Appalachian Author Interviews Story Archives - Page 2 of 11

Appalachian Ginseng Opened Trade With The World

Luke Manget, an assistant professor of history at Dalton State College in Dalton, Georgia, dug through community store records to gain insight into the wild herb trade in America, especially looking at ginseng and its connection to Asia.

Manget spoke with Eric Douglas recently about his new book “Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Give me the 30 second primer on ginseng.

Manget: Ginseng is a deciduous perennial herbaceous plant that grows about 18 inches high and grows pretty prolifically in the mountains. Since the early 18th century, it has been in high demand in East Asia and particularly China. The Chinese have used Asian ginseng for thousands of years as a panacea. I mean, it was the most important medicinal herb in their pharmacopeia. Early in the 18th century, Jesuits working in Canada and China discovered that American ginseng was close enough to Asian ginseng that it could be substituted in the markets and East Asia. And so it started this trade that funneled Appalachian or North American ginseng to the markets in Asia. It was driven entirely by demand from East Asia and China.

Douglas: In the early 1800s, you’ve got people who’ve barely heard of China, are digging up ginseng and sending the crops to China, and making a living off of it or supplementing their income anyway.

Manget: And, in fact, ginseng from West Virginia helped open up trade relationships between the United States and China in 1784. This was right after the American Revolution. And people were moving into the region moving across the Ohio River, moving into the Ohio valley. And in 1784, a group of financiers outfitted this ship called the Emperor of China and it was going to be the first contact made directly between the United States and China. There are a lot of consumers over there; we were trying to figure out how to break into the market. They didn’t really want much of what the Americans produced, but they wanted ginseng. And so we loaded it down with 100,000 pounds of mostly Pennsylvania and Western Virginia ginseng and established a trade relationship with them.

Douglas: I guess the local settlers are taking it to the community store and trading it. And then the community stores are collecting it and sending it to Baltimore or New York?

Author Luke Manget, a history professor, poses with ginseng.

Manget: Initially, there were itinerant merchants who traveled around hauling wagon loads of goods bartering for whatever they could get. Some of the first ones to come into the region would just send out word that they were going to come through with their wagon loads of goods. And people would bring them ginseng, skins and furs and some of the other stuff. I’m sure these merchants would have preferred, you know hard cash and gold and silver, but there just wasn’t a lot circulating. So they had to take whatever the locals could give them. And ginseng served as something of a currency in the early economy. Later on it became funneled to the country store, so the country merchants would open up these big stores, and advertise they would take in barter and then at the end of the year, they might have a merchant kind of come through from Baltimore buying up their ginseng.

Douglas: One of the things you’ve talked about in the book, is the concept of a community commons with gathering on community forest land. Can you explain that to me?

Manget: The story of root digging and herb gathering in Appalachia is essentially a story of the commons. These plants were not cultivated in private gardens, and after the 1830s 1840s, I mean, there’s no public domain left in the region. There’s no kind of public land, all of it’s owned by somebody, mostly in West Virginia, large land companies, absentee owners, speculators. So, it was all private property.

But on a local level, the locals treated the mountain sides primarily as something of a commons. And by that, I mean, it was widely expected that everyone in the community would have access to these forest and mountain sides. It was like a de facto public domain. Members of the community pretty much assume that any plant they found growing wild, that wasn’t planted by someone’s labor, right, that was the property of whoever found it, the harvester rather than the property of the landowner on whose land it was found. By the Civil War, it was a pretty established custom, although it was always subject to some sort of negotiations. After the Civil War, there was more pressure on the commons and it kind of changed the dynamics a little bit there. Now, of course, you can’t just assume that you can take them from people’s property, so it’s shifted along the way, but back in the 19th century, the commons was a pretty powerful institution.

Douglas: Which brings me to my next question. Where does ginseng farming stand today? Is it still a money making enterprise?

