Appalachian Figures
On the hill above modern Pikeville, Kentucky, Dils Cemetery looks down on a town that has grown far beyond the nineteenth century river village Randolph “Ole Ran’l” McCoy knew. His stone stands among those of his wife Sarah, their daughter Roseanna, their son Sam, and other kin whose lives were tangled with one of the most written-about family conflicts in American history. The cemetery itself is now part of the Hatfield McCoy Feud Historic District, which means that a place of mourning has also become a stop on feud heritage tours that wind busloads of visitors past graves and markers.
Yet for all the drama attached to his name, much of what we know about Randolph does not come from campfire stories or television miniseries. It comes from dry records kept by census takers, county clerks, military officials, and reporters. When those records are laid alongside later scholarship, they reveal a Pike County farmer and ferryman whose life was shaped by kin networks, the Civil War, local courts, and finally the hard politics of borderland violence.
This article follows Randolph from the Tug Fork valley into Confederate service, through courthouse disputes and the eruption of the feud, and finally to his last years in Pikeville, using primary records wherever possible and turning to later writers when the archives fall silent.
A Tug Fork McCoy
Public histories and genealogical work agree that Randolph, often spelled “Randal” or “Randall” in the record, was born on October 30, 1825, in the Tug River Valley of what would become Pike County, Kentucky, the fourth of thirteen children of Daniel McCoy and Margaret Taylor McCoy.
By the time federal census takers began walking Pike County hollows in the middle of the nineteenth century, Randolph’s household appears regularly in the population schedules, sometimes under slightly variant spellings of his given name. These enumerations place him on the Kentucky side of Tug Fork as a farmer with growing acreage and a large family. Later historians like Altina Waller and Otis Rice use those census snapshots as part of a wider picture of a valley in transition, where smallholders, timber interests, and future coal speculators all had an eye on the same land.
Local genealogical work from the Pike County Historical Society places Randolph squarely in this network of landholding families. Their summary notes that he “was born Oct. 30, 1825” and gives his parents’ names, then traces his siblings into Logan County, West Virginia, where divorce proceedings between Daniel and Margaret would later spill a great deal of family business into the court record.
Marriage, Kin, and the Pike County Record
Randolph’s adult life in Pike County comes into sharp focus on December 9, 1849, when he married his first cousin, Sarah “Sally” McCoy, daughter of Samuel McCoy and Elizabeth (or Sarah) Davis. The marriage was recorded in Pike County and appears in compiled indexes like “Kentucky, County Marriages, 1797 to 1954,” as well as in genealogical summaries and cemetery notes.
Tourism and local history materials today describe Sarah as born in Pike County around 1829, and note that she later inherited land from her father. That inheritance helped put the young couple on a sizeable tract along Blackberry and Pond creeks in the Tug valley, a landscape that would become inseparable from the story of the feud.
The paper trail for their children begins almost immediately. A particularly useful Pike County document is the 1850 marriage bond for their daughter Louisa and her groom, Anderson Blair. Preserved through a verbatim transcription in the USGenWeb archives, the bond records that “consent [was] legally given” by Louisa’s father. Researchers who have consulted the original have noted the way Randolph’s endorsement appears, suggesting that he signed by mark rather than in a clear hand, one small clue to his literacy and everyday status in mid-century Pike County.
As the decades passed, the McCoy family grew until most reference works credit Randolph and Sarah with sixteen children. The best documented include James, Floyd, Tolbert, Sam, Alifair, Roseanna, Calvin, Pharmer, and “Bud,” names that would appear again and again in feud reporting and later histories.
Other county records show that Randolph did not always appear in court as a respectable head of household. Among the Pike County Historical Society’s summaries of nineteenth century court proceedings is a brief entry for “Commonwealth of Kentucky vs. Randolph McCoy,” filed as a bastardy case with the mother identified as Mary Adams. Bastardy proceedings were one way county governments tried to ensure that children born outside of marriage did not become public charges. This case, preserved in abstract form on the society’s site, reminds us that Randolph’s life in Pike County included the same mix of labor, kinship, and legal entanglements that marked many working families in the region.
War on a Divided Border
When the Civil War broke across the Tug Fork, the McCoys, like their neighbors, faced choices that were as much about local alliances as about national politics. Later writers sometimes flatten the story into a simple split between Union and Confederate kin, highlighting the killing of Randolph’s Unionist brother Asa Harmon McCoy by Confederate guerrillas associated with the Hatfields.
