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![\"Marguerite](\"http:\/\/staging.pinemountainsettlement.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/X_099_workers_2511_mod-177x300.jpg\")
Marguerite Butler. [ X_099_workers_2511_mod.jpg]<\/p><\/div>
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Marguerite Butler, a young woman from Cincinnati, Ohio, and a recent graduate of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY, arrived at Pine Mountain Settlement School on August 13, 1914, with plans to teach for two years, unaware of the hard-won successes, heartwarming relationships, as well as tragic events she would experience. Miss Butler, however, had all the attributes required to deal with both the good and the adverse times that she encountered in the eight years she finally spent at the School. Pat McNelley described Miss Butler in The First 40 Years: John C. Campbell Folk School <\/em>as follows:<\/p>\n …[S]he had abundant use for all the Sociology and Economics she had learned at college, plus all the natural resources of her dynamic personality. At that time roads were trails, in and out of creeks and often the creek bed itself; third grade was the top class at Pine Mountain\u2026. Her inherent ability as an organizer, her untouched gift as a leader, were put to work. This was a job that required tireless physical energy….<\/em><\/p>\n Miss Butler arrived during the earliest years of the School, when construction of only two permanent buildings had been completed – Big Log<\/a> and Old Log <\/a>– and 28 to 38 children boarded at the School (plus 15 who lived in nearby homes). The following accounts were recorded in letters to her mother, father, and sister Jeannette, which she often signed as “Muggins.”<\/p>\n 1914 MARGUERITE BUTLER LETTERS<\/strong><\/a> MARGUERITE BUTLER BIDSTRUP ORAL HISTORY 1978<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n GOOGLE+ – PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL COLLECTIONS<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Marguerite’s first Pine Mountain teaching assignments were history and geography to elementary grade students, arithmetic to first graders, and private tutoring for older students. At first, the third and fourth grades were the highest level necessary. It took several years to add an eighth grade and a graduating class.<\/p>\n She accepted no pay the first school year, because, as she wrote, she felt the School had too desperate a need for money. In the second year, she received $25 a month and “thought I was rich. I only wanted to cover [my] expenses and be independent.”<\/p>\n Another young teacher, Margaret<\/strong> ‘Peggy’ Watts<\/strong>, roomed with Miss Butler in Big Log<\/a> , a house where Katherine Pettit<\/a>, a cooking instructor, three teen-aged “mountain girls,” and two children also lived. It was a house that she described as “the most attractive” and “the cleanest one I have ever seen…for every morning the girls sweep and dust it from top to top.”<\/p>\n Assuring her mother, “Yes, you see, we do put on style even if we are in the mountains,” she enthusiastically told of furniture made by the boys at the School; handwoven curtains, rugs, and baskets; an immense fireplace with an antique clock on the mantle and bookcases on each side; and windows that “open out…like French ones!” However, when the building’s “sleeping porch” was needed for guests, the two women moved to a tent in which Mary Rockwell (Hook)<\/a>, the architect of the School’s buildings and campus, was staying.<\/p>\n (left to right) Evelyn K. Wells, Marguerite Butler, Edith Canterbury. [pmss_photo_MOD_wells_butler_canterbury-2.jpg]<\/p><\/div>\n The teaching position at the School, she soon discovered, also included bathing the children, putting them to bed, tracking them down when they missed school, and administering smallpox vaccinations. She became attached to her “family” of children, delighting in their progress, not only in academics, but in learning the basics of personal care. Various teachers, visitors, and people in community became dear friends of hers, including Evelyn Wells<\/a>, Frances Lavender, Celia Cathcart<\/a>, Mr. Roettinger and his daughter Elizabeth, and the Creech family<\/a> members, particularly “Aunt Sal<\/a>,” who felt that Miss Butler was “like [one of] her own children.”