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Oh, to return once more to the days when…
“Oh, to return once more to the days when they made real country sausage and souse meat! Where grandpa and grandma smoked their long-stemmed clay pipes and would light them by dipping a live coal from...
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Double murder in Vinton County, part 1
The last time she saw William Stout, the man missing, he was mending fences here at his Axtel Ridge place, Inez Palmer told the sheriff. She’d heard her boyfriend’s father had headed out west, and was...
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Double murder in Vinton County, part 2
…continued On November 11, 1926, young neighbor Manville Perry noticed the living room door of William and Sarah Stout’s farmhouse open, and was shocked by the sight he saw. He ran to a nearby coal...
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Dashing through the snow
Stephens’ “Book of the Farm” (1840) says “Winter is the especial season of man – our own season. It is the intellectual season during which the spirit of man enables him most to triumphantly display...
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Fire up the Christmas pudding!
Not every place has the distinction of being named after a Christmas treat. Tradition holds that Pudding Ridge, NC, in western Davie County, got its name one rainy day in February 1781 during a...
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How Cherokee stone crosses came to be
Early one day long ago from time out of memory the people of a Cherokee town awoke and faced east to say their morning prayers to the Creator in heaven (Ca-lun-la-ti). In the distance could be heard...
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None dared stop overnight at the Betts house
The Charleston Daily Mail Dec. 27, 1925 Grantsville, Calhoun County, W. Va., March 24, 1886. The following history of the haunted house, situated on the bank of Little Kanawha river, about three miles...
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We just decided to get married, that’s all
“I got married in 1926. I met [Charlie] in Davie County, between Mocksville and Salisbury. We met at a friend’s house. I spent the night down there with a friend. We just wrote to each other for quite...
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A Jack Tale for Christmas
“A long time ago, when Jack was growin’ up, his daddy give him a brand new shotgun for Christmas. Obviously, Jack was as proud as a peacock over this new gift. He wanted to show his daddy just how...
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America’s first Christmas card?
Irish monks in North America, centuries before Columbus? So claimed Dr. Barry Fell (1917-1994), a professor of invertebrate zoology at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, and a president of the...
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Breakin’ up Christmas
Breakin’ Up Christmas is both the name for 12 days of partying, dancing, and music making ending up on January 6th, Old Christmas day, and also a song sung during that period. The tradition harks from...
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We air now aiming to give a dumb show for to pleasure the Little Teacher
I thought no more of old time play acting in the mountain country till on Christmas Eve in 1930 some of the men and boys at Gander [KY] presented for me an old mummers’ play. Later two of the men gave...
View ArticleThey’s heaps o folks here still believe on Old Christmas
OLD CHRISTMAS They’s heaps o’ folks here still believe On Christmas – that’s Old Christmas – Eve, The elders bloom upon the ground, And critters low and kneel around In every stall, though none I know...
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New Year countdown
Ringing out the old, ringing in the new. Everyone’s doing it tomorrow night. One New Year tradition in Appalachia is the New Year baby. The custom of using a baby to signify the New Year originated in...
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The Little Niagara of the South
Geologists estimate that the rock over which the Cumberland River plunges is about 250 million years old. The falls is 65 feet high and is 125 feet wide. When the Cumberland River is at flood stage the...
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Carter G Woodson, father of Black History Month
February is Black History Month (if you’re in the UK and reading this, make that October!). West Virginia educator Carter G. Woodson, the son of former slaves, was pivotal in its development. Woodson...
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Virginia outlaws marijuana
By 1937, when “Drug Czar” Harry Anslinger, then Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, introduced the Marihuana [sic] Tax Act to Congress, lurid testimonies were being introduced that...
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Now don’t tell a soul I told you this…
“Why–it’s taken for granted that women are gossips by nature, by instinct and by training,” said the Sparrow. “Women ought to deny that charge every time they hear it, too!” she exclaimed. “It’s just...
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Sweet, Sticky Maple Wax
“Sugar making time was looked forward to with pleasant anticipation by the young people,” writes George Benson Kuykendall in a family geneaology published in 1919. His uncle, Isaac Kuykendall,...
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Where’s the Valle Crucis post office? Well, that depends
In 1889, William West Skiles described a North Carolina location “entirely shut in by forest-clad mountains.” The area “was watered by three small, limpid streams, two of them leaping down the...
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