Appalachian History

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The death of Molly Vaughn
2007-05-16 14:40:00
Molly Vaunder went a walking, when a shower came on;She went under a birch tree the shower to shun.Jimmie Randells was a hunting, a hunting in the dark.He shot at his true love and he missed not his mark.He picked up his gun, to his uncle did runSaying, "Uncle, dearest uncle, I have killed Molly Vaughn !I've killed that fair damsel, the joy of my life,And I always intended to make her my wife."Up stepped Jimmie's father, with his locks turning graySaying, "Jimmie, dearest Jimmie, do not run away.Stay in your country till your trial comes on;You ne'er shall be hurt for killing Mollie Vaughn."On the day of Jimmie's trial, Mollie's ghost did appear."Say, ye gentlemen of the jury, young Jimmie goes clear.With a white apron round me, he took me for a swanAnd Jimmie shall ne'er be hurt for killing Mollie Vaughn."This ballad exists in many versions. In America the heroine is known as Molly Vaughn, Polly Van, Molly Banding, Molly Vaunders, Polly Bon, and Polly Bond, but often the ball...
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The stretch-out and the strike
2007-05-15 14:35:00
By the mid 1920s Appalachia, land of farms and farmers, had been crisscrossed by railroad tracks and dotted with mill villages, and the Piedmont had eclipsed New England as the world's leading producer of yarn and cloth. But along with the promise of new jobs came intense competition in the decentralized textile industry, depressing wages, and faster mill machines, which with each new technological advance threatened to further exhaust their operators. These developments inevitably put labor and management on a collision course. Charlie Chaplin?s film Modern Times (1936) captured perfectly the panic of the average millhand caught in the cross-fire of the ?stretch-out?: sped up machinery and ever expanding work quotas.In October 1926 American Bemberg began the manufacture of "artificial silk," or rayon, at its new plant in Elizabethton, TN. The parent company, J. P. Bemberg, was the German affiliate of Vereinigte Glanzstoff Fabriken (VGF), one of the international giants in the ...
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One of the oldest Confederate veterans
2007-05-14 14:30:00
CEDAR BLUFF "REBEL" SOLDIER HALE AND HEARTY AND NEARING 100. -- Cedar Bluff, May 19 - Today, in our town, one of our grand old veterans of the '61 gang passed the 96th milestone of his journey through this ever-changing world. "Uncle George" ---as he is familiarly known--- Burnett, one of the few remaining veterans of the Civil War, is still hale and hearty at this ripe old age, and says "temperance in all things, faith, hard work, lots of patience, and the goodness of the Almighty Father" are some of the main reasons he has attained this age. He is, possibly, one of the oldest veterans left in our county, and is still active taking long daily walks. His vision is not quite as keen as the day near Petersburg he spied the "Yank" nestled close up against a log as the boys in grey had 'em on the run. He walked over to this "Yank," who was trembling with fear, and poked him in the ribs with his old trusty rifle and said, "Come out of there, Yank, and get behind these columns of grey...
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Emma Gatewood, 67, walks Appalachian Trail solo
2007-05-11 14:20:00
Perry and Emma Gatewood?s oldest daughter Helen was already 20 years old in 1928, and the other children weren?t far behind. So Emma Gatewood became ?Grandma Gatewood? to her immediate family long before the rest of the world knew her by that title.Throughout the 30s, 40s and 50s she continued raising her 11 children and four of her grandchildren at the family farm in Gallia County, Ohio. With no means of transportation, Grandma Gatewood would simply walk two, three, four or five miles for her visits. Then in 1955 at the age of 67, Grandma Gatewood made a journey that gained nationwide attention. Seeing a "National Geographic" article about the Appalachian Trail, and discovering that no woman had ever hiked its entire length, Grandma Gatewood decided to set out on an adventure. Amazingly, she made her arrangements and started in Maine on the hike without as much as a word to her family about her plans. Unfortunately this first try ended abruptly when her glasses were accidentally ...
