THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 1, 1996 TAG: 9608300078
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR
DATELINE: ABINGDON, VA. LENGTH: 220 lines
MAIN STREET, with its tree-shaded brick sidewalks, climbs and descends several gentle hills, the sort of hills that are nature's curved-line way of breaking the monotony without challenging a stroller's legs.
On either side are two-story houses, big and small, of mellow red brick with white porches and trim and green shutters.
A 20-block Virginia Historic Landmark District in the heart of town can be easily walked in an hour with an informative brochure and map in hand. There are more than 30 structures which predate 1900, at least six of which were constructed during the 1700s.
Here and there are comfortable wooden benches that seem to say, ``Come sit a spell.''
Abingdon is that kind of town, one of my favorite places in Virginia. It's a town where words like quiet and peaceful and slow-paced might get overworked if they didn't fit the place so well. Charming, genteel and tranquil come to mind as well.
This is Hometown, U.S.A. Or at least Hometown, Virginia.
I could get real comfortable here. I AM real comfortable, sitting in a porch swing at the Main Street Bookstore, gliding slowly back and forth in the shade, trying to imagine what Daniel Boone would be telling me if he walked up and took a seat.
He and fellow explorer Nathaniel Gist first came through here in 1760 - it was wilderness then, of course - and camped just down there through the trees by a spring.
I'd ask Dan'l to tell me the story about how his dogs were attacked that night by a pack of wolves that had skulked out of a cave just back there on the other side of that hill where the courthouse now sits.
The wolves are long gone now. The settlers that soon followed Boone on the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky drove them off. The wolf cave is still there, though, to be seen only through the latticework beneath a dilapidated barn.
All traces are gone, too, of the log fort that Joseph Black built here, not far from Boone's campsite, 15 years later, to protect settlers from Cherokee Indian attacks. In time the Indians were driven off as well.
By late 1776 enough settlers had chosen to put down roots in the rich but rocky virgin soil of the southwest Virginia Highlands that the General Assembly was petitioned to form a county government.
They named it for George Washington. The honor bestowed by the worthies of Williamsburg was influenced either by remarkable optimism or prophetic vision. The erstwhile Virginia militia colonel recently named lieutenant general in command of the ragtag Continental Army, was, in fact, having a very bad time of it at the moment.
He had managed to extract his troops from New York, where a battle - and almost certain defeat at the hands of the British regulars - probably would have ended the American Revolution, and had retreated through New Jersey and across the Delaware into Pennsylvania.
However, by the time the first court of Washington County was held at Black's Fort on the last Tuesday of January 1777, Washington had recrossed the Delaware, had taken Trenton from Britain's Hessian hirelings and Princeton - a turnaround that altered a war and American history.
A year later this place that was first called Wolf Hill and later Black's Fort was incorporated as Abingdon - the first English-speaking town on waters flowing into the Mississippi. The American frontier was beginning to take large strides westward.
I've heard that it was named for Martha Washington's home parish, but that can't be true. Abingdon parish is in Gloucester County, a good distance from anywhere Martha ever lived. I think they just picked a very pleasant name for a very pleasant place.
Rather quickly, Abingdon shook off its wild and rustic beginnings, but it has always clung lovingly to much of the history that followed.
By 1803 William King, an extraordinarily wealthy merchant and salt manufacturer from nearby Saltville, had built Abingdon's first brick residence, which he called ``Grace Hill,'' and people, it is said, came from far and wide just to look at this home that still graces Court Street near the courthouse.
I've been passing through this place for as long as I can remember - about half a century, come to think of it. I've always been intrigued by the place, intrigued by the tales these Federal and Victorian facades and the friendly people behind them have to tell: old tales of Boone and ``Beth'' and the Barter Theatre, and new, emerging stories of a much more ancient past being uncovered by archaeologists over at Saltville.
I had come to this pocket of culture and sophistication nestled in the Allegheny foothills this time to stay and ``sit a spell,'' to visit the town's twin showpieces - the Martha Washington Inn and the Barter Theatre - but also to experience the widely acclaimed Virginia Highlands Festival.
The Martha, as the inn is known by the locals and all visitors who have fallen under her spell, is not only a wonderful and gracious place to stay, with a long and remarkable history that includes the ghosts of ``Beth'' and others.
It began as the very grand and imposing home of Gen. Francis Preston, a member of one of western Virginia's most prominent families, then expanded into a fashionable finishing school for women and was eventually converted into a wonderful small hotel.
It also is one of those places where I'd drive miles to eat - which is why its story appears in today's Flavor Section.
The Barter Theatre, now the State Theater of Virginia and the oldest professional resident theater in the United States, was the Depression-era brainchild of an enterprising young actor-turned-impresario named Bob Porterfield.
Since nobody had any money to support the performing arts, Porterfield invited prospective theatergoers to exchange produce for admission to plays.
The Barter (as it quickly came to be known) Theater opened its doors on June 10, 1933, in an 1831 building on Main Street that had seen many uses, including as a church, a Sons of Temperance hall (and ``opera house''), town hall, firehouse, jail and holding pen for suspected rabid dogs.
Its promotions included the line: ``With vegetables you cannot sell, you can buy a good laugh.'' The price of admission was 40 cents or the equivalent in produce - sort of trading a ham for Hamlet.
At the end of the first season, the Barter company cleared $4.35 in cash, two barrels of jelly and a collective weight gain of over 300 pounds.
The list of the Barter's alumni includes Gregory Peck, Patricia Neal, Ernest Borgnine, Hume Cronyn, Ned Beatty and Larry Linville. In those early days, many accepted a Virginia ham as pay, although playwright George Bernard Shaw returned his ham for spinach because he was a vegetarian.
