The Liston B. Ramsey Center for Regional Studies

The Ramsey Center supports the regional studies focus of the Mars Hill College curriculum, houses archival resources for teaching and scholarship, and offers a venue in which faculty, students, and community members come together for a range of regionally oriented programs and events. The extensive holdings of the Appalachian Archive—photographs, documents, sound recordings, and artifacts—document aspects of mountain life and culture of interest to scholars here and abroad. Most of these materials were collected over several decades by retired regional specialist Richard Dillingham under the auspices of the former Southern Appalachian Center.

In December of 2002, the College renamed the Southern Appalachian Center for four-time speaker of the North Carolina House, Liston B. Ramsey, and dedicated a central space in the Renfro Library to support its programs. Prior to his death in 2001, Mr. Ramsey had named Mars Hill College, his alma mater, as the depository for papers and memorabilia from his long and distinguished legislative career. In keeping with Mr. Ramsey’s lifelong commitment to Western North Carolina and to education, the Liston B. Ramsey Center for Regional Studies serves school children and members of the public as well as the college and the larger scholarly community.

Grants and Special Projects

With support from the Janirve Foundation, the Liston B. Ramsey Center has been fully renovated and outfitted with state of the art equipment for digitizing and viewing photographs and documents. Funding from the French Broad Electric Membership Corporation has helped with the collection of oral histories and with other costs. In 2004 the Ramsey Center used support from the North Carolina Humanities Council to host a symposium on the work of documentary filmmaker John Cohen. Collections documenting four mountain music festivals (the Birthplace of Mountain Music project) will soon be available to patrons thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Friends of Mountain History, and the North Carolina Council on the Arts.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has provided three key grants: 1) a Focus Grant on “Rethinking Regionalism” under which faculty studied current scholarship on place with expert consultants and revised the regional studies minor; 2) A Consultation Grant which provided an assessment of our archival holdings and recommendations for preserving them and making them widely accessible; 3) a highly prestigious Landmarks of American History grant to support summer workshops for community college teachers from around the country. The workshops to be offered this summer focus on “Working the Woods: Economies and Cultures in the Blue Ridge Mountains: 1650-1950.”