Incidentally to our recent observance of the centennial of the building of the Beverly and Fairmont Turnpike Road, there appeared in The Phillipi Republican a picture of the Jacob Woodford house, at the headwaters of Taylor's Drain, five miles north of Philippi, which house was built shortly prior to Luther Haymond's survey for the proposed road in 1848.

From a story my father told me we are made to know that the large outside stone chimney of this house was built during the Henry Clay and James K. Polk campaign for the Presidency, which was in 1844. Likely the house itself had been erected tow or three years before; for it is said by some of the family that Capt. Benjamin H. Woodford, the youngest son of Jacob, was born in this house and not at the former place of family residence on the hill above. By the caucus of 1850, we see that he was born in 1843.

Now let us not forget the story of the Clay and Polk campaign as it pertains to the big stone chimney still standing with this more than a hundred years old house. Two local stone-masons were engaged in building the chimney. One evening at quitting time, one of them, who politically was a Whig, daubed the lower part of the partially built chimney with quite a showing of the CLAY mortar they had been using saying to his fellow workman, "That shows who I am for." The next morning the other chimney builder, a Democrat, came to his work carrying stalks of the poke-weed, with the ripened berries on them, which he tied to the top of the scaffold, saying, "and that shows who I am for." Long I remembered the names of these two rival politicians of that early period, but they are now lost to memory.

In passing this house, then newly constructed, the survey made by Luther Haymond in 1848 went closely in the rear of it, as Route 250 does now. But Jacob Woodford, with his usual persistency for justice and right, rode horse back all the way to the capital at Richmond to see the Board of Public Works, and was granted a change in the survey so that the new road would pass by his front door and not by his kitchen. This change caused the direct turn on the road at the corner of the front yard, which many will remember, and which remained in the use of the road until the coming in the early 1920's of our present system of paved highways.

But it is not the house in which a man lives that tells of the character and worth of his living. The old Woodford house sheltered throughout long years real people two of the best Christian characters of those early days: Jacob Woodford (1798-1890) and Mary Robinson Woodford (1801-1870). They left worthy descendants in whom their lives go on. Fortunate are we today that we still have with us as friends and neighbors, grandsons George, Okey, and Frank, and granddaughter Blanche, all exemplary of their noble ancestry.

Jacob Woodford was a strong, brave, and unfliching man, but withal a meek and forgiving oone. He had the physical makeup to have won any fist fight. But he followed the Christian way of winning -- by loving his fellowman. Mary's Chapel, which he built in 1872 as a memorial to dear Quaker born "Aunt Polly", goes on with its wide community influence today as a reminder that he looked at life as spiritual and of no great material importance. And out of the inspirations of Sunday schools and preaching attended by a boy at Mary's Chapel has come, in later years, through that lad, the Christian leadership and influence of that thriving church at Elkins, Woodford Memorial Methodist, founded by grandson Lee, whom the Lord had materially prospered as a merchant in that new city.

Several years ago I wrote the following true story, just as my father had told it to me, entitling it "The Chaplain's Prayer." I now take it from the files of many such things I have written during life and now give it to you here:

In the days of the Civil War, down in that borderland now known as West Virginia, my father was Unionist, while his uncle, Jacob Woodford, on the adjoining farm, was "rebel." Two sons of this uncle, my father's cousins, answered the first call of old Virginia for soldiers to meet the oncoming Yankees. But throughout the awful conflict the good uncle never lost his composure and neighborly spirit, nor his hospitality.

Many regiments of Federal troops passed his door. One late evening, the chaplain of the regiment asked for entertainment overnight, which the good uncle readily granted. The chaplain's horse was properly cared for, and "Aunt Polly" gave the preacher a good supper. When bedtime came she brought forth the Bible for family prayer. After the Scripture was read, all knelt by their chairs. But for the Confederate uncle the chaplain's prayers went too far, when he implored God for the success of the armiss of Abraham Lincoln. At that early point in the prayer, the good uncle resumed his seat, folded his arms, and remained in sitting posture. When the prayer was finished, he resumed hospitality and escorted the chaplain to bed with a cheery "good-night." Next morning the chaplain and his horse went their way to overtake the regiment, both well fed. The uncle's protest to the prayer had been "a soft answer", but it had turned away wrath.

Comments regarding this page to: Deborah Johnson.