Hiking In Greenbo Lake State Park

 A few days ago on my birthday, one of the big ones, my wife, Candice, wanted to take me somewhere so I could hike in the woods and we could eat out which we haven't done much of in the last fifteen or eighteen months due to the Covid 19 pandemic.  The numbers in Kentucky hadn't quite fully turned the corner as they have now and we decided to take a chance since we are both fully vaccinated.  We had been to Greenbo Lake State Park once before and enjoyed that trip a great deal.  Greenbo Lake is one of the smaller man made flood control lakes in Kentucky.  The largest, Kentucky Lake has over 160,000 surface acres.  Greenbo Lake, at 225 acres, is not much more than a pond compared to the largest lakes which all have over 100,000 acres.  But it is a very pretty little lake with some really good hiking trails in the state park which contains it.  

 

Greenbo Lake State Park also has some historically important coke ovens, a restored one room school, and two unmolested small cemeteries which is unusual in the Kentucky State Park System.  I have written in other places on this blog about the relocation of graves during the construction of lakes and highways in the state.  I have hiked in numerous Kentucky state parks situated around lakes and nearly everyone I have ever hiked in has relocated cemeteries in them which usually were placed in a common government cemetery near or in the park.  I have also published a short story about the relocation of family cemeteries for the construction of a lake this past spring in Seeds 2021, the literary magazine from Northeastern Illinois State University.  My short story is entitled "Damn!" and can be found at numbered page 74 in the online journal at the previous link.  However, the page numbers in the online version do not synch with the page numbers in the table of contents.  That story is actually located at page 85 according to the internet counter.  

 But, let's get back to the hike at Greenbo Lake.  The park has three marked trails which come to a total of 32.8 miles of possible hiking without leaving marked trails and striking off into the woods with a compass or GPS.  I chose the trail which begins near the handicapped fishing pier not far from the boat launching and storage area because Candice has been in a wheelchair for over twenty years and wanted to read near the pier while I hiked for an hour.  I  rarely hike an entire trail anywhere but instead hike out for a little over a half hour and double back to wherever Candice is waiting for me and we always choose a safe location for her to stay.  This particular trail, so far as I hiked it for about 1.5 miles is within sight of the lake in the woods with a few relatively easy uphills and downhills.  I would rate that portion of this trail as easy.  I never saw another human on the trail except for one fisherman in a pontoon boat who happened to be fishing alone within sight of the trail.  He and I had a friendly conversation as he fished for a couple of minutes which was a unique experience for me while hiking to be able to talk to someone actively fishing although I have done it at Eagle Lake on the campus of my alma mater, Morehead State University.  I hiked outward for about 40 minutes and turned around which brought me out of the woods exactly on the one hour mark.  Early in the hike, I encountered the only interesting wildlife of the hike, a small black racer about two to two and a half feet long.  It froze when it saw me on the trail about ten feet above it.  I started to bend over to pick up a small peeble to toss near it to see how it reacted and it instantly turned and disappeared into the leaf mold below me even before I could grasp a pebble.  It was about 85 degrees at the time and any cold blooded animal such as a snake was in firm fettle for traveling on such a day.  I did not have a camera with me and do not have a photo of my little friend.  

After my hike, Candice and I returned to Grayson, Kentucky, to search for a place to dine inside which we hadn't done in quite some time.  After driving all over Grayson looking for an open dining room, we wound up at Huddle House which was the only one we could find with indoor seating.  We went in wearing masks, which is my suggestion to anyone in public until the pandemic is over.  The only people in the restaurant in early afternoon were the cook, the manager, and one waitress behind  the counter and one other couple eating in a booth well away from us.  So we took off our masks which is necessary if you intend to chew anyway.  The hired help was friendly and we talked freely about whatever popped up.  The manager said the day before had been his birthday and I mentioned that this particular day was mine.  A bit later an older man and a young boy who appeared to be his middle school aged grandson came in and sat down well away from us and also ate.  No one else came in the place during our meal.  We actually felt safe in the face of  Covid 19 in light of the low population, good social distancing, and our vaccination.  After eating, we drove back home and it was, according to all measurements, a day well spent. 

