Appalachian History

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 [...]

At the beginning of September 1792, John Watts gathered hundreds of Indians at Willstown to orchestrate a sweeping campaign to attack the Holston region with a substantial combined army in four bands of two hundred each.

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.

Said author Harriete Arnow of her time with the hill people of Kentucky: “I was especially intrigued by their language. They were as definite as Shakespeare. For example, the children never said “tree”; they named the tree: white oak, black oak, post oak, poplar, they knew them all.”

In April, 1889, the Bristol-Goodson Water Company, then just completing their plant on the Tennessee side, desired to extend their water-mains to the Virginia side. This evoked a loud protest from the Virginia authorities and public.