Category Archives: Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Browning Club, 1989

“All weather and winds are alike / Skies may be smiling or frowning / Earth’s a forgotten dream to one / Who opens a volume of Browning.”  These lines by Bowling Green author Eliza Calvert Hall reflected the joy with which Americans in the late nineteenth century embraced the poetry of Robert Browning.  Beginning in the 1880s, Browning Clubs sprang up across the country, providing women in particular with the opportunity for intellectual and cultural stimulation as well as fellowship.

Bowling Green’s Browning Club was founded in 1895.  Although its main purpose was to read and study the poet’s work, discussions soon extended to history, politics and music as well as authors and literature in general.  A year’s worth of club programs usually explored different aspects of a general topic: for example, Thomas Hardy (1928-29), the seventeenth century (1933-34), Russia (1937-38), Latin America (1940-41), and Shakespeare (1950-51).

The Browning Club has recently donated a collection of its club materials to WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Included are minute books, membership information, clippings, photos, and program lists.  Most of the material dates from 1950-1997, but the programs date as early as 1913.

These materials expand the Kentucky Library & Museum’s collections documenting the history of many local men’s and women’s clubs, including the XV Club, Twentieth Century Club, Ladies’ Literary Club, Current Events Club, Mothers Club, Fortnightly Club, Warren County Garden Club, and others.  For further information, e-mail mssfa@wku.edu.

Scraps to Quilts exhibit, 1986

In 1986, students in WKU’s Folk Studies program created “Scraps to Quilts: Derby Fabrics, Women’s Quilts, and Family Stories,” an exhibit of local quilts that had been made using fabric scraps from the Union Underwear Company’s “Derby” plant in Bowling Green.  The students began by inviting owners to bring in quilts to be photographed and have their histories documented.  The Kentucky Museum then displayed a selection of the quilts from April to October 1986.

Although the physical exhibit is long gone, the information collected by the students, including photo proof sheets and negatives, quilt data sheets, audiotaped interviews, exhibit labels and associated research, remains available in WKU’s Folklife Archives.  A finding aid for the “Scraps to Quilts” exhibit materials can be downloaded here.

Fred & Florence Clysdale, with a friend at left, 1951

In 1960, the executive director of the Louisville Area Council of Churches, N. Burnett Magruder (1914-2005), created a stir when he accused Protestant clergy of succumbing to the “Marxist virus” and acknowledged his membership in the John Birch Society.  In the decade leading up to this declaration, as he worked to stem the tide of liberalism in the Council, Magruder had two other principal objectives: completing his doctorate at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and promoting the work of his equally conservative, Canadian-born wife, Edith Clysdale Magruder.  A collection of correspondence now available at WKU’s Special Collections Library casts light on the work and family lives of this ambitious couple.

Edith Magruder was a graduate of Yale and Columbia and the author of several books including A Historical Study of the Educational Agencies of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1845-1945.  During much of the period covered by this collection, she stayed at her parents’ cottage in Grand Bend, Ontario, working to establish a reputation in the field of Christian-based psychotherapy and counselling and, with the help of her husband in Louisville, trying to gain a foothold for her ideas in the United States.  Adopting the professional name of “Judith Brigham,” she also hosted radio broadcasts in Ontario and later on station WAKY in Louisville.

As the collection shows, Edith’s parents, Fred and Florence Clysdale, wrote faithfully to their rather doctrinaire and iconoclastic daughter.  Their letters provide a portrait of a small-town Ontario clergyman and his wife adjusting to the challenges of semi-retirement including a change of residence, the care of an aging relative, and the purchase of their first television set.

A finding aid for the Magruder-Clysdale Collection can be downloaded here.

Gilbert Marshall Mulligan’s Civil War correspondence

The Johns and Moore families of Trigg County and the Mulligan and Brown families of Allen County, Kentucky have left a historical record of more than 400 letters that is now available to researchers at WKU’s Special Collections Library.  The families were linked by Gilbert Marshall Mulligan (1821-1877), an attorney who practiced in Allen and Warren Counties.  In 1848, Mulligan married Mary Winston Johns and had three daughters; after his wife’s early death, Mulligan married Lucy Tate in 1857.  One of Mulligan’s daughters, also named Lucy, married attorney Eugene Scott Brown in 1872.

