The Reminiscences of William A. Wilson III
(owner of Wilson's Springs from 1940 to 1988)
I was born in West Virginia in 1899. My parents brought me back to Virginia when I was about six months old. My father then went into the hospital, and died about a year after that. Mother came here and lived with Grandma wilson for one year, and then she went back to her mother who lived on Kerr's Creek. That's where I spent all my young days up until I was forty years old.
Fishing in the Mill race There used to be a mill right in front of our house, and on Saturday nights in the summertime the men would drain the water out of the race, which was about a mile long. You could just go in and pick up fish by the bucketsfull; suckers mostly. I always had to take the cows up to the farm from where we lived, down in the village. I'd take them up there in the morning and turn them loose, and then go and get them in the evening. This happened to me on Sunday morning, after they had drained the race. There was a lot of little puddles that would never drain, and some would be as long as a room. One of my buddies was in there catching fish that Sunday morning. He'd just get down in the water and feel around and catch them. So I got in with him, and I got so interested in catching fish that I forgot that Morther was waiting for me to come in and get ready to go to church. I didn't get in until 12:00, but I had a bucketful of fish, and that's what saved my hide.
Peppermint candy and stealing watermellons I had another boyhood friend named Ed Mayes and we used to do a lot of hunting together. One Saturday evening we went out snake hunting and caught ten blacksnakes. Another time, when he and I were going to school, we were given the job of carrying water to the school building. There was a spring over near where they llived, and we went over there to get a bucketful of water. Ed told me that he'd swiped a nickel from his mother some time before that, and had hid it under a footlog, but couldn't get it out. We decided that we were going to try and get it. We kept fishing for that nickel, but while we could see it, we couldn't get at it. We finally made a hook out of a piece of wire, and got it out. We were about two hours getting that bucket of water, but we got that nickel. We went on over by the store and got five cents worth of stick candy. You could get ten long sticks, about 6 inches long of peppermint, and we divided it up so that we each had five pieces. We had enough candy to suck on for two or three days.
We used to get our water down in the spring below the house. It belonged to the Mill property, and I had to cross a footlog to get to the spring. As I was coming back across the footlog, I noticed that there was a snake in my path. I was afraid to cross over, and so it took me a long time to get into the house with my water as I had to call for help. Another time some of the men down at the mill had put a watermellon in the spring to cool it off. The Rector Englemann and I, when we were little boys, saw the watermellon and thought that it had been put there just for us. We didn't think tht there ws anybody watching us, so we went on down there. It was all that we could carry, almost too much for two boys. We had gotten almost to the top of the hill when somebody at the mill saw us, and they hollered at us. We dropped tht watermellon and ran. The old watermellon went bouncing down the hill before it burst into pieces. Nobody got any good out of it. We didn't go down that way for a long time. We were so scared that somebody would beat us up.
Snipe Hunting
There was one other time that some of the older men around the store decided that they were going to take Rector and I out "snipe hunting". That was a big joke, but we didn't let them know that we knew about it. We were just all in for it, and told them that we'd like to go. They took us into the woods a couple of miles from the store. They had a sack, and we were supposed to hold the sack while they drove the snipes in. So they sat us down and fixed the sack. They had him over on one side and me on the other, and said ,
"Now ya'll keep real quiet, or they won't come in. We'll go back here and drive the snipes in."
What they were going to do was just leave us and go back to the store and laugh about it. We knew the trick though, so as soon as they got out of sight, we dropped the sack and got to the store before they did. When they came in, we were already there. They didn't like that much.
