Foxfire magazine began in 1966, written and published as a quarterly Americanmagazine by students at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, a private secondary education school located in the U.S. state of Georgia. At the time Foxfire began, Rabun Gap Nacoochee School was also operating as a public secondary education school for students who were residents of northern Rabun County, Georgia. An example of experiential education, the magazine had articles based on the students' interviews with local people about aspects and practices in Appalachian culture. They captured oral history, craft traditions, and other material about the culture. When the articles were collected and published in book form in 1972, it became a bestseller nationally and gained attention for the Foxfire project.
The magazine was named for foxfire, a term for a naturally occurring bioluminescence in fungi in the forests of North Georgia. In 1977, the Foxfire project moved from the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School to the newly built and consolidated public Rabun County High School. Additional books were published, and with profits from magazine and book sales, the students created a not-for-profit educational and literary organization and a museum.
Today, the organization is overseen by a governing board of directors, with day-to-day operations managed by an executive director and paid staff. The magazine program is now a summer internship for high school-aged students living in Rabun County. The program supports up to 12 students for six weeks each summer. These students are responsible for the publishing the Foxfire Magazine.
History
In 1966, Eliot Wigginton and his students in an English class at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School initiated a project to engage students in writing.[1][2] The class decided to publish a magazine over the course of the semester. Its articles were the product of the students' interviewing their relatives and local citizens about how lifestyles had changed over the course of their lives and dealt with traditions in the rural area. First published in 1966, the magazine covers topics of the lifestyle, culture, crafts, and skills of people in southern Appalachia. The content is written as a mixture of how-to information, first-person narratives, oral history, and folklore.
The Foxfire project has published Foxfire magazine continuously since 1966. In 1972, the first of the highly popular Foxfire books was published, which collected published articles as well as new material. Both the magazine and books are based on the stories and life of elders and students, featuring advice and personal stories about subjects as wide-ranging as hog dressing, faith healing, blacksmithing, and Appalachian local and regional history. Foxfire moved from Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School to Rabun County High School in 1977.
One of the most famous contacts in the Foxfire books was a woman named Arie Carpenter, also known as "Aunt Arie."[3]
In 1992 Wigginton pled guilty to child molestation, after more than twenty former students came forward prepared to testify that Wigginton had molested them as children. After his confession, the Foxfire Fund announced Wigginton's "total separation" from the organization.[4]
Since that time, the Foxfire Fund board of directors has governed operations of Foxfire's physical and intellectual properties. Day-to-day operations of the organizations programs and projects is managed by an executive director, who reports to the board, and additional full-time staff.
Books
The Foxfire books are a series of copyrightedanthologies of articles originally written for Foxfire magazine, along with additional content not suitable for the magazine format. Though first conceived primarily as a sociological work, recounting oral traditions, the books, particularly the early ones, were a commercial success as instructional works.
Members of the 1970s back-to-the-land movement used the books as a basis to return to lives of simplicity. The first book was published in 1972 as The Foxfire Book. This was followed by an additional 11 books, titled in sequence Foxfire 2 through Foxfire 12. The students have published several additional specialty books under the Foxfire name, some of which have been published by the University of North Carolina Press.
Published by Random House-Anchor, the magazine and anthologies have become a continuing project of The Foxfire Fund, Inc.
Foxfire Book of Appalachian Women: Stories of Landscape and Community in the Mountain South, Edited by Kami Ahrens, 2023, University of North Carolina Press, ISBN1469670038
Foxfire Story: Oral Tradition in Southern Appalachia, Edited by T. J. Smith, 2020, Anchor, ISBN0525436316
The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery, Edited by T. J. Smith, 1984; 1992; 2019 University of North Carolina Press, ISBN0-8078-4395-4, 1469647540
Hudgins, Phil and Jessica Phillips, Travels With Foxfire: Stories of People, Passions, and Practices in Southern Appalachia, 2018, Anchor, ISBN0525436294
The Foxfire Book of Simple Living: Celebrating Fifty Years of Listenin', Laughin', and Learnin', Edited by Kaye Carver Collins, Jonathan Blackstock, and Foxfire Students, 2016, Anchor, ISBN0804173109
Eliot Wigginton, Sometimes a Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience, New York: Anchor, 1985. ISBN0-385-13358-8
Aunt Arie: A Foxfire Portrait, 1983, Dutton; 1992, University of North Carolina Press. ISBN978-0807843772
Foxfire Fund
The students used some of their revenues to set up the Foxfire Fund, a not-for-profit educational and literary organization in Rabun County, Georgia. It encourages use of the stories and practical instructions from the local people of Appalachia to teach and promote a self-sufficient, self-reflective way of life.
