By J. Trace Kirkwood
Occasionally, chance opens a portal to our past. A door swings open, shedding light on lost portions of our rich history, reminding us that we, indeed, stand on the shoulders of our forbearers.
A discovery of documents in the Allen County Clerk’s Office opened such a door. In the spring of 2004, a small flood in the courthouse basement soaked some of the county’s early 20th century records. The County Clerk, Beverly Calvert, promptly called the agency for which I work, the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives (KDLA). The agency is always on call for these types of emergencies and responds as fast as possible to protect and preserve any records in jeopardy. Ms. Calvert and I formulated a way to rescue some of the old county records in the courthouse basement.
In the first phase of our plan, we unfolded dozens of bundled records – a variety of handwritten and typed documents of various sizes and colors – that had gotten wet in the flood. During this tedious process, which took from June until the end of July, I discovered approximately 45 documents relating to the cholera epidemic that swept through Kentucky in 1833. Inexplicably, the documents had been pressed between two bundles of unrelated estate settlements dating from 1911. There were no clues to shed light on why they were there, but their location within the bundle insured their preservation over the last nine or ten decades.
I have worked as a curator or an archivist for over 15 years. I have had the privilege of finding documents relating to Henry Clay, two century old surveys of creeks and trails in Kentucky, and even the oldest known theater broadside in Kentucky. The magic never fades. That was the case with these old documents in the basement of the Allen County Courthouse. Unfolding a bundle of records and looking upon paper and handwriting darkened for decades is mysterious and exciting. As soon as I had the brown lump of paper in my hands I knew I would be tracking down a story.
The door creaked open. These floppy 19th century documents written in brown ink proved a glimpse into life in Allen County during a trying time for the citizens of Scottsville. They were, however, only a glimpse. The fascination of these documents was matched with the frustration of an incomplete record. It seemed as though we were looking through a timeless telescope that could not be swiveled nor lowered nor raised. Like so much of history we learn a little and ask a lot.
In 1833, cholera made its way through Kentucky for the first time. The disease originated in India in the 1820s and spread to Great Britain by 1831. By the following year, it spanned the Atlantic Ocean and turned up in New York City. Newspapers in Kentucky speculated on the scourge’s arrival. They tracked it as best they could as it spread into the Ohio Valley and down the river. According to Nancy D. Baird’s article, “Asiatic Cholera’s First Visit to Kentucky: A Study in Panic and Fear,” in the 1974 Filson Club History Quarterly, the disease spread throughout the state, starting in Maysville in the spring and summer of 1833.
Practically nothing is known about the cholera epidemic in Allen County and Scottsville. Newspapers from the county and region reporting on the outbreak do not exist. The county’s records have major gaps in them, because in an effort to derail a court proceeding, a defendant torched the Allen County Courthouse in October 1902. His efforts erased a good portion of Allen County’s 19th century history. While his target was the circuit court clerk’s office, the fire spread into the county clerk’s vault. Citizens saved some of the county’s records, but the blaze destroyed many more.
People knew the disease was coming, but because they did not understand how or why it was transmitted, they did not know how to stop its spread. Cholera spread not only from person to person but also through the contamination of water supplies. Increased rainfall amounts – common in the spring and early summer – caused water levels to rise and waste from privies contaminated the fresh water wells. The disease spread quickly. By June, 1833, it reached south central Kentucky, according to accounts in Lexington newspapers.
When the disease appeared in Scottsville in June 1833, Alfred Payne, who was County Surveyor, and Lorenzo D. Henderson, took action to help the town’s people. Payne acquired patents from a famous doctor in Nashville, and in that same city, Henderson acquired the ingredients to make the medicine.
Payne was born ca. 1775 in Virginia and was likely already in the area when the General Assembly created Allen County in 1815. Tax lists from Allen County show that he owned one horse worth $75. The few 19th century Allen County records reveal that he bought and sold large amounts of property throughout the county, a common practice for surveyors at that time. Land purchasers often paid them with a percentage of the land surveyed, so they probably spent a lot of time at the clerk’s office filing indentures and deeds. Deed books show that this was case with Payne.
Tax lists also show that Payne’s taxable wealth fluctuated over the next two decades. Just one year after the creation of the county, the tax commissioner assessed Payne for 750 acres of land along Bays Fork Creek, one slave, and one horse. His total property value was $2,335, a substantial amount for the time. By 1820, the county taxed Payne for nearly 2,000 acres, and he owned 10 lots in the town of Scottsville. One lot was worth $1,000, but lot #161 was worth a paltry four dollars. That year he also owned three slaves and a “retail” store. Payne’s property net value was $6,700. By 1833, the year of the cholera epidemic, he owned only two lots in Scottsville worth $800. Tax and property records indicate that Payne was a fairly wealthy man.
Unfortunately, less is known about Lorenzo D. Henderson. He was most likely a transitory person, not an uncommon thing in 19th century Kentucky. Deed and tax records, along with the ones discovered in the courthouse basement, indicate that he was in Scottsville for a 17 month period that included the cholera epidemic. He owned a dry goods store in Tompkinsville and owned Lot #3 on the square in Scottsville. Deeds show that Lot #3 included a “dwelling” and “out houses”, which was a general reference for other buildings on the property and not privies. Henderson also held chattel mortgages on the personal property of several people in Allen County. He likely owned a store in Scottsville and extended credit to people as long as they had collateral.
