Thomas Austin Merica: Not Long a Boy

Thomas Austin Merica was a handsome man with a gentle wit.

He had thick auburn hair, a symmetrical oval face, prominent brows, a good straight gaze, finely proportioned nose, slightly bowed lips, straight but relaxed shoulders, and the look of a man who could set his mind to something.

I can see all that from his photo, except the part about his gentle wit. I know that from his daughter, who tells me things he did and said.

Something else I can’t see from the photo. That he and his siblings were abandoned as children.Thomas Austin Merica

Tom was four or five years old when his parents announced one day that they were heading off to look for work. It would have been 1888 or ’89. They said they would send for the children once they found something and settled down.

That was the last anyone ever heard from them.

Tom was the youngest. His sister Maggie was seven and Hunter was ten. William would have been 17, and Tom’s oldest brother, Joseph Calvin, was 22 years old and soon to be married.

I might have the ages wrong. Details are sketchy. My family says Tom was a child of four or five when his parents left, but he might have been younger. Or older.

They waited for a week, going about their work and play, the older children helping the younger to dress and clean themselves, put together meals and get to bed.Night tree

They talked excitedly, wondering where their parents would settle, dreaming of exotic places like they might have read about in school books, telling their friends that they were going to move, maybe to a city, or a far away state.

Then they waited for a month, eating through what stores of food they had. No more milk. But there was surely flour, maybe some bacon or salt pork. And maybe Tom’s mother, Elizabeth Turner Merica, had put away beans, corn, or tomatoes. Potatoes and turnips in a bin. And surely there were chickens and eggs. Surely.

Then they waited for another month, and their clothes were dirty, ragged. Their cheeks were hollowing, and they were quiet. They didn’t wonder out loud anymore where their parents would settle. They dared not say what they thought. They slept in their britches, maybe lost one of their shoes, their only pair, running like wild boys through the woods.

I am, of course, speculating. We don’t know the facts, and I imagine no one alive does. But of this next event I am certain. It was winter. And Tom had no shoes.

A kindly neighbor saw him walking through the snow barefoot and took the boy up, wondering what to do with him. A young boy shouldn’t be out walking through the snow with no shoes.www.ForestWander.com

Now that I look again at the photo of Tom as a young man, I do see something in his eyes.

There’s that determination I mentioned. But there is also a yearning. Maybe it is a yearning that could never be fulfilled, a yearning for his mother, or maybe just to know the truth of what happened to his parents.

Who we are is determined in large part by who our parents are. As children we absorb their beliefs, their preferences, even the cadence of their speaking. These things attach themselves to our native characteristics without any effort on our part.

Then often, sometime in mid-childhood, we begin a conscious process of shedding ourselves of our parents’ traits. We replace them with impressions we gather from our school friends, our heroes, even pets play a part in development of a child’s character. Some of who our parents are stays, but influences bombard us from every direction, and once we reach adulthood we are a roadmap of everything we have seen and experienced, every place we have been.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

What happens if some part of that is missing? The proverbial child raised by wolves is devoid of all human culture, while Rudyard Kipling’s feral child Mowgli is “humanized” by animals with human traits. Those are extremes.

But what happens when parents are there during a child’s most formative years, till four or five, and then they suddenly vanish? Who does that child become?

Society has a way of closing in around parentless children, of finding them homes, or at least roofs and civilizing forces. Replacing a missing parent, though, is not as easy as a roof and a new family.

I saw an 1850 census report showing Joseph W. Merica, Tom’s missing father, as a boy of 13 in his father’s home. Then an 1860 census report listing a 24-year old Joseph W. with his brand new 16-year old wife, Elizabeth. They even stuck around for the 1880 census, and by now had three children, spread by five and seven years.

But then, no more. They simply disappeared.Foggy morning

I have looked at the census reports, death reports, and newspapers of places they might likely have gone. Kansas, because there were Mericas there. Ohio and Pennsylvania, because people from the Blue Ridge often went there for work.

I’ve even thought of looking in South Africa, Canada and Chile, too. Why? Because those places lured plenty of Americans with the promise of riches. The largest gold rush in the world began in 1886 in South Africa. News whipped up a fever of excitement and prospectors flooded in from around the world.

About the same time, gold was discovered in British Columbia and Tierra del Fuego. Untold numbers would die getting there and searching for the yellow metal.

If Joseph W. and Elizabeth Merica were among them, we’ll never know. Those bodies would have been left where they fell, maybe buried by a passing Christian.

I’ve been told that Tom’s oldest brother found homes for the children. They were separated, each to a different home, but all within the same community, and so they remained close all their lives.

Legend has it that a Catholic family took Tom in. There were few Catholics in Page County then, but I have no reason to doubt the story. It only takes one good family to change a young boy’s life.

Legend says too that the family was fairly well to do, with a big house on a hill, plenty of pasture for horses, and enough help to afford Tom the luxury of attending school.Lonely Trail

He was lucky, or as lucky as an abandoned boy can get.

Some abandoned children cannot ever again form deep attachment to another person. The fear, the sense of unworthiness is just too great. But Tom must have had incredible internal fortitude, as must his brothers and sister. They all grew up strong, had families, had seemingly happy and relatively prosperous lives.

