Sergeant York And His PeopleCowan, Sam K. (Sam Kinkade)
History
Sergeant York And His People
Cowan, Sam K. (Sam Kinkade)
Appalachians (People); Tennessee, East -- Social life and customs; York, Alvin Cullum, 1887-1964
He was ready at any time to trade with anybody for almost anything. In
the last score of the years of his life, the most successful
financially, he found that the money he could accumulate came only from
the sale of products that could move from the valley across the
mountains by their own motive power--something that could go on foot. So
he turned to stock-raising and with his own slaves cut the present
roadway from Pall Mall to Jamestown, there to join with the old Kentucky
Stock road which ran from Atlanta and Chattanooga, along the Cumberland
plateau by Jamestown on to the north through Frankfort and Cincinnati.
Old Coonrod was not a one-price man on the realty he owned. If the
purchase was for speculation he was a trader with his sights set high.
If the buyer wanted a home, he was generous. It meant the upbuilding of
his community. So the people of that day lived in comradeship. There
were few luxuries and no real want. If there was "a farming patch" to be
cleared, the neighbors came from miles around and there was a
"log-rolling." If it was a home or a crib to be built, it was a
"log-raising," and everyone worked and made fun from it.
The steeple of a church arose in the valley. It was built by those of
the Methodist faith. But before that and even afterward they held
"camp-meetings" and "basket-meetings" where a community lunch was
served under the trees and where the service lasted through the daylight
hours, allowing for a mountain journey home. And the religious fervor
was so sincere and intense at these meetings that they were called
"melting sessions."
Up the mountainside above the York spring, a space was cleared for
shooting matches, where the prizes were beeves and turkeys, and where
the men shot so accurately that the slender crossing of two knifeblade
marks was the bull's-eye of the target. And everyone went on hunts, long
hunts when crops were laid by or winter had checked farm work. And as
human nature is the same the world over, there was many an upright
resident of the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" who left the
plow standing in the furrow because the yelp and baying of the hounds
grew warm upon the mountainside.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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