ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 30, 1997 TAG: 9703310010
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-20 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: WAKE FOREST
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS/THE ROANOKE TIMES
There's an old blues song that goes:
I wish I was a mole in the ground.
Like a mole in the ground,
I would root that mountain down.
And I wish I was a mole in the ground.
You wonder if anyone who resided in the venerable black community called Wake Forest ever sang that refrain.
For sure, they've lived it. The generations that have come and gone since ex-slaves founded this backwoods enclave 130 years ago made a life for themselves by operating underground, literally and figuratively.
Below the earth they dug coal. On the surface they evaded Jim Crow discrimination by building their own self-contained world.
Today, Wake Forest is a diminished place, a scattering of modest houses along a half-mile stretch of paved country road in northwest Montgomery County. About 150 people occupied Wake Forest in its heyday from the 1920s to the 1950s. Only 50 or so live there now.
"Look around. It's just about a retirement center now," says Heartsease Eaves, one of the long-time residents who worries about the community's future.
Yet even those who left to seek opportunities elsewhere maintain strong emotional ties to their ancestral home.
The story of how Wake Forest came to be and the experience of growing up there steered its people through a century when "it wasn't popular for blacks to be black," as Thomas "Butch" Eaves says.
He's Heartsease Eaves' son and married to Jessie Sherman Eaves, a childhood friend and fellow Wake Forest native. Their coming of age in the mid-1960s coincided with the Civil Rights movement, and as a result they've taken advantage of opportunities that were not available to their parents.
Heartsease Eaves raised four young children by herself after her husband died, cleaning houses in Blacksburg and doing shift work at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant to keep her family together.
Jessie's parents, like many others in Wake Forest, hauled water from a well, fed their children from the yield of a family garden patch and thanked God every day for their life's bounty.
"I never thought I was poor," says Esther Jones, who has lived her entire 77 years in the community. "We worked so hard, we didn't have time to think if we were or not."
Wake Forest evolved from the ashes of the Civil War. Some of its original inhabitants belonged to the owners of Kentland, Montgom-
ery County's largest ante-bellum plantation.
Elizabeth Kent, daughter of the plantation's owner, gave two "old and faithful family servants" named Amos and Granville Sherman 16 acres of land along the New River for a settlement. That property was traded for another tract that became the site of Wake Forest, which was gradually occupied by former slaves and other blacks who moved to the area.
In those late 19th-century days, blacks who didn't continue to toil in Kentland's fields worked as tradesmen, as fishermen or boatmen on the New River, or on railroad maintenance crews.
What made their lives fundamentally different from other contemporary rural Southern blacks was the opportunity to own their own small plots of land. Property ownership conveyed status and a toehold on prosperity.
Sometimes livestock were informally traded for acreage. A few official land transfers can be traced inside dusty deed books at the Montgomery County Courthouse. And census records show how the original Wake Forest families - with surnames such as Sherman, Bannister, Milton and Eaves - progressed, methodically acquiring property and education for their children.
Wake Forest acquired its name sometime around the turn of the century, either from a community elder named Peter Armstrong or an early minister, both of whom had ties to Wake Forest, N.C.
During the 1920s, the opening of coal mines in narrow seams near Wake Forest had a profound effect. Large operations near McCoy readily hired black men and offered them a chance to earn salaries, however meager.
Coal mining was strenuous, dirty and dangerous, not work for the faint-hearted. Many Wake Forest men saw opportunity within the mines, however.
Oscar Sherman was one of those. He left the two-room Wake Forest school after eighth grade and followed his father and older brothers below ground. When the Montgomery County mines closed after World War II he moved to West Virginia and dug coal there.
"That's the best work I ever did in my life, I reckon. The hardest I ever did," says George "Snake" Paige, another ex-miner from Wake Forest. "I'd rather have it than any work I ever did."
Mining brought prosperity to Esther Jones' family. For a time her husband, Howard, her uncle, Riley Fears, and her brother, Glenwood Eaves, were owner-operators of their own small coal mine, sometimes employing white men as workers.
Working together also fostered an atmosphere of mutual respect between whites and blacks in northwest Montgomery County. As Oscar Sherman says, "When you got that coal dust on you, you couldn't tell who was black or white."
Religion also created ties that gave both races common ground. A tradition of worshipping together that began years ago with tent revivals and brush arbor services held under a canopy of vines continues today during services at Wake Forest's Little Holiness Church.
Mining also exacted a toll. Both Sherman and Paige suffer from lung disease brought on by years of inhaling coal dust. "I ain't got enough breath to blow a penny balloon," Paige says.
And it killed Heartsease Eaves' husband, Isaac, who was crushed by a rock fall deep within the Big Vein mine in 1953. He is buried in the small Wake Forest Community cemetery on McCoy Road, about 60 feet behind the Montgomery County Coal Miners Memorial Monument. His name is listed on the monument, the only black man among the 44 miners who died in local coal mining accidents in this century.
