Aquilla by the Creek Charles Mattox, Staff Writer, Flemingsburg Gazette, Flemingsburg, KY, February 24, 2005 Every month is black history month for me. Black history, African-American history, Anglo-American History, Native American history, Scotch-Irish history. Kentucky History. Fleming County History. It's all good. It's all real good. I recently began doing some research into the history of Tilton. That's where I came from, you know. Well, one of the places anyway. I live in Bluebank; have for the last 20 years. I also come from Martha Mills. My mother still lives there and I didn't get down to see her much last week for fear of passing on my terrible head cold to her. Most Fleming Countians have been slowed down with some form of illness this month. Such was also the case in the summer of 1833 in our fair county. A very, very bad year for Fleming County. One of unimaginable sorrow it was the year of the dreaded Cholera epidemic. The cholera epidemic would have been a lot worse had it not been for the actions of a few good men. A few good black men. There is a small, enclosed, rectangular stone-masonry wall that encircles a small family cemetery which sits beside the right-hand side of the road as you are traveling south through the center of Fleming County on Highway 11. The small cemetery sits alongside Fleming Creek, before you turn off on the Martha Mills Road. There's a big culvert that runs beneath the road about 50 yards south of that small cemetery. My father used to have one of his favorite mink trapping spots there, about ten feet below Highway 11. Dad and I spent a lot of time in that culvert in the winters of my youth. I had asked dad early on about that small cemetery along the road and all he had said was _stay away from it._ So that was the end of that line of questioning. Once, though, a couple of winter's later, when we were checking the culvert as part of an early morning routine, we started talking about different things there inside the concrete culvert, in no hurry to venture into the freezing wind again. Dad opened up and started telling me some of his great Arthur Pearl "Hog" Hart stories. "Hog" was what dad called a real "wheel prizer and gear grinder." I never knew exactly what that expression meant, but the few men dad hung that label on seemed to me to be a lively bunch who knew how to have a good laugh and enjoy life. According to dad, Hog would occasionally drive off and leave him on a Saturday night back in the late 1930's and early 1940's and he'd have to find his own way back home. One hot summer night he had to walk all the way home to Tilton from Flemingsburg. "I seen ghosts that night, Bub, right up there, by that little rock cemetery, he told me in the confines of that cold culvert 30 years ago." He changed the subject before I could get a lot of specifics out of him about it. I never forgot about it, though, and I spent a little time there lately and began researching. I learned a thing or two about the small cemetery, and I know how Tilton got its name. The two are connected. Connected to that horrible summer of 1833 when the cholera struck the county like a hammer striking a window pane. M.D. Saunders was in Flemingsburg June 3, 1833, for June "court days" when he helped a wagoneer of James Eckles' who'd collapsed in the street. Thus was the beginning of the 1833 cholera epidemic. The Saunders family lived in a stone house on Fleming Creek near Craintown. Within a few days Mr. Saunders, his wife, and his 13 children were all dead. One of the Saunders' daughters had sought aid in Elizaville. She died there, and the epidemic spread. Dr. Edward Dorsey of Elizaville died. Dr. Dorsey Tilton and a certain Mr. Gallagher tried to make it from Elizaville to the Upper Blue Licks to John Finley's house. Tilton had married Finley's daughter. They became ill and returned to Elizaville where both Gallagher and the doctor died. Robert Harper's slave, Bese Chambers, and a freed black man named Fredrick Field became local heroes tending the sick of the Elizaville neighborhoods and burying all the dead. The entire immediate community of Elizaville died, except Chambers, Field and the two-year-old son of Dr. Tilton's. Chambers took the Tilton boy in his arms and carried him to another son-in-law of Finley's, James Sousley. That journey to the Sousley house was commemorated in honor of the surviving child. Tilton was thus named. That same week, just over the ridge from Tilton, Aquilla Jones lost his brothers James, Isaac, and Benjamin to the cholera. He also lost his mother, Sarah Hawkins Jones. He also lost his 11-year-old son, Thomas. Then his 29-year-old son, Amos. Then two-year-old Mary, then James, aged nine, and William, aged four. All the neighbors were dying. Aquilla took some lumber and fashioned a rough wooden sled and then, one at a time, he dragged the lifeless bodies of his family down to a nice little scenic spot by Fleming Creek where they frequently picnicked. That spot is now their eternal resting place. I stopped there the other day, again, looking at the progress of the construction. I picked up some litter around that little scenic spot of Aquilla's by the creek. I Restacked a loosened stone from the small enclosure, lingered a while and thought about trapping mink with my father only a few steps away back in my good-old-days. I don't claim to know much about such things, but the other day, while I was there, I closed my eyes and envisioned an ashen faced man surrounded by his dead family members laying there in a row by the creek bank. The man, Aquilla, didn't dig the graves, though, but simply went back and forth from one of the bodies to the others, straightening their clothes, wiping their faces, talking softly and earnestly to them. "We'll finish that up for you, suh," a strong voice said and the solid grip a strong black man took a shovel and another strong black hand took the trembling hand of Aquilla Jones and led him over beneath a shade tree there by the creek bank just out of the way, so they could begin the sorrowful task of laying to rest another good Fleming County family just like they'd done so many times in the days before. I've no documentation that Bese Chambers or Fredrick Fields dug those graves and helped stack those stones around them there by Fleming Creek. But I do know they dug all those graves in Elizaville and saved countless other Fleming Countians besides the Tilton boy. I know it was through their actions of saving a small boy that the small community of Tilton received it's name. There are many things about them I do not know, nor will I ever know. But I do know a few things. I know what my father said he saw that summer night under the moonlight 75-odd years ago as he walked south from Flemingsburg towards his Tilton home. I try to honor his memory and theirs in the confines of this column as I relate stories about Fleming County. A place rich with black history. A place rich with white history. A place rich with Native American history. The place my father came from. The place that I come from.