Big Sam Mullins of Little Slate Creek in McDowell County was one of the last mountain men, a descendent of the pioneers who came to tame the Appalachians, and he knew it.
“About the only thing you can see around here now is what’s left of old home places abandoned by folks who’ve moved out of the hollow and gone somewhere else,” said the blue-eyed patriarch, stroking three-day-old stubble and cocking his wide-brimmed hat to one side. “There’s not too many of us left.”
Big Sam stood nearly six-feet tall, lithe, and lean as the fence rails scattered around his homestead in the winding hollow near Bradshaw.
At 96, he always up at daybreak, chopped kindling for the kitchen stove, drew a bucket of water from a nearby spring, and boiled his morning coffee in a metallic, blue-speckled container on his black-iron cook-stove. Then he threw out some scraps to his hounds prowling outside the screen door.
A moment later, the man tossed a thick strip of streaked, salt-pork bacon into a lard-laden, hefty iron skillet. Half a dozen eggs were already gathered from the henhouse; biscuits were baking in the oven.
Big Sam’s wife Della Mae, 89, suffered from a touch of rheumatism, had arthritis in her hands and knees, could barely walk since she fell down the back porch steps. “She’s been laid up awhile, poor thing,” the tall man said sympathetically, as he calmed some licking, yellow blazes under his grease-bubbling, cooking vessel. “I do most of the chores. It keeps me busy, but I don’t mind as long as I’m able.”
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Life in the hollow had not changed much over the decades.
Big Sam, a veteran hill-land farmer, kept a menagerie of critters and fowl on his spread, including chickens, turkeys, goats, guineas, and geese. Black-and–tan and red-bone hounds stretched out on the mud-covered ground, just off the front porch, near a straggly horse-apple tree. Somewhere out back a game rooster crowed from the top of his lungs.
Big Sam kept busy during the day, but nightfall brought ease to the homestead, located only a few miles from the Virginia-West Virginia line. He and his wife were typical the industrious folk who settled the region’s mountain hollows in the mid-19th century.
Mullin’s lineages arrived in this remote, steep, and hilly sweep, from the three-forks of Bradshaw to the head of War Creek, long before the infamous gray-and-brown-clad, sabre-baring, and steel-spurred guerrilla scouts combed the hills on horseback, snooping for enemy Union camps and searching for runaways and deserters, and looting whatever crops and livestock they could find.
Those were times of hardship and hunger before the mountainous sector—rich in bituminous underground seams and surface terrains of virgin timber—opened its private portals to industry.
As the wealthy land companies and railroads secured their terrestrial assets for less than 50 cents an acre, including rights to abundant natural resources, corporate firms moved in to devour their prizes—pocketing vast fortunes and safeguarding their property boundaries, for imminent successors, at county courthouses.
But that was then, and this is now. There is not much reason to stay around when jobs are scarce, and poverty is rampant.
As a result, countless mountain communities like Little Slate Creek are being steadily drained of their people. Those who once prospered with relative restraint from times of Prohibition until the mid-20th century—those steadfast inhabitants who derived a modest sustenance from scant hill-land farming and the unlawful bootlegging of cut-rate corn-liquor—are only a memory today.
Forget the 40,000 miners who worked the pits during the 1940s. Forget the swelling population of immigrants from Eastern Europe during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Forget the investors who came to the region from as far away as New York and Chicago to buy land and launch profiteering productions on the backs of low-cost laborers.
But once coal mining wilted and waned in the 1950s, the fiscally dependent towns and their inhabitants faded during the slowdown’s subsequent aftermath. Hard times took its toll on everyone—especially on the unfortunate rural folk struggling along meandering mountain streams and rugged reaches in far-flung hills.
Big Sam said there once were 52 families in the bending, backwoods traces near Bradshaw. His tribe now remained one of the few that was left.
The Mullens’ clan leader lived in the same hollow for the past 80 years. He claims he once leased more than 1,000 acres for $12 a year. “Now I’m paying $125 a year just for the house seat,” he said.
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As the years went by, things appeared to be getting rougher on residents in the hollow, but it was not always like that. Big Sam, like others who thrived and prospered in the 25-mile basin, once amassed massive stacks of greenbacks making moonshine during Prohibition’s heyday.
The old-timer estimated that, for two decades or more, he channeled thousands of gallons of unlawful liquor through his concealed copper stills—those chancy secreted receptacles stashed along dark woodland corridors and soggy forest floors, away from peering eyes of persistent government “revenuers.”
Big Sam noted that his corn-inspired spirits was the only thing that sustained his family during the fierce flu epidemic of 1918, when hundreds of people died in the region. He recalled driving a horse-drawn death-wagon up and down the primitive tracks of Bradshaw, picking up bodies during the infamous global epidemic that claimed the lives of many thousands of individuals in the U.S. alone.
“I’d drink a half gallon of corn-liquor a day,” Big Sam boasted of the era. “If I got too much, I’d quit for a spell. It kept me going and I never did get sick.”
