Category Archives: Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

by | December 8, 2016 · 8:19 am

Pardon Me (Please!)

Josiah Pillsbury's respite

Josiah Pillsbury’s respite

On December 10, 1861, the Confederate States of America officially recognized a group of secessionists calling themselves the Provisional Confederate Government of Kentucky.  This “shadow” regime, however, never gained legitimacy in Frankfort; in fact, it chose Bowling Green, then under occupation by Confederate forces, as its capital.  (A historical marker commemorating the designation stands on WKU’s campus).

The first governor of Confederate Kentucky was Scott County lawyer George W. Johnson.  In need of someone to fill the position of Auditor, and because his first choice had declined, Johnson asked Josiah Pillsbury of Bowling Green to serve in a temporary capacity.

Pillsbury’s reward for doing this favor for his friend was to find himself, along with other officials of the Provisional Government, indicted for treason by a Warren County grand jury.  In “claiming to be auditor in said pretended government,” read the indictment, Pillsbury had acted “in usurpation of the regular legitimate and constitutional government of the state” and cooperated with an army in “open rebellion” in order to wage war on the good citizens of the county.

Horrified, Pillsbury wrote a “my bad” letter, now in the collections of the Kentucky Historical Society, to Governor Thomas E. Bramlette.  He had wanted no part of the Confederate government, he insisted, but accepted the Auditor’s position only to accommodate Johnson until a replacement could be found. Supporting Pillsbury’s request for clemency were prominent Bowling Green attorneys William V. Loving and Robert Rodes.

Governor Bramlette obliged, but the document filed with the Warren County court was not a full pardon.  The constitution, Kentucky’s Secretary of State warned Pillsbury, only gave the Governor power to issue a temporary “respite”; the document Bramlette signed was, in fact, an edited version of a form used to extend the time for criminals “sentenced to be hung.”

The indictment of Josiah Pillsbury (who was eventually pardoned by President Lincoln) and other members of the Provisional Confederate Government of Kentucky, along with Bramlette’s respite, are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For more Civil War collections, click here or search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | December 1, 2016 · 8:12 am

“If Cuba Belonged to Us”

As U.S.-Cuba relations enter a new era, collections in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections offer a look back at America’s fascination with the island in the days before Castro.

Writing to his parents in Kentucky in the mid-1850s, E. S. Baker told them of an offer he had received to supervise a sugar house in Cuba, where his prospective employer owned three farms.  Americans, in fact, owned one-quarter of Cuban farms, Baker had learned, but “the Catholic and Spanish control restricts them too much.”  Profits from cotton, corn and sugar would be fatter, he believed, “if Cuba belonged to us.”  At the time, private armies of Americans known as “filibusterers” were complicating U.S. territorial designs on the island; Baker had been told of men secretly organizing in Kentucky, Arkansas and Texas to go there and “disperse over the farms” in support of their countrymen.

Cuba travel brochure, 1950s

Cuba travel brochure, 1950s

Forty years later, in 1893, Grace Beecher Goodhue of Massachusetts visited Cuba.  As her ship arrived in Havana’s harbor at sunrise, she admired the “exquisitely delicate coloring of the plastered houses – Blue faded pink and the tiled roofs.”  While others went to bullfights and masked balls, Grace and her mother explored the pawn shops, but found little to buy as “the English have been here . . . and have carried everything off in the shape of silver.”   They managed to purchase some white linen for dresses, however, “much to the horror of the clerk who sold it to us” and who insisted that such cloth was for “nun’s dresses not for ladies.”

Another sixty years later, in 1952, journalist and Smiths Grove native Virginia Wood Davis made the excursion to Cuba by plane.  Reporting on her visit for the Kingsport (Tenn.) Times-News, she described the scenery, industry, street life, and even burial customs of Matanzas, the island’s third-largest city.  Fidel  Castro’s Cuban Revolution had yet to grasp power, but signs of strife were on the horizon:  in black paint on the sidewalk in front of a local college, Davis saw the words “Students:  Communism is not for you.  Do not listen to the Communists.”

Click on the links to access finding aids for these collections.  For other collections relating to Cuba, including the Spanish-American War, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Virginia Davis's luggage tag

Virginia Davis’s luggage tag

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by | November 21, 2016 · 8:01 am

Ghosts of Thanksgivings Past

napkin-mss-517a

Thanksgiving Dinner napkin (Catherine Simmons Anderson Collection)

As the yearly festival of over-indulgence in food approaches, here is evidence from some of the collections in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives holdings of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections that Thanksgiving is more about who’s around the table than what’s being served on it.

