Saturday, September 26, 2015

Richmond Paper Comes to Defense of N.C. Mountain People, 1910

“The Mountaineers” from the Charlotte Chronicle, September, 1910

An article in the Columbia State to the effect “nowhere in America are the results of ignorance so painfully illustrated as among the Republicans of the western North Carolina mountains” has caught of the eye of the editor of The Richmond Virginian, who very promptly comes to the defense of the mountain people. At the conclusion of an exceedingly fair and forceful analytical article, he says:

“An investigation is all too apt to discover that for which he searches. Here and there in the mountains survives the typical cabin of the pioneer, equipped with antler and long-barreled rifle, with slattern wife and skulking children. It is, however, but the quaint memento of a vanished past; and it is not remotely the illustration of a type., In the hustling mountain towns, on the well-kept mountain farms in the modern development of mountain resources, the men of the big hills are actors instead of onlookers. Republican or Democrat, the average man of the mountains holds, along with an equal intellectual ability with the average man of the low lands, the tang of interest pertaining to a more or less mysterious history. And that is all. Let us be fair to the mountaineer.”

It is an old story—this throw-off on the mountain people—but we had not expected the time to come to pass when a Southern paper would have to defend them from the statements of another Southern paper.

No comments:

Post a Comment