The Appalachian Outhouse Part 1

Photo Courtesy of Barbara Woodall. The owners named it Mrs. Murphy.

First, I want to start this article out by thanking Mr. +Johnny Depp  for mentioning his mother, Appalachia and outhouses. Johnny Depp's Mother is An Appalachian? is one of my most well read blog posts. The stereotype of outhouses and Appalachia is so predominate in our country, it is sad that Mr. Depp's use and perceptions are the norm instead of the exception. A perception that needs to be changed if we are ever going to solve the problems we have in Appalachia. I am really thankful that his popularity and his just mentioning it, is giving us a basis to talk about it and be heard.

This is going to be a two part blog post. This first part is just a discussion of the reasons we have relied on this system in Appalachia. The second part will be some stories of Appalachian outhouses from my family and my experiences.

 I don't know why the outhouse stereotype is so prevalent for Appalachia when you could find an outhouse or something similar as a necessary function for crap in every part of the world at one time or another. I personally think it is because we have been relegated to use them in Appalachia longer than most places.   The same stereotype doesn't seem to exist on outhouses say in the Colorado Rockies or in the Midwest in the same way. The reasons this is true could be a research paper.

I think it is just the Appalachian region itself is so close to much more populated areas in the East that any unusual thing out of the "modern" ordinary, like an outhouse, especially when I was growing up, stood out like a boil on the butt of humanity in our region.  I was always upset as a child when those from outside the region would ridicule, stereotype, or tell us we are backwards just because in our region we had outhouses and did without modern plumbing for so long. My family, for the most part, did not see it that way.

Some say our people were just "too poor" in our region to get rid of outhouses and put in proper plumbing. Working in the field of Appalachian history for a living, it was amazing to come across this stigma of thought that even many of our older residents still suffer from the shame and the thinking of that stereotype. Yes... in some instances lack of money might have been true.

If we had enough money to throw at the problem we possibly could have solved all of Appalachia's plumbing problems long ago. After all we sent men to the Moon, so most definitely we could pour massive amounts of money into Appalachia to put in defying feats of engineering, creating septic systems in challenging, inaccessible places with low populations....if we had the money of say Dubai.  Some say we should have had those riches with all the coal we sold but let's not go there.

But those of us from here know that Appalachia is a special place in more ways than one. We understand the main reason for our failure to keep up our plumbing with the rest of the world, in the oldest mountains in the U.S., for so long, is because of the mountains geological make up and geography. Why should we ever feel ashamed of things really beyond our control?

Knowing this place as I do, I'm not so sure all the money in the world would buy a good system for some of these places in our mountains. In our area, we have a river that appears to defy gravity and flows North up the Appalachian mountain chain. The New River. I learned in economic development of our area it has a great BIG effect in how you engineer a system. Number one rule for a sewer or septic system, crap runs down hill and we are fighting a water shed that is defying that.

Explaining this to newcomers to our area has been amusing. I mention that in the "Gentrification of Appalachia" another blog post. This is where folks move to our beautiful mountains and it has been amusing to watch their demands for septic and water and trash pickup. Usually in areas that it would be an engineering feat to put in a septic system in the first place and secondly, the population won't support many of the systems they are used to having in larger flat land populated areas.

After owning and renting many homes over the years in Appalachia I know it has nothing to do with being poor. It has to do with working with what you have, where you are!!! Many of us were glad if we bought property that would "perk" and drain to put a septic system in. Never mind the life of those systems is around 20 to 30 years if you are lucky and creates other problems. Many of us were lucky that their area of Appalachia is an area where a town could locate a sewer system to cover many homes. Yet those systems have their own unique problems still.

Personally I know the problems we have are unique. Especially after paying to sink 3 different wells and knowing the water table dropping can turn your sweet water into iron or sulfur if you don't dig it extra deep enough to allow for extreme droughts. After living with septic systems that gave out after 10 years being hooked up to a public water supply system that destroyed them and paying to have them pumped on a regular basis.... I personally know it's not money that is the problem. It's LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!  Especially the soil in my neck of the woods is ROCK with clay, limestone, granite and more rock!!!  You would not believe the rock (actually small boulders) that came out of the ground while digging a 40 foot water line.

