Appalachian History

In 1870 Alice Key Howard [the author’s aunt], a daughter of Mrs. Charles Howard, bought from a man named Stabler a four room hunting lodge with separate kitchens, standing in a dense grove of oaks, many of whose survivors still surround the present house. Even in my memory there was an oak grove with a [...]

“Rattlesnakes are brought into existence in the following manner: “The female snake deposits twenty or thirty eggs in the ground, where the warm earth gives them life, and at the proper time the old one comes and receives them into her body, where they remain until she enters her den in October. “In April and [...]

“Sugar making time was looked forward to with pleasant anticipation by the young people,” writes George Benson Kuykendall in a family geneaology published in 1919. His uncle, Isaac Kuykendall, purchased a 670 acre farm near Huttons, Garrett County, MD in 1881. “It came along in the early spring when there were clear days and frosty [...]

In Grantsville district quite a number of water power mills were erected between the years 1835 ~ 1855, but there are now only two or three within the same limits. Steam power mills have taken their places. In 1837, a man by the name of Williams, from Pennsylvania, built the first steam saw mill on the [...]

An article written about 1926 by Peter L. Livengood of Salisbury, PA, appearing in the ‘Meyersdale Republican’ that year, gives the following account of Grantsville, Maryland’s oldest inn: Little Crossings (still standing and now known as Penn Alps Restaurant & Craft Shop.) On one occasion while Mr. and Mrs. George Matthews kept tavern at Little [...]