ALEX.: You say she was a
Taylor?
POWELL: Yes, and all of those Taylor's
are living in this area, around Boyer, Green
Bank, Arborvale, Wesley
Chapel. Descendants of the settlers, I should recall
the name. I've never known a John.
ALEX.: But the Van Arsdale?
POWELL: Vanosdale. I've only known one Vanosdale family. There
were two boys and a girl. Hallie Vanosdale married one. The Nottingham
girl married another one. There was one lady in that group, one sister,
married Blackie Thomas. What was the whole thrust of this
Taylor thing?
ALEX.: He had gone to William and Mary and had
researched the family tree and had found connections to the Taylor and Vanosdale
families of this county. I had seen the names on the ledgers of the C. J. Richardson
Company and was telling him about it. I may have made a copy of a page of an old journal and sent it to him.
POWELL: Things like this if my children aren't
interested, I would just as soon they go to a museum.
ALEX.: I have some things in the van that the curator
sent down to you. Let's get them now. They're long
legal files, specially treated papers with no acid in it.
POWELL: I have two land grants, one from my mother
family and one from my father’s. I wondered what I could do to
keep them from deteriorating any further.
ALEX.: He said to store them in a flat drawer, and of
course, the worst thing is the handling. Don't let anyone handle them, because the perspiration on the hands
deteriorates them. A lot of paper has acid and that would
cause them to deteriorate. Put them in a drawer that is
secure and out of the light. The only other thing is to
have them in an area where the temperature is fairly
constant. Inside the house it usually is.
(Discussion of umbrella stand bought while antiquing
and camper).
ALEX.: We have very good archives at
Marshall and they are really valuable for scholarly research there.
POWELL: How about Jim Comstock's encyclopedia?
ALEX.: I'm not at liberty to reveal all of that but
Marshall will be connected with it. As I told you, the
complete Jesse Stuart manuscripts have come to us.
POWELL: Are Jim's encyclopedias still available?
ALEX.: Yes, they
are expensive though. He is interested in keeping them up to date. He has worked a long
time on the collection and preservation of it and the
continuation of it.
POWELL: He used to stay here back in the days when my
folks kept an overnight place. One day, one time in one of his Hillbillies he had a statement and I asked him
down at one of the home shows down in Lewisburg what he meant. He said,
"Traveller's Repose was the first stagecoach stop west of the Alleghenies."
I asked him if he meant in point of time or place. And he said, "I don't
really know." And he never has answered my question. But to my way of thinking, it would have been the first
stop after you crossed the mountains, because surely
there would have been stagecoach stops before eighteen and
thirty. Did you hear the peacock screaming? You walk out through
this gate, you may be able to see him. It's the
mating season and he often has his brilliant plumage so you
can see it.
(Break)
ALEX.: . . . not very far, about three-fourths of a
mile.
POWELL: Isn't it pretty?
ALEX.: You don't have to get too far before you can
look down.
POWELL: You should drive
through there. It's about nine miles until you come out on 250. If you got
confused, you could turn left and come back down on the main
road. Today, for example, it's clear and you could see the
observatory and the whole Green Bank Valley. It's pretty much the old pike. A few places, they've changed it but
not much. It's just the original Crozsay
survey.
ALEX.: We ran across that name. Where did you show
me that name?
(Skip)
* I've run across that
name, a John and a Dwight Alexander.
POWELL: Did most of your folks come from Monroe
County?
ALEX.: From
Richmond, Virginia, from that direction. I'd like to see those land grants again, but I don't want
you to bring them out in the sunlight.
POWELL: Well, I've got one in a frame. I guess I
should take it out.
ALEX.: Yes, framed and hung on the wall, he said was
the worst.
POWELL: I don't have it hung. It came to me in a
frame and I've left it that way. A fellow came to me and asked if I wanted to buy it since it came from my
mother's people. I said, "Well, if it wasn't too expensive."
So we agreed on a price and when he bought it, it was in a
frame and I've never taken it out. His father had a
little lock box and I'm sure that's where he kept it.
ALEX.: When I see how you have them stored I'll tell
Brown and have him write you a letter.
POWELL: They're still
very readable, I mean the ink. They're still very legible. None of
my children but then you change. I never thought any of my children would
be interested in antiques. But now we have one
who is.
(Skips and general discussion of refinishing
furniture).
