Appalachian History Series – The Baker, Howard, and Turner Feud, 1898 to the 1910s
In the last decades of the nineteenth century Clay County and neighboring Harlan County sat at the edge of a changing Appalachian world. Railroads, timber camps, and coal projects were beginning to reach into the upper Cumberland, but county power still ran through kin networks, courthouse factions, and a handful of men who could raise armed followers on short notice. When quarrels over debts or insults touched those rival networks, bloodshed could follow.
By the 1880s national reporters had already discovered Harlan’s Howard and Turner families. They were soon writing about Clay’s Baker and Howard fighting as well. In both counties the same surnames turned up in voter rolls, court dockets, militia reports, and sensational stories about “mountain vendettas.” Modern scholars point out that these feuds grew out of politics, economics, and the struggle over who controlled local law, not simply out of some timeless culture of violence in the hills.
The Baker, Howard, and Turner story is really two overlapping feuds that share family names, time frames, and a habit of spilling from private quarrels into public war. One branch took shape along the forks of the Cumberland River in Harlan. The other burned most fiercely around Manchester and Crane Creek in Clay. By the turn of the century, outside observers were treating them as evidence that the new state penitentiary and the old county courthouse had both failed the mountains.
The Howard and Turner feud in Harlan County
The Harlan side of the story began as a falling out between young men who had once called each other friends. In March 1882 Robert E. Lee Turner, son of Judge George B. Turner, stepped out from supper at a hotel in what was then called Harlan Courthouse. He met Wilkerson “Wick” Howard in the street. Both had been drinking and there were lingering hard feelings from earlier quarrels. According to accounts preserved in later newspaper compilations, Howard raised a musket loaded with heavy shot and fired, mortally wounding Turner in front of witnesses.
A jury later acquitted Howard after a trial so charged that both families spent heavily on lawyers. That verdict convinced the Turners that the law could not or would not punish the killing. The feud deepened. Turners tried to surprise Howards at home, gunfights broke out in darkened rooms, and women and older relatives were dragged into the line of fire. Each episode ended with more kin sworn to “see justice done” and more young men on one side or the other.
The conflict moved into the open on a crowded court day in July 1885. Reports from the time describe Howard riflemen taking position in an upstairs window that overlooked the courthouse walk. When William Turner, another of Judge Turner’s sons, appeared in the yard, shots poured down into the crowd. Turner was hit in the chest and staggered away, firing as he tried to reach safety. By the end of the day he was dying of his wounds and several Howards had turned themselves in.
Harlan’s feud never involved only two surnames. Each side drew in brothers in law, cousins, and hired allies. The Howard camp soon rallied around Wilson “Wils” Howard, a younger fighter whose name appears repeatedly in later accounts. Judges and sheriffs were reluctant to move against men backed by dozens of armed supporters. When indictments did come, Howards and their allies often arrived in town already grouped up and ready to intimidate witnesses.
By 1889 the situation had grown so serious that Governor Simon Buckner ordered state militia to Harlan. A New York paper described the county as torn by a family feud and reported that troops were being sent in to protect courts that could not sit safely behind their own walls. Howard kinsmen later insisted that they were defending themselves against enemies who controlled the local bench. Turner relatives told interviewers that the Howards had turned criminal indictments and political offices into weapons.
One reason the Harlan feud looms so large is that it spilled beyond Kentucky. Wils Howard eventually left the county and was arrested in Missouri, where he was tried and hanged in 1894 for a separate killing. Out of state papers printed long accounts of his crimes and execution and tied his name back to the Turner feud on the Cumberland. With his death and the aging of both family heads, the Harlan fighting cooled. Yet the idea of Harlan as a place where local law could not touch powerful clans would echo in later stories about “Bloody Harlan” in the coal era.
Clay County’s Baker and Howard war
While Harlan was struggling with Turner and Howard gunmen, Clay County’s trouble flared later but burned hotter for a short time. By the late 1890s Clay already had a reputation for courthouse violence and long running quarrels involving the Baker, White, and Garrard families. In 1898 and 1899 one of those disputes crystallized into what outside writers soon called the Baker and Howard feud.
