By Blanche R. Dudley
In its heyday, Stotesbury boasted a company store, a movie theater, a doctor’s office, an architecturally-admired church with a spire and stained-glass windows, and a two-room school. Now only a few houses stand defiantly against the forest and wildlife that are fast erasing most signs of human settlement. When nostalgia hits, and I think about the Stotesbury of my childhood, this is what I recall:
- The concrete bridge connected my part of the camp to “cross-the-creek,” where my siblings and I could visit friends when we were old enough to travel about alone (around eight or nine years old). Tall, curved arches rose on either side of the bridge, and a rite of passage for those brave enough was to climb onto the arches and walk all the way across the bridge. The drop from the peak of the arches to the creek bottom below, should an unlucky daredevil fall off, was at least sixteen feet or more. I can’t remember ever hearing that any child fell over – and yes, I foolishly walked the arches, too.
- The white clapboard church sat serenely on a hill with the sun glinting off its multi-colored window panes, which depicted scenes of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the disciples. Every Sunday morning, deacon Jesse Sherman, a one-armed, retired coal miner, summoned worshippers by pulling a rope to ring a huge copper bell that hung in a little alcove at the top of the church.
- The old cemetery lay quietly and mysteriously behind the church, a resting place for inhabitants born as long ago as the early 1800’s. This should have been a real scary place for kids, but it was simply a spot to pass on our way further up the hill to the “hollow” where a few small cabins sat under the thick tree cover.
- Across from the church was the school where students in grades 1-4 studied in one room and those in grades 5-8 in the other—that is, until the population started to dwindle as the coal mines closed in the late 1950’s. Then, only one room in the school room housed the entire student body of about twenty students, or so, in grades 1-6. The older kids went to Mark Twain High School beginning in seventh grade after racial integration.
- Diagonally across the tracks from the school was the “turnaround,” a circular clearing that was the only place big enough in the narrow valley for cars to actually turn around to reverse directions without having to back all the way out of the camp to the main road. The turnaround also doubled as the camp’s baseball diamond and was the site of many community competitions with a red rubber ball and a carved stick bat.
- A stark and foreboding landmark next to the school was the “slate dump,” a dark gray mountain hundreds of feet high and about a quarter of a mile long, that was formed from many years of trucks dumping piles of thin layers of grayish-black rock waste left over after coal was processed. This mountain was like a mini-volcano that smelled of sulphur, smoldered, smoked, and sometimes caught fire. It even had sinkholes. And, yes, kids foolishly played up there.
- The “curve,” known as the spookiest place in Stotesbury, was said to be haunted. This feared stretch of road snaked along the railroad track around a bend that led to the next coal town about a mile away –Tams, West Virginia. I only knew one man brave enough to walk through the curve alone after dark. We kids would, however, run through the curve on Halloween night in groups of six or more. Run really fast!
- The creek bank was one of the most beautiful and tragic spots in Stotesbury. The bank lining the shallow water was covered with a sweet-smelling green grass carpet and brilliant flowers in spring and summer. Graceful weeping willow trees cast shade over the sparkling water that gurgled and sang as the creek flowed south. Miles away, it merged with a large river called the Big Coal River, I believe. It was unimaginable that this peaceful creek, usually about eight to ten inches at its deepest, would turn into a deadly, rain-swollen monster one dark summer night and take the lives of two of my friends during a flash flood. The road which normally ran alongside the creek had washed away that night, and my friends drowned when their car was swept away and overturned in the raging water. Unbelievably, this horror happened exactly where the creek passed through the haunted “curve” stretch of road.
Someday, in the not-too-distant future, all that will be left of Stotesbury will be the thick forest, the smoking slate dump, and the beautiful deceptive creek. The memories, however, will live on wherever old-timers gather and reminisce or, better yet, where they sit and share hard-to-believe tales with younger generations.
October 2020