Louise McNeill, West Virginia Poet Laureate (1911-1993)

Louise McNeill was born near Buckeye in 1911, and grew up on the family farm by the Greenbrier River above Swago Creek. She began teaching in Pocahontas County's one-room schools in 1930. In her 1988 memoir, The Milkweed Ladies, she says she began writing poetry as a teenager. She was rewarded with early success, and her best-known book of poetry is Gauley Mountain, published in 1939, with a foreword by Stephen Vincent Benet. McNeill received the Bread Loaf Publication Award for Time is Our House and the West Virginia Library Association Annual Book Award for Paradox Hill, both collections of poetry.

Gauley Mountain is McNeill's most popular book in Pocahontas County. Most of the people you meet here are familiar with some of the memorable characterizations of early settlers to this region, and some latecomers as well. It's not clear whether McNeill perfectly captured the tone and content of many local family histories, or whether her book has shaped how the people here see themselves and their ancestors. It is most likely a combination of the two.

The Milkweed Ladies (1988, University of Pittsburgh Press) is a brief but vivid memoir of Ms. McNeill's childhood and early life in her Pocahontas County home. The title is taken from a poem McNeill composed as a child for her playhouse tea parties, where her guests were made of milkweed pod fluff:

Milkweed ladies so fair and fine,
Won't you have a sip of my columbine?
Or a thimble of thimbleberry wine?

I consider The Milkweed Ladies among the best nature writing I have read. Her main focus is memior, but it is a memior of a life well aware of its connection to the natural world. Here are a few favorite quotes.

The farm, a wide plateau of rocky, loam-dark fields, lies above Swago Creek, along the Greenbrier River of West Virginia and some twenty-five to thirty miles north of the Virginia line. This patch of earth is held within a half-stadium of limestone cliffs and mountain pastures. On the surface, the Swago Farm is quiet and solid, green in summer and in winter deep with snow. It has its level fields, its fence rows and hilly pastures. There are some two hundred acres of trees and bluegrass, running water, and the winding, dusty paths that cattle and humans have kept open through the years. There are three small woodlands, two of them still virgin and mostly of oak. (p 3)

Until I was sixteen years old, until the roads came, the farm was about all I knew: our green meadows and hilly pastures, our storied old men, the great rolling seasons of moon and sunlight, our limestone cliffs and trickling springs....But before I grew up and went out into the world--and a bloody thing I found it--we were all at home there in our faded cottage in the meadow, all of us safe and warm. Sometimes now, a quiet sense comes to me, the cool mist blowing in my face as though I am walking through islands of fog and drifting downhill slowly southward until I feel the mountains behind my shoulder. (pp 5-7)

Because those years were the years of my childhood, I might tell them in a way that would break my heart. But my heart does not break. There is a kind of benison that falls sometimes on the fields and mountains....And though I realize that I am old now, so that the years play tricks on me, it is all still there sometimes, an unchanged presence, even the rat manure in the water spring; and sometimes we are still at home and it is summer. (p 31)

In winter I sometimes went out early and walked the fields of our farm alone. I liked to go on mornings of fresh snowfall, when all the meadows were trackless and hushed with white. I would walk up through Captain Jim's old orchard and when I got near the moss-gray trees along the rail fence, I would begin to see the little animal tracks and would follow them up and down along the edge of the woods.

There were the triangular prints of the rabbits, or the little field mice tracks like delicate lace woven across the snow. Sometimes there might be fox tracks, on track in front of the other in a straight line. After a warm night, there might be skunk tracks, like little human footprints but with a soft white dab where the tail had brushed the snow; and up in the bushes the bird tracks made dark little stitches mending the hill. There were also the round cat tracks, no claws showing, retracted feline tread; and one morning I saw blood on the snow.

Sometimes I could feel the others close around me, down in their little burrows in the earth: the gray, sleeping wood mice; the little striped ground squirrels; and the soft curled-up rabbits, the snoring old groundhogs, and the ring-tailed raccoons. Then the silence would come down, as though it fell on our meadows from the high whiteness of Pinnacle Rock. (pp 63-64)