Echoes in Time: Big South Fork's first settler, Richard Harve Slaven
There's much we don't know about him, and much of what has been written is disputed. But Richard Harve Slaven is believed to have been the first permanent settler of what we know today as the BSF.
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The 125,000-acre Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area is largely a wilderness area today, but it wasn’t always that way. This rugged region was once home to hundreds of hardy people who carved out a way of life in the unforgiving landscape surrounding the Big South Fork River — mostly by subsistence farming, which is to say they truly lived off the land, although industries like logging and mining came later. Some of them lived on the tabletop plateau lands outside the river gorge, but most lived in the gorge, along the river or one of its major tributaries, where the soil was fertile and more suitable for growing.
The largest river settlements were the No Business Creek community and the Station Camp Creek community. Richard Harve Slaven is believed to have been the first person to permanently settle on No Business Creek, sometime around the year 1800 or shortly thereafter. Jonathan Blevins is often credited with being the first person to permanently settle on Station Camp Creek, though that is almost certainly untrue.
Dewey Slaven, the great-grandson of Richard Harve Slaven, died in 1960 and was the last person living at No Business Creek at the time of his death. In the 65 years since he died, the remnants of the No Business community have slowly faded into the landscape from which the community originally sprung. But for more than 150 years, and across four generations, this community was a thriving place — once swelling to more than 200 people, and complete with a church and school and even its own baseball team. It symbolized the people and a way of life that defined the early years of Big South Fork Country.
The early families
The earliest families of Big South Fork were the Slavens, the Burkes, the Hatfields, the Smiths, and regardless of when their patriarch arrived at Station Camp from Rock Creek in southern Kentucky, the Blevinses. Other families came later — like the Kings and the Millers and the Sweeets and the Roysdons. Today, more than 200 years after Richard Harve Slaven first settled at No Business, many families in Scott County and in surrounding communities trace their ancestral heritage to those first families.
This is by no means an exhaustive history of the Big South Fork’s earliest settlers, but it’s an abridged attempt to explain how settlement came to this remote corner of the northern Cumberland Plateau. We’ll start with Richard Slaven, and continue with some of the other families in next week’s newsletter.
The Slaven family
As detailed in last week’s Echoes in Time newsletter, Richard Harve Slaven is one of the earliest permanent settlers of what would become Scott County, Tennessee, although it’s impossible to quantify who, exactly, came first.
There’s much about Slaven’s life that we don’t know. His parents are usually stated as John Slaven and Elizabeth Jane Graham of Rockingham, Va. If true, his mother may have been only about 14 when Richard was born.
There are several “facts” about Slaven’s origin that are in question. For example, he’s often said to have been a Revolutionary War veteran. But it’s also stated that he was born in 1775. Both of those things cannot be true. And as Larry Slavens points out on his genealogy website, there’s evidence to suggest that Slaven may have been born even later than 1775, perhaps 1777.
It's almost a certainty that Richard Slaven did not fight in the Revolutionary War. Part of that confusion may come from the fact that he was granted land on the Big South Fork River from Bear Creek to Parch Corn Creek. Many of the old East Tennessee land grants were awarded for Revolutionary War service. However, land in the Big South Fork region was granted by the Commonwealth of Kentucky for mining salt peter. If you know your local history, you’ll know that the areas of Station Camp and No Business were supposed to be in Kentucky but wound up in Tennessee thanks to the faulty Thomas Walker Line. Ownership of this area was disputed until the state legislatures of Tennessee and Kentucky struck a deal in the early 1820s.
It has also been written in local history books that Richard Harve Slaven made the move to No Business Creek in the late 1700s. That’s also almost certainly untrue. He married his wife, Susanna Mable Mounts, in Gerrard County, Ky. in September 1798.
Meanwhile, Slaven’s large land grant on the Big South Fork River wasn’t filed until 1817. So, broadly, it appears he made the move to present-day Scott County sometime between 1798 and 1817. But when exactly?
The most comprehensive history of Richard Harve Slaven comes from The Richard Slavey Chronicles that were compiled by Lanny Slavey. Thanks to his work, we know that Slaven owned 200 acres of land near present-day Somerset, Ky. in 1798. He sold it to Robert Henderson in 1799, but was still listed on a Pulaski County, Ky. tax list in 1800.
The first time Slaven appeared in Wayne County, Ky. (which the communities of Station Camp and No Business were long considered to be a part of) was 1801, when he received a 150-acre land grant.
It was 10 years later, in 1811, that the first mention of the 1,000-acre Big South Fork land grant is found in court documents. It was petitioned for by Slaven and a man named John Francis, for the purpose of mining salt. Some written histories suggest that Francis discovered salt brine at Slaven’s homestead in 1807, and that Slaven was at that time living near the confluence of Big South Fork and Bear Creek.
