A Town With Broad Shoulders

The only photo I could find of Orlando horse teams is this very poor one.

I imagine these are preparing to go out into the gas and oil fields.

In its heyday Orlando was a worker's town, probably more than a traveler's town, with gas and oil well drilling, coal mining, and still some lumber harvesting. The Coke and Coal Railroad, owned by Senator Davis, developed a hickory mill in Orlando in 1905 as soon as the rails were there to move out the goods. But that was just the beginning. "Senator Davis. . . knew of the untapped coal, gas and oil resources within those hills. His company . . . owned carefully selected coal lands and rights along the route of the rail in four counties drained by the Monongehela."1

There would also have been the internal traffic of moving products to and from the trains, from warehouse to business, mail delivery and soforth. And all that moving involved horse power. Orlando had two feed stores, two blacksmith shops and a veteranarian.

In 1977, Orlando resident Martin Sweeney remembered the horses through Orlando. “The drillers were there and 75 to 100 horse teams pulled out in the morning when they were developing the oil and gas wells in Lewis, Braxton and Gilmer. They got eight dollars a day for their work.”2

1. The Weston Democrat Wed, Nov 2, 1977. Orlando: Cinderella City writen by Mary Mazza.

2. ibid.

The Parlor

Our grandparents had a formal parlor in their Orlando home. It was the former Dolan Hotel, so they certainly had enough room.

The parlor had huge, overstuffed, oversized furniture in a deeply piled, but simple, burgundy velvet. It was dark and quiet in there (the windows were never opened and the shades were always pulled) and on hot summer days it was always the coolest room in the house. It was a great place to sneak away to. My sister's old school books were in the closet, so I'd sit and read.

Some of the cousins found it spooky. I found it mysterious spooky and loved it. Others sensed a presence that they didn't like.

As far as I know the parlor was only used officially for two things. One was Christmas Eve. The tree was magically already decorated when the door was opened on Chrismas Eve for us kids to rush in. Above is my cousin Joe Burgett and me with the world's scariest Santa. I never found out who was behind the other-worldly mask. It scared the Dickens (holiday reference intended) out of me the first time I saw it. Apparently I got over the initial shock.

It was also used for Aunt Virginia's funeral in the 1950s. Her open casket was in the parlor, just as we do in a funeral home today and people came to pay their respects. The day she was buried the lid was closed with a prayer and her body was taken to the Methodist Church where it was lovingly carried to the front. The lid was opened again and we said our last goodbye. After the service the coffin was driven up the steep hill to Orlando Cemetery, where she rests with her parents and their parents, and their parents.

Fifteen years later Grandpa was buried from a funeral home in Weston and buried in Orland Cemetery.

The Pioneers' Road Through the Mountains

Darrell Groves is a member of the Hackers Creek Pioneer Descendants and has collected the largest and most accurate body of information on our families. He offers the following info on the first settlers' road to Orlando. I'll try to put it on a map to accompany this entry.

If you have a good maping program you can almost see the way our families migrated . . .

from Winchester to Romney/Petersburg/Moorfield through Red House, MD using the old National Trail, US Rt 50.

The would then follow US 50 west to the Cheat River near Rowlesburg, WV. (Actually, the name was McComber.)

They then could continue to Grafton, WV or turned up what is now ST Rt 72 to Etam, WV. This used to be named the Marquess/Maysville Road or Turnpike.

My guess it that those headed for the Little Kanawah took Rt 72 to Etam, WV where they went down a valley that took them through Marquess, WV to the Taylor/Preston/Barbor County lines and then to Phillipi, WV where US 250 and US 119 meet.

They probably followed the US 119/WV Rt 20 trail to Buckhannon, Upshur County. They could have followed the US 250 trail to Elkins, Randolph County. The US 250 trail through would have been more difficult, and it joined the Beverley/Morgantown Turnpike, part of which is US 219.

At Mill Creek they would have crossed the mountain and headed west on what is knownd as Stone Coal Road WV 34 or stayed on what is WV 46 and traveled to Helvitia and on to the French Creek/Rock Cave/Walkersville area.

If they went to Phillipi and followed what is now WV Rt 20 they could have traveled a less rugged trail and gone through Buckhannon to French Creek.

I know that my family took the Maysville/Marquess route because my ggguncle, owned a grist mille there and the town was name after him. His name was Isaac Taylor Marquess.

Many thanks, Darryll.

Revolutionary War Veteran Peter Shields

Left: British Redcoats of the Battlefield

Peter Shields was Phoebe (Conrad) Skinner's grandfather: her mother's father. See the entry "Orlando's Grandmother, Phoebe Conrad" and for more on Peter Shields' adventures see http://duskcamp.itgo.com/Shields.htm

We know Peter Shields was christened on Jan 26, 1756 in Lanchester, Durham, England. His parents had lived in Ireland, maybe they were Irish.

