Appalachian History Series – Hindman Settlement School: Education, Music, and Community on Troublesome Creek
At the forks of Troublesome Creek in Knott County, a cluster of school buildings once looked like a small village in its own right. For generations of eastern Kentucky families, the place was more than a campus. It was a clinic, a community center, a farm, and a front porch where ballads and stories moved from one generation to the next. Since 1902, Hindman Settlement School has used education and culture to try to make mountain life more secure without asking people to give up their sense of place.
Today the school is best known for dyslexia tutoring, literary programs, foodways work, and its role in Appalachian arts. Its story, though, begins in handwritten diaries and early camp schools, in the decision of local families to invite outside reformers to their creek, and in the long paper trail that institution builders left behind.
Summers in the Kentucky mountains
The most intimate record of Hindman’s origins comes from the journals of its founders, Louisville reformers Katherine Pettit and May Stone. Before there was a campus at Hindman, there were summer schools and camps at places like Camp Cedar Grove near Hazard, Camp Industrial at Hindman, and Sassafras. The Pettit–Stone diaries from 1899 through 1902, preserved in Berea College’s Hindman Settlement School Collection, track the daily work that led into the decision to create a permanent settlement school at the forks of Troublesome Creek.
In those notebooks and in the published volume The Quare Women’s Journals, Stone and Pettit described riding or walking over poor roads to visit scattered homes, teaching classes in borrowed spaces, and trying to weave together hygiene lessons, sewing, and Bible readings with a respect for local songs and stories. They paid close attention to the children they met, to the condition of hillside farms, and to the lack of nearby graded schools.
A local farmer, Solomon “Uncle Sol” Everidge, turned their seasonal experiments into something more permanent. Later accounts from the school recall that Everidge invited the women to build on his land so his grandchildren and neighbors could have a school close enough to reach by foot and wagon. He understood that in a steep country, creeks and footpaths were the only reliable roads, and that education would not reach the poorer hollows without coming to them.
By 1902, Stone and Pettit and their supporters had turned this invitation into a formal institution. Hindman Settlement School opened that year beside Uncle Sol’s log house, which still stands on the edge of campus.
A new kind of rural school
Hindman was part of the Progressive Era settlement movement, but its founders adapted urban ideas to a rural, Appalachian setting. In cities, settlement houses were neighborhood centers planted in working class districts. At Hindman, the “neighborhood” covered miles of creek bottom and hillside farms.
From the beginning, Hindman functioned as both a day and boarding school, a health station, and a demonstration farm. Berea College’s Hindman Settlement School Records, along with annual reports, newsletters, and board minutes, document a program that blended classroom work with domestic science, gardening, and home demonstration visits. Staff and visiting nurses weighed babies, checked eyes and teeth, taught sanitation, and sometimes partnered with state agencies to bring basic health care into the mountains.
The Kentucky Historical Society’s roadside marker and related descriptions remember the school as the first rural social settlement school in the United States, founded by Kentuckians May Stone and Katherine Pettit to “provide an educational opportunity for the youth of the mountains” while keeping them mindful of their heritage. Hindman’s official mission statement today still echoes that same language, promising “education and service opportunities for people of the mountains, while keeping them mindful of their heritage.”
The Daughters of the American Revolution became key partners early on. By 1921 Hindman was one of a small group of DAR approved schools, a relationship that brought fundraising, volunteer labor, and national publicity to a place that remained physically remote.
Voices in the archives
One reason historians can tell Hindman’s story in such detail is the density of its records. Berea College’s Hutchins Library holds two major Hindman collections. The Hindman Settlement School Records, 1899 to 1979, preserve core institutional files: correspondence, board minutes, treasurer’s reports, enrollment records, newsletters, and photographs that reach from the first camps through the end of director Raymond McLain’s tenure. The companion Hindman Settlement School Collection includes the Pettit–Stone diaries, founders’ letters, progress reports sent to donors, ballad and folksong files, and biographical materials on longtime teachers and writers such as Ann Cobb, Lucy Furman, and Elizabeth Watts.
Those documents show how quickly the school’s work expanded. Early brochures and booklets, such as The Story of the Hindman Settlement School in the Kentucky Historical Society’s rare book holdings, describe branch schools at Owens Branch and Quicksand, farm and garden programs, and efforts to model new kinds of rural schooling for county leaders.
