Events circa 1898-1980.
Written November 1994.
Meet McCoy Franklin, a Berea College senior, class of 1926, from Crossnore, NC. He was a tall, gangly, six-footer of the Lincoln type, handsome in a rugged way. A serious student, capable all-around athlete, orator, and casually outgoing with a tremendous sense of humor. He was always ready to tell a good story or turn a simple phrase into a good laugh.
He was 28 years old in 1926, so he was considered the “old man” of his class, but he was also a hero to all those who knew his background and his story.
McCoy was good in all athletics in school, a prominent member of a Phi Delta Zeta Library Society, a debating team, and in his senior year won the Tri-State Oratorical Contest. This put him on a pedestal at school.
He was my best girlfriend’s beaux. She was a girl from Sidney, Ohio — one of the few outsiders like myself. She admired McCoy very much but vowed privately to me “I’ll never marry him and go down into the mountains and raise a lot of little hillbillies.” Time found her eating those words. They married, lived happily in Crossnore, and raised six beautiful, brilliant children who all turned out well.
Crossnore was then a tiny village high up in the middle of the Blue Ridge mountains. People traveled to and from it with great difficulty, and the few families living there had remained isolated for generations.
The village had no church or school when McCoy was growing up, just a little store where business was done by barter. Farm produce and handmade articles of all sorts were “legal tender” there. As late as the 1920s, the people there could go for years without handling money.
The Franklins accommodated their family of ten children in a two-story, eight-room log house. It was the palace of the neighborhood.
Father and Mother Franklin were upright, hard-working, strict parents who commanded respect and demanded obedience from their children. Their Scotch Irish heritage gave them high ideals in the realm of honesty and fair play, and always a good sense of humor. They also claimed a direct relationship to the Benjamin Franklin.
McCoy yearned for more “book learning” as he was growing up and in vain begged his father to let him leave home and go to school. He met firm opposition every time he asked because his help was needed at home to keep food on the table by hunting, fishing, and farming.
Unfortunately, the generations of isolation and a few bad experiences warped father Franklin’s ideas of higher education. He firmly believed that education made a crook out of you and vowed never to let his children become educated.
McCoy had a secret dream to become a preacher one day, so he spent his spare time learning all he could about God’s world about him. He cultivated his voice in the great forests of the mountains around him until he could imitate the sounds of Spring frogs, peepers, the songs of birds, and the voices of animals, domestic and wild. Later in his life, he would use these accomplishments most skillfully.
Finally, when McCoy came of age, his father could hold him no longer. He left home on his 21st birthday and went down to Berea, Kentucky. Berea’s Berea College was a school endowed for the mountain people of Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Northern Georgia, and Alabama. The mountain sections of these states were Berea College’s territory and remain so to this day (1994). Berea’s preparatory schools, so necessary in the “teens and twenties,” no longer exist. The states now provide good preparatory schools. Today Berea College is all college and scholastically first rate.
McCoy came down to Berea to the Foundation School, which provided the elementary course for pupils older than sixteen years but still in grades one through eight. Many students could not get this schooling back in the mountains.
There he looked up Dean Edwards, who arranged for McCoy to work for his board and room. Tuition was free at Berea and is still free to all.
McCoy finished all the grades in two years. Then on to the Academy, which he finished with honors in three years. He completed the two-year college course given to those going on to professional schools and then earned his doctorate in a Presbyterian Divinity School.
When I went to Berea, I had finished eight years of elementary school, four years in the academy (the college preparatory school), and by 1921 I was finishing my sophomore year in college (two years). That adds up to 14 years of schooling to that date. McCoy Franklin accomplished the same thing in half the time.
McCoy could have had pulpits in several big churches in the city but instead went back into the mountains to serve his people. There he drew both on his twentieth-century knowledge and the solitude of the mountains’ great forests to create a sermon illustrating the natural beauties around us and God’s goodness to us all. Preaching this sermon in big Northern churches reaped handsome benefits for his cause — a school in Crossnore.
I remember in the late twenties he came to Cleveland to preach in one of the largest, most prestigious churches in the city. He was a smash hit. It was great also for Robert (my husband) and me because McCoy and his wife were our guests.
In adulthood, a new relationship developed between McCoy and his father. At first, father was suspicious, but as they worked together on various projects he began to trust and then admire his son and his “learning.”
For example, when McCoy was putting running water in his new house, he had to tap into a spring up behind the house. The spring was on the opposite side of a crotch in the hillside, so the pipe had to run down the one hillside and then a short way up the other one to reach the house. His father said, “McCoy you’re a fool. You know water won’t flow uphill.” He was delighted when he saw the water flow into the kitchen and bath.
Another instance was when McCoy and his father built a little stone church in Crossnore using worn river rocks and cement donated by a church up North. McCoy always worked beside his father, helping him by reading the written instructions on the blueprints. The result was the most beautiful country church I have ever seen.
I think even his wife would regret ever having called him a hillbilly. His highest honor, late in his ministry, was becoming head of the Presbyterian Synod for the southern mountain states. He was truly a man of the mountains — a tower of strength to his family, his church, and his community.
Mary W. Dial
Transcribed November 1994 by CED
Posted Nov 14, 1994 at 00:39.
Revised Jan 23, 2023 at 20:18. EDT.
Retrieved Jun 1, 2026 at 22:14.
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