A Journey to West Virginia’s Mountains and Hills

On a cloudy morning with a light drizzle, we turned on hwy. 77 on our way to Medina, Ripley, Weirton, and Spencer, West Virginia, three hours away, first on a smooth Ohio road with light traffic, then turning into a paved ribbon road designed so twisted that a slalom competitor would have had difficulty making the sharp curves winding up and down the densely forested mountains in West Virginia. People had not started to travel to their destinations yet to celebrate Independence Day and the roads were relatively clear.

The six senior passengers took their time to load and unload from the Highlander SUV with each stop the driver made. They were all slightly uncomfortable with their knees touching the front seat or the dashboard, but everyone was happy to embark on this adventure to visit Ray’s childhood home and the farm where he lived and worked as a boy.

Graveled side roads disappeared up and down the mountains and hills in the thick canopy of deciduous forests, so dense that it reminded me of a rain forest without the rain. Now and then I could see a small cemetery buried deep in the dim and lush green woods, with no apparent way to reach it from the highway.

The main road was either flanked by big boulders jutting out of the ground or by intensely green flat meadows with deer and fawns grazing calmly and unafraid. We had never seen so many animals either crossing the road in a hurry, grazing peacefully in the meadows, or lying dead in the middle of the road, victims of local traffic and the animals’ lack of fear of human presence – deer, racoons, red foxes, wild turkeys, black squirrels, and other creatures.

Before we crossed the Ohio River into West Virginia we passed by rolling hills, heavily wooded, the historic Zoar Village, a car racetrack, historic Blue Gray Hwy., and Ravens Glenn Winery.

Zoar Village, a historical gem, is in Tuscarawas County, Ohio. It was founded in 1817 by Pietists as a utopian Christian community and survived until 1898. The 2010 census counted the population to be 169.

A few miles across the Ohio River, a local resident in West Virginia had dug up a small and muddy pond, big enough for a couple to have a good time, but not big enough to row a boat on. He had placed a wooden platform with two chairs by this impromptu miniature lake, just slightly bigger than a deep rain puddle.

The “hillbillies” of West Virginia, very proud and private in their daily lives, built their homes in the most concealed spots, with access on gravel roads barely wide enough for a car. I wondered what happens when two cars meet, going in opposite directions. The West Virginians call this living a “holler.”

In the lusciously green land that time forgot, there were lots of mobile homes and huge trucks, elevated off the ground, with plenty of traction should it be necessary in wintertime. Some people are even buried in strange places, close to their beloved hunting grounds.

The two most important stops for this trip were Mt. Zion Community Church and Cemetery and Spencer Cemetery. Several generations of Ray’s relatives were buried there, i.e., grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, their spouses, and some of their children.

Mt. Zion Community Church and Cemetery were located across from each other on top of a mountain, in a sunny opening of the forest canopy, accessible through a one-lane gravel road, snaking through the wooded countryside. Next to the church was a functional wooden outhouse. I was told the church has a bathroom inside, but they kept the weathered outhouse as remembrance of the old days.

The Mt. Zion cemetery had upright headstones with many Irish and Scottish names, and a few German ones here and there. Entire generations of one family were resting in their final place side by side. The graves looked well-tended, the grass mowed, and artificial flowers on most of them. The dead were certainly not forgotten in these parts.

To the left of the outhouse was a deep ravine, a “holler,” as the locals call it. I spotted a house among the dense foliage, down about 300 feet. It was bathed in the sunlight, like an island in the middle of a vast sea of green foliage. The trees, the incline, and the compact underbrush would have made it impossible for anyone to access this house by walking. The gravel road was snaking down towards it, I was certain.

According to West Virginians, a “holler” is a remote road or area along a narrow valley between the hills or mountains. The narrow valleys are also called “hollows.” As travel brochures describe it, “The Mountain State’s combination of mountains and streams make for quite a few remote areas and lots of hollers.”

When Ray was a boy, eighty years ago, people living on the farms went to town on Sunday and that town was Ripley. Many of the hamlets do not even have a stop light, you blink, and you miss them, but Ripley today has a grocery store, a pharmacy, and three fast food places. We drove for endless miles on serpentine roads without seeing a grocery store, a clinic, or a pharmacy of any kind. We wondered where the people got their groceries, their meds, and their medical care. On a stretch of sixty miles or so, we came across a small Piggly Wiggly.

Going back to Hwy. 77 on a different route, down the mountain, we leaned back and forth, moving in tandem with the winding road, wondering if it will ever be straight again. It never stopped curving until we reached hwy. 77 and everyone took a collective sigh of relief. We were not sure how much longer we could have withstood the nauseating feeling of sideways motion sickness.

