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EXPLORING
KENTUCKY - December 2003 by Katherine Tandy Brown An Attitude Switch and a Great Big Ditch
His jeans hitched up by twine at the waist, gray-bearded “Uncle Wall” Hatfield recounted the “Blackberry Election” of 1880, when Pharmer McCoy shot Ellison Hatfield in the back, resulting in the eventual murder of three McCoys by a Hatfield. Some folks say the Hatfield-McCoy feud began over the ownership of a hog, while others swear it was caused by the ill-fated love between Roseanne McCoy and Johnse Hatfield. Both mountain pride and politics fueled the battles, sparking bad blood between the clans beginning around 1865, when Confederate “Devil” Anse Hatfield murdered Union Civil War veteran Asa Harmon McCoy. In 1872, Anse stole a 5,000-acre tract of McCoy land. By the time family patriarch Randolph “Ol’ Ran’l” McCoy accused Devil Anse’s cousin, Floyd Hatfield, of stealing a hog, sued and lost, the feud was on. By 1888, at least a dozen lives had been lost. In reality, the man in black was Ron McCoy, part-time musician, actor, owner of a recording studio in Durham, North Carolina, and great-great-great-great grandson of Randolph, while the lanky Hatfield was a freelance photographer and native Texan named Jerry, both of whose grandparents were Kentucky and West Virginia Hatfields. The monologue was a 2003 retelling of a major event in the famous vendetta. Jerry and Ron were in Pikeville for the Hatfield McCoy Reunion Festival, an annual affair begun the second weekend of June 2000 as a peaceful gathering of descendants of the original feuders. “Before that,” Ron chuckled, “I’d never met a Hatfield!” “Five of six McCoy children were killed by Hatfields,” Jerry added. “I’m not proud of that. The first year we got together, we had a reconciliation service on a bridge on the state line. The governors of West Virginia and Kentucky were there, along with two ministers, a Hatfield and a McCoy, and we threw our animosity into the river. It floated down the Tug and we’ve never seen it since.” While both sides assert the fracas ended around 1920, a peace treaty signed June 14, 2003 on national television during the festival in the Pikeville City Park gazebo made it official. The truce officially brought an end “to all hostilities, implied, inferred and real between the families now and for evermore.” “We hope to leave a legacy of something better,” Ron explained. “It’s like the Civil War – we honor the history but we don’t honor some of the things that took place. The book doesn’t end with the killings and the hanging, it goes forward 120 years. We all came together and made peace and played ball. It’s good for the families and good for Pike County.” Though the three-day fete offers plenty of arts and crafts, a car show, dancing, gospel and Bluegrass, barbecue, funnel cakes and even a mechanical bull, this is not your run-of-the-mill festival. “Because the event is based on a family legacy, we have guides at the library to show visitors how to do their own genealogy research,” said Phyllis Hunt, executive director of the Pikeville-Pike County Tourism Commission. “There’s also a regional authors’ book fair at the Big Sandy Heritage Center.” Shuttles haul the curious to ogle feud sites and town highlights. One stop is the Pikeville Cut-Through, the realized dream of former mayor Dr. William C. Hambley. One of this hemisphere’s largest engineering and earthmoving achievements, the project, which created 400 new usable acres, is second in scope only to the Panama Canal. Called by the New York Times “the eighth wonder of the world,” the $80 million ditch put an end to Pikeville’s perennial flooding problem by creating a mile and a half-long channel through a mountain to provide a new path for railroad tracks, the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River, and U.S. Highways 23, 460, 119 and KY 80. “The town was flooded so often, people knew just what to do,” said our tour guide, Dr. Mary Wiss, now retired as Kentucky’s first female surgeon. “Pin up the curtains, put the furniture you can move on top of the furniture you can’t move, and get out!” The resulting modernization has landed Pikeville twice in “The 100 Best Small Towns in America.” Five districts are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Visitors can pick up a map at the Pikeville-Pike County Tourism Commission, housed in a railroad car in City Park, and take a historic downtown walking tour. Be sure to stop by two individual sites also on the National Register, Dils Cemetery and the hanging site of Ellison Mounts. Part of the Hatfield-McCoy Feud Historic District, Dils Cemetery meanders over the sun-painted Cumberland Mountain foothills just a block off US 119 and is the final resting place of five McCoys: Randolph, his wife Sarah, their daughter Roseanna (who ran away with Johnse but couldn’t marry him because of the feud and died, some say, of a broken heart at age 30), son Sam and his wife Martha. Believed to be the first integrated cemetery in Eastern Kentucky, Dils’ 500 graves include that of Frank Waller, a black man who served as Stonewall Jackson’s aide and served the general his last meal. Ellison “Cottontop” Mounts, nephew of Devil Anse, as much as wrote his own last rites when he bragged about shooting 16-year-old Alifair McCoy as she ran for her life out of a house the Hatfields had set afire in January of 1888. His was the last public hanging on a spot that’s now Pikeville College property. When your appetite for feudin’ history is sated, hoof on over to The Station restaurant for a fried green tomato sandwich with Swiss and bacon on sourdough. Oh, my! For more info, call Pikeville-Pike County Tourism at (800) 844-7453 or www.tourpikecounty.com. Learn facts about the feud at www.real-mccoys.com and about 2004 festival doing’s at www.reunionfestival.com.
Katherine Tandy
Brown is a staff writer for The Lane Report. |
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Copyright 1996-2003, by Kentucky Business Online. All rights reserved. Editorial content
is copyright 2003, Lane Communications Group The Lane Report is a trademark of Lane Communications Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. |
“Frank Phillips” McCoy sat on the courthouse steps in Pike County looking mean and disgusted. Dressed in black from his wide-brimmed hat to sturdy lace-up boots, he sported a coal-black moustache and kept fingering his rifle. McCoy rolled his eyes as the object of his loathing leaned on a cane and spoke to a wide-eyed crowd.
“It was the only family feud that ever went to the Supreme Court,” Jerry noted. “Of course, it wasn’t settled until a bounty hunter captured the Hatfields and they hung one and sent the rest to prison.”