from Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 1997, 40-43
© Copyright 1997 Virginia Community College System
Abstract
Students were taught advanced
research methods by participating in a professional development
project undertaken by two Germanna Community College faculty
members. Oral histories and historical documents about the forced
eviction of mountain residents from their homes in the Shenandoah
National Park area were collected.
In the Summer of 1994, I received my first VCCS Professional Development Grant to create and deliver a team-taught Humanities course with my colleague Nicole Martin, a history instructor. The main objective of the course was to teach students advanced research techniques by inviting them to act as research assistants on a scholarly project undertaken by the instructors. I had become interested in exploring the early history of the Shenandoah National Park (SNP) after hearing my then-landlord talking with some vehemence about the park and about the eviction of mountain residents from their homesteads in the 1930s. Mr. Ford had grown up right about where he was living, in Boonesville, a tiny town nestled against the mountains in the far north-west corner of Albemarle County. I was amazed at the level of anger he displayed, even in the 1990s, and was equally amazed at some of the stories he told about the evictions. I had frequently visited the park and had read the road-side signs and had even watched the movie shown in the Big Meadows visitors’ center, but I had not encountered much information at all about the former residents of the park area. Certainly, I had not heard about mountain residents committing suicide after being forced from their land or about sheriffs or “CCC boys” burning cabins while the evicted family watched. Mr. Ford clearly displayed some historical pain, and just as clearly, there was some dissonance between what he was telling me and what I had learned from park materials. I decided to delve into the issue on my own.
I was about to embark on a project involving scholarly research, and it occurred to me that here was a rich opportunity for students at my college to learn, first hand, what it is that a scholar does when he or she has decided to pursue a topic. It made sense to me to invite them into the project before I had gathered much information or come to any conclusions. Furthermore, I knew this topic would be of interest to the students in my college’s service region; some students are descendants of the people who once lived within the park’s boundaries, and many of them live near the park today. It also made sense to invite my friend and colleague, Nicole Martin, to team-teach the course with me; as an instructor of history, she could give the students some perspective on how historians conduct research. Together, we designed a six-credit course in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, to be offered back-to-back in an intensive summer of study. We advertised heavily and managed to attract 21 students to the course.
In the first week of the course, we introduced students to some of the history behind the park’s establishment. We then discussed what we already knew about the evictions of mountain residents from the park, which was very little, and told the students that we would be looking for any information we could find about the evictions. We discussed the difference between primary and secondary sources, reviewed with them how to compose MLA-style works cited entries, practiced writing abstracts, and then discussed how an historian would go about seeking information. We concentrated the first half of the summer semester on gathering information from local sources, including county courthouses, county archives, county newspaper archives, local libraries, historical societies, sheriffs’ offices, and local people. We organized students into teams of four, with each team responsible for covering one county. Students were instructed to make copies of any relevant information they found and to turn it in with a cover sheet; the cover sheet listed the student’s name, the date the material was found and in what specific location, a contact-person if applicable, a works cited entry in MLA format for the material found, copyright restrictions if any, the cost of copying the material, and an abstract.
Quite a bit of frustration ensued, as students encountered common barriers to research: an historical society building was closed on the day a student drove an hour and a half to get there; the microfiche machine at the newspaper office was broken; an archivist didn’t take a pair of students seriously enough to help them find anything more than published books; groups of students couldn’t get their schedules to mesh. One student wrote in her research journal of a librarian whose attitude about the evictions was painfully clear: “She gave us the impression she felt the mountain people deserved to be put off the Blue Ridge, that they were destroying the trees and the land by living there. She had a semi-callous viewpoint towards the mountain people. While looking at some of the pictures she made a statement about a 10 or 11 yr old boy being allowed to smoke, about schooling for the children, etc. I really feel sorry for the mountain people. Some of the people I talk to make the statement they were better off after they were put off the mt. but by most accounts the mountain people felt they were doing o.k. before they got kicked out of their homes.” To their credit, the students persevered and, once a few major breakthroughs had occurred, they were hooked on the treasure-hunt nature of conducting local research. One student became fascinated with the county deeds and records office. Another pair of students stopped at a service station to ask for directions and ended up talking with an ex-mountain resident for four and a half hours who runs the place.
