President Frost, of Berea College, who has worked among these people for nearly a lifetime, and has helped to educate their young folks by thousands, says: “It does one’s heart good to help a young Lincoln who comes walking in perhaps a three-days’ journey on foot, with a few hard-earned dollars in his pocket and a great eagerness for the education he can so faintly comprehend. (Scores of our young people see their first railroad train at Berea.) And it is a joy to welcome the mountain girl who comes back after having taught her first school, bringing the money to pay her debts and buy her first comfortable outfit—including rubbers and suitable underclothing—and perhaps bringing with her a younger sister. Such a girl exerts a great influence in her school and mountain home. An enthusiastic mountaineer described an example in this wise: ‘I tell yeou hit teks a moughty resolute gal ter do what that thar gal has done. She got, I reckon, about the toughest deestric’ in the ceounty, which is sayin’ a good deal. An’ then fer boardin’-place—well, there warn’t much choice. There was one house, with one room. But she kep right on, an’ yeou would hev thought she was havin’ the finest kind of a time, ter look at her. An’ then the last day, when they was sayin’ their pieces and sich, some sorry fellers come in thar full o’ moonshine an’ shot their revolvers. I’m a-tellin’ ye hit takes a moughty resolute gal.”
The great need of our mountaineers to-day is trained leaders of their own. The future of Appalachia lies mostly in the hands of those resolute native boys and girls who win the education fitting them for such leadership. Here is where the nation at large is summoned by a solemn duty. And it should act quickly, because commercialism exploits and debauches quickly. But the schools needed here are not ordinary graded schools. They should be vocational schools that will turn out good farmers, good mechanics, good housewives. Meantime let a model farm be established in every mountain county showing how to get the most out of mountain land. Such object lessons would speedily work an economic revolution. It is an economic problem, fundamentally, that the mountaineer has to face.
THE END
[1] A friend of mine on the U. S. Geological Survey tested with his clinometer a mountain cornfield that sloped at an angle of fifty degrees.
[2] Average annual rainfall of New York City, 44 inches; of Glencoe, in the Scotch Highlands, nearly 130 inches.
[3] Gant-lot: a fenced enclosure into which cattle are driven after cutting them out from those of other owners. So called because the mountain cattle run wild, feeding only on grass and browse, and “they couldn’t travel well to market when filled up on green stuff: so they’re penned up to git gant and nimble.”
[4] Pure bluff of mine, at that time; but it was good policy to assume perfect confidence.
[5] This was in 1904. There are no dispensaries in North Carolina now.