Roots Trees Pedigrees

I never met my grandfather, Frank P. Hall. He died before I was born.  His full name was Franklin Pierce Hall, named after what many consider possibly the worst president ever, by a father who bore the name of one of the most loved presidents ever – George Washington Hall. My grandfather came in from outside chores, told my grandmother he was not feeling well, and lay down on the sofa.  He watched as a blood clot the size of a golf ball moved up his leg.  It raised his skin in a red half-dome as it made its way slowly, but most assuredly, up his calf and over his thigh, crawling its way toward his heart.  It slipped under his belt and made its way across his thin stomach.  And when it reached his heart it caused that mortal pump to explode.

This, of course, is not right.  It is a scene partly from a horror movie and partly from a Looney Tunes cartoon – both big influences on me as a child, which is when my grandmother told me about my grandfather’s death seven years before I was born.  I don’t remember what words she used.  I just remember the vision my mind created from her words.  My grandfather died of a “coronary thrombosis.”

Kentucky Death Certificate, Registration Dist. No. 520, Primary Registration Dist. No 5251, Kentucky Death Records 1852-1965 for Franklin Pierce Hall, Film 7046526, (Kentucky, Death Records, 1852-1965 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007: accessed 22 Feb 2023). 

A coronary thrombosis is a blood clot that forms in the blood vessels or arteries of the heart. The clot may obstruct blood flow to the heart partially or completely. When this happens, the supply of blood and oxygen that the heart needs is cut off, and this can lead to a heart attack.

https://www.healthline.com/health/coronary-artery-disease/coronary-thrombosis. (accessed 22 Feb 2023)

According to the front page of the July 14, 1955 Floyd County Times, he “died suddenly at 8:45” the previous Saturday, a “native and lifelong resident of Weeksbury.”

Before Weeksbury, Kentucky had a name, Franklin Pierce Hall was born there, on January 14 in 1893.¹    Present in the small log cabin at the time of Frank’s birth was my grandmother, Frankie Jane Tackett, born the prior April. At least, that was her recollection as related to me when I was a child.  Frank P. Hall would become a clerk for the Elkhorn Piney Coal Company when it came to build a town in the place with no name.²  The first post office opened there in 1909 with the name “Rail” and it was not until September of 1914 that the post office would have its name officially changed to “Weeksbury,” named after two officers of the Elkhorn Piney Coal Company- Mr. Weeks and Mr. Woodbury.³  By the mid-1920s the town would have over 1500 residents.⁴  Despite this, the district where my grandfather lived would be listed on the 1900, 1910 and 1920 U.S. Censuses as “Harve Painter,” the name of a man whose last name was Johnson that lived a few miles away, at least as far as I can tell.

In the book Our Appalachia, an oral history edited by Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg, Frances Turner describes her memories of living in Weeksbury.  Her father was general manager of the company and moved into the superintendent’s house.  The home had cost nearly $100,000 to build in 1916 and was built originally for the company owner as a summer residence.  She and her family lived there 4 to 5 years in early 20s.  She recalled that the Italian part of town was called “Yellow Flats,” and that while houses in the rest of the camp were painted pink, green, and white, the stucco cottages where the Italians lived were all yellow.  There were Hungarians, Polish and Czechoslavakians.  There were blacks who came from Alabama and had their own church and own school.  Some of the women worked as housekeepers for the executives.  Other recollections: there was a movie house; the coal company had its own doctor and emergency equipment; miners paid $2 per month for the doctor’s services, including medicine; and the schools were owned and operated by the company.  On the Fourth of July the company always provided expensive fireworks at a celebration that also featured ice cream, watermelon, a band, and a patriotic speech or two.  The company owned stores for furniture, appliances, food.  There was a community hall and a fountain that sold sandwiches, a barber shop, and a poolroom.  And perhaps most importantly, the company also provided electricity.⁵  In the middle of wilderness, connected to the outside world by a ribbon of railroad track, towns like Weeksbury were each a small oasis of Civilization in a wilderness that previously held only pioneers.   All in the name of that driving force that had replaced Manifest Destiny:  Progress.  Progress required steel and electricity and both required coal.  And coal required mining.   And mining required entire towns of people.

Frank would marry Frankie on July 2, 1914 when they were both 21 year old school teachers.⁶  He and Frankie would have twin sons on April 28, 1915 – Julius Caesar and Tulius Cicero.⁷ A daughter would follow in November of the following year – Kelsie Pearl.⁸  In his Draft Registration Card from June 5, 1917 my grandfather would note that he had a wife and “3 babes,” and would claim an exemption based on those dependents.  The Registrar’s Report from that date would describe Frank as tall, slender, with blue eyes and light brown hair.  He was not bald.  Yet.  The Report also noted a “withered limb caused by” a word that starts with a “br” but has a “g” where there should be “k” if the word were to be “broken.”  At any rate, the last word in the description is “foot.”⁹

The year 1920 would bring sorrow and joy for the young Frank and Frankie.  My mother, Ola Mae, and her twin, Ora Faye, would be born on November 29.¹⁰  But earlier that year, their young son Tullius would fall down just outside the house and hit his head.  Within two days he would die.  A haunting picture of him used to hang in one of the bedrooms of the house – a young boy in pale and shimmering clothes, like a ghost against a dark background. 

