Appalachian Figures
On the hill that Hazard folks call Graveyard Hill, traffic hums along Broadway while an older story sits behind chain link and weeds. In that fenced patch of ground the stones of General Elijah Combs, his clerk son Jesse, and their kin overlook the parking lots and streets that grew up around them. Among those later markers stands a stone for Judge Josiah Henry Combs, Elijah’s grandson, the man who deeded ground for the courthouse and town lots, and who was gunned down at his own doorway in the final killing of the French–Eversole feud.
To understand how a Hazard lawyer and county judge ended up as a feud casualty, you have to start with his name written in brown ink in the back of an old marriage book.
Family Record At Daybreak
In the 1820s and 1830s Jesse Combs served as county court clerk for Perry County. Like many clerks of his time he turned the back pages of his first marriage license book into a family register. In that neat, careful hand he recorded births and deaths of his children in the same volume where he recorded weddings for the whole county.
One entry reads that “Josiah H. Combs was born on the twenty fifth day of November 1831 as day broke,” tying the future judge firmly to Hazard and to Jesse and Mary “Polly” Bolling Combs. Later compilers of the Combs genealogy and the Bowling family history repeat that birth date, although some modern summaries round it to 1832.
The same cluster of records shows why Josiah mattered so much in Hazard’s story. His grandfather, General Elijah Combs, had pushed for the creation of Perry County, held early courts in his log house on the Kentucky River, and gave his hilltop burying ground to the family. Jesse in turn became clerk of the new county, a man whose handwriting shaped how the community remembered itself. Out of that line of county builders came Josiah.
Marriage, Children, And A Lawyer’s Household
On 9 July 1853, county marriage records show Josiah marrying Elizabeth “Polly” Ann Mattingly in Perry County. The entry, echoed in the state marriage index and in later genealogical work, ties two tight networks together: the Combses and the Mattinglys, who were themselves linked to the Bowling and Cornett clans across Perry and what is now Leslie County.
Federal census schedules from 1860 through 1880 catch the couple in mid life. In those records Josiah appears as a lawyer in Hazard, with Polly Ann and their children in the household, and by 1880 the Mattingly in-laws are living under the same roof. Family-history compilations pull those scattered entries together and list at least six children for the couple: William Jesse, Nancy, Susan, Sarah, Martha and Mary Ellen. Susan married merchant and politician Joseph C. Eversole, future leader of the Eversole faction. Sarah married Elijah Morgan, who would later side with French. Martha married Ira Jesse Davidson, another man who would become deeply involved in the feud world.
Those marriages meant that by the 1880s Judge Combs was not only a county official, but also father in law and kin to men on both sides of an emerging civil war.
Hazard’s Town Lots And Coal Lands
Local memory preserved in a Hazard Herald feature by writer Gurney Norman describes how Elijah’s grandson Josiah gave property to the county for its first dedicated courthouse and for town lots when Hazard was incorporated. That gift helped shift court from Elijah’s old riverfront log house to a more formal county seat on the hill, and it anchored the Combs name in the center of town life.
Land records from the 1870s and 1880s show Josiah acting as grantor, grantee, or attorney in a series of transactions around Hazard, including coal and timber lands. In a later federal case, Virginia Iron, Coal & Coke Co. v. Webb, the court summarized an 1883 title bond and follow-up deeds in which “Josiah H. Combs” and his associates promised coal land titles to outside interests. That case, argued years after his death, preserves his name as one of the mountain men working at the intersection of family land and rising industrial capital.
Court order books from the same era, preserved at the Perry County courthouse and on microfilm, show him presiding as county judge. Orders about roads, estates, and county levies list “Josiah H. Combs” at the top, giving a paper trail of his years on the bench in the very town his grandfather had founded.
The Feud Comes To Court
The French–Eversole feud grew out of that exact mix of kinship, coal rights, and courthouse politics. In the 1880s merchant lawyers Joseph C. Eversole and Benjamin Fulton French led rival factions in Perry County. Modern scholars like John Ed Pearce and Henry P. Scalf, along with the classic 1917 account Kentucky’s Famous Feuds and Tragedies by Charles G. Mutzenberg, trace the feud’s roots to competing coal deals and long running family alliances rather than simple “mountain temper.”
