The road in front of our house in Linnsburg was cement paved, and automobiles traveled on its surface. Local farmers all had tractors instead of mules. Yet, standing at the entrance of Mr. VanCleave's blacksmith shop, where two or three old-timers sat perched on a sagging buggy seat just inside the doorway, my brother and I were actually staring wide-eyed at a living tableau of rural America 100 years before our time. We had no way of knowing that our generation would be the last tenuous, breathing link to an epic of our country, fading now, like the final flashing glimmer of a summer day in our early boyhood. Traditions within families linger, of course, and shadows of that bygone day can still be found in rural America. In not many years, though, the living memory will fade, and then stories like this work will be all that remain of that time in America.