Rabun County students, who saw their project revenues increasing as a result of the Foxfire books' best-seller status, also decided to create a museum. They purchased a tract of land on Black Rock Mountain, in Mountain City, Georgia. They founded a museum of Appalachian culture there, the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center. Students helped move and reconstruct some 30 log structures, including single-family cabins, a grist mill, barn, smokehouse, springhouse, other outbuildings and more, to preserve aspects of the traditional Appalachian way of life. The Foxfire Fund headquarters are also located on the museum site at 200 Foxfire Lane, Mountain City, Georgia.
Educational philosophy
In 1989, Eliot Wigginton was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship for his work with the Foxfire project. Wigginton had developed the Foxfire educational philosophy based on experiential education.[5]
Wigginton originally thought of the student-produced magazine as a way to help his high school freshmen see the relevance of good English skills. As he and they developed the journals, over several years he began to develop a full teaching approach (a.k.a. the Foxfire approach), which features 11 core principles, related to the philosopher John Dewey's concepts of experiential education. The Foxfire Fund contributed to such development.[5][6] During the late 1960s through the 1980s, the success of Foxfire inspired many United States schools to develop similar programs. By 1998, it had been adopted by 37 school systems.[7] The Foxfire Fund started offering teacher training programs to support such efforts.
Foxfire continues to train educators in its constructivist methods, which begins with the assertion that students must construct meaning for themselves, rather than memorizing information a teacher deems important. Foxfire and other constructivist approaches to teaching propose that by constructing their own meaning, establishing relationships, and seeing the connection of what they do in the classroom to "the real world," students are better able to learn.
As a result of changing ideas in education, Rabun County High School moved the Foxfire magazine/book class from English to the business curriculum and pulled students away from operations of the museum as they once were. In 2018, Foxfire removed the program from the Rabun County School System and revised it as a six-week, paid summer internship for any high school-aged students living in Rabun County, which opened the program to those students attending area private schools as well as homeschooled students. The program averages around a dozen students/summer and those students remain active throughout the year, conducting interviews and publishing the magazine.
The museum is being assisted by the University of Georgia to archive and preserve its extensive materials from more than 30 years of research. In 1998, the University of Georgiaanthropology department started to work with the Foxfire project. The collection is held at one of the cabins of the museum complex and includes "2,000 hours of interviews on audio tape, 30,000 black and white pictures, and hundreds of hours of videotape." By improving how the material is archived and establishing a database, the university believes the materials can be made more easily available for scholars.[7]
Rabun County is the north-easternmost county in the U.S. state of Georgia. As of the 2020 census, the population was 16,883, up from 16,276 in 2010. The county seat is Clayton. With an average annual rainfall of over 70 inches (1,800 mm), Rabun County has the title of the rainiest county in Georgia and is one of the rainiest counties east of the Cascades. The year 2018 was the wettest on record in the county's history. The National Weather Service cooperative observation station in northwest Rabun's Germany Valley measured 116.48 inches of rain during the year. During 2020, the Germany Valley NWS station reported a yearly precipitation total of 100.19 inches.
Appalachia is a socio-economic region located in the central and southern sections of the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States. It stretches from the western Catskill Mountains of New York state into Pennsylvania, continuing on through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Great Smoky Mountains into northern Georgia and Alabama. In 2020, the region was home to an estimated 26.1 million people, of whom roughly 80% were white.
The Highlander Research and Education Center, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School, is a social justice leadership training school and cultural center in New Market, Tennessee. Founded in 1932 by activist Myles Horton, educator Don West, and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski, it was originally located in the community of Summerfield in Grundy County, Tennessee, between Monteagle and Tracy City. It was featured in the 1985 documentary film, You Got to Move. Much of the history was documented in the book Or We'll All Hang Separately: The Highlander Idea by Thomas Bledsoe.
The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) is a United States federal–state partnership that works with the people of Appalachia to create opportunities for self-sustaining economic development and improved quality of life. Congress established ARC to bring the region into socioeconomic parity with the rest of the nation.
Sautee Nacoochee is a census-designated place in White County, Georgia, United States, near Sautee Creek in the Appalachian foothills of northeast Georgia, approximately 95 miles (153 km) north of Atlanta. The nearest incorporated town is the tourist destination of Helen.
