By Stephen Smoot
“Home” carries vastly different meanings to every person who considers the concept. For some, “home” is simply the place where that person happened to hang their hat that day.
For many in Pendleton County, “home” represents the land hacked out of the wilderness by enterprising settlers, carefully tended over time and generations. Home and family merge and intertwine together as important threads of life and the foundation for community.
“This was my homeplace. I was born and raised here,” said Idelta Lambert of her residence near Circleville.
On this day, like so many others, the sun gently kissed the landscape with almost no cloud in the sky. Soft road noise came from the cars passing by, unaware that they passed a homeplace built by a loving father for his family. How could they see the unassuming farmhouse and know that Harman Sponaugle took the timber off the land with his own two hands, prepared the wood board by board, then slowly and carefully built a home that still stands strong so many decades hence?
He built that home for his wife Etta and their multitude of children. In addition to Idelta, the two also bore between 1901 and Idelta’s arrival on Nov. 1, 1925, Beulah, Marvin, Raymond, Alpha, Myrtle, Kitty, Mary, Elsie, Ruby, Levene, Roscoe, and McClure Sponaugle.
Lambert’s father was born in 1877 and mother only four years later. “They lived on the Hunting Ground back when they were younger,” Lambert shared. This mountain comes just shy of 4,000 feet, rising directly to the west of Cherry Grove.
Back then, Lambert said, he “went into the woods for work cutting new timber.” She recalled that “there were all kinds of people” coming into the mountains to work in the timber camps before World War I. One would find “company houses along the railroad track for people to live.”
“In Transforming the Appalachian Countryside,” West Virginia University Professor Emeritus Ron Lewis wrote about constant tensions in those violence plagued camps. Recruitment companies sent in laborers brought from the Deep South and southern and eastern Europe. A rough and ready culture combined with almost no law enforcement outside of guards hired by the company served as a recipe for constant violence.
In August of 1905, eight Italians died when a bomb exploded under their cabin in a work camp. A small riot occurred near Marlinton when a group of Italian workers apparently intentionally ran over a black laborer with a truck. Near Spruce in 1908, “nine Italian laborers who worked for the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company at Spruce stormed the company office, clubbed a clerk to death, and wounded a company official.”
Sponaugle worked some near Glady before quitting the timber camps due to the constant dangers. There, three Italians got into a gun, stone, and knife battle against native workers whom the foreign-born referred to in derogatory fashion as “snakes.”
“He worked there until he had enough money to buy a farm,” she said.
Sponaugle understood that neither he nor his young family would prosper in such an unsettled environment, so he focused his time and work in the North Fork Valley. One of Lambert’s older sisters moved into one of the previously occupied houses as the Sponaugles worked to build a life in the Valley.
“We grew up here on the farm,” remembered Lambert, who went on to add that “he (her father) planted and plowed corn. We hoed the garden.” In the days before tractors, literal horse power tilled the fields. Lambert said, “I had to ride the horse to keep the horse in between the rows.”
Forests full of food started to drop their bounty in fall. Before the blight, many harvested what dropped off of American chestnut trees. Lambert remembered, though, that “we used to pick walnuts in the fall. My dad would take a drag to get the shells off. My parents would crack them.”
Walnuts harvested and prepared for eating did not always go to the family. “You’d have to take them to Franklin,” she remembered, “to buy fabric to make us clothes.” Particularly between 1931 and 1937, cash trade dropped to nearly nothing in Pendleton County due to the closing of the county seat’s three banks.
Lambert also remembered accompanying her mother to the store to trade freshly laid and cleaned eggs for other grocery needs.
Stocking for winter meant taking the “bumpy ride” out Circleville Pike towards Franklin. There households in outlying areas brought wagons into town to purchase months of winter stores before the forbidding season of bitter cold and deep snow settled in.
Even before the Great Depression, many who lived in those days grew up with very little. Most raised with limited wants, but unlimited gratitude for what the Lord provided. Christmas did not bring truckloads of presents forgotten soon after opening, but did provide treasures of its own in that time.
“You didn’t have much,” remembered Lambert. Like every Sunday, “On Christmas you went to church and always got a little something.” She smiled and said, “One time I got a doll baby. I was so proud and so happy.”
The family had farming operations in different locations. Lambert stated that “my dad had a farm up on Hunting Ground. In the spring, he drove goats, cows, calves, and sheep to the old saw mill on Hunting Ground Road. He’d take them up to his farm, then out for the summer.
Until about World War II, even as modern paved highways connected the region, area cattlemen took their herds on drives. Some went south into grazing lands in Pocahontas County. Sponaugle would drive his back and forth from fields in the milder climate of Virginia.
During one extended absence, tragedy struck.
When Lambert was seven years old, “one year he (her dad) was gone with the cattle.” The family then lived in a hand constructed log cabin with wooden shingles forming a roof. She remembered “a spark from the kitchen stove caught the house on fire and burned it.”
Back then in the area, families constructed their own houses and homeowners insurance likely covered not one single dwelling on the North Fork. The family had to pile into a smaller structure on the property while the master of the house labored to build a new home. Between timbering, farming, cattle driving, and raising children, it took the family until 1939 to have their new domicile ready for living.
Part Two will come next week.
