Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of the Phipps Family of Knox, Kentucky
Drive the back roads of Knox County and the Phipps name turns up like a recurring verse. It is etched into marble and sandstone on hillsides above Stinking Creek and Lynn Camp, tied to old farmsteads near Emanuel, and still spoken in the present tense at Old Phipps Cemetery near Gray.
For genealogists the family is a puzzle of Isaacs, Jesses, Jacobs, and Marys who cross county lines and change spellings. For music historians the name belongs to two of eastern Kentucky’s most powerful sacred sounds. One emerges from a Holiness congregation around Corbin and travels to the Bristol Sessions with Ernest Phipps and His Holiness Singers. The other gathers in a Knox County valley around Arthur Leroy “A. L.” Phipps and becomes the Phipps Family, a group so steeped in the Carter style that critics called them “Carter clones.”
Knox County’s courthouse records, its hillside cemeteries, and its local historical collections let us follow the family from tax rolls and land books into church houses and recording studios. The story that emerges is less a straight line than a web of kin, creed, and place.
First traces: tax lists, censuses, and a federal land claim
Unlike some older Knox County surnames, Phipps is a relative latecomer in the local records. Genealogist Tim Phipps notes that no one with the surname or its variants appears on the Knox County tax lists from 1800 through 1811, even as nearby families are already being assessed for acreage on Stinking Creek and the upper Cumberland.
Things change in the 1830s. By tracking the annual county tax books, which survive almost continuously from 1800 to 1859 on microfilm, Phipps shows Isaiah Phipps appearing on the Stinking Creek rolls. Other Phipps men follow, including Jesse on Lynn Camp. Together they form a small cluster that lines up with the first Phipps households in Knox County’s 1840 federal census.
Federal records connect these Knox County families to a much wider migration path. A donation land claim filed in Oregon by a man named Joseph Phipps states that he was born in Grayson County, Virginia, in 1812 and married his wife Nancy in Knox County, Kentucky, on 5 December 1833. That single line in a western land file links the Phipps of southwestern Virginia to a marriage in Knox County and then to the far Pacific Northwest, mirroring the larger nineteenth century route that carried many Appalachian families from the upper South to new states beyond the Mississippi.
By mid century a younger generation appears squarely rooted in Knox County. In the 1850 population schedule a household headed by Isaac Phipps, age twenty seven, born in Tennessee, is enumerated with his wife Eleanor, also twenty seven and born in Tennessee, and children Priscilla, Samuel, and Esther, all born in Kentucky. The same household includes a twenty two year old laborer, Stephen Teague.
Later, a Missouri death certificate ties this census entry back to Knox County. Samuel C. Phipps, born about 1849 in Kentucky and buried in Cedar County, Missouri in 1923, names his parents as Isaac Phipps and a Teague mother, which matches the Teague association already visible in the 1850 household.
Taken together, the federal census, the tax lists, and that far flung Oregon land claim show a family that arrives in Knox County in the 1830s, sets down roots along Stinking Creek and Lynn Camp, and then sends branches outward to Missouri, Indiana, and Oregon while still maintaining a strong local base.
Deeds, courthouses, and the archival map of a family
Paper trails in Knox County’s courthouses and archives give the Phipps story a physical map. The county’s “Record of deeds, 1800-1912,” microfilmed at the courthouse in Barbourville and now cataloged by FamilySearch, preserves land transactions that document where families lived, how they acquired their property, and how they passed it on.
The county clerk’s office maintains a broader collection of deeds, mortgages, and other real estate instruments, with modern digital access back into the mid twentieth century and older volumes available on microfilm. Those deed books, paired with the microfilmed general indexes to grantors and grantees, allow researchers to follow Phipps land on Stinking Creek, Lynn Camp, and later near Gray and Emanuel as it passes between kin, neighbors, and sometimes out of the family altogether.
Vital records and court files round out the picture. Early Knox County marriage registers, preserved in microfilm under the statewide “Kentucky, County Marriages, 1797-1954” collection, place Phipps brides and grooms in specific churches and justice’s offices, often with bondsmen and witnesses from related families.