Contemporary newspaper features traced the feud’s spark to something that should have been trivial. Tom Baker, a strong willed timber man from the Crane Creek country, bought a judgment on a spring wagon from a local creditor. The wagon had been sold to members of the Howard family. When Baker tried to collect, arguments turned into pistol play around a fencepost and left Baker wounded in the neck. The wagon itself was worth only a small sum. The insult of trying to collect on a neighbor and rival was worth much more.
Once the quarrel crossed that line, every old grudge seemed to count. Baker and his allies were accused of shooting Howard men on isolated roads and using high powered rifles with smokeless cartridges. Howard and White partisans cut down Baker kin in their homes and on church roads. Newspapers outside the region spoke of dynamite loaded bullets, couriers carrying threats, and families who kept guns close at hand while they buried their dead.
The killing that pushed the feud onto front pages across the country came in June 1898. Clay County Sheriff Will White, a member of the powerful White clan allied with the Howards, rode near Baker’s stronghold. Tom Baker lay in wait and shot him. Later tellings insist that Baker used explosive ammunition and that he bragged to visiting reporters about the weapon he called his good Winchester. Whatever the exact details, the result was that the sheriff died of his wounds and Tom Baker became the most hunted man in the county.
That death made it almost impossible for Baker to trust Clay County’s courts. The judge, clerk, sheriff, and jailer were largely drawn from his feud enemies, and he knew that surrendering to local officers might mean being killed on the way to jail. His family and supporters claimed that he sent word to the governor that he would come in only if state troops could guarantee him a fair trial. In response, Governor William Bradley dispatched militia to Manchester.
Manchester under arms
Period dispatches collected from papers as far away as Connecticut and California describe Manchester during Baker’s trials as a town under occupation. State guardsmen pitched tents on the courthouse square. A Gatling gun sat within sight of the windows of Sheriff Beverly White’s home. Soldiers searched travelers for weapons, escorted witnesses to and from the courthouse, and manned picket posts on the roads into town.
At the same time, Sheriff White swore in extra deputies, many of them hard men with experience in earlier Perry County feuds. Wire stories talked about “tough deputies” who spent their pay drinking and firing pistols through the night while townspeople hid indoors. One widely reprinted report said that Manchester remained in a state of intense excitement and that Whites and Howards a hundred and fifty strong kept Baker sympathizers out of town entirely.
In June 1899 Tom Baker finally entered Manchester under guard. Accounts from the time agree that he was inside the militia line, near his family, when a single rifle shot rang out from the second story of Sheriff White’s house across the street. Baker fell into the arms of his wife and died almost at once. State soldiers responded by swinging the Gatling gun toward the house, surrounding the building, and forcing the men inside to surrender.
From that point the Baker and Howard feud moved out of Clay County’s direct control. Sheriff White was arrested and charged in connection with the killing. Prosecutors from another district were brought in to try the case. Out of state papers editorialized on the spectacle of a prisoner murdered inside a military camp and wondered whether Kentucky could govern its own mountain counties.
No court ever fixed responsibility for the fatal shot. Over time, Baker’s murder under guard took on a symbolic weight all its own. To his supporters it proved that local officials would go to any length to eliminate an enemy. To his opponents it removed a man they believed to be a ruthless killer who had already destroyed their kin. For the rest of Kentucky it became an example of a feud so bitter that even a ring of bayonets could not keep the peace.
Linking Clay and Harlan
For people on the outside looking in, it was easy to see Clay and Harlan as separate theaters in a single, long mountain war. The same family names appeared, the same circles of marriage and patronage tied officials together, and the same pattern unfolded. A killing in the street or on a back road led to contested trials, to talk of armed bands surrounding courthouses, and to governors who hesitated before sending soldiers to enforce their writ in the hills.
Writers in the early twentieth century did much to cement that picture. Magazine pieces about “the Kentucky feuds” often laid Clay’s Baker and Howard story alongside Harlan’s Howard and Turner fighting, then added other county vendettas as further examples. Horace Kephart’s widely read book about the southern highlands, for instance, devoted a passage to Clay County feuds and drew a straight line from courthouse killings to a supposed mountain culture of revenge. Charles G. Mutzenberg’s book on Kentucky’s famous feuds lumped the Baker, Howard, and Turner stories in with the better known Hatfield and McCoy conflict.
