Octogenarian Spends a Lifetime Unearthing Indian Relics

At 89, Enos Victor "Vic" Jenkins "is tough as a pine knot," his daughter Debbie told me recently, "but there's a real soft side to him."

He doesn't talk as much as he used to. He's seen the ups and downs more than most -- working in farming and construction for 50 years, surviving the deaths of four of his seven siblings and one of his five children. The river took the life of his father at 50 and a brother at 20. Four years ago, his childhood sweetheart and wife of 62 years died.

I've spoken with Jenkins over the past few decades during lulls at the Lucketts Fair, where I was peddling my books and maps and he was exhibiting American Indian artifacts. His wife, Louise Elizabeth, was always at his side; he could count on some of their children dropping by to admire the artifacts, as common to them as the furniture in their home.

The pieces in his collection number more than 1,000, amassed through some 60 years of probing the soils of two Potomac River islands -- the finest relics of 12,000 years of American antiquity that I've seen in the Virginia Piedmont. Unusual items include axes; rolling pins used for smoothing grains and curing skins; and pottery shards with decorative patterns reminiscent of the childlike markings of the Swiss artist Paul Klee.

Three of Jenkins's children told me that their father wants the handiwork of his near-lifetime avocation to be seen by the public, and the family is exploring the idea of making it available for exhibit at a public venue through a permanent loan. Debbie Jenkins recalls her father saying that, "if they were going to be sold, he'd just rather throw them back on the riverbank."

April is the month when Debbie remembers going out with her father and older sister Theresa Jo, now deceased, to look for Indian artifacts on Lower Mason's Island, which is about midway between Leesburg and Point of Rocks. The Jenkins family owned the 250-acre island from 1928 to 1951, and they plowed and harrowed the ground in April before planting corn in May on a 50-acre field.

It's unlikely that such an assemblage of artifacts will be found again. In the 1980s, deep plowing and harrowing -- the method of preparing the soil for corn since English settlement in the early 1700s -- gave way to no-till plowing. In the 18th and 19th centuries, horse- and mule-pulled plows turned over soil to a depth of six to eight inches; and heavy plows pulled by tractors often produced even deeper clods in the 20th century. But in no-till plowing, a seed-filled metal tube stabs the ground and then is quickly withdrawn so the soil is not disturbed.

Vic Jenkins grew up on what locals call Heater's Island, 188 acres of rich river soil just east of the Point of Rocks bridge. You won't find that family name on government maps. They usually call it Conoy Island, named for the Conoy (Kanawha) Indians who inhabited the island and the Potomac River plain until they died out or left about 1715.

Jenkins started picking up and collecting artifacts after his father, Enos Edgar Jenkins, told him what they were. The elder Jenkins rented the island farmstead from Charlie Heater. A 50-acre cornfield, broken up by a plow powered by a two-horse team, became Vic's proving ground. His knowledge of American Indian lore expanded through conversations with relatives and other youngsters, and through his schooling in a two-room building on Furnace Mountain that is still standing.

His mother, Inez Jenkins, "rowed us three children across the 400-foot channel from Heater's Island to the mainland, and then we walked the mile to school," he recalled. No one said that the Jenkinses couldn't go to school in Virginia because they lived in Maryland. Virginians had always farmed the island.

(The state boundary is at the mean high-water mark on the Virginia side, an oddity dictated by Cecil Calvert, grantee of the Maryland Charter in 1632.)

The schooling at Furnace Mountain and collecting on Heater's Island ended in 1928. Vic, his parents and two siblings loaded their possessions -- including the bucketful of Vic's artifacts -- onto a flatboat attached to a skiff with outboard motor. The barge and skiff plied downriver seven miles to Lower Mason's Island, the family's first farm purchase. Cows, sheep, pigs and horses came on additional trips.