When speaking of wild cherry bark, 20th century Alabama folk herbalist Tommie Bass says,

“God did not make anything better…”

Cherry blossoms are just opening here in Western North Carolina on Cherokee land. The native black cherry, or Prunus serotina, has been a big part of my week as my partner and I have felled one that was leaning heavily in our driveway on the land we steward and have made many medicines and carvings from the beautiful ruddy wood, bark and branches. Cherry bark is one of the most important folk medicines in the history of Appalachian and Southern Folk medicine. You can also join me April 18th this year at Turtle Island to learn Appalachian folk medicine with me for an afternoon!

I am always so in love with the cherry tree as a wood carver myself and I have always marveled at how often cherry bark is used in historical Appalachian folk medicine and early American pharmacy. I love the taste and smell of it myself and use the bark bitters as well as syrup often.

Because this is a native tree, the ways in which it is worked with in Appalachian folk medicine are mainly shaped by Indigenous peoples who have long relationships with this beautiful tree. The inner bark is most often the part worked with, aside from the delicious, if not seedy fruits as well as the twigs and gummy resin that often adorns the damaged bark. Cherry bark is a well known medicinal in herbalism today as a cough remedy but it has been worked with for a long time for so much more. Let’s explore.

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I hope you are keeping warm this Winter, it has been a long and difficult one for many of us. As always the plants and trees around me hold me and give me hope alongside the beauty of my incredible community I am blessed to dwell alongside. Some updates from my little home in the mountains…

I have released my first online class! “Three Charms.”

A 40 minute video class with Rebecca Beyer of Blood and Spicebush on how to make three types of historic, woodland charms based on English, French and Appalachian folk magic. Simple, beautiful and protective, learn how to craft a hazelnut, batnut and twig charm for protection of you home and beyond. Lifetime access and a PDF included with detailed instructions and further plantlore about each tree or plant mentioned in the video. This is not a live class and can be purchased and watched at any time.

I also have two more spots left in my IN PERSON course Hedgecraft, in our 11th year. Consider joining us here in beautiful Madison County, North Carolina.

Now that catch up is out of the way, let’s finish our discussion of pine. In the final installment of this first foray into the magic of trees in Appalachian folk medicine and beyond, I want to end on the other love of my life, The Pennsylvania German uses of evergreens and pines in their folk medicine and magic.

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I am an apprentice with the Blobarrick Freindschaft, a part of the Oley lineage of Brauchers and Urglaawers. I was drawn to this work as a person of German (amongst many other things) descent who was born in Pennsylvania. My last name Beyer means “from Bavaria”. I have been studying under a mentor in this guild for about 7 months now.

Die Blanzeheilkunscht is a special word in Deitsch, the language of some of my ancestors, the Pennsylvania Germans, for “herbal therapeutics", “plant talking” or “plant conversation”. As a person apprenticing to be a Braucherin, or a lady Braucher, I learned this from my guild master Robert Schreiwer and his robust knowledge of Deitsch herbalism, which I study alongside Appalachian folk herbalism, as they are deeply intertwined as Braucherei informed the birth of Appalachian folk medicine and magic. I wonder what Germanic immigrants felt when they arrived here to see the many more evergreens that dotted the varied terrain of the Eastern Coast.

In Austria and Germany, there are more native evergreens than the Scots Pine which the North Atlantic Islanders were familiar with. The Norway spruce, (Picea abies), European silver fir (Abies alba), often found in the Black Forest and Alpine regions, as well as the Swiss stone pine (Pinus cembra), Austrian pine (Pinus nigra), and the common Juniper (Juniperus communis).

Juniper was used extensively in Germany and Austrian folk medicine and magic, a practice carried over into the New World with its colonists. Juniper much like Elderberry has a denizen spirits called Frau Wachholder:

“In Germany, a certain Frau Wachholder is held to be the personification and the presiding spirit of the Juniper, who is invoked in order that thieves may be compelled to give up their ill-gotten spoils: this invocation takes place with certain superstitious ceremonies beneath the shadow of a Juniper, a branch of which is bent to the earth. In Germany, also, the Juniper, like the Holly, is believed to drive away from houses and stables, spells and witchcraft of all description, and specially to cast out from cows and horses the monsters which are sometimes believed mysteriously to haunt them. For a similar reason, in Germany, in order to strengthen horses, and to render them tractable and quiet, they administer to them on three successive Sundays before sunrise, three handfuls of salt, and seventy-two Juniper-berries.” (Plant Lyrics and Legends, 1884).

The berries were also used very much in folk medicine for a large variety of ills. From his Hortus Medicus et Philosophicus (1588) written by German Joachim Camerarius the Younger:

“Ein paar Wacholderbeer morgens niichter zu sich genommen, oder Weckholderbeer m weisscm Wein gesotten und darvon getrunken, bekommt wol dem kalten schleimlgen Magen, reiniget die brust, stiilet den husten, die bl6hung des bauchs, das aufstossen der mutter und den krampf, eroffnet die leber und den stein, wehret dem gifte und der pestilenz: insumma, die wacholderbeer sind zu vielen dingen nutz, deshalb hat der koch solche beerlein zu sich m die kuche beruffen.”

English: “A few juniper berries eaten in the morning, or juniper berries boiled in white wine and drunk, are good for a cold, mucousy stomach, cleanse the chest, relieve coughs, bloating, belching, and cramps, clear the liver and kidney stones, and ward off poison and pestilence: in short, juniper berries are useful for many things, which is why the cook has called such berries into his kitchen.”

In Deitsch herbalism, the berries were tinctured in cider and used for dropsy, and urinary troubles. For “porbia” or smallpox, “Faces were anointed daily with an aromatic unguent prepared by boiling crushed ‘wachholdebrerren’ (juniper berries), finely chopped beefsteak and wood ashes in goose-grease.” The heads of the sufferer would then be wrapped in cotton.

“Juniper berries on a shovel of burning embers were carried from room to room” for fumigation in a sick room. Pine pitch was also used in a similar fashion to how it was generally used in Appalachian folk medicine, namely as a plaster for boils to bring them to a head. The pitch was often collected from bored holes in Pinus rigida or pitch pine. This pine sap was rubbed on the back as a plaster for sore kidneys and back soreness, just as in Black southern folk medicine.

Pine species are also often used in toothache charms as seen in my article about Pine and evergreen medicine in Appalachian history. Lunar observance and charms for toothache in the folk magical practice of the P.A. Germans often involved the cuttings of fingernails, a practice that would eventually become widespread in Appalachia as some of them migrated southern wards. While the exact origin of this belie is unknown, one can see it as an energetic imprint of the sufferer often burned into a tree or the earth to decay, this imitative magic allows that so too shall the toothache pain “decay” and fade away. From T.R. Brendle:

“Take a goose quill and cut it off where it begins to be hollow, then scrape off a little from each nail of the hands and feet, put all into the quill and plug shut. Then bore a hole, towards the rise of the sun, in a tree that bears no fruit put the quill with the scrapings of the nails into the hole and with three strokes close up the hole with a bung made of pine wood. It must be done on the first Friday of the New Moon in the morning.”

Hemlock pine bark was also tinctured in spirits and taken for dysentery, a spoonful dose throughout the day. White pine (Pinus strobus) or Weiss Beind needles were decocted and drunk with honey for tuberculosis and all bronchial complaints. The inner bark decoction was also used for rheumatism, dropsy, and kidney issues.

There is much much more to say about the ways evergreen conifers were worked with in the folkways of Appalachia, but I hope these three posts have served as helpful to guide you on a journey to understand medicine in place: bioregional herblore and folk medicine ways of the diverse peoples of this sacred land.

Works Cited…

Brendle, T. R., Unger, C. W. (1970). Folk Medicine of the Pennsylvania Germans: The Non-occult Cures. United States: A. M. Kelley.

