Chapter 30: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture — What Appalachians Made and How They Lived

"My grandmother could look at a pantry full of canned beans, pickled corn, and apple butter and tell you exactly which summer produced each jar. The garden was her calendar. The cellar was her history book." — Oral history interview, Letcher County, Kentucky, 1982, Appalachian Oral History Project

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Describe Appalachian food traditions and their Indigenous, African, and European roots — and explain why this multicultural foundation matters for understanding the region
2. Trace the major craft traditions of Appalachia (quilting, basket-weaving, woodworking, pottery) from functional origins through the craft revival movement to contemporary practice
3. Analyze the Foxfire project as a landmark example of student-led cultural preservation
4. Evaluate the tension between craft as living tradition and craft as commodity — and the politics of who gets to define "authentic" Appalachian culture

What the Hands Knew

The history of Appalachia is often told through wars and strikes, through politics and economics, through the grand forces that shaped the region from outside. This chapter tells a different kind of history — one measured in the things people made with their hands and grew from the ground. The quilts that kept families warm through mountain winters. The baskets woven from white oak splits that carried everything from eggs to coal. The cornbread cooked in cast-iron skillets that were themselves handed down through generations. The leather britches drying on strings across the porch. The ramps dug from the forest floor every spring, smelling so strong that children who ate them were sent home from school.

Material culture — the objects, foods, tools, and crafts that people create and use in daily life — is history you can touch, taste, and smell. It tells you things that documents alone cannot: what people ate, how they worked, what they valued enough to make beautiful when beauty was not strictly necessary. A quilt pattern tells you about the aesthetic sensibilities of a woman who may never have left her county. A hand-carved chair tells you about the relationship between a craftsman and the wood he worked, which tells you about the forests, which tells you about the land. The food on the table tells you about trade routes, growing seasons, cultural memory, and the specific genius of people who turned the limited resources of mountain terrain into cuisines of remarkable depth and variety.

This chapter traces the foodways — the full complex of food-related practices, including production, preservation, preparation, and consumption — and material culture of Appalachia from their multicultural origins through the twentieth-century craft revival to the contemporary moment, when Appalachian food shows up on fancy restaurant menus in Brooklyn and Appalachian quilts hang in art museums. The story is one of creation, preservation, revival, and commodification — and at every turn, the question of who controls the story of what Appalachian people made and how they lived.

The Three Roots: Indigenous, African, and European Foundations

The Indigenous Foundation

The food traditions of Appalachia begin with the people who were here first.

The Cherokee and other Indigenous peoples of the southern Appalachians developed agricultural systems of extraordinary sophistication over thousands of years. The foundation of their agriculture was the Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash grown together in a single mound, each plant supporting the others. The corn stalks provided structure for the bean vines to climb. The beans fixed nitrogen in the soil, fertilizing the corn. The broad squash leaves shaded the ground, retaining moisture and suppressing weeds. The system was an elegant solution to the challenges of mountain agriculture: it produced a nutritionally complete diet (corn provides carbohydrates, beans provide protein, squash provides vitamins) from a compact planting that did not require the large cleared fields of lowland agriculture.

Corn was the absolute center of the Indigenous food system, and it would become the center of the Appalachian food system that succeeded it. The Cherokee grew multiple varieties, each suited to different uses: flint corn for grinding into meal, flour corn for bread, sweet corn for eating fresh. They processed corn in ways that later European settlers would adopt wholesale: grinding it into meal on stone, cooking it as hominy by treating it with wood ash lye (a process called nixtamalization that releases niacin and prevents pellagra), drying it for storage, and making it into a variety of breads and porridges.

Beyond the Three Sisters, Indigenous food knowledge encompassed a vast pharmacopoeia of wild foods: ramps (wild leeks, Allium tricoccum), greens gathered from forest and field, nuts (hickory, walnut, chestnut before the blight), berries, roots, and the extraordinary diversity of game that the Appalachian forests supported. This knowledge — which plants were edible, which were medicinal, which were poisonous, when to harvest, how to prepare — represented millennia of accumulated wisdom, and it did not disappear with European settlement. It was transmitted, sometimes directly and sometimes through intermediate channels, into the food culture that European settlers built in the mountains.

The African Contribution

The African roots of Appalachian food are among the most important and most frequently erased elements of the region's culinary history.

As discussed in earlier chapters, enslaved Black people lived and worked throughout the Appalachian region, and free Black communities existed in the mountains from the earliest period of European settlement. These communities brought food knowledge that profoundly shaped what Appalachians eat.

Cooking techniques — slow-braising tough cuts of meat, frying in animal fat, cooking greens low and slow with a piece of pork for seasoning — have roots in West African culinary traditions adapted to the ingredients available in the American South. The centrality of greens in Appalachian cooking — poke sallet, creasy greens, turnip greens, dandelion greens, ramps — reflects a tradition of leafy vegetable cookery that was strong in both African and Indigenous food systems and that European settlers adopted and made their own.

