to numerous homicides and hanged for murder, was my great-grandfather. Thomas Smith was the father of my father’s mother, Matilda Smith Combs. All of the adults called her “Tildy.” I simply called her Grandma. She married Robert “Blue Bob” Combs, and they had twelve children. There were so many Combs men named Bob that colors were added to their names to identify them. I lived with my grandparents, Matilda and Blue Bob Combs, for about six months when I was a teenager in the late 1950s, shortly after my mother died of cancer.
A few years earlier, I remember playing cowboys and Indians with my cousin, Paul Jones of Lotts Creek, at my grandmother’s house. Several of the Combs families had come for Sunday dinner. Paul walked into the kitchen and asked, “Grandma, was your daddy, Bad Tom Smith, a good shot?”
Grandma looked startled. She walked from the coal cook stove to the table with a huge cast iron skillet without saying a word. That question had conjured up a bad memory. Being a very quiet woman, Grandma didn’t want to talk about her father. She quickly gained composure. “Paul, get out of my way, I wouldn’t want to spill this good gravy on you and the floor.”
One of the few times my grandmother broke her silence about her father was with her daughter—and my aunt—Nancy. Aunt Nancy liked to sing. She was singing some old-time songs around the house one day when my grandmother admonished her to quit singing because it would only lead to trouble. Nancy could end up like her grandfather, who also had liked singing. Tom Smith, I learned, did not only like to sing, but is said to have written several songs. Tom sang the last song he wrote for a group of reporters on the day before his execution.
Bad Tom had six children. My grandmother was thirteen years old, and the baby, Edgar, a little less than a year and a half in 1895, when their father was executed. The other children were Bud, Maggie, John, and Cody.
Sometimes family members of people who have been executed feel ashamed. There’s a story about a woman who was very prominent in her town’s society. One day she decided to trace family roots. The woman hired a genealogy expert to put together the family tree. After much research, the expert told her he had disturbing news. The woman’s great-uncle had been hanged for murder. The lady talked to the genealogy expert privately. The expert issued a written report that stated a great-uncle had died “when a platform he was standing on suddenly collapsed.”
I don’t believe that shame accounted for Bad Tom Smith’s children’s reluctance to discuss him. Certainly they were not proud of the fact. But more important, I believe, is that the emotional trauma they suffered from this event, as children, never left them.
So, who was this man named Bad Tom Smith, who rode on horseback and led an outlaw gang through the hills and hollows of southeastern Kentucky, and ended up at the end of a noose? My purpose in writing this book is to answer that question by examining not just his death, but the events that shaped his life up to that fateful day.
Smith-Combs Genealogy
A Brief Historical Background of Some Mountain Characters and Characteristics
Tom Smith was born on October 13, 1859, in the tiny Perry County community of Carr’s Fork, which would later become a part of Knott County after that county was formed from part of Perry County in 1885. Although Tom became an outlaw, he came from a respected family. William Smith was born in England and came to Virginia when it was still a colony in the eighteenth century. He married Betty “Eunice” Ritchie, also from England, shortly after arrival. Their son, Richard, was born March 6, 1771 in Virginia. After their father’s death, Richard and his brother John moved to an unsettled part of Kentucky. Their mother stayed in Virginia to handle the plantations left by their father. Richard probably came to Owsley County, Kentucky by way of Pound Gap, Virginia in about 1792, along the route known as the Daniel Boone Trail. Richard then settled in the Lotts Creek area of Perry County before moving to Pigeon Roost, on Troublesome Creek, at Ary. According to Henry P. Scalf, in his book Kentucky’s Last Frontier, Richard Smith owned 38,577 acres of land in 1796 through Eastern Land Titles. Richard was a Primitive Baptist Minister for forty-five years. He was said to preach hellfire and brimstone sermons, then sneak out back of the meeting place to take a swig of whiskey. According to Owsley County, Kentucky court records, Richard Smith’s brother, John, was later appointed his guardian.
Richard Smith married Elita “Alicia” Combs in 1792, when she was twenty. Richard Smith, Jr. was the first of their fourteen children. He married Mary Polly Kelly and moved to the Carr’s Fork area of what was then Perry County. The couple had eight children. Tom was the next to the last. His brother, Jeremiah, had died at only a year and a half. The patriarch of the family, Richard Smith, Jr., known as “Dick” to his family and friends, was killed at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, less than three years after Tom’s birth. Tom’s mother, Mary Polly, had not been the same since receiving the news that her husband, a Union soldier, had been killed accidentally by his comrades in a “friendly fire” accident. Life had been hard as Mary Polly had no choice but to raise seven children by herself.
Hazard stretched up and down the North Fork of the Kentucky River. It was an isolated community. The natural barriers of the rugged Cumberland Mountains made traveling by wagon, mule, or horseback difficult. The railroad had not yet come to the craggy hill country. A decision had been made to extend the railroad to Jackson in Breathitt County, some thirty miles away, but that would be the end of the line.
Not many people traveled long distances in the Cumberland Mountains in the later part of the nineteenth century. However, those who did had no trouble finding accommodations. Hospitality was one of the virtues that mountain people both practiced and relied on. No matter how rich or poor a family was, it was a point of honor to offer shelter, food, and drink to any stranger that appeared at their door. This was a habit carried out by nearly all mountaineers. The practice is believed to have originated in the Scottish Highlands, where it is still in place today. Many of the mountain folk in Appalachia were descendents of the Scottish immigrants. When a friend or a stranger appeared at a cabin door, he could expect to receive the best the family could afford. A failure to accept a family’s offer of hospitality was considered an insult.
Early Religion in Eastern Kentucky
During the lifetime of Bad Tom Smith, only a few scattered churches served all of the southeastern Appalachian area. Most of them were originally nondenominational, with few members. Religion did not loom large in the lives of most mountaineers, but they were willing to hear the sermons of any preacher who passed through, no matter what his doctrine. Most preachers were uneducated, barely literate, narrow-minded, and dogmatic. Many used rhythmically chanted preaching and urged congregational shouting. Some practiced foot washing and a few promoted snake handling. Most insisted on natural water—creek or river—baptism. Occasionally an educated preacher would hold a revival and attract large crowds. One of the first educated preachers to come into the eastern Kentucky mountains was Reverend George Owen Barnes. The Presbyterian Church had defrocked Reverend Barnes in 1866 for failure to wholeheartedly subscribe to the Westminster Confession. He was later accused of universalism. He became a self-supporting missionary to the mountain people of Kentucky. Not doctrinally rigid, the Reverend always gave his converts the choice of baptism by immersion or sprinkling. Barnes began his mountain ministry at Jackson, in Breathitt County, on November 12, 1879, pledging to preach “the true gospel.” Jackson then consisted of a courthouse, twenty houses, and a mill. Barnes held a revival in the courthouse, during which he converted the county officials and the jail inmates. The incarcerated converts were baptized by immersion, then came out of the water to shake hands with the converted judge who had sentenced them. Deputy Sheriff Shade Combs brought a jail inmate charged with murder to the revival wearing handcuffs. The handcuffs were removed, and the jailer and the prisoner confessed their sins together. In all, there were 365 Jackson area residents converted. Reverend Barnes found Hyden, the county seat of Leslie County, the most unsympathetic mountain town in which he’d ever held a revival. Drunks brandished pistols, shooting right and left. Men walked restlessly in and out, constantly interrupting the services. One man walked up to the