Foxfire 5

The Foxfire Series #5

by Eliot Wigginton (Editor)

First published in 1972, The Foxfire Book was a surprise bestseller that brought Appalachia's philosophy of simple living to hundreds of thousands of readers. Whether you wanted to hunt game, bake the old-fashioned way, or learn the art of successful moonshining, The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center had a contact who could teach you how with clear, step-by-step instructions.

The fifth Foxfire volume includes rain-making, blacksmithing, bear hunting, flintlock rifles, and more.

Genres: Nonfiction, Reference, History, Crafts, Survival, Memoir, Outdoors

512 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1979

About the author

Eliot Wigginton (born Brooks Eliot Wigginton) is an American oral historian, folklorist, writer and former educator. He was most widely known for developing the Foxfire Project, a writing project that led to a magazine and the series of best-selling Foxfire books, twelve volumes in all. These were based on articles by high school students from Rabun County, Georgia. In 1986 he was named "Georgia Teacher of the Year" and in 1989 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Wigginton was born in West Virginia on November 9, 1942. His mother, Lucy Freelove Smith Wiggington, died eleven days later of "pneunomia due to acute pulmary edema," according to her death certificate. His maternal grandmother, Margaret Pollard Smith, was an associate professor of English at Vassar College and his father was a famous landscape architect, also named Brooks Eliot Wiggington. His family called him Eliot. He earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English from Cornell University and a second Master's from Johns Hopkins University. In 1966, he began teaching English in the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, located in the Appalachian Mountains of northeastern Georgia.
Wigginton began a writing project based on his students' collecting oral histories from local residents and writing them up. They published the histories and articles in a small magazine format beginning in 1967. Topics included all manner of folklife practices and customs associated with farming and the rural life of southern Appalachia, as well as the folklore and oral history of local residents. The magazine began to reach a national audience and became quite popular.
The first anthology of collected Foxfire articles was published in book form in 1972, and achieved best-seller status. Over the years, the schools published eleven other volumes. (The project transferred to the local public school in 1977.)
In addition, special collections were published, including The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery, Foxfire: 25 Years, A Foxfire Christmas, and The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Toys and Games. Several collections of recorded music from the local area were released.

Reviews

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the volume in which the Foxfire series went off the rails a little. I was gonna give this book just one star, but the final 80 pages or so managed to pull it up. Other than the last two sections, though, unless you're *really* into gunmaking, this particular volume doesn't have much to offer. Here and there, you get some interesting information on blacksmithing and horseshoeing, but unfortunately, there's a lot of needless information thrown in. The book opens with the semi-coherent reminiscences of a guy whose stories usually lack any kind of point or ending. Or truth, for that matter. (First he tells us that when he entered WWI, he was sent straight to the battlefields of Berlin. Yep, lots of WWI battles fought in Berlin. Then he tells us that he'd already been serving overseas for 4 years when his brother also joined. Apparently, he was the only U. S. soldier to serve in the AEF for 4+ years.) Anyhow, that segues into a section on iron-making that could've been very interesting if it hadn't been unnecessarily long and filled with background stuff of no practical benefit. And the same is true--only much more so--in the bloated section on gunmaking. Really, this part should've been a book on its own--the Foxfire Book of Gunmaking. In such a book, I'd not have objected to the lengthy section on the National Muzzleloading Rifle Association or whatever it's called, with all the stories about which member did this and which member did that--stuff that would be of interest only to other members and stuff that really had no business being in a book of a supposedly instructional nature. (What if they'd treated all other subjects this way? Would you really want to know the entire history of, say, the National Cornshuck Dolls Society?) Plus there's the manifesto from some prepper dude all the way out in California that I could've lived without. I mostly enjoyed the first 4 volumes in this series, but. with a few exceptions, this 5th was a tedious slog.

[Debra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite in this series, as the topics didn’t interest me, ironmaking, blacksmithing, bear hunting, gun making.
The reason this series of high school articles that were originally in a magazine they published was to enlighten and inspire them.
From the introduction: “ It’s late at night. Ronnie, one of my seventh- grade students, and I are on the Southern Crescent rolling toward Washington D. C. He’s never been on a train before, and he’s never been to Washington. Through him, I find myself doing all this again for the first time.
Lost in the moment, we spend a lazy afternoon waiting for this train. We watched freights go by and counted the cars, waved at men on the platforms of cabooses, retrieved pennies we had put on the tracks, walked the rails, picked up loose spikes and pieces of railroad debris, and watched in awe as our train bore down upon us in the dusk, head lamp swinging, all noise and steam and metal and shouting men.
He’s in the top bunk now, sound asleep. The last thing he said to me was, “ Wake me up at every single station.” Yes. That’s just the way it was for me once. How could I have forgotten?”

[Cristian Lopez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent tour by the Appalachia lifestyle, plus an excellent easy to read resource on blacksmithing and other topics

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Foxfire series is a kind of cultural anthropology of Southern Appalachian life.
http://www.foxfire.org
This volume in the series focuses on ironmaking, blacksmithing, hunting and gunsmithing with lots of interviews with old hunters, gunmakers, and blacksmiths from the region.
It's not really a technical book, but it has some useful information and ideas about forging and rifling your own barrels, making your own locks, etc. You get to hear old blacksmithing stories and them talking about just diving in and teaching themselves what to do. There are guys who just picked up a hammer when they were ten or twelve and started blacksmithing because someone had to do it. That's pretty inspiring.

[Welwyn Wilton Katz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't need to read it all. It was a book excellent for reference and I'm glad to have read the parts I did. Very clear instructions for those do-it-yourselfers who really want to learn how to do things like blacksmithing and other back-to-the-land skills. I don't want to know how to make a flint-lock rifle so I didn't read it, but I'm sure if I'd needed it the instructions there would have been clear and useful.

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Foxfire 5: Ironmaking, blacksmithing, flintlock rifles, bear hunting, and other affairs of plain living (The Foxfire Series #5) by Eliot Wigginton (Editor), Foxfire Students (Anchor Press 1979) (917.58). More transcribed interviews by the students at Rabun County High School in Georgia with their rural elders (See The Foxfire Book). My rating: 7.5/10, finished 1979.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Great Series on how on people use to do thing when they were mostly self sufficient, and not store dependent different volumes cover everything from snake handling. to log cabin building to planting by the seasons, a must for DIY'ers and survivalists. Check out amazon.com for individual contents.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this series. A practical guide to back-country life in past generations, a great set of character studies, and a lot of fun to read. I keep thinking that some of the crafts described here would be a ton of fun to do with my grandkids.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the blacksmithing section and seeing how the life and craft of a blacksmith actually played out in people's lives. The ironmaking section and riflemaking sections were interesting but impractical.

[Jay Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is concentrated in blacksmiths, gunsmiths, and bear hunting. The characters are rich and the "how toos" are excellent. I did not care for the bear hunting section, such a misuse of excellent dogs. The folks are amazing and the lost talents are concerning.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of oral histories from the Appalachian Mountains covering various topics from horseshoes and cowbells to furnaces.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can you ever stop reading about the old ways. For one thing, it's all good to know, and another is it makes you feel really lucky to have all the time you have on your hands today.

[Aim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good resource for men's skills.