The Foxfire Group

It's embarrassing to admit that even though we knew about the Foxfire series of books on Appalachian culture, it wasn't until our friend Tom Scepaniak mentioned them on his Northern Farmer weblog that it occurred to us we should carry them. These books are a treasure trove of information about Appalachian folklore, history, and traditional skills. Best of all, they are direct and unpretentious, being the result of a forty-year-long project which has high school students approaching their parents and grandparents, collecting their wisdom, and setting it down in writing.

In 1966, Eliot Wigginton came to Appalachian Georgia to teach high school English.  Inexperienced and unfamiliar with the culture and values of his new home, he soon realized he was not adequately prepared to meet the challenge. If he continued to rely on his underdeveloped skills, he knew his first year of teaching would be his last.  He remained deeply committed to teaching basic English skills, but his students were not responding to his best efforts.

With the challenge of all this swirling in his head, he took his first step and told them that they could choose how they learned basic writing skills. The students decided to do a magazine and, as their interest in it grew and ideas began to form, they decided to talk with their grandparents and track down and record tales of the community's other elders-stories that had been almost forgotten. They decided to name the magazine, Foxfire, after the phosphorescent glow produced by certain fungi found on decaying wood in damp forest areas of the southern Appalachian Mountains. Those first Foxfire Magazine students, and the students who followed in their footsteps, have now recorded the heritage of the Appalachian area for forty years.

The quality of the students' work, and the interest their stories generated, led to publication of The Foxfire Books series, twelve volumes written by those students from information they obtained in interviews for The Foxfire Magazine, sales of which have now reached almost eight million copies.

(Order the entire set of twelve books here.)

• The Foxfire Book. This volume, the original anthology, celebrates the home life and creative history of Appalachia, featuring sections on hog dressing, log cabin building, soap making, basket weaving, planting by the signs, preserving foods, making butter, snake lore, hunting tales, faith healing, and moonshining.
• Foxfire 2. This second volume celebrates the rites and customs of Appalachia, featuring sections on ghost stories, spring wild plant foods, corn shuckins, spinning and weaving, midwives, granny women, old-time burial customs, witches and haints, and wagon making.
• Foxfire 3. This third volume celebrates the lively and homespun heritage of Appalachia, featuring sections on animal care, banjos & dulcimers, hide tanning, summer and fall wild plant foods, cornshuck mops, butter churns, apple butter, building a lumber kiln, and ginseng.
• Foxfire 4. This fourth volume celebrates the home life and creative heritage of Appalachia, featuring sections on fiddle making, springhouses, horse trading, sassafras tea, berry buckets, knife making, wood carving, logging, cheese making, and gardening.

• Foxfire 5. This fifth volume celebrates the survival techniques and resourceful heritage of Appalachia, featuring sections on ironmaking, blacksmithing, horseshoes, cowbells, shovels, bellows, barrells, furnaces, flintlock rifles, and bear hunting.
• Foxfire 6. This sixth volume celebrates the playful and innovative heritage of Appalachia, featuring 100 toys and games, from bow and arrows to merry-go-rounds, flying jennys to puzzles, cornstalk fiddles to gourd banjos and song bows, and cucumber dolls, as well as wooden locks, shoemaking, and a water-powered sawmill.
• Foxfire 7. This seventh volume celebrates the spiritual heritage of Appalachia, featuring sections on ministers and church members, from Baptists to Methodists to Pentecostals to Presbyterians, as well as revivals, baptisms, shaped-note and gospel singing, faith healing, camp meetings, foot washing, and snake handling.
• Foxfire 8. This eighth volume celebrates the artistic and skillful heritage of Appalachia, featuring sections on Southern folk pottery, from glazed snake jars to swirlware to flowerpots, pug mills, ash glazes, groundhog kilns, face jugs, churns, and roosters, as well as mule swapping and chicken fighting, breeding, and conditioning.

• Foxfire 9. This ninth volume celebrates the crafts and heritage of Appalachia, featuring sections on the Judd Nelson wagon, crazy quilting, general stores, herbal remedies and home cures, herb doctors and healers, a praying rock, a Catawban Indian Potter, witchy and ghostly haint tales, and the log cabin revisited.
• Foxfire 10. This tenth volume celebrates the heritage and history of Appalachia, featuring sections on old folklore, the role of railroads in Appalachian communities, boarding houses, building and technology from the Depression to the present, chairmaking, whirligigs, snake canes, and gourd art.
• Foxfire 11. This eleventh volume celebrates the rituals and recipes of Appalachia, featuring sections on the old homeplace, wild plant uses, planting and growing a garden, preserving food - pickling, smoking, and salting, as well as beekeeping and making honey, hunting stories, fishing, and more affairs of plain living.
• Foxfire 12. Here are reminiscences about learning to square dance and tales about traditional craftsmen who created useful items in the old-time ways that have since disappeared in most of the country. Here are lessons on how to make rose beads and wooden caskets, and on how to find turtles in your local pond. We hear the voices of descendants of the Cherokees who lived in the region, and we learn about what summer camp was like for generations of youngsters. We meet a rich assortment of Appalachian characters and listen to veterans recount their war experiences.

• A Foxfire Christmas. This captivating book of recollections celebrates the holiday traditions of Appalachian families as passed from one generation to the next. Based on Foxfire students' interviews with neighbors and family members, the memories shared here are from a simpler time, when gifts were fewer but perhaps more precious, and holiday tables were laden with traditional favorites. More than just reminiscences, however, A Foxfire Christmas includes instructions for recreating many of the ornaments, toys, and recipes that make up so many family traditions, from Chicken and Dumplings to Black Walnut Cake, and from candy pulls to corn husk dolls and hand-whittled toy cars.
• The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery. A 352-page, 500-recipe hardback cookbook for $9? Yes. More than simply a cookbook, The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery combines unpretentious, delectable recipes with the wit and wisdom of those who have prepared and eaten such foods for generations. Drawn from the wealth of material gathered by Foxfire students, this engaging volume evokes the foodways of a southern Appalachian community. Illustrated with photographs of the kitchens, people, and foods of Appalachia, this captivating collection contains more than 500 recipes.