Leon Pace

Partial Transcript: I’m Leon. My name is Leon Pace. David is here with me this morning, and we’re going to be looking for plants that can be used as herbal remedies and treatments for various ailments, illnesses and wounds, and so forth.

Interviewer
00:00:20 We got a real nice chill today on this fall day. I know the old-timers sometimes had different ways of telling what kind of winter it’s going to be. Do you know what some of those things are?

Leon Pace
The most common one is reading the woolly worm, and I’ve observed woolly worms this year already. They have a good, large segment of black on each end, which normally would indicate going into winter cold and mild in the middle of the winter and the end of the winter cold.

Interviewer
00:00:53 So is that your prediction for this winter?

Leon Pace
That’s what the woolly worms and I predict this winter. (laughs)

Partial Transcript: Leon Pace
This is a small patch of wild ginger. This plant can be used in a salve to treat burns.

Interviewer
00:01:54 And tell me, do you know much about the history of its use by the Cherokee and by others?

Leon Pace
I do not except that they used hog lard to make a base for the salve, and they prepared the ginger and mixed it in and applied it to burns as a salve ointment.

Interviewer
00:02:14 Where do you find this in this area?

Leon Pace
It grows typically in the coves and shaded areas.

Interviewer
00:02:23 Are there particular areas or forests that are good to find it in this area?

Leon Pace
There should be quite a bit of it in the Pisgah National Forest, yes.

Interviewer
00:02:35 Is it legal to just go picking it? Or do you have to get a permit?

Leon Pace
If you gather it in the forest you have to get a permit. (sound of footsteps; crow cawing)

Partial Transcript: This is probably the most well known one of our herb plants. This is a ginseng. It’s almost gone past for this year. It’s in its fall phase in color now, and the berries have dropped. This plant has been harvested extensively for at least three hundred years. Daniel Boone and his sons collected this plant and dried it and brought it out of the wilderness, along with their hides and furs, to take to Philadelphia for sale and trade. It has been used so much ‘til it has almost been hunted to extinction in the wild. Some people are growing this in cultivation, but it’s worth only about half as much grown in cultivation as it is grown in the wild.

Interviewer
00:03:53 Why is that?

Leon Pace
The potency level is much less in the cultivated plants compared to the wild plants. But the people that buys this can tell the difference. If people tries to mix cultivated with wild they sort it out. They can tell the difference. The wild roots has wrinkles and crevices on ‘em, and the cultivated ones is grown so fast that they grow smooth.

Interviewer
00:04:21 Why would the cultivation make a difference?

Leon Pace
They’ve used commercial fertilizers, and it grows it faster. It takes six or seven years from the time the seed goes on the ground to grow a harvestable plant in the wild. The plant needs to have at least five prongs—four to five prongs—before they harvest it, which would yield a root about two inches to eight inches in size.

Interviewer
00:04:48 Tell me all the different uses for this.

Leon Pace
It is promoted as a vitality enhancer and as well it’s used for stomach ailments, (rooster crows) and it’s used for children and older adults who have lost their appetite as a appetite enhancer.

Interviewer
00:05:09 Are people still using it today?

Leon Pace
Yes, sir. In the national forests they’re trying to preserve some of it. They’re trying to control the harvest of it to preserve it. It’s not anywhere’s near found as extensively in the wild as it once was because of the overharvest.

Interviewer
00:05:29 Okay.

Leon Pace
Conscientious gatherers wait until the fall of the year when the seeds are ripe to harvest. Then they plant the seeds back to grow more plants.

Interviewer
00:05:40 Okay. (crow cawing) Very good. Thank you. (rooster crows)

Partial Transcript: This one is a yellow lady’s slipper.

Interviewer
00:06:09 Which one is it? Point to it again. Okay. Got it.

Leon Pace
This group. The plant’s year, of course, is well past and going into its fall phase as well. But it is harvested and used as an antidepressant. (rooster crows)

Interviewer
00:06:25 And how prevalent is this flower right now—this plant?

Leon Pace
Like the ginseng, the yeller lady’s slipper’s been over-harvested as well, although you can still find it in remote areas and on the national forest where it’s protected somewhat.

Interviewer
00:06:45 Is this a threatened plant?

Leon Pace
Yes. Yes, it is.

Interviewer
00:06:53 Okay. Any other stories or history of this plant that you can think of?

Leon Pace
No, sir, not at this time.

Interviewer
00:07:01 Okay. All right. I wonder if I have that. It looks so familiar. I’ll have to look in my yard. (rooster crows)

Leon Pace
They is a yellow one and a pink one. The pink one is much more common than the yellow.

Interviewer
00:07:15 Okay. Are they both threatened?

Leon Pace
The pink’s pretty available yet. I don’t think it is considered threatened.

Interviewer
00:07:24 Okay. (rooster crows; sound of footsteps)

Partial Transcript: This is a common violet, which is found almost everywhere, and they use this for an antidepressant.

Interviewer
00:08:12 Okay. And I assume the flower is violet.
Leon Pace
Violet.

Interviewer
00:08:15 Okay.

Leon Pace
Well, they come in different colors. There’s white violets and violet violets of different shades.

Interviewer
00:08:22 Okay. And where do you often find this?

Leon Pace
Everywhere. It’s very common.

Interviewer
00:08:29 Do people grow it or they just kind of find it as a wild plant?

Leon Pace
It’s almost a weedy plant. Yeah, it’s common as a weedy plant.

Interviewer
00:08:38 Okay. All right. Great! Thanks. (sounds of walking, rooster crowing, crow cawing)

Partial Transcript: This one is called yellowroot. It is used for as a tonic, and it is a good cure for fall sores and cold sores. (rooster crows) You can see that the root actually is yellow. (sound of running water) But you would collect these roots and boil them and use it as a tonic to take by mouth.

Interviewer
00:10:30 Was this tonic something your mom used or doctors used?

Leon Pace
Well, it’s a home remedy. It would be used in the home. I don’t think that regular doctors would prescribe it, but the herbal doctors would prescribe it.

Interviewer
00:10:48 And before there were regular doctors there were herbal doctors. That was your main source of medicine, I assume.


Leon Pace
That is true. My great-grandfather, who died many years before I was born, was noted as a herb doctor, and he learned this from the Native Americans. (rooster crows)

Interviewer
00:11:10 Do you use any of these yourself these days if you have a cold?

Leon Pace
No, I do not.

Interviewer
00:11:17 I just took some elderberry this morning.

Leon Pace
Did you?

Interviewer
Yeah. I’m starting to get something from somebody. (rooster crows) I have a child and, of course, he’s a little sponge for everything that he can pick up in the classroom. I haven’t found anything as good as the elderberry for a lot of these colds that I get.

Leon Pace
Right. (rooster crows)

Interviewer
00:11:42 The rooster wants to be in the film.

Leon Pace
(laughs) Oh, yeah.

Interviewer
00:11:45 I’m going to have to interview him next so he shuts up. (laughing; rooster crows; sound of walking)

Partial Transcript: This is a native dogwood. The bark of this tree can be brewed into a tonic to take for fevers.

