PJMedia: MOUNTAIN CITY, Georgia — Just off U.S. Highway 23, along the spectacular views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, T.J. Smith spends his days continuing the tradition of the iconic Foxfire Fund: an enterprise driven by young people whose respect for the land and culture, and understanding of the importance of preserving that culture’s stories, has persevered for more than 50 years.
If you grew up in Appalachia, you likely owned a set of the Foxfire books or had the Foxfire magazine in your home, giving you an opportunity to see your very heritage in those pages.
They carried the stories of the America that stretches 1,500 miles diagonally along the Appalachian Mountains, from southern New York through great big swaths of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, parts of both Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama.
If you didn’t grow up in Appalachia, you likely have a very skewed view of the people and their lifestyle, associating them with being mostly white, mostly uneducated, mostly backward and mostly nostalgic for a different time.
Very interesting… since my move down here for work, I’ve received nothing but hostile interactions with the locals. Followed closely by false Christians and fake hospitality.
I grew up in upstate NY, were we had but 500 people to a town. Everyone was honest and industrious, to a fault, and they never sugarcoated it. Those who weren’t, were left to rot on their vines.
The move South showed me that southern hospitality was a farse. All that bless your heart crap makes me sick because they are very much out for themselves. They will haggle you down to free for everything yet their trash is gold. I’ve been all around the US and never have I seen this kind of bizarre behavior. I used to hate dealing with the Amish but would rather deal with them now.
Sad part is, due to this type of animosity towards outsiders, it’s caused us all to work with each other more. In my short 5 years here, I’ve seen this secondary economy thrive. The outsiders only deal with outsiders and it flourishes, the locals haggle with locals and it gets nowhere except somehow they accumulate more trash and busted cars.
I don’t get it. Hunt’n, fish’n, chaw and smoking ain’t no way to live life. Also can’t figure out why grandma is raising the kids. Virtually every family down the road, grandma is the authority figure while mom works and dad is nowhere to be found.
I side with the south over the war but it looks like the best it had to offer died in the war.
I’m Appalachian born and bred, raised in the coal fields of southeastern Ohio. Yes, I did have a pile of Foxfire books. Eliot Wigginton = genius.
I moved just outside Appalachia 17 years ago. I want to get back to the hollers and hills….
I grew up in upstate N.Y/N.E and moved south 20 years ago. I love it! The culture here is what it was like in upstate NY in the 60’s/70’s. You’ll never be a local because you weren’t born here — but that’s the same where ever you go. Took me 10 years to be an honorary local here. Yes they are good hagglers, but when you haggle back you gain respect. Help your neighbors and they’ll give you the shirts off their back! Sounds to me like you may have brought some NY attitude with you — people here can sense that. There’s white trash everywhere (including upstate NY). People are people. You get back what you sow.
Down
I’ve been nothing but nice, perhaps too honest and straight forward at times, but never rude or mean. I just don’t play the bless you’re heart game.
I’ve tried on multiple occasions to get locals to come do work, like build a barn extension, put up some fencing, do some yard work, you know, the things that people advertise that they do. I have money and pay for services. What I have found is that those outsiders are willing to work where as locals just want the money.
I want fair work for a fair price. Not have to chase you down to finish grading my riding arena… which is another area of contention but that’s a rant for another day.
I will be heading to the Appalachia area this June with our church kids, 5th time doing a weeklong service project with Appalachia Service Project. We include ASP in our rotation because we think it’s a great idea for the kids from Santa Monica to see a very different part of the world – and to help rebuild homes for those in need. It’s really as much about developing relationships with the homeowners and each other as it is repairing the homes. And I highly recommend ASP for your contributions – they wring value out of every dollar.
@ Sum Random FEBRUARY 12, 2020 AT 4:42 PM
You are not one of them.
I can be friends with Rez Tribal members, but can’t know why. I have had people say: Indians don’t warm up to non-Indians very often. True story. They ask my why only some people (very very few) can be known as friends but I have to just say I can’t know why. I don’t think Indians can know why either. It just is.
If you can be friends with Blackfoot on the Browning Rez, you can be friends w/ShoBan in Ft Hall, Sioux in Pine Ridge, Yakima, Crow SE of Billings or any of the Twelve Tribes on the Colville. But if you don’t make friends on any Rez you will not be able to be friends with other Rez Indians
But I cannot ever be a friend like their Indian brothers even from different tribes can. My good buddy grew up on The Rez, his brother and sister are half and are registered Tribal members. Even he cannot be accepted like other natives. You can be really tight and have great trust, but they will never accept you as a brother.
