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hours. Believing him to be dead, foxes licked the blood brom his face until finally his cousins found him. They carried him on a homemade stretcher to a hospital where he received stitches on his head.
Reager’s aunt( owned cows, and he told how one of them got into a predicament one day. “The cow got up onto a' bank and got wedged behind a locust tree.” Reager watched as his cousins carried on the rescue operaton. They got a load of lumber and built a platform, less steep than the bank, extending from the road to the tree behind which the cow was stuck. Then they cut the tree down and watched as the cow slid down into the road.
Reager remembers how he and his brother used to “gig” eels. “We’d do it with a table fork, then later on we used a board with a nail in it. We’d catch suckers in the spring.” When he and “the boys” weren’t gigging in the river, they were swimming in it, which they would dam up to create a pond.
Prior to opening the Blue Ridge Grocery in 1929, Reager’s father farmed and cut bushes for a living. But because on an injury he was forced to give up heavy labor. Asked why his father opened the store, Reager said “someone talked him into it. It was a way to make a half-way living anyway.”
The structure was built by Calvin Curl is of Flint Hill, who spent time as a convict in a prison camp in Warren County. Reager believed Curtis was jailed for cutting someone but thought it might have been done in self-defense. All the same, he said his dad trusted the man so he worked out a deal with him. The building cost $150 to build.
According to Reager, Curtis died a rather peculiar death. One day in Front Royal at Roy Collins’ butcher shop, Curtis asked the price of beef. “He dropped dead when Roy told him,” said Reager. “He was old anyway.”
Ora Reager took over operation of the store in the mid 1930’s when her husband died. She mangaged it for 25 years, “until she got too old.” Then in 1960 she allowed her two sons to divide the property. Henry’s brother, Charles Thomas Reager, “wanted nothing to do with the store,” so he took the house in back of the store. That left the store for Henry. He built an addition onto the
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