One of my favorite things about being a historian is piecing together the primary sources of the men and women that were actually around to witness the events I’m studying. History tries its best to remain neutral, but I always get a kick out of reading a puritan’s diary and learning what he really thought of his neighbor whose dog wouldn’t stop barking all night. So often we think of the people of the past as stock characters in a storybook, but you need only look at the blood-spattered clothing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, all cornflower blue and crimson, to see that he was a living, breathing man with a wife and children, hopes and dreams.
I was sitting in my office reading about irrigation trenches in turn of the 20th century (I know, fascinating stuff, but it’s not all the Battle of Thermopylae) when my TA came in and tossed a bound package on my desk. There it sat for a week or so, one of many things to get to in an increasingly hectic schedule. I remember I was getting ready to leave one night, I think my jacket was already in my hand, when it caught my attention. The browned canvas of the package instantly got me thinking of Indiana Jones, like the location of the Arc of the Covenant could be decoded from its contents.
It had that kind of bearing to it.
So I sat back down and opened it up, and was instantly intrigued by the stacks of old bound booklets it contained inside. Written on the outside was “Gander, West Virginia, 1835-36.”
Okay, so maybe not the earth shattering discovery I’d hoped for, but still, an exciting find that I was looking forward to diving into.
And so I began to thumb through the pages. Then I began to read. And then I began to really read. By the time I finished, it was 9am and I was yelling for my TA and demanding he tell me where he found that package. The kid was a lerpy undergrad with beard stubble and thick glasses, and he flinched as I barked at him to spill the beans, but all he could manage was that it had showed up in the in box and that he just didn’t know. I told him he could go, and he asked me if I wanted coffee. Of course I did.
Now I’m sitting here, staring at the dusky corners of my office, as brilliant September light pours in from my sliver of a window.
And I start writing this.
I find that writing helps me work out ideas, and come to some greater truth about the nature of things. I really hope it works this time, because I can barely type, my hands are shaking so bad.
So.
Let me tell you the story of Mother Willow.
On Friday, March 20, 1835, the first day of Spring, the citizens of Gander, West Virginia awoke to find that in the night a fully developed tree had grown straight through the road in the center of town, smack in the middle of Main Street and County Road.
It grew right through the brick as if they were laid around it, as it is depicted in a photograph contained in the file. The grainy, black and white image depicts three men and one boy standing around a tree with long, looping branches and roots than coil up and out like piles of electrical cables, and then disappear into the cracks of the brick. The citation for the photo reads The Gander Gazette, with caption, “Photograph Property of the Gander Gazette, Friday, March 20 1835 issue, Story Entitled “Curiouser & Curiouser!” Pictured (L-R): Mayor Thaddeus Clancy Mueller, Constable Reginald White, Doctor Eustice Ottoman, Eustice Ottoman Jr.”
The Mayor, oldest of the men, wears a black tail coat, and stands clutching the lapel of his jacket, peering towards the photographer. The Constable has his hands on his hips and stands close beside him. They’re the typical photograph specimens of antiquity, severe and stoic. The other two, however, display an uncharacteristic lightness in their depictions. The doctor, a mustached man with his sleeves rolled halfway up, holds his young son on his shoulders. The boy’s face is distorted, so it’s difficult to tell, but you can see that he was most likely laughing. One wonders what must have been going through their heads at such an unlikely occurrence as the tree, but one look at Eustice Jr’s smudged face suggests that they had no idea what was in store for them.
After the initial surprise, Gander enjoyed a small period of fame and a short economic boom, as visitors from neighboring counties would travel to see “Mother Willow”, as it had been deemed. The newspaper article is quick to point out that this name is a misnomer, and that Mother Willow wasn’t actually a willow at all. Nobody was quite sure what it was, only that its long, hair-like leaves and twisted branches most closely resembled those of a Weeping Willow.
More unclear is where the “Mother” bit came from. No one is officially credited with coining the name, and a newspaper clipping from April 3rd mentions that the name had been thrown out by someone, and that it had stuck. Normally that would be that. When I first started reading I didn’t think much about it. After all, one name is as good as another, right? But by the end of the tale I wondered about the person that named the tree so early on. What did they know? Why of all names was this the one that stuck? This remains one of the more disturbing questions I ask myself as I try and organize the puzzle pieces to this mystery.
