Tag Archives: Ward Brumfield

In Search of Ed Haley 264

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Culture of Honor, Ed Haley, Music

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Around that time, I got my fiddle out to see if I could coax Jake into playing a few tunes. He said he couldn’t play anything — he’d quit years ago.

“I got shot through this shoulder with a high-powered rifle during World War II,” he said. “My fingers is stiff and my arm don’t operate just right. You’ve got to have a good bow hand to play a fiddle. I used to fiddle, but I can’t do no good no more.”

I asked Jake if he remembered any of Ed’s tunes and he said, “I don’t know — he played so many. ‘Hell Among the Yearlings’, ‘Wild Horse’, ‘The Cacklin’ Hen’, ‘Cluck Old Hen’, ‘Casey Jones’. They was all kinds — you could just keep naming them. Never did hear Ed sing.”

Thinking back to those times caused Jake to say, “Dad fiddled with Ed, you know. Dad never did own a fiddle. Ward Brumfield gave him one and he kept it all of his life. My dad used to like one called ‘The Blackberry Blossom’. ‘The Money Musk’ — man, it was a fast tune when he played it. They’d play ‘The Sourwood Mountain’. Pluck that string, you know. Play that ‘Sally Goodin’. Called one ‘Bear Dog’. It was something like ‘Bonaparte’s’, more or less. I used to, when my dad fiddled, get me two sticks this a way and beat on the strings of the fiddle.”

I asked Jake if he ever heard a tune called “Pharaoh’s Dream” or “Getting Off the Raft” and he said, “I’ve heard of ‘Pharaoh’s Dream’ but never heard of ‘Getting Off the Raft’. Can you play that ‘Danced all night with a bottle in my hand. Swing around the corner with the other man?'”

I asked Jake if he knew anything about Ed’s father and he said, “His dad was a mean guy. My dad has told me many times that Ed had the measles when he was a kid and his daddy took him out up here on Rockhouse and stuck him in the creek and that’s what made old man Ed Haley blind. His daddy stuck him in the creek. His daddy was a bad character. They went on a rampage, him and Green McCoy. My daddy knowed them from the beginning. They shot old Aunt Hollene Brumfield with a .30/.30 Winchester and it come out in her mouth. Never killed her. These fellers went to Kentucky — Ed’s daddy and Green McCoy — and they went and got them somewhere and took them up to Green Shoal up in there and massacred them. Someone took them up on the West Fork and buried them kindly up on the side of the hill. They probably just dug a hole and put them in it.”

Jake remembered Hollena Brumfield well.

“She was an old lady that run a store,” he said. “She was bad to drink — fell down a stairway and broke both of her thighs. She couldn’t get around very good. She had a big garden right there where Taylor Brumfield’s wife’s home is and she’d get out there… She’d keep every bum that come along and work them. She was good to them — she’d feed them, you know — and put them out there in that garden. She’d have them take her a chair out there and she’d hobble out there and sit in that chair and watch them work that garden. Boy, I dreaded her. When she’d talk, the spit would work out that hole there.”

Just before we left Jake’s, I asked him if he knew anything about Ed’s death. He basically repeated what Stump had told us earlier.

“I don’t know what happened. They killed him on the Crawley Creek side of the mountain over there. They beat him to death over there in a beer joint called the Cow Shed Inn. Some drunks did it, you know.”

I was flabbergasted. I mean, how could those Dalton boys tell such an off-target story?

In Search of Ed Haley 228

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley

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Bob said the Brumfields left Hugh’s with Milt and Green when they heard about the existence of an Adams mob nearby.

“They took them up over the ridge and down and crossed into Ferrellsburg up at Fry,” he said.

They went to the home of Tucker Fry, who took all of the women away from the place.

“I think maybe they stayed there a day and night or something like that a trying to make them tell who hired them to do that,” Bob said. “They was a trying to get them men to tell who hired them to kill Al Brumfield. And they took one of them outside and lectured him while the other was inside. When they took him back in, they said, ‘He won’t talk.'”

