Appalachian History Series – Pine Mountain Settlement School: A Mountain School on the Crest of Change
High on the north slope of Pine Mountain in Harlan County, Kentucky, a narrow valley opens just enough for a campus of stone and timber buildings, gardens, and fields. Since 1913, Pine Mountain Settlement School has watched over that valley and the families who live along Isaac’s Run, Shell Run, and Greasy Creek. It began as a boarding school for mountain children and a social center for their communities. Today it is a National Historic Landmark and an environmental education center that still treats the mountain itself as a classroom.
The story of Pine Mountain is not only a story about a school. It is also about one family’s gift of land, women reformers who carried the ideas of the settlement movement into the Kentucky uplands, and generations of students who learned to read, farm, sing, and organize together on the spine of the Cumberland border.
Uncle William’s Mountain
The settler most closely tied to the school’s beginning was “Uncle” William Creech Sr., a Civil War era native of Harlan County who moved his young family to the head of Greasy Creek in the late nineteenth century. In his brief autobiography he remembered buying several hundred acres of “wild land” on the north side of Pine Mountain and working off the debt through day labor and careful farming.
Creech worried that his neighbors’ children had almost no chance at a sustained education. The closest schools were seasonal, short term, and easily disrupted by weather, farm work, or family need. In his letters he wrote that he was less interested in his people becoming wealthy than in building “bright and intelligent” young people with better choices than the cycles of poverty, disease, and violence that he saw around him.
By the 1910s he had decided that his land should carry that hope. William and his wife Sally Dixon Creech, remembered by students and workers as “Aunt Sal,” agreed to deed a large tract on the mountain to establish a boarding school that would belong to the local people as long as the United States endured.
Bringing the Settlement Movement to a Kentucky Ridge
To turn land and hope into a functioning institution, Uncle William looked beyond the Pine Mountain valley. His search led him to Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, where Kentucky reformer Katherine Pettit had already spent a decade adapting urban settlement work to rural Appalachia.
Creech asked Pettit to bring a similar school to his side of the mountain and promised land, timber, labor, and whatever cash his neighbors could spare. Pettit agreed and joined forces with Ethel de Long, a New Jersey teacher and Smith College graduate who had already worked with her at Hindman. In 1913 Pettit and de Long followed the crooked roads into Harlan County and opened Pine Mountain Settlement School with a handful of pupils, an open-sided shelter known as the “House in the Woods,” and borrowed buildings and tents for housing.
The founders wanted more than a simple one-room school. Their charter called for “industrial, intellectual and moral training” shaped by Christian ideals but not locked to any denomination. The campus would be a place where academic work, farm labor, handicrafts, and community life were deliberately woven together.
Stone, Timber, and a Planned Mountain Campus
Even in its earliest years, Pine Mountain looked different from the scattered log schoolhouses of the region. Pettit and de Long asked Kansas City architect Mary Rockwell Hook to design a master plan for the campus. Hook, one of the earliest American women to train in architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, worked with the founders and local people to fit buildings to the land.
Hook and the Creeches decided that the lower open land in the valley would be reserved for farming while public buildings and cottages climbed the gentle rise toward the mountain wall. A network of footpaths and wagon roads tied together classroom buildings, dormitories, a dining and community hall, barns, and workshops. Stone foundations and chimneys anchored wooden walls, and steep roofs often echoed the ridge line above.
For many years the campus itself was one of the best teachers. Children who arrived with little experience of large institutions learned how a community could plan, build, and maintain shared spaces, from the chapel and library to the gardens and the dairy herd.
Italian stonemason Luigi Zande, who later married Ethel de Long, played a central role in turning Hook’s drawings into reality. Zande and his crews of local workers and students quarried stone, cut timber, and raised some of the most distinctive buildings on campus, including the stone chapel and reservoir.
Boarding School for Mountain Children, 1913–1930
In its first phase Pine Mountain served elementary and middle school children, many of whom boarded on campus for most of the year. The school day combined classroom instruction with a structured work program. Students helped cook, clean, tend livestock, and maintain the grounds. Their labor kept the school running and was also meant to teach responsibility and cooperation.
