10 Years Ago
Week of September 4, 2014
Locals Need to Tell
GSA What They Want
At Sugar Grove—Manchin
Sen. Joe Manchin III, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and West Virginia Division of Corrections Commissioner Jim Rubenstein toured the Sugar Grove Navy base last Tuesday to determine its suitability for restructuring as a minimum security corrections facility following the US Navy’s departure in the fall of 2015.
“I’ve always been impressed here—this is a tremendous facility, and we’ve been trying to find the proper use and a marriage-able fit to sustain it as a state entity,” Manchin told a group of local business, educational and elected officials at an informational luncheon held after the tour.
“It’s good to have state, federal and local people here today together to discuss the future use of the base,” Manchin added.
The close-out procedure for the US Navy’s departure from the lower base gives priority to federal, then state, then private organizations.
The United States Department of Defense and other federal entities informally have declined to make use of the lower base. Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services have not determined yet if either one wants the base, according to base Cmdr. William J. Kramer, Jr.
“If the federal government does not take the base, it truly would be a mistake if the state did not hold on to such an asset,” Sen. Manchin said.
DOC Commissioner Rubenstein said the state has a number of corrections facilities with a growing inmate population. He and the governor see the benefit of education so that the inmates can go back into society as taxpaying citizens. “West Virginia has one of the lowest rates of recidivism,” he said.
SUGAR GROVE
The writer received this piece called “Winter is Coming!!!” from Jack Bowers. It does appear to be a good formula for weather forecasting by the Indian tribes who once lived on these hills during the summer months.
“A young brave was honored by being selected by the tribal council as the new chief, in charge of overseeing the annual gathering of firewood to keep the tribe warm during coming winters. The new chief was so thrilled by this honor because he was filling the position of a very highly thought of elderly chief who had died that spring.
During the summer, all was going well, and the wood pile grew until one day one of the boys who was assigned to gather firewood, asked the new chief if they had stacked enough firewood for the upcoming winter. The young chief answered that he would have to go talk to the Great Spirits to ask their guidance.
The next morning, the young chief rode out through the woods until he found the road leading into a small town. As he entered the town, he found a pay phone and called the local weather station and asked, “What kind of winter is coming?” The forecaster told him to wait a moment while he checked. In a little while, he came back and answered that it didn’t look too bad, but to check back in a couple weeks, and he could tell him more accurately what to expect.
The new chief returned to his tribe and said the Great Spirits had told him to continue gathering firewood as normal, so they did.
Several weeks went by, the wood pile grew, and the young chief said he had to go talk with the Great Spirits again, so off he went.
This time, after asking the forecaster about the upcoming winter, it was reported that the forecast had changed, and that it looked like a cold winter was coming with lots of snow.
Back at the tribe, the new chief said the Great Spirits had warned of lots of cold and snow, to continue gathering wood to help stay warm for a very cold winter, so the wood grew, day after day.
Again, the young chief, when asked if enough firewood had been gathered weeks later, said he, once again, had to confer with the Great Spirits, so off he went.
Back at the phone booth, the young chief asked the forecaster about the upcoming winter. After waiting a short while, the forecaster returned, sounding a bit out of breath and flustered, reported perhaps a record breaking winter coming. The young chief was amazed and asked exactly how the forecaster was able to tell so accurately how big a winter to expect? “Well, I look out my window towards the hills and watch how much wood is gathered by the local Indian tribe, and it looks like this year’s woodpile far exceeds anything I have ever seen before!”
20 Years Ago
Week of September 2, 2004
SUGAR GROVE
Grandparents Are
A Treasure to Cherish
Those who are younger may find it difficult to appreciate grandparents. Oftentimes they are referred to as the “Unwanted Generation,” who are aged in a time dominated by the young to be unable to see or hear well enough; to have an active mind that is hopelessly trapped in an inactive body (and vise versa); to be dependent on busy children; to be unable to produce or contribute anything really worthwhile; and to have no one who even remembers their younger days.
This generation was the one who promoted family dinners — who were specifically involved with every day conversations and interactions. (The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Center’s research had the significant findings that these children were least likely to be on drugs, to be depressed, or to be in trouble with the law. They were more likely to be doing well in school and to be surrounded with supportive friends).
Grandparents loved to sit on the front porch and watch the fading sunset with their families, and the tension and stress of the day drain away with the hum of the night insects. There is nothing like a front porch with the accompanying creaky swing to promote family togetherness. A porch swing will bring back memories of hundreds of almost forgotten evenings when families gathered after supper to rest and talk. There is definitely a feeling of love and security that surrounds one.
Seize the moment with grandparents. Make it count. There are endless moments if one looks ahead, and they are ones for the taking. They can be one’s biggest fans, loudest cheerleaders and greatest supporters. They will always believe in one — just give them the time to prove it.
50 Years Ago
Week of September 5, 1974
507 Attend 25th Annual Meeting of Spelunkers
At Thorn Spring Park
There was scarcely room for one additional tent at Thorn Spring Park during the past weekend as hundreds of caving enthusiasts assembled there for their 25th annual Old Timers Reunion.
