McIlwraith, Isa.

[Diary and Ephemera Related to Caney Junior College and the Caney Creek Community Center].

Pippapass, Kentucky: 1934-1936. Small journal (6” x 4”) with 60 handwritten pages; 31 loose leaves of manuscript or typescript; four items of ephemera; twelve black and white photographs each measuring 5” x 7”. All items generally very good or better.

This is an amazing collection which documents one woman's experience of working with rural Appalachians in the summer of 1934. The compiler was Isa McIlwraith, an organist who was the assistant professor of music at Mount Holyoke College and, at the time she compiled these materials, the director of music for the New York Ethical Society. She was later the choirmaster and organist for the University of Chattanooga.

Isa spent the summer of 1934 teaching at Caney Junior College (now known as Alice Lloyd College) which grew out of the Caney Creek Community Center (CCCC) in Pippapass, Kentucky.

According to KentuckyLiving.com:

“A frail, 40-year-old woman traveling to an isolated part of the country and establishing a community that has lasted for a century seems like a piece of fiction. However, it is not an imaginary tale but an amazing journey that has resulted in life-changing opportunities for thousands of people who call the Appalachian Mountains home. In the early 1900s, Alice Geddes Lloyd was stricken with spinal meningitis and polio, which greatly weakened her body. At the recommendation of her doctor, who had given her six months to live, she and her mother made the long, arduous trek from Boston to the hills of eastern Kentucky in hopes that the fresh mountain air would strengthen her weakened immune system. What she found upon her arrival in Kentucky was something more important than her physical well-being; she found a poor, yet proud, group of people who needed her. She found her purpose in life.

At the behest of a local resident, Abisha Johnson, who offered her land to build a structure in exchange for educating his children, Mrs. Lloyd and her mother moved to Caney Creek and established the Caney Creek Community Center Inc. in 1917. Emboldened by the mountaineers’ eagerness to better themselves and connect with the world around them, Mrs. Lloyd immediately reached out to these people that the rest of America had forgotten. She knew that such a project would need significant funding; so, with an Oliver #9 typewriter and great determination, Mrs. Lloyd began writing thoughtful and persuasive letters to the people she knew in New England asking for money, books, supplies, and teachers. The thousands of letters that Mrs. Lloyd wrote allowed the Caney Creek Community Center to grow substantially in the following years.”

Of the many community programs offered by CCCC, bringing education to the area was one of the most important. A woman named June Buchanan volunteered her services after receiving one of Lloyd's letters. She helped establish over 100 schools in the area, beginning with an elementary school and high school on Caney Creek that grew into Caney Junior College (CJC) in 1923.

The collection consists of our compiler's journal, several loose sheets of manuscripts with more notes of her experiences, ephemera from CCCC and CJC and some photographs.

Manuscripts

1. Isa's journal consists of 60 handwritten pages with 11 being transcribed passages from Horace Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders. It holds day to day notes of experiences and what Isa was teaching as well as lists of local vernacular and their meanings. The journal also contains numerous first hand accounts of interactions at the school as well as Isa's less-thanstellar opinion of both the school and Alice Lloyd.

Interesting passages:

–“'Funerlizin': About 200 men women and children gathered on hillside near Preacher Billy's . . . preacher standing on large square place covered with wooden flooring. Benches, one row, around it on all four sides. Table with bucket of water and dipper on floored space . . . graves covered with oilcloth . . . emotional ranting no rhyme nor reason to it. Talking all on one quite high tone much higher than speaking voice. Every once in a while one word is yelled out at the top of their lungs. Preacher Johnnie part of time, up, down, rhythm to voice. Begin and end in ordinary speaking voice. Preacher J throws arms up into air, then bends over hands on knees tuns around to face different parts of audience all time. Calls on 'Brother Will' often, who agrees with whatever he says. Singing—only a few took part in it—preacher read one line then they sang (roared) it.”

