Abraham Dillow & Hester Perkins Family part I

Grandma Dillo's mother, Mary Jane, was a single mom and the story goes that she met a rich man from England. When she told him that she was going to have a child, he told her that his parents would not allow him to marry an Indian girl from American and he went back to England - never to be heard from again.  So my Grandma Dillo was born on April 12, 1884, not knowing her father.  Great-Grandma Dillow had another son out of wedlock but he knew his father - they even claim one other as father and son. The son kept Great-Grandma's last name of Perkins.  Great-Grandma's father, Lewis, was part Choctaw - a member of the tribe of Muskhogean Indians - who lived in Southeast Tennessee. Family tradition says when Lewis was 2-1/2 years old and he raised by a Perkins. Then when Lewis was 34 years old, he nearly cut his left foot off in an accident chopping wood for a furnace company in Kentucky on March 6, 1857.  Lewis had a son from his first marriage who he left with a couple when he moved and got married again.  After he hurt his foot, he went and brought the boy to help him raise his family of eight children. Lewis' daughter, Phoebe, thought he was just lazy but being an Indian was not easy - they were very poor.


Lewis' 8 year old son, Ep (whose birth name was James) earned most of the money to support the family working on a farm as a laborer *all of this information found in National Archives records under James E. Perkins.*  Ep died on November 11, 1863 during the Civil War in Brashear City, Louisana. He was in the Union Army, Company 22, Reg's Ky. Inf. mustered in at Grayson, Ky. on Oct. 25, 1861 as a Private. He was 18 years old, 5'6" high, dark complexion, blue eyes, dark hair and was a farmer by occupation.


"Ep was missing in action on December 29, 1862 at Chickasaw Bluffs, near Vicksburg, Mississippi and listed as a deserter. He was on the muster list for August 1863. So he was missing for 7 months. Ep died from a kick in the abdomen by a Negro after Ep instigated fight. six days later Ep died of acute peritonitis. When he died he had as possessions, 1 pair trousers, 1 flannel shirt, 1 pair of boots, 1 knapsack, and one silk pocket handkerchief [ old]," per National Archives records on the Civil War. His father then applied for a pension as a dependent of James Epson Perkins.


Grandpa and Grandma Dillo met and got married on January 13, 1901 in Grayson, Carter, Co. Kentucky when Abe was 21 years old and Hester was just 16 years old.  In the year 1919, my grandparents moved from Greenup, Kentucky to Lorado, West Virginia on Buffalo Creek. My grandparent’s moved a lot for people who had to pack up everything they owned and move it by horse and wagon. While still in Kentucky, five of Hester's nine children died and she didn’t want to lose any more of her children so she said to my Grandfather that if she stayed in Kentucky she wouldn’t have any children left. They moved to Lorado, West Virginia with the four surviving children: Oma, Steve, Lewis (named after my great-great-grandfather) and Woodrow. My father, Wilbur, was born after they moved to Lorado. When he was six months old, in 1920, my grandparents moved to Chapmanville, WV. Oma was married and also lived in Chapmanville - a couple of houses away from them - with her husband, L J. Oma was 16 yrs old when she married L.J. and she had her first child when she 17 years old.


Rumor has it that while they lived in Chapmanville, Grandpa Dillow got into a fight with another man and kill him. My Aunt Hannah said Grandpa had to leave home, walking across the mountain to Tennessee where he stayed for almost a year before he came back home. Back then when you killed someone all you had to do was leave the state and stay away for awhile, then when you got home just change your way of living and the deed was forgotten.


By the time my dad was two years old, my grandparents moved back to Lorado, WV, where they had two more daughters; Hannah, and Eloise. Then in 1925, they moved to Omar, WV and gave birth to their daughter, Wanda. Lastly, they moved again in 1927 to Landville, WV where their son, Richard, was born.


My grandparents had total fifteen children with ten living to become adults. Their first child, Burdick, was believed to have died due to an overdose of "worm" medicine. He was between one or two years of age. The fifth child, a boy, was stillborn and the sixth child, Retta, was believed to have died by an accident. A story is passed down that when Oma was making popcorn for Retta, age 4, she apparently climbed up on a chair and fell into the fireplace catching her dress on fire. Lucy and Dixie, the seventh and eighth children respectively, died due to high fevers and sickness.


