Tag Archives: West Virginia

In Search of Ed Haley 91

17 Wednesday Apr 2013

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Clyde said Ed never said “too much” about where he learned to play the fiddle.

“Well, he was blind all his life, since he was a small boy, and he started with a cornstalk.”

Ed did talk about other fiddlers, though.

“Oh, yes,” Clyde said. “He knew Sam Vie and Asa Neal, and all those old-timers. Did you know Bill Day? Well, my dad used to play with him a lot. But Bill Day couldn’t play the fiddle as far as I’m concerned.”

Bill Day’s wife Rosie was a sister to Laury Hicks, Haley’s veterinarian friend in Calhoun County, West Virginia.

“Well, Rosie was Laury’s sister, as I remember,” Clyde said. “Rosie stayed with my mother and helped take care of Mom because my Mom didn’t like to cook in the summertime because of the flies. I got in trouble one time and I had to go stay with Laury and Aunt Minnie. And I stayed with them in my growing up years. Laury was a doctor, you know, and so was Minnie. She’d just go on a horse, travel miles and miles and miles on a horse, to go deliver a baby or something like that.”

Clyde also remembered Doc Holbrook, Ed’s friend in Greenup, Kentucky.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Monnie, my sister, was named after Dr. Holbrook’s wife: M-O-N-N-I-E.”

Clyde was well aware of Ed’s suspicions toward the commercial music industry.

“My dad didn’t ever want his music recorded and it was difficult to get him to get in a position where he would let anybody record his music,” he said. “There was a guy named Bus Johnson in Cincinnati that wanted my dad — I remember — he wanted my dad to come down there to Cincinnati to WLW and get some music recorded for him but he wanted to commercialize it, you know, which I wish he had’ve now. My dad and mother would’ve had a lot better life with the money they could’ve made off the music. I always did tell my dad, ‘Pop, you ought to get those things recorded because you got money laying around in the fiddle case.'”

Talking about Ed’s refusal to make commercial records caused me to ask about his home recordings.

“Him and my mother had over six hundred records,” Clyde said. “Them old records that Ralph sent home out of the Army. He was in the Signal Corps at Camp Crowder, Missouri, and he took a lot of the equipment home — borrowed it from the Army — and my dad and my mother was in on some of the records, too, you know. And Lawrence has got all that kind of information; more than I would have because I’ve been gone from home. I’ve been a roamer, you know. And I used to drink a lot. I don’t think I’ll ever take another drink, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m in this hospital and it’s what it’s for. I had strokes. It’s not a nut-house hospital or anything. It takes care of people like me. I used to drink quite a bit myself, but I’ve made up my mind since I had the strokes that I’ll let that stuff alone when I get out of this place. I talk like it’s a jailhouse, but it’s not. It’s full of women.”

In Search of Ed Haley 90

16 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Lincoln County Feud, Music

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I asked Clyde if Ed ever talked about his early life on Harts Creek and he said, “He didn’t talk to us kids too much. My dad’s folks were from all around Logan County, West Virginia. I didn’t know who they were. I remember his Aunt Liza and Uncle Peter Mullins. ‘Club-Footed Peter’ Mullins, they called him, and ‘Reel-Footed Peter’ Mullins. That was his uncle. I remember them because I was the one that went with him when he went up that way. As a matter of fact, I went up there one time and stayed just for a whole year.”

I said, “Your grandfather Milt Haley was involved in an attempted murder…” before being cut off. “Yeah, Hollene Brumfield. I know about that. I know things about it, because I’ve been up there. He killed this guy and in the process of trying to kill this guy, he shot Hollene Brumfield in the face and mutilated her pretty bad. It was a accident. Hollene was riding behind her husband on a horse down Harts Creek. He missed him and shot Hollene — killed her. That’s the way I always got the story from my dad.”

Clyde seemed to have Milt’s story down better than any of Ed’s other kids, so I pressed him for more details about Harts Creek. I asked him about the musicians in that vicinity and he said, “They didn’t play the kind of music my dad played. There was one old fiddler up there, lived up in the head of Harts Creek. Not off on one of the branches — right straight up Harts Creek past Ewell Mullins’ store. This guy’s name was Zack Williams. Him and my dad used to fiddle together. Never went out on big sprees or anything like that, but he’d go up to Zack Williams’ house up on the top of the mountain — head of Harts Mountain — and they’d make music up there. Zack was a pretty good fiddle player.”

