By Gene Hyde This article appeared in the Volume 2, Issue 1 Spring/Summer 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Catherine MacPhee is the Trainee Archivist at the Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre in Portree on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. I met Catherine while visiting the archives in Skye in June 2019 and interviewed her at her home on Skye via Zoom on May 8, 2020, while she was on furlough from work due to the pandemic. Gene Hyde: Hi Catherine. I wanted to ask you some general questions about your work in the archive, picking up on what we discussed…
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Community Archiving Profile: Community-driven Archives Programs in the Buncombe County Public Library System
By Katherine Calhoun Cutshall and Zoe Rhine This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 3 Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. The staff of the North Carolina Room at Pack Memorial Library, located in downtown Asheville, NC, is always on the lookout for new ways to engage the public in our work. Until 2009, when the collection first moved into a space of its own, (separate from adult reference) there had not been much in the way of these efforts. Searching for inspiration, staff encountered Archives Alive: Expanding Engagement with Public Library Archives and Special Collections by Diantha Dow…
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Community Archiving Profile: Continuing the Story: Oral Histories Shape Arthurdale’s Legacy
By Meredith Dreistadt, AmeriCorps Member and acting archivist at Arthurdale Heritage, Inc. This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 3 Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. In the height of the Great Depression, Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady to the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt, left affluent Washington, D.C. to travel to one of the most impoverished communities in the country: the coal mining towns along Scotts Run in northern West Virginia. There she saw firsthand how horrifically affected families were by both the ripples of the Great Depression and the greed of coal companies that ruled over the…
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Community Archiving Profile: Mountain People, Mountain Lives Oral History Project
By Elizabeth McRae and Alex Macaulay, Department of History, Western Carolina University This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 3 Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. For the past five years, history faculty at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC, have collaborated with students at a local high school on the Mountain People, Mountain Lives Oral History Project. Beginning each January, Drs. Elizabeth McRae and Alex Macaulay conduct a series of workshops, preparing students at Smoky Mountain High School to research, organize, and conduct oral interviews with a wide range of local people. In May, the participants scatter throughout…
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Community Archiving Profile: Hazard County, KY area photos archived by radio station WSGS
By Ariel Fugate, Mountain Association for Community and Economic Development (MACED) This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 2 Fall 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Radio station WSGS, based in Perry County, Kentucky, is working to preserve memories of the Hazard, Kentucky, area through a developing a photo archive. Shane Sparkman, one of the owners of the radio station, WSGS, started the “Flashback” program on the radio because he has an interest in Hazard history. “Flashback” references something that happened on a particular day in history in East Kentucky. Shane also began developing an archive of historical photos…
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Community Archiving Profile: Foxfire: Capturing Southern Appalachian Voices for Over Fifty Years
By Kami Ahrens This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 2 Fall 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Since 1966, Foxfire, a non-profit heritage preservation organization in Northeast Georgia, has been recording and sharing oral histories from across Southern Appalachia. Since its inception in a high-school English classroom, the organization has been rooted in the local community. Unlike larger institutions created by collectors, Foxfire’s collections were identified, captured, and curated by the community. Today, the organization has grown into a formal museum and archive maintained by professionals, but retains its relationships and roots within the community. Through experiential learning…
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Community Archiving Profile: ᏚᏗᏱᏧᎾᏕᎶᏆᏍᏗᎢ ᎤᏂᏃᎮᎸᏅᎢ – Stories of the Snowbird Day School
By Trey Adcock and Gene Hyde, UNC Asheville This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 2 Fall 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. By the time Snowbird Day School closed in 1965, about 550 Cherokee children had attended classes in this remote Western North Carolina school, located in the Cherokee community of Snowbird or Tuti Yi (as it is known in the Cherokee language). Quakers had originally run the school in Snowbird but by the beginning part of the 20th century the federal government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, assumed responsibility for establishing and providing educational services. Snowbird…
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Community Archiving Profile: Helen Horn – The Other Half Speaks: Reminiscences of Coal Town Women
By Burr Beard This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 2 Fall 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Burr Beard had the pleasure of working with the late Helen Horn on her transcripts and materials from a valiant effort of her work in the 1980’s to collect oral histories of woman of the Southeast Ohio coal towns, entitled The Other Half Speaks: Reminiscences of the Coal Town Women, 1900-1950 in Athens County, Ohio. Helen Horn entrusted Beard to organize the typewritten files of these oral histories and granted permission to have the files archived in both the Southeast Ohio…
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Community Archiving Profile: Saving Kentucky Craft History
By Philis Alvic, Kentucky Craft History and Education Association This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 2 Fall 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. The Kentucky Craft History and Education Association (KCHEA) is an organization founded in 2008 that gathers, conserves, and presents the history and on-going impact of crafts in Kentucky. This mission is carried out in a number of different ways. Saving objects and documents and recording interviews that tell the story of Kentucky crafts is one of the goals of the organization. Bringing awareness of Kentucky crafts to a wide audience is another goal. So, it…
