“The snow was so deep that we pushed
the windows back, reached out,
and could make snowballs. That’s no
exaggeration.”
— Pat Dugan, Spruce machinist
Spruce: - Ghost Town
Spruce,
West Virginia (elevation 3,853). - The town of Spruce, located high in the
wilds of Cheat Mountain, is thoroughly intertwined with West Virginia’s
industrialization. In many ways, the town typifies industrial history in the
state. Born during the logging boom, Spruce transitioned into a coal town and
now exists as a tourist destination.
Stories that emerge from Spruce are mostly about people breaking rules and instituting self-governance in a place that corporations created, owned, ran and destroyed. The people, who lived in this high, cold town, continue to feel a bond with each other, even though their time there is now more than fifty years distant.
The story of Spruce begins back in Scotland with the Luke family. There William Luke learned the process of papermaking; he primarily used old house rags. In 1852, he immigrated to the United States and soon realized that rags were not a good source for commercial paper production. Using a process derived from the rag method, William created a way to make paper from wood pulp (Clarkson II, 25).
William Luke’s son was the one who truly created the pulpwood empire: John Luke established the West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company, which was to become one of the largest paper companies in the country during the 1910s and ‘20s. The company quickly grew, building mills in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia.
West Virginia Pulp & Paper bought Covington, Virginia, the site of one of these pulp mills, as well as much of the southern part of Cheat Mountain for its virgin timber to supply the mill. The price paid: $8.65 an acre, a pricey sum in those days! This land had belonged to James H. Dewing, who started buying up the land in the 1880s in order to profit from West Virginia’s timber future (Deike, 4).
Red spruce in the
area made some of the best paper—the softwood had the right grain and
consistency for making excellent pulp. Soon the company shipped paper by rail to
Covington. Italian and Austrian immigrants, some fresh off the boat, built many
of the railroads in from Cass and Bowden, to Bemis and up to Spruce. However,
problems soon arose.
The log camps employed men six days a week. On Sundays, especially the Sundays after payday, many men went to Cass and got drunk, so drunk that Monday’s production was notably lower, as many men were still nursing hangovers. The situation was also unsatisfactory for the married men who wanted to spend more time than one day a week with their families.
Logcamp: the huge log-camp that later was the site for the town of Spruce. Note the men hanging out of the second story windows. Photo courtesy Roy Clarkson
Finally, and perhaps the most compelling for West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company, was a problem at the Covington Mill. Originally the Covington mill did all the debarking. Unfortunately, the bark, which was burned to fuel the mill, created a feathery ash that sometimes floated into the windows, ruining entire rolls of paper. For a while they tried spudding the logs—manually removing the bark from the tree when it fell—but sand often got rubbed into the wood on its way to the train, again ruining the paper.
In order to solve these problems, someone put forth the idea of a town on top of Cheat Mountain where the company could control virtually all commerce going into and out of the town. They could build a debarking (also known as rossing) mill and provide a place for the men with families to live. This town was named Spruce, after the abundant spruce trees in the area then being harvested.
The Pocahontas Times published an excellent introduction to the then brand new town:
Spruce is a camp chopped out of the forest on Cheat Mountain in Pocahontas County—back up the mountain from Cass and reached by a switchback railway that lumber trains must ascend, climbing a grade of from 250 to 450 feet per mile. The town’s location is probably the highest in the south having an elevation of 4,000 feet above sea level and a climate that brings frost every month during the year.
I visited it in the mild days of early November, yet it was dead of winter there. As our cogwheel engine climbed the heavy grade, we could note the vegetation changes as the train reached higher levels. Bye and bye we were amid snow flurries and cold winds and finally as the train straightened itself out on the elevated plateau valley we looked forth upon a scene where winter reigned supreme—snow, ice, and frozen streams. The snows that fell there in November usually remain till April and sometimes later, but the hearty lumbermen do not mind and the energetic company that employs them, push right along at all seasons and in all weather. They have built on that plateau a network of railway lines and have established at its principal junction point the town of Spruce, where (there) is a big barking mill that supplies the great paper mills at Covington, Virginia.
The place is not eighteen months old, yet it has its comfortable hotel, its store, its electric lights, its snug offices, it boardwalks and its long rows of workmen’s’ houses. The plant employs 480 men, mostly Austrians, and in the spring 1,000 more of the same are to be added to the force. Superintendent Jones has a big proposition and manages it skillfully. He is a Virginian from Covington and is assisted ably by another Virginian Mr. C. Z. Sellers of Rockingham county, and but recently, ticket agent for C. W. Railway at Stokesville.
Mr. Jones seems to prefer Austrian labor for the reason that it is hearty, cheerful and contented. The great force of them he will soon have are to be engaged in culling the smaller timber from the area left by the woodsmen of Spruce Lumber Company of Cass. All small trees and saplings down to four inches diameter are felled and barked at the peeler mills. Sixteen carloads of this product are now sent down the mountain daily. What can and will be gotten out when the 1,000 reinforcements comes in the springtime can only be conjectured.
The product of this mill in its entirety together with the vast quantity of other timber gotten out on Cheat Mountain must all come to Cass on the C&O for shipment. Here are located the great sawmills of the West Virginia, Spruce Lumber Company, that have in recent years built up and incorporated a live business town. Its outgoing freight receipts, I am told, often exceed $20,000 per month.
The mayor (for the town has a mayor) is Mr. J. A. Kirkpatrick, and here again we see that West Virginia in her development has drawn the on the Old Dominion for some of its best men, for Mr. Kirkpatrick is a Virginian and a native of Rockbridge county. He is also proprietor of the company’s large hotel, where the traveler will find the comforts of life, to say nothing of its luxuries when at night he turns on the electric light in his well-heated bedroom. Nowhere will the traveler find a more obliging or considerate host than he (Pocahontas Times, February 2, 1905).
Visiting Spruce today, it is hard to imagine a large mill in the middle of the forest except for the ruins that bear silent witness. At one time that mill was a huge production point. According to Roy Clarkson, the mill initially cost $50,000 (in 1905). The town of Spruce’s initial population was approximately fifty people.
Polk’s directory named the following positions:
E.P. Shaffer—postmaster;
E. Cruikshank—train dispatcher;
O.G. English—express and telephone agent;
J.L. Ervin—shoemaker;
Amos Lyons—blacksmith;
Robert Newcomer—proprietor of Hotel Spruce and Pocahontas Supply Company;
L.B. Smith—blacksmith;
O.B. Sprague—blacksmith; and
D.J. Taber—lumber superintendent.
