Some Families of Damascus, Virginia, Part X

by Glenn N. Holliman


This is the tenth 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.

Above Bascomb Wilson Osborne rests his arms on his two daughters, Doris and Gladys Osborne who after their mother, Dora Kruger Osborne, died in 1922 were raised by Dave and Pearl Osborne Wright in Damsacus, Virginia. Bascomb Wilson is named after his mother's family, the Isaac Wilsons of Ashe County, Virginia.

To the right, Gladys Osborne (1914 - 1998) poses in Damascus, Virginia.  In the first quarter of the 20th Century, loggers stripped the mountains surrounding the valley village.  In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal created the Civil Conservation Corp which came to Washington County, Virginia and began to replant the forests and restore the streams.  One of the officers of the local CCC was a handsome young man named Howard Adema, a native of Buffalo, New York.  He met Gladys, sparks flew and they soon married.



Below, young Howard Adema, left, stands with his supervisor, Earl Watson, at the CCC camp in Damascus.  The year was 1935 and tens of thousands of young America men were building roads and parks in the national forests.

Seventy six years later, one of the sons of Gladys Osborne and Howard Adema, Bob Adema, visits the stairs and bench built by his father and the CCC at the Backbone in the National Forest just south of Damascus.

Next posting, more on the lives of a family in Damascus, Virginia....