The surviving military records tell a more complicated story of Randolph himself. Compiled Confederate service and prisoner-of-war files at the National Archives, analyzed in Mathew W. Lively’s article “The Confusing Confederate Service of Randolph McCoy,” connect him to May’s regiment of Virginia cavalry and then to Company C of Beckley’s 45th Virginia Battalion Infantry. Those files have puzzled genealogists because they are fragmentary and because his name appears under several spellings.
What is clearer are the prisoner records. Modern summaries in Camp Douglas research newsletters and genealogical compilations agree that Randolph was captured in Pike County in July 1863, sent first to Camp Chase in Ohio and then transferred to Camp Douglas in Chicago.
His presence at Camp Douglas is confirmed by an Oath of Allegiance signed there in July 1865, where he marked his name rather than writing it. That document, preserved among National Archives releases and reproduced in Lively’s research, shows a middle aged Pike County man pledging loyalty to the United States so that he could finally leave a prison hundreds of miles from the Tug Fork.
After the war, Randolph returned to Pike County. Hill’s later investigation for the Kentucky Adjutant General’s office notes that although some commentators tried to root the feud directly in wartime killings, “the charge that the vendetta originated during the war is not sustained by the facts,” even while acknowledging the murder of Randolph’s Unionist brother. That official judgment matters because it comes from a contemporary state investigation rather than from romanticized later retellings.
Hogs, Lawsuits, and Neighbors
The famous “hog trial” of 1878, in which Randolph accused a Hatfield relative of stealing one of his pigs, has become one of the most frequently retold episodes in feud lore. The case appears in Pike County court order books and has been interpreted by later writers as part of a broader pattern of disputes over property, honor, and authority in a rural county where livestock and land were measures of both survival and status.
The basic outline, echoed in public history summaries and in PBS’s brief portrait of Randolph, is that he lost the case. The jury, which included relatives of Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield, sided with the Hatfield defendant, and Randolph walked away feeling that the law favored his more affluent and better-connected neighbors.
Seen through the court record, the hog trial was one of many disputes that sent Randolph and his kin through the Pike County courthouse over the years. Deeds, tax lists, and minor cases in the order books catch them in passing as they registered land, paid taxes, and answered to local officials. Altina Waller’s Feud and Otis Rice’s The Hatfields and the McCoys both mine those same order books, showing that the McCoy and Hatfield clans were deeply enmeshed in the legal and economic life of the county long before shots were fired on election day.
Election Day on the Tug Fork
The turning point in the official narrative of the feud arrives in August 1882. In his 1888 report to Governor Simon Buckner, Adjutant General Samuel E. Hill set out to explain how “border warfare” had erupted between the Hatfields of Logan County, West Virginia, and the McCoys of Pike County, Kentucky.
Hill’s account begins with an attempt by Tolbert McCoy, appointed a special bailiff, to arrest Johnson “Johnse” Hatfield on Kentucky bench warrants. Hatfield kinsmen crossed the Tug Fork, intercepted the McCoy party, and rescued their relative. Shortly afterward, at the August election, Hill writes that Tolbert and “Big” Ellison Hatfield quarreled at the polling place and that Hatfield, much larger than Tolbert, had the upper hand until Tolbert drew his knife and his brothers joined in. Ellison staggered away with stab and gunshot wounds and died roughly two days later.
In retaliation, a Hatfield party seized Tolbert and two of Randolph’s other sons from Kentucky authorities, carried them back and forth across the state line, and, after Ellison died, tied the three young men to pawpaw bushes and shot them. Hill emphasized that all three were sons of “old man” Randolph and noted that one was only fourteen.
Those killings produced indictments in Pike County. Bench warrants circulated for years without effective arrests, as Hatfield defendants spent most of their time across the line in West Virginia and crossed into Kentucky only in armed groups. When viewed through Hill’s report and the Pike County docket, the election day violence looks less like a random eruption and more like the moment when long-simmering tensions over land, authority, and cross-border impunity finally boiled over.
New Year’s Night on Blackberry Creek
The best contemporary account of what happened to Randolph’s household on New Year’s Night 1888 is again Hill’s report, supplemented by newspaper coverage that soon followed. Hill describes Frank “Bad Frank” Phillips, now a deputy, trying repeatedly to arrest the indicted Hatfields and their allies, sometimes crossing into West Virginia himself. Those incursions, he writes, helped provoke a retaliatory raid by a Hatfield party able to “penetrate Pike County a distance of seven miles” to Randolph’s “peaceful mountain home.”
