Monday, September 14
Not one sound. No sun. I try to sleep with my windows open unless one certain bird makes a loud whooping sound or unless an army of crickets are right outside my windows. The rising sun comes in through my bedroom window in the back of the house. But here in West Virginia there is not one sound outside! And the trees are blocking the sun. Johnny and Vickie had said there was no rush to get up - we would spend a lot of time reading and relaxing. So I was lolling around in my pajamas reading a book on the Cumberland Plateau in Kentucky's coal country when I noticed that they were both dressed. They wanted to take a drive to find a cemetery where Vickie's grandfather was buried - well her adopted grandfather. Vickie's mother was adopted, and they wanted to find her adopted father's grave. Vickie had found the name of the cemetery online so we headed out for a visit.
As we headed out of the state park, 2 small deer were on the side of the road. Vickie said that there are a lot of deer around the park - sometimes they come up to the cabins. The hills/mountains are covered with thick evergreens so there is not much of a view coming down the winding road of the park to the main road. This is quite a contrast to the mountains in Kerry which are practically bare of trees except for forestry - there are farmhouses and sheep dotting the mountains.
We headed through Athens which is home to Concord University. I started noticing a lot of churches along the road - fancy new churches, old churches, falling down churches, large churches and small churches. They were different denominations, but Baptists seemed to predominate. This was true everywhere we went. There were very few Catholic churches.
Athens had some old gingerbread houses that must have been gorgeous at some point. Athens was a busy enough small town with fast food chains, businesses, but there were also many houses that seemed to be falling down like everywhere in this area.
We were headed to Spanishburg - Vickie had found her grandfather's cemetery listed on findagrave.com. He was buried in Rumberg Cemetery - http://files.usgwarchives.net/wv/mercer/cemetery/rumberg.txt told Vickie that: "RUMBERG CEMETERY, CAMP CREEK, MERCER COUNTY, WEST VIRGINIA: This information was collected on July16, 2002 by David Hambrick and Ken Bowen and contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives.Take Route 19 from Princeton through Spanishburg. The entrance to the cemetery is about a quarter mile on the right after crossing Wolf Creek . The cemetery is in the upper field."
Johnny followed route 19 - we crossed what we thought might be Wolf Creek - there was a work crew repairing the bridge so Johnny stopped and got out to ask them where the cemetery was. No one was sure so we headed up the road which was the right after the bridge. Up, up, up we went - some houses had cars parked in the yard, but no one was around - the front door of one house was open. Johnny followed the road till it changed to a narrow dirt road still heading upward. He didn't think he wanted to follow that road not knowing where it went. So we turned around and headed down. I suggested stopping at the house with the open front door. Johnny turned into a nearby house with 2 cars parked in the driveway. He went up to the front door, but no one answered. As he was almost back to the car, I noticed a pick up truck coming up the hill, and yelled at Johnny to flag it down. He did and went over to talk to the two guys in the truck. I was feeling kind of excited thinking that the two guys in the pick up might be telling Johnny where the cemetery was. He talked to them for quite a bit - at one point he was leaning both hands over the passenger door. I was getting more excited - I said to Vickie that perhaps they knew her family and were giving Johnny a lot of information. I thought to myself maybe we ought to go listen in case Johnny didn't remember all the details. I was about to say this to Vickie when Johnny headed back to the car. "Did they know where the cemetery was?" Johnny said that they weren't from that area but thought there might be a cemetery further up the road. They didn't know Vickie's family - and they were talking to him most of the time about Jesus! What a let down. We continued down the road - Johnny pulled over when we saw a young woman outside in her yard. She wan't sure of a cemetery but said a family lived down that dirt road we had come to, and they might know more. So we headed back up that road and down the one lane dirt road for a bit, but it was a rough road, and we didn't see any house. So we turned around and headed back down to that bridge.
Vickie was checking online and found on https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2365675/rumburg-cemetery that Rumberg Cemetery was "located on route 19-21 between Camp Creek and Wolf Creek upon a hill behind a two story house in Spanishburg, Mercer County, West Virginia." So we drove around what we thought were Camp Creek and Wolf Creek for quite a while, but we had no luck finding that cemetery. The roads off the main road are numbered but in what seems is a random order. We were looking for 19-21 - we found some roads from 19-6 to 19-25 but no 19-21, and the numbers did not go in ascending or descending order. We agreed we needed a county map.
By this time we were getting hungry, Johnny wanted to go to Welch, West Virginia so we did - we found a Cracker Barrel where we stopped to eat. They told us that the wait would be 30 minutes - we decided to try somewhere else, but Johnny wanted to stop into the Cracker Barrel shop before we went back to the car. I had never been to Cracker Barrel so was quite surprised at the Old Country Store - they sell all kinds of things - food, clothes, sporting equipment, Halloween decorations, and more. We poked around - I bought some pecan pralines - I figured that was a southern treat - plus some butterscotch lifesavers. By the time we had finished our purchases, there was no longer a wait so we stayed to eat. I loved the decorations - old portraits, license plates, old farm tools, and more. The tables were well spaced out, and the waitress was wearing a mask. I wasn't sure of West Vrginia's Covid numbers, but West Virginia visitors had been on the Massachusetts list for no need to quarantine until the day before we left - so I felt very safe.
Wilkepedia reports that during the first half of the 20th century Welch became a prosperous city due to the opening of coal mines and the arrival of the railway. After the end of WWII, Welch began to deteriorate - clean oil supplanted filthy coal - steel mines closed. Mechanization resulted in more massive job losses. There was no other employment. Real estate values plummeted. Miners left the region in search of jobs in other states. This is the same story for most of this whole area of West Virginia as well as Kentucky. John Fitzgerald Kennedy visited this area during his presidential campaign. He initiated the War on Poverty to assist the poverty stricken residents of Appalachia.
Welch in 1946
Photo by Russell Lee - U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17045508
More recent photo of Welch.
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