by | May 21, 2020 · 7:14 pm

In search of a cure

When her late husband, astronaut John Glenn, became the first American to orbit the earth, Anna Margaret “Annie” Glenn, who lost her life to coronavirus on May 19, was herself rocketed into the public spotlight.  She found her new celebrity mortifying, however, because of her severe stutter.  After a successful program of therapy in 1973, Annie became a champion for people with communication disorders.

In 1846, William Malone of Limestone, Alabama was also hoping to find therapy for his 23-year-old son, Clement.  In a letter to his brother-in-law, John Marion Robertson of Franklin, Kentucky, he reported the results of what appeared to be an extensive search.  “We have heard,” he wrote, “that there is a man in Kentucky some where perhaps at or near Springfield, who can cure persons of stuttering.”  He requested that Robertson find out who the man was, where he lived, and what success he could claim.  Working as an overseer in Mississippi, young Clement planned to come home to Alabama before departing for Kentucky in search of treatment, and his father was eager to have some information for him before he went on his way.

We don’t know if Clement found his cure, but speech impediments have sent others on paths that, like Annie Glenn’s, do not surrender to reclusiveness.  It was some kind of speech disorder, probably a stutter, that caused a young Romanus Emerson (1782-1852) to veer away from a career in the ministry, but the Boston merchant (and cousin of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson) openly abandoned religion in his fifties. Pronouncing himself an “infidel,” he wrote and published pro-atheist tracts. 

Reverend Henry David Carpenter (1859-1927), by contrast, retained his faith as both the pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in Bowling Green, Kentucky and the founder of a county school for African-American children.  Widely respected in both the community and the classroom, Carpenter too had a stutter, but his “presence just demanded attention,” according to a colleague in the ministry.  “He’d walk into class and if the students was cutting up they would be quiet because Dr. Carpenter was in.”

Click on the links to learn more about these individuals, found in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  To search our collections further, use TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on In search of a cure

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

by | May 15, 2020 · 11:52 am

“A Great House of Mourning”

Cholera devastated “My Old Kentucky Home” in 1833

We’ve blogged in the past about Kentuckians’ varied reactions to epidemics of disease.  In 1833, cholera’s assault on Federal Hill in Bardstown left permanent scars on the surviving members of the Rowan family. During an outbreak in Bowling Green in 1850, by contrast, a young man affected amusement as he witnessed some rather chaotic attempts at social distancing.  Somewhere in the emotional middle was a Scott County native taking public health training in Philadelphia during the influenza epidemic of 1918; struggling with illness himself, he nevertheless viewed the deluge of cases at the city’s hospital as interesting subjects for clinical study – if they didn’t die first. 

At home in Arkansas in 1835, Jane Washington Walker must have been dumbstruck when she read her mother’s letter.  “The cholera has been among us,” wrote Rebecca Smith Washington from Russellville, Kentucky, as the scourge turned her town into “a Great House of Mourning.”

In language reminiscent of those reporting from today’s virus “hot spots,” Rebecca proceeded to recount in grim detail what the disease had wrought.  “It broke out last Friday night three weeks ago with great violence, in twenty four hours there was nine widows left to mourn the sudden death of their husbands.”  What followed was a parade of names—all known to Jane—and all dead: husbands, wives, children, neighbors, acquaintances, enslaved people.  The disease initially “raged more violently among the Negroes than the White people,” her mother reported, and those who had somewhere to escape to had quickly left town.  Rebecca closed her school.  Stores “shut up, their owners either dead or fled to the country.”  Those who remained were fearful of contact with others.  Though she “felt like I was signing the death warrant of a great part of my family,” Rebecca nevertheless agreed to shelter the family of a man helping to nurse the sick.  She praised the other first responders of the day, even though they could do little to alleviate the suffering.  “The young men performed every office male and female,” she observed, from tending the victims to making coffins out of boxes and planks, digging graves and burying the dead. 

The epidemic was subsiding, but Rebecca’s lingering shock was still evident.  As she watched merchants begin to reopen their stores, and townspeople return to their deserted (and in some cases, burglarized) homes, her thoughts were of her loved ones.  She had long contemplated pulling up stakes and moving to Arkansas; now that “life has become so uncertain,” her desire to do so was overwhelming.  “I shall never enjoy life again,” she wrote Jane, “until I join you.”

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

Comments Off on “A Great House of Mourning”

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Tagged as , , , ,

by | May 7, 2020 · 10:54 am

“One entire description of suffering”

With our prospects of travel currently unappealing and not likely to improve soon, we can at least hope that we will not return to past discomforts of wagons, coaches, and explosively coal-fired locomotives and steamboats.  One such 19th-century travel nightmare is here, but here’s another from the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.