It is so serious a problem that a lack of access to good water and septic closes down our economic development in many areas. Yet Appalachians are really resilient and we get creative trying to solve these problems. We have a modern version of an outhouse that you would not know exists in many areas when you visit a bathroom at a modern business. It's called pump and haul. It's just a tank in the ground that you hire someone to pump and haul the contents to the closest sewer plant when it gets full. One business I worked for that haul was 40 miles away.

I was going to take a picture of one of my favorite little watering holes. It's a Cabin that is a bar called the "Bulls eye". They had outhouses out back. Found out in recent years they were forced to put a septic system in. Think it's pump and haul. Anyway their outhouses are now cinderblock mansions.

My point is we are fighting a stereotype that exists because of the geography of our mountainous hollers.  We should never be ashamed in this day and age for having an outhouse in any way.  Many modern situations still use outhouses in other areas of the country and the stereotype of Appalachians being backwards or ignorant because of our people ever used an outhouse needs to go AWAY!!! It's not true and never was.

 I love that you can find how to build and maintain one on the internet.

In Part II are my stories of our outhouse exploits.  The link is Appalachian Outhouse stories - Build it Downwind

Appalachian Outhouses Part 2 Stories - Build it Downwind of the House, Boys

Photo courtesy of Diane McHone Lloyd

For Part one click here. In Appalachia, one of the first rules I learned as a child was where to build an outhouse. I watched family find a good place down wind of the house.  Or up on the hill away from the house. Though it varied by family of where they would put their outhouse usually it was placed to avoid outhouse "smells". You could keep the aroma down by putting a cup of lime after each use or wood shavings and a vent but the best way to avoid smells leaking into the house was in where you built it. In warm weather you had to contend with flies, bees, snakes etc. I hated going to the bathroom during the day in the summer. I preferred early in the morning or late before dark in the evening. In the winter time there would not be any critters, it was just cold. Here are few of my outhouse stories.

Charlie the Black Snake

Grandpa Burress's outhouse was up on the hill and a long trek in the winter time. It was a two seat outhouse which I always found amusing. Two could use it at the same time. Probably because my grandmother and her sister would go together to the outhouse as children. It was moved a couple of times after so much use, but always on the same hillside above and to the right of the corncrib. My great grandmother would say learning to use an outhouse built character.  One of the most amusing stories about that outhouse were the visits from Charlie the black snake.

Grandpa Burress taught us never ever to kill a black snake or any non-poisonous snake. He said they kept the mice population down and when you killed the non-poisonous snakes the poisonous ones would move in. He would threaten to whip us if we bothered any black or non-poisonous snake on the property.

Charlie lived in the corn crib. He was about 6 feet long and was very familiar to us seeing him on the property. He'd be on the side of a tree or hanging down over the path or on the path just about every day. I always thought he was pretty smart.

But Charlie got too familiar with us for his own good. So much so that when he saw someone going to the outhouse he would actually climb down the wall of the corn crib and race you to the outhouse. Then he would poke his head through a hole at the bottom of the wall and literally scare the crap out of you!!  If there were screams coming from the outhouse, it was usually due to Charlie.

It got to be a game one summer to try to race the snake to the outhouse, do your business before he showed up. Sometimes he would be in there before you got there curled up on the bench and we would have to try to chase him off.

Grandma Burress tried to accommodate Grandpa's wishes until one day according to my Aunt, Little Betty Sue, Grandma had enough. Charlie coiled up to strike her and she went and got a hoe and chopped his head off. Grandma's reasoning was she was tired of fighting off a black snake every time she went to the bathroom. Grandpa didn't much like that she killed the snake, but it was grandma, and if grandma wasn't happy, no body was happy! I was glad Grandma did it because if it had been one of us, it would have been a strap to our backside!!

