Stories about my Father 41
“Mr. James don’t want nobody up there.”
Russellville, Alabama is in the northwest corner of the state. It’s where my grandfather Morris, his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather had all been born. I’d heard about it ever since I was a kid, but I’d never been down to see it. The closest big airport to it is in Huntsville which is to the east and over an hour away. Huntsville is a major aerospace center, but even so, there are no direct flights to it from New York. They all go through Atlanta. We had decided to come down to Alabama to see a friend who’d just lost her wife, so I tacked on a few days beforehand.
Four generations are a long time to be in one place. In my family, most of us move around a great deal. We’ve scattered across the globe. Forget four generations, after four weeks I’m itching to head off somewhere. That intense commitment to a single place is completely outside of anything I know.
The only thing I knew for sure that I’d be able to find of the Hester family in Russellville were the graves of the families of my great-great-grandfather, John Chesley Hester, and my great-great-great-grandfather, Roling Hester. According to the genealogy sites, they were all buried in the Malone cemetery just to the west of Russellville. It seemed like the perfect place to start, so right after I landed, that’s where I headed.
Malone Cem. is what came up on my maps app, which seemed close enough. To get there, Siri led me down narrow roads that wound around low hills covered in young trees. I tried to imagine what the Hester family would have been looking at in the early 1800s, but nothing I saw looked very old. Very little of the eastern United States has any old-growth forest left in it at all. To find any, you’d have to go to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington or up to Tongass in Alaska. None of the straight, thin trees I was driving past in Russellville looked older than adolescents. There were even patches of freshly cut land spotted with stumps with no trees standing at all. The few houses scattered around all looked like they were built in my lifetime. Even the ones that were run-down and abandoned didn’t look older than the 1930s or 40s. It dawned on me, that it was highly unlikely that a two-hundred-year-old- wooden shack would still be standing.
After a bit, we got to the turn-off. I took a left on the Malone Cem. dirt road. The spot that Siri claimed was the cemetery was, however, filled by a small ramshackle house. Farm machinery and stacks of stuff were everywhere. A low, blue-plastic children’s pool sat out in front of it filled with water lilies. I drove past it, but the road became impossibly muddy, so I stopped by a white pickup truck. As soon as I did, a heavyset young guy climbed out of it and came over to the car with his dog. I lowered the window.
“Do you know where the Malone cemetery is?” I asked.
It took me less than a second to think about who he reminded me of – Michael J. Pollard from the movie, Bonnie and Clyde. He even sounded like him. His dog put its front paws up on my door and stuck its head into the car licking my face which made the guy nervous. Given the darting glances down he was making, I was sure that there were now muddy footprints all over the car door. He pointed up the road and told me that the graves were more than a mile up through the woods but there was no path up to them. He said that it was completely overgrown.
“Mr. James don’t want nobody up there. It’s a liability thing.”
I didn’t push it. He seemed relieved that I gave up, and we started talking - warily. He’d heard stories about Buck and Roling Hester and told me that he’d seen their graves. He couldn’t quite figure out why it was called the Malone cemetery if it was Hesters who were buried there. I told him that Buck Hester had been married to Amy Malone so it must have been her family’s plot. That lit him up. He told me that Amy was buried on her own out behind an old barn. She’d been the first one put there and after her, they’d put everyone else far up the hill. He’d seen her headstone and felt the engraved letters.
“Someone told me that Buck married seven sisters,” he offered.
“Wow,” I said. I didn’t really know what else to say to that. We chatted a bit more. Since I wasn’t prepared to wade through mud and climb through a mile of underbrush, I let go of the idea of seeing the graves for myself. At least I’d tried. I thanked him for his time and headed back into town.
Franklin County, where present-day Russellville now stands was once Cherokee and Creek territory. Both tribes, however, were “removed” from it. Over a thousand Cherokee were forced to migrate west to Arkansas in 1808. While they went, the Creek refused to go. This eventually led to the Creek War of 1813-1814 and to their defeat at the hands of General Andrew Jackson. As a result, the Creek were forced to cede much of their land to the United States government, and they then were forced west into Oklahoma.
