How did they preserve appalachian food?!

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Most of it is a lost art, but my Kentucky family smoked meats, canned fruit and vegetables. My grandfather would watch the hogs. He would see that some hogs always laid and wollered on one side. The upside, he would sell as a city ham to be sugar cured, and the down side would be the keeping ham that we would smoke for ourselves. I remember dried fruits and vegetables and some dried meat. There was no way to keep milk and butter so it was delivered everyday. And poultry, well, it was free range. Sugar and sweets came from bee hives and sorghum meals.
I am in my sixties, and these things I have described are long gone, but I remember them growing up in the fifties and sixties.

Look up preserving processes such as drying, salt curing, and canning.