Second Edition of "Goin Up Gandy" Now Available

It has recently been brought to my attention that one of my favorite books, "Goin' Up Gandy" by Don Teter has been reissued into a second edition. Loyal readers of Appalachian Lifestyles may recall the mention of "Goin' Up Gandy" in an old post about The Wreck of the Dry Fork #4. After reading that post, "Goin' Up Gandy" author, Don Teter, contacted me and let me know that the long out-of-print book was soon to be reissued in a second edition. That time has now come. I highly recommend the book and urge all readers of this blog to consider picking up a copy of this remarkable book while it is still available. It is perhaps the single best source of local history for the Dry Fork region and the surrounding areas of West Virginia.

Here is the Press Release:

"Don Teter of Monterville, West Virginia, and McClain Printing Company of Parsons, announce the release of a second edition of his book Goin’ Up Gandy, A History of the Dry Fork Region of Randolph and Tucker Counties, West Virginia.

The 135 page history was first published in 1977, but has been out of print for nearly 30 years. The new edition includes a 20 page index. The book details the history of the settlement of the area, the Civil War period, and the boom times of the logging and railroad industries in the Dry Fork, with extensive footnotes and numerous photos. A map of the area “In the age of steam” is included.

A 1969 graduate of Elkins High School, and a 1973 graduate of Davis and Elkins College, Mr. Teter holds a B.A. in History and Political Science. He has been a West Virginia licensed professional surveyor since 1982, serving as president of the West Virginia Society of Professional Surveyors in 2001, and editing the quarterly publication The West Virginia Surveyor for ten years. Don has done extensive land surveying and consulting work for the Rich Mountain Battlefield Association, the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike Alliance, and Historic Beverly Preservation. He is currently on the History Alive! roster of the West Virginia Humanities Council, portraying writer, artist, and Civil War topographer Porte Crayon.

Copies are available from local bookstores, McClain Printing Company in Parsons, or directly from the author at:

Don Teter
HC 86 Box 32
Monterville, WV 26282

or by e-mail at: teterdon@frontiernet.net

When buying directly from the author the retail price is $26.42, plus $1.58 sales tax (total $28.00). When the book is mailed an additional $3.00 is charged for shipping and handling for a total of $30.00."

Granddaddy in the Timber Camps

In the 2nd row (just to the right of the tear) is my great-great grandfather, Charley Burns, who worked the timber camps around the turn of the century.

I grew up hearing about the timber camps ever since I could remember. I heard stories about my Granddaddy Don, who filed saws in the timber camps. I heard stories about Don's father, Charley Burns, who worked in the early timber camps of the region. I heard stories about my Aunt Mid who worked as a cook in the timber camps out in Bemis, WV. So, as you can see, I have heard alot of stories about the timber camps that were set up when the vast forests of the Potomac Highlands were cut.

In the early logging days there were quite a few men who wandered from timber camp to timber camp looking for work. Some of these camps were several miles apart so these men, having no other family or home, would stop at various homesteads between the camps. None were never turned away and they were all given a meal to eat and a place to sleep, but the faces that kept turning up on a regular basis were figured out to be men who weren't necessarily looking for work in the timber camps, but rather just trying to get by without having to go to the camps. You see, up until the time that the timber barons came in and set up these camps, there was no such thing as wage labor in these mountains. People would just barter for goods and services, and they would sell surplus farm goods or animal hides for cash. Hired hands were paid with a place to live and food to eat, so wage labor was an entirely foreign concept for some of these men. That isn't to say they were lazy, not at all, it is just they were brought up in a society where people worked until a job was done, and not when someone in authority told them when to begin work and when to lay off work. Before the coming of the timber camps, these men worked jobs that the seasons and weather necessitated! In addition, many of these men didn't take well to instruction and orders either, but after the timber companies came in and bought up so much of the land, a large contingent of these folks were left without a home, work and a means of support. That is why some of these men would walk the countryside, pitching in here and there and doing whatever needed done in order to stay out of the timber camps.

