WKU Libraries Blog

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.