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"One of
the things that gives us the most pleasure is to have a family come
in and the father says, 'This is a place my dad used to take me.'
We get that over and over. It's so heartening. ...The store is a
rock in the middle, a place they know is going to be here."
- Gaynell Begley
"We ain't got
King Tut's tomb here, but I think it's pretty good." -
Joe Begley
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Today the C.B. Caudill Store houses
a huge collection of occupational history, a treasury of local relics,
and many natural wonders. C.B. Caudill had collected a few mining
artifacts, but it was Joe and Gaynell Begley who turned the store
into today's showplace. Many articles are family heirlooms, like
the spinning wheel Gaynell's grandmother used 130 years ago. Objects
like the lock from the old Blackey depot hark back to the town's
bustling 1920s.
Still other items, Time -- the ultimate
curator -- has invisibly turned from general merchandise to museum
pieces: hog rings and a can of mustard seed. The many tools here
reflect Joe's pride in the machinist's trade and the premium placed
on self-sufficiency. The breast auger, bean planter and cricket
cages displayed at the C.B. Caudill Store look antiquated and mysterious
to many visitors today; they're no longer necessities of life. Yet
with their obsolescence, the skills required to make and use such
things are withering, too.
"We've got people who can't drive a
nail. They don't even know what a claw hammer is. They can't change
a spark plug in a lawn mower," Begley said, dismayed. These objects,
most of them lovingly tagged with donors' names, are also memorials
to Blackey's elders. "It's more than a relic to me," Joe said. "When
I look up here on the walls, I'm seeing a person that knew me and
I knew him:" Will Click, whose horse shoeing tools are here,
cobbler Bob Sizemore's iron lasts, a tobacco cutter donated by Viola
Stewart of Floyd County. Most overt are Joe's accounts of lost friends:
a roster of Blackey's deep miners, his list of "Anti-strip mine
people now dead."
The C.B. Caudill Store has become an
island of memory. Where people once stopped as customers, buying
and taking home what they needed, they now arrive as "guests," signing
in and donating whatever is worth saving: Indian marbles, a conch
shell, or pine knots. "Good friends of mine gave me these." Joe
said. "I've got their names on it, where they got it in 1972. Both
of 'em's dead now. These things was used to carry fire from one
home to the other back when it was hard to have matches."
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Each item in the store has a story
of its own. Our historic inventory includes: antique tools, old
photographs, mining memorabilia, political memorabilia, Native American
relics, glassware, old patent medicines, farm machinery, knives
and badges, newspaper clippings about Blackey and Appalachian region,
historical records and obsolete merchandise.
Click here
to see more of the items.
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