Literary Pocahontas County
Locust Creek in the mist

Pearl S. Buck, Nobel Laureate

The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace is an imposing white house just outside of Hillsboro. The gray landmark sign in front reads, in part: "Pearl Sydenstricker Buck....was born here at the Stulting Place June 26, 1892. In 1938, she achieved further distinction when she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for literature...." Evidently we are to understand that birth in such a place would be distinction enough for most people. The "Stulting Place" is indeed distinctive. It was intended to recreate the Stulting home in Utrecht, where Pearl Buck's great-grandfather had owned a large furniture factory.

Pearl Buck's parents were missionaries, home on leave from China when she was born here. When she was three months old, her parents returned to China. Except for a childhood visit to Hillsboro and her college years at Randolph Macon Women's College, Pearl Buck spent the first half of her life in China. Pocahontas County was important to Pearl Buck in so far as her mother's life was shaped here. In 1936, Buck published a lightly fictionalized account of her mother's life, called The Exile, in which she describes Carie Stulting's family history and childhood in Pocahontas County.

Next to her mother's birthplace stands Pearl Buck's father's childhood home. The Sydenstricker house was disassembled in its original Greenbrier County, WV location, brought to Hillsboro, and reassembled in the 1970's. It is a very different structure from the "Stulting Place." The Sydenstricker house is an old farmhouse, with a log section and a sawed lumber addition. There is a long, inviting front porch, and the addition suggests old-fashioned rural prosperity, but it is clearly built for function, not for show.

Pearl S. Buck on West Virginia

West Virginia has always been a personally important and interesting State in my life for it was there that I was born. My paternal and maternal ancestors had settled there in pre-Revolutionary times, and there the two families have remained ever since, except for those wanderers, my parents.....

My judgements of my native state must, of course, be colored by my personal experiences there. My forefathers on both sides were among the most fortunate. Politically my paternal ancestors, accustomed to Virginia and Virginian ways, sided with the Confederacy, and four of my uncles fought in the Confederate Army. They owned rich land around Lewisburg and were far from the mines and the poverty. They were educated at fine schools and universities, and today are among the so-called well-to-do. It is inevitable, since my maternal family was equally fortunate and in addition became musicians and artists, that my opinions regarding West Virginia are biased. I believe there is nothing to keep the state poor or backward. the people as I have known them are energetic, intelligent and of strong warm nature. I resent the notion that poverty and backwardness are endemic to West Virginia. To me it is a state ready for progress in every area--ready and able.

Quoted from Pearl Buck's America. Text by Pearl S. Buck, Photographs from Life. Published by Bartholomew House Ltd. 1971 (ISBN 0-87794-029-0).The book consists of a few photos and paragraphs for each state. West Virginia occupies pages 300-304.

The Good Earth

Buck's most famous work is the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good Earth. I reread it recently, and was most impressed by the painstaking description of everyday details. The language is deceptively simple, and sometimes recalls the cadences of the King James Bible, not a surprising connection for a missionary's daughter.

Clinging thus to the outskirts of the great, sprawling, opulent city it seemed that at least there could not be any lack of food. Wang Lung and his family had come from a country where if men starve it is because there is no food, since the land cannot bear under a relentless heaven. Silver in the hand was worth little because it could buy nothing where nothing was.

Here in the city there was food everywhere. The cobbled streets of the fish market were lined with great baskets of big silver fish, caught in the night out of the teeming river; with tubs of small shining fish, dipped out of a net cast over a pool; with heaps of yellow crabs, squirming and nipping in peevish astonishment; with writhing eels for gourmands at the feasts. At the grain markets there were such baskets of grain that a man might step into them and sink and smother and none know it who did not see it; white rice and brown and dark yellow wheat and pale gold wheat, and yellow soybeans and red beans and green broad beans and canary-colored millet and grey sesame. And at the meat markets whole hogs hung by their necks, split open the length of their great bodies to show the red meat and the layers of goodly fat, the skin soft and thick and white. And duck shops hung row upon row, over their ceilings and in their doors, the brown baked ducks that had been turned slowly on a spit before coals and the white salted ducks and the strings of duck giblets, and so with the shops that sold geese and pheasant and every kind of fowl.

