106 South St.

This house at 106 South Street in Martinsburg, West Virginia, was the first place I wanted to visit. 106 South was the address of so many of the letters I have read between my father and his mother. Long before I ever visited the town. This address was familiar. This represented my father’s beginnings and the home where he spent his childhood.

We drove to South St first because one of the things I most wanted to do was stand in front of the house where my father grew up. There was something deeply meaningful about family connecting a place I had known only through old envelopes and family stories with an actual front porch and neighborhood.

The house appears to date from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, when Martinsburg was flourishing as a railroad town. With its broad front porch, turned columns and decorative trim, it reflects the style of many modest family homes during that era. Houses like this were designed for everyday life in a neighborhood where everyone knew one another.

From here, my father could walk downtown, to St. Joseph’s Church and School, and to many of the places that shaped his youth. I could easily imagine him as a boy heading off to school and walking to church. After marrying my mother, he would leave Martinsburg for Concord, New Hampshire. What struck me was that he seemed to have exchanged one small town for another.  

My short visit to Martinsburg was a way of honoring the beginning of my father’s life. By walking the streets, he once knew and standing in front of his childhood home, I came away with a deeper appreciation of his roots and where can came from.