Reaching the End of The Summer

 As I am writing this, it is August 20th - in all honesty, this summer has flown by, my goodness!  But, when I was doing some reflection today on my childhood and teenage years, one thing that is evident is change happens, for better or for worse.  Although the past few days have been somewhat busy, I do have a bit of breathing room and will often take a look at something that stokes the memory archives a bit, and today I decided to take a little "journey" to where I spent a large part of my childhood, the town of Kirby, WV.  In all honesty, I could not believe how really different it looked there, so I wanted to talk about that a bit.

Ever since I was a kid, I loved maps - I could take an atlas, study it for hours, and then I could find almost anything.  With the 21st century now in full swing, the atlas books we used to have are almost a thing of the past - they still sell them, but with everyone going electronic the new thing is Google Maps.  Personally, I love Google Maps - it takes you to street views, and you can sort of "drive" through communities without even leaving your desk.  Every so often, I like to do that with places I have lived in the past, just to see what they look like now.  Today, I decided to check out Kirby to see what happened there.  

I want to take you back first to Kirby in the year 1982 - I was 13 then, and had already lived there two years, and it was not an overly populated place but it had a small town vibe.  Cox's Store was the central part of the town, and it was where the general store, post office, and the event venue for the community was located.  Owned by Lincoln and Nellie Cox since 1940, the store was really much older as it dated back to the late 1800s and is somewhat of a local landmark.  Back in the day, it stayed pretty busy too - a group of 20-something young guys from the surrounding countryside gathered out there almost every night to socialize and do other things (I never was particularly thrilled with that, as often they liked to target me for harassment as a young kid too), and during the day a lot of the older folks around the area - one of note being old Mr. Donahue who lived a couple of miles away - would come and sit in the store and just socialize with Nellie as she operated the store.  The place was not exactly downtown Baltimore, but it stayed pretty busy.  The rest of the town consisted of approximately 7 mobile homes, the Grassy Lick School where most of us went to elementary school then, the American Legion Hall where Lincoln Cox was the local commander, the Baptist church on the other side of the bridge that spanned Grassy Lick Run, and about 6 other houses (including the Coxes, who lived right across the street from the store).   Additionally, Lincoln Cox had a few utility sheds near the creek, and his son-in-law Dean Westfall had a small pigpen between where we lived and the school.  In behind the trailers for a short time was a landfill where the local "wino," John Haines, took care of burning everyone's garbage.  We lived in the trailer then that was at the far end of that park, bordering a small culvert that separated our yard from the Westfall corn field.  On the main road just above our house there was a row of hazelnut trees that I used to harvest from abundantly - I got a lot of hazelnuts in the Fall off of them, and in the summer they also housed a huge population of stick insects (walking sticks) and the occasional praying mantis I caught that would hunt them.   That essentially was the tiny town of Kirby, which at one time probably had around 50 residents within the corporate limits and perhaps a couple of hundred more a few miles out in the countryside that utilized the post office there.  While those years were largely probably some of the poorest I had ever experienced, they had their good points too and it was in reality in Kirby that I sort of discovered my identity and would be shaped into the person I am today.  I have talked about some aspects of that upbringing before - how I discovered my love of vintage music, and also how I used to play in Grassy Lick Run catching hogsuckers for the dog and also trying to capture small sculpins down in those large rocks near the bridge.  Kirby was not all bad, in other words, but I did face some adversities that many kids my age could never imagine, and the other neighborhood kids were pretty much in the same situation.  As we all grew older, we scattered to the four winds and did our own thing; a couple unfortunately are no longer with us.  As we began to drift away from Kirby in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the town began to sort of die with the exit of many of its residents, and when the Coxes finally passed away in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the store, school, and other venues around the area would close and the town would essentially be a ghost of its former self.  Nothing was more apparent about that then when I did a little Google Maps excursion there today.

As mentioned, the store closed years ago, and the school closed in the early 2000s, so by that point there was not much left.  The nearest towns were some distance away - Augusta was about 15 miles to the northeast, and Romney, the county seat, was almost 25 miles away.  Therefore, the next actual town over was nearby Rio, and as Kirby went into decline Rio assumed much of the business that Cox's Store once generated.  Today, Rio is pretty much like it was 40 years ago, as the local "Rio Mall" where I originally got my first vinyl items in my music collection, is still doing a very lucrative business and a few other stores have opened up there now too.  But, not so Kirby.  When I did the "street view" feature on Google Maps, it zoomed in on Grassy Lick Road at the intersection of Grassy Lick and Rock Oak Roads, where the old store is.  Moving north on Grassy Lick Road, the first thing I noticed was the big field where 7 mobile homes used to be - they were apparently moved out years ago, and even the culvert that bordered our old yard there was obscured by encroaching brush.  The Westfall corn field is no longer there either, although I did notice those hazelnut bushes are still growing.  The place is now stark in how different it looks, and I was frankly shocked.  While about 7 years ago we had driven through there as Mom wanted to take a drive that way, and the trailers were gone then too, it still was a bit to absorb seeing that even that old apple tree that used to be in front of the house was taken out as well - I remember those apples well too.  The apples that grew on that tree were big, but they were also very tart.  They were good apples for pies or apple butter, but not for just eating.  However, that often did not stop me from occasionally grabbing one off the lower branches of the tree when I could reach them.  I also remember that tree when my best friend Ralph was teaching me to ride a bike then - I ran it into that tree!  Interesting how I remember small details like that, but that is the credit of writing a journal all these years too.  Now that I think of it, there were two trees in that large meadow that served as a courtyard for us there - one was the aforementioned tree in front of our house, and the other one was at the other end of the field, on a path that we wore going down to the store then.  That tree marked the fence line for the Cox's house as well then (and even that fence is gone now!).   I did notice the two large sycamore trees that were in the back yard are still there though - they loomed tall over the spot where the old trailer used to be at the far end of the culvert.  The Google Maps street view feature is updated for April 2026, meaning that as I am writing this that was four months ago.  Also, and quite strangely, the outline of the access road to our old park as well as the driveway to our house can still be plainly seen too.  On the edge of that was a large shrub that the local kids I hung out with and I called our "fort bush," and I noticed it was still there too, although much bigger than it was then.  A large field still divides what used to be Westfall's corn field from the Grassy Lick School, and since the school closed the local folks repurposed that as a community center now, essentially serving the purpose that Cox's Store used to.  As much as I marveled at the Upper Potomac ghost towns like Kempton and Bayard closer to my home area of Tucker County, Kirby too has become essentially a ghost town in real time, and oddly, it is quite a surreal feeling to see that a place where you spent 6 years of your childhood and early teens is now basically just a collection of a few houses and nothing else.  I often wonder if others I knew from those days feel the same way?  That would be worth exploring.  I suppose at this point I should give a little history behind Kirby and how it came into existence, as I am a historian after all!