In Search of Ed Haley 87

11 Thursday Apr 2013

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In January of 1994, Lawrence put me in touch with his brother Clyde Haley, an old bachelor who had spent most of his life roaming the country, working here and there and always managing to get into some kind of trouble. Lawrence called Clyde “the black sheep of the family,” while Mona laughingly dubbed him as a “rogue.” He was Ed Haley’s oldest son and some seven years older than Lawrence. Each time I went to Harts Creek, people had asked about Clyde. Apparently, he made quite an impression.

When I first called Clyde, he lived in a minimum-security nursing home in Stockton, California. Our conversation started like this:

“Hello, John!”

     Hey, Clyde.  How’re you doing?

“Well, I’m still in the hospital.”

     Well, all right. I been wanting to talk to you for two years now.

“Who is this?”

     This is John Hartford in Nashville.

“Well, I don’t know whether I know you personally, do I?”

     Well, you may not. I’m a real good friend of Lawrence and Pat’s. And I play the fiddle myself and I’m on television. I wear a little derby hat and I dance while I play the fiddle.

Clyde laughed.

     But the reason I want to talk to you is I think your father was the greatest old-time fiddler that ever lived.

“I do, too,” he said.

Apparently, Clyde spent a lot of time bragging on Ed’s music at the nursing home. I told him I would send him copies of his father’s music and he got really excited.

“Okay,” he said. “We do a lot of little dancing here in our recreation periods. I think I’ll be outta here in March. It’s not a jail or anything — it’s a hospital.”

I told him I would be touring California in June and he said, “Well, you’ve got my address. Drop by and see me. I’m in Stockton.”

In the meantime, there were a lot of things we could talk about over the telephone. I could tell early in our conversation that Clyde was sometimes right on with his stories, while at other times he was completely out to lunch. His memories were sporadic — in no particular order — like bits of broken glass in a huge pile of garbage that you have to sort through and put back together.

I knew Clyde was Lawrence’s oldest living brother, but wasn’t exactly sure of his age.

“I was born in 1921,” he said. “That’d make me about 73.”

Clyde said he went with his father on trips more than any of the other Haley children.

“When my dad wanted to leave Mom and get away from her for a change, he’d always take me as his crutch,” he said. “I was his favorite son outside of Ralph. He called me ‘Reecko’. That was his nickname for me. I used to carry the fiddle case for him. And I went with him when he’d go to Logan County and go up on Harts Creek and up in Dingess and up that way. And he’d go over around Wayne County. He knew people up there.”

I asked Clyde to describe his father and he said, “My dad, he was about 6’2″ and he had real small feet. He had feet like a dancer would have and he wore a size six shoe. I remember that because I used to wear his shoes. I never saw him with a suit on in my life.”

In Search of Ed Haley 86

07 Sunday Apr 2013

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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.

In Search of Ed Haley 85

04 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Harts, John Hartford

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I returned to Nashville talking not so much about new musical developments but rambling on to my wife about murders and the people I’d met in Harts. I spent a lot of time studying over Joe’s photographs, especially the faded family group shot. One of the boys in the picture was propped inside a young woman’s arms and appeared very much to be blind. Was it Ed and his mother? Unfortunately, since the woman was almost completely faded away I couldn’t make a positive identification of her, even when I compared it to the photo of Emma Jean found by Lawrence and I on our first trip to Harts.

There was another interesting development: when I removed the picture of Bill and Peter Mullins from its frame, another equally large picture of the “old couple” kind of popped out from behind it. That made three pictures of those folks and it sure seemed logical to me that Joe Mullins would’ve had three pictures of his grandparents — meaning Ed’s grandparents — and not of an uncle and an aunt.

I sent copies of Joe’s old pictures to Turley and Violet Adams to see if they could show them around for identification. A few weeks later, we spoke over the telephone and they said Liza McKenzie had fingered Ed as the child to the right in the faded group picture. She also said the old folks in the back row were Jackson Mullins and his wife, Chloe.

