Appalachian History

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None dared stop overnight at the Betts house
2008-12-29 13:00:00
The Charleston Daily MailDec. 27, 1925Grantsville, Calhoun County, W. Va., March 24, 1886. The following history of the haunted house, situated on the bank of Little Kanawha river, about three miles from this place, is presented to the scientist for explanation. The skeptical reader is frankly and honestly referred to any one of the persons named herein for verification of their share of the history. Although it is one of the strangest and most unaccountable stories written on this subject within a quarter of a century, every detail is well authenticated. A solution of the mysteries connected with this history will be received with gratitude and pleasure by hundreds of the respectable and honest citizens of Calhoun, Ritchie and Wirt counties. But to the history:About three miles from the county seat of Calhoun county there resided, and still resides, Mr. Collins Betts, a farmer, who is well known throughout this section of the country. His house is a one-story, rambling affair, clos...
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They's heaps o folks here still believe on Old Christmas
2008-12-26 13:00:00
OLD CHRISTMASThey’s heaps o’ folks here still believeOn Christmas – that’s Old Christmas – Eve,The elders bloom upon the ground,And critters low and kneel aroundIn every stall, though none I knowHas seen them kneel, or heard them low,Unless, maybe, ‘t was Judith DaughnAnd she’s been dead these years agone.But, as a girl, I ‘member wellHow, sitting at her loom, she’d tellOf a strange thing that once befell,When she lived here upon this creek With Jason. I’ve heard old folks speakOf their log-house, when it was new.All kinds of colored lilies grew,On bushes, to the very door; And Jason laid a puncheon floor,And framed a table and a bedFor Judith. They had just been wed,When they came here from mouth o’Ball.Judith, you see, she was a Hall,And all her folks was mighty soreWhen she took up with Jason; forThey long had been a row betweenThe Daughns and Halls. The Daughns was mean.Jim Daughn, he killed Dalt Hall, and thenDalt’s brother got one of their men.And so...

Go tell it on the mountain
2008-12-25 13:00:00
Merry Christmas everyone! I want to take a minute and thank all my readers for stopping by and having a look around here at the site throughout this past year. Your comments and appreciation really make the task of writing so much easier. Also, I want to acknowledge all the talented and generous people who've contributed so much of themselves to Appalachian History this year (alphabetically): Kevin Bannister, Arylnda Boyer, Matthew Burns, Tim Hooker, Nathan W. Murphy, Lynn Salsi, and Neal Thompson. This blog is so much richer for their help.I promise I'll get back to work posting more tasty things for you to read just as soon as I get done unwrapping a few of these pretty boxes over in the corner.
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Something hit the roof -- like a rubber ball
2008-12-24 13:00:00
Sunday Gazette-MailCharleston, WVDec 22, 1968Fayetteville-- Their search has dragged on for 23 years, but George & Jeannie Sodder will never believe five of their children burned to death in that Christmas morning fire of 1945.A weather-scarred billboard on a lonely WV road offers $10,000 for information leading to the five, regarded as lost in the fire that leveled the Sodder home in minutes.The undying hope that the two boys and three girls still are alive has taken the Sodders to a Mexican border town and a Spanish hamlet in Florida. But always frustration: nothing.For nearly two decades, this billboard stood at the site of the Sodder house fire. It showed photos of the missing Sodder children and offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to their recovery. Still, after all these years, the Sodders receive letters, photographs and telephone calls from persons across the country, from those who say they saw the children.Authorities in this small coal mining community snuggl...
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There's more than one definition of fruitcake in Appalachia
2008-12-23 13:00:00
Yes, it’s heavy as a brick, and lasts long enough that you can re-gift it year after year without anyone commenting on its shelf life having expired. Blame the Scots. Early versions of the rich style fruitcake, such as what we know today as Scottish Black Bun, date from the Middle Ages, and were luxuries for special occasions. Slices would have been served on Twelfth Night. The dessert was later known as Scotch Christmas Bun before becoming Black Bun. From the Irish and English some Appalachian residents have come to know this type of fruitcake as Scotch bun, or Dundee cakes. The heavily spiced, dense, chewy black mixture is made with dried fruit, nuts and whiskey a few months in advance of Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve) eating, in order to give it time to mature. It's wrapped in a shell of very thin, hard pastry to trap in the flavor over these months. It's cut into slices for serving, as gingerbread would be, although it's very different.One’s definition of fruitcake in Appa...
