Their granddaughter, Doches, told writer Topper Sherwood in the late 1980s that Milton was originally known as "Little," but took on the name of his previous owner, Smoot, some time before he left for West Virginia.

The Smoots came from one or more early Virginia families with British and Dutch-German origins. Smoot, genealogically speaking, refers to purveyors of lard or fat.

It was 1871 when Milton, 28, and Sarah, 22, and their two oldest sons made their way, on foot, over the mountains and into Boone County, West Virginia.

The Smoots worked hard, mostly with lumber and a sawmill. Soon they were able to purchase over one hundred acres of land at Sulphur Spring Branch not far from Madison. Seven more children followed.

Milton and Sarah Smoot never knew what arose from their honest hard work and the family values they instilled in their children. From their humble beginnings came doctors, lawyers, champion skaters, preachers, teachers and more. Their progeny gather once a year, and have for seventy-five years now, to pay tribute to them and to the strength and unity of their family.

Sarah Smoot was half Cherokee with prominent cheekbones and a stern mouth. Milton was tall and thin, with very fine, almost aquiline, features. Sarah died prior to 1912 and Milton, it has been said, drank a water dog (lizard) and died several years later in 1924.

By the 1920s, some of the Smoot children and grandchildren had moved away from the old home place. The Boone County Smoots watched as large numbers of other blacks from the Southern states poured into the area to work in the coal mines. Some of the Smoots who had gone to live in Logan County remember the Mine Wars of the early twentieth century. Cyril Smoot went to work in the mines in 1911 at the age of fifteen. Though he has since died he often told the story of the Battle of Blair Mountain.

The Smoot sons who stayed in the Madison area decided in 1929 that once the crops were in, a little harvest time get-together was in order, and a family tradition was born. The Smoots have been gathering in late summer for seventy-five years at the same exact site.

Fast forward to August 2004. The family gathers again in the same old spot, though now a permanent picnic and reunion shelter has been erected (1965), and the food is catered--the family has grown too large and most live too far away to gather several days ahead of time and cook for the reunion. There are Smoots of every color now, each of them wearing a reunion t-shirt that bears the credo "Strength in Unity."

There are not many, but a distinguished few, who can point to a photograph taken at the first reunion in 1929 and show you their young and unlined faces.

Nora Coles is the daughter of Howard and Eva (Smoot) Price--great-granddaughter of Milton and Sarah. She was 4 at the time of the first reunion.

"My favorite memory of a reunion was back in the olden days. Things are modernized a lot now. When things first got started, they would build tables out in the yard. Everybody would bring a basket, we'd cook it and everyone would eat. We'd have gospel singing. That's my favorite--running around as a child and running up under the tables . . . Now some years just one or two people cooks or it is catered. There are just not as many people involved in planning.

"I can remember when we first started my Uncle Reese got some sticks and put them together. He gave a speech . . . he held up the sticks and said, 'If you take one out you can break it. But if you hold them together and try to break them all, you can't do it.' He was talking about the unity and the love we all share. I can still see him standing on that stump telling us if we stick together we cannot be pulled away."

Uncle Reese was a minister and probably had no idea the impact his words would have on the large family. His message to the faithful is remembered to this day.

The reunion is a weekend affair now with gatherings, socials, dinners, dances and other events, but the Sunday program and picnic remains the biggest draw of all. Over three hundred people are there this year; some years the attendance has topped five hundred. Each year the family stands to sing before eating their picnic lunch; the one song they sing without fail is The West Virginia Hills.

Talk with any Smoot and you will find that passed down through the years has been a love of knowledge and education. But education is a treasure that has been hard won for the black family. Ronald Smoot of Huntington, West Virginia, was born the year of the first Smoot reunion. He tells the story of how he came to WVU after a stint in the US Navy. It was 1953. He was one of six black students that year and not one was welcome to live on campus. Today a Smoot family member is the assistant dean of the School of Dentistry at that same school.

As Ronald tells it, every bit of education was hard won for blacks at one time.

"I went to school in a segregated school. Do you know where Highcoal is? It's up around Whitesville. That's where I lived. Over there. I rode through Boone County, 120 miles a day, round trip. Sixty miles one way and sixty miles back to come to a school over here."

Cousin Helen Smoot Arnold was a teacher. Her two daughters are teachers, too.

"I started first grade in Madison. In the Madison Colored Elementary School. My oldest sister was my first grade teacher. My mother had sent her and my three older brothers, Sherman, Virgil and Henry Smoot, down to Institute, West Virginia, and they learned brick masonry, and that is how they got started in the building industry.

"She moved the rest of us children, there were fourteen in the family . . . she moved the rest of us to Institute so we could all go to college. We got an excellent education."

Arnold has very little bitterness for the way she was schooled.

"We couldn't go to Whitesville, and I'm so glad that we didn't. I'm so glad we went to black schools and learned all about my history, my poetry--I learned all the things kids aren't getting today. They cared about us. They wanted to see us educated. Many of my teachers went to Columbia and NYU, but they came back and taught us in Institute."

Other realities of a predominantly white world left scars and bittersweet memories. Ronald Smoot lived in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. He tells of driving into town every night during the bus boycott to help give other blacks, usually servants, a ride home after work. He did this never knowing when or even if he would come back home.

He tells the following story: "I was in meetings with Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth and some of the others. We were in the church meeting--we couldn't leave the meeting for fear that they would turn the lights off. The fire department would come in and shine flood lights on the church and warn us to stay there until morning. There was fear that the lights would be cut and we would be shot inside the churches."

The group falls silent as the memory of such a time and place has been refreshed. It is hard to remain somber for too long as smiling children run and play on all sides of the pavilion. The creek bed that flows alongside the family homestead is temptation to some, but others appear to have been sternly warned by their elders to stay away. Hugging relatives and joyous voices surround them.

In closing, the cousins focus on the positive things that the past seventy-five years have brought this close-knit and dedicated family. Ronald Smoot does not have to think long about important progress for the black community.

"The fact that African Americans can get halfway decent jobs--at one time there was no employment. At one time there were no cars out here in this parking lot. As you can see now, there are fifty thousand dollar cars out there today. And it has happened because of technology and things that have developed over the years and the fact that we have supported each other. That is one thing that has kept us together."

Each year the family elects new officers to plan the next year's reunion. Rodney Smoot from Lithonia, Georgia, is this year's president. He looks far younger than his years; his voice is gentle and polite. His officers will take about a month off, and then begin meeting and planning the 2005 reunion. It is, after all, a family tradition.