Author Archives: Lynn Niedermeier

by | February 12, 2015 · 2:23 pm

The NAACP in Bowling Green

Reverend Henry D. Carpenter was a leader in the Bowling Green NAACP.

Reverend Henry D. Carpenter was a leader in the Bowling Green NAACP.

On this day (February 12) in 1909, a group of activists in New York decided to reinvigorate African Americans’ post-Reconstruction quest for civil and political rights by forming the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  Exactly a decade later, the Bowling Green, Kentucky branch of the NAACP was organized.  At a mass meeting at the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, after hearing the urgings of various speakers on “the good that can result from same,” the first 37 members enrolled.

The Manuscripts & Folklife Archives holdings of WKU’s Special Collections Library include copies of the membership lists and minutes of the Bowling Green NAACP from its inception to June 1927.  Meetings, which rotated through the churches of the city, featured music, prayer, speakers, and discussions of local issues affecting African Americans.  For example, at an executive meeting in March 1919, the problems of “unequal accommodations for our race in traveling,” the “unsanitary conditions existing in the colored Waiting Room at the [train] depot,” and “The Need of a lunch stand for our Race at the depot” were referred to a committee on grievances for follow-up with the proper authorities.  In May, a clergyman “spoke of indignities heaped upon our people by arresting them on suspicion and when proven guiltless nothing done to exonerate the suspect.”

The chapter also considered issues brought to its attention in press releases from the national organization.  At a meeting in June 1921, local churches were asked to take special offerings for the “stricken & suffering” victims of a destructive race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in October 1922 the executive resolved to collect funds to support the NAACP’s advocacy of a federal anti-lynching law.

Click here for a finding aid to the NAACP (Bowling Green Chapter) Collection.  For more collections on African Americans in Kentucky, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | February 5, 2015 · 2:42 pm

Measles: The Sounds and the Silence

Thomas E. Bramlette, immunotherapy counselor

Thomas E. Bramlette, immunotherapy counselor

Measles “attacked every part of our camp at once,” wrote John W. Tuttle, a native of Wayne County who served with the Third Kentucky Infantry during the Civil War.  In 1861, while at Camp Robinson near Danville, he noted the deaths of 61 soldiers and the suffering of countless others.  It “settled upon the lungs of hundreds, perhaps thousands, and more or less seriously impaired their constitutions.”  The effects were so debilitating that “at times, the spasmodic coughing” of the sick, especially in the cold, rainy autumn weather, made it “almost impossible” to hear orders during drills and parades.  Their commander, Colonel Thomas E. Bramlette, was so irritated by the cacophony of his non-immune troops, remembered Tuttle, that he once “severely reprimanded the men of his regiment for not having had the measles when they were children.”

In Breckinridge County toward the end of the war, Bevie Cain saw a different side effect of the illness.  “We are just recovering from a long round of the measles which has been in our family for nearly three weeks!” she wrote a friend.  “I have escaped thus far, though I am grieved that they have so sadly afflicted my brother, who is almost deaf.”  While out hunting near a road, the boy failed to respond when some passing soldiers called out to him.  “I do not know what the consequence would have been,” Bevie wrote, “if a friend of his . . . had not come to his assistance, and informed them of his misfortune.”  The proud young woman, an unrepentant Confederate sympathizer, mourned her brother’s condition.  “Oh!  I don’t know how I could bear the thought of his remaining thus all his life.”

These accounts of the measles are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives holdings of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click on the links to access finding aids.  For other collections documenting Kentuckians’ battles with contagious diseases, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | January 29, 2015 · 2:12 pm

The Buchanan Heirs

Any resemblance? President James Buchanan and Mattie (Buchanan) Gerard

Any resemblance? President James Buchanan and Mattie (Buchanan) Gerard

Like those e-mails we get today from Nigerian princes, it was surely too good to be true. . . but then again, maybe not.  Way back when, a cousin of President James Buchanan was said to have left an estate comprising dozens of valuable properties in New York’s Manhattan and at least six other states.  By the 1920s, all the long leases on the properties had expired and the estate, now worth as much as $850 million, was due for liquidation and distribution to Buchanan’s descendants.