Relocated Cemeteries In Appalachia

A recent posting by my blogging friend the Wayfarin' Stranger on his blog which was actually about an old one room school prompted this post. The post and his wonderful blog can be found at: http://cumberlandvistas.blogspot.com/2012/05/one-room-school.html  I responded to his discussion of the movement of the school for the creation of Cave Run Lake near his native Morehead, KY,  with an e-mail about the need for both of us to examine and blog about the movement of family cemeteries to facilitate the construction of these flood control projects all over Appalachia.  He responded with the idea that we both write about it and cross link our articles which was his way to get me reactivated in blogging since I had done nothing since the March 2, 2011, tornado devastated my home town of West Liberty, KY.  That is a topic which I will approach sometime soon.  It is still a bit too fresh in most of our minds.

But, to get back to the real topic of this article, there are several federally funded flood control lakes in every state in the Central Appalachian Region.  Within easy driving distance of me, there are Cave Run Lake, Paintsville Lake, Yatesville Lake, Dewey Lake, and Buckhorn Lake.  All were built after World War II, funded by federal dollars, and in whole or in part managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers.  There are actually 18 such lakes in the entire state of Kentucky, 10 throughout West Virginia, 5 in Tennessee, 6 in Virginia, 4 in North Carolina, and 10 in Georgia.  Each of these states may also have one or more river drainages which are overseen by the Corps of Engineers.  There are also several other lakes in each of the states which is partially contained in the greater Appalachian area but outside Central or Southern Appalachia.  I am concerned only with the cemeteries which have been affected by the construction of lakes in the Central Appalachian Region.  But within the states named, there are more than 50 such lakes. I also note for the record that all of the above states territory does not lie in Central Appalachia and neither do all of the 53 lakes. 

The Corps of Engineers actually controls more than 400 lakes in 43 states.  Nearly every one of these man made lakes required the movement of grave sites and cemeteries.  A few may have also affected or destroyed Native American archaeological sites including grave sites. A fairly good, but relatively non-disclosive and primarily tourism oriented page about the lakes can be found at:  http://corpslakes.usace.army.mil/visitors/visitors.cfm

Each of these lakes is entirely man made and their construction mandated the removal and relocation of several and perhaps dozens of small, family cemeteries.  In each case, the government purchased title to the land involved whenever possible and paid contractors to excavate and relocate all known graves which would be in the flood plain of the lakes. Whenever opposition to the individual purchases was encountered, the government began adverse legal proceedings under the legal doctrine known as eminent domain and seized the land.  In either case, the government paid for the purchase of land near the lake for the construction of a merged cemetery which would contain most or all of the relocated graves.  So far as I know, in each case, the cemeteries were also built large enough to allow for the burial of future dead in the locale.  Whenever descendants objected to relocation of graves to the merged cemetery, they were generally given the option of moving them to a site of their own choosing although this relocation may not have been at government expense. And one of the other real tragedies of this whole relocation effort lies in the fact that many of the older cemeteries would have also contained poorly marked or even totally unmarked graves which were never found and are flooded today.  In many of these cases, no living human remained who even remembered the exact location of these graves or the names of the individuals buried in them. 

Each of these merged cemeteries is operated by a manager under the laws of the state and federal governments. Most, if not all, of these cemeteries are managed in an efficient and ethical fashion.  This article is intended to be a non-biased look at the cultural issues involved in relocation of graves in Appalachia and not intended as any negative assessment of the processes involved in the management of the new cemeteries.  I will leave readers to draw their own conclusions about how this massive relocation of graves has affected the descendants of the dead in each case, both in and outside Central Appalachia. 

I have not visited most of the cemeteries involved in Central Appalachia.  But I have visited several in both Kentucky and West Virginia.  I am more concerned with the general cultural issues involved and limit specific references to those lakes and cemeteries with which I am most familiar.  I have also sought to gain first hand information from one or more of the managers involved in the process.  However, an initial attempt to gain previously publicly released information about the cemeteries from a Corps of Engineers employee was less than openly addressed.  I suspect that, in many cases, relocation of graves has been a touchy subject in Central Appalachia.  I can only vaguely remember the construction of Carr Fork Lake in my native Knott County Kentucky.  But I do recall that my neighbors who were often unemployed avoided applying for the jobs available as laborers in the relocation process.  Contractors were generally not local but did advertise and hire local people when they would accept the work.    However, most local males would not apply for and would not have accepted jobs whose sole purpose was the excavation of graves and relocation of the dead.

