Rock Walls

Rock Wall at The Henry Home in Sequatchie Valley

I recently had occasion to drive down I-40 from the Plateau into Nashville.  A book I’d read had me thinking about the land around Nashville as it would have been in the 1800’s so I guess I was a little more aware of the farms and scenery than normal.  Couple that with my Daddy in the passenger seat evaluating every farm we passed and mourning the cleared land that “they’ve let grow up” in scrub woods and you can see why I would notice a low rock wall running into the woods among saplings no more than ten years old.

Excepting some natural coves, every inch of farmland on the Plateau and surrounding areas had to be wrestled from nature with a broad axe, horse-drawn plow and abundant sweat.  The land produces rock more abundantly than any other crop and if you want to win the battle you’re gonna’ have to do something with those rocks – nothing grows very well alongside them.

You may remember a story I shared here way back in 2015 about a homestead in the Sequatchie Valley and I included a picture of one of their rock walls.  My Uncle Hollis Henry told us that those walls were built as they carried rocks out of the fields and I imagine that stray wall along the interstate originated the same way.  A wall like that would have a dual purpose of getting the rocks out of the way and fencing off the crop land from roaming cattle.  It was more permanent than the split rail fences and who wants to split rails if you’re already picking up rocks.

Whew, does this line of thought not give you enormous respect for the people who first settled our Tennessee home?  Honestly, I might sit down among those rocks and just give up.  Yet day after day they returned to the field and must have walked hundreds of miles back and forth to their growing wall. 

Example of Schotland's ancient walls.  Photo courtesy of www.ghgraham.com

This is certainly not something unique to Tennessee.  It was undoubtedly a practice the immigrants brought with them from their homes in Scotland and Ireland.  The walls there are ancient. 

Central Kentucky has the most of America’s stone walls.  The Irish built miles of beautiful rock fences there but sadly only about 10% of the original walls remain.  And as those walls need repairs, special masons are often sought to do the work.  That dry stone technique wasn’t necessarily employed on these Middle Tennessee farms and I don’t know whether that was because the farmers here didn’t take the time for the formal construction or maybe they didn’t really possess that skill, being farmers rather than stone masons.  Learning how many of those formal rock fences have been destroyed in Kentucky makes me wonder if there were more of them in Tennessee. 

A well-kept old home I've been admiring in Sale Creek complete with a rock wall.  I wonder if that's original to the house?

I also can’t help but wonder why there aren’t even more rock walls surviving here.  We certainly have had plenty of rocks, although I suspect the sandstone of the Plateau didn’t lend itself so readily to this work.  Once again, I find myself with more questions than answers.  I suppose if I keep asking I’ll keep finding a few answers along the way.  When I do, I’ll be sure to share them.

Mel and Belle – a Muddy Pond Family Memory

I recently made a virtual friend in Mr. Bill Sisco.  I discovered him while researching on Ancestry.com.  I don’t know that I can exactly call him kin yet but you know the branches of family trees among mountain families are so inter-twined that I’m fascinated by all the region’s families. 

Bill shared some memories from his early years growing up in Muddy Pond.  It’s a very familiar story and one I thought you might enjoy as much as I did:

Mel and Belle Phillips

Mel and Bell [Phillips] farmed just outside of Muddy Pond.  Their daughter, Dolly Jane Philips and her husband Benton Phillips owned the store in Cliff Springs. Dolly Jane was a Philips that married a Philips but they were not related. Mel and Bell had one other daughter who was my grandma, Dovie Sisco.

I was born somewhere in the woods (I have no ideal where) near grandma and grandpa’s farm in a shack that mom and dad rented. Shortly after I was born dad built a house on grandpa’s land and the first few years of my life the woods and fields on his farm was my whole world.

Between the two of them they could do anything that needed to be done. Grandpa didn’t bother anyone and you had better not bother him or his but if your barn burned down he would be the first one there to help you rebuild and he would bring a wagon load of lumber and nails with him.

Mel Phillips, Bill Sisco and Dovie Phillips Sisco

I can remember Grandpa working all day in the fields and when he stopped for the day the first thing he would do is take the harness off of his big white horse, throw me up on the back of the horse and lead the horse down to a little creek where he wiped the horse down and let him drink all the water he wanted. When that was done he would lead the horse back to the barn (with me still on the horse) and feed him. I really thought that it was me taking the horse to water and that I was riding him all by myself.  Then he would clean himself up to get ready for supper (what ever happened to that word? Why don’t we have supper anymore?).

Grandpa had a little blacksmith shop in front of the house where he would shoe his horse and repair his farm equipment. [He also] repaired things for his neighbors. Everything was repaired, nothing was thrown away.

