“Come then, and with the sun’s dawn light let’s cheerfully discover what place this is, what men live here, where this people’s city is, and let’s explore from the harbor in all directions. Now pour libations to Jove and call, with prayer, on my father Anchises, then set out the wine once more. So saying he wreathed his forehead with a leafy spray, and prayed to the spirit of the place.” Publius Vergilius Maro – “The Aeneid”
Family had come streaming in from around the United States all day on the first Friday in October. More than a couple hundred people made their way to Pendleton County, a place none of them called their native home. They drove in from Harrisonburg, Virginia, Petersburg, and elsewhere to converge on one of the most historic and iconic spots in Upper Tract, the Poor Farm.
Today, it serves as a magnet drawing generations of the Munley family together throughout the year. The private residence is not available for short-term rental, for tours, or for anything else public. For several generations of the Munley family, however, this has served as part of the foundation of family. The Poor Farm today seems to have its own genius loci that keeps ties strong and relationships never too far apart even over thousands of miles. Although many associate a powerful “sense of place” to the culture of West Virginia, and more broadly the Appalachian Mountains, not a soul among the hundreds who come to the Poor Farm regularly hail from this area.
Yet the pull of place to those who love it and have experienced it remains extraordinarily powerful to the family.
Patrick Munley, a patriarch of the sprawling family, shared that the property had come a long way since it was once called “Dad’s Pig in a Poke.”
He shared his memories of his wife, Donna, himself, their children and ever-extending family coming to the Poor Farm through the decades for family parties, reunions, holidays, or just because. The family comes in frequently and randomly all year long, but always sets aside holidays and other events for huge mass gatherings.
On this occasion, Munley, his brothers, and others cracked jokes on the front porch, gave each other good-natured ribbing, and enjoyed the warm breezes of a perfect early fall day. On this occasion, family members were all day long arriving for a much-anticipated wedding. Neat rows of wooden chairs were arranged perfectly on the front yard, angled so that stunning miles of views down the South Branch Valley lay behind the happy couple flying in from Los Angeles. Rows of recently harvested corn, fields just denuded of hay, and the flanking ridges of green dotted infrequently with autumn colors provided a perfect backdrop for the ceremony and sacrament.
The history of poor farms extends deep into American and English history. Governments constructed them in the 1600s and 1700s as the destitute tried and failed to find more prosperous lives in the cities of Britain, England. Poor houses in cities contained dozens of indigent men and women engaged in manufacturing. Poor farms in the countryside housed the same populations, but engaged in growing food to support their own needs and also for the sale of excess to pay for the facility.
By the mid-1800s almost every county in the United States had some kind of poor farm. They generally appeared in remote areas away from towns for reasons of both cheap land and to separate the residents of the farm from townspeople.
William Rexrode wrote on “Growing Up on the Poor Farm” in 2008. The original facility moved during the Great Depression from Fort Seybert to Upper Tract at a time when the production of chickens and turkeys was expanding tremendously due to the invention of incubators and other technology. The South Fork Valley had ties to commercial production in Moorefield and Rockingham County, Virginia, whereas north of Franklin, farmers continued with traditional crops and livestock.
With the valley blessed with rich soils and huge tracts of flat land, planners put the buildings of the farm on a knoll overlooking productive lands. It promptly started serving those struggling hard in the difficult times.
“I hear people complain about poverty. They can’t tell me a thing about poverty. I know all about it. The only thing we got was what we ate and the clothes we wore,” shared James Russel Helmick to Rexrode.
“We slept on chaff ticks, or straw ticks as they were sometimes called,” he remembered, adding that the work required that they “had to take the cows to pasture every morning and go get them of the evening.” He and some of his fellow residents walked the 10 to 15 cows up and down old US 220 every day. In those days, even large herds of thousands of cattle were driven on the public roads. “They grew all the food we ate,” remembered Helmick, going on to say that “they grew all the food we ate. They had a garden, and they had fruits and butchered hogs and beef.”
Resources to give anything beyond basics needed for life had diminished for government and community. Food “wasn’t too good. About the only time we ever had a special dinner was on Sundays when visitors would come out so they could see how good we were eating.” Helmick shared, “It was a hard life, but you had to put up with it and learned that you could. We came through it all right.”
