Burial Ground of the Hatfields
Sarah Ann, West Virginia
A visit to Hatfield Cemetery is one you'll remember long after your visits to more conventional cemeteries are long forgotten. No one visits the Hatfield Cemetery on a whim. First, you have to drive all the way to Sarah Ann, West Virginia (and no one does that except to visit the Hatfield Cemetery), and second, you have to climb the steep, rutted, rocky path to the graveyard, a muddy slog in all but the driest weather.
A bridge leading to the cemetery has been roped off to stop people from trying to drive up the axle-busting hill. By the time you reach the graves on foot, you need a few minutes just to catch your breath.
The cemetery's focal point is its life-size Italian marble statue of "Devil Anse" Hatfield, leader of the Hatfield clan and sworn enemy of the McCoy family and their patriarch, Randolph McCoy. To find an Italian marble statue of anyone in this rural corner of West Virginia is remarkable, and Devil Anse cuts a particularly memorable figure with his boots and gaiters, luxurious beard, pants hiked high over his big belly, and wayward tie clip and dinner jacket.
The Hatfield children spent $5,000 on the statue, which arrived five years after their father was buried in 1921 -- in a $2,000 solid steel coffin. The Hatfields may have been hillbillies, but they were hillbillies with cash.
Other members of the Hatfield clan have been, and continue to be, buried in the cemetery (Some of the tombstones are only a few years old). Among the other notable interments are Devil Anse's son Johnse, "Romeo of the Hills," who impregnated Roseanna McCoy and then dumped her for her 16-year-old cousin; and sons Troy and Elias, who were simultaneously shot dead in an argument over liquor distribution.
Devil Anse seems to have gotten the best of his bitter rival: he lived longer, died easier (and wealthier), and of course he has a memorable graveyard statue. When we visited Randolph McCoy's much more cosmopolitain grave in Kentucky, his tombstone had only a couple of coins tossed onto it, but Devil Anse's grave in remote Sarah Ann was covered with spare change.
We'd say the Hatfields won.