Imaginary Story--The Tannery Whistle and the Concrete Palace

 

 

In 1910, Marlinton, West Virginia, stood at the height of a roaring industrial boom. Following the arrival of the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Railway’s Greenbrier Division in October 1900, the quiet river crossing of Marlin’s Bottom exploded from a village of 171 residents in 1900 to a bustling municipal seat of 1,045 residents in the 1910 Census—a 511% population surge in a single decade. Equipped with newly strung electric lights, a municipal water system, a hospital, and timber barons rubbing shoulders with muddy-booted "woodhicks," Marlinton in 1910 was a frontier boomtown rapidly dressing itself in 20th-century modernity.

Historical Profile: Marlinton in 1910

1. Schools and Education

Education in 1910 reflected both the town's new wealth and the strict segregation of the era:

• Marlinton Graded School & Edray District High School: Located near the Methodist Church on the upper side of town, the multi-story brick Graded School served the growing population of town children. Around 1910, Edray District High School was established to provide secondary education—including Latin, algebra, literature, and theatrical plays—so local youth no longer had to board out of the county for high school.
  
  
• Greenbrier Hill Colored School: Under West Virginia’s segregated school mandate, African American children—whose families had moved to Marlinton to work on the C&O line, in the tannery, and at local hotels—attended the one-room schoolhouse on Greenbrier Hill.
  
  
• Curriculum & Schedule: The school calendar ran roughly seven to eight months, dictated by weather and harvest. Discipline was strict, recitation was the primary mode of learning, and older boys frequently left in the spring to peel hemlock bark or work on family farms.
  
  

2. Stores, Commerce, and Institutions

By 1910, Eighth Street and Second Avenue formed a dense commercial district boasting roughly 20 retail stores, two banks, and two competing weekly newspapers:

• C. J. Richardson’s Hardware: The premier outfitter for builders, farmers, and timber crews, selling everything from cross-cut saws and blasting powder to cast-iron stoves and harness leather.
  
  
• General Merchandise & Drug Stores: S. B. Wallace & Co. (founded in 1904) operated a thriving drug and notions store offering patent medicines, soda fountain phosphates, and veterinary supplies. The Marlinton Supply Company and local dry goods merchants sold ready-made suits, gingham cloth, flour by the barrel, and lace-up boots.
  
  
• Banking & Finance: The Bank of Marlinton (housed in its grand brick building at Main and Eighth) and the First National Bank handled the massive payrolls of the lumber and leather companies.
  
  
• The Press: William T.  Price and his sons (notably editor Andrew Price, who also served as Marlinton's first mayor) published the Democratic/independent Pocahontas Times, while the rival Marlinton Messenger championed Republican politics and industrial boosters.
  
  
• Hotels: The stately, veranda-wrapped Hotel DeMont (later the Marlin-Sewell) near the depot accommodated traveling salesmen ("drummers"), timber investors, and circuit lawyers, while rough boarding houses near the river catered to transient laborers.
  
  

3. Occupations and Industry

The town's economy ran on raw natural resources—specifically red spruce, hemlock, and hides:

• The Tannery: The United States Leather Company (later Union Tanning) operated a massive tannery along the Greenbrier River. Hundreds of men worked over pungent vats of ground hemlock bark acid, curing heavy sole leather. The sour, earthy stench of the tannery vats and the mountain-high stacks of drying bark defined the south end of town.
  
  
• Lumber & Sawmills: The Campbell Lumber Company and surrounding mills along Knapp's Creek and the Greenbrier River employed sawyers, filers, teamsters, and millwrights.
  
  
• Railroad Men: The C&O Railway employed station agents, telegraph operators, section gangs, and brakemen who managed the daily passenger runs and endless flatcars of virgin timber.
  
  
• Professional & Civic Trades: As the county seat (relocated from Huntersville in 1891), Marlinton supported a sizable class of land-title attorneys, surveyors, doctors at the Marlinton Hospital, blacksmiths, and liverymen.
  
  

4. Crime, Vice, and Law Enforcement

Though West Virginia would not enact statewide prohibition until the Yost Law took effect in 1914, Pocahontas County was already locked in a fierce battle between temperance crusaders and "wet" boomtown elements:

• Blind Tigers & Bootlegging: When the town council or county court refused saloon licenses, illicit speakeasies known as "blind tigers" thrived in back alleys and river shanties. Infamous liquor runners—such as local saloonkeeper Gillespie—faced constant indictments for illegal liquor sales, while suitcase "bootleggers" rode the C&O passenger trains down from Cass and Durbin with concealed jugs of rye whiskey.
  
  
• Payday Brawls & Pistol-Toting: On Saturday nights, when "woodhicks" from the logging camps and tannery hands cashed their pay, fights erupted along the boardwalks. The circuit court docket at the red-brick Pocahontas County Courthouse was packed with indictments for unlawful pistol-toting (carrying a concealed Colt or Smith & Wesson), assault, and disturbing religious worship.
  
