What Happened in Hinton (July/August 1988 | Volume: 39, Issue: 5)

What Happened in Hinton

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Authors: Paul R. Lilly

Historic Era: Era 8: The Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945)

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July/August 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 5

How does one describe a small town? And how does one explain a town when it sets out to catch all its sinners? All I can do is tell you a little of the history of my hometown, Hinton, Summers County, West Virginia, as I remember it.

It always touches my heart when I come in sight of Hinton, regardless of which direction I come from. I’ve been from Virginia to California and from Texas to Canada, and no scenery makes my heart skip a beat, increases my pulse, or causes a warm, glowing feeling to flood my soul the way the overwhelming beauty of our valley does.

When my great-uncle’s brother was in the Confederate army, he forded the river at what is now Hinton, where the Greenbrier and New rivers flow together. He said that there were only two or three houses there then. He told me this in 1940, and he died in 1942 at the age of 103. Less than ten years after the war, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad came down the Greenbrier, and the town of Hinton was born. All railroad men who ran east from Hinton to Clifton Forge, Virginia, were known as mountain men, and all who ran west of Hinton were known as rivermen. Several railroad engineers and crews had two families, one at each end of their run. There was a saying at one time that there was no Sunday west of Clifton Forge and no God west of Hinton.

Hinton was built upon a bench of a mountain with a cliff on the river side. The railroad tracks are between the river and the cliff. The bench is perhaps two miles long and wide enough for two streets from one end of the town to the other. The streets, Temple and Summers, come together on the east end of town and go down Avis Hill. Avis Hill was so steep that when the circus came to Hinton, it objected to having to pull its equipment up the hill. In the early days Summers Street didn’t run all the way out behind Riverview School. I remember hearing that when it was extended, a black graveyard had to be moved to make room. I used to look for ghosts there after dark when I was a child, but I never saw any.

From the early 1920s, when I was three or four years old, until 1942, when I went into the service, Hinton was a beehive of activity. People were coming and going at all hours of the day and night, going to work on the railroad. All the women fussed because they could never hang their clothes out to dry; the coal dust settled on everything. All the houses looked dingy and grimy. Today ,Hinton is clean, with most houses in good repair and freshly painted, but the vital life signs of a growing community are missing. Hinton is like a hundred-year-old