In Search of Ed Haley 84

01 Monday Apr 2013

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     Lawrence, Clifton, and I headed back down to Joe’s in order to see more of his pictures. We first looked in a smokehouse near Joe’s trailer. As Clifton took hold of the door, he proudly mentioned that it had come from Uncle Peter’s old log home. Almost as soon as I stepped inside, just back of an ancient spinning wheel, piles of rotting furniture and bags of god-knows-what, I spotted the large framed photograph of Bill and Peter Mullins — two very serious young men with thick mustaches. Thinking that the picture showed Peter and his brother Weddie, Clifton began to tell of Weddie’s death.

     “They went over to Dingess and they got into a fight about an election or something and one of them got shot over there and they brought him back across the mountain, you know, on the horses. Weddie, he got killed.”

     Nearby this picture was a faded one of equal size featuring what appeared to be a whole family of people. My first inclination was to assume it was the Jackson Mullins family, maybe even showing Milt Haley and Ed somewhere in the shadows.

     Clifton said we were welcome to borrow the two large pictures. He then fetched a box from which we borrowed 22 small photographs. Satisfied, we headed down to Turley’s for his input on their identification.

     Turley was very interested in the large photo of what we thought was Weddie and Peter Mullins, since Weddie was his grandfather.

     “They shot and wounded a constable or sheriff or something another over at Dingess,” he said. “John Dillon was the sheriff over there, or deputy-sheriff. He killed Weddie, and Peter, he got away. Peter come home and Uncle John went back over there and Peter went with him but he didn’t go in, I don’t think. He went in, said this guy was laying there dying, said he asked him how he was. They said, ‘Well, seems to me like he’s a dying.’ Said he just pulled a gun there and shot him and said, ‘He’s dead now.'”

     I was most interested in the large faded photo of what I presumed to be the Jackson Mullins family. The picture showed a very old couple, who I figured to be Jackson and Chloe, Ed’s grandparents. There was another smaller picture of the couple, which we had borrowed from Joe’s box. Turley, though, didn’t think it was Jackson and Chloe Mullins.

     “I can tell you who I think that is,” he said. “Lude and Van Mullins.”

     Van Mullins, he said, was a brother to Peter’s wife Liza.

     “So Aunt Liza was a Mullins before she married Peter Mullins?” I asked.

     “Yeah, I guess so,” Turley said, as if he’d never thought of it before.

     After looking at more of Joe’s pictures, I asked Turley about the location of the old Milt Haley house. He said it used to sit at the site of his present-day home.

     “When I was a little boy I could remember it,” he said. “They was a big old log house front and they was a big long porch. And they had guest rooms. And then the kitchen was back there. Had a big chimney in it. And then they had that porch and everything back through there. Had that big kitchen in it and big fireplace. They could just put a big kettle in there and make a whole big kettle of stuff.”

     It resembled the old Stonewall Workman home, Turley said, although I had no idea what that meant.

     “The year I was six years old is when they remodeled that house — seven,” he said. “I remember after they took a part of it off the top, made it a story and a half.”

     I drew out a floor plan of “The Milt Haley House” based on Turley’s memories.

In Search of Ed Haley 83

28 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, Green Shoal, Lincoln County Feud, Spottswood

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We found Bum on our way up the hollow and went to sit on his porch with his aunt, Liza McKenzie, two of his sisters, Alice and Dicy — and of course Shermie. As soon as Liza figured out who we were she looked at Lawrence and said he was just a small boy the last time she’d seen him.

“Yeah, I guess around 1940 or ’41 was the last time I come to this area,” Lawrence said.

Liza said, “Well, I lived in Kentucky about sixty years. Perry County, up in Hazard.”

I said to her, “Is that where Milt Haley was from?” and she said, “I don’t know but now Ed Haley was borned and raised right around here. When he was a boy, he got up on top of that house down there where Aunt Mag used to live — in that old two-story house — and rolled off in a box. Mother said, ‘Lord, Ed, are you hurt?’ He said, ‘No, God no. It’s give me eyesight.’ He said he jarred his eyesight back.”

I liked Liza right away.

I asked her if she had any pictures and she said, “Loretta’s mother had all the pictures of Ed Haley I ever did know. They used to have a picture down there at Loretta’s of Ed’s mother. She was a pretty woman.”

She looked at Clifton and said, “Clif, I believe your mother had a picture of Ed Haley that was made down there at the old home where he was born and raised. Down there where Aunt Mag used to live. I know they had them.”

Clifton remembered it.

