The Manuscripts unit of Library Special Collections recently acquired an unusual letter in which a Bowling Green resident pleads with a wealthy New York merchant to send funds so that he can save his home from a judicial sale and subsequently allow him to continue educating the city’s young Irish immigrants. On 18 March 1869, James Aloysia Timmons (1836-1902) wrote a solicitous letter to Alexander Turney Stewart (1803-1876), a multi-millionaire who operated New York City’s A.T. Stewart & Co., one of the world’s largest and most lucrative dry goods businesses. Timmons was born in County Cork, Ireland and had a bachelor’s degree from St. Joseph’s College in Bardstown and a master’s degree from St. Louis University. In 1863 he came to Bowling Green and established a small, private college with Professors William F. Kouwenberg and John Leonard.
In the letter, Timmons noted that losing his house “would prevent me from being able to do what little good I have been up to this time, teaching my countrymen’s poor children at very low rates, and some of them without any charge at all.” Timmons announces that he chose Stewart because of his noted “benevolence and…acts of charity.” It is clear that Timmons did not know Stewart personally but only by reputation. He declares his cause a magnanimous one: “I make my request with no selfish views or deceitful purposes, but purely with the view of being enabled to conduct my school, and instructing the poor Irish children of this place, most of whom are not able to pay anything for tuition.” He ends his letter with a plan to pay off the house.
Court flyer advertising the sale of Timmons’ house.
Also included with the letter was a Warren County Commissioner’s sale flyer that further elucidates the situation. It shows that the house’s previous owner, Robert Wenn Ogden, a wealthy Bowling Green businessman, had taken Timmons to court for back payments. The advertised sale was for a “valuable house and lot” two blocks from the public square on Main Street. The flyer further describes the house as “a large brick Dwelling with a basement, all well finished.”
From all appearances, Stewart did not come to Timmons’ rescue. James Timmons eventually moved to Lebanon in Marion County where he taught mathematics at St. Mary’s College. He and his wife had four children. He died on 5 November 1902 at 66 years of age and was buried in the Saint Augustine Church Cemetery.
Selden and Maria Miner vie for the last word in a letter to Selden’s brother in Maysville, Kentucky
The family name was appropriate, given what one of its members had set his sights upon. The Miner brothers, Selden and Samuel, had left Wethersfield, Connecticut, Selden to help settle the identically named Wethersfield, Illinois, and Samuel to make a home in Maysville, Kentucky. In spring 1849, the Maysville Miners were planning a visit to the Illinois Miners, a prospect that pleased Selden’s wife Maria. Unfortunately, the news of some shiny nuggets in a California river bed had sent a contagion through town—a delirium—and her husband had caught it. It was gold fever.
Maria had endured two weeks of her fidgety husband, alternately anticipating his brother’s visit from Kentucky and then declaring “To California I am bound”! “I have no opinion at all of his going,” insisted Maria, before making her misgivings crystal clear in a letter to Samuel. One can picture this skeptical spouse, folding her arms and rolling her eyes. “We are now as it were just getting things a little comfortable around us,” she declared, “& I feel as though we had best try & make ourselves contented with our lot.” She was, in fact, “very confident that there are at least ninety nine chances out of a hundred” that Selden’s get-rich-quick scheme “would entirely ruin us for life.”
Now it was Selden’s turn to make his case. Taking up the pen, he dismissed his wife’s “doleful description of this dreadful ‘yallar feaver.’” All of Wethersfield was abuzz, he reported, with companies of 40-50 men apiece preparing wagons, oxen and a year’s worth of provisions to make the journey west to the gold fields. “They all leave Independence [Missouri] in the middle of May,” Selden wrote. “It will take 90 or more days to reach the Sacramento valley.” And, of course, he had already heard rumors of spectacular success: two men who had “left here poor” were now worth some $100,000 each. Yet, Selden concluded, “I seem to lack the full consent of my wife.” Could his brother referee the dispute?
