February 2022 | Kentucky Monthly Magazine

G E O R G E E L L A LYO N L E A D S 2 0 2 2 H A L L O F FA M E I N D U C T E E S

FEBRUARY 2022

with Kentucky Explorer

and more: 2022 KENTUCKY WRITERS HALL OF FAME INDUCTEES

PENNED

T H E U LT I M AT E CHEERLEADERS KENTUCKY’S COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY MASCOTS INCLUDE A WIDE ARRAY OF COLORFUL CREATURES, LIKE WESTERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY'S BIG RED

LITERARY CONTEST WINNERS

KENTUCKY FRONTIERSMAN SIMON KENTON, PART 3 OF A 3-PART SERIES

Display until 03/08/2022

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O N T H E C OV E R Western Kentucky University’s Big Red

in this issue

32

FEBR UARY D E PA R T M E N T S 2 Kentucky Kwiz 3 Readers Write 4 Mag on the Move 6 Across Kentucky 7 Music 8 Cooking 49 Kentucky Explorer 60 Past Tense/ Present Tense 61 Off the Shelf 62 Field Notes 63 Calendar 64 Vested Interest

12 2022 Kentucky Hall of Fame Inductee Profiles 21 Penned: The 14th Annual Writer’s Showcase The best of reader-submitted fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry 32 Spreading Spirit The mascots of Kentucky’s colleges and universities fire up the crowds while representing the schools’ character and heritage

8

40 Wilderness Odyssey: The Saga of Simon Kenton The adventurer is in his element as a fighter and wilderness scout.

But when he at last tries to settle down, courts, governments and unscrupulous land grabbers have other ideas in the final installment of a threepart series on Kenton

k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 1

kentucky kwiz Test your knowledge of our beloved Commonwealth. To find out how you fared, see the bottom of Vested Interest.

BRITISH ROYALS AND KENTUCKY Celebrating the best of our Commonwealth

1. What year did Queen Elizabeth II attend the Kentucky Derby?

7. Which British Royal visited Kentucky in 2015?

A. 2007

A. Prince William

B. 2002

B. Prince Philip

C. 2010

C. Prince Charles

© 2022, Vested Interest Publications Volume Twenty-Five, Issue 1, February 2022 Stephen M. Vest Publisher + Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Patricia Ranft Associate Editor

2. Which running of the Derby did she attend?

A. 133 B. 123 C. 136 3. Who came with the Queen on her Derby visit?

A. Her children B. Her husband C. Her friend 4. Which horse won the Derby the year the Queen attended?

A. Street Sense B. Curlin C. Zanjero 5. What color did the Queen wear for her Derby visit?

8. The Queen has visited Kentucky several times, including which of these years?

A. 1990 B. 1984 C. 1981 9. What year did the Duke and Duchess of Windsor attend the Derby?

A. 1953 B. 1947 C. 1951 10. What year did did Princess Margaret attend the Derby?

A. 1974 B. 1976

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POSTMASTER: Send address changes to KENTUCKY MONTHLY, P.O. Box 559, Frankfort, KY 40602-0559.

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B. A horse farm

12. Which Kentucky city hosted an exhibit honoring the late Princess Diana?

C. The Kentucky Castle

A. Lexington B. Louisville C. Henderson

“Kentucky Kwiz” courtesy of Karen M. Leet, author of Sarah’s Courage, a Kentucky historical novel, and co-author of Civil War, Lexington, Kentucky, historical nonfiction, both from The History Press.

2 KE NT U C K Y M O NT H LY F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 2

Senior Kentributors Jackie Hollenkamp Bentley, Bill Ellis, Steve Flairty, Gary Garth, Janine Washle, Kim Kobersmith, Walt Reichert, Joel Sams, Tracey Teo and Gary P. West

KENTUCKY MONTHLY (ISSN 1542-0507) is published 10

C. Green

A. The Governor’s Mansion

Cait A. Smith Copy Editor

C. 1978

B. Blue

6. Where has the Queen sometimes stayed during her Kentucky visits?

Ted Sloan Contributing Editor

Lindsey Collins Senior Account Executive and Coordinator

11. In which Kentucky city did Princess Anne help open an art exhibit?

A. Red

Rebecca Redding Creative Director Deborah Kohl Kremer Assistant Editor

Thomas L. Hall, Judy M. Harris, Greg and Carrie Hawkins, Jan and John Higginbotham, Frank Martin, Bill Noel, Michelle Jenson McDonnell, Walter B. Norris, Kasia Pater, Dr. Mary Jo Ratliff, Barry A. Royalty, Randy and Rebecca Sandell, Kendall Carr Shelton and Ted M. Sloan.

Kentucky Monthly invites queries but accepts no responsibility for unsolicited material; submissions will not be returned.

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More to Explore...

Counties mentioned in this issue...

Readers Write British Inspiration

Triggering Memories

The picture of the antique gallery sign on page 22 of the December/January issue is beautiful.

The story about Ralphie, etc. hit the spot (Bill Ellis’ December/January column, page 58).

My father, William W. Ellis—the man mentioned in my Christmas story (page 58) who ran Ellis Welding and Brazing Co. —and another man who worked for Mark Scearce’s gallery made the sign around 1954. It is a copy of the Rose & Crown Inn sign in Tring, England, which is still in business.

Thank you so much for the work it must take to keep the magazine up and running and healthy! It is such a joy.

Bill Ellis, Lexington

K. Bruce Florence, Maysville

Accurately Recording History I thoroughly enjoyed Bill Ellis’ October article (page 74).

It appears that some people seem to prefer to read only history that seems like a Hallmark movie—only good endings. The dark chapters in our history need to be revealed instead of just looking at the rosy parts of our history. Effective solutions can only be attained when we have accurate facts to deal with.

The sign from the 16th century British inn.

We might ask: Who deems events as important, and

who deems events as not important? Whose measuring stick is being used? Through whose eyes is history being recorded and reported upon?

Each of us is likely to evaluate and assess events in a different perspective.

We should all learn from the past to help for the future. Most people recognize that if we do not learn from history, mistakes made in the past will be repeated in the future. If more people understood what happened in the 191820 influenza pandemic, we might have seen a significant reduction in the lives lost due to COVID-19 during the last two years.

Then again ... maybe not.

If history is not accurately recorded and reported, the long-term results can be detrimental for all of us.

Thanks again for another good article. Keep it up! I look forward to Dr. Ellis’ future articles.

The Kentucky Gift Guide Kentucky Monthly is thrilled to partner with Kentucky Proud, bringing to your attention some of the finest handcrafted gifts and treats our Commonwealth has to offer.

Drink Local This handy guide to sipping in the Bluegrass State spotlights local breweries, wineries and, of course, distilleries. Discover unique ways to drink in Kentucky, creative cocktail recipes and more.

Tom Crouch, via email

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Email us your comments at editor@kentuckymonthly.com, send a letter through our website at kentuckymonthly.com, or message us on Facebook. Letters may be edited for clarification and brevity.

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C O N N E C T.

UNITING KENTUCKIANS EVERYWHERE. k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 3

travel

MAG ON THE MOVE

Even when you’re far away, you can take the spirit of your Kentucky home with you. And when you do, we want to see it!

These photos pre-date the COVID-19 outbreak, social distancing and mask mandates. Kentucky Monthly supports all safe travel measures.

Take a copy of the magazine with you and get snapping! Send your high-resolution photos (usually 1 MB or higher) to editor@kentuckymonthly.com or visit kentuckymonthly.com to submit your photo.

Palm Queens FLORIDA (left) The Pikeville High School girls basketball team traveled to Fort Myers, Florida, where they won the Queen of the Palms Basketball tournament in December.

Southeast Asian Travelers SINGAPORE (right) Dot Stagich (left), who lives in Germantown, Tennessee, and Carol Elam of Lexington soaked in the lush beauty of the Singapore Botanic Gardens.

4 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR U A R Y 2 0 2 2

music. hike. bike. run.

How do you plan the weekend?

Let us make it easy for you.

On “The Rock” VISITLONDONKY.COM

CALIFORNIA Five members of the University of Kentucky Woman’s Club visited Alcatraz, where Lexington resident Peg Kasa was “imprisoned” with some fine reading material.

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BUY YOUR GEAR WE BUY, SELL AND TRADE USED MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND EQUIPMENT OF ALL BRANDS Getting “The Gift of Gab” IRELAND Carol McClure of Greenville posed for this shot before climbing the 129 spiral stone steps to kiss the Blarney Stone at Blarney Castle in County Cork, Ireland.

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across kentucky

FEBRUARY BIRTHDAYS 1 Arturo Alonzo Sandoval (1942), noted fiber artist and University of Kentucky professor of art

Bourbon Tasting, Education and More Bourbon fans have a new destination to visit in Lawrenceburg. The 14,446-square-foot Four Roses visitor center features tasting rooms, tasting experiences, an interactive history display, and Bar 1888—named for the year the Four Roses name was first trademarked.

“It’s an exciting time at Four Roses, and we are proud to take this next step in our effort to provide an enhanced experience to our visitors, while maintaining our commitment to producing top-quality bourbon,” said Kelli Wright, guest experience manager at Four Roses. “The new visitor center provides our guests with more opportunities to learn about and experience Four Roses in some welcoming and comfortable new spaces.”

For more information about the new center, check out fourrosesbourbon.com/visit.

Decadent? Depraved? Glorious!

An eye-catching jacket worn by restaurateur Jeff Ruby to the Derby.

PHOTO: KENTUCKY DERBY MUSEUM

The Kentucky Derby is the world’s most famous horse race, and the unique incidents that have occurred throughout its 146-year history are just as notable. The Derby is celebrating some of those “wild stories” with its latest exhibit, Welcome to Derbyville.

From now until the fall, the exhibit showcases several artifacts, paintings and displays. Among them are items from Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman’s 1970 trip to Churchill Downs and Thompson’s infamous commentary, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” which appeared in Scanlan’s Monthly.

The exhibit includes artist Joe McGee’s sketches and studies from walking around Churchill Downs on race days, a “Derby or Bust” wagon used by infield patrons in the 1990s, and interactive components where visitors can write down and share their own Derbyville stories.

For more information about the exhibit, visit derbymuseum.org.

6 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

5 Gary P. West (1943), Bowling Green-based author and columnist 6 Tinashe Jorgensen Kachingwe (1993), R&B singer and actress from Lexington 10 John Calipari (1959), University of Kentucky’s Basketball Hall of Fame basketball coach 12 Ed Hamilton (1947), renowned sculptor from Louisville 15 Chris T. Sullivan (1948), UK graduate who founded Outback Steakhouse 18 Mark Melloan (1981), folksinger/songwriter from Elizabethtown 20 Brian Littrell (1975), Christian singer/songwriter from Lexington 20 Mitch McConnell (1942), U.S. Senate Minority Leader from Louisville 22 Rajon Rondo (1986), UK AllAmerican basketball star from Louisville, currently with the Cleveland Cavaliers 21 John Clay (1959), sports columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader 24 Beth Broderick (1959), Falmouth-born television actress 24 Kelly Dawn Craft (1962), Glasgow-born philanthropist and former U.S. Ambassador to Canada 26 Alexandria Mills (1992), Shepherdsville fashion model and Miss World 2010 27 Jared Champion (1983), Bowling Green-born drummer of the rock band Cage the Elephant 27 Benny Snell Jr. (1998), running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers

music Artist: Jake Ford

by Laura Younkin

The Music Bug

I

t’s not unusual to take home for granted. Kentucky musician Grayson Jenkins, who grew up in Greenville in Muhlenberg County, said it’s easy to “glance over what’s cool in your community.”

Only when he got older did Jenkins realize that coming from a region that spawned the Everly Brothers, Bill Monroe and Merle Travis was pretty remarkable. Growing up, he listened to country radio and didn’t delve into Muhlenberg legends. As a musician now living in Lexington, he said he can finally appreciate the music that was all around him as a child.

Early on, Jenkins had a spotty love affair with music. He got a guitar at 14. “That stuck for two or three months,” he said. “I was really into it, and then I wasn’t into it.”

But singing was something he had done all his life. He’d sing when he was by himself but was too shy to sing publicly. “I didn’t have the courage or know-how to do it—sing in front of people,” he said.

A few experiences helped to slowly build Jenkins’ confidence in his performing skills. In high school, he was chosen to participate in the Governor’s Scholars Program. “That was really eye-opening,” Jenkins said of the program. Being around different people from different cultures and being exposed to new ways of doing things intrigued him.

While at the University of Kentucky, Jenkins had a guitar-playing roommate who played at parties while Jenkins sang along. Then, he got a 4-H

internship back home.

On one of the 4-H outings, Jenkins took students to Nashville. “We took a bunch of middle schoolers and high schoolers to Tootsie’s,” he said, which, in retrospect, he thinks was a daring move.

Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge is a well-known bar.

Jenkins said one of his mentors in that job convinced him to get on Tootsie’s stage and sing. “He probably gave the guy 20 bucks to let me play onstage,” he said.

Getting on the stage at Tootsie’s changed things for him. “Once the bug bites you, you got to go on,” he said. And Jenkins had been bitten.

He went back to college and started playing a regular gig at Henry Clay’s Public House in downtown Lexington. After graduation, Jenkins worked at a full-time job but left in 2017 to make music full time.

Now, he works part time for a company that specializes in live music events and data. The flexible hours of this position allow him to pursue his music career. Jenkins played at Lexington’s Railbird Festival last year and hopes to perform at more festivals while performing less at bars. But he’s just happy to be singing. “I enjoy it.

Life is work and work is life, and most days, that’s OK,” he said.

When asked about his Kentucky influences, Jenkins didn’t mention artists first. He talked about the influences of everyday Kentuckians.

“From a musical standpoint and the way I write, the way people talk influences me,” he said. “Turns of phrases, accents, cadence of speech.”

Jenkins described his style as folkrock influenced by country. “I’m just happy sitting on a stool and playing acoustic,” he said. He has an easygoing, singer-songwriter style that fits comfortably with the Americana music aesthetic.

Jenkins sees his future as a musician as growing bit by bit. “I just want to make records and play songs.

Keep it simple,” he said. “I’m excited for the future.”

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k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 7

cooking

Soup-er Bowls P H OTO S B Y R E B E C CA R E D D I N G

Mock Turtle Soup SERVES 8 1 pound ground beef 6 carrots 2 medium onions 1 stalk celery 48 ounces chicken stock ½ cup ketchup

1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes 1¼ cups chili sauce ½ cup tomato juice ³ cup vinegar

1/

½ teaspoon thyme 1 clove garlic Place the following in a cheesecloth bag: 5 cloves 5 whole allspice 1½ teaspoon mixed pickling spice Optional Toppings: Hard-boiled eggs Finely sliced lemon 1. Brown ground beef in a stockpot and drain. Finely chop carrots, onions and celery and add to pot.

Add remaining ingredients, including the bag of spices.

RECIPE COURTESY OF ASSISTANT EDITOR

Deborah Kohl Kremer

2. Heat over medium high, bringing soup to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer around 30 minutes or until vegetables are tender.

3. Remove cheesecloth bag. Serve with chopped hardboiled eggs and/or finely sliced lemon as garnish.

8 KE NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 2

8

K E N T U C K Y M O N T H LY • D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 8 / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 9

Welcome to Super Bowl season. While chicken wings, chips with guacamole, and meatballs typically lead the Super Bowl party lineup, homemade soup can be a great option for get-togethers. The following recipes—provided by members of the Kentucky Monthly family—are warm, filling and sure to be crowd pleasers.

Plus, each can be multiplied to feed a large group of football fans.

Chicken Gnocchi Spinach Soup SERVES 4-5 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 cup onion, chopped 2 cloves garlic, minced 2 cups poached and shredded skinless chicken breasts or thighs 32 ounces chicken stock 2 teaspoons fresh thyme, minced 2 teaspoons Italian seasoning 1 teaspoon garlic powder Salt and pepper, to taste 3 cups chopped spinach 1 16-ounce package potato gnocchi Optional Toppings: Shredded Parmesan cheese Pesto 1. Heat olive oil in a stockpot over medium heat. Sauté onions until they are translucent, 8-10 minutes.

Add garlic and sauté an additional 2-3 minutes.

2. Add chicken, chicken stock, thyme, Italian seasoning, garlic powder, salt and pepper. Bring to a gentle boil, stirring occasionally.

3. Stir in gnocchi and spinach. Cook until gnocchi float, 3-8 minutes.

RECIPE COURTESY OF ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patricia Ranft

4. Garnish with desired toppings before serving.

k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 9

cooking

White Chicken Chili SERVES 6 32 ounces chicken stock 3 15.5-ounce cans white beans, undrained 1 pound chicken breast 1 16-ounce jar salsa (I use a chunky version) 2 teaspoons ground cumin 2 cloves garlic, minced Black pepper, to taste 8 ounces pepper jack cheese, grated* Optional Toppings: Fritos or corn chips, crushed* Sour cream Avocado Salsa 1. Add all ingredients—except cheese and toppings—to a slow cooker. Cook about 8 hours on low until chicken is fully cooked.

2. Remove chicken to cutting board. Turn slow cooker up to high and add cheese. Stir until melted.

3. Shred chicken and return to soup.

4. Garnish with desired toppings before serving.

RECIPE COURTESY OF SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE

Lindsey Collins *There are many ways to switch up this recipe and make it your own.

I prefer to substitute 4 ounces of cream cheese for the pepper jack cheese and tortilla chips for the Fritos or corn chips!

-Lindsey

10 K E NT U C K Y M O NTHLY F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 2

10

K E N T U C K Y M O N T H LY • D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 8 / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 9

Proud to call Kentucky home.

Creating a Culture of Impact

RECIPE COURTESY OF BUSINESS MANAGER

Kay Vest

Taco Soup SERVES 10-12

Optional Toppings:

2 pounds ground beef

Shredded cheese

1 large onion, diced

Sour cream

1 package ranch mix

Chopped green tomatoes

1 package taco mix

Sliced or chopped jalapenos

1 15-ounce can corn, drained

Tortilla chips

1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes 1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes with green chiles 1 4-ounce can diced green chiles, optional

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1 15-ounce can black beans, rinsed 1 15-ounce can chili beans

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1. Brown ground beef and onions.

