Monthly Archives: November 2013

In Search of Ed Haley 195

11 Monday Nov 2013

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Early the next day, Brandon and I met Billy at his home, with plans to go see the site of the “murder house” at Green Shoal. We found his father, Bill, Sr., seated in a wooden rocking chair very much “in his own world.” He’d been born in 1906, making him one of the oldest citizens living in Harts. Curious, I got my fiddle out and played a few tunes for him. The old gentleman just stared at me like I was crazy. He never said a word. Billy told him we were interested in Ed Haley’s life and he surprised us all when he said Ed used to stay with his father for two or three days at a time. Oh yeah, he said…Ed even slept in the same bed with him and his brothers, who were children at the time. Wow! Bill said Haley was a very serious guy (“not carrying on much”) and had a reputation for being “bad to fight.” He often got with a local fiddler named Dood Dalton and played all night for a house full of people at the Adkins home. Bill also remembered him playing in front of the old Adkins Store/Harts Post Office around 1916 when it faced the railroad tracks. All he could recall about Ed’s technique was that he tapped his feet and pulled a long, smooth bow.

After talking with Bill, Billy, Brandon, and I drove out of Harts Bottom onto Route 10 past the old Adkins store and on up the road to Green Shoal. At that location, standing in a little drizzle, we surveyed the possible sites of the murder house. Suddenly, an older man Brandon and Billy recognized as Doran Lambert came walking down to where we stood on the railroad tracks. A descendant of Paris Brumfield, he lived where the Tucker Fry home stood in 1889. Doran said the murders didn’t happen at Tucker’s place, as Billy thought, but at the present-day location of his father’s garage just up the river between the Guyan River and the C&O Railroad.

We asked Doran more about the Haley-McCoy killings. He said his aunt Ida Taylor, who lived just up Green Shoal, could tell us all about it. A niece to Al Brumfield, her father Jim was Paris’ youngest son. We decided right away to try and see her.

In Search of Ed Haley 194

11 Monday Nov 2013

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I asked Billy about Bill Duty. We had found Milt living with Duty’s family in an 1870 Logan County census and knew from reading an interview with his son in the Lambert Collection that his family settled on Big Ugly Creek in the early 1880s. Billy turned us loose with his Duty notebook, where we soon located his notes on the family of “William Marshall Duty” (1838-c.1910). He said the family originally came to the area looking for work in timber. In 1900 and 1910, Bill Duty lived on the Broad Branch of Big Ugly Creek. We could find no apparent “blood connection” between him and Milt Haley but his wife Emma Ferrell was a great-granddaughter of Money Makin’ Sol Mullins (Ed’s great-great-grandfather). It was a seemingly distant family connection that might have played a part in Milt’s choice of Emma Mullins for a wife. Billy said we should talk with Maude Duty, a widow of one of Bill Duty’s grandsons, for more information along those lines.

That night, after hours of watching Billy and Brandon shuffle through genealogy books, census records and notebooks filled with handwriting, I realized just how difficult it would be to familiarize myself with all the characters and family relationships in the story of Milt Haley’s death. While I had little chance to memorize them, I made the effort to at least document them because they seemed to help explain a lot about Milt’s story. There were other things, of course, to mix into the blend, such as grudges, hatreds, and dislikes.

There was another important reason for documenting the genealogy: knowing how people were connected to each other helped me to objectively weigh in any slant in their stories (whether intentional or not). For instance, if I were talking to a nephew of “Uncle Al Brumfield,” I would probably get a somewhat complimentary account of his character; but if I were talking to someone whose family had feuded with him, comments might be less than flattering. It seemed obvious, then, that who I talked to, their genealogical connection to who they spoke of, where I talked to them, in whose company I talked to them, and what exactly they said (or didn’t say) were all important to note.

In Search of Ed Haley 193

06 Wednesday Nov 2013

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I said, “That’s the very same story that Ed Haley’s people told. They would have just as much shame about the incident as Ed Haley’s folks. I wonder if Spicie and Emma got together and got their stories straight before they went their separate ways? I wonder if Spicie knew Emma Jean?”

