A REAL APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN WOMAN: Peggy Harmon. Harmon-Davis Homeplace, Madison County, FOA Ep. 4

hello I'm Tim Barnwell and I'd like to welcome you to the face of Appalachia there's a little bit of um the pretty little girl with the blue dress on I heard it from Doug Wallen right here in Madison County it's one Peggy liked [Music] [Music] a pretty little girl with some blue dress song is gone [Music] in this episode we're going to get to know my longtime friend Peggy Harmon and her family who lived on a farm in the remote Grapevine section of Madison County North Carolina we'll hear stories from Peggy in her own words from a talk ahead with her in 2004 and learn more about her family through recent conversations with her sister-in-law Ellen Coomer who worked as a school nurse at nearby Mars Hill College neighbors Don and Gene Petty who lived on the mountain across from the Herman Davis Farm and with Chris Parker and Cat Halton the new owners of the place as they share how they are using the farm today I first met Peggy's parents James and Portia Davis when I was out photographing in 1983. I had driven up the Steep dirt road that climbed the mountain at the end of the Grapevine Valley at a clearing there I set up my camera and began making images of the beautiful scene I noticed among the many buildings on the farm below that a lady was sitting on the back porch of her cabin I was worried she might be wondering what I was doing as I am sometimes mistaken for a surveyor due to the unusual look of my large format camera on my way back down I stopped at the farm to introduce myself and found a couple James and Portia Davis working in their Garden I talked with them for a while and they told me that the lady I had seen was James's older sister Alice I spent the afternoon with him and made photographs of Porsha and James in their garden and a palace sitting in her ladder back chair on her porch when I went back to deliver Prince to the davises a few weeks later which I always do as a way of saying thanks to folks I met their daughter Peggy Harmon and her husband Nathan Peggy worked in the Appalachian room at Mars Hill College and understood and appreciated my efforts to document and preserve elements of rural Farm Life we became good friends and had many conversations over the years here's a story Peggy shares about her parents gardening that always makes me smile they had that Garden for years and years and at one time Daddy had a garden warfare surrounded and a neat little gate right in this area they had their sweet potato bed where they had they planted the put the sweet potatoes in the in the bed and sprouted them and got the plants instead of having to go by them they had corn Tomatoes pepper onions motherhood a little onion she called a shell out of onion and it goes like a by the name of a multiplier and you name them but it's an onion that you have to find somebody that has some to get the seed and you have to try to keep the seed or you just don't go out buying in the store and cucumbers and squash all kinds of winter squash acorn squash and potatoes she had a garden full of that and Daddy had it fence style but she would want him to plow it so it'd be easier to hold but she always planted everything up to the fence so that it couldn't plow he couldn't get the plow and the horse around without tearing so much of it up so if he tried the Plaid there was a lost cause because she thought she had to have everything to the end to to get that much more material or a vegetables and things but then when he plowed it and he tore that down she'd already lost it and she really went in a hole because see she's doing extra work which you if she hadn't done it she wouldn't have nothing tore down my name is Ellen Harmon Coomer I was born on big Laurel and lived there until I was five and then I moved to Grapevine because my mother grew up on Grapevine and we moved there and my dad was a tenant farmer so we moved to different places I lived in Marshall for a while but mostly in Grapevine until I went away to school so so you had one brother one sister I had two brothers my oldest brother lived in Black Mountain he passed away and my sister's still living she's out in Hendersonville with her daughter and of course my brother Nathan that I was closest to he passed away a few years ago so yeah Nathan was my youngest brother and we were almost two years apart and we were always the closest between of the children and he he and Peggy got married while I lived away but I'd known Peggy since she was a little girl you know we all went to Grapevine Elementary everybody walked to school and all that and uh I think they dated 10 or 12 years before they got married you know she was an only child and very dedicated to her mother and daddy he tried to get her to move away from the place where they lived and she wouldn't so he moved there in a he and Peggy always worked together on the farm they you know she would raise her own sweet potato plants and they'd plant a big patch of sweet potatoes and they had a garden and you know he just and the goats Peggy was famous for her goats and he would help take care of them and horses and dogs they always had a dog two or three you know so we just loved living out here and you know now all the old folks are are mostly gone all the people that um you know while Stokely used to Norton list live next door and Junior and flossy down below us and Nathan and Peggy I mean and just a number of you know feral and just a number of the old older folks are gone yep who we learned so much learned a lot from just enjoyed living certainly slow your pace now well you know I met Peggy in 1980 really yeah um a friend of mine Andy wolf he was a fiddle player uh he was a doctor of musicology we judge this contest up in Lowell he was from Massachusetts he came down we played some festivals went over to the museum at the college over there well it was a college there yeah and it was now it's the university and the libraries a big new library used to be in the building across