2014 Pickin' in Parsons Bluegrass Festival July 2014 | Page 8

Brooklyn Heights
1906 was a tough year for Charles Darwin Gillespie. Gillespie, an infamous saloon owner and liquor runner was
being sued for $20,000, a fortune at the time. It was only ten years earlier that Charles Darwin Gillespie left Virginia in a pair of dusty boots, a derby hat, and his only black suit. He arrived in Tucker County, West Virginia and
soon after opened a saloon in the county seat of Parsons. Next, he moved upriver to the flourishing town of Hendricks, where the West Virginia Central & Pittsburg Railroad had just come through, and the Otter Creek Boom &
Lumber Company was opening a line and a sawmill to haul in and cut fresh timber.
Hendricks was barely a town before Gillespie arrived in Tucker County. The railroad had only begun to puncture
the rugged and resource rich mountains of West Virginia before the turn of the century, and boom towns were just
beginning to spring up all along the new lines. Like hundreds of other towns, Hendricks was mostly just farmland
before, situated at the bottom of a narrow valley where the Cheat and the Blackwater Rivers came together, and
flanked by steep wooded mountainsides where the logging companies were busy cutting timber.
Gillispie quickly made a name for himself in Hendricks.
With the confidence of a railroad baron, he bought up
land, built a distillery, and distributed booze. And business boomed. He even named a street after himself in a
new section of town Gillespie planned to develop. But
in 1902, in an attempt to maintain order in the crowded
new town, Hendricks was voted dry. Fortunately Gillespie
was a shrewd businessman. Over the next year, Gillespie
bought up more land across the Black Fork of the Cheat
River where he set to work constructing a new distillery.
Here, he built houses for his new employees and had a
foot bridge constructed over the river to provide access
for those customers working and living in Hendricks. In
June of the same year, Gillespie had the town incorporated as Brooklyn Heights. He then opened the centerpiece of
his new town, the Cream of Kentucky saloon. As benefactor and mayor of Brooklyn Heights, Gillespie hired all the
town’s employees, including the local law enforcement, and, of course, had the town voted wet.
It didn’t take long for Brooklyn Heights to gain a reputation as a town of thieves, harlots, and drunks. The town
consistently made newspaper headlines, announcing new violence, or another murder. A man clubbed to death
and robbed. A body found in the river. A carousing husband
shot by his wife. Of 12 murders in the town’s short history,
there was only one conviction with only 5 years served.

The only known photo of Brooklyn Heights

Things began to go bad for Gillespie in 1906, when a prominent Hendricks citizen left the Cream of Kentucky saloon
after a night of drinking on July 25. The man was later found
run over on the tracks of the Otter Creek Lumber Company’s
railroad. Gillespie and his saloon were blamed and the widow
sued him for $20,000 in damages. After going to trial, Gillespie won the case, but the incident gave the county a reason
to revoke his liquor license.

The Cream of Kentucky Saloon became just a mere speakeasy after that, but in the following years Gillespie must have become tired or bored. Maybe it was the impending

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