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Timber Theft and the Google Alert System

3/23/2014

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Last September, I set up a google alert to let me know whenever the phrase” timber theft” showed up on the internet. I wasn’t expecting much, since in my experience very few timber thefts make the news. I was wrong.  There have been stretches when an alert arrived in my electronic inbox daily.

Nor have the amounts or situations been trivial. One gentleman who made the timber theft honor list three times down in Louisiana obviously dealt only in six figures when he could swing it (no ax pun intended), although one of his thefts was only in the mid-five-figure range, which must have been embarrassing to a high roller like him.

And while I was wrong about volume of alerts, I wasn’t totally off about the news coverage. I did a little shoot-from-the-hip analysis of the stories, and I noted that almost all of them were carried by small local papers. An indictment for timber theft may not make the Cincinnati Enquirer or the Washington Post, but to my surprise they do sometimes strike a chord locally. I think the key is the word “indictment.” The possibility that someone may be sent up the river for their crimes seems to bring out the urge to venture into print, albeit locally.

In a few cases, the news found a wider audience. The Charleston Gazette, which I suspect is West Virginia’s largest newspaper, since it’s a good newspaper and Charleston is the state capitol, has a couple of times carried a small article on a theft there. And when a higher educational establishment in Texas issued a bulletin about increases in timber theft in Texas, it got pretty wide coverage in Texas. But I suspect that the Charleston situation got coverage because a public institution was a victim (the theft was from a Charleston city park) and the Texas one because a public institution was the issuer. Rarely does timber theft with an ordinary-citizen victim seem of interest beyond the local area, and if Eastern Kentucky is typical, usually not even there. Nor is a timber theft indictment a common occurrence in Kentucky. The usual response by the authorities to victims is “Go file a civil case.”

That lack of interest by Kentucky authorities was borne out by the observation that not one of the google alerts involved Kentucky. Since we are not short of timber theft incidents, that is a sad commentary for our state.

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Coal and Appalachia

11/11/2013

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The area of Appalachia that Eco-Outpost serves is the area that has coal. It has always had special problems, and has gone through much more trauma than traditional Appalachia, from the first establishment of coal camps through the union wars to the upheaval caused by mechanization in the 1950s through strip mining and mountaintop removal to the trauma of the last few years. Coal counties traditionally have been among the poorest counties, in spite of the billions in wealth taken out of them; that is true today, and it is likely to become even truer. To understand the strains that have pulled on coal-based Appalachia, it is helpful to understand something of the differences between the coal counties and the counties of traditional Appalachia.

The first upheavial related to coal took place when coal began to be exploited by outsiders. Coal's presence in Appalachia had been known for basically the whole of the 19th century, but exploited only locally during that period.. Many small-farm Appalachians, if they lived in coal country, had outcrops of coal on their land, and supplemented or replaced wood with coal for heating and cooking. If they needed coal, they went to their own coal bank, and dug out  a coal bucket or two. A few of them took advantage of the availability of coal to stoke local furnaces for smelting iron or for similar purposes. 

 It was not until around 1900 that rich outsiders began to exploit coal. Industrial titans like the Rockefellers, Roosevelts, and Delanos began to send representatives into Appalachia to buy thousands of acres of land and of mineral rights - the latter often at fifty cents an acre - and began to open coal mines on a large scale.

When these coal magnates established a coal mine in the Appalachians, they generally  built a town to go with it, including all the dwellings and businesses. The town was established to a pattern, and everything in it, from the stores to the recreation facilities, and from the scrip that served as currency to the houses the miners occupied, belonged to the coal company.

If the town had a medical clinic, it belonged to the company. If it had a constable or a mayor, that person, if not actually appointed and paid by the company, served at the sufferance of the company, company-owned in a different way. An official who stepped out of line would find himself no longer constable or mayor. Until the union wars of the twenties and thirties wrested some independence for coal miners who essentially had been serfs, the companies often also controlled how the miners voted. If it was known that a miner had voted “wrong,” he was likely to lose his job.  That meant he also lost his house. The houses were there for coal miners; if you were no longer employed by the company, you could no longer live in the town.

