Jane George
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“I was born Armistice Day, 1922, not far from here, across the hill, in a place called Possum Hollow.” –Jane George For someone so fundamentally linked with Appalachian heritage, Emma Jane Taylor couldn’t have come from a more West Virginia-sounding place. Possum Hollow was so cut off from the world that her dad had to cross a creek on foot every morning to get to his car so he could teach in Spencer. From the beginning, teaching was in Jane’s blood. Both of her parents, Ray and Beulah Lowe Taylor, were educators. They made sure Jane was in school by age four, and her education didn’t end when the school bell rang. As far back as she could remember, her dad had her memorizing poems from McGuffey Readers. In her 90s, Jane could still recite many of them by heart. In August 1926, the family moved to Speed, where Ray had built a house by the newly paved state Route 14 (US 119 today) so he could drive the six miles to work with dry feet. When Jane was in second grade, her father, unhappy with a teacher at Speed School, disenrolled her and her sister Rose and sent away for the Calvert Course of Home Education, generally considered the first national homeschool curriculum. Beulah stayed home and taught the two girls (in 1937, a brother, Robert Raymond, joined the family). In an interview with Danny Williams [see our Winter 1993 issue], Jane speculated that she and Rose were probably the only children in the region being home-taught with a formal curriculum. Jane soon returned to public schools. She attended Spencer Grade School and, in 1936, graduated with honors from Spencer Junior High, where she earned a coveted Golden Horseshoe, the annual award for excellence in West Virginia Studies. For her eighth-grade graduation, Jane and her father adorned Spencer’s Robey Theatre with honeysuckle bouquets they’d made from scratch—demonstrating her lifelong love of nature and crafts. From an early age, she was active in the Roane County 4-H program, in which both of her parents were leaders. Jane attended Jackson’s Mill—the nation’s first statewide 4-H camp—where she was honored as princess of her tribe and interacted with West Virginia’s 4-H pioneers, such as Teepi Kendrick. [See “Head, Heart, Hands and Health” by Michael M. Meador, Summer 1984.] Many people associate 4-H solely with agriculture, but it was much more. Through 4-H, Jane developed a love of Appalachian heritage. In addition, the WVU Extension Service, which sponsored 4-H, tried to lift the spirits of West Virginians who were struggling during the Great Depression. “They hired people to go around to different communities,” Jane recalled, “and put on programs two nights a week that got people out of their homes and, together, to have some recreation. And there was a man in [Roane] County who came twice a week to a little field down here where we played ball and we did a little folk dancing.” 4-H would become one of Jane’s lifelong passions. At Spencer High School, Jane sang in various groups, played in the band, and, at age 16, graduated valedictorian in a class of 126. She turned down a full scholarship offer from Marietta College in Ohio—greatly disappointing her dad—so she could stay home and marry Herman Cox because, according to Jane, “he was the best-looking man in Spencer High School.” She took on odd jobs, such as working the soda fountain at a Spencer drugstore. The couple had four sons—John, David, Timothy, and James—and moved to the Kanawha Valley, where Herman worked in the chemical industry (in 1973, he would die from injuries suffered in an explosion at Union Carbide’s Institute plant). Jane and Herman built a house near Tornado, about seven miles up Coal River from Saint Albans. During this time, Jane remembered doing “a lot of outdoorsy things. We raised exotic birds. We raised a garden. And my oldest son, David, and I and raised roses.” When Jane’s sons grew old enough to join 4-H, she organized a new club in the area and ran two others. She kept volunteering more and more of her time until coming to the realization, “Hey, why don’t you go look for a job and get paid for what you’re doing? And that’s how it all began.” After serving a year as social director for a Methodist church in Saint Albans, Jane became program director for the Charleston Parks and Recreation Commission and then the Kanawha County Parks and Recreation Commission. In these roles, she introduced children to a lot of “folk stuff,” as she described it. For instance, at summer’s end, the county hosted “Song-o-Rees.” Jane recalled this fun, but educational, event, “One playground would be one country, one playground would be another country. It was international music and dancing. We formed a folk quartet and sang all over the county.” Next, she came up with one of her signature programs. “The best thing we did,” Jane said, “was Mountaineer Day Camp. We brought kids in for four weeks, a week at a time, from four different sections of Kanawha County. Went and got them, brought them in, fed them, taught them all this stuff. They did archery, they did music, they did crafts, the same thing that you do with any of the camping groups, but it was all geared to West Virginia mountain heritage.” This was all happening in the two years leading up to our state’s Centennial. When 1963 rolled around, Jane was appointed as Kanawha County’s representative to the state Centennial Committee, which founded the Mountain State Art & Craft Fair at Cedar Lakes in Jackson County. Intended as a one-off event for the Centennial, the fair would become an annual pilgrimage for lovers of history, traditional music and crafts, and homemade ice cream. [See “Mountain State Art & Craft Fair” by Nancy Merical, Summer 2013.] For that first fair, she worked with folklorist Dr. Patrick Gainer and others to find traditional craftspeople and musicians across West Virginia. Jane said, “Part of our purpose was to celebrate our state’s Centennial. But another was to encourage sales and teaching. We didn’t want these primitive crafts to die out.” available in bookstores, libraries or direct from Goldenseal. |
