Martinsburg to celebrate 200 years this weekend

Compared to today, there wasn’t much in Southern Indiana in 1816, when the state was first founded. The land that would become Southern Indiana was considered a wilderness, with American Indians, wild animals and terrain wholly unfamiliar to those coming from the east coast and Europe.

Nearly 10 years before that, Henry Wyman settled on the southern edge of what would be Washington County. In 1814, a family of brothers — Abner, John, Lewis and James Martin — moved to the area and a small town, named after Dr. Abner Martin, was formed.

Martinsburg began as a village with 80 lots, then 122, then more as businesses began to start and the community grew around it. Mills, grocery stores, a church, a school, a blacksmiths shop, a creamery and ice house, a clothing store, a saloon at some point — it became a central hub for area farmers and their families for both business and pleasure and, by all accounts, a great place to grow up and grow old for people living in the town proper.

“I’ve always said Martinsburg before the tornado was as close to Mayberry as you’re going to find,” said Tom Hein, who grew up in the town. “… As kids, I lived a mile out of town and you could ride your bike over here and — my grandparents lived here, so — you spend all day here. Everybody was related to one another, everyone knew everyone’s business and nobody cared. From the way it was, it was like Mayberry.”

“Martinsburg was always a giving town, though,” said Phil Marshall. “If you look at the ‘57 flood of Fredericksburg, Martinsburg packed up the fire trucks and went down to help pump out basements, working I don’t know how many days. If there was a fire in town, the women would gather up clothes or anything the family needed and take those things to the family. If there was a death, there was more food than you can imagine.”

Several people at a meeting of the Martinsburg Betterment Committee remembered those “good old days” as they were planning the town’s 200th birthday party, which will be held next month.

Marshall, Craig Martin and Hein sat around a table in the Lions Club meeting room, recounting their memories of growing up in Martinsburg. There were the various stores and mills, the basketball court and stage on the second floor of the Durnil’s store and Bright’s dentist office.

“When I was a kid, running around town, his was a single building home and there was a window on the backside that swung out, and behind that window, there was a pile of false teeth,” said Marshall. “He would make false teeth, but when I was a kid, and you were walking through when Doc would be making them, if he made a mistake, that window would come open and he’d say, ‘Damn!’ and I thought, ‘My God, you’d go to hell for that!’ He would throw ‘em right out the back door. That pile of teeth scared the tar out of me.”

The general and grocery stores were gathering places for the town, especially on Thursdays.

“Business was usually good, Thursday being the “busy day,” when farmers brought in their butter, eggs and poultry,” writes Lennie R.(Martin) Berkey in her history of the 1920s and 30s in Martinsburg. “I was afraid to handle the chickens and disliked pumping coal oil out in the oil room, from which went down steps to the blackest, rough-floored windowless cellar in the world. One had to have a candle to see in it even in the daytime. Uncle John fell in once on his stiff hat to the amusement of us kids!”

The store owners would take the two- or three-day trip to New Albany and trade these items for shoes or clothing or the various things the farmers wanted.

“My grandmother [Dorothy Hein] never went shopping,” said Hein. “They went ‘tradin’’ She grew up this way. They rarely exchanged cash.”

“I remember going to school and then to Billy Martin’s store for a baloney sandwich or a hot dog,” said Patsy Hein, Tom Hein’s mother. “They had the hotdogs on this machine that went around and around. I have that machine at my house. We’d get some candy and then go back to school.”

She said her family brought chickens and eggs to the store to be traded (their milk was picked up instead of them having to bring it to the store), picking up other items when the store owners returned from New Albany.

She remembers vividly the picnic at Grimes Grove Park, where her grandparents sold lemonade at the food stand. There was the gazebo for entertainment and the Martins would bring displays of appliances and tractors from the store. 

“The games were just small fair-type things, like the ring toss and horseshoes,” she said.

The picnic morphed into the fish fry that continues to this day.

Marshall remembered a man, Lilburn Mott, who was known for telling stories.

“We were sitting around this old wood stove and Jerry Elrod asked how far back we could remember,” said Marshall. “We talked about our grade school days and Lilburn always wanted to one-up people. Lilburn said, ‘I remember the night I was born. I came out and snowflakes was just comin’ down!’ I think he was born in July.”