Billy said, “Grandmaw I believe said them women come over that night and begged for them men — for them not to kill them. She said her mother was telling her about it. Her mother was the Fry where they lived at there. They wouldn’t listen to them. Now I don’t know if that’s true or not. That’s just what was passed down to her. Now I’ll tell you, that table had bullet holes in it.”

Oh, yeah…the table where Milt and Green ate their final meal. Brandon asked Billy who had it last and he said, “My grandmother, Vinnie Workman. I don’t know whether I can remember it or if I was just told about it.”

I told Billy that it sure would be nice to find that table, so he called up his Aunt Don Morris, who had eaten many meals on it as a child. When he got off the telephone, he confirmed, “The table they had their last meal in ended up with my Grandmother Vinnie (Thompson) Workman. And there were bullet holes in the table. Of course my aunt wasn’t there, but she said she can verify there was bullet holes in the table under the bottom of it — not on the top of it. You know, how side pieces are on a table. But when they’d be under the table as kids playing under the table, they’d see the bullet holes. She doesn’t know where the table is.”

And why did Vinnie end up with the table?

“I don’t know,” Billy said. “Uncle Tucker Fry, the one that owned the house where they was killed at, was my grandmother’s uncle. He may have just give the table to her. They was just probably getting rid of it and she took it.”

After thinking about it for a while, Billy said the table might be stored in his parents’ abandoned house next door. We walked over to the dark house and searched in vain.

Back at Billy’s, we returned to the family histories. I noticed there seemed to be a great deal of musical talent in Green and Spicie McCoy’s family. The Fry history referred to Spicie as a “well-known quartet singer” and featured a photograph of her in a quartet with her son, guitarist Sherman McCoy, and her grandsons, Charles and Raymond McCoy. Whether their talent came from Spicie or Green (or both) I didn’t know, but I took note of the fact that some of the children by Spicie’s second husband were also musical. According to Adkins, Harkins Fry of Huntington was a “song writer and publisher, and music teacher.”

My head was filled with images of Milt, Green and Spicie playing dances around Harts.

There was another surprise: according to the Adkins book, Spicie’s sister Angeline married Monteville “Mounty P.” Lucas (a brother to Mrs. George Fry) – a.k.a. “Boney Lucas.” Boney, then, was a brother-in-law to Green McCoy — making his death closely connected to the troubles of 1889. He and Angeline had several children: Eliza Lucas (1877), Julie A. Lucas (1879), Millard Fillmore Lucas (1880-1971), Blackburn Lucas (1882-1946), Ruth “Spicey Jane” Lucas (1883-1971), Taylor Lucas (1889-1966) and Wilda Lucas, born in 1891. Boney died around 1891, according to the Adkins history, when the “Brumfield brothers killed him by cutting his throat while Angeline watched.” According to Billy’s notes, Boney was “killed by Paris Brumfield while he was running from Paris.”

In Search of Ed Haley 192

03 Sunday Nov 2013

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Brandon asked Billy what he knew about the old vigilantes around Harts Creek, and he said his grandfather Fed Adkins had been affiliated with the Brumfields and their gang. (We use the word “affiliated” lightly since Fed and Hollena Brumfield supposedly had a long-term affair that produced an illegitimate daughter in 1892.) They were a rough bunch, Billy said, but usually had good intentions.

“These guys’d set big poles — big switches — on the porches of whoever they wanted to try and correct in some way,” he said. “When you got up that morning and saw switches sitting on your front porch — big long poles I’m talking about, what we’d call saplings — you knew to straighten up. And if what they didn’t do wasn’t corrected, they’d hold them and whip them with those big long switches. And if that didn’t work, they’d burn their house down.”

I had to interrupt Billy by asking, “Would you know what it was you was doing wrong?”

“Yeah, oh yeah,” he said. “You was either interfering with some of their business practices or courting the wrong woman.”

