Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Joseph C. Eversole from Perry, Kentucky
If you stand on Graveyard Hill above downtown Hazard and look past the traffic and parking lots below, the story of Perry County’s founding families is written in stone. Near the fenced plot identified by Combs family descendants as the old Combs–Eversole cemetery lie the graves of General Elijah Combs’s descendants, Judge Josiah Henry Combs, and Joseph Castle “Joe” Eversole, the merchant and lawyer who led his kin in the French–Eversole feud. The hill once looked directly over the courthouse and the bend of the North Fork. From here, the world Joe helped build and the feud that took his life both come sharply into view.
This article traces Joseph C. Eversole’s life from the records that document him in his own time: census schedules and marriage books, grave markers on Graveyard Hill, court order books and land titles, and the flood of newspaper coverage that followed his assassination. Around those primary sources sit genealogies, feud histories, and modern scholarship that help situate him in the wider story of eastern Kentucky.
Roots in the Eversole and Combs Families
Genealogists and local historians agree that Joseph Castle Eversole was born in Perry County in the early 1850s, most often given as 26 July 1852. He was one of the younger children of Major John C. Eversole and his wife Nancy Ann Duff, both members of families that had been in the North Fork country since the early nineteenth century.
The Eversoles themselves traced back to Jacob Ebersohl, later Eversole, whose sons moved from Pennsylvania into the Kentucky mountains. One branch, through Woolery G. Eversole and his wife Lucy Cornett, settled in what became Perry County and intermarried with other founding families such as the Combs and Cornetts. Woolery’s son, John C. Eversole, eventually rose to the rank of major in the Union’s Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry during the Civil War and was assassinated locally during that conflict. The feud literature, as well as the French–Eversole feud overview, explicitly frames Joseph as John C.’s son and successor within the clan.
By the time of the 1880 federal census, the paper trail for Joe is clear. In District 2 of Perry County, a 25 year old “Eversole, Joseph C.” appears as a white male, married, working as a huckster, with his wife Susan and three small children in the household. Their neighbors include other Combs and Eversole kin, and the census transcribers for the Combs and Eversole projects identify him explicitly as the son of Major John C. and Nancy Duff Eversole and his wife “Susan” as a daughter of Judge Josiah Henry Combs and Polly Ann Mattingly. The census itself is the primary record. The genealogical notes that surround it mainly help tie those entries back into the wider family network.
Marriage into the Combs Line and Life on Graveyard Hill
Perry County marriage records for the early 1870s show Joseph C. “Joe” Eversole marrying Susan Combs in 1871, usually dated to the last days of May. The original bond and license, preserved on microfilm in Kentucky’s state archives and reproduced in genealogical abstracts, list both bride and groom as born in Perry County, the groom a son of John C. and Nancy Eversole and the bride a daughter of Josiah H. and Polly Combs.
That match united two of Hazard’s most influential families. On Susan’s side stood Judge Josiah Henry Combs, the grandson of General Elijah Combs and one of the men who shaped Hazard’s early courts, land titles, and town lots. On Joe’s side stood the Eversole clan that traced back to Jacob and Woolery and had already produced one Civil War casualty in Major John C. The Combs–Eversole cemetery on Graveyard Hill above modern Broadway bears witness to that alliance. Gurney Norman’s Hazard Herald feature “Resting Place of Hazard’s Founder Goes Unnoticed by Busy Traffic,” preserved by Combs family researchers, identifies stones on that hill for Judge Josiah H. Combs, Joseph C. Eversole, and Joe’s wife Susan, clustered near the older, partly erased graves of Elijah and Jesse Combs.
Joe and Susan’s household grew quickly during the 1870s and 1880s. Genealogies and the biographical article on Joseph C. Eversole, which collate census, cemetery, and family records, list seven children. Their sons included William Cassius, John Boyd, Dr. Chester Arthur, and Harry Clay, while their daughters included Lillie, Martha Alice, and Clara Belle. Several of the children died young, a reminder that even prominent feud figures lived with the same high infant and child mortality as their neighbors.
By the time the French–Eversole conflict erupted, Joe was not simply Josiah Combs’s son in law. He was a father of a large family, a merchant with a store in Hazard, and a man with something to lose.
From Civil War Orphan to Merchant and Lawyer
The French–Eversole feud did not appear out of nowhere. For Joe, the background was written in his father’s wartime record. Major John C. Eversole’s service in the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry and his assassination during the Civil War appear in military compilations and in Eversole family genealogies. Those works connect John C. to Woolery G. Eversole and highlight the family’s Unionist stance in a county that saw divided loyalties.
