Vanishing Frontier (1963)

foreign this is a report on the North Carolina mountain people Farmers Merchants lawyers blacksmiths Millers spokesman from all walks of life in such counties as Yancey Mitchell Avery Buncombe Wataga giving their Frank views on what's happening in our Appalachians Dr w d Weatherford of Black Mountain and Professor kratis Williams of Boone are major voices in our story if their statements have the tone of urgency and impatience there is good cause for the Appalachian region one of America's last lingering Frontiers is in trouble [Music] yes I'm a mountaineer my people have been on the border since before the American Revolution they were long Hunters Indian fighters fighters in the revolution and leaders in the whiskey rebellions later they fought in the Civil War became Kentucky mountain feudists and have remained in the mountains down to this day I've heard a good many misconceptions of mountain people during my lifetime and many years ago I became interested in trying to learn the facts about the mountain people what I have learned has been an eye-opener [Music] um foreign well in my Boyhood days why a country was dotted with meals everywhere I could count six or eight good meals and now the wine Burger meal is the only one I know of in operation the meal of course and his work is going down because of the fact that men have quit farming and the Farms are growing up in woods bushes and just laying idle this is a land of very little industrialization uh and too many two small farms and these Farms have fractionated to the point were productive and uh the youngsters are just bleeding out of the land a great mass of our boys Drop Out to 7th or 8th grade the result is the average educational level for the entire seven Appalachian States is seven and two tenths years for adult people and of course that's very very low the the population in these counties hasn't appreciably changed in this Century some of the counties have less population today than they had back in 1900. we lost the last 10 years from 50 to 60 we lost a million a hundred and thirty two thousand people out of these mountains we didn't have a net loss of that much because we had 935 000 babies born but there are lots of people left these mountains to go somewhere else to get get better wages here is Burnsville a Carolina town locked in the ancient weather-worn Appalachian Mountains once those walkways trembled with the Lusty Commerce of miners Lumberjacks and farmers the home of lingering frontiersmen of lonely gunsmiths who still fashion their own hunting weapons of mountaineer printers whose Gothic journals crackle with self-reliant thought foreign workers the great grandsons of Daniel Boone himself who still Forge hot metal into a farmer's plowshare or a delicate work of art aging Craftsman of another era when there was a bristling Boom Town [Music] now like many of her Upland neighbors Burnsville is a town and mourning for a lost youth here's the town mayor leadership is one of our important problems here I stated that uh a large percentage of our high school graduates practically all the college graduates have left uh most of our businessmen now are older people like myself and we just don't have the young people to take part in the uh leading the Community Affairs there's a big shortage of employment for our people the county lost 14 percent of its population between 1950 and 1960. do principally to the fact there are simply no good jobs for people here our Factory closed and I was unemployed and I was a machinist for the company I worked approximately five years till it closed down we don't have enough payroll so many people have to go away to seek employment elsewhere the merchants uh would like to make progress and we have made progress in time past uh it's much better than it used to be since our industry come in but we need more it is a paradox that in this area where so many minerals have been discovered such large quantities of certain minerals exist that there is no apparent future for the mineral industry those that we have in quantity have had this decline in price those that are valuable are present in such small quantities as a result of this there is no long-term picture encouraging picture for the mineral industry the first settlers in the Appalachians five generations ago did not come to shovel in mines or to found a lumbering industry they were fresh out of the battlefields of the American Revolution their demands were simple good farmland and a new life in the Western Wilderness Boone Houston severe Crockett they were The Riflemen who would later send Andrew Jackson to the White House with the Cherokee Indian vanquished life for the Pioneers was good in the mountains the sowing of seed corn on slanted Acres pure water Wild Honey and game cattle and Swine mast-fattened in the green valleys and every spring the sharp cry from an oak cabin of a newborn child in Breaking the mountain you ground the first families taked out the broad river valleys new wagon loads from the Shenandoah and they pushed into the Rich Creek bottoms for the belated settler only the shadowed coves the spiny ridges it was the early 19th century the time of fertile beginnings and manifest destiny large families multiplied and the Farms grew smaller a proud people whose ancestry had already earned a reputation for hard toil and fierce Independence [Music] contrary to what a great many people think these Appalachian