Now it was Maria’s turn again, and she filled the remaining space in the letter with her rejoinder: her husband claimed to have the encouragement of his friends, but in fact none of his real friends supported the enterprise. Not only had Selden given little thought to the care of his farm and stock during his absence, she charged, “this is all nothing – nothing compared to what I fear he will suffer in his own person if he goes.” Now, Maria sighed, her friends must pray “that none of my fears may be realized” and that her husband “may be willing to stay—for if he stays unwillingly you know we can neither of us be either happy or useful.”
Many considered George Owen Barnes (1827-1908), a native of Paintsville, Kentucky, one of America’s premier evangelists of the late-nineteenth century. His message was strictly non-denominational and was targeted to a more charismatic audience that believed in faith healing. His father, a Presbyterian minister for fifty years, made sure George received a good education: Centre College and Princeton University. Prior to beginning a church ministry, Barnes and his wife served as Presbyterian missionaries to India for seven years. Afterwards he held pastorates in Danville and Chicago. In February 1882 Barnes and his equally talented wife, Marie, visited Bowling Green for a protracted meeting.
George & Marie Barnes when they visited Bowling Green, “a city full of sinners,” in 1882.
Reverend Barnes’s name came up recently, when Library Special Collections was allowed to copy a small collection of items removed from a family Bible. The items included a long clipping from an unnamed Louisville newspaper dated February 21, 1882. The main title was “About Barnes” but the clipping boasted a number of odd subtitles, i.e. “Pen and Ink Drawings of Two Persons Who Draw Better Than the Siamese Twins” and “Their Wonderful Seven Weeks’ Work in a City Full of Sinners.” This was all fine, until we discovered from the last subtitle “A Bowling Green Preacher’s Welcome” that the “city full of sinners” was Bowling Green, Kentucky.
The lengthy article is almost exclusively biographical and a large portion of it is missing. Fortunately Library Special Collections owns Barnes’ massive published journal titled Without Scrip or Purse, or The Mountain Evangelist, George O. Barnes: This History of a Consecrated Life, the Record of Its Silent Thoughts, and a Book of Its Public Utterances. In it we learn about the protracted meeting Barnes held in our fair city. The Bowling Green entries begin with the overall numbers from the meetings: “771 for the soul and 421 for the body”—referring to 771 “saved” souls during the meeting and 421 healed bodies. The report notes that the downtown Methodist Church hosted the first service on 21 February with about 150 present. The size of the crowd warranted moving it to the larger Baptist Church the following day. Six local ministers attended and endorsed the meetings. The following day while taking a hike to the boat landing, Barnes noted regrettably that the city had “twenty-five licensed saloons…a fearful array against our Lord.”
By the weekend, numbers swelled and organizers moved the meetings to Odeon Hall (the Opera House). On one day alone, February 26, 115 people were “saved.” Despite the soul and body cures, Barnes tried to remain humble. “I want my faith,” he opined, “to rest on the Word of the Lord, and not on success. That only a cup of refreshment.” Throughout the period Barnes worked in town, he took prolonged walks visiting the sick of soul and body. He often frequented the homes of African Americans. It was clear that his meetings were ecumenical and that he did not tolerate racial prejudice.
As he left Bowling Green on March 8, Barnes noted in his
journal: “Left Bowling Green…rain
pouring and almost a hurricane raging.
Satan seemed, in spite, to be blowing us out of his stronghold, where in
seventeen short days our Jesus had struck him so many deadly blows.”
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The dilapidated Nurses Home at Central State Hospital, Lakeland, Kentucky (left) was replaced by a new building (right) in the 1940s (Beulah Smith Collection)
It’s National Nurses Week! Here’s a blog highlighting one of our most recent acquisitions documenting the making of a Kentucky nurse. And below are a few more glimpses into our collections that tell of the trials and tribulations of these essential health care professionals.
On her inaugural shift as a nursing student in 1913, Elizabeth (Cherry) McCallum recalled that “I entered, my first day, in pink probationer’s uniform on an empty 25-bed ward which had just been fumigated after an outbreak of diptheria.” She was shown how to make the beds and scrub all the white iron frames with Bon Ami. When she was done, her instructor returned “and without saying a word to me, she tore apart all 25 beds I had made. She showed me again, and this time the lesson sunk in.”