By 1906, the population had jumped from fifty to 300. The mill, which opened up in February 1905, operated two shifts a day until it shut down in 1925. That’s what brought people to the town. Here is how it worked: smaller trees not harvested in the initial logging—usually anywhere from four to fifteen inches in diameter—were selected in this second cut. Trees were brought to the millpond, which was steam heated in the winter to keep it from freezing. The logs soaked in the pond, which helped loosen the bark before they were transported up to the mill via a series of cleats on a bull chain. Once in the mill, trees were cut into twenty-four-inch chunks and then taken to the rossing machines. Richard Sparks, a Spruce expert explains, “I believe this picture must be from 1926 because my interpretation is the rossing machinery is being removed from the mill. This is the southwest corner of the building; a section of the front wall has been cut away. The log car you can see is on the pond track and they are probably using a cable hooked to a locomotive or a log loader to move the machines. The large concrete tubs that you can see at Spruce today were the foundations of this machinery. Note there is only one smokestack where there had been three.” Courtesy Richard Sparks
Each of the eighteen rossing machines required seven men (126 men per shift) to operate. The machines’ curved knives, mounted on heavy metal wheels, quickly removed the bark, and the wood was then ready to be shipped to Covington. In order to prevent the steam train ash from getting on the pulpwood, West Virginia Pulp & Paper began shipping wood in closed boxcars. Workers filled approximately twelve to sixteen carloads everyday, each carload holding anywhere from ten to fifteen cords of wood. Operating six days a week, this meant that an estimated 138,240 cubic feet of pulpwood left Spruce each year. The leftover bark was then burned in Spruce and used to heat the pond and the 400 horsepower steam generator, which provided electricity for the mill as well as some of the houses and the hotel in Spruce (Clarkson I, 123).
The mill ran until 1925. In this first era, Spruce housed approximately 350 people, quite a number considering the fact that the only way to get to the town was by rail or by foot. As much as WVP&P wanted things to revolve around the mill, they did not. Many of the stories generated during this project happened during those years.
Harvey Hamrick relates a few early stories about Spruce. He was a child in the early 1920s and lived five or six miles away (by rail) in Mace. Harvey occasionally went into the little town of Spruce to sell produce; it was a difficult place to try to raise crops due to its cold climate and frequent frosts.
He relates:
Oh, we took corn on the cob and beans. Tomatoes were too heavy. We sometimes took chickens. I guess that’s about it. Each one of us had a dog; they’d have to carry this stuff. We’d just put it on their back and they would carry it all the way up that track. Well, that was the only way to get in was on this railroad.
Sometimes we would get to ride Shays in there, old Shay engines, but not very often. Sometimes we got to ride back out. One of the engineers was Cal Bradley, and he run the old Number 12 Engine, the biggest Shay that was ever built. He was real nice to us. Some of the others wouldn’t slow down, and we would have to jump off while it was going.
I’ll tell you a little incident that happened: it was very rarely we took any butter or anything that like because it was hard to get over there, you know, in good shape. It was kind of cool that day so I told Mom I would take, I believe, four or five pounds of butter. And she packed it in a bucket for me, and I had something else, I don’t remember what. But I went by myself that day, and I got to ride the train.
I waited till afternoon.
If you waited till afternoon the log train went up, and you could ride it, which
would save you four miles walk on that railroad. Anyway, this day I was riding
on the caboose, and they didn’t stop. I wanted to get off where the blacks
lived. And
this guy on there he says, “You get off and run along the side, and
I’ll hand you the butter.
”
So he
did, and I got off. I did fall almost. It was going pretty fast. It was just
before the cross, a good little ways before we
crossed the river and before we
come into the other line that goes to Cass. And I fell partly, but I got up and
run along side, and he handed me the butter. I missed it, and it hit the side
and come out and got cinders all over it so I about cried over or did cry over
it. Then I went down to the millpond and tried to wash that butter off. (Laughs)
You might know I didn’t sell any of it although I tried. Some of them laughed at
it. I don’t blame them for not buying it.
The town of Spruce taken by Ivan Clarkson in 1920.
This is perhaps one of the earliest and best photos of the whole town.
Photo courtesy of Roy Clarkson
- A painting of the Spruce mill and town around 1923 by Richard Sparks, he notes, “The poured concrete structures were added to both ends of the powerhouse in the early 1920’s. Years later they would be among the last standing ruins at Spruce. In the last modifications to the mill, a third smokestack was added and a fourth track was laid in the mill yard. The trestle of the endless chain conveyor which exited the second story of the mill and ended at the waste pile on the bank of Shavers Fork was modified to include what appears to be a chute in the center for loading the pulpwood cars. Also a small trestle was built from a switchback track on hillside to the north of the mill. This structure crossed the millpond spillway and went into a window opening. As this was right above the location of the fireboxes, it possibly was a system for “automating” the coal supply.” Courtesy Richard Sparks.
As the woods around Spruce thinned out so did the need for labor at the mill. In 1925 West Virginia Pulp & Paper shut down the Spruce mill permanently, and almost all of the inhabitants of Spruce left. A smaller debarking mill was constructed at Cass, which served the same function as the one in Spruce. However, that same year, the second life of Spruce was being conceived.
Coal had been found in the mountains of Randolph County, and Western Maryland, a railroad company, decided to buy the stretch of rail line from Bemis to Slaty Fork. Spruce found a second life with the buyout, and soon a new group of people joined the several families that remained after West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company abandoned the town. Spruce was now a railroad terminus and perhaps one of the most unique stations in the east.
H.A. McBride writes:
In dealing with the Elkins district, mention should be given to one of the strangest of all railroad stations. It is at Spruce, West Virginia, on the Webster Springs “freight only” branch. Here on a mountaintop, 4,000-feet high, is a unique engine terminus. There are no highways to Spruce, and the only way to get there is on foot, horseback or on the railroad. In winter, with heavy snows, even these means fail, and the town is sometimes completely isolated for days. Some sixty employees of the WM [West Maryland] live here with their families in houses provided by the company. There is a company schoolhouse and a teacher for Spruce’s children, and a rail car to bring in a doctor if one is needed. The railroad, until recently, has maintained small engine shops and yards, with coal, water and sanding facilities
Fortunately, some people who lived in Spruce during this second era are still around to tell stories about the old ghost town. Many of the people who lived there only spent their childhoods in Spruce, but what a childhood it must have been.
