The Wheeling Daily Register

PRESTON COUNTY.
A People Who Say They are Happy.
and Yet Show Strong Signs of Un-
happiness-An Interesting Letter
About the Resources and Other
Things of the Mountain County.
BRUCETON MILLS, W. VA.
Editors of the Register:
Although your interesting and well
edited paper has long been a welcome
weekly visitor to this community, we
have never had the pleasure of seeing
any local news in its columns from, at
least, this portion of Preston county.
We are an isolated community, deprived
of any communication by railroad with
the outside world; and yet I can safely
and truly say we are not unhappy. It
is true we do not enjoy the manifold
blessings and advantages accruing from
railroads or public works of any description;
yet on the other hand, we are not
bothered by strikes or strikers, and the
tramp is only known to our people by
reputation. Gentlemen of that migratory
profession seem, from some unknown
cause, to shun us, having, no doubt,
heard that we mountaineers subsist
almost exclusively upon that historic,
triangular grain called buckwheat. Now
we do not by any means wish to say
anything which will induce these
gentlemen to visit us. Not at
all. But we will say that
when that same buckwheat, which is supposed
to be very plebeian, by many who
have never enjoyed the luxury to its
fullest extent, if properly managed in
the culinary department and served hot
with some of the fresh butter and delicious
honey, for which our country has
always held a very enviable reputation,
is fit, not only to grace the table of a
mountaineer, but even that of a king.
Our people have always been known to
be "good livers"; the best the field, the
garden, the flock, the herd, the streams
or the forest can produce, graces the
board of almost every farmer in the
country, and in fact it has been said of
our people, that, while in some other
communities, especially when a ready
market is afforded, the people "eat what
they cannot sell, our people "sell what
they cannot eat," and I think this is, to a
certain extent true, and partly accounts
for the poor financial condition of many
of our neighbors.
Living thus, with an abundance of
pure air, and the best and purest water
with which God has blessed the globe,
with few paupers to support; no tramps
to pillage our chicken roosts; no strikers
to bring blood, fire and ruin upon our
heads; no public works to suspend and
leave hundreds of poor men with large
families to support in our midst, where
almost every man owns sufficient land to
raise his own living; where murder is
never known, and a theft, no matter
how trifling, is a seven days' wonder, is
it any wonder that we are a happy peo-
ple.
Notwithstanding all this our people
want to be made unhappy; they want
railroads; they want public works; they
want our portion of the country devel-
oped; they want a market for the vast
store of mineral wealth which lies hid-
den under their farms and the surround-
ing hills, together with the vast
forests of valuable timber, which
are
yearly being
sacrificed
to the woodman's axe to make room
for his crops; the timber, much of which is
very valuable, being used to make rails
and the remainder is piled up in huge
heaps and burned, simply to get it out of
the way. Thus is fast perishing the
valuable and world wide famed West
Virginia "hard woods," simply from
lack of transportation to market. We
know that thousands and thousands of
fine large trees, (oak, poplar and pine,)
many of which made from four to
six saw logs, have been sold at the
flats and hills of Cheat river for the
paltry sum of ten cents, simply because
the owners of the property considered
them of no value whatever, and thought
the future would be, as the past has
been, and it would not pay to get them
out for market. The day is coming when
this great waste and sacrifice of timber
will be regretted. Our hills seem
to be filled with various minerals
iron ore, coal, etc, the exact extent of
which we do not know anything about,
as we, from some unaccountable cause
either ignorance or laziness, have failed
to have a geographical survey made of
our county, or I believe of any portion
of it I do know that our black-
smiths, parties who run engines, farmers
and others who use coal, simply go out-
side their door and open a drift. Iron
ore of the best quality is here also in im-
mense quantities All we want, as I
said before, is to be made unhappy (?
by the building of railroads through our
country and our people may not eat
so much or live so well, but their finan-
cial condition will be vastly improved.
and this portion of the State greatly
benefited and we would be enabled to
pay a much larger share of the taxes of
our commonwealth.
It has been but a few years since we
were called mountaineers, and considered
an ignorant, uneducated community by
our friends, who, because they happened
to live in that grand old State of Penn-
sylvania, and were blessed with a good
free school system, had educated her peo-
ple to a higher degree than we had been
able to under the old system of things,
with our few old dilapidated log school
houses, very sparsely scattered over our
county. But things have changed, our
hills and valleys are now dotted over
with fine, comfortable school houses, fill-
ed with good teachers, mostly citizens of our
county, and good, earnest workers in the
cause of education. We not only have
better school buildings than our neigh-
bors in Pennsylvania, but what speaks
better for West Virginia, we have them
filled with brighter, more intelligent
pupils, further advanced in the
branches taught in public schools. We
make this assertion and are ready to
prove it at any time by bringing any two
representative schools together in friend-
ly competition. We have built in our
district (Grant) about twenty new
houses, all of which are good, substantial,
comfortable buildings, supplied with all
necessary out-buildings, &c, Some of
our schools have been greatly injured
during the past few years by securing
the services of teachers who were utterly
incompetent, but who by one means-
we do not know nor do we pretend to
say, how -received Nos. 1 and 2 certifi-
cates, while, if justice had been done
them, they would have received none at
all
We hope this state of affairs will be
regulated during the administration of
our next superintendent. We know that
the certificates will be properly graded if
the people should elect Mr. J. E.
David, but
we
are afraid that
his opponent, Mr P. R. Smith,
is ruled too much by the old ring-mai-
ers,
and will not, unless forced to do so if
we should be so unfortunate as to be
afflicted with him) by the people.
Crops of all kinds have been very
good in this vicinity. We do not think
our wheat can be surpassed in quality.
but the yield per acre is not so great
as in some other parts of the country. We
have better grass crops than we have had
at any other time in the past twenty-
five years.
BoB.

DAILY REGISTER