Keepers of the Tradition, Portraits of Contemporary Appalachians

eepers of the K

Tradition

Portraits of Contemporary Appalachians

PORTRAITS & PHOTOS by LESLIE ROBERTS GREGG STORIES by MICHAEL ABRAHAM

Arthur Conner, violin maker

Keepers of the Tradition Portraits of Contemporary Appalachians Portraits by Leslie Roberts Gregg Stories by Michael Abraham

PocahontasPress.com

Bill McDonald, farmer

Copyright Š 2015 by Leslie Roberts Gregg and Michael Abraham All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-10 0-926487-76-0 ISBN-13 978-0926487-76-5 Design by Michael Abraham and Jill Darlington-Smith Portraits and photographs by Leslie Roberts Gregg, except where noted Guest introduction by Fred First Printed in the United States of America

Pocahontas Press www.pocahontaspress.com

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Contents Guest Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII

Foreward. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX Dudley Scott. . . . . . . . . coal miner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Bill McDonald . . . . . . . farmer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Ada Sherman. . . . . . . . gospel singer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Wayne & . . . . . . . . . . . . guitar makers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Jayne Henderson Sam Steffens . . . . . . . . . herbalist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Jimmie Price . . . . . . . . . millstone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 preservationist Kerry Underwood. . . . moonshiner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Edwin Lacy . . . . . . . . . . Presbyterian minister. . . . . . . . . 52 Pam Frazier. . . . . . . . . . quilter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Jason Rutledge . . . . . . . restorative forester. . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Arthur Conner. . . . . . . violin maker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Swede McBroom. . . . . . woodworker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 V

bottles...

VI

Introduction

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McCoy Coal Tribute Plaque

VIII

Foreward

From outer space, the mountains of Western Virginia resemble petrified waves crashing onto shore. In the west is a roiling, disorganized sea, giving way eastward to more orderly ridges and finally to the breaker that is the Blue Ridge. Between are troughs, a series of valleys, the most significant being the Valley of Virginia, the great migration route of early settlers. Unlike eastern Virginia, where most settlers came from England (and involuntarily, from Africa) those settling in the western part of the state came primarily from Scotland, Ireland, and Germany.

The Germans were more prosperous and kempt, and took the better lands, leaving the hardscrabble mountain hollows to the ramshackle, pugnacious Scots-Irish.

The cultural traditions of these people remain with us to this day, carried from each generation to the next by those who revere the skills, crafts, and occupations of their forefathers and foremothers.

We are an informal people, not taken to boastfulness or ostentation. We are proud and talented, but modest in affectations. “The work speaks for itself,” is a common theme. No need to toot one’s own horn. We joke that culture is something we think other people have.

What incoming settlers found was plenty of room and people dispersed themselves widely, providing the isolation that was necessary for the nurturing of specific regional cultural idiosyncrasies.

They were thus imbued with a valuable cultural trait of independence and to some degree fatalism. Life has never been easy in these mountains, and people have had to make do, with the hard work of their heads, hearts, and hands, and with a healthy wariness of outside institutions (like the government!). It is a region of do-it-yourselfers, people who when something broke they fixed it themselves. When they couldn’t find or afford something they needed, they made it themselves.

They have a deep skepticism about whether the complex systems of everyday life will endure. If the world ever goes to hell in a handbasket – and lots of us think it might – Appalachians are the people you want to know. We are survivors. We have lived with scarcity before, we live close to the land, and we will help each other.

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This verdant, fecund land is Appalachia, of a bedrock region of America, where traditions are alive and meaningful. The practice of folklore here isn’t a reenactment, but an everyday lifestyle experience. The ways we cook and eat, dance and sing, celebrate, and mourn are manifestations of our cultural roots.

Leslie is a friend from my college days. She worked for a time in my father’s commercial printing business before making a career for herself in fine art, specializing in portraits. I worked for a time in her father’s car and motorcycle dealership. Our adult paths diverged but then converged again as our only children were nearly the same age and spent much of their academic careers together. We have been close for over two decades.

A telephone conversation in November, 2013, spawned this project. Leslie had spent twenty years as a full-time professional portrait artist. I had released my fifth book, all of which had been set in our greater neighborhood of Southwest Virginia and Southern West Virginia. She called one day to chat, and the idea of doing a project together emerged organically. She had often lamented that many of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the community had passed away as she dreamed of painting them. We shared our desire to honor the traits of our Appalachian neighbors. A collaborative partnership was formed and thus this book was born.

As Leslie and I prepared to begin our journey together, we thought of the many skills and crafts that had endured modernity. Woodworking. Instrument making. Quilting. Who were the people doing these things? Who taught them? Who motivated them? Our list began with the people we knew. ▷ Bill McDonald was an eighth generation farmer on the outskirts of Blacksburg who had sold Leslie a goat when she was a teenager. ▷ Edwin Lacy was an old friend of mine, a country preacher and banjoist who had recently started a congregation in Indian Valley, a remote area of Floyd County. ▷ Jimmie Price, a friend of Leslie’s, shared the passions we had to celebrate the culture. ▷ Sam Steffens was an herbalist, also from Floyd County, who had helped me understand that ancient craft for one of my novels.

The list grew quickly. Each person we visited suggested two or three more. We knew we would only provide a mere sampling of the rich tapestry of Appalachian traditions and the people who kept them. All around us, Virginians were expressing their artistic and aesthetic fancies in a smorgasbord of forms. Our collection would only scratch the surface. But even a sampling would be valuable.

Our initial forays provided insights that would endure through the entire process.

Some traditions were esoteric and specialized. Some were rare and some were still common. There weren’t many millstone preservationists around any more, but there were plenty of quilters. Regardless, the passions were just as strong and vibrant. Everyone we met expressed gratitude for our interest in them and in the preservation of their area of interest.

It was easy to fall into the trap of thinking that their generosity, hospitality, and candor were manifestations of that appreciation. More often than not, we were treated to a homecooked meal, a fine cup of tea, or some other token of gratitude. The reality, I suspect, was more elemental, that these people were culturally imbued with an innate and unwavering munificence, a free-flowing bigheartedness. It made our work much more engaging and rewarding.

Over and over we heard the fear that their time-honored wisdom might turn to dust with their inevitable passing. We quickly gained a sense of responsibility to promote their passions to others.

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Another recurring theme was that as important as the traditions were, they were not inviolate, and that these folks and their crafts were not immune to the exigencies of the modern world. Bill McDonald, like his father, grand-father, great-grand-father, and so on, was still on the farm. Yet he was quick to admit that while the gentle fields on which he pastured his bulls today was the same fertile, picturesque place as his forefathers, the way he tracked the weather, calculated his profits and losses, and bought and sold his products, had changed, and that change was ongoing. Revering the past, these people weren’t chained to it.

The most pervasive theme of all was that these traditions carry an importance that cannot be overstated. These traditions are the glue of the culture, and without culture you have nothing. In a world increasingly hot, flat, crowded, and homogenized, our slice of the central Appalachians remains cool, corrugated, uncrowded, and imbued with unique accouterments of culture, spiced with enactments of art, music, dance and crafts.

Many of these people are old enough to remember childhoods with neither electricity nor phones. Today most of us, even children, carry computers around in our purses or jeans pockets that with the tapping of a few keys provide the accumulated knowledge of mankind’s entire history. It is truly an astonishing time.

Will the traditions endure? Will today’s children learn to gather and mix native herbs, stitch a quilt, sing a ballad, shovel horse manure from a barn, or select a piece of wood that he or she will shape into a violin that will thrill symphony fans for centuries, when texting, video games, and television vie for his or her attention? Will the son or daughter of today, pursuing the blessings of the modern world, find more strength, pleasure, and fulfillment in taking a rectangular piece of wood and shaping it into the neck of a guitar than in surfing the Internet? Who can anticipate the hard times that will inevitably come and the worth of the cultural and institutional knowledge of our predecessors in dealing with them? Only time will tell. Who can calculate the value of the preservation of a culture? Who can articulate the urgency?

In the dozen people we present here, in the portraits of these Keepers of the Tradition, we offer hopeful answers.

Michael Abraham Blacksburg, Virginia February 2015

XI

Jason the horse whisperer

XII

Keepers of the Tradition Portraits of Contemporary Appalachians

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coal miner Dudley Scott McCoy, Virginia

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obody is working harder to keep his family coal mining tradition alive than Dudley Scott of McCoy, Virginia. He shares a charming old home overlooking the New River in Montgomery County with his wife of 67 years, Faye. They have raised five children and now have 10 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. The house embodies the old saying about a place for everything and everything in its place. Even in his Golden Years, Dudley is a fastidious man, with his community’s coal mining heritage carefully catalogued and documented.

Dudley was born in Pulaski County in 1925, but was raised in the McCoy area where there were several working coal mines. “We lived in a community of company houses. It was a very tight-knit community.”

Montgomery County has no active coal mining at all today, but in those days, there were several semi-anthracite mines, at McCoy, Merrimac, and Coal Bank Hollow. The Valley Region coal area is approximately 100 square miles of Pulaski and Montgomery counties. In Dudley’s area, the primary coal seam was on a severe slope, breaching the surface at a 30% grade, then 2000 feet below steepened to 40%, and then 1500 feet further down leveled to 15%.

The distance from the mine entrance to the back end of the mine extended 6000 feet. The seam was 7-feet thick. There were three mines within two miles of his current home: Superior Anthracite, Great Valley, and Parrott (across the river in Pulaski County).

“I went through eighth grade. Then I dropped out of school and did odd jobs around the community.

I started coal mining when I was 18,” he explained.

“My father was a coal miner and when I was about 13, he got me hooked on mining. He took me into a mine during the summer when it was shut down and he was doing some maintenance. I got a chance to operate one of the electric motors. He showed me how. There were fourteen cars in the train. I got a’hold of the controller and pushed it up and those cars started moving and snapping the slack out of the couplings.

“When I first started in the mines, I loaded coal cars with a shovel. Then I worked mostly company work, driving a motor. We had Dudley Scott examines a lantern

3

miners’ language. The foreman would say, ‘How about running the motor up on 15 east?’ I started at forty-two cents an hour. It was 1943.

“The ‘trip’, which is several cars, was hooked to a 6000 foot long cable, 2” thick. There was a large hoist house with a 1000-hp motor. When the trip went down into the mine, it generated power back.

It went in and came out at 1200 foot per minute. Sometimes I would ride it out. When it was on the steep part, coal pieces would fly back, so I’d have to duck my head and keep my eyes closed. The pieces would hit my hard hat like hail hitting a tin roof.

“The hoist operator could tell where the car was by an indicator. People underground could signal him by touching two bare wires on the ceiling, which would ring a bell. One, two, three, or four rings, each had a signal. For example, one bell was stop, two bells was pull, three bells was back up, three short bells was back up fast, three long bells was back up slow, and four bells was pull slower. The cable ran on rollers mounted between the tracks.”

Dudley described an intricate system of moving cars to the mining areas, often pulled by mules, to the main shaft with the cable car. Most summers, the mines would shut down because there was no market for the coal.

During the summers, men would hunt, fish, and garden to keep food on the table.

Dudley volunteered to fight in World War II, training in San Diego at boot camp. But he was a slim man, not 100 pounds. The Marines determined that he was too small to send him to war. So they discharged him and sent him back home. He got a job at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, locally When you’re mining, called the Powder Plant. He you’re in the mine joking and was involved in a fatal accicarrying on with the other dent that he survived only guys. You don’t think about through luck. As dangerous the danger part. as coal mining was, his perception was that working at the Powder Plant was worse.

He was afraid to return there, so he went back into the mines.

I teased him about the obvious irony of going back into the mines because outside work was too dangerous.

“My buddy got killed. I was talking with him just before. I escaped death one time and I didn’t want to do it any more. The War Dudley and Faye Scott

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didn’t work out and I almost got killed at the Powder Plant.

“In 1947, I worked at the Big Vein mine.

The mine was on a slope. We mined out the coal in corridors but left lots of coal in place in what we called pillars. They were left in place to hold up the roof and keep the mine from collapsing. The pillars are roughly 12-foot wide by 200 foot long. The rooms are 50-foot wide. We used what we called a breast auger to drill holes in the coal to set sticks of dynamite. The auger was a type of drill, pressed forward by one miner holding the back end against his chest, and turned by another miner with a crank. We’d drill eight feet. Then we’d shoot the dynamite.”

Note that the coal is already flammable!

“We’d drill on an angle, like a V. When we shoot the dynamite, it would blast off Home made bird houses a big wedge shape of coal. The miners used to shoot their own dynamite, but after some explosions, they started having shot foremen do it. They’d test for methane gas first. They had a little device that looked like a lantern with an open flame in it. If it encountered methane, the flame would build. Methane is lighter than air, so there is more near the ceiling. Methane will only burn with the right concentration with air.

“We had a big fan pulling air into the mine to suck the methane out. There was always a good breeze. It is always around 53-degrees, good working temperature. We had electric lights, powered by batteries. They used to use carbide lights. They have a flame and sometimes they’d start a methane fire. Once over in Parrott they singed a mule and it ran to the outside of the mine. It would prevent the methane from building up because it would start smaller fires.

“The corridors in the mine were like streets in a city. Each one was named, like ‘two-east’, ‘two west.’ I worked the mines for about eight years. My dad actually fired me because he thought it was too dangerous. He just wanted to protect me.

“I went back to the arsenal. The mine at Big Vein got too filled with methane gas to be safe to work. I worked at the Arsenal for 29 years and then I retired. I had a bad heart. My love was in the coal mine.

“When you’re mining, you’re in the mine joking and carrying on with the other guys. You don’t think about the danger part. I enjoyed working. There is an odor in there that I like. You finish your shift and come out and take a shower and you feel refreshed and good about yourself.

“I was working in a mine that blew up when I was off (duty).

I was working the night shift and the explosion happened the next morning.

“The Great Valley Big Falls of the New River

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mine started in 1925. It closed in 1949 because there was too much gas. There’s still plenty of coal down there. It was a modern mine, but it still blew up two times. On April 18, 1946, twelve miners died in a methane explosion. I was never in a mine when one blew up. I was never seriously hurt.

“They shut down the mines every summer. People would put in a garden. Sometimes they’d put a garden on an island in the river. They’d hunt and fish to put meat on the table. People borrowed from each other, like sugar or whatever. Everybody took care of each other.”

Faye said, “I can’t say that I was scared for him to be mining. He was 22 and I was 17 (when we married). I was glad he was working and had a job. He had planted a garden and we lived out of that the first summer we got married. We had plenty of tomatoes and beans. “(Dudley and I) met in Blacksburg. I was eating ice cream with my friend. The bus driver knew us both. The driver told him where I lived and he came up to my house I NEED A CAPTION. a-courting.

It always amazes me to think about how McCoy looked then. There were company houses, a miner’s boarding house, five stores and a barber shop, a post office, train station, and a shoe cobbler. All kinds of things. You could get anything you need. You could catch the train to Roanoke or Bluefield. There was a ferry (across the New River) that would carry two cars and we’d take that and then drive to Radford. If we needed a pair of shoes or shopping, we’d go to Radford. My five children were born in New Altamont Hospital (in Christiansburg).”

A train rumbled down the track, barely a hundred feet from Dudley and Faye’s back door. It dramatically shook the otherwise near silence of the pastoral area. It sent up swirls of coal dust, flying from the uncovered coal cars, rumbling down the track from West Virginia and far Southwest Virginia mines. Dudley said they have eight or ten trains come by every day.

Faye said, “In the coal camps, everybody was like one big family. There were about

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twenty company houses. Everybody knew everybody and people did things together. When I hear Dudley and his friends talk about it, I think it was a great time. The children played together. It seemed like everything they did, they did together. Neither of our boys worked in the mine. They were too young.”

Dudley said, “Sometimes when we’d open up the mine after the summer, I’d go in there and pump the water out and charge the motors. I would be sitting in there where it was quiet. You could hear a rumbling where the mountain was settling. When a train would rumble by overhead, you could hear the wheels run over the joints. There was always a lot of excitement in the mines.”

Miner’s monument in McCoy

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farmer

Bill McDonald Blacksburg, Virginia

“T

his is not my grandfather’s farm,” Bill McDonald told Leslie and me as we stood outside on the gravel driveway leading to his family manse. The view before us was splendid, sun-bathed fields of late-autumn grass with the long ridgeline of Brush Mountain to the northern horizon. “The story you’re after here today is not the Bill McDonald story. It is the McDonald family story. I am fully aware of that.”

We went into a two-story log cabin beside the family home. Bill and his family had painstakingly restored the cabin to use as a guest house. The main floor had a single room with hand-hewed chairs around a wooden table and two rocking chairs before the hearth. In a corner was a stand which held four saddles, vertically. Bill called it his “family saddle tree”.

“I tell people that my family tree is a saddle tree,” he began pointing at each saddle sequentially, starting at the top. “This is my paternal grandfather’s. Then my paternal grandmother’s. Then my maternal grandfather’s. Then my maternal grandmother’s. The first is a Buena Vista saddle. The next is a side-saddle. My maternal grandfather’s was a Western saddle made by a man in Tazewell.

The bottom saddle was also made by the same man. It is called a summer seat saddle because it has a split in the middle. He would have made it in the 1920s, and he refurbished it in the 1960s. The saddles of my maternal grandparents are older, around 100 years old.”

Bill wears a Hoss Cartwright style vest and hat, and at 6’5” and 300 pounds is almost as big. He greeted Leslie with a big bear-hug. My greeting was a handshake with a huge, muscular hand. He is a recent widower, having lost his wife, Teresa, to cancer.