As for the vegetables, there was everything which the hand of man could coax from the soil; glittering red radishes and white, hollow lotus root and taro, green cabbages and celery, curling bean sprouts and brown chestnuts and garnishes of fragrant cress. There was nothing which the appetite of man might desire that was not to be found upon the streets of the markets of that city. And going hither and thither were the vendors of sweets and fruits and nuts and little delicately spiced balls of pork wrapped in dough and steamed, and sugar cakes made from glutinous rice, and the children of the city ran out to the vendors of these things with their hands full of pennies and they bought and they ate until their skins glistened with sugar and oil.

Yes, one would say that in this city there could be none who starved.

The Good Earth, pp 94-95.

To me, this recalls

"And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly abouve the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth."

It is difficult for us to comprehend how little the average novel-reading American of the 1930's knew about China, but Ms. Buck makes the alien culture seem novel but not really so different from us with passages like this description of New Year's celebrations.

The New Year approached and in every house in the village there were preparations. Wang Lung went into the town to the candlemaker's shop and he bought squares of red paper on which were brushed in gilt ink the letter for happiness and some with the letter for riches, and these squares he pasted upon his farm utensils to bring him luck in the new year. Upon his plow and upon the ox's yoke and upon the two buckets in which he carried his fertilizer and his water, upon each of these things he pasted a square. And then upon the doors of his house he pasted long strips of red paper brushed with mottoes of good luck, and over his doorway he pasted a fringe of red paper cunningly cut into a flower pattern and very finely cut. And he bought red paper to make new dresses for the gods, and this the old man did cleverly enough for his old shaking hands, and Wang Lung took them and put them upon the two small gods in the temple to the earth and he burned a little incense before them for the sake of the New Year. And for his house he bought also two red candles to burn on the eve of the year upon the table under the picture of a god, which was pasted on the wall of the middle room above where the table stood. The Good Earth, pp 40-41.

Pearl S. Buck resources on the Internet

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Louise McNeill, West Virginia Poet Laureate (1911-1993)

<i>Gauley Mountain</i> by Louise McNeill

Louise McNeill was born near Buckeye in 1911, and grew up on the family farm by the Greenbrier River above Swago Creek. She began teaching in Pocahontas County's one-room schools in 1930. In her 1988 memoir, The Milkweed Ladies, she says she began writing poetry as a teenager. She was rewarded with early success, and her best-known book of poetry is Gauley Mountain, published in 1939, with a foreword by Stephen Vincent Benet. McNeill received the Bread Loaf Publication Award for Time is Our House and the West Virginia Library Association Annual Book Award for Paradox Hill, both collections of poetry.

milkweed ladies ready to pop

Gauley Mountain is McNeill's most popular book in Pocahontas County. Most of the people you meet here are familiar with some of the memorable characterizations of early settlers to this region, and some latecomers as well. It's not clear whether McNeill perfectly captured the tone and content of many local family histories, or whether her book has shaped how the people here see themselves and their ancestors. It is most likely a combination of the two. The entire text of Gauley Mountain is available on line, and the book can be ordered on line as well.

milkweed ladies sail away

The Milkweed Ladies (1988, University of Pittsburgh Press) is a brief but vivid memoir of Ms. McNeill's childhood and early life in her Pocahontas County home. The title is taken from a poem McNeill composed as a child for her playhouse tea parties, where her guests were made of milkweed pod fluff:

Milkweed ladies so fair and fine,
Won't you have a sip of my columbine?
Or a thimble of thimbleberry wine?

I consider it among the best nature writing I have read. Her main focus is memior, but it is a memior of a life well aware of its connection to the natural world. Here are a few quotes.

