Downtown.wpd                                                                                           

In my childhood, in the last half of the 1930's and the early 1940's, it was miles from Howardsville to the nearest hard-surfaced road. There were no public electric lines, and a single telephone "party line" served the area for miles around.

When I walked off the steel truss Buckingham bridge into Howardsville, to get groceries to carry home, a mile and a half, uphill most of the way, or to watch the trains arrive or depart, or to listen to old men hunkered down in front of the stores and post office, the first thing I'd see would be a single light bulb dangling on a wire across the dusty [or muddy] road between two stores.

That was the village street light. It was powered by batteries.

Then I'd be in front of the Irving store, the heart of "downtown" Howardsville. There had probably been a store on that site since settlers founded the village in the mid-1700's. The building there then dated well back into the 19th century.

Besides the Irving store (operated by others under lease), Howardsville at that time had three other general stores -- jovial Charles A. Baber's, snippish Miss Rosa Gibbs' and one run by ancient Edgar Cobbs on the ground floor of his home.

The only electricity was a Delco system, batteries recharged by a gasoline engine, at Baber's store and sawmill across the street. That store was in a service station built in 1928, probably the newest building in the village not only in my childhood, but until the mid-1960's when Baber built a new store, nearby.

That short-lived store was on the site of a crumbling shed used in my childhood by a circuit-riding blacksmith.

In 1969, a record-breaking flood washed Baber's "new" store and several other buildings away and made as many more permanently uninhabitable, though some still stand.

The Babers built again, this time out of the flood plain, on the road across from where the depot had been. In 1972, river waters inflated by tropical storm Agnes lapped even that high -- above the 1969 flood-line. The James rose again on Election Day 1985. The watershed was absorbing less water as paved roads and roofed house sites multiplied. (Baber's new store and Howardsville Post Office at right.)

Flanking Howardsville "main street" on the approach from the south to the railroad tracks, in my childhood, were two large buildings which in mid-19th century canal days had been "hotels" known, respectively, from the names of the families which owned them, as "The Bugg House" and "The Bragg House." At left Kate Logan Bruns, my grandmother, at the Bugg House.

The one on the west side was Gibbs' store and the one on the east the home of Tom Goolsby's musical family. School-mates from that home were Myrtle and two younger sisters, and Dewey, who'd recite, on call, "The Cremation of Sam McGee."

The post office was moved from the Gibbs store to the Irving store after Roosevelt defeated Hoover in 1932. I was only five then, but I can recall my father, a Democrat, talking to John W. Gibbs, Republican postmaster, about the election.

Across the tracks from the Goolsbys was the depot, a warm spot to wait for the school bus to Scottsville (after we finished the six grades that were offered at Howardsville).

Flanking the Irving store were the Charles Morris house, once the Irvings' home, and a small "office" used as a library and in summer for years as the office of Dr. Margaret Nolting.

[Mrs. Morris hid in a closet in that house as rescuers, lowered to the roof by a helicopter, searched for her while the '69 flood-waters were still high. She heard them, but "I was afraid," she told those who came in a rowboat later.

[She told a reporter that she peeked out the door and saw what she thought might be "aliens from another planet."]

The only other residence south of the tracks was a tall gray building near the bridge, occupied by the Jim and Molly[?] Baber family. My schoolmate from there was Nancy, whom we called "Hanks, a formidable tomboy.

This was not the storekeeper's family -- they lived on a farm in Buckingham with a fine mill pond where my father once took me to fish from a rowboat.

The only other buildings of any kind south of the tracks were an abandoned brick structure near Gibbs store which was sometimes used for dances, rummage sales, etc., and a tiny filling station near the Irving store run in my childhood by Lee Gunter, Mrs. Goolsby's brother. He later operated the gas station at the Tarleton Oak, in Charlottesville].

Across the tracks, to the north, the predominantly residential area began. Other buildings were homes, except the church and the Masonic Hall, side by side, on a hill near the lane to the school.

Most of this part of the village was in the hollow of a creek draining Mt. Alto, a high ridge around the end of which the Rockfish flowed in a great bend.

Across the road to Nelson County (and the tracks) from Gibbs' store were the Bell and Cobbs houses. Mrs. Cobbs had been one of the early women telegraphers [hired by the railroad during World War I?]. Across from them were the Cooley (Carro) and Clyde Brown (Margaret and Hugh) homes.

Facing the depot across the Scottsville road was the Giles house, on the foundation of what once had been a "tobacco factory (shipping warehouse)." Charlie Giles rode the mail train to Washington, and after his wife Zenovia died, brought home a new wife from the District of Columbia.

Near the entrance road to "West Cote," a mansion on a hilltop, was a brick home which had been a bank, one of the first four in Albemarle.

Beyond that were some farm buildings and the hillside, double-veranda home of Jesse Morris, who served on the railroad maintenance-of-way crew, spending icy nights with a blowtorch making sure railroad switches didn't freeze.

After Jesse retired, he moved his neatly built switch-duty hut to his front yard. Those assigned to this duty who had no such hut sought shelter from the weather in some nearby culvert. Jesse's house, below, later renovated, was advertised (in the 1980's) in the Historic Preservation magazine. He was the only black resident of the village, but there were lots of blacks around in the daytime, many bringing pulpwood to ship to the West Va. Pulp and Paper Co. at Covington, Va.