Peter came to America as a British soldier during the American Revolution and served under General Burgoyne. When Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga Peter and his fellow English and Hessian soldiers were marched to Cambridge, Massachusits and then to a POW camp in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Many of the Hessians deserted as they passed through the German communities in Pennsylvania. The English prisoners of war also wondered what they were fighting for, and chose to join the colonies and fight for freedom. Peter was one of those. He deserted the British and served in the Continental Army and witnessed the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown, Va. in 1781.

In return for his military service, Peter was granted 70 acres of land in Hardy County Va. April 2, 1783. He married Elizabeth Singleton in Hardy County about 1783 on North Mill Creek
and they lived there until about 1807 when they moved to Salt Lick in what is now Braxton County.

Left and right: the 1794 documentation of the survey for 70 acres of land in Hardy county that Peter Shields purchased. Double click on the images to enlarge them. Thanks to Dolores Derrico for these images.

All the Conrads and Skinners of Orlando, among many others, descend through Peter Shields.

Material in this entry has been taken fron the information provided by Howard Bee and Darryll Groves and Paul Frazier in their family trees published at Rootsweb.com and Ancestry.com.

Grandma Phoebe Conrad

Phoebe (Conrad) Skinner is, as female ancestors tend to be, hard to know. Here are a few things we can pull from the lives of the men around her.

From her father's, Daniel Conrad's will1 we can see that Phoebe's dad was a character. The will also indicates that she was raised with slaves in the household. Census records indicate that she became Alexander's second wife when she was about 15 and he was about 22. Fifteen was very young in the 1800s, just as it is today. Unlike most of her neighbors, Phoebe could read and write. Her husband, Alexander, could not.

She and Alexander both grew up in pioneer homes and they hued their life together from the wilderness. They began in the wilderness, but their neighborhood became a settled farming community during their lifetime and they were, in the way of that place and time, rather wealthy. Phoebe bore fourteen children, which is a goodly number even by the 1800s standards. Some of her sons and sons-in-laws served in the Confederate Army. Her husband and others fought the Yankees as partisans and the struggle they endured continued long after the war ended.

She brings some of our most interesting ancestor stories in her heritage. Anyone from Orlando with a Skinner or Conrad in their lineage, which is just about all of us, inherits these stories. Phoebe (Conrad) Skinner's father's father, Swiss immigrant Jacob Conrad, Jr. fought in the Revolutionary War. Through her father's mother, Hannah Bogardus, she relates us to Humphrey Bogart!

Her mother's grandfather's story is one of the best Revolutionary War stories we have. Her great-grandfather Peter Shields came to the colonies to fight for the King with Burgoine's army and switched to the Colonial Army. See the entry for Mar '06 Revolutionary War Veteran Peter Shields


1. A transcription of Daniel Conrad's will can be found in Darrell Grove'sRootsWeb family tree at http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=dwgroves&id=I01077

Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree

Many events have led Orlando's fortunes: the end of the Indian wars, the Civil War, the coming of the railroad, the departing of the railroad. I'd say the next big event wasn't the Great Depression of the 1930s but World War II.

I'm not including the Depression because Orlando had already hit its own depression with the leaving of the railroads but more importantly because I suspect this isolated community was more capable of self-sufficiency than most. It wasn't so far from a frontier community that it couldn't revert back to that hard but sustainable life. I could be wrong. I'd love to hear what others think. However, World War II following the loss of the railroad drained the life right out of this 150 year old community. Certainly there was a war to be fought and won. Lots of Orlando boys marched off to keep the world free. Our first daughter marched off in this war. Juanita Stutler, daughter of Oras and Edith (Skinner) Stutler. 'Neet fibbed about her age and did nuring work until the Army discovered how young she was. The photo above is of her with her future husband, Lee Burgett.

The war took its toll on the town in another way. There were good paying jobs to be had in the manufacturing cities. Another of Oras and Edith Stutler's daughters, Mary (pictured to the left with her Uncle Jack), chose Detroit because Oras' brother, Jack, was there. She found work she loved as a dental assistant downtown and she found her husband, too.

In the years after the war all five of Oras and Edith's kids would move to Detroit. Note the echo of the other March 21 entry, just before this one: "Almost all of the William J. Riffle family moved to Akron, Ohio during World War II to work for Goodyear Aircraft, building the Corsair fighter planes."

Geography Primer for Flatlanders

Orlando, along with the western ¾ of West Virginia, sits on the Appalachian Plateau which is about 1,200 ft above sea level. In comparison, the Appalachian Mountains, which run along the eastern edge of the state between the Appalachian Plateau and the Atlantic Ocean, average about 3,000 feet.

