Some Random Thoughts - Ghost Towns From Back Home

What is it you think of when you see the term "ghost town"?  Nine chances out of ten, what probably comes to mind is some rickety old prospector town somewhere out in the Southwest buried by desert sand and assaulted with roaming spheres of tumbleweeds and guarded by saguaro cactus sentries.  If that is what you perceive as a ghost town, I have this to say - you have probably been watching too many "Bugs Bunny" cartoons on the Boomerang channel.  In reality, many parts of the country have these little places, and my home state of West Virginia is no exception to that.   Now, I want to introduce you to some of those places.

The Fairfax Stone as it appears today

About 14 miles north of my hometown of Hendricks, where western Maryland comes to a sharp point like an arrowhead separating the shoulder of the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia from the rest of the state, the mighty Potomac River has its birthplace.  Near its headwaters is the famous historical marker called the Fairfax Stone, which was the place that Lord Thomas Fairfax, who originally owned much of the region as his personal fiefdom, marked the frontier of a territory that later came to be known as Augusta County, which at one time covered an area from the northern neck of Virginia to eastern Indiana.  It is from the headwaters of the Potomac that many of these little ghost towns start to appear, although they also can be found elsewhere in the region too.  By the time I came along as a child, many of these places were long abandoned, save the occasional farmhouse that some local family came into ownership of and by then was in that particular family for many generations.  However, at the dawn of the 20th century, many of these places were once prosperous communities.  I feel a historical booklet on the subject written in 1998 called Ghost Towns of the Upper Potomac (Parsons, WV:  McClain Printing) as compiled by the Garrett County (MD) Historical Society says it best as quoted from page 1 of the small book:

Most of these ghost towns can be identified, when one finally reaches their locations, by ruins of old buildings amid the brush, cement foundations of former bridges, other structures, and remains of coal tipples.  The real tombstones, however, are the large gob piles, partially hidden by tangled brush and scrub trees on the hillsides, that mark the coal mines taht once gave economic life to so many of these old towns.

Our trek to these old ghost towns is rather sad and we want to find where they were and by what names they were called.  For what purpose did they exist and what companies created them while mining the coal seams along this meandering river?  We look at these collapsed pit mouths and we wonder the price of human life paid to dig the coal that once poured from them into the railroad cars. 

Gorman, MD/Gormania, WV - one of the Upper Potomac ghost towns that is still a living community today

Douglas, WV, a mining ghost town just south of Thomas, 14 miles north of my hometown of Hendricks

Jenningston, WV - this is up SR 72, south of my hometown of Hendricks, and also near where my maternal grandmother was born. In its heyday, it was a lumber town.

Kempton, MD - near the headwaters of the Potomac about 3 miles from Thomas, WV.  My step-grandfather, Alonzo Lipscomb, was born here.

As a kid, Mom loved going on Sunday drives with our late Granny Turner, and often on those drives we visited some of these places while Mom played Gospel music by the Chuck Wagon Gang or one of those other great old Southern Gospel groups on the radio or tape deck, and from an early age I developed an enchantment with these places - there was a mystique about them I cannot quite describe in words, but can feel when visiting them.  I still have that today when I visit back home, and there are days I really miss those Sunday drives, as the cares and stress of the city often try to stifle the fond feelings of my youth with all this hustle and bustle - while I feel like sinning by swearing at traffic on the infamous Howard Franklin Bridge that spans Tampa Bay as the minions of hell we call "morning traffic" here make us late to work, etc., it is nice to know that there are places where the roads only have two lanes and "heavy traffic" consists of twelve cars passing by in one day.  However, a bit of sadness is there too, as now many of the communities that were vibrant when I was young are now dying - Hendricks, my home town, is little more than a few people now compared to the vibrant community it was some 30 years ago.  It reminds me, along with staring in the mirror at the increasing silver creeping over my head, that I too am aging.   The recent recession, the crises in the Middle East, and other craziness (such as hearing more than we should about Lindsay Lohan's criminal hijinks or that Bieber twirp's girlish hair on national television 24/7 - enough already with that crap, please!!) has made me think about those days even more when life was a little simpler.  We cannot live in the past though obviously, as the past is now gone, but the best parts of it live in us.  

Pierce, WV - a tiny hamlet about a mile northwest of Thomas, once settled by Italians who came to work in the mines and on the railroad

There is also another dimension to all this as well, and it is purely West Virginia in mindset - we call it "sense of place."  What that means is that we place a strong emotional bond on our native soil, and what we call home means something to us.   Many people today, caught up in their worldly lifestyles and the futile pursuit of more wealth (like many of the corporate yahoos I work with, for example) don't understand that - they eschew and devalue their past and roots at great loss to themselves, and this is unfortunate.  I think the American workplace, especially these god-awful places called cities, could benefit from encouraging people to reconnect to their roots and remember where they come from.  Too many forget, and as a result a generation will lose something very precious.  What a shame too.

Anyway, I have rambled on too much tonight, so I will take leave for this week.  Remember though, if you have that annoying co-worker that seems to be more interested in your work rather than doing their own, or if you have that corporate manager in your office who has his head you-know-where and disrespects you and your co-workers, you have much to be thankful for and proud of.  I know I do, and I wouldn't trade my Appalachian/Potomac Highland roots for the world.  Hopefully this inspires some of you too, and if so, feel free to share.  Thanks, and God bless; we'll see you next visit.