After Mrs. Ownby’s father had acquired the old log building, he went to Sevierville, the county seat, and proposed to the school superintendent that he would furnish this house if the county would supply a teacher for Big Greenbrier children. This was agreeable, and Granny’s College, as it was locally known, came into being.
“The men made benches, long enough for three or four to sit on. The back was nailed up on some blocks and the children used the wall for a back rest. There was no place for books except on the benches or floor. Dad furnished wood for the fire. The boys carried it in and kept the fire going. Everyone helped in keeping the house clean and keeping water in the house.”
Church as well as school was a personalized part of family and community life in a way not known in more formal, urban situations. Each fulfilled not only its own specific function, spiritual or intellectual, but also satisfied social needs. The doctrine was strictly fundamentalist; the dominant denominations were Baptist and Methodist, although the Presbyterian influence was also present, especially in the schools that were founded with both money and teachers drawn from other regions of the country.
Each summer, Methodist camp meetings brought families together under the long brush arbors for weeks of sociable conversation and soulful conversion. The visiting ministers’ feast of oratory was matched only by the feast of victuals prepared by housewives over the campfires as they cooked and exchanged family news, quilt patterns, recipes, and “cuttings” from favorite flowers and shrubs.
Baptists were the most numerous denomination. They divided themselves into many categories, among others the Primitives, the Freewills, the Missionaries, and one small group called the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit. Their rules were strict: no violins in church, no dancing anywhere. To be “churched,” or turned out of the congregation, was heavy punishment—and not infrequent.
One aspect of church that incorporated an important feature of mountain life was its singing. In ancient Ireland and Wales songsters had been accompanied on the harp. Settlers had brought the Old Harp song book of early hymns and anthems with them from the British Isles, and on down the valleys and across the mountains into these remote byways. The notes of this music were not round but shaped, and shape, rather than placement on a staff, indicated the note. This method simplified reading the music; and as the unaccompanied, usually untrained, singers took their pitch from a leader, they proceeded in beautiful harmony, usually in a minor key.
The mournful sound of minor chords was also familiar in the ballads common throughout the hills. Death and unrequited love were their recurring themes, whether they reached back to England and the Scottish borders, as in “Lord Thomas and Fair Elender,” or recounted some local contemporary affair. Beside their blazing hearths during long, lonely winter evenings, or at jolly gatherings or through lazy summer Saturday afternoons, mountain people remembered the past and recorded the present as they sang, altering and adding to the ballads which had been taught to them and which in turn would be handed on to another generation.
Pages 88-89: Butchering was a chore shared by nearly everyone in a family. Here, the Ogles—Earl, Horace, Collie, and Willard—butcher a hog as they get ready for a long winter.
National Park Service