Thursday, February 3, 1949
Milburn Sharp was a telling me the other day that the grey foxes have about moved out of Bucks Mountain and of a consequence the reds have moved there in force. In one day’s hunt, the Sharps jumped no less than nine red foxes. They killed three foxes that day, but in three days of chasing they accounted for no less than nine foxes, and put a wildcat into a hole in the rocks on the Spruce Flat side of Dry Creek.
A Weaver
The Nicholas County News Leader prints the following comments about Maggie McClure, of Marlinton:
Now that the fad of weaving is at large among the bobby-soxers of the nation, the local teenagers might be interested in looking up Mrs. Maggie A. McClure. When she was a kid, she had to do weaving to keep the family clothed.
Mrs. McClure is 88 years old and lives in Marlinton, in the county where she was born February 23, 1861, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Dal Galford. Her parents were among the earliest settlers to come to Pocahontas county.
The early years in Pocahontas were fraught with every difficulty under the sun. While meat was plentiful and for the mere killing, clothes were harder to get than they are today because of the utter scarcity. So that is how Maggie McClure learned the gentle art of getting yarn out of a spinning wheel and linsey out of a loom. Today, she knits gloves and makes men’s hose and her home is full of woven articles she made by her own hand. At her age, she surprised people by sewing and knitting without the use of glasses. She does her reading with the bare eye, too.
Today, she stands alone; the last of Dal Galford’s family. She recalls the early days, when her father started hewing a home from the wilderness. Today, the place is Cass, Pocahontas, and right where Dal built his cabin, the huge Mower Lumber Company rips through logs and turns out some mighty fine lumber.
She inherited pioneering blood and she married a pioneering man, Dave McClure, a brave woodsman who took his young bride from Cass to the headwaters of the Williams River and there stopped to cut trees for their cabin home. She cooked the meals over a log heap fire while her husband cut the trees that were to make the home. Not far from their home was to be seen a wallowing place for bear, and among the trees at a distance could be seen the antlered deer flitting away. The call of the wild turkey could be heard on the hills.
Now, at 88, Mrs. McClure looks back on a life of hardships, which now have mellowed into sweet memories of the past. …
THE WEATHER
This was one January in which we all did not freeze to death, even if things for days on end were entirely too damp for comfort.
We all think this, so far, has been about the mildest winter in the memory of man, and it could well be so.
Friend George Alderman was around the other day to ask who remembered that mild winter of about 60 years ago. There was sugar making in January; no snow until March to skid logs out of the woods for the spring drive, and peach trees bloomed the last week of February.
Sure, at our house, we had cause to remember mild winters in my young days. One matter of expressed anxiety was that of ice for comfort during the hot days of summer. This ice was cut on the river and stored under sawdust in the ice house. Occasional years no ice formed on the river, and then the only place for ice was a pond at Stony Creek, close to a cold north side and hemlock forest.
The year the peach trees bloomed the latter part of February was marked in mind by the interest aroused by newspaper articles on the guess that the warm Gulf stream in the Atlantic Ocean may have changed its course to the west by several hundred miles. Thus the eastern states were enjoying a warming of the climate like that of the British Islands, so far to the north of us. The western states that year were suffering from blizzards somewhat like this year.
BIRTHS
Born to Mr. and Mrs. Harry Lynn Sheets, a daughter, named Deborah Jean.
Born to Mr. and Mrs. Oscar D. Williams, a son, named Oscar Leon.
Born to Mr. and Mrs. Chester K. Shrader, a daughter, named Nancy Ann.
Born to Mr. and Mrs. Jimmy Ray Nelson, a son, named Steve Wayne.
Born to Mr. and Mrs. M. F. Defibaugh, a son, named Morgan Raburn.
COMING HOME
Funeral services for Staff Sergeant Samuel Fred Spencer, age 29, will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday, February 6, 1949, in the Arbovale Methodist Church and burial will be in the Arbovale cemetery with military rights by Allegheny Post 117, American Legion.
Sergeant Spencer was killed in Germany April 10, 1945, while serving with the Battery 419th Field Artillery of the 10th Armored Division He entered the service in 1942…
He graduated from Greenbank High School with the Class of 1933… He is survived by a son, his mother, five sisters and three brothers.