I parted ways with my wandering companion this week.

Since July 2013, I have wandered the back roads of the tri-state region in a metallic blue Scion xD hatchback. I purchased it new and wandered 150,810 miles in it before we parted ways Tuesday morning at the Moses Toyota dealership in Morgantown.

I’m not one to “get attached” to things, but attachment and loathing are inevitable with conveyances. I’m sure my Palatinate ancestors had the same sense of nostalgic grief when they sold their horse or left their trusty cart behind in Frankenthal, Germany, and began their journey to the New World in the spring of 1775. Whenever we sail or drive away from something that has served us faithfully and been part of our life story for more than a decade, parting is not sweet sorrow. It elicits memories of the lives we once knew, the places we visited, the ruts we endured, the exhilaration of discovering a fascinating story, the sunrises viewed through the front windows, the sunsets fading behind us, the person in the front passenger seat, the dogs in the rear seat, the disasters that befell us and the people we met and lost along the back roads and Interstates of our wanderings.

Especially in a nation like ours, where our vehicle choice reflects both our financial status and self-image, the Scion xD fit me like Barack Obama’s tan suit fit him (I can safely use the comparison because he and I share an enigmatic 3^rd-great grandmother). The xD was probably the cheapest, most reliable, most practical car ever envisioned by an automaker, in this case, Toyota. The Scion marque borrowed heavily from models in Toyota’s main line but offered both sporty and toaster-like bodies, as well as features and marketing aimed at the younger generation.

Although “younger” was at least four decades in the rearview mirror of my beloved Tacoma pickup when I bought my first Scion xD in 2008, everything about it appealed to me, especially its reputation for reliability and great gas mileage. With a five-speed manual transmission, the car could deliver 43.5 mpg on Interstate 79 while sipping Marathon gasoline and staying just below the sweet spot of 58 mph. I confess to being the legendary, graying, interstate driver of the “Japanese toaster” that the long-haul truckers hated to come upon on a dark and rainy night.

It was a versatile drive, a miniature SUV that rode high but wasn’t fond of snow or soft ground. It handled the dry forest roads to Dolly Sods and Olson Fire Tower but could get bogged down in an inch of mud in my front yard. Its commodious back cargo area accommodated tripods, cameras, lenses and estate-sale finds. It had a Pioneer sound system with CD player, which mattered back in my pre-hearing loss days. And most of all, it reflected my overall frugal, practical, minimal-footprint approach to living.

My first wife still has that car. My next Scion was a used xA that I bought for my work car. Again, economy was essential when your employer’s mileage reimbursement rate was less than a third of what the IRS allowed. I loved that little bug and handed it down to my wife when I purchased my second xD brand new in 2013.

I splurged on that one and spent an extra $500 for the two-tone (metallic blue with black top) paint job. I insisted on it having a 5-speed manual transmission, and the dealer had to bring a unit from 300 miles away to fulfill my parameters. My Scion xD was just “so me.” It was fun to drive, reliable, thrifty and a poor choice for northeast Ohio winters. I am not going to embarrass myself by relating the incidents where I buried it in snow drifts while backing out of my driveway.

Its poor performance in snow led to one of my great back-roads mishaps in West Virginia. It was December 2020, just a few weeks after we’d relocated here from Ohio. We awoke to a wonderland of snow-covered branches, mountains and roads, and I decided to do some early-morning wandering in my Scion. The scenery enticed me to wander down Ralph Reckart Road, which according to the map was NOT a dead end.

Descending the gradual hill and passing a lovely early-20^th-century barn, I started looking for a place to pull off. But there was none, and the road began a steep descent of a half mile until it reached an old farmhouse and a pile of snow that marked where a plow driver had ceased his work and road came to a dead end.

There was no way my Scion was going to go back up that snowy, icy incline on its own power. I wrote about how that back-roads adventure ended and the interesting fellow I made in the process in my Even More Wandering Back-Roads W.Va. (volume 3) book. I am certain that was the day I had the heart attack that eventually played out as a three-month hospital stay later that winter and spring.

A more recent disaster was last fall, when I visited my neighboring Old Hemlock Nature Preserve to make a video of the flowers blooming in the former forest. I was backing into what I thought was a parking spot that was actually a deep depression with tall weeds. The car came to rest at a 45-degree angle. With only the weight of the engine keeping it from flipping into the abyss, I gingerly exited, accessed the towing bolt and called my wife to bring our CRV and a length of chain.

This is the car that my wife and I dated in, although there’s a bad memory connected to that, as well. On our first in-person date, we agreed to meet in Brookville, Pa., roughly the half-way point between Geneva, Ohio, where I lived, and Hanover Township, Pa., where she lived. Although we’d come to know each other very well through our eHarmony profiles and three-hour phone calls each evening for the prior month, the stress level was high. I had to make an impression.

It was dark when I left the house, and neither she nor I noticed that I had left my headlights on when her Camry pulled up next to my xD in front of the Opera House Café. We exchanged greetings, went inside and from that point on my eyes were affixed on this lovely woman, not the dimming headlights. A normal person would have recognized the “ding, ding” of the lights-on warning, but I could not hear it due to my high-frequency hearing loss (a bass drum signal would be more appropriate for old folks like me). Three hours later, when we came out to my car to make our planned picnic trip to Punxsutawney, I discovered my battery was dead. Impression made: mindless klutz. The grace and understanding with which she handled the situation confirmed to me that was the kind of person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

Not to be outdone by that incident, on the way home from our fourth date, during which Ruth and I made the arrangements for our Dec. 23, 2017, wedding, two deer refused to yield to my Scion. The insurance carrier considered totaling it, but finally agreed to pay for the repairs. With just 18 hours to spare before the wedding in Brookville, I picked up my xD and drove home in one of Northeast Ohio’s infamous lake-effect snowstorms.

We honeymooned in that car, and Ruth and I had many positive, memorable adventures in it as I introduced her to Ohio’s back roads and West Virginia’s mountains, usually with a dog or two in the back seat. It was the car in which I drove my two sick, geriatric dogs, Brody and Polly, to their last vet appointment. And it was the car in which I brought their bodies back to the house for burial in the forest in our front yard. A month later, I drove it to Greenville, Pa., to adopt Edison, who was so excited about being adopted that he had an accident on the seat and we had to ride home with the windows down—in January.

It was the car I drove to my mother’s funeral and the wheels that took me to my divorce hearing. I drove it back and forth to the only job that I ever felt really good about and enjoyed, including my last day there, when I was given two boxes and 15 minutes to clean out my office after being informed my services were no longer needed.

One early spring evening while walking along the Lake Erie beach, I came upon an amazing piece of partially buried driftwood—a horseshoe-shaped root nearly 4 feet wide and 6 feet long. Knowing that it would be burned during the annual cleanup, I extricated the piece from the sand, dragged it several hundred yards to my Scion and shoehorned my sandy treasure into subcompact’s belly. I swept sand out of that car for months thereafter. But I still have the driftwood as a reminder of both the car and lake from which it came. And I still marvel that at one time in my life, I was that strong and crazy.

It was the car that hauled my lights, camera gear, stands, tripods and me to the many barn-quilt locations as I worked on my documentary film about the same. It took me and 600 pounds of 16mm films to Cinevent in 2018 where I sold the films to raise some money to pay for that gear. This spring, I loaded it with 20 cubic feet of bagged mulch and it still zipped up Laurel Mountain at 70 mph in fifth gear. It never failed to amaze me how much power lived under that modest hood.

It took me from the Ohio River to Harpers Ferry, from Charleston to the Pennsylvania border, as I freelanced for Goldenseal magazine until the state’s legislators abolished the print publication last year. The royalties from those articles put gas in my Scion’s tank and helped me maintain the car to my father’s high standards of vehicle upkeep, faithfully changing the oil and filter every 3,000 miles. In return, the car rewarded me with reliable service.

Most recently, the Scion was how I got to the dozens of interviews that went into writing Wandering Tucker County, the closest point of which is about 42 miles from our home. The route between my home and Backbone Mountain is a twisting, steep, dump-truck infested byway through farmland and little towns that takes at least an hour under ideal conditions in north-county destinations; up to 2 ½ hours for more distant spots under typical back-roads hazards.

Thankfully, it was on a steep Morgantown four-lane highway, not a hairpin descent on the Brandonville Pike, that my xD’s brake lines ruptured two months ago. I used the manual transmission to stop the car just shy of a traffic jam. Although my Scion was no stranger to tow trucks, when the driver pulled my Scion onto the bed for the ride to Shorty Anderson’s that afternoon, I knew it was the beginning of the end, and a couple of mechanics confirmed as much—the problems went beyond the corroded, failed brake lines.

A new vehicle seemed unwarranted considering that 90 percent of its use is for volunteering for a not-for-profit newspaper and producing content for a Substack with no revenue. I don’t make enough money from my wanderings to put gas in the tank, let alone put a dent in the $24,000 price tag (plus tax, title, destination and a litany of extended warranty options) of new but very basic transportation. Out of concern for both my safety and being able to pursue “my calling,” Ruth encouraged me to look into something new, even if it meant draining our savings (we eschew debt, especially at this age and for unprofitable pursuits).

Toyota abandoned the Scion line a decade ago. Five-speed manual transmissions are no longer an option. Used vehicles with 20,000 miles on them cost almost as much as a comparable new one in this roaring Republican economy. Pickups and SUVS costing four to eight times what my xD cost are the only vehicles that can be purchased and driven off the lot the same day. Cars have to be ordered, and options are very limited, especially for vehicles like the Toyota Corolla LE that we settled upon due to its reputation for reliability and good gas mileage. It took almost a month to get it after placing the order.

Driving to the dealership Tuesday felt like driving to the funeral of a lifelong friend I’d just betrayed. I loved my xD and the memories, adventures and the hardships it saw me through. If it were not for the safety factor, I would have gladly continued my wandering in its rusty shell until one of us finally collapsed. After almost losing me to cardiogenic shock five years ago, Ruth was not of a mind to let that happen.

I now gingerly wander in a very plain, bare-bones Corolla that cost twice what I paid for the Scion. With its color matching that of my hair, I blend well with this silver vehicle, but it doesn’t reflect my personality, nor can it fulfill my wanderlust like the peppy xD that was always up to a new adventure. Back roads that once inspired curiosity now trigger fear of damaging what will likely be the last car I’ll ever purchase. I do more wondering about the wisdom of what I do than actually wandering, documenting and writing. It all seems so pointless, so insignificant.

Perhaps I’m getting too old, too pragmatic, too wise, too cautious for life’s back roads. The world has changed since I started doing this 50 years ago. People don’t read; culture and history no longer matter to lawmakers. Words, regardless of how long one labors over them or bleeds onto them, have no value in this new marketplace. The world is awash in images and prose, and as if humans are not already overproducing it like rats in a slum, AI is churning out irrelevant verbiage and illusions at the speed of electrons. Like the rusty Scion I just traded in, this work I pursue has little value in this new economy. Unfortunately, losing a traveling companion brings a person to these crossroads.

Perhaps with the passing of time and new experiences beyond the financial challenges of buying and getting insurance on a new vehicle, I’ll grow to like the Corolla.

But it will never replace my 2013 Scion xD.

I wandered some of the best 150,000 miles of my life in that car.

Book sales help keep me wandering

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The day Butch Upole underwent open-heart surgery, Sept. 11, 2001, America faced one of its greatest challenges and threats. As the nation underwent transformation in the weeks following the terrorist attacks, Butch, in his late 50s, came to grips with the reality of being in heart failure and unable to return to farming and construction work, his livelihood for decades.

“After I had my heart surgery, I was so bored,” said the 83-year-old Garrett County, Md., resident. “I was so down. The paycheck stopped. I couldn’t draw unemployment because I wasn’t able to work. Two, three months passed with me sitting there with nothing. And I prayed hard that I’d find a way to entertain myself and get some income. And then these pictures came along. It was just a blessing that I could do it.”

His journey into folk art began with a walk in the front yard of the farmhouse in which he grew up and he since inherited. He picked up some leaves, sticks and rocks as he walked the property. Back inside, he arranged, trimmed and re-arranged the disparate pieces into an image of an old cabin along a path in the autumnal forest.

He stood back, looked at what he’d created and promptly decided it should go in the trash.

“And my daughter walked in the house and she said, ‘No Dad! It looks 3-D. I want it.’ And it was her birthday, so, I said, ‘Here, happy birthday!’” Butch said.

His daughter, Jessica Hartman, showed Butch’s rustic creation to others, who were impressed with the artist’s vision and commissioned him to works for them. Within a few months, Butch’s prayer was answered—he was selling his “all natural pictures” at art and craft shows throughout western Maryland and north-central West Virginia.

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“A couple of old gentlemen invited me to a craft show (at Deep Creek Lake),” he said. “I had never done one before. And they still laugh at me because had no idea what to expect or anything. So, I kind of made a little cabin that I could take down and set up at the show. And (when he showed up at the show with it), they said, ‘You’ve come (prepared) to build a house!’ Everybody else had a tent. And I had boards and everything else. I’d never been to a craft show. I didn’t know how to display (his artwork).”

His first sale at a show was to the doctor who’d delivered his daughter.

“He picked it up and looked at it and said, ‘Did you sign it?’ And I said, ‘No,’” Butch recalled. “And he said, ‘Where’s the thing on the back to hang it with? Do you have a hanger on it?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Well, do you have a bag to put it in?’ And I said, ‘No. This is my first show and I’m green. I really lost it.”

Over two decades later, Butch is a pro at doing shows in the greater western Maryland region. His repaired heart still powers the mind, hands and eyes that make this natural art possible.

“It just keeps growing,” said Butch, who has made and sold hundreds of the pictures that he frames in rustic, re-purposed barn-siding cut down to 2 ¼-inches wide. A sheet of glass protects the creations.

“My glass dealer says I’m the biggest single-pane customer he has,” Butch said.

Butch does more than a dozen shows annually and is a frequent contributor to fund-raisers for regional projects and groups.

“My goal is to take around 100 pictures to a show, but most of the time, I’ll bring back 75 of them with me,” he said. “And then I’ll make another 25 to make up the difference. That’s how I work it. I just never know from one show to the next.”

He has held the price at $40 throughout his nearly quarter-of-a-century of selling.

“The cost of stuff has doubled,” he said. “My glass, my rough barn boards have doubled or tripled. But I do it and I don’t want to make a whole bunch and then have to pack them up and take them back home at the end of the show. I’d rather give the people a break and let them enjoy them as much as I enjoy making them.”

Further, there are intangible benefits to this second career as an artist.

“If I can’t sleep, I’ll get up and work two or three hours on these,” he said. “I put in a lot of hours. If you figured my wages on these pictures, I wouldn’t make nothing. But it gives me something to do. It keeps me going.”

He builds his natural art on a base of mat board measuring 11-by-14 inches. Butch painstakingly cuts, fits and glues each element of the image by hand. Some elements, such as birds, are produced in quantity, then brought into the scenes as needed.

“I make anywhere from six to 10 (with the same elements),” he said. “Right now, I’m working on 10 fish. They take a long time. When I get done with the fish, I’ll have five different things in there—beans off the locust tree, sumac, ropes, petals, corn husks, maple helicopters, and just one fish.”

His subjects range from black bears to birds, dogs to rustic buildings, set against backdrops of green moss, brown leaves and gray tree bark foraged from his property and that of friends.

“I love to do the animals. I like to do them with my flowers, and I like to do them with my cabins. But I don’t know what my favorite would be,” he said. “My little log cabins are the best seller . . . especially if I put a bear or raccoon or something with them. And I make a lot of flowers and sell a lot of flowers.”

“Tree bark is the basic thing,” he adds. “That’s the background.”

Other staple materials include corn husks, moss, the rust-colored hairs of the staghorn sumac, and samara of maples and the tree of heaven (ailanthus). Only the pebbles in his works are inorganic.

“I ain’t killing nothing. (Whatever I use) is already dead,” he said. “In fact, the trees I get my bark off, if they ain’t dead, you can’t get the bark off them.”

He is constantly foraging for materials. “I have to go out and get it when it is in its prime,” he said. “I’ve picked up stuff from (as far away) as Georgia. I got a lot of cotton from Georgia. When I travel, I like to watch for new things; I like new things.”

Butch was thus thrilled when a fur dealer presented him with a bag of scraps, material that he otherwise would have destroyed.

“He walked up to me and said, ‘I’m going to help you out. I’m going to give you all the fur that I’ve been burning. It’s just scrap to me,’” Butch said. “And I thought, ‘What in the world am I going to do with all this fur?’ He gave me a garbage bag full of it. And I decided, ‘Well, if it’s from a coon, I’m going to make a coon out of it. . . . whatever kind of fur it is, that’s what I’m going to make out of it.”

While Butch previously had used discarded feathers from a turkey hunter’s success and found feathers of cardinals and bluejays, having access to the fur of native wildlife from deer to skunks allowed him to expand his repertoire.

“The little furry animals are new this year,” he said. “I’ve really had fun with them, and they took off pretty good.”

There have been challenges along the way. Bending down and lifting cases of framed work is impossible. He struggles with shortness of breath. Earlier this year, Butch’s table saw and his right hand’s index finger had an encounter. What’s left of the finger has healed, but the injury stalled production.

Thanks to his wife; children, Jessica and Jason; and grandchildren he has been able to continue his search for materials, assembly of artworks and presence at shows despite these challenges. His folk art gave him a second chance at creating a rewarding life.

“I can be really stressed out about something, and if I go in there and start making things for pictures, it just relieves me. It’s a relaxation for me,” he said.

