For many decades, that phrase has been the traditional closing for letters written by the directors of Pine Mountain Settlement School. What, I wondered, did it mean?
Photo Above: This was the first school room at Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1914.
Driving through Harlan County a few years ago, I saw the entrance sign:
Pine Mountain Settlement School
Est. 1913
Welcome
The gate was closed … but curiosity pulled me into the driveway, and I couldn’t resist walking some.
Graceful log and stone buildings, scattered on steep hillsides. A widespread garden, and sheep, an ancient log cabin. Not a person in sight.
And silence. Beautiful, lofty green silence.
I knew I’d come back to Pine Mountain to piece together some of the puzzle that so clearly waited there.
You can’t understand the long history of Pine Mountain without knowing a little about the urban settlement house movement. Starting in England in the late 19th century, the urban settlement movement is often credited with the start of social work as a profession, as middle-class workers moved into impoverished neighborhoods and provided language instruction, basic education, health care and child care to newly arrived immigrants and impoverished workers.
Jane Addams’ Chicago Hull House (1889) is perhaps the best-known of the American social settlement institutions, grounded in John Dewey’s progressive reform movement that sought to improve life in an increasingly industrialized, urbanized America.
It was on the Hull House model that the Appalachian settlement schools were created, by well-educated women from New England and Bluegrass Kentucky who wanted better for the children of southern Appalachia in the early 20th century. Some called them “fotched on” women—women who’d been “fetched” from outside the mountains to teach.
One of those women was Katherine Pettit, a founder of the Knott County Hindman Settlement School and, with the help of early Pine Mountain settler William Creech, the founder of Pine Mountain Settlement School.
As told in Mary Rogers’ small but invaluable booklet, “The Pine Mountain Story: 1913-1980,” Uncle William Creech purchased 700 acres of “wild land” on the north slope of Pine Mountain in 1870. He and his wife, Aunt Sal, farmed and raised a family, and Creech wondered how he could help his home place move forward. He saw the geographic isolation of Pine Mountain as a serious problem, denying children access to consistent education and “moral training.” He also lamented unproductive farming practices—“all the timber and stuff they are wasting.” Corn liquor, disease and arguments settled with guns left Uncle William and Aunt Sal deeply troubled.
So when his effort to establish a church where itinerant preachers could bring the Word to Pine Mountain failed, Creech traveled to the Hindman Settlement School and asked Katherine Pettit and her people for help.
Hindman, Creech told people upon returning home, “was far better than most people in this country thinks heaven is.” He promised Pettit (who’d successfully molded Jane Addams’ urban settlement work to fit the needs of Kentucky mountain residents) the land, money and labor to build a similar school at Pine Mountain.
Rogers makes it clear early on in her book on Pine Mountain that Pettit wasn’t out to push any outside cultural expectations on Harlan County people:
Traditional schooling was part of her plan, but she envisaged also a settlement serving a whole community in its economic, health and cultural development.
A settlement would not attempt to substitute an outside culture for the indigenous.
It would try to strengthen people’s faith in their own heritage, making use of both the mountain environment and their unique traditions as media for learning.
It would help people to retain a secure sense of their own worth as human beings.
—page 3
With co-director Ethel DeLong, a Smith College graduate who’d also taught at Hindman, Pettit opened Pine Mountain Settlement School in 1913, at the junction of Isaac’s Run and Shell Run which then formed Greasy Creek. The land was relatively open, allowing the school to raise its own food. As described by Mary Rogers, “The first schoolroom was an open-sided shelter, ‘The House in the Woods.’” Their housing was a “borrowed house, a Masonic Lodge building, and some tents.”
And, most certainly, a great deal of hope.
I returned to Pine Mountain Settlement School in late summer last year, knowing not much about its present operation but intrigued by what I’d learned about its past:
Pine Mountain students rode with the Packhorse Librarians.
In its early years, Pine Mountain was the only source of healthcare in a 300-square-mile area.
Students collected ballads and folksongs that drew the likes of folklorists/song archivists Cecil Sharp and Alan Lomax, balladeer John Jacob Niles and storied folk singer Jean Ritchie to campus.
Writers Rebecca Caudill Ayers, Harry Caudill, Richard Chase, John Dos Passos, James Still and filmmakers Ray and Virginia Garner, Wendell Berry and Gurney Norman all have visited or written at Pine Mountain.
In the 1930s and ’40s, female students at Pine Mountain learned to repair appliances and cane chairs; male students learned to cook, mend and iron.
Students wrote and illustrated their own civics textbooks.
Studying the Cooperative movement, students opened a Consumers’ Cooperative store complete with member shares. Food and crafts from county residents were sold, the goods classified as Fireside Industries.
Students performed Shakespeare and learned how to write and stage their own plays.
And in 1963, they created a “Little School,” sixth to 10th graders providing summer preschool education for area children. Under Title I and Headstart, the preschool became year-round.
That was then, and details like these were engaging.
Still, I wondered, with most of the settlement schools in the southern Appalachians either long-closed or transformed into other institutional forms, what would I find remaining at remote Pine Mountain?
