{"id":80380,"date":"2020-09-13T19:43:50","date_gmt":"2020-09-13T23:43:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.pinemountainsettlement.net\/?p=80380"},"modified":"2021-09-13T14:45:04","modified_gmt":"2021-09-13T18:45:04","slug":"dancing-in-the-cabbage-patch-moonshine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/staging.pinemountainsettlement.net\/?p=80380","title":{"rendered":"DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH Moonshine"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 11: FARM
Series: DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH\u00a0
hhw 2021-09-13<\/span><\/h2>\r\n

TAGS:<\/strong> Moonshine, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, W.C.T.U, Frances Beauchamp, Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs, Katherine Pettit, May Stone, Ethel de Long, Henry Mixter Penniman, Michael McGeer, Abner Boggs, Bish Boggs, Lucy Furman, Percy McKaye, moonshine stills, kettles,\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

MOONSHINE<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Moonshine was not a favored drink of mountain settlement workers, but it was certainly a favorite topic of conversation and generated many a tall tale within the community. The stories about moonshiners, moonshine stills, brushes with revenuers, and competition between distillers, were often collected and repeated by workers, the community, and visitors to eastern Kentucky and other locations in the Central and Southern Appalachians. These tales abound in staff letters, diaries, and scrapbooks in the Pine Mountain archive.<\/p>\r\n

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When Katherine Pettit founded Hindman Settlement School with\u00a0May Stone<\/strong> in 1902, near the small town of Hyden in Knott County, Kentucky, she was under the blessings of the W.C.T.U, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union but she was privately following the national trend toward Progressivism. While the two may seem to cancel one another out, they were strange companions in the opening years of the twentieth century.<\/p>\r\n

By 1910 and in the following years the term progressive<\/em> was commonly used in a variety of political ways. [*See: Michael McGeer. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America<\/em>, 2003] Hindman, in 1902, was in the mainstream of the progressive Settlement Movement but it was also under the influence of the other national trend, that is the WCTU or the Women\u2019s Christian Temperance Union.<\/p>\r\n

The WCTU provided funds for Hindman during its first thirteen years but the relationship soon began to unravel as the progressive ideas of Jane Addams and many of her colleagues saturated in progressive idealism did not play well with the WCTU. At the risk of the loss of funding from the WCTU, the women in Eastern Kentucky’s settlements held steady for the early institutional years as the WCTU funding comprised a considerable amount of the school’s operational budget.<\/p>\r\n

During these WCTU early years, Pettit and Stone were bolstered by the Kentucky Federation of Women\u2019s Clubs and a close friendship with Frances Beauchamp, the Kentucky president of the WCTU. With this strong but disparate support, Pettit and Stone mounted a vigorous campaign to eradicate alcoholism through a program of education that focused on social and moral reform and scientific agriculture.\u00a0 But, Pettit and Stone and their Women’s Club friends were not hatchet carriers like Carrie Nation. They believed that reform started from within and not from without. \u00a0The emphasis placed on health work that Pettit learned at Hindman carried over into her work and programs at Pine Mountain.<\/p>\r\n

Following the departure of Katherine Pettit to Pine Mountain in 1913, the funding from the WCTU at Hindman dwindled and the school experienced several disastrous fires that added to their woes. In 1915, two years after Pettit departed, Hindman experienced a \u201cBroadening Out,\u201d as they described it and the name of the institution was formally changed from the W.C.T.U Settlement to the Hindman Settlement School. \u00a0The name change came just as prohibition began to be a hot political debate in the state of Kentucky and as the Progressive movement rose in favoritism. Frances Beauchamp<\/strong>, President of the Kentucky WCTU and a friend of Pettit, was soon the object of considerable \u201cmudslinging\u201d as described by Jess Stoddart in her well-researched history The Story of Hindman Settlement School, (Stoddart 2002, p.82.)<\/em><\/p>\r\n

While references to the WCTU school disappeared in the wake of the political battles of Prohibition, the settlement at Hindman also was charting a new and progressive educational course. Angered by the perceived retrenchment from prohibition, some significant donors pulled their support for the school. \u00a0All the while, moonshine did not go away. It continued to light the midnight production of corn liquor and the revenue continued to support families who lived on the economic margins of society. Moonshine, after all, was a very persuasive form of social capital not unlike that seen in many parts of the world \u2014 not just Appalachia.<\/p>\r\n

Like Hindman, the relationship of Pine Mountain to corn liquor is a story that is not easily altered by a simple change of name. Nor is the Kentucky tale a unique one. One of the most striking markers of Appalachia\u2019s current return to what is often referred to as\u00a0 \u201clocalism\u201d can also be found in locations as diverse as some South American countries and some countries in Asia, particularly in Thailand, Myanmar and Viet Nam.\u00a0 In those latter Asian countries, the nostalgia for social capital has been used to push for reform in health services, agriculture, and a variety of other older practices that were remembered as part of a healthy democracy.<\/p>\r\n