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The workload was a killer, the heat intense
2007-05-10 14:35:00
"I came from the Georges Creek coal-mining region of western Maryland. Every male member of my family began his working life as a miner. I remember my father being on a number of bitter strikes because the fight over wages and safe working conditions was an every-day struggle."I graduated from high school in 1930 at the height of the Great Depression. After three years of looking I finally got hired as a spinner in the Celanese Corporation's huge rayon plant near Cumberland, Maryland."Working conditions were brutal. A 56-hour week with even more forced overtime - all for a straight-time wage of twenty-two-and-a-half cents an hour. The workload was a killer, the heat intense and the air badly polluted."A substantial minority of Celanese workers came from union families, mainly coal miners and railroad workers. So it wasn't very long before we began talking union. By 1936, after three year's of intense struggle that included several plant-wide strikes and a number of sit-downs, we ...
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The world capital for chenille bedspreads
2007-05-08 14:30:00
Calhoun, Ga. 1934. Mrs. Ralph Haney poses for a photograph in her kimono. The peacock design was made of chenille.Imagine: you?ve piled the family into the car and are driving south for a Florida vacation. You?re traveling along U.S. Highway 41 in northwest Georgia, when suddenly both sides of the road become flanked by row after row of clotheslines chock full of stunning chenille bedspreads. Congratulations! You?re in the thick of ?Peacock Alley.? And most likely you?re in downtown Dalton, GA as well. 1930s travelers often stopped and bought these bedspreads, and of the many designs adorning the spreads, the most popular among tourists was the peacock. Hence the nickname.Sometimes the bedspread buyers believed their purchases to be examples of authentic American folk crafts, when in fact by that decade a well organized industry had formed around the tufted beauties. Catherine Evans (later Catherine Evans Whitener) revived the handcraft technique of tufting in the 1890s near Dalt...
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Land fishing for Molly Moochers
2007-05-07 14:35:00
Their scientific name is Morchella esculenta, but to mushroom fans in Appalachia they?re dry land fish (yes, they do taste fishy when fried up) or molly moochers. Elsewhere in North America the hard-to-find morel mushroom is also known as a yellow morel, common morel, sponge mushroom, honeycomb morel, or haystack. Many European languages share similar names for our English morel, such as the Bulgarian morchella, the Danish morkel, the French motile and the German morchel. As morels are choice edibles, they are sought out by mushroom foragers throughout the world.Shroom hunters claim you can sometimes actually hear the molly moochers grow as they push their way through dried leaves on still chilly ground in early spring.Morel mushroom hunting attracts novices as well as expert searchers. The best time for morels is May but with more than 100 different types of mushroom, mushroom hunting is a summer-long activity.The scarcity of molly moochers has made the ?patches? of the mushrooms...
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They weren't too beaten down
2007-05-04 14:35:00
Sunday school picnic. Much of the food brought into abandoned mining town of Jere, West Virginia by "neighboring folk" from other parishes. There is a great deal of "hard feelings" and many fights between Catholics and Protestants. Miners as a whole are not very religious, many not having any connections with church, though they may have. 1938 Sept."My first assignments were very close to Washington. I think one of the first ones, if not the very first, was in the coal fields in West Virginia. That was a very short assignment, of course. And it was a very interesting one, too. I found the people not as apathetic as I had expected they might be. They weren't too beaten down. Of course, many of them were but they were people with hope and some of them still had a little drive, although, of course, their health was so bad it was telling . . . ."I think [all the FSA photographers] did have a social consciousness definitely, perhaps more than some people have but I think they were all -...
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Relgious persecution, well oiled
2007-05-03 14:44:00
On June 29, 1941, Charles Jones, C.A. Cecil and eight other young Jehovah?s Witnesses from Mt. Lookout, WV drove to nearby Richwood, WV ?to distribute literature of the said religious sect.? Three of the witnesses stopped off at the Town Hall to inform the mayor of the nature of their work and to request police protection. Instead of the mayor, they were met by an angry reception committee from the Richwood American Legion Post, among whom were Martin L Catlette, a deputy sheriff, and Bert Stewart, the chief of police. A mob of 1,500 people gathered outside the Town Hall, in the meantime, and soon other members of the American Legion post, headed by one Louis Baber, had rounded up seven Witnesses and brought them to the mayor?s office.Catlette then took charge. He produced several quart bottles of castor oil, and in the best Mussolini tradion, forced the Witnesses to drink eight ounces each. One Witness, who protested, was made to drink a double dose. While the Witnesses squir...
