The Hindman Settlement School and Its Music
by Virginia Chambers
Journal of Research in Music Education, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer, 1973), pp. 135-144
THE HINDMAN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL AND ITS MUSIC
Virginia Chambers
The late nineteenth century brought as a conjunct to industrial development a corresponding interest in the human condition that was expressed, at least in part, by the founding of social settlements in both England and the United States. In England, university graduates reacted to the disintegration of village life and the hardships of factory workers by moving into industrial slums and working to remedy injustice and share their standards of living with working class people.[1] In this country the rapid industrialization after the Civil War, the influx of millions of immigrants in the decades 1880-1900, corrupt city governments, and lack of action by church and charity groups were factors that influenced socially conscious persons to imitate the English example. As a result, a number of settlement houses were founded in American cities after 1883.[2]
One of the interesting products of the settlement movement in the U.S. was the founding and operation of rural social settlements. These settlements reflected the same ideals as their urban counterparts by providing a better education, sharing aesthetic ideals, and helping people improve their lives by improving their surroundings. More than two hundred settlement and mission schools, operated by individuals and various religious denominations, were in existence in the 1920s, the height of the mission school era.[3] The role of these schools was described by a contemporary writer, James Watt Raine:
These "brought-on," non-indigenous schools show every sort of difference in educational ideals, purposes, and efficiency. They range from kindergartent o college. Most of them started as elementary schools, taking the place of public schools that were not there, or were not functioning. ... Some of them, striving to do the greatest good for the greatest number, keep the pupils only till they have progressedt hrougha few gradesa nd then "graduate"th em to make room for others that are clamoring for admittance.[4]
The first rural settlement school in the U.S.-one upon which many others were to pattern their development-was the Hindman Settlement School, established in 1902 in the county seat of Knott County, Kentucky, in the heart of the Cumberland Mountains. Its founders, Katherine Pettit and May Stone, were members of the Kentucky Federation of Women's Clubs. At the Federation's annual meeting in 1899 an appeal came from Reverend T. J. Mitchell of Hazard, Kentucky, asking for a woman to visit the mountains and "assist in conduct of meetings of wives, mothers, housekeepers, young ladies and little girls. Lectures and lessons on cookery and homemaking should be made particularly enthusiastic, and then the intellectual and moral features can be made interesting."[5]
In discussing this appeal, Pettit described several walking trips she had taken in eastern Kentucky. During her visits she had been urged by residents of several counties to start a school in the mountains. The Kentucky Federation of Women's Clubs, upon hearing Pettit's testimony about the need for schools, raised $180 by subscription. She was asked to organize a summer institute at Hazard, which she did in company with Stone, then secretary to the Federation.6 This institute, Camp Cedar Grove, was operated in the summer of 1899 at Hazard. A tent donated by the Kentucky militia was decorated with flags, pictures, and Japanese lanterns. Four young women gave temperance lectures; taught cooking, needlework, and table setting; and talked and sang with the visitors who flocked to see them.