Drain fat. Add ranch and taco mixes to beef and onions and stir to combine. Add remaining ingredients and stir.

2. Simmer for 1 hour. Or you may combine ingredients in a slow cooker and cook on low for 6-8 hours.

• Family Nurse Practitioner • Women’s Health Care Nurse Practitioner • Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner

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3. Garnish with desired toppings before serving. k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 11

2022

Kentucky Writers

Hall of

Fame.

George Ella Lyon is a multitalented author whose work is deeply rooted in her native Harlan County. Loyal Jones also is an Appalachian, and his writing, teaching and activism have made an enormous contribution to scholarship about the region’s culture. James C. Klotter, who grew up in Owsley County, is a prolific author and has been Kentucky’s official state historian for more than four decades.

These three authors and two deceased writers—pioneering Black journalist Ted Poston and poet Robert Hazel—soon will join 50 other living and deceased writers in the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. An induction ceremony is planned March 24 at the Kentucky Theatre in Lexington.

The Hall of Fame was created by the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in 2012 to recognize outstanding writers with strong ties to Kentucky. Members are chosen by committees at the Carnegie Center and the Kentucky Arts Council that include some of the state’s most accomplished writers.

Learn more about these Kentucky literary icons in this special section. These articles were written by Tom Eblen, a former Lexington Herald-Leader columnist and managing editor who is the Carnegie Center’s literary arts liaison.

L E A R N M O R E AT CA R N E G I E C E N T E R L E X . O R G

12 K E NT U C K Y M O NTHLY F EBR UARY 2022

George Ella Lyon.

G

eorge Ella Lyon has written something for just about every kind of reader. In a career spanning nearly four decades, she has published two novels, 10 poetry collections, six novels for young people, and 34 children’s picture books, plus stories, songs, plays, scripts and memoirs that, like the writer herself, defy categories.

She is a poet, writer, teacher, musician, storyteller and social activist with Appalachian roots and a global reach. “Where I’m From,” her 1993 poem about personal identity, has become a classroom classic, statewide and national arts projects, and a writing prompt used by teachers around the world.

So, what is her advice for other writers and would-be writers?

“Writing, first of all, is for you,” she said in an interview. “It’s really a tool for understanding yourself and helping yourself. Your voice matters.

You have stories to tell that nobody else could tell. You look at the world in a way that no one has ever looked at it before.”

That certainly has been true for Lyon, who will be inducted March 24 into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame along with two other living writers—Kentucky historian James C. Klotter and Appalachian scholar Loyal Jones—and two deceased writers, pioneering journalist Ted Poston and poet and teacher Robert Hazel.

APPALACHIAN ROOTS She was born George Ella Hoskins on April 25, 1949, in the southeastern Kentucky coal mining town of Harlan.

Her father, Robert, was a dry cleaner who read poems aloud and sang to her. Her mother, Gladys, loved to play imagination games with her.

“Mother named me after her brother George and her sister Ella,” she said, explaining her unusual name. “If she’d taken their middle names, I would be Benjamin May.” Lyon’s parents were in the first generation of their families to go to college. When her father’s father, a homebuilder, built their home in

Harlan, her parents insisted he include a library with built-in bookshelves. “That room expressed the center of the family,” she said.

When she was in sixth grade, Lyon’s only sibling, her brother Robert, left Harlan for Yale University. He is now retired after a career as an English professor at James Madison University in Virginia.

Lyon started writing poems in third grade, but the main creative outlet of her youth was music. She first played piano and flute. But by eighth grade, when she started hearing folk songs on the radio, she traded her flute and $10 for a guitar.

She subscribed to, and then wrote for, Sing Out! magazine, the bible of the folk music revival of that era.

“What I wanted to do was go to Greenwich Village and be a folk singer. That was my plan,” she said.

“My folks didn’t think that was such a hot idea.”

Instead of New York, she went to Danville, earning a bachelor’s degree from Centre College in 1971. Next stop was the University of Arkansas for a master’s degree and then to Indiana University, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1978. She married musician and writer Stephen Lyon in 1972. They have two sons—Benn, 45, and Joey, 35—and a granddaughter, Mina, 4.

‘CLOSE TO THE WONDER’ Lyon has taught creative writing at five colleges and universities, but most of her income has come from publishing and—until the COVID-19 pandemic—visiting schools, where she reads to, sings with, and inspires children.

“When I speak to kids, I hope there is joy in that experience and they see possibilities in themselves and in the world that maybe they didn’t see before, and they get listened to when they ask a question,” she said. “I just love being that close to the wonder.

“But I’ve also seen some very hard things in those school visits—children you don’t forget. And some fabulous teachers, who, as we know, are often

the most stable adult in a child’s life.”

For the past 35 years, Lyon has spent much of her time each day in a tiny sun-splashed writing studio on the second floor of her home in Lexington’s Gardenside neighborhood.

She mostly writes by hand at a standup desk but reaches for her laptop computer when she wants to write outside or with her eyes shut.

“I write in part for the same reason I read, which is to be in a larger world beyond myself,” she said. “And then, sometimes, somebody reads it and it really means something to them, and that’s huge. It’s huge to think something you wrote has touched someone the way things other people wrote have touched you.”

Lyon’s list of honors and awards is almost as long as her list of books.

When asked what other writers have influenced her, Lyon names an array of influences ranging from James Still and Robert Gipe to Nikky Finney and Pete Seeger. At the top of the list, though, is Virginia Woolf. “I consider her my word mother in many ways,” she said.

Lyon said she also has been influenced by her sons and husband Steve. “The range of his creativity and his humor,” she said. “Just being married to another artist, that’s a huge thing. You respect what it requires in each other.”

FINDING COMMUNITY Lyon said it took her a while to become comfortable writing as an Appalachian—and a woman—after her education in classic literature, which skews heavily toward affluent white male writers. But once she did, “the world both magnified and came closer because I could listen for my own voice as opposed to having a ‘poetry voice,’ ” she said. It also has given her a community, something she values more with each passing year: “I’ve been really lucky to have a

k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 13

community of Appalachian writers and readers.”

After graduate school, Lyon focused on poetry, publishing her first collection, Mountain, in 1983. But she said her most fortunate break came the next year, when the late Richard Jackson, who would become her longtime editor, encouraged her to write books for children. Her first picture book, Father Time and the Day Boxes, illustrated by Robert Andrew Parker, grew out of a conversation she had with her then-young son, Benn.

“I was just so lucky,” she said of getting started writing picture books. She enjoys collaborating with illustrators, and she loves how young readers embrace stories. “Only kindergarteners get so excited about what you’re reading that they fall out of their chair. I’ve never had an adult do that! Children are so new, and they ask the deepest questions, and they say extraordinary things.”

Social justice has been central to Lyon’s writing and activism. Part of that came, she said, from growing up in Harlan County, a place of great wealth and great poverty. She also thinks it is a result of coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s, when the civil rights, peace and environmental movements were in full flower.

When Lyon was Kentucky’s Poet Laureate, from 2015-17, the Kentucky Arts Council helped her turn the “Where I’m From” poem into a statewide poetry participation project that drew 731 submissions from 83 counties.

Then, Lyon and Julie Landsman, a Minneapolis-based writer and educator, transformed it into an online project (iamfromproject.com) that has received submissions of poetry, photos, audio, video and other artistic expressions from people across the country. The goal was to create more appreciation for 14 K E NT U C K Y M O NTHLY F EBR UARY 2022

America’s rich diversity and to combat what Lyon called “the fearand hate-mongering alive in our country today.”

Lyon said she doesn’t try to preach in her writing, especially in her children’s books, but she said, “I hope if kids are moved by the story, then the concerns of the story may also reach them.”

TAKING RISKS WITH WRITING A writing career as varied and prolific as Lyon’s requires risktaking—writing for others but also for herself.

The boldest example may be her most recent poetry collection, Back to the Light, published in April 2021 by the University Press of Kentucky. In poems that trace her life’s path from childhood to the present, she reveals much, including that she was sexually assaulted at age 5 by an older boy, a family friend, but her mother didn’t believe her.

“It’s partly having a granddaughter and wanting not only to have her be

safe in the world but wanting me to be clearer so I’m not hiding something,” she said of the decision to publish that poem, which she titled “Out with It.” “The stories that aren’t told have a huge impact on us, just like the people who are missing in our family have a huge impact on us,” she said. “It’s a healing, and it’s an acceptance. I’ve had people say to me that that book really helped them.

So, gee, what a thing is that!”

Lyon’s daily writing practice often begins with her journal. She has been keeping journals for decades, and they fill several of the shelves that line the walls of her upstairs writing room.

Journal entries often become writing projects— sometimes years later, because she likes to go back through and read her old journals.

“There’s the experience of visiting yourself earlier but also recognizing things that were ahead of you,” she said. “So, in a way, those journals are like shelves of things you grew and canned; they’re food for the future. That’s not something I knew was going to be true, but it is.”

Lyon said she tends to write more from feelings than ideas. And after all these years, writing has not lost its magic for her.

“It’s a powerful tool,” she said. “I love the fact that, when it’s working, it’s always new, and there’s always a lot to learn. My very favorite moment is when I realize it’s got something I couldn’t give it. It becomes enlivened; we’re collaborating as opposed to me putting words on the paper. I don’t know if that’s what they call ‘in the zone’ or flow.

“I never know where it’s going, except down the page. But it’s a wonderful thing to be in the presence of something that wants to be, and be a part of creation that’s ongoing, and we all tap into in some way or another.”

James Christopher Klotter.

J

ames Christopher Klotter is an award-winning author who has spent his career researching and interpreting Kentucky history. Since 1980, he has served as the State Historian of Kentucky.

“With the possible exception of Thomas D. Clark, Jim probably knows more about the Commonwealth than anyone else in our history,” said Kentucky Monthly’s Bill Ellis, a fellow Kentucky historian and author who is retired from Eastern Kentucky University.

Klotter was born Jan. 17, 1947, in Lexington to Marjorie Gibson and John C. Klotter, who was later a dean at the University of Louisville. His parents divorced when he was young, and Klotter grew up mostly in Owsley County. He was educated at the University of Kentucky, earning his Ph.D. in 1975. He was a U.S. Army officer from 1970-71.

“As a young child, I had traveled to many Kentucky sites with my father and had always found them fascinating,” Klotter said.

But he didn’t start taking Kentucky history seriously until graduate school, when mentor Holman Hamilton got him interested in the Breckinridge family. “That dissertation required me to study the state’s history over a two-century timeframe, which awoke in me a fascination with the state’s past—and its future,” Klotter said.

Klotter is the author of 12 books, including The Breckinridges of Kentucky, 1760-1981 (University Press of 16 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

Kentucky, 1986), and more than 60 articles. He wrote chapters for six other books, edited 11 more books, and has given almost 1,000 talks about Kentucky history across the state.

“Research is usually fun, as you read other people’s mail or old newspapers or recent interviews and the like,” he said. “Writing is a solitary action, and it can be hard at times. But there is a special joy when you craft a well-written sentence, when you understand your subject and can explain that revelation to the reader, when you realize that you are creating a special story that no one else can do.

“In fiction, you are limited by your imagination; in nonfiction historical writing, you are limited by your sources. How frustrating it can be to feel you know something important about your subject, but you cannot find the sources to prove it. But there is a real excitement when you do find missing pieces to the puzzle, when you are operating as the historian as detective, when you find answers no one else has discovered.”

Klotter said he is especially proud of two books: Henry Clay: The Man Who Would Be President (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Kentucky Justice, Southern Humor, and American Manhood: Understanding the Life and Death of Richard Reid (LSU Press, 2003).

The Clay book “encompasses such an imposing national subject, over such a long time period, and covered a timeframe where I had not worked

in much previously,” he said. “The other favorite is almost the reverse.

[It] explores the life and death of an almost forgotten man, but in a short book looks at him in special depth and is, I think, well-written and even shocking.”

Klotter went to work for the Kentucky Historical Society in 1973 and was its executive director from 1990 until 1998. In 1991, he initiated a campaign to fund the construction of the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History in Frankfort. He then served as a history professor at Georgetown College from 1998 until his retirement in 2018.

He has been a leader in many historical organizations, including the Filson Historical Society, the Kentucky Oral History Commission, the Southern Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Kentucky Civil War Roundtable.

He has been married since 1966 to Freda Campbell Klotter, whom he met when he was 5. She was his co-author on two Kentucky history textbooks. They have two daughters, a son, and seven grandchildren.

Klotter has received many awards, including the University of Kentucky Medallion for Intellectual Achievement (2016), the Carl West Literary Award from the Kentucky Book Festival (2021), and the Governor’s Outstanding Kentuckian Award (1998). He holds honorary degrees from Eastern Kentucky University and Union College.

Loyal Jones.

L

oyal Jones is a prolific writer and scholar of Appalachian culture who has been a friend and mentor to many other writers and scholars of the region. He is the author or co-author of 13 books and dozens of articles.

Jones was born Jan. 5, 1928, in Marble, North Carolina, one of eight children in a farming family. When he was 12, the family moved to Brasstown, North Carolina, where the John C. Campbell Folk School had been created in 1925.

After high school, Jones served briefly in the U.S. Navy, then farmed and trained show horses for several years.

A woman associated with the folk school suggested to Jones that he enroll in Berea College. Both institutions had good libraries, fueling his interest in reading, writing and learning more about his native region. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Berea and a master’s degree in English from the University of North Carolina.

Before returning to Berea College to teach, Jones taught in the U.S. Army and Jefferson County public schools. He was associate executive director and later executive director of the Council of the Southern Mountains. Jones founded and led Berea College’s Appalachian Center from 1970 until 1993. Berea College’s trustees voted in 2008 to name the center for him.

“I tried to write about what I thought the real values of the Appalachian people were rather than the negative things, like moonshining and feuds,” Jones said. His favorite and most popular book is Appalachian Values (1995), with photographs by Warren Brunner. He and co-author Billy Ed Wheeler wrote five books about Appalachian humor.

“Loyal Jones, in many ways, deserves to be called the father of modern Appalachian studies,” said Ron Eller, a retired University of Kentucky history professor, author and

leading historian of Appalachia. “Loyal represented a whole generation of mountain young people who discovered their Appalachian identity in the 1960s and 1970s and dedicated themselves to improving the region and celebrating mountain culture. In the manner of traditional mountain storytellers, Loyal was able to relate the dignity of mountain life and culture throughout his writings, lectures and many media appearances. As a scholar, he is widely respected today as a leading authority on Appalachian culture, humor and music.”

Bill Turner, a Harlan County native and scholar of Black history and culture in Appalachia, said Jones has been a longtime mentor and friend. “Loyal Jones picked me up more than four decades ago when I most needed advice, counsel, direction and instructions on how to frame my perspective, research, and writing on Appalachia, specifically Black people in the region,” Turner said. “My book, The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns, not only has Loyal’s imprint and influence throughout, he wrote the foreword. Loyal Jones is a brilliant, compassionate, funny and humble gentleman.”

From 1973 until ’93, Jones led Berea’s annual Celebration of Traditional Music. He has been involved with Hindman Settlement School, including as a director and chairman of the board, since 1978.

Jones and his wife, the former Nancy Swan, who died in 2016, were the parents of three children. Jones now lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina.

Jones’ many awards include the President’s Medallion and W.D. Weatherford Award from Berea College, the Thomas Wolfe Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Society, and the Outstanding Contributor to Appalachian Literature and Culture Award from the Appalachian Writers Association.

k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 17

Robert Hazel.

R

obert Hazel published five collections of poetry, three novels and several short stories. He was a much-admired teacher of writers who later became famous, including Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, James Baker Hall, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, Rita Mae Brown and Charles Simic.

Robert Elvin Hazel was born June 27, 1921, in Bloomington, Indiana, the son of an Indiana University physicist. He served in the U.S. Marines during World War II and attended several colleges as an undergraduate, switching his major from science to English his junior year. He earned a B.A. from George Washington University and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro.

As a writer, Hazel was best known for his poetry. His first volume, Poems/1951-1961, had a glowing introduction from poet Allen Tate. “There is no poet of his generation to whom more has been given,” Tate wrote. “I do not know any younger American poet who has access to an associative imagery as rich and unpredictable as Mr. Hazel’s.”

James Dickey said of Hazel’s poetry: “His principal characteristic is fearlessness; he will say anything that comes into his head, or any other part of him.”

Hazel published three novels: The Lost Year (1953), A Field Full of People (1954) and Early Spring (1971). His best-known short story was “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.”

Hazel taught writing at the University of Kentucky from 1955-1961. He was fondly remembered by former students,

18 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

five of whom are now members of the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

“Time after time, he didn’t hesitate to say that your writing wasn’t good enough,” Berry said. “He would go to great lengths to tell you why it wasn’t good enough.”

Mason remembered Hazel as a seductive personality who made his students believe they could become writers.

“Professor Hazel embodied the glamour of the writing life,” she said.

“He was youthful, well-published—books of fiction and poetry—and available to us personally,” Norman said.

“Bob could be casual with us students, but never at the expense of his authority.”

Norman said Hazel urged him to apply for a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University.

“I filled out my application, got cold feet, said I didn’t want to apply,” Norman recalled. “He said, ‘Gurney, if you don’t apply, I don’t want anything more to do with you.’ So I applied and a few weeks later got word I had been granted the fellowship. It was a life-changing experience.”

Hazel left UK and moved to Louisville to write before taking other teaching jobs at Oregon State and New York universities. At NYU, his students included Brown and Semic, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1990.

Hazel was poetry editor of The Nation magazine in 1972 and a writer-in-residence at Virginia Tech from 1974-79.

After teaching at Virginia Tech, he retired to Eustis, Florida, where he died of a heart attack on July 19, 1993.

Ted Poston.

T

ed Poston, born into a prominent Black family in Hopkinsville, was one of the first African American journalists to work for a White-owned metropolitan newspaper. During a 33-year career at the New York Post, he won two of journalism’s biggest awards.

