Hauntings are everywhere in the Appalachian Mountains. Whether one believes in such things or not, a person cannot deny the shivers in the darkness when an owl hoots a soothing sound of wisdom, or the early morning sounds of a house “settling” as it pops and cracks at one endContinue Reading
Mary McKeehan Patton was a gunpowder maker for the American Revolutionary War, in particular, the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780. Several monuments exist in East Tennessee that honor the Battle of Kings Mountain. A Veterans Monument in Elizabethton, Tennessee, mentions Mary Patton on a side of its obelisk-shaped tower.Continue Reading
I came upon “Aunt Jenny” by doing a little research about paranormal events in Appalachian states. I was quite flabbergasted after reading her story. On one hand, she was a venomous and unforgiving woman (understandably so, as we’ll come to find). On the other, she was said to be aContinue Reading
Professional sculptor and mixed media artist Mary Ruden recently invited Appalachia Bare to attend the historical marker unveiling for suffragette Lizzie Crozier French. Our Admin, Tom Anderson and I stepped into Knoxville Tennessee’s Old Gray Cemetery and were greeted by a wonderful group of individuals, many wearing suffragette white. MaryContinue Reading
Some years ago, my family and I visited former president Andrew Johnson’s home in Greeneville, Tennessee. The tour was interesting, as all historical places are, but I felt a heavy presence throughout the house. Perhaps that feeling had something to do with a sort of transposed shame that Andrew JohnsonContinue Reading
Today has been National Korean War Armistice Day, where the nation remembers and honors Korean War veterans. The Koreas are situated smack dab in the middle between China, Russia, and Japan, and have been “caught up in their conflicts” for centuries. Japan controlled the country from around 1910 to 1945,Continue Reading
Tennessee Williams was one of the foremost playwrights in the 20th century. He wrote close to 40 plays, 70 one-act plays, and several screenplays, achieving great success with The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947; Pulitzer Prize winner), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955; Pulitzer Prize winner),Continue Reading
Welcome to the second and final posting of Appalachian slave narratives capturing individual responses regarding freedom. You’ll find part one here. Visit the following sources for more extensive and wide ranging interviews: Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938 – Library of Congress Slave narratives – Project GutenbergContinue Reading
How many of us in Appalachia have heard: “Appalachia didn’t have any slaves.” “Slavery wasn’t popular here in the mountains.” “They couldn’t have any slaves here because the land wasn’t conducive for farming.” “If we had slaves, there weren’t very many.” But Appalachia did indeed have slaves. Jacqueline Clark’s articleContinue Reading
In the year 2000, my sons Erik and Gabriel and I set out to create a video documentary of the people living in Free Hills, one of America’s last remaining Black settlements established before the Civil War. Located in hardscrabble Clay County, Tennessee, near the community of Celina, the FreeContinue Reading