  
• Gambling & Petty Theft: High-stakes poker and craps games ran behind locked doors in the boarding houses, occasionally resulting in cuttings or shootings that kept the County Sheriff and the town sergeant busy locking men in the stone jail behind the courthouse.
  
  
• The "Capital Crime" of Spelling: On a lighter civic note, Mayor Andrew Price waged a literary war against outside railway clerks and postal workers who insisted on spelling the town's name with a "g" (Marlington), penning his famous doggerel: "He did a capital crime you see / Spelling Marlinton with a G."
  
  

5. Social Activity and Entertainment

• The Marlinton Opera House: Built in 1910 by J. G. Tilton at the corner of Third Avenue and Ninth Street, the Opera House was the oldest reinforced concrete building in West Virginia. Its ground floor housed retail shops, while the upstairs auditorium—equipped with a sloping floor for optimal viewing—hosted traveling vaudeville troupes, Chautauqua speakers, minstrel shows, silent "flickers," and roller-skating nights.
  
  
• Fraternal Lodges: The Independent Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F.) (who constructed their own three-story building), the Masons, and the Knights of Pythias formed the backbone of men's social life, holding parades and benefit suppers.
  
  
• Church & River Life: The Presbyterian and Methodist churches anchored respectable society with Sunday school picnics, ice cream socials, and autumn revivals. In the summer, townspeople gathered to watch Marlinton town baseball games, fished for bass and gigged suckers in the Greenbrier River, or promenaded down to the C&O Depot just to watch the afternoon passenger trains arrive.
  
  

The Tannery Whistle and the Concrete Palace

The five o’clock whistle at the United States Leather Company didn’t just blow; it shook the dew right off the morning glories climbing the back porch.

Twelve-year-old Jubilee "Jube" McCarty bolted upright on his corn-shuck mattress, his bare feet hitting the cool pine floorboards before the second blast echoed off Buckley Mountain. It was a Saturday in October 1910, and the air coming through his window carried the unmistakable perfume of Marlinton—a thick, heady brew of coal smoke from the C&O yard, sweet virgin spruce sawdust from the planing mill, and the sour, sharp tang of boiled hemlock bark drifting up from the tannery vats.

"Jube! If you don't stir yourself, the stovewood box'll be emptier than a preacher’s hat on Monday!" his mother called from the kitchen.

Jube pulled on his knee-length corduroy knickers, buttoned his flannel shirt, and laced his scuffed leather brogans. Within ten minutes, he had split an armload of dry red oak, bolted down two buckwheat cakes swimming in dark sorghum molasses, and slipped out the back gate with a nickel burning a hole in his pocket.

Marlinton was wide awake and roaring. Just ten years back, Jube’s granddaddy said you could fire a cannon down Eighth Street and hit nothing but a stray hog and a mud hole. Now, concrete sidewalks and timber boardwalks lined the mud-rutted thoroughfares, overhead electric wires hummed above the storefronts, and the red-brick spire of the Pocahontas County Courthouse rose proudly over the valley like a brick fortress.

Jube trotted past the white frame Marlinton Graded School near the Methodist Church. On weekdays, Professor McNeil kept him penned inside that building from eight until four, drilling the sixth-grade class in McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader, parsing sentences on the slate blackboard, and marching them to the water bucket for a dipper of tin-tasting water. Today, the schoolyard was blessedly empty save for a few crows picking at apple cores.

He cut down toward Eighth Street, where a team of four massive Percheron draft horses strained in their leather traces, hauling a wagon piled fifteen feet high with curled, dry slabs of hemlock bark bound for the tannery. The driver, a bearded man from up Knapp’s Creek, cracked his bullwhip with a sound like a pistol shot.

"Watch your toes, young’un!" the teamster barked, spitting a dark stream of Mail Pouch tobacco juice into the wheel rut.

Jube grinned and ducked into the C. J. Richardson’s Hardware. His older cousin, Eli, worked inside as a clerk. Through the plate-glass window, Jube admired a gleaming display of Winchester .30-30 lever-action rifles, keen-edged Plumb double-bit axes, and brass carbide lanterns. Next door at S. B. Wallace’s Drug Store, the morning sun glinted off great glass apothecary globes filled with crimson and emerald water.

"Hey, Jube!"

His best friend, Tommy Arbogast—freckle-faced, gap-toothed, and missing half a suspender—came barrel-rolling around the corner of the Bank of Marlinton. Tommy was clutching a freshly printed sheet of newsprint that still smelled of linseed oil.

"Where’d you get that?" Jube asked.

