Our love for each other grew stronger and stronger in spite of the fact that around us the foundations of society were shaking. Unemployment kept climbing. President Hoover would never have adopted the principals of Roosevelt's new Deal. He would hold fast to this conservative theory of supply and demand. The supply of goods was greater than ever but there was no money in the hands of the consumer with which to buy these goods. Any one of the problems was that traditional conservative economics would never solve the nations ills. Hoover would be president until March 1933. This meant that once Roosevelt was elected he would have to wait for months before his inauguration and the crisis was becoming deeper and deeper. This would be corrected later by the 20th. amendment the Lame Duck Amendment that moved the inauguration from March to January. My life on the farm was happy in spite of the hard work. The year I was out of school, I was outdoors most of the time winter and spring. I had decided then that I would eventually go back to school. It had become certain that I would also to to college. In. 1932 my father had given me three acres to plant in corn. We thought this would pay for my first year of college. By the time the crop was harvested corn was less than 25 cents a bushel. It hardly paid for the seed and fertilizer. During the winter months, I spent a lot of time on horseback. Martha and I managed to see each other often but not as often as we would have liked. I have read much about men and woman's best friend being his dog. History forgot about a man and his horse. There was Robert E. Lee and his famous horse "Traveler", and there was John Wesley who believed that his horse went to a reward in after life. There were the Mongol's referred to as the Devil's Horsemen" who swept across Europe on their horses, drinking the horse milk and eating the flesh of horses that were causalities of war. In the Iliad's, Achilles is heard talking to his horses and they gave him a reply to his questions. I also talked to my horse. He didn't give me an audible answer but acted like a good friend. When she was grazing in the field if she saw me she came to me and kept nudging as if to (say) "come on let's ride". She not only was good under the saddle but also to a sleigh, and we used her many, many nights in the deep snow of winter. She was not even gun shy which is unusual for a horse with no special training. When I remember the howling blizzards and subzero temperatures as many days and nights he never hesitated. After all the years I still dream about this period on horseback. I often think what someone would have thought if they had seen a lone rider moving slowly across a moonlit field. Could it have been as aberation, the stuff of which legends are made. But legend of two lovers needs a tragedy, but there was no tragedy. It could have been. The 30's were marching on. We were beginning to hear two strange names-Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini as well as an awakening of militeristic Japan. We were singing "Let Me Call You Sweetheart", "When The Moon Comes Over the Mountain", and one of my favorites, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes". The first Tarzan moving picture appeared and the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped. The 21st. Amendment repealing Prohibition was ratified and Amelia Earhart was lost in the Pacific, and March 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated President of the United States. . In June of 1933, I graduated from High School. I remember most vividly the sermon to the graduates. It was given in the beautiful old stone ivy covered Episcopal Church in Shepherdstown and the minister would later teach a class at Shepherd College, "The History of Religion", and I would be in the class. I don't remember anything about the sermon. It was probably the usual challenge to change the world and moving onward and upward. I do remember one of the hymns. "Lead on Oh King Eternal, the day of March has come". The changes in society were not nearly as radical as the change in my life and outcome. I don't think my teachers in the final years of high school thought I was the same person. I had decided to become a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. This church would later merge with the Methodist Church to become the United Methodist Church as it is today. We had suffered the separation many years before the Civil War. The issue that split it was the refusal of a Methodist Bishop who married a widow who owned slaves to give the slave his freedom. The next year after High School graduation I did the studies necessary to receive a local preachers licenses to preach and I began to be invited to speak to many of the surrounding churches. In September of 1933 I passed all the college entrance tests and enrolled in Shepherd College. My corn crop didn't pay for the first year but the New Deal did. I was given a job under the National Youth Administration New Deal program for beginning college students. For two years I swept the halls of Shepherd College and made enough to pay the tuition and the cost of text books. I majored in History