When it comes to local history, there is no stopping
Daleville’s Gene Crotty when he starts talking about Botetourt. He is currently researching his fifth book, a
history of the Amsterdam area.
The 75-year-old writer doesn’t just sit and read books to do his research. His current project is on the area he calls home. He has walked miles and miles over the terrain between Daleville and Amsterdam. During his journeys he has picked up over 10,000 artifacts that go as far back as 10,000 B.C.
“I have something from about every century that man has come here in the Amsterdam area,” Crotty said.
Because he
paid attention to his surroundings, Crotty is credited with two major
archeological finds in the Daleville area. Arrowheads and rock tools from the sites fill his basement and other
parts of the house. He roams the area
looking for foundations and historic clues.
He has found the lost ruins of churches and other long-forgotten
buildings simply by exploring the Amsterdam and Daleville areas on foot.
All of this
information has built up inside Crotty, and now he is ready to take it out and
put it into a book.
“He wants to
know and learn as much as he can about everything,” his wife Judy
explained. After 40 years of marriage,
she has learned to let him “do his own thing” and in his retirement that thing
is research, writing, and collecting rocks to fill up her laundry room.
The
75-year-old writer still gets out and roams around the grounds of
Daleville. Sometimes that takes the form
of the local welcoming committee when he goes to greet new Daleville residents.
"We call him
the "mayor" of North Daleville,” Judy said. “He loves people.”
His books reflect his love of people, too. They are not epistles about buildings, but instead are stories about the folks who lived in an area. His forthcoming book on Amsterdam will be the same way, and he believes he has pinpointed the first two white men in the area. Those men traveled as far as the New River.
“It’s difficult to get real facts about who was the first English settler,” Crotty said. At one time this area was part of Orange County, so deed references in the 1730’s and earlier are hard to get to. They are also incomplete, he said.
He has a knack for reading aerial maps and figuring out travel routes and migrations, things important to the settlers of Botetourt County in the years before the nation became sovereign.
He claims the Amsterdam area, now “dried up and blown away,” was a major landmark of prehistoric man as well as for the later settlers who moved up the valley of Virginia heading west. In Amsterdam, Crotty said, they had to make a decision about their direction.
“There are only three routes through the Blue Ridge Mountains, and one of them tends to send people right through the Amsterdam area,” he said. “Amsterdam is the area where folks took divergent trails west or south around Tinker Mountain. It was an important interchange in the westward movement.”
He also has found indications of prehistoric man’s trampling in the area and evidence of buffalo, even though some archeologists claim the animal did not roam here.
"Tinker Creek was called Buffalo Creek originally,” Crotty said. He has read diaries dating back to 1651 that mention buffaloes in the Amsterdam area and around Big Lick.
The area also was not entirely wooded in Amsterdam. There were big meadows “with grass up to your chest,” according to diary entries, Crotty said. “Amsterdam has disappeared but at one time it was a real hub of life.”
The retired tax professor has no time to talk about the IRS or anything else when there is history to be uncovered and converted into books.
He wrote his
most recent book, The Visits of Lewis & Clark to Fincastle, Virginia
at the request of George Kegley, a member of the board of The History Museum
and Historical Society of Western Virginia.
The book appeared in time to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of
the adventures of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their exploration of
the American west.
“William
Clark could have met Judith in 1801,” he said.
Judith Hancock was the lady from Fincastle whom Clark eventually
married. “She must’ve made quite an
impression,” Crotty said, because she was still a child then.
Crotty’s
intense research sometimes refutes the local lore of the area, and that’s okay
with everyone who knows him. “Gene’s a
stickler for getting it right,” Kegley said. “He’s a good researcher. He knows
where to look.”
Crotty’s Lewis
and Clark book doesn’t add a lot of new information, Kegley said, but it
does put the information “together so that it has meaning and context. Gene sets the stage in history and relates it
to everything else that is going on at that time.”
His
legendary research skills have made Crotty renowned for hunting down the
obscure facts that elude others. His
home library would make a history librarian drool over the many old books,
maps, diaries, and other papers that he searches.
Crotty’s other books are all on Thomas Jefferson and printed by the University of Virginia. Those books are offered as premiums to donors, according to Kegley.
“He's fairly highly regarded at the university for his work,” Kegley said.
Source: 2004 interview with Gene Crotty by this writer.
Additional information: Gene Crotty passed away in 2017.