Missing his family, including a newborn daughter, William Coolidge, Jr. of Baltimore was already in a grouchy mood when his steamer arrived at Maysville, Kentucky enroute to New Orleans in 1822.  A former Bostonian (and a rather snooty one at that), Coolidge was enchanted with the Ohio River but found Maysville “a dirty hole indeed.”  Pushing on to Cincinnati, his coach ride to Lexington was “attended with discomfiture the roads almost impassable.”  He found Lexington “a tolerable flourishing town” of about 6,000 but, worn down by the January weather, he reached Frankfort “cheerless and gloomy. . . my mind diseas’d and much disquieted within me.”  He didn’t mince words about Kentucky’s state capital: “a dull and insipid hole the inhabitants vulgar, gross and mean, offensively impudent and low bred.” 

On the next leg of the journey to Louisville, his coach broke a wheel, sending Coolidge wandering for miles on foot and horseback in search of a blacksmith and wheelwright to repair the damage.  Reaching Louisville after “severest hardships and dangers,” he found no charms awaiting: “I never saw but ‘twas all of a piece, for roads and men, and women and children were all alike abhorrent and loathsome to my better senses.”  Pining for the virtues of “happy New England,” the Yankee put up at yet another undistinguished boarding house. 

The General Pike – not up to traveler Coolidge’s expectations

January wore on, the temperature dropped, the river froze, and Coolidge’s letters home went unanswered.  “My journal is but one entire description of suffering,” he wailed.  Finally, late in February, he sailed with relief from Louisville, only to have the boat run aground on a sandbar.  He switched to another boat, the General Pike —“old and altogether inferior”—and finally reached the Mississippi.  A thousand miles down the river from Louisville, he was still grumbling.  He had looked upon the waters of the Ohio, Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi, but “nothing on each side of these majestic rivers offering comfort or encouragement for either emigrant or Traveller save now and then a miserable log hut . . . chang’d the dismal view.”

Click here for a finding aid for William Coolidge’s journal.  For more of our collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on “One entire description of suffering”

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Tagged as , ,

by | April 29, 2020 · 11:47 am

Slowing the Spread

A military encampment at Bowling Green: a challenge to “social distancing”

As we know, accompanying the usual physical sufferings from an outbreak of infectious disease are fear and uncertainty, rumors and half-truths, and a search for scapegoats.  Such was the case when the 119th U.S. Colored Infantry set up camp near Bowling Green, Kentucky in March 1866.  Most of its members were recruited from Lexington, and they comprised one of 23 such volunteer regiments organized in Kentucky between 1863 and 1865.  

Unfortunately, the 119th’s presence coincided with an epidemic of smallpox in the town.  This appears to have prompted a local newspaper to accuse the African-American troops of introducing or spreading the disease among the citizens.  Its editor seemed to have little evidence, however, being satisfied to attribute the contagion only to “careless Negro Soldiery.”

This casual condemnation rankled the detachment commander, Captain William T. Y. Schenck.  “What you mean by ‘careless Negro Soldiery’ I do not know,” he wrote the editor, inviting him “or any other person” to visit the camp and inspect it for order and cleanliness.  Just “a few inquiries,” he pointed out, would have revealed that “this disease had shown itself in town at least two weeks before we had a single case of it here.”  It seemed just as likely that his men had become infected by the local civilians, not the other way around.

Schenck then assured the editor that he had quickly taken steps to “flatten the curve” of infection.  Upon learning of the outbreak, he “had all the men vaccinated” and, with few exceptions, allowed no one to leave the camp, “not in fear of the disease being carried from here, as we had none, but if possible to keep it without the limits of this camp.”  Despite his efforts, about 20 of the men fell ill, but they were being isolated in a “secluded building” and the threat was now “very much on the decrease.”  He concluded with a request to the paper to print his response “in order to do justice before the public to me & my fellow officers.”

A finding aid and typescript for Captain Schenck’s letter can be downloaded here.  To browse Civil War collections in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections, click here or search TopSCHOLAR or KenCat.

Comments Off on Slowing the Spread

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Tagged as , , ,

by | April 15, 2020 · 8:44 am

“Just retribution! but how awful!”