<\/p>\n In a 1969 letter to Mary Rogers<\/a>, wife of Director Burton Rogers, Miss Butler fondly reminisces about those days: “How many suppers at Delia’s and Aunt Sal’s!! I especially enjoyed the old folks, but then I loved the children too and felt very close to some my own age….\u201d After re-reading the letters of her youth and reliving the Pine Mountain experience, she stated that “Again I realize how much Aunt Sal, Uncle William<\/a>, Delia, Henry<\/a>, [all Creeches] etc. meant to me.”<\/p>\n Miss Butler often wrote as well about the beauty of the surroundings, picnicking, moonlit nights, visiting Jack’s Gap, wildflowers, flowering trees, and taking the children on field trips. She enjoyed the campus’s laurel, rhododendron, and English ivy which she helped plant.<\/p>\n Not all events were happy ones, but instead tested her ability to respond appropriately, adapt, and persevere. In April 1915, she helped fight a forest fire on the mountain and in 1919 fought the fatal Burkham School House<\/a> fire. She wrote her opinion of the murder of a School worker [Laura Parsons] and about an acquaintance who died as a result of a moonshiners’ feud. She attended to several students injured in accidents and assisted with the burial of Celia Creech’s child.<\/p>\n By 1919 two more buildings were under way: the Office<\/a> <\/span>and the second Burkham Schoolhouse<\/a>. At this time, Miss Butler was given the job of supervising the work on the proposed settlement extension at LINE FORK.<\/a><\/strong> She was charged to improve on a temporary log house at Line Fork, near Gilley, Kentucky, six miles north of the main Pine Mountain campus and to establish the plan for construction of permanent housing. Line Fork was proposed as the second of the nine [some records say seven] satellite settlements that Pettit and de Long proposed to be associated with the central Pine Mountain Settlement. The crude Cabin at Line Fork<\/a> was for the earliest teachers, industrial workers, and nurses that were to staff the extension centers. She then supervised the construction of a permanent Cabin [The Cabin] and participated in teaching sewing classes. She performed these tasks so well that Miss Pettit, Mary Angela Melville<\/a>, and Ethel Zande<\/a> decided to appoint her superintendent of all extension work in 1920. <\/span><\/p>\n In her last years at Pine Mountain she also provided assistance as an extension worker. She was the supervisor of eleven one-room schools that had then been assigned to the Harlan County Superintendent of Schools. Her work involved visiting the schools on horseback, often staying away one or two nights before returning home.<\/span><\/p>\n Also in 1920, Miss Butler spoke before the fiscal court to procure money for the proposed Laden Trail<\/a> road from the railroad station at Laden to Pine Mountain and on to Big Laurel and in 1921 was sent on a speaking tour to various Ohio cities and Chicago to raise money for the road and the School. She wrote an article about school work for the School’s newsletter, Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School<\/em> [1920], became Deputy Commissioner of the Girl Scouts, and also taught Sunday School.<\/p>\n In a letter to Mary Rogers in 1969, she explained that from 1917 through 1922 her one-room schools operated for only five months, having to close in the fall for “foddering,” a family farming practice, and ending at Christmas due to the difficulties of winter travel. So, she relates, Sunday School “lasted 2-3 hours to help take the place of school.”<\/p>\n\n\t\tLETTERS OF MARGUERITE BUTLER 1914 – 1922<\/strong><\/h3>\n
1915 MARGUERITE BUTLER LETTERS<\/strong><\/a>
1916 <\/strong>MARGUERITE BUTLER LETTERS<\/strong><\/a>
1917 <\/strong>MARGUERITE BUTLER LETTERS<\/strong><\/a>
1918 <\/strong>MARGUERITE BUTLER LETTERS<\/strong><\/a>
1919 <\/strong>MARGUERITE BUTLER LETTERS<\/strong><\/a>
1920 <\/strong>MARGUERITE BUTLER LETTERS<\/strong><\/a>
1921 <\/strong>MARGUERITE BUTLER LETTERS<\/strong><\/a>
1922 <\/strong>MARGUERITE BUTLER LETTERS<\/strong><\/a>
1923 <\/strong>MARGUERITE BUTLER LETTERS<\/strong>
1969-70<\/strong> MARGUERITE BUTLER LETTERS to MARY and BURTON ROGERS<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n![\"(left](\"http:\/\/staging.pinemountainsettlement.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/pmss_photo_MOD_wells_butler_canterbury-2-643x1024.jpg\")