The divisions that we currently use to think about Blackberry Creek had not quite come into being by 1880. For example, the area of Pond Creek falls under the heading of Lower Elkhorn Creek in the 1880 census. It also seems, from the family names, that the Blackberry section of the census crosses over Hardy Mountain and includes a good portion of Hardy, including the area where the McCoy's lived. It is also difficult to determine where you are at any given time, since it depends on how the census taker travelled.
In this census, for example, the Blackberry section begins on the bottom of the last page of the Lower Elkhorn Creek section, and, since the first Blackberry household is that of Ulysses Hatfield, it seems clear that the census taker came across Ball Fork and started there. At the foot of Ball Fork, he turned right and came up the creek, all the way to the last house in the head of the hollow - that of Ferrell Marion. After that, it's hard to tell whether he crossed the hill into Left Fork or came down and started just below Ball Fork. At any rate, he came down the creek, and it's easier to tell that when he was at Bluespring, the foot of Hardy Mountain, etc. I think he went all the way down to the river, then came back up the creek and crossed Hardy Mountain, listing the Farley's, then Scott's, then McCoys as he went through Hardy toward Williamson.
Part of the pleasure, though, is trying to figure out where the various homeplaces were.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Dramatis Personae - The Hatfields
Joseph B. Hatfield and his brother Valentine come to what became known as Blackberry Creek at some point around 1814/1815. They settled, as near as we can tell, on the banks of the Tug River near present-day Matewan. While there may have been some moving back and forth across the river in the early years, eventually both brothers end up on the Kentucky side of the river. Both brothers are married to daughters of Ferrell Evans, who lives on Blackberry Creek with them. By 1830, Valentine and Ferrell Evans move their growing families across the river to Gilbert, West Virginia.
Joseph remains on Blackberry Creek, living, I think, on the river at what is now Buskirk. Joseph's children, however, move inward, up the creek. By 1830, Joseph's younger half-brother George moves to Blackberry Creek as well, settling near the mouth of Bluesrping Hollow. Later their younger brother Jeremiah also comes, as well as their father Ephraim (Eaf), who died in 1847 and is buried in the Anderson Hatfield Cemetery at the mouth of Dials Branch.
In the 1880 census, Upper Blackberry Creek is primarily home to the Hatfields - Joseph's children tend to cluster in Buskirk (Valentine, McGinnis, Joseph II) and above Left Fork (Ferrell Marion, Richard Thomas, Ephraim). George and his children tend to live from Bluespring down to the foot of Hardy/Blackberry Mountain.
Joseph remains on Blackberry Creek, living, I think, on the river at what is now Buskirk. Joseph's children, however, move inward, up the creek. By 1830, Joseph's younger half-brother George moves to Blackberry Creek as well, settling near the mouth of Bluesrping Hollow. Later their younger brother Jeremiah also comes, as well as their father Ephraim (Eaf), who died in 1847 and is buried in the Anderson Hatfield Cemetery at the mouth of Dials Branch.
In the 1880 census, Upper Blackberry Creek is primarily home to the Hatfields - Joseph's children tend to cluster in Buskirk (Valentine, McGinnis, Joseph II) and above Left Fork (Ferrell Marion, Richard Thomas, Ephraim). George and his children tend to live from Bluespring down to the foot of Hardy/Blackberry Mountain.
1880 Census Explained Page 1
To see picture full size, click on it. Once it comes up on your screen, wait a little while and then click on it again. Boxes will appear at upper left and lower right. The lower right button lets you view full size. Click on that.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Up The Hill
So I've been working at this material for quite a while. I wrote this for my freshman composition class in 1982 (I was 18). My professor, Judy Rogers, included the essay several years later in a textbook that she and her husband Glenn put together for teaching composition. At some point, Kathy Mincey, one of the English professors at Morehead, used it for her class, and for some unknown reason it's still sitting out there on the MSU website. It isn't a great piece of writing, but it's a good example of some of the themes that I'm still trying to chase down and nail to the page.
The piece was written as a response not to my grandmother's death (who was still very much alive at the time) but borrowing details from the burial of my great grandmother Octavia Hatfield. The cemetery is the J.F. Hatfield cemetery at the head of Blackberry Creek. It was always up there, above where we lived, serving - at least for me - as a reminder of where we would all be going sooner or later.
