Sad Angel: Adamsville Cemetery

I got so intrigued by the Sliding Hill ghost story that I asked my grandson Jared, who is visiting from Los Angeles, to go with me to explore the area. I can't say there is a lot to see--a country highway that borders the railroad tracks that hug the riverbank, small towns and rural homes and farms. But Jared is an adventurer and an explorer, and as intrigued by strange tales as I am.

We drove up Sliding Hill Creek Road, turning here and there, meandering for miles and just looking at the countryside. 

On Sliding Hill Creek Road

We ended up back on the highway, miles from our starting point, in a community called Clifden which  has its own strange story. According to the lady at the diner where we stopped for lunch, there is (or was) a house in the town where the walls just started crying one day. Literally. Water began seeping out of the walls for no reason anyone could discover. She said that the woman living in the house at the time wrote a book about it, but I have not yet found any information about the event or the book. A story for another day.

After leaving Clifden we turned back toward Sliding Hill, stopping on the way at a graveyard I've passed many times but never had time to visit. 

Check out the orb in this photo. I didn't notice it at the time, but now I'd like to go back and look at that gravestone the grave is centered over.

This is the Adamsville Cemetery, as I learned after a long search--it is not listed on Find-A-Grave, or if it is, it is under another name. The cemetery is not being maintained very well, as the grass and weeds were about a foot high, but we waded in anyway.

Yet another bright orb. Usually I can attribute these to dust, but today there was no dust at all;
the grass was still wet with dew.

I have wanted to stop at this cemetery because of this monument:

This angel has caught my eye so many times over the years, and this time I was determined to stop and take photos of her. And would you believe it, I forgot to get the name of the person buried in that plot. So I will have to stop again sometime. Which I will not mind doing. When a cemetery has become a forgotten place, it feels all the more important to stop and visit, a mark of respect for those beneath the soil.

In the center of this graveyard is a stonewalled enclosure made of large cut stones. I believe this might have been the original cemetery and that there was a church down below at one time. Few of the graves within the walls have markers but their presence was obvious when I walked across the area--the ground was sunken in regular intervals. 

Other sites apparently once had wrought iron fences around them; some of the fenceposts are still standing but the fences are missing.

One of the remaining fenced plots

One grave, far up the hill and against the treeline, particularly interested us. The parents' names, Charley and Emma Martin, were clear, as were their birthdates and that of their married daughter. 

There was also a son, Charley Jr, who was buried here. Oddly, there were no death dates for the parents or the daughter. I searched online in West Virginia death records for them and even googled the names but found nothing. Did the family move away after the young son died? How very lonely his grave if that is the case.

In searching for this cemetery's name online, I found another graveyard in the area that I will need to visit one day: the Welsh Cemetery. Suprisingly, Welsh immigrants ended up in Gallipolis, Ohio, and apparently several made their way across the river to West Virginia. We noticed at least one grave in the Adamsville Cemetery that listed place of birth as Wales. So far from their home.


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

Who Haunts Sliding Hill?

Salt furnaces. Coal mines. A beautiful river. And a murder.

Sliding Hill, located in Mason County, West Virginia, has been the site of all of the above.

Sliding Hill is located between the towns of New Haven and Mason, not far from the community of Hartford. Today it is a quiet little place; most residents of the area probably work at the nearby power plant. But in its heyday this stretch of the Ohio River was teeming with people and excitement.

The towns of New Haven and Hartford were named, as you may have guessed, by settlers and entrepreneurs who came to the valley of the Ohio from Connecticut, and named the new settlements after their old homes. In 1856 salt works were built in the area. 

photo of the Jackson Salt Works, from http://www.wvgenweb.org/mason/hartford/hart.html

Processing the salt required coal to fuel the furnaces, so coal mining also became a big industry. With the location of Mason county on the Ohio River, shipment of the salt via steamboat was an easy affair, and the coming of the railroad in the 1880's expedited exports even more. Dairy farming became a growing industry in the rich river bottoms as well. 

In 1774 a major battle in Lord Dunmore's War occurred at Point Pleasant, VA (now West Virginia). This battle officially drove the Native Americans back across the Ohio River, although raids continued for years after the Treat of Camp Charlotte was signed. 

One of the stories about the haunting of Sliding Hill is loosely connected to the fort at Point Pleasant (Fort Randolph). According to this story, an army paymaster was making his way along the river to the fort, carrying with him a quantity of gold with which to pay the soldiers at the fort. A gang of robbers set upon the paymaster and killed him. Hearing soldiers approaching, the thieves quickly left the area, after first hiding the body and burying the gold. Legend has it that the gold was never recovered, and that the area is haunted by the ghost of a man walking along the road.

A dark spot along the road. "Perfect place for a murder," was Jared's comment.

Sliding Hill Creek, a little muddy after all the recent rain.

Two things in this story seem odd to me: first, that the paymaster should have been traveling alone. Surely in those dangerous times, when attacks by Indians were common and the route was a lonely one, there would have been at least one other man with the paymaster. Second, how in the world would there have been time to hide a body and bury the gold? Why would they have buried the gold anyway, if they had time enough to get away? 

The second story of a haunt in the Sliding Hill area was reported in this old newspaper article:

This version, the murder of early settlers who were traveling by canoe and stopped to camp on the riverbank, makes more sense to me, although the statement that they had "much gold" with them seems odd. Why would one carry a lot of gold into the wilderness? Still, it could have been true. It seems unlikely, however, that the robbers would not have come back for the rest of the gold. With so few people in the area, what would have prevented them from recovering it? 

Whichever version is the true story, the belief that an area along the road by Sliding Hill is haunted seems to have been well established. And the sightings reported sound frightening indeed. I suppose we will never know the truth of the story, who was killed and when or by whom.

I wonder, are the ghosts described as horrific haunts on Sliding Hill still wandering, or have they settled gently into their graves after all these years? 

I suppose I will never know the answer to that, either. Only the river would know, and she's not talking.

Sources:

Rizer, Chris. "Operating coal mine still in 1921 on Sliding Hill."  Point Pleasant Register. 22 June 2018.

Stealey III, John Edmund "Salt Industry." e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. 26 October 2010. Web. 17 September 2018.

"Sliding Hill Ghost." Teresa's Haunted History of the Tri-State. 

"A Haunted Spot." The Weekly Register. Pleasant, Mason County WVA. 15 January 1896.

Wikipedia. "Lord Dunmore's War."  


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

Junk Shop Man

We stopped at a junk shop today on our way home from Larry's appointment at the VA Hospital in Huntington, WV. I've wanted to stop here before, but this was the first time we found the place open. I only bought a little strainer, but the man who rain it was worth the stop.

"My wife and I have been married 61 years. I'm 82. In the last 2 weeks I canned over 600 quarts of stuff-dill beans, tomatoes, soup, pickled beets, cucumber pickles, sauerkraut...See that pickup out there? Had it full of beans and no one wanted them, so I canned them."

If you should happen to pass through Henderson, WV, stop in. Especially if you're in need of used appliances. He has plenty of them, but his conversation might be the best deal you'll find.

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

Traveling West Virginia: Tu-Endi-Wei, The Place Between Two Waters

 This small park--possibly the smallest of West Virginia's state parks--encompasses only four acres, but packs a lot of history into its square footage.

I've visited here before, once as a storyteller, and once with some of my granddaughters. I supposed I've stopped in here and there in between, but all of my visits seemed to be short and packed with other things to do. So this time, I took my time.

Because I had some things I wanted to see. I had explored most of the sites and stories surrounding Mothman, the area's strange phenomenon that appeared, according to the stories, in 1962 and led to many more sightings and the appearance of "Men in Black" (this was the first time the term was used). But I wanted time to see things like the Merci Train French Oaks. I wrote about the trees in a post about five years ago .

The West Virginia boxcar from the Merci train is on display
in Welch, WV. For information, call  (304) 436-3803
or (540) 297-4946

The trees were grown from acorns sent in the Merci Train from France--a gift from the grateful French people to the people of the United States for their aid during World War II. Just standing near the trees gave me such a sense of...what? History? Of a time when the world was unified? When the US was unified? I felt sad and at the same time hopeful. The park's superintendent, Doug, happened to be there while we were at Tu-Endi-Wei and he told me he'd set out a few young trees from the seed of the old trees so that the French oaks will continue to be a reminder of history.

Tu-Endi-Wei park (the name means "place between two waters") is also the home of the oldest hewn-log structure in Mason county, WV. The house is in good repair considering it was built in the late 1700's. It is referred to as the "Mansion House" because at the time of its construction it was considered huge for a home on the frontier.

Another monument on the grounds commemorates the gravesite of men who were killed at the site during a battle of Lord Dunmore's War, a conflict between the British and Native American tribes in the area. These men were buried in the magazine, a structure used to store ammunition. The most tragic aspect of this battle was that soon afterwards, Chief Cornstalk came in peace to the fort at the site, and was murdered. Legend has it that he placed a curse on the area which has prevented Point Pleasant from thriving as it seems like it should, with its prime location at the juncture of the mighty Kanawha and Ohio rivers. Both Larry and I had ancestors who were present at the Battle of Point Pleasant: Stephen Holstein on my husband's side, and a doctor in my family line who lived in Rowlesburg, VA (now WV) at the time of his service. (It is interesting to find that there are descendants of my maternal great-grand-mother in West Virginia, none of whom I have yet met).

