City View

One Response to City View

1. Dodie (Smith) Browning says:

   December 11, 2011 at 12:08 pm

   Seeing the pictures of City View where I spent most of my childhood makes me cry. My childhood home is still standing on top of the hill and thankfully is not as run down as the houses near the bottom of the hill.

   Most folks do not realize the rich history of this region. City View overlooks the area where some of the first settlers cleared the land and built their cabins when our nation was in its infancy. From the top of City View, you can see where the very first white child (William Anderson Dingess) was born to his parents, Peter and Sallie (Farley) Dingess. You can see where our Thompson ancestors, Patton & Judy (Farley) Thompson called home (Ellis Addition). I would bet that Patton Thompson hunted game where City View is located and probably sat on those same Big Rocks where I sat many times as a child. Patton died by August 1814, so that would have been 200 years ago that our ancestor Patton Thompson lived there and hunted in those hills that later became “City View Hill”.

   The house where the blue jeep is in the yard is where I grew up. If the roof was clean and house freshly painted, it wouldn’t look much different, except that when we lived there, there were banisters around the front porch, a swing hanging on the left side of the porch, and beautiful blue morning glories climbing up the banisters all the way to the roof. The house is larger than it looks in the picture, because like most, it was built on the side of the hill and had a basement as well as two bedrooms and a bathroom downstairs.

   We owned the vacant hillside lot next door and that was where our clothes lines were and where my mother had a beautiful well tended garden and flowers everywhere you looked. From our back porch (we had two of them, one downstairs and one upstairs off the kitchen), you could see almost all the way to Mount Gay on the right and the entire city of Logan and the Backbone on the left.

   The gray building trimmed in red next door, perhaps a garage, sits on the property where the grand parents of Roger Gertz, a national award winning coach at Logan High School lived, long before Roger’s parents Fred and Margie even met each other.

   The largest home on the hill (just below our house) was the home of Paul “Rink” Hefner, former coach at Logan High, and his wife, Becky and children Susan and “Lucky”. The Hefners moved in the 1940s and Monie and Hobart Young purchased the house. It is the house in the picture with the large deck overlooking the city of Logan.

   Thank you so much, Frank, for taking the time to drive all the way to the last house on top of City View so that I could see what sixty years (since I left City View) and the ravages of time has done to what was at one time a lovely well kept community. Many of the houses are close to being a hundred years old (built in the 1920s). At least the road is now blacktopped all the way to the top of the hill.

   I’m anxiously awaiting the pictures of the old cemetery at the end of the road, where I used to play as a child and especially the pictures of the BIG ROCKS, where we often hiked with a picnic lunch of PBJ sandwiches. We would sit on the rocks and could see Mud Fork, Cherry Tree, Mount Gay, etc. and watch the trains hauling coal from all directions out of the various hollows of Logan County. Thank Goodness the mine companies have not destroyed the BIG ROCKS! That mountain and those rocks are the only things that have not changed.

   The author, Thomas Wolfe was right, “You can’t go home again.” We can, however, go home in our dreams and I send a special “THANK YOU, Frank, for this web site which allows us to share our memories of a different time and to keep those childhood memories alive. Our mutual ancestors, Patton Thompson and Judy (Farley) Thompson would be proud of you.

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