Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Ethel de Long Zande of Harlan, Kentucky
On winter evenings at Pine Mountain Settlement School, the lights in the Chapel still dim for the Nativity Play. Students and neighbors move quietly into place, scripture and carols weave together, and for an hour the Harlan County hills hold a story that has been told in the same clear mountain cadence for more than a century.
That simple script was written by a woman who arrived in eastern Kentucky as an outsider from New Jersey and chose to stay. In her letters, articles, and school reports, she tried to put mountain people on the page in a way that did not flatten them into stereotypes or sentimental pictures. Her name was Ethel Marguerite de Long Zande, and for fifteen years she shared the work of building Pine Mountain Settlement School from an uncle’s hill farm into one of Appalachia’s most influential institutions.
From Montclair to the mountains
Ethel de Long was born on October 20, 1879, in Montclair, New Jersey, to George and Arabella M. de Long. Her father and younger sister were often in poor health, and even as a teenager she carried much of the family’s caregiving burden.
When she entered Smith College in 1897, she refused to leave them behind. The family uprooted their home and moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, so that she could study and still look after them under the same roof. To stay in school she juggled loan funds, tutoring, and teaching at Easthampton High School while keeping up with a full course load.
She graduated from Smith in 1901 and stepped immediately into public school classrooms, first at Central High School in Springfield, Massachusetts, then at Manual Training High School in Indianapolis. Former students and colleagues remembered an English teacher who pushed her classes into argument and discussion instead of quiet recitation, a habit that shows up again later in her mountain writing and in the community meetings she chaired at Pine Mountain.
“Doings on Troublesome” and the Hindman years
Ethel’s life changed when she followed a growing network of women reformers into the southern mountains. Around 1910 she visited the Women’s Christian Temperance Union Settlement School at Hindman in Knott County, founded earlier in the decade by May Stone and Katherine Pettit. Before long they invited her to stay as principal.
From the first, she treated Hindman not only as a place to work but also as a subject to be studied. In “Doings on Troublesome,” published in the Smith Alumnae Quarterly in 1911, she described the settlement on Troublesome Creek for alumnae who had never seen eastern Kentucky. Spinning wheels still stood on porches, women wove coverlids descended from old English patterns, and the daily round of school, worship, and farm chores moved at a pace that startled visitors used to city time.
She followed it with “Mountain Manners,” another essay for the Smith alumnae audience. There she tried to overturn the easy assumption that the “fetched on” teacher would naturally bring better manners than the people she met in the hills. Her examples of unannounced guests at the dinner table and frank questions about age and family have since become some of the most quoted descriptions of Appalachian hospitality.
The Hindman years also sharpened her sense that any school worthy of the mountains had to be more than a set of classrooms. It needed to be a community center, a place where health, work, worship, and play met. That idea, tested on Troublesome Creek, would shape everything she later did at Pine Mountain.
Founding Pine Mountain Settlement School
In 1912 Ethel left Hindman with Katherine Pettit to begin a new experiment across the ridges in Harlan County. Local farmer and Civil War veteran William Creech had been looking for partners who would use his land at the head of Greasy Creek for a school that would “help the people help themselves.” His gift of more than ninety acres became the physical foundation for Pine Mountain Settlement School, incorporated in 1913.
From the beginning, Pettit and de Long divided the work. Pettit carried much of the outdoor and agricultural program. Ethel took charge of academic and industrial education, finances, personnel, and a great share of the writing that kept donors, friends, and alumnae informed.
She also helped shape the campus itself. In 1913 she invited Kansas City architect Mary Rockwell Hook to design a master plan that would follow the slope of the land instead of fighting it. The stone reservoir, chapel, dormitories, and staff houses that rose over the next decade reflected that plan and relied heavily on the stone and timber of the mountain itself.
In “Pine Mountain School: A Sketch from the Kentucky Mountains,” a talk first given in 1915 and printed in the Outlook in 1917, she explained to a national audience what they were trying to do. She described riding trains and wagons into the valley, meeting Uncle William Creech, and finding “a people with their faces set toward the morning,” a phrase that captured how she wanted outsiders to see Pine Mountain’s neighbors.
Board reports and “Dear Friend” letters from those years show how quickly the little campus filled. By the mid 1910s the school enrolled dozens of boarding students and many day pupils, ran a farm and dairy, organized health clinics, and hosted regular community gatherings. Ethel’s correspondence with the Board of Trustees tracks the building of Zande House, Laurel House, and a string of smaller cottages, as well as the ever present struggle to keep the Road over the mountain passable.
