Category Archives: Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

by | November 18, 2019 · 9:51 am

Learning by Doing

My name is Hannah Hudson, and this fall, I have had the privilege of being the fourth Dr. Delroy and Patricia Hire intern in the Department of Library Special Collections. I am a sophomore at WKU, majoring in Cultural Anthropology and minoring in Folk Studies. I have always enjoyed learning about local history and the importance of rural communities in the development of the southeastern United States. When the head of my department mentioned this internship to me, I knew it would be the perfect opportunity to develop my professional skills. Throughout my time as an intern in Special Collections, I have worked on projects from Monroe County, Kentucky, Allen County, Kentucky and Macon County, Tennessee.

Kentucky Governor Louie B. Nunn presents the Commonwealth’s first personalized congressional license plate to Congressman Tim Lee Carter, March 1969.

One project I have worked on this semester involves sorting, scanning, and categorizing photographs from the Tim Lee Carter Collection. Dr. Tim Lee Carter was from Monroe County, Kentucky, and he served eight terms (1965-1981) as a U.S. Representative for Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District. Due to my interest in visual anthropology, it has been very interesting for me to see how Carter’s work as a public servant was documented through these photos. I also gained practical experience while working with this collection as I learned about the process of cataloging in Past Perfect, a widely-used collections archiving database. The work that I have done on this collection will aid in the curation of an exhibit celebrating Monroe County’s Bicentennial in 2020.

Another project I completed was transcribing the 1850 and 1860 slave censuses from Monroe County, Kentucky to make them accessible on TopScholar. This was a particularly significant project to me because I feel that a lot of valuable information is contained in these records. The slave census gives insight into the early history of Monroe County and the significance of enslaved people in its development. I learned a great deal from this project, and it sparked many questions that led me to look deeper into the county’s history. Not only do the records give information on slave owners, but they also give information on the age-sex distribution of slaves and the ways in which they were classified in that time period.

I also researched my hometown of Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee and wrote a historical overview that is available on TopScholar. Red Boiling Springs borders the Tennessee-Kentucky line and is known for the several types of mineral waters that flow throughout the city. The medicinal properties of the springs once attracted visitors from all over the country and created a booming resort industry in the small town. I am passionate about preserving the history of Red Boiling Springs, and I have done independent research on it for over a year now. I am grateful that I had the opportunity and support from Library Special Collections to publish information on this small but significant community.

Dr. Delroy Hire, WKU Alumni from Pensacola, FL, visiting with Hannah Hudson, 2019 Hire Intern.

Throughout my time as an intern with Special Collections, I have gained experiences that will be valuable in my future such as scanning, writing, and cataloging in Past Perfect. Most importantly, I have learned how to use library and archival resources for research. I also learned so much about myself and the Kentucky and Tennessee counties that have influenced my life. I am grateful for the sponsorship of Dr. Delroy Hire and the opportunities that this internship has opened up for me. Any student who is interested in the Hire Internship can contact Department Head Jonathan Jeffrey by phone at (270) 745-5265 or by email at jonathan.jeffrey@wku.edu.

Written by Hannah Hudson

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by | November 7, 2019 · 9:23 am

“I’d rather have the wisdom than the bliss”

“Someone sent me ‘Beauchampe,’” wrote Sallie McElroy in her journal on October 26, 1857.  The anonymous gift she was referring to was a book by William Gilmore Simms—a reboot, actually, of his 1842 work Beauchampe; or the Kentucky Tragedy: A Tale of Passion.  

Ann Cook

The volume was a novelized version of a true story that began on November 7, 1825, with the fatal stabbing of a man in Frankfort, Kentucky.  The victim, former state attorney general Solomon P. Sharp, had allegedly fathered a stillborn child whose mother, Ann Cook, was now living in seclusion near Bowling Green.  Sharp, however, had not only denied paternity but had shockingly claimed that the child had been of mixed race.  The disgraced Ann then fell in with Jeroboam O. Beauchamp, a young law student 15 years her junior, married him, and convinced him to kill Sharp to avenge her honor.  Just before Beauchamp was to hang for the crime on July 7, 1826, he and Ann attempted a double suicide in the jailhouse, but only she succeeded.  They were buried together in an “eternal embrace,” as they had requested. 

