William Burton Hensley, I

• Census: 1850 - Harlan Co., KY, #161-161
• Census: 1860 - Harlan Co., HH 403
• Census: 1900 - Upper Martin Fork, Dist 5; Census: 71 A-enum. 52, page 10
  • Reference: MyHeritage Family Trees - SmartCopy: Oct 24 2017, 18:02:29 UTC
• Reference: MyHeritage Family Trees - SmartCopy: Oct 25 2017, 16:27:41 UTC
• Reference: MyHeritage Family Trees - SmartCopy: Oct 25 2017, 18:03:41 UTC

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Hensley settlement brush mountain, bell county, Kentucky, USA

In 1903, Burton Hensley Sr. purchased the entire acreage and divided it into sixteen individual properties for his extended family. Hog farmer Sherman Hensley and his wife Nicey Ann, Barton Sr.'s daughter, moved into an existing lob cabin on her allotted twenty-one acres. The couple purchased an additional thirty-three acres. The following year, Nicey's niece Nancy and her husband Willy Gibbons also moved to the self-sustaining settlement. Most of the inhabitants of the settlement were named either Hensley or Gibbons, belonging to one of those families.[3] The settlement never had electricity, indoor plumbing, modern roads or other conveniences.[4] Everything was grown, raised and hand-made in the settlement. People traveled by foot or by riding a horse.[5] A spring house was used for food storage.[2]

In 1908, Bell County provided a teacher for the newly erected one-room school house. Originally the school house was little more than a lean-to, erected so the Bell County Superintendent of Schools would agree to send a teacher for the settlement children. The school taught students up through the 8th grade. By the time the school closed in 1947, four different structures had served as the Brush Mountain school. The final structure was a log cabin that was heated by a wood and coal stove made of cast iron and located in the middle of the room. The school had no indoor plumbing or electricity. The student desks were made of wood and cast iron.[6]

The population peaked at about 100 in 1925. During World War II residents moved away to either join the military or to work in the coal mines. Nicey Ann Hensley died in 1937.[7] The population dwindled until 1949, when Sherman Hensley was the only resident. When Hensley finally abandoned the property in 1951, the settlement fell into disrepair.[8] Hensley died in 1979 and is buried beside Nicey Ann at the settlement cemetery, among thirty-six other graves. The settlement was dedicated as part of the Cumberland Gap National Historical Park on July 4, 1959. The National Park Service and the Job Corps began making improvements in 1965,[11] restoring some forty-five settlement structures and the agricultural environment to the prime time of the community.[3]

The National Park Service runs the Appalachian[4] Hensley Settlement as a living history museum.[2][12] It conducts tours of the forty-five settlement structures and agricultural resources May through October.