A petroglyph, found in Mason county, stands behind protective fencing.

A barge passes by the monument to Chief Cornstalk. You can read his "curse" here.

Tu-Endi-Wei is a fine place to view passing river traffic, and even the passing barges call history to mind. Imagine the dugout canoes, the flatboats, keelboats, steamboats and other watercraft that have passed by this lovely site. Imagine the natives, cooking their fish on the riverbanks, the settlers poling their way to a new life, the smoke and excitement of the steam era, the horrendous noise of the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge just a few hundred feet north. So many lives have been touched, both by good and by bad, at this place.

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

Traveling West Virginia: Mason County and the River Museum

Since we may not be able to take an overseas trip this year (still recovering budge-wise from last year's!), we've decided that we will take a few road trips this year to explore places we've been wanting to see. Some will be close to home, others further afield. We took our first trip yesterday as we took a break from furniture repair, tax preparation and all the usual activities that keep us hopping.

We've been to and through Point Pleasant, WV many, many times. We were there last week, actually, driving through on the way to Larry's VA appointment in Huntington.But there was no time to stop--again. I have particularly wanted to visit two places in the town, and then to drive along a road we'd traveled probably 20 years ago.

 Our first stop was the River Museum in town. I've done a lot of storytelling for the Ohio River Museum in Marietta, OH but had never visited this one that is closer to home. So this was the day. The Fout sisters were working at the museum and made us very welcome. The sisters co-wrote a book about the Silver Bridge disaster that struck the small town in December 15, 1967 and pointed out various artifacts from the bridge. I've been to the site of the old bridge, read the signs and the memorial with the names, and I knew some of the story.

We watched two videos while we were there about the bridge's collapse, one of which included an extensive interview with a man who was one of only five people who survived that terrible collapse.

Larry looks at a model of the bridge and photos showing the aftermath.

While I suppose almost everyone living in west Virginia has heard about the Silver Bridge, most probably know about what I did--that it fell near Christmas into the ice-cold Ohio, and that 46 people lost their lives. Knowing these facts, though, doesn't compare to actually hearing the story from someone who experienced it.

Photos of crushed cars and twisted pieces of the bridge.

a piece of the bridge with more information about its collapse.

What horror that day had to have been for Paul Scott, who jumped from the back seat of the car he was riding in with some of his buddies from work. Scott was thrown from the bridge far out into the water; his friends stayed in their car and died.

The museum houses many river artifacts and models of steamboats.

A miniature steam calliope allows you to play tunes. I tried my hand at "Oh Susanna."

I never expected to play one of these in my lifetime. This one, of course, doesn't run on a coal-fired boiler, but with a small air compressor.

It also has a 2500-gallon aquarium with examples of some of the kinds of fish to be found in the Ohio.

And surprise of surprises, there is a simulator that allows visitors to pilot various kinds of boats!

One can choose the type of craft--motorboat, barge, several others--, day or night, and location along the river. I opted for the barge, even though Ms. Fout cautioned me that it would be very slow moving and urged me to try the motorboat instead. I also chose to pilot it at night, and along the Ohio near Cairo, Illinois.

I love barges, and have taken probably hundreds of photos of them over the years. This poster shows how to identify the barges of various companies by their stacks. Who knew that was possible?

Another room housed another surprise: the museum has a training room for potential pilots for learning river radar. This wasn't in use the day  was there.

It was a fun tour, and well worth the $5.00 admission fee. If you decide to go, be sure to check their webpage or their Facebook page for  hours of operation and upcoming events. For example, a couple years ago we took the Cincinnati Belle downriver for an evening cruise sponsored by the museum, and event they sponsor every year. Tickets for this year's cruise are already for sale, and usually sell out.

Tomorrow: The Merci boxcar, the Mansion House and more from Tu-Endi-Wei.

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

In Mason County

We took a little road trip today to look at a formica top table. The directions were a little vague but I thought we could find it easily enough.

I plugged in the road where we were heading to into Google and turned on the directions. Now I knew the area where this road was located and how to get to the nearest town, but Google took us down some new-to-us back roads.

