"
With their homes back in the mountains nearly fifty miles from the
railway, with a journey before them over rocky roads and up
mountainsides to the other communities of Fentress county, the people of
Pall Mall live in the communion and democracy of one great family.
Children call old men by their Christian names. In it is not the
slightest element of disrespect, and it is instead an appreciated
propriety which the old men recall as the custom of their boyhood. Rev.
R. C. Pile, pastor of the Church of Christ in Christian Union, the
church of the valley, is "Rosier" to everyone. All worship together in
the same church; all toil alike in the fields. In the predial, peaceful
routine of their days there is a positive similarity. A farmer will ride
direct to the cornfield or the meadow of a neighbor, knowing the
neighbor will be found at work there. And, as through the gray dawn of
the day they look up to the skies, the wish of one for rain will be
found to be the community desire.
The social meeting-point of the people of the valley is the general
store of John Marion Rains. The storehouse sits by the roadside at the
foot of a mountain in the western end of the valley, just where the road
tumbles down to the solid log cabin old Coonrod Pile had built, to the
spring and the York home.
One end of the long porch of the store-house, as it runs with the road,
is but a step from the ground, and the mountain falls away until the
floor is conveniently up to the height of a wagon's bed; then the road
dips again until the porch is on a level with the saddle-stirrups and
the women dismount with ease from their high-backed, tasseled
side-saddles as they come in sunbonnets and ginghams.
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