This digital story recording was created in conjunction with the Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street program and its Stories from Main Street student documentary initiative, called "Stories: Yes." The project encourages students and their mentors to research and record stories about small-towns and rural neighborhoods, waterways, personal memories, cultural traditions, work histories, as well as thoughts about American democracy. These documentaries are then shared on Smithsonian websites and social media.
Students in the Fannin County High School Media Department in Blue Ridge, Georgia, worked with the Blue Ridge Mountains Arts Association to produce this thoughtful documentary about the history and future of their small town.
Background Music (00:00): (Upbeat guitar strumming)
Ryan Petersen (00:30): There are numerous towns in our area. Some large, some small. Most of which weren't always the way they are now. We know these places as home. The tri-state Appalachia region, the area where Georgia meets north Carolina and Tennessee.
Rachel Gray (00:50): I can literally feel my blood pressure kind of decreasing from, you know, the traffic, just the busyness in the Atlanta area. And coming back home is kind of, just a secure feeling, a sanctuary for me.
Melissa Mercier Lillard (01:04): You can feel a part of the community. You don't get lost. You feel like you can make a difference in those around you.
Ryan Petersen (01:12): Often rural communities are thought of for their agricultural endeavors, but though it is part of the story here, agriculture is just a small facet of our tri-state Appalachia region. The rise or fall of those industries that help to shape the area's economics, and how their boom or declined affected it's people, sometimes by surprise, is the crossroad story. Each path taken has had a cause and effect on the people of the region, some positively and some negatively.
Billy Wayne Chastain (01:42): My name is Billy Wayne Chastain. I was raised in McCaysville, Georgia. I worked 42 years for the mining company. And I started in the mines when I was 23 years old.
Ryan Petersen (01:55): Because the concept of crossroads is not just a physical meeting point between two pathways, it's evolution. It's the intersection of ideals, ways of living, and thriving. Crossroads have occurred here multiple times over the past two centuries. And they are guaranteed to happen again.
Billy Wayne Chastain (02:18): A prospector by the name of Landish, came into this area into the basin area, in the area of Ducktown, Tennessee. And I believe the Creek, he was panning was called Potato Creek. He had some shiny pieces of metal in the bottom of his pan and he thought he'd discovered gold. But when he found out it wasn't gold, he was disappointed. It turned out to be iron pyrite. And that was really a great economical find, in the beginning of a great economical age for the Copper Basin area.
Sarah Mickens (02:58): My name is Sarah Mickens, and I'm the executive director at the Ducktown Basin Museum. Lots of jobs, there was definitely, within the mining, that definitely supplied several years of jobs for everyone around because that's, everyone would come to the basin to look for work.
Asset: 2022.07.01
Find a complete transcript: www.museumonmainstreet.org
