Story - The News-Herald

Vol. 139 No.8

Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2006

A look at the history of Mountain Island
Georgia: On My Mind

By Georgia Green Stamper

In February of 1850, James Herndon woke up one morning, his arthritis worse than usual, his energy and ambition gone, and realized that he was an old man. He was also the second largest slave-owner in Owen County, Kentucky. He hadn’t set out to become that. More than most people of that time and place, he had been exposed to abolitionist thinking. His sister, Susannah, had emancipated her slaves some years earlier, and from their youth, his cousin, the Rev. John Herndon Ficklin, had stood in the pulpit as a fiery and uncompromising critic of slavery.
Herndon was descended from strong-minded people who put their shoulders to their talk. As a youth, he walked out of Virginia with his family because they were being persecuted for their then radical Baptist faith. With a large band of other faithfuls, who called themselves The Traveling Church, he arrived in the wilderness west seeking a little land to call his own and freedom to worship in peace.
It’s unclear when Herndon arrived in the Kentucky territory. Some of his close relatives are known to have been at the fabled siege of Bryan Station in 1782. His aunt, Mary Herndon Ficklin, and her daughter, Philadelphia, were among the remarkable women who saved the fort from burning by forming a bucket brigade from spring to fort while under attack by Indians.
But by the late 1790s, he had wandered north of the Kentucky River where he happened upon Eagle Creek, a tributary nearly 90 miles long that eventually empties into the Kentucky only a few miles before the Kentucky merges with the mighty Ohio. To Herndon’s delight, he not only found rich bottomland along the creek, but a 125-acre island formed at a point where the creek forked into two branches before converging again further downstream. Mountain Island, higher than the surrounding valley, was a natural fort and it had fresh springs and fertile soil.
He settled in and prospered. In 1812, he erected a mill on the island that became the center of the sparsely populated region. In 1817, he was licensed to open a tavern there too. Literate and capable, he was appointed to numerous official positions in the new land ranging from Justice of the Peace to High Sheriff. As his responsibilities increased, he ignored the quiet voice within his heart, and somehow justified the purchase of the men and women he needed to cultivate his fields.
Perhaps this is why his name does not appear in the records of The Mountain Island Baptist Church, a mission established by members of his parents’ old Traveling Church. The church building stood nearly in sight of his log home, and his lack of involvement seems strange. Perhaps he was miffed that the slave-owning congregation was hostile towards his abolitionist cousin John who briefly pastored there. But it’s easier to imagine that Herndon, a slave-owner himself, stood apart from worship because he was uneasy in the presence of God.
To assuage his conscience, he was benevolent towards the slaves who maintained his island kingdom. He often gave them a colt or calf to raise as their own and to barter. He loaned one black man, Valentine, to a neighbor, Dick Sparrow, for two years so that “Tiney” could purchase his wife from Sparrow with his labor. Valentine’s wife was a free woman forever after, purchased by her husband’s love, and in a peculiar way, by Herndon’s kindness.
But by 1850, Herndon knew his life was nearly over, and he did not want to face eternity as a slave-owner. If the thief on the cross could be forgiven, surely God could still be persuaded to deal gently with James Herndon. He had legal papers drawn up freeing the people who had served him, and presented them in county court on Feb. 19.
He assumed this would be a simple process as it had been so in the past. The divisive political winds, however, that would culminate in the Civil War a decade later were already blowing in Kentucky. The judge refused to admit Herndon’s emancipation document on a technicality — the slaves were not present in the courtroom. The judge continued the case until the court convened in April.
On April 15, Herndon was back in fiscal court with all of the slaves, but again the judge refused to hear him. This time the judge ruled that Herndon would have to produce a $21,000 bond to ensure that the freed men and women would not become
a “burden ... to the commonwealth.”
Herndon was stunned. He could not, or would not, come up with the unprecedented amount of the bond. He left, but vowed to return, and the remaining three years of his life were devoted to one legal battle after another in an attempt to free his own slaves. He did not succeed.
In death, he tried again. His will not only emancipated his slaves, but deeded Mountain Island to them and their heirs forever. After additional legal skirmishes, and a change in the sitting judge, the court honored Herndon’s wishes in August 1853.
Today, more than 150 years later, the descendants of Joshua Sr., Dolly, Richard, Valentine, Joshua Jr., Jerry, Willis, Fanny, George, Milley, Susana, William, John, Wiat, Mary, James Lewis, Ann Marie, Annet Jane, George Warren, Charles William, Dolly (Carroll) and Masiat still own Mountain Island.
(Information for this article was obtained through my research of oral history, from various documents and from Dr. James C. Bryant’s account in “Mountain Island In Owen County, Kentucky: The Settlers And Their Churches,” Owen Co. His. Soc.: 1986.)

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