Editor's Note

Editor's Note...

By Susan M. Thigpen © 1996-2012

Online: December, 1996

Hello and welcome to The Mountain Laurel archive. We appreciate your stopping by and hope you will "sit and visit" for a while. In the Blue Ridge Mountains, people gathered around the pot-bellied stove at the general store to socialize and swap tall tales and pass up-to-date information about everything from the state of the world to local gossip. Unfortunately, today most of those gathering places have vanished and people don't have a chance to "socialize" in person as much as in days gone by, but the Internet is helping to take up that slack.

From the beginning of The Mountain Laurel in 1983, we intended it not to be a "newspaper," but a media where folks could catch up on what has been happening for the last two hundred years. What you'll read here is of a time gone by, in the words of people who lived them (or in some cases, stories handed down generation after generation). What you'll read here is the everyday history, things that are often bypassed by history books. You'll hear it in the flavor of the mountains, as though you are sitting down one-on-one and listening to it in person. You'll get old time recipes that never mention the "M" word (microwave), but might tell how to cook it on a wood burning cook stove.

In The Mountain Laurel, you'll find history, genealogy from people searching for Blue Ridge Roots, recipes, crafts, interviews, some mighty tall tales, Mountain Backroad Tours to out of the way places, and much more.

In short, you'll experience the heritage of the Blue Ridge Mountains and their generations of inhabitants - their joy, humor, tragedies, pride and ingenuity. The mountains were a harsh environment and these people had to be smart to survive its rigors. Most of all, you'll feel like a part of it too as you read the shared experiences of pioneers to our nation's first frontier.

Welcome to our family of readers.

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