Monthly Archives: December 2013

In Search of Ed Haley 217

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

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As we headed out of Big Ugly, we dropped Eunice and Doska off at their homes and said our “thank yous” and “goodbyes.” Billy suggested leaving the creek by a different route than Green Shoal, so we could see the grave of Ed’s great-great-grandfather, Money Makin’ Sol Mullins. That sounded good to me, I said. Plus, it was such a beautiful day; the extra drive with our windows down would be a nice way to take in all the fresh air and scenery.

We drove out of Big Ugly on a paved road and then over a mountain that dumped us at a gravel road on the Ellis Fork of the North Fork of Big Creek in Boone County. Sol’s grave was a few feet from the road in a weed patch. His headstone read, “SOLOMON MULLINS, FEB 23, 1782  NC – AUG 28, 1858, A GENIUS IN HIS OWN TIME.” Quite an epitaph for a counterfeiter. On the back of the headstone were the names of his sons: Peter (Ed’s ancestor) of Harts Creek, Alexander of Kentucky, Eli of Kentucky and Spencer of Harts. The footstone mentioned his military service and provided conflicting dates from what was given on his headstone: “SOLOMON MULLINS, 16 KY MILITIA, WAR OF 1812, FEB 20, 1782 – AUG 25, 1858.”

His wife’s headstone listed the names of their daughters: Matilda, Jenny, Margaret, and Dicie (Hollena Brumfield’s grandmother).

Back at Billy’s, we pulled out the Fry family history and looked up information on Lewis “Jupiter” Fry (1843-1924), the fiddler Mayme referenced as her father’s favorite.

“Known as Jupiter because he was interested in astronomy, he owned a telescope and predicted the weather to his family and associates,” the history read. “He also owned a typewriter and typed his own contracts. He never hired a lawyer when he was hauled into court, but represented himself and pleaded his own case. Once when he was involved in a feud over his land, he shot a man. The victim survived and Jupiter was not sentenced. He was a tall, thin man who was well-known for his fiery temper. Lewis owned and operated a grocery store at Gill of Lincoln County for many years. He also operated a push boat, running it from Gill to Guyandotte to buy groceries.”

Jupiter’s younger brother Anderson “Durg” Fry (1849-c.1938) was also a fiddler. He married a first cousin, Drusilla Lucas, and lived at Durg Frye Hollow on the Laurel Fork of Big Ugly. Drusilla was a sister to Boney Lucas and a first cousin to George Fry.

“Durg, of average height, was truly a mountaineer, a great hunter who practically stayed in the woods: coon hunting, trapping, hunting ginseng and catching ground hogs,” according to the Fry history. “He sold lots of animal furs, butchered cattle and hogs for others, and also made molasses. He smoked a pipe and chewed tobacco. He had a dog he called ‘Rat,’ and told others that when he died he hoped the Lord gave him back Rat and 1,000 acres for hunting ground. Durg loved to tell stories and relate stories of the past.”

Mayme Ferrell had told us nothing about Leander Fry (1856-c.1896), who seems to have been the best of the family fiddlers. The Fry history simply said that he “could play the violin well,” while the Lambert Collection had mentioned him as “a great fiddler” who “used to come down [the Guyan River to Guyandotte] from Lincoln on timber to play the fiddle.” Billy said his father used to play a tune called “The Ballad of Lee Fry”. Leander’s biography was vague: so far as we could tell, he never married nor had any children.

In Search of Ed Haley 216

30 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by in Big Ugly Creek, Ed Haley

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I asked Mayme who her father’s favorite fiddler was and she laughed and said, “I suppose my daddy’s favorite fiddler was a man named Jupiter Fry. He married my daddy’s aunt.”

Billy asked, “Was he a brother to Durg Fry?”

“Yes,” she said. “You smart people. He went to New York one time and won a fiddling contest. He used to live down the creek here on the Laurel Fork of Big Ugly. My daddy used to go around there to Uncle Jupiter’s — they didn’t have much — and they would play poker all night long with just two or three pennies. They were very, very poor. Not many people were very well off. You wouldn’t think it by looking at this dilapidated place now but we had quite a bit. All the buildings are torn down. We had plenty — enough for us. We had some money here all the time. But Uncle Jupiter was the best fiddler in the country at one time.”

I asked Mayme if Jupiter was a right- or left-handed fiddler and she said, “Oh goodness, I don’t know. I don’t remember Uncle Jupiter. I remember Durg. He played some, too. He was right-handed. Durg would play and dance while he played. He did the hoedown. He did enjoy dancing.”

I asked Mayme if she remembered hearing any talk about Milt Haley and Green McCoy and she said, “Heavens, yes. Why didn’t I listen? Daddy talked about them. There was a great deal said but I just dismissed it from my mind. I didn’t try to remember it. Did Hollene Ferguson come in there in any way? She was a real kind person. I was there a few times. Incidentally, my mother’s daddy built that house.”

What was his name?

