PEPINO UNKNOWN

NATHANIEL PEPINO, UNKNOWN .

Is there anyone, anywhere, who has heard of or has any data for a Nathaniel Pepino.

The information I have is from a 1941 Delawarean magazine, written as a poem and is sort of a tribute to him in his death . There are no dates nor names in the 'poem' to help

identify the name which is probably one he 'picked up' along his way. No date as to when the time period was. There was a family of Pepino's in or around Wilmington, a Nathaniel Pepino politician in the 4^th Ward in 1897, and an A. Pepino who had race horses.

The data I got from the poem/tribute is thus;

Folks tell NATTY PEPINO walked into SUGAR NOTCH during a storm 40 years ago.

( forth years ago when?) . This storm knocked down Ezion Steeple that crushed Sexton

Higgins deader than a cold cod fish. As the pastor, Rev. Link, was saying a prayer over Higgins, there stood Nathaniel Pepino, in snarled scare crow, silky clothes, a blood red

shirt, a yellow scarf said to be fined that anything they ever saw. He said, he just came from India and it was along road and he was happy to over it, aimed to build a house and never

budge again, a right here was a place as good as any, then walked off laughing happier than any man alive has the right to be.

He made a round shack on the river and there he stayed, laughing at most anything. Some

tried to find where he came from, they tried the asylum, jails, but found nothing, so perhaps he did came from India on foot as he told it. He told stories to children but did not speak to grownups, only when he did't laugh. He told of being the consort of a heathen

queen, Bel Asa, lived in a pearl and silver palace.

So he lived forty years , laughing, the village fool, but the gladdest man alive. Then came

a silent night, and the next morning the village men found him, dead, midst the sunlight he

loved.

There is a coal mining town near Wikes Barre by name of Sugar Notch in Pennsylvania and

a Methodist Church which lost a bell tower in Wilmington at 9^th Street and Market.