Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia Trip by Ruth Paget
In 1979, my Pennington grandma began to nag my mother that I had been to communist China and fancy French and British Montreal, Canada during my freshman year of high school without visiting her in Pennington Gap, Virginia.
“I know Ruth would like to visit aristocratic England, but tell her Pennington Gap is like Scotland where the royals are educated,” she might have said to my mother.
In any case, my mother drove from Detroit, Michigan down to Pennington Gap, Virginia and then out to Robbins Chapel (another surname from my family tree) where the Pennington cousins were staying for the summer.
Robbins Chapel, Virginia is about one mile away from Kentucky and three miles away from Tennessee. Pennington Gap leads to all points west.
Pennington Gap was different from Kentucky and Tennessee according to my grandmother:
“We’re midway up the Appalachians. We’re ridge runners not hillbillies like those people in Tennessee and Kentucky. Hillbillies got rich making moonshine and running it up to New York during the Prohibition. They still hide their ill-gotten gains.”
“The Penningtons are church. Your Pennington ancestor, Isaac Penington, was the father-in-law of William Penn. Our family started as Quakers, but we’re Baptist now.”
My petite grandma could be daunting, so I did not ask if the Penningtons got rich being overseers in coal mines in Virginia.
After the welcome lecture, my cousins and I were allowed to play games and amuse ourselves.
In the mornings, we would walk down to the general store, which had a pool table in the back room. We played all morning and drank Dr. Pepper soda while being Vegas. We would walk up the hill to our various relatives’ houses for lunch. Then, we would play several rounds of croquet on the hillside for physical exercise. In the late afternoon, we would play rummy with the aunts while waiting for the male relatives to get back from golf. At night, we would play kick-the-can, a version of hide and seek where you kick a can up and hide in a fixed spot when the can hits the ground.
Besides games, my Aunt J. taught me how to can blackberries to make the blackberry gravy (jam) that I loved to eat for breakfast on biscuits. That alone was worth the trip to Pennington Gap. She also took me to the family graveyard to help me do genealogical work. She had also done this and was helping me fill in the gaps on the family tree I had been working on.
Sometimes we would go to Kingsport, Tennessee to visit the stockbroker. I loved watching the ticker tape spit out of the ticker tape machine.
Other times we would go to Kentucky for lunch. Kentucky looked like Pennington Gap, but had more Pentecostal Churches. “The Pentecostals handle rattlesnakes without fear, because they are holy,” Aunt J. told me.
I thought Appalachia was more dangerous than Detroit and was glad to be with my family.
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Photo |