Yet even as they shaped national perceptions, these accounts flattened important differences. Court transcripts and correspondence show that each county’s conflict had its own mix of debt disputes, election rivalries, and personal quarrels. The Howard and Turner feud did not begin as a political contest, but political divisions made it harder to prosecute killings once they started. The Baker and Howard feud overlapped with an older pattern of Baker against White and Garrard contenders that reached back into the mid nineteenth century. Modern historians who study the original files emphasize how often violence tracked questions of who would control juries, tax contracts, and future railroad routes.
How the bloodshed ebbed
The shooting did not stop with Tom Baker’s death. Over the next few years Clay County saw further ambushes, fires, and sudden killings. Some accounts speak of wives and children being forced to abandon farmhouses for safer places in town. Others describe families who refused to attend funerals for fear of attack at the graveyard. In Harlan there were scattered flare ups as well, usually tied to older grudges in outlying creek settlements.
Even so, both feuds were moving toward exhaustion. Harlan’s fighting had already cooled by the mid 1890s as leading figures died, left the county, or were imprisoned elsewhere. Clay County’s turn came in the early 1900s. After months of militia deployments and repeated trials, state officials and local leaders pressed hard for peace. By 1903 newspapers were reporting a public handshake between Baker and Howard men on the courthouse steps at Manchester. While later incidents reminded everyone that the quarrel had not disappeared entirely, the open warfare that had once required troops and a Gatling gun gradually faded.
By the 1910s both Clay and Harlan were changing. Coal companies and timber operators were investing money and bringing their own lawyers and surveyors. State police and better funded courts had more reach. New stories about strikes, mine disasters, and political reform began to crowd out talk of vendettas. The old feuds survived instead as cautionary tales, family legends, and material for visiting journalists looking for a dramatic angle on mountain Kentucky.
Story and stereotype
The Baker, Howard, and Turner feud lives on today in several layers of storytelling. Descendants trade clippings and photographs in genealogy forums. Local historians gather scattered news reports, tracking which creek or hollow a particular ambush took place in. Family cemeteries in places like Resthaven and Boston Gap still hold the graves of men whose names appear in the original dispatches.
At the same time, popular histories, podcasts, and tourism sites retell the feud in ways that echo the early magazine writers. Covers and thumbnails promise tales of “blood feuds” and “vengeance in the Kentucky mountains.” Those retellings help keep the basic outlines of events in the public eye. They also tend to treat the Baker, Howard, and Turner story as proof that Appalachia is uniquely violent or backward.
What the primary sources show is more complicated. In both Clay and Harlan, public violence flourished where local institutions were weak, court officers were deeply entangled in kin networks, and outside authorities hesitated for years before intervening. Once the state committed troops, shifted trials to new venues, and invested in more stable courts, the open gunfights along courthouse walks and creek banks declined.
Remembering the Baker, Howard, and Turner feud means seeing the human cost of a system that left families to settle scores with rifles while officials looked away. It also means noticing how often ordinary neighbors, tired of watching their towns turned into armed camps, demanded an end to the war. Between those two truths lies the real story of how Clay and Harlan moved from the age of vendettas toward a more formal, if still imperfect, rule of law.