The Pennsylvania-German Society. (1924). United States: The Society.

http://www.blanzeheilkunscht.com

After delving into the history of pines, spruces and more in my previous post, how can that traditional knowledge be continued safely today? Not every recipe from history is safe or effective, and the beauty of folk medicine is that we let some things go that no longer serve us and we improve upon certain things and watch them grow! Here are a few recipes and ways that I work with evergreens in the Appalachian folk medicine context today that are both food and medicine. These are all inspired by historical uses but adapted to our growth and understanding of human health along with the ever growing influence of beautiful cultures of the people who live here.

These are not intended to treat or diagnose any illness and are given for educational purposes only.

Pine Top Tea…

The first and foremost thing I do with evergreens…. is make tea. Not much different than our collective ancestors of this bioregion did, but here is how I made my pine top tea. First off if you cannot reach the top of the little tree, do not despair. I love the energetic idea of using the part closest to the heavens, however any clean, non-sprayed part of the tree is lovely. Try the white pine (Pinus strobus) or any of the other longer needled pines in the Pinus genus for these teas. I find that the young green tips of the Spruces are nice as teas but their hard, older needles are more resinous.

+++Harvesting tip I learned from Corinne Boyer: coat any tools like pruners or shears in olive oil before using to harvest pine to keep from getting too sticky! Then wipe down with an alcohol wipe.+++

Chop up two large handfuls of evergreen needles, my favorite is the Virginia Pine (Pinus virginiana) for its orangey flavor. Feel free to include a twig or two. Bring one quart of water to a boil and turn it off in a large pot with a lid. Toss in the needles and bits, cover the hot pot with a lid and allow to steep for 30 minutes. You can also do this as an overnight steep for an extra strong tea. Strain and serve warm with honey or alone for coughs, colds and anytime you aren’t feeling “thrifty”. Store any extra in the fridge and re-heat gently for continued enjoyment.

You can also make this in a quart or half gallon jar as a Sun tea but just allowing it to infuse with the heat of the Sun by placing it in a sunny window for a day. I think of Pines and Evergreens as Solar aligned herbs and making their medicine with just the warmth of the Sun is so satisfying. Becuase this tea is rich in vitamin C I avoid decocting or boiling the needles in the water for long as it will degrade this water soluble vitamin.

The bark is also antiseptic medicine and can be decocted (simmered on low heat) for 30 minutes, strained and then the liquid used externally for joint pain and rheumatic pains as a warm compress. It is also useful in first aid for cuts and scrapes as a hot soak, feel free to mix in epsom salts as well for ingrown toenails or other non- puncture wounds on the body.

Wild Sodas and Ferments

You have probably seen similar recipes across the internet, but the wild sodas crafted from various evergreens are some of my absolute favorites. These brews harken back to the Spruce beers I mentioned in my previous post. Let’s see how we can make one.

Wild brewing of sodas or meads without commercial yeast is not only possible, but it is a beautiful way to capture the essence of a place and literally consume it. We can capture the feeling or the nature of a season, a hike, a home, or even a walk we love by making a wild soda or mead with flowers, herbs and fruits we find there. You can keep a yeast starter, just like a sourdough starter:

“For ancient peoples, yeast strains were first acquired from wild yeasts that floated through the air and thrived in abundance on fruits, flowers, and vegetables used as ingredients. When a particularly powerful and flavorful yeast strain (or more likely, combination of several strains) was found, it was saved by either using a portion of an actively fermenting batch to start the next batch, or by re-using the unwashed fermentation vessel, the interior of which would be caked with yeast strains leftover from previous batches. “ -Jereme Zimmerman “Make Mead like a Viking

Wild fermented sodas are rich in probiotics and the medicines of the plants, fruits and roots used to make them. It is an ancient preservation technique, and of course, also yields the mind altering substance of alcohol when brewed to completion. Traditionally, meads were not brewed to high alcohol levels as airtight vessels were not easily made. This is a more healthful way to enjoy them as a soda or almost kombucha-like beverage with a much shorter fermentation time.

First you need to be able to safely ID conifer species. The toxic Yew is the only tree that one may confuse with a conifer, but assuming you are 100% correct on your ID is always the first step. If you are very new to ID, you can always stick to using white pine, (Pinus strobus) due to its ease of identification. It has 5 needles per little bundle, called a fascicle, and is incredibly common. Of course always follow safe and ethical foraging protocols such as avoiding road sides that may be sprayed with chemicals and not over harvesting.

++Some of our conifer species like Red Spruce (Picea rubens) are threatened in certain areas so many sure you familiarize yourself with the species in your area before harvest.++

These are the instructions for a pine soda I make that I based on the wisdom from “The Wildcrafting Brewer” by Pascal Baudar:

1. Gather a large handful or what would yield roughly two cups of finely chopped pine needles or other conifer foliage. I find that including some of the branch bits actually helps the fermentation process! Make sure they aren’t muddy or dirty.

2. Wash a container of glass or ceramic (check for lead!!) like a quart mason jar, with very hot water or soap, or even use the sanitizing cycle on your dishwasher if you have one ( I don’t). Place your pine needles in the jar.

3. Add water (not tap water, which may contain chlorine and kill our helpful little fermenting yeasts) filling the jar giving it a 3 inch head space from the top. Add 4-8 tablespoons of a sugar like honey, brown sugar, molasses, birch or maple syrup, are my favorites, depending on sweetness you like. Make sure your final level of liquid gives some headspace to the jar lid.

4. Mix everything very well with a very clean spoon. Really give it a good mix!

5. Place a paper towel or cheese cloth on top and secure it with a string or rubber band. If you use a jar, simply screw the metal band over the paper towel.

6. Wait around 24 hours (or up to a couple of days if its cold); at this point the fermentation bubbling should be quite obvious. I leave mine out in a warm room to continue fermenting 2-4 days, in winter it can sometimes take longer! Stir three or four times daily with a clean wooden spoon.

7. Taste it with a clean spoon each time! If you like it, you can strain the fermenting solution into very clean swing-top bottles, then wait a day and check the pressure by “burping the bottle”. If it’s hissing a little, you can put your soda in the fridge to carbonate more. So good. I find it lasts about 2-3 weeks in the fridge.

+This does have a small amount of alcohol similar to kombucha just to be aware

I like to drink this as a delicious beverage full of vitamin C and citrus-like brightness just for fun. It also is lovely if you add citrus to it as a garnish or juice. I also like it for an upset stomach, and when I am sick with a cold in the Summer, I find it very cooling. It is also a nice thing to make in Winter when there is not much else to forage sustainably.

Mugolio… Pinecone syrup

Pine syrups are used traditionally for coughs, colds and flu in Appalachia. This is an Italian recipe that is extremely easy and great for windfallen trees in cone. I made the above when a little Eastern Hemlock fell near my friend’s house and we gathered many cones from the still green, but dying tree. This pine syrup is traditionally made in Italy from the mugo pine (Pinus mugo) we do not have here (hence the name), but the same process can be used. Check out Forager Chef’s write up on the flavor differences between all the different cones he has tried!

To make it you need green, young cones of any of our species of conifers. No brown, dried cones. The liquid naturally present in the green cones is drawn out into the brown sugar and lightly ferments in its own juices, making the most delicious sweet treat and medicine.

You will need a very clean and dry glass jar, green cones and brown or turbinado raw sugar.

Harvest clean, green cones, place in your jar, and pack with brown sugar. Don’t leave a huge head space and let them sit in a warm area for about a month. Soon you’ll notice liquid is starting to form, and melting the sugar! Stir them with a clean spoon occassionally and “burb” the jar to let our CO2 as they gently ferment. Once the sugar is mostly melty and the jar has transformed into a liquid gold, you can do two things.

