My mother was a great sassafras drinker. And every spring we had to have sassafras along with our poke salad (that was a wild green). The mountain people particularly gathered a lot of wild greens to supplement their diet, because most people back in those days lived mostly on cornbread and peas. My mother used to enjoy going into the mountains and picking the wild greens. They have a thing called (and I like it today—they cultivate it, by the way, in Tennessee and Virginia) highland creeces. Oldtimers called them creecy-greens.
Eula McGill
born Resaca, GA 1911
February 3, 1976 interview
Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Interview G-0040-1.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0040-1/G-0040-1.html
To some Appalachian farmers, it was simply an aggressive weed tree cluttering old fields. Others believed its wood could prevent chicken lice, and so used it to build chicken houses and chicken roosts. But sassafras’ most famous attribute has always been the healing properties of the springtime tea –a spring tonic- made from its roots.
The Cherokee people utilized sassafras tea to purify blood and for a variety of ailments, including skin diseases, rheumatism, and ague (the tree is sometimes called an ‘Ague Tree’). "The country people of Carolina crop these vines (Bigonia Crucigera) to pieces," said William Bartram in
Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians food traditions, "together with china brier and sassafras roots, and boil them in their beer in the spring, for diet drink, in order to attenuate and purify the blood and juices." The Cherokee would also make a poultice to cleanse wounds and sores, while they’d steep the root bark to treatment diarrhea or for 'over-fatness.'
They emphasized that the tea should never be taken for more than a week at a time. They didn’t know about safrole, though they knew its long term effects. The bark of sassafras roots contains volatile oils, 80% of which is safrole. Commercially produced sassafras was pulled from the American market in the early 1960s after experiments showed that safrole caused liver cancer in rats and mice.
Early white mountain settlers, perhaps influenced by the vine/brier/sassafras concoction described above, made a beer by boiling young sassafras shoots in water, adding molasses and allowing the mash to ferment.
The varied leaf shapes are the Mitten Tree’s trademark—in fact, its Latin name was once
Sassafras Varifolium. Today
Sassafras Albidum ranges widely over the eastern United States (only two other species of sassafras exist elsewhere in the world: one in central mainland China, one in Taiwan).
‘White sassafras' grows along roadways in thick clusters, usually from three to six feet tall. It has roughly the same characteri
sort. WUTK, the University of Tennessee's student-run radio station, is offering up a very special collection of music. As a means of generating some much-needed funds, WUTK has produced Redistilled: 25 Years of Knoxville Rock. Basically, it's a great collection of current Knoxville music luminaries covering tunes from local bands of yesteryear. Knoxville has always had a thriving yet under-appreciated music scene, and this disc celebrates it as much anything you can find in one place.