We settled ourselves into the rocking chairs as he continued to speak about his family. He was in the seventh generation on the land.

“It was deeded in 1763. We know that my people were here before that.

They were Scots-Irish immigrants who landed in Maryland and worked their way through. There were several members of the McDonald family (who immigrated). Some stayed in the Shenandoah Valley near Harrisonburg. Some came to Lexington.

Some came to Botetourt County.

Some settled in the area (now in eastern Montgomery County) that is on the map as McDonald Mill. At the

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time this was part of Augusta County and the courthouse was in Staunton.

“Joseph McDonald and his sister, who was a ‘Bain’ settled in the horseshoe bend of the New River (now in western Montgomery County), the area that is now the Arsenal (now called the Radford Army Ammunition Plant). They gravitated to this area (just west of Blacksburg) because they thought it reminded them more of the rolling hills of Scotland.”

Bill explained that there were several farms in the area that like his were multi-generational, including the Hoges, the Walls, the Oteys, and the Childresses.

“Everyone who settled the area farmed the land out of necessity. But there was a grist mill, a tannery, and a gunpowder production plant.

The McDonalds marketed it under the name, ‘McDonald Sure-Fire Gunpowder’. That would have been around 1760s through the 1780s.

“My mother is a Bowen. Her family is from Bill and Leslie Wales. They settled in Tazewell County, in the Cove section of southwestern Tazewell County. One of my ancestors, Reece Tate Bowen, fought with the Overmountain Boys at Kings Mountain, South Carolina, in the Revolutionary War (in October, 1780). He was killed at that battle.

“British General Ferguson under General Cornwallis had sent word through the mountains of Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina that he expected the new immigrants to be loyal to the Crown, and if they weren’t, he’d lay waste to them with ‘sword and fire’. That went over like a lead balloon. They said, ‘if it’s a fight he wants, then it’s a fight he’ll get.’ Men from all over these mountains mustered up and gathered in Abingdon (the earliest town in the area, 100 miles to the southwest) and marched southward. Ferguson took the high ground and swore he’d never be taken off. He was right; they buried him there. There were 300 or so casualties This is not the for the Redcoats and 36 for the Patriots, but my great-great-greatfarm my son will great-great-grandfather Reece Tate Bowen was one of them. That manage. I’m good with name has been held in high regard in the family ever since. There is that. We need to educate now a family member in the same generation as my son who is the the future generations to eighth to be named Reece Tate Bowen. With all the cousins and appreciate the value of uncles and everything, at one time there were 7 living men with the land and what it that same name. can produce.

“Joseph McDonald was the first to settle in this part of the country. He was already in his sixties when he came to this country.

My direct lineage is Joseph, Jonah, Floyd Fectus, Charles, Richard, James, then me, and then my son. I’m William Hoge McDonald and my son is Joseph Randolph McDonald because (my late wife) Teresa’s father is Randolph.”

Leslie and Bill had known each other for decades. They met when she bought a lamb from him in the 1970s that she raised as a pet. Although his family has this long history in Blacksburg, he grew up in Tazewell, 90 miles west, as his father was an extension agent there. But he spent his summers at the farm in Blacksburg. Bill’s father graduated from Virginia Tech, then served in Korea, and then got his job with Virginia Cooperative Extension. He met Bill’s mother in Tazewell. They worked together, but she had to quit when they got married due to nepotism rules. So she began school

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teaching. They had a house in town and a small amount of farmland. But Bill’s experience for and love of farming developed at the maternal family farm in Bland County and the paternal family farm in Blacksburg.

“My family, my parents, and I, took over the operation (in Blacksburg) from my grandfather in 1976. My mother’s family was in farming, too.

“When I moved here to farm full-time, things were different from now, of course. But what’s been a constant here is that farmers in this area primarily have one thing to sell: grass. The way we sell that is through letting cattle and sheep harvest and utilize that grass into a product that we can use. In the 1700s and 1800s, everyone did some farming to one degree or the other, as they needed to be self-sufficient. So they raised some crops. They had sheep’s wool for clothing. They raised flax to make linen. They grew wheat and corn. They had orchards for fruit. They raised vegetables. They grew sorghum for molasses as a sweetener, as sugar wasn’t available. The constant is good grazing.

“We have a good moderate climate with moderate to abundant rainfall. It doesn’t get too hot or too cold. We grow grass for an extended season. We have more varieties of grass to extend the season. We grow the basics: orchard grass, white clover, white Dutch clover, red clover, fescue, timothy grass, timothy hay, rye, wheat, and triticale. We raise beets and turnips for the cattle and sheep (to eat). They eat the tops and then turn up the bulbs, the tubers, and eat them. We raise forage soybeans, millet, pearl millet, and fox-tail millet. We do a variety of different crops to add nutrients to the ground. We utilize as much forage as possible because this is a good forage area. (Humans) can’t use this stuff directly. Cattle can convert this to a healthy, wholesome nutrient-dense food supply, due to their ruminant digestive system. Cattle regenerate the land as they constantly drop new fertilizer to the ground.

“We have limestone and shale soils in the area. This farm is on limestone. The Catawba (Valley) is a shale valley.

It will dry out faster. We try to enrich the soil texture to keep it productive. We farm and own about 500 acres, but we lease another 350 acres. Absentee landowners allow us to farm. It is better for the environment to be in pasture because grasslands absorb more carbon than forests. Of our 500 acres, around 50 are in forests.

“These old families like to see their kids stay in farming. We’re not sure our kids will be able to. Everybody wants a higher standard of living and the economies of scale in farming mean that you can only make so much per acre. It’s changing all the time, but in years past, if a man had 125 acres, he could support his family. Now it’ll be tough with less

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Bill and his mother, Martha

than 1200. We don’t have vast land resources in my family.”

Bill said there was much to be said about higher value and better quality, but at the end of the day, people want more for their money.

“You have to produce more units. The bad part about agriculture is that the more units farmers produce collectively, the less they get paid for them. In electronics, for example, you set a price for iPhones. The more you produce, the more income you make. Having more of them on the market doesn’t reduce their value. People only eat and wear so much. And what we make is perishable. If there is a surplus, it is worth less. It’s hard to increase margin; we need to increase output.

“Economics is a driving force of everything.

“We raise and sell bulls and replacement females to other commercial producers. So we have a value-added product. That keeps us viable. If you’re in farming, it’s a gamble.

“I have to compete against the romance.

We have hobby farmers who produce just for

the pleasure and they don’t care about profit.”

Leslie said her grandfather always stressed to her the value of land. “He told me over and over, ‘the family farm is important. Hang on to the land. It got people through the (Great) Depression years.’”

Bill spoke about the beauty of the region. “There’s nothing like coming home to this land. I have had the pleasure of traveling to many places in this country and a few in others. It’s always good to come home. When I come into this Tom’s Creek basin and see the cows, horses, and sheep grazing, it’s spectacular.

“Our story for your book is that I am part of a continuum, a multi-generational endeavor. We’re still trying to produce food and fiber for America. American families need what we produce. Starvation is still a problem. We will feed the world through technology. We cannot feed the world on 1940s practices. We are still trying to provide for our families. I hope my son has the opportunity if he wants to, to continue farming. He’s studying industrial engineering. It will be hard for him to keep farming. He might be able to run it without it consuming all his time. He might be able to get a farm manager and some other help and then do the other things he wants.

“Farming has made food cheap and abundant. We are the best fed country in the world, but people are unappreciative. It’s a shame that the worst ( food) for you is the cheapest.

“I have Simmental cattle, from the Simme valley in Switzerland. It’s the most popular breed in the world. We have Angus, too. Angus is the most popular in America.”

We got to talking about Switzerland, and the beauty and the fact that the flattest, most fertile ground is reserved for farming, whereas here it

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is given over to residential developments. Bill said, “The difference in Europe is that they have been hungry. We’ve never been hungry here. We need to understand the value of agriculturally productive land.

“People are getting away from science. Do you know that there is actually a larger carbon footprint in raising a cow all the way to (processing) weight on grass than shipping it (to the plains states) to have it finish-fed to slaughter weight on corn? To get the cow to an endpoint where it can be utilized by feeding it exclusively on grass is more resource-intensive because it must stay alive longer. People want to be romantic about local growing. There are concerns about large, industrial feedlots and slaughterhouses. I have toured them. I was apprehensive. I didn’t think they could be as clean as we have them here. I went to a feed lot in Grant County, Kansas, where they have 120,000 head of cattle on 500 acres. It was one of the neatest, cleanest operations I’ve ever seen. The resources to feed the cows were all around McDonald Farms’ bull them. They catch the run-off and sending it back to the grain farms. (The cattle) are not in mud because it is arid. There is efficient feeding.

Really, nothing is wasted.

“As I said, it’s not my grandfather’s farm. I can’t make a living (raising cows through their life span) and I can’t feed the world doing that. We are doing what we think is best, utilizing sound science.

Nowadays, I am using DNA information to select my cattle. Information is power, so the more information I have, the better decisions I can make. If I base my decisions on emotion, that can be swayed in how it is presented.

“This is not the farm my son will manage. I’m good with that. We need to educate the future generations to appreciate the value of the land and what it can produce. We need to let them gain knowledge of how to allow the land to do that in a sustainable way.

“We have to honor the tradition where we came from because it is the road map of where we’re going.”

Bill’s mother, Martha, who is now in her 80s, joined us. “I was born and raised in Bland County,” she informed. (Note: Bland is 45 miles west of the current him in Blacksburg.) There was five of us children; four were born at home. The doctors came to the house. My mother’s mother came up: Momma Lucy. She was the one the neighborhood called when somebody was going to have a baby.

She wasn’t a trained midwife, but she just helped everybody. She was a super-human person. She

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died when I was four. We lived on a farm at the base of Big Walker Mountain.

“I remember growing up working on the farm. During World War II, the men went either off to war or to work at the Powder Plant (the Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Pulaski County that made gunpowder). We worked several farms that either came through mother’s side or daddy’s side of the family. Daddy ran four farms. So as children we helped too. When we’d fuss about milking the cows, daddy would say, ‘Better not fuss; that’s what educated you!’ That paid the bills.

“All my brothers and sisters had to help. We had milking machines. We had to milk the cows before we went to school in the morning. There was a filling station just below the house and the bus would pick us up there. We were the last house before climbing the mountain.”

Bill told us that in 250 years of farming, he knew that in the earlier generations, his forefather had owned slaves. There were three family homes on their Blacksburg farm that had once been occupied by slaves. With the emancipation of the slaves 150 years ago, the family had run farms without slaves for threefifths of the time. “Slavery has been gone from here for 150 years. You can dwell on it if you want, but let’s move on. Our racial relations today suffer from the fact that we tend to think of ourselves as Irish-Americans or Scots-Americans or Russian-American or African-Americans. If we think of ourselves as Americans first, in that we come from diverse backgrounds but our diversity is our strength, then we can move forward together and build and do great things. Racial divisions are something we need to work past. It is negative energy that doesn’t need to be there. The American dream is still possible in this country regardless of where you come from or what your background is.”

Martha told us that her graduating class at Bland County High School was the largest ever, until just last year. With overall depopulation of rural areas, Bland’s population had diminished over the decades, only increasing recently. “My class had 52 graduates in the class of ‘48. We make a point to keep up with each other.

“I went to Madison College (now James Madison University in Harrisonburg) and then transferred to Radford (now Radford University in Radford). I got a degree in Home Economics and got qualified to teach in several subjects, including a few I never hoped to teach!

“I met my husband at the Richland’s Fair in Tazewell County. He was an (Agricultural Extension) Agent. He came back from Korea (War), and he got a job in Extension. They placed him in Martha McDonald with bridal photo of herself

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Tazewell. We dated off and on for awhile and then got married. We bought a house and some farms.

(After our boys were born) I started back to teaching. I taught for 30 years, mostly at the high school.

(My husband) retired two years before I did. He spent lots of time here in Blacksburg running the farm. We retired here twenty-five years ago and have turned over the farm to Bill. (Back in Tazewell) I had a job jar that I’d been waiting on my husband to do for years. (When we moved here), he just walked off and left that job jar.

“I grew up on a farm. We had livestock projects (in 4-H). Much of the money I made was in my 4-H projects. It is what I’ve grown up with; it is my life. When Bill told me he wanted to be a farmer, I understood that real well. I like being near the land. If I stay inside sometimes I worry about things that I have no control over. When I go outside, Mother Nature brings things back to normal.

“It is wonderful what our ancestors have been able to do. You think of the rough life in earlier clan days. We’ve made a lot of progress as human beings.

“I think we (Appalachians) are not a wealthy people as a group. We have a good standard of living.

In our churches and neighborhoods we have done a lot to help people who are having a hard time.

We like the idea of helping people with a hand-up rather than a hand-out. I take pride in the work I do. Other people take pride in the work they do. If people don’t have jobs, they miss something about being able to contribute to their own upkeep as well as their family and friends.

I want to be able to give people a hand-up so they can accomplish things and gain some self pride and self worth. It is something the human race needs. The good Lord planned for us to do that.”

Bill said the farming community is still tight.

“You see it when a family member dies. If the hay needs to come down, all of us will get together to get it done. We’ll get his hay up.

We keep the farm going.

We’ll have thirty people with their combines and get the work done over the weekend so the family doesn’t have to worry about it. I have been on both sides of that.”

When his father died, neighboring farmers came to chip in. When a friend had heart surgery, Bill and the other farmers helped out. “We’re busy on our own. We’ve had to become more efficient to maintain our standard of living. But you still have to take care of family and friends. You can’t be so busy that you can’t take care of family and friends. If you are, what good is it?

What else is life for?

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gospel singer Ada Sherman McCoy, Virginia

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da Sherman lives to make joyful noises unto the Lord! She lives in a small, spotless house only a mile or so from Dudley Scott in the McCoy community of Montgomery County with her husband of 58 years.

Leslie, Ada, and I sat at her kitchen table where she told us, “I was born and raised in Radford, Virginia. I went to the Fred Wygal Elementary School.” It was a school for blacks; all schools in Sherman’s era were segregated. The building now is the home of the Radford City Public Schools Administration Office.

“I left Radford when I was about 20 and moved to Welch, West Virginia. I’m 82 now, so that was a long time ago! I worked in dry cleaning and day work. Negroes didn’t have access to many good jobs. You either cleaned someone’s house or worked in a restaurant cooking or something like that.

“I was single then but was married in 1956 at a church gathering in Pulaski, Virginia. Right now we live near the home where my husband, Leon, grew up in Wake Forest.

“I became a Christian before I met him. I was playing for the choir in Pulaski. I never had any music or piano lessons. The Lord has blessed me over the years. I still can’t read any music.

I never had teachers. I play by ear. If I hear a song I have never heard before in my life, I can listen and I can pick it up and play it. Even if somebody sings a few notes, I know what they’re going to sing. It is a gift from the Lord. I don’t know what key I’m playing in. I just go ahead and play it.

“I never had any children. The Lord didn’t bless us with any children but I raised two nieces. One is now 52 years old and the other is 65.

“I now play regularly for my church, the New Pentecostal United Holiness Church in Wake Forest. We only have a few members now, only about 5 to 7.

We were having services every Sunday,

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but now it’s only on the first and third Sundays, twice a month. Then we have singing and prayer reading and then scripture reading and then the sermon. I’ll sing two songs before the pastor preaches.

“I sing and people can sing along, but there are so few of us that I usually sing alone.

There are no young people.

The oldest is 94. The youngest is in her 70s. Our preacher would preach even if there were only two people there. He doesn’t preach for the money.

He preaches for the souls.”

Sherman said membership peaked at around 40. “We often go to other churches to sing. Say for instance another church might have a musical.

Then I will prepare a list of songs I’m going to sing. They may have a full program of choirs they’ve invited.

“I have been in Wake Forest for 50-some years. That was more my home than Radford.

Lots of generations have been

born and raised, and have gone.

Wake Forest was settled after the Civil War by freed black slaves from nearby Kentland Farm, now a research farm for Virginia Tech. The Sherman family is one of the original families there.

There are as many white families there now as black. Even though neighborhoods are integrated, the churches aren’t.

“You read in the holy Bible in the book of Psalms, ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord. Praise him with resounding cymbals. Praise him with the stringed instruments. Let everything that has breath praise ye the Lord.’ Now are you going into that church and sitting like you’re at a funeral? No! God is alive! He’s not dead.

Look all around us. You’re going to praise him if it’s in you.

I only sing gospel There’s no way under God’s heaven as powerful as God is, if he songs... I’m with the Lord has come into your heart and saved you, and he’s in you, there now. I don’t want is now way to keep quiet. You’re going to raise your hands.” to sing nothing else.

Leslie said she’d been to a concert in Blacksburg the prior year of gospel singing. “I have never felt so uplifted and so joyful.”

“You see that?” Ada agreed. “I’m rich! I am rich. I am a millionaire. We are here on this earth, just passing through. This is not our home. If you are living for Jesus and He has saved you, and you’ve given Him your life and you are working and doing what you can for Him, and you are trying to win souls for Him, when he comes back, he will take us back (to heaven) with Him.

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“He said, ‘I am going away to prepare a place for you. If I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you.’ He has given us our mansion.”

I chided Ada, telling her that it was clear that her millionaire admission was a figure of speech. I asked if she’d ever been poor.