Interviewer
00:12:21 Do you know more about the history of its use or who first (rooster crows) started using it for that purpose?

Leon Pace
I’m sure this goes back to Native Americans, as do a lot of our treatments.

Interviewer
00:12:39 Do you find dogwoods all over western North Carolina?

Leon Pace
The native dogwood is common all over, yes. (rooster crows)

Interviewer
00:12:51 Anything more about this tree that you can tell me?

Leon Pace
We’ve lost quite a few of these to a disease called anthracnose.

Interviewer
00:13:06 What kind of disease is it?

Leon Pace
It’s a fungal disease. We’ve learned that if you space these dogwoods where they can get a good airflow they’re not as susceptible to anthracnose as they are where they’re crowded. (rooster crows)

Interviewer
00:13:25 And is that how they naturally grow in the woods?

Leon Pace
They tend to grow too close together. They need to be thinned.

Interviewer
00:13:34 So it’s important to manage dogwoods.

Leon Pace
Right. (rooster crows) There is a Kousa dogwood from China that some people use as a replacement tree for a native dogwood, but it’s not the same. It’s not as pretty as our native dogwood.

Interviewer
00:13:54 Are there special kinds of animals or other habitats that you’ve seen kind of having an attraction to dogwoods? (rooster crows)

Leon Pace
The squirrels and the birds dearly love dogwood berries. I was watching squirrels and birds harvesting this morning—before you arrived—out the window.

Interviewer
00:14:16 So they were busy preparing for the winter.

Partial Transcript: This is foxglove. I don’t think that’s a native plant of this area, but it is a source for digitalis, which is a treatment for heart disease. (crow cawing)

Interviewer
00:14:50 Do you know where it’s originally from?

Leon Pace
I do not. No, sir.

Interviewer
00:14:55 Any other uses that it has? Is it a pretty plant?

Leon Pace
It’s gorgeous. It has a stalk about three or four feet tall, and it has little pink and speckled and white flowers that looks like foxgloves hanging down on it. It’s very beautiful in the spring and summer.

Interviewer
00:15:13 Does it have any toxic attributes as well?

Leon Pace
I don’t know whether it does or not.

Interviewer
00:15:20 Okay. I thought I heard something about foxglove also having some kind of poison.

Leon Pace
That’s possible.

Interviewer
00:15:29 Maybe if you use too much of it. (sounds of rooster crowing, walking, crow cawing, crickets chirping, flowing water)

Partial Transcript: That’s a native plant called fly poison. You mentioned toxins. They derive a substance from it—they did in the early days—to poison flies with. It is a member of the lily family, and in the spring of the year it puts up a stalk with a series of flowers about that long on it. And it opens white and it starts turning green at the bottom, and it winds up turning green all the way to the top over time. And the flower stays on a very long time.

Interviewer
00:16:41 And you said it’s like an insecticide.

Leon Pace
They used it for an insecticide in the early days, yes, before we had commercial sprays.

Interviewer
00:16:49 How would they do that?

Leon Pace
They would harvest the roots and powder it—grind it up—and put it in water and disperse it.

Interviewer
00:17:00 Have you ever used it for that purpose?

Leon Pace
No, sir.

Interviewer
00:17:05 It sounds less poisonous for everybody else if we use that rather than some of the sprays that we tend to buy at the big box stores.

Partial Transcript: This is the fall blue aster. This is used for fever.

Interviewer
00:19:07 Wow! I see this all over the place growing. I have this all over my garden growing wild. I had no idea.

Leon Pace
It’s a beautiful plant.


Interviewer
00:19:17 Uh-hunh (affirmative). It’s one of my favorite colors.

Leon Pace
But it is one for medications.

Interviewer
00:19:21 How would you use this?

Leon Pace
Most of these things they processed and put them in water and take ‘em by mouth.

Interviewer
00:19:36 So you dry this down and then—

Leon Pace
Yeah, dry it down and powder it.

Interviewer
00:19:42 And then you would boil some water and mix it in water?

Leon Pace
Uh-hunh (affirmative).

Interviewer
00:19:47 And so how many teaspoons an hour? (laughs)

Leon Pace
I don’t know. (laughing) I guess it depends on who was the doctor.

Interviewer
00:19:55 Would you just use the flower or the leaves as well?

Leon Pace
Most of these things they used the foliage and the flowers both. And some things they use the root as well.

Interviewer
00:20:13 I have this in my office right now on my desk. Every time it starts to flower, I just put this out there so it pretties up my office.

Partial Transcript: This one is jewelweed, and it’s well past. It has orangey-yellow flowers on it in the summer, and this one is used to treat poison ivy. You break it and you get the juice out of it and just rub it on the poison ivy, and it’s supposed to take care of it.

Interviewer
00:20:50 I don’t know if it’s true or not. There’s a myth I heard that with poison ivy usually there’s jewelweed nearby. Have you found that to be the case?

Leon Pace
That’s the case here. (laughs) I’ve got poison ivy and jewelweed growing almost in partnership with each other.

Interviewer
00:21:09 Do you know scientifically why that’s the case—why they would grow hand-in-hand?

Leon Pace
No.

Interviewer
00:21:15 That’s interesting how the toxin and the antidote grow side-by-side.

Leon Pace
Yes. (laughs; rooster crows)

Interviewer
00:21:21 Do you know more about its uses or how you’ve seen it used in the community?

Leon Pace
This is one of the ones that’s still fairly commonly used. If a child gets poison ivy on him the parent will break off some and get the juice and put on it to treat it.

Interviewer
00:21:40 You don’t have to dry it off. You just use it fresh.

Leon Pace
No, you just use it fresh. Yeah. The juicier the better. (rooster crows)

Partial Transcript: What have you got at this little house?
Leon Pace
Well, I used to keep chickens in that little house, but the wildlife’s so rampant here—you know—they reach through the wire and get ahold of ‘em. Mostly raccoons is doing the mischief. So I don’t try anything in that. Everything’s in that building there. I’ve got wire under it so that they can’t dig up under it. Your raccoons’ll dig under a building like that.

Interviewer
00:22:40 Right. So I’ve heard. We’re hoping to get chickens next year. I’m trying to get as many ideas as possible from people about how best to raise them and what to do with them.

Leon Pace
I bought six chickens at the Tractor Supply store this spring on March 20, and they was laying eggs by July 20. That was four months. That was the soonest I’ve ever had ‘em start laying.

Interviewer
00:23:04 What kind of chickens were they?

Leon Pace
Red sex-links and the Tetra Tints.

Interviewer
00:23:12 Are you getting an egg a day from them?

Leon Pace
I got four of them, and I get four eggs a day. I started with six, and that was far more eggs than my wife and I could use, so I gave a friend two of the chickens.

Partial Transcript: Interviewer
00:23:29 Sounds good. Wow! Look at those roses. I’m looking at those beautiful flowers.

Leon Pace
Dahlias.

Interviewer
00:23:47 Dahlias.

Leon Pace
You don’t see that just anywhere. Most people’s not willing to do what you have to do to grow those.


Interviewer
00:23:55 Are these flowers that are local to this area?

