by bluewaters | Sep 12, 2018 | Uncategorized
Joe Pye, an Indian Medicine man who became friendly with the early colonists of Massachusetts and treated their various ills, never came this way. However the purple flowering weed that bears his name is one of the picturesque plants of autumn here in the hills. And right now, as the September days dwindle down, the Joe Pye weeds are lavishing the rural landscape with eye-fetching beauty.
To mountain folks long wise to the signs of nature they are harbingers of fall and the sweet season. For they know summer is nearly over when the tall, conspicuous plants begin to tinge the countryside with crushed raspberry. Long before the folks of the hills ever heard of old Joe Pye, they gave the plant named for him a much more fitting name – queen of the meadow.
According to legend, the Joe Pye after whom these flowers were named is supposed to have been an Indian herb doctor who lived in New England in colonial times and cured varied ills by his skillful use of these plants. He is credited with curing typhus fever patients by dosing them with a brew made from the roots of the plant that produced sweating. He also made a tonic of the roots to treat stomach ailments. His successes with the use of the plant caused the colonists to give it his name.
The Cherokee Indians here in the mountains also used the plant for treating certain diseases and ailments. From the roots they made a warm decoction for treating a disease which was described by old Runaway Swimmer, greatest of the Cherokee medicine men, as a clogging up of the throat passages so as to seriously interfere with breathing and utterance. Some authorities believe the disease was diphtheria .
The Cherokee also made great use of the roots as a remedy for kidney stones and gallstones. And they used a warm decoction of the root as a wash for stiff joints. From the dried leaves and flowers they made a tea to produce sweating. They also regarded it as a love medicine. The medicine men contended that if a young man would hold some in his mouth while talking to a young woman, or while wooing, the success of the conversation would be assured.
Passing on the uses to their white neighbors, the Cherokee’s queen of the meadow, in time found its way pharmaceutical firms. The Wilcox Drug Company at Boone, which was one of the oldest and biggest clearing houses in the Appalachians for wild growing herbal plants, marketed a small amount every year.
Joe Pye weed grows in rich woods, along the roadsides, in wet meadows, and almost anywhere in moist ground. It grows from four to twelve high on a stem as stiff and straight as a lance. The large, coarsely toothed leaves are arranged in whorls along the stem, with three to six leaves per whorl.
The numerous flower clusters at the tops of the stems are grouped into a huge, frosty pink, rounded or pyramidal head. And each head is made up of eight to twenty tubular flowers. The wine-colored sprays are often used in flower arrangements for a feathery effect.
Their real beauty is to see them growing wild as they lift their massed heads of purple to the sun. And right now, here and elsewhere throughout the mountains, the great sprays of the Joe Pye weeds are in all their glory. For they are truly “queen of the meadow”.
by bluewaters | Aug 25, 2018 | Uncategorized
The smell of corn pollen hangs heavy over the land. It is a fragrance as typical of August as the crunch of tooth on the roastin’ ear. And for many an old timer it stirs many a memory. The mainstay of every farmer was his cornfield. No matter the shape or form – shelled, on the cob, or in the jug – it was the coin of the mountains.
It was more than just bread.
As a matter of fact, corn was a way of life.
It was hospitality and sociability and neighborliness.
It was corn-shuckin’s and hoe-downs, fiddle music and banjo pickin’.
It was chair bottoms and hats, bridles and pipes.
It was pudding and soup, hominy and mush.
It was dumplings and fritters, beer and coffee.
It was brooms and sausage sacks.
It was dolls and whistles and fiddles.
It was a ballad called Jimmie Crack Corn and I Don’t Care.
It was johnnycake and gritted bread and hoe-cake.
In the mountain world, each day revolved around corn.
No other crop provided so many necessities for a people who were forced to depend on the things and hand for survival.
Corn fed the family and the livestock.
Many a family slept on cornshuck mattresses.
They burned corn cobs for fuel.
It was an age when “hot bread” meant cornbread to mountain folks. They ate it three times a day and never got tired of it. They poured molasses over it at breakfast, dunked it in polikker at dinner and crumbled it in sweetmilk at supper.
