rabbits, birds, than those made by the mountain youths at the John C.
Campbell Folk School.

Perhaps no greater service is being rendered mountain folk than that
headed by Sergeant York in his agricultural school, because he is of the
mountains and knows well the need of his people.

But even before the settlement school had been thoroughly rooted there
was the Moonlight School of Rowan County, Kentucky, for adult
illiterates. It was a great, a magnificent undertaking by a mountain
woman--Mrs. Cora Wilson Stewart, born in Rowan County. She had been a
teacher in the wretched, poorly lighted one-room log school. Becoming
county superintendent, she set about to lead out of ignorance and
darkness the adult illiterates of her county. Happily she had been
preceded in such an undertaking by a pioneer teacher in rugged Hocking
County, Ohio, in the days of the Civil War. There Miss Kate Smith,
scarcely in her teens, who saw her brothers shoulder their muskets and
march off to the Civil War, took upon herself the task of teaching,
first, a bound boy, an orphan lad bound by the state to a farmer. The
lad later became a stowaway in a covered wagon in which the young
teacher and her parents rode west. This lad in his teens was only one of
many adult illiterates taught by the Ohio woman and her plan proved that
it could be done. That boy, William Wright, became a Judge of the Court
of Appeals.

With book-learning have come many broadening factors in the life of the
southern mountaineer. His sons attend agricultural college, his
daughters are active workers in the 4-H clubs. They return to the
hillside farm to show their mothers how best to can fruit. The boys have
learned how to improve and conserve the soil, how to save forests. The
consolidated school has taught mountain children to mix with others.
They have Girl Scout groups and Boy Scout groups; they learn
self-government under trained leaders.

Above all, book-learning is swiftly wiping out the old suspicions and
superstitions about the medical profession. Time was when there was but
one doctor in all of Leslie County, Kentucky. Mountain mothers relied on
the old midwife; infant mortality was appalling. Then came the Frontier
Nursing School headed by Mrs. Mary Breckinridge. Her work is known
throughout the breadth of the nation. The Frontier Nursing Service has
the support of the leading people of the nation. Debutantes gladly give
up a life of frivolity and ease to become