Wanda Sharp shares a few stories of her childhood in Spruce:
We always went bare footed the first day of May regardless. I never wore my shoes again until fall. We always went swimming the first day of June, and man was that water cold. We had a swimming hole under the Shay bridge, and you learned to swim early. The older boys stood in a circle in the water and had me to jump off the bridge. They knew I couldn’t swim but swore they wouldn’t let me drown.
I jumped. They all swam away and started yelling for me to kick my feet and hands, so I learned to dog paddle in a hurry. We played in the water a lot. We had a raft made out of crossties that floated on the water. The pond would always freeze over in the winter, and we’d ice skate or sled ride on it.
Down below the pond was a little island you had to wade across the river to get to. The boys and us girls built a playground out there. We had a merry-go-round, rope swings from the trees, a seesaw and benches and a picnic table. Sometimes we’d have wieners or marshmallows to roast over there. We were real proud of it because we’d done the work by ourselves.
We had to keep ourselves occupied. We made our own stilts out of poles—we could all walk on them. We made our own dollhouses out of pasteboard boxes. Dad would brace the corners and the roof for us with slats of wood. Mother gave us scraps of linoleums for our floors and material for our curtains and bedclothes. We’d use our imagination using matchboxes and whatever else we could find to make our furniture. Some of them were really nice.
We used the Sears Roebuck catalog for more then just toilet paper too—we’d cut all of our paper dolls and their clothes out of it and play for hours with them. We got magazines called Look. The first kids had to start a story using the first picture—they’d stop in mid-sentence and pass it to the next kid—they would have to continue the story using the next picture in the book. We always had fun with that game.
Leo Weese, who also grew up in Spruce, talks about school:
About every teacher they got in there—they couldn’t take the pressure—they had to leave. I’ll tell ya, I was a little mean, mischievous. My mom would tie me up to the clothesline, you know, just like a dog. ‘Cause them guys at the track crew used to tell my dad that I was up there throwing rocks at them.
Well, I learned to untie myself. I’d run up there and barrel the rocks at them, then run back down and tie myself back up. And they’d tell Dad. Mom would say, “No, it wasn’t him. He was tied up to the clothesline.” So it went on like that, and they weren’t the only ones I’d throw rocks at.
Then one time I was working in the mines, and I was telling them guys about me throwing rocks at them loggers. And this one old man, Bay Tenny, he pointed his finger at me, “You’re the little son-of-a-bitch who was throwing rocks at me.” Here he was working on one of them log crews. He said, “Yeah I was wondering who that little guy was.” He was working for Mower Lumber Company, working up at those log camps.
Wanda Sharp recalls the roughness of school in Spruce also:
The women schoolteachers
always boarded with us. One weekend Mother and Dad went out, and the
schoolteacher was babysitting us. There was this one family that had it in for
the school teacher. I guess she had whipped one of their kids. As soon as Mother
and Dad left, they came up to our house and drug the teacher out into the yard
to fight with her.
We started screaming for Pappy Cussins to help us. He ran over, jumped our fence, and hit the man at least three times before his feet ever touched the ground. Several of the other railroaders came up. They all stayed close by until Mother and Dad came home. After that, the kids came to our house every morning and walked the teacher to school, even the older boys that were already out of school walked with us. They continued to do this until school was out for the summer.
Spruce school picture. From left to right: Front row: Okareta Powers, Millie Calain, Mildred Teter, Glenda Ketterman. Second row: Anita Fay Fansler, Hershal Broughton, Booch Cussins, Elmer Semones, Arveda Powers, Jack Ketterman, Bob Semones. Back row: Christine P, Ruth Semones, Alice Sharp, Juanita Waugh, Jo Ann Semones, Darlene Calain, Joe Ketterman, Betty Broughton, Eddie Broughton and Odbert Calain. Taken 1945. Courtesy Dorie Powers
The last teacher to teach in Spruce was Mr. Bell. We all liked him, but he just didn’t have any control over us so we made his life miserable. If he had ever told our parents some of the things we done we’d all be dead. But he never told on us. We’d upset the outhouse then tell him if he didn’t take us on a hike to the fire tower we weren’t going to set it back up. He’d always give in and take us. Sometimes we’d climb up in the tower and not come down, he was afraid to climb up after us.
One time we had him up at the top of Cass hill. One track went to Cass; one went to Spruce; one went to Bald Knob and one down to an old logging camp. We pretended like we didn’t know which track went to Spruce. The Shay train came up from Cass headed down to the old logging camp. We told him to run and catch the train and find out which track went to Spruce. I can still see him running after that Shay train waving his arms and hollering. As soon as he went around the turn out of sight, we took off for Spruce and left him up there. I was out on our front porch that evening about 6 p.m. when he came limping down the track. He must have rubbed a blister on his foot. I giggled as he went by, but he didn’t say anything.
He kept a bell on his desk at school, and he’d ring it at recess time. Sometimes Pauline and I would go up and ask if we could ring the bell. He thought we meant when it was time to ring it. He’d always say yes, and we’d grab it and ring it. All the kids would jump up and take off. We pulled that on him at least once a week. We had a stone crock water cooler with a little spigot on it to hold our drinking water at school. Every morning one of the kids would take a gallon bucket of water to put in the cooler.
One morning Pauline and I went to
get water. On our way back to school we got some craw crabs, lizards, tadpoles,
and frog eggs and put them in the bucket. We brought them back to school and put
them in the water cooler. We told the kids not to drink the water, but we’d all
snicker every time Mr. Bell got up to get a drink.
One time Pauline and I went to school early and filled the wash pan full of craw crabs and lizards. We put them in Mr. Bell’s desk drawer, they crawled out during class, and everyone got a big laugh out of that.
Once we were teasing him about one of the older girls who was already out of school. We were telling him she liked him and that he should write her a love letter and have her meet him somewhere that evening. He went along with the teasing. We told him what to write and he wrote it. I asked him if I could deliver the letter to her. He said yes, but he took me aside and told me to just go out and tear the letter up. He wanted me to pretend to give it to her. Well, you guessed it; he picked the wrong kid to trust. I took it down and gave it to her mother. Her mother came up to the school and cussed him until a fly wouldn’t lie on him. The devil must have made me do it. He never even got mad at me.
