In the winter of 1892, a letter written by a Blowing Rock, North Carolina school teacher to a friend in Hemingford, Nebraska ignited quite the firestorm.
The letter was a private correspondence but became public when the author’s friend permitted extracts to be published in the Hemingford Guide in a February 12, 1892 article titled “From the South: A Superior Being in North Carolina Writes to a Friend in Nebraska.” A gentleman living in Nebraska – a former North Carolina resident – sent a copy of the newspaper to The Lenoir Topic in Caldwell County with the accompanying remarks: “I consider her statements the most absurd that I have ever read. She brands the people there with being dishonest, ignorant, filthy and, in her own words, as low down as the negroes. She also makes several other statements that I have never found to be true while living in Western North Carolina fifteen years.”
With only gender and occupation to identify the sender and only “Mrs. M___” identifying the recipient, the letter was reprinted as follows by The Lenoir Topic on March 2, 1892:
"It was very nice to receive so long a letter from you, and this evening I will try and answer some of your questions, if I can for talking.
“I think you are of the opinion that I am in a colored school. No; it is work among the mountain whites, many as low down as the negroes. After teaching so long in public schools, where each individual feels it his or her duty to ‘boss’ and direct the teacher, it is quite delightful to be as free and independent as we are here. We are the ones who do the ‘bossing,’ and the neighbors come to us for advice, and we are looked up to as superior beings by those who know us, but are only ‘Northerners’ or ‘Yankees’ to those who do not.
“The feeling is strong here. There is but one Union man in the country here, and he, poor man, finds life hardly worth living, he is so ill-treated and ostracised. Before coming here I hardly knew that there was a North or a South, but one finds it out in a short time. The papers are so narrow and bitter and they misconstrue many things.
“The town is a mile away and contains two or three little stores, a post office and four large hotels within two miles. This is a famous resort, a thousand or so visitors coming in the summer on account of the cool climate, but in the winter the school is the only live thing and our meetings the only ones for miles. We have nearly 80 pupils enrolled, about thirty boarding in this house and an adjoining cottage. In the cottage, Miss ___ lives and cooks for us teachers. The girls bring provisions and Miss ___, the matron, superintends the work.
“We have a number of girls who furnish nothing, but we have $200 sent us this year for the support of such girls. The girls live on corn meal, potatoes, meat, cabbage and molasses. They use but little flour, preferring bread made of corn meal, water and salt to the best light bread. Their board only averages $2 per month, and they grow fat and keep healthy on such fare. I should starve, I think. Oh, they are so happy here after they get over their first home sickness. As one girl said, after the Christmas week’s vacation: ‘I was a heap worse off to come back than to go home.’
“Girls come here with stolid, expressionless faces, and they will scarcely comprehend the simplest directions, but it is beautiful to watch them change and see their faces brighten in a short time. We learn more and more that it is our living and loving that helps them more than ought else. Miss D__ is doing a grand work in teaching them to cook and keep things neat. You cannot imagine the filth many live in at home. Houses with no windows, no stoves, all the family living in one room, some half clad, and such wretchedness as to make one’s heart ache.
“This neighborhood is improved very much from the influences of the school. The girls are eager to learn, and do try, but are so ‘unthoughted,’ as they express carelessness. And most of all, they have no ancestry of honesty and truthfulness back of them. I had no idea before how devoutly thankful I should be for a good ancestry. There is hope for the young people but none for the older ones. They, or many of them, are shiftless, lazy and careless. It is not uncommon for a man to have had three or more wives. The women hoe all day, do the house work, raise a family, chop the wood, milk, etc., and men loaf, visit, and pretend to work a little, so one man can easily outlive several wives.
“Oh, Mrs. M__, we do need so much wisdom from on high in guiding these young people. It almost frightens me to think of what my influence might do, for we are watched and copied so. I do enjoy the work very much and am happy in doing it, but nature asserts itself sometimes and we long to see friends and hear others talk than ‘reckon,’ ‘heap,’ ‘right smart,’ ‘plumb,’ ‘tote,’ etc.”
The Lenoir Topic made the following commentary regarding the letter:
“The Topic has never been accused of being either narrow or bitter and it intends that its comments upon this letter shall be characterized by breadth and liberality and it does not intend to misconstrue anything that the writer of the letter to Nebraska said.
“We doubt if this letter was meant by the writer for publication and the friend to whom it was sent acted very indiscreetly in making it public. But, having been printed, it belongs to the public and those persons who have been treated unjustly by it have a right to protest.
“We shall preface our criticism by urging whatever excuse we may find in the letter for the writing of it. If we were to go off to Nebraska and find ourselves set down among strangers with different manners, customs and ways of thinking from those prevailing at home, we should become very ‘homesick’ for old North Carolina and we should be in no mood to do justice to anything with which we might come in contact in Nebraska. Our state of mind would be illustrated by an anecdote we heard the other day. A Northern gentleman was visiting the house of a Southern friend, several years ago, and on one fine moonlight evening found himself in the company of the beautiful daughter of the family out on the piazza, surrounded by lovely flowers and beautiful tropical plants. The gentleman remarked upon the beauty of his surroundings and suggested that the moon shone brilliantly. ‘Oh! yes,’ replied the young lady, ‘it is all very pretty but this is nothing to the way it used to shine before the war!’ Neither the moon nor the sun could shine quite as brightly for us in Nebraska as it does in North Carolina. And may we not believe that our North Carolina moonshine fails to satisfy the aesthetic nature of our Nebraska guest?
“This letter has internal evidence for us that its writer is an earnest person intent upon doing good, but sharing the same fate that overtakes many like them, these good intentions result in accomplishments that do no justice to the motives that prompted them. A slander emanating from a prejudiced, fanatical person who claims to be actuated by right motives does incalculably more injury than one which can be traced to improper motives.
“There are isolated communities in Western North Carolina that do not enjoy as many facilities for the diffusion of cultivation and refinement as do large cities or more populous and wealthy communities adjacent to them. But the lack of these admirable and delectable graces does not imply the absence of the more important if more homely virtues of self-respect, honesty and truthfulness. The charges of uncleanliness, dishonesty, untruthfulness and general degradation, brought against the people of a certain portion of Western North Carolina, fall just short of being sweeping and taking in the whole population but are applied to so ‘many’ that they become as offensive as if they were sweeping and inclusive of all. It is a vicious, if ignorant, slander against a sturdy, honest, patriotic people, which stops not at maligning the living, but calumniates the ‘ancestry’ of the present race.
“The truth is that our author has taken some cases, which are the exception and not the rule, and from these particulars has fabricated an account of general condition. For, while ‘in many cases’ is so often used in the letter, the impression conveyed is that the letter gives a picture of life in Western North Carolina. Another strange assertion is that about the ‘one Union man.’ The great majority of the people in Western North Carolina were Union men, so-called, up to the beginning of the war and now we are all Union men. There is not one disunionist among us. And we know no such thing as ostracism. Any man who does not insolently push his peculiar political, social or religious views upon his neighbor is treated with civility.
“These remarks, we are quite sure, apply to all of Western North Carolina. We can, however, give a past illustration of the incorrectness of this correspondent’s statements. Blowing Rock is very much such a place as to its elevated location as the writer describes and there is conducted there precisely just such a school as is spoken of in the letter to the Nebraska lady. We are confident that the excellent people who conduct this worthy institution will corroborate what The Topic says. Taking them altogether, there is not a finer race of people in America than that which inhabits Western North Carolina. We charitably incline to the notion that the writing of the letter which we criticize was due to an error of the head and not of the heart of the superior being who wrote it. It was surely a case of liver disease or of homesickness. And it was very ‘unthoughted’ of the Nebraska friend to print it.”
“PERSONA NON GRATA AT BLOWING ROCK”
Word of the newspaper’s sharing of the letter soon traveled up the mountain from Lenoir to Blowing Rock, some residents being notified by telegraph to be on the outlook for the publication as it “contained a sensation.” As soon as subscribers read the letter, there was much excitement about the gross injustice they keenly believed had been done to their community by such sweeping statements, and an impromptu committee immediately went to the Skyland Institute to show the paper to the teachers there, one of whom was Frances Annette Jackson, a twenty-four-year-old Ohio native. The ancestors of her Connecticut-born parents, Andrew E. and Elmira Jane Marsh Jackson, had settled in New England as early as the 1600s. Miss Jackson had lived for a time as a youngster in Illinois and as a teenager in Minnesota, and her parents eventually settled in Cumberland County, Tennessee. Faced with a committee consisting of Ben Greene, Filmore Coffey (half-brother of Civil War renegade Keith Blalock), H. C. Martin (Blowing Rock Mayor), Charles Carter (Blowing Rock Postmaster), Isaac Newton Corpening, and a Mrs. Ingle (likely Mary, wife of German Reformed pastor John Ingle), Miss Jackson acknowledged that she was the author of the letter but that it was private correspondence that she never intended for her Nebraska friend to publish. She expressed regret over the publication of the letter, but this did not fully satisfy the local committee as their desire was for her to retract her statements and renounce the letter as “an unjust aspersion upon the people of Western North Carolina.” Their expectation of Miss Jackson, “without humiliation and without any imputations upon her veracity,” was that she “say to her friends and neighbors at Blowing Rock that she is sorry that she wrote the letter and that it conveys an entirely erroneous picture of life in Western North Carolina, a picture that she did not intend to paint.” The Lenoir Topic guaranteed that, if Miss Jackson would make such an acknowledgement, the people would accept it as a satisfactory apology. Although Blowing Rock citizens were reportedly “very indignant,” they “do not claim that their country is perfect or that it is a Utopia, but they claim that it is not as painted in that letter.” The Blowing Rock people are “proud and high-spirited but…also…generous, warm-hearted and impulsive and will meet any well-meaning person more than halfway.” In response to being confronted by the committee, Miss Jackson promised to write an article for the press clearing up the matter. While anxiously awaiting this anticipated apology, the citizenry “acted with great moderation and have confined their manifestation entirely to the practical act of withholding the supplies [to the school].”