Growing up as the child of a murdered Union officer in a small mountain town could only have shaped Joe’s sense of obligation and honor. By the early 1880s he had moved beyond the farm economy into what local sources describe as a combined career as merchant, lawyer, and political figure. The Joseph C. Eversole biography notes that he owned a general store in Hazard and held various elected positions. It also records something that would eventually become important for understanding his connections and ambitions. In 1884 he served as a delegate from Kentucky’s Tenth District to the Republican National Convention, an appointment documented by his surviving convention badge and by published delegate lists.
At the local level, the records that show Joe’s public role are scattered across the court and land books of Perry County. Order books from the 1870s and 1880s routinely list him among jurors, attorneys, and litigants. Deed books from the same period record a tangle of coal and land transactions involving Judge Josiah Combs, his kin, and outside interests. Later litigation such as Virginia Iron, Coal and Coke Company v. Webb preserved summaries of an 1883 title bond in which Combs and associates promised coal land titles to corporate buyers. Those fragments show Joe and his in laws standing at the crossroads between the older river town of Hazard and the new coal economy that was beginning to reshape the North Fork valley.
It was that crossroads position that set the stage for his fatal conflict with another ambitious merchant lawyer: Benjamin Fulton French.
Coal Rights, Private Armies, and the French–Eversole Feud
Modern summaries of the French–Eversole feud, including the dedicated article on the subject, agree that the conflict began in the mid 1880s between two men who were at first friends and business associates. Both Joe Eversole and Ben French kept stores in Hazard. Both had legal training. Both were connected by kin and marriage into influential county networks, although French had come into the region from Tennessee.
The explanation that most feud scholars now accept centers on coal rights. After the Civil War, outside companies sent agents into eastern Kentucky to buy vast tracts of mineral property. French aligned himself with those interests, negotiating leases and titles in the hills around Hazard. Eversole, like his father in law Judge Combs, was more closely tied to local landholders. Contemporary accounts and later reconstructions describe him traveling the countryside and warning small farmers that French’s employers were trying to secure coal rights at unfair prices.
Tension escalated quickly. The Louisville Courier Journal gave the feud its first major publicity on 30 June 1886 in a front page article reporting that Ben French was raising an armed force against Joe Eversole in Perry County. National papers across the Midwest and South reprinted versions of the story that summer and fall, portraying Hazard as a tiny mountain town suddenly overrun by private armies loyal to rival lawyers.
One episode often cited as a turning point came in 1887, when a gunfight in Hazard left the itinerant preacher Bill Gambriel dead. Accounts published in Mutzenberg’s Kentucky’s Famous Feuds and Tragedies and echoed in later retellings describe an argument in the street between Joe and Gambriel that spiraled into a fist fight, then a shooting in which several men fired. Gambriel was killed, another man was tried and acquitted, and Joe was not indicted. The important point for feud history is that public violence around Joe fed perceptions on both sides that the conflict had crossed a line.
Late that year, the two sides negotiated what came to be known as the Big Creek treaty. Newspapers summarized it as an agreement that both factions would disband their forces and surrender their arms. Yet, like many attempts at mountain peace, it did not hold.
Ambush on the Road to Hyden
On Sunday, 15 April 1888, Joseph C. Eversole and his brother in law Nicholas “Nick” Combs rode out of Hazard with Judge Josiah H. Combs on the familiar road toward Hyden, the seat of neighboring Leslie County. Judge Combs, who was to preside at court there, rode ahead with an officer escort and a female prisoner. Joe and Nick followed behind.
Accounts written within a generation of the events, such as Mutzenberg’s feud history, describe what happened next in stark terms. Somewhere along Big Creek, gunmen lying in wait fired into the party, targeting the two younger men. Later researchers walking the route found a depression in the earth, scattered food remains, and footprints that suggested the assassins had camped above the road for days. From their concealed rifle pit they could strike the travelers almost within sight of neighboring houses and then vanish into the high ridges.
A particularly vivid near primary narrative survived in a school assignment written in 1891 by Malta Elle Davidson, later cited in the Joseph C. Eversole biography. In her letter, Davidson retold the story as she had heard it from the Combs family. She described Nick Combs’s mother, Alice, finding her son riddled with bullets and blinded, lying beside the road with Joe’s already lifeless body nearby. Nick briefly clung to life but could not speak. According to her story, the two men were buried together in a single coffin and grave.
