Blue Ridge Country

The water witch took it in his hand, sniffed it, turned it wrongside out, sniffed it again. "Now have you got a lock of the little one's hair?" He looked at Norie, moaning on th...

Some shake their heads sympathetically, finger to brow, when they speak of Widow Ashby's Sabrina living alone in her ramshackle house far up at the head of Crockett's Hollow. "A...

The rest of the story Captain Anderson himself would never tell but Aunt Levicy told me how he packed the tin peddler back up the hill to the house on his shoulder and had her c...

An isolated people drops easily into illiteracy. Cut off as the mountain men were from the outside world, they knew little of what was going on beyond their mountain walls. Even...

When the train bearing John Martin's bullet-torn body reached Morehead he was carried, still breathing, into the old Central Hotel where he died that night. In the meantime his...

Philomel had been a widower for ten years past and never once had he cast eyes on another woman; that is to say, with the idea of marriage. "There's no need for a man to put his...

The mountain preacher of yesterday is passing fast. Then, his was a manifold calling. When he traveled the lonely creek-bed road with his Bible in his saddlebags, he was the cir...

Though Curt Jett, Mose Feltner, John Abner, and John Smith confessed to the assassination of J. B. Marcum, saying Jim Hargis and Ed Callahan planned the crime, Hargis and Callah...

"If anyone jumped on these United States without a good cause," he declared vehemently, "I'd fight for my country--" Uncle Dyke didn't quibble his words. "That is to say if Uncl...

A part of a zinc tub protruded from the brush heap. "One day," Jorde continued, "unbeknown to Ben's wife, Effie, I snuck off up here away from that Jezebel though she had talked...

Rarely was the voice of the miner's wife raised in song as she plodded through her daily drudgery. Now and then the young folks could be heard singing--but not an ancient ballad...

"There's a heap of change here in these mountains for our children. If a child's afflicted in its nether limbs, it don't need to lay helpless no more, a misery to itself and eve...

Not even Aunt Lindie could keep a straight face, but to spare Ben's feelings she gave out a verse that she felt certain no one could say after her. And try as they would no one...

Things had been going miserably for immigrants in North Carolina. The situation was fast reaching a desperate point. Some of the oppressed were for violence if that was needed t...

To the outsider far removed, or even to people in the nearby lowlands, mountain people may seem stoic. A mountain woman whose husband is being tried for his life may sit like a...

The Hatfields and McCoys have married. Charles D. Hatfield, who joined the army at Detroit's United States Army recruiting office, is the son of Tolbert McCoy Hatfield of Pike C...

Naturally, first come first served--so the settlers who arrived first on the scene chose for themselves the more accessible and fertile lands, the valleys and rich limestone bel...

You've seen all there is to see. You're ready to go, if you are like hundreds of others who visit the last resting place of the leader of the Hatfield-McCoy feud. But, if you ch...

He lost all hopes of freedom, No farther could he go; His agony was desperate, That you all well know. His weeping parents lingered near; A mother gray and old. Soon poor Floyd...

"West Virginians are Mountaineers by geography and tradition, and proud of it. Originally they were induced by wily Virginians to come into these mountains and form a buffer bac...

Then Sid put down his fiddle and his mouth harp and drawing from his coat pocket a crumpled paper, he began again. "My friends, I want to read you this piece in the _Chicago Dai...

Thomas Wiley, husband of Jennie Sellards Wylie, was a native of Ireland. They lived on Walker's Creek in what is now Tazewell County, Virginia. She was captured by the Indians i...

A once itinerant "Tooth Dentist" who became the first Republican county judge in more than a quarter of a century at the mouth of Big Sandy and whose unique sentences have becom...

Main Island Creek, 250 Mammoth Cave and National Park, 288, 303 Man o' War, 303 Manuita and Huraken, legend of, 186-89 maps, and making of, 18-19, 328 Marcum, James B., 74-81 ma...