and was supposed to be a minor in English, but ended with two majors. This happened because I elected every available course in literature and journalism. I attended Shepherd College two full year and one semester of the third year, and part of this was done in the summer time. During these years the New Deal was revolutionary economics. I believe Roosevelt Brain Trust along with John Maynard Keynes and the theories of Thorstein Vebling fathered the revolution. Keynes came to Washington from England to advise the president. His theory was the theory of pump-priming-pouring money into the economy while creating some revolutionary agencies. President Hoover would have thought this Roosevelt was a heretic. The other influence I believe was the Theory of the Leisure Class one factor of which is that of Conspicuous Consumption. It was said that Roosevelt drove money changers out of the temple of finance and began to drastically restrict the monopolistic traditions of the very rich by creating agencies to pump money into the economy. During the19th. century even up to the present the U.S. has had the largest number of very rich adults and the largest number of poor children. The agencies created to prime the pump were many. One of the first was FDIC to ensure bank deposits. Others were Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) which created giant power dams to provide electricity and control floods. I have fished on three of the Lakes, Morris, Loudan, and Cherokee. Other agencies were CCC (Civilian Conservation Corp) to reforest federal land. It established camps for young men and stands today as one of the most progressive agencies of the the New Deal. The AAA (Agriculture Adjustment Administration) to control farm surplus by creating scarcity to raise farm prices. The WPA to provide public works jobs for the unemployed. There was hardly a single person in the county who did not benefit from at least one of the New Deal agencies. In 1935 Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act and I was one of the first to begin yearly contributions. I had some experiences in 1934 and 1935 that brought home to me the need for social security. Prior to this and for many years every county had a poor farm. When people said they might end up in the poor house they were not joking. On many Sundays while I was in college I visited the poor farm to hold religious services for the inmates. A Shepherdstown lady who was one of the saintliest people I had ever known, Violet Dandridge accompanied me. She was a large manly lady that most people had seen in overalls and boots delivering milk. Many people had never seen her in a dress. She was the sole owner of a dairy farm. At the poor farm she would put her arm around these people with tears in her eyes and even as I spoke to a large group I would see her crying out of pity and love for these unfortunate people. Thank God there are no more poor farms. Many of these people had been farmers who had lost their farms or sharecroppers who lost their health and could not longer work. The feature I remember well was the odor that prevailed in the poor house. There was no bathroom or indoor toilets and it was impossible to keep these old people, many of them helpless, clean. There only hope was to live in misery their last years and be buried in a wooden box in potter's field. Martha graduated from High School one year after me and enrolled in Shepherd College in the business department so we got to see each other several times every day. Neither of us would ever see the inside of our old High School building for 50 years when I was invited to speak to the alumni dinner.*1 Speaking of speeches, on one occasion while in college I spoke to a congregation where both the president and the dean of the college were present, I was getting up in the world. I had spoken to some unusual groups but never stood before a crowd that I did not feel a bit of stage fright, especially at weddings and funerals. During the summer of 1935, I became the temporary pastor of a church. Where possibly I like to hear a congregation singing Cardinal Newman's hymn, "Lead Kindly Light the night to dark and I am far from home-Lead thou me home. The distant scenes I do not ask to see, one step at at time is a enough for me". Those distant scenes would be beyond my wildest imagination and would began to appear very soon. Martha's parents had given up as now we were able to see each other constantly. In fact Martha accompanied me during the summer of 1935 to the Church where I would be the pastor for the summer. They had had an elderly minister who died suddenly and needed a pastor until one would be appointed in the Fall meeting of the annual conference. The church was on New York Hill in Brunswick, Maryland, a few miles down the Potomac from Harpers Ferry. We made many friends during that summer. I drove back to Shepherdstown for classes during Summer School. My pastorate would end in October when a new minister would be appointed. The Fall of 1935 I didn't enroll in college mostly because of the scarcity of money. These were the darkest days before the dawn. The winter of 1935 and 36 broke many records for snowfall