Thursday, June 8, 1899
The grove near Hamlin Chapel is the habitat of a gray squirrel that has lost the most of his brush from a bullet and deserves the sympathy of a maimed veteran and not be molested.
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In the grove near the Duffield graveyard are a number of locusts with the letter W on their wings and are solemnly rehearsing their pharaonic dirge-like notes.
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Persons using the Moore alum spring on Browns Creek think they have been benefitted a good deal. So far as the writer has sampled the water, the spring ought to be called a natural lemonade spring, with the sugar left out.
LIGHTNING
Lightning struck W. A. Bratton’s home in Marlinton May 31 at 5 p.m. No one was in the house except Aunt Kate Stewart, the cook; the family being in Virginia. The bolt struck a chimney, partly demolishing it, and seemed to come down the four corners of the roof, burning holes in the spouting and otherwise injuring it, and loosening some of the weather boarding. On the inside of the house, the plastering was loosened. Aunt Kate was electrified by the occurrence, but did not succumb to the shock. The neighbors felt the effects of the thunderbolt. On the same day, lightning struck several houses in Charleston.
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Monday, May 29, lightning played havoc with 14 poles on the Greenbrier and Pocahontas Telephone Line a mile this side of Frankford. The poles were splintered to the ground, and were replaced at once with new ones. When lightning strikes a pole it is apt to destroy those near it. As a protection from lightning, a wire is sometimes put on the pole extending from the top into the ground as a miniature lightning rod.
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This section has been visited by very violent thunderstorms and some damage has been occasioned by washing of plowed fields. Wednesday and Thursday heavy showers, accompanied by wind and hail, passed over the lower portion of the county beating the leaves from trees and leaving many other signs of violence. During the first four days of the week, the air was so heavily charged with electricity that it was almost impossible to use the telephone lines.
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The storm last Thursday afternoon leveled with the ground 15 or 20 panels of fence on Powell Hill near Marlinton. The fence was nine rails high and heavily locked and propped. Higher wind is not remembered by anyone than was blowing at the time.
AN OLD MYSTERY
About 1890, Dick Knapp disappeared from his home near Edray, and it was always believed that he was murdered, tho the failure to find the body has been effectual to prevent any prosecutions in the courts. Last Saturday, Scott Kelley was tried at Green Bank before a justice on a peace warrant and the charge was dismissed. Then came Enos Sharp and swore that the prisoner had admitted to him that he had cut Dick Knapp’s throat with the assistance of some others. Thereupon the magistrate committed him to jail on the charge of murder.
It is considered that there is no case against the prisoner and not likely to be. Such evidence should be weighed with care for it is of a character which innocent men have cause to fear, and if it received credence, no man would be safe.
ANDREW DILLEY’S COFFIN
C. B. Swecker has in his shop a lot of nice walnut lumber that has an interesting history. It came from a tree planted by the late Andrew Dilley near Dilley’s Mill the year he went to keeping house, about 50 years ago. The tree grew to be so large that it seemed to endanger the dwelling and Mr. Dilley had it removed and sawed a year or so before his death.
Five hundred feet of that lumber was bought by Captain Swecker. Several articles of furniture have been made of it and some coffins. Owing to a mere inadvertence, that is regretted, Mr. Dilley’s coffin might have been made of it, and thus he would have had the distinction of being buried in a casket made from a tree of his own planting.