Mountain Folk

Mountain Folk is the fifth and final book in the Backroads series by Lynn Coffey that showcases the lives and customs of the native Appalachian people of Virginia's highlands. Interviews with seventeen people still living in and around the hamlet of Love where the author makes her home, shed a new light on these private and oft-misunderstood folks whose roots grow deep in the rocky soil of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Read about Ruby May Henderson and Irma Roberts, both now over one-hundred years of age who can remember what life was like during the horse and buggy days of their childhood. Or Carl Coffey, whose father died when he was eight years old, leaving him and his younger in charge of making a living for their family of five by logging the forest with a massive but gentle ox named "Mike." Be swept away by Frances Fitzgerald's account of the Flood of 1969, when Hurricane Camille ripped through rural Nelson County, Virginia, dumping over two feet of rain in an eight hour period, destroying not only property but taking the mountains down with it, along with 124 lives. Read the eulogy for Owen Garfield Campbell; one of the last true mountain men of our area, who, following in the footsteps of his early ancestors, continued to live a life devoid of all modern conveniences. These stories and more will thrill the reader and command new respect for the last generation of mountain people who lived the old way.