An Interview with Dr. Victor Woolford Corbin Taken
from the Pendleton County Historical & Genealogical Society's
Newsletters for March & June 1996.
INTRODUCTION: 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? Q.
Where in Butler was the saw mill located? Q.
What year did the mills stop operating? Q.
Who was Hagenmyer and where did he live? Q.
Do you remember Hibbie Maggard? Q.
Is Arron, the nephew still around? 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? Q.
What about your professional life? Q.
Have you lived in Butler all your life? Q.
When Uncle A. was alive did he and your Aunt Adeline
live in DeMossville? 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? Q.
During the Civil War you mentioned that Uncle Aaron rode with Morgan's
Raiders. Did he ever talk about his Civil War experiences? ROBINSON:
Kentucky remained in the Union. Though
Kentuckians complained of being occupied and treated as if they were part
of the Confederacy. 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)
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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