Grandma Dillow named her fifth daughter after her mother-in-law, Hannah Dillow. My aunt Hannah said that her mother always thought her mother-in-law was a witch and that she put a spell on Dixie, the last child to die, when she touched her. My aunt goes on to say, that Dixie wasn’t sick until her Grandma came over to her house and ask to see the baby. She walked over to the crib, put her hand on the baby, and after she left Dixie took sick and died.


We thought the reason why my Grandma Dillo believed that her mother-in-law didn't want her son to marry was because grandma was Indian, but Grandpa Dillow clear that up when he said her being Indian had nothing to do with it as his mother was Indian herself.  Grandpa Dillow told us it was because my great-grandma thought, at sixteen years old, grandma was too young for marriage. On December 16, 1911 my great-grandfather, Stephen, was struck by a C&O passenger train and killed instantly.  Great-grandma lived another six years after his death.


Somewhere between 1927 and 1930, Grandpa and Grandma Dillo moved to Dehue, West Virginia to Rum Creek Junction which everyone just called Rum Creek hollow. They had one more child while living at Dehue, a daughter they named Hope.



Grandma Dillo changed the spelling of their last name by dropping the "w" off of Dillow because she kept getting Dillon mail. Their children didn’t put the "w" on the grand-children's last names, except for Steve - who we called Uncle Bud - he kept the correct spelling for his children. The rest of the grand-children's last names are spelled Dillo.  Aunt Hannah took me over to see Uncle Bud (Steve) before he died. He told me how glad he was to see me, said that he didn’t expect to see any of his brother's, Wilbur, girls before he died. He was on an oxygen machine and could only stay off long enough to say hello.


My father, Wilbur, started to work for the coal mine in 1932 when he was thirteen years old with his father and three older brothers to help bring some money into the house and feed the family. Aunt Hannah said that they only worked one or two days a week during the Depression. After the Depression was over, my Grandpa Dillow went back to farming for other farmers but his four sons stayed to work in the coal mine. Their youngest son, Richard, never became a coal miner. He went to school and became an electrician.


When Uncle Richard and his wife, Lilly, had been married for awhile they found out that they could not have children. By then, my Aunt Eloise was having a hard time feeding her six children, and she had a few siblings that didn’t have any children - or as in my father’s case didn’t have a son - so Aunt Eloise gave Uncle Richard a daughter, who they named Glenna Lou, when she was born.  Five years later, my Aunt Wanda let them have her son, Alex, when he was about two months old. Uncle Richard and Aunt Lilly took their family and moved to Charleston, West Virginia where Uncle Richard fell from a telephone pole. After he got out of the hospital, they moved back to Logan but he was in so much pain that he never worked again. Uncle Richard started to drink and became an alcoholic so his wife divorced him.  They gave Glenna Lou back to Aunt Eloise when she was about 9 years old but kept Alex for a while longer but then gave him back to Aunt Wanda when he was about six years old. Alex always held it against my Aunt Wanda that she gave him away in the first place but his siblings told him that it was the best thing that could have happen to him; what did he want to do: stay and go hungry like the rest of them?  My Uncle Richard lived with my Aunt Hannah for a while but she threw him out because of his drinking.  Uncle Richard died at the age of thirty-nine from alcohol abuse and at the time he was living with Aunt Wanda.


We went to see my Uncle Lewis before he died because I had to ask him a question about a story I heard when I was a young girl about him and his first wife, Maude. It had been a rumor in the family that he divorced his wife shortly after they got married because she chewed tobacco. I wanted to know if this was the truth (because I didn’t think this was a good enough reason). He laughed and said there were other things involved besides her chewing tobacco. He told me a story about his and Maude’s daughter, Ellen.  It seems Ellen and a girlfriend were walking up Rum Creek Road when Uncle Lewis and a friend drove by in a car and had seen these two nice looking girls, they stopped and ask them if they wanted a ride.  Ellen said yes and they got in - Ellen was about thirteen - Uncle Lewis said he asked them their names and Ellen replied that her name was Ellen Dillo.  That, of course, got his attention and he asked her who her parents were? And when she said that Maude was her mother, he knew that he had a daughter for the first time. Previous to this he had no contact with Maude so he no idea he had any children.  He then went on to tell me how Ellen was visiting him and taking good care of him since his second wife, Missouri, died. His first wife, Maude, never got remarried and she lived up Rum Creek all her life. She's related to the Lowe's so she buried in Lowe's cemetery on Kelly Mountain.

