Appalachian History
On an April morning in 1921 a man who had spent most of his life around courthouses and battle lines stepped off a train at a small mountain depot near Barbourville. Beverly Pryor White had been a Union officer in the Civil War, a sheriff in one of Kentucky’s most bitter feud counties, and later a prosperous Bluegrass farmer. He had moved his family away from Clay County decades earlier to escape the Baker and Bailey quarrels that once made his name a kind of shorthand for violence.
When the Cumberland and Manchester train from Manchester rolled into Heidrick station that day, White expected only to collect a valise from the little restaurant at the depot and go home toward Woodford County. Instead John Bailey of Clay County met him at the platform and opened fire. Within seconds White lay dead on the ground beside the tracks, his body struck by multiple bullets, while a boy who had been caught between the two men scrambled to safety. Contemporary accounts in the Mountain Advocate and other papers treated the scene as the sudden reopening of an old mountain feud in a new setting, on a railroad platform a short walk from a county seat.
Who Beverly P. White was before Heidrick
The man killed at Heidrick was not a minor local figure. Civil War records and the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project identify Beverly Pryor White of Clay County as a farmer who served as an officer in the 7th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry, United States service. He rose from first lieutenant to captain in Company E before mustering out in 1864.
After the war White became one of the central political actors in Clay County. By the 1890s newspapers across the country were using his name in stories about the Baker–Howard–White feuds at Manchester. In 1899 the Indianapolis News reported that “Sheriff Beverly P. White” had been arrested and charged in connection with the killing of Tom Baker, a leader of the rival faction, tying the sheriff directly to the violence that made Clay County famous far beyond the mountains.
John Ed Pearce’s Days of Darkness places White among the men who tried to use the sheriff’s office and the courts as weapons in those political and personal battles. By the turn of the century, national papers often described him simply as “the famous sheriff of Clay County,” a shorthand that assumed readers already knew what sort of county that was.
Leaving Clay County for the Bluegrass
Around 1901, after years in the middle of Baker–Howard trouble, White stepped away from the Clay County courthouse. A widely reprinted story from the Atlanta Constitution, preserved and annotated by the YesterYear Once More project, reported that Bev P. White resigned as sheriff on April 1 and moved near Lexington, leasing a farm on the Winchester Pike in Fayette County. The article framed his departure as part of a broader effort by leading feudists to “abandon bloody warfare” and turn to farming and horse breeding.
Later genealogical work and local histories track White into the Bluegrass, where he acquired property and became, in the words of a 1921 Pulaski County notice, one of the “wealthiest and most respected farmers in Central Kentucky.” He and his wife raised their family far from Manchester’s courthouse hill. YesterYear’s transcription of a 1921 article quotes one of his sons remembering that his father moved down from the mountains in part so that his boys would not be drawn into the old trouble between the Whites, Baileys, and Lees.
Even in the Bluegrass, however, White kept his business ties in the hills. He held timber and mineral lands in Clay and Knox counties, and he traveled back periodically to look after them. It was one of those trips that brought him back onto the Cumberland and Manchester line in the spring of 1921.
An April trip that did not end as planned
In early 1921 Beverly White traveled to Rochester, Minnesota, for surgery, a detail repeated in later trial coverage and modern features on the case. Rather than going straight home to Woodford County afterward, he decided to come through eastern Kentucky to inspect his holdings. From Minnesota he worked his way back to Clay County, then boarded the little branch line that ran from Manchester down to Barbourville.
On the afternoon before the killing, White rode north from Barbourville to Manchester on a late train of the Cumberland and Manchester Railroad. According to testimony summarized in Bailey v. Commonwealth, one of the men who rode with him that day was James Bailey, brother of John Bailey. James got off at Fount, the Baileys’ home station, where John and their father lived. The next morning, father and sons boarded the southbound train together at Fount and rode toward Barbourville, knowing that White was returning on the same train.
