Editor’s Note: Each hike of the Spring Hiking Challenge includes a segment documenting its “historical context.” This story provides further insight on Yahoo Falls — this week’s featured hike — and the purported massacre that occurred there in 1810.

Each of the hiking trails in the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area have historical significance attached to them — some of the tales grander than others. There are perhaps none as spectacular as the legend of Yahoo Falls, which is this week’s destination for the #SpringHikingChallenge.

Located near where Yahoo Creek empties into the Big South Fork River, west of Whitley City, Yahoo Falls is the tallest waterfall in Kentucky. It drops 113 feet in front of a massive sandstone rock shelter, and it was inside this rock shelter that the great Cherokee Women and Children Massacre of 1810 supposedly occurred.

This story actually starts in the winter of 1777-1778, when a militia member named Jacob Troxell was serving at Valley Forge under the command of General George Washington.

As the story goes:

Troxell — “Big Jake,” they called him, because of his enormous height — was what was referred to in those days as a “half-breed.” His father was a Jewish immigrant from Switzerland, and his mother was a Delaware Indian. Perhaps it was because of this that commanders in the Continental Army recruited Troxel to pose as a trader and visit the old French outpost at Vincennes (in modern-day Indiana) to persuade as many of the Native Americans as possible to support the American patriots in their war against the British.

At Vincennes, Big Jake befriended a young Cherokee warrior from the Cumberland River valley who was about his age: Tuckahoe Doublehead, son of the great Chickamauga Cherokee war chief Doublehead. Tuckahoe invited Troxell to his village, Tsalachi, which was located near present-day Burnside, Ky., where the Big South Fork River emptied into the Cumberland River. There, Troxell fell in love with one of Chief Doublehead’s daughters, Corn Blossom.

During the winter of 1779-1780, as the Revolutionary War continued, Tories under the command of Major Patrick Ferguson killed Cherokee hunters on the Tellico Trail, an old Indian travel route that is today U.S. Highway 27. In retaliation, Troxell accompanied Chief Doublehead in an attack on the Tories’ camp at Little South Fork. As a result, Big Jake was able to convince Doublehead and his warriors to support the colonials in their war against the British.

Following the war, Big Jake married Corn Blossom, and they had a son named Little Jake. Other white settlers began moving into the Cumberlands, which was opened to settlement by a series of treaties collectively known as the Treaties of Tellico, which saw the Cherokee cede ownership of their territory to the federal government. Many of the Cherokee remaining in the area began to assimilate into white culture, sometimes living in cabins just like the white settlers. Doublehead was one of the leading proponents of this assimilation. Prior to that, he was recognized as one of the most vicious fighters in the Cherokee Nation, and he led an assault on White’s Fort in present-day Knoxville in 1788.

Chief Doublehead became quite wealthy and owned a lot of the same material possessions that white settlers were bringing into the region. Some of his fellow Cherokee believed he was making money on under-the-table deals with the federal government. In 1807, his chief rival — James Vann — and other younger leaders of the Cherokee Nation conspired to assassinate Doublehead. He was shot and badly wounded at McIntosh’s Tavern near Calhoun, Tenn., then finished off in the attic of schoolmaster Jonathan Blacke.

As the assimilation of the natives and white settlers continued, Tuckahoe Doublehead married a white woman from present-day Scott County named Margaret Mounce. She lived at Cherry Fork, near present-day Helenwood. (She was likely a sister to Susannah Mabel Mounts, who married Richard Harve Slaven, first settler of the Big South Fork region.)

The assimilation of the Cherokee and the white settlers did not ease tensions between the two races. Tuckahoe was murdered in Wayne County, Ky. in 1807, by men who sought the location of a secret silver mine.

In 1810, things came to a head in the Cumberland River valley. As relations between white settlers and the Chickamauga Cherokee worsened, Corn Blossom realized that her people needed to leave the region and move further south. Several years earlier, Presbyterian pastor Gideon Blackburn had opened a school on Cherokee land near Chattanooga, and he offered to protect and educate Cherokee women and children from the Cumberland River valley.

Corn Blossom sent her son, Little Jake, on horseback to spread the word that anyone seeking protection at the Blackburn school in Chattanooga should meet at the rock shelter behind Yahoo Falls when the moon was full.

It was August 1810.

More than 100 Cherokee Indians remaining in the region, mostly women and children, gathered at Yahoo Falls and waited for Corn Blossom and Little Jake to arrive and lead them to safety. As they waited, gunfire erupted in the darkness. A group of white vigilantes under the direction of Hiram Gregory had surrounded the rock shelter from above. After killing the few men present, they began to slaughter the women and children, who were trapped beneath the waterfall. More than 100 were killed or severely wounded.

Among the casualties was Big Jake Troxell, who was mortally wounded and scalped. He died two months later.

According to legend, the white men raped the women and younger female children, slit open the bellies of pregnant Cherokee women, and scalped many of the victims.

It is said that Corn Blossom arrived as the slaughter was winding down, along with her son, Little Jake, and Chief Red Bird from Cumberland Falls. They killed most of the men, but both Corn Blossom and Little Jake were mortally wounded in the fight.

The murdered Cherokee people were said to be buried in a mass grave beneath the waterfall. Little Jake died immediately and may have been buried with the others. Princess Corn Blossom died two days later and is buried in an unknown location. Big Jake Troxell died sometime later. His grave marker is located along the road to Yahoo Falls. However, many believe he was actually buried in an unmarked grave at the Otter Creek Cemetery, further south.

In the aftermath of the massacre, some of the remaining Cherokee in the region fled southward; others went into hiding.

The story, however horrific and fascinating it may be, is believed by modern historians to be almost entirely fictional. There is no documented evidence of a Cherokee woman named Corn Blossom; the first mention of her appears in Thomas H. Troxel’s 1958 book, “Legion of the Lost Mine.” In his foreword, Troxel notes that some of the characters in the book are fictional, but he does not specify which.

The details of the Yahoo Falls Massacre itself did not appear in writing until Robert Collins’ 1975 book “A History of the Daniel Boone National Forest,” which he said was based on an unpublished manuscript compiled by Dan Troxell and entitled, “The Great Cherokee Children Massacre at Ywahoo Falls.” Most historians agree that Dan Troxell’s information was sourced from oral legend handed down by the family through the years. All published articles that mention the Yahoo Falls Massacre cite Troxell’s manuscript as their source, and there is no documented contemporary evidence to support the events that supposedly took place at Yahoo Falls in August 1810.

Some elements of the story are certainly true. Jacob Troxell very much existed, and fought in the Revolutionary War. However, other aspects of his life are much debated. He did, indeed, move to Wayne County, Ky. (which included present-day McCreary County) around 1801. His daughter was Catherine “Katy” Troxell, who married Jonathan Blevins Jr. — forefather of the Blevins family that later settled the Big South Fork region and remains in Scott County today.

Beyond that, much is unknown. Some family genealogists suggest that Jacob Troxell moved south, living in both Marion County, Tenn., and in Alabama, after 1810, dying in 1843. His first wife and mother of his children, these genealogists say, was not known. He later married a woman named Elizabeth — who may have been Elizabeth Blevins — in 1823.

The alternative story of Jacob “Big Jake” Troxell is the one that emerged later, in the 1958 “Legion of the Lost Mine” book. This version is the one that has Troxell living among the Cherokee and later marrying Corn Blossom, daughter of Chief Doublehead. The 1958 book appears to be the first reference in literature to Corn Blossom.

As for the grave marker that is placed on the road to Yahoo Falls: it identifies Troxell as a private in the Philadelphia militia. There were two Jacob Troxells from Pennsylvania who served in the Revolutionary War, but they appear to have been different individuals. Even genealogists who believe Jacob Troxell died in 1810 admit that he’s likely not buried along the road to Yahoo Falls, but instead believe that he was buried at Otter Creek further south in McCreary County.

Chuqualatague, or Chief Doublehead, also very much existed. The events surrounding his life and death are well documented. His 1807 assassination near Hiwassee, Tenn. was fictionalized in Dee Brown’s novel, “Creek Mary’s Blood.”

However, there’s no documentation to support that he had a daughter whose name translates to “Corn Blossom.” Further, she’s referred to in modern writings as “Princess Corn Blossom,” and Cherokee tribes did not have princesses.

Less fully documented is the purported death of Doublehead’s son, Tuckahoe Doublehead, who supposedly lived in present-day Scott County. His death at the secret silver mine is documented in Collins’ 1975 book, which also introduces an alternative account of Chief Doublehead’s death: that he was killed amid a dispute near present-day Monticello after Tuckahoe eloped with his white wife. (There’s even a purported grave site for Doublehead in Wayne County.) Collins further wrote that Corn Blossom avenged the death of her brother, Tuckahoe, by shooting and killing his attackers.

Rev. Hiram “Big Tooth” Gregory, the man who supposedly led the Yahoo Falls Massacre, also very much existed. He would have been about 36 years old in 1810, living in Wayne County, Ky. Interestingly, genealogists suggest that Hiram Gregory’s second wife, Jane “Jenny” Stephenson, was first married to Peter Troxell — the son of Jacob Troxell who is also known in the legend as “Little Jake.” The legend suggests that Little Jake, aka Peter, married an Indian woman named Standing Fern. Like Corn Blossom, there is no contemporary evidence that Standing Fern existed.

Little Jake supposedly died at the Yahoo Falls Massacre. However, records from Wayne County show that he was named a road overseer in February 1819, and died sometime between then and January 1820, when his wife was named administrator of his estate.

Gideon Blackburn, the Presbyterian minister, also existed. He did, indeed, start a school for Cherokee children — two of them, in fact. One was located on the Hiwassee River and opened in 1804; the other opened in 1806 at Sale Creek. He was a staunch ally of Chief Doublehead. Troxell’s manuscript states that Blackburn closed his school in grief after learning of the Yahoo Falls Massacre, and that he was later caught with a boatload of alcohol and became an alcoholic. However, it was in 1809 — before the purported massacre at Yahoo Falls — that the Creek Indians implicated Blackburn and others in a scheme to illegally ship whiskey through Creek territory to Mobile, Ala. As a result of fallout over that scandal, he closed both schools in 1810 and moved his family to Middle Tennessee.

As for Hiram Gregory, he has been thoroughly vilified since the emergence of the Yahoo Falls Massacre narrative in Collins’ 1975 book. But every mention of Gregory as a murderer of Indians ties back to the single narrative of the Yahoo Falls Massacre.

In short, historians doubt that the Yahoo Falls Massacre ever occurred. There is no contemporary evidence — court documents, newspaper accounts, or military records — to back up the story, and its only documentation is a single 1975 book that references the Troxel manuscript. It’s doubtful that Corn Blossom, Standing Fern, or Chief Red Bird existed.

Nevertheless, the hike to Yahoo Falls is one of the true gems of McCreary County, and the scenery there is spectacular. If those massive sandstone walls behind the waterfall could talk, they could tell us the true story of what did or didn’t happen there in August 1810. Since they’re silent, all we can do is enjoy their beauty, and speculate.

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This week, we’ll make a short drive to the northern end of the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area, visiting the beautiful Yahoo Falls near Whitley City, Ky.

This is a shorter hike than either Angel Falls or Sunset Overlook, the first two hikes of the Spring Hiking Challenge, but it’s also the first hike to earn a difficulty rating of “moderate.” It’s not a strenuous hike, by any means, but it does feature some elevation change since it starts atop the plateau and dips into the gorge to the base of the waterfall. If you’re just getting started in hiking, don’t let that deter you. This is an absolutely beautiful hike, and Yahoo Falls is one of the most-visited landforms in McCreary County — for obvious reason!

Yahoo Falls
Trailhead: Yahoo Falls
Trail Type: Loop
Difficulty: Moderate
Payoff: Views, Waterfall
Distance: 1.42 miles
Ascent: 125 feet

The Yahoo Falls Loop is a short, well-maintained loop trail near Alum Ford in the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area, with the option to add on mileage by visiting the Yahoo Arch. To get there, take U.S. Highway 27 north to Whitley City. At the caution light on the north end of town, turn left onto Kentucky 700. After half a mile, stay straight across Kentucky 1651 to stay on Kentucky 700. Travel another 3.4 miles, then turn right onto Yahoo Falls Road. The road dead-ends at the trailhead in 1.5 miles.

The trail to Yahoo Falls is one of the most intricately built hiking trails in the entire Big South Fork NRRA.

368 ft.: There is a spur trail to the left. This leads to a beautiful overlook of the Big South Fork River downstream of Yahoo Creek. Take the short side trip to the overlook either now or on your way out. Either way, it’s a beautiful site that isn’t to be missed. The trail is a mix of hemlock and beech to start, with significant stands of rhododendron mixed in.

624 ft.: The trail splits, as the loop portion of the trail begins. You can hike it in either direction. For the purposes of this description, we’re going to hike it in a counter-clockwise direction. Take the right fork to hike counter-clockwise.

0.23 mile: The trail passes a major blowdown that was recently cleared by Big South Fork NRRA maintenance crews. The forest type continues to be a mix of hemlock and beech, with some oak and other hardwoods sprinkled in. Look closely and you’ll see painted dots at the base of the hemlock trees, indicating that they have been treated by BSF botanists for the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive pest that poses a serious risk to hemlock trees throughout the region.

0.28 mile: The trail splits. It isn’t signed, but take the left fork (down the hill).

0.33 mile: The trail reaches an overlook on the east side of Yahoo Creek. Just past it, there are copious stands of rhododendron.

0.40 mile: The trail crosses Yahoo Creek. There is no bridge, but conveniently-placed stones make crossing the small stream easy work.

0.46 mile: Notice how rhododendron and mountain laurel grow together along this section of the trail. These plants are cousins among the evergreen flowering shrubs that are found in the Big South Fork region, but they don’t often grow together. Laurel is usually found in well-drained soils atop the ridges, usually near the rim of the gorge, while rhododendron is found in more shaded and damper areas beneath the cliff lines, inside the gorge. This section of the trail features characteristics of both the plateau top and the gorge areas, allowing both plants to grow together. They’re distinguishable by the rhododendron’s larger leaves.

0.55 mile: The trail splits. The right fork goes to Yahoo Arch, a short trip well worth the additional effort if you choose to do so. The loop trail continues along the left fork.

0.59 mile: Check out the dirt dauber nest beneath the rock along the right side of the trail, sheltered from the weather. The dirt dauber, also called mud wasp, is a species of wasp that build nests out of mud. Nests like these are built by organ pipe mud daubers (so called because the nests resemble organ pipes). The organ pipe mud dauber is native to eastern North America, including both the eastern U.S. and southeastern Canada. Dirt daubers feed primarily on spiders. They are not aggressive and will not sting unless threatened.

0.63 mile: The trail has reached the base of the bluff line, and travels beneath the bluff line. Feel the cooler air, as the dark crevices in the rock have an air-conditioning effect on mother nature!

0.76 mile: The trail reaches Yahoo Falls. At 113 feet, Yahoo Falls it the tallest waterfall in the state of Kentucky — yes, even taller than Cumberland Falls, though the volume of water is obviously much less. Like many waterfalls in the Big South Fork NRRA, the flow of Yahoo Falls depends heavily on recent rainfall. The waterfall is not as spectacular during dry weather. However, the huge rock shelter that lies behind it is always spectacular, and certainly worth the hike in. The trail itself makes a sweeping pass through the rock shelter behind the waterfall.

0.98 mile: A side trail leads to Yahoo Creek and a wooden footbridge, offering a different perspective of the waterfall and excellent photo opportunities.

1.11 mile: The trail begins its ascent toward the top of the gorge.

1.14 mile: The trail reaches the base of the steep staircase. This is the only part of the hike that isn’t easy, and it is what earns this trail a moderate difficulty rating. If you’re not accustomed to hiking, take your time and enjoy the views of the Big South Fork River off to the right as you climb (views that will disappear once the trees have leafed out).

1.2 mile: The trail reaches the top of the plateau. From here, simply continue back to the trailhead. If you didn’t stop by the river overlook on the way in, be sure to do so on the way out. It’s a very short side trip to an excellent vantage point.

Worth noting: There’s another overlook of the river at the trailhead, just around the bend in the road from the restroom facilities.

Scavenger Hunt: This week, we’re looking for a unique hollow tree. Somewhere along the trail, there is a huge beech tree with an open crevice at its base that is almost large enough for a small child to climb inside. Snap a photo of this tree and tag it with the #SpringHikingChallenge hashtag on social media. We’ll randomly select someone for a free set of Ozark Trail trekking poles.

Historical Context: The huge rock house behind Yahoo Falls is historically associated with a massacre of Cherokee Indians that allegedly occurred on Aug. 10, 1810. A number of Cherokee women and children were supposedly massacred by white settlers as they met in the rock shelter to travel to a Presbyterian school that was being opened by Rev. Gideon Blackburn near Chattanooga. They were led by Princess Corn Blossom, daughter of Cherokee war chief Doublehead and husband of Jacob “Big Jake” Troxell.

Allegedly, a group of soldiers sent by Indian hunter John Sevier of Tennessee, and under the command of Hiram “Big Tooth” Gregory, murdered the Cherokee women and children beneath Yahoo Falls.

However, historians doubt the legitimacy of the story. The account of the massacre comes from an unpublished manuscript written by Dan Troxell in the 1990s. Corn Blossom appears to have originated in a 1958 book by Thomas H. Troxel entitled Legion of the Lost Mine. In his foreword, Troxel noted that some of the characters in his book were fictitious, though he didn’t specify which. There are no contemporary records that document the Yahoo Falls Massacre or a Princess Corn Blossom.

The grave site of Big Jake Troxell (1758-1810) can be seen at the turn onto Yahoo Falls Road, 1.5 miles from the trailhead. He was a Revolutionary War soldier in the Pennsylvania militia who later lived with the Cherokee. A monument to the victims of the Yahoo Falls Massacre was placed here in the early 2000s, but was removed by the National Forest Service. (Jake Troxell is not believed to have actually been buried at this place. It is believed by many that he was actually buried at Otter Creek in an unmarked grave.)

Make It Better: Hiking to Yahoo Arch adds about 1.6 miles (0.8 mile in each direction) and it’s a fairly easy hike to a spectacular rock feature.

Be Careful For: The overlooks above Yahoo Falls are protected, but be cautious with small children, as they can easily climb over or around the short fencing.

Please Remember: Hikers are encouraged to obey the “Leave No Trace” ethic. “Leave only footprints, take only memories.” Please do not litter! Also, remember that while all trails in the Big South Fork are dog-friendly, all dogs must be leashed and kept within six feet.

Document Your Hike: Record your participation on this week’s hike by taking a photo of you and your group and tagging it with the #SpringHikingChallenge hashtag on social media (make sure the post privacy is set to public!) or emailing newsroom@ihoneida.com.

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Huntsville, Tennessee – August 11, 1925

The first bullet didn’t make a sound.

It was the second one that echoed – the crack of it bouncing off the stone walls of the Scott County Jail, rolling past the courthouse like thunder on a dry summer day.

Sheriff Richard D. Ellis collapsed in front of the iron door, the keys still in his hand. Blood pooled beneath him on the courthouse steps. The prisoner beside him – George Foster, accused moonshiner – stood frozen, his eyes wide.

No one saw the shooter.

But everyone knew why Sheriff Ellis was dead.

In Scott County, Tennessee, during Prohibition, fighting moonshiners was about as safe as walking barefoot through a copperhead den. And Richard Ellis had made himself a target the moment he took the oath.

***

When R.D. Ellis ran for sheriff in 1920, he didn’t sugarcoat anything.

He was a Baptist preacher, just like his father before him. The kind who quoted scripture with his eyes locked on yours and didn’t flinch when he talked about hellfire. The kind who commanded a room just by standing in it. And he had one promise for Scott County: he was going to clean up the whiskey trade.

But Scott County didn’t just have moonshiners in the 1920s. It had generations of them. They were born into it, raised on it, fed on the fumes of copper kettles hidden deep in the hollers – places like No Business and Smokey Creek and dozens of dense, wild ridges where the law couldn’t reach even if it wanted to.

They called it a way of life.

He called it a sin.

And in 1920, sin was winning.

The hills were alive with the hiss of mash cooking and the sound of boot soles on wet leaves. The law could barely keep up. The National Park Service would later discover over a hundred and sixty still sites in the Big South Fork alone. If that number carried across the county, there were hundreds more.

Ellis didn’t care about the odds. He strapped on a badge, picked his deputies, and went to work.

But this war wasn’t fought with trumpets.

It was fought with guns.

***

On January 31, 1924, Sheriff Ellis’s crusade turned bloody.

He and his deputies were raiding a still just west of Oneida when they walked into an ambush. Gunfire erupted from the trees. Deputy Johnny Acres – the police chief in Oneida and Ellis’s closest ally – was shot through the chest. He dropped without a word, dead before he hit the ground.

Acres had just turned thirty-seven.

No one was ever charged.

When they buried John Acres that cold winter day at Marcum Cemetery, on a knoll overlooking the small town where he’d served as chief of police, Sheriff Ellis stood over the grave with his hat in his hand and his jaw clenched tight. He looked like a man who’d stared into something dark and found it staring back.

But Ellis didn’t flinch.

If anything, he dug in deeper.

That fall, Ellis teamed up with federal revenuers – men who’d made moonshine busts from Kentucky to Alabama. They carried rifles, not warrants. Among them was Col. Bob Smith, a grizzled agent out of Clinton who claimed he could sniff out a still just from the wind.

On November 6, 1924, they set their sights on Huntsville.

The target: Jerry Filmore Sexton, a young father with five small children, a reputation for a quick temper, and a still behind his home. Smith warned Ellis that Sexton might be trouble.

Ellis didn’t hesitate.

The raid turned into a bloodbath.

Gunfire erupted before the agents ever reached the still. Smith would later say he’d never heard shooting like it – not in the war, not in the backwoods, not anywhere. Bullets tore through brush and bark.

Sexton’s wife, Gertrude, was reportedly beside him the entire time, feeding cartridges into his rifle as fast as he could fire. A member of her family was shot and killed. Lee West was hit nine times but survived. Another man, Howard Griffith, was wounded.

Sexton himself was killed with a single round to the forehead.

The rest of the gang fled.

The hills went quiet again.

But they remembered.

And they waited.

***

August 11, 1925. A Tuesday. Bright sky overhead, not a cloud in sight.

Col. Bob Smith was back in town with a prisoner: George Foster, just another moonshiner picked up near Winona. Smith needed a place to hold him. Sheriff Ellis said he’d take him.

They met outside the jail. Ellis took custody of the prisoner, and they turned toward the door.

Then came the shot.

The preacher-turned-sheriff stumbled and fell. He was dead before Smith could turn around.

Foster didn’t run. He just stood there.

When the Knoxville News Sentinel asked Smith what happened, he just shrugged.

“Killing folks up in Scott County is just sort of a mountain pastime,” he said.

The newspaper didn’t hold back its coverage.

“The fellows up there get their biggest thrill out of killing officers,” it reported.

Maybe it was hyperbole. Maybe it wasn’t. But the facts were the facts.

In nineteen months, Scott County had lost its sheriff and its chief of police, both murdered in cold blood. Both killed while enforcing laws that a good chunk of the county didn’t give a damn about.

And there would be more.

Just over a year later, another officer – John Wesley West – would be gunned down.

Three lawmen in two years. No justice.

***

The hunt for Ellis’s killer began that same afternoon. They brought bloodhounds in from Dayton. The dogs picked up a scent and followed it across the wooded hills, through brush and briar, all the way to the edge of Paint Rock.

Then the trail went cold.

The case was never solved.

The bootleggers kept working the hills for a while longer, but the war eventually ended – not because anyone won, but because everyone got tired. Prohibition ended in 1933, and with it went most of the killing. The law turned its attention to other things. The hills got quieter.

But the questions never stopped.

Who pulled the trigger that morning in front of the jail? Was it revenge for the Sexton raid? A hired gun paid in corn liquor and resentment? Or just someone with a grudge and a rifle, waiting for the right moment?

The answers went to the grave with the men who were there – Ellis, Acres, Sexton, and the others who fought on the front lines of a war nobody really won.

The rest of the county moved on, because that’s what people do. They have to.

But some things don’t leave. Memory sticks around like the smell of sour mash in damp timber. History doesn’t really get buried. It just sits there under the surface, waiting.

Editor’s Note: This is the eighth installment of Murders in the Heartland, the IH’s reimagined series covering particularly noteworthy murders that have been committed in Scott County through the years. In many instances, descendants of both the victims and the perpetrators still live in our community. The intent is not to reopen old wounds or to cast judgment, but to document past events that have an indelible impact on our community’s history. At the conclusion of the series, our book by the same name will be republished in a second, revised edition.

Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be The Daybreaker bright and early Monday morning. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!

