Thinking of the Past

Today has me thinking about my grandfather, Garvin Wallace. He was my mother’s father, and according to her, my brother and I were his pride and joy, but I don’t remember him. He died when I was around 2 years old. I do however, know stories of him, and it is these treasured stories that I’m going to share with you today.



My Grandfather Garvin Wallace.

My Wallace family story begins in Scotland, where they came from. There are tales that we are direct descendants of Scotland’s most famous son, William Wallace, the man who was popularized in the movie, “Braveheart”. While I have never been able to make a connection to “Braveheart” Wallace, William is a very popular name in the family, and was the name of my great-great-grandfather, but William is a very popular name, especially for true sons of Scotland, so I don’t know if this is really any kind of clue. Still, it is a matter of pride for my family. My first known Wallace ancestor was Professor Alexander Wallace who was a professor of Latin at Oxford University. It was Alexander who came to America around the time of the American Revolution, and his son Charles was born in Ohio in the early 1800’s. Many of the Wallace relatives had long been established in the South Branch Valley in what is now West Virginia, and it was these family ties that brought my Ohio Wallace’s to West Virginia.


Back to Charles Wallace, who was born in Ohio. Charles married a woman who is only remembered by the family as Grandmaw Susan. They lived in Fayette County, Ohio. Charles & Susan had a son, which they named William Wallace. It was this William Wallace who sometime in his early years, moved to present-day Hardy County, WV, to be near family, and it was in Hardy County that William married Catharine Miller and lived out their lives on their farm near Moorefield. William & Catherine had a son, which they named Charles, who once reaching adulthood he, like many young men of his day, was lured to the American West to seek his fortune.


Grandpaw Charles wound up in western Louisiana, near the Texas border, where he built a trading post and traded with the Indians. By this time, the Comanche Nation was in decline and they were taken advantage of by many traders and especially at Army outposts. Grandpaw Charles always treated the Comanche honorably and fairly and he gained their trust. It was because of this trust that the Yamparika band of Comanche’s traded almost exclusively at his trading post, and made him a very prosperous man. It was at this trading post that a young Indian maiden named Lily Hightree, caught his eye. They fell in love, and he married Grandmaw Lily in both a Methodist and a Comanche marriage ceremony. A few years later, the Yamparika Comanche were removed to a reservation in Oklahoma, and the army bought the trading post off of Grandpaw Charles and Grandmaw Lily. Rather than go to Oklahoma with the Yamparika’s, they decided to return to West Virginia. Soon after they departed Louisiana, they received word that smallpox laid waste to the Yamparika’s and all of Grandmaw Lily’s family perished in the onslaught. Charles and Lily bought a big farm in Hardy County in the Old Fields area, and lived out their days there. For the rest of her life, Grandmaw Lily talked about her people and made sure her children knew about them.



Charles and Lily had three children, Uncle Brooke, Aunt Lola and my Grandfather Garvin. Aunt Lola and Uncle Brooke never had any children, and my Grandfather Garvin was nearly 50 years old before he fathered my mother. They said that Grandmaw Lily was so ecstatic over finally having a grandchild and would sit and rock my mother in a rocking chair and pet on her and say over and over, “My baby, my baby”. Sadly, Grandmaw Lily died when my mother was only 3 years old.

Grandpaw Garvin was a character. He became a wealthy man, undoubtedly because he was an avid moonshiner. In his younger days, Grandpaw Garvin and Uncle Brooke bought an old hearse and hauled their moonshine all over, selling it to people. One of their biggest clients was a grocery store in Keyser. People still talk about Garvin and Brooke having the old hearse loaded down with ‘shine’ and driving all the way into Keyser. They didn’t fear the local law because the judge, the sheriff and other influential men in Hardy & Mineral Counties bought moonshine off of them. One time, a federal revenuer got wind of Garvin & Brooke’s operation, and made it his duty to catch them. Grandpaw Garvin said that he got really close to finding the ‘still’ one time, so they moved the operation into the basement of Garvin’s house. They hid the ‘still’ by building a secret wall between the ‘still’ room and the rest of the basement, and it was undetectable to the unknowning eye. Mom said that she remembers when she was a young girl, Garvin would take her with him on his “Shine” trips, and he’d drop her off at a store with a friend and then make his deals. She knew what he was doing, but he said that it wasn’t something that a girl ought to be involved in.



