Only a Thief

His name was Melanchthon Cliser, and he's not the man you're picturing. You've got a shack in your mind, and a long beard, and a rifle on the porch. Put that down. In the fall of nineteen thirty-five he was going on sixty-two. He'd taught school ten years and been deputy tax collector twelve. He had forty-six acres on the highway just under Thornton Gap, with gas pumps, a store, and a seven-room house his father built, with running water and its own electric light. His wife Carrie ran the lunchroom, where a dime bought a quarter of a pie two inches thick. His father and grandfather lay in the family plot on the ridge above the house. Then Virginia came for the mountain, to hand it to the nation for a park. Cliser wrote letters to the papers against it, and he studied law at home five years. The state's price was four thousand eight hundred fifty-five dollars, and he would not take the check. His reasoning was plain as a fence post. If he hadn't taken the money, the land hadn't been bought. If it hadn't been bought, it was his. That October, Sheriff Lucas came to the house and threatened tear gas. Cliser went in and locked every door. It was said he went to the telephone and demanded the President. "The President's in California," the sheriff called through the window. "You attend to your business," said Cliser, "and I'll attend to mine." Next day he told the papers, "This is the only home I ever knew and I aim to keep it. I'm standing on my constitutional rights. My doors and my gates are locked and only a thief and a robber goes through a broken gate and an open window." It took a threat of contempt of court to move the sheriff. On the morning of October third, a car pulled up at one of the pumps. Cliser walked out thinking he had customers. It was the sheriff and four officers in plain clothes, and they handcuffed him. The Associated Press has him crying out that these men would be imprisoned, and that "the Star-Spangled Banner will wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave." The Library of Virginia says he sang it. They took him to Luray so a judge could explain the law. While the judge explained, everything he owned came out of that house and was set at the edge of the highway. A CCC crew guarded it, and offered to truck it anywhere he chose. There was another side. The Harrisonburg paper warned against maudlin sympathy. Cliser, it said, was neither aged nor simple, with nearly five thousand dollars waiting. A state man said he could've had a permit and run his business month to month. And Annie Shenk, who called him cousin, got leave to stay on for life, she thought, because "unlike Cousin Melanchthon we were as humble as could be." His daughter Merle answered the permit man decades later. "That wasn't what he wanted. He wanted to stay in his home and operate his business for good." She said, "My father believed in the Constitution. He never got over what happened." The house and nine outbuildings came down. He and Carrie went to a crooked old log house. In nineteen forty-seven a congressman was still asking if money was due him. He died at seventy-three. Carrie lived to ninety-seven. When Carolyn Reeder wrote all this up in nineteen eighty-three, the gravel by the pumps had gone to woods. But you could find foundations, if you hunted, and every spring Carrie's day lilies were coming up through the forest floor, in a dooryard with no door.