By Bion H. Butler
One night not long ago the radio outfit brought to our house a curiously interesting story. A traveler who had made the journey from somewhere up in Pennsylvania was telling in detail his trip. He came down through Hagerstown, Winchester, Staunton, Lexington, Danville, Greensboro, and after paying attention to the various places and the things he saw along the road he finally concluded with the statement hat he had now arrived at Pinehurst and that bed time had come and he would say goodnight.
Possibly a bit of romance coming out of the air interested me more than it might under some conditions. But in one way or another it brought back recollections that reached backward over many a year. When the radio told us that the traveler had arrived in Pinehurst and was turning in for the night, it had the same flavor as the curtain call in the Old Homestead when grandpap puts out the cat, lights the candle and starts to climb up stairs. Not that they light the candles any more at Pinehurst. But when the story from the radio had brought us to Pinehurst and indicated that now it was time to sleep, that marked the close of a wonderfully interesting day. Just as the old man with his lighted candle starting up stairs to bed concluded one of the most pleasing melodramas on the American stage in those days when the theatres had a prominent part in the lives of the people.
If I didn’t live in the Sandhills, and if I didn’t want to come to the Sandhills for any purpose important enough to bring me, I would be like Desdemona when she confessed to Othello that his tales of adventure captivated her. I don’t know of any journey that interests me more than that one through the valley of Virginia. The radio the other night talked about Winchester, and Cedar Creek, and Fisher’s Hill—those exciting points where Sheridan and Early and the Cadets from the Military Academy, and the men and the boys from the North and the South wrote the tragic history of our country. I have no great admiration for war, but to drift over the battlefield at Gettysburg where was fought the decisive engagement of our great conflict, or at the bloody field of Antietam, unparalleled as a day’s havoc in American history, I am impressed by the tremendous significance of what has taken place there.
But while the valley from Gettysburg, all the way south, and even into the Sandhills where Sherman registered his remarkable march, is filled with the story of the war, war as only one of the outstanding features. Sixty years ago the valley heard the last of its contending guns. And peace has made that region as interesting at the present time as war made it terrible three score years ago. However, just as men from the North and South mingled there in the early days, so they do now. Instead of gun carriage in that day in the automobile of today. And the cars met on the valley pike carry the tags of all states of the Union. I am of the opinion that day after day a larger number of states is represented on that road than almost anywhere else in the country. It is a thoroughfare between the North and South and many people from the far West come through here to the South, or to the battlefields and the mountains and caverns that are numerous over a long stretch of many miles.
From Roanoke, Virginia, to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is a stretch of 300 miles, mostly of paved road all the way, and in that entire distance hardly a town big enough to be called a small city. Village after village comes in sight along the way, falls behind, is lost among the farms, and another is sighted. Rural scenes the entire distance to Pinehurst. Wheat fields and apple orchards, a panorama of mountains shutting in the valley a large portion of the distance, and very little hill climbing to do anywhere on the route. If I lived in the North and wanted an outing with an automobile trip as a part of it, I would pick the North Carolina Sandhills as the objective point and the valley of Virginia as the way to get there. And when the radio story of the other night brought us down through that country, stopping at the little towns, taking us down into the caverns, delaying for a minute at Lexington where Lee was a leader in the work of education after he had been the leader of a great army, I was almost ready to hit out here in the middle of the winter and run through that country again.
It is a pity that there are two or three places along the route where Virginia has not yet completed the good road. And I suspect that in the wet weather of winter those links would be unpleasant to negotiate. But our neighbor state is at work and it looks as though that in another year or two a fairly perfect road will extend from the door of the Carolina up through the Virginia valley to connect with every good road in the North.
When I went up the road last summer the state highway commissioners of the state of Virginia were at work connecting up the two or three short links between Roanoke and Staunton, which when finished will be a hard road all the way from Roanoke up, and I found the road excellent from Pinehurst to Roanoke except the last 15 or 20 miles which was also in the hands of the construction crews. But at that the road from Hagerstown struck me as being better than the other road which I came back by way of Richmond and Petersburg. I doubt if I would be crazy about making a trip North or South by either route in winter. But in spring, summer or fall, if I wanted a ride and had money enough to buy the gasoline, I would write to the state highway commission at Richmond and ask them about the situation where they are rebuilding the roads in the Virginia valley and if they answered favorably, O would hit that trail that leads from Pinehurst up between the mountains, but which keeps the road in the valley and the scenery in the high spots.
From page 6 the Pinehurst Outlook, Jan. 24, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn91068725/1925-01-24/ed-1/seq-6/
No comments:
Post a Comment