Writing the mountains into print
If Pine Mountain’s stone buildings are one part of Ethel de Long Zande’s legacy, the other lies in the paper trail she left behind. The Pine Mountain archives and partner collections at Berea College and Smith College preserve hundreds of pages of her letters, articles, and school publications.
Her early Hindman essays, “Doings on Troublesome” and “Mountain Manners,” gave northern readers a first look at eastern Kentucky as she experienced it. The “Appeal of the Kentucky Mountains” in the Smith Alumnae Quarterly linked mountain schools to a national conversation about women’s higher education and social responsibility.
Once Pine Mountain opened, she turned her pen more and more toward that valley. “The Far Side of Pine Mountain” in The Survey and “From Kingdom Come to Pine Mountain” in the Outlook sketched the geography, speech, and daily routines of the school’s surrounding communities. In “For the Sake of Learning,” a narrative that later appeared in the Southern Industrial Educational Association’s Quarterly Magazine, she followed one mountain girl’s path through the school to explain why education mattered and why it cost money.
Her shorter pieces, like “A Little True Blue American” and the promotional leaflet “The Fourth Grade,” were written for mission magazines and potential donors but also preserved details of classroom life, student work, and the mix of textbooks, Bible stories, and ballads that filled the school day.
The “Dear Friend” letters, mailed between 1911 and 1928, bridged the gap between personal correspondence and institutional literature. Addressed to “Friends of Pine Mountain Settlement School,” they carried stories of a new dormitory finished in time for winter, a crop lost to frost, a student who had just discovered a love of books, or a family visited by the school nurse on a remote branch. Today the Pine Mountain collections index those letters and use them as a running, nearly year by year record of the school’s early decades.
Behind those public pieces sits another layer of writing that shows how seriously she took her craft. Papers preserved from her Smith College years include literary essays such as “The Passing of the Patchwork Quilt” and studies of authors like Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Carlyle. The care and rhythm of those student pieces echo later in her mountain prose, where she often balanced plain, reported speech from her neighbors with carefully shaped sentences of her own.
Home, family, and the Nativity Play
Pine Mountain was not only Ethel’s workplace. It was the center of her family life. In April 1918 she married Luigi Zande, an Italian stone mason who had first come to Harlan County to work for a coal company and later joined the school to build its reservoir and chapel. Together they planned and built Zande House, a stone and shingle cottage that still stands on the campus hillside.
Their son Alberto was born in 1919, and a daughter, Elena, joined the family by adoption in 1922. Photographs from staff albums show Ethel sitting on the steps of Boys House with Berto in her lap, or standing in a clearing with Luigi and their baby, lumber stacked behind them and the ridge rising beyond. The family’s days mixed board meetings and letter writing with goat tending, gardening, and watching students come and go from the house that bore their name.
In those same years she wrote the Nativity Play that would become Pine Mountain’s longest running tradition. First staged soon after the school opened, the play used a short script and a sequence of carols and hymns to tell the Christmas story in a way that fit the Chapel, the hills, and the voices of local children. The script, printed in a slim nine page booklet titled Nativity Play of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, focused on simple language and left room for silence and music to do much of the work.
More than a century later Pine Mountain still performs the Nativity Play each December, and staff and neighbors still name Ethel de Long Zande as its author. It remains one of the clearest examples of how she wove together faith, education, and community life in a form that mountain families could claim as their own.
Illness, death, and remembrance
By the mid 1920s years of hard work and extensive travel caught up with her. Letters from the Bassett collection and from colleagues like Evelyn K. Wells trace the onset of the breast cancer that would end her life. Even during treatment she continued to write, sending out fundraising appeals and detailed directions to staff at Pine Mountain and at the nearby Big Laurel medical settlement.
Ethel de Long Zande died on March 18, 1928, at the age of forty nine. Notes from Pine Mountain Settlement School and memorial letters printed in The Smith Alumnae Quarterly that year describe a community stunned by the loss of its co director and a wide circle of former students and donors who felt they had lost a friend.
She was buried on the slope near the Chapel at Pine Mountain. A brass memorial plate placed by the Montclair Pine Mountain Association still hangs in the Chapel transept, and her grave stone, photographed in the collections and reproduced in genealogical sources, records her years and ties her permanently to the school she helped build.
