Welcome!
Meet The Ritters
The Moatsville String Ticklers
Ida L. Reed
Hillbilly - English Dictionary
New American Economics Experiment
Maybe everyone has a place like Moatsville. In the real world, in the "now," it is one thing. In the mind and the heart and memories, it's something else. Something about it sticks in odd corners of a person and hums under consciousness like a flowing current.
Even in the 1960's, when I was a kid, I felt Moatsville put a hook into me. Not only was it miles from where I was living . . . it was in a different time that was all its own. The world I usually belonged to moved at one pace; Moatsville seemed immune that bustle.
From a world of noise - from radios and television - I stepped into the silence of Moatsville. Its only soundtrack was nature - the bird calls. The soft shushing sound of the creek flowing by. The wind in the trees and grass.
My normal world was filled with constant traffic passing on the busy street. In Moatsville, the occasional car could be heard far away and tempted me to the porch to see who it was. At home, planes grumbled overhead a few minutes apart; those were rare and silent specks, far overhead, in Moatsville. When in Moatsville, the trains (that passed both in front and behind the house I grew up in) were never seen or heard.
If I tried to tell friends at school about it, they'd get a blank look on their faces. To them, it was like a foreign country. Walking to a general store and not riding in a car to the grocery store down the street? Dirt roads - not paved? What the heck is a party line? No indoor bathroom - an outhouse? Unheard of! Burning coal in a fireplace and coal stove to stay warm and heating water on a coal stove to clean up? They couldn't imagine it.
Separated from the flat land of northeast Ohio, the mountains of West Virginia cradled the 'old home place.' Surrounded by the hills, it seemed that other world trailed away into smoke, then vanished. While in Moatsville, I felt like the rest of the world didn't exist.
1903: Wedding photograph of Freddie Leonard Ritter and Rosa Mandana Cline
Wearing Grandpa's hat on a hot summer day
The old home-place: early 1970's
