More To Crab Orchard Than Meets The Eye
Storme (Graham) Davis takes in the view of Crab Orchard from Big Rock in this photo from the 1976 Plateau.
I grew up in Homestead but really, I’m a child of Cumberland County. My father, Wayne Graham, grew up in Howard Springs, out by the airport, his family rooted in Pomona, Claysville and Pleasant Hill, the western part of the county.
My mother, Sandy (Wright) Graham, grew up in Crab Orchard, in the east/southeast part of the county and home to some of the first white settlement in Cumberland County. Travelers across what was then (1700s) the Western territories were happy to reach Crab Orchard after difficult treks from the east up the Crab Orchard mountains.
I remember Crab Orchard in more modern times, after my birth in 1960. My grandparents, Stanley and Vada Belle (Glover) Wright, lived in Crab Orchard until the early 1970s, when persistent flooding precipitated a move to the Homesteads. My grandfather owned a store on Highway 70 but had sold it to Fred Capps sometime before I was born. The store was adjacent to where they lived, which was just before where you turn off 70 East to get on I-40 (or go to Bat Town).
My older sister remembers that Granny Wright kept change in a jar and would occasionally give us some change to go buy candy or ice cream at Mr. Capps’s store. Mr. Capps was a nice man — “especially to little children whose nickel just rolled under the coke cooler,” says Storme.
The property — and the store property — has been part of a rock yard pretty much ever since. It certainly wasn’t a rock yard when I was growing up. My grandmother had an exceptionally green thumb who could make anything grow. Her yard was dense with vegetation — my dad, at the time in the Army National Guard, told my mother once as they were leaving the house after a visit that he’d had his guerrilla warfare training for the month.
Granny Wright babysat Storme and me during our preschool years, an experience that my sister and I each remember. (My grandfather was the cook on a Speno railroad crew and was gone a lot.)
My grandmother was quite a character and had some, uh, interesting behavior modification techniques. I don’t remember her ever laying a hand on me, but every time I pouted or cried she’d warn me about waking up the “old man on the mountain,” that he was angry if he was woken up and would roll rocks down the mountain. She’d back it up when she heard thunder, telling me that some crying kid must have woken up the old man on the mountain and he was rolling rocks down. That stuck with me for a long time. I still think about the old man on the mountain whenever I hear thunder.
She also once told me that eating boogers would burn a hole in your tongue. I believed it. She told my sister that if you picked your nose a witch would paint your hands black while you slept. Storme said she slept with her hands under the covers for years.
My grandparents got their drinking and cooking water from Baker’s Spout, a pipe encased in concrete at the bottom of a hill that channeled fresh water from an underground stream. Baker’s Spout was a couple of miles north of Crab Orchard on Hebbertsburg Road and served the potable water needs of many Crab Orchard families. My grandparents had a water well but the water had a lot of iron and ran orange in many cases and was not good to drink. I’ve been down Hebbertsburg Road recently and I can’t really remember where the spout was. I heard it was moved to the other side of the road when it was rebuilt and has since disappeared.
I always liked crossing 70 and the railroad tracks to get over to the post office and Kemmer and Bristow’s, a general store that sold all manner of goods. It was like a different Crab Orchard (to me) on the other side of the tracks. The school and a ball field were just below Haley’s Grove Baptist Church (where my mother and father were married in 1957), at the foot of Big Rock Mountain.
(Probably Crab Orchard’s most dominant feature, the limestone mines and kiln, has eaten away at the foot of that mountain for more than a century. Generations of Crab Orchard men have worked at the “lime kill, including both maternal great-grandfathers and other relatives.)
Large rock outcrops at and near the top of Big Rock give the mountain its name. There was a trail up the mountain to those rocks, which were fun to hike up to and play around on. There are family stories about my Uncle Barney (“Snee Wee” to those who knew him in Crab Orchard) climbing out on a rock that goosenecked from the rest of the rocks and posing for pictures. Uncle Barney was practically fearless — he went on to become an Air Force fighter pilot and flew 100 missions in Southeast Asia, most over North Vietnam. Not a job for the timid. Anyway, I don’t know if the trail still exists or if I could find the trailhead again (or that I’m fit enough to hike an uphill trail) but those were always good times. I loved going to Big Rock.
My great-aunt Lola (Glover) Monday was an antiques dealer and for a long time owned what we called “the old hotel,” which stood where a convenience store and gas station are now. The inn was an old wooden structure that I remember was painted blue — “robin egg blue,” she called it, paint that she’d bought at an auction. I remember Aunt Lola first having a house and building just up 70 from my grandparents, just after the cut as you come into Crab Orchard. I don’t remember exactly when she bought the hotel but it was a piece of history.
The original Crab Orchard Inn, which had been around for more than a century before falling into disrepair and was finally demolished in 1933. Helen Bullard and Joseph Marshall Krechniak, authors of “Cumberland County’s First Hundred Years,” wrote in 1956 that “there are so many tales of Andrew Jackson’s overnight stops at the Crab Orchard Inn that even without documentation, it seems fair to accept the fact as true” — sort of our own “George Washington slept here” nod to American history.
My grandparents’ house in Crab Orchard, a piece of my personal history, is also long gone. But it’s always there, in my mind’s eye.
rpdgraham@gmail.com