In 1925 when William Jennings Bryan came by train from Dayton, TN to Chattanooga and up Crow Creek valley to Sherwood and then through the long tunnel to Cowan, Girault Jones was a young student at the University. Upon graduation from the theology program, Jones would be ordained a priest of the Episcopal Church and would later become bishop of Louisiana. In 1925, he made his way on Sunday afternoon by mule or horse down the path into Roark's Cove where he held church school and read Evening Prayer in the little Episcopal Church in the cove. He mentioned that he had 90 to 120 children in church school each Sunday and some 60 to 90 adults attended the church service. I challenged him, "But Bishop, there aren't a hundred people in that whole valley all the way out to Rt. 50." He replied, "There were then. If you go to Green's View [the valley prospect that is the lead image for "People and the Land"] and look down, you will see a pattern of many small fields. In 1925 each one of those fields held a house and a small barn. Each field was that of a separate family. They grew gardens and there was enough pasture for a horse or cow, and they all had a couple of pigs in the pigpens. The houses and barns are all gone now, but the field patterns are pretty much the same."
Four years later, the blight of Depression crept across the nation. The stark, hungry faces are documented in James Agee and Walker Evan's photo essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. These faces are the closest American parallel to the faces the world would later see staring from the concentration camps of Europe and Asia. Hunger and desperation drove people from the land: from the hills of West Virginia, the coves of Tennessee, the mountains of Arkansas. They hoboed the freight trains to the cities. Tens of thousands of them from eastern Tennessee and Kentucky went to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburg, Minneapolis. Others made the long trek westward to California. They would monumentalize their Appalachian culture every where they went by taking along their music, crafts, cooking styles, accents, violence. Roark's Cove began to empty.
By 1940 many of these Appalachian migrants had already been "north" for a decade. Their children were already more familiar with the paths through tenement alley ways than through poison ivy glades in Tennessee coves. Tennessee would see some of these children again, though not for another half century until they retired and inherited the land "down home" in Tennessee. Then they would turn south again, part of the larger sunbelt or "Snowbird" migration that swelled populations from Georgia to California beginning in the late 1960's.
The founding of the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933 created work for many of the young men who were casualties of the Great Depression. Federal funds were used to employ men for nominal wages in public works projects. The stone wall on the left in the two-lane pinch descending Rt. 41 from Sewanee to Cowan is a monument to CCC labor in Franklin County. Elsewhere they cleared brush, built roads and bridges, opened and maintained trails in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Around Pineville, KY, Sam McDowell, a young CCC worker noted the jars of severed copperhead and rattlesnake heads preserved in formaldehyde in the CCC project office. In Sewanee, Fr. Constantine Adamz, priest of Otey parish, collected snakes which he milked for venom that was shipped to Knoxville to be made into anti-venin for CCC workers and mine workers bitten by snakes. The close manual work of opening roads and building trails and paths exposed men to many snake bites. Since the 1930's the venomous snakes around the coves has drifted downward.
1933 also saw the creation of another organization. In that year TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority, was chartered by the U. S. Congress to begin flood control, energy production, and forest and land restoration in the long valley of the Tennessee River. A series of dams along the Tennessee River and its tributaries would eventually allow boat and barge navigation along the river for more than 600 miles. By the 1950's the two centuries old dream of the flat boatmen--clear water down the Tennessee River--was realized as Knoxville became a port city with access to the Gulf of Mexico. Dam construction did not affect the Franklin County area until the 1960's. During the Depression, the local effect of TVA was to provide jobs directly in land restoration work, in reforestation of cutover timberlands, and indirectly to provide jobs through an improving economy. TVA also made possible the electrification of rural Tennessee, bringing power to the hills and coves.