In letters and circulars that staff mailed to donors, sometimes titled “Dear Friend,” workers described the details of that life: girls learning sewing and home nursing, boys studying carpentry and farming, and all students participating in music, drama, and folk dancing. The school’s own magazine, Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School, carried updates about harvests, new buildings, and the slow progress of road construction over the mountain. These publications, preserved in the school’s archive and at Berea College, now read like a running diary of daily life on a remote educational frontier.
The founders believed that the school should not stand apart from its neighbors. Staff established extension programs that supported small one-room schools farther up the creeks and invited local families to the campus for festivals, health clinics, and “community days.” As early as the 1910s and 1920s Pine Mountain regularly hosted Christmas gatherings, pageants, and mountain dances that drew people from both sides of the ridge.
Big Laurel, Line Fork, and the Wider Valley
One of the boldest experiments to grow out of Pine Mountain’s early decades was the network of medical and educational outposts that staff tried to launch in surrounding hollows. At Big Laurel on Greasy Creek, several miles from the main campus, the school helped establish a medical settlement staffed by a resident nurse and visiting physicians. The prospectus for Big Laurel described families walking or riding rough mountain paths for treatment and education at the clinic and school there.
To the east, on Line Fork, the school supported another extension center that combined teaching, social work, and community organizing. Records preserved at Berea College show how staff kept notes on Line Fork programs, from children’s clubs to adult cooperation projects. Photographs of these centers, as well as letters and reports, document an effort to stretch the settlement idea well beyond the main campus.
Through these outposts Pine Mountain became more than a single school. It became a regional network of educators, nurses, and local leaders experimenting with new ways to connect isolated families to education and health care without asking them to abandon their home places.
A Mountain High School and the Guidance Movement
In 1930 Pine Mountain shifted from an elementary boarding school to a boarding high school. The new program added more advanced academic offerings while keeping strong work and arts components. It also made the school an important route into higher education and professional work for mountain teenagers who might otherwise have stopped their schooling after a few grades.
During the 1930s Pine Mountain became a laboratory for new ideas about vocational guidance and rural youth work. The Pine Mountain Guidance Institute brought in national experts and local teachers to study how to help young people navigate schooling, work, and citizenship. Handbooks and reports from these institutes, preserved in the school’s records, show educators wrestling with questions that still echo today: how to balance local culture with outside expectations, how to prepare students for both local livelihoods and distant opportunities, and how to measure success in a community where cash wages were not the only measure of value.
At the same time the campus became a hub for New Deal era projects. In 1937 a pack horse library, part of the Works Progress Administration, used Pine Mountain as a base to carry books and magazines across steep trails to families and schools that had no other regular access to reading material.
Roads, Land, and the Fight Over the Mountain
For years the road to Pine Mountain was a narrow, twisting trace, barely passable in bad weather. From the beginning the founders saw improved transportation as essential. Staff, students, and neighbors lobbied for a real road over the mountain that would tie the school to Harlan, the railroad, and the wider world. The campaign took decades, but correspondence and committee reports in the school’s Land Use and Built Environment files show how closely the push for roads was tied to larger questions about land ownership, coal development, and community control.
Those same records trace Pine Mountain’s evolving stance toward the environment. Early on, staff promoted more “modern” farming practices and helped families secure better livestock and seed. By the mid twentieth century, as strip mining and mechanization transformed Harlan County, Pine Mountain workers began to speak about erosion, timber loss, and the long-term damage caused by unregulated extraction. Petitions on “Lands Unsuitable for Mining” and later environmental surveys reveal a mountain school slowly becoming an environmental advocate.
Songs, Stories, and the Sound of the Campus
From its earliest days Pine Mountain was known as a place where old songs and stories were not only preserved but also performed and studied. Folk music collectors Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway began some of their Kentucky song collecting around Pine Mountain in the 1910s before traveling to other counties. Their work helped draw national attention to the ballads and dance tunes that local families already knew by heart.
The school itself published its own songbooks and calendars, such as Song Ballads and Other Songs of the Pine Mountain Settlement School and the “Year of Song” calendar that paired monthly folk songs with campus scenes.
In the 1930s and 1940s fieldworkers from the Library of Congress, including Alan and Elizabeth Lomax, recorded traditional singers at Pine Mountain. Those recordings, now part of the American Folklife Center in Washington, D.C., capture students and neighbors singing centuries-old ballads alongside religious songs and newer pieces that had already traveled the radio circuits of the South.