Theodore Roosevelt Augustus Major Poston was born July 4, 1906, the youngest of eight children of educators Ephraim and Mollie Cox Poston. He graduated from Attucks High School in Hopkinsville in 1924 and what is now Tennessee State University in Nashville in 1928.

Poston began his career at age 15, writing for his family’s newspaper, the Hopkinsville Contender. He wrote for two major Black-owned newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the New York Amsterdam News. A union activist, Poston was fired from the News for helping the American Newspaper Guild organize its staff.

He joined the New York Post in 1936 and soon became a star reporter. A favorite of publisher Dorothy Schiff, Poston lobbied her to hire more Black and Puerto Rican journalists. Showing he could succeed in areas closed to other Black journalists, Poston got exclusive interviews in 1940 with Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana and Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie.

Poston chronicled the Harlem Renaissance, and his friends included writer Dorothy West and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

In the 1930s, Poston covered the trials of the Scottsboro Boys—nine young Black men who were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train near Scottsboro, Alabama. Because Alabama politicians wouldn’t allow Black journalists to report there, Poston disguised himself to cover the Scottsboro trials. “I sat up there in the Negro gallery in ragged overalls pretending to be a country boy … and I would make notes under the overcoat on my lap,” he said. White journalist friends wired his stories to New York.

During World War II, Poston worked in the Office of War Information in Washington as “Negro liaison” and served as a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Federal Council of Negro Affairs, known as the Black Cabinet. After FDR’s death, Poston was among those who urged President Harry Truman to desegregate the military.

Poston covered such stories as Jackie Robinson joining Major League Baseball, the Brown v. Board of Education case, the Little Rock Nine, and the Birmingham bus boycott.

His best work was a series of articles about the Groveland Four case in Florida in 1949, in which four Black men were falsely accused of raping a young white woman. This work was recognized with two of journalism’s major writing prizes, the George Polk Award for national reporting and the Heywood Broun Award.

New York University’s journalism school named Poston’s Groveland Four series one of the 100 most important journalistic works of the 20th century.

Poston, who was married three times, retired from the Post in 1972. He died on Jan. 11, 1974, in Brooklyn, New York, and is buried in Cave Spring Cemetery in Hopkinsville.

He was one of the first inductees into the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame when it was created in 1990.

Biographer Kathleen A. Hauke chronicled his life in Ted Poston: Pioneering American Journalist (1999) and collected his best work in another book, A First Draft of History (2000).

Poston wrote 10 autobiographical short stories about growing up in segregated Hopkinsville. Hauke edited the stories and annotated them with recollections from the author’s family and friends. The collection was published as The Dark Side of Hopkinsville (1991).

k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 19

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kentucky monthly’s annual writers’ showcase FICTION

POETRY

NONFICTION

Marie Mitchell and Mason Smith

Melva Priddy

Katherine Tandy Brown

Katie Hughbanks

Lee Eric Nance Woehler Linda Ozier Wade Lily Keston Trish Lindsey Jaggers Elaine Fowler Palencia Diana Derringer Brenda Drexler

2022

winning submissions

Roger Guffey

Katie Hughbanks Louisville

And Then There Were Three

A

s I pass by Room 202, I am a tangled web of feelings. Even now, when I help deliver a newborn, I am shocked at how profoundly it affects me. In the hallways and in these rooms, I walk with my head high and with a smile for every person, appearing confident and comfortable in these blue scrubs. But today, once again, I am a mess inside, watching two people become three.

Jonathan was my third love, the one I married. My first love was cross-country running, which I discovered when I was a leggy freshman at Campbell County High School. Running was all I cared about until my senior year, when I discovered my second love: medicine. Mrs. Smith’s anatomy class was challenging but inspiring, and when I graduated, I headed straight to nursing school.

Only after I had finished my clinicals did I meet the tall, dark-eyed man who would become my husband. We had run side by side in a 10K race one county over—strangers chatting, flirting as we competed. I won my age group; he won my heart. He lit up my world in a way I could not have imagined, and his love made my life complete.

But today, as I pass by Room 202, little seems complete anymore. Beyond that hospital room door, a lovely woman my age—31—looks radiant sitting up in a hospital bed, despite having given birth a few hours ago.

Her blond hair flows down her shoulders and spills over the pillow where she rests. In a chair next to the bed sits a man who vaguely resembles my Jonathan—dark eyes but hair a bit longer than Johnny’s. His knees push up against the bed’s mattress, and he leans forward, trying to be as close as possible to his wife, as if they are physically connected. On his lap, wrapped in a pink blanket I had retrieved from the neonatal wing’s supply closet, is the most beautiful infant I have ever seen. She is perfect, with skin like porcelain; her hair, gold-white 22 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

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fiction swan feathers. Delicate as rose petals, as flawless as a newly discovered pearl. When the head delivery nurse handed that child to me in the birthing room, I could barely stand the jealousy that rumbled in my chest. As I wiped the little girl’s face and hands and feet with warm toweling, cleaning and examining her, I thought of the gifts life brings; strange that I was reminded, too, of the cruelty life can bestow.

Yes, life can be harsh; nature can be brutal. The last 3½ years have proven that to me. My Jonathan is gone— he fought like a champion, but brain cancer took him in just nine months. My light, my love has been gone more than two years. With him, the cancer took my dreams.

The loss is double: I lost my husband and my future children. I am destined to help deliver other women’s babies but never my own. If only we could have had more time, could have caught the cancer sooner, could have had a little Jonathan … but there is little point in agonizing over that now. Our children were lost before they were found.

Here I am, no longer part of two—I am just one, alone, and I will probably stay that way. Jonathan was my running partner, my best friend, my everything. He can’t be replaced. When I lace up my running shoes on Saturday mornings, I know my run will be solo, always missing the man I love.

As I walk past Room 202, I can hear the unmistakable sound of that new father cooing at the precious bundle of pink. When I catch a glint of laughter from his wife, I understand that happiness still exists. As a neonatal nurse, I get to help bring some of that joy into the world, one delivery at a time.

Jonathan has left, but here in this hospital I can still find a reason to smile, to hope. All I need to do is peek in that door and look at those three.

Marie Mitchell and Mason Smith Richmond

The Mystery Walker

T

hanks for coming, Officer. I’m Carol-Ann Mattox, the hospitality director here at Richmond’s Tabbard Inn. Yes. It is a lovely, old building, isn’t it? Dates back to the early 1800s. I’ll gladly give you a tour another time.

No, nothing’s been stolen. No one’s been hurt, either.

But, well, I felt I should report a really odd occurrence.

When? Tonight—about two hours ago.

Here’s the thing: Four years ago, we began offering ghost walks in October. Paranormal tours are conducted in most cities these days. So, I researched local ghost stories and hired our oldest daughter, Jordan, to be the guide.

She dresses as a 19th century tavern maid and leads guests around the inn by lantern light. It’s become so popular that we now offer walks nearly every weekend, year-round.

Tonight, 10 of our 11 “walkers” were members of a women’s educational group, the P.E.O., here for a state convention.

Everything began normally until they reached the basement just outside of our wine cellar. That’s when one of our walkers, the non-P.E.O. member, revealed that she was Rain Colchester, a spiritual medium from Bardstown.

She suggested that everyone should stop and take pictures to see if they could capture any spiritual orbs or full-body apparitions that might be lurking about.

Some ghosts seem to be drawn to cameras, she said, and appear to enjoy photo-bombing.

Jordan took a quick vote, and everyone was willing to participate in a short photo op. So, they pulled out their phones and started snapping away.

However, when the pictures were examined, no orbs or apparitions were detected.

Everyone was disappointed, but Jordan offered to take a group picture so they could remember the experience.

She used her own phone so she could include the photo in a school project about her ghost walking tours.

Here’s Jordan’s phone, and here’s the shot she took of tonight’s walkers.

Look closely, Officer. Here are the 11 women, all smiling for the camera. At the back, inside the arch leading into our wine cellar, is a 12th guest, a man.

You can tell the figure is more than just a shadow. Look at his haggard face. Notice his red hair—and his clothes.

He’s dressed like a Civil War re-enactor, someone who might have visited the inn when it was a coach house.

No, I have no idea who he is, where he’s from, or why he appears in the picture.

Rain Colchester was delighted when she caught sight of him because she’s convinced he’s a full-figure apparition,

which apparently is extremely rare to capture. She’s promised to bring her ghost-hunting friends to the inn for an extended chat with this chap, although I’m not sure how one chats with a ghost.

Rain said they use some type of electronic device that lets the spirits impress words into the noise field to communicate with the living. Sounds like a bunch of baloney to me, but she was sure that, with a little encouragement, they could convince the ghost to identify himself.

No, Officer. This couldn’t be an actual person roaming around our wine cellar. For one thing, the door is always locked. And there’s only one stairway going down from the kitchen at the back of the house, so only family and staff have access.

Plus, as I mentioned before, all of tonight’s guests were female. Our cooks and servers are all women, too.

My husband, Greg, is the only male in the inn tonight, and this haunted figure is certainly not the handsome man I married.

Yes, I understand that this isn’t really a police matter, but I haven’t finished my story.

After the walk, Gail Botts, our head server, noticed an older fellow had mysteriously appeared at one of her tables right before closing. She said he had red hair, wore a threadbare uniform of sorts, and ordered a Buffalo Trace bourbon, which he drank in one gulp.

Once he’d finished, Gail said he nodded politely to her, then reached into his vest pocket and dropped a quarter on the table, thanking her for her kind service. He stood up, bowed, then headed for the door, saying he had a stagecoach to catch.

Right, Officer. These days we charge considerably more than a quarter for our whiskey.

But before Gail could reply, “Poof!” He’d vanished. In an instant. Into thin air.

As you can imagine, Gail freaked out. She started screaming, which startled the P.E.O. members still in the dining room enjoying dessert or drinking nightcaps.

None of them had noticed the visitor. But it was hard to miss Gail’s shrieks.

It took me an hour to get everyone quieted down.

Sure, Officer, it might be a hoaxer.

But here’s the coin—the one the stranger left. It’s an old “Seated Liberty Quarter.” Silver. In mint condition.

Dated 1862.

We googled it. Today, it’s worth anywhere from $55 to $1,800.

That’s a magnanimous tip for a shot of whiskey.

Especially for a 160-year-old ghost.

k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 23

Roger Guffey Lexington

Good to the Last Drop

O

ne thing I never saw growing up in rural Kentucky was a family member or a visitor refuse a cup of coffee. Living in an alcohol-free county limited the options for beverages to share socially, but homebrewed coffee fit the bill perfectly.

I was the penultimate child in my family of seven children, all of whom essentially were weaned on black coffee. When I was just tall enough to stand on tiptoes to reach the tabletop, my dad poured hot black coffee into a shallow saucer and gently tipped it so I could slurp up the steaming nectar. Meanwhile, he would dunk Mom’s homemade biscuits into the coffee in his cup to salvage the last few drops.

Much like Henry Ford’s boast that you can buy his cars in any color as long as it was black, black was the only choice for coffee in our home. When I was young, Mom cooked on a woodstove, and a blue-enameled tin coffeepot was always bubbling away. She would measure the grounds into the aluminum coffee basket and wait for the heady aroma of freshly brewed coffee to waft through the house to wake everyone up to start the day.

After Dad bought an electric Kelvinator stove, Mom bought a sleek, aluminum eight-cup percolator with an electric cord wrapped in fabric that was only unplugged when we went to bed.

My dad always butchered hogs in November to supply us with meat for the coming year. Butchering and storing the meat took all day and into the night, but hot coffee kept us going. Dad rendered the pork fat into lard and cracklings in a big black iron kettle and guzzled fresh coffee to warm himself in the chill air. His reward for his labors was a culinary mixture he called redeye gravy. Mom would fry the country ham and save the hot grease to add to fresh black coffee. The coffee would settle into a dark puddle at the bottom, and the grease would float to the top, giving it another name—frog-eyed gravy—an arteryhardening concoction that Dad ladled over biscuits.

In the days before the café au lait and hoity toity cappuccino, coffee offered three choices: Maxwell House in a bright blue can, Folgers in a red tin can, and JFG in 24 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

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nonfiction dark blue 1-pound paper bags. The tin cans had to be opened with a metal key to wind a strip of the can off to remove the lid before storing the coffee in a canister.

Supposedly, Theodore Roosevelt coined the Maxwell House slogan on the can, “Good to the last drop.” In the 1970s, Maxwell House hired Margaret Hamilton, the infamous Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz, to play a New England shopkeeper named Cora, who sold only Maxwell House in her store. Folgers ran ads featuring Virginia Christine playing Mrs. Olson, who assured viewers that a hot cup of Folgers could ease marital tensions caused by inferior coffee.

Mom occasionally switched to Folgers or JFG coffee.

The coarsely ground JFG brewed a darker cup that put hair on your chest. After my older siblings married and started families, our home bulged at the seams when we were all home for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Dad bought a 30-cup urn with a spigot to accommodate the insatiable demand for the magical elixir. In the mid1970s, one of my brothers gifted Mom with a Mr. Coffee Drip Coffeemaker.

Our family never acquired a taste for the decaffeinated coffee Sanka in its bright orange can, but if you wanted to start a serious fracas, just bring up the subject of instant coffee. Mom had bought a jar of Nescafé Freeze Dried Coffee, hoping it would give a quick caffeine fix, but after watching all of us spit the vile solution out as quickly as we sampled it, she relegated the disgusting powder to the back of the cabinet before eventually throwing it away.

In our need-it-yesterday world, millions of people have invested in the Keurig K-Cups brewing systems. These K-Cups are expensive and pose a significant ecological drawback because they are not recyclable. The inventor of the K-Cup, John Sylvan, regrets inventing this disposable convenience and uses a drip pot. From a personal perspective, one drawback is that the single cup of coffee does not produce the intoxicating aroma of a fresh pot of homebrewed java to warm the cockles of our hearts.

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poetry Trish Lindsey Jaggers Smiths Grove, Kentucky

When I Try to Say I’m Sorry to Those Who Are Suffering In my head, it has a certain ring to it, like bells in the distance, like church getting ready to start somewhere, a silver slice through the clean, blue air, no, rather, more like a clap of thunder against a cloudless sky where I question whether I heard it at all, but still, I go in, close the windows and wait for the opening up, for a storm to hit, hope the wind spares the oak tree, old as Egypt, the swing untwisting itself on the lower branch, the swing-path earth worn through to the bone of root where I once fell, no, like a bird, I let go, went singing flat through the rain and broke my arm, and I could hear it happen, though I couldn’t say it, and that hurt so much it should have bled, it should have bled.

k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 25

Katherine Tandy Brown Beaufort, South Carolina

Jane and the Bluebird

T

hough she’d lived in California for 30 years, Jane Gaither Campbell was one of my mom’s closest friends. The two had grown up as neighbors on Main Street in Hopkinsville and had bonded early.

Like her mother, Jane was 5 feet tall and about that broad, with a huge heart, a brilliant mind and a laugh that could spark an entire room to helpless giggles. When the oldest of Jane’s five sons turned 6, she divorced their wildly attractive, philandering, alcoholic father and raised all five by herself. A faithful Al-Anon attendee for years, Jane helped start the Monterey branch of hospice.

This was one strong woman who walked her talk daily.

Though they didn’t see each other often, Mom and Jane managed to squeeze in a lengthy phone chat at least every other month and kept current with each other’s lives and, most important, gossip.

After my mother, Anne, left my dad, married her childhood sweetheart, and moved from Hoptown to Mayfield, my stepfather dubbed her “Queen of the Wingchair,” a moniker inspired by her afternoon tête-àtêtes with friends gathered round her favorite chair, all sipping iced tea and chattering till nearly suppertime.

“The Queen” was godmother to Jane’s middle child, Jamie, and, without reservation, was absolutely wild about him.

One day during her final years, while Mom was struggling with discomfort at the process of dying, Jane called. I was fixing lunchtime grilled cheese sandwiches when I heard the phone ring and Mom’s cheery, “Oh hi, Jane! Has California fallen into the ocean yet?”

It was an old joke between them. While Mom kidded about Jane’s clifftop California abode disappearing in a landslide, Jane wondered if Anne’s Graves County house had fallen into the New Madrid Fault yet.

Mom’s laughter trilled through the den. And then she grew quiet. For a long time. With no back-and-forth banter. I felt a chill. Removing the sandwiches from the 26 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

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nonfiction buttery skillet, I slid them into a warm oven. I had a feeling the phone conversation might be lengthy, and it was.

As a rule, you didn’t get between the Queen and food, but Mom hadn’t told Jane she’d eat lunch and call her back. Something was important.

Twenty minutes later, Mom rang off.

Walking quietly through the den, I asked how Jane was. The Queen looked up. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “The cancer’s come back,” she said, “and it’s everywhere. Jane’s in hospice care. I feel so helpless.”

She began to cry.

“Oh, Mom …” I hurried over, plopped down next to her on the couch, and wrapped my arms around her. For once, the Queen—always cock-sure she could beat the world at its own game—was devoid of resources. I held her as she sobbed.

Later that afternoon, she dried her tears and gave audience to her subjects as usual, but her laughter was distracted. Her sparkle had an edge.

The next day, perky and chipper as ever, Mom called Jane, chattering about everything under the sun. No one could fill space with conversation like the Queen when she was on a roll. Seemingly, Jane had responded in an upbeat manner.

“While we were talking,” Mom told me after hanging up, “a bluebird came and perched on her windowsill. She said it was the brightest cobalt. And it sang and sang as if performing just for her. Her voice sounded stronger today.”

She smiled and dropped the subject. “Wonder which painting I’ll enter in the Art Guild show? Let’s go take a look and tell me what you think.”

Always an aficionado, the Queen had taken up plein aire painting at age 68. Imbued with brilliant colors, her works were pleasingly primitive, and often, she sold a piece or two at the Mayfield Art Guild’s annual show. We chose an oil of vivid scarlet flowers against a Van Gogh-

like background of light purples and blues, a painting that now hangs in my sunny studio and often makes me smile with remembering. I wanted to ask more about Jane, but once Mom closed a conversation topic door, no amount of prying would reopen it. I knew better than to venture into that arena, and I let it lie.