The correspondence of both Mulligan and his son-in-law, Eugene Scott Brown, is well represented in the collection.  In particular, Mulligan’s letters cast light on his law practice and his service as a captain in the Union Army during the Civil War.  But the women of the family are also present: Mulligan’s first wife, Mary, and her sister Julia (Johns) Moore; his daughters Mary Frances Mulligan and Lucy Mulligan Brown; and his granddaughters Winston (Winnie) and Fannie Brown.  Everyone shared news of health, finances, births and deaths, but as two young women entering adulthood at the turn of the twentieth century, Winnie and Fannie also pondered the mysteries of courtship.  Years earlier, in correspondence with schoolmates at various educational institutions in Kentucky, their grandmother Mary Johns did the same.

A finding aid for the Moore-Mulligan-Brown Collection can be downloaded here.

Lena Grey Annis, 1897-1996

Born in 1897 at Borah’s Ferry in Butler County, Lena Grey Annis taught school for 44 years in Kentucky, West Virginia and Arizona.  After her death in 1996, two of her nieces found a treasure trove of family history among her personal belongings.  Included were some 800 letters, written mostly to Annis by family members.  Although the bulk of the letters dated from 1945 to 1973, the complete collection covered 70 years.

After carefully sorting and reading the letters and compiling a family tree to show the relationships of the writers, Annis’s niece, Doris Annis Tichenor, recently donated the collection to WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Tichenor herself best explains the significance of the letters.  They represent, she wrote, “a remarkable contemporary record” of change in a Kentucky farming family–from the advent of electricity and the first tractors and pickup trucks to the shift from animal feed crops to cash crops, the passing of home poultry flocks, the struggle to control flooding, and the closing of Borah’s Ferry, a fixture in Butler County for 150 years.  Annis spent 20 years of her teaching career in Arizona but returned to Kentucky almost every summer, where she retained a share in the family farm.  The letters also document, in Tichenor’s words, the “difficult and tedious work” of “five fractious siblings and their descendants” to hold the farming enterprise together.

A finding aid for the Lena Grey Annis Collection can be downloaded here.

Alice Hegan Rice

WKU’s Special Collections Library has contributed a photo of author Alice Hegan Rice to an upcoming exhibit at Louisville’s Speed Museum relating to its founder, Hattie Bishop Speed.

A lifelong resident of Louisville, Alice Hegan Rice (1870-1942) published many popular novels and stories, but it was Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1901), inspired by her experiences working with the city’s underprivileged, that made her famous.  Selling 650,000 copies in its first two years, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch generated numerous stage, screen and radio adaptations and brought notoriety to Louisville’s Cabbage Patch district and to Mary Bass, a resident of the area who was the model for “Mrs. Wiggs.”

Rice and her husband Cale Young Rice (1872-1943), himself an author, dramatist and poet, enjoyed a personal and professional partnership that lasted more than 40 years and brought them into contact with such early 20th-century notables as Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Ida Tarbell, Henry Watterson and Theodore Roosevelt.

We hold a large collection of correspondence, manuscripts, clippings and scrapbooks relating to the life and career of both Alice Hegan Rice and Cale Young Rice.  A finding aid can be downloaded here.

Dr. Joe Sarnowski’s new book

Dr. Joe E. Sarnowski, Chair of the Department of English at San Diego Christian College in El Cajon, California, has just published his book, The Literary Achievement of the American Poet Robert Penn Warren: His Life-Long Struggles with Morality, Myth, and Modernity (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009). 

In the book, Dr. Sarnowski examines how Warren’s poetry addresses the myths residing in five American cultural discourses: racism, war, romantic love, nature, and death.

For the cover of the book, Dr. Sarnowski chose an image of Warren from the collections of WKU’s Special Collections Library.

Click here for information about the Robert Penn Warren Library at WKU’s Special Collections Library.