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: Oh, How They Lived!

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.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 4

Blue Ridge long

When things are our own, they tend to become a little more valuable, a little more beautiful, a little more precious. Just like we believe with our whole heart that our team is better, even if the score shows different, and we will defend them, and our belief in their superiority, to the end.

This would be key, of course, when the men from WMountain cabinashington came calling on my Blue Ridge ancestors with their bags of pennies and chewing gum, thinking a few treats for the kids, a few dollars for their parents, and a rational appeal would lure them from the land.

They thought it only logical that these people would want to be upwardly mobile, to move to a newer home on more fertile land. But they would be wrong. It would not be that easy.

Mountain living isn’t for the lazy or unspirited. Up there the winds howl louder, and colder. The ground is nearly impenetrable, the few inches of soil stony and too young to be nutritious to non-native plants, and at any rate little more than highly acidic ground leaves or needles.

Temperatures fall about 5.5 degrees for every 1,000 feet higher in elevation, making growing seasons shorter and crops smaller. Pioneer home

Water is a constant source of worry, whether from solid bedrock that makes a dug well impossible, life-giving springs and streams that occasionally run dry, or life-sucking drought. Winters are cold, sometimes bitterly so, and neighbors and supplies that must be bought are, for better or worse, miles away.

I’ve read that the Scots-Irish and the Germans took to the Blue Ridge because the lower, more fertile land was all taken. If bottom land was available, it was at prices these mostly poor immigrants couldn’t afford.

So they came to the mountains, where only the hearty would thrive, and who were more hearty than the Scots-Irish and Germans? They carved their homes from the mountainsides and began life anew in the Blue Ridge, and after a few years or a few generations, could not even imagine living anywhere else.Koonz chimney

Work on a mountain farm is constant, as it is on any farm. But the results are more meager. Our ancestors could grow little past what was necessary to feed the children, though some years there was enough for a pair of new shoes for each of them.

Maybe the mountaineers didn’t work harder than we do. Everyone I know works hard. But the mountaineers’ work was more desperate. If my friends don’t work hard, they can’t afford $200 dinners once or twice a week. If the mountaineers didn’t work hard, they wouldn’t bring in enough food to last the winter. If my friends don’t work hard, they can’t afford their $400 shoes. If the mountaineers didn’t work hard, they couldn’t afford any shoes.

But to the hearty souls who carved into Green Mountain or Piney Mountain or Grindstone Mountain, this was not dispiriting. My grandmother, Florence Collier Merica, spoke of how hard she and her sisters worked on their parents’ farm on the mountain above Naked Creek. Mill, Rockingham

They, as I’ve written elsewhere, “hoed corn all day and danced all night.” They looked forward to “visiting day,” when neighbors from over the mountain, or from the next hollow up, would come a’visiting. Each family put out food, for every guest to those homes, invited or not, must be offered food. It was the Blue Ridge way.  You never knew who would come. They’d stay a while, catch up on news and gossip, then move on down the trail.

Yes, there was time for dance, and fun, and love, and they did all that. A cousin related at several points by both blood and marriage, Bela Lam, who went on to record his music in New YorkBela Lam 45rpm and Richmond, played music at their parties, as did others in this music-loving neck of the woods.

One year my grandfather cooked up the idea of a Halloween party to keep the kids from going out and getting in trouble, and asked Bela to play. It worked. A different cousin collected folk song sheet music and lyrics, and had a vast store of them in an upstairs bedroom of my great grandmother’s home. I wish I knew what became of them when she died.

On Saturday nights neighbors would come to my grandparents’ home because they had the community’s first radio. It was in the parlor, and my grandfather took chairs from the dining room and set them around.My grandmother put a couple of straw mattresses and blankets in the corner, and that’s where the children sat.

Later in the evening, after Amos and Andy, and well into the Grand Ole’ Opera, the children drifted off to sleep. After the show was over, their parents gently picked them up and carried them home. My mother’s mother let her sleep there the entire night sometimes.