“Yes, when I was a child. I remember when we didn’t hardly have food to eat. But we had so much love! I had three sisters and a brother. I’ve seen my mother wrap sacks around her feet because she didn’t have shoes. She went out to pick up wood to keep us warm. She would walk the railroad tracks and pick up the coal that had fallen off the trains. She would bring it home to make a fire for us. She washed our clothes on a washboard. I saw her hang up clothes on the line in the wintertime and they’d be freezing on the line before she could hardly get them up there. Sometimes we just had beans and bread or fried potatoes.

“We had so much love! My mom would set us on her lap and hug us and tell us how much she loved us. We didn’t have toys and things. We’d get fruit at Christmas, apples and oranges. We were so happy we’d eat the white part on the inside.

“They taught us to be honest. They taught us not to steal anything, not even a safety pin. Even if we were hungry, she told us not to steal food. She said, ‘If you ask somebody, I believe they will give you some food.’ She said, ‘Don’t never mistreat nobody. Don’t never make fun of nobody.’ My parents, they planted those seeds.

“But I want to tell you something: I am so happy to be black. God don’t make no mistakes. He made every last one of us. He created every nation under Heaven.

If your blood is AB+ and my blood is AB+, we can give each other blood. When we give blood, they don’t put on it, ‘This blood is from a black person or from a white person.’”

Montgomery County is only about 4% black today.

Many areas in Central and Southside Virginia are 50%

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black or more. I asked Ada if she would have preferred to live in a predominantly black community.

“Not really. I mean, no! I want to live where I like. If you have a job and you make enough money, why should you not be able to live wherever you like?” Ada mentioned a number of communities she’d live in, mostly in the area but some in West Virginia. “We love it here (in McCoy). The people here are so nice!

“People here have never had any racial problems. Black kids and white kids always played together. There isn’t any tension.

“I don’t have my own children, but I raised two nieces. My church is so small and it doesn’t have any young people. But the United Pentecostal United Holiness Church has other churches with young people. Here, we just don’t.

“There are many denominations, but that doesn’t have anything to do with your salvation.” She patted her chest. “It’s what’s in your heart. God is not coming back to no church building. We are the church. It is in us!

“The songs I sing now were sung when I was a child. It is changing so much, but lots of songs linger on. They are old songs. ‘Precious Lord.’ ‘The Blood that Jesus shed for me way back on Calvary.’

‘Plenty good room in the Father’s kingdom, Choose your seat and sit down.’

They were being sung 100 years ago.

“When I was young, mothers sang while they cooked and cleaned; that’s how I learned them. I only sing gospel songs. I don’t sing popular songs or show songs. I’m with the Lord now. I don’t want to sing nothing else. When you give your life to the Lord and you repent of your sins and He comes into your life, the scripture says old things are passed away; behold all things become new. Before I was saved, I was doing what the Devil had me do. God came into my heart and I changed.

“We were taught to be thankful! You tried to raise your family like what you were raised. Part of our tradition was to be good mothers and fathers to our children. We want to leave something for them. There is nothing like family! If even a cousin came to a hard place, we pooled our money and sent it to them. We’ve always done that.

“The community is sweet. When my sister died, the community came and brought flowers and food. I’ve been to the white church on top of the hill. We have always fellowshipped. It’s pretty out here. The river is here. There’s a mountain peak across the river and it is beautiful. I believe that even the people I don’t know, if I walked up to their house I could go in and visit them. I just feel that welcome.”

We walked across to Ada’s Zimmermann upright piano and she began to play for us. She stretched her voice which rang out loud and clear. Her mildly arthritic fingers raced across the blacks and whites. She sang a couple of songs for us. There was nary a songbook in sight.

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I begged her to sing a cappella. “I don’t like to sing without music,” she protested and then relented.

She sang “Just a closer walk with thee,” slowly, soulfully.

Just a closer walk with Thee, Grant it, Jesus, is my plea, Daily walking close to Thee, Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.

When my feeble life is o’er, Time for me won’t be no more, Guide me gently, safely o’er To Thy kingdom’s shore, to Thy shore.

It was beautifully done!

“Will there still be gospel music a generation or two from now?” I asked.

“Oh, yes sir,” she said confidently, showing us the photos of friends and family above the piano.

Her fingers danced lightly over the keys. “Oh, yes!” What better metaphor could there be of congenial race relations than the blacks and whites, making joyful noises, on a piano’s keyboard?

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guitar makers

Wayne and Jayne Henderson Rugby, Virginia

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obody embodies the concept of our book better than guitarist and luthier Wayne Henderson and his daughter Elizabeth Jayne, who is also now a well-regarded luthier in her own right. Wayne is perhaps the most well-known figure in this volume, having made guitars for people like Doc Watson, Tommy Emmanuel, Peter Rowan, and Gillian Welch, and even for rock guitarist Eric Clapton, the construction of which became the subject of Allen St. John’s 2005 book, Building Clapton’s Guitar.

Leslie and I met with them on the shady brick porch of Wayne’s home in the tiny community of Rugby, Virginia, population 7, just south of the Mount Rogers Recreation Area and Grayson Highlands State Park in Grayson County, Virginia. Wayne was born and raised there and lived there all his life. Jayne was born there as well, but grew up in Roanoke with her mother.

“Almost always people ask me how I got into this old time music,” Wayne began. He is a diminutive, stocky, man who perennially wears a baseball style hat, either of his own Henderson Guitars or his beloved Boston Red Sox. He has an elfin smile and twinkling blue eyes, and he speaks with a decided mountain accent, stringing out his long, flat “i” sounds. “It’s always been a big part of my life, as far back as I can remember. My dad (Walter) was a musician; he played old-time fiddle. My cousins played and my neighbors. Everybody who lived around here played.

“I went to school from the first to the seventh grade in a little school right up the road. Music and crafts were always part of this community.”

“People did crafts because they had to. It was a long way to town.

We grew up making stuff. Music and craft was a tradition of the area. I was into it more than most because my family was musical. Whenever we had a gathering, there was always music.

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“One of my first memories of playing music was going up with ( famed luthier) Albert Hash to what they called Cake Walks at Mount Rogers (School). It was an event to raise money for the school system. They I think my proudest just closed that Mount Rogers School a couple moment was when she of years ago. They had all started making them. That’s twelve grades there. Somea pretty big deal. She’s a times the graduating class great artist. would be only three people.

I went to the Virginia/Carolina High School.”

Jayne concurred, “The state line went right down the main hallway.”

Wayne boasted, “I had a big class, about 26 or 27.”

Jayne commented about her experience a generation later, “I had a class of 37.”

Wayne continued, “My grade school had two rooms. There were four grades in one and three in the other. When you were in the first grade, you heard what the fourth graders were doing, so it made it easier because by the fourth grade you’d heard everything already.

“I got in trouble for whittling on things. Every boy always had a knife. I loved to carve and whittle.”

Jayne went inside the house and brought out two toys Wayne had made decades earlier. One was an interlinked chain, made from one piece of wood.

Another was a spherical ball inside an open-sided channeled rectangular box, again carved from one piece of wood.

Wayne said, “I always had the patience to set and carve something like that because I thought it would be cool. Somebody said, ‘You can’t make that out of one piece of wood; you’ve got to carve it in two pieces, put that ball inside, and glue it together.’ I used to love carving chains. I even fascinated myself. When I got the chain done, it was longer than the piece of wood I started with.”

“He makes it look easy, too,” Jayne laughed. “I tell myself, ‘Oh, sure, I can do that.’ Seven tries later…”

Wayne said, “I always use local spruce wood when I can. The first piece of Appalachian red spruce I ever had to make an instrument out of was given to me by Arthur Conner (Note: Please see our chapter on him later in this book.). We were all at a fiddler’s convention. It might be the first time I ever met him. He had heard of my guitar building. He is a wonderfully generous fellow. He said, ‘I’ve got some stuff you need to have.’ I had an old ‘66 Ford that had a trunk about as big as most pickup trucks have now. He filled up my trunk with wood.

“That was my first introduction to local red spruce. It was from West Virginia. He gave me a hunk of it. The old guitar I play all the time now was made from that wood.

“I get lots of salvage wood now from barns. There’s an old barn near here made out of old wormy chestnut. It’s nice, pretty wood. I don’t make guitars out of it, but other stuff. Jayne went to school

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and was working on her degree in environmental law. She wanted to use local sustainable wood. .

That’s unusual (because) everybody wants their guitar made out of rosewood or mahogany.”

Jayne said, “I had a circular, weird path to instrument making. I never expected to do this, ever. I went to school, college, and graduate school. I asked dad if I could sell one (of his guitars) on eBay, because I needed the money, and I knew he was selling them for a fraction of that. Law school (costs) $48,000 a year. It was daunting. He said, ‘Yup, that’s fine, but you’re going to have to make it.

I’ll tell you what to do. I’ll give you the nicest (materials), but you’ll have to do it.’ I thought I’d do it and get it over with. Once I got into it, it was more fun than law school.

“I love making things. So that part was exciting. I wasn’t sure I could make a guitar. I had never seen the whole process.”

Wayne added, “I knew she could do it, because she’s a good artist and a good craftsperson.” The pride was evident on his face.

I chided Wayne about his reputation as a night owl.

He agreed, “Well, I usually get up and am in the shop by around noon most days. I work until three o’clock in the morning. I have visitors and company almost every day. Late in the evening I get more done. I get less visitors and less phone calls. I never turn people away.”

As he spoke, some people emerged from a just parked car and came over to listen to our conversation. Naturally, Wayne welcomed them politely.

Jayne countered, “The thing about my dad that I can’t do is that he will stop and hang out and it doesn’t bother him. I do like when people visit, (especially) when I’m doing things I don’t like, like fitting the neck. It’s no fun; it’s difficult. I love it when people come then!”

“I’ve been doing this guitar shop for fifty years now,” Wayne continued. “I carried mail for a while, but even then I was building guitars on the side. I worked in the shop every day.

I’ve always had orders. Even after my first one or two, I always had orders for more.

Other people made fiddles, but nobody was making guitars. Mom wouldn’t let me sell the first one. But I sold the second one and I’ve had orders for more ever since.

“Around here nobody could buy a Martin or a Gibson because they couldn’t afford it. I was happy to make one for somebody for $50 or $40 and a hardshell case. After I’d made seven guitars, in 1967 or ‘68 I made one that had a pearl binding. After my grandfather died, I spent time with my grandmother who lived just down the road here. I’d take my guitar and play. One night just before dark, the local moonshiner fellow came to see me. He said he’d heard about my Henderson Guitar

25

guitar and wanted to see it.

He asked to play it. He was a good singer and he could play rhythm real good. He said it was about the best guitar he’d ever heard. He got to wanting to buy it. It was the best guitar I had, too, so I didn’t want to sell it.

“I told my granny that I was gonna price it so astronomically high that it would get rid of him. I told him I was going to have to have $500 for that guitar.

He played it for a little while longer and then he left. I told my granny, ‘That worked, that got rid of him.’

The next evening, he came back by himself. He said he wanted to play that guitar again. He sat and played for thirty minutes and he said, ‘Well, I think I’ll just take the guitar.’ He had five $100 bills in his shirt pocket. I didn’t know what to do; I was in shock! I hated to lose my guitar, but that was more money than I’d ever seen or heard tell of. I told my granny that if I could make money like this, it was what I was gonna do. I could have bought a good car for $500 back then. But I thought right then that I needed tools and wood. So I spent the money on that. I still have tools today that I bought with that money.”

I asked Wayne how long a customer will have to wait these days and how much they’ll have to spend on one of his guitars. Jayne answered for him, saying, “If he made the very best, with the fancy inlay and the best wood, he’d probably charge $5000. It’s insane, because Martin charges $60,000 ( for a comparable instrument).”

Wayne added, “One of my guitars recently sold on eBay for $35,000.

I think I traded that one away to Raymond Fairchild in exchange for him coming up to play at my festival (Note: Wayne sponsors the annual Wayne C. Henderson Music Festival & Guitar Competition held at Grayson Highlands State Park).

“I think a lot about what I know today that I didn’t know then. Today it is possible to learn most anything about building instruments and music and everything. Back in those days there were no books. If I saw somebody with a nice guitar, I’d look

26

at it and study it and learn from trial and error. I have a preference for old instruments. Until recent years, the Martin guitar company made everything hand-made. They’ve had to go to CNC (computer numeric control) machines to stay competitive. But I have modeled my instruments after their old hand-made instruments. To learn in those old days, I was pretty much on my own, being so isolated in this area out here. In a big city somewhere there would probably have been way more opportunities of learning how to do things.

“You gain a reputation over time. Music and building has always been a part of my life. I have My cousin Tex lived around the visitors from all over the world. I travel all over corner and he was one of the only kids I the world. People consider us backwoods, hillbilly could play with. My sister and brother folks. We are backwoods, but most of us are proud of it,” Wayne smiled. were 9 and 11 years older and were out Jayne turned to her dad, “You didn’t go to a ton of and gone. If I wasn’t carving or whittling college. You don’t have a doctorate or a PhD… you or gardening, once in a while I could play could, I’m sure. If somebody brought in a Martin with my cousin who was my age. We guitar, you could probably tell exactly what page were sickly and puny. He was sick all the on the Martin book that instrument was written time with a sore throat, so his folks about, and what year it was made and who made decided to have his tonsils taken out. I it. You once told me that if there was something had a sore throat, too, but I never said about Martin guitars that you didn’t know, it was nothing about it because I didn’t want because somebody tore the page out of the book.

Some people assume people around here aren’t them taking mine out. So they took him smart. They are! They just get it in different ways. to the hospital over in Jefferson (NC) to My dad is smarter than anybody I know. have his tonsils taken out. When they “I typically screen two or three calls every day for made an appointment for that to be somebody wanting a guitar. Some people will call done, the doctor came out to talk with to remind him, saying they’ve been waiting for ten his parents and they said, ‘While we’ve years. Some people get all antsy when they’ve been got him in here and put to sleep, we waiting one. I tell them to put things into perspecshould circumcise him, too.’ So they did tive. Dad makes about 30 each year, but he gives that at the same time. My cousin about half of them away. And I think the backlog is now around six years. If the orders stopped now, showed up back in school a couple of he’d catch up in maybe ten years.” weeks later. I couldn’t wait to see how he Wayne smiled at his daughter and said, “I think was doing. He said, ‘When I got back my proudest moment was when she started making from that hospital, I was in pretty bad them. That’s a pretty big deal. She’s a great artist. shape. I feel fine now. But let me tell you She’s always making things. I always worry about something that we didn’t know. her fingers in the saw. But she’s very talented.”

Those tonsils aren’t where we She added, “I’ve made twenty guitars and thought they was. sixteen or seventeen ukuleles. I have at least 47 on backlog. I still grapple with the idea that I am now a luthier because I never planned to do this. I get excited now and sometimes I can’t sleep, thinking about the things I get to do the next day. It doesn’t feel like work; it’s like hanging out. I feel like I’m cheating. With Wayne making these guitars, too, sometimes I feel like they’re ordering from me because it is a shorter wait. (They’re probably thinking) ‘It doesn’t have the exact same name on it, but I’m going to get on her list.’ Then they order what dad would do, but from me. Now I can stand on my own.

“I make small guitars. Look at my hands, how small they are. I can’t hold a D size guitar.”

Wayne told me he was always happy to share his knowledge, both with Jayne and others. “I teach everybody, anybody who wants to learn. I want her to keep doing this because I’ve always had lots

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of fun with it and I hope she will too.”

We got to talking about the money side of things, and how Wayne was so unencumbered by the monetary exigencies.

Jayne said, “That’s something I like about it here. I grew up mostly in Roanoke (with my mom) where things are more driven by money. I like that my dad doesn’t charge people an arm and a leg for guitars. He has what he needs. He has his ‘57 Ford I’ve got one more story for you.

Thunderbird, which is all he always wanted. He This is about an old guy who was going traded guitars for that. My favorite thing about my to buy a mule from his neighbor who granny and my dad is that they are good people; was a preacher. The preacher told him they’re not greedy and they give a lot of themselves it was a religious old mule, ‘The only into whatever they’re doing. They are working for way you can get that mule to go is to just what they need.” say, ‘Praise the Lord’ and the only way Wayne concurred, “I’m always proud when my you can get him to stop is to say instruments bring good money. I’ve always had ‘Amen.’’ enough to get by. That’s all I worry about. It is always So this fellow liked that idea. But he exciting to see somebody playing (my) instrument.” told the preacher he still wanted to try We toured the workshop, a cluttered place snowed the mule before he bought him. So he under by decades of high-priced sawdust. We looked hitched him to a wagon and took him at a guitar base, under construction, sitting in a wooden mold. It had a “floor” and “walls” but not yet down the road. He wanted him to stop a ceiling. There were many braces and other parts, at the corner so he said, ‘Whoa!’ and of already in place. There was a small imperfection course that ole mule kept walking. So in one, but Jayne he happened to remember what assured us it would the preacher told him and he said, be fixed before the ‘Amen’ and that mule stopped. He instrument was said ‘get up’ and nothing happened. shipped.

