Last night I watched the movie "Follow the River" on the Hallmark channel. This film held a particular interest for me, as I was already intimately familiar with the story that it told.
When I was young, my father served a church in the town of Radford, Virginia for nearly eight years. I essentially grew up there, as I was three when we arrived and had just turned eleven when my father later transferred to Cokesbury UMC here in Knoxville. Radford was a college town then as now, and each summer a number of the students were involved in a locally produced outdoor drama known as "The Long Way Home". The drama told the story of Mary Ingles Draper, a young woman from the New River Valley (the play was actually presented on the original site of the Drapers' farm) who, along with her two sons, was captured by Shawnee Indians, transported hundreds of miles overland to the Ohio River Valley and who later managed to escape captivity and miraculously find her way back to the New River and the Virginia settlement from which she was initially abducted.
The story of her arduous journey was vividly portrayed each night by the theater group, and the outdoor drama drew people from all over the southeast. When I was really young, I remember being particularly terrified of the gruesome characters representing the spectres of hunger and death that followed Mary throughout the latter portions of the production.
After her ordeal, Mary remained in the New River Valley with her husband and the family operated a ferry across the river, the remains of which could still be seen at the time I lived there. Mary was buried in the Radford town cemetery, which was located just adjacent to my elementary school. Her large memorial marker was constructed of the stones from the chimney of the original cabin, and I must have walked past it a hundred times on my way home, never realizing just what it was.
The movie last night was entertaining, if not entirely accurate. However, the true story of Mary Ingles Draper is as harrowing (and as interesting) as anything Hollywood could ever come up with.
As for me, the version of the story that will always resonate the most holds with it memories of warm summer nights, of wild and exotic figures dancing on an outdoor stage and, just beyond, the sight of that ancient river meandering by, just as it had those 200 years earlier.