Witness Luther Hatton, who sat with White in the “ladies’ coach,” later told the court that he and White had talked about the presence of the Baileys on the train and that they both sensed trouble. Just before the station he remarked that the situation looked bad. The two men decided to wait until other passengers had gotten off and then leave by the rear steps of the coach.
The shooting at Heidrick depot
The small station where the train stopped was Heidrick, spelled Heidrich or Heidricks in some early reports, a junction about three quarters of a mile from Barbourville where the Cumberland and Manchester line met a main line of the Louisville and Nashville. A short platform, a modest depot building, and a little restaurant gave the place more the feel of a wide spot in the track than a town.
Newspaper stories reprinted in the YesterYear series and in the Mountain Advocate’s modern feature agree on the core sequence of events. When the southbound train stopped at Heidrick, White stepped down near the rear of the coach, intending to retrieve a valise he had left in the restaurant on his way into Clay County. John Bailey stood waiting nearby, accompanied by relatives and allies. The two men came face to face near the platform. A young boy, close enough to be in danger himself, was one of the few people who saw the whole encounter.
The Mountain Advocate’s April 1921 account, reproduced by YesterYear, reports that Bailey fired repeatedly as White stepped from the train, striking him five times and killing him almost instantly. White fell without, in that telling, making any movement. Another contemporary story in the Pulaski News, also preserved on YesterYear, told readers that Bailey “opened fire without a word being spoken” and described the killing as “the outgrowth of a family feud which started twenty five years ago.”
Later, at trial in Rockcastle County, Bailey’s defense argued that White had attempted to draw a gun and that Bailey fired in self defense. The Mountain Advocate’s September 1921 coverage, summarized by later researchers, notes that the defense claimed White reached toward his hip or side and that Bailey acted out of fear based on earlier threats and the long history between their families. The prosecution presented witnesses and physical evidence to suggest instead that White never got a hand to his weapon and that the shooting was deliberate.
Bailey did not flee alone. After the gunfire he remained at the station with his father, his brother, and Deputy Sheriff George Perry, a friend of the family. When Knox County Sheriff Byron P. Walker reached Heidrick, he found the armed group in control of the scene. The Baileys refused to allow John to be taken to the Knox County jail and insisted that he be transported instead to neighboring Bell County. Walker went back to Barbourville to secure proper authority to move the prisoner.
The handcar escape and a sheriff on trial
What happened next turned the killing at the depot into a county wide scandal. While Sheriff Walker was in town arranging the transfer, John Bailey, his father, his brother, and Deputy Sheriff Perry left Heidrick on foot, walked up the railroad tracks to a section crew, and persuaded the crew to carry them toward Fount on a motor car. By the time local citizens realized that the party had gone, they were already out of reach. The Baileys later arranged a surrender on their own terms.
The Mountain Advocate, in the account transcribed by YesterYear, described the public anger that followed. Judge F. D. Sampson of the Kentucky Court of Appeals and other prominent men helped see to the disposition of White’s body and pressed for legal action. The Knox County grand jury returned a strong indictment against John Bailey that spelled out, in formal language, that he “willfully” and “feloniously” killed Beverly P. White by shooting him with guns and pistols at Heidrick depot, and that his father, brother, John Lee, and George Perry aided and abetted the killing.
The same grand jury did something even more unusual. It indicted Sheriff Read P. Black for nonfeasance in office, charging that he “corruptly, negligently and cowardly” failed to arrest Bailey, failed to lead the posse he had summoned, and failed to deliver Bailey to the Knox County grand jury. The language of the indictment reflected a belief that not only feudists but also public officials were responsible for the way violence played out along the tracks that day.
A feud climate and the return of troops
News wires carried the story of the Heidrick killing across the country. An Associated Press dispatch printed in papers such as the Marion Star in Ohio told readers that a posse armed with high powered rifles was scouring the mountain districts of Clay and Knox counties for John Bailey and that friends of both families were arming, raising fears of a pitched battle.