Terrance's Outhouse

Outhouses were not just in the country but in town too. The towns in Appalachia were built before sewer systems. In 1978 I lived in Bluefield WV in a house built in the 1890s. As a matter of fact the whole block was built before the modern sewer system was put in. Most of the houses were connected to the system in this block except one.

Terrance's house could not be hooked to the system because the old house was built on solid rock. To blast through that rock would have possibly damaged the house. They could get water to him from the block above him but they couldn't pump the sewage up hill to reach the line and there was no way to blast through the rock to get a line to the lower block. So he had an outhouse that they would pump and haul once a month. As a matter of fact Terrance told me the boys that pumped his outhouse, (what we called the "honey wagon") said there were many such houses still in town in the 70's. Because of the makeup of the ground and where these houses were located in town just could not be hooked to a modern system.

But Terrance's outhouse was a popular feature in the wintertime. Every cold spell about January or February everyone's water in those old houses would freeze when the temps dropped below zero for an extended amount of time. It was like clock work every year, sometimes lasting a week or more. The plumbing including the commodes would not work. So Terrance would charge folks 25 cents a day to use his outhouse to cover the pump and haul charge for that month. I can tell you when modern systems don't work, you appreciate the good old fashion systems that do!!

Today, just about every house on that block is gone and I would say they will not build where Terrance's house stood ever again because of the solid rock on that hillside.

The Adventure's of the Atwell Boys

I bet I could write a whole book on the adventures of my partner Eddie Atwell's family. I wrote a blog post for a book his son David Adam Atwell's wrote Appalachian Safari: A Virginia Mountain Man's tales about hunting, etc.  One of my favorite Atwell family stories is one of their outhouse tales.

Outhouse's are cold places in the wintertime. Unless you were like my friend C.C. who ran electricity for a heater and a light to hers.  Eddie and his brother had a habit of actually building a small fire on the floor in theirs in the wintertime out of the catalog pages when they were in the outhouse. They would then stamp the fire out before they left.

One morning, Ed and his brother were awakened by their father asking them,  "Which one of you damn boy's burnt down the outhouse?"  Seems their father went out to do his morning business and as he came around the wood pile, nothing was left of the outhouse but a smoldering hole.  They had their work cut out for them that day building a new one.

C.C's Outhouse
In the early 80's, I had a friend that lived in Floyd County, VA in a 1930's home. It had gravity flow water and an outhouse. The land would not "perk" to put a septic system in and it's remote location meant no town sewer service so that also was out of the question.

I took another friend to visit who had never used an outhouse in her life. But this one was quite made up.

This outhouse had a regular toilet seat, a red fuzzy seat warmer, a red rug, a framed picture on the wall, a magazine rack, a toilet paper holder and it had electricity ran to it for a light and a heater. The one who had never visited an outhouse was quite impressed.  These are pictures of the house and outhouse I'm including in this blog post.  Yes the fuzzy seat warmer is airing out.

The outhouse is to the left of the house in this picture. The car is a 1974 Trans AM 455 automatic. Could not pass a gas station it didn't like but would fly. The one in the foreground is what we called the "Falchero"  It was a Falcon that was made into a pick up truck and painted camo style.  Great to go hunting and bar hopping in.

That's it for my outhouse stories for now.

I welcome any comments and stories you may have of your own outhouse tales.

The Fatigue of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

In dealing with any illness it is the symptoms that make it worse. In this blog, coming up on July 4th, 2013, I have about 9 drafts of articles and each one I have quite a bit of material for. With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, (what they ended up giving me as a diagnosis when I didn't recover from the virus's I had), and heart problems, the worst part is having the energy to put together those ideas while being so tired.  When you are tired the brain fog takes over and so I have to work when my mind is not as tired or the articles won't make sense. Even to me.

I went to my doctor's this week and his frustration is the same as mine. There is no cause for Fibromyalgia nor CFS and thus no cure. All he can do is treat symptoms and those can change on a daily basis. What is the connection to the two diseases or to tick diseases? I was diagnosis with Fibro years ago and laughed at it. I thought it was more my working 2 jobs, while going to school full time with 2 kids and a disabled husband as the cause of aches and tiredness. Worked for years with it before developing full blown Chronic Fatigue Syndrome two years ago.

