A Patch of Road and a Place to Call Home

“The road down through the mountain is going to be a good one.”

Now, pull up a chair and let me show you something special I found tucked away in the archives. It is a letter dated August 27, 1946, written by a fellow named Maxwell Hylton to Mr. L. S. Gwinn. You can almost feel the late summer heat of West Virginia just by looking at this page. It is a lovely piece of aged, beige paper, still in good shape after all these years. You can see where Mr. Hylton sat at his typewriter, the black ink still sharp, though he did pause to make a little handwritten correction with his pen, crossing out a word to make sure he got his description of the mountain road just right.

The letter tells a story of a time when our corners of the world were growing fast right after the Great War. Mr. Hylton was busy finalizing the purchase of Mr. Gwinn’s farm, though he admits with a bit of a wink that he was temporarily short of cash after buying up two houses and twenty-five lots over in Beckley. He assures Mr. Gwinn that everything is on the up-and-up, promising to drive him over to Fayetteville to get a certified check from the folks at Mahan and White. It is a wonderful glimpse into how business was done back then—with personal visits and a lot of trust.

But it wasn’t just about land; it was about connecting people. Hylton spends a good bit of the letter talking about a new road being cut through the mountain toward Terry. It sounds like quite the undertaking, costing over a thousand dollars already, with the coal company chipping in and the hope that the government might even pave it with red dog. They were even using dynamite to blast through heavy rock at four dollars an hour! It really makes you think about how much sweat and effort went into building the paths we drive on today without a second thought.

When we look at a letter like this, we are reminded that history isn’t just about big names in textbooks; it is about neighbors making deals, building roads, and planning for the future. It is about the excitement of a new project and the reliability of a promise kept. Even today, we are still traveling the roads those folks built and living on the land they cared for so deeply.

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