Note So he yelled, ‘Praise the Lord’ and that this imperthat ole mule took off pretty fection would be as can be. completely and He decided to try him on a totally out of sight rougher road. So he took him once the top was around the hill and the road got affixed, and its worser and higher and he got to impact on the the edge of the big old cliff where it musical quality went straight down and if he fell would be exactly over he’d probably starve to death zero. Nevertheless, before he hit the bottom. He got so it absolutely would excited he hollered at that old not be delivered mule to stop and said, ‘whoa, until it was as perfect as humanly possible. whoa’ and was so excited he couldn’t “I’m not as patient as dad,” Jayne confessed. “The remember and he got right up to the main lesson I’ve learned is to take the time to make edge and was about to go over. Just at sure everything is what it needs to be. I know that’s the instant, perfect right time he what I need to do to make a better instrument than anybody else.” happened to think, and he yelled, Wayne added, in a comical, self-deprecating way, ‘Amen’ and sure enough that mule “There’s a standing joke around here, when we’re stopped. He was so relieved, he working on something and there is a small impershouted, ‘Praise fection, we’ll say, ‘It’s good enough for who it’s for.’” the Lord!

“What makes dad’s guitars better than anyone

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else’s,” Jayne said proudly, “is that he never leaves the flaws. Even if you can’t see it, it is still important to get it right, every time.”

“We still do anything it takes to make it just right,” Wayne echoed.

The finer points of guitar making

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herbalist Sam Steffens Floyd, Virginia

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am Steffens is not a native Appalachian but has been around long enough to feel like one. The area fits her persona to a tea, if you’ll pardon the purposeful pun. She lives in southwestern Floyd County near the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Her childhood fascinations led to a lifetime interest in herbs, teas, remedies, and tinctures. I had met her a couple of years earlier while working on my fourth book, a novel set about 50 miles to the west in Grayson County. In that story, my heroine, when faced with the partial collapse of society, became a midwife. I wanted to know what the work was like, and Sam was extremely helpful.

As Sam, Leslie and I spoke, we were surrounded by bottles of herbs and teas. Sam is a thin, sturdy woman with a soothing, rhythmic voice. “My midwifery came secondary to herbal medicine. I grew up in the city in the Midwest. My exposure to nature was through my aunt and grandma who lived in the country. I had no idea that you could eat plants. I had no idea that milk came from a cow. I thought milk came from grocery stores. When I became a teenager I deeply fell in love with plants.

I wanted to learn more. I had access to books, so I read extensively.

“While traveling, I had the opportunity to meet a traditional Appalachian herbalist and midwife.

She saw that I was really interested in what she was doing, and thankfully she took me under her wing. She taught me that there is a relationship with plants that opens doors to basic foundations to nutrition and health and well-being, to the creator’s healing powers made manifest.

“This knowledge and information is accessible to anyone. It doesn’t have to be a specialized thing, accessible to people only with initials behind their name. This is the people’s medicine. This is the people’s food.”

We sat at a wooden table in the basement of her home, a geodesic dome, under construction as a replacement from her earlier home that burned to the ground two winters prior, due to an electrical short after a winter storm.

She poured three cups of hot tea for us from a large, glass Mason jar. It had a soothing peppermint taste.

“Most people today don’t put a lot of clout in the dandelions and the violets and the foods right outside your front door. You can go out and pick them and put them in your pot and eat them; they’re pretty great weeds I’d say.

“The generations before faced real scarcities here in the Appalachians. We have to be careful to not fantasize on how it used to be. Lots of

Sam picks herbs from her garden and lawn people here went out into the woods and collected herbs and roots and foraging foods out of necessity, I have heard several of my neighbor’s share this with me. It was not always a nice situation for them. Once scarcity became less of a problem, people moved away from doing a lot of those things. Medicines became found in grocery stores and remedies in drug stores. The values of the natural things lost their importance over time. Many of the folks I know that hold this foraging knowledge do not know how valuable it truly is for our community.

“Everybody has a spice rack. People think they are nice things to season their food with. But really it is medicine. Your food is your medicine. Those spices are in there because they have a flavor, but many of them do something important in supporting your body.

That whole concept really fascinated me. “(My mentor) showed me that if I stayed in a relationship with a plant through the seasons, I would never forget that plant. I would find that the deeper my relationship with the plant was, when health issues would come up, I would know what I needed to remedy it. I could go out and pick it and put it into my meal or into my teas and poultices. The people and plant relationship she shared with me will last within me the rest of my life, even if I never Photo courtesy of Sam Steffens picked up a medicinal plant ever again. I became fascinated with that deeper connection with God’s creation.

“When we got pregnant with our first child, we knew we would have a midwife and the baby at home. My husband and I never had to have a conversation about that; we had already had a silent I can pick things literally right agreement about it. I almost had to beg my mentor outside in my back yard that will help to be my midwife. Thankfully she said ‘yes,’ it was a my family. Now that is a gift life- changing experience for me. At our first pre-naworth receiving. tal appointment, it was a ‘wow’ moment: This connecting right here with people in my community is what I wanted to do. I could feel that it was what I was really called to begin building.

“Over many years I was blessed with apprenticeships with four different midwives. I was blessed to be able to go with Medical Ministries International to work in a hospital in the Dominican Republic. I learned so much there! I learned what real (Third World) poverty was like. We have poor people here, too, but it was different there (in that) it was widespread. We have people here who are starving and starving in their souls more than in their bodies. I am not diminishing the misery of those that are suffering here, but my experience there cracked me open to a truth that solidified how I was being led to the work I wanted to do here serving others.

“The knowledge I have is not an elitist thing. What I do is accessible to everyone. Yes, you must have a drive from deep within to pursue it at the level I’m pursuing it. But this does not diminish the fact that we can all do it if we feel led.

“All I did this morning to make this lemon balm/peppermint tea is walk out into my yard, cut some fresh plants, say ‘thank you’ (to my creator and the wonder of this life), and pour some boiling water over it. Now we’re sitting here enjoying it. Anybody can do that. Everybody can do that.

“We need to teach and learn that most of our health care begins at home. Preventative health care begins in our gardens or when we walk through the grocery store and purchase our foods. If somebody isn’t feeling good, get a (healthy, organically grown) chicken, toss it into a pot, get some

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great vegetables, toss in some wonderful pot herbs, and eat that for the next week, drinking herbal tea, and most likely whatever it is you’re dealing with will take care of itself. Most of what ails us can be healed with our food.

“We were created in a divine image and everything we need for healing is within or found in the yard most of the time. Our bodies have the ability to heal; we were made that way. We emerge from tiny cells and transform into large, powerful creatures. If we support our body in doing that job then it will. Plant medicine and our foods help our body to do that.”

Our conversation turned Sam with her goat, Dosha from herbal medicines to the midwifery.

“When a baby is born, you see the spark open up. The baby realizes it is in a new world. The baby was in an amazing place, the womb, and is now in the air-breathing world with us. It is a beautiful transition at the gates of life and death to witness.

“When we got pregnant, we decided to stop traveling as much. We wanted to build a homestead, a foundation for our children to always be able to come home to during their lives. Every time we had crested over these mountains from North Carolina, it felt like home. This was where my mentor lived, and my husband and I felt from the get-go it was the right place for us to start our family.

“These mountains are one of the most bio-diverse places in the entire country.

We have the ability to walk outside and see thousands of species of life. I can pick things literally right outside in my back yard that will help my family. Now that is a gift worth receiving.

“This is a wonderful community. It is natural for people to connect with their neighbors here. When you drive the roads, you feel rude if you don’t wave at oncoming drivers. That’s important. It is a connecting thread (that has been) lost in many communities. Life is really about connecting, and it happens here if you Photo courtesy of Sam Steffens only open your eyes and your heart to it.”

She gesticulated with expressive hands. “We’ve been here for about 12 years. I’m now seeing children reaching school age that I was blessed to be with when they were born into this world.

It is special watching these kids grow up. They are my neighbors, friends, and fellow community members. I was given the gift of being able to welcome in over a hundred babies into this air-breathing world, a truly wonderful blessing for all of us.

“The generation here before mine had that, too, but many of the youth have moved away. Older people are having trouble keeping these farms in operation and in their families. There is so much

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value in this! I am not sure it is being seen. (Farmers) work like dogs. They spend a lot of time in the dirt. Bailing hay. Milking cows. Getting the cows back in the pasture. Planting, growing, harvesting, and saving seeds. Rain or shine it still has to get done and so they do it. We just have a homestead and that is a challenge enough. The other day I walked out to find the goat eating the plum tree; so I went out in the rain and got the goat out of the plum tree. It’s a lot of work; there is no question about it. But there is a value that is deeper than you can imagine in this life. It is an invisible component that is hard to put into words. You can’t really see it, but it’s there. The wealth that you accrue in your life because of that is better than any dollar bill you’ll ever get.

“It is a felony to practice midwifery in Virginia without a license. It’s really sad because I really believe women and their families have the right to get care from whomever they want. It might be a grandmother. It might be (the mother) with her husband and family at home, or in a state-of-the-art hospital with OBGYNs. It is sad to me that traditional lay midwifery is being snuffed out. It is such a thread of the tradition here. I have met a few really amazing granny midwives whose knowledge is going to be gone in another generation or two. I do not think pregnancy and birth is something to be regulated. I understand why regulations are in place, so if people don’t vet their providers they have a minimum level of protection. But that caters to the midwifery community and the medical community, and not as much to the women and their families. I do not understand why we are not simply focusing on empowering women to learn how to and trust that they can make that decision themselves.

“My focus is on families and my neighbors, the people who live here and for people who want to connect and learn for themselves and for their community wherever that may be. Selling teas, tinctures, and salves supplements the work I really like to do, which is connecting and sharing with others. It is the workshops and the education that inspire me. I can teach people who don’t have the money to pay because I can (make money selling) the herbal products we make. It supports them and still supports my family, too. Five percent of everything we sell goes into our educational programs along with donations from our local community. I love that my home can be an educational resource.

People can borrow books from my library or come cook in my kitchen and learn.”

In fact, her kitchen is central to the main floor of her domed house.

“All of this living and learning and growing together during thick and thin times is to me, the fabric of community. We have the blessing of that through Appalachian communities that are still intact from previous generations. It is easier to pick up those pieces and carry on here. There are many great role models still here to learn from and with. (In the cities,) the deeper layers of those traditions are fragmented and hard to find. It’s still alive here, I think much more so than in other places. More and more people are seeing the value of those things. That’s what makes this area special to me.

“Your health care begins in your kitchen, in your garden, or somebody else’s garden. Hand-byhand and house-by-house is how we will spread empowerment in health and wellness.

“I think for many there is a lack of work (in this region) for financial gain. In one way, it’s a hindrance, but in another way is a benefit. I am not praising poverty by any means. (It is) just that you have to rely on your community and your neighbors more when there is less. I think still about 80% of the people in our county either are self-employed with several needed financial streams

Need to substitute this photo

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or commute out of the county for work. Forty percent of our community lives below the poverty line. That’s financial poverty. There is a deeper wealth that keeps people here. (If disaster strikes,) it’s not about what we can save in our home, how much food we can put up, or how prepared can we be. I think some of that is important but it is really about neighbors and relationships. People come together in those moments. Rather than stealing and fighting, I think if you have spent your time building community and relationships, solid supportive systems will emerge. History is a great teacher, and history has shown this. It has also shown us what happens when you do not have this.

“There is a tendency to put people who you think know something on pedestals. I think this is a big danger as we look forward to learning the sustainability tools for the next generations. No single person should be the linchpins of knowledge, because when they’re gone, everything falls apart. It’s about YOU. You can learn those components (that interest you). I am a vessel for the information I’ve learned. The plant knowledge isn’t my knowledge. The midwifery knowledge isn’t my knowledge. It’s everybody’s knowledge.

It was passed to me, and I will pass it on to whoever is called to learn it, and I hope they will do the same. That’s how this knowledge stays with us for generations down the road.

“All you have to do is take a walk in the woods. Walk silently and openly. I call it God. Call it whatever you feel like you need to call it. When you open up yourself to that still, small voice, that lives deep inside all of us, to that expectant waiting, it just unveils itself.

There is mystery in every leaf and every seed.

You can hear it in the birds talking to you. You can see it in the creatures scurrying around.

There’s a depth of unknown mystery that reverberates through every living thing, completely surrounding you. It’s really special.

It’s not easy to find everywhere. Here all you have to do is take a walk and listen.

“The mountains here are like… like the bosoms of the world. It has a wonderful, welcoming component. When I leave these mountains and come back again, I feel it again. There is a connecting force that is so rich and so alive. It’s easy to forget it’s here. When I come back, I remind myself that it is really here and how deeply blessed we are to get to live here.”

Sam mused about our project. “I’m really happy you’re doing this work. There are so many old-timers that I know, so many people who have an amazing wealth of knowledge. Some don’t know how to share it with another generation or the generation they have to share it with isn’t interested. They may have seen how hard that older person had to work their whole lives and they want to do something else. In another 25 years, if we do not reach out and build relationships with each other to keep it alive lots of the stuff that is here will be gone. It’s the stuff that often does not get into the books but silently slips away into the past that’s forgotten over time.”

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millstone preservationist Jimmie Price Prices Forks, Virginia

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little known aspect of the heritage of Southwest Virginia is its long history in the manufacturing of millstones. Jimmie Price, a former machinist, is working in his retirement years to keep that tradition alive. Jimmie is a descendent of the original family of German settlers to western Montgomery County who founded the community of Prices Forks (now “Prices Fork”).

One of the marks of civilization is the emergence of agricultural grains. The ability to separate the literal wheat from the chaff has allowed for the rise of our modern existence. For over 200 years, southwest Virginia provided the grinding millstones used in the process.

The millstones at the famous Mabry Mill landmark on the Blue Ridge Parkway south of Floyd, Virginia, were quarried at Brush Mountain.

Those stones were purchased by Ed Mabry around 1905. Jimmie Price has volunteered at the mill as an interpreter since 2003.

“It is my goal to honor the people who earned that honor through bumps, bruises, tired backs, and hands on the mountainside,” Price insisted.

We stood at the base of Brush Mountain before a table filled with hammers, chisels, and drills, the tools of the trade for the quarrymen who took quartzite from the side of the mountain and turned it into one of the most treasured industrial products over the past many centuries. It was warm and overcast, and the early-summer day was redolent with a rich, after-storm fecundity.

“There are several German communities here in Montgomery County,” Jimmie told Leslie and me. “Prices Forks. Tom’s Creek.

Mt. Tabor. Luster’s Gate. In 1738 these people came from Southwestern Germany to this area, bringing skills in millstone making with them. They and their descendants built several gristmills along Tom’s Creek (a tributary of the New River). One Jimmie Price at the Brush Mountain quarry

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mill was built by Michael Price in the 1740s.

“There were three groups to the New River German settlement: the Horseshoe Bend settlement which is now where the Radford Army Ammunition Plant is located, the Max Meadow/Fort Chiswell settlement in eastern Wythe County, and the Dunkard settlement in Pulaski County.

“Most every community had a gristmill.

It was essential to every sustainable frontier community. Arriving settlers built cabins, then a fort, and then a gristmill. Then they built a church. Millstone making was a multi-generational skill. They brought the skill with them; there was nobody on the frontier to teach it. They came here looking for a New Germany. This was an intentional settlement. They looked for several resources, all of which they found here. They wanted free, open land, with fertile soils. They wanted water. Timber. Coal. Iron ore. And they wanted this sandstone conglomerate rock they could use to make millstones.”

A gristmill is water-powered machinery. Historic records show that gristmills in primitive forms predated Christ by 500 years. Millstones are always Tradition is the glue that manufactured and used in pairs. They are cylindriadheres cultures and civilizations and cal, donut-shaped, carefully trimmed to be flat on the top and bottom and rounded on the inside and the things we know and care about. outside diameters. The bottom stone is stationary When you lose the tradition, and is called the bed stone. The top stone is posiyou lose the glue. tioned a fraction of an inch above and it rotates. It is called the runner stone. Both stones have intricate patterns carved into them on the facing surfaces called furrows.

Stones varied widely in diameter and thickness. Smaller ones may have been only 8” to 12” in diameter and the largest known from the area was an astounding 6’ 7” in diameter.

The miller would release grain held in hoppers above the millstones, channeling the grain into the center hole from where it radiated outwards as the runner stone rotated. The gap between the stones was adjustable to accommodate different grains. “Miller” is one of the ten most common surnames in America.

Price continued, “Early on, in primitive societies, winnowers would toss the grain into the air to let the wind carry the chaff away after it was crushed by pounding by hand. Once gristmills became common, the chaff was separated by silk cloth.

“In the early days, this (area) was part of Augusta County, which was vast. The county seat was Staunton, 125 miles away.

There were no hardware stores. The people of the frontier needed to rely on their own intelligence and wit.

Tools of the millstone cutter’s trade This community predates the Smithfield Plantation in Blacksburg by some 30 years, but Smithfield has a major importance as well.

“Again, it was a purposeful reason to be here. In large measure, it was the presence of this quartz conglomerate that brought them here. Blacksmithing is the first step in millstone manufacturing, because it provided the necessary quarrying and shaping tools.”

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Blacksmithing requires iron ore and coal, both of which were available here. While most of the coal-bearing rocks in the Virginias today are in the far southwestern counties of Buchanan, Dickenson, and Wise, there are extensive seams in Montgomery and Pulaski Counties. The coal industry was the second-largest employer in the region behind only farming until 1939 before being overtaken by the new Radford Arsenal. None of the mines are in commercial operation currently.

“When John Michael Price and his three brothers, who were blacksmiths and gristmill builders, needed tools and millstones, they had to make them. They couldn’t bring the mountain to the men, so they brought the men to the mountain.

The rock from this mountain became known as Brush Mountain buhrstone. It is a conglomerate of thousands of tiny quartz pebbles, aggregated together and is called quartzite. Quartz on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness is seven.