But research on these illnesses are coming out. Some hope comes through in articles like this: Cause for Fibromyalgia mystery solved. Vascular... imagine that as a possible cause. We have hope that one day the causes and cures will be found. In the meantime I juggle symptoms while trying to live some kind of a normal life.

So I thought I'd list some of the articles I'm working on. My last one...thank goodness I had been working on for a while. Ya'll tell me if this blog gets too disjointed and doesn't make sense. Be my editors so to speak.
Articles In Process:

Jenny Wiley story - Jenny Wiley was a woman who was captured by Indians in 1789 in Bland County, Virginia and taken to Kentucky. Quite a famous case in our area. I was working on that research when I became ill. I am still working on it but writing as I go. It will take a while to get that post up because there are some loose ends and it depends on my brain as to whether what I find makes sense but I am getting there. What I'm learning so far is the official story is a bit flawed and I have to verify those flaws.

Ned Sizemore Clan- You are Native but You Can't Claim That Tribe -  Many folks in my area are kin to Ned Sizemore who was a Native American out of North Carolina. His family applied to claim on several different rolls for benefits and recognition. Each one was quite odd in that none of the commissioners denied they were Native, they just denied them rights of each tribe they said they belong to. A new Melungeon DNA project proves their Native blood line. I'm working on that article to discuss the problems with Native American Appalachian Ancestry and trying to have a connection or recognize that. This one may be two articles. I am toying with that.

Search for Grand Dad's Music. This is the story of my Grandfather Wesley Bane Boyles who was a member of the West Virginia Coon Hunters. A band that played at the infamous Bristol sessions in 1927. The Birth of Country Music. This one is about finished and will be posted first. Mainly because I wrote most of it for the family years ago.

Moonshine Beneath the Pale Moon Light-  Story of moonshiners in my family gathered from news articles and oral history.  I'm trying to record the song Copper Kettle (kind of the family anthem) the way my grandfather taught me. But the old mountain dulcimer won't stay in tune. And these days I sound like a bathtub baritone, great sounding under water!!

Outhouse Stories- Build it Down Wind of the House, Boys -  This one is a further take on the outhouse in Appalachia. With stories gathered from family and friends of their experiences with having to use an outhouse.

Places in our area. Different events places I visit. Have a couple of those in the works. Have to promote our AREA!!

And many, many more.  But I am tired this week. The illness is beating me up pretty good. So I will quit for now. Some have asked why I don't write a book....well I am doing that too... a novel...began years ago.

But I don't know what the future holds. This illness has thrown me for a loop.  It is more important for me if we are going to dispel the myths about Appalachia than Appalachian people are going to have to tell their stories. This is just my family and mine. There are so many good Appalachian bloggers. I really enjoy +Dave Tabler blog, +Gary Holbrook website and Granny Sue the storyteller and antique hunter. Please spread the word and subscribe to all of us. And if you have one about Appalachia let me know. I want to do a list on the side bar to promote that too. Blessings to all.

Johnny Depp's Mother is Appalachian? What Does This Mean to Be An Appalachian?

All photos on this page are from my family albums. This is my mom.

I have been trying to write this blog post for months. Even the title I can not decide. Should it be, "Who is an Appalachian?," "What is an Appalachian?", or "Where are Appalachians located?" It is such an elusive broad topic for this Appalachian woman, I kept putting it off. But everyday something else pops up about Appalachia. In my mind, because we keep being labeled not in a good way, I think it is important to try to put it in some kind of perspective.

Then +Johnny Depp ,.... BLESS his heart....said something about his mother's Appalachian roots and a flood gate opened in my head. I will say I am a little upset with what he said, and I am a Johnny Depp fan, but now, however I say it, something HAS to be said.

This is not going to be some scholarly article. I can write on that level but scholars write for scholars and I'm of the opinion they like to use words that are mostly....well... for scholars. I am of the opinion also many need to be beat over the head with a dictionary.