Later collectors and teachers continued that work. A 2003 collection of traditional songs and ballads from Pine Mountain, for example, shows how mid twentieth century students and workers carried the school’s musical legacy forward long after the original founders had passed.
Today photographs of community sings, May Day dances, and Christmas plays in the Pine Mountain archives allow descendants to see grandparents and great-grandparents in motion on the chapel steps and in Laurel House, frozen mid step in reels and square dances that defined campus life.
Community School and Environmental Center
In 1949 Pine Mountain entered a new phase when it partnered with the Harlan County school system to operate an elementary school on campus. The boarding high school closed and the institution became a community school where local children attended as day students. This arrangement lasted into the early 1970s, when public schooling was reorganized and Pine Mountain faced the question of what to do next.
The answer grew from the land itself. Staff and trustees chose to refocus the school as a center for environmental education and cultural programming. Today children from across Kentucky come to Pine Mountain for day or week-long programs in ecology, history, and Appalachian traditions. Adults attend workshops on folk arts, nature study, and historic preservation. The campus also hosts community events, from weddings in the stone chapel to regional music gatherings.
The designation of the campus as a National Historic Landmark in 1991 recognized both its architectural significance and its importance as an early experiment in Progressive era rural reform. The nomination notes forty-odd contributing buildings and structures and highlights the role of women like Pettit and Hook in shaping a nationally significant mountain institution.
Finding Pine Mountain in the Archives
For researchers and family historians, Pine Mountain is now one of the best-documented rural communities in the central Appalachians. The school’s own online archive, built over many volunteer hours, offers access to digitized photographs, finding aids, staff and community biographies, and full-text transcriptions of letters, reports, and booklets such as Mary Rogers’s The Pine Mountain Story, 1913–1980.
Berea College’s Southern Appalachian Archives preserve microfilmed copies of institutional records, extension center files, and photographic collections, including the Pine Mountain Settlement School Records and Collections that cover most of the twentieth century.
Beyond those core collections, the Pine Mountain story spills into other repositories. The Kentucky Historical Society holds C. Frank Dunn’s photographs of the campus and the surrounding mountains. Oral history projects capture the voices of former students and neighbors. The Library of Congress houses the Lomax recordings. University archives as far away as New Hampshire and Brown University hold the papers of song collectors and staff whose paths crossed the school.
For descendants of students, teachers, and neighbors, these archives offer far more than institutional history. They restore faces to family stories, fix dates to old memories, and show how one mountain valley connected, often unexpectedly, to national currents in education, social work, music, and environmental thought.
A Mountain School That Still Looks Forward
More than a century after Uncle William first imagined a school on his land, Pine Mountain Settlement School still stands where Isaac’s Run and Shell Run meet and climb toward the gap. Its mission has changed over time, but the core idea that education, community, and land belong together has endured.
On a quiet evening the stone chapel can feel like a vessel for those overlapping histories, from early boarders who walked out in rows after services to today’s school groups who spend their days measuring stream chemistry or identifying spring wildflowers. The buildings that Hook and Zande imagined, the songs that students carried down from nearby hollows, the petitions families signed to protect their ridge tops, and the letters that donors read in far-off cities all belong to a single, complicated story of a mountain community trying to educate its children without abandoning its place.
Pine Mountain Settlement School remains one of the clearest windows into how that work looked and felt over the span of a long Appalachian century, and its archives ensure that new generations can keep asking questions of the mountain and of themselves.