For long term storage, pour the cones and now syrup, scrapping any crystallized sugar out into a sauce pan and heat gently to simmer to melt all the sugar for just a few minutes, cooking those cones a little, but don’t over cook of the sugar will solidify when it cools.

You can now strain out the cones and compost them, then pour the mugolio into clean, dry bottles. Store in the fridge! You could also at this point water bath can the syrup to keep it longer term.

Another way I have made it is when the syrup is full melted without heating, I strain out the cones and add one teaspoon of tincture cane alcohol or apple brandy and stir well through the syrup. I find if I do this, I don’t need to heat it, but it will kill any pesky mold that might want to form without changing the flavor much. I have then this cold processes syrup last up to a year at room temperature, but always check for mold. It really is safest to store in cool storage.

This syrup is vitamin C rich, and has some of the beautiful medicinal qualities that syrups of old did. You can also used pine barks, needles and resins in this same method to make syrups, not just the cones. I just love them because they have so much water in them that they ferment just lovely.

I use this as a cough syrup, and I add it to hot teas for cough, colds and flu with rabbit tobacco (Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium), yarrow (Achillea millefolium), mint or mountain mint (Mentha spp., or Pycnanthemum spp.), elderflower (Sambucus spp.), wild cherry bark (Prunus serotina), or pine needle tea. It’s also lovely with sassafras and birch bark (Betula lenta) tea as a spring tonic. I especially like to add it to bitter medicines like yellow dock (Rumex spp.) or dandelion root decoctions tonics as well to help the medicine go down.

Lacto Fermented Spruce Tips…

These are one of my personal favorite ways to get the nutrition of the vitamin C rich spruce into my diet. These go very well with fish and/ or mushrooms. I have lived many places with planted spruces that were easy to reach as part of the landscaping which made this much easier! Here is a good lacto-fermenting overview.

It is as simple as adding freshly picked Spring spruce tips to a very clean jar and adding salt and non-chlorinated water to cover. I like to use an air lock to prevent any more bacterial incoming but to allow the CO2 produced by the fermentation to escape. I just store these in the fridge once they get that sour taste I love, usually after about 3-5 days. Here is a helpful chart to see an approximate amount of salt needed per size of container: Citation is in the caption text.

You can also use fallen bits of evergreen boughs to make flavored sugars and salts. I simply layer clean bits of chopped evergreens between layers of salt or organic brown or cane sugar, and allow to infuse for 1 month. Then I grind them in my spice grinder to incorporate the evergreen bits into the salt or sugar more thoroughly. I simply use a little coffee grinder I keep only for herb grinding (coffee is too hard to wash out of it!) This makes a fantastic gift for the Winter holidays if you observe any. You can use these in cookie, cakes and break recipes as well as a fancy rim for a glass of pine soda or mead!

I like to make spruce, pine or hemlock icing on my Winter Solstice cookies. These are short bread ones. I simply use a little spice grinder I mentioned and blend up about a tablespoon of fresh needles up and mix it into a standard cream cheese icing recipe. Add more or less to suit your tastes! Incredible wintry flavor! You can also add it to the milk or cream cheese and allow it to infuse in the fridge overnight and then make your icing for a stronger flavor. For other ideas in the culinary realm, this piece by Gather Victoria is incredible!

Evergreen Resin Salves, Incense, and Smoke…

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This time is ever needed reminder that even when all seems hopeless in an eternal Winter, there is a promise that the blaze of the sacred bonfires will melt the ice away as our hands are clasped round it. I need the medicine of this hope and I feel it as I witness the bravery and beauty of my community and the many ways people are doing what they can to continue the fight that has been going on for so long.

As always, I find solace in the plant beings around me and their many stories. While the world appears barren, I am also finding solace in writing. I would like to begin a small series on the medicinal uses of trees from the Appalachian folk medicine and Southern Folk medicine perspective. I have been battling a long respiratory illness, so I was especially called to choose Pine as the first medicinal tree monograph, as you shall see why. I hope this brings solace to you as well.

These posts are not intended to treat or diagnose any illness and are intended for research purposes only.

The Appalachian Folk Medicinal and Magical uses of the Evergreens…

One could argue that evergreen tree medicine is one of the cornerstones of the yarb (herb) healer’s practice in Appalachia. Pines in particular are mentioned not only in old folklore books but also in popular modern use as deeply healing medicines and powerful materia magica. Every part of the evergreens I will speak of here, or cone bearing members of the Pinaceae and Cupressaceae family, provide not only effective phytochemicals, but also a spiritual medicine due to their incredible array of lovely aromas and volatile oils.

Their wood, needles, cones, roots, bark and resins are all an important part of the Appalachian folk medicinal lexicon and they make a fine place to start when learning the medicinal ways one can work with trees, for they are also easy to ID and many are abundant. What evergreens can you find in Appalachia?

White Pine (Pinus strobus)

Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda)

Shortleaf Pine (Pinus echinata)

Black Pine (Pinus rigida)

Table-Mountain Pine (Pinus pungens)

Scrub or Virginia Pine (Pinus virginiana)

Black Spruce (Picea mariana)

Red Spruce (Picea rubra)

Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis)

Carolina Hemlock (Tsuga caroliniana)

Balsam or Frasier Fir (Abies fraseri)

And evergreens in the Cupressaceae family

Arbor vitae (Thuja occidentalis)

Red Cedar (Juniperus virginiana)

The deeper south or east you go, more cypress, long leaf pine and other types of evergreens will rise up out of the wetter, warmer, coastal areas, but for our purposes, this is a working list of evergreens in Southern Appalachia but is certainly not a all that can grow here.

Evergreens are used in all cultures’ medicine traditions wherever they grow, and Appalachia is no exception. Indigenous peoples had been working alongside the many evergreen species on Turtle Island for thousands of years before European arrival, and it is interesting to note that the largest European population which migrated to Appalachia, the English, Scottish and Irish, only have a single pine species in their native lands, the Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris). Can you imagine meeting spruce, fir or the pines of this continent for the first time as an adult?

While there are native evergreens to North Africa, those forcibly removed from their homelands in Western and Central Africa (who were the largest population of enslaved peoples here in Appalachia), would also have been new to the many evergreens on this bioregion. This is important to note, because it shows us that the ways in which people came to work with evergreen medicine in Appalachia was heavily influenced and guided by Indigenous medicine ways which were then augmented by the unique relationships the newcomers to this land would form with them.

The evergreens have sharp, clean, and almost citrus-like scents. You can probably summon the smell of pine or fir to your mind right now if you try. Resinous, crystalline and refreshing, the many volatile oils contained in the needles, bark and cones of the evergreens give us a sensory clue to their medicinal powers. Antiseptic, warming, drying (but occasionally moistening), nourishing, vulnerary, immune stimulating, the ways in which it was worked with historically has not changed a lot into modern herbal practice. Let us first begin in the past, with how conifers were used in historical Appalachian folk medicine.

Any species listed above was worked with medicinally in some way, but I have noticed it is often the white pine that was chosen due to its abundance. White pine is often used for its mild flavor and ease of identification, as it has as many needles in a little bundle or fascicle, as it has letters in its name: 5. The tea made from the needles and twigs of this tree is a staple in folk medicine.

It is called pine top tea often or pine top in Appalachian and in general in Southern folk medicine, for it is often the top most part of a little sapling that is cut and used for healing. The top of the tree is closest to heaven, making it the most healing in the Christian worldview many had in the mountains, and also syncretized with the cosmology of some Indigenous and Black worldviews as well in the region.

While turpentine made from pine is extensively used historically, I am going to focus on the whole plant parts practice of herbal healing in this essay.