Maybe they were all lucky to have found loving families that worked to heal the children’s pain. Maybe they clung to each other and gathered strength from that bond. We’ll never know.

But this I know: Tom lived with caring people who gave him a home, an education, and whatever tools he needed to move into the world and start a family of his own.

He got married at 22, to Florence Elizabeth Collier, the prettiest girl he ever saw, he said. Years later he would tell his beautiful teenage daughters, Ruth and Annie, that neither one was as pretty as their mother. Far from being hurt, the girls were delighted at what he said.

One evening when Ruth was getting ready for a date, she heard her father say to her mother, “They go somewhere and park.” Florence answered, “We were young once.”Florence Collier

 

Photos, except of Tom and Florence Merica, courtesy of the amazing photographer, Doug Bradley, https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougandbecky/with/2126448446/

My German-(A)Merican Heritage

This is the first of a several-part series on my grandfather, Thomas Austin Merica.

Thomas Austin Merica was born on May 28, 1884 in Greene County, Virginia. Or at least that’s the family legend.

He was from sturdy German stock, tall and broad-shouldered, with strong arms that could swing an ax and big hands that could grip a plow. He’d do plenty of both in his life.

There are no documents, no photos, no heirlooms to help inform the history of Tom Merica’s heritage. There is only the story that his family came to Page County, Virginia from over the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Greene County. And that story turns out to be wrong.

That, and the story that he and his siblings were abandoned by their parents, which turns out to be right.

Palatine ImmigrationTom’s ancestors, it seems, came to America from the Palatinate region of Germany early in the 1700s, settling in Pennsylvania.

Thousands of Germans were emigrating to Pennsylvania, escaping a semi-feudal and poverty-stricken society that had been embattled in wars for a hundred years or more.

First the Thirty Years War, and then Louis XIV of France kept picking on Protestants wherever he could find them, which meant up the Rhine River.

Then came famine. And more war. Which made a gruesome 12-week journey across the Atlantic with 400 others in a small ship seem absolutely delightful. William Penn had been advertising the awe-inspiring wonders of America to the war-weary Germans.

How could they resist?

Peace! Farmland! Freedom!, he cried out on the handbills his workers spread throughout the Rhineland.William Penn poster

He called the American colonies “the seeds of a nation,” said potential immigrants could practice their religion freely, and assured them they would be paid more here than at home.

He extolled the plenty available to all. In fact, there was “more being produced and imported than we can spend here, we export it to other countries in Europe, which brings in money.”

Anticipating his audience’s desire for “stuff,” he told them they would have three times as much of it in America, of “all necessities and conveniences (and not a little in ornamental things, too).”

Who wouldn’t come?

So Tom’s ancestors landed at the harbor of Philadelphia, and from there they appear to have traveled to the inland regions, perhaps Bucks County, or Lancaster, where so many other Germans settled, and whose unique ways can still be seen today in the Pennsylvania Dutch. But that is a misnomer; the Germans called themselves Deutsch, and Americans misinterpreted it as Dutch.

We don’t know the names of these ancestors any more than we know where they lived, what they did to earn their living, whether they fought off Indians, served as soldiers, died in childbirth, or sang in the church choir.

We know only that they came to America searching for a good life, and hopefully found it out there the edges of society, in those borderlands advertised so vividly by William Penn.

Tom Merica’s ancestors stayed in Pennsylvania for several generations, we believe. Conestoga wagon paintingThen, like so many German immigrants, they packed their belongings, maybe into a Conestoga wagon, that most practical of German American inventions, and turned south.

I don’t know why they went south. Perhaps they heard of the rich farmland to be had in Virginia and Carolina. Or perhaps they were tired of watching over their shoulders for hostile Natives, which were always a problem for settlers in the borderlands of Pennsylvania.

So they joined the flow of German and Scots-Irish immigrants on the Great Wagon Road, a 735-mile trail that carried hundreds of thousands of settlers to their own promised land in the southern colonies and beyond.

Great Wagon RoadPerhaps Tom’s great-great grandfather, Johannes Markey, drove a Conestoga wagon down that great highway.

He might have traveled with the family of Philip Dietz, his future father-in-law.

The Dietzes had previously lived in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where they belonged to the First Reformed Church. It was customary for German immigrants from a particular town or large family to emigrate together as a group, which is a clue that young Mr. Markey might have been from the Dietzes’ homeland, Baden-Württemberg, in Germany.

By 1795 the Dietzes had settled in Rockingham County, Virginia, where Philip’s daughter Elizabeth married Johannes Merkey and became Tom Merica’s great-great grandmother.

Johannes changed his name from Merkey to Merica. But he forgot to change how the name was pronounced, so now, nearly 125 years later, half the family says, “Merica” and half says, “Merkey.” Go figure.

The couple proceeded to have seven children, six boys and a girl, including their second oldest, Tom Merica’s grandfather, George.

George was born near the dawn of the 19th century, 1799, a time that marked a dramatic shift from pre-industrialism to the modern world. The Industrial Revolution was creating new, technological solutions to age-old problems. And it was speeding up the world as never before.

But not on a farm that ran along Naked Creek in Page or Rockingham county, Virginia. Life there remained pretty much as it would have been for centuries. Naked Creek cropWomen loomed their own cloth, men hoed the earth with hand-made tools. Families lucky enough to have a plow horse were as close to technologically advanced as it got.