Culturally speaking, three major aspects and key values of Appalachian Culture collide with the process of relocating cemeteries. These values are Love of Place, Familism, and Religion.  These relocated graves and cemeteries were most often located on old family home places and considered sacred to the descendants.  The two most important institutions in Appalachian Culture are family and church.  The three most important physical locations to the average Appalachian are the old home place, the family cemetery, and the church which the family usually attended.  In many cases, the construction of these lakes and the relocation of graves would have destroyed all three of these important locations and dealt serious damage to the two institutions as well. In all cases of property transfers for these lakes, the property would have been appraised at actual market value if sold.  Many of these older churches, especially Old Regular Baptist, United Baptist, Holiness, and Pentecostal churches would have been simple wood frame buildings with little monetary value in relation to their religious and cultural value. These congregations would have often been tasked with buying land and building new buildings in an area where land was now more valuable both because of the tourism potential and the increased scarcity due to flooding. More often than not, these small congregations would have been placed in a position of great monetary stress due to the much larger cost of replacement compared to the market value of buildings that were small, cheaply built, and of advanced age.

Although I do not generally believe that feuding was as common an occurrence in Appalachia as various forms of media have described it, disagreements between neighboring families occur in all locales across the world as a part of normal daily life.  Relocating several small family cemeteries in a relatively constricted locale, usually one creek or river valley, would have often resulted in members of several families being buried in close proximity to people with whom they had disagreed in life.  Descendants would not have forgotten those disagreements and would have been upset by the idea of having family members buried in the same cemetery with "them Hicks'" for example. 

But the real opposition to moving graves lay in the idea that graves are sacred and the dead should remain in the original grave until the resurrection. This is a topic which I did not address adequately in my earlier posting about family cemeteries.  It was an idea I should have addressed more thoroughly at the time.  Most graves in Appalachia, especially if they are more than 40 or 50 years old, nearly always face the rising sun due to the belief that the resurrection will happen in the early morning at or near sunrise.  This positioning of the graves is intended to guarantee that the people interred will be oriented toward the coming Jesus in order to be one of the first to rise from the grave. The relocated cemeteries almost never made a point of facing graves toward the rising sun and usually located the orientation in the manner most likely to maximize the use of the land.  This point alone would be upsetting to descendants of the dead who had been raised to practice this religious based custom. 

Whenever I discuss the issues of death and burial in Appalachia, I generally refer to two books: "Death And Dying In Central Appalachia" by James K. Crissman and "Coal Camp Kids" by Barbara Ford Ritch.  "Faith And Meaning In The Southern Uplands" by Loyal Jones, whose work I often mention, also contains material pertinent to this discussion. The Crissman book is a somewhat dated but classic discussion of nearly every aspect of death and dying in Appalachia. It is in every way a masterpiece.  The Ritch book is a large oral history of the coal camps on Beaver Creek in Floyd County Kentucky which contains a large chapter on death, dying, and burial customs which contains many vintage photographs of graves, tomb stones, caskets, and dead bodies.  It is somewhat deficient in expository writing but the photos and first person transcriptions are quite informative.  For those readers who are interested in further information on the topic of death in Appalachia, I would also refer you to any or all available copies of "The Minutes" of any of the various associations of the Old Regular Baptist Church in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and several of the northern states affected by the Great Migration.  Individual obituaries are generally contained in most associations minutes and are written by either ministers or family members who knew the deceased individuals.  Although they may appear to follow a stock and rather staid format, individual obituaries may contain real gems of cultural information and these gems may often be found only by browsing dozens of "Minutes".  I refer to one such obituary in my post on "Visiting The Urban Appalachians In Kendallville Indiana".  Although I have never done research there, it is my understanding that the University of Pikeville library in Pikeville Kentucky has a nearly complete collection of these minutes from several of the associations.  Each of these "Minutes" is an annual report of events in a particular association of Old Regular Baptist Churches and, in addition to the obituaries, contains statistical reports of the churches.  They are a wealth of information for researchers and the simply curious in Appalachia.  In particular, the statistics are often far more complete than other enumerations of any kind at the same time in Appalachia. 