The company-housing model that coal towns brought to Appalachia was a departure from traditional Appalachia in a deeply fundamental way. The small-farmer Appalachian family had always had its own house. My husband Dean’s family lived that traditional Appalachian life. His father was an accomplished farmer who carpentered on the side for cash income. His family, for generations back and as wide as the family tree spread, had always lived on their own land, and anyone who had land and trees had a house. If not, the family threw up a log cabin to live and raise a family in. Dean’s sister Martha once described to me her first exposure to the concept of renting a house: “I was flabbergasted. In my world, you had your house. It was just there. I could not grasp the concept that someone else owned the roof over your head.” To those brought up in coal camps, though, renting was the norm, and a house was tied to a job.

That house-sufferance applied to more than voting wrong. If a miner was injured and could no longer mine coal, he not only lost his health and his income, he also lost his shelter. A widow whose husband was killed in the mines could find herself, her children, and her household possessions deposited by the side of the road well before the ground had settled over her husband’s burial mound, or even before the grave flowers wilted. Companies usually owned all the land the town perched upon, and they brooked no competition with their rule. In many coal camps, the only non-coal-company structures were the post office and the school, and it's hard to be sure about the school.

Coal camps worked under a different economic system as well. The economy in a coal camp was not the subsistence economy of traditional Appalachia, but it wasn’t a cash economy either. A coal camp economy was based on scrip. For those who don’t know about scrip, scrip is exonumia. That is, it’s coinage minted outside the legal tender of the United States, It was the lingua franca of financial transactions in most coal camps. In the beginning, scrip’s purported purpose was to alleviate shortages of U.S. legal tender (coins and bills) occurring in coal camps because of the camps’ alleged remoteness. Coal companies were quick to see the monopoly value offered by controlling a town’s currency, though, so in actual use scrip gave the coal companies a virtual stranglehold on miners. Company stores were able to add huge mark-ups to the goods they sold to miners, and the miners could pay those inflated prices or travel substantial distances to buy the goods they needed. Since few miners had cars in those days, or any transportation except their feet, the company store became their default option..

            In addition to the impediments that blocked miners from leaving the coal camps to shop, another factor kept miners shopping with the company. If a miner was paid in scrip, no place besides company facilities was obliged to accept it. Some nearby towns might, but never at 100 cents on the dollar. Generally, a miner or his family traded scrip for cash or for goods bought outside the company store at seventy or eighty cents on the dollar, and the price might be as low as fifty cents.

Scrip held sway in coal camps for decades, but began to lose its power in the post-war years. After the success of some of the union wars of the thirties, followed by the boom times of World War II, miners both gained more power to negotiate with coal companies and found themselves more flush with money. They could begin to afford cars, and that mobility to shop away from the coal camp began to affect the success of the scrip-and-company-store regime.

            Besides coal camp structure and economics, other differences existed. Coal camp culture differed from traditional Appalachian culture, even as that differed from mainstream American culture and even from historic Anglo-Saxon culture in significant ways. Language is one. Mobility has always been another.. Many traditional southern Appalachians have lived in the same small area--in the same county, for instance, or even on the same creek – for all their lives and the lives of their ancestors before them. In many areas of southern Appalachia, there are people who live on the same plot of land their ancestors took up two hundred years before. The old joke about Kentucky, “Two million people and sixteen last names,” has a basis in fact. Families came and stayed. In traditional Southern Appalachia, still today, any conversation between strangers is likely to start with, “Whose boy are you?” Placing people into a family is as natural as speech to an Appalachian. But that depended on the came-and-stayed factor. In coal country, that question never came up in conversation. It made no sense to ask whose boy you were, because the response would have had no meaning. Everybody in a coal camp was from somewhere else.

            Coal camps also differed in the makeup of the population. Traditional Appalachia was almost solidly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant – English, Scottish, Irish. But coal camps reflected the mix of Ellis Island immigrants coming into the country in the early years of coal, so there were Italians, Hungarians, Slavs, many middle Europeans. In a coal camp, you might come on a road called Hunk Holler, now full of  assimilated Americans, but originally named for the influx of job-seeking Hungarians, or perhaps other people from Mittel Europa lumped under that general name. Coal camps also attracted blacks, who, while they still were segregated from whites in housing and schools, worked in the same mines at the same jobs, and were part of the same culture.