POWELL: There is an old doctor in his eighties who
still pedals around on his bicycle. He is supposed to be a walking encyclopedia on Cass in the days of the lumber
industry. Each time I go I think I'll go see Dr.
Arbuckle. But someday Dr. Arbuckle won't be there.
ALEX.: Do you know what his first name is?
POWELL: No, I don't recall. There were two doctors in
Cass in its early days and Arbuckle was one. (Skips)*
Ella is clear as a bell, too.
ALEX.: Is this the lady you go visit?
POWELL: Yes. She has the ability to do character
things. There was one famous character named August Rose* in Dunlevy. He and his whole family are buried up here on
the hill on our farm. He was a German bartender and there
are more stories, funny stores about August
Rose and she can tell you and seemingly do the German
accent that he had. I sometimes think I should take a
tape recorder and have Ella tell these stories.
The stories are hilarious and to hear the accent. They are
something. Her family went to Dunlevy 1905 and bought a
lot and built a house there. My grandfather took my mother to
Bartow and she caught the train to Dunlevy. Now, this is
something I never figured out, why he took her to Bartow
and did not take her on to Dunlevy I don't know. But on the way, there was
ice on the road and coming down the hill the horse fell. That is the old Green
Bank road up
there. He had to unhitch the horse and go get help.
Anyway, when she got to Bartow and got on the train, there was this Mrs. Wiley and her husband going to Dunlevy
to build a hotel. That's when she met the Wileys. Since
1905, my folks and the Wileys, we visit back and
forth. One of the grandsons is with Reynolds Aluminum and he
comes once a year. My parents and the Wileys, the Beards and the Wileys
met on that train in 1905. They maintained the hotel there until the 1920's when it burned.
ALEX.: How do you spell that?
POWELL: Wiley.
There's still one of the widows of one of the Wileys who lives over in Logan.
After the hotel burned they moved over in the house on the corner.
She's the one I was telling you about who knows a lot about
history. She has a scrapbook from over in the coal
fields. She often asks me what she should do with it. I
tell her, "Ella, be sure to give it to someone who will
take care of it." She worked down in the coal,
Gary area, for years and years and years. She kept a scrapbook
that I think is something else. She worries about what will
happen to it.
ALEX.: This is the one down in
Richmond?
POWELL: Yes, Miss Ella Wiley. If I were going to
anyone today for information on Dunlevy, it would be to Miss
Ella Wiley.
ALEX.: What do you know about this inn?
POWELL: Well, I know it needs a coat of paint.
ALEX.: Going from there. Traveller's Repose, I notice
it is spelled here with a double "L", but that
picture you showed me had a single "L". You told me you hadn't seen that very often.
POWELL: No, that's the old spelling and on the post
mark. I have a few things here with the old post mark and it has the two "L's". Now most people spell it with one.
ALEX.: Do you still keep guests here?
POWELL: Not often. We don't advertise. Occasionally,
when I'd be on the floor at Cass and people would be
stranded and everything would be full I'd say, well, I'll
take you and send them up here. That's about the extent of
it.
ALEX.: That Cass country store, you're managing it?
POWELL: Yes. I do the buying, take care of the books,
and go over occasionally and raise a little hell. The
first few years I stayed on the floor every day, carried the
money. There are no banks up here, you know. The nearest
bank is forty miles. We took money to the bank every day. Many's the time I've had $5,000 in an old chamber pot
under my bed upstairs not knowing where else to put it. We
didn't have a safe. We were really crawling those first
few years. We didn't have money to spend on anything. We
started out the first year with ten stockholders each
putting up $500. I had spent the $5,000 before we even opened.
The wiring was $1,500 and the painting and interior. I
think most of the merchandise the first year was
consignment. That was the only way we could operate. It was really
feeble. It's a shame. It was to be such a little bit of financing. We thought each person would put
up $1,500 and then it was $5,000 total.
ALEX.: Very low capitalization.
POWELL: I don't know how we survived. We were a
corporation but many times my husband and I would go down to
the bank and put our names on a paper to carry us through.
To pay the vendors' bills, we would go down and borrow.
If the place had burned, we would have been left holding
the bag for it. But I was just determined that it was
going, that I was not going to start something like that and
not have it go. When we dissolved last April, the second
year each stockholder had put in an additional $350
making a total of $850, we paid each stockholder better than
$8,000. So I wish I could have invested all my money in the Cass general store.
ALEX.: Pretty good return. But people can't always
see that. It's going strong now.
