Appalachian Travels: The Diary of Olive Dame Campbell

Editorial Method

xi editoriAl method Olive Dame Campbell’s original diary of the pioneering trip that she and her husband made through the Southern Highlands in the fall of 1908 and the early months of 1909 is in the John Charles and Olive D. Campbell Papers in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina. It is a small volume, handwritten, and is in fragile condition. The Southern Historical Collection makes this valuable primary source about Appalachian history available only as a microfilmed copy of a transcription of the diary by an unknown person. I used a digitized copy of the original diary to attempt to authenticate the text and present it as it was first written as closely as possible without sacrificing clarity. The parentheses and dashes the diarist used, common in diaries, are generally retained. Punctuation has been corrected only when the failure to do so would be distracting to the reader. Olive Campbell’s sometimes inconsistent spellings of place and personal names have been retained (those spellings also vary in maps and other documents of the period ), but most other irregular spellings have been silently corrected, to help the reader concentrate on the diary’s content . Words that are in full capitals in the diary appear here in small capitals. Following the writing style of her day, Olive Campbell often failed to provide given names in her diary; when I am able to provide them, they are included in a note. editorial method xii The initials JCC (John C. Campbell) are used in the text by the diarist as an abbreviation and appear in the notes as well. This transcription of the diary is separated into chapters based on the months of the trip. Each chapter’s diary entries are preceded by biographical material from chapter 4 of Olive Dame Campbell’s biography of her husband, The Life and Work of John Charles Campbell. Along with a discursive narration, chapter 4 of the biography included numerous excerpts from this diary about the exploratory mountain trip. Although Olive Campbell was unable to finish Life and Work before she died in 1954, the Dame family decided to complete a “working version,” which was copied in 1968 and placed in “certain libraries” for the use of persons who wished to study the Highland Region. Edith R. Canterbury, John Campbell’s former secretary in the office of the Southern Highlands Division of the Russell Sage Foundation in Asheville, was a literary executor for Olive Campbell’s estate , along with Louise Pitman and Lois Bacon.1 Footnote 15 in the biography refers to the typed transcript of the diary, contained in the Campbell Papers on microfilm: “There is an early dittoed version of the diary which at times differs somewhat in wording or content, though not in meaning, from the original handwritten one. Usually, but not always, the original version has been used for the extracts appearing in Chapter IV. Many of these extracts have been slightly edited —for punctuation, breaking up of long paragraphs and completion of sentences—to make reading easier.” Neither the diary nor the biography has been widely published before this publication of the diary. Life and Work is more than six hundred typescript pages long and includes much of Campbell’s correspondence with the Russell Sage Foundation and with denominational and educational co-workers in the region. Even though most scholars writ- editorial method xiii ing about the southern Appalachians have mentioned the pioneering work that Olive Dame and John C. Campbell accomplished , full information about the Campbells’ lives and their work together has never been made available in published form. Some of the findings chronicled in the diary appeared in The Southern Highlander and His Homeland,2 the first major survey of the Appalachian region, which Olive Campbell compiled and completed in her husband’s name after his death in 1919. Her diary of their investigative trip is a valuable primary account of conditions in the Appalachian region during the Progressive Era, when major changes— social, educational, religious, and economic—were taking place. ...