Recently, I had the fortune of finding a copy of a book entitled Historic Hampshire (Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 1976).   It is an older history book of the county, and different individuals contributed to it.  Lincoln Cox actually wrote a very good historical overview of Kirby in it, and as he notes beginning on page 388, the area had some documentation of explorers dating back at least until the 1790s.  Many of these early White adventurers (and later settlers) were called "Long Hunters" according to both Cox as well as a short essay by Eileen Hott and Betty Racey in a later book published called Hampshire County, WV: 1754-2004 (Romney, WV: The Hampshire 250 Committee, 2004) on pages 63-64.  Curiosity about how the place got its name though comes from the late Hamill Kenney in his West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning, Including the Nomenclature of the Streams and Mountains (Piedmont, WV: The Place Name Press, 1945), who notes on page 353 that the name was attributed to one of its earliest postmasters.  I had always wondered about why the creek there was called Grassy Lick Run, and fortunately Lincoln provided the answer in his history of the area - apparently it took its origin from the "lick springs" of the areas (which also produced minerals like salt from the depths of the earth too, which served as a mineral source for deer and other wildlife, hence a "lick") meaning places where local fauna gathered to drink, and in this particular area there was also a lush abundance of grassy meadows, hence the name "Grassy Lick."  As prey animals were drawn to areas like that, it would also draw hunters as well, given the close proximity Kirby has to both Short Mountain and Nathaniel Mountain, which are still to this day popular hunting areas.  This is where both early American Indian tribes as well as White "Long Hunter" settlers were attracted, and in time settlements like Kirby sprang up.  As the old Cox's Store also served as a post office back then too, it was established in 1864 probably by some guy named Kirby, as Kenney proposed, and the genesis of the town dates to that.  This means Kirby came into being as a community after West Virginia became its own state a year earlier.  In my high school years later, I would also live close to a similar type of water source in Preston County called Salt Lick, so at least 10 years of my life were spent near places with the name "lick!"  This is by no means an exhaustive history of Kirby at all, nor is it meant to be as I probably left out a few details, but you get the idea anyway of how the place got its name.  That too solved a big personal mystery for me too, as learning about place names has become a sort of thing for me as a historian.  

As I read more about this, I will probably revisit it more later.  I do have a print-out of Kenney's book, but it is currently packed away, so when I get to a more permanent place soon I will dig that out any maybe find out who the mysterious postmaster "Kirby" was then, as I think he'll have that in his book. Reading Lincoln Cox's account of this makes me regret not talking to him more then, as I probably could have learned a thing or two.  However, relationships then were complex, and most of us saw Lincoln and Nellie as just our landlords and nothing more, as to many of us they were almost like feudal lords then who really didn't connect with the majority of us who were living at poverty level. Lincoln and Nellie both passed away years ago, but thankfully this is an aspect of his legacy that lives on, as well as the pictures one can find of him as a school teacher back in the day - he taught the 5th and 6th grades at Grassy Lick many years before I was even born, and that was his chosen profession after he completed an exemplary service as an officer in the military during World War II.  In retrospect, I appreciate Lincoln a lot more now than I did then, as it turns out he was actually very impressive.  Interesting enough, his daughter Beverly and three of his granddaughters also became educators as well.  One of the granddaughters is a principal at what I believe is a middle school in Morgantown, the second (her sister) teaches at a school in Virginia, and his youngest granddaughter is now an assistant principal at Hampshire High School in Romney.  While the girls radically differ with their grandfather (he was a die-hard political conservative who was influential in Republican politics in the county then, while the granddaughters are openly very much left-of-center in their political leanings) on ideological issues, they do carry on his legacy.  While he never directly influenced me as an educator myself, I actually can study his legacy and learn some good things from that too.  I often wonder what he would think now if I could talk to him as Dr. Thrower instead of that poor skinny local kid who checked mail once a day then at the store?  I do still talk to his daughter Beverly on occasion - she herself is retired now and is living a peaceful life in a house that is perched on the ridge just above where we used to live years ago.  Beverly, like so many of us, has mellowed too - time does that - so it is good to be connected to her too.  That is, as long as she doesn't hold it against me for stealing corn out of her field when I was a kid! 

Those were just some random thoughts I wanted to share here today, and I am hoping to write more stuff like this in months to come.  Thanks again for joining me, and will see you next time.