Zack Harold, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Celebrating W.Va.’s Rail History On A One-87th Scale

Sometime in the 1970s, a group of model railroad enthusiasts in Charleston, West Virginia started getting together at the local Presbyterian Church to talk trains. As the club grew they found a bigger space where they could set up little dioramas for their engines and cars to traverse.

This story originally aired in the Feb. 17, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Sometime in the 1970s, a group of model railroad enthusiasts in Charleston, West Virginia started getting together at the local Presbyterian Church to talk trains. As the club grew, they found a bigger space where they could set up little dioramas for their engines and cars to traverse.

Then, in 1998, the Kanawha Valley Railroad Association got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The county commission gave them some money to build a brick-and-mortar clubhouse. Members decided to use the new space to build one big, permanent model train layout.

So, like the steel driving men who once tamed the West Virginia mountainsides, they set to work. They built huge tables where they laid track and wired it up to electricity. They crafted rock outcroppings from stacks of ceiling tiles that they roughed up with wire brushes — though sometimes they’d just find a nice looking rock outside and add it to the layout. They built houses and businesses and barns, coal tipples and a replica of the Hawk’s Nest Dam. They made thousands of trees from white poly fiber stuffing that they dipped in watered-down school glue and rolled around in ground-up green foam.

The Kanawha Valley Railroad Association built huge tables where they laid track and wired it up to electricity. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Completing the layout took thousands of hours over about five years. But in the end, the club filled in the space, wall-to-wall, with the communities of Charleston, Elkview and Thurmond all at one-87ths scale.

And you can see it — just stop by the Kanawha Valley Railroad Association’s headquarters in Charleston’s Coonskin Park, any Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. Admission is free, though donations are appreciated.

“It’s not only for us to enjoy but it’s for the community to enjoy,” member Anthony Parrish said. “Not everybody can have one of these in their basement.”

Club members have created a little game for visitors to help them fully experience the layout in all its detailed complexity.

“We have a ‘see if you can find it’ sheet that we give our visitors,” said Parrish, who helped build the layout. “There’s one scene here where there’s an old moonshine still located in the forest, in an area you wouldn’t think to look for a moonshine still. There’s rock climbers and stuff [and] a barber shop.”

Look really closely, and you start to notice something besides those Easter eggs. Is that a ‘57 Chevy crossing the Southside Bridge in Charleston? There’s the Kanawha County Courthouse on the boulevard — but where are the high rise office buildings or Haddad Riverfront Park?

This model doesn’t only capture the landscape of southern West Virginia. It captures a moment in time: a single sunny summer afternoon in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The club’s old-timers did the majority of the work on the model, and this was a way of remembering and reliving a bit of their youth.

Club members have created a little game for visitors to help them fully experience the layout in all its detailed complexity. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

But that doesn’t mean the club is stuck in the past. As you stand there, marveling at the West Virginia of yesteryear — along comes a Northfolk Southern diesel locomotive, just like the ones you might see chugging down the tracks today. It belongs to Austin West. At 15, he’s one of the group’s youngest members.

“The engines I have are ones that’s actually been in my backyard that I’ve seen,” West said. “I was like ‘I want to have that.’ And now I can.”

West doesn’t have a layout at home, so the model at the clubhouse gives him somewhere to run his trains. The club also has train cars and digital controllers that members can borrow, greatly reducing the barrier of entry for what can be a pretty expensive hobby.

But that’s not the only benefit newcomers like West get from their membership dues. He’s learned a lot from the more experienced members. Once you really get into it, it’s not enough to collect locomotives and railcars — you’ve got to modify them.

“The cars are mostly dirty and patched. And the front engine is supposed to look like it caught on fire, like the real thing,” West said.

While West prefers modern trains, his buddy Joesph Watson is focused on the Norfolk and Western railroad — trains that disappeared 20 years before he was born. He has diesel and steam locomotives from the N&W line, which he’s weathered with paint and special chalks using techniques he’s learned from other members.

“It’s all about making it look real,” Watson said. “Everybody here does it different. Get those different opinions and add it into what you do, and it makes your own style on how you model.”

