Appalachian History

“That night, as Mutt and I lay on the featherbed that Grandma had made, we talked by the light of the coal oil lamp. We were working on a plan on how to get rid of Old Betsy. That cow just had to go, we reasoned, and soon. Our first plan was to throw rocks [...]

“Well, of course, we had to help with the housework, all . . . we had to do the sweeping and the dishwashing and the scrubbing of floors. We . . . we just had wood floors, no . . . with no paint on ‘em, no nothing on ‘em, and . . . and [...]

That spring, I gathered up suitable pieces of scrap lumber wherever they could be found in order to construct a brooder house. Many of these boards came from a discard pile of surplus materials at the mill where Daddy worked. He often reclaimed a lot of useful items that were otherwise destined to be hauled [...]

“The log cabin no longer adorns the landscape. Instead, is the stately mansion, indicative of wealth, of taste and of hospitality. There are spacious, nicely painted barns, hedges, orchards, well-fenced, well-tilled fields. Steel bridges span the turbulent streams, and macadamized roadways wind among the valleys and skirt the rising hills. Where the wigwam once stood, [...]

One of our cousins had a fight once with a fertilizer spreader, with an inanimate machine. He was pouring fertilizer into cotton rows with this spreader, a brand new expensive labor saving device, and he could not get it to spread the proper amount. It dropped too much, it dropped too little. He worked for [...]