and temperature. During most of those days the only method of travel was horseback and I was right at home. The only farm work possible was keeping a large supply of wood available and feeding the live stock and milking. Several times I went to see Martha by sleigh and we would ride up and down the road nearest the farm. One night I went to see her by car and her mother again burst into the room and not to order me out of the house but to tell me the wind was blowing and the roads were drifting shut fast. That night I got within a mile of home and had to abandon the car and walk. I froze the tips of my ears that night and decided to give up trying to go anyplace by car. We had no idea how much snow was on the upper watershed of the Potomac in the area I now live in but we would know come March. The Flood of 1936 was the high water mark of the first 40 years of 19th. century. Just before my birthday the District Superintendent of the Moorefield WVA. district of the Methodist Church, South (before the merger) appeared at the farm. Did I want a full time job with five churches on the Burlington, W.Va. circuit. Did I want to be a circuit rider this time by car?. The answer was Hallelujah. Yes! I was to report for the first service on Sunday, March 22nd. There was a parsonage one house below the largest of the churches of the five and it would be vacant. WOW! That evening I didn't take time to change clothes but rushed to Martha's home, burst into the house and shouted we're getting married. Just like that. We had never been engaged. That we took for granted. No proposal just a declaration. We're getting married-that's it. When Monday March 26-Where? Right here in this house in the living room. We both knew and had known for years, when it came there would be no hesitation and there wasn't. There was much to be done. We would needed a car, a licenses, a list of who would be invited-a ring, and some new clothes. I had no money. Martha had $100.00 dollars. Our income would begin immediately-$1200 a year, $100.00 a month, more money then I had every seen in my life. First, the car. We bought a new Plymouth sedan. Cost$550.00. Down payment, Martha's $100.00. Payments would b $18.00 a month. The licenses to marry. I was of age but Martha was only 20-the law said 21. He dad went to the court house with me to give his permission. The preacher would be Rev. Hazel pastor of the Shepherdstown Methodist Church. His wife would play the wedding march. I had no best man and there was no bridesmaid. I paid $7.50 for the ring. I don't remember where the money came from. I know I borrowed $10.00 from a good friend Mrs. Easterday who was a friend of Martha's family, and she was the only person outside our families who was a guest. I gave the preacher $5.00, and he returned that. He knew we needed it more than he. The only other guests were Martha's cousin, Howard, her brother Kenneth, and his wife Sarah, my grandfather Licklider, both of our parents, and my sister Elizabeth and her husband Charles. Both our families were there except my two brothers. Martha wore a navy blue suit and white blouse with a white collar. She would have been beautiful in gingham. On our wedding night we went see Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers in "Follow the Fleet", along with Martha's brother and his wife.
At last Martha was married to one of the mean Morrow kids-but her parents loved us and we loved them in spite of the struggles. The date: Monday March 23, 2:30 P.m. in the living room of Martha's home, an attractive old stone house. On the day we were married the flood of 1936 was it highest. The bridge over the Potomac at Shepherdstown went out and the bridge at Harper's Ferry. On the Sunday before we were married I went to Burlington to preach. Burlington is a little community on U.S. Rt. 50, about 8 miles west of Romney. the bridge over the South Branch of the Potomac was washed away. On that Sunday I had left my car at Romney and someone took me across the river in a boat to meet someone from Burlington to hold service that day. Fortunately the parsonage was furnished, but the furniture in a rural Methodist Parsonage left much to be desired, but we were happy, and begin buying some of our own furniture. There was one feature of the parsonage worth writing about. It was the only house in the community with a bathroom and indoor plumbing. Wasn't long until Martha's aunt bought a new electric refrigerator. When we moved the following week we loaded everything in our car. I had already met a good representative group and they were our kind of people of people, mostly farmers and merchants, and the majority Democrats. We got a little homesick at times but soon were well established and going about the routine of a Methodist Minister, baptisms, funerals, but few weddings. People in the church welcomed us when we visited them and expected us to visit them frequently. We were invited out quite often to eat meals with parishioners. The Burlington Church was owned jointly by the Methodist and Presbyterians. We had as many friends who were Presbyterians as Methodist. An elderly man in the Presbyterian Church had a PhD, and wrote Presbyterian