Rum Creek Hollow

Rum Creek Hollow is about 15 miles long, it's off of Rt. 10 and as you travel up the holler the coal camps are as follows: Dabney, Dehue, Hutchinson, Orville, Chambers, Argyle, Yolyn, and Slagle. I was born in Macbeth where the owner of the mines was named Macbeth, and then my father changed jobs after I was born. We moved to Orville and lived there until I was five years old but then my father change jobs again and we moved back to Macbeth but by this time a man with the last name Hutchinson had brought the mines, so that's why the place is known by both names, Macbeth-Hutchinson, however, Macbeth just seems to stick with the old timers. It's on the West Virginia map as Hutchinson.

The Dehue school went from first to eighth grade; after eighth grade everyone had to catch the school bus and go to Logan for high school. First time I ever used a inside bathroom toilet was when I was six years old and at the Dehue school which boasted a boy's bathroom and a girl's bathroom. I don't know if the other schools had inside bathrooms, however, the school at Cham had an outhouse. There were six commodes in a line and one for the teachers with a wall around it for private use. The older girls would slip in and use the private one.  There was no sewage system so the pipes from the bathrooms emptied out into a creek which ran along the school.  If you stood on the creek bed, you could see where it was draining out into the creek.  Dehue school also had drinking fountains>which was new to me, so I was always making an excuse to get a drink.  This one time, I was getting a drink and the principle came down the stairs which was beside the fountain.
                   "Girl! What are you doing out here in the hallway?" He scared me so bad that I stood there and wet on myself.  I don't remember what happen much after that.

The black children that lived up Rum Creek Hollow had to catch a school bus where they had to cross a bridge and go out of the city - we called this section of Logan Black Bottom but its real name was Guyana Dot.  As far as I know all the black children in Logan County went to this school and it's now a collage.

Dehue has nothing on the land now - the approximate one hundred homes, school, soda fountain, cemetery, post office, church, doctor's office, movie house, and club house where they held meetings for the girl and boy scouts - are all gone.

There were also about fifteen homes in Chambers. They had a two-room schoolhouse that went to fourth grade and no indoor plumbing, if you had to go to the bathroom you used an outhouse in all weather. To get a drink of water you had to go outside where there was a pump.  You had to pump up and down before the water would come out, this usually it took two children to get a drink of water, one to pump and one to catch the water with the cup that hung from the pump. Everyone shared the same cup and the same germs. 

Argyle had about seventy-five homes, Hall’s Beer Garden, Lowe’s grocery store/beer garden, a movie house, an ice cream soda fountain, a Company Store with post office - all of which are gone. However a few years ago, a few homes and the church that we went to were still standing.

Yolyn had over a hundred homes, a Company Store with post office, a schoolhouse that went to fifth grade, and movie house all of which is no longer there.

Slagle had a schoolhouse which went to sixth grade, it set up on left hand side at bottom of Lowe's Mountain. There was also a Company Store with post office, a church, and about one hundred homes.

Past Slagle was what we, up Rum Creek hollow, called Lowe’s Mountain. It was called l Lowe’s because the Lowe family is the only ones that lived upon the mountain. The mountain's official name is Kelly Mountain. The coal mines kept the road in good condition for it was a short cut for their coal trucks to get across the mountain leading to the coal mines on Buffalo Creek. You can by-pass a lot of bad mountain roads if you were going to Charleston or Man but most everyone was going into Logan. And hardly anyone ever used Lowe’s Mountain as it was a dirt road and only two cars could pass one another, there were some places you couldn't pass another car. It had a 3,500-foot drop or more over the side if you should go off of the road. After you got to the top of the mountain, you came to Lowe’s cemetery, then as you are going down you come to a fork in the road where left goes to Blair and right goes to Buffalo Creek. This is the mountain that the West Virginia coal mines wars were fought on in 1920-1921. My Grandma Francis told me that the non-union men tried to come over Lowe’s Mountain to get up Rum Creek to the coal mine. She said there were some men killed and the government had to call in the West Virginia National Guards.

