Echos of My Blue Ridge Ancestors

Green Mountain, Jollett HollowOctober is peak tourist season in Shenandoah National Park, when the forest puts on a dazzling show that never fails to delight.

The trees are decked out in their royal colors: crimson, gold, and purple, a palette of shimmering color that stretches from far horizon to browning fields below.

Winged seeds fly on the wind, leaves too, falling to let their trees’ bare bones bask in misty sunlight through the winter.

Tourists flock to the mountains, their cars a slow-moving chain along Skyline Drive, cameras like attachments to their faces clicking every adorned vista.

Hikers scuff through the woods, their irreverent voices ringing through trees, their hiking boots crackling leaves underfoot.

Here and there they come across an old mossy wall, the rough foundation of a home long gone, or a graveyard barely visible through the bramble.

Each of those are testament to a time forever lost, a time when the mountains rang with voices of a different kind, the voices of people whose homes and barns and cemeteries these were. People who tended gardens, pastured their cattle, built schools and churches, and lived full lives in these mountains, most for generations.

In the mid-1700s they started to come, traveling south on the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania to Shenandoah. Settlers were quick to take up the fertile bottom land of the Valley. Latecomers of necessity moved further and further up the mountain, laying claim to every bit of clearable land and making do with what they could find.

P1000731For 200 years those generations eked out their living from the rough soil and rugged mountains.

Now they are all gone, the forest abandoned to its wild ways and the few intrepid hikers who venture from their cars into those deep woods.

In 1934 they began to leave, some of their own accord, others not, when government used the power of eminent domain to clear land for Shenandoah National Park.

Some walked down the mountain without a glance back, never to return. Others were dragged away, literally thrown from their homes, their doors barred by police against any thought of coming home.

It was a nasty business, and one the bureaucrats were loath to take on. But they had jobs to perform, objectives to achieve, and the mountain people were unfortunately in their way. That was the cold truth.

At one time tens of thousands lived in those mountains. But when the thin topsoil was spent, the trees harvested and hills nearly bare, many left.P1000917

By 1934 only about 7,000 remained in 250 square miles. But seven thousand is a lot of people to relocate, especially considering nearly all had
to be coaxed or moved reluctantly from their homes, some kicking and screaming.

This is the dark past of Shenandoah National Park.

A few who were evicted are still alive, although they were mere children then, their memories foggy now, unreliable in the details of their stories, but clear enough to tell of heartless government agents, and of negative depictions that painted them as slovenly, mentally deficient, sub-normal.

There are others who were not yet alive back then and heard the stories from their parents and grandparents. Some of these descendants are encyclopedic in their knowledge of the evictions. Others have distilled their families’ stories down to pure resentment, discarding details and facts, leaving only anger. The bitterness is carried down from father to son, mother to daughter, and in many, it is still palpable today.

The stories resonate. There was Lissie Jenkins, five months pregnant, who sat her rocking chair and would not move, and so was dragged out, rocking chair and all. I’ve imagined her fear of the unknown after most of a lifetime on that mountain; how losing the security of that place may have been more than she could emotionally bear. We are not all adventurers. We do not all look at an unknown future with the optimism of opportunity, but instead, cling to our chosen rocking chair as if it alone holds us to this earth.P1000733

I’ve thought of John Mace, who watched the police stack his furniture in front of his house and set it all afire, his soul no doubt smoldering as the flames engulfed all the physical evidence of his life.

What could he have felt but seething fury at such an act? And what could his neighbors feel but fear and distrust, knowing they would be next if they did not cooperate? Of course with such acts the government became the enemy to many.

I’ve thought of John Nicholson, who was accused of theft after taking the windows from his father’s home, a home that was set to be torn down.

Of Lillie Herring, also accused of theft from her own home, who wrote with proud indignation to officials, “I am not lieing on no one and I’m not telling you one ward more that you can prave and I am living up to what I say.”

And of of Elmer Hensley, who made the simple request to take down his cabin, one log at a time, so he could rebuild it on land outside the Park boundaries. The simple request was denied, with no explanation given.

These acts stink of the meanness and arrogance of some agents, and form the mythology that surrounds the evictions, that they were indeed historic criminal acts by a tyrannical government.

Were they?

My great-grandparents as well as countless cousins, aunts, and uncles were P1000712among those summarily tossed out. William Durret Collier and his wife, Mary Meadows Collier, lived up the mountain from Jollett Hollow.

They owned nearly 500 acres of land, harvesting chestnut tanbark each spring and hauling it by horse-driven wagon down the mountains to the tannery in Elkton.

