Seneca Rocks

Time has flown by this summer, filled with storytelling, travel, selling, gardens and canning. I realized last night that I never posted photos from a day in June when we stopped at Seneca Rocks, a natural rock formation in eastern West Virginia that draws thousands of visitors every year.

So grand!

While I have posted about the Rocks before, we've never been at the park when the pioneer cabin was open for tours, so this was our lucky day.

A better photo of the homestead from Wikipedia:

This place, at the mouth of Seneca creek. was the homestead of Jacob Sites, and early settler in the region who arrived around 1830. He built a one-room cabin first, and additions came as his family grew, and in later years his sons and grandsons who lived in the house also made changes. According to family legend, the home was used as an inn during the Civil War, and later, when the family moved to the nearby community of Onego (pronounced one-go) two doctors were said to have lived there and made more changes.

The kitchen area was probably the original structure.

Check out the height of this door. Larry is pretty short, so a man of 5'8" or more would have to duck to go through.

The house is now part of the Seneca Rocks state park and is maintained by volunteers who plant the gardens and give tours.

We wanted to take a tour but the guide was occupied with two other visitors who had a very unfriendly dog that growled and snapped when we came in so we looked around on our own.

At the time of this photo, the house was being used to store hay and farm equipment. Looks like it was in danger of complete ruin, doesn't it? If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you can see the "needle", a pillar of rock staning in the center gap of the towering rock cliff.

Nearby, Seneca creek rushes along to its union with the North Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac River. It's easy to imagine how it must have been in early times, with the creeks and rivers providing the "map" by which people traveled.

Next time, perhaps we'll be the lucky ones who get the tour. For now, I'm just glad that I finally was able to see inside the homestead after visiting the park so many times over the years without an opportunity to do so.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.