Butch plans to be at several major shows in the Potomac Highlands region during the fall months of 2026, including the Appalachian Craft Show at Leaf Peepers Festival in Davis, W.Va. (Sept. 25-27, on Facebook), (Catoctin Colorfest in Thurmont,Md. (visitfrederick.org/catoctin-colorfest), Oct. 10-11, and the Mylan Park Home for the Holidays Craft Show (vincentpromotions.com/home-for-the-holidays-craft-show/) Oct. 23 & 24), Morgantown, W.Va.

If you enjoy stories about Appalachian arts, check out Volume 3 of Wandering Back Roads West Virginia. Your purchase of books funds more back-roads wandering and stories from Appalachia.

During the Sunday morning that I interviewed John Bright for my book, Wandering Back Roads West Virginia, we took a break in our exchange so John could check in with his sweetheart on the other side of the globe before she went to bed.

It was a dreary gray morning; the kind of post-Christmas banality that infiltrates every corner of a room like dog fur during shedding season. But the moment her voice came through the speaker, John Bright lit up like the public Christmas tree in front of the Davis City Hall.

Listening to John and Ngo Thuy talk about his previous night of work in the Purple Fiddle and her day as an English teacher in Vietnam brought back memories of eight years prior. My wife-to-be, Ruth Evans, and I spent hours talking every evening as we got to know each other during the summer of 2017. We talked so much, I had to raise my cell phone plan to the next level to give me more hours without incurring a penalty.

As with John Bright and Ngo Thuy, Ruth and I met through an online dating service (eHarmony for us). While there are plenty of horror stories to be found about these kinds of matches, we are a success story. We did our dating by phone for six weeks because 300 miles separated us. As Ruth is fond of saying, “we got to know each other from the inside out.” The weekend we finally met face-to-face is a precious memory.

Two years ago, John traveled to Vietnam to have dental work done. It was less expensive to pay for flights, lodging and the dental work in a foreign country than have it done in the U.S. He decided to try the dating ap and within five minutes of connecting through that, he and Ngo Thuy were talking on the phone.

After many more international flights, daily phone calls and massive amounts of immigration paperwork, they were married Sunday. All of Tucker County celebrated at the Purple Fiddle, the former DePollo’s Store, in Thomas. Ruth and I stopped by the wish the couple much happiness. Their story brought back some wonderful memories and a few misty eyes as we reflected on our own journeys to this special place where we live and have built a new life together.

Ruth has been an amazing champion of my work and passion for this place and its people. She never gets gives me “the look” or questions why it’s necessary for me to be gone all day while I chase down stories for the Tucker County Observer and my Wandering Back Roads West Virginia Substack. And when the long day is over, I find her waiting at the door with our rescue pup, Edison, and a meal ready to serve.

I like it best when I travel with her, when we get to socialize with our Tucker County friends who have enriched our lives so much and made us feel so welcome. I’m convinced it is because at one time, they too, were strangers in this land, the Tucker people took them in, nourished their dreams and stood by them in all the nasty storms that come with following passions and our callings. The sense of community in that county is something I’ve never experienced elsewhere.

And it was fully on display Sunday evening as guests brought bowls and plastic containers full of food to share. John and Ngo Thuy asked only for financial donations to go toward that band that played later that evening. Fresh from the ceremony, they entered the historic building in their traditional wedding outfits ready to celebrate.

Ruth and I had to leave for another commitment before the party got underway and band played on. As we drove toward our destination at The Aurora Project, we remembered our own love story and marveled at how we came out of brokenness to this verdant, high place of healing. We’ve had our challenges—indeed, last week was one of the most trying weeks I’ve had since coming here, and there was a day or two I was ready to forget the whole mess. I’ll write about it soon once we have a resolution to the latest challenges to living in the mountains.

Seeing the smiles on all those faces on Sunday, reflecting on our own love story, lifted that banality of the prior week like a powerful wet-and-dry vacuum tackling all that dog hair under the bed.

Congratulations John and Ngo Thuy—may you love your new lives together as much as you love each other.

The degree to which individuals will sacrifice so they can live and work in the outdoors economy of Tucker County is remarkable. For transplants Aaron and Lillian Strain, it has involved months of backbreaking manual labor on long-neglected farmland, working winters in the ski industry and living in a 22-passenger church bus converted into a one-room residence.

This ambitious couple launched their thirty-somethings era in Tucker County after living and working in Colorado, Idaho and Maryland. In Tucker County, they are building along Licking Creek a farm that grows vegetables as beautiful as they are tasty, free of pesticides and packed with so many nutrients they can pass for “medicine.”

On Friday afternoons, a long line of savvy shoppers with their cloth market bags in hand forms in front of Licking Creek Farm’s booth at the Davis Farmers & Artisan Market. Within the first 30 minutes, most of the carrots, radishes, beets, bunching onions, herbs and microgreens spread on the table are on their way to area kitchens. With the way the couple display the beautiful veggies they grow, the veggies practically jump off the table and into the shopping bags.

“A couple of markets ago, I was getting something out of the vehicle and saw in the mirror somebody walk up to the table, point at the table and go, ‘My gosh!’ It’s something you don’t see every day, this big pile of cleaned up, beautiful carrots with the tops still on them. I think we take pride in those, and they are fun to harvest because you are just pulling the carrots out of the ground,” Aaron said.

The couple grow almost three dozen different vegetables in multiple varieties on their farm, whose total production area is only one-third of an acre. For decades, hay has been taken from this land without any inputs or grazing livestock. Several years ago, the owner agreed to lease a portion of it to the Strains for their farm and residence—that 28-foot-bus equipped with the basics. The entire parcel encompasses forested mountainsides, the gentle Licking Creek and grassy meadows dotted with black-eyed Susans.

Their goal is to eventually own about 30 acres of this parcel and further develop it with livestock, fruit trees and berry bushes. But their approach to farming is not about creating large operations with employees, mechanization and corporate clients. They live and dream on a small, sustainable scale, and it is that smallness and intimacy with the land that they pursue.

Their farm started with a book.

“I read a book called “The Soil Will Save Us,” Lillian said of the 2014 tome by Kristin Ohlson. “It’s just all about soil health and the land, how you can bring it back to life and how it can hold carbon. The science got me really interested in that.”

A Virginia Beach native, Lillian earned a degree in fish and wildlife conservation at Virginia Tech and worked for the USDA Wildlife Services developing strategies for keeping wildlife off airport runways. But her passion was being outdoors. With a great deal of help from her father who remodeled a church bus into a tiny house on wheels, Lillian set off on a cross-country adventure with her dog. The adventure terminated with a rafting company in Colorado.

“Travelling was really fun, but I missed community and I missed work,” Lillian said. “I enjoy work. . . . And when I called the rafting company, they were like, ‘It’s great that you have a bus and a dog. You’ll fit right in. So, it was like, ‘I’ll go raft!’”

While working for the rafting company, Lillian met Aaron, who grew up outside San Antonio, went to St. Edward’s University in Austin and relocated to join the outdoor-education community. He was in his second year as a rafting guide when he met the new hire.

“She stuck around for the winter,” Aaron said. “We were working at Copper Mountain, and the following summer, we raft-guided again.”

While Aaron and Lillian enjoyed working at the ski school and Aaron became a supervisor, their encounter with “The Soil Will Save Us” took them into a different kind of different outdoor venture—growing food. She began researching opportunities with WWOOF, a global network that connects organic farmers with short-term students who want to learn sustainable farming skills.

That led them to Idaho, where they worked on a garlic farm as COVID-19 began to shut down the country.

“That gave us the confidence that we could start looking for land,” Aaron said of their months of working the farm. “But we realized that where we were in Idaho, it was getting very expensive for land.”

As the COVID gripped the nation, Aaron and Lillian decided to search for opportunities closer to her family. That led them to Backbone Farm’s internship/apprenticeship program. Located in Garrett County, Md., the 106-acre farm raises produce, meats, mushrooms, flowers and more in a sustainable environment. They spent a summer working at the farm, after which they struck a deal with the owners of Honeymoon Farm in Accident, Md., where the couple worked the following summer.

The intensive, small-scale operation of Honeymoon resonated with Aaron and Lillian, who whose interest in the concept had come through another book, The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming.

“That’s where we learned the style of gardening that we are doing now,” Aaron said. “We were implementing exactly what the book was (suggesting), just on a smaller scale. It’s a lot of manual labor and not reliant on big tractors and heavy equipment, just hand tools and intensive growing. It’s kind of like they want to bring back the small farm. . . . More small farms feeding people.”

Canaan Valley’s ski operations provided employment for the couple during the winter months between their internships. Among other jobs, Lillian worked in the kitchen at White Grass Ski Touring Center and Aaron did whatever tasks needed to be done on the trails. While the arrangement gave them both experience and sustenance, the semi-annual ritual of pulling up roots and relocating to a different residence and employment was inefficient. Chip came to the rescue again, introducing the couple to a woman who had purchased a large tract along Licking Creek. Almost four years ago, they had their first look at the land that was become home and work.

“I remember feeling a little overwhelmed because it was so much space,” Aaron said.

“We always imagined three to five acres,” Lillian said, noting that the former hay field of the parcel is more than 10 times what they needed in size. But its orientation, heritage and position between two mountains with Limestone Mountain to the east held much promise. “This is flat land, it’s open, and runs east to west, so it gets really good sun throughout the day.” Lillian said. “It’s just really beautiful; the mornings here are just gorgeous, the way the fog settles in.”

As a bonus to former whitewater instructors, Cheat River access is less than two miles from their farm, through which Licking Creek flows. But the creek is not a reliable water source for the farm or their household supply. Living in their bus on the property, the couple relied upon periodic runs to St. George to fill the water tanks. The following year, their discovery of a spring on the hillside addressed their need for a fresh, convenient supply. More recently, Aaron discovered a hole in the field while mowing and decided to investigate. It turned out to be a hand-dug well that had been filled with rock. The couple donned their climbing gear and enlisted a neighbor with a tractor and bucket to lower them into the 15-foot abyss so they could clear out the rocks and return the well into service.

Their farming approach typically does not use irrigation, however. “We just water things by hand when we initially plant them, then look to Mother Nature to play along with rain. But we do think having that well will help,” Lillian said.

The most important aspect of the farm, the soil, was not up to the demanding, intensive task the new tenants required of it. “It was very acidic,” Aaron said. “Clay and rock. You can tell that there’s been a creek bed through here that’s moved back and forth.”

Despite the issues, the parcel aligned with the philosophy of using previously cleared land rather than cutting down more forest.

“It’s taking something that hasn’t been utilized and bringing it back to life, that was kind of always our thought. We knew that with some time and amending, things could get better,” Aaron said.

They did a soil test, ordered 22 cubic yards of compost and went to work creating 50-foot-long beds with 30-inch-wide, intensively planted rows. Much of the initial work of breaking up the rocky ground was done with their only piece of gasoline-powered equipment, a BCS Walk-behind Tractor.

“It has a (power take off), so it can take attachments like a tractor, but it is all based on this 30-inch-wide bed system that we utilize,” Aaron explained.

They began preparing the soil in the fall of 2023 and harvested their first crop of root vegetables the following spring.

“We had a bunch of greens and radishes and turnips,” Aaron said. “And we set up in Parsons, and maybe two people stopped by. We didn’t make one sale, and we had brought all this produce and prepped it. And it was a big strike out. We ended up going into a couple of stores and even the library and asked people if they wanted some things. And people did buy our stuff, but I think we made only $50 or $60 bucks.

“That was discouraging,” Aaron added. “But we just kept letting people know we were going to be setting up in Parsons, and it started to grow a bit. But Davis is really the market that has given us a larger customer base.”

Last year, Licking Creek became the supplier for Rowlesburg’s Farmacy WV, a program that partners with medical clinics to use healthy food as medicine for patients with food insecurity.

“It’s high-risk, chronic disease patients,” Aaron said. “Everything from diabetes to high-blood pressure. The idea is that they test the patients throughout the 15-week program . . . they are collecting as much data as they can so they can eventually go (to government funding) sources and say, ‘We have this turnkey system that works really well.’”

This year, the couple rolled out their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, which provides a box fresh vegetables to subscribers throughout the growing season. Lillian points out that wherever they sell, they can accept WIC-FMNP and USDA Senior Vouchers, SFMNP.

The couple admit that making the farm financially sustainable remains a challenge, but their goal is to stay on the farm this winter rather than relocate to Canaan Valley for work. It largely depends on how successful sales are this summer and how much of their earnings they can sock away. Their approach to sustainable farming and living extends to their finances; the couple refuse to go into debt for improvements, even basic ones like housing. This year, they hired contractors to pour a concrete slab and build the frame and roof of what they hope will become their residence or a barn—it presently provides cover for their bus home.

The bus received an important update in the fall 2025—connection to the grid. Prior to that, solar and propane were their only options for powering the bus and its appliances.

“Between (solar) and propane, that’s what powered everything from the fridge to the stove top to the little water heater and the fans, and all our power-tool batteries,” Aaron said.

Being connected to the grid has been “especially nice” this summer, the first time they’ve had air conditioning in their bus.

“It’s awesome. It’s a small space, but we’ve made it home,” Lillian said.

Parked in a former hay field surrounded by plots of rich, loose soil brimming with carrots, tomatoes and more than two dozen other kinds of vegetables, the bus in which Lillian have wandered 30,000 miles is finally at home in Tucker County.

“When we moved to Idaho, we were wanting to find a place to settle down and call home. That ended up not working out,” Lillian said. “I think we were hopeful that we’d fall in love with (Tucker County) when we first got here . . . and we did, we just fell in love with the community and the landscape. We got all the outdoor activities we love, and we were ready to call a place ‘home.’ And this, organically, just kind of fell into place at the right time. It definitely feels like home now.”

“Yeah, we’re calling it home,” Aaron added.

Down Coal Lick Run Road, between the town of Albright and crossroads of Lenox in Preston County, a new community is taking shape in the shadow of Briery Mountain.

The Albright Old Order Amish community consists of at least 18 families who have migrated from Spartansburg, Pa., to Preston County in the past three years. Starting with Jacob Miller’s purchase of the “old Johnny Feather farm” on Coal Lick, the industrious members of this community have built several new homes and barns and renovated existing, often long-neglected houses in the area.

Over in the Cuzzart area, three families are doing a top-notch job of giving new life to a large farm on Bruce Reckart Road that overlooks the crossroads community. This spring, Leander and Barbara Byler opened a greenhouse at the farm, which offers some of the finest scenery and cool breezes to be found in this corner of the state.

Back on Coal Lick Road, between the Brandonville Pike and long-forgotten community of Crab Orchard, Melvin and Emma Sue Byler recently opened what is hands down Preston County’s least expensive grocery store, Mountain View Discount Grocery (follow the signs on the Brandonville Pike and its intersection with Coal Lick Road).

This grocery also has the distinction of being the county’s only store where a flashlight comes in handy when shopping. Being Amish owned and operated, the store does not have electric lights. Melvin says they’ll probably install some gas lights in there come winter, but since there’s no air conditioning either, he’s holding off on the supplemental lighting.

The store also has curbside service; one or more of their seven children will gladly carry your groceries to your vehicle after Melvin, Emma Sue or their oldest son total your purchases on the battery-powered calculator.

“They like to help; they like to carry out the groceries for anybody who asks,” Melvin said.

Cash and check are the only payment options. Debit and credit cards cannot be processed.

Melvin told me that the discount grocery business is something that always interested him when they lived back in Pennsylvania. His brother-in-law had a store there but was not interested in reestablishing the business in West Virginia.

“He didn’t want to be tied down,” Melvin said. “I’m more of a stay-at-home guy.”

Further, there was a definite need for a grocery store for both the new Amish residents and established Yankee families. The roads to Kingwood’s Walmart, the closest option, are not horse-and-buggy friendly.

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“I decided this would help the community,” he said of their decision to expand an old garage behind their home into a store and warehouse.

The couple’s discount grocery store operates with the “salvage store” model. The canned goods are usually dented; boxed items often have their exterior packaging damaged but repaired. And the goods are usually near expiration or a few months beyond the “best by” date.

Each item is inspected by the family for safety before it goes on the shelf. Melvin said he is reluctant to put any product on the shelf that is more than three to six months beyond its date.

The food comes from warehouses where the damage occurred, stores that went out of business or cleared their shelves of slow-moving, esoteric items. Melvin works with a broker in Ohio who puts together a semi load of goods based upon his preferences, such as groceries, health and beauty, or pet food and supplies.

“We will get 24 pallets at a time,” Melvin said. “I’m working on a load by the end of (July) that will be half candy and snacks and half grocery. I call a broker, and they find the stuff for me.”

Beyond the general categories, the couple “never knows what we are going to get,” Melvin said. “I don’t know what some of this stuff is for.”

With nine family members, the Bylers have a ready supply of testers for the varied products. Melvin said he’d never heard of potato pancakes, but after trying a box of the mix that came in a shipment, he was sold on it.

“It was like the potato cakes my mother used to make with mashed potatoes,” he said. “It tasted just like them.”

On the other hand, Melvin was not brave enough to try the Irish Moss (sea moss) that came in one of the boxes that cost him $23 each. Their cost drives the pricing; Melvin and Emma try to double their investment. Typically, this brings their retail price of the item in the range of half of its big-box price. As an added check on their pricing, the Bylers spend a great deal of time researching prices at Walmart and price their version at half of that.

“It takes a lot of time to do this,” he said.

Grocery shoppers who enjoy trying different ethnic foods, vegan options and unusual grains and flavors will be delighted at the selection at Mountain View. Fans of sparkling water and unusual juice beverages will likewise find lots of variety there.

No frozen or fresh food is stocked, however. Melvin said there is a need for fresh produce in the community, and he hopes one of the other families in their community will step up and establish a produce farm.

