Pass the Cookies and the Ballots

By Eugene Scheel

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Forty years ago, I voted in my first presidential election in Waterford. On the lawn of an old brick house was a small stick sign that read "Polling Place." There were no signs touting candidates; no one handed out sample ballots.

Inside, the air was scented with slow-burning logs in the fireplace. There were homemade cookies and grapes to be nibbled, cider to drink and apples to take.

Behind a side table sat Clare Metzger and a helper. It was Metzger's house. She greeted each voter she knew well by first name and by mister, missis or miss and a surname if she did not. Having been there but three years, I fell into the mister category. The helper then checked you off on the register of voters and handed you the paper ballot. No one asked for identification. There were no "I voted" stickers to give out.

Other than some people who had already voted and were chatting and nibbling, the parlor was empty. No poker-faced party faithful checked off who had voted.

On the table you could see the prominent locked wooden box that held the penciled-in ballots. You marked yours on the dining table in the next room and gave your folded ballot to Metzger's helper. She dropped it in the slot.

Sooner or later, an old-timer was bound to tell you that the box you had dropped your ballot into was the same box that Waterford precinct voters had used when they voted in May 1861 to remain in the Union during the Civil War. (Although the Waterford vote was 220 to 31, the county voted 1,626 to 726 to secede.)

Photo: Eugene Scheel

Jane and Wilbur Wortman stand outside Porter's Store in Neersville, where they voted for president in 1948 and 1952. The store closed in 1956 and the building is currently vacant.

The privacy in Metzger's dining room, such as it was, satisfied rural Virginia requirements of the secret ballot for president, adopted by the state in 1874. Before that, it was commonplace to ask a prominent person whom he had voted for. If he didn't care to say, the registrar could look up the ballot and share the voter's preferences with all who cared to hear.

A Virginia woman did not face such inquiries because women weren't allowed to vote until the 1920 presidential election. Carrie Emerick, a Purcellville suffragist and member of the National Women's Party, was the first woman in Loudoun County to pay a poll tax to vote that year.

Virginia, like many Southern states, authorized a poll tax of $1.50 in 1902 to disenfranchise black voters, many of whom could not afford it — really three times that amount, because the tax had to be paid for three years unless the voter had just turned 21. It took nearly a week to make $4.50.

Because I knew that in 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed the poll tax in national elections, I would brazenly cross out the poll tax line on the yearly Loudoun tax bill and add: "This fee is illegal." Yet, until 1970, when the Virginia Constitution was amended to remove the poll tax in all elections, the fee legally remained on county tax bills. But one couldn't be prosecuted for nonpayment.

A few years later, I realized how mean-spirited I had been. Few yearly tax bills exceeded $200, and the extra $1.50 now seems like a small donation.

"Two hundred dollars was a lot of money to most of us farm families," Jane Wortman said after I told her that story.

I spoke to Wortman and her husband, Wilbur, recently because I wanted to know how other sections of the county voted in the past. He first voted in a presidential election in 1948; she in 1952. Their polling place was Porter's Store at Neersville, in then-remote northwest Loudoun, an area known as Between the Hills. The Harper's Ferry Road past the store was dirt in 1948.

Photo: Eugene Scheel

Arlene Janney

No free victuals greeted voters at Porter's, little changed since its opening in 1839. Joseph Jesse Porter had run the store since about 1886, and things had been tight since the Great Depression. Wilbur Wortman said Porter "would open it up at 12 o'clock at night to sell you a penny box of matches."

Jane Wortman recalled the store as "somewhat dark and dank" when she voted there in 1952.

"That's because there was no electricity," her husband said.

Coal-oil lamps provided rudimentary light, and Porter, bent on saving wood, would have been a strong supporter of President Jimmy Carter's suggestion to turn on the heat only when the temperature fell below 66. It did on most November election days, for Wilbur Wortman recalled locals gathering around the warm potbelly stove after they had voted.

George Roy Hess, Porter's son-in-law, was the official at Porter's Store. Like Porter in his younger days, Hess had taught at the nearby one-room Neersville School and had been a director of the old Purcellville National Bank.

"He was a stickler for accuracy," Jane Wortman said.

He gave you the ballot. You checked it wherever space was available, gave it to Hess, and he dropped it in the box. When the polls closed, he counted the vote.

You had to be 21 to vote in Virginia when the Wortmans and I first voted for president in Loudoun, an age that had been codified by the Virginia legislature in 1874. It would give us the saying that if you were "free, white and 21," the world was at your fingertips.

In 1970, Congress, taking heed of the Vietnam era saying, "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote," lowered the voting age to 18 in national elections.

When I asked Arlene Janney about voting in the past, 1952 came to her mind — not because it was the first year she had voted but because it was when she was asked to be an election official.

"I took George Hoge's place. He loved the job, so I think he wasn't feeling well," she said.

That was at Lincoln Precinct, in the oldest building in the village, the 1765 stone Friends' Meeting House. The sign to vote, Janney recalled, was on the front door facing the graveyard. Inside, people voted in the former meeting room. (In 1817, the congregation moved to the present meetinghouse.)

Mabel Taylor and her husband, Lawrence, were caretakers of the grounds, and her kitchen was in a newer, attached wing. "She always had some good soup cooking on the stove, and she offered it to the voters and the people at the table checking them out," Janney said.

"There wouldn't be many that I didn't know, and we maybe had a little friendly talk," Janney said of those she checked off on the register. "The dairy farmers pretty likely came real early but did their milking first. The cows always came first. They left their clocks at the same time, not to interfere with their routine" of milking.

When I asked Janney where people voted, she replied, "Oh, they just went off in a corner somewhere." It was a simpler era.

For further reading, see Wynne C. Saffer's 2002 book, "Loudoun Votes 1867-1966: A Civil War legacy," published by Willow Bend Books.

Eugene Scheel is a historian and mapmaker who lives in Waterford.

Tagged: elections, opinions, Waterford

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