Appalachian Figures
In the spring of 1940, a national newsmagazine sent a reporter into a narrow Kentucky valley where students hauled their own coal, scrubbed their own floors, and climbed stone steps to class on a hillside campus that seemed to grow straight out of the rock. Time called it a “school in Caney Valley” and told readers that the woman behind it all, Alice Spencer Geddes Lloyd, had turned an isolated creek in Knott County into a training ground for “mountain leaders.”
That snapshot caught Caney Creek Community Center and its junior college at mid life. By then the little corporation that began in a shack along Caney Creek had become an institution that mixed work study, strict rules, and a stubborn faith that the “leaders are here,” not somewhere out in the flatlands. The story, though, started decades earlier in New England and runs forward into the present archives, newsletters, and oral histories that keep Lloyd’s experiment alive on paper and tape.
This piece traces that arc and then points toward primary sources for anyone who wants to walk further down Purpose Road.
From Cambridge journalist to mountain reformer
Alice Spencer Geddes was born in Athol, Massachusetts, in 1876 and grew up in a family that soon moved to Boston. As a young woman she studied intermittently at Radcliffe College and found a home in reform journalism. By the late 1890s she was writing for the Cambridge Chronicle, where she helped launch a women edited supplement and later edited The Cambridge Press, a weekly paper with an all female staff that promoted suffrage and local reform.
Suffrage periodicals like The Woman’s Column noticed her work. One 1903 issue described “Miss Alice Spencer Geddes” explaining her experiences as editor and proprietor of a Cambridge paper and urging women to be original and fearless in print. That combination of journalism, women’s rights activism, and willingness to improvise with limited means would matter later on a Kentucky creek far from Boston.
By the early twentieth century Geddes’s health had deteriorated, and like many middle class invalids of the era she sought cleaner air and quieter surroundings. Her move to rural New Hampshire did not go smoothly. Searles’s biography and later reference works note friction with local leaders that left her isolated, in poor health, and searching for a new start.
The turning point came when she and her mother Ella Mary Bowker Geddes accepted an invitation to the Kentucky mountains. In 1916 they arrived in Knott County and settled first at Ivis, where they began offering simple health care, classes, and agricultural advice under the name Ivis Community Center.
“Pippapass” and the birth of Caney Creek Community Center
Within a year another figure stepped into the story. Abisha Johnson, a local farmer in the Caney Creek section, urged Mrs. Lloyd to come deeper into the hills. Later campus accounts and popular retellings describe him trudging over the ridges to ask her to teach his children and offering land and a cabin if she would move to his hollow.
In 1917 Alice Lloyd and her mother moved to Caney Creek. There they organized the Caney Creek Community Center, incorporated that same year as a nonprofit dedicated to the “spiritual, intellectual, social and physical welfare” of mountain youth.
Her early efforts were as much public health as schooling. Letters and later institutional histories describe campaigns for better sanitation, clean water, and hygiene. Lloyd promoted small “Dream Houses” two or three room cottages modeled on her own home, meant to show local families what a clean, well ventilated dwelling could look like.
Sometime in these early years she named her home “Pippa Passes” after Robert Browning’s verse drama. Donors from Browning societies had begun supporting the work, and the name signaled both literary inspiration and a link to those eastern benefactors. When the federal government established a post office there, it adopted the name Pippa Passes.
Outside observers picked up the story. In February 1923 the Manassas Journal in Virginia told its readers that “Pippapass” in Knott County served as the headquarters of the Caney Creek Community Center, organized seven years earlier by “Alice Spencer Geddes-Lloyd, a Boston newspaper woman.” That brief notice, in a small town paper hundreds of miles away, shows how quickly word of the experiment traveled through clubwomen’s networks and religious circles.
From creekside classrooms to Caney Junior College
From the start, Lloyd’s project blended settlement school work with something closer to a tiny college. She and local helpers organized elementary schools up and down Caney Creek, then across a wider swath of eastern Kentucky. Later accounts credit Lloyd and her future colleague June Buchanan with helping establish or support well over one hundred schools across the region, many of them church or community run but linked in spirit to Caney.
By 1923 the Caney Creek Community Center formally opened Caney Junior College in Pippa Passes, offering postsecondary courses designed to train “leaders for Appalachia.” The Kentucky Historical Society’s marker and later reference works fix those dates clearly: community center organized in 1917, junior college founded in 1923, and the college renamed for Alice Lloyd after her death in 1962.
