Decoration Day in the Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern Appalachians

Decoration Day in the Mounta ins

Decoration Day

in the Mountains Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern Appalachians Alan Jabbour & Karen Singer Jabbour The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Blythe Family Fund of the University of North Carolina Press. © 2010 The University

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of North Carolina Press

Jabbour, Alan.

All rights reserved Set in Arno Pro Manufactured in the United States of America

Decoration day in the mountains : traditions of cemetery decoration in the southern Appalachians / Alan Jabbour and Karen Singer Jabbour. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

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ISBN 978-0-8078-3397-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

the guidelines for permanence

1. Mourning customs—Appalachian Region, Southern.

and durability of the Committee

2. Cemeteries—Appalachian Region, Southern.

on Production Guidelines for

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Social life and customs. I. Jabbour, Karen Singer. II. Title.

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Contents Introduction vii Acknowledgments xi

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

About the Photographs xv Two Encounters with Decoration Day 3 Decoration Day in Western North Carolina 19 Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina 49 Historical and Cultural Origins of the Region 86 The North Shore: Removal and Revolution 97 The Origin, Diffusion, and Range of Decoration Day 116 The North Shore and Decoration Day in Sign, Symbol, and Art 131 The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day 145 Concluding Thoughts 169 appendix a. Project History 189 Appendix B. Log of Ethnographic Events, North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project, 2004 193 Notes 195 Bibliography 201 Index 209 A map of western North Carolina cemeteries pictured in this book appears on page 2.

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Introduction Decoration Day is a widespread cultural tradition in a swath of the American South extending from east of the Appalachians to west and southwest of the Ozarks. In the fullest form of the tradition, people visit a cemetery where family members are buried to provide an annual or periodic cleaning. Then they decorate the graves with flowers and other symbols of affection. Finally, they gather as a family or community in a religious service in the cemetery reaffirming their connections with each other and with the community beneath the ground. The service may involve preaching, prayers, hymn singing, and a ritual meal known as “dinner on the ground.” Decoration Day — its practitioners often call the event simply a “decoration”— is a powerful ritual of piety. At the practical level, it provides a cultural motivation for cleaning and repairing a cemetery, which, if not properly maintained, can be reclaimed by the forest of the Upland South with astonishing speed. At the social level, it serves as a focal point for gathering a community, and it has long provided an occasion for community members from afar to return to their homeplace. At the deepest spiritual level, a decoration is an act of respect for the dead that reaffirms one’s bonds with those who have gone before. One would think that such a widespread folk custom, practiced by or at least known to hundreds of thousands of Americans, would by now have generated an extensive literature. But there is no book-length treatment of the tradition, and the articles that discuss it are mostly localized and limited in their perspective on what is a broadly diffused and greatly varied regional tradition. Further, the complicated relation of this cultural tradition to the national Memorial Day, which began in the Northern states after the Civil War, continues to confuse everyone from encyclopedia writers to local practitioners. This volume looks at the historical origins and geographic sweep of Decoration Day and presents some surprising connections and comparative details to help explicate its history. Decorating graves with flowers is of course an ancient cultural practice, but the particular practice of Decoration Day that we explore here seems to emerge from the mists of time during the middle decades of the nineteenth century in the American South. Though this book deals with the historical origins and geographic spread of Decora-

tion Day, its main focus is on a subregion of the Upland South where the tradition seems to be particularly strong. That subregion is a multicounty area of Appalachian North Carolina west of Asheville — Swain, Jackson, and Graham Counties and, to a lesser extent, the counties surrounding them. It is a region where two great mountain ranges converge — the Balsam Mountains and the Great Smoky Mountains. Here many cemeteries hold decorations, and local people are well aware of the cultural tradition of cemetery decoration. Here, too, the tradition of cemetery decoration has been at the root of a tug-of-war between local citizens and the federal government that has lasted for a half century. When Fontana Dam was built (1941–44), a large number of people were removed from their homes in the valley of the Little Tennessee River and along the creeks flowing down the southern flank of the Great Smoky Mountains. The land between the ridge of the Smokies and the thirty-mile-long dam lake became part of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. A document was created and disseminated in which the concerned national, state, and local governmental agencies agreed to build a new road on higher ground above the north shore of Fontana Lake. This road would provide access to the twenty-seven cemeteries surviving in the lands conveyed to the National Park Service. Part of that road was built in the 1950s and early 1960s, but then construction stopped and the road gained a new and by now legendary name, “The Road to Nowhere.” How the ensuing tug-of-war developed, and how a new form of Decoration Day emerged in the cemeteries of the park’s “North Shore,” comprise a special focus of this volume and the primary focus of an earlier published report (see the Project History). Although in Chapter 5 we tell the compelling story of the North Shore cultural revolution, we place it in the context of the wider practice of cemetery decoration outside the national park. There seems to be a symbiotic relationship between the decorations within the park and beyond the park boundaries. Taken together, these two forms of Decoration Day make our region of western North Carolina one of the most varied and vibrant areas in the Upland South for this venerable and culturally powerful custom. We launch our volume neither with the history of Decoration Day nor with its geographical spread. Instead, beginning in medias res, Chapter 1 offers our own direct experiences and observations while attending two decorations in western North Carolina. The decoration at Proctor Cemetery typifies the decorations held today within Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The decoration at Brendle Hill Cemetery in Swain County’s Alarka community provides an example of the decorations held in regional cemeteries outside the park. Taken together, with the comparisons and contrasts they provide, they introduce us from the ground up to decorations as a cultural form. Chapter 2 turns to the overall features of Decoration Day in western North Carolina. In Chapter 3 we step back to look at the cemeteries themselves, which comprise the culviii

introduction

tural framework within which the ritual of Decoration Day is enacted. Then, by degrees, we move to the larger history of the region, the special history of the North Shore removal and revolution, and the origin, diffusion, and range of Decoration Day as a custom. The final chapters turn our attention to the North Shore and Decoration Day in sign, symbol, and art; the community heroes whose devotion is so important to the health and vibrancy of cemeteries and Decoration Day; and finally some thoughts on the deeper meaning of this extraordinary American cultural tradition. This book is jointly authored. Karen and I have worked together on every stage of this project, from the fieldwork through the preparation of the book and the exhibition. The primary responsibility for creating the photographs is hers, and the primary responsibility for creating the text is mine. Hence the “I” in this text is Alan Jabbour, with Karen Singer Jabbour serving as the first and best reader. Alan Jabbour Memorial Day 2009

introduction

ix

figure A-1. Group assembled at firehouse in Bryson City, N.C., January 22, 2005, to read and review the original cemetery decoration report. Rear row: Tonya Teague, Paul Webb, Lawrence Hyatt, Alan Jabbour, Linda Grant Hogue, Dale Hogue, William Crawford, Trevor Lanier; front row: Philip E. “Ted” Coyle (kneeling), Verna Kirkland, Carolyn Kirkland (kneeling), Carmaleta Littlejohn Monteith, Max Monteith, Ellen Monteith, David Monteith, Helen Cable Vance, Christine Cole Proctor, Eddie Marlowe

Acknowledgments This book is dedicated to the people of western North Carolina who taught us about Decoration Day past and present. They took us in as novitiates and shared their knowledge with friendship and generosity of spirit, for which we remain deeply grateful. Some of them assembled in 2005 to read and comment on a draft of our earlier report (Figure A-1), and the influence of others is mentioned throughout the book. A list of the more than fifty formal interviews from our research in 2004 is appended to the Project History at the end of this book, and since that time many more whom we cannot list here have talked to us about many subjects related to Decoration Day. We are grateful to all who have given of their time and knowledge. In addition to providing interviews, Verna and Carolyn Kirkland of Swain County, Gene and Carrie Laney of Graham County, and William Crawford of Jackson County volunteered to guide us through selected cemeteries in their western North Carolina counties in 2004, and they have remained friends and advisors as the earlier project evolved into the present book. Christine Cole Proctor of the Lauada Cemetery Association and Linda Grant Hogue of the North Shore Road Association have provided advice and guidance on many topics. We are grateful to all the unsung heroes of cemeteries and decorations whom we evoked in Chapter 8, and especially to Flonnie Burns Collins, Harold Collins, and Theresa Libich Collins, Janice Inabinett, Wade Woodard, Katherine Murphy Crisp, Regina Cochran Howell, Dyanne Shook Pedersen, and Virgie Brooks Shook. Finally, many thanks to Helen Cable Vance of the North Shore Historical Association, who has responded regularly to our inquiries with good information, wise counsel, and warm good wishes. The idea for this book arose from our work on the North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project in 2004 (described in the Project History). For Karen and me, that project began with a call from National Park Service archeologist Bennie Keel in search of someone to undertake a study of Decoration Day for the North Shore Road Environmental Impact Statement (eis). We were free and intrigued, so we signed up for the mission. Thanks to Bennie for inviting us and advising us as the project unfolded. And thanks to

the staff of Great Smoky Mountains National Park for help during the original project, and for encouraging us to expand the study into the present book. Karen and I were joined in the eis study by anthropologist Philip E. “Ted” Coyle of Western Carolina University and archeologist and cultural resource manager Paul Webb of TRC Environmental Corporation. It was our great good fortune to have such skilled, knowledgeable, and personally committed colleagues on the project team. After our formal study for the eis was done, Ted and Paul continued to share information and offer good counsel as we moved into researching and drafting this book, and they were helpful readers of the budding manuscript. The exhibition on Decoration Day that opened in April 2009 at Western Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Center made a perfect creative companion to the book for public communication about the cultural tradition of Decoration Day. We are grateful to Mountain Heritage Center colleagues Scott Philyaw (director), Trevor Jones (curator), Peter Koch (education coordinator), and other Center staff for their commitment to the idea of the exhibition and their labor in making it come to pass. And thanks to the staff of the University of North Carolina Press and its editor-in-chief, David Perry, for their labors to bring this book to its final form, and to the readers they enlisted to review the manuscript, whose comments and suggestions improved the book in numerous ways. In preparation for this book, we undertook research in the following reading rooms of the Library of Congress: the American Folklife Center’s Folklife Reading Room; the Main Reading Room; the Manuscript Reading Room; the Music Division’s Performing Arts Reading Room; and the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division’s Recorded Sound Reference Center. It is impossible to overstate the value of the Library of Congress and the particular value of its reading rooms as intellectual nerve centers through which the world can access the collections. Thanks to the Library’s reference specialists and other staff for their help. We are grateful to Berea College Library’s Special Collections and Archives Department, which provided an Appalachian Music Research Fellowship enabling Karen and me to be researchers at Berea College for several weeks in 2008; and to Harry Rice, Shannon Wilson, John Bondurant, Jaime Bradley, Grace Sears, and other Berea College Library staff for their assistance. Thanks also to Martha Atkinson of Blandford Church and Cemetery for facilitating our study of the minutes of the Ladies Memorial Association of Petersburg, Virginia, and other documents concerning Blandford Cemetery. The fieldnotes, sound recordings, interview transcripts, and color still photographs from the 2004 field research, together with some additional materials, are available in the archival collections of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and a duplicate set is at

xii

acknowledgments

Western Carolina University.1 The entire collection exists in digital form. The fieldnotes, color still photographs, and sound recordings from our extensive fieldwork since 2004 on cemeteries and cemetery decoration in western North Carolina and elsewhere reside in our own private collection at the time of this writing, but will doubtless find a public archival home someday. Some samples appear on my personal website.2

acknowledgments

xiii

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About the Photographs The photographs in this book are by Karen Singer Jabbour. They were taken during fieldwork by Alan and Karen Jabbour from the summer of 2004 through the fall of 2009 in western North Carolina, as part of a collection of thousands of documentary photographs. The originals are JPEG digital color photographs, generally ranging from 3 to 5 MB, made on a Canon Rebel digital camera. All but one of the photographs are from western North Carolina. “GSMNP” in the captions is an abbreviation for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and all the GSMNP photographs are from the North Shore region of the park in Swain County, North Carolina. The index includes references to both the caption information and selected visual features of the photographs.

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Decoration Day in the Mounta ins

1 Massey Branch 2 New Hope Baptist 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Church Carringer-Garrison Orr Paynetown Cable Branch Proctor Bradshaw Cable McClure Tabor Lauada

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Sawmill Hill Round Hill Watkins Herron Brendle Hill Cochran Mason Branch DeHart Jenkins Thomas Chapel Birdtown Yellow Hill Barkers Creek

26 Keener 27 Sylva Assembly

of God Crawford Sutton-Caldwell Double Springs Erastus Balsam Grove Tuckasegee Baptist Church 34 Woodring 35 Shook 36 Mathis 28 29 30 31 32 33

Western North Carolina cemeteries pictured in this book

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Broom Sol’s Creek Harris Jackson Owen (Wolf Mountain) McCall Shoal Creek Baptist Church E. D. Owen Upper Stephens Wood

chapter one

Two Encounters with Decoration Day Proctor Cemetery, July 4, 2004

Our first experience with Decoration Day came on the Fourth of July in 2004. Karen and I had just arrived in western North Carolina to begin research on the custom of Decoration Day as practiced in the cemeteries scattered through a region of Great Smoky Mountains National Park known as “the North Shore.” The name refers to the northern shore of Fontana Lake, a thirty-mile-long lake created by Fontana Dam, the largest dam in the eastern United States, which dams the Little Tennessee River in Swain County, North Carolina. The lake the dam created displaced a large number of people, because the rising water both flooded homes and inundated the only road to the outside world for people living at higher elevations. We arose early, picked up our Western Carolina University colleague Ted Coyle, and drove to Cable Cove, a boat landing on the south shore of Fontana Lake. We were going to attend the annual decorations at Proctor and Bradshaw Cemeteries, both of which are in the national park near the former town of Proctor on Hazel Creek. The event marked the beginning of documentary fieldwork for our research project. The morning was cloudy and fog shrouded the mountains as we made our way to Cable Cove. When we arrived at about 9:00 a.m., for boarding at 9:30, a crowd had already gathered. We recognized some people who had attended the public meeting we held two days earlier announcing the research project, but there were many others of all ages. Some had bouquets, boxes, or bundles of flowers, and some carried large bags or coolers filled with food and drink. Ted, Karen, and I lost no time introducing ourselves, mixing with the people at the landing, and talking about our project. Since we would be taking photographs and making sound recordings all day, we wanted people to know who we were and what we were doing there. One person we met was Dale Ditmanson, the new superintendent of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, who was there with his wife to take part in the decoration. Erik Kreusch, the park archeologist, had alerted us in advance that the superintendent would

be attending. As we mingled, we heard much talk among the participants about what his coming might portend. The word was that till now no superintendent had ever attended a decoration at any cemetery within the park’s North Shore region. Relations over the years had sometimes been tense and testy between the park administration and local people associated with cemeteries within the park, so the new superintendent’s presence was interpreted as auspicious. The boat that shuttles people across Fontana Lake for cemetery decorations arrived, and people started to board (Plate 5). We were not well positioned near the landing and did not want to crowd out the local participants, some of whom were elderly or disabled. By our next North Shore decoration we would shed our hesitancy; Karen came to realize how important it was to be on the first boat in order to document people arriving and decorating graves. But this time we held back. Meanwhile, a shower began to fall. We had forgotten our umbrella, but our fellow pilgrims were well prepared and took care of us. Linda Hogue, who heads the North Shore Road Association and was an active participant in the public meeting two days earlier, produced an extra umbrella from her car, and someone else provided a plastic poncho. There was some brave talk about how infrequently it has rained over the years for these North Shore decorations, but I noticed that the musicians had come well prepared for rain — their instrument cases were wrapped in rain-shedding gear. We finally took the third boat, that is, the third trip across Fontana Lake by the same boat. Once aboard, we chatted with neighbors on the benches rimming the boat’s interior or just silently soaked up the experience of being on the water. It was cloudy with a bit of drizzle and fog in the air, and mountain and forest views revealed themselves mysteriously and powerfully as we crossed the lake. We have been on several North Shore decorations since that first crossing, and each time crossing the lake evokes a sense of mythic transition from one world to the next, a pilgrimage from the secular to a timeless sacred world. Cemeteries always convey a sense of sacred space, as do national parks. Crossing an unimaginably deep lake from civilization to a cemetery in the wilderness of a national park is the perfect mythic journey to the sacred domain. Arriving on the other side, the boat maneuvered into an inlet that marked the mouth of Hazel Creek. The creek is one of the major streams flowing out of the Smokies into Fontana Lake and the Little Tennessee River, and its banks were once thickly inhabited. Proctor was a boomtown during the heyday of logging in the early twentieth century, and rural settlements stretched up the creek virtually to its sources high in the Smokies. Today the area has reverted to wilderness, though the practiced eye can discover lingering evidence of earlier settlements. Helen Vance, the head of the North Shore Historical Association, told me that the creek was originally called Hazelnut Creek because of the 4

Two Encounters with Decoration Day

hazelnut trees (Corylus americana) along its banks. At some point Hazelnut Creek was shortened to Hazel Creek. As we debarked near the mouth of Hazel Creek, a number of National Park Service employees greeted us. Perhaps because of my years in Washington, D.C., a cynical question crossed my mind: Were they here because the new superintendent of the park was aboard? Subsequent North Shore decorations proved that park staff are always there to help people debark, describe and point the way for the hike that will follow, and offer rides in all-terrain vehicles for pilgrims who need help. Most of the cemeteries of the North Shore — and indeed throughout the Appalachian region — lie astride interior ridges far from rivers and boat landings. Typically, to reach a cemetery, one must hike up a creek, then perhaps along a smaller branch, and finally up to the crest of a steep ridge. Even allterrain vehicles may not be capable of ascending that final ridge, and the lore of North Shore pilgrimages is full of stories about pilgrims on crutches or with other disabilities struggling to climb the ridge to visit family graves. We began walking up the broad, well-kept dirt road that follows the bank of Hazel Creek. It was a comfortable walk and full of interesting things to see. I found myself walking with Harry Vance, Helen Vance’s husband, who as a Baptist minister would later contribute in various ways to the day’s events. We talked about his career as a pastor, which included a stint in the Anacostia area of Washington, D.C., during the 1950s. Karen and I have lived in Washington since 1969, so I could respond with real knowledge when he alluded to his former neighborhood. Then, as we approached the area where the town of Proctor once stood, he pointed out various less-wooded areas in the forest, sometimes punctuated by remnants of the foundations of Proctor’s public and private buildings. Harry Vance said he would be performing two baptisms in Hazel Creek later that day, and he wanted to scout the area where baptisms had traditionally been held, just downstream from the site of Proctor. We left the path and worked our way over to the bank. The moment he saw the water, he exclaimed, “Oh good, it’s clear!” It had rained a lot in recent days, and he had worried that muddy water would make full-immersion baptisms problematic. As he surveyed the area, he seemed to be imagining the baptism in his mind, picturing just where in the deep pool near the side of the creek he would carry out his work, and how the candidates for baptism would get in and out through the weeds and bushes on the bank. Contemplating what was to come seemed to fill him with enthusiasm, and he remarked about the satisfaction he felt in being able to continue performing such rituals, even though he no longer had a congregation of his own. Returning to the road, we met a park employee in an all-terrain vehicle who offered us a ride, which we gladly accepted. The remainder of our trip was not as easy as the stroll up Hazel Creek. We turned from the road onto a steep, muddy path up a narrow branch. FiTwo Encounters with Decoration Day

5

nally we reached a point where we had to leave our vehicle and climbed a steep final path to the ridge crest. One pilgrim on crutches had to work his way up the steep hill backward, securing his crutches in the muddy hillside and then lifting himself by degrees. At the top, the path opened onto a large cemetery in an open glen with a few trees and shrubs. Musicians were playing, and my initial fear that I had missed something was replaced by relief when I saw that Karen and Ted were already there and busy documenting. Proctor Cemetery, the largest of several cemeteries along Hazel Creek and its branches, contains 192 known burials. It was established on the land of Moses and Patience Proctor, who settled in the area about 1830. Moses Proctor, the earliest known interment, was buried in 1863, reportedly in the doorway of his former cabin site. As often happens, what began as a family cemetery evolved over generations into a community cemetery. The congregants on this day came from many families, and the graves they decorated likewise bore many family names. Most of the graves were decorated by the time I arrived, but some families still clustered around graves of their kin, either cleaning or adjusting something, recounting stories about the people buried there, or simply reflecting. The musicians continued to play, and people gradually congregated in a large, loose circle within the cemetery. I hastily unloaded my new digital recorder and connected the microphone. There were two young fiddle players (the Dills sisters, I was told), a mandolin player, and two guitar players (Figure 1-1). When the formal program began, Helen Vance first made some announcements, then read a religious-patriotic essay she had chosen in honor of the Fourth of July. She next called on Linda Hogue to read a piece (Figure 1-2) and then asked Harry Vance to make some remarks. His comments amounted to a brief sermon with patriotic and religious themes. Since it was July 4, he focused on contributions made by Americans from early times to today that have helped secure our freedom. His remarks ended with a prayer. Helen Vance called on the musicians to play some additional selections. Then, having learned at the public meeting two days before that I play the fiddle, she asked me if I would play a patriotic song. I borrowed a fiddle from the younger of the Dills sisters, and as I wrestled to turn off my recording equipment and unharness myself from it, I heard someone request “Dixie.” Then I heard the guitar player make another suggestion — he quietly played the first few notes of “America the Beautiful.” I nodded, and we plunged in. Afterward, at Helen’s request, I briefly spoke about our project and introduced Ted and Karen. Helen then called on Superintendent Ditmanson, who made some graceful remarks about how much he enjoyed being there and appreciated having events like this in the park. At some point a couple of men circulated through the congregation, holding out their hats, to take up an offering. The proceeds were for the North Shore Cemetery Associa6

Two Encounters with Decoration Day

tion, also known as the North Shore Historical Association, to buy new grave markers for the North Shore cemeteries. No one has been buried in Proctor Cemetery since the early 1940s, when people were removed from the North Shore. But cemeteries are not as static as people sometimes imagine. Old and illegible headstones are replaced, and genealogical research supplies missing information. Thus a cemetery is a dynamic cultural creation, its shape and public communications constantly under revision despite the stony illusion of permanence. As the formal ceremony drew to its conclusion, people dispersed through the cemetery singly or in small groups, continuing the process of contemplation and commentary that is a critical part of Decoration Day. Proctor was our first decoration, and it had not yet dawned on us that these “interludes” were a key portion of the decoration. In time we came to realize that Decoration Day is a day of reflection and of engagement between the community above ground and the one below, and much of that reflection and engagement occurs as people walk through the cemetery alone or with a few companions. As people left the cemetery, some, including Ted, went to Bradshaw Cemetery, a smaller cemetery decorated annually on the same Sunday as Proctor, while others drifted back down to the Proctor town site. At the Proctor site, one house, known as Calhoun Two Encounters with Decoration Day

figure 1-1 Musicians during Proctor Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, July 4, 2004

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figure 1-2 Linda Hogue of the North Shore Road Association reads a statement during Proctor Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, July 4, 2004

8

House, remains standing from the old days. Not far from it and close to Hazel Creek stood two rows of picnic tables and benches, stacked with coolers, bags, and baskets people had left behind when they went to the cemetery. Now they returned and began spreading tablecloths and arranging an amazingly varied offering of food on the tables. This was the portion of the decoration ritual known as “dinner on the ground.” The term is consistently used for the cemetery meal on Decoration Day throughout the Upland South, from the Appalachians to the Ozarks. It is also used for the after-church outdoor meals of southern congregations. Dinner on the ground was originally a picnic-like meal, spread on blankets on the ground in the cemetery. But outdoor tables are an improvement over dining on the ground, and outdoor pavilions offer even more advantages, such as shade and shelter from the rain. All these variants of the custom exist in one place or another, but whatever the actual circumstances of the meal, people cling affectionately to the term “dinner on the ground” for the time-honored communal experience it conjures up (Plate 6). Karen began photographing the dinner spread, while I talked to people beside the rows of tables. Presently, a young woman greeted me and asked if we would like to join her and her mother. I gladly accepted and began getting acquainted with Carolyn Kirkland Two Encounters with Decoration Day

and her mother, Verna Kirkland. I apologized that Karen could not join us till she finished photographing the serving of the food. Then I sat down, and we began eating and talking. The conversation touched on many subjects, from “Why are you doing this study?” to Verna’s mentioning that she knew how to make the old-style crepe paper flowers for Decoration Day. But looking back, the point that looms largest is Verna’s suggestion that we look at the cemeteries and Decoration Day practices in an area such as Alarka, the rural community in Swain County where they live. Out of that interchange emerged a research plan that included cemeteries and decorations both on the North Shore in the national park, and on the “south shore” in areas apart from the removal, cultural dislocation, and subsequent cultural revival that occurred within the park. The cemeteries and decorations outside the park became our “control group,” providing a cultural foil against which we could better appraise what was happening within the park. Karen finally joined us, but soon after we noticed a few drops of rain. Then a shower came up, and all along the rows of tables umbrellas sprang into action. The shower quickly evolved into a downpour, and people frantically tried to rescue the food before running to Calhoun House nearby, which was empty but was, luckily, open. Kids romped around screaming happily in the rain, while grown-ups tried to stay as dry as they could. Gradually the storm subsided to a light rain that never quite stopped. Nevertheless, someone decided that the baptisms must go forward as planned, and people started to walk down Hazel Creek toward the site that Harry Vance and I had inspected earlier. Dorothy Gay Calhoun and Laurel Lee Calhoun, two teenagers from a local family who now live west of the Smokies in Tennessee, were to be baptized. Their grandfather and father, both of whom were present, had been baptized in Hazel Creek, so they wanted to be baptized there as well. Harry Vance waded into the pool in Hazel Creek, and another man led the young women out to him, one at a time (Figure 1-3). He prayed while supporting each of them, then immersed each one entirely in the cold stream. Meanwhile, the congregants on the bank sang hymns associated with baptism, including “Shall We Gather at the River.” After the baptisms, Harry Vance joined the two young women and their entire family on the bank, standing joyfully in the rain, for a final prayer (Figure 1-4). People then began drifting down the long path toward the mouth of Hazel Creek and the waiting boat. Everyone was wet, but by this point it did not matter anymore. I rejoined the Kirklands as we waited for a place on the boat, and while the first and second loads went back to Cable Cove, we continued our earlier conversation. Karen, meanwhile, had a conversation with Sheila Calhoun, the mother of the two teenagers who had just been baptized, discussing family names and exploring the possibility of our interviewing family members at home. Finally we boarded as part of the third boatload. The Vances were on the same boat, and Harry Vance — his spirits still high from the baptisms, I think — began Two Encounters with Decoration Day

9

figure 1-3 Rev. Harry Vance baptizes Laurel Lee Calhoun in Hazel Creek, in the rain, during the Proctor and Bradshaw Cemetery Decorations, Gsmnp, July 4, 2004

singing hymns with one of the ladies on board as the boat plowed across Fontana Lake. Somehow I got drawn in and added my customary bass. It was a happy way to end a happy day. Back on the other side, we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways.1

Brendle Hill Cemetery, June 2007 In the spring of 2007, Karen and I returned to the Smokies for a month of additional fieldwork. Our study had been published in 2005 as part of the Environmental Impact Statement on the North Shore Road, but our curiosity about Decoration Day had not yet been satisfied, and the prospect loomed of a book and an exhibition on the topic. We had many goals for this additional fieldwork, but most of all we wanted to attend decorations that were not on the North Shore, so that we could compare the two categories. As we cast our Decoration Day research net more widely, we came to see the North Shore decorations, which occur within and with the active participation of the national park, as a special subspecies of Decoration Day. This month of fieldwork in 2007 would help us extend our personal experience to include cemetery decorations maintained as a continuous tradition, uninterrupted and unaltered by the interventions of the federal government. For our

10

Two Encounters with Decoration Day

earlier study, such cemeteries and decorations had been the “control group,” but now they became our primary focus. One of our favorite cemeteries during our 2004 fieldwork was Brendle Hill Cemetery, located on a small ridge, just beside the road, in the rural community of Alarka in Swain County. Verna and Carolyn Kirkland, whom we had met during the Proctor decoration, introduced us to Brendle Hill and three other cemeteries in Alarka on July 28, 2004 (Figure 1-5). On September 2, 2004, after saying goodbye to the Kirklands at the end of our fieldwork, we stopped again at Brendle Hill — our last fieldwork memory of that year. Planning our return in the spring of 2007, we telephoned Verna Kirkland and learned that Brendle Hill Cemetery has its decoration on the second Sunday in June, so we adjusted our trip schedule to make sure we would still be there. On Saturday, June 2, the weekend before the decoration weekend, Karen and I were in Alarka visiting Cochran Cemetery, and we stopped at Brendle Hill, thinking it might be useful to view and photograph it before the cleanup and decorations got under way. Brendle Hill had a spare look compared to its colorful display the last time we were there. Much of last year’s decoration had been cleared away in preparation for this year’s Two Encounters with Decoration Day

figure 1-4 Rev. Harry Vance prays with the Calhoun family after the two baptisms during the Proctor and Bradshaw Cemetery Decorations, Gsmnp, July 4, 2004

11

figure 1-5 Carolyn and Verna Kirkland interviewed by Alan Jabbour, Lauada Cemetery pavilion, Swain Co., N.C., July 28, 2004

12

event, though flowers remained on quite a few graves. The mixed pattern is a sure sign that no single person or policy governs the cleanup. A number of individuals do their part, often in the general area of the cemetery where their own families are buried, but there is no systematic consistency. The work is a decentralized effort. Looking around, we noticed a funeral home had set up a temporary pavilion for a burial later that same day. After inspecting the site for the funeral, we sought out an “old friend” — a grave we had photographed in 2004 as a new burial. On its headstone were inscribed pictures of some tools, a tractor, and a ginseng plant, emblems of the lifetime devotions of the deceased (Figure 3-16). In 2004 the grave had a large wreath, on which were attached work gloves and work boots, and an ivy-framed drawing of a tractor and barn. A photo had also been affixed just above the marble inscription “Beloved Daddy and Papaw” (Appalachian dialect for “grandfather”). Now, except for the photograph, these were gone, though something new had appeared — a bluebird box on a pole behind the headstone. The site’s transformation nicely demonstrated the dynamic development of many gravesites in the region over time. Down the slope we noticed a large number of metal pipes secured in the ground, each containing a small posy. Somehow we had not noticed them in 2004, but reviewing our Two Encounters with Decoration Day

photographs from that trip later, we saw that they were indeed present. They are emblems of a dilemma for Brendle Hill and some other cemeteries we encountered. Essentially, space is running out, and people are anxiously trying to stake out space for their own families before other families appropriate it. Brendle Hill is an acute example of the problem, because it is on a hill encircled by roads. We also noticed that someone was building a retaining wall for a gravesite on the slope of the hill, more evidence that space was running out on the ridge top. In other regions, such as central and northern Alabama and the Arkansas Ozarks, we saw many signs posted by cemetery committees enumerating rules and procedures to follow to reserve a gravesite. But in this community cemetery, where decentralized, consensual decision-making is the dominant style, there are no posted signs. Time will tell how the fundamental problem of allocating space equitably will be resolved. Nothing else struck us as remarkable that day, but we had the “before cleanup” photographs we had sought, and a few more in the bargain. We left for the day, resolving to return the following Saturday to see the preparatory work for Decoration Day. On Saturday, June 9, the day before Decoration Day, we arose early, had breakfast, and drove to Brendle Hill Cemetery. At first, it seemed deserted, but moments after our arrival a pickup truck pulled in and a man sprang out with a weed-whacker. He promptly and vigorously went to work on a group of graves. Then we noticed an elderly man with a rake in his hand. We walked over and introduced ourselves to Roy Cochran, who was working on a double gravesite where his wife was buried, and where eventually he would be buried. Moles had invaded the site, and he was raking it smooth again (Figure 1-6). Roy Cochran said he had devoted about five hours on Thursday to mowing this site, where members of his immediate family are buried, and a large section of the surrounding cemetery. He seemed to enjoy the conversation, and when we said we would like to see an early grave he had mentioned, he volunteered to accompany us. He made a point of fretting about the array of pipe flower-holders that had burgeoned down the slope from the ridge. It seemed unfair to him for people to stake claims to precious communal cemetery space long before their actual passing. Brendle Hill was more colorful than it had been a week earlier. Clearly work had been going on all week. We noticed, for example, that the family gravesites of the Kirklands, which we had photographed a week earlier, had been weeded, freshly remounded, and decorated (Plate 13). Carolyn Kirkland later confirmed that her mother had cleaned and remounded the graves during the week. They usually do the cleaning and remounding together, she said, but this week a construction job monopolized Carolyn’s time. Surveying the cemetery, we found one other family group of graves freshly remounded in the old style and a couple of others that showed evidence of older mounding but no Two Encounters with Decoration Day

13

figure 1-6 Roy Cochran working on the gravesite of his wife (and his own future gravesite), Brendle Hill Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., June 9, 2007

fresh remounding. Our recollection was that there had been a few more in 2004. It is clear that the old values represented by the practice of mounding are in retreat and that the flat and grassy style is gradually taking over. There are a few cultural holdouts, however, including our friends the Kirklands, who insist on maintaining their graves in the old traditional way. As we prepared to leave, we saw Roy Cochran again. His new mission was to attack a patch of “cockleburrs” with his weed-whacker.2 The patch was not on his own family’s graves, but somehow it troubled him and demanded his attention. But the weed-whacker broke down during the encounter, and as we left Brendle Hill, Roy Cochran was huddled with a new arrival, Tom Brendle, who thought he could help Roy fix it. After visiting Mason Branch Cemetery, another Alarka cemetery that we had visited in 2004, we returned to the Alarka Community Center. Verna Kirkland had invited us to be her guests there for the Shepherd Family Reunion (her mother’s family). Verna and Carolyn arrived just as we did at about 11:30, and Verna introduced us to her aunt, Derol Crisp, and Derol’s sister Ruby. Derol and I got into a conversation about her husband, Hardy Crisp, who had passed away in 1968. Hardy Crisp, who played many instruments but preferred the fiddle, led a group called the Fontana Ramblers String Band. The band still exists but no longer includes members of the Crisp family. There was a short welcome and grace before the meal, and at some point someone 14

Two Encounters with Decoration Day

introduced us as visitors. Karen and I sat at different tables; at mine there were mostly men. To my right was Virgil “Bud” Crisp, son of Jim Crisp, Hardy Crisp’s brother. Bud is a musician who has returned to Swain County after living in Florida for many years. Our conversation took a musical turn, and in response to my queries about Hardy Crisp, he told me instead about his Uncle Charley, Hardy’s brother. Charley, Bud said, was every bit as talented musically as Hardy, but his talent was eclipsed by a contrary temperament that led him to argue, fight, and otherwise turn away from family and friends. He finally ended life “as he had lived it,” being killed next to a railroad track. This chilling narrative, delivered in an understated way, reminded me of the narrative restraint of the old ballad style, betraying neither sympathy nor disapproval. Bud concluded — as I hung on every word — by saying that his Uncle Charley had made three fiddles that reflected perfectly his exacting style as an artist and craftsman. Bud has one, Grand Old Opry performer Pee Wee King (now deceased) had another — and the third was burned. Recounting stories about the people of generations past is central to decorations and family reunions. We heard many personal stories on this day, but there were also conversations about history and culture. Carolyn Kirkland introduced us to an elderly gentleman named Floyd Martin, whom she called her “papaw.” He took Karen and me on a descriptive tour of a wall of historical photographs in the community center and talked about Alarka’s history. I noticed he consistently called Alarka “Larkie,” as in “the Larkie Lumber Company” for “the Alarka Lumber Company.” Later, my neighbor to the left at my table, Nevil Lackey, began our conversation with some unflattering descriptions of the federal government, then somehow segued into a list of cemeteries I should visit, and finally offered a long, detailed discourse on how to make crepe paper flowers in the old style for Decoration Day. Talking and exchanging stories may be central to family reunions, but this one also had music. Mike Johnson, who is married to Ruby’s daughter Barbara, brought his guitar and performed as we ate dessert. He sang country songs and, toward the end of his set, gospel songs, including “Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad,” “Farther Along,” “Amazing Grace,” “I’ll Fly Away,” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Some of us moved near him and joined in. “Amazing Grace” ended with a verse consisting solely of the words “Great God,” which people repeated over and over from the beginning to the end of the melody with hands raised. When we were about to leave, Verna said she hoped we had enjoyed it and was very happy we came. Then she said that this sort of event is typical of the tradition of decorations. Our previous experiences with North Shore decorations were limited to a few hours on the boat, up a trail, at the cemetery, and back onto the boat, whereas the decorations this represented might go on for several days as families gathered and shared time Two Encounters with Decoration Day

15

figure 1-7 Alan Jabbour talks with George Oliver, who distributes flags for the Veterans of Foreign Wars on veterans’ graves before Decoration Day, at Brendle Hill Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., June 9, 2007

with one another. Decorations, in other words, were more than the event, and more even than the event plus the workday preceding it. A decoration was a whole system of family and community activities with Decoration Day in the cemetery at its core. The following day Verna repeated this idea at the Brendle Hill decoration, as if she had been thinking about this formulation for a while and wanted to make sure she conveyed it to us. After the reunion dinner, we said our thanks and good-byes and returned to Brendle Hill Cemetery to see what was going on there. We ran into Dorothy Cochran and Regina Howell, whom we had met and photographed at Cochran Cemetery the previous weekend. We asked about Regina’s son, Clay Young, who, along with his friend Trevor Woodard, had carried out the family tradition of placing a flower on every grave at the Cochran Cemetery decoration last week. Regina said that he was playing baseball, but some other teenagers were with them. We chatted with all of them as they decorated graves. Then we noticed a man coming into the cemetery with a bundle of American flags to place on the graves of veterans, a task often carried out by local chapters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. As he worked his way down the rows of graves and drew nearer, we saw it was George Oliver, whom we had met when he distributed flags at Watkins Cemetery two weeks earlier (Figure 1-7). Today, in addition to his bundle of flags, he had a bundle of flowers. They were to decorate the grave of his father, James R. Oliver, who was buried in Brendle Hill. The next morning was Sunday morning and Decoration Day at Brendle Hill Cemetery. When we arrived a little after 9:00 a.m., some people were already decorating graves 16

Two Encounters with Decoration Day

before the service. The crowd quickly grew, and many of them brought flowers. While some decorating occurs the day before Decoration Day, it also takes place early on the day itself. We saw people we knew, including Roy Cochran and Regina Howell (Plate 7), and met a few new people, among them Regina Howell’s husband, Steve. He told us that his church in Asheville, Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church, once held decorations but no longer practices the custom. Verna and Carolyn Kirkland arrived, and we followed them as they did additional decorating on various graves. We noticed that the graves Verna had cleaned and mounded had additional flowers since yesterday morning. Now, however, Verna and Carolyn were not decorating the graves of close relations but seeking out distant relations, friends, or just graves in need of decoration. Verna said she always tries to see that all the graves are decorated. Presently people began to congregate in the high center of the cemetery’s ridge, where, on this warm, sunny day, dogwood trees provided a little shade and low retaining walls provided places to sit. The service was about to begin. A man with a shaven head, a blue shirt, dark pants, and a tie was circulating and greeting people. Karen and I simultaneously intuited that he would be the preacher this morning, so she began taking photographs of him. At some point he spoke with her, and she described our project and explained that we would be documenting the event. He began the program by introducing himself as Tim Reeves, thanking the group for inviting him, and welcoming everyone. He asked if anyone had anything they would like to say. One gentleman in a full brown suit and tie named Jeff, who turned out to be the preacher at East Alarka Baptist Church, made a few remarks. Someone else said something brief and religious. This was a moment for testimony, not announcements. Then Tim Reeves asked for some music. A group, assembled in the semicircle next to him, led off the gospel hymns and songs (Plate 8). There were a few men among the singers, and a young man accompanied them on guitar, but most were women, with a few girls. Each song seemed to feature a different soloist and a chorus after each verse. All the singers were excellent, and everyone else joined in. The songs and hymns were either well-known, such as “I’ll Fly Away,” or pieces with an easily learned refrain. After about five musical numbers, the sermon began. Tim Reeves read a passage from Isaiah and announced that his sermon topic would be “Sprucing Up.” He related this theme to sprucing up the cemetery for Decoration Day and extended that idea metaphorically to spiritual behavior and relations with the Lord (Plate 9). The sermon lasted perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, gathering intensity as it developed, with an amen chorus helping things along, and then relaxing again at the end. Afterward, the preacher asked for another hymn. As the service ended, he announced it was twenty minutes before eleven Two Encounters with Decoration Day

17

and invited everyone to attend East Alarka Baptist Church for a regular church service with “Brother Jeff.” The Brendle Hill Decoration, with perhaps 300 people, was well attended. Cars were everywhere, including a long row of hastily and chaotically parked cars strung along and partially obstructing the main road. We noticed that the women and girls were dressed in their Sunday finest, while the clothing the men and boys wore was more varied. Hardly any of the men, except the two preachers, wore suits or ties. The cemetery itself was ablaze in color from the flowers, which we tried to capture photographically despite the challenge of a bright midday sun. We drove from there to Mason Branch Cemetery for the end of their decoration and returned to Brendle Hill once more for a last set of photographs (Plate 10). Then we returned to our motel to pack for the long drive home to Washington the next day.3

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Two Encounters with Decoration Day

chapter two

Decoration Day in Western North Carolina Defining the Terms “Decoration” and “Decoration Day”

“Decoration” and “decoration day” merit a special entry in the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English: An occasion on which a family or church congregation gathers on a Sunday to place flowers on the graves of loved ones and to hold a memorial service for them. Traditionally this involved singing and dinner on the ground as well as a religious service.1 Elizabeth R. Hooker provides a detailed description of “A Decoration” in her 1933 book Religion in the Highlands: Few churches fail to have such an event once a year. It is not held on the thirtieth of May or on any other one date; but each church chooses any Sunday during the spring, summer or fall for which no neighboring church has made special plans. . . . The cemetery visited is on a narrow hilltop. . . . Coming nearer, we notice mounds of earth . . . , cleared, as is the space between them, of every weed and spear of grass. The graves lie parallel east and west, so that when the last trumpet sounds all the dead may rise looking eastward. . . . Each grave is decorated with from one to six bunches of bright-colored artificial flowers, stuck into the earth in a row. . . . In the shade of a few trees stand several preachers; and close beside them, and near by among the graves, the people are gathered to listen to the decoration exercises.2 Over the past century, various observers have noted the existence of this tradition in western North Carolina. In her 1935 book Cabins in the Laurel, Muriel Sheppard offers a detailed description of the custom from Mitchell County.3 Alberta and Carson Brewer’s Valley So Wild: A Folk History (1975), written four decades after the Hooker and Sheppard books and describing life in the Little Tennessee River watershed, provides a similar de-

scription of “Decoration Day” and “dinner on the ground.”4 People we interviewed sometimes worry that Decoration Day is dying out, but it has proven to be a sturdier cultural practice than observers expected. Today one can attend decorations aplenty throughout western North Carolina. What we will call the southern Decoration Day is noted by Hennig Cohen and Tristram Coffin in the third edition of The Folklore of American Holidays, where they identify “Graveyard Cleaning and Decoration Day” as an indigenous American folk custom — though without acknowledging that the range of these homegrown Decoration Days is distinctly southern. Their purpose is to honor the dead and to maintain the cemeteries, but they are significant social, religious, and patriotic occasions as well. They feature picnics, “dinner-on-the-ground,” preaching and speech making, and the homecoming of former neighbors and family who had moved away. The times chosen are for local convenience, without regard for the official Decoration Day and Memorial Day observances.5 And Richard Meyer, in his larger essay on “Cemeteries” in American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, observes: Among the more interesting of regional patterns in cemetery-related ritual is the practice, widespread throughout much of America’s Upland South areas, of Decoration Day, an annual time of cleaning, repair, and decoration closely allied to concepts of familial and community solidarity.6 In western North Carolina “decoration” is the generic term for the Decoration Day event and associated activities. One would be more likely to say “the decoration at Watkins Cemetery” than “the Decoration Day at Watkins Cemetery.” “Decoration Day” is used when referring to the specific day of the ritual gathering, such as, “the first Sunday in June is Decoration Day at Cochran Cemetery.” The definite article (“the”) sits comfortably with “decoration” but less so with “Decoration Day.” The region has no general term for the cleanup, preparation, and decoration of the cemetery preceding Decoration Day or early on Decoration Day itself. In some regions of the South, terms such as “graveyard working” or “cleanup” are used to describe not just the preparatory work but the event itself, either as an alternative to “Decoration Day” or as the sole local term for the event. Obviously, both cemetery cleanup and decoration of the graves are key components of this cultural event, but one group of names emphasizes the work — “graveyard working,” “clean-up day,” and so forth — while the other group emphasizes the ritual conclusion of the work —“decoration,” “Decoration Day.” In western 20

Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

North Carolina the cemetery work is a diffuse array of individual tasks with no regular name, and normally no regular day, while the culminating event and its visual aspects get all the attention in the nomenclature. Another term, “homecoming,” has been used by some for “decoration” or “Decoration Day” in western North Carolina. “Homecoming” seems to have been substituted for “Decoration Day” in some church-affiliated cemeteries during the twentieth century, a subject to which we shall return. Today the prevailing terms in the region and the entire Upland South are “decoration” and “Decoration Day.”

Preparing the Cemetery for Decoration Day In western North Carolina, Decoration Day almost always falls on a Sunday, but the cleaning and preparation often occur the weekend before, during the week, or on the Saturday just before Decoration Day. The final decorating of the graves generally occurs on the Saturday before and the earlier part of the morning on Decoration Day (Plates 11, 12; Figures 2-1, 2-2, 2-3). Cleaning and preparing the cemetery are the major tasks that must be done before Decoration Day. Indeed, cleaning the cemetery could be regarded as part of the holiday, rather than as preparation for it. In western North Carolina a half century ago, preparations began at home, where people fashioned crepe paper flowers in the winter and early spring and stored them in cardboard boxes for the decoration to come. Today, when spring arrives, the primary task is cleaning the cemetery itself. If the cemetery has been neglected since the preceding spring, which is the case with some cemeteries, the burst of spring vegetation, together with the previous summer’s growth, will leave grass, weeds, and even small saplings to be removed. Furthermore, full-grown trees may need to be removed from the woods at the cemetery’s margin, either because they are dying and will damage gravesites if they fall or because they create too much shade. Periodically stretches of woods along the ridge line may be cleared for additional graves, and leaning and fallen headstones must be reset firmly in the ground. Such tasks can be done at any time, of course, but the human instinct to defer work is well entrenched. Decoration Day provides a powerful traditional impetus for cemetery cleaning and preparation. One task connected with cleaning the cemetery is discarding old or unsightly decorations from the previous year. In most traditional western North Carolina cemeteries, families are expected to dispose of their old decorations, but some families do and some do not. A few thrifty souls may retrieve their decorations in the fall and recycle them the following spring. One occasionally sees signs posted with directives about disposing of Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

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figure 2-1 Sisters and greatgrandmother of Parker Smith decorate his infant grave, Watkins Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 27, 2007

figure 2-2 Grave of Parker Smith after being decorated, Watkins Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 27, 2007

flowers, and here and there in the region one encounters trash bins at the cemetery’s edge designated specifically for disposal of old decorations. One such bin is in Tabor Cemetery in western Swain County (Figure 3-20). Signage and trash bins become more common in cemeteries as one moves westward from North Carolina. Visual inspection of cemeteries confirms that two chronic problems in cemetery maintenance are getting people to remove old decorations and keeping them from discarding the refuse in the adjacent woods. For the North Shore decorations in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the park staff, who are responsible for preparing the cemeteries, systematically remove all decorations from the preceding year. Other cemeteries in the region use volunteers or paid help to remove all flowers by a certain date, usually in the fall or winter, or even the early spring of the following year. In such cases, the contrast is dramatic between the austere predecoration cemetery, bereft of flowers, and the splash of brilliant colors that signals the flowers’ return on Decoration Day. It is a powerful reminder that at one symbolic level Decoration Day celebrates the return of life in the spring. Nearly all the people we interviewed during our 2004 fieldwork, when addressing questions about decorations before World War II, said that cleaning the cemeteries— as

Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

figure 2-3 Lucina Lynn Crowe, guided by Jeanne Crowe, decorates her birth mother’s grave, Birdtown Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 11, 2008

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opposed to decorating them — was a task for the men. But the gender associations with these activities have never been absolute, and women help in one way or another, perhaps more than the men acknowledge. In some communities in the old days, an announcement in church would call on men to volunteer for cemetery cleanup on a certain day. Other communities simply relied on local word of mouth to muster a crew. The word “cleaning” is used consistently to describe this task. Indeed, in some regions west of the Appalachians, the cemetery preparation day is called Cemetery Cleaning Day or Cleanup Day. Cleaning in the old days included removing all grass, weeds, and volunteer saplings to produce a graveyard with only the trees and plants intentionally maintained as part of the cemetery decor. Several interviewees noted the parallel between the proper care of the cemetery and that of the dooryards to their homes. Older people remember when women “swept clean” the dooryard, removing grass and weeds and creating a yard of hard-packed, carefully swept dirt. Dorothea Lange caught this tradition in her North Carolina photograph “Caroline Atwater, wife of Negro owner, has a wellswept yard.”7 Terry Jordan argues that the clean-swept tradition, for both dooryard and graveyard, is of West African origin and spread from African American practice to become a southern cultural trait shared by blacks and whites alike.8 That may be true, but Jordan also asserts mistakenly that sweeping or scraping dooryards and cemeteries is unknown in the Appalachians. In western North Carolina and throughout the Appalachians, the older standard for a well-kept yard was clean swept, and the cemetery was the same. The parallel, neatly reflected in the word “graveyard,” reinforces the idea that the cemetery is a “home” for the dead. “Cemetery,” derived from Greek, means literally a “sleeping place.” As such, it should feel like home in its outward appearance and should be managed the same way the home’s yard is managed. Over the past century, as the aesthetic for yards in the rural Upland South gradually changed from “clean-swept” dooryards to mown grass lawns, cemeteries experienced the same change, although they generally lagged well behind the dooryards in the transition to the grassy aesthetic. Today’s pre-Decoration Day tasks typically include mowing the new grass. Vivian Cook of Bryson City said her father was one of the innovators who sowed grass seed in their family area of Lauada Cemetery. There were objections at first, she reported, but in time others concurred, and now the entire cemetery is a grassy lawn. Grass helps avert rutting and erosion during heavy rains, especially in a crowded cemetery like Lauada Cemetery, where slopes as well as the more horizontal ridge line are used for burials. Once people grew accustomed to seeing grass in yards and admired a wellkept lawn, they came to see grass in cemeteries as beautiful, too. But, as people noted, grass needs mowing and other care that exceeds the once- or twice-a-year maintenance

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Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

of cemeteries common in the past. So while grass has its virtues, it also has its attendant problems and responsibilities.

