Students studying Digital Humanities at Marshall University build archive for historical documents relating to forgotten writer, Tom Kromer.
Tom Kromer was a prolific writer best known for his semi-autobiographical 1935 novel, “Waiting for Nothing.” Kromer’s work is heavily inspired from his experience with homelessness during the Great Depression.
Now, students studying digital humanities at Marshall University have developed an online archive of the forgotten work.
Kromer was born in 1906 in Huntington, where he studied journalism at what was then Marshall College.
“You didn’t know that an author, that papers at the time compared to Hemingway, lived here,” said Stefan Schöberlein, director of digital humanities at Marshall University, “There’s no marker to Kromer at his birthplace, no statue or sign for him anywhere in town, and no street bearing his name.”
Students designed the Tom Kromer Digital Archive in an effort to restore his visibility. Students put four variations of Waiting for Nothing in the archive, including a German translation, an annotated edition, and an audiobook.
kromerarchive.org
Annotated Edition of, “Waiting for Nothing.”
Kristen Clark helped produce the Waiting for Nothing audiobook.
“The way the work is written it’s kind of like Kromer speaking to you about his experience,” she said. “Having somebody read it to you embodies that affect really well.“
The archive also features transcribed book reviews from the time the book was published, a student developed podcast, and virtual tour using the external history website, Clio.
Michael Martin said the Kromer Clio tour focuses on locations of personal significance to Kromer in New Mexico, Virginia, and West Virginia. Students chose locations like the Keith-Albee Theatre (now known as the Keith Albee Performing Arts Center) in Huntington, which relates to his time at Marshall. Martin said, “He had a small experiment for the journalism major that he wrote about, where he panhandled in that little area.”
kromerarchive.org
“Waiting For Nothing,” Newspaper Reviews
During the early 20th century, Kromer was part of a growing American socialist movement. He spent time writing for socialist newspapers in Appalachia and around the rest of the United States.
“It was a great piece of culture to read about to really give the other side of the sentiments at the time, because of course, when you’re learning about the Cold War, you learn about America as being super anti communist, when in reality there was a huge movement,” Krys Smith explained.
Students working on the archive interviewed one of Kromer’s nephews, Steve Barnhill. Although Barnhill was young when he knew his uncle, he recalls that his family suspected Kromer of being a Russian spy.
Stephen Schöberlein
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Marshall University
Marshall University Students Interviewing Steve Barnhill Over Video Call
Although Kromer’s work has a wider scope than Appalachia, Michael Martin says the influence is present.
“Kromer very specifically writes from a proletariat perspective,” Martin said. “It’s something that you wouldn’t get in a lot of other places that didn’t have the specific economic conditions Huntington had and still has.”
Despite students archiving a great deal of documents, many of Kromer’s writings are lost forever as a consequence of the Red Scare.
As an example, Schöberlein said, “his literary agent was Maxim Lieber, who was then accused of being a Soviet spy, so he fled the country and burned most of his correspondence.”
Despite the loss of historical documents, students are still optimistic about what they can find, as many documents are left to be discovered in the physical archives of newspapers and libraries, and private storage; what scholars refer to as The Great Unread. The students are looking to expand the Tom Kromer Digital Archive with more podcasts and more documents.
“Living history through this single man and his writings throughout the country was probably my favorite part about this whole experience,” Smith said.
Kromer is buried in Springhill Cemetery in Huntington, West Virginia.
You can find the Tom Kromer Digital Archive at kromerarchive.org.
Nellie Canterbury was born in 1933 in a mountain home above the railroad town of Hinton. She was the fifth of six girls and today is the last surviving sister from her family. She is also a writer.
In her book “The Visit,” she writes about her family from the time her parents met to when her mother died. It is a family love story, told as she and one of her sisters sit down for a visit to discuss their lives. The story goes into detail about their farm lives, growing up, preparing their meals and going to church.
Aunt Nellie, as she prefers to be called, explained that she changed the names of the characters in the book slightly, but it is based on her own life and a series of actual visits with her older sister.