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The Mad Gasser of Botetourt County, part 2
2008-12-22 13:00:00
(...continued)The "Anesthetic Prowler" or "The Phantom Anesthetist," he was supposedly a dark, mysterious figure responsible for dozens of Virginia victims falling ill from mysterious gasses flooding their homes. Whole families reported sudden attacks of choking, dizziness, headaches and various respiratory ailments.However, lacking tangible evidence of a culprit or culprits, the press began to express suspicion. The first case to generate skepticism occurred in Fincastle on the night of February 24, 1934, when Ms. Mamie Brown dashed from her residence screaming that she had been gassed. A crowd quickly formed and was led to her house by C.E. Williamson, constable of the local jail, who determined that someone had "tossed a common fly killing fluid into the kitchen--apparently as a joke." At about 9 PM on the 25th, a watchdog at the Chester Snyder farm near Cloverdale began barking. Prepared for the gasser, Snyder immediately leaped out of bed, grabbed a shotgun and fired at what h...
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The Mad Gasser of Botetourt County, part 1
2008-12-19 13:00:00
Whether or not gas will be employed in future wars is a matter of conjecture, but the effect is so deadly to the unprepared that we can never afford to neglect the question.General John Pershing, 1919At 10 PM on December 22, 1933, Mrs. Cal Huffman detected a gassy odor in her Fincastle, VA home, and became nauseated. Despite the incident, she retired to bed while her husband remained awake in hopes of catching the perpetrator, having assumed that their house had been broken into. About 30 minutes later the smell of gas permeated the house; Mr. Huffman telephoned the police. Officer O.D. Lemon arrived about midnight, but found nothing out of the ordinary.Immediately following Officer Lemon's departure at one in the morning, a third attack reportedly took place. This time, all of the seven or eight family members experienced choking fumes that made them temporarily ill. The Huffman's 20-year-old daughter Alice fainted. When nearby Troutville physician S.F. Driver arrived on the scen...
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The Feast of the Seven Fishes
2008-12-18 13:00:00
Technically, on the Catholic Christmas season calendar, December 13 is The Feast of St Lucia. Over in Fairmont, WV on that day this year the local Italian community instead celebrated the Feast of the Seven Fishes. This southern Italian feast is traditionally celebrated on Christmas Eve. It stems from the observance of the Cena della Vigilia, the wait for the miraculous birth of Christ in which early Christians fasted on Christmas Eve until after receiving communion at Midnight Mass. At one time, Rome was the farthest point north where ‘La Vigilia’ was celebrated, but today Italians throughout the world celebrate it. Fairmont local son Robert Tinnell is a screenwriter, director and author whose book, "Feast of the Seven Fishes," inspired Fairmont’s city fathers to launch the local celebration, now in its third year."When I was kid, eating fish on Christmas Eve was just something you did," says Tinnell. "We never called it by name. I never even bothered to question why we did...

We didn't trim a tree at home; we didn't have any trimming
2008-12-17 13:00:00
"I don't think I was ever any more excited than on that last day at school before Christmas when Miss Dumire asked three of us girls to untrim the tree. She gave each of us a box and said, 'Try to put the same amount in each box.' So we were careful, helping each other as the teacher wanted. Then she said for us to be sure to put some of each kind of trimming in each one. Those soft, heavy icicles and the ropes of tinsel. The glass balls and the red candles clipped to the tree limbs.When we finished, we set the boxes on top of the teacher's desk, tied shut. Then at recess she called the three of us aside and asked if we would each take a box home with us so that it would get used over Christmas. Said she would get some new and different trimming for next year. She probably knew, and maybe I even had told her, that we didn't trim a tree at home, that we didn't have any trimming.""You probably asked for it," Blanche chided."No, no indeed! I never would have done that; but...
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Where's the Valle Crucis post office? Well, that depends
2008-12-16 13:00:00
In 1889, William West Skiles described a North Carolina location "entirely shut in by forest-clad mountains." The area "was watered by three small, limpid streams, two of them leaping down the hillsides in foaming cascades," Skiles wrote in Missionary Life at Valle Crucis. "It was this secluded valley which, from the cross-like form of the three streams at their junction," Skiles continued, "was now to receive the name of Valle Crucis." The Latin name means 'Vale of the Cross.' The limpid streams of Skiles' time didn't stay that way. A devastating flood struck in August, 1940, drowning people in the raging Dutch Creek, and leaving severe property damage in both valleys. Pop bottle checkers in the Mast General Store.In the days following the flood, residents congregated at one of the town's two general stores, and Mr. Mast, or Mr. Farthing down the street, would "check them off" as survivors. One of the last to appear was a woman called "Cethy," who had walked from her home on ...
