Folk Figures & Social Reformers Graves

William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield. American Folk Figure. Born in what is today Logan County, West Virginia, he grew up in the hill country along the Tug Fork River and developed a formidable reputation as a marksman and horseman. He and his wife, Levicy, produced nine boys and four girls. He owned considerable property and ran a successful lumbering operation. A Confederate sympathizer after the start of the Civil War, he formed the “Logan Wildcats” guerrilla band after West Virginia became a state and was admitted to the Union in 1863. Some historians believe the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud found its beginning in 1865 when Asa McCoy, brother of the McCoy family patriarch, Randolph McCoy’s brother and Union Army veteran, was found shot to death. Others point to an 1878 complaint filed by McCoy against Floyd Hatfield, Anse Hartfield’s cousin, for stealing his hogs. Popular perception, however, favors the ill-starred romance between Anse’s son, Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy. William Hatfield refused permission for them to marry, the end result was Rosanna being pregnant and abandoned by her lover and her family. Two years later, Anse Hatfield’s brother Ellison was killed by McCoys, with his response being the killing his brother’s murderers, for which an indictment was issued but no further action taken. Tension between the two families remained high through the decade. On New Year’s Day 1888, Hatfield supporters burned the McCoy’s homestead, killing two adult children, Alifair and Calvin, and seriously injuring matriarch, Sarah. A reprisal raid netted nine Hatfield supporters but Anse Hatfield escaped. The sides were drawn into a pitched battle two weeks later, during which a deputy was killed. In September 1889, the captured Hatfields were tried for the death of Alifair McCoy, eight went to prison, a ninth hanged. The trials effectively ended he active feuding. Anse Hatfield spent the last years of his life quietly on his farm. He was once asked to go on the vaudeville stage, but it came to nothing in the end. He converted to Evangelical Christianity in 1911. He was never wounded, despite his violent life, and succumbed to pneumonia a decade later. His funeral was, at that time, the largest ever held in Logan County.

Betsy Ross. Revolutionary War Figure. Born Elizabeth Griscom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she has gained legendary status for her story of her role as a seamstress in the creation of the Flag of the United States, a legend that has no historical records to corroborate. A part of a devout Quaker family, she learned the seamstress and upholstery trade as a young woman, and opened up her own seamstress business, which she successfully conducted through most of her adult life. She married John Ross in 1773, a move that had her expelled from the Quaker Church because Ross was an Anglican. When the Revolutionary War began she wholeheartedly supported the Patriot cause with her seamstress skills by making blankets, tents and cloth cartridges for musket balls. Her husband was a member of the Pennsylvania Militia, and died supposedly in an accident, in 1776. She was commissioned to make flags for the Pennsylvania Navy, and continued to surreptitiously make supplies for Continental troops during the 1777 to 1778 British occupation of Philadelphia, despite the danger of being executed for treason if she was caught. She had married Joseph Ashburn in 1777, however, he was captured by the British Navy and died while being held in captivity in the Old Mill Prison in London, England. The man who brought the news to Betsy Ross about her second husband’s death, John Claypool, had also been imprisoned in London, and eventually became her third husband. After the end of the war and America gained it’s independence from Great Britain, she resided with her family on Arch Street in Philadelphia, and worked as a seamstress until 1827. She lived to the age of eighty-four, died in 1836 and was interred in Philadelphia’s Free Quaker Burial Ground on 5th Street. Twenty years later her remains were removed to Philadelphia’s Mount Moriah Cemetery. The legend of her participation in the creation of the first United States flag began in the 1870s, when her nephew submitted a paper to the Pennsylvania Historical Society detailing the Revolutionary stories he had heard about his aunt. The main story consisted of relating how in May 1776 she was commissioned by Continental Congressmen Robert Morris and George Ross (the uncle of her first husband) and General George Washington to sew the first standardized American flag with thirteen stripes and a blue field with thirteen stars in it, which had been designed by Francis Hopkinson. Betsy Ross’s contribution was to change the stars from having six points to five points (making them easier to cut and sew). This story is doubted by historians in the present day, as there is no contemporary documentation of this event having happened. It was taken as fact during the 1876 United States Centennial celebration, and Betsy Ross was elevated as a legendary female Patriot figure, a status many today believe she deserves regardless of the flag legend. What was believed to be her and her husband’s remains were removed from Mount Moriah Cemetery in 1975 during the United States Bicentennial celebration, and were brought to the courtyard that was created by the house on Arch Street in Philadelphia where it is believed she resided. 

