Primaeval Merryweather, or Blood, Sweat, and Beards

But what can we tell about ye olde Merryweather, its crawling from the slime, its first flowering--or maybe its starting over in some Wild West witness protection program?



Eleazar Meriwether



Merryweather came about in this wise.  Our little piece of paradise was originally the land claim of one Eleazar Meriwether, one of those small-eyed fellows with a huge beard, floppy felt hat, and a resistance to malaria who sprang out of the horizon in days gone by, a star-spangled daguerreotype who took advantage of the absence of any lawful authority to make himself chieftain-in-chief.

In the next generation, one of his semi-legitimate children (the moldy records in the Merryweather Historical Society basement suggest either Vercingetorix or Scipio Africanus Merriwether, his "wives" being Rebecca-Evangeline Littlesmall and/or Sophia Mewseyford) managed to lure the railroad to chug a choo-choo through town.  But the boom started in real earnest when Vercingetorix Merriwether (or maybe Scipio Africanus) looked the other way as the Freemasonic hazelnut and prune planters muscled out the good strong Methodist farming folk.  This also gave the local political machine a creaky giddy-up push (and it has been in motion ever since).

We do not know what this heir to Eleazar Meriwether thought as he contemplated the dark hills round about and the rows and rows of hazelnut and prune saplings running into the horizon.  But we certainly know what his children (Priscilla, Hiram, George, Isaac, Henry, Betha, and Augusta Merrywhether) and his forty-one grandchildren ended up with: a watercolor lithograph of Populist-Era prosperity and respectability, complete with blocks and blocks of books-in-the-black businesses, an agricultural college, an immense bronze fountain with the symbolic figures of the Prune Harvest and the lovers Corylus and Avellena, ultramodern architecture in the form of Arts and Crafts cottages, bubblers to stave off rampant drunkenness, and a boulevard lined with Queen Anne mansions and elm saplings.  (Saplings abounded in those days.)

That Silver Age took on a bit of tarnish when the railroad, the descending aortic artery of any thriving local economy in those days, took a beating from the automobile and the motorway.  (The city fathers of Merryweather (specifically, Edgar Edwin Merryweather) described state route 4 bordering the old Pringle prune ranch as a "significant highway," but no one quite bought it.)  Finally came the 1950s and the interstate, which never bothered to veer close to town, and Merryweather fell into small-town sleepiness, its slumber to be broken only by a kiss tasting suspiciously like Pinot Grigio.