Traditional Life on Straight Creek Eighty Years Ago

RECIPES AND RECOLLECTIONS Traditional Life on Straight Creek Eighty Years Ago Sidney Saylor Farr The Industrial Revolution brought the need for mineral resources, and mining industries came in and tore up the Kentucky and West Virginia Mountains to extract the wealth underneath. Engineers like Mary Lee Settle's father, who arrived in Bell County in the second decade of the 20th Century, were among those who came to the area. This brought the outside world headlong into some parts of the mountains. Meanwhile, other isolated pockets remained, and people like my family continued just as our forefathers had done before us. By the time my father was a young man, most of the agricultural fields in the area were worn out, and local people had to keep clearing new ground for fields to plant. Father courted and married Mama in 1930. She was from Laurel Fork in Leslie County, Kentucky. He built a log cabin just over the hill from Grandpa on Coon Branch of Stoney Fork which ran into Straight Creek which flowed into the Cumberland River at Pineville, about fifteen miles away. Two years later I was born in that cabin on Coon Branch. I have read about how 1932 became known as the year of the drought. People were starving because of the scarcity of crops and wild game. The first charity my family ever accepted was provided by the Red Cross which came in with food to help during the drought. Wild game was very scarce, but still Father brought in a few squirrels and groundhogs and managed to raise a few hogs, which were fattened on the scant supply of woods' mast. On Stoney Fork, each little homestead had its cornfield, its patch of sorghum cane, and its beehives. Down the creek was a gristmill where corn was ground into meal. Hidden in a hollow was a moonshine still, where corn was made into whiskey. Pine Mountain rises from the south side of Straight Creek, one hundred miles long, running through three counties in Kentucky and on into Tennessee. It is filled with limestone caves and covered with scrub trees. A footpath ran up in front of our log cabin across the mountain to the Cumberland River side. Here the railroad played a 104 steei counterpoint to the river, as long trains filled with Harlan County coal shuttled along to Pineville and points north and east. I am the oldest of ten children. Father worked in the timber woods when he could. We ate what we grew on the place or could glean from the hillsides. Just about everything was made by hand, and we had little contact with people outside the region. In southeastern Kentucky almost everyone lived in poverty. If it had not been for the small farms and gardens, domestic animals, and wild game brought in from the hills, our people would have starved out long ago. But we planted corn and raised gardens, chickens, and livestock. We picked fruit and berries, canned and preserved as much food as we could for winter and, in general, made do with what we had. Fortunately, the skills possessed by pioneers have been taught, father to son, mama to daughter, down through the generations, and there is still knowledge of how to raise gardens, tend small orchards, and plant and raise corn on hillsides so steep it was difficult to stand upright in rows of corn. Both my parents, descendents of the pioneers who first came through nearby Cumberland Gap, dug ginseng and other roots, which they dried and sold by the pound in the late fall. For a number of years Daddy made and sold moonshine whiskey. He was skilled at castrating domestic animals, and the neighbors hired him to perform this service for their hogs and bull calves. With money coming in small payments for these services, and for the roots and herbs, the dozen or so eggs sold each week, the occasional gallon of milk or blackberries sold or exchanged for groceries, we managed to pay for food products which did not grow in the hills and for shoes and other pieces of clothing. In the mountains many traditions introduced by the...