My Blue Ridge Family Tree (Album)

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

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their time passed. That gate locked against them forever.

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

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

Mary M. Meadows and William Durret Collier wedding photo

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

 

Thomas_and_Florence_Collier_Merica_wedding.r

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

 

Ruth__Ted_Berryman_c.1941-r

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

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

The end.

What Really Happened?

I did not set out to write a multi-part series on the Blue Ridge Mountain evictions, but as the original post became longer and longer, I decided to split it into parts, all of which I will post in upcoming days. Be sure you read parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Seven.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 8

Blue Ridge long

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The Bluest of Ridges

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

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shenandoah: There is Such a Thing as Happiness

While writing a series about the evictions of Blue Ridge Mountains residents to make way for the Shenandoah National Park, which you can see here, I came across a unique book, Burnaby’s Travels Through North America, which relates the Reverend Andrew Burnaby’s impressions of America in 1759.

You can find copy of the entire book, from its 1904 printing, on the wonderful website, archive.org. The book is here. Burnaby’s feelings for the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah are represented perfectly by the exquisite photos of Jon Bilous, below. You can see all his Shenandoah photos here.

The wide-eyed reverend from the Church of England toured Virginia and other parts of the British Colonies, keeping careful notes of what he saw and experienced. From landing on these shores at the Chesapeake Bay, he traveled with Colonel George Washington, who showed the British gentleman around the Old Dominion. Of Shenandoah and the Shenandoah River, he wrote:

It is exceedingly romantic and beautiful, forming great variety of falls, and is so transparent, that you may see the smallest pebble at the depth of eight or ten feet.

Codorus Park PA - Jon BilousOf the Blue Ridge, he wrote:

When I got to the top, I was inexpressibly delighted with the scene which opened before me. Immediately under the mountain, which was covered with chamoedaphnes in full bloom, was a most beautiful river: beyond this an extensive plain, diversified with every pleasing object that nature can exhibit.”

Shenandoah and Massanutten - Jon BilousAnd of Shenandoahans, he wrote:

I could not but reflect with pleasure on the situation of these people; and think if there is such a thing as happiness in this life, that they enjoy it. Far from the bustle of the world, they live in the most delightful climate, and richest soil imaginable; they are everywhere surrounded with beautiful prospects and sylvan scenes; lofty mountains, transparent streams, falls of water, rich valleys, and majestic woods; the whole interspersed with an infinite variety of flowering shrubs, constitute the landscape surrounding them: they are subject to few diseases; are generally robust; and live in perfect liberty: they are ignorant of want, and acquainted with but few vices. Their inexperience of the elegancies of life precludes any regret that they possess not the means of enjoying them but they possess what many princes would give half their dominions for, health, content, and tranquillity of mind.”

Blue Ridge - Big Meadows - Jon BilousI couldn’t agree more.

Superstition Day: Pretty Is As Pretty Does

My mother is 93 and still of good mind. She grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, but plenty of her ancestors were from up in the “hollers.” I like to visit her just before she goes to sleep at night. She snuggles in under the covers, and I curl up next to her. My dog, Pixie, then jumps up on the bed and noses in between us to fall asleep. Then Mom and I talk about things that interest her. Anything but world affairs, anyway; she’s horrified by what she sees on the news. Like most of us, she dislikes war and strife, but she sometimes worries herself sick about “what’s happening to the world.” I don’t want to send her off to sleep with those thoughts, so I save that conversation for mornings.

She likes to talk about girlish things sometimes. Like the little black slippers her father bought her, or the teacher she had all through grammar school. We like to giggle too, over stories of old boyfriends or funny things that happened in school.

And now and then she’ll remember some old superstition she heard as a child. One little boy at her school looked up in sky one morning when there was a sprinkling of rain, saw that the sun was shining through the clouds and, eyes wide, proclaimed, “It’s rainin’ and the sun is shinin,’ someone’s gonna die ‘afore the sun goes down.” She’s told me that one many times, putting on her best Blue Ridge mountain accent, and it always makes her smile. (Me too.)

The other evening she remembered one I hadn’t heard before:

“Wash your face at the dawn of day
in the field on the first nine days of May
and your freckles will go away.”

She said her sister made her go along to perform this ritual as as a young teen. “But it didn’t work,” she said, “I told her it wouldn’t.”

I like those old superstitions, and I know lots of readers like them too. So now and then I’ll collect a few and send them your way.

In honor of my mother’s delight at talking about girly things, here are some girly superstitions:

If your cornbread is rough, your husband’s face will be rough.

To brush your hair after dark will bring sorrow.

If a butterfly lands on you, you will get a new sweetheart.

To make yourself think clearly, put a ring or bracelet on your head.

If you eat burnt bread, your hair will become curly.

If a part of the hem of your skirt is turned up, and you spit on it, you will have a joyful day.

There’s often a shred of logic in superstitions: If you wet a crease you can then “iron” it with your hand over a flat surface. If you want to focus your attention (think clearly), any little trick that you believe will work, will probably help some. And if your cornbread is rough, you certainly won’t get the most handsome cornbread-lovin’ man in the village.

I love superstitions. They’re amusing, perplexing, and often dark and frightening. Their origins are so far from our lives today that we can hardly imagine how they came to be. I know there’s a lot of behavior shaping (“If your cornbread is rough….”) There’s also a lot of fear of the unknown, and a lot of blind hope from people who may otherwise have very little reason for hope.

It’s common to think that belief in superstition if a consequence of ignorance. While that is no doubt true in some cases, I don’t think it’s primarily ignorance that makes people believe in superstition. I believe it’s powerlessness. If you have no money, no education, no suitors, you can at least have hope, and superstitions give concreteness of a sort to hope.

I have loads of superstitions collected in a folder in the back of my file cabinet. I’ve written them down as I’ve heard them, from books, movies, people in different parts of the country, and my mother. I want to share them with you, and so every now and then I’ll do a Superstition Day.

If you have any superstitions you’d like me to add to my lists on Superstition Days, please send them along to me.

May your cornbread always be smooth!