Harlod Irvine, driving into Harlan this week for the first time in 46 years discovered the sleepy little village he left had grown into a busy, properous small city.

Accompanied by Mrs. Irvine, he drove on through the city looking for something he could recognize; a familiar building or road. But he shook his head.

"My, how it has grown," he said to his wife. The Day's Branch" lay of the land" was the only thing he was able to recall. It was his favorite childhood spot.

Irvin's grandmother lived over on Day's Branch. As a child he sat on the hillside and watched the neighbors "scratch coal out of the hill for fires." These people around the country were either Methodist, Baptist, Camelites or they were "looked upon with suspicion."

"Yes sir," he later told The Enterprise, "when I left here with my father, Thomas B. Irvin in 1908 the town was "a little bit of a place" but it's still mighty like home to me."

True, it was a sleepy little village nestled among the hills but it has already out lived one name (Mount Pleasant).

"When I was just a child," he continued, "my father had a stave mill over on Cranks Creek. One of his childhood memories was the contraption built on the hillside for the purpose of rolling the logs off the hill to be cut into staves.

A lad of ten or 12 wouldn't recall a great deal but Irvine vividly remembered the "might riders" who sometimes passed through the country burning tobacco sheds. They were dressed in black and rode galloping horses and "scared us children to death."

When Irvin and his family left Harlan, they walked to Hubbard Springs to board the train for Colorado Springs.

Irvin's home town was a strange place to him. The strangeness spread everywhere because the place is not the sleepy little village he once knew. He was calmly aware of its strength, its industry and its growth without sounding its name and fame from the hilltops.

Irvin said as he and his wife drove into town from their home in California, he sat quietly thinking of his boyhood days when his father was deputy sheriff and the journeys he took with him to collect taxes.

"Sometimes they gave my father a hog for their taxes and he drove it into town to sell for the tax bill."

Sunday May 30, 1954

Volume 53 Number 126

Page 1

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