The point where Judge Combs stepped into the line of fire came on 15 February 1887. In Hazard that day, Joe Eversole and itinerant preacher William “Bill” Gambriel, a French supporter, argued in the street. Witnesses said Eversole’s men fired on Gambriel during the scuffle. As Gambriel tried to get away he was wounded, then shot in the head and killed. French men demanded that the judge issue a warrant for Eversole. Eversole’s side insisted that the killing had been in self defense. Judge Combs declined to issue the warrant.
Mutzenberg and later writers agree that this decision marked Josiah as a partisan in the eyes of French and his supporters, even though he was also bound to French men through marriage and kin. From that point forward the Hazard courthouse was not just his workplace. It was a fortified symbol in a feud where both sides hired gunmen and raised small private armies.
Battle Of Hazard And The Blanket Court
Newspaper readers far from Kentucky followed the “French and Eversole War” through dispatches in the Louisville Courier-Journal, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, New York papers, and small town weeklies across the Midwest and Plains. The French–Eversole feud article on the conflict is essentially an index to that coverage, listing dozens of clippings from 1886 through the mid 1890s.
Those stories describe state troops marching into Hazard, the running gunfight called the Battle of Hazard in November 1889, and the burning of the courthouse on July 4, 1890. Judge H. C. Lilly finally refused to hold regular court in the town unless the state provided guards. That fall he convened a special term under canvas, the so-called “Blanket Court,” with prisoners held in a guarded tent and cases quickly sent out of the county for trial.
Those same reports mention Judge Combs riding the circuit with his son in law Joe Eversole and nephew Nick Combs when Joe and Nick were ambushed and killed on the road in April 1888. They note that Josiah’s son in law Elijah Morgan, who had thrown in with the French side, was himself ambushed and killed later that year. The feud took lives in both branches of the family while the judge tried to keep a court functioning at all.
Eventually even he had to leave. Contemporary accounts and later syntheses relate that Josiah and his family withdrew from Hazard for a time, driven out by threats and the impossibility of neutral justice in a town where jurors and defendants were often cousins.
False Report, Real Ambush
By 1893 the feud had become such a national spectacle that wire services could not resist it. A cluster of papers, from the Davenport Democrat and Leader in Iowa to the Big Stone Gap Post in Virginia and even a German language paper in Minnesota, ran stories claiming that Judge Combs’s elderly wife had been murdered in the feud. Later corrections admitted that the report was false, but the damage to public perception was done.
The next year the judge made what proved to be a fatal choice. After several relatively quiet years following the Blanket Court term, he decided to move back to his hometown. In September 1894 he returned to Hazard, apparently hoping that the worst of the fighting was past.
It was not. On September 23, 1894, while Josiah stood outside his house talking with neighbors, gunmen hidden in a nearby cornfield opened fire. Period newspapers later described an assassination in broad daylight, in sight of townspeople who watched the judge fall at his own doorway.
Mutzenberg’s chapter on the French–Eversole war, based on interviews and court records only a couple of decades old at the time, names Joseph Adkins as the man who fired the fatal shot and Jesse Fields and Boone Frazier as his accomplices, all long time French men.
Trials, A Gallows Confession, And A Vest
Adkins, Fields, and Frazier were indicted for the murder of Judge Combs. The cases were removed from Perry County to be tried elsewhere in Kentucky. Newspaper stories from 1894 and 1895 show the case moving through trial and appeal, with heavy coverage in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Springfield Leader, Alexandria Gazette, and other papers.
In the first round both Adkins and Fields received life sentences. On appeal the convictions were reversed, and a second trial brought a life sentence for Adkins and an acquittal for Fields. Frazier was never caught. In practice, “life” for Adkins meant about eight years before his release.
The deepest narrative source for the case is again Mutzenberg, backed by the 1895 press. In June 1895 “Bad Tom” Smith, one of French’s chief gunmen, stood on the gallows for another killing and confessed to a string of murders. Among them, he said, were the assassinations of Joe Eversole and Nick Combs in 1888 and the plotting of Judge Combs’s murder, all done at the order of Benjamin Fulton French. That confession was reported in papers like the Daily Democrat of Huntington, Indiana, and the Cincinnati Enquirer and became the basis for later writers such as Wayne Combs in Singing from the Gallows.
