Zack Harold, Author at West Virginia Public Broadcasting

A Family Cultivates Tradition With A Nearly-forgotten Tomato

When Mary Lou Estler married her late husband Bob in 1960, it wasn’t long before she was introduced to a priceless family heirloom — an heirloom tomato.

“They had beautiful dinners,” Mary Lou said. “And Mrs. Estler owned a Blenko piece of glass. All the way around would be these gorgeous slices of mortgage lifter tomatoes. So that was always a favorite.”

Mary Lou Estler slices up her family’s heirloom mortgage lifter tomato. But there’s a mystery with this tomato.

These weren’t the so-called “Radiator Charlie” mortgage lifter tomatoes you find in lots of seed catalog nowadays. That’s a completely different plant that originated in Logan, West Virginia sometime in the 1930s.

The tomatoes on that Blenko serving dish was a breed developed by Mary Lou’s father in law William Estler. It first showed up back in the mid-1920s—years before Radiator Charlie brought his tomato to market.

“Mr. Estler had two tomatoes that he was raising,” Mary Lou said. He was on a quest to develop a low-acid tomato. “Evidently he put those two tomatoes together and came up with this one very special tomato.”

Special indeed. Some reports say the plants could grow up to 12 feet tall. The tomatoes themselves were round, red on the outside, pink on the inside, and could weigh up to two and a half pounds apiece. But most important of all, they were delicious — pleasantly sweet, not acidic and sour.

“Mrs. Eslter had them for breakfast with a little sugar on them,” Mary Lou said.

The tomatoes were a hit with family and friends alike. So William Estler built a greenhouse and started raising seedlings.

“He sold them to local vendors, to local nurseries,” said Dean Williams, Mary Lou’s son-in-law and the family’s unofficial tomato historian. “And he did not sell anything on a retail basis, he strictly sold on a wholesale basis to some of these nurseries.

I never saw anything that gave an indication they were trying to make this into a national type of tomato.”

It was actually an off-hand remark by an employee of one of those nurseries who gave the tomato the name “Mortgage Lifter.” William Estler liked the name so much, he had it copyrighted in 1932.

By the time Mary Lou joined the family, though, her father-in-law was getting up in years. He’d turned over the farm to his son Bob, Mary Lou’s husband. And Bob converted much of the property to a nine-hole golf course to keep from having to sell it.

Bob kept raising his father’s tomatoes, though. And his passion only increased after his father passed away in 1968, in a house fire.

“Bob would put out about 75 tomato plants,” Mary Lou said. “And then he would make a point to save the choice tomatoes to save the seed from.

Dean Williams once made the mistake of bringing Mary Lou a cherry tomato plant.

“That was a no-no. A definite no-no,” he said. “He would not allow any other tomato on the property to grow because he did not want to find any cross pollination of any sort. He wanted the purity of his tomato and that strain to remain intact.”

If Bob was so protective of his father’s tomato that he wouldn’t even allow other breeds on his property, you can imagine how he felt when he heard there was another tomato making the rounds that was also called “Mortgage Lifter.”

In 1987, Bob received a letter from a guy in Texas who got Mortgage Lifter seeds from his sister. She lived in Huntington and got Mortgage Lifter seeds from Bob. The Texan was leafing through a Southern Exposure Seed Exchange catalog one day when he came across a Mortgage Lifter tomato … attributed not to William Estler of Barboursville, West Virginia but to a “Radiator Charlie” from Logan, West Virginia. Confused, he wrote Bob a letter to see if he could clear things up.

“We were like, ‘What?’” Mary Lou said. “It was really rather shocking, to find out that someone else was getting the credit for all of Mr. Estler’s hard work.”

The Estler family didn’t have much recourse. William Estler’s copyright lapsed in the 1970s after the family attorney failed to file a renewal. So Bob did the only thing he could. He fired off a letter to Southern Exposure, demanding the listing be removed.

Bob did not believe Radiator Charlie was claiming William Estler’s tomato as his own. They’re different plants, bred from different parent tomatoes. Bob just felt that, with the Radiator Charlie tomato using the “Mortgage Lifter” name, his father’s tomato — the original mortgage lifter in his mind — was being overshadowed.

The letter didn’t work. Southern Exposure and a lot of other seed catalogs still sell Radiator Charlie’s tomato, and it’s still called the “Mortgage Lifter.”

