Thursday, September 27, 1928
A collision of a horse and automobile on the Hunters-ville road near Kramer’s Camp Monday night resulting in a dead horse and a badly damaged car. Emerson Sharp was driving along and seeing a loose horse, turned out, trying to avoid hitting him. The horse wheeled in front of the car and came over the engine and into the windshield. The driver escaped injury but the horse was killed. It is understood that the horse belonged to T. C. Malcomb, on Knapps Creek. He had recently purchased the horse. It broke away and was making his way back to his former home.
– – –
A little snow and a big frost reported on the higher ground Tuesday morning. Damages to vegetation was not general all over the county, however, as clouds and fog came and melted the frost before the sun came out. Wednesday morning, it was a different story with a heavy freeze and a temperature of 26 above zero.
SHOOTING AT MT. GROVE
On Sunday morning, Mrs. Troy Bolling and Clinton Beverage were shot and desperately wounded while driving along the road near Mountain Grove in an automobile. They were passing near a house occupied by a Mrs. Sheets, when a shot was fired. The bullet hit the boy in the back, passing through his abdomen, and then striking Mrs. Bolling in the hip and coming out at her shoulder. Both were terribly injured. They are being cared for at the Community House at Warm Springs.
Mrs. Sheets, a drug addict, and two men have been arrested and are in jail at Warm Springs.
Clinton Beverage, aged fourteen years, is a son of the late Amos Beverage, of Stony Creek. His mother is Mrs. George Conley.
Troy Bolling has a skidding contract for the Richwood people on Williams River. He went to spend Sunday with his family at Mt. Grove and took the Beverage boy along. The boy’s step father, George Conley, works for the Tidewater Lumber Company near Mountain Grove.
ANOTHER PANTHER
Last Thursday, Mrs. A. P. Beverage, who lives at the head of Stony Creek, saw a strange animal in the fields near the house. She called Mr. Beverage’s attention to it and he identified it as a panther. It stopped a short time, jumped over the fence and disappeared in the woods, going in the direction of the Tea Creek country. It was a large one, possibly over seven feet long. Mr. Beverage has seen a number of panthers, alive in the woods, and dead, and in shows. Hounds had been heard running on the big wooded mountain above the Beverage farm, and the panther, not liking the noise, had moved out.
In August 1927, E. C. Moore and Walter Mason, of Marlinton, and Paul Price, of Morgantown, saw a very large panther on the North Fork of Cranberry. Last Fall, Milburn Sharp saw a panther’s track in the snow on Days Run, just a few miles directly across the mountain from Mr. Beverage’s farm, and in the direction from which the panther came last week.
FISHING TRIP
continued….
The Dutch Bottom was so called from the fact that certain stout hearted immigrants from Holland had been thrown by adverse fortunes on the banks of a mountain stream in a heavy spruce and hemlock forest with the gardening tools that they had brought from their intensive cultivated home fields, and had endured the hardships of an unsuitable place in the mountains long enough to have reclaimed a small field from the hostile soil before they gave up the fight and moved to the warm, fertile fields of the Little Levels where they prospered and founded an important family in West Virginia. There are hundreds of persons who trace their ancestry to the family who attacked the great forest with their diminutive tools and, without exception, this descent is known for its frugality, industry, prosperity and honesty.
In 1848, Hermanus Stulting, aged 34, and his wife and children, the oldest of which was Cornelius J. Stulting, aged five years, arrived at the port of New York, with a brother, Nicolas Stulting, aged 22 years. They immediately fell into the hands of John F. Schemmerhorn, who claimed a large number of surveys in this part of Virginia, aggregating many thousands of acres. He sold the family 600 acres of land on Williams River, a part of a survey made for Henry Banks of 32,300 acres, in 1797. For this 600 acres, he received $300.00. The deed was made to young Cornelius, and the whole bears the appearance of a fraud on the immigrants that would have proved fatal except for the fact that this Dutch family belonged to a breed that could not be beaten.
They built a log cabin at the mouth of a little run and faced it towards Black Mountain. This was in the old days when it was covered with a marvelous stand of black spruce, running up to a hundred thousand feet to the acre. It was one of the most awe inspiring mountains on earth. This growth of spruce disappeared before the woodsmen, and the reason of the name of Black Mountain is not so apparent…
At the time I speak of this little patch of grassland, was our objective for the first night in camp. What happened when we boy scouts set out in search for the river over the divide was that we walked around the head of the stream and continuing on our course came to Williams River at the Dutch Bottom, not being aware that we were starting the fishing at the place we were to wind up the first day.
The stream at this place was flush from the recent rains and was a stream the width of a street. Above us a number of little streams had united to form the head of Williams River. The main one known as Beaver Dam Creek, from the fact that the early settlers had found there an immense dam built by beavers, and the area of the pond is plain to be seen to this day. I have talked with men who remember the stumps of trees cut off by beaver at the time that the animal was common in this country.
A little run coming in at Dutch Bottom had trout in it, and I remember taking a small plump trout at the first try. The trout were scattered all over the main river. The water was slightly discolored and the day warm and bright. A trout could be taken anywhere, and without any previous experience we commenced to pull them out from the little eddies and swirls, and it was apparent that the fish would soon become a burden…
To be continued…