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Traditionally, the Angel Falls Rapid trail is where hiking in the Big South Fork River & Recreation Area begins. It isn’t considered the most awe-inspiring trail in the national park — that distinction usually goes to Honey Creek Loop. But its close proximity to park headquarters and Oneida, and its ease of difficulty, make it a logical first option for visitors to the national park to put boots on the ground.

However, don’t let “easy” fool you into thinking Angel Falls isn’t worth trekking. This is a beautiful trail, with lots of redeeming qualities. We chose it for Week #2 in part because of its accessibility, in part because of its ease of difficulty, and in part because this trail doesn’t deserve to be left out simply because we started the Spring Hiking Challenge with the nearby Sunset Overlook Trail. And there are many nuances to this trail that are overlooked by those who simply park and set out to hike. So, are you ready? Let’s hike!

Angel Falls Rapid
Trailhead: Leatherwood Ford
Trail Type: Out-and-back
Difficulty: Easy
Payoff: Views, Waterfalls
Distance: 3.53 miles
Ascent: 51 feet

As you notice in the trail stats, Angel Falls is approximately one mile longer than the Sunset Overlook Trail. But also notice that there is slightly less elevation gain spread out over that distance. What does that mean? In some regards, Angel Falls is an even easier hike than Sunset Overlook, despite the longer distance. Hiking from the observation platform to the river’s edge adds some elevation gain that isn’t included in these stats, but it’s certainly worth the effort to see the house-sized boulders around the rapid.

To get there, take S.R. 297 (Coopertown Road) west from Oneida. Turn left onto Leatherwood Road (continuing on S.R. 297) at Terry & Terry Store, and drive into the river gorge. At the bottom of the gorge, turn into the Leatherwood Ford parking lot. Immediately turn left again and drive to the north end of the parking lot (the end opposite the gazebo and restroom facilities). The trail begins at the north end of the lot.

As you hike, note the signposts along the route. At one time, this was an interpretive trail, with an accompanying booklet available from the visitor center at Bandy Creek. Each of the numbered signposts corresponded with a site of interest along the route that was described in the booklet. There are 30 signposts between Leatherwood Ford and Angel Falls.

50 ft.: Almost immediately after you step off the asphalt and onto dirt, you’ll notice a camping spot along the river. This sandy beach-like area is both a popular swimming hole for day users and also a “backcountry” camping spot. You’ll also notice two other things almost immediately: rhododendron and trillium. We talked in last week’s hike about the difference between mountain laurel and rhododendron, the two flowering evergreen shrubs that are found in abundance in the BSF. Mountain laurel is found on top of the gorge (along Sunset Overlook Trail and many others), while rhododendron is found inside the gorge — on this trail and many others. As for trillium, it is one of the most celebrated spring wildflowers found in the Big South Fork, and all of the trails that depart from the Leatherwood Ford trailhead are great options to find them. Hundreds — if not thousands — of individual trillium can be found around the start of the Angel Falls Trail.

0.16 mile: A waterfall threads its way through jumbled rocks on the right side of the trail, the first of several side streams that feed into the Big South Fork River along this route. There was once a footbridge across this stream, but it’s no longer in place. No worries, though; you won’t get your feet wet.

0.25: You’ll pass the first whitewater rapid along this stretch of the river. This is a gentle Class I/II rapid that poses little trouble for whitewater paddlers. In fact, whitewater enthusiasts don’t usually venture this far downriver. The roaring river becomes much calmer downstream from O&W Bridge, and much calmer still downstream from Angel Falls. But there are several small rapids between Leatherwood Ford and Angel Falls.

0.4: Early spring, before the green-up, is one of the best times to hike Angel Falls because you are afforded spectacular views of the cliff lines that tower over the river — views that disappear once the trees have leafed out. Here, you’ll get your first look at one of those cliff lines, and it is an excellent photo opportunity if you want to scramble down to the river’s edge.

0.47: A small landslide area has exposed tiny bits of coal along the trail. You can also find coal in lesser amounts along much of the rest of the trail if you keep your eyes peeled. Coal was never mined as prolifically in the Big South Fork region as in the Cumberland Mountains to the east, but mining was a key industry here beginning around the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century. We’ll talk much more about the history of coal as we venture further into this hike.

0.5: Another backcountry campsite is found along the river’s edge.

0.59: A large beech tree on the left side of the trail bears the carved initials of some hikers who have made this hike. Beech trees are hard to resist for anyone with a pocket knife and a desire to leave a record of their presence, thanks to their smooth bark. But as we said last week, please obey the Leave No Trace ethic and resist the urge!

0.73: You can find hemlock trees all along this trail, none bigger than the one you’re seeing here. The hemlocks found in this region are eastern hemlocks, which are primarily found in the New England and Great Lakes regions but also extend southward throughout the Appalachians. They’re currently threatened by the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive pest that weakens and eventually kills the trees. Look closely, and you’ll spot painted “dots” on the hemlocks along the trail. These are the signs of National Park Service botanists treating the trees to protect them from the pest infestation.

0.78: The trail crosses a wooden footbridge. This stream is Anderson Branch. You can’t really see it now, but uphill to the right is the reclaimed Anderson Branch strip mine, one of the most prolific strip mines in this part of the Big South Fork region. Coal was found in abundance around Anderson Branch … in fact, shortly after the construction of the O&W Railroad a couple of miles upstream, grade work began on a spur down the river to Leatherwood Ford and on to Anderson Branch. However, the idea was quickly abandoned.

0.89: Check out the massive boulder between the trail and the river. Sometimes, these boulders were exposed by erosion due to the moving water. Other times, they broke loose from the caprock nearly 500 feet above and tumbled down to the bottom of the gorge. Just beyond this boulder is one of several blowdowns from this past winter that you’ll find along the trail. The forces of nature constantly keep maintenance crews busy in the Big South Fork, and this past winter was particularly rough. Literally hundreds of mature hardwood trees along this two-mile stretch were toppled by winds.

1.1: You’ll get your first look at Angel Falls Overlook, the massive rock outcropping that juts out over the river at the mouth of Anderson Branch. It’s a welcome sight, because it means that the destination is getting close.

1.22: Water cascades through rocks on the right side of the trail.

1.31: Notice the cobble bar on the left side of the river. Also known as “scour praries,” cobble bars are an important part of Big South Fork ecology. There are only about 500 acres of cobble bar habitat remaining worldwide, thanks to dams and other human activity. They require free-flowing rivers where heavy rainfall drastically changes water levels. One of the best examples of a Big South Fork cobble bar is found just upstream of Leatherwood Ford, near the mouth of Bandy Creek. These rock prairies contain several native plant species that are not found anywhere else — like prairie grasses and flowering herbs. Without the floods that “scour out” the species that aren’t adapted to these conditions, these plants would not be able to thrive here. The cobble bars don’t look like much this time of year, other than a bunch of rocks, but later this summer they’ll be teeming with life.

1.4: Various wildflowers — including trillium — can be found in abundance along the trail.

1.51: The stream that you see emptying into the left side of the river is Fall Branch. It drains the area of Bandy Creek Campground and other parts of Bandy Creek on the east side of Bandy Creek Road, and is the largest tributary of the Big South Fork between Leatherwood Ford and Station Camp.

1.67: Here, we get our first look at Angel Falls. Some first-time visitors to the Big South Fork who hike this trail expecting to find a true “waterfall” are disappointed to discover that Angel Falls is only a rapid, but it’s a mighty impressive rapid, a Class IV surge of water that is a recommended portage for even experienced paddlers.

1.72: We’ve talked about the coal that was mined along this stretch of river. How about the coal that was not mined. Here, note the small seam of coal that is exposed along the right side of the trail. It is fascinating to note how firmly it is embedded between layers of rock, which illustrates why mining it was so dangerous.

1.79: We’ve reached the observation platform for Angel Falls. Below is the powerful Angel Falls Rapid. Above is the rock outcropping that is Angel Falls Overlook. They’re impressive sites all around.

It is tempting to end your hike at the observation platform, and if you’re a newcomer to hiking who’s still getting acclimated to the activity and you don’t feel up to a jaunt down to the river’s edge, that’s understandable. However, the most impressive sights of this hike, by far, are found along the edge of the river, where huge boulders — some as large as small houses — are strewn about the stream bed while jagged cliff lines tower overhead.

Scavenger Hunt: This week, we’re looking for coal! You can find it in small chunks along the trail, in small chunks smoothed by water along the river, and also in a seam still embedded in the earth near the observation platform. Take a photo of yourself with the seam of coal or, even better, find a handful of isolated chunks along the river or the trail. (But obey the Leave No Trace ethic and don’t take it with you!) This week, we’ll be giving away a wooden hiking stick affixed with a Big South Fork badge to someone who finds coal along the Angel Falls Rapid Trail. Take a photo and tag it #SpringHikingChallenge on social media.

Historical Context: Angel Falls may not be much of a waterfall today, but up until the 1950s it was very much a waterfall, a split flow that dropped about 10 feet. It was dynamited by fishermen who thought it would improve canoe travel along the river … and maybe it did, but it also created the dangerous (for canoes, at least) Angel Falls Rapid. (The left photo is what Angel Falls looked like in the 1910s.)

Make It Better: The picnic tables at the Leatherwood Ford Trailhead make an excellent, shaded spot for lunch before or after your hike. You can also continue your hike from Angel Falls to the John Hawk Smith Place, a distance of about 1.3 miles (one way). There isn’t much to see at the Hawk Smith Place today, aside from a small cemetery, and the trail is shared-use with horses much of the way. But Hawk Smith was one of the most colorful and notable people to live along the river during the Big South Fork’s settlement era.

Be Careful For: If you venture down to the river’s edge and “rock hop” on the boulders, be careful, especially with small children. A slip onto the rough boulders can result in injury. A slip into the water can result in death.

Please Remember: Hikers are encouraged to obey the “Leave No Trace” ethic. “Leave only footprints, take only memories.” Please do not litter! Also, remember that while all trails in the Big South Fork are dog-friendly, all dogs must be leashed and kept within six feet.

Document Your Hike: Record your participation on this week’s hike by taking a photo of you and your group and tagging it with the #SpringHikingChallenge hashtag on social media (make sure the post privacy is set to public!) or emailing newsroom@ihoneida.com.

For Your GPS: Here is a GPX file of the Angel Falls Rapid Trail that you can load into any GPS app or device.

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Murders in the Heartland: Vengeance against the sheriff

There is a particular kind of man the mountains make – not invincible, exactly, but durable in a way that baffles the men who keep trying to break him. Frank Hughett was that kind of man. He was shot. Poisoned. Shot again. Men from the hills of Scott County spent the better part of a year trying to kill him before they finally got it right, and even then, it took an ambush on a Sunday morning, with his wife and two-year-old baby nearby, to bring him down.

He was fifty-nine years old, sweeping the front steps of a railroad commissary, when the bullet found him.

He was dead in ten minutes.

But the story was hardly that simple.

***

To understand Frank Hughett, you have to understand the country that made him. Scott County in the late nineteenth century was a place where the law wore a face and rode a horse and could be found at specific addresses – which meant it could also be targeted, ambushed, and settled with. The office of high sheriff wasn’t an abstraction. It was a man. And if you had business with the law, you had business with the man specifically.

And folks in the mountains had ways of settling accounts that were not always through the courts.

Frank Hughett was born in March 1851, the son of John Hughett and Christena Lewallen, out of Robbins and the Brimstone Creek country. His father was a justice of the peace – Squire Hughett, folks called him – and the Hughett name was embedded in the landscape the way old names get embedded out there, in the creek hollows and ridge lines and the small places on maps that only locals can find. There was a Hughett post office, near where Huntsville Branch empties into Brimstone Creek, run by his brother, Jasper, who would later help build the bank and the high school down in Robbins.

There were a total of ten children in the Hughett family. Christena died in her forties and was buried at the family cemetery on Brimstone. Squire Hughett lived out his years with Christena’s sister, Lucinda – a woman who could not marry again without forfeiting the monthly pension from her first husband, Capt. William Robbins, who had helped raise the Scott County Home Guard during the Civil War, had his home attacked in what became known as the Battle of Brimstone, and died of typhoid fever in Lexington, Kentucky, far from the mountains he’d set out to defend.

Frank married Amanda – one of William and Lucinda’s daughters – and they had six children together. When Amanda died around 1891, Frank remarried to Abigail Cecil. Then he married a third time, to Rhoda Shoopman, and they had a child together in 1908, when Frank was in his late fifties. There is something quietly remarkable about that detail – a man pushing sixty, starting again, a new baby in the house – and it makes what happened two years later land with even heavier weight.

***

He was first elected Scott County’s ninth sheriff in 1888, succeeding Beaty Cecil of New River. He was reelected in 1890 and 1892, served out his three terms, and stepped aside as the law required. He left the job to John Goad, who had his own difficult tenure – tasked eventually with hanging a convicted murderer named Mike King, a duty that bothered Goad so profoundly that he refused to run for sheriff again. He ran for county trustee instead. Some burdens you carry out of office and try not to look at directly.

Hughett came back in 1896. He ran again and won again, becoming the first man in Scott County history to serve the office on two separate occasions. Whatever it was the work did to him, whatever weight it added to those years of riding out to hard places and standing between the law and people who didn’t want the law standing anywhere near them – it didn’t appear to drive him out. He served until 1900, and then went on living in the county he’d spent years policing.

Then, in the winter of 1910, Frank Hughett was part of a posse.

The man they were after was Riley Lowe, wanted on a larceny charge. He was accused of stealing a moonshine still, which sounds almost quaint until you understand that in Scott County in 1910, a man’s still was his livelihood, and stealing one was serious business, and the men who ran them were not the kind to accept the loss quietly. The posse found Riley Lowe. Frank Hughett killed him.

From that moment on, Hughett was a marked man. Riley’s family had their own accounting to do.

***

June 1910. Oneida. Someone shot Frank Hughett in the street.

The shooter apparently believed he’d finished the job, because when Hughett fell, the man turned and fled. This was his mistake. Hughett regained consciousness – came back up out of whatever dark place the bullet had sent him toward – and gave chase. Wounded, bleeding, fifty-nine years old, he went after the man who had just shot him.

No one was ever apprehended.

Days later, someone poisoned his whiskey.

The Knoxville Sentinel reported that Hughett “suffered much” from the poisoning, which is the newspaper’s restrained way of saying that a man survived being shot and then survived being poisoned in the same month, which should perhaps be classified as something beyond ordinary human endurance. The paper also noted that Hughett “is a man of great bravery and refuses to move away.”

Refused to move away.

That was the essential thing about Frank Hughett. The mountains were trying to kill him – methodically, patiently, working through the available methods – and he would not leave. Whether that was courage or stubbornness or some combination of the two that becomes indistinguishable after enough years in hard country, he stayed. He took a job as a foreman on the railroad at Cook’s Camp on Smokey Creek. He brought his wife and two-year-old child and went to work.

And on Sunday morning, September 19, 1910, at around eight o’clock, he was sweeping the steps in front of the commissary when someone fired from a cluster of bushes on the mountainside above the camp.

Two shots. Under his right arm.

He was dead in ten minutes.

***

Another person in the camp saw a man run from the bushes after the shots. Bloodhounds were brought in from Somerset, Kentucky, and they followed the track with the patient, unhurried certainty that bloodhounds have – noses to the earth, reading the story the ground was telling – until the trail led to arrests. Five men: Joe Lowe, Nelson Lowe, Shack Lowe, John Bunch, and Jeff Bunch. The Lowe name was right there in the middle of it, as Hughett might have known it would be. Riley Lowe’s brother and kin, settling the account that had been opened in the winter.

A newspaper called it “cold-blooded murder in a railroad camp.” That phrasing has the flat declarative quality of a verdict – not quite outrage, not quite grief, just the mountain chronicle doing what it does, setting the facts down in ink so it doesn’t get lost in the hills.

Frank Hughett was buried at Robbins Cemetery back in the community where he was born.

***

Twenty years later, in June 1930, his son Reuben went the same way.

Reuben Lafayette Hughett was forty-three years old, a deputy U.S. Marshal, working a warrant down in Knoxville at Copper Ridge. The suspect was Harrison Welch, charged with selling liquor. When Welch was arrested, he asked for a moment to tell his wife. Reuben Hughett, his father’s son in the way that runs bone-deep in some families, agreed. He followed Welch into the house.

The two men tussled, and Reuben was shot.

They buried Reuben Hughett at Robbins Cemetery, too, beside his father. Two men. Two badges. Two ambushes. Both over whiskey. Twenty years of the same mountain arithmetic, patient and unresolved, the same lesson learned by the same family twice in the same generation, which is not a lesson at all but a weight – the kind that accumulates in county records and grave markers and the long silence of a place that has seen more than it can say.

***

There is an old story in Scott County about the men who went after Frank Hughett’s job. One of his predecessors, John Goad, hanged a convicted murderer and found he couldn’t put it down afterward, couldn’t stop seeing it, couldn’t keep carrying the thing the office required him to carry. So he found a different job.

Frank Hughett did not find a different job. He stayed. He came back. He was shot and he gave chase. He was poisoned and he refused to leave. He brought his family to a railroad camp and swept the front steps on Sunday mornings and went on being exactly what he had always been – a man the mountains had made and could not seem to unmake.

Until they did.

It took an ambush. It took a cluster of bushes on a hillside and a Sunday morning and a man with a rifle who waited until Hughett wasn’t looking. It took every advantage the other side could arrange, and even then it was over in ten minutes, which feels like the last thing a man like that owed the mountains that raised him.

Ten minutes.

The bloodhounds followed the track. The arrests were made. And the Robbins Cemetery received another Hughett, and the hills went on keeping their counsel, and the creek moved through the hollow where the old post office used to be, and the November light came down thin and cold, and the county went on writing itself, one violent chapter at a time, in the only language it had ever really known.

Editor’s Note: This is the seventh installment of Murders in the Heartland, the IH’s reimagined series covering particularly noteworthy murders that have been committed in Scott County through the years. In many instances, descendants of both the victims and the perpetrators still live in our community. The intent is not to reopen old wounds or to cast judgment, but to document past events that have an indelible impact on our community’s history. At the conclusion of the series, our book by the same name will be republished in a second, revised edition.

The Spring Hiking Challenge begins!

The 2026 Spring Hiking Challenge begins this week — the first official week of spring — with a short, easy stroll to Sunset Overlook.

In making this hike, we’re returning to the site of the inaugural Twenty Week Hiking Challenge back in March 2015, when more than 700 hikers joined us on Week 1 for the hike to Sunset.

We chose the hike to Sunset Overlook because we want to start slow and easy for novice hikers who aren’t experienced in the woods. Sunset Overlook is one of the easiest trails the Big South Fork has to offer — subjectively, it’s second only to the Bandy Creek Loop. Angel Falls Trail is an easier walk, but further distance (about four miles).

The purpose of the Spring Hiking Challenge is to encourage local residents to explore the Big South Fork and discover the beautiful places that exist in our back yard — places that some people who have lived in this area their entire lives have never seen before. In the process, we hope participants will discover that hiking is an excellent health tool, not just for physical fitness but maybe even more so for mental fitness.

Over the next 14 weeks (ending the final week before summer officially begins in June), we’ll hike 14 trails throughout the Big South Fork. We’ll avoid horse trails, which are generally more difficult to walk, and stick solely to hiking trails. Each trail will feature at least one of overlooks, rock formations, or waterfalls, along with other points of interest. Each trail will include a “Make It Better” option for hikers that want to add some mileage to their effort. Each will also include a virtual scavenger hunt — requiring hikers to pay close attention to their surroundings to find a point of interest along the trail — with a prize randomly awarded to someone who finds and documents the site we’re looking for.

Hikers will document their participation by sharing photos of their hike on social media with the hashtag #SpringHikingChallenge — or, if they do not have social media, photos can be emailed to newsroom@ihoneida.com. At the end of the challenge, we’ll award a grand prize to two people — one adult, one youth, randomly chosen — who complete all 14 hikes. We’ll also award a prize for the best photograph that’s taken throughout the challenge. Those prizes, as well as the weekly prizes, will be announced in our hike stories and on our Facebook page.

Each week, the hike will be announced, along with full details about it, on our website — www.indherald.com— by Thursday.

So, with all that said, let’s get started!

Click here to continue reading this week’s full trail description!

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The 2026 Spring Hiking Challenge begins this week — the first official week of spring — with a short, easy stroll to Sunset Overlook.

In making this hike, we’re returning to the site of the inaugural Twenty Week Hiking Challenge back in March 2015, when more than 700 hikers joined us on Week 1 for the hike to Sunset.

We chose the hike to Sunset Overlook because we want to start slow and easy for novice hikers who aren’t experienced in the woods. Sunset Overlook is one of the easiest trails the Big South Fork has to offer — subjectively, it’s second only to the Bandy Creek Loop. Angel Falls Trail is an easier walk, but further distance (about four miles).

The purpose of the Spring Hiking Challenge is to encourage local residents to explore the Big South Fork and discover the beautiful places that exist in our back yard — places that some people who have lived in this area their entire lives have never seen before. In the process, we hope participants will discover that hiking is an excellent health tool, not just for physical fitness but maybe even more so for mental fitness.

Over the next 14 weeks (ending the final week before summer officially begins in June), we’ll hike 14 trails throughout the Big South Fork. We’ll avoid horse trails, which are generally more difficult to walk, and stick solely to hiking trails. Each trail will feature at least one of overlooks, rock formations, or waterfalls, along with other points of interest. Each trail will include a “Make It Better” option for hikers that want to add some mileage to their effort. Each will also include a virtual scavenger hunt — requiring hikers to pay close attention to their surroundings to find a point of interest along the trail — with a prize randomly awarded to someone who finds and documents the site we’re looking for.

Hikers will document their participation by sharing photos of their hike on social media with the hashtag #SpringHikingChallenge — or, if they do not have social media, photos can be emailed to newsroom@ihoneida.com. At the end of the challenge, we’ll award a grand prize to two people — one adult, one youth, randomly chosen — who complete all 14 hikes. We’ll also award a prize for the best photograph that’s taken throughout the challenge. Those prizes, as well as the weekly prizes, will be announced in our hike stories and on our Facebook page.

Each week, the hike will be announced, along with full details about it, on our website — www.indherald.com— by Thursday.

So, with all that said, let’s get started!

Sunset Overlook
Trailhead: East Rim
Trail Type: Out-and-back
Difficulty: Easy
Payoff: Overlook
Distance: 2.51 miles
Ascent: 53 feet

Sunset Overlook is one of the most popular hiking trails in the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area, and also one of the easiest. It is a 2.51-mile, out-and-back hike that is almost completely level, except for a slight bit of elevation change near the overlook.

The hike begins and ends at East Rim Trailhead, which is located on East Rim Overlook Road near the Big South Fork headquarters west of Oneida. The destination is a rock outcropping that overlooks the Big South Fork River approximately one mile upstream from Leatherwood Ford. The East Rim Trailhead is a paved parking area on the right side of East Rim Overlook Road, just a few hundred feet from the turn off S.R. 297. The trail begins on the left side of East Rim Overlook Road (across the road from the parking area).

Mile 0.14: The hiking trail crosses a single-lane, gravel administrative access road. The road accesses a shooting range for law enforcement training purposes. Note the sign where the hiking trail crosses the road indicating that only authorized personnel are permitted on the road beyond the hiking trail.

0.15: Almost as soon as the hiking trail re-enters the forest on the north side of the administrative access road, there’s a small pond on the left. This area was farmland before the Big South Fork NRRA was established, and this is the smallest of four farm ponds that are located in the area. It has been mostly filled with sediment over the years, but hosts a healthy stand of cattails and other aquatic plant life, along with amphibians like frogs and salamanders.

0.25: A building can be spotted through the trees to the left. This is part of the National Park Service’s Resource Management division. Specifically, it houses the NPS’s firefighting cache. Also notice the small hemlocks that are growing in abundance here. Although the Sunset Overlook Trail stays entirely on top of the plateau, it features several of the forest types that can be found within the boundaries of the Big South Fork NRRA. This is the head of a small, unnamed stream that eventually empties into the Big South Fork River, and hemlocks can be found in abundance around most streams in the BSF, both inside and outside the gorge. The hemlock is a threatened tree species, due to the hemlock woolly adelgid infestation. NPS botanists are using chemicals to mitigate the damage.

0.27: The trail crosses the first of two wooden footbridges, and mature hemlocks stand sentry over the bridge.

0.40: The trail crosses the earthen dam of the second of the aforementioned farm ponds that remain from the days of settlement in this area. This is the largest of the four ponds found in the vicinity of the park headquarters and is also a source of an abundance of aquatic plant and animal life.

0.47: As the trail re-enters the forest on the east side of the pond, the forest type has changed. Holly trees are now found in abundance along the trail. There are several species of evergreens that provide color along this trail before the deciduous trees have gained their leaves for the warm season. First were the hemlocks along the small stream; now are the holly trees.