My granddaddy Burns would talk about how rough these men were in the timber camps, and how dirty some of them would become. Granddaddy told that it was expected of men to bathe only one day a week, and that was after work on Saturday (bathing more frequently than that would reportedly make you sick). Granddaddy said they worked six days a week and 10 hours a day, so you can begin to imagine the smell. Granddaddy said that the bunkhouses where these men lived would make a mans eyes water whenever you would walk in the door.

Granddaddy said there was always laughter and some running jokes going on in the timber camps. He told that one of the best tricks some of the older wood hicks would pull on the new boys just coming into the camps was to pull the humongous gray lice out of their beards and hold them between their fingers and talk to the lice like they were a favorite dog. They'd pet the louse, and talk to the louse, and then reach it out to the "green" boy like they expected him to pet and talk to the louse too! When inevitably the newcomers would shy away from the huge louse, the old wood hick would stick it back in his beards and tell the louse to "not pay any mind to people who didn't know any better." Granddaddy said they pulled that trick every year and it never did get old!

Speaking of the big gray body lice that were common in the timber camps, Granddaddy told of how some of the men would put a big louse under the glass face of their pocket watch just for the novelty of it, and they would keep the louse that like for months. It was a thing of pride to have the biggest louse!

Granddaddy Don said the roughest place that he ever worked was in Davis, WV, for the West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company. Granddaddy would tell us that "the fastest way to get to Hell was to go through Davis." He said the men there would just as soon shoot or stab you as to look at you, and the management of the company didn't try to stop the violence because having the workforce constantly in a state of fear kept down wages. Granddaddy said that one time a bunch of them were playing cards while riding the train from Davis to Dry Fork, and that a man who was known to be unruly was playing with them. Granddaddy told us that the game was going fine until the man started losing, and he said to everyone playing in the game that "the next damn man who wins a hand against me is going to bust Hell wide open before they get a dime out of me." Well, the men didn't pay much mind to him because after all, it was a card game with timber men so you kind of expected rudeness and rough talk. It just so happened that Granddaddy Don won the next hand of cards and as he started reaching for the winnings, he saw the man going for the pistol that he had tucked in the belt that held up his britches. Granddaddy said he never was so scared in his life but he done the only thing he could do, he jumped off the train! He said the fall just about killed him because he landed in some cut down tree-tops about 4 miles outside of Dry Fork. Scraped and bruised pretty bad but luckily with no broken bones, Granddaddy walked alongside the tracks into Jenningston on the Dry Fork line where he got on the train headed back to Davis. But he learned his lesson, he never again played cards with that man.

Granddaddy worked in the WV timber camps until the timber was cut out, and then he started his own small timber company and hired some of his friends to work for him. They cut timber for a few years on the old Fredericksburg battlefield in Fredericksburg, Virginia, but Granddaddy lived longer than the timber boom so he went out of business in the early 1940's. He then decided to go to Baltimore, MD, like so many other men who had worked the timber camps of the Potomac Highlands, and he found work in the Glenn L. Martin airplane factory, which was booming because of the War Effort. Granddaddy worked there until he retired in the early 1960's, at which time he returned back home to the old Burns homeplace on North Mountain, where he lived out the rest of his days.

Cold Weather Stories

It’s Cold. Since all the talk seems to be of the weather, I thought I’d tell a few stories about the chilly times on the mountain.



Old steamshovel wreck on North Mountain. Granddaddy Don is in the back row, 3rd from the right (wearing a toboggan).

