Joseph S. Hall
Mrs. Clem Enloe of Tight Run Branch was 84 years old when Joseph S. Hall photographed her in 1937. “I was told that if I took her a box of snuff, she would let me take her picture.” That’s the snuff in her blouse. She didn’t give in so easily on everything. She refused to observe the park’s fishing regulations and fished every season of the year. She was filling a can with worms when Hall approached. “See that,” she said pointing to the can, “I use them for fishing and I’m the only one in this park who’s allowed to.”
As the Civil War drew toward its final convulsion, the mountain area engaged in a more familiar struggle for survival. Food was scarce, soda and salt almost non-existent. Women leached lye from wood ashes and made soda. There was no substitute for salt; when available, it cost a precious dollar a pound. Bitter enmities divided families, communities, and counties. Life had never been easy in the mountains; now it was rigorously difficult. And the people in this land of “make do or do without” learned new ways to make do. Continuing old habits and traditions up their isolated coves and along their steep hillsides, they created a life that was distinctive, rugged, and adapted to its natural surroundings.
One historian, John Preston Arthur, has described the mountain woman’s day as follows:
“Long before the pallid dawn came sifting in through chink and window they were up and about. As there were no matches in those days, the housewife ‘unkivered’ the coals which had been smothered in ashes the night before to be kept ‘alive’ till morning, and with ‘kindling’ in one hand and a live coal held on the tines of a steel fork or between iron tongs in the other, she blew and blew and blew till the splinters caught fire. Then the fire was started and the water brought from the spring, poured into the ‘kittle,’ and while it was heating the chickens were fed, and cows milked, the children dressed, the bread made, the bacon fried and then coffee was made and breakfast was ready. That over and the dishes washed and put away, the spinning wheel, the loom or the reel were the next to have attention, meanwhile keeping a sharp lookout for the children, hawks, keeping the chickens out of the garden, sweeping the floor, making the beds, churning, sewing, darning, washing, ironing, taking up the ashes, and making lye, watching for the bees to swarm, keeping the cat out the milk pans, dosing the sick children, tying up the hurt fingers and toes, kissing the sore place well again, making soap, robbing the bee hives, stringing beans for winter use, working the garden, planting and tending a few hardy flowers in the front yard, such as princess feather, pansies, sweet-Williams, dahlias, morning glories; getting dinner, darning, patching, mending, milking again, reading the Bible, prayers, and so on from morning till night; and then all over again the next day.”
Emergencies of health and sickness affected the daily routines. “Doctor-medicine” might have its place, but home remedies were considered most reliable—and available. A doctor with his saddlebag of pills and tonics might be a day’s ride or more away from the patient. But nature’s medicine chest lay almost at the doorstep. Plants in swamp and meadow, leaves and bark and roots of the forest: all healed many ailments. From ancient Cherokee wisdom and through their own observations and testing, mountain people learned the uses of boneset, black cohosh, wild cherry, mullein, catnip, balm of gilead, Solomons-seal, sassafras, and dozens of other herbs and plants.
While they found one school and laboratory in the woods and hills around them, the people of the Great Smoky Mountains also worked to provide themselves with more orthodox classrooms. Continuing customs that had begun before the War, the residents of many little communities “made-up” a school. This meant that they banded together, and each contributed to a small fund to pay a teacher’s salary for the year. The “year” was usually three months. John Preston Arthur left a vivid memoir of his experience in one of these so-called “old-field” schools, which were located on land no longer under cultivation:
Edouard E. Exline