            Another cultural difference related to the land and to primogeniture. In spite of a strong Anglo-Saxon heritage, the principle of primogeniture never took hold in the mountains. There, the custom frequently was that the older children, as they reached adulthood, established new households, usually close by and often on land deeded by the parents. It was the youngest child who stayed at home, took care of the parents as they aged, and inherited the house and land when they died. That heritage and that expectation still survive today among some Appalachians. Recently, the wife of the elder of two brothers complained bitterly to me that the younger son had got the family homestead, which she felt should have gone to her husband. Chances are, there was nothing personal in that; those parents were following established custom.  But there is a third twist to the way land was passed on in families, another dividing line between traditional Appalachia and coal Appalachia. That twist is that choosing to pass the homeplace on to the eldest or youngest child was irrelevant in coal Appalachia because people living in coal camps had no land. Primogeniture, whether in the traditional or upside-down version, was rendered irrelevant.

            Another difference between traditional and coal Appalachia was land use. Touring traditional Appalachian roads, viewers find that a high proportion of houses are built on steep hillsides. The main floor will often be level with the hillside in back, while the front of the house, facing the road, will be a story or higher off the ground. Many graveyards lie on steep hills as well. There was a reason for that. Good arable land in the Appalachians – good bottom land in Appalachian parlance – had to be devoted to the highest and most economic use, and that was not for housing or graveyards, it was for producing food. So the flatter land along the creeks often held the gardens and fields, and the houses and graveyards sat above them on steep hillsides. In coal camps, which were designed from the beginning for coal extraction as opposed to farming, there was no reason to take on the more expensive and more complicated path of building houses on hillsides, They were built on the flat land along the river bottoms. A lot of people in coal camps raised gardens, but they were forced to sacrifice their small yards for that, or go up on the side of the mountain to till and plant, because the flat land and the best soil was covered with houses.

            Coal Appalachia was different, too, in population density and social structure. Coal camps were dense with cheek-by-jowl-houses, unlike the scattered small farms of traditional Appalachia. They were also full of children.
The one-room schools still found in traditional Appalachia well past the mid-twentieth century had never been a significant factor in coal camps. In McDowell County, West Virginia, for instance, coal camp children might attend a big brick edifice that needed three stories just to accommodate the first six grades. After that, they might be bused to another big brick school for the next three grades, and then a third one in a third town for the three grades of high school.

            But that population density was about to change. Around 1950, the coal mines began to mechanize and slash jobs with the brutality of a machete felling cane, casting tens of thousands of miners adrift. In 1970, the nation produced 17% more coal than it had mined in 1950, but with only one-third of the work force. Two hundred and seventy-five thousand mining jobs had disappeared. Considering that coal camp families at that time might commonly have four to twelve children, millions of people were affected.

Those changes hit Appalachia particularly hard because, except for resource extraction industries like coal mining, there were few industries in Southern Appalachia. Even when the nation as a whole was booming, Appalachia was a one-trick pony and that trick was coal extraction. When mining jobs disappeared, there were no others to seek, nor likely to be anytime soon. The difficult terrain and lack of decent transportation almost assured that.

By the time John Kennedy made a campaign stop in Welch, West Virginia while seeking the 1960 Democratic nomination, businesses were struggling all over coal counties. Kennedy later that summer said of the cataclysm hitting the coal fields and southern West Virginia, “McDowell County mines more coal than it ever has in its history, probably more coal than any county in the United States, and yet there are more people getting surplus food packages than any county in the United States. The reason is that machines are doing the jobs of men and we have not yet been able to find jobs for those men.” In 1961, the first food stamps ever issued went to a family in McDowell County.

Kennedy was right. In West Virginia, which had led the nation in coal production for decades, McDowell County had not only led West Virginia but had decade after decade produced more coal than any other county in the United States. In 1960, it still led, but for the people who lived there the world had changed in unimaginable ways. The county seat, Welch, which had 6600 people in 1950, lost a fifth in the ensuing decade, and another fifth in the next ten years, a trend which continued until, in 2000, the population was maybe a third of its heyday in the fifties.