Jane had first phoned on a Monday morning. They talked daily for the next four. I wasn’t always privy to the process, but Mom would tell me how wonderful Jane sounded.

“That bluebird’s still coming to sing to her,” she’d say.

“Can you just imagine?” And then she’d drop it.

After Thursday’s call, Mom reported in a small voice, “Jane doesn’t sound nearly as strong. And she coughed and coughed. I’m so scared. She just can’t … What’ll I do without her?” Tears caught in her throat.

Words of comfort wouldn’t come to me. And even if they had, they’d have been lies. Jane’s life was ebbing, and she was in greater hands than ours.

“What about the bluebird?” I asked, trying to draw her focus from the sad inevitability of the situation.

“Oh, it’s still singing on the sill.” The trace of a smile lifted the corners of her lips slightly. “It must be beautiful.

I told her that it was really me.”

She laughed. “That little guy is such a comfort to her.

I’m glad it’s there.”

On Friday, Mom phoned Jane while I was out picking up groceries. Upon my return, the Queen was sitting in her striped wingchair. The phone rested in its cradle. Her favorite soap, “Days of Our Lives,” was not flickering on the

television screen. The house was still. No friends waited to attend her. She sat, tears again tracking her cheeks.

“Mom? What is it?”

She looked up at me, her mahogany eyes brimming.

“It’s the bluebird. It didn’t come today. Jane sounded so weak. She couldn’t talk but for a few minutes. A nurse had to hold the phone for her. She kept telling me she loved me so much, and she’d see me one day. And then she said, ‘good-bye.’ That was all. Not once in all these years did we ever say, ‘good-bye.' We always said we’d ‘talk again soon, kissy kissy,’ laughed and hung up. But today, she just said, ‘good-bye.’ ” I’d put the bag of groceries on the rattan den table by then and sat down on the corduroy couch beside the throne. Tears slid down her face. I took her hand. It felt so frail and fragile and cool. Through its parchment-thin olive skin, a livid purple bruise puddled.

And there we stayed long enough for the sun’s rays to recede into the kitchen from the den rug, bright with green leaves and orange flowers.

Jamie phoned that night. His mother had passed away peacefully in the afternoon while napping, not an hour after talking with Mom. Jane’s last words to the nowgrown child she’d adored had been, “Don’t worry, love. I’ll be fine.”

Jane’s death seemed to have a profound effect on my mother. After a time of soul-deep sadness, her concerns about the hereafter eased. A year or so later, the Queen died peacefully in her sleep. I like to think that she and Jane are giggling again, only in different surroundings.

Katherine Tandy Brown was born in Hopkinsville, as were her mother, father and grandparents. After graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1969, she lived in Lexington until 2006, when she “ran away from winter to SC,” where she continues to reside. This story is an excerpt from a memoir-in-progress about her mother’s last five years on the earth, entitled Anne, Queen of the Wingchair. k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 27

Linda Ozier Wade Greenville

PENNED

poetry Lee Eric Nance Woehler Madisonville

The Kingdom Now Here’s what wasn’t going to happen.

It wasn’t like someone was going to finally read a book— even this book (or that book)— and then everyone was going to read it, and we were going to all understand and say, “Ah,” and then everything was going to be good, great. It was never going to happen.

We are human, and that doesn’t happen.

Instead, we forget.

We pervert and misinterpret.

We misread, misuse, misplace.

We ban. We bury. We burn.

Of course, also, every so often, one of us gets it.

Even less often still, two or more of us get it and agree.

And then it’s wonderful, perfect.

Perfect in a pocket of space and time.

Heaven here.

28 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

The Truth Be Told A small gray bird sat peering Through a ceiling window light.

A bird’s eye view had he Of those gathered down below.

“How sad,” thought he, “for those beyond Must hear God’s word spoken.”

The small gray bird for words cared not The truth be told …he lives it.

Melva Priddy Winchester

At the Earth’s Core after “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” Adam Zaggajewski — translated by Clare Cavanagh

Lily Keston Midway

adoration i’ve been meaning to tell you about the heron i saw last thursday, winging soundless over the frozen reservoir. in remembering, i rebirth my childlike love of birds but this february, the sky is somber and gray like the dove you almost ran over last night— the road bent like the curve of hair over your right ear; i noticed your veins backlit in the orange bright of 5pm.

Linger over the pain, learn to praise it for what it teaches, how it reaches into our bones and won’t let go. Know: mutilation has been with us forever, before the oceans shifted, before the rivers changed courses, before the word was word, before any of us were born.

Lift your heart skyward toward the clouds or sun or moon.

Open yourself to what is rather than some hazy other or what memory brings.

Know that mutilation praises the earth’s churning core, the loss of forever moving mountains.

Don’t let go the impossible wrenching bliss that tears you open, vulnerable, quaking, ripe.

An erupting world ready and raw like eggs, butter, bananas and honey, in the mixing bowl.

with your hand, i rewrite my body with notes of bird calls and things i forget to tell you about you. pearlescent feathers, like the skin of dying ice, smack air full of pauses when you ask if i am content to learn forever. learn this— i am composed of a multitude of reasons not to fall in love with me, the first and only being your blood is only in you.

k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 29

Elaine Fowler Palencia Champaign, Illinois

To a Fossil Found Along Dixie Highway, Louisville, Kentucky Between concrete sidewalk and asphalt Subaru dealership lot unnoticed by ceaseless traffic, a load of rounded river stones dumped at the base of two brave sweet gum trees to enhance the gritty urban streetscape.

I find you there, across from a Goodwill parking lot where huge cardboard containers bulge with plastic bags tagged “textile overflow”— used clothing to be sent on somewhere— and nearby a set of camo fatigues better suited for jungle effacement lies stuffed under a bush along with a pink towel, waiting to be given purpose So we are both strangers here, Vinlandostrophia ponderosa (I’ve just found you, again, online), me from a town in the eastern Kentucky hills whose small homes were built in the same era as this struggling city neighborhood.

Here the creeks are dry dirt paths but there, where bright streams are choked with fossils, I once found your twin, a grooved, shut, brachiopod shell from an Ordovician ocean of five hundred million years ago, turned to stone like you The Kentucky state fossil, you were named in 1909, the year my mother was born so we have that in common across the aeons and isn’t it all about connection when everything is and always has been on the move, you, me, the fearful young man who just stopped to ask directions, but I couldn’t help him, and suddenly I see that all the little houses have security doors.

Today, you and I and everything I see tremble with such presence that I feel your locked interior contains a message for us all.

In the driveway of one bungalow sits a bass boat, brand name Mon Ark. 30 K E NT U C K Y M O NTHLY F EBR UARY 2022

PENNED

poetry Elaine Fowler Palencia was born in Lexington and grew up in Morehead, where her father taught at the university, and her mother taught at the high school. She has published many stories and poems set in Kentucky.

Brenda Drexler Sellersburg, Illinois

Preservation Hall, New Orleans The line snaked along St. Peter Street, crossed the road to the next block We were patient, excited We’d heard about the magic Then before the door was visible Before we could see the front of the line curl into The old, crusty building We heard

Diana Derringer Campbellsville

Where Does He Go

The presence of true art The musicians played and sweat and beamed They felt the awe that embodied the dim room As we who waited pressed into the hall Against others who had waited for so long Who travelled far to hear And no one was disappointed.

Where does he go, eyes straight ahead, head tilted, eyebrows lifted?

The band played on as the walls trembled My stomach and my chest and ribs vibrated With excitement and mystery and the luminescence of jazz The walls, cracked with peeling plaster Stood proud in honor of their tradition When the band played their music Fingers strumming, lungs near bursting on brass Preservation hall became a place of royalty Honoring the seminal music of New Orleans And the musicians who keep it alive

“Do you see it, just below that bottom branch?

Oops! There he goes!”

His muted laughter lessens the sadness of our souls.

Children and others sat on the floor so they could be close Immersed in same space, the same air as the instruments and their players There were no chairs, standing room only It seemed fitting, in order to feel it, appreciate, and become a part of it all To be in their presence was to know their souls

Once again, we look, knowing nothing lies beyond but trees and grass, and weeds, colored and inhabited by memories and delusion.

I lived in Louisville for 53 years. My first two novels involve Kentucky.

I now live just across the bridge from Louisville.

Helpless to achieve change, we ask, “Where?”

k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 31

The mascots of Kentucky’s colleges and universities fire up the crowds while representing the schools’ character and heritage

spreading

Spirit 32 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

B Y D E B O R A H KO H L K R E M E R

A

school mascot is the ultimate cheerleader.

Seen at sporting events and campus gatherings, these cartoonish characters rev up the crowd. They can resemble an animal or a caricature of a person or … nothing in particular. In some instances, the mascot becomes synonymous with the school itself, but in others, they are not as well known. Following is a glimpse of some of the fun-loving mascots of Kentucky’s colleges and universities.

Symbol of Freedom In 1917, Alice Geddes Lloyd traveled to Pippa Passes in eastern Kentucky from Boston, Massachusetts, to restore her health. While there, she unexpectedly found her life’s purpose—to educate the people of Appalachia and establish Alice Lloyd College. She is said to have told area residents that she was from “the cradle of liberty.”

Although the college does not have a record of exactly how it came to be, its mascot, the Eagle, honors the institution’s patriotic founder. In 2012, the student body voted to officially name the eagle Talon.

Gallant Man of Arms Bellarmine University’s founding president, Msgr. Alfred F. Horrigan, was enchanted by the Arthurian legend and the quest for the Holy Grail and thus chose the Knight as Bellarmine’s mascot in the 1950s around the time the Louisville school was established. In 2020, Bellarmine Athletics and Student Activities sponsored a contest to name the Knight. After 70 years with no name, he is now known as Valor.

Wilderness Champion A bear named Blue made his debut representing Berea College in November 2021. When not cheering on the Mountaineers, Blue, according to college officials, resides in the 9,000 acres of adjacent forest surrounding campus.

Name Change Brescia University was founded in 1925 as Mount Saint Joseph Junior College for Women. It had no teams and, thus, no mascot. Upon changing its name to Brescia and moving to its current location in Owensboro in 1950, the institution formed intercollegiate teams and called them the Brescia Rebels after Rebel Yell Whiskey. In 1968, Brescia felt that name did not represent the values of the school, so the mascot was changed to the Bearcat. In 1987, the Brescia Bearcat officially was named Barney.

Fierce Feline A big smiling striped cat represents the Campbellsville University Tigers. The school mascot originally was a panther but was changed to a tiger in the early 1930s.

Clawz, as he is affectionately known, has carried on the school spirit for almost 90 years.

Striped and Scrappy Georgetown College was chartered in 1829 on land donated by Elijah Craig, the Baptist preacher who is credited with inventing bourbon. The institution’s sports nickname is the Tigers, and mascot Eli is named in honor of the school’s famous benefactor.

Student Guide Pathfinder, the fox mascot of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, cheers on the students, not a specific team. Pathfinder is credited with helping students navigate their way to degrees or credentials and helping them to achieve confidence, endurance and the strength needed to complete their journey.

Award-Winning Equine Murray State University is the home of the Racers, named as a nod to Thoroughbred racing, for which Kentucky is famous. In the 1970s, Dunker, a horse that runs on two legs instead of four, made his debut. Always ready to cheer for the Racers, Dunker won the Ohio Valley Conference Mascot Challenge four times in five years, from 2013-2017.

Not a Friendly Face In 2005, Northern Kentucky University adopted Victor E. Viking as its Norse mascot to reflect the warrior image.

Victor regularly dons the traditional two-horned Norse helmet while sporting a black cape as the Norse go into battle on the court or on the field. Victor was named Atlantic Sun Conference Mascot of the Year in 2012, and ESPN named him in the Top 10 of Scariest Mascots in all of college sports in 2015. In the 2017 NCAA Tournament, he was ranked the best mascot of the tournament by USA Today.

Heavyweight Bird Spalding University introduced the Golden Eagles mascot in 2018. His name, Ollie, was the winner of a campus vote and pays homage to Ali, as in Muhammad Ali (not Ollie’s Trolley, the nearby fast-food restaurant). The late heavyweight champion had a special connection to Spalding, as he first learned to box as a teenager in the building that is now the university’s Columbia Gym. k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 33

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34 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

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Fighting Saint The Saints of Thomas More University are represented by Tommy Mo, named for the school’s patron saint, Sir Thomas More, who was executed in 16th century England during King Henry VIII’s reign and canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1935. Although Tommy Mo commonly wears a traditional tunic similar to one from historical depictions of More, he sometimes adds his blue Thomas More Saints jersey, adorning the number 21 in honor of the university’s founding year, 1921, as Villa Madonna College in Covington.

Pioneering Bat Transylvania’s mascot is a Rafinesque’s bigeared bat, known as Raf. The Pioneers’ athletic mascot pays homage to the university’s legendary professor, Samuel Constantine Rafinesque, a charismatic naturalist whose tomb is on the first floor of Transylvania’s main administrative building, Old Morrison. Legend has it that the professor was fascinated by zoology, botany, and the bat with giant ears, which was given his name.

Wild Warriors In 1909, the University of Kentucky football team won a tough game, and Commandant Philip W. Carbusier, head of the military department of what was then known as State University, told students that the team “fought like Wildcats.” The name stuck. The furclad mascot officially was adopted by the school in 1976.

Mack Tough The first reference to Union College’s mascot, the bulldog, appeared in the Barbourville school’s 1926 yearbook. In the 1960s, students held a fundraiser by selling pins with Mack trucks on them. The fundraiser raised enough money to purchase a real bulldog, who was named Mack. Mack, and future Macks, traveled with teams throughout the years, but there has not been a live canine mascot since 2012. Today, there is a Mack statue, and football players rub his head for luck before taking the field at home games. And the student section of the stands is known as the Dog Pound.

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k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 37

Public Universities Eastern Kentucky University COLONELS

U.S. Tribute Pete the Patriot is the mascot for the University of the Cumberlands teams, The Patriots. Both the college’s name and the mascot have changed since their beginnings in 1888. When the Williamsburg school became a university in 2005, The Patriot was chosen as mascot. It is a reflection of our country’s colonial history and the enhancement of campus academic buildings that replicate the architecture of Independence Hall and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

Large and in Charge Big Red, the mascot of Western Kentucky University, is lovingly referred to as a big blob. He is made of foam, fake fur, plastic tubing, and aluminum framing and boasts a fun, playful personality. Created from a sketch by Ralph Carey, class of 1980, Big Red made his debut at a Hilltopper basketball game on Dec. 1, 1979. Since then, he has been inducted into the Mascot Hall of Fame and has reached the Final Four of ESPN SportZone’s Battle of the Mascots.

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Kentucky State University THOROBREDS Morehead State University EAGLES Murray State University HORSES, RACER AND DUNKER Northern Kentucky University NORSEMAN, VICTOR E. VIKING University of Kentucky WILDCAT University of Louisville CARDINAL BIRD Western Kentucky University BIG RED

Private Colleges Alice Lloyd College EAGLE, TALON Asbury University EAGLE Bellarmine University VALOR THE KNIGHT Berea College MOUNTAINEER, BLUE THE BEAR Brescia University BEARCAT, BARNEY Campbellsville University TIGER, CLAWZ Centre College COLONELS Georgetown College TIGER, ELI Kentucky Christian University KNIGHTS AND LADY KNIGHTS Simmons College of Kentucky FALCONS

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k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 39

The famed adventurer is in his element as a fighter and wilderness scout. But when he at last tries to settle down, courts, governments and unscrupulous land grabbers have other ideas in the final installment of a three-part series.

Wilderness Odyssey: T H E S AG A O F S I M O N K E N TO N B Y R O N S O O D A LT E R

S P E C I A L T H A N K S T O T H E K E N T U C K Y G AT E W AY M U S E U M C E N T E R I N M AY S V I L L E

40 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

Simon Kenton taken captive by the Shawnee. (Courtesy of the Kentucky Gateway Museum Center.)

R E C A P O F PA R T S O N E A N D T W O :

Simon Kenton’s progression from an indolent boy on a hardscrabble Virginia farm to a legend of the American frontier began when he was 16. Believing he had killed a man in a fight, he fled to the untamed region known as Kain-tuck-ee. There, under the assumed name Simon Butler, he excelled at hunting, trapping and—when the occasion called for it—fighting Native Americans.

Standing a broad-shouldered 6 feet, 3 inches tall, he soon earned a widespread reputation as a guide and hunter for and protector of the newcomers to the land. In one brief but bloody encounter with a large party of Shawnee outside the forted settlement of Boonesborough, Kenton saved the life of fellow frontiersman Daniel Boone, killing two natives who were poised to slay his friend.

When the Shawnee captured their mortal enemy, they tortured Kenton mercilessly and condemned him to be burned at the stake. Rescued from a horrific death, he was taken as a prisoner to the British stronghold at Detroit.

After spending months in captivity, he managed to escape both the British and their Shawnee confederates. Making his way back to Kentucky in the summer of 1779, the

24-year-old woodsman discovered from westering Virginians that the man he thought he had killed years earlier was, in fact, alive. Kenton immediately reclaimed his birth name and for the rest of his life would remain Simon Kenton.

I N T H E S E R V I C E O F T H E PAT R I O T S

During the months when Kenton was a prisoner of the Shawnee and the British, the influx of new settlers into Kentucky continued unabated. Forted settlements— “stations,” as they were called—were built virtually overnight. By now, the American Revolution was well into its fourth year; nonetheless, many Kentuckians were reluctant to take part in the fighting, feeling that the war did not touch them.

They were disabused of such notions in June 1780, when Capt. Henry Bird—at the head of around 1,000 American Indian warriors, 150 handpicked British soldiers, and two cannons—left Fort Detroit and marched toward Kentucky. They quickly overran three stations, killing some 20 settlers and hauling hundreds of men, women and children back to Detroit as prisoners. k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 41

Kenton recalled that, when he received word of the disaster, “Charles Gatliffe and myself went to Riddle’s and Martin’s Stations and found them both taken, and a number of people lying about killed and scalped …” Kenton and Gatliffe followed Bird’s trail, at one point reportedly capturing one of the British officer’s brass cannons.