Leon Pace
Dahlias is native of Mexico. They’re not cold hardy. You have to lift the tubers in the fall and store them over winter, and that is the turn off for most people. They don’t have a proper place to do that.

Interviewer
00:24:15 Where do you do that?

Leon Pace
My neighbor next door has got a wonderful bank house. It maintains a temperature at about forty-seven or forty-eight degrees, and the humidity is perfect. And when I take those tubers out in the spring they’re still nice and plump. They haven’t sprouted. The eyes have just barely started raising on ‘em a little bit in May when I plant ‘em.

Interviewer
00:24:38 That’s great.

Leon Pace
At the Bullington Gardens in Hendersonville, they’ve got a dahlia expert now. He came to them last fall, and he’s got one of the most beautiful display gardens for dahlias that you’ll find anywhere.

Interviewer
00:24:52 So they’re perennials if you know how to treat them right.

Leon Pace
Right.

Interviewer
00:24:56 Otherwise they’re annuals. (laughs)

Leon Pace
I’ve been doing dahlias for thirty years.

Interviewer
00:25:01 Wow! They’re stunning. It looks like the bees love it, too.


Leon Pace
Yeah. And the good thing about these they start blooming—well, it’ll depend on when you plant ‘em, but they’ll start blooming by the middle of July or the first of August, and you have flowers ‘til frost, unlike some things which has a season. They come and go.

Partial Transcript: Interviewer
00:25:23 Sure. That’s great. How much land have you got?

Leon Pace
They’s twenty-one and three-quarters acres out here. (sounds of footsteps, crickets, running water, birds chirping) I have to look and see what I’m looking for. (sounds of footsteps, swishing grass, crickets, running water)

Interviewer
00:26:57 I’m not sure how you keep track of everything on this place. (laughs)

Leon Pace
Well, I do use some tags.

Partial Transcript: This plant is Ilex vomitoria. The Native Americans—when they had the feast days, they would make tea from the leaves of this plant and use it as a purge for their stomach after the feast. This plant grows very well here, but it’s not a native here. It grows closer to the coast, and they would make pilgrimages to the coast occasionally and collect these plants and bring ‘em back here for that purpose.

Interviewer
00:27:35 So it was a cleansing process.

Leon Pace
Right. And that’s the reason it’s called Ilex vomitoria. That is its botanical name. That’s the reason for that. The common name for this plant is yaupon holly.

Interviewer
00:27:53 Is it a plant that’s used as just kind of a decorative plant?

Leon Pace
Yes. They have beautiful berries on them. They’re tiny but they’re real shiny, and most of ‘ems red berried. But this particular plant is a yellow-berried plant, although I don’t have the male so I don’t have berries on it. These plants requires both a male and a female plant to set berries.

Interviewer
00:28:18 Do you know of anyone who uses this today if they have some reason health wise that they need to purge their system?
Leon Pace
I do not know. Unless the Native Americans still use it.

Interviewer
00:28:36 My son was doing a project for his fourth grade class last year, and the PD had their potato festival. It was one of those festivals that they would cleanse their system, and they talked about cleansing—drinking things to throw up and clean out the system—to prepare themselves for the new year. I guess the potato harvest was the end or the beginning of a new year, so maybe this is what they were using.

Partial Transcript: Interviewer
00:29:10 What are these beautiful flowers here?

Leon Pace
That’s Saint Michael’s blue aster.

Interviewer
00:29:24 Is it related to the ones that you showed me before?

Leon Pace
It is somewhat related to that.

Interviewer
00:29:33 Are these natives or no?

Leon Pace
They’re not natives of here. The common name for that is cowslip, but it’s Saint Michael’s blue fall aster.

Interviewer
00:29:47 Wow! Stunning! (sounds of footsteps, birds chirping, swishing grass)

Partial Transcript: This plant’s called sumac. It is used for bladder ailments and stomach problems. It typically has a red berry on it, but this plant’s growing in a crowded situation, and it didn’t create berries this year. But they use both the berries and the foliage for the treatment.


Interviewer
00:30:44 There’s a different kind of sumac as well. Right? How do you tell the difference?

Leon Pace
There’s a white sumac. It’s poison like poison ivy. This is staghorn sumac. It’s not poison.

Interviewer
00:30:57 How do you tell the difference?

Leon Pace
The white one has white flowers on it.

Interviewer
00:31:08 One is a cure and one is a danger.

Leon Pace
The foliage is different, too. I can’t explain exactly how they’re different, but the foliage actually is much different between the two.

Interviewer
00:31:20 And this is a plant that grows wild here.

Leon Pace
Oh, yes. Very common. It grows in open fields and sunshine. (sound of wind blowing)

Interviewer
00:31:36 Hidden behind the asters.

Partial Transcript: This is a bottlebrush buckeye. It has these little nuts on it. They’s usually two or three in a shell, and you’d carry these in your pocket to ward off rheumatism and as a good luck charm.

Interviewer
00:32:21 And how does that work?

Leon Pace
I don’t know if it does or not (laughs), but some people swear by it. But these things turns a pretty brown color after they’re ripe and come out of the hull. This is an ornamental, and it’s more of a shrubby-type buckeye. The ones that most people collects the nuts off of to carry in their pockets makes forty- or fifty-foot tall trees, and the nuts is somewhat larger.
Interviewer
00:32:55 But this is good enough for the medicinal properties.

Leon Pace
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Here’s one that I’ve had in my pocket for thirty years. They survive a long time in your pockets. (laughs)

Interviewer
00:33:10 Wow! Is this bringing you good luck?

Leon Pace
I suppose so. I hadn’t had any bad luck. (laughs)

Interviewer
00:33:15 Oh, good. I’ll have to get me one of those. Do you have an extra one?

Leon Pace
Yeah, we got plenty.

Interviewer
00:33:22 Okay, great.

Leon Pace
The squirrels loves them. They’ve ate most of ‘em already.

Interviewer
00:33:27 How do you harvest it before the squirrels get them? That’s always the bane of the gardener—creating a balance between wildlife and human use. Right?

Leon Pace
Well, we have—my wife likes to use these for table ornamentation in the fall of the year, so you wait until they’re almost ripe and collect ‘em and take ‘em in the house, and they’ll finish ripening up and open in the house. (crow cawing)

Interviewer
00:34:29 Are these used for eating as well? Are there any recipes?

Leon Pace
I’ve been told that one side of these nuts is poison and the other side is not, and people don’t have any way of knowing the difference. But the squirrels do.

Interviewer
00:34:45 Interesting.

Leon Pace
And I have noticed under the big trees up in the forest that they eat one side of it and leave the other side.

Interviewer
00:34:53 We have to get a copy of their handbook, huh?

Partial Transcript: This is a sweetgum tree. The bark of this tree can be harvested and compounded and made into a salve to be used for the treatment of hemorrhoids, frostbite, and other such ailments.

Interviewer
00:36:57 Tell me more about the tree.

Leon Pace
The guy that gave it to me asked me if I’d like to have a maple tree, and I said, “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind having a maple tree.” And when I got it home I got to lookin’ at it, and the bark was different, and I done a little investigating and it is a sweetgum. But it’s a native tree. It don’t grow ever’ where, but it grows in a lot of places. It’s fairly common.

