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She wrote 1500 hymns
She wrote about 1500 hymns in all, over a 37 year period. In her lifetime her songs were translated and sung in Africa, India, China, and Korea. Her best known songs, ‘Nearer, Still Nearer,’ and ‘Let...
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Feedsack mania
Feedsack fashion officially got its start in 1924. Oh, thrifty farm wives nationwide had known for years that this common cotton bag— fondly nicknamed chicken linen, ‘pretties,’ or hen house linen—was...
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Malted Milk and madness in Huntsville
Today Dr. William Henry Burritt is remembered in Huntsville, AL as the man who left his mountaintop estate to the city in 1955, and in doing so, provided that city’s first public museum: the...
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Was it murder? Or a heart attack?
“I went up to Wise that night along with my cousin and not meaning no harm,” testified Edith Maxwell at her murder trial. “Along in the evening Raymond Meade came along and said he would give me a lift...
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Bank Night at the Met
The Metropolitan Theatre in Morgantown, WV is one of that city’s best examples of Neo-classical Revival architecture. The 1,300 seat theatre opened on July 24, 1924 with “seven acts of vaudeville sent...
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Mountain songs and sayings have living reality
The convenient and pithy term for the mountain people of Kentucky, “our contemporary ancestors,” does not indicate the origin of the customs, beliefs, and peculiarities which persist among them. For...
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The full force of an ardent Southern temperament
“I don’t know anything else. You see, I was born in North Georgia, in Dalton, the town that has figured in my books as ‘Darley,’” explained novelist Will N. Harben to a reporter in a 1905 interview....
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Acid rain devastates Tennessee’s Copper Basin
In August 1843, a Tennessee gold prospector working on Potato Creek discovered a reddish-brown and black decomposed rock that contained deep red crystals; his “gold” turned out to be red copper oxide....
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The house that makes broomsticks stand on end
GO to Mystery Hill at Blowing Rock, NC! SEE people stand on 45-degree angles! WATCH water roll uphill! Mystery after mystery! America loves Mystery Spots. Irish Hills, MI, also has a Mystery Hill. Lake...
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America’s Roadside Evangelist
Before there were interstates, when everyone drove two lane roads at leisurely speeds, Burma Shave signs were posted all over the countryside in farmers’ fields. Five small red signs with white...
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Dirt racing at Pennsboro
The town was once a stop on the Northwest Turnpike, one of the main roads west in the early days of the country, running from Winchester, VA to Parkersburg (now West Virginia). Later the town was a...
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Busted not for selling babies, but for the abortion clinic
From 1951 to 1965 Dr. Thomas Jugarthy Hicks began to quietly offer babies for adoption from his Hicks Community Clinic in McCaysville, GA. Quietly, because the clinic he’d been running since the...
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General Braddock’s road through the Wilderness
Today realtors tout the Dingle neighborhood west of Cumberland, MD for its charming Craftsman houses of the early 20th century. But this placid upscale neighborhood was a fierce wilderness when...
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You only got one pair of shoes a year
So we lived at a . . . we was renting off of a . . . some people that owned a . . . a lumberyard there. So on Friday evening I went out to this man that run . . . owned it and run it there, him and his...
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America’s only woman ironmaster
Nannie Kelly Wright (1856-1946) was probably the only woman ironmaster in America’s history. Wright was the daughter of the famous riverboat commodore Washington Honshell, who helped form Cincinnati’s...
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Ginseng, the curious rootstock
It’s the heart of ginseng harvesting season. The berry clusters have ripened. The leaves are yellowing. The roots are ready. But stay awhile. The best hunting is still to come, after the first hard...
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Indoor privies for country people at Cumberland Homesteads
Today, it’s Tennessee’s largest historic district, at approximately 11,400 acres. During the Great Depression, the Cumberland Homesteads community came into being as part of a nationwide New Deal...
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The sorghum season is on!
Kentucky and Tennessee are today the leading sorghum syrup producing states, and neither are shy about the fact. The Tipton-Haynes Historic Site in Johnson City, TN hosted a sorghum festival September...
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The women of this country are going to come and sit here
Rebecca Latimer Felton, in her customary way, saw right through the political machinations that led to her officially becoming the first woman to serve in the United States Senate. When Georgia Senator...
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The Great Pandemic of 1918, part 1
Across America in the fall of 1918 the Spanish influenza-and the fear of it-was everywhere. The flu’s name came from the early affliction and large mortalities in Spain where it allegedly killed 8...
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