The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Women: Stories of Landscape and Community in the Mountain South

INTRODUCTION

The Foxfire Women

Oral History, Landscape, and Identity

It seems to me that women now have the lead in more things than they’ve ever had before. — Carrie Stewart

This Foxfire book is dedicated to the women of Appalachia. Though their stories have long been collected in our historical archives and published throughout the books and magazines, only now are we finally dedicating a volume just to them.

Most Foxfire readers know that a group of rowdy high school students and their English teacher in Rabun Gap, Georgia, decided to create a literary magazine in 1966. They believed that stories and meaning could be found in their own Appalachian spaces, not only in classics such as Shakespeare. The very first Foxfire Magazine, published in 1967, was filled with poetry and prose from local students and authors — and it featured interviews with relatives and neighbors, old and young. These oral histories quickly became the star of the magazine and, eventually, the material that generated the multivolume Foxfire book series.

Every year, the high school students continued to venture into their local rural towns to learn more about where they lived, a tradition that Foxfire continues today. In Rabun County, Georgia, Foxfire’s high school students armed themselves with reel-to-reel tape recorders and notebooks, determined to tell the real stories of their mountains. Dozens of Foxfire books and hundreds of articles on a range of subjects, such as how to build a log cabin or plant by the signs, came out of the Foxfire project. The books are now beloved by readers across the nation and beyond.

While stories of women, bonded by common threads of place and culture, are scattered throughout the Foxfire publications, we’ve just now identified the need to craft a book dedicated to the Appalachian women whose stories were carefully collected by our Foxfire students.

Carrie Stewart being interviewed by Foxfire student Connie Wheeler, 1977.

Many women’s stories dwell in Foxfire’s archives, and for this book we selected twenty-one women whose voices together, sometimes with humor, sometimes with sadness, illuminate the many different lives of women in Appalachia over the past century and up to the present day. Reading each interview is almost like sitting next to these women, joining them on their porches and in their homes as they take us on a journey through their childhoods and adult lives. As we read their stories, we begin to see the vibrant themes of landscape and community that echo throughout the volume.

This book was created by undertaking a deep exploration through the Foxfire archives, magazines, and books, going back to the roots of the organization, and it chronicles how things changed over time, starting with the first Foxfire interviews conducted in 1967 and 1968. I was looking for women who spoke to the culture of the time, through each decade. I found that several of these women had been interviewed multiple times — some over the span of fifteen years or more. Though it was extremely difficult to narrow down the selections, once I made my choices, I pulled all published and unpublished material on each individual. I curated content from magazine articles, book chapters, and transcripts into a lightly edited and abridged interview, which I optimized for readability and flow. What you will read in this book comes from Foxfire students’ direct interviews with each woman, presented in her own voice. I decided (and you’ll notice this in some earlier interviews) to retain the syntax, which the students used during transcription to preserve the mountain dialect. While this kind of transcription was not utilized in later years, as it fell out of favor, the women at the time had each approved the way their voices were represented. You will also notice bracketed material and italicized content in parentheses. Words or phrases enclosed in brackets were added by the transcriber when converting the material from the interview to the article, to clarify statements or answers that were not complete. As editor, I have made additional contributions in parentheses to further explain sayings or references that may not be known outside our local region.

Rabun County, Georgia, home to the Foxfire Museum, is located in the uppermost eastern corner of the state, bordered by both Carolinas. The county seat, Clayton, is positioned in a small valley surrounded by the mountainous Blue Ridge. Highway 441 runs right through town and is the main thoroughfare from Atlanta into the mountains. Clayton today is a gateway to the expensive holiday homes of South Georgia and Florida residents. Houses on Lake Burton — a county lake created in the 1920s by Georgia Power — are worth an average of around $1.2 million, but easily reach $7 million. By comparison, the median household income for the county in 2021 was just over $40,000.