Legally, the old community center never went away. Today the nonprofit Caney Creek Community Center, Inc., chartered in Kentucky and recognized by the IRS since the 1950s, still serves as the corporate umbrella for both Alice Lloyd College and the June Buchanan School.
On the ground the change meant more buildings along the narrow road that hugs Caney Creek. Historic photographs and later postcards show the Founder’s Shack, small dormitories, classroom buildings on stilts above the water, and eventually a science center and chapel. A Kentucky state historical marker at the shack reminds passersby that “in this shack was founded the Caney Creek Community Center” and that from here more than one hundred schools in eastern Kentucky were launched.
Work, faith, and the “Purpose Road”
Lloyd’s basic formula for the new junior college was simple but demanding. Every student worked. Every student followed strict rules. Every student was expected to return that education to the mountains. Time’s 1940 article described a campus where young men and women cleaned, cooked, farmed, and maintained buildings in exchange for tuition, while faculty and visitors lived spare lives in the valley.
Later institutional narratives boil that ethic down to a slogan that still appears on brochures and carved into stone: “The leaders are here.”
Lloyd and June Buchanan drew philosophical backing from Harvard ethicist George Herbert Palmer. His ideas about “the Purpose Road” shaped a campus program that asked students to think of their lives as a journey through action, duty, courage, and service toward a higher calling. The physical campus reflects that metaphor. Roads and walks carry names like Purpose Road, Action, and Service, and Pippa’s Song, the college newsletter, regularly revisits those themes in anniversary issues and donor stories.
In one centennial Pippa’s Song feature on the Caney Creek Community Center, student writers described the organization as a “beacon of hope and learning” for mountain youth and traced its growth from health campaigns and Dream Houses to classrooms, a college, and a preparatory school.
Making a national story out of a creek school
By the 1930s and 1940s Lloyd’s experiment had become a staple of club programs, church circles, and religious magazines far from eastern Kentucky. The Kansas City Browning Society, for example, kept detailed files on its support for Caney Creek, including newsletters from the community center and correspondence about a copy of Jerry Davis’s later book Miracle on Caney Creek. Their records, now at the State Historical Society of Missouri, offer a glimpse of how literary and religious groups in the Midwest adopted Pippa Passes as one of “their” missions.
Popular writers helped amplify that story. William S. Dutton’s 1954 narrative Stay On, Stranger presented a romanticized portrait of the campus and its founder based on extended visits, emphasizing sacrifice and grit. Jerry C. Davis’s Miracle on Caney Creek, published in 1982, built on institutional records and campus stories to frame Lloyd and Buchanan as a crusading pair who used “Purpose Road” philosophy, work study, and relentless fundraising to educate a generation of mountain leaders.
The biggest single burst of publicity came on 7 December 1955, when the NBC television program This Is Your Life devoted an episode to Alice Lloyd and her school. The show brought former students and donors onstage, retold the story of Abisha Johnson’s visit, and asked a national audience to help keep the college alive. Contemporary reports and later retellings agree that the broadcast brought in donations totaling roughly a quarter of a million dollars, at a time when the institution hovered near bankruptcy.
Those narratives helped sustain the school, but they also shaped how outsiders imagined the mountains: as a place of quaint poverty waiting to be “rescued” by a determined reformer from Boston.
“Dissension among the do gooders”
For most of the twentieth century, stories about Alice Lloyd followed that sentimental arc. Scholars began to complicate it in the 1990s. P. David Searles’s A College for Appalachia: Alice Lloyd on Caney Creek, published in 1995, remains the most important study. Drawing on the University of Kentucky’s Alice Lloyd Caney Creek Community Center Papers, institutional records in Pippa Passes, and dozens of interviews, Searles portrays Lloyd as both visionary and demanding, someone whose fierce independence generated conflicts as well as loyalty.
In his article “Dissension Among the Do Gooders,” Searles tracks criticisms from local residents, rival reformers, and some staff members who believed that Lloyd’s fundraising letters leaned too heavily on images of backwardness and that her governing style was too tightly controlled. Some ministers and neighbors resented the way national publicity seemed to center one woman’s story rather than local traditions of self help and mutual aid.
Those critiques do not erase the college’s impact. Instead they remind us that Caney Creek’s story is one of tension as well as generosity: between local and outside definitions of “uplift,” between donors’ expectations and mountain communities’ own priorities, and between a charismatic founder and the collaborative work that kept the Center running day to day.
