
“Oh well, coal is West Virginia.” Oh really, is it? -Judy Bonds
“My grandmother and all her brothers, they lived in Indian Creek. . . . She’d take me up in those mountains and brush the leaves off the cliffs and show me where they made their bread – this hole would be this big, and come down like this [indicates a conical shape]. They’d put their corn in there and take a hickory maul and pound it up to make corn bread. . . . Then they’d build a fire on these big flat rocks till they got real hot and then they’d brush it off and pour their stuff on there and bake it. . . . Then she’d show me trees where they’d hang their beef up to dry. They had grown up into trees, but she said when they used them they were just young branches, had limbs out where they could hang them in the crook and smoke them.”
-- Mae Bongalis, Naoma, Interview with Mary Hufford December 15, 1994
“The first white man that ever come in on this creek, he found a peach tree growing down the creek about a mile below here, and he called it Peach Tree Creek.”-- Dennis Dickens, Peach Tree Creek, Interview with Mary Hufford, December 13, 1994
…Mountainous, but farther down the plainer [sic], in these mountains we found plenty of coals, for which we named it Coal River, where this river and the Woods (New) River meets the North Mountains end, and the country appears very plain and is well watered.8

“Over at Bowmans, there’s an old piece of the old road on the river, that you can see the old wagon marks in the rocks where the horses pulled the wagons over the rocks and when the wagons went down, they’d hold the brake and let it slide there to keep from running over the horses--old wagon cuts in the soft sand rock.”-- Rocky Turner,interview with Mary Hufford, Naoma, 1996
