Overseas with the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, Mitchell Leichhardt of Bowling Green, Kentucky wrote his parents about his 1944 Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, cranberry jelly, dehydrated potatoes, peas, olives, finocchio (“Italian celery with a sassafras flavor”), coffee and ice cream.  “I hope it is the last one I’m away from home,” he told them.  “I thought of the big dinner you always have and wished that I could be there.”

Also during World War II, in 1943 Alma Sexton of Greenup County, Kentucky described the holiday just past to her soldier-husband.  “We didn’t have much for Thanksgiving,” she wrote of the family repast of chicken, “spud” and biscuits, but she was “wishing you was here so you could help us eat them.”

From West Point, Thomas Rawlings Woods wrote his mother after Thanksgiving in 1881.  “Thursday was a holiday.  We were released from quarters, and excused from recitations.”  The mess hall offered a “splendid dinner” but, he confessed, “I thought of our Thanksgiving turkey at home and would rather have slipped down and taken dinner with you than to have attended the grandest banquet in the land.”

A U.S. Army captain described President George W. Bush’s surprise Thanksgiving visit to the troops in Iraq in 2003: “We were seated in the chow hall, fully decorated for Thanksgiving when all kinds of secret service guys showed up.  That was my first clue,” he remembered.  “Then, from behind the camouflage netting, the President of the United States came around.  The mess hall actually erupted with hollering. . . . There was not a dry eye at my table.”  As Bush worked his way around the hall shaking hands, the captain hurried through the food line, “got dinner, then wolfed it down,” so he would be ready to meet the President when he arrived at his table.

And here’s an excerpt from a poem by William Shakespeare Hays (1837-1907), Louisville journalist and composer, called “Eli’s Thanksgiving” (excuse both the stereotypical dialect and attitude toward in-laws):

Eli had Thanksgiving dinner, / ‘Twas his day to treat, / Cooked an’ stuffed a big fat turkey / Fo’ de folks ter eat. / Comp’ny sot aroun’ de table, / One dar brought her jaw, / Dun de talkin’ for de party– / Eli’s mudder’n-law.

Click on the links to access finding aids for these collections.  For more on Thanksgiving and other holidays, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | November 11, 2016 · 8:28 am

It’s Over at Last

John Potter's Armistice ribbon

John Potter’s Armistice ribbon

The world was overjoyed when hostilities in the Great War, after inflicting some 37 million casualties, ceased with the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918.

Simpson County native James Lambert would later share his memories of the event.  “In the evening of that day, I was in London,” he recalled.  No vehicles could move, as “rejoicing men, women and children” crammed the downtown streets.  He marveled at the democratic nature of the celebration.  Men carried women on their shoulders, and girls kissed soldiers “right on the streets.  They were not women of questionable character either,” observed Lambert, “but some of the best and fairest ladies of the realm.”  Indeed, citizens of every age, class and occupation had turned out “with uplifted hands, with upturned faces, and with tears running down their cheeks, thanking Almighty God for peace.”

Serving aboard the troop ship USS Powhatan, Thomas O. Helm reported to his mother in Bowling Green that his ship had docked at Brest, and he “certainly did enjoy being in a French port when they signed the Armistice.”  Like Lambert, he remarked on the inclusive nature of the festivities.  The streets were full of parading citizens, singing and linking arms “regardless of whom they were.”  At night, “the harbor was beautiful,” wrote Helm.  “There were 25 transports and at least that many destroyers playing their search lights over the harbor. . . it was like riding down Broadway.”

Back in St. Charles, Missouri, Annie Raus described the local celebrations to the family of her cousin, Private Clem Phillips, then recovering in France from wounds.  “Everybody is so happy we were all so excited we didn’t know if we should laugh or cry.”  The noisy parades passing by had interrupted her washing day and made it impossible to “stay at the tub.”

And in Bowling Green, Martha Potter took out her scrapbook of son John’s overseas Army service and carefully added the red, white and blue ribbon he had worn on his coat the night the Armistice was signed.

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

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by | November 3, 2016 · 8:20 am

An Election Prediction

Henry Clay

Henry Clay

With its use of catchy slogans (“Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”), rallies, songs, banners and ribbons, the 1840 presidential contest between incumbent Martin Van Buren and the Whig Party’s William Henry Harrison marked the beginning of the modern era of campaigning.  Then as now, predictions about the outcome also enlivened the process.

That fall, Henry Clay sat down at his Lexington, Kentucky home, Ashland, to forecast the election results in response to a request from the Tippecanoe Club of Rushville, New York.  At the time, there was no single Election Day:  states voted for their presidential electors between October 30 and December 2, and the electors then met to vote for the next chief executive.  The Whigs had done well in most down-ballot races held in the preceding months, and Clay–who had lost the Whig nomination to Harrison, one of five tries he would make for the presidency–was in a good position to assess the race.