It was absolutely frigid today. The temperature never reached the expected high of 19F, but it was mostly sunny and the little snow we got the other day was almost all melted off the roads. So the back way seemed like a good idea. We always enjoy the roads less traveled, and this one was well worth taking a chance.

Because what I didn't know was that it was taking us into Amish country, which I never realized was so close, just one county away.

It was a beautiful drive, but you can imagine our surprise when we saw this farmer out plowing with his team of horses--actually, he had 3 horses hitched up, something I'd not seen before. I've also never seen anyone plowing with anything when it's this cold! I only had my phone with me, and I know the Amish are not much for having their photos taken so I did not get a close-up shot, daggone it.

Finding the man with the table was one of those third-time's-the-charm kind of adventures. He said third house on the right past the church. We got there and no one was home. The man next door came out and said we had the wrong place. So we tried third house on the right in the other direction, and once again no one was home. I pleaded with Larry to go back to that neighbor's house and ask if he knew a guy called Shorty.

And as it turned out he did! The first house was actually the right place after all, the man just didn't understand me over the barking beagles and bloodhound. The guy was home by then, so we got our table in the end, along with a lot of hilarious stories from a father and son who ought to go into the storytelling business. Talking to them was worth the trip.

So  all's well that ends well, right? We drove back through the beautiful countryside, very happy with our trip.

And then got home to find the gas had gone off. That had us scurrying around to get it going again and getting all the pilots re-lit. Fortunately it had only been off a short while so the house was fine. That's the one downside of free gas--it is just not trustworthy to be left alone in winter. Some people have no problems with it at all, but ours will usually pick the coldest day that we're away to go off. I guess that's not too big a price to pay for the savings though.

It's supposed to be a cold, cold, cold night. Keeping my fingers crossed that the gas stays on! And I'll have pics of the table as soon as we get it into the house tomorrow.


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

Traveling West Virginia: The Belle of Cincinnati

It was windy on board! My hair flew around so much
I probably looked like a wild woman. But who cared?

We've been doing a lot of sight-seeing in the past few weeks, and intentionally so. We have a lot of places on our bucket lists and it's time to start marking some of them off the list.

I have always wanted to take a trip on a riverboat. Not one of the smaller steamers but one of those big boats from the heyday of river travel when theaters, bands and other entertainment floated from town to town, bringing new shows and experiences to the rural population. Most such trips, like those offered on the American Queen or the Delta Queen, are out of our financial reach, but then I read about a dinner cruise being offered by the River Museum of Point Pleasant (WV) aboard the Belle of Cincinnati. Now this was something we could do! So I called, bought tickets, and we waited for the big day.

We drove down to Point Pleasant Monday evening, and had no trouble finding where the boat was loading. Those tall stacks gave away the location pretty easily, as did the droves of people heading toward the levee. (The Point Pleasant levee, by the way, is worth a visit all by itself with its stunning, long mural that depicts the history of the area. You can see a bit of it here, in an earlier post.)

We ran into friends as soon as we arrived. Poet Kirk Judd and his wife were taking the trip too, as was old-time musician, author and square dance caller Mack Samples and his wife. West Virginia really is just one small town--we almost always see someone we know wherever we go. There were hundreds of people boarding, a good sign, I thought, for the River Museum since they put on the cruise as a fundraiser.

Boarding was relaxed and casual, and dinner was served buffet-style on two levels of the boat, so we had choices of places to sit. Every table had a view of the river. Dinner was leisurely and as the wait staff began to clear the boat left the dock, heading downriver.

The Ohio deserves her name, "beautiful river." This night she was in showcase form, with light clouds scudding in the sky, the water rippling gently and the sun's last rays sending gentle gold across the scene.

We identified landmarks we recognized,

and I particularly enjoyed seeing bridges from a new perspective--the underside. It was surprisingly rusty under there. Hmmm. I wondered if this was cause for alarm, particularly since this bridge is the replacement for the doomed Silver Bridge that collapsed into the icy river in December 1967.

It surprised me how loud the bridges were. The smokestacks were lowered as we passed under. Pretty cool.

There was even royalty on board--Miss Tourism, I believe her banner said. I was delighted to see a red-haired queen; it seems to me that redheads get short shrift in beauty contests, something that really puzzles me. This young lady was stunning and gracious.

It was almost full dark by the time we returned. I'd explored pretty much every inch of the boat during the trip.

We did not partake of the offered dancing--the singer was the typical lounge singer, doing 60's and 70's numbers but I was more interested in the water, the scenery and the boat.

All in all, it was a fine trip, and I'd like to go again. I hope the museum continues to offer this opportunity to travel the river in the old-time way. It was a real treat.

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