Skyland Institute, a school for girls, had been founded in Blowing Rock in 1887 by Miss Emily Catherine Prudden, who, at the time of this controversy, was fifty-eight years old. Miss Prudden, like Miss Jackson’s parents, was a native of Connecticut, and she had left her home state at the age of forty-six, after raising her sister’s orphaned children, to teach in Berea, Kentucky. She subsequently lived for a brief period of time with a sister in Minnesota and, in 1882, traversed south to serve as housemother at the Brainerd Institute in Chester, South Carolina. Nearly deaf since the age of seventeen and later arthritic, she went on to become a missionary educator – one of many “Yankee schoolmarms” who came South in the late nineteenth century. Miss Prudden established fifteen primary and secondary schools – some white and some black – in needy communities within western North Carolina beginning in 1884. In the summer of 1885, Miss Prudden vacationed in Blowing Rock, and when she returned the following summer, she purchased a large boundary of land for the purpose of establishing Skyland Institute. Miss Prudden was highly regarded for her philanthropy by the citizens of Blowing Rock. She conducted regular meetings for mothers during which she would share new recipes and dress patterns and serve sugar cookies and milk to their youngsters. Twice a year, she would acquire barrels of used clothing and distribute it to local people.
After establishing a school, Miss Prudden typically only remained in that locale for a few years before transferring control of the institution to a more financially equipped organization, such as a church. This was the case with Skyland Institute by the time the “Nebraska letter” was written, Miss Prudden having turned the school over to the American Missionary Association in 1890. But some prominent residents of Blowing Rock who were concerned about the letter still perceived her to have a controlling interest in the school and wrote to her, asking her to come there “and straighten out the tangle” with hopes that her intervention could “pour oil on the troubled waters.” Recognizing the great good and noble work that Skyland Institute had done in their community, these residents desired for such excellence to continue, but they felt it would be “greatly hindered if the present strained relations existing between some of the teachers and the whole community remain as they are.” Prior to the debacle, the school’s enrollment had reached around eighty students, some of whom were paying pupils and others who received charitable scholarships for free tuition and financial assistance. Many Wataugans patronized the school, but within a week of “the letter” hitting the presses, approximately thirty-five students withdrew. Even the “one Union man” mentioned in Miss Jackson’s letter, Dr. Charles Carter, a Northern man serving as Blowing Rock’s postmaster, desired to distance himself from her assertions, stating that he desired “no such distinction” and “that he is delighted with Blowing Rock and its people who have always treated him well.”
On March 3, 1892, Miss Jackson wrote a “letter of explanation” that was printed in the March 9 issue of The Lenoir Topic:
“To the Editor of The Lenoir Topic: Certain parts of a letter which appeared in The Lenoir Topic of March 2nd are liable to be misunderstood. The extracts were from a private letter written to a dear friend, one who has been a teacher and is interested in missionary work. It was in reply to questions regarding mission work in the mountain country. It does not refer to the friends here who feel aggrieved at the statement of some facts which are mild compared with other truths that I might have written – not about them – but about certain sections of this and adjoining States. I have a large correspondence and to some of my friend write hurriedly, not expressing myself in the clearest manner. It is easy to be careless when one is trying to attend to several duties at once, as was the case when the letter in question was written. I know that the recipient of the letter, for whom alone it was written, would understand my statement because of previous correspondence. I regret that you and some of the readers of The Topic do not.
“The principal trouble in this vicinity seems to be in regard to the following:-
“1st. The comparison of the relative positions of many families. I see no reason to change this since there is ample evidence of its truthfulness.
“2nd. The statement that I knew of but one Union man. I do not, to this moment know of but one Union man in this locality. I was not aware that it is now necessary for a man to say that he is a Union man or otherwise. My friend well understood me to mean but one man who had fought in the Union army, though she knows there are many in other mountain sections.
“3rd. The expression of thankfulness for good ancestry. I had reference to good parents who were desirous that their children should know more of the world than they knew, have a better education than they had, and thereby be better prepared to enjoy life in its best sense. I still doubt the truthfulness and honesty of an ancestry that puts the children out to work, collecting what they earn, promising to send them to school in the winter, but when that season comes letting them spend their time in idleness or worse. Is not my third position corroborated by another letter which appeared in The Topic of the 2nd inst.?*
“The money and help which we receive in these schools come largely through letters written telling of the needs not the prosperity of the people, and, if at any time these needs do not exist the work can be removed to those localities where it is known to exist.”
(*Miss Jackson’s mention of another letter in The Lenoir Topic on March 2 refers to the following quote on the page preceding her letter, from a correspondent using the pseudonym “Raola”: “All we need to make the free school system a success is parents…But some parents not only won’t make their children go but they will not let them when the child is anxious. They are usually the men who keep six or seven children at home all day to tie fodder after sundown, kick against everything done in the district. Go home mad, let their wives get the stove wood and then sit down to tell the family, ‘It’s all a farce.’ I am well acquainted with some of them. They live close here and I can only associate them in my mind with a certain ‘four footed animal that eats garbage and wallows in the mud.’ When will parents learn that their children’s welfare is in their noblest interest?”)
Despite her letter of explanation, public sentiment was that, although Miss Jackson “had it in her power to change this condition entirely,” her follow-up letter did not equate their expected apology. Accordingly, The Lenoir Topic reported that “under the present circumstances, Miss Jackson is, to use a diplomatic phrase, a persona non grata at Blowing Rock.”
