Decoration Day in the Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern Appalachians

By Alan Jabbour and Karen Singer Jabbour

Decoration Day is a late spring or summer tradition that involves cleaning a community cemetery, decorating it with flowers, holding a religious service in the cemetery, and having dinner on the ground. These commemorations seem to predate the post-Civil War celebrations that ultimately gave us our national Memorial Day. Little has been written about this tradition, but it is still observed widely throughout the Upland South, from North Carolina to the Ozarks.

Written by internationally recognized folklorist Alan Jabbour and illustrated with more than a hundred photographs taken by Karen Singer Jabbour, Decoration Day in the Mountains is an in-depth exploration of this little-known cultural tradition. The Jabbours illuminate the meanings behind the rituals and reveal how the tradition fostered a grassroots movement to hold the federal government to its promises about cemeteries left behind when families were removed to make way for Fontana Dam and Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Richly illustrated and vividly written, Decoration Day in the Mountains presents a compelling account of a widespread and long-standing Southern cultural practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: May 31, 2010
• ISBN: 9780807895696

Alan Jabbour

Alan Jabbour served as head of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress, director of the Folk Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Now retired, he continues to do research as an independent folklorist.

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Decoration Day IN THE MOUNTAINS

Decoration Day in the Mountains

TRADITIONS OF CEMETERY DECORATION

IN THE SOUTHERN APPALACHIANS

Alan Jabbour & Karen Singer Jabbour

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Blythe Family Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2010 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved

Set in Arno Pro Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jabbour, Alan.

Decoration day in the mountains : traditions of cemetery decoration in the southern Appalachians / Alan Jabbour and Karen Singer Jabbour.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3397-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Mourning customs—Appalachian Region, Southern.

2. Cemeteries—Appalachian Region, Southern.

3. Decoration and ornament—Appalachian Region,

Southern. 4. Appalachian Region, Southern—

Social life and customs. I. Jabbour, Karen Singer. II. Title.

GT3390.5.U6J33 2010

393’.90975—dc22                                                     2009046323

14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction

Acknowledgments

About the Photographs

1 Two Encounters with Decoration Day

2 Decoration Day in Western North Carolina

3 Cemetery Features in Western North Carolina

4 Historical and Cultural Origins of the Region

5 The North Shore: Removal and Revolution

6 The Origin, Diffusion, and Range of Decoration Day

7 The North Shore and Decoration Day in Sign, Symbol, and Art

8 The Unsung Heroes of Decoration Day

9 Concluding Thoughts

APPENDIX A. Project History

APPENDIX B. Log of Ethnographic Events, North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project, 2004

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A map of western North Carolina cemeteries pictured in this book appears on page 2.

Introduction

Decoration Day is a widespread cultural tradition in a swath of the American South extending from east of the Appalachians to west and southwest of the Ozarks. In the fullest form of the tradition, people visit a cemetery where family members are buried to provide an annual or periodic cleaning. Then they decorate the graves with flowers and other symbols of affection. Finally, they gather as a family or community in a religious service in the cemetery reaffirming their connections with each other and with the community beneath the ground. The service may involve preaching, prayers, hymn singing, and a ritual meal known as dinner on the ground.

Decoration Day—its practitioners often call the event simply a decoration—is a powerful ritual of piety. At the practical level, it provides a cultural motivation for cleaning and repairing a cemetery, which, if not properly maintained, can be reclaimed by the forest of the Upland South with astonishing speed. At the social level, it serves as a focal point for gathering a community, and it has long provided an occasion for community members from afar to return to their homeplace. At the deepest spiritual level, a decoration is an act of respect for the dead that reaffirms one’s bonds with those who have gone before.

One would think that such a widespread folk custom, practiced by or at least known to hundreds of thousands of Americans, would by now have generated an extensive literature. But there is no book-length treatment of the tradition, and the articles that discuss it are mostly localized and limited in their perspective on what is a broadly diffused and greatly varied regional tradition. Further, the complicated relation of this cultural tradition to the national Memorial Day, which began in the Northern states after the Civil War, continues to confuse everyone from encyclopedia writers to local practitioners. This volume looks at the historical origins and geographic sweep of Decoration Day and presents some surprising connections and comparative details to help explicate its history. Decorating graves with flowers is of course an ancient cultural practice, but the particular practice of Decoration Day that we explore here seems to emerge from the mists of time during the middle decades of the nineteenth century in the American South.

