Opening photo courtesy of Foxfire Museum | Photos by Mark Albertin
Desperation begets inspiration.
It happened in the southern Appalachians in the 1800s. And it happened in a Rabun County classroom in North Georgia in 1966. The meeting of the two created the phenomenon called Foxfire.
In the early 1800s, Scots-Irish farmers, desperate for a better life, immigrated to Pennsylvania and then followed the Great Wagon Road southward into the Appalachians, where land was cheap. In 1819, when the Cherokees ceded their land in the Smoky Mountains, many settlers moved into the wilderness of north Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas. Using the tools and skills they brought with them, and adapting them to this new environment, they cleared land, built cabins and barns, plowed fields and raised families.
A century and a half later — the wilderness long tamed, the land well settled with farms and towns, motels and summer homes — ninth and tenth graders at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, some of them descendants of those pioneers, were bored and restless. Their English teacher was at the end of his rope, desperate to figure out how to engage his students with a writing project.
He wondered what would happen if they went home and interviewed their grandparents, or went back into the mountains where a remnant of those first settlers’ descendants still lived. The students could interview them and then, as a class project, publish a little magazine containing the best of their interviews and essays.
The kids loved the idea. Tape recorders and notebooks in hand, they headed for the hills. They called their magazine Foxfire, named for a luminescent fungus that glows when you break open decaying wood on the forest floor. In a way, that’s what they were doing — breaking into a disappearing era and letting its light shine. They were re-discovering this southern mountain culture and showing it to the world.
To everyone’s surprise, the little magazine became a national sensation, which led to the publication of the first of many Foxfire books. Foxfire became a New York Times bestseller. With royalties from the publication, the students bought 100 acres on the side of Black Rock Mountain. Soon they were disassembling old log structures in danger of destruction, and reassembling them on the property. Today more than 20 of these log buildings, dating from 1820 to the 1930s, form the village at the Foxfire Museum.
The students of Foxfire showed the world that the people of the southern mountains were not ignorant hillbillies. Their peculiar speech was an archaic dialect preserved by the isolation of the mountains. They were not formally educated. They knew how to do everything, mostly by hand. In building their houses and barns they were the architects and the laborers, adapting their skills to the materials they found in the rich forests of the Appalachians.
They were engineers of the tools and machines with which they performed the daily chores of farming and housekeeping. They were naturalists who knew the horticultural qualities of every tree and shrub, and botanists who understood the healing properties of the plants growing around them. They sowed and harvested “by the signs,” a complex system based on the signs of the Zodiac.
Mountain life was hard, but beyond mere survival, these people loved beauty. In the most fundamental way, they were artists: they wove subtle designs into their fabrics; crafted baskets that were beautiful as well as practical; and gathered in quilting bees to piece together complex and colorful quilts. When work was done, neighbors got together to sing the old ballads, dance to fiddle tunes, and on Sundays, sing hymns with their shape-note harmonies.
“The mountain people had a great appreciation of the beauty that’s around them,” said Barry Stiles, director of the Foxfire Museum. “[There are] flowers everywhere, trees, just the mountains themselves are really beautiful with fog and sunlight interplaying. And music was very important in the mountain culture. The fiddle was the most common instrument, playing tunes brought over from Scotland and England … they just love to sing … that was an important part of life.”
The grit and ingenuity, the beauty and creativity of these people are vividly on display at the Foxfire Museum, where the mountain culture comes to life in a variety of historic log structures, and where the mountain crafts such as blacksmithing, spinning, weaving, quilting, instrument making, and wood-stove cooking are demonstrated and taught.
Walker Boswell, education director and curator of the museum’s vast collection of Foxfire interviews and photographs, understands the power of teaching by doing. School kids with no classroom interest in history are suddenly fascinated when they watch him pull a glowing piece of iron out of the fire with tongs and pound it into a hook on the anvil, or see a rope bed in one of the cabins and make the connection with the expression “sleep tight.”
Foxfire offers heritage-skills classes for adults and children throughout the year. Visitors can learn foraging, basket making, cigar-box dulcimer making, carving, sewing, weaving and spinning, woodstove cooking, bread and butter-making, and felting.
“The classes are meant to give people just that little touch where they can say, ‘Hey, I was a blacksmith for a day,’“ said Todd Faircloth, executive director of Foxfire. “You know, you think about what kids get these days as a gift. We’ve had grandsons and fathers and grandfathers who have come up and taken a class together. What better gift is a memory like that you share for the rest of your life.”
In performing the tasks as the mountain folk did, Stiles said, “You feel such a bond with the people who did them in the first place. In some way, you get in their head. You’re doing what they did the way they did it. And you understand more by doing it.”
You come to understand the bond between the builders and what they built. “Today, a manufacturing plant spits out a two-by-four,” Faircloth said. “Back then, there was a person who actually hewed those logs, who actually put in chinking, who actually went out to find the rocks that would go on the side of the chimney. So, they were putting their mark on everything. And they did it to last forever.”
For information on hours, tours and classes, visit www.foxfire.org.
Appears in the August/September 2025 issue of Augusta magazine.
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