Parthenia Edmonds recently turned 100-years old. Pictured here at her home in Beckley, she is the daughter of sharecroppers, the granddaughter of slaves as well as a school teacher and business owner that made her own clothing. Upon her 100th birthday she was congratulated with letters from President Barack Obama, West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin and U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, among others.
BECKLEY, W.Va. — As a child, Parthenia Edmonds sat on a creek bank catching minnows near a Virginia plantation where her grandparents worked as slaves and her parents were sharecroppers. The 100 year old Beckley resident said she remembers sitting on the bank “watching the birds fly in formation and thinking, ‘I would like to have an education.’ I think it was a silent prayer.”
She did achieve that goal, as valedictorian of Byrd-Prillerman High School in Amigo and a 1939 graduate of West Virginia College, but it would be wrong to imply attending college as a black woman during the Great Depression is the only remarkable thing about her.
Edmonds marked her 100th birthday Tuesday, as a lifelong-learner, mother, entrepreneur, teacher, philanthropist, herbalist, devout Christian, volunteer and pillar of the Beckley and Raleigh County community.
Edmonds was first taught by her mother, who had only attended until fourth grade, but there was no school available near the farm near Martinsburg, Va.
“My mother thought me how to read and write and spell, what they would now call preschool and kindergarten,” she explained. “I think all education starts at home. My mother always said everybody needs education because she only went to the fourth grade. She encouraged other people to get all the education you can get.”
When the Depression hit, Edmonds’ father got a job as a coal miner and they followed the work to Eckman and then to Tams.
She was a fourth-grader when she recited the Joyce Kilmer poem “Trees” at the Keystone-Eckman school and won a silver dollar. “I think that I shall never see … A poem lovely as a tree,” she recited Tuesday in her home in Beckley, where she has lived for more than 70 years. “A tree that looks at God all day … And lifts her leafy arms to pray.”
Edmonds said she loves to walk through the woods and listen to the birds, and the Kilmer poem has long represented her relationship to God.
Although God has answered many of her prayers, His “divine intervention” hasn’t always been easy. It was an accident that allowed her to attend college…