I do know that some people feel shut out and try and overcompensate and that is something Tribal members can pick up in a flash, but I have seen others who got the cold shoulder and I didn’t pick up on the dynamic involved.
LCD
Don’t take any canoe trips down isolated rivers. Just sayen.
Grew up in the piedmont of NC – fell in love with the mountains in college. I’ve worked in Oktibbeha Co., MS – the tail end of Appalachia – in Huntington, WV, in the heart of it – and the last 20 years here in Pittsburgh, along the northern end of it. Appalachia is the BEST part of America, and always HAS been.
I probably need to specify locations.
I live near the TN GA border. Work takes me up and down the 75/81 corridor and out 40 to the Carolinas.
The issues is have are local to me. Bristol, Huntsville, Spartanburg, Raleigh, Lexington, no issues people seems friendly enough.
Maybe it’s just the overflow from Atlanta?
I met many young couples from upstate New York when I was in the Air Force. They were from places like Falconer and Kennedy and Olean. They loved the friendliness of southern people and found that most of their close friends they made were from the South. After the Air Force most of them settled in the south and said that bulldozers couldn’t pull them back to New York. Perhaps Sum Random should move back to New York rather than suffer unnecessarily.
…both my parents were born and bred in a little place in the hills you’ve never heard of called Fairmont WVa. They met at WVa university after my dad did his hitch in the Air Force as a Navigator on a MATS C-124 flying all over the Pacific, particularly Korea, back when LORAN was how the cool kids did over-ocean navigation, and went out a Captain, and they met studying Accounting. Faced with such a romantic topic, obviously they could do nothing but get married.
Seems there weren’t a lot in the way of jobs for lovestruck accountants then, so somehow Pa landed a job with a baseball glove manufacturer in -not kidding- Normal IL, where my mother put her work aside for a time to have what was ultimately 4 kids.
Dad hated the way factory folk were treatrd, and went to work for an insurance company that moved him to headquarters in SW OH. I’m a bit sketchy on the details because, while SNS was around then, being not quite one I wasn’t really that hep to what the fam was doing, since naps then (as now) were MUCH more important.
….after getting settled, he was standing around at work one day with a smart look on his face when someone said, “Hey SNS Senior! Wanna be our guy to learn this hot new “computer” thing?” He was given a whole floor filled with the latest tech (which your watch probably out-processes now), and ultimately went out decades later as their Senior Systems Analyst after having shepherded them clear through to the Windows era, while doing little side jobs like Civil Air Patrol, Urban Appalachian Council (NEVER forgot his roots), City Councilman, and Vice Mayor along the way.
Ma was no slouch either. Since we kids were so awesome and practically raised ourselves (ha!), she got bored with that and started doing things part time with a local TV station back when women didn’t too much work outside the house. She was apparently standing around with a smart look on HER face one day when they said, “Hey Mrs. SNS’S Mom, you wanna run our HR department”? So, she went out THERE as an Executive Vice President of Personnel (she hated calling it HR), sat on SEVERAL boards (still does, a couple), is treasurer for a couple of non-profits as a willing voulenteer including one that works with battered women, and -20 years after “retirement” – STILL works, back to her roots, as an accountant for a place that does stuff for kids.
I’m actually skipping a bunch of stuff including their very active Church roles and voulenteer service activities, these are just the highlights.
An AF Captain, Navigator, Accountant, Father, Systems Analyst, Councilman, Vice Mayor.
An Accountant, Mother, Executive Vice President, multiple Board Member, multiple Treasurer.
…pretty good for a couple of dumb hicks from the hills of Appalachia…
Gonna’ get me a motorhome and explore the Blueridge.
…as for folks in the “South”, this could mean a LOT of things, but my wife and I have family in the hills of VA, WVa, and TN, so we go to the Smokies and points along the Blue Ridge Parkway pretty often. I did NOT grow up there and neither did she, so no one mistakes us for natives, but no matter where we go, few people have ever been anything but nice to us.
In fact, sometimes the nice can be annoying. It was fun when we first started going down there and doing touristy things, but when her dad died and we went down to settle his affairs, it’s REMARKABLY hard to do BUSINESS there!
…this is because they are courteous to a fault. We just wanted to ask his lawyer a question about his estate, for example, but we had about 45 minutes of pleasantries to exchange and had to be served iced tea before we could talk business. After a brief conversation about actual business, he told us we didn’t need him, told us where to find the documents we needed,and -get this- Didn’t CHARGE us.
A LAWYER.
DIDN’T CHARGE US.
FOR HIS TIME!!