The farm, a wide plateau of rocky, loam-dark fields, lies above Swago Creek, along the Greenbrier River of West Virginia and some twenty-five to thirty miles north of the Virginia line. This patch of earth is held within a half-stadium of limestone cliffs and mountain pastures. On the surface, the Swago Farm is quiet and solid, green in summer and in winter deep with snow. It has its level fields, its fence rows and hilly pastures. There are some two hundred acres of trees and bluegrass, running water, and the winding, dusty paths that cattle and humans have kept open through the years. There are three small woodlands, two of them still virgin and mostly of oak. (p 3)

Until I was sixteen years old, until the roads came, the farm was about all I knew: our green meadows and hilly pastures, our storied old men, the great rolling seasons of moon and sunlight, our limestone cliffs and trickling springs....But before I grew up and went out into the world--and a bloody thing I found it--we were all at home there in our faded cottage in the meadow, all of us safe and warm. Sometimes now, a quiet sense comes to me, the cool mist blowing in my face as though I am walking through islands of fog and drifting downhill slowly southward until I feel the mountains behind my shoulder. (pp 5-7)

Because those years were the years of my childhood, I might tell them in a way that would break my heart. But my heart does not break. There is a kind of benison that falls sometimes on the fields and mountains....And though I realize that I am old now, so that the years play tricks on me, it is all still there sometimes, an unchanged presence, even the rat manure in the water spring; and sometimes we are still at home and it is summer. (p 31)

In winter I sometimes went out early and walked the fields of our farm alone. I liked to go on mornings of fresh snowfall, when all the meadows were trackless and hushed with white. I would walk up through Captain Jim's old orchard and when I got near the moss-gray trees along the rail fence, I would begin to see the little animal tracks and would follow them up and down along the edge of the woods.

There were the triangular prints of the rabbits, or the little field mice tracks like delicate lace woven across the snow. Sometimes there might be fox tracks, on track in front of the other in a straight line. After a warm night, there might be skunk tracks, like little human footprints but with a soft white dab where the tail had brushed the snow; and up in the bushes the bird tracks made dark little stitches mending the hill. There were also the round cat tracks, no claws showing, retracted feline tread; and one morning I saw blood on the snow.

Sometimes I could feel the others close around me, down in their little burrows in the earth: the gray, sleeping wood mice; the little striped ground squirrels; and the soft curled-up rabbits, the snoring old groundhogs, and the ring-tailed raccoons. Then the silence would come down, as though it fell on our meadows from the high whiteness of Pinnacle Rock. (pp 63-64)

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John O'Brien

Book Cover: At Home in the Heart of Appalachia

Identified in the Pocahontas Times as a "recently deceased Pocahontas County author," (March 31, 2005; page 9) John O'Brien's book At Home in the Heart of Appalachia details his relationship with West Virginia, including Pocahontas County. His publisher, Random House, has an informative Web site about the book, including author interviews and an excerpt.

There are several other reviews by Appalachian publications available on the Internet. The Smokey Mountain News published a November, 2001 review by Gary Carden, entitled "Appalachian Home: Constant outside influences have little effect on the abiding culture of these mountains." Amy Quigley reviewed At Home in the heart of Appalachia for the West Virginia University Alumni Magazine, Spring, 2002 edition, and Belinda Anderson interviewed O'Brien for West Virginia Division of History and Culture's Artworks Spring, 2002 issue.

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Stephen Coonts

Book Cover: Flight of the Intruder Book Cover: Saucer Book Cover: Liars and Thieves Book Cover: The Cannibal Queen

Originally from Buckhannon, West Virginia, Stephen Coonts owns a home in Pocahontas County. He has written the occasional letter to the editor of the Pocahontas Times. He is, however, much better known for his aviation thrillers. He has an interesting Web site where fans can read about his latest work, buy books, and even read his advice on becoming a writer. I've included the Amazon link at right because they sometimes have some nice bargains on his books.

