An Interview Dr. Victor Woolford Corbin

 

 

  


The Hotel Berlin - Butler, Kentucky

An Interview with Dr. Victor Woolford Corbin

Taken from the Pendleton County Historical & Genealogical Society's Newsletters for March & June 1996.
Transcribed for the Newsletter by Millie Bowen Belew.
Transcribed here with the Society's permission, thanks so much Society!
If you have an interest in the History of Pendleton County, please consider joining this wonderful Society!

 

INTRODUCTION:
Copied from a recorded conversation with Dr. Corbin by Mr. Lester Robinson, of Plymouth, Michigan in 1983.

This is a true copy of a portion of our conversation with Pendleton County and Northern Kentucky's most loved and respected citizen, 91 year old Dr. Victor W. Corbin.  Dr. Corbin was kind enough to spend over 6 hours of his time with us, sharing memories of a lifetime, memories of living in the land and with the people he loved, the people of Butler and Northern Kentucky.  Dr. Corbin's Aunt Adeline Porter was married to Aaron Hensley, son of Benjamin S. and Anne Mullins Hensley of Grassy Creek.  This conversation was recorded November 28, 1983.

"This town used to be a booming town.  I remember when there were seven tobacco warehouses here.  One was a storage house.  There were two big lumber mills and a saddle stirrup shop where stirrups were made for saddles.  Most of these were shipped to Cuba and a lot of other small industries.  The saddle stirrups were used on sugar plantations in Cuba".

Q.  Does Butler have a bank?
A.  Oh yes, we have an awful good bank, a very good bank, solid as can be.  We have one of the best rest homes if want to go or need to go there.  The best that there is in the country.  It is highly rated, has nurses and everything that the law requires.

Q.  Where in Butler was the saw mill located?
A.  Upriver, on the west side and just south of the bridge.  (river flows north, upriver is south)  In that area was the saw mills, lumber yards, sheds and all.  They sawed this lumber and then it was put in drying sheds and kept there a year before it was planed.  This was to season it.  Now they season lumber by heat.  Now, here is a view of this mill, I am talking about looking toward the river.  They would go up river and cut the rafts and float the rafts down river and the pier caught them.  From the pier a little railroad or conveyer ran up to the mill.  A man stood at the pier and maneuvered the logs of the train or conveyor.  He would give a signal and up that log would go into the mill.  Now here is the planeing mill where they planed the lumber.  Logs were floated down from the mountains south of here in the form of rafts.  They put tie poles across the rafts and pinned them down and then fastened the rafts together.  It took two men on the front and one man on the back.

Q.  What year did the mills stop operating?
A.  I don't know.  I have asked but can't find out.  I talked to one old man and he said they came from Boston down here.  Boston is just south of Butler.  The mill people of Boston, after they got the best of the timber, why they just abandoned that area for better and bigger timber.  Then this fellow Hagenmeyer, Chris Hagenmyer, he bought the machinery, brought it up to Butler and started this mill.  When he left here he was a millionaire.  That was years ago, of course.  Money then had less value than today's standards.  He would probably be worth 10 million today.

Q.  Who was Hagenmyer and where did he live?
A.  His house is torn down now.  He was from Cincinnati.  He and his father-in-law migrated from Cincinnati bought this stuff and started it all.

Q.  Do you remember Hibbie Maggard?
A.  I know Hibbie Youngman.  She and her sister were here just the other day.  I knew them when they were about that high.  Haven't seen them since.  Now they have gray hair.  That's been years ago.  They wanted to get a picture of where they lived.  They told me their uncle was Ben Hensley.  George Youngman, their dad, often helped me with odd jobs, like the sidewalk.  Of course I couldn't take care of everything, in the dentistry business, I had to attend to.  He would do anything I wanted done, like that sidewalk.  He did build the walk and different things.  Sam Cain (husband of Mary Hensley Cain) was their grandpa.  He lived down Grassy Creek.  I used to know them, used to go down there a lot to Aunt Adeline's and Uncle A.  I called Arron Hensley, Uncle A and that toll gate, as he laughs, and then I'd fist, swim and play ball and everything like that.  That was a great place.  Now Uncle A or Aaron had a nephew named after him.  (Aaron Cain)

Q.  Is Arron, the nephew still around?
A.  No, he is dead.  That's the trouble, all of these people are dead.  Sam Cain, now he had a son named, Omer Cain, there was Aaron Cain and there were sisters and I can't remember their names.  Now Omer was a big fellow, a great big man.  Now they had an older brother, but I forgot his name.