Specific ingredients traveled from Africa to the mountains. Black-eyed peas, now considered quintessentially Southern, originated in West Africa. Techniques for smoking and preserving meat drew on African traditions. The practice of cooking with potlikker — the nutrient-rich broth left after boiling greens — is rooted in African foodways that wasted nothing.

The erasure of African contributions to Appalachian food is part of the larger erasure of Black Appalachian history discussed throughout this book. When people imagine "traditional Appalachian food," they typically picture a white family on a farm — not recognizing that the food on that family's table reflected African knowledge, techniques, and ingredients that had been absorbed so completely into the regional food culture that their origins were forgotten.

The European Inheritance

The Scots-Irish, English, and German settlers who moved into the Appalachian mountains in the eighteenth century brought their own food traditions, which merged with Indigenous and African influences to create the distinctive Appalachian foodways.

From the Scots-Irish came a tradition of oat-based and grain-based cookery, a facility with dairy products, and techniques for preserving food through smoking and salting that had been refined in the harsh climates of Scotland and Ulster. The Scots-Irish also brought whiskey-making — the distillation of grain into spirits — which would become both a major Appalachian industry and a source of political conflict (as the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, discussed in Chapter 10, demonstrated).

From the Germans came traditions of sauerkraut-making, sausage preparation, and the meticulous preservation techniques — drying, pickling, fermenting — that were essential to surviving the long mountain winters. German settlers in the Shenandoah Valley and adjacent areas brought a farming tradition that emphasized careful land management and crop diversity, and their influence on the agricultural practices of the region was substantial.

From the English came bread traditions, pie-making techniques, and a general framework of meal structure that shaped how Appalachian families organized their eating.

The genius of Appalachian food culture was its synthesis. No single tradition dominated. Instead, the practical demands of mountain life — limited arable land, unpredictable growing seasons, long winters, isolation from markets — forced a creative blending of Indigenous, African, and European food knowledge into something genuinely new. The corn-based diet that became the foundation of mountain eating was Indigenous in origin, prepared using techniques that drew on all three traditions, and sustained by preservation methods that combined African, European, and Indigenous practices.

The Centrality of Corn

Corn was the mountain diet. Everything else was supplement.

This is an exaggeration, but not by much. From the earliest period of European settlement through the early twentieth century, corn in its various forms was the staple food of the Appalachian mountains. Corn could grow on the steep, thin-soiled hillsides where wheat would not thrive. It produced abundantly in the warm, wet summers. It could be stored through the winter as dried grain. And it could be transformed into an astonishing variety of foods.

Cornbread — made from ground cornmeal, cooked in a cast-iron skillet, without sugar (a point of fierce and enduring controversy between mountain and lowland Southern traditions) — was the daily bread of the mountains. It was eaten at every meal: crumbled into buttermilk for breakfast, served alongside beans and greens at dinner, soaked in potlikker for supper. The cast-iron skillet it was baked in was itself a cherished object, seasoned by years of use and often handed from mother to daughter.

Hominy — corn kernels treated with lye to remove the hull and release nutrients — was another staple, eaten whole or ground into grits. The nixtamalization process that produced hominy was an Indigenous technology of enormous nutritional importance: without it, a corn-heavy diet leads to pellagra, a niacin deficiency disease that ravaged populations elsewhere in the South where corn was eaten without this processing.

Corn was also the basis of the Appalachian whiskey tradition. Corn whiskey — later formalized as bourbon when made in specific ways — was the product of a practical calculation: distilling corn into whiskey was the most efficient way to convert a bulky, perishable crop into a compact, durable, transportable, and valuable commodity. A bushel of corn was difficult to carry over mountain trails. A jug of whiskey was not. Whiskey was currency, medicine, social lubricant, and the focus of the Whiskey Rebellion that first brought the mountain people into conflict with the federal government.

The Chestnut Catastrophe: When the Forest Pantry Disappeared

No account of Appalachian foodways is complete without mentioning the catastrophe that obliterated one of the most important food sources in the mountain diet: the destruction of the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) by the chestnut blight.

Before the blight, the American chestnut was one of the dominant trees of the Appalachian forest — estimated to constitute as much as one-quarter of the canopy in some areas. The tree was enormous (specimens over one hundred feet tall and ten feet in diameter were not uncommon) and extraordinarily productive. In autumn, the forest floor was covered with chestnuts — sweet, starchy, nutritious nuts that were a critical food source for both wildlife and human communities.

Mountain families gathered chestnuts by the bushel. They were roasted, boiled, dried, ground into meal for bread, and fed to hogs (chestnut-fed pork was reputed to have a superior flavor). Chestnuts were also a significant cash crop: mountain children gathered them and sold them to buyers who shipped them to urban markets. For families with limited cash income, the chestnut harvest was one of the few reliable sources of money.