Susan B. Anthony. Social Reformer. One of the most famous suffragettes, she traveled, lectured and canvassed the nation for the vote for over sixty years while also advocating the abolition of slavery, women’s rights to their own property and earnings, and the right to organize and belong to women’s labor organizations. She dedicated her life to women’s suffrage while encountering hostile mobs, armed threats, objects were hurled while her image was hung in effigy or dragged through the streets of America. Born in South Adams, Massachusetts, her father, a liberal Quaker, was a cotton manufacturer. She was home schooled until enrolled in a boarding school in Philadelphia and at age fifteen began teaching, a career that would last for fifteen years. After the family moved to Rochester, the Anthony family members were active in the anti-slavery movement. Quakers met at their farm every Sunday, sometimes joined by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Susan Anthony abandoned teaching and began participating in the movement for woman suffrage. Susan along with fellow suffrage activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association while publishing a newspaper ‘The Revolution’ with the masthead, “Men their rights, and nothing more, women, their rights, and nothing less” and began outlining their agenda for reform in print. Upon the resignation of Stanton as President of the National Woman Suffrage Association because of old age, Susan Anthony took up the mantel of leadership. She averaged 100 lectures a year and engaged in eight different State campaigns for a Constitutional amendment enfranchising women, while attending hearings before suffrage committees of practically every Congress until retirement. She suffered from a serious valvular heart problem in the latter years of her life. After attending a banquet in New York in honor of her eighty-sixth birthday, she had a serious attack of neuralgia. Returning home to Rochester, pneumonia developed and then she lapsed into a coma, resulting in her death at the home she shared with her sister on Madison Avenue in Rochester. Her Unitarian funeral was attended by 10,000 mourners. Black activist Hester C. Jeffrey, sharing the platform with the minister of the Unitarian Church, the Mayor of Rochester and the president of the University of Rochester, gave the eulogy for her deceased friend. The Susan B. Anthony House was the home of the legendary American civil rights leader during the most politically active period of her life. It was the site of her famous arrest for voting and the place of her death. The home is located in a Rochester Historic District where a nine-block area of 19th century middle-class houses and buildings are intact and preserved with the Susan Anthony House and Susan Anthony Square the centerpiece. The residence contains the original furniture and thousands of artifacts, documents, photographs and periodicals. All American adult women finally got the vote with the Nineteenth Amendment, also known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, in 1920, 13 years after her death. New York set a state wide holiday when it designated February 15th as the day to commemorate her life. In 1979 the United States mint created the Susan B. Anthony dollar in 1979 with the face of a woman who actually lived, memorialized on a United States coin on the obverse. She was the joint author with Elizbathe Cady Stanton, Ida Husted Harper, and Matilda Joslyn Gage of “The History of Woman Suffrage.”

Mary Harris “Mother” Jones. Social Reformer. She was born in Ireland, moved to Canada with her family when they fled the Great Famine in the late 1840s, and then when she was 23, she moved to the United States. She became a teacher in Michigan in 1859. She moved to Chicago, and later to Memphis, where in 1861 she married George E. Jones. George and their four children died in 1867 during a yellow fever epidemic. She returned to Chicago, then she lost everything she owned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. After this she joined the Knights of Labor, then became involved mainly with the United Mine Workers, as an organizer and educator. She was known for organizing the wives and children of striking workers in demonstrations on their behalf. She assumed the persona of “Mother Jones” by claiming to be older than she was, wearing outdated dresses and calling the male workers that she helped as “her boys”. After 1900, she began to fight against child labor. In 1903, she organized child laborers to take part in a march with banners demanding “We want to go to school and not the mines!” She attempted to get newspaper publicity for the bad conditions experienced by child laborers, and she tried to meet with the president to discuss the plight of child laborers, but the president refused to meet with the marchers. During the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, she spoke to and organized laborers. She was eventually arrested and tried in a military court, and was sentenced to twenty years in the state penitentiary. After almost three months of confinement, she was released when the Senate began an investigation into the conditions in the local coal mines. Later she helped organize coal miners in Colorado, was arrested and served some time in prison, and was escorted from the state. She attempted to stop striking miners from marching into Mingo County, West Virginia, in late August 1921, by claiming (possibly bluffing) to have a telegram from President Warren Harding offering to work to end the private police in West Virginia if they returned home. She remained a union organizer for the UMW into the 1920s and continued to speak on union affairs almost until she died. An account of her experiences in the labor movement was published in 1925, called The Autobiography of Mother Jones.

