Growing up, you may remember reading the Foxfire magazine or pulling a Foxfire anthology off your bookshelf. The look in to Appalachian history is still strong today - and, the publication is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
I spoke to Barry Stiles, who runs the Foxfire Museum in Mountain City, and Dr. Janet Rechtman, a member of the Foxfire board, to learn a little more about this slice of Appalachian life. Their full interviews are available here and here.
Stiles gave me a little history lesson. In 1996, the students at Rabun County High were learning formal English, but instead of reading old texts, like Shakespeare, they were instructed to venture outside the classroom and learn about their friends and neighbors.
"They went out and started interviewing people, and they became captivated with the culture," Stiles said. "It became their mission shortly after it began to preserve the culture of the mountains.
"The people they were interviewing in the early years of the magazine had been born in the 1800's and they lived much differently than how the students had lived. And they were elderly people, with a lot of wisdom, but were also people who didn't live much longer after being interviewed. So the students really captured something important."
The magazine, which comes out twice a year, focused on how life is and was, how to make things and other details on local culture.
Stiles said the interviewees believed so strongly in what the students were doing, they began giving students their possessions to preserve. The students took it a step further - Stiles said they were able to obtain an old grist mill and some property, and began creating a village.
"They gathered over 20 buildings from the area, disassembled them, re-assembled them on the property, and they funded all of this with royalty money from the Foxfire book sales," Stiles said.
That passion to preserve the culture is what many community members grew to love about the Foxfire program. "For a non-profit that's community based and grassroots like Foxfire is, 50 years is quite an accomplishment," Rechtman said. She gave three main reasons Foxfire stayed alive for the past 50 years, including a deep connection to the community, the branding that brought in the money to keep it afloat (plus what Rechtman calls "a teeny-tiny operating budget" and a lot of reserve funds), and of course, the passion.
"People wouldn't let it go. Even at the worst times when we were having the challenges with the founder*, the students, the teachers, the people who were touched by Foxfire still supported it," said Rechtman. "They put up signs around the community saying 'Foxfire still glows' and even with all this they still support it. That created some resilience so things could go forward."
That resilience means Foxfire is celebrating it's 50th anniversary. And they're celebrating all year long, including a student reunion and Mountaineer festival on October 1. More events for the year can be found here.
In its heyday, Rechtman said the method of teaching and magazine articles spawned into books, a Broadway play, a TV movie and of course, a legacy. You can relish in the Appalachian culture by visiting the Heritage Center in Mountain City, or reading the books in the comfort of your own home.
Until next time,
Stay curious.
*The founder of Foxfire, Eliot Wigginton, is no longer affiliated or part of the Foxfire program following his sentencing in a child molestation case in 1992. Wigginton not only is no longer a part of Foxfire, he served a year in prison and is barred from being a teacher.
