E. Hawk Moore, Old Regular Baptist Preacher & UMWA Activist

Hawk Moore--Photo by UMWA Local 5895

E. Hawk Moore was an Old Regular Baptist preacher, coal miner, and UMWA member and official in UMWA Local 5895 in Wayland Kentucky where he worked for Elkhorn Coal Company for many years and also served as the local's Burial Committeeman for many years.  He was also a close friend of my father, Ballard Hicks, who was also employed by Elkhorn Coal Company for a few years before leaving the mine to buy a country store and care for his terminally ill first wife.  Hawk, as he was always known, lived about a mile up Steele's Creek from my father's store near the head of the hollow and just above the Steele's Creek Church which he served for years as moderator.  Sadly, that church is no longer in existence other than as a rental house.  I apologize for the poor quality of the photo above but it was the only one I could find of Hawk.  It is a detail of a group photo of the Local 5895 officials which is included in the book "Twentieth Anniversary...of Local Union 5895 United Mine Workers Of America 1933-1953" about which I have also written in this blog.  I am also still searching for further biographical information about Hawk above and beyond what is in that book and what I know personally.  Hawk's name also appears regularly in the Minutes of several other Associations of Old Regular Baptists as a delegate as does the name of Clabe Mosley whom I wrote about earlier.  

 

 

I have often seen Hawk's name mentioned in obituaries in the Floyd County Times and I know that the paper's online morgue will contain his obituary which I will quote extensively in a future edit of this blog post.  I believe I will also be able to locate another version of that obituary in the Minutes of The New Salem Association of Old Regular Baptists in the near future.  Although, my father never joined any church, he often attended Old Regular Baptist services with my mother, Mellie Hicks, and knew most of the Old Regular Baptists in the Floyd and Knott County area.  He often traveled to Quicksand Creek in Breathitt County Kentucky to squirrel hunt with Hawk Moore and his son George Moore and a few other men.  They always hunted on the same farm on Quicksand which belonged to some man whose name I do not remember who also was known to make moonshine.  They would travel to Breathitt County to the farm where they were allowed to camp and hunt for as much as a week at a time.  According to my father, part of the deal was that he would always check in with the landowner at his home and inquire as to "where his cow was being pastured".  This was a code phrase which they used so the man would tell them which area of his farm was off limits since that was where his moonshine still was located.  Apparently, the farm was rather large and even with being limited from hunting in one small fork of the hollow or another, they could all still cover plenty ground, kill their limit of squirrels, and avoid interfering with or leaving a trail to the owner's still.  The other part of the deal was that they also bought at least one gallon of moonshine among the lot of them.  I suspect that at times they might have bought several gallons.  For many years until shortly after I was born my father kept a gallon of moonshine in the house for "medicine" but was never a heavy drinker.  

Hawk Moore never drank at all because of his religion but since the other members of the hunting party were able to do so without causing problems he still hunted with them under that setup.  One of my father's favorite stories about hunting with Hawk Moore took place on that farm on Quicksand Creek.  Daddy said he and Hawk were hunting up the same rather narrow, steep, and rocky little hollow one day and Daddy happened to spook a large whitetail buck which was unusual in that time period in Eastern Kentucky.  Hawk was apparently further up the hollow than my father and the deer ran his way.  Both men were hunting with the standard 12 gauge shotguns of the day and probably would not have attempted to kill the deer illegally even if they had been properly equipped.  Daddy said a few seconds after the deer bolted up the narrow, high sided drainage of the hollow he heard Hawk scream something or other like "Whooee!".  Later, he said Hawk said he had been coming down a particularly narrow area of the drainage and the buck nearly ran over him almost literally touching him as the sizeable rack slid past his body.  Hawk was known to make the somewhat humorous claim later that he always believed that my father had been trying to get him killed by driving the deer over him.  They remained friends for life and, as I recall, Daddy made a trip from our new home on Right Beaver Creek to attend Hawk's funeral when he died.  There were also numerous trips through the years between the time we moved from Steele's Creek to Beaver Creek that my parents would hire a driver, since neither of them drove, and travel to Steele's Creek on Sunday to attend the church which was also the church my mother joined.  

I will keep searching for further information about Hawk and edit this post as soon and as extensively as I can. 