It has enabled Watson to recreate something he never saw in real life. He’s 20 and the N&W went away in 1982, when it merged with Southern Railways to become Northfolk Southern.

“It makes you look back on, how would these be back in the day?” he said. “What would it be like to stand on the side of a railroad in the 1930s and see these coming down the tracks?”

And there are his trains, clacking right past Austin’s modern Northfolk Southern locomotives, in this snapshot of midcentury West Virginia. The past and present of American rail transit, alive on a small scale.

Completing the layout took thousands of hours over about five years. But in the end, the club filled in the space, wall-to-wall, with the communities of Charleston, Elkview and Thurmond all at one-87ths scale. *Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

The future, though, is less certain.

Yeager International Airport sits just up the hill from Charleston’s Coonskin Park. And a proposed multi-million dollar expansion of the runway there would require a whole section of park to be filled in with dirt — right where the clubhouse sits.

The building isn’t doomed just yet. The Federal Aviation Administration is still studying the project. But the train club has already started looking for new potential locations.

Member Mike Reynolds said any move will mean the end of their gigantic model of southern West Virginia rail lines.

“This was built to be permanent, so it would be really hard to break it up,” Reynolds said. “And whatever we take will be partially destroyed in the process and have to be redone. But we don’t know where we’re going to, so we don’t know how much room we’ll have. If any.”

It’s a little ironic. The very mode of transportation that supplanted trains as Americans’ go-to mode of cross-country travel now threatens to take away a place where that history is celebrated.

But while club members are concerned about the future of their building and layout, no one seems too worried about the future of the club. New train fanatics are being born every day.

“I’ve got a grandson that’s 3 years old. And from the day he had any idea what was going on, he has wanted to fool with trains,” Reynolds said. “It’s almost like a fox knows how to hunt. They already know what trains are all about.”

“I think it’s magic,” he said. “I do. I think it’s magic.”

The Kanawha Valley Railroad Association will also host its 17th annual Model Train and Craft Show at the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center on March 11 and 12. You can find more about it on their Facebook page.

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This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.

The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.

Toy Story Gets A Much Anticipated Sequel

With new owners, the Mountain Craft Shop Co. will bring traditional folk toys to a new generation of kids.

This story originally aired in the Dec. 23, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Steve Conlon knew everything about the traditional Appalachian folk toys he and his wife Ellie manufactured at the Mountain Craft Shop Co. in Proctor, West Virginia.

He knew the history, the principle of physics that made them work, and the right technique to make that ball on a string float up into the air and come down perfectly inside the wooden cup.

There was one thing Steve didn’t know, though. He didn’t know who would make these traditional toys once he and his wife were gone.

“How will it play out? We don’t know yet,” he said in a 2019 interview with Inside Appalachia. “The reality of the situation is we are manufacturing in America. Look around you. There’s a lot of competition.”

A year after that interview, Ellie died of lung cancer. A year after her death, Steve died from leukemia. That left the business in the hands of their son Terra.

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Steve and Ellie Conlon purchased the Mountain Craft Shop Co. in 2002 from its founder Dick Schnake.

“Terra — it’s Latin for ‘earth,’” he said. “I was an earth child, born on the living room floor.”

Terra lives in San Francisco now, where he’s a computer programmer. He tried to run the business from afar since his parents’ passing but it hasn’t really worked. The company lost money last year. So he decided to try and sell — but that didn’t work out either. At least, not the way Terra wanted.

“I had buyers that were interested in the businesses in Pennsylvania or New York. And ideally I wanted to keep it in the location,” he said.

Mountain Craft Shop Co. is so tied to Wetzel County — so tied to West Virginia — that even the wood used to make the toys comes from local trees that Terra’s dad would cut, mill and dry himself.

One day, while Terra was back in the Mountain State trying to wrap up his parents’ affairs, Fred Goddard stopped by. Goddard is a minister who lives just a few miles up the road.

“I saw some things for sale and I thought, ‘That would be handy on the farm,’” he said. “So I pulled in and [Terra] began to talk about the toy store and I began to share my memories with him.”

