Appalachian History

Water witching (rhabdomancy) is very common in West Virginia. According to a study done about fifty years ago, at that time there were twenty-five thousand practicing water witches in this country. The actual practice of divining with a forked stick, as we know it, began in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century in Germany.

Martin Luther believed the practice violated the first commandment. Through the ages it has been roundly denounced as the devil's work and praised as a remarkable aid to a basic necessity of rural life---finding water. It is often categorized with such rural customs as planting by the signs.

There must be scientific reasons why some people have special powers to locate water through divining. We just have not determined what those scientific reasons are---or perhaps I am enough of a romantic to allow for belief in its efficacy. I agree with a quotation that sums up the situation: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

I once blindfolded a water witch so there was no possibility he could see. I set a large bucket of water within a 360-degree circle around him, turned him around until he was so dizzy I had to support him until he got his balance back, and then let him turn in a circle to locate the water. He found the water every time, and I conducted this test about half a dozen times.

In fact, when his divining rod got directly over the water, his arms would shake violently. When I tried to do this myself, I actually found the water the first time, but it was more guessing than feeling a specific draw on the rod, although I thought I felt something.

Another test I tried was to have a local Randolph County water witch find a course of water in an open field. At that exact spot, I clamped his rod to a supporting stand, where, without him touching the rod, it did not move on its own. I then had him walk close and reach out with one hand and touch the rod. It still did nothing. He then grasped the rod with two hands as I unclamped it from the stand. It dipped down again, indicating the watercourse.

Vogt and Golde reported one test with a water witch who had a brother without the power. He walked behind the powerless brother and held onto his ears. In doing so, the divining rod worked like normal in his brother's hands.

After knowing and working with this local Randolph County witch for awhile, I became comfortable enough with him to ask a personal question. This man did not cut his fingernails, and some, including one thumbnail, were about two inches in length, growing out in a long curve.

Some things seem best not questioned at first, but I was dying to know about this. At last, one evening when I was passing near his home and stopped by to say hello, I decided the time was right. At a pause in our conversation, I said, "Burt, I’ve been curious as to why you have such long fingernails." I then paused anxiously, waiting for an answer to my question, thinking that perhaps it related to some unknown occult methodology involving secretive aspects of divining. Barely looking up, Burt said, "To scratch my ass." It seems things don't always appear to be what you think they are.


source: Signs, cures, & witchery: German Appalachian folklore, by Gerald Milnes, Univ of Tennessee Press, 2007

Randolph County is the largest in West Virginia. Timber rich, today much of it is in the Monongahela National Forest. And that wealth of natural resources set the stage for the Courthouse War of the 1890s between the towns of Beverly and Elkins.

Prior to 1898 Beverly was the county seat; one of the oldest east of the Mississippi River. Beverly was a conservative rural southern town in 1890 much like any town of the South.

Beverly, WV Courthouse. Undated sketch.

But that year U.S. Senator Henry Davis, who was also a prominent coal and timber man, came to Randolph County seeking to deploy resources. He fell upon an area just north of Beverly as a site for a railroad junction from which he could center his operations. Before 1890 the area that was about to become Elkins was home to a scattered rural community known as Leadsville, where the farmers' corn was loaded on boats and floated down river.

Elkins was incorporated in 1890 and renamed for U.S. Senator Stephen Benton Elkins, Davis’ son-in-law. Senator Elkins was a man used to getting his way: he was secretary of war under President Benjamin Harrison and later chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission under President Theodore Roosevelt. (The original Davis and Elkins estates are now the site of Davis and Elkins College.)

Together Davis and Elkins promoted their agenda of business, industry, and commerce, much in keeping with Northern ambitions and enterprise, in direct contrast to Beverly, the home of the old conservative South.

The new citizens of Elkins began a campaign to have the county seat moved to Elkins. The first county wide referendum was held in 1890 and was defeated. Beverly built a new courthouse in 1894 in the hopes of hanging on to the county seat, but this building was burned down in 1897 under suspicious circumstances.

The court records were returned to the old courthouse for safekeeping. This event revived the efforts to have the county seat moved to Elkins. On the third vote the balloting was close enough to have the election referred to the courts.
A number of Elkins supporters, fearing this would cause endless delay, gathered with weapons to make a surprise assault on the old courthouse in Beverly, intending to move the records themselves.

“Bands of armed men were trained to defend their towns,” says the Elkins version of the story. “Beverly residents heard of the plan and gathered to defend the courthouse and town” is the view from Beverly.

Elkins, WV Courthouse, ca. 1915.

“At one point a special train was formed at Elkins to attack Beverly. The attack was averted, though, by a speech given by C. Wood Dailey, chief counsel for the Western Maryland Railroad,” says the Elkins narrative.

“A delegation of [Beverly] community leaders, particularly Dr. Humboldt Yokum, persuaded the Elkins faction to give up their fight and avoid bloodshed,” counters the Historic Beverly website. Beverly resident S.L. Baker, who later served two terms in the State Senate, also served as a mediator to help solve the county seat controversy.