Memories of Family I was very young when my Grandmother Wilson died, but I remember her. One time when I was over here, she gave me a dollar. I remember what she looked like, as she was sitting in the front living room by the mantlepiece. she did a lot of knitting and had balls of woolen yarn stuck in places in the mantle. She reached in there and pulled out that dollar, and it looked to me like it was about as big as a newspaper. Grandmother Wilson was married to William A. Wilson II. I was named after him, but my father's middle name was Montgomery, so he was William M. Wilson. I'm William A. Wilson III, counting the three that were named Alexander, but not consecutively. My Grandmother and Grandfather started the Hotel in about 1840. It was already a summer resort at that time, and was owned by the Strickler family. It used to be called "Strickler's Springs". When the Strickler's died, my grandfather bought the property from the executors of their estate. They didn't operate the Hotel very long. I think they started it somewhere around 1800. They bought it from the Porters, but the Porters never did have anything but that old log cabin. Then the Strickler's built on to that, and commenced to keeping some people. They built everything that we have now except the addition that I built in 1940.
My Grandmother Hull was blind. That was my mother's mother. I remember her more than I do my Grandmother Wilson. She lived until I was about six, and Grandmother Wilson died when I was about four years old. Even though, I have just a faint recollection of either of them. Grandmother Wilson never got sick; she just died. I do remember the clay pipe she always smoked. It had a long stem about ten inches long on it. She had a place on the lower end of the mantle where she kept her pipe, and there's a hole there now where the ashes spilled. The reason they put those long stems on pipes was os you could fill your pipe with tobacco, and then take that long stem, and reach into the fireplace and get a bunch of hot ashes on the tobacco and then go to sucking on the ashes to light the pipe.
Grandmother Wilson's dollar bill and the lamb that grew up I took the dollar that my Grandmother gave to me and bought a lamb with it. Mrs. Harper had a lot of sheep, and very often a ewe wouldn't claim her lamb, and they'd have to raise it by hand. She'd take a lamb and get it started good and if somebody wanted to buy it, she'd sell it to them.
"Now, Alex," she said, "if that lamb don't live, it's your fault. It's real healthy, and it's been doing real well and I've got it started nursing the bottle"
Well, I took the lamb and raised it and after it got to be a big sheep it got mean. I guess being a pet like it was was kind of tormenting it. It took to butting, and Mother and I went up on the farm one day. She was going to pick raspberries along the edge of the woods, and she left me in the fields because it was kind of "snakey" up there around the woods. Idon't know how old I was, but I reckon I was six or seven years old as I hadn't started school yet. that old sheep got to butting me, and I got up on the fence to keep him away from me. The rail fence was just full of ants, and they got all over me. I couldn't get down and the sheep was getting ready to butt me, the ants were crawling on me and I got to hollering and crying. Mother wanted to know what was wrong with me, and I told her that the sheep was butting me, so she came down there and I guess took me home. I traded that sheep to somebody for a calf. It was a female calf, and I raised two or three calves off her before I got through.
Life at the Hotel As far as what life was like at the Hotel, the people that came here were mostly from the neighboring towns and the country. Ordinary people, working people would come here for a vacation. The Rockbridge Baths Hotel was more likely to attract the rich. Most came for medical treatments. Dr. Morrison was there in the later years, but there was some other doctor who was linked with it in the early years. Most people who came to Wilson's Springs were from Lexington, Buena Vista or Staunton. Some came from Lynchburg, Raphine, Brownsburg or some adjoining community. There were a few who would come here from out of state. There were some from Texas, but usually they were kin-people. You can tell pretty much where people came from by looking at the old registers. They would put their names and addresses in there when they registered at the Hotel.
Mostly what they did was somebody would play the piano and they would do a little dancing, or maybe they would take a horseback ride. Some had carriages, and they would get in the carriages and ride up through the Pass. Some walked as far as they could. It was a leasurely was of living. They didn't have any particular movement. You could go and roll ten-pins if you wanted to; that was about the only organized recreation they had. For the most part, they just sat around and talked. Maybe the same people would come every year, and they's sit and talk about what they'd done the year before. It looked like people in those days had more time to just sit, and they didn't think about running around all the time. I can remember when I was a kid around here, they had a stableboy and if someone had a buggy and wanted to go out riding in the evening, he'd go and fetch the horse and hitch it to the buggy and bring it out in front for them. They'd get in the buggy, or get on the horse, and when they had finished riding around, they'd come back and the boy would take the horse and put it away for them.