Things are far different today, though. Nobody wants the boozy, bootlegged brew any longer, even the high-quality fermented blends that are temperate in taste, yet expensive to produce. “It costs too much to make, and people can get something else a lot cheaper,” Big Sam observed. “But I could still run moonshine today if my family had a need of it.”
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Big Sam was just as obligingly unabashed when it came to discussing other seemingly delicate domestic matters. For instance, there are two graveyards on Mullins Mountain. One is the family cemetery. The other has stone grave-markers but no names.
The head of the reclusive clan ventured to say that the shadowy gravesites probably belong to those who died in feuds, or those early homesteaders who were wiped out during property disputes before his ancestors arrived.
“I reckon ’taint good to go poking around up there too much,” Big Sam mused of the old boneyard. “But one thing is for sure, Indians didn’t put those markers up there.”
Meanwhile, lots of folks were pulling up stakes and high-tailing it out of McDowell County, mostly because of the region’s poverty and a new kind of epidemic—narcotics use and other drug-related evils. The county ranks, per capita, among the peak regions of the nation for its alleged abuses and public criminal malevolence.
Even so, not everyone was ready to say good-bye to this slumping, pastoral setting, its winding, and heavily-forested reaches along Little Slate Creek and its remote-mountain tenants—those who inhabit modest rustic structures near the hill-top township of Bradshaw, located on one end of the hollow’s circuitous, twisting dirt thoroughfare, and the Virginia border on the other.
One member of the tribe, Big Sam’s son, Jackie Mullins, after a short-term stint in urban billets, beat it back to his boyhood home to make a new start in the hills.
“The people who settled here were a tough stock,” explained the 52-year-old father of nine. “I moved my family up here so they would grow up strong, so they could learn the ways of the hollow.”
Jackie lives off the land himself. He hunts and traps, digs herbs, and farms. He clings to the values and habits of his bucolic community: devotion to the land, deep loyalty to family, respect for the pledged word, patience, curiosity, and superstition.
At Jackie’s house, shy eyes peek atop porch palings when visitors “come a calling.” “People up here don’t take kindly to strangers nosing around,” the devoted father declared squarely, his keen, steely eyes getting wider. “We’re just naturally suspicious, I reckon.”
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From Jackie’s country-style kitchen wafts the mouth-watering aroma of fresh-baked cornbread in an old-fashioned cook-stove oven while pork chops and fried potatoes simmer in iron skillets on top.
The calm and comfortable mountain man often sipped a cup of herbal tea on his front porch during eventides and gazes out over the emerald foliage that marked the essence of his accustomed Appalachian environs.
And like most of his kind, Jackie is an exceptional marksman. He kills for meat as well as for sport. In squirrel season, Jackie hunts with his petite, dark-eyed daughter, Robin, who totes a hefty, poke-stalk shotgun, a 12-guage.
“It kicks like a mule,” Robin said of her prized firearm.
The plucky and fluent high school senior professed she has no plans of leaving her familiar stomping grounds after graduation. “I will marry, raise a family, and continue the customs that I’ve been taught,” she said decisively.
Jackie’s house, meanwhile, sits not far from the home of his father. About halfway between their silvery-weathered, board-and-batten abodes stands a Chinese chestnut that Big Sam planted, half a century ago, after blight struck the tall, nut-bearing trees of the hills.
As a sudden rainstorm blew in over the lofty summits, Jackie and his guests retreated under the spreading, thickly branched and leaf-covered shelter, which had become a kind of patriarchal symbol among the clan.
And while the rain thumped a drumbeat not far away on the family’s galvanized tin roof, Jackie talked about digging wild roots.
“Yeller root will cure anybody’s stomachache,” he said. “Snake root is a good medicine for stopping diarrhea.”
Jackie could identify more than 100 kinds of herbs and roots of the Appalachian forest. “I sent away and got books,” he said. “I sell some of the roots to a dealer up North who markets them to medical labs.”
When times grow tough in the hollow, Jackie hustled for his progeny, relying on savvy sustenance schemes he developed during seminal phases spent among his skillful and clever kinsmen.
Even so, he was barely able to meet his fiscal obligations. He had several kids in school at the time. His earnings bought clothes, shoes, and other essentials.
Once upon a time, Jackie was a timberman, pulling cross-cut saws from sunup till sundown, and later toting the gas-powered chainsaws from hill to hill.
Eventually, the logging jobs played out, and by that time Jackie was too old for the mines. “Now I do whatever I can,” he said.
In the Mullins’ family Bible are the designations of ancestors and names and birthdates of Jackie’s children. On this list will be the names of grandchildren yet to come.
“We’ve lived here all of our lives,” Jackie said. “Why would we want to pack up and forsake our homes? My father is 96 years old, and Ma isn’t far behind, if we left, who would stay and help look after them. We don’t just go off and leave our kinfolks behind. That would be a sad day in the holler. I doubt if they’d ever got over it.”
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Top o’ the morning!