How Appalachia's children highlight the region's best attributes

Just off U.S. Highway 23, along the spectacular views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, T.J. Smith spends his days continuing the tradition of the iconic Foxfire Fund: an enterprise driven by young people whose respect for the land and culture, and understanding of the importance of preserving that culture’s stories, has persevered for more than 50 years.

If you grew up in Appalachia, you likely owned a set of the Foxfire books or had the Foxfire magazine in your home, giving you an opportunity to see your very heritage in those pages.

“Foxfire began as a school project started in a classroom in 1966 at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School,” explained Smith, president and executive director of the nonprofit. “The kids didn’t really have an interest in Shakespeare and ‘Ethan Frome’ and whatever else they were being asked to read. So, in a response, the teacher just said: ‘OK, I give up. What do you want to do? What are you interested in? You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to do that. What will you do?’”

The children’s answer?

“They were interested in their community, themselves, their families, their friends and their neighbors,” Smith said. “So, they were told, ‘Go out and talk to people in your community about what’s important to them about their lives or about their experiences, and see what you find.’”

It turns out that when they came back to class to write about what they found, the essays were so interesting that they decided to find a way to put them in the public space. They created a magazine and found a way to pay for the printing by selling advertising.

“The first Foxfire magazine was printed in the spring of 1967, and we’ve been publishing the magazine ever since,” Smith said.

When the magazine sold out in less than a week, and in consecutive editions after that, and the children kept getting mountains of letters asking for subscriptions, Smith said that built momentum and got them money: “They got a grant from [the National Endowment for the Humanities] in 1971 for recording equipment and new cameras, and then in ’71, E.P. Dutton, the book publishing company, came to them and said, ‘We’d like you to do a book.’”

And the legend was born.