KNOW YOUR APPALACHIAN NEIGHBORS

Menifee County got made out of leftovers.

In 1869 the legislature took a slice off Bath. A slice off Montgomery. Off Morgan, off Powell, off Wolfe. Five counties, each handing over the corner it could spare. They stitched the pieces together and called it Kentucky's 113th county.

Then they named it for a man who never lived there and misspelled his name doing it.

Richard Menefee. M-e-n-e-f-e-e. Born over in Owingsville, one of the finest orators Kentucky ever put on a courthouse floor, they said. Elected to Congress before he was thirty. Dead at thirty-one. Somebody in Frankfort wrote the county down as Menifee, with an i, and that's how it stayed. The youngest man in the state to have a county named for him, and he never lived to see it spelled wrong.

The county seat they called Frenchburg. After Judge Richard French — the same Richard French that Menefee had beaten for that congressional seat two years before. So the winner got a county with his name spelled wrong, and the loser got the town.

That's a Menifee County kind of arithmetic.

It sits in the middle of the Daniel Boone National Forest, tucked between Cave Run Lake up north and the Red River Gorge down south. Two of the prettiest places in Kentucky. Menifee is the stretch of road in between. People run through it on the Mountain Parkway, headed for one or the other, and they do not stop.

About six thousand folks live here. Fifth-smallest county in the state. Barely a tenth of the ground is farmed. The rest is trees and rock and hollow, standing about like it has for ten thousand years.

The place has a habit of nearly disappearing.

June of 1882, Beaver Creek came up over its banks after a hard rain and carried Frenchburg off with it. Six people dead. When the water went back down, there were three buildings left standing. Three.

March 2, 2012, a tornado cut a sixty-mile scar across eastern Kentucky and ran straight through here. Three more dead.

A hundred and thirty years apart, water and wind, and both times the county picked itself up off the ground and stayed put.

Now let me tell you about a few of the people.

Delbert Barker was born on a farm outside Frenchburg in 1932. Learned to pick a guitar before his family loaded up and left for Ohio, the way half of Appalachia did back then, chasing factory work. In the fifties he turned himself into something the record men called "The King of the Covers." He'd cut a Hank Williams number, an Elvis number, Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Blackberry Boogie," and put it out fast and cheap — his voice, on a budget label, for folks who couldn't spare the money for the real thing. He recorded under about a dozen fake names. Buzz Williams. Clem McCoy. Jug Scott. A one-man knockoff shop with a genuinely fine voice. Then in 1960 he walked away from all of it and pinned on a badge. A mountain boy who spent his best years sounding like everybody else, then went and became a police officer. He died in 2024, ninety-one years old, a long way from that farm.

Then there's Dr. Edward Guerrant, who rode with John Hunt Morgan in the war. Confederate cavalry. When it was over he took sick, nearly died, and came out the other side a changed man — studied medicine, took up preaching, and spent the rest of his days on horseback in these mountains. They called him the Apostle to the Southern Highlanders. He looked at eastern Kentucky and saw a people the rest of the country had driven straight around, and he set out to build them schools and churches and clinics. Frenchburg got one. In 1909 the Presbyterians opened a school here, the only high school Menifee County had. A few years later they raised a hospital on the same hill, and for a long stretch it was the only one between Lexington and Ashland. The buildings sit empty now, up on the campus above town. But for a while there, if you got born or got schooled or got saved in this county, chances are it traced back to a Confederate cavalryman who found the Lord.

And then there's John Poplin, and his is the one people out here still tell.

He came up from North Carolina, a Confederate soldier who'd already buried a son in the fighting. Settled east of Frenchburg. One night a bunch of men pulled him out of his house, and he never came home. They found his body over near Rothwell, covered with leaves. A woman named Eliza Simpkins confessed she'd had a hand in it. And she was frightened enough of John Poplin dead — his ghost, his angry children, something in the dark — that she asked to have her grave sealed shut with cement. They buried her right beside the man she helped kill. His old home place is a museum now. The Swamp Valley Museum, a huddle of old log cabins about eight miles out of town, packed with Mason jars and miner's caps and photographs of the dead.

When you get hungry, there's the Frosty Freeze on Main Street in Frenchburg. Little family-owned drive-up, walk-up window, call-in number, soft-serve on a hot day. Burgers. A hot ham hoagie folks drive over from Bath County for. No chain put it there. A family did, and the town keeps it fed.

For a county built out of scraps and nearly washed off the map twice, Menifee holds onto its own pretty hard.

There's a little theater group in Frenchburg. Forty-some members. Every year they write and put on a play made out of stories they gathered off their own people. Real ones. Local ones. They hold it at a festival called Mountain Memories. And that right there is the whole idea. A place this small, sitting quiet between two famous ones, nobody is going to remember it for you.

So they do it themselves. They write it down. They put it on a stage. They keep the log cabins standing and the Mason jars dusted and the murdered man's picture up on the wall.

Nobody drives to Menifee County on purpose.

That's their loss.

Come see your neighbors.

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