front cover of Don't Go Up Kettle Creek
Don't Go Up Kettle Creek
Verbal Legacy Upper Cumberland
William Lynwood Montell
University of Tennessee Press, 2000
Don’t Go Up Kettle Creek is a historical portrayal of a river and the people who made their living along its banks and tributaries. Drawing upon the personal recollections and oral traditions of longtime residents, William Lynwood Montell describes a century and a half of life in the Upper Cumberland.
  Montell organized his material according to the topics that dominated his tape-recorded conversations with residents of the area-farming, logging and rafting, steamboating, the Civil War-topics that the people themselves saw as important in their history. In reconstructing the past, the author also illuminates the relationship between geographic and economic factors in the region; the prolonged affects of a cataclysmic event, the Civil War, on the isolated area; and the impact of modernization, in the form of “hard” roads and cheap, TVA-supplied electricity, on the traditional ways of people.
  First published in 1983, this book is now available in paperback for the first time. Included with this edition is a new foreword in which Montell and Mary Robbins, executive director of the Tennessee Upper Cumberland Tourism Association, describe changes in the area that have occured since the book’s initial appearance.

The Author: William Lynwood Montell, now retired, was coordinator of programs in folk and interculturual studies at Western Kentucky University. His numerous books include Ghosts along the Cumberland and The Saga of Coe Ridge.
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front cover of Flowering of the Cumberland
Flowering of the Cumberland
Harriette Simpson Arnow
Michigan State University Press, 2013
Harriette Arnow’s search for truth as early American settlers knew it began as a child—the old songs, handed-down stories, and proverbs that colored her world compelled her on a journey that informs her depiction of the Cumberland River Valley in Kentucky and Tennessee. Arnow drew from court records, wills, inventories, early newspapers, and unpublished manuscripts to write Seedtime on the Cumberland, which chronicles the movement of settlers away from the coast, as well as their continual refinement of the “art of pioneering.” A companion piece, this evocative history covers the same era, 1780–1803, from the first settlement in what was known as “Middle Tennessee” to the Louisiana Purchase. When Middle Tennessee was the American frontier, the men and women who settled there struggled for survival, land, and human dignity. The society they built in their new home reflected these accomplishments, vulnerabilities, and ambitions, at a time when America was experiencing great political, industrial, and social upheaval.
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front cover of People of the Upper Cumberland
People of the Upper Cumberland
Achievements and Contradictions
Michael E. Birdwell
University of Tennessee Press, 2015
Unified by geography and themes of tradition and progress, the essays in this anthology present a complex view of the Upper Cumberland area of Tennessee and Kentucky—a remote and, in some ways, mysterious region—and its people. The distinguished contributors cover everything from early folk medicine practices (Opless Walker), to the changing roles of women in the Upper Cumberland (Ann Toplovich), to rarely discussed African American lifeways in the area (Wali R. Kharif). The result is an astonishingly fresh contribution to studies of the Upper Cumberland area.

Randall D. Williams’s essay on the relatively unknown history of American Indians in the region opens the collection, followed by Michael Allen’s history of boating and river professions on the Cumberland River. Al Cross and David Cross illuminate the Republican politics of the Kentucky section of the Upper Cumberland, while Mark Dudney provides a first-of-its-kind look at the early careers of distinguished Tennesseans Cordell Hull and John Gore. Equally fresh is Mary A. Evins’s examination of the career of Congressman Joe L. Evins, and coeditor Michael E. Birdwell and John B. Nisbet III contribute an in-depth piece on John Catron, the Upper Cumberland’s first Supreme Court justice. Troy D. Smith’s essay on Champ Ferguson sheds new light on the Confederate guerilla. Birdwell’s second contribution, an exploration of the history of moonshine, provides insight into a venerable Cumberland tradition. Pairing well with Walker’s essay, Janey Dudney and coeditor W. Calvin Dickinson discuss the superstitions faced by early Upper Cumberland medical professionals. Closing out the grouping of medical articles is Dickinson’s second chapter, which tells the story of Dr. May Cravath Wharton and her contribution to the region’s health care. Laura Clemons explores the relationship between composer Charles Faulkner Bryan and his gifted African American pupil J. Robert Bradley during the Jim Crow era. Birdwell’s third chapter and the collection’s final essay examines race relations in the Upper Cumberland.

Offering a broad look at one of the most understudied regions of the Volunteer State, this significant addition to Tennessee history will prove insightful for students and academics with interdisciplinary and cross-historical interests.
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front cover of Seedtime on the Cumberland
Seedtime on the Cumberland
Harriette Simpson Arnow
Michigan State University Press, 2013
Harriette Arnow’s roots ran deep into the Cumberland River country of Kentucky and Tennessee, and out of her closeness to that land and its people comes this remarkable history. The first of two companion volumes, Seedtime on the Cumberland captures the triumphs and tragedies of everyday life on the frontier, a place where the land both promised and demanded much. In the years between 1780 and 1803, this part of the country presented tremendous opportunity to those who endeavored to make a new life there. Drawing on an extensive body of primary sources—including family journals, court records, and personal inventories—Arnow paints a stirring portrait of these intrepid people. Like the midden at some ancient archaeological site, these accumulated items become a treasure awaiting the insight and organization of an interpreter. Arnow also draws on a medium she believed in unerringly—oral history, the rich tradition that shaped so much of her own family and regional experience. A classic study of the Old Southwest, Seedtime on the Cumberland documents with stirring perceptiveness the opening of the Appalachian frontier, the intersection of settlers and Native Americans, and the harsh conditions of life in the borderlands.
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front cover of Speaking with the Ancestors
Speaking with the Ancestors
Mississippian Stone Statuary of the Tennessee-Cumberland Region
Kevin E. Smith and James V. Miller
University of Alabama Press, 2008

When European explorers began their initial forays into southeastern North America in the 16th and 17th centuries they encountered what they called temples and shrines of native peoples, often decorated with idols in human form made of wood, pottery, or stone.  The idols were fascinating to write about, but having no value to explorers searching for gold or land, there are no records of these idols being transported to the Old World, and mention of them seems to cease about the 1700s.  However, with the settling of the fledgling United States in the 1800s, farming colonists began to unearth stone images in human form from land formerly inhabited by the native peoples. With little access to the records of the 16th and 17th centuries, debate and speculation abounded by the public and scholars alike concerning their origin and meaning.

During the last twenty years the authors have researched over 88 possible examples of southeastern Mississippian stone statuary, dating as far back as 1,000 years ago, and discovered along the river valleys of the interior Southeast. Independently and in conjunction, they have measured, analyzed, photographed, and traced the known history of the 42 that appear in this volume. Compiling the data from both early documents and public and private collections, the authors remind us that the statuary should not be viewed in isolation, but rather as regional expressions of a much broader body of art, ritual, and belief.

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