Needles, twigs and bark

The tops of pines were brewed into decoctions and teas for respiratory illnesses like colds and flus, and these tops were seen as so powerfully healing, merely placing beneath a sick person’s bed was a charm against illness in itself. I speak on these things as someone who hangs the pine tops in my hope to welcome in health and chase away illness. The tops of pine were also poured over with boiling water to make an herbal steam specifically for both colds and neuralgia. Invasive mullein (Verbascum thapsus) leaves were also often mixed in as a tea particularly for coughs, as well as the aerial parts of the native rabbit tobacco or Life everlasting/ Pearly everlasting (Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium) as it is more commonly known in Black Southern folk medicine. Spruce needles were also decocted for coughs.

In a recipe gathered from Kentucky, pine bark was decocted with leaves of life everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea), mullein leaves, and wild cherry bark (Prunus serotina) until thick and preserved with brandy for cough syrup by the spoonful. Another recipe from the area was used more as a tonic and was made from white pine bark, yellow dock (Rumex crispus), safriller (Menispermum canadense) (toxic), mayapple, ginseng, goldenseal, apple tree bark, poplar (Populus deltoides), cherry bark, sassafras bark, bear paw (unknown), peppermint, and mullein leaf.

In general Southern folk medicine, meaning throughout the Southeast into the coastal regions, pine bark was often infused with other barks like sassafras, wild cherrybark, and the roots of spikenard (Aralia racemosa), bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), and buds of balm of gilead (Balm a-gilly is how I most often hear it called locally) (Populus balsamifera) with honey as a stimulating expectorant for phlegmy coughs.

Sometimes ginger would also be added for coughs as well, despite not being a native plant, Appalachians had access to a wide variety of far away spices and herbs at a high cost and ginger is often found in cures. Pine needle tea was not just used for respiratory purposes but also for bowel troubles as well. Spruce (Picea spp.) needles and twigs were also decocted and made into fermented low alcohol beers which were also used medicinally for respiratory illnesses.

These beers were common amongst 17th and 18th century French and English colonists in Canada who adapted the local spruce species to small beer or low alcohol beer making methods they had in Europe. This practice would eventually spread to Indigenous peoples as well and Spruce beer was given for scurvy and as a general tonic for health. The African and Caribbean influence can be seen in a later 20th century cure with the addition of rum to spruce beer and milk for tuberculosis gathered in South Carolina.

Resin

Resin and sap were mixed with either suet or lard and used in ointments for sores, especially hard to heal ones. It was also used as a general ointment for wounds to stop bleeding. Ointment like this was also used for “fall sores” or Impetigo, and for burns. The resin was also used as a pill, rolled up, which was taken as both a tonic against illness, and against the active infection of the dreaded typhoid fever. These little “pine rosin pills” were also taken for indigestion and stomach issues.

These little pills were sometimes one of the few medicines readily available to enslaved people due to the ease of finding and making them from the many pine species. The Rappahannock indigenous peoples used these hardened pine sap balls and swallowed them for kidney trouble. The resin was also mixed with baking soda and applied to painful corns on the feet. The tar made from boiling down the sap of many pine species was used as a plaster on the body for pain and would be smeared on the afflicted body part and then wrapped in clean cloth.

Wood

Evergreens often have unique knots in their wood due to their branching patterns, and these special shapes or knots made in the wood were seen as especially healing parts of the tree. If you have ever looked at a twisted up old pine, you can’t help but agree with the ancestors of this place that indeed, the fantastical shapes carved out by these tree branches appear quite magical. The knots in the wood would often be cut out of the tree and saved for medicine.

Water with pine knots soaking in it was used for typhoid fever. A remedy gathered in Rabun country Georgia for asthma was to tincture the heartwood of a pine or a pine knot in one pint of gin until the wood turns brown, then taking a tablespoon of the tincture 2 times a day. Boiling the knots in milk was also given as a medicine for rheumatism. Pine wood was also used often as a charm for healing in Appalachia. Pinewood is sometimes called lightwood in old books, and this also especially refers to the resin filled heart wood used to help get a fire started.

Indigenous Evergreen Medicine…

It’s important when studying regional medicine traditions to familiarize ourselves with where different plant practices were born and which cultures valued those beings. These are just a small list of ways that First peoples in the Appalachian region were working with evergreen medicine. Much of these pieces of ethnobotanical lore were gathered by Euro-ancestored people so it is important to note, as a few of my Indigenous friends have told me, the uses were sometimes given wrong on purpose or changed to protect the medicine.

When we look at old books about cultures outside our own it is important to ask, who gathered this? What was their social positioning? What was it used to create? Is that information readily available to the people of the Tribe or Nation that it was gathered from? Did the publication it made benefit the people it was extracted from? What I tend to do when researching Indigenous ethnobotany is use a variety of sources and check in with my living friends about its accuracy. Indigenous written sources are always best.

This isn’t to encourage cultural appropriation of the sacred or spiritual remedies but to preserve, honor and name the ways in which the Indigenous uses of plants on Turtle Island formed the backbone of Appalachian folk medicine and how they blended with the other cultural groups to birth this unique practice. These people are still here and still living so historical remedies are given in a past tense but many of these are still practiced today.

Rappahannock peoples historically used the top branches of all pine species and mullein leaves steeped in hot water as a poultice externally on swellings. The hemlock pine (Tsuga canadenisis) was worked with by Menominee peoples for wounds and cuts as well as sores and burns due to tannin content which helps to tighten and sooth inflamed and damaged tissues.

Red spruce was used in Cherokee medicine as a tea of the boughs for measles and for coughs, colds and flus. They also used the Virginia pine extensively, which is my favorite local species to Western North Carolina (I live on Cherokee land). Decoctions and teas of the twigs and needles were given for worms, a syrup of the boughs for chronic rheumatism and the infusion, steam and oil were used in various ways as cold remedy and topically for painful joints. The root bark was boiled for topical applications for piles or hemorrhoids and thin pieces of bark chewed for diarrhea.

The antiseptic medicine of Virginia pine was used for those child-bed fevers and for swollen breasts in those breastfeeding. The tea was also used for measles and for mumps and gout. It was even used as a nervine. This pine tastes the best in my onion, almost like a mandarin orange peel flavor and it comes as no surprise to me that it is so beneficial and special. Spiritually, the wood was burned and the ashes would then be thrown on a newly kindled hearth fire after a death in a home for purification. This is a practice that is similar to many other cultures’ hearth tending after deaths. I hate the common name of scrub pine for this tree, as it is sacred.

Black Appalachian and Southern folk medicine…

The medicinal uses of evergreens we have covered so far by 1920 would have been performed by poor people of all races. However, the special relationships between different cultural groups and how they work with herbs uniquely is always important to mention. These uses of pine were gathered from people who lived through the horrors of slavery and show a marked influence of Indigenous medicine as many people learned directly from Indigenous neighbors.

Medical care and access to it was used as a force of control during enslavement by European ancestored enslavers, leaving many enslaved people to learn quickly: relying on their own understandings of folk medicine and plant knowledge in a radically new ecosystem. The story of Black southern folk medicine is NOT a story of slavery, it is a story of creativity, intelligence, talent and mutual care amongst people subjected to the things today many of us can not even imagine in a land where many plants were new.

The pine rosin or resin pills I mentioned earlier were one of the most commonly used medicines amongst enslaved peoples in the South. They were often given with vinegar as general disease prevention and as a backache treatment. The antiseptic nature of both substances show an excellent understanding of this concept. Pine needles were also a special medicine for children and for babies sickness, colic in particular or other stomach issues.

Instead of tea the needles were chewed and eaten. Pine needles and mullein tea were often given for colds as well, both abundant and easy to find and prepare as tea. A common salve for carbuncles or infections was made from pine resin, sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua), beeswax, suet, and turpentine. The smoke of a pine top was also used to help a frostbite limb.

As I mentioned in my last post, I can’t recommend “The Conjuring of America” by Lindsey Stewart enough for more detailed stories of Black medicine and magic and how it has shaped America. It’s an amazing book I am currently reading.

