‘The greatest gift.’ For 108 years, a sacred tradition plays on at Pine Mountain.
At 2:30 p.m., the sandstone chapel was dark, the windows blacked out with cloth, and spectators entered through the door in a steady stream to be shown to their pews with the light of a flashlight. The only thing that could be seen was the outline of pine trees, the only smell that of their resin, the only sound a piano and guitar playing “What Child is This.”
Then at 3 p.m. on the dot, music went silent and a voice began:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
And with that, the Nativity Play of the Pine Mountain Settlement School began. Somber yet joyful, this story of Jesus’ birth has no preschool sheep with cotton ball ears, no giggles, no missed lines. It’s never called a Christmas pageant. It’s THE PLAY, with the same Scripture, the same shepherds who ponder the Messiah’s coming, the same steady march of the Three Kings, the same ending in the chapel apse, a group tableau around Jesus’ manger as “O Come Let Us Adore Him” plays on.
In 108 years, not a word has changed. Since 1913, when the school’s co-founder Ethel De Long Zande wrote the play and her students performed it under the trees at the foot of Pine Mountain, the only differences are some costumes that shredded into obsolescence, and the actors, who regretfully retire when they move or get too old. They’ve never skipped a year; neither World War stopped production, and last year as COVID raged — the school’s second pandemic, by the way— they filmed the play on Facebook Live.
Here in this place The Nativity Play is sacred. A sacred message for many, a sacred yearly tradition, one that envelops the history and family and legacy that Pine Mountain has produced for so many people throughout Harlan County. The play means the Christmas season has begun, bringing many who went to school here or were married in this chapel, back home to the meadow and woods. A few were even born at West Wind, the dormitory that stands on the overlook above the fields.
“The county holds it dear,” said Billy Joe Turner, who first appeared in the play in the late 1960s when he was a student at the school. He married in the chapel, his son married here as well, and Turner returned to the play in the 1990s as Prophet #2. “To me it’s a legacy I’m carrying on with my family and it’s dear to my heart.”
‘My reward was with me’
The audience left pew by pew in silence, and slowly the spell broke and talk began as parents and grandparents and little girls in their Christmas dresses made their way down to Laurel House for tea and cookies. Even on Dec. 5, the weather is balmy and sun shines through Laurel House’s big windows. After the settlement school was founded by De Long and Katherine Pettit in 1913 to educate Appalachian children (the two women had already started Hindman Settlement School), they hired a pioneering woman architect named Mary Rockwell Hook, who designed most of the buildings out of the tawny sandstone mined from the fields below into vaguely neo-Gothic designs. The stone was carved and set into place by a Sicilian stone mason named Luigi Zande, who would later marry De Long, and train students in the art of stone cutting.
In Laurel’s second floor dining hall, under a high wooden ceiling, people gathered their plates of cookies and sat down at the tables and chairs, all made at Pine Mountain, to chat and catch up. A lady in red and black flitted from table to table. This is Judy Turner Lewis, the stage director, costume mistress, set designer and heart of The Nativity Play. She’s been in charge for 30 years, ever since Mary Rogers, who directed it for years before that, finally retired. Mary and Burton Rogers cast long and loving shadows over the event; he shepherded the school from settlement boarding school to public Harlan County school to an environmental education center as director for more than 40 years. Burton played the organ while Mary, who was English, gave stage direction.
“When their son came back and saw the play and said, ‘Judy, my mother would be proud,’ well, my reward was with me,” Judy said. “Somebody might do it better, but no one loves it more than I do.”
Judy is Billy Joe Turner’s sister; she was in the last class of the public school that graduated in 1971, and later married in the chapel. Her husband, the late Larry Lewis, was born here as well. After he died eight years ago, she had the opportunity to move into one of Pine Mountain’s cabins. “God didn’t have to shove me through that door, and I run,” she said. “I feel like I died and went to heaven.”
Though Pine Mountain Settlement School is known for its long history, its education programs, its celebration of Appalachian craft and the environment, the play, Lewis believes, is the center of the whole enterprise.
“I think it’s the most important part of Pine Mountain,” Lewis said. “”What else could be more important? All of it is Scripture from the Bible, all of it.”
