Frances Stebbins, Correspondent
[This is a memory from the many decades the author has been privileged to write for daily and weekly newspapers circulating in Western Virginia.]
On a day of perfect late-fall weather last month, a friend asked me if I’d like to accompany her to the Botetourt County Seat town of Fincastle. She had some errands she needed to accomplish there and wanted company.
News assignments and later this column had taken me to the town many times over the years, for it is picturesque at any time of year. For 250 years, the scenic town at the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley has been a place to come home to.
The churches have been my specialty, for three of them were established and the worship centers erected well before the Civil War. The United Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopal are all picturesque with their steeples and old brick walls.
There used to be a Baptist house of worship in the town, but it was too small to contain even a fraction of the usual congregation of that group. An aggressive pastor with multiple staff-led his congregation in relocating to more ample space to the south on the Roanoke Road.
In the new building, there is room for several spaces to serve the community directly through a place where, not only food and clothing could be given out, but a free medical clinic for the needy was established too.
My friend and I did not visit any of the churches the day we journeyed northward. She knew several shops to get holiday goodies. We also stopped by the county Registrar’s Office where a former co-worker of my retired friend still works.
And we were able to drop by the office of “The Fincastle Herald” where I enjoyed meeting once again its editor, Matt de Simone, and veteran copy editor Betty Jo Barger.
Last week, the paper reported that the historic town starts getting ready for Christmas before the Thanksgiving turkey is eaten. The holiday lights go up on the narrow, cobbled streets of the village which were never intended 250 years ago to accommodate cars. All the church bells are rung together on New Year’s Eve.
We drove up the hill above the United Methodist Church to visit Godwin Cemetery with its view all the way to the Alleghenies. Both she and I have friends there among others going back to the 1780s. At that time, the Rev. Francis Asbury, a follower of Methodism’s founder, Englishman John Wesley, is reported to have come to Fincastle.
Over the past 35 years, Transfiguration Catholic Church has joined the several others old and newer. It has its own beautiful story.
A lot of us Salemites got sad news in recent weeks with the announcement that our old-fashioned Hammerhead Hardware on South Colorado Street is closing immediately. My visit late last month to say good-bye to the proprietor, Dennis Wampler, revealed that many shelves are bare. A staff member of a nearby business told me the serious illness of Bucky Wampler, the other proprietor brother, hastened the decision to go out of business. The store had been in South Salem since 1976. I loved to go to Hammerhead for several reasons.
- They sold small quantities of such items as specific nails. (If I needed only a half dozen to tack down my deck carpet, a clerk would sell them to me. The big box stores and even our regional ACE Hardware require me to buy far more than I need.
- In the grass seed aisle, I could find a small bag’s worth of simple seed they called “cat grass.” Placed in a pot and watered, it came up almost overnight and provided a treat for my beloved felines.
There were many other household needs easily found and reasonably priced. Bird food and bulbs as well as vegetable seeds and advice on when to plant.
Most of all, there were the cats that lived in the hardware store. For years and years there was a venerable fellow – I think named Homer – who greeted customers if he wasn’t sunning himself in a front window. More recently, black and white sisters, Twitch and Gray, have taken his place. Now, I was told, they will go to Dennis Wampler’s home.
Neither of the cats are gray, by the way. They just came with those names, one of the proprietors once told me. Cats are valuable in stores with so many goodies for troublesome mice to consume.
I have always marveled at clerks who worked in hardware stores because of the huge variety of articles large and small which they learn to identify. When a customer opening the battered door at Hammerhead asked for a pound of fescue grass seed or some variety of bird food, a clerk could always quickly find it.