My mother.

Mom recalls that there were many old things in Garvin’s house, including several old items brought over from Scotland when the Wallace’s first came to this country. Mom remembers that the kitchen table was several hundred years old. She said that she remembers a kitchen cupboard that had several deerhides in them, undoubtedly inherited from Charles and Lily, and that she would take them out of the cupboard and, using a knife, would cut them up in little pieces so she could make purses and other playthings out of them. The woman that gave birth to my mother, a gold digger of the worst kind, would yell and her and tell Garvin, “She’s ruining those things”. Garvin would simply say, “Leave her alone. She’s learning.”



Mom.

My mother also remembers there always being several jugs of moonshine always being in the kitchen, kept high up on a shelf. Mom said she’d sometimes climb up to the shelf, and using a tablespoon, would sample the goods. She said that Garvin would have gotten angry if she drank a lot out of each jug, so she was careful to only get a little out of each jug. She also adds that since it wasn’t a big deal to drink moonshine in the house that the mystery was taken away from it so she didn’t really want to drink when she got older.



Garvin, Mom, Aunt Wanda, and the woman who gave birth to my mother.

Sadly, Mom didn’t get to live with Garvin for very long, the woman that gave birth to my mother soon grew bored with Garvin and as usual, moved on to the next man. She threw my mother off at her mother’s house yet again, and Garvin would only get to see my mother on the weekends. Once my mother and father were married, the lived with Garvin for a year or so to take care of Garvin when he was dying, and it was during this time that Garvin got to know me and Jason. We are told that Garvin always said he regretted that he would not being able to see us grow up, and that he hoped that we would know how much he loved us. Thanks to the stories, we did grow up knowing Garvin and the whole Wallace family. That, to me, makes us truly fortunate.




Me & Jason

Peaches

I remember when I was growing up, every year about the last part of August, we’d all load up in the back of the truck and go down to Romney and get several bushels of peaches. We’d go right to the orchard and get them, and let me tell you, you ain’t lived until you’ve ate a fresh peach right off the tree. Those peaches were so sweet and sticky they practically tasted like candy to us.

The whole bunch of us. I'm the baby.

I remember how one time when I was about 8 years old, we went for peaches and the day before we had used the truck for hauling sawdust to put down in the hog pen. Well, the truck bed still had some loose sawdust in it and when we started down the road the wind picked up the loose sawdust and blowed it all over us kids riding in the truck bed. You couldn’t keep your eyes open for getting sawdust in them. I recall that was one trip in which all of us kids stayed up towards the truck cab where the flying sawdust wasn’t so bad.

It was a pretty uneventful trip except for crossing the big bridge between Petersburg and Moorefield. I always hated that bridge and to me at that age, it was about as big a bridge as there ever was in the whole world. It crossed the South Branch of the Potomac and the water was green underneath, a sure sign that it was deep. I’d always try to close my eyes or hide face down in the truck bed because as we all know if you can’t see something it won’t bother you. Well, this time was especially traumatic for me since it was just after the Great Flood of 1985 which had washed away the huge concrete bridge there, and it was temporarily replaced with an old metal National Guard bridge. That rickety thing creaked and moaned, and made such a racket, I was just sure we were falling into the river below. Of course, all the other kids knew my fear, and of course, gave me a dose of my own medicine by picking on me incessantly before and during the crossing of the bridge. I guess I was always afraid of that bridge and that deep water because when I was little, me, Dad, Jason and the 8th husband of the woman who gave birth to my mother (note I did NOT say grandmother), all went there ice fishing one winter. His name was Skinner and he loved to hunt and fish. He was from around that area, and I remember him talking about how deep the water was, and how that several men had tried to swim to the bottom of the river one time and couldn’t touch the bottom. I’m sure he was just preying on my wild-eyed fears then, especially considering how I was tip-toeing around on the crackling ice. Never the less, I was scarred for life and remained afraid of that stretch of water for years.

