Who: Started as a English class project with teacher Eliot Wigginton, then changed into a school produced magazine, which then changed again into a large learning/ non-profit organization.
Where: Southern Appalachian Mountains
What: A 1966 student-produced magazine, in which students chose to interview and collect stories from elders in their community. The students began their experiential education by capturing oral history, craft traditions, and other material about their culture and writing about it for their English class paper. The subjects and stories range from hog dressing, basket weaving, log cabin building, gardening and more. This magazine then morphed into a series of books that collected those stories and interviews and compiled them into a book to preserve the culture of Southern Appalachia. These books were used as the basis to return to ‘simple life’ backed by the members of the 1970’s back-to-the-land movement and became very popular. A series of 12 books were published, and since then, many additional ones have been published as well as specialty books. Foxfire has since morphed into a large organization that is devoted to preserving the ‘hillbilly’ way of life, often found in Southern Appalachia. There are classes, non-profit charities, and a learning center specifically created for the preservation of this unique American culture under an overall cover of the Foxfire Museum. This museum serves as a host for innumerable photos, audio tapes, videotapes, and more collected materials on the culture of Souther Appalachian. This serves as a pre-cursor to the modern day homesteading movement.
Why: In High School, my dad had several of these books that he held onto, which then, when I was in high school, he gave them to me to read. I was fascinated and never knew of such things that were done. My dad then told me stories of how he and his dad would do similar things, like dressing out deer and other animals that they would hunt and how my grandma made the best cheese in the county. I wish that I had thought to collect those things. That I had gathered not just memories of those people, but of how they survived on the land. My grandma at one point refused to teach me how to make cheese because I would never know the need to do it. That with modern culture the way it was, there was always going to be another way for me to get cheese. This instigated my need to preserve those ways. More and more, we are loosing those traditions and way of life. Those things may one day become relevant again.
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