THE LAND

High mountain walls and bridgeless streams marooned the people of the
Blue Ridge for centuries, shut them off from the outside world so that
they lost step with the onward march of civilization. A forgotten people
until yesterday, unlettered, content to wrest a meager living from the
grudging soil, they built for themselves a nation within a nation. By
their very isolation, they have preserved much of the best that is
America. They have held safe and unchanged the simple beauty of the song
of their fathers, the unsullied speech, the simple ideals and
traditions, staunch religious faith, love of freedom, courage and
fearlessness. Above all they have maintained a spirit of independence
and self-reliance that is unsurpassed anywhere in these United States of
America. They are a hardy race. The wilderness, the pure air, the rugged
outdoor life have made them so: a people in whom the Anglo-Saxon strain
has retained its purest line.

The Blue Ridge Country comprises much of Appalachia, happily called from
the great chain that runs along the Atlantic coast from the Gulf of St.
Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. It is a well-watered region having
numerous streams and rivers throughout, being drained by the Cumberland
and Tennessee as well as by smaller, though equally well-known,
rivers--Big Sandy in northeastern Kentucky, which flows into the Ohio,
and the Yadkin in North Carolina, which eventually reaches the Atlantic
Ocean.

In general the region includes three parallel chains, the Cumberlands,
Alleghenies, and Blue Ridge. Like a giant backbone the Blue Ridge,
beginning in the southwest portion of Old Virginia, continues
northeasterly, holding together along its mountainous vertebrae some
eight southern states; northeastern Kentucky, all of West Virginia, the
eastern part of Tennessee, western North Carolina, the four northwestern
counties of South Carolina, and straggling foothills in northern Georgia
and northeastern Alabama. The broad valley of the Tennessee River
separates the mountain system on the west from the Cumberland Plateau
which is an extension of the West Virginia and Kentucky roughs.

Throughout its vast course the Blue Ridge is not cut by a single river.
A narrow rampart, it rises abruptly on its eastern side south of the
Potomac to a height of some two thousand feet, cutting Virginia into
eastern and western, and descends as abruptly on the west to the
Shenandoah Val