[Illustration: GAULEY BRIDGE & VICINITY.]
Nothing could be more romantically beautiful than the situation of
the post at Gauley Bridge. The hamlet had, before our arrival there,
consisted of a cluster of two or three dwellings, a country store, a
little tavern, and a church, irregularly scattered along the base of
the mountain and facing the road which turns from the Gauley valley
into that of the Kanawha. The lower slope of the hillside behind the
houses was cultivated, and a hedgerow separated the lower fields
from the upper pasturage. Above this gentler slope the wooded steeps
rose more precipitately, the sandstone rock jutting out into crags
and walls, the sharp ridge above having scarcely soil enough to
nourish the chestnut-trees, here, like Mrs. Browning's woods of
Vallombrosa, literally "clinging by their spurs to the precipices."
In the angle between the Gauley and New rivers rose Gauley Mount,
the base a perpendicular wall of rocks of varying height, with high
wooded slopes above. There was barely room for the road between the
wall of rocks and the water on the New River side, but after going
some distance up the valley, the highway gradually ascended the
hillside, reaching some rolling uplands at a distance of a couple of
miles.
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