Friday, September 24, 2004

I got up at 7:30 this morning. I stopped by Manufacturer’s Supply at 8:00 and picked up two bags on concrete mix and then drove to the radio station. There I borrowed my brother Shane’s Olympus digital camera and headed out for Lothair where I picked up our camp member Tim Harp at his house. Highway 80 was blocked at the Ary exit because of a school bus accident this morning so we took Highway 15 into Knott County over to Hindman and then over to Rt. 80. I stopped for a coffee and a Krispy Kreme doughnut at the BP Mini-mart at Martin and then continued on to Jenny Wiley State Park, just out of Prestonsburg. Tim and I met Joe Skeens and Mickey Goble at the boat dock.

Our first priority was to install white lettering on the side of Mickey’s light green fishing boat that read “Caudill’s Navy.” The letters had been crafted by Richard Smith the day before. With our camp namesake’s regiment most often being referred to as “Caudill’s Army”, I saw this unique occasion, probably a one-time ever event, as a way to launch Caudill’s Navy. The johnboat was pretty low in the water with Mickey and Tim onboard along with the 250 pound marker for Pvt. Henry Taylor and the concrete and our tools. So Joe and I drove my truck from the state park to a point just across Dewey Lake from the mountaintop cemetery while Tim and Mickey road the boat for a much more scenic eight miles. The weather was gorgeous today, constant sunshine but without the summer heat and humidity. All of us spotted wild turkey, geese, and long-necked herons in and around the water. Joe and I stopped on a bridge to get a photograph of the Caudill’s Navy vessel passing underneath.

 

Once the four of us gathered at the designated point and the boat was pulled ashore and tied firmly to a tree our first concern was the wet mud near the water’s edge. It was the extremely slick, oozing variety and not an advantage for boarding four people loaded down with cameras and tools into a shallow johnboat carrying a large upright granite headstone. All of us were sliding around like a group of drunken sailors but still applying enough caution as to not upset the apple cart. The balancing act continued for some time until we ever so slowly found our positions in the boat. It was never far from our minds – that fear that we four could be so easily bobbing in the drink, and worse, the granite stone could easily come to rest at the bottom of the lake! Our craft gently wound around several “S” curves in a particularly narrow area of the lake where a number of bent trees formed the boundaries on each side of the water. Now in shallow water, Mickey paddled from the front of his boat while the rest of us remained motionless pausing to take in the beauty of our surroundings on this fall day. I snapped another picture just before we ran aground on the other side. There was now the familiar deep mud again. By the time we each made our way up and out of the boat our shoes and pants legs up past the knee were saturated with quite a lot of mud. But once we made it through the mud without any major falls or mishaps, our real work began. I started out grasping an orange plastic bucket of concrete mix, about forty pounds worth.

Tim and Mickey were the first to grab hold of the stone strapped securely to the dolly, and Joe was soon quickly ahead of all of us carrying the posthole diggers and starting up the side of the mountain in search of three rocks. There was no sign of a path in any direction. Our only direction was up anyway. We made our way through a deep carpet of fallen leaves as we tugged and strained on up a continuously steeper and steeper grade. We past the usual assortment of thorns, prickly holly leaves as we occasionally tried to pull upward in vain by grabbing a dead or at least fragile limb that snapped and gave way. Mickey and I took turns helping jerk the 250-pound rock strapped to the black dolly. Tim didn’t take turns, he pulled without stopping. But it wasn’t without consequence. By the time we made it to the first bench, then up a steep incline, and finally up to the second bench where three graves were located, Tim’s brow was covered in big drops of sweat, he was breathing hard and he complained about his legs giving way and feeling a little nauseated. We all had some degree of those symptoms, but there’s always a little burst of enthusiasm – if not energy – one gets when the goal is within sight. After our Amazon adventure, there they were, three small field stones without inscription, all that signaled this small flat on an otherwise steep mountain was indeed a cemetery, at least a cemetery for the Taylor family.

On October 1, 1836, nearly 168 years ago, Henry Taylor was born to William and Deskin Taylor in what is now Logan County West Virginia. Shortly before his 26th birthday, and after relocating in Floyd County, Henry enlisted in Company E of the 5th Kentucky Infantry in Pikeville. After serving for a year he was taken prisoner by Union soldiers. Now shift to 60 years later when Henry Taylor, an 87 year-old resident of German, Kentucky on Johns Creek in Floyd County finally is granted a Kentucky Confederate pension. Shift again three years later to the winter of 1926. On a cold January day Henry Taylor, now 90, strays into the woods near his home and tragically freezes to death. He has outlived most all of his rebel comrades, but still meets his end in this most unfortunate way. He is laid to rest on a high point above his home.

Shift once more to September 24, 2004 as four men, each with Confederate soldier ancestors who served with Henry Taylor, complete various tasks to help place a new granite military headstone at the grave of the all but forgotten Henry Taylor. We do this in the very same woods were poor Henry froze to death some 78 years ago. Finally he has a proper marker to identify an otherwise lost and unknown grave, and finally some new attention can be given in a small way to his life and his role in the War Between the States.

How did we ever determine this was the final resting place of Henry Taylor in such a remote, isolated place where three fieldstones without inscription remain barely visible in the woods? The answer is Joe Skeens. Joe, who is somewhat famous for his outstanding comprehensive series of Floyd County cemeteries painstakingly compiled over a thirty year period, years ago found documentation from the Army Corps of Engineers upon surveying property during the creation of Dewey Lake which identified these three graves as our Henry Taylor, his wife Betty, and their infant child. Each and every part of Henry’s remarkable story flashed through my mind as we leveled up the new headstone, padded down the loose dirt, and took a few more pictures. With these three mountaintop graves now made even more inaccessible with the addition of the man-made lake on every side, I think we all wondered just who would ever see the new stone hidden in the woods. But despite the isolation of this place, we still felt good in doing our part to find and mark Henry Taylor and to preserve his remarkable story.

Faron Sparkman