George Rogers Clark, now in command of the Kentucky militia, immediately mounted a counteroffensive and named his old friend, Kenton, scout and captain of a company. The native villages that Clark targeted for reprisal were the sites of some of Kenton’s most painful experiences as a Shawnee captive. Writes Kenton biographer Thomas D. Clark, “For Simon, the expedition against Chillicothe and Piqua was sweet revenge.”

The natives were warned of Clark’s approach by a deserter in the Kentuckians’ ranks, thereby depriving Clark of the element of surprise. The inhabitants of Chillicothe had burned their village and fled. Kenton later recalled, “[W]e pursued on to a place called Pickaway Town, and there the Indians embodied and fought us all day, and we whipped them, and for two days, we were busily employed in cutting down their corn.”

The Kentuckians burned the remaining native villages and destroyed hundreds of acres of each community’s corn—the natives’ main sustenance. Stated Clark, “For the next two years, the Indians were too busy finding food and building new villages to make a serious attack on Kentucky.”

At around this time, Kenton began to acquire large tracts of land in Kentucky and Ohio, identifying his claims by notching the letter “K” into the bordering trees. These “tomahawk improvements” sufficed for the moment, but, as Kenton would learn, they were no safeguard against land grabbers and other claimants in a court of law.

THE INDIAN WAR OF 1782

Other events soon darkened the horizon. According to Kenton descendant and biographer Edna Kenton, “Kentucky only seven years before had been an uninhabited wilderness—now its people numbered close to twenty thousand.” Within just a few years, that number would quadruple. Realizing that the settler population would soon grow too powerful to resist, several tribes in the region—Chippewa, Ottawa, Delaware, Wyandot, Munsee, Cherokee and Shawnee—went to war against northwestern Virginia and Kentucky.

Some of the natives were the Shawnee who had been driven from their villages earlier by Gen. Clark and his men, including Kenton. Again, Clark commanded the local forces, and, as Kenton later stated, “We turned out with him … against the same Indians, who had re-embodied, and we whipped them again.”

As the 27-year-old Kenton, once again acting as scout and officer, marched at the head of his company, a young boy named Joel Collins, who watched the column as it passed through Lexington, later provided a comprehensive description of him, as chronicled by Edna Kenton: “Mr. Collins said he well remembered how his youthful fancy was attracted by the appearance of the captain who marched at the head of the first company. He was tall and well proportioned, a countenance pleasing but dignified …

42 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

[H]is hunting shirt hung carelessly but gracefully on his shoulder; his other apparel was in common backwoods style. On inquiry he was told that it was Captain Simon Butler, so well-known afterwards under his true name, Simon Kenton.”

The war ended the same year it had begun—in the settlers’ favor. After the army disbanded, Kenton set out to build his own settlement. He gathered a few families to property he had acquired near Danville, and by the spring of 1783, they had erected cabins, cleared several acres, and planted flax and corn. Within two years, Kenton’s Station would grow from a rough-hewn four-cabin outpost to a well-laid-out 20-family community with a fully functioning grist mill.

HOME TO VIRGINIA … AND BACK TO KENTUCKY

Now a property owner and scion of his own station, Kenton decided it was time to visit his father’s home in Fauquier County, Virginia. He had not seen his family since fleeing at the age of 16, and he now sought a reunion. It went extremely well: Kenton offered family members and acquaintances parcels of land in Kentucky, and nearly all accepted—including William Leachman, the man Kenton had thought he had murdered so many years before. Begun in September 1783, the Kenton migration consisted of 41 people, along with at least five slaves and several head of cattle. Once they arrived, Kenton helped build a “colony” for his family on the Salt River.

When he had his family settled, Kenton returned to surveying for himself and others. Danger still loomed, however. Although the various tribes had been defeated, they had not been subdued. War parties still preyed upon settlers and surveyors in northern Kentucky, inspiring Kenton to construct a blockhouse as a stronghold on Limestone Creek. He also raised and trained his own company of minutemen, known informally as “Kenton’s Boys,” in response to the continued threat. It was, writes Edna Kenton, “Kenton’s own unique contribution to Kentucky’s defense … [When word was sent Kenton of horses or people taken, he and his ‘boys’ tucked some parched corn and jerk[y] into their hunting shirts, laid hold of their guns, mounted their horses, and picked up the trail.”

First and foremost, Kenton was now dealing in property.

Among other transactions, he sold the land on which was built the town of Washington, Kentucky, just south of Maysville. However, Kenton never gave up his role as guide for, and protector of, his fellow Kentuckians. His son James later wrote of him: “He was truly the master spirit of the time in that region of the country. He was looked upon by all as the great defender of the inhabitants … ready to fly at a moment’s warning to the place of danger.”

It must have seemed to the settlers as though the Indian Wars would never cease. The same pattern repeated itself over the next several years: The settlers would assemble in force and win a significant victory over the tribes of the region, forcing them into accepting yet another treaty that further limited their homelands, whereupon the natives would continue to visit vengeance upon the victors, prompting yet another major campaign.

This was the case in 1786, when Kenton joined what

“[T]here was a ‘great man’ came into the neighborhood would prove to be a long, on-and-off war against a with a mighty land warrant and was for laying it in a number of the Kentucky and Ohio tribes. Once again, he great scope of country including Kenton’s Domain—which served as a scout and guide, this time for Gen. Benjamin raised [Kenton’s] ire, he took hold of the great man and Logan. As in the past, it was a bloody affair, with many no one ever got such a caning.” dead on both sides.

Kenton would not find it so easy to rid himself of land Interestingly, despite the no-quarter approach to thieves in the future. The illiterate frontiersman soon warfare between the settlers and natives at the time— would fall prey to companies and individuals intent upon and even after his harrowing near-death experience as a reversing his claims and stealing his land. Writes Edna captive of the Shawnee—Kenton was restrained in the Kenton, “When his battles with the Indians ended, his killing of his enemies. At one juncture, Moluntha, a battles in the prominent courts of the Shawnee white men chief, was began: he captured and understood bound inside Indian warfare a tent. “I better and knew fared better in Moluntha as it.” As Kenton soon as I saw himself him,” Kenton acknowledged recalled, “for I in the years had been before he died, prisoner with “I had a lot of him in ’78.” property, and Orders were maybe they given that the saw my weak chief was not parts enough … to be harmed, to know how but a fellow to use me.” officer entered Kenton’s the tent and skills as a slew the scout, fighting defenseless Kenton serves as a guide on the Ohio River. (Courtesy of the Kentucky Gateway Museum man and chief. “If I had Center.) military leader been there still were when he struck much in demand. He served as a major in the militia Moluntha I would have struck him … I never could under Gen. Anthony Wayne—“Mad Anthony” to his forgive such cruelty.” troops—during another war with the natives. Kenton On another occasion, Kenton overpowered a Shawnee returned home in 1793, but he would be called upon in the warrior who had been lying in ambush, and, wielding his future to fight both the natives and the British. tomahawk, “I sprang on him and … I killed him,” Kenton remembered. “This weighs heavy on me at times and is the only thing in my campaign I much regret[,] for he was S TA R T I N G A N E W in my power and I need not have done it.”

On Dec. 13, 1796, only 10 years after the Kentons’ Despite the advent of new hostilities, the year 1786 had wedding, tragedy struck. Their house caught fire, and its bright side: It marked Kenton’s first marriage, at 28-year-old Martha and the child she was carrying—the Kenton’s Station. Curiously, little is known about this family’s fifth—perished. In those unsettled and often union. His family Bible records only this: “Simon Kenton perilous times, death—while dreaded—was accepted as and Martha Dowden were married February 15, 1787,” and an unsurprising part of life. As Edna Kenton writes, “Grief mentions her death less than a decade later. We do know over death was tempered in those days by other that Simon had guided Martha, her three siblings, and her misfortunes almost as great; love was not the only widowed mother to his station three years earlier, when measurer of values … Death and life were strung on a she was around 14. After their marriage, he built what was string together, and there was little time to grieve.” When described at the time as a “fine brick house”—the first of one settler was killed, his wife commented, “I would its kind in Mason County—on a 1,000-acre farm, where all rather lose a cow than my old John.” And when the of their four children were born. natives slew another farmer, the farmer’s son observed By now, Kenton, who was well on his way to matter-of-factly, “By Christ, father’s killt, and the corn acquiring thousands of acres in Kentucky, had what ain’t been hoed.” might have been his first encounter with a land grabber.

Kenton still had children to provide for and other A resident of Kenton’s Station recorded what his wife responsibilities that often took him far from home. When witnessed in Lexington: traveling, he left the children in the care of the family of

k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 43

Above left, the statue of Simon Kenton at his gravesite in Oak Dale Cemetery in Urbana, Ohio; right, the Simon Kenton Memorial Bridge spans the Ohio River.

Stephen Jarboe, a French immigrant who had settled in Mason County. Two years after Martha’s tragic death, Simon—now in his 40s—won the hand of Jarboe’s 19-year-old daughter Elizabeth. “Betsey,” as he called her, would bear him five more children, and the union was, according to all who knew them, a warm and affectionate one.

When Kenton was a captive of the Shawnee, he had been taken from Kentucky to their villages beyond the Ohio River, and the region had appealed to him. Shortly after his second marriage, Kenton, who sensed opportunities for land investments, moved his family to Ohio, near present-day Springfield.

For a time, Kenton prospered. He was, as biographer Edna Kenton writes, “head of his clan,” presiding over a large estate that included tenant farmers, fine horses and slaves. He developed a reputation for sharing his good fortune with his neighbors. As one chronicler writes, “He kept open house and spread a bountiful table. He owned more acres than he or any man could count.” His “open house” encompassed natives as well as settlers and would come to include a much-pacified Bo-Nah, the Shawnee warrior who had captured and tormented the young Kenton.

Kenton provided for two Native American encampments on his property, and on one occasion, a mob

44 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

of local settlers determined to wipe them out. Edna Kenton writes that Kenton merely took his rifle from the wall and made it clear that the intended massacre “would take place after his own death and would certainly be preceded by the sure taking off of a few white men present.” The mob dispersed without further threat.

A LONG SLIDE

Two years after his move to Ohio, Kenton faced the first of the setbacks that would threaten his land holdings. He had acquired around 250,000 acres from a man who had bought some 2 million acres from the government on a payment plan. When the man failed to meet the payments, the government canceled the deal, and Kenton’s purchases along with it. Writes Edna Kenton, “Kenton’s land went like mist.”

In 1803, still dreaming of a land empire, Kenton made his own treaty with Shawnee chief Tecumseh that would grant him “near half of Ohio and some of Indiana” in exchange for “considerable goods and provisions … and promise to pay more money or goods as long as grass grows and water runs.” There was nothing unusual about the agreement; it was precisely the type that had been framed between the tribes and various private companies and individuals—as well as colonial legislatures—for years.

Ohio, however, had just entered the Union, and its

government moved to ensure that no individual would own half the state, especially when it was promised by a tribe of natives. Once again, Kenton’s plans for a wilderness empire came to naught. Ironically, the state legislature had recently elected him to the rank of brigadier general in the Ohio Militia, an office that he resigned some six months later. Nonetheless, he would be referred to as “General Kenton” for the rest of his life.

At this time, Kenton began to experience the legal oppression that would dog him for years to come. Before leaving Kentucky some years earlier, he had paid the bail—a large sum—for a man named Robertson, who subsequently disappeared, leaving Kenton in debt to the court. Kenton briefly was placed in debtor’s prison. Years later—in 1806, according to his son, William—Kenton discovered that Robertson had escaped to the South, whereupon he saddled his horse and rode “clear to Florida.” “[H]e wanted satisfaction and [I] suppose he got it,” William laconically reported. After being absent from his family from the summer of 1806 to the spring of the following year, Kenton finally returned home, sporting a partially healed broken leg and “a bundle of North Carolina pear trees, which he planted.” Typically, he revealed no details of his absence.

Four years later, a Kentuckian claimed that Kenton owed him money, a claim that Kenton disputed. Under the law at the time, as the accused, Kenton was to be confined until the matter was resolved. By now, he had moved his family from Springfield to Urbana, Ohio, which was largely peopled by old friends and settlers whom he had aided in the past. They immediately held an election and named Kenton to be his own jailer, whereupon he moved his family into the five rooms above the jail.

As a courtesy, Kenton was given the run of the town, but when his 9-year-old daughter Elizabeth died, he could only stand at the edge of town and watch the funeral procession proceed to the cemetery. Finally, after a year of his semi-confinement, Kenton was released.

Bad luck continued to follow Kenton, some of it of his own making. Unsurpassed though he was in the woods, he was hopelessly naïve in the world of commerce. He constantly placed his faith in the wrong people and was lax when it came to taxes and other financial matters. People whom he had trusted with his investments regularly stole from him or squandered his stores of goods.

When the massive New Madrid earthquake of 1811 struck, it put large tracts of his Missouri property under water, rendering the land worthless. Shortly thereafter, the 57-year-old Kenton again was imprisoned in Ohio on the same old Kentucky debt charge, the validity of which he continued to dispute. Rather than pay a debt that he considered bogus, he chose to remain in custody. Another year passed before he was released.

By now, the War of 1812 had broken out, and Kenton entered the conflict as a sergeant. Once more in his element, he formed scouting companies, and, as in previous conflicts, was “on his own hook,” officially allowed to travel, fight and report as he saw fit.

At the 1813 Battle of the Thames, Kenton found himself in the forces opposing his old friend, Tecumseh. When the Shawnee chief and tribal leader was killed, Kenton was

called upon to identify his body. Realizing that “souvenir” hunters were standing by to take the chief’s scalp and other body parts as trophies, Kenton reportedly pointed to another fallen native as the chief, thereby allowing the tribe to appropriately bury and honor their fallen leader.

Following the war, Kenton returned to his cabin, his days as a fighting man finally over. He now looked to a peaceful retirement, confident that he still owned vast properties in Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri and the Northwest Territory. A series of land disputes, as well as revisions in the laws by which Kenton had filed, soon overturned nearly all his claims, rendering him virtually landless and impoverished.

Kenton also had invested in grain mills and built two stores in Missouri. They failed as well, mainly due to the mismanagement of people whom he had trusted. The Kenton family once lived in a fine brick mansion; the family home now was described by an observer as “a log house of the most primitive style, with a dirt floor and a stump left standing in the center.” Writes Edna Kenton, “Of the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the hundreds of thousands of acres that had passed through his hands he had few left of either … His first child was born to riches; his last, to the plainest of pioneer living.”

In 1818, Kentucky court officials, still smarting over the old debt charge, tricked Kenton back to the state. The officials wrote asking him to testify in a land case, and as soon as he arrived, they jailed him—ironically, in Mason County, which Kenton himself had originally settled. He again refused to pay the claim, still maintaining that the charge was false.

Furious at his confinement, Kenton’s friends worked diligently to secure his release, while Betsey periodically rode her horse from their Ohio cabin to bring him food and comfort. Finally, friends in the Kentucky legislature put forth Kenton’s case as a means of abolishing the archaic Debtor’s Law under which he had been jailed, and he ultimately was freed.

ENDINGS

The man who had played such a major part in opening Kentucky to White settlement, guiding and protecting its early settlers often at the risk of his own life, was now reduced to living with Betsey in a small cabin on his daughter’s property on a $20-per-month government pension. Would-be biographers, chronicling the history of what was then considered the Western frontier, made plans to interview Kenton for his life story; none of their plans materialized. Perhaps the most intriguing of the would-be biographers’ efforts was that of Judge John H. James of Urbana. He sat with the aged and illiterate Kenton in early 1833 avidly recording Kenton’s comments in preparation for a book that, sadly, was never written.

Nonetheless, James’ notes give the reader a fascinating glimpse into Kenton’s peculiar turns of phrase in addition to his comments on certain events in his life.

Three years later, Simon Kenton—frontiersman, explorer, scout, soldier and adventurer—died in Logan County, Ohio, at 81. His last words were to Betsey: “I have fought my last battle, and it has been the hardest of them all.” He was buried near his cabin in a spot he himself had

k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 45

RECOMMENDED READING After Simon Kenton’s death, various cheap novels, such as Simon Kenton, Or, The Scout’s Revenge, gained popularity.

Few bore any resemblance to fact. In this author’s opinion, of the small handful of nonfiction books on the life of Kenton,

The original of this painting of Simon Kenton with Daniel Boone can be seen above the fireplace at The Old Pogue Experience at the Kentucky Gateway Museum.

the one that approaches the highest level of historical accuracy is Simon Kenton: His Life and Period 1755-1836, by Edna Kenton.

Originally published in 1930 and currently available in paperback, it is a balanced and highly readable account of her ancestor’s life, neither idealizing nor vilifying him.

Ohio author Ray Crain has written a series of books on Kenton and his times. In 1970, Allan W. Eckert wrote a historical novel, Simon Kenton, The Frontiersmen: A Narrative, which, while entertaining, is, after all, a work of fiction. For seekers of first-hand sources, the pages of Judge John H. James’ interviews as well as other documents relating to Kenton’s life are available through the Champaign County Historical Museum of Urbana, Ohio. Two years after Kenton died, historian and archivist Lyman C. Draper began a years-long effort to interview Kenton’s friends and relatives, and although the book he had planned was never written, the material he gathered is invaluable.

The Draper Collection currently is housed in the Wisconsin Historical Society. And in 2000, Kentucky Educational Television broadcast a documentary on Kenton’s early career narrated by actor and Ohio native Clancy Brown. The documentary, A Walk with Simon Kenton, is available online. — Ron Soodalter 46 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

(Courtesy of the Kentucky Gateway Museum Center.)

chosen. Fewer than 30 people attended his funeral.

Soon after Kenton’s death, both Kentucky and Ohio began naming towns and counties after him. For years, the two states engaged in a fierce competition—uninterrupted by the Civil War—for Kenton’s remains. In 1865, reportedly upon learning that Kentucky had made provision for moving his bones to Frankfort, the Ohio legislature allocated funds for a monument to be built over his grave in Urbana. He had been buried elsewhere, so the state had his remains disinterred and moved to the Urbana Oak Dale Cemetery.

