Transcribed by Rita O'Brien Note: The words Levy and Allen are transcribed correctly. The Charleston Daily Mail Charleston, West Virginia November 16, 1924 RUBBER CAN BE MADE FROM MILKWEED, POE DECLARES Levy Marshall, Kinsman of Edgar Allen, More Proud of His Trace of Indian Blood Than His Connection With the Famous Author of the "Raven" By Walter Morgan Smith Bluefield, Nov 15. ---- If the McDowell county school board can succeed in applying the West Virginia teachers pension statute to cover one of the most interesting applicants in the history of pedagogy in the state, Superintendent W. C. Cook and his colleagues on the board will bring back to respectability and even to honor an uncouth figure of a man who has been found living in an Indian tepee at Davy, subsisting almost entirely on brews from forest plants because he is too old to teach any more and has been too much wrapped up in his intimate study of botany and her remedies to provide for the old age creeping upon him. Levy Marshall Poe, whose application for a pension is now being pressed by the board, has taught school in Wyoming county for thirty-seven years, numbering many persons of present prominence among his graduates. He traces his line back to the kinsman of Edgar Allen Poe. But, he is one-sixteenth Cherokee Indian and so it is the woods he loves, and the paths along forest glades. The trees and the shadows that fell upon tangled hillsides were his delight during the long years when he was preparing nearly 2,000 for life in his schools, and now that he has given up his globe and his maps and hickory withe forever, the woods have become his sole mistress in his poverty. "Poe College" He dreams of founding the Edgar Allen Poe College of Herbology, and indeed, there is a sign above of flap of his tepee in Davy upon which are emblazoned the brave words, "Poe College," but he wears a heavy overcoat in summer to hide the fact that he has only a ragged shirt and no collar to his name. Since, several years ago, the swarthy school teacher rang his school bell for the last time, there have been many who befriended him. But he is not a beggar and he can laugh in the teeth of adversity. They say he is cracked because he talks in millions when he dreams of the commercial value of the roots that he knows as fellow children of nature, put in the soil to assuage the ills that flesh is heir to. Yet there is not one who has ever talked to this halting old man with his toothless gums and his sparse, tangled beard who denies the man has the keenest of brains beneath his shaggy locks. Poe remembers every branch and twig of the family tree which connects him with the immortal poet. David Poe, father of Edgar Allen Poe, was a brother of his grandfather, Adam Poe, who settled in Grayson county, Virginia, and who now lies in the Osborne graveyard on New River, in Grayson county. It was through his great great grandfather, Wyatt, an Englishman, he got his Indian blood, when his kinsman married a Cherokee maiden. There were four brothers of the Poes whose original French name was La Poe, he said, and these four brothers settled in four different states, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. They dropped the prefix of the name for convenience. But the poor pedagogue of Davy would rather talk about his Indian blood than his connection with the author of "The Raven". Since he gave up his duties at the school in Oceana, Wyoming County, where he had taught for thirty years, he has traveled afoot through the mountains for the most part, accepting hospitality where it was offered, brewing concoctions that were strangely potent for all who suffered, and dreaming of the vast acres he some day would devote to the domestic culture of wild plants he knew were good for pain. He knows the Indian name to which he has a right through his great great grandmother's line, and he knows the meaning of it. And yet he is not so old at that -- only 64. He is feeble because he was seized with partial paralysis and doubled up for months in his bed. But, with the instinct of the snake that wriggles off to find a certain weed when it has been bitten in a forest battle with a venomous reptile, Poe sought out wild plants and roots he well knew and brewed them and got on his feet again. And now, it is these plants that are keeping his soul and body together with the assistance of one lone loaf of bread a day. Does the ancient pedagogue present a lugubrious mein in the face of all these miseries? Talk to him and find out. He will tell you with a delightful giggle of the ladies beauty tea that would be a great seller if it could be put on the market. He believes he knows the plant from which the Chinese brew an intoxicating drink of parts -- a drink which enables the partaker to repeat his jag for a week by the mere taking of pure water on top of the sediment that remains that long in the stomach after the original festivities. He knows how rubber can be made from the milkweed. Old Scholars Aid Not only Superintendent W. C. Cook, who himself was a product of Poe's school, but 155 present school teachers who also learned their three Rs under Poe are supporting the pension for the broken man. The fact that his service was in a different county complicates the effort but it is believe the boon can be obtained. He says he was raised in a log cabin in the depths of the Wyoming county mountains. His father was Jesse A. Poe and the family was poor. He used to hire himself out by the day for a peck of cork. He grew ginseng in a patch of his own in order to get the money for his own schoolbook. He has been married twice, having two sons by his first wife, the elder of whom was murdered at Pineville, Ky., and three sons by his second wife, who once lived in Boone county, but who have dropped from sight in late years.