Midland Chutes

As an industry, logging moved southward through Appalachia, with some of the biggest operations in the Great Smoky Mountains coming directly from Pennsylvania after timber supplies were exhausted there. Technical terms migrated along with the workers and as a result became fairly standard throughout the region. The Climax engine, a steam locomotive common on logging spurs in the South, was developed in Corry, Pennsylvania. A Maine blacksmith, Joe Peavey, improved on the cant hook by adding a spike on the end, and the “peavey” can still be used to “muscle” logs. Not surprisingly, many loggers from the southern Appalachians left for the Pacific Northwest after their timber was cut, taking their language with them.
Colonial writings by literate but not highly educated people contain these and a host of other expressions still used in Appalachia that the remainder of the country thinks are quaint. Seemingly Elizabethan English can occasionally be found in the mountains (Shakespeare wrote yers for “ears,” for example), but southern Appalachia has much more in common with the eighteenth-century language of the nation’s founding fathers. Cherokee laundry chute doors is a member of the Southern branch of the Iroquois language family and is related to Mohawk, Seneca, and other Northern Iroquoian languages spoken in New York and Ontario. When Europeans began moving into the southern Appalachians in the eighteenth century, the Cherokee nation occupied much of western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and northern Georgia and sometimes ranged as far north as Virginia and Kentucky.

Place names derived from European languages other than English are not common in Appalachia. Those that occur usually represent or incorporate the name of an immigrant family such as Lesage, West Virginia , and Floyd County, Kentucky . Some derive from place names in the Old World, like Wartburg, Tennessee (named after an area of Germany by German-Swiss settlers in Morgan County, Tennessee), Berea , or Salem . The origins of many place names are unclear because they were used years before appearing on any map and will remain controversial. As a result, popular stories, or “folk etymologies,” often arise to explain their unusual spelling or character.
Indeed, his use of folk vocabulary was so extensive and often so obscure that one modern editor included a lengthy glossary at the end of his edition of Sut Lovingood. The life of David Crockett also inspired the anonymous author or authors of various Crockett Almanacs, which began appearing soon after Crockett’s death in 1836 at the Alamo and remained popular through the 1850s. Writers employed an extensive common stock of words, phonetic spellings intended to represent words, and grammatical forms to represent rustic speech without any specific regional identification. James Fenimore Cooper was perhaps the single most influential American writer to represent the speech of frontier characters, beginning with The Pioneers , the first of his Leatherstocking novels. “Thar’s nun ove ’em fas’ enuf tu ketch me” is typical from one of Harris’s mountaineers. Many its and other forms later made their way into the Barney Google comic strip after Snuffy Smith was introduced to it in 1934.

The curved archway entry, all original plaster and stucco, leads into the living room, which measures 11-by-17-feet, and features the original oak hardwood floors that were an upgrade to the original house plan. Kit homes were rarely altered, but this one was specifically ordered to exclude a fireplace, which probably would have been in the living room, and upgraded to include oak floors, double studding on the windows and doors, coal chute and a back kitchen door. A total of $48.40 for all of the upgrades, on top of the original price of $2,236. Whether you’re looking for basic supplies like buckets, troughs and shavings or high-quality working equipment like Priefert® cattle chutes, corral panels and calf tables, your local McCoy’s can help you find what you need to manage your herd. We also carry fencing in a variety of lengths, heights and styles, including horse fence, chicken wire and goat fencing to make sure that your animals or gardens are safe and secure. The first step to building a basic laundry chute is identifying the right spot to put it.
But in the last forty years of the twentieth century, most of their young people left their conservative roots and lifestyle along with the German dialect. Exact numbers of German speakers in the Shenandoah Valley are difficult to determine, but migration into the valley was numerically small, making these migrants highly susceptible to cultural and linguistic assimilation. Since the early nineteenth century, writers have portrayed spoken language in literature with Appalachian characters and settings.
It has preserved a record of colonial speech unequaled in any other American region, largely due to Appalachia’s relative physical isolation during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Out-migration has been a feature of Appalachian life for more than two hundred years, in the nineteenth century especially to Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. Although separated by several hundred miles, Appalachian English and Ozark English have long shared a close association in descriptions of language in the southern highlands.

Paulding, for example, used literary dialect in The Lion of the West , a comic drama partly inspired by the life of David Crockett. During the eighteenth century, the southern half of the eastern mountain chain was known as the Appalachians and the northern half the Alleghenies, with the overall designation alternating between the two. In a letter to the editor of the Knickerbocker in 1839, Washington Irving suggested that Appalachia or Alleghenia might be a more appropriate name for the United States, probably the first appearance in print of the term Appalachia. Geographer Arnold Henry Guyot established the scientific and popular usage for the entire mountain range with his article “On the Appalachian Mountain system” in 1861. On his map of America, published in 1562, the region “Apalchen” appears to the north of a mountain range, far from Florida.
Many native names were adopted by the French or Spanish before entering English usage, and thus may no longer resemble closely the pronunciation of the original. Tennessee, for example, which first appeared in English as Tinnase in 1707, was recorded by the Spanish as early as 1567 as Tanasqui and derives from an ancient Cherokee town of the same name. Native names in northern Appalachia usually came from Iroquoian languages or from Delaware , those in southern Appalachia from Cherokee (Tellico, Tennessee; Etowah, Georgia). Other names were translated into English, so their native source is now disguised. Humans assign names to land features, whether natural or man-made, to give order, meaning, and familiarity to their environment.

A widely accepted language ideology can dictate political, economic, social, educational, and cultural policies and actions based upon linguistic usages and practices and beliefs about them, including Appalachian ones. This process leads to implicit rankings of superiority or inferiority by which schools, businesses, media, and governmental agencies judge individuals according to their socio-cultural use of language. Most evaluations of Appalachian speech fall into one of three linguistic ideologies, each of which can overlap with one another according to how a person interprets a given set of communicative events. First is prescriptivist, asserting that Appalachian speech deviates significantly from an American English standard. The second is romantic, arguing that Appalachian speech is a survival of Elizabethan English or some other antiquated form of speech. The last is relativistic, maintaining that Appalachian speech is equal to other forms of English in its linguistic functions.
This sun-bleached western city, deep in the heart of the Permian Basin, sits in one of the most productive oil fields in the world — and is home to the cinematic Texas of my imagination. Cowboy hats, trucks kicking up dust and nodding pump jacks backlit by scarlet sunsets are as much a part of the state’s mythology as they are the landscape of the region. In this quintessential oil town, flashy new buildings clash with vacant ones, marking the dizzying cycles of oil booms and busts like rings on a tree.

Such a mine is rare in Appalachia because of the steep topography of the Cumberland-Allegheny Plateau, in which all of the region’s coal lies. In contour mining, workers follow the contour or direction of a seam along a mountainside, cutting straight down to remove the overburden and to expose the seam. This process creates a vertical highwall and then a level bench below it on which machinery can maneuver.
In hand-loading days, miners bored vertically into coal seams manually with picks or later with machines called continuous miners having rotating drill bits to chew out and spit back the coal onto loading arms. When miners reach the end of a seam or it becomes too thin for extraction, they back out of the sections, pulling pillars as they go. That is, they remove the blocks of coal supporting the mountain, in effect pulling it down on their heads. In longwall mining, interlocked longwall machines may remove a span as long as 5,000 feet by using huge blades that cut back and forth horizontally, shearing the coal from the face.