Over many millennia water eroded this flat Appalachian Plateau, cutting valleys averaging, maybe, 300-500 feet. That may not be very high for a mountain, but the craggy erosion through rock and mineral made for a very rough, inhospitable terrain. According to my reading, peaks on the plateau are considered mountains. However, I’ve never heard them called anything but hills so I will call them hills. Another feature of this plateau-turned hill region is that the tops of the hills tend to be remarkably level, in places forming ridges that are easier to travel than some of the lowlands.

Back to the millennia far before history, the water cutting into the plateau trickled into freshets and little streams which met up to form creeks which combined to form rivers, all of which fed the Ohio River. The area drained by a river is considered that river’s watershed, or basin. Follow a river back through the streams to the place in the hills where the water begins to flow and you've come to the headwaters of the river.

So, these many millennia later we have maybe a half dozen rivers with watersheds draining 3/4 of West Virginia into the Ohio and the ridges that separate these watersheds are made up of hills far more level than you’d expect mountain peaks to be. In particular is the Bison Ridge that separates the Little Kanawaha River basin from the Elk River basin.

Orlando is situated near the edge of the Little Kanawaha (kan' aw) River’s watershed, at the confluence of two relatively small and certainly unnavigable creeks: Oil Creek and its Clover Fork. About four miles downstream their waters meet the Little Kanawha River at Burnsville. The Little Kanawha continues on a rather northwesterly route, through the towns of Gilmer, Glenville, Creston, Palastine, Slate and Davisville, picking up more strength from other runs and creeks as it goes, and empties into the Ohio at Parkersburg. The Little Kanawha becomes consistently navigable at Glenville.

Again back to times before history, before humans, in the hills there were fresh and saltwater springs and other permanent features attractive to animals. Animals, the buffalo in particular, traveled from one feature to another, finding the easiest route between them and beating the earth into easily traveled roads. When humans came along, they used all these features, land and water, to travel. Sometimes it was easiest to walk along some of the high ridges, sometimes along the buffalo roads or down along shallow streams. When water was deep enough, canoes would lighten and speed their journeys.

This is what the first European explorers, like Thomas Hughes pictured here, found when they arrived on the scene on the mid and late 1700s. Each mode of European travel has built on these early roads. Wagon roads followed the Indian paths, Railroads made particular use of the stream beds and autos used both the wagon roads and railroad beds. Locks and canals made travel by boat easier. Shadows of these origins can be seen even in today’s expressways.

It is useful to note that state and county lines sometimes use the waterways and ridges as boundaries, but the two systems, natural and political, follow very different logic.

Two things are certain. First, each new mode of transportation echoes these origins as well as pressures from political and commercial interests and second, each creates a new reality for the folks along the way. Orlando, West Virginia is an excellent case in point.

The sketch sbove is one of Central West Virginia's self-styled European explorers, Thomas Hughes, who walked the riverbeds, ridges and buffalo paths throughout this area. The sketch was drawn under the guidance of an acquaintance of Hughes’.

bibliography
Shaffer, Norma Knotts. several web articles about the Little Kanawaha and the town of Creston. See http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~bradytrilogy/memories/images/bibliography/little-kanawha-river.htm

Sutton, John. History of Braxton County and Central West Virginia. McClain Orinting, 1919.

Prince Albert in the Can

Grandpa rolled his own. He bought cigarette papers and Prince Albert tobacco. Rolling by hand, without a cigarette roller, produced something that looked pretty shabby, but with his decades of experience it looked a little better than the marijuana cigarettes our generation rolled. I don’t recall what brand of papers grandpa used, but as I recall, the Zig Zag man was around long before the flower generation discovered him, but he wasn’t alone. Pictured here are a couple other paper brands: Bugler and Job.

Now, about Prince Albert and his can. It came onto the scene in the second half of the 1800s and was an integral part of life in places like Orlando well into the 1960s. Once empty the can took on a life of its own. There'd be lots of them around the house, or rusting along the roadside. The can had rounded sides, was sturdy, waterproof and just the right size to slip into a man's pocket. It was perfect for keeping buttons or small tools, or a few worms in soil. In a pinch it could hold a couple pollywogs in creek water.

Popular as Prince Albert was, in Orlando there was no hope of a crank call to ask if the grocer had Prince Albert in the can and then to blurt out "Well, you'd better let him out!" The phones were too serious a business in the 1950s and well into the 1960s. Few families had them and they were all on a single party line. (That's where everyone used one phone line, but each household had a different number of rings. Anyone could pick up the phone and listen, or talk, even if the number of rings signaled that the call was for another household.) Besides, Mr. and Mrs. Brown ran the only store and both would have known the voice of every kid in Orlando.

