Crossing McDaniel Branch

In 1938, Hugh W. Denny was born into a log house without electricity. Eighty years later, he wrote his memoir on a laptop. Crossing McDaniel Branch is a memoir celebrating his and his family lives, but also shows how rural nineteenth century America made possible the technological wonders of the twenty-first.

As a child, Denny dusted tobacco crops with arsenate of lead, hulled walnuts for money, and walked to school through sleet and floods. His vivid details capture the rhythms of rural life. He attended Tennessee Polytechnic Institute for electrical engineering and worked his entire career at Georgia Tech Research Institute. He had papers published in technical journals and at symposiums, did research for NASA, and attended conferences in India. 

With colorful family stories of an uncle running moonshine, the activities of great-grandparents during the Civil War, and the poems of his grandmother, Crossing McDaniel Branch is a warm and personal look at the past.