It would be more than 120 years before people here had the electric light. More than 160 before they had a telephone. Roads would remain unpaved well into the 20th century.

So Johannes and Elizabeth farmed, loomed, hunted, sewed, and made a home for their children the only way they knew how. The old ways nourished their parents, and their parents’ parents before them, and they would nourish this family now.

When the couple’s son George was 27 he married 19-year old Catherine Wagoner. They stayed near the elder Merkeys and Dietzes, and eventually built a farm somewhere along the 20-mile stretch of Naked Creek between the town of Shenandoah and the Skyline Drive, land so pretty it makes you cry.

Horses in fieldI’ve found nothing to say if George had rich bottom land or farmed the poorer-soiled hillsides of Piney Mountain, or maybe Green or Grindstone mountain.

I only know that he had a bundle of land, and that 80 years later, as young men, two of his grandsons were building side-by-side frame homes and starting farms in the Fleeburg section of Shenandoah.

Tom Merica and his brother Hunter had bought out the inheritance of their other siblings, so this must have been their missing parents’ land, or perhaps their grandparents’.

But wait. Their missing parents?

Tom and Hunter’s parents were Joseph W. Merica, who was George and Catherine’s youngest son, and Elizabeth Turner. They probably pronounced their name, “Mer-key.”Family tree.GIFJoe was 24, a blacksmith, when he married 16-year old Elizabeth. They lived near George and the new wife he married after Catherine died. But it would be six more years before Joe and Elizabeth would start a family.

Twenty years later, in the 1880 census, they were still there. JJoseph W. Merica Family 1880 census.GIFoe was listed in the census as a farmer. He was 44 by this time, Elizabeth 38. The three older children were named in the census as well, but it would be another year before little Maggie was born, and four years before Thomas Austin Merica came into this world.

It would be 26 years before he married Florence Elizabeth Collier, my grandmother, and 40 years before my mother, Ruth Virginia Merica, was born.

A lot would happen in the next 40 years, and the next 40. But we’ll leave that for another story.

To make sure you don’t miss the next installment of Tom Merica’s story, go to the “subscribe” button at the top of this page.

 

My Mysterious Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows

My great grandmother is a mystery to me. My mother knew her well, but she’s 93 and can’t think of much to say about her. My cousin knew her too, but she has nothing to add either. I have no photos, no diaries, no one’s memories.

Here’s what little I do know. She had thick hair that she wore in a knot at the back of her neck. When she got old it turned pure white. She had a sweet face. She called my mother “Little Joe,” though her name is Ruth. She made mackerel cakes for lunch when her daughter and family came to visit.P1000721

Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows was born on May 10, 1864 in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Page County, Virginia.

The “Magdalene” part of her name is not confirmed, but my mother tells me that was her second middle name, and I have seen “Mary M. M. Meadows” on several documents. So I’m going with it.

Mary was born during the Civil War, just about the same time her father died from it.

Not in it, mind you, but from it. The circumstances are a mystery, and there are several theories, but no evidence that would confirm any one of them.

One thing is certain: Mary grew up a fatherless child, and for this it is said she was given powers.

A girl who is born after her father dies is said to have the gift of healing a baby’s thrush. The healer has only to lean close and blow gently into the baby’s mouth.

Mary Meadows had this power, and through her life many new mothers cP1000789ounted on her healing breath. My mother says this was her only extraordinary healing power, but that it was well-used.

My grandmother, Florence Collier Merica, who was Mary’s child, learned many remedies from her mother.

Put an axe under the bed of a birthing woman and it will cut the pain in two, she said.

Brew ginseng root into a tea for the flu, sassafras for a fever.

Give brandy with sugar and water to a child with a cold.

I’m sure there were other poultices and tonics, oaths and spells that were engaged when needed.

Maybe I can pluck one or two more out of my mother’s memory, but mostly they are lost to history, as much a mystery to me as Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows.

Mary Meadows married William Collier in 1884, when she was 20 years old. He was 28.Mary M. Meadows and William Durret Collier wedding photo

He went by his middle name, Durret, which, with the Blue Ridge accent, came out as “Dirt.”

They owned property in the Blue Ridge. I recall it was a little over 450 acres.

Durret and his son-in-law, my grandfather, shaved tan bark in the spring to sell to the tannery in Elkton. That land made them a decent living.

Mary raised five healthy daughters and a big, strapping son. Annie, Emmie, Florence, Maggie, Charles, and Minnie, in that order.

They all grew up and married fine spouses, built or moved into homes of their own, and started raising their families.

Then came 1925. In late July Durret died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma after a long and painful illness. He was 69.

One month later their daughter Maggie died too, far too young, and leaving a 13-year old daughter.

So at age 50 Mary took on the granddaughter Maggie left behind. P1000782Maggie’s husband Comie Watson, a handsome young man, couldn’t care for his daughter, either through grief or aptitude, or because the family decided young Elsie Mae needed a woman’s care.

Elsie was raised with care, as loved as any child could be, and doted on by her grandmother and four aunts.

All Mary’s family was dear to her, and near to her. Only one daughter moved away, to Newport News, a half day distant. The others lived within a few miles of her Jollett Hollow home, two in #2 Furnace and two in Fleeburg.

