Author Archives: Lynn Niedermeier

by | September 14, 2012 · 3:39 pm

Go West, Young Men

Asa Young (1795-1865), father of George

Asa Young (1795-1865), father of George

In 1850, George Chapman Young (1824-1896) of Barren County, Kentucky, set out in an ox cart with two companions to seek his fortune in the gold fields of California.  Ninety years later, George’s son, Cave City farmer Amps P. Young (1876-1946) and his wife made the same journey by car, using George’s travel diary as a guide.  From these excerpts, telling apart the experiences of father and son should be easy:

Passed through Ash Hollow, camped near some Indian Wigwams.

Enjoyed the tourist camps very much being very nicely equipped in the West.

Yellowstone National Park a play ground of about 50 miles by 70 miles . . . where people play with the bears and other wild animals . . . .

Pass the Chimney Rock . . . camped by ourselves, a wolf ate our lariet.

Traveled last night but did not get through the desert reached Green river today about noon, no grass, our mules appear about starved.

Had the great pleasure of eating with a couple of very handsome young Indian Squaws.

They have now quite a museum here [Fort Casper] with quite a few old relicks dug from the old fort . . . .

Passed a grave part dug.  The man had just died, had the diarear when he left home.  The Indians stold 28 horses last night here.

Traveled all day without grass . . . .  We pass hundreds of dead horses every day.

Boulder dam is a man made wonder farming the great Mead lake for power and a surplus of water for irrigation . . . .

We went through San Joaquin Valley to San Francisco crossing the new bridge over the bay by Treasure Island.  After spending three days at the fair we go over the great Golden Gate Bridge . . . .

Making nothing prospecting.

The travels of George and Amps Young (and an 1817 account of a river trip to Natchez by George’s father Asa Young), are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to download a finding aid.  For other collections of travel accounts, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | September 6, 2012 · 3:17 pm

The Lucy Walker

Woodcut of the Lucy Walker explosion

Woodcut of the Lucy Walker explosion

Twice a year, Dr. Charles Henry Webb of Princeton, Kentucky visited his mother in Lexington.  In October, 1844 his wife was ill and unable to accompany him, so he departed with only their four daughters and a few servants.  After leaving the two older daughters at boarding school in Lexington, Dr. Webb and his younger daughters, 11-year-old Nancy (“Nannie”) and 9-year-old Cassandra (“Cannie”) boarded the steamboat Lucy Walker for the journey home.

Near New Albany, Indiana, disaster struck.  The Lucy Walker‘s boilers exploded, and she burst into flames and began to sink.  Hurled into the air by the blast, Dr. Webb landed on a piece of floating wreckage.  He was taken on board another boat with burns and a gruesome wound to the throat.  A rescuer pulled Nannie out of the water when he noticed her hair floating on the surface, but Cannie drowned.  No one knew what became of the servants.

Dr. Webb’s brother-in-law, George Washington Williams, rushed to New Albany to find him in the care of two doctors and some kind local citizens, but unfortunately, Webb soon died.  In two letters to his wife Winifred, Williams mournfully described what he had learned about the accident, the sufferings of the victims, and the arrangements he made to preserve the bodies of his dead family members pending burial back in Princeton.

As it turned out, Dr. Webb’s wife had been ill because she was in the early stages of pregnancy.  The following spring, she bore a daughter and named her Cassandra after the child’s dead sister.

George Williams’ letters, and the reminiscences of a descendant, are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Together, they give a vivid account of the effect on a Kentucky family of the Lucy Walker disaster, one of the deadliest in U. S. history.  Click here to download a finding aid.  For more collections on steamboating, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | August 30, 2012 · 2:17 pm

Waiting to Cross

Vincent Trago's letter

Vincent Trago’s letter

As Union troops neared Bowling Green in the wake of the Confederate withdrawal in February 1862, they found that the departing enemy had destroyed foot and railroad bridges leading over the Barren River into the town.  Camped on the north side, waiting for their turn either to ford the river or cross on makeshift bridges, some of the soldiers took time to write a line home.  Among several such letters in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library is one from Vincent T. Trago, a 24-year-old corporal serving with the 15th Ohio Infantry.

Unbowed by the rigors of military life, Trago assured his correspondent that “I am well as usual [and] can eat my share of rations yet.”  During the 20-mile march to Bowling Green he had avoided the fate of some of his comrades, whose “feet got verry sore so that they took off their boots and went bare footed for 6 or 7 miles.”  Local reception of the marching men also cheered Trago.  The “Kentucky girls were fix up in their Sunday best and were standing by the road side smiling and looking as pleasant as they could,” he wrote, and their African-American counterparts seemed equally delighted with the passing soldiers.  The only sour note had come from within the ranks, where some of the men had shot off their pistols and committed other breaches of discipline, and been ordered to carry rails as punishment.

A finding aid and typescript of Vincent Trago’s letter can be downloaded here.  For more of our Civil War collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | August 23, 2012 · 7:08 pm

Cakes and the Academy

Duncan Hines and his signature product

Duncan Hines and his signature product

Formed in 1949, the Hines-Park Food Company was a joint venture of advertising executive Roy Park and Bowling Green native Duncan Hines (1880-1959).  After his first restaurant guidebook, Adventures in Good Eating, was published in 1936, Hines’s reviews became must-reads for Americans seeking quality dining during their travels around the country.  The next step for Hines was to capitalize on his reputation by creating his own food label.

The “Duncan Hines” label first appeared on ice cream, but soon became closely associated with packaged cake mixes.  In 1955, Hines-Park Foods was pondering a strategy for increasing its sales and, through heightened perceptions of the man himself, making Duncan Hines the most popular product endorser in America.

The Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library has acquired a collection of materials dating from this period of the company’s history.  The highlight of the collection is a fascinating market research study, conducted in 1955, which features among its theoretical and survey data a detailed analysis of the company’s target consumers: women.

The study concluded that Hines’s greatest potential appeal lay with “emancipated modern housewives” who no longer submerged their identities in home and kitchen.  These women aspired to “gracious and beautiful living,” the authors observed, “but are not secure in their ability to carry out such principles.”  With his wise, bachelor-uncle-style, masculine authority, Hines could offer them the confidence that arch-rivals like motherly Betty Crocker could not.  In particular, the study argued that college-educated women, despite rejecting the submissive “homebody” label, were actually more receptive to such male authority because of their “years of respectful contact with professors and instructors.”

A finding aid for the Duncan Hines Collection can be downloaded here.  For more on Duncan Hines, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | August 16, 2012 · 2:39 pm

A Family’s Sorrow

Federal Hill, Bardstown, Kentucky

Federal Hill, Bardstown, Kentucky

When John Rowan (1773-1843) married Ann Lytle (1774-1849), Ann’s father, Revolutionary War veteran William Lytle, made a gift to the couple of a 1,300-acre tract near Bardstown, Kentucky.  The Rowan estate at Federal Hill (as it became known) is now famous for inspiring Stephen Foster’s ballad, “My Old Kentucky Home.”

Foster’s song conjures up a bucolic setting enlivened by the Rowans’ nine children, but late in July, 1833 a dark shadow passed over Federal Hill.  Since the previous year, cholera had been stalking the residents of Kentucky, and when it finally reached Bardstown it tore through the Rowan family like a scythe.  Within a matter of days, John Rowan lost a daughter, Mary Jane, her husband William and their daughter, also named Mary Jane; a son, William Lytle Rowan and his wife, Eliza Boyce Rowan; another son, Atkinson Hill Rowan, just back from a diplomatic post in Spain; a sister, Elizabeth Rowan Kelly, and her husband William, who happened to be visiting; and 26 enslaved plantation workers.  Sixteen years later, the disease also claimed Rowan’s widow, Ann.

The Rowans distinguished themselves in law, politics and business, but their correspondence sometimes hinted at the trauma the family had suffered.  Orphaned children and the estates of suddenly departed relatives required attention from the survivors.  In particular, the losses seemed to haunt John Rowan’s daughter, Anne Rowan Buchanan.  “I am very feeble,” she wrote her sister Alice from Covington.  “I am so much affraid of cholera that my apetite has failed me.”  In the summer of 1848, Ann’s husband, Dr. Joseph Rodes Buchanan, became alarmed at the lack of letters from Alice’s family and feared the worst.  “What can it mean — can it be that there is sickness among you which you wish to conceal from us?” he wrote.  “Mrs. B. naturally dreads that such may be the case. . . . Let me beg of you to write immediately and say if you are all well or what is the matter.”  Perhaps the tragedy in his wife’s family contributed to Dr. Buchanan’s belief in spiritualism, mesmerism and communicating with the dead, described in letters written while pursuing his medical career in New York.

A finding aid for the Rowan Family Papers, available in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library, can be downloaded by clicking here.  For several other collections relating to the Rowan family and Federal Hill, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | August 2, 2012 · 6:50 pm

The Scopes Monkey Trial

Homemade collage with thoughts on evolution, John Scopes scrapbook

Homemade collage with thoughts on evolution, John Scopes scrapbook

It was a lawsuit to test the constitutionality of Tennessee’s Butler Act, a 1925 statute making it a misdemeanor for teachers in state-supported schools “to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”  But when State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes caught the satirical eye of anti-fundamentalist editor H. L. Mencken, he came up with a catchier name: the Scopes “Monkey Trial.”

The defendant was John Scopes, a Dayton, Tennessee high school coach, substitute biology teacher and Paducah, Kentucky native.  The attorney “dream teams” included Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution.  After 12 days of testimony, in July 1925 a Dayton court upheld the law and convicted Scopes of violating its provisions.  Although the conviction was later overturned on a technicality, the Butler Act was not repealed until 1967.

Part of a scrapbook kept by John Scopes and his wife Mildred containing material relating to the Scopes Trial has been recently donated to the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Included in its pages are letters from international divorce lawyer Dudley Field Malone offering his services as co-counsel, and from Clarence and Ruby Darrow commenting on press reaction to the trial in the South.

Much of the material documents the years after the trial during which Scopes, who left teaching for a career as a geologist, found himself a reluctant celebrity.  When Inherit the Wind, a movie based on the trial, was released in 1960, however, he appeared at its premiere in Dayton and at the accompanying “Scopes Trial Day” festivities.  Other correspondence relates to his 1967 memoir, Center of the Storm.  Also included are hand-crafted anti-evolution religious tracts and letters from both friends and strangers offering thoughts and reflections on the “Monkey Trial.”

Click here to download a finding aid for the John T. Scopes Collection.  For more of our collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | July 26, 2012 · 8:45 pm

A Woman With a Mission

Nora Young Ferguson, 1882-1969

Nora Young Ferguson, 1882-1969

It was 1957, and the Warren County, Kentucky courthouse was about to undergo a major interior renovation.  As the offices were being emptied for temporary relocation, someone was intently watching.  A terrorist?  A communist?  A disgruntled defendant?  No, even more intense–a genealogist.  Ever since finding out about stacks of old, neglected county records–deeds and land certificates, marriage bonds, wills, estate documents, guardianship reports, petitions and lawsuits–gathering dust in the courthouse basement, Richardsville native and retired teacher Nora Young Ferguson had been determined to rescue them.  Where some of the local attorneys, she claimed, saw only a fire hazard and “were going to have them thrown in the river,” she saw a rich trove of history dating back to the earliest days of the county.

When a path to the records opened up after the old ballot boxes and other obstacles were cleared away, Nora pounced.  She gathered up the loose papers, took them home (with the permission of the Warren Fiscal Court), and began to clean and sort them.  Of particular interest to her were thousands of 18th- and 19th-century marriage bonds, valuable to genealogists because they often named parents or other relatives as well as spouses.

Nora also spearheaded an effort to preserve the records permanently through microfilming.  She worked with technicians from the Genealogical Society Library of the Mormon Church to photograph the documents, and even called for the expansion of the project to other records in the county and beyond.  She gathered data on her own family history, and helped to found the Warren County Historical Society.  One of her pet projects was fundraising to repair and preserve the Green River Union Meeting House, an early multi-denominational church near her birthplace in Richardsville.

The papers of Nora Young Ferguson, including her family correspondence, genealogy files and many of the original records that she saved, are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives holdings at WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to download a finding aid.  For marriage records, wills, court records and other collections on family history, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | July 19, 2012 · 4:22 pm

“I tried to preach”

A circuit rider, 1867

A circuit rider, 1867

Born in 1827, Jacob Tol Miller became a member of Rolling Fork United Baptist Church in Nelson County.  He started a journal in 1856, the same year he was ordained as a Baptist minister and began riding the circuit to churches throughout Kentucky.  With few interruptions, his journal documents some 25 years of life as a clergyman, especially during the era of camp meeting revivals that preceded the Civil War.

At first, Miller may have felt inadequate to the task of spreading God’s word.  In the months following his ordination, at meeting after meeting and sometimes several times a day, “I tried to preach,” he recorded.  He gratefully accepted whatever remuneration was offered: over five days at a Taylor County church at which he “tried to preach 8 times,” he received two dollars.  He performed baptisms and solemnized marriages, and was heartened when he arrived at a meeting and “saw many anxiously enquiring for Jesus.”

Miller also noted personal milestones in his journal, some joyful and others heartbreaking.  In November, 1857 he wed 20-year-old Martha Jeffries, upon whom, he confessed, his thoughts on the subject of marriage had long been focused.  In October, 1858 his son Henry was born, but a month later, on the couple’s first wedding anniversary, a stunned Miller wrote that “disappointment has come.”  After battling typhoid following her child’s birth, Martha had died.  “It was the happy part of my life,” Miller reflected on their short time together.  Struggling with “indescribable feelings,” he looked to God for strength.

Perhaps his faith was rewarded.  Miller was married again in 1860, to his late wife’s sister.  His travels on the circuit continued, to meetings large and small, both in churches and outside “in the woods.”  And he preached.  The phrase “tried to” disappeared from his journal.

Click here to download a finding aid for Jacob Tol Miller’s journal, a copy of which is housed in WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here for an associated collection, the records of Rolling Fork United Baptist Church of Christ.  For other collections relating to churches and clergymen, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | July 12, 2012 · 7:09 pm

Summer Volunteer Reflects On Her Experience

My name is Marisa Knight, and I am a senior at Bethel University in McKenzie, TN. For the past three weeks I have had the invaluable opportunity to volunteer with the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives at the Kentucky Library & Museum. My grandmother is a former University Archivist here, so being able to work in the same place she did has been especially meaningful.

During my time here I was given the opportunity to create finding aids for collections of all sizes. The best part was getting to read the collections and learn the people’s stories. Being able to help share their stories with other people even in just the small ways that I did was incredibly rewarding. It has been satisfying helping to make such important pieces of history accessible to the world.

Marisa Knight

Marisa Knight

Learning how and where to do certain types of research was also a part of the experience I really enjoyed and appreciated. This is a necessary skill that takes time to develop, and I am glad to say my time here has helped me greatly in this regard. You don’t always find what you’re looking for, which can be frustrating at times, but when you do, the thrill of finding something you’ve been searching for makes it all worthwhile. I loved waking up in the morning and wondering what I was going to find out that day. And the best part is it never stops. There are always unanswered questions in history, and there’s always a search for the answers.

As someone who plans to pursue a Master’s degree in Public History and eventually a career as an archivist, there has truly been nothing more advantageous to my future career goals than working here and gaining the firsthand experience that is so important in this field.

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by | June 28, 2012 · 4:06 pm

“My chin was sticking in my nose”

Herman & Mary Volkerding

Herman & Mary Volkerding

On June 27, 1844, Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of the Latter Day Saints and translator of the Book of Mormon, was killed by a mob for his controversial beliefs.  A little over a half-century later, 31-year-old Kentucky businessman Herman Volkerding witnessed Smith’s legacy in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Volkerding was on a 3,000-mile marketing trip through the western United States on behalf of his employer, a distillery headquartered in Louisville.  Although he was unlikely to have any sales success with the Mormons, while in Salt Lake City Volkerding did not miss a visit to the magnificent tabernacle where they worshipped.  Writing his wife Mary in July 1901, he “could not help but wonder at the ingenuity of the Mormon people.”  He described standing in a gallery at one end of the 200-foot-long, 8,000-seat temple as a Mormon elder at the other end “dropped a pin held not higher than 10 inches and it could be plainly heard.”

The next day, Volkerding attended a special musical service at the tabernacle and called it “the grandest thing by far that I have ever seen.”  He admitted to Mary “that I had to fight to keep from crying and to save me I could not keep some tears back.”  He listened with rapture to “the sweetest tenor you ever heard” and exclaimed of the 5,500-pipe organ that “you would hardly believe it but a human voice at any pitch can be reproduced so naturally and sweetly.”  Volkerding left his wife with an image of her husband, his lip quivering, overcome by the power of music.  “It was too much and I know my chin was sticking in my nose a good part of the time.”

Herman Volkerding’s travels and his affectionate letters to his wife can be found in the Volkerding Family Papers at WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to download a finding aid.  Find out about other collections by searching TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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