the road and we went in there and this really nice woman who knew everything about all the music and all the people around here turned out to be Peggy years later we moved out here and she was our neighbor and I remembered her from there because she was she stood up for being so nice I'd go over and play for Peggy often and her favorite ones were pretty little girl with the blue dress on which is a just Madison County and she likes pretty peggio those are her two favorites I have to do them every time I went and um but yeah I'd go over and play I'd play at the Molasses when we'd be making the Sorghum that was usually my job they had plenty of people to skim and stuff I I'd carry buckets and help a little but mostly I played music I mostly played music Brady was four years old when they moved there and he was 96 when he died so he'd been there for 92 years on that place so you can see why that blood still in me very deep he made molasses up until 75 my daddy had a real bad spell with the what we call now vertigo that particular year that he got sick he had the largest crop that he had had in several years and a large I mean a large Cane Patch and mother said how in the world are we going to get that Cane Patch made up so Dr Jolly had been coming down to the house when they were making molasses taking photographs he told mothers said we've been thinking about something and said we want to help you all get those my license made so Dr Jolly brought his fly system every day till all those molasses were made there would be about maybe 10 12 15 boys and girls and I mean nobody's sure the girls were just as hard as the boys and the boys as hard as the girls and they went into the field and they stripped the fighter off the cane they cut the heads off they cut it and hauled it down on a sled to the furnace and they just done everything that was to be done and they were as half as large and mother cooked far and that made him even happier Peggy was more or less raised by older people I mean she had her parents ain't Alice and her grandmother was living at the time when she was little so she was always more like an adult than she was a child you know I remember she was smaller because she was three maybe two or three years younger than I was but there was only I don't know how many kids there we all played together you know and the thing that always impressed me her mother made her clothes and they were always matching and Peggy forgive me but her her dressing and homemade panties always matched and that was fascinating to me you know but she was always just um special I mean she kind of stood out with the other kids because I guess most of them had brothers and sisters but she you know she was an only child and but the time she was in high school I was living away but I know she was an honors student at Marshall High School but Peggy lived her entire life within well when they lived when she was real little they lived in a old Victorian type house as you start up Grapevine after you pass iron to the ranch and then her dad built that house that they lived in and she lived there and then when she and Nathan married they moved out in the yard more or less into a mobile home and a place she had ever lived as she got older she adapted more of the old-fashioned ways that she would call them and she and her mother were just Inseparable you know and her mother knew so much about all that old way of living and and when they were getting the Appalachian museum at the college uh Peggy and her mom redid or refurnished or whatever so much of that stuff that they had in that and she was so proud of that you know as she got older she was proud and in fact she wanted to be known as a mountain woman I mean that was she one and Tim probably remembers how she really was proud of the fact that she was a mountain woman I remember one time when she was working in the Appalachian room they had tours you know school kids or different people would come in and they asked her if her dress was part of the costume and she said no that's mine that's the way I dress all the time and you know she she dressed old-fashioned and I I just thought it fit her perfect she was an animal lover I mean all animals you know she has a donkey and I'm not sure what they're calling donkey now but that's what we call it and then she has I think they still have the same horse that they had Blackie and um they she had goats all the time and one or another of them she was always milking you know and she'd be up there having a time with one and the others were fighting and but she loved those goats they were they were it was not unusual to see her walk through the field and have a little trail of goats behind her especially when the new ones that the new kids came and they had cats and they always had at least one if not more dogs and I do remember the time they had gone up the road all the way up over um towards Laurel from here and they kept hearing something they looked around the side of the road and somebody had dumped a mama and her babies and so they picked them up and they came over and they said do you want to take a couple I don't remember how many there were we had three at the time so we did not we declined and she said we're going to keep these two I hadn't been back to the farm since Peggy and Nathan passed away in 2016 but was thrilled when Ellen Coomer offered to introduce me to the new owners Chris Parker and Cat Halton Ellen and her sister Alta are so happy with how Chris and Kat have adapted the farm to their own use while preserving its original character even taking over Peggy and Nathan's farm animals and pets Ellen joined me as we sat down with Chris and Kat for a visit my name is Christopher Parker I was born and raised here in Western North Carolina and have lived most of my life here in fact 95 of it um so I was born in Rutherfordton and my mother's family is from Rutherford County and my father's family is from Cherokee um so I've lived in various places in Western North Carolina my name's Kat um I'm from the UK I grew up in England and