Old Time Virtues – From The Land of Saddle-Bags

A few weeks ago I told you I had a great ‘new’ book.  I may have mentioned how excited I was when I first began to read something written by one of us.  I need to reiterate that sentiment today.

Chapter four of The Land of Saddle-Bags is entitled “Elizabethan Virtues”.  Now, I doubt anyone on the mountain today would pick up a book by that title and we surely wouldn’t label anything about our way of life “Elizabethan”.  Yet James Watt Raine might well have been in one of our back yards as he wrote these observations. 

Molasses Stir Off
some 'foreign' writers might present this as a sad means of acquiring sweetener.  It was always a festive time and everyone was please to put forth the effort as sorghum was the main sweetener in their diet.  This is not a picture of do-less people but hard workers.

He begins, “It is perhaps inevitable, but none the less unfortunate, that most of those who write about the Mountain People do not live among them.”  Let me just begin my ‘amens’ right here.  You may recall an article I wrote here well over a year ago about Dr. Wharton who founded the Pleasant Hill hospital and worked to expand it to the current Cumberland Medical Center.  Dr. Wharton did a great work and certainly gave us a wonderful gift in the medical facility we now enjoy.  However, I took some offense to her assessment of the mountain people she found around Pleasant Hill in 1917.  Dr. Wharton was born in Minnesota and educated in North Dakota, Europe and Michigan.  I imagine early-twentieth-century Appalachia was as foreign to her as any third world country would be to me today.  And what she reports seeing is a rather bleak environment of shiftless men anfaceless women; of families scarcely eeking out a living and seeming unconcerned about their plight.  And hers was not the first such report I’ve read; rather, it is what’s represented in most books written in the early twentieth century.

In contrast, Mr. Raine presents the mountain people as a unique race.  We may get a little nervous when people start talking about race in 2015.  However, when he wrote this book in 1924, the reader might have been more open to a broad definition of racial characteristics.  In fact, he mentions that the word ‘racial’ might be a stamp of inferiority.  Some in his day had portrayed the “actions, …motives, [and] outlook upon life [of the mountain people]… as so different …that they are made to seem a strange, peculiar, and far-off people.”  That really does sound like you are describing some foreign race. But Mr. Raine asserts this extreme view is inaccurate.

Instead, he points out the geography that kept the people of the mountains isolated for so many years and therefore they have either allowed the development of resourcefulness and independence; depending on your perception, this may have been forced upon them rather than allowed by them.   These were certainly traits our forefathers brought from England, Germany and Ireland and they have endured across the years.  The book’s author even finds virtue in the mountaineer’s ‘love of leisure’ for he points out that they are satisfied with what they have and not always striving to “procure these coveted things” which others have.  I guess that goes back to our individuality and it’s one of the characteristics I fear we’re losing as the world creeps up our mountain.  We are now told what the “average” American has and think we need at least that or more.  We long to dress the way we’re told is fashionable and drive the cars that are marketed to us and even eat the food of the world. 

“The Mountain men today are called shiftless because they do not flock to the city where they might enjoy the great benefit of crowds, confusion and noise.” I've rarely heard the sentiment that everybody ought to run off and get a factory job, but I’ve sure heard a lot of folks with good jobs up north longing to be back home.  Of course there were some who remembered hunger and cold and never wanted to look back.  But so many of our folks have looked back to the mountain longingly – and many came back when circumstances allowed it.  Of those folks who did move away, they seemed to carry memories of hard working folks with little opportunity for luxury or conveniences.  They moved wherever work carried them and there they cooked the food they’d loved in the mountains – if they could get it for Poke Sallet and cracklin’s are hard to find in the city.  They plied the crafts they’d learned at home, if only as a hobby, for many still whittled and quilted.  And they taught their children the values of their homeland – a love of God, devotion to family, honesty and perseverance. 

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to write about these people and places from the perspective of “one of our own” and I love finding other people doing the same.  I find bloggers from my own generation (and maybe younger) who still live in the mountains (such as the Blind Pig and the Acorn) and cherish the old ways or those who have never really lived here but descend from families that worked in cities and loved farms (such as Appleroot Farm).