Beauchampe was a rather unusual gift for 23-year-old Sallie, then teaching at a female academy in Bowling Green and boarding under the rather Puritanical eye of its headmistress.  As Sallie knew, tradition demanded that women be shielded from such scandal lest it send them to the fainting couch, or worse, to a life corrupted by the taste of forbidden knowledge.  One of her male friends, in fact, seems to have had her debating the wisdom of opening the book’s cover.

Sallie McElroy

But she did not hesitate for long.  Well-read, wryly observant, and Bible-literate enough to slice and dice the sermons of local clergymen, Sallie understood the double standard behind such male hand-wringing.  “Yes, I will read it!” she wrote in her journal.  “Men are extremely anxious to preserve us pure as saints—we must know nothing of the stream of pollution which ‘flows down our streets like a river’ for fear we shall be spattered a little by the spray as it dashes on in its headlong course!”  True, there was the old saying, “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise,” but a “man wrote that,” she observed, “& I’m suspicious of the whole of ‘em!  At least in this instance, I had rather have the wisdom than the bliss, as dear old mother Eve chose before me!”

So read she did, and emerged unscathed.  Disappointed in the style of the book and its divergence from generally accepted versions of the incident, Sallie nevertheless found it “a most thrilling tale.”  She was somewhat forgiving of Ann Cook—“a most extraordinary woman” who fell victim to “pride & ambition” and whose relatives still lived in the area.  But Beauchamp was “a ninny of a fellow,” his reason captive to his passion.  Sharp, too, was “a monster.”  The bottom line, she concluded, was that “All three met only a just fate.”

Sallie McElroy’s journal is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid, and here to read about a more recent book on the famous Beauchamp-Sharp Tragedy, written with the aid of our collections.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | October 31, 2019 · 8:28 am

“O how horrible”

The town of Perryville, Kentucky, from Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 1, 1862

Everyone seems to agree that the most haunted town in Kentucky is Perryville, especially the Civil War field where, on October 8, 1862, some 7,600 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded in a battle that ranked as the second bloodiest in the Western theater up to that date.

While some 36,000 troops actually fought each other, twice that number were in the area at the time.  One of the soldiers who narrowly missed the fighting was John H. Gray of the 101st Indiana Infantry, but his impressions of the battle’s gruesome aftermath can indeed make us think about the paranormal byproducts of such carnage.

Gray had arrived in Perryville exhausted and hungry, having subsisted for several days on virtually no rations.  He and his comrades had lived off handfuls of wet cornmeal fried in a skillet (“corn kake”) some “fat meat” of undetermined origin, and a “coffee pot full of honey,” said to have been bought but more likely stolen.  Gray’s constitution was not the only one to collapse on such a diet.  He found the road from Springfield to Perryville “well perfumed,” as many of the men “had the ‘quick step.’”  Gray himself, weak with diarrhea and vomiting, rode the last few miles in an ambulance.

As his regiment straggled into Perryville and collapsed to recuperate, Gray described the scene in two letters to his parents and siblings.  “The horrors of War are apparent everywhere,” he wrote.  He was particularly shaken at the sight of a “dead rebel this morning lying on the ground,” his face blackened with decay.  “O how horrible,” Gray exclaimed, “a man left upon the field to rot unknown & uncared for.”  Gray was “in a comfortable house attended by a good Doctor,” but all around him were other houses filled with wounded and dying men.  He visited two hospitals, one treating Confederates and the other Federals, and was appalled by the “awful agony the intense suffering and the inexpressible pain of the occupants.”  Those able to rise from their beds were “lame & wounded hobbling about as though this was a world of cripples.” 

Accompanying the men’s physical pain was mental anguish.  Gray spoke with Confederates who cried that they were tired of war, and were ready to vote to “lay down their arms and be as they were.”  Some of these men, no doubt, died with Gray’s sarcastic observation—lovely war—on their lips.  They may or may not haunt Perryville today, but they surely haunted the memories of the men, like Gray, who survived.

John Gray’s two letters written in the aftermath of the Battle of Perryville are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here and here for finding aids. For more Civil War collections, click here or search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | October 24, 2019 · 8:46 am

A Haunted Hollow

Don’t go down that road at night. . . .

