School in Caney Valley

When I was a little chunk of a shirt-tailed lad, a-hoeing corn on the steep hillside, I'd get to the end of a row and look up Troublesome Creek and wonder ij anybody would ever come to larn the young 'uns. Nobody ever come in. Nobody ever went out. We jist growed up and never knowed nothin'. I can't read nor write; many of my chilluns can't read nor write, but I have grands and greats as is the purtiest speakin' and the easiest larnin' of any chilluns in the world. I want as they should have 'a chancet.

This was the eloquent statement made by old "Uncle Sol" Beveridge to two women campers in 1902. Upshot: a school for mountaineers at Hindman in Kentucky's feuding Knott County, high in the Southern Appalachians.

Fifteen years later, in Caney Valley, a 16-mile-long, rock-rimmed gorge, seven miles from Hindman, Mountaineer Humpty Joab spoke a similar piece. The woman who heard him was Mrs. Alice Spencer Geddes Lloyd, Boston socialite, author, magazine writer, newspaper editor, ardent suffragette and freethinker. She had fled to Knott County to get over a nervous breakdown. And she got over it. She stayed on, with $10 cash founded Caney Creek Community Center on Humpty 's 153 barren acres.

Today Caney Creek Community Center has a grade school, high school and junior college. Its $250,000 plant (43 buildings) is the result of contributions from Wellesley and Radcliffe College alumnae, of various women's organizations, who also pay its $50,000 yearly running expenses. It has electricity, but no telephone, no telegraph. Its post office is Pippapass, Ky.--in honor of New England Browning Society donors. In honor of Kipling, its headmistress's office is labeled If.

The 217 mountain boys & girls at Caney Creek get their education free. In return they must promise to return home and work among the Kentucky mountain folk. When the chosen few (the waiting list is 1,000-long) enter, girls must forswear jewelry, cosmetics, slang, high heels. For boys the rules are stiffer: no tobacco, gambling, liquor, guns or "unauthorized meetings with the opposite sex."

Boys work the school coal mine, run a sawmill, a gristmill, take their turn in the print shop (only one in Knott County, pop. 15,230). Girls run the dining hall. Sports are difficult--the outdoor basketball court was dynamited out of the hillside.

Caney Junior College is a professional, not simply a vocational school. Although most of its graduates go out with teachers' certificates, its staff of 18 college-trained instructors give full premedical, -engineering and -dental courses, as well as the customary arts curriculum. The library (a converted barn) has 22,000 volumes.

On Little Theatre nights oldsters come down from their hillside cabins to watch the Caney Players put on Shakespeare, Everyman, Gilbert & Sullivan, original mountain plays like Feudin' and Larnin'. Last week ten softspoken, fresh-scrubbed Caney Players were in Boston on an annual 5,000-mile, seven-week crusade to spread the gospel of Caney Creek Community Center.

Superintendent of Floyd County schools today is Town Hall--a Caney Creek boy. Another is Knott County Attorney Dan Martin, whose hillbilly background has acquired a veneer that would make a Hatfield or a McCoy groan in his grave. He is a Harvard man.

For these blessings Knott County mountaineers thank aging Alice Lloyd--now 63, hale & hearty in her sweater-&-skirt director's uniform. But for all their education, there is still life in the mountaineers of Caney Valley. Out of sheer high spirits, on moonlight, moonshine Saturday nights they occasionally put a bullet or two through the gateway sign, pepper the headmistress's house with slugs.

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