Tiline, Kentucky

Episode 158 / 13 February 2020 / 151 min / full

A Hollow Full Of Murder

"We're going to Tellene, Kentucky... It's TILINE... Talline, Kentucky... this is western Kentucky, straight up panhandle of Kentucky" about 0:06:12

The case: Murder of Sharon Ray (April 2004); Rape case against a covered name (2008). Read the case file.

The figures, as told in 2020

Population

223

Median age

47 and a half

Median household income

$51,652

Median home value

$136,000

Two-bedroom rent

$618

Cost of living

82

Religious

58.7%

Property crime

▼ about one third

Violent crime

▼ one quarter

History, in brief

• Livingston County is named after covered name Livingston of New York City, who studied law at King's College, sat in the New York Provisional Congress and the Continental Congress, and helped draft the Declaration of Independence but went home to New York before signing it. about 0:10:17
• Livingston met the steamboat builder name withheld here Fulton, and their steamboat New Orleans made an inaugural trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 1811. about 0:12:28
• Smithland, two minutes from Tilene, was described in its early days as a lusty, bawling river town full of unsavoury characters. about 0:13:41
• The taverns of Smithland are reputed to have had tunnels used in the Underground Railroad. about 0:14:56
• Around 1800 a road was built between Smithland and Eddyville, then the county seat. about 0:15:06
• In mid-December 1811 a major earthquake shook the area; residents thought it was the end of the world, chimneys fell and tremors went on for months. about 0:15:17
• The night before the earthquake, Lilburne Lewis, a nephew of Thomas Jefferson, murdered his slave George with an axe in front of his other slaves after George broke a pitcher belonging to Lewis's dead mother, at Rocky Hill. about 0:18:37
• By the 1830s the area had a sawmill, a boatyard, a brickyard, a blacksmith shop and dry goods stores. about 0:19:12
• By 1840 the population was growing; huge floods hit in 1884 and again in 1937. about 0:19:38
• In 1961 Smithland temporarily changed its name to Albany, New York for the filming of part of How the West Was Won, starring Jimmy Stewart and Debbie Reynolds. about 0:19:59
• Andrew Jackson Smith, a runaway slave who became a Union Army soldier, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Honey Hill. about 0:20:34
• James Ford, a respected civic leader and businessman who lived from 1775 to 1833, was later found to be the secret leader of a gang of Ohio River pirates. about 0:20:55

The reviews read out

Open the episode file