In 1933 a book about life in the Blue Ridge hollows reached readers across the country. It shaped what they thought of the mountain people. Decades later, an archaeologist walked those same house sites and came up with an answer of her own.
A sheriff can empty one house. To explain an empty hollow afterward, you want a book. Corbin Hollow lies below Skyland, steep and rocky. It only grew into a community after the resort opened, on wages and craft sales to the guests. So when the Depression hit, there was nothing under it. Those families were in real trouble, and I won't tell you otherwise. In the snows of March, nineteen thirty-two, the papers called the food situation very serious, and the hollow was snowed in. A schoolteacher named Miriam Sizer had been after every official who'd open an envelope, pressing them to help these people resettle somewhere good. The state's conservation chairman called one of her letters "a well prepared piece of bunk." He had his own idea. "The very best thing that can be done for these people is to have the Government come in and take the land." Then the officials wanted numbers, and they hired her for two months to get them. In five hollows she counted a hundred fifty-two families. Twenty-two she called self-supporting. A hundred ten went down as begging. And the biggest group, sixty-five, told her they approved of leaving, though few had any plan for how. But a count doesn't sell a park. Pictures do. The promoters' cameras went up into Corbin Hollow, and politicians were brought in to look. The Secretary of the Interior rode in himself. "No matter what is done with these people," he said, "they will be better off. They have nothing to lose." The Associated Press called it a community of "perennial starvation and penniless squalor." In a private memo the director of the Park Service wrote that "the mountain people of low intelligence will have to be removed before we will open the road for general use." Many were dangerous, he said, they were inclined to beg, and if many visitors saw how they lived, the Service would be criticized. Then, in nineteen thirty-three, the book. Hollow Folk, by a journalist, Thomas Henry, and a University of Chicago sociologist, Mandel Sherman. It called them "unlettered folk," in "tiny mud-plastered log cabins," "almost entirely cut off from the current of American life." One hollow's trouble spoke for the entire park, the archaeologist Audrey Horning wrote, and the rest of the mountain got painted with it. Never mind Weakley Hollow, with its post office and two stores, its churches and its school. Never mind the farmers in Nicholson Hollow selling their surplus for generations. Long after, when the people were gone, she went into those hollows and walked the old home sites, picking up what was left. Watches. Calendars. Car parts. Patent medicine bottles. Brass beds. Pieces of phonograph records. The same goods you'd turn up anywhere in the country, a good many of them from Sears and Roebuck. Even in Corbin Hollow, the one that stood for all the rest, there were fine dishes and furniture and shoes, and mail order toys. Mail order toys. In the hollow with nothing to lose, somebody sat down with a catalog, and picked one out for a child, and found the money.
Photo: Arthur Rothstein, Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress (LC-DIG-fsa-8b26613) · Public domain (Farm Security Administration; no known restrictions)