–“Mrs. Lloyd preparing to get rid of 2 tables of girls in fall to make room for two tables of boys . . . Mrs. Lloyd thinks that the mountain girls revert to type much more readily than the boys. They often marry ignorant men and go back to living in one or 2 room shacks . . . frankly not interested in the girls. Has them just because some people wouldn't donate to school otherwise.”

“So much of what is attempted on campus is just half done or not even that—grass cutting, fixing fences, etc. Could have attractive campus. They also fight bed bugs systematically. Mrs. Lloyd seems to cultivate their habit of lack of perseverance; e.g. glee club boys express individually to me that they would like a regular glee club.”

–“Mrs. Lloyd is deceitful. Gets teachers in on false pretense of paying them. Good talker, seems to present very logical reasons for all of actions. She has a mistrust of everyone it seems.”

–an informative chat with a student named Elbert:

“Miss Long suggests that the students at Caney look on the teachers from outside as curious. Elbert says that he for one doesn't. Not after he gets used to their manners after first day or so. At first notices their difference of speech but soon forgets it. Chief difference the quick ways of saying things. He says they all are so slow at the school. Miss Long says what gets her is that students don't mind flunking. Elbert says he wants to get good grades, he would mind.

2. One great item is a draft of a letter that Isa wrote to her parents, using the vernacular she learned in Kentucky:

“Howdy folks,

Hit's a right smart leetle spell Ah reckon sicn Ah tuk ta back ye a letter. Thar ain't nary bitty sense in sich a long delay.

Ah've been turrible busy. The director person here axed me to take two courses 'stead o'one. So here Ah am a-teachin' a music 'preciation course and a methods of teachin' music course. Preparin them lectures takes the most surprisinist amount o'time a body heered teel on. In six week Ah'm a-giviin one hudert an' two hours o' classes, each one requirin' new material.

In the 'preciation class Ah have twenty students and in t'other sixteen. They're the lieablist young folks Ah've see'd rangin' from 18 year old to several that's well nigh thirty, Ah calc'late.

One weekend Ah went a-visitin at the home o' one of my students. She lives 15 miles away. We traveled both ways on horseback an' got caugh in pourin' down rain. Ah liked hit best when we-all got our horses loppin' along, 'stead o' jus' walkin'. You never heerd the likes o'such roads. They're a series o'creeks, mud holes, boulders, bumps, jolts, jolts and jolts.”

3. There are also several loose leaves of handwritten notes further fleshing out her experiences:

–“Life down here is so different from that up north. Many of the people in the country around here live in such poverty and want, with little to make their lives bearable. It seems that they expect yet so little from existence their lives are so shut-in, their wants and desires so few and simple.

Some of their ways of doing things are just so bad. Example—way children are treated—get their own way from the cradle—won't 'cramp it's feelin's'. Case near here—child dying of acute appendicitis because after they got it to hospital it didn't want to be operated on and parents wouldn't go against its wishes.”

–“Delightful assortment of gnats, fleas and flies. My room is my sanctuary since cleaned up. I do want to go around and see how the mountain folks live but dang it all if I don't get chewed up every time! Today I visited a mountain home for real and got 32 or more flea bites on my left forearm.

We have quite a variety of noises around here—birds, chickens, roosters, mules (they're the worst-they sound like a combination of factory whistles with asthma and hyenas with indigestion) dogs, frogs, cats bats (bumping against the screens at night), cows and katydids (or something that 'favors' them as they say down here.)”

–“My ride into the school on the j-j-j-jolt wagon was an experience which doesn't bear repeating. It took five hours to go 19 miles. The 'vehicle' was a veritable 'kivered wagon' drawn by 2 stoical mules.”

–“Highlanders are sly, suspicious, secretive, high-strung and sensitive to criticism. Of late years growing conscious of their belatedness and that touches a tender spot. Don't see how anyone can find beauty or historic interest in ways of life cast off by rest of world so resent exposure of their peculiarities. Hence, hard to write about them without offending them. Hard to convince them that studies of mountain dialect made for any motive except vulgar curiosity.”

