In April 1931, a federal census enumerator named Howard Clements was walking the hollows of Breathitt County, Kentucky, with a ledger and a list of households to count before the government’s deadline. One of those households was a cabin six miles up a creek drainage where a 74-year-old widow named Etta Mullins lived alone. Clements asked her the standard questions: name, age, birthplace, occupation. She answered.
Then, in the remarks column at the end of her entry, he wrote something that was not standard at all. Subject stated that in her childhood, a family of tall ones lived up the hollow. She described them as twice the height of her father, who she recalls as a large man. They kept to themselves.
The structures they inhabited were gone by the time she married, circa 1876. She was insistent I record this. That remark is still in the National Archives. Breathitt County, Kentucky, Enumeration District 14, page 8A, line 23, dated April 12th, 1931.
The ink is faded, but the handwriting is clear. Clements used the phrase twice the height. He did not write she claims or she believes. He wrote she described.
At the end, he added that she was insistent he record it. This was not a newspaper story written for sensation, nor a tall tale collected by a folklorist looking for legends. It was a census remark. Enumerators in 1931 were hired by the federal government, trained to follow a script, and paid by the number of households they completed.
They did not have time to transcribe folk tales. The remarks column was reserved for things that might matter to the Census Bureau later, such as moved since April, speaks no English, or refused to answer. Clements used that space to record what Etta Mullins told him about people who lived in the hollow when she was a child, people she described as twice the height of her father. Her father’s name was recorded in the 1860 census, the one taken the year before she was born.
His name was Samuel Mullins, age 28, farmer, born in Kentucky. The 1870 census, taken when Etta would have been about 13, listed him again as a laborer with no real estate. The 1880 census, taken four years after Etta said the structures were gone, listed him as head of household, age 48. If Etta remembered her father as a large man, and she was describing people as twice his height, then she was remembering people somewhere between 12 and 14 feet tall.
That is what twice the height means if her father was six to seven feet, which would make him a large man in that place and time. Even if Samuel Mullins was five and a half feet, twice that is eleven feet. In Appalachian geography, a hollow is a small valley between two ridges with a creek running down the middle. Up the hollow means farther from the mouth, higher in elevation, and farther from everyone else.
It means the back end of the drainage where the hollow pinches out and there is nowhere left to go. If you wanted to live where people would leave you alone, that is where you went. Clements wrote that the tall ones kept to themselves. That phrase appears in census remarks and county records across the 1800s whenever enumerators described people who did not participate in the social structures around them.
It meant you did not attend church, you did not sell goods at the market, you did not send your children to school, and you did not show up when the community gathered. Etta said the structures were gone by the time she married, circa 1876. The 1880 census lists her as married to a man named John Mullins, aged 23. If she married around 1876, she was about 19 or 20.
That means the structures she was talking about disappeared sometime between her childhood in the 1860s and 1876. Etta was born in 1857 according to the age Clements recorded, so she would have seen these people, or at least evidence of them, between about 1857 and 1869. The structures were gone by 1876, leaving a maximum span of about 20 years during which these people lived in the hollow, Etta saw them or knew of them, and then they left or died, and the buildings they lived in disappeared. Clements wrote structures, plural, not structure or house.
More than one building. He did not describe the structures, only that they were gone by the time Etta married. The fact that he used the word structures instead of cabins or homes is worth noting. It is a formal word, the kind you use when you are not sure what to call something.
It is the word a surveyor uses, the word you use when the thing you are describing does not fit the usual categories. Etta also said these people were a family, a family of tall ones. That means more than one, probably at least three or four, possibly more. A family suggests they lived together and worked the land together.
It means a social unit that persisted over time, not just a lone individual passing through. What Clements did with that remark matters. He wrote it in the ledger, finished his enumeration district, and submitted the ledger to the Census Bureau in Washington. The data was tabulated, and the remark was filed.
There is no follow-up correspondence related to Breathitt County Enumeration District 14, no memo or letter from the Bureau asking Clements to clarify the remark, no request to send someone back to verify it, no flag for investigation. The remark was noted, and then it was ignored. The Census Bureau in 1931 was not a loose operation. It had procedures, supervisors, and a mandate to be accurate.
Enumerators were required to follow up on anything that seemed incomplete or unclear. If a household refused, the supervisor would send someone else. If a remark said moved, address unknown, there were procedures to try to track the person. But a remark stating that a 74-year-old woman recalled a family of people twice the height of a large man living in structures that later vanished was simply filed.
No follow-up visit, no clarifying letter, no notation that the remark was investigated or dismissed. Etta Mullins was not the only person in Breathitt County in 1931 old enough to remember the 1860s and 1870s. There were at least a dozen people in Enumeration District 14 alone over the age of 60. If the tall ones were a known part of local memory, you would expect other remarks.
Searches of the 1930, 1920, 1910, and 1900 census remarks for Eastern Kentucky turned up nothing like this one. Etta Mullins’ statement is alone. It is possible that other enumerators heard similar stories and chose not to write them down. But Clements thought this was relevant, and he thought Etta’s insistence was worth noting.
There is one other detail. Clements wrote that the tall ones inhabited the structures. He did not write lived in. Inhabited is what you say about animals in a den or about ruins that were once occupied.
It is not the word you use for people living in houses. It is a word that creates distance, suggesting the relationship between the tall ones and the structures was not quite the same as the relationship between a family and a home. Etta Mullins died in 1936, five years after Clements recorded her statement. Her death certificate lists her as 79 years old.
She is buried in a small cemetery near the mouth of the hollow in a plot with no headstone. There are 43 graves in that cemetery. Only 11 have stones. After Clements wrote the remark, after the census was filed, no one went back.