Eric Douglas spoke with her over Zoom to learn more about the book and her life.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: When you were writing “The Visit,” coming up with the story, you go into a tremendous amount of detail about their lives, about their courting, how they got together, and all of that sort of thing. Tell me tell me where all that came from?
Canterbury: Well, I had four older sisters. They told me a lot of these things. And of course, my mom talked about it a lot, too.
Douglas: These are the family stories that were passed down over the years, and you decided to write them all down?
Canterbury: Oh, it’s the truth. When she (my sister) was born, her name was Thelma Ann, but she didn’t like her name so she called herself Peggy. She was No. 3 of the six girls and I was No. 5. I visited her when she lived in Arizona for many years. And I visited with her when we were there and she would tell these stories and talk about her past and all that.
Douglas: These are the things you remember and then the family stories that were passed down.
Canterbury: It was just the way we lived. It was the times that I grew up in. And the area, you know. It makes you think and it makes you appreciate what you do have.
Douglas: So tell me a little bit more about your parents. You talk about the way they met in the book and go into a lot of detail.
Canterbury: My daddy was a veteran of World War I. My mother was a schoolteacher. My daddy had been discharged from the service and was walking along a dirt country road and passed by the schoolhouse and my mother was the teacher there. They were having recess and he was singing the song “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” He went on down the road and she ran as far as she could in the schoolyard and hopped up on a log or stump and watched him until he walked out of sight. They were just attracted to each other immediately.
My mom was a little fluffy. She was a little on the fluffy side. And she loved to cook. She was the backbone of the couple, because I’ve seen her help my daddy do things that most men did. I’ve seen her shoe horses, pick up their big hind legs and nail a horseshoe to their hoof and then trim it down. She was an all around woman. She wasn’t masculine. She was feminine. But she worked hard. She could do just about anything any man around could do.
Douglas: She was fairly young. She was a school teacher, but she was 17 or 18 when she started the school?
Canterbury: Probably about 18 years old. You could go to the county seat and take a written test and if you passed, they would grant you a teaching certificate. In the little one-room country schools you had grades one through eight.
Douglas: Did you go to a one room schoolhouse, too?
Canterbury: The school that I was raised in was called the Canterbury School. My daddy went to the Board of Education. There were a lot of children that lived back in those halls then and they needed a school so they built a school. My daddy gave them an acre or two of ground for the school with the condition that if it were ever abandoned, the land would revert back to his farm, which it did.
Douglas: What’s fascinating about this book is that you do have such detail that historians can read this and learn from it to understand what life was like 102 years ago. The way they cooked meals and all the work that they did around the farm just to survive.
Canterbury: When we lived on the farm on the mountain, we had to work like boys. We raised fields of corn because we had our corn ground and the corn meal. We had wheat fields. We had wheat ground into flour. And my dad, he would cut timber. We had some boundaries and virgin timber and he would cut timber.
One night in 1970, Bill Danoff and his then-girlfriend Taffy Nivert were hanging out with John Denver, and they played a few verses from a song they’d been working on. Denver immediately said he wanted to record it.
“It was sort of like an old movie,” Danoff recalled in a 2010 interview with the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame. “You know, ‘why don’t we all do it together?’ And I said, ‘okay, well, we got to finish it.’ He said, ‘well, let’s finish it.’”
The three of them — Danoff, Nivert and Denver — stayed up all night finishing the song. Knowing little about the state, Nivert pulled out an encyclopedia and looked up West Virginia.
“We kept just throwing out lines,” Danoff said. “And then we’d write down the ones that seemed to fit.”
They played “Country Roads” the next night, at The Cellar Door, an iconic intimate venue in Washington D.C.
Stories From 'Country Roads' – First Public Performance
“The people clapped for about five minutes straight,” Danoff said. “First time they’d ever heard the song. And you knew you had something because that doesn’t, that just doesn’t happen, you know?”