Later, twentieth century state death certificates for Phipps men and women born in Knox County but dying in places like Cincinnati or rural Missouri bear witness to another Appalachian pattern. The local community sends its sons and daughters to industrial jobs and farmsteads elsewhere, yet the certificates and obituaries still record birthplaces like Stinking Creek and Emanuel, and many of those migrants ultimately come home in burial.
Probate and court records kept at the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives in Frankfort, and at the Knox County courthouse itself, document the family in another guise. Abstracts of early Knox County wills and estate administrations show Phipps men serving not just as testators and heirs but as appraisers and witnesses in their neighbors’ estates. Circuit court case files cited in regional genealogical journals show Phipps names intertwined with Bakers, Binghams, Sizemores, and others along Stinking Creek, suggesting both ordinary disputes and the occasional feud.
Cemeteries at Emanuel and Gray
If the paper record tells us where the Phipps lived, the cemeteries show us how they wished to be remembered.
One of Knox County’s country graveyards is Phipps Cemetery at Emanuel, sometimes called Phipps Emanuel or Phipps Hensley. A RootsWeb transcription published from on site readings describes it as lying off Sand Gap Road in Tuggle Hollow near the Emanuel community.
The cemetery appears in multiple compiled cemetery lists, including the Knox County cemetery inventory maintained by the Knox Historical Museum and the Knox County cemetery pages of the KYGenWeb project. In those lists it stands alongside other familiar local sites like Lower Bingham Cemetery and Parks Helton, emphasizing how thoroughly the Phipps name is woven into the geography of the Middle Fork of Stinking Creek.
Modern tools like Find A Grave and WikiTree, while derivative, give a sense of the cemetery’s reach and chronology. Memorials for Jacob “Boss” Phipps, said to have been born about 1812 and living nearly a century, place him at Phipps Cemetery in Emanuel, along with many of his descendants. Other memorials list William F. Phipps and his wife Sarah M., as well as later generations of Phipps, Hensleys, Vaughns, and Frazier kin who carry the name into the late twentieth century.
A separate site, commonly called Old Phipps Cemetery near Gray, appears in Volume 5 of the Knox Historical Museum’s cemetery survey series. Recent obituaries show that Old Phipps is still an active burial ground. The 2021 obituary of Cathy Dianne Phipps Brown, born 1963, notes that she was to be buried in Old Phipps Cemetery, demonstrating that the Phipps burial landscape continues to grow even as the earliest stones weather and fade.
Standing in either cemetery, you can see the whole span of the family’s local history. The stones reach back toward Jacob and his contemporaries who came into Knox County in the antebellum period and forward to descendants who lived through coal booms, the gospel record era, and the decline of the L&N branch lines.
Phipps, Binghams, and other Stinking Creek neighbors
The Phipps families did not live in isolation. Their story intersects with other major Knox County lines, particularly along Stinking Creek.
One prominent neighbor in both the records and local memory is the Bingham family. Genealogical compilations and FamilySearch trees describe John Madison “Ole John” Bingham, born in Albemarle County, Virginia in 1791, as the son of Captain John A. Bingham and his wife Deborah Phipps. By the 1830s Ole John is on Stinking Creek in Knox County, where he acquires land and becomes the patriarch of a sprawling local clan. His burial is recorded at Lower Bingham Cemetery along the Middle Fork of Stinking Creek.
Later Binghams who are clearly tied to Stinking Creek and nearby communities still carry the Phipps connection in their bloodlines. Genealogical summaries of John Madison Bingham’s children and grandchildren show them marrying into other familiar Knox County families, reinforcing the idea that Phipps descendants quickly merged into the broader web of local kin.
Modern surname distribution tools underscore this long presence. Forebears’ statistical tables for Knox County show Phipps as a recurring local surname, far more common there than in many other Kentucky counties, which reflects both the original nineteenth century settlements and the decision of many descendants to remain in or return to their home county.
Ernest Phipps: a Holiness preacher at the Bristol Sessions
One branch of the Knox and Whitley County Phipps story leaves its trace not in land records but in grooves on shellac.