In 1899, his work as a surveyor took Lee Fisher away from his wife and young children in Iowa and into the backwoods of eastern Kentucky.  In a series of letters, he shared with wife Adah his impressions of the area’s agriculture, living conditions and people.  Fisher found much of interest in the environs of Floyd County’s Calf Creek, including the prosperous farm of a local fruit grower and beekeeper.  Even more noteworthy, however, were the tales the farmer told him of a nearby gulch—“Bugger Holler”—that was said to be haunted. 

Among the spooky stories:

A man walking through the hollow one night encountered a dog that “turned its head towards him and its eyes began to shine like two balls of fire then it opened its mouth and a light blue flame came out of its mouth,” allowing the man to see “at least 20 feet [!] down the throat of the dog.”

A man riding through the hollow one evening “saw what appeared to be a horse but instead of having a head like a horse it had a head and body like a centaur.”  The man’s own horse “turned around with a snort and trembling in every muscle it ran several hundred yards before he could be stopped.”

A man coming up the road toward the hollow one night “saw a woman standing by the side of the road wrapped in a cloak but without any head on and no matter which way he went she always followed him and it was sometime before he could shake her.”  The experience left him so rattled that he did not “know enough to speak when spoken to.”

An elderly woman passing through the hollow late one night “saw two women standing by the road neither one of them having any head.”

All of these nocturnal travelers seemed to have ignored the conventional wisdom since, Fisher wrote, “it is very rare anybody will pass there at night if they can avoid it.”  He and some of his curious coworkers, however, decided to try some ghosthunting themselves.  They ventured into the hollow after nightfall, “when it was so dark you could not see the road,” but had no luck seeing or hearing anything supernatural. 

The farmer who told Fisher these stories was himself skeptical about their veracity, but hastened to claim that his own house was haunted.  Neighbors had warned him that constructing such a large house for his small family would invite a paranormal presence, but everything remained quiet—at least for a few years.  Then, one night “he heard the most awful noise as if someone had rubbed a stick hard upon a dry goods box and then something like a cannon ball had fallen upon the upstairs floor.”  The pattern repeated itself, and no amount of investigation could reveal its source.  Frustrated, the farmer called for a curse upon whomever or whatever was causing the ruckus, a response that seemed to shame the poltergeist into silence.  But every once in a while it would reassert itself—for example, by causing a bedroom door to spring open and thump against the bed of the unfortunate occupant.

Lee Fisher’s letters and ghost stories are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For other collections about ghosts, spirits and hauntings, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | October 17, 2019 · 10:29 am

Bring out the women!

It was the presidential election year of 1920, and Kentucky Governor Edwin P. Morrow had a woman problem. 

Sworn into office on December 9, 1919, Morrow, a Republican, had thumped his Democratic rival James D. Black by running on a progressive platform that included woman suffrage.  His party made good on its promise: on January 6, 1920, the Kentucky General Assembly ratified the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the vote.  Two days later, Morrow invited a delegation of women, including representatives of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, to a ceremony to witness his official signing of the ratification bill. 

Governor Edwin P. Morrow signs Kentucky’s ratification of the 19th Amendment.

But the Nineteenth Amendment was not the law of the land, as it had not yet achieved ratification by the required 36 states.  Accordingly, Morrow signed another bill on March 29 giving Kentucky women presidential suffrage, in order to guarantee their right to participate in the November 1920 election.

But Morrow knew that the next crucial step would be to get this newly empowered bloc of voters to the polls to put Republican Warren G. Harding into the White House.  His letter to supporters in October betrayed a hint of desperation as he outlined the challenges they faced.  “The election in Kentucky hangs by a thread,” he wrote.  In order to counter the Democratic strongholds in the Bluegrass, the “mountain women” had to turn out to vote.  But the hoped-for stampede, it seemed, was to be driven by the sterner sex.  “For God’s sake,” Morrow begged, “put every effort forth.  Do everything!  See that organization is made with wagons and teams and, above all, fire every man so that he will bring his [sic] women out. . . . For the future of the Party and success at the polls, bring out the women!”

Did the whip-cracking work?  Yes and no.  Harding won the presidency, but his Democratic opponent James Cox edged him out in Kentucky by less than a percentage point.

