Decorated

These are photos from the lobby of the Brasstown Valley lodge, still decorated for Christmas. Since I can't use Hello! to post photos any more I'm trying various things. I tried posting the album but it displays one small photo with a link to the album, so that won't work. These are posted separately. I like the display but can't figure out how to make the photos bigger. And last time I posted this way it slowed the loading of the entire blog to a snail's pace. Hope this isn't too slow for you this time.

A New Year's Tradition

It's almost time for the Possum Drop at Brasstown. Don't miss it. Too bad the special section included with today's Cherokee Scout and Clay County Progress isn't online. The photographs of last year's Drop and 'womanless' beauty pageant are priceless. But there is more about the 'Lowering of the 'possum' on the Clay's Corner site.

And the notorious New 2003 York Times story is still online.....

Purple mountains

 

This photo from Christmas eve, before it turned rainy. Snow mixed with the rain yesterday and it's colder but sunny again today.

Warm December days

I haven't gotten many photos in the last week, with everything else going on, but here are a few from around the area:

The Blue Ridge Scenic Railway train arrives in McCaysville (Copperhill?)
State line dividing Copperhill, TN and McCaysville, GA.
Ocoee River

Ocoee Whitewater Center


Just another old barn along the road.

I had some more to post but Blogger is failing me. These photos have been posted using Blogger's Blog This feature. For the last few years I've been using Hello! to post photos, having tried several different ways to do it but finding deficiencies in all of them.
Now Hello owner Google is shutting it down, and routing it to Blogger. It's not working very well today. Posting this way is always slower than Hello, and I didn't think I liked the display, although it looks OK to me now.
So, apologies for the change in this blog. Out of my control. I hope I can find a better way, but what I once thought would be a fix, posting the photos to Picasa Web and linking to them, resulted in very slow loading of the blog. I'll keep trying.

Mountain living

Worth reading the post on Fred First's Fragments from Floyd blog about a book signing he did at the Chateau Morrisette winery.
First, for the great photo of the wine-tasting room there, a massive thing and an impressive place to visit.
Second, for the stories he tells about people's reaction to his book and their feelings about living in the mountains.
Fred adapts a T-Shirt slogan someone told him about. It was about another Appalachian county, and he thinks it fits Floyd just fine. I don't know how many versions of this are out there, but I saw it just a few days ago on a plaque by an artist at the Folk School show:
No, I'm not a native of Cherokee County, but I got here fast as I could!

Winter night in Murphy

Downtown Murphy, dusk, snow flurries. Posting the photo on top of this page turned out to be prescient, since snow fell for an hour or two and some is still on the ground this morning. 

Blue courthouse matches the snowy sky. 

The Moose. 

Log truck parked in middle of Tennessee Street. 

Concert evening at the Daily Grind, downtown. 

Pleasant company. 

Martha's Trouble, playing their annual Murphy appearance. 

Getting ready

We can't bear to cut trees down, but this one is alive, locally grown, and, as he has for the last three years, Joe bought it at the nearby country store. We're traditional '12 days of Christmas' followers so have a tree inside from Christmas til several days after New Year. Since the tree is living, we can't have it inside much longer than that, so it will wait, while the birds flutter around its branches outside the garage.

The last two trees are doing fine, planted soon after the holidays. Haven't decided where this one will go yet....


The new header photo is anticipation, not reality. It was actually taken last February. No snow here yet, although our neighbor Jim just spotted some flakes.....

Appalachian blog

Here's something I meant to post last week but got sidetracked....an email from Eric Smith informs me of a new blog, Hillbilly Savants ("By Appalachians, for Everyone"). Great stuff, from several contributors.

Among other things, the editors have been combing regional blogs and posting links and reviews of some, including this blog.

There's a great collection of links to Appalachian-area media and other links in the sidebar, and occasional postings on history and culture. One recent post is links to information on Judaism in Appalachia.

Other postings are on local news, music, much more. Definitely worth checking regularly.

Holiday decorations are out at the John C. Campbell Folk School. 

Today was the Fireside Sale, inside. 

Music and beautiful crafts. 

The school's gardens have some great scarecrows. 

Berry and honey patch. 

Log cabin with red clay chinking, on the chimney too. Also on the Folk School grounds. 

The cabin (2 combined) was moved here in the 1920s. 

The clearing skies that made this incredible sunset mean colder weather tomorrow. 

Documenting history

There's a wonderful project running in the Asheville Citizen-Times on the North Shore Road to Nowhere. That's the area along the north shore of the Little Tennessee River that was flooded by the TVA's Fontana Dam in the 1940s.

The evacuated residents were promised that a road would be built to give them access to their historical land and the cemeteries there. After half a century, the consensus is the road would cost too much and cause too much environmental damage to the southern part of the Great Smokey Mountain National Park. The people whose families were displaced demand the road, however.

The newspaper's printed display of these stories, historical photos, maps and timeline is gorgeous, but much more is online, including videos and photo galleries. Located on the day 2 printed map, the site of Horace Kephart's cabin on Hazel Creek, where he lived while writing Our Southern Highlanders. In the story on Kephart, a link to Western Carolina's digital image collection of Kephart photos, and more on the AC-T page.

It's cold again, but clear and beautiful. Need to spend these evenings inside, though, by a fire... 

Was this lady from Murphy? How long ago? I found it in a collection of digital images at the University of Oregon, through a search of Michigan University's OISter digital collections search. The photo was taken by Doris Ullman, and labeled "Elderly African-American woman, Murphy NC". No date, but Ullman worked in Appalachia in the 1920s and '30s. 

This one is by the same photographer and also labeled 'Murphy, N.C." She is described as a 'singer'. Fascinating the things you find in these image collections. There are dozens around now, including two at UNC and WNC I've mentioned before, I think.