There was no waste where corn was concerned. It was one crop a body could depend on to meet their needs. They used everything…the stalks, the shucks and the ears.
It was a time when corn was a way of life in the mountains. And many an old timer, smelling the corn pollen that now hangs heavy over the land, will nod his head in agreement.
by bluewaters | Jul 25, 2018 | Uncategorized
Like riddles and fortunes, tongue twisters were another means of whiling away time of a night around a campfire in which the whole family could participate. And like riddles, they came down by word of mouth along through generation after generation. Each of the mountain families had its own favorite tongue tangler.
Thousands of them still make the rounds today. Song-writers and limerick makers have discovered them over the years and exploited them in such compositions as Mairzy Doats, Six Long Slim Slick Sycamore Saplin’s, The Canny Canner, and the Flea and the Fly in the Flue.
A popular one that popped up to trip and tangle an unwary tongue goes like this:
“A tutor who tooted the flute
Tried to teach two young tooters to toot.
Said the two young tooters,
It’s harder to toot
Than to teach two young tooters to toot.”
Then there’s this one:
“Two toads totally tired to trot to Troy.”
According to popular lore, hiccupping can be cured by saying certain tongue twisters. The next time you are sized with a siege of hiccupping, try to say this aloud in one breath:
“Hiccup, snicup, rise up, right up! Three drops in the cup are good for the hiccup.”
One that is easy the first time but almost impossible three times rapidly: “Black bug’s blood”
Or try this one: “Fanny Finch fried fiver floundering frogs for Francis Fowler’s father.”
You are mighty good if you can pull this one off without lisping: “The sixth sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.”
Or this one: “The seething sea ceaseth and thus the seething sea sufficeth us.”
Related to the Peter Piper tongue twister is this old one: “Needy Noodle nipped his neighbors nutmegs.”
A good test for a suspected tippler might be the ability to say: “Sister Susie sat in the soup.”
Or try intoning: “Nine nimble noblemen nibbling nuts.”
A well known one is the Bettie Boddie tongue tangler which goes like this:
“Bettie Boddie bought some butter,
But the butter Bettie bought was bitter;
Then she bought some better butter
To make her bitter butter better”
Then there is this tricky one:
“Three gray geese in the green grass grazing:
Gray were the geese and green was the grazing”
And this last one:
“When a twister a-twisting would twist him a twist,
For twisting a twist, three twists he will twist;
But if one of the twisters twist from the twist,
The twist untwisting untwists the twist.”
by bluewaters | Jul 17, 2018 | Uncategorized
Give mountain folks their druthers when it comes to breads and most of them will speak right up for cornbread. But it has got to be the unadulterated, old fashioned baked-in-a-black-iron-skillet kind. None of this fancied up, sugar sweetened Yankee stuff. And it has got to be made, naturally, out of water ground corn meal. This is the kind that is coarse ground, sifted, through a sieve only when it comes time to make up a batter for baking. Another thing, as any old timer will tell you, don’t let anybody try to put off a turn of yellow corn meal on you with the claim that it makes just as good corn bread as white corn. It doesn’t …no siree, not by a long shot.
Once upon a time here in the hills almost every particle of breadstuff was made of corn meal. Folks ate it three times a days and never got tired of it. Perhaps one of its attractions, then as now, lay in its infinite variety.
Since the colonists first discovered corn bread baked in ashes back around 1608, folks have been discovering that it is the staff of life and that there’s more ways of fixing it than there are kernels on an ear of corn. When we think of corn bread nowadays we think of the baked in a skillet kind. But the term covers a heap of kinds, from the hoecake of Civil War times up to the melting softness of spoonbread. As a matter of fact, cornbreads include ash cakes, johnnycake, cracklin’ bread, corn muffins, corn sticks, spoonbread, mush bread, egg bread, corn dodgers, batter cakes, corn pone and corn light bread.
