UP GANDERBILL

It was a clash of ethics more than a war of cultures. The Appalachian way of living worked for the mountain people, but not for the Northern industrialists who – by the way – had already tuned their tuning forks among their own rural countrymen (New England schools, for example, were set up by the owners of the local mill and factory so that the sons and daughters of te local farmers could be “schooled” – not so much in their ABCs - but in the schedules and rituals of the mills and factories they would eventually work for.)

The settlers of Ganderbill had, of necessity, developed an oral culture, and the elders in the holler could tell you who was xII

exactly related to whom, and where in the region their people came from. Even so, they did not seem to have much recollection of their colonial history, but the essentials of local existence were there. In our family, for example, I was able to overhear the following: Once an Indian stole a pie from a window sill. A Yankee sniper killed my wife’s grandfather up by the “Suzy Rocks”; the first Fugate ancestor who came to America stepped into a bee’s nest; lots of people starved in “that awful Silver War”; and the earliest of the settlers “came into this country from Virginia.”

These were important facts of local provenance. There was no mention of descent from faded nobility; no recollection of an idyllic family plantation the family had lived on 200 years before; no recanting of why their ancestors left England or France or Up Ganderbill

Germany – or even that they were originally from those countries – and yet, I have no doubt that each of the facts of family history listed in the previous paragraph was true: even though most of the “bigger picture” – the kind of stuff that makes it into the history books - had been forgotten because it was… obviously… unnecessary.

The pioneers made do. Life went on.

When the descendants of these families settled on Ganderbill Branch, Lost Creek, Breathitt County, Kentucky in 1830, they produced offspring from Indian, Irish, Scottish, English, German, French, Welsh, Cherokee, Danish, Viking, and impossible to determine ancestry.

Vesta Noble Fugate, my mother-in-law and Inez’s mother could trace the progress of the original Neaces and Nobles into the area. She would sit on the front porch and point with her finger where her ancestors came through the gap “up on the Barge” (the headwaters of Barge’s Branch) and where they led their mules and horses along the ridge in front of her, until they saw a narrow valley bottom (holler) they wanted to settle in.

This information, when it was told to me, had been passed generation to generation for 150 years old - six generations - not exactly as old as The Iliad or The Odyssey, but still impressive.

At first, they settled in “rock houses” – shallow caves eroded from the limestone outcroppings that are ubiquitous in the region – but they stayed there only until they built their log cabins. Then brothers, sisters, and their close families and relations spread out up and down the “holler,” with the poorer families relegated to the “head of the holler,” the farthest away from where Ganderbill joins Lost Creek, which joins Troublesome Creek, which joins the North Fork of the Kentucky River, which will float you down to the Kentucky River, which will bring you to the Ohio.

Until a few years after my wife was born, the only way to get to her house “at the head of the holler” was to walk the quarter of a mile or so “up Ganderbill” – which meant slipping and sliding up the middle of the brook.

To say that someone is from the “head of the holler” remains a local insult. It means you are the poorest of the poor.

Still, they prospered.

Families grew, farms were expanded, the number of possessions increased, and activity ebbed and flowed with the seasons.

They were “truck farmers” who kept large gardens, the usual barnyard animals, and who supplemented the few “brought

on” products they could afford with those which were manufactured at home: brooms, cane bottom chairs, tables, benches, cupboards, sleds, quilts and woven clothing. Harvests were often lean, but food was always set aside to be preserved for the winter.

Sometimes enough was left over to give to the less fortunate or even to use for barter.

As similar as life was for most of the mountaineers, even in Ganderbill some had specialties: one kept a blacksmith’s forge, another cut logs and took them down the Kentucky river to sell in the capital, and another became the very local stone mason who knew enough about building foundations and walls to help out others.

Industrial growth was unimaginable in the Northern sense because the railroad men, coal and logging companies, and the organized religious sects who moved into the region in the early 20th century to exploit their physical and human resources, did not understand their way of thinking – which was: “We work to live, not live to work, as you do up North.”

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“DISAPPEARANCE” AND “DISCOVERY”

Life could always be promising; land out West was free or the next thing to it, and the skills developed on their farms “back East” would serve them well as the frontier advanced, first to the Mississippi, and then, afterward 1803, into the Louisiana Purchase, and finally to the Pacific shores. To a degree unrecognized by the good folks “up in Washington,” the people had long since liberated themselves, and most who still lived in the mountains did so out of personal choices.