Interviewer
00:37:21 It does have that maple look to it, doesn’t it?

Leon Pace
Yes. The leaves—well, it’s shaped just like some maple leaves, but the bark is different. Even on the small twigs it’s got the rough bark.

Interviewer
00:37:34 Have you tried using it yourself?

Leon Pace
No, I haven’t. This tree has some of the prettiest foliage after it colors of any. It’s a real brilliant red, which again is similar to maples.

Interviewer
00:37:54 And why is it called sweetgum do you think?

Leon Pace
The female has these ball-like things on ‘em, and they’re real sticky. I think that may be why they call it sweetgum.

Interviewer
00:38:21 All right. Let me get a closeup of that bark. (sound of footsteps)

Partial Transcript: I don’t believe we’re gonna find any rabbit tobacco here. I think it’s got too growed up. That needs to be in an open field mostly.

Interviewer
00:41:04 Okay. Tell me more about rabbit tobacco and its use.

Leon Pace
The rabbit tobacco grows about two or three feet tall, and when it dries it’s got little gray—the leaves turns gray and they’re all along the stems, and you can take it and just strip it off pretty fast, and they stuff pillows with it for a person that’s asthmatic to sleep on, and it’s s’posed to cure asthma.

Interviewer
00:41:48 Any other uses?

Leon Pace
Kids smokes it in corncob pipes sometimes if they wanna smoke.
Interviewer
00:41:55 And it doesn’t have any bad effects—

Leon Pace
No.

Interviewer
00:41:56 —like tobacco does.

Leon Pace
I’ve smoked rabbit tobacco when I was growing up. Kids prob’ly don’t do that now, but it was pretty common when I was a boy.

Interviewer
00:42:04 That’s why it was called tobacco.

Leon Pace
Yeah.

Interviewer
00:42:07 Interesting. (sounds of footsteps, wind blowing)

Partial Transcript: Interviewer
00:43:00 Do you need a male and female to get fruit?

Leon Pace
No, no. One plant’ll do it. Holly is about the only plant I know of that requires both sex of plants. Well, I’m sure there’s others, but holly is the main one.

Interviewer
00:43:15 Right. Plus the fruit trees.

Leon Pace
The what?



Interviewer
00:43:20 The fruit trees like apples and cherries and—no, not cherries, but apples and—what else? Apples and plums and pears—they all need the cross-pollination. Right?

Leon Pace
Yeah, they used to use Grimes Golden and plant two or three of them in the orchard for cross-pollination.
Interviewer
00:43:00 Do you need a male and female to get fruit?

Leon Pace
No, no. One plant’ll do it. Holly is about the only plant I know of that requires both sex of plants. Well, I’m sure there’s others, but holly is the main one.

Interviewer
00:43:15 Right. Plus the fruit trees.

Leon Pace
The what?



Interviewer
00:43:20 The fruit trees like apples and cherries and—no, not cherries, but apples and—what else? Apples and plums and pears—they all need the cross-pollination. Right?

Leon Pace
Yeah, they used to use Grimes Golden and plant two or three of them in the orchard for cross-pollination.

Interviewer
00:43:46 Can I take one for good luck?

Leon Pace
Oh, yeah.

Interviewer
00:43:49 I can use all the good luck I can get. Thank you. Good luck for my whole family.

Leon Pace
They’re not quite as large as they are sometimes. But I think—well, here’s one that’s probably got a double in it.

Interviewer
00:44:07 Oh, great. Thank you.

Leon Pace
This right here’s a male holly. It’s a special one, selected by a man named Joe Gable. It’ll have lots of flowers. See all these little buds on it? You don’t have to have a particular holly to do a particular female. Whichever male holly’s in bloom when the female holly’s in bloom will pollinate it. It don’t have to be the same variety. Of course, the same variety is more dependable to bloom at the same time.

Interviewer
00:45:07 Do you have any native fruit trees?

Leon Pace
No.

Partial Transcript: I just tried my first Pawpaw the other day. Boy, that’s delicious.


Leon Pace
Yeah. You know, that’s not real common here—Pawpaw’s aren’t.

Interviewer
00:45:18 Really?

Leon Pace
I’ve got a friend that’s got a couple of Pawpaw trees, but there’s not a lot of ‘em.

Partial Transcript: This plant here’s called yarrow. It is used to treat prostate problems. This has been mowed so it’s not at its normal height. It would usually make a plant on up this tall and has white flowers on it.

Interviewer
00:45:55 Tell me more about it.

Leon Pace
That’s about all I know about it. They make a tea out of it, and they drink the tea for the treatment.

Interviewer
00:46:07 Is this one of those companion plants that also grows well with other plants? They give each other benefits.

Leon Pace
That I don’t know. This grows in various locations. They’s a lot of domesticated forms of yarrow. They’ve domesticated them into different colors rather than the native white. It comes in yellows and pinks and reds, and as far as I know the domestic varieties is as good for medicine as the wild. (sounds of footsteps, running water, birds chirping, wind blowing) Them squirrel’s about carried ‘em off.

Partial Transcript: This is a black walnut. They’re green when they first fall off of the tree, and they gradually turn to this. The medicinal use of this is for burns and to treat boils. You mash these out, and this brown liquid is used as a poultice to treat the wounds and the boils. Also the big use for this—especially in pioneer days when people were raising their own sheep and made their own wool, it made a good brown dye for the yarn that the ladies knitted clothing out of. And here’s one that’s about out of the hull. That’s what the nut looks like.

Interviewer
00:48:36 What about a food source?

Leon Pace
Very good. They liked to use these to make walnut cakes. Nowadays the women don’t crack walnuts. They go to the grocery store and buy (laughs) a bottle of walnut flavoring. But my mother and my grandmother used to crack these things and make cakes. They’d mix the meat of the nut in with the cake batter, and they’d save the—if they was lucky enough to get some halves and quarters out of this when they was crackin’ ‘em, they’d use that to decorate the top of the cake.

Interviewer
00:49:05 So they used every part of it—as a medicine, as a decoration, and as food.

Leon Pace
Sure.

Interviewer
00:49:12 That’s great.

Leon Pace
And the squirrels likes ‘em. (laughs) The squirrels plants ‘em in the flower beds, and you get walnut seedlings ever’ where ‘cept where you want ‘em. (laughs)

Interviewer
00:49:26 So you have your little apprentice gardeners running around right now. So this is the tree right here?

Leon Pace
Yes, that’s one. I have three. I planted these trees myself a few years ago.

Interviewer
00:49:37 A few years?

Leon Pace
Yep. Well, probably twenty—twenty to twenty-five.

Interviewer
00:49:43 How long does it take before you get nuts?

Leon Pace
You start getting a few nuts time they’re seven or eight years old. O’ course the bigger the tree gets the more nuts you get.

Interviewer
00:49:59 Now there’s a disease that’s affecting walnuts I’ve heard about.


Leon Pace
I haven’t heard of that. (sound of running water)

Interviewer
00:50:13 Just like the chestnut. There’s apparently a disease that’s killing black walnuts.

Leon Pace
Oh. Well, I’m sorry. I’m sorry to hear that.

