trained in obstetrics and give
their services to helping mountain mothers and babies. Its purpose was
to combat the infant death rate in remote Kentucky mountain sections.
The nurses ride on horseback and visit and care for mountain mothers.
Mrs. Breckinridge herself was a nurse during the World War in France and
went back to the Scottish Highlands--from which her kinsman Alexander
Breckinridge came to settle in the Shenandoah in 1728--where she became
a midwife.

Mountain folk usually are slow to take on new ways. But the wonders
wrought through the Frontier Nursing Service they have "seen with their
own eyes."

Learning has brought about a great change for the better in the life of
the mountain woman. Once we saw her lank, slatternly, meek,
stoic--mother of a dozen or more, obeying with patient fortitude the
will of her man. We saw too the pitiable child-bride marrying perhaps a
man three times her age because he could take care of her. There being
so many in the family Pappy and Mammy were glad to be rid of one of
their flock. Though both pictures were often as overdrawn as that evoked
by a daughter of the Blue Ridge--a whimsical picture of a pretty maid in
full-skirted crinoline with a soft southern accent--moonlight and
honeysuckle, a gallant, goateed colonel paying court to her charm and
beauty while he sips a mint julep. This picture and that of the
snaggle-toothed mountain woman in bedraggled black calico can no more be
taken for fact than that Jesse James is still holding up stagecoaches or
that cowboys in high boots and leather breeches are daily wedding the
rich easterners' daughters who have come West.

There are well-organized centers: weaving centers that market the wares
of mountain women all over the nation; music centers and recreational
centers. Women and their daughters are better dressed and certainly they
give more care to their appearance than the mountain woman did when she
rode to the county seat on court day with a basket of eggs and butter
and ginseng on one arm and a baby on the other.

She still knits and crochets and hooks rugs--not from leavings of the
family's wearing clothes--but from leavings she buys from the mills. She
does not have to take her wares to the county seat--today she stretches
up a clothesline across the front stoop, pins her rugs and lace on the
line, and the passing motorist buys all that her busy hands can make.

The question is often asked: How does the mountain