From talking to Lewis and looking at the program, you quickly see that most parts are played by close and far relatives of Lewis. This happened not through nepotism, but the only crisis that ever really threatened The Nativity Play’s continuity. In 1999, a plan was hatched to strip mine part of Pine Mountain near the settlement school. Then-director Robin Lambert started a petition to declare the lands unsuitable for mining because the school had already been declared a National Historic Register Landmark; mining could have damaged the buildings, and hurt the school’s water supply, which is piped in direct from a mountainside spring.
That was a declaration of war between the school and nearby landowners who wanted to mine, some of them descendants of William Creech, who had given the land to De Long and Pettit in order to educate Appalachian children so many years ago.
One day not long after the petition was announced, Lewis came to rehearsal and most of her cast did not.
“A lot of people dropped out of the play because they had property,” she said. “But they should have told me first.”
So the Turner-Lewis clan jumped in to fill the gap, and have done so ever since.
The petition was ultimately successful; in 2001, the state government declared about 2,300 acres around Pine Mountain Settlement School free from strip mining. Land owners were recompensed for their losses but it caused a severe rupture in the community.
“It was a really challenging time for the school,” said Preston Jones, a Harlan native who is now executive director of the school. “It’s taken a long time to heal, but I think it has.”
The greatest gift
Why do people, whether from Harlan or from outside it, feel so strongly about Pine Mountain Settlement School? Is is the sweep of green grass that stops only where the mountain’s trees curve down? Is it the romantic stone buildings? It’s a place where many outsiders have come and felt welcome. T.J. Falce is from Tazewell, Tenn., but married a local girl and now plays Joseph in the play. He stands behind Mary (Hannah Poe) as she quietly sings “The Coventry Carol,” a 1534 English melody, to the baby Jesus.
“I’ve been taken in by every person I’ve met in Harlan,” Falce said. He worked at the school for a few years, but returns gladly every winter for the Nativity Play. “This place is so special. I can’t put a finger on it, but everyone who comes here feels it. You can’t really explain it.”
Blake Turner, one of Judy Lewis’ nephews, was so sure of that welcome that 12 years ago, he decided it would be a good idea to bring a girl on their first date to the play. It stuck, they got married in the chapel, and now Angel and Blake have two little boys, Josiah and Isaac, who watch their father play one of the shepherds. When asked if most people want to meet their first date’s entire family, he just grinned. “I knew it would be special.”
So many memories surround this place and this night. Many remember Burton Rogers playing the organ in the play. The organ is special, too, a Holtkamp pipe organ made in Cleveland and brought to Pine Mountain in 1936 by horse and buggy. It cost $3,200 then and was rebuilt in the 1980s for more than $100,000. Now it’s played by Clay Howard, who learned on the job one year when Burton broke his leg. Howard’s mother and her five sisters all attended Pine Mountain Settlement School, and all six of them went on to college from here. “This place is so rich with history,” Howard said.
Gene Harris has seen a lot of it. At almost 85, he still plays guitar for the play by ear, as he’s done since he first picked up his uncle’s instrument in 1942. Harris’ memories are sharp and bright of school at Pine Mountain before the roads were paved, before, he says, the world turned away from God. He was born again at 17 after an unexplained sickness that put him in the West Wind hospital for a week, so he learned to play gospel music and began his life as a preacher.
For Harris, the play is the message that we have forgotten : That we wait in the darkest days of the year not for toys and parties, but for the coming of the Messiah. “God gave us the greatest gift there is on the first Christmas,” he said. “The average person doesn’t understand.”
He said a prayer over the potluck supper, then headed back to the chapel for the night’s second performance.
No one knows what’s coming, pandemic or climate apocalypse or whatever else is next. Sometimes it feels hard to be hopeful. All we can do is cling to sureties like 108-year-old plays that describe the coming of Christ. All we can do is wait.
Pine Mountain waits, as it has for millennia. Below it, the school, which derives much of its income from school trips, suffered like everywhere else during COVID shutdowns, and Jones is trying to position its survival in a world that seems to change every day.
Just like other places, Harlan County itself has had a rough few years, hurt by coal’s downturn, the opioid epidemic and then COVID. But on this Sunday night, just like this night every year for a century, there is the play and the spirit of Christmas, unbeset by supply chains or mall traffic or loud and noisy parties. Here under the embrace of Pine Mountain’s trees, there is nothing but stars. And the silence. And the waiting.
This story was originally published December 9, 2021 at 8:57 AM.
