Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Once her father was free, she’d go in, he’d put down the medical journal he was likely reading, and they’d talk. Sometimes about weighty, even philosophical subjects. More often about patients he’d treated or stories she was covering for the paper. Did they go on from these, her early journalistic efforts, to what she might do next, to career goals, to grand plans for the future? If so, they were soon rendered moot. Because, by the late spring of 1934, her year at the Republican was over, Scranton was seven hundred miles behind her along the backbone of the Appalachians to the north, and Jane was in North Carolina, beginning the third “semester” of her post–high school education.

  —

  In the early years of the twentieth century, an ex-librarian and sometime adventurer named Horace Kephart dispatched his wife and six children back up north to Ithaca, New York, traveled through the Great Smoky Mountains, fell in with local backwoodsmen, and stayed. Later, he wrote a book about them, Our Southern Highlanders, which told of bear hunting and moonshining, of local people never getting around to chinking up their drafty wood-slatted cabins, of local accents so thick an outsider, a “furriner,” could scarcely understand them, of people who wanted nothing but to be left alone. Where Jane found herself now, in the spring of 1934, in Higgins, North Carolina, was about the same distance through the dense hollows of the Pisgah mountains to the north and east of Asheville as Kephart had explored to the west. The locals here were not Scots-Irish, though, but mostly of English stock; the village had been founded by three Higgins brothers and their families in the early 1700s. Various and sundry Higginses—Dewey, Edith, Lizzie, Viola, Hoover, and Carrie were some of them—still lived here, virtually all Higgins residents tracing their lineage back to the three brothers.

  Near Higgins, not far from Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, hills rose to five and six thousand feet. The whole mountain region was one of unspeakable beauty, range after range of peaks fading into one another in the distance, all enveloped in the mists that made the Smoky Mountains appear smoky and the Blue Ridge Mountains blue. Place-names like Bee Log, Bald Mountain, and Crooked Creek studded the map. But the roads were so rude or nonexistent, that, until recently, many people Jane met had never set foot in the county seat, Burnsville, population 866, just twelve miles away. The people were so poor, she’d write, “that the snapping of a pitchfork or the rusting of a plow posed a serious financial crisis.” Jane’s explanation for how she’d wound up here? “My parents,” she would write, “thought I should get a good look at a very different and interesting kind of life.” But maybe, you can hear it said among the family today, maybe it was as much Jane getting on her poor mother’s nerves: Well, now, Jane, we hear Mrs. Butzner saying, why don’t you just go down and visit your aunt Martha…

  A local paper noted Jane’s coming, as it did that of almost everyone else arriving in the mountain hamlet.

  Higgins, May 17. (Special). Miss Jane Butzner of Scranton, Pa., has arrived at this place to spend the summer. Miss Butzner is the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. J. D. Butzner. Since her graduation from the Scranton High School and the Powell Business College she has been a reporter on the Scranton Republican. She expects to continue her writing while here, as well as assist in the various community activities being outlined for the summer. She is a niece of Miss Robison and is a member of the Sunshine Cottage family.

  The news squib didn’t need to say who Miss Robison was. Miss Robison was Jane’s aunt Martha, her mother’s sister, the big-bodied, round-faced fifty-nine-year-old ball of energy and devotion who, in important ways, was Higgins. She and Bess had grown up together in Espy and Bloomsburg and attended the Normal School there. But Martha, five years older, was the more driven of the two. She knew the alphabet at two years of age, was writing at three, could read at six. Her intelligence and personal force were of the kind that, by century’s end, would yield a generation of high-powered women lawyers and executives; Martha became a high-powered missionary. When in 1930 the census taker came to her house in Higgins, that’s just how she replied, plain and simple, when asked her occupation: Missionary.

  “Bible study, a godly Sunday School teacher and other influences,” she’d write, “led me to give my life to the Lord for fulltime service at 18 years of age.” After leaving Bloomsburg, she’d taken short courses in religious education at Auburn Theological Seminary, worked for the Sunday School Association for fifteen years, and in 1920 she finally came to the Presbyterian Church’s Board of National Missions. She “never thought seriously of any other work,” she’d write, and by the time Jane reached Higgins in 1934, Martha had been the guiding light of the missionary center there for twelve years.

  On a trip north in 1928, Martha told a gathering of church people how her great adventure had started. It was on “a wet, murky, gloomy January day” in 1922 after riding twelve miles along muddy roads to reach Higgins. Her assigned task was to use the scant money provided her to set up, over three months, a house for a permanent missionary worker, then move on. Instead, she remained for seventeen years, until shortly before her death. In the valley that reached a mile or two north and south of the blip on the map that was Higgins (though few maps noted it at all) and up the sides of the mountains flanking it, she found squalor, the local school rarely in session, a Sunday school that had never functioned for so much as a year at a time, a local preacher who boasted he hadn’t learned to read until he learned to preach and who could not be persuaded that the world was round.

