Paintings tell the story of a life in Brumley Gap

BRUMLEY GAP, Va. – Hungry and abused in a snow-blown mountain shack, Minnie wished for just one pretty picture on the wall to give her hope.

Nearly 70 years of hard life later, Minnie Ma Scyphers started painting – and covered her walls with hundreds of pictures.

She painted houses, churches and mills with old wooden waterwheels along dirt country roads. She painted rivers, trees and mountains; flowers; and gourds. And, though she never made it past the sixth grade, she wrote poetry, describing in words the places she painted on cardboard and canvas.

“She had something she wanted to express to the world because she had been somebody that was never noticed in her growing-up years,” said her oldest daughter, Sylvia Dearwester.

“She felt like she wanted to do something that would make the world a better place, and that’s what’s depicted in her little poems,” Dearwester said. “Every poem has something to do with making the world a better place, a beautiful place, because her world was so terrible. And I think that was basic to what she wanted to do with her life, and so she thought beautiful paintings would help.”

Born on Clinch Mountain, Scyphers grew up hungry and mistreated after her mother’s death. As an adult she outlived three husbands. But her poems are full of description of the beauty in this world and hope for the world beyond.

Twenty years after her death at age 92, the old Brumley Gap schoolhouse where she lived looks long-abandoned on the outside. But inside, the walls are just as she left them: covered in paintings.

Living alone in her “art house” in her later years, she was like hundreds of other creative people in Southwest Virginia: talented, artistic and virtually unknown.

“It’s very similar to a lot of stories we hear about the artists in our region,” said Elyse Gerstenecker, curator of decorative and folk art at the William King Museum in Abingdon. “We don’t know about them until someone comes forth, usually a descendent … and says, ‘I have all this stuff.’ ”

J.C. Scott, who lives next door and has helped take care of the locked-up museum over the past 20 years, said Minnie Ma was well known in the community when she was alive, and folks would sometimes come to look at her paintings.

But now, he said, he can’t think of anyone else who knew her who is still living. Scott, who is 83, said he’s getting to be one of the oldest people around.

“The young people around here don’t even realize this is here,” he said, standing in a living room that’s still full of Scyphers’ artwork.

“She was the local Grandma Moses type,” said Jane Oakes, a volunteer at the Historical Society of Washington County who lives in Brumley Gap and knew of Scyphers in her last years. “Everybody knew about her paintings, and they thought they were quaint and interesting.”

But unlike Grandma Moses, Oakes said, Scyphers never gained widespread fame for her art. The community acknowledged her talent, but few people outside the area knew of her.

Oakes said the hills and hollows of rural Washington County are full of artists who express their talents in a thousand different ways.

“It can be painting, it can be woodworking, it can be quilting,” Oakes said. “It can be cooking. That’s an art.”

In Brumley Gap, she said, certain women are known for their cakes, which always sell for top dollar at the community’s annual Christmas auction. Here, she said, art is still expressed in the course of everyday living.

Dearwester said she always intended to come back to fix up the schoolhouse and live there, but she got sick with cancer. Now 89, she said, she might have to sell the building soon – and she’s looking for a home for her mother’s paintings.

“She’s captured her particular time of life, with log cabins and various things, and I thought it was just so nice,” Dearwester said. “It depicts an era in the history of Southwest Virginia in the Clinch Mountain area.”

Though Scyphers had a hard life, she wanted to leave something behind. Her daughter hopes those paintings can find their place in the region’s history.

“I do not want to bury any talent which I might have,” Scyphers wrote in an introduction to her poems. “What little light I have, I want to let it shine.”

dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701