Appalachian History

An Extraordinary Story
Told by a West Virginia Girl who was Kidnapped Sunday Night

[New York Times, April 8, 1891]


Wheeling, West Va., April 7. ---Since Sunday night, about 9:30 o’clock, there has been much excitement in this city and vicinity over the sudden and mysterious disappearance of Miss Amy Morgan, niece of Henry Morgan, Assistant Cashier of the Exchange Bank of Wheeling. The family resides two miles from the river on the Ohio side, at the extreme western end of Bridgeport.

Sunday evening the young lady left home and attended a neighboring church. She was escorted home by a gentleman friend, and after chatting at the gate for a few minutes, they separated, Miss Morgan proceeding toward the house. From that moment all trace of the girl was lost until noon to-day, when she was driven home by Charles Hill, who found her at the Bridgeport station in an exhausted condition.

Miss Morgan states that when she left her friend at the gate she found that she had dropped a letter and walked back a few steps to look for it. While thus engaged she was seized by two men, who choked her and hurried her into a closed carriage, threatening her with death if she offered to scream. After turning the carriage around several times they started off and drove all night.

About daylight they stopped and one of the men got out and pounded at a door several times. He came back and said “There’s no one there, I guess the game’s up.”

Then they deliberated as to whether they should kill her or let her go, and finally fixed upon the latter course, telling the girl that if she attempted to follow them they would kill her.

After walking several miles, the girl struck the Bellaire, Zanesville and Cincinnati Railroad and followed it. She reached Kelsey Station, fourteen miles from Bellaire. There she was given food and kept last night, and to-day a ticket was purchased for Bellaire and money given her to ride from Bellaire to Bridgeport, where she was found by Hill, as stated.



crime+in+Appalachia kidnapping Wheeling+WV appalachia appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

Listen to Eleanor Steber sing intro to 'Knoxville:Summer of 1915'


She was the most celebrated American soprano of the 1940s and 1950s. She went on from there to become head of the voice department at the Cleveland Institute of Music from 1963 to 1972, to teach at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, the American Institute of Music Studies in Graz and at her alma mater, the New England Conservatory of Music.

But one of Eleanor Steber's most important contributions to the world of opera was to commission and bring to life a 16-minute song that luxuriates in the calm of an earlier America, a contented, rocking-chair America.

By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May god bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a while I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

Knoxville: Summer of 1915

Composer Samuel Barber adapted the text for his vocal work from the introduction to A Death In The Family, James Agee's Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography. It is a rhapsodic childhood memory, summertime in Tennessee, enjoying the family, sitting on the porch, watching life in the town go by your street, an idyllic time unaware of the war raging in Europe. "That was exactly my childhood in Wheeling, West Virginia," said Steber, who premièred Knoxville with Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony in 1948.

Steber's father, mother and both sets of grandparents were part of Wheeling's large German-American community, in which music played a major role. After winning the Metropolitan Opera Auditions in early 1940, Steber returned to Wheeling for a concert in the Virginia Theater on May 1, a concert that was repeated the next evening in Madison School auditorium.

For this homecoming concert, West Virginia Governor Homer Holt came from Charleston to join all the local dignitaries honoring her. This was the first of sixteen annual homecoming concerts which she presented in Wheeling. Throughout her long career she never forgot Wheeling, where she was born July 17, 1916.


sources: http://www.wvculture.org/HISTORY/journal_wvh/wvh52-10.html
http://www.pictures.eaglefreeenterprises.com/famous_west_virginians.htm
http://www.virginia.edu/music/pressrelease/06-07/cuso100706.html
http://wheeling.weirton.lib.wv.us/people/hallfame/1980steb.htm



Eleanor+Steber arts+in+appalachia Wheeling+WV James+Agee appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

July 4, 1918 parade in Wheeling, WV.


Wheeling+WV appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Probably the most famous boat ever built at Clarington, OH was the Liberty, being the last in the line of packet boats of that name (a packet boat is generally described as a steam boat for conveying cargo, mail, and passengers on a regular schedule.) Way’s Packet Directory 1848-1994 lists an earlier Liberty built in 1857 at Wheeling, WV but "snagged and lost at Twelve Pole Creek, WV, Dec 27, 1862."


The final Liberty was built in 1912 to run from Clarington to Wheeling. It made a round trip a day and whistled each morning about 5:00 AM so that prospective passengers would get up and board the craft for a day's shopping. The Liberty remained in Wheeling several hours each day and brought its passengers back home in the evening.

A change in the Liberty's route marked the decline of packet boating. As people traveled more by rail, then by motor car, the vessel's route was lengthened from this short daily run to a weekly trip between Pittsburgh, PA, and Charleston, WV. At the last, it towed a showboat with the Major Bowes Amateur Hour aboard. It also served as a rescue boat on the lower Ohio River in the famous flood of 1937. Oddly enough, Captain Walter C. Booth was aboard the Liberty when it launched as a brand new boat, and he also rang the last bell to the engineer when it ended its career as a packet boat after its service in the flood rescues.

The Liberty’s whistle was fashioned by a farmer living near Grape Island, WV. It had been previously used on two packet boats, the Ben Hur, and then the Bessie Smith, before being installed on the Liberty. After the Liberty was dismantled in 1938, the whistle went to the towboat Mildred and where it is today is anybody's guess. “It was probably one of the nicest sounding whistles ever to echo among the hills of the upper Ohio Valley,” said The Intelligencer (Wheeling, WV), on Aug. 4, 1960.


sources: http://members.aol.com/RYouCuz/monroeco.htm#fifteen
http://members.tripod.com/~Write4801/riverboats/l.html

Related post: "They'd get up and swing around on the trapeze"

The+Liberty packet+boats Wheeling+WV Clarington+OH appalachia +appalachian+history history+of+appalachia