As part of the conditions for the land grant from the Kentucky legislature, Francis and Slaven had to produce 1,000 bushels of salt. They accomplished this in 1817.
At some point between 1817 and 1821, Slaven and Francis sold the 1,000 acres to Martin Beatty, who contracted with two men named Marcus Huling and Andrew Zimmerman to drill a salt brine well at Oil well Branch near the river. It was in December 1818 that the two men accidentally struck oil, leading to the establishment of what is commonly called the first commercial oil well in the United States. This well was likely located on property that Richard Harve Slaven originally had an interest in. It’s also likely that it wasn’t the first commercial oil well in the U.S., but it was certainly one of the earliest.
As a side note, the discovery of oil — which at that time wasn’t known to have commercial value — prompted Beatty to give up on the well. He instead turned to a career in politics. Huling and Zimmerman changed their focus to attempting to barrel the oil and get it out of the river gorge — and legend has it that this is how the Devils Jump rapid at Blue Heron, Ky. got its name, although that’s best saved as a story for another day.
None of this explains when exactly Richard Harve Slaven moved to No Business, though it seems to help pinpoint it to sometime between 1811 and 1817.
It has been written that Slaven built a cabin on Tackett Creek, which is a tributary of No Business Creek several miles west of the Big South Fork River. It has also been written that his cabin resembled a fortress more than a home, with rifle slits for windows.
In the 1820 census, Slaven is listed as being head of household with 15 persons in the home. They had at least 13 children: Rebecca, Mary, Sarah, William, James, Jonathan, Ruth, Absolom, Alexander, Elisha, Pleasant, Andrew, and Nimrod.
In 1820, a marriage license is found for Mary Slaven and Elisha Blevins. Sarah Slaven, meanwhile, married Anderson Smith — one of the earliest settlers on Station Camp Creek — in 1830. Rebecca may have married John William Strange in 1831.
Richard Harve Slaven died in 1840 and was buried in the community cemetery at No Business, which today is known as Nancy Smith Cemetery. This fascinating cemetery is located a short distance from the confluence of Tackett Creek and No Business Creek. There are almost no commercial stones in the cemetery. A small field stone in the northeast corner of the cemetery is engraved with the initials “R.S.” and the year 1840.
Several decades later, in the early 20th century, heavy rains prompted a mud slide that unearthed some of the burials at the cemetery. The remains were reinterred on the ridge above No Business Creek, leading to the start of the Terry Cemetery.
Fast-forward to the year 1960. Dewey Slaven never married, and lived with his sister on No Business Creek, almost directly across the road from the Nancy Smith Cemetery where Richard Harve Slaven was buried.
As historian H. Clay Smith wrote in Dusty Bits of the Forgotten Past: “As to Dewey, himself, and his sister, they never budged from home until the last six months of his life, when he went to Stearns, Kentucky, for medical treatment, dying there while under the doctor’s care. Neither he or his sister was ever married and it is said that they could live from one year to the next without the help of anyone. They lived in the house where their father had been born and where they grew everything they ate, except salt, coffee and flour. He came to Oneida only about twice a year and then, mostly, to get sweet tobacco and the news, as he called it. They had no radio, television or any form of communication with the outside other than those who might go there on fishing or hunting business. If you should have drifted by their house, you would have found no people more friendly or hospitable than these two; whether you were relative, friend or stranger, you were welcome to their well rounded meal, as it is called, and to as many meals and nights’ lodging as you desired; and without charge.”
Dewey Slaven was the son of Nimrod Slaven and Millie Roysdon, both of whom are buried at Terry Cemetery (where Dewey Slaven is also buried). Nimrod Slaven was the son of Elisha Slaven, and Mary “Polly” Sweet. Elisha Slaven was the son of Richard Harve Slaven and Susanna Mounts.
The Scott County Court kept a voting precinct at No Business Creek open until Dewey Slaven’s death in 1960. When he died, the valley first settled by his great-grandfather was once again vacant. A few other hardy souls remained in other parts of Big South Fork Country, but for all intent and purpose, the settlement era of this rugged landscape was over. In 1974, a bill passed by the U.S. Congress established the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area.
In next week’s Echoes in Time, we’ll take a more comprehensive look at the early settlers of the Big South Fork. As always, you’re encouraged to help complete the historical record by emailing any corrections or other information you have access to.
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◼️ Monday morning: The Daybreaker (news & the week ahead)
◼️ Tuesday: Echoes in Time (stories of our history)
◼️ Wednesday: Threads of Life (obituaries)
◼️ Thursday evening: The Weekender (news & the weekend)
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