Why worry with what is an Appalachian? Because my family has been located here in the Virginia/North Carolina/West Virginia mountains for many, many generations and that makes my grandchildren and my family, even those that live at a distance, of or pertaining to, or located in Appalachia, Appalachian. We deal with what ever that means every single day. Our history, our culture, the way we talk, how we live, are all effected by others perception of Appalachians but most importantly our own perception of ourselves.

Today what brought up my desire to write about this topic again was this article in the upcoming July 4th Rolling Stone Johnny Depp interview.   Where even Johnny Depp says, "My mother was raised in a shack, in the wilds of Appalachia, where the toilet was an outhouse."  He was using the reference to child rearing practices of butt whooping, which was a more universal common practice whose use has changed. The violence alone of "spare the rod, spoil the child" practice was in a much broader religious use than just in Appalachia, but I took what he was saying was his mother didn't know better because of where she was raised. I understand what he's saying about child rearing today is better and less violent but .... mentioning it with Appalachia, shacks and outhouses.....well hurt my feelings.

Sigh......I, for one, have a very different understanding of Appalachian outhouses. Always have. Given the modern problems we have with sewer systems sometimes it would be preferable to have an outhouse! I even argued at a meeting on museum displays that we should not downplay the existence of outhouses in our Appalachian story. I knew many a fancy house with an outhouse just because a septic system could not be put in. It wasn't just the shacks in Appalachia that had an outhouse. There are modern businesses today that have tanks in the ground that need a pump and haul system in Appalachia.

I spoke about that in another blog post. But those two words, "outhouse" and "Appalachia", automatically only "down trodden poor ignorant people" comes to mind. Perhaps his mother was from a poor family with an outhouse, but it seems like I have to defend this subject all the time to those not understanding the make up of the ground, especially in my part of Appalachia, with the nature of building sewer systems.

My grandfather in the 1960's lived in the Bluefield, WV city limits in a four room house he built himself with gravity flow water and an outhouse.  We really didn't consider ourselves "poor" but from the outside looking in I guess folks would think that.

All my life outhouses are just something we lived with and I was born in the 50's. In the 70's and 80's I was living in houses with an outhouse.  In the early 80's, I had a friend that lived in Floyd County, VA in a 1930's home. It had gravity flow water and an outhouse. The land would not "perk" to put a septic system in and it's remote location meant no town sewer service so that also was out of the question.

I took another friend to visit who had never used an outhouse in her life. But this one was quite made up. This outhouse had a regular toilet seat, a red fuzzy seat warmer, a red rug, a framed picture on the wall, a magazine rack, a toilet paper holder and it had electricity ran to it for a light and a heater. The one who had never visited an outhouse was quite impressed.

Today we just have a septic system on this 150 year old house. The problem for that system is we hooked the water up to a treated public water system and it's killing our septic system. Building a sewer plant in an area as rocky and winding in this part of Appalachia for a few people is quite costly. I had an engineer tell me that an outhouse would be more eco-friendly than our septic systems which are failing. Some of us Appalachians have always realized an outhouse can be the results of issues beyond anyone's control and know how to live with an outhouse as a resource. Today modern solar compostable toilets are a blessing in this area. Sorry Johnny, my point is we don't see ourselves in that same "poor" light for having to use one.

So what is an Appalachian and where is Appalachia?  Wiki gives this definition: Appalachia is a cultural region in the eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York state to northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.^[1] While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountain in the U.S. state of Alabama, the cultural region of Appalachia typically refers only to the central and southern portions of the range. As of 2005, the region was home to approximately 23 million people.^[2] 

The Appalachian Regional Commission has a map of Appalachian Counties. From Maine to Mississippi the trouble really begins because there is such a great diversity of people within the Appalachian geographic region itself to even try to define what is an Appalachian.  Many don't take too kindly to say that the only cultural area is in the central or southern portions of the range. There is also a wide spectrum of the economic base from millionaires to miners as well as different ethnicities and races which are comprised in this area called Appalachia.

