Some Families of Damascus, Virginia, Part IX

By Glenn N. Holliman


This is the ninth 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.

One will find information on persons recorded here at Ancestry.com in the Gallery sections.

In Baltimore, Maryland in 1922, a young mother (right) named Dora Kruger Osborne died suddenly and unexpectedly.  She left her husband, Bascomb Osborne, a native of Ashe County, North Carolina and brother of Pearl Osborne Wright, with three young children.  Bascomb, devastated by the loss his wife, was not able to care appropriately for the son and two daughters.  Pearl and Dave Wright generously took them in and raised them as their own in Damascus, Virginia.

The oldest, Bascomb K. Osborne, born 1910, joined the U.S. Navy as an enlisted man in 1927, and rose to the rank of Lt. Commander by the time of retirement in the early 1950s.

The oldest daughter was Doris Osborne (1913-1980)
seen here on the right standing in front of the new high school which was finished in the late 1920s.  Doris would meet and marry a new chemist in town who eventually ran the Beaver Works, a chemical dye company.

Below is Elmer F. Akers, who courted Doris Osborne, won her hand, and together they raised a family in Damascus.