0.55: Another evergreen begins to pop up in abundance along the trail: white pines. These young white pines grow in significant numbers along the ridge on the left side of the trail, spilling down the hillside to the trail itself. If you look to the ridgetop on your left, you’ll see the mature, parent white pines growing tall over the surrounding forest.

0.70: The Sunset Overlook Trail joins an old road trace, which it will follow most of the rest of the way to the overlook. This road once joined the main road, which is today S.R. 297. This road — and others like it that you’ll see joining this old road trace further along the route — were made during mid 20^th century logging operations.

0.90: This is the easiest part of the hike — a great opportunity to slow down and observe the forest that surrounds you. This forest is typical of the mixed hardwood forests found throughout the Big South Fork’s plateau areas: few old-growth oak or hickory trees due to the 20^th century logging operations, but lots of red maple, sugar maple, black gum, sourwood, black cherry, tulip poplar, American beech, and sassafras trees in various stages of growth.

0.99: Yet another type of evergreen comes into view. Mountain laurel is found in abundance along the trail for the first time. This is a sign that you’re getting close to the rim of the gorge. Laurel is typically found outside the gorge, in the shallow, well-drained soil near the edge of the plateau. Its cousin, rhododendron, is found in the more shaded and moist areas inside the gorge. We won’t see rhododendron on this hike, since we’re staying on top of the plateau.

1.08: Note the carved beech tree on the left side of the trail. Beech trees often attract people with a pocketknife or other chiseling instrument because their smooth bark makes it easy to carve messages into their trunks. In some parts of the BSF, carvings from the settlement days can be found in beech trees, though they’re usually illegible because the tree’s growth has distorted the carvings. The carvings on this particular beech tree are more recent, made by hikers. (Please note: carving initials into a beech tree is a violation of the Leave No Trace ethic and should not be attempted.)

1.21: The trail begins a slight descent to the overlook.

1.27: The trail emerges on the unprotected rock outcropping that provides scenic views of the river gorge. Just upstream, almost invisible through the trees, is a drainage on the west side of the river. This is the mouth of North White Oak Creek, the stream that was followed into Fentress County by the old O&W Railroad once it crossed the Big South Fork River. Downstream, the S.R. 297 bridge at Leatherwood Ford is visible. You will also see the observation platform at East Rim Overlook if you look hard enough. One item of interest that you’ll find at the overlook is the mysterious Chi Rho symbol that someone chiseled into the sandstone rock face long ago. The Chi Rho is one of the earliest Christian symbols, formed by superimposing the Greek letters Chi (X) and Rho (P) to represent Christ. This one is mysterious because no one is sure who chiseled it here, or why. However, it probably isn’t as old as you might think. Sandstone erodes quickly, and Big South Fork trail literature from the 1980s does not mention the symbol. Once you’ve enjoyed the views from the overlook, you’ll retrace your steps back to the trailhead.

Scavenger Hunt: In accordance with the “Leave No Trace” ethic, our scavenger hunt will be virtual. Each week, we’ll ask participants to find a sight along the trail and snap a picture of it. This week, we’re looking for a tree along the trail that is bent into an unnatural stair step shape (growing vertical, then horizontal, then vertical again). During the era of Native Americans, the Indians would bend trees to mark trails, causing them to grow in shapes similar to this. However, most of the trees found in this shape in the Big South Fork today are far too young to have been caused by Native Americans. Instead, they’re usually caused because a tree was damaged by a storm or some other occurrence, and then continued to grow. This week, we’ll be giving away an Embrava 32-oz. sports water bottle — perfect for hiking — to one person who finds this tree. Take a photo and tag it #SpringHikingChallenge on social media.

Historical Context: Like much of the Big South Fork region, the ridge leading to Sunset Overlook was heavily logged during the early and mid 20^th century. The road trace that the trail follows is one of the remnants of the logging era here. Another is the deep depression that can be found on the left side of the trail at Mile 0.95. These were called “jack pits” or “loading pits.” Before hydraulic loaders and knuckleboom cranes became common in the 1960s and 1970s, loading heavy logs onto trucks was assisted by digging a pit that the truck would be backed into, lowering the bed of the truck to ground level. Workers would use hooks, chains, jacks or winches to roll the logs onto the truck.

Make It Better: There are several overlooks along this stretch of the Big South Fork River, and two of them are accessible from East Rim Trailhead. Once you’ve arrived back at your vehicle, it’s a short stroll to the second of these overlooks: Leatherwood Overlook. It is located along the Leatherwood Loop Trail. To reach it, follow the trail that departs the trailhead on the west side of the road, following it through the clearing and into the forest. When the trail reaches the Leatherwood Loop junction, take the left option and follow it to a spur trail at the rim of the gorge that leads a tenth of a mile from the main trail to the protected rock outcropping.

Be Careful For: Sunset Overlook is not protected. Use caution with pets and small children.

Please Remember: Hikers are encouraged to obey the “Leave No Trace” ethic. “Leave only footprints, take only memories.” Please do not litter! Also remember that while all trails in the Big South Fork are dog-friendly, all dogs must be always leashed on a leash that does not exceed six feet in length.

Document Your Hike: Record your participation on this week’s hike by taking a photo of you and your group and tagging it with the #SpringHikingChallenge hashtag on social media (make sure the post privacy is set to public!) or emailing newsroom@ihoneida.com.

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You’re reading Friday Features, a weekly newsletter containing the Independent Herald’s feature stories — that is, stories that aren’t necessarily straight news but that provide an insightful look at our community and its people. If you’d like to adjust your subscription to include (or exclude) any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so!

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by First National Bank. Since 1904, First National Bank has been a part of Scott County. First National is local people — just like you. Visit fnboneida.com or call (423) 569-8586.

The death of the baseball star

Helenwood, Tennessee – July 5, 1906

Sam Parker stepped off the train into the afternoon heat and never saw it coming.

He’d been playing baseball in Oneida that Thursday – just a summer game with friends – and caught the Cincinnati-Southern back to Helenwood. He was twenty-six years old, a lawyer with a future, the kind of young man people pointed to as an example of what you could become if you worked hard and kept your head on straight.

Judge James E. Fulton was waiting on the platform with a double-barreled shotgun.

He fired both barrels into Parker’s stomach while his own teenage son watched.

Sam Parker – star athlete at the University of Tennessee, promising attorney, son of one of Scott County’s most powerful political families – died on the depot platform before the doctor from Somerset could even get there.

Fulton’s excuse was that Parker had seduced his wife.

Everyone denied it. Parker denied it with his dying breath. Fulton’s wife, who’d already left him by that point, denied it too.

Nobody believed him. But it didn’t matter. Sam Parker was still dead.

***

Samuel Young Parker was born into the kind of family that made things happen in Scott County.

His father, James Crawford Parker – J.C. to everyone who knew him – came from frontier stock down near Robbins and worked his way up to county judge and eventually state senator. He was Scott County’s first superintendent of schools. J.C.’s wife, Mary Burke Parker, ran the post office in Helenwood. They had nine children, and Sam was the one who stood out.

He was smart like his father. Studied like his father. But it was athletics where he really shined.

At the University of Tennessee, they called him “Judge” – partly because he was studying law, but mostly because of the way he carried himself. He played football, basketball, and baseball, and excelled at all three. The newspapers called him “the best all-around athlete” at UT. In 1904, he helped the football team beat Alabama for the first time, which started a rivalry that’s still going strong today. That same year, he made All-Southern as a fullback.

Parker was also the ace pitcher on the baseball team. Pro teams came calling, but he turned them down. He wanted to come home and practice law, to make a difference in his community.

He was twenty-six and just getting started when Judge Fulton killed him.

***

The shooting happened in broad daylight on the depot platform. No hiding, no sneaking around. Fulton just stood there and waited for Parker’s train to arrive, then raised the shotgun and pulled both triggers.

They sent a special train to Somerset to fetch a doctor, but there was no saving him.

Fulton surrendered to the authorities and was taken to Knoxville for a hearing. His defense was temporary insanity brought on by drink and cigarettes. He said he’d snapped. His lawyers brought in doctors who swore his mental state was unsound. Some people said they’d seen him tearing up money on the streets before the shooting, muttering to himself.

The prosecution didn’t buy it. A man named Church Pemberton – a respected citizen – testified that Fulton had waited calmly at the depot for over an hour before Parker’s train arrived. He wasn’t drunk or crazy. He knew exactly what he was doing.

J.C. Parker was devastated that Fulton had turned on his son. Fulton had been a family friend and had even boarded at the Parker home in Helenwood. Judge Parker sent three of his daughters to plead with Fulton’s attorney. The lawyer was so moved by their appeal that he dropped Fulton as a client and refused to represent him anymore.

The first trial ended with a hung jury. The second one stuck. Fulton was sentenced to ten years in prison.

He served ten months.

Governor Malcolm Rice Patterson commuted his sentence. The man who murdered Sam Parker in cold blood walked free.

***

Ten years later, in 1917, Judge James E. Fulton was the city attorney for Oneida.

When the town’s newspaper, the Scott County News, printed an editorial that angered him, he threatened to kill the editor, J.E. Bell. For two weeks, Fulton stalked Bell around town, making his intentions clear.

Finally, they met face to face in Judge W.H. Potter’s office.

This time, Bell was armed.

He pulled a derringer and shot Fulton in the spine. Fulton died in a Knoxville hospital a few days later – almost exactly eleven years after he’d killed Sam Parker.

Bell was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. The governor pardoned him almost immediately.

***

J.C. Parker never recovered from his son’s death.

He was already sick, already grieving the loss of his wife, Mary, and a teenaged son who’d died earlier. Sam’s murder was the final blow. He died three weeks after the shooting, broken-hearted.

Four members of the Parker family – J.C., Mary, Sam, and his nineteen-year-old brother, Burdette – are buried side-by-side at Helenwood Cut Cemetery.

The rest of the family scattered.

John, Sam’s younger brother, died in Kentucky in 1938 of heart disease. Luther went to Chicago and died there in 1936. Ella, one of the three daughters who’d pleaded with Fulton’s attorney, died of Spanish flu in 1918. Ida died in Kentucky in 1924, just before Thanksgiving. Belle made it to Memphis and died in 1954.

The Parker family, once among the most powerful in Scott County, was broken and scattered.

***

More than a century has passed since that July afternoon on the depot platform.

The depot is gone now. Helenwood barely remembers the Parkers or the man who killed their most promising son. But the story’s still there if you know where to look for it – in the cemetery at Helenwood Cut, or in old newspaper clippings.

Sam Parker was twenty-six years old. He’d just finished a baseball game. He stepped off a train and died before he hit the ground.

His killer served ten months and walked free.

That’s all there is to it. That’s the whole story.

Sometimes justice works the way it’s supposed to. Sometimes it doesn’t. In Scott County in 1906, it didn’t. And by the time Judge Fulton got what was coming to him eleven years later, the Parker family was already gone – scattered to Chicago and Kentucky and Memphis, or buried at the Helenwood Cut.

The mountains don’t forget. They never do.

They just keep standing there, watching families rise and fall, watching men kill each other over things that don’t matter, watching the trains come and go from depots that eventually get torn down and replaced with nothing.

That’s the way it seemed to go in these hills as the 1800s rolled into the 1900s. Maybe it always has been.

Editor’s Note: This is the sixth installment of Murders in the Heartland, the IH’s reimagined series covering particularly noteworthy murders that have been committed in Scott County through the years. In many instances, descendants of both the victims and the perpetrators still live in our community. The intent is not to reopen old wounds or to cast judgment, but to document past events that have an indelible impact on our community’s history. At the conclusion of the series, our book by the same name will be republished in a second, revised edition.

Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be The Daybreaker bright and early Monday morning. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!

◼️ About the IH • IH Sports Network • The Encyclopedia of Scott County
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Our Newsletters:
• Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
• Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
• Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
• Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
• Friday: Friday Features (beyond the news)
• Sunday: Varsity (a weekly sports recap)

You’re reading Friday Features, a weekly newsletter containing the Independent Herald’s feature stories — that is, stories that aren’t necessarily straight news but that provide an insightful look at our community and its people. If you’d like to adjust your subscription to include (or exclude) any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so!

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Today’s newsletter is sponsored by First National Bank. Since 1904, First National Bank has been a part of Scott County. First National is local people — just like you. Visit fnboneida.com or call (423) 569-8586.

Murders in the Heartland: The Hanging

Huntsville, Tennessee – May 17, 1895

By noon on execution day, Huntsville looked like a county fair.

Two thousand people packed into the town square. They came in wagons, on horseback, and on foot. Mothers held their children’s hands. Fathers hoisted sons onto their shoulders for a better view. Vendors worked the crowd, hawking peanuts and lemonade, calling out their prices over the noise. The air had that strange festival energy – excited, expectant, and buzzing.

But there were no games, no parade floats, and no ribbon competitions.

The crowd had come to watch a man die.

Mike King stood on the gallows in the center of town, weeping. His wife sat beside him with their infant daughter in her arms. He was twenty-three years old, missing one hand, and condemned to hang for murdering a schoolteacher who’d taught him to write. This would be the first – and only – legal hanging in Scott County’s history.

It started with fifty-four dollars, a borrowed bed, and a friendship that turned to murder.

***

Mike King wasn’t the type you’d expect to kill anyone.

Born in 1872 along the Tennessee-Kentucky line, he’d lived his whole life in the coal camps and mining towns near the border. His family was respectable, and his own name was clean. He had a wife named China Cordell and a baby girl, Essie. A newspaper would later note that he “always bore a fair reputation – until the time of the murder.”

He had only one hand. How he lost the other, nobody remembers anymore. He worked odd jobs when he could find them and relied on people’s kindness when he couldn’t.

That’s probably how he met Aaron Beck.

Beck was forty-six, a writing teacher from Russell County, Kentucky, who’d come down to Scott County to teach in the coal camps around Paint Rock, just east of Oneida. The newspapers said he was gentle and well-liked – a quiet man who helped people when they needed it.

He took an interest in King. Maybe he saw something worth encouraging. There was an age gap between them, but they became friends. Beck taught King to write, and even helped him prepare to teach a class of his own.

Somewhere along the way, though, something changed in King. Admiration twisted into something else. Friendship wasn’t enough anymore.

He wanted Beck’s money.

***

According to King’s confession, he started thinking about killing Aaron Beck in the middle of December 1894.

Beck had money. More than a schoolteacher had any right to, King figured. He saw an opportunity and began to plan.

On December 20, he waited all day at Tunnel Hill – a remote spot along the railroad that ran from Oneida to the Paint Rock mines. He brought a rifle, and planned to ambush Beck when he came back from teaching.

Beck never showed.

Three days later – the day before Christmas Eve – King found Beck in Oneida and convinced him to come back to Winfield for the night. They got to King’s house late and went straight to bed without supper. King’s wife was away, visiting relatives in Lancing.

Around eleven o’clock, King got up. He retrieved a .38-caliber pistol and shot Beck in the head while the schoolteacher slept.

Beck didn’t die right away. He stirred and flailed. King grabbed a hatchet and finished the job.

He found fifty-four dollars in Beck’s pockets – about nineteen hundred in today’s money.

King dragged the body through the woods and dumped it in a shallow pit behind his house where a tree had been uprooted. He burned Beck’s clothes, scrubbed the blood off the floors, and tried to forget what he’d done.

When his wife came home from Morgan County, King told her their house was haunted. They needed to leave immediately, he said. Maybe he was worried about evidence. Or maybe guilt was eating him alive.

Either way, suspicion caught up with him soon enough.

***

Nearly a month passed. Nobody missed Beck at first. People figured he’d gone home to Kentucky for the holidays.

But whispers started spreading about Mike King’s sudden spending. The one-handed man who’d always been poor suddenly had money. Not just enough to get by – enough to show off.

On January 20, 1895, the truth came out.

The family of Hannibal Ross, a local farmer, found Beck’s body. Some versions say that a young boy gathering firewood spotted a hand protruding from the frozen ground. Others say the smell led them there. Either way, Ross found King and held him at gunpoint.

The body was hauled back to King’s house for an inquest. King was made to help carry the man he’d murdered.

Sheriff John Goad was called in. At first, King said another man had shot Beck and he’d only “finished the job.” But after they took him to the jail in Wartburg – far enough away that an angry mob couldn’t get to him – King confessed everything.

He’d lured Beck home. Waited until he fell asleep. Killed him. Took fifty-four dollars.

***

King went on trial in Huntsville on March 20, 1895. Judge Rodgers came up from Loudon to preside. W.H. Potter prosecuted. King didn’t fight the charges, and there would be no appeal.

His execution was set for Friday, May 17. To keep things calm before the hanging, they held King in Chattanooga until the day of the hanging.

***

By sunrise on execution day, people were already flooding into Huntsville. The hanging was treated like entertainment. Vendors sold peanuts, lemonade, and bologna sandwiches. Children climbed on their fathers’ shoulders for a better view. Some men rode horses through the streets, yelling and firing pistols in the air.

“The people made it a gala occasion,” one reporter wrote. “It was a regular picnic.”

For Sheriff John Goad, it was anything but.

Goad wasn’t a hard man. The job of ending another man’s life tormented him. He even thought about resigning rather than go through with it.

King, facing death, told him plainly: “This is your duty. You must perform it.”

Mike King wasn’t defiant. He was broken. His wife, China, sat beside him on the gallows with their baby in her arms. They held each other while Rev. George Cecil preached a funeral sermon to the crowd.

When it was time for the King to speak, he addressed the masses, tears running down his face. He said God had forgiven him and begged the young men listening not to follow his path.

“It was the saddest scene ever witnessed and there was not a dry eye in the jail enclosure,” a reporter wrote. “Many wept copiously at the piteous pleas and cries of the poor woman and the innocent tears of the poor child.”

Sheriff Goad tried to say something, but couldn’t get the words out.

At 12:30 p.m., the trap dropped.

At 12:37 p.m., Mike King was dead.

***

The rope they used had already hanged one man – a convicted killer named Buddy Wooten in Chattanooga four months earlier. Now it had claimed its second.

King’s body was returned to Winfield and buried at Isham Cemetery. Where Aaron Beck was buried, nobody knows.

China King, the young widow who’d clutched her baby through her husband’s final hour, eventually remarried – but not for thirty years. She had several children with a man named John Anderson before they finally wed in 1937. She died in 1941 and was buried beside him at Chitwood Cemetery.

Their daughter Essie – who’d sat silent in her mother’s arms during the execution – grew up, married a preacher, and raised eight children. She died in 1979, buried in Revelo, Kentucky.

As for Sheriff Goad, he finished his term and left law enforcement for good. He became the Scott County Trustee, then the Circuit Court Clerk, and eventually the superintendent of the Oneida Hosiery Mill. But for all his titles and years of service, he carried one distinction above all others.

He was the only sheriff in Scott County’s history to legally hang a man.

And it haunted him until the day he died.

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth installment of Murders in the Heartland, the IH’s reimagined series covering particularly noteworthy murders that have been committed in Scott County through the years. In many instances, descendants of both the victims and the perpetrators still live in our community. The intent is not to reopen old wounds or to cast judgment, but to document past events that have an indelible impact on our community’s history. At the conclusion of the series, our book by the same name will be republished in a second, revised edition.

Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be The Daybreaker bright and early Monday morning. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!

◼️ About the IH • IH Sports Network • The Encyclopedia of Scott County
◼️ Subscribe • Sponsor • Manage Your Account
◼️ Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, YouTube

Our Newsletters:
• Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
• Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
• Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
• Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
• Friday: Friday Features (beyond the news)
• Sunday: Varsity (a weekly sports recap)

Subscribe now

You’re reading Friday Features, a weekly newsletter containing the Independent Herald’s feature stories — that is, stories that aren’t necessarily straight news but that provide an insightful look at our community and its people. If you’d like to adjust your subscription to include (or exclude) any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so!

Subscribe now

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by First National Bank. Since 1904, First National Bank has been a part of Scott County. First National is local people — just like you. Visit fnboneida.com or call (423) 569-8586.

Dead, Dead, Dead

Huntsville, Tennessee — June 12, 1889

The cry split the night like a blade through bone.

“Don’t let ‘em live a minute longer!”

Some sounds, once heard, never fully leave you. They take up residence somewhere behind the sternum, in the dark little room where all the worst things live. The men standing in that jail yard in Huntsville, Tennessee – nearly one hundred of them, broad-shouldered and mountain-hardened, their faces bare and unashamed in the glow of the summer moon – they would carry that sound the rest of their lives. Most of them, you suspect, didn’t mind.

What happened that night was not justice. But it wore justice’s clothes. And in Scott County in the summer of 1889, nobody much felt like checking the fit. What happened was the first documented lynching in this Appalachian community’s history.

***

This is a ghost story, but the ghosts are facts. It begins – as so many of the worst things do – on a moonless night, on a stretch of lonely Cumberland Plateau land near a place called Bull Creek.

Wednesday, June 5, 1889. Just past midnight.

The mountains of the northern plateau had a way of keeping secrets – just as they were harboring the secret of what had happened to the little orphan girl, Angeline Moore, near Chimney Rocks above the Big South Fork River nearly two decades earlier. Hollers swallowed sounds whole. Darkness came down thick as wool off the ridges, the kind of dark that made a man feel unobserved, untethered, free from the usual consequences of being human.

Elias Reynolds knew this dark. He’d lived in it long enough to stop being afraid of it. Maybe that was the problem.

Reynolds was forty-five years old, rawboned and deliberate, the kind of man that local newspapers would later call a well-known hard case – and mean it as a statement of fact, not metaphor. His nephew, Thomas Lloyd – “Jeff” to those who knew him – was only twenty, but he’d already started accumulating the same reputation. Two men made from the same bad clay, you might say.

They had convinced themselves that the Reverend Thomas Harness had money. Perhaps they’d heard something. Perhaps they’d told themselves a story that grew more convincing the more they repeated it. Desperate men are very good at that -- at building elaborate architecture from desire and wishful thinking, at talking themselves into doorways they ought to walk past.

The preacher wasn’t home that Wednesday night. He was away on business, which was the first of the night’s cruel ironies. Because whatever happened next, Harness wouldn’t be there to see it, and wouldn’t stop being haunted by the not-seeing for the rest of his life.

Inside the modest cabin were two people. Talitha Harness was fifty-eight years old, the reverend’s wife, a woman who had spent decades building a life in these hills. And Peter. Eighteen-year-old Peter, the youngest son, who carried his years on his body but not behind his eyes – a boy in a man’s frame, sweet-natured and without guile, with the mind of a child.

Reynolds and Lloyd knocked first.

That detail didn’t escape the press when the details of what happened were written up in smoke-filled newsrooms in cities like Knoxville and Chattanooga. They knocked. There was still, in that moment, some small membrane of civilization between what they were and what they were about to become. Talitha may have stood on the other side of that door wondering who would call at this hour, her hand on the latch, her heart doing that small, instinctive thing that hearts do when something is wrong, when the air itself has changed temperature.

Then they kicked the door in.

They demanded money.

Talitha Harness refused. Maybe she wasn’t about to give in to a pair of ruffians. More likely it was that she just didn’t have any money to give.

One of them – history has never conclusively decided which, and perhaps it doesn’t matter – pulled a pistol and shot her dead.

Peter ran.

He made it out the back door. He ran into that thick mountain darkness, and for a moment you want to believe that he got away, that the story serves into something more heartwarming. But Reynolds and Lloyd gave chase, and the hills have no mercy. They caught him before the dark could swallow him whole.

And they beat him to death with a garden hoe.

They dragged Peter’s body back to the house and dropped it on the floor, as if returning something borrowed. They looted the place, and the newspapers mentioned they found seventy-four dollars. That’s roughly seventeen hundred dollars by today’s reckoning, which was a tidy sum in those parts and in those days. The Reverend Harness had had a little money tucked away, after all. But it was hardly enough for the bloodshed it cost that night.

Then they set it all on fire and walked away into the night as if they’d done no more than blow out a candle.

By the time the sun rose on June 6, the neighbors came and found the ash and the horror. Peter Harness’s legs were still jutting out from the wreckage of the front doorway.

The Knoxville Daily Journal, when it covered the murders, reached for its strongest language and still fell short: the foulest and most unprovoked murder ever perpetrated in Scott County, the newspaper trumpeted.

***

Here is where small-town stories usually end: grief, questions, and a cold case growing colder. It’s how Angeline Moore’s story ended. It’s basically how Dan Pennington’s story ended. Sure, there were suspects named and even an arrest made, but there was never any justice to be had – not the official kind and not the vigilante kind.

But guilt tends to be obvious, and Reynolds and Lloyd, as it turned out, were not particularly good at being invisible.

A telegraph burned up and down the Knoxville & Ohio Railroad. The two men were spotted in a saloon in Jellico – drunk, flush with stolen money, spending it with the unself-conscious recklessness of men who believed themselves to be invisible … or maybe just invincible.

