Our Contemporary Ancestors In The Southern Mountains

Abstract

Our Contemporary Ancestors In The Southern Mountains by WILLIAM GOODELL FROST Reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly For March, 1899 At the close of the Revolutionary War there were about two and one half million people in the American colonies. To-day there are in the Southern mountains approximately the same number of peopleAmericans for four and five generations— who are living to all intents and purposes in the conditions of the colonial times! These people form an element unaccounted for by the census, unreckoned with in all our inventories of national resources. And their remoteness is by no means measured by the mere distance in miles. It is a longer journey from northern Ohio to eastern Kentucky than from America to Europe; for one day's ride brings us into the eighteenth century. Naturally, then, these eighteenthcentury neighbors and fellow countrymen of ours are in need of a friendly interpreter; for modern life has little patience with those who are "behind the times." We hear of the "mountain whites" (they scorn that appellation as we would scorn the term "Northern whites") as illiterates, moonshiners , homicides, and even yet the mountaineers are scarcely distinguished in our thought from the "poor white trash." When we see them from the car window, with curious eyes, as we are whirled toward our Southern hotel, their virtues are not blazoned on their sorry clothing, nor suggested by their grave and awkward demeanor. They are an anachronism, and it will require a scientific spirit and some historic sense to enable us to appreciate their situation and their character. The case of the "mountain whites" illustrates in a most impressive manner the importance of intercommunication as a means of progress. To a marvelous degree the Northern frontiersman was kept in touch with the thought centres of the East. He ascended the lordly Hudson, and that was his highway to the seaboard. The Hudson was too short, and De Witt Clinton lengthened it with the Erie Canal, so that all the lake region was hitched to civilization . Thus the waterways maintained communication until the railways appeared, and the pioneer shared in large degree the progress of the metropolis. Now, the ancestors of our mountain friends "went West" under the same mighty impulse which peopled western New York and Ohio. But they unconsciously stepped aside from the great avenues of commerce and of thought. This is the excuse for their Rip Van Winkle sleep. They have been beleaguered by nature. The vastness of the mountain region which has enveloped this portion of our fellow countrymen has been concealed by the fact that it was parceled out among so many different commonwealths . The mountainous back yards of nine states abut upon the lofty ridges which separate the Virginias, bound Kentucky on the east, divide Tennessee from North Carolina, and end in Georgia and 70 Alabama. There are some two hundred mountain counties, covering a territory much larger than New England. This is one of God's grand divisions, and in default of any other name we shall call it Appalachian America. It has no coast line like Scotland, no inland lakes or navigable rivers like Switzerland. The surface varies greatly in elevation and geologic structure, but as a place for human habitation the entire region has one characteristic—the lack of natural means of communication. Its highways are the beds of streams; commerce and intercourse are conditioned by horseflesh and saddlebags. In this vast inland and upland realm may be found a contemporary survival of that pioneer life which has been such a striking feature in American history. Beginning with the survivals in matters external , we are at once introduced to the first type of American architecture,—the log cabin. The blind or windowless one-room cabin is replaced in the broader valleys by the double log cabin,—two cabins side by side, with a roofed space between serving for dining-room most of the year; in county towns even a second story with balcony is sometimes developed. In the Carolinas "stick chimneys" prevail, but in Tennessee and Kentucky substantial stone chimneys are the rule, aesthetically placed upon the outside of the wall. The great characteristic in the log-cabin...

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