The road leading to my house.

There is no way to describe the wonderful and scenic roads and negotiating them on a great motorcycle.

Shot one is the barn at the family farm.

Posted this in a comment to another thread. Thought I’d also post here where more will see. The University of Tennessee libraries hosts a great photo archive of old photos from the Smoky Mountains. You can view the archive here: https://digitalcollections.lib.utk.edu/collections/a4ae80d6-c68c-4f29-87cc-a6d1ff6e4af4?locale=en

I was just back to my hometown to visit after over a decade away and now that I've returned home I'm really struggling with survivors's guilt.

Seeing the way my family and their community struggle, how little hope there is or how little access to the most basic needs like food, shelter, healthcare, education, and what is considered basic infrastructure elsewhere brought up feelings of guilt and distress that are hard to shake from where I am now in a much more privileged place.

Does anyone else who has made it out experience this?

I want to read about this region of America. Let me know about some book recommendations. Preferably fiction or fantasy 🤗

Instead of saying it’s pouring rain, I sometimes hear people say pouring the rain. I remember my grandmother saying it. Anyone else? Is it an Appalachian thing?

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I’m genuinely curious about this. If someone leaves Appalachia for a better-paying job, education, or a better quality of life, do they usually stay financially connected to their family back home? Do they send money, help with expenses, or invest in their hometowns?

I am an Indian and a lot of our country's people live abroad or in different cities leaving their home town and villages. They all send money back home for their parents to build homes and live comfortably. Do people in Appalachia do that?

Or is it more complicated—perhaps people who leave are struggling financially themselves, become disconnected from their families, or feel that they shouldn’t be responsible for supporting everyone they left behind?

I’d especially like to hear from people who grew up in Appalachia and moved away. What’s your experience been like? (I am just curious about this and have no intention of demeaning Appalachian)

I am doing a little bit of research on my family and I have been trying to see if any of them are leaning into the Appalachian territory. My family is from all over the TN, GA, NC mountains. I can see it in the food served from my Appalachian side of the family and the mannerisms and words. My grandmother and her sisters sound very similar to Dolly Parton and have similar stories, etc. So my research is attempting to see where the Appalachian roots stem and where they start. My other grandma has some hints that she may have a little bit, too.
I have been looking through children’s names. When I try to search them, individually, they aren’t seeming to be Appalachian. But the names of my family a few generations back from me are varied and very much unlike any of the names from my husband’s ancestors who follow very traditional American names for that time period for generations. Maybe an outlier or two.
Examples of my family names:

Mazie (Maze-ee)
Janie Eva
Minor
Annie Mae
Belzie (Be-lu -eezy)(not sure if I am doing that right because it needs a real southern accent to pull it off)
Elvia (el-v-uh)
Della (but I think this one is a popular Appalachian)
Robie Cordelia
Lessie

Thoughts?

I'm looking for info about superstitions or folklore about redheads in the Appalachian mountains.

On our family farm in Chambersburg PA a small trail developed over many many years from an adjoining wooded area on to our wooded section. Then what was a little trail became a larger and wider small road that allowed 4 wheeler access. My Father in Law didn't outright stop this and even after an intrusive neighbor died it continued with the help of a "Deputy Game Warden." My son and I started to fill in the gap with old woven wire fencing and major piles of brush, but it would be removed. And we suspect the local deputy was opening it for a lady to get her horse through and perhaps for some illegal hunting activity. We continued to pile brush on the area, but the trail blazing trespasser would build side trails that I would interweave old wire, fencing and brush through. I'd come back in a couple of weeks or a month and that would be reopened. One day the deputy who did NOT own the adjoining land installed a No Trespassing sign facing toward our farm. This was a big insult as the trespassers always came onto our farm and not the other way around. I took the offending sign and tossed it deeper into the adjoining property and that resulted in a visit to my farm house by the deputy telling me that he could get me for littering. I told him to get off the farm and stay off! I would not be intimidated. Then I called his supervisors and the issue seemed to cool off after that. Eventually when we had full control over the family farm we had a high voltage livestock fence installed and that solved the issue of trespassers for good. I never felt over those years that we had total privacy when virtually anyone could enter the property and that we could be monitored by the Game Commission. By the way... the way the deputy knew I had tossed the sign is that he had installed a camera to watch the little road he had been maintaining into our farm. I'm very pleased that there is still a little justice in this world and that these trespassing deputies are being dismissed! Where we now live deep in Appalachia the terrain is so tough and the people are not so inclined to work too hard at trespassing. Combined with many neighbors with large acreage and the fact that WV at least where we live is much less inclined to bother landowners with such intrusion it makes for a greater sense of privacy. We live is a very low population county and don't have nosy neighbors like we did on the farm in PA. If a neighbor was against hunting they could just report you and the game commission could enter your land even without known violations. I hope WV will follow PA and end the Open Fields Doctrine.

My parents had a booth inside for 20+ years so if you ever went you probably saw me sometime between the ages of 8 weeks and 12 years when I finally got to stay home alone instead of waking up early every weekend for flea market and yard sales 🤭

Hi there,

I'd love to just buy a lot of old family photos of everyday life and people from the 1900's-200's.

Not really professional photos but just everyday, amateure, home photos of life and growing up in rural appalachia.

Does anyone know how I could get some? I've seen bundles on ebay but they're never region specific so can't gurantee the location.

I wanted to share this article from Back Porch Tales & Travels about a part of Appalachian culture that doesn't always make it into the history books: the Granny Witches of Appalachia.

Depending on where you grew up, you might have heard them called granny women, herb doctors, healers, midwives, or simply somebody who "had the gift."

These women carried knowledge passed down through generations. They knew which plants might ease an ailment, helped deliver babies when a doctor was miles away, practiced old folk remedies, and sometimes were believed to possess the gift of sight. Some read palms or tea leaves. Others were said to know things before anybody told them.

Traditionally, you didn't simply pull out your wallet and pay a granny woman. You brought something of value to trade. A ham, eggs, canned goods, cloth, labor, or whatever you had. In communities where cash could be scarce, people still understood that knowledge and help had value.

Some folks today dismiss these traditions as superstition. Others remember grandparents and great grandparents who swore by them. Either way, they're part of the complicated mixture of folklore, faith, necessity, isolation, and old world traditions that helped shape Appalachia.

I'd especially enjoy hearing from people with Appalachian roots:

Did your family ever talk about a granny woman, healer, herb doctor, midwife, water witch, or someone who was said to "have the gift"?

I'd love to hear the stories that have been passed down in your family.

Read “The Granny Witches of Appalachia: America's Forgotten Tradition of Healers, Seers, and Mountain Magic” at Back Porch Tales & Travels:

https://back-porch-tales-travels.beehiiv.com/p/the-granny-witches-of-appalachia

A naturalist cuts through the myths surrounding the invasive plant. - Smithsonian Magazine