They kept fruit orchards, managed the farm of a wealthier neighbor, and raised six girls and a son.

When the men from Washington came around, they knew they had no option but to sell, and did not protest. They used the money to buy a home at the base of their mountain, outside the future park’s boundaries, close enough that they still walked up to their old orchards to pick apples years after that place was abandoned.

They were happy with what they got, and the stories my family passed down are that most others were happy with what they got too. But maybe that is just my family. After all, this is vastly different from the stories I’ve read about, of Lizzie Jenkins and John Mace and Elmer Hensley and the others who did not want to leave their mountain homes.

P1000792Then again, simple satisfaction is nothing we remember in detail, as we do outrage. The blood doesn’t boil, the adrenaline doesn’t rush with something so ordinary as satisfaction.

That is nothing we commit to stories, or create mythologies around.

Satisfaction does not bond people together as outrage does. It does not inspire rallying cries that cross generations.

Only outrage and its related emotions do that. And so that is what is remembered. It is why family feuds endure across generations. Why hostilities between two groups can last so long that no one is quite sure why they are hostile anymore, but only that they are.

My ancestors became lost to history, while Lizzie Jenkins and those others became standard bearers for the protesters of government oppression.

Yes, there were authentic tragedies and injustices associated with building the Park. Lives ruined not just when the government threw them from their homes, but decided they were so inferior that they needed to be taken from their families and institutionalized. Lives were wasted, and many literally wasted away in the cold corridors of institutions.

They were victims of the “Progressive Movement” that swept America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when do-gooders roamed not just the Blue Ridge and Appalachia, P1000713but all through the cities and countryside looking for pockets of poverty to eradicate.

They believed that people of the lowest classes should be either “fixed,” or marginalized, and so set about sorting people into the “deserving” and “undeserving” classes. “Social progress is a higher law than equality,” wrote one reformer.

In Virginia alone, more than 7,000 people were forcibly sterilized. About half of those were deemed mentally ill, the other half mentally “deficient.”

Some women were put away, sterilized, or both because of “loose morals.” Children were taken from their parents because they were “feeble-minded.”

Many of my fellow Blue Ridge descendants have ancestors who were thus locked up for the sin of poverty.

It was a dark time in America. The “fixers” thought they were “doing good.” They were very, very wrong.

We as a nation recognize that people were wronged. We have institutionalized this memory in textbooks and schools. I remember studying the movement and its repercussions in college, and the teaching emphasized the injustice that was done. By remembering, we can hope it will never happen again.

But what we remember must resemble the truth of what really happened, not the hopped-up inaccuracies that continue to fan the flames of anger.

Some descendants are angry that their Blue Ridge ancestors were lied to, told they could stay on in their parkland homes forever.

Yes indeed, this was the plan at one time, to let people stay. There were many early plans that did not come to fruition, and numerous reasons why this one did not happen.

Early on the Park was planned to include nearly 400,000 acres. Because that much acreage would have encompassed too many economically vital farms, and because the Depression was causing contributions from donors to dry up, the planned acreage was drastically reduced to 163,721 acres.

Reduction of the acreage required a new bill from Congress, and a rider was attached promising that current homeowners would be allowed to stay so long as they did not hamper the park.P1000721

However, Arno B. Cammerer, a lifelong bureaucrat and future Director of the National Park Service, wrote a report stating, “This particular class of mountain people is as low in the social order and as destitute as it seems possible for humans to get…. It is not known how many squatters of similar degree of intelligence, of lack of intelligence, are within the park area proper, but, every one of them being a potential beggar, it is not considered a practical proposition to authorize their retention on lifetime leases within the park.”

Those are harsh words, and hard to read without feeling anger at their writer for such judgment. He deserves condemnation for making such a report without knowing the people about whom he is writing.

Though a few no doubt would turn to begging, Mr. Commerer accused and convicted the entire mountain populace. It is because of this man’s report and influence that the act of Congress granting lifetime tenancy was discarded, the people forcibly removed. But was the original plan to keep residents in their homes a lie? No. An abhorrent act and reneging of a stated plan, yes. A lie, no.

Some descendants claim, too, that their ancestors were cheated, not given fair value for their homes. I have tried to prove that this is true.

I have searched every document I can find, spent many hours looking for evidence of underpayment. I wanted to find that they were cheated, so as to give justice to the people today who still feel so wronged.P1000799

But instead, I found just the opposite. Everything I have seen points to the mountain residents being compensated generously for the enormous disruption to their lives of having to leave their homes.

