This is one of the most endearing and important books in all of Appalachian literature. Olive Tilford Dargan (1869-1968) has captured the lives and spirits of mountain people, especially mountain women, more poetically and in a more compelling way than practically any other of the handful of similar efforts. In the introduction to this edition (yes, this book warranted three editions), Anna Shannon Elfenbein calls it a "story cycle," establishing her belief that these character vignettes have a fictional quality despite the fact that they are so true to life and based on Dargan's neighbors near her Nantahala River farm, in Swain County, North Carolina, where she lived, off and on, from 1906 until 1925. Photographs are by the great female photographer of the era, Bayard Wootten, who warrants an Afterword by Jonathan Morrow.
Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, a 1998 reprint of a book originally published in 1925 as Highland Annals and re-printed with the photographs in 1941. 247 pages with photographs by Bayard Wooten, Introduction by Ann Shannon Elfenbein and an Afterword by Johathan Morrow. Now out-of-print