Sources & Further Reading
YesterYear Once More. “Kentucky Feuds – State of War Continues.” YesterYear Once More (blog), August 25, 2011. Transcribes multiple 1899 telegraph dispatches on the Baker – Howard – White troubles at Manchester. https://yesteryearsnews.wordpress.com/tag/kentucky-feuds/ YesterYear Once More
“Scene Shifts in the Baker-Howard Feud.” San Francisco Call, June 12, 1899. California Digital Newspaper Collection. Coverage of the Baker – Howard trials, venue change out of Clay County, and state troops with a Gatling gun protecting the court. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/ California Digital Newspaper Collection
“Kentucky Feud Causes Militia to Be Called.” Imperial Valley Press (El Centro, California), September 19, 1932. California Digital Newspaper Collection. Retrospective on the Baker – Howard feud and state militia intervention. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=IVP19320919.2.14 California Digital Newspaper Collection
“Feuds in Kentucky: Wild Vendettas of the Mountain Clans.” California newspaper feature, November 18, 1899. California Digital Newspaper Collection. Synthetic turn of the century article summarizing several mountain feuds including the Baker – Howard conflict. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/ California Digital Newspaper Collection
Kentucky Kindred Genealogy. “Turner and Howard Families of Harlan County and the Feud between the Two.” Kentucky Kindred Genealogy (blog), October 6, 2023. Includes a transcription of the 1885 Semi-Weekly South Kentuckian article “Bloody Feud Between the Howards and Turners” and later clippings. https://kentuckykindredgenealogy.com/2023/10/06/turner-and-howard-families-of-harlan-county-and-the-feud-between-the-two/ Kentucky Kindred Genealogy
Clay County KY Genealogical and Historical Society. “Information on the Clay County feud?” Facebook discussion thread sharing scans and typescripts of 1890s and early 1900s newspaper coverage of the Baker – Howard – White conflicts. https://www.facebook.com/groups/theclaycountykygenealogicalandhistoricalsociety/posts/24190358700660139/ Facebook+1
“Feuds of Clay Co. Ky.” Clay Families genealogy pages. Narrative of the Baker – Howard – White feud drawn from early newspapers and oral history, with a detailed timeline from the late 1890s through the 1903 courthouse truce. http://freepages.rootsweb.com/clayfamilies/genealogy/
“BAKER – HOWARD FEUD (Baker – Garrard – White – …).” Clay Families genealogy pages. Background essay tying the 1890s Baker – Howard fighting in Clay County to earlier Baker – White – Garrard feuds and militia call outs. http://freepages.rootsweb.com/clayfamilies/genealogy/
“Feuds of Harlan County Kentucky.” Genealogical narrative on the Harlan County Turners and Howards and their nineteenth century conflict, compiled from clippings and family sources. http://yeahpot.com/
Find A Grave. “Thomas H. ‘Bad Tom’ Baker (1860–1899).” Memorial entry with biographical sketch and family links, useful for basic vital data on the feud figure. https://www.findagrave.com
Johnson, J. Stoddard. “Romance and Tragedy of Kentucky Feuds.” Cosmopolitan 27 (1899). Early national magazine treatment of multiple Kentucky feuds including Baker – Howard and Howard – Turner, written soon after the height of the violence. https://babel.hathitrust.org
Ross, James M. “The Great Feuds of Kentucky II: The Baker-Howard Feud.” The Wide World Magazine 22, no. 140 (December 1909). Illustrated narrative of the Baker – Howard feud based on newspaper files and interviews. https://archive.org
Davis, Hartley, and Clifford Smyth. “The Land of Feuds.” Munsey’s Magazine 30 (November 1903): 161–172. Classic turn of the century article that locates Clay and Harlan County feuds within a broader “land of feuds” in the central Appalachians. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlsc_kl_non_mat/287 TopScholar+1
Kephart, Horace. Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life among the Mountaineers. New York: Outing Publishing, 1913; rev. ed. 1922. Includes a passage on Clay County and the Baker – Howard feud and on the role of county elites. https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/kephart/menu.html Cambridge University Press & Assessment
Mutzenberg, Charles G. Kentucky’s Famous Feuds and Tragedies: Authentic History of the World Renowned Vendettas of the Dark and Bloody Ground. Louisville: C. G. Mutzenberg, 1917. Early book length compilation with chapters on Clay and Harlan feuds, reprinted online by Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/49940 Academia
Semple, Ellen Churchill. “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains.” Geographical Journal 35, no. 5 (May 1910): 511–529. Early environmental determinist essay that uses the mountain feuds, including Clay and Harlan, as evidence for broader claims about mountaineers. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1776860