“John Wesley Berry. He was a riverboat captain and a carpenter from Guyandotte.”

I said, “I know Hollene put people up for the night and I’ve heard that Ed Haley had gone through there and stopped off and played the fiddle.”

“Well, Ed Haley frequented the place in this area,” Mayme said. “He’s been on this creek, too.”

She wasn’t sure if her father ever met Ed but she heard him talk about him.

Brandon figured they knew each other based on some interesting genealogical connections: one of Milt Ferrell’s uncles married Money Makin’ Sol Mullins’ granddaughter, while another uncle married a sister to Chloe Mullins (Ed’s grandmother).

I got kinda excited about Mayme confirming Ed’s trips through Big Ugly.

“Well see, we knew that he’d been to see Bill Duty a lot,” I said. “And we have found that Milt Haley, his father, was actually living in Bill Duty’s household at one time.”

“Milt Haley lived with Bill Duty before Bill Duty ever moved here, when he was still down in Logan County,” Brandon said, “and we think Milt may’ve moved up this way with Bill when he moved up here.”

“Well, I think maybe he did,” Mayme said quickly. “I think maybe he did. You’re awakening some old memories. I think he lived with them.

“Was there music in Bill Duty’s household?” I asked.

“I don’t know about that,” Mayme said. “Bill Duty married my daddy’s aunt.”

“Let me ask you a question,” I said to Mayme. “In the community back when you were a little girl did most people talk about the Haley-McCoy affair, or did they try not to talk about it for fear that somebody might hurt them or something?”

“I don’t think that there was any fear of being hurt,” she said. “They were not quite as notorious as the Hatfields and McCoys were.”

Just before we left, Mayme “made” me promise to come back and play for her in the fall.

I asked her for a favor: Could I go up into the old part of her house?

“Sure,” she said, “Just be careful.”

When I opened the door from the living room leading into the original cabin, I was so overwhelmed with sights and smells of the nineteenth century that it chilled me to the bone. It was dark, except for a little light streaming through a window, and everything was dilapidated, dusty, damp — and in most cases, ruined. A lot of the furniture had just rotted or collapsed to the floor and there were piles of papers everywhere at my feet. It was as if the people living there fifty years ago had just walked out, blew out the candles and never went back. Upstairs was the same. The whole experience made such an impression on me that I later began packing a picture of Mayme’s cabin in my fiddle case and eventually used it as a graphic on one of my albums.

In Search of Ed Haley 215

27 Friday Dec 2013

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At Broad Branch, we found that Bill Duty’s old one-story log house was completely gone. We wanted to go to the family cemetery just across the creek and up the hill but didn’t because it was overran with giant weeds.

We were all just kinda hanging out there, crammed in the car, when Doska said, “Milt Ferrell could play a fiddle. He was a first cousin to my daddy.”

Wait a minute — another fiddler? I’d spent quite a bit of time trying to track down the names of the old fiddlers around Harts. All of a sudden, they were falling from the woodwork.

Milt Ferrell — a man related to the Dutys and with the first name of Ed’s father. I said, “Now who was he?”

“Mayme’s daddy,” Eunice said, as if that helped. “Mayme lives down there.”

“She’s bad off,” Doska added. “One of her lungs has collapsed.”

I just had to see this Mayme Ferrell, although I didn’t want to impose on her if she was in poor health.

Nonsense.

Doska and Eunice said she would love the company…and she just lived down the road.

On the way to Mayme’s someone mentioned that she lived at the old Rector Post Office, a settlement from earlier in the century. We soon turned over a little bridge and pulled up to the only structure left in “Rector proper”: Mayme’s incredible two-story log cabin. It was ancient and leaning, with an old cemetery just behind it on the hill. The whole scene was like something from a dream.

We got out of the car and walked up to a small back porch where Eunice pecked at the screen door and hollered, “Mayme? It’s Eunice.”

In no time at all, Mayme Ferrell was peeking back out at us. She was frail, half-blind and hooked to a breathing machine — and very surprised to see us all on her porch with fiddles, cameras, and notebooks.

Mayme invited us on inside where we sat down in the living room and started talking like old friends. She was well acquainted with Eunice and Doska and knew a lot about Billy and Brandon’s families. It was clear after a few minutes of interchange that her life had went beyond school teaching — she was an educated woman of the modern world, who’d spent twelve years in Los Angeles and San Francisco. She got me to play her a few tunes and the next thing I knew she was singing lyrics that she remembered from her childhood, like “Nigger looky here and nigger looky yander. The old gray goose is flirting with the gander.” Or things like: “I had a piece of pie and I had a piece of puddin’. I give it all away for to sleep with Sally Goodin.” Or this: “Old Aunt Sal, if you don’t care I’ll leave my liquor jug sitting right here. If it ain’t here when I come back we’ll raise hell in the Cumberland Gap.”

Eunice remembered “Cluck old hen, cluck and sing. Ain’t laid an egg since way last spring.” Doska said her father Jeff Duty used to play the tune.

I said to Mayme, “So your father was a fiddler? Tell me about him.”

She was immediately nostalgic.

“Daddy was named for a poet, but I don’t think his parents knew it,” she said. “John Milton Ferrell. He was a great guy. He was a wonderful person. My daddy’s people were just easy going. Most of them were musicians. My daddy, he would lead the songs in church. He was a board member for three terms and the last term he was the president of the board. They would meet over at Harts and those Brumfields — I’ll tell you what — most people were afraid to go through there. Charley Brumfield shot his daddy and killed him. His daddy was beating his mother and he made him leave, so I understand, and then when he came back — I guess he was drunk…”

Mayme looked at Brandon and said, “Those Brumfields were rough then, son. Good people. If they liked you they liked you, and if they didn’t you better leave them alone. They were ambitious people. They just got to feuding among themselves, but it wore out after a while. But my daddy was a good friend to all of them. Charley Brumfield would’ve done anything for daddy. They’d get in a poker game after they had their meeting and they’d all drink. Well daddy would come home with a pocket full of money. One time he came home drunk and he couldn’t hang his hat up. Of course, the older children laughed and I cried, but he sang, ‘Hey hey rushin’ the rabbit. Into the brush and then you’ll habit.’ Didn’t say ‘have it.’ I don’t know what they were getting in that brush. He was a very, very humble person and he was witty.”

Milt Ferrell, Mayme said, played the fiddle around election time, at weddings, at schools or on Friday at all-night dances.

“We’d have barn-raisings,” she said. “After they got the roof over the barn and put the second floor in — the floor where you put your fodder and hay — they’d have a barn dancing. They’d dance all night.”

Milt played with the fiddle under his chin, as did Jeff Duty.

Mayme cried when I played one of her father’s tunes, “Over the Waves”.

She said her father’s older brothers Clinton Ferrell and Fulton Ferrell were also fiddlers. Clint was the smoothest fiddler in the family but would only occasionally pick up Milt’s fiddle and play “Mississippi Sawyer”. Their cousin Jim Lucas was also good.

“Uncle Jim was an excellent fiddler,” she said. “He didn’t jiggle. A real smooth player.”

She didn’t recall any banjos or mandolins on Big Ugly in the old days, although her brother-in-law Clarence Lambert was a great guitarist (“as good as Chet Atkins”) who played Hawaiian music and tunes like “Guitar Rag”.

In Search of Ed Haley 214

21 Saturday Dec 2013

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A few days later, Brandon and I left the festival and headed toward Charleston and on to Harts via Corridor G and Boone County. We reached Harts around three in the morning and parked the bus at the local Fas Chek near a fire station and bridge. Brandon’s uncle Ron Lucas, the manager of the store, had given us permission to park there. The next morning, Billy Adkins met us at the bus and we decided to see Doska Adkins, a woman of advanced age and granddaughter of Bill Duty. Maybe Doska would know about Milt Haley living with her grandfather, who had settled on nearby Big Ugly Creek.

In no time at all, Brandon, Billy and I were charging over Green Shoal Mountain talking genealogy and well on our way to Big Ugly country.

About twenty minutes later, we turned off of the main road into Fawn Hollow and began climbing a rocky driveway toward Doska’s house. We soon spotted Doska cutting brush out near her yard. She was a small-framed woman crowned with a tuft of white hair, having every bit the appearance of “the helpless old widow” — barring the machete in her hand, of course. I could tell right away that things were about to get interesting.

We followed Doska into her home, stepping quickly past a barking dog tied up on her porch. Inside, on the living room wall we spotted a mass of more than forty bushy squirrel tales hanging together in a pattern, which she said were her hunting trophies for the season. Sensing our interest in such things, she showed us a stuffed squirrel that she herself had killed, stuffed and mounted onto a small log. Before we could really ask her anything about Milt Haley, she told us all about how to pickle squirrels for later eating, then opened a desk drawer full of snake rattlers…more trophies.

It took us a few minutes to sit down and actually focus on the reason for our visit. When I told Doska about my interest in Ed’s life, she said he used to stay with her father, Jeff Duty. It didn’t take him long to get familiar with a place, she said, and he couldn’t be fooled with paper money.

“How often would he come there to stay?” I asked.

She said, “Well, I don’t know how often. If I was around, I was real little. I don’t remember him but I’ve heard Daddy talk about him.”

Brandon asked Doska, “Did your dad and Ed play music together?” and she said, “Yeah.”

We wondered what songs Jeff Duty played.

“They was one he played on the fiddle that I thought was real pretty,” Doska said. “I think he called that the ’11th of January’ and he’d play a while and then he’d pick a piece in it. Yeah, man he used to sit on the porch of an evening down yonder where I was raised and play for us.”

Brandon asked, “Was your dad considered the best fiddler up around this part?”

Doska said, “He was pretty good and he could play a banjo, too.”