Among the visitors to the camp was an eighty-year-old patriarch, "Uncle" Solomon Everidge, who had walked more than twenty miles from Hindman to meet the young women. May Stone described her first meeting with the old man as unforgettable. He was tall, white-haired, barefoot, and dressed in homespun crimson hunting jacket and trousers.[7] He was reputed to have asked the young women to come to work at Hindman:
When I was just a chunk of a boy hoeing corn on the steep mountain side, when I'd get to the end of the row, I would look up the Troublesome Creek and down the Troublesome Creek and wonder if anyone would ever come in to learn us anything. But nobody ever came in and nobody ever went out; so we just growed up and never knowed nuthin'. I can't read or write, but
have children, greats and grands, and I want them to have a chance for larnin'.[8]
Whether or not Everidge's speech was the deciding factor is not known, but the Kentucky Federation of Women's Clubs sponsored another camp at Hindman in the summer of 1900. Six young women-Stone and Pettit, Curry Breckenridge and Katherine Christian of Lexington, Laura Campbell of Philadelphia, and Eva Bruner of Louisville-established a camp at Hindman that they called a social settlement.[9] Camp Industrial was a tent pitched above the town of Hindman. Its furnishings were brought from Louisville via a one-day train trip to Jackson and a forty-five-mile, two-day ride in horse-drawn wagons. As at Hazard the summer camp at Hindman emphasized simple things, such as preparation of food, sewing, table setting, and temperance lessons. Miss Breckenridge taught music using a parlor organ, an instrument unknown to the populace, who referred to it as the brass band.[10]
The women's diaries report:
Some of the people thought it was wrong to have any kind of music but "meetin' house songs." We forgot that and asked a boy to bring his banjo and give us some mountain music. A good sister hastened to urge us not to have "banjo-pickin'" and said only wicked folks would allow it and that some of the people were saying that we could not be good if we liked it.[11]
Bruner taught songs to her kindergarten students, although they seemed little interested in learning the songs she sang, She said: They seemed to enjoy the singing, that is in listening to the teacher sing, but it was difficult to get them to join in. It was found that the children did not take up songs readily. They learned them in time but only after great effort. The only reason that I can assign is that they are unaccustomed to singing except "long metre" hymns and certain tuneless ballads. One morning we had the rain song and afterward I asked, "Don't you think that's a pretty song?" "No," replied a frank little boy, "I don't think it's pretty, but I like to hear you sing it."[12]
The summer camp at Hindman was a success, and the ladies were urged to stay in the mountain and establish a permanent school. both Lacking funds and experience, they were unwilling to do so. After their departure and throughout the following year, interested residents of Hindman kept up a steady correspondence with Katherine Pettit and May Stone, urging them to return to Knott County. The young women raised some $2,600 from donations of women's clubs and interested friends, and returned to Hindman. Citizens who were eager to show their support of the proposed school had donated two acres of land near the forks of Troublesome Creek. A school building was purchased, a cottage rented, and the Hindman Settlement School began operation on August 4, 1902.
On opening day 162 students, most of them from the town of Hindman, were enrolled in the school.[13] Most were in elementary school, although a few students were instructed in history, literature, and Latin, subjects usually taught in secondary school. From the earliest days of its operation, the school offered instruction in vocational subjects such as cooking,
sewing, woodworking, weaving, basket making, home nursing, and home economics.
Residents of the area served by Hindman Settlement School contributed to development and expansion of school facilities. When a series of destructive fires threatened the school's existence in the years between 1905 and 1910, Knott County citizens donated land, money, building materials, and labor to enable Pettit and Stone to continue operation of the Settlement.
Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the operation of Hindman Settlement School, from earliest days, has been the emphasis placed on indigenous music. Teachers and workers have listened to children sing, have encouraged them to sing and dance for other people, and have taught songs, dances, and games to children and adults. Although many teachers do these same things with and for children, too few have taken any interest in indigenous culture and helped to keep it vivid by using it. At Hindman Settlement School, the impetus for cultivation and continuation of the music culture of the mountain people may have been
