Early Life in Cisco, West Virginia
by Steve Parks
Originally published in Mountain Trace
(Parsons, W.Va. : McClain Print. Co., 1980)
Kenneth G. Gilbert, ed.
Reprinted by permission of the editor.
Just twenty-five miles east of Parkersburg on Route 47 lies the small, quiet community of Cisco, West Virginia. From September 17, 1886, until August 1958, Cisco was the birthplace and the home of O. C. Beckner, one of the most respected citizens of the community. Mr. Beckner still remembers Cisco the way it was.
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Old chimney at Cisco. No one ever remembers a house attached to it. |
"I remember the first car I ever rode in. It was a Model T. My uncle James Beckner owned it. After I rode in it the first few times, I thought it was wonderful. Now he wasn't the only one who had a car. Dr. Douglas, over at Petroleum, got one about the same time Uncle Jim did. For awhile they said that Doc got his first. But they figured it up that my uncle got his a couple of days before Doc Douglas did.
"Now we still used the horse and buggy to get around in, even though there was a car around. Then the roads were pretty bad and it was pretty hard for the cars to get around. In the wintertime my uncle generally put the car away for the winter because the snow was deep and the roads were too bad."
LIFE AROUND CISCO
"The chimney there at Cisco has been there for at least seventy-eight years. That's as far back as I can remember. And I don't remember there ever being a house there either. But, you can tell that there was some kind of house. You could tell that it was a two-story building because there was two fireplaces, one above the other. But, if you stop and think about it, it's remarkable the way the stone has held up so long.
"There was a general store located directly across from where the church is now standing. It was a pretty good-size store. They handled everything in the grocery line. A fellow by the name of Frank Cain owned it until it burned down. I remember hauling supplies for him from Petroleum for quite a number of years. A lot of times he would have twelve hundred pounds of goods for me to pick up.
"Along in March the mud would be so deep that it was hard for the horses to get through. Then I would have to take four horses. Now in the summertime I would only take two horses. I can remember that his prices were fairly reasonable. You name it and he had it.
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O. C. Beckner's farm at Cisco, West Virginia. |
"There was a blacksmith shop near the store. Mr. Cain didn't own it. Another man ran it. There was also a four-stall garage next door to the store. Uncle Jim owned it. He would rent them out to the drillers, usually to store things in. It also burned down the same time as the store did.
"We didn't work all the time. We usually worked all week and then until noon on Saturday. Then we would quit and go out and play softball with a team four or five miles away. See'n' that I was the only one with a truck, I would load the truck up with whoever wanted to go. The only ball field around, other than just playing out in the field, was up in Buffalo Run.
"Other than playing softball, the only other thing to do was to go hunting or fishing. Since we were right on the Hughes River, a lot of people fished in their spare time. Back then, the river was loaded with catfish. It was also a good place to go hunting, but I didn't do much of it myself.
"There is a rock down below Freeport. It was always called the 'devil's tea table.' On Sunday mornings quite often I would take the Sunday school class I taught for a picnic. We would all load into the truck and take off. Someone had made a ladder out of some saplings to climb upon the rock with. So, one time when we got down there, there were these two girls who said they would get pretty scared to go up. I said I will see you get up all right. So I let the others go ahead that weren't scared. Then I went up and reached down and got ahold and helped them up. After you got up there, it was about as large as this room (ten by twelve feet). It was as flat as this floor on top of that rock. Those two girls got back down and enjoyed it.
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Devil's tea table. |
"That's one thing I enjoyed looking back over my life. At this schoolhouse above Cisco where I went to school, I was converted (baptized) when I was twelve years old and I joined the Methodist church. Then in later years I filled every office there was to be filled in the church. And when I look back over the past, I was glad I got started when I did. I never danced a step in my life, never felt the effects of liquor in my life, and I never smoked but one cigar in my life and that done me. A lot of things that other people enjoyed I never got interested in. And today I am thankful I didn't. I can't look back over my life and see any rough spots.
"My uncle Jim Beckner was a timberman and a sawmill man, too. We would run about eight or ten rafts down to Parkersburg in the springtime. We would have to wait till the water come up.
"To build a raft you just put the logs side by side. It would be ten to twelve logs wide. For a long while we used an auger and bored holes in the logs and then cut the saplings and lay across the rafts and bore holes down through it. Then you would drive a peg in there tight enough that it wouldn't pull back out. That would hold the logs together. The average raft was about twelve feet wide.
"Then maybe five or six years after we got started, someone invented what we called 'chain dogs.' It was a piece of flat iron about five or six inches long and connected with a short chain. The chain length would depend on the diameter of the pole going across the logs to hold them together. They just laid across the poles and then they would drive the wedged pieces down in the logs with a hammer. The wedges come to a point at the end. That way when you pulled them out, then to a certain extent that would let the wood go back together. This was a big advantage to the lumber people. It was a lot better than boring that hole in the logs the old way and using the wooden pegs because ordinarily that was about an inch in diameter and eight or ten inches down in the log."
