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.

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.

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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: How Would I Like Eviction?

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, and Three, Four, and Five.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 6

Blue Ridge longIn 1934, all 465 families who lived in the future Shenandoah National Park were evicted from their homes.

Many of my relatives were among them, including four of my great grandparents, and a great many uncles, aunts, and cousins, the McDaniels, Turners, Colliers, Meadows, and Mericas. But this part of the story is about the Colliers.

Florence Collier Merica, Annie Collier Harris, Emma Collier Merica at mother Mary Meadows Collier's home, Jollett Hollow VA, c.1920Durrett and Mary Collier gathered up their belongings, walked out the door of their mountain home for the last time, left their garden and orchard and the springs and brooks that had sustained them, and went on down the mountain to start all over somewhere else.

They used the settlement cash from the government to buy  a house at the base of Green Mountain in Jollett Hollow, set about building a new life, and there the family stayed for another 60 or so years until the last of them, a great grandson of Durrett and Mary, Kenneth Meadows, died.

I don’t know who owns the land now. Perhaps Kenneth’s children. Or perhaps that land fell out of the family. I was not offered the chance to buy it from those third cousins, who would not remember ever meeting me or even recall that I exist. Still, a bit of me belongs to that place, for the times I visited, the stories my mother has told me, and the blood ties I shared with its inhabitants.

My great grandparents and their community of neighbors missed their mountains. They didn’t move to the valleys; they built their houses at the edge of the new park, where their homes clung like barnacles to the sloping mountain bases.Emma Collier Merica, Jollett Hollow

There are mountain people, and there are valley people, and I guess you know who you are. If clinging to its base was as near as they could get to their mountains, so be it.

Some of them moved on with their lives, but some could not let go. Eviction is a powerful tool, and should never be used lightly. That’s why our courts have set up stringent requirements before evictions can be initiated, in any case.

And that’s why some mountain dwellers’ cases went all the way to the highest courts, where the government itself was put on trial and made to justify its case. The mountain peoples’ claims eventually failed, but the courts agreed there was enough at stake for our loftiest judges to hear their claims.

Can I blame Roosevelt and the others who wanted a national park? Not for a minute. What more beautiful place is there? We have Yosemite and Yellowstone with their grandeur. The Everglades and Redwoods with their irreplaceable wildlife and habitat. Zion and Bryce Canyon with their awesome geological formations. Rocky Mountain and Olympic Parks with their pristine alpine meadows.

They’re all beautiful, and all different. The Blue Ridge had to be added to that noble family of wild American places. It was inevitable, nearly preordained by the mountains’ singular beauty.

That my grandparents and 464 other families were made to leave, I am sorry. I try to put myself in their place, because I am not so different. I grew up in a place whose beauty eventually led to its ruination, Southern California, before the crowds.Elsie Watson Dean - Maggie Collier Watson daughter

We had a small ranch two miles from the ocean. Ours was the only house in the valley, and we children ran free as wild horses, either in the canyons and mesas or down to the ocean.

To me it was just where I lived, and I didn’t know until I left my parents’ home when grown that it was special, that other places weren’t like it. As a child, I loved where I lived, but I knew it was not normal: Other kids lived on streets, where there were other kids to play with, and stores to walk to.

Today I cannot even drive through the area without a sense of profound sadness at what was lost, a lump in my throat over what it has become. I could no more live there again as I could drive over my grandfather’s grave every day.

Now I live in an equally ruined place, but at least it isn’t that place; it is not a reminder of the distance I have fallen from that Wonderland.

But what if someone wanted to evict us from our home back then to make a park? Would I have given up a few years of living there in exchange for the preservation of our valley, the wooded canyons and seasonal streams, the flowered mesas and bird-filled marshlands, and the seashore? From today’s perspective, absolutely, positively, unequivocally yes.Thomas A. Merica c.1960

I would feel lucky, honored. It would be affirmation of the specialness of our home place, and assurance that it would remain that way forever. Today I would be able to visit it and feel the specialness, walking the river bed after the storm rains recede, seeing a pack of coyotes running through the field on a moonlit night, wandering up to the shadowed clay hill to see it covered in shooting stars in early spring, or hiking to the mesa to see an ocean of lupine and cornflower covering its meadows.

Like the pristine forests of the Blue Ridge, these singular places need to be preserved, they need to be experienced by more than a few lucky souls.

What I would want in return is more tricky than the choice to give my home up for its own preservation. After all, it was my home. I would want to be relocated somewhere just like it, and back then there were several places that could have been possibilities. Not exactly the same, but maybe close enough.

Couldn’t that have been done for the 465 families of the Blue Ridge, or at least the 197 of them who were homeowners? A sympathetic government could have worked harder to find comparable locations for those who insisted on mountain life. Even if most of them eventually walked away of their own accord, none of them should have had to walk away bitter. They were treated as if they were in the way, not as if they were being asked to do something unnatural to our instinct to put up house and nest. The government should have, and could have worked harder.

Francis Meadows barn Swift Run Gap VA 1750-1800.2.bwBut for the tenants, I’m not so sure. I lived many years in rentals before buying a home. Renters have few rights, no matter where you are. That’s simply the way it is, dehumanizing as it may be.

