Truckin' on the Western Branch

Charlie Griffin agreed that the Speers family were great bird hunters. “Bird hunters hunt quail and sometimes dove. Duck hunters hunt duck. Turkey hunters hunt turkey. Bruce Speers would get you straight on that.” Virginia Griffin said Speers used to hunt with her husband. On one of their last trips as the men were getting older, Speers said, “You know those quail seem to be flying faster than before.” When he toppled off a stump where he had been resting, Speers called out “hunter down.” Ben Lynch remembered, “Bruce lived on his mother’s family farm and there was no railing on the interior staircase. He used to jump from landing to landing rather than walk down the stairs.” Nancy Wren’s mother, Dot Glisson, and Ruth Speers (Bruce’s wife) were good friends. “If anything happened in the community, Bruce would make a pot of soup and deliver it,” Wren said. “One time he sent a pot of butter beans to my mother, and they were the best I’d ever had. I went to his house to learn how to make them. Bruce had a very elaborate process in cooking them—took all morning and he was in his 80s but he moved like a house afire. That little man who was a giant of a person.” According to him, the Bruces got kicked out of England because they would not kowtow to the British throne. They had a 2,000-acre land grant near Drum Point creek in the 1600s. [Abraham Bruce built a house there on his Churchpoint Plantation in 1690.] My great-grandfather had two sons, William E. and Edward Miars Bruce. Their home, before my time, was on the point where there was a roadhouse for those waiting for barges to High Street in Portsmouth. The Lilley farm was part of the Bruce estate. My grandfather inherited the house on the King farm. Years ago Merchants & Farmer’s Bank stole Richard Flynn’s property because he couldn’t pay the mortgage. Flynn was a freed man working for the Bruces, and Old Man Bruce helped pay for the Flynns’ house in Croziersville. Bruce Speers was the second of four boys born at Bruce Station to Louise and Bruce Speers.

William Bruce Speers. Image by Sheally

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