Foxfire 2: Ghost Stories, Spring Wild Plant Foods, Spinning And Weaving, Midwifing, Burial Customs, Corn Shuckins, Wagon Making And More Affairs Of Plain Living

ghost stories, spring wild plant foods, spinning and weaving, midwifing, burial customs, corn shuckin's, wagon making and more affairs of plain living. edited with an introduction by ELIOT WIGGINTON Anchor Books Anchor Press/Doubleday Garden City, New York ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Hundreds of people have helped us, and to those people—they all know who they are—we literally owe our survival. A list of them would encompass everyone from parents who have let us send their kids into the mountains alone, to school administrators who have let us take kids away from their normal routines, to journalists who have given us an immense amount of support through their publications, to people who have generously donated money, time, energy, advice, and expertise. But rather than detail those people, I'd like to dedicate this space to a man who, perhaps more than any other, drastically affected the future of our experiment. That man was the director of the National Endowment for the Humanities' Education Division—Herb McArthur. Foxfire was three years old, and I had spent the better part of a year seeking additional financial support. As testimony to that struggle, I refer you to a manila folder in my office packed with letters from foundations and organizations—most of which I had visited personally—saying, in essence, that they liked the idea but could see no way to help us. Herb listened to me one day in his Washington office, liked the Foxfire idea, and saw a way to help us out. The end result of that collaboration was two grants totaling nearly twenty thousand dollars that moved us about eight giant steps forward by allowing us, among other things, to purchase videotape equipment, darkroom equipment, send kids to New York on exchanges, and hire Suzy—our first paid employee. Herb has agreed to resign at the request of Ronald Berman, the newly appointed NEH head who, according to the September 4, 1972 issue of Time has vowed to return the NEH to a "strict constructionist" view of the humanities (supporting such things as a television series on Shakespeare's plays) and away from "Classic Comics—culture simplified and castrated." All well and good. But it frightens me to think that this might also mean that other stumbling experiments like ours will be passed over in favor of "professional studies professionally run." Herb's genius was that he could recognize and encourage highly experimental, often risky projects—but projects having the look of a winner about them—and urge that they be assisted. In a day when most of us find only financial rejection at the state and local level, the only place we have left to turn is to larger foundations with directors like Herb. I can only hope for all our sakes that somewhere there are more of them around. BEW CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction 6 8 Maude Shope Sourwood Honey Beekeeping Spring Wild Plant Foods Happy Dowdle Making an Ox Yoke Wagon Wheels and Wagons Making a Tub Wheel Making a Foot-powered Lathe From Raising Sheep to Weaving Cloth How to Wash Clothes in an Iron Pot Anna Howard Midwives and Granny Women Old-time Burials Boogers, Witches, and Haints Corn Shuckin's, House Raisin's, Quiltin's, Pea Thrashin's, Singin's, Log Rollin's, Candy Pullin's, and . . . Kenny Runion 18 28 32 47 95 112 118 142 164 172 256 266 274 304 324 Appendix Index of People 393 408 362 378 INTRODUCTION ne evening a couple of years ago, with some cicadas making a deceptively comfortable racket outdoors, and the mountains easing from green to blue to purple, I sat down alone at a desk full of papers and photographs and notebooks and articles torn out of