Marie Laveau. American Folk Figure. Known to history and popular lore as a legendary “Voodoo Priestess”, the details of her life have proven to historians as elusive and ambiguous. In the nineteenth century, she was the single most storied figure in the substantial New Orleans, Louisiana “voodoo” milieu. Though her birthdate is unknown, there are reports of a young Laveau leading Voodoo ceremonies in Congo Square (now Louis Armstrong Park) as early as 1830, and it is generally thought that she was born in 1794. Her house on St. Ann Street where she worked as a hairdresser was a popular destination for supplicants of all ethnicities who bought her charms and potions to inspire love and protect from (or cause) harm. Perhaps her most celebrated mystic feat was the alleged rescue of a Frenchman from the gallows early in her career. In some versions of the story, she invoked a great storm that caused the noose to slip from the convict’s neck. In more elaborate tales, she is said to have magically influenced a New Orleans magistrate to set the accused free. The date of Laveau’s death is also a matter of some dispute, with some reports having her performing ceremonies as late as 1890 (although these later appearances are generally thought to have been by her daughter). Some Voodoo adherents believe that Marie Laveau is still alive, but there is a folk consensus that she died in 1881 (as reported in local newspapers) and is interred in an unmarked Greek revival tomb in New Orleans’ Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1. To this day, the tomb is the object of adoration and the site of Voodoo offerings, with many visitors marking their pilgrimage by adorning the tomb with at least one large “X”.

Dr Robert Holbrook “Bob” Smith. Social Reformer. A surgeon and physician, he was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Raised in a very religious home in a community where consumption of alcohol was considered immoral, he had his first taste of alcohol when he was nine years old. As a child, he was forced to attend church services up to five times a week, which caused him to vow that he would never attend church once he was no longer under parental control. He attended Dartmouth University where drinking beer and hard cider were his primary activities. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1902, and then sold hardware for three years. He persuaded his parents to send him to medical school at the University of Michigan. His continued drinking led to his expulsion after his second year. His father enabled a transfer to Rush University where hard liquor replaced beer and his binge drinking escalated. He was given one last chance to graduate only if he did not drink for two more semesters. He finally became a doctor at the age of 31 in 1910. He worked as an intern in a hospital for about two years and was so busy that he did not drink heavily. He married in 1915 and went into private practice in Akron, Ohio. He moderated his drinking while practicing medicine, specializing in colorectal surgery, only drinking after work but taking sedatives to get through the day. Soon he began drinking heavily again and checked himself into more than ten sanitariums and hospitals to try to stop. He thought that Prohibition being passed in 1919 would help as alcohol would not be available, but he got exemptions for medicinal alcohol and continued to drink. In 1933 his wife attended a lecture by Frank Buchman, a member of the Oxford Group founded by Harvey Firestone. The Oxford Group was a religious movement whose members practiced self-improvement by performing self-inventory, admitting wrongs, making amends, using prayer and meditation and carrying the message to others. Attending Oxford Group meetings did not help him recover. Then he met Bill Wilson, a businessman who stayed sober by helping other alcoholics through the Oxford Group. Bill Wilson was in Akron on a business trip and was afraid he would relapse into alcoholism. Someone referred him to Dr. Smith and the two alcoholics were able to talk about their alcoholism from having shared experiences. Using the Oxford Group as a model and adding the element of alcoholics talking to alcoholics the two men founded Alcoholics Anonymous. June 17, 1935, the date that Dr. Smith had his last drink of alcohol is, acknowledged as the founding date of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Clarissa Harlowe “Clara” Barton. Founder of the American Red Cross (Angel of the Battlefield). Clara Barton was born on Christmas Day on a farm near Oxford, Massachusetts. She was a teacher and a government worker before heading off to minister the wounds of soldiers, often on bloody civil war battlefields. Barton was so close to the front lines at the Battle of Sharpsburg that a bullet passed through her clothes and killed the wounded soldier she was tending. She came into the missing soldiers business when a prisoner of war brought her a list of dead soldiers from the legendary Andersonville Confederate prison camp in Georgia. Nearly 13,000 of 45,000 confined Union soldiers died of disease, filth, starvation and exposure. Thanks to her work, Barton was able to return to Andersonville and mark the graves of thousands of soldiers, She later published a list of their names. Once people realized she had found dead soldiers, she started receiving thousands of letters from mothers and daughters. As head of the missing persons office, Barton became the first woman to run a government bureau, receiving $15,000 in congressional appropriations and working with her own staff. She went to Europe and visited Switzerland. A group of men called on her and told of an organization called the International Red Cross Committee. Each member wore a badge – a red cross on a white background. On the battlefield the men who wore it were always welcome. Clara Barton came back to the United States and began work toward organization of an American Red Cross. The government agreed to permit such an organization. Barton was the first president and served as its head for twenty-two years. 

