ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 24, 1995 TAG: 9512260076
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-13 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DRIVING west from Christiansburg on U.S. 11, you have to look carefully for the intersection with Silver Lake Road. It's just beyond the Country Kitchen restaurant and Ronnie Thomas' race car shop.
Find the turn, and you needn't drive more than several hundred yards to leave the highway and its commercial jumble behind. The land opens up to rolling farmland hills and the sensation is that of taking a step backward in time.
Less than a mile beyond is where Silver Lake Road crests a broad hill and descends, revealing the sight of a white farmhouse surrounded by trees. This is where my mother and grandmother were born.
In recent years I've come to travel the same path my mother's family followed nearly 75 years ago, when they left the farm and moved to Roanoke. However, my journeys have been much less fateful, and in reverse order to theirs, as I've driven from Roanoke to Christiansburg or to Blacksburg for work or school.
My mother's life changed on the day she left that house. Though only a toddler at the time, she recalls the migration vividly, and how the old car was packed with luggage, plants and people as it drove away down the farm lane. Throughout her life - or for as long as I've known her - she's spoken wistfully about her memories of the old homeplace, as if it were a lost paradise.
By coincidence, the office where I work these days for The Roanoke Times is located not much more than a mile cross-country from her homeplace. Yet my modern-day venue might as well occupy a different planet, with the nearby shopping malls and automobile traffic in sharp contrast to the rural peace of Silver Lake Road.
It seemed appropriate in this holiday season to see if by taking a sentimental journey I could reconcile the past and present, and perhaps, bring a sense of depth and order to my own life. My mother was the linchpin, and she was game for the effort, as we exhumed the musty photo albums from dark closets to prime her memories. Then we drove to Christiansburg to have a look at her life.
Silver Lake Road was a good place to start. The fields flanking the road could be sprouting ranch houses like so much of the rest of Montgomery County. But the owners of the property, Floyd S. Childress and his family, have maintained the land as a working cattle farm. It looks much the same as it did in the old photos taken when my kinfolk lived there.
The Childress family has owned the farm for more than 35 years so it's their homeplace now. Their respect for the land includes a strong awareness of its history and they knew of my mother's family as previous owners. Yet they were surprised - pleasantly so - to meet my mother, who was born in an upstairs bedroom at the farmhouse.
Her ancestors owned the farm for about 60 years. They were of German stock, people who participated in the great migration of Colonial days, from Pennsylvania Dutch country southward along the Shenandoah Valley. They prospered in Montgomery County and my mother's grandfather, Samuel Mullen Zink, owned the farm when she was born.
Among our dusty relics is a 1910 Montgomery Messenger newspaper clipping that describes the marriage of my grandparents, held at the homeplace. "The house was handsomely decorated with trailing vines, autumn leaves, potted plants and chrysanthemums, and it, as well as the entrance to the grounds, was brilliantly lighted with electric lights, which added greatly to the beauty of the scene," it reports.
Presumably the family's plan was for one of mother's four uncles (there were eight children in all) to inherit the farm. Evidently none took an interest in it. Those were the days in the first two decades of this century when droves of Americans abandoned their rural roots, preferring office or factory jobs to the farmer's demanding life.
Also one of the boys came down with tuberculosis. "A gloom was cast over the home" when he died in 1909 at age 22, according to the obituary. "He had been afflicted for four years, and much of the time a great sufferer. All that loving hands and physicians could do was done."
Two of those loving hands belonged to my grandmother and they unknowingly conveyed the TB bacteria into her own lungs. When she became ill they quarantined her at the Catawba Sanitarium. At the time, my mother was 18 months old.
I can only imagine my grandmother's anguish: losing her brother, now deathly sick herself, separated miles away from her only child, her baby.
Family rescued my mother during this sad period. She was taken in by her mother's sister, Aunt Eva, who lived with her husband and two children at Vicker Switch. We have a packet of letters from Eva to my grandmother written during her absence. The ink is faded but the emotional reassurance of her words remains vivid. They tell of my mother's child-like ways, of her developing speech, personality and curiosity.
Eventually my grandmother recovered and rejoined the family. Because of their separation, my mother always called her by her first name: Katie.
The brick house, attached to a storefront, in Vicker Switch still stands and looks much the same as it did when my mother lived there so long ago. Another monument of those days also endures - Eva's son, Joe Hornbarger.
It was good to see cousins reunited as my mother sat in Joe's parlor. A former mayor of Christiansburg, he is 91 now but quite self-reliant. We found a picture of Joe taken in his early manhood and brought it along. He examined it, shook his head gently, smiled and said all anyone could say: "That was a long time ago."
With the male heirs disinterested and depleted, my mother's grandfather sold the homeplace around the end of World War I, moved the family to a smaller plot between Salem and Roanoke, and died several years later. That house, where my mother grew up, was torn down years ago in favor of a shoe store and warehouse.
As a child and young woman, my mother would return to Christiansburg for visits, riding the train from Roanoke to the Cambria station. Her paternal grandparents lived close by, in a white frame house on Lucas Street, which is also still standing and occupied. Some days she and her friends would walk several miles through open fields to visit the old homeplace, a journey that would be improbable today.
Gradually the old folks on both sides of her family reached the end of their days and were buried within 30 yards of one another, on a hillside in Christiansburg's Sunset Cemetery. It's a comfort to know that Joe Hornbarger's daughter, Christiansburg Town Council member Ann Carter, is one of the cemetery's managers, although my sentimentality is a pretty faint reward for all the hard work she and the Childresses perform.
My mother and I had one more stop along our journey of field genealogy before we returned home. That took us along the gravel-surfaced Chrisman Mill Road, one of Montgomery County's few backroads, winding across the Norfolk Southern tracks and through the Crab Creek valley. Somewhere in this quiet section was the location of our first Montgomery County ancestor's home, which dates to pre-Revolutionary War days.
We have a picture of his house - little more than a glorified log dwelling - that was taken years ago, but I'd been unable to find it. I had a better idea of where the family burial plot was located, and I found it after scrambling to the top of a snow-covered hill. I could see why they considered it to be a fine place for repose, even though it had been neglected.
Most of the headstones were broken or their inscriptions were too worn to read. I picked up a wad of snow in my bare hand and hurriedly rubbed it into the stones. As if by magic, the carved names and dates reappeared, although only for a few seconds as the snow melted away.
No wonder we seek to identify with things that withstand the passage of time - a house, a farm, a family.
Driving back to Roanoke, my mother considered the day and that trip along the same road many years ago. "I've often regretted having to leave," she said. "I would have liked to have grown up in a small town, where everyone knew each other."
LENGTH: Long : 139 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ROBERT FREIS. Mementos, including old photographs,by CNBletters, and a clipping from a 1910 Montgomery Messenger, help stir
up memories from the past. color.