Whenever I have the opportunity to meet folks who are interested in reading my Tennessee Mountain Stories, I am often asked which book comes first – where you should start. Until now, all of the novels were stand-alone, independent stories. Now, of course, Gracie’s Babies is a sequel to Margaret’s Faith.

However, because all of the stories are set on Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau and largely around the Martha Washington, Campground and Roslin communities, there is a natural overlap of characters. I don’t care to admit that it is a challenge to keep them all straight, but it’s one of the things I love about telling these stories based on actual history.

These days we don’t much know our neighbors, and that’s a very sad evolution in American communities. If you’re sick you can go to a doctor who doesn’t live anywhere near you, doesn’t know your history beyond the medical facts he has in his chart, and certainly doesn’t know your family. If you’re in need you can go to the government welfare office and they will give you vouchers for groceries and pay your bills without the concern for your eternal condition that the church would have shown back when they were the ones helping the needy. In the same way, your neighbors may never know when your children are baptized, when you overcome a bout of depression that threatened to suck the life from you, or when God blesses you till your cup overflows.

Back in Gracie and Stephen Ingle’s day, things were different. Women had no doctor or hospital to run to when they were expecting their babies, they relied on local “Granny-Women” to assist them in labor and delivery. When sickness struck a home and the man of the house was unable to work the crop it was the neighbors who had to come to the rescue; neighbors came and prepared the body of loved ones who had passed away; and entire communities rejoiced when a family was blessed with a child or visitor or abundant harvest. The sense of community was strong and somehow despite the lack of modern conveniences and long days of really hard work, neighbors knew each other and spent time fellowshipping together.

I write in Gracie’s Babies that the Ingle family goes all the way to Clarkrange to church, a distance of about 3 ½ miles (on today’s roads) and that they only periodically have a circuit preacher visit. They were travelling to Bruner’s Chapel which is now known as the Clarkrange Methodist Church. A few years earlier they would have travelled about the same distance to the Campground Church which was a building shared by the Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist congregations. The Martha Washington Freewill Baptist Church would be established some time later only a mile from the Ingle farms. It doesn’t seem like a long distance to us, but aboard a buckboard wagon or walking in the cold, I imagine it was quite a journey. Yet that was the best time for fellowship and I even imagine the trip itself was a time to visit as individuals and families would join you along the way. Even with just two choices of churches, if you weren’t in the same congregation with one of your neighbors then you wouldn’t be quite as close them, as was the case with the Ingles and the Englands.

As I look down the road to future books, I’m eager to continue to weave this tapestry of lives and families that populated our plateau communities. Of course there were new people coming and going, especially as economic opportunities grew with mines and timber operations, and we’ll get to know some of those folks as well. Maybe some of these characters will even inspire you to spend some time getting to know your modern-day neighbors.