But for the rest of his life, Bob did what he could to set the record straight. He gave lots of interviews to newspapers, magazines and TV stations. He also gave away a lot of tomatoes.

That generosity is part of the reason the Estler Mortgage Lifter is still around today.

Mary Lou tried to keep the strain going after Bob died in 2012 but couldn’t contend with the deer that like to stop by. Her son-in-law Dean Williams grows tomatoes that he’s pretty certain are Estler Mortgage Lifters.

“They came from the Hatcher nursery in South Point (Ohio),” Williams said. “We grew three plants this year. They came in fairly well. We still have quite a few tomatoes. But they’re on the smaller side than what they’re used to.”

But Bob sent seeds to lots of people through the years. The family has heard that relatives in Virginia are growing Estler Mortgage Lifters. There’s tales the seeds made it to Australia and Panama and Africa. But the family knows for sure that a niece in Alabama is still growing the genuine article. She is going to send seed back to West Virginia so Dean can get them going here again.

That’s what’s special about heirloom seeds varieties. Their stories are never over, so long as people keep growing them. And knowing the story only makes the food taste better.

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.

New River Gorge Rock Climbers Grapple With Racist Route Names

Standing at the base of “The Hole,” a gargantuan rock formation in West Virginia’s New River Gorge, you can hear water coming down the mountainside, rushing to the river below. Looking up, you’d see the rock shooting hundreds of feet overhead, curving as it goes, to form an imposing-looking overhang.

On a recent fall day, you also would have seen a man powering his way up the craggy face. He moved fast — finding handholds here and footholds there. The only things that protected him from falling on the jagged boulders below were some rope, some carabiners clipped into metal anchors that have been drilled into the rock, and his partner, who stood on solid ground, holding one end of his rope.

The climber worked his way higher and higher. Then, all of a sudden, he came swooping down toward the ground.

“It wasn’t my best go. Next time,” said climber DJ Grant.

Grant lives in Pittsburgh, but drives down to the New River Gorge nearly every weekend during the warmer months, to climb rocks like The Hole. He got into the sport five years ago.

“It was actually because I was fighting depression and I went to the gym and I loved it. Even now if I’m having a bad day or a bad week, I go climbing and it helps me a lot,” he said. “It’s a puzzle. You have to challenge yourself into solving a puzzle not based on your strength but on your technique and your own ingenuity. So it’s physically active but it’s also mentally stimulating.”

Grant has recently become obsessed with solving one particular puzzle — the climbing route known as “Blood Raid.”

“Like for me, I don’t like failure. I’m also afraid of heights. So it’s me fighting the fear, me fighting the fact that I’m going to fail. It’s everything I hate, climbing embodies. And I love that,” he said.

Grant begins his ascent of “Blood Raid.”

Blood Raid was established and named back in the 1980s by the climber Doug Reed. That’s how it works in the climbing world. Develop a route, and it’s yours to name. But this tradition has come under scrutiny of late.

“If you climb a route for the very first time you traditionally get to name it. It’s just a tradition, not a right. That’s what we’re arguing about right now,” Grant said. “Is that just because you climbed it first, you decide to be juvenile and name it something racist, you don’t get to say you’re not racist or something like that. Just change it.”

The argument Grant referenced started in May. He came down to the Gorge with some climbing buddies on Memorial Day weekend, to celebrate his birthday.

“We are climbing at this wall. There was a route called “Tigger.” It had “Another Tigger in the Morgue” and “Hard Pipe-Hitting Tiggers,” which are both plays on the N-word. And I was really offended by it,” said Grant, who is Black. “It was the first time I realized something like a name could ruin my entire time. I didn’t want to go anywhere close to that wall, I didn’t want to touch it, I didn’t want to look at it. It was so offensive and so hurtful. It ruined by day. It almost ruined my entire trip.”

These offensive names live in a two-volume guidebook called “New River Rock,” which has directions to and descriptions of 3,000 climbing routes in the gorge. Nearly 100 have similarly offensive names.

There are climbing routes with names like “Tar Baby” and “Slave Fingers.” There’s a whole series of climbs named for the racist character Sambo, like “Sambo Goes to Disneyland.” And the list goes on and on.

