Foxfire One – Old Time Self Reliance Skills

From Survival and Beyond

The Foxfire project was started by a Georgia high school teacher in 1966 with the dual purpose of preserving the self reliance skills of the “mountain folk” of rural Appalachia, as well as providing a worthwhile, character-building endeavor for his students.  The project generated several  successive volumes (which I will post on this website periodically) spanning over a decade.

The stories contained in these books are not only instructive and educational, but they’re also entertaining and inspiring, as they are told first-hand, in the words of the rugged people who lived truly self sufficient lives in the Appalachian mountains.

I hope you enjoy these books as much as I do!

From the introduction by Eliot Wigginton:

Daily our grandparents are moving out of our lives, taking with them, irreparably, the kind of information contained in this book.

They are taking it, not because they want to, but because they think we don’t care. And it isn’t happening just in Appalachia. I think, for example, of numerous Indian reservations, Black cultures near the southern coasts, Ozark mountain communities, and a hundred others.  The big problem, of course, is that since these grandparents were primarily an oral civilization, information being passed through the

generations by word of mouth and demonstration, little of it is written down. When they’re gone, the magnificent hunting tales, the ghost stories that kept a thousand children sleepless, the intricate tricks of self-sufficiency acquired through years of trial and error, the eloquent and haunting stories of suffering and sharing and building and healing and planting and harvesting—all these go with them, and what a loss.

If this information is to be saved at all, for whatever reason, it must be saved now; and the logical researchers are the grandchildren, not university researchers from the outside. In the process, these grandchildren (and we) gain an invaluable, unique knowledge about their own roots, heritage, and culture. Suddenly they discover their families—previously people to be ignored in the face of the seventies—as pre-television, pre-automobile, pre-flight individuals who endured and survived the incredible task of total self-sufficiency, and came out of it all with a  perspective on ourselves as a country that we are not likely to see again. They have something to tell us about self reliance, human interdependence, and the human spirit that we would do well to listen to.

Read More at Survival and Beyond

Read more at Survival and Beyond