There are very few homes up Rum Creek now and only one Huge - a coal washing mine in Hutchinson where all the other mines send their coal to get it washed. It is called Alma Coal Mines, so now I guess the place would be called Alma's.

Bridge to get to Dehue School from Hutchinson.The school bus 
dropped children off here
that they pick up at Argyle past Macbeth-Hutchinson.

                                       

This is the water pump that my cousin saved when 
 they tore down the two room school house.

Living in the Coal Camp

Coal miners were mostly white men. "By the year 1913, of the more than 70,000 miners in the state, 14,506 of them were Negroes...32,612 were white Americans." (Reports of Mine Inspectors, 1913, pg. 15). Their wages, as of 1913, were 48 cents per ton of coal. The annual wage for a pick miner was $737.62.

Since most of the mines were located too far from towns, the coal companies built their own homes, Company Store, a church, and a post office. The miner’s family was to get what they needed by shopping at the Company Store. He was paid in not in real money but in money called "scrip" which could be spent only at the Company Store. The earliest coal scrip [tokens] dates back to about 1883. Each mine had its own scrip symbols on the tokens and one Company Store wouldn’t take scrip from a different company store, nor could you spend scrip in the city of Logan where the stores only took cash. The company own everything and deducted from the miner’s pay; electric, housing, food, furniture, doctor, and clothing. They would give the miner three dollars in cash every Wednesday which was deducted from his pay as well. If you needed cash before Wednesday, I recall a store in Logan that would give you seventy-five cent on a dollar for your scrip money.

Samples of script money

The best way to describe Hutchinson company store is that it is like a super Wal-Mart, but a lot smaller, with gas pumps in front. The Orville Company Store was different inside - everything was lined up against the walls with a counter in front and you had to hand a list to counter person or ask and she would get you what you wanted. You couldn’t touch anything unless you brought it first. At Orville Company Store their post office was also inside the store. I had only been in two stores in both Orville and Hutchinson so maybe our store in Hutchinson was the one that was different. I do know that the Hutchinson store had the only post office that had it's own building away from the store. The post office was at the mouth of Macbeth hollow.

Each miner was given a card that he gave to his family to use in the store, for food or anything else that the family wanted to buy. You had to go to a window in the store, hand the card over to the office clerk, and tell them how much scrip that you wanted to draw from the miner’s pay. They would write that amount on the card, this way the miner could keep count of how much of his pay was being spent. It usually was how much that you were going to spend on food that day. This card was known as a scrip card and was about 4"x 8" long. Every payday the Company would issue a new card.

If the scrip card showed that the miner spent more than he made then it was carried over to the next two weeks pay. That's why the miner was always in debt to the Company Store. The Company Store would never refuse to give a miner scrip for food but they would limit him to three dollars scrip a day and still give him three dollars cash on Wednesday until he caught up to his pay. All this meant was he would get no paycheck on payday. But if the miner’s family didn’t use the scrip card at the Company Store, or draw out any of his pay, or used very little of his pay then he would get in his pay envelope cash instead of scrip. I've seen my Dad’s pay stub once: his salary was sixty dollars, don't know if that was for one week or two, which was a good pay check in the early fifty’s. I told my father that was a lot of money, Dad said that it was a shame that he got very little of the check on payday. More than one miner, would get next to no pay in his envelope because his family had taken all he had earned during the two-week pay period to live on. My Dad always manage to get a paycheck. He would start to holler at all of us if his pay was getting low, he made Mom stop buying at the company store.

The Government disallowed the Mines to pay the miners in scrip coins after 1960's. This meant was that for some miners, like my parent's who were always depended upon the coal company for everything, it was the first time they were responsible for their own housing, food, and any other bills. My parents didn't know how to handle their life after the mines closed; they didn't know how to pay bills until they were forced to learn much later after we moved to Ohio.

The coal companies built homes for their miners out of lumber with sheet-rock inside and wood siding on the outside, then painted them all white. The house had no indoor plumbing. Each home was set on cinder blocks about 2 1/2 feet off of the ground so that the water, which ran off of the mountain and into the creek, would not flood the homes. There were three different types of houses in a coal camp; two, three, or four rooms. Some homes had two floors with two rooms on the first floor and two on the second floor. Dehue had we called double homes which had a family living on each side of the house, this is close to the row homes in the cities today. In each house there was a fireplace in every room for heat except the kitchen which had a coal-cooking stove. In two of the rooms (bedrooms) there was a clothes closet, we called them presses. 

