This article, written by Todd Preston, President of the Magoffin County Historical Society, was taken from the December 1, 2011 issue of THE SALYERSVILLE INDEPENDENT newspaper.

          We have all had a bountiful Thanksgiving and hope you enjoyed family, friends and food as we did here in Magoffin County!  We have much to be thankful for; being healthy and happy means so much.

          We are especially thankful for all the people who value their Magoffin County heritage. A good many of you write or telephone us and some of you come in and we get to talk about your genealogy questions.  One visitor recently was Jack May, a great grandson of Frank May.  Lonnie Dunn, Jr. and I escorted him up the Beartree Fork of Rockhouse.  We visited the Frank May Cemetery first.  I was thinking I was the only one still living who would know where it was located as I had copied this small cemetery in 1978 and found it in poor condition.  The information I copied back then is printed in our Cemetery Book Three on page 45. 

          We found an overgrown trail leading to the cemetery and made our way through the brambles to the Frank May house seat and went on up a steep bank to where I thought I could locate the cemetery again because I had left a metal stake there all those years ago.  I had a metal flower hanger to use to mark the gravesites but we had trouble finding the cemetery.  I was about to give up but I gave it one last look by going a little further up the hill.  There I found the metal marker I had placed all those years ago which turned out to be a black cane that was twisted on top to hold a flower arrangement.

          What a relief it is to me that now there are other people than myself who know the location of this cemetery.  We are now planning to clean it up and set a monument on the site.  This was one cemetery I was concerned would become lost forever.

          We also went on up to the large old Blanton Cemetery and took pictures there as well.  We visited the John Pace Cemetery that has a large house built around their graves but a forest fire has destroyed the roof of the building.

          Now, Beartree Road is in a creek bed and full of mud holes.  John Pace of Ohio has a house located near the Frank May Cemetery.  The Matthew Pace Cemetery is located further downstream and still farther down is the John Pace Cemetery with the rock building and the fire-destroyed roof.

          Another cemetery we visited this day was the John Blanton Cemetery where John P. Pace and his wife Sarah Ely are buried.

          This was another cemetery I copied in 1978 and at that time I surmised there were about forty unmarked graves with twelve marked graves.  Someone has given this old cemetery a thorough cleaning recently and it was good to see that it is being taken care of. We would like to know whom the “Good Samaritan” was that did such a good job.

          There is said to be some burials at the Buzzard Rocks in the head of Beartree. Tradition says there are Indian graves that are mounded up but I have never been there.  My buddy Bill Lemaster and others have told me of them.  Perhaps sometime some of my four-wheeling buddies will haul me back there and we can take a look- hint, hint…

          Another welcome visitor was Sam Long of West Liberty who volunteers at their historical society. Randall Risner was here and we joined in a search for the wife of Irvin Boone Prater. He was born in 1828 Floyd Co. KY and died in 1882. He married in Morgan County on 18 May 1847 to Mary Ann Brown. She was born in 1824 Perry Co. KY, a daughter of John Quincy Brown b. 1793 NC and Elizabeth Caudill.

          The children of Irvin and Mary Ann were Dial Prater b. 1849, Hamilton Prater b. 1851, Mary Prater died of whooping cough in 1853, Leander Prater b. 1855, Mary F. Prater b. 1856, Nancy Prater b. 1858, Jincy Prater b. 1861, Jasper Prater b. 1866 and Georgeann Prater b. 1867. 

          Irvin Prater is said to have owned the land where the present Magoffin County High School is located.  The area locally called the “Irvin Rocks” was a noted swimming hole of yesteryear.  This family is interred in the Bluegrass Cemetery near where they lived.

          We have had a good deal of rain lately and I have seen a lot of earthworms as well as “night crawlers” that were introduced to our area by fisherman in the late forties such as Johnnie Hall, Homer Porter, Barton Webb and others.  Dixie became an area well-known for seeing men out late at night with flashlights looking for night crawlers for the next day’s fishing trip.  One group of fishermen who stayed around home and fished in Ole Licking had another kind of bait, the mud eel, which they dug out of the swamps or from the banks of the river itself. 

          Another type of fishing, especially when the sucker fish came up the Licking was called “gigging”.  These fishermen would build a kind of dam out of rocks in the shape of an inverted –V- thus all the fish had to pass through one small area and were more easily caught.

          You may wonder why I got on this subject – it came to my mind when I read about Rev. L. F. Caudill’s early fishing tactics on Paint Creek. He used pine tree knots to burn to light his way. 

          Our regular historical society meeting in November was an interesting one as A. B. Conley, Dorothy S. Wireman, Connie A. Wireman, Jim Joseph, Kay Bentley and Dallas Bentley discussed the year to date and made written lists of the jobs still needing to be finished. It is a substantial list and will require some “midnight oil” if we are to get it all finished in the time frame they suggested!  We want to commend Jim Joseph for his continued interest and work in getting the cemetery in shape where his ancestor Johnson Joseph is buried.  He has already reset the fallen markers for Johnson and his brother Charles Joseph with the help of his son Travis Joseph.  This is an old area cemetery and much more research and work is needed. We are still searching for the cause of death in 1890 of the two brothers who died only days apart.