Thursday, March 29, 1923
Ira D. Brill, proprietor of the Peoples Store and Supply Company, has made and is making great improvements in his store at the west end of the bridge. The room is being made larger, and much more convenient, and the light is much better. The front show window and door have been moved forward six feet or more and a large storage room is being thrown into the main store by the removal of a partition. Also, a storage room is being fitted up on one of the porches. While the tendency of our merchants has been to specialize in some particular line, the remarkable growth of Mr. Brill’s business shows that there is still a field in this country for the general store with everything required on the farm and in the household.
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Things are doing in and around Marlinton these days. Work is going on the new $60,000 Methodist church, ground has been broken for J. L. Baxter’s new brick garage which will have a floor space of about a quarter of an acre; also the excavation has been done for the big garage of the Marlinton Electric Company. Waugh Bros. have commenced work on their Class A road contract from the bridge to the Kee Farm, a $40,000 contract. The Marlin Lumber Company’s plant and woods are running full time and they are building a lot of railroad besides. A number of houses are in course of construction, and Dr. Solter is greatly improving the hospital grounds by filling in a lot of low lands between the building and the river.
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Dr. Bryd Prillerman, President Emeritus of the West Virginia Collegiate Institute and Superintendent of the work among the Negroes of the State Council of Religious Education, made an address to the County Sunday School Convention Friday afternoon. He was here to help in the Country Life Conference for the colored people of Pocahontas county held at Brownsburg Saturday and Sunday. In his address at the convention, he said he considered conditions more tolerable for the people of his race in West Virginia than in any state in the Union. That he preferred to raise his family here, rather than in Massachusetts. That, if there was such a thing as the race problem, it was being more happily solved here than anywhere else. He once told the United States Commission on Education of the Negro, that he believed the school laws of West Virginia would serve as the example of how best to give the people of his race proper educational advantages…
A leader in religious work in this State says he places Dr. Prillerman in the same class with Booker T. Washington and Dr. Shepherd, the African missionary.
ONCE A NEWSBOY
He started out in life as a newsboy and bootblack, and then became in succession an errand boy, a messenger boy, a saloon swamper and a waiter in a high class bar room. One time he was fired “because he didn’t know enough to grow up in the business to be a permanent asset.”
But Samuel W. Grathwell knew enough for something else. When he was 21, he entered college and worked his way through. Nine years later, he received his A. B. Meantime, he had made a wonderful record as a speaker and won membership in three honorary debating fraternities, probably an unequalled record.
Perhaps he didn’t know enough to be a permanent asset in the saloon from which he was fired, but he did know enough to become a real asset to America. And in the war period his talks in industry and for the Army and Navy were so regarded.
When he speaks at the high school on Wednesday, the people of Marlinton will have an opportunity to hear a man who has risen from the most obscure beginnings and has overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable… This former street arab stands today among America’s most popular lecturers…
THE NEW ROAD
By Oscar H. Adkinson
They have changed the road at the “Beecher place,”
And cut down the grade on the hill
They have abandoned the lane where I taught Dolly to pace
And galloped old Charlie to mill
They have felled the trees that shadowed the way.
And closed the river road,
Where the pioneers drove their “twos and fours
In front of their load.
The crack of the whip is no longer heard,
And hushed is the teamster’s song.
The tinkling chains and the crackling wheels
Give way to the auto’s gong.
The old is gone, and better ways
Have been wrought by the genius of men,
We have only memories of other days
We shall not see again.