Friends of The Second Creek, Inc. (FOTSC) will hold their spring quarterly meeting Sunday, July 19 at 2 p.m. at Salem Presbyterian Church, Organ Cave. The church is the third building at the site, built in 1912, with the church being chartered in 1860.
FOTSC strives to preserve history and water in the Second Creek Watershed. Many projects are ongoing in this pursuit of preservation. Some of these projects are: 1) stream/water testing and documentation of the creek’s chemistry and flow, 2) educational projects concerning our watershed and “life” within our watershed, 3) collecting history of communities within the watershed, 4) cemetery surveys and documentation of cemeteries of the watershed, as well as restoration of Old Lebanon Cemetery, 5) oral histories and accompanying photographs of persons/families that have lived in the watershed and 6) collecting family genealogies as well as pictures.
Organ Cave is a rural historically significant area in West Virginia because of the early roads and turnpikes that met and crossed here. Horses could only pull a stagecoach for a few miles. At these stagecoach stops ostlers would change out the horses. Stagecoaches carried many people to and fro through this area to springs in the surrounding areas, as well as making the area available for travel to the East and to the West as the country was opening up. Organ Cave was extremely important during the Civil War because of the availability of salt peter for making ammunition for soldiers. In the early 1900’s Organ Cave was a place of social gatherings during the summer, as well as ice skating on Second Creek during the winter.
If you live or have lived in the Second Creek Watershed and would like to be interviewed for an oral history, please contact us. For this purpose the watershed has been divided up into four areas: Gap Valley; Monitor, Sinks Grove and Pickaway; Glace, Hollywood and Second Creek; and Organ Cave to Mouth of Second Creek. We have compiled three oral history books and four more are in the making at this point. The oral history publications preserve those persons/families “time in space” in print so they may be enjoyed and shared with others for years to come. Each oral history is a treasure, a true gem.
All of Friends of The Second Creek meetings are open to the public and we invite anyone interested to attend. Meetings are held in different parts of the watershed during the year. We invite anyone interested in helping with any of these projects to join us. For further information please call 304-645-4229.