For $5.00 per month plus room, board, laundry and instruction, Elizabeth endured a gruelling and highly unspecialized routine. On any given day, she might leave her morning classes to prepare trays in the kitchen, feed a premature infant with a medicine dropper and warm her with a hot-water bottle, or delouse the head of a Kentucky mountain child brought in for treatment of a hernia, cleft palate, or intestinal parasites. Over her long career, however, which included service in France as a Red Cross nurse during World War I, Elizabeth saw many changes, not only in the quality of medical care but in the enhanced collegiality between doctors and nurses—“how much more skillfully they perform their tasks together.”
Some 20 years after Elizabeth, Eleanor Bowles of Lucas, Kentucky and her friend Mollye were trying to decide what to do with their lives after graduating from high school. Both eyed nursing as a career. “About the occupation, I’ve been looking around. I think the City Hospital at Louisville offers the best opportunities of any,” wrote Mollye. She reported the entry requirements to her friend. Prospective nursing students had to be 18-35 (preferably on the low end of that scale), in the top third of their high school class, and never married—not even widows or divorcees were eligible. The successful applicant received “uniforms, books and cape,” as well as room and board in a building connected to the hospital by a tunnel. And one more thing, advised Mollye: “I forgot to tell you that you have to have your tonsils removed.” So if they could each scrape together the entrance fee of $50 plus another $30 for tonsillectomies, she calculated, they could be on their way. “I’ll be waiting for you,” she told Eleanor “so don’t you go & back out.”
Eleanor didn’t heed the warning, but she didn’t exactly back out. Instead, she got her R.N. at Mt. Sinai Hospital School of Nursing in Baltimore. (We don’t know if her tonsils made it through or not).
A descendant’s recent donation to WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections of the letters and papers of the Weirs, a prominent 19th-century Muhlenberg County, Kentucky family, has provided rich insights into the Civil War history of that county (here and here, for example). Another wonderful item in this collection is the journal of patriarch James Weir (1777-1845), who emigrated to Muhlenberg County from South Carolina. En route in 1798, Weir sojourned in Knoxville, Tennessee and taught school for several months.
Shortly after posting our collection finding aid on TopSCHOLAR, we received an inquiry about the Weir journal from Knoxville librarian Steve Cotham. He had seen excerpts in typescript, but was interested in the original because it was long thought to contain “the first reference to African American banjo music” in that part of Tennessee. Indeed, James Weir’s journal has been cited several times as the source for this interesting tidbit of musical history.
Having only recently processed the collection, however, we knew something was amiss. Arriving in Knoxville on County Court day, the pious Weir had written that he found a rollicking town, “Confus[e]d with a promiscuous throng of every denomination some Talked some sung but mostly all did profainly sware – I stood ag[h]ast,” he declared, “my soul shrunk back to hear the horrid oaths and dreadful Indignities offered to the supream Governer of the universe.” Weir was further mortified to witness “dancing singing & playing of Cards,” and on a Sunday, no less.
It’s a vivid portrait of a frontier community, but nowhere in Weir’s description is there a reference to either African Americans or banjos. So how did this source become part of the body of scholarship on African American banjo music?
Here’s what probably happened:
In 1913, Greenville, Kentucky’s Otto Rothert gained access to the journal when he wrote about the Weir family in his book A History of Muhlenberg County. He quoted accurately from its pages, with only minor edits for spelling and punctuation. But then along came Robert M. Coates with his 1930 book The Outlaw Years: The History of the Land Pirates of the Natchez Trace. Writing of the notorious Harpe brothers and their criminal exploits in Knoxville, Coates used James Weir as a source for his portrait of the city. In what looked deceptively like a paraphrase of a passage from the journal, Coates declared that Weir saw “men jostling, singing, swearing; women yelling from the doorways; half-naked n—–s playing on their ‘banjies’ while the crowd whooped and danced around them.” Mixing quotation and invention, Coates continued: “The town was confused with a promiscuous throng of every denomination”—blanket-clad Indians, leather-shirted woodsmen, gamblers, hard-eyed and vigilant — “My soul shrank back.”
This embellished version of Weir’s journal, including the sudden appearance of “banjies,” took on a life of its own. The reference was picked up in 1939 by the Federal Writers’ Project in Tennessee: A Guide to the State (where the racial epithet was changed to “Negroes”). It appeared again in Cecelia Conway’s African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia (1995) and in George R. Gibson’s 2001 article “Gourd Banjos: From Africa to the Appalachians.” With the original Weir journal in private hands until only recently, it was perhaps impossible for scholars to locate and check the original; in any event, the colorful prose of Coates, who spent most of his career as a novelist and art critic, must have been too good to overlook. The story of the banjies-that-never-were is a lesson for all historical researchers: whenever possible, go straight to the source. And with James Weir’s journal in our collection, now they can.
Lines from James Weir’s Journal – alas, no “banjies”
Click here for a finding aid to the Weir Family Collection. For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.
The only sounds: pages turning softly. This is the quietness of bottomland where you can hear only the young corn growing, where a little breeze stirs the blades and then breathes in again.
I mark my place. I listen like a farmer in the rows.
“A House of Readers” from The Mountains Have Come Closer (1980)
Raised on a 70-acre farm in Buncombe County, North Carolina, Jim Wayne Miller was no stranger to the secrets of the Appalachian foothills. Miller’s poetry, inspired by the works of writers such as Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, Donald Davidson, Randall Stewart, and Emil Lerperger, ultimately reflects his intimate connection to the cultural landscape of the South.
In the spring of 1982, WKU folk studies student Mary Kate Brennan interviewed Miller about “what he considers to be the central theme of his poetry, the development of his poetic art…the death of Appalachian culture, and the urgent need for the people of Appalachia to regain, or retain, pride in their cultural heritage.” Brennan’s interview, less than an hour long, is ambitious in its scope and grapples with the complex intersections between folklore, identity, language, art, and politics. In this interview, Miller also reveals his inspiration for the creation of three recurring figures throughout his poetry—the Brier, the Intellectual, and the Redneck—and how each character represents various aspects of the southern experience. In doing so, Miller addresses his turn towards “culturally aware” poetry, when he suggests that
people [in the Appalachian region] have been badgered into feeling that their society and their traditional life was in many ways inadequate, and oftentimes they’ve been only too glad to abandon traditional ways of life because they’ve been shamed out of them in various ways. But there’s a wonderful steadiness and independent mindedness that’s reasserting itself in the region.
At the time of Brennan’s
interview, Miller had already been working as a full time faculty member in the
Department of Modern Languages and Intercultural
Studies at WKU for more than a decade, and his reputation as a
distinguished professor and poet earned him several notable awards. His
collaborative partnerships with the Poet in the Schools Program in Virginia,
Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky, and Appalachian Studies programs in
universities across the central Appalachian region served as a testament to his
commitment both to public folklore endeavors and engagement within the academy.
Photograph of Jim Wayne Miller courtesy of poet’s personal website
Up
until his death in 1996, Miller continued to write and publish collections of
poetry, along with novels, essays, anthologies, and articles in which an
undercurrent of folklore flowed freely. Speaking to the necessity of creative
vernacular expression, Miller tells Brennan that “folklore is always such an
integral part of peoples’ lives. You don’t go and find people sitting on the
porch breaking beans and spouting one piece of proverbial wisdom after another!
It’s all mixed up in life.”
Collections of Jim Wayne Miller’s poetry are available in the Helm-Cravens library stacks and in the non-circulating Special Collections stacks located in the Kentucky Building.
For more information on Jim Wayne Miller, the Appalachian region, poetry, and folklore, visit TopSCHOLAR or browse through KenCat, a searchable database featuring manuscripts, photographs, and other non-book objects housed in the Department of Library Special Collections!
Post written by WKU Folk Studies graduate
student Delainey Bowers
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Dr. Walker Rutledge, WKU Professor of English, annually brings his English 300 class to the Kentucky Building for an introduction to manuscript collections held by Library Special Collections. Afterwards, the students select a collection to read and then write a summary related to it. The following is Cameron Fontes’ paper. He chose to write about the Mansard Hotel register from the collection (SC 1236). To see the finding aid for this collection click here.
Bowling Green’s Mansard Hotel. This postcard is from the Kentucky Library Research Collection, Library Special Collections, WKU.
Unlike the many impersonal, chain-owned hotels of today, the Mansard Hotel in Bowling Green, KY, encapsulated all the best parts of its community. It was a locally-owned, well-kept institution where local leaders and travelers alike commingled amidst luxurious, yet affordable, furnishings and convenient eateries. When guests arrived at The Mansard, either for just a meal or for an overnight stay, they recorded the details of their visit on the tall, lined pages of the hotel register in grand, gorgeous script. Although it is now yellowed and musty with age, he Mansard Hotel register kept from 16 August 1907 to 7 October 1907, provides an intimate and detailed portrait of the bustling environment of a small-town hotel in the first decade of the twentieth century.
The Mansard Hotel ledger (SC 1236), Manuscripts, Library Special Collections, WKU.
Located behind what was then the local opera house, the Mansard stood near the corner of Main and Center Streets in downtown Bowling Green. At check-in, one of the register columns guests were required to fill out if they were staying overnight was the “Room” column, in which they were to write their room number as well as the number of pieces of luggage they brought with them. Although the number of pieces each guest brought with them is nothing especially noteworthy, one interesting observation that can be made upon reading the record of each guest’s luggage is that for the most part, guests only used trunks rather than suitcases, which are probably the most common type of luggage in use today. On 7 September 1907, a guest who signed as “E. Jenkins” from Buffalo, New York, brought with them one trunk and stayed in room seven.
Buffalo was only one of a plethora of places from which guests at the Mansard traveled. Each guest wrote their place of origin in the register column marked “Residence,” their responses ranging from various towns within Kentucky, such as Golden Pond and Louisville, to St. Louis, Missouri, Evansville, Indiana, and many cities besides. If a guest were visiting simply to take in a meal at the hotel restaurant, they wrote “City” to indicate that they were a resident of Bowling Green. One especially fascinating entry in this column on 24 September 1907, is that of Ed H. Foster, who signed that he was from “Coffeetown,” a small town in Pennsylvania located, funnily enough, about five miles from the town of Hershey.
It is evident which guests in the register were only visiting for a meal by whether or not they write a room number in the “Room” column next to their response in the “Time” column. Obviously, if there was a room number in this column, that was the room in which the guest who signed on that line stayed. If there was no room number, however, one has only to look at the guest’s response in the “Time” column to see for which meal they made a trip to the Mansard. Each guest signed either a “B,” “D,” “S,” or “R”. Most likely, the first three letters indicated the meal at which each guest dined or the closest meal to which each guest checked in for their stay, “B” being for “Breakfast,” “D” for “Dinner,” and “S” for “Supper.” “R” would likely have stood for “Resident,” seeing as how the demographic of permanent residents of hotels was much more common in 1907 than today.
One very famous Bowling Green resident who visited the Mansard for breakfast om 2 September 1907, was none other than Henry Hardin Cherry. Western Kentucky University’s first president, Cherry signed his name in big, beautiful cursive along with the name of his beloved hometown, making sure to proudly write out “Bowling Green, KY,” instead of simply “City,” as so many others had done. That he would have been well-respected and well-known at the time is likely. Having just become the president of what was then “Western Kentucky State Normal School” the year before, he would have already been considered a bastion of higher education in the community.
