FOXFIRE!

Today was FOXFIRE day in our calendar.

Wikipedia has this to say about the beginnings of this amazing 49 year old high school program:

Wild grapevines in the fall colored branches

The Foxfire magazine began in 1966, written and published as a quarterly American magazine by students at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, a private secondary education school located in the U.S. state of Georgia. At the time Foxfire began, Rabun Gap Nacoochee School was also operating as a public secondary education school for students who were residents of northern Rabun County, Georgia. An example of experiential education, the magazine had articles based on the students' interviews with local people about aspects and practices in Appalachian culture. They captured oral history, craft traditions, and other material about the culture. When the articles were collected and published in book form in 1972, it became a bestseller nationally and gained attention for the Foxfire project.

The magazine was named for foxfire, a term for a naturally occurring bioluminescence in fungi in the forests of North Georgia. In 1977, the Foxfire project moved from the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School to the newly built and consolidated public Rabun County High School. Additional books were published, and with profits from magazine and book sales, the students created a not-for-profit educational and literary organization and a museum. The Foxfire program has been shifted from the English to the business curriculum. Nationally, the Foxfire model has inspired numerous school systems to develop their own experiential education programs.

We visited the home of Foxfire today at the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center just a couple of miles up US route 23 from Clayton, Georgia. Located west off of 23 and back a well graded gravel road almost two lanes wide, near the entrance to Black Rock State Park. The Center has grown much beyond its early impressive literary record in books and ongoing magazines. 

But the most impressive fact we learned, and kept trying to remember as we toured the almost two dozen authentic or authentically recreated 19^th century cabins and work buildings of Foxfire Village was this:  every magazine, every book, and every building, was written or constructed, with some adult editorial and supervisory assistance, by high school teenagers.

It was the kids back in 1966, when I was 16 and bored to tears with school, who challenged by their English teacher to get their grades in whatever way they could developed their own program of literary excellence by recording, and publishing, the stories of life in the mountains as told by their own grandpas and nans, neighbors and friends who lived, and still live, though its now two generations later, back up in hollows so deep in the Appalachian Mountains of Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and northward that 

                                                                                          often only rocky creek beds 

                                                                                          are their roads.

   Wisdom Discount = Senior Fee

The first person we met as we entered the visitor center was Pauline. Pauline says she began her journey with Foxfire near when it all began but her level of energy, and her wonderfully articulate way of telling the Foxfire story as she answers your most pressing questions (toilets around back dear. Most are out here) makes her much younger than her years.  She kept us asking and listening for almost an hour.  And we hadn’t even paid our ‘wisdom-discounted’ $5.00 fee yet to walk the grounds.

The walk up the woodland paths through glades of wide trunk deciduous and slender pine to and through the village could take an hour or two, Pauline had told us.  But that would have been without our retired person hiking pace, and our need to photograph and ponder much of everything we saw.  It also did not take into account the wonderful people we would meet along the way.

The first thing to realize about the Foxfire Village is that this is a REAL replica of an Appalachian village.  Its not in the flat land or the valley, its on, or rather IN, the mountain.  You often can’t see one house from the next and there are rarely fields, just gardens and patches of agriculture IN the mountains.

There are no town parks or central commons.  No public buildings either, except for the church. And every Appalachian Village has its church.  It was the very first building raised and by Foxfire records, is never donated or sold for some other purpose.  The chapel here is a very accurate teen-built reconstruction. It’s the only way this town would get a church.

Some of the things you will see at Foxfire are as amazing as the Foxfire project itself.  Like the oldest original cabin in Georgia.  Called the ‘Savannah’, it was built in about 1820 and was in continuous use by many families till removed to this site when sold by its last occupant.

In a small wagon shed there is a handsome newly built reconstruction of a farm wagon but the treasure to beat all treasures is a smallish, almost Conestoga-ish style wagon that is the ONLY verified wagon in existence used on the Cherokee Trail of Tears. 

The owner, an area Waggoner, brought it back after hauling his load of sad migrants to Oklahoma in 1838 on a US Army contract and next used it to haul a group of Mormons from western Georgia to the new promised land, Utah.  Pauline is Cherokee on both sides of her family and Scots-Irish mountaineer as well so she knows of what she speaks.

Mona ran into a cousin of her good friend Opie, the Sheepadoodle the O’Rourks love in the mountains of Colorado. This pup is Augie, a Labradoodle.  Brown, versus Opie’s white, Augie is a Labrador-Poodle mix. Smaller than Opie too, Augie was just as pleasant to be around. Good dogs Augie and Opie!

Along the way we met a neat young couple who had just gotten married at their small organic produce and flower farm in Southern Alabama. Fannie and Charlie were picking something off the ground and eating it when we first saw them. I had to ask (we hadn’t eaten lunch yet and it was nearing 2:30 pm) what it was.  Turned out they’d found a tree (bush?) of ripe and sweet persimmons. 

I had never heard of a sweet persimmon but Charlie assured us these were, since they were so very ripe.  GOOD!  They were good! And then Fannie and Charlie told us how to tell the weather for the next season by the appearance of the inside of the flat seeds of the persimmon when you split them open.  I’ll let you Google that one yourself but will tell you that North Georgia is getting heavy snows this winter if Mona’s seed is accurate!

As we drove out of the parking lot headed to a convenient Chick-Fil-A we’d seen on the way up from the church we passed the happy young couple’s motorized transport. If they can keep all of this on their vehicle days after the wedding as they travel among folks not yet known, their sense of humor will get them through a lot of ‘stuff’ that messes up some other newlyweds plans.

Back home we settled into our deck chairs, on our deck, in time to see a nice mountain sunset, head in to supper, and get some paperwork, photocopying and financial fol-d-rol done. Yes, retired and living on the road does not mean we don’t have ‘work’ to do once in a while.

See you tomorrow!

-Ken