They had several people who used to live at Wilson's Springs all the time. Jim Reynolds was the black man who waited on tables at the Hotel. I don't think he was old enough to have been a slave, although he might have been, back before the Civil War. When I knew him, he had a greyed head and a beard that he kept clipped pretty close. When I was young, he used to tell me,
"I waited table for your Grandmother, and I waited on table for your Uncle Orve, and I'd like to wait on table for you." He must have come after my Grandfather died, because he didn't say a word about him. He just mentioned my Grandmother.
Jim was very gracious; he would bow and scrape. Of course he would get a little tip every now and then. I don't think they tipped him very much, maybe a dime. There was also a whole bunch of black women who used to help out with the cooking. "Old Gert" stayed here a long time. There was one other girl who lived here with Aunt Jenny, and then there was old Mrs. Slater. There was always a family living in that little house by the spring. They were mostly people who helped here part-time. Maybe the women would work at the house, and the men would work on the farm. There were some more little houses in back of the hotel, and a bunch of people used to live in them. There was another house near the ten-pin alley, and there was a family called McDaniel living there when we moved in. The Old Man helped me a lot.
I guess I learned as much as I know about the history of Wilson's Springs from my Uncle Harry Wilson. I stayed with him a lot. Of course Mother knew quite a lot. She got it from my father, I reckon.
Visits to Wilson's Springs The first time I ever came over here to Wilson's Springs to stay was when Uncle Orve was living. I had come over here to spend a week or two. Mother had given me a dollar to spend, and I bought the first soda-pop I'd ever tasted at the store here at the Hotel. You could get a great big glass of soda-pop for a nickel, so I got one every day. I worked for Uncle Orve for some time while I was here cutting wheat. When I went home, I had more money than I had when I came. He paid me for working. I didn't want to take any money. I told him I was just working for my board, but he told me to go on and take the money and not say anything about it.
Four or five of us used to come to Wilson's Springs to spend the day. We stayed mostly up on the Green where the activities were going on; dancing, throwing ten-pins, horsebackriding. One night we started home, and it commenced to pouring down rain. We had on our Sunday clothes. We'd already gotten wet, so I don't know why we didn't go on, but we went into a barn along the road, and slept that night in the barn. We went home sunday morning. You can imagine what my Sunday clothes looked like after I had slept in them after they were wet. Mother put them in the stove and dried them and told me to go to bed to sleep a little bit. She woke me up when it was time to go to the church, and I had to wear those clothes. I know that there never was a person that went to that church with any wrinklier clothes than I had on.
We did most of our travelling by horseback, until I got big enough to work and buy a buggy. First I bought a saddle, and use dthat a lot. In the wintertime we'd get a sled and hook a horse to it. You'd take the wheels off of the buggy and make two runners to set the buggy on.
Miss Sally Dickerson and the buggy ride Uncle Orve was a very quiet man who talked very little. He would sit out there on the porch in a chair and watch the crowd. He didn't mix in with them much. If somebody came over to him he'd talk to them, but he never would go over and get in with the group. They'd have to come to him. He was always good to me though, and seemed to like to have me around. One of the stories he liked was about Miss Sally Dickerson, the schoolteacher that we had boarding with us. She was a great big woman who weighed about 350 pounds. She wanted to come over to Rockbridge Baths, because Uncle Harry Wilson lived over here. He was a member of the school board, and she wanted to see him about the school. I got her in a buggy and was bringing her over here until we got on a hill about three miles from the Baths. The road was awful muddy and when we started up the hill, the old horse was going so slow that I hit him a little with the whip. That made him jump so much that he broke the sailtree on the buggy. The horse just went on through the shafts as far as the lines would let him go. I got him stopped, but I was in a right bad predicament sitting in the middle of the raod with that big, fat woman in the buggy. There wasn't any way that I could fix it, so she said,
"You go on and get on the horse, and ride over to your Uncle Harry's, get a buggy or something and come back and get me."
