Latest / Stories That Live In Us / North Carolina: Buried Treasure, Buried Stories | Episode 107

Transcript

North Carolina: Buried Treasure, Buried Stories | Episode 107 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Crista Cowan: Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
• 0:08
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:12
  Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
• 0:22
  Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 0:31
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us.
• 0:38
  Crista Cowan: Picture a morning in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
• 0:42
  Crista Cowan: It's early spring 1812.
• 0:45
  Crista Cowan: The air still is that cold at that elevation, the kind of cold that just lives in the hollows and along the creek banks long after the calendar says winter is over.
• 0:55
  Crista Cowan: The rhododendron is coming in.
• 0:58
  Crista Cowan: The chestnut trees are enormous, older than memory, casting shadows across the trail.
• 1:05
  Crista Cowan: Somewhere in the woods near Flat Rock, North Carolina, a very old man is walking alone.
• 1:12
  Crista Cowan: He has a shovel.
• 1:14
  Crista Cowan: He knows where he's going, or at least he thinks he does.
• 1:17
  Crista Cowan: He has made this trip before, or he tried to.
• 1:20
  Crista Cowan: The path through the trees, the sound of the water getting louder as he gets closer, the particular bend in the creek where things look different at night than they do during the day.
• 1:31
  Crista Cowan: He's 93 years old.
• 1:33
  Crista Cowan: His legs remember being much younger, but his mind is still sharp enough to be stubborn.
• 1:39
  Crista Cowan: He doesn't make it.
• 1:41
  Crista Cowan: When the search party finds him that April morning in 1812, he is face down in Pheasant Branch, a small mountain stream, cold and clear, running between two hills on the edge of his land.
• 1:56
  Crista Cowan: The shovel is beside him.
• 1:58
  Crista Cowan: There is no sign of struggle, no footprints that don't belong.
• 2:02
  Crista Cowan: The working theory is that he tripped crossing the water, hit his head on a rock, and drowned, unconscious, alone in less than a foot of water.
• 2:12
  Crista Cowan: His name is Abraham Kuykdendall, and he has just become a legend.
• 2:17
  Crista Cowan: The thing about legends is that they replace the man.
• 2:21
  Crista Cowan: Within weeks of his death, people in Flat Rock begin to tell stories.
• 2:27
  Crista Cowan: A figure is seen among the trees at night, frantically digging in one place and then another, disappearing before anyone can get close.
• 2:35
  Crista Cowan: Lights moving through the woods where no lights should be.
• 2:39
  Crista Cowan: A one-horse wagon on the road near Pheasant Branch, with an old man sitting on the seat and a large black iron pot beside him, vanishing into the dark before anyone can reach it.
• 2:51
  Crista Cowan: The most powerful man in the history of what is now Henderson County, North Carolina.
• 2:58
  Crista Cowan: A man who owned thousands of acres of land, who commanded militias, who helped build a county from nothing, who lived through 93 years of colonial America and revolution and frontier wilderness is remembered primarily as a ghost story.
• 3:17
  Crista Cowan: His grave marker isn't even where he's buried.
• 3:20
  Crista Cowan: Nobody knows where he's buried.
• 3:23
  Crista Cowan: And somewhere under a large bent white oak near a mountain stream in the Blue Ridge, there is, according to the legend, an iron washpot full of gold and silver coins that has never been found.
• 3:39
  Crista Cowan: I want to tell you how that happened, but more than that, I want to tell you who Abraham Kuykdendall actually was, because I think the ghost story is the least interesting thing about him.
• 3:51
  Crista Cowan: Abraham Kuykdendall was born in October 1719 in Orange County, New York.
• 3:57
  Crista Cowan: October 1719, three years before the future George Washington, 57 years before the Declaration of Independence.
• 4:06
  Crista Cowan: The American Revolution isn't even really a grievance yet.
• 4:09
  Crista Cowan: The colonies are still very much British, but Abraham is very much Dutch.
• 4:16
  Crista Cowan: He's baptized in October in the Dutch Reformed Church in Deer Park, New York.
• 4:21
  Crista Cowan: It's a small settlement in the Hudson River Valley near what is now Port Jervis.
• 4:26
  Crista Cowan: It's right on the border of New York and New Jersey.
• 4:30
  Crista Cowan: His family has been in America for a few generations by this point, part of the Dutch wave that settled New Amsterdam and then just kept pushing up into that Hudson River Valley in the mid and late 1600s.