–“Considering the quantity and quality of what they eat there is no people who beat them in endurance of strain and privation. Showers 2 days out of 3 in spring and summer and women and men go about unshielded from the wet. They have endurance to cold. In spite of toughness, mountaineers not notably healthy with problems of rheumatism and gnawed by dyspepsia. There's a high percentage of defectives. They are kept at home and go around, allowed to reproduce their kind. Evils of inbreeding known, but knowledge is no deterrent, since whole districts are interrelated to start with . . .”

–“Ordinarily wounds stanched with dusty cobwebs and bound up in an old rag. 'Tooth-jumping': cut round gum, put nail just below gum against ridge of tooth, slant down on upper and up on lower tooth and hit one lick with hammer. Generally out with 1st lick, if not you might as well stick your head in a swarm of bees and forget who you are. Back teeth extracted that way too . . .

–“Those who don't want or can't go to the expense of a frame house build log ones not even well chinked. Whole structure built of green timber, soon shrinks, checks, warps, sags, so that there can't be a square joint, a perpendicular face, or a level place anywhere about it. The roof droops in a season or two, the shingles curl and leaky places open . . . no closets or cupboards, just places for rats and other vermin. Linens and small articles stored in chest or small tin trunk. Most of family wardrobe hangs from nails in wall along with strings of dried apples and beans.”

Other items

1. A seven-page typescript of a lecture that Isa gave in 1935 entitled “Who Are Our Appalachian Mountaineers?” Its first paragraph:

“When the Southern part of the Atlantic coastal region of the U.S. was settled, wealthy planters owned huge tracts of land and hired poorer white people to do the work on the plantations. When the traffic in negro slaves commenced, these poor white folks were thrown out of employment as the wealthy owned all the rich, fertile land in the plains, there was nothing for this outcast class to do but to push further back from the coat to the hilly regions where it was much harder to wrest a living from the soil.”

The lecture goes on to discuss the lineage of Appalachians, and provides detail on the issues of raising crops, the problem of poor roads, the difficulty in raising stock, the history behind the distilling of corn alcohol, local diet and more. After the typescript are several more pages of handwritten notes:

“A summer lunch: warm beans, warm beets, warm salmon gravy, warm cornbread. Summer supper: warm beans, warm potatoes, raw onions halved, warm cornbread . . . Meat appeared twice during the 7 weeks, on 2 Sundays. Considering the quantity and quality of what the mountaineers eat there is no people who can beat them in endurance of strain and privation . . .

Clothing: very plain. Men usually go round in overalls, the women simple cotton dresses. On Caney Creek the folks often received clothing from the school in exchange for bringing some food supplies. Many of the people including children go without shoes and in so doing cannot help but contract hook-worm, one of the plagues of the South . . .

At Caney, sociological lab for the testing of mountaineers for the professions. Caney has all the children fit for school from around its area and has gone into around 8 adjoining counties and also Virginia and West Virginia for students. The school authorities must know all about a child's ancestors before he is accepted. Reason: inbreeding, high percentage of defectives. Also the possibility of the child's mind snapping in early adulthood.”

Searching newspapers.com brings up several instances of her giving the talk.

2. Two rare newsletters from Caney Creek Community Center, not in OCLC

3. The 1934/35 Caney Junior College Handbook. A comprehensive 48-page guide to the school with some letterpress and numerous photographic illustrations. Not in OCLC.

4. Several pages of handwritten music, though we are not sure if any of it is original to Isa's experience at CJC.

5. Twelve wonderful photographs. Included are group shots of students, faculty and locals and three birdseye views of the grounds around CJC and CCCC. One shows a small group of men and is captioned on the verso with their names and brief descriptions such as “Dreyfus Brashear—mountain father,” and “Claude Caudill—blind boy.” Two of the three birdseye views have legends identifying the buildings.

A wonderful collection, with numerous first-hand accounts of life and education in the Appalachians. Very good. Item #9286

Price: $4,000.00