Sara M. Hinson. American Folk Figure. Founder of the holiday “Flag Day”.

Alfred “Alferd” Packer. American Folk Figure. Known as the “The Colorado Cannibal.” His name is often misspelled as “Alferd,” an error that stems from his own illiteracy. His victims were Frank “Butcher” Miller, Israel Swann, James Humphreys, George Noon, and Shannon Wilson Bell. Born in Pennsylvania, he enlisted on April 22, 1862 in the 16th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War, and was mustered out at Fort Ontario, New York on December 29, 1862 suffering from epilepsy. On June 10, 1863, he reenlisted again, in the 8th Iowa Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, and was mustered out again just ten months later in Cleveland, Tennessee, again due to his epilepsy. In 1873, he was in Provo, Utah, looking for gold in the rich Utah hills. In November 1873, he was with a party of 21 that left Provo for Colorado, to attempt to find gold in the Rocky Mountains. In early January 1874, the party met with Cheyenne Chief Ouray at the Indian encampment near Montrose, Colorado. On February 9, 1874, he and five others decide to push on for gold, leaving the others behind in the Indian encampment. Two months later, on April 6, Alfred Packer arrived alone at the Los Pinos Indian Agency near Gunnison, Colorado. A month later, he wrote his confession, stating that Bell killed the other men, and he killed Bell in self defense. Since there was no food, and they had brought inadequate provisions, he lived by eating the dead men. (A second confession, written in March 1883, gives more detail, and a third confession, written on August 7, 1897, is even more detailed. However, each confession contradicts the earlier confession in numerous details as to how the men died, and who killed whom. The only consistent “facts” are that Packer admits to killing Bell after Bell attacks him, and that he ate some of the dead men’s flesh due to starvation hunger). A search party that was dispatched to the site found the bodies as described. Alfred Packer escaped from jail, and went into hiding under the alias “John Schwartze.” In March 1883, a former fellow miner, Frenchy Carbazon found him hiding out in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He was arrested and returned to Colorado, where he was tried and sentenced to death. In 1885 his death sentence was reversed by the Colorado Supreme Court due to a “grandfather’s clause,” and he was retried and sentenced to forty years in prison. In January 1901, Colorado Governor Thomas, convinced by newspaper muckraker Poly Pry, granted Packer conditional parole, and he was freed from prison but not allowed to leave the state of Colorado. Upon release from prison, he moved to Deer Creek, Jefferson County, Colorado, where he lived for the rest of his life, as a vegetarian. He died in Phillipsburg, Colorado. In 1980, the story was made into a movie, “The Legend of Alfred Packer,” and a folk song was written about the incident by Phil Ochs.

Kim Peek. American Folk Figure. He was an American prodigious savant known as a megasavant. He had a photographic or eidetic memory, but also social developmental disabilities, possibly resulting from congenital brain abnormalities. He was the inspiration for the character of ‘Raymond Babbitt,’ played by Dustin Hoffman, in the 1988 movie “Rain Man.” He was not autistic and likely had FG syndrome.