Sammy Green lived in Rabun County in north Georgia. Rabun is located just as far north east in Georgia as it can be and still be in Georgia. This corner of Appalachia is the coldest and snowiest county in Georgia. It is also the wettest with the most rainfall. It has lakes, rivers, creeks, and Georgia’s highest elevations. In years past Rabun county’s people were called Hill Billies. They were out of the main stream, a proud people, they were independent, self sufficient and largely isolated from the people who owned the fertile valley land.

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Eliot Wigginton was a school teacher who was hired into the high school in 1966. It was a new experience and a new people for Wig, as his students soon called him.. He looked at new ways to catch the interest of these mountain children, where most didn’t graduate from high school. After tossing ideas around with his students he decided they would start publishing a magazine. They would call it “Foxfire.” The class and Wig decided to interview the older people about the way their families lived when they were children, and write about the old ways.

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The kids found they had something to be proud of as they interviewed the Appalachian grandparents, parents, neighbors, and other family members. They learned about crafts that were fast disappearing from the mountains and wrote them down for generations to come. Foxfire was more successful than they could ever have imagined. The project took off with a bang and became a renowned student run publication devoted to Appalachian culture. After all these years it is still going strong.

Two years ago Foxfire students went out to interview 76 year old Sammy Green for the Foxfire magazine. He talked into the tape recorder for hours about the hard life he had lived. Green had been a mill worker until his retirement. Now he was suffering from a terminal lung disease. He told the students he did not have the money for a burial, and he was afraid at his death the county would cremate him. According to his religion, he believed that would send him to eternal damnation. He said, all he wanted was a pine box and a hole to put it in.

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The students started a “Bury Sammy” campaign. The school’s industrial arts teacher got volunteers from his ninth grade class to build a coffin. Containers were placed in gas stations, banks, beauty shops, and other stores around town. A county cemetery gave a plot, a granite company gave a gravestone, the funeral directer dropped his rates to cost. Rabun high school students soon collected enough money to bury Sammy Green.

The ninth grade boys made the coffin and last week Sammy Green was carried to his mountainside grave in the coffin by the six boys who made it. Two preachers played guitars and sang the blue grass music that Sammy loved. “I’m a lone wayfaring stranger, traveling through this wearisome land. I’ve got a home in that other city, good lord, and it’s not made by hand.” Sammy Green didn’t have a thing to worry about.

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