"Mr. Andrew Price handed it to me out the back door of the Pocahontas Times office for sweepin' up the lead type shavings," Tommy said breathlessly. "Listen to this—Deputy Sheriff caught two fellows running a blind tiger down in a shanty by the river bridge last night! Found four kegs of Monongahela rye hid under a pile of slab-wood. Got 'em locked in the stone jailhouse right now!"

For two twelve-year-old boys, a pair of authentic bootleggers in the county jail beat any dime novel about Jesse James. They sprinted up toward Court Street, slipping behind the brick courthouse to where the grim stone jail sat. Sure enough, up at the barred second-story window, a man with a bandaged nose was gripping the iron grates, hollering down to a buddy in the alley to go fetch Lawyer McClintic with ten dollars for bail.

A tall man in a black slouch hat—the town sergeant, carrying a heavy hickory billy club—stepped around the corner of the courthouse portico. "Move along, boys. Keep your noses out of the county’s business before I put you to pulling weeds on the courthouse lawn."

They scattered like flushed grouse, cutting back down Third Avenue toward Ninth Street, where the grandest marvel in all of Pocahontas County stood fresh and gray against the autumn sky: Mr. J. G. Tilton’s new Opera House.

Men from outside the county had poured that entire building out of liquid rock and iron rods—reinforced concrete, they called it. Not a stick of weatherboard on its walls. Jube pressed his palm against the cool, gritty gray pillar out front. A bright red-and-yellow broadside pasted to the boarding announced that tonight, a traveling company from Staunton would perform "The Great Train Robbery & Vaudeville Revue — Admission 15 & 25 Cents."

"I’m ten cents shy of fifteen," Jube sighed, fingering the solitary Buffalo-less Liberty nickel in his pocket.

"Not if we meet the eleven-fifteen," Tommy said, his eyes narrowing with entrepreneurial fire. "Come on! She's whistling for the curve at Buckeye right now!"

Down the valley, a long, mournful whoooo-whoooo-whoo-whoooo echoed off the limestone cliffs of the Greenbrier River.

The boys tore down the boardwalk toward the C&O Depot and the wide, painted verandas of the Hotel DeMont. By the time they skidded onto the cinders of the station platform, the great black Baldwin locomotive of the C&O Greenbrier Division came chuffing past the covered bridge, its brass bell clanging, driving rods flashing in the sun, and clouds of white steam billowing over the boxcars piled with white pine lumber.

The brakes screeched with a shower of sparks. Out stepped the "drummers"—city salesmen in derby hats and checkered wool vests, hauling heavy leather sample cases full of shoes, watches, and dry goods to sell to the Marlinton storekeepers. Right behind them came a half-dozen rough-looking timbermen down from the West Virginia Pulp & Paper camps up at Cass, their caulked boots chewing into the wooden platform and their pockets heavy with two months' pay.

"Carry your grip, mister? Right across to the DeMont for a nickel!" Jube piped up, stepping briskly in front of a portly gentleman wearing gold-rimmed spectacles and a gold watch chain across his vest.

The gentleman looked down, amused. "Careful with that valise, son—it’s got forty pairs of ladies' kidskin button-shoes inside. Drop it in the mud and I’ll have the hides off both of you."

"Yes, sir! Wouldn't drop it if a bear bit me, sir!" Jube grunted, hoisting the fifty-pound leather trunk with both hands while Tommy grabbed a smaller sample case. They staggered across the street, dodging a rattling dray wagon and a sputtering, backfiring Model T Ford that belonged to one of the doctors up at the hospital—a contraption that caused every hitched horse on the block to rear up and roll its eyes in terror.

They set the cases down on the polished oak floor of the Hotel DeMont lobby, where brass spittoons gleamed and the air smelled of expensive Havana cigars. The shoe drummer flipped each boy a shiny silver dime.

Rich beyond measure, Jube and Tommy spent the afternoon like kings. They bought two penny sticks of horehound candy and a sack of roasted peanuts at the general store, walked out across the shadowed, echoing planks of the old 1854 covered bridge over the Greenbrier River, and spent an hour skipping flat river stones across the eddies where log rafts used to float before the railroad came. Up on Greenbrier Hill, they traded three glass alleys and a steel ball-bearing with two boys from the Colored School for a genuine braided horsehair watch fob.

That evening, as the new electric streetlights flickered to life with aviolet buzz along Eighth Street, Jube and Tommy climbed the stairs of Tilton’s concrete Opera House. They sat in the very front row of the sloped wooden floor, their boots dangling inches from the stage. When the house lights dimmed and the pianist struck up a ragtime march that rattled the rafters, Jube bit into a sour pickle he’d bought for a penny and watched the painted velvet curtain rise. Outside, a night freight rumbled north toward Cass, its whistle singing through the dark Allegheny ridges, while inside the concrete palace, the whole wide world unfolded before his eyes.