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Educating the Melungeons
2007-05-02 14:45:00
The 125-student Vardy School. Vardy Church is in right foreground; Powell Mountain rises behind.The Vardy School, completed in 1929 and in operation until the 1970s, was a mission school that offered educational opportunities to members of one of America's least-known ethnic groups: the Melungeons. The Melungeons often faced discrimination, both legal and social, and tended to settle in isolated communities such as Newman's Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee. The Vardy Community is at the foot of Newman's Ridge. The district was named after Vardemon Collins, one of the first recorded Melungeon inhabitants, and was first settled around 1780. Batey Collins and his immediate family, circa 1890s. He gave the land for the development of Vardy education.The locals worked with the Presbyterian Church to establish the Vardy School Community in 1892. The resulting Vardy School and a neighboring church became the focal points of life for the eight-mile Vardy Valley along Blackwater ...
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At age 87 she's doing well in the first grade
2007-05-01 14:30:00
"Aunt Betty Arnett lived 87 years of her life unable to read or write; she lives far back at the headwaters of Licking River in Magoffin County, KY. She is now doing well in the first grade in literacy classes offered in the mountains."Photo caption by George Goodman 1939 photo describes 'The Education Project,' a WPA sponsored literacy program.In 1900, George H. Goodman (1876-1961) founded a mail order whiskey business which he continued until the enactment of the 1919 Volstead Act. In 1922 he bought the Paducah News-Democrat which he operated until 1929 when he sold it to Edwin J. Paxton (1877-1961.) From 1934 through 1941 Goodman was director of the Works Progress Administration in Kentucky. During his tenure he traversed the state, camera in hand, seeking to depict the accomplishments of the WPA within the state. Below right, the WPA State Headquarters on 4th Floor, Gibbs-Inman Building at 9th and Broadway in Louisville, KY.WPA appalachian+history appalachian+culture history...
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FDR tiptoes around the lynching issue
2007-04-30 14:35:00
The movement to put anti-lynching legislation in place gained new momentum with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. The president's wife Eleanor had been a long-time opponent of lynching. During that year, lynchings had decreased to a new low of ten incidents and during the entire decade "only" 88 blacks were lynched.Appalachia, though hardly immune to race hatred, was not cursed with the higher number of lynchings to be found in the Plantation South. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, explains: ?Only a small portion of Appalachia, specifically the area along the borders within the foothills, was devoted to monocultural agriculture with all of its attendant evils, including lynching. In rough proportion to the degree that a particular region diverged from the plantation South, the likelihood of habitual mob violence in that region shrank. Of course, neither the pursuit of economic justice nor the rejection of violence lay behind th...
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Now I've got my Tailypo!
2007-04-27 14:30:00
Back in the hollers lived an old woodsman in a one-room cabin with his three dogs. After a day of hunting, the old man finds only a small rabbit to feed himself and his three dogs. Still hungry, the old woodsman begins to doze off. Just as he is about to fall asleep, the awfulest critter he ever did see in his life creeps through a crack between the logs in the wall. The old man cuts off the creature's long tail, cooks and eats it, and goes to bed with a full stomach. He is awakened several times throughout the night when the strange creature comes looking for its tail. Finally, the furry creature sneaks into the old man's bed, and tears the man all to pieces. Nothing remains of the old man's house except the chimney. At night, when the moon shines and the wind blows, you can hear a voice say: 'Tail ypo, tailypo, now I've got my tailypo.'--- Appalachian children's folktaletailypo, appalachian ghost stories, appalachian culture, appalachian history, history of appalachia, appal...

The place I was raised up
2007-04-26 14:30:00
?[The farm was] wedged in . . . there's a branch . . . a big branch come down, and it's clean up on both sides of the hollow. That was just a holler, see. And a hillside. It run up on each side of the hill. I believe it was about a hundred and sixty acres. It was woodland, and . . . and [Daddy] owned another farm. I guess it was, maybe, a hundred. He owned about three hundred acres in both. They joined. He didn't do much to one of 'em. The one farm that he didn't work much was mostly in timber. And he pastured it. He'd get a little hay off of the back. Growing mostly on the place I was raised up.?My daddy, he . . . people back then didn't have nothing to cut hay with, only just an old mowing blade. He had a cow or two, milked, and had hogs. Killed his own hogs, and then raised enough corn on that farm to feed 'em. But he'd . . . he was poor . . . pretty poor, but we'd get by on it. And then ha-. . . raise corn and hay. Maybe had an old mule he'd farm with. ?We ...
