Mrs. Ely (Paulina Adkins ) Cole Gravesite

At rest in the Jasper Workman Cemetery is Mrs. Paulina Adkins Cole. She was referred to as Mrs. Ely Cole by Louis Watson Chappell when he recorded her singing a few songs on August 14, 1940 on Big Creek. The Jaspar Workman Cemetery is a lovely little spot on the hill above the railroad tracks, and is easily accessible for a visit.

Paulina Ellen Watts Adkins Cole was identified only as Mrs. Ely Cole when West Virginia professor Louis Chappell recorded her unaccompanied singing on 14 August 1940, in Big Creek, Boone County. She sang a fairly full version of Maid Freed from the Gallows that she called The Hangman’s Song (Child ballad #95), and hers is close to a version that the collector Patrick Gainer found at Dry Creek in Raleigh County; she lived in Raleigh County for some time so she might have learned it there. She also sang fragmentary versions of The Cruel Brother (Child #11), Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender (Child #73), Pretty Polly, and a verse or two identified as The Miner’s Song. On that day in 1940 she sang a few verses of The Lowlands of Holland, a song dating back to the seventeenth century about a woman’s husband being conscripted into the navy to fight on the seas; it’s been found in Scotland, England and Ireland and like the Child ballads it traveled with eighteenth century emigrants to the New World. 

Little is known about Mrs. Cole’s life. Often known as Pliney, she was born in West Virginia in 1882, mostly likely in the Laurel Hill district of Lincoln County; her parents were there in 1880 where her father Jackson Watts was a farmer, and in 1900 she was still with them there. In 1915 she married J.H. Adkins in Logan County and in 1923 she married Eli Giles Cole, who had been living at Fireco in Raleigh County and working as a laborer for the Virginian Railroad; it was a second marriage for him as well. In 1930 they were living at Cabin Creek in Kanawha County, where Mr. Cole worked as a coal miner. In 1940 they were in Big Creek, Boone County and on his 1942 draft card he indicated that he was a farmer there. He died on 4 January 1949 and was buried at the Jasper Workman Cemetery at Bald Knob in Boone County. Paulina Cole died on 13 February 1957 and is buried there as well.

 —Gloria Goodwin Raheja, February 2021.

-Raheja’s research for her book Logan County Blues: Frank Hutchison in the Sonic Landscape of the Appalachian Coalfields

-Chris Haddox for locating the grave of Mrs. Cole

-Mr. Ronald Nelson for directions to cemetery

-The Louis Watson Chappell Collection at West Virginia University's West Virginia and Regional History Center