No matter what your age is there's one thing in life you can count on, family. In your darkest days or your happiest moments family will be there to help you thru or celebrate with you and the memories you make with them you'll keep the rest of your life.
We moved to Tucker County when I was five years old from Aurora WV with an old blue mobile home in tow and settled on a piece of property way out on a single lane back road in St. George. My dad worked most of the time to keep food on the table while mom handled most of the home life. When we first moved here we lived for a while in that old 1960's model blue trailer without electric or running water burning kerosene lamps for light, wood for heat, carrying water from the water hole on 72, and using an out house for a bathroom. When we got electric hooked up I remember taking baths in a sink with a wash rag and a kettle of water heated on the stove top.
Our days were filled with schooling and our evenings were filled with exploring the mountains, swimming in local swimming holes, digging ginseng, cleaning and hauling scrap metal with dad, and playing in the woods and hay fields. At one time or another I was on every mountain, down every holler, and up almost every tree on Limestone. I ate apples from the neighbors orchard, picked wild strawberries, elderberries, and blackberries, and knew the location of every mountain spring to get a drink from as I walked the mountainsides.
Our lives steadily improved by my parents hard work as dad dug ditches to run water lines and bring water into the house, mom slaved over a hot stove to keep us fed, and us kids learned to use a mattock, shovel, hammer, and other work implements to lend a hand.
When water finally came into the house I remember us kids arguing over who would take the first drink, dad tearing down the out house, and that first warm bath in an actual tub. When time began to take it's inevitable toll on our trailer we worked as a family digging often by hand to make a new home. We moved dirt out of the hole by hand and hauled it away not with fancy equipment and a budget but with a makeshift scoop made by my dad and operated by a winch built on the back of an old ton and a half flatbed that dad had built earlier from spare parts. When we hit rock it was often a twenty pound sledge hammer, wedges, chisels, and breaker bars used to bust it up and a simple wheelbarrow used to wheel it out. I recall dad renting a jackhammer for a short time towards the end to clear the final few feet of hard bedrock.
When it came time to pour a footer and floors it was once again done mostly by hand with us kids tossing pennies into the mix along the way, blocks were laid once more as a family, an old truck frame was fashioned into a boom for the ton and half truck by dad to lift beams into place, the roof was put down board by board and nail by nail with all of us swinging the hammers, and finally tar paper and roofing was rolled out and nailed in place.
Once the outside was finished we began studding the walls with us kids signing our names to several pieces of lumber as it was nailed in place. After a long time and a ton of work the inside of the basement was done we moved into it and made it a home later building a house on top of it once more by hand as a family.
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