| Log House Page # 7 |
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| The house was a long log building with one bedroom and the kitchen-dining room downstairs. They were separated by an entry down the middle. Two bedrooms upstairs were reached from a stairway in the entry. A porch extended all along the front. There was no back porch. A well was in the front yard and the barn and other outbuildingds were across a branch from the house. (5) The site was a lush bottomland from which Hezekiah could see his forested holdings reaching to the top of Big Black Mountain. One relative described the extent of the acreage of Hezekiah and John Creech Sr. " As you travel up Clover Lick to the head of the creek, your people owned all that was visible to the eye and across the Big Black, where it's not visible." The land held extensive stands of virgin timber and thick, deep, wide seams of bituminous coal in unbelievable abundance. The owners easily could have opened a vein anywhere and dug the coal. Some seams were so shallow that out-croppings were easy to locate. Yet they snaked logs out of the woods and cut them up for house wood. As the big corporations and outside prospectors made core drills, they discovered the rich seams of bituminous coal that started the area's growth. From 1910 to 1920, the population of Harlan County rose from 10,564 to 31,546. (6) When Poor Fork was established as a post office on Feb. 11, 1837, Hezekiah was named the first postmaster. (7) The length of his term is not known. The post office was discontinued on Jan. 19, 1839 for six years. After a startup, it was discontinued again in 1857 and in 1863, then finally became permanent. In the 1850 census, Hezekiah gave his occcupation as a farmer and his holdings at 1,000 acres. Apparently he wasn't counting because he owned many more. Commissioners In 1851, he was one of five men named commissioners for a special districting of the county. The November Court of Claims paid them for their work. (8) He also was a justice of the peace. Records indicate that he married again after Elizabeth's death. His great- granddaughter could not recall a second marriage but said it was a possibility. The 1840 census lists a female in the household who was 40 but under 50 years old, indicating that Elizabeth died between 1840 and 1850. The 1850 census shows him as head of household with 13 children and without a wife. The 1880 census lists another daughter, Rebecca, who born 10 years after his youngest child, Sampson, named in the 1850 census. All of the children were born in Kentucky except Rebecca. She was born in 1855 in Virginia. Kinfolks said that he lived to be 100 and cut a third set of teeth, a rare occurence in dentistry for anyone older that 50. In his time, people took great pride in their horses, mules and oxen, since they were important to their livelihood and as transportation. Hezekiah road a big black stallion and spoke with a decided brogue. It was the habit in those days for men to transfer land to their children as they married. Hezekiah was no exception. He also sold some of his land, including tracts to Patsy Blair, Thomas Creech, Ezekiel Hall, Samuel Powell, John Creech and Alexander Estep, as county land records show. In his 88th year and until his death, Hezekiah lived with his son, Sampson, who had moved into the "plantation" home place with his wife and daughter. They also shared the home with two of Sampson's sisters, Annis and Rebecca. With thier large families, Hezekiah and Henry brought prospects of a prolific Branson contingent to the Poor Fork area. A century after their arrival there, the name had disappeared from Cumberland in a mass exodus that took many of Hezekiah's descendants to the west. After Hezekiah's death, Sampson gave up farming and moved to Pennington Gap, Va. A deed dated Aug. 19, 1890, lists 24 heirs of Hezekiah Branson. |