Resolved: That on Balance the Settlement Schools Were Harmful to the Culture of the Southern Mountains

Abstract

Resolved: That on Balance the Settlement Schools Were Harmful to the Culture of the Southern Mountains by Harry Robie Editor's Note: We would like to see a response to Harry Robie's thesis about Settlement Schools in Appalachia. Among American Protestant Christians the response to the question, "Am I my brother's keeper," has almost always been "yes." In the Nineteenth Century that response was nowhere more clearly articulated than in large-scale missionary activity among the heathen wherever they could be found on the planet. Here in this country, the activity also extended to our "exceptional populations"—the Native Americans, Mormons, newly emancipated slaves, and other groups whose beliefs were most at variance with mainline religious practice. Among the people included in the missionary work were the white Protestant inhabitants of the Southern Appalachian highlands. Loyal Jones has written that "no group in the country . . . has aroused more suspicion and alarm among mainstream Christians than have Appalachian Christians, and never have so many Christian missionaries been sent to save so many Christians than is the case in this region" (Jones, 120). That endeavor began with Civil War and continues to this day in such programs as the Christian Appalachian Project, the United 6 Methodist Church's Red Bird Mission, and the work of a number of Christian colleges. The missionary activity, of course, has taken many forms, but, according to Henry Shapiro, one of its "principal fruits" was "the establishment of several hundred denominational and some dozen 'independent' schools in the southern mountains" (Shapiro, 42). Many of these institutions were "settlement schools"; that is, they attempted to change their charges by "total immersion ." Students not only studied; they ate, worked, and slept according to the desires of those who had come to save them from the devil and also, presumably , from themselves. It is the motives behind the origin of these institutions, primarily during the last half of the Nineteenth century, which I believe were suspect, and which ultimately worked to the detriment of mountain culture. Before we look at the schools themselves , however, we need to know why missionary boards felt there was a need to extend their efforts into the Appalachian Mountain chain. After all, in the years before mining became Appalachian principal economic activity, the region was inhabited largely by descendants of settlers from the British Isles, who spoke the same language and professed the same religion as their benefactors. In what way, then, could missionaries be considered as needing to be their brothers' and sisters' keepers in the Southern mountains? The answer is contained, I think, in the Nineteenth Century notion of Progress . The rest of the country, but particularly the Northeast, was considered to have "advanced" much further than had the Appalachian highlands. The quaint residents of these mountains, in the words of one Northerner called to save them, had become our "contemporary ancestors" (Frost, "Educational," 12). Nowhere was this primitive behavior more evident than in their practice of religion. Engaging in such strange rituals as footwashing and the lining of hymns, banning such "improvements" as musical instruments, professional clergy, and Sunday schools, the little independent churches of the hills were considered , at best, as out-of-date; at worst, as heretical. This latter view was particularly held by outsiders after they heard about the few hill congregations who took quite literally the words of Mark 16: 17-18 ("And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover"). It was one thing to believe the Book which contained this passage was the Divine Word of God. It was quite another to put belief into practice by laying on hands or picking up a rattlesnake. One group that wanted to reform mountaineer religion was the American Missionary Association, founded in Boston in 1846 "for gathering and sustaining churches in heathen lands; from which the sins of caste, polygamy, slaveholding and the like shall be excluded." By 1848, only two years from its founding...

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