Appalachian History

Please welcome guest blogger Bob Sloan.


My grandfather, William Baldwin Sloan, was born in 1877, in Rowan County, Kentucky. I was thirteen when he died, young enough far too many questions went unasked.

Like, how'd a mountain kid born on an isolated Appalachian ridge get the name "Baldwin?" I never met another man named "Baldwin." The name's on a lot of pianos, but not many birth certificates.

But every question has an answer. The trick is finding someone who knows it. When I happened to ask the oldest surviving member of my father's family about the name, Uncle Charlie replied, "Pap was named after an old Jewish peddler." Then he told me why:

In the 1870's, a tinker, peddler, and jack-of-all-trades regularly traveled through Holly Fork, on what passed for roads back then. When the route was passable, every few weeks he'd come by the cabin where my grandfather was born. He sold bolts of cloth, offered needles and thread, could hone scissors or patch the hole in an over-used coffee pot. And to a lonely woman raising a family on an isolated ridge, he carried news from other hills and hollers through which he'd passed.

Eliza Jane "Enex" was twenty eight when she married Esbon Sloan, my great grandfather, a man fifteen years her senior. The few surviving photos of Eliza show an unsmiling woman, who found little happiness in life. She came to the marriage with an illegitimate son and gave Esbon Sloan five more children. By the time she died in 1929 even her mind seems to have worn out.

But Uncle Charlie remembers her from before what we call Alzheimer's took her, recalls her speaking of that tinker and peddler with words of high praise. That's noteworthy in itself. Family stories indicate Eliza Jane didn't say much that was good about anyone else.

The year my grandfather was born, Eliza was thirty four years old, with three other children, none old enough to help with heavy labor. Marooned in a lonely log cabin on a wind-blown ridge, with no one to talk to except children and a husband who wasn't a conversationalist, her life was a dull, barren trial.

But every now and then a wagon crested the ridge road, and a smiling man (probably a European immigrant) brought news, gossip, and a glimpse of places she'd never see. He'd leave her with a shiny new needle and perhaps a piece of cloth brighter than anything else in Eliza Jane's life.

County histories don't mention a Jewish peddler crossing our ridges before the turn of the century. Old-timers familiar with the oral history of our county don't know anything about him either.

My great grandmother, though, put his name on a son born in the winter of 1877, looking forward to spring, when her friend's wagon would come again. She made certain that peddler would be remembered.

And he is.

After all, you're reading about him, a hundred and thirty years later.

Bob Sloan is the author of a short story collection ("Bearskin to Holly Fork") and "Home Call: A Novel of Kentucky." His novel “Nobody Knows, Nobody Sees” was published in the Spring of 2006. Bob and his wife Julie live east of Morehead KY, on a small farm that belonged to his grandfather and his father.

Related post: "Doc Brown the Grave Robber"



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Please welcome guest blogger Bob Sloan.

This is about a man who's a legend where I live, a man who once walked
the same ground as the rest of us, but left such a track more than seventy years after his death in 1935, people still talk about him.

When I was a boy it was common to be entertained, especially around
Halloween, by tales about "Doc Brown the grave robber." My grandma could scare the water out of a porch full of kids, describing this mad monster from a time that back then wasn't all that distant.

She'd point down the hill to Open Fork Road, and tell us Doc Brown could had sometimes been spotted riding that very trail toward a graveyard, his passage lit by a kerosene lantern bobbing the rhythm of his mule's gait. Shovel tied to his saddle, sometimes with an anonymous assistant riding behind, everybody knew he was off to dig up some newly buried corpse. And not only did he dig up dead bodies, my grandma said he cut 'em up, sliced 'em to pieces right there beside the grave.

With grandchildren gathering closer, Granny'd nod and whisper, "Yes sir, Doc Brown often rode that very road yonder." My cousins and I would stare at the gravel lane and shiver, seeing personal visions of a grave robber's lantern jolting along in the dark.

"Doc Brown the Grave Robber" was a wonderful story, especially since I half-believed long shadows under moonlit trees might conceal a scary someone slipping closer. After I grew up, I figured like all our mountain stories, there was at least a grain of truth in the ones about Doc Brown. And not all that long before her own death, Dr. Louise Caudill gave me an entirely different interpretation of the "Doc Brown tales," a surprisingly different look at the man.

"Wales Brown was a fine physician," Louise told me over a cup of coffee one afternoon. "As good a doctor as ever worked in these mountains," she insisted. Then she told me the rest...

Louise said Wales Brown couldn't abide a meaningless death. In a time when survivors were often content to blame the passing of a loved one on "milk fever" or "bad air," or simply lay their loss at the feet of a hard, unforgiving God, Doc Brown needed to know the real cause.

But in the 1920's, autopsies weren't often performed, and even when asked permission for one, families frequently refused. "Home burial" was general practice, and there was no sterile, distant hospital in which to do perform such procedures. Typically, they were done by lamplight, on a kitchen table around which the survivors would sit on evenings yet to come. Perhaps their frequent refusal wasn't all that unreasonable...

But in worrisome cases where an autopsy might yield knowledge that could save another life, or warn of a possible outbreak of deadly contagion, for Doc Brown no refusal was acceptable. That's why, on moonlit evenings, Doc Brown and his confederate rode the dark hills around Rowan County homesteads. Under cover of night they moved aside six feet of earth, opened a box of instruments, and by the soft glow of Doc's lantern, the body revealed its grisly secrets. Wales Brown learned what killed his patient.

There is at least a kernel of truth in the generations of tales told in these old mountains. "Doc Brown the Grave Robber" is a story with a truth I never imagined when I was a boy.

How often does someone you thought was a monster turn out to be a hero?

Bob Sloan is the author of a short story collection ("Bearskin to Holly Fork") and "Home Call: A Novel of Kentucky." His novel “Nobody Knows, Nobody Sees” was published in the Spring of 2006. Bob and his wife Julie live east of Morehead KY, on a small farm that belonged to his grandfather and his father.

Related post: "A curious middle name"


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