You’ll see what I mean soon enough.
Regardless, by midsummer, the excitement had more or less died down, and Mother Willow just one more bit of local color. Some later photographs even depict it with notices and fliers tacked to its gnarled trunk. A regular stable of the community.
But then harvest season came.
As the days grew longer and colder, it became apparent that there was something wrong with the crops. By piecing together details from two different journals contained within the file, as well as a Farmer’s Almanac I managed to find in the stacks, nearly every cabbage, every pumpkin, every stalk of corn was shriveled with some unknown blight. It occurred to the complete surprise of everyone, who in generations of working the land had never experienced anything like it.
What’s more, with the aid of the aforementioned Almanac and Google Maps, I was able to view the area where Gander used to be. I marked the areas where the crops had failed on a printed map, and was shocked to see that the afflicted area made up an almost perfectly circular radius around the town of Gander.
And what lay in the dead center of it.
Now what happens next is both less and more well documented than the previous information. While there’s very little official information, like that found in The Gander Gazette, which until now has been the primary source with which I write this, there are a few diaries, journals, and even three horrible wood burnings that depict what happened next.
The first thing that happens is a large amount of food is purchased as larder for the approaching winter. As I said, the town experienced some success with the first appearance of Mother Willow, and had some insurance against shortages.
The second thing that happens is more disturbing.
Now I pause here to mention that in every civilization, from two hundred years ago to two thousand years ago, there are busy bodies. They’re one of the vital characteristics of societies and they don’t seem to be going anywhere.
Fortunately, this means is we get some very interesting perspectives on the goings on from different perspectives.
In that fall of 1835, an unprecedented gruesome event occurred in Gander.
I am not being intentionally vague, because I honestly don’t know what happened. More surprising, the citizens themselves seem to be unsure.
Agnes Sagat, a young woman that lived on Bleacher Street, said that a man named Cobb Smith had murdered a young girl out in the woods and thrown her body into a river. She goes on to describe that her father was one of the men in the posse that eventually tracked him down and brought him back to town.
Another account states that Cobb Smith himself was the victim of a drunken argument gone wrong, and that his killer had staved his head in with a wooden yoke. The unnamed man was restrained and jailed.
Still another account suggests that Constable White (remember him from the photo?) had organized some kind of a coup against Mayor Mueller, and had led armed men into the court house, where a bloody gun fight ensued rendering both Constable and Mayor dead.
Regardless to which story you choose to believe, we do know that at least one man was hung that fall, and where do you suppose he was hung from?
And from there things get odder.
Between October and January 1936, there was a documented seventeen hangings in Gander, West Virginia. Bear in mind, public hangings had gone out of vogue about half a decade before hand. It is odd to see one. It is unheard of to see seventeen in three or four months. And each time the scaffold was the same.
So you’ve got a mysterious tree that grows out of the ground overnight, a blight, some unheard of panic in an otherwise peaceful rural town, and then suddenly the larder goes up in flames. Some say it was an accident, some say it was sabotage, but whatever the case, Gander was now in the teeth of winter, and their entire stock of food was gone.
Now this isn’t necessarily the end of the world. Winters even today can be rough without adequate supplies, but the people of the town had options. They could have sought aid from neighbors, even gotten a government bail out if they had to.
But they didn’t.
They hung more people.
And they started to get up to stranger things.
From the diary of Dorothy Miller:
January 28, 1836,
I strolled through town today to admire The All Mother and Her strange fruits. For many an hour and many a day I have basked in the shade of Her many arms and communed on the sweet Sacrament that drippeth from Her branches. But today as I looked upon Her body that is the Highest, I see a swell that has made Her plump and I feel my own heart swell with joy. Could it be that our Mother has become heavy? Could it be that our Great Mother has quickened? I positively vibrate with ecstasy that boarders on mania!
So there’s that.
And then there’s the other things.
