A staffer, recent student and current student of the Foxfire program in Rabun County spoke about efforts to return to its roots.
Speaking at the Macon County Public Library on Wednesday, July 17, John Singleton, who handles education and community engagement, gave a history of the program plus a vision for the future.
Foxfire, a magazine created by high school students in Rabun County filled with stories of local people, rose to national prominence in the 1970s. The program is overseen by Rabun County High School.
A 1970s Foxfire alum, Singleton said his family has roots for seven generations in Clay County and six generations in Rabun County.
Singleton talked about the history of Foxfire, which started in 1966 when Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School English teacher Eliot Wigginton was trying to find ways to make learning interesting. At the time, the school housed students from all over the south as well as from local areas. According to Singletary, the local kids who hated hearing the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare would pelt Wigginton with spitballs when his back was turned.
“It got to the point where one time he turned his back and [the students] set a trash can on fire,” Singleton said, “Today, if you set a trash can on fire, you’re going to jail. Back then, it was considered a knuckle-headed classroom event, and you might not even get terribly punished for it.”
Singleton said Wigginton realized that the local kids weren’t learning, especially in a community that was less than 50% literate then.
“So what [Wigginton] did, which would have been the first miracle of Foxfire, was he handed these kids tape recorders, put them in groups of four, and they went out into the community and interviewed people,” Singleton said.
Several of the first people interviewed were from Macon County, Singleton said, and contacts from Macon County outnumber those from Rabun County.
The students collected the stories for a magazine, which, in 1972, became the first Foxfire book and became a national bestseller. The name came from naturally occurring illuminated fungi in the nearby forests.
Singleton said the successive miracles of Foxfire were that the school let the students keep the money earned from the sales and then purchased an old, abandoned apple farm on the side of Black Rock Mountain, which is now where the Foxfire Museum is.
The Foxfire project moved to Rabun County High School in 1977, where it resides today.
“But you can imagine that for a kid like me, I’m 16 or 17, I walk into that room, and these faculty are dead serious,” Singleton said. “There’s a bunch of them, and you can remember they all meant business.”
In 1992, Wigginton pled guilty to child molestation after more than 20 people came forward alleging crimes taking place during his career. Singleton said after Wigginton was removed from the program, Foxfire was put in a remaindership and a local attorney oversaw it while staffers determined the program’s future.
Over the next 15 years, Singleton says, Foxfire “worked themselves away from a core piece,” that being the students. Recent Foxfire magazines are an attempt to return to the magazine’s roots and get back into the schools.
“It’s a move away from sort of the intellectual part of Foxfire and a return to the relationship between preserving Appalachian culture, which is intellectual, but at the hands of the students who make a lot of those choices, go out and do the interviews and things like that,” Singleton said.
Singleton said Foxfire used to have more of a student historical perspective, including pictures of the student staff in the magazine. New editions aim to bring that back.
One of the peer mentors and former student staffers, Maddie Perdue, is from Rabun County and currently attends the University of Georgia, majoring in agricultural communication. Perdue joked that you couldn’t pick up a Foxfire magazine without seeing someone related to her.
Perdue started at Foxfire when she was 16 and now continues as a peer mentor to the high school students because as she put it, she couldn’t give it up.
“Every time I hit a new milestone, my parents are like ‘OK, you’re going to do something different with your summers now,’ and I’m like, ‘No, I’m not,’” Perdue said.
Perdue talked about teaching the students how to cook on a wood fire and spinning yarn.
“If anyone ever asks me, like, what’s the best gift you ever received, it’s my spinning wheel,” Perdue said. “It’s been to Athens and back twice. And whenever my friends or my roommates are just hanging out, then I’ll set up my spinning wheel, and I’ll sit here and spin. And they all, like, sit in a circle around me, and then just watch.”
Perdue said she got accepted into eight different schools with essays written about Foxfire and got scholarships because of it.
“It always comes back to Foxfire,” Perdue said. “So, it’s just kind of a big cornerstone of who I am and who I’m going to be.”
Daniel Pope, a Macon Early College student, is one of the current Foxfire writers. His interest started with a field trip to the Foxfire Museum and grew from there. This included an enjoyment of studying history as a hobby.
Pope said he wrote an article on the historic schools in Macon County, which he said will be pretty long and includes around 50 different schools. That article and others will be in one of two magazines the staff says are almost complete.
Singleton praised the current group of students for their hard work.
“I’ve never worked with a group that’s been more focused than this group,” Singleton said.
Singleton said Foxfire aims to keep Appalachian folks from burying their stories, such as his friend who he didn’t know was a mandolin player until college. He also talked about how the program lifts up students. Some, like Pope, enjoyed history from the onset, but others will have their epiphany later.
“I see folks like Daniel lifting up some of the other students who are a little bit more shy and things like that,” Singleton said. “And them starting to get a little bit of confidence about what they’re doing.”
Perdue talked about the joy of hearing other people’s stories. One of her favorites was her 84-year-old great-grandfather telling stories of making moonshine in the backwoods of Rabun County, leaving school in the third grade and not liking how her mama had an ongoing tab at the grocery store.
“And so he’s telling me all about this story, and he’s been arrested Lord knows how many times because he gets caught a lot because he’s stupid,” Perdue said. “He had his boxes built in the side of the hill. He terraced them out so that way he was running 200 gallons of liquor a day.”