First of the corn breads was ash cakes. Corn meal batter was rolled into small portions and baked in the hot ashes in a campfire or on the hearth. Sometimes such cakes were placed on a clean board in front of the fire and cooked. This was called johnnycake. And sometimes a hoe was used instead of a board, the batter being spread on the blade and leaned toward the fire and the product was known as hoe cake.
Corn light bread is something to make your mouth water. It is made with yeast and molasses. It must be made the night before so it will rise overnight and be ready for baking the next day. Molasses is put into the batter and beat until there is not a single bubble left in the mixture. Corn light bread is made in loaves, like storebought bread. When it comes from the oven and sliced it resembles brown bread or a dark gingerbread. It is coarse like brown bread but not as soggy, nor quite as sweet. It is easy to keep, and when cold and sliced thinly, toasted with melted butter…well there is nothing quite like it!
This is cornbread country – unsweetened and cooked in an iron skillet.
by bluewaters | Jun 20, 2018 | Uncategorized
The old wagon track running down the branch to the old mill site is clogged with briars and young saplings. Trees surround the milldam, and laurel and alders hide the channel where a wooden wheel turned and furnished power that ground many a bushel of corn into meal. Only the millstones remain behind. And they now decorate the yard of the old farmhouse nestling in the cove, mute testimony to a vanished age and a vanished occupation.
Nobody remembers the name of the stonemaster who cut the grinding stones and nobody knows where he got the superprime stone from which he fashioned them. But the old millstones were grinding out meal here on the banks of Mountain Creek more than a hundred years ago. And some folks remember the old water-powered gristmill before it crumbled into decay and finally disappeared.
The folks who brought their corn by sled and wagon and on horseback made it a sort of frontier mecca. As their grain was being ground, the menfolks talked and whittled and gathered gossip to take back to their wives on the lonely farms. And while they waited, the freshly ground meal poured off the grinding stones.
Only a few of the old mills have been preserved, but you can see a good many old millstones about the country today. They have become rare collector’s items and used as decorative motifs in yards of summer homes, antique shops and country inns. Sometimes you will find them stuck in the ground as monuments or placed side by side to make walls, or as cornerstones for a walk. Indestructible, they remain as symbols of a lost art.
The old gristmill that stood down on a creek is long gone, its indestructible millstones remain behind as symbols of a vanished age and a vanished occupation.
by bluewaters | Jun 13, 2018 | Uncategorized
Deep in the Smokies, attractions and beauty are plentiful, but it is the time of year when one of the most spectacular shows comes to town. Every year in mid-June, a truly beautiful natural phenomenon occurs; a natural wonder that charms it guests and baffles scientists. And what is this natural wonder? They are fireflies, but they aren’t just any fireflies, they are “bio-luminescent beetles” famous for the synchronous flashing light shows. A rare and intriguing insect, these fireflies are the only species of fireflies that can synchronize their flashing light patterns. There is only one other place in the world besides the Smoky Mountains where this phenomena can be viewed – Southeast Asia.
Fireflies (also called lightning bugs) take from one to two years to mature from larvae, but will live as adults for only about twenty one days. Their light patterns are part of the adulthood mating display. Each species of firefly has characteristic flash pattern that helps its male and female individuals recognize each other. Most species produce a greenish yellow light; one species has a bluish light. The males fly and flash and the usually stationary females respond with a flash. Peak flashing for synchronous fireflies in our area is normally within a two week period in mid-June.
The production of light by living organisms is called bioluminescence. Many species of insects and marine creatures are capable of it. Fireflies combine the chemical luciferin and oxygen with the enzyme luciferase in their lanterns (part of their abdomens) to make light. The chemical reaction is very efficient and produces little or no heat.
No one is sure why the fireflies flash synchronously. Competition between males may be one reason: they all want to be the first to flash. Or perhaps if the males all flash together they have a better chance of being noticed, and the females can make better comparisons. The fireflies do not always flash in unison. They may flash in waves across hillsides, and at other times will flash randomly. Synchrony occurs in short bursts that end with abrupt periods of darkness.
This mating ritual is pure eye candy for any nature enthusiast. This is a stunning natural occurrence and everyone should see it at least once in their lifetime!
