Mountain Born. A Recollection of Life and Language in Western North Carolina

A Way of Life, Food, and Language Long Gone in the North Carolina Mountains. The time is just after World War II. Asheville is a small, proper town, and in the country, farming is a traditional way of life. The houses are secluded, down in a hollow or scattered far apart along a dirt road. Reading is by lamplight, water is carried to the house from the spring. The stillness is broken only by familiar voices or the sounds of nature. Life is simple and hard, the family poor and proud. The foods are the delicious "vittles" of the southern mountains. From gardens, farmyard, and woods, these are the provisions of people who worked the land. The language is forthright, colorful, and earthy. Here are seven hunded old words and sayings, most of them brought to the mountains by British settlers. Many date from medieval and Elizabethan England, and some are not fit for polite society. This is a path trod by rural people. Listen to them and know the way we were.

Jean Boone Benfield was born and raised in western North Carolina and is a descendant of Israel Boone, brother of American frontiersman Daniel. Her ancestors came to America in the seventeenth century and were among the first settlers of Buncombe County, North Carolina. Proud of her rural heritage, she preserves through these remembrances a chronicle of country life during the 1940s and 1950s. Her interests are history, etymology, place names, and surnames in the southern Appalachians. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband and Welsh corgi.