Historicizing Heritage

I wanted to offer a few names that I have appreciated over the past decade as small entries into this miscellany of objects and questions. The first one is Disputanta, KY. I came to know Disputanta in two ways at the same time, roughly. The first way I encountered it was on a bicycle.

Kentucky, and particularly Berea, KY, has some of the most remarkable and under-appreciated road cycling I’ve ever encountered. I’ve ridden many thousands of miles on those roads since arriving in 2008. Disputanta is at the bottom of one of my favorite climbs (or if you’re going the other way, at the bottom of one of the hairiest descents) in the area. We would usually start the ride on Scaffold Cane Rd., a road named for a type of cane that resembles bamboo and was used sometimes for tool handles. I’ve never heard of it used for actual scaffolding, but its name refers, as I understand it, to the way the cane grows rather than its purpose. From Scaffold Cane, you head southbound  and at Clear Creek cemetery, take the middle fork (Hammonds Fork) of a tiny intersection where a former auto shop stands. It’s been defunct since I arrived, but folks still live in the quarters upstairs. Down that middle fork, hurtle around a set of hairpin turns, and at the bottom, you reach Disputanta, where the name for the town is said to arise from a conflict in the 1950s and 60s over where to locate the town’s new post office.

The old one stands right there at the bottom of the hill, a building circa 1920, but it’s been recently rehabilitated and turned into a horse stable and barn by the current landowners. They painted it a dark and fashionable grey and re-sided it. I’m glad to see the building looking better, but the aesthetics are aggressively bland and sadden me. The detail about Disputanta that I wanted to share, however, has nothing to do with the story about the post office, or the amazing cycling that leads in every direction from that hill. The story I want to share is about Bobby and Louise Hart, my neighbors in Berea. Bobby passed away in 2019, but his people came from Disputanta, and the Harts are still in the hills around there and in the neighboring holler, Climax, KY (famous for its spring water, the incredible enclave of back-to-the-land farmers that keep it vibrant, its cavern system, and the remarkably named Climax Holiness Church, among other things).

Bobby would ask me about my rides and never failed to mention his family homestead, overlooking the hill along Burnt Ridge Rd. (so named for its incredible leaf color in autumn, or maybe for the red dirt, or it could be for the sunset. I’m just telling stories now; I don’t know why it was named that way, but I know the name is exactly right). He also never failed to mention how the dispute behind Disputanta had nothing to do with the post office: in his telling, it had to do with how ornery the Combs family was about its property lines, and how the old Combs family apparently had difficulties that were so regular as to seem intentional, failing to  keep their cattle penned in and grazing on their own land. That cattle and property conflict is the dispute that gave rise, decades later, to a desire to locate the post office in what came to be known as Disputanta: so that the place would have enough standing that the land dispute might get the attention of the county surveyors and get resolved.

The internet will tell you, if you look, that current residents call this place Clear Creek. Those people have never been to Disputanta. Clear Creek is at the top of the hill, Disputanta is below it and extends to the next ridge. The loss of Bobby Hart may stand as part of losing the name Disputanta as it gets absorbed by the friendlier and blander toponym; as the post office itself has become nearly anonymous, so too will the town name fade to grey unless we keep it living through the stories that people like Bobby carried.

My second toponym comes from a place in Kentucky I’ve never been, Hell For Certain, KY, in Leslie county, close to the town of Hyden, where I have had delicious blackberry cobbler served to our faculty group by the women’s club of Hyden’s Baptist church. As I say, I haven’t been to Hell For Certain, and the story is that it was named by a traveling pastor “from away” who got turned around traveling in the hills during the summer and, upon his return, said he didn’t know where he’d been, but it was hell for certain.

This is perhaps the stuff of legends, but what brings me to the toponym is the story collection by John Fox, Jr., including “Hell Fer Sartain,” (1897) a story about a Christmas party that serves as the background for character studies. The story doesn’t hold up and I don’t care to recount it, but what I will recount is the attempt by Fox to capture dialect in a way that may not always be respectful to the resourceful, fierce, and astute people in the region, but does try to remain constant to the tone of their lilt. That’s a lilt that you can only hear in the reading if you’ve heard it from the mouths of people in Leslie County, people who can make the toponym Hell For Certain / Hell Fer Sartain into a mellifluous antithesis of the stereotypical story Fox tries to tell. It’s the language that tells the story.

What I miss about places like this in the hills of Kentucky is hard to pull away from those places, hard to extricate or distinguish from afar, hard to move beyond the limits of the being-present (what Heidegger would concatenate with a part of the Dasein in that being) of a place. It’s not simple to characterize the depth of experience in a place considered hell for certain, I mean to say, when the words of the place as they are spoken and live in the mouths of its people are as lovely as the taste of blackberry, served alongside the blessings of those who plate it with humility, their lilt resonant in the ears. I can hear it now, years after, just back over there.