by | October 19, 2024 · 11:48 am

Voices from Special Collections

Learn about some of the unique primary source materials in WKU’s Special Collections Library.  To browse further, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Freedom! Let the World Rejoice!! Hence for the first time since the writer was born – nearly 59 years, can we hire men, & pay them for their service instead of working them & paying their so called Masters & Mistresses the money earned by the sweat of their brow.

– Harvey L. Eades, an elder in the Shaker colony at South Union, Kentucky, upon learning in February 1866 of the ratification in December 1865 of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.



I had rather have the wisdom than the bliss, as dear old mother Eve chose before me!

– Bowling Green, Kentucky schoolteacher Sallie McElroy, reflecting in 1857 on the saying “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.”  Read more. . .




Every disaster which takes a toll of human life brings forth its heroes.

– Thomas E. Jenkins, vice president of the West Kentucky Coal Company, in a 1927 letter of thanks to miner Earl Hamby for his help in recovery efforts after an explosion killed 15 of his coworkers. Read more. . .


I am in a world of trouble.  Sophia.

– Captain Richard Vance, upon the death in 1889 of Sophia, his African-American mistress, homemaker and companion through 22 years of military postings through the South and West. Read more. . .



There are no national parks east of the Mississippi River and there is no place east of the Mississippi River so well known as Mammoth Cave. . . . Mammoth Cave has been exhibited to the public for more than a hundred years.  It is mentioned in the records of Warren County as far back as 1797.

– Marvel Mills Logan, president of the Mammoth Cave National Park Association, urging the Secretary of the Interior in 1925 to begin the process of making Mammoth Cave a national park. Bowling Green banker Max Nahm took a leading role in the project.  Read more. . .

Just imagine yourself with sixty brats, all under thirteen .  . . . a half dozen in my class would be having a fist and scull fight and the whole of them had even forgotten what their lesson was about.

– Henderson County, Kentucky schoolteacher Virginia “Jennie” Amos, to her former classmate May Carpenter, lamenting her duties in 1889. Read more. . .

We lay flat upon the ground for a long time, the missiles of the enemy falling thick & fast among us, wounding many and sending some of our comrades to eternity, among these were Charles Jameson, shot in the shoulder and probably through the heart, Charles Beard shot in the head, and Henry Hildreth, shot in the cheek.

– Michigan volunteer Jason Wiltse, describing the Battle of Campbell’s Station near Knoxville, Tennessee, November 16, 1862. Read more. . .

Some assistance to build a house is greatly needed 2 axes 2 hoes and 1 spade was all the children get to farm with, no cutlass no grass scythe no mattock.  I did not even get a water Bucket.

– Emancipated slave Rachel Eddington, writing in 1857 to her former mistress from Liberia, where she endured poverty, abandonment by her husband, and the deaths of two children.  Read more. . .


Don’t involve me in your petty bickering!

– Bill “Whitey” Sanders, WKU alumnus and longtime editorial cartoonist for the Milwaukee Journal, where his liberal views and devotion to free speech often enraged politicians and the public.


The Sec[retary] read a letter from headquarters with reference to the riot at Tulsa [Oklahoma].  A motion prevailed that the churches be asked to take a special offering for the stricken & suffering of Tulsa.

– Minutes of a meeting of the Bowling Green, Kentucky branch of the NAACP, June 12, 1921, on hearing of the white supremacist massacre that killed hundreds and destroyed 35 square blocks of African-American homes and businesses in the Tulsa community known as “Black Wall Street.”  Read more. . .

That the inhabitants were horror stricken is not to be wondered at, but that they were anything but lunatics afterwards is.

– Betsy Taliaferro, speculating in on the mental health of the citizens of New Madrid, Missouri, twenty-five years after earthquakes in 1811-1812 levelled the town and sent aftershocks through southcentral Kentucky. Read more. . .