Scotland Northern England and Southern Scotland I grew up on a farm there my parents still live in in southern Scotland they got a us a a hill farm that's what it's called there which is very similar to here except we cut our trees down a long time ago opinion in the United States since the year 2000 um I've been in the western North Carolina region since 2016 and we've been here now for just over two and a half years on this property so basically Kat and I um here on the farm um are the Farm's name is the forest Pharmacy so what we do is a lot of mushroom production we also do woodland medicinals herbal herbal stuff so I teach different different classes in mycology everything from basic simple cultivation to sterile lab stuff um and so I do we do two tailgate markets in Asheville currently and we have indoor production of mushrooms as well as outdoor production of mushrooms we would look we were looking for Forest Area obviously because the mushrooms that's what they they like to grow in and so there's 20 acres of this land as forested but this we also this was a bonus this other acreage with the pastures and the Barns and then all these buildings we were looking just for a raw plot of land and then we came across this place and they you know they've had all this this history on it which is I think part of what what Drew Us in that there was already people who had loved intended this land so clearly for so long that it felt really it felt welcoming I think to us I mean the dogs were welcoming and all the animals were welcoming and it felt just like a clear yes and I personally really like old stuff like if it's got a lot of patina on it and it's really rusty like I just absolutely love it so I don't I change things the least amount possible and for me that's that's one of the things too like it's continuing to honor the people who are here before me but changing those things uh to to utilize what what we need out of them as well she broke her hip in 86 or 87. and she spent the rest about four years in the nursing home and other than that she was there well I think she was about 13 years old when they came from Big law across the Ingles camp and uh bought that place and she'd been there ever since until the last four years of her life and she died in a nursing home every calendar from every Peddler that came through that had calendars she just hung them up on the wall and this is nothing compared with what used to be there when my grandmother's leaving because after my grandmother died I guess Alice she was in up in years and she ended taking care and keeping the dust and everything off of stuff she began to kind of take it down and move it around and you know um she had linoleum on that floor pedders would come through you know with rows of linoleum that's what it's called at that time and maybe you had to buy two of them to get enough to cover the floor so when they would come through Alice would try to have enough money and she'd buy some to put down on the floor to keep that from coming when I took that linoleum up I found all these papers underneath it from department stores you probably remember they would have a long holder for paper and you didn't have the bags at that time to put stuff in they would just rip with sheets of paper off however large they needed to cut to pull them off to wrap whatever a piece and it was some of them are as neat as they were if they'd come off the road today and what I've planned on doing is racing them out as flat as I can and framing them they're from stores like call rectors that used to be in Marshall in the 20s McKinney's department store and she had stuck these papers underneath there to add more more leggings about every store had their names on the on the paper and if you happen to get a large enough piece you've got a slice of the advertisement on the store in March of 2016 I got a call that Peggy was back at home and receiving end of life care I went to visit and sat at her bedside with family and friends including Don and Gene Petty and Ellen Coomer and her sister Alta Don played some of Peggy's favorite tunes on the dulcimer to comfort her and people visited to share stories about Peggy over several days the scene took me back to the time I photographed Peggy Consulting her Aunt Alice in her bed in the cabin next door when Alice was Ill over Peggy's last days her husband Nathan was with her constantly despite his failing health within a few months of her passing he died as well and they are both buried in a small plot there on the farm walking through the old Herman Davis Farm with Ellen Coomer brought back a flood of memories as she and I shared tales about Peggy and Nathan Peggy's parents James and Porsha her Aunt Alice and their lives in this multi-generational Farm every structure path and plot of ground held a memory and elicited a story always admire Peggy's desire to remain authentic and faithful to her Roots she was devoted to her parents Aunt Alice Nathan her animals and her work she valued the traditional ways that she learned growing up in Appalachia and worked to preserve them by example in their own life and through our work at the Appalachian room and Rural Life museum at Mars Hill College she led a modest life in many ways but one doesn't have to be rich famous or powerful to have an influence on your community it just takes strong character a sense of purpose and a love of friends and neighbors Peggy exemplified all these traits and that's why she was admired and respected by all who you were and why her life still influences ours today [Music] foreign if you share my interest in the people and places I call home be sure to hit the like And subscribe buttons to learn more about this way of life on this channel I hope to continue to celebrate the people culture and Rich Heritage of Appalachia 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Channel: The Face of Appalachia

Views: 233,495

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Id: p0aawPHn2Bc

Length: 23min 36sec (1416 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023