He got things nearly, but not exactly right.  Of the 26 states in the Union, Clay believed that Van Buren “would not obtain the votes of more than six.”  (He got seven).  Although down-ballot elections in Illinois had been disappointing for the Whigs, Clay was confident that “her vote will be cast in Nov. for W. H. Harrison” (He was mistaken).  He also conceded Maine to Van Buren (Harrison, in fact, won the state).  Otherwise, despite his lack of computer models and sophisticated polling, Clay would not have been embarrassed to compare his predictions with the actual result:  Van Buren’s 7 states brought 60 electoral votes, but Harrison’s 19 states and 234 electoral votes gave him the victory.

Clay nevertheless knew that voter turnout (or lack thereof) could make a fool out of any prognosticator.  “Cheering and bright as the prospects of success are,” he wrote, “it might be fatal to the salvation of the Constitution and the Country, to relax in honorable exertions. . . .  The Whig, therefore, who. . . neglects to perform his duty, is guilty of a double treachery–a treachery to his Country and a treachery to his Whig brethren in other parts of the Union, who are exerting all their energies to ensure success to our glorious Cause.”

Henry Clay’s letter to the Tippecanoe Club 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 Henry Clay and about other presidential elections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | October 27, 2016 · 8:26 am

Don’t Hate 1908

Chicago Cubs player, 1908The last year the Chicago Cubs won the World Series is a distant age for most, but for those browsing the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections, it’s a time easily recalled.  During that year, for example:

Architect Brinton B. Davis was overseeing completion of Bowling Green’s new City Hall at 10th and College Streets.  The cost:  a little over $25,000.

John Marion Robertson, manager of the Bowling Green Opera House, issued a complimentary ticket to Confederate veteran John W. Stark for a performance of “On Parole,” a play about the Civil War that included “scenes in which you,” he wrote Stark, “no doubt, took part.”

A friend wrote Hopkinsville’s Charles Hisgen about the state of the train station. “If we can get that railroad lot cleaned off . . . also coal yard & a new modern passenger depot, when a stranger arrives in Hopkinsville he will think the town amounts to something.”

Phineas Hampton “Hamp” Coombs (evidently not thinking about baseball at all) sent a Valentine by telegram to his wife Lattie.  “I send my love to you by wire,” he crooned.  “Sweetheart, for you my heart’s on fire.”

Butler County physician Dr. William Westerfield recorded in his diary that late October winds were aggravating “forest fires in Muhlenberg Co. causing considerable damage burning over corn fields, fencing etc.”

John Blakey Helm wrote his father from Princeton University about returning to Bowling Green at the school year’s end.  “I expect you had better send me about thirty dollars, which I think will bring me home.  I haven’t anything else here to pay for but have only a dollar and a half.”

And here’s an anecdote about President Lyndon B. Johnson (born in 1908) who, many agree, understood and wielded political power better than any modern chief executive.  At the conclusion of an event at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a military officer informed the President that “your helicopter is ready.”  LBJ, stone-faced, replied “Son, they’re all my helicopters.”

Click on the links to access finding aids for these collections harking back to 1908, and search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat for more.  Then sit back and wonder if the “last time the Cubs won” clock will be reset to 2016. . .

Hamp Coombs's 1908 telegram

Hamp Coombs’s 1908 telegram

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by | October 20, 2016 · 11:58 am

The “Comforts” of Home

Funerals home and away

Funerals home and away

October 31, 1934 marked the closing of the second and final season of Chicago’s A Century of Progress International Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair.  In Bowling Green, Kentucky, the Times-Journal newspaper had arranged three-day tours for local residents, with discounted railroad and hotel rates, admission tickets, and local sightseeing trips.  The total cost per person was a mere $18.45–about $350 today, but still a bargain.

The 38 million people who attended the Fair found a spectacular attraction, but when so much humanity converged on one place, there was bound to be a darker side–accidents, illnesses and even deaths.  Indeed, an outbreak of dysentery, traced to contaminated drinking water at a local hotel, sickened more than 1,700 and killed almost 100 tourists.

On Sheridan Road, however, the Coombs-McCready Funeral Home was alert to the possibility of an uptick in what was, after all, their business, and sought to assure funeral directors across the country of its willingness to act as liaison in the event that a member of their community did not survive the Fair.

“It is more comforting to a bereaved family to feel they are dealing direct with you, whom they know, and not with a stranger,” wrote the firm’s president to Bowling Green’s Gerard Funeral Home.  Accordingly, for $40, “we will represent you and adhere strictly to your instructions”–from intake to providing a casket (another $40) to transferring the remains to the train station for the journey home.  Gerard’s funeral director was invited to forward contact information to Chicago “which will simplify matters at the time we are called to serve you”–and allow those who had suffered loss to connect with home for the necessary rituals.

