Roanoke Rapids Herald

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Crossnore Community In Avery County Has Own Economy System
Crossnore: Up at

Crossnore County
By E. Carl Sink

Don't throw away that boot scrap!

A community in the North Carolina mountains has learned a way to lift itself by it . . . as they have discovered how to make modern hospitals out of discarded petticoats. A-class schools from declassé boots, and a new way of living from crepe-ing robes.

That's Crossnore, the community built out of old clothes and out of the everlasting ingenuity and persistence of Dr. Mary Martin Sloop, who gleefully describes herself as "a cross-minded old bickerer."

The neat settlement, with its schools, hospital, workshops and other facilities for education and living, didn't birth so simply, however. Dr. Mary came, a flatlander, into the rugged Avery County country with Eustace Sloop, a comfort-loving Dutchman Doctor, who was merely seeking a peaceful, paying practice. Now the two of them, both 75 years old and still the dynamos of Crossnore's progress, have a little time in which to catch their breaths and recall the steps which transferred this isolated community into what it is today.

But just before the first world war, a 13-year old Crossnore girl was getting ready to be married, a not uncommon happening around the village. But this one irked Mrs. Sloop no end, and she decided to do something about child marriages.

It was not too difficult to talk the girl into going to school instead of the altar. And the parents, too, agreed . . . since they would likely lose the work of the girl-child in the bean and potato patches, anyhow. They told the young swain he'd just as well get started down the mountain to the sawmill where frustrated mountain men usually go.

And then the scheme bogged down: the child didn't have a thing to wear.

Slowed but undaunted, Mrs. Sloop sent letters down the mountain, started a fresh series of her favorite occupation, praying. Soon after the impasse, a big box labeled "clothing" came muleback from across the ridge.

Impresario Sloop (she's that too) set the stage for the demonstration of providential solution to the problem of child marriages.

The box contained six mourning dresses, blacker than the clouds over Grandfather on a stormy day, voluminous enough, Mrs. Sloop says, to curtain a mountain mule . . . and not a sewing machine in the whole country.

The Bickerer cried that day, in sheer frustration and not at all for the impending fate of the child bride whose swain started grinning back up from the sawmill.

"But good-hearted folks and the Lord generally make things come out right," Mrs. Sloop now gently explains. "It was just sun-down that day when Aunt Hep came by to tell us a family of six daughters down the mountain were mourning their daddy who'd got caught in the sawmill.

They needed some mourning dresses mighty bad and Aunt Hep thought maybe they had some money."

They did have, the crepe-ing robes fitted . . . and Crossnore, a way of living, and Crossnore, Inc., a unique, competent mountain school home for children were born then.

Community Education

For years Mary Martin Sloop had learned and evolved the techniques of selling community education. Her bitterest battle, with Crossnore parents who equally resented the intrusion of outside authority into their home life and the enforced attendance of their children at school when they were needed in the bean and potato harvesting, was won by a "pouting strike". Armed with an enabling act that almost literally cost blood in local referendum and a bit more than bickering convictions, Mrs. Sloop, educator, calmly told her more than willing pupils not to disobey parental ukases to stay home; more, they were to do every assigned task readily but not too fast."

But they were to "look hurt" whenever Papa or Mama happened to be looking.

Of the "bloody revolution" sincerely promised by dissident householders at the first arrest for keeping children out of school, one lone case went to court.

Anyway, frugal Dr. Eustace took a twilight look at the crepe-ing robe transaction, gave a thought to the other-side-of-the-mountain children who out-crowded his Crossnore clinic, and talked the matter over with Mrs. Sloop.

Today, Crossnore, Avery County, N. C., is one of the best dressed communities in the United States. And they have a public school system ranking at the top state level; a boarding school whose teaching is as obvious and much more refreshing than the ozone of Crossnore's 3,400 ft. elevation; a modern hospital completely equipped (including an X-ray and complete dental laboratory); two industries (a sewing room and home-spun weaving mill that will work any and all days, at the help's pleasure), . . . and the best trade in evening dresses in North Carolina.

Aunt Pops (for Poppy and Uncle Gilmer have been selling old, contributed clothes for nigh onto 35 years; since they've kept records (1940) they've turned in $190,000 from the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday sales, including proceeds from some 450 evening dresses in the season which is the nine months school period. With the exception of "a mighty few dollars" coming in from returning Crossnoreans and a trickle of tourists, all that money comes from the folks of Crossnore community who had no money when the Bickerer started . . . and still haven't, for that matter.

Clue to this most happy economic situation is Uncle Gilmer's proud boast: "And outen that $190,000 we took $40,000 cash."

The rest is "coupons", Crossnore's own currency, a fiscal gadget, Bickerer born, which allows a community to lift itself by its own bootstraps.

Guessed at from examining the discarded clothing happily sent in to Crossnore by obviously happy wearers, the $40,000 cash represents about $400,000 worth of goods, Main Street prices.

Or, say $2 Crossnore per article instead of $20 Main Street. Few people can afford plenty of $20 articles; any American can raise $2 somehow for something he really wants.

Crossnore even provides the somehow.

Up at the school commissary, Crossnoreans can get coupons, Crossnore value, for any surplus canned goods and produce; at the sewing room and the Home Spun House they can get coupons (or cash, Crossnore value) for materials or labor; practically always the Bickerer has a building program under way, and the coupon or cash economy is the pay medium. Both coupons and cash, Crossnore values, are redeemable at the sales store, Main Street values.

You just can't beat buying a $20 economy for $2.

One suspects, and Mary Martin Sloop promptly admits, the planning is hatched and nurtured in the brain of the kindly, realistic, comfort loving Dr. Eustace Sloop. But The Bickerer's methods are illuminating.

Actually old clothes only supply about a third of Crossnore's needs even with the controlled economy. A certain revenue, especially from the D.A.R. and similar organizations, comes as outright gifts marshalled by "peoples' good hearts" (to quote The Bickerer). Dr. Mary Martin Sloop's seasonal bulletins which she writes and at one time hand-set into type and printed.

For the rest, The Bickerer bickers. The late WPA is a good example.

Recognizing a good thing for Crossnore when she saw it and having the proof of quality at hand in what Crossnore already had built, Mrs. Sloop had primary approval of her plans for a new public high school in the very early days of the New Deal. But after nearly 13 months, she still didn't have final approval . . . nor word from her shining project. So she went to regional headquarters in Charlotte, announced herself, and stated calmly when she was shown a chair:

"Thank you, but I'll take this more comfortable one. I'll be here until we go home. Don't you think you should call your wife and let her know she's having an eating and sleeping guest?"

After two hours of much sitting and little talking, the office force broke down and confessed the hold-up was centered in Raleigh. The Bickerer moved forthwith to Raleigh, three hours away.

"In the nice, carpeted office there, I told the man, a perfect stranger but a mighty poor executive in my opinion, that he and his wife had company from then on if he didn't sign the application I saw plainly on his desk. . . . Do you know, that boogar held out on me . . . and kept a poor secretary sitting right there 'way past her supper time . . . almost to six o'clock? But he couldn't stick it when his wife started calling up, and we got back with the high school next morning." And that was that.

Only it wasn't. Sitting looking at the river-stone high school . . . and discussing a deal to get a new primary school already on the way . . . The beloved Bickerer confessed:

"I didn't exactly come right back to Crossnore. I stopped by another town on the way and had the 9,000 plans changed a bit by an architect. He said we couldn't possibly build a $17,000 building with a $9,000 grant but then he didn't know Crossnore and I did . . . But he was right, at that. We had to raise almost $2,000 to get it finished"