Appalachian Figures
High above the traffic in downtown Hazard, a small hillside burial ground still looks out over the bend of the North Fork of the Kentucky River. Locals know it as Graveyard Hill. Cars circle the municipal parking lot and climb toward the neighborhoods above town, most drivers unaware that somewhere in that tangle of old stones and fill dirt lie the remains of the man who chose this river bend and helped turn it into a county seat. General Elijah Combs, as people called him, stands at the center of Perry County’s origin story, a figure who belongs both to courthouse records and to family legend.
This article follows Elijah from Virginia into the Kentucky mountains, traces how land grants and court orders turned his homeplace into “Perry Court House,” and follows the afterlife of his memory from a log fort on the riverbank to a weathered historical marker on the courthouse lawn.
From Virginia Parents to the North Fork of the Kentucky
Most modern sketches agree that Elijah Combs was born in 1770 in what was then Frederick County, Virginia, to John Combs and Nancy Harding. His 1855 Perry County death record names those parents and lists Virginia as his birthplace, and later genealogists have used that entry to anchor the Combs family’s move into the mountains.
The Kentucky Historical Society’s roadside marker in Hazard sums up the family story in a few lines: Elijah and seven brothers came with their parents to Kentucky around 1790, he became the first settler at the present town site, helped to form Perry County, deeded land for the county seat, and served in the legislature in 1840. That compressed account mirrors what late nineteenth and twentieth century Combs descendants told interviewers and local historians. It also shows how much of Elijah’s life has been remembered through a mix of official records and family tradition rather than through one neat biography.
The Combs migration route itself comes down to us through oral history. In the John Jay Dickey diaries, recorded in the 1890s, John S. Combs recalled a company of Combs men coming into eastern Kentucky “by way of Pound Gap.” That recollection, later repeated by Josiah H. Combs in his Combes Genealogy, fits with what tax lists and census schedules show. Elijah appears in early records tied to Virginia and Tennessee, then turns up on Clay County tax rolls and in the 1810 and 1820 Clay County censuses before Perry County even existed.
One genealogical summary, following a biography of Elijah’s grandson Hiram Combs, suggests that Elijah moved through Tennessee and into the North Fork country in the first years of the nineteenth century, bringing with him not only his wife, Sarah “Sally” Roark, but also enslaved laborers. The City of Hazard’s official history repeats a related tradition. It says that in 1795 Elijah came from Virginia, built a rough “improver’s cabin” on the North Fork, walked back to marry Sarah Roark, then returned with his bride and two enslaved people and built a two story log house locals later called the “Old Log Fort.” Court, that narrative notes, met in his house for several years.
Taken together, these sources place Elijah in a familiar frontier pattern. A Virginia born son of a large family, he moved south and west, married into another frontier clan with Revolutionary War ties, and then staked out a site on the upper Kentucky River that linked water, timber, and a sliver of bottomland.
Carving Perry County from Floyd and Clay
When Elijah chose his home site, the place that would become Hazard lay within larger, older counties. Through the early 1800s, the “North Fork” country belonged first to Floyd County, then partly to Clay County, and local government was a long trip away.
In the 1810s and 1820s, as settlement pushed farther up the North Fork and its tributaries, petitions and political maneuvering in Frankfort produced a new county. Acts of the Kentucky General Assembly created Perry County in 1821 from parts of Clay and Floyd, naming it for War of 1812 naval hero Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. The new county needed a seat of justice, officers, and a clerk to keep its records.
A bond dated 16 April 1821 shows how central the Combs family was to that process. In that document, preserved in the Kentucky Court of Appeals records, Jesse Combs and Elijah Combs bound themselves to the Commonwealth in a large penal sum to guarantee Jesse’s faithful service as clerk pro tem of the just organized Perry County Court. The bond was recorded in 1822 and later excerpted in published collections of Kentucky court records. That one page ties Elijah directly to the legal birth of the county and to the clerk’s office that would become almost a family inheritance.
By the time that bond was signed, Elijah already held land along the river. Commonwealth land grant books record at least two early state grants to him: one for 150 acres on the North Fork of the Kentucky River in 1822, and another for 50 acres on Carr’s Fork in 1823. These grants formalized what local memory describes as an earlier cabin and a growing complex of improvements around the bend where the later courthouse and business district would sit.
Tax lists from Clay County in the years just before the county division, along with the 1820 federal census for that county, place Elijah at that moment as a landholder with a sizable household and, in at least some years, enslaved people. Those dry entries, alongside the family tradition of his journey with “Anne,” “Nance,” and “Jake,” remind us that the founding of Hazard rested not only on one man’s ambition but also on the labor of enslaved Black Kentuckians whose names rarely appear beyond such notations.
From “Perry Court House” to Hazard
The City of Hazard’s history page describes a landscape that would have looked familiar to Elijah when he first settled there. It notes that he built his first improver’s cabin in 1795 on the North Fork, then constructed the larger two story log house close to the river that became known as the “Old Log Fort.” Court sessions met inside that house while the young county worked out where to put its permanent courthouse.