Their bodies were carried back to Hazard and laid to rest on Graveyard Hill among the Combs and Eversole dead. The funeral drew a large crowd. Yet no one was immediately punished. Feud sympathies were woven into every jury pool. Witnesses were frightened. And some of the men most suspected of ordering the ambush were powerful figures themselves.
“Bad Tom” Smith and a Gallows Confession
The men who fired the shots that killed Joe and Nick remained free for several years. It took an unrelated murder to bring one of them within reach of the noose. In the mid 1890s, Thomas “Bad Tom” Smith, a French supporter with a long reputation for violence, was convicted of murdering Dr. John Rader and sentenced to hang. Contemporary coverage in the Louisville Courier Journal, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, and other papers painted him as one of the most feared men in the Kentucky mountains.
Waiting on death row, Smith began to talk. Newspaper accounts and later writers like Wayne Combs, in Singing from the Gallows: The Story of “Bad Tom” Smith, report that he confessed on the scaffold to multiple killings. Among those, he said, was the ambush of Joe Eversole and Nick Combs on Big Creek. According to the June 1895 coverage summarized in the Joseph C. Eversole article, Smith claimed that another man, Joe Adkins, fired first with a shotgun, that Smith shot as the victims fell from their horses, and that he took money from Joe’s body. He further stated that they acted under the orders of Ben French.
Adkins was later convicted in connection with the 1894 murder of Judge Josiah Combs, a killing widely seen as part of the same chain of violence. French himself was indicted more than once yet either acquitted or never brought to trial, and he lived long enough to feel the feud’s consequences in another way.
In 1913, years after the worst firefights in Hazard had subsided, French crossed paths with Joe’s widow and their youngest son, Harry, in the lobby of a hotel near Jackson, Kentucky. When French greeted Susan Eversole, Harry drew a pistol and shot him in the spleen. A Louisville Courier Journal report on that episode noted that Harry was fined only for disturbing the peace and that his mother paid the fine. French lingered for more than a year before dying of complications from the wound in 1915. Harry was never tried for his death.
The gallows confession and this final act of vengeance fixed Joe’s assassination in public memory as the defining crime of the French–Eversole feud.
Battle of Hazard and the Wider War
After Joe’s death, leadership of the Eversole faction passed to John Campbell, who brought a more overtly military discipline to the clan. Mutzenberg’s narrative and the French–Eversole feud synopsis describe Campbell’s men guarding the approaches to town, patrolling Hazard’s few streets, and enforcing a kind of informal martial law whenever rumors of a French attack circulated.
In November 1889, during a term of Perry Circuit Court, the feud erupted into what newspapers across the country dubbed the Battle of Hazard. Shots around the courthouse sent townspeople scrambling. Eversole men gathered in the courthouse, while French supporters took the jail and the high ground on Graveyard Hill. The firefight continued through the night. At one point, French men Tom Smith and Jesse Fields reportedly used a sunken grave in the Combs–Eversole cemetery as a rifle pit, firing down into the windows of the courthouse. When an Eversole supporter named J. McKnight tried to cross a street near the court house, one of their bullets killed him.
Newspapers in Kansas, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and beyond carried front page stories about the battle. A court order by Special Judge Hurst, preserved in the Perry Circuit Court records and quoted by Mutzenberg, bluntly explained that the judges and officers were corralled by the crossfire and could not safely continue their work. The spectacle of a county court shutting down in the middle of a gunfight became one more part of the feud’s national reputation.
State officials eventually responded with troops and a special “blanket court” that moved many cases out of Perry County to Clark County for trial. Anthropologist Keith F. Otterbein later used the French–Eversole conflict as one of five case studies in his analysis of Appalachian feuds, highlighting how kinship ties, access to land and coal wealth, and a weak formal justice system produced cycles of reprisal that were difficult to stop without outside intervention.
Genealogies, Confusion, and the Long Memory of Joe Eversole
For genealogists and local historians, one challenge in writing about Joseph C. Eversole has been distinguishing him from later men who carried the same name. Public trees, yeahpot family pages, and the Eversole genealogy compiled for the Eversole Families in America volumes caution that a younger Joseph C. Eversole lived in Letcher County in the twentieth century and is sometimes confused in casual online writing with the feud leader buried on Graveyard Hill.
