10 Years Ago
Week of February 12, 2015
Teter Named
West Virginia
History Hero
Eston Teter of Brandywine will be celebrated at the Capitol Complex in Charleston next Thursday as one of West Virginia’s History Heroes.
Thirty-three state residents have been chosen for the honor this year by the West Virginia Division of Culture and History. The honoring of History Heroes coincides with West Virginia History Day at the state legislature.
Teter was nominated by the Pendleton County Historical Society.
He was born in Fort Seybert on Dec. 29, 1918, the oldest of the three children of J. Fred and Cleda Puffenbarger Teter.
- Fred Teter owned and operated one of the five working mills in the South Fork Valley, having purchased the old Buckhorn Cowger grist mill in the middle 1920s.
A firsthand witness to the county’s passage from a bucolic place that had not shed its 19th century customs and ways to a fully modernized rural farming area, Teter was described, in a lengthy “Times” profile from April 4, 2013, as one who “embodies the spirit and history of the South Fork Valley” while maintaining a “love of county history and its preservation.”
50 Years Ago
Week of February 13, 1975
Historical Society
Begins Registration
Of County Graves
The Pendleton County Historical Society has taken on the mammoth job of registering all graves in Pendleton County.
The Historical Society is being assisted in the project by the home demonstration clubs of the county. Individuals living throughout the county also are being invited to help.
60 Years Ago
Week of February 11, 1965
Life In Fairbanks, Alaska Normal, Or Almost So,
At 50 Below
they call it
‘five-dog weather’
The following is a clipping from the Fairbanks News-Miner by Judy Brady, Fairbanks, Alaska, and was sent to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Boggs whose son with his family is stationed there with the U. S. Air Force. Sgt. Boggs is married to the former Miss Virginia Eye, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. B. C. Eye of the Dahmer community near Franklin.
Fairbanks, Alaska— “There’s one bright spot—we’ll be the only town in the country—to have outdoor ice hockey in July, said an old-timer with a grin. “Guess this ‘Frozen North’ business has something to it after all.”
With nonchalance of Alaskans toward cold weather, residents here are viewing the month-long stretch of subzero temperatures with more interest than malice.
Only twice through December did the alcohol thermometers—mercury freezes at -40—climb to above zero, then only for a few hours. Several times temperatures dipped to 60 below. For weeks at a time the temperature dropped to 75 below.
The 16,000 Fairbanks residents have a joke: “I’d go downtown, but I can’t find it.”
The joke is almost truth. The cold traps the usual by-products of combustion—oil and car exhaust—into a dense ice fog that blankets the town and airport.
The fog is so thick that tail and head lights are invisible at more than five feet. Driving is hazardous and flying, for smaller planes that can’t take off on instruments, impossible.
For the Alaska railroad, the cold brings other problems.
“Our oil thicken up like glue,” one official said. “If a car sits too long the wheels refuse to turn and we have to drag it for awhile. We are operating normally though.”
Operating “normally” at 50 below is a source of pride to the people here. Few meetings are cancelled and school goes on as usual.
Everyone dons heavy parkas and boots or Mukluks—moose hide moccasins topped with fur—gloves with linings, long underwear and heavy pants. Children are instructed not to run to keep the cold from damaging their lungs. One frequently feels his cheeks with an ungloved hand to be sure they aren’t becoming frostbitten.
“The cold causes one major problem,” said Frank Conway, airport manager. “Visibility—we don’t have any.”
A familiar sight on New Year’s Eve was beautifully gowned and coiffured women with chiffon dresses peeking out of wool overpants and mukluks.
Driving becomes a carefully protected privilege. At night motorists plug their cars into circulating heaters to keep the water around the engine block warm. Batteries are lugged indoors.
During the day, drivers must frequently interrupt their work to bundle up and run their engines to prevent a freeze up. After cars have been sitting awhile the tires harden into frozen squares that shatter as they bump along.
“We estimate that one year up here is as hard on a car as four years in other states,” one garage owner commented.
The cold presents special problems in everyday living. Homeowners say the cost of heating their homes almost doubled during December. Plumbers say this year’s freeze has broken pipes that stood the cold in less severe winters.
A not uncommon sight is a housewife taking a bag of dirty dishes to work because the pipes at home froze and broke. In many the windows become heavily frosted. One woman described her home as looking “like the inside of a refrigerator that needs defrosting.”
Downtown shoppers cut through buildings rather than walk an extra block in the burning cold and stores leave their back doors open for this purpose.
“I’ve lived here 30 years and just got careless,” said one businessman. “I was out shoveling my walk and didn’t come in fast enough when my hands stopped hurting.”
Despite experience in such weather, the man’s hands had become frostbit. Fairbanks police say that cold injury for December struck a record number of townspeople.
All in all folks here agree it’s “five dog weather”—two Huskies at the foot of the bed and three across the middle.
Sgt. Boggs reports that the weather is more normal now—it has warmed up to 20-35 below zero.
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.
