Many of us may have been introduced to the Foxfire books via what was then the most modern aggregation of knowledge, the mall bookstore.
A Waldenbooks or a B. Dalton Booksellers would have a couple of shelves dedicated to the monumental stories of the old-fashioned ways of living and being in southern Appalachia; the covers plain and each successive volume in a different, earthy color, the bold font, a strong visual anchor of the 70s and early 80s, its main aesthetic draw.
But the volumes themselves projected readers far from the quasi-urban, fluorescent-lit modern world and across time, into a place where everything was hand-hewn and homemade, including clothes, music and stories.
Or, as science fiction writer and Kentucky native Jack Womack put it in a 2000 essay about the perspective of The Foxfire Books: “This part of the United States has been since the Revolution (and even now, to some degree remains) not merely rural, but distant, in time as well as place; its light filters down through the branches from another world’s sun.” It’s the recognition of this difference, you suspect, which is and always has been part of the books’ popularity, as well.
The books meant, and continue to mean, many things to many people. Broadly speaking, they’re of interest to preppers—people who stock up and make preparations against war, famine, pandemics or other disasters—and homesteaders, those yearning for a back-to-the-land lifestyle and fully intending to grow, raise, shoot, catch, build, preserve and sew everything, or as much of it as they possibly can.
There are also people generally interested in American folklore and folkways, whose interest in the Foxfire tomes are perhaps more affectionate; among these, if you’d like to draw up categories, are teachers, interested in showing students what applied sociology can look like, and how to really get elbows-deep into the subject matter.
There isn’t one volume in the series devoted only to quilting or gardening. The first book, which launched the whole enterprise in 1972, had articles on topics as diverse as making soap, planting by zodiac signs, snake lore and hog dressing.
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The original series included stark black-and-white photos with a Walker Evans sort of candor to them. The ordinary people in the photos were busy doing useful things, faces as open and authentic as flowers. Nobody was performing the role of ‘being’ Appalachian.
“In the early years of it, there were a great many negative stereotypes of mountain people,” says Foxfire Museum Director Barry Stiles. “We were the opposite of that. We show the resilience and humor of mountain people. And that resonated with people from all over the world, not just Appalachia, and that gave us an instant best-selling book in 1972.”
Foxfire origins
The stories began in 1966 as an exercise at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School in Rabun County, Georgia, when students in search of an English class project settled on creating a magazine they would write after interviewing locals about Appalachian life.
The students named it “Foxfire” after a local fungi that grows on decaying wood and is an eerie bluish-green due to its natural bioluminescence. With the name in hand, the students took the cultural temperature of the local community, as it were, gathering stories about the old days, knowledge of how things used to be done, old ways of living, and everything that, one way or another, made it unique.
No one could have anticipated that the topic would have had a lot of fans, but the magazines sold out. Before long, Doubleday & Company, a New York Publishing House, showed interest in a book made up of the varied stories from the magazine.
It quickly became a bestseller.
“I was exposed to Foxfire from my grandparents and great uncle,” Stiles said. “Lake Stiles was my grandfather, and he was interviewed many, many times, primarily late 60s and early 70s. My Uncle Mack Dickerson was interviewed a few times, from 1972 until his death in 1980, about different topics. So I learned through them about Foxfire, and came to the museum while it was still being constructed. I’ve been here now for almost 18 years. It’s my heritage.”
His grandfather taught interviewers about making sleds for transport and smoking meat; his grandmother, Ethel Stiles, taught preserving meat and making butter. Uncle Mack spoke on raising cattle, World War I and “many, many other things.”
Stiles thinks Foxfire is the best archives of Southern Appalachian history and dialect anywhere in the world.
For a global audience, the books taught the value of Appalachian folkways, traditions and skills, offering both entertainment and a crack at learning new and useful skills.
For others, particularly those who grew up being taught the same lore in the remote knobs and lush hollows hidden among the ridges, it did something much more: it taught them the value of being Appalachian.
'You need a Foxfire book'
Sharon Wood, a former English teacher at Floyd County High School in southwest Virginia, was introduced to the books when she was planning the curriculum for an elective in her regular English class.
“When I was planning the course, I went to a bookstore in Roanoke. …they said, ‘Oh, you need a Foxfire book!’”
The book immediately struck a chord. “I can’t think of any of it that wasn’t familiar to me,” she said. “The book resonated with me as soon as I read it. It was exactly the way I had been raised, with family storytelling. My dad’s family had orchards and grew buckwheat, which was a major crop back in the early 20th century.”
Her students chose the focus: “Folkways and Customs of Floyd County,’” she said.