Mounding Once the cemetery is raked and cleaned, the next task is mounding, or at least that was once the case universally and is still the case for some in western North Carolina. The term “mounding” is not quite universal; some people in western North Carolina say “heaped” instead. The term and practice of mounding have received some attention from students of cemeteries and burial practices.9 The earth is mounded in a long, straight row running the length of the grave but usually stopping short of the headstone to prevent clay and mud from splashing, staining, or etching the headstone face. Mounds may be more than a foot across and several inches high. Some mounds are tightly packed (Plates 3, 13), others are loose dirt or sand, (Figures 2-4, 2-5); and still others are dressed in white gravel (Plates 1, 14; Figures 2-6, 2-7). The earth is usually raked from the immediate area of the grave, but some people import sand to facilitate drainage. Two interviewees cited favorite local sources for white sand in their conversations with us, and in 2004 William Crawford led us to a roadside bluff that has become a favored source, despite a sign forbidding it, for the white sand or gravel used in one cemetery in Jackson County’s Canada Township.10 In an earlier period, mounding was maintained indefinitely for all graves in the Upland South from the time of interment. People we interviewed said an important function of mounding is to compensate for the settlement of the earth after a burial. It is a fact that earth put back into a hole is much looser than the densely packed earth surrounding it and will settle over time. Another factor, a few interviewees observed, is that the pine caskets used for burials in the old days would eventually rot and collapse, and dirt would fill the empty space within the casket, causing further sinking at the grave’s surface. Settlement accounts for the need for periodic remounding in the years immediately after a burial, but the custom, when practiced, extends to all graves in the cemetery indefinitely. Mounding from previous years does dwindle, which might require some remounding, but the primary cause for remounding older graves is not settlement but erosion from rain. Thus, in addition to its practical justifications, mounding is practiced for reasons of custom and aesthetics — it seems proper, and it is beautiful and moving to people accustomed to it. In short, mounding is both a practical expedient at the time of burial and an annual ritual of renewed devotion. As a ritual, mounding invites our deeper contemplation. We can describe the practice at four levels of meaning, all of which are simultaneously operative. At the simplest level, mounding distinguishes the grave from the surrounding neutral ground of the cemetery.

Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

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figure 2-4 Loose, high mounding, Sawmill Hill Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 23, 2007

figure 2-5 Mounding with white sand, Woodring Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., May 22, 2007

This gives the grave an individual definition and identity, and it helps deter people from stepping on the grave, which is widely considered disrespectful. At a second level, since mounding traces the same path above the ground that the body and casket trace below, the mound comes to symbolize the body itself— a palpable representation of the unseen body below. During cemetery visits, we noticed that when local people talked about a person buried in a cemetery, they frequently pointed to the grave, as if gesturing to the person. Any grave may prompt that feeling, but mounding accentuates the sense of being in someone’s presence. When one surveys a mounded cemetery, it can feel as if one is surveying dozens of people stretched out on their beds. At a third level of symbolism, remounding each year amounts to a symbolic reburial. The hoe, rake, and trowel reposition the earth as it was at the original burial, and the last stage of remounding may require the person to adjust and pack the earth with bare hands. To the degree that the mound symbolizes the person buried below, remounding is an act of connecting with and touching the deceased once again. This ritual reenactment of the original burial provides a symbolic reconnection with the dead. Rituals may have multiple layers of associative meaning, and the meanings, being Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

figure 2-6 White gravel mounding and chapel, Jackson Owen Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., March 11, 2008

27

figure 2-7 Lectern and mounded, graveldressed graves before decoration, Sol’s Creek Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., May 22, 2007

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symbolic rather than rational, can even be contradictory. Thus mounding has a fourth ritual dimension that contrasts with its symbolism as a reenactment of the original burial. Spring is a time of planting, when vegetable gardens and certain field crops are typically mounded, and seeds are planted in a row along the top of the mound. The single-row arrangement of flowers on a mounded grave — the most popular style of cemetery decoration — recapitulates the single rows of plantings in the mounds of vegetable gardens (Figure 2-8). Thus, in one of those deep paradoxes that can occur in symbolic ritual behavior, remounding and decorating a grave in the spring is a reenactment of both burial and resurrection. Mounding may have some general British precedents and some dimmer African echoes as well, but as practiced in the Upland South, it seems to be not an Old World transplant but a major New World cultural invention. After flourishing in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, it has been in gradual retreat in western North Carolina and the Upland South in recent decades. People sometimes refer to this change as “flattening” or “leveling” the graves. The reason for the change is readily apparent to interviewees, who quickly point out that once grassy lawns became the model for cemeteries, mounding became an obstacle to the power mowers used to cut the grass. One article Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

on Decoration Day in far western Kentucky mentioned using sheep for cemetery mowing because they will trim the grass against the gravestones that the mower misses.11 On the contemporary scene, one is more likely to see weed-whackers than sheep. In any case, the gradual abandonment of mounding has been closely tied to the growing popularity of grass and power mowers. Today most cemeteries in the region, such as Lovedale Cemetery in Sylva, Tuckasegee Baptist Church Cemetery in Tuckasegee, Round Hill Cemetery in Swain County, and Panther Creek Cemetery in Graham County, are entirely grassy with level, unmounded graves. Some cemeteries, such as Sawmill Hill Cemetery near Lauada, Dicks Creek Cemetery near Sylva, Woodring Cemetery on Canada Road near Tuckasegee, and Double Springs Cemetery atop Cullowhee Mountain, have both level, grassy areas and mounded, grassless areas. At least one cemetery in the region, Mason Branch Cemetery in Alarka, has vacillated between cemetery styles in recent years. We heard that in the past it presented a stylistic mixture, with some gravesites mounded and clean swept and others flattened and grassy. In 2004, when we first visited the cemetery, it had been refashioned almost exclusively in the traditional clean-swept and mounded style (Plates 16, 25). Then in 2007 we discovered that it had been reworked again to present exclusively the level, grassy style (Plate 26, see Chapter 8). Graves, both mounded and flat, are often dressed with white sand (Figure 2-5) or Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

figure 2-8 Mounding and single-row decoration, Birdtown Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., June 1, 2007

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coarse white gravel (Plate 14; Figures 2-6, 2-7), alternatives that suppress grass, distinguish the gravesite from surrounding areas, and dramatically set off the colors of the flower decorations and green grass (Plate 14; Figures 2-7, 3-4). Some of these graves are also edged with cut stone, concrete blocks, bricks, natural stones, or wooden boards, a practice sometimes called “coping.” White sand or gravel seem to serve as a sort of “third way,” an alternative to both “mounded and clean swept” and “unmounded and grassy.” A number of cemeteries in the high country of Jackson County’s Canada Township and just across the county line in Transylvania County reveal a distinctive form of the white-gravel gravesite solution. Every grave is broadly mounded and dressed with white gravel, and the areas between the gravesites are grassy. Mathis, Broom, Sol’s Creek, Bryson, Harris, and Queen Cemeteries in Jackson County and Shoal Creek and Owen Cemeteries in Transylvania County employ this model throughout the cemetery, and a few other cemeteries combine it with other styles. This format, or style, permits mounding and grass to coexist. In one variation of the style, the space between the graves is filled with the same white gravel, leaving no grass at all. Large sections of Jackson Owen Cemetery and Vess Owen Cemetery reflect this practice, which creates an undulating sea of white gravel mounds decorated by flowers unpunctuated by grass (Figures 2-6, 9-1). The particular style of all these cemeteries is so distinctive that it clearly spread by local imitation. Perhaps one cemetery pioneered this innovative yet conservative style, and the others admired and copied it. We call it “the Balsam Highlands solution” to the great mounding versus grass dilemma. We do not know where this creative cultural solution originated or who invented it. This “third way” in the Balsam Highlands strongly suggests that the area is culturally a distinctive subregion of western North Carolina. Much of Shook Cemetery, farther down Canada Road toward Tuckasegee, also uses this mounding format. Farther westward, Woodring Cemetery off Canada Road and Double Springs Cemetery atop Cullowhee Mountain both have significant sections of mounded graves dressed with white sand (Figure 2-5). In conversation with Jimmy Luker at Sol’s Creek Baptist Church, we learned that Sol’s Creek was also once dressed with white sand but switched over to white gravel a number of years ago after the white sand source ran out.12 Gravel, he added, holds its form and position longer than sand and thus needs remounding less often. The frequent combination of white gravel or sand with edging excludes both grass and the mowers needed to cut it. Many people feel that neither people nor mowers should intrude into the sacred grave space. Borders and gravel help prevent such violations by defining the individual grave space as distinct and protected from the common ground of the cemetery. The style seems modern in its concern for distinguishing the individual from the larger community, yet, in a powerful bow toward tradition, the white gravel cre30

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ates a clean field, like the older mounding tradition of clean-swept graves. Thus, like so many innovations within an organically developing tradition, the use of white sand or gravel is at once tantalizingly traditional and modern. The North Shore cemeteries managed by the National Park Service usually present a clean-swept, mounded style (Plates 2, 3; Figures 2-9, 3-23), but a few cemeteries, such as Proctor Cemetery, are unmounded and grassy. Proctor was a modern town in the 1930s and early 1940s, and Proctor Cemetery may have shifted to the level, grassy style by the time of the North Shore removal. When the park staff began preparing gravesites for decorations (in the late 1970s for most North Shore cemeteries), they may have perpetuated the style they understood to be prevalent in each cemetery when decorations ceased (ca. 1943). There is another possible explanation. At least one cemetery on the North Carolina side of the park, Paynetown Cemetery (also known as Payne Cemetery), located close to Fontana Dam and accessible by car, seems to have had a more or less continuous history of decoration. The park’s archives include a lively correspondence with Green Lee Hill, who attended Paynetown Cemetery decorations in the 1950s and complained about the park’s road maintenance and other issues. His correspondence reveals an active, locally led decoration at Paynetown Cemetery even though the cemetery was already part of the park. The park assumed responsibility for maintaining Paynetown Cemetery in 1961. In Valley So Wild, Alberta and Carson Brewer testify that decorations continued at Paynetown Cemetery in the years just before their 1975 publication.13 These details suggest that park staff adopted the Paynetown model of cemetery preparation years before they assumed the task of cleaning and preparing the cemeteries accessible only by boat beginning in 1978. Thus the older mounded and clean-swept style in Paynetown Cemetery may have influenced — in the absence of clear directives for another maintenance style, such as in Proctor Cemetery — the park staff ’s management policy regarding the other North Shore cemeteries (Figures 3-23, 3-24). Other parts of the park seem to have different policies — or different traditions. In the Cataloochee area, at the park’s eastern end, cemeteries are maintained in the unmounded, grassy style, and online photos of Cades Cove cemeteries, on the Tennessee side of the park, also reflect unmounded and grassy maintenance. In this respect it is useful to think of the park’s practices as “tradition” as well as “policy.” The park may be part of a large federal agency, but the staff members who clean and prepare the cemeteries are nearly all local people who bring a local understanding and sensibility to issues such as cemetery maintenance. They also learn procedures from team leaders and senior staff members of their work crews and over the years pass along the information as a form of occupational Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

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figure 2-9 Single-row decoration, mounding, and fencing, Orr Cemetery, Gsmnp, June 3, 2007

folklore. It is illuminating to interpret park-staff behavior in terms of tradition, and to see the park, not as an alien force within the region, but as an active cultural ingredient and contributing partner in the region’s evolving traditional culture.

Flowers Flowers are the essential decoration for Decoration Day and the most widespread and characteristic decoration for gravesites on any occasion. Fresh-cut flowers have always held a symbolic place of honor. People who grew up on the North Shore recall picking roses and other flowers, including wildflowers, to bring to cemeteries for Decoration Day.14 In fact, the link between roses and Decoration Day is so powerful that some say roses were planted in dooryards and along fences specifically with their Decoration Day function in mind. But people name many different flowers that were used for the holiday. The only requisite seems to have been that they bloomed at the time the decoration occurred. Muriel Sheppard, in her 1935 book Cabins in the Laurel, offers a similar account regarding a decoration in Mitchell County, North Carolina.15 The practice of laying fresh flowers on graves continues to this day. We visited Lower Coward Cemetery in Jackson County’s Caney Fork Township a day or two after a decora32

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tion in 2004 and documented fresh flowers on many of the graves. At other cemeteries, we would from time to time find remnant stems of roses or other flowers on graves. The North Shore decorations we attended included occasional strewing of fresh flowers, despite the relative inconvenience of getting fresh flowers across Fontana Lake and up the long paths. Everyone we interviewed mentioned fresh flowers, and a few asserted that in the early days people used nothing but fresh flowers. It is clear from interviews and other sources, however, that artificial flowers have complemented fresh flowers throughout the twentieth century and perhaps during the last half of the nineteenth century as well. Though a sense of propriety and authenticity may lead people to give priority to fresh flowers in their descriptions, artificial flowers of one kind or another have long been preferred in practice as a more convenient and longer-lasting offering. Interviewees born in western North Carolina before World War II remember fondly the homemade crepe paper flowers that families once prepared for Decoration Day.16 Vivian Cook says her mother used to begin making crepe paper flowers during the winter, and many people remember family flower-making efforts beginning several weeks before Decoration Day. Most flower makers were women and girls, but some boys, such as Max Monteith, now of Cherokee but originally from Forney Creek on the North Shore, were also drawn into flower making, perhaps by older sisters. Crepe paper flowers began as crepe paper sheets of various colors bought from local vendors. In many households the mother created patterns on which the final flowers were modeled. The flowers were hand cut based on the household patterns, then folded or bunched to resemble the species desired. Several people described using their thumb to stretch crepe paper so that it resembled a petal. The paper flowers were affixed to wires or sticks that served as artificial stalks, then dipped in paraffin to make them rain resistant. Finally the flowers were thrust into the soft dirt of the mounds, as if growing from the grave, or otherwise distributed around the gravesite. To add to the natural appearance, some were laid against or close to the ground, while others stood erect a distance above the ground (Figures 2-10, 2-11). Some artificial flowers were fashioned using other available materials, such as tin cans. Helen Vance described cutting tin cans into long spiral ribbons to be used as decorative stems for paper sweet peas. Making crepe paper flowers for cemetery decoration is a long-standing tradition in the South. Old photos owned by Verna Kirkland reveal paper flowers at Brendle Hill Cemetery decorations in the early 1940s (Figure 2-10), and we copied an old photo from Christine Cole Proctor showing paper flowers in Lauada Cemetery around 1960, when the cemetery was still clean swept and mounded (Figure 2-11). She also has a photo from the early twentieth century, judging from the clothing, that seems to show paper flowers in a North Shore cemetery. These photographs are important documentation of crepe Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

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figure 2-10 Photo of blanket decoration with crepe paper flowers on a bed of ferns, Brendle Hill Cemetery, early 1940s, from Verna Kirkland, Swain Co., N.C., July 31, 2004

paper flowers in the older tradition. Interviews we conducted in west Alabama and the Arkansas Ozarks about Decoration Day revealed the identical paper-flower tradition there, and a published essay based on a north Alabama community describes the same custom in detail.17 Since it seems to exist in the same Upland South range of distribution as Decoration Day itself, the custom probably has nineteenth-century origins and has been associated with Decoration Day ever since. Homemade flowers may have been used for weddings or other festive occasions, but perhaps because our interviews focused on Decoration Day, we did not learn about other possible uses. Patricia Rickels indicates brides in Acadian Louisiana used them before World War II,18 and de Caro and Jordan describe crepe paper flowers made for All Saints’ Day in south Louisiana.19 The southern Louisiana practice of decorating graves on All Saints’ Day (November 1) is intriguing because it seems to combines elements of the Mexican Day of the Dead and the southern Decoration Day. In addition to including a tradition of crepe paper flowers, like the Upland South, it also involves cleaning and renovating cemeteries. In southern Louisiana this would include whitewashing wooden-cross grave markers and grave vaults in low-lying areas. 34

Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

figure 2-11 Photo of decoration with paper flowers in clean-swept and mounded Lauada Cemetery, ca. 1960, from Christine Proctor, Swain Co., N.C., 2008

In 1938 photographer Russell Lee, while working for the Farm Security Administration, made a series of about thirty black-and-white photographs of All Saints Day observances in New Roads, Louisiana, near the Mississippi River northwest of Baton Rouge. Most of the series focuses on African Americans cleaning, whitewashing, and decorating graves with paper flowers in a Catholic cemetery. The graves are either mounded in the old southern style or horizontal vaults and crypts. The paper flowers take many forms, but wreaths seem to have been especially popular. Contemporary artists, such as Essie Mae Arsan of Thibodaux, Lafourche Parish, southwest of New Orleans, have maintained the same paper-flower tradition.20 Older interviewees in western North Carolina all expressed a deep fondness for crepe paper flowers. In many ways the flowers were at the aesthetic heart of their memories of Decoration Day before World War II. Many said they still could make them, and one or two had actually tried it again, just to see if they remembered how. The “Decoration Day in the Mountains” exhibit at Western Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Center, which opened in April 2009, included crepe paper flowers made especially for the exhibit by Helen Vance and Verna Kirkland. Yet crepe paper flowers seem to have passed rapidly from the scene in the 1950s and 1960s, eclipsed by the new store-bought artificial flowers, or “plastic flowers,” as some interviewees called them. The “plastic flowers” were in turn eclipsed by newer styles of artificial-fabric flowers a generation later. Today one encounters mostly fabric flowers, a few plastic flowers, and some fresh-cut flowers on western Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

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North Carolina graves. There may be more fresh flowers than we realize, because they perish quickly. But the crepe paper flowers that so many remember so fondly have vanished from the contemporary cemetery landscape, living on only in the recollections and imaginations of the older generation.

Flower Arrangements There are many ways to arrange flowers, but certain patterns recur so frequently as to warrant the term “traditional.” Perhaps the most widespread traditional alignment is the single-row decoration (Figures 2-8, 2-9), which runs the length of the mounding or down the center of a flat grave from headstone to footstone. The flowers or posies along the long row may all be the same color or mixed. Alternatively, flowers may be gathered into a few large bouquets and placed from the head to the foot of the grave. In another traditional configuration, flowers, arranged in a pattern like a blanket on a bed, cover the entire grave. A general blanket decoration often appears on new burials, perhaps using flowers brought for the funeral. Some families maintain blanket-decoration patterns annually on gravesites (Plate 15). Verna Kirkland showed us a photo from the early 1940s in Brendle Hill Cemetery of her father’s grave covered by a blanket decoration of pink and white homemade crepe paper carnations (Figure 2-10). Though it is a black-and-white photograph, Verna confirmed the colors of the original decoration. The flowers are arranged on a bed of fern fronds in a “checkerboard” of neat rows, alternating between pink and white flowers horizontally and vertically, and pink and white rows diagonally. There is a white “tail” flanked with pink at the bottom. On our visit in 2004 to Mason Branch Cemetery, a few miles away, we saw another grave with the identical pattern in red and white (Plate 16). Flowers are sometimes arranged in wreaths, which can be laid on a grave, secured to a headstone, or mounted on wire stands. Wreaths are typically round but may be other shapes. Large freestanding flower wreaths are a regular feature of new burials, though wreaths need not be limited to flowers. Evergreen wreaths are not uncommon, and seasonal decorations at gravesites may include holly wreaths in the winter. The flat and grassy cemetery style has generated new methods and styles of decoration designed to assist mowers — or, looked at another way, to avoid the removal of decorations that often precedes mowing or the damage inflicted by mowers driven too close. In the most popular modern style, called saddle decoration, flower arrangements are placed atop the larger headstones and usually secured with a wire “saddle” straddling the stone (Figure 2-12). Sometimes a pair of urns, placed to the sides of the headstone and filled with flowers, accompanies the saddle decoration. Typically they rest on a stone base,

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wider than the headstone. In double headstone arrangements for husband and wife, there may be a single urn between the two headstones, and, optionally, two additional urns on the outside flanks. At some gravesites metal pipes are set into the ground to hold flowers. In some cemeteries (Figure 3-16), families use pipe flower-holders to reserve space for future burials. Finally, many private, commercial cemeteries and a few church cemeteries require small flat headstones rather than vertical stones. This actually resembles an older style of large grave covers, still visible in many cemeteries and still generating new examples (see Chapter 3). The older-style, large grave covers lie flat on the ground, covering essentially the space of the actual grave beneath the ground, and often are inscribed like vertical headstones. The new flat headstones, which are much smaller, have limited space for inscriptions and do not lend themselves to decoration in a graceful way. People are forced to lay decorations on the stone, insert them in the ground, or insert them in a pipe flush to the ground nearby. The small flat headstones make it much harder, especially in a large cemetery, to find a particular grave. The style perhaps costs less than larger vertical headstones, but its principal objective seems to be the creation of a large, perfectly flat field, uninterrupted by any object, solely for ease in mowing.

Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

figure 2-12 Saddle decorations on headstones, Herron Family Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 27, 2007

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Other Decorations and Decoration Customs Other decorations adorn the graves of the region. Potted or planted perennial flowers are common, surviving from year to year where even the hardiest artificial flowers are whisked off to make way for the following year’s decoration. Ferns, cut and draped over the grave, are also a well-known ornament. And one occasionally finds such crafted items as crocheted crosses or angels, butterflies painted on feathers, woven vine crosses, or other ornaments that might be regarded as perennial, so long as they last. Occasionally someone leaves a round glass object or stone on a grave as a personal token (Figure 2-13), as if to say to the deceased, “I’ve been here to visit you.” There is also a widespread idea that a stone on the grave keeps the spirit from escaping (see Chapter 7). We encountered a couple of cases, such as in Barkers Creek Cemetery in Swain County, of shells or small glass beads being placed on graves as mysterious adornments or tokens (Plate 20). These practices have been found throughout the South. A fine example of shells appears in a 1944 Joseph A. Horne photo of Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, D.C.,21 and we have seen river-mussel shells, seashells, or glass beads in cemeteries in North Carolina, Kentucky, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina.22 Some scholars have suggested an African origin for the shells and glass beads, but Jordan shows precedents in Africa, Europe, and Amerindian America.23 Whatever the origin, the practice long ago became regionally southern rather than ethnically distinct. There is also an African American tradition of broken glass or broken pottery on graves, which seems to be of African origin, but examples of this tradition have not turned up in our visits to western North Carolina cemeteries.24 A popular custom for contemporary graves is to array a gravesite with a variety of ornaments (concrete angels, leprechauns, deer, birds, bird nesting boxes, and other items large and small), personal objects (toys of a deceased child, tools from an adult’s work or hobbies, sports paraphernalia, cup and saucer), and personal messages and tributes from family and loved ones. Such items are often numerous and create a form of decorating gravesites we have named the assemblage style (Figures 2-14, 2-15). It seems to have spread through the Upland South in the last fifty years and is now common in western North Carolina. The impulse to decorate is clearly a broad impulse, only part of which finds expression in Decoration Day activities. People we interviewed often made the point that decorating graves is a communal responsibility, which is expressed in a powerful and oft-cited social rule: No grave should go undecorated (see Chapters 8 and 9). One should not decorate the graves of one’s family while leaving other graves undecorated. The dictum envisions a cemetery in which every grave is shown respect by being properly decorated. People pointed out that though deco-

38

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ration is a family responsibility, we cannot always know why a family is kept away from a decoration. When the family does not or cannot fulfill their responsibility, it becomes the community’s duty. The ideal of community burns brightly in this vision of cemeteries in which every grave is decorated. It is easy enough to find cases in the region where the ideal of decorating every grave is not achieved. On the other hand, celebrants at contemporary North Shore decorations make a point of fulfilling this communal challenge. They always place flowers on each grave, not just those of family members, before the formal proceedings of the decoration event begin. Other cemeteries throughout the region also actively maintain the communal ideal (see Chapter 8). William Crawford pointed out to us the only two graves of African Americans in Jackson County’s Shook Cemetery. The family had moved away from the region decades ago, and no one from the family had been able to tend or decorate the graves for a generation or more. Yet they were neatly mounded and attractively decorated, just like their neighbors.

figure 2-13 Stone tokens on headstone, Paynetown Cemetery, Gsmnp, June 3, 2007

Decoration Day as a Religious and Social Event Decoration Day in western North Carolina is a religious event. Of course, it also has many other aspects, as most religious events do. But it traditionally takes place on a Sunday.

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figure 2-14 Assemblage style, New Hope Baptist Church Cemetery, Graham Co., N.C., May 31, 2007

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Some North Shore residents in the old days convened at the cemetery after church and spent most of the day there. For others, Decoration Day replaced indoor church services. At the cemetery, the event might include preaching by one or several preachers invited for the occasion. Many people we interviewed also mentioned gospel singing, with or without instrumental accompaniment, as a vital and cherished component of decorations. Sheppard’s Mitchell County account includes unaccompanied hymn singing and some emotionally powerful testimony.25 Because decorations past and present vary, any one of the elements listed above may occur at one decoration but not at another. Thus the 2007 Brendle Hill decoration (see Chapter 1) took place on Sunday and included extensive gospel hymn singing, a full sermon, prayers, and announcements. It was held in loose coordination with a regular service at a church some distance away, and people were invited to adjourn to the church immediately after the decoration service. There was no dinner on the ground at the cemetery, and we were not invited to a dinner afterward. We were invited, however, to a midday dinner at a family reunion on Saturday that was scheduled to coincide with the decoration (see Chapter 1). On the other hand, the 2007 Watkins Cemetery decoration dovetailed with no church service, had both gospel hymn singing and preaching, and included dinner on the ground. Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

North Shore decorations in recent decades have developed a more consistent program format, including gospel singing, announcements, a religious message, a prayer, an offering, grace before the meal, and dinner on the ground (see Chapter 5). Despite being managed by the same people and following the same broad format, the North Shore decorations show the classic knack for absorbing new impulses and accommodating whatever local circumstances might arise. For example, the 2004 Proctor Cemetery decoration was followed by baptism of two teenage sisters at a traditional baptizing site in Hazel Creek (see Chapter 1). The event was both special in the annals of local decorations, and at the same time a reaffirmation of the religious core of the decoration experience. Older interviewees, when asked about the importance of various holidays in their youth, all ranked Decoration Day as one of the most important. No one wants to compare the relative significance of holidays, but it became clear that, to a young person in the 1930s and early 1940s, Decoration Day often seemed more exciting and more important than the other spring religious holiday, Easter. One telling detail is that girls and young women were more likely to get a new dress on Decoration Day than on Easter. Decoration Day was the spring holiday that offered social engagement with the widest cross-section of relatives, friends, and new acquaintances in the community. Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

figure 2-15 Assemblage style, infant graves in E. D. Owen Cemetery, Transylvania Co., N.C., July 4, 2008

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To be sure, not all social engagement is healthful. Max Monteith remembers a decoration that was disrupted by a dangerous fight. But nearly everyone of the older generation whom we interviewed associated Decoration Day with “community,” and current decorations are no less infused with the spirit of community. Decoration Day is the annual gathering that has always brought together the widest assortment of people with family ties or community relations. Although most decorations have formal programs or services, it was the informal social aspects that interviewees repeatedly recalled, such as the opportunity to meet and converse with old friends, share dinner on the ground with far-flung relations, and make new acquaintances from the wider community. For teenagers and young adults, it has always been an opportunity to meet and socialize with other young people and scout for marriage prospects.26 As for children, they play happily, as they always do at outdoor gatherings.

Dinner on the Ground A key element in the larger format of Decoration Day is “dinner on the ground.” Though the much-beloved phrase is sentimentally associated with decorations, in fact some decorations have no communal dinner on the ground. Instead, before or after the cemetery ceremony, people convene for dinner at a nearby home. Even such dinners in homes may be public, in the sense that many people beyond the immediate family would be welcomed. The fare is always bounteous and delicious — at least in the remembering. The Decoration Day season is early in the year for most fresh vegetables, so the vegetable fare in the old days was likely to be green beans and pinto beans canned or dried from last year. Chickens were slaughtered, and people recall both fried chicken and chicken and dumplings. Carrie Laney of Graham County’s Upper Tuskegee neighborhood, a regular participant in North Shore decorations, is admired for her chicken and dumplings contributions. Transporting food on the North Shore is a complicated undertaking, but women still bring large, heavy pots and deep dishes of cooked food to every decoration. At dinner on the ground on the North Shore, the food is arrayed on long outdoor tables (Plate 6; Figures 5-5, 5-6), but it is not an anonymous buffet. Women from each family sit or stand by their offerings, describe them to others, and invite people to try them. The food is a means of extending family hospitality to others, whether kin, friends, acquaintances, or strangers. We have been the happy beneficiaries of this hospitality at several decorations. Sheppard describes the same social arrangement in a dinner outside a church in Mitchell County, North Carolina, during a singing convention.27 It provides a perfect behavioral paradigm for Appalachian hospitality. 42

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For dessert, several people mentioned not only ordinary pies and cakes but also “stack cake,” a multi-layered molasses-and-spice cake resembling gingerbread. The filling between the layers is composed of cooked dried apples or peaches. Stack cake requires elaborate preparation and thus is associated with public events of high ceremony, such as Decoration Day, when a cook’s skills are on view to the wider community. Zora Jenkins Walker, who lives near Bryson City, North Carolina, gave us a recipe for stack cake, which, along with similar recipes in print, suggests a range across the Upland South.28 Sheppard mentions “stacked pies” in her account from Mitchell County, but it is perhaps a garbled reference to stack cake, which seems to be pictured in the accompanying photographs.29 We should note the definition and etymology of “dinner on the ground(s)” provided by the Dictionary of American Regional English30: “An outdoor social gathering at which food is shared, usually in connection with a church meeting or all-day singing; the meal itself. [Probably originally grounds the open area around a building, and ground by folketymology].” The definition seems generally appropriate, and the citations are entirely southern dating from 1909 to 1982. The etymology the editors provide in brackets is questionable, however. We need to remember that most Appalachian cemeteries are community cemeteries with no affiliated church. It seems unlikely that the root sense of “dinner on the ground” is the “church grounds,” that is, the churchyard, even though the term is often used for outdoor dinners served at churches after services, during all-day sings, or in other essentially religious circumstances. Our interviewees consistently asserted that “dinner on the ground,” not “dinner on the grounds,” is the correct phrase. It seems probable that the original sense of the phrase was “a dinner spread on the ground like a picnic” — “dinner” denoting both a midday meal and an important social meal, and “on the ground” expressing a sort of felicitous paradox regarding the outdoor communion involved. From that root sense, once people began building tables and benches for the dinner on the ground, it was natural — with folk etymology working in the opposite direction — to begin thinking of the phrase as representing the grounds of a church or cemetery. Hence the “s” is sometimes added, often by more educated people, who have their own folk etymology. Dinner on the ground is obviously a social experience, but it is also part of the religious experience of a decoration. Furthermore, in the case of Decoration Day services in cemeteries, the “ground” on which the dinner is held is not simply outdoor “grounds” but the very ground where ancestors are buried. So at the deepest symbolic level, dinner on the ground during a cemetery decoration is a graveyard communion. In Chapter 9 we will return to some thoughts about the old Protestant antiestablishment association of religious fellowship with the outdoors, the woods, and the woods-surrounded graveyard. The phrase “dinner on the ground” appears in early periodicals, usually in the singular Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

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but occasionally in the plural form, revealing the same Upland South range as the southern Decoration Day. The following examples predate the Dictionary of American Regional English citations: The brethren of the General Meeting of the Friendship Association [of the Georgia Baptist Convention] met in Smithville [Lee County in south Georgia]. . . . The preaching hour having arrived, Eld. A. B. Campbell occupied the stand. . . . After a sumptuous dinner on the ground, met again at 3 o’clock, to hear an essay from Bro. W. Wells. (Christian Index, June 23, 1887) Calvin Church [South Carolina]. — A commission was appointed by Bethel Presbytery to visit Calvin Church in Lancaster county, and install Rev. Chalmers Moore. . . . After a short intermission, with dinner on the grounds, the congregation again assembled and the installation proper then took place. (Christian Observer, June 24, 1896) [We went] to Carolina Church, in Neshoba county [Mississippi]. . . . Being in the country, we had two day-services, 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., and dinner on the grounds, which was nice and abundant. (Christian Observer, Jul. 28, 1897) From the Mountains of Kentucky. Cope’s Branch, Breathitt County, ky. — I preached at 10 a.m., and at 2 p.m. Some of the people had brought lunch and had their dinner on the ground. — Edw. O. Guerrant. (Christian Observer, Aug. 4, 1897) These examples from Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Kentucky, together with the examples from Titus County, Texas, and Greene County, Arkansas, cited in Chapter 6, clearly show that the locution “dinner on the ground,” like the phrase “Decoration Day,” was already pan-southern by the later nineteenth century. The Texas and Arkansas examples both use the locution “dinner . . . spread on the ground,” which clearly indicates the literal, picnic-like root meaning “on the ground,” not the mere location on the grounds of a church. Victoria Casey McDonald’s book The African Americans of Jackson County cites the Jackson County, North Carolina, custom of holding a “Feast in the Wilderness” on fifth Sundays.31 The event drew members of several African American churches for an interdenominational gathering. Rotating from one church to another on every month with a fifth Sunday, it featured all-day religious services and dinner on the ground. Because it was a special event that drew attendance from several churches, it also attracted local politicians. The phrase “Feast in the Wilderness” is from the King James Bible: “And afterward Moses

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and Aaron went in, and told Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness” (Exodus 5:1). “Feast” translates the Hebrew word hag (cf. Arabic hajj), a pilgrimage undertaken to perform a ritual. “Feast in the wilderness” has deep associations in the Protestant world and additional associations in African American communities, which have long felt a special identification with Moses. It shares with “dinner on the ground” and cemetery decorations a devotion to religious experiences shared in the great outdoors (see Chapter 9).

Multiple Decorations Many former North Shore residents recall attending more than one decoration each year. Some managed, and still manage, to attend more than one on the same day — a social custom reproduced in contemporary North Shore decorations, some of which move from one cemetery to another on the same day. In addition, different cemeteries in an area would have decorations on different Sundays in May and June, and people enjoyed having the opportunity to repeat the decoration experience with different people and in other cemeteries. The contemporary North Shore decorations have the same social consequences. Though most people nowadays attend North Shore decorations only at cemeteries where family members are buried, some with family members in more than one cemetery have a formal reason to attend multiple decorations. Decoration organizers, genealogists, or students of family and local history may attend, even if they have no family members buried in that particular cemetery. Others attend North Shore decorations purely because they enjoy the events as spiritual, social, and outdoor experiences. Thus any given North Shore decoration may include people with no actual relatives buried in the cemetery being visited. It is occasionally suggested that holding decorations on different dates for different cemeteries is evidence of confusion or error, as if people mixed up the original dates. But it is clear that different decoration dates in the same region are a matter of careful calculation. Dates are selected for the greatest convenience to the celebrants, which includes avoiding conflicts with the decoration dates of other nearby cemeteries. The experience of multiple decorations is, in a sense, a social celebration of the principle of diversity and organic connection within the community. Multiple and overlapping decorations teach that life’s networks are complex and disparate, yet interwoven. And the loose and decentralized structure of decoration events reflects the older Protestant (in this region largely Baptist) emphasis on consensual community decision-making — not external authority — as the basis for important social choices. The cemetery itself, upon close inspection, reveals the same principles. Burials

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in community cemeteries reveal patterns of growth from a nuclear family to a broader community, with marriage and neighborly sharing extending the network and making it more complex. When one visits a neighboring cemetery, one sees some of the same names, but also some new ones, revealing the overlapping and fluid links that connect family to community to region. Thus the burials in the cemetery and the participants on Decoration Day are comparable cross sections of the fabric of the region’s dispersed rural communities.

Cemetery Decorations, Family Reunions, Church Homecomings Talking with people in western North Carolina about activities associated with heritage, one hears many references to decorations — but also to family reunions and church homecomings. The three activities have much in common, since they are all occasions when people return to an ancestral home and visit family gravesites. Consequently, they sometimes overlap and compete for people’s time and energy. Family reunions are a widespread phenomenon throughout the Appalachians, and indeed throughout the United States. They are much more prevalent today than a century ago, but western North Carolina genealogist Deanne Gibson-Roles says that certain family reunions in the region date to the late nineteenth century. Reunions bring far-flung family members together, typically near an ancestral home. They are sometimes held in the homes of host family members, but more often in local or state parks, campgrounds, or lodges. They may include attending religious services, and it is only natural that they should include visits, whether individually or in larger groups, to cemeteries where family members are buried. These visitors are likely to bring decorations, and the terms “decorate” and “decoration” are used for such situations just as they would be for a formal Decoration Day. Karen and I attended two family reunions in 2007 that seemed to be timed in connection with certain decorations — the Laney Family Reunion on May 27 at Deep Creek Campground in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which coincided with the Lauada Cemetery and Watkins Cemetery decorations, and the Shepherd Family Reunion at Alarka Community Center on June 9, the day before the Brendle Hill decoration. As the account of the Shepherd Family Reunion indicates (see Chapter 1), many reunion participants also attended the decoration the next day, and Verna Kirkland explicitly associated the reunion with the decoration, as if it were a facet of a larger Decoration Day complex of events. Homecomings may sound like a synonym for reunions, but the term in western North Carolina and throughout the Upland South usually describes the church-sponsored 46

Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

homecomings that were a growing phenomenon throughout the region in the twentieth century. Church homecomings emphasize affiliation to a particular church and focus attention on the founding and history of the church. They may include organized visits to church cemeteries for decorations but only as one facet of the event. Furthermore, families returning to an ancestral area for a church homecoming may visit and decorate graves of family members in cemeteries unconnected to the homecoming. This chapter began with the definition of “decoration” (or “decoration day”) in the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, so it is useful to compare how the same work defines “homecoming”: “An annual event when former members of a church gather for a reunion, including special worship services, and to decorate the graves of a church’s cemetery. The term has largely replaced decoration day.” The definition is followed by citations from oral interviews in 1969 and 1974 relating to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.32 What is notable is the definition’s assertion that the term “homecoming” has “largely replaced” the term “Decoration Day.” Our 2004 interviews and 2007 fieldwork give no indication of such a replacement. In fact, we heard “decoration” often and “homecoming” infrequently. But there are trends and fluctuations in word usage; perhaps in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the period this dictionary definition reflects, there seemed to be such a trend. It has also seemed, based on a limited sampling of memoranda and correspondence from Great Smoky Mountains National Park, that “homecoming” became the word of choice for park staff when talking about decorations in the 1950s and 1960s. If such a trend existed, the North Shore Revolution of 1978 (see Chapter 5) and following years may have helped reverse it, encouraging “decoration day” to thrive in both local and park parlance into the twenty-first century. Curiously, Carl Rohr’s dissertation, “The Road to Nowhere and the Politics of Wilderness Legislation,” selects the word “reunions” as the preferred word to describe decorations.33 It almost seems as if “decoration,” the preferred term of the people who do it, is being avoided by others telling their story. In considering the overlapping cultural boundaries of decorations, family reunions, and church homecomings, it is useful to bear in mind that most churches in western North Carolina do not have cemeteries and that most cemeteries are not connected with churches. Of course, there are many churches with adjoining cemeteries, an image many Americans associate with rural America, but they do not predominate. Where this does occur, often the cemetery came first and church founders were later attracted to the cemetery’s holy ground. Thus an inclination among churches to promote “homecomings” that also involve cemetery decoration should not be mistaken for a culture-wide trend. In theory, reunions and homecomings could be organized to coincide with the Decoration Day schedule, and, in fact, Decoration Day dates sometimes serve as anchors for Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

47

figure 2-16 Sign, Balsam Grove Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., May 19, 2007

corollary activities. A sign at the entrance to Balsam Grove Cemetery on Caney Fork illustrates such a confluence: “Homecoming will be the first Sunday in Sept. each year. Flowers will be left on graves until April 1st” (Figure 2-16). This sign, unusual in a region where most cemeteries lack instructional signage, is also notable for naming the first Sunday in September as the “homecoming” date. There are quite a few late-summer decorations in the Jackson County highlands, but homecomings are also often scheduled for late summer and fall. This church homecoming may have melded with Decoration Day, refocusing the event to include the church. Clearly some reunions and homecomings are timed to create “synergy” with Decoration Day. But often family members are buried in more than one cemetery, and a church may have no major relationship to any cemetery. These factors inevitably encourage competition, so that today there is a greater likelihood that a reunion or homecoming will have its own date. Since most families who live far away cannot come to every such event, they are forced to choose. Thus decorations continue in western North Carolina, but sometimes under other names and with a kind of diffusion of the annual focus and energy once reserved for each cemetery’s Decoration Day.

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Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

chapter three

Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

To understand cemetery decoration more deeply, one must reflect on the features of the cemeteries where decorations take place. Many people think of the art in a cemetery as limited to the stone-carving or decorations. But the cemetery itself is an artistic creation, designed and shaped to show respect for those buried there and thus symbolically expressing a worldview and human values. To make an analogy from the world of computers, if the decorations are a program, the cemetery itself is the operating system, providing the aesthetic matrix for the decorations and other artful embellishments. This chapter provides a broad profile of cemetery features in western North Carolina.

Cemetery Categories Cemeteries in western North Carolina may be described using the following categories, though the boundaries between these categories are blurred and permeable. Cemeteries, as dynamic cultural creations, may evolve from one category to another over time, and many cemetery features occur in most or all categories. The categories adopted here may be compared to categories described in Crissman’s Death and Dying in Central Appalachia, which provides a useful resource.1 Crissman, however, does not adequately delineate the “community cemetery” category that is central to understanding cemeteries in western North Carolina. He merges or blurs community cemeteries with family cemeteries, church cemeteries, and civic cemeteries, and he uses the term “perpetual care cemeteries” for the category that is here called “private cemeteries.” His field observations are drawn primarily from western Virginia and eastern Kentucky. Family cemeteries. Some cemeteries in the region contain only deceased members of the family living on that property. These family cemeteries are sometimes located in the developed area of a farm, near the family home, but often they are situated on a ridge

figure 3-1 Carringer-Garrison Family Cemetery, Graham Co., N.C., May 31, 2007

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well away from the homesite. There is some historical evidence of individual burials, especially but not exclusively infant deaths, in the dooryards of rural homes in the region. Cherokees in western North Carolina often bury family members on their own property, and today this is thought to be characteristic of Cherokee culture. Interviews with several Cherokee cultural experts verified that many Cherokees in the region still have a traditional inclination toward home burials. But most Cherokees and non-Cherokees alike would be surprised to learn how widespread home burial has been in the non-Cherokee community of the region from pioneer days to the present. Proctor Cemetery on Hazel Creek in the national park is a large community cemetery that began during the Civil War with the burial of Moses Proctor, an early settler in the area. The body was reputedly buried at the doorway of the original cabin on his property. Thus Proctor Cemetery began as a family graveyard on family property, then evolved into a more broadly based community cemetery. It is a model for an evolutionary process repeated hundreds of times in the region and countless times throughout the Upland South. In our fieldwork we encountered a number of family cemeteries other than in the Cherokee community. The Carringer-Garrison Family Cemetery (we supplied the name based on the names on the headstones) on a country road near Stecoah in Graham County has three beautifully maintained recent burials (Figure 3-1). The Sutton-Caldwell Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

Family Cemetery (this name is on a sign) near Dellwood in Haywood County sits on a small ridge overlooking what once must have been a farm but is now becoming a housing development (Figure 3-2). Sutton-Caldwell has a 2007 burial, demonstrating the family’s retention of cemetery rights and access despite burgeoning development nearby. It is interesting to note that the Carringer-Garrison Family Cemetery not only has recent burials but that the cemetery itself was only recently established. Thus the impulse to create family cemeteries continues in the region today. Many family cemeteries contain multiple family names, either because of marriages, which gradually extend the family network, or because a family shares cemetery space with neighbors. In these ways family cemeteries can grow organically into community cemeteries. Community cemeteries. The rural landscape of the region is dotted with hundreds of community cemeteries. The term “community cemetery” is widely used in the region, and a few cemeteries, such as Mason Branch Community Cemetery in Alarka, incorporate the term in their formal names. A typical community cemetery may have from 25 to 250 graves, and most community cemeteries evolved from family cemeteries. Typically, the names on headstones correspond to the names of families in the immediate community, so a handful of names will predominate. Sometimes families set aside smaller areas Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

figure 3-2 Sutton-Caldwell Family Cemetery, Haywood Co., N.C., May 30, 2007

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within a community cemetery, but over time these designated plots tend to fill up, and the family is forced to use another area within the cemetery. Maintaining a community cemetery is the responsibility of the families whose kin are buried there. Sometimes one encounters evidence of families tending only their own graves and the immediate surrounding areas, but many people evoke the communal ideal for community cemeteries: One should take responsibility not only for one’s family plots but for neighboring plots as well. In effect, the whole cemetery is the whole community’s responsibility. In practice, this communal ideal can be seen at work frequently, but not consistently. Many community cemeteries have cultural mechanisms for solving the problem of cleaning and maintaining the cemetery. Cemetery preparations for Decoration Day are the most important example. Some communities have created formal cemetery associations to make sure the community cemetery is properly maintained. Volunteer labor still provides much of the maintenance — Birdtown Cemetery in the Cherokee Indian community has a Free Labor Group that cleans, clears, mows, and digs graves. But sometimes cemetery associations hold fundraisers and solicit donations, then hire laborers with the proceeds. Workers are mostly frequently hired to mow the cemetery, but sometimes someone must be hired to remove a dying or fallen tree, build a retaining wall to prevent erosion, repair or maintain a cemetery outbuilding or road, or repair the roof of an outdoor pavilion. Cemetery associations can also referee vexing issues concerning the cemetery’s burial and maintenance procedures. May one select a burial site oneself, or must one consult the association? Is it allowable to plant a tree by a loved one’s grave? Can one reserve plots for burials in the indeterminate future? Cemetery associations in much of the Upland South address such issues, and one often encounters signs near the entrance of cemeteries in states such as Alabama or Arkansas where association officers have posted rules and procedures. Fewer community cemeteries in western North Carolina have formal cemetery associations. Signs listing rules and procedures are uncommon, compared with other regions, and it is clear that decision making is generally loose, indirect, and consensual. Many community cemeteries in western North Carolina have no formal organization at all. Such cemeteries are often well maintained through collective commitment, despite the lack of formal governing structures. Sometimes, however, the collective commitment wanes, and cemeteries to fall into disrepair. We have observed older cemeteries where periods of solicitous tending have alternated historically with periods of a lack of focus, care, and responsibility. While showing us Shook Cemetery in Jackson County’s Canada Township, William Crawford observed that such cemeteries are often redeemed and rejuvenated by the efforts of one or two people or a family, who take on the community 52

Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

responsibility as a personal mission and in the process reignite the community’s sense of pride in and commitment to their cemetery. Chapter 8 portrays some of these unsung community heroes. The community cemetery is the most widespread and culturally the most representative form of cemetery in western North Carolina. Many church cemeteries, as we shall see presently, are community cemeteries in disguise, and some civic cemeteries in smaller towns are community cemeteries that came to obtain civic sponsorship. The community cemetery as a cultural form typifies and symbolizes the dispersed rural culture of the region, and its future as a cultural form serves as a bellwether for the survival in a rapidly changing modern world of the region’s dispersed rural way of life. Church cemeteries. In much of America, where communities have multiple churches and some churches have their own cemeteries, a church cemetery would seem to differ from a community cemetery. In some rural communities of western North Carolina, however, there may be just one church, usually Baptist, so such a church cemetery can resemble a community cemetery in its overall representation of the community. A number of church cemeteries in the region are situated just outside the church itself, which conforms to most people’s image of a rural church cemetery (Figures 3-3, 3-4). But some cemeteries affiliated with churches — perhaps they lie on church-owned propCemetery Features in Western North Carolina

figure 3-3 Thomas Chapel Community Church and Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., April 12, 2007

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figure 3-4 Shoal Creek Baptist Church and Cemetery, Transylvania Co., N.C., July 4, 2008

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erty, or the church has assumed responsibility for their maintenance — are situated quite a distance from the church itself. In Swain County, Holly Springs Baptist Church has one cemetery stretching up the ridge behind the church and another cemetery (“Holly Springs Cemetery #2,” the sign says) a mile or two away. The latter appears to have been an older family or community cemetery, high on a nearby ridge, for which the church assumed responsibility in order to have room to expand when the original church cemetery ran out of space. The custom of siting a cemetery on a ridge may dictate a site away from the church, which is more likely to be accessible on a main road. Though one might assume that the founding of the church must have preceded the creation of the cemetery, there are many instances in which cemeteries predate churches. When settlers moved into rural areas of western North Carolina in the nineteenth century, many were not members of churches — the percentage of the population who were church members was rather low in the early nineteenth century. Deaths, of course, do not wait for churches, so people buried family members on their property or in some cases arrived at agreements with neighbors for setting aside a cemetery site. Cemeteries are by definition sacred ground, and both cemeteries and churches are cultural expressions of Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

a rural community. It is as logical to create a church near a community cemetery, which is already a sacred community site and gathering place, as to locate a cemetery near a church. A consequence of cemeteries preceding churches is a certain independence of many church cemeteries in the eyes of the local community. People we encountered in cemeteries might say, “My people are buried here, but I don’t attend this church.” The independent status of the cemetery is important. First, it ensures that families who are not church members will not feel they are intruding into the church’s domain when they visit and tend the graves of family members. Second, it leaves open the possibility that a community member who is not a church member may still be buried in the cemetery associated with that church. This situation often arises when the spouse or the family of the deceased are already buried in a particular cemetery. In this sense, the cemetery functions both as a church cemetery and as a community cemetery. Scholarly commentary on cemeteries occasionally uses the terms “sanctified” and “unsanctified” to distinguish between cemeteries allied with churches and family or community cemeteries with no church affiliation. Thus cultural geographer Fred Kniffen uses the term “sanctified” in his 1967 essay on “Necrogeography in the United States.”2 In a section entitled “Lack of Sanctity” in his important book Texas Graveyards: A Cultural Legacy, cultural geographer Terry Jordan declares that “Southern cemeteries, in keeping with British dissenter Protestant tradition, do not occupy sanctified ground.”3 Charles Wilson also says in the Encyclopedia of Religion in the South that “Southern cemeteries have generally not been sanctified ground.”4 This unfortunate terminology, drawn from the worldview of organized and centralized religious practice, implies (whether intended or not) that only a church — or, more specifically, a member of the clergy — can confer sanctity upon a plot of earth used as a burial ground. But the Protestant tradition of western North Carolina and the Upland South sees the world differently, and these cemeteries are sanctified — they are sacred ground in the eyes of the people who built them. In this worldview, the sacredness of the cemetery is not conferred by clergy or by being in a churchyard. Burial of kin sanctifies the ground, which is resanctified by acts of respect and devotion during decorations and other ritual visits. Civic cemeteries. Though rural cemeteries typically fall into the three preceding categories, some towns in western North Carolina maintain civic cemeteries with public funds. Some, such as Keener Cemetery in Sylva, Moss Cemetery in Marble (Cherokee County), or the Old Mother Church and Cemetery in Robbinsville, seem by their names to have been family, community, or church cemeteries before coming to serve and be assisted by the town in a broader way. Others may have been founded as civic cemeteries. Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

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figure 3-5 McKee family plot, Keener Cemetery, Sylva, N.C., May 25, 2007

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Civic cemeteries are, like the towns themselves, more heterogeneous than rural cemeteries. One encounters many of the same names that appear in rural cemeteries, but also a host of names that do not appear in the countryside. There is more ethnic diversity — Italian names, for example, in the Bryson City Cemetery — and more religious diversity as well, since the civic cemetery has no religious affiliation. Civic cemeteries also have more diversity in the size, cost, and style of headstones. The rural egalitarian ideal tends to encourage a more modest and homogeneous choice of headstones and footstones, as several people suggested to us in interviews or casual conversation. But civic cemeteries have larger and more expensive headstones overall. Some, such as Keener Cemetery or Moss Cemetery, also have large tombs or mausoleums, towering obelisks, gracefully fenced family enclosures (Figure 3-5), and other forms unknown in rural cemeteries. Private cemeteries. In recent decades private cemeteries, administered as commercial enterprises, have sprung up in the region. To some who have recently moved to the region, who have had old rural connections interrupted or obliterated, or who have lost confidence in informal community forces to maintain community cemeteries over the long run, the argument can be compelling for paying money for both a plot and the “perpetual care” of a loved one. Religious beliefs about rising from the grave for the Second Coming on Judgment Day strengthen the anxiety about ensuring that graves are tended

Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

in the long-term future. And, with the passage of time, more people may select a private cemetery simply because their parents or other family members are already buried there. The contemporary trend toward requiring headstones level with the ground, which facilitates mowing and thus reduces maintenance costs, seems to have been spearheaded by private cemeteries nationwide, and many of the private cemeteries in the region require this style of gravesite maintenance. Others have traditional vertical headstones, usually confining flowers to saddle decoration on top of the headstone, urns placed on the headstone base, or pipes inserted into the ground. Some private cemeteries that permitted vertical headstones when they began a generation or two ago have now opened new sections in which only headstones level with the ground are allowed. This trend is clearly becoming standard among private cemeteries, and a few church cemeteries seem to have picked up the idea. Lauada Cemetery. One cemetery in the region is sui generis — it fits no other category but stands alone. When the Tennessee Valley Authority (tva) built Fontana Dam, a number of cemeteries were scheduled to be inundated by the rising water of Fontana Lake. The tva moved most of the markers and remains from these cemeteries to a newly created cemetery in Lauada (pronounced “Loo-aid-a”), draped over a ridge overlooking U.S. 19/74 in western Swain County. Some other graves from cemeteries above the highwater line were also removed to Lauada at the option of the families of the interred — presumably to make them more accessible. Rohr offers a detailed discussion of the grave removals and the creation of the cemetery at Lauada.5 Lauada Cemetery is a large cemetery, with well over one thousand graves, and it continues to receive new burials. Many years ago the tva turned over its responsibilities to the families and communities tied to those buried in Lauada. But the task of maintaining it proved difficult because of its great size and the dispersal of the North Shore communities that once cared for its smaller predecessor cemeteries. After years of managing through informal means, a new formal association, the Lauada Cemetery Association, assumed responsibility for its maintenance in January 1993. Today both the physical appearance and the many new burials testify to the new association’s success.