mountain people are not primarily English they are primarily scotch made up of two groups first the Scotch Irish who came by way of Ireland and picked up the name Scotch Parish and who began coming into this country of course there are other strains of uh ethnic stock in these mountains there's a number of Germans certain number of uh Dutch certain number of French huguenots and here and there uh Swiss but uh the overwhelming majority of the people in these mountains are scotch well it would seem to me that the Mountaineer was not radically different from other rural people at the time of the Civil War in fact there is some evidence to indicate perhaps he was a little ahead of the average Southerner even ahead of uh we say the second or third rate plantation owners objective Travelers through the mountains before the Civil War reported uh excellent homes through the mountain valleys a certain degree of culture and reading matter and evidence hospitality and the homes were well kept the barns looked good and the people were proud and prospering but the civil war came along during the Civil War propaganda writers for the north tended to present the Mountaineer as a kind of a poor white in sympathy with a South the southern propaganda Riders tended to present the Mountaineer as a kind of a misplaced Yankee in sympathy with a North both types of riders of course misrepresented him during the Civil War the great Appalachian Barrier Islands divided the Southland and made it as a result impossible for the South to mobilize its resources properly and it enabled and final analysis the North to more easily conquer the South and preserve the Union the mountain people have not been slave holders in the Maine they were compromised by the war their 70s lay largely with an R following the war when the South lay in the throes of reconstruction there was not very much to be passed around for anybody in some of the states the Mountaineers were left on their own devices and they entered into a series of up to three generations of ignorance and poverty and they lost sigh of their old Thrifty ways they corroded in character and they became ignorant their culture became an oral culture rather than a written culture and they remain in in this situation until after the turn of the century the title of this song is the last old show that's the last shovels used at the burial in the country in the mountains [Music] proud he's stubborn he's self-reliant he is disinclined to cooperate with other people this means of course that it's a little difficult for Mountaineers to come together to do things on behalf of their own communities they are a reticent type of people I remember having a man come up to see me and uh he thought I knew who he was and he said hi and I said hi and he stood around four or five minutes and turned around walked off and I walked down to see him the next day this is over in the mountains here and I said why didn't you tell me who you were well he said a thought you know they will not talk very much the most unfortunate thing about all this is it actually the Mountaineer did not come into contemporary civilizations with depression years and because of the economy in those days he came in through the back door and that means that he left an unpleasant impression of himself when he migrated outside the mountains to the cities of the North [Music] [Music] the Mountain Family became a mountain Clan each home a shut-off Island unto itself Civil War had left a bitter Legacy of Revenge feuds brigandage economic paralysis the Appalachians were locked out of the 19th century but the Primitive Frontier folkways remained on The Outlander was swapping his horse for the motor car but Mountain son and daughter still grew up by the cedar churn the Apple press the draw knife and the Iron Kettle the only thing in plentiful Supply was human life life that was often bitter the custom of splitting up the Farmland among ears continued families began to subdivide themselves into tiny patches of poverty for America it came the age of the depression [Music] of nears had always known hard times now it was almost unbearable [Music] the old clung to their Hills the young had to find a new life somewhere else they immigrated to Cleveland or Baltimore or Detroit [Music] scorned by city folks no longer on a par with their neighbors they were now called hillbilly the mountain Clan was split asunder I can't tell you much but I know we're just we started out with nothing much to live on but we just worked and made what we had of course we raised the children on and then we kept making little along to send them to school they were good in schools from the time they first started when they were little right on and they kept it up as long as they went to school and then since they've been out of school I think they've done well all of them I don't see anything wrong with what they've done everyday living for us here what they've gone through is well the Mountain Family Once Was a Very solid Institution uh there was no such thing as divorce in the mountain family I'm sorry to say that there is considerable divorce growing in the mountain families if we find a good many children who are lift orphans the father walks off and leaves them or something else that's partly due to the fact that the woman and the women have fallen heir to the idea of Liberty of women and they won't do the things they once did they will just won't they won't take the