W. E. Blackhurst

W.E. Blackhurst, a Pocahontas County native, devoted much of his life to documenting local history and observing natural history. He was an English and Latin teacher at Greenbank High School for over 30 years, and was active in the movement to create the Cass Scenic Railroad. This excerpt from the Preface for the posthumously published Afterglow: A Collection of Short Stories and Poems gives a quick rundown of his work:

Warren Blackhurst....wrote of the first great cuttings of the virgin forests, and in Riders of the Flood he told of the formations of the great rafts of logs, from the time they left the stump until they and their riders completed their journey of nearly a hundred miles down the Greenbrier River to the lumber mill at Ronceverte. In Mixed Harvest he told of the first timber surveys, the beginning of the sawmill town and the coming of the railroad which would supplant the river as a means of taking the lumber to market. He also told of the people who were there, and those who were drawn to the industry. Sawdust in Your Eyes depicts the social life of a lumber town when the twentieth century was young, and no one could tell it better; while Of Men and a Mighty Mountain weaves the biographies of the men who made the wheels of the lumber industry turn--from the head of the Company to the mill hand, and how the work of each contributed to the finished product. And through each book there runs a thread of romance, skillfully woven into stories of a great industry. Then there was the railroad, built just for logging, which was the forerunner of the Cass Scenic Railroad.

While there is much to learn about Pocahontas County here, I really wish Mr. Blackhurst had skipped that "thread of romance, skillfully woven into stories of a great industry." In fictionalizing his stories, he fell into some of the unfortunate habits of mid-twentieth centry popular novelists. The attempt at dialect, whether of Irish, Italians, blacks, or hillbillies, is poorly done and offensive. The characterization of the workers as simple and childlike makes my skin crawl. If you can wade through this stuff, which he doubtless included to make the stories more palatable to the "reading public," you can learn a lot about Pocahontas County, and about how logging changed the Appalachians.

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Cal Price

A former editor of the Pocahontas Times, Cal Price's writing still appears weekly under the heading Fifty Years Ago. Mr. Price is the subject of a recent documentary, Thirty. An accompanying Web site includes a biographical sketch and links of interest.

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Pocahontas Times

Our weekly newspaper appears locally each Wednesday. The current week's edition is also available on line, although paid subscriptions are required for the archives. That's why I keep a scrapbook of my favorite typographic errors, so that I may revisit them whenever I wish. My current favorite is a bold headline on page 2, March 24, 2005: "Marlinton man pleads guilt to endangerment with a fireman." Just because you ran a spell-checker doesn't mean you didn't make any mistakes.

Ed Friel

Book Cover: Lighter Side of Rectal SurgeryEd Friel has published a personal memoir, The Lighter Side of Rectal Surgery (2003). I was a little reluctant to pick it up, since the title seemed to promise a very personal memoir indeed. However, it's quite an enjoyable book. Each chapter is an anecdote, told as if waiting in line at the Hillsboro store. In fact, Mr. Friel has certainly told some of these stories in that very place. This conversational style looks easy, but requires considerable skill to make it work.

Mr. Friel has done an excellent job of placing the book all over the county; if you visit here, you can easily find a copy. On the Internet, the book is available through Barnes and Noble.

Patch Adams

Book Cover: Gesundheit! Book Cover: House Calls

Patch Adams' Gesundheit! Institute owns some beautiful property on Locust Creek, not far from Hillsboro. Of this land, the Gesundheit! Institute Web site says: "Although we're famous for being the future site of the hospital, right now we're growing community, healing our environment, offering amazing service-learning volunteer opportunities, and articulating our goals and ideals." Dr. Adams is seldom at the Locust Creek property, but I consider the Institute's presence adequate to identify him as a Pocahontas County Author. He has two books in print: Gesundheit! : Bringing Good Health to You, the Medical System, and Society through Physician Service, Complementary Therapies, Humor, and Joy, House Calls: How We Can All Heal the World One Visit at a Time.

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce visited Pocahontas County on at least two occasions--the first on December 13, 1861, when he was among the Union troops engaged in the Battle of the Top of the Allegheny, and the second time years later, before he published this piece, A Bivouac of the Dead in 1903.