War, another shopping town in the county, fared worse. In 1950, nearly 4000 people lived in War. Between 1950 and 1960, it lost 25% of its population, and in the next ten years another third. Business activity fell even more sharply, because much of that business had come from the coal camps, and they too were suffering. The drop was felt in a variety of ways. With its 1950 population of 4000, War had supported numerous churches, restaurants, pool halls and stores, and even two movie theaters. By 1970, the customers for those businesses had transferred themselves to Detroit or Cincinnati or Baltimore, and War was dying. By 2010, at the end of sixty years, War’s population stood at roughly 20% of its high-water mark.

McDowell County’s overall population also kept on dropping. By 2011, a county which had fed and sheltered almost 100,000 people sixty years before had lost population until it was almost down to its level in 1900, before industrial-scale coal mining began. This over-the-cliff plunge occurred at a time when the nation as a whole was growing four-fold, from seventy-five million to more than three-hundred million.

Comparing that coal-country out-migration to what is generally considered our greatest national displacement--the Dust Bowl of the 1930s—the numbers are stark. As McDowell County was the coal epicenter of Appalachia, Cimarron County, Oklahoma was the geographic center of the Dust Bowl. Both suffered a decline in population, but to a very different extent. Cimarron County dropped 32% between 1930 and 1940. That was seven percent more than the 1950-1960 drop in the population of McDowell County, West Virginia, but it falls short of telling the whole story. Another ten years on from 1940, the Cimarron County population had rebounded by 25%. McDowell County, in contrast, lost another 32% of its people in its second ten years. As Cimarron county continued to recover, McDowell County continued to bleed. Sixty years out from the onset of the dust bowl, Cimarron County population was a fairly robust 61% of its 1930 level, whereas, sixty years out from 1950, McDowell County’s numbers stood at 20% of its apex. The coal fields’ scale of loss - unheralded and indeed almost unrecognized - occurred on a magnitude that makes a piker of the well-documented and often-studied Dust Bowl migration.

In many coal counties,almost every young person left after high school or college. All those big brick consolidated schools began to empty and close, as the towns and coal camps had. The scale of the out-migration was stupendous, and the impact on those left behind more stupendous still, both economically and socially. The coal companies had begun the destruction of traditional Appalachia when they bought the land and minerals, built the coal camps, and lured so many formerly independent Appalachians to mine “their” coal by the promise of a better life. Now they drove another upending of the Appalachian world and culture by taking away those coal-mining jobs that, for miners, had replaced the land as their source of survival.

                Now, what you see is towns not dying but virtually dead. Welch, county seat of the once-richest county in West Virginia, coal's counterpart to Virginia City, Nevada and the Comstock silver lode, but longer lasting, now has street after street of empty brick-and-glass storefronts, studded here and there with the type of businesses that support the moribund or nearly moribund: funeral parlors, florists, drugstores, and medical supply stores.

Now another seism is seizing coal country. Coal mines are closing down permanently across county after county. Residents of those counties are blaming the closures on EPA regulations and on politics,. There is a lot of talk of a "War on Coal." But those factors are not the problem. The problem is, coal is not a renewable resource, and it has virtually been mined out in Appalachia. What is left lies in small seams in hard-to-get-to places. 

The problem is not mechanization, nor EPA rules, or the "War on Coal.".

The problem is markets and supply. Extraction costs are very high for the coal that is left. High-cost coal cannot compete with western coal.or with the bonanza of natural gas being pumped from formations like the Marcellus Shale. The CEO of Arch Minerals, the largest mining company in the US, says that regulations, while cumbersome, are not the problem. The problem is the market. Arch cannot find buyers who will pay as much as it costs to get the coal out. The CEO of Alpha Resources, another big coal company, has said the same. No change in political leadership is going to change that factor.

