Wood, always at hand, is the only fuel in use. The whole heating apparatus consists in one large open fireplace, built of stone, communicating with a large chimney outside the house at one end, and frequently scarcely as high as the one story building which supports it. This chimney is constructed in such a manner as to be a great ventilator of the whole room, quite sufficient, it would be thought, if there were no other means of ventilation. It is usually made of stone at the base, and that part above the fire is of sticks laid upon one another, cobhouse fashion, and plastered over inside and between with similar clay as that with which the house walls are chinked.
Very few of these houses are more than one story high. They are all covered with long split oak shingles--the people there call them "boards"--rifted from the trunks of selected trees. There is no sheathing on the roof beneath these shingles. They are nailed down upon the flat hewn poles running across the rafters, at convenient distances. Looking up through the many openings in the roof in one of these house, one would think that this would be but poor protection against rain, but they rarely leak.
Not one family in fifty is provided with a cooking stove. They bake their bread in flat iron kettles, with iron covers, covered with hot coals and ashes. These they call ovens. The meat is fried, with only the exception of when accompanied by "turnip greens."
The question, "What is the principal food of the people who live on these mountains?" has been asked by me several hundred times. The almost invariable answer has been, "Corn bread, bacon, and coffee." Occasionally biscuits and game have been mentioned in the answers. All food is eaten hot. Coffee is usually an accompaniment of all three meals, and is drunk without cream and often without sugar. Some families eat beef and mutton for one or two of the colder months in the year on rare occasions, though beef is commonly considered "onfit to go upon," as I was told upon several occasions, and mutton sustains less reputation. Chickens are used for food while they are young and tender enough to fry, on occasions of quarterly meetings, visits of "kinfolks" or the "preachers" and the traveling doctors. Fat young lambs are plenty in many settlements from March to October, and can be had at fifty cents each, but I could not learn that one was ever eaten.
A large majority of the adult population use tobacco in some shape--the men by chewing or smoking, the women by smoking or dipping snuff. They never have dyspepsia, nor do they ever get flesh, after they pass out of childhood, though nearly all the children are ruddy in appearance, and well rounded with fat.
One physical type prevails among the people in middle life, and carries along into old age but little change; and old age is common there. Nearly every house has its old man or old woman, or both. Everybody, father and mother, and frequently grandfather and grandmother, is still on hand, looking as brisk and moving about as lively as the newer generations. After they pass their forty years, they never seem to grow any older for the next twenty or thirty, and the grandfathers and grandmothers can scarcely be selected, by comparison, from their own children and grandchildren. The men are taller than the average, and the women, relatively, taller than the men. They are all thin featured, bright eyed, long haired, sharp looking people, with every appearance of strength and power of endurance.
I think the men who live on Walden's Ridge can safely challenge the world as walkers--aborigines and all; and unless the challenge should be accepted by their own women folks, I feel quite sure they would "win the boots." They go everywhere on foot, and never seem to tire.
Nearly all the people of the Tablelands are employed in the pursuits of agriculture. Very few of them seem to be hard workers. The men are all great lovers of the forest sports, much given to the good, reliable, old fashioned long rifles. The women and children are much employed in out door occupations, and live a great portion of their time in the open air. The clothing of all classes is scanty. The use of woolen fabrics for underwear has not yet been introduced, and coarse cotton domestic is the universal shirting, and cotton jeans, or cotton and wool mixed, constitute the staple for outer wearing apparel. The men wear shoes throughout the year much more commonly than boots. They never wear gloves, mittens, scarfs, or overcoats, and they scorn umbrellas. Probably this whole 4,000 people do not possess two dozen umbrellas or twice as many overcoats. The women go about home with bare feet a great part of the summer. They never wear corsets or other lacing.
I have learned by careful inquiry that very few of the people of the Ridge have ever had the diseases of childhood. Scarlet fever I could hear of in but two places, and I suppose that not one person in fifty has had it. Whooping cough and measles have occurred but rarely, and the large majority have not yet experienced the realities of either. Very few people there have ever been vaccinated, nor has smallpox ever prevailed. Typhoid, typhus, and intermittent fevers are unknown. In the great rage of typhoid fever which took place ten or twelve years ago in the Tennessee and Sequatchee Valleys, not a single case occurred on the Mountains, as I have been informed by physicians who were engaged in practice in the neighborhood at the time. Diphtheria has never found a victim there; so of croup. Nobody has nasal catarrh there, and a cough or a cold is exceedingly rare.
I have said that these observations refer more particularly to Walden's Ridge than to the Cumberland Tablelands in our State as a whole. This ridge was chosen by me for this examination, mainly for the reason of its convenience, but partly owing to its being more generally settled than any other equal portion of the table which lies in Tennessee. Lookout Mountain is not as well located; it is on the wrong side of the Tennessee River, and but a few acres of it belong in this State. Sand Mountain is altogether out of the State, but it is perhaps nearer like Walden's Ridge in its physical features than Lookout. That part of the Cumberlands west of Sequatchee Valley is Walden's Ridge in duplicate, excepting that it is further west, and nearer the Middle Tennessee basin. There are some small towns, villages of miners, and summer resorts there, which interferes with that evenness of the distribution of population which Walden's Ridge has, rendering it more liable to visitations of epidemic and contagious diseases. The tablelands north of the center line of the State, above Grassy Cove, are very similar to Walden's Ridge, as far up as Kentucky, with the exception before mentioned--that of climate--it being from one to ten degrees colder in winter.