Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 25, 1995 TAG: 9504250109
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Clinton Baugh was on his way back from turkey hunting when he crested the hill in front of his uncle's house Monday morning. A thick mist barely had lifted from Cove Mountain and nearby Buzzards Cliff, masking the dale where Baugh's family homestead has been for more than 200 years.
Miller Cove stretched barren before him.
The log cabin where his uncle lived was a heap of ashes. His uncle's collie, Queenie, circled around her master's pickup truck. Baugh's uncle was nowhere to be found.
"I sat here a few moments. I couldn't do nothing," Baugh said.
Then he drove to one of his uncle's oldest friends to call for help.
"I knew as soon as Clinton got out of his truck something was wrong," said Earl Sirry, who lives about a mile from Baugh's uncle.
For most of the day Monday, fire and police investigators sifted through the charred remains of the log cabin, searching for any sign of 81-year-old James B. Baugh. In mid-afternoon, they found some bones near the wood stove.
Authorities believe the bones are Baugh's, although it will be several days before the remains are identified.
Clinton Baugh and his cousin John Baugh watched from a ridge overlooking the field where their uncle's home once stood as the rescue truck, police evidence van and detectives' cars wound their way down a rutted road to the ashes.
"I wonder how many of them are going to get out of there today?" Clinton Baugh said. "All it takes is a little rain to wash the road out."
Investigators walked the perimeter of the fire that scorched a back field and melted the pistols that Baugh kept underneath his bed. They examined burn patterns and picked through debris.
But they had no answers about how, when or where the fire had started. The rugged, remote location at 7625 Miller Cove Road, near the Roanoke County-Craig County line, apparently masked the smoke and flames from being seen.
Almost no evidence was left of a man who needed little to survive. A spring near Baugh's house was his only source of water. Oil lamps were just fine for light, a wood stove good enough for heat.
"Loneliness would really bear on some people," said David Steger, Sirry's son-in-law. "But not on Jim. He liked his solitude."
James Baugh was born in the two-story log cabin and could never be coaxed away. It seemed that the land, his home and his family were all he ever needed.
"I asked him one time why he never got married, and he said, 'I don't need no damn woman telling me what to do,''' John Baugh said. "He never hesitated to speak his mind."
He fought at the invasion of Normandy, returning without a scratch. He saw many a fire chew up the mountainsides around him, including the blaze on Cove Mountain just two weeks ago.
But Baugh never worried about things he could do nothing about. And the flames never touched his home.
He belied his age, despite cataracts and a stroke. He would chew tobacco, sit on his porch and, until the stroke, still hunt his land for squirrel, turkey and deer.
"Me and him used to hunt; we'd go up at the end of the mountain and come down at Dragons Tooth," Clinton Baugh said. "Sometimes we'd not kill anything."
"It's the getting out that counts," John Baugh replied.
In recent years, the Baughs had tried to get their elderly uncle to move to a home less secluded, but he wouldn't hear of it. Monday, white dogwoods dotted the land where his house once was. There was a faint smell of wet wood and cinder.
"For him it was his home, where he was born," John Baugh said. "We'd never get him out of here."
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB