Nancy L. Mills and David M. Perkins: pairohermits Our Hermitage

PAIR O' HERMITS - Nancy L. Mills and David M. Perkins

Our Hermitage

We say that we live in a hole in the forest, trying to imagine how this place would appear from above. We say that we live in a log-lodge-in-the-park. Our home is on top of Muddy Creek Mountain and we call it Our Hermitage. The main part of our building is an Appalachian style log house, not very old (20 years) but hand built by local people with local materials (some of the wood sawn on the property). There are two frame additions, each on a concrete pad: the shop or garage on the left and the main living room behind the house, which has a high ceiling and a large corner stone fireplace. Our property is 4.8 acres with the house and maintained grounds occupying about 1 acre and the rest is mainly hardwood forest with some white pines. On the maintained grounds there are about 30 trees, mostly red, white, and chestnut oak but also yellow poplar, hickory, maple, pine and dogwood. Most of the trees are 50-70 feet high, which can best be seen in the photo on the lower right, taken in late fall. The lane in front of the house, shown on the lower left (taken at peak fall color), dead-ends at the far corner of our property, where there are drives to three other dwellings. It is paved, maintained by the county and connects at the other end, a half mile away, to the main road on the mountain, Muddy Creek Mountain Road, which is where our mailbox is located.

The original log construction consists of three divisions. Looking at the house from the front (see above lower right), the kitchen is on the left with a low roof and a big bay window, the center room has the front entry with a high ceiling (this room has our wood stove and a ceiling fan), and the right section of the house has our bedroom below with a loft above (our craft/computer/writing room). The adjacent upper left photo looks through the center room toward the kitchen which is separated by a bar. On the right of this photo is the red oak timber framed entryway into the living room addition. The lower left photo shows this L-shaped living room as seen from this entry. The twig bench sits in front of the fireplace on the extreme left and around the corner on the right are glass doors onto a side porch. The big window at the back of the room is our "window into the woods" where we watch birds and possums and raccoons and squirrels at our bird feeder. We have also seen two bears there and frequent deer. The photo on the lower right shows the stairs up to the loft in the center room. The railings are chestnut. The house is heated by an oil-fired forced air system in addition to electric baseboard heaters. We installed the railroad-style pot-bellied stove because we liked it, though it is not an air-tight stove. It turns out that it can heat the whole house due to its central location in our open floor plan. We buy about 5 cords of cut and split hardwood (oak, maple, locust, ash, cherry, hickory) for the year. Nancy is very good at moving wood as shown.

Muddy Creek Mountain above the Greenbrier valley

Muddy Creek Mountain is part of the Allegheny chain of the Appalachian Mountains. It runs generally from southwest to northeast, as most of these mountains do, from the river town of Alderson for about 11 miles to a point west of Lewisburg. It is an old low mountain varying between an elevation of about 2000 feet at its southern end near Alderson, to about 3000 feet at the northern end. We live about three miles from the Alderson end at an elevation of 2400 feet which makes us about 800 feet above the valley floor and gives us a perceptibly different climate. An interesting feature of the mountain is that the top is relatively level (unless you are trying to ride a bicycle!) and there are old established farms and residences as well as a considerable hardwood forest. The families of some of the people we have met here have been "on the mountain" for generations. A typical West Virginia 1-lane county road runs along the top of the mountain for almost its entire length. This, of course, is Muddy Creek Mountain Road, with access at either end of the mountain, as well as roughly in the middle at a comparatively low spot called the "gap o' the mountain." If you are interested, a good topographic map of our end of the mountain can be seen by clicking HERE (select medium map size and 1:100,000 scale and update map). Both sides of the mountain on our half are comprised of tall cliffs. We live on the eastern side of Muddy Creek Mountain Road, connected to it by a half-mile lane. If you walk beyond our property line for no more than 100 yards, across our neighbors' lands, you come to the eastern cliff below which is the Greenbrier River and its valley. The top right picture shows Nancy at an overlook on the cliff that we reach by a path through the woods in back of our house. The middle picture shows Nancy walking down the lane bringing home the mail from our box on Muddy Creek Mountain Road. As you can tell, we delight in living on our mountain. It is filled with wildlife, which provides us with continual pleasure. There are very few pests (read mosquitoes and ticks). The climate is, at least for us, nearly ideal. We have never seen a temperature over 90F at our house. In the winter there has been comparatively little snow and the January highs and lows are about mid-thirties and mid-teens, though one night in the winter of 2003 we saw a low of -9F, our record low so far. We have been asked many times if we do not miss our life on the boat that we loved so well. And the answer is no. That time on the boat was a wonderful experience, but when we left it behind it was time for us to go. And we have now found, with the most incredible good luck that we never imagined, this new life on top of our mountain that offers such solitude, peace, beauty and pleasure, and such total fulfillment.

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