1 of 8
Young Lizzie DeHart
Lizzie in her youth. She first met Ed through her brother, in Wythe County, Va. Her dark complexion and intensity of personality are clearly evident in this photo.
2 of 8
Ben Harris
Ben Harris. Members of the 80-year-old's family helped Ed Mabry construct the original Mabry Mill. Though her gravestone says Lizzie's real name was Mintoria, no one ever called her anything but Liz or Lizzie, according to Harris.
3 of 8
Concord Primitive Baptist
Concord Primitive Baptist. The Mabrys worshiped at the church, built in 1908 of chestnut logs. It's located in Meadows of Dan.
4 of 8
Mabry Mill Decline
Mabry Mill in decline. After Ed Mabry lost the use of his legs, he couldn't maintain the mill. The wooden races had rotted away and the wheel had begun to list by the time the Blue Ridge Parkway acquired the mill in the mid-1930s.
5 of 8
Mabry Mill Parkway
Mabry Mill Parkway
6 of 8
Ed and Lizzie Mabry
Wedding Day? Parkway officials think the formal photo may be Ed and Lizzie's wedding portrait.
7 of 8
Newt Hylton
Uncle Newt Hylton. He helped Ed Mabry construct Mabry Mill, and is shown here with a model he built of the famous mill. A blacksmith by trade, Uncle Newt also built Concord Primitive Baptist Church.
8 of 8
Young Lizzie DeHart
Lizzie in her youth. She first met Ed through her brother, in Wythe County, Va. Her dark complexion and intensity of personality are clearly evident in this photo.
..Or, Giving Lizzie Mabry Her Due
About 3 million people a year visit the beautiful spot at Blue Ridge Parkway milepost 176.2, where nearly 100 years ago a strong, hard-working couple came to live and make themselves a life on the land. These days at Mabry Mill there’s not much evidence of Ed and Lizzie Mabry, who were both born soon after the Civil War.
And they didn’t have much of an idea what would become of their property, though before she died in the 1930s, Lizzie Mabry did allow that she was thrilled the park service was going to turn the place into something people might want to stop and look at. Contributing Editor Elizabeth Hunter set out to find out just who Ed and Lizzie really were.
They were a tall, robust couple, Ed and Lizzie DeHart Mabry, hard-working, honest and neighborly. Raw-boned and close to six feet tall, Ed was “a tall, flat-like fellow and not fleshy… I guess as stout as most any man that’s ever been in this country,” neighbor Matt Burnette told Blue Ridge Parkway seasonal naturalist Brenda Bowers in the summer of 1975, when she was interviewing people who’d known the Mabrys of Mabry Mill. Though he fell off in his final years, in his prime Uncle Ed – and everybody in the community called him “uncle” – was “a big stout man,” meaning, not fat, but strong of body, hearty. “Muscled up, the old blacksmith type.”
And Lizzie. Lizzie was monumental. Everyone agreed about that. Standing 5'10", she tipped the scales somewhere between 200 and 300 pounds. A dark-complected, powerful, big-boned woman, Lizzie wore long-sleeved dresses, open at the collar, gathered at the bodice and waist. A big apron covered her long billowing skirts. Her sister Addie DeHart made her dresses, for Liz was more the outdoor type. Like most country women of her time, she made a garden and kept chickens, a hog and two cows. She dried berries and beans, made butter, and canned sausage in stone jars she covered with brown paper. She stirred her apple butter ’til it had a crust “thick enough to stand on.” But Lizzie was also “a good helpmeet” in ways that most women are never called upon to become. When Ed hammered glowing iron on his anvil, she pumped the bellows. When her husband sawed the timber that neighbors hauled to the mill on ox-drawn wagons, Liz removed the slab and boards from the whirring blade. She did part of the mowing, and, if Ed were busy shoeing a horse or fixing someone’s mattock, she ground the corn at the mill. She wore a man’s size 8-1/2 shoe, and in winter, rubber boots with felt inserts to keep her feet warm. Her hair was swept back, “kinda slick and then a great big ol’ round twist back there,” one neighbor said. On Sundays when she and Ed attended Concord Primitive Baptist Church, Liz put on a black mohair gored skirt with a black satin blouse. Ed – who called her “Boss” – traded his bib overalls for a blue suit. Because they worked together around noisy machinery, they “got in the habit of talking loud to one another, as though the other party was 100 yards away.”