Once I asked him why Easter didn’t come on the same day every year like Christmas did. He said he didn’t know why, but a few years later—he had joined the Army—I got a letter from him explaining why Easter didn’t come on the same day every year.
One of the parents came up to
school and jumped on him over whipping their kids. The man hit him with his
railroad hat; he was so scared he wet his pants. He quit teaching in the middle
of the school year. I can’t say that I blame him. He was a nice person but just
too easy on us kids. We never pulled that stuff on any other teachers.
Spruce
kids: The X at the top of the photograph shows how high the snow had drifted
the winter before. Pictured here, top to bottom is, Arveda Powers, Glenda
Ketterman, Okie Powers, Wanda Powers, and Jimmy Ketterman. Taken 1943.
Courtesy Dorie Powers
Wanda Sharp continues:
The boys were always
good about sharing their sleds and bicycles with us girls, but we had one boy
who would never share. He got a new Red Flyer sled for Christmas. Me and Pauline
wanted him to let us try it out, but he wouldn’t do it. So the other three boys
took his sled away from him and let me and Pauline use it. He said he was going
home and tell his
Dad on us, so the boys held him down in the snow and told us
to ride over his fingers. We did, and then the boys dared him to go tell
on us.
He got a new bike one time, and I guess the other boys were jealous; anyway they
roughed him up a bit. His Dad got on them the first chance he got and asked
them, “Why’d you jump on Harry fur?” So from then on we called him Harry Fur. We
all liked him but loved to tease him.
We hardly ever had meat on the table. Once in a great while Mother would kill a chicken. If we had meat, it was wild meat, such as deer, squirrel, turkey, groundhog and coon. Dad liked coon but I could never get past the smell. One time Dad and another man went to get fish. They took a quart jar and put carbide in it and put little pinholes in the lid. They’d tie a rock to it and throw it in the water; when the water got to the carbide it would blow up and kill the fish—they all floated to the top of the water. They must have had a washtub full of fish. I remember cleaning fish until I was sick. I don’t like fish yet today.
Boardwalk: Two children and their dog in Spruce, note the board walk behind
them.
There were no roads in Spruce, as there weren’t any roads leading to and
from the town.
Photo courtesy Leo Weese
Dad always raised hogs so we had hog meat in the wintertime. Once Pauline and I went up to the hog pens, and we decided to play cowboy and use the pigs for our horses. Inside the pen was a little house with straw in it and a little door just big enough for the pigs to get through. Pauline dared me to ride one first, so I jumped on that old pig’s back and grabbed its ears. It took off running to the little house, the pig went in, and I went off. I landed in the mud and hog manure. Pauline set on the fence and laughed at me. There’s nothing funny about your best friend sitting on the fence laughing and holding her nose telling you that you smelled like hog poop. That was the end of my cowboy days.
You may not believe the next two stories, but they are true. We had always heard it said there was a verse in the Bible that would stop someone from bleeding to death. Once Mother and Dad were gone, and Mildred and Pauline were spending the weekend with us. We were outside playing, and Mildred jumped off the roof of the playhouse onto a broken jar. She cut her foot really bad. We were so scared we didn’t know what to do—blood was shooting out all over the place. She told my sister Okie to run up to the house and get the Bible. She did, and we didn’t know which verse to read so we just opened it and read the first verse we came to. Mildred’s foot quit bleeding right away. We poured it full of turpentine and wrapped it with a rag, and it healed up in no time.
Another time all four of us girls went up on the old skid landing smoking cigarettes we’d got somewhere. Okie was trying to get her cigarette lit and singed all her eyebrows and lashes off. Her hair was real black so it stood out like a sore thumb. We knew we were in deep trouble so we built a cross and got down and prayed for God to make her brows and lashes like new. When we finished praying you couldn’t even tell they’d ever been burnt off. The Bible says we must have the faith like a little child.
Virgil Broughton was a child with this bunch but remembers a friendlier Spruce:
The biggest thrill we’d have in the wintertime was we’d go upstairs and jump out the window into the snow, ‘cause it would get four, five, six feet deep. We’d go out and ice skate on the river. The winters aren’t like what they used to be. With a sled, you get a running start on a sled, and you could go for a mile. There was an island. The railroaders built a merry-go-round for the kids—set a big timber in the ground, a big board over it—and that thing would go around.
And the sand house—people don’t know what a sand house is—it’s full of sand, real warm sand. They kept it heated with pipes running through it. They used sand in the engines because if you’re pulling 150 loads of coal, those wheels will spin just like a tire. There’s a big sand box in those engines, and they’d just pull a lever and the sand would spray out on the rail. It was just like putting chains on your car. We’d go over in the wintertime, and we’d play in the sand pile. It was just like playing in a summer hayloft. They heated it so it wouldn’t freeze.
Many people spoke of the famous Spruce bears. Devane Cussins, also a child at that time, remembers:
I can’t remember how old I was, maybe around five or six years old—it was the early or mid 1940s. My father and Lee Sharp had taken a motor car and gone fishing somewhere between Spruce and Cheat Bridge where there was a railroad siding so they could park the motorcar [which ran on the train rails]. They was fishing the Shavers Fork of Cheat River.
Along in the evening my father was headed back to the motorcar when he heard a noise and found that a mother bear had just sent her three small cubs up a small tree and disappeared into the under brush. After seeing the small cubs in the tree, he started yelling for Lee Sharp. When Lee Sharp arrived they decided that Lee would go up and get the bears while my father stayed on the ground to watch for the mama bear—knowing that if the cubs made a noise, she would be back.
Sure enough, while Lee was getting the cubs, they started to make a noise, and here came the mama bear. My father said he broke a good size tree limb off a tree and began yelling and screaming like he was crazy and began beating the tree branch on the ground. Amidst all the noise, the mama bear took off and disappeared. They got the bear cubs, jumped on the motorcar and returned to Spruce, where they made a cage out of wooden poles. Lee Sharp with one of the Spruce Bears as it was growing up. The bears developed a strong bond with Lee. Photo courtesy Wanda (Powers) Sharp
One Sunday my father brought one of the cubs to our back yard to play. We had two dachshund dogs—they slept behind the stove in the kitchen. We had a screen door on the back porch that led to the kitchen, and when the black dog and the bear got playful, the bear got after the dog. And the dog headed for the kitchen, but he didn’t stop for the screen door, he went right on through the screen. The bear slid across the porch to the door and stopped.