Ernest Phipps, born in Corbin, Kentucky in 1900, was a Holiness preacher who also worked as a coal miner and truck driver. He led a small ensemble of singers and string players from a local Pentecostal Holiness congregation, performing under names like the Holiness Quartet and the Holiness Singers. In the summer of 1927 he answered talent scout Ralph Peer’s call for regional musicians and traveled to Bristol, Tennessee to record for Victor.
At the Bristol Sessions of 1927 and again in 1928, Phipps and his group recorded a dozen sides, all religious, including “I Want to Go Where Jesus Is,” “Old Ship of Zion,” “If the Light Has Gone out of Your Soul,” and the powerful “Shine on Me,” a Holiness interpretation of a popular gospel piece. The performances are raw, driving, and unmistakably Appalachian, with call and response vocals riding over a string band of fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin, and autoharp.
Those sides sold well enough to remain in print into the 1930s, but Phipps never became a full time recording artist. After Bristol he returned to eastern Kentucky and continued preaching, leaving his recorded legacy as a snapshot of Holiness worship in the era when commercial country music was being born.
Genealogical work places Ernest firmly in the Knox County Phipps web, a son of James and Bessie Phipps who appear in early twentieth century censuses of the area. PhippsGenealogy points to a Knox County marriage record from January 1920 that lists “Eamit” Phipps marrying Minnie Douglass, almost certainly a mistranscription of Ernest, which anchors the Bristol Sessions performer to Knox County vital records.
A. L. Phipps and the family from Emanuel
If Ernest’s sound is the roar of a Holiness congregation, A. L. Phipps and his family offer something closer to the lonesome poise of the Carter Family, refracted through Knox County.
Arthur Leroy Phipps was born in Knox County on 12 August 1916. His future musical partner and wife, Kathleen Norris Helton, was born in 1924. Both grew up in the rural valleys around Emanuel and Stinking Creek. They married in 1937, and by the early 1940s they were performing publicly as a trio with a niece, then later with their own children.
By 1950 the Phipps Family had a regular program on WCTT in Corbin, followed by radio work at WYWY in Barbourville and spots on the Mid Day Merry Go Round from WNOX in Knoxville. Listeners heard Arthur’s steady guitar and baritone voice, Kathleen’s autoharp and soprano leads, and their children blending in a tight ensemble that leaned heavily on the Carter Family songbook, along with original compositions in the same style.
The 1960s brought recordings and a wider audience. In 1962 the family cut “Most Requested Sacred Songs of the Carter Family” for Starday Records, a project that helped cement their reputation as master interpreters of that earlier canon. A few years later they recorded “The Phipps Family: Faith, Love and Tragedy” for Folkways Records, now preserved and available through Smithsonian Folkways, which features songs rooted in family experience, from mine disasters to personal loss.
During the folk revival the Phipps Family performed at the Newport Folk Festival and toured widely, bringing a Knox County valley’s sound to audiences far from the Cumberland. A short entry in the Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music and later work by Kentucky music historian Charles K. Wolfe accented just how faithfully the group carried forward the Carter idiom while remaining unmistakably their own.
For all of that national exposure, the family kept a strong local identity. The Frazier History Museum’s “Musical Kentucky: A Song from Each County” project chose a Phipps Family rendition of “Charles Guiteau” to represent Knox County, and local historians co authored an article titled “Music from a Knox County Valley: The Phipps Family Singers” in The Knox Countian, the magazine of the Knox Historical Museum.
Arthur’s life ended in violence that shook the county. On 30 August 1995 he was brutally attacked in his home on Smokey Creek, stabbed and beaten during a robbery. The case went to the Kentucky Supreme Court as Mills v. Commonwealth, in which the court affirmed the conviction and death sentence of John Mills for the murder, burglary, and robbery of the seventy seven year old musician.
Today Arthur and Kathleen lie side by side at Phipps Cemetery in Emanuel. PhippsGenealogy and RootsWeb transcriptions point out their tombstones among the others, making the burial ground not just a family site but a landmark in American gospel and country music history.