“…WE WOULD BE PLEASED FOR HER TO DEPART…”
By now, Miss Jackson’s original letter had become locally known as “that Nebraska letter” and was once again reprinted, this time on page 4 of the March 10, 1892 issue of the Watauga Democrat. Along with the letter, in that same issue, appeared the following editorial comments:
On page 2:
“We publish on the 4th page of this issue the letter written by Miss Annette Jackson, a teacher at the Sky Land [sic] Institute, in Blowing Rock. The same was published in last week’s Topic. Every one we hear speak of the letter denounces it in the most severe terms, and we think it very rediculous [sic], to say the least of it. Her apology published in this week’s Topic is a very poor excuse indeed, and in our opinion, it only adds fuel to fire. We advise this angelic creature to withdraw from the school at once and go to a more congenial clime, where the people are not so ‘ignorant’; where they are not so low as the ‘nigger’; where the people are cleanly, and ‘filthiness’ is unknown; where the pure, clear-cut English language is used, and where no more slang phrases will grate upon her ears, and especially where the men do not outlive ‘two or more wives.’ Yes, we would be pleased for her to depart from all this filthiness, poverty, ignorance, and uncleanliness, for she is too pure and her ancestry too grand to be situated as she is. If this lady believes what she has written of the people of W.N.C., she should at once withdraw from the school; and if she does not believe it, she ought to make a proper apology and set the matter right. We are sorry that she wrote the letter, and that the school established by that good lady, Miss Pruden [sic], will be greatly injured if not entirely ruined by it.”
And again on page 3:
“Provide yourself with a bottle of camphor, for fear you become sick; get as comfortable seat as possible, and prepare to read one of the most slanderous, and libelous articles that has ever been published on the people of Western North Carolina. It is on the fourth page of this issue, written by Miss Annette Jackson, a teacher in Skyland Institute at Blowing Rock, and for malicious misrepresentations, and slanderous intent was never surpassed by any one [sic] who has such a scant stock of brains as is possessed by the light-headed, silly Nebraska school teacher.”
“The ‘Superior’ lady at Blowing Rock may learn much of the people of Western North Carolina, if she will watch the columns of the narrow (?) newspapers of the State. Our people are very much hurt at the accusations brought against them by a Nebraska lady, who knows so little about what she was writing. Look next time before you let ‘nature assert itself.’ Let’s hear from some of you, the descendants of the heroes of King’s Mountain. Some of you, no doubt, eat corn-bread, cabbage, meat and potatoes, but in whose veins runs the blood of a noble ancestry. Some of you may live in log houses, but they are models of cleanliness and tenanted by an honest and upright a people as ever trod American soil. It will be some time we imagine before this matter is quieted in the minds of an incensed people. We would not forget that she is a lady, but we feel almost tempted to give her a piece of advice given to a Pennsylvanian a few years ago, namely to ‘git’ on account of the falsity of the accusations brought against our people.”
In a letter to the Watauga Democrat editor, a writer only identified as “Justice” shared the following thoughts, “not in direct reply to the letter of the lady to whom reference is made,” but as “simply general observations on the conduct of travelers through our section by one who has himself been a wayfaring man.”
“Mr. Editor: - A letter, purporting to have been written by a lady teacher from the North who has been exercising her vocation in the mountains of W.N.C. reflects upon the character of our people unjustly, in the opinion of your correspondent, who has been sojourning in this section for some time. Yet it is comparatively an easy matter to fall into mistakes of this kind. A traveler through an unfrequented district is liable to have his ears assailed by marvelous tales narrated by scandal mongers and busy bodies, containing hints of dark practices in its social life. It takes him some time to sift them thoroughly, to judge the native population impartially, and admit their virtues as well as their vices candidly. Such was to some extent my experience. Not knowing any reason why dishonoring reports concerning this people should be circulated by apparently disinterested parties unless some foundation for them existed, I was naturally inclined to credit them and in some instances to repeat them. Personal observation afterwards convinced me that they were largely false. The people reared in these secluded valleys have the same human nature that is to be found the world over. So far as I have been able to see, it is not essentially more vicious and depraved here than elsewhere. While it is fulsome and depraved flattery to speak of the mountaineer as nature’s nobleman or as a sort of demigod, possessing every lofty trait that could adorn humanity, it is slanderous to attribute to him the vilest criminal habits and to allude to such things as characteristic of a whole community. A superficial study of the inhabitants of Western Carolina, without entering in to their home life, is liable to lead one into errors.
“First, it is easy to imagine that a want of individuality marks this people and that a single description is sufficient to give a correct idea of all. This is commonly the defect in the portrayal of the mountaineer (this term being used to distinguish them from the low-lander) by our popular novelists. They have a stereotyped method that serves to depict him wherever he may be found, just as some critics have a box of stock phrases which they have only to shake afresh every time they wish to introduce a new book to the public notice. Now no people have a more strongly marked individuality than those to be found in this Appalachian system. It does not require any great amount of intelligence to understand the statement frequently made by the historians of Greece that the multiplicity of Grecian states was due mainly to the independent spirit of their inhabitants caused through their separation from each other by intervening ranges of mountains. They held intercourse so seldom that their interests and opinions were not sufficiently similar to enable them to harmonize. The same feature is true to a limited degree of our citizens here. As close communication is not an easy matter, you are likely to find a greater variety of character among them than would be noticed in the low country, so that the same epithets will not apply to all. Perhaps no locality of the same area will present as many different types of humanity – good, bad and indifferent – as will be discerned here by him who discriminates fairly.