I found that comparable mountain land sold for an average of $5 per acre before the Park. Indeed, Herbert Hoover bought 164 acres right on the Rapidian River for $5 an acre even as Shenandoah National Park was being planned.

Looking through the National Park Service’s records of payments, it appears that the average compensation was well above that $5 appraised average. My own great grandfather, W. D. Collier, received $4,295 for his 452 acres plus three structures, one a two-story 18′ x 32′ house and another a 14′ x 22′ barn, plus another 13′ x 13′ building.

His per-acre compensation was $9.50 an acre for the forest land that he used to harvest tanbark in the spring. It was not the most valuable land, which would be tableland, but it was productive, income-generating land. He would feel that loss of income and have to seek his livelihood elsewhere.

The median home value in America in 1934 was $2,278, and no doubt far less in the Blue Ridge. But using that figure, Durret Collier would have been able to replace his home and buy approximately 400 acres, about what he lost. Indeed, my great-grandparents bought a house and land, and felt they made out well in the deal.

P1000709Did others make out financially as well? Looking at the evidence, I have to say it seems most did.

Fannie Lamb received $3,400 for her 5.9 acres, which must have been prime land. Lloyd Spitler received $200 for his two acres.

John Eppard received $2,074 for his 172 acres. Old Rag United Brethren Church got $1,000 for their quarter acre plus church. The Old Rag school got $800 for their half acre plus schoolhouse.

On the other hand, Allegheny Ore & Iron got only $1.98 an acre for their 1,434 acres, and Bessie Keyser received only $334 for her 102 acres. Most others fell in between those extremes.

It’s easy to see why some might feel their ancestors were cheated when looking at those prices. But it’s helpful to remember that $1,000 in 1934 was the equivalent of $17,763.51 today because of inflation. That is almost a 1,700 percent rise in prices since then, an incredible amount of inflation. I hope this puts some perspective on the prices our ancestors received for their property.

Of course, there is no denying that most mountain people would have far preferred to stay in their homes rather than move off the mountains. Eminent domain is a nasty business, when the state decides that its interests are more important than those of the individual.

Many people believe there is no justification for eminent domain under any circumstances. These are mostly Jeffersonian Republicans who believe the greatest threat to liberty is posed by a tyrannical central government.

That party, the Jeffersonian Republican party, is dead today, but its traditions live on, mostly in the South. For those with that view, the Shenandoah National Park will always seem an illegitimate place, born of the gross injustice served on our ancestors.

Old wallFor them, only this point is relevant. Many of those ancestors were versed in the Constitution and believed the Park to be unconstitutional. They described it as “federally occupied territory.”

I am more moderate. I believe that there are occasions when “the greater good” is served by self-sacrifice. And as one who also believes that the most majestic, beautiful, and sacred places in America should be preserved for all generations, I believe that creation of the Shenandoah National Park was an injustice to a few for the greater good of the many.

That my ancestors were made to sacrifice, I am sorry. I can only hope they also saw the greater good of the Park’s creation, and felt justly compensated. In fact, from family stories passed down, I know this to be true. But for the descendants who believe the individual reigns supreme over the state in every or nearly instance, eminent domain is one of the grossest injustices. No other circumstance matters.

This exercise in examining the evidence in development of the Shenandoah National Park was illuminating. I am satisfied in what I found regarding the one big missing piece of information I sought: that mountain residents were indeed compensated fairly.

But I also learned something about those who are still bitter over the park. Only now have I come to appreciate the power of some descendant’s political beliefs in their opinion over whether their ancestors were treated justly. Politics just had not occurred to me, but now it makes complete sense.

The bitterness is not because they think their ancestors did not get fair prices, as I thought. It is not even per se that their ancestors were made to move. It is, instead, that they believe the government has no right to forcibly take an American citizen’s land, no matter how much the compensation.P1000732

This is about liberty, and an individual’s rights over the rights and privileges of the government. It was for the ideal of individual rights and liberty that America was founded, and they believe no government has the right to infringe on those rights. Eminent domain is one of the most egregious usurpations of rights.

It is true that the depiction of mountain residents was unnecessarily pejorative, and it was unfortunate that many were swept up in the national movement for social engineering.

It is a pity that the plan to allow residents to stay for their lifetimes was undermined by one man. These are all important elements of the mishandling of the Park’s development process.

Would it go more smoothly if done today? It’s hard to say. Government is messy. Two-party democracy is especially messy. (Winston Churchill once said, “democ­racy is the worst form of gov­ern­ment except for all those other forms that have been tried.”)