MacClintock, S. S. “The Kentucky Mountains and Their Feuds II.” The Outlook 68 (1901): 919–927. Popular article that surveys several eastern Kentucky feuds and offers one of the earliest outsider syntheses. https://babel.hathitrust.org
Pearce, John Ed. Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. Still the most detailed narrative study of the Baker – Howard, Howard – Turner, and related feuds, heavily based on court records, militia reports, and newspaper research. https://www.amazon.com/Days-Darkness-Feuds-Eastern-Kentucky/dp/0813126576 JSTOR
Klotter, James C. “Feuds in Appalachia: An Overview.” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 56, no. 3 (July 1982): 290–317. Broad analytical survey of eastern Kentucky feuding, with sections on Clay County’s Baker – Howard / Baker – White feuds and Harlan County’s Howard – Turner feud. https://filsonhistorical.org/publication-pdf/feuds-in-appalachia-an-overview/ Filson Historical Society
Billings, Dwight B., and Kathleen M. Blee. “‘Where the Sun Set Crimson and the Moon Rose Red’: Writing Appalachia and the Kentucky Mountain Feuds.” Southern Cultures 2, nos. 3–4 (1996): 329–352. Historiographical essay that tracks how writers from Johnson and Ross to Pearce and Kephart have portrayed the Baker – Howard, Howard – Turner, and other feuds. https://www.southerncultures.org/article/sun-set-crimson-moon-rose-red-writing-appalachia-kentucky-mountain-feuds/ Southern Cultures+1
Blee, Kathleen M., and Dwight B. Billings. “Violence and Local State Formation: A Longitudinal Case Study of Appalachian Feuding.” Law and Society Review 30, no. 4 (1996): 671–705. Uses the long history of Clay County violence, from Abner Baker through Bad Tom, to analyze how local elites and state institutions shaped feuding. https://doi.org/10.2307/3054114 Cambridge University Press & Assessment+1
Ireland, Robert M. “The Judicial Murder of Abner Baker, 1844–1845.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 88, no. 3 (1990): 260–278. Study of an earlier Baker case in Clay County that lays important groundwork for understanding later Baker – Howard conflicts. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23381827 JSTOR
Otterbein, Keith F. “Five Feuds: An Analysis of Homicides in Eastern Kentucky in the Late Nineteenth Century.” American Anthropologist 102, no. 2 (June 2000): 231–243. Quantitative anthropological analysis of several eastern Kentucky feuds, including Baker – Howard and Howard – Turner, as examples of “market based” feuding. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.2000.102.2.231 AnthroSource+1
Lloyd, A. L. “Background to Feuding: The Vendetta in Kentucky.” History Today 2, no. 3 (1952): 163–171. Places Kentucky feuding, including eastern Kentucky cases, in comparative perspective with Mediterranean vendetta traditions. https://www.historytoday.com
Waller, Altina L. Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Focused on the Tug Fork feud but essential for understanding how economic and political change shaped feuding more generally. https://uncpress.org
Drake, Richard B. A History of Appalachia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Contains a concise overview of feuding and draws on Klotter and Pearce for the Clay and Harlan cases. https://files.core.ac.uk/download/pdf/232571843.pdf CORE
Billings, Dwight B., and Kathleen M. Blee. The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Uses Clay County as a long term case study and situates the feuds within local class formation and state power. https://www.cambridge.org
American History Tellers. “Kentucky Blood Feud: The Revenge of Bad Tom Baker.” American History Tellers podcast, Wondery, episode transcript and audio. Popular retelling of the Baker – Howard feud based largely on Pearce, Kephart, and press accounts. https://podscripts.com/podcast/american-history-tellers/kentucky-blood-feud-the-revenge-of-bad-tom-baker Facebook
Baker, Paul David. My Appalachian Roots: The Clay County Feud – A True Story of “Bad Tom” Baker. Self published, 2014. Family centered narrative that mixes archival work with oral tradition, extending the Baker story into the twentieth century. https://www.amazon.com
Trails-R-Us. “Clay County Feuds and Historic Sites.” Clay County touring and heritage pages outlining key feud locations, including the Manchester courthouse and Baker and Howard cemeteries. https://www.trailsrus.com
Estep, Bill. “Kentucky was torn by bloody feuds in the 1800s. Here is why.” Lexington Herald-Leader (Kentucky.com), January 29, 2023. Newspaper overview of several Kentucky feuds, including Baker – Howard and Howard – Turner, aimed at a general audience. https://www.kentucky.com/news/state/kentucky/article271675597.html
Author Note: I grew up in Harlan and remember first reading about the Baker, Howard, and Turner feud in local histories and old newspaper pieces. Coming back to it now through the records lets me see how those familiar names fit into a much larger story about Clay and Harlan Counties.