Appalachian History

Please welcome guest author Arlene Marcley. Marcley is the founder and president of the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum and Baseball Library in Greenville, SC, a non-profit, all-volunteer organization dedicated to honoring Shoeless Joe Jackson’s life and professional career. The great Ted Williams once remarked, “When I was younger, the Red Sox used to stop in [...]

“For the last three or four years, or until the middle of 1920, the cotton mills passed through a very prosperous period, just as did every other kind of business that was properly managed. “The cotton mills made large profits, but if any other business, including farming, failed to make large profits during the period [...]

After her father died in 1904, Frances Miles Hagood (aka “Miss Queen”) inherited his house in Pickens, SC. That same year she married Judge Thomas J. Mauldin, and the two of them remodeled the Hagood house from a simple farmhouse with a detached kitchen to a sumptuous Classical Revival dwelling. They added a detached law [...]

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 [...]

A few years ago the blacksmith was the very heart and center from which the great machine world grew. In your grandfather’s time the blacksmith shod horses, made plough points, built wagons and carriages, and made all kinds of tools and implements. He could turn his hand to making guns or clocks or locks and [...]