Cherry Hill Disaster
Cherry Hill by JS Moore and Lou Ann (September 6th, 2024)
Interesting take here with lyrics attached below of the Cherry Hill Disaster by Ola Glover Everhart and Carroll Skeen
Photographer:
Date Taken:
Collection(s): Cherry Hill Disaster, Sheet Music,
A dear friend to me we will call Lou Ann shared with me the story of her grandmother Ola being a gifted artist and poet born at the turn of the century around 1903. She would have been thirty years old when she penned the poem Cherry Hill Disaster about a devastated miniscule community on the outskirts of Kingsport, sandwiched between west View and Lynn Garden. The tornado tore through the area just above where the Walmart Neighborhood Market is today and it killed eight people, one of them a descendant to David Crockett. It was March 14th of 1933.
Perhaps twenty miles from there but out past Fall Branch and closer to Ducktown where Washington and Green County Tennessee meet, My Mamaw Opal Lee Hays Moore was from a different Cherry Hill community whose namesake survives today and her family even attended the tiny church there called Cherry Hill. Her father Martin Hays and Dory Hays are both buried in the church cemetery there. She would have only been eight years old when this windstorm came.
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Ironically the songwriter and the music writer of this song Cherry Hill Disaster Ola Glover Everhart and Carroll Skeen are buried within the same proximity at Oak Hill Cemetery in Kingsport, Tennessee where my Mamaw Opal and Papaw Judd are buried side by side. Small world.
Photographer: unknown
Date Taken: March 1933
Collection(s): Crockett Family Cherry Hill Tornado Photographs. March 1933
Now Mamaw — like I said — would have been eight years old at this time and my Papaw Judd was barely a teenager. Papaw had left Hickory Tree near Bristol, Tennessee and set out on foot, got denied employment in Kingsport (The Model City) — somehow managing the settle close to Cherry Hill in a neighboring area called Chimney Top Loop at the foot of the great mountain. I imagine both of my grandparents experienced this extreme windstorm in very different ways as Mamaw Opal was the eldest child and had several siblings and her parents were pious and God-fearing mountain farmers whom owned lots of acreage, livestock, tobacco fields and the like, Judd was in a sense on his own but living with and working for the Taylor family. I wish I’d known of this event to have asked them more about it when they were here. I also need to check the writings of the author Adda C. Hall who wrote a book about this same timeframe called Wayside Gleanings.
A tornado did come through the other Cherry Hill Community just over a decade ago and did some destruction, including leveling the country store of Thelma Shanks or Shanks Grocery I’d spent many an afternoon with my brother and my cousins and often my Papaw Judd. We’d trade in dope bottles and buy bubble gum and candy. She made the best sandwiches.
Such a different time 90 years ago — notice the healthcare system wasn’t anything close to Ballad Health. It was mountain doctors whom paid house calls — next generation from Dr. William Fox of Green County, the Salvation Army and Red Cross and volunteers.
Suggested Listening: Thunder on the Mountain by Bob Dylan and Cherry Hill Disaster by Frank Staten and Amon Hayes