Billy said the Haley-McCoy trouble started when John Runyon moved to Harts and put in a store and saloon across the creek from Al Brumfield. There was intense competition between him and Brumfield. At some point, Runyon went to Washington, DC, and tried to have the government declare Harts Creek as a navigable stream — and thus force Brumfield to dismantle his log boom. Billy heard that Al was in the process of arranging Runyon’s death when Milt and Green ambushed him. They fled to the Mingo County area after accidentally shooting Al’s wife, Hollena.

Billy said his great-uncle Will Adkins was in the mob that executed Milt and Green. Several other participants were recorded in his notebooks: “Paris Brumfield, Al Brumfield, Charley Brumfield, Bill Brumfield, Albert Dingess and other Dingesses, Will Adkins, Black John Adkins (held the horses), French Bryant.” Billy figured his grandfather Fed Adkins was also in the gang, because he hung pretty close to his brother Will and cousin “Black John” Adkins, a mulatto.

Brandon wondered why the Adkinses sided with the Brumfields in the feud since many of the old stories pitted them as enemies.

“Dad and them was real close with the Brumfields,” Billy said. “They fought amongst each other but they still was together when they needed to be.”

Billy’s notebooks finished the story.

“The mob from Harts went to get them with extradition papers. Old Cane Adkins and John Runyon had another mob at Big Branch (another story goes at the mouth of Smokehouse) to ambush and recapture and free Haley and McCoy. But a spy tipped the Harts boys off and they went up Smokehouse, Bill’s Branch, down Piney, up Frank and Catherine Fleming’s hollow, down Abbott’s Branch and killed them at the George Fry house where Gov. Sperry’s house is now.”

Billy corrected the Gov. Sperry part of his notation, saying, “That’s written back 25 years ago, this is, so it wouldn’t be there. I’d be where Doran Lambert owns now. There’s a nun lives there.”

I told Billy, “Now, there’s a story that they came in and told everybody to clear out and there was a little girl in the house and she hid in the fireplace and she saw the whole thing happen.”

“Is that supposed to be Aunt Cat?” he asked. “Yeah, I’ve heard that but I don’t know whether that’s true or not.”

I continued, “And then Roxie Mullins said that after it happened the girl ran out of the house and jumped over the bodies and ran out into the woods.”

Billy said, “Would she have been old enough to done that?”

I said, “I guess, she was the one that told Bob Adkins the story.”

Okay, so how old was she? Based on Billy’s notes, she was born in 1862, making her 27 years old in 1889…a far cry from the “child witness” portrayed in stories. Her reasons for being present at George Fry’s at the time of the murders probably had something to do with the fact that George had married her aunt (and his first cousin).

So who was the “child witness” to Milt and Green’s murder? Maybe it was Cat’s seven-year-old daughter Letilla, who Brandon said later married one of Paris Brumfield’s sons. Or was it George Fry’s six-year-old daughter, Bertha?

And what were the chances that Cat had just made up her version of the story?

“Cat Fry and all of them, they’d tell you anything in the world,” Billy said. “I’m not saying it weren’t true, but just ’cause they told you that don’t mean it was true.”

Billy said Cain Adkins and his family were the ones who fetched Milt and Green’s bodies from Green Shoal for burial. Brandon figured the burial party probably crossed the Guyandotte using the old Ferrellsburg ferryboat.

A Harts mob eventually found John Runyon in Kentucky.

“John Runyon, he went to Kentucky, the way I heard it, and a group from here went to find him,” Billy said. “My grandfather and my uncle was supposed to have been in the bunch and some of the Brumfield boys. They was a big posse of them and they found the creek that John Runyon lived on and they said they had come to get him. He walked out and met them and he said, ‘Boys, you sure you want to take me?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, we come to getcha.’ He said, ‘Boys, I don’t wanna see anybody get hurt but you better look around you.’ And they started looking and they’s probably 150 or 200 rifles up on both hillsides pointed right down at them in the creek. They’s riding up the creek there. They wasn’t any road. And he said, ‘Now, the best thing you can do is turn around and go right back to Harts Creek.’ And they did. They didn’t look back.” Billy laughed, “He said, ‘Now don’t look back.'”