As America entered the Depression, rumors of the jackpot awaiting those who could prove their Buchanan ancestry spread like wildfire.  The ringmaster of the proceedings was one L. D. Buchanan, a Houston, Texas grocer, great-grandson of the Buchanan tycoon, and self-appointed coordinator of the estate settlement.  In Bowling Green, Kentucky, Martha “Mattie” Gerard (1869-1962), the daughter of Lawson Lafayette Buchanan, was skeptical, but if the rumors were true, why not give it a shot?  She swore an affidavit as to her ancestry, carefully prepared her Buchanan history, and mailed it to L. D. Buchanan with a request that he file her claim.

Letters and genealogies flew between Mattie and other prospective beneficiaries in the family, none of whom could completely suppress their doubts. . . or their expectations.  Mattie’s cousin Clara had heard that the mysterious L. D. Buchanan was “sincere and honest” and that the money “might be paid in a month, and it might take 5 years.”  Another potential claimant, she wrote Mattie, “does not think there is any estate, but if there is, he thinks the man will be square.”

Eventually, it all became too much for old L. D. Buchanan.  Protesting mightily that he had received no financial benefit from his efforts, but under suspicion of fraud, he refused all further mail from claimants.  And in 1932, at the urging of an exasperated New York Surrogate Court judge, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a statement: There were no–repeat, NO–Buchanan estate settlements pending in the courts of his state, and “money contributed by claimants for the purpose of establishing their existence is money wasted.”  He might have added that any genealogies prepared for the express purpose of cashing in on an ancestor’s millions should be taken with a grain of salt.

Mattie (Buchanan) Gerard’s file on the Buchanan estate claim is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives holdings of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For other genealogical collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | January 22, 2015 · 2:43 pm

Political Survivors

Since the Cold War, a feature of the annual State of the Union message is the “designated survivor” status given to a member of the U.S. government.  Should a catastrophic event wipe out the Capitol and everyone inside during the President’s speech, continuity of government would rest in the hands of this individual, who watches the proceedings from a secure, Secret Service-protected location.  This year’s “designated survivor” was Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx.

In 1966, giving his farewell speech after 22 years in Congress, Kentucky representative Frank Chelf remembered an event that, if not catastrophic, surely rattled the halls of that institution.  On March 1, 1954, four Puerto Ricans demanding independence from the United States fired pistols from the gallery of the House at members of the 83rd Congress.  “When the sound of the last shot was history,” said Chelf, “five of our colleagues were lying bleeding on the floor of this chamber.”  Having just left for a doctor’s appointment, Chelf concluded that the engagement saved his life because “the seat that I had just vacated minutes before, had been completely riddled by two bullets.  It just wasn’t my time to go.”  The same, fortunately, held true of the five shooting victims, all of whom survived.

Departing Congressman Frank Chelf passes the torch to William H. Natcher, 1966

Departing Congressman Frank Chelf passes the torch to William H. Natcher, 1966

Frank Chelf’s farewell speech to Congress is part of the Frank Chelf Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives holdings of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For more political collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | January 15, 2015 · 2:20 pm

Speaking with Pictures

James Proctor Knott cartoons

James Proctor Knott cartoons

James Proctor Knott (1830-1911) was a native of Marion County, Kentucky who practiced law in Memphis, Missouri before being elected attorney general of that state in 1860.  As the country moved toward civil war, he did not adopt the pieties of either side; he disapproved of secession but declined to take a prescribed loyalty oath to the U.S. government, an act that led to his disbarment and a brief stay in prison.  Knott then moved back to Kentucky (his second wife’s family lived in Bowling Green), where he became a member of Congress and then governor.

James Proctor Knott sketch of man readingKnott also liked to draw.  A collection of his sketches and cartoons is part of the Knott Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives holdings of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Executed in pencil, ink and watercolor, they show Knott’s appreciation of human, plant, animal and architectural forms.  On one small rendering of a landscape, he has added these lines from Hamlet: “We must speak by the card [precisely, that is], or equivocation will undo us.”