I cannot say that all of the mistreatment can be attributed to the ways of that time in history, though I believe that the slanderous accusations and social engineering experiments were of that time in history and would not be repeated today.P1000786

America has the greatest system of national parks in the world. Writer Wallace Stegner called them “America’s best idea.” I may not go that far, but I am proud of them and thankful for them.

As our country gets more and more crowded, there will be a time in the not so distant future when these will be our only places of pristine wilderness, which we all need for the health of our bodies and souls. For me, that is the greater good that made Shenandoah National Park necessary to create.

One only has to visit those peaks and woods during October to see why they were worth preserving. To walk among the tall trees and thick underbrush, through sun-warmed meadows and along cascading streams, stirring up that musty forest floor scent with every step, moving through rays of autumn light that slant through the bent and crooked branches.

This is a quiet beauty. Even the flaming autumn colors blend to a muted tapestry that folds over those soft-rolling and time-worn mountains. I hear echos of my ancestors deep in those woods, their voices riding on the wind like phantoms of the past.P1000839

Four generations of my families lived and died there, names like Markey, Meadows, McDaniel, Collier, Tanner, and Breeden still today rising up from hallowed Blue Ridge ground on grave markers that remained behind when the living left.

Today the Blue Ridge belongs to all of us. And for that I am grateful.

The Grandmother I Never Knew

I know only wisps of my grandmother’s life, those parts that came to me in stories told by my mother, or from the occasional times our family made the 3,000 mile trip from Southern California to the Virginia farm where she spent 64 years, her entire adult life.

Florence Merica, Shenandoah VA c1959I know she was a gentle woman with a sweet smile who spoke quietly and was of few words. She was not effusive with her emotions, but through her actions made it clear to her family that they were loved and to her guests that they were welcome.

To her, a bountiful table and a clean home were signs of love, not duty, and in these acts she never faltered. Big country breakfasts and Sunday chicken dinners could be counted on. So could Saturday chores and Sunday church, all of which gave her family a sense of order and stability that allowed them to flourish within those boundaries. She was the hub of the family with her quiet strength, and all were devoted to her.

Florence Elizabeth Collier was born on a cold winter day in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, just up the ridge from Jollett Hollow, on the edge of the Shenandoah Valley. She was the daughter of Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows Collier and William Durrett Collier, both of whom were also children of those mountains. It is likely that their home was hewn of rough wood, the gaps filled with clay mud and stones, and with packed dirt floors, as were many mountain homes in the early 1900s. The family had a large fruit orchard, fields they farmed, and nearly 500 acres of woodland from which they harvested chestnut tanbark in the spring.

Her mother was known as a healer, and used potions of mountain herbs to treat the patients who came to her for care. I’ve been told by people who knew Mary that mothers brought their babies to her when they suffered with thrush, believing that her breath, blown into the baby’s mouth, could heal the child. This was a gift believed to be bestowed on those who never met their fathers, as Mary was.

Florence did not attend school past the first few years, telling her mother that learning to read and write scared her, and she did not want that power. She preferred to stay at home, working in the fields and garden instead, helping her mother, preparing for the life of a farm wife. The work was hard, but she was undaunted. As a teen, full of life and promise, she “hoed all day and danced all night,” to use the phrase she told my mother years later.

IThomas_and_Florence_Collier_Merica_wedding.2.rt was no doubt at one of the area’s frequent barn dances that she met her future husband, Thomas Austin Merica. She was 17 when they married, and so small around that her young husband, tall and strong, could put his hands around her waist, making her blush with secret delight. That delight never left, and even years later her cheeks flushed when her husband spoke affectionately to her, especially when he called her Sally, a pet name.

One evening when my mother, then a teen, 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.” On another occasion Tom told 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 his love and loyalty.

A photo of my grandmother as a young woman of 22 shows that she was indeed a beauty. Her features are delicate and well-proportioned, and though there is no trace of a smile in the photo, there is tenderness in her full lips, and in the ever-so-slight tilt of her head. A great pile of brown hair is twirled loosely atop her head, Florence Collierwisps falling about her neck and ears. The story goes that her thick chestnut hair fell below her waist until a bout with pneumonia thinned it.

Her high-necked blouse, pleated at the breast and cinched tightly at the waist, is that of a plain and modest woman, as I know she was. The blouse appears to be of the same pattern as the one she wore in her wedding photo, and she no doubt made them both. In this picture a ribbon is wound several times around her neck and clasped with a round cameo broach, perhaps the same one as in her wedding photo. I wonder what ever became of that broach.