punishment they once took Moonshiner Ridge Runner hillbilly those are the epithets cheap fiction writers gave our Mountaineers perhaps they did not know that those were the descendants of George Washington's favorite revolutionary Fighters well to begin with the Mountaineer was presented as a kind of a culmination of Daniel Boone Maddie bumper he entered into fiction following James fennel Cooper in The 1830s One book in particular that presented a North Carolina Mountaineer was Kennedy's horseshoe Robinson which a mountaineer from Burke County is was the lean hungry type carrying a rifle in the trip of his arm wearing Hulk's fun clothing and a hunter's shirt this picture of the Mountain Air was so indelible that I'm afraid that the average American hearing about the mountain they're eating yet thinks of him as somewhat along this line a man who steps out of The Butchers with a squirrel rifle the trip of his arm wanting to know what you're doing here mister there was a lady from New York who had a very poor interpretation of the mountain people she seemed to feel that we were all the Snuffy Smith type of characters that we may have been back in Davy Crockett's time perhaps but she asked me if she could see a real Mountaineer of course I told her I was a real Mountaineer she wanted to know if I went to school how accounted my money did I live in a log cabin was I going to college after I'd explained to her that the advantages were more or less the same in the mountains as elsewhere she wanted to know if I was a rich Mountaineer I told her no of course I was a very average Mountaineer that we all live just like anyone else they have a feeling that those of us who come in from the outside they call us foreigners by the way they have a feeling that we are critical of them because they don't live in accordance in the same fashion that we do and they're they're very sensitive they don't like anybody to come in and criticize them now of course what the mountains have really needed has been not the reports of third-rate writers of fiction but some objective research a fine piece of work was done in 1920 thereabouts by John Campbell after his work the southern Highlander and his home Homeland very little was done to determine exactly what the Mountaineers situation is until recently when the Ford Foundation gave a considerable Grant to the southern Council to investigate the cultural economic life of the mountains the social life of the mountains and to identify Mountain problems this is a step forward this should Supply some of the answers that we need to questions concerning them out there and his dilemma over the heartland of the Eastern United States sprawls the Appalachian mountain range eighty thousand square miles occupied by 5 million beleaguered people Ford Foundation Scholars fanned out over this entire region they sought to find out why it lags behind the rest of the country in schooling Health Transportation government and income included in the survey were the mountain counties of Western North Carolina 22 of them in all the interviewers posed sharp questions is there a peculiar Mountain attitude what does the Mountaineer expect out of life what does he believe in we had some 70 or 75 people in the field interviewing individuals and families for a number of months and we interviewed a good many thousands of people we only found six people who said definitely they did not believe in a god and we only found six eight who said they did not believe in answer to prayer so that there's no skepticism in these mountains there's just indifference they just don't pay any attention to what's going on but they believe in religion unfortunately the churches are very small 21 of all the churches in the Appalachian Mountains have 25 or fewer members which means to say that churches are very weak my own feeling is we've got to have a good deal of consolidation just like the schools had consolidation but there's a great deal of fighting of that local people don't want to give up their little church because their grandfathers and grandmothers were buried in the cemetery there and they don't want to give up the church but we've got to have stronger churches secondly we've got to have better trained ministers 43 percent of all the ministers in the Appalachian Mountains have high school training or a list a new man has any business representing the great issue of religion on a 12th grade education the mountain home and school once teeming with Frontier voices now uncertain companions both weakened by loss of members the southern Appalachians have been called America's number one problem area and where nearly a fifth of the adults has never gone beyond grade five the greatest problem of all is education here the mountain people describe their schooling dilemma [Music] the one of the outstanding teachers in a state Teachers College in the south in the Appalachian Mountains she told me that of a thousand students she'd taught in the last 10 years she'd gone through every card she had not taught a single solitary student who graduated with a straight A record who stayed in that state to teach and she told me she had not told a single student who graduated with a straight C record who didn't stay in the state petite and I said to the Saints superintendent just how long will it take us to reduce ourselves to Absolute mediocrity educationally speaking on any such basis as that incidentally one of our problems is lack of school