So Appalachia, especially coal-country Appalachia, is in flux again, as it was in the early nineteen hundreds and in the 1950s to 70s. The likelihood of replacing coal with something else that will support as many jobs as coal mining is low.  Many coal camps had populations of several thousand, and there were coal camps like that all over
Appalachia. It’s hard to believe that degree of population density will ever again be seen in the Appalachians, although some hope that after a fifteen or twenty year period of extreme difficulty, the area may slowly grow again. If that should occur,however, it would defy the pattern of coal Appalachia since 1950, and is not something a prudent gambler would put down money on.. 
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More on Sustainability Weekend and Berea

11/25/2011

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, we hosted a group of students from Berea College for a day of sustainability, Appalachian-style. One of those students, Alexa Lloyd of Louisville, Kentucky, shares her impressions of the weekend below:

"Letcher County Reflection
 As I began reading “A Tale of the Future,” it hit me that the very first word was “imagine.”  The words that follow describe a sort of utopia, a land better than what we now know and certainly better than we could hope for in the aftermath of mountaintop removal mining.  They describe a sustainable and resilient community, conscious of their environment and of their actions.  So why is this an “imaginary” idea?  Perhaps because as of now, very few people understand what mountaintop removal is-except for the fact that it gets them the resources they need. It isn’t commonly accepted knowledge that energy-hungry consumers are destroying land in order to get fossil fuels and in turn also destroying the atmosphere.  Consumers of fossil fuels are in denial that without major efforts on everyone’s part, we the people will never see “fields of waving grasses, grains, and pastures that reflect in their colors the diversity of the farms below.”  No, instead we will be saddled with “a moonscape, devoid of both life and of people”-and wondering how it got that  way.
           
These are the thoughts that came to mind as I was riding over the  scarred, carved land in a terrifyingly small plane. 
At first I was solely focusing on that plane, how small it was and the sounds I heard as it rattled against early morning winds. Then I started looking out the window and saw the steam and fog rising from the valleys.  I was amazed at how “pretty” it looked, until we flew further and I saw plains and mountains once green that had been utterly stripped of life. Not nearly so pretty-if anything, it was terrifying.  Being from Louisville, I was born and raised on one extreme end of the spectrum.  I never saw the mountaintop removal, I never saw beautiful valleys ruined by machinery and backhoes and explosives. Instead I grew up in one of the cities in Kentucky that consumed most of those resources.  Massive
buildings and heavy vehicle traffic was the norm, as was the resulting thick cloud of pollution that made it nearly impossible to breathe some days.  My parents would drive off to work in the morning, contributing to the pollution that made air quality advisories the norm in my life-and I would sit at home knowing nothing about what we were really doing to our environment.  

In some ways, although I am more informed as an adult, I don’t think it really clicked what we were doing until that flyover sort of pushed it in my face.  As our hosts put it, when you see things like that “you can realize how fragile things
are.”
             
I was still thinking about that as we continued driving to get to where  we were staying.  I had almost  nodded off when we had to get out-the mountain hills were so steep we had to  help the van make its way up the mountain.  The first thing I noticed was the air-it smelled so much cleaner than what I am used to in Louisville, definitely.  As I looked around and tried to stay out of the way I noticed all the vegetation that was around-also something very foreign to me. As we walked up the hill laughing about how good it was to finally be there, I noticed somewhat of a growing sense of camaraderie among my classmates.  Taking us out of our “city” and putting us in an unfamiliar environment was already showing results-moving us in the direction that resilient community members would hope for.
             
In all honesty, I expected to be bored off my rear end. I was pleasantly surprised to not be.  I watched soap being made as men far wiser than us described the farmer’s almanac. I watched older men and women sit around an already crackling campfire and play music, talking about the environment that  they had made their home in.  The land they had made their home and their living from-not the city they lived in, or the car they drove-but instead the crops they were raising, and the food they preserved for their families.  I sat and laughed with my classmates in a circle as we watched a chair being completed, and smiled at the happy blush on Jenn’s face when she got to keep it.  I sat on the porch with Sean and Rachael, laughing at the fact that none of us “city kids” could string beans terribly well-and some people couldn’t even thread the needle to do so! 
 
I think I can speak for everyone when I say dinner was amazing.  There’s nothing quite like the feeling of good food after a busy day of working, traveling, learning, and experiencing.  Even better was the fact that the food was home cooked-and natural. Shoveling down bowls of potato soup and cornbread with fried apple pies to wash it down provided an entirely different mealtime experience than say, eating a triple whopper at Burger King. The sense of community was still there-how different it was to see how different we were living from how we could and should be living.  Even in Berea, which is far more advanced than many communities in terms of sustainability and resilience, we still depend on many outside corporations and businesses to “get by.”  These people were living how we should-in the aftermath and continued destruction of mountaintop removal and coal pollution; they were growing their food from the land and conserving their resources.