A quick glance around the county in 1940 would have revealed scenes familiar in 1920. Winchester, Decherd, Estill Springs were still separate towns. It was a relatively long way from Sewanee to Huntland. Most rural roads were still unpaved. Most farms still had outdoor toilets and the now familiar water towers had not yet been built. General stores were distributed throughout the county and did a healthy business. Long's General Merchandise in Sewanee was still a general store, and Knies Hardware still offered true blacksmithing as it had in 1910. Hay was baled, not rolled; barns were built of wood, not metal. The Elk River was still a natural stream. Cars could be worked on at home, and there were almost no foreign cars in the county. There was still prayer in the public schools, but moonshine begins to disappear. Between twenty and thirty trains a day passed through Decherd and Cowan. You could ride the "Mountain Goat" up the spur from Cowan to Sewanee.
In 1941 this simple world changed forever. World War II had a very different kind of impact on local life from the effects of the Depression, the CCC, and TVA. Although many Tennessee men had fought in Europe during World War I, that war was, despite its horror, a parochial war, not a global war. World War II was a global war and is significant because of the systems management necessary to conduct purposive, integrated war on so large a scale. The global systems nature of this war touched every hamlet in the world. Since 1929, the drain of people from the land had been steady. By war's end in 1945, the sociological transformation of expectations in American society was largely complete: Americans would never again see their nation as they had in 1940. The close of the war continued intra-nationally the high population mobility the war had generated overseas. A new surge of ex-Appalachian migration occurred, much of it along the same routes pioneered a quarter-century earlier by the parents of the veterans: Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and now San Diego, Los Angeles, and Seattle were favored destinations.
The ex-patriot sentimentality would be echoed for decades in the country music tradition in a dozen or more songs such as "Detroit City" and "Sweet Home Alabama." The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, TN became a favorite tourist destination not only for non-southern visitors but for returning southerners as well. WSM, the powerful, clear channel 50,000 watt home station of the AM radio broadcast of the Opry became the strong emotional link that kept these ex-patriots in touch with home music and values. Depending upon the weather, WSM could sometimes be heard in Denver and Ontario. A special audience of listeners developed who parked their cars pointed in just the right direction on hill tops to listen to the scratchy, static filled sound of the Opry hundreds of miles away. In Tennessee rural power meant that the cove homes could have not only lights but radios, and a powerful system of rural value integration would be effected via the AM radio culture of Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and western Virginia and North Carolina. It is not too much to claim that the culture of rural Tennessee cannot be understood, even now in a time of local cable TV, apart from the influences and effects of local AM radio broadcasting.
By 1950 Franklin County began to experience some of the benefits of post-war growth and prosperity. The new wind tunnel facility--AEDC--at Tullahoma provided some jobs. Cowan prospered as the cement plant moved into its best years of operation. The hat factory, shoe factory, small textile and carpet mills provided jobs. Cowan had a half dozen restaurants open for lunch each day. Most houses in the county had electricity and telephones were common. The view into Roark's Cove was changing. Domestic fires, the greatest household danger of the southern countryside, continued their annual work of culling a house here, a barn or shed there. Most were not rebuilt. There was a single fire engine in Sewanee, another in Winchester. Two or three more were all that could be found in the county. The rural residences of the county had neither "city water" nor fire protection. Mules were scarce and most plowing and farm work was done with tractors and power machinery.
In the 1950's the shelves of the stores began to diversify with new products. TV's began to be added to the household inventory along with electric washing machines and freezers to supplement the new refrigerators. Store-bought canned foods became common, and the trash burden in Winchester became a solvable problem and emblem of prosperity. New garbage trucks hauled the problem away. Clothing in the stores did not yet need the label "Made in the USA" because virtually all shoes and clothing were American made. In the 1950's "Made in Japan" was a joking stereotype applied to porcelain knick-knacks and cheap toys. Baseball embodied the American soul, and a few town drunks occupied the policeman on Saturday night. Marijuana, crack, and AIDS were still a quarter-century away. Beer, "petting," and drag racing were the risky activities of teenagers. The bible could still be read in school.