The only reason you could tell which room was used for the kitchen was that it had a coal stove with table and chairs. Usually there was an upright kitchen cabinet, a bucket of water with a dipper, and a dishpan sitting on another table which was in a corner or up against the wall. In the latter part of the 1950’s some families had an electric stove and a refrigerator. We did have a refrigerator but it had nothing in it but the baby’s milk (my youngest sister's) and Mom's pop. Before the refrigerator we did have an ice box that set out on the front porch, the ice man would come once a week and put a block of ice in it for a price. The ice didn't cost much, however, I don't remember exactly how much. In the summer months we use to run behind the ice truck and grab the small pieces of ice or when he stopped the truck he would chip us all off a piece so that we would leave him alone and quite following him.

There wasn't always a house available for some of the miners and some of the camps had a boarding house where single men, who didn’t have families, lived. If you were a new hired you had to put your name on a list to get a house and wait for the next available home. The company would send men around every couple of years, usually when it got as black as coal dust, to spray paint your house white - all the Company homes were white.

The company took good care of their houses; if you had a broken window all the the miner had to do is to stop on his way to work, report it, and someone would be out to fix it that same day. The same thing went on for inside the house. The Company hired carpenters just to fix the homes.

Dehue school went from the first grade to the eight grade and took scrip from all the mines for lunches and school pictures. Lunches only cost fifteen cent then and when I first started school, at the age of six, Mom would give my sister and I the scrip card and tell us to stop at the Company Store as we pass by to take fifty cent out of Dad's pay for lunch and a snack to eat on the way to school. We would leave the card with the clerk and she would pick it up later. We always share with our friends who didn't have anything to eat but that soon stopped when we had moved up Macbeth hollow and didn't pass the company store anymore plus the mines slow down. I think I was about eight when I started getting lunch free. The mines was only working two or three days a week then and we were living on three dollars a day and we couldn't afford to buy our lunch at school. Dad didn't want us to take any money from his check so he would get a pay check.

If the miner was married and had a growing family, he probably was in debt with the Company Store to provide for them. To supplement for food, most married miners were allowed to clear and plant a garden on the side of the mountain if they wanted. My father planted one - not every spring, mind you. It was too much work to cut down trees and clear a space large enough for a garden.

The Company also built a club house where the miners gathered for their union meetings and vote. When election day came the miner’s would treat it like a holiday, everybody would gather at the club house while men would stand outside by the door and give every adult a pint of Old Kentucky whiskey while asking them to vote for their candidate. I heard Mom say once that she took the whiskey, went in, and voted for whom she wanted. No one was going to bribe her! By the end of the day everybody was happy and drunk. 

At Hutchinson, the doctor’s office was located on the second floor of the clubhouse. The coal camps were independent of each other, some of the coal mines up the hollow had already close down and gone out of business, but there were still five mines up Rum Creek hollow open, I think Orville was the last mines to shut down.  Each mine employed between two hundred and three hundred miners and they had their own company doctor.  You were not allowed to go visit a doctor for help if your father didn’t work for those mines. The doctor would refuse to see you. The doctor’s office looked like a drugstore where he had all the drugs on hand that he would need to take care of anyone. If he needed to come your house, he carried a black bag full of drugs and needles to give you a shot.  If a miner or a member of his immediate family took ill and died, the Company paid to have them bury on their land that they had set aside for a graveyard.  Later I'll tell you about several times the doctor came to our house. It seems like he always came to see me.  The miner would have the doctor expense deducted from his wages. Dad threaten me and told me that I had better stop going to see the doctor so much, I always stop to see the doctor when I wanted to get out of school that day. I didn't know that they were writing it down and my Dad had to pay for it, I thought it was free. I always had a good excuse; I'd cut my arm, or had an infection, or a sore throat - that was always a good one.

