J. Wiley Aker, my grandfather, was originally from Western North Carolina / Virginia area in the 1890's. I'd like to visit the area from our home in central Pennsylvania for a several day trip. Does anyone know what sights or events I could use to talk my Pennsylvania Dutch, Moravian wife in going and seeing there? Do not tell about Moravian cookies in Winston Salem, that would of course be a required stop. I'm more interested in anything that would be around the area described in the story.
I'll trade the first couple of chapters of my Grandfather's book my Aunt had self-published back in the 1950's. I think it's interesting and it could be a story of our future if the Ayn Rand devotees get their way.
More below. Women's history quiz: What is a grass widow?
Why did they call the town Pinhook? Well, it was not a town, just a community center in the heart of a big moonshine district about thirty-five miles from the nearest railroad, and five miles from the corner where Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina all join. The citizens, many of the veterans, met at the store and post office and the old water-power grist-mill of my father’s on weekends to pitch horseshoes, play checkers, drink moonshine, and sometimes fight the Civil War all over again. “Fist and skull fighting”, they called it. Now and then they used bulldog pistols and Bowie knives. Oh yes, they called the community center, Pinhook, because about all the fish-hooks we had back in the ‘80’s were made of pins. My uncle, Floyd Anderson, a great uncle, could make good fish-hooks out of horseshoe nails, and he also caught fish with a horse-hair snare. We thought Uncle Floyd was a great man. He was the king moonshiner and bootlegger of the district and his still-house, about five miles up in the mountains from the mill and post office, had a pet black bear and a small herd of Virginia deer.
Ma’s father, Grandpa Perkins, stayed with us a lot, and when he bragged about fighting in Lee’s Army, Ma would say, “Pap, all you ever did in Lee’s Army was make horse collars.” Grandpa was a horse collar maker by trade. When Aunt Sarah Ann Aker, a spinster, would brag about Grandpa Aker coming over England in the Mayflower, Ma would say, “That ain’t so, Grandpa Aker was found under an oak tree in Wise County, Virginia, by a farmer. His parents probably came over in a brig and dropped him under the acorn tree. The farmers who found him named him, Jefferson Acorn. When he grew up he came up here to Grayson County and homesteaded one hundred, sixty acres along the North Carolina state line under the name of Jefferson Acorn. Later he homesteaded another one hundred sixty acres in Ash County, North Carolina, adjoining the original homestead, under the name Jeff Aker. You know the state line runs through the middle of the three hundred twenty acre farm. After all you children grew up he ran off with a grass widow and has never been heard of since.” At that Aunt Sarah Ann always left the house and Ma laughed. Of course I don’t know how true Ma’s story was. She was always a rebel and as my father passed away when I was a boy, maybe I inherited much of her rebellious spirit. She was not afraid of man or devil.
All my father left for my mother was the old grist-mill, one girl and four boys. I was not big enough to walk three miles to school, but old enough to be always in the way and in constant danger of getting hurt around the old mill or getting drowned in the mill pond. So my mother let me live the grandparents, uncles and aunts. Some of my cousins did not have too much respect for the law, especially the liquor laws.
Uncle Floyd’s still-house was my greatest attraction. Sometimes he would give the pet bear whiskey, and when it was groggy he turned it loose for a while to romp and play. Sometimes the pet deer got tipsy from eating the corn meal after the whiskey had been distilled out of it, and there is nothing funnier than an intoxicated deer. There were also a few mountain trout in Little Helton, the stream that passed by the still-house.
Uncle Floyd taught me to fish, and hunt and shoot a gun, pistol and hand bows. At the age of six and seven I could kill squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, and quail. He often let me go possum and coon hunting with him. I resolved then, if I lived to be old like Uncle, I too, would build me a cabin in the mountains and spend my old age fishing, hunting, reading, and doing just the things I wanted to do. That resolution became the dream of my life and I have lived to realize it.
Most every day Uncle Floyd read Bible stories to me about Samson, old Jacob, Job, Moses, King David, old Noah, and others. However, I would not say all the influences at Uncle Floyd’s still-house were the best for a boy, and I can not say they were the worst influences in the world. Sometimes Uncle would imbibe for several days and nights, or until he saw Aunt Cassie’s crippled, rheumatic hand on the neck of his black bottle. That always scared me. Aunt Cassie had been dead for many years. He often let me drink some of the mash, or ‘wort’, when it was ready to distill, and sometimes the world went around upside down.
When my kinfolks, who were religious, according to their standard or conception of religion, realized that, through their neglect, they were making a criminal out of me and began to try to make me go to school and stay away from Uncle Floyd’s still, I rebelled and dodged around in the mountains from one still-house to another for two or three years.
Finally, one dark night I got together my few belongings and said to myself, “Goodbye, you-all!” So far as any one knew, I evaporated. I took to the woods, going north and west, shunning roads and people. I slept in fence corners, haystacks, and barns, when possible. I ate roasting ears, wild grapes, fruit and berries—anything I could forage.
It must have been September, 1893, when I reached Mayberry, West Virginia, a coal mining town in McDowell County. I was about twelve years old, a stranger in a strange land, but the hardships experienced during that pilgrimage from Grayson County, Virginia to the coal-fields of West Virginia, may have played an important part in preparing my mind for the tragedy that befell me some seven years later.
The boys at Mayberry, of my age, were a tough, mongrel lot, and I had to fight for a place among them. It was here that Uncle Jake stepped into my life.
Uncle Jake was a copper colored, old bald, slave negro from Virginia. I think he must have known my people, but he never told me so. He never protected me in a wrong, but saw to it that I was not teamed up on and always got fair play. That was not all, he got me a job in the coal mine near where he dug and loaded coal.
