This book is dedicated to all the people still searching for their place in the world; to those who have found and cherish their sense of place; and to all the people here in these mountains who have helped us find our place.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Old Homeplace
Wit, Wisdom, and Remembrances
Gardens and Commercial Farms
Preserving and Cooking Food
Wild Plant Uses
Beekeeping
Technology and Tools
Farm Animals
Hunting Stories
Fishing
Personality Portraits
Annie Chastain
Billy Long
Lillie Nix
Contributors
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With any Foxfire project, so many people contribute so much that it would be almost impossible to name and thank all of them individually. We owe so much gratitude to students who, over the years, have gathered the information for the books and made the program a success; to parents who often carry the students on the interviews; and to current teachers Angie Cheek and Joyce Green and Principal Matt Arthur at Rabun County High School, who provide a base of operations and unfailing support and guidance for the magazine program.
In particular, we owe a special thanks to the many people who helped us in the production of Foxfire 11. This book was edited entirely by former students who worked when they came home from college, when they had time off of their regular jobs, or around their other jobs. Without Teresia Gravley Thomason, Amy York, and Robbie Bailey, we could not have finished this book on schedule or with the diversity and perspective it managed to achieve. Teresia, while on summer vacation from her job with Pioneer RESA, produced both the “Wild Plant Uses” chapter and “Wit, Wisdom, and Remembrances,” as well as looking at the rest of our sections for grammar and stylistic problems. Amy, who had just graduated from high school and was preparing to go to college, completed the “Hunting Stories” and “Farm Animals” chapters. Robbie, the three-time veteran of Foxfire book production, compiled the “Fishing” and “The Old Homeplace” chapters and frequently told us what to expect next in the process of compiling the book.
Our help did not just come from former students. Many friends and family members of both the Foxfire 11 crew and the Foxfire program also helped in the production of the book. Bill and Pat Gravley and Jane Thomason and Warren Thomason answered questions on everything from recipes to chickens on a regular basis throughout the summer. For a few weeks, we were at the house of J. C. Stubblefield and Bernice Taylor weekly, conducting interviews for nearly every section of the book. There were days when we called Jimmie and Juanita Kilby several times with questions to which they either had a cheerful answer or did their best to find out for us. Jimmy Hunter read and reread several sections, providing comments, insights, and corrections. Debbie Hunter, Bessie Ramey, and Al Durham gave last-minute advice and help with the recipe section. Former Foxfire students Allison Adams and Teresa Thurmond Gentry helped with final edits.
Various community members also provided needed support. Mildred Donaldson and Susie Smith graciously provided needed information for our “Gardens and Commercial Farms” chapter. Doug Adams, Kyle Burrell, and Perry Thompson provided needed advice and knowledge regarding the “Fishing” chapter. Marie Mellinger and Billy Joe Stiles gave invaluable assistance with wild plant names and uses. George and Howard Prater kindly helped us fill in missing information about beekeeping and then sent us away with a few bottles of delicious honey as gifts. Mary Elizabeth Law helped with our research of historical information.
The Foxfire staff, as always, helped when needed. Robert Murray, who could not come near the Foxfire 11 crew without having several questions thrown at him, was always willing to assist. Lila Anna Hiers advertised the coming publication and took numerous pictures for us. Mary Lou Rich did a little of everything, from reading to ordering more supplies, to providing cheerful encouragement and moral support. Michael Buchholz acted as go-between with the Doubleday editors, kept us on task, and helped broaden our perception of what this book could be. Ann Moore read, reread, and read again every page of the book, never complaining, and often encouraging us with everything from words to kind notes left with our sections after she had finished reading them yet again. Bobby Starnes agreed the book should be done and allowed Kaye the time to work on it.
And finally, a heartfelt thanks to the members of our community who welcomed us into their homes and gave freely of their time, their knowledge, and themselves, and, most important, gave us love, friendship, and a sense of belonging. They are the everyday heroes upon which this book and all the others are based. We are indebted to them for raising us right; for supporting us; for showing us that no matter what changes our beloved mountains see, the values and ideas that make us Appalachian—the ones that tell us to be self-sufficient, yet remind us that ultimately we belong to our community and our Creator—will not change. Thank you.
INTRODUCTION
Long before my father passed away in 1995 at the age of ninety, he used to boast that he had seen it all—from the stone age to the atomic age—from right there in our tall-grass prairie community on the southern plains where he was born, raised, and planned to meet his maker “walking out across the pasture.” While his story may be unique, it is not out of character for many of America’s elderly whose lives spanned most of the twentieth century. Born in Indian Territory (in Geronimo, no less) and raised among the Comanches, he survived boyhood by farming and hunting the hillsides and creek bottoms on the homeplace. Later he served as Indian agent for the government and, at one time or another after that, was the teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, a threshing crew boss, an oil field roughneck, a sharecropper, a cowboy, and a bulldozer driver. While he was the gentle family patriarch and “strongest man in the county” to his sons, he was “Uncle Cecil” to my buddies and cousins who would sit gaped-eyed while he enthralled them for hours with his tall tales of yesteryear. He taught us, among other things, to make our own bows and arrows out of the osage orange tree “just like the war chief Great Monsikay” taught him, how to predict exactly when a pregnant sow would have piglets, and how to hypnotize a chicken. What neater information could a twelve-year-old boy possibly possess in 1954! This was, of course, before we went forth to the big world and learned to hide our country ways and disguise our Okie accents so we, too, could sound like the man on the six o’clock news.