The year 1921 would claim Frank’s father, George “Wash” Hall.  According to a note hand-written by Frank, Wash had been educated in Virginia, had taught three terms of school in the county, and had married Rhoda Johnson in 1886.  They had twelve children.  Wash had moved to the location of the future “Weeksbury” soon after he was married and lived there until his death.  He “learned to farm in a profitable manner” and “was a close observer of nature and nature’s laws.” He had joined the Old Regular Baptist Church in September of 1892.  Wash was described as honest in business and as never engaging in “foolish or degrading conversation.”  His thoughts were “always encouraging and elevating,” his judgment was sound,” his advice “dependable.”  The note ended with a quote from Wash; a comment made once when the crops were not good:  “We have reverses here in this life, and while in this life the only enjoyment and happiness I get, is when I am engaged in the worship of God.”

A solemn family with a solemn religion.

Trying to find definitive descriptions of what makes Old Regular Baptists unique is not easy.  It is particularly hard to find descriptions that do not use historical distinctions and require familiarity with words like “Calvinism,” and “pre-destination” and so forth.  But it seems that the denomination started around 1825 and has always been dedicated to holding onto “old ways” while its mother religion moved on.  Nowhere is that more obvious than in their singing using lined out, non-instrumental hymnody.  In other words, the song leader chants a line and then the congregation repeats it.  There is no written music and the melodies are passed on orally from one generation to the next.  It is haunting to hear.  They are also known for their long preaching and their plain speaking at the funerals of non-members.  Which is to say, the sermon at a funeral may well be that the deceased is now burning in hell.  Tough love.  My mother, a member of the comparatively more free-wheeling Free Will Baptists, did not know a lot of jokes.  But she seemed particularly amused by one in which a newcomer to heaven is getting the grand tour, which inevitably leads to a room with a “Quiet” sign on the door.  When the newcomer asks about it, she is told that the room is full of Old Regular Baptists and everyone needs to keep quiet because “they think they are the only ones here.”

It would be several years after their birth before Frank and Frankie realized that my mother’s twin, Ora Faye, was not quite right.  She was mentally challenged in some way that was never fully explained to me.  My mother, in one of her darker moments, told me that her mother, Frankie, would lock her and her twin sister in a room and she would have to take care of her all day.  I have only seen a single picture that was ever taken of my Aunt Ora Faye.  One was taken of my mother the same day.  They must have been about five years old, their hair still blonde though it would later darken to brown.   My mother looks a bit lost in her picture, but Ora Faye looks completely oblivious, sitting on a chair in a yard, her eyes looking in two different directions, the spectacles of my grandfather intruding into the frame as if he had just set her down or adjusted her and didn’t quite get out of the way before the photographer snapped his picture.

By the time Ora Faye was fifteen she would be in the Kentucky Institution for the Feeble Minded in our state capital, Frankfort. ¹² And there she would remain until she died some thirty years later in July of 1965, ten years after her father.¹³  My family hardly mentioned Ora Faye and I know almost nothing about her, except, I suppose, that she looked like my mother.  I wonder if they visited her often.  I wonder if it weighed on my grandfather.  Sometime during this, I’m not sure when, my grandmother had a “nervous breakdown.”  It was an event mentioned by her to me several times but I don’t know when it was.  My brother Steve once told me that she was institutionalized for a time, but wasn’t sure where or the date.  I wonder if it had anything to do with her daughter’s condition.

The Institution for Feeble Minded Children was first opened in Frankfort in 1860 and closed its doors in 1972, only seven years after Ora Faye died there.  Originally opened with the idea of training the mentally challenged, in 1866 the program was expanded to accept those that could not be trained.  There were three categories of patients at the time: idiots, imbeciles and feeble minded.  A patient’s category was determined by an IQ test administered by the staff.  A mechanical department was created where mattresses, brooms, brushes and shoes were made. Gymnastics, singing, sewing and farm work were also added.  During the 1920s efforts were made to pass a law requiring sterilization of mentally challenged individuals, although the law never passed.  In 1945 the name was changed to the Kentucky Training Home.¹⁴

How much abuse and neglect did Ora Faye endure during her thirty years there?  Did she make brooms?  I have wondered about her often. After she died, she was finally brought home and buried in the Wash Hall Cemetery where she lies not that far from her parents and her twin, overlooking the valley of her childhood. I did meet a lady at a family reunion a few years ago who told me that her father had been superintendent at the facility where my aunt resided for so long, and that he always looked after Ora Faye and would frequently bring her ice cream cones and sit with her. This random moment at a reunion I had not attended in more than twenty years did, I must confess, give me a feeling of at least some relief. Was it a coincidence that a woman showed up at the same place and provided at least some answer to a question I had never voiced? I don’t think so. I wish I had taken down that nice lady’s name.