Cemetery Names Cemeteries in western North Carolina are named after families or locales, such as a creek, branch, cove, or local community. Family names for cemeteries suggest either that the community itself is named after a family, or that the cemetery began as a family cemetery. Such family cemeteries have become, through intermarriage, generosity toward neighbors, or outright gifts of land to the community, broader-based community cemeteries

Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

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while retaining the family name as a matter of tradition. Some cemeteries are named after or share a name with a church. Those that are not adjacent to churches are sometimes on land held by a church for community benefit, but in other cases the land is, or was, familyowned property contributed for communal purpose. The region has a surprising dearth of church and cemetery names using the biblically resonant names found elsewhere in the American South — Beulah, Mount Moriah, Shiloh, and so forth. Such names, though not unknown, are uncommon for the region’s cemeteries.

Cemetery Layout The rural cemeteries of the region are almost always laid out along a ridge (Plates 4, 10, 32; Figures 3-2, 3-23). Reasons given in interviews are: 1. Using poor land in order to save fertile bottom land for crops; 2. Avoiding digging into underground water sources; 3. Using relatively level land (at the top of the ridge) to avoid water erosion; and 4. Placing loved ones “closer to heaven.” Most interviewees enumerated two or three of these reasons. The “closer to heaven” explanation was offered often and with enthusiasm, but it was never offered alone, as if everyone recognized it as a spiritually satisfying but ultimately insufficient explanation for the custom. Cemeteries are typically expanded by moving along the ridge, not down the sides. The gravesites sometimes turn down the hill from the ridge but usually only as far as the slope is still relatively gentle. Here and there, where lack of space has forced a cemetery farther down the slope, as in Brendle Hill Cemetery or Jackson County’s Shook Cemetery, retaining walls or terracing have been added to the slope to provide more level space and prevent erosion. The practice of siting a cemetery on top of a ridge is widespread in the southern and central Appalachians. Edward O. Guerrant, a missionary preacher in the southern Appalachians during the later nineteenth century, observed in his book on his Appalachian experiences, The Galax Gatherers: “Probably in nothing are the Highlanders so peculiar as in their burial of the dead. I never saw a graveyard in a valley. They bury on the hills and sometimes on the top of mountains.”6 Crissman discusses the use of ridges for Appalachian cemeteries and the associated lore explaining it.7 The same custom was carried beyond the Appalachians with the westward migration in the nineteenth century and can be observed throughout the Upland South wherever the existence of ridges makes the custom possible. Anita Pitchford’s study of cemeteries in Cass County in northeast Texas

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Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

notes the consistent preference for high ground, including one cemetery on the county’s highest point in the Cusseta Mountains.8 The custom may seem unusual to people used to churchyard or village cemeteries. But the religious awe inspired by high ridges is not unfamiliar, and Scotland and Ireland have many hills and ridges occupied by prehistoric stones, mounds, and stone circles that have had religious significance. Many of these prehistoric religious sites were burial sites, and in a number of cases Christian churches were later built next to the prehistoric sites. The graves in cemeteries are almost universally laid out in rows with the headstones at the west end facing east and the footstones, when present, placed to the east of the headstones.9 This is always described as “facing east,” and the main inscription, if any, on the headstone generally faces east. In a few cases, the main inscription faces west, that is, away from the grave, not overlooking it. Several such examples occur in a sloping area of Old Savannah Cemetery in Jackson County, and William Crawford suggested that the headstones could have fallen at some point and then were re-situated the opposite way. But in other cemeteries in South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas we have observed many instances of headstones facing west while the grave itself is to the east of the headstone, so it is a widespread but less common layout throughout the Upland South. The deceased are buried facing east for religious reasons. They face toward the Holy Land so that the deceased may rise to meet the Lord, who will be coming from the east in the Second Coming.

Cemetery Maintenance In the past, and to an extent in the present, the men of the families represented in the cemetery are in charge of maintaining the cemetery grounds. Springtime, just before Decoration Day, has traditionally been a time for cemetery maintenance. Men (and perhaps some women as well) clear away grass, weeds, and small trees and sweep or rake the cemetery clean. The words “clean” or “swept” traditionally have implied that the graves and, insofar as is practicable, the entire cemetery are cleared of grass and weeds. People often compare this to the old-fashioned method of maintaining a dooryard — grassless and plantless except for a few carefully cultivated shrubs and flowers. Thus the cemetery is, literally and symbolically, a home (see Chapter 2). But as with homes themselves, a newer American aesthetic has introduced grass into cemeteries, and most area cemeteries are now grassy. Some cemeteries show both the older and the newer style of maintenance, as some families maintain the older clean-swept style while others gravitate to the grassy style. Grass must be cut, however, and grassy cemeteries must either recruit the families represented in the cemetery or raise funds to

Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

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hire a mower. Mowing in turn has a profound effect on another older cemetery tradition, mounding. In general, maintenance can be repeated at any season, but it is always done before Decoration Day. Periodically, cemeteries need not just maintenance but major repairs or modifications. For community cemeteries, it is hard to account for the mysterious processes whereby someone decides to take on the task of renovating a cemetery. But we know it happens, and students of local history, such as William Crawford, take great care to name and celebrate these otherwise unsung community heroes, such as Lucy and Mae Middleton, who spent untold time and energy on renovating Shook Cemetery in Jackson County’s Canada Township (see Chapter 8).

Cemetery Borders and Surrounding Forests Some cemeteries are sunny, some are shady, and some have both sunny and shady areas. There is no prevailing pattern, except that they are typically bounded on at least one side by forest. Presumably they are begun as a cleared area, and some people believe they should be kept open to the sunlight. Maintenance can push back the forest to create more sun or allow it to approach the bordering graves for more overhanging shade. The shade suppresses grass and weeds and makes summer cemetery visits a cooler experience. But overhanging shade trees put gravestones at risk during storms from falling trees or tree limbs, and shade also can encourage the growth of moss and mold on headstones. The location of the forest border hinges more often on tradition, land gradation, and other such variables than on legal borders to cemetery property. If the slope from the ridge is gentle, it is more likely to be cleared, whereas a narrow ridge with precipitous slopes is more likely to have trees on the slope that partially shade the ridge. People mention the fencing of cemeteries in the old days to keep out foraging wild animals (particularly wild hogs) and local livestock (hogs and cattle). In this respect as in others, the cemetery resembles the fenced dooryard and garden of a farmhouse. Many older informants recall that in the old days cattle and hogs were routinely turned out into the forest to forage, especially in the fall, when the forest chestnuts alone could fatten up hogs for the winter. Rooting hogs, wild or domestic, are often cited as a historical problem for cemeteries. Some interviewees reminded us that wild hogs remain a problem today on the North Shore, and we witnessed evidence of hog rooting around North Shore cemeteries. Nowadays some regional cemeteries (and most national park cemeteries) are unfenced, but one encounters many fences outside the park, such as at Lower Coward Cemetery in Jackson County and Breedlove Cemetery in Graham County, and the careful

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observer will find remnants of old fence posts and fencing around others, including many in the park’s North Shore region. Orr Cemetery, in the park down river from Fontana Dam, is fully fenced (Figure 2-9). Occasionally trespassing signs are posted at a cemetery’s margin, as in Watkins Cemetery near Bryson City, that suggest friction between an older communal sensibility about cemeteries in the woods and a modern sense of property boundaries.

Trees, Shrubs, and Other Cemetery Plantings Many cemeteries have a few planted shrubs and trees within the cemetery grounds.10 Occasionally there are large trees that may have been left for shade when the rest of the surrounding forest was cut down to open up the cemetery. Such trees may be evergreen, such as pines or hemlocks, or deciduous, such as oaks. A favorite planted evergreen tree for cemeteries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana). Thus one encounters today many cemeteries that have a few old Eastern red cedars, and they almost invariably mark the areas of older burials (Figure 2-7). But they are not always old; red cedars are still being planted today in cemeteries. One also encounters smaller trees and shrubs planted either as general ornamentals or marking the head of an individual grave, and such trees or shrubs are often evergreen, such as cedars, hollies, boxwood, arborvitae, and azaleas. The predilection for Eastern red cedars in Upland South cemeteries has a striking Old World precedent. A recurrent feature of British churchyard cemeteries is their being anchored by venerable yews (Taxus baccata). Many of these yews are quite ancient, and some date from early Christian or pre-Christian times. The churchyard yew in Fortingall, a village in the highlands of Perthshire, is conservatively estimated to be over 2,000 years old, and many estimates range much higher, which makes it in all likelihood the oldest living tree in Europe. Like the prehistoric stone circles and massive stone markers that sometimes can be seen in or near British churchyards, the ancient yews are likely evidence of the church site being a sacred site since prehistoric and pre-Christian times. Yews are not native to the Upland South, but the native Eastern red cedar seems to have been adopted in Upland South cemeteries as a fitting cultural analog to the British churchyard yew. Flowering dogwoods (Cornus florida) are favored trees in the cemeteries of western North Carolina, and William Crawford and other interviewees cite beliefs and traditions that support the dogwood’s gracing so many cemeteries (Plates 17, 30). Dogwoods, of course, bloom in the spring, around the time of Easter, and the white flower (actually not a flower but a bract) is shaped like a cross, so it has a Christian symbolic significance.11 In that vein, there is also a tradition that the dogwood furnished the wood for Jesus’ cross.

Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

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figure 3-6 Yucca beside fieldstone headstone, Sylva Assembly of God Cemetery, Sylva, N.C., March 18, 2007

Yucca is a familiar sight in cemeteries from Virginia to Oklahoma — common enough that it is sometimes associated in people’s minds with cemeteries. It is usually planted next to a grave, perhaps on either side of the headstone, at the head and foot, or in some other arrangement (Figure 3-6). It is evergreen and requires no care, which may be reasons for selecting it to adorn graves, but its sharply pointed, sword-like leaves may also deter animals or people from intruding too closely in the grave’s sacred space. Finally, yucca is prized for its beautiful, dramatic white flowering stalk. Asparagus (of the genus Asparagus) appeared as a planting on several gravesites in Transylvania County’s Shoal Creek Baptist Church Cemetery (Figure 3-7). Its feathery green filigree makes a graceful and distinctive addition to a gravesite. In an interview regarding a cemetery in Mitchell County, North Carolina, Barbara Power told us that her family’s custom was to grow asparagus at home, cutting the greenery to lay on the mounded graves, with dahlias arranged atop the asparagus greenery.12 Roses are also commonly planted in area cemeteries, both as a general cemetery decoration and at specific gravesites, and roses are featured prominently in annual decorations of graves. The association of roses with burials and gravesites is long and sustained in British and American tradition. Hence the famous ending of the old love ballad “Barbara Allen”: 62

Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

figure 3-7 Asparagus in front of headstone, Shoal Creek Baptist Church Cemetery, Transylvania Co., N.C., July 4, 2008

They buried her in the old churchyard, They buried William by her; Out of William’s grave grew a big red rose, Out of Barbara’s grew a green brier. They grew and grew in the old churchyard, Till they couldn’t grow no higher; They twined at the top in a true lovers’ knot, The red rose around the green brier.13

Grave Layout Graves are usually about six or seven feet long. The “facing east” rule, from head to toe, is well-nigh universal (see “Cemetery Layout” above in this chapter) — except, we were told, in some Cherokee burials. Infant graves tend to be about two or three feet long, with small Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

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children’s graves reaching three or four feet. Older children are usually not measured but placed in an adult-size grave. Thus there seem to be broadly two or three grave sizes: regular, infant, and perhaps an intermediate small size. Of course the surface representation is symbolic and not a realistic gauge of the size of the burial below. The footstones help convey this symbolism by providing a measuring point from the headstones, which are typically lined up in a row side by side. With footstones, one knows at a glance whether the burial is an adult or child. If mounding is practiced, it makes the surface symbolism even more palpable. The amount of space between graves and grave rows varies in different cemeteries and even within the same cemetery. Having walking space between grave rows is common but by no means universal. Most cemeteries have at least one or two major paths wending through the grave rows. Sometimes there is a two-track dirt path through the cemetery providing access to cars, hearses, or tractors for new burials or to facilitate cleaning and decorating. Husband and wife are customarily buried side by side with the wife on the husband’s left (picturing them as lying on their backs). Christine Cole Proctor of Bryson City glossed this tradition with another tradition — that the wife lies on the left so that she may be closest to her husband’s heart. Children who die young are normally in the same family burial group with their parents, and adults are also sometimes buried with their parents. In some cemeteries one finds examples of edging and enclosing a family plot with stone, concrete, brick, or wooden retaining walls, sometimes called “coping.” Such family plots are sometimes filled with white gravel that both suppresses weeds and highlights flower decorations. Because family plots fill up, some family members may be buried elsewhere in the cemetery, and because marriage links families to other families, family plots naturally blend into community interrelationships.

Markers and Monuments Graves in the region typically have stone markers at the head of the grave, known as headstones. The vast majority of the markers, with an identifiable front and back, are facing east. Many graves also have modest stone markers at the foot of the grave, known as footstones. Most newer headstones are marble or granite and have two flat, polished surfaces. The narrow top and sides may also be polished, but often they are left rough and unpolished. The rear polished side may be blank, but often it is inscribed in a larger font with the family name. This makes it easier to spot from a distance when one is searching for a particular person or family group. Older stones are often granite, but some are made of slate, soapstone, or other locally available stones, and they are sometimes flattened on only one 64

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face. Some stone markers are irregular, though almost always vaguely flat and vertically situated, and they sometimes have no inscription. Home-hewn or found stones without inscriptions can be found in areas of some cemeteries dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a few can be found from later in the twentieth century. Occasionally wooden crosses are used as grave markers, sometimes with inscriptions but often with no inscription. Earlier generations of Baptists generally disapproved of crosses in their churches, not only because of their preference for plainness in visual presentation but also because the use of crosses was associated with Episcopalians and Roman Catholics. Thus crosses are rare in older gravesites in western North Carolina, but as one moves into and through the twentieth century, crosses begin to appear on gravestones or as freestanding adornments to the gravesite. The modern assemblage style of decorating gravesites employs crosses freely. Lauada Cemetery, which consists of graves moved from the drainage of the Little Tennessee River when Fontana Dam was built, has several groupings of graves marked with wooden crosses. The crosses do not date to the original creation of Lauada Cemetery but were added later by Lawrence Hyatt, a regional historian and genealogist, to mark unidentified graves. One such area is a long double row of sixty small graves stretching from the top to the bottom of the steep hill (Plate 18; Figures 8-16, 8-17). The Lauada crosses are striking, but they are, like Lauada Cemetery itself, a special feature rather than a regional trait. Other than crosses, wooden grave markers are rare in the region, though wood is occasionally used for supplementary gravesite decoration and furnishing, such as wooden benches. Official metal identification markers provided by funeral homes, which include the name and dates of the deceased, are common on recent burials, and some metal markers remain after permanent headstones are added to the site. Lauada Cemetery, where there is special concern about tracing unmarked graves and tracking down displaced North Shore ancestors, seems to have retained many of the metal markers created at the time of the North Shore removal in 1943–44. Footstones and other foot markers are customary in the region but by no means universal. The older foot markers are vertical stones, like headstones, but much smaller. Some private cemeteries discourage foot markers as impediments to mowing or allow them only when level with the ground. Where present, these flat foot markers are small and usually contain no inscription or only the first letter of a family name. Small horizontal stones with the family initial are sometimes used to reserve a place in the cemetery for someone who has not yet passed away. Pipe flower-holders are also used to reserve space for future burials (see Chapter 1, Figure 3-16). The combination of headstone and footstone sets off the gravesite so that visitors Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

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figure 3-8 Double grave cover and obelisk headstones, Tabor Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 23, 2007

can picture the grave and will not step on it. People are taught from childhood not to step on graves, and the twin demarcations of headstone and footstone define the boundary that should not be crossed. Mounding defines the proscribed area even more clearly, but mounding is in decline as a cultural practice, making the headstone and footstone more important in identifying the symbolic area of the grave proper. Some individual graves or family groupings are also set off by stone, concrete-block, brick, or wooden borders, and the area within the border may be filled with gravel or paved with concrete, further separating the grave from the surrounding cemetery and discouraging people from stepping on it. Very large headstones, ornately sculptured stone monuments, statues, and tombs or mausoleums are rare or absent in the rural family or community cemeteries. When present they elicit comments suggesting that they may be a bit inappropriate or extravagant. They do appear occasionally in church and civic cemeteries in towns such as Bryson City or Sylva. Horizontal grave covers, also known as ledger gravestones or ledger stones, are scattered through the region. They are shaped in a long rectangular form corresponding roughly to the size and shape of the grave on which they rest.14 Some are concrete, while others are marble, granite, or other types of stone. They are laid either flush with or on top of the ground, sometimes with a foundation of crushed rock. Commonly, but not always, in66

Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

figure 3-9 Concrete double grave cover with inscribed footstones, Thomas Chapel Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 23, 2007

scriptions are carved directly onto the cover, which accounts for the name “ledger gravestone.” Sometimes they are complemented by a vertical headstone at the end of the grave cover, which may also give burial information. Some regional grave covers date from as early as the mid-nineteenth century, such as the concrete covers, with vertical headstones added in the modern era, on some early graves in Swain County’s DeHart Cemetery. There are also a husband-and-wife pair of graves with mid-nineteenth-century headstones and undated marble covers, which could have been added later, in Swain County’s Tabor Cemetery (Figure 3-8). But there are also modern concrete, granite, and marble covers, such as the concrete double grave cover in Swain County’s Thomas Chapel Cemetery (Figure 3-9). Grave covers are common in the older cemeteries of southern cities, such as Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina. They are widespread in rural cemeteries from the southeastern Atlantic coast to Louisiana and not infrequent in the trans-Alleghany South. In western North Carolina they are present but uncommon. It is sometimes worth noting, not only what is observed, but also what is not observed. One old form of grave marker is a stone rectangular box crypt or grave box situated over the grave. The top of the grave box is a flat stone, on which can be inscribed burial information, though sometimes the end stone of the box contains the inscription.15 It is, in effect, a grave cover or ledger stone on top of a stone box. Grave boxes can be two to three feet off the ground or as shallow as a foot. They are usually big enough to look as if Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

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they could contain a body, but actually the bodies are buried beneath them in the ground; thus they are sometimes called false crypts. It is a form known in the British Isles — we have observed and documented them in Scotland; at the old cemeteries in Jamestown and Richmond, Virginia; and in Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia, where there are examples from the late eighteenth into the early twentieth century (Figure 6-1). We have also documented box crypts in South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. A number of examples from eastern and central North Carolina are described and pictured in Ruth Little’s Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers.16 We have found only one example of a grave box, its stone top missing, in our western North Carolina study area, in Erastus Cemetery, in the high country of Jackson County’s Cullowhee Mountain (Plate 21). Another form of grave cover, sometimes called a table gravestone, stands on short stone posts two or three feet from the ground. It is found in the British Isles, the United States east of the Appalachians (see Figure 6-1), and Appalachian West Virginia, but has not turned up in western North Carolina. Still another form of grave marker consists of two rock slabs placed on the ground with the tops leaning against one another like a gabled roof. This form of marker is sometimes called a tent grave or comb grave, “comb” being an Upland South term for the ridge of a roof. Typically the two “gable ends” are closed in and supported by smaller triangular stones. Comb graves are widespread in the Tennessee Cumberlands, particularly in Overton and White Counties,17 and we have documented instances in Alabama, but not in western North Carolina. Nearly all the monuments and markers in our region are unpainted, but a sporadic Upland South tradition of painting headstones appears occasionally in western North Carolina. One encounters a few whitewashed headstones in some cemeteries, and as an alternative to white paint, metallic silver paint (Figure 3-12).

Regional Stonework The existence of a town named Marble in Cherokee County highlights the history of stone production in western North Carolina. Though marble production is no longer an ingredient in the local economy, one company in Marble, with family ties back to the glory days of local production, carries on the tradition of producing, inscribing, and marketing marble monuments for cemeteries. W.N.C. Marble and Granite was founded in 1948–49 by Fred Barton, and for many years it procured and worked with local marble cut by the local marble factory, Columbia Marble Company. But Columbia Marble Company is now closed, so W.N.C. Marble and Granite gets its headstones from several other marble-producing states and from abroad and finishes and inscribes them in its building

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near Marble. It is the main supplier for new grave markers for North Shore cemeteries, and its proprietor, Bob Barton (Fred Barton’s son), is optimistic enough about the family business to look forward to his own son taking over in the future.18 Remembering how often we had encountered new headstones on old graves, we asked Bob Barton what percentage of his sales were replacement markers. It is actually a small percentage; most sales are for new burials. The region also has other stone shops selling cemetery markers, and Bob Barton recalls a history of fine stone-carvers in the area. Others recall Hugo Stein, a German immigrant who produced many fine stone-carving works in Sylva and is buried with his family in the town’s Keener Cemetery. But the stonecarving era in the region has passed. Regional cemeteries, buildings, and other structures bear witness to another kind of stonework that flourished from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century. The region is dotted with houses, churches, and property boundary walls built with a yellowbrown hewn native stone, sometimes called “fieldstone.” Other structures are made with rounded, unhewn stones, known colloquially as “river stones,” that are cemented together into structural walls. All these structures carry the imprint of the land from whence they

Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

figure 3-10 Walls, Keener Cemetery, Sylva, N.C., May 25, 2007

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figure 3-11 Fieldstone headstone and pavilion, Wood Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., March 11, 2008

came and reflect, not the art of fine stone-carvers, but the art of the regular masons of the region. This construction tradition affects cemeteries in two ways. First, many retaining walls in area cemeteries are either of cut stones or uncut, rounded stones of the “river stone” sort. They appear in many cemeteries but are particularly prominent and elaborate in a few cemeteries, such as Keener Cemetery in Sylva, where their color and design contribute significantly to the overall aesthetic appearance of the cemetery (Figure 3-10). Second, a few individual headstones in various cemeteries are made of this local stone, either hewn or unhewn (Plates 19A, 19B, 20; Figures 3-11, 3-12). Several cemeteries along the Tuckasegee River drainage feature at least one or two such headstones, and the Tuckasegee Baptist Church Cemetery in the town of Tuckasegee has several. It is possible that they are all the work of a single mason who lived somewhere in the Tuckasegee River region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but in any case they suggest a strong regional tradition of stonemasonry.

Inscriptions Headstones are usually inscribed on the side facing east. Some are home-inscribed, but most twentieth-century stones are professionally inscribed by regional stonemasons. Some contain a supplementary inscription, usually just the family name, on the west

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figure 3-12 Fieldstone headstone painted silver, Crawford Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., May 11, 2008

face of the headstone. The east-facing full inscriptions typically give name, birth date, and death date. Military service is often recorded for men and women who served in the armed services. Sometimes the wife’s maiden name is also recorded, and some joint husband-wife headstones include the marriage date. Headstones may contain traditional phrases, such as “Gone but not forgotten.” Some have short religious or sentimental sayings in prose or verse, while others evoke the virtues and contributions of the deceased to family and community. Occasionally one sees messages in languages other than English — a Cherokee-language inscription on a headstone in Yellow Hill Cemetery in the town of Cherokee, for example (Figure 3-13), or an inscription in sign language on a headstone in Graham County’s Massey Branch Cemetery (Figure 3-14). There are also visual religious messages, such as hands folded in prayer, a hand with the finger pointing heavenward, or lambs lying in repose. Frequently graves provide visual evocations of worldly activities for which the person is fondly remembered. The back of one headstone in Watkins Cemetery features the carved outline of a large guitar, and a headstone in DeHart Cemetery features inscriptions of both a guitar and a disc recording to memorialize nationally noted bluegrass musician Arthur Lee Smiley Jr. (“Red” Smiley of the Reno and Smiley duo), who died in 1972 (Figure 3-15). A headstone in Brendle Hill Cemetery features three objects that symbolize the pursuits of the deceased in life — his tractor, his tools, and a ginseng plant (see Chapter 1, Figure 3-16). Such inscriptions are largely a phenomenon of the last fifty years. We did not

Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

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figure 3-13 Cherokee inscription on headstone, Yellow Hill Cemetery, Cherokee, N.C., June 11, 2007

see them in the North Shore cemeteries we visited, except in Paynetown Cemetery, where burials have continued since it became part of the national park. One striking marker at Paynetown is a ceramic tree trunk inscribed with religious quotations.19

Cemetery Structures We found two regional examples of graveshelters, also known as gravehouses or grave sheds, which are shed-like rectangular structures with gabled roofs over the graves. Both are in the vicinity of Bryson City in Swain County. The example in Watkins Cemetery has a roof resting on five posts (four plus a reinforcing post) three to four feet above the ground and extending over the entire gravesite. It is open on all four sides, and the wood is painted red (Plate 22). The example in Jenkins Cemetery, just off U.s. 19, west of town, has a more vertical design like a conventional shed, with lattice work on two of the four sides and the other two sides open. It is much taller than the Watkins Cemetery example and resembles more closely many graveshelters in other regions of the Upland South (Figure 3-17). Within the graveshelters are the graves themselves with the customary headstones, footstones, and decorations. Graveshelters were once more common throughout the region, according to local historian William Crawford, and others told us of graveshelters, now vanished, that once graced various cemeteries. Jeane points out that some existing grave borders may once have served as foundations or baseboards supporting graveshelters.20 72

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figure 3-14 Signing on headstone, Massey Branch Cemetery, Graham Co., N.C., May 31, 2007

figure 3-15 Gravestone of bluegrass musician Red Smiley, DeHart Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 27, 2007

figure 3-16 Inscriptions of tractor, ginseng root, and tools, Brendle Hill Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., September 2, 2004

Some regional historians and genealogists we interviewed, such as Deanne GibsonRoles, associate graveshelters with the Melungeons, a well-known mixed ethnic group in East Tennessee culture. Some Melungeon families also live in western North Carolina. But William Crawford believes, as do we, that the practice was not limited to Melungeons but employed by many people in the region to protect graves from the elements. Indeed, Crissman provides both photos and other citations of graveshelters scattered through the Appalachian region.21 Thomas D. Clark’s book The Kentucky offers an extended description of “grave houses” along the Kentucky River basin in eastern Kentucky.22 Donald Ball has written a lengthy essay on gravehouses in Middle Tennessee, and Corn provides a sampler of graveshelters in a cemetery in Claiborne County, Tennessee.23 Jeane offers photos and citations from Alabama, and Little describes and pictures many from North Carolina east of the mountains.24 Jordan offers a map of Upland South gravehouses known to him around 1980.25 We ourselves have also observed and documented graveshelters in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Kentucky.26 Graveshelters are a distinctive cultural tradition throughout the South, where they have flourished for more than a century. They also display a surprising variety in size, structural features, openness to the outside, and other features. Explanations of their derivation have ranged from the English lych-gate tradition to American Indian practices.27 74

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Creek and Oklahoma Cherokee examples have been cited, and we have documented instances of Cherokee graveshelters in Oklahoma. Although it may also be argued that American Indian examples are part of, rather than the source for, the southern regional tradition, the case for American Indian origin is reasonable. It is, of course, also possible that graveshelters arose as a result of a confluence of American Indian and British-American traditions — a cultural syncretism that develops a New World cultural feature shaped and reinforced by models in both antecedent traditions. One part of the cultural landscape of cemeteries is directly relevant to Decoration Day: the placing of tables and benches in a cemetery or churchyard. In western North Carolina many cemeteries have unsheltered benches that can be used to observe and listen to an oral presentation, such as a Decoration Day sermon, and also to eat a special communal “dinner on the ground” (Plate 32; Figures 3-18, 3-19). Some are simple broad boards laid across posts in the ground. Others are modern benches purchased in a store. At Hooper Cemetery in Jackson County’s Caney Fork boards are stacked at the edge of the woods just beyond the cemetery, ready to be placed on an array of low posts for buriCemetery Features in Western North Carolina

figure 3-17 Graveshelter, Jenkins Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 27, 2004

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figure 3-18 Pavilion, food table, benches, and picnic tables, Jackson Owen Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., March 11, 2008

als, decorations, or other ceremonies. Presumably stacking them prevents weathering and enables people to sit on dry boards. The benches are joined in some cemeteries by tables, which make dinner on the ground more manageable. Some tables are higher and longer, being designed for presenting food buffet-style to people standing and serving themselves; others are lower and have benches for the purpose of sitting and eating. The tables are usually made of wood, but there are instances of stone, brick, or concrete construction. There are also wire-mesh tables in some cemeteries and churchyards that do not collect rain, snow, and ice. We saw a good example of this in Graham County’s Cable Cove Cemetery. Some cemeteries have a roofed open-air pavilion, sometimes called a shed, made of wood or other materials, under which benches and tables are placed. Obviously the pavilion protects people from both sun and rain. Pavilions are more likely to be found in cemeteries beside churches, where they are used for both after-church and cemetery activities. But some community cemeteries with no church affiliation, such as Wood and Jackson Owen Cemeteries in Canada Township and Watkins Cemetery near Bryson City, also have pavilions (Figures 3-11, 3-18, 8-1). Occasionally one finds a chapel that is used, not as a church, but solely for cemetery events. Double Springs Cemetery on Cullowhee Mountain has a chapel built, according 76

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to a sign over the door, “In loving remembrance of those who sleep here. We dedicate this church to God and to their memory” (Figure 9-2).28 One cemetery in Canada Township, Jackson Owen Cemetery (also known as Wolf Mountain Cemetery), has both a chapel (Figure 2-6) and a pavilion with a serving table underneath and benches and picnic tables outside (Figure 3-18). Small individual benches made of wood, concrete, or stone appear at some individual or family gravesites. They are placed there so that family members or friends can sit and contemplate the gravesite, whether during a group event, such as a decoration, or when visiting alone or with family. The use of individual benches as part of the furnishings of a cemetery is on the rise. Shook Cemetery in Canada Township (Plate 30) and Laurel Branch Cemetery in Swain County have many individual benches scattered through the cemetery. At other cemeteries, such as Harris Cemetery in Canada Township or Round Hill Cemetery in Swain County (Figure 3-19), long benches are arranged on the circumference of the cemetery. Many recent burials presenting gravesites in the “assemblage” style add a small bench to the collection of items decorating the gravesite. Other structures appear in some regional cemeteries. A few cemeteries, such as Tabor Cemetery in Swain County (Figure 3-20), have special trash bins for throwing away old Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

figure 3-19 Benches, Round Hill Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 27, 2007

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figure 3-20 Decoration disposal bin, Tabor Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 23, 2007

decorations — a more frequent feature in cemeteries west of the Appalachians. There are outbuildings for storing the mowing and raking equipment, and some cemeteries have installed outdoor toilets (Figure 3-21). We were told the toilets were especially desired by elderly visitors, who wanted to attend decorations but found it difficult to manage a long service at the cemetery without toilet access. Similarly, the benches are a boon to many elderly visitors. One cemetery in Graham County, Massey Branch Cemetery, has a modern structure at its entrance, similar to a double carport that can be purchased at a building-materials store, which provides a shaded and sheltered area for use during funerals or decorations (Figure 3-22). It seems unlikely that the creators of this cemetery improvement knew about English lych-gates, sheltered cemetery gates where mourners wait with the body until the minister arrives to officiate at a burial. But if they did not know about the English parallel, they have reinvented the idea.29 Another unusual structure is a small covered grandstand beneath a venerable oak in Caney Fork Township’s Lower Coward Cemetery, usable for sermons, prayers, or hymn-leading during a burial or decoration. Finally, several cemeteries in Canada Township (Mathis, Broom, Harris, Cathey, and Sol’s Creek Cemeteries) feature a permanent wooden lectern on a post (Figure 2-7). This is one of several material-culture features in the cemeteries of the Balsam Highlands 78

Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

figure 3-21 Outhouse, Harris Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., March 11, 2008

suggesting that it is a distinctive cultural subregion. We found one additional lectern in Lower Coward Cemetery, just over the mountain from Canada Township in Caney Fork Township.

Signs Driving along highways and byways of western North Carolina, one often encounters modest signs directing passers-by to a local church or a community cemetery. Cemeteries seem to claim, by the signage, to be significant sites in a rural community. But the signs may not be designed solely for strangers wandering through the region. Many people in western North Carolina have moved away from the region in search of jobs or better economic prospects. Their children have grown up in other parts of the country, far from their home-community roots. Such people who return for decorations, homecomings, or family reunions often need guidance to find their way to the cemetery they are seeking. Following the sign and leaving the highway, one may drive a distance on a side road, Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

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figure 3-22 Lych-gate structure, Massey Branch Cemetery, Graham Co., N.C., May 31, 2007

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paved or unpaved, before reaching rural cemeteries. Occasionally the last leg of the trip is on a dirt road, up a steep hill, to the top of a ridge where the cemetery is located. There may be an additional sign before that last turn up the hill. And there is usually a sign at the entrance of the cemetery, though sometimes it is absent, as if to say that the cemetery itself is adequate signage at that point. A few cemeteries, such as Euchella Cemetery in western Swain County, have large signs in wrought iron or other metal materials overhanging the entrance. As one travels west from the Appalachians toward the Ozarks and Texas, these metal overhanging signs become more common at cemetery entrances. But in western North Carolina, the sign of choice is a simple, modest wooden sign giving the name of the cemetery. The North Shore cemeteries, because of the history of their absorption by Great Smoky Mountains National Park, do not have the customary signage that identifies most other cemeteries in the region. One exception is Paynetown Cemetery, lying near Fontana Dam, which has an atypical history because of its accessibility by car. At its entrance is a sign, not in the familiar official style of Park Service signage, that says, “Paynetown Cemetery, Founded in 1901 by Greenberry Payne” (Figure 3-23). The sign is a copy of an Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

original sign that Nina Cable Williams, who is buried close to the gate, had arranged to be made. The original sign is in the possession of Nina Williams’s daughter, Peggy Williams Jenkins. We met Peggy at Paynetown Cemetery the Saturday before Paynetown Cemetery’s Decoration Day, as she and her brother, Steve Williams, prepared and decorated their family sites (Figure 3-24).30 Another cemetery, Orr Cemetery, lies not far from Paynetown Cemetery, just off the highway and up a gravel road, but there are no signs indicating its location, and it cannot be seen from the gravel road because of a small intervening ridge. A Park Service sign warns “no horses” near the hidden cemetery — doubtless an effort to protect the resource — but no sign identifies the cemetery or directs a visitor to it. Within a cemetery additional signs may appear, but western North Carolina cemeteries are less message-inclined than cemeteries west of the Appalachians. Nevertheless, one occasionally finds a sign from a cemetery committee or association with guidance on what to do and what not to do. For example, the sign at the entrance of Balsam Grove Cemetery on Caney Fork in Jackson County offers a series of instructions, such as “No shrubs or rose bushes planted on mowing ground” (Figure 2-16). Along the recently erected fence separating Watkins Cemetery from adjacent private property, the property owner has put up signs warning people not to dig graves that intrude into the private property. One unusual cemetery sign is painted on a large, vertically positioned slab of rock at the entrance Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

figure 3-23 Sign and mounded graves in Paynetown Cemetery, Gsmnp, June 3, 2007

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figure 3-24 Peggy Williams Jenkins and Waymon Stephen “Steve” Williams decorating the grave of their mother, Paynetown Cemetery, Gsmnp, May 10, 2008

to Jackson Owen Cemetery (Figure 3-25). And a sign at the entrance of one cemetery, Swain County’s Round Hill Cemetery, could serve as an emblem of the region’s reverence for community cemeteries as places to visit and honor the dead: “The character of a community is revealed in the way it honours its loved ones” (Figure 9-3).

Cemetery Events The two principal types of events in cemeteries are funerals and memorial celebrations such as Decoration Day.31 The Decoration Day traditions are described in Chapters 1, 2, and 8. We were not able to witness any funerals during fieldwork in the region, though we occasionally saw the funeral-home set-ups for imminent burials in various cemeteries. Funerals and graveside burial ceremonies are, of course, central to the public life of cemeteries. Many older informants today remember when church bells were rung to announce the death of a community member. It was customary to toll the bell the number 82

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figure 3-25 Entrance sign, Jackson Owen Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., March 11, 2008

of years the person had lived (see the Blind Lemon Jefferson song in Chapter 7, as well as the famous phrase from the John Donne Meditation, “therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”). In addition to burial ceremonies and cemetery decoration visits, various other events occur in some cemeteries in the course of the year. Easter sunrise services are held at both Brendle Hill Cemetery in Swain County and Birdtown Cemetery on the Cherokee reservation. The outdoor setting and the theme of resurrection interwoven into cemetery decorations make a cemetery an appropriate place for a sunrise service on Easter morning. We have been addressing public events, but cemeteries are also visited by people singly or in small groups. William Crawford reminded us, as we toured Jackson County cemeteries together, that privacy is a necessary attribute of a cemetery. Even though public events can be spiritually satisfying, sometimes one may need to be there alone to seek personal solace, decorate a grave, or remember a birthday or anniversary. This highlights one drawback of the current arrangements for the North Shore cemeteries. A few North Shore cemeteries at either end of Fontana Lake are accessible by automobile, plus some hiking on foot, for private visits. But most of the North Shore cemeteries can be reached only by hiking or horseback riding, which would require overnight trips, or by taking a Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

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figure 3-26 Old and new markers on McClure grave, McClure Cemetery, Gsmnp, August 24, 2004

figure 3-27 Pete Prince demonstrates dowsing rods he designed, Knoxville, Tenn., August 18, 2004

boat across Fontana Lake, then hiking to the cemetery. They can be visited on their Decoration Day, but they are essentially unavailable for private contemplation.

Renovating and Rediscovering Gravesites Our Decoration Day interviews revealed an interesting facet of regional culture regarding individual gravesites. One might imagine that a grave, once created, is a stable aspect of material culture, subject to maintenance but not to dramatic change. But one quickly discovers that many graves of the region, though old, have new headstones. Families have decided to replace headstones that were worn and illegible with new headstones, often with inscriptions containing additional information. And if the family is genealogically aware, they may even leave the old headstone, as documentary evidence, when they add a replacement stone (Figure 3-26). The active genealogists of the area, in league with area family members, have devoted countless hours to tracking down information about people buried in unmarked or illegible graves, and resurrecting their identity with fresh stones. The passion to reconnect with lost kin is so great that, as the quest stories are recounted, one almost feels that people are rescuing their kin from limbo. The folk custom of dowsing, sometimes called divining or water witching, has been brought to bear on these cultural quests to reconnect the dead to the living. Dowsing is used in most parts of the United States to find underground water, typically, to select the best place to dig a well. Dowsers have used the technique for generations to help others find water. Dowsing is typically done with two flexible sticks, or wands, that are held pointing forward as one walks. The sign of having located something beneath the earth is the spontaneous turning of the wands toward each other or down toward the ground. It is sometimes regarded as a skill for hire, but just as often it is treated as a gift from God to serve one’s fellow humans.32 In western North Carolina, dowsing is widely used to search for lost graves. Pete Prince, who passed away in 2006, was a student of the history of former communities in the Smokies. He learned dowsing from Harry Vance and applied his dowsing skills to nearly every formerly inhabited cove in the region (Figure 3-27). He claimed that he identified many previously unknown gravesites, both in cemeteries and in old family dooryards or even beneath houses, and he lectured on, demonstrated, and taught his dowsing techniques to others.33 Dowsing occupies this uniquely important role for the same reason that decorations are a strong cultural tradition: the extraordinary cultural energy people of the region devote to connecting with and showing respect for kin who have passed away.

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chapter four

Historical and Cultural Origins of the Region Roots and Branches

Western North Carolina has a plural culture made up of multiple ethnic components and various historical and geographical ingredients. Appalachian culture is sometimes imagined to be simple and monocultural, but that has never been the case anywhere in the Appalachians, and western North Carolina is even more visibly multicultural than the rest of the Appalachians because of the continued flourishing of Cherokee culture. The plural elements of the regional culture do not coexist in isolation from each other. They have always interacted, creating a larger regional culture that all groups in the region share. The inhabitants who have lived in the region the longest are the Cherokees, an Iroquoian-speaking tribe who dominated much of the Upland South, including parts of modern North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. The site of the Cherokee mother village, Kituhwa, lies along the Tuckasegee River, east of present-day Bryson City. The Cherokees traded with European settlers to the east and south from the seventeenth century onward. By the end of the eighteenth century, they had adopted a number of European cultural features, including horses, guns, and various Old World foods, such as chickens, hogs, watermelons, and black-eyed peas. It is interesting to reflect, as Michael Ann Williams points out in Great Smoky Mountains Folklife, that the first builders of log cabins in the Smokies were the Cherokees, who had borrowed the idea from Euro-American settlers to the south and east.1 Contact and trade between the Cherokees and the new Euro-Americans grew during the eighteenth century and was gradually accompanied by sporadic settlement of the newcomers in Cherokee lands. Shifting alliances in the last half of the eighteenth century among the French, English, and various Indian tribes were replaced by growing tensions with the U.S. government during the early nineteenth century. Calls for the removal of

the Cherokees from the Southeast crescendoed when gold was discovered in areas of northern Georgia where there were Cherokee settlements. In 1838–39 the Cherokees were forced to go to what became Oklahoma in what is known as the Trail of Tears. The displacement of the Cherokees has a direct relevance to the later history of the region, for later generations of European Americans would also be removed from the Smokies by the federal government. Whatever their ancestors thought about the Cherokee removal, the generations of the twentieth century came to see a parallel between the Trail of Tears and their own removal from the North Shore a century later. The removal of the Cherokees, though incomplete, accelerated the flow of EuroAmerican settlers into the Smokies. At the time their cultural backgrounds were heterogeneous. Some came from the east and southeast in the Carolina Piedmont. Some moved southward through the Valley of Virginia from Pennsylvania or Virginia, filtering down through the Appalachians or down into the Piedmont and then back to the Appalachians. Some went through the Valley of Virginia into the Tennessee Valley, then back across the Smokies into North Carolina. In fact, a surprising number of families in western North Carolina today came from Cades Cove and elsewhere in eastern Tennessee after the Cherokee removal. Ethnically, the new arrivals were diverse. The common description of them as “ScotsIrish” — that is, descendants of Scottish settlers in Ireland’s Ulster province who in a later generation migrated to the United States and followed the roads south and west from Pennsylvania through the Valley of Virginia — fits only one subset. Many migrated from England, Scotland, Wales, and southern Ireland, and many more came from continental Europe, particularly German-speaking regions. French, Swedish, Dutch, and other European ethnic traditions were also represented. Most of the new settlers, whatever their ethnic ancestry, were born in the United States and thus brought their Pennsylvania, Virginia, or Carolina cultural influences with them. Though they were diverse, they quickly intermarried and in other ways began fashioning a common regional culture. Some of the new arrivals brought slaves into the region, thus adding African Americans as a third major ethnic category (“third” if one considers all the Euro-Americans ethnically related). African American escapees and free persons also found their way into the area, and some Cherokees owned African American slaves. There was little direct mixing between African Americans and Euro-Americans, but both groups intermarried more frequently with the Cherokees. Other African Americans arrived in the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as workers for railroad construction, mining, and industry. As the twentieth century progressed, however, the African American population declined. Today there are some African Americans in larger towns, but hardly any in the countryside. Historical and Cultural Origins of the Region

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Emergence of a Regional Culture The origins of the people of the region were varied, but their ethnic and national traditions combined with the new way of life and key historical developments to create a regional culture. This culture has certain unique properties but shares a great deal with the more widely distributed Appalachian culture of neighboring states. One useful way of charting the emergence of an overarching regional culture is to observe the religious practices of the region. The new arrivals in western North Carolina were not only varied in terms of European or other ethnic origin, they were also of different religious backgrounds. We tend to assume that everyone who migrated into the region was Protestant, but some arrivals came from Catholic backgrounds. And the Protestants may have been Episcopal, Presbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran, or Reform (that is, European Calvinists). Actually, frontier America during the country’s early years had few churches, and many people had no active religious affiliation at all. But the region, like other parts of the southern Appalachians, was touched by the lingering influences of the Second Great Awakening, which swept the frontier at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. This religious revival movement was itself a sign of an emergent frontier regional culture in America. What eventually developed was a region dominated by Baptist churches in the rural areas and Baptist and Methodist churches, along with a few Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, in the towns. In many ways the rise of the Baptist domain was a sign of the coalescing of a new regional culture that emerged in much of the Upland South. The Baptists were originally Calvinistic in doctrine and church organization, but as the nineteenth century wore on they were the source of waves of new ideas. Hence one finds in the region today numerous Missionary Baptist churches, as well as other denominations that emphasize free will and missionizing in their doctrine. They also added harmony, musical instruments, and other innovations to the church service. The newer trends among Baptists produced counter-reformation efforts to preserve or restore the old Calvinist vision, which accounts for the scattering of Primitive Baptist churches through the region today. The lay of the land and the pattern of settlement had a profound influence on the regional culture that gradually emerged. Essentially there were (and still are) two systems of social organization in the region. The towns and broader river valleys comprise one system, while the rural coves comprise another. The towns include county seats, such as Bryson City (Swain County), Sylva ( Jackson County), and Robbinsville (Graham County). In addition, the town of Cherokee (Swain County) is controlled by the Eastern Band of Cherokee and dominated by tourism. Other towns are discernibly smaller, and all lie along the larger rivers in the Little

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Tennessee River system. Along those rivers — the Tuckasegee, Little Tennessee, and Nantahala and their larger tributaries — lie expanses of fertile bottomland. This land was settled and farmed by landowners who tended to be more prosperous and better connected to commercial establishments in the towns. Some had slaves, and the African Americans in the region were therefore concentrated in the towns and along riverside bottomland nearby. Interestingly, the site of Kituhwa, the “mother village” of the Cherokees, lies on just such a stretch of bottomland between present-day Cherokee and Bryson City. The rural coves comprise a different system, even if the residents relied on the larger towns as commercial centers. The word “cove” describes those narrower creek valleys that in other parts of the Appalachians, and often in western North Carolina, are called “hollows,” or “hollers.” Coves may contain arable bottomland, but usually less than in the larger river valleys. The coves are well suited for small subsistence farming augmented by modest cash crops, but less suitable for larger-scale commercial farming. The network of branches and creeks favors, or even dictates, a pattern of dispersed rural settlement. People of the coves did not cluster in tight villages; they spread out onto small patches of arable land surrounded by woods. There they could combine subsistence gardening and farming with hunting and gathering from the surrounding woods and streams. That is the pattern of life that emerged in the nineteenth century. The people of the coves, of course, traveled to the towns from time to time, traversing the broad river valleys to get there. Some moved to town to take jobs or open businesses, so that today names found in the coves can also be found in the towns, though there are names in the towns that are not found in the coves. Over the years a cultural divide developed between town and cove, not only in this area but throughout the Appalachians. They were all connected in a larger economic system, yet there was and remains today a degree of mutual mistrust between the town and valley dwellers and the cove dwellers.2

Logging, Mining, Manufacturing A third factor augmented this dual system of land use and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The boom industries of logging and mining, which exploited regional resources, generated boomtowns that expanded rapidly for several years, then contracted just as rapidly when the industry judged the area to be no longer profitable. Some boomtowns, such as Proctor on Hazel Creek, were small older towns that expanded greatly during their boom era. Others, such as the logging town of Ravensford along Raven Fork of the Oconaluftee River in Swain County, were created for the industry and vanished when the industry departed. Systematic logging transformed the region in various ways. It eliminated the “old-

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growth forest” that had survived into the twentieth century in many areas. Now there are only remnants of the stands of giant hemlocks and tulip poplars that were common throughout the region in living memory. Many areas were virtually denuded of trees, and the resulting runoff and silting damaged streams throughout the region. The destruction of forests profoundly affected many plant and animal species and with them the huntingand-gathering pattern of culture that engaged and supported so many cove residents. The boomtowns, meanwhile, beckoned with jobs that supported a cash economy, only to disappear when logging was completed in that area. As logging began shifting its major efforts to the Pacific Northwest, many of the generation who had turned to logging in the region followed the jobs to Washington and Oregon. Today logging remains a regional industry of great importance, but a more measured level of continuous logging has supplanted the older boom-and-bust pattern. Meanwhile, throughout the region, including in the national parks and national forests, young forests have replaced the old-growth forests that disappeared in the first half of the twentieth century. Mining has a long history in the region, punctuated by periodic new discoveries of gold, copper, and other metals. Most nineteenth-century mining consisted of small-scale operations, but by the twentieth century some operations were larger, including intensive mining on Eagle Creek before the creation of the national park. Mining has historically tended to follow boom-and-bust cycles correlating to the fluctuations of the price of various metals. But mining never had the societal impact in the region that logging had in the early twentieth century. Similarly, manufacturing has had only a modest impact on the social and economic life of the region. In fact, the largest impact of manufacturing in the twentieth century was the magnet of manufacturing jobs outside, but within striking distance, of the region. These included jobs in the cotton mills and furniture factories in the western Piedmont of North Carolina and with Alcoa and other industries across the Smokies in the Tennessee Valley. A few factories sprang up in the region proper, such as the Singer factory in Bryson City and the Jackson Paper Manufacturing Company in Sylva, but the lack of railroads and, until recently, four-lane highways to facilitate transportation discouraged factory construction in the region. The pattern of development in the region parallels that in other parts of the southern and central Appalachians. Although extractive industries have exported logs and minerals, the most important export since the mid-nineteenth century has been people. The population of the region grew rapidly, but the ability of the land and the local economy to sustain people did not grow. The population explosion throughout the Appalachians in the nineteenth century fueled the westward expansion of the country, and in the twen90

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tieth century has continued to send Appalachian migrants north, east, west, and south in search of jobs and a new life.