The chestnut blight — a fungal disease caused by Cryphonectria parasitica, accidentally introduced from Asia around 1904 — spread through the Appalachian forests with devastating speed. By the 1940s, the American chestnut was functionally extinct as a canopy tree. An estimated four billion trees died. The ecological impact was catastrophic: the loss of the chestnut altered the composition of the entire Appalachian forest, removing a keystone species that had sustained wildlife populations and human communities for millennia.

The impact on mountain foodways was immediate and severe. A food source that families had depended on for generations simply vanished within a few decades. The chestnut's role in the mountain diet was never fully replaced. Acorns, hickory nuts, and walnuts partially substituted, but none matched the chestnut's combination of abundance, palatability, and nutritional value. The loss of the chestnut was a quiet catastrophe — less dramatic than a mine explosion or a flood, but equally consequential for the communities that depended on the forest pantry.

The Garden: Center of the Mountain Food System

Between the corn of the field and the preservation of the pantry stood the mountain garden — the intensive, carefully managed plot that produced the vegetables, herbs, and small fruits that complemented the grain-based diet.

Mountain gardens were small by lowland standards — the steep terrain and thin soils of the mountains did not permit the broad fields of the Piedmont or the Valley. But what they lacked in size they made up in intensity. A well-managed mountain garden on a quarter-acre of south-facing hillside could produce an astonishing volume and variety of food: green beans (multiple varieties, planted in succession for a continuous harvest), tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, sweet potatoes, cabbage, onions, potatoes, turnips, beets, lettuce, and herbs (sage, thyme, dill, basil, and the ever-present medicinal herbs).

The seeds used in these gardens were often heirloom varieties — open-pollinated cultivars that had been selected and saved by mountain families for generations, adapted through decades or centuries of selection to the specific conditions of the local climate, soil, and growing season. A family's seed stock was a form of wealth — biological capital that represented the accumulated horticultural wisdom of their ancestors. Seeds were shared among neighbors, traded at community gatherings, and carefully stored through the winter for spring planting.

The loss of heirloom varieties is one of the less visible casualties of the twentieth century's transformation of mountain life. As commercial agriculture and store-bought food replaced the garden economy, families stopped saving seed. Varieties that had been maintained for generations — a particular tomato adapted to the short growing season of a high-altitude cove, a bean variety that thrived in the acidic soil of a specific ridge — disappeared when the last gardener who grew them died without passing on the seed.

Today, seed-saving organizations like the Seed Savers Exchange and regional projects across Appalachia are working to locate, preserve, and redistribute surviving heirloom varieties. The work is urgent: every year, varieties disappear, and with them the genetic diversity and cultural knowledge they represent.

Preservation: The Art of Surviving Winter

The central challenge of mountain food was not growing it — the Appalachian climate and soils could produce abundantly in summer — but preserving it. The mountain winter was long, cold, and unforgiving, and the family that had not stored enough food by October faced genuine starvation by March. The preservation techniques that Appalachian families developed and refined over generations were not quaint folk customs. They were survival technologies.

Canning — preserving food in sealed glass jars processed in boiling water — became the backbone of mountain food preservation after the development of reliable home canning equipment in the late nineteenth century. Before modern canning, mountain families relied on older methods: drying, smoking, salt-curing, pickling, and fermentation. Canning did not replace these methods but supplemented them, and by the early twentieth century, the sight of hundreds of filled Mason jars lining the shelves of a root cellar or pantry was one of the most characteristic images of Appalachian domestic life.

A well-stocked pantry was a source of pride and security. It represented months of labor — planting, tending, harvesting, and the exhausting work of canning itself, which required days of standing over boiling water in the heat of late summer. The woman who could show visitors a cellar full of canned vegetables, fruit preserves, pickles, and jams was demonstrating not just culinary skill but economic competence and foresight.

Leather britches — green beans dried whole on strings and hung from the porch rafters or kitchen ceiling — are one of the most distinctive preservation techniques of the mountain food tradition. The name comes from the appearance of the dried beans, which shrivel and darken until they resemble strips of leather. When reconstituted by soaking and cooking, leather britches develop a deep, rich, almost smoky flavor that is entirely different from fresh green beans. The technique requires no equipment beyond string and patience, and it produces a preserved food that can last indefinitely in a dry environment.

Salt-curing was the primary method of preserving meat, particularly pork. Hog-killing day in late autumn was one of the most important events in the mountain agricultural calendar — a communal affair in which neighbors gathered to slaughter, butcher, and process the family's hogs. The meat was rubbed with salt and hung in the smokehouse, where weeks of exposure to hickory or applewood smoke produced the country ham that is one of Appalachia's great culinary contributions: intensely flavored, salty, dry-aged, and capable of lasting for years without refrigeration.

