On March 5, 1908, people around Logan, Ohio, opened their weekly paper, The Democrat-Sentinel, and found a letter that was not written to them. It sat in the country news from a neighborhood called Icy Slope, and it began, “My Dear Virginia Reader.”

Everybody read it anyway, and that was the idea. A family from the neighborhood had moved to Virginia, about 280 miles away as the crow flies. Their old neighbors were not done teasing them, so they did it in the newspaper, where the whole county could enjoy it.

1908 newspaper column headed Icy Slope that begins My Dear Virginia Reader and jokes about boys in Virginia chasing a deer and letting the wild turkeys go

The start of the Icy Slope letter: “My Dear Virginia Reader.” The Democrat-Sentinel, Logan, Ohio, March 5, 1908, page 4. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Click the clipping to read it full size.

How the Logan, Ohio, paper worked like a group chat

The Democrat-Sentinel of Logan, Ohio, came out once a week, and its readers wrote a good part of it. Crossroads and hollows all over Hocking County each had a “scribe” who sent in the news: who had the mumps, who went to town, who came to Sunday dinner. The columns ran under names like String Town, Cedar Grove and Big Pine Valley. The scribe at Icy Slope signed with a pen name, “A Stranger.”

Isaac Weaver’s family had been neighbors there. By 1908 they were farming near Amelia Court House, Virginia, which the paper printed as “Amelia C. H.” The photo at the top of this page shows how mail and papers reached many farms in those years: a carrier in a horse-drawn buggy, stopped at a country mailbox. Harris & Ewing took it in 1914, and it is not Hocking County.

The Icy Slope scribe asks about the deer

At Icy Slope, in the hills of Hocking County, Ohio, February 1908 was miserable. The Stranger’s column of February 13 was full of mumps and “the winter grippe,” which is the flu. People who dreaded it, the Stranger wrote, “will have to go to the sunny south, Virginia would be a good place.”

Then came the poke. Neighbors had been getting letters from the Weavers, “but they have’nt heard them say any thing about the deer and wild turkey hunting yet.” In plain words: so how is all that hunting going down there?

Two weeks later the answer was in the paper, under the heading “Amelia C. H. Va.” It began, “Now my dear icy slope stranger,” and it was signed with a pen name too.

1908 newspaper letter headed Amelia C. H. Va. that begins Now my dear icy slope stranger and tells how the boys chased a deer and let the turkeys go

“Now my dear icy slope stranger.” Most of the letter from Virginia, in two pieces, joined. The Democrat-Sentinel, Logan, Ohio, February 27, 1908, page 5. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Click the clipping to read it full size.

The Virginia writer said the deer and turkeys were there all right, “but the dickens of it is you cannot get them.” The boys “chased a deer and let the turkeys go, and did not get either one.” The letter said “we started them that way,” so Ohio might see them “coming over the hill by No. 6 school house, or up the hollow from Grannie Stoneburner’s.” It added, “Keep your gun ready.” There was a brag, too: a pond where you could seine fish, which means scoop them up with a net, “half bushel at a time.”

What the Stranger wrote back from Icy Slope

The Stranger of Icy Slope, Ohio, answered on March 5, 1908, and went down the list. The deer came first. Hunting them, the Stranger said, “would be like snipe hunting,” an old trick where a newcomer is sent out at night to catch a bird that never comes.

The fish came next. The Stranger told Virginia to “just thro out another one for the poor fellow on Icy Slope, place them in a box and sprinkle salt upon their tails to prevent them from spoiling, and send them to Logan C. O. D.” C. O. D. means cash on delivery: the person who gets the box pays for it. As for Virginia’s early onions, already “peering through the ground,” the Stranger had set onions out in November, “and I haven’t seen or heard anything from them yet.”

1908 newspaper paragraphs asking a Virginia neighbor to box up fish, sprinkle salt upon their tails and send them to Logan C. O. D., and saying onions set out in November have not come up

Fish by mail, and onions that would not come up. The Democrat-Sentinel, Logan, Ohio, March 5, 1908, page 4. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Click the clipping to read it full size.

