40 Years Ago
Week of November 8, 1984
Women Dominate Class
In Pharmacy at WVU
Women dominate the new first-year class in the West Virginia University School of Pharmacy — 70 percent to 30 percent males.
State residents make up 86 percent of the class and they come from 29 communities reaching from the northern and eastern panhandles to the southernmost counties.
The five-year program includes two years of pre-pharmacy curriculum with 64 percent of the class completing those requirements at WVU. Fifteen other state colleges and three out-of-state colleges provided the preparatory curriculum for the other students enrolled.
Avoid Black Walnut
Sawdust or Wood
Shavings
As Horse Bedding
Don’t use sawdust or wood shavings from black walnut trees as winter bedding in your horse stable.
Specialists with the West Virginia University Cooperative Extension Service note that numerous cases of founder (Laminitis) have been reported in several states where horses were exposed to black walnut shavings or sawdust. Though the cause of this problem has not been identified, some researchers think a chemical component called juglone, unique to black walnut, is the toxic element.
The founder occurs within 12 to 24 hours after exposure to the material. Apparently only skin contact is necessary to bring on the symptoms of founder. The material need not be eaten.
Black walnut sawdust is dark red to brown, while most sawdust is blonde to yellow. Cedar also is red but not as dark as walnut, and it has a distinctive odor.
If you are unsure of the composition of the sawdust or shavings, let them air outside for several days. The toxic effect of black walnut material appears to diminish after a period of exposure to the air, though it still is not recommended for bedding materials.
50 Years Ago
Week of November 7, 1974
Byrd’s Eye View
By U.S. Senator
Robert C. Byrd
You Name It:
West Virginia’s Got It
West Virginians must surely be fascinated by the rich variety of names of communities and geographical locations in our state.
Consider Munday in Wirt County and Thursday in Ritchie. Or Cyclone in Wyoming, Tornado in Kanawha, and Hurricane in Putnam. In Wirt it’s just Windy.
There is a Cornstalk in Greenbrier, a Cucumber in McDowell, an Apple Grove in Mason. Hardy has a Baker, and Mingo has Pie—but Wayne has only a Fisher, and Greenbrier has Trout.
There is a Left Hand in Roane, a Widemouth in Mercer, and Raleigh has a Skelton. McDowell had Six, but Wetzel has a Hundred.
Preston has Independence; Putnam, Liberty; and Mingo, Justice. There is a Duck in Clay, a Pigeon in Roane, a Bob White in Boone, and Raleigh has a Blue Jay.
Thoughts of faraway places are stirred by London in Kanawha, Berlin in Lewis, Vienna in Wood, Sophia (my hometown) in Raleigh, Cairo in Ritchie, and Shanghai in Berkeley—but Hardy has a Lost City.
Braxton has a Flower, Boone a Bloomingrose, and Cabell has Clover. Lincoln has both Sod and Mud.
Alice is in Gilmer, Ethel in Logan, Shirley in Tyler, Chloe in Calhoun, and Ida-may in Marion—while Frank in is Pocahontas. Henry is in Grant, Leroy in Jackson, Alexander in Upshur, and Jack in Webster. Bud is in Wyoming and Junior in Barbour. Big Isaac is in Doddridge. Old Arthur is in Grant.
There is a Beaver in Raleigh, a Buffalo in Putnam, a Wildcat in Lewis, a Panther in McDowell, a Wolfe in Mercer—and Wyoming has a Wolf Pen.
Braxton has Heaters; but Raleigh has a Cool Ridge, and Pocahontas has Frost. Greenbrier has Sunlight, and Raleigh a Sundial; but Ohio and Boone have Twilight.
Greenbrier has an Auto and Ritchie has a Pullman. Wirt has Burning Springs and Ritchie a Burnt House. Randolph and Upshur each have a Burnt Bridge, and Morgan has a Burnt Factory.
There is Comfort in Boone and Harmony in Roane; but McDowell has War.
Looking at a list of West Virginia place names can be entertaining and instructive. Mercer County, one learns, has a Flat Top. And it is nice to know that in Raleigh, one can find Prosperity. But in Morgan, it’s Omps!
DAHMER
Elias (Alie) Propst, who once lived on the late Walter Propst farm in Mill Gap moved to Iowa in about 1870. Talk about hiking, well, Alie on one occasion, walked and led a bull all the way on the long journey to Iowa.
Robert Propst, son of Mr. and Mrs. Alston Propst, was a successful ginseng hunter. The largest ginseng root he dug weighed 14 ounces when green.
60 Years Ago
Week of November 12, 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.
March to Sea Begins
With Atlanta Burning
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman set out on one of the most famous military campaigns in history 100 years ago this week—a 300-mile march across Georgia, “from Atlanta to the Sea,” with all-out destruction as his purpose.
With 60,000 men, Sherman wanted to “make Georgia howl” and to wipe out the productivity of the state that supplied both men and food for Confederate armies. In so doing, Sherman turned his back on his enemy—the Confederate army of Gen. John B. Hood who then was marching toward Tennessee; and Sherman cut off communications with the North and severed his own supply line so that his army could live off the fat of Georgia. Never had a campaign broken so many rules of war.
It was early afternoon on November 12, 1864, when Sherman severed his connection with his fellow Northerners. Receiving a dispatch from Nashville, he answered by wire: “Dispatch received—all right.” The message went off, and immediately afterward, the telegraph line was cut, Sherman was on his own.