Uncle Harry let me borrow an old buckboard, that was a kind of springwagon and buggy. I went back to where I'd left Miss Dickeron, but I couldn't get her in the wagon because the old thing didn't have any step up into it, and she was too big to get in herself. I was in about as bad a shape as I was at first. Old Man McCowan lived over there, and he suggested that we get a couple of rails off of the fence. There was a high bank there and we put one rail on the bank and one on the buggy. We got Miss Sally up on the bank and we both pulled. I took one hand and he took the other and we led her across on those rails into the wagon. I hooked the buggy behind the springwagon and pulled it on over and Uncle Harry made a new sailtree for it. Every time I told Uncle Orve that story, he'd get a kick out of it.
Aunt Jenny and the pin in the biscuit Aunt Jenny was full of mouth; she talked all the time. She had a lot of fun about her too, a lot of wit. Uncle Orve didn't have to talk too much as long as he was around her, since she's talk enough for the both of them. She was always good to me though. She knew that Uncle was going to will me the place, and she wasn't too pleased about that.
Uncle Orve would always wait until all the guests had eaten, and then he'd come in and eat. They would save some of the good food for him and whoever he had with him. One day I was eating with him, and I bit down on a biscuit. It had a pin in it. You can imagine how it felt when that pin jabbed me in the mouth. Uncle Orve saw me jump and asked,
"What's the matter?"
I told him that there was a pin in the biscuit, and he called Aunt Jenny over and really gave her a good going over. He thought she'd put the pin in there on purpose, but I'm sure she didn't. It was just an accident. I was about 15 at the time.
The Property Transfer The day that Uncle Orve told me that he was going to give me this place is a day I'll never forget. It was in 1920, and I was over here when he was sick and he asked me if I'd do him a favor. I told him that I'd do it if I could. He said,
"I want you to go into Lexington in the morning and bring Sturart Moore out here. Tell him to come prepared to do some writing."
Aunt Jenny was fanning him at the time, but when he said that, she just dropped her fan and walked off. She wouldn't even look at him. She wanted him to leave the property to her nephew, Page Shoulder. I went into Lexington the next morning. It was an awful, rough day. When I got back to Wilson's Springs with the lawyer, he went in the room where Uncle Orve was and left me sitting on the porch. He stayed in there about an hour and a half, and when he came out he said, "Your Uncle wants to see you." So I went in, and Uncle Orve said,
"I just want to tell you that Mr. Moore just wrote my will, and I am leaving you this farm and property at the death of my wife, but I want you to promise me that you will look after her and see that she's not in need of anything. If she ever is, I want you to help her" I told him that I'd do the best that I could.
"Now I don't want you to tell the other members of the family about this," he said, " I'm leaving the place to you because you're the only one who's ever called my wife 'Aunt' ." I guess the rest of the family felt that the old lady was beneath them, and Uncle Orve remembered that I had treated her with respect. I looked after her for twenty years until her death, fulfilling my promise to my Uncle.
She didn't need much help, though, but about a month before she died, Page came over to where we were living and said they'd run out of money. They had a woman staying with them, and told me that they would let me have the place then if I would give them $300. I gave them the money, and they fixed up the papers, so that I could assume immediate ownership. It turned out that Aunt Jenny only lived thirty days after that. Page and Cora Bee knew that she was going to die, and just wanted some money out of me. They found out that Aunt Jenny had money anyway. She had about $2500 in a trunk in the house.
The sale of the Personal Property After Aunt Jenny died, Page and Cora Bee had a sale and sold all of the personal property. They had already gotten rid of a lot of the furniture that was in the hotel. People had bought it up over the years. The only pieces that we have left are the old piano and an old clock with wooden works. I bought the piano at the lawn sale, and Aunt Jenny gave the the clock. Page carried a lot of it down to their house at the Baths, of course. As far as the old grants are concerned, I knew that they were here because Uncle Orve had showed them to me. And they disappeared at that time, too. They hadn't been sold, but Page said that he didn't know what had happened to them. Also, there was a newspaper with George Washington's obituary in it. It had a black mourning border all around the outside page, and it was bound around those old papers and tied with a string.