I have another friend that says he can beat me on the diversity issue of an Appalachian because first he's black, with Native American and an Italian grandmother!  He also says the being a black/Native American/Appalachian now days on the discrimination scale is a triple whammy.

Northern Appalachians say there is a different culture in Southern Appalachia. Many say the Southern Appalachian stereotype gives other Appalachians a bad name. I became very upset once in college because my professor said that the moonshining, blue grass music picking Appalachian was a myth or a stereotype perpetuated by Hollywood. Okay I can tell the difference but EXCUSE ME?  He just had told me my whole family history and experience was a myth? And that was not true!!

But in talking to him over the years what we came to understand is that it was a different history and experience for his Appalachian family. They lived in a town with water and sewer in a slightly northern area from my family. Which leads me to believe that even some Appalachians are discriminatory towards other Appalachians.

Another real bone of contention is "dialects". The way we talk in different areas especially the southern mountains.  Appalachian English of which my family and community in my part of Southern Appalachia still speaks is disappearing. We have always had a hard time dealing with this issue inside the area and out. We are told in order to communicate we need to change our language to "proper modern English".  Never mind some of the forms of the Appalachian English we speak are older than that!  The dialects are different in different areas but one of the most glaring obvious clues you have that you are talking to an Appalachian, especially a Southern Appalachian, is when we open our mouths and speak.

I have a relative right now who works for a very large international company in our area who was given English courses and diction courses to get the "twang" out of his speech in order to be employed by this company. There are also people who work at call centers in our area that have said they experienced the same thing. One lady told me you can get written up for speaking any of the old dialect.  I find it ironic that Samuel Clemons/Mark Twain made a career of writing southern dialects into characters of his books, yet we are wanting to eradicate those in our area from speaking in their own. Is it any different getting someone from India with a dialect when you dial a call center for computer service?

Some say we are winning the dialect war because of words that were ours making it into modern English speech especially in the south. That somewhat may be true but the old speech I grew up with is dying out quite rapidly. I don't say, "If' in ye a mind to", that often as my aunts did. Plus there seems to be this modern move to eradicate it from our children completely in school.

How do you explain that to your grandchildren? How do you save our culture and dialect or at least honor it? Especially when you come across articles like this: Appalachian Americans the Invisible Minority . The goal is to help our children understand today they have to be multi-cultural in order to survive.

Our problems over the years seem to be the perceptions of those from outside the area looking at our people through their own ideals of what life should be like. Many times in the past it was just to exploit our resources then automatically deciding they needed to modernize and change us. As if we could not figure that out on our own.

My Aunt Florence once was told by a missionary, "We have come to save the Appalachian People." At which my aunt asked her, "From what?" She never got an answer. 

Another time a lady came by for a visit during canning season. She was visiting homes in the holler giving out brochures about proper canning. Now my Aunt was in her late 60's and had been canning all her life and never poisoned anyone. I remember when the lady left she said, "Good Lord, they are trying to save us to death!"

We here in this part of Appalachia know the War on Poverty of the Kennedy administration, especially in reference to our area, was based on a very skewed view of Appalachia. At that time there were millionaires mansions right along side a house with an outhouse in the same area they were giving out food stamps. Poverty, any where in the U.S., when you focus on it and take a picture of it, looks the same. The economic systems and politics that create that poverty are prevalent everywhere not just Appalachia.

I am an Appalachian woman by ancestry and I guess definition. When I was growing up we never considered ourselves "Appalachians". That really is a new recent term for our family. We called ourselves, "hillbillies" and to us it was a badge of honor. A redneck was a striking union member. They wore red bandanas around their necks so you would know who was who in a strike. That could be miners or railroaders either one.  It was turned into something completely different from what I grew up with.

I can see where we were different in our speech, our traditions and our location of family history. We never thought of ourselves in the perceptions I am hearing now. We never thought of any of our family as backwards or poor. An outhouse in Appalachia could just mean bad location for a sewer system. Just regular hardships of life.