Sherman had issued orders on the 8th and 9th to prepare for the march. “The army,” he wrote “will forge liberally on the country…” Soldiers were not to enter private dwellings but “may…gather turnips, potatoes and other vegetables and …drive in stock in sight of their camp.”
Foragers were to move to the sides of the army to drive in livestock and bring in foodstuffs, and corps commanders were entrusted “the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton gins, etc.”
Should the residents of an area “manifest local hostility,” Sherman wrote, “then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility…”
Before leaving, the Federals turned to the destruction of Atlanta. The first fires were set November 11, and for four days they continued, consuming despots, bridges, warehouses, cotton bales, stables, public buildings—“everything habitable,” one Federal officer wrote. Homes were not supposed to be burned, but scores of them went up in smoke, and on the night of November 14, Sherman, himself, reported the “heart of the city was in flames all night.”
Next morning, November 15,
Sherman’s army set out in two columns for Milledgeville, Savannah and the Sea. Sherman left on the 16th, and he paused outside Atlanta to look back. His description, written years later, follows:
“Behind us lay Atlanta, smouldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in air and hanging like a pall over the ruined city. Away off in the distance on the McDonough road, was the rear of (Gen. O. O.) Howard’s column, the gun barrels glistening in the sun, the white-topped wagons stretching away to the south; and right before us, the Fourteenth Corps marching steadily and rapidly, with a cheery look and swinging pace, that made light of the thousand miles that lay between us and Richmond.
“Some band, by accident, struck up the anthem of ‘John Brown’s soul goes marching on;’ the men caught up the strain, and never before or since have I heard the chorus of “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” done with more spirit or in better harmony of time and place.”
Next week: Georgia ransacked.
Pendleton Citizens
Exercise Right to Vote
County clerk Luther H. Eye announced today that a whopping 84.65 percent of registered voters in Pendleton County actually voted on November 3.
The big turnout last Tuesday was in keeping with Pendleton County’s history of heavy voting in presidential elections, and the vote was almost identical with the percentage of Pendletonians who voted four years ago when 84.6 percent exercised their right to help choose their governmental officials. In the 1956 presidential election there was an 81.8 percent vote.
Particle Board
To Be Made in State
A new factory is being built in Braxton County. This, is itself, is news as employment will be created and the area economy will improve. However, the interesting part of this economy is that the factory will manufacture particle board making the first time that this has been manufactured in West Virginia.
Since early pioneer days, wood has been a basic part of the state’s economy. Even today, despite the years of cutting, two-thirds of West Virginia’s 15,000,000 acres are forested. With some 500 sawmills operating and about sixty other wood processing plants in secondary production, it is remarkable that the forests in the state still grow considerably more timber than is being harvested.
Over the years there have been basic wood products—lumber, plywood, and paper. The first two of these are actively produced in West Virginia, and the third has a decided effect on the state’s economy due to sale of pulpwood to paper plants in adjoining states.
Since World War II, there has developed a fourth wood product. This is particle board (sometimes called “chipboard” or “flakeboard”). Particle board, basically, is made from small particles of wood that are coated to extreme heat and pressure. The result is a board that is virtually free from warp and that is adaptable to many end uses. Also, from the point of view of conservation of timber, it achieves nearly one hundred percent utilization of wood used compared to only fifty to seventy percent in lumber and plywood.
There is no segment of the wood economy, and probably few in any economy, that has shown the rapid growth that has particle board. Production from 1953 to 1963 increased more than twenty fold. There are now fifty-seven plants making this board: seven in the Northeast and Lake States, 32 in the South, and 18 in the West.
70 Years Ago
Week of November 11, 1954
JAPANESE HONOR FRANKLIN SOLDIER
Sgt. John W. Cowger, 24, Franklin, was among eight American servicemen honored by the Tokyo government November 4 for acts of heroism and welfare activities in the Japanese capital.
Cowger was cited for saving 20 Japanese passengers from a flaming bus last February.
Tokyo Governor Seichiro Hasui presented the awards to the Americans at Prime Minister Shigeru Hoshida’s official residence.
DAHMER
All Soul’s Day which is celebrated November second by the Roman Catholic Church, in honor or their departed, came in and left a blanket of snow five inches deep in our mountainous region here, and the temperature registered 18 degrees above zero.
We believe the oldest man who voted in the November election was Gen. John B. Salling, one of the four survivors of the War Between the States—aged 108 years old.
Mr. Hendron Propst grew two sweet potatoes that weighed six pounds and eight ounces. If anyone has grown any twin sweet potatoes larger than these, we would like to see it in our good weekly newspaper.
80 Years Ago
Week of November 10, 1944
FRANKLIN POWER OVERWHELMS
PETERSBURG 60-0
Petersburg, W. Va., Nov. 3—A hard running Franklin eleven churned up Petersburg here today with end runs, line smashes and forward passes, and in the process buried the Vikings under a 60-0 score before a large crowd.
It took the Panthers only three minutes to get warmed up to take their third conference victory and the lead in the P. V. race.
FRANKLIN HI LIGHTS
Department of Music
The band and a chorus have been touring the county providing the entertainment for the War Fund Rallies. These young people under the guidance of Mr. Judy are active on the home front while their brothers carry the fight to the enemy on the battle line.