In the months after her death Luigi sold Zande House to the school at a nominal price so that it would remain part of the campus in her memory. Before the year ended he had left Harlan County for new work in North Carolina, but Pine Mountain’s records and later family recollections continued to link his story to hers.
Legacy in Harlan County and beyond
Today Ethel de Long Zande appears in many places where people look for the story of Pine Mountain and of the settlement school movement. Institutional histories by Evelyn K. Wells and Mary Rogers, James S. Greene’s dissertation on Pine Mountain’s formative years, and Carrie Day’s The Love They Gave all draw heavily on her letters and articles. Entries in The Kentucky Encyclopedia, the Kentucky Historical Society marker for Pine Mountain, and television and web features on Appalachian settlement schools repeat her name alongside Katherine Pettit’s.
Genealogical projects and online memorials fill in more of the family frame, tracing the de Long and Bray lines back through New Jersey and Massachusetts and preserving images of her grave beside the Chapel.
For Appalachian historians and family researchers, however, the richest sources remain the ones closest to her daily work. The de Long Zande papers at Pine Mountain, the Hindman and Pine Mountain records at Berea College, the “Dear Friend” letters, and the scattered runs of magazines that carried her essays all make it possible to see both the public figure and the private woman.
In those pages she is not simply a distant reformer from the Progressive Era. She is a daughter who moved her family to Northampton so that she could attend college without abandoning them, a teacher who found her life’s work on Troublesome Creek, a fundraiser who rode trains from Chautauqua to Washington to tell stories of mountain children, a writer who took care with every word, and a neighbor whose Christmas play still draws people up the Pine Mountain road each December.
Sources & Further Reading
de Long, Ethel. “Doings on Troublesome.” Smith Alumnae Quarterly, July 11, 1911, 17–22. Smith College Alumnae Association. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
de Long, Ethel. “The Appeal of the Kentucky Mountains.” Smith Alumnae Quarterly, 1914. Smith College Alumnae Association. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
de Long, Ethel. “Mountain Manners.” Smith Alumnae Quarterly, n.d. Smith College Alumnae Association. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
de Long, Ethel. “The Far Side of Pine Mountain.” The Survey 37 (March 3, 1917): 627–630. Pine Mountain Settlement School. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
de Long, Ethel. “From Kingdom Come to Pine Mountain.” The Outlook, December 5, 1917. Pine Mountain Settlement School. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
Zande, Ethel de Long. “Pine Mountain School: A Sketch from the Kentucky Mountains.” The Outlook, February 17, 1917. Pine Mountain Settlement School. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
Zande, Ethel de Long. “For the Sake of Learning.” Home Mission Monthly 35, no. 1 (November 1920): 1; reprinted in Quarterly Magazine of the Southern Industrial Educational Association 13, nos. 1–2 (March–June 1921): 3–7. Pine Mountain Settlement School. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
Zande, Ethel de Long. Nativity Play of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, Pine Mountain, Kentucky. Durham, NC: Durham Offset Company, n.d. Pine Mountain Settlement School. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
Zande, Ethel de Long. “Nativity Play.” Mimeographed script, 1930s edition. Pine Mountain Settlement School Archives. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
Zande, Ethel de Long. “The School as a Community Center.” Address to the National Conference of Charities and Correction, Indianapolis, June 7, 1915. In Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction 43 (1916). Pine Mountain Settlement School. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
Zande, Ethel de Long. “A Little True Blue American.” Over Sea and Land, November 1920. Pine Mountain Settlement School. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
Zande, Ethel de Long. “The Fourth Grade.” Promotional leaflet, 1928. Pine Mountain Settlement School Archives. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
de Long, Ethel. “The Passing of the Patchwork Quilt,” “The Character of Christopher Marlow as Shown in His Plays,” and “Carlyle and Mill.” Undergraduate papers, ca. 1900–1901. Smith College Archives, Northampton, MA. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Ethel de Long Zande – Correspondence Guide.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=56716
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Ethel de Long Zande – Director.” Biographical entry in Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=1696
Greene, James S. III. “Guide to the de Long–Zande Collection.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections, Series 7: Director’s Files, 2014. https://pinemountainsettlement.net
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Dear Friend Letters – Index, 1911–1928.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net