They were neither invisible nor invincible.

Milton Hollingsworth – a former sheriff of Campbell County; a man who had spent years learning to read the particular body language of the guilty – was the one who found them. Young Lloyd reportedly broke down and cried when he was arrested. Maybe he had some understanding, even then, of the machinery he’d set in motion.

The two men were loaded onto a train and sent south to Buckeye – a place now called Pioneer – where Scott County Sheriff Frank Hughett stood waiting with a posse.

Hughett was a practical man. He told his deputies plainly: they would not get the accused killers back to Huntsville alive.

He was only half right.

***

Reynolds and Lloyd made it to the jail and into their cells. Maybe, in those first hours, they breathed something like relief. The bars were between them and an angry public, and the law was between them and the bars. Perhaps that felt like enough distance.

It wasn’t.

On the night of June 12 – exactly one week after the murders – the dark around the old stone jailhouse in Huntsville filled with men.

There were at least a hundred of them. The Daily Journal would describe them as brawny, muscular mountaineers, which was the newspaper’s way of saying that these were not soft men – not men who flinched easily; men built from the same hard mountain stone as the jail itself. They came armed. And they did not bother to cover their faces.

That is, perhaps, even after all the time that has passed, the most chilling detail of all. They didn’t hide. They were not ashamed. A housewife and a mentally handicapped teenager had been brutally murdered and they were going to do something about it. They were, perhaps, proud – certain enough in their cause to stand in the open air and own what they were about to do.

When the jailer refused to hand over the keys, someone produced a sledgehammer.

Six locks stood between the mob and the prisoners.

Six locks.

Six blows from the sledgehammer.

Reynolds and Lloyd were dragged a quarter mile down what is now Baker Highway, the summer night pressing in close around them, the sound of boots on dirt, the breathing of a hundred men who had already made up their minds.

Beneath the limbs of an old oak tree – a tree old enough to have witnessed a great deal of human nature, but if it had formed opinions, it kept them to itself – the two men were made to confess.

Maybe in that moment, the two men felt the same thing Talitha Harness had felt in the split second the gun leveled on her face before one of them pulled the trigger.

They confessed.

And then someone said those words.

“That will do, boys. Don’t let ‘em live a minute longer!”

First one man, then the other, was hoisted up by the neck. They left them there, hanging, for the morning to find. Pinned to the bodies was a note, written in the flat, declarative words of men who had nothing to explain or apologize for:

Any man who sees this and gives it away or meddles in any way shall go the same way or be hanged until he is dead, dead, dead.

***

There was no trial. No testimony. No defense attorney rising to his feet to object to something a prosecutor said, no jury filing in from the side door, no gavel. Elias Reynolds was forty-five years old when he died. Jeff Lloyd was twenty.

The Knoxville newspaper summed up the community’s sentiment with the bluntness of an era that felt no need to soften itself for posterity’s sake: Served them right and relieves the state of a great deal of unnecessary cost.

Talitha and Peter Harness were buried together on a mountain ridge above Bull Creek, looking out over the community they had called home. They lie there still, but the graves are unvisited these days, surrounded by forest that has grown, been cleared by timbermen’s saws, and is growing again. Reverend Harness survived them by four years. The last of the Harness children, Noah, died in Briceville in 1948, carrying the family name to its quiet end.

Reynolds and Lloyd were buried somewhere, but history is not sure exactly where. Lloyd is said to rest somewhere up the river from Huntsville, possibly the old Crowley Cemetery at Winona. If so, no stone marks his grave. The earth there keeps no record and offers no acknowledgement. Just ground, silence, and the long, indifferent years.

***

The oak tree is gone now. The jail still stands, but it no longer holds prisoners. The men of that mob lived out their lives, grew old, were mourned by people who knew them as fathers and neighbors and churchgoers, and they took that midnight summer to the grave with them, tucked behind the sternum in the dark little room.

The lynching of Elias Reynolds and Jeff Lloyd was Scott County’s first. It would not be the last. In all, seven people have met their end this way in these hills – more than any other county in East Tennessee. The machinery, once started, does not easily stop.

What do you do with a story like this? You can’t fix it. You can’t sand the edges off the truth until it’s comfortable to hold. You can only look at it the way you look at a scar – tracing the shape of the old wound, understanding that something happened here, that the skin closed over but the event itself is permanent.

The fire that consumed Talitha and Peter Harness burned out by morning. But the flames of vengeance it ignited smoldered long after – a grim, glowing coal in the history of a place where justice once rode on horseback and arrived wearing a rope.

Somewhere above Bull Creek, on a mountain ridge, two people are buried together.

They had names. They had a home. Someone burned it all to the ground.

The rest is what followed, and the rest is history. Angeline Moore and Dan Pennington had gotten no justice in 1872. But in the summer of 1889, the night had teeth and a score to settle. Everybody knew it, and some of them smiled.

Dead, dead, dead.

Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be The Daybreaker bright and early Monday morning. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!

Subscribe now

◼️ About the IH • IH Sports Network • The Encyclopedia of Scott County
◼️ Subscribe • Sponsor • Manage Your Account
◼️ Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, YouTube

Our Newsletters:
• Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
• Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
• Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
• Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
• Friday: Friday Features (beyond the news)
• Sunday: Varsity (a weekly sports recap)

You’re reading Friday Features, a weekly newsletter containing the Independent Herald’s feature stories — that is, stories that aren’t necessarily straight news but that provide an insightful look at our community and its people. If you’d like to adjust your subscription to include (or exclude) any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so!

Subscribe now

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by First National Bank. Since 1904, First National Bank has been a part of Scott County. First National is local people — just like you. Visit fnboneida.com or call (423) 569-8586.

Murders in the Heartland: The Cecil-West-Smith feud of the 1880s

Christmas Eve, 1881

If you’re spending Christmas Eve in a railroad-town saloon, you probably aren’t there for peace and goodwill. You’re probably there because it’s cold outside and warm inside, because the whiskey is cheap and the company is familiar, and because going home to whatever waits there seems less appealing than one more drink in a room full of men you’ve known your entire life.

The saloon in Helenwood wasn’t much to look at. There was a crooked piano that couldn’t hold a tune. Sawdust on the floor. The kind of place where the walls had soaked up so much tobacco smoke and spilled liquor that they’d turned the color of old leather. On Christmas Eve 1881, John Wesley Cecil sat at a table with his uncle, Robinson Crusoe West. Nobody in the place was thinking about baby Jesus or silent nights.

John was seventeen. Crusoe was twenty-four. One newspaper would later call them “companions in mischief and deviltry,” which is just a fancy way of saying everybody knew not to cross them. The newspaper went so far as to say they were “considered by the community as bad and dangerous men.”

Crusoe had already killed a man and done time for it in the state pen. He was lean and quick, with the kind of reputation that made other men give him space. They called him “Crusoe” after the Daniel Defoe character, but he wasn’t the type to get shipwrecked and wait for rescue. He was the type who’d burn the island down and build a raft from the ashes.

Earlier that day, John and Crusoe had ridden out of town and fired their pistols into the hills. Just fooling around, the way young men with idle time on their hands might do then or now. But there had been drinking, too, and by the time they got back to the saloon, something had changed. Maybe it was the whiskey. Maybe it was just the way these things go sometimes – two young men with guns and too much pride and not enough sense to back down.

Anyway, one thing led to another and Crusoe said: “Let’s shoot it out.”

John didn’t hesitate: “Shoot!”

The guns came up and the shooting started. Crusoe took a bullet in the cheek that lodged against his ear. John caught one in the chest but stayed on his feet. Then the whole room went to hell.

Other men jumped in – Jerry West, Charles West, William West, and George Thompson were names that appeared in the newspapers as being involved. Tables went over. Fists and knives and more gunfire. Nobody could say later exactly who did what or why. But when it was over, John Wesley Cecil was on the floor, bleeding out.

By nine o’clock the next morning, he was dead. Christmas had dawned with tragedy in the Cecil household.

They buried John on the family land at Cherry Fork. He was the first grave in the new family cemetery. He would not be the last. And you can’t help but imagine that his father, William Riley Cecil, stood there and watched them put his boy in the ground, making himself a promise to avenge his son’s death.

***

Crusoe West didn’t run. He probably should have, but he was too shot up to run. He made it home and crawled into bed, and that’s where the Cecils found him.

William Sr. and his sons rode in with a warrant they had sworn out. It was legal and proper. But when old man Cecil told Crusoe that he was under arrest, Crusoe just shook his head.

“I’ll go with the sheriff,” he said, “but I’ll never go with a Cecil.”

Somebody made a move. Somebody raised a gun. Who? Who knows. But the shooting started again.

When it was over, Crusoe West had more than a dozen bullet holes in him. Three of those came after he was already dead, the newspapers said.

But the Cecils paid for it, too. Reason Burl Cecil – John’s older brother – took a knife in the fight. He held on for a while, but died on January 10, 1882.

Huntsville attorney Don Stansberry provides a paper that was given to him by John Toomey Baker years ago, though he said he has no way of knowing whether any of the details in it are true. On the paper, there’s a notation that it was originally provided by James E. Phillips in the 1950s. It is a list of men killed in or near Helenwood through the years, and it provides details that didn’t appear in the newspapers.

Specifically, it states that when the Cecils went to Crusoe’s home, the gravely wounded West told his wife to let the men in and leave the room. Telling Burl Cecil to bend over because he wanted to tell him something before dying, Crusoe stuck a knife in his back, and then was killed by the rest of the men.

While there’s no way to vouch for the accuracy of the paper, it explains why a mortally wounded West would have been able to knife another one of the Cecils from his bed.

Now there were two Cecils dead, along with one West. And still the killing wasn’t finished.

***

May 27, 1883. A Sunday evening in Helenwood.

William “Riley” Cecil Jr. was twenty-seven. He had a wife named Lucinda and three boys. He’d been trying to build a normal life after helping bury two brothers. Trying to keep his head down and his nose clean, you might say.

But old grudges don’t care about someone else’s good intentions.

That evening, Riley and his father ran into the Smith boys – John, Jerry, and Gilbert, if news reports are accurate. They were kin through the Wests. Cousins. And the guns fired one more time.

Nobody agrees on how it started. Some said the Smiths wanted payback for their father – that’s what the Knoxville newspapers reported, though if the Cecils actually killed him it’s impossible to prove by the historical record. The newspapers made up half a dozen different versions, each more dramatic than the last.

What actually happened was simpler … and, at the same time, maybe worse: guns came out, shots were fired, and Riley Cecil dropped with a bullet in his head before he even got his weapon up. His father fired ten times before he went down, wounded but alive.

The press went crazy. Newspapers throughout the South wrote about the big feud up in Helenwood. The Chattanooga Times said both Riley and his father were dead. The Knoxville Tribune claimed five people died. Names got jumbled. Some papers said one of the Smiths got hunted down and killed by a posse afterward.

None of it, apparently, was true, except that Riley Cecil – a third brother – was dead.

The Plateau Gazette, down in Morgan County, got it mostly right: four men dead in total. John Wesley Cecil, Reason Burl Cecil, Crusoe West, and Riley Cecil. The Smiths – Gilbert, John, and Jerry – turned themselves in. Nobody else died.

Riley, meanwhile, joined his brothers in the cemetery at Cherry Fork. Now three sons buried in less than two years, and the grief felt by William R. Cecil Sr. and his wife, Nancy, must have been overwhelming.

***

Feuds make good gossip but bad history. The truth gets all tangled up in that gossip and newspaper headlines and what people think they remember. And by the time it’s all sorted out, nobody knows for sure who started what or why.

By late June 1883, the newspapers that had gotten all the details of the last gun battle so mixed up had more or less sorted out. They stopped reporting Riley’s father as “John” and reported it as “William,” and stopped reporting that he’d been killed and reported he’d been wounded instead. What appears to be most likely is that the original newspaper reports confused the Christmas Eve 1881 bar shooting with the events that followed.

The Smith boys had surrendered by law enforcement by that time, though the pursuit of justice was apparently not a story worth following and the newspapers lost interest.

Beyond that, here’s what we do know:

The Smith boys weren’t strangers to the Cecils. Their mother, Sarah Elizabeth West, was a sister to both Crusoe West and Nancy West Cecil, mother of the Cecil boys. They were all cousins. Family killing family over something that started with a drunken dare on Christmas Eve.

The Smiths went by different names in different records: Smith, then Sexton. Gilbert Sexton ended up fighting in the Spanish-American War, came home, and served three terms as sheriff of Scott County.

John Smith moved to Anderson County and worked in the coal mines until he died of cancer in 1929.

Jerry Smith settled down in Helenwood with his wife, Martha, and lived out his days.

The women did what women always do – they survived. Lucinda remarried and had more children. Crusoe’s widow, Arlena, lived another fifty years but never married again. Their daughter, Sylvania, lived quietly and was buried in Duncan Cemetery.

And the Cecils carried on. George Washington Cecil – a brother to the three dead boys – became a Baptist preacher. His grandson pastored Helenwood Baptist Church for thirty-seven years. His great-grandson pastored it for another thirty-three.

The family that lost three sons to gun violence ended up producing generations of preachers. Beaty Cecil – one of Riley’s sons, who was just a boy when his father was gunned down – later served as Sunday school superintendent for many years at the old Cherry Fork Baptist Church.

***

Helenwood is quiet now. The saloons are long gone, and the town’s 1880s reputation as a rough and rowdy whistle stop on the Southern Railroad has long since disappeared. The feud that killed four men and split a family right down the middle has faded into something that has mostly been forgotten.

Time did what bullets couldn’t. It ended the war.

At Cherry Fork, the headstones at Cecil Cemetery stand testament to three brothers whose lives were snuffed out too soon. John Wesley, seventeen when he took that dare in the saloon. Reason Burl, stabbed going after his brother’s killer. Riley, shot down on a Sunday evening when he maybe thought the worst was behind him.

The piano has been silent for over a century. The guns are rusted. The people who descended from those families carry their names without the weight of what happened in 1881 and 1882.

Peace came late, but it came.

The mountains don’t forget. They never do. They just keep standing there, patient and old, watching families tear themselves apart and then, eventually, put themselves back together.

It’s been that way since men first settled these hills.

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment in the revised “Murders in the Heartland” series, and was not included in the original series that published three years ago. It should be noted that there are multiple people in this story who have identical names to others from Scott County through the years. Robinson Crusoe West had a distant relative also named Crusoe West who was famous for living in a cave in the Pine Hill community, a story later related by the FNB Chronicle. Beaty Cecil, son of Riley Cecil, is not the same Beaty Cecil who served as Scott County Sheriff in the 1880s and was father of the “Fighting Cecils” of New River. That was a different branch of the Cecil family.

Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be The Daybreaker bright and early Monday morning. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!

◼️ Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
◼️ Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
◼️ Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
◼️ Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
◼️ Friday: Friday Features (beyond the news)
◼️ Sunday: Varsity (a weekly sports recap)

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You’re reading Friday Features, a weekly newsletter containing the Independent Herald’s feature stories — that is, stories that aren’t necessarily straight news but that provide an insightful look at our community and its people. If you’d like to adjust your subscription to include (or exclude) any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so!

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Today’s newsletter is sponsored by First National Bank. Since 1904, First National Bank has been a part of Scott County. First National is local people — just like you. Visit fnboneida.com or call (423) 569-8586.

A family feud

Two bodies in the ground at Chimney Rocks, both murdered. One an orphan girl nobody wanted. The other a young father shot in the back on his birthday.

Between them: six months, a wedding, and yet another tragedy in the Station Camp community along the Big South Fork River.

Dan Pennington turned twenty-nine on July 9, 1872. By the next day, he was dead – three bullets in his back, alone in the woods above Station Camp.

The killing had been building for months, maybe from the moment he married Susan Slaven. She was frontier royalty: granddaughter of the first white settler in the Big South Fork, daughter of Absalom and Betty Wood Slaven. Dan was a widower with two small children, his first wife Peggy dead less than a year.

The match might have seemed practical, but it wasn’t.

Susan’s brothers despised him.

The eruption came on Dan’s birthday. Elias Meshack “Shack” Slaven – one of those protective brothers – showed up at Dan’s house with a rifle. The Nashville papers called it a “personal difficulty,” which was one way to describe resting a gun on a fence and taking aim at your brother-in-law. Shack fired and missed. Dan shot back with a pistol, hitting Shack in the shoulder. Shack ran.

Dan ran too. He knew what was coming.

He went into the forest. Someone followed him there. Someone came up behind him and fired twice, maybe three times. Dan collapsed. He died the next day, July 10, remaining conscious long enough to name his killer.

They buried him at Chimney Rocks, the same lonely spot where they’d put Angeline Moore six months earlier – a mutilated orphan girl found on Huckleberry Ridge like discarded refuse.

Two murder victims. Two graves. No justice for either.

***

Dan told his wife – pregnant with their first child together – that one of her brothers had killed him. Not Shack, the one he’d shot. Another one. Stuard. Dan said he saw Stuard running from the trees after the gunshots. Years later, the Scott County Call reported that Stuard had confessed to acquaintances before disappearing: “Don’t blame Shack. I killed him.”

A grand jury indicted Stuard Slaven for murder.

Then authorities arrested Anderson Lewallen instead.

The Lewallen arrest makes no sense on paper. Anderson was the son of John Lewallen, Scott County’s first sheriff. He was respected, and had served as a justice of the peace in the 1860s. In fact, he’d officiated Shack Slaven’s wedding back in 1866. He was in Scott County when Dan was killed, stayed a full year after. Then he went to Texas to join his father, the ex-sheriff who had left Tennessee after marrying his second wife.

In 1873, Anderson came back to Scott County for a visit with his brother-in-law, Elihu McDonald. They arrested him for helping murder Dan Pennington. Despite Stuard Slaven already being under indictment. Despite Dan’s deathbed accusation. Despite everything.

Was it politics? Some old grudge? Wrong place, wrong time? Wrong last name?

At trial, the defense put Susan Slaven Pennington on the stand. The widow repeated what her dying husband had told her: Stuard had pulled the trigger. The jury deliberated and acquitted. The Scott County Call later wrote: “The prosecution must be satisfied, after hearing the evidence, that Lewallen was wrongfully accused.”

Anderson went back to Texas and never returned.

***

Stuard Slaven never stood trial. He fled west, died in Fresno in 1911. Shack vanished to Arkansas with his wife Celia and died there in 1922. Neither brother ever came back to Scott County.

Susan stayed. She remarried to William Owens, who ran a grist mill on Station Camp Creek and owned one of the biggest farms in the valley. They had many children together.

Then smallpox came.

Samantha died at 13 in 1888. Lawrence died at 10 in 1892. Sarah died as a toddler. James died before his first birthday. Electa died in 1896. George died in 1900.

William himself died in 1903, and was buried in a row with his children on a hill overlooking the farm – graves now swallowed by forest in the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area, a horse trail wandering by them but most riders unaware they’re tucked away just out of sight.

Susan left Station Camp after William died. She moved to Mt. Pisgah, Kentucky, just across the state line from Pickett State Forest, where she lived until 1935, when she died at 82. She was a woman who buried two husbands, nearly every one of her children, and two brothers’ reputations.

The hills don’t tend to forget. And at Chimney Rocks, two graves kept their silence.

(Footnote: Dan Pennington’s children were William, who moved to California, and Almeda Pennington West, who remained in Scott County. Susan Pennington Owens had two surviving children, Cordelia Owens Paul and Baily Owens, who were later buried at O’Possum Rock Cemetery in the Black Oak community when they died in 1970 and 1975, respectively. No one was ever convicted of Dan Pennington’s murder.)

Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be The Daybreaker bright and early Monday morning. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!

◼️ Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
◼️ Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
◼️ Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
◼️ Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
◼️ Friday: Friday Features (beyond the news)
◼️ Sunday: Varsity (a weekly sports recap)

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Today’s newsletter is sponsored by First National Bank. Since 1904, First National Bank has been a part of Scott County. First National is local people — just like you. Visit fnboneida.com or call (423) 569-8586.

Sacred Ground: Terry Cemetery

The Terry Cemetery at Robbins is a small, family burial ground atop Grassy Knob, the long, narrow ridge that separates New River from Clear Fork.

The cemetery dates all the way back to 1918, when three-year-old Milo Terry died amid the Spanish flu pandemic. And while there have only been a handful of burials there through the years, the cemetery has never gone inactive.

The Terry family

Milo Terry died on Dec. 7, 1918 of bronchial pneumonia as a complication of the flu. He was one of many Scott Countians who died amid the Spanish flu pandemic.

Milo was the son of Maynard Terry (1879-1937) and Ollie Shoemaker (1889-1967).

Maynard Terry was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, the son of Jasper Terry (1850-1914) and Mary Jane Ellis (1858-1928). Jasper Terry, who settled in the Black Creek area, was the grandson of Josiah Terry, who was the first white settler of Oneida. Therefore, the Terry family of Black Creek and Grassy Knob is tied into the rest of the Terrys in Scott County. Jasper’s father was Martin Terry (1823-1890).

The Ellis family was a prominent family in the Black Creek-Crossroads area for many years. Jasper’s wife, Mary Jane, was the daughter of William Ellis (1825-1912).

Maynard married into another prominent Robbins family when he married Ollie Shoemaker in 1907. She was the daughter of Bailey Columbus Shoemaker (1860-1908) and Lavada Slagle (1864-1939).

Maynard and Ollie had five children besides young Miles. Avery Terry, the first born, died in infancy in 1908 and was buried at Black Creek Crossroads Cemetery. Surviving children included Doris (1910-2004), Lorin (1912-1975), Clyde (1921-2001) and Connie (1926-2021).

Doris married Ralph Gordon Vanderpool, who also grew up on Grassy Knob, and they left Scott County for Roane County. Lorin married Nora Lee Jones, and they moved to Michigan. Connie married Virgle Leo Garrett from Honey Creek and also moved to Michigan.

Clyde was the only of the Terry children who lived in Scott County later in life. He married Flora Wright in 1946. She was the daughter of Hobert Wright and Rosa Branim of Grassy Knob, and they lived their latter years in the Mountain View community nearby, after spending much of their adult life in the Chattanooga area. Their children included Brenda Dunn, Milford Terry, Sandra Skelton, and Linda Schreeder.

Following Milo’s death in 1918, there were no more burials at the family cemetery until Maynard’s death in 1937. Ollie was later buried at the cemetery in 1967. Clyde was buried there in 2001, and Flora was buried there in 2010.

The DeBord family

Susan Ery DeBord was buried at Terry Cemetery in 1993, when she died at age 40. She was originally from Michigan, but married into the DeBord family of Grassy Knob. Her mother-in-law, Hazel Wright DeBord, was a sister to Flora Wright, who married Clyde Terry. Hazel married Bob DeBord, the son of Abigia DeBord (1905-1979) and Georgia Ann Shannon (1907-1996).

One of Bob and Hazel’s children was Richard “Dick” DeBord, who married Susan Ery. They lived in Robbins for several years, and had two daughters, Deana and Kristina. They divorced and Dick remarried.

In October 2025, Dick DeBord died at the age of 74 and was the last person, as of this writing, to be buried at the cemetery – the eighth burial there overall.

The other person buried at Terry Cemetery was Regan Warmanen, who died in 2004 at age 33.

Dick DeBord, 1951-2025
Susan Ery DeBord, 1952-1993
Clyde Terry, 1921-2001
Flora Wright Terry, 1928-2010
Maynard Terry, 1879-1937
Milo Terry, 1915-1918
Ollie Shoemaker Terry, 1889-1967
Regan W. Warmanen, 1970-2004

Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be The Daybreaker bright and early Monday morning. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!

◼️ Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
◼️ Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
◼️ Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
◼️ Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
◼️ Friday: Friday Features (beyond the news)
◼️ Sunday: Varsity (a weekly sports recap)

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ONEIDA | Students in the Diesel-Powered Equipment Technology program at TCAT Oneida/Huntsville recently completed a ground-up restoration of a 1967 John Deere 3020 farm tractor.

All of the work — including an engine rebuild, hydraulic system rebuild, and new paint job — was done in the diesel shop on the Oneida campus, where students combined to put in more than 1,000 manhours of work in making the machine look like new.

The tractor is owned by Lee and Karen Little of Clarkrange. The Littles are an important part of the TCAT team in Fentress County. Karen is the CTE director at Clarkrange High School, and Lee is a welding instructor.

The JD 3020 is a legendary part of John Deere’s lineup, built between 1964 and 1972 as part of the company’s New Generation series. But this particular Deere had seen better days by the time Lee and Karen Little purchased it at auction as part of an estate sale. Lee employed it on his Clarkrange cattle farm for several years but it eventually became unusable, its engine locked up. It had been sitting for three years by the time it made its way to the diesel shop at TCAT’s Oneida campus.

“There was very little green paint on it, there was moss growing on the exhaust pipe,” instructor Gabe Kennedy recalled. “We did a complete engine overhaul with a new head, new pistons, all of that. We rebuilt the hydraulic system. We sanded it down and repainted it. We put a new cam in it. It’s safe to say that we have more than 1,000 hours of work in it.”

