WVU Libraries

By Samatha Wade, WVRHC Graduate Assistant

The West Virginia & Regional History Center (WVRHC) holds many interesting artifacts and manuscripts within its collections. I tried finding interesting items myself, but because the collection is so large, it proved overwhelming. Instead, I turned to staff members here at the WVRHC who work with the collections every day in different ways and asked them to share their favorite item. The following histories are the result.

“Impersonator Russell L. Long, High Street, Morgantown, W. Va”- Lemley Mullett, Digital Collections Archivist

Census records for Morgantown documented Russell L. Long’s birthplace in Pennsylvania, 1889. By 1915, Long was living in Morgantown working as a glass worker. He was also a local impersonator.

A photo taken in 1918 during a Labor Day Parade shows Long dressed as Charlie Chaplin. It’s on this photo Long wrote his “first impersonating of Chaplin was with the Dixy Theater on Hight Street.”

Lemley chose to show the photo below, where he was dressed as Charlie Chaplin on stilts. This photo is dated 1933, standing outside Oppenheimer’s Kuppenheimer Good Clothes store, a popular brand in the 1920s. Long wrote, “My construction of my stilt and the foot pivot is my own invention and makes it possible for me to move with comparative ease being a mechanical tall-man the hours I perform on them.” Long was on these stilts for 3-4 hours. In 1948, Russell L. Long portrayed Charlie Chaplin in the Morgantown Labor Day parade.

In 1967 he “donned the garb of the Revolutionary period and paraded the city streets” in honor of George Washington’s birthday sale sponsored in Morgantown. Long died in Morgantown, 1972.

Pickaxe and Auger – Bridget Jamison, Instruction and Public Services Archivist

Coal miners are a prominent part of West Virginia history, and the WVRHC houses numerous collections relating to coal mines, mining, and coal miners. The J. Davitt McAteer Papers regarding Mining Safety collection includes mining tools. Among them is an auger and pickaxe.

Coal mining in West Virginia can be recorded as early as 1810 at a mine near Wheeling. The industry grew with the introduction of railroads. In 1940, West Virginia reached peak employment in mines. In this same decade, auger mining, a surface mining method, was introduced.

Handheld augers, like the one shown above, are used to drill into a coal seam and extract coal on the screw bit. Before this, however, pickaxes were the most common tool used in mining to break up and excavate coal. While modern machinery and legislation have advanced mining, the mining profession remains dangerous.

A collection of English proverbs, digested into a convenient method for the speedy finding any one upon occasion, John Ray,1678 – Rigby Philips, Rare Book & Print Collections Archivist

The book features English proverbs like “Be not a baker if your head be of butter” and “It’s easie to bowl downhill.” These are only a sample of the funny lines found in the book. John Ray, educated at the University of Cambridge, was a Fellow of the Royal Society and known for his work in botany, zoology, and natural theology. The copy in the WVRHC’s collection is a memorial gift from the library of Stephen Fuller Crocker. Crocker was a professor of English at WVU from 1931 to 1963, and a native West Virginian born in Wheeling, 1898. He passed not long after he retired in 1969.