Another time, in the summer when the blackberries were ripe, Lee Sharp, myself, and a couple of other kids, had taken one of the bears to pick blackberries. By this time the bears was getting pretty good size. About three or four feet tall when standing on it’s hind legs. Everyone would pick berries and the bear would go to each person and eat the berries from your hand. After feeding the bear two or three handfuls, I decided to trick the bear. So when he came to me, I held my hand closed. He became very angry when I would not open my hand, and I still have a nice scar on my wrist where he decided to take a bite of my arm.
I don’t remember what happened to all three, but I do recall that some man had come to get one to take to his home, which was away from Spruce. He had locked the bear in the trunk of his car and while driving down the road, the bear decided he wanted out and was coming through the backseat when the man had to shoot it.
Bert Weese, Leo’s father recalls them as well:
Cussins and Sharp caught two cubs, and they built a pen for her, and Sharp’d get in there and play with her. He’d get in there, and that bear lunged, jumped, and grabbed him. It opened its mouth and put it on his leg. Wouldn’t bite.
I said, “You better be careful.”
One night John and I came in and saw a groundhog go in a hole. When we did the switching and put the engines away, we went over and dug the thing out and brung it over to the pen, opened the door to the lock, put it in.
John said, “That’s the cruelest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ll never do that again.”
That bear just moved over, set one foot on the groundhog, got a hold of it with his mouth and tore him in half. Lee sold him (the bear) to a couple fellows. They come up to Mount Airy and parked their car. They had one of those little turtlebacks.
They left the car at Mount Airy and came in and got the bear. They just got halfway around that circle—the bear sat down—he wasn’t going to go. So Lee had to go over there and loosen the chain, and away they went to Mount Airy. They put him in that turtleback thing, in the trunk of the car. As they were going down the road, they were bumping around, and the bear was going to come through where they was at. He was tearing the place up. They finally had to shoot him.
People in Spruce enjoyed other pastimes too. Hunting and fishing were common activities.
Tom
Broughton, an engineer, recounts:
I saw Gordon and he said, “Do you want to go up river?”
I said, “Yeah.”
He had fish worms, and the river was closed to fishing. They had that river from Spruce up to raise the trout in, and we went up there.
He said, “I’m going to cut a pole here and see if we can’t catch a few fish.”
So he did. He had the hook and line in his pocket, the fish bait, and he said, “Now you watch, and I’ll catch us a mess of fish.”
He caught sixty brook
trout—six-seven-eight inches. One time, this is kind of hard to believe, but
there were so many in there, they all run to that worm and the line hooked one
to the other one in the gills. He throwed it out on the bank with the one that
was on the hook and caught two with one hook with just the line hooked into the
gills.
Leo’s catch. Courtesy Leo Weese.
Murder in Spruce
A murder took place up on the mountain during Spruce’s second era. This tale has different versions. The people who were kids at the time apparently heard a different story than the adults.
Leo Weese, who was a child at the time, related this version:
I’ll tell you a good story that happened up there. They had a big dugout, that’s what they called it, but what it was a dispatcher shanty down there. And this guy was fooling around with this other guy’s wife. This Gainer boy was fooling around with Teeter’s wife. And Gainer was sitting in the dugout, and in come Teeter with a shotgun, 12-gauge. Said, “I’m gonna kill you.”
Gainer said, “No you ain’t Teeter.” He started up out of the chair, and he blew him in half. Boom! That happened up there. I think Teeter got five years or something. Should have gotten nothing.
Virgil Broughton, also a kid at the time, recalls a similar story:
They had a phone booth—they was three of them—oh, I’ve slept in them . . . They leak now, but we used to stay in them for a week or two at a time in the ‘60s and ‘70s, hunting. And there was another one up at the Cut. But there was a great big one in Spruce; they called it the Caller’s Office. And boy, you talk about the moon shining and poker playing over the weekend . . . Yeah, the punch cards, the gambling. There wasn’t nothing else for them to do.
I heard of a guy getting killed in there one night. One of the guys walked in there with a double barrel shotgun and blew a guy’s head clear off. Turns out he was running around with his wife. That was just after the War ended. Guy came to town and got a job and got to know the wrong woman.
But others tell a different story. Here is what Grace Nelson, an adult at the time, says:
We knew about all of it, I guess. It started on the other side of us, down around the doghouse. We had a double house. The Simmons were living over there, and they had all gathered that night. My, they were making a noise. That happened so much I didn’t pay any attention to it.
My husband was hostling. You know what that is? Keeping the engines fired up. I went on to bed, and he came to bed before 11 o’clock. He said, “I don’t think anything’s going on now.” Well, we hadn’t been to bed but just a few minutes until we heard someone say Carl or Boyd got shot. Of course, he had to jump out of bed right quick and get down there to get the boy down to Mace.
But this Teeter hid. He hid for hours. He went up in the coal tipple and sat. They didn’t know where he was. The police came in, but they couldn’t find him until morning. They were all sitting in this doghouse, and he came in and gave himself up.
“Are you looking for me?” He said.
They said, “We sure are.”
But they were drinking
that night, and this boy—
he was a young boy and a friend of Carl’s son—I mean,
he was . . . maybe it wasn’t intended for him when he shot him? We don’t know.
The boy tried to take the gun, and they were wrestling around or something.
Dorie Powers recalled the incident as well:
I don’t think he intended to kill that boy. He was drinking—him and his wife and his son, I understood him and his son had been into a racket, and his son throwed something at him and then run. He run for the doghouse. And Carl took his gun to go up there.
They told me that if Gainer hadn’t jumped up—I reckon to take the gun up maybe—that he would never have got hurt. I guess he really meant to shoot his son, but Gainer jumped up to take it up and that was when he shot him. But I don’t think he really meant to shoot anybody. When Carl was sober, there wasn’t a better man. And he was a good, he and his wife both, were good friends of ours, and if he hadn’t been drinking—really I don’t think he meant to hurt anybody just scare his son was all he probably meant to do.
There is one point missing in that story, however. There were no bars in Spruce, so where did a person go to get drunk?
Johnny Sharp talks about his family and how they made moonshine to get by:
Living was tight. My brothers would cut kindling wood out of the old mill. They’d cut kindling wood for people, and they’d carry coal a nickel a bushel for people. Whatever money was picked up like that was used to live on.
