The Big Sandy

Carol Crowe-Carraco

• Editorial: The University Press of Kentucky
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813188980
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

The Big Sandy River and its two main tributaries, the Tug and Levisa forks, drain nearly two million mountainous acres in the easternmost part of Kentucky. For generations, the only practical means of transportation and contact with the outside world was the river, and, as The Big Sandy demonstrates, steamboats did much to shape the culture of the region. Carol Crowe-Carraco offers an intriguing and readable account of this region's history from the days of the venturesome Long Hunters of the eighteenth century, through the bitter struggles of the Civil War and its aftermath, up to the 1970s, with their uncertain promise of a new prosperity. The Big Sandy pictures these changes vividly while showing how the turbulent past of the valley lives on in the region's present.

1

THROUGH A RIVER THRESHOLD

Roll on forever, Sandy waters roll!

Jesse Stuart, “Leaves from

Plum Grove Oak”

WITH THE BIG SANDY River Valley of Kentucky as our destination, B.C. and I left my family’s northeast Georgia home and wound our way up the southern Appalachian chain to Blacksburg, Virginia. While such a route was a roundabout way for two central Kentuckians to reach the eastern section of the commonwealth, we wanted to start out near the headwaters of the Sandy where many of the area’s first explorers and settlers began. Thus Blacksburg, once the Draper’s Meadow where Shawnee captured pioneer heroine Mary Ingles, serves the modern traveler admirably as a jumping-off point.

To the west and northwest of Blacksburg is the Big Sandy River Valley, approximately 190 miles long and 80 wide. Shaped like a cornucopia, it is located between the Blue Ridge Mountains on the east and fertile Bluegrass region of Kentucky on the west. The basin is drained by the Big Sandy River and its two tributaries, the Tug and Levisa forks. Here in the Appalachian plateau where the borders of Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky come together lie the headwaters of both forks. They rise no more than twenty miles apart and both flow in a northerly direction on parallel lines, being at most times only twenty-five to forty miles apart until their confluence at Louisa.

The terrain is rugged and the traveler is confined, for the river dictates the way one must travel. Over most of the area the main streams and their many tributaries flow in deep, narrow, sinuous valleys between steep, winding, forested ridges. Ribbonlike roads coil up the valleys and over the hills, railroads cling tenaciously to the riverbanks, and houses and mobile homes are perched on high hillsides.

In fact it was this ruggedness that gained the territory between the forks for Kentucky. Instructed by their respective governors to establish the main fork as the boundary between Virginia and Kentucky, a joint commission met in Louisa in 1799 to determine which was the larger tributary. Far from home in an almost unpeopled wilderness, wet and weary as darkness fell, and warmed only by the potent spirits they carried in abundance, the commissioners agreed that the eastern fork, the Tug, was obviously the larger since it was deeper and wider than the Levisa.

During the rainy night the Levisa, having a greater tributary plain, expanded to its actual proportions, dwarfing the Tug Fork. Arising the next morning, the group was greeted by the sight of the larger, rampaging west fork. But, according to Big Sandy historian Henry Scalf, like true Kentuckians and Virginians they chose to ratify while sober what they had agreed upon while drunk. Thus Kentucky gained approximately 1,300 square miles of territory. Big Sandy humorists persist in saying that if the commissioners had remained sober, Prestonsburg would today be in West Virginia, as would all the east bank of the Levisa Fork. In this light, while Kentucky might have been spared years of fraudulent land claims, the commonwealth would have lost numerous valuable mining sites in Pike County and much severance tax revenue.

Likewise the rugged topography was a major factor in the location of game trails and Indian routes through the valley. Not far from the Big Sandy headwaters were the Warriors’ Path and its branches—the Big Sandy Trail and the Shawnee Trail. Over these, generations of Mound Builders and their warrior brothers hunted, traded, and raided in days gone by. After them the white hunters and early settlers slowly pushed into the valley, groping their way in a strange and often hostile wilderness.