Many people who study Black Southern folk medicine will be familiar with Caesar and his cure for snake bites with plantain (Plantago major) which freed him from slavery in the 18th century in South Carolina, but another enslaved man freed for his curing was James Pawpaw, Papaw or Papan, who created an herbal formula that was deeply helpful for a serious bacterial illness known as yaws. From a now deleted article by a historian from Colonial Williamsburg,

“James Pawpaw, born likely in Africa, developed remedies for a variety of ailments while enslaved in New Kent County [Virgina]. Among them was a treatment for yaws, a bacterial infection widespread in enslaved communities where poor conditions led to transmission. In 1729 he provided recipes for his medicines to Lt. Gov. William Gooch and the Council of State, who in exchange purchased his freedom for £50 from Frances Littlepage, of nearby Cumberland plantation, and awarded him a £20 yearly pension. Pawpaw’s treatment for yaws was widely published. Attributed to “Dr. Papa,” it appeared in Every Man His Own Doctor, British North America’s first domestic medical manual, printed by Benjamin Franklin and by others.”

The remedy:

“Take four Ounces of the Bark of the Spanish Oak, two Ounces of the middle Bark of the Pine Tree, two Ounces of the Root of the Sumack, that hears the Berries, of these Ingredients make a strong Decoction, drink it and wash the sore with it..”

This remedy shows James’ relationship to Indigenous medicine utilizing three, antiseptic, native, astringent barks and berries to help fight this difficult infection. Sumac was widely used in Southeastern Indigenous medicine for infections of the mouth and gums. It is important to note that while he was “freed” he was still under the watchful and controlling eye of the ones who wanted his remedy and any more he would find. He deserves many more essays all his own as this remedy was circulated in many books such as John Brickell’s 1737, The Natural History of North Carolina, without crediting him. The conventional treatment option at the time was mercurial salts and poisonous cures using other heavy metals, making this simple, often effective treatment all the more miraculous and accessible.White pine is most often mentioned but what about other species?

The Hemlock pine (unrelated to the poison carrot family plant that killed Socrates) (Tsuga canadensis) is best known today as the host of the beloved reishi mushroom, and as a tree suffering from widespread death due to an invasive pest called the Wooly Adelgid. They were also used extensively in medicine and have uses with are special unto them in Appalachian folk medicine.

In Kentucky, the bark bark scraped and applied to sores and proud flesh where the healing was slow. Decoctions were made of the twigs and mixed with the twigs of my beloved spicebush and drunk very hot for influenza. The inner bark decoction is drunk for diarrhea, and the needles and twigs were drunk as tea for hoarseness, pneumonia (ginger was often added for this particular illness), to “break out the measles” and treat typhoid, as well as general colds and flus. A cough syrup from catnip, mullein, hemlock needles and twigs and rabbit tobacco would be made.

A charm for toothache…

For toothache, take a drop of the oil from a branch of the peach (Prunus persica) tree, procured by burning it with a pine knot or lightwood splinter, and drop it on the tooth.

A good charm to make a wart disappear was to rub a dead pine stick on a wart until the bark comes off. Pine is not the only anti-wart wood in Appalachian folk medicine and magic, but another way to charm them off using pine was to cut as many notches in a piece of pine wood as you have warts. Cut the warts till they bleed, and cover the notches with the blood. Hide the stick under the back doorstep and the warts will go away.

As in many charms in the mountains, it works best if you forget about the stick and don’t think about it. Still yet another charm to remove a wart is to stick nine straight pins into it, and secretly stick them into a pine tree, and the wart will disappear. This one uses contagion magic to transfer the warts to the knotty pine through the pin and the number 9 often used in Appalachian folk magic for it is 3 x 3, the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.

Some evergreen wood has taboos around it. It is said that if you burn spruce pine wood, the house will get burned. Other woods that are bad luck to burn include sassafras, apple and elderberry. Other pines were burned for lightwood (to start a fire) and to smoke for its embalming effects on a corpse at a wake.

It is said that the pine trees minister to a “diseased mind” or one troubled with bad thoughts in Appalachian folk medicine historically. From Frank C. Brown’s Collection of North Carolina Folklore, Mrs. Maude Minish Sutton, Lenoir, Caldwell county circa 1950:

“You can take the achinest heart on earth into a big pine woods and let hit jist drink in the smell and singin’ of the trees and crunch the needles underfoot, and you’ll come out feeling better. I believe God likes the pine trees best of all his trees.”

Charming Pine…

Appalachian folk charms and folklore of the evergreens gathered from Frank C Brown’s Collection of North Carolina Folklore:

• If you find a hairpin, and hang it on a pine tree, you will have a letter by the next mail.

• You can put the girl from his mind, in case you have trouble about getting the hair around his neck, by taking a lock of her hair and putting it in a split in a sliver from a lightning-
  struck white pine, and by then throwing the pine in running water. She will go as far as the water runs.

• Cut your pine wood in the new of the moon, if you want it to be light.

• If a baby has thrush, a man who has never seen his father may walk around a pine tree several times, blow into the baby’s mouth for seven days and they will be cured.

• To cure a backache, dig up some pine roots in a road where there has never been any corpse, burn the roots, and then apply rosin to your back.

• To cure the chills: Take a cord and tie it around the body, and then take it and tie the other end to a pine tree. Then sleep one night with the cord fixed this way, and the chills will leave.

• For chills and fever, tie a piece of yarn taken from your stocking around a pine tree
  then walk around the tree three times a day for nine days.

• A cure for influenza is to skin off the black pine into where the white inner bark appears and then chip out the soft tissue and soak it in warm water for from three to five hours. When the bark has soaked the prescribed amount of time, take in small quantities. The tree, however, must be skinned on the north side. (Many charms and remedies in Appalachian and Southern folk practice require particular directional bark peeling. This comes from Indigenous medicine ways).

Now that we have dug into the history of the medicine, how does evergreen work today in the living practice of Appalachian folk medicine? We will explore that in the next essay.

Bless the pines and spruces and firs, the cedars the cypress and the lightwood and blessed Imbolc and Candlemass.

Works Cited…

Banks, William H., Jr., and Steve Kemp (2004). Plants of The Cherokee: Medicinal, Edible, and Useful Plants Of The Eastern Cherokee Indians. Gatlinburg, TN : Great Smoky Mountains Association.

Bolyard, Judith L. (1981). Medicinal plants and home remedies of Appalachia. Springfield, Thomas.

Covey, H. C. (2007). African-American Slave Medicine: Herbal and non-Herbal Treatments. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic.

Hamel, Paul B. and Mary U. Chiltoskey. (1975). Cherokee Plants and Their Uses -- A 400 Year History. Sylva, N.C. Herald Publishing Co.

Moss, K. K. (2021). Southern Folk Medicine, 1750-1820. United States: University of South Carolina Press.

Stewart, L. (2025). The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women’s Magic. United States: Grand Central Publishing.

Though the world is covered in a thin glass of ice today for me in Marshall, North Carolina, I dream of Spring. In preparation, I’d like to share with you some information about the beautiful tradition of Spring tonic medicines in Appalachia. For me, the history of a medicine is as important as its present uses, so in this piece I explore the historical uses of plants for Spring Tonics, as well as modern ideas and recipes for tonics today. This article is based off a talk I did a few years ago at Medicines for the Earth Conference, in Black Mountain, NC. You can purchase and listen to the recording of my lecture here. I have expanded and added much more here.

Read more

What is Appalachian folk magic? What is Appalachia? What is NOT Appalachian? These are all important questions, and ones with many answers. It’s important to consider what a tradition really IS before pursuing, studying or practicing any bioregional folk way, especially those of diverse cultural origins like that of the Appalachian region. It’s important to me to be clear about how I understand Appalachia and its formation while teaching classes on this historical medicine traditions and folk magical lore.