Sources & Further Reading
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Archive: Index to Series and Guides.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/archive-pine-mountain-settlement-school/archive-index-to-series-and-guides/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Archive PMSS and Berea College: PMSS Archive and Other Related Collections.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/archive-pine-mountain-settlement-school/archive-pmss-and-berea-college-pmss-archive-and-other-related-collections/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “BIBLIOGRAPHY Pine Mountain Settlement School.” Series 40: Bibliography. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “BIBLIOGRAPHY Settlement Schools Southern Appalachians.” Bibliographies Guide. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-settlement-schools-southern-appalachians/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. The History of the Pine Mountain Settlement School. Pine Mountain, Harlan Co., KY, January 1916. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. The History of the Pine Mountain Settlement School: The Clothing of an Idea with Substance. [Pine Mountain, KY, 1918]. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Pine Mountain Settlement School, Inc. [S.l.: s.n., 1918]. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Pine Mountain Settlement School, Pine Mountain, Harlan Co., Kentucky. [Pine Mountain, KY: The School, 1937?]. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Wilson, E. K. A Pine Mountain Study in Civics. Pine Mountain, KY: Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1937. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Findings of the Pine Mountain Guidance Institute Held at Pine Mountain Settlement School, Pine Mountain, Harlan County, Kentucky, August 20–26, 1939. [Pine Mountain, 1939]. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Handbook of the Pine Mountain Guidance Institute. Pine Mountain, KY, 1939–. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Experiences in Consumer Cooperation at Pine Mountain Settlement School, Pine Mountain, Harlan County, Kentucky. [Pine Mountain, 1941]. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Rogers, Mary, for Pine Mountain Settlement School. The Pine Mountain Story, 1913–1980. Pine Mountain, KY: Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1980. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School. Pine Mountain, KY: The School, 191– . https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Song Ballads and Other Songs of the Pine Mountain Settlement School. [S.l.: s.n., 1923]; reprint Viper, KY: Graphic Arts Press, 1976. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Atkins-Pope, Clara. Traditional Songs & Ballads of Pine Mountain Settlement School. [S.l.: s.n.], 2003. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Chase, Richard, and Dorothy Nace. “A Year of Song”: Pine Mountain Calendar, 1952, with Twelve Folk Songs from the Southern Highlands. Pine Mountain, Harlan County, KY: Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1952. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Pine Mountain Album, 1913–1963. [Pine Mountain, KY?, 1963]. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Smith, Frances, and Rockwell Smith. That Most Precious Gift: A Play for Christmas. Pine Mountain, KY: Printed by students of Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1941. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Day, Carrie. The Love They Gave: A Tribute to Miss Katharine Pettit and Miss Ethel DeLong, Founders of Pine Mountain Settlement School, Pine Mountain, Harlan County, Kentucky. [S.l.: s.n.], 1982. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Built Environment – Guide to the Built Environment at Pine Mountain Settlement School.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/histories/guide-built-environment/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Land Use – Guide to Land Use at Pine Mountain Settlement School.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/histories/guide-land-use/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Pine Mountain Early Days Photographs, ca. 1900–ca. 1920.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?s=%22Pine+Mountain+Early+Days+Photographs%22
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Buildings and Campus Photographs, 1913–ca. 1979.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?s=%22Buildings+and+Campus+Photographs%22
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Big Laurel and Line Fork Extension Centers Photographs, ca. 1920–ca. 1942.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?s=%22Big+Laurel+and+Line+Fork+Extension+Centers+Photographs%22
Kentucky Historical Society. “Pine Mountain Settlement School, Harlan County, Kentucky (C. Frank Dunn Photographs).” Kentucky Historical Society Digital Collections. https://kyhistory.pastperfectonline.com/ (search “Pine Mountain Settlement School C. Frank Dunn”).