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Can you imagine how it felt to be full of milk and have no child to suckle?
2008-12-15 13:00:00
Please welcome guest blogger Arlynda Lee Boyer. She grew up in Hillsville, VA and received her BA in history from New College of Florida. Her new book "Buddha and the Bud Car: The Spiritual Wisdom of NASCAR" will release November 2009.I find it very interesting that the list you cite in "125 reasons you’ll get sent to the lunatic asylum" doesn’t include what would have been a very common event in the mid-1800s: loss of a child. Today, psychologists recognize the loss of a child or a spouse to be two of the five most devastating life experiences a person can experience. Yet then, when both experiences were far more common, they did not seem to be commonly accepted reasons to suffer extended anguish. Your list did mention “loss of a son in the war,” but that’s a loss limited in two ways, by gender/age and by circumstance.My guess is that grief was more socially integrated then. Being in closer contact with life and death than we are today, there was a better social mecha...
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We air now aiming to give a dumb show for to pleasure the Little Teacher
2008-12-12 13:00:00
I thought no more of old time play acting in the mountain country till on Christmas Eve in 1930 some of the men and boys at Gander [KY] presented for me an old mummers' play. Later two of the men gave me a fairly complete text for the play....All of the contributors were old people, and the play presented at Christmas time in 1930 was almost as new for the young people who belonged to the community as it was for me. Thirty or more years had passed since its last performance, and the play will not be presented again by this community because the two men who knew the text are both dead.--Marie CampbellJournal of American Folklore, Jan-Mar 1938Mummer's plays in Appalachia are direct descendants of the British custom of Christmas masking, or "mumming," which can be traced to the English court as early as the reign of Edward III. Mummers (Merriam Webster's--- "one who goes merrymaking in disguise during festivals") probably got the name from the German word 'Vermummung,' or disguise...
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The pie the British authorities banned
2008-12-11 13:00:00
CARSKADON'SRaisins, figs, currants, citron, orange and lemon peel, mince meat and all those things which go to make the Christmas table attractive and beautiful. Do not fool your money away on useless toys, but come and supply yourselves with something worth 100 cents on the dollar. Come and see what we have to offer you.
Yours very truly,
GEO T CARSKADONAd from KEYSER [WV] TRIBUNEDecember 5, 1913Mince meat, or mince, pies have had a traditional place on the Christmas table throughout Appalachia for two reasons: 1) lack of refrigeration; 2) British ancestors.This is a time of year when hunters, from the earliest settlers on, have entered the forest seeking wild game to supplement the winter larder. The custom of mincemeat pies during the holidays is partially a holdover from putting up wild game in the days before freezers. The mincemeat mixture was a method of preservation, as the combination of the acids from the fruits and the heat from baking inhibited the growth of bacteri...
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I am a poor girl what you might say got no home
2008-12-10 13:00:00
Franklin NCDec. 10, 1926Mr. F.M. Lida.Dear SirI am going to write you for a little information about R.E. Gilliland if you know any thing about him. Last Thursday night two week ago he and I got married here in Franklin, N.C. and Tuesday morning following he slipped off and left and I don’t know where he is at and cant hear from him and there is some awful talk about him here in Franklin sence he left and also he told me several things that I find that is not so sence he left and he told me that he didnt have neither Father Mother Brother or Sister but his home was at Asheville and his parents both died when he was just smallHe told me that he was in the World War and lost his arm got his head bursted. His stomach cut from hip to hip and his inards let out got shot in both legs and also shot through the hand. He says he is drawing off the Government for these wounds but I don’t know these things for sure and cant find out. Of course I do know that his arm is gone and that he ...
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Christmas images throughout Appalachia
2008-12-09 13:00:00
Community Christmas tree, Knoxville, TN. On Market Street between Union Avenue and Clinch Avenue. Night view. Ordered by Knoxville Community Service Council. December 21, 1921."Two unidentified women (initials M.H.P. and A.H.) in 1908 sent this Christmas greeting to Kentuckian Mary McDowell, "The manner of our growing old is the measure of our life."Covered bridge, 32’ long, near Dunkinsville, OH.In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Portland cutter was the most popular type of sleigh used in the United States.Peter Kimball and his sons–notably Charles Porter Kimball of Portland, Maine, developed the design. Fancy cutters, trimmed with silk and silver cost about one hundred and fifty dollars. By 1910 plain cutters were available in the twenty dollar range. Santa Claus is surrounded by children in front of O. J. Morrison's Store in Grafton, WV, circa 1920.appalachia Christmas+in+Appalachia Knoxville+TN OJ+Morrisons Grafton+WV Portland+cutter covered+bridges appalachian+history ...