I remember my granddaddy Don used to tell of how cold it got out on the mountain when he worked in the timber camps back in the early 1900’s. He said that it was a real danger for the timber men when it got down real cold. Frostbite and hypothermia were regular occurrences in the camps. He even told of it being so cold one time that a tree exploded when they started chopping it down. He said the tree split apart into several pieces and piece shot in every direction for several yards around and that the base log cracked up the tree about 15 feet. Granddaddy Don also told of how deep the snow would get in the mountains around lumber camps. He said many’s the time they’d cut timber in the winter while standing on the packed snow, and come spring when the snow would melt, they’d go back over the same area and get another 8 to 10 foot log off the stumps which were previously buried under the snow.



Granddaddy Don & Grandmaw Mary

This reminds me of another story that occurred about the same time as when Granddaddy Don was working in the timber camps. This one involves Grandmaw Mary and the kids who were left at home while Granddaddy Don was off at work, sometimes for months at a time. He’d send money to them in the mail, but not on a regular basis. Grandmaw always fended for herself, so she canned and put up food all summer long so they usually had enough food, but they’d sometimes run short on firewood, especially when Granddaddy was gone for long periods of time. One time, it got down real cold and Grandmaw Mary saw they were running out of wood. She told the older children that they would have to go cut down the old Chestnut tree near the fence line in order for them to have enough wood to get through the cold spell. The oldest of the boys was only about 12 at the time, so it was a major undertaking. Well, the kids took to chopping at the huge chestnut tree with axes, and since the tree was dead (courtesy of the chestnut blight), it made a great racket as they hammered away at its base. Well this noise alerted the cantankerous neighbor man who lived up the holler from Grandmaw. Well, the man came down to where they were chopping down the tree and cut a fit on them. He said that the tree belonged to him, and that it was on his property, when it was clearly on the Burns side of the fence. The boys went and got Grandmaw Mary and told her about what the man was saying, and she went out to talk some sense into her neighbor. She told him that the tree was on Burns property, but the man argued that the fence line was in the wrong place. Grandmaw then saw that it was futile to argue about whose tree it was, so she tried a different tact with him. She explained to him that since Don had been gone for the past few months, that they were running low on firewood and were in great need of it. She said that the tree was dead and needed to be cut down anyway, lest it fall over on his fence. Besides she added, Chestnut wood wasn’t the best for burning, it cracked and popped a lot and created a lot of sparks, so really it wasn’t her first choice either, but when you need wood, you get what is readily available. The man seemed to understand that Grandmaw meant to have that tree, and he appeared to acquiesce but just as the boys finally felled the giant Chestnut, the man took to cussing and carrying on and saying how he was going to have them all arrested for stealing his tree and damaging his property. Grandmaw once again told him that the tree was on Burns property and that it belonged to her, and she instructed to boys to keep cutting. The man then started cussing the boys and threatening them with his gun which he said he was going to go get and he’d show them whose tree it was. Well, Grandmaw, fed up with the cantankerous old man, said to the boys, “Come on boys and let’s go back in the house, and let the old bastard have the tree. Maybe he can use the lumber to make himself a coffin so he can go through Hell a-cracking”.



Grandmaw Mary

Well that old man was so stunned by Grandmaw’s words, that he immediately took to apologizing to her and the boys, and he said, “Now Mary, if you need that wood, why you just go ahead and take it.” Grandmaw, now with her dander up responded, “I aim to.” The old man then told her, “I’ll go get my boys to come and help you all split that wood up, and get it stacked in the woodshed. Now Mary, are you all okay with food? We have some hams in our smokehouse that we’d gladly share with you all.” Grandmaw told him they had plenty of food, they were just out of firewood. She always got amused at how fast the threat of a crackin’ coffin in Hell will turn people around!