So, the next chapter in The Land of Saddle Bags is “Mountain Speech and Song”.  I’ve written a few times here about our Southern English.  What do you think?  Do you want to hear what Mr. Raine had to say about it over ninety years ago?  Please click on “Comments” below and let me know.

Family, Religion and Politics

We mountain folk are a bit clannish and proud of it.  I’ve recently been learning about our Scots-Irish heritage and our ancestors seem to have passed their devotion to clan along through the generations.  Family means a lot to us and it is largely the center of society on the mountain.  While there’s always been the occasional ‘black sheep’ that didn’t seem to fit the rest of the herd, we are usually quite alike across the family and usually across several generations.

This leads me to ponder where changes creep into families.  And nothing is more creeping than differences of opinion on religion or politics.  My own great-great grandfather, Daniel Todd, came from a family of Methodists.  He said, “There’s two things I could never be, a Democrat or a Baptist”. 

Daniel was the grandson of a Virginia plantation owner.  Our family historian has found no evidence that William G. Todd kept any slaves on that plantation yet he stayed in Russell County, Virginia until the end of The Civil War.  It seems his anti-slavery sentiments rendered him too unpopular with his neighbors and very shortly after the war he headed west.  After a few years, he settled on the Cumberland Plateau in the Martha Washington community.  He had sixteen children and while the five eldest were already adults when he left Virginia, he brought a houseful with him. 

History has not preserved a lot of either William or Daniel’s political opnions, but the Republican Party was pretty new when they presented Abraham Lincoln as their candidate in 1860.  This was the liberal party of the day, urging modernization of the economy and of course demanding freedom for the slaves.  More than half a century later, some still thought of democrats as being pro-slavery. 

The Democrats were fractured in 1860 and presented a Northern Democratic candidate on the platform of completing the railroad to the Pacific, buying Cuba and a strong support of the Supreme Court.  The Southern Democratic party’s platform read much the same but with a bit more emphasis on territorial rights and especially the clause that territories would be admitted as states whether they would be free or slave states.

When Daniel’s oldest granddaughter announced she would marry, her father’s only comment was, “he’s a Democrat you know.”  When she repeated that to her own son years later, they believed it was still the slavery issue that held the family solidly in the Republican party after nearly three-quarters of a century.

Now we know that when mountain people get ahold of a belief, we hold on strong.  But an old lady from Cooktown told me once that her family was Republican until President Hoover ‘nearly starved us all to death’ and they vowed they would never again vote for a Republican.  She was only ten years old when the stock market crashed and plunged America into The Great Depression, but she remained faithful to that vow into the twenty-first century.

Understanding the politics of the late nineteenth century and the Todd’s suffering for their decision to not own slaves, seems to make Daniel’s political party choice obvious.    Yet he raised eleven children and while his politics held strong among them, only two children remained in the Methodist church.  That trend seems out of whack since this family was much stronger in their religion than their politics.

The Todds and their descendents were faithful church members.  Daniel’s wife Lottie and his sister-in-law Gracie are largely credited with the founding of the Martha Washington Baptist Church despite their dedication to Methodism.  Walking all the way to Clarkrange from their Martha Washington homes wasn’t very practical in inclement weather, or when the circuit preacher wasn’t in attendance.  So, these ladies sought permission to hold Sunday School in the building of the Martha Washington School.  I suppose that was rather non-denominational and in fact, there were other groups represented in that congregation before it finally settled as a Freewill Baptist Church.

Daniel had only three sons but two of them were preachers, both in the Baptist church – although the younger son spent some time in the Holiness Church.  The oldest of the Todd children married a family that was charter members of the Campground Baptist Church and raised her own family as Baptists.

It’s a lot easier to research the changing positions of America’s political parties than the changing face of our churches over the years.  For many years travel limitations and scarcity of preachers led us to whatever church was having services and wherever we could reach.  Remember that the Campground Church housed not only Baptists and Methodists but a Presbyterian congregation as well.  Many have long held that the denominations that shared the basic tenet of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ were all brethren and could therefore be accepted.  Even the Holiness church that Daniel Todd’s youngest son preached in got its start from early Methodists.

Once again, as I look at these changes in this family over five generations, I’m left with more questions than answers.  Some facts and lots of stories remain but no one seems able to answer my ever-present, “Why?”.

In the film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, we see Scarlett O’Hara in a rare fit of conscience fearing she’ll die and go to hell.  Rhett Butler comforts her with the idea that “…maybe there isn’t any hell.” But Scarlett replies, “Oh there is.  I know there is.  I was raised on it.” (The dialog was a little different in the novel.) 

Scarlett had a reason for her belief, but I’m not sure that was what Peter had in mind when he directed us in 1 Peter 3:15 “…[to] be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you…” As shallow as the answer may seem, I can’t help but wonder how many of our beliefs are really built on “I was raised on it.”

Daniel Todd's Daughters

Feasting and Fasting

Happy Thanksgiving! 

As we celebrate what we often believe is a uniquely American holiday, I had not thought to write about it until Sunday’s sermon moved me.  You know me to be a Christian Fiction author but this blog is not especially evangelical.  That is due largely to my lack of expertise – there are lots of people writing with far more authority than I could offer.  Today I write more from inspiration than education and I hope that I can cause you to pause for just a moment to give thanks for the myriad blessings we all enjoy.

We always talk about the pilgrims who first settled in North America but their other title was separatists.  Somehow that name is not quite as attractive to us as pilgrim, is it?  But these brave souls wanted to be separate from the government and crown that sought to dictate every detail of their lives – right down to when, where, how and to whom they worshipped.  They came to America so that they could worship however they saw fit. 

Children will do plays this week dressing up as Indians and Quakers; we may tell the story of the colony at Plymouth Rock and the kindness the Native Americans showed these newcomers.  Some will even take a moment on Thursday to think of what we individually have to be thankful for.  And then we will dig in. 

On Sunday, Pastor Bill Hall preached on Fasting and Feasting.  But nobody wants to talk about fasting this week, do we?   We are all gearing up, planning menus and trips to grandma’s house for one of the biggest meals we’ll have all year.  Yet, in America today we feast so much that I wonder if we can really appreciate the feast-nature of this holiday?  If we fasted for one day or even for one meal before the feast would we be better able to appreciate it?

Officially we say that the first American Thanksgiving was celebrated following the harvest of 1621.  We recognize that without the help of the native peoples those first settlers would not have survived and they acknowledged that in their first Thanksgiving feast.  In 1623 the pilgrims kept another Thanksgiving; they had a lot to be thankful for that year.  You see, about half their number had died; those that survived must have felt eternally grateful. 

While some of the settlers the Mayflower delivered may have come from farming backgrounds, the Separatist Church had been in Holland for a decade dwelling in towns and working in trades.  They were no doubt fairly poor but I’m not sure anything could have prepared them for the hardships they would face on a brand new continent.  Those first winters no doubt saw fasting days by necessity for the food stores were lean.  But this was something their Indian neighbors already knew about – it was a way of life for most nomadic tribes who relied so heavily on the availability of wild game.  Of course, the Wampanoag tribe that befriended our forefathers was farmers.  Many of you reading this have seen seasons on a mountain farm and can certainly relate to the fickleness of crops. Thankfully, today we can always run to Walmart if the garden doesn’t pan out; this was not an option in the seventeenth century.

Giving thanks and the idea of feasting with thanksgiving dates way, way back.  In fact, it’s ordered in the Mosaic Law of the Old Testament.  God asked the Jews to keep eight different feast days.  While we see both the children of Israel and the early Christians fasting in lots of different circumstances, The Law actually required a fast for the Day of Atonement. 

Modern Sukkot

Any feast is a lot of work.  One of the feasts the Jewish people were given is Sukkot, the Feast of Booths and this is the perfect example of the work required.  During this seven-day holiday, booths are built and covered with palm fronds or other plant material.  The family leaves their home and lives in this booth for a week, remembering the conditions during The Exodus.  The feast is shared inside this booth as well. 

Family feasting in the Sukkot

While we aren’t building huts in the front yard, there’s still some work required to roast a turkey and trim the table properly – not to mention fighting the crowds to lay in all the groceries required for the feast. 