The Coombs-McCready Funeral Home letter is part of the Gerard Family Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For other collections of funeral home records and information about the Gerard family, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | October 13, 2016 · 8:25 am

“In Reply to Your Ad”

So many replies.....

So many replies…..

In the internet age, those looking for matrimony have many venues in which to market their charms, but at the turn of the 20th century, answering a personal ad in a newspaper or magazine was the principal way to cast a wide net into the sea of eligible bachelors and spinsters.

In January 1907, 21-year-old Lillie Rasdall of Bowling Green, Kentucky replied to 28-year-old Seldon Mantz’s ad for a suitable companion to share his home in Webster, Iowa.  Predictably, her letter touched on those traits that might interest her correspondent.  “I am very tall weight 125 have Blue eyes fair complexion and dark hair,” she wrote. She had moved from the country to Bowling Green three years previously, but hinted that city life had not spoiled her.  “I am a Kentucky girl can do [any] kind of house work.”

A few years later, 52-year-old “John” replied from his Missouri home to Lucy Boucher of Settle, Kentucky.  After reading her ad, he had concluded that “you are all I should be looking for.”  Like Lillie Rasdall, he inventoried the qualities he thought might interest his 50-something correspondent.  A five-foot-ten-inch widower with salt-and-pepper hair, no children, a moderate lover of tobacco but not of strong drink, he described his pleasant home, which needed only “a good loving wife” to complete it.  He did “not want a cent of the money my future wife shall have” but at the same time seemed interested in an honest accounting of what he would forgo: “I do not want one that will misrepresent anything.”

In each case, the letter-writers then broached the next step in the encounter: the exchange of photographs.  You go first, they both seemed to say, then I will send you mine.  Perhaps there was follow-up, but these exchanges did not succeed in lighting the flame of matrimony.  Lillie, sadly, died the following year, Seldon was still a bachelor at 61, and Lucy remained single all her life.

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

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by | October 6, 2016 · 9:53 am

Oil and Spirits

John G. Jackson

John G. Jackson

Similar to the practice of dowsing or water witching–the use of an implement such as an L-shaped rod or a Y-shaped tree branch to divine the location of underground water sources–is “doodlebugging,” which uses the same mysterious technology to locate petroleum or mineral deposits.  In September 1894, John G. Jackson, a New Jersey surveyor, railroad engineer, astronomer and former state senator, was confident that this supernatural aid would vindicate his as-yet unsuccessful search for oil in Kentucky.

Writing to a stockholder in his struggling company, Jackson reported that “various Psychic influences” had urged him not to give up.  Previous drilling efforts had come close, but fate had not been with him: “We have been told by mediums experienced in Petroleum oil matters,” he explained, “that we missed the location of the first well, through mischievous spirit influences, but a short distance.”  Now, however, “different mediums many miles asunder have united in pointing out the places wherein success will be certain.”  All that was needed was courage, perseverance–and yes, a new infusion of cash for the project.  “If the sanguine promises of the psychics prove genuine,” Jackson assured his correspondent, “that will yield very handsomely.”

John G. Jackson’s letter is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid. For other collections about petroleum exploration in Kentucky, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | September 22, 2016 · 8:24 am

Hispanic Heritage

La Chiquita, Frankfort KY

La Chiquita, Frankfort KY

For this National Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15 – Oct. 15), here are a few collections in the Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Created primarily by students, they use interviews, photos, audio and video to document the customs and folkways of Kentucky’s Hispanic communities.

A 2005 folklife project profiled a Hispanic restaurant and grocery store in Frankfort, Kentucky, called La Chiquita.  Both video and photos show a business alive with food, merchandise, music and unique decor.

In 2011, students in WKU’s Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology began an oral history and folklife survey of Allen County, Kentucky.  Their work included an interview with resident John Hernandez about growing up in the county, speaking “Spanglish,” Hispanic foodways, and traditional 15th birthday celebrations known as “Quinceaneras.”

John Hernandez

John Hernandez

At the 2004 Shelbyville, Kentucky Heritage Festival, folklorists captured audio and video of the community’s increasingly diverse population, including its lively Hispanic-Latino culture.

And in 2007, student Linda Perez researched ghost stories and beliefs of the Hispanic community.  Her informants, natives of Mexico and Guatemala, told her stories of the supernatural, including “La Llorona,” an eerily wailing, shape-shifting female spirit whose presence is often invoked to get a child to behave.  Perez’s own husband described a “real life” ghost encounter when, at 8 years old, he came too close to a spirit masquerading as his father in the family’s cornfield, and required a folk healing ritual to recover from the ghost’s attempt to steal his soul.

Click on the links to access finding aids for these collections.  For more studies of Kentucky folklife, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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