THROUGH
MOUNTAIN MISTS
Early Settlers of
Their
Descendants...Their Stories...Their Achievements
Lifting the
Mists of History on Their Way of Life
By: Ethelene Dyer Jones
Senior scholar, Loyal Jones, a
native of nearby
Cherokee County, North Carolina, and for many years director of
Appalachian
Studies at Berea College, Kentucky, wrote an essay on “Appalachian
Values”
first published in Twigs in
1973. His intention when he first wrote
the essay was to dispel the misconceptions often held about people of
the
Appalachian mountain region. Betty Payne
James ofDisputanta, Kentucky, suggested to Mr. Jones that his essay be
made
into a book with pertinent photographs.
The word artistry and depth of thinking from “Appalachian
Values” of
Loyal Jones were combined with excellent black-and-white photographs by
prize-winning
photographer Warren Brunner of Berea, Kentucky to make a book published
by the
Jesse Stuart Foundation of Ashland, Kentucky in 1994.
If you have not yet read this provocative
book, I recommend that you find a copy at your library—or better
still—purchase
your own copy, because you will want to
refer to it again and again.
It
occurred to me, while thinking about a worthy subject on which to write
for his
column, that it would be appropriate to name the values Loyal Jones
calls to
our attention and think of persons within Union County, Georgia, past
and
present, who exemplify the values worthy of emulation.
I thank Loyal Jones for such a
thought-provoking book. I give him
deserved credit for calling to our attention the characteristics and
values
held dear and lived out by our ancestors. And Warren Brenner’s
excellent
photographs brought to my own mind persons and places with whom I am
acquainted
that fit so well the values Loyal Jones enumerates.
I only wish I had photographs to illustrate
this article that carry the same sense and depth that those in Appalachian Values convey. I
ask my readers, therefore, to think of
persons you know, and make a “mountain pictorial” of them as you read
about
these values, still alive and well in the coves, valleys and hillsides
of our
beloved Appalachian region.
Loyal
Jones sets the stage for Appalachian Values by devoting a chapter to
the early
settlers to the region and their origins.
Many Scots-Irish, German, English and Welsh people came to
America and
eventually found their way to our Appalachian wilderness and mountains,
an
ideal place with plenty of wild game, land for clearing and farming,
and
isolation that afforded them the seclusion they desired, “away from
‘powers and
principalities’” (p. 24) that would rob them of their desire for
freedom. “They came for many reasons, but
always for
new opportunity and freedom—freedom from religious, political, and
economic
restraints, and freedom to do much as they pleased.
The pattern of their settlement shows that
they were seeking land and solitude.” (p. 29)
Here
we have but to do a roll-call of people who were listed on the 1834
(first)
Union County census. Which from that
list of 147 heads-of-households enumerated in 1834 are your ancestors? They fall into Loyal Jones’s category of
people with European ancestry that came seeking freedom and
independence. We salute them all.
Religon
is one of the values cited by Loyal Jones.
“Mountain people are religious…we are religious in the sense
that most
of our values and the meaning we find in life spring from the Bible. To understand mountaineers, one must
understand our religion” (p. 39). I
thought of the Rev. Milford G. Hamby (1833-1911), who became a
Methodist
Circuit Rider in 1852. As a minister in
the North Georgia Conference, he often filled as many as twenty-nine
appointments for preaching per month. He
married Eleanor Hughes on May 9,
1850. She was the daughter of the Rev.
Thomas M. Hughes. Her father was also a
faithful minister in Union and nearby counties in the early settlement
days. Eleanor’s grandfather, the Rev.
Francis Bird,
was likewise a minister. A brother-in-law
to Rev. Hamby was the Rev. John Wesley Twiggs (1846-1917) who married
Eleanor
Hughes Hamby’s sister, Sarah Elizabeth Hughes.
Rev. Twiggs was a noted minister, school teacher and farmer. These early ministers in the county did much
to set a pattern of religious practice.
Rev. G. W. Duval, writing in his eulogy of Rev. Milford Hamby in
the
1911 Conference Journal of the
North Georgia Conference Methodist Episcopal Church South (pp. 80-81)
said of
him: “He conferred not with flesh and
blood but was obedient to the heavenly vision…He made the Bible the man
of his
counsel, the guide of his young life.
His library was not extensive. He
made his sermons from the revelation of God’s love to man.” Here I have briefly cited only three of the
early ministers in the county; there were many more, both then and
since. Oftentimes laboring under great
hardships and
certainly without much monetary remuneration for their labors, they
planted the
gospel in hard-to-reach places as itinerant preachers and religious and
educational leaders.
Mr.
Loyal Jones combines three of our Appalachian Values in chapter three,
perhaps
because the three are so inter-related and so vital a part of the
fabric of our
mountain people’s lives. These are
independence, self-reliance and pride.
He
quotes John C. Campbell (for whom Campbell Folk School is named) by
saying in
the mountains “independence is raised to the fourth power” (p.
52)—meaning we
have an exceeding strong spirit of independence. I
think of John Thomas, chosen to be the
first representative from Union County in 1832 to the state legislature. When a name for the new county was being
considered, he said, “Name it Union, for none but union-like men
resides in it”
(The Heritage of Union County,
1944, p. 1). Although our ancestors were
patriotic and supporting of our nation, their geographic isolation and
dependability on local resources bred independence.
Several of the early-settler men had seen
service in the American Revolution and desired independence from
tyranny and
outside rule. The lay of the land to be
tamed and a living to be made from the wilderness inspired an
independent
spirit.
Closely
tied to that spirit of independence is self-reliance.
I think of my own ancestors, the Collins,
Dyer, Souther, Hunter, Nix, Ingram, England and other settlers who
began
productive farms, established churches, set up mills, began schools,
were
elected to government positions—all showed the spirit of self-reliance. True, our ancestors sometimes over-did the
self-reliant bent and depleted the land and its resources, like cutting
timber
and not allowing it to be replenished, before they learned to be
conservators. Not all qualities of
self-reliance are applaudable.
Then
pride is a part of our values; not the puffed-up, vain, egotistical,
arrogant, “better-than-thou”
kind, but a sense of self-esteem and self-respect for a job well done. I think of my Aunts Avery and Ethel Collins
who fashioned many quilts, woven
coverlets, and other handcrafted items, entering them into the
Southeastern
Fair in Atlanta, Georgia and consistently winning blue ribbons. Dr. John Burrison and his crew of historical
preservation people from Georgia State University filmed my Aunt Ethel
before
her death as she showed many of the items that had won acclaim. Never did she seek accolades for her work,
but it was worthy of notice and was recorded in a documentary entitled
“The
Unclouded Day.” She and Aunt Avery had
pride in their work, and rightly so. As
Loyal Jones notes: “The value of
independence and self-reliance, and our pride, is often stronger than
desire or
need” (p. 68).
In
my next column, I will explore more of Loyal Jones’s listing of
Appalachian
Values. Dr. Stephenson asks this
question in the introduction: “Who
really knows Appalachia?” (p. 9, 11). This is a probative question. Even though I was born and reared in that
area of America, and have experienced all the values named by Mr.
Jones, I
realize that we only begin to scratch the surface of the complexity and
depth
of a people whose characteristics, as he writes, represent “the core
elements
of regional culture, the bones upon which the flesh of a people is
layered” (p.
10).
[Ethelene Dyer
Jones is a retired educator,
freelance writer, poet, and historian. She may be reached at
e-mail edj0513@windstream.net;
phone 478-453-8751; or mail 1708 Cedarwood Road, Milledgeville, GA
31061-2411.]
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