Frontier Nursing Service Oral History Project

These interviews document the history of the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS), an organization begun in 1925 by Mary Breckinridge to bring primary health care to remote areas of eastern Kentucky. Nurses, doctors, Eastern Kentucky residents, and supporters of the FNS discuss Appalachia, farming, logging, home remedies, education, social activities, coal mining, corn hoeing, dancing, quilting, moonshine, canning and preserving, midwives, government relief programs, infant mortality, "haint" tales (ghost stories), the unionization of the coal mines, stonemasonry, mountain diseases, the influenza epidemic of 1918, snake handling, churches, the Presbyterian church in Leslie County, the Great Depression, transportation, fund-raising, feuds, the Frontier Graduate School of Midwifery, the Red Bird Center, Oneida Baptist Institute, Mary Breckinridge Hospital, the Philadelphia Committee, the Washington Committee, the Cutshin Clinic, Mary Breckinridge, Richard M. Nixon's visit to Hyden in 1979, Flat Creek, Big Bullskin Creek, Leslie County in the 1920s, and Leslie County politics.