When Emily was about 12 or 13 years old, they joined other families in moving to Madison County, on the Meadow Fork of Spring Creek, where they began to invest in farm acreage.
As Emily worked inside their home, surrounded by the children, she sang songs and told stories and riddles that been passed along through the Harmon family.
The Gentry children were enrolled in the Presbyterian-run Dorland Institute, their tuition paid through income from a grocery store run by Newt, where he sold produce grown on their land.
"[6] The United States government turned Mountain Park Hotel at Hot Springs into a World War I prisoner-of-war internment camp for German sailors.
Sharp did not comment specifically on the likely origin of her songs, but believed that in general the older Appalachian ballads came from England or Lowland Scotland.
Holgar Nygard, Professor Emeritus of English at Duke University, suggested that Scotland was the more likely source for many of the songs in Jane's repertoire, but Brian Peters, in a detailed study of Sharp's Appalachian collection, showed that ballads such as "Barbara Allen", "Little Musgrave" and "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender" most likely originated in England.
[14] Author Irving Bacheller and his wife Anna first met Jane at her boarding house in 1914, telling stories and riddles to delighted children.
According to Betty N. Smith's research, the visit was incorporated into Bacheller's novel Tower of a Hundred Bells, destroyed by a house fire in 1917, a fact confirmed after Jane's death, in a letter from Bacheller to her daughter Maud Long, "I wrote a book largely about your mother and her mountain life which was destroyed by a fire that burned my home in 1917.