My desk is cluttered with the journals, notes, and most every other piece of information of this story. Only one part is missing. I put a set of three wood burnings back in the package and placed it on the other side of the room. I’ve started to drink a little bit because, frankly, they scare the living shit out of me, and I don't mind admitting it.
Whoever made them is clearly a master craftsman, and that is not a compliment in this case. The level of detail, the emotions depicted will stay with me even if I finish this Glenlivet, which I’m more than half done with.
Okay.
Here we go.
The first burning depicts the towns people of Gander, torches in hand, standing around Mother Willow. There are four naked prisoners already hanging from the branches, with the rotten bodies and skeletons of dozens of others among them. A man wearing deer antlers on his head is fitting a noose around a final prisoner’s neck. The look on the man’s face is, simply put, ghastly.
He wants to be up there.
The second burning depicts the towns people standing around the tree again, this time holding hands in what seems to be some kind of a hymn. The antlered man appears as well, only this time he has a bloody scourge raised in a hand at a group of women walking in a circle around Mother Willow. It appears that their entrails are nailed to the tree’s trunk.
They want to be there.
The final image shows Mother Willow in all her horrible majesty. Her spindly skeletal branches appear to be holding the antler man’s naked body aloft, her “strange fruits” dangling from her like tassels from an over coat. The trunk appears bloated and distended.
This final burning also bears burns of a different sort to the others. The final newspaper clipping in the bundle of documents reveals that the town of Gander was burned to the ground by a fire of unknown origin. Grainy photographs depict what’s left of brick and mortar buildings, and the charred skeletons of buildings.
Buildings, not people.
And not Mother Willow.
No one from Gander, West Virginia was ever seen or heard from again.
Unless you count the pages of their diaries that I give to you now.
I’m sitting with my whiskey, watching the sun set now. I love the colors of the fall, that burnt orange that makes one think of crunchy corn stalks and cider. Now as I look out on it I can’t help but think of death and winter.
I wasn’t completely honest when I said that the wood burnings were the only things I left in the package across the room. There was actually one more thing I left in there, because the more I think about it, the more I despise that loathsome setting sun.
The final thing left in the package is the diary of Dorothy Miller, and its last page is the final words of the citizens of Gander, West Virginia. As far as epitaphs go, it’s on the short side.
But short or not, it gets the job done.
February 15th, 1836,
Rejoice! She has a son!
I was sitting in my office reading about irrigation trenches in turn of the 20th century (I know, fascinating stuff, but it’s not all the Battle of Thermopylae) when my TA came in and tossed a bound package on my desk. There it sat for a week or so, one of many things to get to in an increasingly hectic schedule. I remember I was getting ready to leave one night, I think my jacket was already in my hand, when it caught my attention. The browned canvas of the package instantly got me thinking of Indiana Jones, like the location of the Arc of the Covenant could be decoded from its contents.
It had that kind of bearing to it.
So I sat back down and opened it up, and was instantly intrigued by the stacks of old bound booklets it contained inside. Written on the outside was “Gander, West Virginia, 1835-36.”
Okay, so maybe not the earth shattering discovery I’d hoped for, but still, an exciting find that I was looking forward to diving into.
And so I began to thumb through the pages. Then I began to read. And then I began to really read. By the time I finished, it was 9am and I was yelling for my TA and demanding he tell me where he found that package. The kid was a lerpy undergrad with beard stubble and thick glasses, and he flinched as I barked at him to spill the beans, but all he could manage was that it had showed up in the in box and that he just didn’t know. I told him he could go, and he asked me if I wanted coffee. Of course I did.
Now I’m sitting here, staring at the dusky corners of my office, as brilliant September light pours in from my sliver of a window.
And I start writing this.
I find that writing helps me work out ideas, and come to some greater truth about the nature of things. I really hope it works this time, because I can barely type, my hands are shaking so bad.
So.
Let me tell you the story of Mother Willow.
On Friday, March 20, 1835, the first day of Spring, the citizens of Gander, West Virginia awoke to find that in the night a fully developed tree had grown straight through the road in the center of town, smack in the middle of Main Street and County Road.