 

A Visit to Harpers Ferry on Labor Day

B&O Railroad

Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, once a bustling government factory town with over 3,000 inhabitants in its heyday, is nestled in Jefferson County, at the confluence of the Shenandoah and the Potomac Rivers. It exists today because the U.S. Armory (located here by George Washington) manufactured small arms here for sixty years, muskets, rifles, and pistols (more than 600,000) from 1801 until the opening days of the Civil War in 1861. With less than 300 inhabitants today, Harpers Ferry was the location of the incipient U.S. military industrial complex.  The factory’s 400 workers produced more than 10,000 weapons a year. 


Harpers Ferry was settled in a valley rich in natural resources: deposits of iron ore, limestone, timber from hardwood forests, and abundant water which attracted many industries.  The town is famous for its picturesque streets, beautiful vistas, a railroad, two rivers, shale rocks, sandstone, and most significantly, for its contribution to the history of the United States.


The metamorphic rocks in Harpers Ferry are over 500 million years old. Layers of mud, silt, and sand were compressed into sedimentary rocks called shale and sandstone. Increased pressure and heat changed sedimentary rocks (chemically and physically) into metamorphic rocks. Many buildings, sidewalks, walls, steps in town are made from such a metamorphic rock, phyllite, and few from quartzite. 


One of the greatest engineering efforts of the 18^th century America was the Patowmack Canal, “the life-long dream of George Washington.”  What is left of it is visible today by Virginius Island.  This bypass canal was linked to others in the Potomac River watershed, making trade more efficient in the area. 


Virginius Island, along the Shenandoah River, was famous for Hall’s Rifle Works. John Hall “perfected interchangeable parts technology and inspired a world-wide revolution in manufacturing. The factory ruins remind us of Harpers Ferry’s contribution to America’s Industrial Revolution.”

Wagon on Shenandoah St.

Photo: Ileana Johnson

On the eve of the Civil War, there were numerous buildings on Shenandoah Street, facing the river – a boarding house, armory workers dwellings, a market house, paymaster’s house, and the U.S. musket factory. Industries, homes, and lives were destroyed during the Civil War when the town changed hands eight times. Today, the foundations of those buildings are outlined by stones chiseled from the nearby rocks.


Famous and ordinary men and women contributed to Harpers Ferry’s heritage: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, John Brown,  Frederick Douglass, Native Americans, pioneers trekking west, canal builders, railroaders, armory craftsmen, immigrants, slaves, freedmen, and the townspeople of Harpers Ferry. 


Thomas Jefferson described in 1783 the passage of the Potomac River through the Blue Ridge as “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature.” Many hikers have followed the trails and climbed the Jefferson Rock to experience the romance described by Jefferson.


Meriwether Lewis came to Harpers Ferry Armory in March 1803 to supply his now famous Lewis and Clark expedition. Secretary of War Henry Dearborn sent orders to the Armory Superintendent Perkins in Harpers Ferry to help Captain Lewis and advised him to furnish the expedition with weapons, spare parts, and tools.


Meriwether Lewis was President Jefferson’s private secretary and he shared his thirst for adventure and knowledge. President Jefferson had instructed Lewis, “The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce.”


The arms and replacement parts from this armory traveled almost 10,000 miles to the Pacific Ocean and back and kept the Lewis and Clark expedition alive. Lewis supervised the construction of an iron-framed, skin-clad boat and bought supplies, tomahawks, and rifles. He met Clark in July of that year to begin their journey of “land exploration, waterways, animal life, natural features, and resources of the west.”


George Washington was impressed with the area’s “inexhaustible supply of water,” in an age when water-powered mills and factories were thriving until the Civil War. Water energy powered the Industrial Revolution that caught the town into a frenzy of manufacturing development.

The most controversial figure in Harpers Ferry history was John Brown. On October 16, 1859, Brown and an army of twenty-one men raided and seized the U.S. Armory.  His intention and plan were to spark rebellion to free slaves in the South. He was captured 36 hours later in the Armory fire engine house by U.S. Marines. Brown’s trial was reported and followed closely in newspapers.

“I want to free all the negroes in this state… if the citizens interfere with me, I must only burn the town and have blood,” Brown said before his raid.


John Brown made Harpers Ferry a symbol of freedom. Considered a martyr by some and a madman by others, Brown was tried and found guilty of treason, murder, and inciting slaves to rebel. He was sentenced to death by hanging.