Manget: The cultivation of ginseng really ramps up around the 1890s. By this first or second decade of the 20th century, there’s kind of this craze for ginseng cultivation. And it was a big thing back then, and kind of subsided over time for a variety of reasons. Over the last 30 or 40 years, it’s definitely become more important in certain places. Wisconsin, I think, leads the country in ginseng cultivation. There’s a lot of bigger farms up there. In Appalachia, there are people that have the big patches of ginseng. Although most of them they’re doing what’s called forest farming and they’re growing wild ginseng. So they’re essentially growing it in the forest. And it doesn’t look like a garden, but they’re growing it in their woods and they got a big patch going. And it’s definitely their private patch. It’s definitely cultivated in some form.

Douglas: The markets are still there, though. There’s still a demand from Asia for ginseng root. And it’s still a moneymaker?

Manget: It’s still a money maker. There’s less of it than there used to be. And there’s more regulations now. In parts of western North Carolina, it’s declining and the Forest Service has actually prohibited digging for the last couple of years on forest service land in North Carolina just to let it rebound. So it’s a little harder to find, but it gets anywhere from $600 to $1,000 a pound now. So it’s still pretty lucrative if you can find it and dig it legally.

Luke Manget, author of “Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia.” is an assistant professor of history at Dalton State College in Dalton, Georgia.

Memoir Celebrates 'Gilligan's' W.Va. Life, Family

Dreama Denver grew up in Bluefield, West Virginia before she moved to Florida in the early 1970s and went to work for Disney as one of the first cast members. That’s also where she met her husband, Bob Denver, an actor better known as “Gilligan.” When their son was diagnosed with autism, they eventually moved to West Virginia to provide him with full time care.

Courtesy

Dreama and Bob Denver

Eric Douglas spoke to Dreama Denver about her memoir “Gilligan’s Dreams: The Other Side of the Island.” Denver still lives in Princeton and currently runs The Denver Foundation to support families of children with autism. The foundation also provides “honor flights” for West Virginia veterans to go to Washington, D.C and visit the memorials for free.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Let’s talk about Gilligan. What was your life like with Bob Denver?

Denver: I love talking about Gilligan. You know the reason I wrote the book was because people know him and love him as Gilligan or maybe Maynard, if you’re old enough to remember Dobie Gillis. And Bob was so obviously so much more than that. He was such a wonderful father to our autistic son, he loved me like a woman dreams of being loved. And we had a wonderful marriage of 30 years, and that counts, in spite of the stress that we were under with our son. I wrote the book to let people know, yes about Gilligan and the Hollywood years and all that, but about the man he was when it came to commitment and selflessness.

Douglas: You’re from West Virginia, right. That’s why you ended up back here?

Dreama Denver

Courtesy

Denver: Yes, I am from Bluefield. I grew up there, graduated high school there. And then my family moved to Florida, where, right after I graduated and we moved to Orlando, I became one of the first 40 cast members at Walt Disney World back before the park opened when they hired college kids. It was great, great, great fun and a real honor in those days. I’m sure it still is, but it was a huge honor to be chosen because there were only 40 of us.

Douglas: Let’s talk about the memoir and your son. When did you first realize your son had developmental issues? And what was that moment like for you?

Denver: We started realizing that something was wrong when he wasn’t reaching the milestones. Like he didn’t roll over at four months, whatever the months are for that. Then we kind of suspected something was wrong and started looking for help.

The doctor was nice, but he said, I don’t even remember his name now, but he said “This will hold you back your whole life, you need to basically put him away, put him someplace where your life isn’t ruined.” It was devastating. I mean, that’s your baby, you know. And then we found a program in Philadelphia, at a place called the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, which I write about in my book. We went there for about four or five years and did a program with Collin through them.

At the beginning, it’s grief. I don’t know if people understand this, but it’s almost the kind of grief I feel like you would have losing a child. Because you have lost the child that you thought you were going to have. All these dreams about the first day of school, and the first girlfriend and the one that he’ll bring home that you don’t like, and then the one that you do like, and hope he marries, graduation, all these things are out the window. It took some time to get through that and you finally accept what you can’t change.

