Jean Ayer

Tales of Chinkapin Creek Jean Ayer

A collection of stories about what life was really like growing up on a working farm in rural West Virginia in the early 1900's. For young Nellie Wister, life was rich and meaningful among the people of Chinkapin Creek, a small Appalachian community, stirred by changing times, but held together by a distinct West Virginia spirit that rural Americans will recognize today. Tales of Chinkapin Creek illuminates an aspect of the American character rarely explored: the attitudes and temperament of a state with a burr under its saddle. Broken off from Virginia in the Civil War, West Virginians occupied the neglected counties west of the Shenandoah mountain. Their largely Scots-Irish and German Heritage made them a self-sufficient, often stubborn and unpredictable people. For Nellie, each denizen commands a special place in her open heart. These include the morose Uncle Edward; the seemingly erudite Levi Harman; the turtle-toting Wilse Strickland; the feeble minded Bean Kimball; the sequestered, speech-impaired Millie Flood; Nellie's suitor, the tippling Dr. John Echols; the pushy fertilizer salesman Ben Moomaw, and other intriguing real-life characters.