She was close to her sisters and her mother, and visited them regularly. Sometimes on a Sunday she asked her son Jesse to drive her and the younger children to visit her mother at her home on Naked Creek in Jollett Hollow, where Durrett and Mary moved after the government bought their former farm to make way for Shenandoah National Park.

Jesse hooked up the big horse, Pet, to the wagon, and off they’d go on the seven mile journey, stopping at the Meadows store on the way to buy mackerel, which Mary would cook up into fried cakes for lunch. Sometimes Mary’s other daughters came visiting too, and the mother and sisters, Florence, Annie, Emma, and Minnie, would talk the afternoon away while the children played by the creek.Florence Collier and sisters, Jollett Hollow VA, c.1920.r2

Once the family got a car, a sturdy Model T Ford, Jesse would also drive his mother and sisters to visit Emma, who lived in Newport News, 175 miles away. Tom seldom made the journey.

The introduction of the automobile was an exciting event for Florence. Unlike some local people she was not afraid of riding in cars. My mother tells the story that Uncle Hunter, Tom’s brother, drove Florence and some other women up Grindstone Mountain to pick berries. On the way down the car began to go faster, frightening the other women to where they jumped out. Florence came home and laughed about the event with her family.

Maybe it’s not love that I feel so much as longing for my grandmother. Longing to know this woman whose blood runs in my veins, this woman who gave birth to my mother, who in turn gave life to me. When I was younger I was too busy to think about her. She was many miles and another world away. Now, 45 years after I watched my grandmother breath her last breath in her own home on a snowy winter night, her family around her, have I come to sense what a loss it was not to know her better.

She died in the same Virginia farmhouse where she spent her entire adult life; the farmhouse where she lost twins shortly after birth, but raised eight children to adulthood. Where she grew roses along the white picket fence and lilacs outside the parlor window, a big kitchen garden and orchards in the back. Where she cooked on a wood stove and did her business in an outhouse until her death in 1969, never having seen the point of modern technologies.

Where she fried dried apple turnovers for her children, baked coconut cake for Christmas, sewed quilts to keep her family warm, cooked enormous meals for the men who came to help at harvest time, listened to the Grand Ole Opry on the parlorFlorence and Thomas A. Merica, Shenandoah VA c.1945.r radio, and lived a just and satisfying life, relatively free of drama or pain.

I wish I could say more about my grandmother, but these are the only memories, and the only bits of knowledge passed to me by my mother, that I have. They will have to do.

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 Blue Ridge Family Tree (Album)

This is the last, part Nine of My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction series. Be sure you read parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six,  Seven and Eight

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 9

Blue Ridge longThe Blue Ridge Mountains got themselves into the blood of five generations of my ancestors.Ola_Florence_Ruth_Jessee_and_other_Mericas_and_Comers_Shenandoah..CU.r

Those once-giant peaks, which formed when Africa and North America collided more than a billion years ago, and then rivaled the Himalayas in majesty, also helped to form my Blue Ridge ancestors, and me.

The granite and gneiss stone that lay beneath the mountains’ thin soil hardened our ancestors’ backbones.

The thin layer of gray loam and tenacious red clay made farming difficult, but built our ancestors’ perseverance.

We are who we are today in great part because of who the mountains made them.

Those mystically blue mountains shaped two sets of my fifth great grandparents way back Ruth Merica (rt) & Phyllis Grimsley c1940noborderin the 1700s: Francis Meadows and his wife, Mary; and Martin Crawford and his wife, Elizabeth McDonald.

And seven sets of my fourth great grandparents: John Phillip Dietz and Catherina Heck, Martin Alfred Collier and Mary Williams, John McDaniel and Elizabeth Crawford, Bird Snow and Polly Mayhugh, William Breeding and Susannah Tanner, William Lamb and Mary Gear, and James Meadows and Catherine Boswell.

They shaped seven sets of my third great grandparents: Johannes Markey and Elizabeth Dietz, Preston Collier and Elizabeth Haney, Ellis Turner and Susannah Smith, Levi Lucas and Elizabeth Utsler, Thomas Meadows and Elizabeth Breeden, John McDaniel and Martha Snow, and Zachariah McDaniel and Nancy Lamb.

And they molded four sets of my second great grandparents: Mitchell Meadows and Verinda McDaniels, George Merica and Catharine Wagoner, Smith Collier and Frances Ruth Merica and Parents, Shenandoah VA, c.1940.CU.rMcDaniel, and David Turner and Catherine Lucas.

As well as my great grandparents, William Durrett Collier and Mary Meadows, and Joseph W. Merica and Elizabeth Turner.

And my grandparents, Thomas Austin Merica and Florence Elizabeth Collier.

