Oral History Interview with Sam Parker, December 5, 2000. Interview K-0252. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007).
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Abstract
This interview is more about a lack of industrialization in North Carolina than the state's development, but offers an interesting perspective on growth. Sam Parker, Madison County Probation and Parole Officer, praises rural life in the interview. Parker left a job at an insurance agency in the 1960s to settle in the hills of Madison County, where he lived for a while without electricity and grew his own food. In this interview, he discusses his decision to leave the comforts of suburbia and the appeal of living a somewhat ascetic lifestyle, where community connections take the place of Internet connections. Parker sees this lifestyle declining, but does not condemn development or mourn its passing.
Excerpts
Living in remote log cabin affects residents
Electricity arrives in remote home
Impulse to leave suburbia for a rural lifestyle
Life in rural Madison County
Efforts to settle into rural life, and the efforts of most of his neighbors to move to the suburbs
Difficulties of child abuse investigation in a closed society
Different values in urban and rural settings
Remote communities are in decline
Advantages and disadvantages of the I-26 highway running through Madison County
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Finding aid to the Southern Oral History Program Collection
Database of all Southern Oral History Program Collection interviews
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Change in the Mountains
Subjects
Farm life--North Carolina
Madison County (N.C.)
Express highways--North Carolina
Parker, Sam
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