Hillbilly Day in Mountain Rest, 50 years of fun and nostalgia

Several boys attempt to capture Pinky during the pig chase competition Saturday at the 50th annual Hillbilly Day Event in Mountain Rest. Jordan McGuffin, 10, of Mountain Rest caught Pinky the Pig, 20 years after his grandfather Lynn McGuffin won the adult competition at the Fourth of July event.

MOUNTAIN REST — The strains of bluegrass music sifts through the trees, and many in the teeming crowd tap their feet as they bend over plates heavy with barbecued pork and chicken.

Rebecca Queen of Mountain Rest stirs a thick, milky-white paste bubbling in a large pot, wisps of steam carrying an unusual odor.

“Bear lard soap,” she said. “And no, it doesn’t make you smell like a bear to use it.”

Queen has been making soap at the annual Hillbilly Day festival in Mountain Rest for 12 years.

“My husband and I went to Dollywood, and I took a craft preservation course,” she said. “I wanted bring something back to Hillbilly Day that was indigenous and traditional.”

That was part of the reason, locals say, for starting Hillbilly Day — which always takes place July Fourth — in the first place. It was begun as a way to keep some aspects of the way of life of the Appalachian hill people alive no matter how much the rest of the world changed, and to have fun at the same time. Saturday marked the 50th Hillbilly Day.

Tom Lewis remembers the first Hillbilly Day in 1959, he said as he watched one child after another try to climb a 30-foot, greased pole to reach a prize ticket on top

“It was started by a woman we called ‘Mountain Bessie,’ I don’t remember her last name,” he said.

The biggest change, Lewis said, is the size of the crowds, which have grown bigger over the years. Organizers of Hillbilly Day predicted a total crowd of 15,000 for Saturday. Cars and trucks lined S.C. 28 and S.C. 107 for a solid half-mile in either direction near the Mountain Rest Community Center.

Oconee County Sheriff James Singleton didn’t doubt the total for the size of the flow-through crowd Saturday would come close to predictions. But, he said, crowds might not be as big now as they once were.

“Before people started having other events this time of the year, this was the big event of the area,” Singleton said. “People would be coming from all over.”

Even Saturday, a peppering of license plates from distant places, two from New York state and one from Missouri caught the eye, mingled with plates from the Carolinas and Georgia.

For some, the traditional crafts that were on display can bring a pang of nostalgia.

The moonshine still assembled under a tree wasn’t actually working, but for one elderly North Carolina man who declined to provide his name, it brought back memories.

“I used to do that a lot when I was younger, back it in the ’40s and ’50s, make runs and haul it,” he said. “It wouldn’t take much to get that (still) goin’.”

For most of the crafts available Saturday, however, the preservationist wouldn’t have to worry about “revenooers,” just where they could get the ingredients for their own work.

“I usually use chicken fat,” said Rebecca Queen, cutting a hardened, 8 inch by 12 inch, 3-inch thick cake of soap into normal bar-sized chunks for packaging. “But this year I got bear lard from Jack Lombard.”

Lombard, in his late 80s, is a near legendary “man of the mountains” in the Mountain Rest community.

“Bear lard is even more traditional,” Queen said. “I think I’ll make soap here from bear lard from now on.”

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