.png)
By Grant Avis
There is no remembrance of the men of old; nor of those to come will there be any remembrance among those who come after them.
Ecclesiastes 1:11
I remember the Bamberry Woods well, though I never stepped foot in them. Even now,
so many years after their destruction, in closing my eyes, I can see the massive white oak trees,
too wide for one man, or two or three, to wrap their arms around. Further away stand the ash and
the sassafras, detached, their size not allowing neighbors. It was like a cathedral there, Papaw
told me. The tulip poplars, straight and upright, were the columns that formed the aisles, leading
you in one direction. Their brothers, the hickory, the maples, and the beech formed the
congregation. There was no altar, for every inch of those woods was the pinnacle of worship.
Everything in that place reached toward, looked up to, and thought of heaven.
There was no need for me to see the Bamberry Woods to remember them. I remember a
man who remembered them, which is almost the best way to remember, losing only to
remembering a man who remembered a man who remembered a man who remembered a man.
This second form of memory was also true for me and those woods, though, for that is the
connection between myself and the first man to have ever owned those woods. James Higdon,
my 5th great-grandfather, was the first man to ever own any of the vast wilderness that stretched
south from the sulfur springs along Bear Creek to the Nolin River, and maybe the first white man
to ever see it.
I dreamed about that as a kid. I suppose I still do now, when I stifle my mind less and
return to those days of unbridled curiosity, imagine the world around me as the first Europeans in
this country would have seen it, or as the last Native Americans would have. I pretend to be
Daniel Boone now less than I did as a child, but the curiosity is still present. Somebody at
Lincoln Trail Elementary or on KET told me that Kentucky was once a bountiful wilderness,
with gigantic herds of buffalo and flocks of birds that would blot out the sky for hours, and my
excited curiosity about a lost wild country has not left me. Of course, restless men came to this
country, shot those buffalo, logged the forests, and eventually decapitated the mountains their
ancestors crossed. Such is progress, but I still want to see through Daniel Boone’s eyes.
When Papaw was young, he would head out in the morning from the little town of
Clarkson into the vast backcountry of Grayson County. His youth consisted of unaccompanied
days of roaming through Clifty Holler and the Mulberry Flats, catching crawdads, picking up
snakes, and marveling at the natural world that seemed infinite to a young boy whose entire
world was within a day’s bicycle ride of his home. In those days, there were more woods to
squirrel hunt in, and more ponds to frog gig in, as farmers still respected the old traditions of the
land and did not live as though their own grandfather had been a stranger. Also in those days, the
Bamberry Woods still stood in all their grandeur. Papaw would cut across fields and over creeks
south out of Grayson Springs into the sacred woods. He did not know then that his love for those
woods would grow as he aged, with his love for the young woman whose family had owned that
ground for a century and a half enlarging his emotion.
My grandparents had been married for two years when my grandma turned 21, allowing
her own grandmother’s estate to be settled. The Bamberry Woods, which had been in limbo for
15 years now, were the site of a bidding war among members of the White family. My grandma’s aunt, Clara, won. Though she had moved to Louisville decades prior to her purchase
of the woods, she retained the traditional beliefs about our relationship to the land. She had
bought the land because she did not trust her nephews, or especially my married into the family
grandpa, to preserve the woods as it had been for centuries.
Clara was one of the last to remember her two uncles, Dent and Bam Higdon, who owned
the woods and never used the woods, setting them aside in case of dire need. Dent and Bam were
born in Grayson County two decades before the Civil War. Bam was short for Bamberry - he
was the wood’s namesake - with his name coming from Father Bamberry, one of the circuit-
riding French missionary priests assigned to the frontier parish of St. Augustine. Father
Bamberry, having been forced out of an aristocratic life in France during its infamous revolution,
was horrified by the rough life of the frontier. His namesake was likewise horrified by the
changes he saw in his life. Serving in the Confederate Army, Bam Higdon saw the fire and might
of the industrial war machines vanquish men into bloody fragments of a body. After
Appomattox, he wanted nothing more to do with that world. Together the brothers, Dent and
Bam, lived mostly in isolation for the rest of their long lives, living long enough to read about the
destruction of World War I and dying just before its sequel. Unlike Father Bamberry, they loved
the frontier life they were born into and refused to leave it even as their neighbors bought
tractors, cars, and even airplane tickets. Dent and Bam did not use anything they did need, and
they discovered they did not need much. They cooked over a stone hearth open fire, hunted with
a flintlock muzzleloader musket, and lived in the same log cabin all their life. And they still
somehow died happy.
Their pioneer philosophy lived deeply in Clara as well. So when she bought her uncle’s
woods, she also left the woods as a “nest egg” as Wendell Berry’s Athey Keith would have called it. The woods took care of themselves for another half century, remaining in the same state
they had been in for centuries. When Aunt Clara died, she also followed in Dent and Bam’s
footsteps by dying unmarried; her entire estate, including the woods, was left to the Catholic
Church. For the first time since the 18th century, the woods passed out of the ownership of the
Higdon/White family into the hands of the Passionist Nuns. The dear sisters evidently did not
remember their pioneer uncles like Aunt Clara did. I don’t know how the decision was made, so
I can’t say much. I don’t know if any of them ever even saw the place. But I know that the
logging trucks soon had turned left onto 1214 at Grayson Springs and gutted the place. One of
the last old-growth forests in Kentucky was destroyed. The logs were worth enough, and Clara’s
90 years of frugality had left enough, that the nuns built a brand new convent an hour's drive
away from Grayson Springs and the Bamberry Woods.
I’ll ask Papaw to tell me about the Bamberry Woods every now and then. Papaw doesn’t
remember his pioneer ancestors, but he remembers Clara, and Clara remembers Dent and Bam.
Remembering them, knowing them, and loving them, Papaw’s philosophy is as close to pioneer
as I’ve ever seen in the modern world. He still mourns the Bamberry Woods, because he mourns
everything that has been thrown away, and because he mourns the destruction of the last thing
humans hadn’t touched. So when I ask him about the woods, he tells me about those gigantic
trees, and all the wonder they invoked in him, and sighing, he ends by telling me, “They cut
down a cathedral to build a convent.”
Grant Avis is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2026. He is studying history and political science at the University of Louisville.