Kentucky · 1940

Milk and Cornbread

A Dark Appalachian Novel of Kentucky During the Great Depression · J.B. Fox

Every day at four o'clock, Elsie Whitaker takes a tin cup of milk and crumbled cornbread down to the springhouse. She is seven years old.

The Springhouse

Before electric refrigeration, many rural Appalachian farms kept milk, butter and other perishables in a springhouse: a small stone or log building set over a spring, where cold running water kept food cool through the summer.

Milk and Bread for the Hidden Folk

Leaving a dish of milk and bread out for unseen visitors is an old custom in the folklore of the British Isles, where offerings were set out for the fairies or household spirits. Settlers carried many such beliefs into the Appalachian mountains.

Hard Times

The Great Depression hit rural Kentucky hard, and much of the countryside still had no electricity at the start of the 1940s.