Randolph McCoy

Randolph “Randall” McCoy was a Kentucky farmer and family patriarch whose name became inseparable from the nineteenth-century Hatfield–McCoy feud along the Kentucky–West Virginia border. Born in 1825, he lived in the Tug Valley region and raised a large family with his wife Sarah. Tensions between branches of the McCoy and Hatfield families intensified during the 1870s and 1880s through property disputes, court cases, romantic relationships and acts of retaliatory violence rather than through a single simple cause.

The feud became nationally notorious after three of Randolph’s sons were killed in retaliation for the death of Ellison Hatfield in 1882. Violence reached his own household on New Year’s night 1888, when a Hatfield-associated raiding party attacked the McCoy home, killing two of his children and burning the house. Subsequent arrests and prosecutions gradually reduced organised violence, while newspapers turned the families into symbols of Appalachian vendetta. Randolph lived until 1914, long after the feud’s most violent phase had ended.

In Ann Rinaldi’s The Coffin Quilt, Randolph McCoy stands at the head of the McCoy family as its quarrel with the Hatfields hardens into a cycle of accusation and retaliation. The story is filtered through Fanny McCoy, whose perspective exposes the personal cost of the feud and forces her to question the versions of events repeated within her own household. Randolph’s authority and grievances form one side of the family conflict that structures the novel.