Their home was farther out from the mountain’s base, down Naked Creek and around the bend at Fleeburg. Thold farmis is where Florence Collier and Thomas Merica built their home when they got married and came down from the mountain.

Even before the park evictions, most of the homes were not high up, they were in the greater valley, or gathered at the lower elevations, inside the hollows that cleave the mountains, the houses clustered there as if they all slipped down the mountainsides and came to rest nearly on top of each other at the bottom, dotted on opposite sides of a rough trail, or better, a streambed.

Even deep within the mountains, most residents lived in the hollows: Hensley Hollow, Weaver Hollow, Turner Hollow, Crow Hollow, Allen Hollow, Fox Hollow.

Around them, these farmers planted crops and gardens in the more fertile topsoil that flowed down from the mountaintops with every creek and cloudburst.

But whether on the mountain or in the hollows, they raised corn and beans, planted orchards of apples and plums, raised their famiZerkelImagelies and buried their old, and often their young too, in cemeteries just a few steps away. Midwives delivered babies, herbalists consulted on medicine, and occasionally, the fortune teller up in the woods near Waynesboro read nervous young women’s futures.

My great grandmother used mustard plaster for colds, wild cherry bark for coughs, baking soda for stomachaches, and a little brandy in hot water for winter’s chill. To this day, I use cherry cough drops, baking soda in water for stomachache, and warm brandy (without the water) for a deep chill.

The mountaineers supplemented their diets with food gleaned from the forest. Chestnuts, berries, morels, venison, squirrel, raccoon, horseradish, sassafrass. I think of horseradish as a relish or lightly-applied sauce, but my mother told me of a young poor girl she saw who had nothing but a bag of wild horseradish to eat for lunch. She never forgot that girl, and now I don’t think I will either.

In some ways Farm buildingmy Blue Ridge ancestors and their neighbors lived their lives nearly free from outside contact. That wasn’t unusual for many communities, mountain or not, before rail or the automobile. But changing ways was inevitable once the auto started to become popular.

That kind of progress can’t be stopped, and neither can the change that comes with it. Even if the government didn’t take their lands, change would have started happening more and more rapidly for my Blue Ridge ancestors, and maybe their culture would have been lost by now just the same. We’ll never know for sure.

What we do know is that hindsight is everything. Even the Park Service wishes now that the men and women who came to record how these Blue Ridge people lived would have hSpring house entrancead more respect for their customs and folkways; would have preserved the way of life as best they could, because now it is irretrievably lost.

But the park builders had their deadlines, and so we can never go back to see our great grandparents’ homes. But the shiny side of that coin is that today we can see the mountains as they were when our fifth and sixth great grandparents first saw them and decided, “Here we will live.” And, oh, did they ever!

Who else can say that?!

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

The Family Ties that Bind

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 and Two. I also want to thank Jon Bilous for the use of his exquisite Blue Ridge photos. You can see his entire Blue Ridge portfolio here.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 3

Blue Ridge longMost Americans blow away from their family trees like fall leaves in a high wind. They drift to wherever jobs and prevailing winds take them, commence flying the local colors and rooting for their new local team, and forget any loyalties they ever had elsewhere, remembering family only as a holiday obligation.

But we’re not all like that, are we? I was born of a 10th generation Virginian, my mother’s Meador ancestors first arriving in Virginia from England in 1636. They’ve now stayed in Virginia for 378 years and counting. In fact, the family name moved more than the family did, morphing from Meador to Meadows sometime over their first two centuries here.

