The Blair Effect

Items

• A logging crew along the Little River, near Bartow, Pocahontas County, WV.
  Working six days per week, often ten or more hours a day, crews of workers known as “wood hicks” cut and prepared hundreds of logs each day for transport to a sawmill. At the peak of West Virginia’s timber boom in 1909, men with job titles like choppers, sawyers, swampers, and knot bumpers earned between $1.75 and $2.00 per day.
• Maggie Hammons Parker at home in Stillwell, near Marlinton, Pocahontas County, West Virginia.
  The influence of the Hammons family on West Virginia folk life spans generations. However, wide recognition of their songs, stories, and traditions did not come until the 1970s when local musician Dwight Diller became closely acquainted with the Hammonses. Diller learned their music, practiced their traditions, and studied their history. His relationship with the Hammonses triggered interest among other musicians and folklorists, and his field recordings and interviews contributed to a study of the family produced by the Library of Congress in 1973. The Hammonses are recognized as central to the preservation of authentic musical styles and culture in the region. Recordings of their music have been released by WVU Press, the Library of Congress, Rounder Records, Dwight Diller, and the Augusta Heritage Center of Davis & Elkins College. Pictured here, Maggie Hammons Parker was a matriarch of the family and one of five Hammonses inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in 2020.
• Pete, Paris, and Neal Hammons
  Taken in 1906 along the Williams River in Webster County, this photograph features members of the Hammons family—brothers Pete, Paris, and Neal—posing with a fiddle, gun, and phonograph. Known for their distinctive old-time musical sound, their knowledge of mountain lore, and their traditional way of life, the Hammons family embodies the culture and sound of the West Virginia frontier. According to folklorist and musician Gerry Milnes, “The three brothers seem to be making a calculated statement by holding items of importance and usefulness.” Milnes notes that the inclusion of the phonograph “belies any argument that this family was musically isolated from the rest of the world,” contradicting the stereotype of mountaineers as culturally secluded from the rest of the world.
• Subscription School Students and Teachers, West Virginia.
  Though often viewed by the popular press as backward and isolated, historians have consistently shown that Appalachia was connected to the broader national economy and culture. Often following the lead of middle-class reformers, many residents came to believe that both education and industrial development were essential to the advancement of the region. As part of their pursuit of education, some rural communities offered subscription singing schools where adults and children could learn to sing using a form of written music called “shape notes.” Families paid a subscription fee to compensate a traveling music teacher for group lessons that ran about two weeks.
• Logging Camp, Pocahontas County, West Virginia.
  Notice the loggers holding banjos at this Pocahontas County logging camp. Fiddles and banjos were the most common instruments in traditional Appalachian music for many decades; guitar accompaniment did not become popular until the twentieth century.
• Map of the Allegheny Highlands and Greenbrier River Valley of West Virginia
  Two overlapping, regional designations play essential roles in this history of West Virginia’s timber industry. Home to a magnificent variety of hardwoods and softwoods, the Allegheny Highlands include the highest peaks in the Allegheny Mountains. Today, much of this area is part of the Monongahela National Forest. The counties of the Allegheny Highlands are fed by multiple river systems, one of which forms the Greenbrier River Valley. The river systems, and later railroads, connected the Greenbrier Valley with the Allegheny Highlands, forming a transportation and trade network that also linked the region to neighboring counties, such as Braxton and Clay.
• The Wheeling Intelligencer
  This newspaper, The Intelligencer, Wheeling, WV. Details strikes that occurred during 1919, where efforts were made from the UMW to organize a nation-wide strike.