Though this book deals with the historical origins and geographic spread of Decoration Day, its main focus is on a subregion of the Upland South where the tradition seems to be particularly strong. That subregion is a multicounty area of Appalachian North Carolina west of Asheville—Swain, Jackson, and Graham Counties and, to a lesser extent, the counties surrounding them. It is a region where two great mountain ranges converge—the Balsam Mountains and the Great Smoky Mountains. Here many cemeteries hold decorations, and local people are well aware of the cultural tradition of cemetery decoration.

Here, too, the tradition of cemetery decoration has been at the root of a tug-of-war between local citizens and the federal government that has lasted for a half century. When Fontana Dam was built (1941–44), a large number of people were removed from their homes in the valley of the Little Tennessee River and along the creeks flowing down the southern flank of the Great Smoky Mountains. The land between the ridge of the Smokies and the thirty-mile-long dam lake became part of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. A document was created and disseminated in which the concerned national, state, and local governmental agencies agreed to build a new road on higher ground above the north shore of Fontana Lake. This road would provide access to the twenty-seven cemeteries surviving in the lands conveyed to the National Park Service. Part of that road was built in the 1950s and early 1960s, but then construction stopped and the road gained a new and by now legendary name, The Road to Nowhere.

How the ensuing tug-of-war developed, and how a new form of Decoration Day emerged in the cemeteries of the park’s North Shore, comprise a special focus of this volume and the primary focus of an earlier published report (see the Project History). Although in Chapter 5 we tell the compelling story of the North Shore cultural revolution, we place it in the context of the wider practice of cemetery decoration outside the national park. There seems to be a symbiotic relationship between the decorations within the park and beyond the park boundaries. Taken together, these two forms of Decoration Day make our region of western North Carolina one of the most varied and vibrant areas in the Upland South for this venerable and culturally powerful custom.

We launch our volume neither with the history of Decoration Day nor with its geographical spread. Instead, beginning in medias res, Chapter 1 offers our own direct experiences and observations while attending two decorations in western North Carolina. The decoration at Proctor Cemetery typifies the decorations held today within Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The decoration at Brendle Hill Cemetery in Swain County’s Alarka community provides an example of the decorations held in regional cemeteries outside the park. Taken together, with the comparisons and contrasts they provide, they introduce us from the ground up to decorations as a cultural form.

Chapter 2 turns to the overall features of Decoration Day in western North Carolina. In Chapter 3 we step back to look at the cemeteries themselves, which comprise the cultural framework within which the ritual of Decoration Day is enacted. Then, by degrees, we move to the larger history of the region, the special history of the North Shore removal and revolution, and the origin, diffusion, and range of Decoration Day as a custom. The final chapters turn our attention to the North Shore and Decoration Day in sign, symbol, and art; the community heroes whose devotion is so important to the health and vibrancy of cemeteries and Decoration Day; and finally some thoughts on the deeper meaning of this extraordinary American cultural tradition.

This book is jointly authored. Karen and I have worked together on every stage of this project, from the fieldwork through the preparation of the book and the exhibition. The primary responsibility for creating the photographs is hers, and the primary responsibility for creating the text is mine. Hence the I in this text is Alan Jabbour, with Karen Singer Jabbour serving as the first and best reader.