Other notable guests at the Mansard during this time included C.W. McElroy, a state representative for Bowling Green, on 21 August 1907, for supper, along with a couple of other individuals with prominent Bowling Green names including R.B. Potter from Woodburn, Kentucky, on 9 September 1907, and N.J.M McCormick from Indianapolis, Indiana, on 10 September 1907, who may have both been in town visiting family.
Sadly, the Mansard Hotel burned down on 5 July 1969. To stay in a hotel as charming as the Mansard may seem impossible today, but by perusing its old register one can start to gain a sense of its local charm and grandeur. cked
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“Do they miss me at home?” asked student Sarah Boyd
Students,
Exams and end-of-year assignments looming? Roommates getting on your nerves? Out of money?
Ready for a change of scenery?
Then pity Sarah Boyd, attending boarding school in
Flemingsburg, Kentucky. For Sarah, it
was a matter of hanging on until the Christmas holiday, when she could escape
home to Bath County. Without telephones,
Facebook, FaceTime and all the modern tools we have to bridge distance, Sarah
was at her wit’s end, despite receiving some unusual care packages from
home. Here are some excerpts from her
letters to her mother in the fall of 1865:
I am very mutch heart (hurt) to think that no one at home cares any thing about me I am hear and can not hear from home I (have) writen t(w)o leters this is thre(e) and have received no answer.
The first thing in the
morning I have my bible class next my arithmetic and then recess and then Ph(y)siology and (w)riting then we have noon and then the first thing is Gramer (grammar) and then . . . science and then young ladies
reader.
I am not dissatisfied with Mr. Turner (the schoolmaster) for him and Mrs. Turner is as good to me as they can be but there is some hateful girls at this Boardinghouse.
Mary Bats and Em Franklin quarled at me they are the hateful girls . . . (Em) has been trying to run over me ever since I have been here and I have took as much of her as I am a going to . . . Ma I wish you would make me some bit(t)ers and send me. (G)et me some whisky and put some sasparela (sarsaparilla) in it. . . . Mrs. Turner is very kind to me but we do not have very good victiles (victuals).
Dear Ma I received
your leter and was glad to hear from you . . . I am so glad you sent me that
whisky for I kneed it.
I wish you would send
me some money as I kneed some very bad to get stamps and I want to have my photographs
taken to bring home . . . Ma that whisky has done me a great deal of good and
there is not any of the girls knows I have it.
Ma I want you to have something good to eat
for me . . . I am growing impatient about going home.
Poor Sarah. We can
only hope that this lonesome and stressed 13-year-old (that’s right, 13) found her way back to the bosom of
her family.
As we know, there’s a lot more to the pardon process than simple justice. We’ve previously blogged about two Civil War-era pardon requests from Bowling Green and Burkesville, but here’s another 19th-century Kentucky pardon story, plus a new detail about its history found in a letter in WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.
Born in Vermont in 1817, Delia Ann Webster moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 1843 to establish a school for young women. Educated herself in the abolitionist atmosphere of Oberlin College, she become a thorn in the side of local slaveholders, who rightly suspected her of participation in the Underground Railroad. Arrested after helping a family of African Americans escape to freedom in Ohio, Webster was tried and convicted of the crime of assisting fugitive slaves. In December, 1844 she received a two-year prison sentence, the first woman to receive such punishment.
Nevertheless, the trial jury petitioned Governor William
Owsley to pardon Webster because of her sex.
At first, Webster would not accept clemency and demanded a new
trial. By the time she warmed to a
pardon, public opinion had turned against her and she was carted off to prison
in January, 1845.
But on February 24, Webster was suddenly released, the beneficiary
of a “Free and Full” pardon. During the
negotiations, which had continued after she entered prison, one of the stipulations
was that Webster leave Kentucky forever.
But in her later account of her ordeal, she attributed her release to
little more than “a friendly feeling” on the part of Governor Owsley and insisted
that she had refused to accept the condition of permanent exile from the state.
“I could not think of pledging myself never to return,” she wrote.
Or could she? In the papers
of Governor Owsley’s grandson Robert Rodes, a Bowling Green, Kentucky lawyer
and state legislator, we find a handful of his correspondence. Included is a letter dated February 19, 1845,
five days before Webster’s release from prison.