The Diesel-Powered Equipment Technology program is one of the fastest-growing programs at TCAT Oneida/Huntsville under Kennedy’s leadership. Students learn all aspects of diagnosing and repairing diesel-powered equipment, from engines to fuel systems, and from clutches and transmissions to hydraulics.

Originally, students were tasked with only rebuilding the tractor’s engine. But once they met the Littles, they decided they wanted to take it a step further by restoring the tractor to showroom condition.

“The students met Lee and they were just crazy about him,” Kennedy said. “Everyone loves Lee. He’s spent 40-something years in the school system, and he and Karen have dedicated their lives to improving people through education. He has literally bought clothes for students out of his own pocket, and goes with students to job interviews if they need a way to get there. So this was kind of these boys’ tribute to Lee and Karen Little.”

The finished product looks so good that Karen Little told her husband it might be time to look into a new tractor for the farm, reserving the 3020 for parades and showing off. Kennedy debuted the restored tractor in the Scott County Chamber of Commerce Christmas parade on Saturday, where it was met by many positive comments and questions as it rolled through the streets of Oneida.

“The more I look at it, the more I can’t believe we did that,” he said. “I have some awesome students.”

For more information about Diesel-Powered Equipment Technology or any of the other 22 programs of study offered at TCAT Oneida/Huntsville, call (423) 663-4900 or visit tcatoneida.edu.

You’re reading Friday Features, a weekly newsletter containing the Independent Herald’s feature stories — that is, stories that aren’t necessarily straight news but that provide an insightful look at our community and its people. If you’d like to adjust your subscription to include (or exclude) any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so!

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Today’s newsletter is sponsored by First National Bank. Since 1904, First National Bank has been a part of Scott County. First National is local people — just like you. Visit fnboneida.com or call (423) 569-8586.

Shoopman Cemetery is located just off S.R. 63 in Huntsville

On a small knoll just north of S.R. 63 in Huntsville, less than a quarter of a mile from its terminus at U.S. Highway 27, is the Shoopman Cemetery.

Dating back to the 1890s, this cemetery is actually located on Old Monticello Pike, which was the main road from Huntsville to Helenwood at that time, before S.R. 63 was built. Shoopman, which also factors prominently at the Riverview Cemetery at Smokey Junction, is not an especially common surname in Scott County today, but it is belongs to one of the county’s earliest families, dating back to when John Shoopman moved from Virginia to Smokey Creek in the early 19^th century.

The Shoopman family

John Shoopman, the family patriarch who moved from Virginia to Smokey Creek in the early 1800s, died in 1842. He and his wife, Sarah Smith (who died in 1850), had several children — one of them being John Shoopman Jr.

John Shoopman Jr., born in 1803, married Elizabeth Low. She was the daughter of Mikel Low, believed to be the first permanent settler in present-day Scott County. John and Elizabeth, who are believed to be buried in the Lowe Cemetery at Smokey Creek in unmarked graves, raised seven children: Sarah Massengale, Joseph, Jacob, Emaline Hembree, Louisa Massengale, Milton, and Martha.

Joseph Shoopman, born in 1830, married Lousia “Caroline” Rich (1838-1926) and moved to what would eventually be known as Helenwood, and today is part of Huntsville. He was one of the few people from Scott County who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. He was a private in the 2^nd Tennessee Infantry Regiment. Caroline was the daughter of William and Lucinda Rich of Scott County.

The first person buried at the family cemetery along the old Monticello Pike was Almira Shoopman, who died on Christmas Day in 1895 at age 24. It’s not exactly clear what her relationship was to Joseph and Caroline Shoopman.

Complicating the search for Almira’s ancestry is that she, Joseph and Caroline did not appear in census records in 1880. Nor did Joseph and Caroline appear in census records in 1870.

When the 1860 census was taken, 26-year-old Joseph and 19-year-old Caroline were listed in a Huntsville household with 7-year-old William, 5-year-old Jacob, 4-year-old Mary and 2-year-old Sarah.

It isn’t clear why Joseph and his family didn’t appear in the 1870 or 1880 census records. When the 1900 census was taken, Caroline was listed as widowed (Joseph died on Feb. 13, 1900, three days before his 70^th birthday, and was buried next to Almira in the Shoopman Cemetery). Also living in the home were two of Caroline’s grandchildren, 21-year-old Stokley Shoopman and 11-year-old Iva Shoopman. That same census recorded that Caroline had seven children, four of whom were still alive.

Stokley was buried at the Shoopman Cemetery in 1953. He does not have a headstone; a funeral home marker denotes his grave. According to his death certificate, he was the son of William Shoopman and Susie Wilder. His wife was Anna Ramsey, who is also buried at the cemetery with a funeral home marker.

What happened to Iva Shoopman? She was boarding with a Blankenship family in Middlesboro, Ky. when the 1910 census was taken, and isn’t found after that.

It isn’t clear why Stokley and Iva were living with their grandmother in 1900, but William Shoopman was still alive and well at the time. He died in 1936 and is buried at the family cemetery. In 1900, he was living in Scott County with his wife, Sarah, and four children ranging in ages from 21 to five.

Caroline was living with daughter Mary and her family when the 1910 census was taken, and with William and his family when the 1920 census was taken.

The most obvious assumption would be that Almira Shoopman, the first person buried at Shoopman Cemetery in 1895, was a daughter of Joseph and Caroline Shoopman. But that is only an assumption.

The Wilder tragedies

Following Joseph’s death in 1900, the third person buried at the cemetery was Marshall C. Wilder in 1906. The 23-year-old was shot and killed by Mack Woods in a fight that occurred at Somerset, Ky. According to a newspaper article, Wilder shot Woods twice in the abdomen, after which Woods was able to wrestle the gun away and shoot Wilder. Both men died.

Marshall Wilder was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, and worked as a brakeman on the Southern Railroad.

In 1910, Marshall’s 24-year-old brother, Waller “Press” (Preston) Wilder was buried at the cemetery. Press was implicated in the shooting death of constable Fowler Keeton in 1908, along with Kaywood Reed “and a boy named Clark,” according to the Knoxville Sentinel. When he died, Press was incarcerated in the state prison in Nashville.

Marshall and Press were the sons of Lee and Mary Shoopman Wilder — grandsons of Joseph and Caroline Shoopman. It’s not clear that Susie Wilder, who was Stokley Shoopman’s mother, was part of the same Wilder family, though it would obviously stand to reckon that she might have been connected in some way.

Lee was the son of Wilson C. Wilder and Susan Wilder of Lexington, Ky.

Lee and Mary were later buried at the cemetery, Mary in 1927 and Lee in 1938. They had two other children, Bettie Reed (1889-1968) and Lula S. Newman (1894-1975). Bettie and her husband, Manus Reed (1886-1959), were later buried at the cemetery, as well.

The Miller family

Among the many mysteries at Shoopman Cemetery is that of the Miller family. When Robert Bailey transcribed the cemetery for his 1994 Cemeteries of Scott County, Tennessee book that is available for purchase from the Scott County Historical Society, he listed a couple of Millers who had funeral home markers rather than headstones. However, those markers have since disappeared.

One of those was six-year-old Haywood Miller, who died in 1907. The other was infant Violet Miller, who died in 1908. They were the fourth and fifth persons buried at the cemetery.

There are other Millers at the cemetery with funeral home markers, including Caywood Miller, who died in 1913 at the age of about 20; Emma Miller, who died in 1925 at the age of about 58; and Olver Miller, who died in 1946 at the age of about 77.

Olver was Oliver Miller (1869-1946), and Emma would have been his wife, Emily Pemberton (1867-1925). She was from the prominent Glenmary family of Pembertons that included Churchwell Pemberton and Gatewood Pemberton.

It appears that Haywood, Caywood and Violet were all children of Oliver and Emma. Surviving children included Martha Lawson, Ella Jane Lewallen, Rosalie Miller, and Naomi Shoopman.

Naomi, the next-to-youngest, married Bryce Jacob Shoopman (1902-1969) in 1928. He was the son of Jacob William Shoopman (1878-1942) and Lottie Elizabeth Shelton (1883-1951). Jacob William was the son of Jacob “Jake” Shoopman (1855-1877) and Sarah Catherine Shumate (1855-1921). Jake was the son of Joseph Shoopman and Caroline Rich — making Bryce Shoopman their great-grandson.

The cemetery grows

By the time Caywood Miller died at the age of about 20 in 1913, there had been seven people buried at Shoopman Cemetery: Joseph and Almira Shoopman, along with the Miller children and the Wilder brothers.

In 1918, six-year-old Alba Shoopman is believed to have been buried at the cemetery, although she does not have an identifiable grave. She was the daughter of Stokley Shoopman and his wife, Anna Ramsey. Her death certificate notes that she was buried at Robbins.

Other children of Stokley Shoopman included Birtha Lee Dishman, Lawrence Cambon Shoopman, Walter R. Shoopman, Ruby Jackson, and Ralph K. Shoopman. Ruby was buried at the cemetery in 1947 when she died of cervical cancer at age 37.

Dempsey Younger Massengale was buried at the cemetery in 1920. He was the husband of Lecta Gentry. They lived nearby on Monticello Pike.

Sarah Catherine Shumate Shoopman was buried at the cemetery in 1921. Following the death of her first husband, Jake Shoopman, she remarried to William Shoopman, his brother. Jake Shoopman was murdered in 1877 at the age of 22 during a Christmas Day robbery of a family-owned grocery store in Kentucky.

William was also buried at Shoopman Cemetery in 1936, and shares a stone with Sarah.

Just two months after Sarah’s death in 1921, 19-year-old Clarence Shoopman died and was buried at the family cemetery. He died of tuberculosis. He was another of the children of Stokley Shoopman and Anna Ramsey.

James Edwardd Stewart, an infant, was buried at the cemetery in January 1922. He was the son of Robert Lee Stewart (1885-1954) and Ethel Lilly Williams (1887-1971).

Caroline Rich Shoopman was next to be buried at the cemetery, in 1926, followed by Ella Shoopman in 1934. She was 51 at the time of her death, and was the wife of Joseph Russell Shoopman — son of William Shoopman, and grandson of Joseph and Caroline Rich Shoopman, who would later be buried at the cemetery in 1965.

The Reed family

In November 1936, 14-year-old Elmer Ashbury Reed was buried at the cemetery. He was the son of Manus Reed and Bettie Wilder. Manus was from the Reed family at Mountain View, the son of Wiley Reed and Sophie Ellis.

In 1940, infant Bobbie Rene Reed was buried at the cemetery. It isn’t clear what the connection was, though this may have been a sibling to Elmer Reed.

Manus was buried at the cemetery in 1959, and Bettie in 1968. Later, their son Robert Eugene Reed — a World War II veteran — was buried at the cemetery in 1987, and another son, Walter Wayne Reed, was buried there in 2000.

The cemetery today

Burials occur infrequently at Shoopman Cemetery today, though the cemetery remains well-maintained and taken care of.

The last person buried there was Paul Shoopman in 2007. His mother, Assie Shoopman, was buried at the cemetery in 1997. She was the daughter of Frank Shoopman and Liza Mason. Her father was buried at the cemetery in 1929, and was a nephew to Joseph Shoopman and Caroline Rich.

Only three burials — Robert Reed, Walter Reed and Paul Shoopman — have occurred at the cemetery since 1970.

Ruby Shoopman Jackson, 1910-1947
Dempsey Y. Massengale, 1856-1920
Caywood Miller, 1893-1913
Emily Pemberton Miller, 1867-1925
Haywood Miller, 1901-1907
Oliver Miller, 1869-1946
Violet Miller, 1908-1908
Florence Morgan Mote, 1904-1955
Hannah Potter Owens, N/A-N/A
Howard C. Pendergraph, 1894-1945
Nannie M. Pendergraph, 1894-N/A
Bettie Wilder Reed, 1889-1968
Bobbie R. Reed, 1940-1940
Elmer A. Reed, 1922-1936
Manus Reed, 1886-1959
Robert E. Reed, 1915-1987
Walter W. Reed, 1929-2000
Marley D. Sexton, 1888-1953
Alba Shoopman, 1912-1918
Almira Shoopman, 1871-1895
Anna Ramsey Shoopman, 1877-1948
Clarence R. Shoopman, 1902-1921
Ella Shoopman, 1883-1934
J. Stokley Shoopman, 1877-1953
John R. Shoopman, 1876-1965
Joseph Shoopman Sr., 1830-1900
Joseph R. Shoopman, 1876-1965
Caroline Rich Shoopman, 1838-1926
Paul Shoopman, 1940-2007
Ruby Shoopman, 1910-1947
Sarah Shumate Shoopman, 1855-1921
William Shoopman, 1852-1936
James E. Stewart, 1922-1922
Cora S. Taylor, 1874-1940
William B. Taylor, 1872-1937
Lee Wilder, 1853-1938
Marshall C. Wilder, 1883-1906
Mary Shoopman Wilder, 1856-1927
W. Press Wilder, 1886-1910
Louise Zachary, 1922-1970

A pre-Christmas hike in the Big South Fork

The days before Christmas have a rhythm all their own in the Big South Fork. The crowds of summer are long gone, the leaf-peepers of October only a memory. What remains is a quiet, hushed landscape—one that feels like it’s holding its breath, waiting for winter to fully arrive. A pre-Christmas hike here isn’t just an outdoor outing; it’s a small pilgrimage into the stillness of the season.

The trailhead greets you with the sharp scent of cold air and leaf mold, a smell that only the Cumberland Plateau can make so familiar. Frost clings to the rhododendron leaves like powdered sugar, and the sandstone bluffs glow faintly under the pale winter sun. With every step, bootprints crunch into the frozen duff, echoing softly through the empty hardwoods.

Even the river seems quieter this time of year. Down along the banks of the Big South Fork, the water slides past with a slow, wintry confidence, black-green and glassy except where it buckles over submerged rock. A kingfisher rattles from a low branch, and somewhere deeper in the gorge a raven calls—one of the few voices that breaks the silence.

The beauty of a pre-Christmas hike isn’t found in bold colors or loud scenery. It’s in the subtleties: the way the laurel thickets stay defiantly green when everything else sleeps, the delicate lacework of ice along a seep on the rocks, the faint chiming of icicles breaking loose in the warming sun. It’s in the breath you can see and the peace you can feel.

There’s also a certain gratitude that settles in on a hike like this. Maybe it’s the season, or maybe it’s the land itself, but as you climb toward an overlook — Angel Falls, East Rim, or any of the bluffline vistas that watch over the gorge — you can’t help but pause. Below lies a rugged, ancient canyon, wrapped in the muted colors of December, a natural cathedral preparing for the quietest holiday of the year.

By the time you return to the trailhead, the shadows have lengthened and the air has cooled again. Christmas lights will be waiting back home, along with family, warmth, and celebration. But for a short time, you’ve walked through a wilder kind of Advent — one marked not by carols, but by wind through bare branches; not by candles, but by the soft winter glow on stone and river.

In the Big South Fork, even the days before Christmas feel like a gift.

Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be The Daybreaker bright and early Monday morning. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!

◼️ Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
◼️ Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
◼️ Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
◼️ Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
◼️ Friday: Friday Features (beyond the news)
◼️ Sunday: Varsity (a weekly sports recap)

Subscribe now

You’re reading Friday Features, a weekly newsletter containing the Independent Herald’s feature stories — that is, stories that aren’t necessarily straight news but that provide an insightful look at our community and its people. If you’d like to adjust your subscription to include (or exclude) any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so!

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by First National Bank. Since 1904, First National Bank has been a part of Scott County. First National is local people — just like you. Visit fnboneida.com or call (423) 569-8586.

Pike Cemetery dates back to Great Depression era

Through previous installments in the Sacred Ground series, a lot has been said about two of the earliest families of the Tunnel Hill community east of Oneida — the Carsons and the Keetons. But two other families prominent here have not yet been mentioned in this series: the Pikes and the Butlers.

This week, we visit the Pike Cemetery on Butler Lane, across the old Tennessee Railroad from Tunnel Hill Road. It is a cemetery that dates back to 1920 or 1930, and a family that ties into the Keetons who — by marrying into the Carsons — originally settled this railroad community along the headwaters of Paint Rock Creek.

The cemetery begins

It isn’t clear whether the Pike Cemetery began in 1920 or 1930. Some say that 17-year-old Sarah Pike, who died in 1920, was the first person buried here. But there’s no identifiable headstone to mark her grave; that wouldn’t be unusual, since there are some unidentifiable fieldstones in the cemetery. But her death certificate, which was signed by Dr. M.E. Thompson, states that she was buried at the Keeton Grave Yard — a probable reference to the Keeton Cemetery that is located just a few hundred yards away, as the crow flies.

There are also unidentifiable headstones at the Keeton Cemetery. And Sarah’s 18-year-old sister, Monnie, who died exactly three weeks later, on Nov. 28, 1920, was buried at the Keeton Cemetery, making it seem probable that Sarah was actually buried at the Keeton Cemetery, not the Pike Cemetery.

It is very unusual for teenaged sisters to die so close together. Sarah’s death was caused by a form of chronic kidney disease.

Ten years later, Sarah and Monnie’s 21-year-old brother, Bailey Pike, was likely the first person buried at Pike Cemetery when he was shot and killed by Luther Keeton.

The Pike family

As mentioned in the opening, the Pike and Keeton families were connected. Sarah, Monnie and Bailey were the daughters and son of John Clarville Pike (1860-1938) and Mary Ann Keeton (1869-1944).

John Pike was the son of Eli and Betsy Jane Pike. Mary Ann was the daughter of Baty Keeton and Emily Jane Carson. The Carson family was the first to settle Tunnel Hill, and the Carson Cemetery is nearby. It is there that John Linn Carson, the first of the Carson family to settle here, was buried. One of their daughters was Emily Jane, who married Baty Keeton, the son of Harrison Keeton and Elizabeth J. Reed of Helenwood, and that’s how the Keeton family came to Tunnel Hill. Just a few hundred feet from Carson Cemetery is the Keeton Cemetery. Luther Keeton, who shot and killed Bailey Pike, was Mary Ann’s nephew (his father, Henry Keeton, and Mary Ann were brother and sister).

John and Mary Ann had at least nine children: George Melvin (1884-1948), Emily Risden (1890-1967), Maudelly (1892-1892), Baty Eli (1898-1964), Monnie (1902-1920), Sarah (1903-1920), Eva West (1902-1970), Bailey (1909-1930) and Walter Bradford (1913-1971).

Maudelly, who died at the age of just two months in 1892, is married at the Carson Cemetery.

The Risden family

Emily Pike, the daughter of John and Mary Ann Keeton Pike, and the sister of Sarah, Monnie and Bailey, married James Beaty “J.B.” Risden (1890-1982), the son of Tom and Caroline Penlon Risden of Helenwood. He worked in the coal mines and on the railroad, and he and Emily initially settled in Stearns, Ky.

J.B. and Emily had six children: John Lee (1912-1994), Elmer (1915-1945), Milford (1919-1997), Lola Mae (1922-1937), Livona Evans (1925-1992) and Arzonia (1928-1930).

Arzonia Risden (spelled Risdon on her stone) was the second person buried at Pike Cemetery when she died on Nov. 7, 1930, at the age of two, just a couple of months after the death of her uncle, Bailey. An obituary noted that she had been ill for a few days, but that her death was “a severe shock to her family.”

Other Risdens would later be buried at the cemetery. Arzonia’s brother, John Lee Risden, married Geneva Caddell. Their daughter, Shirley, died at the age of eight months and was buried at the cemetery. Only eight days later, John Lee’s sister, Lola Mae, died of tuberculosis just a few weeks after her 15^th birthday and was also buried at the cemetery.

In a community that was experiencing too many teenage deaths, there had been yet another one in 1933, when 17-year-old Martha Pike was buried at the cemetery. She was the daughter of George Melvin Pike and Winnie Jane West, a granddaughter of John Clarville and Mary Jane Keeton Pike, and was the third person buried at the cemetery.

Shirley and Lola Mae Risden were the fourth and fifth persons buried at the cemetery.

The cemetery grows

John Clarville Pike, the patriarch of the Tunnel Hill Pike family, who had married into the Keeton clan from the small community, was the sixth person buried at Pike Cemetery when he died on Feb. 6, 1938, at age 77.

The following February, Geneva Caddell Risden, the wife of John Lee Risden and the mother of baby Shirley Risden, died at the age of just 20 and was buried at the cemetery.

One-year-old Johnny W. Pike was buried at the cemetery in 1942. Mary Ann Keeton Pike was buried there in 1944.

Other early burials at the cemetery included Elmer Risden — another of the sons of J.B. Risden and Emily Pike — in 1945, when he died of a skull fracture suffered in an accident at the age of 30, George Melvin Pike in 1948, and his wife Winnie Jane West Pike just three months later in 1948.

George and Winnie had a 42-year-old son, Everett Charley Pike, buried at the cemetery in 1951. And Nancy Phillips Pike was buried there in 1952.

The Phillips family

Elmer Phillips was buried at Pike Cemetery after being killed in a mine explosion on Brimstone Creek in March 1959. He was one of nine miners killed in the blast.

He was the son of John Marion Phillips (1897-1958) and Disie Pike (1900-1932). He married Charlene Pike (1926-1977), one of the daughters of George Melvin Pike and Winnie Jane West. She was later buried at the cemetery when she died at age 51.

Their children included Delmer Lee Phillips, Hollis Odeal Phillips, Billy Gene Phillips, Elmer Dewayne Phillips, and Gerealdine Phillips.

Delmer Lee was buried at the cemetery in 1968. Billy Gene Phillips, who married Cosetta King, had a son, Delmer Gene, who died in infancy in 1970 and was buried at the cemetery.

The Butler family

The road on which Pike Cemetery is located is named Butler Lane. William “Buzz” Butler was from nearby Paint Rock, the son of Alfred Butler (1894-1937) and Maudie Griffith (1899-1981). He married Oma West (1926-2019). Their children included J ay D., Delmus, Barbara Feldman, Charolette Hatmaker and Donna Kay Jones.

In 1978, Delmus Butler was buried at the cemetery. Infant Charles Dean Koger Butler, the son of Dean Butler and Rita Finney Koger, had been buried there six years earlier.

Infant Christian Jo Butler, the daughter of Joe and Peggy Butler, was buried at the cemetery in 2003. William and Oma West Butler were her great-grandparents.

J.D. Butler was buried at the cemetery in 2010, and Oma West Butler in 2019. Charolette Hatmaker was buried there in 2025.

The cemetery today

The most recent person buried at Pike Cemetery was Charlotte Ruth Butler Hatmaker, age 61. She was one of the children of William Butler and Oma West.

A couple of months earlier, in December 2024, Sheridan Pike was buried at the cemetery. He was the son of Arlie “Ollie” Pike and Juanita Ellis. He was a grandson of George Melvin Pike and Winnie Jane West, and great-grandson of John Clarville Pike and Mary Ann Keeton. His brother, Beamon Pike, was buried at the cemetery in 2022. His sister, Bertha Lou Hammock, was buried there in 2018.

