Note: GEORGE W. LAYMAN -- LILLIE MOOMAW FAMILY
by Patricia Prickett Hickin [pph29@mediaone.net] June 2000

When George William Layman (b.1862), a young Daleville merchant, married Mary Lillie Moomaw in January 1890, he did not give her a wedding ring. That was not in line with the "plain" tenets of the German Baptist faith to which they both belonged. Instead he gave her a gold watch.

Both Laymans (Lemmons) and Moomaws had moved into Botetourt Virginia by the early 1790s, the Laymans settling on Glade Creek east of the Blue Ridge, the Moomaws at Amsterdam. The Layman house is still standing. George Lemmon and Barbara Baumgardner may not have been Dunkards when they moved from Frederick County, Maryland, to Virginia, but in 1847 he gave land at present-day Rainbow Forest for the first Dunkard meeting house in Botetourt. Similarly George W.'s maternal grandfather, George Rieley, gave land for the first Dunkard church in the Blue Ridge area.

George's father, Lewis Gish Layman (1834-1916), was a well-educated man for his day. A teacher and successful farmer, he taught his own children at home for many years. George, the oldest of eight, then attended the Brethren-owned Ashland Business College in Ashland, Ohio. After college he worked in a Daleville store and became enamored of Lillie, who lived nearby and taught in a one-room school in the county (see Joseph Moomaw-Mary Stover Family). George bought a farm just south of Amsterdam, and they were married in January, 1890.

For fifteen years George farmed. Lillie gave birth to five children, only one of whom was a boy. George, who liked new technology and new enterprises, grew restless. He sold his Amsterdam farm to open a factory making tin cans for the booming tomato business. It was located along the railroad tracks at Troutville, near the railroad station. He bought a large frame house on a rise opposite the Troutville Baptist Church, acquired a fine carriage and a beautiful horse, Midnight. A few years later he bought one of the first cars in Troutville, a Rio, and Lillie stowed away her side-saddle in the loft of the barn that now became part chicken-house, part auto garage.

But tomato-growing was ruining the countryside, and ugly red gullies marred the once-beautiful hillsides. After a few years, George turned to banking and, when Democrats gained control of the White House, he also became postmaster at Troutville.

George wanted to be sure that both his son and his daughters were educated for a profession. Louis (b.1893), who wanted to be a lawyer like his uncle Cephas Moomaw , went to Washington & Lee for two years, then decided he preferred an outdoor life and transferred to the University of Michigan to study forestry. The following summer -1914- he was working in the lumber camps of Canada when war broke out in Europe. Louis - a lover of history - forsook his Brethren pacifist heritage and enlisted in the Canadian Cavalry. He liked the idea of seeing something of Europe. In 1916 -- a year before the U.S. entered the war -- he was killed at Ypres, Belgium, in the course of the Battle of the Somme.

George's three oldest daughters, Marie (b.1895), Genevieve (b.1897), and Pauline (b.1899) attended school at Troutville and at the Brethren-owned Daleville Academy and College. Marie and Genevieve, both musical, also studied music at Brandon Institute (Waynesboro) and Peabody Conservatory in (Baltimore). Pauline, who liked science and sewing, went to Harrisonburg Normal School. She was in their second Bachelor's degree class, receiving a Bachelor of Domestic Science degree in 1920.

All three girls taught after college -- Genevieve at White Gate, Giles County; Marie in the Shenandoah Valley and in Tennessee; Pauline in Salem and in West Virginia - then left teaching to marry: Genevieve to Joseph Graybill Kinzie, a Troutville farmer (1919Marie to Samuel Hill Yokeley, M.D., of Meadowview, Washington County (1922); and Pauline to Bluefield, West Virginia, insurance man Minter Jackson Prickett (1924). Grandchildren began arriving in the 1920s: Dorothy, Martha, Joseph, Jr., and (later)Virginia Kinzie, and Patricia Prickett. The Yokeleys had no children.

Dorothy (b.1903) followed a different path. From Troutville High School, she went to National Business College in Roanoke, completing the course in record time. At age 18, she went to work for Roanoke Drug Company. When McKesson & Robbins, the national wholesale drug firm, acquired it, Dorothy became accountant and office manager, the only woman to hold that position with the company. She remained single until she was in her mid-40s. In 1950 she married Thomas H. Cline, a widowed Roanoke tire dealer with one daughter, Sarah Cline Dabney.

When Republicans regained political control after World War I, George, a Democrat, lost his position as postmaster. He entered the real estate business in Roanoke - the rapidly-growing "Magic City." Lifestyles were changing fast: cars becoming commonplace and tires more reliable. Newly-built houses had central heating, powered by coal furnaces. George entered the coal business in Troutville. And Lillie, with her children all grown and away, sometimes rented extra bedrooms to local teachers, and fed them too. As cars began traveling up and down Route 11, George and Lillie decided to enter the tourist business. Rooms rented for $1 a night, garage for 25c; dinner could be had for $1, and breakfast for 50c.

But in the 1930s George's health began to fail. In 1931 his daughter Pauline (with granddaughter Patty) came home to assist with the coal and tourist businesses. In 1932 Minter decided that the depression was too severe in Bluefield and moved to Troutville to enter the insurance business in Roanoke. In August 1933, George died. For the next 10 years Pauline and Lillie continued to rent rooms to tourists and sell coal, until the gas rationing and price controls of World War II made it all too difficult.

Lillie, whom people frequently described as "wonderful" and "jolly," spent her last years enjoying the frequent visits of neighbors, family, and cousins, playing board games with children and grandchildren, and reading her Bible. In 1946 at age 83, she had surgery for a thyroid condition. A nerve was severed in the course of the operation. Six weeks later she was still in hospital with a tube in her throat but in good spirits and able to be up and about in a wheel chair, when she died suddenly and unexpectedly one morning of a heart attack.

SOURCES:

Botetourt County. Court Orders, Deeds, Wills, Deaths, Marriages.

U.S. Census. 1850. Botetourt County, Virginia.

Pauline Layman Prickett Papers. Genealogical notes, family pictures, newspaper clippings, 1874-1988.

Patricia Prickett Hickin, Joseph Kinzie, Jr., Virginia Kinzie Visser. Recollections.

Anon., "George W. Layman," in Bruce, P.A. et al., History of Virginia. (6 vols., Chicago, New York, 1924). IV:433.

Layman, Mary Nash. Layman, Leaman, Leamon, Leman, Lemon . . . Doylestown, PA, 1983.

Sappington, Roger E. The Brethren in Virginia. Harrisonburg, VA, 1973.