Close beside the church is the Masonic Hall, and behind that is the Fenwick home (Eva Helen, whose father, Hunter, was rural mail carrier and Democratic precinct chairman). The Masons, mostly railroad men, moved the George Lodge from Warminster long ago as that community continued to dwindle.

Up the road toward Schuyler, but still in Howardsville, was the Peters home (Margaret) Elderly Sam Peters, hired as an "extra" to sit on the depot platform during the 1940 movie shoot in Howardsville (it was a familiar sitting place to him), was abrupt with pals who teased him -- "I'm a movie actor, now," he said. He had been farm manager of Algoma, my great-grandfather's place, in the years around World War I.

Farther up the Howardsville Turnpike is the Mt. Alto community, described in an accompanying article on this website.

Toward Scottsville, the first home was that of the Watsons, a black family. Stanley had to catch his own ride to the four-room frame high school at Esmont, and we waved to him as we passed (on the way to much-larger, brick Scottsville High) from our bus.

Ironically, our bus was driven by Stanley's brother Ted (war manpower shortages allowed this in our segregated world).

Even we had few options beyond 16 basic credits until war-aware educators added physics, advanced math and such. Before, options were Latin (two years) and choices between science and agriculture or home economics.

Farther along that road were the Hancocks (I think Charley Clements' family were tenant farmers there). Past the road to Billy Ramsey's home on the Mt. Alto ridge, was Miss Monie Gilmer's "Llnarth." (I walked there regularly from "Dungannon" while our cow was dry, carrying a half gallon jar of milk. It was a crow's quick flight from Dungannon across the river, but several miles around by the bridge at Howardsville.

Across from the Hancocks (later Tip Omohundro's) was "Green Hill," now "Tanbark," my first grade home the year we rented it.

Way down the road toward Scottsville, but not actually in Warren, was one-room "Warren School," where my brother Scott went for a year after Howardsville School was closed. He met our second cousin Scott Morrill there. [I didn't meet him until 1998, at a family gathering marking the 100^th birthday of construction of Dungannon.]

[Scott and my sister, Mary Katherine, who is 12 years younger than I am, walked to Beesville School, in Buckingham, for a year or two after a flood in the 1940's washed out the bridge. My mother's friend Lois Main, a descendant of the Bookers of Montrose, which burned in a late 1920s forest fire, was their teacher.]

The only "suburban" part of Howardsville (besides "Monticola") was the Burgess home on the Nelson County side of the River. No other Albemarle homes were in sight of Howardsville, and homes in Buckingham (Miss Sally Brady's "Beechwood" was closest) weren't considered to be in the village.

The Manchester house "Weyanoke," on the hill north of the Buckingham Road, was then the home of John Gibbs, whose sister, "Miss Rosa," ran their store. It was built by John Alexander, a lawyer associated with Gen. T.M. Logan, from dark red sandstone -- the same kind used to build "Dungannon," my grandmother's summer home.

I went to school from a small frame house a couple of hundred yards from the main house at "Dungannon. The nearby Scott home predates "Dungannon," which includes Scott land, once Irving land.

I didn't know much about the Scotts, who were from the family that founded Scott's Ferry, later Scottsville, the first county seat for Albemarle.

No one spent the winter there then, but two elderly ladies from Richmond summered there. A paper-bound book on old Buckingham homes, "The Courthouse Burned" (1977), says the place was once called "Retreat." It was not among that book's many fine illustrations by Dr. Margaret Pennington.

That house burned and Miss Mary Regina Scott, who lives there now, revived the old name, "Monmouth," for her bungalow. Both Miss Sally Brady's place and the Manchester place had been part of the Scott holdings until given to relatives or descendants.

That Scott family shares with Logan descendants descent from William Cox, who arrived in Jamestown in 1610. A member of the family that established Scott's Ferry married a descendant of the original Charles Irving, who came to Howardsville as a trade representative of a firm in Scotland, a few years before the American Revolution.

Another Scott family, at "Donegal," Warren, were family friends from when my great-grandfather bought land for a "summer place" in Buckingham about 1880. The families had known each other in Richmond, as had the Noltings and the Bufords, who also established summer homes along our part of the James once a railroad was built on the old canal towpath.

The Donegal Scotts descended from one of four brothers who came from Ireland just before the Civil War. The other three joined the Union Army but Frederic Robert Scott became a Confederate and after the war went to work in Petersburg and married his boss's daughter, a Miss Branch. He bought a Nicholas home and renamed it.

Lois (Averill) Main, who taught at Beesville School, in Buckingham, was married to the son of the Ohio family that had bought the Logan farm, "Algoma," about the time of World War I. Robert Main built a house on the nearby site of Montrose, the burned home of the Bookers, Lois' grandparents.

Since-fallen chimneys then marked another burned home of a long-departed family, the McCullochs,' downstream from "Algoma."

They moved to Buckingham from Fort Wayne, Indiana, soon after the Civil War. Some time after World War they moved to Lexington, Va. The house burned in the same forest fire in the 1920's that burned Montrose, I think.