Charles Butler, 1972 – 1972
Christian Butler, 2003 – 2003
Delmus Butler, 1951 – 1978
J. D. Butler, 1947 – 2010
Oma West Butler, 1926 – 2019
William Butler, 1921 – 1998
Bobby Chitwood, 1943 – 2012
Patricia Smith Chitwood, 1948 – 2023
Louise West Evans, 1939 – 2012
Barbara Butler Feldman, 1958 – 1980
Olivia Feldman, 1979 – 1979
Delphia Pike Goodman, 1910 – 1986
James Goodman, 1909 – 1973
Bertha Pike Hammock, 1948 – 2018
Charolette Butler Hatmaker, 1963 – 2025
Claude Laxton, 1921 – 1997
Claudene Laxton, 1959 – 2018
Dorothy West Laxton, 1932 – 2001
Robert Laxton, 1952 – 1973
Carl Myers, 1937 – 1994
Delores Holliday Myers, 1939 – 2016
Veronica Phillips Owens, 1975 – 2009
Billy Phillips, 1947 – 2009
Charlene Pike Phillips, 1926 – 1977
Cloreda West Phillips, 1938 – 1989
Delmer Gene Phillips, 1970 – 1970
Delmer Lee Phillips, 1950 – 1968
Elmer Phillips, 1921 – 1959
Elmer Phillips, 1955 – 2021
Geraldine Phillips, 1942 – 2012
Hollis O. Phillips, 1944 – 2006
Gregory Pierson, 1957 – 2024
Arlie D. Pike, 1928 – 1966
Bailey Pike, 1909 – 1930
Baty Eli Pike, 1898 – 1964
Beamon Pike, 1953 – 2022
Donny Pike, 1980 – 2021
Eva Coffey Pike, 1929 – 1996
Eva Phillips Pike, 1921 – 2013
Everett Pike, 1908 – 1951
Frazier Pike, 1942 – 1982
Gaylon Pike, 1941 – 2006
George Pike, 1884 – 1948
Infant Pike, N/A – N/A
Infant Pike, N/A – N/A
Jerry Pike, 1951 – 2023
John Clarville Pike, 1860 – 1938
John L. Pike, 1919 – 1959
Johnny W. Pike, 1941 – 1942
Juanita Ellis Pike, 1921 – 2011
Martha Pike, 1916 – 1933
Martha M. Pike, 1916 – 1933
Mary Ann Keeton Pike, 1869 – 1944
Nancy Phillips Pike, 1894 – 1952
Sheridan Pike, 1962 – 2024
Walter Pike, 1913 – 1971
Willard Pike, 1924 – 1965
Winnie West Pike, 1883 – 1948
Wonnell Pike, 1960 – 2022
Elmer Risden, 1915 – 1945
Emily Pike Risden, 1890 – 1967
Geneva Risden, 1917 – 1938
James Beaty Risden, 1890 – 1982
John Lee Risden, 1912 – 1994
Mary Strunk Risden, 1922 – 1964
Roger Gene Risden, 1940 – 1971
Ronald J. Risden, 1942 – 1978
Arzonia Risdon, 1928 – 1930
Lola Risdon, 1922 – 1937
Shirley Risdon, 1936 – 1937
Katherine Goodman Silvers, 1930 – 2015
Cindy Gibson Smith, 1957 – 2022
Dena Butler Smith, 1986 – 2012
Earnest Smith, 1954 – 2008
Millard F. Smith, 1927 – 2014
Ruby West Smith, 1935 – 2007
William L. Smith, 1927 – 2003
Paul Strunk, N/A – N/A
Billy West, 1945 – 1972
Eva Pike West, 1902 – 1970
Leroy West, 1944 – 1999
Theodore R. West, 1901 – 1985

For more Sacred Ground articles, visit the Encyclopedia of Scott County.

OHS Class of ‘65 meets

The Oneida High School Class of 1965 held their 60th class reunion at RaeZack’s on Monday, Oct. 20, 2025. There were 45 in attendance, including former teacher Mary Ann Brewster and former guidance counselor Amon Lay. This class is still the largest to graduate from Oneida High School, with 128 graduates.

Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be The Daybreaker bright and early Monday morning. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!

◼️ Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
◼️ Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
◼️ Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
◼️ Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
◼️ Friday: Friday Features (beyond the news)
◼️ Sunday: Varsity (a weekly sports recap)

Subscribe now

You’re reading Friday Features, a weekly newsletter containing the Independent Herald’s feature stories — that is, stories that aren’t necessarily straight news but that provide an insightful look at our community and its people. If you’d like to adjust your subscription to include (or exclude) any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so!

Subscribe now

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by First National Bank. Since 1904, First National Bank has been a part of Scott County. First National is local people — just like you. Visit fnboneida.com or call (423) 569-8586.

Lay-Silcox Cemetery dates back to 1902

During the 19^th century, the Lay family spread westward from Elk Valley and other areas of western Campbell County, across the mountain and into the Rock House area of eastern Scott County.

At the time, long before S.R. 63 was built as the modern highway system was developed, an old wagon trail through the Rock House community was part of the main travel route between Jacksboro in Campbell County and Huntsville in Scott County, then on through the Big South Fork region to Monticello, Ky.

The Lays in Scott County — which later included Oneida business owner Arlie Lay and Oneida Mayor Jack E. Lay, as well as Scott County Road Superintendent James D. “Headin” Lay — trace their ancestry to John Michael “Missouri Jack” Lay (1790-1874), who lived in Elk Valley.

With time, the Lay family became quite prominent in the Rock House community, and several cemeteries in the community — which is located off Sugar Grove east of Huntsville — tell that story today. One of those is the Lay-Silcox Cemetery, which dates back to the turn of the 20^th century.

The Lay Family

John Michael “Missouri Jack” Lay was the son of Jesse “River Jesse” Lay and Catherine Bradley. He was originally from North Carolina, but his folks moved to the Elk Valley area in the early 1800s. He married Rachel Foley (1789-1879) in 1810. They had nine children: Spencer Lay, Jesse Lay, Jane Lay, Moses Lay, James Lay, Michael Lay, Winnie Lay, William Dandy Lay and Thomas Lay. Several of their sons were Baptist preachers.

Although Missouri Jack lived in Campbell County, several of his children moved to Scott County. One of them, a Baptist preacher named Michael Lay, was the first person buried at Allred Cemetery in the Straight Fork community in 1879. (Michael Lay’s brother, James A. Lay, was also a Baptist preacher. Headin Lay descended from him. Arlie Lay descended from James’ and Michael’s brother, William Dandy Lay, while Jack E. Lay descended from another brother, Moses Lay.)

Family legend has it that John Michael was given the nickname “Missouri Jack” because he made several trips across the Mississippi River to Missouri, but was never satisfied and always came back home. He met Rachel while living in southeastern Kentucky, not far from Williamsburg, as a young adult. He had moved back to Campbell County by 1813.

Among the children of Missouri Jack: Spencer, also a Baptist preacher, and William Dandy stayed in Elk Valley; Jane and Thomas moved to Missouri; Winnie moved to Kentucky; and Moses, James and Michael moved to Scott County.

The Lay-Silcox Cemetery

Not all of the Lays who settled in Scott County did so in the Rock House community. Michael settled in Straight Fork, while Moses and James wound up at Buffalo, which is a stone’s throw from Rock House. In time, though, the Lays became quite populated in the Rock House community, and some remain there today.

The Lay-Silcox Cemetery began in the summer of 1902, when 26-year-old James Lay was buried there. He was the son of Rev. Greenberry Lay and Martha Jane McKinney, both of whom would later be buried at the cemetery. His paternal grandfather was William Dandy Lay — who was an ancestor to Arlie Lay, the founder of the Lay-Simpson brand of furniture stores. Although William Dandy remained in Elk Valley his entire life, his son, Greenberry, moved across the mountain to Rock House.

Greenberry’s wife, Martha Jane, was one of many children of David McKinney and Nancy Wade. Her parents were part of a broader move from Campbell County to Missouri in the late 1800s, which also included two of Missouri Jack’s children — Greenberry’s aunt and uncle. David McKinney served several terms as a county judge in Texas County, Mo.

Greenberry and Martha Jane had eight children: Nancy Lay Cooper (1870-1933), Sarah Jane Silcox (1872-1938), William Alford Lay (1874-1955), James Lay (1875-1902), Margaret Irene Sharp (1881-1928), Rachel Louana Dupuy (1885-1959), John Crittendon Lay (1888-1975) and Michael C. Lay (1892-1979). It was William Alford who was the father of businessman Arlie Lay.

Following Martha Jane’s death in 1914, Greenberry remarried to Connie Barron of Elk Valley. She had previously been married to William Sexton. They had one more child together: Wymer Lay, born in 1915.

James Lay, the first person buried at Lay-Silcox Cemetery, married Sarah Botts (1877-1952). They had two children together, Elgin Monroe Lay (1899-1975), and Nancy J. Lay. Nancy was only a few months old when her father died, and she died in January 1903, six days short of her first birthday. She was the second person buried at the Lay-Silcox Cemetery.

Sarah and her remaining child, Elgin, left Scott County for Oklahoma, where Sarah remarried to John F. Glenn in 1906. He would later die in 1917, and she married again.

Another child, one-year-old Elra Johnberry Lay, was buried at the Lay-Silcox Cemetery in April 1903. He was the son of William Alfred Lay and Margaret Collins — the younger brother of Arlie Lay.

Following Elra’s death, William Alfred moved his family to Oneida, near where the Scott County Fairgrounds is now located. He had another son, Elmer Richard, who died in 1923 at age 19 of tuberculosis. He was buried at Coffey Cemetery, which is where William Alfred and his wife would later be buried, as well.

The Silcox family

Another family that lived at Rock House in the late 1800s and early 1900s was the Silcox family. This was really an extension of the Lay family, because Greenberry Lay’s second-oldest daughter, Sarah Jane, married James Mountville Silcox of Elk Valley in 1891 and they settled at Rock House with her folks.

James M. Silcox (1869-1927) was the son of Joseph Franklin Silcox (1847-1880) and Emily Arene Boshears (1849-1892). Emily was originally from Scott County, the daughter of William Riley Boshears and Elizabeth “Sadie” Adkins of the Straight Fork community. They’re buried at Fairview Cemetery. However, Emily and her husband settled in Elk Valley, and it is believed that they are buried in the Turley community there.

The fourth person buried at Lay-Silcox Cemetery was William A. Silcox, son of James Mountville Silcox and Sarah Jane Lay. Called Willie by his parents, he was just 10 years old when he died in August 1905.

They had another child, an infant daughter, who was buried at the cemetery in 1908. Seven other children survived to adulthood.

The cemetery grows

The only person buried at Lay-Silcox Cemetery between 1908, when James and Sarah’s infant daughter died, and 1923 was Martha Jane McKinney Lay — Greenberry Lay’s wife — in 1914.

In the 1920s, however, burials began to increase in frequency at Lay-Silcox Cemetery.

One-year-old Leon Lay was buried there in 1923. He was the son of Michael Lay and Emma Ford, a grandson of Greenberry Lay and Martha Jane McKinney. Just four days later, his two-year-old brother, Hubert, died and was buried beside him.

More babies would soon be buried at the cemetery, as well.

The Loyd family

In 1926, an infant child of Benjamin “Ben” Loyd and Myrtle Silcox was buried at Lay-Silcox Cemetery.

The Loyd family was another extension of the Lay family. Myrtle was a daughter of James Mountville Silcox and Sarah Jane Lay. She married Ben Loyd in 1913. The Lloyd family was an expansive family in western Campbell County and eastern Scott County.

Ben and Myrtle had another infant buried at the cemetery in 1932. They also had a number of children who survived to adulthood, including Odessa Mae Cross, Ada Pearl Robbins, Amos Mountie Loyd, Irene Byrd, Hurstle Esau Loyd, Velma Inez Chambers, Mildred J. Owens and Jeanetta Meredith.

The cemetery today

The Lay-Silcox Cemetery remains active, with the last burial occurring there in March 2024: Loretta Sue Lay Vick.

Loretta was the daughter of Arnold Lay and Iona Inez Lay — a great-granddaughter of Greenberry Lay. Her parents are also buried at the cemetery, as is her husband, David Vick, who died in 2007.

Prior to Loretta’s death, Geraldine “Jerri” Marcum Gagne was buried at the cemetery in 2022. Her husband, Donald Gagne Sr., was buried there in 2016. She was another descendant of William Dandy Lay. Her great-grandfather, Michael C. Lay, was a brother to Greenberry Lay. His daughter, Susanna Lay, married Emerson Marcum.

Nettie Evelyn Lay was buried at the cemetery in 2020. She was one of the Lay family who continued to live in the Rock House community into the modern era. She was a granddaughter of Greenberry Lay.

Other burials at the cemetery within the past 10 years include Addie “Lou” Lay Comer in 2018. She was the daughter of George Flemon Lay and Bertie Arvilla Silcox, who are buried at the cemetery. Her husband, Everett “Gene” Comer, is buried there, too.

Eula Ellen “Boog” Lay was buried at the cemetery in 2017. She was Lou’s sister. Lou lived to be 101, and Boog lived to be 99. They have several siblings buried at the cemetery, including Nancy Collins (in 1994), Jim Lay (1989), Ollie Navarro (1994), infant James William Lay (1927), Lloyd “Bucky” Lay (2013), infant Joseph Prior Lay (1937), and 7-year-old Larry Ray Lay (1951).

Claude Allen, 1900-1945
Lewis Allen, 1873-1950
Dorothy Lay Byrd, 1930-2003
Manerd Byrd, 1928-1995
James M. Chambers, 1910-1927
Mary Haney Chambers, 1872-1942
Thomas R. Chambers, 1869-1955
Nancy Lay Collins, 1920-1994
Raymond Collins Jr., 1950-1951
Addie Lay Comer, 1917-2018
Everett E. Comer, 1918-2002
Donald R. Gagne Sr., 1937-2016
Geraldine Marcum Gagne, 1941-2022
Arnold Lay, 1932-2013
Bertie Silcox Lay, 1897-1992
Bobby L. Lay, 1936-2012
Brittian Lay, 1929-1931
Elra J. Lay, 1901-1903
Emma Ford Lay, 1898-1972
Eula E. Lay, 1918-2017
George F. Lay, 1891-1987
Greenberry Lay, 1851-1933
Hubert Lay, 1920-1923
Iona I. Lay, 1925-1997
James Lay, 1875-1902
James A. Lay, 1923-1989
James W. Lay, 1926-1927
Joseph P. Lay, 1937-1937
Larry R. Lay, 1943-1951
Leon Lay, 1921-1923
Lloyd G. Lay, 1931-2013
Margie Gipson Lay, 1935-2011
Martha McKinney Lay, 1850-1914
Michael C. Lay, 1892-1979
Nancy J. Lay, 1902-1903
Nannie Brooks Lay, 1924-2007
Nettie E. Lay, 1935-2020
U.W. Lay, 1926-1927
William D. Lay, 1949-2011
Willie L. Lay, 1946-1970
Susan Marcum Kline, 1948-2011
Infant Loyd, 1926-1926
Infant Loyd, 1932-1932
Gladys Clark Marcum, 1917-1980
Horace M. Marcum, 1916-1994
Nathaniel Muse, 1922-1998
Joseph R. Navarro, 1922-1978
Ollie Lay Navarro, 1925-1994
Margaret Lay Sharp, 1881-1928
Audrie Silcox, 1938-1938
H.B. Silcox, 1899-1989
Infant Daughter Silcox, 1908-1908
Infant Son Silcox, 1929-1929
James L. Silcox Sr., 1931-1987
James M. Silcox, 1869-1927
K.D. Silcox Jr., 1939-1939
Kelly D. Silcox, 1907-1987
Lillian I. Silcox, 1927-1937
Lula Allen Silcox, 1905-1994
Nellie Silcox, 1934-1934
Sadie Byrd Silcox, 1909-2002
Sarah Lay Silcox, 1872-1938
William A. Silcox, 1895-1905
David D. Vick, 1949-2007
Loretta Lay Vick, 1955-2024
Elmer P. Yaden Sr., 1907-1986
Hoyle G. Yaden, 1937-1937
Ina Silcox Yaden, 1913-1974

See past Sacred Ground features on the Encyclopedia of Scott County.

The Game Warden’s Corner: What’s it score?

By DUSTIN BURKE

If you know me, you know that deer hunting is something I obsess with, it’s something that I find myself thinking about at least a dozen times a day. This may sound like a problem to some, but it’s the one thing that has always been a constant to me since I was a boy. When it wasn’t deer season, my dad would buy a North American Whitetail magazine from Walmart. I would read those magazines cover to cover. Just as Ralphie Parker daydreamed about a Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle from The Christmas Story, I was daydreaming about killing a deer like the “Minesota Monarch.” My grandpa had found a non-typical shed when he was younger and “deer were bigger,” as he always explained. Like a dog with a prize bone, I carried that thing everywhere. Matter of fact, I still have it today and display it on my kitchen counter. There was always just something about deer antlers that kept me mesmerized.

On the weekends, my sister and I went to our dad’s house. A perk of going to dad’s during deer season was, just as a kid waking up and hoping Santa Claus came, we would wake up to my grandpa or Uncle Dale beckoning us to come look at the deer they had killed, laying in the back of the truck. I knew one day this would be me. It just had to be!

Fast-forward to 1993 and Dad decided I was old enough to not only go hunting, but old enough to give it the respect it deserved. He signed me up for the hunters’ education safety class, and I was a nervous wreck. Hunting was something I had dreamed about since I could remember and passing this class was the only thing that stood between me and hunting.

I passed the class and deer season couldn’t get here quick enough! As it got closer, Dad would come home from working all day and try to scout places to hunt. My grandpa, uncle Dale, and Dad schemed and threw out ideas. A few weeks before juvenile season, we made a trip to Walmart to get my first set of hunting cloths. We got some Walls coveralls and a pair of boots. The excitement was hard to contain. I talked about it at school, and I talked about it at home.

The Friday before opening juvenile season, we rushed home so we could make sure the gun was “sighted in.” For some reason, Dad was adamant that I was to only use the “iron sights” on the rifle. At the time, it confused me, because it had a scope on it. Looking back on that and having kids of my own now, he wanted to make it as simple as possible!

That morning, the day of November 6^th, the year of our Lord 1993, Dad wakes me up and I immediately smell fried bologna being made in the kitchen. He is making us fried bologna sandwiches. To this day, every time I smell that smell, it reminds me of hunting with my dad. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and walked out on the porch — well, wait, I just opened the front door and the cold hit me. My excitement turned immediately into “can we wait until it gets warmer?” That was not an option.

So, I layered up like Ralphie’s brother, Randy, on The Christmas Story. We made it to our spot, get out of the truck and Dad sprayed me with some stuff that smelled like dirt. We took off walking to “the spot”. I remember carrying his Marlin 30-30 and walking behind him, just trying to step in all the same places as he did. I don’t think I looked up a handful of times. I was so afraid to make any noises, and each time a twig would break, my muscles would tense up a little tighter each step.

By the time we made it to “the spot”, I was worn out from the adrenaline and the excitement. Dad had made a natural ground blind under a group of cedar trees overlooking a small grown-up field. We didn’t have fancy shooting houses, didn’t have pop up blinds, and weren’t hunting out of tree stands. We were just sitting on the ground.

The sun came up and I was visualizing how this would even work and where a deer would come from. Every sound had my heart racing and asking Dad, “what was that?”. After an hour of sitting there exhausting my eyes and tapping him on the leg asking what sound that was, Dad decided to take some antlers and rattle them together. I had seen this stuff on some Roger Raglin videos that he had rented from the video store. As soon as the antlers went together, my heart was leaping out of my chest, and my head swiveled like a turret on a WW2 tank! I remember Dad stopped rattling and grunted three short grunts and one long one.

Suddenly, the distinct sound of running and leaves crashing is getting closer. As I look to where the sound was coming from, a deer comes running down the hill and straight towards us. It’s definitely a buck, because I can see white antlers moving up and down with its head. The buck comes straight to a small tree that was 30 yards in front of us, where Dad had hung some Tinks 69 from a scent rag he made before we left.

As this deer stood there for what seemed like eternity — but was just 30-40 seconds — all I could do was just stare in amazement. I was starstruck! I had waited my whole life for this moment. Imagine being the biggest Peyton Manning fan ever, and one day he is standing 30 yards in front of you! This was the exact same feeling. I had watched hunting videos with bucks. I had read article after article about bucks. Hell, I had dreamed many nights about this very moment. Ironically, I was frozen like a deer in the headlights.

The deer turns and walks back the way he came, and Dad says, “are you going to shoot it or what?” The rest is history, literally! My very first hunt, within the first two hours of my first hunt, I have not only just seen my very first alive buck, but I had my very first buck in my hands! It was nothing that would get my picture in the North American Whitetail magazine, but it was a very respectable non-typical 8-point. The excitement building up to that moment, the excitement while in the moment, and to this day the excitement of that day still makes me smile. I told the story at school, and I smiled the rest of the year. I couldn’t wait to get the deer back from the taxidermist and that deer still hangs on my wall proudly to this day. From that point on, I was hooked! I was addicted! No, I have not received counseling or attended AA classes, not one single time! Matter of fact, killing a “monster buck” has consumed me since that day!

The chase for that “monster buck” has caused many issues in personal relationships — to the point that at 43 years old it’s common knowledge that “deer hunting” isn’t far behind my children on my list of important things. I have been blessed, more than blessed to be honest. I have harvested some nice deer from Tennessee and been lucky to have hunted a few years in northeast Ohio.

I went to Ohio in 2017, when a really good friend said “come up and spend a few days hunting, it will help you get away!” I took him up on the offer, and drove to New Philadelphia, Ohio. Each and every day I spent hunting those four days, I felt like a kid again. I was excited to get to sleep! I dreamed about one of those “Ohio giants” that you read about in North American Whitetail. I woke up each morning just as excited as the morning before. I got in the tree stand, and every rustle of leaves, every pop of a twig, had my heart racing out of my chest. That same feeling that I got when I was a kid was back again! In my heart and mind, the odds of a huge buck stepping out had to be better up here! Well, for 3 days, the biggest buck I had seen, was a little basket-racked 7-point. At home, I would have been discouraged, but not in Ohio! The third night, coming out from the tree stand, we saw a really big 10-point chasing a doe in the field. We watched it for a little bit and on the way home, we devised a plan. On the last day I had to hunt, I ended up shooting a 146” 10-point that field dressed at 263 lbs.! That means, this deer alive, would have been over 300 lbs. Each and every feeling I had at 11 years old came back again!

After that trip, I constantly dreamed of hunting in Ohio. In 2021, the same buddy asked me if I would want to get on a lease with him and another guy. I jumped on it quicker than a fat kid on a Snickers bar! The next four years, I watched my cellular trail cameras and was hooked to my phone like glue. I was a trail camera crackhead! It kept my excitement all year long. I got to spend some great trips with my friends Dave and Shon. I got to enjoy many memories with both of my kids. I had some very memorable hunts. One time I shot at the same deer not once, not twice, but three times with a bow! I missed all three times to be exact. My son and I once sat in the pouring rain of a hurricane and lucked up killing two deer within 15 minutes. One hunt, I rattled in a deer from across the river. The deer literally dove in the river, over its head on a mission to get to me and my son. I got to see him make an amazing shot on that deer. I got to not only see my buddy Dave harvest some good deer, but we laughed each and every time we were together.

The last year, the phone rang at 3:30 a.m. because of a horrible OHV accident had happened on the wildlife management area. Since I’m not only a game warden but also a sergeant, that meant I needed to answer that call. I helped the best I could to coordinate people and machines from my hotel room in Carrollton, Ohio so they could reach the patient. I felt helpless in Ohio and it honestly left me not wanting to do anything. Plus, it was supposed to rain around 9 a.m., but it was our last full day to hunt. Being up since 3:30 a.m., and pending rain, I was on the fence about even going hunting because I hadn’t seen much on camera nor seen much from my tree stands. My buddy Shon convinced me to go hunting anyway. By 9 a.m., I had put an arrow in an awesome 143” buck and was Facetiming the guys working the accident to share it with them. The short of the long, I made some absolute amazing memories! Memories with family and memories with friends. Memories that hang on my wall and the rest I tell in stories!

I say all that, to explain this. Deer hunting has changed so much in my 43 years. Some of these changes have been great, and some of them have been less than favorable. I have seen some black and white pictures of some really, really big bucks killed when my grandpa was in his 20s and 30s. Do you think those deer were hanging on the wall when I was born? Nope. Memories, stories, and some black and white photos are all that existed of these big deer. Killing “monster bucks” was not a thing back then. I am sure they bragged about killing a big deer, but it wasn’t what the sport was about. I wasn’t around back then, but I like to believe they did it for all the right reasons.

Some say the best days of deer hunting was in the late 90s and early 2000s. I couldn’t agree more, for many reasons. Around the mid to late 90s, Bill Jordan, founder of Realtree and Toxey Haas of Mossy Oak started televising shows such as Realtree Monster Bucks, Realtree Road Trips, Mossy Oaks Hunting the Country, and Remington Country. This really started the full-steam-ahead commercialization of the hunting industry. On one hand, it brought attention and popularity to a sport that desperately needed it. It brought better equipment to the table, better weapons, and evolving technology in the forms of trail cameras, scopes, and range finders, just to name a few. It created the idea that if you didn’t have the best camo, the best scent blocking clothing, the fastest bow, the next best rifle cartridge, or the most expensive tree stand then you couldn’t kill a “monster buck”.

Today, archery companies will change one little thing from the previous year model bow and sell it as the new best thing for $1,200 to $2,000. Camo patterns have seemingly started coming back around to the original patterns from the early days, except now they sell them on the most expensive scent-blocking, UV-blocking, fancy-named clothing, and you will pay anywhere from $500 to $2,000 for a set of hunting clothes you wear a handful of times throughout the year. The rest of the time, these expensive comfortable hunting clothes will reside in a fancy scent-blocking bag after you have washed them in scent-erasing laundry detergent and dried them with dirt-scented dyer sheets.

While we are on the subject of erasing scent, we now have fancy little wind-blowing machines we can hang above our heads that apparently can take human scent out of the air — for a price, of course.

