By Rick Steelhammer, Charleston Gazette-Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Alyce Faye Bragg, who chronicled farm life, local folklore and family adventures, past and present, in a popular self-titled column that appeared weekly in the Charleston Gazette-Mail for more than 30 years, died Tuesday at age 88.
A Clay County native, Bragg spent her adult life on the same farm where she was raised, on Big Laurel Creek near the Clay County community of Ovapa.
Her work as a columnist began in 1981, with a column that appeared in the weekly Clay County Free Press. A few years later, then-Charleston Gazette Editor Don Marsh contacted Bragg to explore the possibility of having her columns become a regular feature in the Sunday Gazette-Mail.
“I hesitated,” she recalled in her final column for the Gazette-Mail, which appeared in August 2020. “I told Don Marsh my writing was so ‘country’ it wasn’t suitable for city folk. He replied, ‘Let me be the judge of that.’”
Marsh’s judgment proved correct.
“To my surprise, the column became popular, and I received much mail concerning it,” she wrote. “I have enjoyed every minute of writing it. I have made many friends I would never have met otherwise, and I value each one of them.”
In addition to producing her columns, Bragg was the author of three books: “Laughter from the Hills,” “This Holler Is My Home” and “Homesick for the Hills.”