In 1815, a Major William Russell who had served with General Andrew Jackson in the Creek War built a cabin on the newly “cleansed” land about three miles east of where downtown Russellville stands today. Eight years before that, another guy, Edmund Pendleton Gaines had started building a road called the Gaines Trace from the head of the Elks River Shoals down to the Tombigbee River in Mississippi. Part of that road is now Lawrence Street downtown. In 1817, Andrew Jackson started building another road that ran from Nashville all the way down to New Orleans. That road, where it runs through what is now Russellville, is called Jackson Avenue.
Those two roads were likely what made the area appealing to Buck Hester. It was 1818 when Buck and his eldest son Roling came down from North Carolina and planted their first crop of corn. After a successful harvest, they then brought down the rest of the family. They first settled east of the town in an area called Tharp Springs. After it got too crowded, they moved about twelve miles west to the area around where the Malone cemetery now stands.
Too crowded is, of course, a relative term. Tharptown, as Tharp Springs is now called is a tiny unincorporated town. In 2020 it had a population of about 10,000 people. Two hundred years before I cannot imagine it had more than about 50. That said, the more people in an area, the harder it is to hunt game. To put this into some sort of a timeline, Alabama only became a state the following year in 1819.
Two hundred years is a very long time in our current human history. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find in Russellville, but I would say that the oldest buildings in downtown Russellville date to about the 1920s or 1930s. Most of them were built far more recently than that. Like most small US towns and cities, time has not been kind to Russellville. Half of the storefronts are empty. There is a sizable Mexican population living in the town and I would say about half of the businesses currently operating in the other half are Spanish speaking. There are also a lot of churches.
The courthouse where my great-grandfather first practiced law was built in 1892. He would have started working there at least by about 1896 before moving to Virginia with his family in 1898. Sadly, the ornate building burnt down in 1953. It was replaced by a non-descript functional rectangular block. Finding anything at all dating back to the early days of my family living in the area, beyond the place names, seemed to be almost impossible.
The next morning, I went to the Franklin County archives. Behind the main building was an ancient wooden structure with a plaque on it identifying it as the Jones Cabin from 1870. Buck Hester was long dead by 1870 and Roling was a very old man. I was looking for something fifty years older. Inside the archives, I met Chris, apparently one of the few people in the area devoted to preserving its past. I’d talked to her on the phone a few weeks before. When I told her my name she laughed and said, “You can’t throw a rock around here without hitting a Hester!”
In the archives was a 4” thick binder compiled by someone named Bernice Hester which listed all the descendants of Roling and Lucendy Richardson Hester. It must have been her life’s work putting this binder together because there are thousands of them. Another cousin, Felix Hester had contributed two more binders that explored the origins and family of Robert Hester who was Roling’s grandfather, my 5th great-grandfather.
Growing up, nobody I ever met or had even heard of outside my immediate family shared my last name. When I met Kimberly Hester on Titanic, the Musical, it was a big deal. Somebody else had my name. Suddenly, I found myself in a place where the Hester name was more common than Smith. My sister’s and my connection to Roling and Buck Hester was not unique. At all. There were hundreds of others who could claim the same thing.
While I was there, Chris made a phone call to a guy named Tim Hester who is the local expert on the family. He was gobsmacked that any Hesters had ended up in New York City. It was clear what his real amazement was about. I explained how my great-grandfather’s accident with a gin mill had led to him going to law school and then moving up to Virginia. From there my father had headed off to Europe where he met my mother and then, it was true, they had sired Yankee children. That got a full-throated belly laugh out of him. Technically, I explained, I was born in Virginia so I’m still Southern, but Arlington might as well be in the north given how close to Washington D.C. it is. Tim agreed.