Portrait of John Brown

Photo: Museum Archives

The opening in the Blue Ridge Mountains created by water millions of years ago provided passage on foot, by canoe, by ferries, by canals, and by railroads. The C&O Canal and B&O Railroad provided transportation along the river corridor. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), the first major line in America, still runs through Harpers Ferry.  Tourists today see the bridge ruins jutting out of shallow water and canal remnants as transportation had moved on to railroads and highways.


According to museum archives, “the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers was first crossed by a ferry in 1733. Fourteen years later the ferry rights were purchased by Robert Harper and the town became known as ‘Shenandoah Falls at Mr. Harper’s Ferry.’” Robert Harper began the first ferry across the Potomac River in 1747 and it operated until 1824. 

The Catholic Church in Harpers Ferry

Photo: Ileana Johnson

The mountainous terrain and forested landscape became the stage for the Civil War in 1861 and it wedged the town between North and South. According to museum archives, Harpers Ferry was captured and recaptured five times in one day, September 15, 1862. “Gen. Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson forced the war’s largest surrender of U.S. troops at Bolivar Heights, Schoolhouse Ridge, and the Murphy-Chambers Farm.” 


When fighting started in 1861, attributed in part by some to John Brown’s raid, the retreating U.S. troops burned both federal arsenal buildings to the ground to prevent the weapons from being taken by Confederate soldiers.

Photo: Ileana Johnson

The two rivers, the Potomac and Shenandoah, flooded from time and time and the high-water marks were recorded by the hardware store. Then there were times when the water level was too low, and business came to a standstill.  The C&O Canal was forever closed in 1924. The bridges were closed after they were swept away during the 1936 flood and not reopened until the late 1940s. 

Lower Town in Harpers Ferry

Photo: Ileana Johnson

Hiking to Jefferson Rock then, two buildings were visible, a large stone boarding house and a butcher shop and smokehouse erected by local businessman Philip Coons in the 1820s at the request of factory officials. U.S. bought the buildings in 1836, transformed the boarding house into workers’ housing and leased the butcher shop to Coons.

High Street 

Photo: Ileana Johnson

From High Street, climbing the stone steps, one can walk on the Appalachian Trial, passing the Harper House (the oldest house in town), St. Peter’s Catholic Church, ruins, the Jefferson Rock on the left, the gravesite of Robert Harper in the Harper Cemetery, and continue on the Appalachian Trail by Camp Hill and the former Storer College campus. 


From the Point, overlooking the confluence of the Shenandoah and the Potomac Rivers, the footbridge to C&O Canal and Maryland Heights is visible and the active CSX railroad (former Baltimore & Ohio) with its modern train station. 


Between the foot bridge and the train station there is the original site of John Brown’s Fort and the U.S. Armory Site. John Brown Museum and his Fort in Arsenal Square are clearly visible from the Point. Few buildings are still standing from the lower town as various floods have washed them away and only outlines in stone mark their existence.

Photo: Ileana Johnson

Dry Goods Store

The factory town suffered after the destruction of the Armory in 1861, four years of Civil War, transportation changes, and numerous floods followed by periods when the water table was too low. A brewery was built here in 1895 but the 1914 prohibition forced owners to convert it into a bottling factory for sodas and spring water but then a flood destroyed it completely. 

Photos: Ileana Johnson

Baptist missionaries founded Storer College after the Civil War.  John Storer donated $10,000. Storer College acquired buildings that were originally armory supervisors’ housing and graduated its first class in 1872 and “made significant contributions to progress for black Americans. It drew prominent men to its campus, including Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of NAACP.

Dr. Henry T. McDonald, Storer College President, said in 1938, “People from the far corners of the earth will come here to a spot of supreme interest to students of history, students of scenic beauty, and students of nature’s surprising riches.” The school closed in 1955 due to “desegregation, loss of state funding, and dwindling enrollment.”

1862 tent encampment for runaway slaves

Photo: Museum Archives

Harpers Ferry provided protection to “escaped slaves” during the Civil War. There are photographs dated 1862, showing the tent encampment at the musket factory yard. Union forces afforded freedmen some protection. “By 1865 there were about thirty thousand freedmen in the Shenandoah Valley.”


Harpers Ferry is connected to the neighboring states through three trails, The Appalachian Trail, 2176 miles long, Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (C&O Canal Towpath) along the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. to Cumberland, Maryland, and Potomac Heritage Trail which extends from Pennsylvania to the Chesapeake in Virginia.


If I could hike through the beautiful forests and rocky terrain from Harpers Ferry, 70 miles more or less, the Potomac Heritage Trail would take me home.

