Blood Complicated

By Lauren Fadiman

The Hatfield-McCoy conflict occupies a strange place in American mythology. In our latest issue, Lauren Fadiman explains how the feud has been packaged and repackaged.

TWELVE HOURS INTO MY DRIVE from Connecticut, I knew I was nearing the site of America’s signature feud when the density of Hatfield and McCoy-themed businesses suddenly amounted to a veritable theme park of mundanity. The southwestern corner of West Virginia boasts an HVAC service, a real estate agency, a convenience store, a dentist, a moonshine distillery, a bar, a grill, a hotel, an outdoor theater, a bowling alley, an appliance store, cabin rentals, airboat tours, and personal-injury lawyers, all bearing the name of the vaunted belligerents. This is West Virginia in the wake of coal, trying its hand at tourism: the Eastern Panhandle has Harpers Ferry, and the Kentucky border has a family feud that puts Family Feud to shame.

I met Jackie “Jack” Lee Hatfield Jr. on the land where his great-great-great-grandfather, the infamous Hatfield patriarch William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield—his sobriquet, depending on the legend, was either an invention of the newspapers or bestowed in childhood to distinguish Anse from his cousin, Anderson “Preacher Anse” Hatfield—died after a lifetime of grievance. The original house Devil Anse erected on the site, long since burned down for insurance money by an uncle deep in gambling debt, was a palace of paranoia: a wooded refuge to which Hatfield and his family retreated after two decades of lethal bickering with their McCoy neighbors. The bloody back-and-forth had left at least twelve dead by 1888, when Devil Anse resettled in the unincorporated community of Sarah Ann. He chose the new site for its proximity to the rushing Island Creek, across which he built a single retractable drawbridge that could be pulled back at the first sight of danger.

From the bluffs that overlook the site, Devil Anse’s sharpshooters could survey the road in either direction. Now the bluffs overlook a gravel parking lot, a midcentury prefab, and a modular memory box containing what little is left of a bygone Appalachia: the Devil Anse Hatfield Homeplace & Museum, which the prodigal Jack—formerly an insurance executive at a faraway outpost of Blue Cross and Blue Shield—has come home to build.

“This is West Virginia in the wake of coal, trying its hand at tourism.”

I drove into Sarah Ann, West Virginia, a couple of hours before Jack and I had planned to meet, thinking I would kill time wandering the museum, but there wasn’t much to see: shards of pottery, corroded coal scrip, and a handful of anonymous black-and-white photographs. The Hatfield working the front desk, Cher, told me that a big part of the homestead’s labor is debunking would-be claimants to the Hatfield legacy, who sometimes go so far as to break into Jack’s little prefab house and settle into his massage chair under the mistaken impression that this was the bona fide family home. Cher is accordingly strict with her family tree, meticulous with birth and death records. When I asked her if she knew the history of her family before they made it to America, she replied that, on her non-Hatfield mother’s side, she’s gotten all the way back to Adam and Eve.

Jack arrived at about 3 p.m., his arm bandaged around the elbow as if he’d just donated platelets to the Red Cross, and I was tempted to make a joke about the ceaseless spillage of Hatfield blood. But I had the distinct impression it would be too soon—even though the feud ended more than a century ago. Time moves slower in Appalachia, and history, like the mountain range over Island Creek, casts a long shadow. Jack and Cher talked about their long-dead family members like living friends, but when Cher was out of earshot, Jack confided that she is technically only a Hatfield by marriage—a descendant of Devil Anse’s grandfather’s children from a second marriage in the late 1700s.

There are not too many Hatfields with a direct line to Devil Anse left in Logan County, and the living are outnumbered by those at rest in the family plot uphill from the museum. But everyone wants to be a Hatfield. A Reddit post on r/West Virginia from last year seeking out members of the feuding families garnered dozens of positive responses. “We’re descendants of both families,” reads the typical comment on the thread. “We’re, like, 30th cousins,” runs a more cautious one. Other posters posit ties thicker than blood: “I had my first beer with Charlie Hatfield, Devil Anse’s nephew, when I was six months old,” claims one such poster. “It was the 1950s, so things were really different.” The fact is that, in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, everyone is obliged to be a Hatfield, a McCoy, or both. From the outside, there is something quintessentially American about it. For the actual family members, their lineage—and inheritance—is considerably more complicated.

Continue reading “Blood Complicated,” an essay by Lauren Fadiman, on our site.

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