James Proctor Knott landscape with Hamlet quote

Click here for a collection finding aid.  For more collections relating to artists and cartoonists, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | January 8, 2015 · 2:38 pm

A Little Flight Through History

Mona Lisa; Elizabeth Robertson Coombs

Mona Lisa; Elizabeth Robertson Coombs

January 8, 1962 saw the unveiling, for the first time in the United States, of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece La Gioconda — or, as it was probably better known to an advance audience of dignitaries at Washington’s National Gallery of Art, the Mona Lisa.

The painting was on loan from the Louvre, but half a century earlier a petty thief named Vincenzo Peruggia had attempted to borrow it permanently.  On August 21, 1911, he hid in the Louvre until it closed for the night, then removed the Mona Lisa from its frame.  The next morning, he sauntered out of the museum with the treasure concealed in a smock.  By the time it was recovered more than two years later, the Mona Lisa had entered the public imagination as the world’s most famous, and now closely guarded, work of art.

Traveling in Europe at the time, an aunt of Bowling Green’s Elizabeth Robertson Coombs had a unique experience of the theft.  She had spent the summer in England, touring the countryside and enjoying London — “of course it isn’t New York,” she wrote, referring to Elizabeth’s home at the time, “but it is very nice.”  After a tour of France’s chateau district, she went on to Paris for a month, where she shopped for her winter wardrobe, wandered through Montmartre, and visited the Moulin Rouge (which fell short of a promise that it was “eminently respectable”).  And yes, she reported, “we saw Mona Lisa before stealing — and the hooks where she had hung — after.”  But one can imagine Elizabeth’s aunt smiling as serenely as La Gioconda when she dropped this bomb on her 18-year-old niece: “By the way — I had my first aeroplane flight while we were in Paris . . . in a biplane — went around the horizon — and mounted to about the height of the Eiffel Tower . . . it was perfectly heavenly.”

Letters written to Elizabeth Robertson Coombs early in the 20th century are part of the Coombs Family Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives holdings of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | December 11, 2014 · 2:45 pm

A Cavalcade of Cards

In the course of processing family papers in Manuscripts & Folklife Archives, we regularly uncover a variety of Christmas cards sent to Kentuckians from family and friends across the country and the world.  Here are a few of the more eye-catching ones that have surfaced this year; they date from the 1920s to the 1970s:

A. Ross Pittman linoleum block prints, cards sent to Drucilla Jones, Bowling Green

A. Ross Pittman linoleum block prints, cards sent to Drucilla Jones, Bowling Green

 

From Olive Sewell, Bury St. Edmonds, Suffolk, to Marjorie Clagett, Bowling Green

From Olive Sewell, Bury St. Edmonds, Suffolk, to Marjorie Clagett, Bowling Green

 

Sent to the Clements family, Owensboro

Sent to the Clements family, Owensboro

 

From her niece Emma to Senora Tolle, Glasgow

From her niece Emma to Senora Tolle, Glasgow

For more on Christmas letters, cards, customs and folkways, search our collection finding aids in TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | December 4, 2014 · 2:09 pm

A December Election

Elizabeth Martin's take on the 1844 election

Elizabeth Martin’s take on the 1844 election

When last we left the Whigs, they were fighting the presidential race of 1844, pitting their candidate, Kentucky’s Henry Clay, against Tennessee Democrat James K. Polk.  Both parties had dumped their presumptive heirs to the nomination, Vice President John Tyler and former President Martin Van Buren, respectively.

With their nation poised to become a continental power, the Whigs and Dems sparred bitterly over the annexation of Texas and Oregon, Manifest Destiny, and the westward expansion of slavery (Polk was for, Clay against).  But economic issues such as the tariff (Polk wanted to lower it) also hovered in the background.  Voting began on November 1–this was the last presidential election to be held on different days in different states–and when it concluded on December 4, 1844, Polk was declared the winner by a narrow margin.

