Billie and Julie Galloway, the author’s great-grandparents, gather around a holiday table in Norton, Virginia. Julie Galloway was born in 1897 and lived to 1995. (Courtesy of John Peace)
I grew up on a dairy farm in the coalfields of Virginia. That meant Thanksgiving morning looked exactly like every other morning. You got up before daylight, walked out into the cold, and fed and milked the cows. The steam from their breath rose through the rafters, the milk machine hummed and the world was quiet except for the sound of cattle shifting their weight. Neighbors might be hiking up a ridge with a rifle hoping a buck would wander by. No one was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade because our TV antenna only picked up a picture when a storm was coming.
Once the chores were finished, we came inside, washed up and sat down to what we considered the real beginning of Thanksgiving: Chicken and dumplings. Thick dumplings that sat heavy and honest. Chicken from a hen that had been scratching around the yard a day or two earlier. I grew up thinking every kid in America started Thanksgiving this way.
Billie and Julie Galloway, the author’s great-grandparents, gather around a holiday table in Norton, Virginia. Julie Galloway was born in 1897 and lived to 1995. (Courtesy of John Peace)
College at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg straightened that out. One day I sat in an Appalachian history class listening to the professor explain what my family did was not common everywhere. It was a regional tradition. It stretched through the coalfields of Virginia and Kentucky, across the ridges of West Virginia, into East Tennessee, western North Carolina, eastern Kentucky and the Blue Ridge. Families in the Smokies did it, too, and so did families in the foothills of Ohio. Appalachian families who had moved to Cincinnati kept the tradition alive.
The reason chicken took the lead was simple. Rural families in the mountains were usually too poor to buy a turkey. Turkeys were expensive and rare unless you managed to shoot a wild one. (I have never thought wild turkey tasted good.) A chicken was usually always available. A good laying hen that had slowed down in the summer made her final contribution in the pot. It was practical and it fed a family.
Appalachian-style chicken and dumplings. (Appalachian Foods & Recipies)
Old mountain cooks also used everything. One example is the egg bag. Inside a hen sits a long string of tiny yolks lined up for future eggs. The elders would empty that into the broth that made it rich and golden. It was old mountain know-how long before anyone tried to call it “heritage cooking.”
Farther south in the Smokies the same pattern shows up. Blind Pig & the Acorn’s “High Country Thanksgiving Traditions” tells a story that could have been written about our own table. The day started with a big breakfast: pork tenderloin or home-cured ham, biscuits and gravy. The main meal in mid- to late-afternoon featured baked hens, stone-ground cornbread dressing, hominy, leather britches (dried green beans), greens with turnip cubes and stack cake with dried apples.
None of this came from abundance. It came from hard times, thrift and a sense of family that was not written on greeting cards. A Thanksgiving table in the mountains did not try to impress anyone. It was there to feed your people and any neighbor who walked in hungry. Gratitude was not something said in a toast. It was something cooked with your own hands.
A milk bottle from Clinch Haven Farms, the author’s family dairy farm. (Courtesy of John Peace)
The rest of the country may picture Thanksgiving with a perfect turkey set under soft light. Out here in rural America the holiday was shaped by real life. It was shaped by work and weather and the simple knowledge that food tastes better when it comes from the land beneath your feet. If that meant chicken instead of turkey, nobody felt shortchanged.
And the truth is simple. A hen cooked right will still beat a turkey any day of the week. The mountain folks knew that long before Hallmark ever showed its first snowflake.
John W. Peace II is a fifth-generation farmer from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where he grew up on his family’s dairy, Clinch Haven Farms, and still lives today farming hay and beef cattle. He’s a proud father to Trey and Shelby Peace, and partner in life to Cathy Swinney. A Virginia Tech graduate with graduate studies at Penn State, he served as the youngest Chair of the Wise County Board of Supervisors (2004–2008). John co-owns SafeHavenServices.co and urTOPIX LLC (urTopixLLC.com), a Democratic campaign consulting firm focused on reaching rural voters. He’s also a two-time Amazon bestselling author. Learn more at www.JohnWPeace.com.
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