• 4:43
  Crista Cowan: His parents are Cornelius Kuykdendall and Martja Westvall.
• 4:48
  Crista Cowan: Though I'll be honest with you, genealogists have argued about this for decades.
• 4:52
  Crista Cowan: Because you see, there were two Kuykdendall brothers who married two Westvall sisters, and there's this tangle of intermarriages that makes the family tree look more like a family wreath.
• 5:03
  Crista Cowan: That's what my mom calls it.
• 5:04
  Crista Cowan: What we know for certain is that Abraham was born and baptized and raised, all in that area that is now Orange County, New York.
• 5:13
  Crista Cowan: But from the time he could make his own decisions, he rarely stayed in one place for very long.
• 5:19
  Crista Cowan: Growing up when and where he did, he learned what the frontier teaches you: that you figure things out for yourself, that you don't wait for someone else to solve your problems, that the land rewards the bold and punishes the hesitant.
• 5:34
  Crista Cowan: In 1743, he marries Elizabeth Fiddler in Kingston, New York.
• 5:40
  Crista Cowan: He's 23 years old.
• 5:41
  Crista Cowan: She's about 15.
• 5:43
  Crista Cowan: That is not unusual for the time, though it is a little bit jarring to say that out loud in our time.
• 5:48
  Crista Cowan: They'll be married for more than 50 years.
• 5:51
  Crista Cowan: They'll have at least 13 children together.
• 5:53
  Crista Cowan: They will move across Virginia into what is now West Virginia, down through the Carolinas, out to what is now Tennessee, and then back to Carolinas again.
• 6:04
  Crista Cowan: Their life together is not settled.
• 6:07
  Crista Cowan: It's a life of constant motion, reinvention, constant arrival to somewhere new.
• 6:13
  Crista Cowan: But Abraham is not just a man who moved around.
• 6:16
  Crista Cowan: He is a man who led as he did so.
• 6:19
  Crista Cowan: In 1747, when he's 28 years old, Spain is attacking North Carolina's port towns and shipping lanes.
• 6:26
  Crista Cowan: And there is something called the Spanish Alarm.
• 6:30
  Crista Cowan: It's this period of military threat along the Carolina coast.
• 6:34
  Crista Cowan: And Abraham is listed as a corporal in Captain Samuel Corbyn's militia.
• 6:38
  Crista Cowan: He's 28 years old, and already he's the kind of man they put on a list to call on when there's trouble.
• 6:44
  Crista Cowan: By 1770, he's a captain.
• 6:47
  Crista Cowan: He's appointed to command the Tryon County Militia.
• 6:50
  Crista Cowan: That's Western North Carolina, the frontier edge of the colonies.
• 6:54
  Crista Cowan: And by 1775, as the revolution is beginning to catch fire, he's appointed again as a captain.
• 7:00
  Crista Cowan: By 1776, he's the captain of the safety committee in old Tryon County.
• 7:05
  Crista Cowan: These are the people who are organizing resistance to the British at a local level.
• 7:10
  Crista Cowan: These are the people who are deciding in real time what a revolution looks like in the local communities.
• 7:17
  Crista Cowan: He's in his 50s when the Revolutionary War begins.
• 7:20
  Crista Cowan: He's in his 60s when it ends.
• 7:23
  Crista Cowan: Most men his age are just watching.
• 7:26
  Crista Cowan: Abraham is still serving.
• 7:29
  Crista Cowan: When Trion County gets dissolved, then Rutherford County is created in 1779.
• 7:35
  Crista Cowan: Abraham is selected as one of the commissioners to choose the site and supervise the construction of the courthouse and the prison and the stocks for the newly formed county.
• 7:45
  Crista Cowan: He's also appointed Justice of the Peace.
• 7:48
  Crista Cowan: He doesn't just participate in the building of this new nation.
• 7:51
  Crista Cowan: He's literally deciding where to put the courthouse.
• 7:55
  Crista Cowan: And then when the war is over, and most men his age are looking for somewhere to settle down and rest, Abraham moves again.
• 8:04
  Crista Cowan: He and his brother Peter take their families to Washington County, North Carolina, which is actually now Tennessee.
• 8:13
  Crista Cowan: Peter dies there in 1783, leaving a will that names Abraham as his executor.