It was not until 1884 that the State of Ohio constructed a large granite block over Kenton’s grave to serve as the base for a life-size bronze statue. The statue itself was not completed until 1979. As one chronicler poignantly observed, “The grave of the great frontiersman and mountain man Simon Kenton is marked by a huge memorial, ironically given to honor him by the government that did not give him any respect when he stood before them in old age.”

Across the Ohio River, a larger-than-life stone monument to Kenton was erected in Maysville, Kentucky, in 2019. It shares a place of prominence with a bronze bust of Kenton’s old friend and sometime enemy, Tecumseh.

Today, artifacts of Simon Kenton’s life—such as his flintlock rifle and pieces from his original coffin—can be found in museums and historical societies throughout Ohio and Kentucky. One of the best collections is in Maysville at the Kentucky Gateway Museum Center. Over the last several years, both states have dedicated schools, highways and bridges to his memory. Constructed in the 1930s, the Simon Kenton Memorial Bridge, spanning the river that factored so significantly in his life, joins Aberdeen, Ohio, to Maysville. In 1998, the Ohio legislature named U.S. 68 from the Ohio River to the town of Kenton the Simon Kenton Memorial Highway. And every September for decades, the city of Maysville has hosted the weekend-long Simon Kenton Festival near the location where Kenton first settled in Kentucky and where he once built a blockhouse for the protection of its settlers.

In retrospect, Simon Kenton was very much a product of his time—and when that time ended to make way for a new wave of settlers, developers, businessmen and opportunists, he was brushed aside. Nor was he alone: His old friend Daniel Boone suffered the same fate, losing his vast land claims to the courts and living out his final days in a small cabin.

Perhaps the best summary of Kenton’s life is that which ends Edna Kenton’s biography: “[T]he clear bright sense of danger inspired him; at ease[,] he was at a loss …

He was a man ‘on his own hook,’ framed to swim in his own sea; when it drained away he was left without the right lungs to breathe the new air. But in his own waters—in his own time—he was leviathan.” Q

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KENTUCKY GATEWAY MUSEUM CENTER 215 Sutton Street Maysville, Kentucky 41056 606-564-5865 www.kygmc.org Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10am-4pm The Old Pogue Experience located in the limestone building on the corner of sutton & west 2nd Streets kygmc campus

KYGMC is home to several Steve White original paintings! Subjects include Simon Kenton, John Colter, Maysville's ship-building history and more.

Stop by Kentucky Gateway Museum Center to see these beautiful pieces!

"Simon Kenton Departing on a Spy Mission"

By Steve White

"Kenton Running the Gauntlet"

By Steve White

Give to the Make Your Mark for History on Your State Income Tax Return Your donation goes to a grant pool to help museums, libraries, and history organizations in your community.

history.ky.gov/participate/support-local-history 48 K E NT U C K Y M O NT H LY F EBR UARY 2022

A section for Kentuckians everywhere … inside Kentucky Monthly.

The 1901 Kentucky Derby was the 27th running of the Kentucky Derby. The race took place on April 29, 1901.

K ENTUCKY XPLORER E All About Kentucky

Volume 37, Number 1 – February 2022

Charles H. Anderson, professor of engineering design at the University of Kentucky from 1919-38, is pictured in his 1921 Rolls-Royce in front of UK’s Kinkead Hall, circa 1931. Photo courtesy of the University of Kentucky’s Special Collections Research Center.

Your Letters -- page 50 The Lost Silver Mine of Jonathan Swift -- page 54 Finding George Washington in Kentucky -- page 58

“I Remember” By Our Readers

and More!

Featuring Things Old & New About Kentucky

50

THE KENTUCKY EXPLORER

Kentucky Explorer a magazine published for Kentuckians everywhere Charles Hayes Jr. • Founder Stephen M. Vest • Publisher Deborah Kohl Kremer • Editor Rebecca Redding • Typographist One-Year Subscription to Kentucky Monthly: $20

FOUNDED 1986, ISSUE 335, VOLUME 37, NO. 1

Letters to Kentucky Explorer Letters may be edited for clarification and brevity.

Kentucky Veteran Remembered We have published Kentucky Explorer for one year and are happy to bring it to you. I have always been a history lover and have learned so much since our first edition in February 2021. From well-researched stories about the Civil War and long-forgotten Kentucky residents who went above and beyond to hand-written cards and letters describing a walk to school, a church from childhood, or happy memories of a meager meal made from what was on hand—I treasure each reader’s submission.

Charles Hayes, who created Explorer, and his staff are enjoying their well-deserved retirement. What a gift they brought to us for 30-plus years! Although we deliver Explorer in a smaller package, we hope its loyal readers still enjoy these stories of Kentucky’s past, along with articles from Kentucky Monthly.

We have heard from many of you, thanking us for keeping your favorite magazine alive, and we are equally grateful for your support. But we can’t do it without you! Please continue to send in your photos and recollections. I would love to share them with our readers. When a thick envelope arrives addressed to “Kentucky Explorer” or an email arrives with “Story for Explorer” in the subject line, it feels like a gift, and I can’t wait to open it.

You can reach me at deb@kentuckymonthly.com or mail items to Kentucky Monthly, Attn: Deb Kremer, P.O. Box 559, Frankfort, KY 40602-0559.

— D E B O R A H KO H L K R E M E R

Abraham Lincoln’s birthday is Feb. 12. Have you visited his birthplace in Hodgenville?

I went to school with F.G. (Gary) Powers at Jenkins.

Gary graduated at Grundy, Virginia (featured in the story on page 53 of the November issue). His dad, Oliver Powers, had a shoe repair shop in Jenkins.

I am now 90 years old. I graduated from Berea in 1953.

Knew a fellow at Berea by the name of Richard Vest who was killed in a car wreck during my first year there.

I enjoyed Charles Hayes’ magazine immensely.

James Adams Montana

Back Issue Gratitude In the December 2021/January 2022 issue, we shared a letter to the editor from Stephanie Garris, who was looking for back issues of Kentucky Explorer to give her 89-year-old father for Christmas. We shared her address and asked if anyone had any copies to spare. Here is an update.

Thank you so much to everyone who generously donated their back issues of the Kentucky Explorer magazine!

My dad was elated when he opened the boxes and said they were the best and most thoughtful gifts.

Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart!

Stephanie Garris 145 Renwood Place Springboro, Ohio 45066 616.460.7258, stephbarkergarris@ yahoo.com

In memory of Donna Jean Hayes, 1948-2019 Kentucky Explorer appears inside each issue of Kentucky Monthly magazine. Subscriptions can be purchased online at shopkentuckymonthly.com or by calling 1.888.329.0053.

Please send letters to Editor Deborah Kohl Kremer at deb@kentuckymonthly.com or mail to Deb Kremer, Kentucky Monthly, PO Box 559, Frankfort, KY 40602.

Begun in 1818, the first commercial oil well in North America was on the Cumberland River in McCreary County.

February 2022 51

Maynard “Colored” Rosenwald School

By H.D. Overholt Adolphus, Kentucky treasurerallenkybees@gmail.com In eastern Allen County near the quiet community of Maynard are the remains of fortitude, education and philanthropy. Traffic on Ky. 98 east of Scottsville cruises by the buildings of Caney Fork Baptist Church and the Maynard “Colored” Rosenwald School, along with a cemetery holding a vast amount of untold history within its sodden graves.

Observing 100 years in 2021 since the completion of the school was a central focus of the newly formed Allen County Kentucky African American Heritage Council. To give meaning to the endeavor and understanding of Rosenwald Schools, one must travel to the past and review our national history.

The 1896 United States Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision justified “separate but equal” public facilities for African Americans.

Although the ruling dealt with segregated rail travel, it was applied to many elements of American life, including schools. Financially, communities often struggled to provide two racially separate educational facilities to serve both White and Black student populations.

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856-1915) was invited by Black Alabamians in 1881 to develop the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, which today is known as Tuskegee University. The privately funded institute’s graduates would return to mostly rural schools of deplorable conditions to teach and focus on essential education for the betterment of communities. To sustain the institute’s operations, Washington solicited financial support from donors and met Julius Rosenwald at a fundraiser in 1911.

Rosenwald (1862-1932) was the son of early 19th century German-Jewish immigrants. Growing up in Illinois, he became a successful, self-made businessman and in 1908 was named president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., a leading national retail and mail-order business. While Rosenwald accumulated a vast fortune, he was equally committed to philanthropy and contributed $25,000 after a visit to the impressive Tuskegee Institute campus. He subsequently joined the institute’s board of trustees. This 1913 partnership of Washington and Rosenwald began the far-reaching school-building fund for African American communities in 15 Southern and border states.

The Rosenwald school-building program required local Black communities to be full partners in its development and would include contributions of cash, land, materials and labor. The grants also required the local White school boards’ agreement to own, maintain and staff the schools

once the buildings were completed. The intentional fostering of the beginning of Black/White dialogue also enhanced the school education development.

Progressive school-design features by noted Tuskegee Institute architect Robert Robinson Taylor (1868-1942) were introduced. Among these designs were large double-hung windows for lots of light in the absence of available electricity, building foundations on small piers to enable moisture and temperature control and air circulation below the buildings, and a main classroom, cloakroom and kitchen. Even White public school officials saw the increase in student learning and adopted some of the plans.

In Allen County, Judge Fletcher Gaylon Harlan and his wife, Sallie B Bridges Harlan, executed a deed dated Nov. 21, 1890, to Willis Holder and Ambros Whitney, trustees of Caney Fork Colored Baptist Church, containing 8¼ acres.

The remains of Maynard The “modern” schoolhouse “Colored” Rosenwald School; was erected on the Caney inset, Nintha Shipley Ponds Fork acreage in 1920-21 using design No. 11 for a one-teacher building, with $1,500 in public funding and $500 of Rosenwald Funds. The 36- by 23-foot structure with a metal hip roof and west side windows was the only Rosenwald School in Allen County and also is the only Black school in the Austin quadrant of Allen County still standing.

About 1934, the school ceased classes, and teacher Nintha Shipley Ponds (1902-1974) received funds from the local school board to transfer students daily the 6 miles to the Scottsville School for Blacks. Part of the folklore of the building that remained intact after the closing is related to Clarence Burton, who, as a young child, obtained water from the site and let his grandmother, Tennie Carpenter, know of visitors at the schoolhouse. According to a story circulated locally, after some years of vacancy, public school personnel came to the site and removed outside weatherboarding for use in other buildings. Carpenter, Henrietta Holder (also known as “Aunt Rit”) and Mary Burton headed out with a mission in mind. They instructed the men to cease their labor as the building was privately owned by the church and would remain intact.

Because of these women’s devotion, as well as others, today the Maynard School is one of fewer than 11 pecent of Rosenwald school buildings still standing. More stories abound concerning the Maynard School’s role in the life achievements of our greater Allen County community.

Archiving and presenting these stories also are part of the Allen County Kentucky African American Heritage Council’s goals in history preservation.

As we observe Black History Month, let us become aware of the great impact within our life of dedicated citizens within society who have contributed to our lives for the betterment of future generations.

“Don’t count the days; make the days count.” Muhammad Ali

4 THE 52 THEKENTUCKY KENTUCKYEXPLORER EXPLORER Send memories to Deborah Kohl Kremer at deb@kentuckymonthly.com or mail to Kentucky Monthly, Attn: Deb Kremer, P.O. Box 559, Frankfort, KY 40602.

“I Remember” Send your memory in today!

By Our Readers

Visiting Grandma’s House

A few furnishings were left in the house when they moved. A broken but still usable rocking chair, an old

By Norma Patrick Seto pump organ, and an ancient cabinet, among other things, Once in a while, it is good to return with cousins to the remained in the house long after their visits stopped.

Many years after our grandparents had left this earth to old home place on Settlement Branch, Johnson Fork, gain their heavenly home, about 20 of us made the trek to Magoffin County. the place where each of us had our own good memories of Pleasant memories surface and are shared as we walk Grandma and Grandpa. Our most senior cousin found rest along trying to identify paths that have not been used for and comfort sitting in the old rocking chair. many years. That is part of the charm and Others found joy in reading from the challenge of the day, and we love it. newspapers that were pasted to the walls.

The old house stood for a long time after it Newspaper served as wallpaper and helped was abandoned. We knew we were taking to insulate against cold air that could find a chances when we stepped into a structure way in through cracks between the rough that could have fallen on us, especially boards. As the day progressed, it seemed considering the weight of several people natural when someone started the song moving about and challenging the floor “Precious Memories” and then “Amazing structure and walls.

Grace.” After the singing, we slipped easily When our grandparents moved out of that into a time of prayer. The preacher in our house in the early 1950s, they kept ownership. group gave a short devotion and encouraged Living on the main road gave them better a time of reflection. Being with people I love access to the store and post office, but they in a home that had given so much love to missed the home where they had spent a each of us is cherished in my mind and good portion of their lives together. memory. Just before the sun slid behind the When weather permitted, Grandma Lizzie Lizzie and Fairsh Patrick hills, it cast the last rays of sunshine and Grandpa Fairsh Patrick would set out through the bare and broken window. It seemed to send a early on a given morning, walk a mile down Johnson Fork, message of love and blessing and maybe the words, “We turn up Settlement Branch, and arrive to spend the day at love you still; so glad you came to visit.” a place that held so many memories for them.

Special Delivery

By Norma Patrick Seto We lived in the Turkey Branch cabin when I was born in June 1944. As sharecroppers do, we moved to and lived at several other places, and then moved back to the cabin on Turkey Branch when I was 5.

On June 4, 1944, Mom went to fetch water from the spring, and when she bent to scoop up the water, her garment split right up the back. Mom called the dress her “Hoover apron,” which she defines as a wraparound maternity dress. I was a 10-pound, 2-ounce baby, and I was pushing the threads and the fabric to the limit.

She walked back up the hill to the cabin and declared to my dad, “If this baby is not born tomorrow, I don’t have a thing to wear.” Being always cooperative, I made my appearance the following day. Mom saved the scraps and fabric from the dress, and over the following weeks, she incorporated the pieces into a quilt that is now

displayed proudly on a wall at my place. I love looking at the quilt, showing it, and telling the story.

Mom was assisted in the delivery by Dr. Barnes Conley, who was driven by motorized vehicle to the mouth of Johnson Fork. From there, he rode a horse to the cabin on Turkey Branch. At that time, Monroe Davis and his family lived in a house just at the point where the path turns up the hill to go to the cabin. A day or so after I was born, Monroe’s young son, J.M., made his way up to the cabin and asked to see the new baby. When Mom asked how he knew she had a baby, J.M., who was probably 4 years old at the time, said that he saw my head sticking out of the saddlebag as the doctor rode by on his way to “deliver” me.

Norma Patrick Seto is the author of Life Goes Better with Chocolate Gravy: Mountain Memories—Mischief and Misery. For more information about her book, contact her at 872 Bay Harbor Drive, Maineville, OH 45039 or comax@fuse.net.

There are 173 school districts and 1,233 public schools in Kentucky.

February 2022 53

Winchester Public Servant Capt. William Albert Attersall: mayor, fire chief, carriage dealer and soldier

By Robert G. Blanton Clark County Fiscal Court Magistrate, Winchester rgblanton7652@bellsouth.net

S

everal months ago, a photo circulated on the internet depicting unidentified workers digging along Winchester’s South Main Street. With the help of Winchester Municipal Utilities, it was discovered that the gentleman in the center (of some prominence) is believed to be Winchester Water Works Superintendent (for 48 years) Charles Attersall. Having no other photos of Attersall made it unverifiable. But then I remembered a photo of the Winchester Fire Department I had purchased many years ago on eBay. The photo identified the firefighters, and I remembered the name Attersall. Charles was a firefighter, as was his brother, George, and father William. Seeing William reminded me that he served as mayor but for only two years. I began to dig, and with the help of others, this is what we discovered.

Until his death by consumption—today know as tuberculosis—on Nov. 29, 1908, William Albert Attersall remained a true public servant. Born in London, England, on Feb. 24, 1841, Attersall immigrated with his family to America when he was 11 and lived first in Cleveland, Ohio, before moving to Winchester in 1855. During the Civil War, he served as a captain in the Union Army’s 20th Kentucky Infantry Regiment under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.

During the war, he met Charlotte Boro of Louisville, whom he married in 1869.

In 1886, J.H McClymond sold his carriage business on Fairfax Street (later Lexington Avenue) to Attersall, who grew it to become one of the largest in its class in Kentucky. Attersall built and restored carriages—a talent and trade for which he attained quite a reputation. He also sold carriages that he brought from Louisville and Cincinnati. In 1905, Matt Bean acquired the business. Then, a disastrous fire in 1909 destroyed the Attersall building and gutted the city’s engine house next door. Attersall donated the land on which the engine house had been constructed to the city.

Attersall’s service with the Winchester Fire Department began in 1858, when he was a teen. At one point during his tenure, he was appointed by the city council to purchase a fire engine and equipment. He took it upon himself to negotiate an extra $1,500 in supplies for the department at no extra cost to the city. Attersall served more than 20 years as chief in the 1880s through Dec. 7, 1903. In 1890, with a department of 57 volunteers, Attersall had an annual salary of $250. It is believed that he initiated the militarytype ranking within the department, and that, in part, is why he is sometimes referred to as the “Father of the Winchester Fire Department.”

Top, the Winchester Fire Department, 1890s; above, the city’s South Main Street

Attersall’s tireless commitment to Winchester continued when he served on the city’s first board of education, where he promoted and encouraged the grading system.

After serving on the city council for many years, he was elected Winchester’s fifth mayor in 1905. He served as mayor from 1906 until 1908, when he grew ill with tuberculosis.

On April 3, 1908, Attersall sent this letter of resignation to the City Council: “Gentlemen: Owing to ill health, I have decided upon the advice of my physician, that I ought not in justice to myself or the city, longer retain the position of Mayor.

“I am not remindful of my obligations to the citizens of Winchester and to you gentlemen, that was conferred when I was chosen mayor, but it is in great measure because of my regard for the welfare of the city that I feel that the direction of its affairs should be turned over to one whose physical condition is better for the performance of the duties of the position.

