Greenbrier County, West Virginia - Letters from Oleta Arritt Pitcher

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The records for this work have been submitted by Louise Perkins, 
E-mail address:  perkins @digital.net, October 1998.
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                       Memories of a Small Town Girl

There is much to be said for growing up in a small town.  Most everybody
knows each other and because of that, they tend to lend a helping hand in time of
trouble.  Whenever a family member died or had a serious illness, there was
a neighbor to lessen the burden of the person who was in trouble.

I was born October 18, 1909, in the little town of Ronceverte, WV, situated
on the beautiful Greenbrier river.  In the early 1900's, it was a bustliing
little town, population around 3,000, with several stores, four churches,
two banks, a high school, two grade schools-one in the east end and one in the
west end.  Also, a few other businesses such as Brown's Factory which made
furniture and Lawrence Lumber Factory which made buggies.

My mother was Neta Green, who at the age of 25 married my father, John
Arritt, who was 45.  Eighteen months after my birth, my sister, Elva, came along,
and four years later, my brother, John Clayton was born.  My father owned a
little store on the side of the hill where he sold groceries and a few other
items.  I remember a pickle barrel and a case with colored striped candy which we
called meat candy.  Our family quarters were behind the store.

Many times in the spring the snow inthe mountains melted, causing the river
to rise.  The piers around the middle of the river would often catch animals
and parts of buildings as they swept along.  Once there was a person caught on
a pier.

Ronceverte was divided into east and west.  The cemetery separated one from
the other.  When we went to town we had to walk two miles or more past the
cemetery in the east end.

A four-mile streetcar railroad ran from downtown Ronceverte to Lewisburg. 
It cost 20 cents to ride from the east end to the West Virginia State fair at
Lewisburg.  Once a year my mother and grandmother took my brother and
sister to the fair where we spent the day so we took a basket lunch.  There was much
to see and do.  We rode the "merry-go-round", sitting in the front seat with
my mother.  I guess she was afraid we would fall off the horse.  We stayed
until the gates were ready to close at night.

The Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad ran through the town, and several men were
employed there working on the tracks and on the coal cars, and also in a
small depot.

When I was six years old, my parents sold the previous houe and bought an
eight-room house close to my grandparents.  Shortly afterward my father
died of tuberculosis.  He had a bed on a screened-in-porch, and we were not allowed
to get close to him.  My mother worked a large garden and sold dishes painted
with roses.  She drove a horse and buggy to town to get necessities.

I was six when I started to school.  This was a two-room school, a little
room and a big room.  There was a large pot-bellied stove in each room. The boys
sat on the left side of the room and the girls on the right.  The
schoolyard was full of chestnut trees.  The chestnuts were much smaller and sweeter
than the ones we have today.  A few years later all the chestnut trees died from
blight.

When I was seven or eight, I spent much time with my grandparents (James
John and Margaret Honaker Green).  I slept upstairs and my grandfather would
come up each morning and carry me downstairs on his back to get me ready for
school. My grandparents had plenty to eat. My grandfather had a large garden, and
my grandmother canned all kinds of vegetables which she stored on shelves in a
large cellar.  There was also a big potato bin where potatoes were stored
for the winter.  We had chickens also, so we had plenty of eggs.  In the fall
was hog-killing time, especially in November after it got cold.  My sister and
I would ago to the back of the house so we could not hear the shots fired
that killed the hogs.  My brother did not mind, though.  After the hogs were
killed, sausage was made, and the hams and shoulders were salted and hung up in the
smokehouse to be used during the winter.   Also, in the fall was
applebutter time.  The neighbors came and peeled and cored bushels of apples.  A large
brass kettle inthe yard was used to cook the apples for hours, and someone
had to continually stir them with a ladle to keep them from burning.  Jsut
before time to put the applebutter inthe jars, the cinnamon was added.  The
neighbors shared the applebutter.

Each night my grandfather would read from the Bible, and we would all get
on our knees while we prayed.  After that, my brother, sister, and I sat on
the floor between the stove and the wall where it was warm and played with our
dolls and tinker toys.

When the first radios came out, our neighbor by the name of Brown was the
first to get a radio.  Members of the community went to Brown's house to hear the
man talking through the air, as we called it.

When we were growing up, I am sure there were ugly rumors of racial bigotry
and slurs but we never heard them.  My grandfather loved the black folks just
as much as the white folks.  In 1944 when he died, there were as many black
folks at his funeral as whites.  It was instilled in us that all men are created
equal, and we judge everyone by how they act and not the color of their
skin.