Today an extensive network of two-lane roads covers Kentucky’s Big Sandy region, and railroad transportation is provided along the main stream, two forks, and principal tributaries by the Norfolk and Western Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. But even so it would take half a summer to see the region and still there would be many hidden hollows and unsuspected valleys.

A three-hour car trip over U.S. 460 from Blacksburg through the vicinity of the headwaters brings B.C. and me to Kentucky proper. Our trail is a mountain road which twists and turns, climbs sharply, and drops abruptly. Our admiration for those early people grows with each mile. Densely wooded mountain slopes crowd in on both sides of the road. The aura of the past permeates our thoughts. In 1799 the Kentucky General Assembly created Floyd County, and from this base all or parts of eighteen Kentucky counties have since been carved. Very little effort is needed to imagine this land as virgin territory, unchanged since America’s early youth.

We are romanticizing, of course, for the land is not that remote. There is the paved highway itself to keep one’s perspective firmly in the twentieth century. Basketball goals adorn many of the trees along the sides of the road. At various twists in the highway are coal tipples and surface mine sites. Railroad coal cars pulled by diesel engines carry the “black gold” north to Catlettsburg, Ashland, and beyond. Rolls Royces, Cadillacs, and expensive sports cars share the road with coal trucks. Smoke stains the sky as the funeral pyres of junked automobiles and piles of discarded coal and slate burn fiercely. Even this far-eastern section of Kentucky is not totally deprived of civilization’s mixed blessings.

While we cannot see it, to the northeast is the Big Sandy’s Tug Fork, which for ninety-four miles forms the boundary between West Virginia and Kentucky. Tug Fork’s major tributaries are the waters of Pond, Big, Wolf, and Rockcastle creeks. All of these have headwaters not far from the Johns Creek tributary of the Levisa. Approximately 100 miles of the Tug was navigable in years gone by, but the navigation season was shorter than that of the Levisa. Not only did the east fork rise more quickly after a rain, but it also ran out more quickly, leaving little time for steamboat and pushboat activities. Along the banks of the Tug, the hills are high, rocky, and steep, many of them unsuited for cultivation.

Along our car route, the Levisa Fork’s winding course has a network of fourteen tributary streams each with a drainage area greater than fifty miles. Just to the southwest is the most important tributary, Russell Fork. Following a winding course, it has carved out a gorge through the Cumberland Mountains and created the Breaks. This tortured serpentine channel is over five miles long and 1,600 feet deep with craggy rock walls. In the gorge the river falls 450 feet in a succession of frothing rapids, pools, and bends. Tradition has it that Jonathan Swift’s fabled silver mines were located in this area. Today Breaks Interstate Park counts the silver of the tourist trade.

Soon after Russell Fork breaks through the mountains near Elkhorn City, it is joined by Elkhorn Creek, which heads at Pound Gap, the scene of John Fox’s Trail of the Lonesome Pine. The mining town of Jenkins, once considered a Consolidated Coal Company model, is on Elkhorn Creek. Below the mouth of Russell Fork, Shelby, Island, and Mud creeks flow in from the south. A bit to the east is Fishtrap Lake, a 1968 flood control project of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, with an abundance of bluegill, black bass, and trout.

U.S. 460 takes us to Pikeville located in a horseshoe bend of the Levisa, which is being redirected to give the town growing room. Here four important highways come together to form a crowded prosperous hub where the traveler finds it difficult to get overnight accommodations because representatives of coal and oil interests have inundated the region. Pikeville, today a town of many coal millionaires, became famous before the turn of the century because of the notorious Hatfield-McCoy feud. A few miles east of Pikeville is the Blackberry Fork of Pond Creek where the cabin of feudist Randall McCoy stood. Continuing across the dividing ridge, another crooked road descends Hatfield Branch to the Blackberry Creek of Tug Fork and the Hatfield country of West Virginia.

In Pikeville our road merges with U.S. 23, the Mayo Trail named for the local coal magnate and philanthropist John C. C. Mayo. This road, which bisects the valley from north to south, has long been the major artery of the area, and once in the days before the superhighways it was considered the shortest and most direct route between the Great Lakes and Florida.

