Editor's Note: The famous 1921 Clayhole Election Battle brought more national attention to Breathitt County. Here is what a local history, "In The Land Of Breathitt," said about the incident in 1941:

CLAYHOLE (170 pop., 850 alt.), on Troublesome Creek, twelve miles south from Jackson, on State 476, now a peaceful community, flared into the newspaper headlines of the Nation on November 8, 1921, as the scene of an election-day massacre. Clayhole precinct, a stronghold of one of the two major political parties, was considered a key to the outcome of the election in Breathitt. According to one version, the events that led up to the "battle" had been planned. The rumor was spread the night before that the polling place would be "torn up" when it was opened in the morning. The fact that the phone lines were cut strengthened the belief that men were organized to carry on a fight.

The battle occurred shortly after the polls were opened. A candidate for the office of county judge, defeated in the August, 1921, primary, was said to have led a party of men to the voting place and demanded a fair election after a voter had been challenged. He was asked to leave the room and remove his men from the door. Upon refusing, election officers attempted to remove him by force. Without warning or threat, scores of shots were fired. When the gunfire stopped, men were lying about the polling place, some dead and others dying. The election clerk was the first to fall. His wife, who appeared in time to see her husband slain, knocked the pistol from the hand of the man she said shot him. At the end of the fusillade four men had been killed and eight were wounded inside the polling place and around its door.

The second and more reliable version of this bloody incident attributed it to a mix-up and dispute between two clerks of the election, for whom there were conflicting authorizations. A clerk had already been certified by the Breathitt County election commissioners when, on the day before election, a second party came before them and made affidavit that the clerk they had previously certified was ill and could not serve. He requested that the ballot box be turned over to him. The trouble started, according to this explanation, when the clerk first authorized appeared at the polls and demanded to serve. Upon subsequent investigation, however, it was found that the difference between the two clerks had been settled before the fighting began.

Efforts were made to reopen the polls after the fight, but it was found the ballots had been thrown into the creek and few of them could be used. Few persons were daring enough to approach the polls after the battle. Physicians from Jackson hurried to the scene of the battle on a special train from the Mowbray and Robinson lumber plant at Quicksand.

During this same election, incidents in which gunfire played a part also occurred at the Simpson, Buckhorn, and Spring Fork precincts. At the end of this tragic election day around a dozen men had been shot to death and many had been wounded.