And that jail was standing serviceable and strong until a few years ago
when the prosperity of Fentress county called for an edifice of red
stone.

Clemens and Pile remained friends and competitive land owners until
"with an activity and a suddenness that bewildered Obedstown and almost
took away its breath, the Hawkinses hurried through their arrangements
in four short months and flitted out into the great mysterious blank
that lay beyond the Knobs of Tennessee"--to Missouri, where a few months
afterward "Mark Twain" was born.

Another friend of Coonrod Pile was David Crockett. The "Hero of the
Alamo" had many hunts in Fentress county, upon the "Knobs" and along the
upper waters of the Cumberland. The old Crockett home still stands a few
miles to the north of Jamestown beside the road that leads to Pall Mall.
It was in a house upon land owned by Coonrod Pile that "Deaf and Dumb
Jimmy Crockett" spent the last years of his life, and from which he made
so many journeys to locate the silver mine of the Indians who had held
him captive and who pinioned him to the ground while they dug their ore,
never allowing him to see where they worked, but using him to help carry
the mined product. David Crockett in his autobiography tells the story
of "Deaf and Dumb Jimmy" but he places the scene in Kentucky, making
probably the same mistake in the location of the state-line boundary
which Coonrod Pile had made.

Coonrod Pile lived to the age of eighty-three and at the time of his
death was the most powerful personality in Fentress county. His business
interests had grown to such proportions that he had economic problems to
solve and the simple practical methods he used are followed in the
valley to-day.

He dug only so much coal as he could use, the transportation problem
preventing its sale. He could only market the poplar, the cedar and such
woods as he could float on the rises of the Wolf to the Cumberland river
to be rafted. He raised cotton, but only the amount the women needed for
their looms. He grew wheat and corn, but no more than was necessary for
flour and meal for the neighborhood and to feed the stock he owned,
laying aside a portion for use in time of need for the improvident and
unfortunate.

He was ready at any time to trade with anybody for almost anything. In
the last score of the years of his life, the most successful
financially, he found that the money he could accumulate came only from
the sale of product