Q.  In the obituary I sent you, of Benjamin Hensley some of the things mentioned about Benjamin were that he was the secretary of the creamery here in Butler at the time he died.  He was president of the Butler Savings Bank and was at one time a State Senator in the KY Legislature.  What type of person was he?
A.  You are talking about Uncle A's brother, Ben Hensley.  Ben was quite a man around town.  He owned a big farm and he dealt in livestock, bought sheep and cattle and stuff like that and finally he got into politics and got up there to the State Capital in Frankfort you know.  His politics, I don't know in what capacity he served.  He was a pretty well to do man.  I mean wealthy with money.  He finally got into that stuff in Frankfort and of course from there on I wouldn't know.

Q.  What about your professional life?
A.  You see, I worked here 59 years in dentistry and I took care of an awful lot of people.  I had a technician toward the last ten years.  All I did was take out teeth and do the surgical work and trim the bone, sew it up and then I would turn it over to the technician, take an impression, turn it over to him and he finished the job, made dentures and all.  That was about the last nine years of my work.  For about another nine years I had to do all the surgical work in the county dentistry.  The man at Falmouth got old and they wasn't trained for it to start with and they had a time getting teeth out, trimming bone and so on and all that stuff.  They couldn't do it.  They were much younger than me and hadn't had that training.  They came to me, this was at Falmouth, if you will just take out the teeth and smooth the bone up, trim it up and send them to us, we will do the plate.  So that is what I did for about 9 years, nothing but that.  Encyst, bone cyst, you would run into them every once and a while.  After that is when I got the technician and he made the other stuff.  Of course I had patients everyplace, Newport, Covington and all like that.  Just dozens from Newport and Covington.  Now when I started it took me about 5 years to make enough money to feed my family.  I'll tell you why.  People coming to me had to come in horse and buggy.  There wasn't an automobile in the country and they had to come and that's pretty much of a drive.  Five or six miles and that was about the limit my patients could travel, but when the automobile came they could come from Newport or anywhere else.  That's what boomed my business up.

Q.  Have you lived in Butler all your life?
A.  Practically all my life.  In World War I, I was in the Army for a while down in Camp Sevier, S. Carolina.

Q.  When Uncle A. was alive did he and your Aunt Adeline live in DeMossville?
A.  Yes, they had a toll gate or toll road.  He had a mile of turnpike and the county kept after him and after him to sell it.  He was the last of the toll road owners to sell.  They kept after him and so he finally sold it, one mile of turnpike.

Q.  Dr. Corbin, there was a family legend among Uncle Aaron's nieces and nephews who lived in Illinois, that he not only owned toll roads, but also toll bridges.  You are probably the only person that I will ever talk to that know Uncle Aaron personally.  Do you know if he ever owned any toll bridges?
A.  None that I know of.  About the toll road, I have let that thing (toll gate) up and down many times.  I used to like to go down there you know.  I would play ball down there and fish and set out troll lines.  Swim in that creek and the river, oh that was a great place.  Then that little town of DeMossville had two or three tobacco warehouses. about three or four stores, all that stuff and the prices were so reasonable.  I thought that was the greatest place and marbles was cheaper there.  Of course we would make a big bull ring, put our marbles in, shoot and whatever they shot out was their marbles.

Q.  During the Civil War you mentioned that Uncle Aaron rode with Morgan's Raiders.  Did he ever talk about his Civil War experiences?
A.  The only thing that I remember him telling, he told about when they would stop, they burnt that black powder in the rifles then and they had to take their teeth and pull the cap off and put that in the rifle to fire the bullets and that black powder made them so dry.  He said that he recalled just laying down to a spring that he come up on and bullets flying all around.  He said he had rather have the water than not take the risk.  With bullets hitting all around him he had to get that water.  They all had this problem of dehydration caused by this black powder during the war.  That was a horrible thing, uncalled for.