Bob was almost 16 years older than I was, and much wiser. I was 33 when we had Collin. I was going through the grief and all of that after we found out, and Bob sat me down one day and he said, “Honey, look, you’re grieving for your expectations. You’re grieving for the things that you’re not going to be able to experience with this child.” He said the truth is, Collin doesn’t know the difference. He is severely autistic. So Collin doesn’t know about marriage, and he doesn’t know about going to school and graduating high school and he doesn’t know about those things. So if we make his life as agreeable to him as possible, if we don’t put him in situations because he is severely autistic, where he’s made fun of or ridiculed, or those things don’t happen to him, then we’ll take care of them and his life will be fine.

That just really sort of straightened me out. Because I thought, the things I’m grieving over are my things. A few years after Bob passed away, I re-grieved everything as if it just happened. I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And I didn’t have my husband, I didn’t have a son who could go “Mom, we’ll get through this.” That took some time. But again, it was healing. Because at the end of all that, I came out of it again, being able to define joy, and my life and purpose.

Douglas: Is that where the idea for the memoir came from?

Denver: Bob had always told me long before he was sick, and long before he passed away, “If you want to write our story, feel free to do it. But if you do it, be straight about it. Don’t pull any punches, don’t sugarcoat it, tell it exactly like it was.” He thought our story would be helpful to people going through the same thing. People tell me that the book is raw. It’s just showing how you don’t know what life is gonna throw at you. You can be riding on top of the world, and then have a baby or do something that you think is going to be a happy addition to what you already have and it changes things completely.

Bob taught me so much he taught me to carry on. I’m just so grateful to have had 30 years with him. And now I’m grateful for my son who has taught me so much that I would never have learned.

WVU Press Tells Appalachian Stories, Helps To Share Region’s Diversity

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently labeled WVU Press as a “new publishing heavyweight.” But the small university press hasn’t lost its focus on West Virginian and Appalachian stories.

Eric Douglas spoke with director Derek Krissoff to find out what makes the press tick.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Tell me what WVU Press is.

Krissoff: That’s the question that I’m always hoping that people will ask. And the most important thing to stress about WVU Press, and I think about university presses in general, is that we’re book publishers. We’re fundamentally a book publisher in the same way that Random House or HarperCollins is a book publisher. We acquire and edit and design and produce and market and sell books. We sell them in the marketplace. You see them at bookstores and see them reviewed, hopefully, in newspapers and on public radio, and so forth.

The difference between what we do at WVU Press and what a large commercial for-profit publisher does is that we are not for profit. We’re part of WVU. So we’re part of the state of West Virginia. And we have mission reasons for what we do alongside the commercial reasons. Obviously, we want to see our books succeed. We want to have resources from the sale of books that we can invest in publishing more and better books. We want to see the books get attention alongside the books from HarperCollins. But we also want to reflect positively on WVU as a research institution. We are the largest publisher in the state of West Virginia. And that’s something that we take seriously. And we want to publish books that project outward the strength of WVU as an institution, but also the strength of West Virginia as a place.

Douglas: Granted you certainly want to sell books, but you have a different lens through which you look at books.

Krissoff: One of the pieces of confusion that people sometimes have about university presses is they think we only publish faculty at our own university. And that’s not true. We publish faculty from all around the world, although we certainly do publish WVU faculty. And we also publish people who aren’t faculty at all.

Douglas: How many books do you publish in a year?

Krissoff: We publish between 15 and 20 books a year. And we also have a small scholarly journals program. The number of books is actually going down a little bit. That’s deliberate, because we want to invest a little bit more in every book that we publish. For a while, we were up close to 25. Now we’re 20 or even a little bit less. But sales have gone up as we’ve gone down on title output, because I think we have been able to really focus the resources that we have on the books that seem most likely to reward that.

Douglas: You’re talking about representing West Virginia, and Appalachian literature, in general. But, there’s a misconception that Appalachian literature is coal mining memoirs, and grandma and pop all up in the hills. But that’s not all that you publish.

Krissoff: I’m glad that you noticed that. And that’s a deliberate effort on our part to reflect the full diversity of the state and the region. And I think Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Life of Church Ladies is an example. She is a Black author in Pittsburgh, so just up the road from Morgantown, so that felt like a regional acquisition for us. And certainly, having the opportunity to amplify the voice of a Black writer in our part of the world was attractive.

But from that success we’ve been able to invest the resources in something like Bill Turner’s book, The Harlan Renaissance, which is just out, which is sort of based on his experience growing up in primarily Black coal camps in Eastern Kentucky in the middle part of the 20th century. Not a typical Appalachian story, but an important Appalachian story.

And then our lead title for spring is a book called Another Appalachia by a woman named Neema Avashia. She grew up in West Virginia and is a writer and educator. She’s queer and she’s Indian American. Her parents immigrated to West Virginia from India, and she proudly claims the identity of an Appalachian. She’s got stuff in her book about Tudor’s Biscuits. I mean she’s into it. But she doesn’t reflect the sort of prevailing notions about what Appalachia is or about who Appalachians are. And that seems like an important thing we can do to help amplify those voices, and to maybe change perceptions about what Appalachia is culturally, politically and all the rest.

Douglas: So let’s talk about Deesha Philyaw. I interviewed her over the summer for The Secret Life Church Ladies. That book kind of blew up on you.

Krissoff: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, which has only been out a little over a year, is far and away the most successful book commercially that we’ve ever published. And really a university press success story, I think, across our industry. That book was a finalist for the National Book Award, which is the biggest book award given in the United States. It won the PEN Faulkner Award and won The Story Prize and is being adapted for HBO. These are things that in many cases no university press book has ever done before. Obviously, we try to keep the spotlight on the books and the authors, but if there is kind of a narrative about the publishing house, too, then that’s great. And we can use that opportunity to raise awareness of what publishers do and what university presses do.

Douglas: What makes your ears perk up when you get a submission? What are you looking for the next book?

Krissoff: That’s a great question and it’s a tricky one to answer. Certainly, we are motivated by a commitment to social justice, by a commitment to reflecting the diversity of the region. So if there’s an opportunity to work with an author whose voice will be amplifying, who wouldn’t have that opportunity with a big house in New York, where they might not see the audience for the book, or kind of get what the author was trying to do, then that is immediately appealing, and a lot of our recent successes have come from working with members of those communities to tell their stories effectively.

But I think there are also stories about Appalachia that wouldn’t get told otherwise. An example along these lines would be something like our collection of responses to Hillbilly Elegy that we published a couple of years ago called Appalachian Reckoning. Before Deesha’s book, that was the most successful book commercially that we published. And this is one where the idea sort of came from in-house. Hillbilly Elegy was doing so well and dominating so much of the story about our region. And we thought, there are other stories here, too. What can we do to draw those voices into a single volume, and sort of present some sort of counterweight to balance out the story of Hillbilly Elegy? Get people talking about Appalachia in different ways than JD Vance was. That’s a case where instead of hanging back and seeing what came over the transom, we sort of went out and found people to do this book. And that was really successful, and I think helped position us as a press that was dedicated to the many different voices from this region.

‘The Other Feud' Looks At The Civil War’s Effects On Hatfields And McCoys

The Hatfield and McCoy Feud is one of the best known legends in the country, well beyond its roots in West Virginia and Kentucky. Historian Philip Hatfield looks at how the Civil War, years before the feud itself, may have influenced the feudists themselves. Nearly all of the men involved, on both sides, fought in the war for the Confederates.

Hatfield spoke with Eric Douglas to discuss his book, “The Other Feud: William Anderson ‘Devil Anse’ Hatfield in the Civil War.”

Douglas: Tell me about Devil Anse’s Civil War history. Tell me tell me what he did throughout the Civil War.

Hatfield: Devil Anse was, like many of the men in the Tug River Valley area, required to serve in the militia before the Civil War. That was just kind of an annual event. They would get together for two or three days for muster once a year. Those events typically wound up more of a picnic with a drunken brawl than a real military event. That was about the extent of the antebellum experience that the militia had. When the war came, Devil Anse was in the 129th Virginia Militia. And that was a regiment that was composed of men from Logan, some men from Wayne, and what later became Wyoming County.

They were in a few small actions at Boone courthouse, Wayne courthouse and southwestern Virginia, which became West Virginia later. He was part of the Virginia State Line when that regiment disbanded. In 1863, into 1864, he was in the 45th Battalion Virginia Infantry, which was a regular Confederate unit. It wasn’t a state organization, like the VSL.

I was not able to pinpoint the exact date, but sometime in the fall of 1864, Devil Anse deserted. There were over 300 desertions in that regiment around the same time, and essentially what was going on they received word that they were getting their homes and their farms burned out and attacked by the Federal Army. So they left to go home to protect their families.

Douglas: So they started saying “I need to go home and protect my own land. I’m not going to fight for the Confederacy anymore.”

Hatfield: There’s a lot of evidence that the soldiers were getting letters from home and news of Vicksburg falling into Union hands. After Gettysburg, it was pretty much a lost cause and the soldiers in southwestern Virginia were beginning to realize this.

When you’re getting letters from home saying, “Hey our neighbor’s farm was burned out, or the Federals are stealing our cows and our horses,” it was desertion en masse.

Douglas: Devil Anse served in the Civil War up through 1864. And then back home through the end of the war. How did that go on to affect the feud later?

Hatfield: There’s an argument in the literature known as the legacy theory. There’s a group of researchers who would attribute the feud violence to economic factors during the Reconstruction period, rather than roots in the Civil War. A lot of this I’ve reviewed in the book, but there’s some problems with that. Economic factors were certainly part of reconstruction in Appalachia. But the restoration of the Union didn’t really apply in that part of the country. The folks there weren’t really willing to go along with the new program. For years, Confederates weren’t allowed to vote. Confederate Veterans couldn’t hold office. There were a lot of fights on Election Day.

All 14 of the men in the feud, from both families, were also Civil War veterans. And, you know, just from what we know about the effects of combat on modern veterans, there’s a whole psychology literature that deals with combat stress or PTSD. It’s very well-researched now. But those things leave an indelible effect on people and the feudists really got their education in warfare from these partisan guerrilla missions.

Douglas: Do I remember correctly that the Devil Anse was a big timber guy?

Hatfield: He became successful in the timber industry after the war. I don’t think he was wealthy by eastern Virginia standards, but he was successful and owned quite a bit of land and had a fairly large group working for him. And there was some animosity between him and Randall McCoy that had to do with business transactions after the war, but that is admittedly conjectural.

Douglas: You made the point several times throughout the book that there were a lot of family stories that have no basis in reality — that these guys were at Gettysburg and other battles, but they weren’t even near them.

Hatfield: They weren’t even close. The Gettysburg thing has its roots in one of the McCoy family members, Truda McCoy. She mentioned that Devil Anse and Ellison were part of the Logan Wildcats, which was a pre-war volunteer company. But that became Company D of the 36th Virginia and neither Devil Anse nor Ellison appear on the muster rolls. They weren’t in that regiment. Yet that story gets kicked around in almost all of the feud literature.

“The Other Feud: William Anderson ‘Devil Anse’ Hatfield in the Civil War” is available from 35th Star Publishing.

Book: Blair Mountain Told Through Eyes Of Participants

A new book looks at the Battle of Blair Mountain through the eyes of people who were actually there. “On Dark and Bloody Ground” is compiled from a series of oral histories collected in 1972.

Author Anne Lawrence collected the original recordings and worked with WVU Press and the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum to publish the book in time for the 100th anniversary of the battle. She spoke with Eric Douglas about the process.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Describe how you got started on this project.

Lawrence: I wrote this book in 1972, when I was just 21 years old. At the time, I was a junior at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, studying history and sociology. And this oral history project was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I was not the original grant recipient. The original grant recipient was the Miner’s Voice, which was the newspaper of Miners for Democracy, which was at that time the reform movement in the United Mine Workers Union.

As luck would have it, one of my very close friends was working in the Miners for Democracy campaign. And she said, I think I know someone who can do it. That was me. So they gave me a call. I thought it was a fantastic opportunity. I took a leave of absence from Swarthmore College and drove to Charleston and spent the next six months driving around southern West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, and parts of southwestern Virginia with my little portable tape recorder, and cassette tapes, trying to find people who still remembered the mine wars of the 1920s and 30s.

Douglas: Had you ever done an oral history before?

Lawrence: No, I had never done an oral history before. So I had to learn about oral history, I had to learn about West Virginia history. And I had to learn how to find the people who remembered these events.

Douglas: How did you track down the miners you spoke to?

Lawrence: Well, I worked through the Miners for Democracy network. I did work through the Black Lung Association, which was working at that time to win health care benefits for miners who suffered from black lung disease. So they had many older members. I had contacts in Vista. And it actually was a little bit like a snowball process. Once I got out in the field and started meeting people I would ask if they knew any other old-timers who might remember these events. And they would put me in touch with their friends and contacts. So once I got in the field, one contact often led to another.

Douglas: One of the first things any person who records oral histories knows is sometimes you have to earn somebody’s trust before they’ll really open up to you.

Lawrence: I spent a lot of time sitting on people’s porches. I went to senior centers. At the time I was a smoker. I’ve subsequently quit smoking but at the time I would carry my cigarettes with me. And I would sit on someone’s front porch with them and offer them a cigarette and just sit there. Some people’s trust I did not win. And those people I didn’t interview so I just took it one person at a time.

Douglas: Ultimately how many interviews did you conduct?

Lawrence: I think I recorded about 80 interviews. They are somewhat over 40 that appear in the book that’s just been published.

Douglas: For the purposes of this book, it’s strictly about the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Lawrence: It’s mostly about the Battle of Blair Mountain. There are a few interviews with coal miners and their wives and family members describing the ultimate unionization of southern West Virginia in 1933 during the early years of the New Deal. So the book has an arc to it. These initial struggles to organize the southern West Virginia coalfields bookended by the victory that occurred in 1933.

Douglas: What’s your biggest takeaway from your recordings? And then revisiting them to publish this book?

Lawrence: This book is about a lengthy, lengthy struggle to unionize the coal fields. It’s about the participation of ordinary people in shaping their own history. I did not interview public figures. I interviewed ordinary people who, in fact, had a tremendous historic impact. So one of the takeaways I would draw now is that ordinary people can shape their destiny through their own actions.

Douglas: Tell me about how you came to work with Catherine Moore and the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum.

Lawrence: It was a remarkable story. I had been working over the last few years to get this material into the public domain. It had originally been circulated as a type script manuscript and in the form of an NIH project report, but it was never formally published. I had reached out initially to see if we could get the collection of tapes donated to a library, and I was able to donate the tapes to George Washington University Labor History Collection. They assisted me in digitizing the material and putting it up online.

As part of that process of trying to get this work into the hands of people who might be interested, I did some online research and I discovered the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, which is a wonderful recent effort to build a library of people’s history in Matewan. I thought they might be interested in it and I reached out by email to Catherine Moore, who was the president of the museum. A few minutes later, I get a response from Catherine, that says, “I can’t believe it’s you! I’ve been looking for you.”

She had discovered a copy of the manuscript and had an idea that it should be published in connection with the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain. She subsequently put me in touch with Derek Krissoff, who is the head of the West Virginia University Press. And we took it from there. So I’m extremely grateful to Catherine for helping me make those connections and for having the vision that this would make a book now, that would be of interest to West Virginians, and others.

Hear the oral history of Grace Jackson.

Douglas: Were there any favorite stories from the book?

Lawrence: The book opens with an interview with a woman named Grace Jackson, who had been a girl living on Cabin Creek when Mother Jones came there during the strike of 1912 and 13. She has recollections of being with a crowd of miners and their families walking down the creek behind Mother Jones. She was very elderly when I talked to her in 1972. And she had some of the earliest recollections. I talked to people who fought on both sides of the Battle of Blair Mountain. I think one of the funniest stories I encountered was a teenage boy who had gone up to the mountain to fight on the union side. And word had somehow gotten back to his family that he had been killed on the mountain. He eventually came back home, walked into his home where they were having a wake for him. He was there quite resurrected from the dead. The family was quite astonished. But he told a lively story about that experience.

Douglas: You interviewed people that fought on the side of the mines. Did those people regret fighting?

Lawrence: I talked to a number of people who had fought on the anti-union side who were coal miners who had essentially been conscripted to go up onto the mountain. I think they did experience regret for having done that. One of the women I spoke to had two brothers who were on opposite sides of that conflict. They had been in a shooting war, essentially shooting at each other. And she talked about how that had really irreparably torn apart their family.

Douglas: Is there anything we haven’t talked about?

Lawrence: Cecil Roberts, the current president of the United Mine Workers provided an afterword, which was very moving to me. And it’s a beautiful piece of work. The story is that Catherine and I thought it’d be wonderful if he would write an afterword and we sent him a pre-publication copy. We didn’t hear back from him for several weeks, and we thought we probably wouldn’t hear from him. And then he contacted us, said that he loved the book. And in fact, I had interviewed his grandmother.

He had grown up on Cabin Creek and was a descendant of many of the participants in the events I had documented. He drew the connection with his own family history and the roots of his commitment to coal miners and coal miner unionism.

The book is available through WVU Press. Portions of the project have been digitized and are available online through the George Washington University Library. For more information on the activities around the Battle of Blair Mountain, visit the Blair 100 website.

This story is part of a series of interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.

Folk Medicines Examined In New Book

Appalachian lore often includes medicines made from plants and herbs to cure ailments. A new book by Rebecca Linger and Dennis K. Flaherty examines the components of some of those traditional herbs to see just what effect they have and determine how best to use them.

Rebecca Linger and Dennis Flaherty were both on the faculty of the University of Charleston School of Pharmacy. Both have an interest in medicinal plants but from different perspectives. Dr. Linger teaches graduate courses in ethnobotany and was interested in the chemistry and pharmacology of medicinal plants. Dr. Flaherty, who is now retired, taught graduate toxicology courses and approached the book project from a human toxicology perspective.

The book is titled “A Guide to the Toxicology of Select Medicinal Plants and Herbs of Eastern North America.” Eric Douglas spoke with Linger to understand the history behind these medicines.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Explain to me the interest in herbal medicine and the medicinal properties. Where did that come from?

Linger: I was born in southern Ohio, and my mother’s people come from Adams County, Ohio. My grandmother was someone who pretty much doctored the family and herself and she had some very interesting remedies that she would use on her children. When I was little, I was always getting canker sores, which now that I’m older, I recognize that it’s because I had a thiamin deficiency. My grandma had this little tin of yellow root powder. And she would always give me a little bit of that in a plastic bag and say “Take this home, lick your finger, tap it on the powder and put it on your sores whenever you get a canker sore.” And when I used that stuff, it’s bitter. Being a four- or five-year-old kid, doctoring yourself with an herbal medicine was really, really tough. But I did it because the canker sore would be gone in a day. And if you’ve ever had any kind of mouth sores you know it’s really, really painful. So I trusted it, and it worked great.

Douglas: How did people learn this stuff? Where did that knowledge come from in the first place?

