The Community of Smackem & On The Middle Fork In Breathitt County, Kentucky

By Rev. Walter Wullschleger - 1981

It was in the spring of 1970 when I was the census-taker for that year. The Jett's Creek area had been given to me which also included a large area from Highway 30 between Jackson and Booneville, all the way to the Lee Co. line. Smackem was a small community between the Middle Fork and Owsley County, lying several miles down the river from the community of Jett's Creek. This remote part of Breathitt County of which it is said, "you can't get there from here." You have to go over into Owsley County and approach it from the "back side" as it were.

An alternative is to come in by helicopter and be lowered into Smackem by the lift cable for there is not a level spot clear of trees for a copter to land. However, I was told that I might leave my car at the end of the road, walk up the river to the first swinging footbridge, cross and come back down the river to the mouth of Smackem Branch and get in that way. So that is what I did. I collected my census forms and headed back the way I came, thinking how hardly I would choose to live in such a lonesome valley so remotely separated from civilization.

Now, ten years later, a man stopped me on the street in Jackson and asked if I were not the person who took the census in Smackem in 1970. He remembered me but I would never have remembered him. He asked me if I knew how Smackem got its name, and, of course, I didn't. "Well," he said, "there was a family in there once that had several young women in it and the young fellows would go there to visit because of that attraction. For that reason it became known as "Smackem" because that is what they did there."

Another amusing incident happened in the Jett's Creek area at a home where there were 14 in the family. When I picked up their census form we counted the children's names and he discovered that he had left out two of them. He wrote them in and then I noticed that the wife's name was missing. I noted that to him and he said, "Why, does she count, too?"

But the following account of my acquaintance with Jett's Creek tops them all:

When I came to pick up Terry's form, I came face-to-face with the real, antique, and historic Kentucky of the days of Daniel Boone'. Here was a fine old couple living just as they did when the first settlers built their mountain homes and carved out a stubborn existance under almost unyielding circumstances. Here were still intact the oldest practices of the pioneers. The down-in-the-creek road to their place was the first evidence of pioneer days. Then the tobacco barn, the neat garden, the one mule and one cow, a flock of chickens and a hog or two type of farming, plus the alarming and doubtful welcome of several dogs at the picket fence gate was the introduction of a fruitful visit. As wonder after wonder appeared, I was shocked to learn that the very able and efficient matron was feeding the dogs and chickens on homemade cow-butter and fresh eggs. Replying to my shocked response, I was told that it was because of their remote residence, with no telephone or transportation to the outside world that the deep-freeze was full of produce and no place to put more that the dogs were being treated to the best of human food.

At the time, I had a produce route in Perry County that I served one day each week. So I made a deal with these dear old folks to buy all their surplus for the customers on my route. For several years thereafter, this source of supply wa3 their delight.

At this time the Terrys were constantly being besieged by the representatives of mining and oil companies who were bent on either leasing or buying their valuable land for their own future profit. After some months, even years, of unsuccessful arbitration, unkept appointments, and promises unremembered, Mr. Terry declared open warfare on these fly-by-night unidentified mining enterprises and declared he would shoot the next one that showed up or at least turn his meanest dog loose to urge him down the road.

Ten years have now gone by since then but so far as I know the Terrys are still in business in a new house on their old farm on Jett's Creek in Breathitt County.