The Old Corncrib - Repost

The corncrib was a relic of the days when the previous owner of the farm had grown field corn to feed his cattle, his mules, his chickens, and his family. The corn was harvested after drying on the stalk in the field, and the unshucked ears were stored in the small slat-sided building that was lined with rodent-proof woven wire to protect the precious golden bounty. Nowadays, the corn crib stood empty, but for a few ancient moldy cornshucks. (Art's Blood, p. 123)

This, of course, is the original of the corn crib where Elizabeth and Ben found the unhappy Kyra. It's functioning today as a tool shed and a carport for our little utility vehicle but in 1973, when we bought the upper part of the farm from Clifford and Louise, the corn crib brimmed with fat dry ears of white corn -- Hickory King, I think it was.

Corn was the staff of life on the small farm. Every so often Clifford would take a bag or two of the whole corn to a mill in Tennessee where it would be coarsely ground -- shucks, cobs, and all -- and mixed with cottonseed meal and molasses to make feed for the cows. Every day Louise would pull the shucks off a few ears and toss them to her chickens who would eagerly peck the cobs clean. Nell the mule was the daily recipient of more ears (but not too many, lest too much corn make her 'rank' (overly frisky and unmanageable.) The fattening pig, who lived mostly on buttermilk, foods scraps, and garden waste, would be fed ears of corn during the month or so prior to butchering to "harden up the flesh."

And this same corn, shucked and shelled would be taken, not to the big mill, but to a nearby little mill run by a belt attached to the rear wheel drum of a tractor. The owner of this improvised mill would take his pay in meal -- in a little measure specifically for the purpose. This fragrant meal, which was freshly ground in small batches twice a month, provided the best cornbread in the world. Eaten midday -- hot and steaming out of the wood stove, dripping with home-churned butter, it accompanied an array of vegetables, fresh or home-canned, depending on the season, and a very modest taste of some sort of meat. The leftover corn bread might go to the pigs or the hounds, or, dunked in chilled buttermilk left after the day's churning, provide a light supper.

"You keep the mule to plow the corn and you grow the corn to feed the mule," Clifford told us. Man, animals, and corn -- their existence was interwoven.

Old Tobacco Barns (repost)

The old tobacco barns that dot the landscape in our county sometimes puzzle uninformed visitors who remember snug red New England barns or massive white-boarded Midwestern structures. The visitors laugh and shake their heads and go back home to tell their friends about the ignorant hillbillies of Appalachia -- too shiftless to make a barn that'll keep the weather out. Sometimes they assume that once there was chinking between the logs and the present generation hasn't bothered to repair it. But they're wrong on both counts.

These beautiful old silvery-gray buildings were meant to let the air in -- built specifically to air-cure burley tobacco, at one time the major crop in our county. Inside the barns, stout tier poles stretch from end to end, four or five or more tiers high. When the tobacco was harvested, the stalks of the whole tobacco plants would be impaled on tobacco sticks -- five plants per stick. Then these sticks would be hung from the tier poles, rank after rank of wilting yellow-green leaves till the barn was full. From September till November the leaves would cure in the mountain air, their tarnished chartreuse hue giving way eventually to a rich golden brown that said the leaves were ready to be stripped from the stalks, sorted and graded, and taken to market.

Proud old barns, built right for the job they did.

Not from Around here, Are You?

How do you pronounce it -- App-a-LAY-shun? Or App-a-LATCH-chun? It probably depends on where you're from. And since the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Georgia all the way to Maine, there's plenty of room for disagreement.

In Appalachia: A History, John Alexander Williams says this about the term Appalachia:

"As if the varying boundaries weren't enough, there is no fundamental agreement even about how to pronounce the word "Appalachia." Residents of southern and central Appalachia pronounce the term with a short -a- in the stressed third syllable; further north, the same -a- is given a long pronunciation, as in "Appal-achia." 

"Most of the experts and bureaucrats who came from Washington and elsewhere to fix the region's problems beginning in the 1960s adopted the northern pronunciation, while resident experts favor the southern-- which led to a situation, according to one commentator, wherein 'people who said AppaLAYchia were perceived as outsiders who didn't know what they were talking about but were more than willing to tell people from the mountains what to do and how they should do it.'

"Finally, while a majority of both long and short -a- users crunch the third syllable as though it were spelled Appal-atch-yuh, in New England-- where the term "Appalachian" first came into widespread use by nongeologists thanks to the Appalachian Mountain Club and the development of the Appalachian Trail-- a variant pronunciation uses "sh" rather than "ch," as in Appal-ay-shuh."

 In my county, a lot of folks pronounce the name of a nearby community Lee-cester. Across the county line, the folks who live there call it Lester. Both of them spell it Leicester.