“So here’s a cool one. Kool Krux Klimbing with all Ks? Yeah,” Grant said.

Grant said these names have upset him for years. But until recently, he felt powerless to do anything about it. Then two important things changed. For one, his 10-year-old son started climbing with him.

“The defining moment is, when can I allow my son to open a guidebook and read it and not be worried about him asking me questions? What’s a tar baby? What’s slave fingers? What’s Kool Krux Klimbing? Hey daddy, is that KKK? I don’t want to have those conversations. I want to be able to have my kid enjoy the outdoors,” he said.

The other thing that changed for Grant was the nationwide protests that followed the death of George Floyd, a Minnesota man who died after a police officer used his knee to pin Floyd’s neck to the ground for several minutes.

Eventually, conversations about police brutality shifted to include the wider problem of racism in America. The world of rock climbing began its own conversations — because no matter where you go, from the Red River Gorge of Kentucky to the Ten Sleep Canyon in Wyoming, racist route names are a problem.

Grant and his partner Natalie reached out to the New River Alliance of Climbers, better known as NRAC, an advocacy group that represents climbers’ interests in the Gorge. They asked the group to acknowledge the racism in the climbing culture.

At first, they got no response. But after a few weeks, NRAC’s board reached out and set up a Zoom call in late July with Grant and other climbers of color. They wanted to discuss how to make rock climbing in the Gorge more diverse. The issue of the names came up pretty quickly during the call.

“It could start with the route names,” climber Ronnie Black, a Black climber in Vermont who has climbed in the New River Gorge for years, told the Zoom assembly. “Just coming from out of town, to a climbing area, looking at that guidebook, it’s damn near impossible to climb a route called ‘The Racist’ and go and camp in the woods and not feel like you’re going to get lynched when you go to sleep.”

Grant was also on the call, and stressed that NRAC should facilitate getting the names changed.

“You guys know each other and I don’t think we as a marginalized community should have to reach out to the first ascensionist and say ‘Hey we don’t like this, can you please change it?’” he said. “We think NRAC should be the liaison between us and the community and say, ‘We think you should change this.’”

This idea — to have the people who christened these routes to change the names — is more complicated than it sounds, because some of these routes have been around for over 30 years and their creators are scattered all over the country.

A screenshot from the July 28, 2020 Zoom call that NRAC held with minority climbers to talk about racism in the climbing community.

And what if the first ascensionists don’t want to change the name? In that case, NRAC might just re-name it for them.

Gene Kistler, NRAC board president, liked the idea.

“When I look at climbing and how much it’s changed, when I started climbing, for years there weren’t even women climbing. Today’s it’s so different,” Kistler said. “I don’t think anybody here would have an issue. There have been some issues with the name changes and preserving history and people are struggling.”

“But I think all that’s process. And the fact of the matter is, changing the names is a really simple lift compared to what’s next,” Kistler said.

NRAC quickly formed a Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Committee — JEDI for short — and started trying to figure out how many names needed to be changed.

Members of the committee went through the guidebook page by page and ended up with a list of 92 route names that ridicule some type of minority group: Black people, Asian people, LGBT folks, people living with disabilities. There are all kinds that are offensive to women. A lot of the names can’t be said on the radio.

There’s a deadline to get this work done, too. A new edition of the guidebook’s second volume will go to press this fall. After that, it will likely be a long time before another edition is printed. So, if NRAC doesn’t get the names in that volume changed quickly, they will sit on bookshelves for years to come.

Mikey Williams compiled the first comprehensive New River Gorge climbing guidebook back in 2008. He is preparing the new edition too. He also used to be a member of the NRAC board until he resigned a few months ago, partially because he says the organization shouldn’t be wading into what he sees as social justice issues.

Guidebook author Mikey Williams outside Bridge Bound Campers, his custom adventure van business in Fayetteville.

“As the guidebook author, it made sense to recuse myself. Then I look at this list and I’m like, man, it’s frustrating,” he said. “Any of the names that had a reference to the N word, for sure. You’re like, OK. That was bad. And the Kool Krux Klimbing, all spelled with K’s? Like, come on man. How could we not have seen this? Let’s get the KKK stuff out of the book.”

But there are other names on the list that Williams did not see as offensive, including some of the routes he personally named.

“Here’s the route description for the route ‘Aryan Race.’ ‘A sustained pump race of reflective white rock that’s steeper than a Hitler salute,’” he said. “Probably not in the best taste, but to me I had no idea it would be … offensive isn’t the word for it. I never thought that would be taken as a celebration of white supremacy. I’m certainly not a white supremacist. I’ve got no love for Hitler. Being able to use that description, it’s such a colorful, accurate description of the route.”

Williams said the route name “Aryan Race” pokes fun at the Third Reich, but when the name is taken out of context, it becomes offensive. He’s not the only one that feels this way. Several climbers have pushed back on NRAC’s renaming efforts because, they said, the original climbers weren’t trying to be racist or offensive. But Grant and other climbers advocating for name changes point out that context doesn’t appear anywhere in the books.

“I don’t get the context so why are you defending the context of it, when for 20 years I wasn’t given the context? It’s only after I voice my opinion and my concerns about it that you tell me it’s not racist because it was done in such a way,” Grant said.

The first ascensionists NRAC has approached so far seem to agree with Grant. Each has agreed to change their route names. Even Williams said he’s trying to decide what he’ll rename “Aryan Race.”

“Now I realize that, while I was laughing, not everybody was laughing,” Williams said.

For his part, Grant said he’s happy with the progress NRAC has made so far with getting the names changed. But the damage is done. Some routes are always going to bring up bad memories, even once they’re called something else.

“A lot of these routes I will never get back on because I know the backstory of it. Any of the ‘Tigger’ routes, I refuse to climb, ever, because of the backstory on it,” Grant said. “But I would love for someone, I would love for my child to not know the name of it and get on it and enjoy it.

“But for me, I’m still hurt by it,” he adds. “I’m still hurt by what it was. I’m still offended by it. But I hope the next person who gets on it is not offended by it. That’s all I’m hoping for. That the next person can enjoy it more than I can ever enjoy it.”

Becoming A Father: Adopting A Foster Child

I knew I would be a father someday. I just assumed it would happen the normal way. My wife Whitney had other ideas. She suggested that, instead of going the traditional biological route, we should become foster parents. After some long conversations, she had me onboard, too.

I wrote the following essay for the Father’s Day episode of Inside Appalachia.

Zack Harold takes a walk in the forest with his new daughter.

We began 10 weeks of classes, where we learned all the rules and got advice on how to deal with issues kids in foster care might experience. We started turning our home office into a kid’s room, too. This was tricky since we didn’t know how many kids we’d be getting, what their genders would be, or how old they would be, so we got a set of bunk beds, some gender-neutral bedding, a few toys — and figured we’d sort out the rest later.

After that, we had someone out to our house to do a home inspection. And just like that, the day after Easter 2019, our home was “open,” as they say in the foster care world. By that Wednesday, we got a call to see if we’d take a 5-year-old girl. By Friday night, Whitney and I were parents.

It was a strange thing to have a kid in the house at first. It’s a little bit like getting a roommate who can’t cook her own food, do her own laundry, or reliably groom herself without prompting.

Somehow we figured out how to take care of her and she seemed to enjoy living with us.

I felt a deep responsibility to take care of our little girl, and I liked spending time with her, but there was no spark.

For me, fatherly love came like a slow-rising tide. I was developing a bond; I just didn’t notice it as it was happening. Then I looked at her one day, I think I was following her up a trail in Kanawha State Forest, and realized I felt this brand-new kind of love in my heart — one that wasn’t ever going to go away.

Eventually it became clear our girl wasn’t going anywhere, either. It is a complicated thing, adopting a foster child. A lot of bonds have been broken in their lives for them to become eligible for adoption. The first priority of foster care is to reconnect kids with their biological families. If that fails, the goal is to find a safe, loving forever home for children. A few months after our little girl came to live with us, our foster care agency asked if we’d be willing to adopt her. This time, Whitney and I didn’t have to talk about it. The answer was, without hesitation: “Yes.”

So began months of paperwork and anxious waiting. Until you get your day in court, it feels like a trap door could open, and she could be gone. We’d had that experience before. About six months after welcoming our first foster daughter, a second little girl was placed in our home. Then one day Whitney called me at work. DHHR decided to move her to a biological family member, who would pick her up from school that day.