My grandfather liked to play jokes on my grandmother.  One time he bought
us some nuts in the shell.  My grandmother asked him to give her one, and he
handed her an almond in the shell.  She said, "Go on-I don't want that old
peach seed!"  One time my grandfather came in the kitchen where my
grandmother was sitting in her rocking chair, and she asked him what he was doing in
the woodshed so long.  He told her he was working on something to run by
perpetual motion.  She laughed and told him he couldn't do such a thing as that. Of
course, this has been common for years now.

When I was in the fourth grade, one morning our teacher came in and told us
about a tomb abeing opened in Egypt which contained much gold.  Of course,
we didn't know it was King Tut, a pharaoh from the Valley of the Kings. What
excitement there was, even though we didn't understand it.  The gold
standard was in, so we knew what gold was.  Some of the merchants sold cheap
jewelry, saying it was from the tomb.  Of course, we only had one small newspaper a
week, called the West Virginia News, so we didn't know much of what was
going on.

Every year we took two trips.  My grandmother's sister lived across the
river from us, and we walked up the railroad track about a mile and yelled for a
man on the other side of the river to come get us in a boat.  Sometimes he had
to make two trips as there were too many of us.  At our aunt's house many
times the maple trees had been tapped, and the men were making maple syrup in a big
kettle a ways from the house.  There was a brook running in front of the
house, and we spent many hours playing in the water.  The other annual trip was to
a little town called Caldwell where we visited other relatives.

All social events were held in our school.  There were ice cream socials
where our mother bought us a cone of ice cream for five cents.  Many of the girls
brought pretty wrapped boxes of cake, food, etc. which the boys bid on. 
The highest bidder got to eat with the girl whose box he had won with his bid.
Sometimes the girl let the boy know beforehand which box she had brought. 
I never did get to take a box, but I did get nominated for the prettiest girl
by a boy who had a crush on me.  I think the bid was a quarter.  A girl much
prettier than I won.

I can't rmember us having a Christmas tree, but we did believe in Santa
Claus, and on Christmas Eve one of our grandparents would say, "I hear somebody
outside."  Our one gift would be in a corner of the porch.  It wasn't
wrapped but we didn't mind that.

Every Sunday afternoon our grandfather took us for a walk in the woods where
we played and picked wild flowers and nuts.  One of my aunts took us to the
river at Brown's Factory to play in the water.  Of course, bodies were not
exposed at that time, so we went into the water with our stockings and our dresses on.

Each spring my mother and aunt would go to the "bottom.", a large field
close to the river to pick greens.  We children went along, and we picked polk,
narrow dock, and several other plant leaves.  My mother and grandmother
cooked them with a piece of fat back bacon.  To this day I love all green
vegetables.

World War I started when I was eight years old.  We felt proud of our
doughboys as they were called, who I thought would win "the war to end all wars." 
When the troop trains passed through town, the windows were opened, and the
soldiers would wave to the crowd.  We sang the songs "Over there," "Johnny, Get your
Gun," and other patriotic songs.  Most every house had  a flag flying, and
even in our playhouses we had little flags.  When Armistice Day came, there were
all kinds of parades and celebrations.  years later we found out there were
over 8,000,000 men killed and 2,000,000 wounded.  112,432 of these were
Americans.

My grandmother died when I was twelve.  I remember sitting on the porch
steps and was so scared becaue I knew something was wrong as my mother and aunt
were in the bedroom so long.  When I saw the casket in the "best" room, I
ran upstairs and cried uncontrollably until my mother came up and comforted me
and led me down the stairs.  I had loved my grandmother very much.

I entered high school in 1924.  The school was in the west end of
Ronceverte, and it was a ways out of town, so we walked the four miles.  There were no
school buses or transportation.  The winters were cold and the snow deep,
but we never stayed home.  I loved school, and I always made good grades. Many
Saturdays I went sled riding with some of my classmates on a sloping hill
by the cemetery.  My childhood and early teen years were happy and content,
but then a family moved across the street who had a good-looking son.  We soon
started dating and I thought I was in love.  I was seventeen and he was
sixteen.  His mother talked my mother into letting us get married as he
said he would run away if he couldn't marry me.  At the age of eighteen I became
Mrs. Archie Clyde Collins.  To this union was born two daughters, Hilda and
Louise. Soon my husband started taking hobo trips and was gone months at a time.
Between this and all the girls he ran with, I had to get food to put on the
table.  I worked in a restaurant at $7.00 a week, and then I did piece work
at a rayon plant in Covington where I made $15.00 or $16.00 per week.  We saw
hard times, both physical and financial, for eighteen years when he finally left
for good.

Later I married a wonderful man by the name of Grant Pitcher, and we spent
fourty-three years of happy married life until he died in 1990.

I am thankful for all of these eighty-six years God has given me, and I hope
my life has been a blessing to someone along the way.  By Oleta Arritt Pitcher