provided by Katherine Pettit. Apparently she first came in contact with this mountain music in 1900, when her diaries record that enroute to Hindman she heard a group of lumbermen from the mountains entertaining themselves at the home where she lodged. She took down the words of as many ballads and songs as she could and found the music "equally as unusual as the words."[14] The words to "Lovin' Hanner," "Lord Daniel's Wife," "Pretty Polly," "The Drunkard's Dream," and others are placed at the end of her diaries and attest to her interest. Her enthusiasm for mountain music was probably personal and based on its appeal to her, for there is no evidence that she was aware the ballads were of interest to collectors. Pettit's attitude, at least before famous folk song collector Cecil Sharp's visits to Hindman, is typified by this
description:
It is pleasant to go up into the library at six o'clock after dinner, sit down before the great fire, with its blazing backlog and forestick, and see what happens. The first person to enter, usually, is Miss Pettit. She is followed fast by six little girls .... They gather their little chairs about the fire, and either Miss Pettit reads some pretty story to them, or they set a little table with real
dishes, "cap" some corn over the fire, and have a tea-party. . . . Then when their tea-party is over, Miss Pettit suggests that "song-ballads" are in order, and they lift their voices in "Barbary Allen," "Turkish Lady," "The Brown Girl," or some other old song that has been forgotten by the rest of the world for two or three hundred years. As they sing, the older children drop in by twos and threes, the girls from the dishwashing, the boys from the shop, and all lend their voices to swell the singing. Fitzhugh takes down the banjo and picks an accompaniment, Enoch lines out the words if necessary, the teachers gather in too, and the hour is all too short for everybody ....[15]
The emphasis on music in scenes as described above, served some important functions. The indigenous music of the mountains maintained its value among its practitioners because other persons, in this case people of stature in the community, found the music interesting and beautiful. In the performance of the music, an oral tradition maintained vitality. Such gatherings also served as an informal means of education as songs were passed from one person to others. Travelers to the mountains who
stayed at the Hindman Settlement School were fascinated with the singing they heard. One visitor, Mrs. John C. Campbell, heard ballad singing for the first time in 1908. She recorded the event in her diary:
I shall never cease to be grateful to Miss Pettit for opening to me what was to become an absorbing and illuminating interest as the years went on. She asked, that first night, as we sat after supper in the living-room before a huge open fire, if I would like to hear an old ballad. When I politely assented, without too much real enthusiasm, she called on one of the girls-Ada B. Smith, her name was-to sing me "Barbry Allen." Shall I ever forget it? The blazing fire, the young girl on her low stool before it, the soft strange strumming of the banjo-different from anything I had heard before-and then the song! I had been used to sing "Barbara Allen" as a child, but how far from that gentle tune was this-so strange, so remote, so thrilling. I was lost almost from the first note, and I was again on the long road over which we had come, the dark hills, the rocky streams bordered by tall hemlocks and hollies, the lonely cabins distinguishable at night only by the firelight flaring from their chimneys. Then these, too, faded, and I seemed to be borne along into a still more dim and distant past, of which I myself was a part.[16]
Olive Dame Campbell's interest in the music she heard at Hindman led her to collect ballads, hymns, and songs as she traveled throughout the mountains with her husband John, secretary of the Southern Highlands Division of the Russell Sage Foundation. Ultimately, she was to collaborate with Cecil Sharp in the publication of English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians.[17] She was probably the first person to use mountain schools as a center for collecting indigenous music. Those who lived at mountain settlement schools while they sought out music from the local culture found themselves in an advantageous position.
Many students knew the music sought by collectors and shared it willingly. Travel into remote areas was less forbidding when collectors could rely on returning to the relative comfort of the school grounds at night. Those who collected music, dances, or other folklore were usually received into homes without suspicion because they came from the schools. Among those who collected ballads and publicly noted their indebtedness to mountain schools were Loraine Wyman, Howard Brockway,
Josephine McGill, Evelyn Kendrick Wells, Richard Chase, Mary Wheeler, and Gladys Jameson, all of whom published songs collected as a result of visiting or working in settlement schools.
