It was almost a hundred years ago during the prohibition when my great great grandparents on my fathers side, William Henry and Jenny Hicks, moved from Tennessee to a small valley on the North East corner of New Philadelphia in a location that used to be the county dump. There was a very small log cabin that they were able to get with what little money they had...
You may ask why did they travel such a long ways in the 1920's to get to a place like New Phila though?
Well, Henry had been a revenuer in Tennessee, and they would hold court in the one room, dirt floor log cabin that they called home. They was one particular evening when they were holding court for some moonshiners, and a knife fight broke out. "One of the men had his throat slashed, and my grandpa (Frank Hicks) at three years old could always remember that man laying on the floor and the blood pouring out of his throat on to the dirt... That was when Jenny told Henry 'Enough is enough- we are taking the family to Ohio.' where her parents lived." said my dad as he recalled the story his grandfather told him.
Jenny's parents home is till sitting there, and is lived in by Ward Hicks and his wife Betty, the son and daughter in law of my great grandfather Frank Hicks.
There home was always filled with children. Jenny and Henry had thirteen of them. They were only blessed enough to raise nine due to the other four passing during childbirth or within the first year, and there was twenty-five years difference between the youngest and oldest. "Grandpa always said up until he was about ten years old he thought a woman just naturally had a baby grow out of her hip, because he could never remember a time when he didn't see a baby on his mom's hip." said my dad. They had six boys and three girls in the three bedroom home they lived in.
A boys room. A girls room. And of course, their room.
A lot of people. Not a lot of room.
My great grandfather, Frank, being the oldest always worked, and in the ninth grade he quit school. The family was in real trouble during the long and gruesome days of the Great Depression. Well, Frank knew the county operated a coal mine on the other side of the hillside the lived on. He figured that if he dug long enough and deep enough he may hit coal on there side as well. He went to the dump, and crafted his own flat wheel barrow own out of a wheel rim, a railroad spike, and some fat 2x4's.
Frank dug.
And he dug.
And he dug some more.
A year went by and he finally hit coal. "It's unimaginable by todays standards to think as a fourteen year old boy he did all that... Grandpa was a tall man- 6ft 2in. Jet black hair- he was a real handsome man. Most of that mine was never more than 4-5ft tall, and he used to joke, 'That one seem of coal I once dug was so skinny I used to have to drill a whole in my lunch box just to get my sandwich out.' Meaning it was so short in there he couldn't even open his lunch box." my dad said with a big smile.
Soon after Frank was out of high school the bank was going to foreclose on the farm. He was back in the mine one day and heard machinery and people talking through one of the walls. They then went to the county engineers, and told them they thought the county had cut into their property to get coal. The engineers didn't believe them and told them to go on their way.
So with a compass and a carbide light, these two "uneducated coal miners" went into the county mine after it closed for the night. Grandpa Courtman, Jenny's dad, would send Frank as far as he could until the carbide light would disappear. They then would take a compass reading. They would continue this over and over again until they finally had a map drawn out. With the map they drew out they believed they had proven the county was digging and stealing coal off their property.
They brought there map to the county again. This time with enough proof, the county sent out their high end tech at the time with their own crew of surveyors to draw out their own map... Grandpa Courtman and Frank, being only five feet off, were right. The county then gave them $1,200 then for the coal they had taken. They owed $1,000 on the farm, and were then able to pay it off before the bank was planning to kick them out. "Grandpa always talked about the day they went to pay off the farm. They stopped at a general store on the way home. Jenny got brand-new fabric to make all the girls new dress and the boys new britches, and Henry got a sack of candy for each of the kids... It was highlight for him." My dad said. For years they plowed the farm with a blind mule, and so they also got hillside plow... They felt they hit the big time with the coal money.
Frank operated that coal mine for several years. He didn't have my grandfather, Dennis Hicks, until he was twenty-five years old, and my grandfather even drove a coal truck for him while he was in high school. "Dad always said that if his dad taught him nothing else, he taught him how much a man could get done in one day. He said that Frank Hicks was the hardest working man... The hardest working man he had ever seen." recalled my dad with tears in his eyes. He mined that coal for a long time, it was back breaking work, and he never denied a bag of coal to a man that needed it. Up till the day he died he still knew the name of every person that owed him a nickel for a fifty pound bag of coal.
After the coal mining business he started the roofing company, Hicks Industrial Roofing, that is here in New Philadelphia to this day. It has been passed down three generations now. The fourth is in training, and fifth has been born and says he wants to be a "Hicks Roofer."
That valley where Jenny and Henry settled almost a hundred years ago not only was a humble beginning, but the beginning of a history our family treasures. That valley is called Hicks Hollar/ Hicks Avenue now. Six of the homes in this treasured valley all belong to descendants of Jenny and Henry including my family and I. Though this little valley is treasured by us Hicks', many of us Hicks' have ventured out like Jenny and Henry did. Some have gone to London, England and the Philippine's to live and some have made it big in business. We each carry the inspiration our ancestors gave us, and proudly wear our last name as we come from the blessed Hicks family.
Interview with my dad, Mike Hicks.
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