of
Nada Adkins
Born April 23, 1908 as the second child of a humble farmer and minister of the Apostolic faith, in the green wooded valley known as Clymer's Creek, Nada Adkins warmed our family with the friendliest of smiles for ninety years. As the oldest child, she moved with the family from her Clymer's Creek and Milton Putnam County beginnings, to Kanawha County's Cuckleburr Creek, and eventually to Rush Branch along the Little Sandy Creek. It was here that she encountered the love of her life, truly a case of love at first sight. And it was here that she would marry John Wesley Strickland, settling at the mouth of Rush Branch where they would live out the remainder of their lives, raising three wonderful children: Lorine, Robert and Russel. As her husband worked the land, growing corn, potatoes, beans and more, at times with the help of his horse, Sam, and raising chickens on their small egg farm, Nada readily joined in the family community affairs of canning fruits and vegetables, making apple butter, and managing her children as they picked the wild fruits and nuts in the hills nearby, and swam and fished in the creek.
Lovingly cared for in her later years by her only daughter, on October 9, 1998, Nada was laid to rest beside her beloved Wes, with her son Russel and other family close by, in the Proctor Cemetery, just up the hill from where her mother had watched over the entrance to Rush Branch hollow for the previous seventy years. Her traditional biscuits, now made by her daughter, are still the best in the world. The old homestead is gone now, as is the one-lane steel bridge just down the road, but the fireflies and the forest remain...and they remember the children laughing and playing in piles of leaves, and the many visits of the family she loved.