The dedication of Josephine McGill's Folk-Songs of the Kentucky Mountains, for example, offered "sincere thanks to all who assisted in the making of the collection, which was suggested by Miss May Stone, head of the Settlement School of Hindman, Knott County, Kentucky." The second of Wyman and Brockway's collections, Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs, is dedicated to the memory of William Creech, the patriarch who donated land for Pine Mountain School.[18] Mary Wheeler was music
teacher at Hindman in 1926-1927 and noted in the preface of Kentucky Mountain Folk Songs that she had obtained the songs in her collection from children at Hindman Settlement School and from older singers as well.[19]
The most famous of the collectors who headquartered at settlement schools was Cecil Sharp. Sharp, whose work in collecting folk songs and dances was well-known in England, visited this country in 1915 and was introduced to Olive Dame Campbell by William Chauncy Langdon, a specialist in pageantry then working with the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. Sharp was immediately interested in the music shown him by Mrs. Campbell and able in 1916 to travel in the Southern Highlands
to hear and collect music. On his first trip, one which was arranged by the Campbells, he visited several Presbyterian mission schools in North Carolina. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, written with Mrs. Campbell, was published the following year. On a second trip, Sharp traveled extensively in the Kentucky mountains and was reputed to have said that he found more songs at Hindman in one day than he ever had in any one day.[20]
Hindman Settlement School, and others like it, served as more than collection agencies for folklorists. Students also learned from and contributed to the music used in the schools. Music was a part of mountain life, but it would be unwise to assume that the Kentucky mountains were "a land of troubadors whose inhabitants carol before breakfast, woo at luncheon with love lyrics, entertain in the evening with ballad shockers, and retire with gospel hymns, folk of course."21 Students came to schools
with varying degrees of interest in and capacity to perform music. Some knew dozens of songs, some knew none. Rebecca Caudill, for instance, says:
"We children did not grow up on Appalachian mountain ballads so much in vogue now and so much sought after by collectors. Stella introduced us to ballads when she came home from the Presbyterian Academy with a head and a notebook full of them."[22]
On the other hand, Edna Ritchie, speaking of music in her home, says: "For maybe two hours or three we would sing ballads, folk songs, hymns, lullabies and nonsense songs. ... This 'singing on the front porch' is one of the happiest memories of my childhood .... What are some of the songs we sang? Everything we knew, though never all in one evening, for that would have taken too long."[23]
Whatever the musical backgrounds of its students, Hindman Settlement School was a vital force in the dissemination of mountain music. From Katherine Pettit's interest in ballads to the encouragement given children to sing for each other, from the collection of songs to performance of indigenous music throughout the U.S., the school has served as an agency for the propagation of music and other mountain arts and crafts. For many years the teaching of music at Hindman was informal. Instruction was a simple process that involved singing in dormitories and at parties and informal gatherings. There is no doubt, judging from extant descriptions of musical life in the school, that informal teaching was an effective way to disseminate music. Formal instruction in music during the school day began in 1914. There is no available record of the number of classes taught or the type of instruction, but one teacher did comment, "The children delight in the real study of music."[24] Teaching responsibilities of music teachers in early years is not detailed, but the impression gained is that from 1914 through 1965 the music curriculum consisted entirely of singing.
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Instruction in piano is available at the Settlement during after-school
hours and may date back to the time of Lucy Furman, who came to
Hindman in 1907. She had a piano from Lexington hauled in by wagon
from Jackson, forty-five miles distant. Descriptions of piano lessons are
to be found in The Glass Window, one of four novels written during
her twenty-year residence at the school.25 Whether Furman herself taught
piano could not be determined. One report said, "Miss Lucy Furman
brought a big piano from Lexington and had a room papered with red
wallpaper. She taught the children 'real music'."26 A former student at
Hindman, who lived in Miss Furman's cottage as a small boy, had no
recollection that she ever taught piano.27
Although it was not possible to talk with other music teachers who
worked at Hindman, an interview with Ruth White, who was the music
teacher there for twenty-six years (1940-1966), indicated the extent of
her duties.28 White was responsible for instruction of all students in the
school. She taught a twenty-minute music period daily in grades kindergarten
through eight, rehearsed the glee club and ballad club in the
high school, played piano for folk dance classes five or six nights each
week, and taught some thirty piano lessons weekly. Additionally, she was
responsible for Christmas pageants, commencement programs, student
recitals, and other school performances.
The school owned one set of music textbooks, The Music Education
Series, which White used to some extent.29 She supplemented these books
with music she learned from students, teachers, and residents of the area.
In her estimation, she used more indigenous music than any other kind.