Archives, museums, and the work of remembering
Behind this story are the small institutions that hold the records together. The Knox Historical Museum in Barbourville maintains vertical family files, including a Phipps folder, and publishes The Knox Countian, which has carried articles on both the musical Phipps Family and the broader history of Stinking Creek and its people.
The county’s public library, local archives, and the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives collectively preserve probate files, court records, and original tax books. Guides from KDLA and FamilySearch walk researchers through the maze of land patents, deed books, and county court minutes that turn names on a stone into a fully documented life.
In the digital realm, sites like PhippsGenealogy, WikiTree, Find A Grave, and YourRoots do important but very different work. They often compile and interpret and must be checked against the underlying records, yet they also bring together distant cousins, preserve family lore, and flag sources that might otherwise be missed, such as the Oregon donation land claim or obscure county court cases.
For the Phipps families of Knox County, that combination of courthouse ledgers, hillside cemeteries, family memories, and old recordings reveals a story that is both local and far reaching. It runs from a handful of names on an 1830s tax list to a Holiness string band in Bristol, to Carter style harmonies on a Newport stage, and finally back again to Emanuel and Old Phipps Cemetery, where the hills still hold the echoes of hymns that once went out over WCTT and WYWY.
Sources & Further Reading
FamilySearch. “Record of Deeds, 1800–1912 (Knox County, Kentucky).” FamilySearch Catalog. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/115133.
Knox County Clerk. “Records.” Knox County Clerk (Barbourville, Kentucky). Accessed January 8, 2026. https://knox.countyclerk.us/records/.
FamilySearch. “Kentucky, County Marriages, 1797–1954 – FamilySearch Historical Records.” FamilySearch Wiki. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Kentucky,_County_Marriages_-_FamilySearch_Historical_Records.
FamilySearch Wiki. “Knox County, Kentucky Genealogy.” Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Knox_County,_Kentucky_Genealogy.
Forebears.io. “Knox County Genealogy Resources & Vital Records.” Accessed January 8, 2026. https://forebears.io/united-states/kentucky/knox-county.
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. “Research Guides.” KDLA: Resources for Researchers. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Pages/Research-Guides.aspx.
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives. Kentucky Court Records Research Guide. Frankfort: KDLA, 2023. PDF, accessed January 8, 2026. https://kdla.ky.gov/Archives-and-Reference/Documents/ResearchGuide-Kentucky_Court_Records.pdf.
Phipps, Tim. “Knox County, Kentucky and the Phipps Family.” Phipps Genealogy (blog), May 5, 2016. https://phippsgenealogy.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/knox-county-kentucky-and-the-phipps-family/.
Phipps, Tim. “A Phipps Presence in Knox County, Kentucky.” Phipps Genealogy (blog), January 12, 2012. https://phippsgenealogy.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/a-phipps-presence-in-knox-county-kentucky/.
Phipps, Tim. “Clay County, Kentucky Tax Lists.” Phipps Genealogy (blog), June 5, 2016. https://phippsgenealogy.wordpress.com/2016/06/05/clay-county-kentucky-tax-lists/.
Phipps Genealogy. “Documents” (category archive, including posts on Joseph Phipps’s Oregon Donation Land Claim). Phipps Genealogy (blog). Accessed January 8, 2026. https://phippsgenealogy.wordpress.com/category/documents/.
“Phipps Cemetery, Emanuel, Knox County, Kentucky.” Freepages, RootsWeb. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~kykinfolk/genealogy/phippscemetery.html.
“Phipps Cemetery in Emanuel, Kentucky.” Find a Grave. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2188163/phipps-cemetery.
Knox Historical Museum. “Knox County, Ky., Cemeteries.” Knox Historical Museum. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://knoxhistoricalmuseum.org/collections/cemeteries.
Knox Historical Museum. Knox County Cemetery Survey, Vol. 5. Barbourville, Ky.: Knox Historical Museum, n.d. (Listings for Old Phipps Cemetery and other Knox County graveyards).