A key step came on 10 July 1826, when Elijah and his wife Sarah executed a deed conveying roughly ten acres on the north bank of the Kentucky River to the justices and trustees of Perry County. That tract became the courthouse square and the surrounding town lots. Later accounts of Hazard’s founding almost all echo that transfer. The Kentucky Historical Society’s roadside marker explicitly mentions that Elijah “deeded land on which Hazard stands to trustees” in 1826, and the City of Hazard’s own summary credit him as the founder of the “little village” first known officially as Perry Court House.
The town at first carried the functional name of the county seat. Even in those years, however, court records sometimes used “Hazard” as a place name. Over time the heroic name won out. By the mid nineteenth century the post office and town incorporated under the name Hazard, in honor of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, whose victory on Lake Erie during the War of 1812 made him a national figure.
Survey books and plats associated with the 1826 deed sketched the early town. They traced lot lines up from the riverbank, along what became Broadway and High Street, and across the little flat on which Elijah’s first and second houses had stood. Those surveys, when read alongside later descriptions in Perry County, Kentucky: A History and the Combes Genealogy, help modern researchers locate Elijah’s homeplace under today’s streets, storefronts, and parking lots.
Jailer, Sheriff, Legislator, and “General”
Once the county and town existed on paper, someone had to keep them running. In the 1830s and 1840s, that job often fell to Elijah.
Federal and local sources agree that he held a string of county offices. A modern summary, drawing on sheriff lists and court minutes, notes that he served as jailer around 1832, as magistrate soon after, and as sheriff in 1836 and 1837. Court order books from the period show him sitting with the county court, handling road orders, serving as security in bastardy cases, and taking on the countless routine tasks that made a new county function.
In 1840, he stepped onto a broader stage. The Journal of the House of Representatives for the Kentucky General Assembly’s 1839 to 1840 session lists “Elijah Combs” among the members, representing Perry County. That one session, noted briefly on the state historical marker, marks the high point of his formal political career.
At home, people knew him by a different title. Across the nineteenth century, local writers refer to “General Elijah” or “General ‘Lige’ Combs,” a title that has produced as much myth as fact. The Combes Genealogy, written by his grandson Josiah, insists that there is no evidence he ever held the rank of general in national service and points out that his name does not appear on lists of officers in the War of 1812. Instead, Josiah suggests that the title came from his role as “general of the militia,” a phrase also used by John S. Combs in the Dickey diaries.
Later sketches, including the City of Hazard history and the modern Wikipedia entry, link Elijah and his in laws to the wartime world that gave Perry County and Hazard their names. Sarah Roark’s father, Michael Roark, served as a Revolutionary War scout and spy on the southern frontier, and one biographical note about their grandson describes Elijah as a War of 1812 veteran who lived into his eighties. Whether or not Elijah himself fought in that war, he clearly moved in circles of men who had. The act that created Perry County and named it for Oliver Hazard Perry, the local salt lick near his home, and the county’s veterans lists all suggest that the world of naval dispatches, frontier scouting, and militia musters shaped how he and his neighbors understood their community.
Family Networks and Frontier Town
Elijah’s story is also the story of a family whose branches soon reached into nearly every corner of Perry County life.
The Combs Families research pages, working from death records, wills, and the Jesse Combs family register, identify Sarah “Sally” Roark as Elijah’s wife and list at least six children who survived into adulthood. Those children and grandchildren married into other early Perry County families like the Cornetts, Duffs, and Eversoles, building dense kin networks that would later sit at the center of church life, business, and even deadly feuds.
Elijah’s son Jesse became especially prominent. Born, according to family records, in 1798, Jesse served as clerk of the Perry County Court for decades and later became known for recording his own family’s births and deaths on the blank pages of the first marriage book. Jesse’s son, Judge Josiah Henry Combs, rose to county wide power in the late nineteenth century and played a role in the French Eversole feud. He was also a key voice in preserving the family’s version of Elijah’s life in his Combes Genealogy.
Other children and grandchildren carried Elijah’s name into church pulpits, law offices, and businesses. Louisa Combs married into the Cornett family and appears in pension records when Elijah gave a deposition in support of her in laws’ Revolutionary War pension claim. Mary “Polly” Combs married Major John Duff, linking the Combs line to another influential county family whose descendants would recount memories of “General Combs” to John Jay Dickey in 1898.
These family networks anchored the new town of Perry Court House. Combs households clustered near the courthouse hill and along the river. Their relatives appeared as justices of the peace, early merchants, and later as leaders on both sides of the French Eversole feud. To trace the growth of Hazard across the nineteenth century is to follow the Combs name from Elijah’s log house to frame stores, law offices, and feud era headlines.
It is also to confront the reality that the family’s early prosperity rested partly on enslaved labor. Census schedules and tax lists suggest that Elijah and some of his kin owned enslaved people in the decades before emancipation, even in a mountain county where slavery was less prevalent than in the Bluegrass. When local histories speak of “founding families” at the salt lick on the North Fork, the record reminds us to ask whose unpaid work cleared the fields, cut the logs, and ferried goods along the river.