The miners walk to work, there was no place set aside for parking cars at the mine, if a miner did own a car they left it at home.  My uncle Noah worked at Orville and lived in Logan, so he always drove to work and took a bath before he went home.  If they didn’t live in the coal camp and had to drive to work they had to leave the car at the bathhouse. Not many of the miners lived outside of the coal camps, I only know of my uncle Noah and that was because my aunt Belva didn't like living in the coal camp. There was only about three cars at our end of Hutchinson and two telephones.  Some of the men like to have cars so they could visit their families that lived off of the hollow or go shopping in Logan instead of at the company store. Our neighbor, JB, who lived four houses above us had a car and if we had an emergency Dad always ask him to take him where he had to go.

It was hard for a miner to get all the coal dust off of his skin, the only part about him that wasn’t cover in coal dust was the whites of his eyes and some miners would pay two dollars a week to take a shower before they went home. Counting our house there were two homes where miners could pay to take a bath in Macbeth that I knew about. I will get into how we got a bathhouse and running water in our house later as it's a long story.  We never help the miner take a bath,only a miner's wife help him, or he was on his own.  He would come at 6:30 am and change from his day clothes into his miner's uniform and then be back at 3:00 pm to take a shower. Before we had a bathhouse, my mother always had hot water ready for my father when he got home from the mines. She would have the tub sitting in the kitchen and when he came in she would help him take off his mining clothes and give him a bath.

The mines always blew a whistle at the start of work, at lunch time, and quitting time but if it blew any other time the families knew that there was trouble.

To get a clear picture of what a coal camp looks like picture the sea shore with the sand everywhere, well that is the same for a coal camp, except coal dust is everywhere and everything is black.

The summer time in a coal camp was loads of fun for kids. We played from morning to bedtime when our parents call us in to wash up with water which had been heated on the coal stove and we always listened to the radio shows before we went to bed. We never complained to our parents that there was nothing to do, we always found something to do nor did we ever find ourselves bored.  I don’t ever remember seeing an overweight kid in camp. We played games or climbed the mountains; we exercise the fat right off of our bodies.  The first thing that Mom would say in the morning, when she let us outside to play, was to watch out for the rattlesnakes. Snakes was the only life threatening thing for us but there was a lot of other mishaps that we could get into like falling into sink holes or breaking a bone from swinging on a grape vine from tree to tree.  We couldn’t afford insect spray in those days, or there was none to buy because it hadn’t been invented yet, so Mom made her own insect repellent which worked just as good.  She would set a rag on fire, smother it, and just let the rag smoke -  that seemed to keep the bugs away.

Logan Court House burnt down in 1960. A more modern one was rebuilt.       

My father drove a buggy train like this one to bring the

coal up out of the mines. He had a brakeman who rode the last car to help him
stop the train and keep it on the tracks.

                                         

Growing Up in a Coal Mining Camp

coal camp

   Dehue coal mines    

Dehue Hollow after you go under the coal mines

               

  Dehue Grade school

The house where my sisters and I grew up in Hutchinson (1951--1959)

I was born April 18, 1941 in Logan, West Virginia in Hutchinson up Rum Creek Hollow just before World War II. I decided to write a blog and tell others a little about my home town, and what it was like to be a coal miner's daughter growing up in a coal camp. My family got tired of me telling them about my life so one day my husband said since we are all tired of listening to you talk about your life why don't you write it down, and I thought why not...so here is my life as a coal miner's daughter:


Logan, Logan, Co., West Virginia


Logan County was created from Cabell, Giles, Kanawha and Tazewell counties by the Virginia Assembly on January 12, 1824. Logan is a small town but today there is not much there, the buildings are still standing but most are empty. Someone came in bought up the town and moved all the stores to a Shopping Center on Corr-G, which is Rt. 119 between Charleston, WV and Williamson, WV. My mother's parents moved to Rum Creek Hollow from Beauty, KY in 1925 where Mom went to eighth grade at Dehue school. My father's parents moved from Ashland, KY to Buffalo Creek in 1919 then moved around to different parts of Logan, Co. They moved to Dehue in 1929 and Dad went to work for Dehue Mines at the age of 12 yrs.old. My father went to Dehue school for only two years, he was in fourth grade when he stopped and went to work for the coal mines.

In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Logan was a booming coal town. The population in 1940’s was 67,768 and at its highest in 1950’s was 77,391 persons. After the coal mines shut down in 1957 the population was less than 37,710. People started to move to bigger cities to find jobs and feed their families.