“I respectfully tender my resignation as mayor to take effect at once.”

The council accepted the resignation and appointed J.A. Hughes to fill the unexpired term of Attersall, who died just eight months later.

Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County (now LaRue County) on Feb. 12, 1809.

6 THE 54 THEKENTUCKY KENTUCKYEXPLORER EXPLORER

The Lost Silver Mine of

Jonathan Swift

By Daryl Skaggs Olive Hill

O

on the ambiguous descriptions, every county in eastern Kentucky could probably claim to be the location of the Swift mine.

The Swift legend reports that a vein of pure silver ore existed in eastern Kentucky and was mined by an Englishman named Jonathan Swift during the late 1700s.

Some ore supposedly was smelted into coins and taken to Virginia, while the remainder of the ore and coins was hidden in caves in the vicinity of the mine.

Maps and journals of the mine and travels of Swift first were chronicled by John Filson, a noted early Kentucky historian, surveyor and biographer of Daniel Boone and Swift. Filson was an eloquent, creative writer; but apparently he had some personal and financial interest in the promotion of the mine, which calls into question his motivation for extensive writings and glamorous promotions of the reported mine.

It is unlikely that there is any natural occurrence of gold, silver or any precious metals in the Paleozoic rocks of eastern Kentucky. Based on geologic studies, the surface rocks in eastern Kentucky are not a favorable site for gold or silver exploration.

ne of the most appealing of all Appalachian legends is that of the tale of the lost silver mine of Jonathan Swift. Almost 200 years after the alleged events transpired, treasure hunters continue to search for the vein of silver that Swift claimed to have lost. Many believe Swift’s mine was located deep in eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia or eastern Tennessee.

Thousands of Kentuckians have spent time and money in search of this legend. Numerous books, maps and interpretations of the Swift legend have been studied by amateur prospectors, hobbyists and folklorists in search of the lost mine.

Versions of the Swift maps probably number in Historic marker on the grounds of the Wolfe County Courthouse. the hundreds, and, based

Appliances With Which You May Have Grown Up

In the image on the left are stoves, refrigerators and hot water heaters. Washing and sewing machines are on display in the photo on the right. These photos are believed to be from the 1940s from the Domestic Service appliance store on West Broadway in Mayfield. They were submitted by Beth Wilson Egerer.

As of 2018, Louisville, Lexington and northern Kentucky had a combined population of 2,402,958,

February 2022 55

Custer in Kentucky: A Brief History

This painting, with a buckskin-clad Gen. George Armstrong Custer in the center, depicts the Battle of Little Bighorn. The original was painted by Casilly Adams. In 1888, Adams sold it to a saloon keeper in St. Louis, Missouri. Down on his luck in 1892, the barkeep sold the painting, as well as the bar, to Adolphus Busch for $35,000. According to Anheuser-Busch, there since have been 18 editions of the print, with more than 1 million copies distributed.

By Dr. Marshall Myers Richmond

A

fter the Civil War, Gen. George Armstrong Custer dropped by former Confederate Gen. Abraham Buford’s horse farm in Woodford County, where he bought a horse.

Buford’s horses were “prized flesh” featuring several successful racehorses. And Custer, indeed, had an eye for prized horses.

As Custer rode away, Buford yelled, “The Indians will never catch you on that horse.”

• • •

Custer’s reputation as a military leader was spotty, despite his memorable heroics at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Known as the “Boy General” or “Yellow Hair” by the Native Americans, he had a reputation as a “bad boy” who often impulsively put himself and his men at risk. He earned as many demerits at West Point as possible without being expelled from the military training facility.

To his critics, Custer lost the Battle of Little Bighorn because he committed a gross military blunder. In particular, he never should have split his command.

As a lieutenant colonel, Custer was assigned to command the post at Elizabethtown on Sept. 3, 1871. While there, he was to deal with Ku Klux Klan problems and the illegal distillers who avoided federal taxes.

He took along his wife, Libbie, who once quipped that she was living in the part of Kentucky that was “very poor.”

She went on to say that “the people [are] low and uneducated. Three or four ride the same horse. The most active inhabitants … was a pig.”

While Custer was in Elizabethtown, he spent time bargaining for exquisite horses and dogs in Louisville and Lexington. His men broke up many a still—sometimes sampling the “contraband” themselves. He soon acquired many fine horses and hunting dogs and pictured himself as worthy of unbounded admiration.

More than anything, Custer earned a name as the hero of Little Bighorn, though he was massacred by natives. Yet even before that fateful encounter, he was a celebrity, having written several popular articles for Galaxy Magazine.

Aside from the shorter pieces, he penned several books in which he detailed himself as a wary and heroic fighter of Native Americans.

When he died, Libbie carried on the publicity Custer himself sought, penning several books that elevated his legend. But her writing was not the impetus that created the myth that many ascribe to Custer.

Anheuser-Busch, the beer distiller, furnished hundreds of saloons with a large backdrop painting of the heroic Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The enormous print cemented Custer as a man worthy of unbounded veneration in the minds of many Americans.

… which is 54 percent of the state’s total population, but occupy only about 19 percent of the state’s land.

56

THE KENTUCKY EXPLORER

Civil War Widow’s Pension Finally Granted

By Jan Fitzsimmons Arlington, Virginia fitzjannie@gmail.com 410.736.9413

‘stonemason’, all other accounts say he “handled stone” as an “ordinary laboring man” but was not a professional by trade.

In quick succession Louisa gave birth to five children.

Sarah Jane, John, Theobald and Savina were born in Kentucky. Mary was born in the Kansas Territory, circa 1856. The family spent about three years in that region, Life in Kentucky during the Civil War was complex. living near the border of Missouri. Louisa’s half-sister, “The war sharply divided the sentiments of the different people in Sarah Breen, stated: “While they were in Kansas, [John the community, and during its progress those sympathizing with the Fitzsimmons] was such a Union man during the John Brown southern cause held aloof from social and formal relations with those troubles that he got afraid the proslavery men would kill him. And they sympathizing with the northern cause. Johnnie Fitzsimmons identified sold out and then came home.” himself with the northern cause and I sympathized the other way, and, Louisa was a thrifty woman who handled the family hence, did not know much about him after his enlistment,” remarked finances. She made sure that her husband gave her his Georgetown resident J.J. Rucker. earnings. What money her husband gave her, she invested in her own name. “[Louisa] was known to my wife as a deserving poor woman, who sometimes had a pretty hard time and my wife ohn and Louisa Fitzsimmons were my second-greatemployed her … to do sewing,” remarked Professor Farnum. grandparents. As John had fought in the Civil War, John was known as a “very jolly, jovial, clever sort of Irishman …

Louisa was entitled to a widow’s pension at his death. most generally full of fun.” Although This story is the result of a poor, John was a healthy, able14-year accumulation of witness bodied man and worked various narratives found in a her widow’s jobs. pension record. The italicized Louisa did not want her portions are quoted directly from husband to go to war. With a large the records. Family members, family and a wife soon “to be neighbors, military colleagues, confined,” John was not compelled medical professionals and others to enlist. But in 1861, although his provided evidence for Louisa’s in-laws and most of his neighbors claim to access of John’s pension. were Southern sympathizers, John, Louisa was born in 1828 in 52, enlisted in the Union Army Kentucky, the second of three with the 6th Kentucky Cavalry. children of Jonathan and Sallie Sarah Breen remembered, The day (McAlister) Hyatt/Hieatt, who … he and his company started for Lexington were married in Mercer County in … [John] went off cheerful and well …

1823. Louisa’s father died when the [Louisa] did not sympathize with the children were young, and Sallie Southern cause. I never heard her say a remarried an Irish immigrant word in sympathy for the South. I named Patrick O’Brien. They had sympathized with the South, but I am sure three children of their own. she did not.” Louisa complained little In 1848, Louisa married John John and Louisa Fitzsimmons’ marriage after her husband left for war. In Fitzsimmons, an Irish Catholic documents nearly 20 years her senior.

1862, she gave birth to a daughter, Although she had been born a Susan.

Presbyterian, they were married by a Catholic priest at the During John’s enlistment, the 6th Cavalry was “worn home of her mother and stepfather in Lexington. The down in hard service,” especially in the Cumberland Gap. couple set up housekeeping in Georgetown. Comparing “Duties were very arduous, being scouting, picketing, conveying the 1850 Kentucky census records to the 1850 slave dispatches, making reconnaissance, all of which were difficult and schedules, while family and neighbors of the Fitzsimmons dangerous in the mountain region.” The Union forces were in couple were slaveholders, John and Louisa were the retreat from Confederate forces, and John experienced exception. “excessive fatigue, exposure, and hardship.” Jumping a ditch in Prior to his marriage, John’s life remains a mystery. the Cumberland Mountains near the Tennessee Line, he Although his occupation on his enlistment record was injured his back.

J

The name Kentucky comes from an Iroquoian word “Ken-tah-ten” meaning “land of tomorrow.”

56 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY NOV EMBER 2 0 2 0

February 2022 57

the possible reasons why John had Louisa described his homecoming in committed suicide. Burns claimed it January 1863, when he was discharged was because John and Louisa had a bad from a Danville, Kentucky, hospital. “He marriage. “She treated him about as bad as a was hauled the distance (28 miles) in an wife would treat a man. She would turn a cold ambulance, and was just barely able to bear his shoulder to him and not prepare his meals. She weight … by the help of a cane.” His medical was boss of the family … [John] used to tell me his disability was officially noted as troubles, and I advised him to thrash her.” rheumatism and kidney problems, Others disputed that claim. One which prevented him from further commented that it may have been due service. to their religious differences; still others People noticed John’s dramatic said John had accepted Presbyterianism. change. He was a “physical and mental His inability to support his family was a wreck … all going to pieces”; “frail”; “sick, common response. Some said it may weak, pale and emaciated.” “He had lost flesh.” have been due to his painful suffering He was moody and melancholy. The from his war injuries. A few mentioned “wild look … of [John’s] eyes and that he did not his fear of the rebel forces. act straight” alarmed Louisa’s parents.

Louisa filed her first general affidavit “I was often fearful that he would commit for a widow’s pension in 1878. This suicide, as he got despondent and low spirited,” claim was rejected on the “grounds that Louisa worried. “He thought the rebels were the cause of soldier’s suicide was not a going to kill him and this seemed to prey upon his result of his military service.” Louisa mind more than anything.” appealed. The claim was rejected and John feared his former friends “were reconsidered several times. Each time, it down on him because he had gone into the was reopened requesting further Federal Army.” Neighbor Thomas Burns evidence, Louisa had to collect and alleged that “4/5ths of the people sympathized submit additional witness narratives. with the South … This was not a healthy town for The sticking points for approval were: if a Union man.” insanity caused the soldier to commit John was unable to work, and his suicide and whether or not his insanity/ family struggled to get by. Few rarely suicide was a direct result of the saw him in the months following his soldier’s military service. She filed return. His brother-in-law, Tom Breen, another claim in 1888. vaguely recalled trying to get John work In February 1891, an Assistant at nearby Camp Nelson. Sarah Breen Secretary of the Interior summarized: remembered the day in early October “First, that the soldier’s conduct described by the 1863 when John came to her door looking for Tom. John looked “very bad, evidence, he was insane. Second, that the cause and wild … of his eyes.” Tom noticed that he of such insanity was very much probably the looked “very wild and queer.” result of disease of kidneys and rheumatism … I At home in the early morning hours am constrained for the reasons stated … to of Oct. 4, 1863, John cried out for his overrule the rejection and direct the allowance of wife. He was on a cot between the the claim.” dining room and the kitchen where he In January 1892, 30 years after John’s slept. John had often moaned and death and 14 years after Louisa filed for groaned in his sleep since returning a Civil War pension, the government from the war, but this sounded different agreed that the afflictions John suffered to Louisa. When she discovered her during his military service led him to husband in a severe convulsion, he commit suicide. Louisa was approved confessed to taking strychnine. for $8 a month, retroactive to the date Top, affidavit Louisa filed in 1888; Burns arrived after being alerted by of John’s death until her marriage to middle, John Fitzsimmons’ Certificate Tom Breen that “Johnnie was dying.” John Henry Whalin in 1879. She received an of Disability; bottom, Louisa’s pension was in a second convulsion. Thomas sat additional amount of $2 per month for award. on the cot, took hold of his neighbor’s each child under 16 until they reached hands, and told John that he did not the age of maturity. Today, that total believe he had taken poison. John shouted, “Before my God I compensation would equate to nearly $60,000. have!” and then pointed to the strychnine laying on the Henry Whalin died in Los Angeles in 1893. The last hearth. When Burns asked him why, John replied, official record noting Louisa Whalin is a 1900 census. She “Misfortune, misfortune!” lived in Morgan County, Illinois, at the time.

John died in his third convulsion.

John was buried in the Georgetown Cemetery. The final In their deposition statements, witnesses speculated on resting place for Louisa remains unknown.

Pine Mountain State Resort Park in Pineville, established in 1924, was the first Kentucky state park.

58

THE KENTUCKY EXPLORER

Finding George Washington in Kentucky

By Sam Terry Glasgow

W

hile our first president, George Washington, is among the best-known leaders of our nation, much of his unique personal history has been overshadowed by his actions in the Revolutionary War and his years as Commander in Chief. Most of us carry his likeness in our pockets and wallets daily and rarely consider his legacy outside of fabricated tales about chopping down cherry trees and the like. Washington’s birthday, Feb. 22, was celebrated as a federal holiday from 1879-1971, but now, the “Father of Our Country” is honored along with Abraham Lincoln (birthdate Feb. 12) and other presidents on the third Monday of February, known as Presidents Day. Washington is intricately woven into the history of Virginia, but he also has connections to Kentucky. Most notably, he was the owner of a large tract of land in present-day Grayson County. In 1788, Washington agreed to purchase the land from Henry Lee. While the deed filed years later mentions £600 “of current Virginia money,” the reality was that Washington traded a prized horse, Magnolio, in exchange for 5,000 acres of Kentucky land.

A careful buyer, Washington was familiar with John Filson’s book, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, and he noted that the area was said to be rich in

iron ore deposits, which potentially could be quite valuable as the frontier was settled. Likewise, Washington advised Lee that the horse, an Arabian stud he had purchased from the estate of John Parke Custis was “high in health, spirits, and flesh, [and] can be delivered in good order.” He went on to comment, “It is true I am not fond of buying a Pig in a Poke especially too of a sort which may be expensive to me, but under the circumstances attending the choice of the Land you offer me for Magnolio, there can be no doubt of the quality of it.”

In January 1789, Washington requested a clearer title of the property, noting that he was not satisfied with the details Lee had provided. In reality, the land was 5,400 acres situated “at and about the mouth of Short Creek in the vicinity of what is known as ‘Hites Falls’ some several miles below the ‘Falls of Rough’ on the South side of Rough creek in what is now Grayson County.”

Serving as the nation’s first president demanded much of Washington’s time, and there was little activity regarding the Kentucky land. However, Lee sold the same land to Alexander Spotswood, a relative of the president.

Spotswood decided to seek his fortune in Kentucky and wished to see his purchase before determining a place to settle. It eventually was realized that Lee had double-sold the land. “That he sold you these lands is certain, that he sold them to me and got pd. Is certain,” Spotswood wrote to Washington in September 1795, adding, “As land is a thing never to be forgotten when once sold, I leave it to you to determine, what could be his motives for the double sale.”

Washington proposed selling the land to Spotswood if Lee would provide him lands of a higher quality in Kentucky. Spotswood nixed the idea. In 1798, Washington wished to sell his Kentucky land George Washington’s 1798 survey of his 5,000-acre tract of land in present-day Grayson and drew his own survey of the County, Kentucky. Image courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society.

In 1873, Louisville druggist John Colgan invented chewing gum.

February 2022 59

Above, the Spotswood house; right, the Washington County Court Hourse in Springfield.

property. The resulting document is now part of the Kentucky Historical Society collection. The document deeding the land to Washington officially was filed in Kentucky in 1799, just a few months before he died, having never seen the land or visited Kentucky.

A Kentucky Historical Society marker (No. 212) near Yeaman Church of Christ on Ky. 54 in Grayson County gives an abbreviated version of the story of Washington’s Kentucky land.

While Washington never made it to Kentucky, his legacy is honored in multiple state locales. In 1786, while Kentucky was still part of Virginia, a new settlement on the Ohio River was established and named in Washington’s honor. Washington, Kentucky, was the first town in America named in honor of the Revolutionary War hero. Since that time, Washington’s name has been given to one U.S. state, 31 counties and 71 townships.

Other Washington legacies found in Kentucky: Georgetown, the seat of Scott County; Mount Washington in Bullitt County (first named Mount Vernon in honor of the president’s Virginia home but was later changed in deference to Mount Vernon in Rockcastle County); and Washington County. Coincidentally, Washington’s Kentucky land is located in Grayson County, named in honor of Col. William Grayson, Washington’s aide de camp; the city of Grayson in Carter County also honors

Grayson.

Other connections to Washington can be found in Kentucky. In Glasgow stands the Alexander Spotswood house, built in 1799 and the oldest brick home in Barren County. While documentation is lacking, two centuries of local lore reveal that Washington played a role in building the house for his great niece. Alexander Spotswood and his wife, Elizabeth “Betty” Alexander Lewis, both had familial connections to Washington.

Spotswood’s mother was Elizabeth Washington Spotswood, a daughter of George’s half-brother, Augustine Washington. Betty was the daughter of Fielding Lewis II, whose mother was Elizabeth “Betty” Washington Lewis, George’s sister. Situated in Logan County is the John Whiting Washington house in Russellville; another Washington-connected home, Elmwood, near Auburn; and the Fairfax Washington House in Logan County. Additionally, Augustine Washington owned property in Pulaski County for a period of time.

Sam Terry is the creator and author of the Sam Terry’s Kentucky blog, which can be found at www.samterryskentucky.com or by the same name on Facebook.

Reach 120,000 readers with classified advertising available in Kentucky Explorer. Classified ads $50 per issue (up to 25 words).