It turns out Goddard’s relationship with these toys goes back even farther than Terra’s — and even farther than Terra’s parents. Steve and Ellie Conlon were not the Mountain Craft Shop Co.’s original owners. They bought it in 2002 from its founder, Dick Schnake. He started the company in the mid-1960s. He was a mechanical engineer by trade but didn’t manufacture the toys himself. Schnake handled research and development and farmed out manufacturing to a staff of artisans.

But Schnake displayed his toys in a little showroom near his home, where shoppers could take them for a test drive. Goddard’s mother used to take him to that toy store when he was a little boy.

“Dick would stand and talk for hours,” Goddard said. “He would explain how the toys were made. He wanted us to see every toy in the store, not just what we were interested in. He wanted to show us everything.”

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Traditional wooden folk toys manufactured at the Mountain Craft Shop Co. in Proctor, West Virginia. The toys can be found at craft fairs and gift shops all over Appalachia.

Goddard doesn’t only have memories — he still has some of the toys his mother purchased from Schnake.

“I have a rubber band gun. And that one, of course, tended to get me in some trouble around the house,” he said.

As Goddard walked around the Conlons’ shop, Terra floated an idea.

“All of a sudden he said ‘I could sell you this business.’ And I’m thinking ‘No, I could never own this,’” Goddard said. “And he made an offer and I realized, I can’t pass this up.”

The timing was almost too perfect. Goddard lost his wife of 33 years to COVID-19 last December. Since then, he found love again with a widow who lost her husband to COVID-19. They’re engaged now and Goddard’s fiancé, as fate should have it, is an amateur woodworker.

Goddard plans to keep any current employees who want to stay. He also plans to recruit some additional elves to help build toys. The company won’t be able to stay in its current facility but Goddard plans to find a storefront where he can display the toys just like Dick Schnake once did.

Terra says it’s what his parents would’ve wanted.

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

These marble runs are among the many traditional folk toys manufactured by the Mountain Craft Shop Co. They are sold with marbles manufactured by Marble King in nearby Paden City.

“I’m super pumped that not only is it someone in West Virginia, but it’s someone in Wetzel County,” he said. “My mom spent so much time, so much effort, developing the ‘West Virginia grown’ and Mountain State marketing. I like that.”

Fred’s just happy he’ll be able to give kids the same kinds of toys — and the same kinds of memories — he has.

“This area, this state, this country, this world, needs this store,” he said.

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New Book Explores History Of West Virginia Hot Dogs

“Making Our Future” by former West Virginia state folklorist Emily Hilliard dives deep into the niches of Mountain State culture, from songs of the labor movement to the history of hot dogs. The book was released on Nov. 22, 2022.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Harold: There’s so much that we could cover. I would like to talk about something that’s near and dear to my heart — your chapter on hot dogs. Can you tell me about how the craze began?

Hilliard: It’s linked to industry and immigration, popularization of mass culture, urbanization and European migration. There were a lot of instances where Greek and maybe Italian immigrants were setting up hot dog stands in West Virginia. And mostly, that was in major urban centers in industrial areas. I think that’s why we see the hot dog really being popular in West Virginia in the southern coalfields, the northern coalfields and then industrial cities like the Ohio river towns of Huntington and Parkersburg. Hot dogs really seemed to boom in the 1910s and 1920s in West Virginia.

Harold: I love the line in the book from a Fairmont newspaper that calls Charleston “one of the greatest places on earth for hot dog eaters.”

Hilliard: That was amazing to find. I found several articles about hot dogs in Charleston. I found that there were at least four hot dog stands in Charleston in the early 1920s. Three of four of them were owned by Greek immigrants. And there was this amazing stat in one of the articles. It said 22,000 dogs a day are sold out of those four hot dog stands at one point. That is about one for every two residents in Charleston at the time.

Harold: I have this highlighted in my copy. “If all the hot dogs consumed in a year in Charleston were strung together, the string could extend to Huntington and back and still have enough left to run down to St. Albans on one side of the road and back on the other.”

Hilliard: And then I think it goes on to say, “Or it could go all the way to Morgantown.”

Harold: To return to your point: I found it interesting that it was so tied to industry. Because it’s cheap. It’s portable. This is the perfect thing for people who are doing shift work.

