Read Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail for Free Online

the parlor, with a horsehair sofa that pulled out into a bed. A Victrola sat on a small table, near the bookshelf. The living room had a heating stove and the kitchen held a cooking stove and a sink with a hand pump that drew water from a cistern. One porch had a swing, and the children’s rooms had chamber pots they’d use in the winter. There was a plot large enough for a three-acre garden out front, and Emma woke early each day to tend to it by kerosene lamp. She grew rhubarb, cucumbers, beans, and a healthy patch of morning glories.
    They had only $5,000 to put down from the sale of their other farm, which meant there was work to be done between there and comfortable. Emma threw herself into it, and saved until it hurt. The children all worked hard, too. By two years old, they were sweeping floors and gathering eggs. By three they were collecting kindling for the potbellied stove. By four they were washing and drying dishes. By five they knew how to wash their own clothes.
    Each morning, P.C. would rise at five and dress and walk to the bottom of the stairs, where he’d pound on the newel post while calling out their names. The kids would jump to their feet from where they slept, four to a bed. The girls swept the house and did the dishes and sometimes helped prepare the meals. After breakfast, they’d all head out into the fields to hoe or pull weeds or pickvegetables or deworm the tobacco plants. The younger children were charged with filling a bucket with lime and walking among the muskmelons and watermelons, sprinkling the mixture on the vines as they went.
    To prepare the fields, P.C. hitched a drag to a team of horses to break the earth, and the kids would sometimes climb onto the flat wooden contraption and drag their bare feet in the loamy soil.
    Emma went to the fields each day and worked alongside the farmhands, as did all the kids. When the work was done, the children would tear off across the bottoms toward the Ohio River, between their home and the mountains. A few of them could swim to the other side, but most stayed in the shallows, laughing and splashing off the day’s dirt. They’d sing “Old Black Joe” and climb inside an old tire and spank each other down the hillside.
    At harvest time, they’d pick muskmelons, watermelons, tomatoes, cucumbers, and corn. P.C. took most of it to the Saturday market down in Huntington. The rest they ate or canned or sold at a little vegetable stand by the highway. Muskmelons or a dozen ears of sweet corn for ten cents. Cucumbers for a penny each. Emma canned hundreds of gallons of fruits and vegetables for the summer and winter, and the shelves in the cold underground cellar were lined with scores of half-gallon jars.
    They ate everything that came from the earth and wasn’t poisonous, from blackberries to persimmons to wild raspberries. They learned that birds and animals don’t go hungry, so why should people? So many trees and bushes provided food—hickory nut, beechnut, walnut, honey locust pod, maple syrup, crabapple, mulberry, plum, cherry, huckleberry. Edible plants included dandelions, narrow dock, wild lettuce, white top, clovers, violets, meadow lettuce, poke leaves, and milkweed. And nothing went to waste.
    Once in a while the men would kill a fattened hog, and they’d build a fire under a fifty-five-gallon drum full of well water. Latein the day they’d string the hog from a tree and gut it. When the water was hot enough they’d lower the heavy carcass into the drum, then crank it back up and run their sharpened knives over the flesh to remove the coarse hair from the hide. They’d portion the hog and Emma would take the hams, prepare them and smoke them in the smokehouse. She’d take all the meat from the head and cover it in brine in a ceramic crock, sometimes adding a little vinegar, and make hog’s head cheese. She’d stuff green peppers with shredded cabbage and dunk them into the brine. It wasn’t rare for the kids to eat so much that