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Six men to a room
2007-04-25 14:30:00
?Men in room at Mrs. Jones's boardinghouse. Six men live in this room. Three beds, pay eight to ten dollars a week rent. Most of them have families they left behind in Bluefield, West Virginia; Bristol, Tennessee; or High Point, North Carolina. They are carpenters, carpenters' assistants, riggers and laborers. They make sixty cents to one dollar and twenty-five cents per hour.?Photographer John Vashon's photo captionRadford, Virginia, December 1940.appalachian+history appalachian+culture history+of+appalachia appalachia
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The poor third class have fallen behind
2007-04-24 14:30:00
FDR?s government found itself in the business of real estate development during the early New Deal years. In 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt came to Scotts Run, WV to assess what she might do to improve living conditions of out-of-work miners and enable them to become self-sufficient. Two months later, The Resettlement Administration, Division of Subsistence Homesteads purchased the Arthur family farm in Preston County, and the first of the nation?s ?stranded communities? projects was born. The homes were built to three basic patterns and each one had its own land for gardens, with outbuildings and a root cellar. Arthurdale survives in remarkably good condition. A number of houses are still lived in by the families for whom they were built. Based on the success of Arthurdale, WV, over 100 such communities were developed across the country. The Tygart Valley Homesteads at Valley Bend, WV and Dailey, WV were built in 1934-35 for workers likewise laid off from local mining and lumbering jo...
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Appalachian clog dancing
2007-04-23 14:30:00
Clogging is an expressive style of American dance with origins in the folk dances of the British Isles, Africa, and pre-Columbian America. Settlers in the American South took elements of these styles to form a unique American dance style, Appa lachian clog dancing.Though the eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish settlers brought with them the clog, a step dance characterized by a very erect upper body, the additional influences of the traditional dance of Native Americans with its toe-heel, toe-heel movement and African American buck dancing, in which the arms hang loosely at the dancer's sides, made for a distinctly American style. The basic clogging and buckdancing step consists of a double toe shuffle, where the dancer brushes forward the toe and then the heel of the free foot, shifts his or her weight to that foot, then rocks onto the other foot, before stepping back onto the foot that had originally been free. The leg is generally raised a little more than six inches off the gr...
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America loves the yo-yo
2007-04-20 14:30:00
West Virginia entrepreneur Donald F. Duncan (1892-1971) had never heard of the yo-yo until 1928, when he encountered Pedro Flores on a business trip to California. Earlier that same decade, Flores had immigrated to America from the Philippines, and initially worked as a bellhop at a Santa Monica hotel. Carving and playing with wooden yo-yos was a traditional pastime in the Philippines, but Flores found that his lunch break yo-yo playing drew a crowd. He promptly started a company to make the toys, calling it the Flores Yo-Yo Company ("yo-yo" means "come-come" in the Tagalog language). In 1930 Duncan bought out Flores, who went to work for Duncan running promotions. The company teamed up with Hearst Newspapers to promote yo-yo contests. Hearst added a twist, requiring players to sell three newspaper subscriptions if they wished to compete in the contests. A single promotion in Philadelphia sold 3 million yo-yos in 30 days. Duncan introduced the looped slip-string, which allows ...

Shenandoah Valley Apple Blossom Festival time
2007-04-19 14:30:00
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Shenandoah Valley Apple Blossom Fest ival , one of the oldest civic celebrations in Virginia. During the 1930s interest in the Apple Blossom Festival was declining and profits were in the red. A decision had to be made whether to continue the Festival or drop it completely. The turning point came in 1938, when Mr. Tom Baldridge was appointed Executive Director of the Festival. Baldridge, born 1909 in Jackson, Tn., had come to Winchester, Va. to manage the Capitol and Colonial theaters. At the same time, he also held a full-time job as a promoter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, organizing promotional events and movie premieres on the East Coast. With his Hollywood connections, Baldridge was instrumental in bringing stars such as Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Lucille Ball to Winchester, and the festival has never looked back since.?I?ve been in the celebrity business,? Baldridge told The Winchester Star in 1997. ?Celebrities would thank me for the pu...