What a time there was when the daughters visited! They sat and gossiped the afternoon away as the children played wild inside and out, or quietly read or listened while the women talked.

Her second to oldest, Florence, who was my mother’s mother, took her younger children with her on these visits.

When she could, she got her son Jesse to drive them, either in the car or in the wagon. Occasionally her husband Tom came along and did the driving.

Tom always greeted Mary the same, “Afternoon, Miss Mary.” Mary always answered, “Oh, Tom!” Theirs was a true respect and affection.P1000745

If there was no one to drive them, Florence and the children walked the several miles from Fleeburg to Jollett Hollow. Or, as the community called it, “Jolly Holler.”

They commenced several miles down Fleeburg Road, past Minnie’s house, past their beloved Oak Grove Church, then across Naked Creek and left onto Naked Creek Road.

They walked up past the Merica Store, the road winding with the creek, about six miles distant, till they reached the plank footbridge that took them across to Mother Mary’s log house.

As a routine they stopped along the way at Merica’s Store to buy several cans of mackerel.

They took the mackerel to Mary and she tossed it with an egg and a little cornmeal, shaped it into patties, and fried the cakes up in lard till they were hot and crispy. These were savored by the women and children alike during those visits.

After lunch the children might leave the women alone to talk in peace.

P1000715One late fall day Elsie was asked to watch little Ruthy and Annie Merica, my future mother and her little sister, play outside after lunch.

They got down to the bridge and started across. Elsie called to the children to be careful, just as little Annie gave Ruthy a good shove and she fell in.

Elsie ran into the cold creek, grabbed up Ruthy, and raced into the house to get off the sogged wool clothes and wrap her in a warm blanket.

All that afternoon Ruthy sat by the stove and listened to the women chatter, and loved every moment of it.

I wish I had a picture of that old log house. I remember it vaguely, still standing on the hill long decades after Mary died, logs mortared with mud chinking that was now so loose that the wind leaked in, three wood steps and a stoop up to the front door, packed dirt floor inside, though the second story was fairly nice with plank floors and better walls. Only Elsie lived there now, as old and decrepit as the house, with her vast and beloved store of folk songs she had gathered through the years.

I wish I had taken a photo the last time I saw it. Better yet, I wish I had wandered through with the nostalgia that I feel now that I am older. I would have liked to feel my great grandmother in that space, for I am certain her energy still radiated. Then I could have known a little more about her, not through documents or facts or other people’s memories, but through my own senses.

But it’s too late now. And what I’ve said is all I know about my great-grandmother. Except for where she was buried after dying on November 21, 1953, five months after I was born. Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows and William Durrett Collier rest now in the Samuels Cemetery in Jollett Hollow, where I visit them whenever I am in that part of the world.Mary & Durrett Collier headstone

Blue Ridge in My Blood

I did not set out to write a multi-part series on the Blue Ridge Mountain evictions, but as the original post became longer and longer, I decided to split it into parts, all of which I will post in upcoming days. You can see Part One here.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 2

Blue Ridge longOther states claim the Blue Ridge, especially North Carolina, but to me they belong to Virginia, and particularly to the Shenandoah Valley, and specifically to that section that lies between Massanutten and the Blue Ridge, the Page Valley. That’s mine. I own not a bit of it, but it is in my blood. More accurately, then, I am it’s.

A view of the Valley’s softly rolling hills, farms dotting the landscape, river glistening like a slow waving sparkler down the Massanutten side, a low sun Shenandoah Valley5casting long shadows from its woodlands, that endless green like a carpet of rumpled velvet, and those blue-tinged mountains beyond, brings a tear to my eye for such beauty.

My family came into the Blue Ridge hundreds of years ago, some from the Virginia Colony, some along the Great Wagon Road that carried Scots-Irish and German immigrants to their promised lands from Pennsylvania to Virginia and beyond.

I could write of so many ancestors who lived in those mountains, like my fourth great grandfather, John Dietz; or my third great grandfathers, Johannes Markey, Ellis Turner, and Zachariah McDaniel; or my second great grandfathers, Mitchell Meadows and David Turner. But I’ll follow the trail of Francis Meadows, my fifth great grandfather, who came from Orange County, Virginia and was in the Blue Ridge by 1743, one of the earliest settlers, and built his home on the side of Hightop Mountain, near Swift Run Gap.Francis Meadows barn Swift Run Gap VA 1750-1800.2

Francis was the fifth generation of Meadows’ born in the Colony, the first being Thomas Meador, born in Virginia Colony in 1638. Somewhere along the line the Meadors became the Meadows, and it stuck.

The mountains stuck, too. Francis’s great grandfather owned something like 5,000 acres near the Rappahannock River out on the coastal plains, but I get the impression that Francis came to the Blue Ridge with scant wealth. He owned his property, bought from the original land patent holder, and married a woman who was said to have fought off a bear with a broom. Their family grew up, got married, and stayed in the mountains, as did their children, and their children’s children.

Five generations later, the Meadows were still in the Blue Ridge. It was in their blood, as it is still in mine, though greatly diluted.

