The Road to Harmony: An Appalachian Childhood

From the broken mountain, with its green rocks and running springs, to Hawbottom, with Catoctin on the right and South Mountain across the valley to the left, the Hollow Road turns past the silent stones of the old distillery, dropping away to the stream and past Mosker’s farm to The Corner, then up the little hill between the houses, around Orpha’s barn, to the first farm on the right. This is the road home – the road to Harmony – where a hog can root the mortgage off a farm faster than Hell can send a feather and four saddlebags of gold lie buried at Bootjack Spring ... Somewhere in these things there is the history of a people – small and poor, democratic and proud. It is a history that is part fiction, and part the determination of a community to believe in itself. It is the story of this community, in a recollection larger than my own, that this book seeks to tell.