Mom & Dad, Summer 2005

Another story about the cold weather was when my Dad was a young man. After Granddad Thompson died when Dad was 10 years old, Dad moved up to Monkeytown to live with his parents. You see, in my family, it was custom that the oldest grandson live with his grandparents. Well, once Dad moved in with his parents, it became abundantly clear that there wasn’t enough room. My granddad worked in Baltimore at the time and came home just long enough to get Grandmaw pregnant, and then he’d leave again. He’d sometimes send money, but often he did not. So the next summer, when Dad was 11 years old, he went to work in the hayfields in order to get money to help out with the family expenses and in order to build himself a room onto the house. Dad was big for his age so the farmers all thought he was about 15 so they hired him on for a dollar a day. Dad worked all summer and come the fall, he had saved enough money to buy the lumber to build him on a room. With the help of a few people, they built a very crude room onto the front of the house. There were cracks in the walls that you could through a cat through, and it had one little window that resembled the one in the storybook of Noah’s Ark. But it didn’t matter to Dad, he finally had a bedroom all his own. Well, for a few days anyway. His little brother Tom decided that he would sleep there too, so Dad soon had a roommate. Since Tom was still little, he often wetted the bed, and Dad would have to get up and change the covers out, and give them to Grandmaw to wash the next day. Well, winter soon set in, and Dad said that many mornings he’d wake up with a dusting of snow on the bed covers. He said they left the door open which was next to the kitchen where the wood stove was, and that on the side facing the door, you’d be real warm, and on the side facing the window, you’d freeze. He said you learned to turn a lot throughout the course of the night. As the weather got colder, someone gave Dad and Tom a big old feather tick to sleep under. Well, one night when the weather was down around zero, Tom pee’d the bed and Dad didn’t realize it, and when they woke up the next morning, the feather tick was frozen to Dad’s bed clothes! Dad then told Tom that he couldn’t sleep with him any more until the spring! Dad’s room is still on the house, only now it has been remodeled, and is now the kitchen area. It doesn’t, however, resemble the rough little room of necessity that Dad built so many years ago.



Me & Shirley, Fall 2007


My final story about cold weather concerns one of the first times that I took Shirley home to the mountain to meet my family. Shirley, although a child of the coalfields, always led a pretty pampered life. She grew up with all the amenities, including central heating. Well, Mom and Dad still have a wood stove so the heat comes from only one area of the house. Shirley insisted on closing the bedroom door that one night, which I advised her was a bad idea. I told her to sleep in my bed…a heated waterbed…but her modesty and upbringing wouldn’t allow her to sleep in the same bed with someone she wasn’t married to, so Mom set her up the old cast iron bed to sleep in. Well, it was down around zero that night, with the wind whistling around the corner of the house. Shirley kept waking me up with her question, “What is that? It sounds like a banshee.” I’d always reply, “It’s the wind. Haven’t you ever heard the wind before?” She’d say, “Not like that!” and would soon go back to sleep. Well this went on nearly every hour, until finally about daylight, I was awakened by a nudging on my shoulder. It was Shirley. I asked her what was wrong and I turned on the lamp by my bed. There stood Shirley, pitifully asking, “I’m s-s-s-s-oooo c-c-c-c-old. C-c-can I g-get in b-e-e-e-e-ed with you?” I swear to you that her lips were blue! I reminded her that I told her it would get cold if she shut the bedroom door, and that of course she could get in my nice, warm, heated waterbed. She then decided that she needed a drink of water and walked over to get her glass of water on her nightstand. She gasped and I asked her what was the matter now. She said, “my water is frozen!” I told her to open the bedroom door and to get in bed with me. As soon as she opened the bedroom door, the warm air flooded into the room and she soon warmed up. She slept like a baby the rest of the night. Shirley still claims that is the coldest that she has ever been in her life. Poor girl, she sure has led a sheltered life!

So just keep in mind over the duration of this current cold spell, that it won’t be long before we see the first green sprouts of spring, and soon thereafter, the warm breezes of summer will return to these hills. The nightbirds will once again croon their songs of passion, and nature will once again caress us into slumber with the softness of the season.

George & Phoebe Jane

Tales of George and Phoebe Jane abound in my family. Their handed-down stories continue to cast a long shadow of honor and pride on multiple generations of their family. I’ve been thinking about them for the past few days so I’d thought I’d share some of their stories with you.

