BRIDGEPORT, W.Va. — Among the unusual stories preserved from the West Virginia frontier, few have a premise quite as strange as the legend of “Crock Face,” an Indigenous warrior said to have disguised himself as a scarecrow while waiting to ambush an early settler in the hills of what is now north-central West Virginia.
The tale, associated with Harrison County and recorded by West Virginia historian and folklorist Jim Comstock, has survived as one of the state’s more peculiar pieces of frontier folklore. Its setting falls within a documented period of violent conflict between settlers and Native peoples, though the extraordinary circumstances surrounding Crock Face and his disguise cannot be independently verified.
According to the story preserved by Comstock, Crock Face sought revenge against Benjamin Coplin, a frontier settler whose family lived along Simpson Creek in present-day Harrison County, about 35 miles southwest of Morgantown.
Rather than attack Coplin openly, Crock Face supposedly devised an unusual way to approach him without attracting attention. He concealed himself within a crude scarecrow in a nearby field, where he could remain unnoticed until his intended victim came within reach.
For hours, the disguised warrior remained motionless among the crops while travelers passed without suspecting that the apparently harmless figure concealed a man waiting inside. His elaborate deception might have succeeded had it not attracted the attention of a dog.
The animal reportedly became suspicious of the motionless figure and began barking, while at about the same time a wagon or sled carrying pumpkins overturned nearby. The resulting commotion drew people toward the field, and apparently Crock Face was forced to abandon his plan.
As the story was recorded, he attempted to escape but became entangled in the scarecrow’s framework or in the straps used to hold the disguise together. Unable to free himself, he strangled and died before those who approached understood what had happened.
One version of the tale holds that a moccasined foot protruding from the disguise finally revealed that the figure in the field was not a scarecrow at all.
The peculiar circumstances transformed what might otherwise have become another grim account of frontier violence into a story remembered for its irony, with the would-be attacker ultimately overcome by the elaborate disguise he had intended to use against his enemy.
The history behind the Crock Face legend
Although no contemporary record confirms Crock Face’s unusual death or the people he might be associated with, the historical setting in which the story takes place was very real.
During the 1770s and 1780s, the valleys of present-day north-central West Virginia lay near the western edge of European-American settlement. West Virginia would not exist as a state until 1863, and the territory was then part of Virginia’s vast western frontier.
Settlers moving westward across the Allegheny Mountains established isolated farms and small communities on lands long inhabited, hunted, and traveled by Native peoples. Increasing settlement in the upper Ohio and Monongahela valleys contributed to decades of conflict among Native nations, settlers, and colonial and, later, American forces.
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Families in the region sometimes lived within reach of fortified blockhouses, where they could seek refuge during periods of danger, while raids and retaliatory attacks became part of the historical memory of many early communities.
Simpson Creek, a tributary of the West Fork River, itself a tributary of the Monongahela River, became one of the early centers of settlement in what would become Harrison County. Benjamin Coplin is identified in historical accounts as one of the area’s pioneers. However, stories involving the region’s frontier families were often committed to writing decades after the events they purported to describe.
That distance between an event and its eventual recording presents a familiar problem for historians studying frontier folklore. Stories repeated within families and communities could preserve the memory of actual people and events while accumulating details that became impossible to distinguish from later embellishment. The Crock Face story appears to belong to that tradition.
Jim Comstock preserved West Virginia’s unusual stories
Much of the legend’s survival is owed to Jim Comstock, one of the most distinctive figures in 20th-century West Virginia journalism and publishing.
Comstock, a longtime newspaperman and folklorist from Richwood, devoted much of his career to collecting West Virginia’s history, humor, legends, and eccentricities. He founded the West Virginia Hillbilly newspaper and compiled the monumental West Virginia Heritage Encyclopedia, preserving stories that might otherwise have disappeared with the generations that told them.
His collections remain valuable records of West Virginia culture, even though many of the legends he preserved originated in oral tradition rather than in contemporary historical documentation. Crock Face is therefore best understood not as a documented historical account but as a frontier legend preserved by one of West Virginia’s foremost collectors of folklore.
That distinction does not make the story any less revealing. Instead, it offers a glimpse into how generations of Appalachian families remembered the dangerous and uncertain world of the early frontier.
A strange story that survived for generations
The tale of Crock Face contains many of the elements that helped frontier stories endure—a recognizable place, an early settler, danger, deception, and an ending unusual enough to be remembered long after anyone who might have witnessed the event was gone.
It also reflects the perspective from which many early frontier histories were recorded. Native people were often portrayed as antagonists in accounts preserved by settler families. By contrast, the circumstances that produced violence between Native nations and expanding European-American settlements received far less attention.
More than two centuries later, there may be no way to determine whether a man actually concealed himself inside a scarecrow along Simpson Creek, whether an unusual frontier encounter gradually evolved into the story, or whether the episode belongs entirely to folklore.
What survives is the image that made the legend memorable in the first place—an apparently ordinary scarecrow standing in a Harrison County field while something unexpected waited inside.