• 8:19
  Crista Cowan: So Abraham settles the estate, gathers his children and his brother's younger children, and brings them all back to North Carolina.
• 8:27
  Crista Cowan: He is now in his late 60s and he's just getting started.
• 8:32
  Crista Cowan: In the 1780s, Abraham arrives in what is now Henderson County, North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Mountains, what probably feels like the western edge of everything.
• 8:43
  Crista Cowan: He's awarded 600 acres by the state of North Carolina as compensation for his service in the revolution.
• 8:50
  Crista Cowan: 600 acres of mountain land dense with chestnut and oak and rhododendron crossed by cold streams sitting along the old state road that drovers use to move their livestock down from the mountains of Virginia and North Carolina and Tennessee to the coastal markets of South Carolina and Georgia.
• 9:10
  Crista Cowan: He looks at this spot of land and he sees opportunity.
• 9:15
  Crista Cowan: Within a few years, Abraham owns more than 2,000 acres.
• 9:19
  Crista Cowan: Most of the land is now in the village of Flat Rock.
• 9:22
  Crista Cowan: He builds a tavern, the largest inn in the area, built of logs, which was unusually grand for the frontier.
• 9:29
  Crista Cowan: He builds stables and corrals large enough to house the livestock of the drovers that are passing through.
• 9:35
  Crista Cowan: He builds a grist mill and a sawmill.
• 9:39
  Crista Cowan: He builds a distillery and he serves, by all accounts, excellent whiskey.
• 9:44
  Crista Cowan: He gives land for a church, the Mud Creek Baptist Church, built in 1804, still a functioning congregation today.
• 9:52
  Crista Cowan: He is in his 70s when he builds all of this.
• 9:56
  Crista Cowan: He is doing it from scratch in the mountains with no banks, no infrastructure, no guarantee that any of it will last.
• 10:05
  Crista Cowan: He has 13 children now scattered across the frontier.
• 10:09
  Crista Cowan: He has a wife who has followed him across half a continent.
• 10:12
  Crista Cowan: He has survived a colonial childhood, a revolution, and the death of his brother.
• 10:16
  Crista Cowan: He has buried people he loved.
• 10:18
  Crista Cowan: He has started over more times than most people start once.
• 10:23
  Crista Cowan: By every measure that mattered in his world, land, power, influence, posterity, Abraham had won.
• 10:32
  Crista Cowan: So why, after more than 25 years of empire building in this place, why does he end up face down in a creek?
• 10:42
  Crista Cowan: Here's where the story gets complicated.
• 10:45
  Crista Cowan: Abraham has a policy at his tavern: payment in gold or silver coins only.
• 10:51
  Crista Cowan: No paper, no credit, no promises.
• 10:53
  Crista Cowan: You pay in metal or you don't stay.
• 10:55
  Crista Cowan: That's not unusual for the time.
• 10:57
  Crista Cowan: Paper currency was unreliable, banks were scarce and often very far away.
• 11:02
  Crista Cowan: And a man on the frontier learned quickly that the only money you could trust was the money that you could control.
• 11:08
  Crista Cowan: But Abraham takes it a little bit further than most.
• 11:11
  Crista Cowan: He accumulates over the years a significant fortune in coins, and he keeps it in his house under his own roof.
• 11:19
  Crista Cowan: His first wife, Elizabeth, dies sometime between 1800 and 1804.
• 11:25
  Crista Cowan: They had been married for more than 50 years.
• 11:29
  Crista Cowan: Her gravesite is not known.
• 11:31
  Crista Cowan: Abraham is 80-something years old.
• 11:34
  Crista Cowan: He's a widower in the mountains with a fortune and coin and no bank to put it in.
• 11:38
  Crista Cowan: And then in January of 1805, at the age of 85, he remarries.
• 11:44
  Crista Cowan: Her name is Bathsheba Barrett Oxford.
• 11:47
  Crista Cowan: She's a widow.
• 11:48
  Crista Cowan: She's approximately 63 years old, about 20 years younger than him.
• 11:53
  Crista Cowan: Although legend is going to later dramatically exaggerate, describing her as young and beautiful and extravagant.
• 12:00
  Crista Cowan: The historical record is a little different.
• 12:03
  Crista Cowan: What the legend agrees on is this: Bathsheba liked nice things, fine clothes, jewelry.