Historical Traumas The history of the region has been punctuated by a series of “historical traumas.” The term comes to us from Carmaleta Littlejohn Monteith, who is active in educational and cultural programs for the Eastern Band of Cherokee. She used it in conversation during an interview we conducted with her husband, Max Monteith (Figure 4-1). The Cherokee tribe suffered disease, defeat, and displacement in the eighteenth century, but their great historical trauma at the hands of the U.S. government was their removal in 1838–39. The Treaty of New Echota, signed by a small minority of Cherokee leaders, none of whom were from western North Carolina, ceded Cherokee lands in the Southeast in exchange for a payment and land in what is now Oklahoma. President Andrew Jackson pushed through the negotiations, and his successor, Martin Van Buren, issued the order for the forced removal in 1838. In the long and arduous march westward, now called the Trail of Tears, several thousand people died.3 Some North Carolina Cherokees were able to gain exemptions from the removal because of intermarriage and other factors. Others hid to avoid being rounded up. According to modern Cherokee legend, one Cherokee, Tsali, killed two soldiers while resisting removal of his family. He later surrendered voluntarily to protect the small band of remaining Cherokees and was put to death. His heroic resistance and selfless sacrifice is legendary, not only among the Cherokees but throughout the region. Catherine Albanese points out that his story functions as a contemporary origin story for the Eastern Band of Cherokee, who are descendants of those who remained.4 The next historical trauma for the region was the Civil War and its aftermath. This area of western North Carolina generally supported the Confederate cause. Many headstones in regional cemeteries testify to service for the Confederacy. Since slaveholding was limited in the region, and rare in the coves, one presumes that the region supported the Confederacy primarily out of a sense of family and community ties, and loyalty to North Carolina and the South. The Cherokees also generally favored the Confederates — perhaps in part out of a mistrust of the federal government. But there is much evidence of division on this issue throughout the region. Some fought for one side and some for the other, and some simply laid low, hoping to avoid the consequences of war, including the marauding gangs who used the chaos of wartime as an opportunity for their own depredations. Residents of eastern Tennessee, just across the Smokies, tended to sympathize with Historical and Cultural Origins of the Region

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figure 4-1 Alan Jabbour and Max Monteith inspect North Shore maps drawn by Max’s brother David Monteith, during an interview at Max and Carmaleta Littlejohn Monteith’s home, Cherokee, Swain Co., N.C., July 29, 2004

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the Union more than did their North Carolina neighbors, though there were divisions there as well. Thus the war brought out and accentuated tensions between the two sides of the Smokies. Despite family links across the state line, a sense of suspicion and resentment toward East Tennessee continues to this day in western North Carolina. In matters pertaining to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it takes the form of a long-standing and widely held conviction that Tennessee residents have received more benefits from the park than North Carolinians. During the long aftermath of the Civil War, the dangers of war may have subsided, but the Reconstruction period seems to have brought little real peace and less prosperity to the region and the Appalachians generally. While stability may have returned as the century wore on, it was disrupted again by the dawning of the era of wholesale logging. The region was not accessible by railroad till the early twentieth century, when logging companies brought rail lines to the region to haul logs to market. World War I also had an impact, as many young men from the region served in the armed forces in Europe and at home. But unless the loss of the old-growth forest is counted as a historical trauma, the next major regional trauma came in the late 1920s, on the eve of the Great Depression, Historical and Cultural Origins of the Region

with the first of two removals of the people of the Smokies in order to create Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Though logging was the only traditional industry to establish itself in the region, the twentieth century brought the development of another industry, tourism, that profoundly affected the region’s development. Tourism was rooted in a growing national perception of the region as naturally beautiful, ecologically distinctive, and culturally fascinating. Its forested mountains are among the highest in the eastern United States, and the region is filled with rushing rivers, waterfalls, and other scenic attractions. Its peaks and coves contain an extraordinarily diverse array of plant and animal species. By the early twentieth century the growth of local-color literature and travelers’ observations contributed to an image of the Smokies as a culturally remote region with attractive and venerable customs. The earliest tourism consisted of hunting and fishing visits by outsiders, often well-to-do men from American cities who used the region’s early hunting lodges as rural retreats. Such hunters introduced the European wild boar into the region, and it thrives to this day. Gradually, as the twentieth century progressed, a broader family-oriented tourism began to take hold throughout the region. Taking a wider view, America inherited from the late nineteenth century and developed in the twentieth century the concept of national parks as extraordinary places set aside for safeguarding and public appreciation. The broader conservation movement, as well as the parallel movement for historic preservation, spawned the idea of national parks as a coherent, systematic national response to the conservation and preservation impulse. In a sense, setting aside parks was a way of compensating for and assuaging the anxiety about change, and thus it was a favored tool of the Progressives at the turn of the century. Yellowstone National Park was our first national park (1872), and many more followed quickly as advocates fleshed out the concept in the ensuing decades. Great Smoky Mountains National Park was not one of the earliest. In fact, by the time it was created in the 1920s and 1930s, an argument for creating a park in the Smokies was that the eastern states were seriously underrepresented in the national park system. One of the strongest advocates for the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park was Horace Kephart, whose book Our Southern Highlanders first appeared in 1913, was revised and expanded in 1922, and is still in print.5 The book is a perfect example of America’s spiritual migration from the nineteenth-century ideal of the pioneer or frontiersman to the twentieth century’s idealized image of the Appalachians, after the closing of the Western frontier. The mountains came to be seen as a cultural byway that somehow, through isolation, preserved the customs and values of the old American frontier and the British culture that helped shape it. Kephart, a librarian who had grown up in Pennsylvania and Iowa, moved to the Smokies in 1904. He lived on Hazel Creek from Historical and Cultural Origins of the Region

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1904 to 1907, returning after an absence of a few years to live in Bryson City till his death in an automobile accident in 1931. In honor of his writings celebrating the region and his advocacy for the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the National Geographic Board named a peak in western North Carolina after him. But the local memory of him is mixed. Many contemporary residents of the region resent his more stereotypical characterizations of the Appalachian mountaineer. All these forces culminated in the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park beginning in the late 1920s. On the North Carolina side of the Smokies, the removal of people to create the park primarily affected homesteads and families situated at the higher elevations of the mountains. Mostly they moved down the creeks to the communities below the park boundary. They were changing homes, and sometimes they were changing communities, but in most cases they were not radically changing their way of life. None could imagine that in less than a generation there would be a second and more drastic removal when the building of Fontana Dam was announced. Fontana Dam was a project of the tva, which had already brought electricity to thousands of citizens throughout the Tennessee River basin. The largest dam in the eastern United States, Fontana Dam was justified, in part, as a key ingredient of the war effort during World War II. The primary purpose of the dam was to supply electricity to Alcoa, the aluminum manufacturing company located just west of the Smokies in eastern Tennessee. To this day, the visitor to Fontana Dam will see electric power wires leaving the dam and following a path directly toward the Tennessee border to the west — to some Carolinians one more piece of evidence that Tennessee gets the better of all deals involving the Smokies. The dam created a lake that raised the river level hundreds of feet and extended for nearly thirty miles. In 1943 and 1944, as workers toiled feverishly to finish the dam, thousands of residents of the Smokies were told they must leave their homes. The removal included not only people at the lower elevations, whose property would be flooded, but also many whose homes were on higher ground who would be cut off as high water inundated State Road 288, the only east-west access on the north side of the river. They all had to leave. These inhabitants of Hazel Creek, Forney Creek, Chambers Creek, Noland Creek, and other creeks and branches came to be known in retrospect as the residents of the “North Shore,” meaning the land on the northern side of Fontana Lake. By the end of 1944, the removal was complete and the lake was rising. Most of them never saw their houses again, despite assurances that they could return to retrieve additional belongings. Some of the houses and outbuildings were dismantled to be used as scrap lumber; many more were simply burned. Most of the people who had been removed settled in Swain, Graham, and Jackson 94

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Counties. Some crossed over to towns across the Smokies in East Tennessee, such as Maryville. Others sought employment in towns farther away in North Carolina, such as Waynesville or Marion. A large concentration of the displaced stayed around Bryson City, near the eastern end of the new lake. They had received compensation for their land, but the land in Bryson City was much more expensive, perhaps reflecting a spike in market prices caused by their arrival. Many resisted the removal. One point that they made repeatedly, according to their later testimony, was that they needed access to their cemeteries on what came to be called the North Shore. They wanted to be able to show respect for deceased family and kin by decorating the graves properly. Decoration Day was for them one of the year’s most important holidays. The religious custom of Decoration Day, which bound them together as a community and reaffirmed their ties with their deceased families and ancestors, had to be salvaged to assuage this traumatic removal. The federal government, in a formal 1943 document, proclaimed that, as soon as the war was over, a road with a “dustless surface” would be built on the North Shore. Not long afterward, the land that the tva had taken was turned over to the National Park Service to expand Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The people who were displaced had to find consolation in the knowledge that after the war the government would build a new road that would provide access to the cemeteries they had left behind. People connected with the North Shore sometimes speak today of the “first park,” meaning the earlier boundary of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the “second park,” in reference to the expansion after Fontana Dam was built. They note that some people had to go through not one removal but two. Taken together, the two removals suggest to them a pattern of betrayal and indifference, and the double impact ensured that the result would be felt as a historical trauma by those who endured it. North Shore residents began to see the Trail of Tears a century earlier in a new light. They are quick to say that they are not claiming their suffering was equal to the suffering of the Cherokee people, but they add that they now empathize with the Cherokees and see the succession of historical traumas as a long-term pattern, or legacy, of their home region, one in which the federal government is profoundly implicated. Thus the historical traumas become the political backdrop for understanding how Decoration Day has evolved in the region. Fontana Dam may be the largest dam in the eastern United States, but it is not the only one in the region. Other dams are nearby in western North Carolina, and the tva has built many dams throughout the Tennessee Valley. Some may have generated protests, and, no doubt, all of them caused some people a great deal of pain. But only the removal in preparation for Fontana Dam created a social and cultural movement that has lasted for decades. Before the building of the dam, the land between the lake and the Historical and Cultural Origins of the Region

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Smokies previously had either no name at all or generic names like “the lower end of the county.” Most people identified themselves more locally; they thought of themselves as being from Hazel Creek, Forney Creek, Chambers Creek, or the like. Out of the crucible of the removal and the sense of grievance against the policies of Great Smoky Mountains National Park — policies that discouraged people from returning to decorate the graves of their ancestors — was born a social and cultural movement strong enough to name the entire area “the North Shore.”

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chapter five

The North Shore: Removal and Revolution The 1943 Agreement

In 1943, with the construction of Fontana Dam well under way, the four governmental parties with vital interests in the project — the tva, the State of North Carolina, Swain County, and the U.S. Department of the Interior— signed a “memorandum of agreement.” The memorandum has many provisions, but it focuses primarily on providing for a new road on the north side of the soon-to-be-created Fontana Lake. The rising water would submerge N.C. State Road 288, which had been paid for in part by Swain County. The new road would presumably traverse the same general east-west course as the old N.c. 288 but would be on higher ground, above the shoreline of the lake-to-be. Many people today say that the plan to transfer the land to the park was not made public until late in 1943, after many people had already moved out. But the document makes it clear that the land the tva was acquiring would be transferred to Great Smoky Mountains National Park as soon as the dam was built. Hence the Department of the Interior, on behalf of the National Park Service, is a party to the agreement, and the proposed road is called the “Park Road.” Regarding the road, the agreement says: The Department [of the Interior] represents and states that it has evolved a Master Plan for the development of the Park . . . , and that said Master Plan includes an “around the Park” road, of which the Park section of a projected road between Deals Gap and Bryson City constitutes an important link. . . . the Department agrees that, as soon as funds are made available for that purpose by Congress after the cessation of the hostilities in which the United States is now engaged, the Department will construct or cause to be constructed the following described sections of road, all of said sections being hereinafter collectively referred to as the “Park Road.”1

figure 5-1 Helen Cable Vance at home, Jackson Co., N.C., August 19, 2004

And it offers the following specifications for the road: “Said Park Road when constructed shall as a minimum standard be finished throughout its length with a dustless surface not less than twenty (20) feet in width.”2 The agreement provides two stipulations. First, no further action was to be taken until after the end of World War II. Second, all commitments in the agreement were subject to Congressional appropriation for the project. That can sound to the reader today like an effort to build into the agreement a means of backing out later, but the stipulation that the agreement was subject to the availability of Congressional appropriations is a reasonable legal caveat, especially for a major construction project. There is every reason to believe that the signers of the document all expected the road to be built after the war. In fact, the first major section of the road was eventually built, ascending from just outside Bryson City several miles into the park. The road even includes a tunnel under a ridge, but just on the other side of the tunnel, the road stops. The incongruity of its ending just beyond a tunnel inspired someone to nickname it “The Road to Nowhere,” and the name stuck. The 1943 agreement clearly specifies what each of the parties agrees to do. But as to the reasons for building the road, it is silent, except to point out that the Department of the Interior envisioned the road as a component of a larger roadway around the park. That much seems logical; indeed, the Tennessee side of the park has just such a road leading from U.s. 441 west and southwest to Deals Gap. The road envisioned in the 1943 agreement would begin where the Tennessee road ends and continue along the park’s south flank, ending in Bryson City. 98

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Many former residents of the North Shore, past and present, cite another purpose for the road unmentioned in the 1943 agreement. A key issue raised by the families who were to be removed, and by their community leaders, was maintaining access to the many family and community cemeteries dotting the North Shore (twenty-seven by current count). They wanted a means of access to the cemeteries, they said, because one should show respect for deceased relatives and ancestors by visiting, cleaning, and decorating their graves. They and their descendants have stoutly maintained for the past half century that the road was promised as a means of ensuring that they would be able to visit their cemeteries for this purpose. Helen Cable Vance (Figure 5-1) recalls: And that contract for the road would never have been written if it hadn’t been for the people insisting on a way to go back to the cemeteries. They weren’t going to put a road in there. That wasn’t even part of it when the tva came in there: “There’s no road going to be back in there.” But they kept saying, “We’re going to have a way back to our cemeteries.” A lot of them didn’t sign to leave those graves until they got promise of a road back in there. Alan Jabbour: So, you actually remember this being discussed as an issue? Helen Vance: Yes, well! And I remember when the tva man came to the house and told Daddy — this is before he even signed to leave his — he said, “I’m going to have them [the family burials] moved,” but he hadn’t signed it. This was about the last of 1942 or the first of 1943. My brothers were both in service at the time. And this tva man came by the house, and he told him they are going to build a road back in here. And I remember how happy my daddy was that they had finally decided to build a road back where they could come back. A lot of people left thinking they could come back and put these markers [headstones with identifying inscriptions] there. And they didn’t get a chance to.3 Of course, there were other motives for building such a road. The Department of the Interior considered it part of a plan for the park’s development, providing a key section of a road that would encircle the park. Swain County no doubt thought of it as providing a potential boost for tourism on the North Carolina side of the park, and many current advocates of the road are interested in economic development. In Swain County, there is a lingering feeling that Bryson City never benefited adequately from Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But even those who support the road today for economic development also support it for access to the North Shore cemeteries. Cemetery access is a paramount and universal issue today, and many people who remember the removal state that it was connected with the proposed North Shore Road from the beginning.

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The Early Response to Removal After the 1943 agreement and the construction of Fontana Dam, the public record suggests that there was a lull in discussions regarding the proposed North Shore Road. World War II continued until 1945. Then for a few years people returning from the war gradually settled back into civilian life, and at the federal level there was a great effort to reduce government expenditures in the postwar years after the burst of spending and accumulated debt caused by the war effort. But by the 1950s there were stirrings again on the subject of access to the North Shore. A short section of the planned road was built at the Fontana end in the late 1940s, and in 1959 the State of North Carolina built the portion from Bryson City to the boundary of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, as called for in the 1943 agreement. The federal government continued the construction for several miles within the park border. But in 1962, as opposition to the road rose within the growing environmental movement, the federal government suspended construction just beyond a newly completed tunnel. And there matters stand today. Although there has been construction since then on various other roads within the park, there has been no construction on the North Shore Road since the 1960s. After the removal, since there was no restriction on returning to visit old homesites, some individuals managed to do just that. From people’s present-day accounts, visits to homesites and cemeteries that were relatively accessible, because they lay close to the Fontana or Bryson City ends of the lake, happened with some frequency. A few people who owned or hired boats crossed the lake and revisited less accessible areas. Certain areas of former population concentration were not easily reached, however, either overland or by boat. And although some older roads and bridges, such as the road and bridges running up Hazel Creek, were maintained by the park to provide access for hikers, horseback riders, maintenance crews, and fire protection, other roads were neglected and quickly grew impassable. Some cemeteries were maintained, particularly those close to Fontana or Bryson City, while others that were less accessible became overgrown. An extended and public protest occurred in the 1950s over cemetery access. Green Lee Hill, who had family ties to Paynetown Cemetery near Fontana, wrote a letter to Sen. Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee after a Mother’s Day decoration in 1953. He protested that the attendees at the decoration were rerouted to a neglected, impassable road. A petition to the park with sixty-one signatures demanded better access. Hill continued to correspond with the park on access to Paynetown Cemetery, and in 1959 he paid an angry visit to Superintendent Fred Overly’s office. His trenchant cultural challenge to the superintendent has become part of the oft-quoted lore of the North Shore: “You don’t have much regard

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for the dead, do you? Down here we like our dead folks and like to pay proper respect to them at these homecoming affairs.”4 As the tide of requests and protests regarding cemeteries rose, the park undertook a survey of cemeteries in the park in 1960–61, revealing a large number of cemeteries throughout the park with a variety of original maintenance agreements. It was clear, Superintendent Overly observed in 1961, that more active maintenance of cemeteries would be necessary in the future. As our report for the North Shore Road Environmental Impact Statement shows in some detail, the policy of the National Park Service and Great Smoky Mountains National Park toward cemetery maintenance wavered over the decades.5 There was always some sense that cemeteries are a cultural resource to be protected, but there was also a sense during difficult periods for the National Park Service budget that the cost of maintaining the North Shore cemeteries was more than the park could allocate. Civilian Conservation Corps crews could be enlisted for park projects in the 1930s, but by the early 1940s such job programs had evaporated. In the decade after World War II, the overall thrust of Congressional actions was to reduce government and pay down accumulated war debt, not to expand programs like national parks. The pattern of the 1950s and early 1960s continued without dramatic change into the 1970s. Many individual requests came to the park regarding cemeteries, and individuals and families visited some North Shore cemeteries. One group made efforts to maintain Proctor Cemetery on Hazel Creek, but most cemeteries did not fare well.6 Apparently public awareness of the issue of cemetery access was not very high. But Congressman Roy Taylor, whose western North Carolina district included the park, championed building the road called for in the 1943 agreement, and the first section was built several miles into the park in the 1960s. Growing opposition to further construction began to take shape, however, both from old-fashioned park lovers and from a new breed of environmentalists and advocates of protecting “wilderness.” Eventually construction ceased, and the Park Road of 1943 was on its way to becoming the Road to Nowhere.

The North Shore Revolution On Sunday, October 17, 1976, a reunion of former North Shore residents was held at the Deep Creek Campground, just inside the park boundary not far from Bryson City. The Smoky Mountain Times reported that “450 former Fontana Dam area residents” gathered for this first reunion, and “plans were being made for a follow-up reunion next year, according to organizers Helen C. Vance and Ruth V. Hicks.”7 At the reunion, conversation reportedly turned to the fact that no decorations had

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been held in most North Shore cemeteries since the expulsion in 1943 and 1944.8 By the spring of 1978, the impulse to revive the decorations had turned into a reality. Helen Vance (Figure 5-1) and her sister Mildred Johnson, with the help of some friends, organized a decoration at Cable Cemetery, and they arranged for four small boats to transport people across Fontana Lake. As Helen Vance tells it: We started with the Cable [Cemetery], because the family had not been back. And they said, “Well, next year on the fourth Sunday in May, . . . we’re going to go back and have a decoration next year.” That was in 1977 or 1978. We let the others know and we put it in the paper. And we went over there beforehand. . . . So many monuments were just laying down over on the ground or whatever. So, we put an article in the paper and also they sent word to the park. So the park called us, and they went back and they had it cleaned up. They wanted to know if we’d go over and look at Cable Cemetery. We did, and they had gone in there and cleaned it up. We were so proud of it! That’s the way it got started. So, we went to that one. And Henry Posey said, “Alright, Helen, if we can go to Cable and get this many people, let’s go to Proctor.” We went to Proctor, and he said, “Let’s go to Bone Valley.” So we just branched out. He says, “What do you think about going to all of them.” I said, “Suits me. Let’s just go.”9 Henry Posey joined Helen Vance and her sisters as a key member of the core group. The first North Shore decoration, at Cable Cemetery, was a great success; so was the second, which took place at Proctor Cemetery on Hazel Creek. Hundreds of people participated, and there was intense media coverage. Thus was a cultural movement born. The leaders soon found themselves negotiating with Boyd Evison, the park superintendent, on a variety of major issues. A schedule was devised for decorations at various North Shore cemeteries, and the park agreed to provide boats to transport visitors for a full summer of Sunday decorations. Pushed some more, the park began supplying vehicles to transport participants, especially the elderly and infirm, up the long trails that lay ahead once participants had debarked on the North Shore. Park staff became active in maintaining the cemeteries, which had suddenly come into the public limelight. The original reunion at Deep Creek took place in the year of the nation’s Bicentennial celebrations, when much attention was being given to the historical and cultural roots of American communities. Helen Vance has said that the Bicentennial, despite its emphasis on local history and culture, was not a direct influence on the North Shore cemetery decoration movement. But Eddie Marlowe, who attended the early decorations on the North 102

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Shore, offered an observation revealing how much the idea of celebrating one’s roots was in the air: “I think that it’s important for people to know your heritage. I remember about that same time, maybe a little bit later, Alex Haley come up with the book Roots, and how he traced his ancestors back to Africa and how that opened up so much for him, and it did the same for us here in the Smoky Mountains.”10 In 1978 the public stir about the new decorations on the North Shore led the North Carolina Humanities Committee (now the North Carolina Humanities Council) to fund public presentations on North Shore cemeteries and cemetery decorations, with the stipulation that there be a nonprofit organization to receive the funds. So the movement created a formal organization. As Helen Vance tells it, We put on a program and we went to different places and gave a program. We went to Bryson City, Robbinsville, Marion, and Waynesville just more or less telling about our cemeteries and so forth. And that was in I guess about 1978, 1977 somewhere’s about there. . . . So, Charlotte Ross and Dr. Ross, he taught at Appalachian, and she was working with the North Carolina Humanities Committee at the time. So, she said, “Well, in order for you to get a grant to promote your cemeteries and your access, you’ll have to have a name.” So, we sat around at my dining room table there and we were going back and forth with names, how we would get a name. And I said, “Hazel Creek, Fontana.” I said, “No, we want a word that includes everybody.” So, from the end of the dam to the top of the dam, we wanted to include all the people. So, we came up with “Cemeteries on the North Shore.” And that’s the way the name came up.11 So the organization became the North Shore Cemetery Association, embracing a new term representing the entire region north of Fontana Lake. Superintendent Boyd Evison seems to have been quite accommodating, as if he sensed the efficacy of this new grassroots movement with which he was negotiating. But he decided to draw the line on one issue. Plastic flowers had become widespread in regional decorations by the 1970s (see Chapter 2). He ruled that they were inappropriate and inadmissible in park cemetery sites, presumably for environmental, aesthetic, or historical reasons. Apparently, after a policy standoff, people ignored the park’s edict and continued to use plastic flowers for North Shore decorations.12 Today park maintenance staff clear away all of the previous year’s decorations — nowadays not the old “plastic” style but the new “fabric” style — in the weeks before the new decoration takes place. Another park policy, this one governing the replacement of headstones, sought to preserve the original headstones and limit the size of any replacement stones. This, too, met with some challenges, though over the years the North Shore pilgrims seem to have The North Shore: Removal and Revolution

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internalized the concept (Figure 3-26).13 Today one finds new markers beside the old headstones in North Shore cemeteries, but, with only a few exceptions, the new markers maintain the size, modesty, and grace of the old regional cemetery style. Thus the North Shore cemeteries preserve a historical demeanor more than most other regional cemeteries, where newer burials and some replacement markers reflect modern styles in headstone size, shape, and carving. The movement matured in the 1980s. Its name oscillated between “North Shore Cemetery Association” and “North Shore Historical Association,” reflecting the broadening context in which members saw its labors. In 1986 it launched a newsletter called Fontana, edited by Ruth Chandler, joined somewhat later by Willa Mae Trull. Fontana explored facets of North Shore family and community history, including personal memoirs of North Shore life from various contributors. According to Helen Vance, the number of North Shore cemeteries being decorated grew till about 1980, when it reached a level that has been maintained with little change up to the present day. Another sign of the maturing of the movement was the creation of the North Shore Road Association, which under Linda Hogue’s leadership has focused on advocacy for building the long-sought-after road. The annual schedule for North Shore decorations is widely distributed throughout the region, and decorations are attended by immediate family members and friends, wellwishers, and others from the region and beyond. A core group of active members attends multiple decorations, including not only organizers like Helen Vance and her sisters Mildred Johnson and Eleanor Rhinehart but also several long-term movement organizers and a regular group of musicians. Helen Vance’s husband, Harry Vance, a Baptist minister, sometimes attends and delivers the message. Others go for the service, the camaraderie, and the excursion into the Smokies, whether their immediate family is involved or not.

The Name and Identity of the North Shore It is interesting to try to determine when the term “North Shore” began to be used. It refers to the north shore of Fontana Lake, and it did not exist in the pre–Fontana Dam local lexicon. Earlier terms such as “the lower end of the county” did not distinguish between the north and south sides of the Little Tennessee River. The two sides of the river were essentially treated as one subregion. The term “North Shore” may have arisen first as a coinage of the federal agency staff in the region, or it could have been coined by the local press. No one now knows from what source the term arose, but it cannot be older than the 1950s or 1960s. In 1969 Superintendent Keith P. Neilson used the term in a letter to Green Lee Hill,

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preserved in the park archives: “The question of access to the cemeteries behind the lake, which are accessible by trail or boat only, is something beyond our control. It is true that construction of the proposed road on the north shore of Fontana Lake would have made these cemeteries much easier to get to, but unavailability of construction funds in the past has resulted in very little progress in fulfillment of the Park Service commitment.”14 This use of the term suggests that park staff were using it in their internal discussions during the 1960s. By the late 1970s, the term had become the public byword for a newly identified place and a new cultural movement. An unpublished essay by Zora Jenkins Walker in 2003, entitled “A Road Is Forever,” evokes the easy back-and-forth access that bound together both sides of the pre-Fontana Little Tennessee River into one region: Although my home was on the Graham County side of the Little Tennessee River, I also felt at home on the Swain County side: Fontana, Ritter, Wayside, Proctor, and upper Hazel Creek. I visited my relatives over there, the Laneys and my great-uncle Martin Hyde and his wife, Rachel Farley Hyde. He was the postmaster at Proctor. I think I have walked about every trail there was over the mountains from Wayside to Proctor. I also rode the train occasionally and made a few trips in an automobile over the years. Our two family doctors lived over across the river. . . . We’d cross the river in a paddle boat in different places, or the big ferry boats at Wayside and Fontana. I remember when I had yellow jaundice. We called it “yellow janders.” I had to walk all the way to see Dr. Clark and then back home. Although I felt pretty bad, that was the only way we had to make the trip.15 Fontana Lake disrupted the earlier cultural interconnectedness between the two sides of the river, and in the postwar years a new special identity began to take hold among those who had been removed and their descendants. Thus people now speak of themselves as being “from the North Shore,” and they sometimes seem to imply that the term confers a special distinction. When the interviews we undertook for the Environmental Impact Statement involved couples born on opposite sides of the lake, the spouse not born on the North Shore would often seem reluctant to join the interview, presuming that we wanted only North Shore memories. Nevertheless, there have always been close family ties between people in Swain, Graham, and Jackson Counties, and though the experiences of the North Shore exiles, particularly the traumas arising from forced removal, are distinctive, the region’s cultural traditions offer no distinctive demarcations between the North Shore and adjacent North

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Carolina counties. Any emergent cultural identity now is due entirely to the experience of removal and the later experience of cultural revival shared by the North Shore exiles and their families.

A Profile of North Shore Decorations Every decoration has its own special character, yet certain recurrent commonalities make each event a performance of a ritual genre with which participants are familiar. Based on several decorations during 2004 and 2007, what follows is a profile of what might be called a typical North Shore decoration.16 On most Sunday mornings from late April through late October, following the published schedule, people gather early at the Cable Cove boat ramp. The boat provided by the park arrives, and people start boarding (Plate 5). A few small decorations may require only one boat trip across the lake to carry all the participants, but some require two, three, or even four trips across. On larger decorations there may even be two boats. A few attendees may also make the journey in private boats. Of course, no boat is needed for decorations at the two extremes of the lake, which can be reached by automobile and on foot. But the boat journey has become something of an emblem of the North Shore decoration experience over the past generation. Many people find that it provides a special meditative solace, as if serving as a spiritual prelude when one leaves the world of daily life and enters the timeless sacred domain. As people arrive, they greet each other warmly. Most of the participants are acquainted, but some may have come from afar and are seeing relatives for the first time in a year or more. They unload items to take along on the trip — food for the dinner on the ground, rain gear (generally there is no shelter where they are going, and rain is a frequent participant in the decorations), walking sticks, and, of course, flowers for the decoration. If there are musicians, they bring their instruments and some wraps to keep them dry. The boatman carefully counts passengers until the maximum is reached, then reassures the rest that he will be back soon. From Cable Cove the boat ride will not be too long if the destination is Hazel Creek, which is just across the lake from Cable Cove, but other North Shore destinations require a longer ride. Park staff greet pilgrims debarking on the North Shore and offer rides in all-terrain vehicles brought in by boat for the occasion. Depending on the particular decoration, the hike may be anywhere from several hundred yards to several miles, and, of course, it is all uphill. Some people happily accept the ride, making sure that elderly people and people who have difficulty walking are served first. But many more, even some of the older generation, turn down the offer, preferring the exercise of a bracing hike in the woods. Even 106

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if one hitches a ride, the last hundred yards are likely to be accessible only on foot (Plate 23). The cemeteries all lie on top of ridges (see Chapters 1, 3), and the wagon roads on which the all-terrain vehicles navigate generally follow the creek beds below the ridges. So for the elderly or handicapped, the last hundred yards are a formidable challenge. How they surmount the challenge to visit loved ones in the cemetery becomes part of the lore of North Shore decorations, narrated in amazement and admiration years later. Tables and benches are located at a point along the path before arrival at the cemetery, and the park staff have usually provided some temporary canopies to shield the food and the diners from rain, should it make an appearance. People drop off their food baskets and coolers before ascending to the ridge top. Upon arriving at the top of the ridge, one sees a clean-swept cemetery with, in most cases, mounded graves, no weeds, and no remaining decorations from last year. The park crew has already been here to make preparations, a central role in the ritual once played by the men of the community before Decoration Day. The first task after arrival is decorating the graves. Those who have brought flowers begin distributing them on graves (Plates 2, 24), beginning with their own family members but perhaps also adding flowers to nearby undecorated graves. One person, in quiet consultation with Helen Vance, gathers up a box of flowers and systematically goes down the grave rows, making sure that a flower or two is tucked into the mound of every grave in the cemetery. A communal tenet of Decoration Day is that no grave should remain undecorated. Children are often enlisted in the act of decorating graves, and their active participation helps seal the experience in their memories, as not just a sylvan adventure but a solemn ritual. As people move from grave to grave, they contemplate each headstone and comment to their family and relatives on the people buried there. This leads to general reflections about life in the Smokies before the removal, past decorations, or stories about various ancestors. Some people bring family scrapbooks and genealogy lists to share and correct in consultation with others. Our interviewees, when describing decorations, often cited conversation with family and community as a central feature of the event, not just an ancillary by-product. At some point, gospel music mingles with and then supplants the conversation (Figure 5-2). The music may be unaccompanied singing, but usually there are some instruments, such as guitar, mandolin, banjo, and fiddle, to provide accompaniment. The gospel singing is in the old-style, four-part singing with overlapping harmonies that oscillate back and forth between the lead singers and the other part singers in the chorus. Most are lively-paced gospel hymns, such as “I’ll Fly Away” or “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” but later in the service there may be some classic contemplative slow hymns. Some leaders The North Shore: Removal and Revolution

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figure 5-2 Hymn singing at Cable Branch Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, August 1, 2004

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always end with “Amazing Grace.” As the singers warm up, the people gather into a loose circle in the cemetery, joining the singing and listening as the music echoes, with that magical outdoor sound, through the open glade in the forest. After several gospel songs are sung and the celebrants are gathered in a circle, Helen Vance — or whoever else is in charge of the event— steps forward and begins by welcoming everyone and making announcements. She may mention efforts that have been made to replace old and unreadable headstones with new stones that properly name and date the people buried in this cemetery. She calls on special guests to say a word. In the 2004 decoration at Proctor Cemetery (see Chapter 1), the guests included our project team and the superintendent of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Dale A. Ditmanson, whose presence as the first superintendent to attend a North Shore decoration spurred much talk. In the 2007 decoration at Cable Cemetery, we were again among the guests invited to speak. She may also recognize attendees from a family prominent in this cemetery. The extended Cable family was recognized in the 2004 Cable Branch Cemetery decoration. Helen Vance then asks someone to collect the offering, and the singers and musicians provide music while a couple of men walk around the circle with hats or caps extended The North Shore: Removal and Revolution

(Figure 5-3). It may be stipulated that the offering is to continue the work of replacing headstones, which is arranged at a discount through W.N.C. Marble and Granite in nearby Marble, North Carolina. She then calls on someone to deliver a message and offer a prayer (Figure 5-4). It may be her husband, Rev. Harry Vance, or someone else. The speaker may have a small Bible for reading a verse, and the Bible remains in hand for visual punctuation of the message delivery. The message itself is a short reflection on a religious theme. The person delivering the message ends with a prayer and may also be asked to add a blessing for the dinner on the ground waiting after the service. There may be one or two more hymns or gospel songs, after which the service is over. Some North Shore decorations include two cemeteries on the same day. Typically, the two cemeteries are reasonably close to one another, though “close” is a relative term in the wilds of the North Shore. Often the two consist of a larger cemetery and a smaller cemetery, and the larger cemetery is normally decorated first. After the service is over, those who wish to decorate the second cemetery proceed there, accompanied by one or two organizers who can provide the structure of a brief program for the pilgrims decoratThe North Shore: Removal and Revolution

figure 5-3 Passing the hat at Cable Branch Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, August 1, 2004

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figure 5-4 Gary Jones offers the message, Cable Branch Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, August 1, 2004

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ing that cemetery. The program may include hymns, remarks by the families connected with the cemetery, and a closing prayer. People linger by the graves to converse and commune, while others make their way down the ridge to spread out the dinner on the ground (Figure 5-5), which is usually spread along a row of tables and benches but sometimes spreads to nearby logs or literally “the ground” (Figure 5-6). At the dinner, some people eat the food they brought for their own families, but often the food is arrayed buffet-style so that anyone can try anything, and all are encouraged to help themselves. After the dinner, people linger for conversation. There may be extraordinary events, such as the double baptism in Hazel Creek that followed the Proctor decoration in 2004 (see Chapter 1). Eventually, people begin walking back to the boat, and park vehicles are again available for those who want a ride back to the lake. The boat loads and departs, while other people linger in conversation, waiting for the boat to return for additional loads. Back on the other side, people talk more but gradually load up their belongings, say their farewells, and depart.

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figure 5-5 Women setting out food for dinner on the ground, Cable Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, May 20, 2007

figure 5-6 Dinner on the ground, Cable Branch Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, August 1, 2004

Political and Social Challenges to the North Shore Movement The principal goal of the North Shore movement has always been to gain access to North Shore cemeteries. Thus, for the movement, the boat trip arrangements of 1978 were a great accomplishment but only a partial fulfillment of their dream. “The Road” (often named with no qualifying adjective) promised in the 1943 agreement was, to them, the primary goal, and it was seen as helping them fulfill a religious obligation, though some also saw it as an economic boon. Pressing their claim for the North Shore Road had consequences they could not have imagined. Changes in the world around them began to affect the road debate. Factors that were of no consequence when the issue was initially raised in the 1940s or 1950s became crucial. The most important development was the growth of the environmental movement, which began changing the focus and character of the debate about the road. As Rohr’s dissertation points out, the older vision of national parks as resources for public use was complemented, and to a degree challenged, by the newer vision of “wilderness.”17 There was in fact a strong push for describing and interpreting the North Carolina side of the Smokies as a wilderness area, and the park seems to have been moving in this direction, quietly and without fanfare, during the later decades of the twentieth century. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of the most heavily visited parks in the national park system, so there emerged a national constituency for keeping the North Shore Road from being built. The size and passion of that environmental constituency stunned and distressed the people of the North Shore. They naturally thought of the debate about the road as a local and regional debate. Suddenly they found themselves cast as opponents of the environmentalists, who often implied or said outright that the North Shore people were against the environment. So many of the people we interviewed protested, “We’re the environmentalists!” that it became a leitmotiv of our interviews. By calling themselves environmentalists, they mean that they have had personal experience with, and feel personal commitment to, the Smokies as stewards of their ancestral lands. The fact is that many of them are passionately devoted to the Appalachian forests. They know the forests and streams intimately, and they want them protected as much as anyone. Many would cheerfully name the species of each tree or plant we encountered along a forest trail as we hiked toward a cemetery for a decoration. And, as one of our local guides said, gesturing toward the mountains on every horizon surrounding her home, “Those environmentalists couldn’t point out which mountains are the Smokies if you asked them right now.” Nor have all their opponents been from afar. Many people in the region oppose the road, and there is enough irritability on the subject that a certain amount of hostile lore

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is floating around. I was told by one man, as a fact, that a lot of those North Shore people call the park saying they want to visit “papaw’s grave,” ask for a free boat ride, then take along fishing gear and make a fishing trip out of it. The narrator had not himself been to a decoration, so he was simply recounting local lore. What is more, a few of the local people who are committed pilgrims to North Shore decorations reflect ambivalence, or even opposition, to building the road. They, too, worry that too much tourism would violate the sanctity of both the cemeteries and the park itself as a natural preserve. The younger generations seem more divided on this point than the older generation, who are unhesitant and unequivocal about their desire to see the road built. Interestingly, all generations we interviewed also said that they support the park and stressed that they did not seek a return of private landholdings in the Smokies. They, in fact, believe in the ideal of the national park as a means of conserving what they regard as their natural and cultural heritage in the North Shore. A few have adopted the argument that they are still the rightful owners of the land until the government fulfills its part of the bargain by building the road. One senses, however, that this is a legalistic or rhetorical challenge rather than a realistic assertion. They want there to be a park, as there is now, but with a road providing better access to their cemeteries. There is a kind of imbalance in the debate about the North Shore Road. Those who argue against the road presume they are making a case against development — the customary threat to environmental protection. Some boosters for Swain County development do in fact support the road. But stories circulate among the North Shore people about being reproached by environmentalists for wanting to bring “McDonald’s” into the park — a thought that horrifies the North Shore people as much as it does the environmentalists. The core of the argument for the road is not prodevelopment at all; it is religious and moral. The religious aspect derives from their feeling of responsibility for showing respect to the graves of their ancestors. The moral aspect undergirds their argument that the road should be built because the government promised to build it, and the government should honor its promises. Environmentalists are not accustomed to such arguments, or fear them, so they fail to acknowledge the religious and moral position of their opponents.

North Shore Decorations Today and Tomorrow If one asks the people attending North Shore decorations today whether they are satisfied with the arrangement that has been worked out with the National Park Service, the responses reveal an interesting complexity. The participants in the decorations still over-

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whelmingly favor building the North Shore Road as the only permanent solution to the problem of access to the North Shore cemeteries. The boat schedule is limiting. One can only visit any given cemetery once a year, and the visit is limited by the schedule of the boat transportation. There is sometimes tension between decoration pilgrims who want to linger and the captain of the boat rented by the park, who naturally wants to finish his duties. Some people also cannot swim and are afraid of boats. And when it rains, a nearby automobile is a refuge, but there is no protection from the elements standing in a cemetery on the North Shore. Yet many people have come to prize the boat experience as part of the special pilgrimage of a North Shore decoration. There is something compelling about the experience of sitting in the boat crossing Fontana Lake. It provides people with a feeling of a journey from the workaday world into a timeless sacred domain. A few devoted regulars at North Shore decorations do not look forward to the building of the road, preferring the special qualities of the present arrangement. Even some who are eager to see the road built acknowledge that they may miss the boat journeys. The North Shore decoration movement is at a point of historical transition. If the road were to be built, there would be a reduction or elimination of the use of boats to ferry people across the lake. New patterns would evolve to accommodate a new situation. It would be possible for the decorations to last longer, since travel time will be reduced, and more flowers could be brought for decoration, and more food and other items for a longer dinner on the ground. In fact, Paynetown and Orr Cemeteries, which are accessible by car at the Fontana Dam end of the lake, seemed in 2007 to have significantly richer and fuller decorations than most North Shore cemeteries reachable only by boat. But the engagement of park staff would still be necessary for preparation of the site and shuttling and facilitation between the road and the cemeteries. On the other hand, if the road is not built — as seems increasingly likely in 2009 — the North Shore movement inevitably will face a transition in leadership, as the generation born on the North Shore is replaced by generations for whom the North Shore is not one’s old home but the home of one’s ancestors and a place for pilgrimages. The movement inevitably will need to adjust its mission to take the new realities into consideration. At the Pilkey and Posey Cemetery Decorations in 2007, David Monteith, a member of the Swain County Commission and a North Shore movement leader, spoke about the need for the movement to reassert the right of families from the North Shore to be buried in North Shore cemeteries — an idea that sounded as if it could be part of the future mission for the movement. It is a fact that people have the right to burial in North Shore cemeteries, even though they are now part of the park. Some may be aware of it; others

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may not. The principal barrier to using those cemeteries for burial is that they are accessible only by boat on the date of the once-a-year decoration. But there have been burials at Paynetown and Orr Cemeteries, which lie within the park near Fontana Dam but are accessible by car. Looking back over a generation of decorations using boats in collaboration with the park staff, one must conclude that the partnership between the North Shore movement and the park has been successful and productive. The history of conflict is not forgotten, and tensions remain today over issues such as the park’s resistance to fencing the cemeteries and its insistence on eradicating plantings (“invasive species”) that linger as evidence of the life people once lived on the North Shore. But the issues and tensions should not obscure the accomplishment of the movement and the park in partnership. Together they have created over a generation an extraordinary religious and cultural experience for thousands of people with roots in the region — an experience with profound historical and traditional moorings, and at the same time a grand contemporary creative contribution of this generation of local activists and park staff. It is deeply traditional, and at the same time it stands as a unique accomplishment in American culture.

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chapter six

The Origin, Diffusion, and Range of Decoration Day Distinguishing Two Decoration Days

In earlier chapters we sometimes spoke as if Decoration Day were a single holiday. It may be more helpful to describe two Decoration Days that share the same name and intertwine historically in ways that make them easy to confuse. The southern Decoration Day is an annual holiday observed on various Sundays during late spring and summer over a wide area of America’s rural and small-town South. The tradition is concentrated in the southern Appalachians and in the states to the west and southwest that were settled largely by nineteenth-century migration from the Appalachians. The holiday provides an annual occasion for cleaning a cemetery, decorating graves with flowers and other adornments, and holding a religious service in the newly decorated cemetery. It is thus a time to show respect for and commune with the deceased and to reflect on their lives and times. It is equally an occasion for renewing contacts with relatives and neighbors, and for making new acquaintances. At yet another level, it is a celebration of spring itself, as a time of the annual renewal of life. The northern Decoration Day is primarily a holiday to honor the fallen in battle. It has always been called both Decoration Day and Memorial Day in the northern United States, and it evolved into the contemporary national American holiday called Memorial Day. Its celebration often includes a parade that traditionally goes from the town center to the cemetery for the Decoration Day solemnities and back again. In the nineteenth century it was often organized as a public commemoration by the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans created after the Civil War whose members launched the northern Decoration Day custom in 1868. Created to memorialize the Civil War dead, the northern Decoration Day found ways to adapt as Civil War veterans passed from the scene and twentieth-century wars yielded new warriors to commemorate. Southerners today are keenly aware of the national Memorial Day, and those south-

erners who practice their own Decoration Day sense that it is somehow connected with the northern and national holiday. Thus there is some evidence, especially in border states, of a trend toward the coalescing of southern Decoration Day with the national Memorial Day. In our western North Carolina experience (see Chapter 1), members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars follow the decoration schedule for various cemeteries in order to distribute small American flags on the gravesites of people who served in the armed services. In the North, on the other hand, there is virtually no awareness of the southern Decoration Day. Perhaps because the South lost the Civil War, or because the national publishing and print culture has been historically dominated by the North, the southern Decoration Day remains today almost a hidden cultural tradition, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of southerners either practice it or at least know about it.

The Origin of the Northern Decoration Day Americans sustained more deaths in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined through the Korean War, and historians in recent decades have turned their attention to the social wounds and cultural responses precipitated by this great American trauma.1 One immediate consequence of the war was the urgent need to attend to the hundreds of thousands of war dead, many of whom were buried hastily and with little or no identification in places far from home, often in regions that had supported the opposing side in the war. In response to this situation, Congress provided funds soon after the war ended for the proper burial of Union soldiers who died in battles on Confederate territory, creating a new network of National Cemeteries throughout the southern states. Encyclopedias and other standard reference sources inform the reader that the American holiday called Memorial Day, also known as Decoration Day, arose just after and in response to the Civil War. Several towns in both the North and the South laid claim to being the first community at the end of the war to commemorate the fallen in battle by decorating their graves. But we may turn our attention to two candidates, both southern, for the original inspiration for what emerged after the Civil War as the northern Decoration Day, our contemporary Memorial Day. The first post–Civil War ceremony honoring the fallen in battle seems to have taken place in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 1, 1865. Though it was noted at the time, it was nearly forgotten for more than a century. After Union troops took control of Charleston in early 1865, attention turned to a large number of Union soldiers who had died in a makeshift open-air prison set up by the Confederates on Washington Race Course, a horse-racing track in Charleston. At least 257 Union soldiers had been hastily buried

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there without coffins in unmarked graves. Under supervision of the Union troops and assisted by various white abolitionists and missionaries, a work crew of African American Charlestonians fenced off an area on the race course, built a gate on which was inscribed “Martyrs of the Race Course,” and reburied the Union soldiers properly. Then on May 1 a procession of about 3,000 African American schoolchildren, followed by black women from a society organized to distribute clothes and food to freed people, then by a black men’s Mutual Aid Society, marched into the grounds and around the track singing patriotic and religious songs. The procession ended with the strewing of large quantities of flowers upon the graves. There followed a dedication of the cemetery, more singing, a host of speeches, and picnicking on the race-course grounds. Later a brigade of Union troops marched around the graves and drilled on the grounds. A modern chronicler of this extraordinary event, historian David Blight, calls it (citing northern commentators from the era who used the phrase) “the first Decoration Day.”2 Charleston’s extraordinary Decoration Day at the end of the Civil War bears comparison with another decoration held in 1866, and again in 1867 and thereafter, at Blandford Cemetery, just east of downtown Petersburg, Virginia (Figure 6-1). The cemetery’s burials date from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it continues to function as a civic cemetery today. It also became the repository for as many as an estimated 30,000 Confederate burials transferred from other sites. The city of Petersburg now preserves the church and cemetery as civic monuments. Blandford Cemetery drew the attention, just after the end of the Civil War, of a newly created organization, the Ladies Memorial Association of Petersburg, Virginia, which held a successful memorial event decorating Blandford’s Civil War graves in 1866. The association established June 9 as the annual date for their decoration, in memory of the Petersburg battle on June 9, 1864, in which a local militia of older men and boys (younger men being away with the Confederate army) held off a Union attack. Historian Caroline Janney offers a detailed account of the rise of the Ladies Memorial Association of Petersburg, which inspired similar ladies’ memorial associations throughout the South in the aftermath of the Civil War.3 The organization continues its work today. No evidence has turned up that the leaders of the Ladies Memorial Association of Petersburg were aware of the earlier event in Charleston, but there was some national coverage of the Charleston event, and the two events share certain key elements. In both instances, organizers used the word “decoration” for what they were doing and used flowers as the key means of showing respect for the dead. Both used a processional march to the cemetery (at Blandford, beginning in its second year) to highlight the community’s support. Both had accompanying speeches and prayers, and both may have had music and dinner on the ground, though we have testimony for those features only from Charleston. 118

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In short, both could have served as bona fide models for the northern post–Civil War Memorial Day. Yet only the Petersburg event appears to have been directly involved in what happened next. Though there are competing claims for how Memorial Day arose, all sources give major credit to General Order No. 11 issued on May 5, 1868, by Gen. John Alexander Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic: “The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form or ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.” Mary Cunningham Logan, General Logan’s wife and a political and cultural activist throughout her life, provides an unexpected link between his general order to the Grand Army of the Republic and the postwar decorations of the Confederate graves in Blandford Cemetery. She visited Virginia with friends in March 1868. According to her account in the Los Angeles Daily Times (May 30, 1903): Origin, Diffusion, and Range of Decoration Day

figure 6-1 Blandford Church and Churchyard, Petersburg, Va., May 16, 2007

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We were in Petersburg, Virginia, and had taken advantage of the fact to inspect the oldest church there, . . . and we passed to the building through a churchyard. . . . as we passed through the rows of graves I noticed that many of them had been strewn with beautiful blossoms and decorated with small flags of the dead Confederacy. . . . Gen. Logan . . . met me at the station [and] I told him of the graves of the Southern soldiers in the cemetery at Petersburg. He listened with great interest and then said: “What a splendid thought! We will have it done all over the country, and the Grand Army shall do it! I will issue the order at once for a national Memorial Day for the decoration of the graves of all those noble fellows who died for their country.”4 In another account of the same events, in Reminiscences of a Soldier’s Wife: An Autobiography, Mary Logan describes the cemetery more graphically: In the churchyard near Petersburg we saw hundreds of the graves of Confederate soldiers. These graves had upon them small bleached Confederate flags and faded flowers and wreaths that had been laid upon them by loving hands on the occasion of their Decoration Day. Upon our return . . . I remarked to [General Logan] that I had never been so touched as I was by seeing the little flags and the withered flowers that had been laid on these graves.5 Her characterization of the tiny flags as “bleached” and the flowers as “faded” and “withered” suggests that they were remnants of the decoration carried out the previous year by the Ladies Memorial Association and the townspeople of Petersburg. It is noteworthy that she calls the event “their Decoration Day” — suggesting that she was told that was what they called it. She was seeing the results of the second public decoration organized by the association, which, by contemporary accounts, was a great civic success. Janney, describing the June 9, 1867, decoration, reports that the association “organized the group’s first grand procession from downtown and a memorial service at the city’s largest cemetery, Blandford. According to one observer, ‘every garden and hillside was robbed to pay tribute to valor and endurance.’ Another pronounced it ‘a veritable Sabbath in memory of the dead.’”6 The 1866 and 1867 Petersburg decorations seem not to have been ordinary southern decorations but special memorial events created in the wake of the Civil War. The 1867 procession is unlike typical southern decorations but like the pattern for the northern Decoration Day, which often begins with a parade from downtown to the cemetery. Mary Logan did not see the Petersburg Decoration Day, but it is not unlikely that her empathy 120

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led someone to describe the event to her. It is also noteworthy that the term “Decoration Day,” which she uses for the Petersburg event, though not contained in General Logan’s general order, seems to have been applied widely across the North from the outset to name the new event. Finally, it is worth wondering whether the flowers on this occasion were all freshly cut, or whether they included the paper flowers so widespread in southern decorations in the twentieth century. Live flowers from nine months earlier would have been shriveled and almost unnoticeable after the ravages of summer and winter, but paper flowers might have been better preserved, though faded, as she describes it. Janney notes some telling commentary in both southern and northern newspapers in the wake of the first Grand Army of the Republic decoration on May 30, 1868. The Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch argued that it was inappropriate for the Grand Army of the Republic to imitate a “rebel practice,” saying that it “would be better to adopt a form not founded upon a slavish imitation of rebel customs.” Echoing the Philadelphia paper’s hostility, but for opposite reasons, the Richmond Southern Opinion called the northern Decoration Day “a miserable mockery and burlesque upon a holy and sacred institution, peculiar to Southern people and appropriately due only to the Confederate dead.” It is significant that commentary on both sides recognized cemetery decorations as an existing southern custom.7 Despite the criticisms, the new commemorative holiday, spearheaded by the members of the Grand Army of the Republic, who were in virtually every town and village in the North, swept across the northern states and was instituted in the National Cemeteries in the South, quickly becoming a major event in the nation’s annual calendar. Dozens of orations were published in the late nineteenth century on the occasion of the new holiday and the Civil War sacrifices it commemorates.8 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Decoration Day” poem, in the volume In the Harbor (1882), typifies the Decoration Day poetic tributes of the late nineteenth century, all of which focus on the Civil War dead. Charles Ives’s 1912–13 orchestral piece “Decoration Day,” later the second movement of his Holidays Symphony, evokes the town band marching to the cemetery on Decoration Day, playing for a service, then returning to the town. Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward (1888) begins with its hero falling asleep on Decoration Day. During the twentieth century, as the Civil War receded and new wars intervened, its purview extended to Americans fallen in all wars. Memorial Day, which had always served as one name for the holiday, became its official name. But in northern small towns and countryside, many people still call it Decoration Day. From the start, southern states resisted the northern-inspired holiday. Instead they designated “Confederate Memorial Days” with varying names and dates on a state-byOrigin, Diffusion, and Range of Decoration Day

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state basis, focusing on the Confederate Civil War dead. The Confederate Memorial Days were on fixed dates, though state legislatures selected the dates and they varied from state to state. Thus in date selection as well as in the focus on the war dead, the Confederate Memorial Days are similar to the northern Memorial Day and quite distinct from the southern Decoration Day with its anniversaries varying from cemetery to cemetery. Scholarly analysis and assessment of the southern Decoration Day is scanty. Nearly all the standard encyclopedias and many books on American customs and holidays assume that the northern custom was the original Decoration Day, and most simply ignore the separate grassroots southern tradition, though encyclopedias do usually mention the Confederate Memorial Days. Even some local southern accounts of the southern Decoration Day accept the premise of the northern-influenced historical accounts that the holiday began to honor the fallen dead in the Civil War. One contemporary Arkansas website gives the following summary of Decoration Day: In 1868 General John A. Logan declared Decoration Day for the purpose of decorating the graves of Civil War Veterans. Has since become a day on which all war dead are commemorated. And in more recent times, a day when all graves are decorated. Decoration Days in Newton County are days when family and friends, from near and far, gather to remember the dead. In the past, graves were sometimes decorated with twisted creep paper [crepe paper] and homemade tissue paper flowers, or a cluster of wildflowers. Yuc[c]a Plants [of the genus Yucca] were often planted at graves, known as tombstone plant because of that practice. Past and present, decoration days are times of fellowship . . . often times with dinner on the ground . . . lawn chairs drawn to the shade and visiting about the times of the past.9 This description of a southern Decoration Day envisions devolution from General Logan’s Decoration Day honoring the fallen warriors in the Civil War to a general cemetery observance honoring all ancestors. But it is possible that the flow of cultural influence might have run in the other direction.

In Search of the Southern Decoration Day If one begins with the 1868 general order to the Grand Army of the Republic, the northern Decoration Day has a single point of origin. But the source of the southern Decoration Day is still mysterious. No single person, event, or publication can be pointed to as a source point. Yet it seems clear that the practice is southern, and its practice seems to be strongest in the countryside of a region often loosely described as the Upland South.

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A few documentary details, including the memorial events in Charleston and Petersburg, despite their special characteristics, suggest the possibility that the southern Decoration Day originated in the coastal and piedmont South and was transplanted to the Upland South through westward migration. If so, the Appalachian region, with its pattern of dispersed rural settlement and loose, locally organized community traditions, proved a fertile ground for the tradition as well as a launching pad for its rapid spread west of the mountains in the nineteenth century. Critical literature on the southern Decoration Day is scanty, and most references to the custom come from observers who know it locally but seem not to have a sense of its larger geographic dimensions. One effort to look at the tradition more broadly, James K. Crissman’s Death and Dying in Central Appalachia, based on observations primarily from eastern Kentucky and western Virginia, devotes a chapter to “Funeralizing and Memorial Traditions.”10 “Funeralizing” refers to an older tradition of burying the dead promptly without a funeral and deferring till later the memorial ceremony for the deceased. The deferred ceremony grew more elaborate, distinguished by lengthy testimony offered by preachers and other orators. The practice of funeralizing, once established, sometimes extended itself into repeated memorial services for loved ones on anniversary occasions. Crissman concludes that Appalachian traditions of memorializing the dead — namely, the southern Decoration Day and like practices— are not derived from the northern Memorial Day custom. Instead he proposes that “central Appalachian memorial procedures . . . were derived from the practice of funeralizing. The main difference was that memorial practices involved the entire cemetery and all the dead who were interred within its boundaries, rather than just the person or persons who were buried without a funeral.”11 It is true that funeralizing and Decoration Day have much in common. From cleaning and decorating the cemetery to sacred music, preaching, prayer, and dinner on the ground, the two practices seem cut from the same cloth. But funeralizing memorializes an individual — usually just once — while Decoration Day memorializes everyone in the cemetery annually and is thus a communal ritual. It seems likely that both practices are related laterally, like cultural cousins, and not vertically, like ancestors and descendants in a family tree. Both are folk customs with mysterious origins and collective transmission, and both are a creative response to a deeply felt need to pay respect to the dead in a religious social setting.

The Date of Decoration Day “When does Decoration Day come?” I asked Gay Calhoun of Waynesville, North Carolina, who was born and reared on Forney Creek on the North Shore. He hesitated for a

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moment, then said, as if he had received a flashback, “When the snowballs are in bloom,” thus revealing the deep connection between Decoration Day and the blossoming of spring. Decoration Day in western North Carolina — the grassroots southern Decoration Day, not the national holiday — typically occurs on a Sunday, usually in the late spring. The North Shore decorations are from the fourth Sunday in April through the fourth Sunday in October, in order to accommodate scheduling boats to ferry people across the lake on fifteen North Shore decoration dates. Overall, though, the holiday is associated in the minds of older interviewees with the late spring, and while Gay Calhoun and a couple of others connected Decoration Day with snowballs (of the genus Viburnum), for most people a stronger association was with the blooming roses of late spring. So General Logan’s date for the new northern Decoration Day, May 30, fell squarely within the range of the traditional southern Decoration Day. The southern Decoration Day customarily occurs on Sunday, but the pattern is not universal. The North Shore decoration for Mitchell Cemetery is on a Saturday at the request of families who travel from out of state for the decoration. Elsewhere in the country, a website featuring the cemeteries of Titus County in northeast Texas lists the Decoration Day date for many cemeteries.12 Several are scheduled for Saturday, not Sunday, apparently to avoid competing with Sunday church attendance. The Saturday dates highlight the potential competition between churches and cemetery decorations (see Chapter 2). An important feature of the southern Decoration Day is precisely that its date is not fixed. Most decorations are tied to a specific Sunday, say, the third Sunday of May, but a kind of diversification of decoration dates developed in most localities. This diversification has an important social corollary: people with connections to multiple cemeteries can attend multiple decorations. This diversity of date highlights a key purpose of southern decorations. They are a time to interact with a wide variety of relatives, neighbors, and community members. Several interviewees contrasted this public scope and social breadth of Decoration Day with holidays such as Thanksgiving or Christmas, where gathering the immediate family is more important than seeing distant kin and community acquaintances. Thus Decoration Day is not harnessed to any nationally fixed date, like Independence Day or Thanksgiving. Nor is it tied to a fixed date in the calendar of an organized religion, such as Halloween (October 31), All Hallows Day or All Saints Day (November 1), or All Souls Day (November 2) for the Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church. Instead the floating date points to the custom’s origin and its flourishing in the dispersed rural settlements of America’s Protestant South. Multiple dates do not point to random local variation from a fixed original; instead, they are an indicator of the decentralized worldview out of which the custom arose. The floating date of the southern Decoration Day 124

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contrasts with the fixed date of the northern Decoration Day, which grew out of General Logan’s centrally originating and nationally distributed executive order, and with the fixed dates of the various state-mandated Confederate Memorial Days. Some cemeteries in border areas of the Upland South, where northern influence has more sway, seem to be selectively observing Decoration Day, even if it is the southern variety, on the weekend of Memorial Day. They sense a relationship between the two Decoration Days, one local and one national. On an Arkansas website that lists Newton County cemeteries together with their Decoration Day dates, over half the decorations are on the last Sunday or the fourth Sunday of May, suggesting that some may have switched to Memorial Day weekend to be in harmony with the national calendar — thus taking advantage of a three-day weekend for travelers from afar.13 Here and there one finds a cemetery that holds its decoration in late summer. In considering these later dates, we should take note of two commentators on the date of Decoration Day. The Brewers in Valley So Wild remark: “In the old days nearly all Decoration Days were set late in summer when farm work was lightest. That is still a popular time, though the dates vary in each locality. Usually they remain the same at one spot from year to year.”14 Charles Wilson, in his “Cemeteries” entry for the Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, also makes this point: “Graveyard Day, or Decoration Day, reflected the farm cycle of life, typically occurring in late July or August or else after the harvest as an autumn ritual.”15 But in our experience throughout the Upland South, the date is typically in the late spring; only a few decorations fall in the late summer or early fall. The website listings of Decoration Day dates in places such as Titus County, Texas; Newton County, Arkansas; Lawrence County, Alabama; and Monroe County, Tennessee, confirm this pattern. They always seem to be concentrated in May. Texas and Alabama hold some decorations in April, and Arkansas and Tennessee hold some in June. July and August are occasionally represented. But a significant concentration of July and August dates occurs in the high country of the Balsam range in Jackson County, North Carolina. The later decorations may have been influenced by a community’s preference for the free time of late summer or by the later flowering in the high country of North Carolina. Finally, some may have been influenced by the surge of interest in church homecomings during the first half of the twentieth century, which are usually scheduled for late summer or fall, and sometimes merge with decoration practices (see Chapter 2). Many people notice similarities between the southern Decoration Day and the Day of the Dead in Mexico and the American Southwest, a multicultural New World synthesis of the European All Souls Day and indigenous traditions. The two customs are similar, but there is no evidence that they are closely cognate. The southern Decoration Day, fallOrigin, Diffusion, and Range of Decoration Day

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ing on different dates in the late spring, is closely associated with spring maintenance of community cemeteries. All Souls’ Day is on a fixed date, November 2, much later in the calendar year. Unlike All Souls’ Day, the southern Decoration Day has no special belief systems and practices associated with visiting spirits.16

The Geographic Range of Decoration Day The greatest difficulty in charting the history of the southern Decoration Day is the absence of a documentary historical record proving the existence of such a tradition before the late nineteenth century. More references to the southern Decoration Day may eventually turn up in nineteenth-century personal correspondence, diaries, books published by travelers, local newspapers, church records, or the like. But at the time of this writing, other than the special events in Charleston’s race course and Petersburg’s Blandford Cemetery, and the newspaper commentary of the era describing decorations as a southern tradition, we have little documentary evidence from before the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, there are many published references to the northern Decoration Day from 1868 on. It was a new and welcome cultural practice that offered a means of remembrance and a healing salve for the pain of the Civil War. It was initially organized and promoted by the Grand Army of the Republic, which had a mission to foster remembrance and respect for Civil War dead and was well positioned to institutionalize the new holiday in northern communities. Furthermore, newspapers, magazines, journals, and books were more prevalent in the North more than the South, especially the Upland South, which retained many frontier characteristics in the decades after the Civil War. Thus the North’s authors, publications, and publishing houses provided an engine for publicizing and promoting the new holiday. Within a few years, the custom had taken firm hold in the North, and within a couple of generations it was so deeply rooted as a community celebration that Charles Ives would create a musical composition evoking his childhood memories of Decoration Day in northwestern Connecticut. Thus there is documentary evidence aplenty regarding the rapid diffusion and lasting popularity of the northern Decoration Day. Though early documentary evidence for the southern Decoration Day is scarce, there is another source of evidence for the history of the southern tradition — its geographic distribution. Our own field documentation and observations have taken place principally in western North Carolina, where we carried out fifty interviews on the topic of Decoration Day and visited perhaps 200 cemeteries. We also conducted in-depth interviews in Alabama and Arkansas on Decoration Day and have documented cemeteries and discussed decoration practices extensively in most southern states. The personal interviews

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and observations confirm that the entire region participates in the same southern Decoration Day, with its focus on kin and ancestors, not the fallen in battle, and with all the same familiar details, such as hymn singing, crepe paper flowers, and dinner on the ground. A scattering of articles in regional folklore journals confirms the range of distribution we have observed in our personal fieldwork. Slayton describes a Decoration Day celebration in her home community of Town Creek, Alabama. Northeast Texas yields Kirtley’s brief description of “graveyard-workings with dinner-on-the-ground” and more detailed descriptions by Cowser and Pitchford. Jackson describes “graveyard cleaning” and “dinner on the ground,” with preaching in between, in a west Tennessee community. And far western Kentucky is featured in Decoration Day articles by Lamkin and Hoskinson.17 Thus the southern Decoration Day seems to be distributed in the Upland South from Appalachian Virginia and North Carolina westward and southwestward through West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, northern South Carolina, northern Georgia, northern and central Alabama, northern Mississippi, northern Louisiana, northeastern Texas, Arkansas, eastern Oklahoma, and southern Missouri. The borders of this large region of the country are amorphous; one cannot say with precision where they lie. But the Upland South shares many cultural features that, taken together, mark its identity as a region. The southern Decoration Day seems to be one of the many distinguishing cultural features of the Upland South. The southern Decoration Day is further verified by internet search engines and searchable data bases. A database search of periodicals from the nineteenth and early twentieth century offers further historical examples from the turn of the last century: Clarksville [Texas]. — The first Saturday in May is “decoration day” at Green Hill cemetery, in Titus County. The custom of decorating the graves of the dead has long been maintained in that community, and always proves interesting and profitable. This year a great multitude thronged the cemetery and church grounds all day Saturday. Dinner was spread on the ground, at noon, and addresses were made in the forenoon, and in the afternoon. (Christian Observer, May 21, 1902) Decoration Day. — The Soliphone has been requested to make announcement of decoration day services at Mount Zion church on Sunday May 18th. The forenoon exercises will consist of music, speeches and decorating the graves in Mt. Zion cemetery. In the afternoon the unveiling of the monument of M. E. Hutchins will be the event of the day. Dinner will be spread on the ground and a large crowd and a great occasion are anticipated. (The Daily Soliphone, Greene Co., Arkansas, April 22, 1902) Origin, Diffusion, and Range of Decoration Day

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The Board of Directors of Midway church and cemetery [Midway, Georgia] met Wednesday, March 14, at Midway church and elected selectmen for the following year. . . . The day was also used as decoration day, all present decorating the graves of their own families who are buried in Midway cemetery. (Christian Observer, Mar. 28, 1900) The first example may be compared to Kirtley’s northeast Texas example from 1954 and to a Titus County, Texas, cemetery website from the early twenty-first century that names Decoration Day dates for many cemeteries.18 Taken together, the three documents show Decoration Day being actively practiced in northeast Texas from the late nineteenth century to the present. The third example above, from coastal Georgia, shows Decoration Day observed in the lowland South in the nineteenth century. A 2007 posting by Cathy Thompson on the website of the newspaper Indian Country Today, entitled “Cherokee Nation Church Celebrates Decoration Day,” describes and portrays with five color photographs the Decoration Day ceremony at Belfonte Baptist Church and Cemetery in Belfonte, Oklahoma: At the Belfonte Cemetery, like many other cemeteries in Oklahoma, Decoration Day is a planned and anticipated event. Volunteers from the church work diligently to clean the graves and prepare for the big day. . . . An impromptu survey revealed that the majority of those who attend this year believe that the traditional event is held to celebrate and honor those who have passed on with a “handshake,” a “hello” to the ancestors. . . . According to Cecil Qualls of Nicut, “Indians have always decorated themselves”; so it stands to reason in his mind that the Cherokees continued decorating themselves even after death, as shown with the many colors of flowers adorning the graves at the Belfonte Cemetery.19 We visited Belfonte Cemetery in 2008 and found it to be a partially mounded and richly decorated cemetery. Decoration Day is also a national holiday in Liberia. A Liberian newspaper offered the following description on a website: “Every year the second Wednesday in March is celebrated as Decoration Day. This day is set aside to honor the dead in many respects. Years back, it was celebrated in a different fashion with the true meaning of the day. The grave sites were cleaned and painted and prayers were offered for the dead.”20 The past tense here seems unwarranted, for another website provides a current photo of a boy who hires himself out to whitewash the horizontal grave boxes, as has always been the annual custom on Decoration Day.21 Liberia was settled by former slaves from 128

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the United States. Migration to Liberia occurred mostly from the 1820s through the 1850s, dwindling during and after the American Civil War. The websites testify to intense local involvement with the holiday, whether observed in the quiet old-fashioned way or in a noisy, demonstrative modern way. There is no hint of association with the American Civil War, the freeing of the slaves, or the fallen in battle. The Liberian Decoration Day, like the southern Decoration Day, is about cleaning and renewing graves, decorating them with flowers, and honoring and connecting with deceased ancestors and family members. It is a reasonable hypothesis that the custom was brought from the American South by the early Liberian settlers and has been maintained ever since. Search engines also reveal that in Ontario, Canada, a number of smaller communities observe what they call Decoration Day. It involves community decoration of all the graves in the cemetery, and the dates vary from cemetery to cemetery. The website for Haldimand and Norfolk Counties, on the north shore of Lake Erie, lists the dates for Decoration Day in thirty-one cemeteries. Most of the dates are in June, July, and August. In Port Hope, one cemetery’s decorations were initiated by the International Order of Oddfellows beginning in 1877; the cemetery is now decorated as “a general practice rather than an Oddfellows event.”22 The resemblance of these small-town Ontario decorations to the southern Decoration Day is striking. There are also some echoes of the northern Decoration Day, including processions to the cemetery and martial music (pipe bands in the case of Port Hope). Palm Sunday in Wales, and perhaps in some English counties east of Wales, is celebrated by strewing flowers on graves. The holiday goes by the name “Flowering Sunday,” or Sul y Blodau in Welsh. According to Sikes’s British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions (1880), “Palm Sunday takes precedence among the Welsh, and is very extensively and enthusiastically observed. The day is called Flowering Sunday, and its peculiar feature is strewing the graves of the dead with flowers. . . . In the large towns, as Cardiff, many thousands of people gather at the graves. The custom is associated with the strewing of palms before Christ on his entry into Jerusalem, but was observed by the British Druids in celebration of the awakening life of the earth at this season.”23 Flowering Sunday shares with the American Decoration Day a focus on the spring rather than the fall of the year. But it is tied to a religious holiday, and its fixed date contrasts with the variable dates of the southern Decoration Day. The geographic spread of the examples we have been contemplating, from the Smokies to northeastern Texas and Liberia, offer strong evidence that the southern Decoration Day originated well back in the nineteenth century. The presence of the same cultural tradition throughout the Upland South argues for the age of the tradition, which was carried westward (and eastward to Africa) by nineteenth-century migration and has surOrigin, Diffusion, and Range of Decoration Day

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vived in essentially the same form till the present. To argue that the southern tradition was derived from the northern Decoration Day is to argue implausibly that, in all these widely dispersed regions from North Carolina to Texas to Liberia, the tradition devolved in exactly the same way from the northern Decoration Day honoring the fallen in battle into a southern day for cemetery cleaning and honoring ancestors and kin — and that the devolution of the tradition so uniformly across the South did not occur anywhere in the North. Similarly, it is much simpler to argue that the community-based dating of the southern Decoration Day, observed on different Sundays even in the same community, preceded the centralized edict providing a single date for the northern Decoration Day. Otherwise one must argue that the southern tradition regarding the date devolved everywhere without exception into a local-option free-for-all, while the northern tradition for the date maintained itself with no local variation. Finally, the extraordinary decorations in Charleston and Petersburg, by their commonalities and the lack of evidence that one influenced the other, suggest the logical explanation that both drew on traditional practices already in place. It takes nothing away from their uniqueness and power in memorializing the Civil War dead to say that they built on the foundation of tradition. Eventually, more nineteenth-century documents may turn up to provide evidence about the early history of the southern Decoration Day. Meanwhile, the geographic distribution and the disparity in the dating process for the two traditions provide powerful data in support of their separateness and the precedence of the southern tradition. It is much simpler to argue that the southern tradition came first and influenced the northern tradition — a tradition that, though inspired by the older southern concept, was refashioned to focus on memorializing the fallen warriors of the Civil War.

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chapter seven

The North Shore and Decoration Day in Sign, Symbol, and Art The North Shore in Sign, Symbol, and Art

Mitzi Hall of Knoxville, Tennessee, stood talking with a circle of friends and strangers at the Cable Branch Decoration on the North Shore in 2004. Around her neck was a silver chain with a striking and attractively set blue pendant. Closer examination revealed that the setting contained an irregular piece of blue pressed glass (Figure 7-1). When asked about it, she explained that it was a shard of a Depression glass pattern called “Cherry Blossom” ( Jeanette Glass Co.) used by her grandmother on the North Shore. It was found near her grandmother and mother’s homesite on the North Shore during a decoration. Her friend and companion at North Shore decorations, Larry Vickery, had it set into a lavaliere and gave it to her as a present. She always wears it at North Shore decorations, and the visitor to her home will discover a glass cabinet given over to displaying pieces in this pattern: “I have a special little black velvet display thing to put the necklace on. I keep it in a china cabinet, because, since I found that one little piece of glass, I’ve started collecting the dishes. So now I have several pieces of the dishes. So I put the piece of glass in the china cabinet. And I wear it occasionally so I can tell people the story of it. It’s just meaningful.”1 The pendant is a powerful symbol of Mitzi Hall’s devotion to the North Shore decorations and to preserving and making palpable the memory of her family ties there. We encountered many signs, symbols, and artistic representations that show the North Shore, and the issues swirling around it, moving from the social into the symbolic realm. A large roadside billboard set on private property just before the Road to Nowhere enters Great Smoky Mountains National Park provides a public challenge to the U.S. government on the “broken promise” of the North Shore Road: “welcome to / the road to nowhere / a broken promise! / 1943–?” The sign has often been photographed and appears prominently in books, magazines, and other public forums. But when we

figure 7-1 Mitzi Hall’s pendant, featuring a shard from her grandmother’s home on the North Shore, Cable Branch Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, August 1, 2004

figure 7-2 Sign, Road to Nowhere, Swain Co., N.C., May 29, 2007

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visited the region in 2007, the sign was in serious disrepair and seemed half dismantled (Figure 7-2). A couple of people with whom we talked wondered aloud if the sign’s state was symptomatic of the state of the movement for building the road. By 2009, we heard that a new sign had been erected. Another smaller sign is available for tacking onto signposts or trees. We saw one on a tree on the road by Christine Proctor’s driveway near Bryson City in 2004 (Figure 7-3). Decoration Day in Sign, Symbol, and Art

figure 7-3 Sign on tree outside Christine Proctor’s home, Swain Co., N.C., July 6, 2004

figure 7-4 Bumper stickers, Gene Laney’s truck, Graham Co., N.C., August 5, 2004

Baseball caps and bumper stickers on local vehicles proclaim “Build the Road.” Gene Laney of Upper Tuskegee in Graham County produced a bumper sticker that turns the popular “I’d rather be . . .” formula to regional symbolic use: “I’d rather be on Hazel Creek” (Figure 7-4). Meanwhile a spontaneous form of public expression arose at the end of the Road to Nowhere. At some point, the young people of the region became fascinated with the long and, when walked through, eerie auto tunnel at the end of the Road to Nowhere. They began covering the walls of the tunnel with spray-paint graffiti, and eventually the Decoration Day in Sign, Symbol, and Art

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figure 7-5 Graffiti in tunnel, Road to Nowhere, Gsmnp, May 29, 2007

inscriptions covered both walls from one end of the long tunnel to the other. The spraypaint sentiments are an incongruous mix of the graceful and the gross. One droll piece of graffiti, playing on the “Road to Nowhere” sign at the park entrance, says “12-13-03 Went Nowhere” (Figure 7-5). Taken in their epic entirety, the graffiti are an extraordinary adornment of a place that young people symbolically adopted as their own when the adult world had abandoned it. Our project encountered other examples that represent and commemorate the North Shore experience through traditional artistic media, such as drawings and paintings. For example, Christine Cole Proctor has framed drawings (Figure 7-6) that portray her husband Troy Proctor’s family home and the Cole family home on Forney Creek, with Christine and her sister, as girls, standing on the porch. A family friend created the drawings based on tva photographs. On Verna Kirkland’s living-room wall hangs a framed wood burning, created by Arnold D. Kirkland, portraying the Kirklands’ former Chambers Creek homeplace. On the literary front, Zora Jenkins Walker has composed songs and short prose vignettes that evoke the North Shore experience. Her prose vignettes include “Paradise Lost,” which was published locally in 1995, and the unpublished vignette “A Road Is Forever.” Her songs include “I Would Rather Be on Hazel Creek” (inspired by Gene Laney’s bumper sticker), which she sang at the Bryson City Theater in 2003 on the occasion of a

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figure 7-6 Drawing from tva photographs of North Shore homes, in Christine Proctor’s home, Swain Co., N.C., July 6, 2004

production of Birdell, a play by storyteller and painter Gary Carden of Sylva, North Carolina, dealing with North Shore themes. Her performance for our interview revealed that the song was set to a tune of the sort traditionally used for old-time ballads and songs, and it was performed in a traditional Appalachian singing style.2 i would rather be on hazel creek Way back in the Great Smoky Mountains Is a place that I like to go. But I can only go there in my memories, For this happened a long time ago. In a wall of majestic mountains Lay a valley that seemed like a dream. In the midst of this beautiful valley Ran a clear and awesome stream. It wound its way down the valley Running swiftly and sometimes running slow, Until it completed its journey In the Little Tennessee River below.

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The people who lived in this valley Seemed to be so happy and free. They had everything that they needed. This was where they wanted to be. Then the Tennessee Valley Authority Hit the people with a great big “wham,” They told them they had to leave there So they could build the Fontana Dam. There were many other families in other places In the counties of Graham and Swain Had to leave their home in the mountains With a lot of heartbreak and pain. They didn’t know where they were going Just any old place they could find, With a lot of sad feelings and memories Of so much of their lives left behind. They left behind some of their loved ones, The ones who had died along the way. But they got a promise before leaving That everything would be okay. They would build them a good road to the graveyards They could travel on anytime that they chose. But along comes all these buttinskis Whose favorite word is “oppose.” They say, “Let’s take the money,” But that just wouldn’t be fair. We deserve the road that was promised To the families of the ones who were there. In the fall of 2009 we were back in touch with Zora Jenkins Walker and discovered that she had composed two extra verses for “I Would Rather Be on Hazel Creek” (Figure 7-7). She said she thought of them as being added at the end of the song. In 2004, when we first met her, there was much optimism that the long campaign for the North Shore Road might finally be bearing fruit. But by 2009 various political developments had generated some pessimism within the movement as to whether it would ever be possible to get the road built. The new verses discreetly hint at this new pessimism: 136

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figure 7-7 Zora Jenkins Walker with a manuscript of her song “I would Rather Be on Hazel Creek,” Swain Co., N.C., October 8, 2009

Our government should honor its agreement, On a promise that is long overdue, For it’s only a drop in the bucket Of all the big things they do. For now we will just keep on fighting For what we know is right. If we never win the battle We will know we have fought a good fight. Gary Carden’s Birdell is a one-person play offering the reminiscences and reflections of a woman forced to leave her home during the North Shore removal. The play premiered in 2002 in Sylva. Since then it has been staged at several places across the state, particularly in western North Carolina venues, including Bryson City, Andrews, Lenoir, and Marion, where its story has an immediacy to people of the region. Actress and Caldwell County resident Bobbie Curtis, who says her performing career has been buoyed by her performances as Birdell, told an interviewer from the Caldwell County News-Topic, “I love doing Birdell; people still refer to me as Birdell. . . . I feel that I really am in her shoes and that I have been there.”3 Decoration Day in Sign, Symbol, and Art

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Zora Jenkins Walker’s song places the cultural and political issue of cemetery access front and center in the closing verses. Gary Carden’s play and other symbolic expressions, like Mitzi Hall’s pendant or Gene Laney’s “I’d Rather Be on Hazel Creek” bumper sticker, evoke the North Shore as a place and the removal as a historical trauma. All these symbolic and artistic works reveal the importance their creators attach to North Shore identity. One can establish the cultural significance of places in many ways. Our interviews revealed significance through people’s testimony, and our documentation of decorations established significance through people’s actions. Symbolic and artistic expressions created to evoke the North Shore as a remembered or imagined place, and to communicate to the public about the issues surrounding that place, are an important additional means of gauging the cultural significance of the North Shore experience to the people of western North Carolina.

Decoration Day in Song and Literature The southern Decoration Day is a cultural tradition richly infused with religious music. Nearly every description of Decoration Day in the South includes comments about the gospel hymns or other religious music, which clearly comprise a central part of the program for the event. In this respect, the southern Decoration Day is a religious service not unlike other religious services. The region has many events that feature religious music — not only Sunday morning and evening church services but Wednesday night prayer meetings, a variety of singing conventions, revival meetings (from church to tent to brush arbor), special homecoming events, and more. Decoration Day is a special event, but, though the repertory of decorations might tilt toward certain appropriate hymns and songs, there is no special repertory reserved for Decoration Day. The hymns sung there might be sung at any religious gathering. There are also songs in the southern musical repertory that evoke Decoration Day, and they provide a testimony to the powerful hold of Decoration Day on the imagination of the region. In the post–World War II bluegrass style, which is dominated by Appalachian and Upland South musicians, “Bouquet in Heaven” is a song in the core repertory. Composed by Lester Flatt, who was born in Sparta, Tennessee, it was recorded by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and has been covered by various other bands. Following are the chorus and first stanza: When it’s Decoration Day in Heaven There’s a bouquet I’m longing to see, There’s a flower somewhere in the bouquet That means all the world to me. 138

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Now she left the old homeplace is lonely Since mother has been called away, And I know I can never more see her Till we meet on that decoration day.4 “Bouquet in Heaven” is one of many bluegrass songs that express sorrow for a departed mother. The central metaphor of the song envisions a Decoration Day in heaven where the singer will meet mother again along with other souls in the form of a bouquet of flowers. The song thus perfectly encapsulates the central concerns of the southern Decoration Day with death, separation from family, and the flowers of resurrection. The metaphor of flowers for souls is not limited to this Decoration Day song. “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet” is a famous country gospel song recorded in 1947 by Kitty Wells, who was assisted on the chorus by Hank Williams. The Stanley Brothers from southwestern Virginia later recorded a bluegrass version. It is a song of consolation for the death of loved ones: Gathering flowers for the Master’s bouquet, Beautiful flowers that will never decay, Gathered by angels and carried away, Forever to bloom in the Master’s bouquet. The focus on mother, child, death, and reunification is powerfully expressed in “Village Churchyard,” an old sacred song from the eastern Kentucky lining-out hymn tradition. The Stanley Brothers recorded a modified version in the early bluegrass era, and Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys recorded it again in 1972, in a stunning rendition using the old unaccompanied lining-out style. The following transcription of the first and fourth stanzas is our own: In that dear old village churchyard I can see a mossy mound; There’s where my poor mother’s sleeping In the cold and silent ground. . . . . . . . . . . Oft I wander to the graveyard Flowers to plant with tender care On the grave of my dear mother; Darkness finds me weeping there.5 Thomas Clark, in his chapter on “Funeralizing,” cites “Village Churchyard” as a favorite song for funeralizing events in eastern Kentucky: “In all American music there is no more Decoration Day in Sign, Symbol, and Art

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downright melancholy than is to be found in the wailing chant of ‘The Village Churchyard.’ The ballad recites a long grief-stricken tale of a lone orphan child wringing its pale hands beside a mother’s grave.”6 The song was rewritten by A. P. Carter and recorded by the Carter Family. Their version, in which the relationship is between lovers, has not seemed to inspire imitation, while the mother-child relationship of the original text continues to live on in Appalachian tradition. The song appears in The New Baptist Song Book, a favorite volume for eastern Kentucky lining-out hymnody.7 The composition and earlier history of the song are unknown to me, but perhaps that history would demonstrate that the song is composed in the voice of an orphan, as Clark says. The internal evidence of the text does not compel us to picture an orphan, nor is the gender of the voice internally indicated. All singers or listeners are free to imagine ourselves in the voice’s role, decorating our mother’s grave. Both “Bouquet in Heaven” and “Village Churchyard” are examples of a song genre that in the Appalachian South is considered to be religious. If sung by a bluegrass band, such songs might appear on an album of gospel music. In live sets they are introduced as being religious and are distinguished from the secular repertory. The lining-out style is specifically reserved for religious music in southern musical tradition, whether white or black. Yet “Village Churchyard” is a narrative of personal grief more than a hymn or gospel song. There are dozens of songs of this sort in the southern religious repertory. They are not explicitly religious in the doctrinal sense of the word, but they set a tone of high seriousness and they contemplate life “under the view of eternity.” Often they turn on themes of family piety, separation from family and home, and the death of a mother or other family member. They are, in fact, a genre of songs speaking to some of the same larger themes that are interwoven with Decoration Day as a religious ritual — family piety, personal bereavement, and a vision of resurrection and spiritual reunification. Southern African Americans have historically participated in the Decoration Day tradition. In western North Carolina the rural areas have historically had a low African American population, and the numbers have dropped further over the last half century as African Americans moved to larger towns and cities in the North and South. Thus there has probably been a decline in African American participation in Decoration Day in the rural heartland of the tradition. Nevertheless, it is interesting to take note of a group of blues songs based on the Decoration Day tradition, all performed by blues artists from the westerly portion of the Upland South cultural region. The first known recording of “Decoration Day Blues” is by blues singer Teddy Darby (also known as Blind Darby, Blind Blues Darby, Blind Squire Turner, and Roosevelt Darby), who recorded it in March 1935 for the Vocalion label. Teddy Darby was born in 1902 in Henderson, Kentucky, a town in western Kentucky across the Ohio River from 140

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Evansville, Indiana. In the 1935 session he sang and accompanied himself on guitar, joined by Peetie Wheatstraw on piano.8 Unfortunately, the recording has not been included on the various reissues of Teddy Darby’s repertory, and we have not located the original release. It may be that no copy of the original recording is extant. The next “Decoration Day Blues” was recorded by Curtis Jones in September 1937.9 Jones was born in Naples, Morris County, northeast Texas, in 1906. He performed in Texas, the Southwest, and the Southeast before moving to Chicago, where he began recording for Vocalion in September 1937. The following transcription of the first and second stanzas from that session is our own: On-n-n-n-n every Decoration Day, On-n-n-n-n every Decoration Day, I go out to the cemetery to beautify my baby’s grave. In my baby’s lifetime, she was kind in every way, In my baby’s lifetime, she was kind in every way, That’s why I have the blues on every Decoration Day. The two takes of the song in this session, and one more in early 1938, were not issued but have been subsequently released on modern blues “reissue” albums. Sonny Boy Williamson ( John Lee Curtis Williamson) was the next bluesman to record “Decoration Day Blues.” He was born in 1914 south of Jackson, in west Tennessee, spent most of his career in Chicago, and became one of the major shapers of the twentieth-century blues harmonica sound. He recorded first a “Decoration Blues” in March 1938, then a “Decoration Day Blues No. 2” in May 1940.10 This transcription of the first and second stanzas of the latter is our own: People, I had a woman, she was nice and lovin’ kind to me in every way, People, I had a woman, she was nice and lovin’ kind to me in every way, Lord, but she died and left me, and so I have the blues on every Decoration Day. Lord, I was standin’ round her bed, these were the last words my baby had to say, Lord, I was standin’ around her bed, these were the last words my baby had to say, She said, “Sonny Boy, I want you to bring me some flowers on every Decoration Day.” Comparing Sonny Boy Williamson’s version of “Decoration Day Blues” with Curtis Jones’s song, one can see that the basic idea is the same, but the words express the idea in a different way. We will probably never be able to sort out exactly who influenced whom and how, especially without being able to hear Teddy Darby’s version, which may be the Decoration Day in Sign, Symbol, and Art

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source for both the others. But Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Decoration Day Blues” seems to have been the primary source for several recordings of the song in the rhythm-and-blues era from the 1960s on. A number of well-known bluesmen recorded versions of the song, such as Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Burnett), Sunnyland Slim (Albert Luandrew), and John Lee Hooker, whose version is entitled “You’re So Nice and Kind to Me Lou Della.” From there it passed into the repertory of blues-influenced rock bands like the Ontario-based Cowboy Junkies, who did a version with the object of sorrow being a man instead of a woman. One early and interesting jazz recording contains a reference to Decoration Day. Martha Copeland was a jazz blues singer from the 1920s, whose original home is unknown but who seems to have been living in Pittsburgh when she recorded “On Decoration Day” in New York on September 8, 1927.11 The song gives voice to a searing reply to a boyfriend who has sent a letter filled with threats. It is not a blues in form, and its verbally challenging rhetorical style is somewhat reminiscent of the rhyming toasts and dozens of African American oral tradition. The final verse delivers a classic riposte as its punch line: You said something ‘bout turnin’ my eye black and blue, Now let me tell you, brother, if you ever do, Hear what I say, on Decoration Day, They’ll know where to bring your flowers to. “Decoration Day” is the title track on a 2003 CD album of the same name by the Alabama-rooted rock band Drive-By Truckers. Composed by Jason Isbell, the song is a ballad-like narrative of a family member haunted by a two-family blood feud. The opening lines not only evoke Decoration Day but describe a widespread folk custom of placing stones on a grave to “keep down” the spirit of the person buried there: It’s Decoration Day, And I’ve a mind to roll a stone on his grave. But what would he say? “Keeping me down, boy, won’t keep me away.” In the wide world of literature and film, Decoration Day has made only an occasional appearance in the late twentieth century. The novel My Old True Love by Sheila Kay Adams includes a Decoration Day scene southern style that very much reflects the author’s roots in western North Carolina’s Madison County.12 Decoration Day is the name of a 1987 novella by John William Corrington that, in turn, was made into a 1990 feature film of the same title. Although the story is set in the Shreveport area of northern Louisiana, it is not really anchored in or focused on the experience of the southern Decoration Day. 142

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Despite the references in literature and film, it seems that the larger themes and worldview of the southern Decoration Day are best reflected in grassroots musical traditions — from the lining-out song “Village Churchyard” to Lester Flatt’s “A Bouquet in Heaven,” and the various versions and renditions of “Decoration Day Blues.” Indeed, grassroots song has not only vivified the cultural tradition of cemetery decoration, it has even articulated alternative views on the practice of decorating graves with flowers. A recording by the Carter Family of southwestern Virginia, who drew deeply from the well of nineteenth-century popular song, helped keep alive the song “Give Me the Roses While I Live” wherever country music is popular: Wonderful things of folks are said When they have passed away; Roses adorn the narrow bed Over the sleeping clay. chorus: Give me the roses while I live, Trying to cheer me on; Useless are flowers that you give After the soul is gone.13 Another song from eastern Kentucky tradition, “Just a Rose Will Do,” offers a compromise on the question of flowers: Oh, the time has come for my leaving, I’ll bid this world adieu; Don’t spend your money for flowers, Just a rose will do. chorus: I’m a-going to a beautiful garden After this life’s work is through; Don’t spend your money on flowers, Just a rose will do.14 In both these songs, the text occupies a niche of sentiment that has had no other adequate expression in the tradition. They may seem to be counter-decoration songs, but of course they rely on the existence of a healthy tradition of flower decoration to provide traction for their counter-sentiments. Other songs seem to stretch the imagination to encompass the experience of death Decoration Day in Sign, Symbol, and Art

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itself. A powerful Cherokee song from Oklahoma was reported to be used during processions from the church to the cemetery to decorate the graves of Cherokee ancestors on Decoration Day. The song was obtained by Willard Walker in the 1960s from Sam H. Hair.15 The English translation of the first and second stanzas is as follows: when they place the flowers [on the grave] they sing this. Friends, relatives, close neighbors, Let us all line up, Let’s go visit our relatives at the graveyard Where they are resting quietly. Let us go see our loved ones Sleeping quietly in the grave-mounds, Men, women, and children, Who have crossed the river of death before us. In a similar vein, but focused on the individual instead of the community, we close the chapter with the lyrics of a famous song by the early country blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was born in the 1890s near Wortham, Texas, south of Dallas. “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (1928) has been covered by Lightning Hopkins, Bob Dylan, Canned Heat, the Grateful Dead, and many other blues and rock bands and popular singers over the past seventy-five years. Its brooding evocation of the singer’s death and burial, and its concern that the singer’s grave be kept clean, encapsulate nicely the worldview that created the southern Decoration Day. Blind Lemon Jefferson died in 1929. Following is our transcription of the first and last stanzas. The third and fourth lines of this song’s first stanza are an epitaph on Jefferson’s grave.16 Well it’s one kind favor I ask of you, Well it’s one kind favor I ask of you, Lord it’s one kind favor I’ll ask of you, See that my grave is kept clean. . . . . . . . . . . . . Did you ever hear the church bell toll, Did you ever hear the church bell toll, Did you ever hear the church bell toll, Then you know that the poor boy’s dead and gone.

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chapter eight

The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day Well-Kept and Unkept Cemeteries

To be in an Appalachian cemetery on Decoration Day is to see powerful evidence of a collective community-based tradition at work. There is good reason to believe it has always been thus. Muriel Sheppard’s vibrant account in Cabins in the Laurel of an early 1930s decoration in Mitchell County, North Carolina,1 conveys forcefully this same sense of collective community engagement that we experienced in western North Carolina threequarters of a century later. Witnessing it, one realizes that a decoration is not a “top-down” operation, prescribed or managed by a single controlling authority. Rather, it is a ritual enacted by a community out of a collective sense of the requirements of tradition and the obligations to the dead. The participants plan, adjust, and enact the tradition by conversing, comparing ideas, and trying to arrive at a community consensus to resolve questions and problems. Here, one feels, is community consensual democracy at its best. A consensual tradition, however, is by its nature subject to shifting levels of community attention and commitment. Larger national forces — world wars, depressions, new religious movements, and new technologies — or significant local trends — the closing of a local plant or the shifting of lumber production to other areas — can cause families to move or change their lifestyle. This can rob a community of spiritual energy to maintain an older cultural tradition such as cemetery decoration. A kind of cultural entropy can set in, threatening a decoration at any given cemetery with decline and extinction. Thus not every cemetery is well kept. This fact prompted a well-known lament by Horace Kephart in Our Southern Highlanders: The saddest spectacle in the mountains is the tiny burial-ground, without a headstone or headboard in it, all overgrown with weeds, and perhaps unfenced, with cattle grazing over the low mounds or sunken graves. The spot seems never to be visited between interments. I have remarked elsewhere that most moun-

taineers are singularly callous in the presence of serious injury or death. They show a no less remarkable lack of reverence for the dead. Nothing on earth can be more poignantly lonesome than one of these mountain burial-places, nothing so mutely evident of neglect.2 In her 1932 novel To Make My Bread, which is partly based on observations in the Hazel Creek area, Grace Lumpkin evokes a similar sentiment: “There were no flowers in the burying ground. The graves lay flat and plain on the slope. The dead were dead and there was enough to do caring for the living.”3 On the other hand, Sheppard’s 1935 book, based on her sojourn of a few years in the North Carolina mountains, contains a clear description of mountain decorations (see Chapter 2). It may be that the other authors happened to encounter cemeteries before the annual maintenance tidied them up and Decoration Day made them beautiful. But romantic exaggeration is a likelier explanation for these evocations. Kephart is notorious for celebrating cultural extremes — he helped make moonshining the emblematic art of Appalachia in the eyes of the modern world. Nevertheless, moonshiners do in fact exist in western North Carolina, and one also encounters cemeteries that are untended and overgrown. Although most North Shore cemeteries are well tended today by the park staff, it was not always so. Most of them were utterly neglected for a generation or more after the removals of the early 1940s. And though most of the cemeteries in adjacent counties are looked after either regularly or periodically, some show a lack of active maintenance, and a few are altogether abandoned. If one visits the same cemetery at different points of the year, it may seem at times well tended and at other times neglected. That is a natural by-product of the traditional cycle of cemetery maintenance in the region. Furthermore, different cemeteries go through longterm cycles of relative care and relative neglect. When William Crawford, during our tour of Jackson County cemeteries, celebrated certain local citizens who devoted themselves to upgrading and renovating their cemeteries, he was suggesting that these visionary individuals inspired the community to replace an earlier period of neglect with the current period of careful maintenance. The cemeteries within the region that are most likely to be neglected are small family cemeteries, Kephart’s “tiny burial-grounds.” Many families have moved away, and some have abandoned the family graveyard, along with all their other connections with the place. Even if another family occupies the same land, the new family may not use or maintain the same cemetery plot, and it slips into overgrown ruins within a few years. Community cemeteries are less susceptible to this pattern of utter neglect, because community customs can generally withstand the periodic departure of individual families from the

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area. The wholesale departure of members of a community, however, can undermine customary community practices. Some rural African American cemeteries in the region show the neglect that results from the departure of all or most of the community. Of course, the forced evictions from the North Shore and the more gradual departures of communities from National Forest Service lands have inevitably caused some community cemeteries to be neglected. The civic and church cemeteries, having organizational structures supporting them, are reliably well tended. The community cemeteries, so characteristic of the rural coves are more variable, reflecting the loose-knit, informal, and consensual culture of the communities scattered through the rural watersheds. The older Baptist religious worldview reinforces the grassroots decision-making, which sometimes can lapse into avoidance and neglect. In such a context, one cemetery may be well kept, while another is not. People notice and gossip, but no one enforces, and care replaces neglect only when new community leadership emerges to revive the tradition. The efficacy of community involvement when tradition is thriving may disguise an individual’s contributions to saving and nurturing the tradition. A flourishing tradition has many active adherents; most actions are based on a broad consensus; and there seems to be less need for leadership. But when the tradition languishes, there is a need for the kind of devotion, commitment, and leadership that only an individual can provide. There is a natural oscillation between engagement and neglect in community cemetery traditions, and the consequence of neglect is much more obvious when the cemeteries lack institutional support from churches or municipal government, which can lend stability even in a period of neglect. Without the emergence of a committed individual with leadership gifts, a drift into disregard for a community cemetery may become irreversible. Thus we celebrate here the unsung heroes of Appalachian cemeteries, whose tireless personal efforts and visionary leadership are essential to the cultural conservation of cemeteries and the Decoration Day tradition.

