By William “Skip” Deegans
Shown above is an advertisement for an American Legion’s Fourth of July celebration at Bivens Hill Park in 1934. Named for the family that owned the park, it was located on U.S. Route 60 between Sam Black Church and Crawley. With a grove of majestic shade trees, it was a popular picnic area. It was also the site of a restaurant, tourist court and gasoline station.
The American Legion picnics and barbecues at Bivens Hill Park were big events and drew some 20,000 people. Detroit’s mayor Frank Murphy, the speaker at the 1934 event, was a rising star in the Democratic Party. He became governor of Michigan, U.S. Attorney General, and in 1940 President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was a noted advocate of the First Amendment, but took the position that all forms of speech are not protected: “…there are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which has never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or ‘fighting’ words – those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of speech.”
Note in the lower right hand corner of the advertisement that gold prizes would be awarded to the couple married at the event. Can any readers recall if their parents or grandparents were married at the Bivens Hill Park picnic and what was their prize?
Advertisement courtesy of the West Virginia Daily News.
Sources: The West Virginia News, Independent-Herald, Supreme Court Society, Middle Tennessee University.