No one knocked on her door and asked her to describe the tall ones in more detail. She lived for five more years, during which someone could have recorded her testimony in full. No one did. In 1931, there were people alive who specialized in exactly that kind of work.
Folklorists, anthropologists, and journalists employed by the Works Progress Administration were traveling through Appalachia recording oral histories and regional stories. The WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project sent interviewers into every state to collect narratives from elderly residents before they died. If Etta Mullins’ statement had been flagged, someone could have been sent to interview her properly. The system was designed to record, flag, and follow up.
It happened in other counties. It did not happen here. There is, however, another record of what she was talking about. In 1884, a surveyor named William Trace was hired by the Commonwealth of Kentucky to map property boundaries in Breathitt County as part of a state-wide effort to settle land disputes and establish clear titles for taxation.
Trace’s field notes are held in the Kentucky State Archives in Frankfort. On page 147 of his field book, dated August 23rd, 1884, Trace recorded a bearing and distance from a marked oak tree on the ridge line above what he called Mullins Creek drainage. He walked down slope, took another bearing, and wrote, Big house abandoned. 40 x 60 ft stone foundation visible structure collapsed no road access.
Forty by sixty feet is 2,400 square feet. A typical one-room cabin in rural Kentucky in the 1880s was about 16 by 20 feet, or 320 square feet. A two-room cabin with a loft might reach 500 or 600 square feet. A house with multiple rooms built by someone with money or access to labor might be 800 square feet.
A 2,400-square-foot structure in a hollow with no road access is not close to typical. Trace used the phrase big house, which is not a technical term. Surveyors in the 1880s used dwelling, cabin, or residence when referring to buildings people lived in. Trace used big house, then noted the foundation dimensions and that it was abandoned.
The coordinates Trace recorded can be converted to modern GPS. When plotted by a surveyor specializing in historical land records, the location sits approximately 1. 8 miles up the creek drainage from the mouth of the hollow where Etta Mullins lived in 1931. That is up the hollow, the back end of the drainage, exactly where Etta said the tall ones lived.
There is a problem with the dates. Trace surveyed the site in 1884. Etta Mullins said the structures were gone by 1876. A structure can collapse and still be visible for years.
The foundation can remain. Trace found the house eight years later collapsed, but still visible enough to measure. A wood frame structure with a stone foundation exposed to weather in the Eastern Kentucky mountains can collapse in less than a decade if no one maintains it. By 1884, the house was down, but the foundation was intact enough for Trace to pace it out and record the dimensions.
The site had no road access, meaning it was built before roads reached that area or was deliberately built away from them. Forty by sixty feet of stone carried up a hollow with no road is a significant effort. Most cabins in the region were built on piers or sills, not stone foundations. A stone foundation requires quarrying or gathering stone, hauling it to the site, and laying it in courses.
It requires skill and time. It is what you do when you want a structure to last. Property tax rolls for Breathitt County in the 1870s and 1880s list Samuel Mullins owning 12 acres of Mullins Creek drainage in 1875, but no structure is recorded, no improvements listed. The house might have been on land that was not formally titled, common in Appalachia in the 1800s.
Or the house might have been far enough up the hollow that the tax assessor never saw it. Surveyor notations from the same period in adjacent counties show a pattern. In Wolfe County in 1883, a surveyor named Marcus Bell recorded a large dwelling, collapsed stone base, 35 x 50 ft in a hollow off the middle fork of the Kentucky River, no road access, abandoned. In Perry County in 1886, a surveyor named Eliza Stout recorded a stone foundation, dimensions 45 x 55 ft, no structure standing, location remote, in a drainage that is now part of the Daniel Boone National Forest.
Both sites are within 30 miles of the Breathitt County site. Three surveys, three counties, three unusually large structures in remote locations, all recorded within a four-year span, all abandoned. The Census Bureau’s 1930 manual includes a section on anomalous remarks. It states that if an enumerator records a remark that seems implausible or extraordinary, the enumerator is supposed to notify the district supervisor, and the supervisor is supposed to make a notation in the district log.
The district log for Breathitt County Enumeration District 14 is three pages long. It lists 17 households that required follow-up visits, mostly for unclear addresses or missing information. Etta Mullins is not on that list. Her remark was not flagged.
It was simply filed. The foundation is still there. A hike into the site, using the coordinates Trace recorded, found the stone outline on a flat clearing on a slope above the creek. The dimensions match Trace’s record, roughly 40 by 60 feet.
The stone is limestone, laid in a rough rectangle with the long axis running east-west. No stone remains above the first course; the structure on top is gone. At the northeast corner of the foundation is a depression about six feet across and two feet deep, circular, lined with stone, likely a well. Scattered near the foundation were a few pieces of ceramic, thick, unglazed, fired at low temperature, suggesting they were made on site, not purchased.
That suggests the people who lived here were not trading with settlements downriver. The ranger at the Daniel Boone National Forest office had never heard of a large stone foundation up the Mullins Creek drainage. He said the Forest Service had conducted surveys of historical structures in the 1990s, and nothing like that was recorded. A family of people described by Etta Mullins as twice the height of a large man lived in a house with a stone foundation in a remote hollow in Eastern Kentucky sometime between the 1850s and the 1870s.
They built the house large enough to accommodate their height and dug a well. They made their own ceramic and kept to themselves. By 1876, they were gone. The house collapsed.
In 1884, a surveyor recorded the foundation. In 1931, an elderly woman told a census taker about them, and the census taker wrote it down. Then the federal government filed the remark and did nothing. The foundation is still there.
The well is still there. The ceramic is still there. The remark is still in the National Archives.