My favorite memory from this trip, however, was the time spent by the fire singing songs and telling stories.  Our hosts also told us that “These hills are full of stories,” but they’re the type of stories you don’t realize exist until you’ve heard them and even seen them for yourself.  As the adults retired to either warmth or sleep, the rest of the class continued
incinerating marshmallows and flicking embers at each other.  We sat and talked until late at night-our lives back home, our experiences growing up, and what we thought of what we had seen that day.  Even once we cuddled up in the tents to try and stay warm, we were still laughing hysterically about jokes we had told or remembering songs that had been sung around the fire.

Overall, I think I learned a lot more from this trip than I expected to.  For me, I was simply lucky that I wasn’t really sure what to expect and therefore kept somewhat of an open mind.  Being receptive to the new ideas that were coming forward made it much easier to appreciate those ideas."


 
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Berea Comes to Eastern Kentucky

11/24/2011

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We count among our Board of Directors an alumna of Berea College, which was founded to serve Appalachia, and we have been working with the College for  a number of years, as the Other Projects page indicates. Much of that cooperation is with the Sustainability Department directed by Richard Olson, since there is a lot of commonality between what Berea hopes to encourage and much of Eastern Kentucky has never quite given up: the old farming and food preserving skills that once made people nearly self-sufficient. Loretta Lynn once, when asked by a talk show host what she had been doing, replied "Canning," and went on to enumerate how many hundred quarts of corn, beans, and other foods she had preserved that summer. The talk show host asked her why she did that, with the implication, at least, that with her fame and money, she clearly did not need to can. She replied that money and fame can disappear in an instant, but you'll always be all right if you have a garden and a cellar full of canned goods.

We annually host students from the college for a day in Eastern Kentucky. This year  that visit took place on 22 October The emphasis was on sustainability as still practiced in this area. The class consisted of about a dozen students plus faculty from two places, Berea and Wayne State University. The students are interested in the environment and sustainable living, and the day was all about sustainability Appalachian style. We recruited our friends to help us, and together we strung green beans onto thread and hung them up for drying into shuckey beans (which my father called leather britches), pulled the husks off ears of corn, shelled the ears of  corn, ground the corn kernels into cornmeal,  used the husks to make a  shuck mattress like the kind my grandparents used on their beds (and that I slept on  as a child), and  boiled some of the dried corn kernels with lye to make hominy. While the hominy-making was going on, one of the faculty kept asking, "That's lye? Real lye? And you're going to eat what comes out of that pot?" But  when supper came, she did eat the hominy, and loved it.

 Besides preserving food, we caned a chair seat with hickory bark, made homemade soap, also with lye, and used a draw  knife and shaving horse to make furniture legs. We also built a huge bonfire and made music around it. 
 
The process was educational to me as well as to the students. For one thing, since it was too late in the year to use green beans from the garden, I had to buy them. I parceled out about five pounds and told the students that we first had to remove  the strings  from the bean pods before runing twine through the beans to render them "hangable" for  drying. To my surprise, the bought beans had no strings. One of  the participants (the cornmeal grinder) said that these days what  you buy in stores  are hybrid beans that have had the strings bred out of them, along with the taste. Can't speak for the taste, but they certainly had no strings. So we went  straight to needle and twine and produced a dozen nice strings  to hang on the porch  of the cabin we were using.

I also learned something about cornmeal. Home-grown and -ground is much healthier than store-bought. Apparently, the little seed at the base of each kernel is taken out of commercial cornmeal, either to make cornflakes or to extend shelf-life, or both. So you are missing important nutrients when you  buy corn meal from the store. Home-grown and -ground tastes better too.

