Camp Chase

Today finds me thinking about my gr-gr-gr-gr-grandfather, Joseph Lantz, and the horrors he must have witnessed and was subjected to while in the Confederate Service. He was a Captain in the North Fork Militia,and was in active during the Battle of Riverton.





The Battle of Riverton site.

Captured near the end of the War Between the States (or as some of us were brought up hearing, "The War of Northern Aggression") my grandfather was held prisoner in Camp Chase Prison in Ohio. What pure hell this must have been for him and his companions. Camp Chase Prison was opened in May 1861 and remained open throughout the War. It was located about 4 miles from Columbus, Ohio. The prison held a large population of men from the mountains of West Virginia. For these men, their world must have been turned upside down. Not only were they prisoners, but they were prisoners in a foreign land. To these men of the rugged mountains, I’m sure Camp Chase was like a foreign country. Even today, when I am out of my mountains, I feel a great unease and get the feeling that if only I could get back into the mountains, then all would be right with the world. How these men must have gazed and wished for the mountains that they knew lay far to the East.



My gr-gr-gr-gr-grandfather, Joseph Lantz.

Growing up, I heard stories from the older folks about the living conditions at Camp Chase Prison. Of course, they had heard these stories from their elders, and theirs before them. A few former prisoners from Pendleton County described Camp Chase prison as a big mud hole. They said the water was dirty and the food was wormy. They told of how the men would sit around and tell stories of home and what they were going to go when the War was over. I recall hearing a story about how one man in Camp Chase prison had made a pet out of a big rat, and one time the rations were so scarce that a bunch of his cohorts killed the rat and made soup out of it.

One of the best Camp Chase prison recollections, to me, was recorded by the Hammons Family titled, “Camp Chase”. At the beginning of the track, Burl Hammons talks about stories that he grew up hearing about Camp Chase. He talked of how the men were mistreated at the Yankee prison and how the prisoners simply wanted to go home, so much so that it consumed them. The story continues with how the Yankee captain liked fiddle music and told his Confederate captives whichever man played him the best fiddle tune, he would set that man free. If this is a true story, can you imagine how much heart and soul went into this fiddle contest, these men would have been playing for their very lives. As the contest progressed, one man played a tune that absolutely floored the Yankee captain, because it was just that good. For all the people who like fiddle music, they know how the fiddle puts lyrics right into the tune and that the tune tells the story. Well, after the contest, the Yankee captain lived up to his word and gave the man his freedom, but before the man left the captain asked, “What was the name of that fiddle tune?” to which the man replied, “It’s a tune that I came up with, and the name of it is “Camp Chase!” I don’t know of the Hammons story is true, but I do know that I can’t listen to the tune, “Camp Chase” without hearing the suffering of the prisoners, and hearing the hopes of freedom and home that these men held so dear. I can sympathize with these men who longed for the mountains for Camp Chase would have been both a physical and mental Hell for them.

I’m sure my grandfather tried for the rest of his life to forget Camp Chase, but at least he got to return home to his beloved Germany Valley after the War. So many prisoners died at Camp Chase and are buried there.



Camp Chase Cemetery. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Here's a Youtube video of Betty Vornbrock doing a great version of "Camp Chase".

Summertime at the Sow's Ear

Always at this time of year, my mind drifts back to those summer days sitting on my Granddad’s front porch. I remember one lazy summer day on Granddad’s porch, I lived up to my nickname “Hacker”. They called me that because seldom was the time when I didn’t have an old hatchet with me. I don’t know why but it seemed that I always had a hatchet. I’d use it to clear brush if I wandered around in the woods, I’d throw it at tree's and blocks of wood to see if I could make it stick, or I’d just hold it above my head and let out a war whoop and make people think I had went off and was going to chop them to pieces. Regardless of what i was doing, I always seemed to have a hatchet with me. Well, on this one day and for some still unknown reason, I took to lightly hacking at my Granddad’s old dry-rotted porch posts. It didn’t take much until the posts simply crumbled away in places.


Granddad's house, "The Sow's Ear".

My Granddad tried to get me to stop but eventually just said, “If you destroy those posts, you’re goin’ to have to cut me some hickory poles to hold up the porch roof.” Well, I continued chipping away at the posts in the middle of the porch, even then I knew that the corner posts would hold up the roof. After I had hacked the old posts away, I went up in the woods and cut and trimmed up some nice hickory poles. I peeled the bark off of them, and they were a very pretty white color. We placed them in the spots where the old posts were, and nailed them up. They looked about a hundred times better than the old posts did, and even my granddad said it was a big improvement and said, “Hackey, I reckon you done me a good deed.”