Governor Morrow’s letter is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more political collections, search TopScholar and KenCat.

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by | October 10, 2019 · 10:35 am

A Clutch Performance

Sallie McElroy

In fall 1860, Sallie McElroy Knott enjoyed recording in her journal her impressions of the young Prince of Wales when he visited the St. Louis Fair.  Newly married, Sallie was living with her husband, future Kentucky governor J. Proctor Knott, in Jefferson City, where he was serving as attorney general.  But Sallie had other fair experiences, including one in Bowling Green, Kentucky, when she was still Miss Sallie McElroy, a teacher at the local female academy. 

It was late September, 1857, the school was closed “on account of the Fair,” and her students “were crazy” to go.  Sallie herself was somewhat indifferent, but had resolved to attend in order to root for some of the young people in their first public displays of horsemanship.  The next day, however, she had to confess to her journal of the “dire catastrophe my poor self met with yesterday!  Where to find a corner dark enough to hide my blushes or a washing tub big enough to contain the floods of tears issuing from my eyes!” 

Sallie had dressed quickly to meet her escort at the fair—as quickly as possible, given that these were not the days of shorts, tank tops and flip-flops—but in her rush she had neglected to notice that “my unmentionables were about to burst out at the buttonhole.”  Upon her arrival, “horrors!” Sallie wrote.  “The 1st step I took I felt a loosening around my waist.”  She tried to “clutch desperately” at her “most nether garment through crinoline, flannel etc. with both hands,” but then she met a flight of steps and her escort insisted on taking one of her hands.  Making it to the top “with the aforesaid garment dangling around my feet,” she found a place to sit down, then managed somehow to shed the rogue undies and stuff them in a crack under the seat. 

Sallie’s hope that no one would discover her cast-offs was disappointed in the worst way.  Some young boys not only found them, she wrote, but “twisted my poor lost trousers on a pole & perambulated with them round the Fairgrounds.”  A patron at the fair, one “Dr. Vanmeter,” gallantly intervened “& rescued my poor unfortunates,” but instead of attempting to reunite them with their owner’s “longing legs,” he carefully put them in his pocket!  “I’m afraid he’ll wear ‘em clean out,” Sallie concluded in a comic coda to this bizarre episode, “& I shan’t ever get a last fond look at ‘em.” 

Sallie (McElroy) Knott’s journals (we’ll hear from her yet again) are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more collections, search TopScholar and KenCat.

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by | October 3, 2019 · 11:08 am

Sallie and the Prince

It was the 1860 fall fair season, and St. Louis, Missouri was abuzz over a royal visit to the Fifth Annual Fair of the city’s Agricultural and Mechanical Association.  Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) was just eighteen when he arrived on September 27 with the Duke of Newcastle as part of a tour of Canada and the United States.  He had drawn large and appreciative crowds everywhere he went, and newspapers gushed over the young prince’s appearance and demeanor.  It was left to individual Americans, at once dazzled by and suspicious of this embodiment of inherited privilege, to offer more realistic impressions.

Sallie (McElroy) Knott

One such onlooker in St. Louis was Sarah “Sallie” (McElroy) Knott.  Married for two years to Missouri’s attorney general J. Proctor Knott, 26-year-old Sallie was still having difficulty adjusting to life away from her family in Bowling Green, Kentucky and being the wife of a “public man” (Knott would later become Governor of Kentucky).  But she found a confidante in her journal, in which she recorded her earnest thoughts and sometimes acid takes on the people and events around her.

