RIVERSIDE REST W.Va. (Hinton News) – This week’s piece is a little more sentimental to me but still has its ties to Summers County history nonetheless. The lamp you see here was bought at John and Lucille Clay’s store in Riverside Rest, in the early 1950s. Now comes a twist with the lamp you see in the photo.
My good late friend Chubby Clay lived in his parent’s store in Riverside Rest. I had mentioned him and his parents in my story about how the town of Riverside Rest was formed. Their store, the antique furniture restoration they did, and his mother’s recaning antique chairs ability couldn’t be matched from what I hear.
He had the mate to this lamp in his living room, which is what had been the main room of their store. You see, when they first built the store in the 50s, they built living quarters over the store part with the intention of building the house part to the left and it all being attached together.
That never happened and his father John passed away. So instead of building the house like they had originally planned, he and his mother turned the storeroom into their living room with the kitchen and three bedrooms upstairs. An interesting part about this house too was that it never had a bathroom inside of it. You had to go outside and walk around to the back of the building to access the bathroom. You see it was originally for the customers and it too was never changed when they decided to convert the store into a house.
The black and white photo is of Lucille Clay standing in front of their store while it was being built. Chubby teased me like he did with so many other antiques he had in his home and would say; “I will sell it to you one day William”. He never got around to it and when his estate auction was held in 2015 I believe, I tried my best to get the winning bid on that lamp but lost it. But I did win the bids for a few other pieces he had also teased me with just like the lamp.
Now where the matching lamp that you see in the photo comes into play. It belonged to my good friend and fellow historian Suzanne Humphrey in Pence Springs who passed away in 2022. Her father Jim Tolley developed the Hinton Alderson Airport in Pence Springs in the late 1920’s. He had purchased this lamp for his wife from the Clays store. I intend to write a piece about the airport’s history and show some of the early photos of it soon.
Suzanne had given it to her son Andy, who loved local history and antiques as much as I do. He passed away in 2021. In conversation with his father Billy I had told him about the lamp and having tried to buy the mate to it that had been in Clays Store, Suzanne had told me when I was a child that her father had bought this one from there for her mother.
My mother and I had parked at Billy’s house to attend the Wings and Wheels festival that was held at the airport in Pence Springs this past September 21. As we were leaving the show I noticed Billy walking down his front steps carrying this lamp where he then gave it to me to keep. I added it to my collection where I will always treasure it for both its history and more importantly because it belonged to Suzanne.
A little side note about this lamp. I was only 9 years old when the flood of 1996 occurred. My family has always been good friends with the Humphrey’s and would help them move items out of their house when a flood was going to occur and clean up after. I wasn’t quite old enough to help my father and brother remove items from their house. So I stayed home, leaning on the back of our couch in front of the picture window watching everything they carried out of the house through my father’s scope on his gun because I could not find his binoculars haha.
This lamp was one of those pieces that I can remember my brother carrying out of the house and placing in the seat of Suzanne’s car. Oddly enough, the 1850s little table that I had talked about in my story on the Lahey Boarding House is where this lamp had sat inside of Suzanne’s house for nearly 70 years. It now sits in my living room surrounded by other pieces of local history. Where it will more than likely sit for another 7 decades or more.
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