In Hill’s telling, the attackers surrounded the Blackberry Creek home, demanded surrender, and opened fire. Inside, Randolph and his son Calvin tried to hold them off. When the house was set on fire, Calvin dashed for the corn crib, hoping to cover his father’s retreat, and was shot dead partway there. Randolph escaped into the dark with a shotgun and managed to reach the woods.
The report then focuses on the women and children left in the burning cabin. One daughter, ordered to make a light, was shot through the breast when she could not comply. Modern sources identify her as Alifair. Hill’s account of the old mother beaten insensible on the porch and a younger daughter dragging her injured mother, her dead sister, and two small children to safety has become one of the most quoted passages in feud history.
Regional and national newspapers followed with their own versions. The Current Literature article “The Dramatic Story of a Mountain Feud” and later summaries in papers from Louisville to New York retold the burning of the McCoy home on Blackberry Creek, naming “Ole Ran’l McCoy” as the Kentucky leader and describing the family’s flight into the winter woods.
The archaeological record offers a quieter confirmation of that night’s violence. Excavations in 2012 and 2014 at the Randolph and Sally McCoy homesite near Hardy, Kentucky, documented burned structural remains and bullets consistent with a firefight and deliberate burning, findings that align closely with Hill’s 1888 description and with the family’s later testimony.
Militia, Courts, and the Law Beyond Tug Fork
The aftermath of the New Year’s raid unfolded in both Pike County and Washington. Hill reported that Phillips, with a posse of Kentuckians, soon re-entered Logan County, killed Jim Vance in a firefight, and captured a number of Hatfield defendants who were then jailed in Pikeville. His description of frightened jail guards, armed townspeople, and rumors of a Hatfield raid to burn the jail echoes the climate of fear recorded in late nineteenth-century newspaper pieces.
One of the legal ripples reached the United States Supreme Court as Mahon v. Justice, a feud-related extradition dispute. In that case, lawyers argued about the legality of dragging a West Virginian prisoner across the line into Kentucky to answer for the killings of McCoy family members. The Court’s opinion, which recounts how Plyant Mahon was seized and brought to Kentucky, is not about Randolph personally, but it shows how violence along the Tug Fork forced federal judges to grapple with cross-border law enforcement once local remedies had failed.
Together, Hill’s report, the Mahon decision, and the thick Pike County court record that scholars like Rice and Waller unpack in their footnotes shift the story away from caricatures of hillbillies feuding in a lawless vacuum. They show how men like Randolph tried to use legal tools available in a poor border county and how those tools proved limited when defendants could step across a river into another state’s jurisdiction.
From Burned Cabin to Pikeville Ferry
In the wake of the New Year’s attack, Randolph’s life narrowed. Public histories, drawing on family accounts and local reminiscence, agree that he left the Blackberry Creek homeplace and moved his remaining family to Pikeville. The town, a growing river and rail center, offered more security than an isolated log house in the hollow.
Later writers, including the Pike County Historical Society and the Dils Cemetery interpretive site, note that Randolph operated a ferry in Pikeville for a time and that the house where he spent his later years still stands near the intersection of Main Street and Scott Avenue.
A generation after the New Year’s raid, Randolph became news once more, this time as an aging man. Newspapers across the country carried short obituaries and features under headlines like “Noted Feudist Dead.” One syndicated piece, preserved on the Genealogy Trails site, describes “Randall McCoy, nonagenarian and one of the leaders of the famous Hatfield McCoy feud,” who died at his grandson’s home in Louisville from burns suffered in a fall into a cooking fire the previous autumn.
There is some disagreement among modern sources about the exact date of his death. The Pike County Historical Society summary gives October 30, 1914, as the date, while general reference works and some cemetery transcriptions list March 28 of that year. The obituaries agree on two points that matter most for understanding his last months. First, he lived long enough to see his story turned into a kind of newspaper shorthand for Appalachian lawlessness. Second, his end came not in a gunfight, but in the quiet, terrible way many elderly people die, from an accident in a home kitchen.
Whatever the precise date, his body came back to Pike County. At Dils Cemetery, his stone stands among those of Sarah, Roseanna, Sam, and others, tying the tumult of his life to a hillside that also holds Black residents, Union and Confederate veterans, and local merchants. That mixed burial ground, founded by John Dils Jr. in the 1870s and opened deliberately to the whole community, makes Randolph’s grave one part of a wider story about race, class, and memory in Pikeville.
Remembering Randolph: Archives, Family Stories, and Historic Districts
Today, anyone trying to move beyond caricature and understand Randolph McCoy as a person rather than a symbol has several types of sources to work with.
