.....Five miles upstream from West Hamlin, the little town of Branchland lies along the Guyandotte River in Lincoln County. I haven't visited Branchland for many years but, during the years of 1947 through 1952, I spent quite a few days there. My oldest sister Betty married an moved to Branchland in 1947 to live beside of her husband's parents. This is not to be a story of the social conditions of the town or a tale about any particular persons that lived there. It is to simply be a recall of the memories of a young boy who was not native to the town. I will do my best to filter out the view of my adulthood.
.....Fifty years ago, the main part of Branchland lay across the river from Route 10. To reach the town, you crossed a rickety old bridge that, when you walked across, you could see the dark river below through the holes in the flooring. Every vehicle that entered the town was announced by a "clackety clack." Immediately on the right, at the end of the bridge, stood the old building that housed the post office. Aat the end of the block, the road made a sharp right hand turn, and on this corner stood an old store building where you could buy just about anything.. Between the store and the post office, there ran an elevated board sidewalk. To the inside of the walk, there was a overgrown weedy lot. If you truned left at the store, you could see and pass a "gas" processing plant of some kind which sent a constant vibration through the town. Directly across the road from where the road went around the corner, was what was the main feature of the town 50 years ago: the Virginan Rairway tracks. To the left stood the old railway depot. Across the road from the depot was the "beer joint" and pool hall. After navagating the corner, the road continued ahead a short distance before it made a left hand turn and crossed the tracks. On the other side of the crossing, a road branched off to the left and went down the other side of the tracks where it passed homes and the United Baptist Church. On the hill overlooking the town, is the old cemetery. Once the main road crossed the tracks, it went straight to another corner where it turned and proceeded to the town of Hubbal where Chuck Yeager was born. If you wished, instead of turning right towards Hubbal, you could continue straight and travel up a Lincoln County hollow and head out through the country side. Most of the town was made up of homes.
.....Directly across the road from the railroad crossing, the house that my sister lived in was more humble than most of the houses in Branchland. Not much more than a narrow three roomed shack, the edifice was covered with tan "brick siding." When you went though the front door, you entered the living room. Then you could go straight to the bedroom and, again, straight through to the kitchen. There was no bathroom. There was just a privy on the bank overlooking the lower river bottom and the river.
.....The saving feature of the house was the front porch with its porch swing. On the long lazy days of summer my sister Midge and I would set and watch what there was to see go by. Most of the time, this wasn't much.
.....One feature of this house, and of most of the houses on the river side of the tracks, was that there wasn't any water. All water, except what could be caught in rain barrels for washing, had to be hauled by hand from wells across the railroad tracks. These wells were drilled and had long buckets that had to be hauled up by hand. When pulled out of the wells, these odd buckets were held over water buckets where a lever was tripped which spilled the water down into the buckets. Then the water, usually two buckets at a time, had to be carried back to the house across the tracks. Carrying forty pounds of water over quite a distance was a chore.
..... Betty did have a TV. She was the first in the family to own one. The channel was 5 out of Huntington and usually didn't come on the air until at least 10:00 am...later on Sunday. Sign off was about 11:00 during weekdays and 12:00 P.M on Saturdays. It was at Betty's house that I watched the delayed broadcast of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth. During those early days, there were always interruptions and the notice on the screen, "Please stand by. We are experiencing technacal difficulties." Saturday night Wrestling, the "Barn Dance, and the broadcasts of the Cincinnatti Red's baseball games were the favorite programs. The store also had a TV and folks would gather there in the afternoons to watch the Reds.
.....On those long hot days of summer, we would try to gather up enough pennies so we could go to the store and by enough "RCs" to share at five cents a bottle. It may be my memory of youth, but i believe that "pop "was much better and stronger back then . RC in the pyrimid bottle was our favorite. Betty managed to have a little garden so sometimes we would have things like "new potatos and green beans." For other entertainment, Betty and I would play "Chinese checkers." We were so competive that we soon became experts. I was so proficient that the children back home would not play with me and claimed that I was cheating when I had all of my marbles "home" before they hardly got started. Sometime, during these years at Branchland, someone opened up a small movie theater on the other side of the river. They would have regular movies and a serial that would continue every week.
