I though the list might find this story of interest because it tells so much firsthand of what life was like in early times in WVA. This was written at the time Eliza Henkle North had her 100th birthday celebration in Knox County, Illinois, in 1905. This particular account was written by one of her grandchildren but I don't know which one. ____________________________________________________________________ One hundred years ago Grandma North was born in a small log house on Reed's Creek in West Virginia. One hundred years! And still her mind is as bright and her memory as perfect as though she were fifty. Everyone who visits her is sure of a welcome and sure to leave feeling better for seeing her and talking to her. We have just spent a pleasant evening with her and she has related a numbr of events that we feel sure would interest many readers...and we decided to write them, although aware how much is in the telling. Her first recollecyion is when she was a child of but two years of age. The family of three children lived in a one room log house on the South Branch of the Potomac River. She remembered a hired girl sitting in front of the large fireplace in a rocking chair with her feet stretched to the fire and singing in a dolorouos voice" "Here sits an owl with its head all white: It thinks it's a long and lonesome night." The other verses were a repetition much to Grandma's disgust. Her father next built a frame house near the old one. She remembers living with a woman whose husband was a Tory. He was hiding in the woods to keep from being draftef by the Americans. He made frequent visits to his wife and one day overstayed and was captured by two soldiers. She forgets what was done to him but rememners just how the soldiers were dressed and how they looked when they left the room. When older she says singing school was her greatest delight. She told us of the many jolly gatherings, wool pickings, flax scutchings and swingings, butter boilings, and other social gatherings she attended; and then never any worry of what she was to wear for they had two dresses then, one for every day and one for Sundays. Many wore moccasins but as her father was one of the wealthier class she always had a pair of shoes. When twelve years old she and her brother fed 30 head of cattle through a cold winter when her father was sick. They fed them salted straw at night and in the morning cut a browse of linn wood for them. Her father owned five farms, one of them a mountain farm called "Pretty Ridge". When ten years of age she and her father rode out to this farm on horseback. On the way home near the "Shades of Death", a place where the mountains and trees excluded all the rays of the sun they discovered a bear treed by the dogs. Her father left her to watch the bear while he went one and one half miles home for his gun. She sat there on her horse knowing no fear and when there was a movement from the bear she would clap her hands and start the dogs to barking. In her younger days she tells how she was caught in a trap set for an otter, and was saved from injury by the big boots she slipped on because her shoes were too thin to wear on the expedition, her companion pulling her out and leaving the boots. She also tried to build a fire from a powder horn, but escaped injury. She knew much of sorrow, having seen four of her little ones die in one month from diptheria. She still mourns the loss of a deer that their dogs chased past her house one day. She shot it and wounded it but it got far enough down the river for two men to get it, skin it and take it home and eat it. She remembers the comet before the War of 1812, describing it as being the shape of a large frying pan and tells of the "Dark Day" and "Bloody Sky" before the Civil War, and the showers of meteors in 1835. She said meteors fell like snow only they stopped just short of the earth. In the Civil War there were two armies camped at different times in front of her home. The Confederate men first, under Johnston, two companies of infantry and two of cavalry to guard the bridge on the Potomac. Next Fremont's men, 27,000 of them went north over the bridge. The bridge was then burned by the Confederates. The Union men then put up a pontoon bridge and went south, marching past the house for three days and three nights. ____________________________________________________________________ Eliza Henkle was married to Thomas Jefferson North in 1823. In 1836 her husband bought a mill site at Upper Tract in Pendleton County on the west side of the South Branch of the Potomac River and built a mill to grind wheat and corn, a saw mill and a machine for carding wool. Here they made their home and raised their family.