Early on, the actors were often distracted not only by the occasional squealing of a pig or clucking of a hen, but also noise from the jail below. The rabid dog pen was eventually converted into dressing rooms. The fire siren on the roof - another occasional distraction which forced the actors to ``freeze'' until the wail ceased - was not removed until 1994.
The Barter got its first facelift in 1953 when New York City's oldest legitimate theater, the Empire, closed down. Porterfield was given 48 hours to salvage whatever he wanted from the building before the wrecking ball began to swing. He came back to Abingdon with an estimated $75,000 worth of property including theatrical equipment, seats, lighting fixtures, carpeting, furniture, curtains and paintings.
The stage lighting system used at the Empire included a light board designed and installed by Thomas Edison. It was used at the Barter, and later at its ancillary Barter Stage II, until 1978.
The second renovation, completed in just 84 days and costing $1.7 million, began in 1995 and ended with a re-opening in April of this year. The roof was raised, the balcony expanded, the seats recovered and the whole place painted in a warm, pale rose. Today, is it a grand and comfortable venue to watch a performance.
The Barter's current seating capacity is 506. The season runs from March through December. Ticket prices range from $14 to $20, depending on the performance and the day of the week.
During the Virginia Highlands Festival it was possible to see four plays in two days.
The festival was fun. This year's was the 48th annual event. In recent years it has attracted about 200,000 people to Abingdon during the first two weeks of August. Here are some of the reasons:
Free shuttle-bus service (including a red double-decker right out of London) to event sites and outlying parking areas.
An antique market show and sale (90 dealers from 18 states in 145 booths spread over 45,000 square feet) in which the merchandise is vetted - that is, checked by experts for authenticity, quality and accuracy of dealers' descriptions.
A pierced-tin furniture display - corner cupboards, sideboards and pie safes - showcasing 19th century regional craftsmanship.
An you-can-get-dirty-too archaeological dig on the grounds of the Fields-Penn 1860 museum house.
A juried arts and crafts show with more than 130 exhibitors.
Daily noontime music concerts under a big tent.
I particularly enjoyed the latter two.
The concert was a double bill. The first was the Virginia Barndance Band - really a quartet, but if you've got a fiddle, a clawhammer banjo, a guitar and a bass, you've got all the band you need for old-timey, foot-stompin', a-pickin' and a-grinnin' mountain music. If you had heard them play ``Goin' Down This Road A-feeling Good'' or ``Oh, Them Golden Slippers,'' you'd know what I mean.
The second group, the Joyful Singers from the Abingdon Senior Center, was something else. Sometimes I wasn't sure if all of them were on the same page, but they did all seem to finish at the same time. And they put an awful lot of themselves into ``Precious Memories.''
The arts and crafts exhibitors were as diverse and talented a group as I've seen anywhere.
There was Buzz Strandberg of Waddell, Ariz., an unlikely combination of flute maker and stone carver; Haley Jensen of Wytheville, Va., who mounted leaves and herbs into works of art; rock merchant Dave Johnson of Waynesville, N.C., who had dug up a bunch of huge quartz crystals in Arkansas and was selling them for about one-third of what they would cost anywhere else because he's a nice guy (in my opinion); Clendon Boyd of nearby Floyd, who had hand-carved bowls from wild cherry and cucumber magnolia; and Mary Sue Johner of Troutville, Va., who was selling Mountain Boogers for $10. A Mountain Booger is a puppet, by the way.
And finally there were blue-ribbon winners Douglas J. Haggerty and Kim English of Mars Hill, N.C., who had turned broom making and wood carving into remarkable works of art. They were featured last year in both Southern Living and Better Homes & Garden stories.
In an around Abingdon, you'll also find:
The William King Regional Arts Center, a fine showcase of southwest Virginia art and culture, is an affiliate of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Also, there's the Arts Depot, a converted railroad station, where studio artists work and exhibit their creativity.
The Virginia Creeper Trail is a 34-mile former railroad bed connecting Abingdon with Damascus to the east. It's used today for hiking, biking, horseback riding and cross-country skiing. Bird watchers have identified 35 species in the woods and fields along this smooth, cinder-covered bath. The old steam engine No. 433, the original ``creeper,'' sits in a shed at the Abingdon end of the trail.
South Holsten Lake is a boating and fishing paradise just a 10-minute drive east of the town.
Mount Rogers National Recreation Area surrounds Virginia's highest peak (5,729 feet) and is less than an hour's drive.
White's Mill, just west of town, is a 1797 grist and flour mill and general store. The water-powered mill, a Virginia Historic Landmark, is the only one in western Virginia still hard at work.
At Saltville, less than hour to the northeast, an ongoing archaeology project has unearthed artifacts that attest to the presence of humans in this area 14,000 years ago, nearly 2,000 years earlier that what is presently considered the oldest accepted evidence of humans in North America. Living with these humans were sloths, horses, mastodons, mammoths, musk ox, caribou, moose and black bear.
The NASCAR star Sterling Marlin and the Morgan-McClure Motorsports team have recently set up shop outside Abingdon off Interstate 81. They are building a complex that will include a race and paint shop and a 10,000-square-foot museum.
On the way, check out the little community of Rural Retreat, just off I-81 about an hour northeast of Abingdon. It's said to be the birthplace of Dr Pepper, the soft drink (see separate story, page E4). ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
STEPHEN HARRIMAN
The Famed Barter Theatre, above, and the Virginia Highlands
Festival, below, are good reasons to visit.
Map
The Virginian-Pilot by CNB