Well, you couldn’t live on it, and my mother would take in any washing money that she could get and wash for people. She’d wash for the store man, Fitch Simms, but that doesn’t go very far, so we’d make our home brew—five gallon of home brew—and sell it twenty-five cents a quart.
My brother Lee then decided he would make a little liquor. First we borrowed a washing tub, and copper—used a piece of copper tubing and wrapped fur around it up at the side of the creek. Used the creek water trough for the cooling tub, right above my house at the side of the creek. It’s in the summertime: set the ash barrel outside and made it.
Made a few runs like that, and finally we built . . . my brother Sterle decided he would dig him a hole in the bank and put him a little building and put it back in the bank so the mash wouldn’t freeze—it would still work—which we did. After the mash was run off, after you run your liquor off, then the washing tub was hid good.
The work was carried to the top of a pine tree and hung up at the top of the pine tree so everything was put away. And we kept secret paths. Furthermore, people didn’t pry onto us too much. They didn’t feel welcome sometimes in that area. That’s the way we made a little bit of liquor, sold it for a dollar a pint, 75 cents for a twelve-ounce jar. We sold not as a big business but just to keep food on the table. And in the summer time we would pick berries. You took a bushel basket, buckets, and go up there and pick blackberries and put in that bushel basket and carry them off and sell them for 25 cents a gallon.
But that was the hard stuff. Most everyone had access to “homebrew.”
Ed Broughton recalls how they made it:
‘Bout everybody had a stone crock behind the burnside. We called it home brew if you wanted to cap it, but if you just wanted something that you didn’t want to bother capping, you’d make something like old hen. You’d just throw raisins in there, a bunch of old grapes—anything that would ferment—leave it and let it work. And it was good home brew too!
You have to know the right amount of ingredients to put in it, and you got to have a good ear. My dad knew. He could put his ear down there and he could hear that fizz, you know. He’d hear that last fizz and say, “It’s ready to cap. Let’s put the cap on her.” You’d cap it and after about thirty days, you’d pop one of them. You got some pretty good beer. It was better than what you could buy.
It seems surprising that the company would allow something like this to go on, but Pat Dugan relates how Spruce was pretty well self-governed:
Do you know what Frank Imes and Ikey Calain and them boys told me when I went in there? I walked into the yardmaster’s office that evening, looked the group over—I mean, I knew quite a few of them—but there were a few I didn’t know. So he looked up and said, “Well you finally made it.”
I said, “Yeah, I don’t know for how damn long, but I finally made it. I’ll give you just as good as you give me. I may stay longer than you or you may stay longer than me. We haven’t gotten around to that.”
He said, “Well, I’m going to tell you one thing I want you to remember.” He said this in front of everyone. “I don’t want you to forget. You remember the three monkeys?”
I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “You just play that part—that you never hear nothing, never see nothing or know nothing. No matter what. I don’t care who that man is, you play that part.”
Now it’s not like a mafia outfit, don’t get me wrong. It was family. If you had trouble, it didn’t do me no good to go out and broadcast it. Let’s keep it right here in Spruce. We didn’t have no law officers. We didn’t need none. We were our own. If you went out and killed a deer or you did this or you did that, sure you went and ate, but you didn’t ask no questions. Just like Harry Johnson, he’s dead and gone, but Harry and I went hunting in that laurel thicket. Burt Weese and all of them told me to be careful so I wouldn’t get lost in there. I could see how you could get in that laurel thicket and continuously walk in circles and never get out.
Anyway, while we were up in there hunting, Harry said, “What are you looking at, Pat?”
“This is a damn funny thing,” he said. “That’s a salt block.”
I said, “What would you need a salt block back in here for?”
“Now never you mind. Just forget that you saw it.”
So that evening when we
come in, Frank looked up at me and said, “You got nosey today didn’t you?”
That’s the way that it was. We got a game warden, lived right in the
yardmaster’s shanty. Man by the name of Hobatter. He practically told me the
same thing.
The
old dog house in Spruce, which is the location of the death of Boyd Gainer.
Pictured is Charlie Fansler and Bud Teter in the door and Okie Powers is in the
back. Photo courtesy Dorie Powers.
It seems like most everyone you talk to remembers the town’s misfit, the outcast who might have been a little crazy but was definitely very odd. In Spruce, this man was Jack Arlington, and it seemed like everyone had a story about old Jack.
Johnny Sharp recalls:
One time Les and I went down to Hopkins Mine and went to the top of the hill there. We explored all around. An old man lived up there, Jack Arlington. He was as black as the black in a beetle. His hands were real black, and his beans were awful good. He fed us, and we fooled around until almost dark and went off the hill.
It’s about six-and-a-half miles down there after you get off and hit the railroad. So a half a mile off the hill down to the railroad, he gave us a carbide light and one filling of carbide. We started up the railroad track, stayed as long as we could, and got up to milepost 84.
There was a pile of ties at the side of the track that looked like a bear standing up. We made a great big circle up against the hill and come back from the railroad track and up the track we went again. We got to Big Run bottom and there was a deer, or something made a racket that we knew was going to get us. We ran like scared rabbits, got up to the bridge—four miles down—cut off there, and there was a big rock heap we knew about.
We went out to that rock heap—boy we done stuff—got us a fire going and stayed all night. The beans, we had the beans for supper! Stayed all night and the next morning, and when we got stirred around there after daylight, got the frost shook off of us, Les headed for home. He had enough of it. We took back down the river and stayed all day again to have a bite to eat.
I’ll tell you, Jess Hornick . . . Jess’s brother Hess said, “Jack, come up in the morning and I’ll get your breakfast.” Jack went up. Hess was by himself so he mixed up a big bunch of pancake batter and baked the pancakes for Jack for his breakfast—fried him some eggs and some bacon.
“Oh yeah Jack, you can eat these.” And he piled some more on his plate. Hess kept the bacon. Hess baked seventeen hotcakes for him besides the eggs and the bacon.
Finally, Jack said, “Hess, I can still chew but I can’t swallow!”
Jack would start just as soon as he got started out of Spruce. He would go out of Spruce limping, He had his sack on his back and his cane, and he would go just a limpin’ and a hoppin’ and a limpin’ and a hoppin’.