ROBINSON:  Kentucky remained in the Union.  Though Kentuckians complained of being occupied and treated as if they were part of the Confederacy.
CORBIN:  Kentucky was sort of a middle ground, not a part of the ---.  It was a dividing line.  Now Northern Kentucky is the dividing line between the North and the South.  The people here you know were of divided loyalties.  This made a lot of hard feelings.  They took my grandpa, he was a fellow that said what he thought.  Then you couldn't do that.  They sent him up to an island in the Great Lakes and had him in prison, my grandpa.  It was an awful horrible thing.  I guess it couldn't be settled.  They tried it awful had, I think maybe if they had given Lincoln a little more time maybe it could have been, and then on top of that, he was killed.

ROBINSON:  My great grandmother was Ann Hensley.  She was the mother of Aaron and Benjamin Hensley.  Ann Hensley was the daughter of Dick or Richard Mullins.  She was the oldest child of Richard and Rebecca Mullins.

CORBIN:  Now there are a lot of Mullins' around here.  Jalie Billings, she was a Mullins.  Here is what she said.  "One of her ancestors came up here from Cincinnati or Covington, somewhere in there.  He came up on horse back hunting land."  In them day - he must have been in the Revolutionary War, because they would give or gave my great grandpa and all 1,000 acre tract of land.  Grandpa Corbin didn't get any land but Grandpa Barton did.  He came up here, Jalie told me, and when he got to that fertile valley at DeMossville (Grassy Creek) he said "I am not going an further."  The land was rich then.  He said "I am to stay right here."  He might have built that old red brick house.  I don't know.  It might have been him.

ROBINSON:  Yes, Jalie's father, Richard Mullins, did build the old red brick house.  At the time the house was built it had 20 rooms.  It was built in the late 1820's and early 1830's.  Part of it was torn down in the 1870's.  The remainder that you remember was razed in 1972 to provide a site for the new Grassy Creek Christian Church parsonage.  Richard's father was in the Revolutionary War, his name was Gabriel Mullins.

CORBIN:  I remember the house, the old brick one.  Oh yes, one more thing before I forget.  When Benjamin Hensley died he willed the hotel here in Butler - I will show you where it was - part of the hotel was dismantled from the original building - about three quarters of it.  There is a good portion of it still standing and in use today.  Benjamin Hensley willed that hotel to his brother Aaron.  Uncle A. didn't want to fool with it, didn't want to run it, he was getting old.  He sold it to my Daddy and he run it for 20 years and my Daddy made more money there than any place he ever worked.  The price wasn't high, but I forget what they charged - there was a lot of traveling then.  My Daddy paid a certain price for the hotel - a bit more than ordinary.  My Mother managed the kitchen when they started up the price of breakfast was a quarter.  What she served for breakfast, a little steak about that big, you know, coffee, hot biscuits and jelly and all that stuff.  We could buy our food supplies for much cheaper then.  I am trying to think how much we had to pay for those steaks.  It was awful cheap.  Uncle A. then moved from DeMossville to Butler, but he didn't live long after he got up here.  My Daddy was in that hotel business about 20 years.  My daughter went out to that old cemetery out here and collected this.  (Inscriptions from monuments)  My grandpa's names are on these tombstones.  These are from the Taylor and Barton Cemetery.  There are two Generals buried out there - Revolutionary War Generals and that would be Robert Taylor and William Barton.  William Barton was my grandpa.  My daughter has a book telling everything he did during the Revolutionary War.  Robert Taylor, the other general, was also my ancestor.  He got an 1,000 acre tract of land for his war services.  The country didn't have any money after the war, but the country did have plenty of land.  Robert Taylor died in 1851.

Q.  Is your Barton ancestor related to or descended from the same line as E. E. Barton the lawyer and historian?

A.  Yes, he is related, now that was Ed Barton.  His daddy and my grandpa were brothers.  Uncle Tom Barton was old pioneer school teacher.  Now Ed Barton died before he could get his genealogical collection published.  Of course his heirs turned all of his papers over to the Mormon Church and the church photographed the material and now all of this information is on micro-film.  (They were turned over to the University of Kentucky who micro-filmed them.  The Mormon Church has copies of the film.) mb

ROBINSON:  You are descended from some very remarkable people, Dr. Corbin.  These are men of achievement.  It is a pleasure to hear of it.  You say that you are also related to the Yeltons?