The store’s first day of business was June 5 and, for the most part, was very strong throughout June. Melvin said both the Amish and English communities have been very welcoming.

“I haven’t talked to anybody who doesn’t like it,” observed Melvin’s neighbor “Bud” who has assisted the family with their transition to the new state and community. He said the Amish are purchasing run-down places and rehabbing them into family homes or building new structures from the ground up. A few miles north of Melvin’s and Emma’s house, a relative is building a new home on a parcel overlooking the lovely farming valley of Centenary. As with other families who have moved into the community, they are living in a camper until the house is ready for occupancy.

Melvin said the community does not have its own bishop. They follow the practice of rotating their meetings between the homes of members. They gather on Saturdays, and the store will be closed on those days when they host the service. Those dates are posted in the store weeks in advance.

Otherwise, the store is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Saturday’s hours are 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., and on Tuesdays and Fridays, hours are extended to 8 p.m. Closed on Sundays.

As for why the Amish from Spartansburg chose Preston County to establish a community, Melvin said it has to do with the price of land, which is lower in West Virginia than where they moved from. The intention is not to farm the land as an occupation, however. Virtually all of the Amish men who have relocated to Albright are self-employed in roofing or carpentry work.

He said the community has been helpful and welcoming, and more families from Spartansburg are looking for land to purchase in the region. Bud, Melvin’s neighbor, praised them for their hard work and dedication to bringing failing properties back to life.

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Although the Bylers and Millers were unaware of the area’s history when they relocated to Preston County, they are actually coming full circle on Coal Lick and Bruce Reckart roads. More than two centuries ago, first-generation immigrants from the German-Swiss region known as the Palatinate settled along Lutheran Church and Coal Lick roads. Their community, known as Crab Orchard, includes the farm of Jacob and Mary Feather (Vatter), my fourth-great grandparents. Melvin’s farm is on part of that land.

As Melvin notes, the Amish also came from regions that included Germany, Switzerland and Alsace to seek religious freedom and land in America. Many of them had lived and farmed in the mountains of Europe for generations; centuries later, the mountains of another state are drawing them to high places and new opportunities.

“It’s a beautiful place,” Melvin said. “It’s not as big (as Spartansburg), and it’s more laid back. There are not as many people, and the pace is slower. I like the mountains.”

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It’s Good Neighbor Days weekend in Bruceton Mills, our hometown.

Freshly cleaned window panes of homes and businesses along Morgantown Street sparkle gold in the setting sun and there’s nary a piece of litter to be found at the old stone dam, where a new West Virginia swing was dedicated in June. The driveway around the elementary school has a fresh coat of blacktop. The black-eyed Susans in the landscaping at Clear Mountain Bank are blooming on cue. Over at the Bruceton-Brandonville Volunteer Fire Department’s operation center, workers are putting in long hours setting up fencing, tables for dinner patrons and chairs for the pageant that will be held Friday (July 17) following the parade.

The procession is a showcase for just about any community resource with wheels, feet or hooves. I would expect farm tractors, vacation Bible school floats, Mr. or Mrs. Good Neighbor riding in an antique car and flatbed toting the event’s queen and her entourage of princesses. Virtually any person or conveyance can join the parade without advance registration. Even a vintage car from which the owner of a septic tank pumping service tosses advertising trinkets has a place in this procession.

It is Appalachian Americana with a purpose, fundraising for a regional fire department that gets a good chunk of its funding from the local holiday. The tradition is as old as the fire department itself, being established nearly 80 years ago.

Last year, I sat down with Melissa Kent, vice-president of the Bruceton-Brandonville Volunteer Fire Department (BBVFD) Auxiliary, to talk about the tradition’s origins and heritage.

“It’s always been to raise money for the fire department,” Melissa said. “It was a very small department with a very old, used truck that somebody loaned them. I can remember when I was younger, the department had its own (carnival) rides. They would set them up for the event and take them back down when it was over. They had the Ferris wheel on that concrete pad out there.”

The liability and upkeep on the Ferris wheel and other rides became overwhelming, and the department disposed of them and turned to booking amusements from outside vendors. (Unfortunately, this was long before Patrick Morrisey discovered West Virginia voters’ passion for red and brought to Charleston his grand vision of the Ferris wheel.)

COVID-19 put many of the small ride operators out of business—the owner of the world’s largest portable Ferris wheel being the exception, of course. Back in Bruceton Mills, the fire department has switched to renting several inflatables to keep the children engaged while their parents browse the vendor show, relax by the town’s iconic dam/fishing hole on the Big Sandy, or just be neighborly.

“We try to provide lots of extra seating outside the fire hall so people can just sit and talk,” Melissa said. “It’s really about the namesake, good neighbors.”

Several decades into the tradition, the fire department instituted the practice of recognizing a “Good Neighbor” from a slate of candidates nominated by the firefighters and, more recently, by the community. Firefighters vote in early July to select the individual or couple who will be honored and preside over the two days of neighborly activities, including the coronation of its queen and junior courts.

Back in 1952, a talent show was held to determine which Bruceton High School female student would serve as queen. Darlene Crane wowed the judges with her accordion playing both in 1952 and 1953. The organizers eventually replaced the talent show with letters of recommendation, an essay and interviews held earlier in the year.

The winners of Little Mr. and Miss Good Neighbors Day competitions is determined through a fund-raising competition. Contestants, ages 4 to 7, raise money for the fire department in the weeks leading up to Good Neighbor Days. Their efforts have been known to bring in $5,000 for the department. Contestants and their families raise money by placing donation jars in businesses, soliciting contributions on social media, selling items or doing special projects.

“So, the boy and girl who raised the most money are then crowned (after the parade) Little Miss and Little Mister,” Kent said.

The court rides on a float in the big parade that goes through town twice before disbanding for the pageant.

“It’s probably the only parade in the United States that reverses,” Melissa told me. “It goes up to (the top of the hill above town), then reverses and comes back down and ends here (in front of the fire station).”

The fire department’s largest income-producing activity of the event is food served from the fire hall. Hamburgers, hot dogs, sausage sandwiches and other culinary favorites, including the department’s famous funnel cakes, are served on Friday. On Saturday, the Good Neighbor Day Kitchen cooks and serves a barbequed chicken dinner.

Melissa made an interesting observation about the community’s appetite for the liquid cheese used on everything from hamburgers to fries during the event.

“We will go through about 35 gallons of cheese in those two days,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.”

Equally astounding is the quantity of wrapped candy tossed into the crowd from floats and vehicles during the parade. Youngsters leave the event well sugared and with plenty of extra candy to last until Halloween. Melissa said the fire department alone planned to dispense 400 pounds of candy along the route last year.

.“I just know that that every kid has at least a shopping bag full of candy when they leave here,” said Melissa when asked if she any estimate of how many tons of candy is distributed.

A vendor fair is held in the fire hall during the event. Regional businesses donate services and items for a silent auction, thus demonstrating their neighborliness and support of a department whose myriad responsibilities would challenge a paid organization.

The service district covers 150 square miles and includes 18 miles of Interstate 68, from the Maryland line to Cooper’s Rock.

“We had one storm this past winter when (the department responded to) 25 calls on the interstate in one evening,” Melissa said. “The firefighters didn’t know if they were coming or going.”

Additional responsibilities were added after the state closed the Jenkinsburg Bridge over the Cheat River, cutting off access by Masontown’s fire and rescue. The BBVFD, as the nearest department with access, had to buy a boat and train and equip seven firefighters for swift-water rescue. More than $15,000 had to be raised outside the operating budget. Last year, the department demonstrated the new gear as they staged a mock rescue on the Big Sandy, which flows behind the department’s headquarters.

Whether they need a water rescue or someone to check out the smell of gas in their home, residents of the service district just assume the department will always be there with the appropriate resources when a need arises. Melissa, a full-time teacher at Bruceton Elementary, said working in the department and auxiliary revealed to her the high cost of readiness.

“I grew up as a fireman’s daughter,” she said. “My dad was a fireman from the age of 16. I think it was just in my blood to help. But I didn’t know how much things cost until the last 10 years or so, when I got involved and I would help them with fundraisers. And then, I became a member, and it was like, ‘Holy cow!’ Just to outfit a fireman, and you’re supposed to change that gear every 10 years, it is just under $10,000 for each (firefighter).”

Bruceton Mills is located at exit 23 off Interstate 68 in Preston County.

Visit by book store.

My wandering and this Substack are supported by the sale of my books like Still More Wandering Back-Roads West Virginia, which includes several other stories from Preston County. On Friday evenings in the summer, you can find me and my wife peddling those books at the Davis Farmers and Artisans Market in Davis, W.Va.

From 19^th-century techniques to composites of hundreds of digital images, the abstract work of Thomas-based photographer John Ryan Brubaker redefines the boundaries of his medium and documentation of his world.

“I often find that people think (my photographs) are paintings because they are abstracts, because they have a matte finish and don’t have glass on them, generally,” Brubaker said. “So, people think they are paintings at first. Then they ask questions . . . and then it is a matter of trying to explain, ‘Well, it’s like a hundred photos.’ And when I say that, ‘People are like, ‘Oh, I think I understand.’ They may not exactly understand how it was done, but they get the gist of it.”

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Brubaker’s work is the featured exhibit for July in the Aurora Project gallery (General Store), 23976 George Washington Highway, Aurora. The opening reception is 5 p.m. July 12. The exhibition will be open on Saturdays and Sunday the balance of the month. Hours are 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The reception and opening are free events.

Brubaker is the son of a commercial photographer, but it was his mother who “put a camera in his hand” as a youth. It was not until he left his native Grand Rapids, Mich., to study art at Florida State that he began to take the medium seriously. A job mixing chemistry in the college’s darkroom and photography class got him hooked on the medium that his father still works in as an amateur.

“I realized this is my interest, this is my people, this is where I want to be,” he said. “That one photography class was sort of my gateway into the arts in general. And I spent the rest of my college years in the art department.”

By the time he received his BFA in 2000, Brubaker had adopted the obscure photochemical techniques and abstract approach to underpin his work. “I liked the sort of moody, dark, black and white stuff,” he said. “Even sort of spooky, Joel-Peter Witkin and (Clarence) James Laughlin. Just sort of weird, experimental black-and-white things. Even then, I was working with multiple exposure quite often, which I still do now.”

One his works that hangs in Brubaker’s third-story studio is composed of more than 3,000 images digitally merged into one haunting, two-dimensional representation of many journeys. It is from his Ambient Geography series, examples of which will hang at Aurora.

“There are places that are not fixed at a particular geographical location, but are instead visited experientially, through time and movement: an oft-travelled route through the city, a walk to a lover’s home or favored path in the forest. Our thoughts and memories of these places often take on an emotional or sensory form,” Brubaker writes of his project.

The technique behind these haunting images involved creating minute-by-minute photographs of the journey while maintaining a common horizon and vertical orientation. “Each work contains the visual content of roughly one hundred individual views that have been combined mathematically. The final image is the result of averaging the brightness and tone of these many photographs, pixel by pixel, into a single visual composite,” he wrote.

Brubaker said most photographers think in terms of one moment in time, one direction and one point of view. But his approach is to push many moments, directions and perspectives into one frame. The result is often abstract, dark, moody. “I’m trying to disrupt that one perspective, one angle, one moment, whether it’s camera-less cyanotypes or other methods or other things,” he said.

The road to Thomas

Brubaker’s long journey to Thomas could have been a work worthy of a thousand images. After graduation from Florida State, he paid the bills by running a small graphic design company that made websites. He moved to Brussels, where a friend lived, and earned his MFA from the Sint-Lukas School of Art. Thanks to his residency and Belgium’s education-focused climate, Brubaker’s MFA cost about $800.

His master’s thesis was Maps for Getting Lost, a series of photo books based on his exploratory journeys of Brussels. “They are an investigation of the process of travel without destination, or orientation,” he wrote on his website, jrbrubaker.com.

Brubaker briefly lived in Oakland, Calif., after his Brussels years, but a trip to Portland, Ore., changed his trajectory. “It wasn’t really until Portland when I started becoming more involved in photography. I met some really interesting people, other photographers, when I was out there,” he said.

In 2011, he visited a friend from Grand Rapids, Nathan Baker, who’d discovered Thomas as an ideal incubator for artists and their work. Brubaker sums up the town’s appeal in one word: space.

“In Portland, it didn’t seem like I could really do the things that I wanted to do, I couldn’t afford a studio space,” he said. “There really was not the possibility of starting a gallery with friends or to get in on anything from the ground up.”

East Avenue was still struggling at that time, and Brubaker, Nathan Baker, Seth Pitt and Kimberly Joy Trathen became partners in the studio and gallery space in what had been Jim Cooper’s Haberdashery. Initially known as the White Room, their space is now known as Invisible, an incubator and gallery shared among emerging and established artists.

Many of the artists who landed in Thomas during those years earned living expenses working at the Purple Fiddle. Brubaker was an exception; he simply relocated his part-time graphic arts business. He said there’s never been a time in his fine arts career that art alone could pay the bills. Work for a non-profit in Brussels continues to provide Brubaker with the basics for his life in Thomas.

Nevertheless, Thomas nurtures on other levels, often invisible to the casual visitor. “One of the things about Thomas that is still special is that . . . there are spaces and events and things here that are not recorded, that you have to (live here) to experience,” he said. “There’s some stuff that we don’t publicize and there’s stuff that just happens spontaneously.”

Further, Thomas possesses a heritage that inspires artistic exploration, even for “a visual artist working mostly with experimental photographic processes.” While most photographers think in terms of a single moment in time, Brubaker’s perspective is much wider, which lends itself to drawing upon the region’s heritage of exploitation, specifically coal mining.

Brubaker’s first project to focus on that history was Slow Mining. Using pieces of coal he picked up on his walks around the community and on its trails, Brubaker made abstract paintings with the substance serving as both pigment and a three-dimensional clay of sorts. He ran the coal through a meat grinder and added it to acrylic medium for the paintings. His Sackler Treatment series used gelatin capsules filled with crushed coal to make statements about exploitation by both the coal industry and pharmaceuticals firms (Sackler Family/opioid crisis).

Coal’s legacy also appears in On Confluence, a series of works based upon Brubaker’s explorations of the North Branch of the Blackwater River that flows across the street from his apartment. The stream receives daily an estimated 2 million gallons of acid mine drainage from the legacy coal mines under Thomas. The water is so acidic it can act as photographic developer for the iron-based Van Dyke process.

“The process uses acidic water as its developing agent, making the contaminated portions of the North Fork an idea location for creating prints,” Brubaker writes on his website. “The works in this exhibition were processed directly in the river effected by acid mine drainage and have absorbed traces of the same heavy metals and mine runoff as the North Fork Watershed itself.”

Brubaker literally immersed himself in this project by wading the murky, brown water of the toxic stream as it makes its journey from Thomas to Douglas Falls. From poisoned water gushing from pipes to air bubbles on the stream’s surface, the images explore the river and its legacy. He exposed the paper using the sun and developed it in the acidic water in Long Run. Fixed in standard photo fixer, the prints were returned to the river for rinsing, then dried on the shore. The resulting prints are thus inorganic in their chemistry and organic in their composition.

More recently, Brubaker has been using another 19^th-century photographic technique, cyanotypes (think “blueprints”), to make images of rain. That series, “Rain Pieces,” explores the microclimate of Tucker County using a combination of the Van Dyke and cyanotype processes.

“This chemistry is sensitive to water in sunlight, so you can put it out (during a rain event),” he said. “The water makes its impression; I finish it with the sunlight (or UV light) and rinse it. So, they’re really like one-of-a-kind records of the rain here. And, since I’ve started doing this, I have become really interested in this sort of microclimate that we have here and how it is changing. We’re essentially a temperate rain forest. Climate change is happening, and we can see it in all different ways.”

Brubaker estimates that he has made at least 200 of these records of Tucker County moisture events and yet each one is unique. As with his other one-of-a-kind print originals, he scans them in high resolution and prints them on a 40-inch-wide printer owned by the artists.

The rain portraits will comprise much of the exhibition on the first floor of the Aurora Project’s gallery, which was once a general store. The store’s original shelving was retained, and Brubaker said the horizontal surfaces will be his preferred way for exhibiting the Rain Pieces, face up toward the sky where their patterns originated

.“I think I am going to put a bunch of these out,” Brubaker said as he leafed through the 11-by-15 inch originals. “That makes sense, facing upward on all the shelves.”

He also plans to include pieces from the Ambient Geography series and perhaps a few examples of his artistry. All of his works require an understanding of the processes and premises in order to grasp the depth and ingenuity of Brubaker’s work. None of it is the breathtaking landscapes, misty sunrises and dramatic sunsets that draw most photographers to Tucker County. Brubaker’s studies are the prosaic; seeds bobbing on an acidic stream that offers little hope for life; raindrops that could have been the tears of a miner’s widow; collective memories of prosaic journeys.

“These pieces were made to serve as reminders that there is infinite potential in whatever course one chooses to pursue,” Brubaker states regarding his “Every Path is Viable” series. “And that at any moment, there are a multitude of paths available.”

Explore more of John Ryan Brubaker’s art at www.jrbrubaker.com and visiting the Invisible Gallery in Thomas. Learn more about the Aurora Project at their website.

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Here’s a few images from the celebration, which will end in a fireworks display that begins about the time I’m going to fall asleep!

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And finally … a photo of two folks who had just purchased my Wandering Tucker County book from a pop-up shop on East Avenue operated by Nanette Seligman during the months of July and August. Thank you for supporting this work by purchasing my book!

Saturday was a big day in St. George, despite a downpour in the valley and fog as thick as humus on Backbone Mountain.