Then the letter turned warm. “Now I have been slightly acquainted with you some 20 odd years,” the Stranger wrote, “and this is the first time we have peen seperated at such a distance.” (The spelling is the paper’s.) And a visit was promised in the grandest style of 1908: “Now you must not go up-side-down or in-side-out if we should drop down at your door, in an airship.”

1908 newspaper paragraphs saying the writer has known the Virginia reader some 20 odd years and may drop down at the door in an airship, signed Not a Stranger

The end of the letter, signed “Not a Stranger.” The Democrat-Sentinel, Logan, Ohio, March 5, 1908, page 4. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Click the clipping to read it full size.

That was a tall tale. The Wright brothers made their first public flights that same year, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum says. An airship was something else: a long gas bag with an engine hung under it.

A long airship labeled Baldwin Balloon flies low over a crowd in hats, with a man walking the open frame under the gas bag, in a 1909 Bain News Service photo

An airship of those years: the “Baldwin Balloon” over a crowd, with a man walking the open frame under the gas bag. This is not Ohio or Virginia, and no airship came to Icy Slope. Bain News Service, 1909. Library of Congress. Click the picture to see it full size.

This time the pen name at the bottom was “Not a Stranger.” And on the same page, another column joined the fun: “We are waiting here with guns to catch the deer that Isaac Weaver’s, of Amelia C. H., Va., are going to chase over this way.”

Icy Slope melts into Flowery Banks

The teasing between Icy Slope, Ohio, and the Weavers in Virginia ran all year. On May 7 the Ohio column brought news of its own: “Well, as the sun and rain has melted the ice away and brought out the flowers, you will find us here often in Flowery Banks items.” The neighborhood had changed its name with the weather.

1908 newspaper heading News of Other Towns over the Icy Slope column, which says the sun and rain have melted the ice and the news will now come as Flowery Banks items

Icy Slope becomes Flowery Banks. The Democrat-Sentinel, Logan, Ohio, May 7, 1908, page 3. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Click the clipping to read it full size.

In August a Virginia scribe signing “Juanita” wrote that they had eaten six watermelons in one week. The next week Juanita rubbed it in: “Hello, Flowery Banks, how did those watermelons taste? The ones that I eat for you. They tasted fine to me. Ha! ha!” Ohio was not impressed. “But don’t put yourself in misery eating them for me,” Flowery Banks answered, “as there are wagon loads of them here at Logan.”

1908 newspaper item signed Juanita: Hello, Flowery Banks, how did those watermelons taste? The ones that I eat for you. They tasted fine to me. Ha! ha!

“The ones that I eat for you.” The Democrat-Sentinel, Logan, Ohio, August 20, 1908, page 7. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Click the clipping to read it full size.

When the frost came back to Icy Slope, Ohio

On October 8, 1908, the Flowery Banks column in the Logan, Ohio, paper opened with one line: “The frost has cooked our flowers again and it will soon be Icy Slope.” Farther down, the scribe called to Virginia once more. It would “soon be time for those turkeys and deer again,” and Ohio did not care to watch for them another year. Then, for one sentence, the joking stopped.

1908 Flowery Banks column saying the frost has cooked our flowers again and it will soon be Icy Slope, then telling the Virginia scribe that winter will be here and you will not be here either

The frost comes back, and so does the deer joke. Three pieces of one column, joined. The Democrat-Sentinel, Logan, Ohio, October 8, 1908, page 7. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Click the clipping to read it full size.

“You have said this good bit that some of you were coming back this fall,” the scribe wrote, “now fall will soon be gone and winter will be here and you will not be here either.” That is what the deer, the fish and the watermelons were really about. Two sets of neighbors missed each other, and nobody wanted to say so straight out. So they said it a joke at a time, in the one place both sides were sure to look every week: the Logan paper, with the whole county reading along.

Sources