Writeswell Inc.

Knowledge is power — and history.

"In the fall of 1966, roughly 30 tenth-grade students in Rabun County, Georgia - a mountain community of just 8,000 people - walked out of their English classroom and into the hills of Appalachia. They weren't on a field trip. They were on a mission.

And most of them had no idea what they were about to find.

Fall 1966. Rabun County, Georgia. Appalachian Mountains.

The school sits in a valley hemmed in by ridgelines. The nearest city is hours away. Most of the students have spent their whole lives here - hunting, farming, attending the same small church their grandparents attended.

Their English class isn't going well. The standard curriculum means nothing to them.

Grammar exercises feel abstract. Literature feels imported from somewhere else.

So one afternoon, their teacher does something unusual. He stops the lesson. He asks them, plainly: What would actually make you want to learn?

The students talk it over. Someone suggests a magazine. Someone else says it should be about here - about the people right outside these windows, the old men and women who still know things the modern world has already forgotten.

The class votes yes.

They name their new project after a bioluminescent fungus that grows on rotting logs in these mountains - a fungus that glows blue-green in the dark, visible only if you know where to look.

They call it Foxfire.

March 1967. Volume 1, Issue 1.

The students raise $400 from parents and local donors. They sell advertising to nearby businesses. They teach themselves to use a reel-to-reel tape recorder. They learn photography from scratch.

And then, notebooks in hand, they fan out into the surrounding hills to sit with their grandparents, their neighbors, their elders - people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s who still live without refrigerators, without running water, without telephones.

What the students find stops them cold.

They find a woman named Aunt Arie Carpenter, 80 years old, living alone in a hand-built cabin, churning butter the same way her mother taught her, growing her own food, preserving her own meat. She tells them stories. She shows them her hands. She asks them if they want some coffee.

They find men who know how to notch a log cabin so it will stand for 200 years without a single nail. Women who know which plants in the forest treat fever and which ones stop bleeding.

Families who have been making moonshine in copper stills since before their great-grandparents were born. Preachers who handle serpents as an act of faith. Quilters whose patterns carry the names of mountains and seasons.

Here's what makes it worse: almost none of it was written down anywhere.

These weren't just skills. They were an entire civilisation - one that had developed over 200 years in the isolation of the southern Appalachian range, shaped by hardship and self-reliance and a particular relationship to the land.

And it was disappearing. Not slowly. Fast. The elders were aging. The young were moving to cities. Within a generation, the knowledge would be gone - dissolved into history without a trace.

The students understood this before their parents did. Before anyone with a publishing contract did.

1967. The first issue sells out.

All 600 copies are gone within days. Letters start arriving from across Georgia, asking for more. Then from other states. Then from people who had grown up in Appalachia and moved away decades earlier, who read a description of the first issue in a local paper and wrote in trembling handwriting asking, Is Aunt Arie still alive? Can you ask her if she remembers my family?

The students publish a second issue. Then a third. They work weekends. Some of them spend their afternoons after school driving into the hills for more interviews, more photographs, more tape recordings. They are teenagers doing the work that professional folklorists and archivists had never bothered to do.

1972. Doubleday publishes The Foxfire Book.

A New York publisher sees the magazine and offers a book deal. The students' collected interviews — on log cabin building, hog dressing, planting by the signs, snake lore, faith healing, moonshining, wild plant foods — are compiled into a single volume.

It sells 2 million copies in its first decade. Then keeps selling.

By the time the 12-volume series is complete, the Foxfire books have sold over 9 million copies - making them one of the best-selling non-fiction series in American publishing history. Not because of clever marketing. Because the students had preserved something real that the rest of the country hadn't known it was losing.

What the students built with the money changes everything.

They don't pocket the royalties. They are teenagers - and they vote to put it back into the community.

They purchase land on Black Rock Mountain in Mountain City, Georgia. They disassemble historic log structures from across the region and rebuild them on the site. They create a 32-building museum and heritage centre, staffed by local people, demonstrating blacksmithing, basket weaving, butter churning, and traditional building methods to visitors from across the country.

The Foxfire Fund generates over $1 million in college scholarships for Rabun County students over the decades that follow. Dozens of similar oral history projects - modelled directly on Foxfire - spring up in schools from Texas to Maine, on Native American reservations in Montana and New Mexico, in Navajo communities in New Mexico and Eskimo communities in Alaska.

What no one mentions is the quiet revolution underneath all of it.

These were not exceptional students. They were bored teenagers in a rural county school who, by most metrics, were headed for an unremarkable year of forgotten grammar lessons. The elders they interviewed were not famous. They had no platforms, no recognition, no plaques on walls.

But the students saw what the world was about to lose — and they picked up tape recorders.
Maude Shope told a Foxfire student in 1972, I never did try to drive a car. My mule is the way I got around. That sentence exists today because a 15-year-old wrote it down. Because they showed up, sat across from her, and listened like it mattered.

It did matter. It still does.

The Foxfire Magazine continues to be published today, still produced by high school students in Rabun County each summer. The museum still stands. The recordings still exist. The voices of those elders - the quilters, the moonshiners, the herbalists, the preachers, the cabin builders - are still audible on tape.

Because 30 teenagers in 1966 decided that the people right outside their classroom windows were worth remembering.

Share this with someone who needs to know - that ordinary people, paying attention, can preserve what the world is about to forget."
Let this story reach more hearts.....
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