There have also been numerous cultural collisions between coal and other mineral extraction companies and the local populace concerning attempts to relocate cemeteries in order to facilitate strip mines, oil wells, gas wells, and rock quarries.  One such battle is currently ongoing at Carcassone in Letcher County Kentucky.  I have no direct personal knowledge of the conflict other than what I have seen in the media. But a local couple whose family members are buried on a small, mountaintop cemetery are involved in an ongoing battle with a coal company which wants to move the cemetery more than twenty miles away, which is a massive distance by Appalachian mountain standards.  Newspaper accounts can be found at the Mountain Eagle , the local newspaper in Whitesburg, KY. I will attempt to directly contact the people involved in the conflict and gain more information which is certainly pertinent to this discussion.

 

This article will not be complete until I have managed to interview at least a couple of the cemetery managers involved about policies and procedures involved in the relocation of these graves.  I will also try to take the time to do some research in the Floyd, Rowan, and Johnson County Kentucky Libraries and newspaper morgues from the time period involved in the construction of Dewey Lake and Paintsville Lake in order to search for information about current events and opinions at the time the lakes were created.  Please feel free to insert your own personal information about this process and to make suggestions of ways to obtain more accurate information about the processes involved.  I would also love to interview any former employees who may have worked in the relocations. 

Kentucky Route 7--My Favorite Places In Appalachia

Kentucky Route 7

After having spent a major portion of my life somewhere along the winding road which runs from Jeff in Perry County in Southeastern Kentucky to South Shore in Greenup County in Northeastern Kentucky near the shores of the Ohio River and the northern edge of Appalachia, I have a great deal of attachment to Kentucky Route 7 and many spots along its serpentine route.  I was born at the old Lackey Hospital just across the Knott County/Floyd County line about a quarter mile from Route 7.  On the day my parents took me home from the hospital, they turned right after crossing the railroad and onto Route 7 and went through Estill, Glow, and Wayland, on the way home to Steele's Creek about two miles from Route 7.  We lived there until I was 6 and, although I do not remember much about it, I am sure most of the trips I took in those first years of my life were up and down Route 7.  When I was 6, they took me on another  trip up Route 7, across the Knott County line at the mouth of Caney Creek, to my home for the next 14 years in a country store they had built on the edge of Route 7 at Dema. 

Wayland Post Office (formerly a bank)

Following the deaths of my parents when I was 18 and 20, I left the area and only came back sporadically to visit until I moved to White Oak in Morgan County in December of 1992.  The home I own there sits about 100 yards from Route 7 at the mouth of Big Spring Branch where it enters White Oak Creek.  For the past 19 years, I have been able to look out my front windows onto more than a mile of Route 7 where it winds down White Oak Creek toward the Licking River and West Liberty.  I have lived 39 of my 60 years up and down Route 7.  I have driven thousands of miles on its winding tracks literally from end to end.  I spent more than three years working in Magoffin County and regularly drove up and down the 38 miles of the road in that county.  I walked up and down Route 7 for 7 years while I was in grade school going both to and from school by foot.  I used to visit foster care homes, located on or near Route 7, in Carter and Greenup Counties on a regular basis. I attended the inaugural summer of Upward Bound at the old Stewart Robinson Campus at Blackey on Route 7 in Letcher County.  Route 7 is literally in my blood, bones, intellect, culture, and DNA.

I have seen many things along Route 7 which I did not like.  But I have never seen a mile of the road that I do not like.  Route 7 is as much a part of Kentucky and Appalachia as any other highway in the region.  I have travelled many of those other highways and have varying degrees of love or appreciation for them. They include US 23, WV 10, US 119, US 52, US 421, KY11, US 60, US 460, KY30, and lot of other roads all over Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, North Georgia, and Northeast Alabama.  But none of them have the deep seated hold on my heart which Route 7 will hold until the day I die.  It is highly likely that when I die the hearse will carry me on one last trip up or down Route 7.  Route 7 was the first road that led many of my family and friends out of Appalachia to the industrial north or life in the military.  It has also been the road which has begun to lead many of them back home after long lives and careers in places they did not enjoy nearly as much as the hills surrounding Route 7. 

