GREENVILLE W.Va. (WVDN) – This week’s piece is a bit more of a personal story, but it does have indirect ties to Summers County. This chair belonged to my great-grandparents, Everett Lee McDaniel and Anna Ruth Mann McDaniel, who owned and operated their farm in Greenville, WV. It is now the Mountain Meadow Hunting Preserve in Greenville.
After Everett passed away in 1969, Granny had an auction to sell off the farm machinery and various pieces of personal property, such as this antique rocker. The auction was conducted by the late Buddy Light, who passed away on December 15, 2023. Everyone knew, or at least heard of Buddy in Summers County. He told me once how many auctions he had done during his auction tenure. It was in the hundreds! Here, he did Granny’s auction in 1969 and was the auctioneer who did my benefit auction in 2017 after my wreck. That only encompasses 48 years of his career in calling auctions. Buddy also did the very first auction I went to in Pence Springs in 1998 at the Riverside Inn.
I digress and get back to this rocker. Insurance agent Hugh Harris in Alderson had been at the family auction when dad was a kid and purchased this rocker. He took it home to Alderson, where it became his favorite chair in his home. I went to a sale in the field beside his house in roughly 2009. He walked up to me and got me to come with him to his house. He said he had something he wanted to show me.
He took me and Mom in and told us about having purchased this chair at Granny’s auction at Greenville “back in the day.” Mom called him a few years later and asked him if he wanted to sell it. He just laughed and told us it was not for sale as it was his favorite chair. And then went on to explain how he sat down in it on Christmas day in something like 2011, and down he went, one of the legs had broken. He then had it repaired.
Hugh passed away on November 8, 2018. I am friends with his children on Facebook and mentioned to them the family connection and told them if they ever decide to sell it to please give me “first refusal with it” as my Granddad Thompson would have said. David Harris and I were talking earlier in the week, and I brought it back up. He agreed to sell it to me since it had been in my family.
So it started out at Greenville, then to Alderson, then to David’s house in Morgantown, and as of today, to Pence Springs with me. Quite the journey for an antique rocker, and then to have tracked it down 48 years after it had been sold at an auction is pretty intense. After inspecting it when I picked it up, it had originally had spindles in the back. Apparently, they had broken, and Grandpa McDaniel had replaced them with these rounded-edge flat slats.
They are a little more crude and the same as other pieces he built in the 1920s and 30s. Such as the highchair he built for Grandma Jones and a child’s rocker that Grandma used when she was small. When we cleaned out my Great Aunt Erma’s estate in Ballard in 2006, I found it in an outbuilding, brought it home, and had it repaired. Just another piece to add to my huge collection of family pieces,
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