• 12:11
  Crista Cowan: Those peddlers who traveled the old state road learned quickly that she was a very good customer.
• 12:16
  Crista Cowan: And Abraham, who had spent his entire life being the one who decided everything, who controlled everything, who trusted no one with anything important, he did not like this.
• 12:26
  Crista Cowan: Legend has not been kind to Bathsheba.
• 12:30
  Crista Cowan: She's cast as a spendthrift wife, and the reason Abraham hid his gold, she is a villain in a story that probably doesn't actually have a villain.
• 12:39
  Crista Cowan: The truth is probably a lot more nuanced, probably a lot more human.
• 12:44
  Crista Cowan: Abraham was a man who never shared control of anything, not the militia or the land or the money.
• 12:50
  Crista Cowan: And whether Bathsheba was extravagant or simply living in a way that made him nervous, we don't know.
• 12:56
  Crista Cowan: What we do know is what he did.
• 12:59
  Crista Cowan: One night, the legend says it was dark.
• 13:03
  Crista Cowan: He used a pine torch to light the way.
• 13:05
  Crista Cowan: He went to his strongbox, he transferred his coins into a large black iron wash pot.
• 13:12
  Crista Cowan: And then he woke up his two enslaved men.
• 13:15
  Crista Cowan: Now, I need to stop here for a moment because this is the part of the story that treasure hunters and ghost story enthusiasts tend to move past quickly.
• 13:26
  Crista Cowan: And I don't want to do that.
• 13:28
  Crista Cowan: We do not know these men's names.
• 13:32
  Crista Cowan: The historical record, which preserved Abraham's birth date and his baptism record, and his land deeds and his militia appointments and his marriages and the names of his children did not preserve the names of these two men.
• 13:46
  Crista Cowan: They were enslaved.
• 13:48
  Crista Cowan: They were property in the eyes of the law and the record keepers of 1812 in Buncombe County, North Carolina.
• 13:54
  Crista Cowan: In the inventory of Abraham's estate after his death, they were simply referred to as two Negro men, unnamed.
• 14:02
  Crista Cowan: Now, I'm not going to stop looking for their names, but that's where we're at right now.
• 14:06
  Crista Cowan: What we know is this Abraham blindfolded both of them.
• 14:11
  Crista Cowan: He made them carry the heavy iron pot through the dark woods, crisscrossing through trees until they were completely disoriented.
• 14:19
  Crista Cowan: He removed their blindfolds.
• 14:21
  Crista Cowan: He had them dig a hole beneath a large bent white oak near a mountain stream.
• 14:27
  Crista Cowan: They buried the pot, then he blindfolded them again for the return trip.
• 14:31
  Crista Cowan: And then he told them, on threat of death, never to speak of what they had done.
• 14:36
  Crista Cowan: Think about what he asked of them.
• 14:39
  Crista Cowan: Not just the labor of carrying a heavy pot through the dark woods, not just the fear of being blindfolded and led through the wilderness in the middle of the night.
• 14:52
  Crista Cowan: He asked them to carry his secret and to protect his wealth and to risk their lives for his peace of mind.
• 15:00
  Crista Cowan: And here's what I find both heartbreaking and kind of remarkable.
• 15:04
  Crista Cowan: After Abraham died face down in Pheasant Branch, those two men told everything they knew.
• 15:11
  Crista Cowan: They told the family.
• 15:12
  Crista Cowan: They described the walk through the woods as best as they could remember it.
• 15:17
  Crista Cowan: They said that the pot was buried near a large bent white oak near a mountain stream.
• 15:24
  Crista Cowan: They gave every detail they had.
• 15:27
  Crista Cowan: They were not loyal to Abraham and his secret.
• 15:29
  Crista Cowan: They were loyal to the family.
• 15:31
  Crista Cowan: They tried to give back what Abraham had hidden.
• 15:35
  Crista Cowan: They just didn't know enough.
• 15:37
  Crista Cowan: Abraham had made sure of that.
• 15:40
  Crista Cowan: He had trusted them with the labor and threatened their lives with the consequence.
• 15:46
  Crista Cowan: But he hadn't trusted them with the actual information.
• 15:50
  Crista Cowan: He had kept the most important part, exactly where they were, which oak tree, exactly which stream.
• 15:56
  Crista Cowan: He kept that all to himself.