One of those in the audience was Andy Ridenour, who at the time was a student at Concord College (now Concord University), in southern West Virginia.
“I was on holiday break between Christmas and New Year’s, along with some friends from West Virginia. We all went nuts, with our West Virginia connection. Quite frankly everybody went nuts.”
This wasn’t the first time Ridenour had seen Denver play. A couple months prior to the show at The Cellar Door, Denver played at Concord College. Ridenour believes Denver’s trip to the small town of Athens, West Virginia may have helped spark the hit single.
Credit courtesy Concord University
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Newspaper article previewing John Denver’s visit to Concord College (now Concord University) in fall 1970.
“He and his band flew into Roanoke, Virginia, and they had to drive over on old US 460,” Ridenour said. “A lot of it was two-lane roads, running parallel to the New River. And when John and his band got out of the car, they commented on the roads. They were happy to have safely arrived.”
When “Country Roads” was released the following year, Ridenour said Denver sent an autographed copy of the album to the Concord radio station. “He said, ‘thanks for the inspiration.’”
Credit Courtesy Bill Danoff
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John Denver performing at the Cellar Door in D.C. in 1970.
The song has been a worldwide anthem since its release in April 1971, and it’s one of the things people across the globe connect with West Virginia. But there’s a debate about whether the song was really even written about the state. The opening verse mentions the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the Shenandoah River, two geographical features that are mostly associated with Western Maryland and Virginia. While the river and mountains do touch a small portion of West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, Danoff said he wrote most of the song during a drive through rural Maryland.
“I was just driving out in Western Maryland, and it was kind of countryside that reminded me of my home upbringing in Western New England.”
But Danoff said he does have a connection to West Virginia. Growing up, he spent many evenings listening to the Wheeling Jamboree from WWVA.
“In the bridge of that song. there’s a there’s a line: ‘I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me/ the radio reminds me of my home far away/ and riding down the road I get a feeling I should have been home yesterday.’”
“I’m thinking of that radio,” Danoff explained. “I’m thinking of WWVA and heading toward that that radio signal. So there really was a kind of an early and subconscious connection.”
And as for the geographical issue, when somebody pointed that out, Danoff came up with this answer, on the fly. “So I thought about it and I said, ‘well, the guy’s going home to West Virginia. He’s going through Virginia, and he’s passing the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shenandoah River.’”
These details don’t seem to bother most West Virginians.
“I think that we excuse it,” said Sarah Morris, an English professor at West Virginia University who is writing a book about “Country Roads.” She’s scoured the internet and read dozens of threads. People all over the world debate what this song is really about, and which state really gets to claim it.
“And lots of places across the world want to own it, which is why we see bands and musicians taking it up and changing the lyrics to match their homes,” Morris said.
The song “Country Roads” has been recorded in at least 19 different languages, and in countless different arrangements, including the Toots and the Maytails’ version “West Jamaica.” That bands’ lead singer recently died of COVID-19.
But nobody owns the anthem more than West Virginians. The state bought the rights to the song so they could use it to promote tourism. West Virginia University plays it whenever they win a football or basketball game.
WVU Football: Country Roads
When West Virginia Public Broadcasting out a call out on social media, asking people to share stories about this song, and what it means to them, we were flooded with emails from people like Stephanie Ostrowski, of Martinsburg, W.Va., who played “Country Roads” as the last song at her wedding. “Actually it’s become a tradition with a lot of our friends. Everyone gets arm at arm together and sings ‘Country Roads.’ It’s a great way to end the night.”
And Michael Rubin, who lives in Harpers Ferry W.Va., who recalled begging his father to buy the 8 track so they could play it in the car.
Frank Saporito of Wheeling said the song inspired him as a teenager to save all the money he earned so he could afford the same guitar that John Denver played.
Sarah Morris said this song is emblematic of a nostalgia for the past, and a desire for something just out of reach. These themes resonate strongly with many folks from West Virginia.