Interviewer
00:50:21 I know.

Leon Pace
It takes about fifty years to grow a walnut tree big enough to make the kind of boards that they like to make out of ‘em.

Interviewer
00:50:32 So tell me about the walnut use in terms of lumber.

Leon Pace
It’s a very expensive lumber. It’s one of the more desirable lumbers. It’s a good hardwood, and they like to use it to make cabinets and furniture out of it mostly rather than building.

Interviewer
00:50:50 Did you have carpenters in your family who built things?

Leon Pace
No. We didn’t have any carpenters. We was mostly farmers.

Interviewer
00:50:58 Okay. Let me get a few shots of them on the ground. (sounds of running water, woodpecker) I have a hickory tree in my back—a couple of hickory trees in my back yard, and rarely do I get to see them because the squirrels always beat me to it.

Leon Pace
Yeah, they go up in the tree and harvest the hickory nuts before they’re ripe enough to drop.

Interviewer
00:51:33 Right.

Leon Pace
Luckily the walnuts can drop most of the time before they harvest them.

Interviewer
00:51:42 Which is harder to process—the hickory or a black walnut?

Leon Pace
Well, the hickory’s smaller, and they’re more tedious to separate the nut from the hull than walnuts is.

Interviewer
00:51:55 Yeah, it’s a lot of work.

Leon Pace
Course walnuts has hard shells. You have to hit ‘em purdy good to crack ‘em.

Interviewer
00:52:01 So what do you do to crack them?

Leon Pace
A good-size rock and a hammer’s the best thing to use. Put ‘em on a rock and whack ‘em with a hammer. (sounds of running water, rooster crowing)

Interviewer
00:52:19 A friend of mine just puts them in a paper bag, and he runs them over with his truck.

Leon Pace
Well, yeah. That’s the way to get the outer hull off of ‘em. Sure. But then after you do that, you still got this inner hull to crack to get the meat out of the nut. So you’ve really got two chores of separating them from the hulls. (sounds of running water, rooster crowing) I think that’s all we got, David, that’s available to us here.

Partial Transcript: Leon Pace
How do you like that?

Interviewer
00:54:02 Beautiful.

Leon Pace
It’s never had that many berries on it before.


Interviewer
00:54:09 What kind of—this is a holly?

Leon Pace
This is a native—excuse me. This is a deciduous holly. Deciduous hollies, you know, lose their leaves in the wintertime. And the beauty of this thing, after it loses its leaves all you’ve got’s berries on the stems. And when it snows and you got a white backdrop, that’s a beautiful thing. But these berries are the largest of any, I think—of any holly. (sounds of running water)

Interviewer
00:54:44 Are you looking to get rid of this one?

Leon Pace
That?

Interviewer
00:54:47 Yeah.

Leon Pace
I could let that go. You need it?

Interviewer
00:54:50 I probably won’t need it ‘til the spring, but I’d love to get it and maybe just get a fence around it so it’s protected. I have a friend of mine who—I forget. He told me what he does, but he creates a barrier so that the chickens can’t get too close to the fence. And then the raccoons can’t grab them because the raccoons like to grab them and then start chewing on them.

Leon Pace
I’ve had ‘em—I’ve had raccoons to eat chickens through this kind of wire. They can’t get the whole chicken, but they—especially little chickens. That’s why I’ve got his on there. They go up under there and they’ll catch a little chicken by its leg, and they’ll eat its leg and pull it down. They’ll completely eat the legs off of ‘em, and they can roll them over and over and do some more damage to ‘em through that. But they can eat a big chicken through that wire. They can get their arms in and pull a big chicken over there and eat a whole lot of it through that wire there. They’re really destructive.

Interviewer
00:55:54 They’re too smart for their own good.

Leon Pace
Yep.
Interviewer
00:55:58 How do raccoons taste? Are they any good?

Leon Pace
You know, I don’t think I ever ate raccoon.

Interviewer
00:56:04 (laughing) I’ve heard groundhog and squirrel are good.

Leon Pace
Yeah, groundhog’s good. Squirrel’s good. But most of the wildlife had been hunted to near extinction during the Great Depression. When I was growing up, it wasn’t much wildlife around here. Most of this wildlife’s come back in my lifetime. But people were serious about hunting for food during the Depression, and they pretty well wiped out a lot of the wildlife species.

Interviewer
00:56:36 What kinds of things were hard to find?

Leon Pace
When I was growing up you rarely ever seen a deer. Raccoons was pretty much non-existent. Groundhogs was rare. Turkeys—we didn’t have turkeys at all. Of course, I think it was a disease got in the turkeys and wiped out a lot of them. But most wildlife—squirrels and rabbits and possums was about the only wildlife in abundance. And of course skunks. (laughs)

Partial Transcript: Leon Pace
Do you want to see the chickens?

Interviewer
00:58:28 Sure. The chickens aren’t native to America, are they?

Leon Pace
No.

Interviewer
00:58:40 Turkeys are. Not chickens.

Leon Pace
Chickens come from junglefowl. I keep that here all the time. You never know when you’ll catch a 00:58:48 (s/l cun one). (sounds of door opening, chickens cackling) The three white ones and the two red ones is the pullets I was tellin’ you about that started laying so early. (sounds of chickens)

Interviewer
00:59:14 How long have you had chickens?

Leon Pace
I’ve kept chickens all my life. (sounds of chickens) The four pullets has already done their job for today.

Interviewer
00:59:27 Wow! They can retire. Take it easy, girls! (laughs) (sounds of chickens)

Leon Pace
I should have already cleaned that, but what I like to do is wait ‘til I take out my day-aboves, and then I take that out and put it over the space where the dais goes for next year, and it decays over winter and makes a very good fertilizer.

Partial Transcript: I have a bunch of moss in my yard, and I used to think that was a good thing until I started wanting to grow some fruit trees. And I realized that was a sign of the quality of the soil.

Leon Pace
Yeah. You have to alter the soil if you go from moss to fruit trees or most any other tree.

Interviewer
01:01:28 Yeah. I’m trying to get in a ton of lime and the greensand and the phosphorous in there to make the soil more amenable for fruit trees.

Leon Pace
Well, in this area the phosphorous is low everywheres. It’s lower in places than others, but it’s low everywheres. And because of that, we have trouble getting buds set on—for buds on the rhododendrons. So we use diammonium phosphate to try to alter that. But it takes it a long time to get in the soil, so we’ve gone to puttin’ some in the plantin’ hole when we plant. We plant ‘em now so it’ll pick it up summer.

Interviewer
01:02:07 Right. And it takes a while for it to get inside.

