Feature article
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Final course: Sauceman bids GTC readers adieu
By Fred Sauceman
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Note: This is my last column for GoTriCities. I want to thank the staff and management of the Times-News for generously providing me space, for the past six years, to tell the stories of some wonderful and fascinating people, through the common denominator of food. And I want to thank all of you who have read this column and have sent such inspiring comments my way over the years. I think it’s fitting to end with a story from the road. This one is taken from my brand-new book, just published by Mercer University Press in Macon, Georgia. The book is the third and final volume in my series, The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — From Bright Hope to Frog Level. It’s subtitled “Thirds.”
Locals joke that Paint Bank, Virginia, is three miles past the end of the world, and a T-shirt sold at the General Store proclaims, “I survived Route 311 to Paint Bank, Virginia.”
Truth is, many travelers pass the little community by, hell-bent for the swanky Greenbrier Resort across the state line in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. After book interviews in Roanoke, Virginia, we were intent on pursuing the day’s agenda of planned stops. That is, until we came upon the angular architecture of Humphreys Chapel United Methodist Church in Paint Bank. And across the street a set of rusting Gulf Super No-Nox gasoline pumps. And a strapping St. Bernard dog in a pickup truck at the Paint Bank General Store.
We knew nothing of the history of Paint Bank, but Mikell Ellison gave us a detailed lesson. She runs a bed and breakfast in the old train depot and oversees the Swinging Bridge, a restaurant in the back of the general store with floors made of wormy Virginia red oak.
Mikell left a career as head of a construction company in Greensboro, North Carolina, to live in Paint Bank, a place, people say, where there are more buffalo than permanent residents.
She explained that Paint Bank was at the center of a Virginia mining and timber boom in the early 1900s. At that time, over 2,000 people lived in the area around Potts Creek, where the train had to turn around at the terminus of a dead-end run.
“The bark of oaks and hemlock from here was used to tan English leather for saddles and boots,” Mikell said. “Manganese and iron ore were shipped out of here to Pennsylvania. It’s said that the Cherokees used the iron ochre to mark their faces, which may have been the origin of the place name.”
In 2005, the Swinging Bridge Restaurant opened, using as the core of its menu the buffalo meat raised just two miles away at Hollow Hill Farm. Mikell brought a knowledge of Southern cuisine gleaned from books she’d read about how to prepare meals in a wood-fired cookstove. From her mother-in-law in West Virginia, whom she describes as “the best cook in the world,” comes buttermilk pie.
“I felt like the art of Southern cooking had been lost in this area, because we had so many pizza places and so many things that weren’t really tied to this part of the U.S.,” Mikell told me. “Our pie crusts are homemade, our banana pudding is made with real custard cooked on the stove, and it’s topped with meringue. We stew our own chickens for chicken pot pie.”
Farm-to-the-table, corn-fed buffalo is served in a variety of ways at the Swinging Bridge: buffalo burgers, buffalo stew, buffalo chili beans, filet mignon, ribeye and barbecue. Meats from the Hollow Hill Farm, including Scottish Highlander beef, are available at the general store, where customers fish cold soft drinks in glass bottles out of an ice-filled cooler.
Out back is Tingler’s Mill, with its overshot waterwheel still working, on property given to Colonel William Preston in return for his service during the Revolutionary War.
And then, up the road a piece, a personal surprise: an historical marker pointing out the farm where my ancestor Anne Newport Royall once lived. Known as America’s first woman journalist, she was repeatedly turned down in her request for an interview by President John Quincy Adams. One morning she followed him to the Potomac River and sat on his clothes while he bathed. She got the interview.
The Paint Bank General Store and Swinging Bridge Restaurant
LOCATION: Highway 311, Paint Bank, Va.
PHONE: 540-897-5099
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Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — From Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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