After Page died, Cora Bee was cleaning up and sorting out his belongings. She was going to have a sale, and came upon those old papers. Mrs. Parent was helping her, and heard Cora Bee say ,
"I'm going to throw these old things away. I don't think anybody's going to want them." Mrs. Parent took them and looked at them and said,
"Mr. Wilson might want them," to which Cora Bee replied "If he wants them, you can go ahead and give them to him."
So she took them home, called me an said that she had some papers that I might like to have. I went on down there, and as soon as I saw them, I knew what they were; they still had that string tied around them. I opened them up and she said that she'd like to take the newspaper clipping with George Washington's obituary in it and have a copy made. That, of course, was the last I ever saw of it.
Aunt Jenny's leg Aunt Jenny was a big , fat woman and she talked just like a phonograph, she just kept on talking. The rest of the family didn't particularly like her. They claimed that she was right "fast" when she was growing up, that she had a lot of boyfriends. And she didn't come from as good a family. She lived pretty wild, or so they said. She and Uncle Orve married late, so they were too old to have any children. She eventually got gangrene, and probably got it from bad circulation. It looked a lot better than it smelled. They tried to take here to the hospital, but she wouldn't go. They wanted to take the leg off, but she was suspicious of doctors. She always said that when her leg went, she was going to go with it. She'd dress it herself every morning, putting stuff on it to keep down the odor, but one morning she reached down and it wasn't hooked on anymore. It was just lying in the bed with her. She held it up and said,
"Well, I thought that when this went I'd go with it, but it's gone, and I'm still here."
They put it in a shoebox and buried it in the garden. When she died, I made them dig ut up and put it in her grave with her. I didn't want it out there in the garden to "hant" me.
After the funeral, we came up here to the house and had a lawyer read the will. She left most of her property to Page, who was her grand-nephew, and to another nephew, Web Shoulder. Later Page came out to the porch where I was and said, "She didn't leave poor old Dad a thing." I suspect that old man Bill got a pretty good share, though, because he used to hang around here all the time, but Page and Web got most of it. I know that she had $2500 in the Brownsburg Bank, and she kept $2000 in a trunk in the house, but Page came up to me anyway and said that they didn't have any money.
Uncle Orve had had right much money because he left Hugh Adams $1500 and Bethesda Church $1000. He left John McCormick some money, too. John's mother used to stay here and help with the work. She had a boy, and Uncle Orve must have thought it was his because he left him $500. I believe he left Page $500 also, and he said he had plenty of money to pay off all the people that he said he owed money to, which I guess he did. Hugh Adams was my first cousin's son, and he's dead now. I don't know if John McCormick is still living or not. He lived in Covington. Of course Pag e is gone.
He also left Aunt Jenny a lot of money, enough to live on at least, but she didn't spend very much of it. She didn't go anywhere, and she wore the same clothes that she'd worn for years. Page and Cora Bee pretty much ran the place, and old Dr. Scott stayed here and ran the upper end.
Moving into Wilson's Springs We moved here as well as I can remember, on September 7, 1940. I was forty years old. when we arrived, I had a job ahead of me in tearing down most of the old outbuildings that were around the property. There was an identical wing attached to the house that we now live in. I may have started tearing it down before we moved, but I was still tearing down on the day we moved from the Baths. I had a couple of fellows working for me, and had a big Ford truck, and was doing a little bit of everything with it.