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Directors’ Office Files, 1911–1949.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Records and Papers. Berea College Special Collections and Archives. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Board of Trustees, 1913–1983.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Records and Papers. Berea College Special Collections and Archives. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Student Records, ca. 1919–1949.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Records and Papers. Berea College Special Collections and Archives. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Religion – Records of Church Memberships, Baptisms, Weddings; Statements of Belief at Pine Mountain Settlement School.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?s=%22RELIGION+PMSS%22
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “BIOGRAPHY A–Z – Guides to Workers, Community Families, and Visitors.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/biography/biography-a-z/
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Guide to Audio Recordings – MULTIMEDIA.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?s=%22Guide+to+Audio+Recordings%22
Kentucky Oral History Commission. “Callie McQueen Interview, October 10, 1986.” Pass the Word: Kentucky Oral History Finding Aids, Kentucky Historical Society / Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/
Kentucky Oral History Commission. “Alvin Boggs Interview, January 3, 1983.” Pass the Word: Kentucky Oral History Finding Aids, Kentucky Historical Society / Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/
Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. “Alan and Elizabeth Lomax Kentucky Recordings – Pine Mountain Settlement School.” Lomax Collections. https://www.loc.gov/collections/alan-and-elizabeth-lomax-collection/about/
Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. “Lomax Kentucky Collection – Catalog Records and Audio for Pine Mountain Settlement School.” American Folklife Center Collections. https://www.loc.gov/collections/alan-lomax-in-the-southern-states
National Park Service. Pine Mountain Settlement School National Historic Landmark Nomination. Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1991. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/78001337_text
Kentucky Historical Society. “Pine Mountain Settlement School (Historical Marker #2387).” ExploreKYHistory. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/909
Hudson, Karen. “Pine Mountain Settlement School.” SAH Archipedia. Society of Architectural Historians. https://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/KY-01-HL14
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. “Pine Mountain Settlement School Records and Papers, 1864–1984 (bulk 1913–1949).” Southern Appalachian Archives, Hutchins Library, Berea College. https://libraryguides.berea.edu/SAA_PMSS
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. “Pine Mountain Settlement School Collection, 1913–1975.” Southern Appalachian Archives, Hutchins Library, Berea College. https://libraryguides.berea.edu/SAA_PMSS
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. “Settlement Institutions of Appalachia Records, 1970–1982.” Southern Appalachian Archives, Hutchins Library, Berea College. https://libraryguides.berea.edu/sia
Brown University Library. “Loraine Wyman Papers and Music Collections.” Brown University Library Collections. https://search.library.brown.edu (search “Loraine Wyman Pine Mountain”).
Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. “Edmund Wilson Papers – Correspondence with Pine Mountain Settlement School Director Glyn Morris.” Yale Finding Aids. https://archives.yale.edu/
Harvard University Library. “Archival Collections – World War I: Helen Hatch Babson Papers.” Harvard Library Research Guides. https://guides.library.harvard.edu/WWI_archival
Greene, James S. Progressives in the Kentucky Mountains: The Formative Years of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1913–1930. PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1981. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
McQuillen, Marly Hazen. “Pine Mountain: Community at the Crossroads of Appalachia.” MA thesis, University of Memphis, 2014. https://tamarackfoundation.org/directorylisting/marly-hazen-ynigues/
Fesak, Mary C. “‘The Ideals of Pine Mountain’: Gender, Progressive Thought, and the Built Environment at Pine Mountain Settlement School.” Honors project, University of Mary Washington, 2016. https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/41/
Jurgens, Eloise H. Southern Appalachian Settlement Schools as Early Initiators of Integrated Services. EdD diss., East Tennessee State University, 1996. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2747
Guthrie, Catherine Sabina. Progressives in the Eastern Kentucky Mountains: Hindman and Pine Mountain Settlement Schools, 1889–1930. 1991. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Blackwell, Deborah L. “The Maternalist Politics of Road Construction at Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1900–1935.” Appalachian Journal 37, no. 3–4 (Spring/Summer 2010): 226–241. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40934466
Blackwell, Deborah L. “A Murder in the Kentucky Mountains: Pine Mountain Settlement School and Community Relations in the 1920s.” In Searching for Their Places: Women in the South Across Four Centuries, edited by Thomas H. Appleton Jr. and Angela Boswell, 196–217. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. https://www.bibliovault.org/BV.book.epl?ISBN=9780826214683
Reynolds, Nicole. “The Pine Mountain Settlement School Centennial Photography Exhibit.” Appalachian Heritage 41, no. 3 (2013): 113. https://doi.org/10.1353/aph.2013.0090
Whitaker, Janet, and George Ella Lyon. Settlement Schools of Appalachia. Lexington, KY: Kentucky Educational Television, 1995. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/bibliographies/bibliographies-guide/bibliography-pine-mountain-settlement-school/
Kentucky Educational Television (KET). Settlement Schools of Appalachia. Documentary film, 60 minutes. Kentucky Educational Television, 1995. https://education.ket.org/resources/settlement-schools-appalachia/
Whisnant, David E. All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. https://uncpress.org/book/9780807842884/all-that-is-native-and-fine/
Wikipedia contributors. “Pine Mountain Settlement School.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Mountain_Settlement_School
Wikipedia contributors. “Settlement School.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_school
Author Note: Pine Mountain Settlement School has always felt close to home for me, both as a Harlan Countian and as a historian. I hope this piece gives you a clearer sense of how one mountain campus has shaped, and been shaped by, the communities around it for more than a century.