The killing did not stand alone. That summer, after William Lee, a man tied by family networks to the feud, was shot and killed by former army officer Bart Reid, Governor Edwin P. Morrow ordered state troops into Knox County again. The Bridgeport Telegram and other papers ran stories under headlines about an “old feud” renewed, emphasizing that the Bailey–White conflict had produced a number of deaths on both sides over the preceding quarter century.
At Mount Vernon, where the Bailey case would eventually be tried after a change of venue, reports described trainloads of clan members arriving armed and ready for trouble. One New Castle, Pennsylvania, paper said the Bailey and White factions “presented somewhat the appearance of wrestlers prepared to leap at one another,” separated only by the presence of cavalry troops and special deputies outside the courthouse.
Trial under guard in Rockcastle County
Because of the tension in Knox County, the courts shifted Bailey’s trial to Rockcastle County. When the case of John Bailey was called in Mount Vernon in August 1921, the Rockcastle courthouse was ringed with approximately twenty five Kentucky National Guardsmen from London and twenty special deputy sheriffs. Incoming trains brought contingents of Baileys, Lees, and Whites, and every person entering the courtroom was searched for weapons, women included.
Newspapers across the country ran near identical stories about that first day, describing the trial as growing out of a “mountain feud” and stressing that state authorities were more concerned with keeping order than with courtroom drama. The New York Times reported that the only excitement on the opening day came from the systematic search for pistols and knives.
Within that guarded space, however, prosecutors and defense attorneys argued over the seconds on the platform at Heidrick. The prosecution framed the case as a cold ambush of a man who had tried to leave feuding behind. The defense insisted that years of threats and the events on the train justified Bailey’s fear and that White moved as if to draw a weapon. Coverage in the Mountain Advocate and other Kentucky papers noted that the lawyers on both sides drew not only on eyewitness accounts and the pattern of bullet wounds but also on the long feud history between the families.
After hearing the evidence, a Rockcastle County jury convicted John Bailey of murder and fixed his punishment at life imprisonment.
Bailey v. Commonwealth and what the higher court said
Bailey appealed. In February 1922 the Kentucky Court of Appeals handed down its decision in Bailey v. Commonwealth. The opinion, as preserved in case law databases, begins by restating the essential facts: that the killing occurred on April 8, 1921, at a small station called Heidrich in Knox County; that the venue had been changed to Rockcastle County; and that the jury sentenced Bailey to life in the penitentiary.
Bailey’s lawyers did not claim that the evidence was insufficient. Instead they argued that the trial court had allowed improper testimony from witness Luther Hatton and Sheriff Walker, that the prosecuting attorney’s closing argument had been prejudicial, and that there were irregularities in the way the jury was selected. The Court of Appeals analyzed each of those issues in turn.
On Hatton’s testimony, the court noted that most of the statements to which Bailey objected had either been excluded or admonished away, and that what remained simply explained why Hatton and White chose to leave the train by the rear steps after discussing the “bad situation” they sensed. On Sheriff Walker’s testimony, the court held that describing the bullet holes in White’s clothing and their relation to the wounds on his body did not unfairly prejudice the jury, since the clothes and other physical evidence were before the jurors.
Perhaps the most cited passage in Bailey v. Commonwealth does not concern the feud at all but the role of prosecutors. In language quoted in later Kentucky cases, the court reminded Commonwealth’s attorneys that their duty is “not to persecute, but to prosecute,” and that while they may argue strongly for a conviction, they must stay within the bounds of fairness. Even with that caution, the Court of Appeals concluded that nothing in the record justified overturning the verdict, and it affirmed Bailey’s conviction and life sentence.
Sorting out the records of Beverly P. White
For genealogists and local historians, one of the puzzles around the Heidrick killing has been reconciling the various records for Beverly P. White. Civil War files and the Civil War Governors project confirm the existence of a Clay County farmer and Union officer by that name, born in 1842 and living in the right place and time to match the former sheriff.