  Early on, the story goes, Martha stumbled on some mechanical gear remarkably cleaner than anything else around—part of a still, naturally, that hardy staple of Appalachian moonshining lore. But Martha found others of her prejudices undercut. It was “most unfair,” she’d tell her northern audience in 1928, “to describe extremes as though they were typical and to make general and sweeping assertions” of the mountain people. She found among them men and women stuck firmly in the past, but others forward looking; some intelligent, others “not only illiterate, but whose minds are closed to all that means growth and broadening of life.”

  One day, listening to an egregiously ignorant religious debate among some of the locals, she was seized by the “overwhelming conviction” to stay right where she was and try to better the community. She set about building up the Sunday school. She began men’s bible classes, directed plays at the church, managed to prop up its finances. In the early days, sometimes forty or fifty children would crowd into her own modest house for bible school lessons. For seven years, with little support, she struggled.

  Then, in the second week of November 1929, two weeks after the stock market crash, she received a letter from her cousin, John Markle, a wealthy Pennsylvania coal baron. Markle had learned of her work in Higgins, taken an interest in it, and wanted to help, with money. A few days later, in tones of mingled gratitude, astonishment, and hardheaded practicality, Martha wrote him back, sketching in some of what she’d done in Higgins, and outlining her needs: a school, a building to house it with room for craftwork, and an infirmary; recently, a little girl had almost died before they could get her to Asheville, forty miles away. The list went on. “You see, all these things for our work I’ve been dreaming about—but never dared think they would ever, any of them, come to pass. I think the heavenly Father,” she added, “must have put in your heart the idea of helping some of these dreams to come true.” Early the following year, Markle promised to give $25,000 toward Martha’s work, an amount today worth half a million or more.

  Soon the money was flowing south and a building was going up, with a mansard roof and great stone chimneys, like a chateau lifted intact from the French countryside. The first floor had a community library, a health unit, and a meeting room; the second floor was divided into three spaces, for woodwork, weaving, and pottery. “The spaces are all ample and yet hospitable and folksy,” Markle heard in a letter from the Presbyterian Board of National Missions in 1931. Film footage shot probably around the same time shows a
small level area in front of the Markle building and the adjacent minister’s house, with a few automobiles; it’s the only such area around, the rest of the site rising up toward the surrounding hills. We see movement and bustle, working men in overalls, suspenders, and caps, a little island of modernity conferring big-city grace notes on the otherwise isolated mountain community.

  Soon, local people were making quilts, chairs, and brooms of tightly tufted straw, working the three looms on the second floor. And soon outsiders were coming to see what Martha (and cousin John) had wrought. “Welcome,” declared a sign, in artfully inscribed letters, beside the road, to the

  HIGGINS NEIGHBORHOOD CENTER

  PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

  MARKLE HANDICRAFT BUILDING

  LOCAL PRODUCTS WEAVING

  WOODCRAFT BASKETRY, ETC.

  That “etc.” included wild honey and sorghum molasses. On July 3, 1934, while Jane was there, the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, visited, buying several “mountain jugs” at the little roadside stand they’d set up for the occasional tourist.

  By the time Jane arrived in Higgins in May 1934, Aunt Martha—Higgins’s “inspiring genius,” one account called her—had made great strides at dragging it into the twentieth century and bettering the social and, presumably, the religious life of the local people. Jane stayed with her and Martha’s foster children at Sunshine Cottage, which sat on a knoll, up a steep slope from a stream that you could hear rustling and gurgling all around the little compound. The Markle building was substantial. It dominated the site. Yet it was wholly dwarfed by the mountain rising across the road from it, as if sited precisely in order to show off men’s and women’s insignificance in the face of God’s grandeur.

  Jane’s sister, Betty, had come down for a visit in the summer of 1932, but stayed only about a week. Jane was up in the mountains for about six months and for at least some of that time put to work. In July, the center hosted a vacation bible school. “Girls’ club work will be under the direction of Miss Jane Butzner,” a local paper reported—noting what was apparently her chief credential, that in the Girl Scouts back in Scranton she’d been a Golden Eaglet, the highest rank. On July 29, Higgins briefly became a kind of rural metropolis, as “the largest gathering of people ever brought together in this neighborhood” converged on its Holland Memorial Church for a grand family reunion, 250 people from all over, dozens of Higginses among them, gathered on the lawn in front of the Markle building.

  By early fall, just as the surrounding hills were erupting in fall color, Jane’s father and younger brother Jim came down to pick her up, along with the brooms, chairs, and other craft mementos of Higgins she’d collected, and take her back to Scranton. In those first hours of her leavetaking, we can’t say how Higgins inhabited her mind. But over time, it is plain, the place touched her profoundly. Fifty years later, she would devote to it a substantial chunk of one of her books.

