Eliot Wigginton

After a decade of collecting oral histories of people struggling for social justice in the South, Wigginton edited and published, Refuse to Stand Silently By: An Oral History of Grass Roots Social Activism in America, 1921-1964 (Doubleday, 1991).

Eliot Wigginton (born Brooks Eliot Wigginton on November 9, 1942) is an American oral historian, folklorist, writer and former educator.

He is most widely known for developing with his high school students the Foxfire Project, a writing project consisting of interviews and stories about Appalachia.

The project was developed into a magazine and series of best-selling Foxfire books.

The series comprised essays and articles by high school students from Rabun County, Georgia focusing on Appalachian culture.

Brooks Eliot Wigginton was born in West Virginia on November 9, 1942.

His mother, Lucy Freelove Smith Wigginton, died eleven days later of "pneunomia due to acute pulmonary edema," according to her death certificate.

His maternal grandmother, Margaret Pollard Smith, was an associate professor of English at Vassar College and his father was a famous landscape architect, named Brooks Edward Wigginton.

His family called him Eliot.

He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in English from Cornell University and a second Master's from Johns Hopkins University.

In 1966, he began teaching English in the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, located in the Appalachian Mountains of northeastern Georgia.

In 1966, Wigginton began a writing project with his students at Rabun Gap‐Nacooche High School, who began to compile written oral histories from local residents based on recorded interviews.

In 1967, they started publishing the interviews, along with original articles and other student writing, in a quarterly magazine called Foxfire, named after local Phosphorescent lichen.

Topics included folklife practices, recipes, customs associated with farming, and the rural life of southern Appalachia, as well as the folklore and oral histories of local residents.

Wigginton at first claimed to be innocent; however, local prosecutors announced their intent to release testimony from over 20 people claiming that Wigginton had molested them as children between 1969 and 1982.

In 1972, an anthology of collected Foxfire articles was published as The Foxfire Book (Anchor Press, 1972).

The Foxfire Book achieved New York Times best-seller status, selling 298,756 copies by February 1973.

By 1975, Foxfire magazine had about 10,000 subscribers, and had earned $250,000 in royalties from sales of Foxfire and Foxfire 2. In 1976, Foxfire 3 appeared on the New York Times Best Sellers list in the Trade Paperbacks section for 5 weeks.

In total, the school published twelve volumes.

Special collections were also published, including The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery, Foxfire: 25 Years, A Foxfire Christmas, and The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Toys and Games.

Several collections of recorded music from the local area were also released.

The project transferred to the local public school in 1977.

Wigginton had an interest in activists working for social change in association with the Highlander Folk School.

In 1987, Wigginton was named "Georgia Teacher of the Year," and in 1989, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

In 1992, Wigginton confessed to and was convicted of child molestation.

On September 15, 1992, Wigginton was indicted for child molestation.

The state charged that Wigginton had sexually fondled a 10-year-old boy during an overnight stay at the Foxfire grounds.

On November 13, 1992, Wigginton pleaded guilty to one count of non-aggravated child molestation.

He received a one-year jail sentence, which he served at the Rabun County Jail, and 19 years of probation.

Bill Parrish, then-executive director of Foxfire Fund, announced that the guilty plea would require Wigginton's "total separation" from the organization.

After being permanently removed from the Foxfire Project, Wigginton moved to Florida, where he is registered as a sex offender.

After Wigginton's departure, the Foxfire project continued under the auspices of the Foxfire Fund and its educational model of the "Foxfire approach" to experiential education.

The students and Fund developed a museum in Mountain City, Georgia, consisting of several cabins.

In 1998, the University of Georgia anthropology department started to work with the Foxfire project to archive 30 years worth of materials.

The collection is held at the museum and includes "2,000 hours of interviews on audio tape, 30,000 black and white pictures and hundreds of hours of videotape."

By improving how the material is archived and establishing a database, the university believes the materials can be made more easily available for scholars.

The Foxfire educational philosophy is based on the values of "a learner-centered, community-based expression."

By 1998, educational theories from Foxfire were being used by teachers in 37 school systems in the US.

In 2014, Wigginton contributed an oral history interview for a documentary on Mary Crovatt Hambidge, founder of the Hambidge Center for the Arts & Sciences, describing his childhood memories of Hambidge and her weaving operations at the Rabun County property where he also briefly lived in the late 1960s.