Andrew's world West Virginia history

Photo sourced from WOWK 13 news With mother's day quickly approaching, I couldn't wait to write this post. I tell people every year about how mother's day started in West Virginia (spoiler alert: father's day did too). It started in Grafton, WV by a woman named Anna Jarvis. Anna wanted a day to commemorate everything her mother (also named Anna)  had done. Her mother was a communityactivist and led groups to combat childhood disease.  In 1908, which was 3 years after her mother passed (1905), Anna held a church service at St. Andrew's Methodist Episcopal church, after getting financial assistance from a Philidelphia department store owner named John Wanamaker. That same Sunday, a mother's day service was held in Philidelphia at one of Wanamaker's stores. After this, she began her campaign of letter writing to politicians and news papers to try to make mother's day a national holiday. In 1914, president Woodrow Wilson finally signed a measure ...

     Photo sourced from seedsavers.org       If you've been around people that raise a garden much in your life, you've probably tried the Mortgage lifter tomato. Mortgage Lifters are a pretty unique variety of tomato. They're usually big enough that a slice of one on a sandwich will be as big around as the bread, however they are hard to slice because they're so big and juicy.      My grandpa has always raised Mortgage lifters in his garden, so I'm pretty familiar with them. I was surprised to learn, not too long ago, that this cultivar was developed in West Virginia.      Theres a couple different stories about where exactly in WV this tomato originated and who it was developed by. Some people say it was a guy named William Esther from Barboursville, WV.      Others say it was in Logan county by a guy that they called "radiator charlie" who sold the tomatoes to pay off the mortgage on his house duri...

     One of my great, great grandpa's tobacco barns      Everywhere you look here in WV, there's probably an old barn, some are even a century or more old. Growing up in rural WV, I had the opportunity to explore  old barns and other structures from the past like corn cribs and coal houses. I've always been interested in these old structures, especially after I got a little older and started to really appreciate the craftsmanship and I wondered how people built these huge barns with the limited tools and technology of the day. I mean it wasn't like they rented a crane to lift these heavy logs.      Years ago they held gatherings called "barn raisings". The whole community would come together to help their neighbor build their barn. That's a thing of the past, though, I doubt you could assemble the whole community to do anything nowadays, much less something that doesn't benefit them.       They had differe...