Pickling — preserving vegetables (and sometimes fruits and eggs) in a vinegar brine — was another essential technique. Pickled corn, pickled beans, pickled beets, chow-chow (a pickled relish of green tomatoes and mixed vegetables), and sauerkraut lined the pantry shelves alongside the canned goods. Fermentation — the controlled action of beneficial bacteria on food, as in sauerkraut — was a preservation method with roots in the German tradition that became widespread across the mountains.

The cumulative effect of these preservation techniques was a winter diet that, while monotonous by modern standards, was nutritionally adequate and culinarily inventive. A February meal of cornbread, leather britches cooked with a piece of salt pork, pickled beets, canned tomatoes, and a slice of country ham was a meal assembled entirely from preserved foods — but it was a real meal, nourishing and flavorful, produced by the accumulated knowledge and labor of the women (it was almost always women) who managed the family's food supply.

Quilting: Function, Art, and Community

The Quilt as Necessity

A quilt was, first and always, something to keep you warm.

This may seem obvious, but it is worth stating because the modern fascination with Appalachian quilts as art objects and collectibles has sometimes obscured their original purpose. In mountain homes heated by a single fireplace or woodstove, where winter temperatures could drop well below zero and the wind found every gap in the log walls, quilts were essential survival equipment. A family needed a heavy quilt for every bed, and beds were shared — parents in one, children in another, sometimes three or four children under a single quilt.

Making quilts from scratch was necessary because commercial blankets were expensive, often unavailable, and not warm enough for mountain winters. Quilts were made from what was at hand: scraps of worn-out clothing, feed sacks, fabric remnants from the rare purchase of new cloth. Nothing was wasted. The economics of mountain life demanded that every piece of fabric serve multiple lives — first as a garment, then as quilt material, and finally, when the quilt wore out, as stuffing for pillows or patches for other quilts.

The Quilt as Art

But within the constraints of necessity, mountain women created objects of extraordinary beauty.

Quilt patterns — the geometric designs formed by the arrangement of fabric pieces — carried names, meanings, and regional associations that constituted a visual language as rich as any folk art tradition in the world. Patterns like Double Wedding Ring, Log Cabin, Bear's Paw, Drunkard's Path, Star of Bethlehem, and Grandmother's Flower Garden were passed from mother to daughter, varied from community to community, and adapted to the materials and aesthetic preferences of individual makers.

The Log Cabin pattern — concentric strips of fabric arranged around a central square, with one half of the block in light fabrics and the other in dark — is one of the most widely recognized Appalachian quilt designs. The central square was traditionally red, representing the hearth fire at the center of the home. The light and dark halves represented the sunny and shady sides of the cabin. The pattern was both aesthetically compelling and deeply symbolic, encoding a vision of domestic life in geometric form.

The color choices in mountain quilts reflected both the materials available and a sophisticated aesthetic sensibility. Quilters worked with what they had, but they worked with intention. The contrast between light and dark fabrics, the use of a single bright color as an accent in an otherwise muted composition, the careful balance of pattern and negative space — these were artistic decisions made by women who may never have seen the inside of an art museum but who possessed a visual intelligence that sophisticated collectors would later recognize and value.

The Quilting Bee

The quilting bee — a communal gathering at which women came together to quilt — was one of the most important social institutions in mountain communities, rivaling the church in its capacity to build and maintain social bonds. A quilting bee was work, but it was also conversation, gossip, advice, storytelling, singing, and mutual support. Women who might be isolated on separate homesteads for weeks at a time came together around the quilting frame, and the conversation that happened while their hands worked was as important as the quilt that resulted.

Quilting bees also served as occasions for the transmission of skill. Young girls learned to quilt by watching their mothers and grandmothers, absorbing not just the technical skills of piecing and stitching but the aesthetic traditions — which patterns were appropriate for which occasions, which color combinations were pleasing, how tightly to stitch the quilting lines. This oral and manual transmission of knowledge, from hand to hand and eye to eye, was the primary mechanism of cultural continuity in a society where written instruction was scarce.

Basket-Weaving: Cherokee and Scots-Irish Traditions

Two distinct basket-weaving traditions converged in the Appalachian mountains, each with deep roots and distinctive techniques.

The Cherokee basket-weaving tradition is one of the oldest continuous craft traditions in North America. Cherokee weavers used river cane (Arundinaria gigantea), white oak, and honeysuckle to produce baskets of extraordinary intricacy and beauty. The double-weave basket — a technically demanding form in which two separate baskets are woven simultaneously and then connected to create a single, double-walled vessel — is a Cherokee invention that has no parallel in European weaving traditions. Cherokee baskets were functional (used for gathering, storing, and processing food), ceremonial (used in religious and social rituals), and artistic (featuring geometric patterns achieved through the use of naturally dyed cane splints).

The Cherokee basket-weaving tradition was nearly destroyed by removal and dispossession but survived through the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina. Today, Cherokee basket-weaving is recognized as a major art form, and master weavers like Rowena Bradley and Lucy George have been celebrated for their work in preserving and advancing the tradition.