They had never been trapped there.

The 1960s wore everybody out, and finally the hillbillies bought the government package, hook, line, and sinker. It they were xIII

poor and the cities were rich, life must be better there; so, somehow (probably with maps supplied by the government), they found their way to Detroit, Cincinatti, and Pittsburgh and took jobs on assembly lines, in phone companies, and at fading factories, and usually got into trouble, lived in “Little Kentuckies” for a while, and sooner or later fled back to the mountains.

These people are hopeless, thought the folks in Washington.

After all the good thing the government had done for them to get them out of the mountains, the poor things still wanted to stay on their family farms in a nationally unacceptable lifestyle, and the government was frustrated: so this time they sent in welfare money, food stamps, and make-work programs; and the hillbilly kids finally began living like the rest of the country,

“Disappearance” And “Discovery”

and switched from Bluegrass to Rap, from moonshine to drugs, and from working their asses off, to sitting on them indefinitely.

After almost 100 years of trying, Washington had finally worked its magic, and, according to many observers, had put an end to yet another an identifiable, independent, self-sustaining American sub-group – much as they had to the American Indian.

Of course, the missionaries of the 1800s, the WPA photographers of the 1930s, and the anti-poverty workers of the 1960s could each and all of them “the best of intentions” – and to have done as best as they could with an historically recalcitrant When the “mountain people” were “discovered” by evangelists, coal mine operators, and social service agencies in the late 1800s, population, so when the returned to Church Headquarters, their artist cooperatives, and Our Government In Washington they had they were portrayed as an “antique people” who had lived in the hills forever.

something to brag about it, they could grab a promotion or two, and the lucky ones could live off the residuals.

The world was told they were poor. THEY were told they were poor.

Meanwhile, back in the mountains..

They were rediscovered during the Great Depression when they were photographed, recorded, and memorialized by folk—

lorists paid by the WPA. The mountain people welcomed them, sat for their portraits, and sang their songs into early recording devices, and soon after the products were published, they were told the nation looked on them with pity and shame.

But it was the War On Poverty in the 1960s that finally did their culture in. With the U.S. Treasury overflowing and Washington on a do-gooder spin, the country was finally in the position and mood to “do something about them” – these people who had craft-ily avoided civilization and committed such uncivilized sins as living in unpainted farm houses, wearing clothes that were covered in patches, and using newspaper as wallpaper.

“Hippies” at that time also dressed in patches, lived in unpainted farm houses, and had posters on the wall – mostly of peace signs and Che Guevara – but that was cool.

So the government sent its hippies into the mountains with organizations like VISTA to help “them” live more like “us,” and the hillbillies shot them.

The War on Poverty was ridiculous for a number of other reasons. Our ancestors had never “disappeared,” except in one corner of the American liberal imagination, which needed to “rediscover” some antique people so they could “reform” them – much as the missionaries of the 19th century had hoped to.

These people, after all, had been cut off from the glories of the 20th century and from the progress of the rest of the country, and the only “Christian thing” to do was get in there, spread some money around, pass the great hand of the GreatWhite Father In Washington over their heads and – Presto! Change-o! – terrific things will happen.

Who was it, then, who went off with Andy Jackson to the Battle of New Orleans; who was it then, less than a generation later, who fought –on both sides - in the Civil War (Eastern Tennesee, after all, was with the Union, and Kentucky was officially neutral); and who was it then who returned to the family farms from Gettysburg, or Shiloh, or The Wilderness?

It must have been someone else, because our pioneer ancestors didn’t know HOW to get out of the mountains the same way they got in – according to the government.

But the mountain people HAD fought in all those wars and they always had choices – and they took them when they wanted to. Almost as soon as they’d settled the hollers some of them “lit out for the territories”: to Missouri, Indiana, Texas, and a few years later, all the way to California just in time for the Gold Rush.

Just as the Chesapeake, Culpeper, the Northern Neck, and Southwestern Virginia, had served both as a cradle and point of departure, so Eastern Kentucky began to be used as a kind of Grand Central Station which directed them in further directions.

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