The Moores of Route 23

Journal of Backcountry Studies The Moores of Route 23 BY MICHAEL MOORE When U.S. Route 23 crosses the Virginia border into southeastern Kentucky, it climbs Pine Mountain and cuts through Pound Gap. Even though engineers—in one of the biggest projects ever undertaken in the United States—have lowered the grade and made the road straighter by removing a good portion of the mountain and rerouting a river, it is still easy to view the country side as Christopher Gist did in 1753 when he first surveyed the pass and blazed a trail for westward settlers. (Daniel Boone was to emulate Gist’s feat 20 years later through the Cumberland Gap, 100 miles to the southwest.) The Big Sandy Watershed is the geographical context for Route 23 in Kentucky. It is a triangular-shaped region that embraces 10 counties there, plus three in West Virginia, and four in Virginia. The base lies across the Clinch River in Virginia, which is south of Pound Gap. The sides of the triangle converge at Catlettsburg, Kentucky, where the Big Sandy empties into the Ohio River. Within that triangle, Route 23 runs directly through the region and continues along the Levisa Fork past Pikeville and Prestonburg toward Louisa, where it joins the Tug Fork to form the Big Sandy River. There, both the river and the road abut the West Virginia border, and go past Paintsville toward Catlettsburg and the Ohio River. It was not known as Route 23 until Congress in the 1920’s developed a numbered national road system. Before then, “23” was a series of loosely connected two-lane roads, sometimes paved, sometimes not. And before that time, in the 19th century, it was not much more than trails and dirt roads that paralleled more or less the Levisa and Big Sandy. Also connected were many creeks and runs that fed into the Levisa or Tug, enabling loggers like my ancestors—who were but a branch on the huge family tree known as the Moores—to float their timber to market. The Big Sandy was the major route in and out of Kentucky, but it was more than just a transportation corridor. It defined the economic and social possibilities for settlers like my forbears who traveled along the Levisa and Big Sandy, opening up what Henry Scalf has called Kentucky’s Last Frontier. Here, Isaac Moore and his descendants cut timber and rafted the logs down river and either took the trails back or, after 1837, rode a steamboat as far as Piketon (as it was then known). They also mined lead and salt, ran hotels and general stories, and traded goods and services in the manner of small-scale businessmen. They dealt in real estate and acquired land. © 2008 Michael Moore Journal of Backcountry Studies 2 Journal of Backcountry Studies 3 The Big Sandy and its trails, furthermore, shaped the way the Moores saw the world and by extension, themselves. John Fox, Jr. who lived near Route 23 in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, wrote about that frame of mind in Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Although the book is nearly a century old, it remains powerful in its description of the beauty, tragedy, and mystery of the mountains: You see, mountains isolate people and the effect of isolation on human life is to crystallize it. Those people over the line have had no navigable rivers, no lakes, no wagon roads, except often the beds of streams. They have been cut off from all communication with the outside world. They . are the closest link we have with the Old World. They live like the pioneers; the axe and the rifle are still their weapons and they still have the same fight with nature. [Their feuds are] a matter of clan-loyalty that goes back to Scotland. They argue this way: You are my friend or my kinsman, your quarrel is my quarrel, and whoever hits you hits me. If you are in trouble, I must not testify against you. If you are an officer, you must not arrest me; you must send me a kindly request to come into court. If I’m innocent and it’s perfectly convenient – why, maybe I’ll come.1 Fox also described the conflict that the mountaineers had with the miners and industrialists who came into their valleys to dig coal and iron and introduce urban values and ways of thinking. It was a clash of two different ways of life and perception and although better roads, modern schools, K-Mart, McDonalds, and Lowe’s have softened the differences, the older memories and values are still close to the surface. Self-sufficiency is important since medical, police, or emergency assistance may not be nearby; hospitality and kindness toward strangers are still graciously extended; and an occasional shooting recalls the old ways of settling feuds. The relative isolation and distance from help are compelling arguments even today to keep a loaded .38 by one’s bedside at night. When and from where did the