Francis Meadows barn Swift Run Gap VA 1750-1800It was undoubtedly a hard life, and theirs was a poor family, living on a small farm attached to the side of a mountain. I don’t know why they stayed there. The soil quality was far inferior to the valley below, the weather more extreme, more changeable. Crops didn’t grow well in the rocky soil. Seasons were shorter because of their elevation and the 5.5 degrees that temperatures drop per 1,000 feet in the Blue Ridge. For better or worse, town was several miles away, making it hard to bring in supplies. If they had a cow at all they were lucky, and if their children got a new pair of shoes a year they were fortunate.

Francis Meadows rock wall Swift Run Gap 1700sMary Meadows, daughter of Mitchell Meadows and great great granddaughter of Francis Meadows, was born in 1864 in the Blue Ridge, just up from Jollett Hollow, which sits on the eastern edge of the great Valley of Virginia, the Shenandoah. There she grew up, and there she married William Durrett Collier, whose people also came to the mountains early.

They could have left the mountains. After the marriage, Durrett (as he was called) could have grabbed Mary’s hand, looked over to her with a gleam in his eye, said, “Come on,” and run with her down the mountain, through the hollow, along Naked Creek and into Elkton or Shenandoah. They could have found a train to Richmond, or Newport News, or Chicago, or San Francisco.William Durret Collier and Mary M. Meadows wedding photo

They could have gone to the booming industrial centers of the North and found factory jobs, or followed the Oklahoma land rush to make a new start out West. They could have left that place forever. People did. But they didn’t. They stayed.

I don’t know why they stayed, if it was for love of the spectacular scenery, love of community with mountain people like them, love of communion with the mountains and forest, or was just all they knew how to do. Or maybe it was that inability to make change that befalls families who must work so hard that they don’t have the time or energy to even think of anything else. They are trapped by hardship into further hardship, an endless cycle that feels hopeless, and so you lose any hope you once had for a better life.

I think that plenty of outsiders believe that’s the case, that to see a family living in a log house chunked with mud, children barefoot, clothes stained, beds of hard pallet, that family must be unhappy. But they would be wrong. Money can indeed buy episodes of happiness, but it can’t buy contentment or belonging.

From all indications, Durrett and Mary kept their hope and kept their humor. They worked hard, played some, brought home the bacon, paid their bills, had their ups and downs, and went about their Steve Hajjar valley4days like their parents and their grandparents and really, like you and me, a version of the American life, if not the American dream. They raised five girls and a boy, all hard-working but fun-loving youngsters who, my mother quotes her mother, Durrett and Mary’s youngest, as saying, “hoed corn all day and danced all night.”

So there they lived, and there they stayed, five generations into a Blue Ridge dynasty, until one day they walked down from the mountain with all their belongings, chased off by the powers of eminent domain when Franklin Roosevelt wanted to create a national park of the Blue Ridge.

Blue Ridge sunsetThanks to Jan Hensley for her photos of the Francis Meadows homestead.

You can read Part Three of My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction here. Or access the whole series here. To make sure you don’t miss any installments, go to the “subscribe” form at the top of this page.

The Bluest of Ridges

I did not set out to write a multi-part series on the Blue Ridge Mountain evictions, but as the original post became longer and longer, I decided to split it into parts, all of which I will post in upcoming days.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 1

Blue Ridge longMy great grandparents lived above the Shenandoah Valley, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, a stretch of peaks, gaps, glens, hollows, creeks, coves, falls, meadows, forests, thickets, and woodland that reaches from Georgia to Pennsylvania. The mountains are like frozen swells of the ocean, billions of tons of rock and soil blown into soft curves by an eternity of wind and rain.

They’re the oldest mountains in the world, and there’s just not that much left of them. These days they rise only about 2,000 feet from the Shenandoah Valley floor, hardly an awe-inspiring height, and about what we out West would call a foothill. But while their height from sea level, 6,685 or so in their bare feet, isn’t inspiring, their serene beauty is.

Blue Ridge Dave AllenThey are gentle, welcoming, not at all intimidating, as are our Sierras that separate California from the rest of the country like a knife edge.

That’s what age does; it rounds our edges, softens our need to be the biggest or the toughest, slows us so we can see others, then opens our arms to welcome them.

Hundreds of years ago early settlers named this mountain range the Blue Ridge. It’s a beautiful name, and exactly the right one. The mist that shrouds its hillsides and hangs in its valleys colors the mountains in shades from dark sapphire to pale azure. Like undulating ribbons they lie in sequence, one overlapping the other, until they simply disappear into distance’s pale mist and you can see them no more.

All the mountains’ detail, the trees and rock outcrops, meadows and streams, fade into blue outlines of mountains. You can swear at times they are transparent, how the mist rises to leave nothing but the shape of a ridgeline in deeper blue than what lies either nearer or farther beyond it. Mona_Lisa,_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci

In the 1400s Leonardo da Vinci noticed a blue haze hanging above the hills of Tuscany. He painted it, and the art historians called those backgrounds hesitant or insubstantial, that he painted them in haze so as not to divert focus from the central theme.

But it was not just a technique, it was a feature of Leonardo’s beloved Tuscan landscape. Da Vinci speculated in his notebooks that the blue haze might have been caused by minute and nearly invisible mists of water emitted from the trees.