The Mabrys rose each morning at 4 a.m. and breakfasted before daylight on biscuits, sausage, butter, jellies and coffee. They skipped lunch, and ate dinner between 4-5:30 p.m. Though they had a cookstove, Lizzie prepared much of their food in the fireplace. Her beans bubbled in a big black pot; cornbread baked in a dutch oven buried in the coals. In summertime, Lizzie “raided the garden,” but in winter they ended the day with cornbread and buttermilk. Ed had a big tin cup that held a quart of liquid; he drank two tankards of buttermilk at every evening meal. After supper, he sat by the fireplace in a rocker he’d made, chewing tobacco and working arithmetic problems on a slate, with a slate pencil. A few of the passel of cats the Mabrys shared their house with stretched out next to him on the warm stone hearth.
The cats – whose numbers waxed to 18 and waned to two – had the run of the Mabrys’ house. They entered and exited at their pleasure, through “cat holes” cut in the wall near the back door. The cats may have taken the place of the children Ed and Lizzie never had. You could sometimes find Lizzie down at the mill, “sittin’ there rared back with that ol’ cat layin’ up in her lap,” a neighbor recalled. Though Lizzie was “free hearted,” doling out peas to guests with a ladle instead of a spoon, she didn’t like anyone sneaking in to harvest her chinquapins or huckleberries. You had to ask permission – and got it only after Liz had picked her fill. She was as good a hand at grinding cornmeal as Ed – some said a better hand. And everyone agreed that the Mabrys ground the best meal in that country – because Ed kept his rocks sharp and they ground the meal slow. Every so often they checked its texture by taking up a pinch of it to roll between their fingertips as it sluiced down the trough. Like other millers, the Mabrys took their payment in “toll” – an eighth of the milled corn – in lieu of hard currency.
Ed was born two years after the Civil War ended, in 1867, and hailed from Patrick County. He moved to the Meadows of Dan area in 1899. No one seemed to know when or why he shortened his surname from Mayberry to Mabry. Though he didn’t have much nearby kin, Lizzie came from a big local family. She first laid eyes on her husband-to-be when her brother Green, who worked with Ed in the old Bertha zinc and iron-ore mines in Wythe County, brought him home a time or two. Ed later struck out for the West Virginia coal mines, where he had no intention of staying. It was “about the best place he ever saw to… hog you out a little sum of money to buy you a home with,” next-door-neighbor Bess Ayers said. It was probably in the coalfields that he learned the blacksmithing trade. Back home, he heard that John Thompson wanted to move west and staked his little sum of hogged-out money on the Thompson place. There he and Lizzie set up housekeeping in an old log house. He built a smithy, then a woodworking shop with a hand-powered lathe. Ed “seemed to have a talent for most any trades that came along,” his friend Tump Spangler said. “He could turn his hand to most anything he wanted to do.”
And what he wanted to do most was to build a mill with an overshot wheel. As best historians can tell, Ed probably constructed his gristmill in 1908, added a sawmill in 1915 and a woodworking shop the following year. He built and balanced the wheel with the help of his friend Newton Hylton, bought millstones from a “granite” or “hard pebble” rock quarry on Brush Mountain near Blacksburg. The stones were already shaped, but Ed cut the furrows in their surfaces for the grinding. That his land was nearly level – and the stream that ran across it negligible – didn’t discourage him. He dammed the creek to make a pond above the mill. He bought more acreage. He built a warren of races to every outlying stream and branch, tying them into a central race leading to the wheel. Still, to run the sawmill, Ed had to wait for “a wet spell or a flood,” Fred Clifton remembered. If you brought timber to be sawed when it wasn’t wet, “they just let the log lay. But when you brought your corn in to get [it] ground, he always managed to grind it. He made practically everything that was used in the country.” For his smithy, Ed bought an anvil and hammers, but made his tongs, bellows and other tools. “He could build a wagon and put the tires on it. Made horseshoes, fire andirons and pokers,” Clifton said. He had a saw for making shingles, a planer and turning lathes. He sawed chestnut, oak, walnut, poplar, maple – every kind of tree that grew in the area – for furniture makers and house carpenters. He ground meal and chop. He made and repaired wagons, mowing machines, hay rakes and other farm machinery and tools. And he was always adding to his mill, improving it in ways.