The county is characterized by stark disparities in wealth and high rates of poverty. Roughly 70 percent of students, kindergarten through twelfth grade, receive free and reduced-cost lunches. In recent years, the county has undergone rapid transformation as it was converted into a top-destination tourist town. With this change, area demographics shifted because longtime residents increasingly moved out of agriculture, which then opened up more jobs for Latinx immigrants who have settled in the region. Many city dwellers from southern Georgia and Florida choose Rabun County as the ideal spot for establishing new businesses, ranging from high-end home decor boutiques to upscale farm-to-table restaurants.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Rabun County was characterized by a contrast in lifestyles common to the history of rural development across the United States. While most students in the Foxfire program lived in homes with running water and electricity, the community elders whom they interviewed still lived in much the same way that they were raised: without telephones, electricity, running water, or refrigeration. It was curiosity about this extreme difference in lifestyles that drove students to capture many of the stories that they did. Often, students were shocked to learn that their very neighbors or family members chose not to drive a car or install plumbing, instead taking a mule or walking to the store and continuing to use an outhouse. Maude Shope admitted to students in 1972, I never did try to drive a car. My mule is the way I got around. While these self-sufficient means have been misrepresented by those who wish to create a myth of a romanticized Appalachia, the rich and diverse oral histories of women, especially older generations, affirm that these activities were a daily reality.

Rabun County looks drastically different from the way it did in 1970. Compared to the towns where the women in this book grew up in the 1910s and 1920s, today’s Rabun County is almost unrecognizable. Foxfire has always focused on capturing the kinds of oral histories that help us to remember what used to be and to contemplate where we are going.

This region of Southern Appalachia shares distinctive cultural markers, but one of Foxfire’s most valuable contributions lies in how it brings to light the rich variety of attributes that exist across communities, and from individual to individual. As evidenced by the testimonies collected here, each Foxfire woman held her own philosophical tenets and practices. Some women forbade dancing in their homes and communities and attended church twice a week, while others didn’t go to church at all. But what each of them express is a profound and personal connection with place. In reading these histories, I urge you to think about what they valued and what their apparent faith in the land provided to them. Many remained in the mountains despite unspeakable hardships. Those who see a monolithic narrative of Appalachia may reduce this to stubbornness, but the women in this volume show us the richness of their experiences and the many varied expressions of their strength. The stories and experiences of the Foxfire women help us reconnect in a tangible way with place, community, and people.

These oral histories also push back against racial stereotypes of the region. The women’s narratives expose the rich human diversity of the region. Spanning several decades, the interviews introduce us to a range of ethnicities and cultures. The details of their lived experiences speak against the notion of tough mountain women that has been repeatedly put forth by writers, ethnographers, and journalists. The women you’ll meet in this volume tell us in their own words times when they were resilient and tenacious, yet they were always so much more.

For example, in the Appalachia of the Cherokee, women were traditionally at the center of society, holding positions of respect and authority. European gender roles increasingly influenced Cherokee culture beginning in the eighteenth century, but in this book we discover how Cherokee women retained some of this autonomy in their families. Black Appalachian women in this book recount the horrific impact of slavery and Jim Crow laws and bring to light stories of discrimination that are often lost. In their own words, many share the ways in which they exhibited strength in the face of adversity, or how they loved and protected their families.

Women, just like other members of their families, had to take on all tasks, not only those superficially associated with their gender. In the mountains, women did not exist in separate spheres, as touted by common Victorian rhetoric. Several women featured in this book recount times when they were out in the fields with their husbands, brothers, and fathers, and how they cared for the gardens that fed their families all year long. Many of these women also raised large families or cared for elderly relatives. When the logging industry began to boom, women managed farms independently while their husbands and sons were away in the woods. After the Depression, factories emerged in the region, offering some women their first opportunity to work outside the home, sometimes even before men in these areas entered such industries.

Women talk about producing food for their families by maintaining gardens full of native herbs and — to use a modern term — heirloom vegetables. They have countless stories of and recipes for using the harvest to create simple yet nourishing dishes that sustained their families. In their narratives, foods like cornbread and beans connect generations through the oral transmission of recipes, and they share memories of learning to make them from a mother, grandmother, aunt, or other mentors.