The George & Phoebe Jane (Bennett) Cunningham Family in 1877.

My Grandpaw George was born on the 15th of November 1843 and he was the son of Daniel Cunningham and Sidney Sponaugle. Daniel and Sidney weren’t married until later in life even though they lived together. George went by the last name of Sponaugle most of his life although you can find him listed on various historical records as both Cunningham and Sponaugle. The odd thing about his surname is all of his children and his wife went by Cunningham but apparently George didn’t, his tombstone has Sponaugle on it. His family remembers him as Cunningham.

Pendleton County Timber Cutters. Left to Right: Unknown, George Sponaugle Cunningham, Dewitt Bland, Bob Cunningham.

My Grandpaw George was a timber man. He cut timber all over in Pendleton, Pocahontas, Randolph and Tucker Counties in WV. Stories maintain that men would cut the virgin timber in the wintertime while standing on snowdrifts, and in the summer they’d go back over and get another 6 foot log off of the stump. George’s time as a timber man was a little before the great timber rush where the forests in those counties were completely denuded.

Phoebe Jane Cunningham & Alpha Burns, Easter 1911

My Grandmaw Phoebe Jane was a very strong-willed and outspoken woman. During the War (note the Civil War is still called “The War” in Pendleton County), a regiment of Yankee’s traveled up the Dolly Path on their way to Franklin following the Battle of Riverton. They stopped at Phoebe Jane’s house and asked if they could water their horses. Phoebe Jane told the Yankee captain “I’ll see any of you damn Yankees in Hell before I give you even a drop of water from my spring, why don’t you go steal from some other poor family because you done stole everything from here thatyou’re going to get”. The Yankee captain must have realized he’d have a fight on his hands because he ordered to regiment to move to a water hole located further up the mountain. Later Phoebe Jane said she would have shot the Yankee’s where they sat and she that had made up her mind that they weren’t going to take any more food out of the mouths of her family. Like many residents of Pendleton County, George and Phoebe Jane were strong Confederates.

My Grandmother, Phoebe Jane (Bennett) Cunningham holding my gr-granddaddy Don Burns, abt 1900.

An interesting fact about George and Phoebe Jane, they were not racist like many southern sympathizers are depicted. In fact, one of George and Phoebe Jane’s best friends was a black man named Solomon Mills (locally known as Black Saul). Black Saul was a blacksmith and a shoemaker in Circleville and after the War he became a valuable member of local society. As Black Saul got up in years, he had no family to care for him so he moved in with George and Phoebe Jane. I found it odd that Black Saul left a Last Will and Testament, and it was witnessed by Mrs. Phoebe Jane Sponaugle. He left most of his “estate” to Phoebe Jane for caring for him in his old age. His estate, such as it was, consisted of a feather tick and his cobbling tools. My brother, Jason, now owns Black Saul’s shoemaking tools, they were handed down through the family along with the story.


Black Saul was laid to rest in the Bennett Cemetery beside of George and Phoebe Jane and he is listed in the cemetery register as “Saul Mille”. It took quite a bit of digging to find anything about him in historical records, like I said I was quite surprised to find a Will for Solomon Mills. Without it I never would have connected that Black Saul, Saul Mille and Solomon Mills were one and the same man.


The Bennett/Cunningham Cemetery where George, Phoebe Jane and Black Saul are buried.

Phoebe Jane passed away in April 1923 at the age of 80. She was cared for in her old age by her son-in-law and daughter, Charlie and Jennie (Cunningham) Burns. Charlie was also Phoebe Jane’s first cousin (their mother’s were sisters). After Phoebe Jane’s death, Charlie and Jennie left Pendleton County and moved out to some Burns property in Red Creek in Tucker County. Charlie and Jennie’s only son was my granddaddy Don. Granddaddy Don stayed on part of the old Burns homeplace on North Mountain where my family remains to this day. Our roots run deep in that land of rocks and clay, it is part of us and we of it.