In addition to the mill, the Mabrys had an apple house, chicken house, granary, a wash house, woodshed, “cellar” and a barn. They were “stay-at-home folks,” said a friend, who doubted that Ed, who died in 1936, ever rode in a car. He certainly never owned one, though he had a buggy. He may have worked all the time, but Ed loved a joke, to tell funny tales. He was a “most wonderful personality,” just “a lovely man to be with,” said Matt Burnette, who remembered going to Ed’s smithy when he was a little boy to get “heel irons” put on his shoes. In those days, mountain children “didn’t have nice, neat, good-looking shoes to wear, especially for everyday use,” he explained. Instead, parents bought them “rough-like shoes that would stand the scuff,” then sent “little boys like me and my brother to Mr. Mabry” to add heel irons to make the shoes last longer. Ed fashioned the heel irons from the worn-out blades of mowing scythes or cradles. “Don’t wear your shoes – not a time – ’til I put the heel irons on,” he cautioned the children. When he was running short of old blades, he asked them to bring one along. “Well, he would take that thing off, and take his cold chisel and cut off a slice the length he wanted and he’d lay that in the fire and get it hot. Then he’d go to hammering on it and first thing you know he had it beat out, maybe an eighth of an inch thick. Then he would curve that little thing and make it look just like a horseshoe to exactly fit the heel of the shoe.” After punching three holes in the heel iron, he nailed it on. Once he was finished, the children put on their new shoes and wore them home. “How proud we was,” Burnette remembered, “to make that pretty track in the mud. It looked just like a pony shoe, you know, that track.” For this work, which took more than an hour for each pair of shoes, Ed charged 15 cents.
Sometime between 1915-20, Ed moved his helpmeet into a new house. He’d cut the timber for it on Fork Mountain and hauled it to the mill on a wagon he’d probably built himself. He sawed the lumber, framed and trimmed the house, drove every nail. He painted its exterior with a brush he fashioned from a horse’s tail. It was a fine looking place: two stories, tin roofed, with a central chimney, four front windows and a little front porch with a peaked roof. Its interior walls were paneled in chestnut. The Mabrys lived almost entirely in one of the two big downstairs rooms (the other was for company). The room they used had a big fireplace, a stove, a large table to eat on, chairs and a high-backed bed. A long porch ran across the back of the house, part of it closed in for what Lizzie called her “dog house,” though she stored flour and cornmeal there. People also suspected, because she refused to let anyone else enter it, that that was where she kept her money.
Things went well for the Mabrys until around 1930, when something happened to Ed. One neighbor thought he had “infantile” or multiple sclerosis, another a stroke, another cancer. One even thought malnutrition might have caused him to lose the use of his legs. No one really knows what turned the stout, hearty man who could do most anything into a crippled fellow who hobbled down to the mill, and, once he got there, had to remain standing because if he sat down he couldn’t get back up. Whatever was the matter didn’t affect his sense of humor. “He couldn’t walk,” said Frank Dalton, who helped Lizzie with the grinding in Ed’s last years, “but he’d still tell the big tales and laugh and tell jokes.” At the end of his life he lost even the use of his arms. “He couldn’t reach up and catch you by the hand or anything like that,” said Bess Ayers, who was there when Ed Mabry died. “When we got there, he just looked up at me so sweet and then grinned, oh so cheerful. He was dying when we got there, [but] he lived a right smart little while. He couldn’t speak and I’d talk to him and he’d just squeeze my hand back in reply.”
After Ed’s death, Lizzie lived on for a while in the house Ed built for her with a young couple, for she was afraid to spend the night alone. Her husband’s death left Lizzie distraught. She sat in her chair hour after hour, sad and lost, wringing her hands. When the couple left after eight months, Lizzie sold all her things and went to live with her sister. A few years later, she caught pneumonia and followed Ed into the Sweet Hereafter.