Is the Greek gyro a yee-roe or a jie-roe? Is the space between your eyebrows and hairline your fore-head or your far-ed? You say to –may- to; I say to- mah- to . . .

Hit don’t matter, as my neighbor said about the spelling of her name, but the way you pronounce a word can tell others something about where you’re coming from. . .

Sepia Saturday -- Salt of the Earth

Kind of timeless, this first picture.  When do you think?  1901? 1925? 1933? 

Nope - 1974. The year  after we bought the upper part of the Freeman farm in the mountains of North Carolina.

It was the farm Louise Payne Freeman grew up on. And after many years of sharecropping, she and her husband Clifford bought it from the other heirs.

Clifford and Louise grew up in a time that was almost timeless --no electricity,  no cars or trucks; they cooked and heated with wood.  No bathroom -- just a zinc tub in the kitchen on Saturday night, a 'little house' out back, and chamber pots under the beds. Raising most of your own food was the norm -- a grocery list might consist of flour, salt, baking powder, and coffee.

Louise told me that she was 'a great grown girl' before she traveled as far as the nearest little settlement -- two miles away.  As a young man, Clifford left the mountains to go to Detroit to work in the auto plants but, after tasting the city water, got back on the bus and headed home -- where he belonged.

The power pole in the second picture is a tip off that we're in more modern time.  (Clifford and Louise didn't get power till the Sixties.) Clifford is riding Nell, his slow-moving thirty-three year old mule. He's had two hip replacements and can't hardly go, he says.

Louise, a few years younger than he at sixty-nine, is a 'stout woman' and can out climb the thirty-something Florida woman taking the picture. They're heading up the mountain to salt the cows --  a weekly chore. Their cow dog Patsy  is following Louise.

My son and my nephew were thrilled to get a ride on Nell.

And my husband and I were thrilled to find ourselves adopted by these mentors. We learned how to plant potatoes, to raise a crop of tobacco, to milk a cow, churn, and make butter, We learned how to raise pigs on that extra milk and how to butcher them and put up all that good meat.  John learned how to plow with a team of mules; I learned how to wring a chicken's neck.

We learned the language of our new home -- branch for stream, chat for gravel, poke for bag --  and we learned to love and respect these folks for their wisdom and goodness.

Thirty some years later -- we are the old folks now,  passing on the lessons learned to the younger generation.  

And the stories I heard and the realities of the mountain farm have all found their places in the setting of my mystery series, just as there's a bit of Louise and Clifford in more than one of my characters.

Truly, they were the proverbial 'Salt of the Earth.'

Go HERE for other Sepia Saturday posts . . .

Visiting a Friend

Today I'm visiting a friend -- at Kaye Barley's blog "Meandering and Muses." Come with me!

I'm talking about being a 'transplant' to Appalachia and I'd love it if some of you popped over and commented -- today or whenever!

Old Tobacco Barn

The old tobacco barns that dot the landscape in our county sometimes puzzle uninformed visitors who remember snug red New England barns or massive white-boarded Midwestern structures. The visitors laugh and shake their heads and go back home to tell their friends about the ignorant hillbillies of Appalachia -- too shiftless to make a barn that'll keep the weather out. Sometimes they assume that once there was chinking between the logs and the present generation hasn't bothered to repair it. But they're wrong on both counts.

These beautiful old silvery-gray buildings were meant to let the air in -- built specifically to air-cure burley tobacco, at one time the major crop in our county. Inside the barns, stout tier poles stretch from end to end, four or five or more tiers high. When the tobacco was harvested, the stalks of the whole tobacco plants would be impaled on tobacco sticks -- five plants per stick. Then these sticks would be hung from the tier poles, rank after rank of wilting yellow-green leaves till the barn was full. From September till November the leaves would cure in the mountain air, their tarnished chartreuse hue giving way eventually to a rich golden brown that said the leaves were ready to be stripped from the stalks, sorted and graded, and taken to market.

Proud old barns, built right for the job they did.

Something New

After my recent failure to send a holiday album of pictures to all recipients of my newsletter, The Goodweather Reports (too many, too large pictures-- some servers choked on them), I'm experimenting with this blog which seems to promise to let me add pictures at will. We'll see.

The picture above (taken from my bedroom window) is sunrise at the winter solstice. The sun has gone as far to the south as it can and now will begin its journey north, bringing with it longer days.

"Growing up in Florida and in the suburbs, she had never realized how the sun paced back and forth during the year, like a restless dog on a tether. During the winter it rose far to the southeast and skulked along the ridgeline, disappearing in mid-afternoon." ( from Signs in the Blood, the first Elizabeth Goodweather novel.