“Horrible!” wrote Sallie Knott on April 15, 1865.  The previous evening in Washington, D.C, President Abraham Lincoln had been shot at Ford’s Theater and Secretary of State William H. Seward stabbed by unknown assailants.  At home in Lebanon, Kentucky, Sallie sat down to record her reactions in her journal.  But it wasn’t easy to sort out her thoughts, for at the outbreak of the Civil War she had made one thing clear to that same journal: “I glory in the name of Rebel.”

As a young schoolteacher in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Sallie had developed a disdain for Northern attacks on her state’s way of life.  Her anti-Yankee sentiments grew after she married her cousin James Proctor Knott in 1858 and moved to Missouri, where he was a lawyer and state legislator.  In 1861 Knott, now Attorney General of Missouri, was stripped of his office for declining to take an oath not to “aid the Southern cause,” and the couple was forced to return to Kentucky. 

Sallie Knott

For the next four years, Sallie remained largely true to her promise to confine her journal entries to personal affairs, but the news from Washington demanded comment.  Sallie could not restrain her sense of triumph.  “Just retribution!  but how awful!” she declared.  Lincoln had proclaimed the previous day “a universal Thanksgiving day,” but “while his partisans were feasting & making merry, by his own order, over the misfortunes of a brave & oppressed people, he & his chief director & adviser in all his fiendish schemes, are dying!  Lord, thou art just & holy; & thy judgements infinitely surpass our desires or comprehension.”

Her thoughts then turned to the identity of the perpetrators.  Of course, fingers pointed to Southerners as “the prime movers in the plot,” but Sallie put her money on General Ulysses S. Grant who, “with the army at his back, is going to try to make himself sovereign & absolute!”  Grant had accepted Lincoln’s invitation to attend the play at Ford’s Theater, she noted, but then backed out and left town.  And like Americans who, after President Kennedy’s assassination, rejected the “lone gunman” theory, she saw conspiracies in the shadows.  “Why,” she asked, “was there no attempt to arrest either assassin by guards, servants, police, nor a theatre full of people?” 

Would “a terrible struggle for absolute power & the rights of the people” now ensue, with the army on the side of despotism”? Sallie wondered. “ Let us be still & see!”  In the meantime, she had to hold her tongue around grieving family and friends and at her church’s memorial for the martryed president.  “No heathen Juggernaut ever received so much devotion as we have been obliged to offer at the shrine of Abe Linkhorn’s dead, ugly old phiz!” she sputtered.  “Bah!  ‘tis perfectly sickening!”

Sallie McElroy’s journal is part of the holdings of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click here for a finding aid.  Search all our collections through TopSCHOLAR or KenCat.

Comments Off on “Just retribution! but how awful!”

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Tagged as , ,

by | March 29, 2020 · 5:10 pm

The Jump Ball

With March Madness now becalmed, here’s some Hilltopper basketball history to keep the pulse racing:

It was March 11, 1966. The Ohio Valley Conference Champion Hilltoppers entered the NCAA tournament with a 23-2 record and a stellar lineup that included Clem Haskins, Greg Smith, Dwight Smith, Wayne Chapman and Steve Cunningham.  After a lopsided 105-86 win over Loyola (Ill.), they moved on to the next round against All-American Cazzie Russell and the Big Ten Conference Champions, the University of Michigan Wolverines.

With 10 seconds to go and WKU leading 79-78, the referee called for a jump ball between Greg Smith and Cazzie Russell.  He then tossed the ball off center, directly over Russell’s head.  Russell did not jump, but Smith did, tipping the ball with his left hand to center Steve Cunningham.  Russell claimed that Smith “kind of belted me on the lip as he came up and held my shoulder.”  Smith only recalled coming down in the scramble and turning, which prompted a Michigan player to point and yell, “Referee, he’s pushing!”  The official called Smith for fouling Russell—the first foul on a jump ball that Hilltopper coach John Oldham had ever witnessed.

Russell sank his two free throws, giving Clem Haskins only a few seconds to salvage a victory for WKU with a sixteen-foot jumper.  He missed.  Michigan won the game, 80-79.

The Hilltoppers later maintained that film of the play actually showed Russell fouling Smith.  But the game was in the books.  Clem Haskins bitterly called the incident “the worst call in the history of basketball.”

The next night, the Hilltoppers took out their frustrations on Dayton University, 82-68, to take third place in the tournament.  Michigan took second, falling to the University of Kentucky, 84-77.

Search WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections through TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on The Jump Ball

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Tagged as ,

by | March 12, 2020 · 8:18 am

Women strike a chord

Mary Frances Bradley

On the morning of March 12, 1925, a bit of musical (and women’s) history was made on the Hill when a new tune rang out at chapel assembly.  The song College Heights was the winner of a competition between members of Macon A. Leiper’s English class.  The students had set out to create a poem that, when paired with a musical score, could serve as the school’s anthem. 

