Category Archives: Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

by | May 12, 2016 · 2:47 pm

Vertrees Diary Featured in National Publication

Photo of Vertrees

Peter Vertrees (1840-1926)

Quotes from Peter Vertrees’ typescripted autobiography, housed in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives unit of Library Special Collections, were recently included in an article titled ‘”I Stayed at My Post Until the End’:  Peter Vertrees:  Black Confederate and Celebrated Church and Community Leader,” in the UDC Magazine.  Published by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the magazine is distributed to the organization’s 18,000+ members.  The article by Elaine Clonts Russell relies heavily on the autobiography, but is supplemented by other research.  During the Civil War Vertrees served as a cook in the 6th Kentucky Regiment.  “I never was a soldier on the firing line,” said Vertrees, “but these scenes brought the real activities of war to my view and made me realize what the real combat was.  I suffered the same deprivations of warfare that the soldiers felt.  Sometimes I was hungry, sometimes cold, sometimes drenched with rain, sometimes tired and footsore from walking, but I stayed at my post until the end.”

After the war Vertrees became a minister and was involved in civic affairs.  A Tennessee state historical marker recognizes his contributions and can be found on South Water Street (Highway 109) in Gallatin, Tennessee.  The finding aid to the Vertrees Collection can be found by clicking here.  To search for other collections about the Civil War or African Americans see TopSCHOLAR.

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by | May 11, 2016 · 12:18 pm

Elaine “Penny” Harrison

Elaine "Penny" Harrison, 1924-2016

Elaine “Penny” Harrison, 1924-2016

WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections lost a valued former colleague with the May 6, 2016 death of Elaine “Penny” Harrison.

According to her family, it was while watching a movie that the young Elaine Maher and two childhood friends decided to assume the names of the film’s three heroines.  Thus was born Elaine’s lifelong nickname, “Penny.”

A Connecticut native, Penny met WKU alumnus Lowell H. Harrison while working at New York University.  After they married in 1948, she followed him to London on his Fulbright Scholarship, then to Texas, where Dr. Harrison taught at West Texas State University and Penny earned a master’s degree in history.  In 1967, Dr. Harrison returned to Bowling Green to teach at his alma mater and Penny joined the Kentucky Library (now part of the Department of Library Special Collections), where she served as manuscripts librarian until her retirement in 1986.

While at WKU, Penny earned a master’s degree in library science, completed special studies in archives at the University of Wisconsin, and developed a manual for processing manuscript collections at the Kentucky Library.  The first treasurer and archivist for the Kentucky Council on Archives, she was honored with a KCA fellowship in 1987 to recognize her outstanding contributions to the profession.  Special Collections Librarian Sue Lynn McDaniel says that Penny also enjoyed mentoring students in her field.  In fact, McDaniel recalls, “she gave me the career/education advice that allowed me to become her successor as Manuscripts Librarian at WKU.”

Penny and Lowell Harrison (who died in 2011) also gave generously to WKU and the Kentucky Library.  Acknowledging their financial support for collection development, then-Special Collections Department Head Riley Handy told them simply: “We have no better friends than you.”

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by | May 5, 2016 · 8:12 am

General Pershing’s Teeth

After graduation from the Louisville College of Dentistry, Edward Wallace Barr (1887-1962) joined his father’s practice in his home town of Bowling Green, Kentucky.  When the U.S. entered World War I, however, Barr was commissioned a lieutenant in the Army Dental Corps and sent to France.  As a member of the Sixth Heavy Artillery, he was considered the first dentist to “go into the trenches,” but in November 1917 was put in charge of the dental offices at the general headquarters of the American Expeditionary Forces in Chaumont, France.  There, his patients included Commanding General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing.

E. Wallace Barr's Army ID

E. Wallace Barr’s Army ID

As his appointment book showed, Dr. Barr treated many servicemen until his discharge early in 1919, but perhaps it was only General Pershing who merited a discussion between Barr and Pershing’s former dentist, Colonel Ross T. Oliver of the Chief Surgeon’s Office.  “I am glad you found that upper bridge in good condition,” he wrote Barr.  As to the gum disease affecting the General’s lower molars, “that condition has existed for a number of years.”  His recall of one particularly troublesome tooth that had “such a loss of substance that we could easily run an instrument through the bifurcation” suggested, nevertheless, that Pershing could look forward to many more happy hours in the dentist’s chair.

