Their ignorance of town ways has been the source of much amusement to city people when occasionally some of the mountain folks stray down to Atlanta or Greenville. There never were any rustics so rural, I believe. It is laughable merely to look at them. What would excite our respect for its strength and honesty on some wild hill-top, only makes them doubly ridiculous in the city’s strange streets. A good story has come down from the old days before railroads, on this point.
A large party of “Hard-shell Baptists” from the Blue Ridge went down to Augusta, in wagons, one August, to buy supplies. While there, one of the brethren lost his head through drinking a glass of brandy which had been mixed with ice and sugar until it was very delicious. On his return home he was dealt with by the church. He freely acknowledged the fault, but said that he had been deceived by the “sweetnin’.” The church council thereupon forgave him easily the wrong of being drunk, but expelled him for the lie he told about having ice in his tumbler, in midsummer, when everybody knew it was colder upon the mountains than down at Augusta, yet there was no ice!
But little by little this old, charmingly ignorant and simple mountain people, are being modernized by the running of railways past, if not through, their mountains, and the increased number of visitors that go to see their bold crags and lovely valleys. The old men and women still cling to their old ways. “’Pars like ’twould take a power to change me,” one dear old lady said to me. But the boys and girls are getting more “peart,” are anxious to learn and see, and are not afraid of a little change. When the Piedmont Air Line proposed to put a branch back into the hills toward the gold diggings around Dahlonega, I heard a mountain family discussing it. The daughter and pride of the household, a gushing damsel of seventeen, put in her opinion:
“Uncle Jim saays if he was to see one of them railroads a cummin’ he’d leave the world and take a saplin’. Dad saays he’d just lie right down flat on the yearth. But I want ’em to come. I’d just set right down on a basket of cohn turned ovah, and clap my hands. I ain’t afraid.”
Then she caught me making a note, as she thought, and instantly begged me to stop.
“Some of these yere folks are right foolish,” she said, half ashamed, “and maybe you’ll make a heap of fun outen ’em; but you must brush ’em up a powerful lot. You musn’t give ’em too much of their nat’l appearance.”
Well, I hope I haven’t!