That was until my Aunt Nawey came home from work. She about had a conniption, and said it looked like a bunch of hillbillies lived there with the hickory poles holding up the porch roof. She marched over to my Dad and told him what I had done, and wanted him to replace the porch posts. As luck would have it, we had a few old cedar porch posts there from where we had recently remodeled our front porch, and Nawey said that would be fine. The next day, me and Granddad put up the new porch posts and all was again right with the world. Nawey threatened to skin me alive if I hacked at the new porch posts! After they passed Nawey’s inspection, my Granddad informed her that he liked the hickory poles better and told her “No matter how hard you try, you ain’t never goin’ to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!” (I bet you can’t tell that I could get away with anything with my Granddad!)

In those summer days of my youth, we always seemed to have the same routine every day, about noon we’d go down to Riverton and get a few snacks and to catch up on the local gossip for the day, and then after about an hour or so, we’d start back up the mountain, only coming home through the Bland Hills.

Bland Hills

Bland Hills road was always so quiet and peaceful, and we’d poke along on our way home, stopping to look at anything unusual that caught our eye like grazing deer, an occasional hawk flying overhead, or perhaps some blooming patch of wildflowers alongside the country road. Seldom was the day when we’d pass another vehicle on our trip, and it was because of this that Bland Hills was chosen as the location for my Granddad to let me drive his truck, even though I was underage and still a couple of years away from getting a drivers license.

Looking back, I’m sure that he let me drive coming back up the mountain rather than driving down the mountain was so I couldn’t really let the truck get away from me on the uphill drag. I learned to drive fairly fast, and I had driven our car with an automatic transmission before so that wasn’t an issue for me, but figuring out a clutch was entirely different. It also didn’t help that Granddad’s truck was a 1967 Ford F-150 with a 3-speed transmission on the steering column! I don’t know whoever came up with the concept of a 3-speed transmission, but whoever it was should be dragged out into the woods and shot. As I recall, first gear was way up on top on the front of the column, second gear was all the way down on the front of the column, and somewhere about halfway on the steering column you could, if you were lucky, manage to finagle and contort the belligerent beast into third gear. Reverse was one of those directions that remained a mystery to me in the old truck, it was supposedly somewhere through the magical corridor, down by the magical mirror and was only attainable, I’m convinced, by saying a few quatrains of an old Pennsylvania Dutch hex. Luckily, on Bland Hills road I didn’t have much use for third gear or reverse, so I was good to go. I remember Granddad would drive over toward the backside of Riverton, and pull off the road and let me under the wheel, and I’d take over right at the foot of Dolly Ridge. Try as I might to ease out on the clutch upon taking off, I’d always either lurch forward and kill the motor, or I’d tear out throwing gravels and dirt for several yards behind me. All my Granddad would ever say is, “Take ‘er easy, hackey, take ‘er easy!”


Granddad & my cousin Poodies.

Once I got took off, I was pretty good at it and didn’t have much difficulty in shifting gears since most of the way was in first gear, and once we got up on the ridge, I’d shift into 2nd. Soon after getting to the top of the ridge, we would come to the forks in the road, the left going towards Monkeytown (which was were home was) and the right going back into Brown Bear Lodge.

Well, Granddad would always say, “I believe we’ll ride back this way today and see if anything is different.” There never was anything different back in Brown Bear Lodge, I'm fairly sure that nothing had changed there since the Yankee's marched up Dolly Ridge after the Battle of Riverton way back when the North invaded America. But going right at the Forks did add a couple of miles on to the trip since the road back into Brown Bear Lodge was a dead end and we’d have to backtrack out of there. I remember we’d drive by the old Cunningham Cemetery where two sets of my great-so-many-grandparents are buried, and Granddad would inevitable tell me about them, and tell me about how years ago they had a problem with groundhogs back there, and the groundhogs had gnawed and dug their way into some of the graves and were bringing out scraps of clothing from the graves. Of course, this was very upsetting to the people who had loved ones buried there, and several men set around with guns and waited for hours to shoot the groundhogs. After killing several groundhogs from that spot, then men stuffed rocks into the groundhog holes and covered them over the best they could. He said now people kept watch for any sign of groundhogs returning even though that had happened several decades ago, and no other action was needed. It was almost as if he shared the cautionary tale with me to keep alive an ongoing feud between humans and groundhogs.


The old Cunningham Cemetery.

Eventually, I’d have to turn around, and I had a favorite spot for it, remember how I said I could never find reverse in the old truck, well I got around this by turning around at a wide spot in the road near a big open meadow. It was wide enough to swing the truck around without having to put it in reverse!


This is the meadow that has the wide spot I used to turn around in.

After backtracking the Brown Bear Lodge road, and then onto Bland Hills road toward home, I would creep along ever so slowing, sometimes stopping to see something of interest, and all the while learning how to take off without popping the clutch. I’d drive to what we called the “First Hill” near the main highway, at which point I’d pull over and let Granddad take over the wheel again, and he’d drive us on home.