What was lost by those forced to move was a terrible lot: Their homes, their community, their very way of life. But they are not the only ones who lost. The government lost a chance to honor the mountain residents, even as they forced their leave. But more so, the world lost another of its unique cultures, and that is a loss to us all.

You can find Part Seven 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.

A Complex Tangle of Emotions

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, and Four.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 5

Blue Ridge long

The Blue Ridge evictions were not so long ago. They happened within the lifetime of my mother, who is still alive, though she is the last of her family. She was 14 when her grandparents had to leave their Blue Ridge home, but has only a few memories of the event.

As a girl, and before the evictions, she and her mother walked through Jollett Hollow and up the mountain to her grandparents’ home for visits. After the eviction, the walk was easier, just into Jollett Hollow.Mountain child, Howard Simon

Her grandfather, Durret Collier, had a good amount of land. The Park records say 452 acres. In the spring, Durret and my mother’s father, Tom Merica, peeled the tanbark from their trees with a spudbar and hauled it to Cover’s tannery in Elkton. Durrett also managed a farm for a Mr. Moore, or Morris. These, to my knowledge, were his only sources of income.

My mother’s grandparents kept a busy house. As a young family, I can imagine the commotion on visiting day, with five daughters and one son. There must have been suitors aplenty! Later, with the girls grown and married, visiting day was still special. Aunts and cousins and neighbors came and went, some bringing casseroles or jelled salads, others sitting with plates of fried chicken or macaroni and cheese. Food was central to visiting, and a good host never got past “Come in” or “How are you?” without offering something nourishing.

With so many adults around, my mother sat quietly off to the side and listened to the grown-ups talk. She didn’t like playing with her cousins as much as she liked spending time with her mother, often coming in from play when there were visitors. She liked to hear what adults talked about, the community news, the gentle gossip that got her mother giggling.

She remembers some vague talk of the evictions, that her grandparents were pleased to be able to move to a better house to raise the young granddaughter who had been left in their care when her mother died. She remembers that others who talked with her grandparents were similarly pleased. Yes, she remembers some felt they were treated unfairly, but the impression she took away, filtered through these last 79 years, is that people thought it a net positive benefit to them.

Berry pickers, Howard SimonI imagine their very first reaction was negative though, on hearing that the government was condemning their property and evicting them from their homes. Who would be happy about that? But time, and the offer of money, which was in short supply for most of these people, won in the end.

Maybe those who went willingly are the minority. Or the majority. I don’t know, and probably never will. There are different levels of going “willingly.” But this I know: Not everyone was so pleased. A survey was taken in five hollows. Of the 132 families surveyed, 27 didn’t believe the park would ever exist, 17 were indifferent, four were hostile, ten showed anxiety, nine wanted to remain in the park, and 65 felt positive. Yet of those 132 families, 93 had no plan about leaving.

I can understand that, and I imagine the anxiety level was much higher than reported. Even under the best circumstances, moving causes stress and anxiety, and these were about the worst circumstances possible – eviction. Even if they did turn around to see it as a “net positive” as my ancestors did, I’m sure it wasn’t easy coming to terms with being forced by outsiders to leave their homes.

There was talk of violence. Some took the matter to court, hoping our legal system of checks and balances would prove the condemnation of their homes illegal. A cottage industry of books and college theses on displacement and the abuse of eminent domain sprouted up, many focusing on the loss of home and culture that these people suffered. Of course, there were also others that praised the efforts of Roosevelt and his New Deal to lessen poverty by moving subsistence farmers from marginalized lands to more fertile farms.

A 1930 census counted 150,659 subsistence farms in all of Appalachia. Of those, only about 465 were in the Blue Ridge, within the future park’s boundaries, and of those, 197 owned their homes or property. The rest were tenants, and a few squatters. Of those 197 owners, all were given cash buyouts and offered new homes outside the park boundaries, as were 93 non-property owners who were given moving allowances. These were mostly tenants or caretakers of mountain farms.Kitchen

There were 104 families resettled by state welfare, and 67 who either relocated on their own or were granted permission to live out their lifetimes in their park homes. I know that only equals 461, and I don’t know what category the missing four families belong to, but those are the statistics I found.

Of all the land bought and deeded to the Federal government for the Shenandoah National Park’s creation, only seven percent was owned by the displaced residents. The vast majority of the land, 93 percent, was owned by people who would be considered outsiders; in other words, people who did not live within the future park’s boundaries, and a few who lived there, yet owned so much property as to be wealthy landowners and tenant holders who could easily move elsewhere, and did.

But what a seven percent that was. These were not just suburbanites whose first goal on moving into a new house is to move to a more expensive house. Old house, Fred GearyThese were families who had been there for generations. Many lived in compounds of extended families, with parents, brothers, grandparents all with their own small homes. Some were so poor that they couldn’t afford to move anywhere else. Each family’s circumstance was different, but I guess that every one of them was a complex tangle of emotions, needs, desires, and problems that had to be dealt with before they could pull up roots and leave.

But eventually, one way or another, all but a few of those families packed up and moved out, forcibly or voluntarily. They resettled, for better or worse, and lived out their lives, hopefully in peace and with love. They either bought or were given new homes, and they made do. That’s what we all do. We make do.

You can find Part Six 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.