It should come as no surprise that the bloodiest war on U.S. soil also sparked one of the nation’s most famous family feuds.
Many historians trace the roots of the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys to 1865. Returning home from the Civil War, Union soldier Asa Harmon McCoy was killed by a band of Southern sympathizers, whose ranks were filled with Hatfields.
But after years of fighting that led to 13 deaths, a pall cast over the Tug Valley between West Virginia and Kentucky, and the “mountain folk” just wanted to put the feud behind them.
Nearly 150 years later, the area’s “mountain folk” want to embrace this dark past in an effort to bring more tourism dollars to the region. Visitors from around the globe flock to this area every year, particularly during the annual Hillbilly Days Festival and the Hatfield-McCoy Reunion Festival.
Tourism officials in both West Virginia and Kentucky have developed a Hatfield and McCoy driving tour to promote significant feud sites along the border — the tours feature maps that guide visitors to historical markers and buildings, and the Pikeville-Pike County Tourism agency added an audio CD featuring actors retelling the feud story.
The tours provide different perspectives of the sites, but many stops overlap, including patriarch Randolph McCoy’s Kentucky home (where three McCoys were gunned down in a pawpaw patch) and the place where star-crossed lovers Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield met.
With rural roads winding through much untouched and undeveloped landscape, it’s easy for visitors to be transported back to a time when feuding was a way of life in these hollers of West Virginia and Kentucky.