MORGANTOWN — Smartphones don’t lie. That’s why Chad Nuce got his audience right where it lived Monday night.
“I started thinking,” the Georgia attorney posed to the appreciative crowd, “is there anything we’re building today that’s gonna be around for 200 years?”
Well, likely not, he said, answering his own question — and that wasn’t architectural conjecture on his part.
Heck, he said, to chuckles from the crowd, the artificial-intelligence feature on his phone even agreed, citing less-robust construction methods, and the like.
The room didn’t need reminding, though, that there is a structure in Morgantown built in 1795 – that’s 230 years – which is still very much standing.
Not only that, it’s an integral part of the proceedings of an outreach organization doing vital work in the community since 1935 – that’s 90 years – when Eleanor Roosevelt put out the call to service for a country mired in the Depression.
Jacob Nuze, Nuce’s 18th-century ancestor who sailed from Germany to Philadelphia and then made his way west to what is now Morgantown, built the dwelling now known at the Old Stone House in that Colonial decade when America was still new.
Chad Nuce was a kid growing up on Florida’s Gulf Coast in Tampa when his family started taking vacations to the hills and hollows of West Virginia, so he could see his grandparents in Kingwood.
The Old Stone House, he remembered, was always one of the first stops.
As he got older, Nuce became more and more enthralled by the sandstones and timber that the pioneer Nuze assembled with his own two hands.
He started thinking about his lasting lineage.
“I think that’s when the lightbulb went off,” he said.
“How many kids get to visit something that’s 200-plus years old, that your sixth-generation grandfather built?”
It was history, he said, that was tangible – and tactile.
He could run his hand along the timber bracings and the surface of those stones quarried by the resourceful immigrant so many generations ago.
He could literally feel the history.
History, of course, was the motivator of Monday night — as well as the celebration.
Members of the Service League of Morgantown assembled to install new officers, and to celebrate that 90th birthday — and the next 90 to come.
Nuce, who practices law in a little town around an hour from Atlanta, was a special guest, along with his wife, Diane and son Colby.
Cast in stone
The second half of the evening was given over to the altruistic architecture of the organization that has contributed close to $471,000 to the community in its 90-year existence.
By 1935, the house on Chestnut Street had already amassed a storied history of its own, as the group’s historian Cookie Schultz told the audience.
It had already served as a tavern and a church among its many iterations, Schultz said – and heavy redefining was at the top of the to-do list, for the 10 women who were the league’s charter members.
“First, we need to figure out who we are,” she said, using present-tense to snap that moment into immediacy.
“We know we need to help in the community. We know we need to have a better educational and cultural system for the children in our community.”
There were the well-baby checks by licensed physicians that went through 1982, she said.
There are the ongoing literacy programs and outreach programs of the Service League, that have stood, Schultz said, just like Jacob Nuze’s original stone walls.
“And now we get to look forward to our next 90,” she said, smiling.
Nuze’s relative is happy to amend his AI assessment in that regard, he said, with a smile of his own. Sure, he said: Maybe the physical buildings going up today won’t be standing 200 years from now.
But something tells him, he said, that the Service League of Morgantown will still be here – out in the community, and under the roof of a venerable dwelling, at the same time.
Donna Tennant, who just finished a second stint as Service League president, likes that image.
“I said the other evening it takes a village to create such an organization – but in our case it also takes the Old Stone House.”
