The story we share with you today first appeared in the Oct. 6, 1976, issue of the Brown County Democrat.
James Mack Hamblen is fifth-generation Brown County Hamblen, great-great-grandson of famous early settler Job Hamblen (1762-1833) who had been a Revolutionary War soldier on the winning side.
Job settled in Bartholomew County in 1821, then moved westward to near what became the Brown County line and in 1825 into what is now Hamblen Township, named years afterward in his honor by the legislature upon the request of one of his sons.
Another of Job’s sons was John Hamblen, who begot David R. Hamblen, James Mack (Jim) Hamblen’s grandfather. David’s son, Robert Mann, Hamblen, fathered Jim up in Hamblen Township on Aug. 10, 1886. The Hamblen family traces back to George Hamblen, of English heritage, born in Maryland about 1726. The family base apparently became Lee County, Va., and a reunion is held each year in that area, this year on the Kentucky side of the Cumberland Gap.
A meticulous chronicle of the family and allied families was written by the late Porter Hamblen and published in 1940. Porter Hamblen was the son of Williamson Hamblen, a brother of Robert (Jim’s father), so Porter was a first cousin of Jim. Porter’s son, J. B. Hamblen lives in Nashville on Artist Drive.
Jim’s dad, Robert, was born in Hancock County, Tenn., in 1839 and moved to Brown County as a married man in October 1857. Jim’s mother Fanny (Fox) came with her husband, who is described as a timberman and mule team “hauler.” Of course, they already had family here in the others descended from Job.
A farmer all his life, and an avid square dancer until age 70, Jim grew up as a horse fancier who “rode to the hounds” after Brown County foxes on weekends. He worked only horses in the fields, never owned a tractor.
At 90 years of age, he remained strong in voice and keen of eye but just a little hard of hearing. Jim has been married 67 years, come November, to a Brown County girl, the former Katherine M. Frye. Her parents were Brown Countians, too; William and Sally (Miller) Frye. Katie was born about two miles from where she and Jim live now, half-a-mile south of Peoga on the Peoga Ridge Road which heads on down toward Gatesville.
Jim was born on his parents’ farm, about two and a half miles south of Gatesville. As a boy he frequently rode horseback past a then-existing log cabin north of Gatesville and wondered who had lived there.
Years later he learned it had been occupied by Job Hamblen, his own great-great grandfather.
The road, when Jim was a youth, still ran along a creek bed, well back from the present road along which a tourist attraction, the Job Hamblen Marker, stands. It is Job’s gravesite. He is the only Brown County pioneer memorialized with a standing monument.
It is the Taylor, Taggart (and Hamblen) cemetery, believed to be the first graveyard in Hamblen Township. The first school (also used for prayer services) was built in that location in 1837, Jim says.
Jim had an older sister, Mary Hattie (Freeman) and a four-years younger brother, John David Hamblen, who married Love Snyder. John David has been dead about 30 years, but his widow is living, at Edinburg. John David was a factory worker and father of two daughters.
The Jim Hamblen’s have three girls, all of whom are “doted on” by their mother and dad. Mable (Mrs. Virgil Asher) is widowed and living at Needham in Johnson County. She has two daughters and one son. Jim’s only grandchildren. They have given him four great grandchildren.
Edith (Mrs. Clarence Roth) and Ruth (Mrs. William Shaw) both live near Shelbyville. Clarence is retired William is still farming. Since Jim and his brother had only girl children, and the brother has passed on, Jim is the end of his Hamblen line.
His sister has two sons, one of whom, Sayrel Freeman, lives near Brownsburg.
Jim graduated from the eighth grade at Taggart school. Both boys and girls wore boots on a creek-crossing trek to classes in all kinds of weather. Jim remembers that, of a morning, the boots would be “hard as dornicks” and had to be knocked against a wall to soften them up before they could be put on again.
It appears that his grandfather moved onto an 80-acre farm, just (on higher ground) where his father settled in a big hollow, at about the same time.
His father soon was forced onto that higher ground, too because it was characteristic of the county to have unhealthy swampy valleys and bottomland. Jim, Mary Hattie and John David were all born while the family lived south of Gatesville.
Jim remembers, when he was four years old, pinpointed in fact by the day his brother was born in 1890, his favorite plaything was a hatchet.
From time-to-time Jim worked on, or rented land, in Bartholomew and Johnson Counties. But he has owned only three parcels in his lifetime, all in Brown County, A boss, Melvin Wheaton, who lived two miles south of Nineveh, thought so highly of Jim as his top hand that he insisted on, and got, a World War I occupation deferment for Jim, from the military draft. Jim was running a “victory garden” of nearly 500 acres for Wheaton. But Jim himself never requested that he not be drafted.
During wartime Wheaton paid Jim $1.25 per day for assuming all that responsibility. After the war he tried to reduce Jim’s pay to an even dollar. Jim quit, after five years with Wheaton, and found another job at $1.25. He couldn’t get along wit the new boss and quit after one week.
Having saved over $600 while working for Wheaton, Jim felt a little free to choose his own jobs. He farmed a while in a valley below Gatesville (near his family’s first Brown County home), then went back with Wheaton at $1.25 per day and stayed three more years-until the boss tried to cut his pay again.
The first place he and Katie owned was two and a half acres he paid $125 for, in 1911, and to which he added half acre “to make the line straight.”
He says they kept this small piece 25 years or longer. His second purchase was near the Bartholomew County line. He built a good log house on that land, which was absorbed by Camp Atterbury in 1942. For $75 he had the house logs transported to his present spread.
He and Katie (their daughters married and long gone from home) moved temporarily into a rickety small house on this property until they got the log house rebuilt in 1944. At 90, Jim no longer farms. He misses it. “Farming has been my life.” His spirit is willing, but his flesh has some second thoughts.
Jim fell and broke his hip just before his 87th birthday. He was in the Johnson County Hospital on his birthday he became so fond of his roommate that Jim later presented him with his entire hay crop. Shortly before Jim broke his hip, he rode his own double-gated mare in a fourth of July Parade.
His generosity, demonstrated by the hay crop incident, has been a lifelong trait, especially noted during the hard times of the Great Depression.
A truly religious man, James Mack Hamblen belongs to the Church of God, “right down the road.”
“The Lord’s been very good to me, all my life,” he assured me on his 90th birthday as the family gathered to celebrate the anniversary.
“And I’ve gone right along with Him, too.”
Submitted by Pauline Hoover, Brown County Historical Society
