The Marble Maker

        In my post of a couple of months ago (Small Town, USA, June 2021) I mentioned a small town in West Virginia. The visit to this town, Ellenboro, started with a road sign on US 50. The sign had the population listed under the name; I perked up and thought how great it would be to visit a town so small. I Googled it before getting to the exit: Population 363 in 2010, down to 217 in 2019. How could the population change that drastically in nine years? If my math is right, that is more than a 40% drop. I wanted to find out why.

        Srianee and I exited the highway and turned right. It probably wasn’t the best choice for seeing the main buildings of the town, but as it turned out, it was absolutely the right direction for talking with a very interesting “stranger”. We drove down the road about a half mile or so, saw a few houses, and we laughed at the thought that this could be the extent of the small town. While turning into the Ellenboro Water-Sewer Department to turn around and head back to the highway, I looked up at the logo on the building. We both wondered what the man on the logo was doing. It looked like a glass blower, but I couldn’t figure out why a glassblower would be on a water and sewer facility. Two men came out of the building, and we received the answer to our mystery.

        “We used to have a glass factory here, but it closed a few years ago,” one man explained, which probably also explained the drop in population. “But we still have Sammy Hogue. He makes marbles and is famous. You should go talk with him – he’s in the red brick house down the road.”

        We thanked the men for the tip and off we went in search of Sam Hogue. A red brick house and a building in the back with an “Open” sign on the door – we knew we had arrived. After a few minutes of trying to find Sam in one of the three structures without being too intrusive, we noticed a tall, lanky man moseying through the yard toward us. He introduced himself and invited us into his filled-to-the-brim workshop. This quiet, humble man showed us his tools, machinery, and the floor to ceiling storage of thousands of glass marbles of all colors and sizes, and patiently answered our questions. He then invited us into his large garage outfitted with a 1930’s Model T (or A?) Ford, a Harley, and much more machinery and storage. The third building was his showroom, where Srianee and I were both honored to purchase two of his beautiful marbles and the stands he had made to keep them from rolling away. He told us his stories of his marble making and that he had stopped making the marbles just two months earlier because of the abundance of his inventory.