There are two other mountain ranges in the world named for their blue mists, one in Australia and the other in Jamaica, and both named the Blue Mountains.

They and the Blue Ridge are all treed with woody plant species that emit their essential oils into the air around them. Known as isoprene, the oil creates the blue-tinged haze that give all three ranges their name.Leonardo_da_Vinci_attributed_-_Madonna_Litta

There’s debate as to the reason the trees release their isoprene, but this we know: There is a purpose. Nature is economical. Nothing is given or taken without good reason.

One hypothesis is that isoprene protects the photosynthesis of tender leaves from heat stress. Yet once released, isoprene mixes with chemicals in the atmosphere to create ozone, which is harmful to the trees.

Science cannot yet explain this costly tradeoff. Perhaps if the genius painter Leonardo Da Vinci were around today he could. Some surmise that the blue haze he wrote of that hung over Tuscany was isoprene.

No matter. The beauty of the mist is not in its science, but in what it does to our souls when we view the mountains through its filtered light. Blue Ridge shortThere is a profound silence telling you that secrets hide here, covered by mists and time and the forests that reclaim their pristine past.

The secrets belong to our ancestors, those hearty people who traversed the ridges and crawled through the underbrush to finally come out on a flat or a meadow where they would build a home, a Blue Ridge home they never planned to leave.

You can read Part Two of My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction here. Or access the whole series here. To make sure you don’t miss any installments, go to the “subscribe” form at the top of this page.

Her Careless Naming of Human Property

Slaves

I’m venturing toe-deep into the subject of slavery. I cannot even begin to write eloquently about that atrocity; too many people have said it better than I ever could, and I don’t want to dive into it if I can’t do the subject — and my feelings about it — justice. So I will only write of this one, brief encounter I just had with historical slavery, and the visceral revulsion that came over me.

By simply being aware of the daily news you become aware of the vastness of modern slavery. Sex slavery, the bondage of smuggled illegal workers, child soldiers, and debtors’ slavery are all rampant problems worldwide. Not long ago I learned of more than 100 slaves who were held for a year inside a warehouse in Los Angeles, less than 60 miles from me, and forced to work as garment sewers. And only a month ago a woman of foreign royalty, living not ten miles from me, was deported for holding domestic slaves here.

Whipped backSlavery is illegal in every country in the world, but not so long ago it wasn’t. Emancipation was only 57 years old when my mother was born, and she remembers the community’s animosity for a woman known as “Granny,” because she had been a slaveholder. That community, by the way, was in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the South’s breadbasket, and the place burned to the ground by General Sheridan’s Northern troops during the Civil War. These small farmers, Mennonites, Methodists, and United Brethren, which included my mother’s family, opposed slavery, and some opposed all war as well.

But nothing about slavery has touched me as viscerally as this has. I just read the will of my fifth great grandmother and found that she was a slave owner, and it gave me the shivers. That will gives proof that there was slave ownership in my family, that it was this close to me — this close to being my generation’s responsibility.  If things had gone differently with the Civil War, those slaves might still be in bondage, five or six generations later. What would I do?

Elizabeth Newton Berryman, like her husband before her, was a slave owner, and in her will she writes of the distribution of her human property to her heirs in the same breath as the disposal of an “old silver tankard.”

She lists over 50 slaves, including, “Old Negro Jack and Grace and their ten Children.” For each of the bequests of slaves, she begins, “I give to my son,” then lists the slaves’ names, ending, “to him and his heirs and assigns, forever,” meaning that the son and his heirs will own those slaves and their children and their children’s children forever. A family eternally damned to live as possessions, like cows or pigs or old silver tankards. Buying-Slaves-Havana-Cuba-1837_jpg

She writes that two of her daughters do not receive any slaves, because, “my daughter Sarah Douglas has had her part of the negroes and my daughter Katharine Vowles has had her part of the Negroes.”

I can only hope that my ancestors were not cruel, though slavery itself is the ultimate cruelty, and so any leniency heaped on slavery is of scant solace. Even now I feel a ridiculous and hopelessly useless anger at the will’s careless naming of human property. This is the will; the bold is my addition:

In the Name of God Amen I Elizabeth Berryman of the County of Westmoreland being weak in body but of sound and disposing mind and memory do constitute and appoint this my last Will & testament in manner following. Whereas my husband Benjamin Berryman by his last Will authorized me to make distribution of all his slaves to his six sons or the survivors of them and whereas three of the said Sons viz Newton, John and Henry died before they came of age and was not possesst of any of their fathers estate and whereas William, James and Maximilian are the surviving sons I give all the slaves with their increase to be divided as follows, Advertisement of Slave Dealer, Charleston, South Carolina, 1835_jpgImprimis I give to my son William Berryman Old Negro Jack and Grace and their ten Children and bob which in his possession and Sall which I delivered to him as part of his fathers estate some years past but being a little Negro girl, that attended me I desired my son William to let her stay and wait on me which is now with me, as also I give him Rachel and Nel & Beck their Mother, to him and his heirs and assigns forever and allso my fathers Old Silver Tankard without a lid and also my fathers coat of arms. Af (&?) alsSlave houseo I give to my said son William Berryman all the lands I bought of Cossom Bennett in the County of Westmoreland which I have given him by a deed and do confirm to him his heirs and assigns forever.

