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days, edged, put togetner and soidered...It was the coldest work you could have in the winter time and the hottest work you could have in the summer time," Mr. Dennis
said, shaking his head lit the memory. “1 had a sun stroke up on a roof one day. It ’bout near killed me so I decided I’d have to learn another trade, one that would keep me indoors.”
He moved to Hagerstown, an industrial hub back then, and learned to run a loom at a silk ribbon mill. "That was my trade until I went into the service in World War I.”
But. W. B. Dennis was a band man. After Luray, he played in the Hagerstown Municipal Band, considered to be one of the best in the country at that time. “So when 1 went into the army, instead of giving me a gun, they gave me a horn.”
With the regimental band of the 318th infantry, he boomed his way on the big bass horn from Camp Lee, Virginia, to the battlefields of France.
“1 was 29 when I went into the army. When I got out, I came back to Hagerstown and got married,” Mr. Dennis recalled. He went back to work in the silk mill and back to playing in the Municipal Band.
Mountains The Cure
“But my health had been shot to pieces in the service. I was considered disabled. After I spent four months in a veteran’s hospital in 1929, the doctor said ‘The only chance you’ve got is to get back into the mountains somewhere as far as you can get and then forget the way out.’ ”
In 1930, W. B. Dennis returned to Rappahannock with his family and bought a farm in Castleton. The Derinis children went to a little country school, learning their three “Rs” where Hope Hill Church is now. Mr. Dennis reported the pride that all nine of his youngsters graduated from high school in Sperryville. “That was as far as we could afford to send them but
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