The Curators of Watkins Cemetery Watkins Cemetery is a large community cemetery just west of Bryson City with burials dating to the nineteenth century. Some of the displaced North Shore families that settled in Bryson City live just west of town and have adopted Watkins Cemetery as their new home cemetery. We heard about the cemetery during our interview in 2004 with Christine Cole Proctor, originally from Forney Creek on the North Shore, who lives nearby. Later that summer we visited it and began getting acquainted. It has a red pavilion (Figure 8-1), and near the pavilion is an extraordinary graveshelter that stands about shoulder-high on

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figure 8-1 Pavilion, Watkins Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 28, 2007

posts painted the same red as the pavilion. We photographed a handwritten sign posted near a donation box at the pavilion that solicited help from the cemetery families: For Donation for Clean Up on Watkins Cem or you can contact Harold Ray Collins 488-6759 or Flonnie Collins 488-1923 Thank you All help will make a Cem we will all be proud of. When we returned to the region for additional fieldwork in the spring of 2007, we heard that Watkins Cemetery has its Decoration Day on the fourth Sunday of May, so we resolved to visit it that weekend. We stopped at Watkins Saturday morning. As we drove in, we saw a number of cars parked at the cemetery and several groups of people preparing and decorating family graves. The cemetery grass and other growth had been neatly trimmed, and some graves had already been decorated. Not knowing anyone there, we simply introduced ourselves to the first family group we encountered, the Willis brothers and sisters, who were sitting in the pavilion. Though some of them live in the area, at least one returned from Rabun Gap, Georgia, for the decoration. We took a picture of them in front of the Willis grave they had been decorating. Then we introduced ourselves to two women seated on the other side of the pavilion, and we discovered that they were the curators of Watkins Cemetery. Flonnie Burns

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Collins has for years been the chief caretaker of Watkins. Her son Harold Collins and daughter-in-law Theresa Libich Collins work closely with her and are increasingly taking over the caretaking responsibility. Both Flonnie and Theresa are friendly and outgoing. Karen and I were drawn to them and found ourselves returning to talk to them repeatedly during the day. Flonnie Collins follows in the footsteps of her mother, Laura Burns, who renovated Watkins Cemetery when it had fallen into neglect and continued to maintain it for many years. Laura Burns passed away in 1998 (Figure 8-2), at the age of 93. Her devotion to the cemetery is commemorated in two signs painted by two great-grandchildren and hanging at either end of the pavilion: “In loving memory of Laura Burns” and “In memory of Laura Burns, Use but Don’t Destroy.” She selected Flonnie to help and ultimately succeed her, and then — since she lived a long life — selected Harold and Theresa to be Flonnie’s helpers and successors (Figure 8-3). Thus the force of Laura Burns’s passion and commitment lives on today, not just in the testimony to her on the signs, but in the continuing labors of her daughter, grandson, and grandson’s wife to manage Watkins Cemetery and make it beautiful. Theresa tells of watching Laura Burns go through the cemetery before or during a decoration, pulling a spoon out of her pocket to dig up any weed or blade of grass she saw peeking through the ground. The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

figure 8-2 Gravesite of Laura Burns, Watkins Cemetery, Swain Co., May 27, 2007

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figure 8-3 Harold and Theresa Collins, Watkins Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 26, 2007

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The anecdote about Laura Burns’s spoon describes a cemetery that is clean swept and mounded. The transition to a mixed-format cemetery has been recent. Today there is grass throughout, but some individual graves or family plots are still weeded and mounded by the families who tend them. The cemetery still has a reddish clay hue, after having been grassless until recently and still only thinly grassed over. After we had talked for a while with Flonnie and Theresa, we invited Flonnie to come out in the cemetery to have her picture taken next to the graves of her loved ones. She chose to be photographed by the grave of her mother. As she talked about the gravesites where we stood, features we had viewed and photographed in 2004, such as the angel statues dominating the area near Laura Burns’s grave, could be seen again through the eyes of a knowledgeable interpreter. Flonnie bought the angels for the site a few years ago and repaints them most years. This year she apologized for not having had time to repaint the angels. We also photographed Flonnie sitting on the contemplation bench that Harold built for her near her husband’s grave and the gravesite reserved for her in the future (Figures 8-4, 8-5). Flonnie often rests there when she is working in the cemetery. The bench sits with its back to the woods. From it she can survey not only the sites personally close to her, but also the entire cemetery she has nurtured with her tender care. The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

figure 8-4 Contemplation bench built by her son Harold for Flonnie Collins, next to her husband’s grave (and her future grave), Watkins Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 27, 2007

figure 8-5 Flonnie Collins, Watkins Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 27, 2007

figure 8-6 Janice Inabinett decorating the grave of her father, Hilda Inabinett, Watkins Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 26, 2007

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That same Saturday we also met Janice Inabinett (pronounced rhyming with “cabinet”), who has assumed a mission to maintain a number of African American graves in Watkins Cemetery (Figure 8-6). Janice, who is African American, says that an elderly uncle watched her as a young woman and, concluding that she was the right person for the mission, assigned it to her and told her all the stories that made the graves meaningful. She now decorates all the graves that have any connection with her family and other community members she knows about, including one grave of an American Indian who married into the family, and the grave of her Inabinett grandfather, who moved to the area from Charleston, South Carolina. She is a professional storyteller, and she uses those skills to interpret this family of graves to others. Karen and I went on her tour, as did an African American woman with roots in the area who has moved back from Detroit. Having heard that there was an African American section in Watkins, I asked Harold and Theresa if they could define where the boundary was between the black and white sections of the cemetery. They resisted the idea of a definite border. Perhaps there is actual overlap and integration where the two general areas converge, or perhaps there are other African American burials in other areas of the cemetery, but in any case the idea of The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

a boundary troubles them. Harold said the idea of a fence had once been proposed by some in the African American community, but he and Theresa opposed it firmly. They think of the cemetery as a unified whole and are guardians of its integrity. People told us that African American participation on Decoration Day has traditionally occurred in the afternoon or evening. Some people recall admiringly the preaching and singing of the black participants on Decoration Day. But Janice and her friend from Detroit were the only African Americans we saw when we were at the cemetery. Sunday we returned to Watkins Cemetery for Decoration Day ceremonies. The program was similar to the format at Brendle Hill (see Chapter 1), including hymn singing (Figure 8-7) and preaching, but it concluded with dinner on the ground served in the pavilion. As with the Brendle Hill decoration, the actual decoration of the graves, which was occurring most of the day on Saturday, continued on Sunday morning before the Decoration Day service. But, as at Brendle Hill, people, especially women and girls, dressed up on Sunday much more than they had on Saturday. We left for a while to attend the Laney Family Reunion at Deep Creek, but when we returned later, we found the dinner-on-theground fare still spread out on the tables in the Watkins pavilion. Theresa wondered if I knew what ramps are and offered me some pickled ramps Harold had gathered (Allium The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

figure 8-7 Hymn singing, Watkins Cemetery Decoration, Swain Co., N.C., May 27, 2007

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figure 8-8 After Watkins Cemetery Decoration, Swain Co., N.C., May 27, 2007

tricoccum, an Appalachian wild leek), then some “leather britches” (dried string beans cooked with hambone, fatback, or bacon). I helped myself to both, as well as to other food from the remaining bounty. Surveying Watkins Cemetery at the end of Decoration Day, all was quiet again, but the cemetery was radiant in the blazing sun with the dancing colors of the day’s decoration (Figure 8-8).

Other Curators: Lauada, Mason Branch, and Birdtown Cemeteries The curators of Watkins Cemetery are not alone. Others have found a mission and risen to the challenge with other cemeteries. In 2004, when local historian William Crawford gave us a tour of Jackson County cemeteries, we visited Shook Cemetery in Canada Township. He cited two sisters, Lucy and Mae Middleton, whose efforts restored and redeemed Shook Cemetery when it had fallen into decline. In fact, the community cemetery as a cultural form probably depends on such people presenting themselves when the need arises. For some, the mission comes upon them as a sort of calling, responding to a sense that the cemetery is languishing from neglect. For others, the mission is already in the family, and they grow into it as a part of family life, learning it from the inside and 154

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feeling pride as a family member in the results of their labors. Eventually, after assisting a parent or relative, they inherit the generational mantle of responsibility and in turn cultivate someone from the next generation to carry on. During the 2004 project, our colleague Ted Coyle interviewed Bayless Crisp, who for years cleared, cleaned, and mowed Lauada Cemetery. He had several collaborators in the effort, particularly Troy Proctor, whose widow Christine Cole Proctor is now president of the Lauada Cemetery Association. Bayless and Troy, together with a few other volunteers, spent many a day toiling in the seven-acre cemetery, which the tva had turned over to the community. The cemetery was created when burials from certain North Shore cemeteries were moved to this site (see Chapter 3). Ted Coyle asked Bayless why he, Troy, and their friends mowed Lauada for free, considering that it now was a job for hire. Bayless answered: Because I’ve got an interest. All my people and everything is buried in here . . . when I’m out here, I have a feeling like I’m in church. It’s sacred to me. . . . I was working six days a week, and I’d come out here and mow all day on Sunday, and I had an aunt and she was a great churchgoer. . . . And she said that was God’s calling to me to do stuff like this. So I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong by mowing on Sunday because it seemed like I’ve got a blessing out of doing stuff like that, mowing on Sunday. . . . I think Troy, he had kind of the same feeling as I did. Of course, now, he was a churchgoer and he’d go to church on Sunday. He wouldn’t work on Sunday, but I would. . . . he’d come out in the evening after he got off duty and he’d mow and everything, and then I’d usually work the night shift, and I’d come out and mow in the morning, and it kept us busy just about all of our spare time. But I don’t regret a minute of it. And I don’t know how many lawnmowers and weed-eaters I’ve worn out out here and how many times I’ve got stung. . . . It’s just a sacred place to me every time I come out here.4 In 2004 we visited Mason Branch Cemetery in Alarka. It is a medium-sized cemetery, and its earliest burial dates from 1906. Its recent history, we were told, included being a mixed-style cemetery with some graves clean swept and mounded, some level and grassy. By the time we saw it in 2004, it had been reworked to make it entirely a clean-swept and mounded cemetery (Plate 25). Imagine our surprise, on the day before Decoration Day for Mason Branch in 2007, to find that it had been completely reworked again, this time to make the graves level and create a new cemetery-wide carpet of grass (Figure 8-9)! Clearly a great debate has been going on among the members of this community about how to manage their cemetery. After surveying the changed landscape, we fell into conversation with an elderly couThe Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

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figure 8-9 Mason Branch Cemetery in the grassy and unmounded style, Swain Co., N.C., June 10, 2007

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ple who had returned to Alarka from Georgia for the decoration. As we talked, I noticed a man dressed in work clothes, going from grave to grave to adjust details and dust each headstone with a whiskbroom. When an opportunity presented itself, I introduced myself. He said his name was Wade Woodard, the person who tended the cemetery (Plate 26; Figure 8-10). Wade Woodard grew up in Alarka. His father, George Matt Woodard, was for a half century the voluntary caretaker of Mason Branch Cemetery, and when Wade was a boy, he helped his father work on the cemetery. Then Wade moved to Florida, where he spent much of his adult life, first in Jacksonville and then in the Gainesville area while he worked for the Levy County school system. In 1996, after both he and his father developed serious health problems, he decided to move back to Swain County, where he resumed his work with his father on the cemetery. In 2000 George Matt Woodard passed away, and he is buried now in the cemetery that once was in his care. Wade then assumed the role his father once filled. Now Wade lives on a ridge overlooking the lower ridge of Mason Branch Cemetery. The community members whose families are buried there have debated about the style The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

figure 8-10 Wade Woodard, Mason Branch Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., June 10, 2007

of managing the cemetery, as indicated by the variations mentioned above. Wade seems to feel that, however it is dressed, the cemetery is still his baby. He talks about every grave with personal affection and impeccable recall of the details of its appearance past and present. He says with pride that he owns a detailed map of every grave in the cemetery, and he seemed fascinated by the copy we presented to him of our 2004 report, which contained three photographs from Mason Branch. It will be interesting to see how he manages in the future, and whether he will find and groom another person who can eventually succeed him. Birdtown Cemetery, on the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee just west of the town of Cherokee, is a large cemetery with burials dating well back into the nineteenth century. We first visited it at dusk on May 31, 2007, and we noticed by the entrance what looked like a grave headstone but was actually a memorial marker. At the top of the stone was an oval-inset color photograph of the person being memorialized. Below it these words were carved in the stone: “In Memory of luther murphy for his many years of dedicated service to the Birdtown Cemetery” (Figures 8-11, 8-12). Proceeding into the cemetery itself, we discovered in the twilight that it had been very The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

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figure 8-11 Memorial for Luther Murphy, entrance to Birdtown Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., July 11, 2008

figure 8-12 Cameo of Luther Murphy on his memorial stone, July 11, 2008

recently decorated, probably over the Memorial Day weekend that had just passed. Many of the graves had been raked and mounded, and since it had not rained for some time, the rake lines on the mounded graves were as clearly discernible as if it had been raked an hour earlier. The soil in the cemetery is a rich red clay, and the raking and mounding heightened its visual impact. Dusk was quickly merging into night, but it was a beautiful and moving sight. The next morning we returned and lingered to get better acquainted with the cemetery. The decorations and the red earth radiated a different beauty in bright daylight (Figure 8-13). We noted that the graves typically were graced by single-row decoration, which is also the most widespread method of decorating outside the Cherokee community (see Chapter 2). Some graves were decorated using the blanket-decoration style, and a few used patterns of decoration that we had not seen before. Some contemporary burials reflected the newer assemblage style of gravesite arrangement and decoration. In the spring of 2008, we visited Birdtown Cemetery again and met Nellie Lambert plying a weed-whacker near the entrance. Seeming to enjoy an opportunity to take a break from her work, she talked with pride about Birdtown Cemetery and its traditions. She confirmed that the Birdtown decoration takes place on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend and said it customarily is held at 7:00 a.m. and involves preaching and hymn singing under “the big tree” (a large and venerable oak tree near the cemetery entrance). The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

figure 8-13 Birdtown Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., June 1, 2007

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Nellie Lambert characterized Luther Murphy as the last of the older generation who tended the cemetery, knew its history, and knew every detail about every burial in the cemetery, including some burials that were unmarked. She pointed to a three-foot-high pedestal that had been erected since our last visit and said the family, who had put the memorial to Luther Murphy at the entrance, now planned to elevate it by placing it on the pedestal. We may have inquired who would carry on now, because she said that a new group of younger men were committed to working in the cemetery, including not only mowing and clearing but also digging graves. Since the cemetery was crowded, backhoes often could not be used for new burials; the digging had to be done with picks and shovels. The new group is named, in a triumph of forthrightness, the Free Labor Group (Plate 28). We got the name of Luther Murphy’s children from Nellie Lambert and set out to find his son Jesse Murphy. At Jesse’s house we met his wife Dolores, who, after listening attentively to our account, decided we should really talk to Luther Murphy’s daughter Katherine. The next day we stopped by Katherine Murphy Crisp’s house and found her sitting on her front porch, resting after work in the garden. After our longish presentation, in which we tried to convey both who we were and who sent us there, she smiled and invited us to sit down. We talked at length about her father, to whom she was close — his love of gardening, Birdtown Cemetery, and bear hunting, all the things for which his children and the community remember him. Katherine repeated the detail that her father knew every burial in the cemetery, including some with no markers. At some point the conversation turned to the art of flower decorations, and we asked if Katherine remembered how to make crepe paper flowers. She said yes, she knew how to do that, and I noted that she said it very much in the present tense— not “I remember” but “I know.” Then she said she was working now on some flower wreaths for the upcoming Birdtown Cemetery decoration and wondered if we would like to see them. We were delighted, and Karen asked if she could get her camera. Just inside the front door and to the right was a room where the walls were utterly covered with family photographs, from her parents to her great-grandchildren. All the remaining space in the room was filled with artificial flowers of many colors — some worked into elaborate arrangements, some awaiting future assembly (Plate 27). Karen asked Katherine if the wreaths that she had already assembled were designed with specific people in mind. She replied by pointing to each completed wreath and telling who it was for and why. We left feeling that we had begun getting acquainted with the Luther Murphy whom we had first encountered on that memorial stone at the cemetery entrance. Birdtown Cemetery is one of the more striking cemeteries that we encountered; we sensed that we were viewing the results of long and loving community commitment and care. But 160

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our Birdtown visits underscored once again that, though “it takes a village,” it also takes the personal commitment of certain knowledgeable and devoted individuals to lead the way. Thus Luther Murphy belongs in our pantheon of western North Carolina’s cemetery heroes.

Decorating Every Grave In Chapter 2 we took note of the widely cited Upland South principle that no grave should go undecorated. When a cemetery has its Decoration Day, the first concern of the participants is necessarily to see that their own family graves are properly cleaned, repaired, and decorated. But a decoration that leaves some graves in the cemetery undecorated is a silent reproach to the democratic ideal of community integrity. The ideal decoration should enable every member of the living community to view the whole cemetery and see flowers on every grave — a testimony to the whole community’s caring about the whole cemetery. Decorations are a way of showing respect for the dead. But even if you have shown respect for your own deceased kin in the cemetery, standing by when other graves lie undecorated seems to reveal a certain lack of respect. Ideally, respect must be shown for the entire community of the dead in the cemetery. There are essentially two ways to carry out this principle in practice. The first is to bring enough extra flowers to ensure that, when you have completed the decoration of your family graves, there will be flowers left over for other graves. You can spread out geographically to neighboring areas, or you can focus your efforts on other family graves that you know will not or cannot be decorated by the families directly involved. Perhaps a family has moved away and cannot attend Decoration Day. Perhaps there are no living members of a family represented by a particular burial. If every participant provides some additional decorations beyond their family responsibilities, the whole cemetery will be shown proper respect, and the living community can enjoy the satisfaction engendered by seeing every grave decorated. The second way to fulfill the “every grave” mandate is for one or more people to take upon themselves the responsibility of ensuring that every grave in the cemetery, or every grave in a distinct section of the cemetery, is decorated. If it is a large cemetery, this mission requires lots of flowers and lots of time. But it is morally uplifting and offers no little satisfaction to contemplate flowers gracing graves that otherwise would lie barren and unattended. Even if people attend to neighboring graves, a few graves may somehow be left undecorated, whereas taking on the mission of seeing personally that every grave is decorated ensures that the overall results will not be found wanting. The principle that every grave should be decorated is a powerful symbolic affirmation The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

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figure 8-14 Regina Howell decorates graves, Cochran Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., June 2, 2007

of the unqualified commitment of individuals to a community. In ordinary life, “community” is a murky concept with amorphous boundaries. But in the cemetery the boundaries are clear, the fulfillment of the mission is a measurable goal, and the resulting beauty reinforces the moral message. Like the principle of the plenum in art, which dictates filling every part of a canvas with visual content, the decoration of every grave on the canvas of the cemetery provides an aesthetic richness that symbolically congratulates the fulfillment of moral duty and the obligations of piety. On Saturday morning, June 2, 2007, Karen and I visited Cochran Cemetery in the Swain County community of Alarka, meeting our friend Verna Kirkland at the entrance and going in together. As we walked around to survey the cemetery, it filled up quickly with people armed with hoes, rakes, shovels, and boxes of flowers. Many came in family groups, their work being undertaken collectively by as many family members as could be mustered. After walking around with Verna, we began introducing ourselves to people whom we met along the way. One person we met was Regina Howell, who was busily working on some graves (Figure 8-14). Regina introduced her mother, Dorothy Cochran, and pointed out that her young son Clay Young and his friend Trevor Woodard were there, too. When she learned that we lived in Washington, D.C., she said she had lived for a few years in the Washington 162

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area, during which she served as a volunteer at Arlington National Cemetery. But now she was glad to be back in her home county again. The task for the two boys this morning, Regina explained, would be to decorate every grave in the cemetery. She might help out a bit, but the work would be done mainly by Clay and Trevor, while she decorated family graves. In answer to our queries, Regina explained that it was actually her own mission to decorate every grave in Cochran Cemetery, but she was training the next generation to take over the mission. Regina added that she had actually received this tradition from her mother, Dorothy Cochran, who had inherited it from her mother-in-law many years ago. So we had just met three generations of the tradition, and there was a fourth generation as well. Clay and Trevor may have been shouldering the full burden of tradition, but they bore it lightly and gracefully, as they eagerly worked their way from one grave to the next down the long sloping ridge of Cochran Cemetery (Figure 8-15). They seemed to have boundless energy and enthusiasm for the work, though they did agree to take a break long enough to be photographed with Regina and Dorothy, arm on shoulder with each other, in a family workday portrait. Later, as we left the cemetery, I looked on both sides to see if there were any graves without flowers. As far as I could tell, every grave had been carefully decorated, including the little grave by the entrance that everyone says is the grave of an unknown African American infant reputed to be the cemetery’s first burial. We were elseThe Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

figure 8-15 Clay Young and Trevor Woodard decorate graves, Cochran Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., June 2, 2007

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where the next day, when Cochran Cemetery had its actual Decoration Day, so we never got to congratulate Clay and Trevor on accomplishing their mission. The previous Saturday Karen and I visited Lauada Cemetery (see Chapter 3), hoping to find people cleaning and decorating their family graves in anticipation of Decoration Day the next day. We had visited Lauada twice in 2004 and were eager to see it again, and this time with plenty of people at work. We were not disappointed. There were lots of cars, and lots of people busily decorating graves. Passing Lauada’s pavilion, we saw two women decorating two graves together, so we approached them and introduced ourselves. They were Virgie Brooks Shook, who was born on Chambers Creek on the North Shore, and her daughter, Dyanne Shook Pedersen. After the North Shore removal, the family lived in Bryson City. Virgie now lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Dyanne lives in Danielsville, Georgia, but they travel here every year together to decorate graves at Lauada. Karen took their picture standing behind their car with the open trunk revealing plenty of additional flowers (Plate 29). The open trunk filled with flowers presaged what was coming next. Dyanne said that her next task was to decorate the fifty-two unknown graves marked by two long rows of wooden crosses, descending from the top of the hill to the bottom. They were infant graves, she explained. I answered that we knew the two rows of crosses well. Driving along the highway by the bottom of the cemetery in January of 2006, we had been struck by the sober sight of the undecorated white crosses and brown grass against the blue winter sky, and Karen had climbed the hill and photographed them (Plate 18). Now we were delighted that we had happened upon the very people who decorate them every year, and we asked if we could tag along. It turns out that Dyanne had inherited the task of decorating these unknown graves from her mother. Virgie too had inherited the responsibility from her mother, Melvina Chambers Brooks, who had taken on the task as a personal mission not long after the creation of Lauada Cemetery. Dyanne’s daughter, Leigh Anne Pedersen Pruitt, has also helped over the years. Karen followed Dyanne down the hill to photograph her as she decorated the white wooden crosses (Figure 8-16), while I stayed up top to talk with Virgie. We noted that she decorated on the inside of the two rows, which to me is artistically the right solution but does not follow the rule about graves facing east. It is also more manageable when you can bring the flower box down the center and move to each side to decorate. Dyanne tried to alternate blue and pink flowers to indicate the mix of boys and girls among the unknown babies, but eventually the supply of blue and pink ran out and other colors had to be mixed in. When Dyanne reached the bottom, she found she was four posies short of what was needed. When she returned to the top, she fretted that she would have to assemble four 164

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more posies and go back down to decorate the remaining graves. This had happened before, she said. So I volunteered to do the remaining four decorations, if she would make the additional posies and lend me the screwdriver she used to dig a hole for each posy in the hard, dry earth. I also promised to do a fresh count of the crosses. Dyanne happily took me up on my offer, so down the hill I went. It was satisfying to be able to decorate the graves and contribute something to the effort, and the fresh count revealed that the actual number of graves is not fifty-two but sixty. Add the one fully identified baby grave, set just off to the side near the bottom, that Dyanne always decorates, and the mission total is sixty-one. No wonder she kept running out of posies! A few days later other business again brought us down the highway that passes below Lauada Cemetery, so we looked up the hill to see the double column of graves. We were in for another surprise. The two rows of white crosses, and the two parallel rows of posies that Dyanne Pedersen had placed next to the white crosses, were just as we had left them. But down the middle, between the two columns, were two new columns of red, white, and blue flowers placed at a distance from the crosses and closer to the middle (Figure 8-17). It was as if the cross and the posy at the head of each grave were complemented by a foot flower. We can only hope that the story behind their mysterious appearance is as moving as the beautiful story of Virgie Shook’s and Dyanne Pedersen’s commitment to decorating the unknown graves at Lauada. The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

figure 8-16 Dyanne Pedersen and Virgie Shook decorate unknown graves at Lauada Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 26, 2007

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figure 8-17 The unknown graves at Lauada Cemetery, decorated by Dyanne Pedersen and Virgie Shook, as well as by an unknown decorator, Swain Co., N.C., May 31, 2007

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Helen Cable Vance and the North Shore Revolution In Chapters 1 and 5 we introduced Helen Cable Vance, who since 1977 has been the shaping and guiding force of the North Shore Revolution. That revolution has, in turn, reshaped the history of western North Carolina in a number of ways. The most visible accomplishment of the revolution has been the elaborate system the National Park Service arranged for shuttling pilgrims across Fontana Lake to the North Shore, enabling them to decorate the graves of their ancestors and relatives. But as we introduced her, we spoke of the North Shore Revolution as a collective effort of many people. That is as Helen Vance would have it. Like many skilled leaders, she has always envisioned and presented the endeavor as a shared effort, and she has taken care to involve many people in the work at every stage. Thus when one attends a North Shore decoration, it seems that the stages of the event unfold effortlessly by collective cooperation and assent. But someone had to invite a speaker to offer the religious message for a Decoration Day event. Someone had to be sure that there were plenty of extra flowers so that other participants could be enlisted to distribute flowers on every grave. Someone had to make sure that musicians could attend with instruments and that hymn books were brought along. Someone had to make advance plans to take care of the service at the The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

second cemetery when two cemeteries were on the same decoration trip. Someone had to work with the National Park Service regarding any problems or special requests that had arisen. And someone had to help newcomers, from the Jabbours at the 2004 Proctor decoration (see Chapter 1) to members of the press writing a feature on the North Shore decorations. Generally speaking, for the last thirty years the person orchestrating the collective effort has been Helen Vance (Figure 8-18). Helen Cable Vance was born in Proctor on the North Shore in 1926. She thus was a teenager when the North Shore removal was set into motion in 1942–43, and she has many clear recollections of those days, including memories of meetings between her father and tva representatives to discuss the removal. Her father worked for Ritter Lumber Company, and her mother was a schoolteacher. The Cable family is widespread in the area and has connections to Cades Cove on the Tennessee side of the Smokies, from which many pioneer families crossed the mountain into North Carolina after the Cherokee removal in the early nineteenth century. Her mother’s family name is Cabe. The North Shore cemetery with which the family had the closest associations is Cable Cemetery. Two younger sisters have been helpers in the work of the North Shore Cemetery Association, Mildred Cable Johnson and Eleanor Cable Rhinehart. Mildred has made a particularly important The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

figure 8-18 Carrie Laney and Helen Vance, Cable Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, May 20, 2007

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contribution by serving as the movement’s resident photographer. Her important photographs document thirty years of the work of the North Shore Cemetery Association. The North Shore movement has taken the form of a short revolution followed by a long consolidation. The revolution took about three years (roughly 1977–79), after which the remaining major innovation was the launching of the North Shore Cemetery Association’s newsletter, Fontana, in 1986. The consolidation period has lasted for the remainder of the thirty-year history. When the revolution was complete, some opponents hinted that as soon as the revolutionaries — namely, the generation who were born on the North Shore — passed away, the movement would subside. But the North Shore decorations are packed with people of all ages, including children and young adults in great numbers. There are many signs that the movement has succeeded in transferring energy to the next generations, who were not born on the North Shore but nevertheless have acquired a deep feeling of connection to it. Leading a revolution calls for different skills than those needed to consolidate it into a stable, ongoing enterprise. Leading the revolution demands radical thinking that imagines the unimaginable, unshakable self-confidence, and the knack for making everyone see and embrace what you envision. Consolidating the revolution into an ongoing enterprise with staying power, on the other hand, takes a steady hand and a sense of what will prove a balanced and productive course, along with diplomatic skills to manage a thousand daily issues with movement allies, adversaries, and powerful institutions like the National Park Service. A key reason for the movement’s successes is that Helen Vance possessed all these leadership skills. Helen Vance, together with all the others who have helped lead the North Shore movement, are expressions of a larger tradition of cemetery heroes woven deeply into the cultural fabric of western North Carolina. She and her sister Mildred Johnson organized the first decoration on the North Shore, and it was directed at the cemetery with which their family had the closest association, Cable Cemetery (see Chapter 5, Plate 3). The success of that undertaking led them, teaming up with others, to organize a decoration at Proctor Cemetery and then other decorations, as the movement exploded into a fullblown cultural revolution. The magnitude of the accomplishment tempts us to regard it as unique in the history of western North Carolina — and in certain respects it is unique. But it takes nothing away from the accomplishment to say that Helen Vance belongs in the same pantheon of cemetery and Decoration Day heroes that includes all the other people we have considered in this chapter — the cemetery curators as well as the “decorate every grave” devotees — and countless others as well.

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chapter nine

Concluding Thoughts The North Shore Decorations: Regional Impact of a Cultural Revival

One measure of the significance of the North Shore movement is its radiating impact on the wider region. Such an impact is not easy to prove. The tradition of cemetery decoration is diffused widely throughout the central and southern Appalachians. But it appears that western North Carolina has preserved the tradition of cemetery decoration more fully and tenaciously, and has given more prominence to older features of the tradition, than some other Appalachian subregions. One might wonder whether the North Shore decorations may have contributed to this tenacity. The following considerations support that conclusion. • The people removed from the North Shore settled mostly in the adjacent areas of Swain, Graham, and Jackson Counties. Perhaps the largest concentration settled in and around Bryson City. Of course, some moved to Tennessee — Maryville has a sizable North Shore community — or to towns farther away in North Carolina, such as Waynesville, Marion, and beyond. But most of the activists in the North Shore Cemetery Association have lived in the three North Carolina counties adjacent to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and these counties are where cemetery decoration seems strongest today. • Cemetery decoration has always been pluralistic. Many older people describe the custom on the North Shore in the 1930s of visiting multiple decorations at different cemeteries. They did so because different branches of the family were buried in different cemeteries and because decorations have always been community social occasions, a time for recontacting relatives, meeting new people, renewing old acquaintances, even courtship. After the North Shore removal, burials generally did not continue in the North Shore cemeteries and family members were buried in Bryson City, Sylva, and beyond, so in time people had other decorations to attend. Many of the same people who managed Lauada Cemetery, where many North Shore graves

were moved, were active in the North Shore Cemetery Association. Thus it would have been natural for practices developed in the North Shore decorations to influence other cemeteries in the region, since they were used and visited by some of the same people. • The North Shore decorations have received heavy media coverage since 1978. The reporting has been not only local, but also regional and national, and it has included television as well as print media. The continuing media coverage over a generation inevitably gave prominence to the North Shore decorations; highlighted the conservative aspects of North Shore practice, such as mounded graves; and generally kept the idea of decorations current in the minds of the region’s residents. • The connection of the North Shore decorations with a hot political issue — building a road in the national park — tended to cast the North Shore decorations in a contemporary light. Because they seemed socially and politically relevant, the younger generations were less likely to regard them as old-fashioned. • Several North Shore activists are also schoolteachers, and they have introduced North Shore educational units into local school curricula. High school and college students in the region have often been urged to do independent research papers on the North Shore decorations. • A park staff member who worked on the Tennessee side of the Smokies said he could not recall seeing mounding on the Tennessee side, whereas mounding is not hard to find in Swain, Graham, and Jackson Counties on the North Carolina side. This suggests that the North Carolinians are more conservative in cemetery maintenance practices. The fact that the North Shore cemeteries generally have been mounded over the past generation seems a possible influence in that conservative tilt in the nearby region. On balance, it seems reasonable to conclude that North Shore cemeteries and their decoration have played a unique and important role in shaping trends throughout the larger region. That role can be illuminated by consideration of the concept of cultural revival. The term has had many uses in the cultural lexicon of the past century. One can speak of the revival of a Broadway play that was first produced a generation earlier. The sense of the word here is literal: the play was once produced, lay dormant, and is now revived. Or one can speak of a blues guitarist who is a revival musician or a “revivalist,” meaning, for example, a young white musician imitating black bluesmen and popularizing their art with new audiences. Such a “revival” seems not to be a revival at all; rather, it is a transfer of a cultural property from one segment of society to another. Or, finally, one 170

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can speak of attending a revival meeting at one’s church. Here the term refers to a religious convocation for the purpose of reviving one’s religious engagement and commitment. Presumably one already belongs to that religious group, so it is not a religious conversion or a cultural transfer, but an intensification or rejuvenation of one’s existing religious feelings and identity. This final sense is how “revival” is used as a cultural term here. There is a literature on this subject in folklore studies, and a parallel and intersecting literature in cultural anthropology. A volume of essays edited by Neil Rosenberg, entitled Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, offers a number of approaches to the subject, using folkmusic movements as the primary subjects for consideration. His “Introduction” provides a helpful guide to the various uses of the term as a cultural concept, and my own “Foreword” to the volume also touches upon the subject.1 In anthropology a useful related work is Anthony F. C. Wallace’s exploration of the concept of “revitalization movements.”2 At first glance it might seem that, when the North Shore decorations began in 1978, they simply resumed an older practice after a hiatus of a generation. But on closer examination, the North Shore decorations were hardly a simple resumption of the older status quo. They exploded suddenly and powerfully, as if capturing and channeling pentup cultural energy waiting to find new expression. The number of people who participated in them seemed to astonish everyone involved, and the move from one modest, low-key experiment to a summer-long program of decorations at numerous cemeteries happened within two years. At the same time, the movement led to the formal organization of the North Shore Cemetery Association, and the leaders of the movement were suddenly vaulted into prominence through news coverage and a series of public lectures throughout the region, supported by the North Carolina Humanities Committee (now the North Carolina Humanities Council). It was a full-fledged cultural movement — and, thirty years later, it still is. What took shape in 1978 was both profoundly traditional and radically innovative. It was not possible to resume decorations as they had been before, when everything else had changed. The decoration was now performed not by local communities, but by pilgrims who had been exiled from the North Shore a generation before. To perform the decorations, the pilgrims had to leave their present communities and journey into the wilderness. The ritual cleaning of the cemeteries in advance of the decoration, which had formerly been performed by the men of the community, was now done by the staff of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. And the pilgrims did not walk or ride to the cemetery, as they had before the removal. Instead, the pilgrimage began with a voyage on a boat across a deep and formidable lake — a radically new element, but also an ancient symbol of spiritual transition from the secular world to the timeless sacred domain. Concluding Thoughts

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The boat trip and subsequent hike meant that they could not bring large quantities of cut flowers from their yards, and this newer generation had lost or set aside the art of making paper flowers, so they brought a smaller sampling of cut flowers and store-bought artificial flowers. And finally, a loose general format emerged for the service at the cemeteries, in contrast to the great variability of the plan and program for decorations before the removal. In short, the new cultural movement urgently and powerfully reasserted tradition, but it had to respond to new circumstances with new solutions. The boat journey was one such innovation. But perhaps the most astonishing result of this cultural revival was the enlistment of the park as a full partner in the ritual. From the time of the revolution forward, park staff performed the ritual cleaning of the cemeteries, contracted for the ritual boat ride, provided portable toilets and temporary canopies, furnished vehicles on the North Shore to carry those unable to walk, and offered general guidance and monitoring for large groups in unfamiliar forest surroundings. The partnership seems to have been invented fully in that first year or two, though there have been many smaller adjustments in subsequent years. And inevitably, for the old-timers and the rising generation alike, the religious aspect of the decoration that they were seeking merged with the same environmental experience of being immersed in the wilderness that so many park visitors seek. It became, in a stroke, both a religious experience and a park and wilderness experience. The astonishing new cultural partnership with the park must have seemed extremely unlikely in 1978, but it has now lasted more than a generation with no signs of ending.

The Spirit of Inclusion One moral message of Decoration Day is what might be termed “the spirit of inclusion.” The activities of a cemetery decoration contain, encoded within the ritual actions, a moral message for the participants. The message is contained both in the structure of the cemetery itself and in the act of its decoration: everyone buried in the cemetery is equal and must be included in the ritual of decoration. The underlying idea is reflected in two separate but related practices in the community cemeteries of western North Carolina: the ideal of decorating all graves and the special devotion to the graves of newborn infants. A common theme of many of our interviews in the region was the collective obligation to decorate all graves in the cemetery (see Chapter 8). The same idea turns up farther west, in the larger region within which the southern Decoration Day is practiced. But it seems to be brought up with a special intensity and fervor in western North Carolina. The responsibility for decorating all graves may be compared with the overall responsibility of the community to clean, mound, and otherwise prepare the cemetery for decoration. 172

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In both cases the challenge is to look beyond family responsibility to larger community responsibility. Of course, the ideal of decorating every grave is not always perfectly realized. Some cemeteries are not decorated at all, and for others that have a formal decoration, some individual graves may still go undecorated. Nevertheless, as a principle that everyone in the community is acquainted with, “decorating every grave” serves to exhort people to think about the entire fellowship of the cemetery as well as their own family when they enter the cemetery on Decoration Day. People naturally think first about decorating the graves of their own kin, and those graves are likely to receive the most flowers and the most careful arrangement. But the ideal of decorating all graves helps them regard the entire cemetery, and hence the entire community, as a communal responsibility. The ideal, as it is communicated orally through the community, also generates “heroes,” as we saw in Chapter 8, who take onto themselves a special mission of decorating graves other than their own family graves. They may have a mission to decorate the entire cemetery. Dorothy Cochran took on such a mission years ago from her motherin-law, committing herself to seeing that every grave in Cochran Cemetery is decorated. Her daughter Regina Howell embraced the mission as a family responsibility, and in 2007 Regina’s son Clay Young and his friend Trevor Woodard represented the next generation carrying on the mission. In North Shore decorations, the leadership always ensures that flowers are brought with which to decorate every grave. During the Cable Cemetery decoration in 2007, Carrie Laney undertook the task of decorating every grave (a task on which I helped), but Helen Vance may have supplied the flowers. Some people take a mission that covers a special category within a cemetery. Virgie Shook and Dyanne Pedersen are two generations of decorating the sixty anonymous graves at Lauada Cemetery. Janice Inabinett has taken the mission of decorating African American graves in Watkins Cemetery. Verna Kirkland, in addition to decorating the graves of her kin in Brendle Hill Cemetery, brings an extra box of flowers to decorate other graves that seem to be unattended. For all these people, decorating graves beyond the scope of their immediate family is a mission that they assumed as a kind of calling — like being called to preach. Whether it comes to them directly, in a moment of emotional commitment, or is transferred to them from another family member as a family responsibility, their calling is something that is known and talked about in the wider community. Thus their votive example, being observed by others, helps keep the ideal alive. They may inspire others to assume similar mantles of community responsibility, and in the meanwhile they encourage people generally to be attentive to decorating their own family graves. This responsibility raises interesting questions about the boundaries of community in the Smokies. The rural community cemeteries of the region are multicultural in Concluding Thoughts

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the sense that they represent multiple ethnic strands of what became the regional white population. But does the community include African Americans and Cherokees? Both groups are clearly part of the life of the region, and both communities have historically been discriminated against. One can see this social dilemma being played out in the cultural language of cemeteries. One resolution of this dilemma presented itself during a visit with William Crawford to Shook Cemetery in Jackson County. The cemetery was beautifully decorated at the time of our visit. Walking down the rows of gravestones, we came to two headstones that our host said were graves of an African American family who had lived in the community. The gravestones revealed that the burials were a generation or two ago, and he said the family had moved away from the region many years ago. They had been the only black family in the community. Nevertheless, both graves were freshly decorated with flowers. Someone else from the community, presumably operating on the “every grave must be decorated” principle, had decorated the two graves. When we visited Cochran Cemetery with Verna Kirkland, she pointed out as we entered that the first grave we encountered was the grave of an African American infant who had been buried there more than a century ago. Normally, we would have had to wonder who decorated this grave, since the African American family no longer resides in the community. But in this case we knew, because we watched Clay Young and Trevor Woodard, under Regina Howell’s supervision, embark on their task of decorating every grave in that cemetery. Values are sometimes in conflict, and one can see the conflict played out in the cultural code of the cemetery. Another story we heard from several sources illustrates palpably the conflicting values regarding the place of African Americans in the community. One North Shore community in the early twentieth century included an elderly black man who, during an influenza epidemic, nursed many people in the community. Then he fell ill himself and passed away. People were uncertain where to bury him, and some in the community said he should not be buried in the community cemetery (Higdon Cemetery on Hazel Creek), since he was African American. Finally, as a compromise, the community buried him just outside the fence enclosing the cemetery. Years later, after the North Shore revolution resuscitated Higdon Cemetery and brought family members back to it, people decorating the cemetery remembered the story of this burial and located the grave. No one could remember his name, but they purchased a gravestone to mark the grave, and it reads simply “A Black Man.” Reflecting further, they decided to move the fence so that the previously segregated grave, now marked by the headstone they had purchased, was enclosed with the rest of the cemetery.3

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Although we have visited several African American and Cherokee cemeteries in western North Carolina, we have not attended local decorations in those communities. But a number of cemeteries in the region that are predominantly white include some African American or Cherokee burials. Watkins Cemetery in Bryson City contains a sizable number of African American graves and at least one Cherokee grave (see Chapter 8), and the burial, headstone, and decoration practices are generally consistent with the rest of the cemetery. Old Savannah Cemetery in Jackson County has a section on the upper edge of the cemetery, next to the woods, where there are reputed to be American Indian and African American burials, and where the graves are unkept. The David Rogers Cemetery in Jackson County contains a sizable group of African American graves at the upper end of the cemetery; they are not separately enclosed, look well kept, and seem integrated with the rest of the cemetery in style and decoration. Overall, it appears that African American graves are at least partially integrated into the region’s cemeteries, while also occurring in small special cemeteries for their own communities. Some Cherokee burials also occur in general community cemeteries, but most Cherokee graves are in separate Cherokee cemeteries or on the private land of the family. The white community expresses a curiosity about Cherokee burial practices, but it is often accompanied by a disclaimer to the effect that “they have their own way and it is their business.” These practices indicate with reasonable accuracy the historical and contemporary relationships of these minorities to the white community. Visitors to the community cemeteries of the Upland South are often struck by the number of infants occupying graves in the cemeteries. It is not uncommon to encounter four, five, or six infants in the same family buried side by side. Occasionally the infant burials of several families are grouped together, and the impact of seeing them is even greater. The headstones, footstones, and mounding of their graves typically indicate much smaller graves than adult graves or even the graves of older children (see Chapter 3). If the graves are mounded, or if there are prominent footstones as well as headstones, one can see at a glance these infant graves scattered across the cemetery, a veritable subtheme of pain and sorrow within the larger themes of the cemetery. Once one has absorbed the impact of the sheer numbers of these infant graves, one becomes aware that they often reflect as much care and expense as the adjacent graves of adult members of the same families. The stones are often equally attractive, and they are usually carefully inscribed like adult headstones. Some infant graves seem to receive special treatment beyond what other family members receive, such as the infant grave in northern Alabama that had a well-made and carefully maintained graveshelter over it. Often the inscriptions include not only the facts of birth and death, but expressions of

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the hopes, pain, and sense of irretrievable loss felt by the parents. And one often sees the grave of an infant beautifully decorated, even when the graves of other family members lie bereft of decoration. This decoration may adorn an infant burial from a half century ago or even a century. The case seems to be that the family has moved away or otherwise has lost the close connection to the graves in that cemetery. Someone else among the living community of the cemetery, perhaps on Decoration Day, cannot bear to see the infant grave undecorated; thus the infants receive flowers, even when the graves of other deceased members of the family go flowerless. It is occasionally said that, since infant mortality was so high in the old days, people were inured to the frequent deaths of infants at, or soon after, birth. The cemeteries tell another story — a story of pain and suffering over the loss of the infants. It is a pain suffered by the whole family, but, of course, it is most poignantly the pain of loss expressed by mothers. The beauty of the flowers that decorate the babies’ graves may modulate and contain the pain, and even transmute it to a graceful decorum, but the pain is still there. Both the dictum that every grave should be decorated and the special focus on infant burials express the larger “spirit of inclusion.” Both traditions, as important components of the larger tradition of cemetery maintenance and decoration, convey the symbolic message that all the burials in the cemetery are equal, and that they comprise “the community.” The community includes not only adults and children but even the infants who lived no more than an hour after birth. It also includes people of all ethnic groups — notably, in western North Carolina, African Americans and Cherokees. The cemetery itself reinforces this message, since its “operating system” calls for like burials arrayed in a pattern that visibly defines the community inclusively. This does not mean that everyone in the community thinks of community inclusively, or that no prejudice exists in the community. Communities contain many ideas that contradict each other. But the cemetery and the rituals attached to it reinforce the idea that all souls buried there are equal members of the community.

Pilgrims in the Wilderness, Pilgrims Going Home Preceding chapters have occasionally used the word “pilgrims” to refer to the people performing the rituals of cemetery decoration. Perhaps this is the moment to explore the layers of meaning embedded in that word. The word “pilgrim” is an old Christian term from the Latin peregrinus, meaning “wanderer.” Pilgrimages have a cultural history stretching back into prehistory and an Old World geographical spread ranging from England to India and Indonesia. The medieval pilgrimage was a personal religious mission that involved leaving home and going to a faraway sanctified place. Hence Chaucer’s pilgrims in Can176

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terbury Tales have embarked upon a pilgrimage to Canterbury— the first long sentence of the prologue ends its description of April’s stirrings with the phrase “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” (“Then folk long to go on pilgrimages”). The Protestant reformers in seventeenth-century Great Britain were hostile to the pilgrimages of established religion, with their associated shrines and saints’ relics, seeing them as a corrupt facet of the old regime. Whereas the practices of the Catholic Church and the Church of England encouraged leaving home to go on faraway pilgrimages, the British Protestant reformers developed a view of life itself as a pilgrimage in an alien and spiritually challenging land — witness John Bunyan’s allegorical hero, Christian, in Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84). The idea of life as a pilgrimage was intensified for many British Protestant dissenters by the human dislocations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the disruption of an older settled village life by the coming of the Industrial Age, the clearances that forced many people off their ancestral lands, the migration from Scotland to Northern Ireland, and the migration to the New World. In the New World, the pattern of migration did not end. Rather, as land quickly filled up, many young people from each new generation migrated farther into the interior of the continent in search of unoccupied land or to seek their fortune. One generation might be born in Northern Ireland (with ancestors in Scotland); the next, in central Pennsylvania or central North Carolina; the next, in Swain County, North Carolina; the next, in Tennessee; and the next, in Texas. Perhaps some lingered at every stage of this journey of dispersed kinship, sinking deeper roots into the way station where, for them, the journey ended. But all shared a sense from family experience of life as a pilgrim’s journey through a strange world. Many a gospel hymn in the southern repertory evokes this sense of severance from home: “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through.” Gwen Kennedy Neville, to whom I am indebted for many of the ideas explored in this section, observes in Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture that the Protestant reformers and their descendants in America evolved an inversion of the Catholic idea of pilgrimage.4 Even if life itself is a pilgrimage, it is not exactly parallel to the more limited idea of a pilgrimage as a specific journey. But in a world of dislocation and migration, the Protestants invented a new sort of pilgrimage. It does not take the pilgrim away from home, instead, in an inversion of the Catholic and Anglican view of pilgrimage, home becomes the destination. “Home” represents a reaffirmation of the bonds of kinship, a reconnection with communities left behind by migration, and a reconstitution of religious fellowships that had to be set aside because of the exigencies of life’s greater pilgrimage. The other key cultural element in the British Protestant worldview that Neville traces from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern Ireland to the Upland South of the New World Concluding Thoughts

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is the open-air service. She interprets this both as an ancient pre-Christian survival and as another Protestant inversion of Catholic and Anglican ecclesiastical norms. Many of the founding meetings of the Scottish Covenanters were open-air convocations, and the origins narrative for the founding of the religion is thus bound up in the anti-ecclesiastical gestures of meeting outside of established churches in the open air.5 In American frontier Protestantism, the pilgrimage and open-air meeting themes resurface in the form of the camp meetings that began with the Second Great Awakening in Kentucky at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Camp meetings, brush-arbor meetings, and tent revivals became common and widely dispersed during the nineteenth century in the American South and are still active cultural forms today. Most of these forms were open to all, but some were associated with specific churches or communities, and in some communities the camp meetings became institutionalized as the community constructed open-air tabernacles for convening and cabins for sleeping. Other nineteenth-century forms sprang up, such as the outdoor funeralizing events (see Chapter 6) and the “feast in the wilderness” custom (see Chapter 2). The rise of family reunions and church homecomings (see Chapter 2) seems to date from later decades, and both forms continued to evolve through the twentieth century. For many participants, both family reunions and church homecomings, of course, involve pilgrimages back home. Family reunions have strong outdoor components, including cemetery events and the use of outdoor pavilions. Church homecomings, celebrating the founding and development of a church, may have focus more on inside events, but they also may include cemetery visits and a sacramental dinner on the ground. This Protestant matrix of “pilgrimage back home” and “outdoor religious ceremonies” seems to be the root complex out of which the southern tradition of cemetery decoration grew. How and when it emerged is unclear (see Chapter 6). Its focus on spring for the ritual may be another conscious Protestant inversion from the Catholic and Anglican associations of Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls’ Day— fall rituals involving cemetery visits and decoration. It could have been fostered by churches with influence in the South, and particularly in the rural small-farm Upland South. The Presbyterian, Methodist, and especially Baptist churches are likely candidates. It may also have been shaped by the activities of benevolent burial societies, such as the Odd Fellows. It seems useful at this point, in the spirit of stimulating future inquiry, to offer a cautious hypothesis that seems to account nicely for details that are otherwise hard to explain. We have noticed several tantalizing hints that Decoration Day as a community observance originated, not in the Appalachians and points west where it is strong today, but in the coastal and piedmont South. The two prominent events cited as the origin of the modern Memorial Day — the stunning African American decoration at the Race Course 178

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in Charleston and the powerful decoration of Confederate dead in Petersburg’s Blandford Cemetery — occurred in the coastal and piedmont South. There are late-nineteenth-century published references to Decoration Day east and south of the Appalachians. Ruth Little, discussing the unusual eggshells decorating an eastern North Carolina grave, refers in passing to family decorations: “In some areas of North Carolina, ‘decoration day’ was held at the family graveyard just prior to Easter. Families converged on the cemetery to clean it up after the ravages of winter and to honor their ancestors for the coming of spring and of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”6 And several conversations with our colleagues from east and south of the mountains have yielded descriptions of cemetery decorations done, not by whole communities, but by families as an annual family ritual. So perhaps decorations began as a family ritual, often in a family cemetery. Then, as many family cemeteries evolved into community or church cemeteries in the nineteenth century, the family ritual evolved, along with the cemetery itself, into a community ritual. Such a nascent community ritual might also have been promoted by organized religion or by organized burial societies, such as the Odd Fellows. But the intimacy of the original family orientation of the ritual could account for the lack of widespread publicity about the practice, and the evolution of the practice by local community consensus would also keep it subliminal at the wider public level. The family practice of cemetery decoration would logically have been shared by black and white southerners. Thus it could have been the foundation upon which both the Charleston and the Petersburg landmark events were constructed, which in turn became models for coping with death, grief, and loss on a national scale. It is noteworthy that the minutes for the Ladies Memorial Association of Petersburg talk about burial, reburial, mounding, and decoration in cemeteries other than Blandford and show an effort to coordinate the date of the Blandford event not to conflict with other cemetery decoration events in the immediate region. The minutes leave one with a sense that, though they felt they were doing something of landmark importance, they also saw themselves as building on tradition, not inventing something altogether new. The tradition of cemetery decoration, expanding from family to community orientation, would have taken hold firmly in the Appalachians, where the dispersed settlement pattern and decentralized Protestant religious practices provided fertile ground. From there it would have been carried westward and southwestward with migration in the nineteenth century. But the cemetery-by-cemetery focus with variable dates ensured that the custom never gained the sort of wider public visibility that is achieved when everyone does something on the same day. The possibility that Decoration Day emerged from the world of rural family and comConcluding Thoughts

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munity cemeteries would help account for the unheralded origin and development of the tradition in the 19th century. Many other such rural southern folk traditions, such as ballad singing, lacking institutional sponsorship or the participation of regional elites, left few traces in the nineteenth-century print world. We know of them almost entirely from twentieth-century folklore collectors. The southern Decoration Day fits perfectly into the cultural framework we have been sketching. Cemeteries are outdoors, and in the Appalachians the community cemeteries are often on top of ridges surrounded by woods. Thus visiting a cemetery is often not just an outdoor experience, as might be the case with a churchyard cemetery, but a fullfledged wilderness experience (Plate 32). Furthermore, the participants in a Decoration Day ceremony are likely to include, not only local families, but travelers from farther away who are coming home for the decoration. For them, the decoration is also the pilgrimage home, reconnecting their lives with kin both alive and dead in an outdoor religious ceremony. Cemetery decorations, with their lack of institutional support, also fit the anti-establishment tradition of radical Protestantism in Great Britain and America. The Appalachian community cemetery stands mutely apart from all other social and cultural institutions, whether national or local. Most Appalachian community cemeteries are not affiliated with churches, though some have attracted churches that are built next to their already established sacred ground. We have taken note earlier of the evidence that Decoration Day has sometimes conflicted or competed with local churches. Church homecomings may try to co-opt or crowd out Decoration Day, or decorations may occasionally be switched from their traditional Sunday to Saturday to avoid head-to-head competition with required church attendance. Now we can see that the holy ground of the cemetery and the holy ceremony of Decoration Day are a quintessential Protestant religious expression. They lack formal institutional support; they are held on holy ground in the wilderness; they merge religion with respect for family, kinship, and ancestors; and they attract pilgrims for whom the decoration is also a pilgrimage back home. Seen in this light, the special contemporary case of the North Shore decorations, incorporating a boat crossing a mysterious body of water, an arduous journey by foot up a ridge, and a sacred ceremony in the wilderness of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, seems not so much a modern innovation as a radical restatement of the root Protestant values of Decoration Day. In its confrontation with vested authority, it is quintessentially a grassroots Protestant protest. And since everyone, even the family members living in counties adjacent to the park, must leave their contemporary home and journey far into the wilderness to an original home, it is more thoroughly a pilgrimage for everyone than

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the homespun decorations at those same cemeteries seventy years earlier, before the expulsion from the North Shore.

