Isaac Underwood
By Beverly Belcher Woody
Isaac Underwood was born in 1835 along Runnet Bag Creek below where Smart View Park is now located on the Blue Ridge Parkway. He was the oldest of the eleven children of Samuel and Rebecca Hollins Underwood. When Isaac was a toddler, the family moved near the headwaters of Rock Castle Creek. The Underwoods were originally Quakers from Bucks County, Pennsylvania who made their way to Patrick County, Virginia by way of Orange County, North Carolina. When Isaac’s great grandfather, Samuel Underwood married his great grandmother, Misiniah (a Native American woman) in 1764, Samuel was excommunicated from the Quaker church.
Isaac married Miss Mary Lourinda Finney on the 24th of March 1859. The wedding ceremony was performed by Elder Daniel Columbus Conner. The young couple set up housekeeping in a cabin that Isaac had built before the marriage. Isaac’s parents gave them an underticking and a quilt and Mary’s parents gave them a pig and a calf.
By the time the war began in 1861, the couple had a little boy, William Madison. Isaac gathered enough grain and meat to last for two years and hesitantly left his little family. He wrote that it was one of the hardest trials of his life, leaving his wife and baby exposed to all the elements of danger at home and he in the midst of cannons, bullets, swords, and disease. During the war, Isaac contracted typhoid fever, pneumonia, and smallpox.
Isaac miraculously survived and came home in 1865, but he was weak and sickly. He realized that he could not make a living by labor on the farm. He purchased a “camera and picture outfit” from New York and began traveling through southwest Virginia and neighboring counties of North Carolina making photographs of families and betrothed couples.
Over the years, Isaac and Mary had four more children, Exonia, Sarah, Martha, and Rosie. The couple purchased land and built a home near (what those of us born in the 60’s or earlier would remember) as Frank’s Place on Route 8 North in Stuart.
In 1894, at the age of fifty-nine, Isaac Underwood decided to write a memoir of his life. I am so grateful that he recorded his thoughts and experiences for all of posterity. Isaac was a deeply religious, thoughtful man, but one with a quick wit and great sense of humor. Isaac’s talent as a poet belied the fact that he had very little formal education. Several of his works were published in the local newspaper and in the “Poets of America.” The following are just a sample of Isaac’s writings that I think you will enjoy…
Isaac’s thought on women’s clothing: “The girls looked a great deal better back then, for they grew up in a natural shape, and were healthy and strong. They had not learned to shape up themselves around the waist with corsets to lap their rib bones together, thin and dwarf their middle, and let both ends grow as they do now. They never had any humps or bustles on their backs like muzzles on an ox to disfigure their shapes. Neither did they put a number six foot into a number four shoe as they do now, but let the muscles grow free from cramped up parts, and they grew up healthy.”
Isaac’s rules for house raising or log rolling: “If one wanted to raise his house or roll his logs, he took his guns and dogs a day or so beforehand and went out to invite his neighbors; some living from three to twenty miles away, hunting game as he went. And he often killed game aplenty to feed his neighbors handsomely when they came in to help him. Often taking a buck, a string of squirrels, and a wild turkey. When the day arrived for the work to be done, each helper arrived with his tools, his gun, and his dog. If he only lived three to ten miles away, he started out early to get there for his breakfast. If he lived farther away, he often started the day before, and hunted along the way. He was always expected there by the first meal despite the distance he had to come.”
Isaac’s school memories: “Our school houses were made of logs and the floor was more often dirt than anything else. The teacher sat back in a chair near the fire with a long switch in his hand, ready for battle if his orders were disobeyed in the least, looking as grim and dignified as any governor of state.”
Isaac compares threshing wheat and baseball teams: “Young men are getting up baseball clubs to develop muscles, but if they had to thresh out wheat with a stick and eat it as it was ground in those primitive mills, they would soon have muscles without resorting to athletic clubs. They would think their grandparents were raised very hard if they could see the methods of cleaning grain and grinding it then, but this was what made those old fellows live so much longer, for they had something to do all the time that developed muscles, and they ate more of the bran of their grain which also helped develop the brain.”
Isaac drew his final breath on the 23rd of September 1902; less than twelve hours earlier, he had given his cherished book of poetry and memoirs to his oldest child and only son, William. It is only fitting to close with an excerpt from one of Isaac’s poems… “Then to whom can we go for relief, amid fears that beset us in life; or who can we call on in grief, but the being that gave us this life. He’s the author of all that is great, the center of all that is blest; if his creatures will trust Him alone, He will assign them a future, at rest.”
(Thank you to Sandy Christman, the late Willie Bruce Underwood, and Shirlien Belcher for contributions to this article. Woody may be reached at rockcastlecreek1@gmail.com.)