Item I give to my son James Berryman, Negro George, Jack, Anthony, Ben, Aaron, Suke, Nace, Mary, Tim, Ned, Jude, Peg and her youngest Child Gerrat, Winney, and Bettey to him his heirs and assigns forever.

Item I give to my son Maximilian, fourteen Negroes which he has in his possession as also Salley, Lilla and Frank which are yet in my possession, to him his heirs and assigns forever.Slave Auction.GIF

Item my will and desire is that my stock and household stuff of what kind soever Tobacco Corn Money etc shall be equally divided between my three children that is to say William James and Katherine Vowles.

Item my son Benjamin Berryman had his part of his fathers estate before his death, Item my daughter Rose Taliaferro had her part of her fathers estate before his death.

Item my Daughter Frances Foot has her part since her fathers death according to his Will and gave a receipt for it.slave-ship-loading-plan

Item my daughter Sarah Douglas has had her part of the negroes and my daughter Katharine Vowles  has had her part of the Negroes, the reason of my giving son William Seventeen Negroes and my son James but sixteen is because some negroes that my son William is possest of are very Deficient for old Jack & Grace are almost past labour, and one negro fellow with One eye and one hand, and another cripled Lad of very little use, therefore I think the division I have made will make them equal according to quantity and quality.

Item I appoint my sons William and James Berryman executors to this my last will and testament.

In withness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this 14th day of June 1762 –
Elizabeth E Berrymen (her mark)Man and brother

Signed Sealed and delivered In presence of Gerrard Blackstone Causeen
Josias Causeen
Thomas Clark
William Staples
At a court held for Westmoreland County the 22d day of February 1763,

This last Will and Testament of Elizabeth Berryman decd was proved according to law by the Oaths of Josias Causeen and William Staples . Witnesses thereto and Ordered to be recorded and on the motion of said William Berryman One of the executors named in the said Will who made Oath according to law and together with Willoughby Newton his Security entered into and acknowledged Bond with Condition as the law directs Certificate is granted him for Obtaining a probate thereof in due form liberty being reserved to James Berryman the Other executor named in the said Will to join in the probate when he shall think fit -TesteAuction poster

Nothing could feel more foreign than owning another human being, and yet that chapter of our nation’s history was only 150 years ago, so near our time that the last group of Civil War veterans lived until the 1950s; so near our time that my own mother knew former slave owners.

It’s doubtful that, even without the Civil War, slavery would have lived into our time. But it’s not impossible. Look how unsanctioned slavery thrives still, a tragic disgrace.

Not a Free Spirit, Yet His Mind Wandered Free

You can see Chapters 1 and 2 of this story here, here, and here.

FRANCIS OTTO EGGLESTON: Chapter 4

Francis Eggleston spent his childhood on an Ohio farm, in an era when it was common for parents to take their children out of school after the fourth grade, or to skip sending them to school altogether.

OneRoomSchoolhouseFrancis’s family was different. For grammar school they sent their two boys to the “District School – all in one room from primer to as big as the teacher, but less learned.”

In his biography, he wrote that, “It meant a walk of more than one mile, but there was commonly company much of the way.

“The school house,” he went on, “was a frame building painted white. It was heated by a ‘box’ stove and when you were cold you held up your hand and asked if you could ‘go to the stove.’Harvey's Grammar

As with nearly every school of the time, “The curriculum consisted of reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic and geography and that crazy business of grammar, in which you parsed sentences after the ideas of the teacher and ‘Harvey’s Grammar’ – sentences about as scientific as a beech and maple woods.

Still, “It was good exercise for one’s brain cells. Once in a month you ‘spoke pieces’ and so learned to use your voice. There was singing if the teacher was a singer but no organ or piano.”

Twinsburg Institute original school buildingAfter this Francis and his brother both “went away to school,” to the Twinsburg Institute, a noted college preparatory school run by education reformer Samuel Bissell.

Though he never said specifically in his biography, Francis made it clear that he was not cut out for farm workand that, “I was a book worm of sorts from early days. A reader of the poets and dramatists; of Emerson, Theo Parker, Carlyle, Ruskin, and the like.” 

He was eager for all education, and entered one of the territory’s several colleges, Oberlin College, “at 16 or 17.”After reading Emerson and Carlyle and Ruskin, the poet, the dramatists, “and the like,” he was eager for more. His own reading could take him only to a certain level, and after that he needed a teacher to help him decide what it all means, and where to go from there.

But instead of finding it a temple to mental expansion, he found the university constricting, a place where a young man’s intellectual explorations were not encouraged, but were directed toward a set of values and beliefs.Oberlin 1906.pngNot that he believed any other university would be an improvement. “The educational enterprise as conducted in colleges in those days,” he wrote, “was that of channelization of the human mind — much like the ‘breaking’ of a colt to work in harness.”

Francis was a responsible young man who bowed to duty always, yet his mind wandered free and formed its own ideas, respective of prevailing doctrine or authority. He formed his own interpretations of the world, and was not easily subdued.

“I have always been a seeker,” he wrote, “rather than a safe deposit compartment.”

It’s because of this free-spiritedness that his life was a succession of one radical change after another. But because he was also dutiful, he tried to be a free spirit within the confines of the roles his place in society dictated.