“Secondly, it is also easy to fancy that because the social life of a country we have just entered is not marked by certain customs with which we are familiar, it is totally corrupt. Upon going into any neighborhood, we often search for the vices peculiar to it and we never fail to unearth some. Nor, strange as it may seem, conduct reprehensible in one place is not always regarded so unfavorably in another and vici versa [sic]. So if we see that certain habits we have been accustomed to condemn where we have been raised are more prevalent where we are temporarily sojourning, we take it for granted that every thing has gone wrong. We do not remember that, although other forms of vice were rife in the home we had just left, we never gave it the ‘black eye,’ and concluded that it was almost a desperate case. What this country needs is that, while its would-be benefactors recognize its faults, they should also admit and applaud its virtues. Thus will they work more intelligently and more hopefully. They can see more clearly what is the nature of the task before them and what is the basis for their expectation of success. Your correspondent has been struck most especially by the independence and contentment of spirit displayed here – excellencies to be coveted by any people. What a boon to the world if something of this could be infused into the restless and dissatisfied bosoms of those who live in the great centres of trade and on the truck lines of transportation. Your correspondent heartily repents of ever having entertained the reports to which he refers, and trusts that others, who desire to do good, will wait until they have mingled more intimately with the people before expressing their views so confidently. What we want here are the educational and ecclesiastical advantages that are to be found in places in closer contact with the world’s wealth and culture, without the disadvantages of their saloons, their brothels, and their gambling gardens.”
One week later, on March 17, 1892, the Watauga Democrat carried the following commentary from a Caldwell County newspaper, the Gamewell Racket:
“There is no call for getting excited over the Nebraska letter, published in the Topic. Such letters are written by some travellers about every country they happen to visit, and such people as those described in the Nebraska letter may be found in small numbers in every State in the union. The trouble is, these letter writers keep bad company and then afflict the public with a description of it.
“One man went to Buncombe county and ‘bunked’ with one of these ‘filthy’ families, who all ‘live in one room,’ and was devoured by bedbugs and fleas. Afterwards he wrote a letter abusing North Carolina and complaining of the fleas. If this man had acted white and put up with respectable people he would have gotten away with his hide whole, and in a happy frame of mind. His taste was bad and more than likely his morals were.
“There are many people who think the whites are ‘lower’ than the negroes. This is simply a matter of taste, and depends on how such people have been raised on the kind of ‘ancestry’ they have back of them. If they believe this and act upon it and esteem the negroes above the whites, I don’t see how we can hinder them.
“I once visited a school of business, about a ‘mile from a town that contains two or three little stores, a post office, and many cottages and four large hotels, within two miles.’ I had with me a negro chain carrier. This servant was urgently invited into the parlor, given the place of honor and all the paintings, drawings and other art-pictures were spread before him for his inspections and criticisms, and he was treated with about the same degree of courtesy and honor that a gentleman would treat the Governor of the State, or one of his very distinguished friends. Men who held places of honor did not fare quite so well.
“I am too broad to complain of anything like this. I have nothing but pity for such people. They get into this kind of company and catch vermine [sic] and the itch, and then think they can get rid of them by cursing and abusing North Carolina, but they cannot. There is not sulphur enough in the hardest kind of searing to kill them. They have got to anoint themselves and wash themselves seven times in the river Jordan or some other water. There is not a tinge of sectionalism in what these people do or say. They are too broad for that. They are as broad as the gates of perdition. It is just individual taste that makes the difference, and this taste crops out alike in certain individuals in all countries.
“So let us be broad and charitable, and may we not believe that our North Carolina moonshine wants to satisfy the aesthetic nature of our Nebraska guest. No, it can’t be that North Carolina moonshine, if it has no rattle weed root in it, is as good as any moonshine in the world. The lady does not complain of the moonshine, and I have no doubt from this circumstance that it does satisfy her aesthetic nature, whatever that is, and besides this, I am informed that moonshine is the product of the Appalachian chain alone, and that in the broad and profound vocabulary of Nebraska’s slang, there is no such word as moonshine.”
“LET US JUDGE THE WRITER OF THE LETTER BY HER WORKS OF LOVE”
On March 11, 1892, Miss Emily Prudden wrote from Mitchell County “Another letter from the South” to the editor of The Lenoir Topic. It was published by the paper on March 23. The headline noted that Miss Prudden’s letter was a vindication of the people of Western North Carolina and an answer to unjust criticisms:
“Reading in The Topic of March 2nd ‘A letter from the South,’ I am moved to send another ‘letter’ expressing regret that those careless and indiscreet words should ever have been printed. Their grave should have been on Nebraska soil. They are not a fair sample of that lady’s efforts; nor do they, I am sure, express her real sentiments.
“Letters from this same lady, with countless others, freighted with words of love and appreciation for these dear mountain people, are daily hastening to every section of our land, and messages from every quarter are ever on the way hither, expressing deepest interest and affection for this same people; and yet, strange to tell – it is the one careless, random talk, that lighting in some far off corner of the land, springs to life again, and wings it[s] way back, on its mischievous errand. Would that those white-winged words of love and good will could also rise to view, and drown in oblivion all unfair and ‘unthoughted’ ones.
“There came to me in the same mail with The Topic, a letter from a teacher in another county in which after describing her pleasant friends, pupils and surroundings, she adds: ‘If other mountain sections are like this, I feel that the South has been misjudged.’
“As to Blowing Rock – the words of that letter cannot be taken to heart there. The coat does not fit them. That beautiful town with its dear, warm hearted, noble people, cannot be harmed by a shower of such letters, any more than these snow flakes that are tossed hither and tither by the March winds, as I write, can harm the earth where they lay themselves to rest.
