Day 86 (August 8). WV & Steeles Tavern

From: South Point, OH

To: Raphine, VA

Miles today: 267

Total miles: 17688

I crossed back over the Ohio River and took I-64 east through West Virginia to Charleston, the state capitol.  It is a fairly large city geographically, possible because the area is relatively flat.  I-64 then turns almost due south for fifty or sixty miles to the town of Beckley.  The difference between the peaks and valleys is large along this stretch, and I expected to see deep excavations along the road, like that in eastern Kentucky.  But the road cuts were relatively modest, despite the spectacular scenery.  This must be one of the few routes through central WV that permits this. 

I have been to Beckley once before on a motorcycle, not from the Interstate but via smaller roads. I remember being surprised by climbing and climbing up a “mountain” and finding a small city at the top – I am used to the towns being in the valleys.  But in the Cumberland Plateau, the valleys are very narrow, but there are some parts of the top of the plateau that have not been eroded into sharp relief yet.  That is where most of the towns are, because that is where the flat land is.

At Beckley, I-64 turns east again, and I followed it through more high relief. After a while the terrain leveled off, and then, in the distance, I could see a different type of mountains – the Appalachians.  The difference, if you know what to look for, is remarkably clear.  And on the other side of those mountains was Virginia, and home. It felt good.

This image shows the difference between dissected plateau (upper left) and "conventional" folded mountains (lower right).  This is from the Wikipedia article on "Dissected Plateaus," but it is near the region I drove through today!

Those crazy West Virginia mountains

The conventional folded mountains (with ridge lines!) of the Virginia Appalachians. Almost home! 

I crossed the border into Virginia, and continued over a few ridges (ridges!) into the Shenandoah Valley, near Lexington. Here I-64 merges with I-81 and goes up the valley, but I exited the interstate at this point and took the older US 11.  This is a road I have taken before, exploring family history.  Some of my ancestors are Steeles, coming to “the colonies” in something like 1650, and settling in the Shenandoah Valley.  By the time of the American Revolution, the villages of Lexington and Staunton existed, and the Steele’s either built or took over a ”tavern” about halfway between the two.  This was one of many such places that cropped up along travel routes, providing food, a place to sleep, and care for the horses at locations about a day’s travel from one another.  This is remarkably similar in many ways to outposts like Eagle Plains that I spent three nights at in Yukon earlier on this journey.  A small village called Midway grew up around “Steele’s Tavern,” and three or four generations of my ancestors ran or helped run the place.  When the US Post Office came up with more formal addresses, including zip codes, “Midway” was disallowed as a name because it was already in use elsewhere in Virginia, so the village officially became Steeles Tavern (no apostrophe).  According to the detailed writings of my paternal grandmother, the tavern itself no longer exists, but this now totally dilapidated building stands where it once was.  My ancestors, 18^th and 19^th century truck stop operators!

Not the original building, but the original location of "Steele's Tavern." 

Today, along that part of Route 11 (at one point known at least locally as “The Great Road”), there is very little besides the Steeles Tavern post office.  But two miles away, another tiny village called Raphine was luckier. It lies almost on top of the Interstate, which runs parallel to Route 11 for a couple of hundred miles up the Shenandoah Valley. It has – a gigantic truck stop, which also serves the gasoline, restaurant, and motel needs of automobile drivers.  In fact, this is where I am right now.  Route 11 givith, and the bypassing of Route 11 taketh away and givith to someone else.   

Left: I-64 and US 11 are only two miles apart, but Raphine is closer to the Interstate.  Right: "Steeles Tavern 2015?"

There is one other thing about this area that family history requires me to discuss. Back in the 1830’s or so, a neighbor of the Steele family, one Cyrus McCormick, invented a machine that could harvest far more wheat in a day than an entire family working together could.  This is important because, when grain ripens, you only have a few days to harvest it before it goes to seed or rots.  This machine means that one family could farm a much larger area of wheat by themselves, leading eventually to the mega-farms we have today, with only a few per cent of the population living on farms as opposed to the majority up until that time. If I’m making this out to be a big deal, you have to understand that “The McCormick Reaper” was drilled into me as family lore up until the day the last of my paternal line passed on. So forgive me.

Anyway, after McCormick moved to Chicago and made his fortune, he retained ownership of his old lands in Virginia, with a much nicer house.  Sometime after the Civil War, an Englishman named Walter Searson came to the US seeking his fortune.  (I think he was a second son or something, so didn’t stand to inherit in England.)  He ended up in Chicago, and somehow met and impressed McCormick, who was looking for someone to manage his Virginia estate.  Walter accepted the offer, moved into McCormick’s house, and later married Irene Steele, one of the many Steele’s in the area.  They had eight kids, one of whom was my grandmother, Mildred.  She grew up in the McCormick house, which has been beautifully preserved by Virginia Tech as part of the state’s legacy.  So here’s a picture. 

Left: Virginia Tech now maintains the old McCormick farm in Steeles Tavern.  Right: Now offices, this is the house my grandmother grew up in (although the family did not own it).  Nice digs for 1900.  (Later came the Depression.)

This was all stuff I had heard from my father and grandparents a million times.  What I hadn’t heard, and only discovered while going through the tons of slightly sorted genealogy crap that I pulled out of my dad’s house when he died, is that Mildred was sent to college – this was in the 1910’s, when very few women went to college – on money that came from the McCormick family.  Russell Sage College, in Troy, New York, had only opened a year or two before she went there.  (My grandmother never talked about going to college to me, even though she graduated.)  The other college in Troy is Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where my grandfather, the son of German immigrants, had just enrolled.  The rest, as they say, is (family) history.  Interestingly, when my grandmother was very old, she told me that people had warned her not to marry him, because “mixed marriages don’t last.”  People are fascinating.