My Kentucky Ancestors, Part 1
(From Lookout Pinnacle, a view of Cumberland Gap (and the junction of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee)
“Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors.” –Ralph Ellison
In my youth, American media seemed to embrace Appalachia, which was often presented playfully but unironically as a both uncouth and undiluted version of America. The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show on TV were wildly popular. In the comics section of the newspaper, Li’l Abner and Snuffy Smith were prominent. Sure, we chuckled at the antics of Jed and Granny Clampett and their clan, but the sharpest barbs were saved for the Beverly Hills banker Drysdale and his wife. I have my own connection to a small town in Appalachia.
In July 2020, I planned a road trip to Roanoke, Virginia, to spend time with my daughter, Emma, and my two grandsons, Oscar and Linus. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, I decided it wouldn’t be wise to spend a night with my 87-year-old mother in Columbus, Ohio, as I usually do, so I looked for a different Iowa-to-Virginia route. I realized I could go south from Indianapolis on I-65 to Louisville, head east to Lexington, and then south on I-75, which would take me near East Bernstadt, the Laurel County town where my father and his brother grew up. My gramma Duer is buried there, and I’ve long wanted to pay my last respects to a woman who played a major role in my early life (which I will elaborate on in Part 3). She died five days after my youngest son, Jesse, was born, and I made the difficult call to be with and care for my family rather than make that long mid-December trip for her funeral and burial.
I have good memories of East Bernstadt. Although it’s a mere six-hour drive from Akron, my family visited there only a handful of times. But when we did, I could sense the powerful pull of geography and history on a people and place, something I came to appreciate over the years, that tarot deck of culture. In 1880, a Kentucky immigration commission sent land agents to Europe to promote the state. And the Swiss colony of Bernstadt was first settled one year later by a group of immigrants – including my great-grandparents, Jacob Muster from Bern and Amelia Blunschi from Basel – who had bought land, sight unseen, and made that leap. They named it after Bern, that city on the fertile plateau west of the Swiss Alps. I imagine they were a bit disappointed by their acquisition, which was better suited to coal mining than farming, but they made do.
Through my own experiences, I became drawn to the romance of the hollers of eastern Kentucky, those narrow valleys tucked back in the mountains. I once paid a visit to a family who lived in a holler, following a dirt road that eventually became the creekbed at the heart of that landform, until we reached a farm nestled between two steep ridges. Even in the middle of summer, maybe seven or eight hours of sunlight could reach the bottom of the holler. Driving around Laurel County, one could happen upon Wildcat Hollow, Salt Log Hollow, Possum Strut Hollow, Copperhead Hollow, Angel Hollow, and of course, Dark Hollow. These were not terrifically telegenic scenes, but they had their charm. Tacked to telephone poles, metal signs advertising Mountain Dew reminded us that “It’ll tickle your innards!” Often used for target practice, they were peppered with buckshot or perforated with .22 caliber bullet holes. And barns painted with Mail Pouch chewing tobacco ads declared, “Treat Yourself to the Best!” – sometimes the only painted surface on the weathered siding.
During the summer of 1967, I turned thirteen and spent a couple weeks in East Bernstadt with my cousin Jeff from Cleveland, who was two years older than me. We stayed with one of Gramma’s brothers, Paul Muster, who grew tobacco on the acreage behind his house. In the early morning, we were tasked to patrol the tobacco rows and pick off fat juicy worms and squish them in the red clay. We’d cross the railroad tracks into town and visit the general store and post office run by Gramma’s youngest sister, Frieda Casteel. We’d hang out and play pool at the home of our second cousins, the three Casteel sisters, who were cute and joked with us about being our “kissin’ cousins.” On hot afternoons, we’d take a rowboat out on a deep murky pond shaded by tall trees, watch for water moccasins, and fish for catfish and bluegill in a lazy, desultory way. We swam at the country club pool in nearby London with our Curry cousins. We waded in the shallow Rockcastle River and picked off leeches. We walked the woods, where I was thrilled to find a twelve-inch-long fossil (later identified as a fossilized fragment of a giant club moss from Mesozoic forests). I think this all was my dad and uncle’s idea to initiate us into the world of their childhoods, and something about it did stick with me.
Saint Sylvester Cemetery, where Gramma is buried, lies behind the little Catholic church atop Muster Hill that I remember attending when I visited. Google Maps helped me get to East Bernstadt, but I happened upon the church on my own, seeing a sign and then looking up the hill at the white clapboard structure, jarring loose memories from fifty years ago. Paul Muster’s tobacco farm across the road is no longer there, and trees have grown up around the church, but surprisingly, East Bernstadt itself hasn’t changed much. Interstate 75 passes within a few miles of the town, as the crow flies, but I had to drive over ten miles from the nearest interchange to get to it, a forgotten town in the Dan’l Boone National Forest. The cemetery is half full of my kinfolk – Musters and Blunschis and Currys and Casteels and Duers. There were six graves of family members who served in World War II. Counting my dad, at least seven of my relatives, from a town that has never numbered more than 700, fought in that war. Army Air Force Lieutenant Henry Muster died in the South Pacific on January 3, 1945. All the others returned home.
Being there felt comfortable and comforting, like lounging on a weatherbeaten couch on a front porch. I drove the five miles into London, the county seat. When I stopped at a Burger King to grab dinner, the woman handing me my change wished me “a blessed day” and the teenage boy who took my order and then handed it to me addressed me as “bud” in a way that made it seem as if we’d always been the best of friends. I camped for the night in Levi Jackson State Park, just south of London, and began the next morning with a walk through fern-flooded woods. I packed up my camp, filled the car with gas, and headed south for twenty miles on a narrow, winding state highway through national forest land, at least two Confederate flags along the way obstinately and obscenely flying from front porches.
I then picked up the Cumberland Gap Parkway going east, which not surprisingly, took me to the Cumberland Gap itself, a V-shaped breach in the Cumberland Mountains ridgeline through which European American settlers had trickled and then flooded west in the late 18th century. I pulled off to take a look, saw signs for Pinnacle Overlook, and drove the steep cutback road to the top for an amazing view from 2,500 feet to the east of that passageway that had been a buffalo trace and a Cherokee and Shawnee trail and then the Wilderness Road.
The story of Appalachia is one of people bound to the land “by the investment of love and work, by family loyalty, by memory and tradition” (Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America). But it’s also the story of a land that for the last 130 years has been far more exploited than nurtured. Maybe I’m drawn to the potential of the beauty hidden within that tragedy. I reckon, after all’s said and done, the place is still right pretty.