Away up in the heart of the Allegheny mountains, in Pocahontas county, West Virginia, is a beautiful little valley through which flows the east fork of the Greenbrier river. At a point where the valley road intersects the old Staunton and Parkersburg turnpike, a famous thoroughfare in its day, is a post office in a farm house. The name of the place is Travelers' Repose, for it was once a tavern. Crowning some low hills within a stone's throw of the house are long lines of old Confederate fortifications, skilfully designed and so well "preserved" that an hour's work by a brigade would put them into serviceable shape for the next civil war. This place had its battle--what was called a battle in the "green and salad days" of the great rebellion. A brigade of Federal troops, the writer's regiment among them, came over Cheat mountain, fifteen miles to the westward, and, stringing its lines across the little valley, felt the enemy all day; and the enemy did a little feeling, too. There was a great cannonading, which killed about a dozen on each side; then, finding the place too strong for assault, the Federals called the affair a reconnaissance in force, and burying their dead withdrew to the more comfortable place whence they had come. Those dead now lie in a beautiful national cemetery at Grafton, duly registered, so far as identified, and companioned by other Federal dead gathered from the several camps and battlefields of West Virginia. The fallen soldier (the word "hero" appears to be a later invention) has such humble honors as it is possible to give.

His part in all the pomp that fills
The circuit of the Summer hills
Is that his grave is green.

True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are marked "Unknown," and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the contradiction involved in "honoring the memory" of him of whom no memory remains to honor; but the attempt seems to do no great harm to the living, even to the logical.

A few hundred yards to the rear of the old Confederate earthworks is a wooded hill. Years ago it was not wooded. Here, among the trees and in the undergrowth, are rows of shallow depressions, discoverable by removing the accumulated forest leaves. From some of them may be taken (and reverently replaced) small thin slabs of the split stone of the country, with rude and reticent inscriptions by comrades. I found only one with a date, only one with full names of man and regiment. The entire number found was eight.

In these forgotten graves rest the Confederate dead--between eighty and one hundred, as nearly as can be made out. Some fell in the "battle;" the majority died of disease. Two, only two, have apparently been disinterred for reburial at their homes. So neglected and obscure is this campo santo that only he upon whose farm it is--the aged postmaster of Travelers' Repose--appears to know about it. Men living within a mile have never heard of it. Yet other men must be still living who assisted to lay these Southern soldiers where they are, and could identify some of the graves. Is there a man, North or South, who would begrudge the expense of giving to these fallen brothers the tribute of green graves? One would rather not think so. True, there are several hundreds of such places still discoverable in the track of the great war. All the stronger is the dumb demand--the silent plea of these fallen brothers to what is "likest God within the soul."

They were honest and courageous foemen, having little in common with the political madmen who persuaded them to their doom and the literary bearers of false witness in the aftertime. They did not live through the period of honorable strife into the period of vilification--did not pass from the iron age to the brazen--from the era of the sword to that of the tongue and pen. Among them is no member of the Southern Historical Society. Their valor was not the fury of the non-combatant; they have no voice in the thunder of the civilians and the shouting. Not by them are impaired the dignity and infinite pathos of the Lost Cause. Give them, these blameless gentlemen, their rightful part in all the pomp that fills the circuit of the summer hills.

William Pierce

Until his death in 2002, William Pierce was head of The National Alliance, a Neo-Nazi organization headquartered at Mill Point, between Marlinton and Hillsboro. Pierce's novel, The Turner Diaries (1978) (published under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald) last came to national attention when it was discovered on the bookshelf of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The Pocahontas County-based outfit still seems to mail out its books, CD's, and periodicals from my local post office, but I haven't kept up with the National Alliance's post-Pierce reorganizations.

Last time I looked at the National Alliance's Web site, they featured an article from National Vanguard, Issue 125 entitled "The Assault on Art and Beauty" by Josiah Nott. (It is no longer available in complete form, even in the .pdf file.) To support his points, he referred readers to Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841). I was a little confused by his arguments, but I also admire Carlyle, and would add these books to Nott's recommended reading: Sartor Resartus (1831) and The French Revolution, A History (1837).

Book Cover: Sartor Resartus Book Cover: The French Revolution, A History
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