Records and correspondence relating to E. Wallace Barr’s service in the U.S. Army Dental Corps are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more collections about medical professionals, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | April 29, 2016 · 8:31 am

“A great deal to answer for”

Letter to Hitler from Fort Knox, Kentucky

Letter to Hitler from Fort Knox, Kentucky

Early in the morning of April 29, 1945, Adolf Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun.  The next day, with Soviet troops only blocks away from his bunker at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, he and his bride committed suicide.

Among the millions who received the news without a flicker of mourning was Martha (Woods) Potter.  The 76-year-old lifelong resident of Bowling Green had followed Hitler’s rise to power with outrage.  “Isn’t Hitler the last word in audacity or is it Mussolini?” she asked as early as March 1936.  “That pair could come over here and take America away from us if they took a notion.”  In September 1938, as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain negotiated with the Nazi leader over the fate of Czechoslovakia, she observed to her daughter that “Hitler will have a great deal to answer for if he lets the world go to war.”  After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, she understood the Fuhrer’s grip on his people, declaring “We all hate Hitler and blame him instead of the Germans.”  In June 1940, with France about to fall and England in the crosshairs, Martha was in favor of America sending the British “all the armaments they want,” and deplored Congressional reluctance to do so.  “They are all afraid of what Hitler will think,” she complained.  “Who cares what the Hun thinks?  He needs a rope around his neck and while they are tying they might get Mussolini’s neck caught in the same noose.”  At news of the Fuhrer’s ignominious death, Martha was triumphant.  “Now if we can give Hitler’s dead body a few kicks it will be to suit me,” she wrote her children.

Martha’s animosity was nothing, however, compared to that of an unknown soldier at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  In “A Letter to Hitler,” he laid out in explicit verse the indignities awaiting the dictator–specifically, the fate of certain of his body parts and the pristine splendor of his “palace”–once American GIs caught up with him.

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

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by | April 21, 2016 · 10:45 am

The power of a ‘trusty friend’

Part of John Denny's power of attorney

Part of John Denny’s power of attorney

When six of his slaves were spirited away from his Mercer County, Kentucky plantation in 1824, John Denny (1750-1834) gave his “trusty friend” John Guthrie power of attorney to track down, regain possession of the fugitives, and “dispose of them in whatever way he may think proper.”  This grant of agency is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.

According to the power of attorney, the slaves were stolen by James Hall Denny, John’s own 21-year-old son, and James’s brother-in-law Asher Labertew.  The younger Denny had become strongly opposed to slavery and, perhaps in defiance of his father, may have tried to escort the slaves to freedom in Indiana, where both he and Labertew settled soon after.

A testament to this family drama, the power of attorney was also evidence of the curious intimacy between slaveholders and the African Americans whose bodies they owned and controlled.  In order to assist and support Guthrie’s authority to repossess the runaway slaves, Denny shared his knowledge of their physical characteristics.  The group consisted of a woman, her children and grandchild.  There was Nelly, a “heavy woman” with “foreteeth somewhat [in] decay” and a forefinger broken and “lyed down in her hand she cannot straiten it out,” a daughter, a “bright mollato [mulatto] named Mariah” with “a little man child at her breast,” and another, Milly, who was “middling Chunky.”  Eliza was six or seven, and the youngest, three-year-old Mary, was “somewhat inclined to a yallow coulor.”

Whether John Guthrie recaptured the six is not known, but an ominous clue appears in the fact that the power of attorney was recorded in Mississippi ten months later.  Perhaps Guthrie found his quarry and, in accordance with the authority granted him, “disposed” of the family by selling them down the river.

Click here to access a finding aid for John Denny’s power of attorney.  For more of our collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | April 14, 2016 · 8:03 am

3,000 and Counting

Charles Nourse letter; SC list

Charles Nourse letter; SC list

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

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

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

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

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by | April 7, 2016 · 8:56 am

Mrs. Moore Goes to War

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

Mary Leiper Moore; publicity for WAC recruiting drive

Mary Leiper Moore; publicity for WAC recruiting drive

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

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

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

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

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by | March 24, 2016 · 8:21 am

The Apple and the Core

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by | March 17, 2016 · 8:38 am

Politics. . . As Usual

American Party of Kentucky documents

American Party of Kentucky documents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by | March 10, 2016 · 8:44 am

A Confederate Rail-Splitter

Alexander Morse's letter from Bowling Green

Alexander Morse’s letter from Bowling Green

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

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

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

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

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

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