Partial Transcript: Well, my name is Leon Pace. I’m a native of Henderson County. I was born here on July 11, 1942. We lived at Flat Rock when I was born, and when I was two years old my parents bought a sixty-five-acre farm near where we’re at today. Actually, it’s one property between my current property and the property where we moved to in 1944. And my daddy was gonna be a farmer, and he farmed one year, and he didn’t take to farming too good. And Mr. David Camp was constructing a dairy farm at the bottom of the mountain named Shoal Falls Farm, and in 1945 in the fall, my dad took a job milking those purebred Guernsey cows for Mr. Camp. So at that time we moved to Shoal Falls Farm, and I experienced several years growing up on a dairy farm at that location. And then we eventually moved to Transylvania County, and I went to public school in Transylvania County. And in growin’ up, I worked for the dairy farm at Shoal Falls. I worked for some of the farmers in the valley who grew tobacco and sweet corn for the corn market and various other farming occupations. When I finished high school, I took a job at the Ecusta plant at Pisgah Forest, which is now closed, and I worked for them for thirty-eight years and retired.

Partial Transcript: Growing up in this area was very different from what it is today. Instead of having televisions and computers and electronics to play with, we had to devise our own forms of entertainment, which was mostly on the outside. We spent a lot of time in the summertime playing in the streams catching minnows and crawfish and lizards and playing with ‘em. We made various toys out of what was at hand. A syrup bucket made a good steering wheel for a pretend automobile—a syrup bucket lid. We done a lot of bucket lidding. Old tires—you could have races with those and see who could roll those old tires down the hill the fastest. We made grapevine swings to swing with and various entertainments of that. We eventually got bicycles. We spent a lot of time riding bicycles on the mountain roads around this community.

01:07:29 Most of the occupations was either farming or the local paper mill, and a lot of the people that worked at the paper mill farmed on the side. Everybody grew a vegetable garden then, and a lot of ‘em had small tobacco allotments, which have all disappeared.

Partial Transcript: Some of my fondest memories growing up was at Shoal Falls Farm. It was like a small community. There was four or five houses of the employees, and most all of ‘em had children. And we spent a lot of time playing on that farm. It was exciting to be around the cattle and especially when the new calves was born. If you could be around the calf barn at feeding time, the guy would let you maybe bottle feed a calf, and that was a lot of fun. And we eventually got big enough to go in the fields where the harvesting was going on for hay and silage and things like that—around equipment. That was exciting. Picnicking was a big deal in those days. There was a springhouse above the waterfall at Shoal Falls Farm, and it was in a cool spot. A lot of times some of the families in the evening would carry a picnic up there and picnic together. And they was three sets of swinging bridges going up to the Shoal Falls, and it was always a lot of fun to walk those swinging bridges and get up to the foot of the falls and feel the spray off of the waterfalls in the hot weather. That was enjoyable.

Partial Transcript: I went to school in the early days at Valley Hill, which is now Atkinson School. And my dad took a job at Sky Brook Farms for a short term one time, so I went a couple of years of school at Etowah.

Interviewer
01:09:35 How did you get to school?

Leon Pace
We rode school buses. When we moved back into this community we went to a little country school down at Little River—a three-room school with a pot-bellied stove and a water pump outside and outside toilets—for a half a year. And they opened a new school over at Penrose for the second half of the year, so I went to that school and then finished school at Brevard High School.

Partial Transcript: My parents were Claude E. Pace and my mother was Molly Justice Pace. My dad was born May 11, 1912, and my mother was born January 22, 1922. My dad was raised in the Berea Church community, and my mother was raised up on Point Lookout near Sugarloaf. My dad lived to be ninety-two years and five months old, and my mother lived to be eighty-seven years old.

Interviewer
01:10:46 Tell me about the kinds of things your mom had to do in terms of cooking, cleaning, and preserving food.
Leon Pace
We lived in the country, and my mother had to do things that you do in the country to maintain a home and a house. My parents grew a large vegetable garden. They raised a pig for meat each year, and we had one calf for beef each year. And we raised chickens at home for fryers and for eggs, and my mother could go in the yard an kill a chicken and clean it and bring it in the house and prepare it for food. And all the vegetables that we grew that we didn’t use while it was in season she canned that. We didn’t have a deep freezer. She canned it, and she used a tub outside to do the canning process. They had to build a fire and put the tub of water over the fire and boil the cans to process ‘em. And my dad took care of the pork. He salted it down in the basement and cured it. They used salt and black pepper and cornmeal that he rubbed it on the meat every so often until it was cured. We burned wood in a woodstove, and my dad owned a sixty-five acre property on this mountain that we cut wood off of, so we had to cut wood just about every Saturday. We didn’t have a chainsaw. We had to use a crosscut saw and wedges and go devils and axes, so we had to get at least one pickup full each week to keep the fire going.

Partial Transcript: The house was built by a guy named Seldon Kilpatrick. My dad worked at the dairy farm, and he didn’t have a lot of free time so he hired Mr. Kilpatrick to oversee the building of the house, and he used some local guys that was carpenters to work with him.

Partial Transcript: The clothing—my mother made a lot of it. She made all of our shirts. I guess we bought all the clothes except the shirts, but she made my brother and my shirts and my dad’s shirts. Then when my little sister come along, she made all of her dresses and things that she wore.

Interviewer
01:13:28 And where’d the material come from?

Leon Pace
They was a remnant shop in Hendersonville that she could buy the material from. The shirts was usually flannel because—you know—for wearing outdoors they was long-sleeved and made in flannel material.

Partial Transcript: There was some country stores. The one that we frequented was in Little River, and it was called Jot ‘Em Down Store. And you could take a bag of eggs down there and trade ‘em to Miss Marrow for candies. She’d take eggs in exchange for candy bars and candies. They sold shoes there, and they sold some clothing. It was pretty much a little general store—canned goods. They had gas pumps and had a kerosene pump. You could buy kerosene there to start fires.

Interviewer
01:14:23 Was it a kind of a social place, too, where people would gather?

Leon Pace
Very much so, and especially on Sunday afternoon. It’d be a—they had a pot-bellied stove and some chairs setting around. There’d be a big crowd of men gathering in on Sunday evening to tell tall tales.

Interviewer
01:14:41 Do you remember any of the stories?

Leon Pace
Offhand I don’t.

Interviewer
01:14:46 Did they have any music that was performed—people playing—playing anything at the store?

Leon Pace
No, they didn’t . But they done some of that at the schoolhouse. They was a small stage at the country school, and that was used like a community center in those days. I remember ‘em doin’ a little play skits and doin’ music with that. Yes.

Partial Transcript: Our chores was to keep the wood in, help with the garden, and feed the pig and the calf that we was raising and take care of the chickens. That was basically our chores when we was small. Of course, as soon as we got big enough to work for other people and earn some money we had to do our chores plus work for other farmers in the neighborhood.

Interviewer
01:15:45 Which farmers did you work for?
Leon Pace
I worked for Mr. John Marrow for several summers. He grew sweet corn and sold it at the market in Columbia, South Carolina. And when I got old enough to get a driver’s license, I went with him on that run. We would pick three loads of corn a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Monday evening we would go to Columbia to deliver the corn and distribute. Some of it went to the market and some to the local grocery stores in Columbia. And we’d get in late Tuesday and start the routine again Wednesday morning and then again Friday morning and then the weekend and played Saturday evening. And various ones that had tobacco allotments, and I helped various ones of ‘em with tobacco. I did work one or two summers in the gladiolas at the Thomas Gladiolus Farm in the Little River community. That was the last work I done before I went to the paper mill at Ecusta—was work for the gladiola farmer.