“He’d sit on his stool, drink his Coke, smoke his cigarettes and wave at every vehicle that went by up and down the road,” said Martin.

“He was the kind of guy who knew everything, but wouldn’t reveal anything,” said Marshall.

“One of the best euchre players there ever was,” said Martin. “He taught us all how to play.”

“All the kids liked him,” said Hein. “He died in 1990. I was in Europe at the time and I remember getting the letter.”

The little community’s place away from larger towns like Salem didn’t mean there wasn’t anything to do. Churches held revivals throughout the year, summers were full of picnics, the fall brought trick-or-treaters for Halloween parties, and in winter at Christmastime, churches would put on shows and the town held a Christmas party, first at the school and then at the firehouse.

“The United Brethren church was placed in a poor location …” recalls Berkey. “The members often considered moving it, but never did … Best of all, I loved the Christmas entertainments. The Church of Christ people would not have anything of the sort, but our parents let us take part in the U.B. exercises. We practiced songs, drills and speeches … You have heard me tell how one dark night, coming home from practicing at the church, I hit my head on Uncle Will’s hitching post. I howled and wailed, to the disgust of the rest of the crowd, and they ran off and left me. When I came to the little bridge along the plank walk, they jumped out and scared me! When the great night of the entertainment came, we wore white dresses and our hair in long curls. O, what a time!”

The town held pie baking contests, where ladies would bake pies and hope a young man they were sweet for would buy it and the couple would share it. Hein said Martinsburg was known for being good cooks and bake sales would frequently sell out. The Friendly Circle, a Martinsburg women’s club, put out a cookbook Hein said is still frequently used today.

“It’s home. I’ve never known anything else. I’d never live in the city. I was born a mile from here that way,” Patsy said, pointing one way down the road outside the Lions Club building, “and moved a mile that way later. I’ve always lived two miles from where I was born.”

Marshall lives in his grandparents’ house. Hein lives in his great-grandparents’ house.

“It was a great place to grow up and a great place to retire to,” said Hein. “We could take those values wherever we went and you can’t beat small-town values.

It was the kind of place where neighbors were free to come into your home at any time. Hein remembers when Marshall’s mother could be found, chatting with “Ma” McPheeters in his grandparents’ kitchen before they were even up in the morning. No one locked their doors. People left their keys in their cars.

Change came slowly to the little town, which was finally connected to electricity in the 1940’s and water in 1969. Unlike many places, according to Lois Marshall Greene, the internet came to the town in the 1990’s, before cable TV in 2000. The speedy way the world moved around Martinsburg impacted the town, specifically the businesses and by the 1960s, only a few businesses remained, including the Marshall’s Grocery Store, a woodworking shop, broiler houses and the still-standing Billy Martin’s Store, which has been in operation since 1859.

Martin said there’s still three residents he remembers from his childhood living in Martinsburg.

If there was an event that changed Martinsburg the most, it was a tornado in 1974.

“The tornado changed everything,” said Hein. “The culture, the fabric of the town.”

“It was the turning point in everyone’s lives,” said Martin.

The F4 or F5 tornado destroyed much of the town, but only took the life of one person, Janice Whitson. Martin remembers being in school when the storm hit.

“There was no doppler radar, but we had a tornado drill that morning when we got to school and I was in the seventh or eighth grade then and remember we had another drill later that day around 2:45,” he said. “I remember sitting in the lockers five miles away and watching hail the size of baseballs over in Pekin. Then, they said a tornado had touched down about five miles from the school, so they were holding the buses.”

As they were going home that day, halfway between Martinsburg and Pekin, Martin said a woman stepped onto the bus and whispered something to the driver. He watched as emergency vehicles rushed past and prepared to get off at the next stop.

“Barry Hazelip just happened to be on his way home from IGA Food in Salem,” he said. “I stopped him and said, ‘We need to get to Martinsburg.’”

They walked from the top of the hill outside Martinsburg, past lines of cars driven by people anxious to know what had happened to their town or to see the damage.

“The first thing I see is the store with the top story gone,” said Martin. “We couldn’t really see the house. Mom went through it. She was sitting in the car with my nephew from Tennessee.”