I have had an  idea for several years to attempt a collection of short stories to be titled "Route 7 Stories".  A few of those stories have been written and many more remain to be completed before that idea can become a reality.  Most of those stories will be rooted in or simply retelling of events I have either seen or heard of along Route 7.  I have seen and heard these stories in country stores, city halls, funeral homes, doctors offices, court houses, churches, flea markets, auction barns, homes, graveyards, water holes, cow pastures, and corn fields all up and down Route 7 all the way from Jeff to South Shore. They involve drunkards, preachers, liars, thieves, undertakers, law men, outlaws, teachers, social workers, public officials, judges, mothers, fathers, sex offenders, murderers, foster children, and dozens of other people, horses, mules, cows, cats, and stray dogs who lived at least part of their lives on Route 7.  And I have not found much difference between any of the protagonists whether they be man or beast.

I have not spent a great deal of time on the road in Perry County but I have driven every mile of it north to south at least a few times.  Perry County used to be the source of legal alcohol for most of the bootleggers in Eastern Kentucky since it was, for many years, the only wet county in the region.  Small time bootleggers in several Eastern Kentucky counties would often drive over sections of Route 7 to transport their alcohol home from Hazard and Vicco in Perry County. 

I went to Letcher County for the initial summer of the Upward Bound Program which was held on the Stewart Robinson Campus at Blackey.  For 8 weeks, I would leave home on Sunday afternoon with a school mate and his parents who hauled me to Blackey since my parents did not drive.  After staying the week, we would get picked up on Friday afternoon and wind our way from Blackey to Dean and across the Knott County line to the head of Beaver Creek on our way home.  I learned a little about Letcher County during that summer.  I also went to a dentist, payed for by Upward Bound, in Whitesburg to have my teeth pulled and a set of "store bought" teeth made.  On one of those trips, I was actually taken along by a bootlegger who went on to Virginia for a load of whiskey while I was in the dentist's office.  I also spent a night or two over the years at the Carcassone community center at square dances.  Sometime during that period, I remember hearing of a terrible wreck on Route 7 in Letcher County which killed several high school students when they missed a bridge. I also remember the old dairy bar at Dean and the Dean stockyards where my father and a friend of his used to take me now and then.

I learned many things in Knott County on the 20 miles or so of Route 7 on Beaver Creek.  I fished, gigged, and swam several miles of the creek and walked several miles of the road  with my two cousins (more like brothers) Johnny and Jack Terry. It was also common for teenage boys in those days to make car top boats and pole up and down the few semi-navigable stretches of the creek.  You needed to find a junked car from the thirties or forties which had the best rounded tops, cut off the top, and float the open stretches of water. I also remember the incident when Dickie Layne died by diving in a hole of water which was too shallow at the mouth of Patton on Right Beaver not far from where Viola Handshoe bootlegged for many years.  My cousins and I covered Route 7 from about Kite to Garrett while we were growing up.  I remember several incidents from riding the Kerns Bread Truck with Harold Purkey, Jr. in summer.  I learned a great deal during those years on Route 7. 

