10/13/19 Report - The Path and My Dear Friend Larry.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

Old Indian and Wagon Path in West Viriginia

Photo by TreasureGuide

It's a sad day for me.  A dear friend passed way.  He grew up in a house just up the hill and to one side of this path.  Just a couple years ago I took a picture of him walking this path along with his 93 year old aunt.  It was the last time each of them would walk the path that they once joyfully played on as children.

So how did I ever get to know this hidden back woods path?  It started when I met my wife at college about fifty years ago, and I began driving the winding roads from Pennsylvania to West Virginia to pick her up on the weekends.  I'd usually arrived when Hee Haw was on TV.

Well, the years passed.  It only took a minute or so, as it seems.

Eventually I got to know Larry, who was my wife's cousin, along with the rest of my wife's family.  Turns out he was quite an artifact collector.  His father dug old bottles and insulators in the woods, and Larry collected Indian artifacts.

Their house at the top of the path and off just a little to one side was built beside a natural spring, where evidently the Indians spent a lot of time.  Arrowheads littered the ground there, and Larry started collecting them as a child.

Down at the bottom of the hill by the Ohio River, in later years, Larry found a copper point and copper beads that the Carnegie Museum and the Smithsonian both believed were from the Late Hopewell period.  They concluded the point was probably ceremonial and associated with a cremation burial.  The point and beads were also noteworthy because they were found in an area where copper artifacts of that period are very unusual.

Ceremonial Copper Artifacts Found by Larry P.

Here are a few of Larry's other finds.

After I was married, I took my metal detector on a trip to visit my wife's family and started detecting the old path which wound its way up the hill between the homes where the poor Slovenian immigrants settled a few generations earlier.  The first time I detected the path I found a gold 1940s class ring from the same high school my wife's mother and Larry's father attended in their youth.  I found items from their family history, and I also found items from an earlier time, including a horse shoe, crotal bell, musket ball, wagon parts and other older items.

I eventually learned that my ancestors had roots in the same area.  My ancestors included the Wetzels, who were among the earliest white settlers in the area.  John Wetzel was a scout on the western front during the Revolutionary War, but if you want to know more about the Wetzel family, there are books about Lewis Wetzel, whose parents were killed by the Indians when he was a child.  He was wounded and taken by the Indians but escaped and went on a rampage of revenge the rest of his life.  The books clearly describe the adventures of the Wetzels, mostly those of Lewis, and the area around the same path I'm talking about today.

As I think of Larry and that path today, I think of the history it has seen.  The path was used by the Native Americans, followed by pioneers and settlers, and then immigrants from far away places like Slovenia.  It has been used for centuries and is one of too few such places that remains pretty much unchanged, and where besides the birds and blowing leaves you can almost hear the whispers of history.

There was a time when I knew nothing of that path, let alone my ancestors that settled in the area or the history of the immigrants of more recent years, but now, thanks to metal detecting and my dear friend Larry, I've held objects that connect me to those people as well as the more distant past.  I would have never guessed that I would be so connected to that area in so many ways.

The next time I visit that path - and I will - it won't be just any path.  It will be alive, as it is today, with Indians, my long-haired, buck-skinned musket-toting ancestors, as well as the poor immigrants that settled there in the next century because it reminded them of their homeland across the ocean.  But despite the quiet and peace, most of all it will  remind me of the last time I walked down that path with my dear friend Larry.