The publication of Bridgewater Stories – A Childhood Memoir by Wilma Casey Warren was celebrated at a reception honoring the new author Saturday afternoon on March 24 at Our Lady of the Valley Nursing Home. Now in her 80’s, author Wilma Warren had been working on the book for almost twenty years, with time off to deal with health issues, when friends and family helped her put it together.
People came from all over, especially the Bridgewater-Harrisonburg area and Roanoke Valley to spend time with Wilma, visit with old friends and take home a copy of the long-anticipated book. The books were signed by Wilma and son Stephen Warren, who edited the book. Unique to the gathering were the “testimonials” of people who are featured in the book.
The stories are set in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia during the 1930s Depression Era. Wilma was the youngest of five children of Abner and Emily Casey, and only a tot when the family moved from their native Arkansas to Broadway, Virginia where her father was Ranger of the Dry River District in the George Washington National Forest. Two year later the ranger station was moved to Bridgewater and that’s where the stories begin, with friendships that have lasted through the decades.
The stories are a slice of small town Americana where friendships were the ultimate source of people’s well-being and joy of life, and when “the adults seemed to go out of their way to make life fun for us children.” The Bridgewater Baptist Church was the church home for each one in the family and Wilma credits her Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Byrd, for her “bedrock belief in God.” Those years were also enriched by the proximity of Bridgewater College with its ties to the larger world of scholarly interests and the arts as well as her father’s connection to the neighboring camps of President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps.
