The Way of Life in the Kentucky Mountains, The Way of Life Series, Eric Bender, editor

1942, Row, Peterson and Co., Evanston Ill., 64 pages

What a goldmine of Appalachian folk lore this is. The author was an older naturalist and writer who moved to the Forks of the Moccasin Creek up in the Kentucky Mountains for his health. He soon discovered that these materially poor people had a much richer and healthier life than the city dwellers he was accustomed to dealing with, and resolved to write an account of their local customs and history. He was soon of the opinion that the ‘leisure class’ was a misnomer when applied to the urban wealthy.

James Raine detailed the history of the settlement of the region, and through photo documented examples of tools and terms for rural life, demonstrates that the mountain life was not a devolution of Anglo-Saxon customs, but a preservation of 17th Century Scotch-Irish customs; a time capsule where the terminology of Shakespeare’s time was somewhat preserved alongside Scotch-Irish crafts and customs and pioneering methods learned from the Indians. Very nice close-up black and white photos illustrate the people and their way of life. Nearly a dozen individual portraits are found within the book.

On page 21 we are introduced to Old Green Kimbell, the one hundred year old patriarch of his clan, who lost a bloody feud some twenty years earlier with the Kennedy Clan. The feud is detailed through personal interviews and photos from page 24-38. The author then returns to everyday living in the high wooded country beneath the mountains that Daniel Boone scouted in the late 1700s. The great age of Green Kimbell—a Civil War veteran—takes the oral history uncovered by Raine back to the 1850s.

The later part of the book does not lose the reader as the schooling efforts of a stunningly attractive young teacher named Mahala Colderon are detailed. She was a college graduate and the daughter of the local doctor. The author, quite taken with the girl, uses this opportunity to describe courtship customs among the mountain people, who were named Saddlebag Folk’ simply because any supplies, furniture or other goods had to be transported on horseback above Moccasin Fork. He ends on this high note, a hopeful and at once nostalgic little book written by a retired man in a land that he swore he did not want to leave.