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Where did the convicts and indentured servants go?
2008-12-08 13:00:00
Please welcome guest blogger Nathan W. Murphy, a professional genealogist and currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah. Raised in Kentucky, he's fascinated by the early settlers of the area.  And for his dissertation he needs your input, dear reader!"Many of us have family traditions that an ancestor came to frontier Kentucky or Tennessee in the early days to escape the law back East. Historians are learning that in this area, these folks would have run into people of similar dispositions. More than 50,000 convicts from the British Isles were banished to America during the Colonial Period."The list of convicts sent to America is fairly complete, thanks to the work of Peter Wilson Coldham. Many of them, after serving labor terms of seven or fourteen years in Maryland or Virginia, or running away from their masters, settled in backcountry North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. I am trying to learn what happened to at least 100 of these former convicts as my Ph.D. disser...
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I tried to get her to sing all the song
2008-12-05 13:00:00
John Jacob Niles composed the Appalachian influenced Christmas carols 'The Carol of the Birds,' 'The Flower of Jesse,' 'What Song s were Sung,' 'Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head,' and 'Sweet Little Boy Jesus.'''I wonder as I wander,' one of his most popular carols (as of 2008 it’s been recorded at least 231 times) illustrates the working methods of this inveterate collector of homegrown musicality:"I Wonder As I Wander grew out of three lines of music sung for me by a girl who called herself Annie Morgan,” Niles explained. “The place was Murphy, North Carolina, and the time was July, 1933."The Morgan family, revivalists all, were about to be ejected by the police, after having camped in the town square forsome little time, coking, washing, hanging their wash from the Confederate monument and generally conducting themselves in such a way as to be classed a public nuisance.“Preacher Morgan and his wife pled poverty; they had to hold one more meeting in order to buy eno...
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125 reasons you'll get sent to the lunatic asylum
2008-12-04 13:00:00
Weston Hospital in Lewis County, WV, officially named the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane upon completion of the facility shown here in 1880, was typical of the many that were established throughout the country. Its design reflected the Kirkbride plan in action.Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride's theory centered on what he referred to as the "moral treatment" of the insane, a constructive idea unique to the United States, for mental asylums from the mid to late 19th century.He advocated moving patients from overcrowded city jails and almshouses, where patients were often chained to walls in cold dark cells, to a rural environment with grounds that were "tastefully ornamented" and buildings arranged "en echelon" resembling a shallow V if viewed from above.This design called for long, rambling wings, that provided therapeutic sunlight and air to comfortable living quarters so that the building itself promoted a curative effect, or as Kirkbride put it, "a special apparatus for lunacy."...
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Muralist Lola Poston and the Lincoln Theatre
2008-12-03 13:00:00
Her paintings were shown at the 1939 World’s Fair, and she helped decorate the White House during the Roosevelt Administration. But the artistic highlight of Lola Poston’s painting career was surely the six 15x20 ft. murals she created in 1929 for the auditorium of the newly built Lincoln Theatre , a talking picture palace and vaudeville stage in Marion, VA. Billed as "the finest playhouse between Roanoke and Knoxville," the theater opened on July 1 that year playing Close Harmony to a standing room only crowd. Lincoln Theatre served as the flagship of a chain of movie houses throughout SW Virginia. Today it’s one of only three remaining American movie houses built in Mayan Revival style.Lincoln Theatre’s interior resembles an ancient temple with exotic representations of mythological gods and creatures painted on the ceilings and walls. Poston’s murals live amidst this décor, housed in pyramid frames. Poston used cotton panels with water-based paints to depict scenes in...