The Decorated Cemetery as an Artistic Expression of Appalachian Culture Since our 2004–05 work on the eis for the North Shore Road, we have stayed in touch with our partners on that team, Ted Coyle and Paul Webb (see Project History). In December of 2006, Ted Coyle responded to our updates with this comment: “The other day I climbed over the mountain behind my house and came down on Shook Cemetery — the one that Alan and Karen were so impressed with. Although I’d been by the area many times, this was my first visit to Shook. Coming off the mountain, I came on the cemetery and it looked so beautiful. It struck me that cemetery decoration is the defining folk art of the mountains. It embodies the key features of the culture in one ritual” (Plate 30). The participants in cemetery decorations often use the same word, “beautiful,” to describe their reaction to a well-decorated cemetery. They might also use “beautiful” for an individual gravesite’s decoration, but in practice the word seems more often to characterize the entire decorated cemetery. It is an appropriate word, for a fully decorated cemetery shimmers with a special beauty that is all the more powerful because it is apprehended at a panoramic level of perception. A bare cemetery, hugging the ground, has a rigorous, formal look, like a structural drawing that is elegant in its formal arrangement but spare in its affective impact. A richly decorated cemetery has the same structural form, but the multicolored flowers galvanize the form into a dancing visual feast, like Thomas Aquinas’s phrase splendor formae, used in his discussion of aesthetics. In the early days of the North Shore movement, the management at Great Smoky Mountains National Park tried very hard — ultimately with little success — to suppress the new “plastic” flowers that North Shore pilgrims were starting to bring to decorations. The idea was that the new store-bought flowers were historically and aesthetically inappropriate. But with the passing of each new decade, the commercial flower trade has created products of increasing quality, variety, and sturdiness. Today the elaborate fabric flowers produced by the industry dominate cemetery decorations, both on the North Shore and throughout the Upland South. It is hard to say that this generation of flower decorations is less graceful, and the flowers certainly last longer. In fact, one can make a case that the new artificial flowers have helped inspire some cemetery communities to new heights of sumptuous decorative creativity. It may well be that some decorated cemeteries we now behold are more elaborately decorated than ever before, with more flowers and more colorful display. People often assume that the

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past was somehow more glorious than the present, but the availability of the new generation of fabric flowers may have helped spark a renaissance (or efflorescence) in cemetery decoration happening everywhere around us today — a renaissance we miss as we search for the glories of the past. Perhaps the advent of crepe paper flowers as a homemade folk art in the past had a similar precipitating impact on the tradition in that earlier era. Technological advances often stimulate new bursts in grassroots creativity. The current renaissance — assuming for the sake of argument that this renaissance is a fact, not a theory — seems to present itself unequally in different cemeteries. In certain communities, such as Alarka in Swain County and Canada Township in Jackson County, the tradition seems to inspire a strong and vibrant participation from community members, and many who have moved away return regularly for their decorations. Some individual cemeteries, such as Watkins Cemetery near Bryson City and Birdtown Cemetery near Cherokee, may have been blessed with strong leadership and a tradition of community participation. Some even benefit from physical or structural advantages that inspire the decorating impulse, such as the awesome views provided by Barkers Creek Cemetery or Balsam Grove Cemetery in Jackson County, or the tight integration caused by lack of space in many cemeteries, which intensifies the visual impact of heavy decoration. The North Shore decorations may be less visually overwhelming, since the logistics of North Shore decorations discourage the lavish decoration style that is possible elsewhere. But Paynetown and Orr Cemeteries, which are on the North Shore cemetery decoration calendar but are accessible by automobile, have a more sumptuous visual presentation. Ted Coyle’s reflections on encountering Shook Cemetery bring us back to considering cemetery decoration as an Appalachian folk art. It certainly is a folk art, in the sense that it is an artistic genre of cultural expression that arises from and is maintained by the people without formal professional training, centralized control, or institutional direction. Further, one may say that it is a religious folk art, in that it is created by a religious ritual and presents the results of that ritual in visual form. It is also a regional folk art, in the sense that within the region it flourishes across ethnic boundaries. It may be a creation of the Euro-American majority — itself a pan-ethnic synthesis of many cultural strands — that dominates the Appalachian region. If so, it was also embraced from an early period by members of the African American and Cherokee communities, who may have contributed to its development in ways we do not now understand. In addition to being a religious folk art with regional distribution, cemetery decoration is a collectively produced folk art. All folk art reveals a collective shaping influence, but the artifacts of many folk arts are produced by individuals, even if they reflect the shaping influence of the group over time. A traditional pot or quilt is produced primarily as an individual act, and the larger group shapes the traditions that the individual learns, 182

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absorbs, and renders. But both the cemetery itself and the decoration that adorns it result from collective acts. The decoration is a collective act produced during a ritual every year, and the cemetery itself is enacted collectively over many years. The new burials and the revamping of the “operating system” — the headstones, style of presentation, walls, and other physical features — gradually reshape the cemetery’s continuous becoming. Thus individual gravesites can be said to be beautiful, but beyond the beauty of the individual gravesite there is a special beauty to be found in the panoramic contemplation of the cemetery as a whole. Intuiting that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and feeling the special glory revealed by the collective ritual as a community effort, people say that “the cemetery looked beautiful when it was all decorated.” They may admire individual grave decorations, but they reserve their highest words of aesthetic appreciation for the collective votive offering (Plate 1). We may now count the ways in which, as Ted Coyle said, cemetery decoration “embodies the key features of the culture in one ritual.” The first feature is the valuing of kinship. People of both western North Carolina and the wider region of the Upland South prize kinship ties, both laterally in the present and back through the generations. The community cemeteries of the Upland South are living artifacts of kinship ties and visible explicators of the subtle arterial system that connects outward from kin to community. Decoration Day brings together in the cemetery the people who represent both the threads of kinship and the dissolving of kinship into the larger pool of community. The valuing of kinship shades into the next feature of the culture, piety. Most Americans think of piety as a word denoting religiousness. But the etymology reveals the larger meaning of the word and the way that it informs Appalachian culture. Piety derives from the Latin pietas, the broad sense of which in classical Latin is “dutiful conduct towards the gods, one’s parents, relatives, benefactors, country, etc.”7 Although the meaning of the word resembles the Latin religio, pietas seems to apply more broadly and inclusively to the gods, family, ancestors, kin, and country. Both nouns focus on practice rather than belief; they highlight dutiful conduct and the traits of character that dutiful conduct reveals. Thus cemetery decoration is an act of piety that connects the devotee simultaneously to God, kin, and community, and shows “respect” (the preferred word in our interviews about Decoration Day) for the deceased (Figure 9-3). A third feature is equality, a value that bespeaks a sort of democratic egalitarianism. Equality as a value manifests itself visually in the region’s community cemeteries. Surveying them, one quickly senses that there is a kind of modest equality at work in the headstone selection, ensuring that people rarely erect headstones that seem ostentatious or expensive compared to their neighbors. The sense of egalitarianism also leads to the principle of inclusion, discussed earlier in this chapter, whereby every grave must be decoConcluding Thoughts

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figure 9-1 Jackson Owen Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., March 11, 2008

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rated and infant graves receive as much decoration as the graves of prominent community elders. The panorama of a decorated cemetery reveals a colorful bed of flowers blanketing the entire cemetery. In an undecorated cemetery the graves look equal, but separate; the flowers of a decoration bind the equal parts together into an integrated whole. There is another dimension to the equality that decorations reflect as a cultural value. Cemetery decoration is at least equally shared between men and women, and some men with whom we talked cheerfully acknowledged that women were often the prime movers in making the decorations happen and shaping them in all their particulars. Jack Cable, who had returned from Delaware to his birthplace on the North Shore for the Cable Branch Decoration, told Karen as they discussed decoration traditions, “The women are the backbone of the nation, the planners and the doers.” Decorations are not exactly a women’s art, like quilt-making. But, like ballad singing in the older Appalachian world and hymn singing today, cemetery decoration is an arena where women can excel, display their artistry publicly, and provide a significant shaping influence on the art itself. Indeed, the cemetery itself displays an equality of gender that is unmatched in every realm of Appalachian life. Some churches in the old days (and a few today) segregated Concluding Thoughts

figure 9-2 Chapel, Double Springs Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., March 6, 2009

men and women, with two entrances and seating on opposite sides of the central aisle. Some jobs and roles in the public sphere seem generally reserved for men. But for a decoration, women are visible leaders of the community effort, and some of them, as we have seen, are heroes. Furthermore, the cemetery itself has men and women buried side by side, with their children, presenting an integrated recapitulation of the family with all treated equally. A fourth feature is individual freedom. The sense of the individual’s freedom to choose manifests itself in many ways in the region’s cemeteries. The headstones may be roughly equal in size and cost, but they vary greatly in style, and the decorations are also strikingly varied, so that most cemeteries of any age present an interesting heterogeneity. Furthermore, the overall style of a cemetery may be contradicted by the individual preferences of certain families. Hence there are holdouts who insist on mounding their family graves in otherwise level cemeteries, and no one objects. Few cemeteries have cemetery committees, and fewer post rules for burial and decoration, compared to other parts of the Upland South. Individualism also implies individual responsibility, so the cemeteries we visited are decorated by individuals from each family, not by a committee of designated people. Even Concluding Thoughts

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figure 9-3 Sign, Round Hill Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 27, 2007

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“decorating every grave” is a personal calling, not a collective or assigned task. Someone who cannot attend a decoration might ask a friend to decorate her family graves for her. And food for dinner on the ground is placed on long tables, but each woman who brings food stays with her own offerings and makes the hospitality personal. All tasks pertaining to the ritual are managed on an individual-to-individual basis. The high premium placed on individual responsibility also means that group decision-making is cautious and consensual. This is not fertile ground for command-and-control leadership. But, paradoxically, both community cemeteries and Decoration Day events also exemplify a fifth value, the ideal of community. Again and again in our interviews, people expressed the idea that Decoration Day was about “community.” And since the decoration is also a symbolic communication with the dead, it is important to remember that a cemetery decoration brings together a community of the living, assembled above ground, for a ritual of piety connecting them with a community buried beneath ground. As the ritual symbolically reconnects these two parallel and kindred communities, it provides the gift of beauty and connectedness in return for the gift of flowers.

Concluding Thoughts

If asked to name important forms of Appalachian folk art, few people would include a decorated cemetery on their list. We are accustomed to thinking of folk art at the smaller level of the individually created folk forms — the pot, quilt, or basket, perhaps even the artistically carved gravestone in a cemetery. But the cemetery itself, seen as an integrated whole on or after Decoration Day, is a compelling panoramic canvas— a strikingly beautiful folk art created by communities together over time. We hope that Karen’s photographs will convey to others what Ted Coyle, Paul Webb, Karen, and I all experienced as we attended decorations and visited cemeteries in western North Carolina — a sense of the decorated cemetery as a folk art capable of breathtaking beauty and expressing powerfully the deepest values of Appalachian culture (Plates 31, 32; Figures 9-1, 9-2, 9-3).

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appendix a: Project History In 2004 I was engaged to produce a study of the cultural tradition of Decoration Day in the Great Smoky Mountains. The study was part of the larger Environmental Impact Statement on the North Shore Road, which was proposed to run roughly parallel to the northern shore of Fontana Lake through the North Carolina side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The idea for the study seems to have arisen out of interchanges among Erik Kreusch, the archeologist for Great Smoky Mountains National Park; Paul Webb, an archeologist and cultural resource manager for trc Environmental Corporation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and Bennie Keel, archeologist for the National Park Service’s Southeast Regional Archeological Center in Tallahassee. It was Bennie who first contacted me in search of a researcher to undertake the study. The study team, in addition to me, consisted of Philip E. “Ted” Coyle, a cultural anthropologist at Western Carolina University; Paul Webb; Karen Singer Jabbour, my wife, who served as our photographer; and several of Ted Coyle’s students at Western Carolina University, who produced transcripts of our recorded interviews, attended decorations, and helped the project in other ways. We knew little about Decoration Day when we began. But as we became better acquainted with it, we found that we greatly admired the tradition for its beauty and cultural power. The rural people of the region clearly cherished it, and, as we discovered, it is practiced throughout a much broader region—generally speaking, the Upland South, ranging from the Appalachians west and southwest to the Plains. What is more, evidence began to mount that it may have had a national impact in inspiring what became our national Memorial Day. Decoration Day was also deeply imbedded in the hotly debated issue over the North Shore Road, which has gained a degree of national visibility, and for which our Environmental Impact Statement was commissioned (see Chapter 5). Our study in 2004 involved six weeks of fieldwork in the region and extensive research into the existing documentary record. The fieldwork included over fifty interviews, documentation of several decorations in North Shore cemeteries, and visits to additional cemeteries in Swain, Graham, and Jackson Counties in North Carolina. The resulting report was published in 2005 as a freestanding paper document and in 2006 in digital form as part of the Environmental Impact Statement for the North Shore Road.1 Following publication of the report, Karen and I found that our interest in the topic had not subsided, and we began to consider creating a book and an exhibition to share our research

more widely. We extended our comparative knowledge of the subject by carrying out fieldwork in western and eastern Kentucky, central and northern Alabama (with glances at northeastern Mississippi, northwestern Georgia, and Atlanta), eastern and western Tennessee, northern Arkansas, eastern Oklahoma, northern Louisiana, South Carolina, and certain Virginia towns. We returned to the Smokies for a brief visit in April 2007, a month of fieldwork in May and June 2007, and brief visits in March and May 2008 and March and October 2009. The new Smokies fieldwork enabled us to attend decorations and pre-decoration cemetery cleanup efforts in several Swain County cemeteries outside of the national park, and to attend additional North Shore decorations in the park. We expanded our general knowledge of the cemeteries of the region, including cemetery samplings in other adjacent counties (Transylvania, Haywood, Madison, Macon, and Cherokee Counties, North Carolina) and in new categories (African American and Cherokee cemeteries) that we had not visited previously. This book has a wider geographic purview than the earlier report and concentrates more on the cemeteries and decorations outside the park. There are more references to “western North Carolina” and fewer to “the Smokies.” It must be stipulated, however, that the “western North Carolina” referred to here does not include all that normally falls under that rubric—or at least we cannot vouch for all of western North Carolina, since our fieldwork was confined to the North Carolina counties west of Asheville. The book also occasionally comments on features of cemetery decoration across the Upland South, where our field experience is extensive but by no means comprehensive. The evidence suggests, however, that the main features of Decoration Day as a folk custom are consistent, not only throughout the southern Appalachians but across much of the Upland South as a larger cultural region. Compared with the earlier report, some chapters of this book are entirely or mostly new (Chapters 1, 7, and 8); some are substantially new but also incorporate significant elements of the earlier report (Chapters 2, 3, 6, and 9); and some are substantially the same (Chapters 4 and 5). The earlier report recommended the creation of publications and exhibitions on this tradition, and we are happy to begin fulfilling that recommendation ourselves. The subject is important, so we hope others will pursue it and expand or amend our contributions. This publication emphatically does not make the previous report superfluous. The report contains its own unique contributions to knowledge—notably a careful analysis of why the North Shore cemeteries should be formally designated a “traditional cultural property,” eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, and why its former inhabitants should be considered a “traditionally associated people” (written by Philip E. Coyle), and a long, detailed description of the salient technical and historical features of each of the twenty-seven North Shore cemeteries (written by Paul Webb). The photographs in this book (with the exception of historical photos) were taken by Karen Singer Jabbour on a Canon EOS Rebel digital camera. The 2004 photographs are part of the archive for the North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project, and the photographs from subsequent years are from our personal collection.

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An exhibition also entitled “Decoration Day in the Mountains” and based on the research for this book was presented by the Mountain Heritage Center at Western Carolina University from April 2008 through May 2009. The exhibition is constructed in a touring format. Although the book shares many images with the exhibition, they do not mirror one another. One should regard them as separate creations that can be contemplated independently but will reward the viewer who contemplates them together. They reflect on the same subject, but in different ways.

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appendix b: Log of Ethnographic Events, North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project, 2004 This book cites a number of interviews with people in western North Carolina during the North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project in 2004. The interviews are part of that project’s permanent archive, accessible in either the archival collections of Great Smoky Mountains National Park or at Western Carolina University. They are not individually footnoted in the text but can be easily located using the retrieval system laid out here. Each interview or other “ethnographic event” (the term used in the 2004 project’s final report) is labeled “NSCD,” referring to the North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project. Then comes the date of the ethnographic event, followed by the initials of the fieldworker: AJ for Alan Jabbour, KJ for Karen Singer Jabbour, PC for Philip E. Coyle, and TT for Tonya Teague. AJ/KJ stands for recordings of interview events by Alan and Karen Jabbour as a team, whereas KJ standing alone in the entry stands for Karen Jabbour’s photography. Every interview, even if not recorded or photographed, is documented by fieldnotes. NSCD 7-2-04: Public meeting, Swain Co. Administration Building and Courthouse NSCD 7-4-04 PC-1, KJ, PC: Proctor and Bradshaw Decorations NSCD 7-4-04 PC-1: Kathryn Forbes and Dot Tysinger interview NSCD 7-6-04 AJ/KJ-1: Christine Cole Proctor interview NSCD 7-7-04 AJ/KJ-1: Linda Grant Hogue interview NSCD 7-12-04 PC-1, PC: Kelly Cole interview NSCD 7-18-04 PC-1: Fairview and Cook Decorations NSCD 7-19-04 PC-1: Millie Vickery and Ruth Vickery Hicks interview NSCD 7-21-04 PC-1: Bayless Crisp interview NSCD 7-27-04 AJ/KJ-1: David Monteith interview NSCD 7-27-04 PC-1: Duane Oliver interview NSCD 7-28-04 KJ: Visit to Alarka Cemeteries with Verna and Carolyn Kirkland NSCD 7-29-04 AJ/KJ-1: Max W. Monteith Sr. interview NSCD 7-29-04-KJ: Visit to Mason Branch Cemetery with Verna and Carolyn Kirkland NSCD 8-1-04 PC-1, KJ: Cable Branch Decoration NSCD 8-2-04 PC-1 and PC-2: Larry Vickery interview NSCD 8-2-04 AJ/KJ-1: Gay and David Calhoun interview NSCD 8-3-04 AJ/KJ-1: Shirley Crisp interview

NSCD 8-4-04 PC-1: Eddie Marlowe interview NSCD 8-4-04 AJ/KJ-1: Gene and Carrie Laney interview, Graham Co. cemetery tour NSCD 8-5-04 AJ: Swain County Genealogical Society picnic NSCD 8-6-04 PC-1: Edwin Cabe interview NSCD 8-6-04 AJ/KJ-1: Hazel Cline Sawyer interview NSCD 8-7-04: Peggy Bradshaw Medford and Cledus Medford interview NSCD 8-8-04-KJ: Visit to Watkins Cemetery NSCD 8-9-04 PC-1: Mildred Johnson comments scanning photographs NSCD 8-9-04 TT-1: Trevor Lanier interview NSCD 8-16-04 AJ/KJ-1: Deanne Gibson-Roles interview NSCD 8-18-04 AJ/KJ-1: Peter Hayden Prince interview NSCD 8-18-04 AJ/KJ-1: Mitzi Lea Hall interview NSCD 8-19-04 AJ/KJ-1: Helen Cable Vance and Eleanor Cable Rhinehart interview NSCD 8-20-04 PC-1: Mildred Johnson comments scanning photographs NSCD 8-20-04 KJ: R. O. Wilson and William L. Crawford interview NSCD 8-20-04 KJ: Visit to Lovedale Cemetery NSCD 8-21-04 AJ/KJ-1: Mary Vivian Calhoun Cook interview NSCD 8-21-04 AJ/KJ-1: William Claude Laney and Esta Laney interview NSCD 8-23-04 AJ/KJ-1, AJ/KJ-2, AJ/KJ-3: Zora Jenkins Walker interview NSCD 8-24-04 KJ: Visit to Chambers Creek and McClure Cemetery NSCD 8-25-04 KJ: Visit to Jackson Co. cemeteries with William L. Crawford NSCD 9-2-04 KJ: Visit to Brendle Hill Cemetery NSCD 9-6-04 PC-1: Welch and McClure Decorations NSCD 9-19-04 PC-1: North Shore Reunion at Deep Creek NSCD 9-21-04 PC-1: Bryan Aldridge interview NSCD 9-22-04 PC-1, PC-2, PC-3: Sandy Sumner and Randy Wood interview NSCD 9-22-04 PC-1: Glenn Cardwell interview NSCD 9-26-04 PC-1: Bone Valley and Hall Decorations NSCD 9-26-04 PC-1, PC-2: Recorded follow-up interview with Mitzi Hall NSCD 10-10-04 PC-1: Wike-Walker-Calhoun Decoration NSCD 10-29-04 PC-1: Claude Douthit interview NSCD 11-8-04 PC-1: Rodney Snedeker interview NSCD 12-6-04 PC-1: Duncan Hollar and Lorrie Sprague interview

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Notes Acknowledgments 1 The collection items bear the archival name NSCD Collection (for North Shore Cemetery Decoration Collection), followed by the last name of the collector(s), the date of the fieldwork, and a letter and number code for identifying the physical item; see “Project History.” 2 See <www.alanjabbour.com> under “Projects” and “Photos” categories.

Chapter 1 1 NSCD Collection, Jabbour 7-4-04 AJ/KJ-1. 2 Montgomery and Hall, Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, 138. 3 Jabbour fieldnotes, June 2, 9, and 10, 2007.

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Montgomery and Hall, Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, 170. Hooker, Religion in the Highlands, 125–26. Sheppard, Cabins in the Laurel, 214–15. Brewer and Brewer, Valley So Wild, 288–89. Cohen and Coffin, Folklore of American Holidays, 326–28. Meyer, “Cemeteries,” 134. Dorothea Lange, Orange Co., N.C., July 1939, Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Coll., LC-USF34-019811-E. Jordan, Texas Graveyards, 14–15; Joyner, African Reflections, 15. Jordan, Texas Graveyards, 16–18; Crissman, Death and Dying, 153. NSCD Collection, Jabbour 8-25-04 AJ/KJ-1. Lamkin, “Decoration Day in a Country Town,” 157. Jabbour fieldnotes, June 2, 9, and 10, 2007. Brewer and Brewer, Valley So Wild, 289. Compare Jordan, Texas Graveyards, 28. Sheppard, Cabins in the Laurel, 215. Ibid. Slayton, “Paper Flowers and Dinner on the Ground,” 84–88. Rickels 1975: 158. De Caro and Jordan, Louisiana Traditional Crafts, 8–10. For Russell Lee, see Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, ( June 25, 2008). On paper flowers, see Louisiana Folklife Center, .

21 For Joseph A. Horne, see Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, 22 See <www.alanjabbour.com>. 23 Jordan, Texas Graveyards, 21–28. 24 Bolton, “Decoration of Graves of Negroes in South Carolina,” 214; Ingersoll, “Decoration of Negro Graves,” 68–69; Jordan, Texas Graveyards, 21. 25 Sheppard, Cabins in the Laurel, 215–17. 26 See also Lamkin, “Decoration Day in a Country Town,” 157–60. 27 Sheppard, Cabins in the Laurel, 217–18. 28 NSCD Collection, Jabbour 8-23-04 AJ; Oliver, Cooking and Living along the River, 43; American Heritage Cookbook, 602–3; Farr, “Dried Apple Stack Cake.” 29 Sheppard, Cabins in the Laurel, 218; photographs: 217 opposite, 224 opposite. 30 Cassidy and Hall, Dictionary of American Regional English, vol. 2, 76. 31 McDonald, African Americans of Jackson County, 33, 40–41, 68–69, 95. 32 Montgomery and Hall, Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, 307. 33 Rohr, “Road to Nowhere,” 140–42.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

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Crissman, Death and Dying, 106–9. Kniffen, “Necrogeography,” 427. Jordan Texas Graveyards, 33; Jordan, Bean, and Holmes, Texas: A Geography, 131. Wilson, “Cemeteries,” 143. Rohr, “Road to Nowhere,” 119–20. Guerrant, Galax Gatherers, 169. Crissman, Death and Dying, 106–7. Pitchford, “Material Culture,” 278. Crissman, Death and Dying, 107; Jordan, Texas Graveyards, 30. Compare Crissman, Death and Dying, 107–8. See NSCD Collection, Coyle 7-21-04 PC-1, where Bayless Crisp describes the “petal” of the dogwood symbolizing a cross and the crucifixion. Jabbour fieldnotes: North Carolina, July 4, 2008; Kentucky, May 23–27, 2008, Interview with Barbara Power. The version is my own; see Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. 2, no. 84; Bronson, Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, vol. 2, no. 84. McVicker, “Reflections of Change,” Chapter 7, gives central Missouri examples. Ibid. Little, Sticks and Stones. Finch, “Ashes to Ashes,” in Birdwell and Dickinson, Rural Life and Culture in the Upper Cumberland, 66–72; Cantrell, “Traditional Grave Structures,” 93–103. Jabbour fieldnotes, June 8, 2007. Crissman, Death and Dying, 118–30. Jeane, “Southern Graveshelters and English Lych-Gates,” 14–17. Crissman, Death and Dying, 130–32; Campbell, Southern Highlander, 148, has a description and photograph of a cemetery with “Low, latticed houses, painted blue and white” (location unidentified). Clark, The Kentucky, 195–96. Ball, “Middle Tennessee Gravehouses,” 29–62; Corn, “Covered Graves,” 34–37.

Notes to Pages 38–74

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Jeane, “Southern Graveshelters and English Lych-Gates”; Little, Sticks and Stones. Jordan, Texas Graveyards, 37. See <www.alanjabbour.com/photos> for Alabama examples. Jeane, “Southern Graveshelters and English Lych-Gates”; Jordan-Bychkov, The Upland South. Jabbour fieldnotes, October 5, 2008. Jeane, “Southern Graveshelters and English Lych-Gates,” provides a thorough discussion of the British lych-gate tradition. Jabbour fieldnotes, May 10, 2008. Crissman, Death and Dying, 147–55. For a general history of dowsing, see Bird, The Divining Hand; Hyman, “Dowsing”; Vogt and Hyman, Water Witching U.S.A. NSCD Collection, Jabbour 8-18-04 AJ/KJ-1.

Chapter 4 1 Williams, Great Smoky Mountains Folklife, 74. 2 In Fleischhauer and Jabbour, Hammons Family, 2, I discuss the same cultural patterns and resultant social divide in West Virginia. 3 Duncan and Riggs, Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook, 13–32, is a Cherokee-oriented and siteoriented review of this history. 4 Albanese, “Exploring Regional Religion,” 344–71. 5 Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders.

Chapter 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

North Shore Road Final EIS, Appendix A, 8. North Shore Road Final EIS, Appendix A, 11. NSCD Collection, Jabbour 8-19-04 AJ/KJ-1. Quoted in Rohr, “Road to Nowhere,” 124–25. Jabbour, Coyle, and Webb, North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project Report. Oliver, Hazel Creek from Then till Now, 97. Smoky Mountain Times, October 21, 1976. Oliver, Hazel Creek from Then till Now, 96–97. NSCD Collection, Jabbour 8-19-04 AJ/KJ-1. NSCD Collection, Coyle 8-4-04 PC-1. NSCD Collection, Jabbour 8-19-04 AJ/KJ-1. Rohr, “Road to Nowhere,” 130. Ibid. Quoted in Jabbour, Coyle, and Webb, North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project Report, 55. NSCD Collection, Jabbour 8-23-04 AJ/KJ. Compare Rohr, “Road to Nowhere,” 142–44. Rohr, “Road to Nowhere.”

Chapter 6 1 See especially Drew Faust, This Republic of Suffering. 2 Blight, Race and Reunion, 65–71. The event was described in the Charleston Daily Courier, May 2, 1865, and by a correspondent for the New York Tribune, “Our Martyr and His Mourners,” May 13, 1865; see Blight, Race and Reunion, 409–11 (endnotes). An 1867 illustration of the Race Course

Notes to Pages 74–118

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cemetery appeared in Harper’s Weekly, reproduced in Rosen, Confederate Charleston, 155. 3 Janney, “To Honor Her Noble Sons,” 256–69. The minutes of the Ladies Memorial Association, preserved as part of the records of Blandford Church and Cemetery, offer many insights into the social and cultural issues surrounding the Blandford decoration. See also Ryan, “Memorial Day Origin,” a website describing the work of the Ladies Memorial Association of Petersburg. . 4 Logan, “Memorial Day: A Noted Woman’s Story of Its Origin and Growth,” 11. 5 Logan, Reminiscences of a Soldier’s Wife, 243. 6 Janney, “To Honor Her Noble Sons,” in Virginia’s Civil War, 258. 7 Quoted in Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past, 77, 226 (endnotes); the Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch is quoted in Southern Opinion, June 6, 1868. 8 Blight, Race and Reunion, 72–77, analyzes the evolving themes of nineteenth-century Decoration Day oratory in the North. 9 See . 10 Crissman, Death and Dying, 145–55. For descriptions of funeralizing, see Guerrant, Galax Gatherers, 169; Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, 335; Clark, The Kentucky, Chapter 12. 11 Crissman, Death and Dying, 152–53. 12 See <www.tituscemeteries.com>. 13 See . 14 Brewer and Brewer, Valley So Wild, 288. 15 Wilson, “Cemeteries,” 175. 16 See Chapter 2 regarding All Saints’ Day in Louisiana, which seems to reveal features of both the Day of the Dead and the southern Decoration Day. 17 Slayton, “Paper Flowers and Dinner on the Ground,” 84–88; Kirtley, “‘Hoping Out’ in East Texas,” 202; Cowser, “Community Memorial Day Observances,” 120–21; Pitchford, “Material Culture,” 277–90; Jackson, “God’s Country,” 63–64; Lamkin, “Decoration Day,” 157–60; Hoskinson, “Down Our Way,” 117–19. 18 Kirtley, “‘Hoping Out’ in East Texas”; <www.tituscemeteries.com>. 19 Thompson, “Cherokee Nation Church Celebrates Decoration Day.” Indian Country Today. . 20 <www.liberianobserver.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/6219/Decoration_Day:_What_Does_It_ Mean_.html>. 21 <www.liberiastories.blogspot.com/2005/03/decoration-day-photos.html>. 22 <www.nhb.com/hunter/IOOFindex.htm>. 23 Sikes, British Goblins, 266. For a contemporary description of the Welsh custom, see <www.geocities. com/mysteriesofwales/customs.html>.

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4

NSCD Collection, Coyle 9-26-04 PC-2. NSCD Collection, Jabbour 8-23-04 AJ/KJ-1; Jabbour Collection, October 8, 2009. See <www.newstopic.net/articles/2007/08/10/news/66curtisfeature.txt>. “Bouquet in Heaven,” Mercury 6200 (10-inch 78-rpm and 7-inch 45-rpm), Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, Cincinnati, Ohio, April–May 1949 (side 2, matrix 2608). 5 Stanley, Ralph. “Village Churchyard,” on 33-rpm sound recording Old Country Church, reissued on Disc 3 of the four-CD box set Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, 1971–1973. 6 Clark, The Kentucky, 203–4. 7 Ratliff, New Baptist Song Book, 28–29. In the 1949 and the 1975 editions, “Village Churchyard” is on

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Notes to Pages 118–40

8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16

28–29, and the sets are identical except for a 1949 typo corrected in 1975. Ralph Stanley’s set has several significant differences from the published text—folk transmission at work. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 195. Vocalion 03177 (C-929-B). Ibid., 485. C-2002-1, Vocalion unissued. Chicago, 28 Sept. 1937. Released on Document Records DOCD-5296: Curtis Jones: Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Vol. I—28 September 1937 to 9 May 1938, Track 1, 1994. Curtis Jones, vocal/piano; Willie Bee ( James), guitar; Fred Williams, drums. Transcribed in the Recorded Sound Reference Center, Library of Congress. Ibid., 1044–45. BB 34-0713 (04199-1), recorded Friday, 17 May 1940. Sonny Boy Williamson, vocal and harmonica; Blind John Davis, piano; Big Bill Broonzy, guitar; probably William Mitchell, imb. Transcribed in the Recorded Sound Reference Center, Library of Congress. Columbia 14189-D, Side A. Transcribed in the Recorded Sound Reference Center, Library of Congress. Adams, My Old True Love, 46–47. Text for “Give Me the Roses While I Live” from booklet for CD recording Meeting in the Air by Jim Watson, Tommy Thompson, and Mike Craver (Barker/Sapsucker Records 2326). Text for “Just a Rose Will Do” from recording by Carla Gover and Mitch Barrett, from Clay County, Kentucky, tradition. Walker, “Western Cherokee Decoration Day Song,” 99–104. Transcribed in Cherokee and with English translation by Wesley Proctor. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 444. Paramount 12608 (20374-1), recorded in Chicago, ca. Feb. 1928.

Chapter 8 1 2 3 4

Sheppard, Cabins in the Laurel, 214–17, excerpted in Chapter 2 above. Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, 324–25. Lumpkin, To Make My Bread, 42. NSCD Collection, Coyle 7-21-04 PC-1.

Chapter 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Rosenberg, Transforming Tradition, xi–xii, 1–25. Wallace, “Revitalization Movements.” Compare Rohr, “Road to Nowhere,” 141. Neville, Kinship and Pilgrimage, 13–27. Ibid., 28–48. Little, Sticks and Stones, 242. Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, entries for pietas and religio.

Appendix A 1 Jabbour, Coyle, and Webb. North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project Report.

Notes to Pages 141–89

199

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Bibliography Print Publications Adams, Sheila Kay. My Old True Love. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2004. Novel with pre–Civil War Decoration Day scene, 46–47. Albanese, Catherine L. “Exploring Regional Religion: A Case Study of the Eastern Cherokee.” History of Religions 23 (1984): 344–71. The American Heritage Cookbook and Illustrated History of American Eating and Drinking. New York: American Heritage Publishing, Simon and Schuster, 1964. Contains entry on “stack cake” as a Smokies specialty. Ball, Bo. “All in This Together.” Appalachian Heritage 32, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 57–62. Describes Decoration Day in southwestern Virginia just after World War Two. Ball, Donald B. “Observations on the Form and Function of Middle Tennessee Gravehouses.” Tennessee Anthropologist 2, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 29–62. ———. “Social Activities Associated with Two Rural Cemeteries in Coffee County, Tennessee.” Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 41, no. 3 (September 1975): 93–98. Describes two Decoration Day events in Tennessee Cumberlands. Bird, C. The Divining Hand: The 500-Year-Old Mystery of Dowsing. New York: Dutton, 1979. Birdwell, Michael E., and W. Calvin Dickinson, eds. Rural Life and Culture in the Upper Cumberland. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001. Bolton, H. Carrington. “Decoration of Graves of Negroes in South Carolina.” Journal of American FolkLore, 4 ( July–September 1891): 214. Bone Rattler: Bulletin of the Swain County Genealogical and Historical Society. 1984– . Brewer, Alberta, and Carson Brewer. Valley So Wild: A Folk History. Knoxville: East Tennessee Historical Society, 1975; Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. History of the Little Tennessee River watershed. Bronson, Bertrand Harris. The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, with Their Texts, According to the Extant Records of Great Britain and North America. 4 vols. Princeton and Berkeley: Princeton University and University of California Presses, 1959–1972. Brown, Margaret Lynn. The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Brunvand, Jan Harold. American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996. Burrison, John A. Roots of a Region: Southern Folk Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Campbell, John C. The Southern Highlander and His Homeland. 1921. Reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969. Cantrell, Brent. “Traditional Grave Structures on the Eastern Highland Rim.” Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 47 (1981): 93–103.

Cassidy, Frederic G., and Joan Houston Hall, eds. Dictionary of American Regional English. 4 vols. to date. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985– . The Cemeteries of Jackson County. Cullowhee, N.C.: Jackson County Genealogical Society, 1998. The Cemeteries of Swain County, North Carolina: Bringing the Past into the Present for the Future. Bryson City, N.C.: Swain County Genealogical and Historical Society, [2000]. Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884–98. Clark, Thomas D. The Kentucky. Rivers of America Series. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1942. Coffin, Tristram Potter, and Hennig Cohen, eds. Folklore from the Working Folk of America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973. Cohen, Hennig, and Tristram Potter Coffin, eds. The Folklore of American Holidays. 3rd ed. Detroit: Gale, 1999. Corn, Jack. “Covered Graves.” Kentucky Folklore Record 23, no. 2 (April–June 1977): 34–37. Brief article and four photos on graveshelters in a cemetery near Clairfield, Claiborne County, Tennessee. Corrington, John William. Decoration Day. In All My Trials: Two Novellas. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987. Cowser, Robert. “Community Memorial Day Observances in Northeast Texas.” Western Folklore 31, no. 2 (April 1972): 120–121. Quoted in its entirety in Cohen and Coffin, The Folklore of American Holidays, 1999, 326–27, entitled “Memorial Day in Northeast Texas.” Crawford, Larry. “Decoration Day: It’s a Southern Thing.” The Kentucky Explorer 22, no. 1 (May 2008): 102–4. Crissman, James K. Death and Dying in Central Appalachia: Changing Attitudes and Practices. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. De Caro, F. A., and R. A. Jordan. Louisiana Traditional Crafts: April 12 through May 11. Baton Rouge: LSU Union Gallery, Louisiana State University, 1980. Served as a catalog for an exhibition, presumably in 1980. Decoration Day. 1990 feature film based on novella “Decoration Day” by John William Corrington, q.v. Dixon, Robert M. W., John Godrich, and Howard W. Rye. Blues and Gospel Records 1890–1943. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Duncan, Barbara R., and Brett H. Riggs. Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Farr, Sidney Saylor. “Dried Apple Stack Cake.” Appalachian Heritage, 32, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 65–67. Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of Random House, 2008. Finch, Richard C. “Ashes to Ashes: Burial Upper Cumberland Style.” In Birdwell and Dickinson, Rural Life and Culture in the Upper Cumberland, 66–72, q.v. Fleischhauer, Carl, and Alan Jabbour. The Hammons Family: A Study of a West Virginia Family’s Traditions. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1973. Box set of two long-playing disc recordings and a 36-page illustrated booklet. Reissued as two-CD set, with additions, Rounder Records, Rounder 1504/05, 1998. Fontana. 1986– . Newsletter of the North Shore Historical Association (North Shore Cemetery Association). Subsequently renamed Fontana: North Shore Historical Association. Frantom, Marcy. “Gravehouses of North Louisiana: Culture History and Typology.” Material Culture: Journal of the Pioneer America Society 27, no. 2 (1995): 21–48. Guerrant, Edward O. The Galax Gatherers: The Gospel among the Highlanders. Richmond, Va.: Onward Press, [1910]. Reprint, with Introduction by Mark Huddle, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005.

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Hill, Samuel S., and Charles H. Lippy. Encyclopedia of Religion in the South. 2nd ed. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005. Holland, Lance. Fontana: A Pocket History of Appalachia. Robbinsville, N.C.: Published by the author, 2001. Hooker, Elizabeth R. Religion in the Highlands: Native Churches and Missionary Enterprises in the Southern Appalachian Area. New York: Home Mission Council, 1933. Hoskinson, Philip E. “Down Our Way: Decoration Day at Pleasant Grove.” Kentucky Folklore Record 5 (1959): 117–119. Reproduced (except for the final paragraph) as “Grave Day at Pleasant Grove” in Cohen and Coffin, The Folklore of American Holidays, 327–328, q.v. Hyman, Ray. “Dowsing.” In Brunvand, American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, 205–6, q.v. Ingersoll, Ernest. “Decoration of Negro Graves.” Journal of American Folk-Lore 5 (1892): 68–69. Jabbour, Alan, Philip E. Coyle, and Paul Webb. North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project Report. National Park Service, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 2005. Also published as Appendix G (vol. 2) of the North Shore Road Environmental Impact Statement 6 vols. (National Park Service, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 2006). Jackson, Ewing. “God’s Country.” Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 19 (September 1953): 58–64. Final section, entitled “Graveyard Cleaning and Dinner-on-the-Ground” (63–64), is reproduced in its entirety in Cohen and Coffin, The Folklore of American Holidays, 327, q.v. Janney, Caroline E. “To Honor Her Noble Sons: The Ladies Memorial Association of Petersburg, 1866–1912.” In Virginia’s Civil War, edited by Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 256–69. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. ———. Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Jeane, Donald Gregory. “Cemeteries.” In Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, q.v. ———. “Rural Southern Gravestones: Sacred Artifacts in the Upland South Folk Cemetery.” Markers: The Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies 4 (1987): 55–84. ———. “Southern Graveshelters and English Lych-Gates: The Search for Culture Trait Origins.” Tributaries: Journal of the Alabama Folklife Association, Issue No. 3 (2000): 9–27. ———. “The Traditional Upland South Cemetery,” Landscape 18, no. 2 (1969): 39–41. ———. “The Upland South Cemetery: An American Type.” Journal of Popular Culture 11 (Spring 1978): 895–903. Jenkins, Hazel C., and Ora Lee Sossamon, eds. The Heritage of Swain County, North Carolina. Bryson City and Winston-Salem: Swain County Genealogical and Historical Society and Hunter Publishing Company, 1988. Jewett, Sarah Orne. “Decoration Day.” In A Native of Winby and Other Tales, 39–64. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company; Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1893. Short story set in New England village. Jordan, Terry G. Texas Graveyards: A Cultural Legacy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Jordan, Terry G., with John L. Bean Jr. and William M. Holmes. Texas: A Geography. Boulder: Westview Press, 1984. Jordan-Bychkov, Terry G. The Upland South. Santa Fe, N.M., and Harrisonburg, Va.: Center for American Places in association with University of Virginia Press, 2003. Joyner, Brian D. African Reflections on the American Landscape. Washington, D.C.: National Center for Cultural Resources, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2003. Kephart, Horace. Our Southern Highlanders. New York: Macmillan. 2nd ed., with additional chapters, 1922. Originally published 1913.

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Kirtley, Guy. “‘Hoping Out’ in East Texas.” In Texas Folk and Folklore Edited by Mody C. Boatwright, Wilson M. Hudson, and Allen Maxwell, 195–202. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, no. 26, 1954. Kniffen, Fred. “Necrogeography in the United States.” Geographical Review 57, no. 3 ( July 1967), 426–27. Lamkin, Thelma Lynn. “Decoration Day in a Country Town.” Midwest Folklore 3 (1953): 157–60. Spring Hill, Kentucky, is in Hickman County near the Mississippi River. Reprinted in Coffin and Cohen, Folklore from the Working Folk of America, q.v. Lewis, Charlton T., and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879. “Impression of 1962, First Edition 1879.” Little, M. Ruth. “Afro-American Gravemarkers in North Carolina.” Markers: The Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies 6 (1989): 102–34. Study focuses on four counties from the Piedmont and Coastal Plain. ———. Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Many excellent photos of key cemetery features; study includes no Appalachian counties west of Asheville. Logan, Mrs. John A. “Memorial Day: A Noted Woman’s Story of Its Origin and Growth.” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 1903, 11. ———. Reminiscences of a Soldier’s Wife. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913. Reissued as Mary Logan, Reminiscences of the Civil War and Reconstruction, edited with an Introduction by George Worthington Adams. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press; London and Amsterdam: Feffer and Simons, 1970. Lumpkin, Grace. To Make My Bread. New York: Macauley, 1932. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. McDonald, Victoria A. Casey. African Americans of Jackson County: From Slavery to Integration. Sylva, N.C.: Catch the Spirit of Appalachia, 2006. McVicker, Maryellen Harshbarger. “Reflections of Change: Death and Cemeteries in the Boonslick Region of Missouri.” Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1989. http://www.mo-river.net/History/ boonslick/ Meyer, Richard E. “Cemeteries.” In Brunvand, American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, 132–134, q.v. Milbauer, John A. “Southern Folk Traits in the Cemeteries of Northeastern Oklahoma.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 46 (1989): 175–85. Mitchell, Douglas. “John William Corrington’s Decoration Day.” Legal Studies Forum 24, nos. 3–4 (2000): 687–95. Reproduced online by the Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas School of Law, http:// tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/lsf/mitchell24.htm Montell, Lynwood. “Cemetery Decoration Customs in the American South.” In The Traditional Way of Life: Essays in Honor of Warren E. Roberts, edited by Robert E. Walls and George H. Shoemaker, 111–29. Bloomington, Ind.: Trickster Press, 1989. Montgomery, Michael B., and Joseph S. Hall. Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. Neville, Gwen Kennedy. Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture. The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, Working Paper No. 22 (2003). ———. Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project Report. See Jabbour, Coyle, and Webb. Oliver, Duane. Along the River: People and Places. Published by the author, 1998. Photographic collection.

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———. Cooking and Living along the River. Published by the author, 2004. Earlier editions vary in format and content. ———. Hazel Creek from Then till Now. Published by the author, 1989. ———. Remembered Lives: A Narrative History of Our Family. Revised 2nd edition. Published by the author, 2003. Originally published 1993. Olson, Ted. Blue Ridge Folklife. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Pierce, Daniel S. The Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000. Pitchford, Anita. “The Material Culture of the Traditional East Texas Graveyard.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 43 (1979): 277–90. Ratliff, J. H., Jr. The New Baptist Song Book. “Revised edition, 1949. A collection of good hymns, songs and ballads.” Lookout, Ky.: J. H. Ratliff, Jr., 1949; Lookout, Ky.: Foster Ratliff, 1975. Rehder, John B. Appalachian Folkways. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Rettie, Dwight F. Our National Park System: Caring for America’s Greatest Natural and Historic Treasures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Rickels, Patricia. “The Folklore of Acadiana.” In The Culture of Acadiana: Tradition and Change in Southern Louisiana, edited by Steven L. Del Sesto and Jon Gibson, 144–74. Lafayette: University of Southwest Louisiana, 1975. Rohr, Karl Barousse. “The Road to Nowhere and the Politics of Wilderness Legislation.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Mississippi, 2003. Rosen, Robert N. Confederate Charleston: An Illustrated History of the City and the People during the Civil War. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. Reproduces 1867 illustration in Harper’s Weekly of Charleston’s Race Course Cemetery. Rosenberg, Neil V. Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Foreword by Alan Jabbour. Sheppard, Muriel E. Cabins in the Laurel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935. Sikes, Wirt. British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1880. Slayton, Sonia Ann. “Paper Flowers and Dinner on the Ground: Decoration Day in North Alabama.” Louisiana Folklore Miscellany 6, no. 3 (1990): 84–88. Stanley, Ralph. “Village Churchyard.” On 33-rpm sound recording Old Country Church (Rebel SLP 1508), 1972? (recorded December 11, 1971). Reissued on Disc 3 of the four-CD box set Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, 1971–1973 (Rebel 4001), Charlottesville, Va.: Rebel Records, 1995. Starnes, Richard D., ed. Southern Journeys: Tourism, History, and Culture in the Modern South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. Stilgoe, John R. “Folklore and Graveyard Design.” Landscape 22, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 22–28. Taylor, Stephen Wallace. The New South’s New Frontier. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. U.S. Department of the Interior. National Park Service, Great Smoky Mountains National Park. North Shore Road Final Environmental Impact Statement, Swain County, North Carolina. Gatlinburg, Tenn., September 2007. Vogt, E. Z., and Ray Hyman. Water Witching U.S.A. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Walker, Willard. “A Western Cherokee Decoration Day Song.” Journal of Cherokee Studies 7, no. 2 (1982): 99–104. Wallace, Anthony F. C. “Revitalization Movements.” American Anthropologist 58 (1956): 264–81. Reprinted in Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, edited by William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, 3rd edition, New York: Harper, 1972.

