In the future I hope to provide two versions of the diary, one consisting of selected entries for a more lively reading, and the other being the complete document for use as a reference by anyone with a more extensive interest in its historical or genealogical value. The current incarnation of this web site features the "Readers' Edition" only.
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| Photo by Duane Bristow (see bottom of page). |
What possesses me to do this? More to the point, why would you want to read entry after entry of unglamorous farm and sawmill work, of travel records, trades, weather patterns, and church sermons?
I find a great value in encountering the details of this community's life as it is described here: concisely, matter-of-factly, without any sort of romantic glaze. Most of the accounts I have read or heard describing the lives of small farmers in that day and time, have been as lifetime recollections-- they were colored by an understandable nostalgia. I value those too. They speak to me on an immediate and emotional level.
It's obvious from the outset that John Arch Collins did not intend to write a pastoral. What's more, there's no anguished self-analysis, no lush imagery, and the people assume neither heroic nor demonic proportions. Whatever his reasons for keeping his records so faithfully, the diary reveals an interest only in objectively recording the events of the day. As we read about the plowing, the sawing, the sowing, day after day, the description is undeniably repetitive and mundane.
And then some remarkable things begin to happen.
The friends and relatives whose names keep reappearing begin to grow more distinct-- slowly, incrementally, we begin to know them. Though Collins was spare with his description, the momentum of his records gathers. The dry facts begin to coalesce, and the landscape takes on a little bit of color. A man is arrested in the field, released, and returns to work in the fields. Another man goes to Statesville and gets lost. A Sunday is spent with friends. A couple court and marry. A child dies and work becomes impossible...
People have assumed personalities. We have gotten to know them little by little, over time, the way we come to know people in our own lives. The days of chores, tedious and unremarkable, have become the seasons of work, and acquired a rhythm and a texture. The visits, singalongs, meetings, church services have become threads in a luminous fabric. The community takes on a character. By degrees, a vanished world has reappeared before our eyes.
And it is a vanished world. Bell's Crossroads, as it existed then, is gone and will never return. Still one can hear a clear echo of it in this diary, a voice that speaks with the dignity and restraint that typifies the people of that time and place...