In all my study of our family history that goes back on the eastern shores of Virginia 100 years prior to the Revolutionary War, to 1750's on the frontier, the "isolated" Appalachian just did NOT exist in my family!! EVER!!! They had kinship ties all over the United States traveling far and wide! Our family reunions look sometimes like the United Nations.

So what is an Appalachian? I think that is for us to determine now. Is it just people tied to a geographical area? Is it a separate distinct culture? To change the bad perceptions we are going to have to tell our actual stories and our history with an understanding that there were moonshiners, outhouses and millionaires all in the mix.

And Johnny Depp? I am sure your mother will never ever have to use an outhouse again. But I can bet that if all the worlds systems go into a crisis and the sewer systems quit working....you'd be asking her how to build and maintain one and she would KNOW!!  Appalachians from the wild have that knowledge.

Please feel free to comment your thoughts on these subjects.  Yes, I know I was a little hard on Johnny Depp...but I have just about all his movies. To me he's one of the best actors of our times. I am a big fan but that doesn't mean he ain't above reproach. None of us are. His mother is Appalachian and that to me makes him Appalachian, though he may be a refugee from us. As such he has to come to terms to what that identity means to him and his family and question do the outside perceptions of what is an Appalachian really fit?

August 2016 UPDATE Condolences to the Depp family on his mother's death. There is a saying here in the mountains...as long as our children's hearts beat and our grandchildren's hearts beat, so does ours.

On another note I love this song about Appalachians.

Gentrification of Appalachia

Appalachia is changing. Has been for some time.  I know there is no one stereotype of Appalachain people. But lately I've noticed this dogged undercurrent of a big getting away from any mention of the old ways especially about outhouses and the way we lived and referring to it as being so substandard. People, especially those new to Appalachia, wanting to see our history distanced from a past that frankly was just the way it was before they brought money here and a demand for good plumbing.  A tweaking of this ideal life for what Appalachia is or isn't for folks.  It just depends on who you talk to.
The Appalachia my family knew was just different. We were not rich people, we were salt of the earth people. We used an outhouse because there was no septic system or city sewer system. Many places the ground was so rocky with so much clay they couldn't have put a septic system in even if you wanted to.

Just within the last ten years I have hooked the old 150 year old house to a public water system. We finally disconnected the old well. This was not just a matter of rich or poor but more of what was available. But in my lifetime I've been in some fancy houses that had lousy plumbing in Appalachia.

I can remember carrying good water in jugs from a spring when I was younger in the early 1970s. The house we lived in, though it had a well and a bathroom, it was IRON water. Turned all your clothes orange!!  And the bathroom froze up in the winter despite Dad's best efforts. He put in an outhouse for emergencies.  It was not a bad way of living just different and we coped with it. Some folks had sulfur water that smelled like rotten eggs and would clog up pipes for the same results. But an outhouse built character is what my grandmother said. Some homes didn't have well water they had gravity flow water off a hill and went into a cistern. It was not only the monetary resources of the people but the geography of the mountains that produced the stereotypes of living conditions.

But I went to a meeting the other day and it was among people who are trying to save the heritage of our Appalachia and create a tourism market in Appalachia.  What struck me the most is here were people talking of the mountain music, arts, crafts, history and wanting to celebrate that by speaking of wanting to change the stereotype of Appalachia such as everyone lived in a house with an outhouse in the old days. They wanted to change the perception of Appalachia from the barefoot children going to school and the backwoods downtrodden folks to one of gentility instead. I kept thinking every community I have researched family history in had barefoot children pictures in school. So now we don't want to show "that part" of Appalachia, even though they existed and it was real. OK.....mmmmm   And it's because we are trying to "sell" the Appalachian experience. Ok.... what the heck is that?