RUNNING THE RAFTS
"In the spring when the water came up is when we would run the rafts to Parkersburg. There were two or three mills there that bought logs. Some of the logs would be sixty or seventy feet long. When the river was up, that made the river that much wider. It took three men to operate the raft; two men up front and one in the back. Oars were fastened to the middle log on both ends of the raft. The man on the back of the raft was called the pilot.
"Now once in awhile you would have a little higher raise and they would have a little more current. The faster the current the faster the logs would go. The pilot's job was to tell the men in the front which way to throw the raft, either right or left. They had to make sure it didn't run into the banks. One man on the front would handle the oar by himself, and the other man would come along behind him and put his hands on the oar and help him to push the oar to keep the raft in the middle of the stream.
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Holes and pegs were about one inch in diameter. Small trees about six inches thick at the big end were used. The first rafts were held together with wooden pegs. | 
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It took two men on the front and one on the back. | |
 Chain Dog
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Later rafts used chain dogs across the saplings to hold the logs together. |
Three wooden pegs were fastened to a board on a small tree to make an oar. The pegs were about one inch apart. |
| Diagrams for rafting in early life at Cisco. |
"One experience I remember on the raft is one day we had a rain shower and the water came up that night. We were going down the Hughes River near the Darnell Mill at Freeport. We were about a half a mile away and we could hear that water roaring and I said to this fellow, 'That don't sound a bit good to me.' I had a little piece of rope with me that I always carried on the trips in case we needed it. I tied this rope to the pole to hold to. At this point the river had a heavy backwash and it would come back on you. What made it worse was there was some long logs on the front of the raft. When we went down over the dam at the mill, the raft started to go down. I think, I am sure you could feel the bottom of the raft hit the bottom of the river. I stood there with water up to my belt. Now I don't know, but it was that way for two hundred or three hundred yards. My uncle was the pilot and I looked at him when we were about halfway down and he was standing there and he didn't get his shoe soles wet. I'll never forget that. Directly she (raft) began to raise and it finally came up.
"Some mornings you couldn't hardly get out of sight if the wind was blowing hard on you. That would slow you down, especially in between the two dams down the river there.
"As I remember it took about three days to float a raft to Parkersburg from Cisco. Now once in awhile you would have a little higher raise, and they would have a little more current. Sometimes the water would just be level with the dams. That would slow speed down a bit."
SAWING LOGS
"To cut the trees they used crosscut saws. They would look around the tree and see which would be the best way to fall. Sometimes if it was a pretty good-size tree, they'd saw it in five or six inches and then take an ax and cut that section out. I've done that when the tree has been so big that we would have to do it on both sides of the tree. You would try to fell the tree on the level ground so it wouldn't hurt the tree. Now, sometimes you wouldn't be paying any attention and when the tree would fall, it would hit a high place and break the tree.
"Some of the logs were sixty or seventy feet long. There were a lot of small ones too. That is why we had to have the sawmills so when we got the trees cut down and had the ones we wanted to take to Parkersburg, then we would go back and cut up the smaller ones for crossties and lumber. There wasn't much left after that."
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Oxen that were worked on the Beckner farm. |
OXEN AT WORK
"We used oxen all the time to log with. We usually only used horses if we were clearing some acreage or something. I would say oxen were easier to break than horses. There's a little bit more danger in breaking a horse than there is an ox. Usually you hooked an ox up with one that was already broke and worked it with them to break the other one.
"On the big trees we sometimes used twelve yoke of oxens. Normally on the smaller logs, we would separate them and the driver would take two or three yoke and the other fellow would take some for the other log. Then if they had a big log, they would put them back together. I imagine most of the logs were about three feet at the base.
"Ordinarily two men, the driver and the other fellow they called a 'roustabout,' were all that was needed to drive the oxen. The thing you mainly had to watch out for was in the weeds in the springtime. The weeds began to grow up, and the oxen would be reaching out to eat and maybe catch their neck on a tree as they passed.
"Usually the men had to stay close to the oxen. As a rule the driver generally stayed up front. I remember one day this fellow said he had to leave, and my uncle said to me, 'Do you think you can handle the oxen?' 'Well, I'll do my best.' The driver said to me, 'Now there is one thing you'll have to watch. There is a lot of green weeds along and if an oxen sticks his neck out to get a weed, well, he might get his head caught.' I was driving them and I heard a big bellow. I went up in front of them and hollered to get them stopped. I had to get them stopped to get the pressure off his neck or you could break their neck."