George Gustav Heye was an American collector of Native American artifacts in the Western Hemisphere, particularly in North America. He founded the Museum of the American Indian, and his collection became the core of the National Museum of the American Indian.
Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School is a small, private college preparatory school located in Rabun County, Georgia, United States, in the Appalachian Mountains. It is both a boarding and a day school. Rabun Gap is notable for initiating the Foxfire magazine project in 1966, experiential education based on interviewing local people, and writing and publishing articles about their stories and oral traditions. This inspired numerous schools across the country to develop similar programs.
Lake Burton is a 2,775 acres (11.23 km2) reservoir with 62 miles (100 km) of shoreline located in the northeastern corner of Georgia in Rabun County. The lake is owned and administered by the Georgia Power/Southern Company, but it is a public lake. Noted for the remarkable clarity of its water and surrounded by the biodiverse ecosystem of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the lake celebrated its centennial in 2020.
The Appalachian College of Pharmacy (ACP), formerly known as the University of Appalachia, College of Pharmacy, is a private doctoral pharmacy school located in Oakwood, Virginia. The school, established in 2003, is Virginia's only three-year accelerated Doctor of Pharmacy program. ACP's mission is to improve the health outcomes of rural and underserved communities, particularly those in Central Appalachia, through education, service, and scholarship.
Eliot Wigginton is an American oral historian, folklorist, writer and former educator. He is most widely known for developing with his high school students the Foxfire Project, a writing project consisting of interviews and stories about Appalachia. The project was developed into a magazine and series of best-selling Foxfire books. The series comprised essays and articles by high school students from Rabun County, Georgia focusing on Appalachian culture. In 1987, Wigginton was named "Georgia Teacher of the Year," and in 1989, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Appalachian Volunteers (AV) was a non-profit organization engaged in community development projects in central Appalachia that evolved into a controversial community organizing network, with a reputation that went "from self-help to sedition" as its staff developed from "reformers to radicals," teaching things from Marx, Lenin and Mao, in the words of one historian, in the brief period between 1964 and 1970 during the War on Poverty.
The Rabun County School District is a public school district in Rabun County, Georgia, United States, based in Tiger. It serves the communities of Clayton, Dillard, Mountain City, Pine Mountain, Sky Valley, Tallulah Falls, and Tiger.
Rabun County High School is a public high school operated by the Rabun County School District. It is located on the edge of Tiger, a town in Rabun County in the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the original venue of Foxfire magazine and related projects.
Tijan M. Sallah is a Gambian poet and prose writer.
The Appalachian region and its people have historically been stereotyped by observers, with the basic perceptions of Appalachians painting them as backwards, rural, and anti-progressive. These widespread, limiting views of Appalachia and its people began to develop in the post-Civil War; Those who "discovered" Appalachia found it to be a very strange environment, and depicted its "otherness" in their writing. These depictions have persisted and are still present in common understandings of Appalachia today, with a particular increase of stereotypical imagery during the late 1950s and early 1960s in sitcoms. Common Appalachian stereotypes include those concerning economics, appearance, and the caricature of the "hillbilly."
Aunt Arie Carpenter (1885-1978) was a resident of Macon County, North Carolina, in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. She was interviewed for the Foxfire Book published in 1972, through which she became known to thousands of readers. High school students interviewed her and reproduced her stories and skills of living in the Foxfire oral history-based books.
Bettie M. Sellers was an American poet known for her poems about nature, especially about the North Georgia and Southern Appalachia region.
Henry Harrison Mayes was an American evangelist and coal miner from Middlesboro, Kentucky. He planted thousands of religious signs and concrete markers alongside American highways and near airports. The main message of the crosses and sometimes heart-shaped markers were "Prepare to Meet God" and "Jesus is Coming Soon", sometimes engraved with instructions for their final destinations on other continents or planets. His work has been considered a type of folk-religion and he referred to himself as "God's Advertiser".
Appalachian cuisine is a style of cuisine located in the central and southern sections of the Appalachian Mountains of the Eastern United States. It is an amalgam of the diverse foodways, specifically among the British, German and Italian immigrant populations, Native Americans including the Cherokee people, and African-Americans, as well as their descendants in the Appalachia region.
References
↑ Mendonca, Adrienn (2005-09-16). "Foxfire". New Georgia Encyclopedia. University of Georgia Press. Retrieved 2010-01-23.
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