11 Monday Nov 2013
Posted in Green Shoal, Lincoln County Feud
Tags
Appalachia, crime, feud, George Fry, Green McCoy, Green Shoal, history, Lincoln County, Lincoln County Feud, Milt Haley, murder, photos, West Virginia
Site of the Haley-McCoy murders, Green Shoal, Lincoln County, WV.
06 Wednesday Nov 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Angeline Lucas, Billy Adkins, Boney Lucas, Don Morris, feud, Green McCoy, Harkins Fry, history, Imogene Haley, Milt Haley, music, Paris Brumfield, Sherman McCoy, Spicie McCoy, Tucker Fry, Vinnie Workman, writing
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.”
03 Sunday Nov 2013
Tags
Al Brumfield, Black John Adkins, Cain Adkins, Cat Fry, Fed Adkins, feud, Green McCoy, history, John W Runyon, Milt Haley, Paris Brumfield, Will Adkins, writing
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.'”
01 Friday Nov 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Billy Adkins, Cain Adkins, Cat Fry, crime, feud, George Fry, Green McCoy, history, Lola McCann, Milt Haley, Vinnie Workman, writing
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.”
31 Thursday Oct 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Al Brumfield, Bill Adkins, Billy Adkins, Cain Adkins, fiddle, Green McCoy, Harts, history, Hollene Brumfield, Jackson Mullins, Lola McCann, Milt Haley, writing
That night, Brandon suggested visiting Lola McCann, a local widow of advanced age. Lola, born on the West Fork of Harts Creek in 1909, lived in Harts proper, just back of an old hardware store, a video store, and the post office. She spent a lot of time with her daughter Cheryl Bryant, who lived across the street with her family. We found Lola at her daughter’s home almost buried in the cushions of a plush couch. As everyone made introductions, I headed over and sat down beside of her.
When Brandon asked Lola about the old Al Brumfield house, she said it was haunted, that Hollena Brumfield had kept the clothes of deceased relatives in an upstairs closet (top-story front downriver side). She never would spend the night there. She said the staircase was stained with blood and five or six bodies lay down in the old well. This all sounded like folk tales, the type of stories to tell in an old cabin around the fireplace…but who knows?
As things kinda moved along with Lola, Brandon mentioned that we should be sure and visit Billy Adkins, a neighbor and expert on local history and genealogy. Lola’s daughter immediately called him and invited him over. The next thing I knew a little stocky guy with a shaggy beard arrived at the door. It was Billy, of course, holding a fiddle, which he said belonged to his father Bill Sr., an old fiddler in Harts.
I told Billy that his father just had to know Ed Haley but he said, “I asked him and his mind’s gone. He can’t remember. He’s got Alzheimer’s. His mind just comes and goes.”
Bill, Sr. had given up the fiddle in recent years, but Lola’s daughter had a short home video of him playing “Bully of the Town”, “Way Out Yonder”, and “Sally Goodin” in 1985. Bill’s style was completely different from what I pictured as Ed’s — he held the bow toward the middle and played roughly with a lot of double-stops — but I was still anxious to talk to him. Billy said we could see him the following day as he was already in bed asleep.
When we mentioned our interest in the 1889 troubles, Billy said, “Green McCoy married Cain Adkins’ daughter. Cain and Mariah. Mariah was a Vance, I think. And they lived where Irv Workman’s house is now.”
Brandon asked, “Which is near where they’re buried, right?” and Billy said, “Yeah, right across the road from it. And Milt Haley married Jackson Mullins’ daughter. Jackson and Chloe Mullins, from up on Trace. She married again.”
What? Ed’s mother remarried after Milt’s murder?
“I believe it was another Mullins,” Billy said, “but I’d have to look it up. Milt’s name was Thomas, you see.”
It was all in his notebooks at home, he said, although he warned us: “See, I didn’t document any of this stuff. I didn’t put my sources down and when I’d run across it I’d just write it down. Now, I don’t know how I found it out.”
28 Monday Oct 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Al Brumfield, Ben Adams, Charley Brumfield, feud, Green McCoy, Harts, Hollene Brumfield, Jane Thompson, John W Runyon, Mae Brumfield, Milt Haley, timbering, writing
After a brief rest at Mr. Kirk’s, Brandon and I drove to see Mae Brumfield at her little yellow house just up the creek from the bridge at Harts. Mae was one of Brandon’s special friends, a woman of advanced years and closely connected to the Brumfield family. As a girl, she was a close friend to Charley Brumfield’s daughters. Later, she married Tom Brumfield, one of Al’s grandsons, and settled near his widow — “Granny Hollene” — at the mouth of Harts Creek. Just back of her house was the former site of the old Brumfield log boom, as well as the spot where Paris Brumfield killed Boney Lucas.
Mae welcomed us inside as soon as she saw Brandon. She was very thin and frail — a wisp of a woman — but she seemed to be very independent and self-sufficient. Her house was tidy and there were several crafty-type dolls in sight as evidence of her fondness for crocheting and knitting. Almost right away, Brandon asked her about Hollena Brumfield — the woman supposedly shot by Milt Haley.
“Granny Hollene?” Mae said. “Why, I’ve combed that old gray head many a time. I loved her better than anything. She wasn’t afraid of nothing. She’d cuss you all to pieces if you done something to her but she was a good person. Everybody was welcome at her table. She didn’t turn nobody away. You know that hole was in her face where those men shot her. It never was worked on. They didn’t have plastic surgery like they do now. And after all that, a sawmill blew up and broke her leg. That was why she was crippled. And she still run everything on.”
Mae told us what she knew about Al Brumfield.
“I’ve heard Grandpa talk about him. Grandpa liked him. Al Brumfield, my grandpa said, was an awful smart man. He told me he was a good-looking man. He was sort of blonde-headed and had blue eyes. People said he could take a dollar and turn it into a hundred in no time. Al Brumfield today woulda been a millionaire. He owned up to Margaret Adkins’ farm where the Ramseys used to live around there. Back this way, he owned all that property over in yonder where the Chapmans lived. He owned up this creek to Big Branch, all back this way, all them bottoms up through yonder and where I live and clear on down to Ike Fry Branch — maybe to Atenville. He had sold that to Charley, I think, his brother.”
We asked about Al’s trouble with Milt Haley and Green McCoy.
“People timbered then for a living, you know,” she said. “Well, Al put that dam in across the creek here or on down there somewhere — a boom. These people drifted their timber down here when they come a raise to they could get it out. Al went to the government and got a charter to put this dam in and caught the timber. He’d catch the logs and charge people so much for catching their timber. I don’t know whether it was ten cents or a quarter. It wasn’t very much. They’d come down here then and raft them and then run them on down to Huntington and sell them. That’s what the startation was, I think, of this killing. A lot of these men up the creek, you know, they was like today. They was prejudice in families and jealousy and he was building up good, you know. Had plenty. And they didn’t want to pay that toll. And they didn’t like him. They was the ones that hired this Haley and Green McCoy.”
Brandon asked Mae who specifically hired Milt and Green and she said, “I think it was Adamses. Now I won’t tell you for sure. Old Ben Adams was one. They didn’t like him. They called him ‘Old Ben Adams.’ He lived way up this creek somewhere. Them Adamses shot at Al’s gang up here somewhere back in the beginning about this timber. I think they tried to kill him out then. That’s why they wanted rid of him was on account of him catching timber and they was enemies. But Adams wouldn’t do it hisself — he hired these two men — and that’s what caused it, so I understood.”
So John Runyon wasn’t the one who hired them?
“No, I believe he owned the mouth of this creek, didn’t he, and Al bought it from him? He’s the man that owned the store… I don’t know how much of this land he owned — just the mouth of this creek, I’ve heard them say. I guess Al bought all this other property.”
At the ambush, Hollena hollered for Al to run because she knew he was the target of the men shooting at them. Al retreated for a short time before coming back up the creek firing a pistol toward his would-be assassins, but was unable to hit them due to heavy growth on the trees. Milt and Green fled into the woods, at which time “old Jane Thompson” came to Hollena and “got her up.”
19 Saturday Oct 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Al Brumfield, Bob Adkins, Charlie Conley, crime, Green McCoy, Henderson Dingess, history, Hollene Brumfield, Hugh Dingess, John Brumfield, Lincoln County, Milt Haley, writing
A few days later, I picked Brandon up at his apartment in Huntington and we drove to see Bob Adkins in Hamlin. We parked on the street in front of Bob’s house (just past the red light) and walked up onto the front porch where his wife, Rena, a very friendly and cordial lady, met us at the door. She welcomed us inside to the living room. We listened to Bob speak of Milt Haley’s death. It was clear that his memory had faded somewhat since my last trip to see him in 1993.
“Well, what the trouble was there, that fella Runyon, he had a saloon and a little old grab-a-nickel store right across the creek there at the mouth of Harts,” Bob said. “And Aunt Hollene and Al Brumfield, they had a big store over there on the lower side of the creek. They was competitors in a way, you know. And that fella Runyon, he wanted to get rid of them, see. He hired these two thugs to kill them. These fellas Milt Haley and Green McCoy were two characters. And a fella by the name of Runyon gave them a side of bacon and a can of lard to kill them…each.”
Bob laughed, fully aware of how it would all turn out and seemingly amused.
“They got in a big sinkhole up above the road with a high-powered gun — a .30.30 Winchester.”
According to Bob, Haley and McCoy waited in that sinkhole for Al and Hollena Brumfield to pass by.
“Ever Sunday, Aunt Hollene — she was my mother’s aunt — she’d go up to the forks of Big Hart about ten miles up there to visit her father, old Henderson Dingess. Al had a fine riding horse and he’d get on the horse and she’d ride behind him. They’d go up there on a Sunday and have dinner with her father. And they’d been up there — it was a pretty summer day — and they came along about three or four o’clock in the evening. They shot at Al’s head and that high-spirited horse jumped and that bullet missed his head and hit Hollene in the side of the jaw — knocked her teeth out. That knocked her off’n the horse. Of course, that horse sprang and run. But they had come down off’n the hill and they aimed to shoot Aunt Hollene again. And she a laying there in the road — her eyes full of blood. She couldn’t see hardly who it was. She begged them not to shoot her anymore — she told them she was dying anyway.”
So where was Al Brumfield at that time?
“Al got offa the horse down below there and come back under the creek bank and got to shooting at them see and they took off,” Bob said. “Hollene got over that. She was my mother’s aunt. I was around her home a lot. She lived in that big white house in Hart. Burned down now.”
How did they figure out who ambushed the Brumfields?
“Well, they didn’t know who it was,” Bob said. “But they noticed they weren’t around home, the Brumfields and Dingesses did. They was watching all around to see who it was. And these two guys just left their families and went into Kentucky. Just deserted their families. Then they knew who it was. After they got a hold of them, the Dingesses and the Brumfields, they told them the whole story. That was at my grandfather’s home. They took one guy out there in the yard and gagged him so he couldn’t make a noise and stuck a gun in his back and told him if he made any noise they’d shoot him. So he listened to that other fella inside the house. That other fella broke down and cried and he told them the truth about it. And they killed both of them over at Green Shoal. Took them out in the yard and shot them all to pieces. Walked off and left them. I was born and raised about three quarters of a mile below there.”
I asked Bob why the Brumfields did not avenge John Brumfield’s murder with the same ferocity. John, I knew from Brandon, was killed by Charlie Conley at a Chapmanville Fourth of July celebration in 1900.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’ll tell you, John Brumfield, he was mean as a snake anyway. He treated them fellers pretty rough. And they killed him up there in the head of Hart in an association ground. They just walked up to him in that association ground — a whole bunch of people there — and shot his brains out.”
An association ground?
“They had them once a year near an old schoolhouse,” Bob said. “People’d all gather in and they had a place where they traded horses. Half a mile away, an old country preacher would preach to them. It was kind of a rough place up in there at that time.”
09 Wednesday Oct 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Al Brumfield, Appalachia, Brandon Kirk, feud, Green McCoy, Harts, Harts Creek, Henderson Dingess, Hollene Brumfield, James V. Henderson, John W Runyon, Milt Haley, Wild Bill, writing
Having satisfied my thirst for Brumfield family history, Brandon pulled out some great newspaper articles pertaining to the 1889 troubles. He began with one from the Ceredo Advance dated Wednesday, October 2, 1889, and titled “Disappointed Love Leads to a Desperate Double Crime in Lincoln County:”
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. September 27 – Word has just reached here of a sensational crime on Big Hart’s creek, in Lincoln county, 90 miles up the Guyandotte River. Al Brumfield, a newly married man, and his bride had spent the day with his wife’s parents some distance up the creek. Just at dusk, on their return, and when near their home, they were fired upon by a man who sprang from the bushes by the road-side. Mrs. Brumfield was shot in the head and fell to the ground unconscious. Her husband was shot in the right lung but managed to crawl to a neighbor’s for assistance.
The nearest physician, twenty-five miles distant, was summoned, but arrived too late to render the woman any assistance and she died in a few hours. The latest information is that Brumfield is also dying. He claims he recognized the assassin, but refuses to say who it was. It is the belief of the neighborhood that a suitor of Mrs. Brumfield, who failed to win her, is the assassin.
The article was full of errors but its implication of a single “assassin” with a personal attachment to Hollena Brumfield was interesting.
On Wednesday, October 9, 1889, Ceredo Advance ran a letter from “WILD BILL,” written on September 27. Wild Bill gave his address as Warren, West Virginia — a now extinct post office on Harts Creek below the mouth of Smoke House Fork.
ED. ADVANCE: — As you have had no communication from this place for some time I will give you a few items. There have been several cases of flux in this vicinity and two or three deaths. Farmers are busy saving fodder and cutting up corn. Our neighborhood was thrown into a state of confusion last Sunday evening about 3 o’clock. One mile from this place some low down villain attempted to assassinate Mr. Brumfield and wife. They had been on a visit to Mrs. Brumfield’s father, Mr. Henderson Dingess, and as they returned home they were shot from the brush, one ball striking Mrs. Brumfield just in front of the right ear and ranging around the cheek bone and striking her nose producing a serious but not fatal wound, and one ball striking Mr. Brumfield in the right arm below the elbow producing only a flesh wound. They were cared for and dressed by Drs. Moss, of Cabell county, and Hudgins, of Logan county. They will recover. Mr. Brumfield is a prominent merchant living at Hart, W.Va., and is a good citizen, highly esteemed by his neighbors. His wife is a noble and kind-hearted lady and beloved by all her acquaintances. They have a large train of friends who sympathize with them in their distress. The object of the attempted murder is believed to be robbery. The good and law-abiding citizens should unite and rid the earth of such miserable miscreants.
Based on this September 27 letter, written a week after the ambush at Thompson Branch, there were two theories regarding the motive for the crime: one, it was done by a jealous suitor; two, it was an attempted robbery. In either case, this second article again referred to the attacker in the singular sense…sort of.
By October 24, locals had deduced Haley and McCoy’s guilt, captured them in Kentucky and murdered them at Green Shoal. WILD BILL was apparently unaware about this latter act because on October 25 he again sent a letter to the Ceredo Advance (printed on November 6).
ED. ADVANCE – Mr. Allen Brumfield, who was shot in the arm near this place about a month ago, has got about well. His wife, who was shot at the same time, is improving very slowly, but she will get well. The perpetrators of the awful crime — Milton Haley and Green McCoy — have been arrested. Haley did the shooting and McCoy is accused of being an accomplice, but the latter will be released by turning state’s evidence against Haley. The law should be enforced against such persons to the utmost extent. Our neighborhood is in a state of intense excitement and may terminate in a deadly feud between two parties…
[Since the above was written a mob took Haley and McCoy from the officers and killed them. — ED]
God only knows what our country will come to, as the deadly Winchester is fast becoming the ruling factor in our land.
Well just who was this WILD BILL? He seems to have access to a lot of information regarding the growing feud on Harts Creek. Maybe it was “Detective Wild Bill,” who history records as a participant in the Hatfield-McCoy Feud in the nearby Tug Valley.
A story featured in the Ceredo Advance titled “A Visit to the Lincoln County Battle Field” and dated Wednesday, November 13, 1889, was most interesting:
Mr. J.V. Henderson, editor of the Charleston Nonpareil, was in this city today [Nov. 7], having just returned from the scene of the recent trouble in Lincoln county. He went to get a full description of the places and the causes which led to the trouble for the metropolitan dailies. Mr. Henderson went into the house where Green McCoy and Milton Haley were murdered, and made a map of the house and its surroundings. He also made a map of the Hart’s Creek country, giving the location of each faction — the Brumfields and the Runyons. While going up Hart’s Creek he was met by two men acting as pickets, armed with Winchester rifles, who asked him where he was going and what was his business. Mr. Henderson told them that he was a newspaper man and wanted to get information regarding the trouble in that vicinity. They told him that they would give him one hour to get off the creek and leave the country.
Mr. Henderson took the hint and left at once. He says he learns that both factions are heavily armed and are expecting an attack at any time. Each side has pickets out ready to give the alarm in the event of hostile movements by the other side. The road up Hart’s Creek is blockaded, and travelers through that region avoid the place.
Unfortunately, few issues of the aforementioned Charleston Nonpareil survive in libraries today. Brandon later located copies of the Nonpareil for February and May of 1889 and February and June of 1890 — the times just prior to and just after the trouble — but none for the fall of 1889, which would have maybe mapped the murder site and the location of the feudists’ homes. There was one interesting development: according to The Cabell County Record, Mr. J.V. Henderson, “one of the best known figures in West Virginia newspaper work,” died at the Spencer insane asylum in 1898 at the ripe age of 43.
29 Sunday Sep 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Al Brumfield, Boney Lucas, Brandon Kirk, George Fry, George W. Ferrell, Green McCoy, Henderson Dingess, history, Hollene Brumfield, John Hartford, John W Runyon, Milt Haley, Paris Brumfield, The Lincoln County Crew, writing
After a few hours of digesting this material, I met Brandon Kirk in the hall near the copier. Brandon, a neatly groomed young man wearing a tie, was freighted down with satchels. We introduced ourselves and were soon in the study room where Brandon started fishing through his bags and pulling out letters, notebooks, folders and photo albums. Within a few minutes, the table was covered. It was as if someone had walked up with a giant garbage bag full of papers and dumped it all out in front of me.
One of the first things Brandon showed me was a small account of Milt Haley’s murder titled “The Brumfield-McCoy Feud”, which was originally published in a 1926 edition of Lambert’s Llorrac.
The Brumfield-McCoy Feud took place in the month of September, about 1888, some three miles up Hart’s Creek. Hollena Brumfield and her husband, Allen Brumfield, had been visiting Henderson Dingess, father of Mrs. Brumfield, one Sunday and were about two miles below Mr. Dingess’ on their way home. Green McCoy and Milt Haley laid in wait for them. Mr. and Mrs. Brumfield were riding down the creek, Mrs. Brumfield being on the same horse behind her husband. McCoy and Haley began shooting at them, one bullet striking Mr. Brumfield in the arm, and the other tearing away a portion of Mrs. Brumfield’s face, disfiguring her for life. Mr. Brumfield jumped from his horse and ran, and in that way escaped further injury. McCoy afterwards told that they were bribed by John Runyons with a barrel of flour and a side of bacon to McCoy, and twenty-five dollars in money to [Haley]. The murderers escaped into Kentucky but were captured a little later and brought back. Allen Brumfield supplemented the reward offered by the state with one of his own.
It seems the cause of the trouble was bad feeling between John Runyons and Al Brumfield. Runyons had a store and saloon at the mouth of Hart’s Creek. Brumfield had a store on Guyan River about a fourth of a mile below Hart, on the south side of the Guyan and sold whiskey on a houseboat. John Dingess [Mrs. Brumfield’s brother] was a bartender.
McCoy and Haley were brought back and kept over night at the house of George Fry. The next morning a number of men, presumably Brumfield’s friends came in, and the two prisoners were shot and killed.
Along with the above article was another version of “The Lincoln County Crew”, which gave George (and not Tom) Ferrell as the author.
Come all young men and ladies, come fathers, mothers, too;
I’ll relate to you the history of the Lincoln County crew.
Concerning bloody rows, and many a thieving deed,
Dear friend, pray lend attention to these few lines I say.
It was in the month of August all on a very fine day;
Allen Brumfield he got wounded they say by Milt Haley.
But Brumfield couldn’t believe it, nor hardly thought it so;
He said it was McCoy who shot that fatal blow.
They shot and killed Boney Lucas, a sober and innocent man,
And left his wife and children, to do the best they can.
They wounded Rufus Stowers, although his life was saved;
And he seemed to shun the grog shop, since he stood so near his grave.
Allen Brumfield he recovered, some weeks and months had past;
It was at the house of George Fry, these men they met at last.
Green McCoy and Milt Haley, about the yard did walk;
They seemed to be uneasy and no one wished to talk.
And then they went into the house, and sat down by the fire,
And little did they think, dear friends, they had met their final hour.
The sting of death was near them, _________________________
A few words passed between them concerning a row before.
The people some got frightened, began to rush out of the room;
When a ball from some one’s pistol laid the prisoners in the tomb.
Their friends then gathered ’round them, their wives to weep and wail;
Tom Ferrell was arrested, and soon confined to jail.
The butchers talked of lynching him, but that was all the fear;
And when the day of trial came, Tom Ferrell he came clear.
And then poor Paris Brumfield, relation to the rest,
He got three balls shot through him, they went straight through his breast.
The death of these few men have caused great trouble in our land;
Men to leave their wives and children to do the best they can.
Lincoln County’s still at war, they never, never cease;
Oh, could I only, only see my land once more in peace.
I composed this as a warning, a warning to all men;
Your pistols will cause trouble, on that you may depend.
In the bottom of the whiskey glass, the lurking devil dwells;
It burns the hearts of those who drink, and sends their soul to hell.
07 Sunday Apr 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Brandon Kirk, Charles Wolfe, Green McCoy, Harts Creek, history, Huntington, John Hartford, Lawrence Haley, Marshall University, Milt Haley, timbering, West Virginia, writing
Around that same time, I called Brandon Kirk, a great-nephew to Lawrence Kirk. Brandon was into genealogy and local history; for the past several years, he had been heavily researching the Brumfields. A college student and library assistant at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, he spent his weekends at Harts interviewing neighbors, gathering up old photographs and documenting cemeteries. He said his family had told him about my recent trip to Harts; he was eager to make contact and compare notes on the story of Al Brumfield’s trouble with Milt Haley, especially since I represented a “non-Brumfield, non-Harts Creek” perspective.
After my initial call, Brandon sent me detailed letters in giant manila envelopes full of information about the Brumfields, the death of Milt Haley and the Adams and Mullins families on Harts Creek. It went a long way in explaining who some of the people were in the stories Lawrence and I had been hearing. It was clear that Brandon had a lot of information to offer. He knew all the genealogies, geography, and chronology that we’d been lacking to completely understand the story of Milt Haley and Ed’s connection to Harts Creek.
At the time of the Haley-McCoy murders, according to Brandon, Harts was in the midst of a timber boom. It was a tumultuous time: a whole new economic system had descended on locals who’d previously been primarily small farmers. Competition and the desire to accumulate wealth and status had created a lot of jealousy among and within local families. This new way of life was made worse by the arrival of “new faces” in town, many of whom were transients from Kentucky looking for work. Brandon figured that Milt Haley and Green McCoy were among these immigrants, as their family names were absent from the old records around Harts Creek. In his estimation, Milt and Green may have been like so many of the new arrivals: outlaws trying to escape a seedy past in a somewhat isolated but moderately booming town. He cited at least one such example in his own family tree.
As for the Haley-McCoy murders, Brandon and I seemed to have traced down roughly the same versions of the story. He said it was just one of many murder stories in Harts’ past that had caught his interest — and only one of several involving his ancestors. As a result, he had neglected to hunt down many possible leads regarding it. It was one of probably a hundred incredible stories pertaining to Harts.
I told Brandon about my recent trip, how I had gone to Milt and Green’s grave with Lawrence Kirk. He said he had never been to the grave but had heard that Milt and Green were buried together in a single hole. I wondered why they were buried together and he suggested that if they were handcuffed together at the time of the murders maybe it was a practical decision; or maybe their mutilated bodies warranted a “rushed job.” There may have also been a customary aspect to the burial: in 1882, during the Hatfield-McCoy feud, three of Randolph McCoy’s sons were buried together after their single-night execution.
Around that time, I compiled Xerox versions of my notes on Ed’s life and sent it to Lawrence Haley and Dr. Wolfe. Dr. Wolfe showed his copy to Judy McCollough of the University of Illinois Press who immediately called and told me that I had a book in the works and that she wanted to print it. It was the first time I had really thought about my research regarding Ed Haley as anything more than an obsession to totally immerse myself in his life. I told her that it wasn’t a book yet, but if it was gonna be there was a tremendous amount of work that needed to be done.
10 Sunday Mar 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Al Brumfield, Ben Walker, Burl Farley, feud, French Bryant, Green McCoy, Hollene Brumfield, Lawrence Kirk, Melvin Kirk, Milt Haley, Stella Abbott, timbering, Victor Shelton, writing
Mr. Kirk had heard a lot about Milt Haley’s trouble with the Brumfields. His version of events, along with that of Roxie Mullins, Bob Adkins and the Goldenseal article, comprised the bulk of what I knew of Milt’s death.
“I feel like that I’ve got pretty much the base of what happened, but there’ve been add-ons and deletions and so on along the way,” he said. “It was a tragic thing.”
The whole trouble had nothing to do with John Runyon, as we’d previously heard.
“The real thing behind it, them Adamses over in yonder and the Brumfields, they got into it over the timber,” Mr. Kirk said. “What they’d do, them people’d cut that big timber and put it in them creeks. Then they’d get spring floods and float them out. Brumfield had what they called a boom in down there to catch that timber. Then they’d make them into rafts and raft them down the river to the town of Guyandotte. There was a log market there. And Al got to stealing their logs.”
That was an interesting new development in the story, I thought. I mean, maybe Al Brumfield wasn’t completely innocent in the trouble. And maybe Milt was, in the eyes of at least some locals, justified in ambushing him.
“Word of mouth that’s come down to me from my mother and grandmother, some of the Adamses was supposed to hired McCoy and Haley to shoot Aunt Hollene, old man Al Brumfield’s wife. I remember her well. She had a hole in her jaw there. When she’d eat or talk, spit would work up in it. Or if she would eat candy or something, you could see the candy. She was a tough old lady. She’d been blowed up in a sawmill and had a short leg — walked with a cane. Cussed like a sailor every time she made a step. But they shot her.”
Now where did this shooting take place?
“The shooting was supposed to took place up on Big Hart there at the mouth of Thompson Branch,” Mr. Kirk said. “They was coming down the creek. They’d been up there visiting Hollene’s parents. She was one of them Dingesses from up there.”
Mr. Kirk said Al was shot in the arm and fell from his horse, while his wife was shot in the face.
Surprisingly, there were rumors of Milt and Green’s innocence, but Mr. Kirk “never did hear that expounded on.”
“I’ve heard it said a time or two, ‘Well, I doubt them being the ones that did it.’ I never would get into a discussion ’cause — not that it mattered either way to me in one sense — but I was convinced that they did it.”
Once Milt and Green were captured in Kentucky, a lynch mob formed in Harts consisting of Hugh Dingess (Hollena’s brother), French Bryant and several Brumfields. They joined up with Victor Shelton, a local lawman.
“You see, old man Victor Shelton was a constable or JP down here and he was a friend to them Brumfields,” Mr. Kirk said. “He went over there to Kentucky with them and they turned them over to Victor Shelton. When he come back across the river into West Virginia he just turned them over to the Brumfields and he come on back. They had horse roads all through these mountains and creeks everywhere. He probably left them over in there around Twelve Pole somewhere and went on back down in here around Ranger someplace where he lived. But that’s the way they got in charge of them.”
After taking possession of Milt and Green, the mob re-crossed the Tug River at the present-day town of Kermit in Mingo County and went up Jenny’s Creek (or possibly Marrowbone Creek) to Twelve Pole Creek. They entered Harts Creek at the head of Henderson Branch and made their way to Hugh Dingess’ home on Smoke House. At that location, they ate a big meal and spent the night. The next day, they headed up Bill’s Branch and crossed a mountain onto Piney Creek. They rode down Piney to the West Fork (just above Iris Williams’ home), went a short distance up Workman Fork, turned up Frank Fleming Hollow and dropped down off of the ridge to a home near the Guyandotte River. (Mr. Kirk was very adamant about this home being on the west side of the river, not at the mouth of Green Shoal where Bob Adkins had said.) By that time, “Dealer Dave” Dingess, Charley Brumfield, Burl Farley, Will Adkins and “Black John” Adkins had joined the gang.
At this home, the mob questioned Milt and Green separately and tried to secure a confession. As one was led out the door, he hollered to his friend, “Don’t tell ’em a damn thing!” — but his partner told it all, thus deciding their guilt in the eyes of the mob. (Based on what we’d heard from Bob Adkins, I figured that it was Green McCoy who made the confession.)
A host of young local ladies, including Stella Abbott, cooked a chicken supper as Milt and Green’s last meal. Either Milt or Green (undoubtedly an emotional wreck) said he wasn’t hungry, so his partner replied, “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow ye may die.” Supposedly, a Brumfield nearby them then said, “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow ye shall die.”
Mr. Kirk said French Bryant supposedly killed Milt and Green, although he’d also heard that Burl Farley, a timber boss from Harts Creek who was connected to the Dingess family, “gave the order” to shoot them.
“Old man French Bryant was a big old mountaineer-type fellow,” Mr. Kirk said. “Rough talking, grouchy. Most people liked him pretty good. French Bryant was married three times, I reckon. Yeah, that old man, I went to his funeral. He’s buried right at the head of Piney there.”
There was a lot of confusion over the murders. Word was spread through the community that Haley and McCoy were killed by a mob who’d taken them from the Brumfield posse. Mr. Kirk dismissed that notion, saying, “The ones who got them in Kentucky were the ones who killed them.” He was certainly a good source for that statement considering his family connection to the Brumfields.
Lawrence and I hung onto Mr. Kirk’s every word as he described Milt Haley’s burial, which he said occurred the day following the murders.
“The next morning, Melvin Kirk, who was my father’s father, and several other people — I don’t know who else — went with Ben Walker and got them either in a sled or an old wagon and hauled them around there,” he said. “My grandfather helped them take them around there and clean them up. Back then they didn’t take them to a funeral home — they just wrapped them and made a rough burial preparation. I think they made a coffin for them and buried them on the old man Walker’s property. Of course, there was a preacher at the burial because old man Ben Walker was an ordained preacher. He’s the one that married my father and mother in 1911.”
Mr. Kirk turned our attention toward a mountain across the creek.
“See that gap yonder in the hill? Right over there, they call that the Walker Branch. That’s where old man Ben Walker lived. He was an old preacher. He owned all of this land in here. You can go right over there and turn right and go up that side of the river right over to where they were killed.”
I asked Mr. Kirk whose decision it was to bury Milt and Green at that location and he said, “The old man Ben Walker decided where to put them. I never did go to their grave. A lot of people thinks it’s down in the lower end of that garden. There are some graves down there, but that’s not it.”
He wasn’t sure why they chose to bury them in a single grave.
“I guess it was just maybe the work involved. I think they’ve been quite a little bit of that done here where there was multiple deaths. Whenever I was young, my daddy and I would ride down that creek. He’d tell me, ‘Right up on that hill is where Haley and McCoy’s buried.’ He called his daddy ‘Paw.’ Said, ‘Paw and Ben Walker took them up there and buried them.’ Just got a rock for a marker.”
24 Sunday Feb 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
blind, Clyde Haley, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, fiddle, fiddler, Great Depression, Green McCoy, Harts Creek, history, Imogene Haley, Lawrence Haley, Milt Haley, Mona Haley, music, Noah Haley, Peter Mullins, writing
We all met up with Mona later in the day. She acted surprised that I was even interested in seeing her again, joking, “I’m good for something, aren’t I?” She was extremely talkative and almost immediately took over the conversation in a way that gave me the impression she really knew a great deal about Ed and Ella’s music. It was quite a different presentation than my first meeting with her.
“See my brothers don’t know about music like I know about music,” she said right away. “They know the tunes and they know the keys and stuff, but I don’t think they listened like I did. I paid attention to Pop’s music because I love music. I always loved music.”
She told Lawrence, “You don’t have the ear for it like I do.”
It was the first time I had heard someone be so candid with Lawrence. He seemed a little put off by it, muttering, “Probably not.”
We told Mona about talking with Bob Adkins and she said, “Pop’s mother was supposed to had the whole side of her face blown away. Now whether she was killed or not, I don’t know. That happened on Harts Creek and that’s what made Milt Haley get in with Green McCoy ’cause one of the Hatfields shot my dad’s mother’s face away. Side of her face. Well now, that’s how I understood it. But I’ve heard it said about that sinkhole that fills up with blood where that Milt Haley and Green McCoy was beat to death — buried in the same grave — and every time it rains, the grave fills up with blood.”
Noah said of Milt, “Well, ain’t he the guy that shot the person that shot Pop’s mom in the face? I thought Pop’s dad shot and killed the guy that shot his mother in the face.”
Mona wasn’t sure about that but said, “I know that Pop said that if he could see, he would get the guy that hurt his mother. Shot her. Her name was Emma Jean.”
Mona was sure the measles had caused her father to go blind, not Milt or ice water.
“No,” she said emphatically, “Ice water wouldn’t make you go blind. He had the measles.”
She said Ed started playing the fiddle when he was small and never talked about learning from anyone.
“Did you know that he started out on a cornstalk homemade fiddle?” she asked me. “I heard that his uncle or somebody up in the hills made him a cornstalk fiddle. Musta been Uncle Peter, I don’t know. Uncle Peter was a crippled man. His foot was turned backwards.”
Noah said, “He was a mean one, too.”
Mona knew little else about Ed’s life on Harts Creek.
“I don’t know if I told you about him talking about… As a young boy he was sitting on one of those log fences that goes this way — zig-zag, I call it — and it was a bull pasture inside. And he always carried a pistol with him. For what, I don’t know. It was a bull pasture fence he was sitting on and he was playing his little cornstalk fiddle and somebody come back behind him and was playing a joke on him by acting like a bull — you know, making noises like a bull. So Pop pulled that pistol out and shot and missed him by about an inch.”
Mona was quick to mention Ella, pointing out that “she figures in a lot of this, too.” I agreed, of course, but hadn’t been able to find out much about her from Lawrence, who seemed to keep his memories of her to himself. Every time Pat brought her name up, he said things like, “John doesn’t want to hear about Mom — he wants to know about Pop.” He always said it in a straightforward way that I knew to basically avoid the subject, as did Pat.
Mona said her parents met when Ella came to one of Ed’s “concerts”.
“I remember a lot of things about Mom,” she said. “Me and Mom was close. She walked around to feel if there was dirt on the floor — to see if it was clean — and if it wasn’t heads would roll. And she could cook. I remember back, I guess, during the Depression, her making lard cans full of soup so she could feed the neighbors and she had big bread pans full of cornbread for the dogs. And she could type as good as any typist.”
Mona looked at Lawrence and said, “Remember that whistle she had for us? It was like a calliope whistle. It was plastic or tin or something. And every one of us had a different tune. Each one of us knew our tunes. Different note.”
Mona’s pride in Ed and Ella seemed a little more on-the-surface than what I had detected with Lawrence.
“If there was a movie made, then there should’ve been one made about that — two blind people raising kids,” she said. “I’m just in awe of them and how they took care of all of us kids. They kept food and they kept shelter for us and we never went hungry. And they kept clothes on us. And I just don’t know how they done it. We always had a stable home. They always kept us occupied. We’d sit around in the wintertime and they’d give us soda crackers and apples and tell us to take a bite of one of them and then try to say a tongue twister.”
Mona said, “And we’re all reasonably intelligent,” although she jokingly pointed out that there were “some rogues in the family.”
Noah smiled and said, “I don’t know but one rogue.”
Mona knew exactly who he meant, so she told me, “That’s my other brother Clyde he’s talking about. He’s a rogue, but he’s all right.”
She said she was probably the real rogue of the family.
“Mom was real strict with me, but I was pretty head-strong,” she said. “I was rougher than all the boys put together, I reckon. At least that’s what they told me.”
19 Tuesday Feb 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Al Brumfield, Bob Adkins, Brooke Dingess, Cat Fry, feud, Green McCoy, Harts Creek, history, Hugh Dingess, Jake Adkins, John Hartford, Lawrence Haley, Lincoln County, Milt Haley, West Virginia
The next day, Al and his posse headed for Hugh Dingess’ “great old big house” on Harts Creek. Bob’s mother Brooke Dingess was a witness to events that followed.
“They stayed all night there and they wanted to be awful sure that they were right, you know,” Bob said. “See, they didn’t want to kill somebody that was innocent. Well they took Haley outside and put handcuffs behind him and gagged him so he couldn’t make a noise and stuck a gun in his back and told him if he made any noise they’d shoot him, see? And a funny thing happened out there, though. He broke loose from them and pretty near got away.
“And then they told McCoy that they had taken Milton down there to hang in the orchard, and if he had anything to say he had better be saying it, see? He broke down and cried and he told them the truth about it. And he told them that they pulled straws on which one would do the shooting and it fell on Green and he got sick — vomited — and he just couldn’t do it. So Haley said, ‘You ain’t got no nerve. Give me the gun and I’ll do it.’ And he claimed Haley was the one that shot. He didn’t do it.”
As if to prove his story, Green then said something to the effect of, “You go down there and check at that sinkhole and you’ll see a pile of shavings that I whittled with my long razor.”
Bob said, “Well, Haley came out and cursed McCoy and told him he didn’t have any nerve and said everything to him. Said that fellow just cried and said, ‘Now, you know I’m telling every bit the truth.'”
Bob said the mob was convinced by McCoy’s confession, but I felt it had a few holes in it. First of all, what if Green skewed the truth by blaming everything on Milt — who he thought was dead — in the hopes of saving his own life? Second of all, why would he and Milt have only had one gun between them for their ambush? Of course, maybe these details were worked out by subsequent confessions not remembered by any living person today. In any case, the mob was apparently satisfied.
Bob said, “They didn’t do anything to them there. They weren’t nobody’s fool, now. They didn’t want any murder going on around their home; then it would be too easy to pin it on them. They’d go to somebody else’s home.”
Bob said his aunt Catherine Fry — an eyewitness to subsequent events — told him the rest of the story about Milt’s murder. He said she was nineteen years old at the time and lived at the mouth of Green Shoal on the Guyandotte River. She said a mob arrived at her home during the night and woke her from her sleep.
“Well, Cat said the first thing she knew she was sitting in the living room — the front room, you know,” Bob said. “They had whiskey there. A lot of drinking going on and a whole bunch of them… Must have been ten to fifteen maybe. The Brumfields and Dingesses all mixed up, you know. Haley and McCoy were back in the bedroom under guard. They had them both in bed.”
Milt continued to verbally abuse Green for admitting their guilt.
“Around ten o’clock, somebody shot the lamp out and Cat run and jumped behind a flour barrel over in the kitchen corner until the fracas was over.”
Milt and Green were shot in bed then pulled out in the yard where the mob “took an axe and cut their heads open and shot them all up — shot them all to pieces.”
I asked Bob what happened next and he said, “They got on their horses and left — walked off and left them. Al Brumfield was one of the head fellows who was there and he was a first cousin of Dad’s. Evidently somebody else took his horse. He came down to Grandfather’s house, which was his uncle by marriage and he told Grandpaw what they had done. Grandpaw told him to go on upstairs and go to bed. No, he did not want to do that because he was afraid those McCoy and Haley people might come in on him, friends or something, [and trap him in the house]. He slept up in the hollow under a beech tree up there. It was summertime, you know. I bet he didn’t sleep good and if he did he shouldn’t have. And the next morning he got out and he ate his breakfast with Grandpaw and then he went on to Harts — home, you know?”
In the next few days, someone hauled Milt and Green’s bodies to the West Fork of Harts Creek and buried them in a single, unmarked grave.
Bob gave us directions to the grave, which he’d last seen as a boy.
“You go up main Harts Creek. It’s not over a mile, I don’t think. It’s the first big creek that turns off to your left. You turn to the left there across the creek and go up that road about a mile or a mile and a quarter and they’s a little hollow there and they’s a house right in there. It’s been a good while since I been up there. If you’ll ask some of them people there, they’ll tell you right where it is.”
Lawrence and I planned to go to Harts in a few days and find it.
Bob said, “We lived there in a house right down below there for one year before we came down here. We sold our old farm up there and we had no where to go and we moved over there on an uncle of mine’s farm. And I farmed one summer right down below there. I went up there and saw that. Had just a little stone. Two of them there. They was buried in the same grave. Them stones may be torn down and gone now. We left there in 1919 or ’20.”
18 Monday Feb 2013
Posted in Breeden, Ed Haley, Guyandotte River, Hamlin, Harts, John Hartford, Lincoln County Feud
Tags
Al Brumfield, Appalachia, Bob Adkins, Breeden, Cincinnati, crime, feud, feuds, Green McCoy, Guyandotte River, Harts Creek, Henderson Dingess, history, Hollene Brumfield, John Dingess, John Hartford, John W Runyon, Kentucky, Lincoln County Feud, Milt Haley, Norfolk and Western Railroad, Thompson Branch, Tug River, Twelve Pole Creek, West Virginia
Wow. So what about Al Brumfield, the guy who got into the feud with Milt?
“Well, he was a little more tamer fellow than old Paris but he was kind of a rough character — mean as a snake,” Bob said. “All those Brumfields were, you know. They was a tough outfit, all of them was.”
Al and his wife Hollena lived in a large white house at the mouth of Harts Creek, which Bob said had recently burned. They had a store and log boom nearby and kept a boat tied up at the riverbank for easy access across the Guyandotte. Things were going great for them until John Runyon (who Bob called “the root of all evil”) moved in from Kentucky.
“That fellow Runyon, he had a saloon and a store right across the creek there at the mouth of Harts, you know — a shebang,” Bob said. “And Aunt Hollene and Al Brumfield, they had a big store over there on the other side of the creek, over on the lower side of the creek. They was competitors in a way, you know. This fellow Runyon hired these two thugs to kill them, so as to get rid of their competition. And he hired Milt Haley and Green McCoy to kill them. They got a side of bacon and a can of lard and five dollars to do that…each. And these fellows, Milt Haley and Green McCoy, were two characters. I don’t know why they ever took a chance on that. Them boys got into that before they knew what they was into. Them Brumfields was mean as the devil up there.”
Bob spun out the details of Milt and Green’s ambush of Al Brumfield.
“Every Sunday, Al and Hollene would get on their horse and they’d ride up to the Forks of Big Hart about ten miles to visit her father. He was old Henderson Dingess, my great-grandfather. Al had a fine riding horse and he’d get on the horse and she’d ride behind him, see? And they’d been up there on a pretty summer day, and they’d done had dinner with her father.”
Haley and McCoy, meanwhile, laid in wait for them in a sinkhole at Thompson Branch with a .30/.30 Winchester.
“And Al and Hollene came along about three or four o’clock in the evening and those thugs laywaid them on the side of the hill up there as they came back down Harts Creek. They shot at Al’s head. That horse jumped and that bullet missed his head and hit Hollene right in the face right there and the bullet knocked her teeth out and came out this side here. It knocked her off of the horse.”
Al was carried on down the creek by his horse, which “sprang and run” so Milt and Green came off the hill toward his wife.
“They aimed to shoot Aunt Hollene again — and she a laying there in the road, her eyes full of blood. She couldn’t see hardly who it was. But she begged them not to shoot her anymore, because she figured they’d already killed her. She told them she was dying and begged them out of it.”
At that point, Al came back up along the creek bed shooting toward them “and they got scared and they run.”
Bob said, “Well, the Brumfields didn’t know who it was so they watched all around to see who it was. They watched Runyon like a hawk but he changed his name and walked right off. He left his store, his saloon and his family and went back to Kentucky. They hunted for years for him but they never did find him. He never poked his head around there anymore, not even to contact his family.”
Milt and Green also disappeared from the neighborhood — which caused locals to assume that they were guilty of some role in the trouble.
“And these two guys just left their family and went into Kentucky and just deserted their families,” Bob said. “Then they knew who it was. And they started looking for them.”
Al Brumfield put out a $3,000 reward for their capture. Detectives were told to search in river towns, as both men had run rafts out of the Guyan River.
A detective caught Green McCoy first in a Cincinnati restaurant. He identified him by noticing a nick in one of his ears. Just before apprehending him, the detective walked up and said, “I think you’re the man I’m looking for.” Once caught, Green gave the whereabouts of Milt, who was found working a butter churn on a steamboat at the river. Both men were jailed. Al Brumfield was informed of their capture by letter.
Brumfield organized two of his brothers-in-law and perhaps one of his brothers into a posse and rode to the rendezvous point (presumably in the vicinity of Cincinnati). He posed as a sheriff, paid the reward, took possession of the two men, then headed across eastern Kentucky and up the Tug River to Williamson. He and his gang rode a train on the N&W across Twelve Pole to Breeden, where they crossed the mountain and spent a night at the home of John Dingess, Hollena’s brother. Dingess ran a large country store and saloon, Bob said, but “nothing exciting happened around there.”
20 Sunday Jan 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Appalachia, Ashland, Big Sandy River, Bill Bowler, blind, Cabell County, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, Field Furniture Store, Gibson's Furniture Store, Green McCoy, guitar, Harts Creek, history, Ironton, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence County, Lawrence Haley, life, Logan, Milt Haley, Mona Haley, music, Noah Haley, Ohio, Paintsville, Peter Mullins, Portsmouth, Ralph Haley, Route 23, Route 60, Russell, South Point, West Virginia, writing
Lawrence said we could go see Mona if Noah would show us the way. Apparently, Lawrence didn’t know where his own sister lived. Noah agreed to guide us there, but drove a separate car so he could leave right away. He and Mona weren’t getting along. On the way, I said to Lawrence, “Now this sister is the youngest one?” and he said, “Yeah, she’s the baby.” I said, “She’s the only sister you have, and her name is?” “Mona,” he finished. “M-O-N-A. That wasn’t what she was intended to be named. Mother intended her to be named after old Doc Holbrook’s wife — her name was Monnie.”
Mona was staying with her daughter in nearby Ironton, Ohio. At the door, before Lawrence could tell her who I was or the reason for our visit, she looked right at me and said, “Well I know you. I’ve seen you on television.” It was an instant connection. I noticed that she had a high forehead just like her father.
We went on out in the yard where she showed a little surprise that Noah had led us to her house.
“He’s mad at me,” she said before sighing, “I feel sorry for poor old Noah. So lonely. Has to buy his friendship.” Right away, she dispelled our hopes that she had any of Ed’s records.
“No, I don’t have any,” she said. “I let my part of the records get away from me. I lost mine in my travels. I left them somewhere and never did get them back. It was around ’56. I went back to get them and the lady — Dorothy Bates — had moved. And I think she’s dead. I was living here in Ironton.”
Mona seemed a little emotionless — her voice was hollow, distant, as if her mind was a million miles away. She didn’t seem to show much remorse about losing her father’s records — “I’m sorry that I did, but you know hindsight’s 20/20.”
I asked her if Ed ever talked about his father or mother and she said, “He talked about his dad getting killed. He said that he was in the Hatfield-McCoy feud and he got killed with Green McCoy. He was a friend to the McCoys, I guess. And that’s all I can tell you about that. And he never talked about his mother at all.” Mona had no idea who Ed’s mother was and knew nothing about her connection with Uncle Peter Mullins on Harts Creek. She didn’t even remember what year her father died, saying, “My memory is failing me. I was married and living at South Point.”
I noticed again how much Mona looked like her dad.
I asked her if she ever had any long talks with him and she said, “My mother and I were very close but we didn’t talk much about my dad. I’ll tell you, I loved my dad but I didn’t like him very much because he was mean.”
She laughed and said to Lawrence, “Wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, if you struck him the wrong way,” Lawrence admitted. “He never was mean to me. I can’t even remember Pop whipping me.”
Mona insisted, “He wasn’t ever mean to me either but he was mean to Mom.”
I asked her what Ed did to her mother and Lawrence said (somewhat agitated), “He was a little bit mean to Mom. He’d fight with her sometimes and we’d have to stop things like that.”
It got a little quiet — a whole new facet of Ed’s life had just opened up to me.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said that,” Mona said, “but that’s how I feel. I sympathize with him now but he was a mean man.”
Lawrence tried to smooth it over by saying, “I put that down, part of it, to frustration with his condition. Really, I do.”
Sensing Lawrence’s dislike of the topic, I got the conversation directed back toward Ed’s music. He and Mona remembered Pop playing frequently on the streets of Ashland at Gibson’s Furniture Store, Field Furniture Store (later Sears) on 17th and Winchester and at the Ashland (later Second) National Bank on 16th and Winchester. It made sense that Ed often played on Winchester Avenue, the main east-west thoroughfare through town, currently merged with Route 60 and Route 23. I asked if Ralph ever played with Ed and Ella on the street and Mona said no — that he only played with them at home. Bill Bowler, a blind guitarist, was the person she remembered playing with her father on the street.
“He wasn’t very good,” Mona said. “When they’d get ready to set down and make music Pop would have to tune up his guitar for him.”
Ed hung around Ashland through the winter, Lawrence said, then took off around February. There was not a particular place he went first; it just depended on his mood. Mona said he was in Greenup County, Kentucky, often.
“He played in front of the courthouse there,” she said. “I’ve seen them have that whole front of the courthouse with people standing around dancing.”
She and Lawrence also remembered Pop playing in Portsmouth, Ohio; Cabell County, West Virginia; Logan, West Virginia; Lawrence County, Kentucky; Paintsville, Kentucky; and “all up and down the Big Sandy River.”
“They’d play around railroad YMCAs, too,” Lawrence said. “They had one in Ashland, one in Russell. And down on the N&W they had a big railroad YMCA in Portsmouth — New Boston, I guess. And there was a big steel mill at New Boston. Mom used to play there more than Pop, I guess. Mom used to play at the main gate.”
Mona and Lawrence gave me a great idea of how Ed dressed when on the road. She said he wore “moleskin pants and a long-sleeve shirt — sometimes a top coat when it was cold.” Lawrence said his dad always buttoned his shirt “all the way to the top button” but never wore a tie and mostly wore blue pants. For shoes, he preferred some type of slipper, although he sometimes wore “high top patent leather shoes” — what I call “old man comfort shoes.” Mona said he always donned a hat, whether it was a Panama hat, straw hat or felt hat. He also packed his fiddle in a “black, leather-covered case” — never in a paper sack as Lawrence remembered. “No,” she stressed, seeming amused at the idea of Ed having anything other than a case. Lawrence disagreed, clearly recalling to the contrary — “Buddy, I have.” He said Ed seldom had his fiddle in a case when he went through the country, usually just tucking it under his arm. “Same way with Mom. She didn’t have a case for her mandolin a lot of times. I guess that’s the reason he wore out so many, reckon?”
05 Saturday Jan 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Al Brumfield, Appalachia, Bob Adkins, feud, Green McCoy, Harts Creek, Henderson Dingess, history, Hollene Brumfield, John Hartford, John W Runyon, Lincoln County, Milt Haley, West Virginia, writing
Several months later, I spotted a follow-up article about Milt Haley’s murder in the Spring 1992 edition of Goldenseal titled “Settling Family Differences.” It was based on an interview with Bob Adkins, a Lincoln County gas driller born just after the turn of the century at Ferrellsburg, West Virginia. It was rough country in there during his childhood.
“I know of 18 murders within ten miles of where I grew up,” Bob said. “Never knew of anyone to kill a stranger. They were settling their own family differences. People lived by the gun. Never saw but one fistfight. I made it a point to tend to my own business.”
Bob’s great-grandfather Henderson Dingess was the father of the Hollena Brumfield (spelled “Haline” in the article) shot in the face by Milt Haley and Green McCoy. Henderson and his wife Sally (Adams) Dingess lived on the Smoke House Fork of Harts Creek in what was then Lincoln County (but is today Logan County).
“The Dingesses made part of their living floating logs downstream,” Bob said. “They also had an orchard and a federal licensed brandy making operation.”
Al and Hollena Brumfield were wealthy businessmen at the mouth of Harts Creek on the Guyandotte River. Al’s father Paris Brumfield “lived half a mile below there on good bottom land,” Bob said. Al and Hollena “built a boom across [Harts] Creek to catch logs that were floated into the Guyan in the spring. Al charged by the log and prospered. They built an eight-room house and put in a store. Haline ran the store and offered food and lodging to travelers.”
There was a picture of the Brumfield home in the article — it was the same place where Lawrence had said his grandmother was shot in a feud.
Bob gave a great account of Milt’s murder, expounding on what I already knew while opening up a few new leads.
A fellow named Runyan [spelled “Runyon” in other sources] came in from Kentucky and put in a store and saloon and made competition for Haline and Al Brumfield. Well, when that fellow came and put in a store it was believed that he would like to get rid of Al.
Every Sunday Al and Haline rode up the hollow to Harts Creek to see her daddy, Henderson Dingess. They both rode on one horse. Runyan gave some men a side of bacon and a barrel of flour to kill them. They got in a sinkhole and shot at Al on the way back. Al jumped off, but they hit Haline in the cheek and the bullet went out the other cheek. Al ran and got away and then came back for Haline. She knew there were two men but she didn’t know who they were. Thought it was Burl Adams but became convinced it wasn’t him.
The men got away, but when it was found out that Milt Haley and Green McCoy had disappeared suddenly that night everyone agreed that they had been hired by Runyan to kill Al Brumfield. Runyan also left Harts that night. Runyan just left, and they looked for him the rest of their lives. Then they missed Milt Haley and Green McCoy. They just left their families and disappeared. Figured it was by steamboat on the Ohio.
News got to Cincinnati that $1,500 was offered for Haley, Runyan, and McCoy. A detective there found [Haley and McCoy] and when Al heard they had his men he went down posing as sheriff, paid the reward, got them on the N&W train to Wayne County by Kenova, then up Twelve Pole Creek to Tug River. Breeden was a railroad stop and they walked from there to Harts by Left Fork of Twelve Pole.
Haline’s brother, John Dingess, had a saloon at Dingess on the way. They stayed there and stayed the next night at Grandpa’s [Hugh Dingess]. His daughter Brooke was 14 at the time. That night they took Milt Haley out, told McCoy they had hanged him, then McCoy told the whole story. Haley was held and made to listen to McCoy. Then they brought Haley in and he called McCoy yellow and still denied all of it.
Next day they went along West Fork of Harts to Fry. Stayed at Aunt Catherine Fry Adkins’s house at Fry. She was in the kitchen with the two men tied together, everyone drinking. Someone shot the lamp out over her head. Then they shot the men and took axes to their heads. This wasn’t much strange. They took the law into their own hands but made sure it was the right people.
Al Brumfield come to Grandpa [Adkins]’s that night but slept up the hollow. [They] took the bodies to West Fork of Harts and buried them in the same grave. Their relatives kept quiet.
After repeatedly studying Bob Adkins’ story in Goldenseal, I concocted a theory about Ed’s mother that coincided somewhat with Lawrence’s story about her shooting at the Brumfield place. Bob told in the article how his father Albert Adkins met his mother Brooke Dingess while boarding at Hollena’s in the 1890s. They were married after Albert’s first wife Emma Jane Hager died of tuberculosis in 1901. Well…what if this Emma Jane Hager had been Emma Jean Haley? Had Emma Haley abandoned Ed and changed her last name so as to lose her identity as the widow of a man accused of attempted murder? Was the transportation slow enough and the memories of locals distorted enough by time to make such a transition of identity? It seemed a plausible enough theory, so I resolved to explore it by contacting Bob the next time I was in West Virginia.
01 Tuesday Jan 2013
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Al Brumfield, crime, George Fry, Green McCoy, Harts Creek, history, Hollene Brumfield, John W Runyon, Kentucky, Lincoln County, Lincoln County Crew, Milt Haley, Paris Brumfield, West Virginia, writing
Meador’s article was my first real glimpse into the story of Milt Haley’s death since talking with Roxie Mullins. I read it carefully and often.
“In 1889, around the time the Hatfields and McCoys were killing each other along the Tug River, another less known family war was occurring, not too far away, in Lincoln County. The details of the feud are sketchy today, and would be all but forgotten had its events not been recorded in a ballad known as ‘The Lincoln County Crew.’ In 1923, the text of the ballad, attributed to George Ferrell, and a brief explanation were published in The Llorrac, a Lincoln County historical journal published by the students and faculty at Carroll High School in Hamlin.”
Meador began with a somewhat interesting description of Harts at the time of Milt’s death.
“The community of Harts, isolated in southern Lincoln County near the Logan County line, was one of the places where citizens occasionally had to take the law into their own hands. Harts, on the Guyandotte River about midway between Huntington and Logan, was a convenient stopping place for travelers journeying between the two towns. Also it played host to the teams of rough-and-tumble men who rafted logs down the river to ports on the Ohio. Because of its location and because whiskey was sold there, Harts attracted more than its share of troublemakers. Differences were often settled with a gun, and killings sometimes avenged by the family of the murdered person.”
The impetus for the feud that claimed Milt’s life, according to Meador, was trouble between Allen Brumfield and John Runyon, two merchants at the mouth of Harts Creek.
“In Harts, in the latter decades of the 19th Century, lived a man by the name of Allen Brumfield. According to Irma Butcher, Brumfield lived in a large white house near the Guyandotte River bridge. The Llorrac relates that Brumfield operated a store near Harts and sold whiskey from a houseboat in the river. Allen Brumfield, according to The Llorrac, was not the only whiskey merchant in Harts. At the mouth of Harts Creek, a man by the name of John Runyons operated a store and saloon. For some reason there were hard feelings between Runyons and Brumfield, and Runyons is reported to have hired Milt Haley and Green McCoy to kill Brumfield. Payment for the two men is supposed to have been a barrel of flour, a side of bacon and $25.”
Now that was a real interesting twist to the story — no mention of Milt’s wife getting shot at the Brumfield place. Milt was apparently a hired gunman. In a way, I wasn’t surprised. From the very beginning, I had the impression that Milt was a bad character. Roxie Mullins had said he was “awful bad to drink and kept a Winchester loaded and sitting right by the side of his door. A whole mob killed him. They was afraid of him because he had a pretty bad name.” Lawrence had said, “When my dad was very young he didn’t like the whiny way my dad was acting so to make him more of a man he took him out and dropped him in a rain barrel through the ice.” And then there was the poverty aspect: I mean, to kill someone for a barrel of flour, a side of bacon and twenty-five dollars?
According to Meador’s article, Milt and Green supposedly ambushed Brumfield, a very common thing to do in those days.
“The day chosen by McCoy and Haley for their grim deed was a Sunday afternoon in mid-August of 1889. Allen Brumfield and his wife, Hollena, were returning on horseback from a visit to Mrs. Brumfield’s father, Henderson Dingess, who lived on Harts Creek. Mrs. Brumfield was on the same horse, behind her husband. From ambush and without warning, McCoy and Haley fired at the couple as they rode down the river. Their aim was good but not fatal. Allen Brumfield received a bullet in his arm and his wife was shot in the face. Brumfield jumped from his horse and by running was able to make his escape. Mrs. Brumfield also survived but was disfigured for life. Irma Butcher, who knows little about the history behind the ballad, remembers as a young girl visiting in the home of Allen Brumfield’s widow, Hollena, at Harts. Mrs. Butcher relates that widow Brumfield had a hole ‘the size of a quarter’ in her nose, where she had been shot during the feud.”
After the shooting, Milt and Green fled across the Kentucky state line to escape from the law.
“Haley and McCoy fled to Martin County, Kentucky, but in mid-October of that same year were captured and lodged in the Martin County jail. Their captors were no doubt attracted by the reward offered by the state of West Virginia and supplemented by Allen Brumfield.”
A posse fetched Milt and Green and brought them to Lincoln County.
“The accused gunmen were returned to West Virginia by way of Logan County, which was then a border county including what is now Mingo County. There they were turned over to a party of Lincoln County men headed by the aggrieved Brumfield himself. The group journeyed as far as Chapmanville by mid-afteroon and tried to find lodging for the night among the families there. No one would take them in, evidently because of a fear of mob violence. Still looking for overnight shelter, the party continued down the Guyandotte River. For some reason, the guard split so that a portion crossed to the other side, leaving but an officer and three men in charge of the prisoners. A few miles below Chapmanville this small company entered into Lincoln County, soon finding lodging at the house of George Frye. The Frye house was located near the mouth of Green Shoals at Ferrellsburg.”
At Green Shoal, Milt and Green were brutally murdered by a mob.
“About eight o’clock that evening, according to the Logan County Banner of October 31, 1889, an armed mob estimated at 20 or more men surrounded Frye’s house and demanded that the prisoners be turned over to them. Frye and his family were ordered into the kitchen and the guards were allowed to leave the house. The mob then rushed in, firing their guns. McCoy and Haley were dragged out into the front yard and shot several times. The angry crowd then took rocks and smashed in the skulls of the two men. Their bloody work accomplished, the mob disappeared into the darkness, leaving the neighbors to take care of the bodies.”
No one was brought to justice for the killings.
“The Logan County Banner, in relating the story of the murders of Haley and McCoy, said that there had been no arrests in connection with the killings even though it was generally well known in the area who had been involved. The paper also gave the impression that most local people were in agreement in condoning the action of the lynch mob. The paper itself seemed to justify the unlawful treatment of Haley and McCoy on the grounds that they had shot an innocent woman.”
At the end of Meador’s article was an interesting note about Paris Brumfield, father to Al, hinting at past trouble between the Brumfields and McCoy.
“Another mystery concerns a man by the name of Paris Brumfield, who is mentioned in Professor Cox’s version [of the song] as being murdered by his own son. A story quoted in the November 7, 1889, edition of the Logan County Banner, says that Paris Brumfield was engaged in a shooting scrape with Green McCoy about a year before the attack on Allen Brumfield.”
31 Monday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Al Brumfield, Ed Haley, feud, fiddle, George Fry, Green McCoy, history, John Hartford, Kennie Lamb, Lincoln County Crew, Milt Haley, music, Paris Brumfield, Stephen Green, writing
When I arrived back in Nashville, I set about lining up Ed’s fiddle as close as I could to how he would have wanted it. I had John Hedgcoth make a duplicate bridge, then strung it all up so that if he were to walk in the room it would suit him. After about a week, though, the neck started pulling up. I loosened the strings and called Kennie Lamb, a violin expert and craftsman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Kennie picked the fiddle up in Nashville and hand-carried it back to Louisiana for minimal restoration.
A few weeks later, I received a letter from him:
John,
The Markings in Red Corrspond to the Haley Bridge. The only exception being that the D string on the Original Bridge has two notches very close together. I have Marked a D notch in Red but the unmarked D notch will line up with one of the Original notches so you can take your choice on where you believe Mr. Haley Kept the D String.
I have noticed one other interesting thing: Mr. Haley “or Some one” has played this fiddle with the bridge set Almost 1/2 inch to the rear of where it should be set. NOTe: the Markin[g]s where the feet of the bridge once stood. The bridge was in this position for Many a year: Before the neck was out of Alignment and probably before the damage and subsequent repair to the back button the Original bridge may have been tall enough to sustain the rearward Position. The Old Gentleman may have positioned it to the rear in Order to lower the strings or being blind he may not have known exactly where the bridge was supposed to stand. Of course the fiddle would off note badly in the Position but I have seen many such “And Worse” Positions. I hope I have Accomplished what you wanted.
Around the time Kennie’s letter arrived in the mail, Stephen Green, an archivist at the Appalachian Center Sound Archive in Berea, Kentucky, sent me a Summer 1986 article from a West Virginia magazine called Goldenseal. It told all about Milt Haley’s murder and was based on a song called “The Lincoln County Crew”, as sung by Irma Butcher of Bear Creek in northwestern Lincoln County. The song was very similar to Cox’s “A West Virginia Feud-Song”.
Butcher first heard her version around 1910 from fiddler Keenan Hunter, a friend to her banjo-picking father, Press Blankenship. In 1978, she played it for Michael M. Meador at the Vandalia Gathering, West Virginia’s annual statewide folk festival in Charleston.
Come all dear friends and people, come fathers, mothers too;
I’ll relate to you the story of the Lincoln County Crew;
Concerning bloody rowing and many a thieving deed;
Come friends and lend attention, remember how it reads.
‘Twas in the month of August, all on a very fine day,
Al Brumfield he was wounded, they say by Milt Haley;
The people did not believe it, nor hardly think it so,
They say it was McCoy that struck the fatal blow.
They shot and killed Boney Lucas, a sober and innocent man,
Who leaves a wife and children to do the best they can;
They wounded poor Oak Stowers, although his life was saved,
He meant to shun the drug shop, that stood so near his grave.
Allen Brumfield he recovered, in some months to come to pass,
And at the house of George Frye, those men they met at last;
Green McCoy and Milt Haley about the yard did walk,
They seemed to be uneasy and no one wished to talk.
They went into the house and sat down by the fire,
But little did they think, dear friends, they’d met their final hour;
The sting of death was near them when a mob rushed in at the door,
And a few words passed between them concerning the row before.
The people all got frightened and rushed clear out of the room,
When a ball from some man’s pistol lay the prisoners in their tomb;
Their friends had gathered ’round them, their wives did weep and wail,
Tom Ferrell was arrested and soon confined in jail.
Confined in jail at Hamlin to stay there for awhile,
In the hands of Andrew Chapman to bravely stand his trial;
But many talked of lynching him, but that was just a fear,
For when the trial day came on, Tom Ferrell, he came out clear.
I suppose this is a warning, a warning to all men;
Your pistols will cause trouble, on this you can depend;
In the bottom of a whiskey glass, a lurking devil dwells;
And burns the breast of those who drink, and sends their souls to hell.
17 Monday Dec 2012
Posted in Ed Haley
Tags
Al Brumfield, Appalachia, Charles Wolfe, Ed Haley, Green McCoy, Harts Creek, history, John Hartford, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, Milt Haley, music, Paris Brumfield, West Virginia, writing
I was elated the entire trip home. As soon as I got back in Nashville, I called Dr. Wolfe and said, “I don’t even know where to begin to start telling you everything. I’ve got records and I got leads on where the rest of the recordings are. They just took me in and everything and as I got ready to go they gave me one of his canes for a souvenir. I’ve held one of his fiddles in my hand and looked at it. Now the other thing that Lawrence let me bring back are his reel-to-reel dubs of everything the Library of Congress has. There’s a bunch of tunes on there we haven’t heard: ‘Sourwood Mountain’ and ‘Dora Dean’.
“Yesterday we went up to Harts Creek in West Virginia, his birthplace. He’s a West Virginian; he’s not a Kentuckian. And in fact, Lawrence, because of the way his dad was treated when he was alive around Ashland, says he prefers to think of him as being a West Virginian. Lawrence, being the youngest of the five brothers, he’s kind of the keeper of the flame more or less. I think being around him I really get a flavor of what the old man was like. Even when we went up into Harts Creek, why the old-timers up there said he talked just like Ed.”
Dr. Wolfe asked me what my intentions were and I said, “I think what it amounts to is doing everything we can to preserve the music and the history because the story is incredible.”
I wasted little time in listening to all of Ed’s recordings on a reel-to-reel player borrowed from Doug Dillard. It was an incredible experience. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I immediately focused in on Ed’s recording of “Brownlow’s Dream”, the tune Roxie Mullins said was Milt Haley’s last tune. It was an amazing four part version of a tune I had learned from Elmer Bird called “Jimmy Johnson”. Lawrence had recalled his father singing, “Old Jimmy Johnson bring your jug around the hill. If you can’t bring your jug, bring your still if you will.” Not long after going through the reels, I took them to Bruce Nemerov at the Center for Popular Culture in Murfreesboro. I had promised Lawrence I would get him good copies.
A few weeks later, Dr. Wolfe called me with news of an old West Virginia ballad that mentioned the name of Milt Haley. It was titled “A West-Virginia Feud Song” and published in Professor J.H. Cox’s Folk-Songs of the South (1924). T.M. Martin of Marlinton, Pocahontas County, West Virginia, informed Cox about the tune in 1916, while S.S. Workman of Seebert, West Virginia, was the source for events surrounding it.
“The fight, out of which this song grew, occurred, as near as he could remember, in 1890, at the house of George Fries, eleven miles east of Hamlin, Lincoln County, and the trial took place at Hamlin,” Cox wrote. “The trouble between the factions was of long standing. The McCoy mentioned was a close relative of the McCoys that fought with the Hatfields. George Pack helped Mr. Workman get this song together. They never saw it in print.”
Events chronicled in the song lyrics seemed to be about Ed’s father, who was reportedly killed with a McCoy, but the account was so confusing that I really wasn’t sure.
Come all you men and ladies, and fathers and mothers too;
I’ll relate to you the history of the Lincoln County crew;
Concerning bloody rowing, and a many a threatening deed;
Pray lend me your attention, and remember how it reads.
It was all in the month of August, all on a very fine day,
Ale Brumfield he got wounded, they say by Milt Haley;
But Brumfield he recovered; he says it was not so,
He says it was McCoy that fired that fatal shot.
Two months have come and passed, now those men have met at last,
Have met at George Fries’ house, at George Fries’ house at last;
McCoy and Milt Haley, it’s through the yard did walk,
They seemed to be uneasy, with no one wished to talk.
They went into the house, sit down by the fire,
But little did they think they had met their fatal hour.
As the mob came rushing on them, the ladies left the room;
A ball from some man’s pistol lay McCoy in his tomb.
They shot and killed Boney Lukes, a sober and innocent man,
And left his wife and children to do the best they can;
They wounded old Ran Sawyers, although his life was save[d];
He seems to shun the drugshops, since he stood so near the grave.
Tom Feril was soon arrested and confined in jail;
He was put in jail in Hamlin to bravely stand his trial;
The Butchers threatened to lynch him, and that was all his fears;
The trial day it came on, Tom Feril he came clear.
There is poor old Perries Brumfield, he died among the rest;
He got three balls shot through him, they went through his breast.
The death of poor old Parris so lately has been done,
They say it was a hired deed, it was done by his son.
So go tell the nation around you it will never, never cease;
I would give this whole world around me to reach my home in peace;
In the bottom of a whiskey glass there is a lurking devil dwells,
It burns the breath of those who drink it and sends their souls to hell.
Writings from my travels and experiences. High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water. Mark Twain
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