The Scots-Irish white oak basket tradition, brought to the mountains by settlers from the British Isles, used a different material and different techniques but served similar functions. White oak baskets were made by splitting a section of white oak log into thin, flexible strips (called splits or splints) and weaving them into sturdy, utilitarian baskets used for everything from gathering eggs to carrying produce to storing grain. The skill of splitting oak — producing strips of uniform thickness and width from a rough log — was itself a craft that required years of practice and a deep understanding of the wood's grain and properties.

The two traditions influenced each other. Cherokee weavers encountered Scots-Irish techniques; Scots-Irish settlers learned from Cherokee weavers. The resulting Appalachian basket tradition, while drawing on both roots, became something distinctively its own — a material culture expression of the cultural synthesis that characterizes so much of mountain life.

Woodworking, Chair-Making, and Pottery

Woodworking and Chair-Making

In a region covered with forests, wood was the primary material of daily life. Houses, barns, fences, tools, furniture, musical instruments, toys — virtually everything a mountain family owned was made of wood, and the skills required to work it were among the most valued in the community.

Chair-making was a specialized craft that produced one of the most distinctive Appalachian objects: the ladder-back chair with a woven hickory bark or white oak split seat. These chairs were designed for durability, comfort, and the specific demands of mountain life. They were light enough to carry from room to room (or outdoors to the porch) but strong enough to last for generations. The rungs were set into the posts with such precision that they tightened as the wood dried, creating joints that needed no nails or glue.

The best Appalachian chair-makers were artists as much as craftsmen. The proportions of their chairs — the angle of the back, the height of the seat, the spacing of the rungs — reflected both functional knowledge (a chair tilted too far back was uncomfortable; one tilted too far forward was unstable) and aesthetic judgment (a well-made chair was pleasing to the eye in ways that were difficult to articulate but immediately recognizable).

The Seagrove Pottery Tradition

In the Piedmont foothills of central North Carolina, a pocket of clay-rich soil supported one of the most remarkable pottery traditions in North America. The Seagrove pottery tradition — centered in and around the community of Seagrove in Randolph County — has been producing utilitarian and decorative pottery since the eighteenth century, making it one of the longest continuously operating pottery traditions in the United States.

The original Seagrove potters were English and German immigrants who recognized the quality of the local clay and established workshops that produced the utilitarian wares mountain families needed: crocks for storing food, jugs for vinegar and whiskey, churns for making butter, plates, bowls, and cups. The ware was typically salt-glazed or alkaline-glazed — finished with techniques that required local materials (salt, wood ash, clay slip) rather than imported glazes, reflecting the self-sufficiency that characterized mountain craft production.

Over generations, the pottery tradition developed distinctive regional characteristics — particular forms, glazes, and decorative motifs that marked a piece as "Seagrove ware" to knowledgeable buyers. Families passed the tradition from father to son (and sometimes from mother to daughter, though the published histories have been slow to acknowledge women's contributions). Names like Cole, Owens, Teague, and Luck have been associated with Seagrove pottery for two centuries or more.

The Foxfire Project: Students Saving Their Own Culture

"Somebody Should Write This Down"

In 1966, a young English teacher named Eliot Wigginton arrived at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School in the mountains of northeastern Georgia and faced a problem familiar to every teacher who has ever stood before a classroom of bored teenagers: his students did not care about the curriculum. Grammar exercises, composition assignments, the standard apparatus of high school English — none of it was reaching them.

Wigginton tried something different. Instead of teaching from textbooks, he asked his students to interview their grandparents, their neighbors, the old people in their communities who still knew how to do things that were rapidly being forgotten: how to build a log cabin, how to make lye soap, how to tan a hide, how to kill a hog, how to make moonshine, how to quilt, how to make apple butter, how to predict the weather from the behavior of woolly worms. The students would record these interviews, transcribe them, write them up, and publish them in a student magazine.

They called the magazine Foxfire, after the bioluminescent glow produced by certain fungi on rotting wood in the southern mountains — a natural phenomenon that the old people knew about but that was not in any textbook.

The first issue appeared in 1967. It was rough, unprofessional, and extraordinary. The students had captured, in the voices of their own elders, a body of knowledge and experience that was disappearing as the older generation aged and died. The interviews were vivid, detailed, and immediate — not the clinical descriptions of an outside observer but the living words of people talking about their own lives, their own skills, their own memories.

A Publishing Phenomenon

The Foxfire magazine attracted attention beyond the mountains. Wigginton compiled the best material from the first several issues into a book, The Foxfire Book, published by Doubleday in 1972. It became a bestseller. Not a modest academic success — a genuine, mass-market bestseller that sold millions of copies and spawned a series of twelve Foxfire books, each focused on different aspects of Appalachian traditional knowledge.