Ed knew the government planned to build the Blue Ridge Parkway past his mill and through his farm, though he didn’t believe – ’til they bought part of his land – that the road would ever be built. Neighbors disagreed as to his reaction to the project. One said he grumbled that a man who had “never bothered nobody” ought to be left alone. Another said Ed thought the price the government paid him was fair. As for Lizzie, she was thrilled when she learned that the park service was “going to make a scenery” out of the mill, which had gotten rickety after Ed lost the use of his legs. The wooden races had rotted; the wheel had begun to list. (When that happened, the Mabrys installed a kerosene motor and kept grinding corn.) To have seen their place restored, to have known that people would come from miles away to look at it – that the mill would become the parkway’s most popular and photographed attraction – now that would have made Lizzie proud. But she never lived to see the day, and that’s probably a good thing. Because in 1942 – against the recommendation of park service historical technician Thor Borreson, who visited in 1940 and found the house more historically significant than the mill – the park service tore the Mabry’s fine frame house down. In its place, they installed a log cabin with no relation to the Mabrys or Mabry Mill. That revision of history – apparently made to give the site a more rustic appearance – angered one of their old neighbors. “I think that’s disgraceful [of] the country to bring that thing in an’ make people think that’s where [the Mabrys] lived,” said Josie Goad, whose husband helped with the millwheel’s reconstruction. And she wondered why Lizzie’s name “never got mentioned no way or no how hardly,” once the mill became a tourist attraction. Lizzie “worked in that shop an’ that mill more ’n he did,” she said indignantly. “I don’t understand why that they left her out so.”
Memories Of The Mabrys: Their Legacy Is Just Off The Parkway
Construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway changed life in the little community of Meadows of Dan back in the 1930s. Completion of a new four-lane U.S. 58 will bring even more visitors to the area. But memories of Ed and Lizzie Mabry remain undisturbed at the little country church they attended and in the cemetery where they are buried – both within a few miles of Ed Mabry’s now-famous mill.
The fenced enclosure where the Mabrys are interred is officially called the Caney-Richardson Cemetery, though there are no signs to mark the small grassy plot. The cemetery contains perhaps 20 gravestones and is well-maintained by families still living nearby. Edwin B. Mabry’s headstone is easy to find. But the stone next to Ed is inscribed Mintoria L. Mabry. It was only after talking with a local historian that I confirmed that Mintoria was indeed Lizzie, the wife of Ed Mabry. “Nobody ever called her anything but Liz or Lizzie,” says Ben Harris, 80-year-old life-resident of Meadows of Dan. Harris’s family – especially his uncle Newt Hylton – was involved in much of the construction of the mill. “Newt built the original water wheel,” says Harris. “Uncle Newt got his picture taken a lot,” Harris says with pride. He showed me one black and white taken by Appalachian photographer Earl Palmer. “Mr. Palmer said Newt was as true a mountaineer as he could find, and of course he meant that in the good sense,” says Harris. Uncle Newt, a blacksmith by trade, also built the “new” Concord Primitive Baptist Church from chestnut logs in 1908, according to Harris. The unadorned church welcomes a congregation once a month now. The recent addition at the front of the church brought plumbing indoors for the first time. The grounds of the church are spare, but the built-in picnic and 40-foot-long covered dish and watermelon-cutting tables speak of busier Sundays past. You can imagine the Mabrys enjoying a pot luck meal with their neighbors after services before walking the mile home. “When Ed and Liz got up in years, they weren’t much able to do for themselves,” Harris says. “Matter of fact, though my folks didn’t accept it, the Mabrys offered to give them the mill – everything – if they’d take care of the two of them those last years. The Mabrys are buried with the Richardsons, who helped Lizzie handle her affairs after Ed died.”
Finding them:
Cemetery: Travel north from Mabry Mill on the parkway about a half mile and turn on the first left (Fork Mountain Road). The cemetery is on the left in about a mile.
Church: Take the Meadows of Dan exit from the parkway. Immediately upon exiting pass Va. 614 then take an immediate right onto Concord Road (Va. 795). The church is a half mile on the left.