Appalachian Daughter

The Depression years were now behind them, World War II had ended and the soldiers had come home. We knew it had ended when we heard a great racket coming up Cowan Creek in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky sometime in the middle of 1945.  What we had heard was a band of young men and women in the bed of an old truck, beating on washtubs and other noise makers, shouting, “The war is over, the war is over” as they were driven up and down first one road and another.  Not many people had radios then and this was the way the war news was spread.

 But with the war over, another great upheaval was on the horizon as the migration of the residents from the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky to the land of plenty to the north was just beginning.

Many decades earlier a similar migration had taken place.  The residents of the Pine Mountain area of Eastern Kentucky had left their homes along the eastern coastal states of the United States and followed explorer Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap into the wilds of beautiful Kentucky. Those early families, mine included, decided to settle in the valleys and heavily forested mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Most of the settlers in this area were of English and Irish extraction. They had already left their country of origin behind and settled on the eastern costal states. Then Mr. Boone tempted them to move once again. Here they would scratch for their livelihoods growing small patches of vegetables and fruits for their own daily fare and corn for feed for their one or two horses or mules and a cow and some pigs and chickens.  They made a pretty good living hewing the virgin timber stands, then floating the logs to Frankfort and selling them.

The virgin timber they cut would be marked with their personal identification and tied into rafts during fall and winter on the Kentucky River that meandered crookedly from town to town for hundreds of miles. Once the spring floods came, the flotilla of saw logs would be floated to Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, and there sold to timber buyers.  Our own “Pap” Caudill, our Mother’s dad Jesse, would actually live on those “rafts” for many days until his log rafts reached the log market in Frankfort.

Once the timber was sold Pap would then walk or hop a freight train back to the mountains and start to repeat the process.  The land was cleared in this manner, providing an income, firewood for their own use and making the ground available for planting more crops.  I have seen pictures of tall men standing at the butt of one of the saw logs and the puny humans looked like midgets standing before them the logs were so thick at the base.  Our maternal grandmother, Mary “Mama” Miller Caudill, used to entertain us with stories of her husband’s trips down the river taking these logs to market.