The streets of the town always had a crowd of people going to and from the stores and theaters. Today the population in the town of Logan is 2,206. I never went into Logan by myself until I got in high school, I remember when i was 7 yrs old i got to ride in my cousin's, Buster, new first car - a 1940's Chevy Coupe.

My mother's mother lived across the creek from our house up against the mountain and her house was the only one over there so my mom would make my sister or me spend the night with her. Grandmaw would always talk to me and tell me stories; so this one night she told me about a woman who donated the land that our courthouse sets on. She made one condition to the donation in the 1800's, that there is to be no more men hung from the tree that sets on the front lawn of the courthouse. My Grandmaw said there was a lot of men hung from that tree. (The new courthouse doesn’t have any lawn).

When there was an affair, like judging a contest going on… people would gather in front of the Courthouse. I can recall a particular Halloween night when my sister, Shirley, and I was out with a group of other kids to see what trouble we could get into because it was all mischief for us, no one gave out candy...anyway mom had come looking for Shirley and me (I was 13 and Shirley was 16.) up the hollow. When she found us; Earl, who was a friend of both my parents, stopped his car (only because mom was with us) and was telling us about this contest that they were having in Logan at the Courthouse for best costume and he ask if we would like to go and watch. We all got in his car and went to Logan to watch the contest, we didn't have a costume on ourselves.

The public buses run regular up every hollow so it was no trouble to get to Logan to do your shopping and home again. It cost a nickle to ride the bus to Logan, but you had to have cash which most people didn't have. I remember this one time when I took the bus when I was about 11 years old and my mom was taking me to Logan to visit her sister, there was this lady breastfeeding her baby, she was sitting there with her boob uncover in the baby's mouth. This was not a shock for me, I had seen many women breastfeeding the same way, it was just that she was sitting behind the driver and it was the first thing I saw as I was getting on. In those days, all the colored people had to go to the back of the bus and on this particular crowded bus there was a fat colored lady, she had a bunch of chickens with her that she was taking somewhere. The other passengers where getting upset with her because the chickens were making a lot of noise so they were hollering back and forth at one another, however, most of the people on the bus were ignoring them.

It will be a shame to let the city of Logan fall into ‘ruins.' So many memories will be gone for those of us that were born and raised there. Already most of the coal camps and small towns have disappeared. But there is a lot of others things that we didn’t have in the 50’s that are there now… like fast foods and Laundromats. And a great many thanks should go out to the group of people that are trying to make Logan into a tourist town, and I know that everyone past and present is hoping that they succeed.

I also went to Logan high school the first year that it opened in 1957 on the Island. It is called the Island because that is where the Indians first settle when they first came to Logan and water runs all around the land. The school was bigger than our other high school it had to be because it was the first high school in Logan in which black and white children went to the same school from grades 9-12. Because I didn't have no money of my own or food that I could take for lunch, I would leave school at lunchtime and walk around the streets in Logan. I always stopped at the fence of Courthouse to look at the two Indian graves that were buried in the yard. I like to go and look at their headstones and wonder what kind of life they had and if there was really Indians buried there - one of the graves stone had name Aracoma she was an Indian Princess and the daughter of Chief Cornstalk, her life is similar to Pocahontas.

Speaking of graveyards, Logan County is the burial site for Devil Anse Hatfield, one of the family leaders in the famous feud between the Hatfield s and the McCoy. Devil Anse Hatfield and my uncle were good friends, I will talk more about them later on.

Logan has a new (to me) state park, that they call Chief Logan State Park, that wasn’t there in the 50’s and I ask my Aunt Belvia, what used to be there and she told me it use to be Henlawson Hollow. The Park took up most of what used to be the hollow. A lot of kids that I went to school with in Logan came from Henlawson, that was a big hollow but now a lot of the homes were gone. But it is one of the most beautiful Parks that you will find in any state.

There is a statue of Chief Logan in the Logan Park and at the bottom of the status is written a letter that he wrote after his family was murder.
"I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan's cabin hungry and he gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked and he clothed him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan remained idle in his cabin, an advocate of peace. Such was my love for the whites that my countrymen pointed at me as they passed and said, "Logan is the friend of white men." I had even thought to have live with you, but for the injuries of one man, who the last spring in cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relatives of Logan, not even sparing my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it, I have killed many. I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbor a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one."

He was later believed to have been killed by another Indian over a disagreement.