Sources and further reading
Alice Lloyd Caney Creek Community Center Papers, 1915 to 1923, University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center (Lexington, Kentucky). Early correspondence, organizational records, and financial documents that trace the founding of the Caney Creek Community Center and its first years of operation. H-Net Networks
Caney Creek Community Center newsletters and bulletins. Mid twentieth century institutional newsletters, often cataloged under the subject heading “Caney Creek Community Center (Pippa Passes, Ky.) Periodicals,” survive in several libraries. A 1931 issue, for example, circulated far beyond Knott County and shows how the Center presented itself to donors. eBay
Time Magazine, “Education: School in Caney Valley,” 8 April 1940. National feature on the Caney Creek school that describes student work requirements, campus facilities, and local attitudes in vivid detail.
This Is Your Life, “Alice Lloyd” (NBC Television, 7 December 1955). Half hour episode that brought Lloyd, former students, and supporters onto the national stage and triggered a major fundraising surge. Clips and the full program are available online. Alice Lloyd College+1
Alice Lloyd’s manuscript history of the Caney Creek Community Center (1955), Alice Lloyd College Archives. Unpublished 221 page narrative written by Lloyd herself, used heavily by P. David Searles and other scholars. CORE
Appalachian Oral History Project collections. Interview tapes and transcripts housed at Alice Lloyd College, Lees College Campus of Hazard Community and Technical College, Appalachian State University, and Emory & Henry College. These interviews, conducted in the 1970s, record the voices of students, staff, and neighbors who experienced Caney Creek’s institutions firsthand. Appalachian Oral History+2National Agricultural Library+2
Pine Mountain Settlement School “Scrapbook Before 1929.” Clippings and ephemera, including 1925 press coverage of the Caney Creek Community Center, which show how other Appalachian reformers and journalists interpreted Lloyd’s work. Pine Mountain Settlement
Kansas City Browning Society Records, State Historical Society of Missouri. Correspondence, newsletters, and a copy of Miracle on Caney Creek with related letters that document sustained Browning Society patronage of Caney Creek and the Pippa Passes mythos. SHSMO Files
McGaw Library and Learning Center, Alice Lloyd College (Pippa Passes, Kentucky). Institutional archives including photographic collections, alumni files, the Appalachian Oral History Project, and an extensive vertical file on Alice Lloyd, June Buchanan, and Caney Creek. Alice Lloyd College
Pippa’s Song (Alice Lloyd College and June Buchanan School newsletter). Multi decade run of newsletters with anniversary essays, donor stories, and historical retrospectives on the Caney Creek Community Center and its founders. Alice Lloyd College+2Alice Lloyd College+2
P. David Searles, A College for Appalachia: Alice Lloyd on Caney Creek (University Press of Kentucky, 1995).The foundational scholarly study of Lloyd and her institution, based on extensive archival research and interviews. CORE
P. David Searles, “Dissension Among the Do Gooders: Alice Lloyd and Her Critics in Appalachia,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 93, no. 2 (1995): 180 to 206. Explores local tensions, criticism, and the politics of reform at Caney Creek. Kentucky History
Jerry C. Davis, Miracle on Caney Creek: June Buchanan Joins Alice Lloyd in a Crusade to Educate Kentucky Mountain Leaders (Thoroughbred Press / Caney Creek Community Center, 1982). A detailed insider narrative that highlights religious motivations and the Purpose Road philosophy. Google Books
William S. Dutton, Stay On, Stranger!: An Extraordinary Story of the Kentucky Mountains (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954). Earlier popular account, written during Lloyd’s lifetime, that helped introduce the school to a wide lay readership. Google Books+1
Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period (Belknap Press, 1980), entry on Alice Lloyd. Concise biographical sketch that places Lloyd in the wider world of Progressive Era women reformers. Encyclopedia
John R. Williams and Katherine R. Martin, “The Appalachian Oral History Project: Then and Now,” Provenance 2, no. 1 (1984). Overview of the AOHP that explains how Alice Lloyd College became a hub for collecting Appalachian voices. KSU Digital Commons+1
Christopher Beebout, “Alice Lloyd College,” ExploreKYHistory (Kentucky Historical Society). Historical marker entry that summarizes key dates and contextualizes the college within Kentucky history. Explore Kentucky History+1
Heather C. Watson, “Alice Lloyd College,” HerKentucky (2011). Personal but historically grounded reflection on Lloyd’s legacy in Knott County and on the college’s meaning for local families. Kentucky Life + Style + Travel Blog
Chatlos Foundation, “Alice Lloyd College” spotlight. Donor profile that reiterates the institution’s mission of “providing leadership for Appalachia” and notes its transition to senior college status in 1982. Chatlos