Grandma was the doctor for everyone, She didn’t have a degree or the title but everyone from miles around came to grandma when they were sick or hurt. There was not any real doctors anywhere close by. She used to take me with her down on the mountain side to dig up roots that she used for medicine. She would tell me where to dig and she would fill up her bag (she also kept a jug of moonshine that she used for medicine).

They were my heroes. It broke their hearts when Mom and Dad moved to Ohio and took me away.

If Clothes make the Man, what do Shoes do?

I overheard someone recently comment on a grown man going barefoot and how that must have brought shame on his family.  It got me to thinking about our changing opinions because it wasn’t too many years ago that shoes on the mountain were only considered a necessity in the wintertime. 

But then I remembered the story about Gladys Pell and how the first time she saw her future husband he was barefoot in church.  We pondered why that embarrassed her because her own family was anything but wealthy.  Maybe the sentiments are the same – only divided by fifty or sixty years.  Maybe after so many years of having to do without proper footwear it’s become one of those things that we can’t imagine doing without.

Chinese woman with feet re-shaped by years of binding.

Shoes are a huge fashion statement these days and I have to admit that I like shoes.  I don’t have a  great many and I sure don’t spend the money on them that some folks do.  But I have often said a little prayer of thanks when I’m out in the mud in waterproof boots.  And the technology behind tennis shoes or hiking shoes today is unbelievable and I’ve thought many times about the soldiers who marched hundreds of miles in rough brogans – or even without shoes; of the farmers who followed a mule and a plow day in and day out wearing hard soles and no fancy insole support.  At least we aren’t like the Chinese of 1600 – 1800 who bound up their girls’ feet creating something inhuman – I read an interview where a woman explained you started binding feet at about 3 or 4 years old, ‘when you could reason with the child about the pain.’  I could cry right now just thinking about it.

Loretta Lynn’s iconic Coal Miner’s Daughter lyrics mention “…we didn’t have shoes to wear but come wintertime we’d all get a brand new pair…” Now there’s some creative license in a song but I’m wondering if she was a little optimistic in that explanation because new shoes for a passel of kids would have very nearly required a miracle for the average coal miner.  More likely the younger children wore hand-me-downs.

Hand-me-down shoes may have been an easier gift in yester-year when households had a shoe last  and skill to make repairs.  My great grandmother, Emma Stepp, possessed such a skill.  The story is that she could very nearly make shoes – and if she could have gotten ahold of all the materials maybe she could’ve created them from the ground up.  We have a story about her visiting with her sister one of the poor relations (which is rather a joke in itself as they were all fairly impoverished) and learning that one of the children had no shoes for the coming winter she asked her sister if she could find an old pair of shoes at home.  The next day Grandma delivered a fine pair of shoes for the child.

Cultures around the world are different and there are certainly places where good shoes are still scarce.  A girlfriend shared with me her experience on a short-term mission trip to deliver shoes.  Instead of just dropping boxes filled with footwear the missionaries sat beneath the people and fitted them with the proper shoes.  I would never have thought her proud but my friend told me how humbling the experience was for her and I can certainly understand that. Yet in bible times washing feet was an honored custom for visitors whose feet were tired and filthy from foot travel on dusty terrain. 

Isn’t that amazing to think how our perceptions have changed over a few thousand years?  We’ve gone from routinely washing another’s feet to shame at the sight of a grown man barefoot.

Under the Bluff

We have these phrases that we use all the time and I have a hard time knowing what’s our mountain vernacular and what’s common English.  So if you told me there was a spring “under the bluff” I wouldn’t think twice about it and unless I was unfamiliar with the particular piece of land I could go right to that spring. 

After the recent article about water, I was talking with a cousin who hasn’t lived on the mountain in nearly seventy years.  He made that very statement about our grandparents' old place, that they had a spring under the bluff.  Somehow it surprised me to hear him use that particular phrase and it got me to wondering whether that’s regional or widely accepted.

A little internet search for the term “bluff” – which I really thought everyone would know about – yields a definition from Oxford Dictionaries lacking any reference to a rocky overhang.  What do you reckon people call that thing because I think bluffs appear all over the place, not just in the vicinity of the Cumberland Plateau?  Well, “The Free Dictionary” does reference, “a steep promontory, bank, or cliff” so I guess it’s not totally foreign.

The mountain has plenty of bluffs – and they can be a welcome respite in the summer for cool shade, in a rainstorm or blocking the wind on a cold winter’s day.  Our Native American predecessors made good use of them if the arrowheads found under them give any indication. (And maybe you'll remember the story here about the Indian Painting under the bridge rock.)  We even have a story about some men working away from home; their boarding house went up on the rent so they just set up housekeeping under a bluff. 

Now spending some time under a bluff is not akin to living under a bridge – it’s usually quite nice under the bluff and since bluffs aren’t generally good building sites, most of the ones I can think of are off to themselves in the woods where it’s quiet and there’ll often be water dripping off the roof so you have that gentle sound.  A story about living under a bluff isn’t a sad one really.