Diamond is ten. This is extremely hard material. It is a rock for the ages. The little imbedded pebbles act as saw-teeth. The roughness grinds better and lets air in, keeping the grain cool. It is found in only a few places in America, including near Atlanta, in upstate New York, and in Kentucky and Indiana. Brush Mountain was an historic leader nationally.

“There were at least seven quarries across ten or twelve miles, most here on Brush Mountain but at least one across the (New) River on Cloyd’s Mountain (in Pulaski County).

“Prices Forks, and it was plural until VDOT (the Virginia Department of Transportation) changed it to Prices Fork, is the visible, historic remainder of the heart of German New River settlement. There is an overlook called Lover’s Leap just west of Prices Forks, a cliff over the New River, where you could see five German settlements. It was a strategic location.

“The craft of millstone making was passed from grandfather to father to son. In the late part of the 19th Century, steel roller mills became more popular. They were faster. But they heated up the grain. Stone-ground is best. It is slower.

You know the expression, ‘nose to the grindstone’? Millers would literally smell the flour, and if it was milled too fast, it would heat up and begin to smell and it would lose flavor. They could sense if they were overheating the grain. Also, if the millstones touched each other, they could produce sparks which could ignite the dust in the mill. A proper distance between the stones served more than one function.

“By the turn of the 20th Century, there was a decline in buhrstone ground grain. There were still mills that needed replacement stones. So there was a viable business until the 1950s, especially at the smaller mills. The sons and grandsons of millstone cutters went to the cities for occupational opportunities. The glory years were after the Civil War until the early 20th Century.

“There is a difference between a stonecutter and a stonemason. A stonecutter shapes individual stones. A stonemason builds buildings or bridges by stacking stones. The stonecutters were

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incredibly skilled.

The millstones look practically machine cut, they were so precise. In the same way a car wheel needs to be balanced, so did a millstone. They did this by hand!”

During one year in the 1940s, sixty pairs were ordered from the Brush Mountain quarry.

Commercial production of millstone

manufacturing ceased in 1955. They started in 1745, so the industry was in operation for an astounding 210 years. Brush Mountain millstones were shipped all over the world. Jimmie has records of a pair of 54” diameter stones shipped to Japan in the mid-1940s.

“I am a student, a documenter, and an interpreter. I never was personally involved in commercial millstone making. I got involved because my wife’s father was a maker.

“You see the pride these people and their families had! The last three millstone makers in the area were Billy C. Hurt (1930-2012), W. C. Seville (1924-2003), and Robert Houston Surface (1913-1998), who was my father-in-law. Mr. Seville was supervisor of Virginia Tech’s Hokie Stone quarry for many years. The men were skilled and intelligent, but they were humble. They didn’t think they were doing anything special.

“My father-in-law was an avid verbal historian. I couldn’t let his knowledge pass away with him.

I felt obligated, responsible, for carrying forward this knowledge and tradition. In absence of him having a son, it fell to me. As far as we know, the stone he cut for us was the last domestically cut stone in American history.”

Price said there were sales agents throughout the region who called on the millers to get orders for millstones. Many quarry owners also did their own sales. Millstones periodically needed sharpening, but lasted a lifetime. Many men made their living traveling from mill to mill, sharpening stones. Most mills had two pairs, using them for different grains. If one became dull, it was taken out of service to be sharpened.

“These were extraordinary men. They had brawn. Patience. Finesse. Keen eye. Strong back. Analytic. An average size millstone was 30” to 50” inches in diameter. To pull a rock from a mountain and turn it into a stone of this size, weighing hundreds of pounds and chiseled to a balance and consistency took many days and exceptional skills. It was time and labor intensive. From the time it

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is roughed down it can be readied for shipment in a couple of days with two men working together.

At its maximum, there were one to two dozen men working at a time. The men had teach-ability and the humility it takes to be trained by elders. They received the pride of a job well done.”

Price’s father was a teamster. He drove a horse-drawn wagon carrying the stones to the nearest railroad, either in Blacksburg or to Whitethorne Station at Kentland. Jimmie made special mention of the women, who he felt were as essential as the men. They grew gardens, fixed meals, carried firewood, and took care of the kids. They were constantly busy. Supporting the millstone cutter was a family effort.

Individuals and municipalities are now buying and refurbishing the old grist mills. In terms of preservation and education, they are making a comeback.

“Think of the importance to a community.

Think about the importance to this commonwealth. Think of the salvation of what these men and women were about for centuries.

“My father-in-law might have went to the fifth grade. He read trade magazines from Virginia Tech. He was a stonecutter. Blacksmith. Electrician. Engine repairman. Electronics repairman. He could do so many things. He understood aspects of the space program. He read journals hours on end.

He could have been an engineer. A scientist. The stonecutters weren’t highly educated, but they had common sense and they knew how to learn and make things work. Common sense isn’t all that common these days.

“There is a lot of ingenuity in our history. Artisanship. I believe it is a gift from God.” Price is a minister and currently Pastor of Fairview Community Church near Prices Forks. He is co-author of Millstone manufacture in Virginia and Malissia said, The life of school teacher Malissia Surface.

“My people cut the stone that ground the flour Jimmie Price and his son Gregory (left) that fed our region. My people cut the stone that built Virginia Tech. That stone signifies endurance.

For education to endure you need an enduring facility and campus and you need enduring traditions. That stone supports the education but also the traditions. Tradition is the glue that adheres cultures and civilizations and the things we know and care about. When you lose the tradition, you lose the glue.”

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moonshiner

Kerry Underwood

Five Mile Mountain Distillery • Floyd, Virginia

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oonshine production owns a special place in the heart of so many mid-Appalachians.

Illegal from the time of prohibition until only recently, moonshiners have been a proud but reclusive lot, understanding the penalties of being caught. With recent changes in federal laws, now small-scale moonshining is arising as a legitimate industry. One Floyd County businessman is soon to open one of the first new, legal distilleries in decades.

Kerry Underwood owns Oddfellows Cantina, a famed downtown Floyd restaurant. He has extensive local roots, dating back to the 1700s, but is on the cutting edge of national marketing trends, with lots of entrepreneurial ideas, admittedly some good and some bad. Opening Five Mile Mountain Distillery is hopefully his best ever.

Leslie and I met with him on a chilly November morning, sitting on chairs brought specially for our meeting, while his partner and a friend worked inside constructing the repurposed facility, the old town water plant just southwest of town.

Sporting a trendy black jacket and a long grey pony-tail, he speaks in a measured pace with a deep, gravelly voice. He informed, “My family on my father’s side emigrated from England and settled in Floyd in 1787. We initially leased land from Lighthorse Harry Lee, father of Robert E. Lee. Harry had been given the land as a grant from King George II. We settled over near the Buffalo, long before the town of Floyd even existed.”

His reference to “the Buffalo” is Buffalo Mountain, a monolithic massif in southwestern Floyd County that at almost 4000 feet is the County’s highest summit and most prominent landscape features. Its rounded profile resembles the back of a bison.

“We’ve been here a long time,” he boasted proudly. “I grew up in Roanoke County but have been here in Floyd County for 16 years. I live now about a mile from the old family home place.

“The building here has been vacant and has sat in disrepair since long before I arrived. I’ve been admiring it for the whole time I’ve been here. It was owned Five Mile Mountain Distillery

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by the town. It pulled water from Dodd’s Creek. The water was treated and purified and delivered to homes in town from 1947 until 1977, so this building has been vacant for almost 40 years. The current water system is fed by five wells.

“We bought the building with the intention of putting in a micro-distillery to make moonshine and aged whiskeys and bourbons. My great-grandfather Alsaberry Underwood made moonshine.

He was a prominent figure over near the Buffalo.

He raised his family there. It was considered a wild area in those days. Alsaberry and his wife are buried People here didn’t think making under an old tree. They made moonshine for family moonshine was wrong, although they use and medicinal use. It was a natural segue for knew it was illegal... Laws against it us. When I came up with this idea, a lot of my older were bad laws that good men relatives said I was following in my family tradition.

‘This is what we did for a long, long time.’ I knew my had to break. family made moonshine. Lots of people around the Buffalo were considered outlaws. They were loners.

They wanted to be separate from the law or from people who told them what they could or couldn’t do with their land.

“It’s an interesting personal story for me. I wanted to buy land somewhere in Floyd County. I drove up and saw a piece of property with a realtor. I bought it that day. My dad came up with me about a month later and said, ‘Well, you know your great-granddaddy’s place was only about a mile from here?’ Floyd County is large and it’s in a remote area of the county. To have, at first sight, picked a piece of property like that with family ties, it was spooky. It was like coming home, in a way.”

Beside the high-chair where Kerry sat was a large oak barrel.

Atop it he’d positioned three old-time earthen moonshine bottles, each with white sides, brown tops, and a center cork.

He mused, “I noticed a trend, particularly out west, of micro-distilleries springing up. They were making whiskeys. Out west, they didn’t make moonshine. I wanted to diversify from the restaurant and could see (distilling) as an emerging trend.

And I knew it was part of our heritage. I saw it as a business opportunity. I wanted to get ahead of the curve here in Virginia. I spoke with distillers out west and they said, ‘This is your heritage, not ours. We didn’t make moonshine traditionally like y’all did back east.’ To me, it seemed part of our tradition and part of our culture and something I wanted to continue.

“All whiskey comes off the still as corn whiskey, which is basically moonshine. Moonshine comes off the still and you can drink it. Bourbon, whiskey, and moonshine all start as moonshine and then are barrel-aged.

It’s all made from Kerry pre-assembles his still

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corn. It also contains sugar and yeast. You can make ‘shine without sugar. Corn has lots of sugar in it. You can cook the corn down and make whiskey, it just takes longer. Refined sugar helps you get more product from your materials.

“Before World War II, moonshine was mostly made without sugar, but after the war sugar became cheap. Mountain people realized they could increase their volume of production by using it.”

I mentioned that nearby Franklin County, down off the Blue Ridge Mountains, considers itself the “Moonshine Capital of the World.”

Kerry contested that claim, “Lots of Floyd County moonshine was sent down to Franklin where it could be more easily distributed. Lots of it was driven down Five Mile Mountain Road, so we used that name for our company. Floyd County actually produced more moonshine than Franklin County. By the late 1930s, over a million gallons of moonshine were being shipped out of Franklin County, but much of it was made up here in Floyd.”

Kerry explained that at the federal level, restrictions loosened regarding small-scale breweries and distilleries. For many years, people could make their own beer and wine for personal consumption, but nothing could legally be distilled, because it was traditionally done for sale and the Feds wanted their tax money. Once they could figure out a way to get their tax money from small distilleries, they were willing Window design for “Five Mile” to change the laws and started handing out permits.

Kerry was able to get a license in a month.

The idea had come to Kerry about two years earlier.

“We incorporated and acquired the building a little over a year ago. We began re-construction to fit our needs. Construction is still underway, but we acquired the license in the meantime. The building was a mess. There were 160,000 gallons of water still in the building. We pumped that all out and have spent the last year turning it into what we need it to be.

“We have a 100 gallon all-copper still that was made by the oldest coppersmith in Kentucky. We are employing traditional methods, including having an open flame. The main ingredient is corn

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meal. We’ll source that from a local company in Montgomery County. We cook the corn meal, add sugar, add yeast, and it’s about a five day process. It turns into what is called ‘steel beer’. We pull the liquid off and then the mash. We put it into the still and cook it for about eight hours and then it will yield a product that is about 160to 170-proof. That’s strong stuff; it’ll run a car! We’ll dilute it to 100-proof and 80-proof. What the old-timers sold in the woods was about 95- to 100-proof. We’ll hand-fill glass bottles and sign each label with the date. Our customer is the ABC (Alcohol Beverage Control) and they take it from there and re-sell it, but we will be allowed to sell from here. We’ll have a tasting room and people can buy it and take it home.

“There are three other micro-distilleries in Virginia now. They are making vodka and gin. We will be the first distiller in Floyd or Franklin Counties since the 1930s to make and sell moonshine. It suits Floyd. It’s part of our culture and tradition. Even the locals, the old-timers, are proud to see it happen.

“There is an 87-year-old man in the area, Walton Smith*, who in his day was a prominent man.

He once dated (country singer) Patsy Cline. He was an active moonshiner. He found out about this and he contacted me, saying, ‘I want to be part of this.’ He expressed his fear over this art being lost if he would die before he could pass on his knowledge and skills of making corn whiskey.

He doesn’t want to ever admit doing anything illegal.

“He has told me a million stories. He ran moonshine from West Virginia to North Carolina. He’s a bit shy about talking about it because he still fears someone will come along and arrest him, to this day. I spent about six months trying to convince him that the federal government would now allow me to do this. He’s come around now. He believes now but we have to reassure him on a monthly basis that we’ll be okay doing this.

“People here didn’t think making moonshine was wrong, Inscription on still

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although they knew it was illegal. They were proud of their product. Laws against it were bad laws that good men had to break. They had been doing it for a long, long time. Someone came along and said they couldn’t do it any more. It was no different from raising corn. Everybody did it. Authorities started arresting people. It got to be a game of cat and mouse. Sheriffs and deputies knew who was making, but they couldn’t arrest anybody they couldn’t catch. (The moonshine runners) became really good drivers.”

In the early days of Appalachian settlement, there was an economy based upon the abundance provided by the chestnut tree. It literally provided the wood for cradles and caskets, furniture, houses, and barns. People and especially pigs ate the nuts. The nuts provided a principal element of the forest mast, the feed for all forest animals. So there was more wildlife abundance. It provided the straight wood needed for split-rail fences. It had natural rot resistance and provided a hot fire when burned. A blight swept through the area in the late 1930s and killed virtually every (chestnut) tree.

It was a severe, even devastating blow to Appalachian people and is widely considered the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history. People turned even more to moonshining as a cash generator. For many a poor mountain family, moonshine was their only cash-generating product.

We talked about the roots of NASCAR, where many There are lots of great of the drivers originated in the central Appalachians and stories about us and worked as moonshine carriers. Kerry told us, “There was moonshining. There was a man an old dirt track that the moonshiners raced on after who came by here and said that church on Sundays. It’s still there, down in the woods. They as a boy he used to sit beside his had three or four organized races down there in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. The Woods Brothers built the car grandfather’s still. He told me Walton drove to run moonshine. They started racing these there was an old white mule. cars and that sport developed into NASCAR. NASCAR They would train him, show him absolutely was a direct result of moonshine running. There the way to the still in the woods. were dirt tracks around here everywhere.”

They would (tie sacks of) sugar Kerry explained that the cars looked from the outside on his back and send him on his like any other car, but there was serious power under the way and he would carry the hood. Moonshine was carried in the trunk. “The police sugar to the still. He knew the were driving six-cylinder Buicks and the moonshiners mule got caught five or six times, were driving eight-cylinder Fords that had been hopped up. There weren’t a lot of two-way radios for the police or arrested five or six times. If the much backup. If the moonshiner could reach the county mule found revenuers busting up line, he was safe from that sheriff. It was a race and the the still he would just run off. police cars were lots slower.

That old mule worked many, “Our company is named Five Mile Mountain Distillery, many stills. I thought it was a named after the Five Mile Mountain Road, which was fregreat story. You don’t take quented by the moonshiners. In those days, it was a tight, mules to jail.” one-lane road. I was told the moonshiners would back down the mountain because if they ran into a roadblock, they didn’t need to turn around in the middle of a one-lane road to escape. To back up on that road, even now, would be a feat of nature. It’s still back and forth, back and forth. It’s paved now but still winding and curvy.”

Kerry claimed to know how to make moonshine. “I know some from tradition and some from my own experimentation. It isn’t legal to make it for yourself, but there are still moonshiners in these mountains today. You can make beer or wine for your own consumption, but once you start distilling, the federal and state governments frown on it. It’s not rocket science but you have to follow certain procedures to make a quality product. That’s our intention.

“What local moonshiners make is better than store-bought stuff. (Large corporate distillers) make huge quantities with giant stills, 24-hours a day. The old time moonshiners made small batches. There

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are three parts of product from a still: the heads, the hearts, and the tails. They remove the ‘heads’ which is the first thing that comes off at a very high proof, but it has high acetone and volatile chemicals. We dispose of it. It can be used as a floor cleaner or de-greaser. Large distillers can leave it in.

The only thing you really want to put into the bottle is the hearts. It has a lower proof but has fewer contaminants. The reason you might get a headache from store-bought whiskey is they leave the heads in. You shouldn’t be drinking them, but these distillers leave them in diluted quantities. It makes a sub-quality product. You can keep the tails and run them back again.

We will taste it every hour. The heads have an oily feel in your fingers, after the alcohol evaporates. This is because of the volatile chemicals. We will be able to see and taste the end of the head run. Then we’ll start bottling. It will come off in a pretty good flow.

DEFINITIONS We’ll put in ALCOHOL - a colorless liquid obtained 80 gallons through fermentation. Alcohol is of mash flammable and is used in solvents, in there explosives, cleaning products, and with lots intoxicating beverages. of water. We’ll pull approximately two gallons of BOURBON - A straight whiskey dishead and ten gallons of whiskey, which will be about tilled from a mash having 51 percent 140-150 proof. We will then dilute it with fresh water or more corn. Named from Bourbon down to around 100 and 80 proof. We’ll use well County, Kentucky where it was origiwater with no chemicals or chlorine, not even fluonally produced. ride. It is perfect quality water. It works well for a disCUTS - The three parts of a distillation tillery because in other places and using other water run in which only the second part, the systems, they may have to pull out those things.

