How Appalachia's Children Highlight the Region's Best Attributes

Via Billy

MOUNTAIN CITY, Georgia — Just off U.S. Highway 23, along the spectacular views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, T.J. Smith spends his days continuing the tradition of the iconic Foxfire Fund: an enterprise driven by young people whose respect for the land and culture, and understanding of the importance of preserving that culture’s stories, has persevered for more than 50 years.

If you grew up in Appalachia, you likely owned a set of the Foxfire books or had the Foxfire magazine in your home, giving you an opportunity to see your very heritage in those pages.

They carried the stories of the America that stretches 1,500 miles diagonally along the Appalachian Mountains, from southern New York through great big swaths of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, parts of both Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama.