Merry Christmas

Christmas is an incredible time of year – a time when kindness blossoms toward strangers as well as loved ones.  We deck the halls with green boughs and glittering tinsel that brings a smile on dark winter days.  And we like to believe that it is a celebration that began over two thousand years ago when our Savior was born.

I have researched American Christmas traditions in the past and was surprised to discover that instead of the quiet, reflective holiday I expected to learn about, the holiday more closely resembled the Fourth of July in nineteenth century America, particularly in northern cities.  Where available, fireworks were set and in their absence firearms were used in the apparent goal of creating as much noise and chaos as possible.  In fact, a hundred years before in Colonial Virginia, Christmas was similarly celebrated. 

The Colonial Virginians sought to celebrate Christmas as they believed English lords were doing, feasting, hunting and gambling.  However, in that era, New Englanders were prohibited from celebrating the holiday.  This difference reflects the deep cultural differences of early Americans since New England was populated by Puritans seeking religious freedom while early Virginians were entrepreneurs looking for riches. 

Our modern sentiment would expect the Puritans would be more likely to celebrate Christ’s birth. However, they believed that The Bible was silent about Christmas festivities and therefore they too chose silence on the issue.  While the Puritan’s European persecutors did celebrate Christmas with some degree of the pageantry we enjoy today, their early Christian ancestors probably did not.  Church history indicates that the celebrations didn’t really begin until the fourth century and they have been surrounded with controversy ever since. 

Certainly, that day in Bethlehem was heralded by a heavenly chorus however, after Christ’s crucifixion, it was the resurrection which those first believers celebrated.  They were looking forward to the second coming of Christ and spent little time remembering his humble birth. 

Christmas was declared a national holiday in America in 1870.  Those years following the Civil War saw many cultural changes in America and our holiday traditions began to really solidify.  So, the Christmas pudding and mincemeat pies of the old world were quickly replaced with sweet potato pie in the South and clam soup in the North.  It took a few years for marketers to build the industry of Christmas, but we were enjoying decorations from the beginning – no doubt some of those practices came with the earliest immigrants.  The Kansas Home Cookbook detailed the Christmas dinnertable’s adornments as early as 1886 and I would be hard-pressed to lay the table they describe. 

Many of us enjoy a simpler Christmas, decorating with homemade ornaments and using sentimental pieces to remind us of past holidays and family members no longer with us.  But when you long for the simpler, old fashioned Christmases of the past, try to clarify just how far past you wish you could go.

Regardless of how you celebrate, today we must remember Jesus Christ’s birth; let us do it in a beauty of spirit that reflects the gift He gave us this day and in fact, the gift we receive with each new day. 

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Herman Stepp Heads West

My family recently lost a beloved cousin, Oliver C. Stepp. While his roots were sunk deep in the mountain, he lived his adult life in Westminster, California and thinking about him made me want to share some of his early experience with you. 

When Oliver was twelve years old, he left Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau with his parents, Herman and Delilah Stepp along with Herman’s sister, Opal and her husband Eugene Welch.  They were headed West in hopes the more arid climate would help Herman’s health.  Eugene and Opal accompanied them hoping to find work. 

Herman had been diagnosed with Tuberculosis and he certainly suffered from breathing problems.  However, he did not allow his illness to prevent him working in the Wilder coal mines while living in Martha Washington.  Now, I’ve mentioned here before how many men from the Campground, Martha Washington and Clarkrange communities  walked to Wilder each day to put in a hard day’s work and we’ve established that while the distance wasn’t insurmountable, the mountain they had to climb certainly seems impossible to us today.  Years after Herman’s death, his brother Edsil would remark that he may have been sickly but he didn’t let it stop him from walking across that mountain and working in the mines. 

Herman, Delilah and Oliver Stepp
Taken just before they left Tennessee

In fact, Herman was prospering while living in Tennessee.  He was one of the first in the community to own a car, as well as a radio.  This prosperity reveals just how hard he worked, for the miners were paid by the ton – the more coal a man pulled out of the earth, the higher wage he received. 

But prosperity cannot be measured by wage and property and in 1940 tragedy struck the Stepp family and undoubtedly sealed the decision to leave the mountain.  Herman and Delilah had two children at that time, Oliver and Anna Rhea.  Anna Rhea took sick with a somewhat mysterious ailment that was never really diagnosed.  I believe they were able to get her some medical care at Pleasant Hill’s hospital but she eventually passed away at age nine years. 

Herman and Delilah are remembered as excellent neighbors and Delilah’s heartbreak touched the entire neighborhood.  Studying history is sometimes a rather sterile process – it’s seems easy to recount dates and facts without empathy but my heart breaks anew as I imagine what that little family went through.  Death is a part of all our lives and certainly during the early twentieth century, especially in rural America, was almost accustomed to losing infants.  However, the loss of a child you have loved and cared for nearly ten years seems almost unbearable.  We have always believed the decision to move west was driven solely by Herman’s declining health, yet considering their loss I can’t help but believe that a fresh start in a new environment was a welcome prospect.

