Our Southern Highlanders

by Horace Kephart

Datura stramonium;

stramonium

mydri...

The mountain home of to-day is the log cabin of the American pioneer—not such a lodge as well-to-do people affect in Adirondack “camps” (which cost more than framed structures of similar size), but a pen that can be erected by four “corner men” in one day and is finished by the owner at his leisure. The commonest type is a single large room, with maybe a narrow porch in front and a plank door, a big stone chimney at one end, a single sash for a window at the other, and a seven or eight-foot lean-to at the rear for kitchen. Some of the early settlers, who had first choice of land, took pains in building their houses, squaring the logs like bridge timbers, joining them closely, smoothing their

puncheons

adze

almost as truly as if they were planed, and using mortar instead of clay in laying chimney and hearth. But...

In Carolina they seldom build a house of round logs, but rather hew the inner and outer faces flat, out of a curious notion that this adds an appearance of finish to the structure.

As it is they merely notch the logs at the corners, leaving wide spaces to be filled up with splits, rocks, mud—anything to keep out the weather. As a matter of fact, few houses ever are thoroughly chinked and he who would take pains to make a workmanlike job of chinking would be ridiculed as “fussin’ around like an old granny-woman.” Nobody but a tenderfoot feels drafts, you know.

there is something very attractive and picturesque about the little old log cabin. In its setting of ancient forests and mighty hills it fits, it harmonizes, where the prim and precise product of modern carpentry would shock an artistic eye. The very roughness of the honest logs and the home-made furniture gives texture to the picture. Having no mathematically straight lines nor uniform curves, the cabin’s outlines conform to its surroundings. Without artificial stain, or varnish, or veneer, it is what it seems, a genuine thing, a jewel in the rough. And it is a home. When wind whistles through the cracks and snow sifts into the corners of the room one draws his stumpy little split-bottomed chair close to the wide hearth and really knows the comfort of fire leaping and sap singing from big birch logs.

In a single-room cabin there usually is

cockloft,

Most of the family wardrobe hangs from pegs in the walls or nails in the loft beams, along with strings of dried apples, peppers, bunches of herbs, twists of tobacco, gourds full of seeds, the hunter’s pouch, and other odd bric-a-brac interesting to “furrin” eyes.

The narrow mantel-shelf holds pipes and snuff and various other articles of frequent use, among them a twig or two of sweet birch that has been chewed to shreds at one end and is queerly discolored with something brown (this is what the mountain woman calls her “tooth brush”—a snuff stick, understand).

perhaps some halftones from magazines that travelers have left (a magazine is always called a “book” in this region, as, I think, throughout the South). Of late years the agents for photo-enlarging companies have invaded the mountains and have reaped a harvest; for if there be one curse of civilization that our hillsman craves, it is a huge tinted “family group” in an abominable rococo frame. There is an almanac in the cabin, but no clock. “What does man need of a clock when he has a good-crowin’ rooster?” Strange as it may seem, in this roughest of backwoods countries I have never

I have been describing an average mountain home. In valleys and coves there are better ones, of course. Along the railroads, and on fertile plateaus between the Blue Ridge and the Unakas, are hundreds of fine farms, cultivated by machinery, and here dwell a class of farmers that are scarcely to be distinguished from people of similar station in the West. But a prosperous and educated few are not the people.

It is not the well-to-do valley people, but the real mountaineers, who are especially interesting to the reading public; and they are interesting chiefly because they preserve traits and manners that have been transmitted almost unchanged from ancient times—because, as John Fox puts it, they are “a distinct remnant of an Anglo-Saxon past.” Almost everywhere in the backwoods of Appalachia we have with us to-day, in flesh and blood, the Indian-fighter of our colonial border—aye,

Hundreds of backwoods families, large ones at that, exist in “blind” cabins that remind one somewhat of Irish hovels, Norwegian

saeters,

the “black houses” of the Hebrides, the windowless rock piles inhabited by Corsican shepherds and...

In the damp climate of western Carolina such an interior is fusty, or even wet. In many cases the chimney is no more than a semi-circular pile of rough rocks and rises no higher than a man’s shoulder, hence the common saying, “You can set by the fire and spit out through the chimbly.” When the wind blows “contrary” one’s lungs choke and his eyes stream from the smoke.

we still shall find dire poverty the rule rather than the exception among the multitude of “branch-water people.”

another will be so small that “you cain’t cuss a cat in it ’thout gittin’ ha’r in yer teeth.”

parboiled

A substitute for the church fair is the “poke-supper,” at which dainty pokes (bags) of cake and other home-made delicacies are auctioned off to the highest bidder. Whoever bids-in a poke is entitled to eat with the girl who prepared it, and escort her home. The rivalry excited among the mountain swains by such artful lures may be judged from the fact that, in a neighborhood where a man’s work brings only a dollar a day, a pretty girl’s poke may be bid up to ten, twenty, or even fifty dollars.

Christmas is a day of license, of general indulgence, it being tacitly assumed that punishment is remitted for any ordinary sins of the flesh that may be committed on that day. There is no church festivity, nor are Christmas trees ever set up. Few mountain children hang up their stockings, and many have never heard of Santa Claus. New Year’s Day is celebrated with whatever effervescence remains from Christmas, and in the same manner; but generally it is a feeble reminder, as the liquid stimulus has run short and there are many sore heads in the neighborhood.

proselyte.

The circuit-rider, whether Methodist or Baptist, found here a field ripe for his harvest. Being himself self-supporting and unassuming, he won easily the confidence of the people. He preached a highly emotional religion that worked his audience into the ecstasy that all primitive people love. And he introduced a mighty agent of evangelization among outdoor folk when he started the camp-meeting.

In these backwoods revival meetings we can witness to-day the weird phenomena of ungovernable shouting, ecstasy, bodily contortions, trance, catalepsy, and other results of hypnotic suggestion and the contagious one-mindedness of an overwrought crowd. This is called “taking a big through,” and is regarded as the madness of supernatural joy. It is a mild form of that extraordinary frenzy which swept the Kentucky settlements in 1800, when thousands of men and women at the camp-meetings fell victims to “the jerks,” “barking exercises,” erotic vagaries, physical wreckage, or insanity, to which the frenzy led.

tenebra

Josh Billings

Artemas Ward.

eli...

added to and clipped from, as cyarn (carrion). They are fond of grace syllables: “I gotta me a deck o’ cyards.” “There ain’t nary bitty sense in it.” More interesting are substitutions of one sound for another. In mountain dialect all vowels may be interchanged with others. Various sounds of a are confused with e, as hed (had), kem (came),

On the other hand, some words that most Americans mispronounce are always sounded correctly in the southern highlands, as dew and new (never doo, noo). Creek is always given its true ee sound, never crick.

An unconscious sense of

euphony

seems to govern the choice of hit or it, ...

The Scotch-Irish, as we call them, were mainly Ulstermen, and the Ulster dialect of to-day bears little analogy to that of Appalachia.

elided.

delimit

prosaic

preterite

dram

Everywhere in the mountains we hear of biscuit-bread, ham-meat, rifle-gun, rock-clift, ridin’-critter, cow-brute, man-person, women-folks, preacher-man, granny-woman and neighbor-people. In this category belong the famous double-barreled pronouns: we-all and you-all in Kentucky, we-uns and you-uns in Carolina and Tennessee.

locution

correlatives

veriest

caviled

cuckold