\n\n\n\n
![\"Susie](\"http:\/\/staging.pinemountainsettlement.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/pmss_susie_on-road-229x300.jpg\")
Schoolhouse I in background.
[pmss_susie_on-road.jpg]<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
The story of Susie Hall Angel is similar to many of those who attended Pine Mountain Settlement School during its boarding school years. Susie came to the School from a remote mountain village to learn the ways of the more advanced outside world, but, encouraged by the School\u2019s mission to preserve and nurture Appalachian traditions, never forgot the music, crafts, foods, and tales of her heritage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Susie Hall was born November 12, 1913, in the town of Viper, Perry County, located in the Appalachian mountains and coalfields of southeastern Kentucky. She was the fourth of nine children of Joe Hall, a farmer, blacksmith, carpenter, and stonemason, and Ida (Young) Hall. She spent her childhood playing in the creek and woods with her siblings, helping her mother hoe the garden and care for the younger children, and attending first through eighth grade in a two-room schoolhouse in Viper. The extent of her experiences during this time was of the hardscrabble farm life and coal-mining employment of her family, kinfolk, and neighbors who lived along Mason\u2019s (aka Macie\u2019s) Creek. Her memories of her childhood were mostly positive, describing her family as \u201cpoor, but we didn\u2019t know it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Susie was the first cousin of Eula Fern Hall<\/a>, who also lived in Viper and was a student, member of the Octet singing group, and secretary at Pine Mountain Settlement School. The two had the same paternal grandparents, Eli Hall and Susan (Combs) Hall. Both Fern and Susie were second cousins of Jean Ritchie, a well-known ballad singer, songwriter, and Appalachia dulcimer player from Viper and a descendant of John Henry Hall, one of Eli Hall\u2019s brothers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since there were no high schools in the immediate area of Viper and no viable transportation to any that existed elsewhere, Susie attended grades 9 through 12 at Pine Mountain Settlement School, beginning in 1930 and graduating in May 1934. To pay off her school debt, she worked as housemother and taught girls to cook and keep house at Practice House<\/a> during this time. Five of her brothers and sisters also attended the school: Mabel Hall<\/strong> 1931-1933; June Hall<\/strong> 1936-1938; Opal June Hall<\/strong> 1940-1944; Corbett Kenneth Hall<\/strong> 1941-1943; James Herbert Hall<\/a><\/strong> 1942-1944. (Her other siblings were Ruby Hall,* the oldest of the Hall children, Cora Lee Hall and Delmer Cecil Hall.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Transportation to and from Pine Mountain School was usually on foot for many of the students. Susie often told of the approximately 20-mile hikes home during holiday and semester breaks, remembering them as an adventure rather than a hardship. Boys and girls who lived in the same general direction would start out together, then one by one, they would leave the group, turning onto paths or creek branches to their homes. Glyn Morris<\/a>, then director of the School, hiked the trail himself in admiration of the students\u2019 determination to attend the School despite the distance. In his book, Less Travelled <\/em>Roads<\/em>, he described the pleasures of the walk that Susie and her friends must have experienced as well:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Glyn Morris and his friend began at Greasy Creek, the \u201cmain thoroughfare as creeks go,\u201d and turned onto Rockhouse Creek where \u201cHen\u201d Turner\u2019s blacksmith shop was located. Morris described the sense of \u201cquietude\u201d as they walked, having left behind the noise of logging trucks. Pure solitude seemed to envelop the first house they encountered with its rows of drying shucky beans hanging on the porch, except for the sounds of a family hoeing in the cornfield and the plaintive dinging of a cowbell.<\/em><\/p> They proceeded over the \u201ccrest of the ridge where the creek heads up\u201d and where Noah Spark\u2019s house could be seen in the hollow below. They picked up Cutshin Creek, which gathered waters from many of the other branches. \u201cIn the summer, flowing leisurely, it pauses in places where the winter torrents have worn holes beside large rocks on sharp bends, making a cool, deep pool of green water where bass loll.\u201d<\/em><\/p> They next turned off onto the right-hand fork, passing an old mill, \u201cthe logs hand-hewn and silvered in the sun. Inside the mill and below us was the patterned wheel worn smooth by rushing waters. ….\u201d [Winding] through hollows following the drying creek bed to its head…[they] could hear only the hum of the insects and the occasional call of a bird…until they came upon a house in a clearing where children [were] playing in the yard of a one-room schoolhouse.” They soon realized that the teacher of the 30-plus children was \u201cAlice,” a PMSS graduate.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Along the way, Morris was struck by the \u201cgracious quality\u201d of the few strangers they came across. He<\/p>\n\n\n\n …thought of others who walked the trail to Pine Mountain and of their accomplishments. They came seeking to overcome disadvantages so overpowering that many have not yet had the vision or the will to break away from them.<\/em><\/p> On Stoney Fork of Leatherwood second growth timber – now doomed as the logging trucks reach up the winding valley below – -gives indication of what once was everywhere …. Great oaks, maples, and poplars spread their shade over the steep, rocky trail.<\/em><\/p> When the two reached the place where Mason\u2019s Creek empties into the North Fork of the Kentucky River at Viper, they stayed overnight with the \u201cHall family.” The next day they returned to Pine Mountain \u201cvia another route up Line Fork, through a magnificent growth of virgin poplar trees.”<\/p>Morris, Glyn. Less Travelled Roads<\/em>. New York: Vantage Press, 1977. <\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n During Susie\u2019s last year at PMSS High School, August Angel<\/a>, a science and printing teacher at the School, became enamored with her, seeing her as \u201cmore beautiful to me than any girl I had known.\u201d He demonstrated his interest in Susie by accompanying her home on these treks across the mountain and getting to know her family, against the wishes of Glyn Morris who had someone else in mind for August.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\t\tSUSIE HALL ANGEL: At Pine Mountain Settlement School<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/staging.pinemountainsettlement.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/098_IX_students_02_2437005-300x207.jpg\")
[098_IX_students_02_2437005.jpg]<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n