Partial Transcript: The Ecusta mill was a wonderful place to work. It was—it actually brought prosperity to Transylvania County. Before the Ecusta mill came here, the only industry they had was a couple of tanneries and some logging operations. And the people that didn’t work for that farmed—done farming and whatever they could do—common labor. But the Ecusta mill came in and it started—it was a growing operation, and it eventually employed about 3400 people at its peak.

Interviewer
01:17:33 Do you remember when it opened?

Leon Pace
It opened in nineteen and thirty-nine, and it ran ‘til August of 2002.

Interviewer
01:17:41 Tell me—what did they make and what kinds of jobs did they have?

Leon Pace
It was basically a plant to manufacture products for the tobacco industry—fine cigarette paper and the tipping paper for the mouthpiece. And at one time, we manufactured the filter tips that went on cigarettes. And beside—outside of that, we manufactured fine printing papers for The Watchtower publication and for Bibles and for dictionaries and publications of that type. And we had a pretty good-sized operation to manufacture analyst belts to run business machines and cigarette manufacturing machines. And eventually they built a division to manufacture cellophane—cellophane wrapping paper for cigarette packages and cookie packages and anything that required a cellophane wrap.

Interviewer
01:18:43 What kind of jobs did you do when you worked there?

Leon Pace
At Ecusta, I started as a common laborer and worked up through operator of various pieces of equipment. And eventually I became a technician in the perforating department, which required figuring out the logistics for setting up jobs and actually settin’ them up and gettin’ the machines running. And after that, I got a job in the research and development department in what was called the tobacco research group, and we had prototype equipment of all the converting equipment. It was in the mill, and we used these small machines to manufacture individual samples of the various products that the tobacco industry wanted to look at.

Interviewer
01:19:34 Did you miss being outside when you were in the factory all those years?

Leon Pace
I did and I spent every minute I could outside on weekends and in the evenings when I was off from my job.

Interviewer
01:19:49 Any interesting stories you can tell me about the life in the factory?

Leon Pace
Well, in the factory there was some interesting things that happened. One night a fella and myself was the only ones in the department working, and we had to go into the room next door to transmit our production and to send up a sample. And when I went through the door, I saw a blaze, and they was a pile of the paper on fire burning. And it was obvious that we had a firebug because that couldn’t of just happened on its own spontaneously. So I called the gatehouse and got that crew down here, they called a guy from the safety department, and it turned into some drawed-out investigation. But they never did find out who the firebug was.

Interviewer
01:20:55 Did they stop the fire without too much damage?

Leon Pace
I put the fire out. I put the fire out with a fire extinguisher.

Interviewer
01:21:03 But if you hadn’t found it then it could have burnt down the plant.

Leon Pace
It could have, yes, sir. It could have been detrimental.

Interviewer
01:21:09 Did they give you a medal and a big raise for your bravery and alertness?

Leon Pace
I think the guy in the safety department said thank you for puttin’ the fire out. (laughs)

Partial Transcript: The church in the rural neighborhood was the gathering place and the social event when I was growing up. Everybody had to work all week long to make things do—you know—to keep food on the table, a roof over your head, and clothes on your back. So we really looked forward to Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings to go to church to see our neighbors and friends. And we could find out what was going on in their part of the neighborhood through the week that way.

Interviewer
01:22:03 What church did you go to?

Leon Pace
When we lived at Shoal Falls Farm, we attended church at the Holly Springs Baptist Church, which at that time was a small typical clapboard country church. It has since been raised and a new brick building built down on the Crab Creek Road. But it was a typical country church with the steeple and the bell in the belfry. They was a little shelf over each window that had a kerosene lantern settin’ over it for lighting at night, and it had a pot-bellied stove to heat it. And the wasps lived in the attic, and when the stove got the building hot those wasps would come through the cracks, and you had to be careful or one of ‘em might light on you and sting ya.

Interviewer
01:22:54 So those wasps kept you alert to the sermon.

Leon Pace
Oh, yeah. Right.

Interviewer
01:22:59 What role did the church play in terms of support of people in need or helping folks who had problems?
Leon Pace
Yes, the church was very instrumental in helping people who were in need. They didn’t—they didn’t have a lot of money to give to ‘em, but the families would bring canned goods and meat products and maybe some used clothing ‘at wasn’t in too bad a condition and share it with ‘em to help ‘em over a rough spot. And you know, some people if they could’d provide some labor to ‘em to help ‘em ‘til they could get ‘em a job.

Interviewer
01:23:44 Any special memories you have of the church or things that happened at the church or the minister? Anything that comes to mind?

Leon Pace
We had various ministers in our little church. None of them was educated at seminary. They was all self-taught ministers, and they was all bi-vocational. The churches could not afford a full-time minister in those days, so they was either carpenters or mill workers or had some other occupation. And most of the time, they didn’t actually live in the community. And because it’s bi-vocational, they wasn’t enough ministers to go around. So most of ‘em pastored two or three churches at the same time, which meant you didn’t have a pastor or a minister at each church service. Sometimes a lay speaker or a deacon would have charge of the services when the pastor was not present.

Interviewer
01:24:47 So they switched off.

Leon Pace
Well, if you had a Sunday morning service this week you’d have a Sunday night service the next week. You know, it flip-flopped from week to week but ‘tween at least two churches. We had one preacher—between Sunday school and preaching, him and the deacons would go out in the woods and smoke a cigarette. That’s highly uncommon now, but back then a lot of the ministers smoked cigarettes, and some of them chewed tobacco. Baptisms was done in the streams. We didn’t have baptismal pools. I remember when I was baptized, I was baptized in a deep hole down here in the Crab Creek.

Partial Transcript: Oh, yes. When I was growing up, people were more connected to each other than they are now because of various reasons, mainly because of the way we live now versus then. But people had big chores to do then, and they’d help each other. If a person was gathering corn, three or four of the neighbors’d help ‘em gather their corn. When it come time to shuck it, they’d have what they call corn shuckin’s, and they had good participation where they had everybody put aside what they was doin’ and go and help their neighbor shuck the corn. And they made a party out of it. They’d have music after that and food usually. But if someone run on hard luck, people was a lot more alert to it, I think, in those days and would get aid to ‘em sooner probably than they do now. It was more like a big family than it is now.

Partial Transcript: Yes. The difference in the way the community was then and now, I think, started changing after World War II when factories started coming into bein’ and people started getting factory jobs. But the main change came with electronic things in the house, like television and computers and electronic toys. In the old days, people would sit out on the porch in the evenings and have conversations. And if somebody was goin’ by in the street they’d stop and come in and join the conversation. You might have a whole porch full of neighbors at one house enjoying each other’s’ companionship ‘n socializing. But we’ve got to where we don’t do any of that anymore. I mean everybody’s got their own thing inside the house. When I was growin’ up, I remember my mother used to go and sit with sick people all night. That was one way the community’d come together to help each other. They’d set up with sick people and take care of them and—you know—give the family some relief ‘at was havin’ to care for ‘em.

Interviewer
01:31:41 Do you miss that?

Leon Pace
Yes, I do. Yeah. It was a much slower, relaxed time. We just don’t seem to have time for each other anymore that we should have. Even families don’t always have time for each individual family member.

