Henry Hutchens Feature

Henry Hutchens and I walked into the woods until our cars disappeared behind us. Then we eased ourselves down a steep, rocky path ending on a flat patch of sandy soil at the edge of the North Deep Creek. Looking to our left, we got our first sight of the shimmering cascade draped over the rocks of Shacktown Falls.

The water sparkled from the daylight of a clear December sky. The chilly air required a jacket. A November drought exposed more of the creek’s rocks than Henry remembered, changing the layout, but it didn’t matter. Henry Hutchens was home.

We stood next to the shoals below the 12-foot falls as Henry traced the outline of an invisible building that, to him, was as present as the water babbling at our feet.

“The old mill was right there, near those rocks,” he said.

He was pointing upstream, to the left of the falls, at the spot where the Yadkin Valley Roller Mills operated from 1895 to 1949. “We liked to explore and watch the water hit the old wheel. It didn’t turn. Mill closed when I was three.”

Henry Hutchens was born in Yadkin County in 1946. He spent his childhood on Styers Mill Road, which bisects the North Deep Creek between the old and new Highway 421, six miles west of the tributary’s deposit into the Yadkin River.

His family was poor. “We didn’t have nothing,” He confessed. “Can’t say we had raccoon or possum on our table to eat, but there might’ve been. You didn’t ask.”

If there was raccoon on the Hutchens family dinner table, it was thanks to a coon dog like the ones the hunters trained out on a stretch of creek below the falls.

“Right over there is where they brought the dogs,” Henry said, pointing downstream to a calmer, deeper section of the creek. “They’d tie a raccoon to a tire and anchor it out in the water. Then, one by one, they’d turn loose the dogs.”

For Henry and his brothers Bud, Marshall, and Gene, the sight was pure entertainment. The coon hunters were testing the dogs to learn which ones would fight and which would run. Mixing a dog with a desperate raccoon was the best way to find out.

“The dogs would swim out and snatch the raccoon off the tire, but the raccoon would have none of it. It’d take that dog under water and try to drown him. Any dog that didn’t run was a good coon dog. One that got scared wasn’t. What a show.”

The creek provided years of fun for Henry and the rest of the boys from Shacktown—an unincorporated slice of Yadkin County midway between Yadkinville and the Forsyth County line. Henry tried to remember the names of the old gang but stopped and admitted there might be a hundred or more who loved Shacktown Falls like he did. The boys were all related, either by blood or experience.

“We spent five days a week down here from spring to fall, mostly fishing and swimming. I don’t have a single bad memory about this place.”

The gang included Henry’s cousins Larry and Johnny Hutchens, the Pinnix and Williams boys, the Hennings, the Collins and the Couches. And there were the Browns—brothers Wendell and Roy and their cousin Donnie. “Make sure you get ‘em all in,” Henry insisted after exhausting his mental list.

It’s a daunting task. Much like diving to the bottom of the sunk hole and making it out alive.

The sunk hole, as the Shacktown boys called it, was a natural whirlpool formed in a horseshoe bend of the North Deep Creek about 500 yards upstream from the falls. It’s still there, but Henry couldn’t get us close enough to see it because of a private residence that now blocks the path.

It was a popular swimming spot for the brave, or foolish, among the Shacktown gang. “You’d come down here and there’d be ten or fifteen boys swimming. We used a vine to swing us out. The water was deep. Wendell was the only one who could dive to the bottom and come up with a handful of sand.”

It’s a good thing Wendell was there the day Henry’s little brother, Gene, took a dip in the turbulent water. Henry stayed on the bank and watched the others. He liked to swim, but not in the whirlpool. “Didn’t want none of it,” Henry admits. “I absolutely would not go in there.”

But Gene, undaunted, dove right in. And didn’t come up.

“I hollered for Wendell to go get him and he jumped in and brought him back up,” Henry said, “but then Gene goes and jumps in again! And with me standing on the bank yelling at him, ‘Don’t do it, Gene!’”

Telephoning fish was another form of creek entertainment the boys loved. Although illegal, as a spectator sport, it was harmless fun.

Sometimes, without warning, two or three older men would appear at the creek with an antique crank telephone. They’d strip the ends of the phone’s wires, dip them into the creek, and one man would crank the old contraption while the others watched the water, ready to drop their nets. The electrical current caused the fish to surface.

“Easy fishin’,” Henry said with a grin. “And while they were cranking, they’d holler out, ‘Calling Frank Mackie! Calling Frank Mackie!’”

Frank Mackie was the Yadkin County game warden in the 1950s and 60s and it was part of his job to snuff out telephone fishing. He often did, but always with the grace of a Mayberry sheriff.

While the telephoners were taunting him with their chants of “Calling Frank Mackie,” he’d sneak up behind them and, right on cue, pop out from behind a tree and announce, “Here I am!”

A good-natured fine followed and, without a fuss, the men would pay up and leave. Only to return in requisite time and repeat the show.

However, when it came to moonshiners, Henry and his friends kept to their neck of the woods.

“We didn’t bother them,” he said seriously, “and they didn’t give us no problem. But we knew not to go downstream below the bridge or there’d be trouble. That was their territory.”

These days, moonshiners on the North Deep Creek are relics of the past, along with coon hunts, sunk hole misadventures, and the rest. But for Henry Hutchens, the memories live on.

“I dream about this place. I really do. You know, I still remember when Marshall thought he could clear out both ditches at once!”

That was the day Henry’s brother Marshall careened a ’46 Ford truck down the slick Styers Mill dirt road next to Roger Cain’s farm, plowing through the ditches on both sides, before finishing upside down.

“Wrecked it bad, but Roger came over with his tractor and pulled it out, set it upright, and got it cranked, and then Marshall drove it away!”

Henry’s stories are endless, and the joy was obvious as he remembered the best times of his life. It’s the reason his eyes got teary this past fall when he fetched a yellow plastic bag from the end of his driveway.

“When I saw that bag, I knew it was the phone book, but when I pulled it out and saw the picture on the cover—I said, ‘Wow!’”

Yadtel Telecom chose the Shacktown Falls for the cover of this year’s phone book and when Henry saw the image of his boyhood hangout, his emotions took over. “I could feel my eyes getting watery.”

He called Yadtel to ask for a copy of the photo and the company obliged, providing him with a framed print he displays in his house on Rockford Road, nine miles north of Shacktown Falls. Without fail, every day since he hung the photo on his dining room wall, Henry pauses for a look. “Can’t help it. Best times of my life. I miss those guys.”

Now, with each glance of the framed falls, Henry Hutchens returns to the hidden sanctuary on the North Deep Creek where the boys of Shacktown bonded as brothers all those years ago.

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