The Seed and the Story: Visiting Decoration Days: A Pilgrimage to Arkansas from California

Photo from Karen Alexander-Stoeckel of her Grandma, Ocie Hance-Alexander (in blue dress) with her brothers and sisters at the gravesites of their parents, Greeny and Dora Hance. Needmore Cemetery, Arkansas.

Beginning this weekend people throughout the area will engage in the decades old tradition of Decoration Days, placing flowers on the graves of their loved ones and transforming the cemeteries into vibrant landscapes of color.  The very first column, which ran in May of last year, was about this tradition and how it can connect families and communities across generations, reminding us that, as long as we keep their stories alive, the dead are always with us.

I asked others to share their stories and a woman here in Arkansas mailed the column to her niece, Karen Alexander-Stoeckel in Cambira, California.  This past week Karen contacted me by email to share her beautiful story, and she said I could share it with you all.

Her father Virgil “Odell” Alexander was born in Casa in 1929 to Robert Alexander and Ocie Hance-Alexander, and as a child he “loved to hunt in the hills with his coonhounds and bring wildlife home to tame as pets.”  At the age of five, he picked cotton to supplement the family’s income, later working in a lumber mill near Petit Jean. In 1953 he moved to California where he began work in the dairy business. He and his wife had five sons and one daughter, Karen.   Here is how she describes her relationship to Decoration Days:

My brothers and I were born and raised in California and Arkansas seemed like a distant planet to us.  The stories my daddy shared with us were rich with lessons he had learned and the love of his Hance and Alexander family.  As children, we only made a few trips back east to visit our grandparents because Daddy’s work schedule was so demanding.  I remember the well on the back porch of Grandma’s house and how cold and sweet the water was.  The fireflies in her front yard were a sight I’ve never seen anywhere else. 

The letters from home were precious to my daddy.  He prized the photos that his mama would send every year that were taken on Decoration Day at the Needmore Cemetery.  Photos of relatives in their Sunday best and women wearing corsages , standing or sitting near grave sites that were splendid with flowers.  As a child I did not understand my daddy’s fondness for these pictures of grave sites and was too young to appreciate the culture they derived from.

Grandma and Grandpa are gone now and so are the letters and photos from home on Decoration Day.  The relatives who gathered in those old pictures are also gone or soon will be and the love of my life, my daddy, passed away last October.  My brothers and I are having a memorial service for him here in California and then I will be bringing his ashes home to Arkansas where he requested they be laid to rest.

When I come to Arkansas, I will be attending my very first Decoration Day at Needmore Cemetery and words cannot express how emotional I feel about being near so many of my family laid to rest there.  Because of the oral history my daddy passed down to his children, I will not merely be reading names on headstones but remembering that my great-great grandfather, John Henry Alexander was remembered as being able to “sit a good horse” and walked every day down to the general store with the aid of his cane to enjoy talking, whittling, chewing tobacco and in general passing the time of day.  I have gathered bouquets of Lavender from my back yard and I have them drying to take with me to Needmore Cemetery to be lain in honor and respect to all those who lived before and are now rejoicing with my daddy.

I’m bringing my camera too.  Like my dear grandmother of years past, I intend to share and cherish these photos with my family in California. My daddy’s legacy of home and family lives on through my nine year old granddaughter who recently stated that if given any place in the world to visit, she chose Arkansas where my Papa is buried.

She signed the email, “Looking forward to visiting your wonderful state and celebrating Decoration Day soon.” What’s your Decoration Day story?  What does the tradition mean to you?  I’d love to hear from you, see your photos, and share your stories with readers.  And I am so honored Karen allowed me share her beautiful story here.

The Seed and the Story: ARVAC and VISTA, Folk arts and the War on Poverty in Arkansas.

Click on the photo to connect to ordering info via Amazon.

The Seed and the Story is a weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!  The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading.

Alongside researching the history of Chickalah and Harkey’s Valley, I’ve been reading In Service to America: A History of Vista in Arkansas 1965-1985.  Written by Marvin Schwartz, this 1988 publication traces the VISTA organization throughout the state.   I’ve been particularly interested in the work of this organization in central Arkansas, including the creation of a craft co-op, which served both Yell and Pope Counties.

