Thursday, January 18, 1900
BIG TRACT OF LAND SOLD
L. M. McClintic, as special commissioner, made a private sale of 2,519 acres of land on the headwaters of Williams River and Cranberry, known as the Edmiston lands. The consideration is $20,136, and the purchaser was E. W. Campbell, of Warrenton, Pennsylvania. The sale was confirmed at the special term of the Circuit Court held here last week and was sold on six, twelve- and eighteen-months’ time…
This is the section where about 50,000 acres was bought twenty years ago of Pocahontas landowners for 40 cents an acre. The speculators held it a few years and sold it for $2.50 an acre and thought they were doing well. It is now worth $8 to $10. This section lies about ten miles west of the Greenbrier Railway.
Good timber lands immediately on the railroad, which a few years ago were practically unsellable, are now rated at $25 an acre.
McCLINTIC’S CAMP
About 60 men are at work now and an opening for a few more good men. A. F. Dunning, who has been general manager of the woods, has gone to Ronceverte on a visit. Jack Eckley, a well-known woodsman, has charge of the men who work in the woods. Sliding has been the order of the day and night when cold enough to freeze ice on the slide. The slide is about 3 miles long and the logs are slid in by horse power. One team is supposed to take 75 logs to the landing, where they are benched up nicely to wait the spring floods.
One of the best horses died with spasmodic colic last week, that had cost $125 in September.
Harry Luzier is the cook. He weighs 220 lbs. and can get around as fast as anyone need. He is one of the finest cooks that follow the woods.
During the recent snows, teams were hauling baled hay across the mountain from Mr. McClintic’s home. About 500 bales were stored away for summer use.
J. A. McLaughlin, of Marlinton, is our worthy clerk. He went home on a visit Christmas, and when he returned, he says to Pat the Scaler, “Is a person more apt to catch the measles by kissing anyone?” The Scaler replies, “How many times did you kiss anyone?”
“O, I kissed my girl about 25 times,” and in a few days he said, “I wish I had not have went to see her. I have the measles right now.”
OUR WEAK POINT
One of our London Subscribers (how we swell whenever we think that we have subscribers in London) hits the Pocahontas Times in its tenderest place. He writes the inuendo, and we get to hear of it by his correspondent’s burst of misplaced confidence. We cannot afford to miss printing a good joke just because it is on us. It is:
“The Pocahontas Times has slain more English since the war began that the armies of Paul Kruger.”
We fear it does not help crimes of this kind to say that they were committed unintentionally. We belong to the vast majority over whom Mr. Lindley Murray wept and tried to reclaim. A murderer of the King’s English in our teens, we have committed many a capital crime since.
Little combinations such as “have went,” “hadn’t ought to,” “have came,” creep into the copy and shock our friends. But we plead in extenuation that our editor was reared in a hard school – a weather-beaten old school on top of a hill, where the school teacher wore his breeches on the inside of his boots, and where Sammy Sauerkraut, who earned 25 cents a week by not eating meat at home, came to be publicly instructed. In that school, the predicates never agreed with the subject except by chance…
SHOWALTER – TRACEY
A rather romantic and picturesque wedding transpired at Marlinton Tuesday afternoon when John Richard Showalter and Miss Nancy Margaret Jane Alice Tracey were married seated in their buggy in front of the Marlinton manse, Wm. T. Price officiating.
The groom is a well-known and much respected young farmer of the Linwood vicinity. The bride is a daughter of J. P. Tracy, who was the only spectator of the marriage service. Immediately after the ceremony the party set out for Elk, where a reception awaited them at the home of Samuel Gibson, who is a brother-in-law of the groom.
MRS. HARVEY BOBLETT
Mr. Harvey Boblett, nee Grimes, died at her home near Mill Point last Saturday of Bright’s disease.
She leaves surviving her husband and ten children, five sons and five daughters. She was buried Sunday evening at the McNeel burying ground.
MRS. REBECCA J. HILL
Mrs. Rebecca J. Hill, relict of George C. Hill, died near Lobelia November 24, 1899. She was born in Greenbrier County April 8, 1826, and was married in 1848 and was the mother of eleven children, four of whom are living. She was a kind mother and a loving wife.
Our sky is hung with black and somber cloud curtains; our vision is overcast with the gloom of sorrow and every sound that strikes our ear has in it a cadence of despair. Without the presence of our loved one who has gone before, the world seems empty and cheerless, and in our heart there is a dreary, aching void.