Project Summary

This project focuses on the history of Teges Creek in Clay County, a small, rural, eastern Kentucky community. Residents and former residents give a history of the area from the turn of the century, showing how it has changed, not from rural to urban and not from farm to coal camp, but from one kind of rural community to another. They also discuss their personal histories, road building in the 1930s, the coming of electricity in 1950, taking corn to mills for grinding, raising sheep and sending the wool away to be made into blankets, cutting timber and building rafts to ride downriver to sell, going to square dances and bean stringings, putting away enough food to last all winter, and making homemade caskets and laying out the dead. Some discuss working in coal mines or going to Ohio to work in factories.