This is the place where went went ice fishing with skinner. The bridge is maybe 500 yards upriver from here.

Anyway, after making the harrowing crossing of the river, we headed on to Romney. The rest of the trip down was typical for us, and we soon arrived at the orchards. Mom had grew up down that way and she knew all of the places and most of the people, so she knew who to deal with and who gave the best deals. We soon found prices that we could live with and got our allotted 5 bushels of peaches and we also got several bushels of apples. Since we were at the orchard, the men there let us kids eat our fill of bruised and damaged peaches because they couldn’t be sold and would ruin anyway in the heat. To us kids, you’d have thought we had died and went to heaven. We gorged ourselves on peaches, and had the sticky nectar dripping all down our faces and off the ends of our elbows. I’m pretty sure we even had the sticky peach juice in our hair. Oh, God they were good.

About the age I was in this story.

After an hour or so, we all loaded back in the crammed truck bed and started up the road. Well, that’s when the real fun began. Remember I was telling you about the loose sawdust flying around, well now that we were all sticky with peach juice, that sawdust started to stick to us. We were a sight! Practically every inch of our bodies was covered with matted-on sawdust. On our way back through Moorefield, Mom stopped at Heck’s Store and told us to stay in the truck that she just needed to quickly pick up something, so we just stayed there in the truck bed. Then the yellow jackets found us. I’ve no doubt now why the Moorefield High School mascot is the yellow jacket because that place must be over-run with them. Undoubtedly, all that sticky, sawdust-laden peachiness on us kids had attracted entire swarms of yellowjackets because we were soon dodging and swerving from the little buggers! To save us, our granddad who was driving the truck, told us to calm down and he drove around the parking lot to keep the yellow jackets off of us. I wonder what those people in the parking lot must have thought was wrong with that bunch of swarping kids in the back of that truck who were all covered with sawdust and swatting at the air! I’m sure they thought the whole lot of us was touched!

It wasn’t long before Mom came back out of the store with a small bag of stuff. None of us asked what was in the bag and we soon started on up the road. Soon, we neared the big bridge again, and once again the picking on me started, and I just let the derision slide off of me like water off a duck’s back, and remembered the ring leaders for later tormenting once the tables had turned! Well we crossed the bridge and granddad pulled the truck off in a wide spot just above the bridge. Mom hopped out and said, “Okay kids, here’s some shampoo and towels, now go swimming and warsh that mess off of you”. That's what she had bought in Heck's! Well most of the kids took off running for the river but I about freaked. This was the deep water near that bridge I was afraid of, as a matter of fact, you could even see that bridge from where we were at, and I was just sure that the whole lot of us was going to drown. Mom assured me that the water here wasn’t all that deep and that I should just stay near the river bank if I was scared. She then tried to point out to all of us the Fox and the Ox that were supposedly visible in the sandstone cliffs above the river and she told us that this was one of the best swimming holes in the area. Well, hesitantly I entered the water, and washed off real good and noticed the older kids swimming out in the middle of the river. They all seemed to be okay and no water monster or nothing had violently arose from the deep to devour them. Instead, there was only a trail of soapsuds slowly floating down the river away from them.


It felt good to get that itchy sawdust and sticky peach juice off of us and I kind of relaxed a little. We stayed there for a while and played in the water, and though I never did venture far from the riverbank, it did help me overcome some of my fear of that deep, dark and foreboding stretch of river. Soon, after we had dried off, we were loaded back in the truck bed beside the apples and peaches, only this time the flying sawdust didn’t stick to us, and we headed back up the mountain road that led to home.