I also spent a great deal of time on the Floyd County section of Route 7 from the Knott County line to Garrett.  We almost never ventured on the remaining few miles from Garrett to the Magoffin County line up Salt Lick because it had a reputation for being too dangerous due to several well known miscreants who lived in that area.  Yet for several years my half-sister Lucy Hicks Moore and her family lived on Salt Lick and today they still own that land.  More recently, my cousin Jack Terry lived on Salt Lick for a few years. That section of road in Floyd County held the old Wayland Fountain; the little gas station at Wayland where Marion Ed Moore died of a heart attack in his twenties; the Wayland jail which has since been a fruit market for a while; the Wayland Post Office which used to be a bank in which my father lost his life savings in October of 1929; the Green Bradley Curve where Elmer Morrison once wrecked his flat bed truck, Bloomer Curve where a notorious local alcoholic always seemed to drive in the creek and a tanker truck driver once died due to a Halloween prank gone wrong; the original Dema post office run by John Barney for many years; the Estill Livestock yards where I also went with my father; Marlon Combs' 5 & 10 where I bought comic books; the curve entering Garrett where my close friends Avery Chaffins and Snap Conley died way too young in a wreck; the offices of Doctors Dempsey and Wicker where my parents took me for a penicillin shot when I was down with flu, croup, or whatever seasonal ailment was prevalent at the time. Just off Route 7 near Garrett, where Rock Fork used to be before Route 80 destroyed the whole hollow, is the grave of my great-grandfather Hence Hicks who was murdered in a corn field because he had $4,100 in his hatband in 1935.  That was a massive fortune in the Great Depression.  The Floyd County Times stories from the time say that he had accumulated the money "through a life of hard work and frugality". That is not bad for a poor hillside farmer.  That section of road holds hundreds of memories every time I drive it.

So does the 38 mile stretch in Magoffin County which runs from the top of the mountain where Salt Lick heads up against the Licking River to the head of Bloomington Branch at the Morgan County line near the home of my neighbor Willie Isaac.  The memories in Magoffin County accumulated in a much shorter time frame than those in Floyd and Knott County.  I worked there for more than three years for Social Services doing abuse and neglect investigations and managing ongoing cases.  What I learned from most of those experiences is that most clients of that system are no worse than the judges, attorneys, and social workers who work with them.  They may be less well off, less educated, and less fortunate.  But they are no less human and many of them are fine individuals. 

That stretch of road goes past Gunlock, Royalton, Salyersville, Lakeville, Elk Creek, Elsie, and Bloomington.  At Royalton, it passes the old location of an auction which used to take place in my childhood.  I remember hearing people in Knott County, less than 30 miles away, talk about going "way down on Licking River" as they were leaving for the auction. 

The memories in the Morgan County section of Route 7 have accumulated over the past 19 years as I have lived here and gradually gotten to know the people around me.  Beginning near Willie Isaac's house where Big Spring Branch heads up against Bloomington Branch, Route 7 wends its way through White Oak, Cottle, West Liberty, Wrigley, Little Sandy, and on to Sandy Hook in Elliott County.  Morgan County marks the real end of the mountains and the beginnings of the rolling hills leading to the Ohio River.  Tobacco used to be a leading source of income for small farmers.  Now it is nearly all gone with the end of the price support system.  A few small patches still get planted and cut.  But most of the former tobacco farmers have moved on to other crops or just quit growing anything for sale.

I do not know the Elliott County section of Route 7 nearly as well as I know the rest.  But sometimes I will drive that way to visit my cousin Jack who owns a farm near Blaine in Lawrence County.  I like the overland route instead of the simpler way through Salyersville and Paintsville on 4 lane roads.  Until the Little Sandy prison was built, Sandy Hook managed to do a pretty good job of remaining a small, quiet, country, courthouse town.  Now it has grown and traffic is more prevalent.  Progress is not always a good thing. 

Although I have made several trips over the route from Sandy Hook to South Shore, I also have not spent nearly as much time there as I have on the southern end of the highway.  Much of that is the country that Jesse Stuart wrote about in his many books.  It is more affected by the proximity of I64 and Ashland.  But it clings to the edge of Appalachia and often manages to manifest the characteristics which are more common among the mountain communities with which I am more familiar.  It is also often the country that Tom T. Hall and Don Rigsby have written about in song. 

Route 7 is a wonderful way to spend one day or several.  For those of you who live somewhere along the route, it can be productive to spend a day or two off the bigger highways and take a trip or two from home in each direction to see what is left from better times.  For those of you who do not know Kentucky Route 7, it can be a wonderful way to gradually  immerse yourself in Appalachian culture.  Begin at South Shore and drive slowly along the road.  Stop at spots you like.  Take a few pictures.  Listen to a few stories in the remaining road side restaurants and stores.  Read tombstones in some of the graveyards along the road.  It can be a great way to grow closer to Appalachia.