Edna & Edith Monteith Photography courtesy of The Collection of Hunter Library, Western Carolina University
Editor’s Note (October 2024): We love and celebrate our mountain communities; however, following the devastation of Hurricane Helene, many areas remain inaccessible for travel. Please check DriveNC.gov’s travel map for the latest on traveling to these areas.
Rising from Dillsboro’s grassy valley, a three-story farmhouse cuts into the western North Carolina sky. The 1908 house is now home to the Appalachian Women’s Museum. In celebration of the annual Airing of the Quilts festival, colorful blankets hang from the white wraparound porch, swaying in the fresh mountain breeze.
When museum volunteer Dave Russell first attended the festival five years ago, he felt like a kid again. “I fell in love with the place,” he says. “The farmstead reminded me of staying with my grandmother during the summers. We cooked together and we did canning together and we sewed together.”
Russell was drawn to the museum’s mission to preserve the stories of “ordinary women leading extraordinary lives.” Since then, he’s whiled away his Saturdays quilting in the first-floor Textile Room — and enthusiastically greeting visitors who come to learn what life was like for Edna and Edith Monteith. The two sisters — born in 1908 and 1915, respectively — who called this house their home.
Their father, Elias Monteith, was the local postmaster. When Edna turned 20, she joined him in the day-to-day operations, and after Elias died, she ran the Dillsboro post office alone for 45 years. Meanwhile, Edith managed life on the farm. The two remained mostly single — Edith was married for three weeks — until Edna’s death in 1988 and Edith’s in 2001.
Without the sisters’ daily care, harsh mountain winters took their toll on the home’s architecture. By 2005, only a shell of the gabled roof remained, and the floor of the wraparound porch had completely rotted through. With no indoor plumbing or electricity, the house was declared a tear-down by the Town of Dillsboro.
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In many ways, the Monteith sisters’ story wasn’t uncommon for this area, but they had more means than most women at the time, says Cathy Busick, a distant Monteith relative and Sylva local. Busick led the charge to save the dilapidated Historic Monteith Farmstead and transform it into a museum. “During wars, women around here frequently took over their farm’s chores,” she says. “They milked the cows and fed their families and kept them warm — no easy feat with no indoor plumbing and 20-degree winters.”
The post office exhibit shows how simple life in Dillsboro was in the early 20th century — when only 58 residents had mailboxes. photograph by RYAN KARCHER PHOTOGRAPHY
Busick believes that’s why the Monteiths’ house is the ideal location for a museum that celebrates the contributions of Appalachian women. “Theirs are the unsung stories,” she says. “We wanted to preserve their home and use it as a base for community outreach events like fabric swaps, Music on the Porch, and basket-weaving demonstrations. If we don’t share this way of life, it’s just going to go away.”
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On a tour of the museum, Russell escorts visitors into the kitchen to show off a few of his favorite Monteith family artifacts: a scale that let Edith know how much she could charge for fresh eggs at the market, an assorted candy bar box that the sisters filled with 24 Mars chocolates during visits to the grocery store up the hill, and several hand-stitched aprons.
After leading guests through rooms devoted to education, Cherokee women of southern Appalachia, and music, Russell shepherds them upstairs to many visitors’ favorite exhibit: Dillsboro’s 58 original wooden post office boxes, plus an additional 42 metal slots that were added as the population grew.
For Busick, the exhibit is a reminder of Edna’s grit and perseverance — two qualities representative of Appalachian women.
Edith Monteith’s scale that she would use to price out customers’ egg purchases. photograph by RYAN KARCHER PHOTOGRAPHY
“After 45 years of being the sole postmaster, Edna applied for her retirement pay, and they told her she wasn’t eligible for a pension because she was never technically the postmaster,” Busick says. “We have a record of the letter she wrote to them, where she basically said, ‘Excuse me, I have been schlepping through snow and sludge and ice every day to get to the post office to perform the job of the postmaster,’ and in a very eloquent way, she made it clear that she expected that pay — and she got it!”
Russell and the museum visitors end their tour where they started: in the Textile Room, surrounded by colorful quilt blocks that Edna and Edith hand-stitched for a future use. Life was hard; in an isolated region, the sisters lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression. “But there was an air of simplicity that comes with being happy with what you have,” Russell says. “That’s what gives this place a peaceful feeling.”
Appalachian Women’s Museum
100 West Hometown Place
Dillsboro, NC 28725
appwomen.org
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