In addition to the ballads, songs, and hymns sung in Knott County, she
made much use of music from the English ballad tradition espoused
by Cecil Sharp. An interesting feature of the music program was the
ballad club, initiated by Elizabeth Watts and May Stone and continued
by Ruth White until her retirement. Admission to this club was
voluntary and determined by having applicants sing a song or ballad
learned at home. In later years, White used mimeographed copies of
song texts she had collected in her work to teach songs, and the students
sang the monophonic ballads in unison.
Music teachers and settlement workers at Hindman did not confine
themselves exclusively to the use of indigenous music and culture. As
early as 1905, the women began sharing their own Christmas customs with
the mountaineers, a practice that became widely known throughout
eastern Kentucky and was copied in other schools. Prior to the coming
of settlement schools, Christmas was celebrated on January 6 by older
people, though younger persons celebrated the holiday on December 25.
25 Lucy Furman, The Glass Window (Boston: Little, Brown and 26 Co., 1926). Grace Douglas Fortney, interview held in Harlan, Kentucky, August 25, 1967.
27 Albert Stewart, interview held in Knott County, July 23, 1968.
28 Ruth White, interview held in Knoxville, Tennessee, August 22, 1968.
29 T. P. Giddings, The Music Education Series (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1923).
Chambers/143
For many, Christmas was a time for drinking and carousing. On their
part, workers at Hindman introduced the customs of decorating Christmas
trees, filling stockings, and singing carols. Some six hundred people
attended the 1912 celebration, which is described in the following
manner:
Four marshalls of the day carrying insignia of their office, tall, rough, straight
limbs of pine surmounted with big bunches of lovely holly tied with flowing red
ribbon, led them in procession up the stairs and into the schoolroom singing
"'Twas in the Winter Cold." Along came a chorus, then Mary and the
Shepherds, and the Wise Men, King Wenceslas, and the Wassailers and others
from old English carols that are familiar here. Their songs and tableaux
occupied only half an hour and then a jovial Santa Claus came bounding up
the stairs and delighted the children by his treatment of good boys and girls.
The distribution of presents was most time-consuming and interesting for the
tree was a real community tree. The Settlement only gave candy (for about
300 stockings of the nearly 1,000 we have filled) and oranges to the children.30
The Hindman Settlement School continues as an active force in eastern
Kentucky life. The Settlement grounds adjoin the public high school,
now operated by Knott County. Included on the grounds are dormitories
for those students whose homes are still inaccessible to school buses, a
dining hall and activity building, a library that serves the entire county,
an industrial arts building, a craft house for weavers and potters, and a
playing field. The Settlement offers a number of extension services for
eastern Kentucky residents and operates a bookmobile that serves Knott
County. A resident teacher skilled in weaving and pottery-making gives
instruction throughout the region and brings interested residents to work
at the Settlement craft house. Kindergarten children are transported
from rural areas to the Settlement several times each week for group
play and prereading experiences. The kindergarten teacher, whose is salary paid by the Settlement, also teaches art in the high school. Workers
paid by the Settlement direct adult literacy classes in several nearby counties and work with school dropouts. Emphasis on music, dance, and
folkways indigenous to the eastern Kentucky mountain region continues
at Hindman. Dancing parties are held at the Settlement for students
each week, and student performers from Hindman are in demand
throughout Kentucky for programs of ballad singing and folk dancing. Dancers from the school appeared at the New York World's Fair in 1965
and 1966.
The Knott County Board of Education has, since 1965, paid the salary of a music teacher who works in the town of Hindman. Since the
Settlement does not have to pay this salary, the money thus freed has
enabled the Settlement to finance a highly interesting experiment. A
musicmobile, a jeep truck capable of traveling the rough roads that are
the only access to some remote areas, visits about twenty country schools
0o Ruth Huntington, annual letter to WCTU members, 1912, n.p.