CORBIN:  Oh, there are an awful lot of Yeltons and Taylors.

ROBINSON:  Ed Barton wrote that he was of French Huguenot descent.

CORBIN:  Well, most of my people were from France.  My grandmother was a Beckett.  She had black hair and black eyes.  The Southern French are darker or olive skin people and the Northern French are fairer.  Well, my grandmother and her sister had raven black hair.  That is where her ancestors came from, Southern France.  All of those Frenchmen, purt near all them will have a big nose, you ever notice that, either a flat nose, kind of like mine or it could be a long slender nose.

Q.  Were the Hensley brothers tall or short?

A.  I think Ben was rather tall but he wasn't as heavy set as Uncle A. was.  A. Hensley was a heavy set, big man, had that white hair all back here.  I am sorry that I lost that picture of him, but I did.  I have looked and looked everywhere.

Q.  Now over to Grassy Creek.  Do you remember where Samuel Cain lived?

A.  Oh, I remember him well.  They owned a farm kind of over in that river valley.  In just what house, I couldn't tell you.  That is called Grassy Creek bottoms.

Q.  Do you remember the old Mill House?

A. No, I don't.  I remember one mill, but it was a windmill in the Grassy Creek bottoms, near DeMossville.

Q.  Why don't we go for a drive?

CORBIN:  (in the car)  Park right here, now there is Ben Hensley's house.  Isn't that house in good shape?  It has been well taken care of.  Now Sarah Hensley was Ben Hensley's wife.

ROBINSON:  Well I have reached another milestone in my family research.  I never once thought that I would ever see the house that Ben Hensley lived in.  Yes, the upkeep has certainly been well maintained.  Look at the unusual shape of those upstairs windows.  I noticed a house with windows like that on U.S. 27, just south of the Butler Road, yesterday.  So that is where my grandmother's brother lived.  I never thought being here was possible.  I never thought there was someone around who could tell me about Aaron and Benjamin like you have, Dr. Corbin.  To me they have always been legends, someone that lived a very long time ago.  Now it seems like they were alive during my lifetime.

CORBIN:  Now you will notice that the back of the Christian Church is directly in back of Ben's house.  Right in this same street is the old hotel. (now known as the drugstore) mb  A. Hensley owned it and we bought it from A. Hensley.  The front there with the main entrance is the original part of the old hotel.  The white frame addition was added long after A. Hensley died.  The original building extended way back here.  The old hotel was within 25 feet of that house over there.  There was an open space about 25 feet wide.  It extended from the north side of the hotel to the border of the lot that house sits on.  This 225 foot open space was the location of your uncle's livery stable.  This livery stable lot was about 100 feet deep and Ben Hensley had it all.

Q.  Do you remember where the old bank was located?

A.  Yes, up here and turn right.  Hold it right here.  Now there is the new bank (constructed in 1921).  The old bank stood there about where the driveway for the drive-in-window is now.  It is a good bank, a sound bank.  I want to show you another old building that is over a hundred years old.  We are passing the new post office there on our left.  Turn here, see that big building there?   The bricks for that building was burned on my land.  There was a little peninsula that stuck out into the Licking River that contained clay for making those bricks in that building.  Those bricks were fired over a hundred years ago.  My Mother clerked in that store for Bob Shaw before she was ever married.  I come up the other day and took a piece of metal and scratched on a brick as hard as I could.  You could see the old layers of paint.  The name of the fellow that owned the store was Bob Shaw and his home is right there beside the store.  It is now a funeral home.

ROBINSON:  The Licking River, it is certainly not a small stream.

CORBIN:  It's pretty good size, sometimes it can get awful high.  See that little thing, that little white building?  That's where I started practicing dentistry.

ROBINSON:  Your first dental office?

CORBIN:  Right there in that little white building.  I did have a picture of me standing by the door.  In those days a dentist had to wear a white coat, whether he was any account or not.  A white coat fixed him up good.

