SILVER MOON TAVERN 250 BLOOMING STILLS 255 LEARNING 258 MOUNTAIN MEN 269 COAL 273 PUBLIC WORKS 274 BACK TO THE FARM 283 VALLEY OF PARKS 301 WHEN SINGING COMES IN, FIGHTING GOES OUT 317 VANISHING TRAIL 327 INDEX 331 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BLUE RIDGE COUNTRY 1. THE COUNTRY AND THE PEOPLE THE LAND High mountain walls and bridgeless streams marooned the people of the Blue Ridge for centuries, shut them off from the outside world so that they lost step with the onward march of civilization. A forgotten people until yesterday, unlettered, content to wrest a meager living from the grudging soil, they built for themselves a nation within a nation. By their very isolation, they have preserved much of the best that is America. They have held safe and unchanged the simple beauty of the song of their fathers, the unsullied speech, the simple ideals and traditions, staunch religious faith, love of freedom, courage and fearlessness. Above all they have maintained a spirit of independence and self-reliance that is unsurpassed anywhere in these United States of America. They are a hardy race. The wilderness, the pure air, the rugged outdoor life have made them so: a people in whom the Anglo-Saxon strain has retained its purest line. The Blue Ridge Country comprises much of Appalachia, happily called from the great chain that runs along the Atlantic coast from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. It is a well-watered region having numerous streams and rivers throughout, being drained by the Cumberland and Tennessee as well as by smaller, though equally well-known, rivers--Big Sandy in northeastern Kentucky, which flows into the Ohio, and the Yadkin in North Carolina, which eventually reaches the Atlantic Ocean.