A typical view in the Bland Hills.

Once we got home we’d sit on the front porch and talk and tell stories, or find something that needed done, like poking around in the outbuildings or climbing up in the attic at Granddad house. It was always an adventure, you never knew what you were going to find. I remember one time we were up in the attic digging out some old boxes of stuff. The attic was but a crawlspace, and you had to be really careful so as to only place your weight on the rafters of the old house. I recall that it was so hot and stifling that you could barely breathe, and I’d crawl around, find a box, and drag it back to the opening of the attic and hand it out to my granddad on the porch roof. I remember one time I kept noticing the electric wire had been gnawed by a rat in several places and I commented to granddad, “If that rat gnaws through the rubber coating of that wire, it’ll have a bad day.” Well sure enough, after crawling further back into the attic, I saw the skeletal remains of the rat, still stuck into the electric wire where it had succeeded in biting its way into oblivion. Really, I don’t know what ever kept that place from burning down with the gnawed electric wires, the sawdust insulation and the wiring system that my granddad figured out and installed.

We’d then dig through the boxes that were placed “overhead” for the past several decades, there’d be old pictures, school papers from the kids, sometimes knick-knacks, and various other items. It really was like sorting through Pandora’s Box. If something caught our eye, we’d lay it to the side so we could take it with us. Everything else was placed back into the boxes and put back into the attic, where those treasures remain to this day. I wonder what I would find if I were to look through those boxes today?

Doc & Killdare

Growing up I spent a lot of time in the old hardware store in Riverton. It was one of those old community gathering places that you hear so much about these days. I remember there were benches on the porch for people to sit in and there were a few chairs inside near the cash counter. There always seemed to be a bunch of old men gathered around there telling lies about their lives and trying to pass it all of as the gospel truth.

On a typical summer day, old man Doc would be sitting out on the bench on the porch, he was some kin to us and my Granddad always talked to him and asked if he needed a ride home. You see, Doc didn’t have a car and he either walked or hitched a ride from his house to the hardware store every day. Doc would always take him up on the offer for a ride home, which to me at the time was pure torture. Old man Doc was notorious for not being able to control his bowels and as often as not, we’d end up having to clean off the truck seat after dropping Doc off at his house. But of course, it couldn’t be cleaned immediately, no siree-bob, we had to wait until we were up the road a ways so Doc wouldn’t know that we were having to clean up after him. Doc was always a pleasant enough old man to talk to, it was just having to clean up after him that was the bad part. I never knew my Granddad to ever not offer a ride to Doc if he needed one though.

Another familiar face at the hardware store was old Slack Hand. You can read about Slack Hand by clicking here. Old Slack Hand would always be sitting in an old split-bottom chair with what looked like the bottom nearly hanging down to the floor. I imagine it was his immense girth that led the chair to have the sagging bottom in it, and it was an on-going joke among many people that if the straining buttons on his shirt ever broke loose, they would likely injure somebody really bad. I remember it always seemed that his chair would be in the way of getting to the pop cooler. You could neither get to it from the front of him, nor by going all the way around the store to reach it from behind him, somehow he always managed to position himself just so he’d completely block access to the pop cooler. I know now that this was because if you asked him to move for a second so you could get into the pop, he’d inquire “So, are you gonna buy me a pop?” As often as not, someone would say, “Give him a sody so he’ll shut up.” and so Slack Hand would wrangle a free pop out of the deal.



Another common face at the store was a man called Killdare. He was the pseudo-hunter of the group and was always telling about his exploits of hunting in the mountains. I remember several of his far-fetched tales, and I’ll share with you the two most memorable stories of his. The first was about the time he was hunting out on the Huckleberry Plains. It was mid-summer and it was a warm day when he left with his plott hound, Sam. Killdare and Sam were in search of grouse which would be feeding on the ripening huckleberries. Well ole Killdare said him and Sam were several miles out on the plains when a big black cloud came approaching from the west, and he figured it was a thunderstorm and decided to seek cover. When the storm finally reached them, it brought with it a snowstorm.



Killdare said that in a matter of minutes, the ground was covered with snow, and it was still snowing so hard that he couldn’t tell which way was up and which way was down. He said it snowed for several more hours during which time he made a lean-to between two boulders and set up camp. He said it soon grew dark, and seeing that there was already over a foot of snow on the ground, he settled in for the night and bedded down.



