Back to the Waltons ...
There is a Walton’s Mountain Museum in Schuyler, Virginia. I have never been there, even though I lived fairly close to it for years. As I understand it, the Museum focuses on the TV show; I’m not sure how much they delve into the reality of life in Schuyler, which is where Earl Hamner grew up. He based his book Spencer’s Mountain on stories from his life.
When I was a kid, I was absolutely the only child I know who liked the show. I found it fascinating, because I felt like I was watching a movie version of Grandmother’s life. She was one of seven siblings, and her mother died young, so she grew up in a great big clapboard house with with a whole bunch of kids, just like the Waltons.
She got married in the 1930s, but she stayed behind in the old homeplace with her widowed father, my great-grandfather. She would have been younger than ‘Olivia’ at the time, and she only had two children! But otherwise, a lot about the story was familiar to her. With her husband (my grandfather), there were five people in the house, and running the place was all on her shoulders.
In the TV show, the Waltons are supposed to be some version of poor; but they are actually somewhat well-off, in the country sense of the word. I suppose my Grandmother’s family was somewhat better off, though not rich by any means. They were the first to have a car, the first to have indoor plumbing, the first to have electric appliances. In the early part of the century, they sent out the laundry; but that wasn’t necessary once electric laundry equipment came in. In the 1950s, they installed a giant commercial freezer in the well-house, and it was still there when we sold the house in the 1990s. The Waltons had a lot of that, too, just perhaps on a smaller scale.
Race relations are another interesting aspect of the show. People outside of the central Appalachians don’t seem to realize that slavery was not widespread in the area and black people were few and far between. This changed with railroads, mines, and other industrialization between 1890 and 1920, when there was a large influx of non-white people, including a very large number of Syrians. There were a lot of racial problems in that period, including lynchings. After 1920, though, most of those populations left for the industrial jobs of the north, and non-white populations in the Appalachians almost vanished.
By the 1930s and after, it was not surprising to encounter more of a live-and-let-live attitude about racial matters, if for no other reason than that there was almost no one around to hate. Several very good friends of my grandmother and her sister were black or Syrian. My aunt dated one of the Syrian kids when she was in high school in the 1950s. When the black and white Methodist churches in our area integrated in the late ’50s, there were no objections, and the older people I knew remembered the event very positively. All my life, that’s the way it’s been.
Another thing about the show that fascinated me was the way the events of the Depression and the developing horror in Europe were described through the radio reports. Year by year, the Depression lessened and the European situation worsened. The way the family reacted to the events was fascinating to me as a child, because I knew how it ended, but they didn’t.
I also loved the Baldwin sisters. They reminded me of a few neighbors and cousins of mine!! And I was one of the few kids who had tasted a local version of The Recipe!!
I didn’t mean to write to so much, but this thread brought back a lot of memories.
