The people who came to the Blue Ridge were, for the most part, from the teeming and iniquitous cities of England, with a rich dash of Scotch and Irishmen. These city dwellers, by and large, knew little or nothing about the agricultural way of life. Many of them had spent most of their lives on cobblestones. The First installment appeared in the Fall issue. Viewing the plight of the people there in the 's, Caudill saw little possibility of population grown accustomed to mining ever returning to agriculture: In the history of mankind there have been no epochs in which an industrialized , wage-earning population has voluntarily reverted to the soil.
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History supports Caudill here. But history does not explain how a "population of embittered rejects" and "human refuse," "city dwellers," many of whom had "spent most of their lives on the cobblestones" not only survived on the American frontier but became "by inclination permanent frontiersmen" and developed an agricultural way of life. If generalization were possible about a movement so far-ranging, protracted, and diverse, one might say that it consisted rather of people who feared a future loss of status rather than of those already reduced to the last extremity of want.
Simpkins of Marshall University explains Appalachian people and values "who they are and why they're like they are" by a combination of racial, cultural and situational factors. In fact, his explanation of Appalachian behavior patterns rests firmly on this assumption. Again Simpkins disagrees with Caudill about whether the people who settled Appalachia were rural or urban in background. CaudilPs settlers lived on cobblestones for years. I'm talking about the people that came If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution that supports Shibboleth authentication or have your own login and password to Project MUSE, click 'Authenticate'.
View freely available titles: Book titles OR Journal titles. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. It has been over 40 years now, so I cannot remember exactly what my mom said but her intentions were clear.
I was still groggy, for we had been out until after midnight the night before helping our friends and neighbors. Where did she go? I walked out on our front porch where my dad was sitting. He was clearly in a state of shock. As I looked down the street the sun was just rising and I could see it. A wall of water about six feet high was steadily moving down our street. I knew two things.
The Tug Fork River was going to invade our home, and at the rate it was moving we had about an hour before it did. Help others whenever you can. So, the entire Tug Valley Area knew that flooding in the low lying areas was going to happen.
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That is why we had been out past midnight. Two relatively young parents with two teenagers and their friends could definitely help, especially a single mother with young children or an elderly widow.
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It is just what you do for, as the Good Book says, to whom much is given much is required. After all, we lived well above the flood plain, at least until then. This little town sits at the headwaters of the Tug River. We were, in effect, doomed even as we helped others. We just did not know it. When life gets tough, so do you. I left the front porch and went back into the house.
Mom was coming in the back door. Slater Street climbs directly up the side of an Appalachian mountain. As the water moved in, the entire neighborhood had taken their cars and parked them one behind the other in the road that ran through the cemetery. I met her in the kitchen and tears welled up in my eyes. Mom got out the garbage bags, and she handed me one and said to fill it full of clothes. Someone also went out back and got our metal garbage cans and dumped the garbage out.
My Mem-maw lived in a house just as you entered the cemetery. Do not let others stop you even those you love from doing what needs to be done. We got right to work. As we did, Dad kept walking around like what is probably best described as a zombie. He kept saying that there was no need to pack things up.
The water was not going to get into the house. I remember thinking that I did not know what he was looking at because it was clear the water was going to flood the house.
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Things that mean the most really are those that money cannot buy. So, there we went my sister and me on each side of that metal garbage can. We were 14 and 16 at the time. We carried as many loads as we could before the water overtook the house. In those garbage cans were yearbooks, baby photos, family albums. When you only have an hour, those are the things you save. The water eventually stopped rising later that day but not before 33 inches were in the house destroying pretty much everything.
Very little was spared that day in our neighborhood: No matter how bad it is, someone is always worse off. We were cut off from the rest of the world. The entire valley was flooded. We had no electricity, no water, no heat and the temperature had dropped and it started to snow. Someone had opened the grade school for shelter and offered up its kitchen contents for the neighborhood. My family members went down and came back with lots of those little milk cartons.
We needed a lot of that milk, but we did not need it all. Dad and Mom took a blanket put those milks in the center and sent my sister and me around the cemetery. Many of our neighbors were taking refuge in their cars. There we went, each holding two corners of that blanket with little grade school milks in the center. We went car to car through the cemetery knocking on car windows offering milk to those less fortunate on what was, for us, the worst day of our lives. There comes a time to sit down and cry; then you get back up. Once the water went down, the clean-up began.
Flood mud was a new term I learned. And, oh the smell!
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Words cannot describe the smell. Dad eventually got back to his usual self almost as soon as the house was flooded.
One day, a couple of weeks after the water went down, I was in the house alone working on cleaning up our living room paneling—a chore my mom and dad left me with. We had a good sized living room with dark brown paneling.
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I was on my hands and knees cleaning from the waterline down. I scrubbed and scrubbed until all of that flood mud was gone. When I finished the entire room, I stood up and admired my work. Then I saw it. Slowly at first and then it worked its way around the room like dominos falling. The flood mud was seeping back onto the paneling.