"Memoir" by Robert Hicks--Book/Manuscript Review

Robert Hicks, Photo by UMWA Local 5895

For those of you who ever actually read the list of "Books I Have Read Lately" which has been located at the bottom of the page on this blog ever since I have been blogging, you might have noticed lately that I had added "Memoir" by Robert Hicks to that list of books.  I used the term "book" somewhat expansively in reference to that particular work as I sometimes to do documents, manuscripts, and other unpublished sources of information which I believe could be useful to another student of Appalachian Studies or of some particular subject covered by some writing I have read.  I have always hoped that at least a few of my readers might choose from time to time to read some of these listings.  This particular manuscript can only be found in one place on earth so far as I know and that is the Wayland Historical Society in Wayland, Kentucky, where I have been doing some research recently.  If you decide to try to locate and read this manuscript, you will need to travel to Wayland to see it.  But the bright side is that the Historical Society has a relatively broad policy about access to their holdings and the copying of those holdings.  

I had two different reasons for choosing to read this 50 page manuscript: 1) my ongoing research involves the town of Wayland and the Elkhorn Coal Company which built the town and owned it until about 1970; 2) Robert Hicks was a distant cousin of mine and was raised in a holler called Bruce near Mousie, Kentucky, where my father was also raised.  Robert Hicks served as the fifth president of UMWA Local 5895 in Wayland, KY, and his son, Bobby Ray Hicks, still serves as president of Local 1741 which was merged with Local 5895 sometime after coal mining ended in Wayland and the number of active UMWA members dwindled. As his biography in "Twentieth Anniversary...of Local Union 5895 United Mine Workers Of America 1933-1953" states: "Robert Hicks started work in the mines...in 1919" and served his local union, the town of Wayland, and the greater community in a variety of ways as Financial Secretary and President of Local 5895 and as Police Judge of the City of Wayland.  

When I read this memoir, I was able to learn some previously unknown information about my extended family and the area in Mousie where they lived and many of them are buried.  I also learned more about a man named John "Bud" Wicker who had been a school teacher and elected official in the area around the turn of the twentieth century.  This was particularly important to me since a treasured family member who developed dementia late in life had fixated on John "Bud" Wicker at times during the severe deterioration of their dementia.  As a well known and well loved caretaker would walk through the house this person would often say, "There comes that SOB John "Bud" Wicker".  Their caretakers knew nothing of John "Bud" Wicker but I had at least heard of him during my childhood and knew that he had been well respected in the county.  His photo and a warm remembrance of him is included in the memoir and I immediately copied that page and mailed it to the caretaker of my family member.  It seems that the family member, in their dementia, had fixated on their old grade school teacher after they could no longer recognize their caretaker and we all found it quite humorous as some of these dementia stories can be.  Secondly, I was able to learn the original source of one bit of information about my paternal grandfather, Charlie Hicks, which I had found repeated in another more questionable source.  Robert Hicks had also included in the memoir other somewhat more lengthy information about my grandparents: 

"I remember on several occasions, Joe and I would go up to Uncle Charlie and Aunt Betty's to stay all night.  Uncle Charlie was somewhat of a rhyme maker.  He was all the time making a rhyme on someone and we just loved to hear him.  Aunt Betty was always working with her loom weaving cloth to make her children clothes, or she would be spinning wool on her old spinning wheel to make wool thread to knit their stockings.  She was also one of the old midwives who caught babies from under persimmon trees, or got them out from among Uncle Charlie's bee gum stands.  Uncle Charlie was always talking about his "honey money" and his old woman.  He must have had at least seventy five bee gums and an old mule called Jim.  He would start out on Old Jim and say, "Come on Jim, we're going to Lackey or maybe Garrett."  He would start out singing "Tell Mother I'll Be There".  That's an old Baptist song.  At breakfast he would have a big bowl of honey and we boys didn't care too much for honey.  All we wanted was that big bowl of gravy.  I think that gravy was the greatest thing the old people ever learned to fix.  It it hadn't been for gravy, many folks would have starved to death.  We would eat every bit of it and even scrape the skillet clean.  That was a big skillet too."  (Robert Hicks, "Memoir" page 7)

It was wonderful for me to read that somewhat lengthy remembrance of the paternal grandparents I had never known personally or heard hat story in its entirety.  I had known that Grandma Betty was a midwife until she was about seventy-five and I had also known that  Grandpa Charlie kept seventy-five or a hundred stands of bees until he was about eighty and peddled honey among the coal camps by mule back even at that advanced age.  It also reminded me of a story my father Ballard Hicks used to tell about going to Jackson in his childhood with Grandpa Charlie and at least one of his brothers.  It was the first time they had seen cement sidewalks and Daddy always said that his brother kept looking at the poured concrete sections of the sidewalk until he finally said, "I sure wish I knowed where they got these big flat rocks.  Pap could sure use some of them to set his bee gums on."  