Hindman’s story also survives in sound. Berea College’s sound archives include Hindman related recordings that range from traditional ballads and play party songs to folk dancing and oral history. These audio collections document social events on campus, visiting musicians, and the way music was woven into everyday school life.
The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky preserves another layer. The Hindman Settlement School Oral History Project gathers interviews with alumni, former teachers, staff, and community members who reflect on classrooms, farm work, Christmas celebrations, and the ways the school shaped Knott County life beyond its gates. Other Nunn Center interviews, including the International Stage: McLain Family Band Oral History Project, tie Hindman’s mid twentieth century folk arts and music programs to the careers of musicians like Raymond W. and Ruth McLain, whose family lived and worked on campus.
“The best school in the mountains”
By the period that historian Jess Stoddart calls Hindman’s “golden age,” roughly 1915 through 1932, the school’s reputation for academic rigor, health work, and community outreach reached far beyond eastern Kentucky. Stoddart’s monograph Challenge and Change in Appalachia uses the school’s own files, photographs, and correspondence to trace how farm extension programs, home demonstration visits, and settlement style clubs linked Hindman to national conversations about rural reform.
Hindman’s own history page notes that the institution has often been called “the best school in the mountains,” and it is clear from reports and letters that supporters believed the experiment on Troublesome Creek could serve as a model. Students from Knott and neighboring counties studied reading, arithmetic, history, and geography alongside courses in gardening, sewing, carpentry, and music. Many boarded in campus houses and worked in the gardens or barns to help pay their way, learning as much from chores and community events as from their classroom lessons.
Lucy Furman, one of Hindman’s best known staff members, turned her experience into fiction. For roughly twenty years she lived and worked on campus, eventually building her cabin Oak Ledge on the hill above the school. The novelist Amy Clark has written about that cabin and its view over the Hindman campus, describing how Furman’s stories grew directly from daily life among students and staff in the 1910s and 1920s.
Music at Hindman
Music was central to both Hindman’s public image and its daily routines. From the earliest years, staff encouraged students to sing local songs along with temperance and patriotic pieces, and they welcomed outsiders who wanted to document the area’s music.
Loraine Wyman and her accompanist Howard Brockway were among the first systematic folksong collectors to visit eastern Kentucky. In 1916 they began their work at Pine Mountain Settlement School, then also collected at Hindman and elsewhere in the region. Their published collections Lonesome Tunes and Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs draw partly on performances by Hindman students and neighbors, and they credit the school as one of the places that opened doors and vouched for the visitors.
Cecil Sharp and his collaborator Maud Karpeles also passed through. Sharp’s 1917 Appalachian diary, digitized by the English Folk Dance and Song Society, includes entries from mid September for days spent at Hindman Settlement School. He noted both the repertoire and the social life he encountered there, and his later published descriptions of Kentucky square dances highlighted the influence of settlement schools.
Within the school itself, teachers like Ann Cobb and Josiah Combs collected and copied ballads from students and neighbors. Their manuscripts and clippings lie today in the Hindman collections at Berea, alongside later writings and teaching materials by James Still and other campus writers. Musicologist V. Chambers drew heavily on these materials and on Hindman’s own records in a 1973 article on “The Hindman Settlement School and Its Music,” which mapped how the school functioned as a hub for folk song study in the early twentieth century.
Health, agriculture, and community work
Hindman’s founders were as concerned with health and livelihoods as with reading and arithmetic. Institutional records and later histories describe a campus that included barns, gardens, and demonstration plots. Staff taught terracing and contour plowing to combat erosion, pushed for better sanitation in homes and schools, and ran a clinic that addressed eye diseases, hookworm, and other chronic problems that flourished in isolated communities.
Recent writing by Hindman’s flood recovery archivist Sarah Insalaco has highlighted how that early agricultural work laid groundwork for the school’s modern foodways program. Her “Teaching through the Land” essay connects Pettit and Stone’s insistence on school gardens to twenty first century efforts to support small farming, seed saving, and local food in Knott County.
Community life at Hindman has long extended beyond enrolled students. Christmas plays, pageants, and campus gatherings brought in whole families. Oral histories collected by the Kentucky Oral History Commission and partner institutions include memories of holiday events, health clinics, and short courses that drew people from across the Troublesome Creek valley.
Challenge and change in a new century
Like many institutions rooted in the Progressive Era, Hindman has faced periods of strain and reinvention. Stoddart’s Challenge and Change in Appalachia traces how the school struggled through the Great Depression, adjusted to the rise of public high schools, and debated its role once state systems began to reach deeper into the mountains.