I asked if her grandfather Bill Duty ever talked about Milt Haley and she said, “No, all of my grandparents was dead before I was born. See, I was born in 1917 and I never seen nary one of my grandparents. Mommy used to have a picture of my grandpaw but I don’t know what happened to it.”

Billy asked her, “Was Ed Haley any relation to you at all?”

“No, he’d just come through here — I don’t know why — and he liked to stay at my daddy’s,” she answered. “Didn’t matter who come through this country. If they’d ask to stay all night somewhere they’d say, ‘You can go to old man Duty’s and stay all night.’”

Of course, knowing what we knew about Milt and the Dutys it seemed likely that Ed came around Jeff for reasons more than his hospitality. As Bill Duty’s son and a fiddler, he would’ve been an excellent source on Milt — the father Ed never really knew.

Doska said her grandfather Duty’s home was no longer standing on Broad Branch but I wanted to see the site anyway. (It was, after all, very possibly the place where Milt settled with the Duty family in the early 1880s.) We asked Doska to accompany us but she said she looked awful; she had been cutting brush all day, she said, and wasn’t dressed to go anywhere. After a while, though, we persuaded her to go with us.

On the way to Broad Branch, Billy suggested that we stop and see 89-year-old Eunice Ferrell. Eunice had settled on the creek years ago and married a son of the Tom Ferrell mentioned in “The Lincoln County Crew”. She was a very friendly Mormon, slumped over with age. I told her I was interested in “Blind Ed Haley,” an old fiddler from Harts Creek, and she said she didn’t know about him. Her father-in-law had been a fiddler, though. She knew something about Tom’s trouble with the Butchers.

“They said they was in a card game and this man was trying to run the horse over him,” she said. “And he killed him but he got out of it.”

We told Eunice that we were going to see the old Duty place on Broad Branch if she wanted to go and she was all for it. We helped her into the car and took off.

Along the way, I stopped the car so Doska could point out her father’s home — the place where Ed used to stay. Brandon said some “hippie-types” from a big city had moved into the place several years ago.

“Michael Tierney lives there now,” Eunice said. “He’s a lawyer. Catholic man. He’s a good neighbor.”

We were having a blast.

“I’m glad I come,” Eunice said.

In Search of Ed Haley 213

20 Friday Dec 2013

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The next day, Wilson Douglas and Kim Johnson came on the bus where Wilson spun another one of his great stories, this time about Ed and Doc White.

Ed was already over at Laury Hicks’, but Laury was gone somewhere. That mail carrier brought the word through that Ed wanted Doc to come over and go down there to Bear Fork and play some music for that dance. Well, Doc lived in Ivydale. He played the fiddle a little, the banjo a little. He come down there and he got me one evening. Doc said, “Now, if you’ll drive, we’ll both go. We’ll hear Ed fiddle.” I said, “All right.” So we started. It must’ve been four o’clock in the evening. It was warm, you know. It was maybe the middle of August.

We stopped over on the Calhoun County line. That’s between Calhoun and Clay. Doc said, “Stop here. I know this old lady here. We’ll get some wine.” She had a bunch of green beans and set them out along the road selling them you know in little baskets. She said, “Now Doc, I’m gonna sell them beans right there for six dollars a basket.” Doc said, “My god, I don’t want to buy them beans.” So she kept on, you know. She looked at me and winked. Said, “Now Doc, better take a couple of baskets. Well, I’m gonna rake in here and show you how nice they are.” She had a quart jar of moonshine in each one of them. She was a bootlegging and Doc said, “Yeah, by god, yeah, I’ll take two baskets.”

We got down the road a little bit, Doc he pulled them two-quart fruit jars out and throwed them baskets and green beans over the hill. I said, “Now, look, Doc. If you get too drunk and cause trouble over there, they’ll throw all of us in jail.” Time we got to Bear Fork they was all drunk but me and I was a driving. Some old man there was calling that dance and Ed Haley was fiddling some of the prettiest fiddling I ever heard, but as the evening progressed the alcohol went to working on him. He lost his coordination. And he got so high, he was a making bad notes. Doc did, too. Doc was a talking fine — his glasses way down on the end of his nose. And Doc said, “Well, we better go home.” They liked Ed. They wanted to keep him all night. He said, “I gotta go with Doc and this boy. I gotta get back over to Laury Hicks’.” We come in the next morning. He was so drunk when we got back to Hicks’ I had to lead him up the steps. That’s the way it happened, all them things over there.

In Search of Ed Haley 212

19 Thursday Dec 2013

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Late in the summer of 1995, I boarded my bus and cruised along the familiar Kentucky interstate highway system toward something called the Appalachian String Band Festival at Cliff Top, West Virginia. J.P. Fraley and Wilson Douglas assured me it was of the fastest growing festivals in the region and would be a great place to learn more about Ed Haley. Along the way I picked up Brandon Kirk, who gave me the first draft of the Haley manuscript. Somewhere around Oak Hill, we eased off of the interstate onto a ridiculously curvy road and, after what seemed like hours, we arrived at Cliff Top — a Depression era CCC camp on top of a mountain filled with buses, automobiles, tents, campers, fiddlers, concessioneers, hippies, and just about anything else a person could imagine.

There were a lot of familiar faces milling about the grounds.

Brandon busily snapped pictures and kept saying things like, “So that’s Wilson Douglas?” or “Wow, that’s J.P. Fraley?” or “Virgil Alfrey? Cool.”

I wasted little time getting out my fiddle and playing with folks. There was an “Ed Haley buzz” at the camp. People were curious about my research into his life and music. Once I started playing in jam sessions, a lot of people asked if I was using an “extra-long bow.” At first, I wondered what the hell that was all about. Then, remembering how I had been busy working on Ed’s bowing style — his use of long bow and the Scotch snap (the little “stops”), I realized that I was (like Ed) creating the illusion of a longer bow. Wilson Douglas had once said that Ed’s bow was “six inches longer than any other kind of bow.” He was been sure of it. “A boy don’t miss nothing for he’s eager to learn,” he had said.

At some point Billy Adkins showed up with his teenage son Clint bringing news of new leads. He said he had found references to a “Runyon’s Branch” in old Harts deeds and had made contact with Tom Atkins, a genealogist and great-grandson to Cain Adkins who lived in Williamson. Cain, I remembered, was Green McCoy’s father-in-law. Billy left after a few hours saying that he’d see us in Harts in a couple of days.

At dinner, I met Jess Chambers, a Boone County resident and great-nephew to Ed’s friend, Johnny Hager. Jess didn’t know much about Ed but told us some interesting stories about Johnny’s background. In the late 1880s, Johnny took his mother and left the Mud River country of Boone County and headed West. Roxie Mullins had told me about that venture in 1991. “My mother, she was a Hager, and her mother went to the Western States and died there and was buried on the banks of the Wabash River,” Roxie said. “Uncle John told us — he was with her. Said she just lived there six months till she died.” Johnny returned to West Virginia around the turn of the century, Jess said, and soon persuaded Ed to travel with his music. No doubt, Johnny brought styles and tunes back with him from the West, which may have carried over to Ed. Wilson Douglas had told me Ed played a tune called “Boot Hill” that “came from out West back in the 1880s.” There was another tune in Ed’s recorded repertoire called “Poplar   Bluff”, which I recognized as the name of a Missouri town.

Later that evening, just at the start of a fiddling contest, Pat Haley showed up with her son Steve. Pat’s leg was healing up nicely. She looked much better than when I’d seen her in March, but her spirits were down. The doctors didn’t give her daughter Beverly long to live. Brandon took to Pat right away. He hung out with her for several hours until Steve drove her back to Ashland. Steve returned later that night and hung out till daylight with Brandon and my bus driver, Tim Wendt.

In Search of Ed Haley 211

14 Saturday Dec 2013

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After pouring over all of this new information, I called Ugee Postalwait and asked if she could sing me any more of Ed’s songs. I hadn’t been thinking much about Laury Hicks lately and it seemed like a good time to just “check in” on that facet of Ed’s story. It wasn’t long until she was spinning this story that gave me insight into Ed’s ability to take a little melody and make it into a tune.

“One time when I was a little girl, somebody went up or down the road at night a singing, ‘Blue-eyed rabbit went away, the blue-eyed rabbit went to stay. Doodledy-do, doodledy do, doodledy do do doodledy do’,” Ugee said. “So I got up and that’s all I was singing all day long. Ed said, ‘What are you trying to sing?’ I said, ‘I’m a singing ‘Doodledy Doo’.’ Dad and him said, ‘Well it’s got a name. What is it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ Said, ‘Where’d you hear it?’ I said, ‘I heard it in the night.’ Said, ‘Did you dream it?’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t dream it.’ They fooled around with that piece there for weeks trying to play it. When Ed Haley and Dad got done playing that, they had all kinds of runs in that there piece. One’d be a playing it and then the other’n, then they’d bring the different runs in on that song. Someone liked it real well when Ed was a playing it and wanted to know what the name of it was. He said, ‘Well, the one that give me the name of it said it was ‘Doodledy Doo’.’ Ed just laughed and would tell Aunt Rosie about him a playing that piece.”

This story was very interesting since I was starting to formulate this improvable theory that Ed first learned to play fiddle tunes by listening to his mother whistle or hum them. As a young widow who had lost her husband in tragic circumstances, she may well have been determined to pass along some of her beloved’s music to little Ed as best as she could. Of course, he may well have begun playing before Milt’s death, even “sneaking” and playing on his fiddle when his father was out working timber. (I’d had a similar experience with an old fiddle in my grandfather’s closet as a boy.)

I asked Ugee if Ed ever talked about where he learned to play and she said, “He told me about somebody leaving an old fiddle laying around when he was a boy. I don’t remember who the man was.” I told her his father had been a fiddler and asked if maybe he’d meant “my old man left an old fiddle laying around” and she said, “Some old man left an old fiddle laying around and I just wonder if it was his dad. And he picked that up and went to see-sawing on it and he said he found out he could play the fiddle. He said that was all he was good for: to play the fiddle. That’s all he studied. I asked him if he went to school to learn to play the fiddle. He said no.”

I just couldn’t shake the image of Ed playing on Milt’s fiddle. If he hadn’t fooled with it before Milt’s death, maybe he picked it up afterwards (“it was just laying around”) and learned to play with his mother’s help. I had these images of Emma whistling or singing Milt’s tunes to him and saying, “Yeah, do that.” “Don’t do that.” I got chills thinking about the way Ed may have began learning tunes and the way I used to ask Lawrence, “Did he do this?” “Did he play this?” Or the way he would say to me, “Pop didn’t do it like that.”

In Search of Ed Haley 210

12 Thursday Dec 2013

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In the end, suspect or not, Runyon may have felt safe to comment on the feud since he was a man of the badge. If so however, he learned the error of that line of thinking once the Ferrell-Butcher trouble erupted on nearby Big Ugly Creek in January of 1890. (Its events were eventually merged with those of the Haley-McCoy trouble in the song “The Lincoln County Crew”.) The Logan newspaper covered this event:

Albert Butcher, who was shot by Tom Ferrell near Deal’s grocery in Lincoln county, Dec. 31st, died Friday morning last. The latest report we have says that Butcher and Ferrell had been drinking and playing cards all day for a pair of pants, and there was a dispute over $1.50. Butcher got the pants and got on his horse and started home, when Ferrell caught his horse by the bridle and demanded his pants or $1.50. Butcher got down off of his horse and the shooting was done immediately. One report says that Butcher attacked Ferrell with his knife and cut one of his fingers and wounded him in the breast. Another report says that Butcher only made Ferrell loose his bridles. Dr. Hudgins, of this place, was called and operated on Butcher, and it appears that the ball, which was a .38-calibre, had entered the abdomen 1/2 inch to the right and 1/2 inch below the navel, making five wounds in the intestines. The abdominal wall was opened, the fecol matter and blood worked out, the wounds in the intestines entered, and every thing done to save the life of the patient. Dr. Hudgins is a skilled surgeon, but in this case no skill could save.

Not long after Butcher’s death — and this is the part that would’ve had a sobering effect on Deputy-Sheriff John Runyon — a mob of Logan County Butchers went to retrieve Ferrell at the county jail and carry out mob justice. The Lambert Collection offered a great eyewitness account of their “raid” on Hamlin:

There was a saloon, but I can’t recall whose it was. I saw many men and two women stagger out of it while we were there [in Hamlin]. The occasion of the drunk women was when the Butcher mob came down from Big Ugly to take Tom Ferrell out of the jail and hang him for the shooting of one of the Butcher family. Tom Ferrell was just a boy about 20 yrs. of age. He had a difficulty of some kind with one of the Butchers, and to protect his own life had shot the man. Ferrell then came to Hamlin and gave himself up. The jailor Andrew Chapman locked him in a cell for safe-keeping for they realized there would be plenty of future trouble. Sure enough in a day or so the mob came riding into town. The mob was led by Capt. Butcher and two women were along. All had shiny guns on their shoulder. They rode up the street past our house to the jail that stood behind the court house, but when they got to the jail the prisoner was gone.

A Mr. Duty told me that his father then lived on Big Ugly Creek where Mr. Ferrell lived and knew all the circumstances of the killing. He heard of the Butcher plan to hang young Ferrell, so he mounted his horse and started to Hamlin to warn the jailor to protect Ferrell. He rode his horse so hard that it fell dead and he got another horse and rode it hard, but got to Hamlin before the mob did. The jailor at once turned Ferrell out and told him to run to the woods for his life. The jailor’s brother, John Chapman, lived with him and helped care for the prisoners, so he told John to go too, and to run. Word, by way of wireless, was circulated that John and Ferrell struck for the woods with John taking the lead by many yards. He was running for his life, too.

When the mob rode into town, the street was soon empty, for everybody took to cover, and stayed out of sight for the two or three days that the mob hung around. They stayed at the Long House, the other hotel in Hamlin, but it was close to the Campbell House. In fact there was just an empty lot between the two, for it was on the same side of the street.

The mob made many trips up and down the street from the hotel to the saloon and then on a little farther to the jail. They always went as soldiers with their shiny guns on their shoulders. Most of them staggered after they made their first trip to the saloon, and the men always had to keep the women from falling. They stayed so drunk. After two or three days they left as suddenly as they had come, and then John and Tom Ferrell came back to the jail. Ferrell was tried in court and found innocent by way of self defense. Mr. Duty told me that Mr. Ferrell was always in fear of his life after that. He was postmaster at Dolly in Lincoln County, but he lived a miserable life, and in constant fear. They said that Mr. Ferrell was a good and honorable man, and was not to blame for the deed that left him an unhappy man.

Surely, Runyon was horrified to witness this whole fiasco. If a mob could take over the county seat and march through town sloshed and armed with weapons, how safe was he — a mere deputy-sheriff — in isolated Harts?

In Search of Ed Haley 209

12 Thursday Dec 2013

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Thereafter, on January 9, 1890, came this powerful bit of news in soft faded print: “John Runyon, Deputy Sheriff of Lincoln county, and Benjamin Adams, of Harts Creek, registered at the Oakland House Saturday [Jan. 4]. Mr. Runyon says that every thing is quiet on Harts Creek, and thinks that the Brumfield-McCoy war is at an end.”

The implications of this tiny find were huge. First of all, John Runyon didn’t leave the Harts area for Kentucky immediately after Milt and Green’s murders, as we had been told. Secondly, he had distanced himself enough from the trouble by January of 1890 to provide the local paper a quote concerning the status of the feud. So what had happened between November 1889 when The Ceredo Advance reported the feud as having a Brumfield faction and a Runyon faction, and January 1890 when Runyon dubbed it a “Brumfield-McCoy war?” The newspapers themselves were confused because one of them said regarding the factions at work in the feud: “if two sides [it] could be said to have…”

Obviously, by January of 1890 Runyon had found a way to separate himself from the trouble, perhaps at the expense of Ben Adams. But why would he be so bold as to register at the Oakland House (a popular meeting place for timbermen) at the same time as Adams? And what was his reaction when the newspaper reported him there with “old Ben Adams”? Surely, the Brumfields and Dingesses felt their joint occupancy at the hotel was just too suspicious — as did we. No doubt, Runyon’s statement that “every thing is quiet on Harts Creek” changed immediately.

We were also fascinated by the fact that Runyon was a Lincoln County deputy-sheriff. Previously, we had only heard that Runyon was the owner of a small “grab-a-nickel” store near the mouth of Harts Creek. How did he get to be a deputy? Wouldn’t that position have been best served by someone from a large family (meaning many votes for the sheriff) and with deep roots in the area? Maybe we had underestimated Runyon. His status as a deputy-sheriff was perhaps an indicator that he had more power and was more of a threat to local businessmen and politicians like Al Brumfield than we’d figured.

Also, as an officer of the law, Runyon should have played a prominent role in settling the 1889 troubles, first in regard to Hollena and Al’s shooting, then later in regard to Milt and Green’s murder. The fact he was a local lawman and a suspect in the crime may have explained why the Brumfields resorted to using vigilante justice in handling Milt and Green. What kind of justice could they have expected from Runyon and his friends in the county seat after all, if he was an enemy or maybe even behind the hiring of Milt and Green in the first place? We wondered, did the Brumfields ask him to accompany their posse to fetch Milt and Green in Kentucky, or was he already a suspect in the crime? Obviously, there were a lot of questions along those lines.

In Search of Ed Haley 208

07 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by in Ed Haley, Hatfield-McCoy Feud, Lincoln County Feud

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On November 7, 1889, The Banner printed a Huntington story titled “Two More Victims To the Endless Hatfield-McCoy Feud/Prisoners Belonging to the Latter Faction Lynched.” This article was extremely difficult to read — some of its words were completely gone, which probably didn’t really matter since it was so error-ridden.

HUNTINGTON, W.VA., October 25 — Information was brought [here from] Hamlin, Lincoln County, that about midnight Friday, a mob surrounded the Lincoln County jail, took two of the prisoners, Green McCoy and Milton Haley, and hung them to a tree a short distance from the [jail]. Haley and McCoy are natives of Kentucky and are allied to the McCoy faction of outlaws [feuding] with the Hatfields generally familiar by the public. McCoy was engaged in a shooting scrape with Paris Brumfield about a year ago and about a month ago he, in company with Haley, ambushed and attempted to murder Brumfield and his wife. The shooting occurred on a Sunday and both victims [were] badly wounded, Mrs. Brumfield being shot in the breast and her husband in the leg. For a time it was thought the woman would die but she recovered. McCoy and Haley escaped to Hunto, Kentucky, [but] not before they made two more attempts at assassination in the county, in ____ of _____ man named Adkins was wounded. The would be murderers were arrested at Ben Postoffice, Martin county, Kentucky, and were confined in jail there. Friday they were locked up in Lincoln county (W.Va.) Jail, and in the absence of definite information it is supposed they were lynched by some of the Hatfield sympathizers.

It wasn’t clear if the Adkins who supposedly wounded in the above account was closely related to Cain Adkins or Fed Adkins. The place names given were also questionable, since Brandon couldn’t locate Hunto or Ben Post Office in any Kentucky map books.

