The Old Men's Fight

I told you back at the church that the war came down hard on this Union cove. Let me give you the man whose name is written biggest across it — because you can see his monument from here. Look up at the high bald on the mountain: that's Gregory Bald, and it's named for Russell Gregory.

Russell Gregory was a cove leader, born back in 1795, and a cattleman. Every summer he drove his herd up onto that bald to graze the high grass, and he built himself a round stone house right up near the summit to live in while he minded them. A stone house on top of a mountain — picture that. Like most everybody down here, Gregory was a Union man in a Confederate state, and the war split his own family right down the middle: he had four sons soldiering, one for the Union who died of the measles in '62, and two who wore Confederate gray. His own boys, on opposite sides. That was this cove's war.

Now, by 1864 the young men were gone off fighting, and rogue bands of Confederate raiders had taken to coming down into the cove to steal cattle and food from the folks left behind — mostly women, children, and old men. And Russell Gregory, an old man himself by then, had had enough. He organized the graybeards of the cove — the elderly men — into a little militia, and when a band of marauders came through, these old men ambushed them near where Forge Creek meets Abrams Creek and ran them clean out of the valley.

But here's the hard end of it. Two weeks later, the raiders slipped back in. They camped near Gregory's place and slaughtered one of his calves for their supper. Russell walked up and demanded they pay for it — and one of them shot him. He died that evening. November of 1864. An old man, killed on his own land, over a stolen calf, in a war his own sons were fighting on both sides of.

They buried him down in the cove, and they left his name up on the mountain, where his cattle grazed and his stone house stood. Gregory Bald. Now you know the man it honors — and what it cost to earn the honor.