He’d get back down there about a half a mile below Spruce. But he got down there talking to himself. A log went across the creek just before he went up the incline, and he thought that was the best way for him to go, otherwise he went down the incline and walked straight up—he’d walk this log to get out of there. The incline you know, they run straight up.
So he walked out to his log. “Jack,” he said, “You can’t walk that log.”
“Why sure I can walk that log.”
“No Jack, you’ll fall in the creek.”
He’s talking to himself and answering: “You’ll fall in the creek.”
“No I won’t fall in no creek. I can walk that log.” And he started. He got out on it, and he fell in the creek. “See you ole son of a bitch, I told you you would fall in the creek.”
Did you hear about the time he laid down? He started from Spruce. There was a switch went in just this side of the twin bridge just before the double tracks. They put coal down there a lot of times. He went down there and got tired and just crawled—I think it sprinkled rain or something on him—but he just crawled in under there, laid down and went to sleep.
I guess they come up there, uncoupled that train and pulled a whole train of coal right down. He laid right there on the track, between the two rails, and he laid there. He was a small man, and he just kept real quiet and laid down real flat and never moved and let them pull a whole train of coal on him. Well, that’s not saying the six, eight cars—that’s one thing—and when you start out with sixty or seventy out, that’s something else.
He’d sleep in the sand house on the warm sand. He’d want to get up and get out of there the next morning, and we’d lock him in the sand house. One time Wagner and I used to get firecrackers, and we got the sand up in the oil house. We had a string of them fire crackers, them little ones; we’d hold them together.
We got him after us first—run down by the engine—let him see us. He started to climb out to get us. We dropped the firecrackers out and he hit on a step. They started exploding. That knocked them off, and they just scattered on the ground. One would go off there and one would go off here. Boy he was jumping up and down. I’m telling you when he got straightened out; we never got a cussin’ like that.
Bert Weese recalls a traveling barber:
There was a tramp barber that was a real case in Spruce. The tramp barber always came in. He really was a barber, but he sold clothes. He came just every so often. He’d come in and take your measurements for some boots and stuff, and he’d cut your hair. He mostly wanted some food and a place to sleep.
Nobody ever knew his
name. Have no idea where he was from. He’d be in Elkins quite a bit and
Marlinton, everywhere. He was just really a bum, I guess, because he’d come in
and stay at everybody’s house that he could stay. He was just a walking Hobo.
What his name was . . . I don’t know, but he had money stolen off him. He had
worked and had money stolen off him.
He had a brother living in Richwood, and he had worked in the camps and saved up quite a lot of money—had a pretty good chunk of money on him—and somebody stole it from him and he started looking for the guy. He would go everywhere. He would come by maybe 10 o’clock in the night, pitch dark. It could be raining or anything else, and he’d keep walking. Wouldn’t stay. I picked him up in the road and hauled him up to Mace, and he’d take right off over the hill, hit the railroad track at 10 o’clock. He was looking for the guy that robbed him. He’d go in and stay maybe one maybe two days before he’d come back again; go clear through Richwood, Webster Springs. He walked like that for years.
Johnny Sharp remembers a hobo coming to stay at his house:
Johnny (his father) lived in that house there at the lower end of Spruce and one night, Carolyn was probably a year or two old, he brought this man in. He rode in on a train—hobos would come in on the train—he came in and wanted me to fix him something to eat, so I made him sandwiches and things.
He went out and Johnny told him, “You come out and we’ll give you breakfast in the morning.” He didn’t come back in the morning. A couple of days later somebody gave us a detective magazine, and there was that man’s picture in that detective magazine. He had killed a man and kept him in a room for three days covered him with talcum powder so the odor wouldn’t . . . I told him, “Don’t you ever, ever bring no one into this house again.” Yeah, back in those days we fed everybody.
- Clown: A Belsnickle costume. Belsnickle is a dying tradition of German roots. People would dress up in costumes and travel from house to house and people would try to guess their costumes. Candy would also be distributed. Much like Halloween, this tradition took place during the Christmas season. Grace Gainer explains, “We used to dress up and go to people’s houses dressed up like a witch. We would go anytime, we called it goblin. We would get dressed up and put masks on our faces, and they would ask us in, and we’d go in and talk for a bit. And then we’d leave.” Photo courtesy Leo Weese
Life and Times in Spruce
Those were different times. People shared what they had more because times were rough for everyone. Here are some telling stories about the material quality of life back then.
Tom Broughton recalls some of the costs of living then:
It was a job fixed so there wouldn’t be no raise in wages. In ‘31 they cut it down to $1.90 a day—eight hours a day. We was working ten hours a day, six days a week when we started: $2.50 a day is what we started out at.
Then, the way they worked it, they cut us down to eight hours a day instead of ten and took 5 percent off of us to $1.90 a day. They charged us a dollar a month for the house coal and water at Spruce. We had no electric. They had water in the house, and we got the coal at the tipple. We had to carry that a short ways. That wasn’t much money.
Bert Sharp recalls:
Do you want to see how much I made in two weeks? Thirty-nine cents an hour. I started out as an apprentice machinist. When we finished in four years, I made $1.04. There was two weeks—September 15, 1942—amount earned was $48.49.
Stafford ran the jewelry store in Elkins. If you wanted to buy a gun, he’d get you a gun. Anything you wanted, Bill Stafford would get for you and then deduct it. He took $4 a month out or every two weeks for her wedding ring.
You could go to the A&P store and fill the taxi up with groceries for 13–15 bucks every two weeks, and we’d live on that. I’d get bread off of the bakery, two day old bread, and put it in the deep freeze. You had to pinch your pennies. I worked my vacations to pay for some of the bills that had accumulated.
People didn’t need as much money back then. After all, rent was only a dollar a month!
Lucille Ward explains the Spruce water system:
We had oil lights, burned coal in the cook
stove for heating. We did have running water in the house. In the summer, in
order to keep things, we had a tropper built out in the back
porch—a little
enclosure—and kept the running water going through that. It kept the food cool,
because it was good cold water.
I’ll explain to you what that water system was. When the West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company built the town back in 1903, right above the town of Spruce was a little stream. And up on the back on the mill side, just up above the houses, is where the stream came off the hill. Up there on the bank they had built a little concrete dam and made a place to gather their water.
They dammed that up, and they did actually build a concrete dam. They ran a pipe out of it and the gravity feed. Even the houses—we talk about it being a flat place—actually, where the houses started, it was downhill enough that the water would keep flowing down through the houses.
