Historic moment in West Virginia

Thomas Alva Edison, Harvey S. Firestone, Jr., John Burroughs, Henry Ford, Harvey S. Firestone and R.J.H. de Loach on one of their annual camping trips.

Edison invented the electric light bulb, the phonograph, the motion picture camera and electric power stations among his 1,093 patents. The Dazzling Dutchman was born in Milan, Ohio. Papa had to escape Canada after taking part in the failed 1837 Mackenzie Rebellion.

Firestone, born in Columbiana, Ohio, founded Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio. His 3xgreat-grandfather, Nicholas Hans Feuerstein, came to America from France. As with many immigrants, the name morphed, into Firestone.

Ford founded the Ford Motor Company, which perfected the assembly line for building automobiles. Ford, son of an Irish immigrant, was born in Greenfield Township, Michigan, which was absorbed into Detroit by 1926.

Burroughs was a conservationist born on a Catskill Mountains farm near Roxbury, New York who became a federal bank examiner and a close friend of poet Walt Whitman.

Robert John Henderson de Loach, a professor at Georgia State Teachers College in Statesboro, is the author of “Rambles With John Burroughs,” “Progressive Sheep Raising” and “On Cotton Cultivation.”

The group in 1918 toured West Virgina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and the Great Smoky Mountains.

This was an annual camping trip, interrupted only in 1917 because of World War I, misnamed “the war to end all wars.”

Quite a blast from the past, I would say.