consolidation we have about 967 high school students in Avery County they go to three separate high schools which are located within 12 miles of each other um the the schools are too small to have really good faculty and uh in the sense of teachers being able to specialize in their subjects and uh to have a good curriculum that's one of the needs we are vocational training is almost impossible under the present setup many of the high schools are simply not large enough to provide an educational opportunity which removes this unfair competition as between the one who graduates from the small High School predicting the mountain area and the one who graduates from the large High School in an urban or metropolitan area well I think that most mountains teams when they go off to larger universities out of the mountains however pretty bad inferiority complex so to speak because we've come from small high schools our classes are small and we just don't feel like that we're able to compete with the students that have come from large city schools and I think that our consolidation of high schools in our County would really help this because with these small crisis we're just our teachers just can't give us the material that we really need all the data I know anything about would indicate that those who come from small high schools generally are less well prepared immediately for college than those who come from the larger school but so far as native capacity is concerned these youngsters uh have what I call their share of brains the third thing is this we've got practically no vocational training in the public schools or the Appalachian Mountains except Agriculture and nobody's interested in agriculture anymore because in the first place the mountains don't provide much land for agriculture and less than 20 percent of the people now are are engaged in agriculture once it was a hundred percent but it's only about 20 percent now now that leads me to say another thing that we've got somehow or other to motivate these boys and girls to uh are they boys in particular to want to go to school they don't think it's necessary as a matter of fact when a boy finishes the seventh or even the eighth grade as most of these boys do at 16 instead of at 14. they are not prepared then to take the kind of training that's necessary if industry does come in they have neither enough mathematics or enough physics nor no chemistry nor anything else that pertains to Mechanical operations so they can't take the training and they're left out well during the uh time while North Carolina first became so actively understood and seeking industry we did organize this group that we call the Avery County Chamber of Commerce for the purpose of trying to induce industry into Avery County get new jobs we got a lot of prospects we got but a little industry we found that uh that our labor Supply that is available here that is the unemployed labor Supply was largely untrained and not really suitable for industrial employment just immediately in our study of the Appalachian region we discovered that it would take approximately 400 million dollars to bring our equipment that means buildings uh Furnishings libraries Laboratories whatever you had to bring our Public School equipment in these seven states up to the standard of the United States 400 million dollars well there just isn't 400 million dollars on these mountains to to get to do that kind of thing the Factor the salaries are lowest among the teachers in the mountain section I think is some indication of the index of Education of the mountain people and if reader consider that education is not a regional matter but it's more of a national manner then the combined efforts of the local community the state and the nation must be brought to bear upon this educational uh problem I am not one of those who fears federal aid education so long as it's management is safeguarded at the local level [Music] a patch of cabbage some corn tobacco Mountain farming is dying the average man grows 15 Acres which pays him less than eleven hundred dollars a year government Specialists are trying to rescue those who yet remain maybe they're just growing tobacco or beef cattle or dairy cattle but they will need to supplement that income there are several ways they can do that they can go into producing drug crops such as strawberries beans tomatoes and apples they're just a lot of things they can do to supplement their income and I might say that we have a lot of advantages here in Yankton County in particular west of North Carolina we can produce the best flavored fruit of anywhere in the United States and that's one of the distinctions of Yankee county is having the highest flavored Apple in the United States well this bad a year is called be branch I can tell you where a guy's name but anyway I've I've lived your own life uh I've been uh I was raised and born in one of the houses over promise year and uh after I came out of army I moved in down here me and my wife build apartment and we lived there about 12 years and last year we built this new home here we've been here around six months now living in it and and we are in the Applebee's here mostly most uh our main tension in farming is on apples we also have cattle and growth tobacco and then sell their apples we formed a co-op which has really proved not good for us we've been around now about five years uh it gives us a better chance to sell our apples in big