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This Side of the Mountain James Gage This Side oftheMountain is the title mypredecessor, Sidney Farr, chose for her editor's column, a practice I have retained. However, it is also a specific place—Berea, Kentucky—nestled under the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, where many of the people and much of the commerce from Central Appalachia pour down out of the mountains and onto Interstate 75, with its arterial connection to the rest of America and the world. For the past several years, what we have witnessed from this side of the mountain is a flood of logs, mostly oak, passing out of the region on truck-back toward destinations in the North and in Europe and Japan. In those far-away places, rough logs will increase in value many times as they are turned into veneers and fine wood products. What wondrous creation the forests of Appalachia were to its native inhabitants and the early settlers. How quickly they were decimated for the economic benefit of far-off coal, timber and railroad interests. So quickly, that romantic Thomas Wolfe would write in The Men of Old Catawba (1935) of "great trees that smash down in lone solitudes of the wilderness," while in River of Earth (1940) realist James Still described a single black birch on the property rented by a family aptly named Baldridge. Now, astoundingly, the great forests of Southern Appalachia have rebounded. Fourth and fifth-growth timber has attracted a prosperous world outside Appalachia, hungry for fine hardwood products, and once again landowners face tough decisions regarding profits versus preservation. In this issue of Appalachian Heritage, linguist Michael Montgomery questions the persistent notion that isolation accounts for most dialect features among Appalachian speech communities. Indeed, Appalachia is less isolated than ever, with satellites beaming TV signals directly to homes all over the region, labor from Mexico and Central America tending significant regional cash crops, and merchants from the Netherlands buying choice oak, hickory, cherry and ash for export. Chad Sharber and Alan Mills have contributed to this issue an essay and accompanying photographs concerning a lovely forest and waterfall in Rockcastle County, Kentucky, spared from logging in memory of late Berea College president John B. Stephenson, who often went mere for solace and inspiration. Carl Kilbourne, an associate with the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center, advocates farmers from the region 3 learning to manage their forest lands, to harvest their own timber selectively, to add value to it through the use of portable horizontal bandsaw mills and solar kilns, and to seek marketing strategies so they might both conserve and profit from Appalachian hardwoods. Also in this Spring 2000 Appalachian Heritage are an essay concerning lost innocence, by Catherine Morgan; short stories by Regina Villiers, Jeanne Bryner and William Richardson; poetry by Shirley Valencia, Marilyn Gabriel, Nancy King, David Alan Payne, Walter Lane, Deborah Byrne and Ruth Latta; reviews of new Appalachian books; and the winners of the 1999 Denny C. Plattner Appalachian Heritage Awards for poetry, fiction and non-fiction prose. Finally, as the Spring 2000 Appalachian Heritage goes to press, we note the passing of two sons of Appalachia: Doug Wallin, from Madison County, North Carolina, and West Virginian Milton Ogle. Martin Douglas Wallin died on March 15. He was a lifelong resident of Marshall, North Carolina, the son of Lee and Berzilla Chandler Wallin. In 1990, Mr. Wallin received a Heritage fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the nation's most prestigious award for traditional artists. The presentation stated that Doug Wallin was "quite simply the finest living singer of unaccompanied British ballads in southern Appalachia." Only a year before, the North Carolina Arts Council had honored him with a HeritageAward for his "natural artistry" and his "reverence for the meaning and heritage of the old songs." For the past decade, Doug Wallin performed widely with his brother Jack. He is survived by his sister, Bertha McDevitt, and her husband Ralph, of Asheville; his brother Naman and sister-in-law Geneva, of Florida; his brother Jack Wallin, of Marshall; and fourteen nieces and nephews. News of Milton Ogle's passing came with this letter from Loyal Jones, longtime contributor to Appalachian...

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