The Foxfire books tapped into a national hunger for practical knowledge, self-sufficiency, and connection to pre-industrial ways of life that was particularly strong in the 1970s, during the back-to-the-land movement and the cultural upheavals of the post-Vietnam era. Readers in suburban homes bought The Foxfire Book to learn how to build a log cabin they would never build, make soap they would never make, and kill a hog they would never kill. The books sold not because their readers intended to practice these skills but because the skills represented something that American culture felt it had lost: a direct, physical, unmediated relationship with the material world.

The Foxfire Method

More important than the books' commercial success was the pedagogical model they represented. Wigginton developed what became known as the Foxfire Approach to Teaching — a methodology in which students learn academic skills (writing, research, interviewing, editing, photography) through the investigation and documentation of their own community's culture. The approach was student-driven, community-connected, and built on the premise that the knowledge held by ordinary people in a student's own community was as valuable as the knowledge in any textbook.

The Foxfire approach was adopted by schools across the country. A Foxfire network of teachers developed, sharing methods and materials. The Foxfire Fund, established to support the project, became a significant educational organization. The model influenced a generation of teachers and students and demonstrated that cultural preservation and academic achievement were not competing goals but complementary ones.

Complications

The Foxfire story has a shadow. In 1992, Eliot Wigginton pleaded guilty to child molestation charges involving a former student. He was sentenced to a year in prison and a decade of probation. The revelation devastated the Foxfire community and forced a painful reckoning with the disconnect between the ideals the project represented and the behavior of its founder.

The Foxfire organization survived. It distanced itself from Wigginton, restructured its governance, and continued its educational and cultural preservation work. The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center in Mountain City, Georgia operates today, and the Foxfire approach to teaching remains influential.

But the complication cannot be set aside. It is a reminder that institutions, however valuable, are human creations run by fallible human beings, and that the celebration of a person's public achievements does not immunize the examination of their private actions. The knowledge preserved in the Foxfire books remains valuable regardless of its compiler's crimes. The pedagogical model remains sound regardless of its creator's failures. But the story is incomplete without this chapter, however uncomfortable it makes the telling.

The Craft Revival Movement

Discovering (and Reinventing) Mountain Craft

The formal revival of Appalachian crafts began in the late nineteenth century and was driven, paradoxically, by the same outsiders who were simultaneously constructing the stereotypes that this book has been critiquing.

Settlement school workers, missionaries, and cultural reformers who came to the mountains in the 1890s and early 1900s found communities where people still made things by hand — quilts, baskets, chairs, pottery, woven cloth — that had largely disappeared from the industrialized consumer economy of urban America. Some of these outsiders recognized the aesthetic and economic value of these crafts and began organizing programs to support, formalize, and market them.

The Berea College crafts program, established in the late nineteenth century in Berea, Kentucky, was one of the earliest and most significant of these efforts. Berea, founded in 1855 as an interracial institution committed to serving the Appalachian region, incorporated craft production into its educational mission. Students learned traditional crafts — weaving, woodworking, broommaking — as part of their college labor program, and the products were sold to support the institution and provide income for the students. The Berea College crafts program continues today and is one of the most recognized names in American craft production.

The Southern Highland Craft Guild, organized in 1930, brought together craft producers from across the southern Appalachian region into a cooperative organization that provided marketing, quality standards, and a collective identity for mountain craft. The Guild established the Allanstand Craft Shop in Asheville, North Carolina (now the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway), which became the primary retail outlet for Appalachian craft and a pilgrimage site for collectors and enthusiasts.

The settlement schools — Hindman, Pine Mountain, Pi Beta Phi in Gatlinburg, the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina — also played significant roles in the craft revival, organizing production, teaching traditional techniques, and marketing products to outside buyers. The John C. Campbell Folk School, founded in 1925 and inspired by Scandinavian folk schools, combined craft instruction with community education and democratic values, creating a model that influenced the craft revival for decades.

The Tension

The craft revival was both beneficial and problematic. On the beneficial side, it provided income for mountain families during periods of severe economic distress, preserved skills that might otherwise have been lost, and generated respect for Appalachian material culture that countered the prevailing narrative of mountain backwardness.

On the problematic side, the revival was driven largely by outsiders who made decisions about which crafts were "authentic," which techniques were acceptable, and which designs would sell to urban consumers. Mountain craft producers were sometimes pushed to modify their work to suit outside tastes — to use color palettes that appealed to middle-class buyers, to produce forms that fit middle-class homes, to suppress innovations that did not match the outside world's idea of "traditional" mountain craft.

The craft revival, in other words, preserved Appalachian material culture at the cost of partially controlling it. It saved traditions but also froze them, creating an expectation that "authentic" Appalachian craft should look a certain way — an expectation that could be as constraining as the poverty that had originally threatened the traditions.

