(Editor’s note: This is a reproduction of historical book excerpts, and contains descriptions of people that are understood to be outdated and wrong, and would not be used today.)

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The “Memories” that follow are excerpts from the book “‘As I Recall:’ Memories of Growing Up in Vienna, WV,” by Norvell Chancellor (1902-1993) in 1979. His book was donated to the WCHPS by Sharon Fisher in 2020.

“The first date I recall writing on my arithmetic paper at school was 1909. I must have been in the second grade at the Greenmont School located about a mile up the streetcar line from my home. The street car line ran from Parkersburg, West Virginia to Marietta, Ohio, along the Ohio River. My first school was a one-room wooden building in the village of Vienna on a sandy road. My teacher was a very nice young lady by the name of Miss Flo Way who taught first thru third grades. The fourth through the eighth grades were taught at a two-room, two-story school with a bell tower just across the road from my first school. Both schools with ‘outside plumbing.’ I attended fourth and fifth grades at the latter school. I walked to school along with some of my brothers and sisters and friends.

“Our way home from school during the nice weather, Spring or Fall, we often came across an old colored man by the name of Aberham Brown, whom we called ‘Uncle Abe,’ who was usually on his way home from the one grocery store in our general neighborhood. Uncle Abe was a former slave owned by the Stone family whose farm was next to that of my grandfather Chancellor’s farm. He always seemed delighted to see us kids and would often entertain us by imitating a cow or a calf bawling (they were different sounds), a horse whinnying, a sheep or goat bawling, a hog grunt or, perhaps, a rooster crowing — all very authentic sounding. He would imitate the sound of any animal which we kids called for and such laughter you never heard including that of Uncle Abe’s. He lived in a well kept old log cabin on the Spencer Stone farm. I recall that on several Christmas afternoons my brother Bill and I would walk the two or three miles to Uncle Abe’s cabin with a basket or two full of Christmas candy, oranges, nuts, fruit cake, turkey or ham meat, etc. He would greet us with laughter and thanks and would ask us to sit awhile with him in front of his huge fireplace ablaze with a roaring log fire. Sometimes he would tell us stories of by-gone days during his youth such as the time during the Civil War when a battalion of Union soldiers camped on a field of land that is now the Parkersburg Country Club golf course by the Ohio River and one half mile from my home. The farmers in the area were apprehensive about their presence, including my Grandfather Chancellor, since most of them were Southern sympathizers. Incidentally, my Grandfather was a Southern sympathizer during the war but did not own slaves as he was totally against slavery.

“By the time I was in the sixth grade I attended a brand new, four-room, two-story brick school located only a quarter mile from home and, by that time, I had a bicycle which I rode to school. By then, there were seven of our eight kids either in grade or high school. I recall that my mother would fix seven lunches, wrap them in newspaper and place them in a row on the dining room mantle according to age. There were no school lunch programs in either grade or high school at that time. My brothers and sisters in high school rode the five miles to Parkersburg High on the inter-urban street car that ran right in front of our home.”

To be continued …

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Bob Enoch is president of the Wood County Historical and Preservation Society. If you have comments or questions about Look Back items, please contact him at: roberteenoch@gmail.com, or by mail at WCHPS, PO Box 565, Parkersburg, WV 26102.