OLIVE TILFORD DARGAN

by George Brosi

Olive Tilford Dargan's great-grandmother, Susannah Whitely, was a Virginia aristocrat who married John Day and accompanied him to Kentucky. The youngest of their five daughters and twelve sons was Mordecai Yarnel Day, a farmer who preached that slavery was an abomination before the Lord. His daughter, Rebecca, married into another generations-old Kentucky family when she took Elisha Francis Tilford as her husband. Tilford owned a farm in Grayson County, Kentucky, but like his wife, also taught school. They had two boys and two girls. Olive was born on January 11, 1869.

In 1879 the Tilford's moved to Doniphan, in the Missouri Ozarks, where they founded a school. Three years later they set up another school near Warm Springs, Arkansas. At the age of fourteen, Olive Tilford taught a satellite one-room school four miles from her parents, responsible for forty "children" ranging in age from six to twenty and including two nephews of the notorious outlaw, Hildebrand! At the age of seventeen, she won a scholarship to Peabody College by getting the highest score in Arkansas on a competitive examination. During the two years it took her to graduate from Peabody, she accompanied friends on a camping trip to North Carolina and vowed, "If I ever own a home of my own, it will be in these mountains."

After graduation, Olive Tilford taught in Missouri and Texas. At the age of twenty-four she enrolled at Radcliffe College in Boston where she met Pegram Dargan, a South Carolina poet then a senior at Harvard University. After a year teaching in Nova Scotia, Tilford returned to Boston and renewed her friendship with Dargan. When she moved to Blue Ridge, Georgia, to write, Dargan followed her there. They were married on March 2, 1898, and settled in New York City. It was there that Olive Tilford Dargan began her literary career in 1904 with the publication of dramas written in verse. In 1906 the Dargans bought a large Nantahala River farm in Swain County, North Carolina. When Olive Dargan became pregnant, she stayed with friends in Connecticut. There her premature daughter died within hours of her birth. With dependable tenants to run the farm, the Dargans traveled extensively. Throughout much of the time from 1911 until 1914 Olive Dargan was in England. She completed a non-fiction work, The Welsh Pony, there in England and her first book of mountain poetry, Path Flower and Other Verses, was published simultaneously in both Britain and the United States. When Pegram Dargan drowned off the coast of Cuba, however, Olive Dargan returned to the farm in the North Carolina mountains and spent most of her time there until the farmhouse burned in 1923. During this period, she published three very different poetry collections.

Olive Tilford Dargan moved to Asheville, North Carolina, in 1925. It was there that she wrote the collection of short stories which many consider her best work, Highland Annals, and three proletarian novels under the pen name, Fielding Burke, as well as one final book of verse and one last short story collection. Two of her proletarian novels revolve around the role of mountain migrants in the Gastonia Mill strike, and the third takes place in Colorado during the notorious coal mine strike during which the National Guard attacked a tent city of evicted miners with machine guns. Call Home the Heart is the first of these novels, and generally considered the most powerful. The compelling lead character, Ish, is torn between three suitors each of whom represents an important dimension of life: art, politics, and survival. Although it was published 58 years after her first book, Dargan's last, Innocent Bigamy and Other Stories, still reveals both enormous talent in putting together words, inspired themes, and compelling plots. Olive Tilford Dargan died, at the age of 99, on January 22, 1968.

Olive Tilford Dargan was one of the very best authors ever to come out of the Appalachian South. Her writing is purposeful and meaningful. Few have surpassed her in the description of mountain beauty or in the ability to transmit a feel for human relationships.

by George Brosi

Semiramis, and Other Plays. New York: Brentano's, 1904. 255 pages of verse drama.

Lords and Lovers and Other Dramas. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906. More dramas written in verse.

The Mortal Gods and Other Plays. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912. A 383-page collection featuring a title play which treats revolution in Mexico sympathetically.

The Welsh Pony. England, 1913. Non-fiction, printed privately. Rare.

Path Flower and Other Verses. London: Dent and New York: Scribner's, 1914. Dargan's first poetry collection.

The Cycle's Rim, 1916. Verse dedicated to the memory of Dargan's late husband.

Dr. Frederick Peterson, co-author. The Flutter of the Gold Leaf and Other Plays. 1922.

Lute and Furrow. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922. 148 pages of poems in celebration of farm life and music.

Highland Annals. 1925. Short stories based so closely on Dargan's Swain County neighbors that it is difficult to determine whether this is a fiction or non-fiction collection.

Call Home the Heart. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1932. A 432-page proletarian novel written under the pen name, Fielding Burke, that depicts the role of mountain people in the Gastonia mill strike.

A Stone Came Rolling. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1935. Another proletarian novel, 412 pages, also written under the pen name, Fielding Burke. A sequel to Call Home the Heart.

From My Highest Hill: Carolina Mountain Folks. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941. A beautiful 221-page coffee table book consisting of the text of Highland Annals with two added vignettes and photographs by the famous photographer, Bayard Wooten.

Sons of the Stranger. 1947. Another proletarian novel, written under the pen name, Fielding Burke. It depicts a strike in Colorado that resulted in a shameful machine gun attack on the tent city of evicted coal miners.

The Spotted Hawk. Winston-Salem: J. F. Blair, 1958. Dargan's last poetry book, 128-pages; it won the Thomas Wolfe and Roanoke-Chowan awards.

Innocent Bigamy and Other Stories. Winston-Salem: J. F. Blair, 1962. A 261-page short-story collection published 58-years after her first book!