Heart of the run is used. The initial part “It takes about five days to mash and then about is the Heads and the last is the Tails, eight hours of production. We will have several and they are not used for consumption. batches mashing at the same time. So we’ll have DISTILL - to subject to a process of vaporabout six runs a week. We’ll be distilling every day ization and subsequent condensation, and will be pulling off about 80 gallons of proof as for purification or concentration. whiskey per week. It’s not huge but it’s not tiny, GIN - an alcoholic liquor obtained by diseither. Many new micro-distilleries are doing about tilling grain mash with juniper berries.

30 gallons or something like that. We wanted a 100FERMENT - to use yeast to break down gallon still right off the bat. sugar molecules into ethyl alcohol “Our still is fired with propane gas, open flame. and carbon dioxide gas. The chemiOpen flame on a copper still is the traditional way. cal change occurs because the yeast Whenever we faced a decision about whether to rapidly reproduces itself in solutions go traditional or more modern, we went traditional that contain sugar. every time. I wanted the old-timers and locals to say, MASH - v. to mix (crushed malt or meal ‘Okay, that’s the way we did it. That’s the whiskey we of grain) with hot water to form wort. made. That’s the whiskey we sold and drank. We’re MASH - n. a liquid composted of grist proud of it.’ stirred with boiling water to create “The (product you see in the stores) in the ABC worts. stores is from other distilleries that aren’t following WHISKEY - an alcoholic liquor disthese methods. Approaching the still smells really tilled from a fermented mash of grain, good. You smell the corn. You smell the alcohol. It as barley, rye, or corn, and containing has a fermented smell. (Regarding illegal stills,) it from 43 to 50 percent alcohol. was a smell that gave it away.”

WORTS - the liquid that drains from the mash.

I asked Kerry if he was worried about being successful enough to draw in competition. He replied, “I’m fine with competition. There may be more distillers later, but we’re here already.

We’re way ahead of the curve with regards to East Coast distilleries. We haven’t bottled our first run yet, but already I’ve had people offer to invest or be part in some way of what we’re doing.

“I met with a man at the ADI, the American Distillers Institute, and he said what we were doing was part of our heritage. He said, ‘You could make a sign this big (Kerry held his hands six-inches apart.) that said ‘Five Mile Mountain Distillery’, and people would still come from everywhere to find you and try your whiskey.’

Because making moonshine was illegal, it was always a clandestine activity. Initially, when people got caught, they received slight sentences, perhaps a day or two in jail, and went back into business. But finally the federal government got involved and things became more serious. “When the Feds got involved, they’d take your car and your house and sell them at auction. That wasn’t the local police. (With them,) it was a game. Sometimes if they caught you, they’d just take five gallons as a fine and then let you go. The Feds got serious and that changed things. Some ‘shiners got caught and some didn’t.

“Walton Smith told me that once he was running some ‘shine to West Virginia. He was coming back but he still had some in his car for another drop. He was driving a 1939 Ford that had been souped-up. He was following his friend who was driving a car that was a little slower. A policeman got behind them and was chasing them. Walton, running 100 mile an hour in this old Ford car on mountain road got behind his friend and pushed him. At 100-mph! They were going to get caught so Walton put his bumper against his friend’s back bumper and pushed him the rest of the way. And they got away. You can imagine this scene. In a modern car it would be one thing, but imagine it in a 1939 Ford!

“The ones that lived through this became really good drivers. A lot of them died. A lot got caught and lots went to jail. There are very few that never got caught. Walton is one of them.

“I am proud of what we’re doing. We had a family reunion recently. All the old-timers came and patted me on the back for doing it like granddaddy did. There was a lot of pride in the heritage.

(Because of the illegality) it was something they never could talk about. They couldn’t say, ‘That’s my whiskey and that’s why it is so good.’ It means a lot to me to be part of Floyd and to carry on a tradition that Floyd has been known for over 200 years and now bringing it to the forefront and letting them be proud of it.”

* “Walton Smith” is an alias. To protect the older man’s privacy, we are not revealing his name.

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Presbyterian minister Edwin Lacy

Indian Valley, Virginia

E

dwin Lacy is your typical non-traditional traditionalist. He has modernized and regionalized the traditional church congregational model and made it appealing for a group of people that, as he says, “Haven’t darkened a church door in years,” forming an organization he named the “Wild Goose Christian Community.”

Indian Valley is a remote area of a remote county, Floyd. It was there that Edwin found a small church building that had been abandoned by its shrinking congregation and he convinced his Presbytery that he had a workable idea to put it back into service.

Edwin is a jovial man with a roundish face framed by red-to-white hair and a ton of charisma.

He’s also a world-class claw-hammer banjoist. We met on a cold, cloudy winter day when a brisk wind blew in from the north over Macks Mountain. The church was ideally suited to accommodate his idea of a meeting in the round, where rocking chairs replaced the pews and the carpet was discarded in favor of the native oak floor.

“I’ve always had a deep appreciation of the tradition and sought as much knowledge about the tradition as I can. But I’m always thinking about what’s to come; I always look forward. I’m not a preservationist. I am indebted to and thankful for the preservationists, both of the culture and the church. But if you look at the history, you see that the most revered people were the innovators of their day. It appeals to me to be an innovator who builds on the traditions.

“I was born and raised in Wytheville where my dad ran a small business. My dad came to the mountains from Southside Virginia after World War II with his brothers.

He quickly fell in love with these Appalachian Mountains. Because it was new to him, he was entranced by it and he strove to learn and appreciate more. He loved the mountain people, the arts and crafts. He was a banjo player and he fit right in.

Wild Goose Christian Community

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Wild Goose features a hardwood floor and rocking chairs He was determined to teach me that appreciation.

“My mother’s family goes back to the late 1600s in the area, when her ancestors came through Pennsylvania and down the Valley (of Virginia) from Ireland and Scotland. This was the western expansion, the frontier, in those days.

“My parents met in Wytheville. The fact that my mother’s family was so deeply steeped in the tradition and my father was new to it made me appreciate both perspectives.

“I grew up Presbyterian. It has its roots in Scotland. I We’re not looking to had positive experiences in the church and was close to isolate ourselves. We have good my minister. He was Scottish, either born there or born in degrees from good universities... the States to Scottish parents. We were close to his family.

We are not isolationists, we’ve By the time I got to high school, I knew I wanted to go to just chosen to live in rural places. seminary.”

Our Appalachian uniqueness is Instead, Edwin went to Appalachian State (in Boone, still much about us. The culture North Carolina) and Virginia Tech earning a degree in moves on. history. He had several jobs, including his family business, before he became a professional musician, playing banjo in several bands. He played folk, folk revival, in a children’s band, and then his long-standing Americana band, “Skeeter and the Skidmarks.” At the urging of his brother, he finally decided to attend the seminary in his late 30s in Dubuque, Iowa. He trained in preparation for small, rural churches. After earning his Masters of Divinity, he served churches in Indiana for ten years.

“Being away from these mountains for fifteen years, and I never had any intention of leaving, when I came back I had a new broader perspective and appreciation. My faith didn’t change much

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that I can articulate, but in my early experience as a preacher, I was intimidated. I was a spiritual leader, but I felt unprepared, by no fault of the seminary. In smaller congregations, there were lots of people who had belonged longer than I had been alive. What did I have to teach them? I felt that I had no right to be in the role. It took some time for me to feel like I had something to bring to the table for them.

“I never wanted to be a parish minister. I wanted to be a counselor, but within a Christian context. I’ve always struggled with the church because of my perception of its inability to create the level of community that I sought.”

Edwin speaks in a pleasant, unhurried baritone voice. He talked about the prevailing model of most organized religious experiences, with a performance and an audience, and how he felt that that model didn’t always build communities. So when he organized the Wild Goose Christian Community, he removed all the pews and brought in rocking chairs.

“Doing things in the round is the best way to create a community. So we sit in a circle. I understand that I can fit less than half the number of people in here with this configuration. Pews would accommodate 100 people. But membership had dropped to only about 12 and they never filled it. We’ve had fifty and sixty people here, but anything over forty and the group dynamics starts breaking down. When we start making a second row, it changes everything. Our model works best with forty people in a circle.

“I always struggled with the audience/performer model. And I struggled with ‘preaching,’ again because I felt there were intelligent, well-educated people who were strong Christians for fifty or more years, and it didn’t make sense that I would ‘preach’ to them. Yes, I had a seminary education, but we were never to get the most from our community if I always talked and they always listened. So I don’t preach. I lead discussions. It is not a teacher/student situation.”

When he got the opportunity to come back to Southwest Virginia, he served a big church in Bristol that had around 500 people. “I learned that the Indian Valley Church was getting ready to close because it was too small. The congregation was formed in 1914 and this building was built in 1946. It was going to close for the second time, after being revived once in the 1980s.

It was just too small.

“The model ( for tiny rural churches), and it happens again and again, is that the Presbytery closes them, the members go to other churches in the area and the Presbytery sells the building and land. I have a personal interest in this church. When I worked for my dad, we

came over here and I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. It has always been special to me, Indian Valley.

“When I learned about this church, I went to the head of the Presbytery, presented my idea, and we worked out a plan for me to be here. He was an old hippy and he thought it just might work, and if it did, Floyd would be the place.

While I was serious in that the concept I had might work, not in my wildest dream did I think they’d go for it. They put a substantial monetary commitment together to get us going.

“The main thing I envisioned here was a circle of rocking chairs and a fireplace. I saw a focus on Appalachian music. And Appalachian arts. Every Friday night in Floyd, there is a huge gathering, an eclectic mix of people and cultures on the street, because of the music. Music is the bridge between the old farmer culture and the newer alternative culture.

“I was given the go-ahead. It was designed to attract people who were, for whatever reason, not being satisfied by traditional churches. We wanted to use innovative approaches to worship. Christian worship has centuries of traditions, and we wanted to explore what had been done in the past and apply those ideas to the present.

“People here in the Appalachians have deep roots in Scotland and Ireland because primarily that is where people around here originated. There is a Celtic tradition that has been largely sidelined that is coming back into vogue of being a celebratory approach. Rather than sin and redemption, they’re more about the goodness of God in everything and in the creation and nature. Those aspects celebrate the roots, but really appeal to the folks here in Floyd County and around this area. In Celtic tradition, the wild goose is the symbol for the Holy Spirit rather than the dove. It is wilder, more unpredictable, with strength.

“Between the concept and the approval, and then to our actual opening, was about a year. I put up fliers on bulletin boards at local country stores, inviting people to come and participate. I invited several members of the Presbytery so we at least we knew somebody would come. Our key was our welcoming aspect and the constant music. Some churches do Appalachian music and Bluegrass events, but ours was to be totally central to the service.

“We had fifty people that first night. It was very celebratory. People were excited! It was a happy night. The concept had come into fruition and it was exciting. We got some press on NPR (National Public Radio), and that

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brought many new members, especially musicians. Then word of mouth took over.

“We’re really isolated out here, even by Floyd County standards. Our goal was to have 15 people in regular attendance by the end of the first year. We had 30 within six weeks. Everything has exceeded my expectations. It has grown organically as a community. I expected that I would need to provide a lot of leadership and direction. But our members took over, organizing our music, our food, decorating, and such.

“We are not yet a year in operation, and we’re aware of at least three worshiping communities that have already formed under a similar model. As a workable model for collective worship in a rural setting, I think we’ve really hit on something. Wild Goose provides some basic elements that are transferable to any rural community in America.

Edwin played the Steven Foster tune, Angeline the Baker on his banjo for us. He commented, “I’m honored and tickled to have Wild Goose in consideration for your book.

Maybe without exception every book I’ve ever seen on Appalachian culture is about looking backwards. I’m excited about what you’re doing because I am interested, and I know you are, in how those cultures we so celebrate will fit into a future-oriented society. I always feel like the people who appreciate the traditions are trying to keep alive a dying thing. To some degree that’s true.

But those traditions are very much alive. They have a life of their own that will extend into the future.

“We’re not looking to isolate ourselves. We have good degrees from good universities. We have cellular telephones and computers and the Internet. We are not isolationists, we’ve just chosen to live in rural places. Our Appalachian uniqueness is still much about us. The culture moves on.”

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quilter

Pam Puckett Frazier Meadows of Dan, Virginia

P

am Puckett Frazier is a self-proclaimed “granny quilter.” Leslie and I met her in her small, immaculate frame home which she shares with her disabled son. It’s on a country road with a vast view behind it, in the up-mountain community of Meadows of Dan, in Patrick County, Virginia, near the famous Mabry Mill and the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a beautiful summer day, with redolent fields of grass like waves into the distance to the west.

Pam told us, “My father was in the military, so I lived all over. When I lived in North Carolina, my sister signed me up for a (quilting) class. My grandmothers had quilted. I didn’t enjoy the class, but other family members were nearby and they were quilting. I had always been intrigued with it, but I was at the age when I didn’t have time for it. So I visited the ladies, sisters that met every Monday night to quilt. That’s when I fell in love with it.

“I am a traditional quilter. I do things the old-fashioned way. I do (some stitching) by machine, but even my vintage Singer (sewing) machine is old!

“It’s the peacefulness that I love the most,” she confessed, talking about her feelings as she became involved in her projects. “I get focused. I can solve the world’s problems. It is a quiet place for me. (By the time I became interested in quilting,) both grandmothers were in the mid-stages of Alzheimer’s or dementia, so they weren’t good resources. I had made the mistake of letting these wonderful teachers slip away. I started doing research, learning through books and on-line.

“Daddy was a Puckett, the oldest of 14 children. His people are from Laurel Fork (about eight miles to the west). One family member is Orlean Puckett, who is a legendary local figure. She gave birth and subsequently buried 24 of her own babies from the age of 16 to her mid-thirties. She was a mountain midwife who, over a 49-year career starting at age 45 successfully delivered over a thousand babies. (Note: Orlean Puckett lived from 1844 until 1939.)

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“My mother’s people, the Hensleys are from here in Meadows of Dan. I have a large extended family.

“My Grandma Puckett worked in a sewing factory. Many of the small towns in the area had sewing factories where working women made a living. My other Grandma worked at Leggett’s (department store) in alterations. Both of them always sewed, primarily occupational but also recreational.

“My father was in the military, so we were always traveling. When my (maternal) grandmother moved in with us, that was when my interest grew. My mother didn’t sew much. It was because she grew up in poverty.

When she could afford to buy clothes, she didn’t want to sew. It was common in her generation. When I got the bug for it, I collected machines and then fabric. I remember one day realizing that I no longer identified myself as an accountant and bookkeeper or business manager, but instead as a quilter. It was huge for me. Nowadays, when asked what I do, I don’t say I have a degree in accounting or business management, but that I’m a quilter.

“As soon as my mother could afford store-clothing, that’s what she did. My grandmother would buy chicken-feed in a fabric sack that she’d pick based upon the color, so she could make a dress.” She said the feed sacks in those days were made of good fine-grained fabrics which actually made nice clothing. They were made in beautiful prints to encourage My interest comes from having women to buy their feed.” roots here, strong roots, but being Opportunities arise from time to time for Pam to mostly raised elsewhere. My whole reflect on her earliest efforts, “My first quilts mortify me now. They were pretty bad. I made one for my sister family tree is here. I needed to who was going through a difficult time. I spent three understand that connection.” months on it. I was so pleased! It was such a relief ! I knew she would be okay. It gave me great peace, and it told me it was what I was meant to do. It was the start of my journey of heritage arts. I think and pray while I quilt. Every quilt (I do) has a story, a story of where I’m at when I make it.

“We moved back to Virginia in 2000 (to take care of my son). I have a massive family, and I needed their support. Every third house around here has a relative living in it. I didn’t have that same group of ladies ( from North Carolina) here. So I started a local quilt group. Lots of people were quilting in their own homes. I presented an idea at the community club of starting a quilter’s bee. The first night, I had no idea how many we’d have. We had seven or eight, but (now) we have an average of twelve to sixteen.”

Pam spoke about elders in the area in other heritage arts. One woman made stuffed bears. A man made baskets. Pam realized the importance of learning these skills. She has since learned how to make the bears. She has learned to can food and make wine.

“My interest comes from having roots here, strong roots, but being mostly raised elsewhere. My whole family tree is here. I needed to understand that connection.

“One grandmother died when mom was pregnant with me. Old mountain people will say that a

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baby is ‘marked’ by the death of an older relative. I was said to have been marked by the spirit of my grandmother. I don’t know if I give that any stock. But I’ve always had a connection to her, to her work, her life, and her community.

“When we settled here, I knew there was something that tied me to this place. I knew these were phenomenal people. I made the decision to get to understand that better and to feel that connection more. I knew it was a big part of who I was. I more physically represented my maternal side, whereas my siblings looked more like the Pucketts. I am a grandmother now. When we have a holiday dinner, it is enormous! Most people do not have that. If I don’t teach my granddaughter about her Aunt Orlean or about the Pucketts or the Hensleys or how to quilt, she won’t know that. This generation will lose this unless I impart it to her.”

About the process of making quilts, she said, “I collect fabric. I don’t go to the fabric store for coordinated colors. I have scraps of fabric. I keep them down to two-inch squares.

I have pattern books and magazines. Sometimes it pops into my head. Some I sketch.

Sometimes I work from patterns. Sometimes it starts with a fabric swatch.

“I have three binders of patterns and two shelves of quilting books. When somebody’s grandmother passes, people will call me and give me old patterns and fabrics. I will preserve them and share them. I can draw from these or make a sketch myself. When I do picture quilts I work from sketches I draw.