Linger: The answer is that if you look back in recorded history, there have been many medical texts that have been written in all cultures. So the Chinese had the Yellow Emperor’s book of medicine. That actually encompasses many, many different fields. But if you think all the way back to primitive man before recorded history, you’d have to figure that there were observational things. “Is this plant edible? Well, let me eat a little bit of it. Oh, it’s edible. It’s bitter. But it didn’t really make me sick. And it actually helped with something.” The other thing is that the observation of what plants animals ate helped early man to recognize what was there.

But in terms of what plants have medicinal properties, it really was kind of a trial and error that you would have this idea that “Well, let me try this and see if this helps with this problem.”

I do want to point out that there was a Neanderthal grave that was discovered in Germany. And when they excavated it, they noticed that the body covered with a lot of medicinal plants. They thought it was a Neanderthal burial practice. But when they really looked at the flowers in the grave, every single one of them had strong medicinal properties. And so maybe the Neanderthals recognized medicinal properties.

Douglas: For the book, you’ve taken these oral traditions of medicines, but then you break down the chemical properties. As a scientist, what was your thought about this? Were you skeptical? Or were you? “Hey, I know from personal experience this stuff works?”

Linger: There are herbal books that have been written that basically will talk about all the plants that have been historically used as medicine. I did have a certain level of skepticism. It’s like, “Is that really true?” One of the plants out there that has an ascribed medicinal property to it, but there’s nothing in science to support is maidenhair fern. It’s supposed to help you grow a thick head of hair. There’s nothing in it.

After World War II, the United States government shifted its focus from implements of war to implements of health. The National Cancer Institute was founded from that. And one of the processes that scientists there advocated to academics across the country was to find new cures for cancer. The academics went back to the herbals. From that process, we got the mayapple, which is a beautiful spring flower. The fruit is edible, the rest of the plant is incredibly toxic, because it stops your cells from dividing. And so from that we got two chemotherapies that are still in use today. And they’re very, very effective.

The book will allow you to learn how to dose yourself with medicinal plants. But it will also give you the caution that don’t use too much of it, this is the recommended dose, don’t go over this. And this is how it will interact with the organ systems in your body. If you take too much of it, it could harm your liver or your kidneys. Some of them are going to cause your heart to have issues.

Douglas: Were there any big surprises when you jumped into this research?

Linger: I talked about the horse chestnut. I was born in southern Ohio so the buckeye tree is, of course, near and dear to my heart. I was always raised that buckeyes were poisonous, but I would see half-eaten buckeyes in the field. My uncle always teased me that only the squirrel knows which half of the buckeye is not poisonous.

You can use the buckeye as medicine, you can make a tincture out of it, or a tea out of it, and use very, very small amounts of it. And it will actually help with stomach complaints and so forth. It’ll help with inflammation. So it will help a little bit with your arthritis. One of the folktales that I’d always heard was to carry a buckeye in your pocket and you’d never have joint pain.

Douglas: Today, you hear a lot about essential oils and that sort of thing. Is that an extension today of this kind of medicine?

Linger: Definitely. A lot of medicinal properties of plants are in the oils of the plant itself. I’ll give the example of pine oil. It can disrupt some of the pain signaling in your body so that it will alleviate pain and inflammation. There is some truth to that. Smelling lavender oil is relaxing. Cedar wood and sage oil can be very relaxing, too.

But you have to be careful with essential oils because they’re so strong. There are some that are really, really toxic.

One thing about it that needs to be said is that if you are infusing essential oils in your household, be aware of the pets that you have because especially cats aren’t able to metabolize the essential oils and they’ll build up in the system. Essential oils can be toxic to your pets.

“A Guide to the Toxicology of Select Medicinal Plants and Herbs of Eastern North America” is available in Charleston at Taylor Books, the Capitol Market and the gift shop at Kanawha State Forest. It is also available on Amazon.

This story is part of a series of interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.