Some Families of Damascus, Virginia, Part VI

by Glenn N. Holliman


This is the sixth in a series of stories with photographs of  my great uncle and aunt, Dave and Pearl Osborne Wright and their many years of life in Damascus, Virginia.  Pearl is the grand daughter of Isaac and Caroline Greer Wilson of Ashe County, North Carolina.  As ever I am grateful to Phyllis Mink, daughter of Doris Osborne Akers,  Bob and Rob Adema, descendants of Gladys Osborne Adema and Geraldine Stansbery Holliman Feick, a niece of Pearl Osborne Wright and this writer's mother, for making many of the historical photographs available.

These stories and others are in Ancestry.com under the names of Dave Wright, Pearl Osborne and Bob Adema.

When one reads Louise Hall's history of Damascus, the feeling grows that Dave Wright was the all-around handy man for the village.  While a youngster, he played in the town brass band.  A hard worker beginning in 1901, he daily lit and cleaned the oil lamps downtown. From 1905 until his retirement in 1949, he 'was' the electric company, running the generators for the town.   
                                     

 Dave Wright as a boy who became  the  'electricity' person for Damascus 


The electric generator he operated was at the 'race' on Beaver Creek.  As the decades went by he continued to manage the larger and larger units, finally retiring from the Appalachian Power Company.

At the Emporium Hall, it was Dave, beginning in 1911, who ran the Westinghouse Movie Projectors.  When the Damascus Amusement Company built a movie hall in 1920, Dave, one of the owners, not surprisingly ran those movie projectors.

In 2011, Bob Adema, Dave Wright's great nephew observed Laural Creek where it merges with Beaver Creek, near the site where electricity was generated by his uncle for the town a century earlier.
                                                                        
And when a car taxi service started from Damascus to Glade Spring in 1912, yes, Dave was recruited to drive the new fangled automobiles.  The small rail road cart above, loaded with Damascus young people, soon gave way to the horseless buggy.