The Black Gospel Music World has always consisted of, been inclusive of, and been a haven for gay men and lesbians.  If the truth were to be told, many of your biggest names in Black Gospel through the years were gay or bisexual.

– Bowling Green native John Buell Edmonds, promoting Called, Justified, Glorified and Gay, a fictionalized account of his life as a gay African-American gospel music performer.

I was a patient in a North India Medical College Hospital.  I was recovering from post-polio muscle transplants.  There in that Hospital I heard along with the rest of the world the announcement that Dr. Jonas Salk and his associates had reported a polio vaccine 60-90% safe. Tears of joy came into my eyes.

­­- Christian missionary Marietta Mansfield, on learning in 1955 of the successful development of a polio vaccine. Read more. . .

There is every appearance of success in our taking Lord Corn Wallis.  Our Army is very strong.  I suppose we have twenty thousand men in the field.  They are in high spirits wish to be in action.

– Nathaniel Lucas to his sweetheart Sarah Rivers, September 15, 1781, just before the siege of Yorktown, Virginia and the surrender of Lord Cornwallis that foretold victory in the American Revolution.

 

I’ve always felt our ship might have had the same fate it we hadn’t had a good captain and a slow boat.

– Jennie Scott Green, after returning from Europe to her Grayson County, Kentucky home in 1912 on the President Lincoln, a ship sailing just ahead of the doomed Titanic. Read more. . .

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by | August 26, 2024 · 9:58 am

Boiling the river dry

The Steamboat Evansville

“The Eighth Wonder of the World.”  It was a title the steamboat Evansville shared with her sister vessel, Bowling Green.  Built in 1880, she carried passengers, tourists, livestock, farm produce and other cargo between the two cities until she was lost to fire in 1931.

It was a tricky business for the 30-foot wide by 120-foot long Evansville to squeeze her bulk through the locks and dams of the little Green and Barren Rivers.  Departing Bowling Green for the return trip to Evansville required a “roundtoo,”  a maneuver in which she would back down the river from the wharf into a chute at the foot of Wilkerson Island, then rely on the current to help swing her around and point her in the right direction. Steamboat engineer and historian Courtney Ellis recalled a nail-biter as the Evansville scraped up mud from the river’s edge while barely avoiding the limestone outcroppings on shore.

It was no surprise, then, that the captains, pilots and crew of the Evansville were some of the most skilled of their profession.  Among them were Captain Richard T. Williams (1833-1912)  and his five sons.  The middle son, William, was in command of the Evansville on June 6, 1917, when he faced a sudden and deadly threat to the safety of his vessel and its passengers.

The Evansville had just passed Mining City, between Rochester and Morgantown on the Green River in Butler County, when the crew first spotted the dark funnel cloud in the distance.  Williams’ nephew, serving onboard as a clerk, rushed to the captain’s quarters to warn of the approaching tornado.  Realizing that his craft was no match for the storm, Williams ordered the throttle opened to “full steam ahead.”  His only chance was to reach a nearby abandoned ferry, where the high bluffs there might afford some shelter.    

The Evansville made it, and Williams ordered her tied up to a sturdy oak tree standing under the bluff.  The thick manila rope – the “best money could buy,” for emergencies only – was handled by a crew member adept at managing the slack to keep the mooring post from being yanked out of the deck.  The engines were set to “come ahead.”

When the tornado crossed the river about a half mile away, passengers watched in amazement as it “boiled the river almost dry.”  Some insisted they could see startled fish flopping near the bottom and on the banks.  The Evansville was driven backwards by the whirlwind, but its engines countered the force and the deckhand held its mooring line taut.  A limb broke off the oak tree to which it was tethered, shot through the window of the pilot house, and narrowly missed the pilot in his high perch. 

William N. Williams’ Steamboat Engineer’s license

Then, almost as quickly as the water had been sucked out, the river “knitted back together” and the Evansville was safe.  The tornado went on to wreak havoc on land – at Reid’s Ferry, it was said, it swept up a baby and laid it down a short distance away not only unharmed but laughing.  If the passengers aboard the Evansville weren’t laughing, they were at least grateful to have survived the ordeal, thanks to Captain Williams and his crew.

This account of the Evansville’s bout with a tornado is part of the James R. Hines Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here for a finding aid, selected scans from the collection, and a typescript.  The photographs of the Evansville are part of our spectacular collection of steamboat photographs in the Courtney Ellis Collection.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat. 

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by | July 29, 2024 · 3:10 pm

Never Treason

Union envelope depicting “Traitor” John Cabell Breckinridge (WKU Special Collections)

Though he settled in Hancock County, Kentucky in 1845 at the age of 49, James Prentis retained his solicitude for his native Virginia – “the mother of States” – where he had grown up and studied law before taking up mercantile pursuits in Lewisport.  There, he continued his family tradition of slaveholding, admitting that while he supported emancipation, he “dreaded any interference which would rashly precipitate such a result”; after all, he couldn’t see how he was “to get along comfortably and happily” without enslaved labor.

But as the secession movement intensified after the election of Abraham Lincoln, Prentis found himself looking across a political chasm at his fellow Virginians.  From the onset of the Civil War through its aftermath, he drafted lengthy letters and essays, sometimes under the name “Senex” (“wise old man”) to friends and newspaper editors, deploring the foolishness of the South’s attempt to dissolve “our glorious Union” and condemning, in the starkest terms, those who incited, enabled, and led it.

Writing to an old Virginia friend in the spring of 1861, Prentis implored him to come to his senses; indeed, Prentis could only attribute secessionism to some sort of psychological breakdown – a “hallucination,” a “mental aberration,” a “sad and strange infatuation.”  True, blame for the crisis could be divided between Southern secessionists and Northern abolitionists, but the latter were utterly feckless and easily suppressed, compared to the “immediate authors of our ruin – the Seceders South,”  whose movement could be “likened to the frantic cowardice of the Tenant of an impregnable fortress who blows it up & himself with it, because a rollicking school boy explodes a pop gun against it.”  So absurd did Prentis find the “doctrine of secession” that he could only attribute it to “the work of demag[og]ues & restless conspirators for selfish ends, the high & active attainments of some of whom have been freely used to poison the Southern mind & fire the Southern heart by an artful display of fancied wrongs.”

But whatever the roots of the doctrine, the applicable term for its adherents was traitor.  Addressing his old college friend Edmund Ruffin, a former Virginia state senator and avid secessionist who was spotted on the battlements of Fort Moultrie in South Carolina, Prentis declared himself “astounded with the report that you are in collusion with the enemies of our Country & a particeps criminis in Treason – This I state merely as a fact, without intending the smallest imputations upon your motives.”

Even the Confederacy’s “crushing defeat” did not satisfy Prentis.  What were you thinking? he seemed to say, complaining of the South’s stubborn refusal to accept moral guilt for its “reckless & insane effort” to destroy the “civil & religious liberty bequeathed to us by our revolutionary fathers.”  Writing to another Virginia friend, he sternly mocked the South’s failure to take seriously the “terrible rights & necessities of war” and the expectation that “you would, of course, be immediately restored to all your rights forfeited by Rebellion & Treason.”  He warned his friend “not to expect that your late foes in arms” would feel much urgency toward relief measures when Southerners clung to such canards as “the North began it.”

Prentis’s hard-line views gained full expression after the president of the former Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was captured.  “What is to be done with Jeff. Davis?” he mused in a five-page essay.  He credited only the “law abiding instincts of our people” with the fact that Davis’s treason, a crime “of the most revolting magnitude,” had not yet been met with mob justice.  He argued further that Davis ought to be held responsible for the barbarous treatment of Union soldiers in the “various prison pens of the South”; whether or not he knew of these violations of the laws of war, circumstantial evidence trumped any attempt to absolve him: Davis was like “the keeper of a menagerie of wild beasts” who had turned them loose to commit atrocities.

Prentis scoffed at the proposal to put Davis on trial in, of all places, Richmond, Virginia, where “there is no earthly chance of conviction.”  Instead, “as more or less a prisoner of war,” he ought to be tried before a military tribunal.  Even more incomprehensible were calls from some individuals and the press for a simple “acquittal.”  This, Prentis declared, flew in the face of both human and divine justice and “inculcate[d] the atrocious sentiment that the greater a man[’s] crimes the less he should be punished for them.”  Treason, the worst offense imaginable, demanded the “extreme penalty of the Law,” and neither legal technicalities, nor forum shopping, nor squeamishness about retributive justice should thwart this verdict. 

The letters and essays of James Prentis are part of the Prentis Papers in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here for a finding aid, selected scans and typescripts.  For more Civil War collections, click here or search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | June 25, 2024 · 11:43 am

For further information. . . look no further

Directors and officers. Company history. Operational schedules. Location(s). Lists of products and services. Achievements and awards. Images of massive factories, office towers or other icons of prosperity. Today, we would expect to see this type of publicity and promotion on a web page or a social media site. But more traditionally, it was crammed onto the principal means of pre-internet communication for an individual or business: a sheet of letterhead.

WKU’s Special Collections Library has many examples of such items. Some might regard them as ephemera, but they are often historically rich documents: artistic, colorful, and chock full of information about what people did and how they did it before the electronic age.  Here are some examples:

Over the signature of Commissioner Malcolm Crump of Bowling Green, the letterhead of the Kentucky Jamestown Exposition Commission, created in 1906 for the state’s participation in a fair celebrating the 300th anniversary of Jamestown, Virginia, described the project’s origins and administration. Text in the lower left corner solicited funds for Kentucky’s contribution, impressively rendered in the upper left corner: a replica of its second white settlement, Fort Boonesboro. 

In 1926 a young man known to us only as “Boots” typed a chatty letter from “the wilds of Kentucky” to a lady friend in Nashville, but the reverse of his letterhead (or presumably that of his employer) bore a Wikipedia-style entry about the Green River Fuel Company of Muhlenberg County and its product, “Green River Coal”: where it was, its appearance and uses, how it was mined, and why “Competitors Cannot Duplicate” its quality.

Similarly, in 1931 the reverse of riverman Jeff Williams’ letter gave patrons of the Evansville and Bowling Green Packet Company a Google Maps-style directory of its steamboats’ many ports of call along the Green and Barren rivers.

In a page that could have been taken from a Sears catalog, the reverse of a young man’s 1899 letter to his uncle showed the product lines—from desk sets to wall units to switchboards—of the American Electric Telephone Company, with offices in Cave City, Kentucky.

The 1870s equivalent of pop-up ads appeared on the reverse of the letterhead of Alphonse Duteil, a Louisville “Importer & Manufacturer of Human Hair Work.”  More than 20 data-heavy ads showed Duteil in good company among the city’s manufacturers, dealers and wholesalers.

In lieu of a Facebook page, in 1920 Monroe County “Lawyer, Banker and Horticulturalist” Rowland G. Railey unfurled his biography down the front left-hand side of his letterhead.

And how’s this for the Civil War-era equivalent of a pinned tweet?  William Shreve Bailey of Newport, Kentucky, editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Free South, inscribed his letterhead with instructions to correspondents to address him at a post office box in Covington.  The reason?  Besides enduring threats and a mob’s destruction of his press, Bailey suspected that the Newport postmaster, “a pro-slavery mobite,” might simply pitch his letters in the trash.

Click on the links for finding aids and full-size scans of these letters.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | May 20, 2024 · 10:46 am

The Ladies Art Club

WKU’s Special Collections Library holds the records of many local women’s clubs in its Manuscripts & Folklife Archives: the Current Events Club, the Browning Club, the Twentieth Century Club, the LARTHS Literary Club, the Mothers Club, the Pierian Club, the Delineator Club, the Eclectic Book Club, the Severance Club, and the oldest (1880) of Bowling Green’s women’s clubs, the Ladies Literary Club, to name just a few.  For the first time, we can now include an African-American women’s club on our list.

Ladies Art Club minute books

The Ladies Art Club was founded in 1906 by Virginia Mitchell and her minister husband Robert, the president of Simmons Memorial College in Bowling Green.  Its first president was M. Celestine Slaughter, a teacher at State Street School, the city’s first school for African Americans.  We have yet to learn of the club’s earliest years, but minute books recently recovered from the former Southern Queen Hotel on State Street chronicle its activities during the late 1930s, early 1940s and mid 1950s.  The membership roll, which usually listed about a dozen women, included Ashula P. Williams who, along with her aunt Mattie Covington and daughter Dolores (Williams) Moses, operated the Southern Queen as a hotel for African-American travelers.

Like most such organizations, the Ladies Art Club was grounded in faith, fellowship, intellectual enrichment, and philanthropy.  Meetings regularly included prayer, scripture readings, song, discussion of current news, a tasty meal, and the collection of funds for various good works: flowers for the sick, Christmas baskets for the aged, shoes for needy children, furniture for the State Street School library, and spending money for Kentucky State University students.  Over time, the club contributed from its “sinking fund” to the Kentucky Club Women Scholarship Fund, the March of Dimes, and organizations fighting tuberculosis, cancer and venereal disease.  

One of the regular activities of the club was an annual art exhibit.  Held at a member’s home and open to the public, the exhibit featured fancy sewing works such as pillowcases, tea and guest towels, and pot holders.  Members were urged – sometimes even admonished – to contribute what they could in order to bring a variety of items to the showing.  Another disciplinary measure appeared in the minutes for January 3, 1941, when members were reminded of a club rule “pertaining to gossip”: anyone who did so or caused “discord in any way” would be dropped from the rolls.

In discussions of current news, the club was attentive to matters, both national and local, of interest to the African-American community.  When, in September 1953, funeral director James E. Kuykendall and his family were victimized by a cross burning on his property, the club “by common consent” sent a letter to the family deploring the attack on their “peace and happiness.”  But other correspondence was more joyful.  In 1957, with the club observing its fiftieth anniversary, its first president, M. Celestine Slaughter, wrote from her home in Washington, D.C. in response to a gift.  “What great happiness and gratitude overflowed my heart when I opened the package,” she exclaimed, praising the club’s “earnest efforts in bringing needful spiritual and happy relationships to the less fortunate in relieving them of stress and need.”

Click here to access a finding aid and full-text scans of the minute books for the Ladies Art Club.  For other club records (women’s and men’s), search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | April 22, 2024 · 11:09 am

“A bench for the Court to sit on”

Edmonson County, Kentucky’s story begins on January 12, 1825, when it was created from land carved out of surrounding Grayson, Hart and Warren counties.  By May 1825, as prescribed in the enabling statute, the county court had gone to work on the nuts and bolts of infrastructure, finance, and law enforcement, and its order book, held in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Special Collections Library, tells that story in detail.

The book’s first entries document the appointment of constables, tax commissioners and a jailer, after which the court turned to locating the “permanent seat of justice.”  A panel of commissioners recommended that the county seat be established on a 100-acre tract donated by patentees Joseph R. Underwood and Stephen T. Logan “on Green river and immediately above the mouth of big Beaver dam creek.”  The town was “to be called and known by the name of Brownville [sic] in Honour of Genl. Jacob Brown who distinguished himself during the late war with Great Britain” – not the Revolutionary War but the War of 1812, in which many Kentuckians served.  (Brownsville with an “s” was established in 1828 under legislation authorizing a town trustee-style of government.) 

The county court itself needed a place to conduct business, so it enlisted one John Rountree to provide a two-story house with “a Bench for the Court to sit on also a bench for the Lawyers and a bar and Jury Benches,” and two jury rooms upstairs.  A detailed plan for the county clerk’s office on the public square covered two pages: 25 by 14 feet, made of brick with a “good Chimney” on each end, the floors to be “good oak or ash plank,” the doors and window shutters to be “yellow poplar,” and all doors, window casings and sashes to be covered with three coats of white paint.  Additional public structures planned for the town were a warehouse and a stray pen.

The court appointed commissioners to complete other municipal tasks: letting a contract to build a jail, and viewing and marking out a network of roads to connect Brownsville with neighboring settlements.  Also appointed to calm ever-present fears of rebellion were slave patrols consisting of a captain and assistants who were to patrol twelve hours per month within five miles of the town south of Green River, “visiting all negroes quarters and suspected places of unlawfull assemblies of slaves.”

Other matters of public order addressed by the court included granting licenses to perform marriages, to practice law in the county, to keep a tavern (at specified rates for food, whiskey, lodging, and stabling horses) and to operate a ferry; one John Rhodes was doubly lucky to be granted a license to “retail spirits at his ferry.”

A finding aid and full-text scan of the Edmonson County Court order book can be accessed here.  This collection also features militia rolls, fee books, data on early school districts, and land records, including a memorial book of early recorded deeds.  The first page lists two deeds from 1830 (1829?), for 100 and 1000 acres respectively, from “Abraham Lincoln” to Thomas Ray, and to Abraham Lincoln from the Grayson County sheriff.  Is this the Abraham Lincoln?  More likely, it is the 16th president’s cousin and namesake, the son of his uncle Mordecai Lincoln who settled in Grayson County about 1811 and departed for Illinois about 1829.

For more collections of our county records, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | March 27, 2024 · 11:25 am

From the Farm to the Farms

As we know from books like Code Girls, And If I Perish, and A Woman of No Importance, American women served in World War II out of duty and patriotism.  But for some, the war also offered an opportunity for adventure and the chance to escape their small towns for a unique experience of the wider world.  One of them was 19-year-old Dorenda Martin, who left her family’s farm in Smiths Grove, Kentucky in the summer of 1944 for a job in Washington, D.C.

In a letter to her parents, Dorenda described her work as a clerk-typist (“We are called Junior Clerks instead of Secretaries because the pay is less”) in the Washington Building, part of the city’s financial district anchored by the U.S. Treasury Building.  Once there, however, she quickly found her racial prejudice put to the test.  She was allowed time off work to attend an afternoon class to improve her typing skills, but found it populated mostly by African Americans (the boys were even called “Mr.,” she huffed) and switched to a morning class. 

Near the Washington Building was the White House, where Dorenda and some coworkers chatted with an officer about getting a personal tour.  President Roosevelt was out of town, they were told; as to the indefatigable Eleanor Roosevelt, laughed the officer, “didn’t any one know.”  Dorenda also planned to visit the Pentagon, “a large war building” with its own shops as well as offices.  She heard that the Duke of Windsor (whose Nazi sympathies were causing consternation in the intelligence community) had recently tried to enter, but didn’t have a pass so “he had some army officer to come help talk his way in.” 

When not at work or sightseeing, however, Dorenda’s life revolved around “the Farms.”  Located on the family estate of Robert E. Lee, Arlington Farms was a sprawling complex of temporary housing for female civil servants and service members.  Residents were supplied with laundry, shopping, cafeteria and recreation facilities, and the lobby of each hall served as a rendezvous point with the servicemen who “just come out here and look around till they find a girl that looks to suit them.”  Dorenda was more impressed with the military women: the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, a branch of the Naval Reserve) who congregated in their blue and white uniforms for church services; and the WACs (Women’s Army Corps) who “were a lot of fun, & asked us to come to chow.”  She was also intrigued by individuals like Juanita, a petite young woman from Puerto Rico; Vera, who had escaped the German occupation of Czechoslovakia; and a barefooted walker, who Dorenda “hollared” at to inquire where she was from.  “I was expecting her to say Ky. because she said she didn’t wear shoes where she came from.” 

After bringing her parents up to date with this lengthy letter, Dorenda concluded “I have a lot of fun here.”  But duty called, and she “might not write for a month now.”

Dorenda Martin (far left), at a War Bonds event (Harris & Ewing photo)

Dorenda Martin’s letter is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to access a finding aid and typescript.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | February 19, 2024 · 11:25 am

My friend and critic

After graduating from State Street High School as its valedictorian in 1936, Bowling Green, Kentucky native Lillie Mae (Bland) Carter earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tennessee State University, married, had four children, and pursued a career as a first grade and remedial reading teacher in the Toledo, Ohio public school system.  A civic activist and champion of African American history and literature, Carter encouraged her students to express themselves through writing. 

Carter herself was an author, editor and poet.  Her books included Black Thoughts (1971), a volume of poetry, and Doing It Our Way (1975), an anthology of multi-generational poetry and prose.  But like most writers, Carter encountered obstacles to getting her work published.  This struggle helped her form a bond with one of the most prolific purveyors of the black experience to the world, the poet, author, playwright and icon of the “Harlem Renaissance,” Langston Hughes.

“The only way I know to achieve publication,” Hughes wrote Carter in 1947, “is to continually submit one’s work to magazines, and if it comes back (as it usually does) send it to others.”  “Do not mind rejection slips,” he counseled.  “I have hundreds of them.” 

Over the next twenty years, Carter corresponded with Hughes, who critiqued her poems and offered advice on where to submit them for publication.  He shared her frustration over editors who were reluctant to accept “race-problem” poetry or fiction, but recommended that she simply keep searching for others who weren’t so squeamish.  Delighted with her poem, “Whispering Leaves,” he asked permission to send copies to the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American culture at Yale University, and to New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.  Hughes found poems she shared with him in 1963 to be “strong and dramatic and, I think, would make most effective program pieces to read aloud to audiences.  I suggest you try them out the next time you have occasion to speak in public – or maybe you should create an occasion to do so.”

Lillie Mae Carter

Carter dedicated Black Thoughts “In memory of my critic and friend, Langston Hughes.”  It included the gentle “My Prayer,” which Hughes had praised (May I live from day to day / In an honest, sincere way; / That someone through me may see / What joys come from serving Thee), and a tribute to a former custodian at Toledo’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School (Keeper of the building, goodbye! / Rest well in new buildings on high).  But also found in its pages were the mournful “Half-Still” (Half slave, half free / Half a citizen still / That’s me) and the bitter “America” (America is not red, white and blue / America is lily white – all the way through.)

Lillie Mae (Bland) Carter’s papers are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | January 18, 2024 · 3:04 pm

“The best government that ever was made”

After her husband’s death in 1852, Maria Knott left her home in Lebanon, Kentucky for Missouri, where her son, James Proctor Knott, was beginning his legal and political career (Proctor Knott would later become governor of Kentucky).  Five of Maria’s other children were also in Missouri, but late in 1860 Maria returned to Lebanon to visit her son William.  She was caught there when the outbreak of the Civil War tore apart her family, her town and her country.  Her letters and diaries, held in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Special Collections Library, vividly record her conflicting emotions and experiences.

Maria’s son James Proctor Knott

“In this cruel rebellion,” she wrote, “there is scarcely a family that is not divided”– her own included.  Son William was against secession.  Maria’s Missouri children, however, were less enamored of the Union.  Though not “secesh,” son Proctor, then Missouri’s Attorney General, would lose his position after balking at what he believed was a heavy-handed loyalty oath to the United States.  Proctor’s wife (and first cousin) Sallie needled William for his “tory” sympathies and took delight in calling herself a “rebel.”  When William was briefly taken prisoner after secessionists captured a rail car in which he was traveling, Maria complained angrily that some of his uncles would not have “raised a finger” to rescue him.

Maria’s daughter-in-law (and niece) Sallie Knott

In the face of growing violence, middle ground was hard to find.  “I don’t like Lincoln any more than you,” Maria admitted to Sallie about the recently inaugurated president, but “don’t condemn him for what the south has brought on us.”  Secret, pro-slavery cabals like the Knights of the Golden Circle had seized on the interregnum between Lincoln’s election and inauguration to initiate a rebellion. Now, Maria observed with distaste, “I am told all the respectable portion of society belongs to the secession party,” yet lawlessness prevailed and citizens were being “driven from their homes on account of their principals [sic].”

Trying to sort rumor from fact, Maria followed news of the war closely, and observed firsthand its effect on Lebanon.  She was saddened by the hardships of Union soldiers passing through the area – encamped in cold and rain, sick with measles and smallpox, and dying far from home and loved ones – but despaired at their demands on the local population as they appropriated precious food, water, livestock, timber, horses, wagons and mules to meet military needs.  “Joy go with them,” she wrote wearily, but “I for one will be glad to see the last one leave.” The threat of Confederate incursions caused unbearable anxiety.  “We are to be murdered and burnt by the rebels who are approaching,”  Maria cried after they captured Lexington and Frankfort in mid-1862.  She reserved special animus for Confederate guerrilla John Hunt Morgan – that “child of satan” – who tormented Lebanon with destructive raids in 1862 and 1863.  In September 1862, with the town full of “secesh soldiers,” she pronounced members of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s “rebel Cavalry the dirtiest most woebegone looking set of men I ever saw.”

John Hunt Morgan, a “child of Satan”

“God only knows what is to be the result of this war,” Maria often lamented, but she would never know, for she died on March 6, 1864.  From the beginning of the conflict, however, she maintained that her “once happy united states” would be irreparably changed as some, including many in her own family and community, foolishly staked their futures on “destroying the best government that ever was made.”

Click here for a collection finding aid and for typescripts of Maria Knott’s letters and diaries.  For more of our Civil War collections, click here.

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by | December 4, 2023 · 10:30 am

Scholars All

As December unfolds and students across the country strive to earn the acclamation of their teachers, not only for academic achievement but for associated good behavior, here are a few historical examples of such awards from among the keepsakes of young 19th-century scholars and their families:

In 1860-61, 14-year-old Aaron Bate received awards from Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown College for grammar and arithmetic (one hopes the Ingenuo adolescenti was also proficient in Latin, the language in which the citations were written).

On June 14, 1864, 13-year-old John Bowker Preston’s teacher presented him with a Reward of Merit card on which two prancing cherubs celebrated his aptitude for spelling. 

In Grayson County, Texas, teacher J. O. Edwards filled in pupil S. H. Orr’s evaluation ticket for the fall 1875 term commending him for attendance, good behavior, “No. of words missed” (low; a spelling score, maybe?) and “No. of Head marks” (high).  The memento then appears to have been supplemented with inspirational quotations, classmates’ autographs, and instructions to a relative to “put in the Bible when she gets it.”

Also in 1875 but in Grayson County, Kentucky, Harrison L. Gary (though not himself a perfect speller) commended 9-year-old John Robert Lee Mason “for his good conduct at Scool & elswhere studying well his Lessons,” with further admonitions to “Love and obey Parents cheerfully” and “Always consider the end before you begin.”

In 1888, “One Hundred Tokens of Merit” came to 11-year-old Nettie Kimberlin, a pupil in Washington County, Kentucky.  For “Good Deportment and Perfect Lessons,” read the “Card of Honor.”

In June 1909, Logan County’s Auburn Seminary awarded Harold Helm a certificate for being neither absent nor even tardy during the preceding quarter.

In 1891, Bowling Green’s public schools gave the nod to Fred Cartwright for attendance and good deportment.

These commendations are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click on the links to access finding aids.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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