St. George Day is held in late June to celebrate the history and perseverance of this community along the Cheat River in Tucker County. The Flood of 1985 nearly wiped out the lower part of St. George, but natives like Priscilla Nestor Flanagan, who now lives on what was her paternal grandparents’ farm, never gave up on the bucolic community. They pitched in, shoveled mud out of homes and the circa-1850s Methodist Church and kept St. George from becoming a ghost town. Even the old Academy building, nearing a century of service to the community when the flood hit, was salvaged.

Priscilla, who lived on the mountain at that time, came down to look at the disaster, drove back up the twisting road to her farm, grabbed the pot of soup that was stewing on the wood stove and started feeding her friends who’d lost everything in the flood. She stuck around the community cooking and serving meals to the displaced and volunteers until things got back to “normal.”

Saturday, June 27, the community recognized and thanked Priscilla by crowning her queen of the annual event.

A low-key celebration, St. George Day is one of the few times the Academy is open to the public. Both of the downstairs classrooms are filled with memorabilia and photographs that have been donated to the restoration group by families of the community. Among the prosaic rocking chairs, beds, toys and pump organ is a true one-of-a-kind item: the saddle used by a resident who was born without legs but nevertheless became an expert rider and served the Confederate Army’s cavalry.

A committee determines who gets to be crowned queen. In addition to the honor and a few minutes of sitting on a “throne,” the queen gets to ride in the one-unit parade through town (the unit being a quad vehicle).

On hand for the event was the 2025 queen, Carol Croston, and a prior year’s queen, Alice Parsons Phillips. All three ladies had been students in the Academy building during their childhoods. The Academy survived only a couple of years before it closed for lack of students who had parents who could afford tuition, room and board.

The two-room building with a second-floor stage and theater became a public school and was used into the late 1970s/early 1980s by the board of education, which also built brick schools adjacent to the academy. Eventually, the schools were consolidated, and St. George students were bused out of the drowsy community.

The board planned to raze the Academy, but the Parsons family donated land onto which the stout building could be moved. That effort was under way just as the flood hit. Fortunately, the structure was still up on steel beams and the water and debris flowed under it.

There are many other stories about St. George, which was formed in 1856 from Randolph County, Virginia. If such stories interest you, check out my new book, Wandering Tucker County, W.Va. It has more than 600 pages (expanded edition) of stories and photographs in an 8.5-by-8.5-inch format.

I devote an entire chapter to St. George and its environs in this new book. And in it you can read about the amazing Priscilla Flanagan and what has kept her coming back to her childhood home throughout each stage of her life and made her worthy of the “queen” honor.

I need to mention that St. George Day was one of the first Substack articles I wrote—July marks my first anniversary of writing on this platform, to which I was introduced by my good friend in Ohio, Kathy McCarty. During the last 12 months, more than 100 persons have become subscribers to Wandering Back-Roads West Virginia. I’m honored to have each of you as a reader, and I hope my wanderings and snippets of life in West Virginia inspire you to visit the state or follow my work in the books that I write.

I have a great deal of interviews and stories planned in the months ahead, including a new book project focused on a highway dear to my heart and story. I depend upon book sales to support this work in my trusty 2013 Scion xD that just marked its 150,000th mile!

Please encourage others to subscribe to this FREE resource and check out my books, Wandering Back-Roads West Virginia, based upon my four decades of wandering the state as a writer and photographer.

Thanks for being a reader!

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On West Virginia Day 2026 (Saturday, June 20 for those unfamiliar with the statewide holiday that marks the admission of West Virginia into the Union), Friends of Blackwater hosted a celebration of Thomas’s Early Merchant Families. My friend Joe Dumire did a great job of pulling together biographies of the four families that were recognized and presented his research to a crowd that filled Rudolph’s Restaurant—the former Thayer Building—in Thomas.

Stories were shared throughout the afternoon, with Virginia Dilettoso DePollo taking center stage with her stories from both sides of the families of merchants/restaurant owners. Her memories of the ice cream made by her parents, Sam and Mary Dilettoso, had guests longing for a large sundae built around the fresh product served at his Roma Restaurant.

“They would get cream, 100 percent cream, from New Castle, Pennsylvania, shipped by rail and delivered to the restaurant three times a week by Ed Breedlove, who was delivering at that time in the community. My father and my older brother learned to make the ice cream . . . we had fresh ice cream. And most of the town knew when Dad was making ice cream, and they would stop by and get what they wanted,

soft serve. They would get it right from the machine.

“They made four batches out of this 25-gallon can (of cream). They would start with vanilla, then they had a fruit flavor—White House, it was called, the cherry ice cream, and the vanilla part was the White House. Then they added nut flavor—pecan, walnut—whatever. And the fourth one was chocolate, always had to be chocolate.

“This machine was really dangerous, because the blades in the machine were (this) high, and they went around and whipped the ice cream up. And then we would pack it in several ways—it if was bulk ice cream to be used in the soda fountain, it was put in cans you see in stores today. Or we would package it in pints and quarts. Those were flat things that I would have to fold up. They would fill them and pass them down to me. I’d close them up, stamp them with whatever flavor they were and put them in the freezer. It was very popular in the community at the time because it was homemade, fresh ice cream,” she said.

I recorded Joe Dumire’s presentation and offer it here:

Interested in more history from Tucker County, West Virginia? Check out my book, Wandering Tucker County, at my bookstore.

Five miles south of the Mason Dixon Line, the glades, pastures, farms, woodlands and homesteads of Preston County create scenes worthy of real estate brochures and West Virginia Department of Tourism Facebook ads.

Frank and Rachel Stevens enjoy an idyllic, woodland lifestyle in their homestead surrounded off a narrow gravel road near the state line. Self-avowed “nature freaks,” the couple have done everything possible to minimize their impact on their 12-acre parcel, carving out only what’s absolutely necessary to accommodate their double-wide home, driveway, gardens and storage building for firewood. Their only footprint on the forest itself is a web of narrow, wood-chip covered paths that provide access to the “sanctuary” just beyond their back door.

Walking the path with Frank and Rachel on a sunny morning in mid-June, Rachel stops and knells on the woodchips to help a red salamander scurry into the luxurious spread of hay-scented ferns. The impact of the couple’s lifestyle on this web of life drives each decision they make about the property and their lifestyle.

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In the winter of 2025, Rachel and Frank were notified of a potential threat far greater than a 1-foot-wide foot path through the woodlands. The notification informed them that their property was within the proposed route of the MidAtlantic Resiliency Link (MARL) Project. MARL is a 107.5-mile 500-kilovolt transmission line stretching across the region from southwest Pennsylvania to Loudon County, Va., aka “Data Center Alley,” which has more than 100 of the facilities.

NextEra Energy, the nation’s largest energy infrastructure investor, is the builder. Property owners whose parcels are 5 miles on either side of the proposed route were notified in early 2025.

“I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ My hands were shaking. That was my first reaction when I got the postcard,’” Rachel said. “How could something I love so much potentially be taken from me? It was heart-breaking. This (land) is one of my greatest joys in life.”

MARL

NextEra Energy, which recently combined with Dominion Energy to create the “world’s largest regulated electric utility business,” states that the transmission line will provide “increased access to lower-cost generation sources, strengthen the regional electric grid, enhance reliability for homes and businesses and supporting economic growth across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia.”[ii] The plan does not include a substation in West Virginia, however because the Mountain State’s grid will be modernized and its capacity increased, regional ratepayers will see their monthly utility bill increase.

“This line serves an entire region, and West Virginia customers pay only their allocated share under the same framework applied across all PJM states,” said Kaitlin McCormick, senior director of development for NextEra Energy Transmission MidAtlantic. The PJM is a regional transmission organization that serves West Virginia. It is the largest power grid operator in the United States.

The route, which begins at a substation in Dunkard Township, Pa., crosses into West Virginia and goes through parts of Monongalia and Preston counties before entering Maryland. It reappears in West Virginia’s Mineral and Hampshire counties before reaching its substation destination at Gore, Va. The route follows an existing high-voltage transmission line for most of its route through Preston and Monongalia counties. A NextEra Energy press release stated that adjustments were made to the original route to “limit impact to watersheds, stream habitats, scenic viewsheds and ecotourism centers” based upon the more than 1,500 comments received from the public.

“This project is designed to minimize impacts on landowners and the environment, deliver reliable power, provide critical infrastructure for economic development and generate significant tax revenue for local communities,” McCormick stated.

Last month, the W.Va. PSC held a series of public meetings in the affected West Virginia counties. About 100 people attended the Preston County meeting, held June 11 in the Craig Civic Center, Kingwood. Judy Rodd, who owns land in both Preston and Hampshire counties and is executive director of Friends of Blackwater, made comments that referenced Tucker County’s “huge fight” over the data center that will be near wilderness areas and two state parks.

“This is a chance you have to stand up against the data center proliferation,” she told the commission members. “And you have a very good reason, because this pipeline, this electric line, will not benefit West Virginia. It’s just passing through, and maybe it creates jobs in the construction, but these data centers do not create jobs. They’re practically run by robots . . . and we need to stand up against it.”

Those who spoke in favor of the line cited the job-creation benefits of the project to the regional labor force. “The MARL line represents hundreds of thousands of work hours for skilled trades workers,” stated Jonathan Wilson, representing the Laborers’ International Union of North America. These are not temporary, low-wage positions . . . (that will) keep young people here instead of leaving (the state) for work opportunities.”

Denny Boss, representing IBEW Local 317, stated that projects like MARL “drive the electric grid, improve system reliability, and help ensure that homes, businesses and infrastructures have access to the power” that will “grow big wages and more jobs in the region.”

However, Judith Delagarza told the PSC that the 300 temporary construction jobs pale against the 61,000 tourism-based jobs. “Tourism preserves our private property, our natural resources, maintains the viability of fragile ecosystems, and the beauty our state offers,” she said. “It protects our way of life, heritage and generational farms.”

Preston County resident Corey Anderson argued that the project will not “provide meaningful local benefit except higher . . . utility bills for local residents and local businesses.” Ratepayers in the states through which MARL passes will pay for the project through higher rates regardless of whether or not electricity is delivered to that area from the line; the mere presence, not actual use, of the line is what determines ratepayers’ obligation. Because the final cost of the project has not been determined, the impact upon the rates can only be estimated.

“In our Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity filing in West Virginia, we provided a detailed study of impacts on retail rates in West Virginia,” McCormick stated in an email regarding the project’s cost. “This study shows the average rate increase for the average residential customer is under a dollar a month.”

McCormick did not address the project’s cost, however, which was rolled out in 2023 at $441 million. The latest updates place it at $1 billion, however. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has estimated that West Virginia’s electricity customers will pay $572 million over the line’s 40-year life before drawing any power from the line.[iii] McCormick stated that the Link “was not built for any single customer or industry. It is designed as a reliability project, meaning it is designed to serve those who depend on reliable power in the PJM region.” She noted that it is a “bi-directional energy highway” that moves electricity to where demand is highest.

“The project is not necessary for any business or person in West Virginia,” Corey Anderson told the PSC. “The project serves our corporate overlords, continuing efforts to treat West Virginia like a colonial outpost to provide increased transmission capacity across our backyards and into data centers that can hotbox a square mile at time.”

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Sacred land

A swath of real estate 200 feet wide will be required to accommodate the 200-foot-tall steel towers. More land will be needed where MARL shares an existing right-of-way. Jessica Lipscomb, a Realtor from Preston County, stated that “the impact on real estate value is real, measurable and a permanent threat to our county’s economic health.” While landowners will be compensated for the right-of-way, buyers “consistently pay more money for land without high-voltage transmission infrastructure. The burden is falling disproportionately on our rural landowners. Landowners may lose development potential,” Lipscomb said.

Other Preston County residents spoke from the perspectives of heritage, familial connections and their land’s intrinsic values. Ray Paugh, a Bruceton Mills resident, said his family “has been in these mountains since before there was a West Virginia . . . the United States of America.” His grandparents lost their farm to eminent domain for a golf course. After serving in the military for more than a decade, Paugh returned to Preston County and built a “forever home” that will be in the project area.

“Now I’m going to have to stare at a 120-foot-tall power tower and listen to its rumbling,” he said. “I don’t think that’s quite the American dream. I know you can’t answer my question, but have you ever had anything sacred? Have you ever had something near and dear to your heart and watched somebody just trash it?”

“. . . have you ever had something sacred? Have you ever had something near and dear to your heart and watched somebody just trash it? This link is not going to benefit West Virginia. That is clear. So, please, let them get their power from somewhere else. Don’t drag an extension cord across our state.”

Ray Paugh, Bruceton Mills resident, addressing the PSC of WVa.

“These farms were built over years of hard labor and sacrifice,” said Preston County resident Mike Sisler. “Family homes (will be sitting) in the shadow of the 200-foot-high tower with the EMF energy field extending over 700 feet on each side from the edge of the right-of-way.”

He said the transmission line projects that cross through the state are “not unlike when the lumber and coal barons of past generations pulled our precious resources and wealth out of the state, leaving the people of West Virginia to pick up the pieces.”

Although it appears as if Frank and Rachel would not lose any of their land to the project, their property is in the five-mile zone to the north of the proposed route. The anxiety and fear related to the project weigh heavily on them. She said they lived in the D.C.-area before coming to Preston County more than 20 years ago because they wanted to live simple lives connected to nature and the land. The couple have made many economic sacrifices to live that lifestyle which is now threatened by the insatiable appetite for power in the region they left behind.

“We made sacrifices to live this lifestyle,” she said. “To just take it from us is a small thing to (NextEra Energy), but it’s a huge cost to us.”

Calling the line a “path of destruction,” Rachel asked the PSC, “what this massive destruction to wildlife habitat gives back (to) Mother Earth? No matter how modern and high-tech our AI-driven lives we cannot separate ourselves from Mother Earth. We are inextricably linked; what we do to nature, we do to ourselves.”

Preston, Tucker other W.Va. face another line project

The Valley North Project seeks to build a 260-mile 765-kilovolt transmission line connecting Putnam County, W.Va., to Frederick County, Md. A new substation in Hardy County is part of the project, being built by Valley Link Transmission Company LLC, a collaboration between Dominion Energy, FirstEnergy Transmission and Transource Energy. According to packets dated June 9, 2026, and mailed to property owners in the affected areas, both Tucker and Preston counties are in the “project study area.”

As with the MARL line, the owners are promoting the line’s benefits as enhancing electric service reliability for customers, driving regional economic growth and creating hundreds of construction jobs.[i]

The project is in the “open houses and community input stage.” The open houses in affected counties began in June and will continue through July.

All of the open houses are 4 to 7:30 p.m.

1. The Tucker County event is July 8 at Tucker County High School, 116 Mountain Lion Way, Hambleton.

2. The Preston County event is July 21 at the Craig Civic Center, 311 Tunnelton St., Kingwood.

3. Grant County’s event is in the Landes Arts Center, 20 Mountain View St., Petersburg, on July 23.

4. Barbour County’s open house is July 15 at Philippi Middle School, 611 Cherry Hill Road, Philippi.

5. The Garrett County, Md., event is July 15 at Southern Garrett County High School, 345 Oakland Dr., Oakland.

To view the packet and map, visit https://vltransmission.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ValleyNorth_AnnouncementPackage_WV-1.pdf

Comments can be submitted by email, vlnorth@vltransmission.com, and by phone, (304) 207-0120.

Proposed and alternate route identification is expected in early 2027. Permitting, environmental studies, easement acquisition and construction follow regulatory filings.

Purchase Wandering Tucker County, W.Va., from books.by/feather-cottage-media and support this work.

[i] Valley North Project information packet of June 9, 2026, issued by Valley Link Transmission, LLC, c/o FirstEnergy Transmission, Martinsburg, W.Va. https://vltransmission.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ValleyNorth_AnnouncementPackage_WV-1.pdf

[ii] “MidAtlantic Reslilency Link Unveils Community-Informed Route for Regional Transmission Project,” press release dated Sept. 26, 2025. https://www.nexteraenergytransmission.com/content/dam/neet/us/en/pdf/neetmidatlantic/news-release-midatlantic-resiliency-link.pdf

[iii] Cost of Mid-Atlantic Resiliency Link construction more than doubles: Report. https://www.wboy.com/news/local/cost-of-mid-atlantic-resiliency-link-construction-more-than-doubles-report/

Growing up in Davis, Lindsey Hull never grasped the heritage, culture and art that were shaping her persona like the wind that creates skiable drifts along the fencerows at White Grass. But a brief homecoming in her freshman year at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) awoke Lindsey to the undetected powers that at work in her life since early childhood.

“I remember I’d literally only been gone for three months, and I was coming back for winter break,” she said. “My mom and dad picked me up from the airport, and I am sure they got sick of me because every two seconds, I’m like, ‘Oh, my God! There’s a mountain. It’s so huge. It’s so beautiful.’ But I didn’t even see them when I was a kid. . . . Now, every time I see a mountain, I’m still in awe of how small we are and how big this world really is.”

“I feel like that for the longest time I’ve tried to distance myself from who I am,” she added. “But it wasn’t until I started making music again and coming back here that I realized that is what makes me who I am. And that’s the thing that sets me apart, the roots that I have here and the lucky pieces I had growing up.”

After a year-long hiatus in Davis, the 2025 SCAD graduate is set to leave home again but with a fresh perspective as she pursues her professional music and theater/film career. She’s heading to Nashville.

“I’m a songwriter, that’s something that’s very important for me, and Nashville is the place to go if you write songs,” she said. “I’m just excited to meet people and just be in the scene, to keep creating and find people to create with.”

Lindsey was unaware that “people to create with” were already in Tucker County during her childhood and youth.

“It’s crazy, but I’d never gone to the Purple Fiddle,” Lindsey said. “I started going this year, and it has been so cool to talk to some of the bands. Also, I got plugged into Augusta Heritage (Center in Elkins). I’m going to be doing social content with them and taking summer camps.