“I’m not meticulous unless I’m doing a picture quilt. I have bags of light, medium, or dark fabric values. I pull out a fabric and go with it. I don’t like to over-think it. There won’t be any depth and interest without spontaneity. I don’t get too matchy-matchy. It gives my quilts more depth, color, and energy.

“Beyond picture quilts, I do traditional quilts like ‘double wedding ring,’ ‘trip around the world,’ ‘nine-patch,’ the list goes on. There are thousands of them. Then there are art quilts, like landscapes. It is reproducing a painting in fabric. These are typically hung on the wall.

“The back (of a quilt) is of no consequence. They are traditionally blank. People wanted the top side to be decorative.

“In the past, women made functional quilts. This area, the junction of Floyd, Patrick, and Carroll Counties, is known for its double-ring, nine-patch, four-patch, Irish chain, double Irish chain, and Dresden plate patterns.

“I have been given fabric and I buy fabric. Whether it has been given to me or not, I have to replace fabric I use. I, like my grandmothers, will cut my costs where I can.

“My ancestors were not able to just go out and buy fabric. It was expensive and thus it was a luxury. Neither could they buy

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paints, fancy pens, or canvases. The art media they used to express their creativity were the materials they had on hand.

Whether it was a piece of fabric cut from worn clothes or a piece of chestnut from a fallen tree, they didn’t have the means for fancy things. But they had an appreciation for beautiful things and in their own way figured out how to produce that.

“Their work is not often found in fancy art galleries. They are usually driven by the local county fairs. The pride of winning a blue ribbon was enough praise for them. I have shipped quilts across oceans, but the one at the county fair with the ribbon on it is my pride and joy. People who appreciate the fine quilts are the people who remember their heritage.

“Quilting is not a way to make a living by many people’s standards. I can have $300 (of materials) in a quilt and many hours in it, too, and someone might offer to buy it for $200. I seldom get paid even minimum wage for the hours I have put in if I get paid for the time at all. Like my ancestors before me, I make them and the price I charge may often (coincide) with the bill that is due. It is my way of providing the needs for my family when money is tight.”

Pam went to her cabinet and pulled out several of her quilts. She showed us that in some cases, different fabrics were stitched together into patterns. In other cases, the stitches themselves made designs, often sea-shells or leaves, spread around the quilt. It is all done by hand, through the back side. She will often spend several hundred hours on a single quilt. They were stunning!

“There are old, traditional patterns that have been handed down,” she continued. “People here have bloodline connections, but it is beyond that. We share a connection to a way of life. It’s hard to explain.

Pam’s venerable Singer sewing machine When I lived in other places, (people had) no roots, no foundations; everybody was a stranger. Here everybody knows everybody and everybody is related to everybody.

You need to be careful what you say (in public) because the person you’re talking about has a relative in the room.

“We’re proud people. We’re country people, but we’re intelligent and well-educated. I have letters after my name. But that’s not where my pride comes from. Lots of people think mountain folk are ignorant hillbillies. Yes, I walk around barefoot. But I’ve gone to college.

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“We’re proud of our heritage. I would love for everybody to hear my family stories. We are strong, hard-working, knowledgeable people. Smart people. My daddy and his father were carpenters, good ones. There are homes all over these mountains that they built that are still standing decades later.

These people are driven to achieve perfection. These people keep on until they get it right. That’s the ethic of these mountain people. I love being part of it.

“I constantly strive to do better. I want every quilt to be the best I can make it. We all have to start somewhere. But I want every quilt to be better.

“When I teach people, I instill that people keep trying and trying until they get it right. If I teach people from this area, these mountain folk, they’re all driven to perfection: that’s how I can tell if they’re from here. They are continually wanting to do better.

“There’s a phrase you’ll hear around here (in quilting circles) that when you start out, you can hang a toe in the stitches. That means the stitches are so loose that you can catch them with your toe. I’ve been doing it for 17 years and my stitches are consistent. I don’t try to be perfect; I just try to be better.”

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restorative forester Jason Rutledge Check, Virginia

J

ason Rutledge is an intense, passionate man – passionate about restorative forestry, draft horses, and saving the planet.

On a wicked-cold, dreary mid-winter day, Leslie and I drove to his farm that he shares with adult children, Jagger and Ashley, in the Copper Hill community, near the edge of the Blue Ridge escarpment that covers most of eastern Floyd County. Jason is in his early sixties, a weathered man with deep creases in his face with a bushy white beard. As we parked, he drove his battered fourwheel drive farm truck down the sloped gravel driveway from his impressive hand-made barn to reach us.

“We need to go get some hay from a neighbor before we can chat,” he told us, sardining Leslie, me, and Jagger, now in his early thirties, into the cab with him. Towing the trailer behind us, we crept down US Highway 221 southbound while traffic behind us followed along impatiently. An impressive red-tailed hawk took wing from a nearby tree as we crept past.

We soon turned onto a side road where we loaded square bales of hay from a metal barn onto the truck bed. Returning to Jason’s farm, we drove slowly through the home pasture for sixteen of his magnificent Suffolk Punch draft horses as Jagger spread the hay from the truck bed. After cutting the appropriate trees from the forests, Jason uses the horses to drag the trunks out for processing. The horses varied in size and markings, instantly recognizable features to Jason and Jagger. We emerged from the cab to pet these awesome animals and found them as Jason with a magnificent Suffolk Punch draft horse gentle and appealing as they were powerful.

Rubbing my hand on one animal’s cheek, I asked Jason my silly question of the day, “Do they like this work?”

“Yes, they do like working. They like it like a coon dog likes to hunt, a border collie likes to herd, or a Labrador retriever likes to retrieve. They came from the same cultural space, in England, where a stable agricultural society bred and trained animals for hundreds of years. The first characteristic the breeders looked for was attitude, the willingness of the horse to do what they asked it to do. They have a work ethic, like all utilitarian animals. We have thousands of years invested in our working relationship with animals. I have always felt that this culture is a vital instrument that should remain in the toolbox of human endeavors into the future. Just because we’ve had 75 years

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of cheap intensive energy in the form of oil doesn’t mean we need to erase thousands of years of our interdependent relationship with domesticated animals. So yes, they do enjoy the work, it’s what they were born to do.”

“When it is time for you to load them up and take them somewhere to work,” I asked, “what is their first sign that it is a work day?”

“I come to the field and tell them. I talk to them. I take a halter, and they know what that means.

But it is the words and the eye contact. I believe that every instant that we are within their senses, they are totally attuned to us. My home is a sunken-earth, passive solar home. I’m convinced they are even aware of me when I’m inside.

“I love these horses like I love my family. No matter how much I think I know about them, I am continually learnWe are not ignorant ing more. They constantly communicate to me how their hillbillies out here working awareness is different than mine. They see, hear, smell, horses because we don’t know and feel life differently than we do. They are prey animals, any better. We know in our and they constantly communicate with each other. I am hearts it is the best way to lots convinced they can read my mind, and they often prove that they know what I want them to do before I ask them. of things we have to do.

I embrace that and love that. I stay open to them teaching me. They teach me every day.

“I love these horses! They know I love them.

“There is an English word, ‘tilth,’ that means ‘ready for tilling’. Farming is creating an ecological disturbance that gives favor to the plants of my choice. All ground has seed in it. Farming allows the seed of my choice to flourish.

“This land was only recently cut from forest. When I got it, it had been cut and left aside. I pulled the stumps and cleared the rocks. I wanted virgin land, or as close to virgin as possible without pesticides or herbicides, for my crops and horses.

“When the white man arrived, what is now the Eastern United States was a continuous forest.

Everywhere you see open ground here, the natural condition has been altered. I till as little land as I have to. I only grow what I need for my animals and for myself. The forest can take care of itself better than any farmer can tend a field” We spent some time observing the horses while Jason told us about each one. They had massive, heavily muscled shoulders and haunches with hoofs shod by shoes as big in diameter as a lunch plate. Jagger lifted one horse’s right hind leg easily and compliantly to show me the shoe. Jagger was as articulate as his father, explaining his farrier duties and their working relationship. “I can do one horse after another and by the time I’m done with them all, it’s time to start over again.”

Jason and Jagger breed and sell horses as part of their business. A good horse will sell for around $6000. Jagger said, “If you calculated the time we have spent raising and training a horse to sell, our hourly compensation would be pennies. I live in the barn. When a horse is born, I will often sleep with it. If we looked at it strictly economically, we’d quit.”

Ashley Rutledge on a warmer day

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Jagger Rutledge The day’s chill drove us into the warmth of Jason’s house, with a brief walk-through at the barn. There was an impressive collection of tack, much of it personally designed, comprised of metal, leather, and nylon. There was also a requisite amount of old equipment, treasures amidst junk, the remnants of decades of benign neglect. He showed us a horsedrawn cart that he once rented out to a movie set.

Jason drew together the relationship he’s established between draft animals and restorative forestry. “There is no indelible link between restorative forestry and animal power. Restorative forestry is a branch of silviculture, which is the science of growing trees. You can practice restorative silviculture without using animal power for extraction, but I think it is part of the same theme, as animal power provides the ultimate low impact overland extraction technique.

“I won’t speak negatively of my competition. Some foresters will clear-cut a forest. That is a landscape scale billboard for their work. At the same time, (by contrast) it is an advertisement for my work. You wouldn’t even be able to tell where I’ve logged because of the techniques I use.

“I make determinations on what I cut based upon characteristics of each individual tree. I do it in a way that considers all the rest of the trees. When I get a contract, I walk the land with the owner. I identify which trees we’ll take. I devised a system I call ‘Nature’s tree-marking paint indicators’ which are 18 physical indicators in categories of damaged, diseased, and inferior. With this evaluation, I can determine which trees are ready for harvest. I employ a ‘worst-first’ methodology. It is a scientifically and experientially informed system for determining which trees are not doing the best. They have good material. In some cases, they are over-mature. Those are the trees we harvest first.

“We will cut any type of tree and let the customer use it for the appropriate purpose. By using restorative forestry, we can maintain a productive, beautifully enhanced ecosystem, and we can come back every seven to ten years and do it all over again, forever.

“When my competitors use high grading ‘best-first’ methodology or clear-cutting, not only does the forest look awful, but it is unproductive and may not be ready to harvest again for a lifetime or another seventy-five years. I work to counter those bad practices. I have a neighbor a couple of miles from here. I have cut his forests four times already, and he has more productive timber now than the first time I went there!

“I like to make new words. I don’t do it in an elitist way. That’s a problem with all specialists. That alienates people. I am trying

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to access people and get trust.

(My customers) own the trees and the wood. I sell them the service of ‘man-aging’ the forest. Restorative forestry is the best example you’ll find of ‘man-aging’ a resource.

“When you cut all the trees past a certain age, or when you clear-cut, it looks like hell. It is hell. We have no research on the impact of silviculture on the world of today. When you clear-cut, you provide a fertile environment for the multitude of new invasive species.

There are so many plants that are here now that weren’t here even thirty years ago. The crap that comes in is so aggressive it won’t even allow a new tree to grow.”

I asked his thoughts about the perpetuation of the culture into the future. He said in his distinctive nicotine-tinged, gravel-in-a-grinder voice, “We need to address the way we reward people for meeting human needs. We need an assessment for what I do and people like me do. We need to pay people who do the right thing a decent, living wage. We work really hard. We have great skills and great knowledge. We work with great horses and the greatest forests on the planet. And it is still hard to make ends meet. It is dangerous, the second most dangerous industry to coal mining. I want to see some continuity of traditional values to link to the present. We have rebel kids these days.

They need clear, defined paths to do the right thing by the culture and the land, and they need to be rewarded for making the right choices.

“How can we make money doing things the right way? Why are we better rewarding people for doing the wrong things? I am a capitalist, an ecological capitalist. I want the people who take the best care of the ecosystem to get paid the best. It’s an honest system.

“Nothing today reflects the entire cost of doing something.”

I said, “Coal and oil extraction has enormous externalized costs, like soil and forest and ground-water remediation. If the extraction companies were forced to pay them, they would be much less favorable techniques. The costs are borne by the ecosystems and the local people.”

“You can never restore a mountain,” Jason said. “The coal is gone. You can’t restore the ecosystem. You leave behind a denuded, less productive landscape.”

I spoke to Jagger about his reaction to our conversation. He said, “I have made a choice to continue to perpetuate this culture. I have a desire to carry the burden of the next generation, to show respect to my father for what he’s done, by keeping on. We are different people with different skills. We complement each other.

“I need to have income and to be future-driven. The horses are one of our tools for better forestry

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Ashley, Jason, and Jagger Rutledge and properly managed timber. They are beautiful. But it all has to make money. My core values are similar to my dad’s. We will keep raising horses, harvesting timber, and doing forestry the right way for the forests and for our sustenance.

“I do most of the tree cutting now. I have been cutting trees since I was a kid. I can honestly say that I have never cut a tree that was not dead, damaged, dying, or didn’t fit our criteria. I never cut big, healthy trees. I leave the best, and I take the worst. We are ‘worst-first’ foresters.”

Jason added, “I was featured in a national magazine 25 years ago. There was a sidebar article, and they asked people what they thought about what I was doing. A USDA forester thought what I was doing fine, but said about me, ‘he’s an anachronism.’ I didn’t know what it meant.

So I looked it up. The definition was someone who was out of time with the present. Out of synch with the current time. I brooded on that for a long time. I had an epiphany in the woods.

I realized I was out of time but in the future. The more we learn about the environment and the forests and ‘man-aging’ the more we will be able to justify the best care of it. When people talk about gloom and doom and the futility of where we’re going, I want to bust into the room and say, ‘there are people who have been thinking about this for 30 years and do have solutions to it.’

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“We are not ignorant hillbillies out here working horses because we don’t know any better. We know in our hearts it is the best way to lots of things we have to do.

“Before you go, I have a story to tell you.”

He began by telling us about his service in the military during the Vietnam War. He wanted to avoid combat, so he joined the Navy and following his aptitude testing, was assigned to work at an office in London, England. Once on his day off, he drove his Triumph motorcycle northeast of the city towards Ipswich. Lost, he stopped to regain his bearings. A boy of twelve or so was leading a large, chestnut-red horse down a lane.

“The English countryside was mesmerizing to me. Every field had been in cultivation for centuries. There were endless rock walls that had clearly taken enormous labor to build. There was a ‘landscape patina,’ shiny from the presence of human use for thousands of years. I was mesmerized by this child, leading this great horse that was pulling a cart filled with bundles of twigs. The horse stopped before a gate.

The boy opened the gate, and he spoke to the horse. The horse walked through and then stopped at the boy’s command. I spoke to the boy and asked him if I could Jason and Michael better see the horse. It was beautiful! I had never seen a solid red horse without any markings. When I asked about it, he said, ‘it is a Suffolk Punch’. Punch is an English colloquialism meaning ‘round’. So the horse was thought to be round all over.

“At that moment, I was experiencing olfactory-stimulated homesickness. I smelled the horse, and it made me homesick. I also smelled wood, the bundles of twigs. When I asked him what he was doing with them, he said, ‘My mum cooks with them.’ It was fuel wood. I was from a state filled with forests from horizon to horizon and (at that moment) I was in a country where people were using twigs as a fuel source. We both went on our way.

“Decades later, I was back home in America and that experience faded from my memory. After the Vietnam War, I dropped out. I had given up on education and being accepted by society. Ten years after that experience in England, I was given a coffee-table book by my mother, an album of horses.

I thumbed through the book, and I saw a photo of a horse pulling a cart. The horse was a solid-red mare, just like that horse I had seen in England.

The memory flooded back into my mind and swept over my body. The caption had the name of the owner, who lived in Ipswich, England. I wrote to him and told him about my experience. Weeks later, I got a reply. He said that his hired man’s son had told about meeting an American sailor on a motorcycle a decade earlier. ‘That is indeed the

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same horse you saw in 1969.’

“Now the story gets even better.”

Jason explained that in the meantime, he had acquired three imported English draft horses. The Englishman wrote that he was a member of an international draft horse owners group. He had recognized Jason’s name.

Jason continued, “He wrote and said that one of the horses that I owned at that time was a daughter of the horse I had seen years earlier as I was lost, riding my motorcycle around England!

“I tell this story to youngsters. I want them to believe that there is a creator. If there is a creator that puts these mysterious things together in a seemingly unconnected reality, that experience is proof of the oneness.”

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violin maker Arthur Conner Check, Virginia

“I

’ve been a-whittling ever since I come into this world, since I was big enough, I reckon,” winked Arthur Conner, arguably the finest fiddle maker around here. He is an impish man with a devilish grin, subdued perhaps by his advancing age, looking towards his 90th birthday. “When I was a boy, there wasn’t no electricity. We grew most everything we had to eat. We all had hogs and cows. And chickens. We used to order the chicks from Sears and Roebuck. They came in a box, likely 50 or 60. The mail carrier would bring them.

“I grew up right around here, about a mile away as the crow flies. I’ve been all around the world. I drove over the Himalayas during the Second World War. But I’ve lived most of my life right here. I built this house from scratch.”

It was a small, brick ranch house, with lots of pine paneling that was cut from logs on his property. He built much of the furniture inside, too, including the kitchen table and chairs.

“Whittling has always been a hobby. I’m self-taught.

I worked for the railroad in the Roanoke shops for 37 years. When I retired, I thought I’d take it easy. I took about two weeks off and went back down and asked them if they’d take me back. They said no. So I looked for something else to do.

