The Foxfire Project: High School Students Who Saved a Dying Culture

The assignment Eliot Wigginton gave his students in nineteen sixty-six was unusual for an English class: go find the oldest people in your community and ask them how they do things.

Wigginton was twenty-three years old, a first-year teacher at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School in Mountain City, Georgia, on the southern end of the Blue Ridge. His students were disengaged from conventional curriculum, and he had a practical problem to solve. The assignment he invented was journalism as ethnography: go ask your grandmother how to build a log cabin. Ask the old man down the road how he runs a moonshine still. Ask how they make a rabbit box, how they process lard, how they read the weather by looking at a woolly caterpillar.

The magazine his students produced, called Foxfire, ran continuously for decades. The first student-produced issue was published in spring of nineteen sixty-six. When Anchor Press compiled the material into an anthology in nineteen seventy-two, it became a national bestseller, and the Foxfire book series as a whole has sold several million copies in the decades since.

What the Foxfire archive actually is, beneath the publishing history, is a collection that cannot be reconstructed. The elderly Appalachian informants who taught Wigginton's students about pre-industrial life, about the knowledge systems that had sustained mountain communities through poverty, isolation, and the slow withdrawal of outside resources, were the last generation who held that knowledge in living memory. Within fifteen years of the first Foxfire issue, most of those informants were dead.

The archive now held by the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center in Mountain City includes more than two thousand hours of audio recordings, thirty thousand photographs, and hundreds of hours of video. It is one of the most significant collections of regional folk knowledge in the United States, and it was assembled by teenagers with tape recorders.