Appalachia Town Hopes for Tourist Lure in Famous Hatfield-McCoy Feud

The Hatfields and McCoys don’t fight anymore, and many of them would just as soon forget their ancestors’ feud. But some in the community are trying to find a way to commemorate the bloodshed.

“There are a lot of grandsons of Devil Anse (Hatfield) and his brothers around here,” said Paul McAllister, director of the new Matewan Development Center. “Most of them are in their 60s and they’re a little bit bitter about the reputations they had to grow up with and live with.”

The Matewan Development Center, in the only three-story building in the town of 800, features a photo display on the massacre and other incidents in the town’s history. It draws a few people a week. McAllister is hoping that the National Park Service will help turn Matewan into a tourist attraction. He envisions a museum, for instance, within 10 years.

In September, 100 years had passed since eight Hatfield clan members were sentenced to life in prison and a ninth was sentenced to death for slaying five McCoys. The sentences ended the bloodshed in which 10 to 20 people died.

But most participants died of old age. The Hatfields’ patriarch, William Anderson (Devil Anse) Hatfield, got religion and gained community respect before he died in 1921 at age 83. His grave at Sarah Ann in Logan County is marked by a towering Italian marble sculpture of him. The leader of the McCoys, Randolph (Old Ran’l) McCoy, embittered by the deaths of five of his 16 children, moved to town in Pikeville, Ky., dying in 1910 at age 85.

Buried with them are the real reasons behind the feud in the heart of Appalachia.

What is known is that the Hatfields, living mainly in what is now Mingo County, W. Va., and the McCoys, in Pike County, Ky., fought on and off for a dozen years in the region’s wooded tangle of valleys and ridges.

Story of Affair

Some say the feud started in 1878 over a pig that belonged to the McCoys and ended up in a Hatfield pen. Others say the dispute stemmed from the Civil War, in which, this version goes, the Hatfields fought for the Confederacy and the McCoys the Union. Others say both families fought for the South.

Romantics say that the feud stemmed from an illicit affair between Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy, and that she eventually bore him a child out of wedlock.

In a 1988 book “Feud: Hatfields, McCoys and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900,” author Altina Waller contends that the feud was the result of a clash between the traditional culture based on subsistence farming, represented by the McCoys, and the emergence of capitalism fueled by coal mining, timber cutting and railroad interests in the Hatfields’ region.

Whatever the cause, open warfare between the families began in 1882 when Devil Anse’s brother, Ellison Hatfield, was stabbed two dozen times and shot during an Election Day brawl in Pike County. The Hatfields seized the three McCoys responsible, and when Ellison died they were tied to pawpaw trees and executed.

The feud escalated until New Year’s Day, 1888, when the Hatfields attacked the McCoy home in Pike County, burning it to the ground and killing two of Old Ran’l’s children.

Now, McAllister’s organization is trying to find a way to commemorate the feud and the 1920 Matewan Massacre, a downtown gun battle between United Mine Workers sympathizers and coal company guards in which at least nine people died.

Robert McCoy, a former Matewan mayor, is among those who had to grow up with the stigma attached to the feud, even though his branch of the family had economic ties to Devil Anse and never took part in the bloodshed.

But McCoy also is on the Matewan Development Center’s board of directors, whose plans call for historic restoration downtown.

“As a member of the family, I probably get a little tired of it. . . . But as a community, I think it’s one of our great hopes for economic survival here.”