South American shade coffee plantations — a highly preferred wintering ground — have been converted to monocultures of sun coffee, devoid of the large trees that the species needs to survive.

Prime Cerulean breeding habitat in North America happens to correspond with prime coal producing regions of Appalachia where mountaintop removal is practiced. Researchers with the USGS Biological Resources Division completed a study in 2002 that indicated Ceruleans have an unexpected preference for ridgetops. They found that “92% of [breeding] territories occurred only in fragments with ridgetop habitat remaining.” This is precisely the habitat destroyed by mountaintop removal mining.

The USGS study also found that Cerulean breeding density is lower in forest habitats that are fragmented or closer to mine edges. The bird is now increasingly found in marginal secondary forest habitat that has regenerated following the abandonment of farms, growth of trees following timber harvests, and other reforestation efforts.

Mountaintop mines are reclaimed primarily with grasses. The compacted nature of the soil slows or even prohibits the natural succession of forest in these areas, making fragmentation effects long-lasting.

Cowbirds feed in grasslands, so this is another factor that may be hurting Cerulean populations. Like many of its warbler cousins, Ceruleans may receive the unwelcome attention of parasitic cowbirds. These cowbirds attempt to foist their young onto unsuspecting adoptive parents by pushing Cerulean eggs out of the nest, then laying their own replacements. While the cowbird adults shirk their parenting duties, Ceruleans will energetically raise the changeling youngsters because they do not recognize cowbird eggs or young.

The Cerulean Warbler is on the Audubon Watch List, and is also recognized as a species of conservation concern through Audubon’s Important Bird Areas program. Attempts to categorize the bird as ‘threatened’ under the United States Endangered Species Act had not succeeded as of November 2008. It is, however, listed as a species of special concern in Canada, where it is protected. Additionally, the Cerulean Warbler is considered “Vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Sources: www.actionatlas.org/conservation/migrations-corridors/save-the-cerulean-warbler/summary/paaEF236A11ED13866CC

http://shadecoffee.org/shadecoffee/Profile.aspx?birdid=506

http://bird-habitats.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_mountaintop_removal_affects_wildlife

Ramps are the first green thing of spring in Appalachia, and certainly the smelliest. Mountain folks have traditionally looked forward to the return of the ramp after a winter of eating mostly dried foods, often believing the ramp to possess the revitalizing power of a spring tonic (not unreasonable: they are high in vitamins A & C.)

The “little stinkers” are typically served with ham, bacon, fried potatoes, brown beans, cornbread, and a dessert. If you’re a serious aficionado of allium tricoccum, you know it’s an acquired taste: take garlic and multiply that intensity by about ten. The mere scent of those who have recently eaten a mess of ramps has been known to clear a room.

The Ramps & Rainbow Festival got underway March 30 this year at the Cherokee Indian Fairgrounds in Cherokee, NC, kicking off a month and more of festivals celebrating the most loved bulb in Appalachia. The high points of these community fundraisers include the Ramp Festival at Cosby, TN, and the Feast of the Ramson (this year is the 73rd one) at Richwood, WV. But many smaller events proliferate throughout April and well into May.

Feast of the Ramson? Ramson is a variety of garlic, but there’s a more poetic answer to the question: the first sign of the Zodiac calendar is Aries, which ushers in spring during March and April. Aries is the Arabic word for Ram, the male of the sheep family—stout, rambunctious, and a bit odoriferous! It only makes sense to call spring’s first green shoot the “Ram’s Son.”

When the first ramp feed was held in Cherry Bottom, VA (now Richwood) is lost to history. That there were springtime get-togethers of frontier settlers with ramp feeds is certain. Ramp feasting as an event began about 1921 when some Richwood men met for a cookout during ramp season. Eventually their gathering moved indoors and came under the jurisdiction of the Chamber of Commerce. The success of the Richwood event inspired other communities to start their own dinners. The town went on to become home to the NRA—the National Ramp Association.

Festivals celebrating a community point of pride were not commonplace in 1954 when the Cosby Ruritan Club of Cocke County TN decided to establish a celebration centered around the ramp. The first Festival attracted a crowd of between 5,000 and 6,000, including the Tennessee governor. Although the festival differs from year to year, there have been common threads: bountiful food, music, dancing, politicians, and a young woman who is crowned “Maid of Ramps.”

In 1955, the Festival was attended by ex-President Harry Truman. In 1959, at the sixth annual Ramp Festival, attendance approached a never-again-topped 30,000 due to the featured guest, “Tennessee Ernie Ford,” a popular television celebrity, and native of nearby Bristol. Other festivals have featured entertainment notables such as Eddie Arnold, Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, songstress Dorothy Collins of “Hit Parade” fame, Minnie Pearl, Brenda Lee, and Dinah Shore.

But no matter which of the many available ramp festivals you choose to attend, two factors remain unchanged: the celebration of the region and its culture, and the return of spring and the adulation of the ramp.

related post: “The salient feature of ramps is the smell”

sources: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/legacies/TN/200003547.html
www.richwoodwv.com/ramp.asp

Cosby+TN Richwood+WV ramp+festivals allium+tricoccum ramps appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history