Berryville: Heart of the Valley

Time trip: Sammy, Bev and Margy at Berryville News Stand

Armchair Adventures

published July 1, 2012

by Paul Sullivan

Back to the Future

 in Berryville

            Here’s what I can recall about Berryville and Clarke County. It’s from way far back, mostly in the 1940s and 50s.

            Mom always said we had lots of McCormick relatives up there, in what she’d call The Valley. That means the Valley of Virginia-the upper valley not far from Winchester.

            Through mom’s mother’s side, we’re McCormicks, but the only one of them I know still living up there is cousin Bev Whiting.

            Aunt Bessie was Bev’s mom, and she was something else. Dad called her a pistol. When I was little, Aunt Bessie evoked a certain amount of fear. Not that she was mean, but she ran the big feed and grain store down by the railroad tracks. She was the boss. And nobody in Berryville ever doubted that.You didn’t cross Bessie Whiting. No sir.

            But I digress.

            I’m not sure if it was my sister, Margy, (Margaretta) or me made the suggestion we ought to drive up to Berryville and see Bev.

            And so it was that on the first day of summer-lovely day it was-Margy wheeled her Honda van westward, over the Blue Ridge, down into the Shenandoah Valley and into Berryville.

            My first reaction was that no town in Virginia could resist change, could hold back the flood of development so well.

            It could have been 1950, from that initial cruise down the main drag. I mean, had anything changed?

            There was great-grandpa Province McCormick’s last home; further along, there was the Battletown Inn, where the diminutive Civil War mounted Scout had hung-out in his final years. A few miles back up the road we had passed something with the name “Hawthorne” on it-a subdivision, I believe. That had been the old McCormick farm before Union troops burned it during a rampage down the Valley.

            Some years before she died, mom offered each of her four kids a piece of the old farm. By then we had established lives elsewhere and turned it down. Now-now that it’s way too late, I’m not so certain.

            This is unspeakably lovely, hallowed, green ground; so close to the fabled Shenandoah River. No wonder someone wrote those unforgettable lines of song, “Oh, Shenandoah, I Long to See You!”

            Back to the moment. It had been so long that neither of us could remember exactly where Bev lived. Margy turned here and there, I tried to lift it from the screen of my fone. Just then she said, “There he is!” And darned if he wasn’t-a small man dressed all in white-southerner to the core-waving us on from three blocks away.

            “Well,” I remarked, “He may be 92, but he sure has sharp eyesight!”

            Bev Whiting is the living embodiment of Old Virginia. Thoroughly decent, well-mannered, level-headed, and looking forward, with an eye on where he’s come from. But it was his sunny disposition I enjoyed most. There couldn’t be a mean bone in the man’s body.

            A child of Berryville, he’d lived his entire life in Clarke County, but for time soldiering in the U.S. Army Field Artillery during World War II.

            I don’t know if there’s a town historian, but I know who I’d nominate for the job. We could not imagine anything or anyone in Berryville worth knowing that Bev Whiting does not know.

            Bev, his stepson, Sammy Card, and the two of us sat there and “visited” (as old timers say) for awhile.

            But when Virginians get together, they eat together. Where to?

            We cruised the town’s single commercial street which offers several choices for dining. But there was only one choice for me, and I said so.

            We had to lunch at the Berryville News Stand.

            In the decades when it really was a news stand, it had been Bev Whiting’s store. The nerve center of Clarke County might have been a more accurate name for the place.

            It’s a deli now. Nothing fancy to look at, but my turkey-avocado-cheese sandwich and big glass of iced coffee was top-grade.

            After lunch, we piled back in the car and, with Bev narrating, took the best tour anyone could imagine of his little town.

            Across the railroad tracks, there was the big building that used to be the family feed and grain business; back behind that, hidden in an industrial park, is the town’s economic lifeblood, Berryville Graphics, a major book publishing house. The Winchester Star had done a story that very day on its expansion. Think books made from real trees are dead as the dodo-bird? Think again. How about 120 million copies a year?

            Those employees must live somewhere, I mused.

            Bev showed us where. And in this scenic little village of surprises, we turned here and turned there and, suddenly found ourselves in a pretty typical suburban development, complete with waving UPS driver. We were right in the middle of the year 2012, after all.             And it really wasn’t all that bad.