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When the state of Virginia moved the mountain people from their homes to clear the way for Shenandoah National Park, “it hurt some of them pretty bad... It hurt their souls, their heart,” Elmer Atkins believes. “But I'm not sorry. I mean that. I came out here. I don’t regret it. I had a choice not to come. I didn’t have to come. I had a choice I could have made about it, but now I’m proud I came. Yea. I’m proud.”
Atkins, who now numbers a gas station, an antique shop and cider pressing mill among his business interests in Sperryville, grew up in Beach Spring Hollow, one of a dozen children in a log bodies house with five fireplaces.
He remembers playing marbles and tag, pitching horseshoes and swinging on grape vines in the clearings and hollows of the mountains. He played checkers in the evenings and had the daytime job of getting in the wood. “Daddy would cut it up and leave it on a wood pile and he’d tell you, ‘Now, I want that box full of wood when I come back home.’”
His mother made butter and cheese that was kept in the spring house. “You’d go out there on the hottest kind of day...and let the spring run over your milk box a little bit to cool it.”
Elmer helped with the gardening as well as the wood. “One of the worst jobs I had was keeping the bugs off the potatoes. I’d take an old pan, something like an old wash pan, a big round tub and I’d take a little brush and knock the bugs in.”
For winter, beans were threaded on cotton, "strings of them that would go clear across this room.” Turnips, potatoes and cabbage were buried with a little bit of grass on top to keep the dirt from running down.
Money from chickens and eggs and chestnuts was used by the Atkins family to buy kerosene, sugar, salt, coffee, clothes and shoes—things they couldn’t make or grow on their mountain farm. “One pair of shoes a year is all we had. We got them in the fall of the year and we were told. ‘Now you can kick them out as quick as you want but you’re going to kick with your toes from then on out.’ ’’
Elmer’s father hired out by the year; others worked by the day. “A man got 50 cents for a day’s work and a bushel of com cost 50 cents. The old men would say as long as they’d
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