In Search of Ed Haley 191

02 Saturday Nov 2013

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After talking with Lola, we walked down the street with Billy Adkins and spent a few hours filtering through genealogy books at his kitchen table. Billy, I discovered, had two large bookcases filled with categorized three-ring binders dedicated to Harts families. One of the first things we dug out were notes pertaining to Ed’s mother, Emma Jean Haley. Years earlier, Lawrence Haley had told me that someone shot her in the doorway of what I later learned to be Al Brumfield’s house. In his notes, Billy recorded her as re-marrying James Benton Mullins, a son of Peter and Jane Mullins, which we ruled out immediately: James B. was her uncle. The Emma who had actually had married this fellow was born in 1876 (about eight years after Emma Haley) and was listed in other sources with the maiden name of Johnson.

“I don’t know where I found that out but somebody told me that that woman right there was Milt Haley’s widow,” Billy said. “But that date’s totally wrong, see.”

Whether or not Ed’s mother had ever remarried anyone, based on census information, Brandon was convinced that she had died in the 1890s. In the 1900 Logan County Census, her mother Chloe Mullins listed seven of her nine children as being alive. The seven accounted for were Joseph Adams, John Adams, Ticky George Adams, Peter Mullins, and Weddie Mullins. The two who were not listed in the 1900 census were Dicy (Adams) Thomas, whose husband was listed as a widower in the census, and Ed’s mother.

We found out from Billy’s notes that Emma Haley descended from a notorious counterfeiter named Solomon Mullins.

“Money Makin’ Sol,” as he was called, was born to John and Jane Mullins on the Broad River in North Carolina in 1782. Around 1806, he married Sarah Cathey; he settled in Kentucky by 1810.

“Solomon was always ready for action,” according to photocopied papers at Billy’s house. “He served in the War of 1812 in Cpt. David Gooding’s Company of Kentucky Volunteer Militia. After the war, Solomon, evidently ready for more action, began counterfeiting coins. Family tradition has it that Solomon found one of John Swift’s ‘Lost Silver Mines’ in the hills of eastern Kentucky and ‘South of the Mountain’ in Southwestern Virginia. Thus he became known as ‘Money Making Sol’, and I might add always the ‘genius’, stayed one step ahead of his trouble. In 1837 Solomon decided to join his father and his two brothers in Russell County. He bought a farm and built a shop just a little ways from his house where he began making money again. He melted the silver down and didn’t seem to care who saw him.”

“I was born August 29, 1840, at my father’s home below Clintwood,” according to a 1926 interview with one Nancy Mullins. “The Mullins mixed with the Indians. I have heard it said that Grandpa John Mullins was about one-fourth Indian. Grandpa John had at least two brothers. One was named Sol and he owned a lot of slaves. He was a moneymaking man. He lived on the other side of the branch in a bottom near my father’s home. He had a crowd of slave wenches. He made money on Holly Creek back of Press Harris’ home. He had his work place under a cliff. Pa and Uncle John used to help him work at this business. They would ‘strike’ for Sol. While they lived there, his slave women would take guns and go hunting. They would kill deer and pack them in on their backs. The government got after Sol and he went to West Virginia where he died.”

“Solomon Mullins moved to the waters of Holly Creek, about two miles northeast of Clintwood, [Virginia,] where he lived for several years,” according to Sutherland’s The Mullins Family in Dickenson County (1967). “He owned several slaves, mostly women, who worked in the fields and hunted in the woods. He made counterfeit money for several years under a cliff near Holly Creek. The cliff is still pointed out by neighbors as ‘Sol’s Cliff.’ He was caught at work once by a detective and when he saw he was caught, he ordered the detective to help him work, saying: ‘Grab that hammer and strike this.’ He hoped this would make the detective afraid to tell on him, but it didn’t do any good. He managed to get pure silver and mixed other metal with it to make the counterfeit money. He would pay $2 of his counterfeit money for $1 of the government money. At last, he took a scare and left this country.”