It grew right through the brick as if they were laid around it, as it is depicted in a photograph contained in the file. The grainy, black and white image depicts three men and one boy standing around a tree with long, looping branches and roots than coil up and out like piles of electrical cables, and then disappear into the cracks of the brick. The citation for the photo reads The Gander Gazette, with caption, “Photograph Property of the Gander Gazette, Friday, March 20 1835 issue, Story Entitled “Curiouser & Curiouser!” Pictured (L-R): Mayor Thaddeus Clancy Mueller, Constable Reginald White, Doctor Eustice Ottoman, Eustice Ottoman Jr.”
The Mayor, oldest of the men, wears a black tail coat, and stands clutching the lapel of his jacket, peering towards the photographer. The Constable has his hands on his hips and stands close beside him. They’re the typical photograph specimens of antiquity, severe and stoic. The other two, however, display an uncharacteristic lightness in their depictions. The doctor, a mustached man with his sleeves rolled halfway up, holds his young son on his shoulders. The boy’s face is distorted, so it’s difficult to tell, but you can see that he was most likely laughing. One wonders what must have been going through their heads at such an unlikely occurrence as the tree, but one look at Eustice Jr’s smudged face suggests that they had no idea what was in store for them.
After the initial surprise, Gander enjoyed a small period of fame and a short economic boom, as visitors from neighboring counties would travel to see “Mother Willow”, as it had been deemed. The newspaper article is quick to point out that this name is a misnomer, and that Mother Willow wasn’t actually a willow at all. Nobody was quite sure what it was, only that its long, hair-like leaves and twisted branches most closely resembled those of a Weeping Willow.
More unclear is where the “Mother” bit came from. No one is officially credited with coining the name, and a newspaper clipping from April 3rd mentions that the name had been thrown out by someone, and that it had stuck. Normally that would be that. When I first started reading I didn’t think much about it. After all, one name is as good as another, right? But by the end of the tale I wondered about the person that named the tree so early on. What did they know? Why of all names was this the one that stuck? This remains one of the more disturbing questions I ask myself as I try and organize the puzzle pieces to this mystery.
You’ll see what I mean soon enough.
Regardless, by midsummer, the excitement had more or less died down, and Mother Willow just one more bit of local color. Some later photographs even depict it with notices and fliers tacked to its gnarled trunk. A regular stable of the community.
But then harvest season came.
As the days grew longer and colder, it became apparent that there was something wrong with the crops. By piecing together details from two different journals contained within the file, as well as a Farmer’s Almanac I managed to find in the stacks, nearly every cabbage, every pumpkin, every stalk of corn was shriveled with some unknown blight. It occurred to the complete surprise of everyone, who in generations of working the land had never experienced anything like it.
What’s more, with the aid of the aforementioned Almanac and Google Maps, I was able to view the area where Gander used to be. I marked the areas where the crops had failed on a printed map, and was shocked to see that the afflicted area made up an almost perfectly circular radius around the town of Gander.
And what lay in the dead center of it.
Now what happens next is both less and more well documented than the previous information. While there’s very little official information, like that found in The Gander Gazette, which until now has been the primary source with which I write this, there are a few diaries, journals, and even three horrible wood burnings that depict what happened next.
The first thing that happens is a large amount of food is purchased as larder for the approaching winter. As I said, the town experienced some success with the first appearance of Mother Willow, and had some insurance against shortages.
The second thing that happens is more disturbing.
Now I pause here to mention that in every civilization, from two hundred years ago to two thousand years ago, there are busy bodies. They’re one of the vital characteristics of societies and they don’t seem to be going anywhere.
Fortunately, this means is we get some very interesting perspectives on the goings on from different perspectives.
In that fall of 1835, an unprecedented gruesome event occurred in Gander.
I am not being intentionally vague, because I honestly don’t know what happened. More surprising, the citizens themselves seem to be unsure.
Agnes Sagat, a young woman that lived on Bleacher Street, said that a man named Cobb Smith had murdered a young girl out in the woods and thrown her body into a river. She goes on to describe that her father was one of the men in the posse that eventually tracked him down and brought him back to town.
