Description
Here is the gripping and unforgettable true story of what happens when eight children are abandoned in a shack in the Appalachian Mountains. Written as fiction, The Woods of Fannin County brings to life the story of how eight children survived four years mostly alone, without mother or father.
In the fall of 1945, eight children vanished from a small rental house in Morganton, Georgia. Sisters and brothers, the oldest was ten and the youngest a newborn. The parents of these children were divorced, and their mother had returned home to the Blue Ridge foothills. Without support she now had no use for her eight children. She and her father—the grandfather—loaded the children into a wagon and rode them by mule-team to a shack on a remote mountain in Fannin County, near the North Carolina line.
The mother occasionally visited the children, spending a night and cooking a vat of hominy on her visits, but mostly she was gone. Once she didn’t show for two months. The older children had to figure out how to survive and how to keep the little ones alive. They began to roam the mountains and valleys of what had been Cherokee Territory, scouring for food and scrambling to take care of themselves and each other.
In 1949 a moonshiner discovered the children and reported their whereabouts. The state welfare department rescued them and sent them all to an orphanage in the south.
Over time the children themselves became silent about their childhood, and their story was buried. Few people ever knew what happened.
One day in 2015 the children, long grown and many of them now grandparents, began to reveal their story to Janisse Ray, award-winning author of the bestselling memoir, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. The Woods family wove a sometimes painful, sometimes jubilant, and always astounding revelation of their subsistence in an Appalachian wilderness.
Had that not happened, this remarkable story of abandonment, survival, and the incredible resilience of eight children might have been forever lost.
Janisse Ray is known for her literary nonfiction, characterized by rich lyricism, knowledge of the natural world, and sincere embrace of the ecology of the heart.
Based on a true story, The Woods of Fannin County is Ray’s first novel.