Hilliard: I talked to the descendants of A.J. Valos, who was a Greek immigrant born in 1894. He had actually worked as an indentured servant in the hot dog industry in New York and then moved to Parkersburg and opened the Broadway Sandwich Shop, which is still open. He opened that in 1939. And his relatives were saying they thought much of the success of his shop was because it was right across the street from the Mountain State Steel Foundry. And it was also close to a high school. So they got students from the school coming for a snack or for a meal. And then there were some other companies right nearby, so factory workers would grab hot dog before and after shifts.

Harold: Let’s talk about the hot dog stand war of 1922 in Fairmont.

The book was published Nov. 22, 2022 by University of North Carolina Press.

Hilliard: This was also something I found through looking through historic newspapers. There was this flurry of activity in the Fairmont papers in 1922. City officials were upset with the clientele that these hot dog stands in Fairmont were attracting. Most of that seems like racist and classist resentment of the Greek and Italian immigrants who were running these hot dog stands and wagons, and also the clientele of high school students and workers. They equate them with dive bars and beer joints and attest that they are unsavory, and tried to shut down some of these joints.

Then there’s the counter response of someone writing in and saying “maybe the city officials could worry about more important things than just shutting down hot dog stands.” Then there’s another newsstand owner who writes in and he is incensed that people had been thinking his new stand was a hot dog stand. He writes into the paper to assert that is simply not true. “I don’t want to be affiliated with that kind of base business.”

Harold: First comes the hot dog and then comes the West Virginia hot dog. You get into the history a little bit, which seems a little murky. When did we start putting slaw on dogs?

Hilliard: The first mention of slaw that I could find was from a 1949 paper in Raleigh County, and it was about the jail. Incarcerated people in the jail liked slaw on their dogs because they could smuggle in a razor blade.

That was another instance where it’s like, is this a joke column? I think there was a little bit of humor to it. But it is kind of funny to think that is why people started putting slaw on hot dogs.

Stanton from the West Virginia Hot Dog Blog credits a Stopette advertisement in the paper from 1922 that says something like, “Everyone’s talking about the Stop-Ette’s new dog with slaw.” So it may have been popular in the state before that. We just don’t know. There were traditions of coleslaw and cabbage with German immigrants and Eastern European immigrants who were living in West Virginia at the time.

Harold: I don’t think I’ll ever look at a hot dog the same way again.

Hilliard: Well, hopefully that doesn’t mean that you won’t still enjoy it.

Harold: I love them even more. You’ve published a book and authors have to do a certain amount of self promotion — telling people about the book, letting them know they can pre-order it. You ran into a little bit of controversy on social media over hot dogs. Can you tell me what happened?

Hilliard: I posted a map that my friend Dan Davis from Kin Ship Goods made for the book. It’s of the hot dog joints that are included in the book — most of them, but not all of them. I think maybe people just didn’t read that’s what it was for. I wouldn’t say it wasn’t quite viral, but it had hundreds of retweets and responses. People were just so mad that their favorite hot dog joint was not on this map. And I ended up issuing the disclaimer and saying, “This is not a value statement of the best hot dog joints. It’s simply the hot dog joints, some of them, that are listed in the book. And it’s not exhaustive by any means, and neither is the book. But I would love to see your hot dog map.” Which I’m serious about. I would love to see a collection of people’s favorite hot dog joints in West Virginia, or the ones where they have memories. I think Dan is making some merch for it, which might inspire more controversy. But hopefully not.

Harold: Or hopefully so — because like you said, if we generate enough controversy, this will lead to the creation of rival hot dog maps and then we just have a whole other chapter in your next book.

Hilliard: Yeah, that would be fun.

Harold: I feel like the state of West Virginia owes you a profound debt of gratitude for the work and love that you’ve put into this book, whether we’re talking about your chapter on hot dogs or your chapter on the author Breece D’J Pancake, or the chapter on the teacher strike or the one on independent pro wrestling. What we’ve ended up with is a book that you could put in somebody’s hands and say, “This is why West Virginia is special. This is what makes us who we are.” And I’m just so glad that you’ve given that to us.

Hilliard: I really appreciate that. In a way, it’s a love letter back to the state in all its complexity.