Here is a link to a You-Tube video about The Fox and Ox Rocks, it has information and a photo of them at the end of it. The video is 1 minute long.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSedqzVyyH0

The Tale of a Southern Belle

I never met my great-great grandmother Rebecca, but my mother did. This may not seem remarkable but it is. You see, my grandma Rebecca was born before The War of Northern Aggression (that’s the Civil War to all you Yankee folk) and she was a bonafide southern belle. Like everyone else in that time and place, Rebecca’s family had strong southern sympathies.

Petersburg, WV, circa 1900.

Grandma Rebecca told of how when she was born in 1853, it was customary for a father to give a slave girl to each of his children to care for them and to be their mammy. My grandma Rebecca said that the slave girl done everything for them, she'd dress them, wash them, feed them and even cleaned them after using the chamber pot. When the War came, life forever changed for my grandma Rebecca, her family lost its money but they did retain the land. A few years after the War, Rebecca’s father, Aaron, was killed in a farming accident and the family was forced to sell the ancestral farm and move to town. Through it all, Rebecca said the most difficult thing about life after the War was learning to lace up and tie her own shoes, she said neither her nor her sisters knew the first thing about common everyday tasks.

After moving to town, Rebecca met and married my great-great grandfather, Jacob. While his family name was respected, he certainly didn’t come from a poor genteel family like Rebecca’s. For all of you who aren’t aware of the class difference, poor genteel is used in reference to people who were wealthy and came from good families before the War but lost their money in the War, and it was used to differentiate them from the common poor. The poor genteel were welcome in all society circles, regardless of their economic woes. After the marriage, my grandfather Jacob worked a small farm in Hardy County until the rails and the mills opened up the Potomac Highlands, and they moved to the then growing town of Petersburg, WV. Jacob then worked as a brakeman for the railroad and they lived in a row house for a few years until Jacob could afford a house on Virginia Avenue, which they lived in for the rest of their lives and where they raised their 7 children. Jacob died in the early 1900’s, and Rebecca was left a widow for the nearly 50 remaining years of her life.

Above: Building the Railroad Bridge below Petersburg, September 1910.

Above: Petersburg Railyard where Jacob worked, about 1920.

Later in her life, Rebecca shrunk up so until she was a tiny slip of a woman, and she slept in baby bed. When my mother visited her as a child, she said that Grandma Rebecca’s skin was so thin that it was almost clear and that you could see the blood right in her veins but she was very clear minded. One of the most memorable things that my mother recalls is how Rebecca took up chewing tobacco and could spit several feet and hit an old coffee can that she used as spittoon. Rebecca had a little ole housedog that was nearly as ancient as she was and she called him “Old Blue”. Her and Old Blue had some exploits, which may appear in a future post.

Virginia Avenue in Petersburg, circa 1940.

Many remnants of the teachings of my Grandma Rebecca still live on in my family. For example, you have to have clean shoes, only “trashy” people wear dirty shoes. Rebecca said that it doesn’t cost hardly anything to keep your shoes clean and clean shoes say a lot about the person wearing them. Even today, when I meet someone for the first time, one of the first things I look at is their shoes. You can really size up a person that way. Another teaching from Rebecca was anything that you write, you have to write it in black ink, you can’t use blue ink or a pencil, it shows good breeding to use black ink, I think this probably has roots in both her antebellum upbringing as well as her devout Presbyterianism. Yet another thing passed down from grandma Rebecca is the rule that you have to eat everything with a fork or spoon. There is no such thing as finger foods. You always have to have a utensil no matter what the food, and whether you use them or not. “It’s a matter of culture”, Rebecca said. I drive Shirley crazy with my quirky always-having-to-have-a-fork, I just smile and tell her, “Thank my grandmother for that.”

Petersburg, WV circa 1910

My grandma Rebecca died in 1966 at the age of 113, she died peacefully in her sleep and was the pillar of her family and community. It makes my head spin to think of all she saw and the knowledge that she must have had from living through several decades of American life.