French himself was indicted in connection with the judge’s killing and other crimes, but a jury acquitted him. He left the feud years later with a reputation black enough that he wore a bulletproof vest in public. In 1913 he encountered Susan Combs Eversole, the widow of Joe and daughter of Judge Josiah, in a hotel lobby at Elkatawa. When he greeted her, her one-armed son Harry drew a pistol and shot him in the side. Harry was fined for disturbing the peace. French died in 1915 from complications of that wound, closing the feud’s long echo of revenge.
Graveyard Hill And A Fenced Plot
Back in Hazard, the judge’s story ended in the same cemetery where his grandfather Elijah and father Jesse had been buried. The Combs–Eversole graveyard sits above the junction of High Street and Broadway, squeezed between houses and the retaining wall of a former African American church. In a Hazard Herald feature later preserved by Combs family researchers, Gurney Norman noted that Elijah’s grave lay in one of the oldest burial grounds in the city and that Josiah had been the grandson who gave land for the early courthouse and townsite.
Development on Graveyard Hill erased many graves. A Combs descendant, Bill James, wrote that his great grandmother paid for a fence around the immediate family section after she saw how nearby stones had been plowed under or cut off by construction. Within that fence stand the stones of Judge Josiah H. Combs, Joseph C. Eversole, and Susan Combs Eversole, their relationship literally marked in marble.
Today motorists in Hazard pass within a few yards of those graves and rarely look up. Yet the hillside still holds the physical trace of a man whose life runs like a thread through land records, census pages, court minutes, and sensational big city headlines.
Two Men Named Josiah H. Combs
Genealogists and local historians have long warned about confusing Judge Josiah Henry Combs of Hazard with another Josiah H. Combs who came later. The younger man, born in Hazard in 1886, became a noted linguist and folksong scholar. His works Folk-Songs of the Southern United States and Combs: A Study in Comparative Philology and Genealogy, along with a rich manuscript collection at Berea and Western Kentucky, document Appalachian music and speech in the early twentieth century.
The younger Dr. Combs grew up in the same feud country that had killed his elder namesake. In fact his work on the Combs genealogy helped preserve records about the judge’s line, even as later compilers at sites like Combs &c. corrected and expanded his research.
For anyone working on Perry County history it is crucial to keep the two straight. Judge Josiah Henry Combs was the one recorded in Jesse’s family register as born at daybreak in 1831, the lawyer and county judge who gave land for the courthouse and was assassinated in 1894 during the French–Eversole war. Dr. Josiah H. Combs was the twentieth century folklorist who wrote about ballads and dialect. Their shared name shows how often mountain families carried memory forward, but their lives belonged to different chapters.
Why Judge Combs Still Matters
Judge Combs’s story complicates easy pictures of Appalachian feuding. The man at the center of this narrative was not an isolated backwoods gunman. He was a clerk’s son who read law, held county office, and dealt with outside corporations over coal lands. He married into another prominent family and tried to navigate the impossible role of being both father in law and judge to men on opposing sides.
The primary record that survives is remarkably rich for a nineteenth century mountain figure. A family register in the back of a marriage book fixes his birth. Census schedules show his household changing as children and in-laws move in and out. Court order books and deed records trace his public work in Hazard. A federal case over coal titles preserves his name in company with Eversoles and outside investors. Newspaper correspondents from Kansas to New York described his town as a war zone and his death as the tragic end of a “mountain vendetta.” Cemetery photos and local newspaper features map his grave onto the modern city that grew up around it.
For Appalachian historians, Josiah Henry Combs stands at the point where family, law, land, and violence met in one small Kentucky river town. To tell his story from the records he left behind is to see both the damage feud culture did and the ways mountain people tried, often at great cost, to build courts, towns, and communities anyway.