——

The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the WestVirginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.

New Podcast Takes Up Snake Handling Churches — But Leaves Behind The Stereotypes

Folkways reporter Zack Harold interviews musician, songwriter, painter and former preacher Abe Partridge about his podcast “Alabama Astronaut,” which chronicles the world of Appalachian snake handling churches and the unique genre of music found within their walls.

This story originally aired in the Nov. 4, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Folkways reporter Zack Harold interviews musician, songwriter, painter and former preacher Abe Partridge about his podcast Alabama Astronaut, which chronicles the world of Appalachian snake handling churches and the unique genre of music found within their walls.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Harold: Can you give us a brief introduction on how you became familiar with the world of snake handling churches?

Partridge: I guess it depends on how far we want to go back, but I pastored in Middlesboro, Kentucky when I was in my mid 20s. I went through a crisis of faith, I guess you could say, and I was in the process of leaving the church.

During that time, I met a guy by the name of Jamie Coots, who was pretty well known in the serpent handling faith. We probably had a 30 or 45 minute conversation, but in that 30 or 45 minutes, it was a real striking conversation that I never forgot. He gave me his phone number — I think he knew that I was struggling.

Well, I started playing songs and painting and stuff like that. I was touring on the West Coast with artists by the name of Jerry Joseph and this other Alabamian from Birmingham named Will Stewart. He had a song that he wrote called “Brush Arbor.” It had a line in it that mentioned “copperheads and the Holy Ghost.” And I thought that was odd. I asked Will what it was about and he’s like, “It’s about a book I read called ‘Salvation on Sand Mountain.’” I read it at the beginning of the pandemic. And guess who’s in it? Jamie Coots.

So I said, “I’m going to go find this serpent handling church and I’m going to go.” Well, I found a few. And at every one that I went to, I had heard songs that I never knew — that I’d never heard before. And I had spent a large portion of my life in church.

*Musician, singer-songwriter, painter, podcaster and former preacher Abe Partridge*

Harold: For people that haven’t heard the podcast — what makes it special, compared to church music they might be familiar with?

Patridge: It differs, number one, in the lyrical content. These people happen to believe a certain passage of scripture that’s found in the book of Mark, chapter 16, verses 18 and 19. It draws from Jesus’ last words to his disciples before he ascended into heaven. And the last things that he told his disciples was there were five signs that were going to follow them that believe. Very quickly, the five are: cast out devils, laying hands on the sick and they shall recover, speaking in tongues, “they shall take up serpents,” and then “if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”

Now there are hundreds of millions of Pentecostals that exist on planet Earth. And nearly all of those Pentecostals will do three of those signs — speaking in tongues, they profess to cast out devils and they profess to lay hands on the sick and then they recover. But outside of these few believers, I’m not aware of any other ones in the world where they literally take up serpents and literally, if they consume a poison that it does not hurt them.

So whenever you hear a song that references those, you know that it had to originate within this sect of believers — because there is literally no other sect of believers on planet Earth that falls under the realm of Christianity that believe these things.

Harold: The musical style is also unique. How would you describe that?

Partridge: Dennis Covington wrote the book “Salvation on Sand Mountain.” He described it as a mixture of Salvation Army and acid rock. And then other people have called it rockabilly, rock and roll, rock and roll sacred music. I call it serpent handling gospel music. They just call it music.

Harold: So how is this tradition being passed down?

Partridge: The same way that music was passed down for all the centuries before man had access to means of recording. Person to person, church to church. I have yet to meet a serpent handling musician that had any type of formal training in music. They pass down both the songs and the style of their playing, I guess you would say, orally.

Harold: But you’ve got churches all the way from Alabama up into West Virginia. It’s a pretty big swath of territory. Are they visiting one another and passing along songs? How does that cultural exchange happen?

Partridge: The serpent handlers know each other. They sometimes have special meetings they call them “homecomings.” Sometimes they have meetings called “revivals.” And people will travel from the other churches to attend. I’ve actually been in services before where, if you listen to the audio, you would assume there was only one guitar player. But in actuality, there were multiple guitar players. They pass the guitar along as each one feels led. But they play the same style, because it all derives from their sacred music.