Dedicating the Arrowhead Monument at Old Fort
2008-12-02 13:00:00
Old Fort : the name says it. It is indeed one of the oldest towns in western North Carolina, and it was originally a fort, built by the colonial militia before the Declaration of Independence. Once called “Gateway to the West,” the settlement served as the westernmost outpost of the early Thirteen Colonies.Frequent skirmishes between the Scots-Irish settlers and the Cherokee and Catawba tribes took place along the banks of Mill Creek, which runs through the center of town. There is an old law still on the books that requires any traveler between Marion and Old Fort to notify the Constable of their intended trip and expected arrival time. If a traveler was late, it was assumed that they had run into trouble, and a search party would be dispatched from the fort to rescue them. The Native Americans, for their part, were so alarmed by the incursion of pioneers into their lands that they allied themselves with their old enemies the British in 1776. Reacting to particularly heavy a...
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Jumping on a bear to fight fist and skull
2008-12-01 13:00:00
Chattanooga Times Free Press, 11/24/08: A state wildlife biologist predicts a record number of black bears will be taken during the current hunting season.There are two periods during which dogs can be used to hunt bear — one in mid-November, the other during the first two weeks of December."Him and his brother-in-law one night back years ago, about forty, went out a-bear huntin', a-possum huntin' or other, and treed a bear. He minded up the tree till it come down. I shot it. It rolled off down the mountain a piece, tore loose from the dogs, and run away on down the flat and treed up another tree. We minded hit up there a good long while. "Finally it come down from up there. We had us a big fire made up at the root of the tree. When it come down, why we had a good fire light to fight it by. When it come down, I shot again, didn't hit it the last time. When I shot it the last time, shot at it, why, just throwed my gun down and jumped a-straddle of it, grabbed it by both...
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Stearns KY emerges out of the Big Survey
2008-11-28 13:00:00
Louis Bryant and Justus Stearns needed each other, and it’s surely no accident that their worlds finally intersected. Bryant, a bright young mining engineer, had moved into what is today McCreary County, KY at the beginning of the 1890s to consolidate mineral and land holdings acquired there by his father. But while the Bryant family had mining expertise and raw land, they lacked the financial depth to develop the surrounding regional infrastructure they needed to grow their business. And so Louis hit the road to do a little selling. In 1893, he took a one-ton, thirty-six-cubic-foot block of bituminous coal from his family’s Worley mine to the Chicago World’s Fair. Justus Stearns by this time had made a fortune in the lumber business from his base in Ludington, MI. But virgin timber resources in that region were becoming depleted as the upper Midwest grew in population. And so Stearns hired field agents scattered around the country looking for business opportunities. He had e...
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Happy Thanksgiving, y'all!
2008-11-27 13:00:00
Now git on out of here and go have some turkey. We're closed today!
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Why not Skyland?
2008-11-26 13:00:00
She was the only woman to take part in the negotiations that brought about the creation of Shenandoah National Park in 1935. Addie Nairn Hunter, an accomplished, independent divorcee from Washington, exercised an enormous impact on the direction of George Pollock’s Skyland resort in Stony Mountain, VA from the moment she swept into Pollock’s life. She provided the first solid financial advice, backing and direction that her trumpet-blaring husband had ever seen.Not long after meeting in 1910, the two married. Pollock’s memoir, Skyland, does not mention her previous marriage, perhaps out of respect for his wife’s privacy, and refers to her only as Addie Nairn. Several of her first husband’s relatives owned lots and cabins at Skyland. Addie shared with George a sense of obligation to the land. She once bought 100 old-growth hemlock trees near Skyland, in an area she named the “Limberlost,” after the novel Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter, at $10 a pop to...

Rich outsiders vs. the less rich locals at Skyland
2008-11-25 13:00:00
To the locals, he was an arrogant and self-serving businessman, responsible for the dislocation of over 400 families when he sold his mountaintop acreage to create the core of the Shenandoah National Park. One neighbor felt "especially betrayed by George Pollock…[for] "pushing the people out. And, you know, coming up with all the stories of the areas that were just really poor. They didn't ever say anything about the people who worked, and made a good living, and lived there peacefully and nicely."To his guests at Skyland---‘Polly,’ they called him---George Freeman Pollock was the eternal party boy, blowing his bugle at sunrise while dressed in ten-gallon hat, hunting trousers and boots, with a .45 revolver strapped to his hip. He liked holding up live rattlesnakes to show visitors. Massanutten Lodge, where Pollock lived with his wife Addie for many years, was known as ‘Poker Flat’ to resort regulars thanks to the non-stop gambling there.Pollock was well connected from th...