Go here.
The piece was written as a response not to my grandmother's death (who was still very much alive at the time) but borrowing details from the burial of my great grandmother Octavia Hatfield. The cemetery is the J.F. Hatfield cemetery at the head of Blackberry Creek. It was always up there, above where we lived, serving - at least for me - as a reminder of where we would all be going sooner or later.
Go here.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Chinotahishetha
I often ask myself, when the work of the day has settled down and things grow quiet and still, how did I get there? How did any of us get there, to that river valley in eastern Kentucky and western West Virginia, scattered along those creeks and streams like so many seeds, sprouting wildly in the deep shadows of hollows that for centuries knew only the footfall of bear and fox and mountain lion, and for more centuries after that the occasional band of Shawnee hunters, passing through, building fires in the shelter of overhanging rocks? Perhaps as they slept they dreamed of their homes, along the Ohio River near Portsmouth, or west, in Clark County, the village they called Eskippakithiki, the Place of Blue Licks. They had other names that hide behind the places we know: Eskalapia, Tywhapita, Tyewhappety. Or the name they gave, when asked by English explorers, to the Kanawha River - Chinotahishetha, which means, roughly "He, the Shawnee, is guarding that which is his."
Then they were gone, defeated at the Battle of Point Pleasant, overwhelmed by history. Soon the land itself was neatly divided into tracts by Thomas Jefferson's Land Ordinance of 1785 and sold for as little as $1 an acre. After that, my ancestors came, Hatfield and Ball and Blankenship, Farley and Evans and Dotson, Runyon and May, McCoy and Smith, beginning, timidly, around 1810 and gaining momentum in the second decade of the new century. Hungry for land and, I can only assume, space, primal emptiness, they came, clearing back the virgin forest, building homes, planting things, naming things. By 1820, they had established themselves in the hollows of Pike County, from Buskirk on the banks of the Tug River, all along Blackberry Creek, Bluespring, Left Fork, Smith Fork, Calf Branch, Pond Creek, Pinsonfork, McVeigh. And there, despite the steep hillsides and narrow hollows, the thin soil, the difficulty of getting anywhere, the isolation, they survive. One might say, looking at the census rolls from 1820, 1830, 1840, seeing the number of children in their homes grow to 6,8,10,12, that they even prospered. Certainly, as William Faulkner might say, they endured.
From that point on, I can trace their comings and goings by way of census rolls, church records, the occasional deed or court document. I can watch them intermarry and mingle, see how their children spread out along the hollows, each generation carving the land into smaller (and less productive) portions, but at the same time note how the family networks grow more complex and intertwined. I don't really know anything about these people. They didn't leave much in the way of documents or artifacts. They are little more than names, dates scribbled in census books, but something of them survived in their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren; in the songs my great grandmother might have sung to herself as she weeded her garden, in the stories she told about her great grandfather, in the knowledge my grandfather had of the hillsides around his house - where to find gingseng, which tree the squirrels came to feed at early in the morning, where the chestnut trees had been before the blight in 1933.
I know a few things for certain. They came and they stayed. They changed the land and the land changed them, individually and collectively, until at times it is difficult for me to tell which side, human or natural, was more profoundly altered by the other. I honestly can't say that I understand the forces that drove them to make the choices they made. What makes a man and woman load their children and all of their worldly belongings onto rickety old wagons and head out into a wilderness that only a decade before had been the hunting grounds of the Cherokee and Shawnee? I know that they came to Blackberry Creek and, after over 100 years of moving from place to place, they stayed. It is common among outsiders, historians and cultural scholars, to see Appalachia as a kind of trap, a place where people came but were too poor or too stubborn to leave. But as I look at the land records from the 1830s and 1840s and watch these original settlers and their adult children buy up every scrap of land on Blackberry Creek they can get their hands on, 50 and 100 acres at a time, I don't get the sense that these were people who wanted to leave. I get the sense, impossible to prove but difficult to shake, that these were people who, after more than a century of roaming, had finally found a home.