• 15:58
  Crista Cowan: That's kind of the story inside the treasure story that nobody ever talks about.
• 16:03
  Crista Cowan: A man who trusted no one, certainly not the men who carried his fortune through the woods.
• 16:09
  Crista Cowan: Okay, back to the legend.
• 16:11
  Crista Cowan: So sometime after burying the pot, the stories vary on how long.
• 16:16
  Crista Cowan: Abraham decides he needs some of his coins for a business transaction.
• 16:20
  Crista Cowan: He takes a shovel, he goes into the woods alone.
• 16:25
  Crista Cowan: He does not tell anyone where he is going.
• 16:28
  Crista Cowan: He doesn't come back.
• 16:29
  Crista Cowan: One version of the story says he was found quickly, and another one says the search took a little longer.
• 16:36
  Crista Cowan: What all the versions agree on is the image of this old man face down in the water with a shovel next to him.
• 16:43
  Crista Cowan: The most likely explanation is that he tripped, crossing Pheasant Branch, struck his head, and drowned.
• 16:49
  Crista Cowan: His sons came.
• 16:51
  Crista Cowan: They asked the two enslaved men what they could tell them.
• 16:55
  Crista Cowan: And those men told everything.
• 16:58
  Crista Cowan: Search parties went out immediately.
• 17:01
  Crista Cowan: They looked along the banks of Pheasant Branch.
• 17:04
  Crista Cowan: They looked under white oak trees.
• 17:06
  Crista Cowan: How many of those were there?
• 17:08
  Crista Cowan: They looked for a large bent oak near a stream.
• 17:11
  Crista Cowan: They never found it.
• 17:13
  Crista Cowan: To this day, they haven't found it.
• 17:17
  Crista Cowan: Treasure hunters still search the area around Flat Rock.
• 17:20
  Crista Cowan: One set of searchers were part of an archaeological dig sponsored by a university, and there's an entire study written up about it.
• 17:28
  Crista Cowan: But I'm not convinced that they were on an archaeological dig so much as they were looking for that treasure.
• 17:34
  Crista Cowan: And who can blame them?
• 17:36
  Crista Cowan: It's estimated that large pot of coins would be worth around $8 million today.
• 17:42
  Crista Cowan: More if there are rare coins in that stash.
• 17:46
  Crista Cowan: And it's still out there.
• 17:47
  Crista Cowan: Abraham Kuykdendall died on April 1st, 1812.
• 17:53
  Crista Cowan: He was buried somewhere near his home on his land in Flat Rock.
• 17:57
  Crista Cowan: The family cut down large chestnut trees, those enormous old trees that once dominated the Appalachians.
• 18:05
  Crista Cowan: They split the trunks in half and they lined and covered his grave with them to keep the wild animals away from the body.
• 18:12
  Crista Cowan: Nobody marked the grave in any other way that survived.
• 18:18
  Crista Cowan: There's now a monument to him at Mud Creek Baptist Church Cemetery.
• 18:22
  Crista Cowan: It's a fine monument, well decorated, placed there in 2000 by the Abraham Kirkendall chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
• 18:31
  Crista Cowan: Along with descendants in the Kirkendall family, they wanted to mark that spot.
• 18:36
  Crista Cowan: That DAR chapter was named for him.
• 18:39
  Crista Cowan: His legacy is honored.
• 18:41
  Crista Cowan: But the monument is not where he's buried because nobody knows where he's buried.
• 18:47
  Crista Cowan: This man who spent his entire life deciding exactly where everything went, right?
• 18:52
  Crista Cowan: The courthouse, the church, the coins, his family ended up in an unmarked grave in an unknown location.
• 19:00
  Crista Cowan: And almost immediately the ghost stories began.
• 19:04
  Crista Cowan: People traveling at night near Pheasant Branch reported seeing a bent old figure moving through the trees, digging frantically in one spot and then another, and then disappearing before anyone can reach him.
• 19:17
  Crista Cowan: A traveler on horseback described pulling alongside a one-horse wagon on the road near the creek with an old man driving in a large black iron pot on the seat beside him, and then watching the whole thing just vanish.
• 19:32
  Crista Cowan: A local historian named Louise Howe Bailey, who owned a home near the site of Abraham's death, said she would sit on her porch on certain nights watching for the mysterious lantern lights in the woods.