Beesville School was across the road. It's now all scrub woods. [My brother Scott, seeking the site of Beesville school in the 1990's, was told it was at the curve where the McCulloch place had been. The chimneys were gone, and there was no clue a house had ever been there, but it was still considered a "landmark."

The road to the Snoddys left the "main road" there. Beyond was the turnoff for the road to Warren. One of the Snoddys owned "Algoma" when it burned in the 1980's. It was about 100 years old.

The Snoddys lived in the area of the home of the first of the Anderson family to move to Buckingham, not long after the founding of Howardsville.

Earl Norris was "foreman" for John Gibbs, Lightfoot Ragland was tenant farmer for the Scotts, Harry Bryant for the Irvings, and "Dungannon" had a series during the 1930's: DeWitt, Moon, Willie Stinson. I don't recall who farmed for Miss Sally Brady.

Willie Stinson's son Lacey joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and he himself left for construction work when Hercules Powder built a plant at Radford. A day's pay in Buckingham was $1 -- in Radford it was $5. Joseph Stinson had been farm manager at Algoma at the end of the 19^th century.

Charlie Dillard, from Chestnut Grove, a primarily African American community near Esmont, did farm labor for us as World War II began, and his sister, Estelle, did the housework.

Rt. 602 wound up the Buckingham hill past the "Dungannon" and Crews entrances. Just beyond the Irving's entrance ("Selma") lived the Adcocks. The road went through Axtell [formerly Jonesborough] and Glenmore, past the onetime site of the community of Camm, toward Buckingham Courthouse (formerly Maysville).

"Selma," originally 4,500 acres, once included Miss Sally Brady's place, the Scott place and, presumably, "Dungannon" and "Algoma." Ballowe's Creek, the upstream boundary, was named for an owner who sold it to early settler Matthew Jordan of Locust Hill. The first Charles Irving married Jordan's daughter and his descendants eventually built the first of a series of homes named Selma.

Glenmore

The tiny Episcopal church at Glenmore, some miles into Buckingham, is where I was confirmed. It didn't really take. My Presbyterian wife, former Daily Progress reporter Nancy Talmont, is in charge of my spiritual fate. She is a member of Hartwood Presbyterian Church, in rural Stafford County.

Gen. Logan's daughters -- my grandmother Kate Bruns and her sisters, Lena (Mrs. Douglas) Forsyth and Lily (Mrs. Albert) Morrill -- returned there every summer for the food-laden "Homecoming."

Axtell was the home of Ruth Jones, who worked for us at "Dungannon," and her son James, who was one of my earliest playmates.

Ruth's younger sister, Frances Amos [Jackson], who went with us to Charlottesville as live-in maid and Scott's "nurse" at the end of the 1930's, went to New York for a career as a social worker. She retired to Buckingham County, where Scott and I visited, seeing her for the first time in about 60 years.

Howardsville School

Howardsville school, a four-room structure which had once had nine grades, was in a field near the Peters home. There was a coal-house and two outhouses, and plenty of field space to play.

The road up the hill that begins at the foot of the long steps to the church should be named "Schoolhouse Road." It now has a sign: "Howardsville Lane."

Not only was the one-teacher operation I attended on a shelf of that hill, below "Monticola," but an older school where my father taught in 1916 was halfway up that hill on the down-slope side. That road may have been an old approach to "Monticola," and originally went above the river bluff to join the present Rt. 602 at Rockhouse Creek.

Dad told me that Obadiah A. Trice (still station agent in my childhood) complained to the School Board when he freed the students to skate on the river during one of its regular freezes.

When I went to Howardsville (first, fifth and sixth grades) it was a one-teacher school. My fifth and sixth grade teacher was Miss Frances Steed, 19 (I think), whose father had a department store in Esmont.

My first-grade teacher at Howardsville was the former Louise Proffitt, wife of Jimmy Cobbs, who was much later an Albemarle deputy sheriff. I was the only pupil in the first grade. She wrote the word "moon" on the blackboard and asked me what it was. I decided reading wasn't something I was ever going to learn to do.

Jimmy's brother Fred (they had been students of my father's in his single year as a teacher, 1916) was an expert on catfish. He had been a talented clerk at the railroad engine-changing yard at Gladstone, at Bent Creek, well upstream from Howardsville. But events led to his retirement, and he used his mathematical skills only to do taxes for his neighbors.

My father was fond of Fred, and they shared a fondness for alcohol. I recall Dad having Fred, in his fishing clothes, as I remember it, at "Dungannon" for a drink in my grandmother's Victorian living room.

Years later, I chuckled again, at my first meeting with Allan Beattie, who bought and magnificently preserved "Dungannon" and all its outbuildings. That Victorian living room was then filled with Beattie, the sculptor's, miniature nude and seminude statuettes.

When I was the sole first-grader at Howardsville school, I walked, on the Albemarle side, from "Green Hill," where we lived that year. At my height then, the snow seemed very deep.

I recall rounding the final curve and seeing the depot (orange, in the mid-1930's, gray later) knowing that I soon would be warm. But it was still quite a walk up the hill to the school.

On our return from three years in Charlottesville, classmates (when I was in the fifth and sixth grades) included Evelyn and Billy Giannini and Margaret Trice, whose home was downhill on "Mt. Alto" from the Gianninis and whose father presided at the depot. Margaret led the girls' gang that "ran" our school when I was in the fifth grade.

(In Charlottesville, I attended Venable in second and third grades, but since we lived near Fry's Spring, outside the old city limits, I had to go to newly opened McIntire School, in fourth grade.)

Hand-me-down clothes were common, but when I showed up at Howardsville School wearing a cousin's cast-off riding britches, I was teased unmercifully.

Classmates also included Marjorie Baber (the store-keeper's daughter) who married Wilbur Crews. They had several sons, including Jimmy, who is moving into the Bryant house, "Grace Farm," near the entrance to "Selma." Wilbur, his brother John and several sisters, grew up on the farm next to ours. The house there, built about 1790 by the Scott family, had been named "Restalrig" while owned by the Logan family.

The present owner has cut some of the trees that rimmed her house site, revealing a magnificent view from the highest house site in the area. 

Marjorie's brother, Robert, ran the family's third store in Howardsville for many years after I left, and more than once saved lives by warning of flood waters which rose in the night.

The Bryant brothers, Kenneth and Clifford, like me, walked from Buckingham because Howardsville School was closer than Buckingham's Beesville School, several miles back in the woods. At that time they lived on the Irving farm in a house that had been moved from Howardsville as a "dormitory" for the Irving sons.

And Willie Amos, who at 15 was in the second grade and had a can in his desk to spit illicit chewing tobacco (but Willie got a nickel a day for coming early to start the coal-stove fire).

The steel truss bridge which washed out in 1969 had been built between 1905 and 1907, although some of the four spans had been replaced after 1940s floods which required temporary ferries.

I climbed a girder to the highest point on that old bridge while walking to school with Kenneth Bryant. There before me was a nest with baby birds. Hooking my arm around the girder, I got them down, and proudly showed them at school.

Our young teacher, horrified, sent Kenneth back with the birds. Carrying them up that girder would have been very difficult. "Throw them in the river?" I asked later. "Yep," he said.

Twice I fell victim to "easy credit." In the first grade, a storekeeper extended me credit for my favorite after-school snack, a 10-cent miniature lemon pie. My parents quickly stopped this.

In the fifth or sixth grade, another storekeeper allowed me to charge after-school snacks. This time, my $5 birthday check from my grandfather was confiscated to pay the bill. I have been careful about money ever since.

Although the coldest I have ever been was walking to school across the James River bridge in a high wind at midwinter, I always recall Howardsville as hot.

Many a summer day I was there, barefoot and straw-hatted, particularly in 1940 when scenes for the Fred MacMurray-Madeleine Carroll movie,   Virginia, were shot in or near Howardsville.

I watched the depot scenes from high in a big magnolia in front of the Goolsby's, and I spent plenty of time at "Monticola" that summer. The sweeping front lawn (a pasture) where a crane camera followed MacMurray's truck up the long winding driveway.

I encountered Sterling Hayden (this was one of his earliest films) on a gravel road near "Monticola." He kicked a small rock toward me. I kicked it back at him. He was wearing riding boots. I was barefoot.

"Monticola" was occupied in my childhood by elderly Miss Emily Nolting. She allowed the movie to be shot there in 1940, but used her advance money to spruce the place up. Hollywood had to "un-spruce" it to get the effect that had led them to select it.

Some other scenes for this movie were shot around Farmington Country Club, near Charlottesville, and elsewhere in Albemarle.

After the "movie people" left, we had a flood (1940) which washed out two spans of the James River bridge.

We had no theater in Howardsville. To see a movie, we went to the Victory Theatre in Scottsville, or to Charlottesville. I did see one movie in Howardsville. It was shown outside, from a projector on a truck. Another traveling show, with a tent and seats, did "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" -- with live actors.

[The last time I saw the title "Virginia" in a TV listing, I stayed up to see it -- It was about a woman named "Virginia."]

When I lived in Charlottesville, I could always tell if a person were a fisherman or a hunter by asking if they knew Howardsville (30 miles away). It's not on the way to anywhere.

Subsequently, new landowners posted their properties against turkey and deer hunting, angering my pal Kenneth Bryant, whose depot office wall was covered with turkey beards.

History

I don't know much of Howardsville's real history. We kids were told that there were 13 saloons and a saddle factory before Gen. Sheridan burned his way down the James River.

Allen Howard, for whom it was named, came up the river about 1730 and patented land at the junction of the Rockfish. Howard, who died in 1761, began building his "great house" in the 1740's, according to John Hammond Moore's History of Albemarle (1976/86)

This house was probably on the site of "West Cote," but was probably frame instead of brick. It was called "Summer Hill" in my childhood, a name bestowed by the Blair family, which bought it in the 1890's and owned it until after World War II.

The late Virginia Moore, in her 1969 book, "Scottsville on the James," wrote that Howardsville was founded by Howard's family. Flatboat travel from Howardsville to Richmond began in his time.

Eventually, a "Howardsville Turnpike" to the Shenandoah Valley through Rockfish Gap, meant goods from the valley could be hauled to the James and sent by flatboat to the state capital.

"Summer Hill" (now "West Cote" again) was the home of an old Mr. Blair when I was a child. He would walk to the post office with a large walking stick, wearing a genuine pith helmet.

After he died, his daughter, Janie Whitworth, gave me that hat. Her attractive [to we somewhat older males] daughter, Betsy, was the age of my younger brother, Scott, when I was in the fifth grade.

The present house at "Monticola," the other Howardsville "mansion," was built before the Civil War by a Dr. Hartsook, who sold it to the Nolting family, of Richmond, in 1887. A much older, Revolutionary era, house was nearby, but was demolished.

When my great-grandfather, Gen. T.M. Logan, rented "Monticola" while building "Algoma," on the Buckingham side of the James, in the early 1880's, it was still known as "The Hartsook Place." The builder moved to Richmond due his insurance business. It is possible to see the "Algoma" site, several miles away and on the other side of the river, from "Monticola."

There was an aged Mr. Hartsook around when I was a child. He was a contemporary of the Mr. Lewis who lived at A Avon Hill,@ on a Nelson County hill across the river from "Selma." Mr. Lewis was a dead-ringer for actor Frank Morgan, who played the wizard in "Oz."

He, and sometimes his wife, would ride their horses into Howardsville in the days just before World War II. Mr. Lewis' daughter built a summer home nearby, and the pretty little grand-daughter used to visit -- but she, also, was a contemporary of my younger (by 5 2 years) brother Scott.

Hartsook, Lewis and old Mr. Bell (whom my father addressed as "Mayor" of Howardsville) were the heart of the group that sat or "hunkered down" in front of Baber's store. I studied them as they intently watched a Southern bread company agent skillfully spell out the company logo in salt on the clay in front of the store.

As the Great Depression continued, until the job-creating gear-up for World War II, there were enough young men around to play baseball on a regular basis. They played behind the Irving store. The 1890's "Algoma Logbook" refers to regular baseball games between Howardsville and nearby communities.

One of those young men was the late Billy Goodman, who had to jump from his creekside home in Howardsville [old Cobbs' store] when flood waters roared into it in 1969.

Our life then, in the late 1930's and early 1940s, was strictly governed by the railroad. The morning paper came from Lynchburg because that's where the early morning train came from. The arrival and quick departure of the 9 p.m. train from Richmond closed the village for the night. One train each way passed about midday. You could commute to Richmond for a day -- a very long day.

The Party Line

Miss Edith Taggart was telephone "central." She lived in the telephone office building, in Scottsville, and could tell you where the doctor was and who was away from home for any extended period. She could also tell you, usually, where nearly anybody was.

But from Boiling Spring through Howardsville to the portion of Buckingham that centered on Howardsville, we had a single party line (three longs and a short, for us, on the hand crank on the side of the wall-mounted phone).

Thirty families was usually the maximum for a party line, but a lot of people in the community didn't have telephones (many didn't have indoor toilets, etc.).

In spite of the warning relayed to my mother, who was not home when the phone man came by, "Absolutely no ear (eaves)-dropping," the phone might as well have been an open line.

After a couple of partying Howardsvillians in a truck ran off the road into Ballenger's Creek at Boiling Spring (where Rt. 626 crossed the Nelson and Albemarle Railway), the party line phone -- which ended at the elder Gibbs' home at Boiling Spring -- was full of "bulletins."

"Hal's all right."..." Hal [Lewis] then asked where Earl [Norris] was ...."They're looking around in the water."...."They found Earl. He had DROWNED!!!" Everybody was on the line. Who needs radio?

The Rockfish River was a frequent flooder. Howardsvillians salvaged canned food after a flood during my childhood emptied Alberene Stone's Schuyler commissary. Buckingham low-grounds were frequently flooded, blocking the long approach to the bridge.

A 1942 flood washed out the railway bridge over the Rockfish at Howardsville, which had used the big stone supports originally designed to carry the pre-Civil War canal over that little river.

A 1944 flood demolished a large part of Schuyler, and iron from there was found downstream at Howardsville, according to Garth G. Groff's paper-bound "Soapstone Shortlines" (1991), a complete history of soapstone mining and the Nelson and Albemarle and preceding rail lines. I think that flood cost some spans.

The night of August 19, 1969, rains of tropical proportions sent houses in Nelson County sliding off hillsides turned to jelly in the wake of Hurricane Camille. House parts, big trees, and bodies came down the Rockfish to Howardsville.

Debris dammed the little river at the railroad and road bridges, and the wreckage was diverted along the tracks to gouge away buildings in its path --including the abandoned brick "dance hall," the Bugg and Bragg houses and the depot.

Swift moving water damaged almost every other building in town, though a few were rehabilitated and a very few were high enough on hillsides to escape. The "downtown" -- the part of the village between the tracks and the river -- died that night. It had survived many a flood but after 1969  - and an even higher flood in 1972 - no one wanted to build there.

More than 125 persons died in Nelson County that night, including some who were driving through on U.S. 29 and were buried in mud or swept away by streams flowing into the James. Entire families died when their homes slid off hillsides into raging water.

The Irving store and the adjacent Charles Morris house were still standing when the waters calmed, though the raised first floors of both were flooded. Two smaller adjacent buildings didn't fare as well.

