Cough remedies were numerous. Many made use of spikenard and elecampane. Virginia snakeroot was considered effective for coughs of all kinds. Another remedy consisted of a mixture of Indian turnip and honey, but many users believed that the Indian turnip must be scraped from the top down to be of any benefit. Also useful were teas, particularly those made from horehound or bear's-foot, the latter a superlatively bitter concoction that required a “good nerve” on the part of the consumer. Favorite treatments for inflammation of the chest included demulcent liquids and rubefacients. Comfrey, spikenard, sassafras pith, and slippery elm bark provided soothing drinks, and horseradish and mustard the poultices used to relieve difficulty in breathing.
Many pioneers considered childhood diseases inevitable and exposed their children to milder ones, such as chickenpox, as early as possible in the belief that the younger the victim the less severe the disease. Smallpox, however, held terror for old and young alike. Vaccination was used in some areas by the 1820s, but most sections lacked that protection, and many residents would have rejected it had it been available.
Annoying skin problems elicited remedies reflecting both common sense and superstition. The itch, a common affliction, usually responded to a mixture of sulfur and lard. Chapped lips might be cured, so it was said, by kissing the middle rail of a five-rail fence.
Pioneers often recognized that good health was related to proper diet, pure water, and clean air. They noted that flooding in the Ohio and its tributaries brought fever, probably typhoid. Never suspecting the mosquito, residents along the West Fork of the Monongahela opposed the erection of locks and dams in the stream in the early nineteenth century on the ground that they would create ponds of stagnant water that would exude vapors harmful to health. Henry Ruffner, president of Washington College, returned to a mountaintop farm in his native Kanawha Valley where pure air and physical activity might repair “a constitution broken by 30 years of constant labor in a literary institution.”2
Early doctors ranged from woefully ignorant and unprincipled quacks to men whose knowledge and skill matched those of the most advanced areas of the country. Wheeling, Charleston, Clarksburg, Morgantown, and populous towns of the Eastern Panhandle drew some of the most capable practitioners. Even the best physicians engaged in bleeding, a practice recommended by no less an authority than Dr. Benjamin Rush, the eminent Philadelphia physician and teacher. Joseph Doddridge declared that in many ailments the danger was not that the lancet might be used too freely, but too sparingly. Most communities lacked doctors but had men or women possessing some skill in the medical arts.
Persons whose means permitted patronized the numerous mineral springs of the state, including White Sulphur and Old Sweet Springs. Drinking or bathing in their waters may or may not have been efficacious, but the social seasons must have proved powerful psychological restoratives. Most residents, however, continued to rely upon familiar home remedies and patent medicines purchased at the country stores. They retained an honored place on many home medicine shelves long after other sources of medical attention had become available.
Superstition. Most pioneers brought into the mountains with them an accumulation of superstitions, many of them of European origin. Such beliefs long continued to influence the thinking and fire the imaginations of people in isolated sections, and some still survive. Given to the stories of love and tragedy, early settlers were almost inevitably attracted to tales of witchcraft and the supernatural. They often blamed strange happenings and incurable diseases, especially those of children, upon witchcraft. Accused persons never paid the supreme penalty, such as New England leaders meted out a century earlier, but some suffered sorely for their alleged activities.
Many superstitions concerned everyday occurrences. A black cat crossing one's path meant that bad luck would follow, but it could be averted by walking backward across the cat's path. Breaking a mirror entailed seven years of bad luck, unless the pieces were placed under running water, in which case the bad luck would last only seven days. A bird flying into the house was an omen of death. Such superstitions, as well as a belief in the special importance of dreams, served as constant reminders of the influence of supernatural forces. Far more exciting were reports of ghosts, and scarcely a family escaped some alleged experience with the occult.
The Role of Churches. Often closely related to belief in supernatural intrusions was the influence of religion in the daily lives of pioneers. Most accepted the basic tenets of Christianity and acknowledged the value of Christian principles, even though they might violate them in their own conduct.
Throughout the colonial period and until 1786, when the legislature accepted the principle of separation of church and state, the Anglican or the Protestant Episcopal Church, was the official religious establishment of Virginia. Yet for more than half a century, religious toleration had been extended to the trans-Allegheny country in order to promote settlement of the backcountry. There a variegated religious complexion prevailed. Along with Anglicans were large numbers of Presbyterians, Lutherans, German Reformists, Quakers, and Dunkers and scatterings of other denominations.
Isolation and the exigencies of prolonged frontier life eroded old denominational ties. Before the Revolutionary War few settlements had resident ministers, and most pioneers depended upon infrequent and uncertain visits by itinerant preachers for marriage, baptism, and funeral services. Recognizing their neglect, Moravian missionaries began as early as 1747 to visit settlers along the South Branch of the Potomac and Patterson Creek. There they emphasized the bounties of God's love and preached a doctrine of free grace that “tasted well” to their listeners. They usually refused, however, to perform marriages and baptisms for persons whom they did not know and thereby denied them two of the services they most desired of the church.
The weakening of existing church ties in West Virginia coincided with the Great Awakening, a religious revival that began in New England in the 1720s and swept southward during the following decades. The revival, which affected most denominations, stressed the importance of emotions and personal conversion over ritual and ceremony, the need for evangelical work in religiously neglected regions, and more itinerancy among ministers. Disruptive though it was, the movement proved highly invigorating by infusing new zeal into older denominations and providing the impetus to others that until then had attracted but few adherents. Already prepared by a profound piety and a blurring of doctrinal differences, West Virginians formed “the plastic material for the revivalist who found them receptive to a gospel which taught a direct personal relationship between Christ and the believer.”3
The Revolutionary War era gave religious dissent a respectability that it had not previously enjoyed in Virginia. Beginning in the 1770s, Methodists and Baptists especially, in successive waves of revivalism, reached out to the frontiers and gathered a harvest of souls. Within the next half century they gained a preeminence in West Virginia that they have never lost. In 1850 Methodists had 281 and the Baptists 115 of the 548 congregations in West Virginia. The Presbyterians trailed far behind with 61 congregations and the Protestant Episcopal, formerly the Anglican, Church had only 22. Older denominations such as the Quakers, Lutherans, German Reformists, and Dunkers were reduced to very small fractions of church members in the state.
The Baptists. Of the major denominations in present West Virginia, the Baptists were the first to gain a solid foothold. In 1743 they established the Mill Creek church at Gerrardstown, which was broken up during the French and Indian War but later revived and took the lead in forming the Ketocton Regular Baptist Association in 1765. Two New England ministers, Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall, who visited the Eastern Panhandle in 1754 with the intention of establishing a base for spreading the ideas of Separate Baptists throughout the South, encountered a chilly reception. Most listeners objected to their “animated” preaching, and they moved on to Sandy Creek, North Carolina, which in time became a center of Baptist influence in the South.
During the Revolutionary War Baptist ministers