not to touch them. I was a little afraid.

not to touch them. I was a little afraid. But they laughed and went away. I always thought they were so attractive-and I thought that most of the stories about the gypsies were just rumors.”

Besides the Washington camp at Bagley’s Mill, there was a gypsy camp up at the flat woods (Flatwood), Ed and Ethel Bailey remember. “They’d come to the farmhouses and ask to “borrow” milk or sugar or flour. Of course, it never was returned,” Ethel said. “And they sold furniture made out of mountain poles.”

Ed said that their wagons were covered with heavy canvas. “But they only came in summer, when it was warm, or early fall. I always had heard that they went far south in the wintertime.”

Ed knew of a scheme where the gypsies “blessed” money. “They’d ask for money, say that they would bless it, put it in a bag and tell you not to look in the bag until sundown. By sundown they were gone and guess what was in the bag?”

Ed thought that Ethel’s father, Henry Timbers, had traded horses with a gypsy man, but Ethel doesn’t remember this. “But they did trade horses, up and down the county,” Eld said. “Later, they came in cars and that’s when they sold the lawn furniture. But before that (in the twenties) horses were their main business.”

East across the county from the Flint Hill, Flatwood and Bagley’s Mill camps, gypsies chose a poplar woods near a stream in Amissville (near where Jack Atkins lives now) as a camp, Aubrey Keyser said. Amissville folks did not welcome them warmly, said Lucy Hodgson. And it appears that they had good reason to resent the gypsies from the Amissville camp.

“They’d stop us on the way to school and try to get our lunches,” Hodgson said. “And I well remember a couple of gypsy women trying to get my brother’s lunch pail and he whacked them over the head with it. They were on foot. After that, the school children kind of lost some of their fear of gypsies and started whacking them whenever they tried to grab the children’s