The Huntington story apparently had little credibility since The Banner followed it with corrections:

The above is copied from the Enquirer, and is about as reliable as you find most reports about the Hatfield-McCoy feud.  In the first place, the prisoners Haley and McCoy were not in jail.

Secondly. — No mob ever surrounded the jail, they went into Geo. Fry’s house and took them out without any resistance from the guards.

Thirdly. — They were not hung to a tree a short distance from the jail building, but were shot at Green Shoals some 25 miles from the C.H.

Fourthly. — Haley has no connection whatsoever with the McCoys of Kentucky.

Fifthly. — Mrs. Brumfield was not shot in the breast but in the face, and her husband was not shot in the leg but in one arm.

Sixthly. — McCoy and Haley never wounded Adkins, or even shot at him.

Seventhly. — Neither the Hatfields nor the Hatfield sympathizers had anything to do with the _____ing of McCoy and Haley.

It was done by the citizens of Lincoln who sympathized with the Brumfields and Dingess and by men who do not believe in the assassination of women by way laying and shooting them as they peacefully ride along the bank.

The Hatfield-McCoy feud had nothing whatever to do with the trouble, and from present appearances it is about over. Reports that some forty men _____ are armed and preparing for battle is without foundation.

For the next month, The Banner was silent about the Haley-McCoy trouble. Then, on December 12th, it gave this brief update: “Enoch Baker, of Harts Creek, was in town Monday, and reports every thing quiet, but thinks the Brumfield-McCoy feud is liable at any time to break out afresh.”

In Search of Ed Haley 207

02 Monday Dec 2013

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Toward the end of June 1995 Brandon made a trip to the Cultural Center in Charleston, West Virginia, where he spent several hours researching the story of Milt Haley’s murder using old microfilmed copies of the Logan County Banner. By examining the articles chronologically, a new perspective on the 1889 trouble emerged: the “official news accounts of the day” vs. oral tradition.

On page three of a Thursday, September 26, 1889, edition of the Banner was an article titled “Serious Shooting on Hart’s Creek, In Lincoln County” which detailed the ambush at Thompson Branch:

On last Sunday, while Mr. Allen Brumfield and his wife, who live near the mouth of Hart’s creek, in Lincoln county, were returning home from a visit to Mr. Henderson Dingess, father-in-law of Mr. Brumfield, and when about a mile and a half below Mr. Dingess, they were fired upon by some parties in ambush. Mrs. Brumfield was serious if not fatally wounded, the ball entering her right jaw near the ear and coming out near the nose, carrying away the greatest portion of the right jaw. Mr. Brumfield was shot through the right arm and another ball passed through his vest, grazing his breast. A son of Mr. Dingess, who was with them, was shot through the leg. Dr. C.L. Hudgins of this place, and Dr. V.R. Moss, of Barboursville, were sent for and Dr. Hudgins dressed the wound on Monday. We have not learned the names of the parties who were suspected of the shooting, but learn that they are being hunted for, and if found will be properly punished.

The Banner mentioned on its Thursday, October 10, 1889, society page: “John W. Runyon, of Harts Creek, and W.C. Fry, of Guyandotte, were in town Tuesday on business.” W.C. Fry was William Christian Fry, a brother to George Fry, at whose home the Haley-McCoy murders took place a few weeks later. We wondered, were he and Runyon in town together on business? And did their simultaneous trip to Logan have anything to do with George Fry’s home later being selected as the “murder house?”

The Banner first reported Milt Haley’s death in an article dated Thursday, October 31, 1889, and titled “MORE MURDERING/Two Prisoners Taken from their Guards and Shot to Pieces:”

On Thursday of last week, Green McCoy and Milton Haley, the parties charged with the shooting of Allen Brumfield and his wife, on Harts creek in Lincoln county a short time ago were [held by a group of] citizens under charge of Al Brumfield. They were brought to Chapmanville in this county and wished to remain there over night, but fearing that an effort would be made to [kill] the prisoners, citizens there would not take them in. The guards, with the prisoners under their charge, then started down the river, a portion of the guard crossing to the opposite, leaving but the officer and three guards in charge of the prisoners. About six miles below Chapmanville, the guards and prisoners stopped at George Fry’s, at Mouth of Green Shoals in Lincoln county to stay all night. About 8 o’clock a number of persons supposed to be about twenty, came to Fry’s house, and demanded the prisoners. Mr. Fry and family were told to go into the kitchen and the guard to leave the house. The mob then entered the house and began shooting. The prisoners were dragged out of the house and shot down in the yard in front of the door. Not being satisfied with putting several balls through each of the men the mob took rocks and mashed their heads all to pieces. After finishing their murderous work the crowd dispersed, leaving the neighbors to look after the dead bodies.

No effort has been made to arrest any who were engaged in the outrage, yet it is pretty generally understood who were the leaders of the gang.

More than likely, the portion of the guard “which crossed the river and left the main group,” if true, went to alert Brumfield’s friends as to where the prisoners would be held that night.