“Yeah, they was sitting out in the yard,” he said. “They was together. She was in the chair and he was standing. He didn’t have no pants on.”

Clifton said, “Yeah, you’re right. They was a picture down there. But I looked; they was so many pictures in that box.”

     Box of pictures? I thought.

Before I could ask about them, Clifton said, “There’s one down there faded out. It’s in a big frame. I got it in another building.”

He told me, “I can show them to ya.”

About that time, Cas Baisden came up to the porch. Bum said he was Liza’s 83-year-old twin brother. I asked Cas if he remembered Ed and he said, “I knowed him, yeah. He was raised up here. Old man Peter lived down at the mouth of the holler and his boy lived up the road here and old man Ed’d go up there and he’d come down that road a running and jumping just like he could see and cut the awfulest shine that ever was.”

Lawrence joked, “That’s probably how Clyde got to be the way he was.”

Cas said, “Yeah, I guess Clyde took after him. Clyde went out here and got down in a well once and they had the awfulest time that ever was getting him out. Way back in top of a mountain.”

I asked Cas about the first time he ever saw Ed and he said, “It’s been many a year ago. He stayed down here, him and his wife and them. They’d play music and drink and fight and scratch with one another and them boys was so mean… He’d get so drunk he couldn’t walk.”

Bum knew that Ed was real “easy to get mad about music,” but said he could get him to play nearly anything he wanted because Ed liked him. He’d ask Ed to play something like “John Henry” and he’d say, “Are you sure that’s what you want me to play? You know, I was just thinking about playing that.” If Ed didn’t like someone Bum said he’d “goof around” and not play for them.

Things kinda tapered off after that. Nobody knew anything about Ed having any brothers. Cas had heard about Ed’s father, who he thought was named Green.

“You know, he got killed when I was a little fella, I guess,” Cas said. “His name was Green. They took him over yonder on Green Shoal, they said, and killed him. Walked him down here and up Smoke House and over and down Piney and across the river.”

I asked if Lawrence looked like Ed and Liza said, “Yes, he does. Ed was a bigger man than he is. Ed was a big man.”

But Lawrence looks like Ed in the face?

“Yeah, he looks like him all over.”

Cas said, “Ed was a taller man. I guess he takes after his mother. She’s a little short woman.”

Lawrence agreed: “Yeah, she was about five feet tall — not much bigger than Aunt Liza.”

In Search of Ed Haley 82

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Ed Haley, John Hartford, Music, Spottswood

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I told Turley that Lawrence and I needed to visit Joe Mullins, who had been gone during our last trip to Harts Creek. Turley completely deflated us: Joe, he said, had recently suffered a stroke. He now lived with his daughter Connie Mullins in a trailer just up the creek. Turley pointed the way. Driving a short distance, Lawrence and I parked our car by the creek and walked over a little narrow bridge where an army of barking dogs greeted us. At the porch, Connie introduced us to her brother, Clifton. We stepped on inside and found Joe seated in a wheelchair, surrounded by more dogs. His mind — or at least his ability to communicate a great deal — was all but gone due to the lingering effects of his stroke. Lawrence sat next to him with his hand on his arm. Almost in tears over Joe’s condition, he tried to rekindle Joe’s memories by saying, “I’m Ed Haley’s boy.”

I hung out with Joe’s kids — Connie, Clifton and Loretta. While all were reasonably young, Clifton and Connie had Parkinson’s Disease.

“They’s four of us got it,” Clifton said. “They said it runs through the family some way another. Musta come down the tree somewhere.”

I asked him how old he was.

“38,” he said.

Clifton had just moved back to Harts.

“I got hurt in Michigan and Daddy was sick so I said, ‘Well, it’s a good chance for me to go help my daddy and my sisters.'”

Clifton’s sisters said he was the one who found Ed’s smashed fiddle years ago in the rafters of Uncle Peter’s old smokehouse.

“I was up in there — we was playing around one day — and it fell out on me,” he said. “And I just looked at it and I said, ‘Well, I’ll try to glue it together.’ I started gluing it and it wouldn’t glue so I dumped it into the creek. I didn’t know whose it was. I was about eight but all the pieces wasn’t there to it. When it hit that guy it just splintered everywhere.”