“In this, Mitchell county, I find the same class of cordial, interesting, good people, that I have known at Blowing Rock. One who has lately settled in this county remarked, that he had been in every country of the world and visited the islands of the sea, and that there was not to be found another people under the sun with such sterling good qualities as these people possess.
“As to Union sentiment – during eight years of school work in six different counties, I have not heard one disloyal word – but many warm expressions of love and loyalty to our common country. Nor is this loyal feeling a recent arrival here. It came with the first settlers. It has been here ever since.
“With respect to ancestry; all the good ancestry any one can boast of belongs equally to the mountaineers. All the colonies inherited the best Europe had to give; only here in the mountains has this heritage of good blood been kept unadulterated. Dr. Roy, of Chicago, has recently written these words:- ‘As the storm of the Revolution was gathering, some of the colonists under Irish, Scotch and Hugenot [sic] leadership made their way into these mountain fastnesses and built there, their homes, their fortunes, and a new commonwealth. And so these mountain men became ‘The Rear Guard of the Revolution.’ And more than this, they were holding in hand that territory so that in the treaty yet to be made with England it should fall to the new Republic. Nay, further, those mountain patriots were counteracting the artful endeavor of the Spanish Government, which was scheming to attach that region to its own Florida and Louisiana. And still further, these pioneers were standing with adamantine firmness against allowing Spain the exclusive control of the Mississippi river. Then it was a thousand of these riflemen, who, under the Hugenot [sic], John Sevier, fell upon the red coats and Tories at King’s Mountain and won that decisive victory, of which Thomas Jefferson said:- ‘That glorious victory was the joyful annunciation of that turn in the tide of success which terminated the Revolutionary war with the seal of independence.’’
“No citizen of this State need feel ashamed of his ancestry, or his birthplace. Whatever is now behind in the development of these mountain districts is soon to be more than made up in the rich estate of the future. Nature has been very lavish here; perfection of climate, grandeur of scenery, files on files of mountain ranges, opening illimitable vistas of beauty, and these same mountains are a storehouse of riches for the nations. Soon they will unload their wealth of granite, of marble, of iron, of mica. And the railroads piercing every section will distribute these stores to every corner of the land.
“We cannot fail to love this land of beauty nor to appreciate the high and noble qualities of its dear people whose friendship is so warm and true. At the same time we cannot ignore the fact that probably the majority are not thus prosperous and cultured. We see with pain the homes of poverty, ignorance and suffering. We long to give the helping hand to these belated travellers on the road to prosperity. Through no fault of theirs are they in this condition, and their patient endurance of deprivation and trial, calls forth our warmest sympathies.
“It is to this class the ‘Letter from the South’ really applies. The writer is zealously at work trying to lift some of this less fortunate class to a larger and happier life. By her ‘daily living and loving’ she is seeking to develop that beauty and excellency of character that is to be the crowning grace of this beautiful section.
“Let us judge the writer of the ‘letter’ by her works of love, not by one indiscreet word.”
“HANDS ACROSS THE ‘BLOODY CHASM’”
Miss Prudden’s thoughtful letter wisely acknowledged and expressed regret for the hurt that had been caused, and yet she acknowledged the good in Miss Jackson – that of a genuinely loving person despite her choice of unfortunate words as she had put pen to paper. The Lenoir Topic deemed Miss Prudden’s letter “nice” and it seemed to have salved wounds and brought balance and the desired peaceful conclusion to the calamity, at least among the local citizenry. Notwithstanding, the war continued in the presses for a few more weeks, escalating the matter beyond one small town teacher’s perceptions of her host culture to a debate about North-South and even East-West relations. On March 30, 1892, The Lenoir Topic published the Hemingford Guide’s response to the Lenoir editor’s March 2 commentary regarding “the Nebraska letter”:
“Just as the editor of The Topic suspects, the letter in question was not written for publication, but parties who heard the reading of it requested us to make some extracts from it, and we did so, not with the intention of hurting the feelings of any one, but only to show to the people of the North that the many reports concerning the ‘posh white trash’ and the ‘strong feeling’ of the South are not all fabrications. When we published the letter we were well aware that there were several families in Box Butte county who came from the South – some of them from North Carolina – some of whom read the Guide regularly, and the appearance of this letter in the columns of a North Carolina paper, together with the comments on the same, is no surprise to us; we know that many people from the South will not acknowledge that the least feeling against Northern people exists in some parts of the States that formed the Confederate government, but we know that there is a feeling in many localities of the South. It is not general, to be sure, yet it is altogether too common for the good of the country in general. And this feeling is not against the Yankees alone, in some places the stars and stripes are as much despised as the Yankees. A friend, whose reputation for truth and veracity has not been questioned in the several years we have known him, tells us that, while travelling through Virginia, a few years ago, he saw a lot of men walk up to a showman and order him to ‘take that flag down,’ and it was the regular and much-to-be-proud-of Union flag that was floating on the showman’s canvas. But why quote Northern people on this subject, when we have the proof in the editor of The Topic’s own words. He says:
’Another strange assertion is that about the ‘one Union man.’ The great majority of the people in Western North Carolina were Union men, so-called, up to the beginning of the war, and now we are all Union men. There is not one disunionist among us. And we know no such thing as ostracism. Any man who does not insolently push his peculiar political, social or religious views upon his neighbors is treated with civility.’