Alan Jabbour

Memorial Day 2009

FIGURE A-1. Group assembled at firehouse in Bryson City, N.C., January 22, 2005, to read and review the original cemetery decoration report. Rear row: Tonya Teague, Paul Webb, Lawrence Hyatt, Alan Jabbour, Linda Grant Hogue, Dale Hogue, William Crawford, Trevor Lanier; front row: Philip E. Ted Coyle (kneeling), Verna Kirkland, Carolyn Kirkland (kneeling), Carmaleta Littlejohn Monteith, Max Monteith, Ellen Monteith, David Monteith, Helen Cable Vance, Christine Cole Proctor, Eddie Marlowe

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to the people of western North Carolina who taught us about Decoration Day past and present. They took us in as novitiates and shared their knowledge with friendship and generosity of spirit, for which we remain deeply grateful. Some of them assembled in 2005 to read and comment on a draft of our earlier report (Figure A-1), and the influence of others is mentioned throughout the book. A list of the more than fifty formal interviews from our research in 2004 is appended to the Project History at the end of this book, and since that time many more whom we cannot list here have talked to us about many subjects related to Decoration Day. We are grateful to all who have given of their time and knowledge.

In addition to providing interviews, Verna and Carolyn Kirkland of Swain County, Gene and Carrie Laney of Graham County, and William Crawford of Jackson County volunteered to guide us through selected cemeteries in their western North Carolina counties in 2004, and they have remained friends and advisors as the earlier project evolved into the present book. Christine Cole Proctor of the Lauada Cemetery Association and Linda Grant Hogue of the North Shore Road Association have provided advice and guidance on many topics. We are grateful to all the unsung heroes of cemeteries and decorations whom we evoked in Chapter 8, and especially to Flonnie Burns Collins, Harold Collins, and Theresa Libich Collins, Janice Inabinett, Wade Woodard, Katherine Murphy Crisp, Regina Cochran Howell, Dyanne Shook Pedersen, and Virgie Brooks Shook. Finally, many thanks to Helen Cable Vance of the North Shore Historical Association, who has responded regularly to our inquiries with good information, wise counsel, and warm good wishes.

The idea for this book arose from our work on the North Shore Cemetery Decoration Project in 2004 (described in the Project History). For Karen and me, that project began with a call from National Park Service archeologist Bennie Keel in search of someone to undertake a study of Decoration Day for the North Shore Road Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). We were free and intrigued, so we signed up for the mission. Thanks to Bennie for inviting us and advising us as the project unfolded. And thanks to the staff of Great Smoky Mountains National Park for help during the original project, and for encouraging us to expand the study into the present book.

Karen and I were joined in the EIS study by anthropologist Philip E. Ted Coyle of Western Carolina University and archeologist and cultural resource manager Paul Webb of TRC Environmental Corporation. It was our great good fortune to have such skilled, knowledgeable, and personally committed colleagues on the project team. After our formal study for the EIS was done, Ted and Paul continued to share information and offer good counsel as we moved into researching and drafting this book, and they were helpful readers of the budding manuscript.

The exhibition on Decoration Day that opened in April 2009 at Western Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Center made a perfect creative companion to the book for public communication about the cultural tradition of Decoration Day. We are grateful to Mountain Heritage Center colleagues Scott Philyaw (director), Trevor Jones (curator), Peter Koch (education coordinator), and other Center staff for their commitment to the idea of the exhibition and their labor in making it come to pass. And thanks to the staff of the University of North Carolina Press and its editor-in-chief, David Perry, for their labors to bring this book to its final form, and to the readers they enlisted to review the manuscript, whose comments and suggestions improved the book in numerous ways.

In preparation for this book, we undertook research in the following reading rooms of the Library of Congress: the American Folklife Center’s Folklife Reading Room; the Main Reading Room; the Manuscript Reading Room; the Music Division’s Performing Arts Reading Room; and the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division’s Recorded Sound Reference Center. It is impossible to overstate the value of the Library of Congress and the particular value of its reading rooms as intellectual nerve centers through which the world can access the collections. Thanks to the Library’s reference specialists and other staff for their help.

We are grateful to Berea College Library’s Special Collections and Archives Department, which provided an Appalachian Music Research Fellowship enabling Karen and me to be researchers at Berea College for several weeks in 2008; and to Harry Rice, Shannon Wilson, John Bondurant, Jaime Bradley, Grace Sears, and other Berea College Library staff for their assistance. Thanks also to Martha Atkinson of Blandford Church and Cemetery for facilitating our study of the minutes of the Ladies Memorial Association of Petersburg, Virginia, and other documents concerning Blandford Cemetery.