Clifton suggested that we visit Bum and his family just up the hollow. Two years earlier, Bum had told originally Lawrence and I how he had witnessed Ed smash the fiddle over a man’s head while at a tavern on Crawley Mountain. Bum lived only a short distance from Joe’s trailer, up the hollow past Uncle Peter’s old homeplace, in a house situated near Enslow Baisden’s log cabin.

In Search of Ed Haley 80

15 Friday Mar 2013

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     Mr. Kirk hopped in the car with Lawrence Haley and I and guided us to “Presto’s garden,” a small corn patch located just off of the hill from the Haley-McCoy grave. It was late afternoon: the air was clear and the remains of the sun slanted through the trees on the hillside. Lawrence Haley chose to stay at the garden due to his heart condition, but I made the steep climb toward the grave with Mr. Kirk just behind me. A few minutes later, we stopped at an indentation — a round shallow crater about seven feet in diameter. It had a little pile of stones on each end and was just as Bob Adkins had said it would be. We walked back and forth studying the “bowl” and the markers and I took some pictures.

     At the bottom of the hill, we got back in the car and rode up Low Gap Road to the site of Milt Haley’s murder. On the way, I told Mr. Kirk what we’d heard about Ed’s mother Emma Jean Mullins being shot in the face.

     “See, I hadn’t heard that part of it,” he said. “Well now, you know them Adamses and Mullinses up there on Hart married back and forth for generations. That’s quite possible. Of course, them Brumfields and them Adamses had trouble over that log boom they had had there at the mouth of Hart. It’d catch water and hold it back like a dam. They’d float them logs all out of Harts Creek back in yonder, then when the backwater come up in the spring of the year they’d make them into a raft and float them out of here and take them to the town of Guyandotte. That’s the market. They claimed the Brumfields got to sawing the ends of them logs off and re-branding them. I don’t know what the extent of their trouble was but they had some misunderstanding over that lumber and then Runyon and whiskey got involved in it down on that houseboat where they’s selling whiskey. All of them drinking, you know. They’d all go down there and get drunk and talk this shit up, you know, and get it started, get it going, down there where the booze was. Things were getting out of hand. Whiskey’s destroyed an awful lot of people in this country. A lot of my relatives.”

     Mr. Kirk said, “They’s supposed to killed them at daylight or immediately after daylight. The story that I’ve heard on it has been that they were both knocked in the head with the flat side of a double-bit axe. Killed them separately. Hit them right in the top of the head there. And I’ve heard people say they was shot up you know, and some said they were chopped up with an axe. But my grandmother, she was awful critical of the Brumfields and their conduct. She was an Adkins — part Dingess. Bill Brumfield’s widow. By her being pretty critical of them, I feel like she handed me what she had as being true. But now they was organized into kind of a posse. She said they called theirselves ‘The Night Riders.’ Vigilante group. Operated all the time at night. They were pretty sneaking in what they did.”

     They must’ve had some serious shortcomings, because Mr. Kirk said they “tried to organize themselves into the Klan, but the Klan wouldn’t have them.”

     After surveying the site of Milt’s murder, we drove down to the mouth of Harts Creek where Mr. Kirk pointed out the site of the recently burned Al Brumfield house.

     “Except being a landmark, it wasn’t worth much,” he said. “They used to have a meal-house out there to ground meal for people. Had a store in here. That’s Al Brumfield and Aunt Hollene. He was in his fifties when he died of typhoid fever. Watson Adkins later bought his house and lived there. Had a store over here for years. Now, Runyon had a boat down yonder — great big boat — barge built in there and had a store in it. He run poker games. Selling whiskey. Had a few groceries in there. Al and his bunch trying to do the same thing over here.”

     All during our ride with Mr. Kirk, he kept pointing out spots where murders had taken place. As we made our way back up West Fork, I asked him why there’d been so many killings around Harts Creek. He didn’t hesitate in saying, “Whiskey. Whiskey’s caused it. This section of country up through here — this West Fork section — has had a few killings. It wasn’t as bad as back yonder. Whiskey involved in every bit of that.”

     Lawrence Haley agreed that whiskey was the primary cause of trouble in the old days, even mentioning how one of Uncle Peter Mullins’ boys once killed a “revenue man” around Trace Fork. He said it “it took just about everything Uncle Peter had to keep him out of jail.”

     Mr. Kirk said, “Is that the one they called ‘Reel-Footed’ Peter? Ewell’s daddy?”