While rummaging through my father’s possessions after the funeral, I discovered something that brought back a flood of memories. There among his few books—Bible, various Year Books of Agriculture, and a surveyor’s handbook—was a water-stained, tattered, and duct-taped copy of the original 1972 Foxfire book. My brother George and his wife, Lynn, had given it to my dad for Christmas that year. As I flipped through the worn, consumed pages with carefully penciled-in personal observation notes in a distinguished handwriting of an earlier generation, I realized that he must have read this Christmas gift at least a hundred times. I remember coming home from Europe that winter to a country and its families torn apart by Vietnam and racial strife. We gathered around the fire on Christmas Eve to admire this most unusual gift—and how a high school English class way down in a faraway place called Rabun Gap, Georgia, decided to go out and interview the old people about their traditions as a pr
oject in cultural journalism. I now realize that this positive bridging of young and old by the Foxfire kids could not have been better timed for a troubled America. For my father and his generation, the simple fact that their knowledge was appreciated and recorded in black and white was a verification of a hard life well lived. For my part, I momentarily forgot about the generation gap and felt very grateful in being reminded that there was no need to feel shame in this family and rural place. It was one of the happiest Christmases of my life.
Exactly a quarter century later I took a personal pilgrimage to the little log cabin on the mountain above Mountain City, Georgia, where the very simple but beautiful and effective Foxfire philosophy of education through practice had been crafted and nurtured. Here, within hand-hewn heart pine walls, successive Foxfire Magazine classes, in pursuing what interested them in the local community, had created perhaps the world’s richest archives of regional folk history Engulfing me in the cabin were the results of more than three decades of premier oral history research—wall-to-wall catalogs and files containing over two thousand taped and transcribed interviews, twenty thousand black-and-white photos and slides, and hundreds of videos. Here was a scholars’ paradise and a national treasure in need of immediate attention. I learned from Dr. Bobby Ann Starnes, the president of The Foxfire Fund, and Michael Buchholz, the resource director, and other dedicated staff members that for several years the archives had suffered benign neglect when the organization was going through changes in leadership. Dust, silverfish, dampness, and time were beginning to take their toll. I felt honored when the Foxfire folk asked me and Dr. Virginia Nazarea, my colleague in anthropology at the University of Georgia, to help them in their ongoing efforts to preserve the materials.
The first product of this revitalization effort is this wonderful new volume on Appalachian farm life prepared by present and past Foxfire students. The Foxfire archives, through voices of local people, document one of the greatest transformations of the American landscape since our country was founded: the decline of the American farm. The official statistics are brutally honest: between the 1960s when the Foxfire Approach was being conceived and today, the number of farm families has declined by over 50 percent. During this same period, the farm population dropped from 15 million to around 4 million. Accompanying this decline has been the physical abandonment of the countryside and the industrialization of farming. The culture has disappeared from agriculture. Most farmers today do not even grow their own food, preferring instead to purchase it at the supermarket. Simultaneously, the remaining farms are increasingly assaulted by an encroaching suburbia that is often spiritually and aesthetically bland. Much of rural America has become a “subdivided” landscape where every place is no place. Strip Mall, Georgia, looks the same as Strip Mall, Anywhere, USA. As we destroy the cultures of our rural past, to quote Kentucky author-poet Wendell Berry, “we did not know what we were doing because we did not know what we were undoing.” And rural futurist Wes Jackson warns, “The loss of cultural information due to the depopulation of our rural areas is far greater than all the information accumulated by science and technology in the same period.”
As we enter the twenty-first century, however, men and women much like my dad are still out there waiting to tell their stories of change and continuity. While the Southern Appalachian region has faced much the same fate as other rural areas, the ruggedness of terrain and the doggedness of the people have allowed a traditional world to linger on long after its disappearance in the flatter parts of the country. By tapping into these survivals, Foxfire 11 offers a countervailing perspective to the assumed inevitable decline of regional character and rural traditions. Unlike those of us who waited too long to listen to the turn-of-the last-century generation, the students of Foxfire have shown us how a sense of place still lives on in historically hardscrabble communities with names like Licklog, Turkey Cove, and Warwoman Creek. The homogenizing march of the interstate highways, fast food and motel chains, tourism, and land speculation may have altered the main thoroughfares over the mountains, but growth and “progress” have not stomped out either the memories or the desire to maintain the old mountain ways.