So the little band set out seemingly with only the wide West as their destination.  The first day they barely made it to Memphis and they quickly lost track of the number of time they had to stop and repair flat tires.   Eventually, they made it as far as Oklahoma when Herman declared they would stop for a while.  Four years later, Herman’s family resumed their westward journey while his sister Opal and husband decided to return to Tennessee.

The family made it to California, found work and began building their life there.  Unfortunately, the arid climate had not improved Herman’s health as they hoped and just four more years passed before he passed away.  If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I am continually struck by the difference in medical care today and yesterday and this is another example.  While Herman was hospitalized in his last days, he never once had a positive test for Tuberculosis.  His wife would always believe he died from Black Lung, contracted from his years in the coal mines where he started working when he was just sixteen.

We began with Oliver’s life with Herman’s passing the young man’s life was forever changed.  Prepared to enter college after high school, Oliver instead found himself the head of his family caring for his widowed mother and infant brother.  This began a lifetime of service which Oliver rendered with neither bitterness nor complaint.  He would be drafted to the Army and serve in Germany while sending his entire check home to care for them.  Even after marrying and fathering two children of his own, Oliver continued to selflessly care for friends and neighbors.

I am ashamed that I don’t better know these West Coast cousins and in talking with them there is no hint of our Southern-Appalachian accent but there is a definite sense of family.  Whether they realize it or not (and I sure hope they aren’t insulted by the observation), Oliver imbued his daughters with many values he learned on our mountain.  As I listened to his oldest daughter talk about her daddy, I kept hearing a description of his grandmother or his aunts and uncles who I have been very blessed to know.  I suppose you can take the boy out of Tennessee but you can’t take Tennessee out of the boy.

Finding our Way

Things move a little slower in the country – and we like it that way.  But, as we discussed a few weeks ago, change happens everywhere.  We know our way around the mountain roads as well as we know our own houses; even the wilderness paths are no stranger to many of us.  We know, and we’ve discussed here, how communities long since abandoned are still visible if you look carefully.  And yet our roads do change, and have changed many times through the years and I find it a fascinating challenge to search out routes of travel at different points in time.  And for that challenge, I have been on a quest for antique maps.  Knowing of my hunt, my brother-in-law recently came across an 1850 map of Tennessee and he was good enough to share it with me – thank you very much Derek.  Like so much historical research, this map leaves me with more questions than answers. 

I could write pages about the differences in this map and a modern representation of the mountain and could include a long list of questions that arise from studying those differences.   But what most impresses me is our shifting perspectives and focus.

This map has no road names.  Of course there is no interstate system and it often appears there’s no good way to get from one major location to another.  Ah, but perhaps what was major has changed; perhaps where one would most need to go was very different in the mid-nineteenth century.  No railroad would cross The Plateau until 1890 so in 1850 to ride from Nashville to Knoxville, you would have to travel to Chattanooga, with a significant jaunt through Northern Alabama, and then ride northeast up to Knoxville (and I think you had to change trains a couple of times on that trip too).  The roads seem to connect one little town to another with no idea of traveling great distances. 

Every little creek and branch seems to be labeled on this map.  That seems a little funny to us since there aren’t lots of signs along the water.  I would imagine the nearest source of fresh water was a far better landmark than a road and therefore of greater importance to the map maker.  Have you noticed that our modern maps, so criss-crossed with interstates, streets and lanes no longer label the small bodies of water?  I even checked the highly detailed aviation charts and found only names of major waterways.  Today we can pull up a satellite image of our community and zoom down to identify individual houses and yet we would never know the name of the creek running nearby.

Cities have long been created or broken by the location of a railway or interstate highway and as I study this map I can’t seem to tear myself away from the names of towns  that were significant enough to be labeled and those that are missing.  The intersection of the north-south route from Crossville into Fentress County with the east-west route from Monticello (which is the only town noted in Putnam County) is called Long View.  Now, that’s not a community I’ve even heard of and it appears to have been a good bit west of present day Clarkrange.  I found a Fentress-only map from 1888 online that does show Clarkrange, but no north-south road through it.  Thirty-eight years later, Long View is not mentioned, although Fentress County then showed several more communities including Boatland, Orchard Grove, Armathwaite, Barren Springs and Tinch. 

As I said before, there are just more questions than answers and so my quest continues.  Some of these pathways predate the European settlers so I know that until modern road-building entered the picture those routes would not have changed much for centuries.  I still want to know the names those roads carried over the years.  And now I want to know what happened to these lost towns!

Please take a look at the close up pictures I’m including here and let me know what you see.