Warren B. Crummett
(View Education)Elmer and Virginia Smith Crummett were teachers in one-room mountain schools serving 8 grades. Elmer was also a top farm hand who worked his small 15-acre place and farmed for other farmers, including his father. At Warren’s birth, Virginia quit teaching and became a “stay-at-home mom”, providing home schooling for Warren’s first six years.

Immediately after birth, Warren was enrolled in the Cradle Roll of the Crummett Run Church of the Brethern and he joined the church in 1933, being baptized by immersion in the South Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac River. The following year, he was named Superintendent of the Sunday School. That same year he graduated from Mt. Hall School, a one-room elementary school situated across the road from his home, by passing a state administered examination. High school was not possible because funds were not available for room and board and there was no school bus service, or other transportation to Franklin High School, 30 muddy mountain miles away. So he returned to Mt. Hall School on a graduate basis, serving as an unpaid teacher’s assistant.

By now, working on his father’s and grandfather’s farms, he was qualified as a semi-skilled farm hand. He could use an ax, crosscut saw, hoe, spade, mattock, crowbar, pitch fork, shovel, scythe, etc., with reasonable efficiency. He could milk a cow and bridle a horse. Moreover, he was a woodsman and used these skills to identify and study the behavior of more than sixty different species of nesting birds in about 30 acres around his home. This included 15 different species of songbirds in the 15-acre tract on which his home was located.

In 1934 he began high school, riding the first ever school bus to be routed close to his home. At Franklin High School he took the college preparatory course, graduating as salutatorian of his class in 1939. Although the school bus left his home at about 6 a.m. and returned as late as 5:30 p.m., he was able to serve as bus safety patrol boy, president of the Hi-Y Club, president of his home room and play varsity baseball his senior year.

He graduated cum laude from Bridgewater College of Virginia in 1943, with a B.A. degree in Chemistry and Mathematics. At Bridgewater he was a handyman on campus in the summers of 1940 and 1941. During the school year he served as an assistant in various chemistry laboratories. The summer of 1942 was spent as a laboratory technician with the American Viscose Corporation of Roanoke, Virginia, where he was assigned projects on the efficient of dialyzers, the composition of brine coolants, and the environmental condition of the Roanoke River. These various work efforts provided funds sufficient to pay tuition and fees. Food from the farms of the parents of 3-5 male students living off campus was prepared by these students without benefit of refrigeration or hot tap water.

At Bridgewater, Warren was President of the Chemistry Club; News Editor of the campus newspaper, B. C. Bee; advertising manager of the 1943 Annual, Ripples; and played varsity baseball.