The pages of this book portray farm families who created and refined the practices associated with tilling the soil, tending the seed, harvesting the produce, and finally preparing it for consumption or storage for the next planting. In this system, tied closely to the changing seasons, an intimate and sacred connection prevailed between the people and the earth and between the society and the landscape. Children learned directly from their parents by observing and participating. A farm child never had to explain or hide what his father or mother did for a living. However poor the economy, the locally evolved foodways and survival tactics were part and parcel of a rich human culture that gave a special meaning to life.
I can hear some “growth without limits” proponents arguing “so what?” If the family farming way of life has virtually disappeared, then what value is bygone knowledge today? After all, aren’t technology, information, and global markets supposed to work for a better future? And in this future, what use are bean stringings, pea thrashings, corn shuckings, and taffy pulls? I, for one, leap to disagree with this quick deterministic dismissal of the past. What was is just as good as what is. While specific knowledge, technology, or activity may sometimes seem like folkloric anachronisms acted out only in heritage fairs, the underlying principles of rural living can still serve as a moral and ethical compass in our individualistic, hypermodern world. Our citizenry has grown used to a society where children don’t have any idea where their food comes from other than the supermarket and old folks die in heat waves because no one checks on them anymore. We are seeing a deterioration of our communities, our ecologies, and our physical and mental health. If an appreciation of the past helps us move forward and make better choices, then why not use it?
The student editors, writers, and compilers of Foxfire 11—Kaye Collins, Lacy Hunter, Amy York, Robbie Bailey, and Teresia Thomason—once gathered with me in the archival log cabin to educate me on what they learned from working on this volume about farm life. Although none of the students had ever lived on a farm, much less milked a cow by hand, they all said the exercise provided a powerful vehicle to reflect on the lives of the earlier generations who had sacrificed so much. Unanimously, they felt the lessons for living provided by the elders could guide us in the future. First, they were impressed by the brave self-sufficiency of their parents and grandparents who had no guaranteed nine-to-five job and no social security but survived nonetheless with pride and joy. Second, the simpler lifestyle of the old mountain way could teach us a few things about bringing balance back to our rush-about modern lifestyles. Third, the students yearned for a more personal world where neighbors supported each other, where resources were shared, and oral communication (talking, singing, storytelling, preaching) was a valued art form. Finally, they learned that the land from which they sprang helped pay for the prosperity of America and the education of its youth. They know that it is time now to repay the land through revival of an old-fashioned stewardship and reverence drawn from the inspiration of bygone generations of farmers. Sure, we cannot go back to an earlier life—even if we wanted to—but as we search for ways to cure our modern social ills, heal our land’s wounds, and restore a balance between ourselves and our lost roots, there is much of value in these pages.
The first person I ever met at Foxfire was its conservator, Mr. Robert Murray, who can best be described as a modern-day Will Rogers. He kept me and my graduate students spellbound and in stitches as he gave us a knowledge-rich folk tour of the wild useful plants around the center’s grounds. As we strolled back down a winding path to our car, he told me that when the Foxfire project started in the mid-1960s, the Appalachian hill people were experiencing a “period of shame” in which they believed their hand-me-down knowledge, hard won through everyday experience, had little value compared to the higher-status knowledge found i
n America’s cities and flatlands. They thought that to be accepted they had to shed their “hillbilly” ways and adopt those of outsiders. Learning had to come from textbooks or other materials designed and produced by formally educated people who lived far from Rabun Gap. Highland culture had to be replaced by a national culture promoted by the mass media. Today, however, all over the United States and cultures beyond our borders where the Foxfire philosophy of experiential hands-on learning has taken root, students and teachers know better. As the world globalizes and regional identities disappear, a counterreaction emerges in villages, towns, and cities where people are actively seeking their roots—and listening to the aging guardians of indigenous knowledge—for inspiration in capturing lasting values of a community-based culture. This Foxfire volume, published on the dawn of a new millennium, not only continues the grand American tradition of the ten Foxfire books before but comes at a time when we as a people need more than ever such fine examples of how young and old can realistically anchor themselves in their communities. The timing of this Foxfire book is no less critical for our country than the original Foxfire book of 1972.
—Robert E. Rhoades
Professor of Anthropology
University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia
Being involved in The Foxfire Magazine class benefits everyone in one way or another. Of course, the obvious benefits are practical ones: computer skills, business skills, and proficiency in communication. These skills, however, seem unimportant when I think about what I really learned in my years spent working for Foxfire. I started out new to the program and painfully shy. I could not imagine how I would ever survive the first interview. I was quite sure, in fact, that the man I was interviewing was going to hate me. But I did survive (and he did not hate me). After a summer of interviewing people, arguing with other senior editors, and seeing articles I had written published in the magazine, I gained confidence that has impacted every part of my life.
Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living Page 1