Her lack of familiarity with the Tucker County music culture is partially due to the fact Lindsey was more focused on an acting career than music during her teen years. She left Davis to pursue a degree in acting. “I didn’t want to pursue music as a career because there’s that old saying, ‘If you choose to do something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.’ I combat that with, ‘Once you monetize a thing you love, it’s no longer just a thing you love,’” she said.

In the months following graduation, Lindsey’s focus shifted back to making music as she discovered a wealth of resources in her home county.

“The music culture we have here is something so magnificent and deeply rooted, but I don’t feel like I recognized it when I was growing up here,” she said. “Being back here this year has been restorative, transformative.”

Lindsey’s return to Davis coincided with the release of her debut EP, “Learning to Fly.” The six-song project blends her signature indie-folk sounds with her Appalachian background. An official music video of a song from that EP, “Brand New,” premiered Aug. 22, 2025.

“It’s a coming-of-age story that talks about my experience from growing up here in the mountains to jumping off to college,” she said. “The final track is called ‘As I Fly.’ I wrote it between my junior and senior year of college, (as I reflected) on how transition out of college was to what I experienced four years earlier as I transitioned from high school and moving away.”

‘. . . every time I see a mountain, I’m still in awe of how small we are and how big this world really is . . .’

McGowan Mountain towers over the Black Fork River near Hendricks, W.Va.

Lindsey worked with other SCAD seniors to produce music videos of two songs she wrote and performed. The senior thesis project involved more than three dozen students in a wide range of creative disciplines. Positive feedback from her cohorts gave her the validation she needed to keep writing. Lindsey estimates that she has penned 50 to 100 songs and would have no problem filling a two-hour set with original music.

She proved that in May, when Lindsey performed at the Cheat Fest, where she had both her first camping experience and festival gig.

“I’d never been to Cheat Fest before, and it was such a treat,” she said. “The people were great. I forgot my sleeping bag on the first night, and I became the camp charity case. My friends were telling me afterwards of all the cool things they heard in the crowd during the show. . . . It was so cool to play with a band.”

Lindsey cites Billie Eilish and Lizzy McAlpine as two artists who influence her work. “I think we are all a piece of everyone we meet,” she said. Locally, Dry Fork resident E. May influenced her as a tutor and encourager. A songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, recording artist and band leader, E. MAY holds a BFA in fine art and runs a homestead business, Healthberry Farm. They first met when E. MAY judged a talent show that Lindsey entered when she was around the age of 10.

“I got second place, and afterwards she came up to me and said, ‘I think you should have gotten first place. Here’s my business card,” Lindsey said. “I started taking lessons from her. The first song I ever full wrote was because of her and with her help. And every time I came back from Savannah, I’d grab a tea with her on back porch. . . . I just like hanging out with her at her studio and talking life. She actually was in my band for Cheat Fest. That was really sick. And we’re going to do a few more gigs around here before I move.”

Lindsey summed up her Nashville goals as “making music and hanging out with cool people.”

“Of course, I want to write a Grammy- and Oscar-winning songs for film. And I have my list of artists I want to open for,” she said. But she leaves space for serendipity, as well. “It’s important to have vision, but I think sometimes we get too locked into a plan, and we miss the good that happens on the way to get there.”

Lindsey’s plans for the summer include continuing her work for the Tucker County Convention and Visitors Bureau, where she originally volunteered for the Leaf Peepers Festival and ended up being hired as an office assistant. “I love working with them, and they’ve kind of let me make the role whatever I want it to be and explore the things that I want to explore and build my portfolio, which has been great,” she said.

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Her acting portfolio is already grounded in Tucker County, going back to when she was 12 years old and cast in the “West Virginia Stories” motion picture. She originally delved into acting with Ilene Evans’s Voices from the Earth (voicesfromtheearth.org) storytelling troupe. While under the tutelage of Voices’ Bill Peterson, Lindsey learned that his son, Preston, was producing a film set in Tucker County. Bill felt Lindsey would be the perfect actress for a lead role in the otherwise all-adult cast.

“I was 12 years old and doing my first film here,” she said. “I remember being on that set, and it was like, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done. This is the thing I have to do the rest of my life.’”

Lindsey said she loves theatrical acting but feels that film is better at capturing an artist’s soul. “The camera picks up everything—from a little lip quiver and one tiny tear,” she said. “I feel as if my job as an actor is just to be in the moment and experience what this character is experiencing. There’s something so beautiful about that to me. And that’s what I studied at school; I did a lot of student films. I did background work and got to learn some great things from watching great actors.”

Focusing on acting left little room for developing her interest in music, which was in Lindsey’s genes. Her late father, Robbie, played the guitar, and her uncle, Steve Hull, cut a record in Nashville years ago. “I grew up watching my dad play guitar, sing and stuff. But I was stubborn . . . I said I would never learn guitar. So, I learned piano, instead,” Lindsey said.

The gift of a “cheap, little toy guitar” from a family member activated a genetic predilection for the instrument. Her next instrument belonged to her father, who died Jan. 27, 2024, after a year-long battle with cancer.

“He gifted me his guitar with the sweetest little speech of like, ‘I never went far with music, but I know you are gonna go far,’” she said. Lindsey said most all of her songs have been written using that guitar, although her performance instrument is a Taylor, a graduation gift from her mother, Tina Hull.

“So, now I have three guitars, and life is great!” she said.

The struggle

There was a time when Lindsey’s life was not great; it hurt. Lindsey struggled to fit in with her public-school classmates who did not appreciate her penchant for “make-believe games.” Resources that could have helped her family identify her neurodivergent traits were absent in the Tucker County community. But while a student at SCAD, where she was surrounded by other artists who struggled with similar challenges, Lindsey discovered that she has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Putting a name on the disorder also opened the door for her to gain further experience in music and acting. The Monday prior to Cheat Fest, a Canadian camera crew came to town to produce a documentary for Darkspark (darkspark.org), a nonprofit that provides a platform (Versions) for underrepresented youth from around the world. These students share their voices through musical storytelling in short documentary films.

“It’s about who you are as an artist in your community and how that made you what you are,” she said of the documentary that was shot in Davis last month. “We recorded one song professionally; we went to Pittsburgh for an eight-hour shoot/recording day,” she said. “It was insane! I got a fiddle player from Pittsburgh to join in on the track. It was really sick!”

The recording session had a serious, local side—her song for the documentary addresses Appalachia’s water-quality issues. She said that the first verse of the song is specifically about Davis/Thomas, but further verses expand to more visible issues that are happening in the lower part of the state and not experienced in Tucker County. The song reflects her concern and love for the place and people who are at the core of her being.

“I love the people here, the way everyone is family, even if they are not,” Lindsey said. “There’s just something so special about a small town. Even if someone hates you, they are going to help you out. If they see you stranded on the side of the road, almost anybody is going to stop and see what they can do for you.”

That said, Lindsey is not interested in being tied down to any one place for very long. “I never want to spend more than two years in one place,” she said. “The whole world is so big, yet also so small. And there are so many places I want to see. They say, ‘Home is where the heart is,’ but I feel like I have so many different homes, like my heart is broken up into a million pieces, but in a good way.”

And Tucker County holds a good many of those pieces.

“This will always be my home. No matter how often I move away, no matter where I go, this is where my roots are,” Lindsey said.

Lindsey Hall videos are on You Tube at Lindsey Hall. Her EP and two other songs are on spotify.com. Keep up with her career at Lindsey Hull Sings on Facebook.

Support my work by shopping for books like Wandering Tucker County West Virginia at my online bookstore, books.by/feather.cottage.media.

As I state in the Introduction to my new book, I have been wandering Tucker County, W.Va., since I was a fetus in my mother’s body.

That amounts to 72 years and nine months today.

Wandering Tucker County, W.Va., is a (mostly) oral history of the county wrapped in a memoir and told through the stories its residents shared with me over the decades, but particularly since the early 1990s. That’s when I began writing for the now-defunct Goldenseal print magazine as a regular contributor. As such, I often drew upon my contacts in Tucker County for stories.

A Tucker County book sloshed around in my mind for at least five years, and I decided that the 170th anniversary of the county’s founding would be a good occasion for releasing it. I did so during the ArtSpring Festival in Davis over Memorial Day weekend.

Even more than the anniversary, two external forces pressing upon this county convinced me that this was the time to document the county as I’ve known it. The first influence is completion of the Tucker County section of the four-lane highway, Route 48, also known as Corridor H. The Davis/Thomas to Parsons segment remains uncompleted, but once that link is built, much will change about an area often referred to as “everyone’s hometown” and a bastion against corporate ownership.

There is one traffic light in the entire county, and it at the intersection of routes 72 and 219 in the county seat of Parsons. There is but one gas station/convenience store in Davis. Thomas has only one gas station, and it is known statewide for having the best pepperoni rolls. You’ll find only one gas station in Canaan Valley, as well, despite hosting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.

Don’t look for a Sheetz; there is none here. There’s one fast-food chain restaurant, McDonalds, in Parsons. In the tourism-centric towns of Davis and Thomas there is but one Dollar General and one supermarket, but several upscale coffee shops and bakeries. Mom-and-pop businesses drive the county’s economy.

Corridor H, cutting through northern West Virginia from the Virginia line to Weston, will change all that. It’s already transformed other communities where big businesses that cater to hungry, thirsty and bored motorists arrived as the interchange signs went up.

The exact route of Corridor H across Backbone Mountain is still being debated. If the current plan is followed, it will require a bridge over the North Fork of the Blackwater River and connect to the existing highway between Davis and Thomas. The impact on these two pristine communities will be severe, destroying the genuine atmosphere of the communities. Further, the highway construction could bring further pollution to the Blackwater River as old mines are disturbed and their acidic drainage released.

The Northern Route is being pushed by environmental groups like Friends of the Blackwater. Under that plan, Corridor H would go north of Thomas, through the ghost towns of Benbush, Pierce, William and Sissaboo, the latter being where my mother grew up and my uncle and his son still have a home. Theirs and many other residences and family lands would be claimed by the Northern Route.

That decision will be announced by May 2027.

Meanwhile, the mountaintop communities are being threatened by a sprawling power plant/data center complex located between Davis and Thomas. Covering 1,200 acres, it would include a huge solar field, nuclear power plant and two generating plants fueled by natural gas with diesel as a backup fuel source. There will be smokestacks, storage for millions of gallons of fuel and huge demand for water in both the power plants and data center. The water, reportedly, will come from flooded mines in the area and will require processing to strip out the myriad contaminants. Of course, a backup source of water will be necessary, but there are times neither community has enough water for its residents and small businesses, let alone a huge data center.

Under HB2014, communities and their elected officials have no vote in the placement of data centers in West Virginia. It’s all handled on the state level. The residents of Tucker County have raised their voices and protested and held town meetings and gone to Charleston, but the plans move forward unabated. The governor, Patrick Morrisey, has yet to show his face in Tucker County, and it was only recently that Randy Smith, the president of the senate, bothered to come to a town meeting, where he talked out of both sides of his mouth.

All this ties into my reasons for doing the book. My decades of visiting the county and having family here made me aware of just how unique Tucker County and its little communities like Davis, Thomas, St. George, Parsons, Hendricks and Hambleton are. The people here are special, too. They’ve been here for generations; their forefathers were either farmers trying to feed their families in this bit of Canada gone astray or immigrants who came to mine the coal, operate the coke ovens, build the railroads or harvest the timber. They stuck around after the coal mines closed, the last of the ancient trees was cut, the coke ovens went cold and the railroad pulled up its tracks. They kept their little grocery stores, haberdasheries and dress shops, and hardware businesses open until death came for them. And while it often looked like death was claiming the towns themselves, the stout buildings of East Avenue in Thomas and William Avenue in Davis were just awaiting resurrection.

Meanwhile, in the Cheat River Valley, the horrendous 1985 Potomac Basin Flood ripped through the county seat and downriver farming communities, destroying businesses, homes, livelihoods, livestock and human lives. Out of that disaster, Tucker Community Foundation, was formed and with it, a much stronger and resilient Tucker County.

Forty years after the flood, state parks, the arts, outdoor-recreation and hospitality services have created a destination that is exceptionally popular with visitors from Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Columbus (Ohio) and northern Virginia. Housing and commercial property prices have soared. And the data center/power plant project threatens all of it.

Two state parks, Blackwater Falls and Canaan Valley, will be within a few miles of both Corridor H and the data center. Heat and pollution from the data center threatens the unique climate and environment of Canaan Valley, which holds about 10 percent of the state’s wetlands and has been reinvented as a ski resort area. Canaan Valley is home to the nation’s 500th National Wildlife Refuge and has hundreds of high-end second home/vacation home units.

Thomas and Davis have been reinvented as arts towns. The Purple Fiddle, an eclectic music venue, and the galleries of Seth Pitt and other contemporary artists are East Avenue, Thomas, anchors. But there’s also the 1901 Cottrill’s Opera House, which is being renovated, and Buxton and Landstreet Company Store, now an art gallery, and vintage shops to explore. Friends of Blackwater has done an amazing job of telling the community’s and landscape’s story through trails and interpretive signage, not to mention a long battle to bring the canyon into public ownership and restore the health of the Blackwater River.

In Davis, there is the iconic Sirianni’s Cafe, which serves up the best pizza in the state (based on my experience) and where "freaks appear for free” and food is served on a mishmash of plates procured from second-hand shops. No credit/debit cards are accepted. You can spend the night in a former boarding house or stay on the rim of the canyon in a state lodge. You can see the stars at night and become enveloped by the fog most mornings, but especially in autumn. The water that tumbles over the falls is not black, but it is tan from all the tannin in the soils it drains. The canyon is simply stunning, but especially so when the hardwoods breakout their autumnal palette and transform the canyon walls into magnificent murals that stir the heart and have been known to bring tears to my eyes.

And the people—kind, authentic, quirky, friendly, creative. I love the people of Tucker County; I may not live there, but I consider myself a “native.” I spent the best days of my childhood in Tucker County, and my days as an adult there provided with me cherished experiences.

All this is to say why I wrote the book and illustrated it with hundreds of photos that document the community and its people. Tucker County is about to change dramatically, and I wanted to create a document of the place as I’ve known it. I pray that I’ll be dead wrong; that the Charleston and Washington, D.C., powers will keep their hands off Tucker County and allow it to continue its natural evolution as an outdoors mecca still struggling to heal the scars and administer the antidotes to the decades of coal- and timber-resources exploitation.

If this challenge concerns you, there are several resources where you can do deep dives into the topics:

• Here on Substack, Country Roads News provides excellent ongoing coverage of the data-center issue.

• Tucker United is a grassroots effort to stop the data center. Follow them on their Facebook page.

• Friends of the Blackwater is at the forefront of protecting the environment and heritage of Tucker County. It is a leading proponent of the Corridor H Northern Route.

Each time I drive Route 219 up Backbone Mountain and take in that breathtaking view, I shake my head in unbelief. How can a state’s leadership be so beguiled by outside money’s influence? Why would these “leaders” insult the residents’ hard work in reinventing their county and threaten the very things that bring 1 million tourists and second-home owners to Tucker County in the first place? Those people could stay home and see data centers, smokestacks and smog in their own communities. Tucker County is unique, authentic, natural and refreshing. Evidently, our state’s leaders feel our attributes ought to be poisoned by the banality of the AI age. Can’t we have just one oasis where insanity cannot trespass?

As the old Christmas carol states, “I wonder as I wander.”

More about the new book:

Wandering Tucker County, West Virginia is 8.5 x 8.5 inches. It comes in two versions:

550 pages, hundreds of black-and-white historic and contemporary photos by the author and from the West Virginia and Regional History Center at WVU Libraries. This version is available from Amazon in softcover only. Price is $49.95.

I also offer this version at my online bookstore, books.by/feather-cottage-media. In general, the print quality, especially on the photographs, is better from my bookstore because they fulfill the printing through the Lulu network. Unfortunately, the printing cost through this provider is 2.5 times that of the amazon book! Therefore, the price is higher, $54.95.

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An expanded edition has more than 600 pages and includes a photo essay of Tucker County in 2025 and additional resources and stories for deeper dives on various topics touched upon. For this edition, we ordered a small press run from 48-Hour Books in Twinsburg, Ohio. This company does a fantastic job on quality control and printing. The cover on the expanded edition is heavier than that of the standard edition and has a protective pearl coating. A very limited number of hardcover books were printed, as well.

I am selling these books only at events and by mail. To order by mail, please contact me at carl@thefeathercottage.com.

The books will be available at the Davis Farmers and Vendors Market in the Davis Town Park from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Friday evenings. I am offering the softcover edition at a 7-percent discount (basically, I’m paying the sales tax). Cost is $60 for the softcover edition. If mailing the book, the shipping is $10, via insured media mail.

My mother died on Jan. 28, 2018. Today marks the ninth Mother’s Day I’ve been without a living mother to dote on with gifts and presence.

I visited my mother in the nursing home on my lunch break the day she died. I doubt whether she knew I was there. She’d broken her hip on the eve of my wedding day, December 23, and was in the hospital being prepared for surgery when our simple ceremony took place in Clearfield, Pa.

Mom drifted in and out of consciousness for several weeks, but she clearly had given up on life as she stopped eating and refused hydration. She’d had more than a dozen surgeries during her life, including several major abdominal ones. My mother had reached the point where the amount of input required to keep living no longer justified what few joys still awaited.

The morning of her accident, Mom laid out her clothing to wear to the wedding ceremony. She loved going to thrift stores, and after taking care of the wedding preparations, she convinced Dad they needed to make a round of the thrift stores.