history of several areas in the country. *2 When we first met he shook my hand and said I knew when I saw your name that you were a Presbyterian renegade. He had written in one of his books that my Grandfather Morrow had been an elder in the Presbyterian Church in Charles Town, WV. I thought during the early months of our marriage, I will probably never saddle horses again and leaving Wild Goose I would never see the Jarretts again. They sold the farm and moved back to New York. I never forgot something Mrs. Jarrett had said. She said she could never forgive the Methodist Church for changing the name of Trinity College to Duke University to receive the Duke millions-money from the sale of tobacco. By this time my younger brother Henry was at Duke University School of Law from where he soon graduated. My other brother Ned was to make more money than either of us as a popular auctioneer with two large farms. The Methodist Church has the Episcopal form of government, which means ordained bishops and the bishops make the assignments to their churches. The Methodist split originally from the Church of England. Its leader was John Wesley who was a priest in the Church of England. The Methodist Church has the original 13 rules of articles of the English Church with the exception of one article, which pledges loyalty to the King of England, changed to loyalty to the U. S. form of government. The organization is the annual conference headed by a bishop and all the traveling ministers. This conference is the minister's church. He is no longer a member of any church. Traveling ministers are ministers who have achieved full membership in the annual conference and are called traveling ministers because they are frequently moved to another appointment within the conference. The minister must be admitted to the conference on trial, after two years he is ordained a Deacon. At the end of two more years he is ordained an elder with full authority to administer all the sacraments of the church. In the Methodist church, South, a minister could be admitted to the Conference by a 2/3 vote of all Conference members provided he agreed to pursue four years of religious training by correspondence in the School of Religion of Emory University. In the fall of 1938, I was so admitted. After two years I passed the required tests and was ordained a deacon , after two more years I had passed all the test, and was ordained an elder. The other requirement was that I have two years of college. So with my daily work as a pastor of a church I was also spending many hours a week studying. This was why the gift of that typewriter was such a godsend to me. On Oct 30, 1937, our first child was born, a boy, named Dale Walton. He was born in the room we were married in at Martha's old farm house. *3 Few expectant mothers had their babies in a hospital. Martha's old family doctor with his nurse and my assistance delivered the baby. My joy was to give the anesthetic not too little and not too much being instructed by the nurse. Martha has her first labor pains about 9:00 A.M. At the time I was in the woods at Wild Goose Farm hunting squirrels. My mother said if Martha called she would ring the dinner bell high upon the smokehouse, and so I heard the tolling of the bell and knew it was tolling for me. *4 I rushed to Martha's side but there was plenty of time. The baby was not born until 6 p.m. that evening. Dale was the only one of our children who had a black mammy. *5 This was a large Negro women who must have weighed in at 250 pounds. I can see her yet in this first week holding the baby over her shoulder, a little white spot in a field of black. She was about the same size as Aunt Annie who had been my black mammy. I called one of our friends at our church and announced that it was a boy. He said and so is ours.*6 On Dec 7, 1938, our second child was born. the baby was delivered at the parsonage by the country doctor in Burlington about 5:00 A.M. in the morning. This was at the same time the family next to us was also expecting. Their baby, a girl *7 was born two days before our son who was named William Ruthvan. *8 Both mothers had the same doctor and the mother next door had a sister who was a nurse who helped out the new mothers. This family has had some terrible tragedies. The father died at a very early age, one son went down in a bomber over the Pacific, and another son died of a heart attack which was probably a result of his part in the war in Europe. We still are very close to the widow and her daughter, Nancy.