That tall gray house near the confluence of the Rockfish and the James also stood after the 1969 flood, and for years there-after. No one tried to use these buildings after a second flood, in 1972, knocked some of them off their stilts. The tall gray building was eventually moved to a site near Charlottesville.

The worst of the debris had been diverted along the railroad tracks, instead of coming down the final stretch of the Rockfish.

On the north side of the tracks, the Giles home across from the depot survived after damage. Standing after the flood but too badly damaged to be used were the Bell house and the Cobb house (and store). One of the Bells, Leslie, was engineer of a train blocked at Scottsville in 1969 by the volume of water flowing down hillsides.

Above the high river waters were the Brown house and the Cooley house, on a bank above the road, but a lot of damaging water came down the steep hillside behind them.

The brick home where the road curves near the "West Cote" entrance, once a bank, was mostly under fast-moving water but, unlike nearby wooden homes, could be rehabilitated.

The foreman of the railroad maintenance crew, John Hurt (whose son, Vernard, used to take the mail from the train to the post office and vice versa, and was local salesman for the publication "Grit"), lived on a low spot across the road from the church. A strong creek flow claimed that house in 1969.

Robert Lewis Baber, storekeeper Charles A. Baber's nephew, was elsewhere in Virginia that night, but heard about the sudden tropical rainfall, and telephoned Howardsville to see what was happening. Jesse Morris' wife, whose home was high on a hillside, told him that most of the town had been swept away ["was just swup away"].

Warminster and Warren

Half a dozen miles upstream on the James, final remnants of the village of Warminster washed away. Half a dozen miles downstream, a lot of what was left of "downtown" Warren disappeared. Whitted's store, by then used only as a dwelling, survived the floods but burned later.

At Warren, the old brick mill and homes on high ground survived, and there are many new homes there today. At Warminster, from the road leading to the river, you see no buildings at all.

A new James River bridge was built upstream from Howardsville, on the Nelson County side of the Rockfish, after the 1969 flood. The old site is now a "beach" with a boat ramp.

When the big island in the James at Howardsville washed away in 1969, I recalled my father saying that when he was young it was just larger than a wheelbarrow. By my time, large trees covered it.

And it is growing back again [2007], but slowly.

In an earlier bridge washout, Walker Adcock was one of those who poled the temporary ferry. Walker once bravely walked through flood waters toward the bridge -- and disappeared into the water where a hunk of road had been washed out. Another ferryman was an elderly black man with whom I argued whether Joshua actually made the sun stand still. I quoted my newly learned Copernicus, but he stuck with his belief.

I knew little of adult relationships in Howardsville, but I knew most of the players, some gruff, most friendly. After I dropped out of high school for a year to learn telegraphy and work on the C&O, I lost touch. I rode the bus from Howardsville my final 2 years of high school, but worked summers and some holidays and didn't spend much time in the village.

When I finished high school (1946), we left. My mother and three (younger) siblings moved to New Orleans, where both my parents grew up. I went back to the first of two more summers of railroad work and two years at the University of Virginia. The suitcase I had bought from Clifford Bryant was my "home."

O.A. Trice was one of the gruff ones, but he was very kind while I was working for the railroad -- relaying messages to and from my mother, assuring her that I hadn't caused any accidents, handling the boxes of dirty clothes I sent her and clean ones she sent me (free, by rail). My meager fee for this laundry allowed her to expand her collection of Modern Library reprints of classics).

Helen McLean, Hunter Fenwick's sister, was long the postmistress. Grady Fenwick was postmaster later. Another sister was Mrs. Giannini, who worked in the post office.

A relative of theirs, Frank Wells, built us a kitchen table from the cypress floorboards of one of my grand-father's water-catching cisterns. It has spent much of its 50-plus years' existence in dining rooms, admired as an "antique."

In our small community it seemed to me, there were four white "social classes" -- groupings based on marriages, church affiliation, whether you were a credit risk, etc. -- and three black ones, within a population of fewer than 200 persons who relied on our village stores.

[I later discovered that most of the residents of the village itself broke down into two families -- a railroad family and a post office family -- and that even these were at least distantly connected by marriages.]

In establishing a ranking in pre-World War II Virginia, land ownership seemed to be an important starting point.

A farmer whose place was near ours, who was shocked at finding me reading "The Reader's Digest" while milking, wanted his daughter to stay away from my friend, the son of a tenant farmer whose wife had taught school. My friend's family didn't own land.

I've since been told the land-owning farmer couldn't read or write.

After land ownership came what church you claimed. As elsewhere in Old Virginia, the "whiskey-palians" seemed to feel that God created Virginia for them. (The confluence of the Rockfish and the James was the junction of Virginia's three Episcopal dioceses, incidentally, but there was no Episcopal church at Howardsville.]

There were Baptist churches around, but the only Presbyterian church I recall was at Scottsville. Howardsville's Methodist church was the only one there, but it had been used frequently by other denominations. Glenmore was the closest Episcopal church.

Usually, in Virginia, length of family residence in the area is a major criterion. There were some surviving "old families" in this area, but there were lots of "summer people" -- mostly from Richmond -- whose descendants stayed or returned for generations.

The summer people began buying the cheap land and old homes when Howardsville was suddenly within commuting distance of Richmond, after the Richmond and Alleghany Railroad was built along the James on the towpath of the canal after the 1877 washout.