Getting moved over here was a right smart job, too. There weren't any fences. I brought some stock with me, so I had to start building fence right away. The CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) people built two miles of fence for me. I had to furnish the wire and the posts, but they did all the work. That was about the time that they were building the road through the Pass. That was one reason that I was glad to get possession of the place, because I could negotiate with the Highway Department in putting the road through. If she had still owned it, she would have had some say in what they were going to do. In the upper end, they first built down to the Green, but finally decided that they'd go ahead and build it through to the Baths. Aunt Jenny's executors were still in possession of the upper end, and I had to share the money with them.
The same thing happened when I sold the right-of-way through here for the power plant. She still had a life interest, and we had to divide the money, but after I got full possession of the place, after I had paid that $300, I didn't have to divide it with anybody anymore. I had to get over here and get to work to for thirty days, anyway, so I didn't really lose anything by paying the $300.
The Condition of the Property
The property was in bad shape when we moved here. I wish I had taken some pictures, because all the old out-buildings were pretty well dilapidated. They had had shingle roofs on a lot of them, and they were old and leaking. I spent a lot of money getting it so that I could live, putting roofs on, putting up fence and so on. The fields were nothing but brush heaps. They hadn't done anything to the house or property for twenty years. I guess they figured they weren't going to get the place, so they didn't have to take care of it. All they wanted to do was get what they could out of it. They'd rent out a little peice of it now and then, but they'd just plow it up. Old man Bill Shoulder, Page's daddy, would work it, but then he'd just go off and leave it. They wouldn't put any grass on it or anything so it would just grow up in weeds.
There were old filthy curtains hanging everywhere when we moved in. That was one of the first things that we did was burn those old curtains. We had a girl that came over and helped us. The floors had floor oil all over them, and there were matts on top of matts and we had to shovel those up because they were rotted. I made some minor alterations to the house when we moved here. When the ballroom was built, the two wings weren't hooked together. There was an open space between them called a "dog-run". When they tied them together, they built a porch that came back the width of the house. That porch ended where the downstairs bathroom is now. It used to be the entrance to the hall, and you can still see the door there in the bathroom even though it is closed off. There was another little room in back of the middle part. It was a kind of a "plunder room', a place to store everything. I had to tear that off. There was another old kitchen hood on to the back of the house, about where my woodhouse is now, and there were two more little shacks beside "Jim's cabin", where people lived in the summer who helped here.
The old springhouse was two stories, and the springbox was on the first story. That was where they kept their meat, milk or whatever they wanted to keep cool. Then there was a washhouse right out form that where the guests could go and wash. They had an outside toilet right in back of that. It was a five-holer, and was positioned right over the spring branch. Joe Woods said that people used to come along the road down there and get water out of that same spring branch. They used to say it was the best water that they'd ever tasted.
That old springhouse had a loom that they used to weave cloth on. I, like a fool, tore it up and burnt it. That thing would have filled a large room, it was a great, big thing. They used to make all of their own cloth; raised the flax right here to make something called "linsey cloth". I don't see how you ever wore it though. That stuff would just scratch you to death. They used to keep whiskey and brandy in the upper story over the springhouse, and they'd sell it out by the gallon and by the quart. There was a sliding door where they would write the customer's name on it and recod how much they had bought. A quart of apple brandy went for 25 cents, and a gallon would cost you about a dollar. I laid that old door out, and was going to keep it as a relic, but it got away from me, and I don't know what happened to it. There were a lot of things I would have liked to have kept, but I was just swamped with work to do. Everything just piled up, and there was enough to do to just get the old place so that I could make a living off of it. I didn't have any money to live on, and had to make a living as well as get the place back in order.
I got a little money out of the Highway Department when they came to put the road through the Pass. I also got a little from the power company when they put the power line through, but that was just a few hundred dollars. I sold a whole lot of pulpwood. I did just about anythig to get a few dollars to keep things going. I didn't begin to get in a position where I had a little money ahead until about 1950. Then I began to accumulate a little, and was able to do some things that I hadn't been able to do up until that time. Carrie was teaching, and that was a big help. She had her own money, so I didn't have to give her any. She could buy her own clothes. I guess it was just get along some way, so we kept going.