*9 At Burlington we now had two boys, our family had doubled in 2 years. I kept up with routine duties-now a father and pastor of five churches, and the necessary time in study. Naturally as you study more subjects for sermons over a short period of time you are growing in experience. We found time to do a little fishing in Paterson Creek and I knew the water from this creek went to the Potomac and passed by my childhood home. In winter we did something I had never done before. When the ice became thick enough to walk safely, with special permit, we were permitted to snare suckers. A series of holes about a foot square were cut in the ice across the creek. Over each hole one of the party would kneel-face close to the opening and hold in his hand a length of piano wire with a noose in it. Other members of the party would go down the stream and stomp hard on the ice. Suckers are slow movers and they would come slowly under the hole. It was very easy to snare them and jerk them up on the ice. A party of eight or ten men would end up with a bushel basket of fish. Suckers are more edible in the winter. I also began to deer hunt for the first time. The first day hunting in the foothills of the Appalachians I saw the first wild deer I had ever seen. Only bucks with antlers were legal game. *10 Our party usually consisted of a few young men bur mostly older men of the community. the method used was to make long drives maybe one whole side of a mountain. The older men stayed on the stands where deer were known to cross. I was one of the youngest in the crowd and had the energy to walk for a whole day, so I was included in the drive. I weighed about 130 pounds and had walked all my life-many times 5 miles to an early class at college-cultivation corn with a double shovel plow up and down the rows all day long. Most of the older men were fat and slower and probably hadn't walked a mile at any time in years. These men usually killed the deer. In later years when I began to hunt alone and had the whole Monongahela National forest to hunt in I could kill a deer and did every year. The 30s were marching along with a better economy each year. The storm was gathering in Europe. Every student of history knew about appeasement. To prevent war the dictators were being given anything they demanded. This couldn't last. Winston Churchill called it the gathering storm. In one of his books which is the last volume of his history, which is the "History of the English People". One by one nations withdrew from the League of Nations. Great Britain began conscription to mobilize. In another year -1940- the U.S. began to mobilize. Congress passed the Selective Service Act. All wars had not bee fought. We fought a war to end war but we were about to be plunged into another. The world was never as unsafe for democracy as it was becoming day by day. In 1939 Hitler attacked Poland. A new word came into use - Blitzkreeg=lighting war. There was nothing left for Britain and France to do but declare war on Germany and World War 2 began. These years I was growing in knowledge, experience, and years. I always felt that no matter how much you know-what you do not know is greater. There were mothers whose sons were being inducted into the armed services. A minister is constantly walking into the valley of the shadow of death. The death of the old was not so hard to bear. I often thought of the lines from a hymn "More homelike seems the vast unknown since these have entered there". It was a tragic death of the young that was the hardest to bear. One of these was he sudden death of a teenager, a farm family I visited often one evening he came home from school, changed his clothes, started the farm tractor that operated a large circular saw. Neither he or his father knew that the saw was about to work loose from one of the bearings where it was fastened, would give away, or the screws were loosened and were working their way out. On an end of the shaft was a large pulley for the belt running to the pulley on the tractor. On the other end of the shaft is bolted to the frame and holds a large circular saw. It was this end that was becoming loose and as the vibration of sawing continued it suddenly came free and whirled into the body of the youngster. It was a gruesome sight to see the body of a young man who was sawed to sudden death in a flash. His body was severed vertically almost in two. It is hard to know what to say to comfort a family like this. They were such good people. Another was the death of a small child about four years old-a beautiful little girl *11 whose parents were among our best friends. She had accompanied her grandfather down town. The car was parked on one side of the street and he had stepped across the street to see a friend. The little girl managed to get out of the car to dart across the street to her grandfather. She stepped in front of a large truck and was instantly crushed to death. Another was an adolescent boy the only child of one of the bankers of the community. He was an active member of my boy scout troop.*12 He was seriously ill with rheumatic fever and never recovered. A minister has to see so many people who are close to him into whose homes death has come. This is one of he hardest jobs of the ministry. If not careful a minister becomes hardened to the presence of death and becomes as emotionless as the mortician who does not weep for his people. He cannot afford to. Often I found myself quoting as I drove from place to place of Bryants Thanatopis, "gliding into darken musing with a healing sympathy to so live that when they summons comes to join the innumerable caravan which moves to that mysterious realm where each shall take his place in the silent halls of death there go not like the quarry slave at night scourged to his dungeon but sustained on soothed by an unfaltering