In 1837, Sol and his son Peter were involved in making counterfeit coins in Russell County, Virginia. As a result, according to Boone County, West Virginia, History (1990), they moved to Marion County, Tennessee, where they renewed their counterfeiting activity. In the winter of 1841-42, after pressure from government authorities in Tennessee, Sol and Peter moved with their families and slaves to the North Fork of Big Creek in Logan (now Boone) County, (West) Virginia.

“They rode mules and walked all the way,” according to Boone County. “He died in 1858 and Sarah died about 1872.”

As Brandon flipped through the Sol Mullins notes, I could see his brain working, making connections. Suddenly, he said, “Sol was a great-grandfather to both Emma Haley and Hollena Brumfield…making them third cousins.”

Oh my.

Sarah Ann (Farley) Headley

01 Friday Nov 2013

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sarah-farley-headley-copyright

Sarah Ann (Farley) Headley, daughter of William F. and Jane (Clark) Farley and wife of Caleb Headley. Sarah (1849-1945) is my great-great-great-grandmother. She lived at Sulphur Spring Fork of Fourteen Mile Creek in Lincoln County, WV.

In Search of Ed Haley 190

01 Friday Nov 2013

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Before heading to Billy’s, we became knee-deep in conversation about Milt Haley’s death. Billy told us about the Brumfields retrieving Milt and Green in Kentucky.

“Now, I don’t know where they come from over there,” he said. “I know they had a bogus warrant, the people that went to get them. They made up a fake warrant and got them. Then when they started back down through here, they was a big bunch of people was waiting to attack them. That was Cain Adkins and them and his family. They was fields full of them up on Big Branch. And somebody tipped them off, and so they went up what’s called Bill’s Branch. And so they took up Bill’s Branch and down Piney and then over to Frank Fleming holler.”

From Frank Fleming hollow, the Brumfield gang went over a mountain and crossed the river to a Fry house near the mouth of Green Shoal. At some point, according to Lola, a group of men came in and shot out the lights. Cat Fry crawled under a bed while either Milt or Green shouted to the other, “Stand up and die like a man!” Lola heard that one of the men “died a praying and the other died a cussing.”

I asked Billy if he’d heard how Milt and Green were killed.

“I’ve heard so many stories, I don’t know,” he said. “I just heard they was shot. I heard they was tied up to a tree. Tied to a chair back to back in the kitchen.”

Lola said she heard that Milt and Green were shot and hung.

“The table Milt and Green had their last meal on ended up with my grandmother, Vinnie Thompson Workman,” Billy said. “And there was bullet holes in the table.”

I asked Billy if he had any pictures of the “murder house” and he said, “No, I don’t know of anybody would. It’s where Doran’s house is. It was over there against the hill — an old log house. Of course, the railroad and stuff wasn’t there, you see. That was the old John and Catherine Fry house to start with. And then John’s son Baptist, he lived there next. That was my grandmaw’s grandpaw. And after he died, I guess this George Fry lived there. Charley Fry and George Fry both lived there and I don’t remember which one lived there when they killed them there.”

At that point, Lola completely changed the direction of the conversation when she said, “Billy, Cain Adkins was kin to us.” She’d never met Cain and had no clue what happened to him but knew that he once owned most of the lower end of West Fork at one time. All the old-timers referred to him as “Uncle Cain” because he’d been a well-respected person in the community.

Lola said George Thomas (one of Ed’s cousins, we later learned) owned the Cain Adkins farm in the years prior to her birth. Her father bought the place from him around 1905. At that time, the only remnant of Cain’s life there was his apple orchard by the creek. The Haley-McCoy grave was on the family lands.

“You go up almost to the top where it gets real flat,” Lola said. “They’s a path used to be up there. It’s up pretty much on the hill. It ain’t way up there, I’d say the first flat.”

Brandon asked her, “Now, did you tell me that some old woman used to come up there and decorate that grave?”

“They always came as long as they lived, I guess, and decorated the grave,” Lola said. “That was their wives. I was only four or five years old, but I can remember seeing them. One of them was tall and slim. But they stopped at our house every time they come.”