“John Madison ‘Ole John’ Bingham Sr.” Find a Grave. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/46027728/john-madison-bingham.
“John Madison Bingham (1791–1889).” FamilySearch Family Tree. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/K2S7-42K.
Forebears.io. “Phipps Surname Origin, Meaning & Last Name History.” Accessed January 8, 2026. https://forebears.io/surnames/phipps.
“Ernest Phipps.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified October 13, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Phipps.
“Ernest Phipps and Congregation.” Hillbilly-Music.com. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.hillbilly-music.com/artists/story/index.php?id=10480.
“54 – ‘Shine on Me’ by Ernest Phipps & His Holiness Singers.” The Old Weird America (blog), May 31, 2010. https://oldweirdamerica.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/54-shine-on-me-by-ernest-phipps-his-holiness-singers/.
“Ernest Phipps & His Holiness Singers.” EarlyGospel.com. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.earlygospel.com/ernest-phipps-and-his-holiness-singers.
“Ernest Phipps.” In The Artists & Personalities of the 1927 Bristol Sessions. Birthplace of Country Music Museum, 2014. PDF, accessed January 8, 2026. https://birthplaceofcountrymusic.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/bristol-sessions-artists-personalities.pdf.
“Phipps Family.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified May 22, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phipps_Family.
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. The Phipps Family: Faith, Love and Tragedy. Folkways FW02375, 1965. Album notes and streaming page. https://folkways.si.edu/al-phipps-and-the-phipps-family/faith-love-and-tragedy/american-folk-old-time/music/album/smithsonian.
Discogs. “The Phipps Family – Faith, Love And Tragedy (1965, Vinyl).” Discogs. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.discogs.com/release/7484304-The-Phipps-Family-Faith-Love-And-Tragedy.
Discogs. “A.L. Phipps & The Phipps Family – Most Requested Sacred Songs Of The Carter Family.” Discogs. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.discogs.com/release/4499410-AL-Phipps-And-The-Phipps-Family-Most-Requested-Sacred-Songs-Of-The-Carter-Family.
Frazier History Museum. “Musical Kentucky: A Song from Each County.” Frazier Kentucky History Museum. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.fraziermuseum.org/musical-kentucky.
House, Silas. “Watershed.” Oxford American 80 (2012). Online edition accessed January 8, 2026. https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-80-spring-2013/watershed.
Wolfe, Charles K. Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. https://nkaa.uky.edu/nkaa/items/show/30000506.
McNeil, W. K., ed. Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music. New York: Routledge, 2005. https://www.routledge.com/Encyclopedia-of-American-Gospel-Music/McNeil/p/book/9780415941794.
Ramsey, David. “Right Down with the People: The Phipps Family and the Evolution of Early Country Music (Part One).” Right Down with the People (Substack newsletter), September 2025. https://davidbramsey.substack.com/p/right-down-with-the-people.
Berea College, Special Collections & Archives. “Sound Archives Research Guides.” Hutchins Library, Berea College. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://libraryguides.berea.edu/bsaresearchguides/researchguides.
“The Phipps Family Collection.” In Berea Digital Collections. Hutchins Library, Berea College. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://dla.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/berea.
“Music from a Knox County Valley: The Phipps Family Singers.” The Knox Countian (Barbourville, Ky.: Knox Historical Museum), c. 1993. (Article cited in Knox Historical Museum Phipps Family pages.) https://knoxhistoricalmuseum.org/publications/knox-countian.
Mills v. Commonwealth, 996 S.W.2d 473 (Ky. 1999). Opinion of the Supreme Court of Kentucky, August 26, 1999. https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/59147f31add7b0493445d79e.
Kiely, Terrence F. Forensic Evidence: Science and the Criminal Law. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2006. https://www.amazon.com/Forensic-Evidence-Science-Criminal-Second/dp/0849328586.
Author Note: I wrote this piece to trace how one Knox County surname threads through courthouse ledgers, hillside graveyards, and old gospel records. If your own Phipps stories, photographs, or tapes touch these same hollows, I hope you will share them and help deepen the record.