     Lawrence confirmed that it was — and that it was his great-uncle — and Mr. Kirk said, “I can remember old man Peter. I believe it was his right foot that was curled in. Man, he’d work in the woods, draw a team…”

In Search of Ed Haley 78

07 Thursday Mar 2013

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The next day, Lawrence and I went to find Milt Haley’s grave on the West Fork of Harts Creek. It had been two years since our initial trip up the Guyandotte Valley and I was excited to once again plant my feet on the grounds of Ed Haley’s childhood. We followed Bob Adkins’ directions to the West Fork of Harts Creek, where we found a confusing sign labeled “East Fork Road” pointing us across a stone bridge and past a somewhat large red brick church. Lower West Fork was very much different from my memories of main Harts Creek — more sparsely settled. It was surprisingly beautiful farm country with a view of an almost-forgotten agrarian way of life. There were old barns, cattle and tiny farms all along the nice little road.

Not surprisingly, Lawrence and I were unable to find the Milt Haley grave, which we figured was located in a thicket on top of one of the surrounding mountains. Hoping for the best, we decided to ask for directions at a nice-looking house. We chose a neat little white home, where an older lady came out and showed almost complete confusion as we asked about Ed Haley, Milt Haley and a grave. Once she figured out what we were talking about, though, she introduced herself as Iris Williams, said she was part-Brumfield and pointed toward the grave just down the road and to the right on a hill. She said her older brother Lawrence Kirk would know all about it. She went back inside and called Lawrence, who said he’d come right over and tell us what he knew about Ed Haley and the Haley-McCoy murders.

It wasn’t long until Lawrence Kirk pulled into the driveway and popped out of his car. He was a short stocky 70-something-year-old fellow with thinning hair and glasses. He made his way toward the porch, grinning and waving a newspaper. He said he had seen me on TV and unraveled the paper, which featured a front-page story about our recent visit to see Lynn Davis in Huntington.

In one of those “strange contact moments,” I introduced him to Lawrence Haley. It was a first-ever meeting of men whose ancestors had shot it out along Harts Creek over one hundred years earlier. They seemed to like each other right away and made it clear they held no grudges over their ancestors’ troubles. This was great news — no barriers to information flow. However, I have to admit, I got a little adrenaline rush in thinking that Lawrence and I were now in “enemy territory.” In my mind, the 1889 feud was still smoldering in the hearts and minds of at least a few people.

Instead, we all sat on Mrs. Williams’ front porch with Mr. Kirk, who remembered Ed well.

“I’ve heard Ed Haley play up there at the courthouse square many of a time in Logan with Ed Belcher,” he said. “They’d get together up there sometimes and play all day. I’d be with my dad up there when I was a youngster. I kinda got acquainted with the old man, enough to speak to him. He’d always ask you who it is. ‘Yeah, I know some Kirks,’ he’d say.”

Mr. Kirk said he used to see Ed and his wife on the Logan-Williamson bus that ran between the coalfields and Huntington.

“I felt sympathetic towards them,” he said. “They were blind — handicapped — and I’d notice them. I can’t remember that well about him. I can’t remember too much how he was dressed. It bears on my mind about ever time I ever saw him he was bald-headed. I’m not sure…but he played that fiddle.”

Mr. Kirk last saw Ed play music on a Sunday just before the election of 1948 or ’50 at the Harts Tavern. His uncle Taylor Brumfield was the owner of the tavern. Ed was there with Bernie Adams, who Mr. Kirk called “a pretty good guitar player.”

“Bernie was bad to drink,” he said. “He just drunk liquor until it finally killed him, I reckon.”

Ed was “being pretty sassy” at the tavern.

“They wasn’t giving him enough money to please him, you know,” Mr. Kirk said. “They was buying him a few drinks but he felt like fellows ought to throw him in a few dollars of money along. But that bunch there, they had to have their quarters to buy some beer with.”

Ed told Bernie, “Well hell, let’s go. This tight bunch here won’t buy a man no beer. Can’t get a crowd together no how.”

Bernie said, “Now, Ed. Don’t get to talking too rough about these fellows around Harts. Some of your folks didn’t have too good a relation with these Brumfields around here.”

“Aw, to hell with these damn Brumfields,” Ed said. “There’s nobody afraid of these Brumfields.”

I almost fell off the porch laughing.