By Stephen Smoot
Last week the Pendleton Times ran the first part of this series of articles based on the memories of Idelta Lambert of Circleville who will soon turn 100 years old.
Life in remote and rural areas of West Virginia during the 1930s and going into the 40s differed less from the centuries before than from the decades yet to come.
The North Fork Valley was no exception.
Every member of the family pitched in for chore time in those days. Chores were not simply busy work to teach kids responsibility, but vital activities needed to provide family necessities.
“We raised geese for the feathers,” remembered Lambert. She added, “We had 20 geese and brought them in during the summer. We’d bring them in and put them in the barn for about a half a day.”
Then they would go to the barn where they had put the geese. “We had big wash tubs and objects to sit on” as they caught the geese to relieve them of most of their feathers and would “hold the goose head in your left hand.” She stated most of the feathers because “you had to leave some feathers under the wings.”
Goose feathers could go into pillows and “feather ticks you’d sleep on.” Still popular, feather ticks are fabric containers stuffed with goose feathers to enhance warmth and comfort when resting or sleeping.
Lambert also shared that her family “made their own soap” using the traditional recipe and techniques handed down over the generations from the earliest settlements. “I know she (her mother) put lye in it,” said Lambert, who continued by stating that they “made it in a big kettle. We’d use ashes and lye. I think that they put tallow and grease in it somehow.”
Tallow and grease came from “my mother and her sister . . . taking fat off of everything they butchered,” then rendering it down for storage and future use. They would “put it in a big kettle, take the lard out, and put it in crocks. They stored it that way, kept it in the cellar.”
Even the most resourceful families, however, sometimes needed help to add value to what they could get from the land and their animals. “My dad and mom sheared sheep,” explained Lambert, who then went on to say that they hung the fleece up to dry out, picking it and pulling it out.
The fleece would then make the difficult and long trip over the mountains to Franklin where at least one business had a carding machine to prepare the fleece. These machines separated out the strands of raw fleece for the production of wool for a variety of purposes.
In some times and places, time moves slow and one could say that about the North Fork from the years after the Civil War until those leading up to World War II. Time can also seem to speed up as changes come rapid fire to individuals, families, and communities.
The Great Depression and the Second World War brought much change to the area and the families who lived there.
“I remember when Roosevelt was elected president,” Lambert stated.
She talked of how in that election, “they hired people to haul people in to vote.” In those days, Pendleton County still had sharp political and social divides. People still with living memory of the Civil War, or those raised on harrowing tales of violence and conflict, tended to follow history when voting.
North Fork residents had tended to support the Union and had the same tendency to support the Grand Old Party. Most of the rest of Pendleton County had favored the Confederate States and remained faithful to the Party of Jefferson and Jackson.
Yet Roosevelt’s victory brought major changes to the North Fork, whether they supported him or not. Lambert explained that “after Roosevelt got in, he started the WPA and CCC camps.” These organizations, the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, gave employment to millions across the nation thrown out of work by the economic disaster.
The Works Progress Administration focused on major projects. For example, it broke ground in 1937 on Circleville School. Lambert and her generation were the first to attend school in the two story Georgian Revival structure whose Doric columns and wooden cupola make it an outstanding example of that style.
Older and younger children were separated in different sides of the facility. It replaced an older school building still used by the Circleville Volunteer Fire Department for special events and other purposes.
“Men went to work,” Lambert recalled, then said “The WPA helped people.” In some cases, that help was as simple as installing toilets in homes.
Camp White, constructed by and for the CCC, hosted Company 2595 between 1935 and 37. Its crews constructed towers and built modern roads and trails. It was located on WV Route 28 near Seneca Rocks. Participants didn’t just work. A softball team from the camp won a regional championship in 1936.
New Deal era federal infrastructure spending also supported a $50,000 waterworks project started in Franklin in 1936.
Not long after, a federal government presence came with a vastly different mission. The onset of World War II after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor transformed the area into a training ground for troops preparing to fight Germany, Italy, and Japan in the cause for freedom.
And as troops from across the nation came to learn the art of war in the North Fork Valley, residents from that area would enlist or be drafted for deployment around the globe.
Part III coming next week.