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Webb, Paul. Cultural Resources Existing Conditions Report, North Shore Environmental Impact Statement, Swain and Graham Counties, North Carolina. Durham, N.C.: TRC Garrow Associates, 2004. ———. Ravensford Tract History. Durham, North Carolina: TRC Garrow Associates, 2002. “Extracted from Cultural and Historical Resource Investigations of the Ravensford Land Exchange Tract, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Swain County, North Carolina.” Williams, Michael Ann. Great Smoky Mountains Folklife. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Wilson, Charles Reagan. “Cemeteries.” In Hill and Lippy, Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, q.v. Wilson, Charles Reagan, and William Ferris. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Winniford, Lee. Following Old Fence Lines: Tales from Rural Texas. College Station: Texas A & M Press, 1998.

Manuscript and Nonprint Collections Berea, Ky. Berea College Library, Special Collections & Archives Appalachian Religion Survey Records Disputanta Oral History Collection Josiah Combs Collection Katherine Pettit Collection Leonard Roberts Collection Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tenn. Great Smoky Mountains National Park Archives, Sugarlands Visitor Center North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project Collection (NSCD Collection) Petersburg, Va. City of Petersburg, Blandford Church and Cemetery Washington, D.C. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center Various subject folders Library of Congress, Manuscript Division John Alexander Logan Family Papers Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division Various commercially published sound recordings Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection

Websites Bolton, Barbara and Peter. I.O.O.F. Decoration Day. <www.nhb.com/hunter/IOOFindex.htm>. June 25, 2008. “Essie Mae Arsan: All Saints’ Day Wreaths.” Louisiana Folklife Center. . June 25, 2008. Jabbour, Alan. . June 25, 2008. Liberian Observer. <www.liberianobserver.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/6219/Decoration_Day:_What_ Does_It_Mean_.html>. June 25, 2008. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection. America from the Great Depression to World War II: Black-and-White

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Index Page numbers indexed in italics refer to illustrations. Black-and-white photographs are indexed by page number for caption elements and selectively for certain uncaptioned visual elements. Color plates are indexed by plate number following the page numbers in each entry, and their indexing also includes selectively certain uncaptioned elements. Cemeteries from the western North Carolina study area are not identified by town, county, or state in the index, but cemeteries in other regions are identified geographically. Acadian, 34 Adams, Sheila Kay, 142 Africa/African, West, 24, 38, 103, 128–29 African American, 35, 38, 39, 44, 45, 87, 118, 140–42, 144, 146, 152–53, 173, 174–75, 176, 178–79, 182, 190 African Americans of Jackson County, The, 44 Alabama, 13, 34, 38, 52, 59, 68, 74, 86, 125, 126, 127, 140, 175, 190 Alarka, N.C., viii, 2, 9, 11, 14, 15, 29, 51, 155–56, 162, 182. See also East Alarka Baptist Church Alarka Community Center, 14–16, 46 Alarka Lumber Company, 15 Albanese, Catherine, 91 Alcoa, 90, 94 All Saints Day (All Hallows Day), 34, 35, 124, 178 All Souls Day, 124, 125–26, 178 “Amazing Grace,” 15, 108 American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, 20 American Indian/Amerindian, 38, 74–75, 86, 152. See also Cherokee “America the Beautiful,” 6 Andrews, N.C., 2, 137 Appalachian/Appalachians, vii, viii, 5, 8, 24, 42, 43, 46, 58, 68,

74, 80, 81, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 112, 116, 123, 127, 138, 140, 145, 147, 154, 169, 178–79, 180, 182, 184, 187, 189–90; image of, 93–94, 146 Aquinas, Thomas, 181 Arabic, 45 Arkansas, 13, 34, 38, 44, 52, 59, 68, 74, 125, 126, 127, 190 Arlington National Cemetery, 163 Arsan, Essie Mae, 35 Asheville, N.C., viii, 17 Asparagus, 62, 63 Assemblage style, 38, 40, 41, 77 Atlanta, Ga., 190 Atwater, Caroline, 24 Ball, Donald B., 74 Balsam Grove, N.C., 2 Balsam Grove Cemetery, 2, 48, 48, 81, 182 Balsam Highlands, 78. See also Mounding/mounded: Balsam Highlands Solution Balsam Mountains (Balsam Range), viii, 2, 125 Baptism, 5, 9, 10, 11, 41, 45, 110 Baptist, 5, 53, 65, 88, 104, 147 “Barbara Allen,” 62 Barkers Creek Cemetery, 2, 182, pl. 4, pl. 20 Barton, Bob, 69 Barton, Fred, 68, 69

Baseball caps, 133 Baton Rouge, La., 35 Belfonte Baptist Church and Cemetery (Belfonte, Okla.), 128 Bellamy, Edward, 121 Bench. See Structures, cemetery: bench Berea College, Hutchins Library, xii Bible, 44–45, 109 Bicentennial, 102 Birdell, 135, 137 Birdtown, N.C., 2, pl. 27 Birdtown Cemetery, 2, 23, 29, 52, 83, 154, 157–61, 158, 159, 182; tended by Birdtown Free Labor Group, 52, 160, pl. 28 Black. See African American Blandford Church and Cemetery (Petersburg, Va.), xii, 68, 118, 119, 119, 120, 126, 179 Blanket decoration, 34, 36, 159, pl. 1, pls. 15–16 Blight, David W., 118 Bluebird box, 12 Bluegrass, 71, 73, 138–39 Blues, 140–42, 144 Boar, European wild, 93 Boat, 3–5, 9–10, 106, 110, 114, 115, 171–72, 180–81, pl. 5 “Bouquet in Heaven,” 138–40, 143 Box crypts, 67–68, 119, pl. 21

Bradshaw Cemetery, 2, 3, 7, 10, 11, pl. 6 Breedlove Cemetery, 60 Brendle, Tom, 14 Brendle Hill Cemetery, viii, 2, 10–18, 14, 16, 33, 34, 40, 46, 58, 71, 74, 83, 153, 173, pls. 7–10, pl. 13, pl. 17 Brewer, Alberta, and Carson Brewer, 19, 31, 125 Britain/British, 55, 62, 68, 75, 78, 86, 87, 93, 129, 177 British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions, 129 Brooks, Melvina Chambers, 164 Broom Cemetery, 2, 30, 78, pl. 1 Brush-arbor meetings, 138, 178 Bryson Cemetery, 30 Bryson City, N.C., x, 2, 24, 43, 66, 72, 76, 86, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 132, 137, 147, 164, 169, 175, 182 Bryson City Cemetery, 56 Bryson City Firehouse, x Bryson City Theater, 134 Bumper sticker, 133, 133 Bunyan, John, 177 Burnett, Chester (Howlin’ Wolf), 142 Burns, Laura, 149–50 Cabe family, 167 Cabins in the Laurel, 19, 32, 145 Cable, Adolph and Marie, pl. 24 Cable, Jack, 184, pl. 2 Cable Branch Cemetery, 2, 108, 108, 109, 110, 111, 131, 132, 184, pl. 2, pls. 23–24 Cable Cemetery, 2, 102, 108, 111, 167, 167, 168, 173, pl. 3 Cable Cove, 2, 3, 106, pl. 5 Cable Cove Cemetery, 76 Cades Cove, Tenn., 31, 87, 167 Caldwell County, N.C., 137; NewsTopic, 137 Calhoun Family (David, Dorothy Gay, Gay, Laurel Lee, Sheila), 9, 10, 11, 123–24 Calhoun House, 7–8, 9

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Index

Calvinist/Calvinistic, 88 Camp meetings, 138, 178 Canada, 129, 142 Canada Road, 29, 30 Canada Township, N.C., 2, 25, 30, 52, 60, 76, 77, 78–79, 154, 182. See also Balsam Highlands Caney Fork Township, N.C., 2, 32, 48, 75, 78, 79, 81 Canterbury Tales, 176–77 Carden, Gary, 135, 137, 138 Cardiff, Wales, 129 Carringer-Garrison Family Cemetery, 2, 50, 50 Carter, A. P., 140 Carter Family, 140, 143 Cass County, Tex., 58 Cataloochee, 31 Cathey Cemetery, 78 Catholic, 35, 65, 88, 124, 177 Cemeteries: siting and layout on ridges, 5, 6, 58–59, 107, pl. 4, pl. 32; community, 6, 13, 43, 49, 50, 51–53, 54, 55, 66, 146–47, 172, 173, 180; family, 6, 37, 49–51, 50, 51, 54, 55, 66, 146; as dynamic cultural creations, 7; contemplation and solitary visiting, 7, 83, 85, 107; events other than decorations in, 12, 82–85; lack of space in, 13; signs, 13, 48, 79–82, 81, 83, 148, 148, 186; maintenance, 14, 52, 59–60, 107, pl. 28; church cemeteries, 49, 53–55, 53, 54, 57, 66, 147; civic cemeteries, 49, 55–56, 56, 66, 147; private cemeteries, 49, 56–57; cemetery associations, 52, 57; cemeteries preceding churches, 54; independence of many church cemeteries, 55; and term “sanctified,” 55; naming, 57–58; clean-swept style, 59, pl. 3, pl. 25; layout facing east, 59, 63, 70; “heroes” of community cemeteries, 60, 147–68; borders and surrounding forests, 60–61; trees, shrubs, and other plantings, 61–63, 62, 63; unkept, 145–47.

See also Decoration/Decoration Day; Edging/borders/ coping; Grave/gravesite; Lauada Cemetery; Mounding/mounded; Structures, cemetery Chambers Creek, 94, 96, 134, 164 Chandler, Ruth, 104 Chapel. See Structures, cemetery: chapel Charleston, S.C./Charlestonian, 67, 117, 118, 123, 126, 130, 152, 178–79 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 176 Cherokee/Cherokees (American Indian tribe), 75, 86–87, 89, 91, 95, 167, 182; Eastern Band of (North Carolina), 2, 50, 52, 63, 71, 72, 83, 88, 91, 159, 174–75, 176, 190; in Oklahoma, 75, 128, 144; language of, 71, 72 Cherokee, N.C., 2, 33, 71, 72, 88, 89, 92, 182 Cherokee County, N.C., 2, 55, 68, 190 “Cherry Blossom” (glass pattern), 131 Chicago, Ill., 141 Christmas, 124 Church bells, 82–83, 144 Churches. See Cemeteries: church; Homecoming, church; Structures, cemetery: chapel Church of England/Anglican, 65, 88, 124, 177 Civilian Conservation Corps, 101 Civil War, vii, 50, 91, 92, 116–22, 126, 129, 130, 179. See also Blandford Church and Cemetery Clark, Thomas D., 74, 139–40 Clarksville, Tex., 127 Clean-swept yards, 24, 35, 144, 155–57, pl. 24 Clean-Up Day, 20–22, 24 Cochran, Dorothy, 16, 162–63, 173 Cochran, Roy, 13, 14, 17 Cochran Cemetery, 2, 11, 16, 20,

162–64, 162, 163, 174, pls. 11–12, pl. 15 Coffin, Tristram Potter, 20 Cohen, Hennig, 20 Collins, Flonnie Burns, xi, 148–50, 151 Collins, Harold, xi, 148–50, 150, 151, 152–53 Collins, Theresa Libich, xi, 149–50, 150, 152–53 Columbia Marble Company, 68 Comb graves. See Grave/gravesite: comb graves Confederate (Civil War), 91, 117–22 Confederate Memorial Days, 121–22, 125 Congress/Congressional, 98, 101, 117 Connecticut, 126 Cook, Vivian (Mary Vivian Calhoun Cook), 24, 33 Copeland, Martha, 142 Coping, 30, 64, 66, pl. 31 Corn, Jack, 74 Corrington, John William, 142 Cove, 89 Covenanters, 178 Cowboy Junkies, 142 Cowser, Robert, 127 Coyle, Philip E. “Ted,” x, xii, 3, 7, 108, 155, 181–83, 187, 189, 190 Crawford, William L., x, xi, 25, 39, 52, 59, 60, 61, 72, 74, 83, 146, 154, 174 Crawford Cemetery, 2, 68, 71 Creek (American Indian tribe), 75 Crepe paper flowers. See Flowers: paper Crisp, Bayless, 155 Crisp, Charley, 15 Crisp, Derol, 14 Crisp, Hardy, 14–15 Crisp, Jim, 15 Crisp, Katherine Murphy, xi, 160, pl. 27 Crisp, Ruby, 14 Crisp, Virgil “Bud,” 15 Crissman, James K., 49, 58, 74, 123

Crosses. See Grave/gravesite: wooden crosses Crowe, Jeanne, 23 Crowe, Lucina Lynn, 23 Crypts, 67–68, 119, pl. 21 Cullowhee, N.C., 2 Cullowhee Mountain, 29, 30, 68, 76 Cumberland(s)/Cumberland Plateau, 68 Curtis, Bobbie, 137 Cusseta Mountains (northeastern Texas), 59 Danielsville, Ga., 164 Darby, Teddy, 140–42 David Rogers Cemetery, 175 Day of the Dead, 34, 125 Deals Gap, 97, 98 Death and Dying in Central Appalachia, 49, 123 De Caro, F. A., 34 Decoration/Decoration Day: description of, vii–ix; on North Shore, viii, 3–10, 15, 23, 33, 39, 41, 45, 103, 106–11, 124, 167, 168, 169–72, 182, 190; in western North Carolina, viii, 19–48; cleaning and decorating on, 14, 21–25, 107, pl. 2, pls. 11–12, pl. 24, pl. 27, pl. 29; as complex of associated activities, 15–16; and the spirit of inclusion, 17, 38, 107, 161–65, 162, 163, 165, 166, 172–76, 186; definitions of, 19; other names for, 20–21, 24, 125, 127; disposing of old decorations, 21, 23, 77–78, 78; weekday of, 21, 39, 124; meaning of, 23, 42; gender associations with tasks of, 23–24; early citations for, 127–28; single-row decoration, 29, 32, 36, 159, 159; blanket decoration, 34, 36, 159, pl. 1, pls. 15–16; Southern, 34, 116–17, 122–23, 126, 127–28, 129, 130, 138, 142, 143; wreaths, 35, 36, 160; saddle decoration, 36, 37, 159; non-flower decora-

tions, 38; assemblage style, 38, 40, 41, 77; as a religious and social event, 39–42; multiple decorations and community diversity, 45–46, 169–70; Northern, 116–22, 126, 129, 130; relation to funeralizing, 123; date of, 123–26; competition with church services, 124; geographic distribution of, 126–30; as pilgrimage, 171, 176–81; family decorations, 179–80; decorated cemetery as folk art, 181–87 “Decoration Blues,” 141 Decoration Day (Corrington novel and film), 142 Decoration Day (Drive-By Truckers song and album), 142 “Decoration Day” (Ives orchestral piece), 121 “Decoration Day” (Longfellow poem), 121 “Decoration Day Blues,” 140, 141–42, 143 “Decoration Day Blues No. 2,” 141–42 “Decoration Day in the Mountains” (exhibit), ix, xii, 35, 191 Deep Creek Campground, 46, 101, 102, 153 DeHart Cemetery, 2, 67, 71, 73 Delaware, 184 Dellwood, N.C., 51 Department of the Interior, 97–99 Depression, Great, 92 Detroit, Mich., 152 Dicks Creek Cemetery, 29 Dictionary of American Regional English, 43, 44 Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, 19, 47 Dillsboro, N.C., 2 Dills sisters, 6, 7 Dinner on the ground, vii, 8, 20, 40, 42–45, 75, 109, 110, 111, 118, 127, 153, 186, pl. 6; food at, 42, 153–54, 178; definition and etymology of, 43; as religious experience, 43; early citations

Index

211

of, 43–44. See also Food/ foodways Ditmanson, Dale A. (superintendent, GSMNP), 3, 6, 108 Divining, 84, 85 “Dixie,” 6 Dogwood, 61, pl. 17 Donne, John, 83 Double Springs Cemetery, 2, 29, 30, 76, 185 Dowsing, 84, 85 Drawings: from photographs, 134, 135; wood burning, 134 Drive-By Truckers, 142 Druids, 129 Dutch, 87 E. D. Owen Cemetery, 2, 41 Eagle Creek, 2, 90 East Alarka Baptist Church, 17, 18 Easter, 41, 61, 83, 179 Eastern Band of Cherokee. See Cherokee/Cherokees Eastern red cedar, 61 Edging (Borders, Coping), 30, 64, 66, pl. 31 EIS. See North Shore Road Environmental Impact Statement Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, 55, 125 English. See Britain/British Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). See North Shore Road Environmental Impact Statement Episcopal/Episcopalian, 65, 88, 124, 177 Erastus Cemetery, 2, 68, pl. 21 Euchella Cemetery, 80 Euro-American, 86, 87, 182 Europe/European, 38, 86, 87, 88, 92, 125 European wild boar, 93 Evans, Austin, pl. 24 Evansville, Ind., 141 Evison, Boyd (superintendent, GSMNP), 102, 103 False crypts. See Grave/gravesite: grave boxes

212

Index

Farm Security Administration, 35 “Farther Along,” 15 Feast in the Wilderness, 44, 178 Federal government. See U.S. government Fence. See Structures, cemetery: fence Ferns, 34, 38 Fieldstone. See Stone construction Flags, 16, 16, 37, 75, 81, 117, 120, 156, pl. 15 Flatt, Lester, 138, 143 Florida, 15, 156 Flowering dogwood, 61, pl. 17 Flowering Sunday, 129 Flowers, 32–37; paper, 9, 15, 21, 33–36, 34, 35, 121, 122, 127, 160, 182; cut, 31–32, 121; uses of, other than Decoration Day, 34; “plastic,” 35, 103, 181; fabric, 35, 103, 181–82, pl. 27; as metaphors for souls, 138–39. See also Dogwood; Roses; Snowballs; Yucca Folklore of American Holidays, The, 20 Fontana (Fontana Village), N.C., 100, 103, 105 Fontana (newsletter of North Shore Historical Association), 104, 168 Fontana Dam, viii, 2, 3, 57, 65, 80, 94, 95, 97, 100, 101, 114, 115 Fontana Lake, viii, 2, 3, 4, 33, 57, 83, 85, 94, 97, 102, 104, 105, 114, 166, 189 Fontana Ramblers String Band, 14 Food/Foodways: chicken and dumplings, 42; stack cake, 43; ramps, 153–54; leather britches, 154. See also Dinner on the ground Footstones, 64–66, 85, 175 Forney Creek, 2, 33, 94, 96, 123, 134, 147 Fortingall, Scotland, 61 Fourth of July, 3–10, 124 Franklin, N.C., 2 Free Labor Group, 52, 160, pl. 28

French, 86, 87 Funeralizing, 123, 139, 178 Funerals, 12, 82 Gainesville, Fla., 156 Galax Gatherers, The, 58 “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet,” 139 Gatlinburg, Tenn., 2 Georgia, 44, 68, 86, 87, 127, 128, 156, 190 German, 69, 87 Gibson-Roles, Deanne, 46, 74 Ginseng, 12, 71, 74 “Give Me the Roses While I Live,” 143 Gore, Albert, Sr., 100 Gospel music. See Music/musicians: hymns and gospel Grace. See Prayer Graffiti, 133–34, 134 Graham County, N.C., viii, xi, 2, 29, 40, 42, 50, 50, 60, 71, 73, 76, 78, 80, 88, 94, 105, 133, 133, 136, 169, 170, 189, pl. 5 Grand Army of the Republic, 116, 119–22, 126 Grave/gravesite: clean-swept, 24, 35, 144, 155–57, pl. 24; dressed with white sand, 25, 26, 29–31; dressed with white gravel, 27, 28, 30–31; painted headstones, 34, 68, 71; grave covers (ledger gravestones, ledger stones), 37, 66–67, 66, 67; markers and monuments, 62, 64–68; infant, 63, 163–65, 165, 166, 172, 175–76; layout of, 63–64; size of, 63– 64; headstones and footstones, 64–66, 85, 175; metal identification markers, 65; wooden crosses, 65, 152, 164–65, 165, 166, pl. 18; box crypts (false crypts, grave boxes), 67–68, 119, pl. 21; comb graves (tent graves), 68; table gravestones, 68, 119; inscriptions, 70–72, 72, 73; dowsing for, 84, 85; renovation and rediscovery of, 85, 103–4. See also Cemeteries;

Decoration/Decoration Day; Edging; Mounding/ mounded; Pipe flowerholders; Stone construction; Structures, cemetery Grave boxes. See Grave/gravesite: grave boxes Grave covers. See Grave/gravesite: grave covers Gravehouse (Grave shed, Graveshelter). See Structures, cemetery: graveshelter Graveyard. See Cemeteries Graveyard Day/Graveyard Working Day. 20–21, 125, 127 Great Awakening, Second, 88, 178 Great Britain. See Britain/British Great Depression, 92 Great Smoky Mountains (Smokies), viii, 9, 85, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 103, 104, 112, 113, 129, 135, 170, 189, 190 Great Smoky Mountains Folklife, 86 Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), viii, xii, xv, 2, 3–10, 7, 8, 10, 11, 23, 32, 39, 46, 47, 80, 81, 82, 84, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 108, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 131, 132, 133–34, 134, 167, 169, 180, 181, 189, pls. 2–3, pl. 6, pls. 23– 24; archival collections, xii; “first park” and “second park,” 95; transfer of land from TVA to, 97; support for, by North Shore exiles, 113; partnership with North Shore Historical Association for decorations, 115, 166, 172. See also Decoration/Decoration Day: on North Shore; National Park Service; North Shore Green Hill Cemetery (Titus County, Tex.), 127 Greene County, Ark., 44, 127 Guerrant, Edward O., 44, 58 Hair, Sam H., 144 Haldimand County. See Ontario, Canada

Haley, Alex, 103 Hall, Mitzi Lea, 131, 132, 138 Halloween, 124, 178 Harris Cemetery, 2, 30, 77, 78, 79 Haywood County, N.C., 2, 51, 51, 190 Hazel Creek (formerly Hazelnut Creek), 2, 3, 4–5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 50, 89, 93, 94, 96, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 110, 133, 133, 135, 146, 174 Hazelnut, 5 Headstones. See Grave/gravesite: headstones and footstones; Grave/gravesite: markers and monuments Heaped. See Mounding/mounded Hebrew, 45 Henderson, Ky., 140 Herron Family Cemetery, 2, 37 Hicks, Ruth Vickery, 101 Higdon Cemetery, 174 Hill, Green Lee, 31, 100, 104 Historical traumas, 91 Hogue, Dale, x Hogue, Linda Grant, x, xi, 4, 6, 8, 104 Holidays Symphony, 121 Hollow/holler, 89 Holly Springs Baptist Church and Cemetery (#1 and #2), 54 Homecoming, church, 21, 46–48, 48, 125, 138, 178, 180 Hooker, Elizabeth R., 19 Hooker, John Lee, 142 Hooper Cemetery, 75 Horne, Joseph A., 38 Hoskinson, Philip E., 127 Howell, Regina Cochran, xi, 16, 17, 162–64, 162, 173, pl. 7 Howell, Steve, 17 Howlin’ Wolf, 142 Hutchins Library, xii Hyatt, Lawrence, x Hyde, Martin, and Rachel Farley Hyde, 105 Hymns. See Music: hymns and gospel “I’ll Fly Away,” 15, 17, 107

Inabinett, Hilda, 152 Inabinett, Janice, xi, 152–53, 152, 173 Independence Day, 3–10, 124 Indian Country Today, 128 Infant burials. See Grave/gravesite: infant International Order of Oddfellows, 129, 178, 179 In the Harbor, 121 Invasive species, 115 Iowa, 93 Ireland, 59, 87 Iroquoian, 86 Isbell, Jason, 142 Ives, Charles, 121, 126 “I Would Rather Be on Hazel Creek,” 134, 135–37, 137, 138 Jabbour, Alan, ix, x, xi, xii, 3–18, 12, 16, 46, 74, 92, 99, 108, 128, 149, 152, 157–65, 167, 173, 181, 187, 189 Jabbour, Karen Singer, ix, xi, xii, 3–18, 46, 74, 108, 128, 149, 152, 157–61, 167, 181, 184, 187, 189–90 Jackson, Andrew, 91 Jackson, Ewing, 127 Jackson, Tenn., 141 Jackson County, N.C., viii, xi, 2, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32, 39, 44, 48, 48, 52, 58, 59, 60, 68, 70, 71, 75, 76, 79, 81, 83, 88, 94, 98, 105, 125, 146, 154, 169, 170, 175, 182, 184, 185, 189, pl. 1, pl. 4, pl. 14, pls. 19–21, pl. 30, pl. 32 Jackson Owen Cemetery (Wolf Mountain Cemetery), 2, 27, 30, 76, 76, 77, 82, 83, 184 Jackson Paper Manufacturing Company, 90 Jacksonville, Fla., 156 Jamestown, Va., 68 Janney, Caroline E., 118, 120, 121 Jeane, Donald Gregory, 72, 74 Jeanette Glass Company, 131 Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 83, 144 Jenkins, Peggy Williams, 81, 82 Jenkins Cemetery, 2, 72, 75 Johnson, Barbara, 15 Johnson, Mike, 15

Index

213

Johnson, Mildred Cable, 102, 104, 167, 168 Jones, Curtis, 141 Jones, Gary, 110 Jones, Trevor, xii Jordan, R. A., 34 Jordan, Terry G. ( JordanBychkov, Terry G.), 24, 38, 55, 74 Judgment Day, 59 “Just a Rose Will Do,” 143 Keel, Bennie, xi, 189 Keener Cemetery, 2, 55, 56, 56, 69, 69, 70 Kentucky, 29, 38, 44, 49, 68, 74, 86, 123, 127, 139–40, 143, 177, 190 Kentucky, The, 74 Kentucky River, 74 Kephart, Horace, 93–94, 145–46 King, Pee Wee ( Julius Frank Anthony Kuczynski), 15 Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture, 177 Kirkland, Arnold D., 134 Kirkland, Carolyn, x, xi, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17 Kirkland, Verna, x, xi, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16, 17, 33, 34, 35, 36, 46, 134, 162, 173, 174, pl. 13 Kirtley, Guy, 127, 128 Kituhwa, 86, 89 Kniffen, Fred, 55 Knoxville, Tenn., 84, 131 Koch, Peter, xii Korean War, 117 Kreusch, Erik, 3, 189 Lackey, Nevil, 15 Ladies Memorial Association of Petersburg, Virginia, 118, 120, 179 Lafourche Parish, La., 35 Lake Erie, 129 Lake View Drive. See Road to Nowhere Lambert, Nellie, 159–60 Lamkin, Thelma Lynn, 127 Laney, Carrie, xi, 42, 167, 173

214

Index

Laney, Gene, xi, 133, 133, 134, 138 Laney Family Reunion, 46, 153 Lange, Dorothea, 24 Lanier, Trevor, x Lauada, N.C., 2, 29, 57 Lauada Cemetery, 2, 12, 24, 33, 35, 46, 57, 65, 155, 164–65, 165, 166, 169, 173, pl. 18, pl. 29 Lauada Cemetery Association, xi, 57, 155 Laurel Branch Cemetery, 77 Lawrence County, Ala., 125 Leather britches, 154 Lectern, 28, 78–79 Ledford family, pls. 11–12 Ledger gravestones (Ledger stones). See Grave/gravesite: grave covers Lee, Russell, 35 Lenoir, N.C., 137 Levy County, Fla., 156 Liberia, 128–29, 130 Library of Congress, xii “Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad,” 15 Little, M. Ruth, 68, 74, 179 Little Tennessee River, viii, 2, 3, 4, 19, 65, 88–89, 104, 105, 135 Logan, John Alexander, 119–20, 122, 124, 125 Logan, Mrs. John A. (Mary), 119–20 Logging, 4, 89–90, 92, 93 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 121 Looking Backward, 121 Los Angeles Daily Times, 119 Louisiana, 34, 35, 38, 67, 68, 74, 127, 190 Lovedale Cemetery, 29 Lower Coward Cemetery, 32–33, 60, 78, 79 Luandrew, Albert (Sunnyland Slim), 142 Luker, Jimmy, 30 Lumpkin, Grace, 146 Lutheran, 88 Lych-gate, 74, 78, 80

Macon County, N.C., 2, 190 Madison County, N.C., 142, 190 Manufacturing, 90 Marble, N.C., 2, 55, 68, 109 Marion, N.C., 95, 103, 137, 169 Markers. See Grave/gravesite: headstones and footstones; Grave/gravesite: markers and monuments Marlowe, Eddie, x, 102 Martin, Floyd, 15 Maryville, Tenn., 95, 169 Mason Branch Cemetery (Mason Branch Community Cemetery), 2, 14, 18, 29, 36, 51, 154, 155–57, 156, 157, pl. 16, pls. 25–26 Massey Branch Cemetery, 2, 71, 73, 78, 80 Mathis Cemetery, 2, 30, 78, pl. 14 McCall Cemetery, 2, pl. 31 McClure Cemetery, 2, 84, 85 McDonald, Victoria A. Casey, 44 McKee family plot, 56 “Meditation,” 83 Melungeon, 74 Memorandum of Agreement, 95, 97–99, 133 Memorial Day, vii, 20, 116–22, 125, 159, 178, 189. See also Decoration/Decoration Day Message. See Preaching Methodist, 88, 178 Mexico/Mexican, 34, 125 Meyer, Richard E., 20 Middleton, Lucy and Mae, 60, 154 Midway Church and Cemetery (Midway, Ga.), 127 Mining, 90 Missionary Baptist, 88. See also Baptist Mississippi, 44, 127, 190 Mississippi River, 35 Missouri, 127 Mitchell Cemetery, 124 Mitchell County, N.C., 19, 32, 40, 42, 43, 62, 145 Monroe County, Tenn., 125 Monteith, Carmaleta Littlejohn, x, 91, 92

Monteith, David, x, 92, 114 Monteith, Ellen, x Monteith, Max W., x, 33, 42, 91, 92 Monuments. See Grave/gravesite: headstones and footstones; Grave/gravesite: markers and monuments Moonshining, 146 Morris County, Tex., 141 Moses, 45 Moss Cemetery, 55, 56 Mounding/mounded, 13–14, 25–32, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 35, 60, 66, 81, 128, 139, 144, 145, 159, 170, 175, 179, 185, pl. 1, pl. 3, pls. 13–14, pl. 16, pl. 22, pls. 24–25; to compensate for settlement, 25; “heaped” as another term for, 25; meaning of, 25–28; origin of, 28; in North Shore and other GSMNP cemeteries, 31–32, 81, 107; Balsam Highlands Solution, 27, 28, 30, 54, 184, pl. 1, pl. 14. Mountain Heritage Center, xii, 35, 191. See also Western Carolina University Mount Olivet Cemetery (Washington, D.C.), 38 Mount Zion Church and Cemetery (Greene County, Ark.), 127 Murphy, Jesse and Dolores, 160 Murphy, Luther, 157–61, 158 Music/musicians, 88, 118; hymns and gospel, vii, 15, 17, 40, 78, 107–8, 108, 110, 138–39, 153, 153, pl. 8; during Decoration Day events, 4, 6, 7, 15, 17, 107–9, 127, 129, 138–44; bluegrass, 71, 73, 138–39; blues and jazz, 140–42, 144; on headstones, 71, 73; making reference to Decoration Day, 138–44; lining-out style, 139–40, 143 Mutual Aid Society, 118 My Old True Love, 142 Nantahala River, 2, 89 Naples, Tex., 141

National Cemeteries, 117, 121 National Forest Service, 147 National Geographic Board, 94 National Park Service, viii, 5, 80, 81, 93, 95, 97, 101, 105, 166, 168, 189. See also Great Smoky Mountains National Park; U.S. Department of the Interior National Register of Historic Places, 190 “Necrogeography in the United States,” 55 Negro. See African American Neilson, Keith P. (superintendent, GSMNP), 104 Neville, Gwen Kennedy, 177 New Baptist Song Book, The, 140 New Hope Baptist Church Cemetery, 2, 40 New Orleans, La., 35 New Roads, La., 35 Newton County, Ark., 122, 125 Nicut, Okla., 128 Noland Creek, 94 Norfolk County. See Ontario, Canada North/Northern, vii, 117, 126. See also Northern Decoration Day North Carolina, 2, 23, 38, 68, 74, 86, 87, 90, 91, 92, 95, 99, 101, 105, 112, 113, 169, 177, 179; western, viii, xi, xiii, xv, 2, 3, 24, 28, 30, 33, 35–36, 38, 39, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 61, 65, 67, 68, 74, 75, 79, 80, 81, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 94, 117, 124, 126, 127, 137, 138, 140, 142, 145, 146, 161, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 187; western, history and culture of, 86–96; state government of, 97–99, 100. See also Cherokee; Logging; Memorandum of Agreement; Tourism North Carolina Humanities Council (formerly North Carolina Humanities Committee), 103, 171 Northern Decoration Day, 116–22, 126, 129, 130 Northern Ireland, 177

North Shore, ix, xv, 3, 33, 42, 45, 60, 65, 87, 92, 95, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 109, 112, 113, 115, 123, 124, 131, 132, 134, 135, 135, 147, 164, 166, 167, 174, 181; park staff role in decorations, 3, 5–6, 23, 102, 103, 106, 107, 146, 171–72, 173, 180; removal from, 31, 57, 94–96, 137, 147, 155, 164, 169, 171; decorations before removal, 40; history of term “North Shore,” 104–5; and North Shore movement, 112–15, 168, 169. See also Decoration/Decoration Day: on North Shore North Shore cemeteries, viii, 4, 5, 9, 31, 33, 69, 72, 80, 83–84, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 114, 124, 146, 190; burial rights in, 114–15; technical and historical features of, 190. See also these cemeteries: Bradshaw; Cable; Cable Branch; Higdon; McClure; Mitchell; Orr; Paynetown; Pilkey; Posey; Proctor North Shore Cemetery Association. See North Shore Historical Association North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project Report, xi, 190 North Shore Historical Association (North Shore Cemetery Association), xi, 4, 6–7, 104, 167–68, 169–70, 171 North Shore Reunion, 101–2 North Shore Revolution, 47, 166 North Shore Road, 99, 100, 112, 113, 114, 131, 136, 189. See also Road to Nowhere North Shore Road Association, xi, 104 North Shore Road Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), xi– xii, 10, 101, 105, 181, 189 Oak, 78 Obelisk, 66 Oconoluftee (Oconaluftee) River, 2, 89

Index

215

Oddfellows, International Order of, 129, 178, 179 Offering, 6–7, 108–9, 109 Ohio River, 140 Oklahoma, 62, 68, 74, 87, 91, 127, 144, 190 Old Mother Church and Cemetery, 55 Old Savannah Cemetery, 59, 175 Oliver, George, 16, 16 Oliver, James R., 16 “On Decoration Day,” 142 Ontario, Canada, 129, 142 Oregon, 90 Orr Cemetery, 2, 32, 81, 114, 115, 182 Our Southern Highlanders, 93, 145–46 Outdoor toilets, 78, 79 Overly, Fred (superintendant, GSMNP), 100, 101 Overton County, Tenn., 68 Owen Cemetery, 30. See also E. D. Owen Cemetery; Jackson Owen Cemetery Owens Cemetery, 30 Ozark/Ozarks, vii, 8, 13, 34, 80 Pacific Northwest, 90 Painted headstones, 34, 68, 71 Palm Sunday, 129 Panther Creek Cemetery, 29 Paper flowers. See Flowers: paper “Paradise Lost,” 134 Park Road, 97, 101. See also Road to Nowhere Park Service. See National Park Service Pavilion. See Structures, cemetery: pavilion Payne, Greenberry, 80, 81 Paynetown Cemetery (Payne Cemetery), 2, 31, 39, 72, 80–81, 81, 82, 100, 114, 115, 182 Pedersen, Dyanne Shook, xi, 164–65, 165, 166, 173, pl. 29 Pennsylvania, 87, 93, 177 “Perpetual care cemeteries,” 49, 56–57 Perthshire, Scotland, 61. See also Scotland

216

Index

Petersburg, Va., 67, 68, 118, 119, 119, 120, 123, 126, 130, 179 Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, 121 Philyaw, Scott, xii Photographs: discussion of, xii– xiii, xv, 8–9, 11–13, 15, 18, 33–34, 35, 36, 38, 43, 134, 150, 157, 164, 167–68, 190; reproductions of early, 34, 35, 135 Piedmont, 87, 90 Piety, vii, 183 Pilgrimage/pilgrims, 171, 176–81 Pilgrim’s Progress, 177 Pilkey Cemetery, 114 Pipe flower-holders, 12, 13, 37, 65 Pitchford, Anita, 58, 127 Pittsburgh, Pa., 142 Port Hope (Ontario, Canada), 129 Posey, Henry, 102 Posey Cemetery, 114 Power, Barbara, 62 Prayer, vii, 6, 14, 40, 78, 109, 110, 118 Preaching, vii, 6, 17, 40, 75, 78, 109, 110, 127, 153, pl. 9 Presbyterian, 88, 178 Primitive Baptist, 88. See also Baptist Prince, Peter Hayden (“Pete”), 84, 85 Proctor, Christine Cole, x, xi, 33, 35, 64, 132, 133, 134, 135, 147, 155 Proctor, Edna Ledford, pl. 11 Proctor, Moses and Patience, 6, 50 Proctor, N.C., 89, 105, 167 Proctor, Troy, 134, 155 Proctor Cemetery, viii, 2, 3–10, 7, 8, 10, 11, 31, 41, 50, 101, 102, 108, 110, 167, 168, pl. 6 Protestant, 45, 55, 88, 124, 177–78, 179, 180 Pruitt, Leigh Anne Pedersen, 164 Qualls, Cecil, 128 Queen Cemetery, 30 Rabun Gap, Ga., 148 Ramps, 153–54 Raven Fork, 89 Ravensford, 89

Reconstruction, 92 Red cedar, eastern, 61 Reeves, Tim, 17, pl. 9 Reform. See Calvinist/Calvinistic Religion in the Highlands, 19 Religious music. See Music/ musicians: hymns and gospel Reminiscences of a Soldier’s Wife: An Autobiography, 120 Reno and Smiley. See Smiley, Arthur Lee, Jr. (“Red”) Resurrection Day, 59 Reunion, family, 14–16, 40, 46–48, 101, 102, 178 Revival, 88, 138, 178; as concept for interpreting North Shore decorations, 170–72; and “revitalization movements,” 171; tent, 138 Rhinehart, Eleanor Cable, 104, 167 Richmond, Va., 67, 68, 121 Richmond Southern Opinion, 121 Rickels, Patricia, 34 Ritter, N.C., 105 Ritter Lumber Company, 167 River stone. See Stone construction “A Road Is Forever,” 105, 134 Road to Nowhere (Lake View Drive), viii, 98, 101, 131, 132, 132, 133–34, 133, 134. See also North Shore Road “Road to Nowhere and the Politics of Wilderness Legislation, The,” 47 Robbinsville, N.C., 2, 55, 88, 103 Rogers Cemetery. See David Rogers Cemetery Rohr, Carl Barousse, 47, 57, 112 Roman Catholic. See Catholic, Roman Roots, 103 Rosenberg, Neil V., 171 Roses, 32, 33, 62–63, 143 Ross, Charlotte and Dr., 103 Round Hill Cemetery, 2, 29, 77, 77, 82, 186 Saddle decoration, 36, 37, 159 “Sanctified” cemeteries, 55

Sawmill Hill Cemetery, 2, 26, 29 Scotland/Scottish/Scots, 59, 61, 68, 87, 177–78 Scots-Irish, 87 Scruggs, Earl, 138 Second Coming, 59 Second Great Awakening, 88, 178 “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” 144 Sermon. See Preaching “Shall We Gather at the River,” 9 Shells, 38, pl. 20 Shepherd Family Reunion, 14–16, 46 Sheppard, Muriel E., 19, 32, 40, 42, 43, 145, 146 Shoal Creek Baptist Church Cemetery, 2, 30, 54, 62, 63 Shook, Virgie Brooks, xi, 164–65, 165, 166, 173, pl. 29 Shook Cemetery, 2, 30, 39, 52, 58, 60, 77, 154, 174, 181–82, pl. 30 Sign, 131–33, 132, 133. See also Cemeteries: signs Sikes, Wirt, 129 Singer factory, 90 Single-row decoration, 29, 32, 36, 159, 159 Slayton, Sonia Ann, 127 Smiley, Arthur Lee, Jr. (“Red”), 71, 73 Smith, Parker, 22 Smokies. See Great Smoky Mountains Smoky Mountain Times, The, 101 Snowballs (Viburnum), 123–24 Sol’s Creek Baptist Church and Cemetery, 2, 28, 30, 78 Song. See Music/musicians South/Southern, vii, 33, 38, 67, 120, 122, 124, 128, 129, 140, 178; Upland, vii, viii, 8, 20, 21, 24, 28, 34, 38, 44, 46, 52, 55, 59, 61, 68, 72, 74, 86, 88, 122–23, 125, 126, 127, 129, 138, 140, 161, 177, 178, 189–90. See also Decoration/Decoration Day: Southern South Carolina, 38, 44, 59, 67, 68, 74, 86, 117–18, 127, 190

Southeast Archeological Center, 189 Sparta, Tenn., 138 Stack cake, 43 Stanley, Ralph (and the Clinch Mountain Boys), 139 Stanley Brothers (Carter and Ralph Stanley), 139 State Road 288 (North Carolina), 94, 97 Stecoah, N.C., 50 Stein, Hugo, 69 Sticks and Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Gravemarkers, 68 Stone construction (stonemasonry): fieldstone, 62, 68–70, 70, 71, pl. 19 A-B, pl. 20; riverstone, 69 Structures, cemetery, 72, 74–79; bench, 8, 40, 75, 76, 76, 77, 77, 107, 148, 150, 151, pl. 30, pl. 32; table, 8, 75, 76, 76, 77, 107; trash bin, 23, 77–78, 78; chapel, 27, 76–77, 185; lectern, 28, 78–79; fence, 32, 56, 60–61, 73, 80, 115, 167, 174; wall, 69; pavilion, 70, 76, 76, 77, 147–48, 148, 153; graveshelter (gravehouse, grave shed), 72, 74–75, 75, 147, 148, 175, pl. 22; lychgate, 74, 78, 80; grandstand, 78; outdoor toilet (outhouse), 78, 79 Sul y Blodau, 129 Sunnyland Slim, 142 Sutton-Caldwell Family Cemetery, 2, 50–51, 51 Swain County, N.C., viii, xi, xv, 2, 3, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 22, 23, 23, 26, 29, 29, 34, 35, 37, 38, 53, 54, 57, 66, 67, 67, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 88, 89, 92, 94, 97–99, 105, 113, 114, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 156, 157, 158, 159, 162, 162, 163, 166, 169, 170, 177, 182, 186, 189, 190, pls. 7–13, pls. 15–18, pl. 22, pls. 25–29 Swedish, 87

Sylva, N.C., 2, 29, 55, 56, 62, 66, 69, 69, 70, 88, 90, 135, 137, 169 Sylva Assembly of God Cemetery, 2, 62 Table, 8, 75, 76, 76, 77, 107 Table gravestones, 68, 119 Tabor Cemetery, 2, 23, 66, 77, 78 Taylor, Roy (congressman), 101 Teague, Tonya, x Tennessee, 2, 9, 59, 68, 74, 86, 87, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 100, 125, 127, 138, 141, 169, 170, 177, 190 Tennessee Valley, 87, 94, 95 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 57, 94, 95, 97, 99, 135, 136, 155 Tent graves, 68 Texas, 44, 58, 80, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 141, 177 Texas Graveyards: A Cultural Legacy, 55 Thanksgiving, 124 Thibodaux, La., 35 Thomas Chapel Cemetery, 2, 53, 67, 67 Thompson, Cathy, 128 Titus County, Tex., 44, 124, 125, 127, 128 Toilets, 78, 79 Tokens, 38, 39, 142 To Make My Bread, 146 Tourism, 88, 93–94, 113 Town Creek, Ala., 127 Traditional cultural property, 190 Traditionally associated people, 190 Trail of Tears, 87, 91, 95 Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, 171 Transylvania County, N.C., 2, 30, 41, 54, 62, 63, 190, pl. 31 Trash bin, 23, 77–78, 78 TRC Environmental Corporation, xii, 189 Treaty of New Echota, 91 Trees, removal of, 21. See also Dogwood; Oak; Red cedar, eastern; Yew Trull, Willa Mae, 104

Index

217

Tsali, 91 Tuckasegee, N.C., 29, 30, 70 Tuckasegee Baptist Church Cemetery, 2, 29, 70, pl. 19 A-B Tuckasegee River, 2, 70, 86, 89 TVA. See Tennessee Valley Authority Ulster (Northern Ireland), 87 Union (Civil War), 92, 116, 117 U.S. Congress, 98, 101, 117 U.S. Department of the Interior, 97–99 U.S. government, viii, 15, 86–87, 91, 95 Upland South. See South: Upland Upper Stephens Cemetery, 2, pl. 32 Upper Tuskegee, N.C., 42, 133 Valley of Virginia, 87 Valley So Wild: A Folk History, 19, 31, 125 Van Buren, Martin, 91 Vance, Harry, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 85, 104, 109 Vance, Helen Cable, x, xi, 4, 33, 35, 98, 99, 101, 102–4, 107, 108, 166–68, 167, 173 Vess Owen Cemetery, 30 Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), 16, 16, 117 Vickery, Larry, 131 “Village Churchyard,” 139–40, 143 Virginia, 49, 62, 67, 68, 86, 87, 118–21, 119, 123, 127, 143, 190

218

Index

Wales, 87, 129 Walker, Willard, 144 Walker, Zora Jenkins, 43, 105, 134, 136, 137, 137, 138 Wallace, Anthony F. C., 171 Washington (state), 90 Washington, D.C., 5, 38, 162 Washington Race Course, 117, 126, 178–79. See also Charleston, S.C./Charlestonians Water witching, 84, 85 Watkins Cemetery, 2, 20, 22, 40, 46, 71, 72, 76, 81, 147–54, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 175, 182, pl. 22 Waynesville, N.C., 2, 95, 103, 123, 169 Wayside, N.C., 105 Webb, Paul, x, xii, 181, 187, 189, 190 Wells, Kitty, 139 Welsh, 87, 129 West African, 24, 38, 103, 128–29 West Virginia, 68, 86, 127 Western Carolina University, xii, xiii, 3, 35, 189, 191 Western North Carolina. See Great Smoky Mountains National Park; North Carolina: western; individual counties, towns, and districts Wheatstraw, Peetie, 141 “When They Place the Flowers [on the Grave] They Sing This,” 144 White County, Tenn., 68

“Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” 15, 107 Williams, Hank, 139 Williams, Michael Ann, 86 Williams, Nina Cable, 81, 82 Williams, Waymon Stephen (“Steve”), 81, 82 Williamson, Sonny Boy ( John Lee Curtis Williamson), 141 Wilmington, N.C., 164 Wilson, Charles Reagan, 55, 125 W.N.C. Marble and Granite, 68, 109 Wolf Mountain Cemetery. See Jackson Owen Cemetery Woodard, George Matt, 156, pl. 26 Woodard, Trevor, 16, 162–64, 163, 173 Woodard, Wade, xi, 1, 156, 157, pl. 26 Wood Cemetery, 70, 76 Woodring Cemetery, 2, 26, 29, 30 World War I, 92 World War II, 33, 34, 94, 98, 100, 101 Wortham, Tex., 144 Wreaths, 35, 36, 160 Yellow Hill Cemetery, 2, 71, 72 Yellowstone National Park, 93 Yew, 61 Young, Clay, 16, 162–64, 163, 173 “You’re So Nice and Kind to Me Lou Della,” 142 Yucca, 62, 62, 122

plate 1 Broom Cemetery after decoration, Jackson Co., N.C., June 1, 2007

plate 2 Jack Cable decorating a Cable family grave, Cable Branch Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, August 1, 2004

plate 3 Mounded graves, Cable Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, May 20, 2007

plate 4 Barkers Creek Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., April 11, 2007

plate 5 Boarding the boat at Cable Cove, Graham Co., N.C., August 1, 2004

plate 6 Dinner on the ground during Proctor Cemetery and Bradshaw Cemetery Decorations, Gsmnp, July 4, 2004

plate 7 Regina Howell adjusts decorations on a grave, Brendle Hill Cemetery Decoration, Swain Co., N.C., June 10, 2007

plate 8 Hymn singing during Brendle Hill Cemetery Decoration, Swain Co., N.C., June 10, 2007

plate 9 Rev. Tim Reeves offers the sermon, Brendle Hill Cemetery Decoration, Swain Co., N.C., June 10, 2007

plate 10 After the Brendle Hill Cemetery Decoration, Swain Co., N.C., June 10, 2007

plate 11 Edna Ledford Proctor, seated, and family decorate Ledford graves, Cochran Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., June 2, 2007

plate 12 Ledford graves after being decorated, Cochran Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., June 4, 2007

plate 13 Packed mounding with rake-lines by Verna Kirkland, Brendle Hill Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., June 9, 2007

plate 14 Mounded, graveldressed, decorated graves, Mathis Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., May 22, 2007

plate 15 Blanket decoration with broken heart of yarn rosettes, Cochran Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., June 4, 2007

plate 16 Blanket decoration on grave in Mason Branch Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., July 31, 2004

plate 17 Dogwood tree in Brendle Hill Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., September 2, 2004

plate 18 Undecorated wooden crosses on unknown graves, Lauada Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., January 15, 2006

plate 19 A–B Fieldstone headstone (front and back), Tuckasegee Baptist Church Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., July 4, 2008

plate 20 Fieldstone headstone with cockles and whelk, Barkers Creek Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., April 11, 2007

plate 21 Box crypt, Erastus Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., March 6, 2009

plate 22 Graveshelter, Watkins Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., August 8, 2004

plate 23 Climbing the ridge to Cable Branch Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, August 1, 2004

plate 24 Adolph and Marie Cable and grandson Austin Evans decorate a Cable family grave, Cable Branch Cemetery Decoration, Gsmnp, August 1, 2004

plate 25. Mason Branch Cemetery in the clean-swept and mounded style, Swain Co., N.C., July 31, 2004

plate 26 Wade Woodard at the grave of his father, George Matt Woodard, Mason Branch Cemetery in the level and grassy style, Swain Co., N.C., June 10, 2007

plate 27 Katherine Murphy Crisp in her Birdtown home, Swain Co., N.C., May 10, 2008

plate 28 Burial site dug by Birdtown Free Labor Group, Birdtown Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., July 11, 2008

plate 29 Dyanne Shook Pedersen and her mother, Virgie Brooks Shook, preparing to decorate graves, Lauada Cemetery, Swain Co., N.C., May 26, 2007

plate 30 Shook Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., June 1, 2007

plate 31 Stone-bordered family gravesites, McCall Cemetery, Transylvania Co., N.C., July 4, 2008

plate 32 Upper Stephens Cemetery, Jackson Co., N.C., July 4, 2008