trust approach thy grave like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant dreams". Or the words of Tennyson."Twilight and evening star and often that the dark, may there be no moaning of the bar Where I put out to sea-but a such a tide that moving seems asleep too full for sound or foam where that which from out the boundless deep turns again home". There were other experiences such as the little group of people in a mission church on the blue ridge mountain, a mission called Shenandoah because it was so close to the Shenandoah River, a humble group, none of them rich, but who gave what they could and were deeply appreciative of what I was doing for them. There was another group near a small town in Virginia, Purcelville, VA. I was there filling in for a friend. It was an unusually beautiful church. I was to hold morning service in this church and in the afternoon visit and speak in a prison camp. This was certainly one of the most unusual assignment. There were no walls or fences around the camp. The boys were secured by chains. They sat on the edge of their bunks as I spoke to them. There were two rows of bunks. On each bunk was a shackle locked around the ankle. Each time a boy moved their was the sound of the chain. I don't remember if there were hymnbooks. There apparently were because we sang hymns. This was truly a captive audience. A few years later I was to have a similar experience. More about that later.
There were other events that I recall. One of these was an event that circulated among other ministers. My mother-in-law was visiting us, who was not very well, having recently been in the hospital for an operation. There was only one good bed in the parsonage and this was our bed. In our room also were the cradles of our two small boys. I was out late to a meeting on this particular night. When I returned everybody was in bed asleep. I did not know that Martha had given our bed to her mother, and was asleep in another room. I prepared for bed in a small room which was also my study. I walked quietly into our bedroom and felt my way around the bed, being very careful not to awaken the children. As I got into bed something was wrong. My wife weighed only about 115 pounds, but something much bigger was in my bed. I pushed and pushed but it didn't move. By this time Martha was standing in the door wide awake. I had gotten in bed with my mother-in-law and it wasn't any wonder I couldn't mover her because she was a very large woman. *13
With the high prices for hospital care and all medical costs I think often of the practice of doctors and hospitals. When we were first married it was the practice of ministerial discounts. For instance Martha had her appendix removed in 1938. The surgeon charged us one dollar. Our doctor fee for delivery of our first child was $30.00. The doctor when our second child was born was an elderly county doctor who lived a couple of houses above us. To deliver our baby he made no charge at all. The year we married in the flood of 36, the tall bridge between West Virginia and Maryland washed away. In less than 2 years a much higher and more beautiful bridge was built jointly by W. VA. and MD. The day of its dedication as the James Rumsey Bridge was opened with a pageant on the river below based on Rumsey's trial of his steamboat at this spot. The organizer of the program was Dr. W. H. S. White, president of Shepherd College. Since James Rumsey married a Morrow he got as many Morrows *14 as possible on the program. On the river below in the boat were my brother Henry and my sister Elizabeth. President White invited me to give the invocation and the benediction. That between the two governors-Maryland and West Virginia. This was the last time I would be invited back to Shepherdstown for nearly 50 years when I was invited to speak to the all graduates of S.H.S. since opened in 1929, but I would be back many times. Once to take aerial photographs of the Bridge and many times to pass under it in boat and canoe fishing. It was not 1940-autumn. I had finished 2 years of the course of study and would now be ordained deacon and leave Burlington to another assignment. The ordination took place at the meeting of the annual conference. I believe it was either Roanoke, Virginia or Washington, D.C., I do not remember exactly. The ordination usually takes place at the annual conference on Sunday, the last day of the conference. This is where the Bishop lays his hands on your head after the candidate has answered several questions. Do you know the general rules and will you keep them? Are you going on to perfection? Are you in debt so as to embarrass you? Have you been called? There are many questions about daily life and work, about the Bible, both old and new testaments, about original sin, and church government. There are nineteen main questions all of which must be answered in the affirmative. I was duly ordained and at the end of the annual conference of 1940 was assigned a church at Petersburg, W. VA., the county seat of Grant County, a well built brich church and brick parsonage beside the church. For 4 1/2 years I had served five churches in Burlington. Now I would have only one.