.....The little house was next door to Betty in-laws' two story house. Beyond that house was several more houses. From the back door of the little house, you could see the back of the post office. Right next door to the left was an old large house that was falling down. You could go though this house, if you had the nerve, and see the decaying rooms. As I said before, usually there wasn't much to do around the house. Sometimes I would amuse myself by killing flies. If one got to bored, you could lie across the bed and feel the rumble and vibration of the "gas plant." Or, you could wait for the miners to get off shift and see fhem get out of automobiles with their faces and hands all black with coal dust.
.....By far the most excitment, for me, was centered on the trains: steaming, bellowing, hissing steam engines. They would come roaring through the town at all hours of the night with their coal cals. But, they were not all coal trains. There were a few passangers trains still running the rails then. They brought the mail. Along with the express, there was a local that went down in the moring and then back up that evening and, if you wanted to, you could ride to Huntington or Logan. When the mail was in, you would see the man from the post office push his hand wagon down the street to the depot to pick up the mail, take it back to the post office, sort it, and put it up for delivery. Sometimes there was a switch engine that would stop, snort, and puff, and do what ever it was that it was doing before moving on. When the big engines began to move, there would be an explosion of steam, and a "chug" then another and another until, as the monster was going on down the tracks, the chugging was hard to distinguish as individual sounds. But, it was at night that the big steam engines seem to be most expressive. You would be lieing in your bed in the dark when you would hear, away in the distance, a mournful "whooooooooo whoooooo," and you knew a train was coming. I don't know if there are many things that can set a young boy's blood racing as that sound. Pretty soon, you would hear it again...only this time it was much closer. Now you could hear the growing rumble and roar, and before you knew it the scream from the whistle, as it blew for the crossing across from the house, was like a banshee and the roar and the rumble seemed to set the bed rocking somuch that it seemed that you would have to hold on to keep from being thrown to the floor. The little house was just built on blocks at the corners and in the middle of the house and it didn't take much to make it thrum. Just like everywhere else in America, the sounds of the steam locomotives are gone from Branchland forever, or so it would seem.
.....At Branchland, some called the Guyandotte "Ol Sweetwater" because it was so polluted with mine waer. I never saw anyone fishing. I never really got close to the river except to watch it from the bank behind the "outhouse," or to peer at the murkey water through the cracks in the floor of the bridge. .
.....Rising in McDowell County, the river has never had much respect. An important West Virginia river, the Guyandotte drains most of Southern West Virginia with its highes streams being in southern Ralleigh County. With an elevation of 2700 feet at its mouth, the highest of these streams is the Left Hand Fork of Tommy Creek of Stonecoal Creek of the Winding Gulf. The lowest streas are Trace Creek and Merrick Creek which flow into the Guyandotte at an elevationof 520 feet. Counting the tributaries of the Mud River, I have listed 903 streams that empty their waters into the Guyandotte.
.....The future of the Guyandotte is looking much brighter than it did fifty years ago. A dam has been built upstream for flood control and for recreation. The river itself has been cleaned to the extent that you can now fish it in its waters. HowI I wish that we could have fished all those years ago. All I would have to have done was to walk out back and go down to the river. I hope the time has bas passed when the "coal barrons" and the "out of state" coal interests can murder a river and get away with it.
.....My sister attended the little United Baptist Church that was on the hillside of the railroad tracks. Most of the time the services wee confined to Sundays and Wednesdays, but, every once in a while, there would be a "revival meeting." During my stays with Betty, I attended several revivals. Usually the services were fairly spirited. The most firey sermons that I heard were by a blind evangelist whose dog would lie not far from him as he moved around the pulpit. There wasn't a lot to do in Branchland and attending church was a healthy alterative to the "beer joint." There were a lot of good people who lived in Branchland, and of course, there were a few rascals. I remember a very short man who visited the beer joint often. One evening, after he had had many more than one to many, he made it as far as my sisters porch with its swing. He sat in the swing for awhile until he passed out head first onto the porch floor. I won't disclose his name, but his intials were I. A. Yes, the church helped to balance the weight of the beer joints in the social life of just all little West Virginia towns.
,,,,,It has been many years since I have been to Branchland. I returned once abot 16 to 18 years after ime that I was there as a boy, drove across the bridge, and looked around a little. I could not see that much had changed. I didn't stop to talk to anyone, but, if I had, I would have probably heard the "Church Yeager Drawl" that just about everyone, including , little girls, used in that section of Lincoln County. I still remember, and cherish that, "Welll Son......" Branchland was once part of my life, and still is somewhere down deep.