Snow Up to the Waist

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2014

We had crossed the Allegheny Mountains, driving through a rock tunnel, speeding by changing wintry landscapes, bald trees, and still wind turbines dotting the Pennsylvania sky like giant spiders. After seven hours we made it to Scott’s boyhood home.

As huge snowflakes started dancing in the air, Ray opened up his memory bag of childhood stories. The first snow of the year was beginning to stick to the ground and the drab Ohio landscape was turning into a winter wonderland. But this gentle snow blowing from Lake Erie was just a fuss when compared to blizzards past.

It was 1950 and a monster snowstorm had buried the family up to their collective waist in fluffy whiteness. The small Medina Hollow in West Virginia was far from the maddening world of civilization but this time it resembled a lunar white desert. The roads were inaccessible for an entire week before bulldozers from the county showed up to free them from complete and utter isolation.

The feeling of despair never entered the minds of these resilient , intrepid, and self-sufficient country folk who used the Sears and Roebuck catalog as toilet paper and an outhouse dangling over the creek. Sometimes it was washed away by the swollen waters and had to be salvaged from the mud downstream and drug back to its stilts.

The cows were trapped in the shed when huge snow banks slid off the roof and closed off the only possible exit and entrance to feed and water the cows - their source of milk, butter, and cheese. The boys dug a tunnel through the snow to get the Holsteins out to the water.

The fact that they were cut off from the world by miles and tons of snow did not frighten them. They only went to the store in the nearby town of Ripley once a month to buy salt, flour, coffee, and sugar – everything else they grew and canned themselves. They had no refrigeration and electricity; a building dug into the hill, well-insulated with 8 inch walls of sawdust, kept everything cold and well-preserved.  Apples, pears, potatoes, and onions were covered with straw. The milk was kept fresh in the spring. The flowing water was the magical place that sustained life - it was their cooler, fishing hole, the water source for animals and humans, and their Saturday bathtub before church.

In his typical West Virginia brogue, Ray reminisced about the yearly ritual of breaking the soil, planting the garden, weeding it, watering it, and the pig they always butchered on Thanksgiving Day. They stayed up all day and half the night, up to their elbows in blood, meat, and guts. “We saved everything but the squeal and we would have saved it too if we could have caught it. And we cleaned the guts in the river and made sausage sleeves out of them. We even used the pig’s tail to grease the griddle.”

The men dipped the hogs in a barrel to scald the hair off of them and then laid them on a sled, saved the liver, the heart, and other parts to make sausages or fry them.  I wondered  why they did not take a blow torch to singe the pig’s hair like my Grandpa used to do at Christmas time when he butchered the family’s hog. But then again, I always found hairs in the pig’s hide when I was trying to chew Grandpa’s specialty head cheese.

The large family survived during spring and summer by growing vegetables, eating unwashed tomatoes right out of the patch and raising chicken and collecting eggs. When it came time to cook a chicken, they would hang it live on the clothes line and cut its head off to keep it from flopping around and bruising the meat.

“It was not easy then, that’s for sure,” he said pensively. “We did not go to town much, we sold some eggs, we sold cream from Jersey and Holstein cows’ milk, but we did not buy much.”

They made sauerkraut in steeping barrels, stomping salted cabbage with their feet. When the sauerkraut was ready, they washed the salt off. “We did not know any better - that was normal to us.”

Every morning all kids had to get up at 4:30 a.m. and do their chores first before they went to school. Out in the middle of a field, they drank water from the creek and used nature’s bathroom, with special markers for the spot, no sophistication or hygiene worries.

Many kids dropped out of school too soon but Ray’s brothers stayed through 12^th grade because their parents stressed the importance of school, “reading, writing, and Route 21.” Route 21 took many kids out of West Virginia to the “promised land” in Ohio in search of jobs. Medina was so small it only had a grocery store and a church, no chance for employment. Ripley was the big city with one traffic light.

Some kids were so poor, they brought raccoon sandwiches to school. Parents sent them to school just to get them out of the house until they got in fights and tried to beat the teacher and the cops took them back home.  

Kids wore overshoes to handle the deep mud. When the school bus would get stuck in spite of the spare gravel on the road, children had to get out in ankle-deep mud and extricate the bus by pushing it out of the ruts. Nowadays there would be a lawsuit if kids pushed the bus.

It’s a wonder Joan married Ray after seeing all the spitting, tobacco and snuff-chewing men in the main square by the Courthouse. People slept with their dogs in bed and the pig underneath the bed because winters were so fierce and cold. Ray’s uncle was considered rich by most area residents because he owned a jewelry store in Ripley, trading watches.