The Heaters of Oil Creek

One of the earliest families of Orlando is the Heaters. Their immigrant ancestor, John Heater, came to the colonies on an English prison ship. It seems that, like pioneer John Hacker and so many others, the sentence to be transported to the Colonies was a great opportunity for him. He settled first in Pennsylvania. In the early 1790s John and wife Mary were living in what is now Braxton County. For the most part, the Heaters settled along Sand Creek, which runs into the Little Kanawha River. South of Burnsville in Braxton County there is a town and a cemetery called Heaters on the Right Fork of Sand Creek.

The Heaters came to Orlando with the John and Mary’s son. William L. Heater b ~1794 d. 1885 married a Cogar girl: Mary. I don't know the time or order of events, but I have read that a Coger family settled a few miles to the east of the Heaters and we know William and Mary raised a healthy family of seven boys and 5 girls along Oil Creek. Among the spouses William and Mary’s kids chose, there were 2 Poseys, 2 Skinners, 2 Riffles, 2 Blakes and a Conrad.(Also a Wymer, Cox, Ocheltree, Starcher, Sharp and Plyman.) In this second generation, if I have done my research carefully, only one child, Thomas, left the Oil Creek area. The remaining 10 kids of William and Mary produced a 3rd generation of Oil Creek (Confluence) Heaters: more than 30 kids named Heater and maybe 22 whose moms were Heaters. These kids spread out to Glenville, Chapman, even as far as Clarksburg. Many remained along Oil Creek.

In that first generation of Heaters born along Oil Creek, William and Mary’s son Peter Heater and daughter Nancy’s husband George W. Blake, both Confederate soliders, were killed in the Civil War. (Nancy remarried, Calvin Skinner, who had served in the Confederate Army and had deserted in 1863.)

We don’t know what happened to grandmother Mary (Coger) Heater, but John died after she did, of asthma, in the spring of 1885 at the home of his daughter Nancy Skinner.

I hope some of the Heater family can supply photos and stories of the Heaters in Orlando.

The War to End All Wars

WWI came along during Orlando's heydays. Here are photos of two of our Orlando boys who answered the call. Austin W. Skinner 1896-1947, left, was a Corporal in the 27th Infantry. His parents were William Otto and Clara Oneta (Skinner) Skinner. Cousin Crystal Kearns is the source of this beautiful photo of Austin Skinner.

Above on the right is Oras Lenord Stutler 1896-1967, son of Ovie M. and Ennie (Riffle) Stutler. He entered the Army in 1918.

I've been unable to verify these three soldiers: John Sutton1 listed James B. Blake and John Conley as Orlando boys who were wounded in WWI and Lee Blake tells us "the scond son of Thurmissa and Lucy (Skinner) Riffle, Cllie V. Riffle was killed in battle on October the 24. 1918." 2

The 3 boys I was able to trace, were greatgrandsons of Alexander and Phoebe (Conrad) Blake. I have no doubt the other two will also trace back to the children of Catharine (Scott) Skinner Posey.

Folks on the home front did their part, too. In the photo immediately to the right Edith Skinner and a friend dressed as men to sell War Bonds. Edith married Oras. Wish we knew who her friend was. Cousin Joe Burgett showed me the table the table in this photo. It's in the old warehouse in Orlando.

1. Sutton, John Davison. History of Braxton County and Central West Virginia. (McClain Printing Co, Parsons, WV. reprint 1967) pg 457.

2. Blake, Lee. Monograph: Blakes and Riffles Going Back To The Seventh Generation. July, 1953 Weston, WV.

Orlando, the Name Game

Orlando about 1918

The sign into town says "ORLANDO UNINCORPORATED". Growing up we all wondered two things.

a. What does incorporation entail and was Orlando ever incorporated?
b. Why was it called Orlando?

Decades later we have answers to some of our questions.
a. A community must have a population of 500 residents per square mile to seek incorporation. With incorporation comes more responsibility and control for a community.

At its peak Orlando was reaching the population needed for incorporation, but it was never incorporated. The photo above was taken at about Orlando's population peak.1

b. To the second question we have too many answers. How did Orlando get its name? The hamlet naturally developed where the stream named Clover Fork flowed into Oil Creek. It was called, in all obvious simplicity, "Confluence." This 1895 map of Braxton County indicates the town of Confluence right where it should be, in the upper right quater of the map. The name was changed to Orlando about 1803. because there was a Confluence, Pennsylvania and the two were getting confused.

Joy Stalnaker tells us that when the change was being considered, "Skinnerville" was a contender. Somewhere I've seen "Orlando Junction," which would have been a cool name.

Still, who or what was "Orlando" that the town was given this name?

1. Orlando:Cinderella City... . Weston Democrat Wed, Nov 2, 1977.