“There was this huge outmigration of West Virginians to work in industries in the 60s. West Virginia, per capita, lost more people in the Vietnam War than any other state. All of that was happening right around the time the song was released. So there was this overall mood of homesickness, not just for West Virginians, but also for our country. So the song was born into that.”
Homesickness is universal. Maybe that’s why it resonates with people all over the world. Morris compares it to a concept in Welch culture known as “Hiraeth.”
“It’s this deep, internal, fundamental longing for a place we can never go. And I think there’s an element of that in country roads, too.”
Morris said “Country Roads” is maybe about a longing for a place that never really existed in the first place. A place that our memories changed over the years.
And during the pandemic, that nostalgia has grown even stronger for some people, like Sonya Shafer. She left West Virginia right after high school. She’s traveled the world for work. Lately though, that work has all been remote. So she felt the urge to come back.
“I could feel the magnetic pull taking me taking me back, asking me why I left asking me why I’m not home, asking me why I’m not in West Virginia.”
Shafer hired movers to bring her stuff across the country from L.A. and bought a one-way ticket to Lewisburg, West Virginia, where she grew up. At the airport she recorded an audio memo, in between flights that were taking her home, in which
“Today’s the day I’m on layover here in O’Hare [airport in Chicago] with my cat. Really it’s ‘Country Roads,’ take me home. I’m going home. It’s been a long time coming, and I slept in an empty apartment last night and actually played the song a few times.”
Two weeks after the move, Shafer said returning to West Virginia has been everything she’d hoped. She takes a walk to a nearby creek every day– and she’s enjoying being called “honey” and “darlin.” And when she called the DMV to get her new license plate, she said her heart flooded with emotion when she heard the hold music, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
On a sunny day in early September, hundreds of Wheeling residents, state lawmakers, and the Pride of West Virginia, West Virginia University’s marching band, all came out to Main St. in Wheeling to celebrate an important milestone in the city’s history: 250 years.
Jay Frey headed up Wheeling’s 250th commission, and he wanted to show Wheeling’s big city in a small package feel in the ensuing celebration. “We’re a small town that doesn’t know we’re a small town. Because in my lifetime there were upwards of over 60,000 people in this area. But we have many of the attributes from the 19th and 20th century that make us feel bigger than we are,” Frey said.
The parade wasn’t the only event that the city put together, there was also a costume ball at the beginning of the year, a fireworks display to celebrate 170 years since the construction of the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, and other events meant to remember a storied past.
“Ladies and gentlemen, one out of every 20 persons living in Wheeling is of african descent. This twentieth man is not a newcomer or an alien. For his ancestors were settled by force in Virginia one year before the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. No biracial clash has ever taken place in this city’s history. Due largely to the liberal ideology of the whites and the splendid conduct of the colored people. But justice and candor require attention to the handicaps suffered by Wheeling’s 20th man,” Scott recited.
Wheeling is half the size it was in its industrial heyday, but like many towns that sprung up during early white settlement, it had a modest beginning as mentioned by Wheeling Historian Travis Henline.
“Wheeling at the time it was founded was nothing but a frontier outpost. I mean you had just a few families who were settled here like the Zane’s and the McColloughs and a few others,” Henline said.
This first settlement happened in 1769 and was named Zanesburg after one of the founding families. A century later Wheeling would experience a boom during the industrial revolution because of its prime location on the Ohio River.
“So now you have the Ohio River, a major conduit for thousands of years for people, comes together with the National Road which brings people by wagon and by foot across the mountains to the Ohio River and then you have the the B&O Railroad which connects us to the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. All of that makes us a gateway to the west and a transportation hub, I mean that’s a huge part of our history,” Henline said.
The B&O Railroad finished construction in 1853, ten years before West Virginia became a state, which the city of Wheeling had a hugely important role in.
“Well without Wheeling there would be no West Virginia. Because we are strategically located in the Northern Panhandle. When the conflict of the Civil War began we are here in the comfy confines of this strip of land between two very powerful Union states in Ohio and Pennsylvania,” Henline added.