I don't "put away" food, as we call canning and preserving, since we're not here in summer, but a lot of people pitched in with home-produced sauerkraut, pickled corn, pickled beans, canned berries, dried apples, molasses, etc. I received   a particular bonus in that one of our friends gave me two quarts of mixed pickles.  You are probably this minute thinking of something made with cucumbers, like  bread and butter pickles or dill pickles, but "mixed pickles" here conveys corn, green beans, and cabbage (and sometime onions and green peppers) chopped, mixed, and pickled with salt and vinegar (no sugar). In the old days, the chopping would have been done with an empty, sharpened Carnation milk or similar store-bought can.They turn out like sauerkraut, unsurprisingly. To serve them, you rinse them and fry them in what once was lard or bacon fat, but now commonly is something like olive oil for health's sake. I love the things, and have fried and eaten one quart pretty much singlehandedly, but am reserving the other for a special occasion.

Anyway, the students seemed to have a great time, and they sent us a sort of poster on which they had drawn sketches of ears of corn, green beans strung on twine, a big  campfire, the chair we caned, and similar reminders of the day, with notes about what they enjoyed most.

Richard Olson and his wife Cheyenne practice what he teaches about sustainable living. They have started a non-profit called Sustainable Berea (click on the highlighted name or go to http://www.sustainableberea.org to visit their website). Kami Pothukuchi, an Associate Professor at Wayne State who also accompanied the group, has founded two efforts toward sustainable living in Detroit. One is an award-winning project called Seed Wayne, which focuses on raising food in the city, and the other is called Detroit Fresh, which concentrates on providing a supply of vegetables to inner-city corner markets. To access either web site, click on the names above.

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Molasses Stir-off

11/24/2011

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We went to a molasses stir-off this weekend at the farm of friends. Not many people make molasses any more, but Randy and J.P. Campbell and their cousin Jesse Campbell hold a stir-off almost every year. J.P. grows the cane on his farm, and they all pitch in at stir-off time. It was a two-day affair that started Friday afternoon and lasted through Saturday. We took a camera in hopes of getting material for a short documentary. Some of the video is pasted on this site on the documentaries page.

Saturday was the social day with a lot of non-participants attending and a lot of good conversation - visiting, in Appalachian parlance - but from the point of view of learning about stir-offs Friday evening was much more interesting, because it included setting up, stripping and cutting the cane, and squeezing the juice. They were using an old-fashioned cane press but had converted it to be powered from a tractor drive-shaft, which turned the grindstones a lot faster than mules could.

Still, it took at least two hours to feed in a quarter-acre of cane stalks and press out the juice. The end product was a little over a hundred gallons of juice, all of which was poured into a foot-deep, 4'x8' rectangular steel pan. The second day consisted mostly of straining the juice, building the fire under the pan, and boiling the juice. It took almost nine hours to boil the juice down, which Randy said was the longest it had ever taken, and which he blamed on mostly wet wood for the fire.

Two people skimmed foam the whole time the juice boiled, essentially while standing in a steam bath for nine hours. It was only in the last half hour that molasses seemed to come, but it came fast at the end, turning from a thin greenish to a more viscous light-brown liquid topped with golden amber foam..

Cutting the cane and skimming the juice as it boiled were the two labor-intensive and dirty jobs, although Matt Oaks, one of the party, told me what he hated worst was feeding the cane into the mill. He said it was boring and seemed to take forever. For myself, I liked that part best because of the instant gratification. As the cane stalk went in, you could immediately see the juice running out.

As said, Saturday was the social day. The wives brought food and set up lunch for the participants and the hangers-on like us. We contributed, of course, but we brought dessert while we ate mostly soup beans, shuckey beans, sauerkraut fried with weiners, and cornbread, all traditional Appalachian foods and all delicious. It was a good trade-off.

What started as 100 gallons of juice and many hours of labor ended as perhaps ten gallons of molasses. The whole process brought home to me the reality of how hard our ancestors toiled for their food. As I was mulling this over, it occurred to me that the only sources our Appalachian ancestors had for sweetening were honey and molasses. I'm sure a few of them could have afforded sugar, but not many would have been able to. Their cash, when they got it, was usually reserved for salt, which was much more critical, and perhaps shoes.

It took a lot of persistence and unremitting effort to start with cane seed and end up with molasses, with the product being winnowed down and skimmed all the way. That's the way it is with a lot of life,especially the successful bits. The tools are just different.

If you would like to attend a stir-off, there's one held every September in West Liberty, Kentucky. Their web site is http://www.cityofwestliberty.com/sorghumfestival.htm.
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