Sources And Further Reading
Family and courthouse records
Jesse Combs Family Records, recorded in the back of the first Perry County marriage license book and transcribed at Combs &c. Research Families, “Jesse & Polly Bolling Combs of Perry KY.” Includes the entry for the birth of “Josiah H. Combs” and ties him to Jesse and Mary “Polly” Bolling Combs. Combs Families
Perry County, Kentucky marriage record for Josiah H. Combs and Polly Ann Mattingly, 9 July 1853, in county marriage books and statewide indexes such as “Kentucky, County Marriages, 1797–1954.” Combs Families+1
Federal census schedules for Perry County, Kentucky, 1850–1880, showing Josiah in the household of Jesse and Polly, then as a lawyer with wife Polly Ann and their children, with Mattingly in-laws in 1880. Transcribed and annotated in Combs &c. 1880 Perry County census notes. Combs Families+1
Will of General Elijah Combs, 1855, Perry County court records, which names Jesse and connects the judge’s line to the founder of Hazard. Discussed in Combs genealogical compilations. Combs Families+1
Land and legal records
Virginia Iron, Coal & Coke Co. v. Webb et al., federal case summarizing an 1883 title bond and later deeds executed by Josiah H. Combs and others for coal lands near Hazard, confirming his role in land and mineral transactions. StrongSuit
Perry County court order books and county court minutes from the 1870s through 1894, preserved at the Perry County courthouse and on Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives microfilm, which show Combs presiding as county judge in local civil and probate matters. Wikipedia+1
Newspapers and feud narratives
Contemporary press coverage of the French–Eversole feud, especially the assassination of Judge Combs and the trials of Joseph Adkins and Jesse Fields, as indexed in the French–Eversole feud article. Key titles include the Louisville Courier-Journal, Atchison Daily Champion, Perrysburg Journal, New York Times, Scranton Republican, Springfield Leader, and the Daily Democrat of Huntington, Indiana. Wikipedia+1
Chas. G. Mutzenberg, Kentucky’s Famous Feuds and Tragedies (1917), chapters on the French–Eversole war, including narrative accounts of the murder of Joe Eversole and Judge Combs, the “Blanket Court,” and the trials and gallows confession of “Bad Tom” Smith. Project Gutenberg
John Ed Pearce, Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky (University Press of Kentucky, 1994), a modern scholarly treatment that revisits the French–Eversole feud and situates it among other eastern Kentucky vendettas. JSTOR+1
Henry P. Scalf, Kentucky’s Last Frontier, a broad regional history with sections on Perry County, the Combs family, and the feud era. Google Books+1
Wayne Combs, Singing from the Gallows, which retells the “Bad Tom” Smith story and relies heavily on the 1895 newspaper accounts of his confession. Goodreads+2AbeBooks+2
Genealogical and local history compilations
Combs &c. Research Group, “Jesse & Polly Bolling Combs of Perry KY,” “Founders Resting Place,” and related pages on Combs–Eversole Cemetery and Hazard family lines, with transcriptions of family records, census entries, cemetery photographs, and notes on the judge’s death. Combs Families+1
Yeahpot family history page “Jesse Combs and Mary Polly Bolling” and public trees on FamilySearch and similar platforms that compile census, marriage, and cemetery evidence for Judge Josiah Henry Combs and his descendants. WikiTree+1
Gurney Norman, “Resting Place of Hazard’s Founder Goes Unnoticed by Busy Traffic,” a Hazard Herald feature reprinted at Combs &c., which describes Graveyard Hill, the Combs–Eversole cemetery, and notes that Elijah’s grandson Josiah gave land for the courthouse and early townsite. Combs Families
Chelsea Queen, “Josiah Henry Combs: Judge and Feud Victim of Perry County, Kentucky,” Medium (2025), a recent narrative synthesis that draws together feud scholarship and the newspaper record for a modern audience. Medium+1
Feud and folklore context
French–Eversole feud article, summarizing the causes, battles, assassinations, and media coverage of the feud, with references to Mutzenberg, Pearce, Scalf, and local reporting such as Bill Richards’s “French-Eversole War: Perry County was Bloody, Costly” in the Hazard Herald. Wikipedia+1
Materials on Dr. Josiah H. Combs, including the Berea College Special Collections guide to the Josiah Combs Collection, the University of Texas Press edition of Folk-Songs of the Southern United States, and historical markers noting his life as a Hazard-born folklorist and linguist. Berea Archives+2University of Texas Press+2