quantities and get shot of them we're used to before we formed this Co-op we had uh did you sell the truckers or anywhere in the world we'd get rid of our apples and now we're sending them early getting a better price for apples and I think everyone's pleased with it this is a good place to live a good community and and uh good climate and you couldn't find any better place to live than in these mountains when we bought this Farm it was very bad shape we live in This Old House here uh two years uh till we get the farm paid far then we uh decided we would build a new house upon the hill above it when I come here well you couldn't make 25 Bush of a corner of an acre and now I can make a over a hundred bushel anywhere I want to plant last year our farm the corn we made around 30 tons of the acre of silage and that's on the same land that didn't make 25 when I came here 12 years ago [Music] industry is coming to the mountains industry to the Mountain Man used to signify public works or the lumber and Mining camps it meant a trek by thousands out of the mountains into the Piedmont cotton Mills or to Detroit or down to the fiery smelting plants of Birmingham now with improved Mountain Roads industry has a new meaning specialized factories trickling into the valleys and settling at the very back door of the hard-pressed mountain job Seeker to get these jobs the mountain people now shedding the remnants of a pioneer life must gird not for the 20th century but the 21st [Music] for industrial technology no longer is of the Iron Age but of the Space Age and the chasm is widening every hour a long way in time from the blacksmith Anvil to an outer space Observatory monitoring the universe but both coexist in the Appalachians is time on the side of the Mountaineer [Music] we must utilize to the atmos the resourcefulness which is such a distinguishing characteristic of the Mountaineer we will lose industry as we've lost them in the past because of the obsolescence or the product that they produce we must be prepared to supplant them with interesters that meet new demands that grow out of the changing economy of our section resourcefulness in lumbering a ravenous industry which stays alive only so long as it can be fed more trees well at the present time I'm in the process of redoing my Sawmill operation completely I have found that the operation that I've been doing in the past is quite inefficient and not to such an extent is to meet present day competition so I'm presently trying to get a little better to install new Machinery which will utilize more of the product that's been going to waste I think I think the timbering in the future will become more specialized that uh the things which I am doing now I hope will be the uh predominant uh Factor as to whether you stay in or stay out then operations will become more concentrated more centralized and will have to be more efficient I think the experience of the industries but have come here is that the Mountaineer makes an excellent employee he is quick to learn uh he's used to hard work generally speaking he has a high sense of personal loyalty for those with whom he's associated I must say at this point he insists on being treated as an equal he's entirely willing to carry out all this but he's not willing to be regarded as just uh Nino they serve an industrial manual assault there are mountain caddies uh produce uh sturdy stable reliable honest hard-working people their greatest asset are people I'd say that the industries in Winston-Salem reflect that do you take RJ Reynolds he came out of this mountain environment and to a great extent those Industries great Industries built there on the Piedmont reflect these virtues of these mountain people because they come down there and work in them we have done Mighty well in getting new Industries into this part of the world in a period of three and a half years beginning January the first 1956 about the time I began to study in a period of three and a half years we got four thousand four hundred and forty eight industries that were either brought in or were started Anew and that's a very marvelous figure and if we can keep that up we will ultimately have some way of occupying this Surplus labor that we have at the present time we've got so much Surplus labor that we just have got to have something to do or otherwise they're going to leave with the other parts of the world but is industry the answer the Appalachians are seeking after a leader a plan schemes for retraining Redevelopment some counties urge private local Improvement some a Statewide approach others suggest coordinated region-wide development of all the Appalachians but all schemes must begin with the community well we are uh [Music] trying to take advantage of the federal Area Redevelopment program uh get some of the benefits that that program offers we have a summer theater here and are working to get a a grant to improve its facilities to take a mountain phrase our people believe in killing their own snakes I think we're better aware of our problems than somebody from Washington or Raleigh this made the Northwest North Carolina Development Association possible this Association was conceived back in 1954 with the idea of counties working together for their own betterment it's an entirely locally financed there's no federal or state money all the planning is done at the local level it's had magnificent cooperation from very large Industries Reynolds