Engrossed with the colorized countenance of Henry Clay, it reads:
Gov. of the State of Ky. His Excellency William Owsley
I am sorry if I gave
you an impression that I was not exceedingly anxious for a pardon. It is entirely erroneous. And if you will send me a Pardon or Respite,
I will pledge you my word to leave your State never to return.
Delia A. Webster
In any event, Webster did not honor her pledge. After a few years at home in Vermont, she bought a farm in Trimble County, Kentucky and resumed her activities with the Underground Railroad until driven off by angry locals.
There’s way more to the story of Delia Webster—for example, the scandalous letters sent to her by the lovesick warden of the prison where she had resided in her own private cottage. “They are quite amorous,” wrote Robert Rodes to his wife after they were published in the newspaper. “You must criticise them and give me some strictures in my communications to my love.” But Delia Webster’s contrite letter to Governor Owsley, part of the Rodes Collection in WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections, shows that there may be more to her notorious pardon than previously understood.
Shaker Eldress Nancy Moore’s letter to her brother is written in a clean, cursive hand.
Sarah Moore, Scottsville, Kentucky, recently donated a
letter written by Nancy Elam Moore, a distant relative and a leader at the
Shaker village at South Union, Kentucky.
A photocopy of the letter has been housed in the Manuscripts unit of
Library Special Collections for many years.
The letter, written to Nancy’s brother James Moore on 4th
August 1837, discusses her father Jesse’s estate, particularly a piece of
property located in Warren County, Ohio, the site of Union Village, another
Shaker community. She advised her
brother to proceed with caution and to not do anything until he had “fully
investigated the case.” Seems that a
John Wallace, signing himself as the Power of Attorney for Jesse W. Moore, had
sold a 112-acre farm belonging to Moore to a Mr. John St. John for $440. This was undisputed. However, no documentation existed proving
that that said John Wallace had been empowered as Moore’s agent. Nancy advises her brother to go to Russellville,
where he could “examine our Father’s will.
It might shed some light on the subject.” James’ will is indeed recorded in Logan
County, and it gives 5/8ths of the estate to the Shaker community at
South Union (Will Book A, p. 588-589). Although
the letter’s subject matter is only tangentially related to the Shakers, it
does provide insight into communications maintained between Shaker members and
their families “in the world.”
The photocopy, which was retained, has an added note from
Harold Moore dated 28 November 1983 in which he explains how he received the
copy while attending the funeral of William Simpson Moore. Seems Harold shared Jesse’s will and other
biographical information with William’s oldest son, William Benjamin Moore, at
the funeral. At that time, William
provided Harold with a copy of the 1837 letter to keep with his records. Harold’s note unscrambles the genealogy: “This ‘gem’ is a letter from Eldress Nancy
Moore of Shakertown fame to her brother, James, who was my paternal great
grandfather. Bennie’s [William Benjamin]
great grandfather and my grandfather were brothers.” Their father was the James
to whom this letter [was] written.”
Sarah Moore, the donor of the letter, was William Benjamin Moore’s
daughter, and she notes that he went by Benjamin or Ben and only family members
ever referred to him as “Bennie.”
Eldress Nancy Elam Moore was born on 1 September 1807 in Warren County, Kentucky, and was brought to the Shaker village at South Union in Logan County when she was four years old. She served in numerous ministerial roles, including being appointed as an assistant to Eldress Betsy Smith in 1849. She made several visits to colonies in Ohio, New York, and Massachusetts. Nancy was appointed an Eldress of the Church in 1864. Eldress Nancy died at South Union on 5 December 1889. One of the treasures of the Manuscripts unit of Library Special Collections is Moore’s journal which describes life in the South Union Shaker village during the Civil War, 1861-1863. It outlines visits and exploitation suffered by the Shaker community from both Confederate and Union forces. (MSS 405)
Blue oval box personalized with Nancy Moore’s name. Courtesy of Kentucky Museum, WKU.
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