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By Bob Weaver 2022
It was a torturous and fanciful story told family members across the years. It happened during the Civil War at the head of Walker Creek near the Village of Floe.
The story was told by Nettie Sears Mollohan and Esta Sears Ater in the 1970s.
It is a story about "Billy Rocks," a place name near Floe. Their father Mart Sears would tell the tale around the fireplace on long winter nights while they ate parched corn.
Billy Sears went to visit a neighbor named Marge who lived in a one room log house. She was a big woman that wore gathered skirts with a wire hoop underneath, making the skirt stand out.
While Billy was visiting, six yankees came to the door and Billy had no place to hide, with the soldiers just about to catch him.
Marge lifted her skirt and Billy huddled underneath the hoops. She stood in one place while the soldiers searched the house.
After they left, Billy fled. He and his horse traveled through the woods hiding from the soldiers on the ridge between Floe and Hallburg, when he discovered a huge rock formation. Under the rocks was a space as big as a room, where he hid.
While hiding in the woods, the soldiers burnt his house, so he and his horse maintained residency there for sometime, cutting brush and piling it around the rocks so he could not be spotted.
At that time people had large cornfields and he would slip and get corn for himself and the horse, often eating parched corn, also hunting and eating wild berries.
The story goes that Billy stayed under the rock until the war was over, a place now known in the community as "Billy Rocks."
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