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each week. A music teacher employed by the Settlement drives the musicmobile
and teaches one or two music lessons per week in each school he
visits. The musicmobile has been in operation since 1962, and the number
of schools it serves varies from year to year. The truck carries music books,
records, and instruments to help in the instructional program, one that
reflects the interests of the instructor.
There is no accurate, scientific way to measure the impact or effect,
over the years, of the Hindman Settlement School's distinctive music
program. Graduates of the school are scattered throughout the United
States; among distinguished alumni are physicians, bankers, teachers, and
longtime Kentucky Congressman Carl D. Perkins. At least one graduate,
Josiah Combs, has used his knowledge of music and folklore in a professional
capacity. Combs, who studied at Hindman for three years and
called himself the school's first graduate, was granted a Ph.D from the
Sorbonne for his doctoral dissertation, Folk Songs of the Southern
United States.31 Combs was the author of many books and articles about
folk customs and dialects and was a professor of languages at several
universities. Surely Hindman Settlement School has also enriched the
lives of thousands of other persons.
* University of Wisconsin
Madison, Wisconsin
3 Josiah Combs, Folk Songs of the Southern United States, ed. by D. K. Wilgus,
Publications of the American Folklore Society Bibliographical and Special Series,
Vol. 19 (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1967).
FOOTNOTES:
1 R. A. Woods and A. J. Kennedy, The Settlement Horizon (New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 1922), p. 19.
2 C. R. Henderson, Social Settlements (New York: Lentilhorn and Company,
1899), p. 14.
3 Richard Drake, "Appalachian American-The Emergence of a Concept, 1895-
1964," Mountain Life and Work, Vol. 41 (Spring 1965), p. 7
4 James Watt Raine, The Land of Saddle Bags (New York: Council of Women for
Home Missions and Missionary Education Movement of the United States and
Canada, 1924), pp. 176-177.
5 Reverend T. J. Mitchell, letter read before the Kentucky State Federation of
Women's Clubs at Frankfort, Kentucky, on June 2, 1899. Papers of Hindman Settlement
School, Hindman, Kentucky.
6 May Stone and Katherine Pettit, "Diaries of Experiences in the Kentucky Mountains-
Summers of 1899-1901," (typewritten), p. 1.
7May Stone, "Uncle Solomon Everidge," Mountain Life and Work, Vol. 4 (April
1928), p. 17.
8 Stone, p. 17.
9 Stone and Pettit, p. 18.
Stone and Pettit, p. 21.
1 Stone and Pettit, p. 38.
12 Stone and Pettit, pp. 50-51.
13 Marcia Smith Lawrence, "Hindman Settlement School Has a Colorful History."
Hindman News (May 1, 1952), p. 2.
14 Stone and Pettit, p. 10.
15 Annual letters written to WCTU members from Hindman Settlement School,
1908-1912. Papers of Hindman Settlement
16 School, p. 10. Olive Dame Campbell, The Life and Work of John Charles Campbell (Madison, Wisconsin: College Printing and Typing Company, Inc., 1968), p. 140.
17 Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp, English Folk Songs fromi the Southern Appalachians (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917).
18 Josephine McGill, Folk-Songs of the Kentuicky Mountains (New York: Boosey and
Co., 1917), n.p.; Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway, Twenty Kentucky Mountain
Songs (Boston: Oliver Ditson " Company, 1920), n.p.
Mary Wheeler and Clara G. Bridge, Kentucky Mountain Folk Songs (Boston: Boston Music Co., 1937), p. vii.
20 Elizabeth Watts, interview held in Berea, Kentucky, August 1968.
21 Richard M. Dorson, "A Theory for American Folklore," Journal of American
Folklore, Vol. 72 (July-September 1959), pp. 199-200.
22 Rebecca Caudill, My Appalachia (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966),
p. 23.
23 Edna Ritchie, "The Singing Ritchies," Mountain Life and Work, Vol. 29 (Summer
1953), pp. 6-7.
24 Mae Huntington and May Stone, letter to WCTU members, January 1914. of Hindman Papers Settlement School, p. 3.