It is interesting that place-based education, a kind of localism, has often returned to indigenous knowledge and past practice for educational assistance in an effort to re-form and inform social capital. A brief visit of a group of Viet Nam visitors to Pine Mountain in the early 1970\u2019s revealed much about the common issues in the two countries, including the power of Asian \u201cmoonshine\u201d cooperation to work its magic in restoring civic engagement and to nudge the people toward less destructive economic initiatives.<\/p>\r\n

In Appalachia drinking was a discreet part of many social gatherings. It enhanced conversation, made young men bold, softened the sensibilities of young women, and lessened the aching back of the subsistence farmer. In many cases it was the juice of existence, providing desperate families a means of providing for a house full of children or a poor crop. But it is the stories of rampant drinking and associated violence like that documented in the records of the Hyden school and also at Pine Mountain, particularly in the health centers at Big Laurel and Line Fork, that are seared into the public mind.<\/p>\r\n

\u00a0 The novels of\u00a0Lucy Furman<\/strong>, a staff member at Hindman, and many other writers promoted\u00a0 \u201cmoonshine stories\u201d\u00a0 to an eager national audience.\u00a0Percy MacKaye<\/a>, the playwright,\u00a0John Fox, Jr<\/strong>., and other visitors to Pine Mountain continued to romanticize the practice of distillation of the mountain\u2019s principal crop \u2014 corn. John Fox, Jr. was\u00a0notoriously energized by the marketing of what Darlene Wilson in her article for\u00a0Back Talk From Appalachia<\/em>\u00a0(1999) called the \u201cdichotomous stereotype of twin Kentuckys \u00a0\u2014 the twins being the \u201c\u2026sneaky, murderous, moonshiners,\u201d versus the \u201ccivilized \u2018outer-world\u2019 of the rest of the state. (See: Wilson,\u00a0Back Talk<\/em> \u2026 p. 112). \u00a0Yet, marketing and publications at Hindman and later at Pine Mountain can be found using moonshine stories to capture the imagination of an audience that believed the area to be rampant with stills and guns. \u00a0<\/p>\r\n

Unfortunately, the written records of the rural settlement schools, largely the record of \u201coutsider authors\u201d, gave credence to some of the tales of violence, redemption, and survival centered on moonshine. \u00a0After all, in the 1920s Harlan County\u2019s murder rate was the highest in the country \u2014 a ready testimony to the mixture of guns and alcohol. \u00a0\u201cBloody Harlan\u201d was at its core a name born out of the mine wars, but the rage was often fed by corn liquor. But, then, even this story is much more complex than the easy tales often spun about moonshine in the mountains of Kentucky and there is little doubt that it enables the easy path to the long road of stereotyping.<\/p>\r\n

THE MOONSHINE MEN OF KENTUCKY<\/strong>
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\"The_Moonshine_Man_of_Kentucky_Harper's_Weekly_1877\"<\/a>\r\n

\u201cThe Moonshine Men of Kentucky,\u201d Harper\u2019s Weekly, October 20, 1877.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

At any rate, Pine Mountain staff and community also added to the many moonshine tales found in the public literature. After all, moonshine tales are good entertainment for many. One of Pettit’s first traveling companions into eastern Kentucky was the “expert” on mountain moonshine tales, Henry Mixter Penniman<\/a>. The Rev. Penniman was a faculty member at Berea College in Kentucky and a well-known authority on mountain culture. It was Penniman who had led Pettit and a group of fellow troupers into the eastern mountains to explore the Appalachian culture. Berea often accommodated visitors and their own faculty who wished to visit the rugged mountains of eastern Kentucky and to see first-hand how the “notorious” mountaineer lived.\u00a0 Often visitors were directed by the college or the President, to seek out the Pine Mountain area in order to give the folk a deeper dive into the local culture of Appalachia. Berea had for many years provided consultation and support to the settlement schools in the southeastern corner of the state and was particularly fond of Hindman and Pine Mountain.\u00a0 Many articles by William G. Frost, an early President of Berea , and by his faculty from the college, signaled that they felt the region to be under their care and their watchful eye.\u00a0 They kept in close touch with the settlement schools in the southeastern region and \u201cmoonshine\u201d was often part of their concern and sometimes and somewhat, their exaggerated focus. Penniman was their moonshine expert.<\/p>\r\n

DR. HENRY MIXTER PENNIMAN<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

Dr. Penniman, a faculty at Berea College, was particularly concerned by what he saw in the Southern Appalachians and in its people and was someone who had built up good relations with many of the people in the southeast corner of the state. He was a close observer of the culture and of the language and the wry humor of the people of the region. Not much was missed by Penniman, as seen in two tales both collected and somewhat concocted and, reportedly, recited by Penniman in public performances. These selections from the Berea Quarterly<\/em> have surrogates in the archival record at Pine Mountain.<\/p>\r\n

THE BEREA QUARTERLY<\/em>\u00a01908, p.\u00a020-22
Henry Mixter Penninman<\/p>\r\n