During the second part of the course, we shifted our focus to gathering information from university libraries, the SNP Archives, the State Historical Society, and the Library of Congress. The whole group took a field trip to the Library of Congress for a basic introduction. One student wrote in her research journal, “The Library of Congress was incredible. I had guessed it had to be very large, but I had never imagined how large! I guess I had always imagined that you could find anything there, so I was a little disappointed to discover that most of what I wanted to look at was at the Department of the Interior.”
Near the end of the summer session, after students had gathered and reviewed many sources of information about the evictions, we sent them to the park to pose as tourists and to find out what sort of information a typical tourist would gather about the evictions from park materials such as ranger-led talks, slide shows, and road-side markers. Students recorded their observations in their journals, and then shared their experiences with the class. One wrote, “I found 3 signs, which I copied, that referred to the residents who lived in the area before the park. One was about head butting and cussing contests. One referred to 400 families that had moved out when the park was established. It made no comment on how they moved. You would conclude from reading it that they moved voluntarily. There was also one that stated that the turkeys had been over-hunted and could not be found in the area at the time the park was established.”
The experience of visiting the park after conducting a summer’s worth of research helped illustrate for the students that history is a created narrative which can reflect the bias of the writer, the bias of the times, and the impact the writer wishes to make on an intended audience. Truths are not always self-evident, and sources need to be questioned before they are trusted. One student’s journal entry, written at 5:00 one morning in June, illustrates the questions the course raised: “Last night I was thinking about the whole picture of what happened with the Park, the mt. people and the big picture of it all is hard to settle the feelings inside. Parts of one wants to go on the defense for the people and what they perceive as was done to them. Part of me wants to think they were better off because their descendants went on to make something of their lives. I’m emotionally confused for them.”
While the students were conducting their research, Nicole and I were interviewing ex-mountain residents on video tape. Toward the end of the summer session, we showed students some of these interviews and discussed methods of gathering oral histories. A few student teams decided to conduct their own interviews on video tape; one was with Ken Steeber, the volunteer in charge of the SNP archives, and another was with Richard Nicholson, a man who remembers his family’s eviction from the park.
We conducted exit-interviews with each student and recorded these on video-tape; some of the testimony students gave us about the process of learning was downright moving. Teaching this course proved to me something I was already half-convinced of—namely, that community college students are entirely capable of doing serious research if their teachers take the time to show them how, and if they become engaged in a topic with local relevance. I believe we should invite students to join us as scholars, invite them to take part in projects where their contributions will be genuinely useful to both the community of scholars and their community at large.
Though by no means exhaustive, the research completed by my students in the summer of 1994 has been genuinely useful to me in a number of ways. The Children of the Shenandoah, a local group of descendants of ex-park residents, asked me to join them in a meeting with SNP officials in November of 1994. The report I submitted to the SNP on class and cultural bias in presentations of park history was based largely upon the findings of my students. I gave them due credit in the report’s introduction. I have twice been asked to speak at Children of Shenandoah meetings; the first time, I invited student Mona Dodson to accompany me and to discuss her own findings. The second time, I held a training session in conducting video-taped interviews. I applied for and received an NEH summer stipend to continue research on the evictions during the summer of 1995, and, in April of 1996, I was invited by Piedmont Virginia Community College to participate in their “Windows Series” of lectures; I gave a talk entitled, “Conflicting Interpretations: Images of the Mountaineers of Shenandoah.” This project and all of its offshoots have helped me redefine my role as a teacher and scholar; I feel best about my work when I am able to bring scholarship to the community and the community to scholarship.
Suzanne Crane is Assistant Professor of English at the Locust Grove campus of Germanna Community College. Funding for this project was provided by a professional development research grant from the Virginia Community College System. The author has been awarded a Chancellor's Commonwealth Professorship for 1997-1999.