They all lived and died within a few miles of each other up in the Blue Ridge.

They worked the soil, raised their families, danced, praised God, leaped in joy, crumbled in sorrow, stood for what they believed and ignored the rest for upwards of 300 years.Ruth Berryman and Teddy 1943 Shenandoah.r

They shed their blood, sweat, and tears in those mountains.

It’s where they lay their bodies down to rest each night, and at life’s end.

And finally, 80 years ago, they walked down those mountains, into the valleys below, and never went back.

Their time passed. That gate locked against them forever.

Pick up a handful of soil within Shenandoah National Park today and hold it. You can practically feel their hearts beat.

You can smell their blood and sweat, taste the saltiness of their tears. That earthiness, that is them. And us.

Mary M. Meadows and William Durret Collier wedding photo

William Durrett Collier and Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows, my great grandparents, married April 27, 1884, Page County

 

Thomas_and_Florence_Collier_Merica_wedding.r

Thomas Austin Merica and Florence Elizabeth Collier, my grandparents, married July 22, 1906, Page County, Virginia

 

Ruth__Ted_Berryman_c.1941-r

My parents, Ruth Virginia Merica and Theodore Newton Berryman, married May 29, 1940, Washington, D.C.

And we continue, happily, and grateful for our Blue Ridge Mountain ancestors.

The end.

What Really Happened?

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. Be sure you read parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Seven.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 8

Blue Ridge long

Memory is a trickster, always pulling pranks and distorting what we think we know.

When I was a tiny girl, no more than four years old, I remember our family driving from San Diego to Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles to see one of the first Dodgers games since they girl-at-the-windowleft Brooklyn.

Ours was a baseball family, so I already had a sense of what was happening on the field, with balls being hit and caught, players running this way and that.

But then something out of the ordinary caught my eye. A baseball player started to run from the field toward his dugout, and as he did, fans from the stadium poured over the wall and onto the field, chasing, then mobbing him.

I asked my father what was going on, and he explained that the man was a famous baseball player, Jackie Robinson, who would not be playing anymore, and people loved him and wanted to say thank you, and goodbye.

I’ve told that story many times. Then, about a year ago, I mentioned it to my brother, who was also there. He’s ten years older than I am, so would have a much better memory of the event.

But instead of corroborating my story, he said, “Un-uh, you weren’t there. That’s my memory, the-study-houryou heard me tell the story and then remembered it as though it was your own.”

Is he right? He thinks so. Am I right? I certainly feel right, the memory is that vivid.

Is it my memory? I hope so. But I can’t guarantee it is. That’s a bit unsettling, and in some part I wish my brother had not challenged me. It would have been easier that way. I don’t like the confusion I have now where once I had a treasured memory and an interesting story.

Memory is a funny thing. It doesn’t stand still. It changes in ways so small that we don’t know it’s changing. Details blur, and so do causes. But never mind those, it’s the meaning of the memory that matters, not the accuracy of details.

We may forget exactly what happened on 9/11, the sequence of events, the hour of day, but we will never forget its significance. Or we might remember the events so vividly that our trickster memory convinces us we were there.

It’s called the illusion of truth, or confabulation, and it is what may or may not account for my Jackie Robinson story.home-comfort

Silent film actress Mary Pickford once recalled her fear when filming a scene alongside alligators. But she wasn’t there. The alligators were shot separately and that film was run as a background to her scene.

Ronald Reagan several times talked about when he filmed the liberation of Nazi concentration camps as it was happening, in Germany. But the closest he ever got was making World War II training films in Hollywood.

Both of them confused their own experiences with the vividness of the event in our collective memory.

I have a similar memory of the Blue Ridge mountain home evictions for the making of the Shenandoah National Park. Not that I was there. The sensation isn’t that strong. But I feel it in the same way that some other descendants of the evictees do, of the emotions that tore at our ancestors. Almost as if we ourselves were evicted.

I feel the pride of place, that they lived somewhere so special that the government wanted to make a park of it.meditation

I understand the anger of being told they had to leave their mountain home, to give up their property against their will.

I have the tinge of shame at how people came to view these mountain folk after the media and social workers portrayed them as hillbillies, illiterate and slovenly, instead of independent, self-reliant, and true to our pioneer heritage.

And finally, I feel the comfort and happiness my grandmother got from her new home, nearer her family and in a community of friends.

Are all these feelings valid? Of course. But are they accurate? No. No memory is perfect, no retelling of an event is the complete truth. We mean for it to be. But our trickster memories have been at work.

