Truckin' on the Western Branch

When I was 12 years old, I worked for Harold Jones—his wife was a Peake—at the service station near the blacksmith shop. I used to drive a buggy to school with Nellie and Pearl Lilley and my brother Grady. You used to be able to get on a train at Bruce station to get to Portsmouth.

I graduated from Churchland High in 1931 or 32. I remember smoking under the stage in the school.

I tried everything—tried to get into the Naval Academy, went in to the Naval Reserve and the Merchant Marine. I was still in school when I started farming. Grandfather had hurt his back and Daddy was sick. Grady got a job managing a service station in Harrisonburg.

People took advantage of me. In 1935 I bought a tractor and planted 50 barrels of potatoes and they sold good that year, but the tractor had a cracked block and the shop took the tractor.

I met Ruth when I was riding Outlaw, a gray horse, stylish but wicked. I had ridden up Route 17 and was resting in the shade. Ruth and a man from Churchland came riding up and stopped to talk. I was selling insurance and sold a policy to the boyfriend.

Ruth worked at Pig Point and all the Pig Point crowd used to come to Mr. Dickens’s dance hall in Churchland where you could get dinner for four for $3. I ended up at Mr. Dickens with the neighborhood bunch and took the boyfriend home when he got drunk and then took Ruth home. I married her in the early 1940s. She died in 1991.

Fleet Carney Morgan is a cousin of mine.

Mr. Lilley bought the Lilley farm in 1920, but the truck farm was dying. Lilley had a young wife and nothing coming in. Prohibition was here, so he made whiskey. They brought in black families to live in the tenant houses and hid one or two gallons of moonshine in each house. I used to find the jugs when I was trapping muskrat and sold off the whiskey.

Several family farms had different managers. Daddy used to keep the books and he saw that everyone was stealing from the farm. Cholera wiped out the hogs one year and the cows the next.

We had show horses and tried racehorses. We had a peach orchard and made a trotting track around it. The neighbors had a little Brittany dog that chased the horses. Grady went to Delmarva with some colts and got in with the big stables in Pennsylvania that did a lot of breeding and trading. Grady became an area manager for some racehorse people. Grady ended up with a horse, a trotter that wouldn’t trot, and he got him trotting and raced that horse on several tracks. The horse was making money but had the wrong papers. My son John W. “Buddy” Speers and Dave Smith were very close. Johnny Ellis, Dave, Eddie Russell, and I all used to go hunting together. Buddy died in 1986, and Dave got to be a big wheel writing poetry and came to town to do readings. Dave Smith is an educator and poet who twice has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A significant number of his poems hark back to his childhood in Churchland and roaming the fields hunting with the Speerses. Alice Kirchmier Dodson For generations Wildwood has had a reputation for hospitality, caring, and often outrageous fun. Set on the Western Branch at the former Hodges ferry site, the sprawling grounds with vintage homes, outbuildings, and grazing animals has been a landmark in the area—particularly at

Alice Kirchmier Dodson. Image by Sheally

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