Using primary records helps prevent that confusion. The 1880 Perry County census, the 1871 marriage bond with Susan Combs, the grave photos from the Combs–Eversole cemetery, the 1888 and 1895 newspaper coverage, and the Malta Elle Davidson letter all point consistently toward a man born in the early 1850s, married into the Combs line, and killed in mid life on Big Creek. That is the Joseph Castle Eversole whose life and death shaped late nineteenth century Hazard.
Modern public history in Hazard still remembers him, even if sometimes more as a symbol than as an individual. Interpretive materials at the Bobby Davis Museum and Park, along with local histories of Bad Tom Smith and the French–Eversole feud, use Joe’s grave and the story of his ambush as touchstones in explaining why the town was once the subject of headlines far beyond the North Fork.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Census Bureau. Population Schedule, Perry County, Kentucky, District 2, 1880, entry for Joseph C. Eversole household. United States Census, 1880. Digital images and index, FamilySearch. https://www.familysearch.org
FamilySearch. “Kentucky, County Marriages, 1797–1954.” FamilySearch Historical Records Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Kentucky,_County_Marriages_-_FamilySearch_Historical_Records
“Joseph C Joe Eversole and Susan Combs.” Yeahpot Genealogy: Eversole Family. https://yeahpot.com/eversole/joseph1853.php
“Joseph Castle Eversole (1853–1888).” WikiTree: The Free Family Tree. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Eversole-180
“Susan (Combs) Eversole (1855–1946).” WikiTree: The Free Family Tree. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Combs-1599
“Descendants of Woolery Eversole.” Three Forks Regional History Association Genealogy: Eversole Family. https://tfkrha.org/Genealogy/Genealogy_Eversole_Woolery.php
Brock, Carlos. “The History of Jacob Eversole.” FamilySearch Memories. https://www.familysearch.org/photos/artifacts/56456695
“Joseph Castle Eversole (1853–1888) – Memorial.” Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/18659137/joseph-castle-eversole
“The Combes Genealogy, Chapter X, pp. 63–76.” Combs &c. Families of America. https://combs-families.org/combs/jhc/jhc-063.htm
Norman, Gurney. “Resting Place of Hazard’s Founder Goes Unnoticed by Busy Traffic.” Hazard Herald (reprinted at Combs &c. Families). https://combs-families.org/combs/records/ky/perry/news/hazard_founder.htm
“Combs Cemetery (Graveyard Hill), Hazard, Perry County, Kentucky.” Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2193416/combs-cemetery
“Joseph C. Eversole.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Eversole
“French–Eversole feud.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French%E2%80%93Eversole_feud
“Josiah Henry Combs.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Henry_Combs
“French-Eversole War.” The Salt of America (blog), June 2012. https://thesaltofamerica.blogspot.com/2012/06/french-eversole-war.html
Kirk, Brandon Ray. “French-Eversole Feud.” BrandonRayKirk.com, March 3, 2019. https://brandonraykirk.com/category/french-eversole-feud
“Bad Tom Smith.” Murder by Gaslight (blog). https://www.murderbygaslight.com/2010/06/bad-tom-smith.html
Combs, Wayne. Singing from the Gallows: The Story of “Bad Tom” Smith. Clay County Historical Society, 2011. https://www.claycountyhistoricalsociety.org/singing-from-the-gallows
Mutzenberg, Charles G. Kentucky’s Famous Feuds and Tragedies: Authentic History of the World Renowned Vendettas of the Dark and Bloody Ground. 1917. E-book, Project Gutenberg, 2013. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43809
Pearce, John Ed. Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. Open-access PDF via CORE. https://files01.core.ac.uk/download/pdf/232571845.pdf
Scalf, Henry P. Kentucky’s Last Frontier. Pikeville, KY: Pikeville College Press, 1972. Google Books preview. https://books.google.com/books/about/Kentucky_s_Last_Frontier.html?id=6ZkoGoiyBscC
Otterbein, Keith F. “Five Feuds: An Analysis of Homicides in Eastern Kentucky in the Late Nineteenth Century.” American Anthropologist 70, no. 6 (1968): 1233–49. https://www.jstor.org/stable/670659
Richards, Bill. “French-Eversole War: Perry County Was Bloody, Costly.” Hazard Herald, July 2012. PDF linked from French–Eversole feud article. https://hazardkentuckyblogs.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/french-eversole-war.pdf
Author Note: I wrote this piece to follow Joseph C. Eversole through the records that still circle around Graveyard Hill, from marriage books and court orders to feud headlines and family letters. If you have photographs, documents, or stories from the French–Eversole years, I would be honored to hear from you and help weave them into Hazard’s recorded history.