We are influenced by events of intervening years, accounts told by others, the happy person’s tendency to remember only the positive, the depressed person’s tendency to remember only the negative, and a host of other memory tricks that work to distort everything we think we remember as the truth.an-idle-hour

I’m lucky. I “remember” through what my mother tells me; that my great grandparents were at peace, even happy about leaving the mountain. That’s the memory I carry, and so I’m at peace with the Park.

Some descendents aren’t so lucky. They carry a more troubled memory of the evictions, and I can understand why.

If I knew my ancestor was bitter,  it would not be so easy to have a good memory of the Shenandoah National Park’s creation. Being loyal to the blood, I would feel outrage at my ancestor’s treatment, and frustration at not being able to correct it, even decades after they are dead and gone. It would be an affront to me, to my blood.

How does someone with a bad family memory of the park’s creation shed themselves of those feelings? I don’t know. And should they?

Many times anger comes from powerlessness, the inability to do something about a problem.dear-old-grannie So some descendants have taken action, working with the Park to ensure that our ancestors’ histories are told to Park visitors, and told in the right light; building memorials outside the Park, maintaining Park-land cemeteries.

I would also want markers where some of the homes or communities were, and to see that graveyards are kept neat. That’s about all we can ask.

I applaud those who feel they need to do so for taking action. It takes commitment.

The strength of these people’s ancestral memories is a phenomena I haven’t experienced before. The bond these Blue Ridge evictees’ descendants have with their ancestors is remarkably raw, fresh.

To compare, on my father’s side I can trace my family back to the first (non-Native) settlers in America. I’ve been to New England and seen the houses they lived in, the meeting houses and churches they filled with their voices, the plaques that engraved my ancestors’ names in history. It was exciting, thrilling even, but it did not captivate me as these bits and shards of Blue Ridge family history have. I did not feel their experience.boat-builder

Perhaps, like an unburied body, there is something unsettlingly undone in the Blue Ridge. Perhaps those homes that were vacated, suddenly and on someone else’s terms, eventually crumbling without their families, or being torn down, haunt us with that sense of unfinished business, that lack of closure.

Or maybe we see that time has stood still in the Blue Ridge. With no subsequent development, and with the mountain woods and meadows remaining untouched, we can almost see our ancestors in their daily work, their farming and cooking and hunting, their mending and fixing and building and tending to children.

We see the trails they took to go “a’visitin'” or to church. We see those old photos from the National Archives that let us look right into the kitchens and living rooms of our the-village-cobblerancestors, and we can almost see ourselves right there beside them, conversing in their ancient language, living between our time and theirs.

Or perhaps it’s these mountains themselves, haunting and lovely, creaking with age and whispering the secrets of our ancestors in every breeze.

I don’t know what memory binds me here, but whatever it is, it has me. The Blue Ridge and her people are beating in my blood, beating in my heart, and for that connection I am grateful.

What was Lost in the Blue Ridge

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. Be sure you read parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 7

Blue Ridge long

Every 14 days, somewhere in the world a tribal elder dies, the last of his or her kind, and with him goes his culture’s language, folklore, crafts, and beliefs. Half the world’s languages are in danger of disappearing in the next 90 years as children leave the old ways, wooed by bright lights and big cities.

In China, traditional villages, some of them from the 13th century, are vanishing at an astounding rate of about 300 per day, Cliser evictionbulldozed to make way for urban cities, the old people moved carelessly to apartment dwelling or some other unfamiliar government convenience.

For the Blue Ridge mountain people of Virginia, it’s too late. Their culture scattered to the wind when they were evicted from their mountain homes.

Without the cohesion of place they were simply swallowed by the larger culture of America, along with their way of life.  Like drops of water in the ocean, they were absorbed, and then forgotten as a unique group.

Years ago I traveled to the island of New Guinea. To get there I had to fly from Los Angeles to Hawaii, then Guam,then Sulawesi, then Bali, then Irian Jaya, all on successively smaller planes. There was no direct route to where I was going.

MountainFrom Jayapura, Iryan Jaya I boarded a small Canadian-made plane, a Sea Otter, and flew out over the ocean, where we turned back 180 degrees, picked up air speed, started climbing, and that plane gave it everything it had to fly over the mountain range that jutted 15,000 feet into the sky nearly straight from the ocean’s edge.

Our destination was the Baliem Valley, a place 11,000 feet high and surrounded by those 15,000 foot peaks, which were nearly constantly hidden in clouds, though the valley was bright, sunny, and tropical.

