Common Academic Experience: Storming Heaven

Missed the Common Book Event: Something’s  Rising?

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Missed the Common Book Event: In Response to Industrialism?

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Missed the Common Book Event: President’s Convocation?

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Professor Crowe shared with his faculty colleagues how this year’s Common Book has many local and regional similarities:

The Common Book Committee gave us excellent guidance on the use of Storming Heaven in their presentation on the nineteenth. I had already developed some ideas for using the book in several of my courses, but the suggestions from other disciplines significantly broadened my perspective on the impact it could have on my students. They did a good job.

Yet, there is still another perspective which I feel we should carry into our classrooms, not so much in terms of teaching techniques but in terms of underlying assumptions which, I believe, can enhance the experience for us and for our students.

A significant number, probably most, of our students have roots in southern Appalachian culture but I doubt that many of them are aware of it or what it might mean. My own family proves this point. My Mother and my wife’s Father were both products of this culture. My grandfather farmed the bottom lands of the Powell River. (He also rafted logs down river to Chattanooga.) He later moved into LaFollette – a mining camp at the time – and became a merchant politician. My wife’s Grandfather farmed just outside of town before becoming a LaFollette merchant. Neither of our Grandfathers ever went into the mines but their backgrounds were the backgrounds of the people in Ms. Giardina’s book.

I gave copies of Storming Heaven to both of my daughters (now in their 40’s) and encouraged them to read it so that they would have a better understanding of their ancestors. When the younger of the two finished reading the book, she called me to ask, somewhat indignantly, why she had never heard any of this history. She asked why it wasn’t in her textbooks. All of it, virtually every word of the book was foreign to her even though she has spent forty-one of her forty-five years in east Tennessee and visited frequently in her grandparents’ LaFollette homes.

As you may know, Anderson (Lake City and Clinton), Campbell (LaFollette & Jellico), Claiborne (Tazewell) counties were the top coal producing counties in Tennessee for the first fifty years of the twentieth century. One of the great mine disasters, Fraterville, occurred in Anderson County. LaFollette began as 300 people in the community of Big Creek in 1890 and grew into the town (coal camp) of LaFollette with 3000 people in 1920 because Harvey LaFollette bought 27,000 acres in 1895, built his “big house” (a great 29 room Victorian which still stands) and developed the LaFollette Coal, Iron and Railway Co. which employed 1500 people in 1920. His railroad hauled iron ore from his ore mines to his blast furnace, coal from his coal mines to his coke ovens, coke to his furnace and men to and from their workplaces. The men were paid in scrip usable only at the company store and there was a club house. There was an Italian community at the foot of the mountain on the north side of town, and an African-American community outside the southern city limits. Much of the town was company housing for which a monthly rent of $7.50 was deducted from the men’s pay. I imagine the town was much like Ms. Giardina’s town of Davidson. It was this environment in which my Mother and my wife’s Father grew up.

When we moved back to LaFollette in 1944, we kids could still play on the old foundations of the blast furnace and there were great piles of red dog in the area. Newcomers learned quickly that John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers since 1920, was second only to God. At the time, we did not know that we were seeing the beginning of the end of the era described in Storming Heaven, but we were. It is a time now past and forgotten in East Tennessee but it should be remembered by its children. And LaFollette isn’t the only Tennessee community with such a past. There are many communities in and along the mountains bordering Kentucky that began as coal camps.

The most important reason I had for wanting my girls to read the book was to enable their discovery of the dignity of the people of Appalachia. While my daughters were never, so far as I know, called hillbillies, I remember the sting of the word when I was a child. The east Tennessee entertainment industry perpetuates (perhaps I should say perpetrates) the image and much of America sees the people of Appalachia – especially in the eastern Kentucky and West Virginia portions – in that light.

As we enter into our discussions of Storming Heaven, I believe it is important for us to remember that the book introduces some of us and many of our students to our heritage. All of us, especially our students, can better understand ourselves, our mores, and our lives if we have an appreciation for our connection to Ms. Giardina’s story.

Roger Crowe

This year’s common book is Denise Giardina’s historical novel “Storming Heaven”. Take a look at the 2009 Common Book website for information about the book, the author, related research resources, and associated service learning.