In the middle of the night he said he was awakened by some sort of bellowing, the likes of which he had never heard in these mountains. The sound kept coming closer and he was increasingly puzzled as to what it was. After a few more minutes, he said that a great shaggy head poked around the corner of his lean-to and he was face to face with a giant moose. Well, Killdare, being always at the ready for such a chance encounter with big game, up and shot the moose and killed it dead right then and there. He said he got up out of bed and dressed out the moose, and cut him off a big hunk of the meat and roasted it over the fire. He went on the say that was the best tasting meat he’d ever had. Well, his telling of the story at this point would always lead somebody to ask, “How did a moose get all the way onto the huckleberry plains of West Virginia?” to which Killdare would respond that he reckoned the moose got lost in the snowstorm and he figured it was thinking it was headed towards the Rocky Mountains instead of the huckleberry plains. Of course, nobody believed his story and they would try to trip him up in it by inquiring how come nobody had ever seen the moose head that he had killed, (Killdare was notorious for collecting mounted animal heads), and he’d answer them, “Well the next morning, it stopped snowing and it got hot, real hot, and all of the melted like that (he’d snap his fingers) and it caused a big flood right up on the huckleberry plains. He said the floodwaters washed away the entire carcass over the moose except for the hunk of meat he had roasted over his fire, and it was all he could do to save himself and ole Sam. Then someone would ask him how come nobody living down the valley from the huckleberry plains had reported any flooding, and Killdare would say the flood waters all ran towards the low end of the huckleberry plains and it all dropped down into a big cave, and from there he doesn’t know where the water ended up. He said he reckoned the unexpected summer snowstorms and the ensuing floodwaters were the reason why there wasn’t any trees that grew out on the huckleberry plains.




The other hunting tale told by Killdare involved his hunting wild turkeys in Germany Valley. He said he was walking up Dolly Ridge and came upon a big downed tree and it was plum covered with turkeys. He said he had never seen a sight like that in all of his days, and he decided to count them all to see how many there were. He said he counted exactly 100 turkeys, and as he was finished counting them he noticed that they were all lined up in a perfectly straight line from where he stood, so the idea came to him that perhaps he could shoot more than a couple of them with only one shot. He said he drawed up and took careful aim and fired, he said there was a great rustling noise and he seen turkeys flopping everywhere but he only noticed one turkey gobbler flying away. He assessed the situation (that was a favorite saying of his “assessed the situation”) and he seen that his one shot had killed 99 of the 100 turkeys. Of course, nobody believe his great hunting prowess and someone would always ask him, “Why didn’t you just say that you killed all one hundred of them turkeys with just one shot, why did you have to say that one got away?” to which Killdare would incredulously report, “I’ll be damned if I’ll tell a lie over just one turkey!”




There were many other colorful people who came into the store and who I got to know during our frequent trips there, people like Mabel Mack and Wild Indian Turnip, and Waltaddie and his daughter Hoghead, but those are stories best saved for another day.

Summertime Swimming Hole

Summertime has always been a magical time for me, and has always been my favorite season. I like the heat and everything about the season. As the old song says “Summertime and the livin’ is easy.”

My reasons for loving summer are many, but all of them have roots in my childhood. I remember on the last day of school, it was always tradition in my family to go swimming in the river. In my earlier childhood, the whole gang of us loaded into the back of granddads truck and went to the swimming hole behind Teddy Bland’s place below Riverton.

After what seemed like an eternity where granddad stopped and talked to Teddy and let him know that we’d be down at the river, we finally made our way past Teddy's turkey houses, through the hayfields and on back to the river. I remember my granddad would always sing a little ditty that went "I'm goin' swimmin' with bow-legged women" to annoy us, but mostly we ignored his singing because we were so excited to get to the swimming hole.



Mind you this was in early June in the Potomac Highlands and the water wasn't exactly warm, although it certainly didn't matter to us, we'd have gone swimming even if ice chunks had been floating down the river. I remember my aunts and my brother would always ease into the water amid loud exclamations of "ooosh, that's cold", while me and a few of the others would just run right into the river and hit it all at once. Eventually we'd all be in the water and having a great time.

We had games that we’d invented for when we were swimming, like the old “warsh machine” as we called it, to do this you’d get in water about up to your chest and by linking your hands together and making a quick side by side motion, a great foam arose from the water, to us it looked exactly like the water in the old tub of the wringer washer that mom used.

Inevitably, someone would bring soap and shampoo and the older kids would wash their hair and wash up in the river, we didn’t have running water at home (unless you count running to the spring to get it) so it was easier to do this than to haul water up the hill from the spring to wash in. I remember for as far as you could see down the river, there’d be a long trail of soapsuds floating on top of the water.

As we’d eventually wear ourselves out from all the swimming, we’d get out of the water and dry off with towels we had brought with us, some of the girls would lay out on the rocks the dry off in the sun. We’d usually change into dry clothes, that way we could hold up the wet clothes from the truck bed or hang them out of the car window, and let the wind dry them on the way home.

I’m sure we looked like a bunch of gypsies with our wet clothes flapping in the breeze but we didn’t care, we had the whole summer ahead of us.