“In other words, a Union man is ‘treated with civility’ so long as he keeps his mouth shut. That has been told us before. Here in the North a man is free to ‘push his political, social or religious views’ anywhere and everywhere. He can talk free trade, free coinage of silver, free ‘niggers,’ free whiskey, or anything else, and he can vote as he talks and he will never be taken to task for it, either. This should be a free country, but it is not. Freedom should extend in North Carolina and in Mississippi and in Arkansas the same as it does in Nebraska and in Kansas and in Iowa. A man should be free to speak his mind on political questions South of Mason and Dixon’s line the same as he is North of it, but he is not.
“The ‘posh white trash’ is an element which may be found in all sections of the South, and that many of those poor whites are as low down as the low negroes is freely asserted by all who have lived there, and The Topic’s denial does not alter the fact.
“The Topic claims that the author of the letter above referenced to attempted to convey the idea that the people of North Carolina, generally speaking, belong to the low class, but such is not the case. ‘Many of them’ is the way she qualified her remarks. Had she included the people in general, her statement would have had no effect, because the people of the North know that the ignorant whites are only a small portion of the inhabitants of the South.”
And, as to be expected, The Lenoir Topic rebutted the Nebraska paper in the same issue:
“It would be plainly a waste of time and space to engage in a controversy with the blind Guide of Hemingford, Nebraska, which gives notice in advance that denials from The Topic – and presumably other witnesses – will not be taken into account against the self-sufficient assertions of whatever tramp may pass through the South and go back home to Nebraska waving the ‘bloody shirt.’ We can disprove the assertion that there is ‘strong feeling’ in the South against Northern people by the testimony of Northern people, Republicans and Democrats, residing in almost every Southern community. If the Guide and others of its way of thinking will not credit these witnesses, it would be useless to attempt to convince them of their error. The ‘take that flag down’ episode is a transparent fiction. The United States flag, when raised to rally around its defenders of the Government, will float over a larger proportion of the fighting population in North Carolina than it will in Nebraska and the North Carolina followers of the flag will carry it as far across the enemy’s lines as any Nebraskans will dare to do. The Guide must remember that it was not difficult to renew the love of the people of the South for the ‘old flag.’ They followed the ‘stars and bars’ for four years – and they never trailed it in the dust – but they had followed the ‘stars and stripes’ before and had shed their blood for it on the plains of Mexico and elsewhere. They did not make the ‘old flag’ responsible for their quarrel. It is our flag now as much as it is yours and North Carolina’s star shines from it as brightly as Nebraska’s does. The fling at the so-called ‘posh white trash’ of the South is unworthy of a citizen of a State in the young and vigorous West, which owes its development and progress to the drain it has made upon the brain, brawn and muscle of the East and South and where no distinctions of class are supposed to be made. It is no crime to be poor. If it were we Southerners would all be in the penitentiary, for our wealth is more generally diffused in this section than in any other portion of the country. We have respect here to personal worth and excellence of character and pay little homage to mere extrinsic qualifications as any people in the world. It is a base slander upon us to endeavor to advertise the South as having within her borders as low and degraded a class of citizens as the Guide tries to make out the mythical ‘posh white trash’ to be. We have some poor people and some ignorant people here but the proportion of that class is smaller, we venture to say, than it is in Nebraska. The Guide ought not to garble The Topic’s words. The Topic said that all men are treated civilly in the South who do not ‘insolently push their peculiar religious, social and political opinions upon their neighbors.’ Do Nebraska people treat with civility persons who are insolent to them? The Guide rudely disturbs a beautiful vision in which we have been indulging. We have been told that the great West and Northwest have agreed to do away with sectionalism and that they will reach their hands across the ‘bloody chasm’ to grasp the hands of the South. Is this vision to fade away?”
Remarkably, in the span of about three months, what had begun as a private correspondence between two friends resulted in perceived slights upon the Appalachian people, interstate friction between North Carolinians and Nebraskans, and an almost rehashing of the decades past Civil War.
But what of Miss Jackson? She remained in Blowing Rock and continued to teach at Skyland Institute through the 1895 term but by 1896 appears to have been replaced by L. L. Goar, from Miss Jackson’s former home in Montevideo, Minnesota.
Skyland Institute reported annually in The American Missionary, a journal of the American Missionary Association, and Miss Jackson was a frequent contributor, often commenting on her students’ vernacular and their preference for cornbread. Interestingly, in April 1892, only a month after the blowup surrounding her Nebraska letter, the journal published the following contribution, authored by Miss Jackson, in which she repeated some of the same streams of thought and language, sometimes word for word, as she has expressed in the Nebraska letter:
In August, 1892 she reported on the school’s June 9 commencement exercises:
“The exercises commenced at two o’clock, but people began to gather much earlier. Young men and maidens in their ‘Sunday best,’ fathers and mothers anxious to see their children do well, and – summer boarders.
“The girls looked very pretty in white or light dresses, and we were indeed proud of our school.
“As one remarked who knew: ‘Your exercises were as fine as those in many of our big schools,’ meaning the Southern schools. The people departed with a better understanding than ever before of the work Skyland Institute is trying to do.”
Following are excerpts from Miss Jackson’s 1893 report…:
“Another year of sunshine and shadow has passed over ‘Skyland,’ a year in which the sunshine has far exceeded the shadow.