Bob said the mob even took Milt and Green into different rooms trying to get a confession but they just blamed the shooting on each other. Finally, French Bryant “blew Haley’s brains out with a gun.” Burl Farley hollered and everyone shot Haley and McCoy “all to pieces.” Cat Fry, who was about ten years old at the time, hid in a corner or in the fireplace and witnessed their deaths. “It was very cruel,” Bob said.

The mob returned to their homes after killing Milt and Green and it wasn’t long until the “murder house” was burned to the ground so there’d be no evidence against them.

I asked Bob if he remembered the house and he said, “Aunt Cat, she told me it was a two-room log house. One of them old-timers, big ones. They all slept in one room. Big fireplace in the other one. I never was in that house.”

Bob said that hard feelings over the feud lingered for years, especially toward Ben Adams. “After Haley and them was killed, old man Ben Adams never done no good at timber,” he said. “He run a mountain still up there — moonshine — and he had cabins built and he had men there and ever man had a Winchester and you couldn’t do much a bothering him ’cause old man Ben was a mean man.”

So what happened to Ben, we wondered.

“Ben died in 1912,” Bob said rather undramatically, “and was buried up yonder on the hill.”

According to Bob, the 1889 feud eventually ended because most of the participants were related and ultimately wanted to see it put to rest. “Here’s the thing,” Bob said. “The Adamses and Dingesses all married through each other and the Brumfields married into the Dingess clan. Everybody was kindly keeping a steel tongue because they didn’t want no more feuding more’n what they had and they didn’t want the young people to really know anything about it — how cruel it was. Dad up here never would talk about it. Nobody talked. Years and years and years in here it was just gossip. People a talking that didn’t know a thing on earth about it. It was a rumor. Someone would tell one story and someone would tell another.”

Every now and then a bit of the story leaked out, mostly from eyewitness Cat Fry. “Aunt Cat down here, now, was a little eight-year-old girl in the same house when they was killed,” Bob said. “She would very seldom talk about it but once in a while if nobody was around sometimes she’d start off a telling me about it some. She wouldn’t hardly tell you names. Nobody wanted to hear it. They wanted to let it die down and forget all about it.”

Bob remembered French Bryant well. “He was a big 200-pound 6’4″ tall mean man,” Bob said. “He’d carry a pistol on him that hung on his hip — one of these cap ‘n balls. He lived just over the hill up yonder and he made liquor and sold it all the time up that holler. Nobody lived up there. He had two miles of a hollow there to himself and he had a big dapple gray stud horse about fourteen, fifteen hundred pounds. He’d get on that horse and go to Ferrellsburg and if the river wasn’t too big he’d swim him across that river and he’d get him a load of groceries and put them on his back and then swim that horse back.” Bob told Billy, “People didn’t fool with that old man, either. Right when you leave the mouth of Hart and come up there at the schoolhouse — just across the creek starting up West Fork — there was a big house there and old man Ross Fowler lived there. I never did know what Ross done, but old man French went there… They didn’t have no lamp oil, they had pine knots. He took a sack full of pine knots there and set them afire and burnt creation up — burnt them out of house and home. Nobody ever knowed he did it, of course. He was a mean old cuss but he didn’t bother nobody in his last days. He made a little liquor and sold it and that’s the only way the old man could make it.”

Just before we left Bob’s, he told us a very important bit of information about Ed’s relationship with Al Brumfield’s oldest son, Ward. “Like I started to say a while ago, they was a feud between the Brumfields and the McCoys,” he said. “But remember, Ward Brumfield was a very fine man. He was a handsome man. Ward was a wonderful person. He was a first cousin to me and I have to congratulate him. He’d get up and him and Ed Haley’d hug each other and they’d prance and dance on the floor and just love each other. They’d both sit down at the table to eat together. Ward and him forgot all the past. Ward and Ed Haley was good friends.”