I told Chris about my experience out at the farm looking for the plot and she immediately bristled. “He’s not allowed to keep you from visiting that cemetery.” She and some volunteers had surveyed many family plots in the area, including that one. When they tried to go up to see it, the guy had pulled a shotgun on them. As she said, there is a law granting right-of-way for anyone to visit any cemetery in the state. A shotgun, she conceded, supersedes the law. She offered to call a sheriff’s deputy to go up with me.
While the farmer had been clear with me, he hadn’t seemed threatening. As much as I’d made him feel anxious, he’d also seemed interested in the history. I decided that I would go back and offer to pay him to walk me up. She assured me that I didn’t have to do that. Technically she was right, but, in truth, I also had no idea where it was. I decided to try again. Chris was remarkably helpful and let me pour through all the material that they had. She even offered to send me a digital scan of the Hester books which I gratefully accepted.
Thinking about the best way to get through to the farmer, I headed out to find a pair of mud boots. Up the road from town is a massive department store called Rural King. It is like going into the best Target ever - country-style. It stretches for miles or seems to, anyway. There was not a single item in the entire store that anyone from New York City would ever need. I could have spent the rest of the day there. On one side, an entire wall of the store was filled with mud boots. I picked a green pair that were like the ones I remember him wearing.
A week ago, the prospect of coming down to rural Alabama filled me, I’ll admit, with not a little trepidation. The south has been so demonized in our eyes, that it felt like I was wandering into Taliban territory, I was honestly more anxious about it than I was when my mom, my ex, and I went to Mali in West Africa and needed to hire an escort consisting of a jeep filled with soldiers from the Mali army. The guy on the farm seemed OK to me, but he’d pulled a gun on Chris. I decided to just be as nice as possible, keep innocent, and worked on a plausible backstory involving my friend Merri to explain my wedding ring. Even when Chris had asked about my wife, I’d told her that I’d left her back in New York. No chances were being taken. I was going to cross this pond without making a single ripple.
When I pulled up to the farmhouse on Malone Cem. road, the guy came out immediately. He looked agitated. I asked him if he’d be willing to walk me up to the cemetery himself and that I would happily pay him for his time. He told me that he was beat to hell and trying to get someone on the phone and now was not a good time. I persisted. “How about tomorrow morning?” I asked. “Lunchtime,” he said. I jumped in before he could change his mind, “That’s great! How about noon?” He agreed. Was it really that easy? I got back into the car.
“What is your name?” I asked. “Robbie,” he said, looking a little startled. “I’m Richard.” I smiled and I left. Not a shotgun to be seen.
That night, I didn’t sleep all that well. I tossed for a bit and then I got up and did some work for some concerts that are coming up. I emailed Michael a picture of the Malone Cem. sign and told him where I was going and exactly when. My sister emailed me, genuinely worried, and advised me to “butch it up.” Should I really be doing this?
When I got to the farm, his front door was closed, and nobody answered the door. I was early by about 15 minutes. His dog was crated on the front stoop and wagged her tail furiously when she saw me. We made friends again through the wire. The road seemed less muddy to me, and I started to think that maybe I could just head up on my own. Maybe I would leave a couple of $20 bills under the windshield wiper in case he got mad. Would he come after me with a shotgun? What, exactly, does a shotgun look like?
At noon, almost on the dot, the white pick-up pulled into the road and drove up. He hopped out and with no small talk, we started off. He was in Timberlands, so I decided to forget the mud boots and just stick with my sneakers.
We walked past a thicket of trees and then the road turned right and led into an open pasture with a handful of cows grazing in it. As we walked, I asked him about the farm. Were they dairy cows or beef cows? (Beef) Did he grow anything? (Just hay) Had he always lived on the farm? (His father had worked for Mr. James and when he passed, Mr. James kept him on.”)