Francis O. Eggleston, circa 1883

Francis O. Eggleston, circa 1883

As a son, a husband, and a father, his roles were clearly defined. How, then, could he find space for his spirit to soar within those defined edges?

“I readily inclined to the actor’s calling,” he wrote, “but human nature cuts many capers and we all have our own temperamental twists…. I was not so much a scholar as I was a lad for special occasions that called me out.”

He quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Our moods do not believe in each other.”

After matriculation at Oberlin he taught school for several years, but, as was written in his obituary 70 years later, “the pedagogic life was not to his complete satisfaction, and he entered Western Reserve University, from which he obtained a medical degree.”

He then married the one and only sweetheart he ever courted, and ventured from Ohio to Knoxville, Kentucky to begin life as an adult.

There, Francis Eggleston started his adult life as a physician, but after practicing medicine for three years he decided against continuing on in the profession.

“As for medicine and surgery,” he wrote, “I tire of butchery as an occupation.

“You never know what you will run into, the disintegrated flesh and scattered remnants of humanity make me prefer less sensitive elements.”

Indeed, he was too sensitive to practice medicine, and so he went back to Oberlin College to study a subject through which his spirit could soar, theology. He emerged a Methodist minister, and served for many years in churches in Ohio, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Francis Eggleston was certain in his beliefs, though those beliefs were always evolving. He constantly questioned beliefs, and especially, systems of belief, which is what brought him from Methodism to Unitarianism. He was a devoted student of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who at that time was famously Unitarian.

In his autobiography I found many references to the evolution of ideas, and of things. This must have been hard to reconcile with the life and duties of a Methodist minister, and perhaps it was part of the reason he evolved from that religion to Unitarianism.

FOE Eggleston bio page excerpt - change but cannot dieDarwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, yet it wasn’t until the 20th century that Darwin’s explanation of life was widely accepted by even the scientific community.

I don’t know if Grandfather accepted Darwin’s theory the first time he read it, or if he had to come to terms with it slowly, but at least by 1940 he was all in. He wrote:

“A changeless world could not exist — except as a dead moon. It could no have life even in its lowest forms. It may be said of all living things…. Only those who were alive before 1860 can measure the advances in many fundamental ideas and loss of fears from that remote period to 1941…. Mankind has advanced even more from the loss of superstitions than from the gains of positive elements…. I must accept this faith of human science or life will dwindle and hope perish.”

In another place, he wrote:

“Only a living world could be self-existent, or creative and progressive. The static conception of creation was of necessity mechanistic. Life is not for a moment inactive or finished. Such a world would contradict itself. In a living world man himself becomes a project: an enterprise. Society, made up of living persons, becomes a major project of measureless scope and infinite hope.

“We know now what a biologic continuum is and how it acts in our natures. Science is very explicit on this point. We do carry along germs of inheritance generation after generation — vital parts of ‘what we were before we became ourselves.'”

And in another place:

“I began life orthodox, and end a naturalist.”

“…the world is infinitely unfinished…life must be progress. The businessman may aspire to a competence and retirement from the grind of business. The student has no such wish. I have an expanding horizon, and no valued and cherished consistency.”

My great grandfather, Francis Otto Eggleston, was incredibly well read, as his biography includes references to and quotes from poets and thinkers ranging from ancient Greece to  the modern-day, all used to clarify or demonstrate his thoughts.FOE Eggleston bio excerpt - mental stimulation my need

If he had been brought up in a different place, or had he attended a different college, perhaps he would not have found such societal constriction of his spirit. Still, this was the Victorian era, and social pressure was great all across this country, in and out of its institutions.

As it is, Great Grandfather Eggleston found an outlet for his unconstricted thoughts and beliefs as a columnist and commentator for the Bergen Record, of Bergen County, New Jersey. He had free reign to speak his mind, and had a large audience with lively discussion through the readers’ responses in letters.

The Bergen Record’s obituary would have pleased Great Grandfather, with is headline” F. O. E. Of the Forum Dead; Woodcliff Lake Philosopher.” The article’s subtitle, though, reflected his constant, life-long search: “Eggleston, 90, In Turn A Teacher, Doctor, Clergyman, Writer.”FOE Eggleston obituary 1st paragraph

In the obituary, the paper wrote that,

“He was renowned for the lofty style and the finish of his communications, which were generally reminiscent of the Emersonian manner and viewpoint.

“It was a technique which many readers found absorbing. Some said they read F. O. E. before they read the day’s news.”

I’m glad Great Grandfather’s mental wanderings were finally given an appreciative audience. He wrote for the paper for 15 years, up until four months before his death at 90.

He lived those years in a happy household with his daughter and her husband, and his twin grandsons. I wrote briefly about that family nest in the post, I Have Been Talking with the Trees.

Great Grandfather Eggleston died in 1944. Two of his three grandsons were “somewhere in the Pacific,” and would not return until the war with Germany and Japan was over. He had one great grandchild, my oldest brother, one year old, with whom he spent many delightful days.

F.O. Eggleston, Tad&Ted Berryman Woodcliff Lake c1918_CU.rI never met The Old Gentleman, as he was known around town, but I feel that I know him, and for that I am richer.

The End.