Stan Hyatt:
I have a neighbor that can sit down and make wagon wheels from scratch. They're carpenters, they're
plumbers, they're automobile mechanics. They can do anything. I'm not that gifted myself. I don't
want to mislead you and you think that I am, but these people in Madison County – because it was so
shut in for so long and isolated somewhat geographically and by the road situation from the rest of
the world, they learned to survive. I'm convinced that the older people over here could do just about
anything to make a living if everything collapsed economy-wise and everything, and that to me is a
very valuable thing to be able to do. They could make it. I feel like that a lot of people in the
cities that have all the conveniences today – if we ever went into bad economic times, they would
really suffer.
- Stan Hyatt, Resident Engineer on the I-26 project and Madison County resident
Interview with Stan Hyatt by Rob Amberg, November 30, 2000, Interview K-0249, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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