• 19:47
  Crista Cowan: Abraham Kuykdendall survived the Spanish Alarm, the American Revolution, the Frontier, the loss of his brother, the death of his first wife, and 93 years of a life that would have broken most of us in the first decade.
• 20:01
  Crista Cowan: And what he is remembered for primarily is a pot of gold that nobody can find and a ghost that won't stop looking for it.
• 20:10
  Crista Cowan: He got exactly what he was afraid of, just not in the way he expected.
• 20:16
  Crista Cowan: He didn't lose his fortune to a thief.
• 20:19
  Crista Cowan: He didn't lose it to Bathsheba's spending.
• 20:22
  Crista Cowan: He lost it to himself, to the same quality that had made him extraordinary, the absolute unshakable conviction that he was the only person who could be trusted with what mattered most.
• 20:36
  Crista Cowan: He became a legend instead of a man with stories.
• 20:41
  Crista Cowan: I found Abraham in my family tree on a Sunday night.
• 20:46
  Crista Cowan: Because you know that's when I do my best research.
• 20:48
  Crista Cowan: Sunday nights on FaceTime with my dad, the two of us, working through our ancestry DNA matches while my mom eavesdrops from the next room.
• 20:58
  Crista Cowan: It's my favorite time of the week.
• 21:01
  Crista Cowan: I was following a line that I hadn't looked at carefully before, a branch that had always been kind of vague in my tree, names that didn't, you know, didn't have any story or context.
• 21:13
  Crista Cowan: And there he was.
• 21:14
  Crista Cowan: Abraham Kuykdendall, born 1719, died in 1812, Flat Rock, North Carolina.
• 21:19
  Crista Cowan: That's what I knew.
• 21:20
  Crista Cowan: My six times great-grandfather on my mom's, mom's, mom's mom's side.
• 21:25
  Crista Cowan: And once I noticed him, I couldn't stop myself because over the next weeks and months, I started pulling records.
• 21:31
  Crista Cowan: The militia lists, the land deeds.
• 21:34
  Crista Cowan: There are a lot of land deeds because this man bought and sold probably six to ten thousand acres through his life.
• 21:41
  Crista Cowan: The church records, the census.
• 21:44
  Crista Cowan: And then I found the legend the iron pot, the blindfolded enslaved men, the creek.
• 21:50
  Crista Cowan: And I sat with it for a really long time.
• 21:54
  Crista Cowan: But when it came time to tell a story about North Carolina, I immediately thought of Abraham and how he spent 93 years building this remarkable life.
• 22:05
  Crista Cowan: He crossed the frontier, right?
• 22:06
  Crista Cowan: He fought in a revolution.
• 22:08
  Crista Cowan: He raised 13 children.
• 22:10
  Crista Cowan: He built a tavern and a mill and a church and a community out of nothing in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
• 22:16
  Crista Cowan: And the people who came after him, including me, some eight generations later, if we know him at all, know him primarily as a ghost story.
• 22:27
  Crista Cowan: Not because he wasn't extraordinary.
• 22:30
  Crista Cowan: He was, but because he kept the most important things to himself.
• 22:34
  Crista Cowan: Sure, the gold, but also the stories.
• 22:37
  Crista Cowan: What did it feel like to be a corporal at 28 during the Spanish alarm?
• 22:41
  Crista Cowan: What did he and Elizabeth talk about on those long moves through the frontier?
• 22:45
  Crista Cowan: What did he think about when he walked those 2,000 acres in Flat Rock and looked at what he'd built?
• 22:52
  Crista Cowan: What was he afraid of?
• 22:54
  Crista Cowan: What did he hope for?
• 22:55
  Crista Cowan: Those things, if he ever shared them, didn't survive.
• 23:00
  Crista Cowan: And that is frustrating and sad.
• 23:02
  Crista Cowan: And honestly, it's the reason I do the work I do.
• 23:06
  Crista Cowan: Not the professional work, though that too, but the real work, the work of finding the people who came before us and asking what they have to tell us about who we are now.
• 23:18
  Crista Cowan: I spend my days helping people find their families.
• 23:23
  Crista Cowan: And the thing I hear more than almost anything else, the thing that breaks my heart a little every single time I hear it is this.
• 23:31
  Crista Cowan: My mother died before I could ask her.
• 23:34
  Crista Cowan: My grandmother's gone, and I never got her stories.