Partial Transcript: If the electric should go off and the conveniences stop, most people couldn’t survive two days because all they’d have’s what few items they bought at the store on hand. And when that was gone, if they was snow on the ground, they’d probably have to walk out to somewhere to the store to buy some more goods. The bathrooms don’t work when the power’s off unless you got a generator. The water stops. We’re just not prepared to handle that.

Interviewer
01:32:56 So in the past we were a much more of a self-reliant, self-sustaining community than we are today.

Leon Pace
In the past we was much more self-sufficient. Before we learned to use electricity, we functioned all right without it. You had outside toilets. You had water in the spring. If you was fortunate you could pipe the water to the house by gravity and have a little flow of water comin’ into the kitchen. And you had your canned goods in the pantry, and you had your potatoes and root crops in the bank houses. You had your pork in the smokehouses, and most women get up a big barrel of flour in the kitchen and some cornmeal on hand to make bread. So you know, we could exist for weeks and months at a time without havin’ to go out if necessary.

Interviewer
01:34:00 We’re not really prepared for those kinds of things today.

Leon Pace
And I think today most people don’t even know how to grow vegetables. They’d have to be some kind of educational program, if that become necessary, to teach people how to grow vegetables and how to do the preserving.

Partial Transcript: The gristmills in the area was used to make animal food and to make flour and cornmeal for home use. Most of ‘em was turned by water. They had waterwheels, and they had a set of millstones that worked one against the other, and the corn or barley or whatever they was grinding trickled through, and the action of the millstones mashed it and ground it into a usable product.

Interviewer
01:35:04 Which mills did you use when you were growing up?



Leon Pace
When I was growin’ up, they was a mill on Church Street in Hendersonville called McFadden’s Mill. O’ course it was not run by waterwheel. It was run with an engine of some sort, but we used that one. And they was another one when we lived on the Sky Brook Farm at Horseshoe. It was a motorized mill that we used. But in Transylvania County—I visited several times—they was a mill named Morgan’s Mill that had a huge waterwheel and run the old-timey way. And a lot of people used that mill.

Partial Transcript: I think it’s important to pass the wisdom of the elders down because when you can Google something on the Internet you’re not sure that you’re gettin’ true facts. Some of the Internet things are good and accurate and some are not. So I think it’s important to—and I think it’s more realistic if you get it from a live person than it is to get it from electronics. And if you get it from a live person you can maybe get a demonstration on how to do some of the things while you’re talking about it as well.

Interviewer
01:36:45 Why is it important to remember our history?

Leon Pace
We need to know where we came from so we can know where we’re goin’ so we can chart a path for the future.

Partial Transcript: When I was growin’ up, if my parents had not learned from their parents at the time I grew up we wouldn’t have had food to eat. My grandparents passed on to my parents the knowledge they needed to live their daily lives and to provide for themselves and to grow their crops and their gardens and tend their livestock and how to make their clothing and the things of necessity.

Partial Transcript: When we forget our past we lose—we lose ever’ thing. We don’t have any connection to anything. We forget where we come from. We forget—well, we don’t know who our ancestors is if we forget our past. I think it’s important to know our heritage and which countries we come from, even which of the old countries we’re from.

Interviewer
01:38:32 How does that inform us for the future? (long pause) Take your time. (laughs) These are tough questions.

Leon Pace
Knowin’ our past, I think, helps us to know what actions and what steps to take for our future and how we should be teachin’ our own children and our own grandchildren.

Partial Transcript: I’m a member of the Henderson County Genealogical and Historical Society, and I have been since 1986. The society formed in 1983. It’s now thirty years old. I retired from the Ecusta mill at the end of 1998, and I have been a regular volunteer at the center ever since then. We have a good collection of printed material—old documents, census records—and we have a lot of pictures—old pictures of people and places and buildings. And we have a membership that covers the entire Unites States, and we help people do their genealogical research to trace their roots. And we get a lot of questions from all over. People emails questions to us and writes questions to us, and we do the research and try to find answers for them.

Interviewer
01:40:26 Tell me. Why do you do that kind of work?

Leon Pace
The reason I do this is because I’m interested in that sort of thing. I’m interested in my ancestry and my roots, and I want to help other people that’s interested in theirs. And you meet a lot of nice people that away, and you’d be surprised how many distant cousins you can meet—that comes in to do their research—through helping them.

Interviewer
01:40:52 How does it make you feel when you’re helping someone trace their roots and reveal this knowledge about who they were and where they came from?

Leon Pace
When we’re able to find a nugget of information for a person that’s been lookin’ for a long time, it makes them feel real good, and it really makes us feel good and proud of our work when we can provide that one nugget of information that maybe opens a door to other information for them. They’s a lot of walls that you run into doing this work, and you never know where you might find that one bit of information that’ll break down the wall. And occasionally we’re able to do that for people, and it makes you feel real good to do that.

Partial Transcript: I would tell them that it’s important to remember our history because that’s the only way they can know who they are. If they don’t know their past they don’t really know who they are. And you know, our past is interesting and I think we need to preserve some of the buildings we’ve lost. But we’re fortunate enough to have pictures of some of ‘em, so we need to preserve the pictures, and we need to preserve the buildings where we can. In the future, people won’t even know how structures was constructed if we can’t preserve some of it. We lose a lot of architecture that away.

Partial Transcript: I’m a plant lover, and I created this garden because I enjoy plants. And I’m not interested in just one plant. I like all plants. But mainly right now, I’m working with hollies, rhododendrons, and azaleas, both evergreen and the natives. I particularly like the native azaleas. There are some beautiful hybrid native azaleas on some of these balls, and the organizations that I belong to are trying to preserve these—these balls. The balls tends to grow in over time, and our association—our azalea society and rhododendron societies—is working with the forest service to clean these balls and mow ‘em to protect these plants. Anywhere where they’s three of our native species are bloomin’ at one time you get hybrids—natural hybrids—and they come in pinks, lavenders, purples—all shades. They’re gorgeous. And of course, the only way we can have those plants in our gardens is to collect the seeds. They will permit seed collecting, but you can’t collect plant material. So some of the folks have collected some of the seeds, and they’re propagating ‘em from seeds and makin’ ‘em available for our gardens.

Partial Transcript: Yes. It is important to keep some of the plants goin’ and maintain them as a connection to the past because a lot of these plants was used for herbal remedies and dying cloth and yarns and for seasoning the foods. So it is real important to preserve those plants for the future. And of course, all of our native plants that’s used for landscape plants needs to be preserved as pure natives. The hybrids is gorgeous, but we need to protect the natives and preserve those as well. And on some of these balls some of the—the plants that’s been propagated from seeds—a lot of ‘ems goin’ back on the balls as the balls is cleaned off and enlarged back to their more normal size. We don’t know exactly how these balls occurred. Some people thinks it was early settlers cleared ‘em off for pasture land for their livestock, and more ‘n likely they was used for grazing lands. But they coulda been caused by fires in the early days, too. They coulda burned off originally. But they’re beautiful spots when the azaleas and the other plants are in bloom.