WHY, WHY, WHY DELILAH?
© 2025 Terry Harmon
Perhaps one of the most intriguing of mountain lasses was my distant cousin, Delilah Baird. Born in 1800, she left home at the age of eighteen, wooed by another of my cousins – a preacher man named John Holtsclaw. Problem was, the good reverend already had a wife and seven children at the time of his elopement with Delilah. But Delilah knew it, and it did not dissuade her dream of common-law happiness with John in faraway Kentucky.
Upon their arrival there, John constructed a bark camp against the trunk of a large, fallen tree that was situated at the mouth of a branch. They later moved further down the creek into a rude cabin, where Delilah would use firebrands to fend off wolves that got too close to her door or attempted to devour the young calf penned near her chimney. She also “sanged” (gathered ginseng, i.e., “sang”) on a nearby mountain.
But one day, Delilah saw something oddly familiar, something she recognized from her days back in Carolina. It was one of her father’s steers with a large bell fastened about its neck, and she suddenly realized John had not taken her to Kentucky after all. No, he had merely driven her around for miles on end until she lost her bearings and then deposited her on the other side of the mountain from her original home. Taking this deception in stride, apparently in the same manner she had tolerated John’s being a husband and father when they ran off together, she soon reestablished communication with her family and continued her housewifery. She rode across Beech Mountain to obtain supplies and to sell her “sang” and maple sugar. She knitted socks and stockings while riding on the road to and from her old home. And she brought dried grass in a sheet in order to get seed for the meadow around her new home. Even after John’s wife appeared at their door asking to be allowed to spin, weave, wash, hoe, or do anything so that she could provide their children with bread, he chose to remain with Delilah.
Many years later, after John had long passed, 81-year-old Delilah established a long distance correspondence with Ben Dyer, of Texas. Delilah wrote to him, offering him a home in North Carolina and support for life. She added, “My folks are lawing me to death,” and asked him to come and help her defend her rights. At this time, Delilah dressed gaily and was supposedly demented, but a commission appointed to investigate her condition found she still had mind enough to manage her own affairs. After the usual maneuvers of courting couples, Ben agreed to come to North Carolina on the terms stated, and Delilah wrote again to say she was delighted he was to come, assuring him again that she had plenty, “and all we will have to do is to sit back and enjoy ourselves.”
As it turned out, Delilah was not as willing as she had thought to make a commitment to love, and when Ben arrived, neither of them was impressed with what they saw. She paid him nothing, gave him no home, and allowed him to return to Texas, but the following year, he sued her for his expenses, and the court awarded him just shy of $50 for his round-trip train fare. I venture to say poor Ben would have related well to the lyrics of the Tom Jones classic: “My, my, my Delilah. Why, why, why Delilah? I could see that girl was no good for me.”