Contact Deborah Kohl Kremer at deb@kentuckymonthly.com

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Advertising signs. Handmade quilts. Marbles. Jars. Much, much more. Complete and partial estates. Call Clarence, buyer for more than 30 years, at 606.531.0467. (F-D)

The first advertisement for bourbon was printed in the Western Citizen Newspaper in Paris, Kentucky, in 1821.

past tense/present tense

by Bill Ellis

Something Is Missing in Our Lives And We Have Already Forgotten

I

loved it all—the roaring lions, the beautiful costumes, the sound of the band, and the fragrance of cotton candy and popcorn. I’m talking, of course, about the circus.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey shut down its three-ring extravaganza in May 2017 after a 146-year history.

Circuses large, medium and small are all about gone. No more will we see the posters nailed to about every telephone or light pole in the county.* You can still visit a casino in Las Vegas with a circus motif, including high-wire acts, or see a version known as Cirque du Soleil or other versions of such traveling shows.

They are exciting stage performances.

But never again will a circus come to your town with wild animals, a parade down Main Street, the stretching of a large tent across a once-vacant field, and the sights and smells of a “Big Top” show.

Animal rights groups pushed hard to eliminate the old-fashioned circus days in which wild animals were a part of the acts, including those of the famous Clyde Beatty, which was probably for the good.

I don’t miss the lion tamers, who, I suspect, always did a bit of overacting. But to a kid in the late 1940s who had never seen a wild African animal, it made quite an impression.

Somewhere in my memory, probably around the mid-1940s, I recall my mother taking me to a small circus. The stands were temporary—a bit too large for a 5-year-old kid. I slipped off the seat and fell to the

60 K E NT U C K Y M O NTHLY F EBR UARY 2022

ground. My mother later told the story that, for a moment, she thought I had disappeared, but then she looked below and saw me sitting on the dirt. Once I was hoisted back to the seat, she kept a hand on my arm.

• • •

While on a road trip way back in the last century—1998, to be exact— my wife, Charlotte, and I wandered into Hugo, Oklahoma, one morning. I forget now how we heard about Hugo, where several small circuses had their winter quarters, the largest of which was Carson & Barnes.

We entered a small restaurant with a circus motif and had a nice meal. A waitress introduced us to a native Kentuckian who worked as an “advance man” for Carson & Barnes. I cannot recall his name. He drove us around the small town, pointing out the headquarters of several circus companies. He took us by a cemetery with a circus theme that paid tribute to the numerous circus personnel who were buried there. I got his phone number and promised to call him later.

That fall, my wife had emergency surgery to repair a hole in her heart. I suffered a serious heart attack and had multiple bypass surgery on March 30, 1999. I planned to go back to Hugo and visit with the man we had met, interview him formally, and write something about that unusual town in Oklahoma. When I called Carson & Barnes’ telephone number, I learned that he had died.

• • •

I can admit at this late stage of my life that something else stirred inside me at the circus when I was about 12 or so. A dark-haired, lightly clad lady swung from a trapeze in a strange fashion. I suddenly realized that she was beautiful not in the way of other females I knew. The word today would be “sexy”—one that I had never heard before.

This happened another time on my way to becoming an adult. I reckon I was a late bloomer. I played football during my freshman year of high school. The seniors on the Shelbyville Red Devil football squad were my heroes. One day, the girlfriend of one of the seniors walked down the hallway past me. I turned and watched. As I later somewhat jokingly told that couple: “That was the day I seriously determined that there was more to life than football.”

Do you recall the first time you saw a circus? Was it in a small town or a large city? An arena or a real bigtop tent with sawdust, maybe even a famous three-ring circus? * A news item from Oct. 29, 2021, announced that Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey might return without animal acts. With the conclusion of this pandemic—if it ever ends—perhaps other smaller shows will again take to the road.

Readers may contact Bill Ellis at editor@ kentuckymonthly.com

off the shelf

Cusp of Adulthood Ask any adolescent, and they’ll let you know—either verbally or otherwise—that “change is a wild ride.” At least, that is the point that author Ellen Hagan makes in Reckless, Glorious, Girl, her poetic narrative of Beatrice Miller’s middleschool experiences in Bardstown.

At home, there’s a vigorous interplay between Bea, her protective mother, and her cool grandmother, who is all about seeking adventure and hoping to pass it to her granddaughter. We see Bea at school and beyond, with slumber parties (be sure to bring your iPad), important shopping trips (Mamaw loves vintage), puberty, and her crush on Rodney and not Liam. Bea navigates seventh grade on a wet road filled with potholes, though sometimes the splashes are fun.

Called “a gorgeous, intergenerational story of Southern women and a girl’s path blossoming into her sense of self,” Hagan’s book shows she’s in touch with fledgling young lives and knows how to portray such with a cadenced literary craftiness.

Among other endeavors, the author co-leads the Alice Hoffman Young Writers Retreat at Adelphia University. She lives in Kentucky and New York City.

By Steve Flairty Reckless, Glorious, Girl, by Ellen Hagan, Bloomsbury Children’s Books, $15.29 (H)

(P)-Paperback (C)-Clothbound (H)-Hardback

Exploring Paths to Freedom The 600-plus miles of Ohio River that create Kentucky’s northern border was one of the biggest obstacles to an enslaved person looking to flee to the free states of Indiana and Ohio.

In A Tour on the Underground Railroad Along the Ohio River, author and Oldham County native Nancy Stearns Theiss, Ph.D. broke down this river region into chapters, moving upstream from Kentucky’s west to the eastern part of the state. In each chapter, she shares the plight of the enslaved, stories of workers on the Underground Railroad, information about the towns, and suggestions of places readers can visit now to learn more.

This 175-page book works as both a history book and a guidebook. In addition to the overview of the history of the era, there are photos and historical documents that add to the storytelling.

Readers can take the book along with them for ideas of places to go and things to do to get a better feel for how the Underground Railroad played a part in each region.

Theiss is the executive director of the Oldham County Historical Society in La Grange.

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Get ready for gardening season wit down-home collection of practical advice and personal anecdotes fro Kentucky Monthly’s gardening colum Walt Reichert. Organized by the sea each chapter offers color photogra and straightforward tips for everythin from combating critters to pairing p The Bluegrass State’s green thumbs proliferated, thanks to Walt’s encouraging and down-to-earth mo of gardening wisdom.

Horticulture meets humor in gardening columnist Walt Reichert’s collection. o o o o o

To order: kentuckymonthly.com 1-888-329-0053

k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 61

field notes

by Gary Garth

Winter Hikes

Professor Lester G. Mimms (1905-1991) served the Hopkins County School system for 37 years and coached the J.W. Million Purple Waves from 1935-64.

F

ebruary can sometimes fool us and occasionally make fools of us. A day that begins with sunshine and the hint of spring can close with a biting wind on the heels of snow or sleet. February sunshine is a precious and vexing commodity. By the time the calendar turns to Solmonath (the Anglo-Saxon term for the second month), we are on the long shadow side of the winter solstice, but cold sunsets still arrive with stunning and occasionally unforgiving suddenness.

For those of us itching to get outside, February can be a cruel month.

One solution: Lace up your hiking boots.

I decided to ply a recently opened path that crosses a small slice of the Commonwealth with a troubling but historic past. The 2-mile-long Coach Lester G. Mimms Trail opened in December. It is part of Kenlake State Resort Park and treks near the western shore of Kentucky Lake, connecting historic Cherokee State Park (now part of Kenlake State Park) and the Kenlake State Park campground. This section of the park is located north of U.S. 68/Ky. 80 near Aurora. The northern section of the trail puts hikers within sight of the U.S. 68/Ky. 80 Eggner’s

Ferry Bridge that spans Kentucky Lake.

The trailhead at the Cherokee terminus of the Mimms Trail is just down the hill from the historic lodge dining hall (now available for special events) and is nicely graveled. But the dolled-up section of the trail doesn’t last long. The gravel extends down the hill and into the trees for about 60 yards. The rest is a well-marked (flanking trees are blazed with orange markings) dirt path that follows the rolling timbered lakeshore.

The trail passes a couple of cabin sites that reflect a time many would like to forget. Cherokee State Park, opened in 1951, was the only park in Kentucky and one of only a handful in the country developed exclusively for African Americans at a time when racist “separate but equal” nonsense was largely the law of the land. The 300acre park, which overlooks Kentucky Lake, included a dining hall, a dozen cottages, a bathhouse, picnic areas, a fish-cleaning station and a boat launch.

It proved widely popular. An estimated 2,000 people attended the park’s opening, which was both applauded and criticized. Cherokee operated for 13 years until Gov. Bert Combs signed a 1963 executive order ending segregation in Kentucky’s public facilities. Cherokee closed the following year and over time fell into disrepair.

In 2009, the park, now known as Historic Cherokee, was added to the National Register of Historic Places and has since enjoyed some building and grounds restoration.

Today, it is a day-use area accessible from U.S. 68 or via the Mimms Trail from the Kenlake campground.

For a late winter hike, plan carefully. Check the weather forecast and dress in layers, wear supportive footwear, stay hydrated, and pack a hat and gloves. Use a trekking pole or hiking staff, especially if conditions are wet. Carry your phone. Hike with a partner, if possible, and tell someone where you’re going and when you expect to return.

Kentucky has no shortage of hiking options, and while multi-day trips can be done in late winter, most casual hikers limit their winter outings to a relatively short hike or a half-day trek. Here are a couple of suggestions from the folks at Kentucky Tourism (kentuckytourism.com): Eagle Falls Trail, a 1.5-mile trek, is located within Cumberland Falls State Park. It leads to Eagle Falls and overlooks Cumberland Falls.

Honeymoon Falls Trail, located within Pine Mountain State Resort Park, leads to Honeymoon Falls. The 350-foot elevation change makes it a strenuous trek.

Kentucky is laced with public hiking trails at sites such as the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area, Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, The Parklands of Floyds Fork, Daniel Boone National Forest, and Kentucky State Parks.

Readers may contact Gary Garth at editor@kentuckymonthly.com 62 K E NT U C K Y M O NTHLY F EBR UARY 2 0 2 2

calendar Due to COVID-19, please visit the event’s website or call the contact number prior to attending to ensure that it is taking place.

FEBRUARY 2022 SUNDAY

MONDAY

Ongoing A Child’s World Exhibit, Filson

Ongoing Welcome to Derbyville Exhibit, Kentucky

<<<

Historical Society, Louisville, through March 21, 502.635.5083

13

Taylor Dayne, Tiffany and Jennifer Paige in Concert,

Derby Museum, Louisville, through Fall 2022, 502.637.1111

1

The Sound of Music, Carnegie

14 Valentine’s Day

21 Presidents Day

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

3

2

America – The 50th Anniversary Concert, Carson

Visual and Performing Arts, Covington, through Feb. 13, 859.957.1940

Center, Paducah, 270.908.2037

8

9

10

RiverPark Center, Owensboro, 270.687.2770

BB&T Arena, Highland Heights, 859.442.2652

House Theatre, Paducah, through Feb. 20, 270.444.6828

15

16

17

Dinosaur World Live!

EKU Center for the Arts, Richmond, 859.622.7469

20

TUESDAY

Come From Away, Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, Louisville, through Feb. 20, 502.584.7777

Jeff Dunham Seriously Tour,

Championship Tractor Pull, Kentucky Expo Center, Louisville, through Feb. 19, 502.367.5000

Unpacking Mother, Market

Cross That River in Concert, Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center, Lexington, 859.280.2218

24

Aaron Lewis and the Stateliners in Concert, The Corbin Arena, Corbin, 606.258.2020

27

Cirque Mechanics, Preston Arts Center, Henderson, 270.826.5916

28

Ongoing Roots and Refuge Exhibit, National Quilt Museum, Paducah, through March 1, 270.442.8856

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

4

5

KFC Yum! Center, Louisville, 502.690.9000

Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, Owensboro, 270.926.7891

11

12

Convention Center, through Feb. 13, 270.297.9932

SKyPAC, B owling Green, 270.904.1880

Eric Church in Concert,

West Kentucky Boat & Outdoor Show, Owensboro

18

The Mousetrap, Flashback Theater Co. Black Box, Somerset, through Feb. 19, 1.888.394.3282

25

East Nash Grass,

Motown Legends: Orchestra Kentucky,

19

REO Speedwagon in Concert, Appalachian Wireless Arena, Pikeville, 606.444.5500

26

Ricky Skaggs in Concert,

Brennen Leigh in Concert,

Paramount Arts Center, Ashland, 606.324.0007

Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, Owensboro, 270.926.7891

Ongoing Illuminations Exhibit, Kentucky

Ongoing West of Ninth Exhibit, Frazier

History Center, Frankfort, through March 20, 502.564.1792

History Museum, Louisville, through Sept. 1, 502.753.5663

<<<

a guide to Kentucky’s most interesting events For a more extensive listing of events, visit kentuckymonthly.com. k e n t u c k y m o n t h l y. c o m 63

vested interest

Imagining the Multiverse S POI L E R A L E RT: I F YO U H AV E Y E T TO SE E SPIDE R-MA N: NO WAY H O M E , YO U M AY WA NT TO TURN BAC K H E RE , IF ONLY B ECAU S E WI T H G RE AT POWE R C O ME S GRE AT RE SPO NSIBILITY.

D

id you know there is a deleted scene from the iconic film It’s a Wonderful Life? In one version, George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, finds the graves of the entire Giuseppe Martini family near the grave of his brother Harry and learns that, instead of moving into Bailey Park as he remembers, the Martinis had perished in a raging fire in the slums of Potter’s Field.

As Clarence Odbody, George’s guardian angel, says, “Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around, he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”

Clarence, an AS2 (angel second class), shows a despondent George an alternate universe, one created on the premise that George had never been born. One of the last people George sees before wishing he’d never been born is Mr. Martini, who owns a small tavern in Bedford Falls not far from the bridge where George ponders suicide. He searches for Martini in the altered reality, and it’s clear that Martini’s not there, but the viewer has no idea of the Martini family’s awful fate.

The idea of an alternate universe is nothing new. We see it in Charles Dickens’ 1843 classic A Christmas Carol, where Ebenezer Scrooge finally realizes that his actions in the “present” can have a ripple effect on the “future.” Dozens of versions of A Christmas Carol have been featured on film.

My first professional film review STEPHEN M. VEST was of 1985’s Back to the Future with Publisher + Editor-in-Chief Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly. The movie shows what happens when the “present” interacts with the “past.”

In 2000’s The Family Man, Jack (played by Nicolas Cage) is shown a life in which he’s married to Kate (played by Téa Leoni). Rick and Morty, a show on the Cartoon Network, is based mainly on the “multiverse” and cadre of Ricks and Mortys who exist beyond our reality.

There’s even a Zillow commercial where Susan, a broker, talks to the various versions of herself, such as “Negative Me,” “Lazy Me,” and “Helpful Me” in a crowded corporate boardroom.

Similarly, Ordinary Joe on NBC follows a guy down three different paths based on a decision he makes at his college graduation.

Spider-Kid spotted in Morehead.

So, the concept presented in SpiderMan: No Way Home is that each significant decision we make spins off an alternate reality in which the choice went another way. “Multiverse is a concept about which we know frighteningly little,” says Dr. Strange. Most of my children went to the premiere of the film in December, and Molly, my middle daughter, has seen it a half-dozen times since, including two times she got me to join her.

She says it’s the greatest film she’s ever seen, which is saying something, coming from someone who has spent more time on the Titanic than any of its crew or passengers.

Maybe she was hoping that, if she watched the film enough times, the ship eventually would miss the iceberg, or Rose would make room for Jack on that massive door (or ceiling tile).

Imagine a Kentucky in a world in which John Wilkes Booth didn’t kill Abraham Lincoln, or “whoever did it” didn’t assassinate Gov. William Goebel.

Is there comfort in the idea that a missed romance or career opportunity lives on somewhere else? Is there a version of Stevie who enjoyed a marginally successful high school and small-college baseball career? Where might I find the Stephen who was headed to the seminary?

Kwiz Answers: 1. A. An avid horsewoman, the Queen seemed to enjoy her Derby experience in Louisville; 2. A. The first Kentucky Derby took place at Louisville’s Churchill Downs in 1875 with Aristides winning; 3. B. Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-reigning British monarch in history, was escorted by her husband, Prince Philip; 4. A. With crowd favorite Calvin Borel aboard, Street Sense overtook runner-up Hard Spun in the stretch to win by 2¼ lengths; 5. C. The Queen dressed for the occasion in a lime green ensemble complete with an elegant hat in lime green and pink; 6. B. The Queen has stayed at William S. Farish’s Lane’s End Farm in Versailles; 7. C. The Queen’s son, Prince Charles, and his wife, Camilla, toured Louisville as their last stop on a four-day visit to the United States; 8. B. The Queen has made several trips to Kentucky horse country, visiting several breeding farms during her stays; 9. C. The Duke and Duchess attended the 77th running of the world-renowned Kentucky Derby; 10. A. Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowden, attended the 100th running of the Derby in 1974; 11. C. In April 2003, Princess Anne opened the art exhibit “All the Queen’s Horses: The Role of the Horse in British History” at the Kentucky Horse Park; 12. B. Louisville’s Frazier History Museum in 2012 hosted an exhibit titled “Diana: A Celebration” honoring the late Princess of Wales.

64 K E NT U C K Y M O NT HLY F EBR UARY 2022

11 Consecutive Appearances on Jay

6 Straight Years Advancing to the National

Mathews’ List of Top Performing Schools with Elite Students

Science Bowl Competition in Washington, D.C. 174 National Merit Finalists

We come from all across Kentucky to The Gatton Academy on the campus of Western Kentucky University. As juniors and seniors in high school, we enroll in WKU courses, conduct research with WKU professors, and study abroad. While we are challenged academically, we thrive in a supportive environment designed just for us and make lifelong friends. Best yet, our tuition, meals, housing, and fees are all paid for by the Commonwealth of Kentucky. You, too, can have a future filled with infinite possibilities.

WEBSITE: wku.edu/academy / EMAIL: academy@wku.edu / PHONE: 270-745-6565

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