tobacco and Wachovia bank and they've gone ahead in a number of areas for the Improvement industrial tourists Community Development A Youth Development well I'm very sorry to tell you that the churches have not taken too large a share in the ongoing Community organization and the reason is this the average Minister who has 12th grade education of course is apt to be very definitely uh conservative if he's conservative he draws a line straight between the sacred and the secular and he thinks the sacred is in his church and the seculars outside so he advises his people not to get into the secular things that's a very serious problem leading people in the various denominations are going to take a stalking and get the churches to recognize that you cannot have either a church or a school or anything else without having Community sense of responsibility and we don't have it well always I think as I mentioned area-wise there are problems that we have worked on and the thing we have been most concerned is that communities not get fired up and work towards short-term goals and not realize that this is a continuing process that we must continue to work to improve our communities and I think when we look at it on an area basis that we'll see progress for those who continue to work year in and year out towards long time goals as well as short-term goals people have always been drawn to the ranges of Nantahala Unica and watoga of the Blue Ridge and Great Smokies a vacationer's paradise where melting Ice Age glaciers came to rest shedding their seeds and Stones long ago the Cherokees called it the land of laughing Waters a French explorer so overcome by its mystery he scaled a lofty Peak and sang the naziers 20th century came and others were awed the first tourists were men of wealth like Vanderbilt and Cone who built summer Resorts far above the modest native dwellings today their grand Retreats are vacant lofty reminders of an Age of Empires and opulent seclusion [Music] now it is the time of super highways and supermarkets and the hills attract a different tourist his Shangri-La is usually found by the roadside left to its own development the Mountain Highway has often become a sideshow blotting out the trees and Hills Beyond [Music] tourism is an important industry but sometimes today's tourists searching for the Lost traces of pioneer life may find instead a grotesque caricature Mr Sam Moore he is going to show how to do the wait a minute you get the women that almost award and the armadillas made with Rhododendron and is also as you make the finger press on one side runs the propeller right-handed and if you press on the opposite side reverse is a fellow and uh this next toy that we make here is made is is a River cane and his uh whirly gig this is a twin Portage egg made for Marie take about an hour to make what [Applause] you get a dollar to Hayes seeds power the next one is the Rattle Trap and show them how the rattlecraft works there Mr Ward it's made with white pine wood [Applause] in accident the fly killer Mr Ward if you'll hand me the fly killer I will show how the slack killer works you uh pull this back into the slot and uh also put your little bullet in there and you pull the trigger and you kill a fly with it uh a tourist industry would be one thing that would help us out and uh we have a beautiful scene around here and the people from the lowlands are Florida particularly you know they like it up here in the summertime a lot of people that have already come in I think one of uh my answer to our problem possibly is tourist industry uh it's a big business all over the western part of the state seemed like we haven't gotten our part of it I guess because we're not aggressive enough you know too go out actress which we're going to try to do we decided that one of our great assets was our strategic location here in the mountains high in the mountains between the industrial Piedmont of North Carolina and the little Industrial Area represented by the Tri-Cities in East Tennessee that there must be attractions here for a resort development that if we could do that not only would we improve opportunity for our local people here but we would become also an asset to the industrial Piedmont down where there are rapidly developing factories and Industrial employment there are people looking for recreational facilities and thereby developing those things ourselves we feel that we've become then a part of the larger picture and and uh and really significant to them as well as doing something significant to ourselves one thing that cannot be underemphasized is the fact that these mountains just run like a polar finger right down into the hottest area of the United States and to be able to come in a matter of miles from sheet to to blanket uh circumstances is one of the great assets and one of the hopes of this area is the development of the tourist industry the retired people and that sort of thing business for 40 years and we want to get what it was peaceful and quiet and good substantial neighborhood so we started driving and looking and we looked at several places and we like this community here in Western North Carolina that in any places we'd ever seen we like the Mountain View and we like to people and uh the hospitality the churches and we just decided to come here and last upon and Leo you uh you couldn't get up this mountain except on a mule a horse when I came here and uh the bars and thistles and Thorns