“Seemed like everybody around here had a fiddle, and lots of them needed repair. So I did some of that.

Ricky Skaggs came by once, and we got to talking about music and fiddles. I guess he’s the one that convinced me that I could try to make a fiddle. He wanted a fivestring fiddle.”

Arthur took one from a rectangular leather case that contained two fiddles, one a five-string and the other a traditional four-string. Both were exquisite.

“A five string fiddle is the combination of a violin and a viola. Ricky wanted it a little bigger than a violin. He asked Arthur’s cello

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me to make him one. It was pretty crude, my first one.

But he played it for awhile.

The next one I made was regular violin size. Violins have strings for E, A, D, G, but I added the C as a fifth string, a lower string.

“I get lots of company, lots of people who are interested in my fiddles. One woman drove over from Blacksburg. She was from (Virginia) Tech, but she was (originally) from the Netherlands. She fell in love with my five-string violin. So right now there is a five-string fiddle of mine somewhere floating around the Netherlands, somewhere.

We sat in Arthur’s cozy living room with his second wife, Eileen. They knew each other from childhood. The widow and widower decided to get married, and had been married for seven years. Both had had large families. He said, “I’ve made lots of fiddles. I’m more interested in music quality. By the time I made fiddles for my young’ns and my grand-young’ns and for her young’ns, why I’ve probably given away more than I’ve sold. I’ve tutored some people, too. But I don’t take no money.

“When I was a boy, there weren’t any stores for toys, so we made them ourselves. I started whittling out tops and toy guns.

You done whatever you could to get some money. My mother We had to survive. Survival died when I was fourteen, and my daddy is a great motivator. took to the moonshine. He worked on my hind end when I did something he didn’t like. About the time I got as big as he was, I took that switch from his hand and I broke it. He said, ‘Now if you can’t do what I tell you to do, then get out.’ I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. So I got a 7th grade education, that’s all. I could have had a better job a few times if I’d had a better education.

“For most of my life, I worked building coal hoppers (cars) at the Norfolk and Western shop in Roanoke. I worked in the shop.

They built their big steam engines right there in the shop. I started as a laborer. It was around 1950 or so. I retired around 1985. I was in my early sixties.”

There were five violins sitting on the measuring tools

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counter. A bass fiddle took up much of the space, laying sideways on the living room floor. There was a cello in a stand. He spun a top he’d made on the floor and it whirled for over a minute. There was a beautiful carving on the living room table of a pair of hands.

“My fiddle making started from my whittling. I know lots about fiddle making, but there’s more out there that I still don’t know. I make them out of maple, curly maple. See these stripes? I didn’t put them in there. That’s natural in the wood.”

The back of the violin in his hand had fine zebra-stripes.

It was beautiful! He showed us two-piece and one-piece backs.

He explained how a log would be split to make the pieces and how they would be mated and then glued together. The necks were all handcarved. One had a traditional swirl pattern.

Another had a cat-like head with inlaid eyes.

One had a curly-horned ram’s head. “I’m known for my ram’s head scrolls. I can usually get $2500 for the ram’s head ( fiddles). I draw it first, right on the wood. If I break it, I throw it away and have to start over.

“Fiddles need to age and get some music in ‘em. They need time and Arthur examines violin parts a’playing. Some people when they get up and go to work, they’ll leave the radio on and leave the fiddle near it so the vibrations can make it play better. They get better over time. I say 40 years minimum of playing time to get the maximum ability of the fiddle. A good fiddler could tell the difference, blindfolded.”

He took out a bow and tightened it. He held the fiddle to his chin and played “Rock that cradle, Lucy” for us, and then sang, Rock that cradle, Lucy, Rock that cradle now; Rock that baby, Lucy, Don’t let that baby cry “That’s how I learned to play, by voice by song, by following the song. You can read music but it don’t make no sense to me.”

He put the chin-rest to his chin again, and started to play and sing again.

I’m a’crossing the river on a hickory log Me and my wife and an old brown dog Log it broke and my dog fell in,

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Arthur looks over a drawing of a violin Lost my wife and a bottle of gin.

I asked about the difference between a fiddle and a violin.

“A violin is more of the time high dollar played classically.

A fiddle is everyday playing. The instrument itself is the same.

If someone in the symphony asked me to make a violin, it’s the same thing as a fiddle.

Down in the Roanoke Symphony there are two or three people playing my fiddles.”

I mentioned that there seemed to be three things that people focus on with fiddles, the sound, the beauty, and the whittling on the scroll.

Arthur said, “I am known most for the sound.” He said he chooses the wood carefully. He showed me the fine stripes from the rings of the tree. “Each one is a year’s growth. They need a fine, straight grain. That piece of wood comes from Sitka, Alaska. The first fiddle you make it don’t look pretty. I have learned that if I’m going to go look at trees to make fiddles, I need to go to sheltered areas. Exposed areas have trees that are twisted and I need straight wood. It takes me about two weeks to make a fiddle.

“When I look at bluegrass music on the television or anything pertaining to a fiddle, the first thing I look for is the lightness of color here, here, here, and here (He pointed to the two upper and two lower bouts, the wider portions of the fiddle.) The two sides must match each other exactly. Otherwise, the grains won’t match and there will be more open ends on one side than the other. Sound follows the path of least resistance. If the sides don’t match, all the sound will come out on one side and not the other. At its thinnest, the wood on the top is 3 mm (about 1/8 inch). I use a dial micrometer to keep the measurement.”

Conner indicated that on the top, the thickness is pretty uniform. The bottom is thicker towards the center where more of the stress of the strings is absorbed. The bottom starts with a piece of wood, or two pieces butted together and glued, that is up to 1” thick, and then 90% or so is chiseled or shaved away.

The bottom is carefully sculpted with a center ridge and varying thicknesses across it. He uses mostly a metal scraper that resembles an Eskimo knife or ulu, and avoids sanding at all, claiming the fine sawdust clogs the pores of the wood. The outer rim on the top has an inlay in a Eileen and Arthur Conner

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groove, which is sanded flush. He has concocted a witch’s brew containing lye and Borax to clean the wood before varnishing to eliminate any possibility of residual insect eggs or other contaminants. It will also eliminate the pectin or sap. He does this right before gluing on the top.

“We had to survive. Survival is a great motivator. We had to learn on our own, to teach ourselves.

When you have good fiddlers and lots of them playing your instruments, you figure you’re pretty good.”

The mathematics of making a fiddle are complex, well beyond what most of us might think a man with a seventh grade education could master. Yet Arthur has become one of the best. Clearly, he has an exceptional mind for design, detail, and artistic flair.

Arthur took Leslie and me to see his shop. He’s a good storyteller, and as he hobbled to the workshop he regaled us with his adventures during World War II, where he drove a truck loaded with drums of gasoline over the Burma Road and across the Himalayas. “I’ve been around the world. I’ve been on every ocean there is, I reckon.”

The workshop was a separate building, a former one-room school that Arthur disassembled and re-assembled in his back yard. As is typical for the benign neglect of long-standing workshops, there was sawdust everywhere, even growing in tendrils like stalactites. He showed us his most prized possession in the shop, a set of four German chisels. There was an inch-thick book with detailed specifications and intricate measurements of the dimensions of the wood from classic Italian violins, including “contour maps” of the surfaces and detailed thicknesses.

“What I do now is copy Paganini and del Gesu,” He told us. “The best way you can tell a del Gesu violin is by the peg box.” The peg box is the part of the instrument where the tuning pegs are placed, at the top of the neck.

This is where custom violinists can be most creative with their carving style. del Gesu is Bartolomeo Giuseppe Antonio Guarneri, del Gesù, one of Renaissance Italy’s most famous luthiers. A member of the Guarneri family, he was the most highly regarded and was a student of Nicolo Amati, under whom Antonio Stradivari was also apprenticed. “del Gesu was known for his larger peg boxes.” The peg box, in fact the entire head of the violin is carved from a single piece of wood. Niccolò Paganini was the most celebrated violinist of his era, the early 1800s in Italy.

Arthur has also made a few violins for left-handed musicians. He told us he puts the bass bar, which is a strip of wood glued to the underside of the top, and the sound post, a cylindrical wooden rod also inside the sound box, on the other side. Then the order of the strings is reversed.

“The Lord showed me how. A guy gave me an expression I’ll never forget. We talked about religion.

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I don’t go to church much, but everything you look at is created by the maker. More or less. The birds. A blade of grass depended upon him, the maker. That guy said, ‘Well, what I think about is the good Lord gives you a sack of potatoes. He expects you to keep the weeds out.’ I thought about that. What that means is that the Lord gives you a little bit but he expects you to get off your sorry butt and do something with it. The Lord, he gives me a gift I’ve had ever since I come into the world.”

Michael embarrasses himself by impersonating a violinist

Mike Mitchell is a fiddler and instructor from Floyd. He performs exclusively with Arthur’s instruments and apprenticed as a fiddle maker with him, passing the tradition to his own students.

I have been blessed to promote the instrument, the man, and the craft. Arthur and his wife Eileen are the closest to being my grandparents in the world. I love the old man.

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Four and five string violins in a case

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woodworker

Donald “Swede” McBroom Pilot, Virginia

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eslie and I picked a stormy winter morning to call on Donald “Swede” McBroom, with rain pouring down and gullies washing over the road on our way over Pilot Mountain, south of Christiansburg in Floyd County. Swede had only recently plowed the snow off his driveway from a 30-inch ‘snow-pocalypse’ a week earlier, one of the most significant accumulations seen in these parts in decades. He escorted us through his new, self-designed custom home, filled with an eclectic mix of artwork and fine antique furniture from Italy and France. A man of many interests and talents, his bookshelf held titles like Three Pillars of Zen, Climbing the Blue Mountain, Bottanica, and Jefferson the Virginian. The lower level of his house was filled musical instruments, including drums, guitars, banjos, violins, and even a rosewood marimba.

Swede is a tall man in his mid-sixties, with a fringe of long hair rimming a bald top. He has blue eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses. He speaks in a relaxed, confident, laconic way.

“I was raised in Roanoke, born in ’49, in the middle of the baby boom. Dad was a businessman and mom stayed at home. I volunteered in the Navy during Vietnam (War) to avoid being drafted into the Army and served from 1968 until 1972. I was not great college material at the time.

“I became a surgical nurse and spent most of my time as a scrub nurse in hospitals. I got my nickname, Swede, from a couple of mates. I realized I didn’t want to have a medical profession and work in hospitals the rest of my life. This was in 1974 and I was 25.

“I always had an abiding interest in woodworking. As far back as I can remember, my family was businesspeople or lawyers. Back to the Civil War, an ancestor was a judge in Abingdon. I don’t have any personal tradition in woodworking.

“I know that I was interested in designing things from an early age. I started making waterbed frames in the Navy. I built lots of waterbeds and shelves; simple stuff. I really wanted to do more. My parents and grandparents had nice furniture. I was inspired by that.

“I married an English girl. I couldn’t find

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somebody to teach me what I wanted to know in woodworking here in the States. We moved to southern Scotland where people, younger people, were making a living working with wood. They were willing to take on apprentices.

“We have developed a culture in America that primarily wants things fast and cheap. Customers became uninterested in the worker that made the item. Obviously we have shipped so many manufacturing jobs overseas.

Even in the 1980s, I couldn’t compete by doing things like making chairs. A big corporation could sell chairs made in Asia for less than I could buy the materials.

“The way people look at buying things has changed, too. People don’t want longevity. Long ago, if a family bought a fine piece of furniture, the intention was that it would last for generations. Now people buy image.

People buy things not for use or longevity, but for what they look like.

These become philosophical questions: how we make things, why we make things, why we want things.

“We will once again someday be forced to re-localize. We’ll need things that work properly and for a long time.

“There has always been a tradition of hand-work in England and there still is. So in 1976 when we moved Swede in his woodworking shop to Scotland, I fell in with a couple of families that were making furniture in the style of antiques. They would take them to auctions and say, ‘This is a fine example of a seventeenth century chest of drawers.’ They didn’t say it WAS a seventeenth century chest of drawers.

Sometimes they did really well and sometimes they lost their ass. I learned to make things as they really should be made. We did all kinds of work, commercial and residential. This was in and around Edinburgh. Four of my seven kids were born there.

“My brother lived in Floyd (County). I knew about Floyd and that it was a great place to be. It had good sources of wood. I moved back in 1985 and built a shop. It was more of a personal decision than a business decision.

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“I had lived in many places, but there was no better place than Floyd.

“When I started, we wanted to produce good, solid, traditional furniture.

We built a company with 12 people. Our workforce fluctuated over the years.

Then in 1994, our shop burned to the ground. I lost all my tools, a full set of antique tools I used every day. I had over 400 books. I try not to think about it. It took a while to recover.”

Swede put together a series of small woodworking shops around Floyd in the intervening years.

His latest is on a hillside a few miles east of Floyd with a commanding view.

He has also done lots of teaching, which is important to him. He markets with print advertising in glossy magazines and on the local National Public

Radio station.

“We’re best known for unusual stuff,” he continued. “It’s not perfect or traditional, but very natural with holes and knots. People like that. We do lots of texture work. We’re known for our functionality rather than being so arty. It has to function properly. We do more doors than anything else, fancy entry doors. We do conference room tables. We do ecclesiastical crosses and bishop’s crooks and things like that. We do custom bars. We’re trying to create unusual stuff, stuff with a twist. Most of our work comes as commissions.

“My kids have done some woodworking with me, but they’re going their various We will once again ways. One is an airline pilot. someday be forced to One is a jeweler. One is a re-localize. We’ll need things musician. It has been nice that work properly and for a to work with them, to have long time. two or three years of closeness. We’re all obsessed in the workshop. We have had several other apprentices in the workshop that didn’t work out.”

I asked if this was a good place for him to do what he does.

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“Absolutely. For me, this is the only place for me to do it. It is not even Southwest Virginia; it is Floyd. It is a community that has merged lots of new people with the old timers. It has always been isolated. It has been do or die. People help each other. It is very tight-knit, and singularly it has been a good place for creative people to move into.

“In earlier generations, people couldn’t so readily drive to Roanoke or Christiansburg.

People raised their own food. It is the ethic here. If a person is trying to contribute, neighbors will help. Because it is welcoming, everybody has a say.

“Appalachian people are always hearing that everybody else is smarter. More talented.

I think it’s just the opposite. They have all the intelligence and common sense God could give anyone. And I love it. I love my neighbors.

I count so many friends, both native people and alter-native people. We have high arts.

We have film makers. Artists. Music. We have

cosmopolitan things that aren’t looked on with suspicion. It is the sweetest community I have ever encountered.”

Like so many of us, Swede is concerned about the future of our nation and world. I asked about his sense.

“I built my house to not need lots of outside resources.

I am involved with teaching of organic gardening. I raise draft horses with Jason. We’ve always had a culture of sustainability in Floyd. It’s here not because it is new and trendy, but because it has always been necessary. The greatest asset we may have in a calamity is each other. Money won’t buy survivability. It’s how you treat your neighbor. Having useful knowledge that you can share will mean everything. We have that here. Throughout the community we Hand-crafted doors

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understand that, and I think we’ll be here for each other.

“You’re doing a book on people and crafts. It needs to be a proper examination of philosophy. You need to be writing about how people think, because how they think influences how they do what they do.

“I’m nearing retirement age. But I won’t stop. You keep moving. You need a passion for what you do.

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Keepers of the Tradition Leslie Roberts Gregg

Leslie Roberts Gregg is a full-time portrait artist. She grew up in the Longshop area of Montgomery County, Virginia and graduated from Blacksburg High School and Virginia Tech with a degree in Art. She has spent her career blah, blah, blah.

Keepers of the Tradition is her first book.

She lives in the Lusters Gate area outside Blacksburg with her husband. They have one adult son.

Michael Abraham

Michael Abraham is a businessman and writer. He is a native of Christiansburg, Virginia and a graduate of Christiansburg High School and Virginia Tech with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He has had a varied career in engineering, sales, marketing, business management, and real estate management. He currently splits his time between the management of an industrial shell building in Christiansburg and his writing career.

Keepers of the Tradition is his seventh book.

He lives in Blacksburg with his wife, two dogs, and four motorcycles. He and his wife have one adult daughter.

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ho can calculate the value of the preservation of a culture? Who can articulate the urgency? Over and over, portrait artist Leslie Roberts Gregg and author Michael Abraham heard the fear that their time-honored wisdom might turn to dust with their inevitable passing.

The two quickly gained a sense of responsibility to promote their passions to others. In the dozen people presented here, in the portraits of these Keepers of the Tradition, Gregg and Abraham offer hopeful answers.

Stunning pastel portraits and colorful moving personal stories flesh out the Keepers of the Appalachian Traditions. The practice of folklore isn’t a reenactment, it’s the everyday lifestyle experience for these Keepers of Appalachian Traditions.

In Keepers of the Tradition, artist Gregg and author Abraham provide a collection of artistic and verbal tapestries of Appalachian traditions and the people who keep them, honoring a small sample of those who, in their words and interests, provide the glue that adheres the culture.

$28.50 NON-FICTION Learn how the Keepers revere, celebrate and practice the skills, crafts, and occupations of their forefathers and foremothers.

Theyshare time-honored wisdom and stories of their cultural roots, who taught them, who motivated them.

Visit KeepersoftheTradition.com to find special interview excerpts, photos, and recordings from the Keepers of the Traditions. Visit often for the latest additions, updates, and calendar of events as we celebrate our rich cultural Appalachian Tradition.

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