Created in 1965, VISTA was an outgrowth of President Johnson’s War on Poverty and Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.  This national legislation sought to provide lasting and locally based solutions to struggling communities.  Operating much like a domestic version of the Peace Corp, volunteers in the VISTA program received a subsistence wage and lived in economically poor areas where they worked in partnership with community members to generate economic initiatives and help residents gain access to health care and adequate food.  VISTA volunteers, many of them college age, worked to help create grassroots programs which focused on local needs, thus making each VISTA program unique to its region.

In 1960 approximately 40% of the population in the river valley was living below the poverty line.  Illiteracy, inadequate housing, and unemployment were rampant.  One of the first VISTA programs in the nation was the Yell County Economic Opportunity Program, a pilot recipient of an OEA grant.  The organization was soon absorbed into its larger sister organization, ARVAC (Arkansas River Valley Area Council), which hosted numerous national and local volunteers.   ARVAC formed programs such as the Housing Development Corporation, an organization utilizing the rural tradition of barn raising to help low income families secure homes, and ARVAC Rural Folkcrafts, a network which provided a market for rural quilters, white oak basket makers, seamstresses, and other artisans, allowing them to sell their traditional wares and earn a living for their families. Another organization, Counseling Associates (formerly known as ARVAC Community Mental Health Program), began under the ARVAC VISTA program and operates independently today.

In its early days VISTA brought in volunteers from around the nation, but in later years became more focused on long-term, locally based volunteers, which helped the programs thrive.   From the beginning, the goal of VISTA programs was to become self-sufficient. ARVAC stuck around and quickly became a model of successful VISTA organizing.   ARVAC’s craft co-op, which began in 1975, continued throughout the 1980s, as did housing initiative, which later became known as Universal, INC.

Schwartz’s book features interviews with a few river valley VISTA workers, including the late Myrtle Cress who worked in Ola and Betty Burnett who organized a housing co-op in Dardanelle.  It also highlights the work of Lou Vitale who was instrumental in founding the crafts co-op. I’d love to learn more about the creation of these initiatives, how people felt about the work, the craftspeople who sold at the co-op, and the use of the barn raising tradition in area housing initiatives.   Were you affiliated with VISTA?  Did you or someone in your family sell crafts at the co-op?  Perhaps your house was built utilizing the barn raising tradition?  I’d love to hear more.   An extra special thanks to Mike Luster of the Arkansas Folklife Program for introducing me to this book.

Also please don’t forget we’re still working on compiling stories of plants and seeds for our book on stories and gardening in the area.  We’d love to include your story!  To learn more visit us here.  To read a little bit about the backstory of the garden book read this column.

“Crossing Borders: From Mexico to U.S.” on Hearing Voices radio program

I was driving last weekend when I came across this Hearing Voices radio program on KABF.  ”Crossing Borders: From Mexico to U.S,” originally aired in 2008.  A tale of what immigrants face attempting to cross the border, the program is still just as relevant today in 2012.  This program, like all of the productions by Hearing Voices, is a mixture of so-called “driveway moments” gathered from various broadcasts and recordings and then interwoven to tell a somewhat parallel story.  Luis Alberto Urrea’s readings are particularly disarming and vivid, especially the endless repetition of “Vatos,” which becomes hypnotic with rhythm and stories of loss.

From the Hearing Voices synopsis:

In “Sasabe,” a Sonora, Mexico border town, Scott Carrier talks to immigrants on their hazardous, illegal desert crossing, and to the border patrol waiting for them in Sasabe, Arizona.

Luis Alberto Urrea reads from his books Vatos and The Devil’s Highway, about death in the desert.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña imagines “Maquiladoras of the Future,” fantasy border factories.

“And I walked…”, by Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler, is a sound-portrait of Mexicans who risk their lives to find better-paying jobs in the United States.

And sounds from the Quiet American’s one-minute vacation.

Click here to visit the page and listen to the piece.  

“Hand of Man” Video About Mountain Top Removal

Music for the Mountains cd. Released 2011.

The band Magnolia Mountain recently released a video for their song “Hand of Man” about the horrors of Appalachian mountaintop removal.  The song appears on the Music for the Mountains compilation cd, which was released last year (to read about that project go here).

According to the band’s web page, the video took about a year to make. It’s filled with footage detailing the destruction that comes from this form of coal mining, including reference to high cancer rates and polluted waterways.  The video takes its cues from a long history of Appalachian organizing.