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As far removed as it is possible to be
2007-04-18 14:30:00
"title="Doris Ulmann Photograph Collection / Special Collections & University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries"id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054513568 057528530" />"title="Doris Ulmann Photograph Collection / Special Collections & University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries"id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054513464 978313410" />?The population of this vast mountain region is divided into two distinct classes, as far removed in character and environment as it is possible for people to be. First, there are those who live in fertile valleys along the rivers and the railways, with the very best religious and educational advantages, and who are equal in intelligence and refinement to any people in America."[People of the second group] do not live in these favored valleys, but far back from the main lines of travel in small clearings by the watercourses, almost entirely removed from the outside world, with few advantages for learning and few opportunities for improvement. The extreme poor liv...
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We pause to mourn
2007-04-17 14:30:00
In light of the horrific shootings yesterday at Virginia Tech, today's entry is suspended as we take a moment to pray for the victims' families and friends.
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Finger Lickin Good
2007-04-16 14:30:00
He was born in Indiana, not Appalachia, and for the first 39 years of his life he stumbled around from one job to the next: insurance salesman, steamboat ferry operator, gas lamp manufacturer, railroad man, even justice of the peace.But in 1929 Harlan Sanders finally found his life?s calling. That was the year he moved to Corbin, Kentucky and opened a gas station along U.S. Route 25. When tourists and traveling salespeople asked Sanders where they could get something to eat nearby, he got the idea of opening a small restaurant next to the gas station. He invented what's called "home meal replacement" - selling complete meals to busy, time-strapped families. He called it, "Sunday Dinner, Seven Days a Week." The restaurant had one table and six chairs and specialized in Southern cooking such as pan fried chicken, ham, vegetables, and biscuits. Sanders moved his establishment across the street to a bigger location, with room for 142 seats, a motel and a service station. He took an ei...
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They earned their living at a neighboring hotel
2007-04-13 14:28:00
Nearly every day my mother or my aunt took me "down the street," by which they meant downtown. Murphy's Five and Dime was usually on our itinerary. Another stop was the Corinne Shop, where the proprietor, Marie Hiltie, indulged me by calling me "Mrs. Jones" and pretending I was a grown-up.On Saturday mornings my uncle would put me in the car and take me to Brown's Creek to feed sugar cubes to the mules that worked in the mines. But my happiest moments were spent in the Citizen's Drug. They would hoist me up to the soda fountain and let me mix my own fountain Coca-Colas with enough Coca-Cola syrup in each for a whole six pack of today's Coke.In the afternoons when classes ended at Welch High School, the store would fill with noisy teens having Cokes and Nabs. My aunt's teacher friends would gather there, too, to visit and chat. To my child's eyes, far the most glamorous denizens were several women who used to drift in for a Coke around mid-afternoon some days. They had flawless...
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We have set our names upon your waters
2007-04-12 14:30:00
?The French Broad is a river and a watershed and a way of life where day-before-yesterday and day-after-tomorrow exist in odd and fascinating harmony. Beneath the deepest waters impounded by Douglas Dam lies buried the largest untouched Indian mound of the French Broad country. Our most ancient relic of man and our most recent trophy of his scientific skill rest practically side by side. ?There is the same coexistence of past and present within the people. It helps explain how they may be at once so maddening and so charming, wrong about so many things and yet fundamentally right so often. This living past and present is my story of the French Broad. I should like to think that by some unmerited but longed-for magic I have spoken for a few of the anonymous dead along its banks and up its mountains. For the Negro baby drowned in the river when its mother tried to swim from slavery and bring it into freedom. For the sheriff who was shot in the back from a laurel-thicket ambush as he p...
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All our folks was farmers
2007-04-11 14:30:00
Mrs. Riddle raises and sells vegetables, and keeps bees, but the real business of the family is raising beef cattle. Jim rents 120 acres from the Middletons and pays them a flat sum of $300 a year for the house and lot and the farm land. Jane seems to think this a profitable bargain and, while noncommital about gains, intimates they are prospering. They have 25 full-blooded Herefords, several full-blooded Jerseys, and other cattle of mixed breed. Those lying in the shade of the trees adjoining the lot looked rather gaunt. There were no stalls for them. Evidently they sleep in the grove.Part of the land is wooded, part is pasturage, and about half of it is arable bottom land, already green with springing grain. They also raise corn, peas, beans, and hay, and although Jim, 55 years old, is small and thin, and does not appear to have much strength, he can plow all day without excessive fatigue."All our folks was farmers," said Mrs. Riddle, "back up in the mountains. No, I don't know w...
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You had to work. It was hard work.
2007-04-10 14:37:00
"You had to work. It was hard work. From the time we was five years old we worked in the corn fields. From the time you was able to count to three you started working. Every day. Except Sundays. My dad didn?t believe in working on Sundays. It was raising corn, wheat, and potatoes, and a big garden. It was all strawberries. Anything you could raise, we raised it. Tobacco, we raised tobacco."Where did I go to school? West Virginia, Pleasant Valley. Forest Home. One room. With a pot-bellied stove in it. We carried wood to keep the fire going. It was fun. It really was. Because, the teacher - we had from the first grade to the eighth grade, and from then on you went into town. You was bussed into town. But we walked to school. We walked a mile and a half to school. We didn?t have no busses. The kids walked then. The teachers was good. I had two men teachers in my lifetime and one woman. What I remember most about them is, I don?t know, getting the switch used on you. The punishment ...
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As meat loves salt, a folktale
2007-04-09 14:30:00
A king is curious to know which of his daughters loves him the most, so he asks them. The first two claim to love him more than anything else, but the youngest simply says, "as meat loves salt." The king is so angered but what he thinks is her flippancy that he banishes her. She packs up her three prettiest dresses, hides them in a marsh, makes herself a dress and cap of rushes, and travels around to find work. After working as a kitchen maid for awhile in the house of a rich man, the rich man throws a series of parties for his son. The youngest princess / kitchen maid dresses up in her dresses and attends the gala each of the three nights, and the master?s son falls in love with her."id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_505006735736652 7378" />After searching in vain to find her, he begins to pine away for her. She makes him soup and drops the ring he gave her into the soup, which is delivered by the First Cook, who hopes to take credit for the soup. The master?s son recognizes the ring and ...
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Expecting a visit from the Easter Bunny shortly?
2007-04-06 14:30:00
Bunny is derived from the old or Middle English root word "bun" and describes a rabbit, a young one in particular. Rabbits are small furry mammals that belong to the order Lagomorpha. If you happen upon a rabbit in the wilderness of Appalachia, it will definitely have come from the Leporidae family, and will usually be one of three different species of cottontails that inhabit the eastern United States.Easter n Cottontails Silvilagus floridanus are the most abundant rabbit found here. Appalachian Cottontail Sylvilagus obscurus and New England Cottontail Sylvilagus transitionalis are similar in appearance to the Eastern, but each has differences in coloration unique to their species. Debate exists whether the latter two species should be classified as one species or two.If you live in suburban areas and small towns and see a rabbit or two or three, usually these will be Eastern Cottontails. They prefer bushy undergrowth with mixed habitats. Outside suburbia, a little bit of analysis m...
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Down in Beulah Land
2007-04-05 14:35:00
"I lived down in Beulah Land , and times were hard on black people back then," said John Easter. "A lot of times we had to quit school to chop cotton while the white man's children kept going. It hurts me to talk about it, but I tell people bygones should be bygones." Easter was born Aug. 7, 1914, in the Limestone (AL) County community of Coxey near the Elk River, but spent most of his life close to Tanner. He recalls that they could hardly get through the dirt roads, because the wagons would mire down and get stuck in the mud. He attended a country school through the sixth grade, and then the closest school for upper grades was in Athens. "I didn't have no way of going and no place to stay." Some students boarded, and some lived close enough to walk, but he didn't have any money to pay the tuition. From his cotton-chopping days, he recalls that the field workers "couldn't get nothing unless you went to the white boss man; you couldn't see a doctor unless the boss man said you ...
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Riding the Rails
2007-04-04 14:40:00
"From 'middle class gentility to scrabble-ass poor,' the undiscriminating Great Depression forced 4,000,000 Americans away from their homes and onto the tracks in search of food and lodging. Of this number, a disturbing 250,000 of the transients were children. Some left home because they felt they were a burden to their families; some fled homes shattered by the shame of unemployment and poverty. Some left because it seemed a great adventure. With the blessing of parents or as runaways, they hit the road and went in search of a better life."Public perceptions of the road kids differed. There were people who saw the American pioneer spirit embodied in the young wanderers. There were others who feared them as the vanguard of an American rabble potentially as dangerous as the young Fascists then on the march in Germany."For most of the young transients, riding the rails would not become a way of life. "After a while," Jim Mitchell remarks," you knew you had to get on with your life....
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