Thursday, April 17, 1924
Tiny McCoy who shot himself in the head after killing his wife, mother-in-law and brother-in-law at Cass April 6, was taken to jail last Wednesday from the Marlinton Hospital.
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The younger generation does not realize what floods meant to us in the days gone by. The county is pretty well bridged, and the presence of a railroad makes the people independent of floods. But in our young days, the stage of the water had a great deal to do with the travel and many a day has been spent waiting for the flood to subside so that the stream could be crossed, and many a visit has been made by the force of circumstances that caught a traveler on the wrong side of a ford. I think that we must have taken the course of events far more calmly then, than now. If high water barred the way, the traveler possessed his soul in patience, and the host welcomed him to all the comforts and consolations of a home.
A little later, the spring floods came to have a great significance for the reason that the principal industry of the county was the cutting of some twenty million feet of white pine, and that depended upon sporadic floods that took the logs into the boom at the railroad at Ronceverte. The river was swift but it was uniform enough to permit large boats called arks to navigate downstream. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not have pulled them back up stream. A drive was formed of about a hundred men and sixteen horses and the logs were followed into the booms. When the river got too deep to ford, it was right for driving. They had good cooks on the ark. Five meals a day, and a bountiful feed. The length of the day was regulated by the daylight. The passing of the drive was the sight of the year. Everybody came to see the loggers work.
I can remember the time when it was the height of my ambition to belong to the drive, and I was helpless not having the necessary influence to be selected for that high walk in life. I often think of those days when I see Captain Smith. That is where he got his title. Bossing a hundred men. He had charge of the timber industry here for years and was greater than a king. Now a days he dispenses justice as a county seat squire.
About the most annoying thing that could happen was for floods to fall so that the logs did not get through. The whole county felt it. It did not often happen, but I remember at least once when the summer came on and the drive had to tie up short of the booms…
GHOST
Gregory Knapp or Knapp Gregory was a hunter, and about 175 years ago he kept his hunter’s camp somewhere on Knapps Creek, which stream bears his name to this day. One day, he returned from the hunt, but left his dogs in the woods. He surprised a party of men robbing his camp. The robbers killed him. To leave the impression that Knapp had been carried away captive by an Indian war party, the robbers decided to hide Gregory’s body in a pond or sink hole some distance away. The dogs came home, took the trail of the robber, and followed it in full cry to the sink hole or pond. The dogs were so close after the robbers and were so savage that the robbers killed them, too. And for years after, in the fall of the year, at the right time in the hunter’s moon, the settlers could hear the furious coursing of Gregory’s hounds in the hills of the Knapps Creek Valley, as they run again their last chase to their master’s body.
This is the tale of Gregory’s ghost as I remember it as told me by aged people now dead.
DIED
James Mathew McClure died at the Marlinton Hospital Sunday morning, April 13, 1924, aged 77 years. He was born March 20, 1847, on Bruffeys Creek and had been a resident of Pocahontas county all his life. For 60 years, he had been a member of the Mt. Zion M. E. Church…
Funeral service was conducted from the Presbyterian Church with burial in Mt. View Cemetery.
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Mrs. Annie Rebecca Weiford died Saturday night, April 12, 1924, aged 66 years. She was the widow of the late Rev. G. S. Weiford, of Warwick. On Tuesday, the body was brought to her old home at Warwick and buried in the Waugh graveyard on Indian Draft… Mrs. Weiford was a daughter of the late John Dilley and his wife, Naomi McNeil Dilley, who lived in the Hills near Dilleys Mill.