I’m staying up the mountain in Zande House, built in 1917 by Italian stonemason Luigi Zande for his bride and school co-director, Ethel DeLong Zande. As dusk settles in, I walk the Pine Mountain grounds. Chickens are on the loose on the hillside, and the tall ironweed, cutleaf coneflower and Joe-Pye weed are twilight-vibrant along the garden and pasture fences. The handcrafted limestone chapel stands silent, its call-to-worship bell and simple stone cross rising into the open sky. Later, I sit on the porch of Zande and read, understanding that this place has offered me the rare gift of offline time.
We meet the next morning in the dining room of Laurel House at the center of campus: Helen Wykle, trustee and archive website co-editor; Kiristen Webb, program director; and Judy Lewis, community coordinator. Spending most of her elementary school years at Pine Mountain, Helen graduated from the Foundation School and Berea College, and then headed west to California. “But we always came back here for reunions,” she says.
“Sometimes I feel that people think I don’t understand them, because I left,” she muses. “But the basics are ours together here.
“I have great hopes for Pine Mountain. It has an incredible future waiting, particularly as people reassess what it means to have quality of life. To have a place to go to learn firsthand—how streams work and rivers flow, for example—that’s increasingly important. This place is incredibly biodiverse—we’ve had folks from the Smithsonian here.” (Pine Mountain maintains the 350-acre Bickford State Nature Preserve, home to many rare plants and animals.)
Program Director Kiristen Webb lays out the current three-pronged focus of Pine Mountain: environmental education, Appalachian crafts and sustainable agriculture and food systems. As new schools were built in Harlan County, students were bussed to those centers, leaving Pine Mountain with some hard decisions. After long discussion, the board of trustees voted to keep Pine Mountain running not as a public school, but as a place to which students could come, see and learn about their natural surroundings, food production and regional crafts such as pottery, spinning and weaving and quilting.
(A visit to the Pine Mountain website (www.pinemountainsettlementschool.com) lays out a varied list of workshops, events and community gatherings.)
“We have a ‘pass it on’ program here—we bring in folks to teach some of the heritage skills—and we partner with Berea College’s “Grow Appalachia” effort to address food insecurity and teach home and community gardening skills,” Webb says.
“At Pine Mountain, it’s always been about ‘what is needed,’ not about ‘what I want them to need.’” The settlement school model isn’t based on telling people how to be—it’s a reciprocal relationship. So if you come here, you’re going to gain knowledge and experience from this culture, these people, this place,” she says.
“You build community doing work together here. People feel it, the togetherness and belonging in this space.”
Longtime Community Coordinator Judy Lewis is proof positive of this. She did elementary school at Pine Mountain, then went to Red Bird Mission School for high school.
“I dropped out and got married,” she says. “And then I came back here cleaning house for Mary and Burton Rogers. He was director from 1942 to 1973. Mary’s the one who pushed me to go back and get my GED.”
For 30 years, Lewis has been the frontline connector between the Pine Mountain community and the school. “I oversee the day camps, baseball, the Mother’s Day Dinner, Fair Day, the Nativity play—everyone loves that, it’s been put on since the beginning, and whoever thought I’d be in charge of it?”
Judy Lewis lives in the Creech Farm House at Pine Mountain, which seems right and good. Her final words ring beautifully true: “Pine Mountain has been here a long time, and I believe the reason is that they always remember why it was started, and they remember the community. Pine Mountain will be here for a long time to come, as long as there are children to learn and community to serve.”
For my part… I’ll be back to Pine Mountain. To see the Nativity Play or for Fair Day, to shop the Farmers Market or learn to spin. To write and walk and weave, celebrate what was and understand better what can be in this storied place.
Somewhere up there, Uncle William Creech must be pretty happy with how his dream for his people and place turned out at Pine Mountain Settlement School.
Thanks to the ongoing work of Helen Wykle and her co-editor, Ann Angel Eberhardt, the Pine Mountain Archives are a treasure trove of information about the school. Much of the archival material stored at Pine Mountain has been put online, accessible at pinemountainsettlement.net
An Old Man’s Hopes for the Children of the Kentucky Mountains
“I don’t look after wealth for them. I look after the prosperity of our nation. I want all young’uns taught to serve the livin’ God. Of course, they wont all do that, but they can have good and evil laid before them and they can choose which they will. I have heart and craving that our people may grow better. I have deeded my land to Pine Mountain Settlement School to be used for school purposes as long as the Constitution of the United States stands. Hopin’ it may make a bright and intelligent people after I’m dead and gone.”
From a Letter by William Creech, circa 1915
Kay Moore Remembers
We asked readers on the BRC Facebook page to share their memories of Pine Mountain with us.
Here’s one especially lovely one we received. Thank you, Kay Moore!
“I went to school there until it closed and we had to go to Green Hills! I remember May Day when we would put crepe paper from a pole and we would dance around the pole and sing! Going hiking and caving. … My all-time favorite is when Mr. Rogers played the organ at my wedding. I loved that chapel from the moment I saw it and still do. I wanted so bad to be married there and have someone to play the organ. He knew me and my brothers as children so he told me he would play for me. Most beautiful thing ever. Some of my best memories are at PMSS!”
The story above first appeared in our March / April 2025 issue.
