THE queerest people in this country, I fancy, live down in the southern part of the Blue Ridge where that magnificent range of mountains passes through the northern parts of both Carolinas and of Georgia. Even their houses are small and queer, and all their tools and machinery of the most primitive description.
The farm-houses through the mountains are made of logs, and, as the weather is not usually very cold, the chinking of mud and chips between the logs is very likely to fall out and be only half replaced, so that in the storms of winter, they must be comfortless abodes; but, as I said, the cold comes mainly in the shape of sudden storms after which there is a warm spell. You remember, that when the stranger asked Kit, the famous “Arkansas Traveller,” why he didn’t patch the hole in his roof, he answered “that it had been so all-fired rainy he couldn’t.”
“But why don’t you now that it doesn’t rain?”
“Because now it don’t leak!” cried Kit triumphantly, and went on with his fiddling.
Well, that is a very good example of the spirit which builds these houses and tries to keep them—not in repair exactly, but at least upright. I am speaking of the ordinary farm-houses in the mountains. Now and then you will see more snug and pretentious ones, but not often even among men who own several hundred acres of land and a large number of cows, horses and sheep. Sometimes they build two log huts pretty close together, and roof over the space between, making an open hall-way or store-shed, where saddles, and dried fruit are hung, and where all sorts of things are placed out of the rain or sun. In nearly every case, too, the roof of the front side of the house is continued out into a broad shed, where benches are placed, and half the household work is done I have often seen the loom upon which they wove their homespun clothes filling up half the space in this broad porch, and shaded by masses of morning glory, Virginia creeper or columbine. A low log house with one of these long-roofed porches reminds one of a man with a slouched hat pulled down over his eyes.
Whether the house is large or small; such as I have described or better than that; you will be sure to see the chimney wholly on the outside. It stands at the end of the house, and is a huge pile of stone set in mortar or perhaps only a conglomerate of sticks and stones and mud, half as wide as the house itself at the base, and then narrowing somewhat to the summit six or eight feet above the gable. The great summer house of Mr. John C. Calhoun, the famous senator who died about twenty years ago, has two of these big outside chimneys made of brick; and this mansion was considered a very grand one in its day.
“SWEET HOME” IN THE MOUNTAINS.
If you should go inside—and the women and children are very hospitable to strangers—you would find little evidence of what we in the north call comfort. There will be one large room, serving as sitting-room, dining-room and kitchen, nearly one whole side of which will be given up to the vast fireplace which is hollowed into the broad chimney. On the opposite side from the fire, perhaps, will be a little bedroom partitioned off, but often not, and the only other room in the house will be the rough boarded attic overhead, reached by a ladder. Lathing and plastering are hardly known outside the few villages, and carpets are still more rare. A bedstead or two, some splint-bottomed home-made chairs, as straight-backed and uncomfortable as possible, a rough table and some benches complete the furniture. Stoves are not yet known to the mountaineers. They cling to the old-fashioned way of cooking at the open fireplace, hanging the iron pot in which they boil their food over the fire upon a swinging iron arm fixed in the side of the chimney and called a “crane;” or if they want to roast a spare-rib of beef or pork, hanging that by a hook upon the crane, and steadily turning it round until it is evenly done.
Another favorite dish is the hoe-cake or corn-dodger, which is a batter-cake of corn-meal baked before the open fire, or in the bottom of the iron pot. Wheat flour is almost unknown in some of these mountain districts, cornmeal and sorghum molasses wholly taking its place. The mills where it is ground are the most picturesque and seemingly useless affairs. Every mile or so through these rough hills there comes tumbling down a clear and rapid stream, so that water-power is plenty enough for each man to have his own mill, and most of them are essentially home-made. I saw one over near the sources of the Chestatee which from the outside looked far more like a heap of old drifted logs than anything else. The man who ran it built the whole affair himself, with only an axe, a saw and a two-inch auger for tools. The entire running-gear was wooden, yet this mill had stood many years and ground all the corn of the neighborhood. Such machinery is slow and weak of course, but the people who use it have plenty of time. They can’t understand the hurry and anxiety to save time which characterize their more thrifty neighbors who live in the world instead of alongside of it.