EDITORIAL NOTE:<\/p>\r\n

Professor Penniman is a Massachusetts man, educated at Brown University and Andover Seminary, who has been connected with Berea since 1895. More than any other member of our Faculty he has assisted the President in making friends for our enterprise, and more than any other, except Professor Dinsmore, he has come into immediate contact with the mountaineers. He is what the Kentuckians call a \u201cgood mixer,\u201d and he has preached on half the creeks in Eastern Kentucky, entering into the real life of the people with a sympathy which opens their hearts.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

Professor Penniman has a keen sense of the ludicrous and a good scent for literary material as well. Instead of giving a statistical or scientific account, he gives pictures, impressions, which have made his presentations of the mountain work most attractive, in spite of his being a \u201dminister of the Gospel\u201d he has become a great impersonator, so that a business men\u2019s club. or a camping party in the Adirondacks counts itself fortunate when it can secure an hour of his recitals.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

We find room this month for one brief anecdote which is almost a photograph, but a photograph selected with an artist\u2019s eye. Following it is a testimonial which recently came to President Frost regarding Professor Penniman\u2019s impersonations before well-known people in Cincinnati.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

\u201cDRUNK INNERCENT\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

Henry Mixter Penniman.<\/p>\r\n

Splash, splash down the mountain passway, for the path lay in a stream fretting and playing in the narrows of a \u201cV\u201d shaped valley. A mountaineer on his big mule and a preacher on his horse, after a long, hot, hard day were riding forward in the edge of the night. The preacher was tired enough to fall off.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

A long silence was broken by the man on the mule.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

\u201cMr. Preacher, you\u2019ve ben yere nigh six year an all thet time I\u2019ve knowed you\u2019ve wanted to ast me one thing an you ain\u2019t ast hit. Now I\u2019m goin to promise hit to ye without your astin.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve alius wanted to ast me not to drink no mo\u2019. Now I promise I\u2019ll drink no mo\u2019.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\r\n

This was like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky. The horse moved over to the mule, and the big mountain hand almost crushed the preacher\u2019s. The stump and rock in mid-stream that made them unclasp was a relief.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

Again the silence was broken.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

\u201cMr. Preacher this country will take notice that I am quitting and they\u2019ll know you are into hit, and thars plenty of folks round yere will try and spile your mind about me. Now if you hear I git drunk come to me, ef I get drunk I\u2019ll tell ye an I\u2019ll still be a pullin\u2019 to be a temperance man.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\r\n

Not long after, the preacher heard his mountain friend was drunk and riding to his cabin asked point blank,<\/em><\/p>\r\n

\u201cDid you get drunk?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\r\n

\u201cYes\u201d was the answer,<\/em><\/p>\r\n

\u201cI got powerful drunk but I got drunk innercent.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

\u201d How was that?<\/em><\/p>\r\n

\u201cI\u2019m troubled with cramps, when them cramps ketch holt I hev to hev some whiskey to subjew their pain and when I git nuf whiskey down to subjew their pain, hit onhinges my ides as to what\u2019s right and I slip into the rest innercent.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\r\n

\u2018 \u2018Mr. Preacher I don\u2019t low hits wrong to take er dram, but I do say hits wrong to git drunk. I cayn\u2019t tak er dram and not tak mo\u2019, so I ain\u2019t goin to tak er dram.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\r\n

HARD AND HIS KETTLE<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

Another tale, among many about the use and abuse of Moonshine can be found in the Pine Mountain Settlement School collections .\u201dHard and His Kettle,\u201d\u00a0 is a chapter from Henry Mixter Penniman\u2019s book, Moonshine Life of the Mountains of Kentucky. \u00a0<\/em>It is uncertain whether the book was published, but this particular chapter was printed in the\u00a0Berea Quarterly<\/em>, Vol. 12 No. 9, 1908 and captures the same regional dialect and humor often found in the community around Pine Mountain.<\/p>\r\n

The typescript found here varies only slightly from the\u00a0Berea Quarterly<\/em> version and appears to be a transcript from the papers of Katherine Pettit\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

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\u201cHard and His Kettle,\u201d from Moonshine Life of the Mountains of Kentucky, by H.M. Penniman of Berea College, 1908. 01 penn_moonsh_001.jpg<\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n
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\u201cHard and His Kettle,\u201d from Moonshine Life of the Mountains of Kentucky, by H.M. Penniman of Berea College, 1908. 02 penn_moonsh_002.jpg<\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n
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\u201cHard and His Kettle,\u201d from Moonshine Life of the Mountains of Kentucky, by H.M. Penniman of Berea College, 1908. 03 penn_moonsh_003.jpg<\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n
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\u201cHard and His Kettle,\u201d from Moonshine Life of the Mountains of Kentucky, by H.M. Penniman of Berea College, 1908. 04 penn_moonsh_004.jpg<\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n
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\u201cHard and His Kettle,\u201d from Moonshine Life of the Mountains of Kentucky, by H.M. Penniman of Berea College, 1908. 05 penn_moonsh_005.jpg<\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n
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\u201cHard and His Kettle,\u201d from Moonshine Life of the Mountains of Kentucky, by H.M. Penniman of Berea College, 1908. 06 penn_moonsh_006.jpg<\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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