• 23:38
  Crista Cowan: I didn't know I needed to ask until it was too late.
• 23:41
  Crista Cowan: I hear that.
• 23:43
  Crista Cowan: That void, that that void that opens up when someone leaves before they share their stories.
• 23:50
  Crista Cowan: Abraham Kuykdendall had 13 children and 2,000 acres and a pot of gold.
• 23:57
  Crista Cowan: He kept the gold so safe that nobody could find it, not even him.
• 24:02
  Crista Cowan: And eight generations later, here I am trying to find the man behind the legend.
• 24:08
  Crista Cowan: The gold isn't what was lost.
• 24:10
  Crista Cowan: The man was lost.
• 24:12
  Crista Cowan: His stories, his life.
• 24:14
  Crista Cowan: There's a creek in Flat Rock, North Carolina called Pheasant Branch.
• 24:19
  Crista Cowan: It runs between two hills, cold and clear the way mountain streams do.
• 24:25
  Crista Cowan: And in the spring, the rhododendron comes in along the banks.
• 24:28
  Crista Cowan: The chestnut trees are long gone.
• 24:31
  Crista Cowan: There was a blight that took them in the early 20th century.
• 24:35
  Crista Cowan: This terrible ecological loss, those enormous trees that once covered the Appalachian forests, but the creek is still there.
• 24:45
  Crista Cowan: And somewhere nearby, if the legend is true, there is an iron washpot full of coins that nobody has found in more than 200 years.
• 24:56
  Crista Cowan: And people still look for it.
• 24:58
  Crista Cowan: I understand that impulse.
• 25:00
  Crista Cowan: There is something irresistible about buried treasure, the idea that something valuable is just beneath the surface, waiting for the right person to find it.
• 25:10
  Crista Cowan: But I keep thinking about those two men who carried that pot through the dark woods, the men whose names we don't know yet, who were blindfolded and threatened and asked to carry a secret on pain of death.
• 25:24
  Crista Cowan: Those men, the moment Abraham was gone, who tried to give that secret back, they told everything they knew.
• 25:32
  Crista Cowan: They wanted the family to find what had been hidden.
• 25:36
  Crista Cowan: They understood something Abraham never did.
• 25:40
  Crista Cowan: The things you protect by hiding them, you usually end up losing them.
• 25:46
  Crista Cowan: The gold is in the ground, the man is a ghost story, his grave is unmarked, and the stories that could have made him real to the people who came after him, those are the things that are really lost.
• 25:59
  Crista Cowan: His great, great, great, great, great, great granddaughter found him on a Sunday night.
• 26:05
  Crista Cowan: And I kept digging for a couple of years to learn more about him, pulling records, following threads.
• 26:12
  Crista Cowan: And I'm telling his story now, more than 200 years after he drowned in that creek, because that is the only way it survives.
• 26:20
  Crista Cowan: Your family has buried gold too, not in iron pots under oak trees, but that would be cool.
• 26:26
  Crista Cowan: But in unspoken stories, in memories that feel ordinary to you and would feel extraordinary to the people who came after you.
• 26:34
  Crista Cowan: In answers to questions your grandchildren haven't even thought to ask yet, if you have them.
• 26:40
  Crista Cowan: You haven't run out of time.
• 26:42
  Crista Cowan: Abraham did.
• 26:43
  Crista Cowan: He went into the woods alone with a shovel and he didn't come back.
• 26:47
  Crista Cowan: And the most important things he carried, the real things, the ones that can't be measured in coins, went with him.
• 26:55
  Crista Cowan: You can make a different choice.
• 26:58
  Crista Cowan: Share what you know.
• 27:00
  Crista Cowan: Tell the stories that feel maybe too small or too ordinary or too complicated.
• 27:05
  Crista Cowan: Write them down, record them.
• 27:08
  Crista Cowan: Sit across from your mother or your grandmother or your aunt and ask the questions you've been meaning to ask.
• 27:14
  Crista Cowan: Don't wait until you have it all figured out.
• 27:18
  Crista Cowan: Don't wait until the family tree is finished to print it out and hang it on your wall as a conversation piece.
• 27:24
  Crista Cowan: Don't wait until the research is complete to share the stories.
• 27:28
  Crista Cowan: The time is now.
• 27:30
  Crista Cowan: Because the difference between a legacy and a ghost story is whether you share it or bury it.
• 27:39
  Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.