Anne Armstrong
The memoirs of regional writer Anne Armstong have been printed by the University of Tennessee Press, and the press is planning to reprint her famous novel “This Day and Time.”
Anne Wetzell Armstrong died in Abingdon, Virginia, at the Barter Inn on March 17, 1958. Although born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1872, she moved with her family to Knoxville, Tennessee, just before turning 13 and grew up in that city. In 1911, she and her husband, Robert Franklin Armstrong, came to Bristol, Tennessee, where they lived on Spruce Street.
A few years later around 1916, the Armstrongs built a home, which they called “Knobside,” on the Holston River in the Big Creek section of Sullivan County outside Bristol, Tennessee, near the Virginia border. It was there that Anne Armstrong wrote her novel “This Day and Time” (1930), which is considered the first work of fiction to realistically portray the people of Appalachia, including their way of life, their customs and dialect. The book was considered scandalous at the time. Some of the mountain people were offended when they recognized themselves in the play Armstrong adapted from her book and which Robert Porterfield put on the stage at Barter Theatre as “Mountain Ivy” in 1934. The heroine of the story was named Ivy Ingoldsby and modeled on Armstrong’s longtime housekeeper and friend, Rosy Duncan.
In the early 1940s, Armstrong (who was a widow by then) was forced to leave her mountain home near the Holston River when the Tennessee Valley Authority built the dam that created South Holston Lake and flooded her property. She lived for a time in Bristol, Tennessee; Asheville, North Carolina; and various other places until 1951 when she took up residence at the Barter Inn in Abingdon, as reported in a Bristol Herald Courier newspaper article (March 15, 1951) by Robert S. Loving, veteran journalist and author of “Double Destiny: The Story of Bristol Tennessee-Virginia” (1955).
Interestingly, at the third annual “Virginia Highlands Festival of Arts, Crafts and Antiques” in August 1951, Armstrong was the featured speaker on nonfiction writing at the festival’s creative writing workshop — her topic being the art of writing and the personality and works of the late Thomas Wolfe, who had spent a few days at her cabin at Big Creek and with whom she had corresponded. In addition, during the festival that year Barter Theatre premiered a second adaptation of “This Day and Time” under the title “Some Sweet Day.” Armstrong continued to reside in Abingdon at the Barter Inn until her death in 1958. She and her husband are buried together in Rooty Branch Church Cemetery in the Emmett Community of Sullivan County (just off US Hwy 421 in Holston Valley near Bristol, Tennessee).
During the time she was living in Abingdon, Armstrong completed a two-part memoir —called “Of Time and Knoxville” — about the years she had lived in Knoxville from 1885 until 1902. Although a type-script copy of Part One of the memoir is held in the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University, the work had never been published until this year when the University of Tennessee Press published a version edited by Linda Behrend, a native of Elizabethton and longtime resident of Bristol, Tennessee, who now lives in Knoxville. Behrend is a librarian who, over the years, worked at Virginia Intermont College (Bristol, Virginia), East Tennessee State University (Johnson City, Tennessee), and the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). She has written and presented extensively on Anne Wetzell Armstrong and is author of the Armstrong entry in the “Encyclopedia of Appalachia.”
“Of Time and Knoxville” by Anne W. Armstrong and edited by Linda Behrend is available from University of Tennessee Press. UT Press also has plans to publish a reprint edition of Armstrong’s novel “This Day and Time,” which was reprinted in 1970 by East Tennessee State University but has been out of print for many years.