The fieldnotes, sound recordings, interview transcripts, and color still photographs from the 2004 field research, together with some additional materials, are available in the archival collections of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and a duplicate set is at Western Carolina University.¹ The entire collection exists in digital form. The fieldnotes, color still photographs, and sound recordings from our extensive fieldwork since 2004 on cemeteries and cemetery decoration in western North Carolina and elsewhere reside in our own private collection at the time of this writing, but will doubtless find a public archival home someday. Some samples appear on my personal website.²

About the Photographs

The photographs in this book are by Karen Singer Jabbour. They were taken during fieldwork by Alan and Karen Jabbour from the summer of 2004 through the fall of 2009 in western North Carolina, as part of a collection of thousands of documentary photographs. The originals are JPEG digital color photographs, generally ranging from 3 to 5 MB, made on a Canon Rebel digital camera. All but one of the photographs are from western North Carolina. GSMNP in the captions is an abbreviation for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and all the GSMNP photographs are from the North Shore region of the park in Swain County, North Carolina. The index includes references to both the caption information and selected visual features of the photographs.

Decoration Day IN THE MOUNTAINS

WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA CEMETERIES PICTURED IN THIS BOOK

chapter one

Two Encounters with Decoration Day

Proctor Cemetery, July 4, 2004

Our first experience with Decoration Day came on the Fourth of July in 2004. Karen and I had just arrived in western North Carolina to begin research on the custom of Decoration Day as practiced in the cemeteries scattered through a region of Great Smoky Mountains National Park known as the North Shore. The name refers to the northern shore of Fontana Lake, a thirty-mile-long lake created by Fontana Dam, the largest dam in the eastern United States, which dams the Little Tennessee River in Swain County, North Carolina. The lake the dam created displaced a large number of people, because the rising water both flooded homes and inundated the only road to the outside world for people living at higher elevations.

We arose early, picked up our Western Carolina University colleague Ted Coyle, and drove to Cable Cove, a boat landing on the south shore of Fontana Lake. We were going to attend the annual decorations at Proctor and Bradshaw Cemeteries, both of which are in the national park near the former town of Proctor on Hazel Creek. The event marked the beginning of documentary fieldwork for our research project.

The morning was cloudy and fog shrouded the mountains as we made our way to Cable Cove. When we arrived at about 9:00 A.M., for boarding at 9:30, a crowd had already gathered. We recognized some people who had attended the public meeting we held two days earlier announcing the research project, but there were many others of all ages. Some had bouquets, boxes, or bundles of flowers, and some carried large bags or coolers filled with food and drink. Ted, Karen, and I lost no time introducing ourselves, mixing with the people at the landing, and talking about our project. Since we would be taking photographs and making sound recordings all day, we wanted people to know who we were and what we were doing there.

One person we met was Dale Ditmanson, the new superintendent of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, who was there with his wife to take part in the decoration. Erik Kreusch, the park archeologist, had alerted us in advance that the superintendent would be attending. As we mingled, we heard much talk among the participants about what his coming might portend. The word was that till now no superintendent had ever attended a decoration at any cemetery within the park’s North Shore region. Relations over the years had sometimes been tense and testy between the park administration and local people associated with cemeteries within the park, so the new superintendent’s presence was interpreted as auspicious.

The boat that shuttles people across Fontana Lake for cemetery decorations arrived, and people started to board (Plate 5). We were not well positioned near the landing and did not want to crowd out the local participants, some of whom were elderly or disabled. By our next North Shore decoration we would shed our hesitancy; Karen came to realize how important it was to be on the first boat in order to document people arriving and decorating graves. But this time we held back.

Meanwhile, a shower began to fall. We had forgotten our umbrella, but our fellow pilgrims were well prepared and took care of us. Linda Hogue, who heads the North Shore Road Association and was an active participant in the public meeting two days earlier, produced an extra umbrella from her car, and someone else provided a plastic poncho. There was some brave talk about how infrequently it has rained over the years for these North Shore decorations, but I noticed that the musicians had come well prepared for rain—their instrument cases were wrapped in rain-shedding gear.