There’s some effort required of fasting as well of course.  It’s more than just going without.  The fast was intended to bless someone else.  What you were going to eat is supposed to be given up so that someone else can enjoy it.  With our social programs and hopefully because of active churches, it would actually take a little effort in America to find someone who really didn’t have a meal. 

Of course in our modern society, not every home is a Norman Rockwell painting.  Even if you are not living the idyllic family life this year, there is still so much be thankful for. 

This year I’m thankful for healthy children and loving friends and family surrounding me.  I live in a land of plenty where the probability I’ll go hungry this winter is really pretty small.  We have steady work, a warm house and shoes without holes.  And we will have a bountiful table on Thursday.  All of these and so many others are direct blessings from God and I give him the praise for them.

What do you have to be thankful for?

Daniel Boone’s Wanderings

I have a great new book to share with all of you and I’ll be doing so periodically over the next few weeks (as I manage to read it through).  The Land of Saddle-Bags (1924, Richmond, VA: Presbyterian Committee of Publication) was written by Berea College Professor James Watt Raine.  I’ve read many books about the Appalachian people in the early twentieth century and I’ve complained about most of them.  When I started reading this book, it brought tears to my eyes for I felt that finally here was a man who wrote with appreciation of my people.  He did not present us as a people in need of fixing, pathetic and ignorant. 

Professor Raine was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US when he was twelve years old. While he was educated in Ohio and New York, his family lived in West Virginia and Arkansas.  Therefore, he grew up among the Southern and Appalachian people and no doubt was one of them.  Many mountain folk were so busy surviving in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s that there are few books published by them.   The writings about these people in this era are penned by outsiders who came to the mountains to teach and heal the poor creatures living there.  It was a noble undertaking but I feel it doesn’t really reflect the true nature of the people.  The tone of The Land of Saddle-Bags seems determined to correct this image.

The book is only 260 pages yet I feel I can write from it for weeks.  It details the progression of civilization from New England down the Valley of Virginia and westward.  I was fascinated by Mr. Raine’s brief history of Daniel Boone and wanted to share it with you verbatim.

http://tnstateparks.com/parks/about/sycamore-shoals

“In 1750 Daniel Boone moved with his father, brothers, and uncles from their home in Pennsylvania into the Valley of Virginia.  They stayed in Rockingham County one season, presumably to raise a crop of corn. They then moved on down to the valley of the river Yadkin. Here the father and most of the uncles settled permanently and lived the rest of their lives. But Daniel, fifteen or sixteen years after his marriage, moved his family to Watauga, in Tennessee, a region he had explored ten or twelve years before. He had scarcely built his cabin before the whole valley was over-run with Scotch-Irish from North Carolina, coming there by thousands on account of the wrongs they received from the Government officials.

The next year, accordingly, in 1773, Daniel Boone and his wife, Rebecca Bryan, and their children started for Kentucky, where Boone had been hunting and exploring some years before. With them went forty Bryans, Captain William Russell, and several others. But in Powell’s Valley, just before they reached Cumberland Gap, the mountain pass into Kentucky, they were attacked by Indians. Several were killed, among them Boone’s eldest son, and the party decided to return to Watauga until the region became safer. Boone, having already sold his Watauga home, went into the Clinch Valley, near Russell. Two years later he moved his family to Boonesboro, where, in the meantime, he had built log cabins and started a stockade or fort. His migration from Pennsylvania, where he had lived sixteen years, to Kentucky thus took twenty-five years. He spent a year in Virginia, twenty years in the four different places in North Carolina, and four years in Tennessee.

It was, therefore, when he was forty-one years old, that he thus brought his family to Boonesboro, and he lived in Kentucky thirteen years. Then Boone’s land was seized on technical error by shrewd title-sharks, and in 1788 he moved to the mouth of the Great Kanawha River, now in West Virginia. For eleven years he lived here-about, but again coming into conflict with registered titles, in 1799 he decided to go beyond the jurisdiction of the United States. Accordingly, he moved across the Mississippi River into Spanish territory, penetrating nearly fifty miles west of St. Louis, and here lived for twenty years. His wife died when he was seventy-eight, and shortly thereafter he was persuaded to give up living alone in his cabin. From that time he lived in his son’s two-story stone house. Yet in his eighty-fifth year his sons could scarcely restrain him from starting out alone, or with an Indian lad, to begin life anew in the unexplored Rocky Mountains.