By 1743 the Meadows family moved from Virginia’s coastal plains at the Rappahannock to the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, on Hightop Mountain, near Swift Run Gap, and thus I was born not just to a 10th generation Virginian, but to a fifth generation Blue Ridgian. Indeed, seven of my mother’s eight great grandparents were from those mountains, the origins of the eighth being so far unaccounted for.Blue Ridge - Big Meadows - Jon Bilous

This is not unusual in the Blue Ridge. In fact, it’s typical. What is unusual is that my mother moved all the way to California. It’s unusual because most people born to the Blue Ridge don’t leave. It’s unusual because she is the only one of nine children to leave. It’s unusual because… here it comes… 94 percent of those born in Appalachia (of which the Blue Ridge is part) are descended from families that have been there since the American Revolution, five, six generations ago.

I am from California, where everyone is from somewhere else, and so to me that is an astonishing testament to the bonds that tie my mother’s family and other Blue Ridge natives to their homes and families. I should add that I am not just astonished, I am envious. My childhood home is gone, vanished, my clan disbursed like dandelion seeds in the wind to take root elsewhere. From six or more related households within a few miles of each other in Encinitas and Leucadia, California, we blew outward to Oregon, Washington, North Carolina, the High Sierras, Alaska, and elsewhere. No one is left in our little hometown. Even our home is gone, torn down to make way for something bigger.

Blue Ridge mists - Jon Bilous.GIFWhat are these ties that bind some so firmly to family and place? Why are Blue Ridge natives (for I’m interested only in Blue Ridge natives, not Appalachians in general) so different from the rest of the country? I found a Facebook page that’s open only to those whose ancestors are from that one small area of Virginia. It’s an active site and its members are amazingly knowledgeable about their and even their neighbors’ ancestors. I’ve never seen that anywhere else. They are historians, and clearly love their work. They are also clearly proud of their ancestors. There are certain surnames that have prestige, the honor of a long history in the Blue Ridge. The Breedens, Lams, Eppards, Turners, Deans, Meadows, Hammers. And some, like the Hensleys and Shifflets, are genealogical royalty, their families spread across those mountains for centuries, like history’s icing.

We’ve all seen people who proudly announce their ancestors are this president, that king, some other inventor or explorer. When telling you, they have a pleased expression, as if thinking that genetic connection makes them smarter, or more important in the scheme of history. But it’s different in the Blue Ridge. When those descendents proudly point to a photo of their ancestor, you’re likely to find yourself looking at a worn-out looking man or woman dressed in old, maybe tattered clothes, maybe sitting in front of a barely-standing shack in a dirt yard.

Blue Ridge forest fog - Jon BilousI get that. Those are my ancestors too, at least on my mother’s side. Within this Blue Ridge genealogy group on a Facebook page, I have that same pride. The blood of these strong, determined, American pioneers runs through my veins. They climbed the mountains, hacked their homes from the wilderness, raised strong families, fended for themselves, helped their neighbors, never infringed on anyone else and asked only to never be infringed upon. Their clothes were raggedy, but yours would be too if you had just made America. While Thomas Jefferson and John Adams may have been the brains that created this country, these people were the backbone that gave America its strength and character.

They made their homes in the mountains of Virginia, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen on the five continents I’ve traveled, and so grand a place that their descendents have stayed through half a dozen generations, staying as close to those original Blue Ridge mountain homes as they can. They’re bound to that place by some undefinable force. Way out here in California I feel it too, pulling me back to a place I’ve never lived.

When I was growing up I would sometimes say that my mother was from the South. That gross inaccuracy always rankled her, and she would correct me, “I am not from the South, I am a Virginian.” That is an important distinction, something she’s always been proud of. She is equally proud to be from Shenandoah, and if there were some sort of shorthand way of saying it so others would understand, I’m sure she would proudly tell people she is from close to where her grandparents and great grandparents and great great and great great great grandparents lived their entire lives, back to five generations ago.

Unlike the 94 percent who remain there all their lives, she didn’t want to stay. She wanted all the experiences a bigger world could give her. But she took Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge with her, and then she passed them on to me. Like I say, I have Blue Ridge in my blood. I feel richer for it. And who knows, maybe some day I will live there.

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

Blue Ridge in My Blood

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

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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