| Only one mile separated Joe Clark's home in historical Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, and my Grant-Lee Hall dormitory on the Lincoln Memorial University Campus, where I lived from 1926 to 1929. Joe Clark and I had to see one another sometime on the streets of Cumberland Gap, which then had a population of approximately three hundred and remains about the same today. We students of Lincoln Memorial used to walk over to Cumberland Gap and buy supplies. And it was from Cudjo's Cave (the great cave under "The Pinnacle" of Cumberland Mountain, where Lincoln Memorial gets its water supply-a pure water, cold as ice) that I worked on the biggest and hardest work project I ever worked on at Lincoln Memorial. With a crew of Lincoln Memorial's strongest young men, we dug with picks and spades; we drilled holes by hand into the limestone rocks and blasted with dynamite and blasting powder a water line from Cumberland Gap over a foothill mountain to the little town of Harrogate and Lincoln Memorial-a line big enough to carry water for hundreds of students, faculty members, college maintenance families, and villagers. |
| It was then and later that Joe Clark was taking these immortal photographs of his day and time, for his own pleasure, with his little Kodak, photographs that are priceless history. His photographs have captured a time and place in the very heart of Appalachia that has practically vanished. Joe Clark, at that time, never dreamed that he was photographing for posterity; he was only taking pictures of his family, his kinfolk and friends, to go into his personal album. |
| Now, Joe Clark's photographs are going into a bigger album, for many people to see and to discover in his book Tennessee Hill Folk, a book I predict will be around for a long time to come. His book is one for libraries, schools, and people of all ages-not merely in Appalachia and Tennessee, but all over the United States. Here is the best collection of photographic history of a way of life of Joe Clark's and my people that I have ever seen. I, too, am Appalachia: all my ancestors-my mother's and father's people-are from the heart of Appalachia, and I live in Appalachia, prefer it to any place in America or the |
|
917.68'944