A cousin contacted me yesterday regarding our great great great grandfather William Ellington Bond. I had put together a Genealogy book for my family in 2005 and decided to look through it for information regarding our grandfather. I had forgotten about the following story I had included in the book.
The Ugly Horse
On 16 Oct 2005, my brother Greg and I were returning to NC from visiting the folks in KY. I wanted to look for the grave of Jeremiah and Mary Yates and we swung through Haysi, VA looking for the Andrew Jackson Edwards Cemetery. We found one good looking prospect on a beautiful ridge but our ancestors were not there. We tried a couple of other small roads but with no luck.
We were inching up a narrow one lane mountain road when we came upon a lady walking her dog. We asked her for directions and she told us to check with her brother who was cutting firewood on up the road. So we continued.
Rounding a sharp curve, Greg calmly remarked “Now there’s something you don’t see every day.” It was a Llama, resting upright, with its legs folded underneath it, chewing aggressively on its cud. As we drove slowly by keeping our eyes on it, it swiveled its head to watch us and never stopping chewing the cud.
About 100 yards later we came upon three men beside the road. This was Oct so they were wearing flannel shirts with matching baseballs hats and I’m pretty sure all three were chewing tobacco. They were cutting firewood just like the lady said. They were on Greg’s side of the truck and I rolled down his window and shut off the truck so we could talk. We were driving my Dodge 2500 long bed Cummins Diesel pickup. That thing was so loud I always had to shut it down in drive throughs.
The look on their faces told me they were thinking “Them boys ain’t from around here.”
One of them leaned back on his boot heels with his hands in his pockets and loudly asked “WHAT DO YOU KNOW BOYS?” Greg without missing a beat said “Right back there is the ugliest horse I’ve every seen in my life.”
One of them immediately said “Yeah, and he’s HELL TO RIDE TOO!” Needless to say, that broke the ice and they proceeded to tell us of several places that might be our
cemetery but none of them proved to be the one we were looking for. It turned out we were reading the directions backward and we soon found the cemetery. But I still chuckle every time I think about the “ugly horse.”
Here are the photos I took that day of the graves of my great great great grandparents.
Here is the grave of William Ellington Bond my cousin was looking for:
