Interview with Jesse Beard. Beard, woman, owned Traveller’s Repose lodge.
Characterized by its look as a boarding house. It is located along an old
military marching route.
ALEX.: Then that goes back a good ways then.
BEARD: Yes.
ALEX.: So, they went there first in what year?
BEARD: Nineteen five. Nineteen five and they sawed it out in by 1912. It's
pretty well done. They left there in 1912.
ALEX.: They really boomed in periods of rather short durations
BEARD: Yes, they were. They would move in and saw out the lumber in areas
like that in pretty quick—pretty fast. All the timber they could acquire. Of
course, in places like Cass, you know where they had thousands and thousands and
thousands of acres it took them quite a while. A forty year period Cass covered
or better.
ALEX.: What is this place called here? It seems to me like I stopped here
years ago and talked to fellow by the name of Buck something that lived up the
mouth of Seneca.
BEARD: Buck Harper.
ALEX.: Buck Harper. That was it. The fellow had a load of cattle out here in
front of the house and I don't know, he pulled off and I pulled off to ask
directions or something. Is this called . . . ?
BEARD: It's called Traveller's . . .
ALEX.: Traveller's . . .
BEARD: Repose.
ALEX.: Repose. That's what I thought I saw.
BEARD: Kind of a pretty name, isn't it?
ALEX.: Yes, it sure is. And it's right on the route of the old Turnpike.
BEARD: Yes, it was an overnight stagecoach stop on the Stanton to the
Parkersburg Turnpike. And it was built about the time the original house was
about less than a half a mile from here and then when the Crowse Pike was built
in the '30's they moved the house and built it here. And of course, the house
was burned in 1861 and all the family refuged to Highland and various prisons
and then in 1866 Peter D. Yeager . . You see, we are related to this land
through the Yeagers and not the Beards.
ALEX.: Oh yeah.
BEARD: And Peter D. Yeager came back when he was released from prison and
rebuilt Traveller's Repose and reopened the inn. There has always been an inn
and a tavern and what have you here since the 1700's. And reopened it and called
it for a short period of time the Greenbrier Hotel.
ALEX.: I declare.
BEARD: And then it went back to Traveller's Repose and my folks said when
they came here in 1912 the old sign was still out front. It's interesting that
they always spelled it with two "L"s. T-R-A-V-E-L-L-E-R-S.
ALEX.: Huh.
BEARD: As they knew it then after '66, it had twenty-two rooms. When my
father acquired it in 1912, he tore the back section of the house down and just
put the four rooms. But this front part is 1866 vintage.
ALEX.: So in a sense this has been a place of business for travelers.
BEARD: Yes, it has. Even my folks up until as long as my mother was able,
uh, for years and years had overnight guests.
ALEX.: Oh yeah.
BEARD: I think maybe if you've read Morris Brooke's book on Appalachia, the
Appalachians rather, he refers to the specimens that were hung on the porch at
Brown Beard's at Traveller's Repose. You know, when they were doing the Cheat
Mountain Salamander Research and that sort of thing, a lot of them stayed here.
He still kids mother about her biscuit and of choice of juices, country
ham and biscuits and country eggs and so forth for 35 cents.
ALEX: Thirty-five cents. Well, you taught school for a while, huh?
BEARD: Yes.
ALEX.: You graduated from where--Wesleyan?
BEARD: West Virginia Wesleyan.
ALEX.: West Virginia Wesleyan. Well, you had a famous president who may be
governor up there.
BEARD: Yes, I'm real fond of Jay.
ALEX.: That's our church and that's our church school, I guess, isn't it
Lisa?
BEARD: Is this, is this, uh?
ALEX.: This is my daughter, Lisa. She's sixteen. I should have introduced
her when I came in.
BEARD: I meant to ask.
ALEX.: She's sixteen. She just finished the 10th grade at Huntington East
High School.
BEARD: Well, how nice. Well, I didn't know whether she might be somebody who
was traveling with you to record or what have you.
ALEX.: No, no, I can't afford that kind of help. But she does just as good a
job as that kind of help could do.
BEARD: I have three daughters so I know.
ALEX.: Well, you've been working on this pamphlet you say.
BEARD: I'm trying to do something. I haven't . . . my father's youngest
sister lives in Elkins and she's in her eighties and she has been collecting
family history all of her life, and she has masses of materials and still hasn't
assembled them. And I don't know what she's, I think possibly she's going to
make those available to some library as is, I don't know, but she had hoped to
get them into book form, but they're strictly family things. I was trying to do
a little historical booklet on this valley that would be interesting to anybody
who had ever lived here or had folks who had lived here.
ALEX.: It just might have an interesting . . . it's a beautiful valley up
through here.
BEARD: Yes, unfortunately a few things have happened to it that shouldn’t
have. Uh, we're fast becoming not by my or anything that I have done, but fast
becoming land of trailers, I'm afraid, which makes me most unhappy.
ALEX.: You mean permanent kind of camps?