I also write this in hopes of furthering the conversations about what makes Appalachia special, worth protecting and a place to treasure, warts and all. I also write this so that those who would study with me or read my books understand where I am coming from and my understanding of the region I hold dear above all things and my relationship to it. If you’ve never met me, hello, I’m Rebecca Beyer (she/her).

I have lived in Western North Carolina for 16 years and have dedicated myself to its many beings and folk ways through living close to the land while learning alongside many different types of people who make up modern Appalachia and studying it closely. While I was born in what is considered the northernmost point of coal Appalachia in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so I speak on this matter as an outsider. I was not one raised within it, nor inside any cultural group aside from WASP America.

I was raised with no folk medicine, plant knowledge or craft and moved 9 times as a young person throughout the Mid-Atlantic (I even lived in California for a few years as a very young child.) I started practicing Wicca at 12 through my Unitarian Universalist church and became obsessed with living history after witnessing the Amish folks that lived near me in Pennsylvania. I lived on farms on an off as a child from 8 onwards and knew that rural life was the one for me, one close to the earth.

The Delaware water gap and the woods of eastern Pennsylvania have mostly defined my lived experience of relationship to nature before I moved out at 18, on Lenapehoking (land of the Lenni-Lenape). I started my education on the Green Path of herbalism and farming in 2007 at Howell Living History farm with my friend Rob Flory as a mentor (our fearless leader). As a life long horse girl, I was thrilled to learn to drive draft horses amongst many other skills. There is some homecoming in my move to Western North Carolina though, as my great grandmother was born in the mountains of Brevard, North Carolina, and before her, most of my mother’s side came from eastern Kentucky.

That’s a little about me, but now on to Appalachia…

The Appalachian Regional Commission defines Appalachia as,

“a 205,000-square-mile region that follows the spine of the Appalachian Mountains from southern New York to northern Mississippi. It includes all of West Virginia and parts of 12 other states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia”.

Despite these definitions, there perhaps exists two Appalachia’s however. In my opinion, there is the physical mountain range mentioned above , and there is also the social/cultural idea of Appalachia. Despite it being difficult to define exactly where it is physically due to the Appalachian Regional Commissions definitions versus indwellers definitions, I generally speak about the mountain South, from West Virginia to Northern Alabama, that has shared foodways, cultural influences, religion, language and folk arts. I study plants so when I teach Appalachian folk classes I am largely speaking for the Southern Appalachian bioregion from West Virginia to Northern Alabama because of their shared and interrelated flora and fauna.

My first focused introduction to Appalachian folkways was through ballads and music alongside my best and dearest friend: Saro Lynch Thomason of East Tennessee. We met back in 2005 at Bard College in the woods of Upstate New York as 18 year olds. She introduced me to the songs of her region as well as the struggle for Mountain Justice and the issues of coal mining. After the sad sale of our family farm in eastern Pennsylvania, where I had intended to move and farm after graduating, I instead moved here in 2010 to be with Saro, my most beloved and closest person after finding myself afloat in the world.

I finished my Plant and Soil Science degree in Agroecology from the University of Vermont in 2010, and then promptly I moved to an area about 30 minutes outside of Asheville called Gerton where I worked on a small farm. I was deeply interested in localized, bioregional lifeways, petroleum free farming with horse power and historical folk medicine and endeavored if I am to live in a place I needed to devote myself to studying its history, foodways, ecology and more.

It was here in WNC I met Byron Ballard, our village witch of Asheville, in 2013 and took a class with her on Appalachia folk magic. She was my first teacher on the subject that was not a book. She has gone on to be a friend and mentor throughout my time here, supporting me through difficult illness and offering advice and support through my many joys and sorrows. I am deeply grateful for her. The services she provides to our community are very special, through her work with Mother Grove as well as a teacher, writer and so much more. She introduced me to the term Appalachian citizen which I wear proudly as a transplant to these mountains.

She not only taught me through classes and her books about what Appalachian folk magic feels like, she also explained to me through conversation about the continuing struggle with stereotypes and misuse of the word hillbilly and the like here in the mountains she grew up in. Conversations with her and my many other friends who are from this region have been the most defining to me in my quest to understand what people feel about being Appalachian, what they feel Appalachian-ness is and what others outside of Appalachia think of the region and its inhabitants. I turned from studying general farming and western herbalism, to digging into the study of Appalachian folk medicine and magic.

I live very rurally off grid in Marshall, North Carolina. If you ask my neighbors where they live, some of whom have been here for 5 generations or more, they surely will not answer, “Appalachia.” Most of my community refer to themselves by the name of their immediate locale, not by the name of the mountain region. There is little conversation about the “right way” to pronounce it, (“throw an Apple-at-cha” vs “Appa-lay-sha” like they say it where I am from), and more just trying to make it in this world. Appalachian-ness as an identity began to form a long time ago, but it is always growing and changing just as its people, land and folkways are. Where I live, the way young people talk about Appalachia is markedly different than the way elders do. Have you noticed that in your community?

In their essay, “The Uses and Misuses of Appalachian Culture”, Phillip J. Obermiller, and Michael E. Maloney talk about the troubles around attempting to define a unified culture:

“Fredrik Barth criticized all attempts to create a homogenized, unitary “culture” for any group. Those who do ‘silently reaffirm the assumption of pervasive logical coherence in culture without exploring its extent and character, [while leaving] the axioms of received wisdom on ‘culture’ undisturbed’ (Barth 1989, 122). The message here is that trying to delineate a culture often tells us more about the biases of the observer than the nature of the people being observed.”

I have lived in many different places since moving here to the mountains and have lived in tents, sheds, punk houses, and even a bus while dedicating myself to learning the plants through classes, plant walks, books, conversations and conferences since 2010. I have immersed myself in learning the skills needed to hunt, fish, gather and grow food and medicine grounded in this place and time. I have lived on the edges of the Anarcho-primitivist subculture for many years and through this lens have matured my understanding of living on land and what it means, especially here. It is something I am always thinking about and wondering over.

In 2015, I pursued a Masters in Appalachian Studies from Appalachian State University, and it is interesting to note that when I began my program, our head of department told us that we should prepare ourselves to be discriminated against for having gone to a university bearing the name of Appalachian State, as well as the double whammy of having a secondary degree in such a topic. While I personally never experienced this, I understood why this was, and would go on to deepen and broaden my understanding of the negative stereotypes of what makes something Appalachian. I focused on the history of plant uses in Southern Appalachia, or Appalachian Ethnobotany.

This is all to explain how I came to this place and my efforts in attempting to know it. I come not to cosplay rural poverty or an idealized Appalachian self-sufficient woodsperson stereotype, but in a quest to live spiritually closely to nature in a way that causes least harm, while celebrating the seasons and acknowledging history of the land I am a guest on as well as my own ancestor’s folkways. Also, I come at it from a place of pleasure. I love learning about history, foodways, folkmagic and craft, and I derive a deep sense of joy from these pursuits. I tend to avoid and feel disinterested in New Age magical concepts and prefer historically founded traditions as they help me feel more grounded in my own ancestry as well as in justice spaces with the ancestors of those mine have caused harm to. I like to know where people learned things from, and love when people acknowledge their teachers.

But all my personal blathering aside, how did this region become what it is? Why are things like stumpwater, salt and red pepper so important in our charms? There isn’t one clean answer, and I am certainly not the one to give it. It has many facets, and I can only see so many from my vantage point. I would still like to try and follow the thread of what made Appalachia historically and how one can feel its edges when learning about folk magic, food, craft and medicine ways in this special place. I also want to explain this so that those taking classes with me understand my background and where I am coming from in my teaching and how we can acknowledge where different practices originated in our study of Appalachian folk magic and medicine.