She lived with us for two weeks. I’d helped her with her homework. I’d fixed her breakfast. I’d hugged her goodnight. She was becoming part of her family. Now I wouldn’t get to say goodbye.

What if that had happened with this little girl, too? Luckily, I didn’t have to find out. Courtrooms are still closed because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But last Thursday, we got our day in court via Skype.

As the hour approached, we all got dressed up. Whitney bought special dresses for the occasion. I put on a tie for the first time in three months. Then I propped my laptop on the coffee table and logged on. There was the judge, the court reporter, our lawyer, and the adoption specialist from Necco, our foster care agency.

The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Our lawyer asked us a few simple questions: Where we live, what is our wedding date, and whether we believed this adoption was in the best interest of our family. And then, it happened.

Throughout the Skype call, our girl had been motionless and expressionless. I worried what was going through her mind, but once it was over, she said she didn’t want to speak up because she didn’t know any of the people on the screen. Fair enough, kid. I think it was a strange experience for all of us.

The rest of the day was a party. The grandparents all came over — and stayed six feet apart, of course. But we ate hotdogs, hamburgers, and sheet cake. Our girl devoured about two dozen chocolate covered strawberries one of Whitney’s aunts made. And while we usually try to watch her sweets intake, we told her all bets were off that day.

After all, we missed out on five years of her life. We’ve got a lot of celebrating to catch up on.

Wetzel County Workshop Keeps Folk Toys Alive

When I was a kid, the thing that intrigued me most about Santa wasn’t the beard, or the flying reindeer, or the repeated breaking and entering. No — I was fascinated by his workshop. I loved to imagine the elves working tirelessly to make toys that would end up under Christmas trees around the world.

But you know, I never once imagined the elves making the season’s hottest toys.

Instead, I pictured Santa’s little helpers building toys with good old-fashioned wood and glue. I imagined a shop filled with the smell of sawdust and the sound of popguns.

In addition to wooden toys, the Mountain Craft Shop Co. also sells metal puzzles and cloth dolls.

Turns out, my visions looked a lot like what I found in Proctor, West Virginia; headquarters of Mountain Craft Shop Company, which has been turning out traditional handmade Appalachian toys since the early 1960s.

The tree-shaded workshop used to be an elementary school. Now, one side of the building is filled with power saws and a wood lathe, bottles of Elmer’s Glue and slabs of locally sourced hardwood. The other side, the shop’s showroom, is filled with toys your great-grandparents probably would recognize.

“I like to tell the kids, can you remember before Walmart and plastics. There wasn’t necessarily a store to go to to buy toys, so grandmom or granddad or dad or mom made the toys from what was readily available: sticks that they found out back, little pieces of wood, pieces of string, little bits of leather,” says Steve Conlon, who runs the business with his wife Ellie.

Steve and Ellie Conlon outside the headquarters of their Mountain Craft Shop Co. in Proctor, W.Va., which manufactures traditional Appalachian folk toys.

A few months back, Conlon gave me a tour of the property, which he calls “Wetzel County’s Only Amusement Park.” Putting down his popgun, Conlon picked up what looked like a capital letter L.

He held it by the short end and whipped it around in the air, creating an ear-splitting ratcheting sound.

“We call this a rattletrap. All this noise is generated from a tongue depressor and this little cogged wheel here. I tell ‘em, it sounds better in a van,” Conlon said.

Then he picked up that old toy where you try to catch a ball on a string in a cup. Conlon tried twice before landing the ball perfectly on his third attempt.

“This actually dates back to 1580 in England,” Conlon said. “Good for eye-hand coordination.”

Next, he moved over to a low table and palmed a handful of marbles — manufactured about 20 miles away at the Marble King factory, in Paden City.

“We make a variety of marble toys. This one is interesting. We call it a musical marble tree. It’s about 30 inches tall and it has pieces of wood — leaves — that stick out on either side. We drop a marble and a marble goes from one leaf to another,” Conlon said.

He dropped the marbles and they began bounced down the wooden fronds, sounding like Animal from The Muppet Show going nuts on a marimba.

“Makes a wonderful noise, don’t you think?” Conlon said.

The Conlons manufacture all these toys and dozens more models in their tiny shop, which they open to visitors. They also sell their toys in gift shops around West Virginia and surrounding states and at Tamarack, in Beckley. But they did not come to West Virginia to be toymakers. They wanted to be farmers.