Harold: Has there been a change over the years in the kind of music that the snake handling churches are playing? Or has it maintained some kind of consistency?

Partridge: I wouldn’t call them “changes,” I would call them “tweaks” with the introduction of electric instruments, probably in the ‘60s. But before that even, they were playing acoustic instruments, and they were playing the same type of songs they’re playing now.

It’s still actively, right now in 2022, being passed down. And I’ve got hundreds of hours of recordings that show this kind of music being played back into the ‘50s.

Harold: It seems the depth you’ve gone into all this — is it all just about the music? Or is there something else behind it too?

Partridge: So it’s always been music first. That was my goal. But I will tell you this, if it was just about the music, I wouldn’t still be going. I’ve already got hundreds of hours of recordings. I could put a record out but two weeks ago, I was still there.

It’s actually helped rekindle my own faith. I wouldn’t necessarily like to line out what that looks like. And, you know, I’m not going to start picking up snakes. But I have witnessed things in the moment that felt absolutely supernatural.

Harold: So you’ve got the recordings. What’s the plan to present those to the public?

Partridge: We have released the Coots Duo album, which is an album that we recorded inside of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus’ Name in Middlesboro, Kentucky — which is Jamie Coots’ old church — with his son Cody, and his wife, Cassie.

Cody happens to be a fourth generation serpent handler, serpent handling preacher and songwriter. So we’ve recorded music with them. And we’ve already put that out on our website. It’s already available for download.

The Coots Duo album, produced by Partridge, features snake handling preacher Cody Coots and his wife Cassie.

The goal is to create a documentary record that is captured within the church. But now I need to find the most powerful moments and get these things mixed and mastered — which I do not personally have the skills to do. So that’s where we’re at right now.

And let me tell you when it gets done, it is going to blow your mind. Because it’s so good.

Harold: This is one of the most compelling podcasts I’ve heard in a long time. It gives a peek into a side of American culture that I don’t think a whole lot of people have thought about. A lot of people don’t even know exists. And it handles it with such respect and an apparent love of the subject matter.

Partridge: It’s not hard to treat them with respect. It’s not hard, but it never gets done. I think the overall theme is, there’s a lot of people in this world. And like Dr. Hood said in the podcast, if we’re going to have diversity in this country then it requires a respect.

You can find more information about the Alabama Astronaut podcast, the Coots Duo album and Partridge’s other projects at AlabamaAstronaut.com.

——

Water Aficionados Still Seek Healing At Berkeley Springs

In the years before indoors plumbing, many Appalachians got their fresh water from the natural springs created by our ancient mountain range. But in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, people are still filling jugs with spring water to lug back home. Some do it for the taste, but others say the water has healing properties — a tradition that also goes back centuries.

This story originally aired in the Oct. 7, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Every couple weeks, Lauren Lee stuffs a few dozen gallon jugs into a big black laundry bag. She brings it to a covered pavilion right in the middle of Berkeley Springs State Park, which itself is right in the middle of downtown Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.

She chooses one of two brick water fountains and begins to fill her jugs, one by one, with water drawn from the seven underground springs.

“I like coming down here. I always meet new people. I’ve never been able to do this anywhere I’ve ever lived,” Lee said.

She doesn’t just come here to socialize though.

“We have well water where we live, so it’s a lot easier to use this in our machines, like for coffee,” Lee said. “And for the plants, because our water kills our plants.”

The water is free. But of course, it wouldn’t be much more expensive to just buy water at Kroger or Dollar General. It would certainly be more convenient. No empty jugs or laundry bags necessary.

But the water Lee draws from these springs has something store-bought water does not.

“I feel like this is part of the healing and just the nutrients I’m getting from the earth,” she said.

People have been coming to Berkeley Springs for centuries, looking for a healing. It was native people who apparently introduced Europeans to its medicinal properties. The springs were already such a popular destination by the mid-18th century that a young surveyor named George Washington made sure to stop when he visited the area.

Washington would return a few times — once to cure his rheumatic fever and later with his wife Martha and her daughter Patsy, hoping to treat the girl’s seizures.