“Crops were almost a failure last year, and there has been untold suffering for want of sufficient food and clothing. Can you imagine what it would mean to sit down to meal after meal consisting only of corn-bread made of meal, salt and water – no meat, butter, milk, or the many articles which we call the necessities of life?
“We have been very thankful for the clothing sent us, but it has been insufficient to supply the need. Some of our pupils have been obliged to leave school because their clothes were unfit to wear here, and we had none for them. One little orphan boy, a day-pupil, came till his clothes scarcely held together, and each day the question was, ‘Have ary clothes come yit?’ He was ready to chop wood or do any work for them, but as none came he sorrowfully left school.
“Several of our young women were obliged to decide whether to stay in school without shoes or go home. As we advised the former they staid, for they could go on with their classes even though pride suffered. Many were compelled to leave in April to work on the little farms.
“One of our bright Juniors, eleven years old, borrowed a first reader to teach her stepmother to read so ‘when I grow up and teach school she will be more comfort to papa.’ This same little girl, who is now living on a farm, came yesterday to get some Sunday-school papers. She has a class of thirteen girls, and said so brightly ‘I ask the Saviour every day to help me.’ She is teaching the life of Christ, and studies her Bible carefully…How we hope and pray that as our dear girls leave this sheltered home they may be kept from evil, and may be daily growing into a better knowledge of our Lord and Master Jesus Christ.”
…and excerpts from her 1894 report…:
“Each year has brought changes and progress, but the past year has far surpassed the others in visible results.
“Instead of a Commencement we closed with a Christian Endeavor picnic, each girl in the home making some article of food and passing it as hers. How proud they were, and with good reason too, for everything was a success…Some girls come, who perhaps know how to fry bacon, make corn-bread of meal, salt and water, but little else in the cooking line. There is no work more important than teaching them to cook food in a variety of healthful ways.
“Then they learn to sew, mend and care for their clothes; do room work, wait on table [sic] and other home duties, so that in the summer some of them can earn a little money in the boarding-houses. Last fall five of our girls were taken home by summer guests from the North and South. We hear good reports of satisfaction they have given, and a year in the city home will help them more than the same time in school.
“We have had fewer girls in the house than usual, crops were poor and our Student Aid Fund small. But friends have been very generous in sending us barrels of clothing. Girls have been supported all the year wholly by ‘clothes money’; many necessary articles have been bought in the same way, and we say, ‘Blessings on the people who send us old clothes,’ although it does add greatly to our labors to ‘keep store.’ We try to give away as little as possible, knowing that the people will have more self-respect if they pay in some way for what they get. A girl comes for a spring hat. ‘What do you uns ax fer hit?’ ‘Ten cents.’ ‘Wall, I didn’t reckon to pay that much. I hain’t got any money. Got any work I kin do?’ So we set her to work, and then the hat is hers earned by her labor.
“At the beginning of the year we felt we must make more calls, and know the people better in their homes. As hiring a horse and buggy was out of the question we started with short walks, increasing their length and our strength until twice we walked fourteen miles. A twelve mile tramp up high hills, down into beautiful dells, by the rippling stream, over thirty-one rail fences and through deep mud was the most tiring one. But how we enjoyed every step of the way, and with what cordiality we were received! Everywhere we found people ‘mighty proud’ to have ‘them Skyland teachers’ come so far to see them, and the best they had was ours. It would fill your hearts with pity to go into some of the homes; little log-houses, sometimes with no windows, no stove, so dark and cheerless, and the lives sad and hopeless. We long to brighten the home with pictures and pretty ornaments, to bring more joy and sunshine into these lives. We are sure that we have gained a place in their interest and they in ours, as we could never have done but for the long calls and walks.
“Though we have to work so slowly, in looking back over the four years, we can see in the better homes and lives how truly the work does pay, but all we can do is only a tiny drop in the bucket.”
…and excerpts from her 1895 report:
“The year has been by far the best one in home and school work, and we hope the Christian Endeavor spirit will go with each pupil through the coming days.
“We want to extend our hearty thanks to the many friends who have sent to these young people the much needed help.
“It may seem a small thing to you to preserve and send laid-aside clothing to missionary fields, but to us it means very much. Many all through this region are only too glad to bring provisions to exchange for warm clothing of any kind. So by such help board is provided for some ‘free girls,’ they are clad while in school, and the poor people greatly helped. The Student Aid has been most acceptable and we have longed to have it doubled and tripled. Our hearts have often been strengthened, our hands held up by the loving sympathy and prayers of the American Missionary Association.”
In 1910 Miss Jackson was living and teaching in Demarest, Georgia. She moved to Florida by 1930, first to Melbourne and later to Fort Pierce where she died unmarried in 1939 at the age of 74.
Miss Emily Prudden retired to Blowing Rock in 1909 or 1910 and, at the request of the American Missionary Association, resumed charge of Skyland Institute until she was eighty in 1912, the same year of the school’s closing due to public resources making its presence less necessary. By 1913, the school property was for sale. Miss Prudden died on Christmas Eve, 1917, and her remains were returned to her native Connecticut for burial.
Next year (2017), will mark the 125th anniversary of “that Nebraska letter,” proof of the Latin proverb Verba volant, scripta manent – Spoken words fly away, written words remain.