The court ultimately ruled in Elkins' favor, and the county records were ‘peaceably’ moved to Elkins about 1899,though resistance in Beverly was still stiff.

“Explaining the struggle to control the courthouse in Randolph County, a Pittsburgh newspaper reporter observed that ‘under other circumstances a county seat war might be a mere passing event,’” notes Ronald L. Lewis in Transforming the Appalachian Countryside “but in Randolph County ‘it stood for everything.

“It was the meeting of the old and the new civilization,” a conflict between ‘tradition with all of its sentiment and modern industry with all of its disregard for tradition.’ It was a ‘collision between the young men who believed in business…and the old men who have veneration for their home and the home of their ancestors.’

"The contest was so spirited because it was ‘the ruthless assault of nineteenth century progress upon the posterity of the pioneers’ who settled in the mountains generations before.”

Beverly’s Dr. Yokum, it should be noted as a postscript, by 1912 owned not only his home at Beverly, but several lots of land in Elkins.


sources: Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, by Ronald L. Lewis, University of North Carolina Press, 1998
www.ancientfaces.com/research/story/386313
www.historicbeverly.org/bevhist4.htm
www.wvculture.org/shpo/nr/pdf/randolph/08001240.pdf
www.regionvii.com/images/Randolph_Co_Narrative.pdf

Lent is here, and that means that many residents of Helvetia, WV will be foregoing hosenblatt meat pastries deep-fried in lard for awhile. Luckily last Saturday folks there had ample opportunity to consume that delicacy, along with donuts and rosettes, at the annual Fasnacht celebration. The Swiss settlers of Helvetia combined the Catholic celebration of Lent with the Protestant Winterfest of Zurich, when Old Man Winter is burned in effigy to hasten the advent of spring, to produce this annual February revel.

Fasnacht is the most famous city and canton in Switzerland's Basel Stadt. And Helvetia is the Latin name for Switzerland. In West Virginia's Helvetia, homes are decorated with scary figures to frighten Old Man Winter away. These after all are the Rauhnächte (rough nights), the nights between winter and spring, when evil ghosts are supposed to go around.

This photo of musicians in Helvetia is undated; prior to the construction of the Star Band Hall in 1910 Fasnacht celebrations took place in homes, with the musicians off to one side of the parlor as in this photo.

Helvetians decorate the community hall in colorful ribbons and Swiss lampions (paper lanterns with candles), and hang a gruesome Old Man Winter by the neck in the middle of the dance floor. And they create elaborate masks.

At dark on the Saturday night before Ash Wednesday, the villagers and guests don their masks and congregate at Star Band Hall. This plain rectangular frame structure, built in 1910, was for many years home of a quite famous brass concert and marching band.

“The Helvetia Star Band will rank favorably with the best in the State,” declare the authors of ‘The Story of Helvetia Community,’ an undated article most likely from the early 1920s. “This band is frequently asked to play for occasions at various distant points over the State.

“There is band practice twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and in this way the players are always able to measure up to the expectations of those asking them to perform. Several of the members of the band served their country as buglers or musicians in the bands of the respective branches to which they belonged while in the army.” The Star Band was active for 65 years.

The assembled parade marchers light the lampions, then proceed up the road Mardi Gras style to the Community Hall where they parade around the dance floor as their masks are judged. They dance schotisches, waltzes, polkas, and squares until midnight, when the fiddler announces the hour to burn Old Man Winter. The prettiest maiden then mounts the shoulders of the tallest man and cuts down the ghoul. He is dragged out into the snow, roughed up and cursed, then thrown onto the bonfire amid shrieks and applause.

A group of Swiss immigrants from Brooklyn, NY calling themselves 'the Gruetli Verein' settled the tiny community of Helvetia in 1869. The members had agreed that they would all emigrate to another section of the country together when the time was right.

A member of the society named Isler surveyed large swaths of the eastern West Virginia mountains for a Washington-based firm, and reported back to the society on the richness of the country. A committee of six men was assembled, and left Brooklyn by rail on October 15, 1869. They arrived at Clarksburg and began the difficult work of traveling by foot over the mountains.

At one time there were three Swiss colonies in Randolph County: Helvetia, Adolph, and Alpina. In the early 1900s Dr. Hanz Gruber was Helvetia’s village doctor for about ten years. He was a nephew of Franz Gruber who wrote for his Austrian church choir the much loved carol "Silent Night, Holy Night." Dr. Gruber's house still stands.


Sources: 'The Story of Helvetia Community,' by Eugene Daetwyler, Annie Teuscher, and E. Metzner at www.wvculture.org/history/agrext/helvetia.html
Helvetia, West Virginia : a study of pioneer development and community survival in the Appalachia, by Atje Partadiredja, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1978
One's own hearth is like gold : a history of Helvetia, West Virginia, by David H Sutton, New York: Peter Lang, 1990
www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/es/wv/fasncht_1
www.timeswv.com/entertainment/local_story_042191843.html
www.wvhumanities.org/fasnacht.htm
www.wvculture.org/history/agrext/helvetia.html

Many thanks to Elvira Niles of Lithia, FL for her input on this article.



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