Charles Tollett from down in Big Lick thought he had made the discovery of a lifetime.  It was way back in 1978.  Charles crossbred an Oak Tree with a Panamanian Cherry tree strictly by accident. After months of growing and cultivating, Charles noticed there was something strange about his new tree.  It buzzed when he got near it.  Charles didn’t give it much thought for a long time. One day Tollett had his buddy Lindell Agee come look at his ‘buzzing’ tree.  Agee, being the scholarly type, told Charles he thought the new breed of tree was putting off some kind of electrical signals.  Before long, the men got others involved and in early 1979 – built a device that they installed into the tree that looked like a crude standard electrical outlet.  Next, the guys went looking for someone who didnt have all the oars in the water to actualy plug something into the tree.  Wouldn’t you know, Walter Tollet stopped in to see what all the talk was about and ended up being the one elected to plug an electrical device into the new ‘electric tree’. Walter chose a Bissell upright vacuum cleaner model H-439.  Once all the onlookers were at a safe distance from the tree – and Walter – the action began. Walter leaned over and plugged the Bissell into the tree. To everyone’s surprise, that upright vacuum cleaner let out a scream you could hear clear to Vandever, and took off running ..heading toward the crowd sucking leaves, grass, twigs… everything as it flew across the yard. Before someone could unplug the vacuum cleaner it ran over Lindel Agee’s foot, caught is pant leg in the vacuum rotor motor, ripped his pant leg clean off and sucked it up in the Bissell model H-439.  Everyone was running for their lives. Eventually the vacuum-gone-wild ran down the hill and reached the limit of the electric cord thus unplugging itself from the ‘electric tree’.

When the whole escapade was over, everyone one in attendance promised never to tell of the incident to anyone for fear the community might think they were all batty or at the very least had a few too many sips of the mountain ‘squeezins’ (for medicinal purposes only of course).

Years later Charles figured his ‘electric’ tree might be worth revisiting and maybe change the world.  Trouble was, in time bark had formed over the electric outlet on the tree and nobody could find which tree it was that produced all that free electricity. Now we’re not sure any of this ever happened – but it sure makes for a good April Fools story.