Shannon Kyle Higginbotham

(The following item was provided by Melba Lowe, a genealogist in Blount County, Alabama who often works with the museum in Oneonta.)

A short autobiography of James Monroe Fendley scribbled off for the most part on the solitary banks of Bloulder Creek, Colorado, in August, 1929, and copied in August 1930 by Jessie Nave Fendley. (I only have 4 typed pages, but the last page ends in the middle of a sentence, so the original is longer.)

"These events occurred before I was 11 years old. We moved from Village Springs in 1871. The reason we wanted to get away was on account of a neighborhood feud that had existed for years between the Poseys and the Higginbothams. There were constant quarrels and threats and fights, and now and then a killing. We tried to get along peaceably with both sides, but one day at school Bud had a fight with one of the Higginbotham boys. That evening about dusk from a clump of trees behind our house a shot rang out, then in a minute another, and at regular intervals another, and another, until it seems to me a hundred shots had been fired. That was all. It was only a bluff, of course, but my mother was so terrorized that the next morning Bud was packed off to Uncle Bill Edwards, who was teaching school over on the mountain. I think probably it was there where he joined the Ku Klux, as my Uncle was a Cyclops or some such officer in the order. Later, on one of the raids, Bud rode his little mule, covered with a bed sheet, through Shan Higginbotham's big house, to the consernation of the entire Klan. Higginbotham was a northern sympathizer, and threatened to shoot the first Ku Klux that showed himself about the place."
(note by compiler - James Fendley was born May 1860, so these events probably happened between 1865-1871.)