At the Foxfire Museum, we often demonstrate cooking on a woodstove and offer cornbread samples to visitors. Every time, we hear, I haven’t had cornbread like this since I was a kid. This is exactly how my grandma made it. Although electric stoves have replaced wood-fired ovens and industrial agriculture has long since replaced subsistence farming, the oral histories in this book echo the experiences of many community members, helping to preserve the memories and practices associated with women’s experiences in the mountains.

Lyndall Toothman during an interview in the Foxfire classroom, 1985.

In most of their interviews, Foxfire women shared their struggles with gripping rawness and honesty. Carolyn Stradley, abandoned in the mountains at eleven, struggled to provide for herself. She remembers that bobby socks were the popular thing at that time and I only had one pair. I’d wash them [every night] and if they weren’t dry by the next morning, I’d put them on wet. I think being laughed at and made fun of in school and never feeling like I was as good as anyone else were probably the worst things [I experienced]. The women’s vulnerability reminds us that although the idea of self-sustainability is often glamorized — especially through social media — the reality of a life without electricity, running water, grocery stores, or medical care is harsh and demanding.

For many women interviewed by Foxfire in the 1970s and 1980s, simple material goods that we now take for granted in our commercialized culture, such as clothes and shoes, were rarities. Most children received one pair of shoes a year; if they wore out during that year, they went barefoot. Underwear was often made from bleached flour sacks. We also hear about the many family members, most often young children, who died untimely deaths because medical treatments weren’t available. Many of these hardships were just a part of daily life, and though these women felt the weight of it, as described in their own words, they accepted these challenges and focused on what gave them strength and joy. The women featured here emphasize that their challenges and responsibilities contributed to a sense of fulfillment and a greater appreciation for what they did have. Mary Carpenter told students, Back in them days, I believe people had a better time than they do now because there wasn’t too much to have. When you did get something, you appreciated it and was thankful for it.

Several women whose voices we hear in this book said that community activities like cooking for a corn shucking or quilting at a guild meeting were important sources of entertainment and support. These gatherings often provided them with a space to engage with peers and build same-sex friendships that provided solidarity through both good and bad times. These friendships were often similar to kinship ties, and they served to further strengthen their communities.

For readers familiar with Foxfire, you may have already encountered some of these themes in Aunt Arie: A Foxfire Portrait, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1983. Arie Carpenter, lovingly called Aunt Arie by all who met or read about her, was interviewed by Foxfire students more than twenty times between 1969 and 1975. Born in the 1880s, Arie still lived in a largely self-sufficient manner at the time of her interviews: cooking on a woodstove and raising nearly all of her own food. She continued to use an outhouse and get her water from a well. Many former Foxfire students attest that Aunt Arie became a grandmotherlike figure for them, leaving a lasting impact on all those who walked through her door. In 1987, the Hallmark Channel released Foxfire, a movie based on a Broadway play inspired by interviews with Aunt Arie. In a 1990 interview, former Foxfire student Faye Carver — twin sister to Kaye Carver Collins, featured in this volume — noted that Aunt Arie was a very good person, … but I felt like she was typical of mountain women her age. I didn’t think she set out more than the others. Everybody — all the mountain women — had the same trials and hardships that she had. Aunt Arie was a very special person in her own right, but I think she symbolized what mountain women her age were. Arie represented one type of mountain woman. While Aunt Arie is justly celebrated, this book takes on the welcome task of highlighting many other Appalachian women whose stories are equally compelling.

The women interviewed in the 1960s and 1970s — Margaret Norton, Ethel Corn, Maude Shope, Beulah Perry, Addie Norton, Mary Carpenter, Marinda Brown, and Anna Tutt — capture the drastic transformations that were occurring in the region: changes in transportation, landscape, technology, and even identity. Interviews conducted by the Foxfire students in the 1980s through the early 2000s feature craftswomen like Nola Campbell, who reminds us that it takes time and determination to build skill: You have to want to do something before you can, and you have to pay close attention if you are going to learn anything. Stay right with it. … You just don’t learn overnight. Flora Youngblood, Lyndall Toothman, and Amanda Swimmer echo this message. The students captured poignant and inspirational stories from Carrie Stewart, who was 103 at the time of her interview. Carrie shares the chilling image of her enslaved father being sold on the auction block as a child in Franklin, North Carolina. Carolyn Stradley, a self-made businesswoman, tells us about her mother’s death and how her father abandoned her and her brother when she was only eleven.