Even Christmas remained just “what you heard somebody talk about” and “we never got to go anywhere, just stayed there at the Poor Farm except for going to school.” Later in the decade, children got to move to the new children’s home in Elkins, including Helmick. He went to school and even earned a Golden Horseshoe Award for knowledge of state history. Tragedy was never far away, though. “My dad passed away at the poor farm. I think that was about 1938. I was at Elkins and didn’t find out about it till six months later,” Helmick commented.
Poor farms faded from use as the modern welfare state committed to helping struggling people and families in their own domiciles. Pendleton County’s passed into private ownership by the 1950s.
Munley recalled that in 1968, the year after his service to the cause of freedom in Vietnam concluded, his father had loaned $10,000 to a woman in Fairfax County, Virginia. She had acquired the property and dreamed of establishing a school there. That said, life happens as it often does and those plans fell through. No longer able to fulfill her dream, she signed over the Poor Farm to the Munleys. “Dad’s Pig in a Poke” included the structures on the property and its 268 acres. He flew his own plane into Petersburg and drove up US 220 to Upper Tract to survey what he had bought. The family arrived in the dead of night. He recalled that “we couldn’t wait to see what it was like in the day.”
The Munleys tried to figure out what to do with the place. At times, they rented residential space. Most of those who rented there, with the notable exception of Mike Weaver who also helped to restore and maintain the buildings during the 1980s, did not treat the historical property with respect and the family eventually stopped offering lodging there.
A spirit of place engages best the spirit and love of family and those two merged together for the Munleys. “My mother had 13 kids. Then 13 kids had 34 grandchildren,” noted Munley. Of course, his dad knew how to put the kids to work. He shared that his father would say, “Let me show you something,” which would lead to several days of work on the structure. Few things build love of, and respect for, place quite like pouring one’s sweat into it. As generations came, the massive family continued to grow. Most would lose contact over two or three generations, but The Poor Farm has always pulled family back, even though Pendleton County was never home to any of them. Children especially loved the spacious grounds where they could explore fields, forests, and creeks. Others were drawn to the legendary toy room put together upstairs by Munley. It holds hundreds of toys for every age, as well as part of his own personal library.
Downstairs on a long wall filled with family photographs is tacked an old-fashioned piece of lined paper for use in early elementary grades. On it, a child wrote, “I love visiting my gramma in West Virginia. She has a pond and she has 15 acres of land. There is about 20 rooms in the mansion.”
While the property has its own dramatically unique appeal, the community setting made Pendleton County special to all who made their way there. As family gathered on the afternoon of the rehearsal dinner, one could hear folks sharing plans. One said he and his wife loved going to “that corner restaurant.” Others made plans to see Seneca Rocks while in town. Munley took delight in describing his most challenging hole at Fisher Mountain, the eighth. “We call it the ‘he hate me’ hole,” he and his brothers laughed. “When you get on the green, if you don’t hit it hard enough, it will roll back to you and beyond!”
On the hill overlooking the original house and caretaker building, teams raised a massive tent for the reception. Second Empire style and other antique chairs were placed in a circle outside for lounging and socializing by a decorating team from Morgantown. Saturday brought the nuptials of Sean Munley and Kaitlin O’Connor, both left behind the bright lights for a little while and fast-paced culture of Los Angeles for the bucolic upper South Branch Valley and the easy rhythms of Mountain State farm country.
Sean Munley recalled the hold that the Poor Farm had on him and other youngsters in his family in their youth. The past O’Connor and present Kaitlin Munley then shared that the two families had much in common, saying, “I am one of nine children.” Nearly 180 came from both families, providing a perfect “opportunity to blend our two family trees.” She shared repeatedly what an honor it was to her and her family to share a part of the history of both family and property. “This place has literally gathered families together” during the course of the Munleys’ tenure as owners.
She added that “this is a story of family and place.”
The Munleys could have envisioned a thriving business, sold the land for an enormous sum, or found some other monetarily profitable use for the property, but had a much more vital ideal in mind.
In the words of Marcellus Tullius Cicero, the land and its particular genius loci helped the family to “follow the bonds between brothers and sisters, and next those of first and then of second cousins; and when they can no longer be sheltered under one roof, they go out into other homes, as into colonies. Then follow between these, in turn, marriages and connections by marriage, and from these again a new stock of relations; and from this propagation and after-growth states have their beginnings. The bonds of common blood hold men fast through good-will and affection; for it means much to share in common the same family traditions, the same forms of domestic worship, and the same ancestral tombs.”