So, no, I have no way, really, of knowing what drove their choices, but I can say without exaggeration that I am to a large extent the result of those choices. I cannot reach back across time to know for sure who they were or what they wanted or how they felt when they sat on their porches and looked out at the same Blackberry Creek where I grew up, or what they thought when they climbed to the same ridge tops that I've walked dozens of times and looked out across a seemingly endless stretch of blue-tinged hills. All I have of them are my own personal memories, the more tenuous memory of historical research, and, perhaps most importantly, the bone-deep memory of culture, which molds us the way the contours of the hillsides direct the path of the streams. But this memory, whether personal or historical or cultural, is important, since it is the one way that we can keep faith with them and with the Shawnee who were here before them, with the land itself - we too, in our stories and our songs and our boxes of old photographs and faded documents, guard that which is ours.
Then they were gone, defeated at the Battle of Point Pleasant, overwhelmed by history. Soon the land itself was neatly divided into tracts by Thomas Jefferson's Land Ordinance of 1785 and sold for as little as $1 an acre. After that, my ancestors came, Hatfield and Ball and Blankenship, Farley and Evans and Dotson, Runyon and May, McCoy and Smith, beginning, timidly, around 1810 and gaining momentum in the second decade of the new century. Hungry for land and, I can only assume, space, primal emptiness, they came, clearing back the virgin forest, building homes, planting things, naming things. By 1820, they had established themselves in the hollows of Pike County, from Buskirk on the banks of the Tug River, all along Blackberry Creek, Bluespring, Left Fork, Smith Fork, Calf Branch, Pond Creek, Pinsonfork, McVeigh. And there, despite the steep hillsides and narrow hollows, the thin soil, the difficulty of getting anywhere, the isolation, they survive. One might say, looking at the census rolls from 1820, 1830, 1840, seeing the number of children in their homes grow to 6,8,10,12, that they even prospered. Certainly, as William Faulkner might say, they endured.
From that point on, I can trace their comings and goings by way of census rolls, church records, the occasional deed or court document. I can watch them intermarry and mingle, see how their children spread out along the hollows, each generation carving the land into smaller (and less productive) portions, but at the same time note how the family networks grow more complex and intertwined. I don't really know anything about these people. They didn't leave much in the way of documents or artifacts. They are little more than names, dates scribbled in census books, but something of them survived in their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren; in the songs my great grandmother might have sung to herself as she weeded her garden, in the stories she told about her great grandfather, in the knowledge my grandfather had of the hillsides around his house - where to find gingseng, which tree the squirrels came to feed at early in the morning, where the chestnut trees had been before the blight in 1933.
I know a few things for certain. They came and they stayed. They changed the land and the land changed them, individually and collectively, until at times it is difficult for me to tell which side, human or natural, was more profoundly altered by the other. I honestly can't say that I understand the forces that drove them to make the choices they made. What makes a man and woman load their children and all of their worldly belongings onto rickety old wagons and head out into a wilderness that only a decade before had been the hunting grounds of the Cherokee and Shawnee? I know that they came to Blackberry Creek and, after over 100 years of moving from place to place, they stayed. It is common among outsiders, historians and cultural scholars, to see Appalachia as a kind of trap, a place where people came but were too poor or too stubborn to leave. But as I look at the land records from the 1830s and 1840s and watch these original settlers and their adult children buy up every scrap of land on Blackberry Creek they can get their hands on, 50 and 100 acres at a time, I don't get the sense that these were people who wanted to leave. I get the sense, impossible to prove but difficult to shake, that these were people who, after more than a century of roaming, had finally found a home.
So, no, I have no way, really, of knowing what drove their choices, but I can say without exaggeration that I am to a large extent the result of those choices. I cannot reach back across time to know for sure who they were or what they wanted or how they felt when they sat on their porches and looked out at the same Blackberry Creek where I grew up, or what they thought when they climbed to the same ridge tops that I've walked dozens of times and looked out across a seemingly endless stretch of blue-tinged hills. All I have of them are my own personal memories, the more tenuous memory of historical research, and, perhaps most importantly, the bone-deep memory of culture, which molds us the way the contours of the hillsides direct the path of the streams. But this memory, whether personal or historical or cultural, is important, since it is the one way that we can keep faith with them and with the Shawnee who were here before them, with the land itself - we too, in our stories and our songs and our boxes of old photographs and faded documents, guard that which is ours.
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