Lee Named South’s Commander-In-Chief
General Robert E. Lee became commander-in-chief of the armies of the Confederacy 100 years ago this week, but he would have exchanged the title for a single, solid, well-equipped army.
For what he was given to command was his old Army of Northern Virginia, now dwindling, starving and freezing along the Richmond-Petersburg line; a hodge-podge of an army gathering in the Carolinas to oppose Sherman’s march northward, and an assortment of military groups scattered in the Deep South, notably that of Nathan Bedford Forrest in Alabama and Mississippi. Each of those armies was out-manned at least three-to-one.
The change was political rather than military, for it indicated a growing resentment in the Confederate Congress against President Jefferson Davis. It was no less than an effort to take from Davis his command of the military.
Davis did not consent to the bill creating Lee’s new position, but when it was passed, he signed it into law, suavely pretending that it made Lee a military advisor to him and ignoring the humiliation that it was supposed to inflict.
And when Lee took over the position, he could do little more than issue an order, again trying to rally the dwindling power of the South behind him.
Resorting to last-gasp measures to build his army, Lee announced he would pardon deserters (except those who deserted to the enemy) if they returned to the fold within 20 days.
“Let us oppose constancy to adversity, fortitude to suffering and courage to danger, with the firm assurance that He who gave freedom to our fathers will bless the efforts of their children to preserve it,” he wrote.
As for the future, he wrote, “I rely for success upon the courage and fortitude of the army, sustained by the patriotism and firmness of the people, confident that their united efforts under the blessing of Heaven will secure peace and independence.”
But his real problems he saved for a letter to Secretary of War Seddon in Richmond that same week. February 13, he wrote, had been “the most inclement day of winter.” On that day, he reported, his soldiers “had been without meat for three days and in scant clothing took the cold, hail and sleet.”
His men’s strength, he wrote, would fail under that treatment even if their courage survived. His cavalry could not gather in one place because no one place had sufficient forage. “You must not be surprised,” he told Richmond, “If calamity befalls us.”
Across the other side of the Richmond-Petersburg line, Ulysses S. Grant watched and waited for the end. Lee was losing nearly a regiment a day in desertions, alone, he figured. It could not be long.
Next week: Columbia, S. C. is ransacked and burned.
70 Years Ago
Week of February 10, 1955
Our Land . . .
To Have and To Hold
By Con Kelly
County Forester, Conservation Commission of W. Va
Pendleton county is a land of topographic extremes—rocky mountain ledges grade into fertile level bottom lands, steep wooded slopes drop off to gently rolling ridges.
Each acre of our county presents a unique production problem in itself—each is capable of producing a certain return, no more nor less, whether it be in cropland, pasture, or woodland. This concept or thinking is called “land capability.” Every acre of our county, to a degree, is now in production, or in use—this is termed “land use.” Only when land use is correlated with land capability can maximum, long-range productivity be maintained. To a county such as ours, where our financial stability is based almost wholly on the productivity of the land, proper land use is a “must.”
The evil of a thing is not in its use, but in its abuse. Land was created to be used by man for his sustenance and prosperity. However, land exploitation and abuse soon became the rule—croplands were overworked, pastures overgrazed, forest overcut and burned. When productivity declined through land-abuse, once prosperous nations paid the penalty—poverty, starvation, and disease. The giants of the Old World, China and India, because of inability to feed their own people, were weakened within, and fell to their enemies.
The scars of past land-abuse are evident throughout our county. Steep, hillside pastures still funnel soil and water through their gullies to create flash floods. Cut and turned-over mountainsides support only scrubby, non-commercial vegetation, and are incapable of holding water through the wet seasons. Improperly farmed cropland loses its precious topsoil at every rainfall, with a subsequent drop in productivity.
The past is history—the future lies in the balance. A nation’s strength is directly proportionate to the productivity of its land. And the productivity of the land is at its peak when it is used only according to its capabilities.
The watchword for our county might well be— “As the land goes, so goes Pendleton county.”
80 Years Ago
Week of February 9, 1945
MOUTH OF SENECA
Hello! This is the voice of Seneca crooning a message to you through these cold February winds.
Sorrow and War
We have been looking, waiting and wishing with you for Berlin to fall and it will fall–that is imminent and inevitable. Each day we are bathed and saturated in war news, war programs and war propaganda and our country is struggling and fighting to win the war and an honorable peace. Yours—Katinka
BOY SCOUT
TRAINING HELPS YOUTH OF AMERICA
The foremost military and naval authorities were shocked at the facts concerning America’s young men, revealed by the draft. An unbelievable high percentage were found to be unfit for active service because of physical handicaps that could have been corrected in childhood. Many had mental defects and a surprising number, in spite of the nation’s excellent public school system, were illiterate.
But these authorities were greatly impressed at the splendid showing made by former Boy Scouts.
Over twelve million men and boys have had the benefit of Scout training during the thirty-five years since the Boy Scouts of America was first organized. To this should be added the millions in over seventy different lands who have been members of foreign Scout associations. These young men are dedicated to the cause of tolerance, of friendship among the civilized nations of the earth.