BEARD: People selling off, people selling off a little piece of land here
and their letting someone pull in a trailer. No restrictions, no . . .
ALEX.: Yeah.
BEARD: Sad really.
ALEX.: Well, the real estate that I see up and down this valley is well
kept.
BEARD: Well, we try, yes.
ALEX.: You don't seem to be too proud of it. I don't see really any what we
call tarpaper shacks or Ginny-Lynns.
BEARD: No, not quite like Bull-Run over the hill in Pendleton, but the Hevener's place is beautifully kept, of course half of it was sold. There used to
be about 32 hundred acres in that farm. And one of the sons sold his share, be
the man who bought it from Buckhannon, Mr. Tharp, does a beautiful job of upkeep
on the upper half. That land that lays in that valley is beautiful.
ALEX.: Yes, it's a beautiful area. Well, what would you say is the
economical life of Durbin now? I guess when your folks were living the mills
were, but do you think the tourist business is . . .
BEARD: Uh huh. I think the future of this . . . now with the Observatory and
the Cass Train, definitely there's still some lumber. Fence rails. There are two
mills here that produce rails and they do a nice business. There are three small
mills in the area who are still getting out timber.
ALEX.: Uh huh. And you've got the tannery.
BEARD: The tannery is still operating. I guess it employs about a hundred
men.
ALEX.: Do you see any future in the restoration of Durbin itself?
BEARD: Well, I really would have liked to have seen that and I’ve had my
heart set on the restoration of Cass, but um, I've almost given up. To me, when
I came here, back here, in '62, uh, Cass was still in pretty good condition. You
know, the mill was still operable and uh, eighty houses fifty of them in pretty
good condition. I could see it as a Fontanna village. Something of that sort
where families could come, you know.
ALEX.: Yeah. Well, we're working on restoring some area of Huntington what
we call Heritage Village. We've got the old bank of Huntington, the old B&O
station, in an area of urban renewal whether or not I take an active part in the
Huntington Historical Association, and whether or not it's going to come to
realization difficult to say. I could see some value in it. I see so many at
Cass that seems to have al ready disappeared.
BEARD: Uh huh
ALEX.: But it appears to me that the front street of Durbin is still there
and with the right kind of effort could be restored a great deal.
BEARD: Dodge City, Virginia City . . . something of that atmosphere.
Possibly . . .
ALEX.: That would create an additional kind of attraction. I guess being
here with the highways being completed as they are and being on the old turnpike
and there would be a great deal of access in here for people of the east.
BEARD: Uh huh. Well, there's still remains in Cass. The old store.
ALEX.: Yes . . .
BEARD: Four stories of it.
ALEX.: Yes.
BEARD: Which, I've always been told it's the largest, that it was, and
presumably still is, the largest wood structure, complete wood structure east of
the Mississippi and I wouldn't be at all surprised that it's true.
ALEX.: I haven't heard that. It's rather interesting.
BEARD: And the superintendent's house, which is fabulous.
ALEX.: Would that be . . .
BEARD: Shaffer's house and two or three of the other houses, one that he
built for his wife's family, uh, and maybe perhaps as many as fifty. Maybe forty
would be a better number, could still be retrieved. Uh, nice old oak floors and
even built and maybe something like this. I understand that if the state
requires it, which seems to be, the only person that's interested in it that,
I've seen the plans and it's to be just completely raised. I mean it won't be
anything left there. They're just going to take all the buildings down and make
parks.
ALEX.: That would be unfortunate.
BEARD: It is.
ALEX.: They're putting a lot of money into that area. I've got some figures
in my research on how much the state's spending over in the county and what I
don't have is some of the figures I'd like to get out of these small lumber
mills and I don't know how accurate the books are and whether they consider that
information confidential or not. I hadn't looked at Cass in that respect. I kind
of hated it when the train station burned. Somebody had to have set that fire as
well as the shops up there, you know.
BEARD: And of course, I'm so disturbed when I see these all the nice little
post office buildings going and being replaced by those red, white, and blue
trailers.
ALEX.: Yes, isn't that something.
BEARD: We had a nice little post office up there by the store. The original
post office. And now it's just sitting there and the post office is over on the
other side of the river in a trailer. It just took away from the atmosphere. The
post office was an atmosphere. It had old tiffany glass over the door and just a
lot of nice things.
ALEX.: Well, I'm like you. I hate to see those things go. I lead the effort
as much as anybody to keep Old Main on the Marshall University campus, and I was
one of those very active in collecting signatures for the petition when it
became evident that Cass was going to be sold and the railroad needed to be
preserved. I worked in that effort with the legislature to get the state to take
it over to preserve it. I hope it doesn't go the way you say it is going to go,
but I can see they're spending a tremendous amount of money there, and I guess
for the most part for what I can get over at other sections of the state and
adjoining counties that a fairly young group of people operating a railroad some
of the residents. I remember when I first took the trip up to the top of the
mountain. I believe Blackhurst was the narrator. And he did such an outstanding
job as you know.
End of the the first Powell transcript