Craft as Commodity: The Market Problem

When the World Wants What You Make

The commodification of Appalachian craft accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century. What had been objects of daily use — quilts, baskets, pottery — became objects of collection, display, and investment. Appalachian quilts that had been made to keep families warm sold at auction for thousands of dollars. Baskets that had carried eggs to market were displayed in museum cases. The functional objects of mountain life were recontextualized as art, and their monetary value increased as their connection to the communities that produced them became more tenuous.

This transformation created opportunities and problems. The opportunity was economic: skilled craft producers could earn real income from their work, sometimes enough to sustain a livelihood in communities where other economic options were scarce. The problem was definitional: who determined what counted as "authentic" Appalachian craft? If a quilter in Letcher County used polyester fabric instead of cotton scraps, was her quilt still "authentic"? If a potter in Seagrove used commercial glazes instead of ash-based glazes, was his work still "traditional"?

The market tended to reward the appearance of tradition over the reality of it. Buyers wanted objects that looked old, that felt handmade, that evoked a pre-industrial world of self-sufficiency and manual skill. They were less interested in the actual conditions of production — the fact that the quilter worked a full-time job and quilted on weekends, or that the basket-maker bought his white oak splits from a supplier rather than splitting them himself.

Contemporary Makers

Today, Appalachian craft exists on a spectrum from strict traditionalism to radical innovation, with most makers working somewhere in between. Some maintain traditional techniques with meticulous fidelity, producing work that their great-grandparents would recognize. Others push the boundaries, using traditional forms as starting points for contemporary artistic expression.

The tension between tradition and innovation is productive. Makers like the late woodworker and sculptor David Ellsworth, the quilters of the Gee's Bend community (Alabama, at the edge of the Appalachian region), and contemporary Cherokee weavers demonstrate that tradition is not a fixed point but a living conversation between the past and the present. The best contemporary Appalachian craft honors its roots while insisting on the right to grow.

Weaving and Coverlets: The Loom in the Cabin

One craft tradition that deserves particular attention — both for its beauty and for its near-disappearance — is the tradition of hand-weaving on the floor loom, which produced the coverlets that were, alongside quilts, the primary bedcovers of mountain households.

A coverlet is a woven bedcover produced on a loom, as distinct from a quilt (which is assembled from fabric pieces and stitched together). Mountain coverlets were typically woven in the overshot pattern — a technique in which a pattern weft "overshoots" or floats over the ground weave, creating complex geometric designs. The patterns had names as evocative as quilt patterns: Whig Rose, Pine Bloom, Chariot Wheels, Sunrise, Lover's Knot, Blooming Leaf.

The production of a coverlet required a loom — a substantial piece of equipment, typically built by a local craftsman and occupying a significant portion of the cabin. The weaver (almost always a woman) spun wool or cotton into yarn, dyed it with natural dyes extracted from plants (walnut hulls for brown, indigo for blue, madder root for red, goldenrod for yellow), and wove it into cloth on the loom. A single coverlet might require weeks of work from shearing to finished product.

By the early twentieth century, hand-weaving had declined precipitously in most mountain communities, replaced by commercially manufactured textiles. The craft revival movement preserved it — Berea College's weaving program, in particular, maintained the tradition and trained new generations of weavers. Churchill Weavers, founded in Berea in 1922, became one of the most successful hand-weaving operations in the country, producing throws, baby blankets, and scarves that were sold nationally.

Today, a small but dedicated community of Appalachian hand-weavers continues the tradition, and handwoven coverlets from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are prized by museums and collectors. The patterns — geometric, bold, rooted in the mathematical precision of the loom — represent a different aesthetic tradition from quilting but an equally sophisticated one, demanding a different kind of skill and producing a different kind of beauty.

The Anchor Examples: Food and Craft Across the Region

The four anchor communities of this textbook illustrate the range of Appalachian material culture:

In Harlan County, Kentucky, the food traditions of the coalfields reflected the multiethnic character of the mining communities. Italian miners brought bread-baking traditions. Hungarian miners brought paprika-seasoned dishes. Black miners from the Deep South brought the greens-and-cornbread tradition that blended with the existing mountain diet. The company store shaped what people ate — limiting access to fresh produce while providing canned goods and processed foods that were profitable for the company. The transition from garden-based to store-based eating, driven by the company town system, was an early and destructive disruption of mountain foodways.

In Asheville, North Carolina, the craft tradition became central to the city's identity. Asheville's location — in the broad basin of the French Broad River, surrounded by mountains — made it a natural hub for the craft revival. The Southern Highland Craft Guild's Folk Art Center, located on the Blue Ridge Parkway just outside the city, draws hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. The city's contemporary identity as a center for artisanal food, craft brewing, and handmade goods is a direct descendant of the early twentieth-century craft revival, though the gentrification that has accompanied this identity has priced many local craft producers out of the market.

In McDowell County, West Virginia, the near-total dominance of the coal economy suppressed many traditional food and craft practices by replacing the garden-and-holler economy with the company-store-and-cash-wage economy. The recovery of foodways in McDowell County today — through community gardens, farmers' markets, and food sovereignty projects — represents an effort to rebuild what the coal economy destroyed.