Queen of the black community in our part of Buckingham County was Jo ("Josie") Rose, who had grown up knowing the wives (when they were girls) of many of the major landowners, and was in demand as director of social events revolving around food.

Her brother was a Philadelphia policemen. There was a large outflow of both blacks and whites from Virginia in search of better economic opportunities, while even then persons from elsewhere were buying homes and land in Virginia as a premium place to live.

The Irvings

Captain Joseph K. Irving received his title from his days as an adolescent canal boat captain. There were captains in Scottsville, also, who earned their titles that way. After the canal washed out in 1877, Irving operated a store in Howardsville, as had his emigrant ancestor from Scotland.

I think the Irvings first lived in the house closest to the river, where Charlie Morris lived when I was young. They built the present "Selma," upstream on the Buckingham side, in the 1880's, after an original Irving house by that name burned. The first Irving came from Scotland before the American Revolution. On the wall at "Selma" was a framed canal boat bill of lading.

["Selma" is owned by my first cousin, H.D. (Harry) Bruns (II), named for our grandfather, Dr. Henry Dickson Bruns of New Orleans, who married Kate Logan and built "Dungannon" in 1898 as a summer home. It was sold in 1949 to cover my grandmother's final medical expenses. Allan Beattie bought it in 1953 and moved there much later.]

John Irving, a lawyer, one of three sons of Capt. Irving, had retired from active practice by the time of my childhood. He lived with his mother and his daily trips to Howardsville for the mail and conversation meant he was a good bet for a ride up the long Buckingham hill toward home.

Miss Courtney Irving, a nurse and John's only sister, was a lifelong friend and co-worker of Dr. Margaret Nolting of the Richmond family that owned and summered at "Monticola."

Dr. Nolting owned a cabin on a cliff high above a horseshoe bend in the Rockfish River. The gate is near the Giannini home, on the ridge of Mt. Alto on the road from Howardsville to Schuyler.

I thought it'd be the most magnificent place in the world to live.

These two women lived and worked in Richmond, but their office during long summer vacations was in the little building beside the Irving store. It had once been, before my time, a library.

Capt. Irving married Ida Turner, whose family lived deeper into Buckingham County. On the next ridge from "Selma," when I was a child, was an abandoned house (since burned) that had been the home of Miss Bell Irving (his sister?).

In my childhood, Mrs. Irving and her housekeeper, Lucy Chambers, were the white and black arbiters of women's behavior in the area. Lucy seemed more popular than the stern matriarch.

Besides John and Miss Courtney, the Irving children were Joe, editor first of The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, and later of the newspaper in Lynchburg (My memory of him is slight), and Charles, who served in France in World War I and was a C&O doctor.

Charles married Julia Bentley, a grand-daughter of one of Gen. Logan's older brothers. [Gen. Logan was the 10th child in a family that grew up at "Dungannon" plantation, south of Charleston, SC. He came to Virginia with the Hampton Legion in 1861, married Kate Virginia Cox of "Clover Hill," Chesterfield County, and engaged in railroad finance in Richmond for many years.]

Charles Irving was a lifelong best friend both of my father (John D. Bruns) and Harry's father (T.M. Logan Bruns). Uncle Logan visited him often at his Fluvanna County home, which burned in the 1960's, and they continued that generation's favorite activity, hunting. He and Dad played monthly at the Green Mountain Poker Club.

I was the family disgrace when it came to hunting and fishing: I didn't care for either. Dad and Uncle Logan had made many friends in their youth through hunting.

One Christmas Eve I went with Dad when he was duck-hunting. He shot a duck which fell into the James River. We walked downstream endlessly until it finally drifted within reach of the bank. We got home to find an angry mother. She'd put up a huge Xmas tree, alone.

I loved to walk, and walked to Scottsville both by road (15 miles) and by railroad (12 miles), and to Esmont by both. I walked to Warren through Buckingham often while learning telegraphy, and all of Rt. 20 and Rt. 626 between Howardsville and Charlottesville.

The river view I remember best is looking upstream between the wooded bluffs from a hill above the river on "Dungannon."

I learned about Pearl Harbor when my parents returned from a Sunday visit with friends who had a radio. I learned of Roosevelt's death when my mother called me to the house.

By then we had a radio (battery at first)! Electricity had come. Paved roads came just before and during World War II.

My mother hired Clifford Bryant to cut some stove wood along the right-of-way cleared for the new electric line. His father came along, and cut a tall pine which fell against the wire. Mr. Bryant chopped into it -- and jumped back as the current, coming through the sap, shocked him. He left the ax in the tree for a while.

The Rural Electrification Administration and the GI Bill moved that part of the country into the 20th century. That "backwater" area now attracts those lucky enough to be able to live far from conventional job opportunities.

Some of the river villages, most thriving before the James River & Kanawha Canal washed out in 1877, and many dating from before the canal (finished in 1840), are virtually gone, along with their depots (the railroad demolished those the flood left), but new rural homes abound -- some expensive, some very basic.

There are still a lot of gravel roads. The Buckingham road that used to serve the Warren ferry ends at the river -- a canoe launch, at a site where in the last century stood a tavern -- Fallsburg.

