The Mountains Are Abundant - If You Know Where to Look!

 

Harlan County is not owned by the people who live there. I know some will argue with this but it is true. My home county is actually 80% owned by absentee land owners. Many are large coal or gas corporations sitting on the land waiting for a time when it would be economically feasible to get at the minerals below. Even some of the folks that own the land don’t even own the minerals nor timber on it. At one time people could purchase your rights to minerals or timber and leave you the land. This practice lead to all sorts of strife in the Appalachian Mountains. But, that is not what this piece is about. It is about the abundance left behind by these absentee land owners.

My great grandmother was a granny doctor of sorts. She was an herbalist that knew an herb for every human frailty. Some called them Granny Women, Granny Doctors, Granny Witches, or Granny Sages. She didn’t know about herbs grown in China or Russia or the far flung places in the world. She knew about the herbs that grew right here in her back yard and up on the hills. Knowledge handed down through the generations. All the old timers had ginseng, yellow root, and other herb patches growing right on their property. Maw said that granny always had a large herb patch outside her house. "I wished I had known to write down all that Mommy had known." But sadly that has all been lost to time.

My great uncle used to dig sang. That was his herb that he was good at finding and Ginseng brought the highest prices of all the herbs. That was really the herb that he concentrated on. But he also went every year to Coeburn Fur and Herb Company over in Virginia and he let me include my herbs. The Coeburn Fur and Herb Company does not exist anymore but when they did he took pounds and pounds of “Sang” over to them. I didn’t concentrate on sang.

I also collected herbs for him to take. However, didn’t concentrate on ginseng. I harvested herbs like Soloman seal, Indian turnip, blood root, yellow root, black cohash, sassafras, wahoo, golden seal, rattlesnake root, and many others. I would harvest all summer and my uncle would take them for me over to the herb company to sell when he sold his ginseng. Some were worth more than others. It takes a lot of Indian turnip to make a pound; so if there was a pound of that it was worth more than some other roots. 10 Pounds of fresh bloodroot would give you one pound of dry clean bloodroot. It takes a lot of bloodroot to get 10 pounds. I think the most I ever got was $2 per pound for dry bloodroot. So there was not a lot of money in the practice. But for a young man with a long summer it was nice in the early winter to have some serious pocket money, $150 or so come fall.

Then, in the winter we turned to trapping. I trapped mink, weasel, fox, bobcat, skunk, muskrat, and even the occasional opossum and rabbit. Muskrat was my meat and potatoes for trapping. Muskrat was only about $1.50 per hide for #1 hides. But, I could catch as many as 40-70 per season. Fox was a close second and mink, bobcat, and weasel were few and far between. Fox was bringing on average $25 per hide for number one. One year Parvo virus decimated the fox population and made fox catching just as uncommon as mink. By the end of winter I had enough to make a considerable trip over to Coburn Fur and Herb. $200 back in the early 70’s was nothing to sneeze at. My first car in 1981 was just $900. But, herbs and furs were not all that was in the mountains bounty.

In the fall we hunted squirrel, groundhog. raccoon, opossum, grouse, and other small game. Deer, turkey, and black bear were really scarce back then. To this day one of my favorite meals is breakfast with squirrel, biscuits, gravy and home fries cooked on an open fire. Just can’t buy that at any of the restaurants around here. All the hunting trips also included hunting for herbs. Hunting in deep woods you spend a lot of time looking at the ground. You have to or else you make so much noise everything around knows you are coming half a mile before you get there or you will step on a nope rope(snake). Well, this looking at the ground yields a wealth of herbs and roots to collect. So squirrel hunting wasn’t just squirrel hunting it was also an herb gathering trip.

In the spring of the year we were in the woods gathering things like ramps – an oniony garlicy type of plant that they expelled you from school if you ate them before coming to school. Yeah, they had a strong pungent aroma. I love them to this day but don't get many any more so garlic will have to do. We also picked bears lettuce and other succulents. In the summer you collected stinging nettle and touch me not all the while looking for groundhogs. A good fat groundhog could be up to 25 pounds for a real big one. That’s a lot of meat on the table. I remember seeing a groundhog that my uncle Floyd had skinned out it looked like a yearling lamb hanging there. The skin also makes really good leather for boot strings and tool wraps. No commercial value as a pelt though. 

In the spring there were the raspberries and in summer the blackberries. Then in the fall there were all sorts of nuts. Then after the first frost there were the persimmons, paw paws, and finally in early winter there were all the beech nuts and walnuts ready to be cracked. The mountains are plentiful indeed. 

Many a mountaineer built them a little shack up on the hill where a coal company had since operated. They used the materials around to throw up a little shack that no one raised a fuss about for years till the coal company found out. They heated with coal and firewood harvested right on the land. They cleared spots to farm and threw in crops on little hillside fields. Today we would call it living off the grid in a tiny house. Back then they called it living free or land owners called them squatters depending on which side of the debate you were on. Many families lived like that on their own land or family land.

I knew several families that lived in these impromptu thrown together homes. They lived in a half a trailer here or a tar paper shack there, sometimes on their own land or on a family members land. They often had a “Coal Bank.” A coal bank is an impromptu mine that they work by hand to get their own coal to burn for heat. Nobody worried too much about the 2 or three tons of coal that they extracted per year. They were living off the land and the land is very fruitful. However, most of the time, this was a very impoverished existence. It could also be hazardous to your health. 

Mines often left slate dumps. Places where they dumped the non coal refuse that came out of the mine with the coal. Often there is still considerable coal left in the refuse but it is too labor intensive to be profitable to extract. Some enterprising young men in order to heat their family homes would dig the coal out of these slate dumps and would use it. This was a dangerous practice. My father had a cousin who was doing this very thing and the slate dump collapsed and had, for lack of a better word, an avalanche and he was covered up for hours before it was discovered. So living in Appalachia was not the easiest of life. 

The mountains do provide an existence and may again in the future. But, for the foreseeable future, I hope no one has to live that kind of existence any more. I had close friends that grew up this way. I loved to go over to their house but didn’t want to live like that myself. Sure I helped haul coal and wood to feed the fire at home. I chopped a lot of kindling and fire wood. As a matter of fact I still do. I just don’t heat my house this way anymore, just my workshop. I like my creature comforts with minimal effort so I can concentrate on other things.

On a homestead there is always something that needs to be done. So when you look at things just try to remember that there is just so much life in your body and mind and that there is just so much you can do in a day. So try every day to understand that Life and Homesteading are a Marathon and Not A Sprint – Slow Down and Enjoy the Ride!!

 

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