She had a dizzy spell, fell and broke her hip while shopping. I was returning a rental car at the time—my vehicle had been damaged in a collision with two deer as I returned from visiting Ruth in Pennsylvania two weeks earlier. I needed to pick up my car at a shop some 50 miles from the rental agency and had only my father to give me a lift. It was an incredibly stressful day that was made even more so by the snow squalls coming off Lake Erie.

Looking back on that entire month, it seemed like hell had once again released a bevy of demons upon my life, a continuation of what had been years of major troubles ranging from a job/career loss to divorce and illnesses. My mother helped me get through those challenges by assuring me that I was loved, I would make the best decisions and they would help me start all over at 62.

And things were going well. Ruth and I had met through eHarmony and soon discovered we were perfect for each other. I had a job I loved and felt as if I was finally contributing to the betterment of our community. I had rescued a stone house from the wrecking ball and transformed it into an oasis of peace and isolation. More than two dozen mature oak trees were on the property, providing seclusion and a foot of leaves in November. I still have in my mind the image of my mother, at the age of 85, raking those leaves on a glorious autumn afternoon. My parents were always there for me in the most practical of ways.

Thus, one of big regrets in my life is that I did not call off from my job and spend the afternoon at my mother’s side in her last hours. My position was on shaky ground; I was a politically independent working for a Republican board of county commissioners. Another employee was being groomed for my position, and little by little the commissioners reinterpreted my job description to prevent me from doing the very things that the previous board hired me to do. I knew I was on thin ice, and I wanted to demonstrate the extent of my loyalty.

My mother died with only my father by her side. Her only child, who drew his first breath in her presence, was absent she drew her last all because he wanted to please three politicians who held his career in their hands.

Fewer than three months after my mother died, I was let go for “lack of work.” It was a manufactured absence of duties; there was work, but they had someone else in mind to do it, someone more aligned with the Trump-brand of the party.

I had failed my mother for people who cared nothing for me, for a job that was as fleeting as my mother’s last breath. And that thought haunts me on this Mother’s Day, which comes two weeks after my mother’s younger sister, Barbara, died.

As we met with my uncle Lowell and their youngest son Tim last weekend, we reflected on the relationship between my mother and Barbara, who were more than a decade apart in age but shared many of the same interests and traits. Both had amassed collections of dolls so large that one bedroom was required to hold them all. Both loved to frequent thrift stores and purchase whatever caught their fancy that day. My mother had collections of Holly Hobbie pieces, large dolls, cameo brooches, watches, reverse-painted pictures, teapots, and salt-and-pepper shakers (she had over 900 sets). My father still has a bedroom full of her collectibles; you cannot easily part with the possessions of someone who shared 66 years of her life with you.

Barbara and Lowell also were married for 66 years. There were many other parallels between their experiences: marrying young, surviving the first several years as a military family and coming home to West Virginia, which offered little in way of employment or opportunity. Both couples migrated to industrial urban areas—Lowell and Barbara to Baltimore, my parents to Ashtabula County, Ohio. Unlike my parents, my aunt and uncle purchased property back in Sissaboo, where the sisters had grown up, and put a small mobile home on the property. My parents loved joining Lowell and Barbara at their getaway. The stories and laughter went on late into the evening as my mother and aunt reminisced and shared updates. My father and his brother-in-law slipped out and headed up the mountain on the ATVs to fish in the beaver ponds. What grand times they had!

Yesterday, Ruth and I stopped at Eloquence Antiques in Morgantown and poked around the various vendor booths filled with survivors of the past. Nine years after the last time I had shopped for a Mother’s Day present, I still looked for the cameos, pictures and dolls that my mother enjoyed collecting. Each piece I saw reminded me of her, her smile when she opened the gift, and the challenge of finding a place for it.

While my mother loved collecting things, she had a wish that went unfulfilled—to ride in a hot-air balloon. It was an odd wish considering that she never flew and when she was a child, made her father tell the Ferris wheel operator to stop the thing so she could get off it. She hated heights.

Regrets and mystical experiences

Time has taught me that time itself is the greatest gift we can give to those we love and who mean so much to us. Taking the time to be present is how we best show love. The salt-and-pepper shakers, Holly Hobbie ceramic pieces, jewelry and other nicknacks are souvenirs of those moments.

I wish there existed a souvenir of my last visit with my mother, something she clutched in her hand, that reminded her of how much I cared. A final “thank you” for the Thursday evening spelling drills that helped prepare me for a career as a journalist. For tolerating my incessant “why” questions, something that drove her sister crazy. For cooking thousands of meals the West Virginia way—seriously over cooked and borderline burned. For praying for me, believing in me, offering sanctuary when hell released its demons on me.

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If regret were an offering, I would lavish it on her today. I would tell Mom that I failed both her and my father, that I prioritized work and supervisors over love and family. Yet I know from an experience that happened in the days following my mother’s passing that she understood and assured me that life continues after we take our last breath.

The morning after she passed, my dog, Polly, who had cataracts, wandered away in the darkness. I called and called for her and searched as much as I could without being late for work. For the next three days, I drove the neighborhood, country roads and even the Interstate looking for her or her body. I was dealing with both my mother’s funeral and the loss of a dog I loved very much.

I had given up on finding her alive. And then, the night after Mom had been laid to rest, we received a tip from the police department that a black dog had been spotted wandering around a cemetery across the creek and forest from our property. But the dog would not go to the strangers who tried to catch her.

Equipped with flashlights and treats, we drove to the cemetery. We spotted what looked like Polly running scared around the headstones. We positioned ourselves in her path, and I grabbed her collar as she dashed past me. Polly was wet, cold, shaking and so hungry. We took her home, gave her a blanket in front of the wood stove and treated her like royalty. She’d spent three days and three nights in a cemetery and came back to us. Perhaps it was coincidence, perhaps it was God answering prayers or perhaps it was my mother trying to send hope and love; compassion and grace.

I’ve had to face my own mortality in the years since Mom died. For weeks, I was in a coma after going into cardiogenic shock following an aortic valve replacement. My mind was thrust into a series of horrible, vivid experiences during those weeks. They remain with me to this day, but one was especially graphic and realistic.

I quote from the accounts I wrote of my experiences.

The afterglow across the Amish hamlet in North Central West Virginia has more orange than a pumpkin field and red than a blood bank. It glows brighter than a searchlight. Bare, blacker-than-eternity hardwood forms stand gaunt against this sunset of sunsets.

I stand in the side yard of a brick church and gulp the blazingly cold air into my lungs; my body shudders and begs for more air as my legs tremble.
The sun and I are one in this moment, both fading, both dying.

A preacher comes alongside me. “Are you ready to die, Carl Feather? Before this day is over, you will be dead.

The shadow of a hot-air balloon plays across the meadow. In the balloon, I recognize my mother. She is waving and smiling.

And she tells the man, “No! It is not his time.”

It was just like Mom to be there for me, to advocate for my very life, even though I was not there when she passed.

This is what mothers do. They know their children are imperfect and make dumb decisions, yet they forgive and love.

And they show up when we need them most, even after they are gone.

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As you head out of Parsons toward Elkins down Route 219, you pass the little lumber ghost town of Moore. The town, which was founded as a sawmill community, consists of a church, a few homes and a split-rail fence operation owned by Carlo Ricottilli.

Most people don’t give much thought to where split-rail fencing is made or the process of milling it. But spend a few hours touring Carlo’s muddy but fascinating sawmill and you’ll never look at another split-rail fence without noticing the girth of the rails, their taper, how well they fit in the post and the quality of their wood.

If you want to tour the mill with Carlo, however, you’ll need to hurry down to this Tucker County town. Carlo plans to retire in four years—when he turns 90.

“I pretty much do the entire week,” Carlo told me back in January, during a rare break from working in his South Haddix Road sawmill. “Sometimes I work (evenings). I have one guy that works until seven, and I stick with him if he needs it.”

Ricottilli Lumber sells direct to fence dealers, mainly in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and as far north as Michigan and New York. “I’ve got some in Japan,” Carlo said.

Many of the mill’s customers were established years ago through personal contact while he and his late wife, Patricia Ann, went on motor trips.

“She would tear out the Yellow Pages for fence company listings, call them up and offer them a sample of free rails,” Carlo said. “She got a lot of orders that way.”

Carlo said that while there are several other split-rail fence manufacturers in West Virginia, Ricottilli’s distinguishes itself with larger rails. “Our standard is a girth of at least 14 inches,” he said. The rails are 11 feet long, tapered on the ends so they create a 10-foot section when overlapped in a post.

It’s a seasonal business, but the sawmill employees are busy throughout the year. Carlo said orders start shipping this month and will peak May through July. The mill has a core of eight to 10 workers, double that in the summer if Carlo can find people who want to work.

“We’re having trouble finding workers, so the three of us who are supposed to be supervisors are basically workers,” Carlo said. He recently had two long-term employees retire, leaving him with the job of being president, sawyer and maintenance man. There’s enough at the mill for a full-time person in each slot, so filling all three slots keeps Carlo very busy.

“I usually have something going on that I want to get done,” Carlo said when asked what motivates him to keep working. His most recent project was relocating a part of the operation from leased land to a parcel owned by the company. “It’s a huge, huge job,” he said of the relocation. “I got two sawmills; one that’s running, and I got one that’s got to be taken apart, moved up there, set up. So that’s what we are doing now, and that keeps my mind very occupied.”

Carlo is the last surviving child of first-generation Italian immigrants Panfilo and Giovanna Ricottilli, who immigrated in 1908 and 1912, respectively. Their first stop was Thomas, where Panfilo worked beside his father in the coal mines.

“That was the best place for (immigrants) to make money,” Carlo said. “His dad would come over and work, build up a little cash and go back to Italy. My father came over and worked with him.”

In Italy, the family made its living by farming. Panfilo did what was necessary to feed and house his family, but owning a farm and returning to that vocation was his long-term goal.

“And the way he ended up with the farm was that one of his friends, Ralph Quattro, had a farm over in Barbour County. My dad was in Ohio at the time, and another farm, adjacent (to Quattro’s), came up for sale. And that’s how we got there,” Carlo said. They started with 100 acres and added to the property as adjoining farms became available. Owned by a great-nephew of Carlo’s, the farm covers more than 700 acres.

In the United States, Ricottilli family grew to 14 children. Carlo was the youngest, and by the time he came along in 1940, his father had added a sawmill and gristmill to the farm to “keep them busy.”

“The sawmill was just kind of side thing for him,” Carlo said. The farm included timberland that was mostly chestnut trees killed by the blight. “They made the best use of the chestnut they could. And part of that was making split-rail fences, which kind of got this family going in the business,” Carlo said. “My dad had free labor. The older sons were tough, hard workers. And the trees were available. After the potatoes were harvested and all that work done, they would cut the trees. They might get only a nickel for a rail, but somebody would buy it.”

The sons used crosscut saws to harvest the trees. A hammer, wedge and muscular arm split the chestnut logs into rails. His father later added a circular mill for sawing boards. This constant exposure to timber and sawmill work led to six of the Ricottilli children going into the business. Carlo speaks of his late brothers with deep respect for their knowledge, tenacity and willingness to look after their mother and the farm after Panfilo died in 1948 at the age of 61

“My brother Armand was actually the father of the family,” Carlo said. “We worked for him. Some people would start a fence mill . . . and give up. Armand would buy it. And he would put one of my brothers into it. ‘Here’s your fence business. You can go make fence.’ And that’s how so many of them became fence producers.”

When the supply of chestnut was exhausted, split rail manufacturers had to choose between closing or expanding their operations with equipment that would replace the hammer and wedge.

Carlo studied forestry at WVU. He went to work for a Buckhannon company setting up sawmills, then got a job with Georgia Pacific in Richwood. “And they sent me to McDowell County, Iaeger. And I took a job with Luther Compton and Sons in Pike Hill, Kentucky. I ran their sawmill by contract; they paid me, and I paid the labor and stuff.”

With more than a decade of experience under his belt, Carlo started his sawmill at Moore, a community whose raison d’être had been timber. The W.H. Lumber Company established its mill there circa 1890 and named the new town in honor of John and William Moore, the area’s first settlers. The Dasher Company owned the sawmill at Moore that same year and operated for 25 years until the supply of timber along Haddix Run was exhausted.

“We had just a dinky little sawmill to start with,” Carlo said. It was just Carlo and his wife at the time. Their children—Ron, Brian and Lisa—were too young to be working around a mill. Carlo did it all, from cutting the timber and hauling it his mill; from milling it to peddling the finished product. He built the business slowly, acquiring used equipment at auctions and through contacts he made working for other companies.

Carlo preferred cutting timber to milling it. He would still be working in the woods if his energy level allowed. Two years ago, Carlo was diagnosed with cancer and went through treatments that sapped his energy. “I didn’t have a lot of energy back then, but I’m coming back pretty strong,” he said.

Logging ranks first as the nation’s most dangerous profession. “The danger is there, but if you are working with knowledgeable people, it is safe enough,” Carlo.

Even experienced loggers like Carlo and his late brother, Dominick have been hurt. “He cut a tree down, and he started to trim it up. And a limb knocked the saw out of his hand, just like that. He can jump around quickly, but he was hurt a few times.

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Carlo had his moment in 2010. He was cutting down a pine tree with assistance from a bulldozer operator. The dozer’s blade was putting pressure on the tree to keep it from falling on a house. “(The operator) had a lot of pressure on it. And it just went ‘bang!’ I was knocked down, and the tree fell on me. It broke my leg and my pelvis and dislocated my shoulder. And everybody is saying, ‘O.K., O.K.’ until I told them one testicle was dangling in my pants leg,” Carlo said.

Recovery took months, but Carlo eventually returned to the forest and mill. He said the largest hardwood tree he cut in his career was a red oak about 4 ½ feet in diameter near Grafton.

Carlo no longer goes into the forest and cuts timber for his mill; he depends upon other logging companies for the mill’s supply. The primary species used for fencing are pine, poplar, hemlock and locust. The latter is in very short supply in Tucker County forests and highly desirable for fencing.

“People just love it because it is so durable, and you don’t have to treat it,” Carlo said. “Locust has reached a low supply with a high demand,” Carlo added. “A locust that we can use for a post can be quite scarce, and the price is going to be sky high. We have to go a farther distance out to bring them in because the price is better. But it’s kind of scarce around here. In an ordinary stand of timber, only 1 or 2 percent is going to be locust.”

Regardless of what species his mill is processing, the operation’s sawdust, bark and scraps are hauled to the nearby Kingsford charcoal plant.

“They take it all,” Carlo said. “And there are times—this is kind of ridiculous—the majority of our profit is what we made from them.”

Walking across the muddy grounds of the sawmill on a January-thaw day, Carlo observed that “sawmills are not made to be pretty.” The work is done under cover but without walls. The workplace is noisy with whirling circular saws and automated machinery throughout the production areas. Heavy equipment moves the logs with an ease that could cause serious injury or death to a careless worker. Carlo’s two sons, Brian and Ronnie, work at the mill, thus keeping the Ricottilli tradition alive and their father under watchful eyes.

Unlike the sawmills that operated in Moore only as long as there was timber up the hollow, Carlo and his mill have survived in the industry by being adaptable. Carlo said that when the chestnut petered out, naysayers declared, “Well, you’re done for.” But the industry transitioned to spruce and pine, which required equipment to debark the logs and cut them into rails.

And just like the owner of Ricottilli Lumber, “things kept on going,” Carlo said.

Carlo Ricottilli is one of dozens of Tucker County residents whose stories are part of my new book, Wandering Tucker County, West Virginia. Check out both the standard and expanded editions of this new book at my bookstore, books.by/feather-cottage-media.

Also, I want to thank the 100 subscribers who have signed up for my Substack essays on life in West Virginia and Appalachian culture. And I want to recognize my friend, Kathy McCarty, who suggested I start a Substack just for my this kind of writing after Goldenseal Magazine closed its print operation last summer. This has given me a reason to get back out on the back roads and continue my work of documenting what is becoming a fading way of life. Each month I see land being cleared for data centers, beef farms and solar projects. The face of Appalachia is changing, and it is my passion to preserve the stories.

That’s why I wrote Wandering Tucker County . . . a huge data center and power plant being thrust upon Davis and Thomas by legislators, the governor (who refuses to show his face in the county) and out-of-state interests threatens one of the most unique places in the United States. The story of Tucker County and its really kind, unique and hard-working people are at the heart of my new book. It is a book about family (see last week’s Sissaboo Sisters post) and a land that keeps pulling me back and never fails to inspire me.

My big sister passed away Sunday, April 26, 2026. Her name was Barbara Watring Long. She was 82.

She wasn’t really my sister; I’m an only child. She was my mother’s younger sister; nearly 12 years were between them, and just 10 years between me and Barbara, who always sided with me when I got in trouble with her big sister. And that made her more like a sister than an aunt.

Barbara was born at home in Sissaboo Hollow on a very cold night in January 1942. “It was a cold day, lots and lots of snow,” my mother once told me. Her father, Clayton Watring, was a track man for the Western Maryland, whose mainline and Sand Run Branch were right across the highway from their house. Her mother, Violet Keiper Watring, had grown up in boarding houses and was in charge of housekeeping in the Watring home, a very basic one-story house that along Route 219. Clayton had built it from lumber salvaged from the couple’s first home, in Henry, which was mostly in Grant County on the Maryland border.

The Henry Brothers Coal & Coke Company, a Davis Coal & Coke Company subsidiary, settled the town in 1901. Twenty years later, it had 250 residents. There was lumber to cut and coal to mine. But by the time my mother was born Aug. 3, 1932, just three houses remained in Henry, and one of them was an abandoned boarding house. Towns built by coal and timber were legion but notoriously evanescent.