We walked across one field and then through a gate and across another one that was the size of at least one football field. The cows were Black Angus, and he was clearly very fond of them. The more I asked about them, the more he talked until suddenly he announced that we were there. All I could see was a barbed wire fence and the forest beyond. He carefully unwound the center wire and I stepped through the opening, making sure to hold the wire between the barbs and not slip. “Butch it up,” kept running through my head. Once I was through, I suddenly found myself in front of two tall grave markers. The one in front of me had engraved on it, “Mary Ann, Wife of J.C. Hester,” I had found my great-great-grandmother. The one to the left of it read, “John Chesley Hester,” and his dates. My great-great-grandparents were right there in front of me.
I told Robbie who they were. The decorative finials had fallen off the tops of both the stones. John Chesley’s was lying on the ground. “We had to put that whole stone back up. It fell clean over. We couldn’t get that top part to stick.” We walked further in through the overgrown underbrush, and I saw the corner of a modern-looking stone sticking out of some leaves and vines. I wiped it off with my foot. It read, “Lucinda Hester, Wife of Roling Hester,” and her dates. It wasn’t a modern stone at all, it was older than the two standing ones. It belonged to John Chesley’s mother, my great-great-great-grandmother. I looked to the left of her stone and noticed a little grey corner sticking out of the ground. I pushed the dirt away and cleared it off and, lo and behold, there was my great-great-great-grandfather.
Robbie then found a grave marker for James Malone. He’d never seen it before and other people he had brought up there had asked about him. He was excited at having found it. I explained who he was. Roling’s father was Buck Hester. Buck married Amy Malone who was buried elsewhere on the property. James was Amy’s brother, so he was Roling’s uncle.
Nobody really knows where Buck is buried. Back at the archives, Chris told me that there were some who thought he was in an unmarked grave next to Roling, but there was also a mention of him being buried at a completely different cemetery about 15 miles away. I told that to Robbie, who then said that he didn’t believe it. “Why would they bury him so far off? It don’t make no sense.” His interest and conviction were a little surprising. I looked at him for a second and then he said to me, “My buddy and I wander all over the place looking for old cemeteries. I like finding ‘em. They’re real inneresting.”
After that, everything relaxed. Many of the other stones belonged to very young children, some less than a week old, and some who had lived until four or five. “Cholera took ‘em, probably,” Robbie said. We separated and read off dates on different markers to each other.
Finally, we started back. On the way, he told me about how his father had gotten cancer from being in Vietnam. Nobody in Washington would tell him and his mom anything about what he’d done. When his dad passed, they got a letter from the President thanking the family for their sacrifice and commending his father’s bravery. Nobody else in the family who had been lost in the war got anything like that. He told me that his dad’s name was on a wall in Arlington.
When we got back to the house, I gave him some money as promised and thanked him for his time. He thanked me and said that he’d had a good time and had enjoyed talking with me. The fact that he seemed surprised made me smile. He said that he’d learned some things that he hadn’t known before. I told him that I had, too.
I don’t for a second disbelieve Chris that Robbie pulled a gun on her. Chris has lived in Russellville for decades fighting to preserve a past that few in town care about. Given our world, I’m sure that it is easier for Robbie to deal with a man than with a woman. That’s certainly part of it.
When it comes right down to it, though, Chris, however long she has lived in Russellville, isn’t from there. Weirdly, I am. I may not have been born there, myself, but all my people were. All those people buried in that overgrown plot are kin to me. Whatever other advantages I might have in Robbie’s eyes, and however strange and suspicious I might seem, the main thing I have over Chis is that I’m family.
What a fascinating and exciting narrative!! And what a spectacular find, discovering your great great great and great great grandparents!!
I lived in a small town in Vermont in the late sixties and early seventies. On “my” land, there was a very small Potter family cemetery. I have often wished I belonged to a family with a rich local history and a small family cemetery…
Interestingly, the person who now lives on that land is actually a potter!
Fascinating and so well told. So glad you persisted and now have and feel your connection to family and place even more.