Days of Darkness Read Free Page B

Howards seem to have been regarded as peaceful citizens when they moved up the Cumberland River and settled in what became Harlan County. Samuel and Chloe Howard were probably the first permanent settlers, building a home there in 1796. When Harlan County was created in 1819 the county court bought twelve acres of land from John and Susannah Howard and Samuel and Chloe Howard for five dollars. The land, located where the Martins Fork, Poor Fork, and Clover Fork join to form the Cumberland River, became the county seat. The first records list as owners of town lots Joseph Cawood, Berry Cawood, Adron Howard, Andrew Howard, John Howard (seven lots), Benjamin Harris, Alfred Hall, Wix Howard, John Jones (two lots), Abner Lewis, and Edward Napier. No Turners are listed, indicating that they were living outside the town, but they had a great deal of property on county tax rolls. Sam Howard built the first courthouse and jail shortly after the county was formed, and in 1833 added public stocks and a whipping post near the jail. The Turners by that time had bought much of the good acreage in town. William Turner also owned a tavern and two stores, and for several years he was one of the few county residents taxed for owning a silver watch.
    In 1853, when he was sixteen, Devil Jim Turner married Sarah Jones, but marriage didn’t settle him down. He and his older brother William, John and Hezekiah Clem, and Joseph Nolan formed a dangerous gang. In 1854 Hezekiah Clem and Nolan allegedly killed John Clay and robbed him of ninety-five dollars. David Lyttle, their attorney, got them acquitted, and Nolan decided to go straight, but Clem became known as a gunslinger, and Jim fell in with him. By 1860 Jim was in trouble with his cousins, the Middletons, and Narcissa Middleton accused him of trying to kill her husband William.
    When the Civil War erupted, Jim enlisted in a Union outfit, but he deserted when his term was half over and, according to Narcissa Middleton, “gathered up a guerrilla company, he being the captain, and kept up a regular system of murder, robbery and horse stealing throughout the war, southern men being the principal sufferers.” Incidentally, Confederate William Jr. and Unionist Devil Jim often rode together, one robbing southern sympathizers, the other Unionists, both getting fairly rich. The sign on the lawn of the Harlan County courthouse today states that it was burned by Rebel troops in retaliation for the burning of the courthouse in Lee County, Virginia, but some local historians maintain that Devil Jim and his outlaws did it. Wood Lyttle, in his memoirs, says that Devil Jim “burned it in broad daylight.”
    At the end of the war, William Middleton was killed, allegedly by Devil Jim and his men, on his way home. In 1869, William’s widow, Narcissa, testified that Jim, his brother William and Francis Pace killed David Middleton, William’s brother. Before they could be tried in Clay Circuit Court, Campbell Hurst, who was scheduled to testify against them, was stabbed and killed on the main street of Harlan in what Narcissa Middleton swore was a set-up to keep him from testifying. On December 5, 1874, Jim, William, and Francis Pace were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. William died in prison in 1877. Francis Pace was pardoned in 1891 and vanished. Devil Jim got out on parole and went with his son Hiram to Washington, where he suffered a stroke, fell into the fireplace, and died of burns. (Tom Walters says that Devil Jim was shot by Wood Lyttle. In any event, he died.)
    The Howards, like their cousins in Clay County, had been Whigs and fought for the Union and had come home to take up the job of making a living. They spread out around the county, some on Martins Fork, some on the Cumberland River south of Harlan. Hiram and Alice Howard ran a grocery store on the southwest side of Harlan and made whiskey. In 1869 a Hiram B. Howard sold his store to William Blanton, Jr., but