In 1776 — when Washington was probably busy with other concerns — the Virginia General Assembly established a town around the springs. They called it “Bath,” after the spa town in England. That began a flurry of development in town, and some buildings from that time still survive.

There’s the two-story Roman Bathhouse, built in the 1780s. For a small fee you can still enjoy a half-hour soak in a 750-gallon tub filled with spring water. The Gentlemen’s Spring — where you find the drinking fountains — arrived in the 1800s. So did the Ladies’ Spring, today known as the main bathhouse.

The bathhouse also sells empty gallon jugs for anyone who wants to take some water home — provided they have them in stock.

Should you arrive without an empty jug, you can pick one up from the main bathhouse.

“I sold 15 to one person on Saturday,” said Leslie Smith, who runs the front desk at the spa. “People swear by that water. They take a bath in it. They wash their hair in it. They cook with it. There’s a woman that comes from China, they come in here and all day long [they fill] five-gallon jugs. Like 50 of them.”

Inside Appalachia didn’t encounter anyone from China when we visited — but we did find someone from Lebanon.

“My friend told me about it a long time ago,” said Fadi Talj. “Then when I moved closer, I realized I’m only 30 minutes away. And that’s when I started coming to get it.”

Talj is from Lebanon originally, and then lived in Frederick, Maryland before moving closer to Berkeley Springs and its water.

“You don’t find many of these places around, so if you find one close, you take advantage of it,” he said.

Dorothy Vesper, a geology professor at West Virginia University, is a fan of Berkeley Springs water, too.

“Every time I go by, I fill my water bottle,” she said via Zoom call. “It’s good stuff.”

Vesper is not sold on the health claims, though. A few of her graduate students have studied Berkeley Springs water. They found there are minerals present: magnesium, as well as potassium, sodium, calcium and other members of the periodic table. But all the chemicals exist in vanishingly small amounts.

“You’d have to drink a lot of it to get enough of anything that was nutrient-helpful,” she said.

The research has yielded some good news. Not all natural springs are created equal. Some are not safe to drink from. Some have been contaminated by their surroundings, while others are really just discharge from old, abandoned coal mines.

Berkeley Springs, on the other hand, is pristine.

“It doesn’t have a metallic [taste]. It’s sort of a soft spring water. I just think it tastes nice,” Vesper said. “I have no qualms whatsoever, I would drink it right out of the spring.”

Aside from the taste, though, Vesper said the spring water is no better for you than what comes out of the tap at home.

So what about those who feel like they’ve been helped by this water? What about those who believe they have been healed by it? Is this all just the placebo effect?

Vesper made clear, she is not a physician, but she has a theory.

“Personally, if you let me go and spend two weeks hanging out at some springs — I’d feel better,” she said.

There might be something to that.

There is a peacefulness at the park among the spring-fed pools and the cherry blossoms. Maybe the benefit Lee and Talj ascribe to the water actually comes from the ritual of returning week after week and bringing water up from the earth, just as our forebears have done for centuries.

If the healing isn’t in the magnesium — maybe it’s in the memories that are mixed in there.

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This story contains music by Joseph Haydn and the Staples Singers.

Charleston Company Launches Butcher Apprenticeship In Move To Keep Meat Local

Breakdowns in the food supply chain from suppliers to our grocery stores have raised concerns and increased prices. Buzz Food Service in Charleston is trying to alleviate some of that in our region by training new, local butchers. Folkways reporter Zack Harold has the story.

Beau Bellamy gets to Buzz Food Service at 7 a.m., a full hour before the day’s meat cutting begins.

Buzz sells fresh meat and seafood to restaurants, resorts and other commercial customers in seven Appalachian states — all from a headquarters just outside Charleston. But before any of that can happen, the butcher shop has to pass a daily inspection by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s why Bellamy’s here: to get things ready.

“They’re not looking for chunks of meat. They’re looking for tiny little specks,” Bellamy said. “And if they find something like that, you either have to fix it or they can shut you down altogether.”

He spots a tiny piece of meat, smaller than the size of a match head, wedged between two tables. He takes a cloth and cleans it off.

“That’s enough to get you in trouble with the USDA,” he said.