Within the Baliem Valley live a people called the Dani. No one knew they were there until recent times. They were first spotted by the Western world in 1938 from an airplane, but it wasn’t until 1961 that a team went in to explore.

Baliem villageMichael Rockefeller, of “those” Rockefellers, was part of that team until he disappeared, his body never to be found.

The Dani were headhunters and cannibals until recent decades, and even recently there were rumors.

I needed to obtain special permission from our State Department to visit there because of ongoing wars between tribes. The police in Denpasar measured my bones before I left, in case they had only bones to identify me later.

The Baliem Valley and the jungles that crawled up its surrounding mountains were the whole world of the Dani.

Tribes were like states unto themselves, complete with different rulers and dialects of language, even though two tribes may live only a mile distant from each other. Baliem Valley, Dani village, Cynthia Berryman Mulcahy

Each tribe had its own way of speaking; its own customs and history. Language dialects changed from village to village.

Maybe each of them used herbs and plants as cures a little differently. Raised their children differently. Hunted differently. Sang different songs.

When I was there no hotels or restaurants were in the Baliem Valley. No natives wore clothes, except those living at one local Christian mission, or in the dinky military barracks in the valley.

I stayed in the village, introduced to the tribe by my guide, and slept on a hard floor alongside the porters who carried our supplies. One morning we were confined to our hut because a battle raged outside, with bows and arrows, one tribe against the other because someone stole a woman and a pig.

Why do I bring this up? Because Irian Jaya’s government, far away on Baliem Valley, new road, Patrick Mulcahy 1984a distant island, decided to build a road over the mountains and into the Baliem Valley, where the primitive Dani lived.

The nation’s other islands were getting too crowded, and they wanted to relocate those people to the Baliem Valley.

I saw the giant earth movers while I was there, a stark contrast to the naked, spear-carrying natives who lived there.

Today there are vacation resorts in the Baliem Valley. The natives panhandle for cigarettes, and demand money in return for taking their photo. There are hotels and restaurants employing natives, who must wear clothes, something that until recently was foreign to them. Their native culture is disappearing, a victim of the easy lure of Western pleasures. Soon it will be gone altogether, save for native performances at events and cultural centers.

Will the Dani survive the oBlue Ridge stillnslaught of popular culture? No. I can say that unequivocally. It may not be tomorrow, or next year, or in ten years, but it will happen.

They’ll be lost to history, just as the all of Virginia’s Blue Ridge culture was lost with the Shenandoah National Park’s building.

Sure, my great grandparents and other mountain folk carried their customs down the mountain with them, but once out of the mountains, their distinct ways were quickly diluted by the larger community’s ways. That’s how it works.

There are still mountain cultures here and there in pockets throughout the South. But each is distinct from the others, if only in subtle ways. Barbara Allen lyrics

As with the Dani in Irian Jaya, there are different lyrics to the ballads, different ways of strumming a guitar, different ingredients in foods, different quilt patterns, and ways of tying rag rugs, and different herbal potions or superstitions to drive away freckles or curly hair.

I know there is a distinctive banjo technique that can be traced only to Grayson and Carroll counties in southwestern Virginia. I know that my grandmother believed whatever a newborn baby touches first, that is what profession they will be. She made sure her youngest, Bobby, touched a bible. He did not grow up to be a minister, but he was the kindest, gentlest man you’d ever meet. I have no doubt there were many unique practices in our part of the Blue Ridge that are now gone forever.

Old cultures are being mowed down to make room for the new. And more and more, the new culture that takes their place is becoming the same all over the world.

Maybe that is inevitable. Maybe it’s even a good thing; differences between people are what causes war, after all, and so maybe the ultimate result will be the end of strife between nations or peoples. ZerkelImage

I can hope, anyway. Because otherwise, loss is simply loss.

The Blue Ridge are the oldest mountains in the world. And the culture of the people who lived there was one of the oldest (non-Native) cultures in America.

The world around them was changing rapidly in the early 1930s. The car, the airplane, the electric light and telephone – the country was giddy with change, and so it looked with suspicion on those backwards people who didn’t welcome it. It was all too easy to marginalize them, and to ultimately decide their fates for them.

Today the mountains remain, but the people are gone. The forest reclaimed its land. Vines twined in and over those old cabins and twisted through crumbling mortar. Saplings Blue Ridge shack remains - Jon Biloussprung from between their fallen walls, and 80 seasons of fallen leaves have covered their remnants.

Our Blue Ridge ancestors are long gone, and so are their homes. Their culture is lost, save for a few old folks who still remember. Soon they’ll be gone too. I want to learn what my ancestors knew, and continue telling their stories.

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