Joan, Ray’s wife, a city girl from Ohio, was appalled how people lived in West Virginia. She must have loved Ray very much to stick around for 55 years. And Ray’s economical lifestyle became their trademark. Living simply, God, and family remained their guiding light.

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2014

 

 

 

The Flushing Outhouse

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/55958

Ray loves to tell stories about his childhood of long ago America - his eyes twinkle with excitement. He was a teen in rural West Virginia of 1950, carefree and happy. His parents’ farmhouse lacked indoor plumbing, not that it bothered the boys that much. They bathed every Saturday evening before church in the family washtub in the kitchen after the adults in the household.

Water was heated on the stovetop and everyone took their turns in the same soapy water, gradually turning into muddy brown. The metal tub was large enough to accommodate one person sitting in a crouched position. By the time the boys got to bathe, the water was dirty and lukewarm. The adage, “don’t’ throw the baby out with the bathwater” was certainly true.

It was a royal treat in summertime to wash in the creek that crossed the farm nearby. The boys learned to swim there, frolicked in their underwear, drank the water, and took baths upstream or downstream, wherever was most convenient at the moment. The creek was their refrigerator as well. In the shallows, they kept bottles of fresh, unpasteurized cow’s milk. In August, the creek kept watermelons cold.

It did not bother Ray that the outhouse was hanging over the creek upstream on stilts, dumping its contents in the water. When a summer deluge came, the tiny creek would swell to raging rapids, overflowing its banks, and floating the outhouse away. The local bridge, a tenth of a mile downstream, would stop the outhouse from its treacherous descent.

Ray’s dad and the boys would bring it back to its resting place, closer to the farmhouse, dragging it through sand and mud with sleds pulled by horses.

The interior was always a sandy, muddy mess and the cleanup with shovels and buckets took hours. Once the outhouse was resting again on its stilts, all cleaned up, nobody was too upset over the hard work they had just completed, but everyone bemoaned the loss of the Sears and Roebuck catalog, their free toilet paper.

Happy as coons in a corn field, the boys took turns swinging naked from the trees around the banks, dropping into a deeper hole, splashing in the swollen creek. Most became good swimmers by necessity, yet it was a miracle that nobody drowned.

The creek was truly the nature’s bounty in a time when people had to be creative to survive. Nobody knew much about modern conveniences nor cared. Ray’s family’s outhouse was the only “flush toilet” for miles around.

The Flushing Outhouse

Ray loves to tell stories about his childhood of long ago America - his eyes twinkle with excitement. He was a teen in rural West Virginia of 1950, carefree and happy. His parents’ farmhouse lacked indoor plumbing, not that it bothered the boys that much. They bathed every Saturday evening before church in the family washtub in the kitchen after the adults in the household.

Water was heated on the stovetop and everyone took their turns in the same soapy water, gradually turning into muddy brown. The metal tub was large enough to accommodate one person sitting in a crouched position. By the time the boys got to bathe, the water was dirty and lukewarm. The adage, “don’t’ throw the baby out with the bathwater” was certainly true.

It was a royal treat in summertime to wash in the creek that crossed the farm nearby. The boys learned to swim there, frolicked in their underwear, drank the water, and took baths upstream or downstream, wherever was most convenient at the moment. The creek was their refrigerator as well. In the shallows, they kept bottles of fresh, unpasteurized cow’s milk. In August, the creek kept watermelons cold.

It did not bother Ray that the outhouse was hanging over the creek upstream on stilts, dumping its contents in the water. When a summer deluge came, the tiny creek would swell to raging rapids, overflowing its banks, and floating the outhouse away. The local bridge, a tenth of a mile downstream, would stop the outhouse from its treacherous descent.

Ray’s dad and the boys would bring it back to its resting place, closer to the farmhouse, dragging it through sand and mud with sleds pulled by horses.

The interior was always a sandy, muddy mess and the cleanup with shovels and buckets took hours. Once the outhouse was resting again on its stilts, all cleaned up, nobody was too upset over the hard work they had just completed, but everyone bemoaned the loss of the Sears and Roebuck catalog, their free toilet paper.

Happy as coons in a corn field, the boys took turns swinging naked from the trees around the banks, dropping into a deeper hole, splashing in the swollen creek. Most became good swimmers by necessity, yet it was a miracle that nobody drowned.

The creek was truly the nature’s bounty in a time when people had to be creative to survive. Nobody knew much about modern conveniences nor cared. Ray’s family’s outhouse was the only “flush toilet” for miles around.