POWELL: Each year it grows by between $5,000 and
$10,000, better gross wise than previous year. It used to be that we thought if we got a dollar for each rider we
were doing well, but last year we were getting between $2.50 and $3.00 per person.
ALEX.: It's a store everyone wants to visit.
POWELL: I don't know what the state will do. Take
bids, I guess.
ALEX.: Yes, that is the customary way.
POWELL: We don't have the
money to put under the table that is necessary with the state.
ALEX.: There's a lot of that that goes on, I'm sure.
Uh, I don't think I asked your age before, but how much do
you remember about Dunlevy?
POWELL: Nothing. I was not born there. My sister
was, but . .
ALEX.: Winterburn?
POWELL: Yes, by 1915 when
I was born my parents had moved down here. It was pretty well sawed out. They
didn't last too long.
ALEX.: Most of them were five-year operations,
weren't they?
POWELL: About 1905 to 1912 or '15 was the period of
operation for Thornwood. Started as Dunlevy, my mother
still won't let you call it Thornwood. You'll find that as these operations start to wane that one firm will
sell out to another. West Virginia Paper sold out to Mower about 1940. The Dunlevy Company sold out to the
Thorn Company and it became Thornwood. When I drive my
mother through, I'll say, "Now this is Thornwood where you
lived." She'll say, "I never lived in Thornwood. I lived in Dunlevy."
ALEX.: Thorny Creek. Was there at Thorny Creek?
POWELL: I thought it was just the Thorn Company. It
might have been Thorny. There is a Thorny Creek.
ALEX.: Where is that?
POWELL: Down near the Boy Scout Ranch.
ALEX.: That was the Thorny Creek area. Now this
tannery up here, it's owned by some people from Wheeling?
POWELL: Do you know Mr. Widney?
ALEX.: Yes, he gave me some of that. I was just
trying to get another perspective on that. Do you know of a place called Gormania?
POWELL: My recollection from my early days, of the
superintendent John W. Goodsell. Seemingly, the stock was
pretty well divided. I mean, a lot of people owned stocks
in the old Pocahontas Tannery. Then it was sold to
Howe's Leather Company.
ALEX.: Yes, that's about where Widney brought me in.
POWELL: I remember when Mr. Goodsell died the stock
wasn't worth much. One of his children, a girl who wasn't
considered as intelligent as the others, kept her stock. I heard recently
that it was worth quite a lot of money. The others had sold theirs for a
nominal amount. After Howell's, maybe ten years ago, Junior Widney
and I don't know
the others, bought it back from Howe's. Junior's father, Mr. Widney,
had for many years followed Mr. Goodsell as superintendent.
ALEX.: I heard the name Eye mentioned.
POWELL: Mr. Richard Eye
was assistant superintendent for many years and is retired and lives over near Mr.
Howard Hevener at Boyer. He goes back just for something to do and works yet.
ALEX.: He'd be knowledgeable.
POWELL: Very. There's a Mr. Warwick Hoover in his
eighties who lives at Frank, who might even be more so. He
was assistant superintendent for a while. Warwick grew up here and knew the lumber industry, too. Yose Yarnell
who as a little girl lived in ____. Not many people know there was a sawmill there.
ALEX.: Down near his place?
POWELL: Down near Howard.
ALEX.: That is good water.
POWELL: It's good mountain water, comes out of a pipe
from Cheat Mountain.
(Break)
POWELL: That is the very
worst thing to do for it, to fold and unfold it.
ALEX.: That's Robert Brook, Esquire Governor of the
Commonwealth of
Virginia. Do you mind if I read it? Too all of whom, the prefends* shall come, know ye that by
virtue of a land office treasure warrant number 13744, issued
the 18th day of August, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-Two, there is granted by the
Said commonwealth to
John Yeager a certain tract and partial land containing
one hundred acres by survey bearing date the twenty-eighth
of April, One
Thousand Seven Hundred Eighty-Four Lying, the
county of Bath, the south side of the Greenbrier
River and is bound as follows beginning at a yew pine and maple South 24
degrees E 34 poles to a white oak South 67 degrees (I can't
read)* 76 poles to a large white oak and so forth. It bears the signature of Robert Brooks going to John
Yeager. We would be able to get a copy of this. The second one
is framed and is granted to James Wood. James Wood is
the governor of the
Commonwealth of Virginia. The grant is to William Houchins and it's signed
by James Wood and date is the fourteenth day of November, One Thousand Seven
Hundred Eighty-One.