  In it, the mature Jane Jacobs did not view Higgins through a scrim of nostalgia or allow visions of a simpler rural past—of a Higgins perhaps poor, but more noble for all that—to distort her memories of the place. “We may mourn the disappearance of the old subsistence life with its bypassed, interesting ways,” she would write. But, she all but said, she didn’t indulge in that kind of thinking herself. Nor was Jane apt to remind you of Horace Kephart, that chronicler of the Smokies, in his love for the mountain people and fascination with their ways. Conceivably, her time in Higgins might have ignited in her a wish to return, renew old ties, immerse herself in the lives of those she’d met in 1934. But she seems never to have seen Higgins again, nor to have much corresponded with anyone she’d met there. The Asheville area became renowned for its artisans, craftspeople, and music makers and as a popular destination for tourists and retirees (including Jane’s brother Jim and his wife, Kay, whom she did visit in 1988) as well as photographers who could never get enough of its mountain mists, of baby bears and great bounding bucks, of shimmering waterfalls and oaks in autumnal glow. Jane was not blind to these charms; she’d recall the area’s “majestic folded hills, hardwood forests and loud, tumbling brooks.” But they were not what made the deepest impression on her.

  No, what stuck with Jane all those years later was something darker and bleaker: Higgins’s poverty, its ignominious decline over the generations, the tragic disappearance of its old skills. Jane would write of how, before the coming of Aunt Martha, candles had disappeared from daily use, of families forced to “make do with firelight”; of an ancient relic of a sorghum mill, “powered by a circling, plodding mule”; of looms repaired so ineptly that the cloth they made was of inferior quality, “too fragile in some spots, too thick in others, lumpy and unraveling at the selvages.” Jane would tell her son Ned how coffee in Higgins meant a pot of old grounds, hot water run through it again and again, stretched interminably; she tried it herself and “about died.” Whatever the temptation to paint this backwoods world in a warmer glow, such loss of human craft, ingenuity, and economic vitality to her seemed a tragedy.

  Read Martha Robison’s accounts, public or private, read articles written about Higgins, and it is hard to avoid the truth that her little mountain outback depended on charity. When a writer for the Presbyterian Advance described her work there in September 1932, he billed it as “the thrilling story of Higgins Neighborhood Center and its enterprising executive Martha E. Robison.” And it was a thrilling story, if you gave yourself over to it in the right spirit. But his account concluded by asking for help—for a radio, and “a phonograph with a lot of good records,” and a Delco electric generator. Any letter to Miss Robison “proposing to send gifts,” readers were assured, would “secure prompt response.” And yet these hard times in Higgins, long predating the Depression, were not the product of a killer hurricane, spring floods, or racial oppression. Its people, from that same hardy English stock that first colonized America, worked hard, “were bright and full of curiosity, as intelligent as any of us,” Jane would remember. “They were a far cry from the feckless and loutish hillbillies of the comic strips.” Yet somehow, Higgins had descended to this sad state where it depended on the kindness of strangers.

  Jane was neither unmindful nor unappreciative of Aunt Martha’s efforts. On the contrary, she had seen with her own eyes all she had done, could contrast it with the Higgins of that wet January day back in 1922 when Martha Robison had first come to town. And, amid the depths of the Depression, Higgins was getting better—no question. But what gnawed at Jane was how it had descended so far in the first place. How had Higgins gotten to the point that all of Aunt Martha’s dynamism and determination, and all of John Markle’s money, were so necessary? A question began to form, if perhaps without words yet to put to it: How could this have happened?

  CHAPTER 4

  THE GREAT BEWILDERING WORLD

  IN NOVEMBER 1934, in the middle of the most malignant economic depression anyone could remember, eighteen-year-old Jane Butzner moved to New York City.

  Nothing we know of her parents suggests that either of them discouraged her from doing so. They were both in “the helping professions,” but hadn’t tried to push her into nursing, teaching, or medicine. They had offered to put her through college; but Jane was not about to endure another day in class, and they were not about to make her. The spirit and energy of cantankerous Uncle Billy in Fredericksburg, the example of her adventurous aunts in Alaska and North Carolina, were alive in the family; in comparison, lighting out for New York was unspectacular, hardly apt to be discouraged—that is, if anything like discouragement was part of the Butzner family repertoire at all. Even Jane’s straitlaced mother could be seen as a model, having thrown over one career for another and abandoning small-town life for big-city Philadelphia.

  For Jane, high school was behind her. She had basic job skills, and a year of reporting experience with a serious paper. Her hometown, whose depressed coal economy had preceded the country into the Depression, offered scant reason, economic or otherwise, to remai
n. In moving to New York, she was doing what generations of ambitious and spirited young men, and sometimes women, had done before her—heading off to the city to become artists and writers. New York, Jane would write, was “where I came to seek my fortune.” A cliché? Certainly, but true: “I was trying to be a writer.”

  By the time Jane arrived in New York, her sister, Betty, six years older, was already there. While Jane was painfully scraping through high school, Betty had been working hard, doing well, in Philadelphia. She’d graduated from the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art in June 1933, completing a program in interior décor, her four years there brimful with furniture, fabrics, watercolor, and design; on the evidence of the several prizes and honors awarded her in her junior and senior years, she probably stood near the top of her class. But her career miscarried in Depression-sick New York. For a while she’d lived with other young women in a cheap rooming house on East Ninety-fourth Street. Finally, though, she got a job in Brooklyn, in the home furnishings department of the big Abraham & Straus department store downtown—one unworthy of her education, perhaps, but a job. Soon she moved to an apartment on the top floor of a walk-up on Orange Street, a fifteen-minute walk to A&S, where Jane now joined her.