Well see now there are artisans now taking up the Appalachian crafts, (I applaud those folks for that) and are creating a semi quasi mythical way of life, creating art studios and art trails. But the wonder of it is very few of these folks I have talked to are people actually from Appalachia.  Many have Ph.ds and just want this simple way of life that they think Appalachia of the past represented. Yet they have changed Appalachia by coming into the mountains. Mainly because they are not content with doing without modern amenities. So they moved on a mountain top and then brought money to demand decent plumbing and trash pick up and roads. It's been amusing to watch.

But what I really find questionable is many want to make this extraordinary living at the old Appalachian "arts" or even small farming while changing the view of Appalachian actual history. It's not a bad thing to have this diverse economic growth. We have goat people, and alpaca's, and ostriches with sheep and wineries. Very odd to walk through the mountains and run up on an ostrich! 

But I recently saw a "chair" artist. He made split oak chairs much like my great grandfather did. Wants a pretty penny for them too, $300 and up each. Is it worth it, probably if you don't want to have the pride to make it yourself, but looking at his work and remembering the old chairs around the family, I don't think he took the care that Grand dad did with making his chairs.

And wineries, there were many in the mountains who made there own brews. Just wasn't as commercial though we had a quite few small business commercial operations.  There was actually a small winery in Bland County ran by the Justus family. But we mostly made our own. I ought to pull out my aunt's dandelion wine recipe. (I once made a batch collecting dandelions off the municipal courthouse lawn in Radford VA. Prettiest crop of dandelions you ever saw that year.)

This is the difference, these new chairs, these new wines, are for money on an economic level that just never existed here in the mountains much. I had an uncle who ran a mill and for grinding the corn he would take a percentage of the corn not coin and then would sell it sending it by train or wagon east and south. It was more of a barter system that I am aware of. And of the chairs,  Grand Daddy made his chairs because he was too poor to purchase Grand Maw store bought ones. He would "trade" making a chair if he found something to trade for. We made do using the resources we had...and in the process, was artful in how we made do. The myth and simple life they want, the newcomers are destroying because they don't understand it came with an outhouse and bad plumbing. It came from a more barter system of community. It came out of necessity.

We provided for ourselves something useful like a quilt out of the best part of a rag, something beautiful like a hand carved box out of left over wood, or created music that sounded sweet or sad or made you want to dance. That's what made it different, that's what makes Appalachia special. It was born out of hard times, not good times. Out of real life, not easy street or the rich parlors of the coal or railroad barrons, but on the side of a mountain in a house that could be called a shack today. I wonder what picture they would rather have on the wall with a quilt in a museum exhibit. A ranch style brick?

Now, our children are buying in to the modern life. What will they learn of their own history? Will the story be we never had to make what we needed and we all lived in real fancy homes and only made chairs for art sake. It's second nature. We have indoor plumbing and water now. The cross cut saw is hanging in the shed, rusted. We go to Walmart and Lowes and no longer have to travel a long distance to get a stove. They won't know that we ordered from Sears and Roebuck the fancy things and pick them up off the train. Our children don't know about going into town only on Saturday. By the way, those that lived in town, yes, they might have had indoor plumbing in some of the houses but right next door you had an outhouse that could be visited by a tanker truck in the late 1970s to pump it out!

Appalachia has changed and is changing and now to tell our story they want to get away from the reality of the circumstances that existed for many of our Appalachian people that created the real art of Appalachia, the flavor of Appalachia, the one they sort of want to mimic for big bucks.

At that meeting there was a comment that people from the mountains are "ashamed" to say how they lived so we need to steer clear of any exhibit that puts Appalachian people in a stereotypical light such as with an outhouse.  That statement made me feel hurt and ashamed that we have to change what I know of my own family history just to please...... who? and I wanted to scream OH FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, HOW STUPID CAN YOU GET!!!  I think we ought to embrace every bit of our history and all the things that made us different even the darn plumbing!!! If you are going to tell the story and get the "flavor" of Appalachia that is a BIG part of it.

This Picture is of Grand Dad sitting in a homemade split oak chair, in a house with gravity flow water and an outhouse, in June 1961, just on the outskirts of Bluefield WV.   THAT'S REAL APPALACHIAN HISTORY FOR ME!!!