…and then, after 15 minutes of hadshaking, commisserating about our loss, and waving good bye -FROM A LAWYER THAT WE DID NOT OTHERWISE KNOW – we were on out way to the funeral home.
…where the funeral director made the lawyer seem downright RUDE by comparison.
HE had cookies.
And it was IMPOSSIBLE to discuss, you know, burying her father with the funeral director without a long talk about the weather here, back home, who all was in her family that might be related to him (no one was), local sports, bursitis…my GOD they were nice, and my GOD they wasted an ENORMOUS amount of time!
Up North we tend to want to get down to it, do business, and leave. Every time I tried to do ANYTHING in Tennesse, however, whether it was paying taxes, purchasing plumbing parts (we had to manage the inherited property), een going to the dump, folks were prepared to palaver for a long TIME by way of introduction until you just wanted to scream “GET TO THE POINT, MAN, GEEZE!” (I never did).
…and God help you when you try to order at a non-chain restaurant, bring a change of clothes, you’re gonna BE there awhile…
…so the only problem I really had was folks being TOO courteous. The only real asshole I had to do business with there about a property deed turned out to be from California. Of course, I didn’t go into the “big cities” like Knoxville, where it’s quite different, I hear,so maybe that’s why I didn’t have experiences like @Sum Random’s.
The folks I met (those who weren’t tourists, we weren’t far from Pigeon Forge) were, by and large, hard working, God fearing folk who would invite us to Church on Sunday, provided I’d get a shave first, and not “bless your heart” unless you DESERVED it.
…yes, Meth is a thing there, and heroin is all over the place, so there IS evil, some of it in the wife’s kin, but certainly no more so than other places I’ve been, and less so than MOST.
I couldn’t live there because I’m used tona faster pace. But it’s a nice place to visit, and if they ever learn how to shovel an inch or less of snow it would be even NICER, but that’s a different story for another day…
…the hospitals are,uh, “uneven”, though. It’s not that they don’t have a lot if big, pretty buildings, they just don’t have a lot if medical expertese to put IN them.
My father-in-law had his ultimate cardiac problems a couple towns over from Sevierville, but had to be FLOWN to Knoxville because that’s where the heart doctors were.
…up where I live and served on an ambulace, we were spoiled by having multiple cardiac specialist hospitals in a 20 mile radius, both cetralized and in the third ring ‘burbs, so everything from childbirth to trauma to myocardial infarction to cancer care was in easy driving distance.
You get into the South, however, even in the tourist areas, and the salient feature at every hospital is a helipad. I first heard a “code silver” on the PA at a hospital near Gatlinburg, and I’d never heard THAT one, so I asked a nurse and she said it was the code for helicopter transport of a cardiac patient, a thing that would be unheard-of back home, but she said was quite routine there. More than a splinter or a simple broken bone would suffice to buy you a whirlybird ride if you were emergent, because the local hospitals were little more than clinics due to both equipment issues and the lack of doctors.
Ambulace rides could be heroically long, too, because it was a “fur piece” to even these clinics, much of it UP a hill or DOWN a hill. And the torist area at the foot of the Smokies is essentially at the bottom of a giant bowl, and you ain’t leaving in ANY direction if it snows because you HAVE to go up.a mountain to get OUT.
Hence the emergency helecopters.
…this does make the locals more self-reliant, however, and MUCH less likey to run to the doctor for every little thing, there being few doctors to run TO. This makes folks a bit hardier, in my view, but also prone to home remedies of dubious value, up to and including heroin for pain relief. Tennesse was the first place I heard of “smurfing” in a law enforcement document, which is the practice of going to several pharmacies to bypass restrictions on decongestants so you can get enough to make saleable amounts of meth. Farmers also had to keep a close eye on outside propane and ferilizer storage, these being also popular for drug production.
…so at the end of the day, it’s a place, not without its charms, but not without its challenges. Up North and down South, you’ll find sinners and saints in both. There are regional behavior quirks, but on the whole, people are people, and its pointless to hate one and love another just because of the generic region they hail from…
Li’l Abner and The Beverly Hillbillies are history
SUM RANDOM GUY,
Have you figerred out that “Bless your heart” is an insult?
I prefer Arden on the Keyger Mountain ridge.
I see neighbors from 300 to 700 yards away, driving tractors. I can’t see any houses unless I walk 150 yards from my back door — and those houses are 1/2 mile away, or more.
Sometimes I get stray cows in my pasture. That’s about the worst of it. My wife and I chase a cow at 5 in the morning.
“Tony’s cow got in!”
And I’ve never met Tony. I have no idea if he even exists. But they told me three years ago THAT pasture was owned by Tony.