When a procession of carriages carrying the Prince of Wales and his retinue arrived at the St. Louis Fair, Sallie was there.  Like so many of her countrymen and women, she had written in her journal, “I anticipate the pleasure of feasting my Republican eyes with a sight of royalty!”  Afterward, she described her experience with the requisite amount of Republican snark.  “He sat in a carriage,” she wrote, “with the Duke of New Castle beside him, & drove round the circuit of the grounds, for the gratification of the plebeian crowd of a hundred thousand or more, all eager to see a future King.  I stood within three feet of him, & gave him a specimen of American manners in the shape of my best tuck & bob curtsey! of which he was ill-bred enough to take no manner of notice!!”  The massed spectators did not prevent Sallie from getting a close look at what Queen Victoria’s genes had wrought: “He was a gawky Dutch-English stripling, sitting with head tucked down like any awkward boy, & picking to pieces a bouquet he held in his hands.  He is the possessor of an immense nose – huge feet & hands – bandy legs – blue eyes & quantity of light hair – ruddy complexion, almost fair as a girl’s – upon the whole rather a good face, but nothing uncommon.” She also found the “old Duke” to be nothing special beyond “a portly, good natured looking Englishman.”  It was an age before paparazzi, when the strobe of camera flashes was yet to annoy the royal retinas, but Sallie also found the Prince spared of another hazard: the halitosis of over-adoring commoners.  “The multitude had sense enough to keep quiet,” she observed, “& so the cortege swept by, undisturbed by sniffing the air, tainted by the huzzahing breath of the ‘great-unwashed’”!

Albert Edward, Prince of Wales

Sallie (McElroy) Knott’s journals (there will be more of her wisdom to come) are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more collections, search TopScholar and KenCat.

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by | September 26, 2019 · 9:59 am

Dear Congressman Carter

On February 6, 1974, a resolution of the House of Representatives gave the Judiciary Committee authority to investigate the possible impeachment of President Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal.  Watching the proceedings closely was Kentucky’s Fifth District representative, Republican Tim Lee Carter.  Serving the fifth of his eight terms, the physician from Monroe County had brought his own causes to Congress, including a plan for national health insurance and, in 1967, a call to end to the Vietnam War.  With respect to impeachment, however, Carter was a strong defender of Nixon and, as he would later point out, was the first member of Congress to give testimony on the President’s behalf.

Like other legislators, Carter heard plenty from voters in his district and around the country on the question of impeachment.  From October 1973 to November 1974, he received hundreds of letters, cards, telegrams, petitions and preprinted cards from both supporters and opponents of the measure.  Some were brief – “Censure Yes Impeachment No” read a terse telegram from a couple in Coral Gables, Florida — while another telegram from California declared: “Immediate impeachment and trial of President essential to country nothing less will serve act promptly.”

A “fishing expedition,” a/k/a “witch hunt”?

Many communications, not surprisingly, were lengthy and passionate.  “President Nixon is the victim of a relentless witch hunt,” wrote a Missouri couple. “We urge that you stand firm and cast your vote against impeachment.”  From Richmond, Kentucky, an EKU faculty member wrote, “I think this nation cannot stand to allow people in high offices to get away with unconstitutional acts. . . .  Nixon will accomplish not a generation of Peace but a generation of under-the-table crooked deals!”  Some saw mere partisanship—“Why are the democrats stirring up such a fuss over campaign donations when they are spending and wasting so much money trying to drag up some evidence to impeach Pres. Nixon?” asked a couple from Summer Shade, Kentucky.  “The envy, harassment, venom of the Media and Leftists would destroy the U.S. to get Nixon,” came from Mount Vernon, Kentucky. 

. . . or a slam dunk?

Others took the longer view.  “We have to have faith in the truthfulness of our leaders, and he [Nixon] has caused us to be sadly skeptical of every word he says . . . since he and his aides still persist in covering up and fighting the investigations, he must be impeached by Congress,” a writer argued from Barbourville, Kentucky.  “There is so much evidence of wrongdoing committed to enhance the President’s power, his prestige, or his individual niche in history, that I no longer trust his leadership.  If allowed to remain in office, Mr. Nixon will probably continue the pattern he has set,” concluded a voter from Monticello, Kentucky, conveying “a sincere expression of a tragic concern” and “not another anti-Nixon vendetta.”  Congressman Carter wanted to maintain the focus on Nixon’s positive achievements, particularly in the area of foreign policy, and some of his constituents made clear that distressing domestic issues such as energy and food prices, taxes, abortion, and perceived media bias were coloring their opinions of the impeachment crisis.

Even after the Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment and Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974 rather than face trial in the Senate, the letters to Congressman Carter continued.  Words like “traumatic” and “tragedy” appeared, as did expressions of both support and opposition toward granting the President a pardon or immunity from prosecution.  A week after the resignation, Carter regretted that Nixon’s administration had been “involuntarily terminated” but looked with gratitude to the Constitution and its provisions for a smooth transfer of power.  “Recent events,” he wrote, “have clearly demonstrated the strength of our government, our people, and the principles that have guided us through our great history.”