We wind along its two lanes between a cordon of low hills to Allen, where Beaver Creek pours its waters into the onrushing Levisa. While Beaver is a short stream, its two main tributaries, Right Beaver and Left Beaver, reach like long slender fingers into and on beyond the southern portions of Floyd County. On Otter Creek, a feeder to Left Beaver, is the mining town of Wheelwright. To the west on the Caney Fork of Right Beaver stands Alice Lloyd College at Pippa Passes. Here on the fringe of the Big Sandy is one of the most unusual and successful experiments in Appalachian education. Alice Geddes Lloyd, with her “right hand,” June Buchanan, and others have fashioned a school where the ironclad rule of admission is desire to learn, not ability to pay. Today this small junior college is becoming known for its excellent collection of Appalachian materials gathered in its oral history project.

B.C. and I follow the Mayo Trail northward through Floyd County. Branching off from the paved highway squirm narrow gravel roads. If one penetrates them deeply enough, the mountains grow wilder, houses disappear, and the country is nearly deserted. But deer hunting is good, and ruffed grouse and squirrel are plentiful. Bears and wildcats may still roam these hills. Although difficult to reach, this area affords ideal conditions for hikers and backpackers.

Another bend in the river, and the road brings us to Prestonsburg, the oldest town in the Big Sandy and the scene of tremendous activity during the steamboat era. At the beginning of the Civil War the town was a rallying point for eastern Kentuckians who sided with the Confederacy; later, for a short while, Union Colonel James A. Garfield made it his headquarters. Nearby are the battlefields of Ivy Mountain and Middle Creek. To the southwest of Prestonsburg, clinging to the side of a deep ravine, is the mining town of David. Before coal days it was a salt lick, and here Daniel Boone spent his first winter in Kentucky in 1767-1768.

Continuing north from Prestonsburg toward Paintsville, the road follows the narrow bluff along the river bank as the Levisa is joined from the east by Johns Creek and Millers Creek. As the valley widens, we pass the Blockhouse Bottom, site of Mathias Harman’s first lodge built in 1755, almost twenty years before a similar construction was erected at Harrodsburg. To this same site and a later stockade, Jenny Wiley followed her dream to safety. A few miles to the east is Jenny Wiley State Park adjoining the Corps of Engineers’ Dewey Lake. Built for flood control in 1949, the 1,100 acre reservoir, abounding with bluegill and crappie, offers excellent recreational facilities and is easily accessible from many places in Kentucky.

As we travel through Floyd County, B.C. points out numerous small family cemeteries located on the tops of hills in order to conserve the level bottomland for agricultural purposes. Occasionally the private graveyards include small roofed structures resembling bandstands. There are not a great number of them, and they are unique to the mountains. B.C. reminds me of an Indian summer afternoon spent on Mare Creek in the home of contemporary Big Sandians Henry and Nora Scalf and their story of Aunt Alice’s August Meeting. Near the Scalf’s home is a family cemetery where a memorial service for “Aunt” Alice Scalf’s husband (Henry Scalf’s father, William) has been held for the past sixty-six years. Each year since 1912 the service has begun with the hymn “A Twelfth Month Has Rolled Around Again/Since We Last Met to Worship on This Ground,” which is followed by a sermon. The service concludes with a large family dinner.¹

Heading on northward, we come to Paintsville, where a historical marker attests that Dr. Thomas Walker reached this site on June 5, 1750. He called the tranquil green river the Louisa, for the Duke of Cumberland’s wife, but time and common usage corrupted the name to Levisa. On the bank of the river Walker found evidence of an abandoned Shawnee village site and of the prehistoric Mound Builders’ tenure in the valley. He must have been amazed to see the red and black symbols painted on the barkless trees. In 1938 archaeologists from the University of Kentucky excavated on the property of the C & O Railway in Paintsville and found the mounds to be burial places containing bones and copper bracelets belonging to the Adena Culture which flourished between 800 B.C. and 800 A.D.