I am not one of the guys that has to buy a brand-new bow every year, but I do have a 5-year-old Mathews bow that I got used. I haven’t bought new hunting cloths since 2009 but have thrown around the idea a few times over the years. I take a little trip to Bass Pro Shop and realize the old Scent Lok that I have is just as good. I do have quite a few of the fancy cellular trail cameras. In the quest to kill “monster deer,” this has been one of my “have to have” pieces of equipment. It’s almost more addicting than the hunting itself, to be honest. But, ironically, three of the five bucks I killed in Ohio I didn’t have on camera one single time. Trail cameras have been an invention that have helped but also hurt. More times than I would like to admit, I have chosen not to hunt a spot or not go hunting because I had no activity on my trail cameras.

All of this talk about the commercialization of hunting with the great technology hasn’t hurt hunting as much as harvesting “monster bucks” or “trophy deer”! Ironically, the title “trophy deer” isn’t based off each individual’s trophy, but off what everyone else’s “trophy deer” is. I have harvested quite a few 110” to 125” bucks and been happy as can be about them — until I compared it to someone else’s deer or got caught up in the score.

So that brings up the question: “What is a trophy deer?”. I think you could ask five people and probably get six different answers. No, I know my math isn’t math’n, but I assure you someone will change their mind once they hear what everyone else’s trophy is! As I grew up, a trophy was measured by points. You might have harvested a basket-rack 10-point, but it was still a 10-point! Then at about age 19 or 20, I became an avid bowhunter and the trophy was anything that would make Pope & Young at 125”. This was also still in the early 90s. Somewhere along the way, the trophy went from 125” to it was only a monster buck if it was 150” or more. And thanks to those shows I mentioned earlier, along with quite a few more since, if you don’t harvest a 150” or more deer every year, then you aren’t even a hunter! You can post your 125” to 140” deer on social media and be as happy as a deer hunter could be — until the “trophy hunters” come along, telling you how you “should have let that one walk”, or that it is “not a bad deer for a 3.5 year old”, or “that deer would have been a lot bigger next year.” Those people will have you thinking that maybe you shouldn’t have harvested that deer and will almost having you claiming it was a “management deer.”

While we are on the 150” subject, let’s toss around some numbers. There are an estimated 9.1 million whitetailed deer hunters in the United States, give or take a few. Out of those millions, only 40 to 50% are even successful each year. Actually, we are going to lean more towards 40% than 50%. It is said or believed that less than 5% of bowhunters ever harvest a deer bigger than 125” — in their entire lifetime! The number of deer that grow to be that coveted 150” or more are a lot less than 40%. Actually, it is somewhere below 10%, and getting a deer that is 170” or more is less than 1%. I am not trying to discourage the “monster buck” guy but rather put it all into perspective. It makes perfect sense, because all the factors it takes a whitetailed deer to make that benchmark of 150” aren’t plentiful (i.e. genetics, age hunting pressure, health, etc.). These stats can really open your eyes. It almost shows you that the “trophy hunter” is in the minority … almost.

The bigger picture is, as a whole, the growing standard on judging other hunters by how many inches of bone they have in their hands. (We are talking about Boone & Crockett and Pope & Young scores on antlers — get your mind out of the gutter!) How many times have you seen a person on social media in a picture holding their “trophy deer” in their hands and they don’t even have a smile on their face? One thing I can say, whether it was a 5-point or a 14-point, I have always had the biggest smile on my face! Or you see them posting a celebratory picture of accomplishment, to just downplay in the description that it wasn’t the big one they was looking for, but it would do? I’d say I’ve even been guilty of this one myself.

Deer hunting has started down a path of being a “wealthy game” instead of an activity that brings us peace, joy, challenge, accomplishments, and memories. A game of if we don’t harvest a 170” buck than we should be ashamed.

I circle back to my hunts in Ohio. This year, the farmer sold the farm we leased. He bettered himself and you can’t blame him for that at all. No doubt, the commercialization again has played into this . Trying to find a place to hunt in about any state that has been sold as having “monster bucks” is like winning the lottery. You either have money to buy land yourself, have family with land or connections, or be ready to pay $3,500 to $5,000 a person to lease a property. Even in states that aren’t known for “monster bucks,” you will still be hard pressed to find a lease that is less than $1,500 to $2,000. Here in Scott County, TN, we are blessed with close to 200,000 acres or more of public land with the North Cumberland WMA and the Big South Fork Recreational Area. With that being said, “monster buck” hunting in these places will take some realistic expectations or otherwise you will finish almost every hunt discouraged.

Aldo Leopold, who was an avid lifelong hunter and author of Sand County Almanac, saw hunting as a way to understand the natural world and connect with nature in a way that it wasn’t just a sport. I will take it one step further and say hunting is about making lifelong memories with family and friends. As sure as I am that we are all guilty of getting caught up with the Jordans, Lakoskys, and Waddells” and thinking you must have the best of this and the best of that in order to harvest a trophy animal. I still strive to harvest a 150”-plus deer with my 5-year-old Mathews (and if someone wants to give me a new bow, I wouldn’t turn it down) and my 16-year-old Mossy Oak Treestand Scent Lok! I have found killing a nice, mature 5-point gives me the same sense of accomplishment, and getting to share that with a friend or even better family is icing on the cake. Yes, I still daydream about big deer and I now have a subscription to North American Whitetail. I periodically draw or paint whitetailed deer as a coping mechanism when it is not hunting season. Yes, I come home some days and just sit on the couch to look at my deer mounts, just to remember each memory with them and smile. Now I find just as much joy when one of my kids harvest an animal and I’ve noticed I get “buck fever” worse with them than I have ever gotten by myself.

If you harvest a deer, I will be your biggest fan and help you anyway I can. On the whole, we need to remember the feelings we got when we first went hunting. Remember the time we first harvested our first deer. The feeling when we harvested our biggest deer. Or we could get a little deeper and appreciate a crisp morning, watching the sun rise over the horizon. As the sun rises, and the thermals rise in the sky, you get to hear those precious sounds of morning and the life pouring back into the forest. You remember how to have fun again — how to appreciate each other and the memories we get to make with each other … getting to teach someone the “ins and outs” of hunting and nature … and remembering that everyone’s trophy is different, whether it’s a “Kentucky 11-pointer” or a 135” 10-point!

Harvesting a deer will always be an accomplishment. We are stewards of this sport we call hunting and of this land we call home. Let’s respect one another. Let’s raise each other up. Let’s do better about protecting it as a whole!

Sgt. Dustin Burke, of Oneida, is a wildlife officer with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.

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Scott County’s Civil War-era German doctor

One of the more intriguing early settlers of Scott County is a man who didn’t stick around too long, and one that very little is known about. That man was Dr. Gustavus Reynard (also spelled Reinhardt) Brandau, and perhaps the fact that we know so little about him is part of what makes him so intriguing.

But Dr. Brandau — G.R. Brandau, as he was often called — is also intriguing because of who he was. He was an early postmaster in Scott County, and his post office (which would have been at his home) was referred to as “Fort Brandau.” It likely wasn’t a fort in any military sense; the post office opened in 1857 and closed in 1860, before the Civil War began. Still, the name alone conjures up all sorts of images and possibilities.

Sadly, we don’t know much about Gustavus Brandau, including what brought him to Scott County. What little we do know is gleaned through old census records and various other government documents that are still in existence. He arrived in Scott County sometime between 1855 and 1857, and left around 1866. He apparently lived in the southern part of Scott County.

An old edition of the FNB Chronicle from the 1990s lists Scott County’s post offices and postmasters through the years (from D.R. Frazier’s 1984 book Tennessee Postoffices and Postmaster Appointments, 1789-1984. A reference is made to “Fort Brandon,” founded Sept. 2, 1857 and discontinued Oct. 22, 1860, with Gustavus A. Brandon serving as postmaster. That is almost certainly a reference to Gustavus R. Brandau, who lived in Scott County at the time.

As for the location of Fort Brandau, it seems likely to have been in the Glenmary area. Gustavus Brandau’s neighbors when the 1860 census was taken included Matthew and Rhoda Young, John and Rebecca Young, and Aaron Goad. All of them were known to be residents of southern Scott County. Matthew Young (1815-1893) was one of the most prominent residents of Glenmary. He married two of the daughters of Rev. Andrew Leutian Lewallen (first Elizabeth; then, following her death in 1845, Rhoda). He and both wives are buried at Campground Cemetery near Coal Hill.

It seems odd that a man of Gustavus Brandau’s stature — postmaster, apparently wealthy, and highly enough regarded in Scott County that he served as this community’s representative at a convention in Knoxville following the Civil War, when East Tennessee attempted to form its own state — wasn’t remembered more prominently by history. If not for that post office notation in the old FNB Chronicle, he might’ve been lost to the dustbin of time completely. But here’s what we know about this mysterious German doctor.

A stranger from Hessen

We don’t know who Gustavus Brandau’s parents were, but we know from various census records that he was born in Hessen, Germany around 1820. An old ship’s manifest shows that he sailed alone to New York on the ship Magdalena in October 1847, when he was about 27. We may never know what brought him to America. Or why he chose the Cumberland Plateau.

A couple of generations earlier, Hessians had been feared and vilified by American colonists for the role they played during the Revolutionary War. It was common for German states to maintain standing armies for hire during the 18th century. These mercenary soldiers were well-trained, very disciplined, and — whether deserved or not — gained a reputation among Americans as being ruthless on the battlefield. Because Great Britain did not maintain a very large army, it depended heavily on these German mercenaries during the American Revolution; one out of every four British ground troops during the war were Germans who were fighting not for loyalty to the British crown but for money. Many of them were from Hessen — or, Hesse-Cassel, as the state was known at the time — and therefore all German soldiers in the war became known to Americans as Hessians.

However vilified they might have been, many of the Hessians who came to America to fight fell in love with this new world, and decided to stay. In time, they were assimilated into the American culture, and their role in the war was largely forgotten.

Gustavus Brandau was not one of those Hessian soldiers, of course. He was not born until 1820. Because we don’t know who his parents were, we don’t know if his father or grandfather might have been a Hessian soldier. In any event, it was in 1857 that he arrived in New York City aboard the Magdalena.

The 1850 census found Brandau in Morgan County, living with a pair of fellow Germans — Charles and Margaret Haag, who ran a tavern. That detail alone sets a perfect scene for an old screenplay: a European doctor in a frontier saloon, somewhere between a civilization and the wilderness, plying his trade among rough-hewn settlers and hard-drinking mountaineers. Brandau’s occupation in 1850 was listed as physician. It seems that he had arrived in Wartburg — which had been founded just a few years earlier by George Friedrich Gerding, a land speculator who intended to create a series of German colonies on the Cumberland Plateau — by 1848.

By 1860, Brandau had moved to Scott County. He was 38, and he was prosperous enough to employ servants. His household included his wife, Anna, two small children (2-year-old Hemelz and 10-month-old Alexandre), a white servant named Mary Price, her 9-year-old daughter Sarrah, and a 19-year-old farmhand named John Great.

The historical records search for what became of Mary, Sarrah and John after 1860 is a dead-end. But an old marriage license in Nashville shows that Anna Brandau was Anna Waggoner, daughter of William Henry Waggoner and Elizabeth Armentrout, and that she and Gustavus were married in Nashville on Nov. 15, 1855 in Davidson County.

Unfortunately, what became of Anna is just as mysterious as what became of the servants who lived in her home in southern Scott County when the 1860 census was taken. She simply disappeared, and Gustavus married again in 1866. It seems likely that she died — but of what? And where was she buried?

Some family trees also list another child of Gustavus and Anna — Ellen — who was born and died in 1860.

A Union surgeon

When the Civil War began, Gustavus Brandau sided with the Union — as did almost everyone else from Scott County. In May 1863 he enlisted in the federal army at Lebanon, Ky., and mustered into the 11th Tennessee Cavalry in Knoxville, Tenn. as a surgeon. The 11th Tennessee was just being organized at that time, and was commanded by Col. Isham Young. Many of those who served in the 11th Tennessee mustered in at Camp Nelson, Ky. in August 1863.

Little information is available about Brandau’s wartime service, other than that he served until 1865, then mustered out. He is not listed in Paul Roy’s Scott County in the Civil War among the more than 500 others from this community who served in the war, though he apparently should’ve been. We do know from historical records of troop movements that the 11th Tennessee was at Cumberland Gap from October 1863 to February 1864. It was part of Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s assault on the Cumberland Gap after he had marched his Army of the Ohio through Scott County and seized Knoxville from Confederate forces. The 11th Tennessee Cavalry was eventually absorbed by the 9th Tennessee Cavalry in 1865.

Brandau’s remarriage

On May 1, 1866, Gustavus Brandau married Charlotte Caribbean Roehl in Knoxville. She was a 19-year-old German beauty with an origin story that reads like fiction. Her parents, en route from Denmark to California during the 1847 gold rush, had been blown off course by a storm, their ship — Charlotte — winding up in the Caribbean Sea. When their baby girl was born on Christmas Day in 1847, they named her after the voyage itself: Charlotte Caribbean. The family had moved to Knoxville by 1860.

The same week that he married Charlotte, Gustavus represented Scott County as its lone delegate at the East Tennessee Convention in Knoxville. The purpose of the convention was to seek independent statehood for East Tennessee. Records of that week’s convention, and Brandau’s role in it, come from Brownlow’s Knoxville Weekly Whig newspaper. East Tennessee had sought to separate itself from the rest of Tennessee once before — in 1861, after East Tennessee voted against secession but the rest of the state supported secession. Delegates had met in Greeneville in June 1861. Scott County was not represented at the first East Tennessee Convention in person, but was represented by proxy.

The May 1866 convention had the same outcome as the 1861 convention in Greeneville. Delegates argued that East Tennessee was isolated from the rest of the state by the Cumberland Mountains, and that the political differences that had emerged amid the secession fight in 1861 still existed, even though the Civil War was over. But its argument fell on deaf ears in Nashville and Washington, and statehood was not granted.

From Glenmary to Arlington

After the May 1866 convention in Knoxville, the records trail grows faint. We know that Brandau moved to Knoxville permanently; he and Charlotte were living in Knoxville when the 1870 census was taken, along with Brandau’s two children by his first wife, Henry and Alex, and two more sons: Walter R. and Adolph Gustavis. A daughter, Annie, would be born in 1873. Property records place him on Gay Street in Knoxville in August 1866.

Then, in October 1875, Gustavus died. He would’ve only been around 55 at the time but it isn’t clear what he died of. He was buried at Knoxville National Cemetery. But after some time, his body was exhumed, and he was reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C.

Charlotte continued living in Knoxville for a time. By 1900, she was living with her daughter, Annie, and her son-in-law in Columbia, Tenn. In 1910, she lived with her son, Adolph, in Nashville. In 1920, she was living with Annie again, this time in Washington, D.C.

It seems the family always had money. Gustavus had employed servants when he lived in Scott County in 1860. His daughter employed servants in 1900, and his son employed servants in 1910.

Charlotte eventually died in 1925, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Adolph lived the remainder of his life in Nashville, while Annie later moved to Florida. Less clear is what happened to Henry, Alex and Walter.

The man and the mystery

So who was Dr. Gustavus Reynard Brandau?

A physician, certainly. A Union soldier, yes. But he was also something harder to pin down: a man between worlds. Between Germany and Tennessee. Between medicine and war. Between one wife and the next. Between the frontier wilds of Glenmary long before it was Glenmary and the marble headstones of Arlington.

The name of his little postal outpost — Fort Brandau — survives only in faint ledgers, a whisper from the forested hills of southern Scott County where coal would later be discovered and give rise to one of the county’s largest late 19th century settlements. Yet in that name lies a story of ambition, reinvention, and a peculiar blending of old-world intellect and new-world grit that defined so many immigrant dreamers of the 19th century.

And yet so little was recorded about his life in America. You can’t help but feel that Gustavus Brandau accomplished something worth remembering during his time in Glenmary. But there’s no record of it. All we’re left with is the wonder of a Hessian surgeon who built himself a fort and left behind a mystery.

Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be The Daybreaker bright and early Monday morning. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!

◼️ Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
◼️ Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
◼️ Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
◼️ Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
◼️ Friday: Friday Features (beyond the news)
◼️ Sunday: Varsity (a weekly sports recap)

Subscribe now

You’re reading Friday Features, a weekly newsletter containing the Independent Herald’s feature stories — that is, stories that aren’t necessarily straight news but that provide an insightful look at our community and its people. If you’d like to adjust your subscription to include (or exclude) any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so!

Subscribe now

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by First National Bank. Since 1904, First National Bank has been a part of Scott County. First National is local people — just like you. Visit fnboneida.com or call (423) 569-8586.

All in the family: A TCAT journey

HUNTSVILLE | For a trio of Oneida siblings, education at Tennessee College of Applied Technology Oneida/Huntsville is a family affair.

Morgan Branscum and her brothers, Malachi and Mason Pike, all chose TCAT to pursue hands-on careers that fit their passions. Morgan is training in the new Allied Health and Medical Assisting program, while Malachi and Mason are both enrolled in Automotive Technology. And the circle of learning doesn’t stop there. Malachi’s wife, Mikah, and Mason’s fiancé, Angel Posey, are both at TCAT, as well. Mikah is enrolled in Allied Health with Morgan, while Angel is in Cosmetology.

Morgan, Malachi and Mason are third generation TCAT students. Their mother and grandmother both graduated from TCAT Oneida/Huntsville and used the skills they gained at TCAT as a launchpad for their careers. Linda Acres, their grandmother, completed the nursing program and worked for many years at Huntsville Manor before retiring. Their mother, Cindy Pike, completed the Administrative Office Technology program and worked at Ridgeview Behavioral Health Services for 15 years as office coordinator.

The children of Melvin and Cindy Pike, Morgan, Malachi and Mason grew up in Oneida. They didn’t share the same high school experience; Morgan graduated from Oneida High School in 2022, Malachi graduated from Scott High School in 2024, and Mason graduated from Penn Foster as a home-school student. But TCAT has brought them together — all three completing classes under the same roof on the Huntsville campus.

For Morgan, pursuing a diploma in the Allied Health and Medical Assisting program was about following in her grandmother’s footsteps.

“I really love helping people,” she said. “Whenever I was little, my grandma used to take me to the nursing home. I knew right then that was what I wanted to do with my life.”

The Allied Health program is TCAT’s latest program offering. It combines Nursing Aide, Phlebotomy and EKG Technician, which have long been offered as stand-alone and supplemental programs at TCAT, and enables students to also earn their certification as a medical assistant. Morgan doesn’t plan to stop at that point, however. She intends to enroll in the Practical Nursing program and pursue a career as an LPN. Eventually, she wants to work at a pediatric center.

Malachi and Mikah were middle school sweethearts, even though they didn’t go to the same school. Malachi attended Huntsville Middle and Mikah went to Burchfield. They met at a football game — “I was just wanting to watch Burchfield get beat,” Malachi admits with a laugh — and the rest became history. The two were married in May, and Mikah enrolled in the Allied Health program with her sister-in-law.

“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” she said of the health care profession. “In high school I took every medical class that was offered to me, even clinicals.”

Mikah says she eventually wants to be a labor and delivery nurse.

Mason and Angel also met in middle school, both attending Huntsville Middle. Angel graduated from Scott High this past spring, and they have set a wedding date for June 10, 2026.

“I always did hair in my family,” Angel said of her decision to enroll in Cosmetology. “I grew up knowing I wanted to eventually do hair. I enjoy coloring hair and making people feel better about themselves.”

Then there are the brothers. Malachi and Mason both grew up tinkering on cars. Malachi said he developed a love for working on cars when he was in seventh grade. “Then I got an addiction to buying them up and fixing them,” he said. (“Can confirm,” Mikah adds.)

Like Malachi, Mason dual-enrolled at TCAT Oneida/Huntsville as a high school student. He says it’s all about gaining knowledge and the opportunity to build a successful career as an auto mechanic.

Malachi and Mason are always outside, their sister and significant others say, whether it be tinkering on cars or working on some other project.

“As long as I can remember, he’s always been working on something,” Mikah says of her husband.

The five are a tight-knit group. Morgan was a bridesmaid in Mikah’s wedding. Angel does Morgan’s hair (“she’s made me feel better about myself,” Morgan says). Malachi and Mason enjoy being uncles to Morgan’s children — and they’re already training the oldest to be a mechanic. “He’s working on changing the battery in his Power Wheels right now,” Malachi said of his nephew, Hutson.

There’s a lot of laughter when they’re all in the same room, and they enjoy picking at each other the way siblings do. But make no mistake: Morgan is fiercely protective when it comes to her brothers. “I’m a mother hen,” she says.

Through that relationship, TCAT has become a place where they cheer each other on, study together, and take pride in building better futures together.

“I really wanted to do (the Allied Health program),” Morgan said. “Then I found out Angel was going for Cosmetology. I thought that would be really cool. Then I found out Mason was going into Automotive, and Malachi was already here. I told Mikah we should do Allied Health together.”

“It’s way easier having someone to study with,” Mikah added. “It’s been good to have a familiar face in class.”

The five all agree that the TCAT experience has been a productive one so far.

“Ms. Sue is the best teacher,” Mikah said of her instructor, Sue Sims. “I’ve learned so much that I didn’t even know my brain could hold.”

Angel said she’s already learned a lot under Jayne Roysden and Tammy Sharp in the Cosmetology program. “They teach us something new every day,” she said. “They break it down for you and show you every little thing.”

Malachi said he got off to a good start as a high school student working under Nick Neal, who is the instructor for Scott High students in the Automotive Technology program at TCAT. Now he is continuing to learn from Tim Gibson and Jimmy Baird. “All of them teach you the most they can,” he said. “I’ve learned so much more and now I can finish any project on my own.”

While sisters-in-law Morgan and Mikah plan to one day be pediatric and labor-and-delivery nurses, and Angel hopes to be a hair stylist, Morgan sees her brothers headed towards building a business for themselves.

“They’re probably going to open their own shop, honestly,” she said.

Between them, this one family represents three different TCAT programs, one shared goal, and a powerful reminder of how career and technical education can bring people together to build brighter futures.

Autumn’s canvas in the Big South Fork

There’s a magic to October in the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area — a transformation that sweeps across the sandstone bluffs and hardwood ridges, turning the rugged Cumberland Plateau into a patchwork quilt of crimson, gold, and amber. The forest canopy, dense and wild through the summer months, softens under autumn’s hand. Hickories blaze yellow, maples burn red, and oaks deepen to rust and copper. For a few fleeting weeks, the 125,000-acre expanse of the Big South Fork becomes one of the most breathtaking natural galleries in the South.

Located along the Tennessee-Kentucky border, the Big South Fork is a land of deep gorges, high ridges, and the untamed Big South Fork of the Cumberland River that cuts through it all. Fall brings a new rhythm to the landscape. The haze of summer gives way to crisp, clear air. Morning fog settles in the valleys, then lifts to reveal forests glowing with color beneath blue October skies. By late afternoon, the low sun bathes the cliffs and hollows in golden light — the kind that makes even the quietest trails feel sacred.

Where to See the Colors

For many, the experience begins at the overlooks. East Rim Overlook, near Bandy Creek, offers a sweeping view of the river gorge, where layers of color stack upon one another in the vast distance. Sunset here is a photographer’s dream — the cliffs catching fire as the sun dips low. To the north, Devil’s Jump and Blue Heron Overlook in Kentucky provide equally dramatic perspectives of the river’s twists and turns.

If you prefer to be in the thick of it, take a hike along one of the park’s countless trails. The Angel Falls Overlook Trail leads through dense hardwoods to a commanding view high above the Big South Fork River. The Twin Arches Trail, one of the most popular in the park, winds through towering forest and beneath the largest natural sandstone arches in the eastern United States. Along these trails, the colors are intimate — leaves drifting down like confetti, crunching underfoot as deer move quietly through the underbrush.

For those who’d rather take it all in from the saddle, Big South Fork’s extensive horse trail network offers a different vantage point. Riders can explore miles of secluded backcountry, where every turn brings new hues and the earthy scent of fallen leaves fills the air. Even a slow drive through the park — particularly along roads like Divide Road or the scenic route to Blue Heron — reveals a tapestry of color that seems to go on forever.

Timing the Peak

Fall color in the Big South Fork typically begins to show in early October, reaching its peak around the third or fourth week of the month. Because the park spans a wide range of elevations and microclimates, the display often lingers well into early November. The higher ridges change first, followed by the valleys and river corridors. For visitors hoping to catch the best of it, that late-October window is usually ideal — a time when nearly every tree, from the scarlet maples to the golden poplars, seems to glow at once.

A Season of Reflection

Beyond the scenic beauty, there’s something deeply reflective about autumn in the Big South Fork. The sound of the river softens under fallen leaves. Campgrounds at Bandy Creek or Blue Heron grow quieter, more peaceful. A smoky campfire and a cool evening breeze make perfect companions as darkness settles over the plateau.

Here, far from city lights and noise, fall reminds visitors of simpler rhythms — of seasons that turn whether we notice or not, of beauty that exists not in permanence but in change. It’s a fleeting masterpiece, and that’s what makes it unforgettable.