A region defined…

I have read and heard it said many times that it is difficult to see where, what and how different cultural groups have contributed to the lore of the region. However, by studying the ethnobotany, history and ecology of a place, we are able to often find the threads home to the land of origins of different beliefs. When we familiarize ourselves with all the people’s folkways, we can start to tease out the different cultural contributions. It is difficult, because like all folkways, Appalachian folk magic is an unofficial system that does not have a set doctrine or dogma.

Historically, Appalachia is made from three predominant cultural groups, each from very different parts of the world. It is much like a stool with three legs: one Indigenous, one African and the other European, each containing within them a myriad of unique specific nation’s ways. These cultural groups came together in this particular, mountainous topography and climate to form the bones of the healing and magical methods employed within it.

First, there was Indigenous Appalachia for thousands of years. Diverse languages, cultures, religions, foodways and folk healing methods dotted hollers and hilltops of the well populated Mountain South. Yuchi, Cherokee, Creek, Shawnee, Choctaw, Mingo, Catawba and many more people had large communities throughout the region. The Ani’-Yun’wiya’, (Cherokee) alone have been in this region since 8000 BCE.

The European story begins in the 1500’s with the arrival of the Spanish and the people from Western and Central Africa they had enslaved in their quest to expand their riches. The Spanish used Roman humoral medicine combined with Christian ideologies and eventually melded them with Indigenous beliefs over time. These were of course also influenced by these largely West and Central enslaved Africans who of course had their own healing traditions and worldviews.

Scotch-Irish and British colonists and their contributions to Appalachian culture are often solely mentioned in the conversations about the medicine, folklore and music of this area, but it was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that they arrived in Appalachia and began the process of cultural exchange and assimilation with their own healing methods, as in the case with astrology, biblical prayer and spiritual-medical actions. The cultures from Europe which came to have the greatest presence in these mountains, and perhaps the greatest influence on the folk beliefs there were, by number, the English, Scots- Irish, the Scottish and the German.

The Cherokee, Catawba, Muskogee, Yuchi and many other nations had lived here for thousands of years and knew how things had to be done to ensure a good life in this specific bioregion. No amount of racial prejudice could totally discount their knowledge and experience to white colonizers. First Nations peoples also had a unique blend of certain African beliefs into their systems of healing, for by 1620 they had been mingling together as those fleeing enslavement fled deep into the mountains away from their oppressors.

Without the knowledge that the First Nations people provided to colonists, many if not all would have perished through harsh winters in a new terrain full of strange animals and plants. European beliefs also had an effect on Native Americans over time. For example, they went from believing that the neglect of ritual during hunting could cause illness to the idea that the hunter inhaling bad odors, or miasmic theory of illness, would cause sickness, a markedly European belief about disease. The ways in which information was shared between these two groups was markedly different, by either forced assimilation or mutual exchange as Europeans sought ever more land in their expansion westward with the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

We can see the West and Central African world view’s fingerprint on Appalachian folk medicine in their beliefs that spirits could cause illness as well as in their varied and complex beliefs about conjure and magic. The idea that living in a bad way with other people and one’s environment was shared between many West and Central African cultures, such as the Yoruba, and many of the Native American communities, which allowed them to blend together more readily. Often, due to differing worldviews, many Africans did not find much of value to them in the medicine of Europeans, as it was also often used as a method of control and punishment from enslavers.

Eventually these healing practices were further augmented by the Irish and other Western Europeans in the 1800’s. The Irish particularly brought more beliefs surrounding the inherent power of the land and the sacred landscape. There were of course European immigrants from the Nordic counties, the Mediterranean and other locales, but these groups from Western Europe came in the largest droves, leaving a more noticeable fingerprint upon the region. One could argue the final mixing of beliefs occurred in the Antebellum South, a period during which many European-ancestored people lost their wealth. This resulted in class lines changing and caused folk healing and magic methods to cross not only race lines but class lines.

It is also interesting to note how the unique landscape of an area shapes its medicine. The Southern Appalachian landscape is notoriously mountainous and damp. It is no surprise then that its folk medicine and magic formed among the dense woodlands, humid air and rocky terrain would harbor malaria, numerous parasites, and oft broken bones. The types of ailments faced by a people cause them to reach for certain remedies more often, lining out their recipe books and folk magical needs.

There were also certain books, like William Buchan book, “Every Man his Own Doctor” from 1794 and Dr. John C Gunn’s, “Domestic Medicine or Poor Man’s Friend”, and English translations of a German charm book, John George Hohman’s “Long Hidden Friend”which had wide circulation throughout the region, particularly in Pennsylvania.

These works’ influences were detectable in many different areas of Appalachia, and still are through all communities. Soon the specific healing beliefs were no longer identified solely by the ethnicity of the person that performed them, but the area they were from on this soil. Appalachian folk healing began to have a shape with specific charms, prayers, plants, and practices that exist to this day. As the 1900’s dawned however, a new outside force would begin to further render and forcefully define Appalachian culture.

The “place apart” Appalachia is born…

As America became more urbanized during the industrial period at the beginning of 1900’s, new literary trends were born. The rise of book printing and literacy amongst the burgeoning middle classes created a literary desire to seek out stories of “untouched or uncivilized” areas of the country to be consumed by the urban population. One could argue it was the people known as local color writers of the 1920’s who are to blame for officially setting the people of Appalachia apart from the rest of the United States in ways that continue to paint a stereotypical, incomplete picture of our region. These were people largely from Northern States of means who traveled through the region remarking on its unique character as both a repository of lost folk ways and a place inhabited by poor, rugged uncivilized white Highlanders. Learn more about that here.

These writers, who essentially acted as travel writers in the early days of tourism, spoke of Appalachians as peculiar and backwards yet also charmingly living a century behind the rest of America. They used Appalachia as an example for comparison to the rest of the country to show how much they had progressed in comparison to this strange land of strange people. They also excluded much mention of Black and Indigenous people in the areas, instead focusing on the poor white Appalachians. This effort to both preserve Appalachia as a place out of time, a place rich with what would become called American folk culture, as well as a place to be modernized by outside forces would determine the outcomes and nature of the folk arts, medicine, magic and spirituality of the mountains.

They defined Appalachia as a “place out of time” which housed “our contemporary ancestors”, since shortly after the Civil War. Many forces outside of the mountains came together to press Appalachia into the cultural diamond it is today at the turn of the century through their distorted witness. This plethora of eyes turned their sights on our region, envisioning, observing and applying what they saw as a balm to the struggles, both real and imagined, of the mountain South. Extractive industries, from coal to timber, were ravaging the mountains in some areas and made agrarian life increasingly unprofitable or impossible as Appalachian people moved to work in mill towns, coal mines and urban factories at the turn of the 20th century.

Social and cultural reforms were also on the move through the hands of missionaries and college educated middle class white women from the North seeking to provide aid to Appalachia, or what President of Berea College, William Godell Frost, called the “ward of the nation”. On one hand, due to the mythologizing from those early local color writers after the Civil War, Appalachia had gained a reputation as a sort of time capsule inhabited by sturdy Anglo-Saxon stock unchanged by time.

The dances, language, superstitions, song and craft traditions which the Appalachians were believed to hold caused them to be viewed as a repository for culture that the rest of Antebellum America wanted desperately to believe in and identify with as it sought a new identity. Poverty and extraction were real, but the ways in which Appalachia was spoken about and by whom would greatly change the way the rest of the world viewed the region as helpless and backward. By simplifying or rendering Appalachia as “uncivilized” it paved the way for extractive companies to enter the mountains, salivating at the rich natural resources that simply were “not being used wisely” by the backwards inhabitants of the land who were content in their poverty.

As media changed and the television made its way into homes in the 1950’s and 60’s, many stereotypes were further pushed through sitcoms and TV programs that featured Appalachians as poor, having exaggerated accents, being uneducated, clannish, resistant to progress, violent and even dangerous as we approach the Deliverance movie era of the 1970’s. While it may seem harmless, stereotypes are not just hurtful to a people emotionally and spiritually, they also go so deeply into the human psyche as to affect legislation, economic development and public policy. Economic and social hardships faced by certain areas of Appalachia have been directly impacted by these negative caricatures.