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Horace Kephart, champion of the Smokies
2008-04-03 14:30:00
On April 2, 1931 Horace Kephart was killed in an automobile accident near Ela, NC along with fellow author Fiswoode Tarelton. Kephart (1862-1931) was a travel writer and librarian who published hundreds of articles during his lifetime, but became especially renowned for his classic works 'Our Southern Highlanders' and 'Camping and Woodcraft.'In one of Poe's minor tales, written in 1845, there is a vague allusion to wild mountains in western Virginia "tenanted by fierce and uncouth races of men." This, so far as I know, was the first reference in literature to our Southern mountaineers, and it stood as their only characterization until Miss Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") began her stories of the Cumberland hills.Opening of 'Our Southern Highlanders,' by Horace KephartIn 'Our Southern Highlanders,' published in 1913 and expanded in 1922, Kephart argued that the rest of America knew almost nothing of a people set apart "from all other folks by dialect, by customs, by cha...
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Chattanooga woman strikes out Babe Ruth
2008-04-02 14:30:00
On April 2, 1931, world famous New York Yankees sluggers Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were struck out by a 17 year old female pitcher named Virnett 'Jackie' Mitchell in Chattanooga, TN. "I don't know what's going to happen if they begin to let women in baseball," grumbled Ruth off-field. "Of course, they will never make good. Why? Because they are too delicate. It would kill them to play ball every day."Joe Engel, owner of the Southern Association's AA Chattanooga Lookouts, had recently signed Mitchell after spotting her in a baseball camp in Georgia. Engel, a former big league player who scouted for the Washington Senators after his playing days, was known for his innovative, entertaining, and often zany promotional stunts. The local papers were full of stories about the first woman to ever play in the minor leagues, though Jackie Mitchell was actually the second woman to sign a minor-league contract. In 1898, Lizzie Arlington played one game, pitching for Reading (PA) against Al...
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Had to furnish my own horse; bought one from the coal company
2008-04-01 14:30:00
John Holt (1870-1918), a coal miner in Murray City, OH, kept a journal of his daily life.John Holt and the coal miners he worked with outside of the mine in Murray City.April 1907- "The miners here geting 57 cts per ton for screened coal and two dollars and fifty six cents per day for day work inside of mine 236 for outside work 8 hours to be one days work. I went to work day work in mine no 2 but onely work a short time when I got contract of picking up coal at mines no 1, 2, and 3 had to furnish my own horse bought one from the coal company Paid $60 dollars for him and he was well worth it as he is a vary good horse but old. “Also bought a cow a young one first calf for $30 dollars. She is vary good. Later in September I think, I bought a two seated surray for one horse or I paid $50 dollars for it later I bought a one horse wagon and buggy or runabout of John ???? for $25 dollars 2 get 90 cts per ton that being Pick price for picking up coal and cleaning tracks. I made $70 doll...
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Mountain songs and sayings have living reality
2008-03-31 14:30:00
The convenient and pithy term for the mountain people of Kentucky, "our contemporary ancestors," does not indicate the origin of the customs, beliefs, and peculiarities which persist among them. For they too had ancestors. These were, for the most part, British, and of the soil. Just as today many a mountaineer has never been ten miles from his birthplace, so also his forebears remained at home. They were sturdy men and women, steeped in traditional ways, independent and as little humble as possible. The mountaineer is that way too. He cares neither for ease nor for soft living. He is hospitable. "Welcome, stranger, light and hitch," is the salutation, and the stranger is bidden to take "damn near all" of whatever the table offers. A hunter by race, he is first of all a poacher, in arms against such as would deny him the right to take game where he may find it, a trait dating back to the time of Robin Hood in England. His speech is reminiscent of this older land and people...
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The King of Stink
2008-03-28 13:30:00
Ramps are the first green thing of spring in Appalachia, and certainly the smelliest. Mountain folks have traditionally looked forward to the return of the ramp after a winter of eating mostly dried foods, often believing the ramp to possess the revitalizing power of a spring tonic (not unreasonable: they are high in vitamins A & C.)The "little stinkers" are typically served with ham, bacon, fried potatoes, brown beans, cornbread, and a dessert. If you’re a serious aficionado of allium tricoccum, you know it’s an acquired taste: take garlic and multiply that intensity by about ten. The mere scent of those who have recently eaten a mess of ramps has been known to clear a room."id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_51825494630179 51426" />The Ramps & Rainbow Festival takes place tomorrow at the Cherokee Indian Fairgrounds in Cherokee, NC, kicking off a month and more of festivals celebrating the most loved bulb in Appalachia. The high points of these community fundraisers include the Ramp Festiv...
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