Not a chocolate-flavored Nehi drink to be found anywhere. And the 10-cent lemon pie? Not for a dime, any more. You can play the lottery, now, and there are lots of TV reception dishes, but when you walk in the tall grass, the bugs still bite.

This is all the God's truth -- hope to die!, as Harry Bryant used to say, (If some isn't literally true, recall the toll of age on memory, and some very second-hand accounts)

Alan Bruns 1999, [with a few updates from the 21^st century]

Through Hamner's Eyes

Earl Hamner Jr., a cousin of the Gianninis, grew up in Schuyler, a half-dozen miles up the Rockfish from Howardsville. I never went there as a child. We went up and down the James River, as the trains did, or overland to the "city": Charlottesville.

Schuyler was a mill town -- soapstone quarries, a row of identical houses built by the company, a commissary where you charged groceries and clothes against your wages.

But when Hamner wrote his books, and eventually created the television series, "The Waltons," he emphasized country life in central Virginia just before World War II killed off the Great Depression. The actors' characterizations took me back to my childhood. His store-mistress was perfect.

Country courtesy, independence of outlook, a laid-back approach to constant, inevitable hard work are depicted perfectly.

(I pretty well escaped that hard work, despite the fact that most of those years we were living in a nearly cash-less economy, but those I knew seemed trapped in it.)

I met Hamner briefly when we were both young adults, and a friend courted his sister.

I once had an intense debate with an interim owner of "Summer Hill" over which was the actual village's oldest building. As state editor at The Daily Progress, in Charlottesville, I had run a picture of Irving's store, which my colleague, Boyce Loving, identified as the oldest.

My critic contended that the foundations of the Giles house, across the Scottsville road from the depot, were the same as had been there when they supported a tobacco "factory (shipping warehouse)" in canal days.

We argued in a series of calls -- and one shouting match in the Daily Progress newsroom -- until I lost my patience. She later wrote she had never heard such language on the telephone.

When we ran Fred Cobbs' picture in the paper, after he was helicoptered off his roof, my old nemesis was indignant that Fred should have been chosen to represent her village in the newspaper. After the flood, she plagued the State Highway Dept. so much about a dead cow at her entrance road that they reportedly handled it last of all such requests.

Howardsville was the scene of the demise of my father's 1937 Ford. Dad never had a problem deciding when to replace a car -- he got one after he wrecked the preceding one.

We turned over in the 1936 Ford after sliding on gravel on a curve coming home from Scottsville. He fell on me but neither was hurt. The 1939 Mercury got it when he cut a corner in Esmont and a tin lizzie coming down a steep hill smashed into us.

Dad didn't learn to drive until he was about 40 and his mother gave him a model-A Ford. The wheel came off that car. My mother saw a wheel roll ahead as he slowed down. A 1935 Ford survived intact.

The '37 Ford was homebound from a party when Dad heard 'coon hounds. He dropped off my mother and tracked the sound. The hunter said Nelson County was full of raccoons, so he and the dogs got in.

At Howardsville, the road to the bridge to Nelson parallels the railroad tracks. Dad turned too soon and his wheels hung up where the ground surface had been raised to the height of the tracks, creating a channel.

Most of Howardsville came out to help try to rock the car out of its trap. Then they stood well back and watched the 2 a.m. fast freight remove it. The next morning I asked my mother where the car was. "Ask your father," she growled.

My father continued to commute to Charlottesville, now in a Chrysler Royal which he sold during the war. He never owned another car, which led to the break-up of my parents' marriage, as he continued to live in the city.

The saga of his early commuting days from Howardsville was enhanced by the fact that the road was gravel half the way until just before World War II, and the other half was under-width, bumpy concrete (Rt. 20).

Kenneth Bryant

Kenneth Bryant, son of Harry Bryant, the tenant farmer at "Selma," spent most of his final years on the railroad as agent at Dillwyn, on the Buckingham branch, and he lives nearby.

(I put you last, Kenneth, but my friendship with you -- leading to the railroad experience -- shaped my life. I never got rich, or gave much of a damn about working with money as the primary -- until I realized I'd probably live to retirement, and had to bear down.)

I referred earlier to my mother Mary Bryan Bruns as having growled at me. She was not a growler but a shouter. But she was he greatest one-on-one teacher imaginable.

My father John D. Bruns loved poetry and classical literature and hunting and fishing and alcohol. He was perhaps a too permissive parent except on an important occasion when, at the very last minute, I decided that I didn't care to leave home and go to work for the railroad after dropping out of high school and spending months learning to handle train orders, etc.

He explained why I should keep a commitment, once made, especially one involving sacrificing important educational time, etc. The discussion reached the shouting stage, and moved into the yard.

But I got his point, and on Dec. 13, 1943, at age 16, I opened a needed, midnight-to-dawn shift at Warren. I have never regretted that decision.

As far back as during the Civil War, and well into World War II, the minimum age had been 18. Kenneth went to work on his 16^th birthday, the following May.

The late Bill Moore of Scottsville, who was already third trick telegrapher at busy Gladstone Yard when I went to work, may have been the youngest telegrapher ever hired by a major U.S. railroad.# 

John Dickson Bruns