“We moved here in 1974 from Philadelphia and we brought with us a couple beehives in the back of the U-Haul truck. I was just fascinated with bees. We tried chickens and cows and every other agricultural pursuit and bees kept kind of rising to the top. So it evolved into us owning a lot of beehives and needing other locations to keep them,” Conlon said.

They placed some of their hives on the property of a neighbor named Dick Schnacke. He was a mechanical engineer by trade and worked at the aluminum plant in nearby New Martinsville. But he also taught himself to make traditional folk toys. But researching how to do it wasn’t easy.

“Very little was really recorded,” Dick Schnacke told the West Virginia Division of Culture and History in 1978. “You see, toys were not considered to be anything but trifles, all through the ages, until just the last few years. So nothing was recorded.”

A portrait of Dick Schnacke, founder of the Mountain Craft Shop Co., still hangs in the company’s Proctor, W.Va., headquarters.

Still, Schnacke forged ahead. He eventually compiled two books on folk toys. He also spun his passion into a small business, the Mountain Craft Shop Company. Schnacke handled all the research, development, marketing, and sales. But, kind of like Kris Kringle himself, turned manufacturing over to a team of elves.

Dick Schnacke compiled his research on traditional toys into two books.

“He actually didn’t make any of the toys himself. He had probably 10 people who were making the different toys at home. People who were buying their farm by making toys to be sold,” Conlon said.

Through the years, Schnacke grew the company’s inventory to include some 200 traditional toys. But by 2002, he was getting older and looking to get out of the toy business. So he offered to sell it to an enterprising couple who could keep his legacy alive — his friends the Conlons.

Along with the business, the Conlons also got Schnacke’s expertise on building folk toys.

“It was a manufacturing business. We had to learn how to manufacture those toys and had to accumulate a lot of power tools, which wasn’t painful for a man to do,” Conlon said.

To keep manufacturing costs low, they decided to start making most of the toys in-house. The Conlons, who still raise bees and sell honey, get the wood from trees they harvest on their own property or from logs their neighbors give them. They mill the logs themselves and air dry the lumber in the shop.

“Some woods do a lot better at certain things. We pick out the woods for their adaptability of the product and also the beauty. If you use a piece of walnut, it really makes a toy stand out. If I’m turning things on the lathe, cherry is a very nice wood for turning,” Conlon said.

Steve Conlon demonstrates the traditional “limber jack” dancing toy in his workshop.

Many of the toys are incredibly labor intensive to produce. Take the Jacob’s Ladder, for instance. This classic, deceptively simple-looking toy creates the illusion that pieces are click-clacking to the bottom of a string of wooden tiles.

“The Jacob’s Ladder has 8 different pieces of wood. So I make the pieces of wood in here, plane them down, sand them,” Conlon said.

Conlon’s wife, Ellie, then cuts 24 pieces of fabric and glues them to the wooden tiles to bring the jacob’s ladder together.

“We make about a thousand a year. Not too many people want to work for pennies on the hour. If you own your own business, you do that,” Ellie Conlon said.

That level of commitment — and sacrifice — is one reason the Conlons are not yet sure who will take over Mountain Craft Shop Company when they decide to retire.

“How will it play out? We don’t know yet. The reality of the situation is, we are manufacturing in America. Look around you. Manufacturing in America — there’s a lot of competition,” Steve Conlon said.

One thing remains certain, though. The traditional toys they make have not lost their ability to captivate children. They see it every time they set up a booth at a craft fair.

“Kids will just spend minutes, half an hour, there as long as parents are willing to stay. And then of course there’s crying and screaming when it’s time to leave,” Steve Conlon said.

When Conlon says this, it reminds me of something that happened a few months ago, when my wife and I took our five-year-old little girl to Babcock State Park in southern West Virginia. We told her she could pick out one thing from the gift shop. She perused the whole store but ultimately gravitated toward a shelf near the window — where she picked up a Jacob’s Ladder made by the Conlons.

As we cruised down the interstate headed for home, I noticed I couldn’t hear any noise coming from her tablet.

Instead, I heard the clacking of the Jacob’s Ladder.

Even in this age of screens, toys made with wood and glue still possess magic. And Steve and Ellie Conlon are keeping that magic alive.

