Thursday, November 16, 1922
I was initiated into the order of tourists, and went bowling along the Virginia roads like one of the idle rich. The occasion was the football game at Charlottesville, between the University at that place and Washington & Lee…
It seems but yesterday that a trip to Charlottesville over the country was a matter of at least two weeks, and yet on that Saturday, another party from this place attended the game and lost but one day. They traveled 240 miles and in a Ford.
Thirty-two years since, I saw Old Millboro in a covered wagon. The trip took five days. Four nights sleeping on the ground with a wagon train, hauling goods at a dollar a hundred, the overhead charge for the enterprise being $2.40 for toll.
The other day, we hit the old wagon road as far as Mountain Grove, detoured there by way of Clifton Forge, to pay a call, and got to Staunton at midnight, having left Marlinton at 2:30 p.m., something like 150 miles. It occurred to me about this time that while I had ridden in automobiles often that this was the first time that I had been a tourist.
In the old days, when the Pocahontas people went forth in covered wagons, they were about as welcome along the road as the plague. Just about never was there a chicken missed, a fence used up for a campfire, or a wild halloo at night, but what the the Pocahontas wagoneers were blamed for it. But the latter day tourist breathing forth his holiday spirit, and with his purse strings loose, is as welcome as the flowers that bloom in the spring. Most of the country that we went through was familiar to me in the old days when a man would ride up to a farm house and stay a night or a week according to his wish and pleasure. But the places had got mixed up with each other in my memory, and I made many mistakes in sorting out the names of places and streams and gaps and mountains.
Along about the shank of the evening, we went bowling through Panthers Gap, between Old Millboro and Goshen. This is so called because, in the old days, panthers slouched across the road in the night time and the way through was to be avoided after eight…
Somewhere over there in the old state we struck road project number 9 from Old Point Comfort to the West Virginia line and that is a good road as far as it has got. And it is up and over the Height of Land as blown dust-devils go, and the Ford – it fled like a stag of ten, but our car like a barren doe…
CASS
On last Saturday, Constable L. S. Cochran arrested Pete Kelly, charged with killing George Mallory at Cass. In the month of July 1913, Mallory was found dead in bed under very unusual circumstances, and suspicion pointed very strongly towards Kelley at the time, but as the State did not have the chain of evidence complete, no arrest was made. Kelley immediately left for parts unknown and all trace of him was lost for about seven years. He recently came back to Cass, and soon found himself in the clutches of the law; he was brought before Squire J. B. Sutton for a preliminary hearing, but waived examination and was locked up at Cass waiting to be taken to jail at Marlinton. During the night, some confederate of Kelley took the bolts out of the hinges of the outside door of the cell and released the prisoner, who left for parts unknown.
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The corn dance is on again. With the ripening of the corn, it looks like there had been an impulse to tamper with the moonshine again. Last Monday night a federal agent stopped a car and took two prominent citizens, Lee Overholt and J. J. McNellan, to Lewisburg where Commissioner McWhorter held them for the federal court under bond. And they brought Henry Rider (Peg Leg) and some other persons to jail last week.
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A number of persons who get into trouble from using liquor would like to quit it. And after a short abstinence they fall back into the deplorable habit. If they will but abstain for twelve months and let their minds and bodies get back to a normal condition, they could wade through a river of old corn whiskey without taking a drop.
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Among those accused this week of tampering with the liquor laws are Lee Overholt, J. J. McNellan, Henry Price, J. Henry Rider, Cornelius McLaughlin, Hattie Perry, Everette Alderman and two Woollards, all these were taken to Lewisburg before the federal commissioner. It is our earnest hope that this will be all the hint that the citizens of this county need that there is a law against liquor in the land.
BIRTH
Born to Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Sharp near Warwick, November 10, 1922, a daughter.