*1 After 50 Year Reunion, Dad told me that his brother Ned was sitting
at a table with another graduate who, when Dad was introduced, turned to Ned and
asked if he was related to Dad. Ned replied that he wasn't. When Dad acknowledged
in his speech that Ned was indeed his brother, the woman turned to Ned and said,
"I thought you weren't related to him", to which Ned replied, " I
didn't want to claim him until I knew what he was going to say." (DWM)
*2 His name was Dr. Woodward, and may have been the Woodward who wrote,
"History of the Winchester Presbytery." I have always thought that
this Dr. Woodward would have known that Dad was a great-grandson of Rev. William
Claiborne WALTON, the Presbyterian Evangelist. (DWM)
*3 My mother was also delivered in this same room by Dr. G. W. Banks of
Shepherdstown. The doctor who delivered me was Dr. Glover from Martinsburg. (DWM)
*4 I love that line. (DWM)
*5 Her name was Hattie, but I don't remember her last name. I do remember
meeting her on the streets of Martinsburg, WV, when I was quite young. (DWM)
*6 The friend was Pete Holman who lived on a farm on the east side of
Saddle Back Mountain. The child however was not a boy, but a girl named Mary
Lou. (DWM)
*7 Nancy Shank, daughter of Baker and Clarice Shank. (DWM)
*8 Named for his grandfathers William MYERS and Ruthvan MORROW. (DWM)
*9 Gene Shank died in the Pacific during WW II. (DWM)
*10 On one of the hunts before the war, Gene Shank was with Dad, and shot
a doe by mistake. Dad didn't say what did with it. (DWM)
*11 This event actually took place in Petersburg, during the war. The
child was Jackie Shobe, d/o Woodrow and Mary Elizabeth Shaffer Shobe. She was
with her grandfather Shaffer when she was killed in downtown Petersburg. I
remember when the police brought the truck driver before the
Justice-of-the-Peace, Myrtle Parks, at the Park Motel across from the Methodist
Parsonage. I'm not sure this man was ever charged with any violations. The child
walked under his truck. (DWM)
*12 This was Junior Lynch. (DWM)
*13 Mom told me that they stood there giggling and neither us kids or
Grandmother MYERS woke up. My Grandmother had a fit when I said I was going to
send the story to Reader's Digest.
*14 At the time, 1939, there was the assumption that all MORROW families
in Jefferson County, VA, were of the same ancestry. My grandmother, Louise
LICKLIDER MORROW used to say the MORROWS had no money or property left, because
"they financed James Rumsey and lost everything on that damned
steamboat." Research by the editor has subsequently determined that there
were three MORROW groups in Jefferson County, and none of them were
related. Our group, as it can be seen at this website, migrated from Frederick
County, MD, c1815-1817 to Berkeley Co., VA, to Frederick County, VA, before
1830, and then to Jefferson County, VA, where Joseph MORROW lived by 1832. The
Rumsey MORROWS had migrated from Caroline County, VA, to Bohemian Manor in Cecil
County, MD, where they met up with RUMSEY, then Shepherdstown in Jefferson
County in the 1770s. Another group, I call the Weaver MORROWS, because they all
seemed to be Irish tailors, came fro Ireland in the 1800s. One was James in
Martinsburg, the other was William who might have come from Frederick County,
MD, to Charles Town. With all of the James and Johns, it took nearly 40 years to
sort them out.
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