A Spirits Travelogue

Occasionally, some of my readers of Spirits in the Field or Bright Wings to Fly have asked me for pictures of Pike County, Kentucky or of Greasy Creek. They say they would like to see the field where Elisha Hopkins had his final grand party in 1860 to celebrate the successful cotton crop, the same celebration where he had the vision of death and devastation that the Civil War would bring them. They say they would like to see where Elisha was when the Indian boy frantically ran to him, to announce that the Union Army was advancing through Pike County in its mission to destroy the Virginia saltworks that were sustaining the entire South in 1864, and where the same lad came to tell him of his brother’s death. The field is still there, much changed, of course, and changing still. But nearly all of that era is gone and has been gone for 140 years.
 
Even the coal town that was built on Greasy Creek a half-century later is gone, and only bits and pieces remain, but there is enough left to tell the stories. I published Wings to tell the Civil War stories I did not have enough room to tell in Spirits, which dealt more with an intractable government that refused to afford me the simple decency I felt my family graves required. I suppose I won that struggle, in a fashion, but there is no way I can win the next one. With the odious practice of mountaintop removal destroying entire mountains daily, it often seems that even the spirits of my people will abandon us for what is happening to the hills.
 
In my next book, scheduled for publication in 2008, I hope to bring back the era of the old coal towns because, like the Civil War era, it deserves remembrance. It was a dangerous life, with men going into the mountains to remove the coal that their ancestors once owned, but it was a good life for my people. For a while, there was prosperity, something that had been lost to the mountaineers since the War took it away, but even that promise was ultimately unfulfilled, when the mine closed and the town disappeared.
 
In all my books, I tell the stories of my family, the family I essentially ignored for most of my life, but the stories also of the region itself, of all the families of this branch of the Appalachians that was cursed with rich veins of coal that continue, to this day, to be both the reason and the bane of our existence. Greasy Creek was one of the first places in Kentucky to suffer from mountaintop removal, back when no one anticipated entire mountains disappearing along with the hollows they sheltered, but now the practice has devastated Southern West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, parts of Southwestern Virginia, and is now threatening East Tennessee. It is the preferred method of extracting coal, but it is not mining.
 
There is a strong sense of fatalism among all Appalachians, but in the coal mining areas it is even more pronounced; coal miners have always known that any day they enter the pits could be their last day on earth. But today, fewer and fewer men are going underground to mine coal; the trend now, probably unstoppable, is to blast away the entire mountain to get at the coal seams. There are few real coal miners anymore; they have largely been replaced by heavy equipment operators and blasting experts. The camaraderie of men who were at war with the mountains, who fought them just as soldiers fought America’s wars, is no more, and the old soldiers, the miners of yesterday, now sympathize with their former enemy as it falls to a final, ignoble defeat.
 
This column will be posted on Labor Day, at a time when huge celebrations used to be held in Pike County and other coal mining places to honor those who worked underground. The celebrations are no longer held on such grand scales here, and rarely anywhere else; there are few coal miners left to attend. People take weekend trips instead, to visit family or to look for scenic places to visit in the last holiday before fall. Here is a Labor Day trip my readers can take without leaving their seats

Click on the thumbnails for a larger image.
 

	Confederate General Humphrey Marshall closed the border at Pound Gap after losing to Union Colonel James Garfield at the Battle of Middle Creek in 1862. Abraham Lincoln sent a runner to Pikeville to make Garfield a general, beginning Garfield’s road to the presidency. The Northern papers wrote several stories about the victory, since it was a rare bit of good news in 1862 as the North was being regularly trounced.
	From this spot on Pound Gap, my great-great-great-great-grandfather Cornelius Hopkins saw Pike County in 1822 after leaving Patrick County, Virginia. He did not see the ravages of mountaintop removal, of course, his landscape was covered with trees a thousand years old. This picture was taken in winter; deliberately, so that the brown scars of strip mining can be seen and not covered with the alien grasses that hide them in summer foliage.
	On old US 23, down from Pound Gap, there is a historical marker at the mouth of Little Creek, just across the mountain from Greasy Creek. In the background, new US 460 is under construction; across Shelby Creek, to the left, was the location of Joseph Hopkins’s cotton farm. It was the rendezvous point for the raiders of Confederate General John Hunt Morgan when he rode back from his many trips into Kentucky in his futile quest to retake the state for the Confederacy.
	The Greasy Creek Old Regular Baptist Church, recently remodeled and upgraded with air conditioning. The land was given to the church by Winright Adkins after the old cabin of Cornelius Hopkins became too small and too decrepit for church services. Some of the current members were shocked at the red roof, thinking it immodest for a church that had rested quietly beside Greasy Creek for over a century.
	The Falls of Greasy Creek, little more than a stumble for the creek as it makes its way to the sea. Before coal mining came to Greasy Creek, when the water tables were regular and higher, there was a fine waterfall and pool here. Somewhere on the left bank, covered now, is Victoria’s rock, where she sat and wondered if the War would ever end, and if either her Confederate father or her Union lover would return to her.
	The Greasy Creek Hotel, where visitors stayed when doing business in the town. It is now undergoing its own remodeling, its owner salvaging the ancient structure for apartments. It is almost the only public building still standing where an entire town once stood. The other structure was the hospital, now a private home, whose residents are completely accustomed to the bumps and rattles of the ghosts of coal miners who died there.
	The date carved into the concrete pier that supported one of the aerial trams that brought coal down the mountainside to load onto coal cars. It was the last concrete poured in 1921, but the mine temporarily shut down in 1928 after the owner died of a heart attack in Cleveland. The mine never reopened and all the steel was removed in 1940 to melt down into armaments for the coming Second World War.
	The Greasy Creek School, now closed, sits on Elisha’s field, awaiting construction on the new road to end so that the School Board can sell it without worrying about boulders falling on the new owners. In the background, road construction continues apace, with the access ramp now cut through the place were my family buried their dead for nearly two hundred years. The old three-room school that I attended, as did my father and grandfather, sat where the walking track now curves.
	Another part of the field. Somewhere beside the basketball court, John Cabell Breckinridge sat beside a fire with Elisha Hopkins and other members of my family and Elisha told him why he could not support either side in the coming War. According to my grandmother, Breckinridge spent his last night as a citizen of the United States there, his head resting on a pillow her own grandmother had made, before he left the next morning for Virginia and his appointment with destiny.
	My parents’ tiny house where I was born. My father built it after he returned from World War II. It replaced the great old house that my great-grandfather built a hundred years ago, the one my sorely vexed great-aunt burned down in an attempt to incinerate her profligate husband in 1933. Although no one lives there anymore, the house still draws water from my great-grandfather’s well, which has never gone dry, in spite of the many droughts in the past and the blasting from road construction behind it.
	My great-grandfather’s bell; my great-grandmother rang it to call in her boys from the field for dinner and supper. Other times, it was used to summon help during emergencies on the farm. On rare occasions, we will ring it for family who come to visit, so that they can hear what their ancestors heard a century before, and perhaps to remind their spirits that we have not forgotten them after all.