“I had nothing else to begin with,” she said. “There was nothing in print I could use. I wanted the kids to collect from their own families, but they needed an impetus and a pattern,” she said. “We were a mountain county in which everyone just about knew everyone else,” she said. “The kids could rely on not just their families but their neighbors to provide materials…”
The county proved fertile soil for information. “I had kids who were the seventh generation of their family living in this county,” she said. “So they had all sorts of history to draw on, and some of them did not know it… It was so gratifying to see that they wanted to know not only where their ancestors came from but how their ancestors used skills while they were developing this county …”
While Foxfire guided her project, it was “the idea of collecting your own story, of building the history of your family and your community,” that was ultimately the class focus. “I always tried to get students to understand that literature is not something that happened somewhere else. We have stories that need to be remembered, we have stories that need to be put in print.”
Dr. Grace Edwards, who retired from Radford University after a 30-year career, grew up in Rutherford County, North Carolina, “and the part I lived in was basically the foothills of Appalachia,” she said. “But I did not know I was Appalachian until I was full grown.”
In the 1980s she was the first director of the Appalachian Regional Studies program and the Appalachian Regional Studies Center at Radford.
“When I first started, the Foxfire books were very much in vogue. We had gas shortages in the ‘70s, and people were beginning to worry about what we would do if we ran out of fossil fuels to take care of heating and cooling needs, and the Foxfire books offered some comfort because they were like, ‘There’s avenues to do that.’ “
Edwards introduced students to the books in her folklore classes. “I told my students I hoped we weren’t going to get into a predicament where we had to use the old ways, like heating with wood or drawing water. But the Foxfire books were good not just for the cultural significance, but for lifestyle things some of us might need to know about.”
While its initial burst of popularity passed and broader culture moved on from a widespread yearning for rural living, plenty of people still wanted to learn Foxfire’s lessons.
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Validating local culture
“I can’t tell you exactly when I learned about it,” said Ricky Cox, a professor emeritus in Radford’s Appalachian Studies program, “but the original book, which really made a big splash all around the country, was a fashionable thing… It was in national newspapers as this cool thing. Indirectly, it excited me enough that I got my hands on the book.”
As a Floyd County native, he took Wood’s class, and it “was exciting to me then, because we were required to go out and collect information and talk to someone, and that validated local culture.”
This mattered because, at the time, many teachers who’d grown up in the region took care to speak unaccented English, he said. Sounding Appalachian meant sounding poor and ignorant, or at least unpolished.
When he got his own hands on the Foxfire book directly, “it was a real exciting and liberating thing,” Cox said, “and it sort of smoothed over some of the things that I worried about, as how I might not fit in, in a university.”
Despite being a good student, Cox knocked around for a while after high school, spending 10 years as a machinist. “I did some reading and tried to educate myself before I went back to school,” he said. “I was a very successful student, but I was pretty backward. I didn’t have many models of people who’d gone to college.”
When he got to college, Cox finally felt more secure as an Appalachian about his place in academia—one that “did not discount or completely ignore Appalachian culture. You wouldn’t just have to forget all that and just leave it behind,” he said.
“I think the book had a life aside from what it might have meant to young people or teachers. I had an uncle who had an entire collection of them on his shelf. It taught people their heritage had more value than they were led to believe,” he said.
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New attention to the stories
“What we’re finding now is that a lot of people are reaching for the Foxfire books, and their parents or grandparents had it,” said Stiles, the Foxfire museum director. “There’s a younger generation who weren’t exposed to it before but are having kind of a revival of Foxfire.”
He also noted that times of societal stress bring new attention to the books.
“During COVID—we shut down for a little while, maybe six weeks, because we’re mostly outdoors anyway—people started reading the Foxfire books again. Sales were up about 350 percent. People wanted that knowledge, that comfort, of others who grew up in that hardship. People weren’t just buying one book, but the whole set. We ran out,” he said.
“In other times, when the economy has gotten more difficult, our sales have gone up because people want to know they have the knowledge to preserve food,” Stiles said.
Dr. Edwards understands why Foxfire gained popularity in the first place.
“There were things happening in the country, and over all, that sort of led to looking at a simpler lifestyle,” she said. “The Vietnam War, the flower children, Woodstock, those things that were culturally big moments in our history; and of course people looked to part of the country where there seemed to be a simpler lifestyle,” she said. “That’s a big misunderstanding, because there are things in Appalachia that are not simple at all.”
Going forward, Edwards’s view is that, while the Foxfire moment may have crested, it likely will still have its place. As for Foxfire’s general influence, she feels there are some areas where it lingers.
“Two things immediately come to mind: quilting, because certainly quilts have always been important in the Appalachian region, certainly they used to be needed for warmth and comfort, and now for decorative purposes,” she said. “But now I think more people have taken up quilting. Perhaps that’s because of Foxfire; I’m not sure,” she said.
“The other thing is wood stoves. I don’t mean cook stoves, but … I would say that the wood stove in modern society may very well have been influenced by Foxfire.”
Wood, the former English teacher, believes interest about the past reaches well into the present.
“The greatest thing about the whole series of Foxfire books is that they have helped young people appreciate their culture.” In other words, what her students did in Floyd County could be replicated in any city or town.
“Everyone needs to be able to see where they are culturally planted,” she said.