Environmental issues and abuses in the coal industry, brought to attention by movements like the Roving Pickets, called for federal government intervention in Appalachia around this time. Other works like the book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area by Harry M. Caudill, published in 1962, detailed the poverty and history of the Cumberland area of Appalachia in Kentucky bringing unique issues in Appalachia to national attention. That same year, President J.F. Kennedy would begin the steps necessary to create the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) in 1965 to address the needs of the communities of what was now defined as Appalachia.

The ARC was established to bring Appalachia “up to speed” with the rest of America economically and socially. While it included parts of the country the general public did not identify as Appalachian, such as New York, it aimed to address rural American’s issues after Governors of those states requested aid. It used issues such as flooding, economic depression, industrial collapse and geographic isolation to group together certain areas, while excluding others, like the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a place long thought of by its own residents as Appalachian. This greatly affected the ways in which America would define and think of what made a place a part of Appalachia. The ARC has many criticisms and here is an interesting paper I read when wondering about its long term impacts.

I feel here it is important to mention that the very idea that 13 states and millions of people who make up Appalachia all share a definable culture is a difficult one to grapple with. When I speak of Appalachian culture, I speak of the unique groups that historically came together to form its body of music, foodways, healing arts, folk medicine and more. As Appalachia has entered the modern world, it becomes more and more difficult to define what is it culturally by listing traits or values people hold within it due to its diversity of class, ethnicities and histories. We must ask: what do we gain or lose by supporting a certain vision of Appalachia, whether negative, positive or neutral?

I feel Phillip J. Obermiller, and Michael E. Maloney again say it well in their aforementioned essay,“The Uses and Misuses of Appalachian Culture”:

“The concept of culture itself is a relatively new one. Its roots are found in the nineteenth-century rise of nation-states and the concomitant drive to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution. Both of these threads used lists of traits and behaviors to show why nations were better than tribes, fiefdoms, principalities, and city-states, and why more “evolved” people were always more civilized than other groups. Both explanations of “civilization” were based on comparative cultural analysis such as that used by Giffin and Weller. While Franz Boas, an early twentieth-century anthropologist, thoroughly debunked this elitist fraud, some Appalachian scholars and activists have not yet caught on.”

Speaking of the plural heritages of Appalachia can feel more honest to me than trying to encompass it all as a unified flavor and can help avoid the past mistakes of those attempting to define it. Black Appalachian experiences are seldom mentioned and Indigenous peoples in the region are rarely spoken of in present tense. Ideas of what makes Appalachian culture today is also different than it was in the 1930s, it is always growing and changing as all things do.

It is my hope as one who shares information about this particular place that I do so from a historical perspective, not a modern voice claiming what IS and ISN’T Appalachian, because I have no right to. It is my goal to instruct on what medicines and plants have been important in this region to all its people to the best of my ability and try and describe the beliefs of its many different residents, not just tell a story that fulfills fanciful or rustic stereotypes. It is also my goal and I believe my duty to continually learn to make sure I am doing this as accurately as possible by examining my own biases.

Appalachia today…

There is a disconnect I see that is growing wider all the time between the lived experience of Appalachian-ness and the idea of it espoused on social media and in broader film, books and other forms of entertainment. As someone immersed in not just studies of the flora of our region but also basket making, carving and many other folk crafts, I feel it’s important to understand how these things meet and move when engaging in these activities. Things that I see pushed as Appalachian on social media are largely concepts like:

Ruralness, toughness, insider/ outsider thinking, resourcefulness, resilience, poverty, whiteness (Scots-Irish-ness specifically), dangerousness of the landscape, a negativity and harmfulness of its land spirits. There is also a tendency to lump rural experiences together, especially under a Euro-centric umbrella, and a disparaging of the urban or those with less access to natural spaces.

There is also inclusion of things like Western Indigenous cryptids and a hodge podge of spooky tales that may have originated outside the region as people rely more and more on videos rather than the word of a neighbor, family member or interview to learn more folklore. There is a new lore being created through tik- tok and instagram, they could be said to be the next round of local color writers with infinitely quicker writing speed and information dissemination. Appalachia has continued to be for entertainment purposes only, often warped by the many AI books with imaginary authors.

Appalachian folk magic is a bubbling cauldron of millions of voices, stirred with a spoon of the unique ecology and lived experiences of the many peoples of this place. It is always growing and changing, just as its people do. Today we have Latine, Asian, and many more cultural influences adding to the pot, an ever more complex story. One thing we can say for sure is that Appalachia is not frozen in time, it is not primitive and it is not simple.

While defining just what exactly Appalachian culture IS is beyond the scope of this essay, I think it also bears to mention what historian Patricia Nelson Limerick says best:

“There [are] some who would argue that when an ethnicity becomes the basis of a thriving literary tradition, it is already on the ropes, already on its way to status as the property of a small group of self-conscious intellectuals and no longer just the lived reality of regular folk”.

Now that we have such a large body of folklore and folk magic defined by the modern audience as “Appalachian” I want to invite the observer to pull back and ask where this information was gathered? Is it based on hearsay or history? What does it mean for the people it is defining? What does it imply if it is true? And finally, what more can I learn here to see a bigger picture? Today we must also ask: was this written by AI? The intentions of how and why we share information is extremely important and something I am always asking myself as an educator, practitioner, citizen and lover of this place.

It is my hope that after reading this you feel invited to ask yourself, what do I believe about Appalachian folk magic? And why? Do I feel defensive of it having certain characteristics? Do I feel open to it being more complex and nuanced than I previously thought? Am I conflating ideas of rural America with Appalachian-ness? It is always my goal to help hold the door open for the possibility that Appalachian folk magic is not just a basic system of superstition cobbled together by the uneducated white poor, but instead a deeply interconnected and beautiful body of lore built to “get things done” made by many hands who are no longer here to tell their diversity of stories.

This is a very surface look at many complicated questions, and I hope it inspires you to learn more. It is my goal that Appalachia and its folk ways continue to be witnessed, preserved and taught with love and reverence, as well as realistic critique and understanding of the pain that enslavement, colonization, poverty and ecological destruction have wrought not only on our region, but on every continent. It is my goal to uplift and tell the stories of Black, Indigenous and poor Appalachians of every race alongside the magic of the plants that have both found themselves here and are native to the area. Long live Appalachia and may we all hold dear the histories of the land we live on, no matter how people attempt to sanitize or sensationalize it.

Works Cited:

This piece is largely based on my 2018 Graduate Thesis, “A Place For Plants: Ethnobotany, Bioregionalism And Folkways In Appalachia”.

Cavender, Anthony P. Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Light, Phyllis D. “A History of Southern and Appalachian Folk Medicine.” Journal of the American Herbalists Guild, vol. 8, no. 2, Mar. 2008.

Limerick, Patricia N. Something in the soil: Legacies and reckonings in the new West. New

York: Norton, 2000.

McKinney, Gordon B. (December 2004). “Extracting Appalachia: Images of the Consolidation Coal Company, 1910–1945, and: To Move a Mountain: Fighting the Global Economy in Appalachia (review)”. Enterprise & Society. 5 (4). Cambridge University Press: 721–724.

Phillip J. Obermiller, and Michael E. Maloney. (2016). “The Uses and Misuses of Appalachian Culture.” Journal of Appalachian Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 103–12. JSTOR.

Stewart, L. (2025). The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women’s Magic. United States: Grand Central Publishing.

Ulack, Richard; Raitz, Karl (1 May 1981). “Appalachia: A Comparison of the Cognitive and Appalachian Regional Commission Regions”. Southeastern Geographer. 21 (1): 40–53.