Two of my books, These Healing Hills and An Appalachian Summer have Frontier Nursing Service history. Mary Breckinridge established this service in Leslie County, Kentucky in the 1920’s with a vision of bringing better healthcare to mothers and children. Mrs. Breckinridge had a heart for children and she put feet to her dreams and made a difference in the lives of many of the mountain people she and her nurse midwives served. At the time, few roads went up into the hills of Eastern Kentucky and most women depended on granny midwives to help them deliver their babies. But the Frontier Nursing Service changed that by giving mothers prenatal care, staying with them in their cabins until their babies were safely delivered and then following up with postnatal care too.
My stories were set in 1945 (These Healing Hills) and then 1933 (An Appalachian Summer). But midwives rode up into the hills to deliver babies years after that. At a library event where I talked about These Healing Hills, a reader told me about a woman who had been a nurse midwife for the service in the 1960’s and offered to introduce me if I wanted to meet her. Of course, I wanted to meet her even though I’d already written my story. I did have the idea of writing another story about the service, but even if I hadn’t had that thought, I still wanted to meet Alice. And what a treat that turned out to be.
Alice was in her nineties when she invited me to come visit her in a nearby town. She had her slide projector set up when I got there and took me on a tour of her time as a midwife, first in Eastern Kentucky with the Frontier Nursing Service riding out on horses to her patients and then in Alaska going by dogsled to deliver babies. Alice was ready for anything and handled most anything that came her way, including once popping a bear in the nose when it was bothering a new litter of pups. I doubt Alice ever backed down from any challenge.
While she was in Eastern Kentucky she decided she wanted a snake skin belt. So what does she do? She kills her a rattlesnake by grabbing it and giving it a whip-like jerk. Then she skins it. I asked her if she still had the belt and she admitted that her dog got the skin and ruined her belt making ideas. If you’ve read An Appalachian Summer, you might remember that I borrowed Alice’s snake skin story to let one of my Frontier Nursing characters have the same experience.
Alice had some amazing stories of her time as a Frontier Service midwife, but as you can see in the next picture, what she loved best was bringing babies safely into the world. She called this baby her big baby boy as he was the biggest baby she delivered in the mountains.
It was great talking to Alice and hearing her experiences with Mrs. Breckinridge. She reinforced what I’d read in my research that Mary Breckinridge wasn’t one to hear “I can’t.” And so, when she asked Alice to build a small clinic, Alice went to work and built this little clinic even though she’d never built anything before. She did say she got a little help from some local men with the roof, but by the time she told me about this, I was ready to believe this little woman could do anything she set her mind to do.
She loved animals and once had a pet wolf. When I knew her, she was still volunteering at a spay and neuter clinic and she had three, or maybe it was four, dogs of her own. Her small house was like a museum of Frontier Nursing history with pictures on every wall along with books about the service and memorabilia of her time there and in Alaska. I was quite honored that she had my books on a favorite shelf. When I sent her a copy of An Appalachian Summer a year or so later, she said she sat right down and read it through. She missed the Frontier Nursing Service when she had to leave because of a family illness. So she drew pictures of her memories of those years and showed she had artistic talent too.
Sometimes you meet a person who has lived life to the fullest and helped so many people along the way. Alice was that kind of person. She met every challenge that came her way, but the one challenge she wasn’t able to defeat was cancer. But then, maybe she defeated it her own way by heading on up to heaven late last year. I do hope the Lord had something for her to do when she got there because Alice wasn’t the kind of woman to sit down and rest. She needed those challenges and ways to help others.
Alice never wanted anyone to make over her and tell her she had done anything extraordinary even though she had. That’s why I haven’t written about her here on my blog until now. I hope she’d think I did her right with this post, and I was very glad when she thought I got things right in my Frontier Nursing stories.
Have you ever known a person like Alice who was always meeting challenges and living life to the fullest?