Tag Archives: John Morris

History for Boone County, WV (1928)

15 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by in Boone County, Huntington, Logan

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A story titled “Old Times in Boone County Told About By Historian” and printed in the Logan Banner in Logan, WV, on April 20, 1928 provides some history for Boone County:

Old-timers and students of local history should be interested in the following excerpt from the history of Boone county by Prof. W.W. Hall. The family names mentioned are familiar ones.

What is here reproduced was taken from the Coal Valley News:

About the year of 1798 Isaac Barker reared a pole cabin on the brow of the hill on the lower side of White Oak Creek, near old lock seven. This was the first white man’s home established in Boone county. The second settler in the county was Johnson Kinder, a brother-in-law of Barker. He settled on Kinder Hill a few months after Barker came. The first settler on Little Coal River was John Halstead, who settled at the mouth of Camp creek about 1800. A few months later Jackie Dolin was married to Isaac Barker’s daughter and led his blushing bride, attired in her homespun, through the trackless forest up Brush creek and over the hill to a scantily furnished home on Camp creek. Not long after this Thomas Price, a daring hunter from North Carolina, wandered over the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap to Maysville, Kentucky, where he embarked in a canoe, ascended the Ohio, the Kanawha, the Coal and the Little Coal rivers to the present site of the town of Danville, and became the first settler there.

For some years after the coming of the white men there were no churches, but when an Old Baptist or Methodist preacher would arrive in the settlement, word was passed around to the neighbors and that night earnest prayers, exhortations and hallelujahs would ascend from those rude homes. The first church erected in the county was the Olive Branch Baptist church at the mouth of Turtle creek. The first term of the circuit court held in the county after its organization in 1847 was held in this church. The grand jury made its investigations while seated on the framing in Ballard’s old water mill near by, and the petit jury retired to the paw paw bushes below to consider their verdicts.

The daring hunters, adventurous pioneers and brave soldiers who came from the best families in the east to establish home in the wilderness, were not contented to let their children grow up without the rudiments of an education, so they established Old Field schools in the slave cabins, tanneries, country churches and abandoned dwellings, when an itinerant teacher who could read, write and cipher a little came along. The first free school in the county was taught by John Morris, just after the Civil War, in an old house abandoned by Dr. Church. The old house stood across the hollow from W.H. Turley’s present residence in Madison. Within the next year or two a log school house was erected near the upper end of Danville and another on the point across the river from Hadalton. The children of Madison had to go to Danville or Hadalton to school until 1885, when the people of Madison, by mandamus, compelled the board of education to give them a school. The first school house erected in Madison is now used by Dr. Smoot for a barn. While the course of study in these early schools was meager and the work crude, yet they did succeed in inspiring a few boys to strive for higher education. Former United States Senator John E. Kenna was born in Boone county and attended his first schools in a log house on Big Coal river. Dr. Marshall A. Estep, an eminent physician of Texas, and his brother, Judge Charles L. Estep, of Huntington and Logan, were reared in the “Promised Land,” the name of their father’s mountain home on the summit of Spruce Ridge, and attended their first schools in a log house on the Spruce Fork. One of these early log school houses still stands on the head of Mud river, remote from the highways frequented by trade and travelers. Two of the most recent prosecuting attorneys of the county, two clerks of the circuit court, two of the clerks of the county court, four county superintendents of schools, chief U.S. Marshal for the southern district of West Virginia, and two prosperous dental surgeons attended school when boys in that little log school house on the head of Mud. The attendance in it was never large.

In Search of Ed Haley 334

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Calhoun County, Ed Haley, Music

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Around that time, as Billy and Brandon wandered in the woods of eastern Kentucky, I called Jimmy Triplett, a fiddler and protégé of Doc White in West Virginia. Doc, in addition to being Ed’s friend, was a jack of all trades — fiddler, doctor, dentist… I’d recently heard that he was a photographer and wondered if maybe he had pictures of Ed or Laury Hicks. Jimmy wasn’t really sure.

“It was way back when he was a youth that he took pictures,” he said. “I guess he was considered an amateur, but he made a lot of photographs used for postcards.”

I asked Jimmy if Doc ever talked about Ed and he said, “Yeah, he talked about how good he was and everything. He said that he was one of the best that he ever heard.”

What kind of tunes did Doc play?

“The main one Doc plays is ‘Pigeon on the Gate’ — he got that from Ed Haley,” Jimmy said. “I think it would be in standard tuning — it’s a D tune. I don’t know that there’s that many other tunes that he got off of Ed Haley that he played, but he talked about him a whole bunch and then described seeing him and his wife play.”

Jimmy played a tape over the telephone of Doc talking and playing “Pigeon on the Gate”.

“Here’s one they call the ‘Pigeon on the Gate’,” Doc said. “Ed Haley, a blind man, played that tune from Kentucky. Best fiddler that ever I heard draw a bow. His wife was blind and she played the mandolin. They used to come through the country and stop at our houses and stay for days and play with us. You ought to’ve heard him play the fiddle. He’d make them fellas over there sick.”

Jimmy referred me to John Morris, an Ivydale-area fiddler who’d known Doc and even learned “Pigeon on the Gate” from him. John was too young to remember Ed personally (he was fifty-something) but had heard a lot of stories.

“I growed up hearing about Ed Haley from my dad,” John said. “I heard a lot of other stories about him later. He used to come here and stay at my grandparents’ house some. Their names were Amos and Ocie Morris. They just lived about a mile and a half from the train station and it was on the way to Calhoun County and they were from Calhoun County. He’d ride the train to Ivydale. If it was the evening train, usually a lot of people from Calhoun County — the next county back — stayed at my grandparents’ house. He’d stay at my grandpaw and grandmaw’s up here and then go on the next day. He usually, I think, visited with Laury Hicks mostly.”

What about Laury?

“Laury Hicks was evidently a riverman,” John said. “I believe it was Aunt Minnie Moss that said he could take a hog’s head of salt or something under each arm and he poled boats up and down the Elk River and hauled supplies when they used them flatboats. I’ve heard stories of his strength — what a strong and robust kind of a man he was. My dad said that when Laury Hicks died, Ed Haley wasn’t here and the next time he come through they took a chair and set it out at Laury Hicks’ grave and Ed Haley sat out on Laury Hicks’ grave and fiddled for about four hours.”

John said stories abounded about Ed among the people of Calhoun County.

“They told that they was having church over there someplace one night in an old school building or something on top of the hill between Walker and Stinson,” he said. “Ed happened to be in the country and they wanted him to play some hymns. He got started playing and he got off of playing hymns and they wound up breaking up church and having a dance. And they was about to take him up over it — about to get in trouble with the law over it — for breaking up church.”

I asked John if he thought that was a true story and he said, “Well, I’ve heard that. I know Ed cussed all the time. He was bad to cuss and swear. I heard that my Grandmaw Morris about put him away from the table for swearing at the table. Dad said he swore continuously.”

It was coincidental that John would mention Ed’s profanity. A few days later, Brandon met a niece to Johnny Hager at a genealogical meeting and she said Johnny quit traveling with Ed because he used foul language and because he had another woman in Calhoun County. Supposedly, when this woman died Ed played the fiddle at her grave all night. This “other woman” story may have had some merit: Wilson Douglas told me that Ed had an illegitimate daughter in that country.