Q.  Does Butler have a dentist now?

A.  No.  Dental work is so high, I don't see how people can afford it.

CORBIN:  Now there is where I was born, right over there, the little cottage.  I can't remember those early years when we lived there.  I do remember us living on the east side of the river where we moved to care of my grandpa.

ROBINSON:  It's very neat, another one that's been well cared for.  I notice this about Butler.  First it is a very tidy little town, very neat, kept up well.  I haven't seen one neglected old building.  I would guess that almost 50% of these homes are almost 100 years old or near it.  A lot of the families here trace their family histories back to the late 1700's.  The are of Arkansas where I was born and spent 19 years of my young life is so young.  The area was settled in the late 1860's.  Plymouth, Michigan, where we live now, was settled in 1813.  It's rare though to run across anyone who is a descendant of those early Plymouth settlers.  Butler is different.  It's people very definitely have their roots here.  There is a love of the past and a love of the land that I don't find among the people of Plymouth.

CORBIN:  You speak of where you came from in Arkansas being settled in the 1860's.  Missouri was the same way.  I remember as a boy, so many people from here moving to Missouri because they could buy land as good as ours, cheaper.  Some of my Beckett ancestors, they moved to Missouri.

ROBINSON:  I see there is more to Butler as we drive by.

CORBIN:  That's a rental place there.  It used to be a school house, but now it is an apartment building.  That is where I went to school.  Now I was on the board when they built that building.  The old wooden building where I went to school, they tore it down and built this brick building.  Turn here and this is the Masonic Lodge, and here on the left is the Christian Church.  On our right is where Uncle A. lived, here in front of the church.  It seems it was one of those two little houses.  He bought this house but didn't live there long.  He died shortly after moving here.

Q.  Dr. Corbin, what is the farmer's cash crop in this area?

A.  Tobacco, and that holds true for all of Kentucky.  The biggest product of the ground is tobacco.  I mean money wise.  Corn maybe would rate next.

Q.  I know nothing about tobacco.  Although I have heard of Kentucky burley.  Is burley grown only in Kentucky?

A.  Yes.  They have burley in this section but when you get into the Carolinas that's a different kind of tobacco.  It's a different color of tobacco, the same in Virginia.  You know in early times - Indians had tobacco - it wasn't much account.  The good tobacco, good smoking tobacco is really a tropical plant that came from South America.  I grow tobacco, I have some acres growing now.

(as we approach the east end of the Butler Bridge)
CORBIN:  Right down there in that white house is where my grandpa lived.  I lived there until 1911 and then my Daddy bought the hotel from Uncle A.  (house right off the road and slightly below the level of the bridge)  That house is the only house I knew until we moved to Butler.  We lived at the hotel about 10 years and finally sold out.

 

 

Pendleton County Biographies Compiled by Mildred Bowen Belew

DR. VICTOR W. CORBIN

Dr. Victor W. Corbin was born 1 November 1892, Butler, Pendleton County, Kentucky and died 18 April 1985, at the Baptist Convalescent Home, Newport, Campbell County, Kentucky.  He was a son of William Norris and Laura Barton Corbin.  He married 29 December 1917, Izenra Thomason and she preceded him in death 2 May 1968.

He was a dentist, practicing at Butler for 56 years.  He was a member of the Butler Baptist Church where he taught Sunday School and served as deacon for many years.

Dr. Corbin served as a Lieutenant in the Army during World War II.  He was a member of the Bostwick Masonic Lodge # 508 of Butler where he served as past Master.  He was also past President of the Northern Kentucky Dental Association.

Dr. Corbin was one of Butler's oldest citizens, though he remained young in every respect.  He was active and able to get around until late in life and he enjoyed life to the fullest.  He was faithful to his church and a true Christian.  He was an outstanding dentist and high-class gentleman from the old school.  He was "Mr. Butler" himself and always knew all the old timers when they returned to Butler Homecoming.  He and his wife raised one son and three daughters, William E. of Butler, Mrs. Mary Bradford of Alameda, California, Mrs. Elizabeth Argabrite of Lexington, Kentucky and Mrs. Dorothy Barnes of Villa Hills, Kentucky.

 

 

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