Freshman Mary Frances Bradley of Franklin, Kentucky took first prize with her memorable lyrics:

College Heights, on hilltop fair,
With beauty all thine own,
Lovely jewel far more rare
Than graces any throne!

Bradley brought an extra advantage to the contest: her father Ben J. Bradley, an accomplished musician and composer, contributed the melody. 

Not long afterward, another songstress, Bessie Swartz Cherry, the sister-in-law of WKU’s first president Henry Hardin Cherry, conceived another musical tribute.  The Red and the Gray referenced the school’s official colors prior to the change to red and white in 1956. 

Both The Red and the Gray and College Heights became fixtures at commencement exercises in the 1930s and 1940s, but the latter eventually triumphed and has now become a familiar chorus for generations of WKU graduates:

College Heights we hail thee,
We shall never fail thee,
Falter never, live forever,
Hail! Hail! Hail!

Search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat for resources on women’s history held by WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.

Comments Off on Women strike a chord

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Tagged as , , , ,

by | March 6, 2020 · 8:28 am

“First in the mystical haze”

Nancy Reagan and her husband

“Without Nancy, there would have been no Governor Reagan, no President Reagan,” said aide Michael Deaver when Nancy Reagan died on March 6, 2016.  Like many other First Ladies, she was a behind-the-scenes adviser, lightning rod, and icon in her own right. 

Two collections in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections fall at slightly different points on the spectrum of opinion about Mrs. Reagan.  As we have previously blogged, the Reagans inspired Logan County native Betty Kathleen Hall to write a kind of joint biography in the form of a narrative poem.  As hagiography, her 184-page work has no peer.  Here’s Nancy at Reagan’s 1967 inauguration as Governor of California:

The inaugural ball was stylish and gleaming,
and Nancy was first in the mystical haze:
She wore a white, one-shouldered gown, by Galenos.
all beaded with diamond-like glass daisies.

Nancy’s worshipful gaze at “Ronnie” whenever he spoke also earned notice:

while others applauded
Nancy transfixed into a pure adoration.

But Nancy was no shrinking violet, as Hall made clear in her evaluation of the sources of Ronald Reagan’s success:

And towering high with an eagle eye,
Nancy’s antennas scan political sky.

In 1982, at the request of a Kentucky cousin, Frank Kavanaugh recalled his interactions with “Some First Ladies and Their Husbands” beginning in 1967, when he arrived in Washington as a documentary filmmaker associated with George Washington University’s Department of Medical and Public Affairs.  His most vivid memories of Nancy Reagan related to the March 30, 1981 attempt on the President’s life and a subsequent TV film that recreated the assassination attempt and its aftermath.  As Reagan recovered in hospital, he wrote, Mrs. Reagan was “the strongest force in that building.  She was aware of every activity or plan surrounding the president, seldom left his side, and could make life miserable for anyone who was not contributing to President Reagan’s chances for recovery and comfort”—a role that, Kavanaugh realized, was “not too unlike the role she took throughout the president’s life.”  In her determination to preserve Reagan’s image as the “good guy” and “the great and charming communicator,” he observed, Mrs. Reagan “could be vicious.”  Even though she, like her husband, had acted in films, she never saw the highly praised documentary about the attempt on her husband’s life. “To her it was a nightmare that she wanted to avoid reliving,” said Kavanaugh.  The President, on the other hand “loved it.  He was back in the movies.”

Click on the links to access finding aids for these collections.  For more of our collections about political women, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on “First in the mystical haze”

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Tagged as , , , ,

by | February 27, 2020 · 8:12 am

“We had to turn out in full strength”

Claim form for victims of Morgan’s Ohio Raid

The surrender of Confederate cavalry leader John Hunt Morgan on July 26, 1863, marked the end of the “Great Raid,” his 18-day charge from Kentucky into Indiana that veered east into southern Ohio.  There was “a great scare here,” reported infantryman Aaron Stuver in a letter to his sister from Cincinnati, “and we had to turn out in full strength” as the state militia scrambled to defend the area against Morgan and his raiders. 