were so thick that you couldn't catch a rabbit so immediately that we started in the first thing we did was to build a road and we started into cleaning up and for the last two years we've been cleaning and straightening and trying to get the place to look like but uh you'd like for it to be something that you'd be proud of and something that the city of Burnsville and the people in this community would be proud of some people call themselves retire and they come up maybe in a trailer and spend several months and then they go right back to Florida we are have more or less divorced ourselves from Florida in the way of when it comes to set them down and later as a matter of fact we wouldn't go home at all if it wasn't our children and grandchildren but they crucify us if we just came up here and stayed 12 months out of the year the mountain people searching slowly casting away their ancestral tools they are torn in loyalty between a better life in the city and the old way on the dying Frontier with its meager rations the Bittersweet Paradox say to Scholars a surplus of people and a shortage of land [Music] whether this generation of mountain people do they seek in vain to be called Americans [Music] the mountain folk now have television radio they have good roads county seat car seat roads good secondary roads all this means that the Mountaineer is coming more and more into contemporary civilization so that tends to indicate to me that the Mountaineer as a differentiated type of American personality will disappear within the next decade or two well our people are uh are not backward they're a little bit shy but uh they're the best people in the world they're they're not people who are uh gonna let anybody run over them but at the same time uh they're uh a very uh good people and uh they're willing to learn if given a chance and about all we need around here's a chance to uh make a better life for ourselves I've built this house I'm planning on staying here I mean we love it here and it's always been our home and we're making a good living out there so we plan to stay here we're very happy to be in our new home we've worked for a long time in planning it and actually getting it built and we're very happy to be here and we have a lot of work to look forward to at the present time I am president of the County Council of Home demonstration clubs and I'm very interested in the work of the home demonstration Club and because we're very active in PTA and with the community development program we have two sons Kevin he's six years old and Danny is eight years old and we are working especially for them and to make their life better you think this could be possible in the mountains oh I think so of course I want them to go on to school and get a good education but I hope that they will be able to come back here and find a place in life fun senior in high school now and as far as I know now go to Appalachian State Teachers College in Boone next year major in business education after that I hope to teach here in the mountains if at all possible I feel that the mountain area in Avery County is on the brink or just around the corner from a great boom and if it's possible for me to get a law degrees it will be a great demand for lawyers as well as doctors School teachers and gays Institute any profession that you can name within the next 10 years in our area I think that the growth potential of our forest as well as the reforestation programs which are put on by private landowners and by the government indicate that we can go all in all in the industry as opposed to the idea of Forest being completely cut out there are a lot of related products which are being utilized today which will facilitate this use of low-grade woods and charcoal use of woods and Pulp and of course my products as I said before from the lumber industry well regarding Western North Carolina I think I'd be classed as an optimist I think the uh Industrial Development that's already taken place here shows that it can go a good deal farther and that together with development of the tourist industry I think and uh help us a great deal this the Mountain Air and climbing around on these Hills have completely changed my feeling and way of living when I came up here I was ulcerated and sickly and I was always taking all kinds of medicine and now I can eat anything you put on the table anytime you put it out there two things the character of the people their stability their innate conservatism their willingness to work hard and above all their honesty and combine that with the Magnificent region itself both Scenic and in in terms of climate and with the great resources and water pure water a shrinking resource nationally I say you take those things and combine them in the long run you can't lose the Mountaineer and the lowland are in all history have differed but uh I am happy that the fortunes of Life have permitted me to live among the true Mountaineers descendants some of them of frontiersmen that came in here 170 years ago who've never left these Hills who have been shaped and molded by the mountains they are a a natively intelligent people they are kindly they are hospitable I regard them as the finest people as a group I never know and I have nothing but affection spot they are a part of the greatness a very central part of the greatness of this democracy which is the state of North Carolina [Music] thank you [Music] thank you foreign thank you