Margaret Ecker describes the communal living experience characteristic of those who stayed at the Ponderosa in Lake City, Tenn., a property donated by locals to host Coalition students. Follow this link for full-footage of Margaret Ecker’s and Rosie Hammond’s reflections about their SHC experience in East Tennessee. Recorded Summer 2022.
[Story contributed by Trip Van Noppen] In 1975, I began working for Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM) and moved into the Ponderosa, the really old farmhouse outside of Lake City that Bill had somehow obtained for general housing needs. Jimmy Dean and Granny Loomis were already there. They needed a caretaker. Bill drafted me to …
Contributed by John E. Davis, August 2015. I am the eldest son of a Southern couple who moved north for employment after World War II. Every June, my parents would “go home,” loading their three boys into a station wagon with no air conditioning and traveling hundreds of miles down US 1 from New Jersey …
[Story contributed by Margaret Ecker, RN, MSN] Sometime around 1975, local friends in Lake City offered us newly minted community organizers this abandoned house for a dwelling. We lived communally, our numbers fluctuating with the season. We lived with a coal burning stove and kept our provisions in gallon glass jugs against the mice. We …