For anyone looking to experience Tennessee’s wildest autumn, the Big South Fork offers not just color, but connection — to the land, to the season, and to the quiet wonder that only fall can bring.

Discover more at DiscoverScott.com.

Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be The Daybreaker bright and early Monday morning. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!

◼️ Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
◼️ Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
◼️ Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
◼️ Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
◼️ Friday: Friday Features (beyond the news)
◼️ Sunday: Varsity (a weekly sports recap)

Subscribe now

You’re reading Friday Features, a weekly newsletter containing the Independent Herald’s feature stories — that is, stories that aren’t necessarily straight news but that provide an insightful look at our community and its people. If you’d like to adjust your subscription to include (or exclude) any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so!

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by First National Bank. Since 1904, First National Bank has been a part of Scott County. First National is local people — just like you. Visit fnboneida.com or call (423) 569-8586.

Sacred Ground: Norma Baptist Church Cemetery

A stroll through the Norma Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery is a walk through the history of one of Scott County’s oldest communities. You’ll see stones bearing the names of some of the families that have been around Norma since the very beginning — when it was called Skull Bone, and then Norcross, before it was Norma — like Byrd, Lloyd, Hatfield, and Adkins. You’ll see the stones of some of the community’s most beloved citizens through the years, like Dr. D.T. Chambers. And you’ll be reminded that there was a time when Norma — not Oneida or Huntsville — was theplace to be in Scott County, back near the beginning of the 20^th century when timber was king and the New River valley had plenty of it to offer.

The Baptist church cemetery at Norma dates back to 1895. It isn’t this community’s oldest cemetery, by any means. But it’s a true community cemetery, and was from the very beginning — a distinction from most Scott County cemeteries, which started as family burial plots. And back when this cemetery was “new,” Norma was in its prime as a bustling New River timber town.

Although named the Norma Baptist Church Cemetery, the cemetery actually predates the church, which was established in 1908.

Beginnings: The Hatfield family

The first burial at Norma came in September 1895, when Mary Hatfield Thompson died at age 69. She was the wife of Henry Thompson, and a member of one of Norma’s first families — the Hatfields.

Born in Kentucky, Mary was the daughter of Joseph Hatfield and Elizabeth Gibson. (This is not the same Joseph Hatfield who was a Revolutionary War veteran and later moved to present-day Scott County.)

Not a lot is known about Henry and Mary. In 1850, 25-year-old Mary lived with her parents in Campbell County, along with siblings Keziah, George, James, Joseph, Louisa, Elizabeth, Andrew and William, ranging in age from 27 to 4.

Mary and Henry were married on July 11, 1853 in Campbell County. She was listed as “Polly” in the marriage records.

After that, she next showed up in census records in 1870 Scott County, when she and Henry lived with her older sister, Keziah (or Kissiah), and two children, John Parton (age 10) and Mary Parton (7). By 1880, the family had moved to Clinton in Anderson County, with Keziah still living with Henry and Mary. It appears Henry and Mary never had children.

Whatever became of Henry, he was not buried at Norma.

As previously mentioned, the Hatfield family was one of Norma’s earliest families. A bit deeper into Norma is the Hatfield Cemetery, where many of them are buried. Joseph Fowler Hatfield, Mary Thompson’s father, was originally from Kentucky before moving to Norma in the 1830s. Joseph “Fowler” Hatfield Jr., Mary’s brother, was Scott County’s sixth sheriff, serving from 1874 to 1876. A Joseph F. Hatfield — likely the same Fowler Hatfield who served as sheriff — was the first postmaster at Skull Bone when the post office was established in December 1878.

Another of Mary’s brothers was James Hatfield (1834-1929). He married Lucretia Low (1839-1925) in 1854. She was the granddaughter of Mikel Low, the first settler of Scott County. One of their grandchildren — an infant boy — was the second person buried at Norma in July 1897. He was the son of John Franklin Latfield (1859-1917) and Kissiah Jane Boshears (1866-1937), who were married in 1884. Like many other members of the Hatfield family, the infant boy’s parents are buried at Hatfield Cemetery.

John and Kissiah — “Kizzie,” as she was known — had a number of children who lived long lives: Ulysses, Narcissus, Cynthia, John, Lucretia, Elizabeth, Cora Lee, and George.

But the birth of their ninth child in 1897 began a string of hardships for the family. Their 10^th child was Clifford Odell Hatfield, but he died in 1902 just before his second birthday and was buried at Norma. They had another infant child buried at Norma in 1903 (and more buried at Hatfield Cemetery in 1908, 1909 and 1912).

The Byrd family

The Byrd family was another of Norma’s first families. In fact, when the New River Lumber Co. came to Norma in the late 19^th century, the land holdings it purchased were referred to as “The Byrd Lands” (or “Bird Lands”).

Scott County’s Byrd family dates back to William M. Byrd Sr., born in 1804 in Buncombe County, N.C. He is buried at Fairview Cemetery. He was the son of Jordan Delk (1756-1810) and Martha “Patsy” Bird (1775-1831). He had a brother, Joseph Bird (1807-1894) who also moved to Scott County and is buried at Fairview. So did Jesse Byrd (1802-1882). Still another brother, John Byrd (born 1799) made the move to Scott County, as well. A sister, Isabella Bird Cook (1811-1861) moved to Scott County for a time, as well.

William Byrd married Elizabeth Shoopman (1806-1871). Their children included Martha Adkins, Farrell “Bratcher” Byrd, William Byrd Jr., Jesse “Baldy” Byrd, Riley Byrd, Elizabeth Adkins, Oliver Perry Byrd, and Zachariah Byrd.

Jesse Byrd married Nancy Shoopman (1803-1888). Their children included John Byrd, Joseph Byrd, Thomas Byrd, Peter Byrd, Mary Ann Byrd, Burton Byrd, Mary Jane Riseden and Nancy Epperson.

Joseph Bird married Mourning Cross (1807-1872). Among their children were Mary Pickard, John Bird, Wiley Bird, and others. However, Joseph did not move to Scott County until after his children were grown and his wife died.

John Byrd did not marry.

One of the earliest burials at Norma Cemetery was an infant who was born and died in November 1900. The child’s parents were Eddie Byrd (1875-1957) and Louisa Hatfield (1876-1958). Eddie was the son of Zachariah Byrd and Sintha Marcum, making him William Byrd’s grandson. Louisa was the daughter of James Hatfield and Lucretia Low, making her the niece of Mary Hatfield Thompson, the first person buried at the cemetery.

“Shird” Byrd was buried at the cemetery in December 1902, at age 38. It is thought that his real name was Sherwood. He was the son of William Byrd Jr. and Sarah “Linda” Adkins. He married Rachel Phillips in 1883. She was the granddaughter of Joseph Phillips (1787-1881), who made the move to Scott County as a teenager in the early 1800s with his brother (Thomas Phillips) and the family of Revolutionary War veteran Abraham Goad.

Oliver Perry Byrd was buried at the cemetery in May 1904, at age 40. He was Shird’s brother. He married Manerva Elizabeth Hatfield (1868-1955), who was a great-granddaughter of Joseph Hatfield and Elizabeth Gibson. They had a number of children, including James Henry Byrd, William “Berry” Byrd, Kizzie Jane Wright, Parzida Rector, John Ramsey Byrd, Burnettie Phillips, Flara Linda Jeffers, and Ada Cross. Most of their children are buried at Antioch Cemetery or Riverview Cemetery.

Later in 1904, the infant son of James Henry Byrd and Parzida Hatfield was buried at Norma — Oliver Perry Byrd’s grandson. James and Parzida were married in 1903. He later married Daisey Belle Reed.

In 1914, Perry Byrd was buried at the cemetery when he died at age 37. He was the son of Jesse Lawson Byrd (1842-1904) and Elizabeth Ann Burk (1850-1910). Jesse Lawson Byrd was the son of Isabella Bird (1811-1861), one of William Byrd’s siblings who made the move to North Carolina. She eventually married William Cook (1803-1863) but had several children prior to their marriage. Jesse Lawson was a son with Jacob Lee Lawson (1824-1891). Jacob Lee’s father — Jesse Lawson Byrd’s grandfather — was Revolutionary War veteran David Lawson, who was part of the migration to Scott County with the Abraham Goad caravan.

The mystery grave

In 1907, someone was buried at Norma Cemetery with a large, flat cement slab covering their grave. There is a Masonic symbol on the slab, and the initials “N.R.,” with the dates 1835 – 1907.

No one knows who this N.R. was, though it seems likely that he was relatively well off, perhaps one of the newcomers to Scott County working with the lumber mill at Norma.

For reasons unknown, burials at Norma Cemetery ceased for a while at this time. There had been nine people buried at the cemetery between 1895 and 1907, but only one other person was buried between 1907 and 1936 — Perry Byrd, in 1914.

A Lora Holmes (or Laura), daughter of Pete Holmes, was said to have been buried at the cemetery in 1932. If she was, it was an unmarked grave. Lora Holmes appears in Pete Holmes’ residence in the 1930 census as a 19-year-old daughter. Pete’s real name was Commodore, and he was a coal miner from Grundy County, Tenn. who died in Indiana in 1957. His wife was Myrtle Holmes. He lived in Campbell County when the 1910 census was taken, moved to Harlan, Ky. by 1920, and was back in Scott County by 1930.

When Lora (Laura) died in August 1932 at age 24 in Knoxville, her death certificate states that she was buried at “Norma, Tenn.”

Also said to be buried at the cemetery in an unmarked grave is Linda Sue Burchfield, a baby who died in 1936.

The Hughett family

In 1941, a baby named Lowell Fredric Adkins was buried at Norma when he died less than a month before his first birthday. He was the first person buried there in nearly 30 years — except, perhaps, graves that weren’t marked in 1932 and 1936. His parents were Earl R. Adkins (1917-1992) and Christine Lowe (1924-1953). His mother was buried at the cemetery 12 years later.

James Hughett, 19, was buried at the cemetery in January 1942 after dying of paresis. He was the son of Freeman William Hughett (1889-1967) and Johanna Marie Hansen (1896-1963), who are also buried at the cemetery.

The Hughett family was originally from Bull Creek. Allen Hughett, the son of William Hughett (1813-1865) and Jane Jeffers (1808-1905) married Nancy Goad, the daughter of Robert Goad (1803-1872) and Mary Brown (1806-1890). One of their children was James “Jim” Hughett (1854-1920), who married Mary “Polly” Phillips (1858-1944) in 1875. She was the daughter of Jeremiah Phillips (1837-1918) and Malinda “Lindy” Delk (1838-1910), and a sister to the Rachel Phillips Byrd already mentioned in this story. Jim and Polly’s children included Jeremiah Hughett, Allen P. Hughett, Malinda Belle Hamblen, Thomas Granville Hughett, Freeman William Hughett, Sherman Hughett and Winfield Scott Hughett.

Freeman William Hughett married Johanna Marie Hansen (1896-1963) in 1915 and they made a life for themselves at Norma. Johanna was from Norway, the daughter of John A. Hansen and Severine S. Hansen. The Hansen family sailed from Liverpool, England to the U.S. in 1913, arriving in Boston, Mass. in October 1913. It was in Massachusetts that Freeman and Johanne were married two years later, in October 1915. How they met isn’t clear, but Freeman had left Scott County to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces as a young man. In 1910 he was stationed in Washington State.

Following their marriage, Freeman and Johanne returned to Scott County and lived at Bull Creek for a while before moving to Norma. Freeman started as a timber-cutter, rose to become a salesman in the lumber company, and eventually owned his own business. Their children included Elmer Lee Hughett (1916-2008), Robert C. Hughett (1918-2006), Margaret Ruth Cranford (1920-2007), James A. Hughett (1922-1942), John Arthur Hughett (1924-1995), William H. Hughett (1929-1931), Ralph Freeman Hughett (1932-1961), and Mae Esther Summers (1935-2015).

Freeman was buried at Norma in 1967, and Johanna was buried there in 1963.

The cemetery today

The most recent person buried at Norma Baptist Church Cemetery was Angela Lloyd, just last week. She was the 47-year-old daughter of Jimmy Ray Lloyd and Ilene Lawson. Her mother was buried at the cemetery in 2020.

Other burials at the cemetery in 2025 include Billy Ray Silcox and James Whitney Watson, both of whom died in January.

Billy was a U.S. Army veteran from Norma. James was a deacon at Mill Branch Baptist Church. His wife, Nadine Vann Watson, was previously buried at the cemetery in 2022. His mother, Lottie Marcum Watson, was buried there in 1992.

The cemetery has been particularly active in recent years. Other recent burials include Delmer Lee Sexton and Janetta Jeffers Lawson in 2023; Wilma Washam Sexton, Jackie Wayne Lloyd, Cheryl Adkins Strunk, Bernadene Botts Lawson, and Dennis Lynn Sexton in 2022; Susan Owens Lloyd and Christina Monique Lazarou in 2021, and Willard Gross Jr. in 2020.

--

Lowell Adkins, 1940–1941
Kenneth Austin, 1929–2007
Pearlie Ford Austin, 1903–1991
Robert Austin, 1939–2018
Henry Bunch, 1868–1956
Nancy White Bunch, 1871–1944
Linda Burchfield, 1936–1936
Darrin Byrd, 1969–2017
Infant Byrd, 1900–1900
Infant Byrd, 1904–1904
Infant Byrd, N/A–N/A
Oliver Byrd, 1864–1904
Perry Byrd, 1877–1914
Sherwood Byrd, 1864–1902
Artie Byrd Chambers, 1892–1945
Divine Chambers, 1885–1970
Fred Dougham, 1932–2003
Eva Hutson Foust, 1905–1989
Horace Foust, 1896–1964
Joe Foust, 1945–2015
David Graham, 1959–2007
Willard Gross Jr., 1955–2020
Clifford Hatfield, 1900–1902
George Hatfield, 1827–N/A
Infant Hatfield, 1902–1903
Infant Hatfield, 1897–1897
Leah Hatfield, 1961–2018
John Hines Jr., 1942–1942
Lora Holmes, N/A–1932
Freeman Hughett, 1889–1967
James Hughett, 1922–1942
Johanna Hansen Hughett, 1896–1963
Clara Watson Hutson, 1924–1995
Joe Hutson, 1917–1989
Cloris Hutson Jeffers, 1921–2014
Floyd Jeffers, 1914–2002
Malinda Lloyd Jeffers, 1894–1972
William Jeffers, 1892–1972
Marsha Ruth Sexton Jones, 1943–1994
Autha Coker Lawson, 1916–2009
Berlin Lawson, 1911–1995
Bernadene Botts Lawson, 1966–2022
Bertha Silcox Lawson, 1965–2013
Curtis Lawson, 1915–1980
Janetta Jeffers Lawson, 1940–2023
Mitchell Lawson, 1909–1977
Pernie Lawson Lawson, 1913–2011
Ralph Lawson, 1958–2015
Shirley Lawson, 1937–2013
Daniel Lay, N/A
Christina Lazarou, 1984–2021
Kenneth Lee, 1915–1984
Myrtle Jane Lloyd Lee, 1927–1996
Angela Lloyd, 1977–2025
Danny Lloyd, 1964–1968
Elidee Davidson Lloyd, 1943–2001
Ernie Lawson Lloyd, 1909–1994
Ilene Lawson Lloyd, 1949–2020
Jackie Wayne Lloyd, 1953–2022
Ray D. Lloyd, 1941–2009
Shadora Lloyd, 1993–1993
Susan Owens Lloyd, 1961–2021
Wiley Lloyd, 1904–1981
Hezekiah Lowe, 1922–1987
Mildred Lowe, 1927–2009
Jerry Murley, 1946–2018
William Murley, 1955–1995
Pearl Bunch Phillips, 1890–1955
Shirley Foust Phillips, 1937–1989
Thomas Phillips, 1885–1953
N. R., 1835–1907
Christine Lowe Reed, 1924–1953
Berlin Sexton, 1911–1987
Delmer Sexton, 1941–2023
Dennis Sexton, 1954–2022
Elizabeth Thomas Sexton, 1922–2010
Leonis Sexton, 1913–1985
Wilma Washam Sexton, 1944–2022
Laura Marcum Sharp, 1915–1981
Quinton Sharp, 1948–2016
Billy Silcox, 1943–2025
Cheryl Adkins Strunk, 1964–2022
Mary Hatfield Thompson, 1826–1895
Denoren Watson, 1932–1986
James Watson, 1942–2025
Lottie Marcum Watson, 1903–1992
Nadine Vann Watson, 1942–2022
Shirley Winnie, 1981–1981

See past “Sacred Ground” cemetery profiles on the Encyclopedia of Scott County.

Thank you for reading. Our next newsletter will be The Daybreaker bright and early Monday morning. If you’d like to update your subscription to add or subtract any of our newsletters, do so here. If you haven’t yet subscribed, it’s as simple as adding your email address!

◼️ Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
◼️ Tuesday: Echoes from the Past (stories of our history)
◼️ Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
◼️ Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
◼️ Friday: Friday Features (beyond the news)
◼️ Sunday: Varsity (a weekly sports recap)

Subscribe now

Located off Gib Griffith Road in the Slick Rock area of Brimstone, the A.J. Robbins Cemetery is a small, peaceful burial ground on a knoll overlooking Brimstone Creek and the old railroad that once ran through this valley.

Only 15 people are buried at the A.J. Robbins Cemetery, but it remains active. Several people have been buried there in the 2000s — including one just two years ago.

The Robbins family

A.J. Robbins was Andrew Johnson Robbins, named for the U.S. senator and future president who had left a favorable impression on Scott County.

Johnson visited Scott County, along with Congressman Horace Maynard, in June 1861 to urge people here to vote against disunion. Four days later, Scott Countians voted against secession by the largest margin of any county in Tennessee: 521-19. Johnson then urged President Abraham Lincoln to send federal troops into East Tennessee to liberate the pro-Union region from the grips of the Confederacy.

The result of Johnson’s urging to Lincoln was the organization of Camp Dick Robinson in eastern Kentucky, near Danville. The first federal army base south of the Ohio River, it was built for the purpose of raising a 10,000 man army and training them before launching an invasion of Scott County and East Tennessee. Many men from Scott County and the rest of the eastern portion of the state went to Camp Dick Robinson to enlist and join the fight.

Although he didn’t enlist at Camp Dick Robinson, one of those who enlisted was A.J. Robbins’ father, William Robbins (1832-1863). He lived in the Slick Rock area of Brimstone and was instrumental in the formation of the Scott County Home Guard in December 1861. He and 70 other men met at the Scott County Courthouse in Huntsville and pledged an oath of loyalty to the Union and each other, and Robbins was the first man to affix his signature to the paper.

In response, a regiment of Confederate soldiers under the command of Col. John C. Vaughn — a former sheriff in Monroe County, Tenn. — arrived at Brimstone Creek on April 1, 1862 searching for Robbins. What resulted was the Battle of Brimstone, a skirmish at Robbins’ home that left the Rebels defeated and a few men dead on either side.

Following the battle, William Robbins formally enlisted in the Union army and was commissioned a captain in the 7th Tennessee Infantry, which was being organized in Huntsville by Col. William Clift of Chattanooga. The 7th Tennessee was routed by Confederates at the Battle of Huntsville in August 1862, and after spending a few months rooting out guerrillas who were raiding and looting in the North Cumberland region, the soldiers were ultimately reassigned to outfits in Kentucky. It was in Lexington, Ky. that William Robbins fell ill with typhoid fever and died on April 16, 1863, at the age of 30.

A.J. Robbins never knew his father; he was only six months old when William Robbins died. His mother, Lucinda Lewallen — daughter of Joel Lewallen (1803-1892) and Rachel Sue Taylor (1798-1892) — lived with and had several children with John Hughett (1824-1908), a prominent Brimstone man who served 44 years as a justice of the peace (now known as county commissioner). John’s sons, Jasper Hughett and Frank Hughett, had married the daughters of William and Lucinda Robbins; Jasper married Vicie and Frank married Amanda. Like their father, the Hughett brothers were well-known in south Scott County. Jasper was a businessman and merchant in Robbins, and Frank was elected sheriff of Scott County.

It is written that Robbins — which was first a railroad depot, and then the town that sprang up around the depot — took its name from A.J.C. Robbins, a man who may have worked on the railroad. We don’t know if that’s the same A.J. Robbins as Andrew Johnson Robbins of Brimstone Creek, but it seems likely that it was from this family that the town of Robbins took its name.

The Robbins family had come to Scott County with A.J. Robbins’ grandfather, Michael Robbins, who married Mary Lewallen, daughter of Anderson Grant Lewallen and Lydia Rice of Glenmary. Michael was born in Virginia in 1781. His father was believed to be John Robbins (1741-1834). There’s some question about the lineage, with some family trees indicating that John Robbins was born in Wales and others indicating that the family had actually been in the American colonies — settling in New Jersey — for a couple of generations by the time John Robbins was born. Either way, John Robbins moved south to Virginia, and from there his son, Michael, came on to Tennessee.

Once they arrived at Brimstone Creek, the Robbins family flourished. Vicie and Manda — the sisters who married the Hughett brothers — both died young. (Vicie is buried at Hughett Cemetery near Slick Rock; we don’t know where Manda was buried.) Dr. Horace Maynard Robbins (who wasn’t William’s son, but was one of Lucinda’s sons with John Hughett) served as a superintendent of schools but eventually left for Oregon. (Incidentally, Congressman Horace Maynard had also visited Scott County with Sen. Andrew Johnson in June 1861, and in the process lended his namesake to another of the Robbins boys.)

But it was with A.J. Robbins that the family legacy really cemented itself in southern Scott County. A.J. married Julia Ann Hughett (1861-1937) in 1881. She was the daughter of William Alexander Hughett Jr. (1836-1913) — a brother to John Hughett — and Sarah Marie Delk (1835-1918). They had 13 children. (Capt. William Robbins had a brother, John Robbins, whose son, Melton James “Mitt” Robbins, was elected Scott County Judge and later served in the state legislature. Mitt and A.J. were first cousins.)

The cemetery begins

The A.J. Robbins Cemetery off Gib Griffith Road is believed to have started with the burial of Melton Robbins in 1891. He died in infancy, and was the eighth of A.J. and Julia Ann’s 13 children.

There wasn’t another burial on the small knoll until A.J. died in January 1923, at age 60. His wife, Julia Ann, was also buried there in 1937.

A couple of other burials took place at the cemetery between the deaths of A.J. and his wife: Opal Robbins, a two-year-old child, was buried there in 1927, and 34-year-old Joseph L. Robbins was buried there in 1933. Joseph was A.J. and Julia Ann’s son, and Opal was his daughter. Joseph, who married Arphia Long and had four children, was killed by a gunshot wound to the stomach.

Other children of Joseph and Arphia included Theodore J. Robbins (1920-1969), Ralph Lee Robbins (1923-2013), and Walter Riley Robbins (1927-1988).

Rufus Monroe Robbins was buried at the cemetery when he died in July 1947 at age 66 of a heart attack. He was also the son of A.J. and Julia Ann., who had married Essie Lawrence Jones (1894-1982). She would later be buried at the cemetery, as well. They had a son, Harold Virgil Robbins (1912-1969) who is also buried at the cemetery, as is his wife, Vera Bell Barnett (1921-2008), and an infant son, Richard Gaylon Robbins.

Horace Maynard Robbins (1901-1955), son of A.J. and Julia Ann, was buried at the cemetery in 1955. He had a son, Vernon Ray Robbins, who died in 1956 at age 10 and was also buried at the cemetery.

The cemetery today

Glenna Mae Robbins West was buried at A.J. Robbins Cemetery in 2006 when she died at age 62. She was the daughter of Silas Kermit Robbins, and the granddaughter of Rufus Monroe Robbins. She first married Claude Henry (1937-1978), who is buried at Slick Rock Cemetery. Following his death, she married Billy West. She had a total of 10 children. At the time of her death she had 35 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. She had a brother, James Kermit Robbins, buried at the cemetery in 2015.

The most recent burial at A.J. Robbins Cemetery was Glenna Mae’s son, Tracy Aaron Henry, in November 2023. He was 49 when he died, and was survived by five children and six grandchildren. He was a second-great-grandson of A.J. and Julia Ann Robbins.

Tracy A. Henry, 1974-2023
Andrew Johnson Robbins, 1862-1923
Essie Jones Robbins, 1894-1982
Harold V. Robbins, 1912-1969
Horace M. Robbins, 1901-1955
James K. Robbins, 1945-2015
Joseph L. Robbins, 1899-1933
Julia Hughett Robbins, 1861-1937
Melton Robbins, 1891-1801
Opal Robbins, 1925-1927
Richard G. Robbins, N/A-N/A
Rufus M. Robbins, 1891-1947
Vera Barnett Robbins, 1921-2008
Vernon R. Robbins, 1946-1956
Glenna Robbins West, 1944-2006

See past “Sacred Ground” cemetery profiles on the Encyclopedia of Scott County.