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.

At the Wheel: The Life of Jessie Merica, Part 1

Jessie MericaI don’t know if Jessie Thomas Merica was a horse-obsessed boy, but even if he was, I bet he soon forgot ole’ Pet the family equine once the automobile came into his life.

Jessie was born in 1916, which was exactly the right time for a boy who would have a life-long love affair with cars. His was one of the first generations to grow up with the automobile, mostly those 4-cylinder 20-horsepower open-top Model T jobs, a simple, economical car invented by Henry Ford that would dominate America’s roads for 20 years. Until Ford’s modern marvel the average car sold for about $4,000, twice the average American’s income. Ford introduced the assembly line into manufacturing, bringing the Model T’s price in at $825.

Car ownership suddenly surged. The roads filled with Ford’s black Tin Lizzies, a tin can of a car in a world that before then had only known expensive, custom-made, hand-built autos. The Tin Lizzie was reliable, though, and even stubborn old farmers saved for them.

The first car in Shenandoah, where Jesse’s family lived, was owned by Dr. B. C. Shuler, and it turned heads everywhere he went. One day Jessie’s mother, Florence Merica, walked with a friend from their home in the Fleeburg district into town. They met Dr. Schuler there going about his business, and the three got to talking. When the women admired his car, he told them to hop in and he’d give them a ride home.

That ride gave Florence a notion that the Mericas needed a car too, and she made up her mind right then that her family would have one.

By 1929 over half of all American families owned a car. And the Merica family wasn’t about to be on the zero side of that equation. They weren’t the first in Fleeburg to have a car. But they weren’t the last. Tom Merica, Jessie’s father, brought home a Model T Ford with canvas top, eisenglass windows, and a bud vase, which was strictly an aftermarket addition for those who wanted a little elegance with their basic black car.

That Model T was the beginning of a love affair that lasted Jessie’s whole life. No, not just a love affair. It was also a job, a business, a recreation, even a grudge.

He was already used to being the family chauffeur even before the Merica family joined the new mobile era. When his mother wanted to visit her two sisters or mother up at #2 Furnace or Jollett Hollow she often asked Jessie to drive the wagon those six or so miles. She could do it herself, but liked when he came along.

Model T FordBut his best days were after he was allowed to chauffeur the car, especially when his mother asked him to drive her to her third sister, Jessie’s Aunt Emmie.

From their home in Fleeburg, a district of Shenandoah, Emmie’s home in Newport News was a good 175 miles or more. Instead of the three hours it would take today, it was a good half-day trip, four or more blissful hours of steering along curving, straight, rising, dipping, bumpy, and occasionally smooth roads from nearly one edge of the state to the other, ending at the Atlantic Ocean.

Jessie and his mother sat up front and talked together a good part of the way while Jessie’s little sisters, Ruthy and Annie, rode in the back seat. On hot summer days with the top down the the girls sat up and let the wind whip their hair. When they’d had enough they crawled off the seats and rode crouched on the floor till they were ready to climb back up and start the cycle again.

Buckroe Beach amusement park.GIFOn one of those trips to Newport News Jessie took Ruthy and his mother, Florence, to the Buckroe Beach amusement park. Florence rode the ferris wheel with a grin as wide as her face, then said once was enough, and she was glad she wouldn’t have to do that again.

Jessie took Ruthy off to ride the roller coaster and carousel, and play carnival games. But when he spotted a pretty girl, it was all over for Ruthy.

He stood up straight, pulled his shoulders back, ambled over and asked the object of his interest if she would go on the ferris wheel with him. While they were twirling in the sky Jessie leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Ruthy watched from the carriage behind in awe and embarrassment.

Buckroe Beach ticketJessie and his new girl played more carnival games while Ruthy tagged along behind. He won a prize and gave it to the current love interest, then they disappeared into a photo booth and had their picture taken. Ruthy had her picture taken too. Jessie gave the photos to Ruthy on the way home and asked her to put them someplace safe.

Once home she slid his under the cloth mantle on the piano. There it stayed until several years later when Jessie brought home the love of his life, a pretty young lady named Emily Doom, and announced that she would be his wife.

Ruth – for she was a young lady now too and no longer went by Ruthy – took out the photo and showed it to Emily, thinking Emily should know that Jessie once kissed another girl. Emily just smiled. She knew Jessie had never loved another.

But before Jesse would meet and marry Emily, he had some more growing up to do. He needed to learn a trade. But more than anything he needed a car.

Winter roadOne dank winter day Jesse took Ruthy along in the family car to pick up Uncle Nash, the aged black man who lived in a dark home by the railroad tracks in Shenandoah.

Uncle Nash was still eating his breakfast, a big plate of ham and eggs and pancakes that powerfully scented the small room.

Jessie looked around, then told Uncle Ned, “Well, I think I’ll just take today off. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned, Ruthy followed. They stopped to visit their oldest sister, Ola Grimsley, before leaving Shenandoah for home. It was too cold to work that day.

By the time Jessie was 15 his older brother Charles had taken control of the family car, and because Jessie desperately needed to drive, that meant he had to buy his own. So he worked hard, saved his money, told no one, and one day pulled into the driveway in his own car, a Model T, like his father’s.1910 Model T Ford

His reception was not what he expected, though. Instead of being heralded as the bright, industrious hero he thought himself to be, his father told him in no uncertain terms that he was not to have his own car, and to “get that thing out of here.” He said Jessie was still too young, too irresponsible.

Tom Merica, Jessie’s father, was as big, strapping, and handsome as Jessie. And he was as stubborn as Jessie. Thus an argument ensued. Jessie lost, and here is when Jessie decided he was man enough to leave home.

He was already responsible for hiring and managing the field hands on their farm, like Uncle Nash. He chose them, decided where and when they would work, showed them how it was done, paid them, picked them up and took them home when need be.

Tom and Jessie could not come to terms on the car. “Get rid of the car or leave,” Tom said.Jesse Merica c.1950 I don’t know if Jessie’s father already understood the outcome of that ultimatum. Maybe anger clouded his mind. Maybe he thought Jessie would back down. But no, that was not to happen.

Part 2 of At the Wheel: The Life of Jessie Merica will be published next Monday. To ensure you don’t miss it, enter your email address in the box at the top right of this page, and it will be mailed to you. Or, follow via WordPress. 

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.