Shenandoah Heritage by Carolyn and Jack Reeder

Monday, April 25, 2022

I am just finishing a book loaned to me yesterday from a Friend at the Woodbury Friends Meeting. I have been attending there since the first Sunday in January, but I was an attender at Philadelphia friends for several years when I lived there in the 1980's. Anyhow, two Friends had just returned from a vacation in Shenandoah and one, Etain Preston, had brought this book to share with us and to discus: Shenandoah Heritage - The Story of the People Before the Park.

As may be the case with many older people, one thing can set off a string of memories which we have by the trunkload. So anyhow, reading this book, I was reminded of the Foxfire series which came out in 1972 and was a sensation. So many young people were trying to get back to some older more rural, peaceful, and simple way of living that it struck a chord in their fantasies. I bought the set and when my parents retired to a mountain in West Virginia, I gave them to my father.

Of course, it wasn't all singin' on the porch and making corn husk dolls back in those days. We have tendency to either fantasize or vilify rural life when in fact, it was much like life anywhere else but with different acessories. Needless to say, along with the distilling of Moonshine, there cam a significant amount of drunkeness, violence, domestic abuse and child abuse. Just like in any small town or big city, there would have been the hardworking and clean living residents who took care of the animals and kept up the property, and the ne-er do wells who beat the kids and neglected the animals and let the fields go to bracken. Certainly then, as now, however, it was the craftspeople who made a mark and who were of most interest to me and in fact I have hanging in my kitchen the most beautiful woven whisk broom from an Appalachian demonstration of handcraft tht I saw in West Virginia on a visit to the folks in Maysville unincorporated I also have a handmade basket. And once every year I swould stop at the Honeymooners Souvenir Shop to buy my daughter a new pair of Cherokee moccasins. The Honeymooner Souvenir Shop is now, hilariously bearing the sign "Honeymooners Gun Shop."

So the Foxfire books came back to me and then I remembered a presentation my daughter gave on Death Songs at halloween in Philadelphia at the Mutter Museum one year. It was stellar! She had slides and songs and one Appalachian folk ballad that I remember was "She walks these hills in a long black veil, she visits my grave when the night winds wail, nobody knows, nobody sees but me" It is a song about a love triangle and love triangles were one of the many causes of murder in the chapter in the Shenandoah Heritage book I am reading. This chapter is about crime and vigilante justice and the shooting that attended drinking and jealous rages both deserved and imagined. As it said in the book, someone got shot and buried and that was that.

My brother lives in my parents house on the mountain but things are much different now than they were even in 1984 when my parents moved to West Virginia, and a world away from 1937 when my father, at age 16, worked on Skyline Drive with the CCC.

I reminded the people at Meeting Discussion group that New Jersey has rich resources of its own from the CCC days and you can see good displays as close at Parvin State Park and Bass River State Park.

Hope this has stirred some memories for you - by the way, my father was a big fan of caverns too and one of the ones near where he lived in West Virginia had a cave where moonshiners were said to have run a distillery. The caverns there were called Smoke Hole Caverns and visiting there was so reminiscent of the caverns we visited in the 1950's when my father bought his first stationwagon and the family hit the open road!

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com