Court and county records in Pikeville, Logan, and Frankfort preserve his appearances before the law, from the bastardy case with Mary Adams to his role as father and landholder, and finally to divorce proceedings in his second marriage to much younger Hattie Steffey, which the Pike County Historical Society has summarized from the original case files.
Military and prisoner-of-war files in the National Archives, read carefully through work like Lively’s Civil War Profiles article and cross-checked against Camp Chase and Camp Douglas research, document his Confederate service, capture, and release.
The 1888 Adjutant General’s report and Mahon v. Justice bring the state back into the picture, showing how Kentucky and federal authorities tried to restore a semblance of law around a man whose cabin had been burned and whose children lay buried because indictments alone had proved powerless.
Newspapers ranging from the Louisville Courier-Journal to out-of-state papers in Indiana, Louisiana, and beyond carried both sensationalized feud coverage and later obituaries like “Noted Feudist Dead,” which framed Randolph as an emblem of a bygone age of bloodshed even as they noted his quiet last years.
Manuscript and photograph collections at the West Virginia and Regional History Center, Berea College’s Appalachian Feuds collection, and local museums in Pikeville hold images of Randolph and Sarah, letters, and clippings that add texture to the story told by the official record. The PBS American Experience “Hatfield and McCoy Family Album” gathers many of those photographs into a curated set, reminding viewers that behind the stereotypes stood ordinary faces.
Finally, archaeologists and historic preservationists have anchored his life in specific places. The excavation of the McCoy homeplace, the Dils Cemetery historic listing, and the National Park Service’s documentation of feud-related sites in the Tug Valley mean that Randolph’s story is now mapped onto the landscape in a way that visitors can see and walk.
Family histories written by descendants, such as Truda Williams McCoy and Barry McCoy, add yet another layer, mixing oral tradition with documentary evidence. Like all family narratives, they must be read critically and tested against the archives, but they preserve memories that official papers seldom capture.
Taken together, these sources show a man who was never simply the one-dimensional “feudist” of popular imagination. Randolph was a Pike County farmer, a Confederate private who survived two years as a prisoner, a husband whose marriage appears in both warm family memories and harsh divorce complaints, a father who lost multiple children to violence and disease, and an old man buried among Black and white neighbors in a hillside cemetery that now bears historic plaques.
To stand at his grave today is to look out over a town and a river valley still wrestling with the legacies of land, labor, and law that shaped his life. For Appalachian historians and family researchers alike, the challenge is to keep returning to the primary records that anchor his story, even as folklore and popular culture continue to retell and reshape the legend of “Ole Ran’l” McCoy.
Sources and Further Reading
This article draws first on primary records and near-primary transcriptions, including Pike County marriage records and court summaries from the Pike County Historical Society; the USGenWeb transcription of the 1850 marriage bond of Louisa McCoy and Anderson Blair; Pike County and Kentucky court proceedings that include Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Randolph McCoy; prisoner-of-war research on Camp Chase and Camp Douglas; and nineteenth and early twentieth century newspaper coverage preserved in digitization projects such as Hoosier State Chronicles and Genealogy Trails. Genealogy Trails+4USGW Archives+4Pike County Historical Society+4
Government documents, especially Adjutant General Samuel E. Hill’s 1888 “Report from the Adjutant General of Kentucky” on the Pike County troubles and the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Mahon v. Justice, provide a contemporary framework for the feud and the New Year’s attack on the McCoy home. KY National Guard History+1
Archaeological and preservation materials from the Kentucky Office of State Archaeology and related reports on the Randolph and Sally McCoy House, along with the Dils Cemetery interpretive site and National Park Service documentation for the Hatfield McCoy Feud Historic District, ground the story in specific places that can still be visited. Kentucky Archaeology+2Dils Cemetery+2
Secondary works that synthesize these records include Altina L. Waller’s Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860 to 1900, Otis K. Rice’s The Hatfields and the McCoys, Lisa Alther’s Blood Feud, John Ed Pearce’s Days of Darkness, and Mathew W. Lively’s article “The Confusing Confederate Service of Randolph McCoy.” These studies are essential guides to the archival trail and to the broader social context of Randolph’s life. Civil War Profiles+4Wikipedia+4Find A Grave+4
Finally, public history and media projects such as PBS’s American Experience feature on “Randolph ‘Randall’ McCoy,” the “Hatfield and McCoy Family Album,” and tourism materials for Dils Cemetery and the Hatfield McCoy Feud Historic District help trace how Randolph’s image has shifted from local farmer and litigant to national symbol and back again. Dils Cemetery+3PBS+3Dils Cemetery+3