In the New River Valley, Virginia, the more diversified economy preserved a wider range of food and craft traditions. The valley's agricultural base supported gardening, canning, and livestock traditions well into the twentieth century, and the presence of Virginia Tech created a market for locally produced food and craft that has strengthened in recent decades.

The Politics of Food: When Ramps Go to Brooklyn

Ramps: From Holler to Haute Cuisine

Nothing illustrates the politics of Appalachian food more vividly than the story of the ramp.

Ramps (Allium tricoccum) — wild leeks that grow in the forests of the Appalachian mountains, harvested in early spring — have been a staple of mountain food culture for as long as anyone can remember. Their pungent, garlic-like flavor and their emergence as one of the first green foods after the long winter made them a spring ritual across the mountains. Ramp suppers — communal gatherings at which ramps were cooked and eaten in every possible preparation — were social events that marked the transition from winter to spring.

Ramps were also a marker of class and rurality. The odor of ramps, consumed in quantity, is powerful and persistent — detectable on the breath and even the skin for days. Children who ate ramps were sent home from school. Workers who ate ramps were shunned by co-workers. The smell was, for many mountain people, a source of both pride and embarrassment — pride in a tradition that connected them to the land, embarrassment at the social stigma that came with smelling like a wild allium in a world that increasingly valued antiseptic modernity.

Then, sometime in the early 2000s, ramps showed up on the menus of upscale restaurants in New York City.

The food writers discovered them first. Ramps were declared the "it" ingredient of spring — rare, wild, seasonal, pungent, impossible to cultivate commercially. Chefs at restaurants where a single appetizer cost more than a mountain family spent on groceries in a week featured ramps in dishes with names like "ramp pesto with hand-rolled pasta" and "foraged ramp kimchi." Food magazines published breathless profiles. Ramps became, briefly, the most fashionable vegetable in America.

The irony was suffocating. The same food that had gotten mountain children sent home from school was now a luxury ingredient for urban sophisticates. The same flavor that had marked its consumers as backward, rural, and poor now marked its consumers as adventurous, discerning, and willing to pay fourteen dollars for a small bundle at a farmers' market in Brooklyn.

This is the politics of food in a stratified society. The same cultural practice can be a source of shame or prestige depending on who is performing it and where. Mountain people eating ramps are hillbillies. Manhattan chefs serving ramps are artisans. The food is the same. The social context is everything.

The ramp boom also raised ecological concerns. Ramps grow slowly — a plant may take seven years to reach harvestable size — and the surge in demand led to overharvesting in some areas, threatening wild populations. Communities that had been harvesting ramps sustainably for generations watched as commercial foragers stripped their forest patches to supply distant urban markets. Some communities responded by restricting access to traditional ramp grounds, and several states enacted or considered harvest regulations.

Community History Portfolio: Checkpoint

Chapter 30 Checkpoint — Cultural Portrait (Material Culture and Foodways):

For your selected county, investigate the material culture and food traditions — past and present:

1. Food traditions: What food traditions are associated with your county? Are there specific crops, dishes, preservation methods, or foodways that are locally significant? What are their cultural origins (Indigenous, African, European, or a combination)?
2. Craft traditions: What craft traditions (quilting, basket-weaving, woodworking, pottery, weaving, or others) exist or have existed in your county? Are there individual makers, families, or organizations associated with these traditions?
3. Markets and commodification: Have any of your county's food or craft traditions been marketed to outside consumers? How has this commercialization affected the traditions and the communities that practice them?
4. Preservation efforts: Are there active efforts to preserve or document traditional foodways and crafts in your county? (Consider museums, heritage centers, oral history projects, community organizations, school programs.)
5. Primary source: Locate at least one primary source related to material culture or foodways in your county — a recipe, a photograph of a craft object, a description from a historical account, an oral history excerpt — and write a 200-word analysis of what it reveals about how people lived.

This checkpoint should be approximately 800-1,200 words and will be incorporated into the cultural portrait section of your final portfolio.

Chapter Summary

The material culture of Appalachia — the food, the quilts, the baskets, the pottery, the thousand objects of daily life made by hand from the materials the mountains provided — tells a history that written documents alone cannot communicate. It tells a history of multicultural synthesis, in which Indigenous, African, and European traditions blended under the pressure of mountain necessity to produce something genuinely new. It tells a history of ingenuity, in which people with limited resources created objects of functional excellence and aesthetic beauty. It tells a history of women's knowledge, transmitted from hand to hand across generations through the quilting bee, the canning kitchen, and the garden. And it tells a history of power, in which the things mountain people made and ate were alternately dismissed as backward and celebrated as authentic, depending on who was looking and what they wanted. The Foxfire students understood something essential: that the knowledge held by their grandparents was worth preserving, not because it was quaint, but because it was profound. That understanding has never been more urgent than it is now.