It is time for another edition of A Peek into Summers County’s Past. Each week, local history collector, William Jones, discusses items from his collection and their significance to local history. In this edition, he is talking about the Country Life Club.
To begin, Jones said, “This week’s piece involves my grandfather David Eugene Jones, my dad’s father, ‘Gene’ as most people knew him. The one thing that especially stood out about my grandfather the most has to be his reputation of being the best ‘draft horseman’ in this area in his time. He had always loved horses, especially draft horses. Grandpa, as I called him, retired from the Alderson Federal Prison Camp and had always had an active farm, first in Clayton and then Pence Springs.”
“He married my grandmother in 1952, they first lived in Clayton where they started their family, and then moved to the farm they bought in Pence Springs in 1962. Grandpa started what would give him the reputation of being so exceptional with draft horses while living there. They became involved in the Country Life Club that had been organized by the Clayton School Parent Teachers Association with Oma Boyd, a teacher, being the main orchestrator of the organization in 1953. The original concept of the club was to bring about a stronger relationship between the school and the community.”
“It was soon realized by the P.T.A. just how successful this was going to be and the club was called together to discuss the possibility of creating an organization called the “Country Life Program.” After the program became even more successful than first thought with more people from the area attending the meetings, its name was changed to Clayton-Griffiths Creek Country Life Program.”
“Grandpa became more active over the years, using his wagon and team of horses to pull the club’s entry in the Alderson 4th of July parade in 1961. You can see in the photo of the wagon with the canopy over the people, grandpa is the man wearing the white shirt with the derby hat and bow tie. This must have ignited a fire in my grandfather to show his horses. Because it led to him being an annual entry in the Alderson parade, The Farmers Day parade in Union, Pioneer Days in Marlington, where he had won first place several times, as well as showing and competing with his team at the state fair for several decades.”
“The color photo is of another time he used his wagon to represent the club through a parade in Hinton sometime in the late 1960s. Notice the signs down the side of the wagon; religion, recreation, and agriculture. Three things that this organization took pride in promoting with great respect in the community.”
“Grandpa was kind of an unknown carpenter of sorts as well. He built many of these ox yokes like the one you see here by hand over the years. Where he would simply sit on a block of wood outside of his barn door and worked the wood by hand with a draw knife, using ash to make the yolk. He would then soak the hickory in the creek on his farm where he could more easily bend it to form the ‘bows’ that he would then apply to the yolk.”
“He enjoyed these types of events so much that he built the little wagon you can see in the photo of my father David Jones. Dad would use a pair of his father’s calves, with an ox yolk that grandpa had built also. Where dad would then pull his sisters through local parades. He even built the small miniature ox yolks to hold picture frames like this one with my father in it in the late 1960s during a parade in Hinton. The gentleman you see behind dad is Carmel Kirby from Alderson.”
“Seen here is one of the medium size ox yokes he crafted while sitting on his block of wood by his barn. My father uncovered it and the others that are stored in his wagon, where dads little wagon also sits in the bed of the large wagon in the barn loft. My father inherited these items when my grandmother passed away in 2020. The wagon came down the line from her family in Greenville, West Virginia. Grandpa was so well known for his ox yolks that he built by hand that his craft was recorded in an article in Goldenseal Magazine in the 1980s. Various people would even have him build them one as well, either to use or to display. Hugh Harris, a well-known insurance man at that time in Alderson and Grandpa’s good friend, Hugh, was a collector of antique farming implements. He had him make one and told Gene, as he called him, that he wanted it to be as much like an old and used one as much as possible. So before Grandpa gave it to Hugh, he put it on a pair of his oxen and worked them for about an hour so Hugh could say it had been an original ‘used’ one.”
“Lastly, I had seen photos of it but am too young to remember it. Grandpa built a large red ox yolk much like the one in the photo, only larger. He then electrified two antique oil lanterns and placed them inside the bows and hung them on the front of his and grandma’s house. We found it in going through the ones in storage for this article. We are going to clean it up, rewire it and rehang it on the front of the home place. Very fitting since it is a 1950s all-original ranch-style house that is going to become the ‘Hines Boarding House 2.0’, a vacation rental.”
This is the end of another edition of A Peek into Summers County’s Past. If you have a story from the area’s history to share, send us an email at news@hintonnews.com
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