Graveyard Hill and the Memory of a Founder
Elijah died in September 1855, according to Perry County vital registers and his own will. His death register entry gives his age, names his parents, and confirms that the elderly justice and former sheriff still lived in Perry County at the end of his life.
He and his wife Sarah were buried on the hillside above what is now downtown Hazard, in what became known as the Combs Eversole graveyard on Graveyard Hill. When novelist and essayist Gurney Norman revisited that cemetery for the Hazard Herald roughly a century later, he described traffic on Broadway passing almost within earshot of the founder’s grave. He noted that Elijah’s granite monument and Jesse’s marker had already disappeared by then, casualties of road work and development that cut into the old burying ground.
Today, only fragments of that landscape survive. Photographs and on site surveys by Combs researchers show fenced sections of the cemetery perched above the municipal parking lot, with later stones for figures like Joseph C. Eversole and Judge Josiah H. Combs standing where earlier markers once ringed the hill. Findagrave entries for the Combs Eversole cemetery and for “Elijah ‘General Lige’ Combs” repeat the now standard narrative: founder of Hazard, office holder, donor of courthouse land, and leader in the county’s early growth.
On the courthouse lawn below Graveyard Hill, a black and gold Kentucky Historical Marker summarizes that story for passing drivers and festival crowds. In a few lines it ties together the migration of Elijah and his brothers in the 1790s, the naming of Perry County for Oliver Hazard Perry in 1821, Elijah’s 1826 deed of the town site, and his service in the legislature in 1840. The marker and the half hidden cemetery answer each other. One is public, polished, and condensed. The other is private, eroded, and incomplete. Between them lies the work of reading Elijah’s life in the surviving records.
Reading Elijah Combs in the Records
For historians and genealogists, Elijah’s story emerges from a mosaic of primary sources and later compilations. At the core sit official records: the 1855 Perry County death register entry that names his parents and birthplace, Floyd County probate minutes that show him administering his father John’s estate around 1819, early Clay County tax lists and censuses that document his property and household, Commonwealth land grants on the North Fork and Carr’s Fork, the 1821 county bond with his brother Jesse, the 1826 deed of the town site, county court order books listing his service as jailer, sheriff, and magistrate, and the House journal that records his single term as a state representative.
Around those records cluster near primary sources that capture local memory still close to Elijah’s time. The Jesse Combs family register, written into the back of a Perry County marriage book, gives dates for his children and ties that line of descent directly to the courthouse office where Jesse worked. The Dickey diaries record late nineteenth century interviews with descendants like John S. Combs and Matilda Duff Lewis, who remembered Elijah as “general of the militia” and as the father and grandfather of specific sons, daughters, and in laws. The Combs Eversole cemetery itself, especially in early photographs, shows how later generations marked and re marked the founder’s resting place.
Finally, there are the layered secondary accounts that have carried Elijah’s name into the twenty first century. Perry County, Kentucky: A History, compiled in 1953 by the Hazard chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, incorporates both courthouse research and family stories to sketch him as county founder and town builder. Josiah H. Combs’ Combes Genealogy uses those same records and the Dickey diaries to assemble an extended narrative of John and Nancy Combs and their eight sons, including Elijah. The City of Hazard’s history page, the Kentucky Historical Society marker, Pine Mountain Settlement School’s “History of the Combs Family” clipping, and modern online genealogies and wikis all repeat and modify that composite portrait.
Taken together, these sources show General Elijah Combs as more than a name on a roadside marker. They reveal a Virginia born migrant who carved out a home on a river bend, helped persuade Frankfort to create a new county, turned his own land into a courthouse square, held nearly every local office available to him, and left a family whose reach shaped Perry County life for generations. They also remind us that every “founder” stands in a crowd: of brothers and cousins who traveled the same dangerous road, of enslaved workers whose labor made a frontier farm and courthouse possible, and of descendants who chose which stories to carve in stone and which to let vanish with the weather.
Sources and Further Reading
This article draws first on primary records, including Perry County vital statistics, Clay and Floyd County tax and court records, Kentucky land grant books, and legislative journals, as well as on near primary sources like the Jesse Combs family register and the John Jay Dickey diaries in manuscript and transcript form.
Key printed and compiled sources include the Hazard chapter DAR volume Perry County, Kentucky: A History (1953) and its later reprint as History of Perry County, Kentucky, compiled by Eunice Tolbert Johnson; Josiah H. Combs’ The Combes Genealogy; the Combs Families research reports “Gen. Elijah and Sarah Roark Combs, Sr.” and related Perry County pages; Pine Mountain Settlement School’s “History of the Combs Family” clipping and Combs family notes; Gurney Norman’s Hazard Herald feature “Resting Place of Hazard’s Founder Goes Unnoticed by Busy Traffic,” preserved at Combs Families; the City of Hazard’s official “History” page; the Kentucky Historical Society’s marker entry “Founder of Hazard”; and modern finding aids such as the Wikipedia entries for “Elijah Combs” and “Josiah Henry Combs” and related genealogical summaries, all of which point back toward the documentary trail that begins on the North Fork of the Kentucky River.