Letters to Congressman Tim Lee Carter regarding the impeachment inquiry into President Richard Nixon are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more political collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | September 19, 2019 · 10:16 am

He Knew his ABCs

FDR and some of his New Deal federal agencies

Perhaps feeling justified during a time of war, in 1943 Congressman Hampton P. Fulmer decided to push back against a cranky voter.  The South Carolina Democrat, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, had received a complaint from Eugene M. Biggers of Houston, Texas concerning the plethora of federal agencies created under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal—“Alphabetical Agencies,” as they were called, because of the acronyms by which they were known: the NRA (National Recovery Act), WPA (Works Progress Administration), CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), and so on. 

“I would like to know just what line of business you are engaged in,” the congressman challenged Biggers.  “In the next place, I would like to know whether or not you would prefer going back to the conditions which existed in every line of business in 1930-33,” referring, of course to America’s tumble into the Depression.

Biggers, meanwhile, had been busy compiling a list of agencies and offering copies to interested parties.  The response, he found, was overwhelming.  Small businesses, taxpayers associations, educational groups, farmers, and the press clamored for confirmation of what many had long maintained: that these “damnable Bureaus,” as Biggers wrote, were wasteful, oppressive, and manipulative, run by “fan-tailed theorists” burdening the American people with regulations and regimentation.  In a three-page reply to Congressman Fulmer, Biggers railed against the “Roosevelt New Deal Party” and, despite the war, presented an unapologetic indictment of the “experimenters in Washington” who had imposed themselves between producers and their markets and upended the laws of supply and demand.

And just what was Biggers’ line of business?  Unfortunately for Congressman Fulmer, it was printing.  Even without the internet, he was well positioned to “go viral” with his views.  He offered, for the low price of $1 per hundred, a reproduction of the congressman’s letter, his own response, and his list of 104 “Alphabetical Agencies” (out of a total of 2,241 agencies, bureaus and commissions that he had uncovered) as souvenirs of “the goofiest period in America’s history.” 

These printed materials created by Eugene M. Biggers are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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by | September 10, 2019 · 4:14 pm

Miss Em

Emily Perry in 1888

It was summer 1913, and Put-in-Bay, Ohio was gearing up to celebrate the centennial of one of the most important naval battles of the War of 1812.  On September 10, 1813, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry wrested control of Lake Erie from the British Royal Navy, forcing the surrender of a squadron of ships and opening his terse report of the victory with the memorable phrase, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

Remarkably, at the center of the excitement, and one of the most honored guests expected at the celebration, was “a frail, sweet-faced, silver haired Kentucky woman.”  Emily Perry was the daughter of the late Reverend Gideon Babcock Perry, who had been born in Rhode Island at the same family homestead as his cousin, the famous Commodore.  Emily had followed her father through numerous pastoral postings in the Midwest and South until they reached Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1867, where Reverend Perry became rector of Grace Episcopal Church.  “Miss Em,” as she became known, immersed herself in social, cultural and charitable activities, organizing concerts and other entertainments for worthy recipients like Hopkinsville’s public school library.  Now, with her parents and three brothers gone, she lived with her sister, Maria Efnor, who had been adopted into the family as a child.  In addition to superintending the work of her United Volunteers Musical and Literary Society, Emily was a devoted scrapbook-keeper, pulling together newspaper clippings on the vast number of topics that attracted her interest: Civil War history, music, poetry, celebrities, and women as well as men who had made names for themselves in politics, science, arts and culture. 

Alas, as proud as she was of her heritage, and despite being promised every comfort and consideration she might have wished for, Emily decided to decline the invitation to the festivities.  At 69 years of age, her eyesight was failing, and that of 82-year-old sister Maria’s was completely gone.  Emily instead remained at the family home at Ninth and Campbell streets, ultimately compelled to obey the command on Oliver Hazard Perry’s battle flag—“Don’t give up the ship.”

Papers and photographs of the Perry family, including Emily Perry, are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

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