Aunt Arie Carpenter, center, outside her home in Otto, North Carolina, with Foxfire students Carla Coleman, left, background, and Laurie Brunson, right, background, and exchange students from New York, 1970.

Reaching the most recent interviews at the turn of the twenty-first century, we witness an accelerating shift to new technologies and changing cultures, while the realities experienced by mountain elders become increasingly preserved more in memory than seen in action. Sharon Stiles chronicles the shift from cooking on a woodstove to gas and admits that when she and her husband bought their first gas range, I was terrified of it because I thought it was going to blow up or something. In a 2018 interview, Ronda Reno talked about keeping folk healing traditions alive and skills that she learned from her great-grandmother: I don’t reckon there was any choice in what I was going to do. This is all I know. I was born and raised to do it. We also get a glimpse into niche communities and outsider perspectives from Sandra Macias Glichowski, Lena Dorsey, and Angelina Davis. Sandra Macias Glichowski, who migrated to Georgia in 2017, said about her new life in the mountains, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as free in any other places as here or inspired. In her interview, she explains why. We see Dakota Brown and Kaye Carver Collins also actively practicing and transmitting the culture of their elders in their communities.

The stories brought together in this volume shine a light on the diversity of women’s experiences in Appalachia. Still, while the Foxfire archives are rich and deep, they are far from complete. The process of gathering oral histories is always shaped by the relationship between the interviewer and interviewees and by the social circumstances and conventions of the time. We recognize that our interviewees may have chosen to omit certain aspects of their lives — this is common in the process of doing oral history. And though we do not speculate about these omissions, it’s important to recognize that they may be there and that hiding behind them may be narratives of, for example, queerness, disability, or race that go untold. We encourage readers to use this book as a starting point for a broader exploration of women’s lives, past and present, in Southern Appalachia. Narratives and oral histories from many sorts of women and many diverse groups of women exist in other regional archives, and encountering them can be both enjoyable and informative. Please consult the recommended reading and resources at the end of this book to continue your journey.

For me, encountering the women of Foxfire feels like sitting down with a grandmother, mother, aunt, or friend and hearing the stories and advice they offered to the Foxfire students during their interviews. The legacy of these Appalachian women lies in the messages they shared between generations and in the relationships they seem to form with us even long after they are gone. Everyone deserves to meet these women and to listen to their stories.

Margaret Norton demonstrates butter churning to Foxfire student Chuck Childs, 1967.

Margaret Burrell Norton (1910–1983)

Interviewed several times, beginning in 1967

Betty’s Creek, Georgia

Everybody helped everybody else.

Come butter come, come butter come. These are the words Margaret Norton sang as she rhythmically churned her butter in a stoneware crock. Margaret carried a wealth of traditional folklore passed down orally through generations of mountain dwellers. As the first woman to be recorded by Foxfire students, she shared this knowledge with the teenagers who visited her, carrying cameras and microphones to capture every detail. Foxfire students interviewed her on a vast range of topics, from woodstove cooking to planting by the signs of the Zodiac, community events to courtship.

Margaret was born and raised on Betty’s Creek, a small community in Rabun County, Georgia. Even after she married, Margaret and her husband, Richard, remained in the area. Her family lineage is tied to the same place, and she shares with us a mental map of land distribution among her family. During the 1970s, a time of rapid growth and change in Rabun County, Margaret struggled to understand why so many people were selling off their land to developers and outsiders. She expressed that without land, people had nothing to leave their children or grandchildren. Like many in the mountains, she valued land above money.