From Jeff Bigger’s post in the Huffington Post:

The Hand of Man” takes the listener to White Star Holler in Kentucky, where seven generations of mountain families have struggled to defend their lives and livelihoods from the toxic fallout from coal company destruction:

White Star Holler was my home
Shared the crops that we had grown
Shared the water from our well
Shared the life we loved so well
Coal men brought the mountain down
Leaked their poison underground
Mother, neighbor, friend, and son
Cancer took them, every one  (to read the whole post go here)

The band is asking that this video be shared far and wide to spread the word about mountaintop removal.  Want to know and/or get involved?  Visit I Love Mountains.org and be sure and check out the work of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.

The Seed and the Story for January 11, 2012: Chickalah Academy

Chickalah Methodist Cemetery. Click on photo to see full listing of graves in cemetery.

The Seed and the Story is a bi-weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!

You can follow the Boiled Down Juice on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend! And thanks for reading!

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I recently began doing some research on the history of Chickalah and have been reading two books which provide a great deal of information about this and other rural communities in the area.  Both Wayne Banks’ 1959 publication, A History of Yell County Arkansas, and Catherine Eikleberry Roger’s Readin’, ‘Ritin, and ‘Rithmetic, published in 1981, are filled with oral histories from community members who have long since passed away.  In addition to many of the stories I’ve heard over the years from family and friends, these books help shed light on this community which once boasted eight businesses and two hundred and fifty residents.

Today Chickalah is a small, rural community with a few churches, a community center, and a rural fire department.  In the late 1800s, however, Chickalah, often referred to as Chickalah Village, was located about a mile north of its present location and was home to the Chickalah Academy, a two story building which provided the first non-denominational educational opportunities in the area.  Prior to the Academy, all schools in the village were subscription based and conducted by the Methodist church on Harkey’s Valley road across from Little Chickalah Creek.  The Chickalah Academy, located near where the fire station stands today, was a two story building with four separate entrances.  The school boasted three departments: “Primary,” “Grammar” and “Academic,” and in addition to these regular classes students also had access to classes in vocal instruction, piano, organ, guitar, and violin. 

The Chickalah Academy burned sometime during the early 1900s, and although another two story building was constructed, the subsequent school appears to have only hired two teachers.  Eventually that building was torn down and replaced by the one-story, two room building that still operates today as the Chickalah Community Center.  As many readers may remember, beginning in the 1930s, the Chickalah School began a gradual process of consolidation with Dardanelle Public Schools.

To my knowledge there is no one living today who attended the Chickalah Academy, but some of you have probably heard stories about the school, and no doubt there are many readers who remember attending the later school before consolidation.  In my quest to understand more about Chickalah, I’m especially curious to learn more about the coming of Highway 27 and how this shifted the population from what is often referred to as Chicklaha Village to the Chicklah we know today.   I’m also curious to learn more about a shoe factory that may have once been located in the area.  Operated by the McCray family, the factory would have existed sometime in the mid 1800s.  I’d also love to learn as much as possible about the sawmills in the area and the role they played in the larger timber industry. Do you know anything about these topics?  I’d love to include this and any other information in our ongoing research at the community center I’m working to open, the McElroy House: Organization for Folklife, Oral History, and Community Action.   As always, I’d love to hear your stories.  You can visit me online at www.boileddownjuice.com.  If you want to know more about the McElroy House and our goals, you can check us out online at www.mcelroyhouse.wordpress.com. Of course, I always love handwritten letters or phone calls as well!  Thanks so much for reading and sharing your stories.  I feel very thankful to be learning from you all.   

Arkansas One of Ten Most “Depressing” States, says Health.Com.

From Health.com

Thanks for reading!  Don’t forget you can follow the Boiled Down Juice on facebook and Twitter. You might also be interested in the newly forming McElroy House: Center for Folklife, Oral History, and Community Action.

A few weeks ago I saw this article popping up in several friends feeds.  I saved the link into a drafts folder, wondering what useful, action-based information could be drawn from the article.  Rather than ramble on about my own theories and ideas, I’ll just pass along the information and see what readers make of it.

According to Health.com, Arkansas is one of the “ten most depressing states” in the U.S.

Before we get into the meat of the article, I must take a little bit of an issue with the title, “Ten Most Depressing in the U.S.”  We all know Arkansas gets all kinds of flack and has problems that go on for days.  It’s a complex state, this place many of us call home.  Maybe you’ve noticed, but one of the goals of this blog is to explore concepts of home and take a closer look at how, and why, people love the places they call home and how they’re working to make it a more sustainable, stronger place.