By the later twentieth century the boarding school model faded. Hindman increasingly turned toward specialized educational programs, especially for children with dyslexia, and toward arts and cultural work that could not easily happen in standard classrooms. Today the school describes itself as a “beacon for progressive learning, community enrichment, and cultural exploration” that addresses literacy, food insecurity, and access to traditional arts across central Appalachia.
The literary side of that work is especially visible. Since the 1970s Hindman has hosted the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, which has brought generations of poets, novelists, and essayists to the creek. The school’s grounds hold the graves of writer James Still and teacher Elizabeth Watts, while the chapel and hillside houses serve as gathering spaces for readings, discussions, and classes.
Music and dance programs also continued into the era of bluegrass and beyond. The McLain Family Band, whose patriarch Raymond K. McLain served as director, became a symbol of how Hindman’s combination of traditional arts and formal schooling could send Appalachian performers onto an international stage without cutting their ties to home. Their story is documented not only in Berea’s McLain Family Band Records and Hindman files, but in a dedicated Nunn Center oral history project that tracks their memories of Christmas Country Dance School, campus life, and touring.
Troublesome Creek flooded
In late July 2022, the same geography that once made Hindman a natural meeting place turned dangerous. Torrential rains produced catastrophic flooding on Troublesome Creek and across several eastern Kentucky counties. The Hindman campus took several feet of water in multiple buildings.
Narratives in the school’s own Troublesome Rising digital anthology describe water climbing over the footbridge, workshop participants sheltering together in Stucky House, and staff trying to move archives and equipment upstairs as the creek forced open steel doors in the Mike Mullins Center. Photographs taken in the weeks after show debris piled along campus roads, damaged housing, and the muddy outlines of water levels on stone and siding.
Archivists, staff, volunteers, and partner institutions responded quickly. Hindman became a shelter and distribution center even as teams worked to dry documents, salvage photographs, and stabilize artifacts. Updates on the school’s archives blog have chronicled slow progress in cleaning and rehousing material, along with the arrival of AmeriCorps NCCC crews and volunteer weekends focused on rebuilding trails and preserving records.
The flood tied Hindman’s modern story to older themes. It highlighted the vulnerability of creek side communities to environmental change and extraction related erosion. It also underscored the value of the paper and photographic record preserved in campus archives and at Berea. Those materials now help communities remember earlier floods and storms, and they give context to twenty first century debates about land use, climate, and justice.
Hindman’s place in Appalachian history
Hindman Settlement School’s survival into the present is unusual among early settlement schools. Pine Mountain Settlement School and a handful of others share that distinction, but many once similar institutions closed or transformed beyond recognition in the later twentieth century.
For historians, Hindman’s significance lies in several overlapping roles. It was the first rural social settlement school in America and a model for other Appalachian institutions. It served as a site of folk song and dance collecting that helped shape outside understandings of mountain culture, for good and ill. It offered formal and informal education, health care, and community development in an era when state systems barely touched Knott County. It became a center for Appalachian literature and arts through its writers’ workshop and residencies.
The school is also one of the best documented institutions in the region. Anyone tracing its story can draw on the Pettit–Stone diaries, institutional records, newsletters, photographs, and ballad files at Berea; on oral histories preserved at the Nunn Center and the Kentucky Historical Society; on published sources like The Quare Women’s Journals and Challenge and Change in Appalachia; and on Hindman’s own online histories and archival updates.
At the same time, Hindman remains a living place. Children still cross the bridge over Troublesome Creek to attend dyslexia tutoring and summer programs. Writers still gather on the hill above the valley. Garden plots still track the seasons. For more than a century, that continuity of work has tied the school’s present to a past that can be read in letters, ledgers, songs, and flood stained photographs. Hindman’s history is not only a record of one institution but a window into how communities in central Appalachia have tried to educate their young, preserve their culture, and face change on their own terms.
Sources & Further Reading
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. Hindman Settlement School Records, 1899-1979. Berea College, Berea, KY. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/522.
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. Hindman Settlement School Collection, 1899-1977. Berea College, Berea, KY. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/386.
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. “Pettit-Stone Diaries, 1899-1902,” in Hindman Settlement School Collection. Berea College, Berea, KY. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/archival_objects/57331.
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. Katherine Pettit Papers, 1899-1937. Berea College, Berea, KY. https://bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/388.