Soon we arrive at Louisa where the Levisa and Tug forks come together. Here an abandoned old jail bears a historical marker stating that it was the birthplace of Supreme Court Justice Fred Vinson. Through Louisa to the east traveled Confederate General Humphrey Marshall in his retreat from Kentucky. The remains of the Union fortifications are still to be seen on top of Fort Hill overlooking the town. A unique bridge connects Louisa with West Virginia. The structure was once featured in the old Ripley “Believe It or Not” column because one can get off and on it in the middle since it crosses both the Levisa and Tug forks. It was billed as the only bridge in the world that spans two rivers, connecting three bodies of land, two states, two cities, and two counties.

Outside Louisa the highway does not follow the river, but winds through the hill country where green stalks of corn surround the neatly painted farmhouses in the bottomlands. Along the sides of the road coal-filled railway cars wait to move on to their destination. For twenty-seven miles the Big Sandy forms the dividing line between Kentucky and West Virginia. Many small tributaries and one large stream—Blaine Creek, which furnished a large part of river commerce in pioneer days—join the river along the route.

As we near Catlettsburg, smoke from the Ashland Oil and Refining Company fills the air. Catlettsburg, today a sleepy little town, was once a busy trading post with the greasy odor of rawhides a familiar smell on the waterfront. Following the Civil War, the timbering industry soared, and Catlettsburg roared. Front Street consisted almost entirely of saloons. Now the wharf is only an expanse of mud bank. The flood wall practically obliterates the main street, and the citizens have resigned themselves to living in a virtual suburb of Ashland. But here is the mouth of the Big Sandy, and here the river loses itself in the course of the Ohio. Along with B.C. and me, a deserted picnic area and small boat landing are the only observers of the end of a journey that began so many tortuous bends to the east—the only ones to “hear today the Sandy River laughter.”²

In the course of the trip through mountains and hills the Big Sandy and her two forks, the Tug and the Levisa, along with a maze of tributaries, have drained a land basin of 4,283 square miles. As America’s historic rivers go, the Big Sandy is definitely in the small range. But like all rivers the Big Sandy flows through time as well as space. And her time journey has been incalculably longer and more devious than any map can show. In fact the Big Sandy serves as a microcosm of much of the fluvial culture of the United States and a mirror of events in the commonwealth of Kentucky.

2

KENTUCKY’S LAST FRONTIER

God Almighty, what a place
for a man to live in!

Saul Pattern in

Harlan H. Hatcher,

Patterns of Wolf pen

LIKE THE RIBS in a papaw leaf, the Big Sandy River with its Levisa and Tug forks and tributary creeks veins the easternmost section of Kentucky. The river is both inviting and forbidding, inescapable and beautiful. The spring rains swell it beyond its banks and send it muddy and churning over the countryside. The summer droughts calm it into a drowsy rivulet of lazy green tranquility. The valley of the Sandy is an isolated area. It is penned in on the west and east by rows of rugged hills, guarded on the south by the Cumberland ridge of the Appalachians, and protected on the north by the lure of the great Ohio River and its level land. As the surrounding territory was conquered and cleared, the Big Sandy River Valley preserved its pocket seclusion until the latter part of the eighteenth century. Explorers, hunters, and late-arriving pioneers directed the development of the fluvial culture of this area, which Henry Scalf fittingly enough called “Kentucky’s Last Frontier.”

There have been numerous claims made, most without documentation, concerning the first white man to enter the Big Sandy. While some have said he was a sixteenth-century Spaniard, it is more likely that he was a Frenchman or an Englishman, caught up in the western interior exploration movement of the seventeenth century. In 1674 Gabriel Arthur of Virginia, while traveling with a Cherokee war party, must have crossed the Big Sandy near its mouth to reach a Shawnee village on the southern shore of the Ohio River. In 1699 colonial New York Governor Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont, must have had access to scouting reports in the area, for he made reference to the Toteroy Indians on the Big Sandy River of Virginia. Almost half a century later, in 1742, John Peter Salley and the two Howard brothers had to float past the mouth of the Sandy on their Kanawha-Ohio-Mississippi water route to New Orleans. But the significant early contacts were the ones sponsored by two Virginia land companies, for these led to further exploration and settlement of the ...