Some indexes to Kentucky death records list a Beverly Pryor White with a death date in late September 1921, in apparent conflict with the April 7 or April 8 date given in the newspapers. Closer examination by genealogists using the underlying death certificate images, however, suggests that the April 1921 date and Knox County location match the Heidrick killing and that the September listing likely reflects a clerical or transcription error. Wikitree and related compiled genealogies give White’s death as April 7, 1921, in Knox County, consistent with the courts and contemporary press.
Find A Grave, drawing on family sources and local history, remembers him as Sheriff Beverly Pryor “Beve” White, Sr., the Clay County official who once stood at the center of the Baker–Howard feud and later died in the Bailey–White feud’s last prominent killing.
Why the Heidrick killing still matters
On one level the murder at Heidrick looks like a familiar Appalachian story. There is a railroad station in the mountains, deep family ties across county lines, an old feud name, and national reporters eager to write about “clans” and “mountain wars.” On another, it is a story about how those feuds aged and how they intersected with changing institutions at the start of the twentieth century.
By 1921 the man who died on the platform was no longer a young feud captain. He was a sixty something veteran and farmer who had tried to move his family out of the old conflict zone. The man who shot him was part of a younger generation that grew up in the shadow of the earlier Baker–Howard–White fights. The killing unfolded not on a courthouse street in Manchester but at a junction where a small mountain shortline met a main railroad and where people from the hills and the Bluegrass crossed paths.
The legal response also looked different from the 1890s. State soldiers guarded the courthouse. National papers described a judge ordering telephone censorship to keep witnesses from slipping away. A rural Kentucky grand jury indicted not only the alleged killer but also a sitting sheriff for failing to do his duty. And the state’s highest court used the case to talk about prosecutorial ethics as much as about feud violence.
For readers in Knox and Clay counties today, the Heidrick killing is still part of local memory. Dr. James Bailey’s series “The Bailey–White Feud” in The Knox Countian, the Mountain Advocate and Manchester Enterprise feature “Murder on the Platform,” and the careful transcription work at YesterYear Once More all testify to an ongoing effort to tell the story with more nuance than the old national caricatures of “mountain feuds.”
In the end, the platform at Heidrick reminds us that the lines between war and peace, past and present, ran very close together in early twentieth century eastern Kentucky. A man who had worn Union blue and pinned on a sheriff’s star walked down from a railroad coach expecting to travel home to the Bluegrass. Instead his life ended in a few seconds of gunfire that carried the echo of older wars into a new century.
Sources & Further Reading
Contemporary newspaper coverage in the Barbourville Mountain Advocate, Corbin Times, Pulaski News, and out of state papers such as the Marion Star, Lima News, New York Times, and Atlanta Constitution, as transcribed and compiled by the YesterYear Once More blog in its “Kentucky Feuds: Bailey–White” posts and “The Bailey–White Feud Revisited.” YesterYear Once More+1
Bailey v. Commonwealth, 193 Ky. 687, 237 S.W. 415 (Ky. Ct. App. 1922), for a summary of trial testimony, procedural history, and the Kentucky Court of Appeals’ discussion of the case. vLex
Civil War and biographical materials on Beverly Pryor White from the Civil War Governors of Kentucky project and related compilations, along with Find A Grave and genealogical datasets that link him to Clay County service and later life in central Kentucky. FromThePage+2findagrave.com+2
Secondary interpretations in John Ed Pearce, Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky, in Dr. James Bailey’s “The Bailey–White Feud” series for The Knox Countian, and in the Mountain Advocate and Manchester Enterprise feature “Murder on the Platform: The Killing of B. P. White and the Violent Echo of the Bailey–White Feud.” Core+2Knox Historical Museum+2
Genealogical discussion threads and local historical society notes that help reconcile the various records for Beverly P. White and trace the later lives of the Bailey, Lee, and White families, used here as finding aids alongside the primary sources above. facebook.com+1