If you’re interested in picking up some toys from the Mountain Craft Shop Company before Christmas, their Proctor, W.Va. will be open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 20; 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 21-22; and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 23. They will be closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Their toys are also available at Tamarack and many state park gift shops.

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the 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 Virignia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stores of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.

W.Va. Campground Preserving Appalachian-Born Style Of Sacred Music That Is Quickly Being Forgotten

There’s a place in southern West Virginia that many consider holy ground. For nearly 70 years, gospel music fans have gathered on this mountaintop just south of Summersville Lake for weekend concerts featuring singers from all over West Virginia and its surrounding states.

This is the annual West Virginia Mountain State Southern Gospel Convention.

It doesn’t take long before you realize the people who come here feel a deep connection with southern gospel music.

“It’s the old-fashioned way of worship,” said Pat Coberly, the convention’s second vice president. “And southern gospel music is more that way. It tells of happenings — it tells of trials, troubles, it tells of wonderful things that happen. It’s more down to earth, more earthy than a lot of your music.”

“It’s the only kind, in my opinion, that can get in your soul. It moves you,” said Jim O’Dell, a singer who’s been coming to the convention for years.

There is also a deep love for the land here.

The camp is in Mt. Nebo, which takes its name from the Old Testament mountain where God gave Moses a peek at the Promised Land. In the same way, longtime attendees see these 48 acres as a little piece of heaven.

“It is a home,” said Jim Nelson, the convention’s first vice president. “It’s not like next weekend there will be football there and the following weekend basketball or a country music concert, or something like that. This is dedicated to gospel music and to the Lord. In fact, we call the shelter where the sing is: ‘The Tabernacle.’ And treat it as such. Set aside for singing and fellowship and just praising the Lord.”

Backstage at the WV Mountain State Gospel Convention Tabernacle.

Southern gospel musicians and fans make their way to the tabernacle on a rainy summer Friday night. Singers trickle into the green room behind the stage, taking their place in a row of old wooden theater seats, each with a number on the back. Those numbers are important because that’s how singers decide the order in which they’ll sing.

“If you wanna go first, you’re in no. 1 chair. If you wanna go fourth, you’re in no. 4 chair. I picked number four because Terry said ‘I can’t get there by 7, don’t book us first,” Odell said.

O’Dell has been performing here for years with several groups. He’s been singing with the trio Saved By Grace for the past three years.

“It’s a good atmosphere. And the people are so nice over here. It’s just a wonderful place to sing and fellowship,” he said.

Fellowship. That’s a word you hear a lot around here.

Although the convention is strictly for Christian music, it is independent of any church organization. For longtime convention attendee Linda Fitzwater, who lives about 25 miles away in Danese, West Virginia, that independence is one of her favorite parts.

“There’s no denominations here. There’s no Methodists, there’s no Baptist, there’s no Pentecostal. Everybody worships the Lord as one, which is the way it should be,” she said.

They worship together and they work together.

“We dress up and have the sings but any other time we’re raking leaves, mowing grass, cleaning bathrooms, hauling rocks, all that. It takes it all to keep it a’going,” second vice president Pat Coberly said. “And it’s all volunteer. We’re all volunteer work. Nobody gets paid for anything, except for the Lord. And the blessings from the Lord.”

A view of the campground at the WV Mountain State Gospel Convention.

Most things at the Convention are free — except for the food at the concession stand and souvenirs at the bookstore.

No one has to pay admission. There’s no fee to park. The convention doesn’t even charge campers to hook up to electricity, water, and sewer offered in the campground.

Coberly says that’s because the convention serves a higher purpose.

“We’re here for the Lord. This is God’s. This is not ours,” she said. “We’re just workers for him. This belongs to him. And we’re here to spread his word through gospel music.”

Catch that? Not “Christian” music. “Gospel,” music. There is a difference.

That Old-Time Religion

Most of the Christian music you find on the radio now is known in the music industry as “contemporary Christian music.” This style has been around since the 1960s, when artists started mixing the sounds of pop and rock music with religious lyrics.

But the West Virginia Mountain State Southern Gospel Convention was built on a completely different, and older, genre of sacred music known as southern gospel.

You can trace the roots of the style to one songbook, published in the year 1900 in the tiny town of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee.

