A Peek into Summers County’s Past: E.E. Willey Bros Dairy

TALCOTT W.Va. (Hinton News) – You never know what you will find and where it may lead. Just recently, while scrolling through Facebook, I ran across an old token that says “E.E. Willey Bros. Dairy Talcott, W.Va. Good For One Quart of Milk.” It got me thinking that I had never heard of this particular dairy before.

I was familiar with hearing about Hollarns Dairy in Talcott and Greener Acres Dairy in Lowell, but couldn’t remember hearing about E.E. Willey Bros Dairy in Talcott before. I started thinking and piecing things together. I could remember talking with Richard Leftwich’s mother, Margaret, whom we all called “MeeMaw.”

I remembered that prior to her parents running the store and post office in Judson, when she was a child, she grew up on a farm in Talcott on Hungards Creek. Talking with Barbra Wilcox, who is the newest member of the Summers County Historic Landmarks Commission, who described to me in great detail where this farm was located, as E.E. Willey was her great-grandfather.

Richard Leftwich told me that, yes, his mother grew up on that farm and his grandparents ran the dairy for Mr. Willey. His Grandfather, James Smith, came to this area from White Rock, Va., until he relocated the family to Judson to operate the store and post office.

He said his Grandfather, James Smith, is the one who built the milking barn that still stands by the road to this day. It is of an unusual design as there are no poles in the center. Everyone in the community made fun of him at the time and kept saying there was no way that barn could stand.

So much so that that barn building style became known as “The James Way.” It has survived for well over 100 years, which just goes to show you, as the old people said back in the day, “there is more than one way to skin a cat.” Ha

The odd part of this is that this token was recently found along the riverbank at Barger Springs, which is on the other side of Talcott from where the dairy was. The auction ad you see was where the E.E. Willey farm, better known as the John Willey Farm, was sold at auction on September 14, 1929. The farm was sold to help one of the other family members out of financial difficulty.