Old Virginny

Damascus, Virginia set in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Washington County, Virginia

A link to a nice concise history of Damascus

We recently threw off the traces and took a road trip that included a two-day stop in Washington, County, Virginia, where our South ancestors were in residence in the 1800s. We arrived on Sunday night and stayed in Abingdon, Virginia, where there are numerous structures that date back to colonial times. We were up early on Monday to drive part of the Crooked Road, Virginia's Heritage Music Trail. We wanted to go the Blue Ridge Music Center operated by the National Park Service on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Galax, Grayson County, Virginia, starting from Damascus, Virginia.

It was a perfectly beautiful sunny day as we drove through the little town of Damascus, population now under one thousand but sometimes filled with tourists since it is on two famous trails for hikers and bikers, the Appalachian Trail and the Virginia Creeper trail. We had chosen to drive The Crooked Road, Virginia Hwy 58, between Damascus and Galax though that is certainly not the quickest route from Abingdon to Galax--it's just the most beautiful. All along this winding, mountainous road crisscrossed with clear mountain streams and seeming at times just a path through the tall trees and undergrowth, are signs about the Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail, but we did not take the time to take in the information on them since we wanted to make the Blue Ridge Music Center by noon when the free concerts begin. The first sign to Galax, just outside Damascus, said it was 55 miles to Galax; we were pretty disconcerted when we had driven about fifteen minutes and saw a sign that said 59 miles to Galax--we were losing ground somehow. At any rate, we kept winding and finally found Galax and then outside the town, the Blue Ridge Music Center. The museum display there took a while to take in since there are so many interactive things to view and listen to. Like we have come to expect from the National Park Service, this center was top-notch in all it provided, starting with the location. There is live music every day at noon all year around.

Blue Ridge Music Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Galax, Va

The band was already set up and beginning to play, so we took our seats in the breezeway and began to tap toes with the band. The setting was magnificent, with mountain views behind and in front of us, everything green (in contrast to things at home, where most things are now toast brown), with a few things changing colors for fall. One can imagine that in a few weeks the views would be even more wonderful. The musicians for the day were the Buck Mountain Band, a group of three women, one on guitar, one on the bass fiddle, and one on the banjo; the man calling the tunes was, as they say, the fiddler. They were all playing Old Time Music, the music of the mountains that predates Blue Grass music. Older folks from around the area, the band members took time to answer questions between songs, but they played for four hours with only a short break. Two more musicians joined them after lunch, another guitar player and a woman on mandolin.

Though the pictures make it look like there was no crowd, before long all fifty or so seats were taken and people were standing as well, on a Monday afternoon in September. They told us that all the songs they played were learned by ear, as they said were most of the old time music songs. They mentioned that there are several versions of most songs since once written down, a song learned by ear bears the changes of the musician who was playing it when it was learned. This is true for the song that moved me the most, "My Home's Across the Blue Ridge Mountains" which can be found in various forms both in lyrics and arrangements on the web

Link to YouTube Carter Family version of "My Home's Across the Blue Ridge Mountains"

 Link to a variation of the lyrics from the Smithsonian

The Buck Mountain Band version had lyrics that included a later addition to the lyrics that include a lament by a Confederate prisoner of war, "a moulderin' in this Yankee prison" who will never see his love again. He begs that someone feed his baby candy since he will never see home again. The original song is quite old, older than the Civil War, but this version made me think of our South ancestor Clark Albert South (1835-1902) who was in Company H of the Virginia 37th Infantry that I wrote about in my July 4th post about the Civil War and its impact on our family. Clark was captured at Spotsylvania in 1864 and released in 1865. He did survive, which the soldier in the song does not expect for himself, but Clark never saw his wife Priscilla again since she died in his absence. He remarried to Charity Wooten who helped him raise his three children by Priscilla as well as giving him seven more. 

I have to admit that we did not take the crooked road back to Damascus for our return trip but chose instead to drive a bit up the Parkway and find the Interstates back to Abingdon. We saw not only great views from those highways as well, but hillsides covered in pumpkins, some ready to ship and some still in the hilly fields, a first for us to see pumpkins as far as the eye could see like that. 

Back in Abingdon we spent the next day at the Washington County Historical Society research center after a stop in the county courthouse to search for some documents. The research center has grown amazingly since our visit there with my brother Bob and nephew Danny ten years ago. It has a new location on Main Street near the courthouse and has at this time digitized many many more items than before. Run and staffed by volunteers, it is a treasure house for us Southsiders. One could spend more than the day that we spent there and still be forced to leave some items for another visit. 

 I will be sharing some of my finds from that visit and a day spent in Richmond's Library of Virginia too in the near future. In Richmond I was also researching my Scott side, but I did find some South items and have ordered a number of Grayson County records on microfilm that LoV loans to other libraries to view at the San Marcos library when they arrive.