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Progress Reached Our Valley by Hamette Amow We were fools of course, but the abandoned 160-acre farm on Little Indian Creek ofthe Big South Fork ofthe Cumberland seemed perfect for a couple who planned to live simply, farming only enough to grow our food. This would leave plenty oftime for doing what we wanted to do; for me, that meant writing. Surrounded by green walls of hillside woodlands, cut by the creek, bordered by the river, the land was cheap, beautiful and remote. U.S. 27 was only 10 miles away, but after two miles or so of graveled road to the Cumberland National Forest fire tower, the way was dirt and rock that worsened as it left the ridge to wind down the creek valley, crossing at last as our place was reached. A good all-weather road being built on the ridge top by W.P.A. would in time reach our valley; it was already nearing our post office, to which mail came three times a week. The word was little used then, but our place was on the western edge ofwhat is now called Appalachia. Climbing out of the creekbed, the Model A in second, the first thing seen of our place was a large dilapidated barn surrounded by rolling pastures grown up in brush and weeds. The high ridges fell back, leaving room near the barn for a large frame house, almost as ramshackle as the barn, but at the time we bought the place, rented by an itinerant preacher with a large family. A wagon road in fair shape passed below the house and then directly in front of a building that had once housed a store and post office. It went on through a cedar thicket, crossed a spring branch walled by young poplars, then up a limestone ledge, and there was the house where we intended to live. The place had long ago begun as a log house, two huge rooms below, two above. The splendid chimney of hand- "Progress Reached Our Valley" is reprinted by permission from The Nation, August 3, 1970. Copyright 1970 by THe Nation. 16 hewn stone was even older. According to an elderly neighbor, it had been put up first for a house built around 1803 that had stood some distance away above the river. The log part of the house was older than the memories of our oldest neighbors. Some did remember when there had been a sawmill in the valley, and when two framed rooms, one above and one below, porches and a separate kitchen, had been added. The whole, including the log part had then been weatherboarded and the inside walls and ceilings covered with narrow tongue and groove planking. Our older neighbors could remember the last couple to spend all their married lives in the house; they'd lived in plenty and brought up a big family. They'd used the separate kitchen, gone now; the fallen down porches had been painted white and covered with vines. All the children were long since grown up and moved away and the old couple had been out there in the graveyard for more than twenty years. After that, first one and then another had lived on the place, and they let it go to wrack and ruin. What had once been a stone root house with log smokehouse above was only a hole in the hillside, half filled with blocks of stone, overrun with honeysuckle and infested with snakes. A few other blocks of stone down by the spring were the only reminders of the springhouse. Old and long-neglected apple trees with a few quince and plums gone wild, were all that was left of a large orchard. The place was traced with paths and roads, some so worn by generations of human and animal feet that one walked between walls of earth and rock, narrowed yet more by large pines grown in the path. I wondered why so many roads; one, wagon-wide, was cut through rock down to the Big South Fork; others, deeply worn, but now thick with pines went into the Cumberland National Forest where no one lived. In...

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