Another account states that Cobb Smith himself was the victim of a drunken argument gone wrong, and that his killer had staved his head in with a wooden yoke. The unnamed man was restrained and jailed.
Still another account suggests that Constable White (remember him from the photo?) had organized some kind of a coup against Mayor Mueller, and had led armed men into the court house, where a bloody gun fight ensued rendering both Constable and Mayor dead.
Regardless to which story you choose to believe, we do know that at least one man was hung that fall, and where do you suppose he was hung from?
And from there things get odder.
Between October and January 1936, there was a documented seventeen hangings in Gander, West Virginia. Bear in mind, public hangings had gone out of vogue about half a decade before hand. It is odd to see one. It is unheard of to see seventeen in three or four months. And each time the scaffold was the same.
So you’ve got a mysterious tree that grows out of the ground overnight, a blight, some unheard of panic in an otherwise peaceful rural town, and then suddenly the larder goes up in flames. Some say it was an accident, some say it was sabotage, but whatever the case, Gander was now in the teeth of winter, and their entire stock of food was gone.
Now this isn’t necessarily the end of the world. Winters even today can be rough without adequate supplies, but the people of the town had options. They could have sought aid from neighbors, even gotten a government bail out if they had to.
But they didn’t.
They hung more people.
And they started to get up to stranger things.
From the diary of Dorothy Miller:
January 28, 1836,
I strolled through town today to admire The All Mother and Her strange fruits. For many an hour and many a day I have basked in the shade of Her many arms and communed on the sweet Sacrament that drippeth from Her branches. But today as I looked upon Her body that is the Highest, I see a swell that has made Her plump and I feel my own heart swell with joy. Could it be that our Mother has become heavy? Could it be that our Great Mother has quickened? I positively vibrate with ecstasy that boarders on mania!
So there’s that.
And then there’s the other things.
My desk is cluttered with the journals, notes, and most every other piece of information of this story. Only one part is missing. I put a set of three wood burnings back in the package and placed it on the other side of the room. I’ve started to drink a little bit because, frankly, they scare the living shit out of me, and I don't mind admitting it.
Whoever made them is clearly a master craftsman, and that is not a compliment in this case. The level of detail, the emotions depicted will stay with me even if I finish this Glenlivet, which I’m more than half done with.
Okay.
Here we go.
The first burning depicts the towns people of Gander, torches in hand, standing around Mother Willow. There are four naked prisoners already hanging from the branches, with the rotten bodies and skeletons of dozens of others among them. A man wearing deer antlers on his head is fitting a noose around a final prisoner’s neck. The look on the man’s face is, simply put, ghastly.
He wants to be up there.
The second burning depicts the towns people standing around the tree again, this time holding hands in what seems to be some kind of a hymn. The antlered man appears as well, only this time he has a bloody scourge raised in a hand at a group of women walking in a circle around Mother Willow. It appears that their entrails are nailed to the tree’s trunk.
They want to be there.
The final image shows Mother Willow in all her horrible majesty. Her spindly skeletal branches appear to be holding the antler man’s naked body aloft, her “strange fruits” dangling from her like tassels from an over coat. The trunk appears bloated and distended.
This final burning also bears burns of a different sort to the others. The final newspaper clipping in the bundle of documents reveals that the town of Gander was burned to the ground by a fire of unknown origin. Grainy photographs depict what’s left of brick and mortar buildings, and the charred skeletons of buildings.
Buildings, not people.
And not Mother Willow.
No one from Gander, West Virginia was ever seen or heard from again.
Unless you count the pages of their diaries that I give to you now.
I’m sitting with my whiskey, watching the sun set now. I love the colors of the fall, that burnt orange that makes one think of crunchy corn stalks and cider. Now as I look out on it I can’t help but think of death and winter.
I wasn’t completely honest when I said that the wood burnings were the only things I left in the package across the room. There was actually one more thing I left in there, because the more I think about it, the more I despise that loathsome setting sun.
The final thing left in the package is the diary of Dorothy Miller, and its last page is the final words of the citizens of Gander, West Virginia. As far as epitaphs go, it’s on the short side.
But short or not, it gets the job done.
February 15th, 1836,
Rejoice! She has a son!