When West Virginia University graphic design professor Eve Faulkes and her students took on the task of designing the West Virginia Humanities Council’s new traveling exhibit, “The Hatfields & McCoys: American Blood Feud,” they did a bit of traveling themselves.

Armed with the text for the exhibit, written by West Virginia historian Stan Bumgardner, they went to Logan County to interview people about the famous feud and to take pictures of the Hatfield cemetery in Sarah Ann, West Virginia, as well as a location in Kentucky where the McCoy family lived.

Graphic design students involved with the project included Abbey Estep, a junior this year and a native of Ronceverte, West Virginia; Jacob Dunn, of Pomeroy, Ohio; and Kristen Manzo, of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, who both graduated in 2014 with a BFA in Graphic Design. Their completed work was previewed in the lobby of the Creative Arts Center for a week in late January, and has now hit the road — traveling all over the state.

“The WV Humanities Council hired Sam Bumgardner to create the text, and we took it from there,” Faulkes said.

They became very familiar with facts about the Hatfield-McCoy Feud, a prolonged vendetta between neighboring families in the Tug Valley that was fought largely in the 1880s, during which time more than a dozen members of the two families were murdered. The Hatfields lived mostly in Logan and Mingo Counties in West Virginia, and the McCoys lived in Pike County, Kentucky. Their leaders were Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield and Randolph McCoy. The affair was the most notorious of several feuds taking place in eastern Kentucky and neighboring areas at the time.

The exhibit explains how the feud began and how it escalated — drawing national attention to the region in the decades after the Civil War.

The WVU designers started with some of the famous colorful quotes by “Devil Anse” Hatfield, such as: “I belong to no church, unless you say I belong to the one great church of the world. You can say it is the devil’s church.”

“We first generated the typographic treatment of the main quotes by Devil Anse and they were a lot of fun,” Faulkes said. “They really set the style for the rest of the exhibit.”

In addition to photos taken in the Tug Valley by Faulkes and her students, there are plenty of historic photos and a map of the region. A panel titled “The Hatfields & McCoys in Historical Scholarship” features some of the many books that have written about the feud over the years.

“We also had to determine how the exhibit would be fabricated,” Faulkes said. “We have done three other exhibits for the Humanities Council, and all have been different. This one is the best yet. It is very stable and easy to set up.

“Signs Plus in Morgantown printed and mounted the exhibit panels, and Wilson Works Fabrication and Machining, also of Morgantown, made the hardware to attach them with their water jet cutter,” she said. “Plus we had to make many different pieces to go with it, including labels, crates and the instructions to accompany it, explaining how to set it up.”

According to Mark Payne, program manager with the West Virginia Humanities Council, the exhibit will now travel to the Mingo County Public Library in Williamson, West Virginia — in the heart of Hatfield country — where it will have its premiere viewing starting Feb. 25. After that it will cross the state line to Pikeville, Kentucky, which was the home of the McCoy family and also the site of the trials of several Hatfield family members.

After that, the exhibit will go all over West Virginia, to colleges, libraries, museums and other venues.

“I currently have a list of about a dozen places, from Parkersburg to Martinsburg, that want the exhibit and we are still taking suggestions,” Payne said.

The exhibit will return to Tug Valley for the Hatfield-McCoy Reunion in June 2015, with a special visit to the Matewan Visitors Center.

“Interest in the Hatfield and McCoy Feud really took off after the airing of the recent History Channel mini-series about the two families, starring Kevin Costner as Devil Anse,” Payne said. “People started googling Devil Anse Hatfield, Jim Vance, and other people involved in the feud. And since all the information is in the West Virginia Humanities Council’s e-WV online encyclopedia, views of the encyclopedia just spiked.”

Other West Virginia Humanities Council traveling exhibitions created by students in the WVU School of Art and Design’s graphic design program during the past few years include “Born of Rebellion,” which covered the formation of the state of West Virginia during the Civil War, and “John Henry: The Steel Drivin’ Man,” about legendary folk hero John Henry.

Payne said these two previous exhibits were seen by thousands of people in approximately 50 communities all over West Virginia. Most recently, the award-winning “Born of Rebellion” exhibit toured West Virginia during the sesquicentennial in 2013 and the John Henry exhibit is now on permanent loan to the Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center at Fairmont State University.

The Hatfields & McCoys traveling exhibit is funded in part by ZMM Architects & Engineers of Charleston. All the exhibitions are free and open to the public.

For more information about “The Hatfields & McCoys: American Blood Feud,” or the exhibition schedule, contact Mark Payne at payne@wvhumanities.org or 304-346-8500.

-WVU-

cl/2/3/15

CONTACT: Charlene Lattea, College of Creative Arts
304-293-4359, Charlene.Lattea@mail.wvu.edu

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