In 1952, three years before he died, my grandfather was asked to write the annual Circular Letter for the New Salem Association of the Old Regular Baptist Church.  Someone brought a spiral-bound copy of a reproduction of the Minutes of that congregation in my office twenty plus years ago. I didn’t have the sense to copy or write down information that could lead back to that source, but I did have enough sense to make copies of the relevant pages. In the Circular Letter, he wrote, in part:

…I could mention many subjects in the Bible that would be interesting and beneficial, but the night following your selection of me to write this letter, I was impressed and inspired, as I feel, to write on the subject of “Love.”…There is no greater subject to be found in the Bible.

The Apostle John…writes much about this subject.  John tells us love is of God and God is love.  We all understand that love has more than one form, and we all know, or should know, it’s the greatest thing in the world, in the home, in the church and in our associations.  It is that perfect expression of unselfishness which prompts us to do good, to return good for evil, and to make the Golden Rule our rule of dealing with our Brethren and Sisters, and not only them, but all with whom we deal and come in contact with.  It puts into our lives something nothing else can put there, a feeling for which a price cannot be fixed, a feeling all the gold on earth cannot buy.  Naturally, everybody has love for natural things, love for their family, love for their country, and in a degree, love for all humanity.  This natural love prompts the parent to work for and support its offspring; it prompts us to love our homes and the natural surroundings, and to protect our countries against invaders.

I could write at length about natural love, but my desire is to write about the love the Apostle John wrote about.  God’s love, which we are born of, and lets us…love in deed and in truth and not in words nor expressions by tongue…. Love is the dominant factor throughout both the old and new scriptures and a requirement of our Lord.

…

Beloved, our whole spiritual life is the product of love, and not only our whole spirit lives, but love is the foundation of all our true churches and associations. …

…

…I must conclude this letter, but my subject will go on, for it’s from the beginning to the end.  It’s the first and the last.  God is love.  In the day and age, tribulation is mounting, and we are praying for peace, peace, where there is no peace except that found in Jesus….  Spiritual peace is a product of love.  It is born in us, and prompts us to strive for unity; prompts us to work for harmony and refrain from saying or doing anything that will bring discord….

May God’s perfect love and peace be with you and bless you all.  Your humble Brother in hope for a more abundant life.

                                                                                                               Frank P. Hall

Though I never met him, and though I lacked the foresight to learn much about him before those that did know him passed on, I am well familiar with the place – with the plot of earth, where Frank P. was born, lived, and died.  My parents bought a piece of real estate from him and built a house.  Beside the house was a store that my parents ran, first selling groceries and later selling furniture and appliances.  On the other side of the store sat the house Frank built for his family, and in the backyard of that house was a single stone, even with the ground, that my grandmother pointed out to me.  It was a cornerstone of the log cabin in which Frank was born.  On the other side of the house was a one lane road, unpaved except for red dog,¹⁵ that followed a tiny stream of water – Mill Branch.  The stream had once been bigger, wider, faster, because it took its name from the fact that a mill had been located on it, and mill would have required more power to turn its water wheel than that little creek could muster.  The stream, supposedly, was clogged and filled to its present size by a mine that once operated up the narrow hollow.  I remember the remains of the mine, a small scale “truck” mine, and remember vaguely sitting on the front porch of my grandfather’s house watching coal trucks roll up and down the road.

My grandfather owned the hills and “bottoms” on both sides of Mill Branch, his property extending for a good distance up the hollow behind his white house.  There was a barn once, but I don’t remember it.  There was an outhouse too, but by my time there was “indoor plumbing” in the house my grandmother had inherited.  Frank P. farmed the flat bottoms.  My grandmother, diagnosed with diabetes in her thirties, had littered the garden spot closest to the house with thirty some years of tiny empty insulin bottles.  No doubt tilling that land today would produce a crop of them.  At one time, during the days of the barn, they had a cow and sold milk to their neighbors.  They had chickens too.  My grandmother once told me that Frank was “too tender-hearted” to even kill a chicken, and she had to do it herself.  She would grab a chicken by its head and twirl the body around, breaking the neck.  Sometimes the head would come off in her hand and the chicken body would run around in a circle for a time before collapsing.

Tender-hearted Frank also once had a pet raccoon.  Or was it a squirrel?  He had a fruit orchard, and kept bees.  Behind the house, beside the garden spot full of insulin bottles, was a small white building with a poured concrete basement.  In fact, it was almost all basement except for a small room upstairs.  It was used to provide cool storage for the apples from the orchard.  Even lawyers, in the days of the Depression, had to engage in sustenance living.

In the small room of the apple house that was above ground were several boxes of books.  These included law books but also a small hardback volume of Adrift in Arctic Ice Pack by Elisha Kent Kane, and edited by Horace Kephart.   Kephart is probably best known for his book about travel in the Appalachian Mountains, Our Southern Highlanders.  Dr. Kane was the senior medical officer on what is known as the first Grinnel expedition in 1848, one of the earliest search and relief efforts to find the Erebus and the Terror, ships that had disappeared in the Arctic three years earlier.  The book, based on Dr. Kent’s journal from the voyage, dealt with, as you might expect, their own ships becoming frozen into the Arctic ice pack and drifting where it took them.  It was published in 1915 and I like to think of Frank sitting in a comfortable chair by a window in his modest home in Weeksbury, reading about arctic adventure.

In that book, on a folded piece of notebook paper, is the following piece of writing:

As of a thirsty man many day

Upon the sand of the desert

Like a mirage, always there,

But never to be touched

There you are, only one step

Ahead of me always

As of the man without food for a

Long time past,

There is plenty of the best to eat,

But ‘tis only in a dream

I love mysteries.  But not all can be answered.  The subject of the musing could be any of many.  A woman?  God?  Success?  My search of the language has not turned up a poem or quote. Was this an original Frank P. Hall writing? Not all mysteries have clear answers – part of the attraction.

Endnotes

¹ United States Selective Services System, World War I Draft Registration Card. Ancestry.com. Web: http://www.ancestry.com.

² Ibid; and Census 1920 Floyd County, Kentucky, population schedule, Magisterial Dist. No. 6, Painter Harve Precinct No. 6, Supervisor’s Dist. No. 10, Enumeration Dist. No. 10, Sheet No. 18A, dwelling 24, family 24, identifying Frank Hall as a book keeper for Elkhorn Piney Co.

³ Robert M. Rennick, The Post Offices of Kentucky’s Big Sandy Valley (The Depot, Lake Grove Oregon, 2002) p. 41. Unfortunately, there are no sources cited for the information given.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg, Our Appalachia (The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, reprinted 1988, original copyright by Appalachian Oral History Project 1977) pp. 209-217.

⁶ Pike County, Kentucky Marriage Records, F.P. Hall – Frankie Tackitt, married 2 Jul 1914; digital images, Ancestry.com. Kentucky, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1783-1965 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016: accessed 23 Feb 2023.

⁷ National Archives at St. Louis; St. Louis, Missouri; WWII Draft Registration Cards for Kentucky, 10/16/1940-03/31/1947; Record Group: Records of the Selective Service System, 147; Box: 268. Ancestry.com. U.S., World War II Draft Cards Young Men, 1940-1947 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011, Julius Caeser Hall of Weeksbury, Kentucky, dated 16 October 1940 : accessed 23 Feb 2023.

⁸ Ancestry.com. Kentucky, U.S., Birth Index, 1911-1999 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2006: accessed 23 Feb 2023. Original data: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Kentucky Birth, Marriage, and Death Databases: Births 1911-1999. Frankfort, Kentucky: Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Kelsie P. Hall, Floyd County Kentucky, Vol. No. 112, Certificate No. 55559.

⁹ United States Selective Services System, World War I Draft Registration Card. Ancestry.com. Web: http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 23 Feb 2023.

¹⁰ Kentucky Birth Index, 1911-1999, for Ola M. Hall, (prepard by Kentucky Dept. for Libraries and Archives). Find My Past. Web: http://www.findmypast.com.

¹¹ Tullius Hall headstone, Wash Hall Cemetary, Weeksbury, Floyd County, Kentucky; and personal remembrance from my grandmother, his mother, Frankie Jane Tackett Hall.

¹² 1940 U.S. Census, population schedule, Kentucky, Frankfort, Franklin County, Ward 2, Kentucky Institute for Feeble-minded, Supervisor Dist. No. 6, E.D. No. 37-4. Find My Past. Web:https://kyhi.org/asylums/frankfort-state-hospital-school/ http://www.findmypast.com.

¹³ Commonwealth of Kentucky Dept. of Health, Div. of Vital Statistics Certificate of Death. Custom Id: 65 15232; File No. 116, Registrar’s No. 170, Registration Dist.535, Primary Registration District No. 2180; Ancestry.com. Web: http://www.ancestry.com.

¹⁴ https://kyhi.org/asylums/frankfort-state-hospital-school: accessed 23 Feb 2023. More details, many of them disturbing, can be found at the website.

¹⁵ “Red dog is the remains of burned-out coal refuse . . .[that] gets its name from the reddish color the rock develops from exposure to high heat.”