Morgan ultimately brushed past Cincinnati—“or we might have had an interview with the rebels,” wrote Stuver.  Splitting up his troops, he then caused havoc as he charged through southern Ohio ahead of a major battle in Meigs County, at Buffington Island on the Ohio River.  The largest Civil War engagement in Ohio, the battle memorably witnessed the death of Major Daniel McCook, one of fifteen in his family who saw service with the Union.  The patriarch of the “Fighting McCooks,” as they were known, was buried in Cincinnati after a large funeral in which four companies of Stuver’s regiment participated as escorts.  During the ceremonies, both enlisted men and officers, wrote Stuver, stood up to a soaking rain “like good soldiers.”  McCook, he observed, “was a Paymaster in the Army, and went voluntarily after Morgan, he was 60 years old.”

While the Great Raid accomplished little lasting good for the Confederates, it succeeded for a time in siphoning off Union forces from important offensive measures in east Tennessee.  It also caused fear and uncertainty among civilians in Indiana and Ohio, many of whom suffered loss and damage to property that had been seized by Morgan or otherwise caught in the crossfire.  Eight months later, the Ohio legislature created a commission to assess claims, and in April 1869 authorized the payment of compensation.  The final cost Morgan extracted for the Great Raid was the printing of special forms for “Morgan Raid Claims,” on which farmers like Asahel Skinner of Meigs County certified their losses.  Skinner received a total of $220 for two horses, bridles and other provisions, and for the death of a colt.

Aaron Stuver’s letter and Asahel Skinner’s damage claim from the Great Raid are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections.  Click on the links to access finding aids.  For more Civil War collections, click here or search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

Comments Off on “We had to turn out in full strength”

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Tagged as , , , ,

by | February 21, 2020 · 10:10 am

He Touched the Heart as Well as the Funny Bone

As we celebrate Black History Month, Library Special Collections would like to spotlight one of Bowling Green’s best known sons, Reuben Crowdus, aka Ernest Hogan.  Coincidentally, local attorney and historian Ray Buckberry has recently donated a nice gift of research material about Hogan and sheet music written by him to Special Collections.  Buckberry was the chief person responsible for researching and orchestrating the effort to get a historical marker erected for Hogan at the L&N Depot in 2009.  Here we re-print a short biography of Hogan written by Buckberry for the publication Mt. Moriah Cemetery:  A History and Census of Bowling Green, Kentucky’s African-American Cemetery (Landmark Association, 2002)

Reuben Crowdus was born 17 April 1865 in Bowling Green, Kentucky.  Not much is known about his early life, although indications are that he left home at an early age, joining a traveling minstrel show.  One of his first jobs is said to have been as a plantation singer in a low-rent, tent-show version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a show that launched the careers of many black entertainers.

In 1891, Crowdus adopted his stage name “Ernest Hogan” and later began referring to himself as “The Unbleached American,” utilizing both references throughout his career in show business.  He wrote the lyrics, music, or both, for approximately 35 published songs.  The 1896 sheet music for a song written by Hogan contained a notation that the music is to be performed “with Negro rag.”  This was the first use of the word “rag” on a song sheet and many thereby credit Hogan as writer of the first piece of ragtime music.

His first big solo starring role in New York City came in 1898, with the show “Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk.”  This was the first black show to play in a first class theater on Broadway.  A Chicago paper reported that Hogan “is firmly established as the greatest colored comedian of the age.”  The rising star organized a group of about 20 experienced entertainers in 1905, and called the “The Memphis Students.”  Their opening show in New York was so successful it was held over for 5 months.  This show has been referred to as the first public concert of syncopated music in history.

A long-cherished dream was realized when he mounted his own musical comedy “Rufus Rastus,” opening on Broadway in 1906.  A critic commented that the depth Hogan brought to his new role took him out of the ranks of “darky comedian” forever in that he had learned to “touch the heart as well as the funnybone.”

Hogan became seriously ill and, in 1908, his business friends produced a benefit show in his honor.  The show lasted four hours and a noted black performer remembered it as the “greatest assembly of colored actors ever to appear in the same theater and on the same stage in one night.”

On 20 May 1909, Hogan died.  His remains were returned to Bowling Green for burial in Mt. Moriah Cemetery.  By Hogan’s request, the local band participating in the service at the Methodist Episcopal Church, played only his favorite ragtime tunes.  At the cemetery, the many floral displays were said to represent the most flowers ever received for any funeral in Bowling Green.

Hogan had an infectious and crusading spirit, talent and generosity; he was appropriately referred to as “a Moses of the colored theatrical profession.”

To see the finding aid for the Ernest Hogan research material, click here. To see other material in our collections about Hogan, search KenCat or TopSCHOLAR.

Comments Off on He Touched the Heart as Well as the Funny Bone

Filed under Manuscripts & Folklife Archives, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,