This location made Wheeling the prime location for the capital of the reformed government of Virginia after the state seceded from the Union in 1861. After two years, Wheeling would become the birthplace, and capital of the then new state of West Virginia, making it the only city to have been the capital of two different states.
While Wheeling didn’t remain the capital of the state, it was still an economic powerhouse, earning the nickname “Nail City” because of the amount of iron manufacturing in it.
But all things must come to an end, and Wheeling’s economic boom is no different.
Wheeling Today
“So Wheeling in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s that’s when you see a lot of the industry is closing down and it’s moving out. You had the interstate coming through, you had the retail centers, the mall in the 70’s and the highlands later on that kind of kill the commercial things happening in downtown Wheeling. Some of the jobs leave, so the people leave,” Henline pointed out.
Many of the industries that became synonymous with Wheeling like Wheeling Steel or Marsh Wheeling Stogies, had either moved or completely closed their doors by the 2000’s. This lead to a pretty bleak reputation for the city.
But the current mayor of Wheeling Glenn Elliott points out, there are still some victories in recent years worth celebrating.
“One of the issues we have with downtown is that people judge it to what it was in 1950 when it was a retail hub. If you look at cities all across the rust belt, downtowns are no longer the retail hubs they once were,” Elliott said. “All that’s moved to malls and shopping plazas in the suburbs. But if you look at actual employment numbers, downtown Wheeling is booming in terms of the actual number of people working there every day, you just don’t see them because they’re at their desk or workstations.”
Wheeling 250th ‘Leave Behind’ Items
While the celebration mainly focused on one off events, there were a few items the Wheeling 250 commision wanted to leave behind. These “leave behind” items included a new flag for the city, a set of murals commemorating the river, the rails, and the road that made Wheeling a transportation hub, and a children’s book. The latter is one of Jay Frey’s personal favorite accomplishments on the 250 commision.
“Well I’m extremely proud of the children’s book that was just released in time for the holidays this year which is called Once There Was a Mouse. It was written by Cheryl Ryan Harshmen, and illustrated by Robert Vilamagna. It’s meant for little kids, who I think will enjoy it, and I don’t want to spoil anything. That I think is… as the Rotary Club who funded the publication of the book pointed out, this is celebratory, its charming, but it also plants a seed in small children who will be in their fifties when Wheeling celebrates its 300th anniversary and I think that’s pretty meaningful.”
A devastating flood struck Harpers Ferry on October 16, 1942. Ironically, it occurred on the 83rd anniversary of John Brown’s raid—the event that forever put Harpers Ferry in the history books.
The town’s early history was tied to water. In the 1740s, settler Robert Harper established a ferry there, at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, giving the town its name. Then, based on a recommendation from George Washington, one of the nation’s two government armories and arsenals was built at Harpers Ferry.
The armory and much of the town was wiped out during the Civil War. The town continually struggled to recover. However, periodic flooding dealt townspeople one setback after another. Particularly devastating floods occurred in 1870, 1896, 1924, and 1936. After the ’42 flood destroyed some of the last homes and businesses in the Lower Town, all hope seemed lost. But, West Virginia Congressman Jennings Randolph stepped in with a plan to turn portions of the town over to the National Park Service. Randolph’s actions helped save Harpers Ferry, and today, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park attracts a quarter-of-a-million visitors annually.
The recently renovated Coin Harvey House on Third Avenue in Huntington is a beautiful old building with a double staircase and glass windows. It easily stands out from its modern-day surroundings, which include a fast food joint across the street and an auto body shop next door.
“I am from this area, and I have lived and played in Huntington since I was little,” said Amanda Shaver, a Cabell County native and a graduate student at the Marshall University history department. “I remember seeing this house. It has such a unique look and feel to it, that once you see it, you won’t forget it. It looks like it belongs in New Orleans, or somewhere not Huntington.”
For a long time, the house was boarded up and abandoned, trapping much of its past inside and making its story nearly inaccessible to the public.