We finally took the third boat, that is, the third trip across Fontana Lake by the same boat. Once aboard, we chatted with neighbors on the benches rimming the boat’s interior or just silently soaked up the experience of being on the water. It was cloudy with a bit of drizzle and fog in the air, and mountain and forest views revealed themselves mysteriously and powerfully as we crossed the lake. We have been on several North Shore decorations since that first crossing, and each time crossing the lake evokes a sense of mythic transition from one world to the next, a pilgrimage from the secular to a timeless sacred world. Cemeteries always convey a sense of sacred space, as do national parks. Crossing an unimaginably deep lake from civilization to a cemetery in the wilderness of a national park is the perfect mythic journey to the sacred domain.

Arriving on the other side, the boat maneuvered into an inlet that marked the mouth of Hazel Creek. The creek is one of the major streams flowing out of the Smokies into Fontana Lake and the Little Tennessee River, and its banks were once thickly inhabited. Proctor was a boomtown during the heyday of logging in the early twentieth century, and rural settlements stretched up the creek virtually to its sources high in the Smokies. Today the area has reverted to wilderness, though the practiced eye can discover lingering evidence of earlier settlements. Helen Vance, the head of the North Shore Historical Association, told me that the creek was originally called Hazelnut Creek because of the hazelnut trees (Corylus americana) along its banks. At some point Hazelnut Creek was shortened to Hazel Creek.

As we debarked near the mouth of Hazel Creek, a number of National Park Service employees greeted us. Perhaps because of my years in Washington, D.C., a cynical question crossed my mind: Were they here because the new superintendent of the park was aboard? Subsequent North Shore decorations proved that park staff are always there to help people debark, describe and point the way for the hike that will follow, and offer rides in all-terrain vehicles for pilgrims who need help. Most of the cemeteries of the North Shore—and indeed throughout the Appalachian region—lie astride interior ridges far from rivers and boat landings. Typically, to reach a cemetery, one must hike up a creek, then perhaps along a smaller branch, and finally up to the crest of a steep ridge. Even all-terrain vehicles may not be capable of ascending that final ridge, and the lore of North Shore pilgrimages is full of stories about pilgrims on crutches or with other disabilities struggling to climb the ridge to visit family graves.

We began walking up the broad, well-kept dirt road that follows the bank of Hazel Creek. It was a comfortable walk and full of interesting things to see. I found myself walking with Harry Vance, Helen Vance’s husband, who as a Baptist minister would later contribute in various ways to the day’s events. We talked about his career as a pastor, which included a stint in the Anacostia area of Washington, D.C., during the 1950s. Karen and I have lived in Washington since 1969, so I could respond with real knowledge when he alluded to his former neighborhood. Then, as we approached the area where the town of Proctor once stood, he pointed out various less-wooded areas in the forest, sometimes punctuated by remnants of the foundations of Proctor’s public and private buildings.

Harry Vance said he would be performing two baptisms in Hazel Creek later that day, and he wanted to scout the area where baptisms had traditionally been held, just downstream from the site of Proctor. We left the path and worked our way over to the bank. The moment he saw the water, he exclaimed, Oh good, it’s clear! It had rained a lot in recent days, and he had worried that muddy water would make full-immersion baptisms problematic. As he surveyed the area, he seemed to be imagining the baptism in his mind, picturing just where in the deep pool near the side of the creek he would carry out his work, and how the candidates for baptism would get in and out through the weeds and bushes on the bank. Contemplating what was to come seemed to fill him with enthusiasm, and he remarked about the satisfaction he felt in being able to continue performing such rituals, even though he no longer had a congregation of his own.

Returning to the road, we met a park employee in an all-terrain vehicle who offered us a ride, which we gladly accepted. The remainder of our trip was not as easy as the stroll up Hazel Creek. We turned from the road onto a steep, muddy path up a narrow branch. Finally we reached a point where we had to leave our vehicle and climbed a steep final path to the ridge crest. One pilgrim on crutches had to work his way up the steep hill backward, securing his crutches in the muddy hillside and then lifting himself by degrees. At the top, the path opened onto a large cemetery in an open glen with a few trees and shrubs. Musicians were playing, and my initial fear that I had missed