Her connection to the landscape motivated her to continue a life that she felt preserved and protected the mountains, even well after changing technology and industry made these practices obsolete. She depended heavily on folk beliefs such as planting by the signs to cultivate her garden — a method of planting, cultivating, harvesting, and processing foods dictated by the signs of the Zodiac and the phases of the moon. Certain signs were deemed prosperous for planting while others were considered barren. Each day of the month had its own unique sign. Though Margaret didn’t know the science behind the system, in her eyes, her own faith and experiences confirmed the value of this practice. By the time Foxfire students encountered this system, Margaret was one of few who believed in — and still practiced — the signs.

From 1967 until 1972, Margaret ran a column in the Foxfire Magazine featuring local recipes from women throughout the community. These included carrot pudding, pickled foods, biscuits, and more. Several of her own recipes and those she collected are featured in The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery. Margaret also taught the students how to churn butter, a process captured on film in a commercial for JFG Coffee of Knoxville, Tennessee. Margaret’s contributions to Foxfire were abundant, and her life provides an example of the many roles and responsibilities of women in the mountains.

My grandfather was named Doc Burrell and he come here from over about South Carolina. His wife was Sally Carter, and he used to own this land that’s right here (the Rock House at the Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, Georgia). That was on my daddy’s side. My daddy’s name was Rom Burrell. Rom owned some land up the road from here. You know that old house that’s up on the left-hand side of the road as you go down? Well, that’s ours. That’s where we was born and raised. Now the way he got a hold of that is he married — well, my mother was born there. He married Love Beavert, and he inherited half of the land and him and her bought the other half. There was just two heirs to it, which was Love and Faye. Faye was my mother’s niece. And my daddy bought her part of the land, so therefore it all belonged to him.

Now Rom was brother to Decatur and he owned what is now Moon Valley. My Grandmother Burrell had a sister by the name of Lou Lindsay and he took care of Lou Lindsay and she gave him what she had. She had that land up there. She was Sally’s sister and they come from Towns County, Georgia.

I’ve lived here on Betty’s Creek [Rabun Gap, Georgia] all my life. I was borned in that house on the left hand side of the road as you go down. The only place I’ve ever moved was from down there up to where Richard is. I’ve seen all the changes as they come along up here on Betty’s Creek.

They used to tell a tale ’bout a long time ago [when you] walked near everywhere you went. And, you know, that old lakeshore house up there was said to have everybody afraid to travel back and forth the trail at night ’cause [they’d] hear something pattin’ along. Just acted like something was walkin’ along with you, although you couldn’t see it, you know. They say the best way to keep from gettin’ scared when you hear something is to find out what it is. Go right on and find out what it is and then you’ll know. It’s usually an animal or something like that when you couldn’t find it out. But I never did think nothing ’bout it; I never was afraid of that.

It hasn’t been too long ago that they had open range. People took out their cattle to the mountains in the summertime and you’d go once in a while and see how they was gettin’ along. And they’d stay all summer. When they put the refuge in, they just said, You’re goin’ to have to fence up your place now, and take your cattle and hogs out of the mountains or sell ’em. ’Cause the stock law came into effect.

Used to be [everybody] raised their own [food]. They had their hogs and their chickens and they raised their garden, and whatever they bought from the store they swapped corn for it or they killed a hog and took the meat in and sold it. You never heard tell of goin’ to the store and buyin’ things. There wasn’t anything like that to sell, any meat or any chicken or anything. People raised ’em theirselves. It wasn’t until after the Depression that they begun to have fatback and things like that in the store.

[We plant everything by the signs.] It’s all true and just a few hours can make a difference. It sure works for me. And th’ones that don’t — if they once was to get started at it, they wouldn’t change for nothin’. But they have just growed up thataway and it’s hard to change when you’ve done a certain thing all your life. But I don’t know why they won’t try it. If they just was to fail with something several times, they perhaps would try then, because that’s the thing that made me start tryin’. My cucumbers failed. I planted them and they just bloomed and bloomed and bloomed and never did any good. I just planted ’em in an unfruitful sign.

Young people aren’t followin’ it. They don’t even know the signs. They perhaps just go on about somethin’ else and never help their parents in the field. You know, the young generation don’t work like we had to work when we was growin’ up. They’ll just run into trouble. The farmin’ and stuff’ll just be goin’ out more and more every year. [But it works, and] it must have been in the plan when the world was made. Because you know in Ecclesiastes it says, There’s a time for everything. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. That’s God’s book, you know, so that’s the reason.

Margaret Norton cards wool for spinning, 1972.

Some people say the only way out now is for people to go back to the way they’s livin’ fifty years ago. Wonder how the young people’d feel about that? It’d be hard, I’ll tell you, with all the conveniences you’re used to. It’d certainly be somethin’. You’d have to go out to the wash place and wash your clothes and battle ’em and boil ’em and hang ’em out.

We had granny women here on Betty’s Creek. Lot of times, you didn’t have no doctor. You just had the granny women. [The granny women] took care of deliverin’ the babies. They looked like regular people, they didn’t have no special costume that they wore. They just had on a plain white apron. [They didn’t charge.] The doctor, after he come in, started chargin’ two dollars, three dollars. [The granny women went through some rough weather] — just any type of weather. Rain, snow — and ridin’ the horse too, you see. Maybe they’d have another case to go to, and they’d go and come back. I know that happened lots of times.

But I wasn’t sorry to see that way of life pass, well, no, not really and truly. ’Course it just seemed like it didn’t change all at once. Gradually came on. The first improvement we got was electricity. Well, that was a great improvement over heatin’ irons over the fire. Then the roads come in. We knew we needed the road, and when it came in, that meant more people ’cause they could travel and they could get here.

Before the pavin’ of the road, this was just a small settlement and all the families and the farmers owned their land. Now, lots of the land has been sold out and new families moved in here. They have bought land up here and are building houses. If people sell their land, the mountains might get overcrowded. They don’t sell it for the money. They sell it because the tax is so high that they are not able to pay it. So many people are wanting land; I don’t know why now. You know, Rabun County was established on land at fifty cents an acre and back in them days, people didn’t have no problem over lines. They would say, Your land is here and my land is here. You didn’t hear no fussin’ and fightin’ over lines like they do now.

[Other places,] people are selling out their land to where their children wouldn’t have anywhere to live. But not so up on Betty’s Creek. People on Betty’s Creek won’t sell their land. Somebody comes nearly every day to buy land (to Margaret’s house). But we got four children and seven grandchildren. They all got to have a place to live. Richard won’t sell an acre of land for $2,000. He’s been offered $2,500 for one acre. But what would he do with his $2,500 and his land gone? Well, it would soon be gone and you wouldn’t have nothin’.

If I was in charge of the mountains, I’d just let ’em be natural. I think, once in a while, the timber should be cut off of ’em, because when it gets big it just falls down and knocks the other over. But so far as to puttin’ houses on top of [the mountains] and big highways on top of ’em, I don’t agree with that.

Sometimes people that are gettin’ old and their grandchildren have inherited [the land]; maybe the grandchildren have lived somewhere off from here and they decide to sell their land. That is the only kind of land that has been sold. They have moved off to the city or something and they say, Well, we had rather have the money as to have the land. They sell ten acres of land for $10,000. That’s all the land that has been sold here on Betty’s Creek.

People are gettin’ so crowded now, everybody needs land, everybody needs somewhere to live. Well, we haven’t got nay but good people that come in the last few years. They come up here from Atlanta and Florida, and they say their idea is to bring money into a section, not to come to take it away. There’s people works for ’em that wouldn’t have those jobs. They could have got a job, but they’d a’left Betty’s Creek. They’d a’had to went somewhere else, backwards and forwards each day. ’Course, when I grew up, there wasn’t no place to work. There wasn’t no factories or no place to work.

Y’all can’t remember as far back as all that. Yeah, it’s real different I’ll tell you. We always felt like we was the backwoods people and we didn’t have the chance the city people had. So the city people tells us now that we’s the best off. You know how the city people used to look at the country people? They thought they had to get up and go to work without a cup of coffee for breakfast. That’s what they called mountain people; didn’t even have coffee for breakfast. So when they got up here and found out what the mountain people had — their own hams and their own meat and everything — they changed their mind. The city people bring in new ideas and new ways of doing things, which people [here] are not used to.