Moores emigrate? Most likely, it was from Scotland through Northern Ireland2. The family surname is one of the most common in County Antrim, next to the Giants Causeway and only 12 miles from the Scottish coast. They probably were Scotch-Irish and Presbyterian—a hellish breed of rebellious, stubborn, fiercely independent, and dour folk, who were extremely suspicious of any kind of authority, be it King or Established Church. They weren’t too fond of the Catholics either, particularly after James II laid siege to Londonderry in 1689. Above everything, they cherished their freedom and were ready to fight for it. James Leyburn3 observed that the Scotch-Irish came to America during the 18th century in five great waves, roughly corresponding to the degree of suffering at the hands of their British landlords, who, with the Church of England, stifled revolt for over 700 years. The Scotch-Irish wanted the freedom to be married and buried by their own ministers and to have those ceremonies legally recognized. They were tired of the “rack rents” that jacked up their taxes to astronomic heights and impoverished them. They suffered when the linen and lace mills shut down, throwing them out of work. But most of all, they wanted land of their own. Land was everything, it was income and security; it was status and respectability; it was a clear sign of a 1Trail of the Lonesome Pine, 97-98. 2 Preliminary results of DNA ancestry testing are beginning to provide some support to this thesis. 3 The Scotch-Irish – A Social History (Univ. of North Carolina Press) 1961), 171-176. Journal of Backcountry Studies 4 man’s moral worth and of his favor in God’s sight. It gave concrete form to the idea of freedom. There was much land in America, just over the horizon. Many Scotch-Irish landed in the Philadelphia area. Although there had been Moores in New England and the South, they found good, cheap land as well as a tolerant Quaker government in Pennsylvania. But by the middle of the 18th century, land prices were skyrocketing and Pennsylvania was filling up fast, thanks largely to German immigrants, whose sober, industrious, law-abiding, and docile ways were undoubtedly more attractive to colonial authorities than were the hard-drinking and combative Scotch-Irish. Consequently, settlers who arrived later took the Great Wagon Road4 stretching for 700 miles from Philadelphia southwestward to the Potomac, then down the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, through the western Carolinas, terminating in Savannah. Up and down its length, from northeast to southwest and back again, settlers made their way to the frontier, seeking cheap land. The governors of Virginia welcomed these people because they made good Indian fighters and protected the Shenandoah boundary. Accordingly, the authorities granted religious freedom and legalized Dissenting ministers and marriages. They were also generous with land grants which enticed later settlers like my great-great-great (or 3g) grandfather Isaac Moore to head toward Pound Gap. The governors of North Carolina also welcomed the Scotch-Irish, but later turned authoritarian when the settlers decried the governors’ neglect of the frontier and their practice of taxation without representation. The quarrel escalated into armed conflict and became a dress rehearsal for the Revolutionary War. Isaac Moore’s Legacy Isaac Moore was born in Virginia in 1789 and lived in Russell County. Around 1811, he took his family across Shelby Gap into Letcher County, Kentucky, and built a cabin along Elkhorn Creek. He had 11 children by his first wife and seven more by his second. He began to make money in the timber trade from land he owned both in Kentucky and Wise County, Virginia. By 1830, Isaac was living in Pike County, adjacent to Letcher. In 1832, the court of Wise County, Virginia, appointed him as a land evaluator, putting him in an advantageous to acquire still more land. He and his sons (including Aaron, my 2g grandfather) cut trees and floated the logs down Elkhorn Creek along the Kentucky-Virginia border to where it flows into Russell Fork and then into the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. They then rafted the logs downstream to Catlettsburg, where they sold them for about a dollar a piece. They would return home along the waterways or Indian trails. Running logs was dangerous business. To ensure enough depth on shallower streams, the men built splash dams at various places that could be collapsed by pulling out a key log when the water was deep enough. As a contemporary observer wrote: The huge logs rearing on end as they took the plunge, then reappearing in the boiling cauldron below to be sucked back to the fall, again to be sent under, and again to emerge.

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