Pine Mountain Settlement School. Notes from the Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1919–1928. Institutional newsletter. Pine Mountain Settlement School Publications. https://pinemountainsettlement.net
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Ethel de Long Zande – Board Reports and Directors’ Annual Reports to the Board of Trustees, 1913 onward.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Governance Records. https://pinemountainsettlement.net
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. Pine Mountain Settlement School Records, BCA 0042 SAA 042. Finding aid and microfilm collection, 1911–1983. https://berea.libraryhost.com/?p=collections/controlcard&id=271
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. Hindman Settlement School Records, BCA 0041 SAA 041, 1899–1979. Finding aid. https://berea.libraryhost.com
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. Hindman Settlement School Collection, BCA 0010 SAA 009. Finding aid. https://berea.libraryhost.com
Berea College Special Collections and Archives. Katherine Pettit Papers, BCA 0012 SAA 011. Finding aid. https://berea.libraryhost.com
Wells, Evelyn K. “A Record of Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1913–1928.” Internal history prepared for the Board of Trustees, 1929–30. Pine Mountain Settlement School. https://pinemountainsettlement.net
Rogers, Mary. The Pine Mountain Story, 1913–1980. Viper, KY: Graphic Arts, 1980. https://pinemountainsettlement.net
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Histories – PMSS Guide.” Portal to institutional histories and narrative accounts of Pine Mountain Settlement School. https://pinemountainsettlement.net
ExploreKYHistory (Kentucky Historical Society). “Pine Mountain Settlement School.” ExploreKYHistory mobile history entry, Historical Marker 2387. https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/288
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “The Nativity Play.” Program and event description. Pine Mountain Settlement School. https://pinemountainsettlement.net
Blue Ridge Country. “In the Spirit of Pine Mountain.” By Joan Vannorsdall. Blue Ridge Country, March 5, 2025. https://blueridgecountry.com/newsstand/magazine/in-the-spirit-of-pine-mountain/
Blue Ridge Country. “Appalachian Holiday Traditions.” By Angela Minor. Blue Ridge Country, October 27, 2025. https://blueridgecountry.com/newsstand/magazine/appalachian-holiday-traditions/
Kentucky Educational Television (KET). “The Role of Women in the Development of the Settlement Schools.” Web feature accompanying Settlement Schools of Appalachia documentary, 1995. http://www.ket.org/settlement/setschools_03.html
Greene, James S. III. “Progressives in the Kentucky Mountains: The Formative Years of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1913–1930.” PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1982. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1249487592
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. Big Creek, KY: Carrie Day, 1982. https://pinemountainsettlement.net
Hudson, Karen E. “Home: A Fitting Environment for the Child.” Mountain Life & Work 68 (Winter 1992): 2–7. https://pinemountainsettlement.net
Spalding, Susan Eike. Appalachian Dance: Creativity and Continuity in Six Communities. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. https://www.press.uillinois.edu
Dolfi, Jennifer J. C. “Symbiosis in Lucy Furman’s Settlement School Novels.” Honors thesis, University of North Carolina at Asheville, 2011. https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/unca/f/j_dolfi_lucy_%202011.pdf
Kleber, John E., ed. The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Entries on “Pine Mountain Settlement School,” “Hindman Settlement School,” and “Settlement Schools.” https://www.uky.edu/ukpress
Pine Mountain Settlement School. “Ethel de Long Zande – Writing and Publications Guide.” Index of writings, talks, and Dear Friend letters. Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections. https://pinemountainsettlement.net
Greene, James S. III. “Guide to the de Long–Zande Collection.” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections, 2014. https://pinemountainsettlement.net
“Ethel de Long Zande.” Wikipedia, last modified 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel_de_Long_Zande
“Ethel Margaret (DeLong) Zande (1878–1928).” WikiTree. Genealogical profile and source list. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/DeLong-1113
Find A Grave. “Ethel Marguerite deLong Zande.” Memorial entry with gravestone images and Kentucky death certificate. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/25810604/ethel-marguerite-zande
Chalkboard Champions. “New Jersey’s Ethel De Long Zande: Founder of Settlement Schools.” Brief biographical article. https://chalkboardchampions.org/education/new-jerseys-ethel-de-long-zande-founder-of-settlement-schools/
Author Note: As a historian of Appalachian education, I keep coming back to Pine Mountain Settlement School in my research. I hope this piece helps you see Ethel de Long Zande not just as a name in old reports, but as a person whose words and work still shape the valley around the school.