Elizabeth "Betty" & Charlie Hicks

Robert Hicks also made one short reference to my maternal great-grandfather Hence Hicks, who was murdered in 1935, by saying that he had been an oxen driver in a local logging or farming operation.  But he only made one short reference to the United Mine Workers of America to which he apparently had devoted several years of his life and had obviously inculcated union thinking into his son to the point that Bobby Ray Hicks also became a UMWA official.  That failure to discuss the UMWA left the readers of his memoir without many key elements of his life's work I am certain.  But this book is well written with only minimal linguistic errors considering it was written by a relatively uneducated man.  That skillful writing is also one more testament to the fact that the Hicks genes seem to carry some propensity for producing people who like to write or "make a rhyme" as my grandfather, father, and myself have done along with Robert Hicks.  If you are a descendant of some of the Hicks family living around Mousie Kentucky, you will benefit from making a trip to the Wayland Historical Society and reading the "Memoir" of Robert Hicks. 

"Twentieth Anniversary...of Local Union 5895 United Mine Workers Of America 1933-1953" by UMWA Local 5895--Book Review

During a recent research trip to the Wayland Kentucky Historical Society in Wayland, KY, one of the key coal camp towns of the Big Sandy River drainage in Floyd County KY, I was provided a copy of this fifty page book commemorating the first twenty years of UMWA Local Union 5895.  The book was originally written and published by the local union as part of an anniversary celebration in 1953.  It was reprinted by the Historical Society in May 2005.  It is well worth the reading by any student of UMWA history, Floyd County, Wayland, Kentucky, Appalachia, the Big Sandy River, or trade unionism in general.  The book states that "in a regular meeting in May, 1952 ...a motion was passed to instruct the President to appoint a committee and commission them to prepare a history of our local union to be printed in book form...".   The committee was composed of the following members: Nobel Hobbs, Chairman; J. F. Dixon; Lawrence Mount; Charles Burnett; McKinley Parrigin; Robert Hicks; Joe Hicks, Secretary; Pete Mills; E. Hawk Moore; Guy Coleman; Charles Turner; and Roy Lykins.  Let me state for the record that during my childhood and teen years I knew both E. Hawk Moore and McKinley Parrigin.  It is also likely that I am distantly related to Robert Hicks who, along with his brother Joe Hicks, served the local union in a variety of roles for many years.  They were both born at Mousie, KY, the birthplace of my father, Ballard Hicks.  I did not know Guy Coleman but after his death I spent many hours in the home of his widow, Rusha Coleman, because of my friendship with their son Keith Coleman.  Let me also state at the outset of this review of this book that the committee did an excellent job with the book, especially in light of the fact that they were all working full time jobs in the mines, were generally also performing other unpaid duties for the union, and were, in most cases, only educated at the high school level.  The Wayland Historical Society is also to be commended for their efforts to reprint the book and making it available to a larger audience in the second generation copies.  I had never seen a copy of the original text and I am certain that, like many small publishing projects, few copies of the original exist today.  

This book may be only fifty pages but it contains a treasure trove of information for members of all the groups I listed in my opening paragraph.  There are photos and biographies of many of the early officers of Local 5895.  There are nine brief written chapters detailing the first twenty years in the life of the local union.  There are group photos of the local union officers in 1953 and the committee which produced the book.  There is a list of "Some Of Our Firsts" which enumerates more than a dozen key actions and events in the history of the local union.  There is also a brief description of key achievements in the most recent union contract at the time.  There are lists of local union members and their sons who served in WWII and of those members who died in WWII & Korea.  The book also contains a "Public Service Roll" listing members who held elected or appointed positions in the city government of Wayland.  The book is dedicated to a list of 35 "...industrial soldiers who gave their lives in accidents while producing coal..."  in the previous twenty years.  

I found information in this little book which is priceless to me as both a committed believer in organized labor and a writer committed to preserving the history and culture of Central and Southern Appalachia.  I am sure many of my readers will also cherish much of the information which has been preserved in this little masterpiece.  It is a shame that it was not more widely circulated but it has been preserved in the Wayland Historical Society and can be accessed there by contacting the Historical Society.  I am willing to scan and e-mail specific information from the book to my readers who have a genuine and valid interest in reading it.  It is a real tragedy that every union local in the country has not done such a piece of work.  But, as we all know, frequently union members were literally fighting for their lives on a daily basis, working in dangerous occupations for companies which did not care one whit about an individual life of an employee once that person had been replaced.  That brings to mind the old saying in the coal fields of Appalachia that in the early days of coal mining company officials would have rather lost a man than a mule in the mine since another miner could always be hired but a mule had to be bought.  If you ever visit the Wayland Historical Society, try to get a look at this little book, view their wonderful collection of period antiques, and consider giving them a donation to support work like this.