It was called “Gospel Chimes,” and it was the creation of singing instructor James D. Vaughan. The book contains songs by Vaughan and other Christian songwriters of the day, arranged in four-part harmony.

Vaughan sent out quartets to perform concerts featuring the bouncy tunes from his songbook.

As the company grew, he published additional songbooks and started additional quartets. It wasn’t long before other publishers got in on the act. This inspired other quartets to head out on the road and churches to organize singing conventions, where different congregations would come together and sing their favorite songs.

That’s how the West Virginia Mountain State Gospel Sing got started back in 1949.

Held at the Nazarene Church Camp, just outside Summersville, it was supposed to be a one-time thing. But the sing was such a success that organizers decided, right there by the camp’s split rail fence, to make the convention an annual occurrence.

It eventually out-grew the Nazarene Church Camp and bounced between a few locations before the convention purchased 48 acres of land in Mount Nebo.

Over the years, the event eventually shifted away from congregational singing to focus more on performances by southern gospel quartets. And that’s when the crowds really started flocking to the Tabernacle.

The campground’s bookstore sells the convention annual, a yearbook featuring photos and contact information for all the groups that sang the previous year.

Fitzwater, now 77, says she started coming to Mount Nebo when she was just 16.

“I can remember when I was a teenager that these fields up here where they park the cars would be full. There would be thousands. Not hundreds, but thousands of people here.”

The 1970s is when the convention really seemed to hit its stride. Singer Eddie Withrow remembers one night when prominent southern gospel songwriter Conrad Cook wasn’t quite finished when the convention was over.

“It was about 2:30 in the morning and the singing had just stopped here in the tabernacle. And he said, ‘If I had a piano, buddy we’d sing.’ We pulled a piano off our bus and set up a little sound system and we got right out there. There must have been probably 150, 200 people around in a circle in their lawn chairs,” Withrow said.

Precious Memories

Attendance at the convention remained strong through the 1980s and 1990s. That’s when I first started going. I remember stepping onstage with my family’s southern gospel group, The Bobby Adkins Family, and looking out at what seemed like an endless sea of people.

Reporter Zack Harold (front right) as a boy with his family’s southern gospel singing group, The Bobby Adkins Family, at the WV Mountain State Gospel Convention.

But things started to change. Radio shifted away from southern gospel music, as did some churches. Older fans started dying off. In the 1990s, average attendance was around 15,000 between all three sings. By the year 2000, that figure had dropped to about 10,000 people. And it’s continued to decline.

Each sing now draws just a few hundred people. I hadn’t been to Mount Nebo in years, but on the night I was there, there were almost as many singers waiting in the back as there were audience members to hear them.

The people running the convention aren’t content to let their tradition die on the vine, though.

Larry Neff was elected convention president last year. He has some ideas about how to get the convention thriving again. The organization held its first-ever bluegrass gospel sing in May 2019, which attracted a modest but promising turnout. They’re also upgrading the campgrounds in hopes to attract more campers.

These steps appear to be working. Neff says he noticed a slight increase in attendance in 2019. But he knows the long-term future of the Convention is up to the young people.

“If you don’t have young people to come up and carry it on… like now most of us are over 50. You’ve gotta get young people interested in something if you want it to grow and keep on growing,” Neff said.

Neff acknowledges that getting young people involved will likely require incorporating some of the more modern Christian music young people seem to enjoy — while still finding a way to stay true to the Convention’s roots.

“I believe we’re going to have to get contemporary music in here. Bluegrass gospel. And still keep it the old fashioned way. Somehow we’re going to have to mix those three together.”

Although the event used to draw thousands of people, the WV Mountain State Gospel Convention now only draws a few hundred people.

In the meantime, the folks on Mount Nebo are doing their best to make it through. While I was there, Nelson took the stage to explain some recent bad news the board received.

“We found out our insurance we have been carrying has been very lacking in the amount of coverage we need to have,” he told the tiny crowd. “So to bring our insurance up to date is an increase of about $3,000. We’ve got to cough up some money.”

So what do the organizers do? The thing they’ve always done. Nelson asks Withrow to say a prayer. Then, as the offering plates make their rounds, the crowd joins together in an old, familiar song:

“When we’ve been there 10,000 years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we first begun.”

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the 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 Virignia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stores of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.