Eaves' death left his wife to raise their children alone. "It was rough raising them, trying to be both mother and father," she recalls today. "I had to do without a lot."
The only employment available to black women then was domestic work, often in the houses of Virginia Tech professors or Radford arsenal executives. That's what she did until the arsenal began hiring blacks for jobs above janitorial work in the mid-1960s.
Eaves worked there on a production line for 25 years and retired in 1989 with a pension. Her son, Butch, calls her efforts "remarkable," and adds, "She was always there for us."
Esther Jones also had to go to work as a custodian at Virginia Tech after her husband was disabled. Nicknamed "Queen" as a child, she rose to be the housekeeper for two Virginia Tech presidents.
During the presidencies of T. Marshall Hahn and William Lavery, she worked in the presidents' homes, meeting governors and all sort of bigwigs. "It was very exciting work," she says with a grin.
Both Jones and Eaves live in houses on old family land. Generations in Wake Forest built close to one another. Often you'll find a contemporary house next to an old, unoccupied homeplace that's blanketed by vines.
It's that way because Wake Forest hasn't been able to expand beyond its traditional boundaries. The community stands exclusively on the southeast side of Wake Forest Road. The opposite side, part of the original Kentland estate that's since changed hands, is wooded and vacant.
Sherman says Wake Forest residents have been unable to buy the land. He and others worry about what will happen to their community if the land across the road is subdivided.
After the coal mines closed, Wake Forest began to lose its population. At one time the community had stores, two churches, a school and all sorts of tradesmen. Butch and Jessie Eaves recall Wake Forest as a child's paradise, full of woods, fields, playmates and elders to administer love or whippings as circumstances dictated.
But the loss of steady work forced men and their families to become part of the migration followed by so many Southern blacks, from their rural homeland to northern industrial cities. Some who left Wake Forest still reside in places such as Washington, D.C., and Detroit.
Oscar Sherman's brother, Homer, walked out of a local coal mine in the early 1940s and vowed to never return. He spent the next 32 years on construction jobs in northern cities. In 1975 he retired and came home.
Elder William Beamer, minister of the Wake Forest Pentecostal Holiness Church, understands why. Hired to lead the church 25 years ago, Beamer lives in Mount Airy, N.C., and conducts a round-trip, three-hour commute to preach on Sundays.
He's declined offers to lead other congregations much closer to his home. "It's just an attachment," Beamer explains. "A togetherness that you see in few communities."
Butch and Jessie Eaves graduated in the last two classes at the Christiansburg Institute, the public segregated academy that closed in 1966 after a century of teaching blacks from the New River Valley.
Butch recalls having to walk 16 miles home after football practice with Blacksburg Police Chief Bill Brown, then a fellow student at the institute, because there was no late school bus to Wake Forest. Jessie was among the first black students to enter Radford College.
They lived in Washington for 12 years; Butch's brother, Buck, lived there 18 years. But they all came back.
Now Butch and Jessie live a comfortable middle-class life in their brick ranch house on Jackson Street in Blacksburg. He works at Alliant Tech Systems; she works in Virginia Tech's computer science department.
They're trying to pass along the old, hard-earned values to their two daughters. But Jessie says that's hard to do, contemporary attitudes being what they are.
Other patriarchs and matriarchs also wonder what's to become of their children's children, so far removed from Wake Forest.
"I have heard it said that some are going to come back," says Elder Beamer. "I'm hoping that becomes a reality."
LENGTH: Long : 192 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Alan Kim. 1. Esther "Queen" Jones sits in front of herby CNBhouse at Wake Forest holding her family's century-old Bible. Her
residence is built just down the hill from husband's grandparents'
house. 2. Retired coal miner Oscar Sherman (left) battles black lung
disease but still feeds his cattle on pasture land he's acquired
near his Wake Forest home. 3. Wake Forest resident George "Snake"
Paige (below) poses with his great-granddaughter Tokesha Paige at
the old ballpark where men from Wake Forest played baseball.
Tokesha, a student at Prices Fork Elementary School, is one of the
few children still live in the community. 4. Blacksburg residents
Jessie and Thomas "Butch" Eaves say growing up in Wake Forest
instilled personal values they've tried to pass along to their own
children. color. 5. Elder William Beamer (left), minister of Wake
Forest Pentecostal Holiness Church, drives round-trip from Mt. Airy,
N.C. for Sunday services. 6. Heartsease Eaves (right) raised her
four children alone after her husband died in a 1953 coal-mining
accident. 7. Coal miners (from left) Snow Vaught, Edgar Caldwell,
Ricky Fears and Henry Price meet with a Virginia Tech professor near
McCormick after a day's work in the mines. Whites and black Wake
Forest residents often worked together in the mines near McCoy.
Photo courtesy Kenneth McCoy. Graphic: Map by RT..