In Elkton, Kentucky, 53-year-old Elizabeth Martin found herself on the wrong side of the vote (had she been able to vote, that is).  Writing to her nephew Benjamin Hinch, she mourned the outcome as “a grate calamity indeed” that left the defeated Whigs “all down in the mouth.”  Elizabeth’s daughter Avaline was also disappointed.  “The times are very hard with us,” and were likely to continue “since they have elected old Polk.”  But this joint mother-daughter letter included another, more personal debate, as the women earnestly proposed suitable names for Hinch’s newborn son.

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

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by | November 19, 2014 · 2:51 pm

“Permit Safely and Freely to Pass”

George Crawford's 1807 passport

George Crawford’s 1807 passport

For most of us, our most-deplored photo (next to our driver’s license) is the one on our passport.  But it wasn’t until late 1914 that Americans were required to include a photographic likeness with their passport applications.

Earlier passports might simply state the holder’s name, as did the 1807 passport of George Crawford, signed by New York mayor DeWitt Clinton.  Or the document might give notice of the age and physical attributes of its bearer.  For example, the 1863 diplomatic passport of Bowling Green lawyer Warner L. Underwood described his high forehead, blue eyes, prominent nose, “ordinary” mouth and chin, round face, and “florid” complexion.  George Harris’s August 1914 passport was for a man with a medium forehead, large nose, dark complexion, and dimpled chin.  Although it included her photo, the 1919 passport of WKU teacher Elizabeth Woods also noted her medium nose and mouth, round chin, and oval face.  Like Underwood’s, her passport was not the pocket-sized book we use today, although at 8X12 inches it could be folded in quarters and kept in a cardboard cover, like that of Grayson County merchant Willis Green.

Willis Green's 1923 passport

Willis Green’s 1923 passport

What gives modern passport photos their charm, of course, is that mug-shot quality (a “neutral facial expression and both eyes open” is the rule).  But earlier specimens weren’t quite so uniformly dreadful.  From the flapper-era glory of Ruth Hines Temple’s 1926 photo, to the Cold War-era gaze on Congressman Frank Chelf’s 1959 passport (“not valid” for travel in Hungary, Cuba, etc.), these photos allowed a little of the bearer’s personality to shine through.

Click on the links to access finding aids for the collections containing the passports of these traveling Kentuckians, part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives holdings of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  For more, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Ruth Hines Temple; Frank Chelf

Ruth Hines Temple; Frank Chelf

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by | November 4, 2014 · 1:59 pm

The Whig Ticket

Whig Almanac, 1845 (Emanie Arling Philips Collection)

Whig Almanac, 1845 (Emanie Arling Philips Collection)

Before its demise in the mid-19th century, the Whig Party sent four men to the White House.  In 1844, the Whigs and their candidate, Kentuckian Henry Clay, were the choice of 16 prominent Warren County citizens, who made their case in an open letter to fellow voters.  Most of their rhetoric still infuses political debate today, and could be republished with only the date revised:

The time has come when the American people should feel and know that this great great country of theirs, belongs not to office holders and office seekers, but to them.

A most momentous crisis is at hand in the history of our beloved country…Great principles are in issue.

The Whigs are the advocates of an AMERICAN tariff…discriminating in the amount of duty imposed, between those articles which the American citizen can manufacture or produce and those which they can not…  Providence…has filled our mountains and our plains with minerals…and given us a climate and soil for the growing of hemp and wool.  These being the great materials of our national defence, they ought to have extended to them adequate and fair protection.

The Whigs are in favor of a well regulated Bank of the United States; of a reduction and reform of the expenditures of Government, and a modification of the executive powers of the President.

Remembering that we are one people, in town and country all the same, elevated by the same prosperity, depressed by the same misfortunes, subject to the same laws and warmed by the same patriotism, let us unite together as one man [sic] around our principles and sustain our men [sic] and our measures by our suffrages at the polls.

A typescript of this Whiggish appeal is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For other collections about elections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.  And don’t forget to vote!

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