
Ross & Laverna’s nearest neighbor was James Wesley “Jim” Headley, who lived almost in sight of their house.

Ross said that night he slept on the ground within two feet of where he had slept the night before. Sheridan said, “Boys, you must face the other way.” Then he rode up and down the line and waving his hat, he said, “Boys, where you slept last night you shall sleep tonight.” The soldiers yelled and shouted and threw their hats in the air, quickly got in formation, “faced the other way,” and soon the Confederate army was retreating in a run. He jumped on his black horse, and when he met his army the black horse was almost white with lather. Sheridan heard the shots in the hotel at Winchester, twenty miles away. The soldiers did not have any faith in the under-generals, but they fought a while, then started slowly retreating and soon they were “dog trotting”, as Ross always said, or slowly running. Some under-generals called the army into formation and ordered them to march to meet the enemy. Sheridan was at Winchester, Virginia, twenty miles away at a hotel in conference with some other northern generals. The soldiers were preparing to eat breakfast, and he was making some coffee for his canteen when their scouts gave the alarm that the Confederates were coming to attack them. Ross said the army was in camp for the night on a ridge of a small hill. When Irvin was a little boy, he always enjoyed having him relate that account, first hand, of Sheridan's ride. Sheridan and was present at Sheridan's ride. Ross joined the Home Guards, but he said about every day the Home Guards were called out to arrest someone, and often they were neighbors and friends so he became disgusted with doing that and volunteered in the Army of the North and served all through the Civil War. Shortly after they bought the farm, the Civil War began. In the spring and autumn when the weather was too cold to not have any fire and not cold enough to have a fire in the living room, they would build a fire in the kitchen chimney. His brothers, "Bub" and "Wes" as he called them were gone by then.ĭuring the cold winter days they always sat around the log fire in the living room, but we also had a small fireplace in the kitchen.

When the new room was built in front of the house, their son C. Two beds were in the rear bedroom for MAry Ann & Emma Jane, and three beds upstairs for the boys. There was a bed in the corner of the living room by the fireplace, and that is where Ross & Laverna slept. She did succeed in getting him to buiuld a partition through the living room, and make a bedroom out of the rear part. Laverna always wanted Ross to build a frame room in front of the house, but he did not do it until their son, C. They lived in a log house, with a frame shed kitchen built at the rear of the log house and a long porch in front of the house. Irvin Elder, and also their death records and a reading of the Lemasters (aka Tennant) Cemetery.

The following information comes from the book, "Look to the Hills," and auto-biography of their son, C. Most of the families on the Lemasters and Headley Fork's of Walnut Fork were related, as the land was settled by Elisha Headley (Headley Fork) and on the Lemasters Fork settled Rawley Lemasters and wife, Jerusha (Headley) Lemasters (Elisha's sister, Laverna's parents), and Enoch Lemasters (brother to Rawley) and wife Sarah (Headley) Lemasters (sister to Elisha & Jerusha).

Ross and Laverna set up housekeeping in the head of Headley Fork, a branch of Walnut Fork, which drains into Indian Creek, a tributary of Middle Island Creek, the longest creek in West Virginia not to be called a river.
