Today, our journey begins in Appalachia’s Lawrence County, Alabama, where the mountains are more like hills, or, like a far-off friend reminding us, “I’m here.” Inside the county, the small town of Oakville boasts two outstanding parks and museums. One park is the Oakville Indian Mounds Park and Museum. TheContinue Reading
Hauntings are everywhere in the Appalachian Mountains. Whether one believes in such things or not, a person cannot deny the shivers in the darkness when an owl hoots a soothing sound of wisdom, or the early morning sounds of a house “settling” as it pops and cracks at one endContinue Reading
How many of us in Appalachia have heard: “Appalachia didn’t have any slaves.” “Slavery wasn’t popular here in the mountains.” “They couldn’t have any slaves here because the land wasn’t conducive for farming.” “If we had slaves, there weren’t very many.” But Appalachia did indeed have slaves. Jacqueline Clark’s articleContinue Reading
We’ve come to the third and final post in a series about the Extraordinary Tanner family (See posts one and two.). Today, we’ll meet the trailblazing, tenacious Tanner women, who were exceptionally intelligent and highly successful in a time when women, especially African American women, weren’t afforded serious education orContinue Reading
In part two of our series, we examine creatures from the Kentucky Hellhound to the dreaded Snarly Yow. Our journey takes us into moonshine country and skyward, then makes a daring turn toward the woods and on thoroughfares. Take care on this trek, lest you get lost and are foundContinue Reading
Their similarities were keen enough to define an archetype of the Appalachian writer at mid-20th century. Their differences were such as to make each a singular talent. Jesse Stuart, James Still, and George Scarbrough knew one another and admired each other’s work. All possessed shared experiences of growing up onContinue Reading
Growing up in the 1960s during an era of assassinations, civil unrest, and the war in southeast Asia, at times I wore sadness like a raincoat as a palpable and threatening cloud hung over the nation. My memories of that time recur as a series of stock and binary images: Continue Reading