Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2019 - 19

COUNTRY ROADS

MOUNTAIN-CLASSIC BOOKS

'STORMING HEAVEN'
The Denise Giardina novel from the late '80s still rings true and strong.
"Every American should read 'Storming Heaven,' and
every lover of good books should know this masterful
writer's voice. Anything I read after this will never be
as important."
- Caroline Chute, author,
"The Beans of Egypt, Maine"
Raised in a West Virginia coal camp, Denise Giardina writes with beauty and passion about railroad
and coal company exploitation in early 20th-century Appalachia.
Told by four rotating first-person narrators-
among them a coal-camp nurse, a union organizer,
and an Italian miner's wife-"Storming Heaven"
follows the fate of West Virginians whose lives were
overtaken and destroyed by coal companies. It's got

everything you want in a compelling novel: catastrophe, love, and loss; birth and death; war and a
journey home.
With the miners' unionization struggles culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain at the core of
Giardina's novel, the question for the curious reader
is simply this: who will survive, and at what price?
And the title? One character puts it this way
when pressed to define Heaven: "'Heaven is this
here. Hit's all these men together, and you, and
knowing this here is the way we was meant to do.
But it only lasts a minute. Then hit's gone.'"
That's how it is with this novel-it's over too
soon, and the glimpse of Heaven is as real as it gets.
-JOAN VANNORSDALL

Virginia's Belle Grove Plantation Barn Transformed

JOE TENNIS

ine years of dreaming and
planning led to the restoration of a century-old barn at the
historic Belle Grove Plantation
near Middletown in Frederick
County, Virginia, just off the
historic Valley Pike (US-11).
But, this is more than a barn.
It's now the Beverley B. Shoemaker Welcome Center-with a
museum, gift shop and 150-person event space suited for dinners, gatherings and educational
The bank barn at Virginia's Belle Grove Plantation is now
programs, says Kristen Laise, the
the Beverley B. Shoemaker Welcome Center.
executive director of the Belle
Grove Plantation.
The timber-framed barn belonged to the Brumback family, which owned Belle
Grove in the early 20th Century. This family, Laise says, is what helped save Belle Grove
as a historic shrine, touched by the Battle of Cedar Creek during the Civil War in 1864.
"And I really credit them as the first step in the preservation of our property," says Laise.
The 1918 barn's $1.2 million re-furbishing spanned less than a year; a dedication
was held in April 2019.
"It is a bank barn," Laise says. "So, on the lower-level, it was built into the bank. And
the upper level is accessible by a staircase and lift."
bellegrove.org
-JOE TENNIS

30 Years Ago

in Blue Ridge Country
"About 900 families, approximately 5,000 people, lived in what
is now the park. They would have
to move. Some of them didn't mind
. . . [but] about 170 families-tenants and those who couldn't afford
to buy new farms-were sent to
'resettlement communities' . . . it
sounds good on paper, but to take
someone and say, 'You have to
leave your home of three generations and live in this place because
the government says you have to' is
a human story of great tragedy."
-Charles Anibal, park naturalist
for Shenandoah
National Park,
speaking to writer
Tom Hill in Hill's
piece "The Skyline
Drive Turns 50,"
in the November/December,
1989 issue.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019

http://www.bellegrove.org

Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country - November/December 2019