Boone always felt uncomfortably restricted when neighbors crowded their homes too close around him. He wanted to live in the open. He enjoyed the freedom of the unfenced wilderness. His life therefore was a succession of flights from his neighbors. However, he was not a recluse, in fact he was very genial and social in his nature, always enjoying neighbors – but not too close. He wanted elbow room. Like a sociable English gentleman, he needed a scope of land large enough to be alone when he wished. In this Boone was typical; he constantly led settlers into new territory, and as constantly fled from their midst as soon as they began to clear the forests.”

Say Thank You to a Vet

I am posting this article earlier than usual because I wanted to be sure to be on time for Veteran’s Day.  This is a holiday we need to pause to recognize those brave men and women who have fought for our nation; they deserve our attention for at least one day each year.  However, I found myself struggling to find the words; I started the article two or three times but couldn’t get it just right. Then, as I was baking a rather pitiful Happy Birthday cake for a very appreciative Marine (the USMC turned 240 years old yesterday and it turns out Marines don’t care so much if their cake is pretty so long as it’s sweet!), I suddenly realized that it is the effort – the service - that we must recognize and appreciate even if the words are not especially eloquent.

We are now more than 150 years past The American Civil War and seventy years past World War II, the stories of the common soldier are fading fast.  I really appreciate those people and organizations that have worked to preserve those stories and I’m always asking for them whenever I have a chance to talk with a veteran.  In fact, I’ve recently re-connected to one of my cousins who served in World War II and one of the first stories I wanted to hear from him was about his war-time experiences. (I’ll be sharing some of his stories over the coming weeks.)

Today I thought I’d share a little story with you about my great-great-grandfather, Philip Perie.  Now, if you read much of my stuff, you’ll often see glimpses of “Grandpa Perie” for his life, and the legends that live on about him are certainly story-material.

Grandpa Perie was born in 1822 – at least that’s what his tombstone says.  We wouldn’t usually doubt that date, but census records from the late 1800’s give ages that don’t correspond with that birthdate.  Still, he was born in Falerna, Italy and had at least one brother. 

Italy in the nineteenth century was a conglomeration of states ruled by foreign powers with a populace fighting for independence.  Therefore, the country was torn by one civil war after another.  I’m sure that every home had lost a father, husband or son to these wars and Mrs. Perie desperately wanted to give her own boys a better chance at life.  So, she worked her fingers to the bone to earn passage to bring them to America.  She first sent Joseph to America and he situated himself in Chicago, Illinois.  Then, in 1856 Philip followed and declared at the port of entry he was bound for Chicago.  He was already thirty-two years old, not an especially young man in those days.

So many immigrant stories begin with peasants buying passage to the promised-land only to arrive on our teeming shore to find the tired, poor, huddled masses were still pretty tired and poor.  And those fleeing from political unrest and persecution often found more of the same in America.  Yet, they came and they adopted America as their home and when war broke out, they chose a side and took a stand. 

I can’t even imagine what either Philip Perie or his mother must have felt when he’d been here just nine years and The American Civil War broke out.  I don’t know whether he enlisted immediately or waited until he was draft; whether he joined the Army for the regular paycheck, as many immigrants did, or if he truly believed in the cause of the union is lost to history.  But he fought and for the rest of his life he was proud of that service. 

I’m including a couple of pictures of Grandpa Perie in front of a giant flag; I don’t know if the Uncle-Sam-look is by design or perhaps the iconic recruiting mascot is modelled after Philip’s generation.  Even with so many questions remaining, doesn’t this old man simply exude patriotism?  Doesn’t he rather make you want to take your own stand for liberty?

Our brave soldiers, sailors and Marines have marched into battle for many different reasons over the years and every one of them ought to be remembered with great pride.  There are many things I would change in our nation today if I had the power, and our liberties do seem to be under attack on many sides.  But we still enjoy the greatest freedom on earth and that freedom has never been free.

Please say thank you to a vet today.