Credit Emily Allen / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The historic Coin Harvey House is located on Third Avenue in Huntington, West Virginia.
Today, learning that history is as easy as pulling up an app on your phone — the Clio app, to be precise, which was developed about seven years ago by Marshall University’s history department.
Clio is a free website and mobile application that guides users through walking tours of historical and cultural sites created by volunteers, interns and students.
“Just the opportunity to research something I had seen so many times growing up, and to actually know the history of it, and why it’s here, and what it means to the community really inspired me,” Shaver said. She worked on a Clio entry about the Coin Harvey House’s history earlier this year.
Shaver’s entry on the Coin Harvey House showcases some of those upgrades. In addition to a standard five-paragraph account of the history behind the house, she also included 360-degree images from inside, and an interview with Jim St. Clair, a local who most-recently renovated the house.
The Coin Harvey House was built in the late 1800’s for William Harvey, a local lawyer and advocate for the “free silver” idea, which supported backing American money with silver, at a time when money was mostly backed by gold. Years after Harvey died in the 1960s, the house became a hub for local motorcyclists, until it fell into disrepair.
According to Shaver’s interview with St. Clair, the Harvey House is the last residence standing out of several large, historic homes that had once occupied Third Avenue.
Clio was first created by Marshall professor David Trowbridge seven years ago as an engagement tool. He said the program is about showing students that history is everywhere.
“I wanted to show them that history wasn’t just something that happened on the East Coast and cities like Boston, but was all around them,” he said.
Credit Emily Allen / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
David Trowbridge is a history professor at Marshall University. He developed Clio about seven years ago.
Every semester he offers students the opportunity to create entries of a historical site of their choosing for Clio. With the aforementioned grants — including support from the Whiting Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the West Virginia Humanities Council — Trowbridge said his students and other contributors can incorporate more multimedia, like interviews and images.
Still, the process of researching a site’s past remains the same.
“They become people who are not content to simply Google it, or accept the first few hits that Google gives them,” Trowbridge said. “They become savvy consumers of information in an information age, when people oftentimes struggle to find valid sources online.”
Credit Emily Allen / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Steven Straley, a graduate student at Marshall University, stands next to a statue of John Marshall, fourth chief justice of the United States, for whom Marshall University is named. Straley wrote about Marshall for the history-focused travel app, Clio.
Today, Trowbridge reports Clio has been used in more than 100 universities and 300 historical hubs throughout the country. It houses 600 walking tours nationwide.
Not only are there more entries, but there’s more people uploading them. Through donations and grants, Trowbridge said the Clio Foundation has offered a few paid opportunities for interns and volunteers to create entries.
“I love the sort of public aspect that Clio has, and how [it’s] not just looking at a book or going straight up to the monument and looking at a sign,” Satterfield said. “It’s looking personal stories, sometimes, and the way that [they] really connect to actual people.”
Clio is most popular in its home state of West Virginia, where Trowbridge said there are about 80 Clio tours. He and Eric Waggoner, Executive Director of the West Virginia Humanities Council, call the app a great tool to highlight the state’s “heritage tourism,” in which people travel to learn more about a place’s history and culture.
“The great benefit of Clio, I think, is that it turns the world into a museum,” Waggoner said. “It connects historical properties and historically significant sites and locations with the user directly through phone technology. And it allows people in their travels … to go on what amounts to basically a walking tour of historically significant sites, with information.”
Credit Emily Allen / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Emma Satterfield works from Marshall University on creating West Virginia Clio entries through AmeriCorps and Preserve West Virginia.
Yet, West Virginia also can be one of the trickiest places to use Clio, where some rural areas still lack broadband infrastructure and reliable cell service. Trowbridge said he’s hoping Clio will one day get a grant to address that.
“One of the things we’re trying to apply [for], are grants for some kind of a system that would make it possible to download a walking tour in advance, and then it could just use your phone’s GPS,” Trowbridge said.
For now, Clio users can download PDFs of tours before traveling.