The roads on either side of town were blocked. Marshall said Brigadier General Jack Elrod, a son of Martinsburg, had the National Guard in town by 6 p.m. and they stayed to prevent looters as the townsfolk picked through what was left of their lives.

“We started going house to house right after it happened,” said Marshall. “Maude Heistand on the side street, was trapped in her home. It was an old tin-roof house and it collapsed. We were walking by and someone called out, ‘Help!’ She had crawled under this old, heavy table and we got her out. She didn’t really have any scratches on her.”

Hein was on a different school bus, which made it to the quarry, but couldn’t go any further. He said grandparents came and walked them to their home on the south side of town.

“It’s just like it is today when natural disasters strike,” said Martin. “All the neighbors, friends, the community, township and county all come together. That’s how it was back then. So many people came to the rescue.”

Marshall said no one was trying to salvage copper or anything like that. They just wanted things cleared away so they could move on with their lives. Local farmers and construction companies brought in trucks and equipment to excavate and shift debris. HUD, now FEMA, brought in trailers for temporary housing and very few, if any, were living within the city limits. There was no electricity or water for two weeks or more after the tornado as they did what they could to rebuild and keep the town on the map.

In the end, all but two families returned to the town after the storm.

“I miss the older homes with the wraparound stone porches, Victorian-style homes, the old stores, the mill, the schools,” said Martin. The tornado obliterated much of the structures in the town. Marshall said a lot of the debris from those structures are buried over the hill from the Lions Club building.

Because of the destruction and rebuilding, modernization came to Martinsburg. The town didn’t look quite so much like Mayberry anymore.

“It just doesn’t have the same feel,” said Hein. “There were a lot of older people who lived here when we were growing up. People lived here forever. It changed them because when you’re 80 years old and you’re losing your home or your parents’ home you grew up in, what do you do? Do you rebuild? Live in a HUD trailer? Move in with your children? I think the whole flavor, so stable and stately before, the whole culture and environment just changed, not just for the younger kids, but the older generation as well. I think some of them have never recovered from it.”

Marshall said, after the tornado, which changed the appearance and feel of the town so much, you could have changed the name of the town. Martinsburg as it was known before was more or less gone.

“The town isn’t the same, but the people still are,” he said.  

Something else the tornado took was the trees.

“One thing I always liked about growing up here was it was like a tunnel going up through Martinsburg,” said Martin. “All the trees that overhung the street … all the way up to the strawberry patches.”

“As kids, we didn’t get many strawberries picked, but we sure had fun throwing them at each other,” said Marshall.

Still, very few people left the town, holding on to the community they loved and working hard to turn it back into something they could love still.

The birthday party on September 22 will not just be a celebration of the town, but of the spirit that kept it alive.

The event will start at 9 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 22, and run until 9 p.m. Historic photos will be on display, along with a yard sale, food and vendor booths, games, a silent auction, horse-drawn covered wagon rides, a baby contest, live entertainment and a special presentation on the history of Martinsburg. 

“It’s been amazing, planning this,” said Hein. “When we started planning, we wondered if anyone would come, but people who went to school here are coming back, people from all over are saying they’ll come.”

Organizers are still looking for vendors and food booths. Prizes will be awarded for the oldest visitor, youngest visitor and the one who came the furthest.

“The heart of Martinsburg will come alive, hopefully with beautiful September weather,” said Martin.

The Betterment Association will be selling Martinsburg cemetery books, first published in 1975 and now, finally, updated. Call Janice Martin at the Billy Martin Store from 8 to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, at 812-967-3997 for more information or to reserve your spot on the order list. Hardback books are $35 and spiral-bound books are $20. T-shirts will be for sale at $15 for youth, small, medium and large, and $20 for plus sizes. The Association will also be selling bricks for a memory walkway for $100 a brick.

“To me, Martinsburg is my heritage, me being a Martin,” said Martin. “We’ve had the store for five generation. Instead of going off to school, I picked up the store. I just love the Martin heritage and I’m looking forward to our celebration.”

“To me,” said Marshall. “I don’t think I could have been raised any better.”

“There couldn’t have been any better place to be raised than Martinsburg,” said Hein.