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. New collections in regional repositories: Appalachian State University Berea College East Tennessee State University University of North Carolina Asheville Virginia Tech Western Carolina University nbsp; W. L. Eury Collection, Appalachian State University Private William Rufus Barlow Civil War letters – In the summer of 1862, William Rufus Barlow (1827-1865) of King’s Creek, Iredell County, North Carolina was conscripted into the Confederate Army, joining other draftees in Company B of the 18th North Carolina Infantry. The letters sent home by Barlow to his wife, Elizabeth German…
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Special Collections Committee News: Thinking about Special Collections: The Understory Grounding Appalachian History
By Stewart Plein, Special Collections Committee Chair, Appalachian Studies Association 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. Introduction While reading the newspaper on the first day of this New Year, my attention was drawn to an Associated Press article[i] about the impending opening of a collection of letters between the poet T.S. Eliot and his friend, Emily Hale. Sealed for fifty years at the request of Hale as a stipulation of her donation, the correspondence is now available for the first time. The opening of this collection provides students, scholars, and researchers…
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Editor’s Column
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. Welcome to the Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator, which wraps up our first year of publication. The editors have been pleasantly surprised at how well the Curator has been received. As of this writing, we’ve had over 2,000 unique visitors, and you viewed individual stories and articles over 5,800 times. Thanks for reading …or at least stopping by and checking out the Curator! The Appalachian Curator is a publication of the Special Collections Committee of the Appalachian Studies Association, and we’re featuring an…
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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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Featured Collection: The Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection, Knoxville, TN
By Steve Cotham, McClung Collection Manager 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 Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection was created in 1919 with the donation of Calvin McClung’s personal library to Lawson McGhee Library, Knoxville’s public library. McClung carefully built his outstanding private collection of local and regional history over the course of his lifetime, and the new library department became a significant resource for the community and researchers interested in East Tennessee subjects. The McClung Collection will celebrate its centennial on June 15, 2021. Today the collection has 75,000 books; 25,000 reels…
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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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Featured Collection: The National Park Service Collections Preservation Center at Great Smoky Mountains National Park
By Michael Aday, Librarian-Archivist at the Collections Preservation Center at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park 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. In May 2016 representatives of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the National Park Service Southeastern Regional Office, Senator Lamar Alexander, and local dignitaries gathered in Townsend, Tennessee to cut the ribbon on a project that had been over 10 years in the making. That project, The National Park Service Collections Preservation Center, officially opened that day, though it would be several months before collection items would be moved…
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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…