Stoddart, Jess. Challenge and Change in Appalachia: The Story of Hindman Settlement School. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_education_in_appalachian_region/3/.
Stone, May, Katherine Pettit, and Jess Stoddart, ed. The Quare Women’s Journals: May Stone and Katherine Pettit’s Summers in the Kentucky Mountains and the Founding of the Hindman Settlement School. Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1997. https://archive.org/details/quarewomensjourn0000ston.
Chambers, Virginia. “The Hindman Settlement School and Its Music.” Journal of Research in Music Education 21, no. 2 (Summer 1973): 135-44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3344589.
Wyman, Loraine, and Howard Brockway. Lonesome Tunes: Folk Songs from the Kentucky Mountains. New York: H. W. Gray, 1916. https://archive.org/details/lonesometunesfol00unse.
Wyman, Loraine, and Howard Brockway. Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs. Boston: Oliver Ditson Company, 1920. https://archive.org/details/20KentuckyMountainSongs.
Sharp, Cecil. “Diary, 1917: Hindman Settlement School Entries, September 18-24, 1917.” In Cecil Sharp’s Appalachian Diaries. English Folk Dance and Song Society. https://www.efdss.org/vwml-digitised-resources/cecil-sharps-appalachian-diaries/13008-sharpdiary1917.
Hindman Settlement School. “About.” Hindman Settlement School. Accessed January 2026. https://hindman.org/about/.
Hindman Settlement School. “Teaching through the Land.” Historical update by Sarah Insalaco, Flood Recovery Archivist, June 10, 2025. https://hindman.org/2025/06/10/teaching-through-the-land/.
Hindman Settlement School. “News and Updates: Archive Recovery and AmeriCorps NCCC Posts.” Various entries by Sarah Insalaco and staff, 2024-2025. https://hindman.org/news-and-updates/.
Hindman Settlement School. “Appalachian Writers’ Workshop.” Hindman Settlement School. Accessed January 2026. https://hindman.org/workshop/.
Kentucky Historical Society. “Hindman Settlement School.” Kentucky Historical Marker Database. https://history.ky.gov/markers/hindman-settlement-school.
KET Education. “Settlement Schools of Appalachia.” Kentucky Educational Television. https://education.ket.org/resources/settlement-schools-appalachia/.
Palencia, Elaine. “The Literary Heritage of Hindman Settlement School.” ElainePalencia.com. https://www.elainepalencia.com/the_literary_heritage_of_hindman_settlement_school_132577.htm.
Hansel, Patricia. “Sustaining a Movement through Appalachian Writers Workshops.” Paper presented at the Appalachian Studies Association Conference, 2018. https://mds.marshall.edu/asa_conference/2018/accepted_proposals/156/.
Mountain Association. “Appalachia’s New Day: Literary Tradition in Eastern Kentucky.” October 14, 2019. https://mtassociation.org/communities/literary-tradition/.
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “Hindman Settlement School Oral History Project.” Kentucky Oral History Commission and University of Kentucky Libraries. https://www.kentuckyoralhistory.org/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=140&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=Hindman+Settlement+School.
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “International Stage: McLain Family Band Oral History Project.” University of Kentucky Libraries. Example interview: “Interview with Raymond W. McLain, December 6, 2022.” https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark%3A/16417/xt7n8jqjw6wst.
Helton, Melissa, ed. Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2024. https://www.kentuckypress.com/9781950564439/troublesome-rising/.
Hindman Settlement School. “Troublesome Rising Digital Anthology.” Fireside Industries, 2025. https://hindman.org/fireside/titles/troublesome-rising/troublesome-rising-digital-anthology/.
Kentucky Lantern. “‘Troublesome Rising’ Story Doesn’t End When the Water Crashes into the House.” October 21, 2024. https://kentuckylantern.com/2024/10/21/troublesome-rising-story-doesnt-end-when-the-water-crashes-into-the-house/.
DAR Blog. “DAR Schools Tour: Hindman Settlement School.” Daughters of the American Revolution, October 7, 2013. https://blog.dar.org/dar-schools-tour-hindman-settlement-school.
KET. “The Local Honeys, Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, and Roadside Theater.” Kentucky Life, PBS. https://www.pbs.org/video/the-local-honeys-appalachian-writers-TdSlVg/.
Author Note: As a historian working in the Kentucky mountains, I am drawn to institutions like Hindman that braid together education, music, and community life. I hope this overview helps you see the school at Troublesome Creek as both a carefully kept archive and a living place in Appalachian history.