US Route 33 and the Long Way Home

We took a meandering route home from Pittsburgh and the Three Rivers Storytelling Festival . A stop at son Aaron's home in Fairmont, then on to our favorite road--US Route 33 across the center of West Virginia. The way is dotted with tiny communities--like Pickle Street (name derived years ago when a wagonload of pickle barrels overturned in what was then a rutted wagon track of a road), Stumptown and Sand Ridge.

We made several other stops along the way. I'll post the one at Lambert's Winery in a separate post.

This gravestone shaped like a tree has always intrigued me. Today we took the time to stop and look at it and others in the cemetery by the old octagon-shaped church (I thought I'd surely find a photo of it online, but no luck. So next time, a photo of the church--it's really a treasure). I wonder if the man it commemorates was a timberman?


In the same cemetery, my husband found this simple stone on the grave of a Confederate soldier, a member of the horse artillery named John B. Dawson.

Further along our journey, we noticed a sign in Spencer, WV that we'd not noticed before. "Civil War site," it read and an arrow pointed to a road that I thought led only to Wal-Mart.

We followed the road, that turned quickly into a rutted dirt track, to a parking area, then walked another 1/4 mile or more to the top of a hill to see what might be there. What we found was a Civil-War era graveyard, serenely looking over a stupendous view of Spencer and surrounding areas.

Also on the site: the ruins of the home of the Farm Superintendent of the former Spencer State Hospital for the Insane.

The house apparently burned, but the stonework is beautiful, with many arches, and a fireplace still intact.

Evidence of other visitors--raccoon tracks in a mud puddle.

At journey's end--a favorite spot on the porch to think about what we'd seen. Graveyards make us introspective, don't they? I thought about the many veterans' graves we'd seen, from different wars, all side by side in the cemeteries. I wondered about the many stones at Sand Ridge from 1922--what happened that year? An influenza epidemic?

Those thoughts (and a writing prompt on the WV Writers Roundtable) led to this poem:

Follow Me Home

Follow me
to mossy graves of soldiers
from old wars long past
and soon forgotten

Follow me
to farms and land abandoned
where fireplaces stand
to mark their place

Follow me
along a lonely highway
that traces a course
through history

Follow me
on US Route 33
through Pickle Street, Linn,
and Leatherbark

Follow me
remember your ancestors
who lived, worked, died
and left small trace

Follow me
along this twisting two-lane
into the shadows
follow me home