Watch this special Inside Appalachia Folkways story below:

Bellamy clearly knows his way around this meat shop, even though he’s only been doing this for about a year. He spent the 10 years before that as a paramedic, riding around on ambulances.

Then the pandemic hit. Beau and his wife had a premature newborn baby with breathing troubles. He didn’t want to risk bringing anything home, so he quit. He delivered bread for a while, then worked for a friend’s asphalt company. Finally, he saw a billboard for a brand-new paid apprentice program at Buzz.

Buzz was expanding. The company built Appalachian Abattoir just down the street from the meat shop. Abattoir is French for “slaughterhouse.” It’s where Buzz processes locally raised cows and pigs.

Most of the time, animals raised in Appalachia get shipped off to the Midwest where they’re fattened up, slaughtered, processed and butchered. The meat then makes the whole trip in reverse, traveling thousands of miles to end up in your grocery store.

Buzz built its abattoir to keep at least some of that meat right here at home.

“Essentially, four companies in the Midwest produce 85 percent of the beef and pork we eat in this country,” Buzz President Dickinson Gould said. “We put ourselves, essentially, in the position to supply ourselves.”

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Buzz sells fresh meat and seafood to restaurants, resorts and other commercial customers in seven Appalachian states.

Buzz staffed its new venture with employees from its butcher shop. This created a problem. They needed more employees to replace them, and experienced meat cutters aren’t in ready supply.

“I had many people say to me, ‘That sounds like a great plan but where are you going to find the people to do that kind of work?’” Gould said. “And the best idea we came up with, and we kept coming back to was, let’s start from scratch with a real apprentice program and teach people from the ground up.”

Previously, Buzz trained meat cutters one-on-one. New hires learned at the elbow of a more experienced butcher. That process would no longer suffice with so many newbies coming aboard all at once. The company needed to formalize the process.

When Bellamy and four other apprentices started working at Buzz in September 2021, they began an intensive curriculum that covered every aspect of the meat business. They learned about cutting meat, as well as the economics of it. They learned about the biology of cattle. They’ve taken field trips to other processing facilities. They get the chance to work shifts at General Steak and Seafood, Buzz’s retail operation in downtown Charleston.

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Beau Bellamy gets to Buzz Food Service at 7 a.m., a full hour before the day’s meat cutting begins to get things ready for a daily inspection by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

As it turns out, this approach has helped apprentices become much more proficient much faster.

“In the past it would take about a year and a half for a new staff person to really be able to work completely independently and really cut some of the higher end or more expensive cuts we process here,” said Angela Gould, the company’s chief operations officers. “Now we’ve found with this group, that is reduced down to about six months.”

There is no better example of this than Bellamy. He is now a maestro of the meat shop’s band saw, using the screaming machine to turn giant hunks of beef into delectable-looking steaks.

He is even training students of his own. A second class of six apprentices started in January 2022.

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Bellamy uses the meat shop’s band saw to turn giant hunks of beef into delectable-looking steaks.

“It’s two years as a paramedic before they allow you to get on an ambulance,” Bellamy said. To be able to walk in the first day and start to learn — and then after 5 months to be able to teach someone else — it’s certainly a credit to the program and the people.”

Despite all that, Bellamy’s education is only half over. The whole apprenticeship program takes two years to complete. At the end, he’ll hold a certificate recognized by the U.S. Department of Labor. That’s a ticket to any kind of life he desires.

Have you noticed there aren’t as many grocery store butchers these days? Buzz President Dickinson Gould said that isn’t because stores no longer find it profitable — they just can’t find anyone qualified to do the job.

Zack Harold

West Virginia Public Broadcasting

“Grocery stores are essentially realizing, where is the next generation of people qualified to do this work?” he said. “They don’t exist, nor is the school you can send them to for training. It’s exactly the kind of training we’re building here.”

Bellamy plans to stick around at Buzz. But even if he does leave and go to work for a grocery store or start a butcher shop of his own, it would still serve Buzz’s overall goal for the internship program: to make the supply chains that we all depend on a whole lot shorter.

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This story originally aired in the Aug. 26, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia.

TheFolkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.