James Dawson of Roanoke, Va., who was in charge of the program, said 507 spelunkers were registered for the Labor Day weekend get-together, but that another 50 or so persons were present who did not register.
Dawson said most of the others came from the eastern part of the country, but that other states represented included California, Montana and Texas.
60 Years Ago
Week of September 3, 1964
100 YEARS AGO
By LON K. SAVAGE
Editor’s Note—The following is one of a series of articles on the Civil War. Each weekly installment covers events which occurred exactly 100 years ago.
Sherman
Circles and Captures Atlanta
Atlanta fell to the Federals 100 years ago this week.
It fell to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman who had led some 90,000 men down from Chattanooga, driving John B. Hood’s Confederates deeper into Georgia, finally into Atlanta and now out the other side.
There was just a little irony in the way Atlanta finally capitulated. For weeks, Sherman’s army had been lobbing shells into the city until the citizens were beginning to get accustomed to it. Then, as August came to an end, the shelling suddenly stopped.
Word spread through the city that Sherman had given up, that he was retreating. A closed investigation followed, and it was found, indeed, that Sherman’s lines around Atlanta were empty.
But instead of the relief Atlanta had so hoped for, Sherman’s silence marked the beginning of the end of Atlanta as a Confederate city.
Instead of departing from Atlanta, Sherman was circling down below the city. His purpose: to cut the two railroads feeding Atlanta—one that came from Macon and the other from Mobile. With those two railroads destroyed, Hood and his Confederates would have to leave Atlanta or starve.
Hood soon got word that some of Sherman’s men were moving south of the city, but he failed to realize that most of Sherman’s army was making the move. He sent some of his men down toward Jonesboro to ward off this new move—but it was not near enough. By August 30, Sherman’s huge army moved across the Mobile railroad; for miles his men ripped up the railroad ties and made fires of them; they lay the rails across the fires until the metal was red hot; then they twisted the rails around trees. “Sherman’s hairpins,” they were called.
On beyond the Mobile railroad to the southeast the Federals moved, and Hood dispatched two corps to stop this new threat. On the 31st, the Confederates collided with Sherman’s army near Jonesboro, and the Federals drove them back in route. More Federals pushed on across the Macon railroad—that last railroad to Atlanta—and the city had been severed from the Confederacy that fed it.
Hood realized his game was up in Atlanta. At 5 p.m. September 1, his men tramped smartly through Atlanta’s streets loaded with everything they could carry, while the people of Atlanta watched in dismay. The army was marching out, leaving the city to the Federals.
That night, as the city waited between the two armies, someone set fire to a train of munitions, and at midnight the train suddenly exploded with a noise that rocked the city. Then, for five hours, the burning and exploding munitions spewed rockets and fireworks into the night sky until it appeared that the whole city was burning. Next morning, when all had died down, the Federal soldiers came marching in; the Stars and Stripes were unfurled above Atlanta’s courthouse, and Sherman sent to Washington a message that was destined to set off widespread rejoicing in the North and bring about Lincoln’s re-election: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”
Next week: McClellan Nominated.
70 Years Ago
Week of September 2, 1954
EDITORIAL
The Little Red School – – –
The big yellow school bus is pushing the little red schoolhouse off the American landscape. According to the County Superintendent’s office there were 60 one-room schools in use in Pendleton County in 1945. Today there are only 18.
According to the National Geographic Society, modern steel and brick structures housing hundreds of pupils are replacing the one-room schools at the rate of 10 a day. In 1918 there were 196,000 one-room schools representing 71 per cent of all the country’s school buildings. By 1952 only 51,800 single-unit buildings were left.
Educators believe advantages of consolidation outweigh the good points of the “little red” schools. Progress in road building and motor transportation have made consolidation possible. Larger buildings offer better facilities at lower cost per pupil.
The one-room schoolhouse, red, white or the weathered color of hand hewn logs, molded the early thinking of millions of children. It was frequently a stern teacher, but in later life generations of Americans built nostalgic memories of their youth around the harsh clang of the recess bell or the afternoon drone of reciting pupils or the prank that spelled a half hour stay after school. Even the rod, often a hickory switch, became a symbol of happy, unspoiled days.
Sometimes school, for all its mental drudgery, meant respite from bodily toil. In a little backwoods shack at Knob Creek in his native Hardin County, Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln “learned to read and write, and cipher to the rule of three.”
The late Henry Ford rescued Redstone school, in Sterling, Mass., from its ignominious function as a garage and moved it to his “Longfellow’s Wayside Inn” estate at South Sudbury, Mass. It now serves as a classroom for 16 Sudbury “grammar” school children. It was Redstone, where Mary Sawyer’s little lamb “followed her to school one day” that inspired the poem, “Mary Had A Little Lamb.”
Recently 206-year-old Quasset school in Woodstock, Conn., was dedicated as a permanent shrine. On the walls of Quasset’s single classroom are wooden pegs for hanging wraps. Lunch pails and a water bucket with tin dipper sit on a shelf. A high stool and dunce cap, and a slippery elm switch for malefactors have been preserved.