At the time, many boys from twelve on up worked in coal mines, keeping doors on the air course and tending switches on the tracks for the mule drivers and dinky engines that distributed empty mine cars to the coal diggers and gathered the loaded cars which were hauled outside the mine where the coal was dumped into gondolas for the market. The boys were called trappers. But, before telling more of my mining experience, I must tell a little more about Uncle Jake.
He was a childless, hard-shell Baptist preacher, but believed in keeping on hand a little moonshine corn whiskey for ”the stomach’s sake.” He did not believe in education outside the Bible. To him, the Bible contained all the knowledge necessary to a man’s health and happiness. The more I see of this world’s wars and falsehoods and greeds, the more of a hard-shell, like Uncle Jake, I become. He could read, but never read anything but the Bible. He could not pronounce half the words correctly, but he knew their meaning. He was a nature worshiper and could pray sweetest prayers I ever heard in a rhythmic, sing-song tone of voice, characteristic of all hardshells. He thanked God, in his prayers for everything; fields, forests, birds, animals, pearls, precious metals, naming each of them. I have to admit that Uncle Jake’s prayers profoundly influenced my entire life.
He was different from the average coal miner. His old white headed wife scrubbed the hardwood floors of their little cottage daily. Her linen was spotlessly white. When you entered their home you felt like removing both your shoes and hat.
About three times a week old Jake invited me to his house after work hours. After telling a few Bible stories in a humorous manner, he would reach under the bed, pull a jug of corn whiskey, and pour out two table glasses about two-third full of the one hundred proof moonshine and mix sips with his stories. When I did not have to work on Sundays I usually dropped around to his home just before it was time for him to preach to his congregation and listen to him pray and his people sing.
CHAPTER II
SOME EARLY EXPERIENCES AT MAYBERRY
On my first job in the mines I received fifty cents for ten hours work. Sometimes I worked extra hours which brought my check up to fifteen dollars and eighteen dollars per month. Board and room cost seven dollars per month; and suit of shoddy clothes, eight dollars to ten dollars; overalls, thirty cents to fifty cents; shoes, seventy five cents to one dollar per pair, etc. If you did not do all your buying at the company store, you were fired.
I trapped for about one and a half years when I was promoted to spragger and extra mule driver with an increase in pay to one dollar per day. In another year I was again promoted to brakeman on one of the little twenty five ton dickeys used to haul mine cars, and my pay increased to one dollar and sixty cents per day.
The little coal cars we handled held five tons, and the coal diggers received seventy five cents per car for mining and loading by hand five tons of soft coal. One day the old engineer I broke for figured out the overhead and total cost to the company per ton to get the coal to the gondolas. According to his figures, the company paid thirty cents for the “Black Diamond” per ton, and when it was dumped into the big cars, they received seven dollars per ton.
But I was not interested in the company’s profits. I had always worked for my clothes and keep, and forty dollars to fifty dollars per month was the most money I had ever seen. All I was interested in was my job and getting the coal in the gondolas. Probably it was for that reason that Ed Stephens, the mine boss, took a great liking for me and, when his sister Mary, from the countryside visited his home in Mayberry, the boss invited me to spend several evenings with him. But I was very much embarrassed in the presence of ladies; that is, on my first few visits. This was around 1896, when I was only fifteen and Mary must have been at least twenty.
In the fall of ’96, old Mother Jones from Pennsylvania slipped into Mayberry and held labor union meetings nights in the wooded hollows outside the town and organized the miners. They went out on strike, and the company set the furniture of the strikers out of the company houses into the streets and roads. The strikers found a small plot of privately owned land on top of a nearby mountain, and moved onto it in tents. The railroads and horsepower transfers refused to haul any supplies to the strikers and they soon starved out and came back to the mines for less pay than they received formerly. The company said, “Let that be a lesson to you.” Such treatment may have been some of the reasons why John L Lewis was born around that period.
There were no bath or change rooms in the camp. The only bath tubs I saw in the town were zinc wash tubs. Some miners only bathed all over on special occasions. No compensation laws and no insurance except a few wildcat companies that preyed upon the miners. Men were killed or crippled for life almost daily and, generally, their families were evacuated from the company house. In such cases, often, mothers and children camped in the woods and lived on mesh until rescued by relatives.
I have not told you that the population of Mayberry was about one thousand, mostly southern negroes, but miners had been imported from many European countries; Hungary, Italy, Spain, Wales, Belgium, England, and others. The Shemokin Coal and Coke Company, where I worked, was the largest in the immediate section. The superintendent, office and store employees were mostly Pennsylvania Dutch.
The town was built at the mouth of Buck’s Hollow in McDowell County on Elk Horn Creek. The ridges on both sides of the wide draw were covered with bushes, briers, hemlock and other pinacous trees and shrubs. There were some seventy five weather boarded houses and cottages, an office building, company store, a church, school house and many boxed-up shacks. There was no running water or sewerage system and but few outside toilets. The main lavatory was the concealing bushes on the hillsides. Shallow wells for domestic water were dug here and there in the bottom of the draw and, during the long spring rains, human waste washed down and soaked into the wells, causing epidemics of diarrhea, fever, and other diseases each summer. Some years, men, women, and children died like flies. There were no hospitals or trained nurses. We had horseflies, mosquitoes and bed bugs galore. The only way we knew to fight them was to roll, tumble, and scratch.
Over twenty years ago we drove through Maybeury West Viriginia (I think the name's misspelled above). It is only slightly better off now. Upon request I will type out the next couple of chapters were he goes to the Spanish American War comes back to Maybeury and loses an arm and a leg in mining accident.