“Coming down (from what is now Route 90) from Bayard (in Grant County), there was Wilson and Dobbin, and then Henry,” my mother once told me. “When you got to this house Dad had at Henry, the road ended right there. You’d come down a bank, go across the tracks and come through the yard to our house. We carried water from a spring; we had no running water in the house. On Saturday nights, that was our job. At that time, you could buy lard in five-pound buckets, and my brother (Bobby) and I had ones that fit each hand, and we carried water from that spring in those buckets.”

My mother and Bobby attended first grade in Bayard. Because Henry was so sparsely populated, the siblings had to walk the railroad track to Wilson, where a school bus picked them up.

“Mom and Dad didn’t want to send us out by ourselves, so Okereta (Keiper Parsons, a cousin), came and stayed with us that first winter to walk us to and from the bus,” my mother said. “And if Okereta got sick, we didn’t go to school.”

My mother had fond memories of Wilson and Dobbins. “It was a pretty little town. Bob Shoemaker had a store there. And at Dobbin, there was a man by the name of Helmick, who lived up on a hill. And he had a bear that he kept in a cage. The bear would get out, and he’d take a wheelbarrow and get after it with that, and it would go right back in its cage. After her husband died, she buried him right there in the backyard. She could sit at the kitchen table or just about anywhere in her house and look right out at her husband’s grave.”

My grandparents rented from a family who had a mean streak that eventually drove Clayton and Violet to relocate to Railroad Hill in Thomas. “The (landlord) was going to kill Dad one night. This Bill, he was just terrible to Dad. He hit him on the head with a board, just split his head wide open,” my mother told me. “It seems like every time we left the house and came back, they’d done something to hurt us.

Clayton was employed by the Western Maryland on a track crew, but during The Depression, work was very sporadic, perhaps two days a month. He supplemented his income working at a strip mine and delivering coal. Sometimes, my mother went to work with him and rode alongside him in the equipment. Extra money was also made selling rags and scrap to the junk man, but very little was discarded.

“I remember Mom sewing our shoelaces if they broke,” Mom told me. “Even after we moved to Thomas, she continued to do that.”

The family planted a huge garden and canned every bit of it.

“We had no refrigerator, so in the fall, Dad would dig a big hole and line it with roofing paper. And he would put the turnips, cabbage, onions, potatoes, apples in there. On a bad day, Dad would open that hole, and it would be just like Christmas because you had all this stuff to eat that you wouldn’t have otherwise,” Mom told me.

They passed the Depression years productively. Clayton read books to Bobby and Mom, instilling a lifelong love of reading in them. During winter, a quilting frame was set up in the parlor, and the work around it went on day and night.

“Bobby and I got into a fight, and we knocked over the oil lamp on the quilt,” my mother told me. “That did not go over too good with Mom. She had an old radio, a floor model, and it was just batteries. We didn’t have electricity in the house. And Bobby and I would get behind the radio and do the music thing and put on all the shows.”

At Christmas, the family boarded a Western Maryland train at Wilson and traveled to Shaw in Mineral County, where Violet’s mother and father, Cora and Alex Keiper, were employed in the timber industry. The house went unheated during their time away. “We came back from Shaw and everything was just frozen,” she said. “We had this big goldfish bowl, and the water in it was a solid chunk of ice. Dad built the fires in the house and got things thawed out, and that goldfish started swimming around!”

Barbara arrives

For more than a decade, it was just my mother and her brother. And then Barbara came along, and my mother was thrilled to have a baby sister. My mother’s real name was Cossette, but everybody in the family, except Barbara, called her “Tick.” Barbara called her “Ticky.”

My mother adored her baby sister.

“I can remember when Tick would go to school, and she’d have her lunch there and save a nickel from it to buy a candy bar to bring home to me,” Barbara told me. “I can still remember standing by the dining room door waitin’ for when she got home, because I knew she was gonna bring me a candy bar.

“We had a lot of fun growing up. We didn’t have hair curlers for our hair. We saved old stockings. And Tick would roll my hair with these old stockings, and she would roll her own hair that way. Well, Tick and I slept together with all these stocking in our hair. And it was odd seeing us laying in bed with all these stockings in our hair.

“Now, maybe I shouldn’t tell this, but I could not understand how if Tick and I both were girls, why she had breasts and I didn’t have any. And I kept saying to her, ‘Ticky, I don’t have them. Why don’t I have them, Ticky? And she’d say, ‘Someday.’ Well, that someday came, and I outdid Ticky!” Barbara said.

Aunt Barb had rheumatic fever as a child. She was treated with penicillin, the fever came down and Barb got better. But a few weeks later, she got up to go to school and couldn’t walk. She spent a month in the hospital and for nearly a year after that was bedridden at home. By then, my mother was married and living away from West Virginia.

“Tick always sent me little things to cheer me up when I had rheumatic fever,” Barbara said. “And when I came home from the hospital, I still had to be in bed. Mom had this old day bed in the dining room, and when my hair needed washed, Mom and Tick washed my hair while I leaned my head over the end of the day bed. Tick was a good sister to me.”

Years ago, my mother shared her perspective on that story with me.

“I spent an awful lot of time taking care of that bratty kid,” Mom said. “She was a brat when it came time for her to get her hair washed. She was really nasty about that.”

But Mom always wanted the best for her baby sister.

“They were having a Halloween party up at the Pierce school, the school and Sunday school went together to have it. I never cared for Halloween, but Tick wanted to dress me up. And she dressed me up like a lady. She curled my hair, put a hat on me, one of her dresses and high-heeled shoes and all. And she put this black veil down over me; I mean, she talked me into this nonsense. So, I went up to the school to have this party. It wasn’t too long before other people started coming, and one of them was Mary-Belle Lansberry, who lived down the road, and Mom and Tick. They were all dressed up for Halloween. They got this guy up the road to take them to Pierce. And when Mom got in the car, the seat of her pants split. So, she had to go back in and find something to pin on the back of her pants.

“She found a pillow topping that said, ‘HOME SWEET HOME’ and put that on the back of her pants. And they all came up to the party like that. But I won a bag of candy corn for being the prettiest one there. And Tick said, ‘See, I told you.’ She was always looking after her little sister.”

Their childhood home, although covered in mineral paper for years, had a white picket fence around it. “They claimed it was to keep me in,” Barbara said.

Money was tight, and Clayton and Violet rented the land that their house was on, therefore they were reluctant to make expensive improvements. But in 1960, they decided to put white siding on the home.

“And the guys who put the siding on the house, I believe that Mom and Dad fed them three meals a day; they would eat all their meals there at Mom’s and Dad’s house,” Barbara said.

She grew up in an era of hobos and tramps, who wandered the Seneca Trail and rode the rails from town to town looking for a meal and shelter. “One time, two of them came by and they were looking for someplace to spend the night,” Barbara told me. Clayton had a key to an abandoned house next door to them and let them spend the night. “And in the morning, they came over to the house and guess what? They had breakfast with us,” Barbara said.

That was the value she grew up with.

“Treat people how you want them to treat you,” Barbara said. “And I’ve tried to do that. I’ve tried to live up to that.”

Dad always told me, “Honey don’t make fun of anyone until you’ve walked in that person’s shoes.” Mom had a modified version of it that she told me, “Don’t make fun of anybody, because by the end of the day you could end up like them, or worse.”

Barbara also learned to stick up for herself and family. “I remember one time in school this girl was telling it that Daddy worked her father (on the railroad) to death. And I told her, ‘My dad never did that!’ And I went in the classroom, and I slapped her. And she went and told the principal, and the principal took me to the office. And he said to me, ‘Barbara, what do you think your parents would say?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what my dad would say, but I know my mother would say it was perfectly O. K. I had the right to do that.’

“And I came home, and I knew I had to tell Mom and Dad what I did. And I did. And Daddy, he said to me, ‘Honey you don’t have to do that for me, because I don’t care what anybody says about me. I know what I do, and God knows what I do. So, you don’t have to do that,’” Barbara said.

What Clayton did was teach Sunday school in a Pierce schoolhouse for many years. “And when it came Christmas time, whether there was money in the collection or not, Dad bought candy from Cosner’s store and a case of oranges,” Barbara said. “Well, we would bag up that candy, and it was all done up in a square box and in sections. You had your hardtack, your chocolate drops and you had the coconut bonbons, and there was some other kind of candy they had. And we would pack up that candy and every kid in that Sunday school would have a bag of candy and an orange on the Sunday before Christmas. And if Dad had some left over, he would stop at each house in Pierce and ask them if they had kids. And if they did, they got a bag for each kid.”

This same hospitality was extended to family. “Grandma Kieper had dinner with us every Sunday,” Barbara said. “After church, Dad and I would go to her house in Davis and bring her here. She’d have dinner with us and spend the day with us, and then they’d take her home. I used to stay with Grandma Keiper at night. And this one time, I remembered I had stayed there several nights, and then I had to come home. Well, I started crying that night, I wanted to go back to Grammy’s house. So, Dad got up and took me back to Grammy’s house to spend the night and the next day.”

“There was one thing I remember about Grammy. Bobby was in the service at the time, and I remember when we went to bed at night, Grammy would get down on her hands and knees and pray that God would bring those boys home safe, that He would bring Bobby home safe,” Barbara said.

Barbara had less contact with her paternal grandparents, who lived in Lead Mine, but she recalled them as very loving and hospitable.

“I can remember Grandpa Watring, when we would go over there, he would open his arms and say, ‘Here comes my little girl!’ But, oh, that road going up to their place, it was something. Daddy and I would go over there, and this one time we had to back down that hill because we met another car. And I started crying because I was scared to death backing down that hill,” Barbara said.

Barbara admitted to being “babied” as the youngest child. “I was a daddy’s girl,” she told me. “I couldn’t cook; I didn’t pay no attention to the kitchen. But, if it was to change the oil in the car or something like that, I’d do that. But Tick was the homebody. She cooked and did all that stuff like that.”

Although Barbara was a daddy’s girl, her mother demonstrated her love in very practical ways.

“My mother took very good care of me . . . my mother was always there,” Barbara said. “She did our clothes. She made them look beautiful. She ironed them. Every pleat in her skirt had to be so-so. And she cooked and cleaned the house. She was an amazing cook, an amazing housewife. But it was hard for her to understand certain things.”

Things like when Barbara wanted to drop out of high school and marry Lowell Long. Her grandma Keiper was the first person she shared this with.

“And she told me no I wasn’t,” Barbara said.

Her mother “didn’t go for it,” either.

And then she told her father. “And Daddy says, ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes, Daddy. I know what I’m doing.”

Barbara and Lowell were married June 18, 1960. It’s likely I was there because my parents stood up for them, but only after Mom also had grilled Barbara about what she was getting into. And her response was the same, ‘Oh yes, I know.”

Lowell was drafted and headed off to Texas. After fulfilling his obligation, he and Barb moved to Baltimore, where Lowell had found work. Barb returned to Sissaboo to live with her parents while pregnant with their first child, David.

“It was February 9th, I was in labor, and Mom and Dad came down to the hospital that night. Oh my, it was snowing and blowing. And Mom is sitting by the side of my bed crying. Lowell is sitting beside my bed timing my pains. Daddy was standing at the foot of the bed, praying. But they left there and went home. And David was born the next morning. And Dad came down to Parsons to work, and he stopped to see the baby and bring Lowell a Thermos of coffee. And when we came home from the hospital, Dad came out to the car to carry David in. And we stayed with Mom and Dad until the baby was six weeks old. And then we went back to Baltimore.”

Lowell eventually got a car inspector’s job with the B&O. In 1967 they bought their home in Dundalk. Another son, Tim, was born to them. After the boys were grown, Barbara went to work for Dollar General, then G. C. Murphy’s/Maxwells, back to Dollar General, and finally, Maxwell’s. She came to like the city life better than that of Sissaboo and settled into Dundalk.

“It worked out good. We’ve been married for 58 years now,” Barbara told me in 2019. “And it’s been good. We had some rough spots, but we had more good spots than rough ones. And we have two boys that are great, a grandson, and two great-grandchildren; they are as sweet as can be.”

Our family ended up in Ashtabula, Ohio. Mom would get terribly upset with Barbara because she was not one to write letters like my mother was. Even when Barb sent a Christmas or birthday card, it was just a signature. Mom used to say, “Well, I guess that sister of mine has broken her arm and can’t write.”

My parents timed their visits back to Sissaboo to coincide with those of Barbara and Lowell. The laughter continued late into the night as they drank cup after cup of coffee and munched on the cookies my mother baked and doughnuts my grandmother fried. Oh, the stories they told, the laughter that echoed in that lonesome hollow!

It all ended July 16, 1968, when Clayton was killed on the Western Maryland Railroad. Nearly 60 years later, Barbara still could not talk about the accident without becoming very upset.

There was a falling out between the three children after my grandmother died in 1976. For years, the sisters didn’t talk. But something happened that brought them back in contact with each other, and the relationship and good times resumed at Barbara’s and Lowell’s mobile home on the lot next to the old home place. I never saw my mother laugh like she did when she got together with Barbara. I never saw my father as relaxed and happy than when he was riding the ATV and fishing with Lowell in the beaver dams above their home.

“She and Junior came to the trailer, and oh, the times we had together!” Barbara said. “And one time, Tick got down on the floor and thought the dog wanted to play. And the dog jumped on her and started playing, and she just laughed and had a time with that dog jumping on her.

“These are the memories that I have. We had a good time. We had parents that loved us and cared for us and showed us about life. They showed us who to believe in. And that’s how we were brought up,” Barbara told me. “But most of all, we grew up with love. We had love for each other.”

My mother died in 2018. And now my Aunt Barbara is no longer with us. She is “home.” And having experienced as a child what home was like in Sissaboo Hollow, I know she is joyful and pain-free, that she and my grandmother are laughing as they weave their stories about Sissabook Hollow.

And I am so anxious to hear them.

The quotations in this piece were taken from interviews I conducted with my mother when writing Mountain People in a Flat Land (Ohio University Press, 1997) and with my aunt while writing My Fathers’ Land (Feather Cottage Media 2023) and Wandering Tucker County, West Virginia (Feather Cottage Media, May 2026). The last two titles are available on books.by/feather-cottage-media.

Back in 2024, when the world seemed brighter, peaceful and more hopeful, I spent the better part of a day riding the Sistersville Ferry between its namesake West Virginia town on the Ohio River and Fly, Ohio.

The ferry is the last one operating on the Ohio River between Ohio and West Virginia. Bridges have replaced ferries, but Tyler County does not have a bridge across the Ohio; the bridges in neighboring counties are 32 miles apart. Back when there was an aluminum plant operating on the Ohio side and coal mines were being worked, the ferry provided a needed service that operated year-round.

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Now that the industries are gone, the ferry operates more as a novelty and tourism attraction than necessity. And its hours are limited: late morning to evening, from late spring to early fall. It takes a whole five minutes to make the crossing, which is on a “long reach” section of the Ohio River. The 20-mile-long stretch is free of the bends that characterize the other portions of this river.

Commercial barge traffic has the right-of-way, so the ferry’s crossing is subject to waiting for “clear sailing.” The crossing will be made for just one pedestrian; the captain explained to me that the boat uses the same amount of fuel regardless of whether it’s docked with an idling engine or running.

The town of Fly does not offer much in way of entertainment; indeed, the town got its name because it didn’t last long. The community’s claim to fame is that George Washington camped there the night of Oct. 26, 1770, during his exploration trip of the Ohio River. This trip marked the beginning of a journey whose purpose was to find lands suitable for settlement in the new Ohio Country. Veterans of the Indian Wars were eligible for these lands. The ferry began operation circa 1817 and was chartered by Virginia in 1818.

The Riverview Restaurant is the destination if you are a pedestrian or want to continue your journey on the Ohio side along Route 7.

The City of Sistersville owns the ferry, which can accommodate up to one semitrailer or numerous passenger vehicles, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians. With a fare of $5 and gas costing at least that much to drive to one of the bridges, the ferry can save time and some pocket change, at least when it is operating.

Unfortunately, some bad news come out of the town earlier this month—on April 9, when they put the ferry into the river for the upcoming season, the tug portion of the ferry sank.

According to The Marietta Times of April 11, the tug will have to be lifted from the river with a crane, then transported to dry dock for assessment and repairs. Comments in news stories project a positive future for the ferry and continuation of this inexpensive back-roads attraction.

The ferry is both historic and significant as a tourism draw for the lovely city of Sistersville. I included its story in my fourth Wandering Back-Roads West Virginia book, Still More Wandering Back-Roads West Virginia.

In conjunction with that story, I interviewed the captain of the ferry, Bo Hause, who retired in 2024. Here’s a 12-minute film about the ferry and its captain.

Unfortunately, Capt. Hause’s replacement didn’t work out, and the city council last spring had to scramble to find another with the proper licensing. Finding a captain is a challenge because the position does not begin to pay what these licensed pilots can make working on commercial tugs. Further, the work is seasonal and involves a great deal of public contact—the captains become celebrities and ambassadors for the city and state.

Capt. Kevin Bunner took over in August 2025.

Hopefully, the town will be able to get the ferry back in the water and operating for the 2026 season. The ferry hosts special excursions, often of a historical nature, throughout the year, as well as evening cruises. These are promoted on its Facebook page and website.

Some of the scariest and yet most-inspiring independent film's I’ve ever watched come from the cameras of Canaan Valley filmmaker Justin Harris.

Justin’s work to date has focused on whitewater legends in Tucker and Preston counties, including the Cheat and Blackwater rivers and Red Creek. Any person who has visited Blackwater Canyon or Douglas Falls and stared into that valley filled with its boulders and angry whitewater cannot imagine someone paddling a short section, let alone the entire length. But Justin and other enthusiasts have done it, several times over, and lived to document and share it.