If you’ve got a good-sized bluff on your farm it’s also a fine place for keeping stock, especially hogs since they are shorter than cows and these openings are sometimes small.  In the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area there is a bluff where two different families kept their hogs and the fencing around it is still kept intact.

In my latest novel, Plans for Emma, a young man sets up under a bluff for a while and he’s doing just fine at that point.

I want to give special thanks to Scott Philips of Backwoods Adventures for sharing today’s pictures.  If you’re planning a visit to the Big South Fork, Scott can sure show off the bluffs there.

Now I’d love to hear from you – is this still a common expression for you?  If so, be sure to let me know where you live or where you’re from because I’m very curious how far this saying reaches.

Engagements, Rings and Weddings

Over the Christmas holiday my niece, Anna Grace Lane, accepted a marriage proposal and a ring from Mr. Cody Hull.  So you can imagine the big topic of conversation these days is wedding plans.   As usual, I’ve found myself comparing what seems to be the norm today with the approach my grandparents’ generation, and those before, took to weddings. 

I had already been thinking along these lines after the proof-readers of my latest novel asked for more details of the protagonist’s wedding.  Each one of them was disappointed when I expressed that mountain weddings of the late 1800’s weren’t very grand.  So I thought I’d share some of my research with yu’ns.

The very stage of being engaged is the first difference.  Remember the Christmas story?  Mary was “espoused to be married” to Joseph, not a term we use today and their process of marriage was different too.  The first step of marriage in ancient Israel was a betrothal which involved a would-be groom giving a gift to the girl’s father and reaching an agreement with him.  This was a firm commitment.  Months or even a whole year would pass before the wedding festivities which might last for days.  Only then would the couple be considered married.

In fact there seems to be a difference between being engaged and just plannin’ to get married.  In the past, couples simply decided to marry and did so pretty quickly thereafter.  You may recall the recent article about my Aunt Janavee Sisco whose intended husband was working up north.  Janavee had spent a few weeks visiting her brother in Dayton, Ohio when she and Willard Sisco deepened a lifelong friendship.  The two had grown up just across the holler from each other and Willard’s sister had already married Janavee’s brother.  They decided they would marry but it was time for Janavee to return to Tennessee.  Willard came home shortly thereafter and as he told me he decided he’d better go ahead and marry her before someone else did.

It seems like a familiar sentiment; another great aunt remembers asking her mother’s advice on a proposal.  “If you don’t marry him somebody else will,” was the wisdom my great-grandmother imparted. 

Willard and Janavee drove to Georgia because Tennessee required a blood test and two week wait for results.  Clyde Whittaker and Ellen Bilbrey drove up to Jamestown, Kentucky and why they went north instead of south Clyde doesn’t remember sixty-eight years later.  He does recall that most folks who didn’t want to wait two weeks for their blood tests went ‘down toward Chattanooga’.

We’ve talked here about some traditions when we talked about  a traditional Appalachian wedding cake and the saying that the number of layers in a bride's cake reflected how beloved she was.  However, among our mountain folk, I can’t find any stories of church weddings – even simple ones before 1950, and not many until the mid 1960's.  June Howard told me a few years ago that “most people got married at the preacher’s house, usually in front of the fireplace.”  That’s the exact location Clyde and Ellen chose, however, they didn’t particularly know the Baptist preacher who married them – they’d stopped in a restaurant and asked where they might get married.

Then there’s the question of a ring… I heard an advertisement for Tiffany’s recently claiming they invented the modern concept of engagement rings.   However, Wikipedia traces the tradition back to Rome.  Either way, we’ve come to expect an engagement ring and I see lots of young ladies wearing diamonds that I can’t imagine their grooms paying for.  Remembering our comparison with Israeli traditions?  That region doesn’t use engagement rings and actually wear their wedding rings on the right hand.  The tradition of diamond rings really rose after the output from African diamond mines exceeded one million carats per year in 1872.  That tradition greatly declined in America after World War I and certainly during the Depression years. 

Still the secluded Appalachian peoples had their own traditions when preachers rode a circuit and gold was reserved for coins that rarely entered a mountain home.  When I’m researching genealogy I’m surprised how hard it is to find marriage records.  It was a long way to the county seat in those horse and buggy days and I wonder how many vows were said before a preacher that were honored for a lifetime despite never being officially filed?  Early marriage licenses were issued by churches; in 1837 the United States began issuing marriage licenses from the state. 

The idea of a church ceremony was completely foreign on the mountain except for the very well-off.  I’ve tried to question why simple church weddings weren’t conducted without flowers or pageantry and the only answer anyone could offer was that so many people went to Georgia that it was never practical to plan even a simple wedding.