No, it's not just you. If I remember what Bill Bryson said correctly, it was the way many English people pronounced it, which carried over to Colonial America. The East Coast eventually began pronouncing it as it was spelled. The earlier pronunciation survived over here in the frontier areas (Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, etc.) for quite some time, but was perceived as the backwoods' way of saying it. (It's always ironic how those things work, as chimley was the older way of saying it.)
In the same way, these "backwoods" pronunciations are often more closely related to the way Elizabethan English was actually pronounced. Even some of our current American pronunciations are more closely related to Elizabethan English pronunciations than current British English pronunciations.