Tragically, a few have not, and Justin tells that story, as well, in his trilogy of films, all of which are available on YouTube and from his website, Mountain River Media.

The filmmaker

I spent a morning earlier this year talking with Justin at his Canaan Valley home, where he and his wife, Marcie, and son, Miles, have lived since the COVID-19 outbreak changed the way and where creators work.

“After (COVID-19), the creation of full-time remote work definitely opened up the possibilities to living in Canaan with a lucrative career,” said Justin, who had a long journey to becoming a creator.

His home-based production suite at Northpointe overlooks the valley from a high vantage point. One could not imagine a more inspiring location to work, and the impeccable media he produces reflect that inspiration, talent and diligence.

“First and foremost, it is the wilderness and outdoor adventures here,” he said when asked drew him to Tucker County. “This place is through and through West Virginia. And you know that West Virginia is a little bit rough around the edges. But it’s also a little more free, and I think that, overall, the people here—even though we butt heads sometimes because everybody’s got strong opinions about the data center and the highway—understand community.”

Justin, like many of the Valley’s part- and full-time residents, grew up in Virginia. He discovered Tucker County when he was in his mid-30s and going through a life reset. He had lost everything in a divorce, took a seven-month hiatus as a hermit on an island in the James River and eventually launched a new career as an outdoor-adventure photographer and filmmaker. But he had to discover Canaan Valley first.

His introduction to the area was through seasonal gigs in outdoor sports. Justin shared on social media his photography of kayakers on the James River during his self-imposed exile in 2013. The following year, he met his future wife, Marcie, who encouraged him to “Do what you want to do.” Justin found work as a river guide on the Upper Yough, which was fine during kayaking season, but left the winter months open.

“Most of the people who were river guides had a seasonal life, and they either worked at (Deep Creek Lake) or Timberline or Canaan State Park,” Justin said. “So, that winter, I told her I was going to come down here and take a job as a ski instructor for like $11 an hour.”

The following spring, Justin was invited to assist the Upper Yough River’s main photographer, who was familiar with his work from the online James River photos. “So, I did that for the whole summer, and it went well. That led to an invitation from Warren Wik, ski school director at Canaan Valley Resort, to take wintertime photos on the mountain for the resort. “And before long, Samantha Haverty, who was the sales director, hit me up for some pictures, and she was like, ‘Hey, would you mind reporting to me instead of Warren from now on?’” Justin said.

Justin supplemented that income by working as a bartender at Timberline on Saturday nights. The tips were amazing. “There’s no other job that could pay like that,” he said. But when Canaan Valley Resort created a “media director” position for Justin, he had to surrender his weekend gig at Timberline. It was an opportune time to make the transition—social media was rapidly becoming the preferred way to reach prospective guests, and Justin had the skills to produce story-based media for the resort.

In 2018, his supervisor suggested he work as a contractor rather than an employee to ease Justin’s income tax burden. Justin created a company, Mountain River Media, which has produced award-winning documentaries and has clients throughout West Virginia.

“We tell their story through photography and video. That’s what we’re selling,” Justin said.

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His wife, Marcie, works in nuclear medicine throughout West Virginia. Aside from not having a sushi restaurant and GrubHub, Justin’s needs as a creator are well met in Canaan Valley.

“I work in a room (above the kitchen). I made the entire White Grass Story (film) looking right out the window at White Grass, which was super cool,” Justin said. “If I’m not on a shoot somewhere, I’m upstairs working. Daycare (for Miles) is in Davis, it’s right there. Or I’ll go to White Grass and visit that little triangle of my life. There are worse lives to live.”

The films

Filmed during CheatFest weekend in 2022, The Red Creek Sessions film focuses on a rare whitewater opportunity that coincided with the festival. A wet spring had created a rare opportunity for kayakers to run the Red Creek from Dolly Sods to the Dry Fork of the Cheat. The drop on the upper section of Red Creek is 126 feet per mile. Using his GoPro, Justin captured point-of-view footage as he and other enthusiasts navigated the remote waterway. A few days later, he returned and shot supplemental footage of the landscape.

During a hike of the creek that day, he noticed that the stream suddenly disappeared underground. That piqued his interest in the geology of the area, and Justin placed a Zoom meeting interview with Philip Prince, a geology professor at WVU and expert in Appalachian geology.

“So, the film when you watch it, is a Zoom meeting interview, which is really unprofessional, but I didn’t know it at the time,” he said.

Using footage of the runs during CheatFest weekend, overhead footage of Red Creek’s journey from Dolly Sods to the Dry Fork of Cheat River, and the interview, Justin told the story of this intrepid group of kayakers.

“It’s basically exploring the geology of the Dolly Sods from the eyes of white water kayakers,” Justin said.

He uploaded the film to YouTube, where it drew accolades from viewers who suggested he enter it in film festivals. A photographer friend and filmmaker from Morgantown, Gabe DeWitt introduced Justin to Film Freeway, and using his own funds, Justin began applying to festivals.

“And The Red Creek Sessions ended up winning 47 film awards all over the world a year and a half later,” Justin said. “And I was just like, ‘O.K., I guess (I’m) a filmmaker now.’” In 2023, with Marcie’s blessing, Justin hit the road with the film, presenting it at film festivals and paddling in Utah’s San Juan River and many classic whitewater runs throughout Colorado.

“I said, ‘I’m never going to have this opportunity again. I want to go to Colorado and just get lost and forget what day it is, forget what town I’m waking up in,” Justin said. “And I did that for 12 straight days. I just went from town to town, met up with kayakers, went kayaking on some rivers, and went to film screening.”

Justin’s next film was Freeland—A White Grass Story, which focuses on Chip Chase’s legendary White Grass Ski operation. It was filmed in 2022 and 2023. At its heart, the film is about two communities, the Nordic skiers at White Grass and the kayak community that paddles the same water on the Blackwater.

“It took us two winters to film it,” Justin said of White Grass. “In 2023, this valley got 20 inches of snow on May 4. If it hadn’t been for that snowstorm, we would have had to wait another year before we could finish it,” Justin said. “I’m convinced to this day that some higher power gifted us with that snowstorm so we could finish that film.”

It premiered at the Jack Frost Festival 2023. Thirty-six hours later, Marcie, gave birth to their son, Miles, in Morgantown. The family toured with White Grass in Tennessee and throughout New England during the summer of 2024. The film won Best Short Feature at the Maine Outdoor Film Festival and was overall winner at the Into The Wild Film Fest in Barcelona, Spain.

His third film, Freeland: A Blackwater Story, was made in 2024 and stands in stark contrast to White Grass. “It’s like yin and yang,” Justin said. “I wanted to make the yang of that story, and it was Blackwater. Everything in White Grass is happy, and it’s a big party and everybody goes there to see each other,” Justin said. “The Blackwater is a very mysterious place that few go down into. It’s dark and scary, and so when you watch this film, it’s not sunshine and rainbows. It talks about death in whitewater. It talks about aging and time.”

In his Facebook posts about bringing the Blackwater film to YouTube, Justin pays tribute to paddler Timmy Gavin, who lost his life on the Upper Blackwater River in 1998

Justin has not paddled that river since making his film and having Miles come into his life. In his mid-40s, Justin said the reality is that he may have already passed that point in life where tackling the legendary river can be safely attempted by an experienced whitewater enthusiast.

But he will always have his memories and films.

It is 6 p.m. Saturday in Marion County. The sun is setting and out on Brunners Ridge, eight miles east of Interstate 79’s Exit 139, a red velvet curtain is rising on the Sagebrush Round-Up.

A single slice of butterscotch pie lingers on the counter of the music hall’s restaurant. Guests who paid their $8 admission early and bought the $15 dinner share their medical-procedure stories around the folding tables in the rear of cavernous building, once part of an auto assembly plant. They lean across scraps of country fried steak and cup their ears toward their neighbor as the hall’s massive speakers blast above the 100 decibels mark. It’s useless. The Round-Up is no place to visit after 6 p.m.

The friends ramble, shuffle and half-dance toward the upholstered folded seats just beyond the stage where spotlights in primary colors play across the line of musicians. Dressed in snazzy outfits, swinging guitars that shower the audience with sparkles, they belt out a modern country song that wafts across Bunner Ridge like a 2 a.m. fire siren on a country road.

The musicians’ names are Bill and Lisa Janoske, Brandon Howdershelt, Skip Lamm, Leo McMillen, and Dana Murphy. They call themselves The Round-Up Band. Bill Janoske is on lead guitar, and his wife, Lisa, handles bass guitar, tambourine, mandolin, vocals, and background vocals. She’s also secretary to the board of directors, and Bill is treasurer.

Brandon Howdershelt, he’s president, youngest one they’ve ever had. He plays rhythm guitar, lead guitar, drums, bass guitar; sings vocals and background vocals, too. His guitar teacher was responsible for introducing him to the Sagebrush Round-Up 20 years ago. “I’ve been coming here since I was 10 years old,” he says.

“I really enjoy the classic country music, the atmosphere, and the people here,” he says. “And I just enjoy coming every week to entertain the crowd.”

Brandon and the other five members open the show and play several sets throughout the evening. If single acts need a backup, the band is there for them.

This Saturday night is about 12 years short of a century since the Fairmont-area tradition got its start on December 10, 1938. The original Sagebrush Round-up debuted to live and radio audiences from the stage of the Fairmont Armory on Jackson Street. WMMN, Fairmont’s local radio station, attempted to build a Saturday evening audience with a show modeled after the popular Wheeling Jamboree broadcast on WWVA. Stocked with talent from WMMN’s live, weekday radio broadcasts, the one-hour show showcased some of the best talent Appalachia had to offer: Grandpa (Marshall Louis) Jones, Little Jimmy Dickens, Cowboy Loye (Donald Peck), Uncle Rufe (Armstrong), his Coon Hunters and his wife, “Petunia” (Norma Francis), the “Old Pardner” Murrell Poor and his Trading Post Gang, Curley Mitchell and his Ploughboys, the Buskirk Family, Tex Mitchell and the Rhythm Rangers, and “Little” John Graham and his wife Cherokee Sue.

“We played the Round-Up practically every Saturday night,” John Graham told me back in 2003. “We’d usually play a fiddle tune, sing a song, maybe five or six songs.”

The 8 p.m. radio show was but an hour long, but the musicians continued to entertain the live audience late into the evening. “… they moved the chairs out and they would square dance in there,” recalled the Bob Cunningham, who attended the original Round-up shows as a young man.

“You’d have so many people who would come out to watch, there would not be anywhere for them to sit,” recalled the Bill Murray, who played and sang with the Mountain State Melody Boys. “The audience would stand outside and watch through the windows.”

Most contemporary Round-Up audience members will not know this, but the Bunner Ridge stage pays homage to the original show in several ways. A 10-by-30-foot section of the armory flooring is incorporated into the contemporary Round-Up’s 60-foot-wide stage. Décor on the stage—a lighted railroad cross-buck and country-store porch—hark back to the rustic appearance of the original Round-Up stage.

World War II, gasoline rationing, and Saturday night overtime in the mines and factories that fed the Allies’ war effort cut deeply into attendance at WMMN’s live shows. The Round-up held its final show October 2, 1948; by then, folks who wanted to listen to hillbilly music could drop a dime in a jukebox or tune in to an “all country” radio station. In a couple of years, they’d be able buy a 45 and spin the music at home.

Fairmont’s tradition of live music was thus relegated to front porches and family gatherings until the early 1980s, when jam sessions came to the Winfield Community Building. Those sessions grew into regular Saturday night shows that drew many of the former Round-Up performers and audiences numbering in the hundreds. After several years of packing the community building, the musicians moved their gatherings to an open stage on Bunner Ridge. Formerly organized as the Winfield District Country Music Association in 1984, the non-profit group changed its name to the Country Music Association of West Virginia to more accurately reflect its mission. Today, it is known as the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Inc., whose mission statement includes providing “a suitable environment for displaying memorabilia and other artifacts related to the musical heritage of this area . . . and “for musicians and fans to meet and enjoy country music and fellowship.

That “suitable environment” is a 170-foot-by-100-foot steel-frame building that once was part of the Volkswagen manufacturing facility in New Stanton, Pennsylvania. In the summer of 1993, volunteers erected the building on land donated by Jack “Hardrock” Bunner. Round-Up musicians and audience members alike supported the project with personal loans and donations so the previously outdoor shows would have an indoor, year-around venue.

“I think one of the reasons that we’re around is that we have a very nice building,” Lisa Janoske says. The venue is set up to seat 460 patrons at tables spread across folding chairs in the back, rows of folding chairs in the middle, and in 270 upholstered theater-style folding seats in the front and VIP sections.

The work was done during the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced a suspension of live performances beginning in March 2020. “We can’t say enough about the donors and sponsors that helped us through that. We really didn’t have to dip into our savings very much, if any, to keep the (utilities) on in the building because of all the people who donated and just love the place as much as we do,” Bill Janoske says.

Drawing upon their library of recorded shows, the directors kept the Round-Up alive on home screens thanks to streaming. As in the early 1940s, when AM radio brought the Round-Up into isolated homes, live streaming continues to provide a front seat at the weekly shows.

Those days are recalled in the Round-Up’s museum. Memorabilia from the show’s WMMN days and the musicians who performed on it fill several rooms in the well-lighted, spacious exhibit area. Radio sets dating back to the 1920s, the guitar once strummed by Cowboy Loye, and the microphones that converted those notes into electrical signals are displayed. Hundreds of photographs, autographs, and other paper memorabilia provide a newsreel of that era when families gathered around the Philco after a long week of work on the farm or in the mine. One of the rooms pays homage to the latter occupation, which once fueled the Fairmont area’s economy.

Equally well documented is the modern-era Round-Up story. Hundreds of photographs and dozens of autographed posters from the Nashville stars that have played the association’s venues cover the walls. Bill says the directors typically book two “national acts” out of Nashville annually. In 2026, those acts are Rick K Rock N’ Roll (June 20), Honor thy Legends: Miss Dolly Parton Tribute (Sept. 19) and Andy Giggs (Oct. 3). The annual car show is Aug. 8.

These events provide greater exposure for the venue, whose “regular” crowd comes from a radius of approximately 50 miles. The stage draws its performers from a much wider circle, thanks to a musician-friendly atmosphere.

“Sagebrush is cool,” says Steve Smith, a Roane County native and string musician who lives in McHenry, Maryland, and drives over to perform at the Round-Up.

Bill says the venue’s large stage and appreciative, focused audience draw talent.

“It’s not a bar. I hear a lot of (musicians) say, ‘You go to a bar . . . and you are the secondary attraction. The band is there . . . but, they can only play until the fight breaks out,” Bill says. “Here, we have a lot of bands complement the audience because the audience came to see the band. They didn’t come for some other reason, although this is a very social venue. A lot of people come week after week to see their friends.”

And eat. The Round-Up offers a full-course, eat-in dinner prior to the show, as well as a concession stand with snacks and soft drinks during the performance. But no alcohol.

“We are family friendly venue,” Bill says. “No smoking, no alcohol. . . . We have grandparents that bring their grandkids, and parents that bring their kids. And those kids come back. It’s an older crowd, and the musicians don’t have to deal with that bar scene.”

Hall of Fame

The West Virginia Country Music Hall of Fame is housed in the Sagebrush building. Lisa says any person can nominate an individual or group for inclusion through a written request. Nominations also come from Hall of Fame Committee members and organization directors. The committee reviews the nominations and reaches out to the nominee for additional information before presenting their findings to the board of directors for final selection. (The West Virginia Country Music Hall of Fame is not to be confused with the Charleston-based West Virginia Music Hall of Fame.)

“There are different criteria that we look for when they return that application,” Lisa explains. There are categories for performers, non-performers, and Nashville acts, but in all cases, longevity in their art is a priority—at least 30 years.

Those in the latter category include Hawkshaw Hawkins, Little Jimmy Dickens and Kathy Mattea. At the 2024 induction ceremony, Little Roy & Lizzy Long and Kevin & Debbie Williamson were brought into the Nashville fold, while Albert Anderson, Jack & Cindy Falbo, Samuel Manno, Larry Reed, Steve Smith and Esther Wolfe received their plaques as Sagebrush Round-Up performers and supporters.

Steve Smith, who also is a member of the Wheeling Jamboree Hall of Fame, says it was an honor to be included in the hall.

“You know, West Virginia always seems to be looked down upon, right? So, it’s an honor for me to be inducted into the West Virginia Country Music Hall of Fame for the fact that it shows West Virginia has talent, and its people have ability, and that music here is just as good as it is anywhere else,” Steve says.

This year’s Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony and show is April 18. For more information, follow the Sagebrush Round-Up on their Facebook page.

From the amazon description:

The American Log Cabin traces the very beginnings of log cabin architecture on the shores of America in 1638 to the journey made by the first settlers down the Great Wagon Road to the Old Frontier of today's West Virginia. Author Gerald Milnes shares images from his fifty years of photographically documenting early frontier architecture and its evolution in the region. Historic photos of a few important structures are also included in the pages. Numerous snippets of historic information, ethnic attributes, folklore, and anecdotes gleaned from older folks, are documented for the record. Beginning with forts erected for protection, the work illustrates the constant need for shelter that served people, animals, and the material culture so important to early rural life in the Appalachian Mountains.

Gerry is a folklorist and has written some great books about Appalachian culture. He also produced an excellent DVD about the World War II training maneuvers on Seneca Rocks.

His book about German Appalachian Folklore has great information in it, straight from the mouths of real folks.

Gerry is also a great musician who shows up at Friends of Blackwater events now and then. For folks interested in fiddle playing, he’s got the book for you!

You can find these books on amazon.com, but seriously, readers, please support authors by purchasing direct from them.