Crutchfield's eccentric personality and unsophisticated manner of dress garnered frequent media attention during his lone term in Congress. In 1873, a correspondent for the "Washington Star" noted that since the tenure of Davy Crockett in the 1830s, each of Tennessee's congressional delegations had included at least one "mountaineer character," and that Crutchfield filled this role in the Forty-third Congress. The correspondent described Crutchfield as "a sunburnt, wiry little man, with foxy hair and whiskers, and though, by report, of considerable means, wears the cheapest of homespun suits, a good deal frayed at the edges, and with a pair of heavy, well-greased cowhide brogans that were the perpetual despair of the Pullman boot-blacks." In reporting on one of Crutchfield's speeches, the correspondent used eye dialect to depict to Crutchfield's thick Southern accent.