Place isn’t just a geographic location.  It’s a concept, and a highly fluid one at that.  The title is rather misleading in that it claims Arkansas is a “depressing” place (overly subjective) rather than Arkansas has “high rates of depression” (accurate).   I’m all for discussing Arkansas’s problems (and there are so many), but we won’t get very far making blanket, subjective generalizations.  But enough rambling.

With that said, here’s the intro to the article:

On its own, where you live isn’t enough to make you depressed. Personal circumstances and genes also play an important role in mental health, so an area that feels like a downer to one person may be home sweet home to another.

That said, mental distress is unusually and persistently common in some states, whether due to economic troubles, lack of access to health care, or other factors.

Continue reading »

Saving Our Rural Arkansas Post Offices Toolkit from the Rural Community Alliance

From the Rural Community Alliance site, Save Our Rural Arkansas Post Offices.

Recently we posted about the history and significance of the Dardanelle, Arkansas Post Office and mural, and our thankfulness that it is still open and in use.  But as you’ve probably heard, many rural post offices in Arkansas (Arkansas has the highest rate of proposed closures in the nation) and around the nation are facing closure, something that will, no doubt, deal a devastating blow to many rural communities around the nation.

I saw this morning that the Rural Community Alliance, a non-profit organization based in Arkansas with the mission of helping rural communities and schools thrive, has created the webpage Save Our Rural Post Offices.   The webpage features a tool kit  where you can find action guides to prevent the closing of your posts office, a state by state list of closings, and a list of Arkansas specific closings, which can be found via the national website Save the Post Office.  

The tool kit provides practical tools such as a sample letter to the editor and a petition form you can print out and begin passing around.  Thanks to this great resource, all the tools you need to begin working toward saving your post office are in one place.

The site also provides examples of what other citizens have done, including those of Fox, Arkansas who created a video to help fight for their post office.  Their video is up on Youtube:
 

Here’s a great piece about the hazards of rural post office closings from the Daily Yonder.

And here’s another great piece from our friends at the Art of the Rural.  

And here’s a link to our piece about the Dardanelle Post Office.

To learn more about the Rural Community Alliance click here.

Is your post office facing closings?  What are folks in your community doing?

Know Your Chicken, You Got to Know Your Chicken: Pickin Chicken App for Iphone

Ever heard that song by Cibo Matto called “Know Your Chicken?” Well anyway, there is an Iphone app, sponsored by Mother Earth News, to help you discover which chicken breeds best meet your needs. I love reading about the various ways people are returning to food sufficiency and sustainability while also embracing the tools of technology.

Continue reading »

Something You Should See: The Natural State of America

From the film's webpage

Last week at the annual conference of the Arkansas Anthropological and Sociology Association, Dr. Bryan C. Campbell, professor of visual anthropology at the University of Central Arkansas, played a short clip from his upcoming documentary about the Newton County Wildlife Association and their ongoing fight to keep their forests free of toxic herbicides. The tiny bit of the film that we got to see was incredibly compelling. Beginning with the history of the organization’s founding in 1970, the film focuses on this highly effective and active resistance movement in the Ozarks, detailing how every day people are able to organize and fight to keep their forest safe.  Unfortunately today they face a new host of challenges.

The preview of the film is now available online, and you should really check it out. To watch the preview click here.

The film will be shown at all major film festivals in Arkansas and throughout the nation. To keep up with developments related to the film and to find a viewing location, be sure and become a fan of the film on facebook.  To do that go here.

Dr. Campbell runs Conserving Arkansas’s Agricultural Heritage (think I have posted about this before. If not, I should have!). They preserve agricultural folkways and engage in seed conversation and seed swaps across the state. Check out all the information by clicking here. If you are a seed saver you would love to attend these gatherings.

And, for a little extra info, Here’s a nice article about Dr. Brian Campbell and his work with the Seed Bank at UCA.

Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens by Bill C. Malone

At this year’s American Folklore Society conference (something I intend to write more about very soon)my wonderful friends Mike and Rachel Reynolds-Luster surprised me with a belated birthday gift: a paperback copy of Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens (Music in American Life Series, University of Illinois Press, 2008). It’s so good I have to tell you about it. Continue reading »