Back at this time when
they built the town, it was actually unusual to have running water like that.
There is some talk . . . some people feel that because of the convenience of
putting running water in the houses, this was something to get people to work in
the logging days. Like a luxury—to have running water in the house. It was
thought that maybe the paper company could manipulate people to think we have
running water.
Washday for some Spruce kids.
Photo courtesy Dorie Powers
There wasn’t much money for entertainment. Besides drinking or hunting, there wasn’t much to spend extra money on.
Ed Broughton describes winter entertainment:
A lot of the men and women went along with this. That pond we showed you, the West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company had a good pond. There was a lot of water in that. The winters were so cold that pond would freeze over thick. We could build a fire right in the middle of that pond, leave it burn all night, and it would never burn through. We would ice skate on that and stay out all night. We’d have sleds. The women would get out and pull their little kids on them sleds, and we’d have a wonderful time.
The weather got pretty bad in Spruce. There are many stories about how bad the snows got from time to time. Here are chilling tales of life in the highlands, the first from Wanda Sharp and the second from Devane Cussins:
Wanda Sharp
recalls a great snow:
One year, it was either 1945 or 1946, it snowed so much that when we got up that morning and looked out the upstairs window, all you could see was the neighbor’s roof and chimney. We climbed out the upstairs window and slid down the snowdrift in boxes. Dad dug a path from our kitchen door to the outhouse and the coal shed, but the walls were so high it seemed like a long tunnel to me. I don’t remember any of us ever missing school because of the snow. We always made snowmen, snow angels, played fox and geese and jumped off the hill behind the schoolhouse about forty feet into the snowdrifts. It always drifted real high back there.
I don’t remember having a cold too often, but when we did get one, Mother would grease our chest and back with a poultice made from grease, camphor, turpentine, coal oil, and Vicks salve. Sometimes she’d make an onion poultice for us, and we would stink to high heavens, but it worked. Photo by Leo Weiss
Leave the Faucet Running
Devane Cussins tells about frozen pipes:
You always had to keep the sink water running in the wintertime to keep it from freezing. Once Edith and Pappy left for the weekend, and the sink drain froze shut and the water over-flowed onto the floor and froze. When they came back, they couldn’t get the door open because of the ice on the floor. They had to climb through the window. Pappy built a fire to thaw the ice, and then Edith had a mess to clean up.
The winters were fun because the snow would blow through the windows of the schoolhouse, and we could skate on the wooden floors. The schoolhouse sat on high ground above Spruce by the railroad tracks, and there was a cut where the tracks went through the hill behind the school. During winter, the snow would drift against the banks, and we could jump off the bank into the snowdrift. Or the kids that had sleds could sleigh ride down a path from the school, past the girl’s privy toward the doghouse.
One winter the snow got so deep in the cut behind the schoolhouse that it was up level with the banks on the sides of the cut. The railroad had a big snow plow, which could be pushed ahead of an engine to clear snowdrifts from the tracks. One of the engineers, I don’t remember who it was, was going to clear the drift with the snowplow.
I guess they thought it would be a fairly easy job. But the first time they tried, the plow went in only so far and stopped, and the engine began to spin. So they backed out and decided to get up more speed. When they tried the second time, the snowplow and the engine both got hung up in the snowdrift. So they had to couple another engine to the rear of the first engine to get the plow out. I am still not really sure how the snowdrift was cleared.
At times Spruce was completely shut off from the rest of the world, which wasn’t that bad, unless you had a medical emergency. A doctor lived in town full time during Spruce’s first era, but there weren’t enough people to justify a doctor during the second period. If people got hurt, they were taken by railcar to Mace where they either met a doctor or traveled to a hospital.
Leo Weese shares:
See this scar above my eye? When I was little I was chasing three girls with a double- bladed axe, and I fell on it. They loaded me up on a motorcar with a big Turkish towel on my head. And they took me to Mt. Airy, put me in a vehicle, and drove me down to Elkins to see Doc Butt and Dr. Mauzy. They looked at me, and they said, “Hell, no use in numbing it now …” And they just took a needle and sewed it right up. But I bled a whole Turkish towel full.
Spruce wasn’t meant to last. Trains grew larger and the railroad more efficient, and eventually, the town no longer needed to exist. In 1951, almost all of the houses were moved out of Spruce at one time, and many people moved down to Laurel Bank, or as the Railroaders called it, Slaty Fork.
Johnny Sharp relates:
It was a move, which allowed your train to operate over more miles. You got more mileage from Elkins to Spruce. You wasn’t getting the hours out—you could run it a lot faster and still get eight hours work. And if you went on to Slaty Fork, you could still make it in eight hours, so they got the use of a man for another fourteen miles.
Leo Weese remembers:
Everybody moved from Spruce at one time—except for the track people—in one big caravan. They brought cars from as far away as Elkins. And then, there was a lot of local folks, like in Bowden, Bemis, Durbin, Mt. Airy, Cheat Bridge, and all of them had five-six men and track cars and whatnot. All these cars came in, and it stretched from in town in Spruce all the way around up to the phone box up there, probably a half mile. Everybody moved out one time. And I moved out with them.
A few homes remained at Spruce for several years. Nancy and Lee Sharp moved back in 1952 for a while after getting married, but eventually Western Maryland burned the rest of the houses down. And so Spruce has sat for approximately fifty years, slowly returning to the forest from which it came.
Recently there have been efforts to list Spruce in the National Registry of Historic Places. Remains of the old mill and some other building foundations are still visible. The site is also of archeological significance, and parts of Spruce have been excavated. Spruce today can be accessed by foot from Snowshoe or the Monongahela National Forest as well as by an excursion train called the Cheat Mountain Salamander.
-
A
current view of the town of Spruce, taken from the same angle as the painting
and the panoramic photographs, with fifty years of decay added. Richard Sparks
writes, “Seen from the north are the remains of Spruce in April, 1994. Most
prominent are the poured concrete endwalls of the mill powerhouse. The man is
standing on a small smokestack; just above his head can be seen the foundations
for the endless chain conveyor that went from the mill, east to the banks of
Shavers Fork. To his right, at the base of the hill, is the concrete and timber
lined spillway of the millpond. The townsite is the open area across the
river in the middle distance.” Photo
courtesy
Richard Sparks