Appalachian History

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 [...]

“Our study of the situation at Rabun Gap [GA] gives us the keenest interest in Mr. Ritchie, principal of the Rabun Gap Industrial School, himself a mountain boy and struggling to place the school on a firm financial basis,” report the United Daughters of the Confederacy to members in their 1908 Minutes of the Annual [...]

So everything went along pretty calm, until Thursday of the third week. It clouded up to rain; the thunder cracked and the lightning flashed. Afternoon recess came and we were going strictly on schedule: afternoon recess at two-thirty. I heard those wagons coming up the road and I saw these big girls: one of them [...]

Part 1 of 2 Five miles out from Old Fort, up near Catawba Falls; that was my first school. No teacher ever stayed there five months. Usually, they’d stay five or six weeks. All right. The regulations were that your dress had to come down to your ankle bone. That’s what you had to wear [...]

Some would consider her the founder of Adult Literacy Education in the United States. Cora Wilson Stewart (1875-1958) was an elementary school teacher and county school superintendent in eastern Kentucky’s Rowan County who, in the fall of 1911, decided to open the classrooms in her district to adult pupils. When the Moonlight Schools opened on [...]