Author Archives: Lynn Niedermeier

by | April 14, 2016 · 8:03 am

3,000 and Counting

Charles Nourse letter; SC list

Charles Nourse letter; SC list

What do a Chinese laundryman’s account book, a receipt signed by Daniel Boone, a diary describing an 1847 visit to Mammoth Cave, letters from a repatriated slave to her former owner, and a handwritten Shaker hymn book have in common?

They are all collections in the Manuscripts and Folklife Archives holdings of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections, and they share classification as Small Collections (SCs), that is, manuscript collections that are small enough to fit into a single file folder.  Although we hold even vaster quantities of manuscript collections (MSS) ranging in size from one to dozens of boxes, our SCs collectively comprise more than 66 linear feet.

We recently achieved a milestone when we catalogued our 3,000th small collection.  We wanted the designation of SC 3000 to go to a significant acquisition, and found one in the papers of Charles Ewing Nourse (1826-1866) of Bardstown, Kentucky.  The highlight of the ten items in this collection are three highly descriptive letters written by Nourse during his service in the Mexican War, a conflict in which Kentuckians fought but which is far less well-documented than, say, the Civil War or World War II.

From the oldest (SC 1419), a 1781 letter of Revolutionary War soldier Nathaniel Lucas to his sweetheart just before the decisive Battle of Yorktown, to the newest (SC 2994), a 2016 guide to walking trails in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park co-authored by retired Bowling Green attorney Ray Buckberry, our small collections, in terms of their variety, historical significance, and educational value, are much bigger than they appear.  Click on the links above to download finding aids, and search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat for finding aids to the other 2,995 or so!

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by | April 7, 2016 · 8:56 am

Mrs. Moore Goes to War

It was courtship of a different kind.  From September to December 1943, the War Department conducted a 10-week nationwide drive to attract 70,000 recruits to the Women’s Army Corps (WACs).  In order to free up more men for combat, women were urged to sign up for military duty as clerks, mechanics, electricians, parachute riggers, weather observers, truck drivers, radio operators, hospital technicians, and much more.  Kentucky’s goal for the campaign was 1,512 recruits, equal to the number of casualties the state had suffered in the war.

Mary Leiper Moore; publicity for WAC recruiting drive

Mary Leiper Moore; publicity for WAC recruiting drive

In Bowling Green and Warren County, where the goal was 27 recruits, citizens assembled in committees to organize the drive.  Among them was Mary Leiper Moore, WKU’s Kentucky Librarian, who was named chairman of the publicity committee.  Across her desk came draft press releases and other literature from the War Department to be used in the recruiting effort.  The Park City Daily News published articles based on these materials, touting the service opportunities awaiting women who became WACs.  Appealing to pride and patriotism, local businesses subsidized ads urging them to join.  “You Can’t Top Kentucky Women,” read one.  “They make the best WACs in the World!”

Not all, unfortunately, went as Mrs. Moore had hoped.  One of the major recruiting events was a stage show and dance at WKU on November 12, 1943, featuring a troupe of Army Air Force players and musicians from Louisville’s Bowman Field.  Coordination with the military brass, however, had broken down in the days leading up to the event (the appropriate military acronym for the consequences of such misfortune can be inserted here).  Confusion reigned regarding travel and accommodation for the performers, changes in venue (from an “unheated tobacco warehouse” to WKU’s Van Meter Hall, and then to the gymnasium in the Physical Education Building), and the timing of the show, which finally took place at the late hour of 10 p.m.

Afterward, Mrs. Moore write a stinging letter to the commander at Bowman Field.  The best efforts of local organizers, she complained, had been frustrated by the Army’s poor communication.  “Result, utter confusion and dismay of the public and auxiliary forces!”  The blame, she charged, lay not with “the women and the WACs” but with “the men and the Army”. . . specifically, its upper ranks: “If a Captain, Majors and several other officers can’t plan and successfully execute, over a few obstacles, a small show in a small town,” she asked, “what are they going to do when they get into combat?”

Click here for a finding to Mary Leiper Moore’s papers relating to the Warren County WAC recruiting drive, part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  For more collections on World War II and the WACs, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | March 24, 2016 · 8:21 am

The Apple and the Core

Smiths Grove College was established in 1875 and operated as such until 1901, when it became the Vanderbilt Training School and then Warren Baptist Academy.  Today, North Warren Elementary School is located on the site.

As Women’s History Month draws to a close, let’s look at some notes, probably from the 1890s, of a debate at Smiths Grove College on “a question that is agitating the whole nation,” namely whether “it is right to give to women the same right[s] as we do to men.”

Listing the arguments in favor, our anonymous scribe was both principled and practical.  Times had changed, and as the barriers to women’s property ownership and entry into the professions were disappearing, so too should their political disabilities.  “Suppose some woman owns a farm and she would have a hired hand.  This hired hand would be allowed to elect the officers of the country and she would have no voice whatever although she is paying taxes,” observed our proponent.  Contrary to fears that politics would corrupt the female sex, the grant of suffrage would allow women to “purify politics.”

"Should Women Vote?" wonders a harried husband (from a 1903 postcard, WKU Library Special Collections)

“Should Women Vote?” wonders a harried husband (from a 1903 postcard, WKU Library Special Collections)

But no consideration of the issue was complete without addressing Biblical notions of women’s roles, to which our writer responded wryly and dismissively.  When the Apostle Paul called upon women to be obedient and “keep silence in the churches,” his admonition came at a time when “there were about a dozen women in the country and all they knew was to have some fried meat & bread ready when the men got hungry.”  True, it was Eve who gave Adam the apple to eat, “but I’ll venture to say,” concluded our debater, “that he helped her up in the tree and then gave her the core.”

Click here to access a finding aid for the collection of Smiths Grove College materials containing these righteous feminist arguments, housed in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | March 17, 2016 · 8:38 am

Politics. . . As Usual

American Party of Kentucky documents

American Party of Kentucky documents

Since existing political parties do not offer valid choices to the voters, a new party is urgently needed.  The two existing parties, Democrat and Republican,. . . have deserted the principles and traditions of our nation’s Founding Fathers.

A clip from last night’s cable news?  Au contraire, as we look back almost 50 years to the policy declaration of the American Party of Kentucky, a copy of which is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.

First convened in 1968 to “provide the vehicle through which responsible conservative candidates can be offered to the voters,” the American Party stood for allegiance to God, limited government, free enterprise, private property, and traditional morality.  It stood against totalitarianism of all stripes, foreign aid, the United Nations, and government-sponsored charity.  By early 1969, the Party was incorporated and tutoring prospective candidates on how to file for local, state and national offices.

For its presidential candidate, the American Party selected former Alabama governor George C. Wallace, who, despite his segregationist resume, electrified supporters with his fiery rhetoric.  “Yes, they’ve looked down their nose at you and me a long time,” he said on the campaign trail.  “They’ve called us rednecks — the Republicans and the Democrats.  Well, we’re going to show, there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country.”

After the 1968 election, the Kentucky American Party’s Richard H. Treitz wrote to the faithful on letterhead of the Wallace campaign to thank them for their efforts.  The best was yet to come, he declared, asking for support in turning a grassroots movement into a truly national political party.  While not victorious in ’68, the soldiers of God and country had “scared the two-alike parties like never before and . . . THEY HAVEN’T SEEN ANYTHING YET!”

Click here to download a finding aid for the American Party collection.  For more of our political collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | March 10, 2016 · 8:44 am

A Confederate Rail-Splitter

Alexander Morse's letter from Bowling Green

Alexander Morse’s letter from Bowling Green

Our collection of Bowling Green-related Civil War resources in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections continues to grow with the addition of an 1861 letter of Confederate cavalryman Alexander P. Morse.

Camped near Bowling Green, Morse, a member of the First Louisiana Cavalry, tells his father of the influx of some 20,000 Southern forces to the area, with another 15,000 in striking range.  “We see nobody but soldiers, and nothing but guns & ammunition,” he wrote from his perch on a “well graduated hill.”  Despite the prevalence of measles among the men, he was “as well and hearty as a buck,” chopping wood with “as much ‘sang froid’ as Abe Lincoln or any other rail splitter,” and catching sleep on a mattress not yet consigned to the sick.

Although he noted that a force of Texas Rangers was attempting to engage Union troops at Green River, Morse was more excited by his dinner conversation with a fellow Louisianan who had witnessed the Battle of Belmont near Columbus, Kentucky.  Over a “great treat” of a meal, Lieut. Col. Daniel Beltzhoover showed Morse the sword he used in the fight, cut through with a minie ball just as he drew it.

An interesting postscript: After the war, Morse became a prominent lawyer.  One of his clients was Louisiana Judge John H. Ferguson, the defendant in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld racial segregation laws until overturned in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education.  Morse’s principal contribution to legal scholarship, a treatise on the meaning of the phrase “natural-born citizen,” is best left to discussion in other blogs.

Click here to access a finding aid and typescript of Alexander Morse’s letter, and here to browse our Civil War collections.  For more of our manuscript collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | March 3, 2016 · 10:04 am

Letters to May

May Carpenter (right), with a friend

May Carpenter (right), with a friend

We previously heard from Virginia “Jennie” Amos in 1890, when she wrote to May Carpenter of Smiths Grove, Kentucky about going corsetless at a girls-only picnic that ended up being crashed by some local “town dudes.”

In other letters, Jennie also enlivened the short life of her former Cedar Bluff College classmate (May died at 20), with trash talk about friends, life and love.  Let’s hear some more from this paragon of late-Victorian female delicacy:

On her schoolteaching duties:  “Just imagine yourself with sixty brats, all under thirteen. . . . While I was lifting them by their ears. . . a half dozen in my class would be having a fist and scull fight.”

On a friend’s impending marriage:  “It is perfectly awful to think of her associating with such a scrub. . . . I can’t help but believe something will take place yet, and do most heartily hope it will be his getting drunk and breaking his neck.”

On another friend’s marriage:  “And Miss Sallie is married . . . . Did not think she would have A. Lawson. . . . It seems like good girls never get the kind of men they deserve.”

On yet another friend’s honeymoon:  “You must make Bettie tell you how badly scared Scott was the first night.  I can’t imagine him as being so immodest as to undress in a girl’s room and to get in bed with her.  Isn’t it awful to think of?”

On a date:  “My beau was one Mr. Walter Culley who was never known to speak a word unless asked a direct question.  He did not bother me very much though as we played cards most of the time.”

And this complaint, in the middle of a gossip-filled letter , about her friend “Emma’s” tale-telling behind her back:  “She never showed any sign of talking about other people to me, but then she knew I had such perfect contempt for people so inclined that may have prevented her from talking to me.”

These letters are part of the Carpenter Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s  Special Collections Library.  Click here to download a finding aid.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | February 25, 2016 · 8:59 am

Judgment Days

Samuel Carpenter's judgeship appointment, 1847

Samuel Carpenter’s judgeship appointment, 1847

As U.S. Supreme Court history turns a page with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, we see irrefutable evidence of the personal and professional lives of other august members of the bench in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Circuit Judge (and Bowling Green mayor) John B. Rodes, Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Charles H. Reynolds, U.S. District Judge Walter Evans, and local judge John M. Galloway are among those represented in our collections.

In 1846, Judge Henry Ormsby Brown (1787-1852) wrote to his wife Lucy during his travels on the circuit in western Kentucky.  He was intrigued with the “thriving little town” of Cadiz, “with a better society than is generally found in such villages–a genteel courthouse & several churches.”  Anxious (a little whiny, in fact) for letters from home, Brown instructed Lucy to “ascertain by the time it takes this letter to reach you” whether she should write him there or address her letter to his next destination.

When Samuel Carpenter (1824-1900) was appointed in 1847 as circuit judge for the 13th Judicial District of Kentucky, his certificate noted his substitution in place of one John W. Helm, “who refused to accept.”  On the reverse was recorded Carpenter’s oath that he “would administer Justice without respect of persons and do equal right to the poor and the rich.”

Scrutiny of judges has, of course, become ever more contentious.  In 1987, Elkton, Kentucky attorney George Street Boone shared his thoughts with Senator Wendell Ford on the nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Following the confirmation hearings closely, he found the controversial nominee “articulate, highly educated and intelligent,” but nevertheless more “radical” than conservative.  Given the Supreme Court’s “strong and stabilizing influence in this country,” he wrote, neither Bork’s record nor his performance at the hearings justified his appointment to the nation’s highest court.

Click on the links to access finding aids for these collections.  For more collections on lawyers and judges, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | February 10, 2016 · 9:54 am

Don’t Say “No” to the Dames

Margie Helm's Colonial Dames membership card

Margie Helm’s Colonial Dames membership card

Founded in 1891, the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America seeks to preserve and promote an understanding of America’s formative years through education and historic preservation.  Membership requires proof of descent from an ancestor who served the country during the Colonial period, but candidates must also be “invited and proposed” by an existing member.

Lydia Mae Helm, a cousin of WKU head librarian Margie Helm, resolved to join the Colonial Dames in 1942.  A Washington attorney who already knew many Dames socially, Mae was nevertheless a little intimidated at the prospect.  Her first test was appearing at a formal tea for 60 women, of whom 20 were being vetted as candidates.

Afterward, Mae informed her cousin Margie that the tea was a “complete success,” given in a “gorgeous apartment” and attended by women of charm, wealth, civic conscience and patriotism.  She was especially dazzled by those who had married titled foreigners, and conversed with one who promised to help her with her genealogy.  Planning her research trip to the Library of Congress, Mae declared “I have started and I am going to finish it.”

Margie Helm herself became a member of the Kentucky chapter of the Colonial Dames in 1951.  Two years later, she was recruited by its Historic Activities Committee in a project to identify 18th- and early 19th-century houses in the western part of the state.  Highly tasked as WKU’s head librarian and busy with church and other community work, Margie resisted the assignment, but received a stern letter from the committee.

“You can’t do this to me,” wrote Frances Fairleigh, “and further more one does not say ‘No’ to any work of the Dames.”  “So accept gracefully,” she advised.  Further, Margie was not to delegate the task to any outsider, for “this is Dames’ work.”  “For the present,” Frances concluded, “you are chairman of the western district.”  Margie appears to have surrendered, noting on the envelope her meek reply: “accepted temporarily.”

Mae and Margie Helm’s adventures with the Colonial Dames are part of the Margie Helm Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For more of our collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | January 21, 2016 · 3:58 pm

On the Plains of Mexico

Charles Nourse's Mexican War letter

Charles Nourse’s Mexican War letter

Like his sister Sally, Charles E. Nourse (1826-1866) of Bardstown, Kentucky was an intelligent observer and capable correspondent.  In service with the 4th Kentucky Infantry during the Mexican War, Charles wrote home to his family of his experiences while on duty.  Three of his letters are now part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.

“I am in the city of Vera Cruz and am very well,” Charles wrote his brother James in November 1847, but his landing at that Mexican port city had not been uneventful.  Asleep during the approach, he was awakened by a thunderstorm that kept his ship, and its seasick crew, tacking offshore for 3 days.  Afterward, he had a chance to explore the city, with its many tradesmen, war-damaged houses, and a few attractive “Senoretas.”  A month later, a long march took him through fascinating territory.  Of Perote Castle, the 16th-century Spanish-built fortress used by the Mexicans as a prison, he wrote that “a few bombs could kill every man in it and it is very unhealthy.”  While in the valley of Perote, Charles and his fellow soldiers heard gunfire in the distance and readied themselves for battle, only to learn that it had been an accidental discharge and that it had killed a young soldier from Louisville.  Finally, standing on a high point overlooking the valley of Mexico, Nourse found a 50-mile view that took in fertile fields, “six or seven cities with glittering spires & domes,” lakes, and snow-capped mountains.

With spring 1848, however, came the “sickly season,” when every day Nourse would hear the “solemn dead march” as its victims were taken to their final resting place.  Nevertheless, he assured his grandmother, he had emerged unscathed.  And besides, he reflected, “All have to die!  if a man be buried on the plains of Mexico without a stone to mark his place of rest or under a marble monument at home what is the difference when he is dead.”

Click here to access a finding aid for Charles Nourse’s letters.   For more collections on the Mexican War and other wars, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | January 14, 2016 · 8:57 am

A Woman’s View of the Fight

Union and Confederate letterheadsIn Kentucky, the imminent breakup of the Union in 1861 and the approach of civil war sparked lively intra-family debates.  In the Brown Family Collection, part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives holdings of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections, a transcribed letter to Charles Ewing Nourse (the Browns were his in-laws) from his older sister Sarah (“Sally”) Doom, the wife of a Nelson County tanner, eloquently shows her struggle to make sense of the war.

Was it a purely political question of states’ rights, Sally wondered, versus an intrusive federal authority?  “I cannot,” she wrote, “look upon the disruption of the most glorious Government that man ever saw, with any sympathy or pleasure.”  The whole, she believed, was greater than the sum of its parts, and the initial secession of South Carolina would lead to “the privilege of all to secede into innumerable petty states which can and will be overthrown and enslaved by any Foreign power that may desire it.”  Insisting that she was “very green to try to talk politics,” Sally nevertheless declared that “if I were a man I would devote myself to my country (if I had the sense).”

But she wanted to dig deeper into the matter.  “We ought to weigh the thing better than we have,” she continued.  To those claiming that secession would remedy the current crisis, and that it was worthwhile to “throw away” the benefits of a federal government, she cut to the chase:

Could I believe the South were actuated by noble feelings, I could sympathize with them.  But the grand moving object of ‘our noble progenitors’ is the survival of the African slave trade . . . in my opinion the most degrading, despicable occupation a people could engage in.

Click here to access a finding aid for Sally’s letter.  For more collections on the Civil War and slavery, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.  Click here to browse a list of our Civil War collections.

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