On June 24, 1834, Henderson sold his store in Tompkinsville to Rice Maxey and William F. Evans of Nashville. On July 2nd of that year, he sold the lot with the dwelling and “out houses” to Henry E. Douglas and Larkin F. Wood for $1,200. On November 12, 1834, he sold Lot #20, which was just west of the square in Scottsville, to Evans and Maxey, who were trustees of a John Hardin in Tennessee. That is the last shred of evidence of Henderson being in Allen County.
No records suggest that Alfred Payne and L.D. Henderson were business partners or even knew each other prior to June, 1833. The cholera epidemic may have been the only thing to bring their worldly paths together.
According to the papers discovered in the courthouse, Lorenzo Henderson traveled to Nashville in June, 1833, as an agent for Payne. He purchased $53.25 worth of ingredients necessary to make medicines to treat cholera. On June 28th he purchased from Dr. Samuel P. Ament in Nashville hemlock; white pond lily root; poplar bark; lobelia seed; healing salve; six gallons of brandy; and nerve powder, perhaps to enhance the brandy.
That same day, Henderson purchased jars, bottles, and vials from H.A. Casseday’s store. He spent $29.75. He maintained a small ledger book – also contained in the discovered documents -- to keep track of his purchases and expenses. Henderson kept very close track of each item.
Alfred Payne figures even more prominently in the bundle of papers. A bill from the Ferguson and Long Tavern shows that on June 29, 1833, he paid $2.62½ for two days of supper, board, and a bed, which was never a guarantee at many taverns of that time. Payne also paid $8.00 for stage passage to Nashville. The papers do not make it clear whether or not Henderson and Payne traveled together.
In June, Payne paid Dr. Ament so he could be an agent for Dr. Samuel Thomson of Nashville. Thomson was well known in Tennessee as an “herbalist.” Instead of using and teaching the famous Dr. Benjamin Rush’s methods of blistering, blood letting, and purging, which had been in common use since the 1790s, Thomson prescribed concoctions and medicines generated from plants and trees to treat disease. According to the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, Thomson had as many as 29 agents selling patents to his medicine throughout the state. The papers discovered in the courthouse include 19 blank patents, which Payne had the right to sell for $20 a piece to anyone wanting to use Dr. Thomson’s remedies – hence the term “patent medicine.” A slip of paper among those discovered showed that Payne purchased 25 patents. So, he sold six.
The papers also included a July 9, 1833, letter from Edmond Hall, who may have lived in Bath County, Kentucky, describing some of the gruesome symptoms of cholera. He wrote, “Cholera usually comes on with diarrhea, the discharges of which are of a white color resembling rice water…spasms or cramping in the second stage which comes on in the lower extremities, gradually rising up into the stomach.” The disease was often fatal, and victims died within a hours of the first symptoms. It was a horrifying epidemic. Hall recommended treatment with calomel, rhubarb, chicken water, and turpentine all applied at various intervals of the illness. It makes one wonder if the cure was part of the problem.
Perhaps Alfred Payne ignored Hall’s treatment because he dutifully transcribed Dr. Thomson’s remedy for cholera on a sheet included in the once wayward bundle of documents. He wrote, “the patient must be well rubed [rubbed] with spirits of turpentine” and “place the patient between wooling blankets.” At this point patients may have demanded the brandy and “nerve powder” Henderson purchased in Nashville.
Although there is no concrete evidence to whether or not cholera spread into Allen County in 1833, it is hard to imagine that two men went to such great lengths to purchase large quantities of medical ingredients in anticipation of an epidemic. Perhaps they speculated and designed to make money from cholera’s arrival. Why would they have made such an effort to document their expenses then submit them to public scrutiny in the county clerk’s records?
Perhaps they used their own funds to acquire medicine and patents in Nashville then sought reimbursement from the county. Maybe Allen County was a forerunner in the public health movement that swept the state following subsequent cholera outbreaks. Either no one has mined the answers to these questions from other records or the answers do not exist.
Lorenzo D. Henderson disappeared from the county’s records in 1834. He was probably one of the thousands of souls the advancing west swept out of Kentucky. Alfred Payne, on the other hand, maintained his position as county surveyor until his death in late 1849, according to deed and will records at the Allen County Courthouse. Curiously, the 1840 U.S. Census enumerated Payne in Smith County, Tennessee, which was adjacent to Allen County before that state created Macon County in 1842, but he never relinquished his position as county surveyor in Allen. He wrote his will on May 17, 1848, and left his estate to his daughter Martha Anderson, a widow. He also left money to insure the education of his grandchildren. His family probated his will at the Allen County Court session in January, 1850.
Like many discoveries of old documents, these raise more questions than they answer. This should only be the first step into further investigation of this chapter of Allen County’s history.
The discovery of these documents inspired members of the Allen County Historical Society to roll up their sleeves and unfold and re-box thousands of documents housed in the Allen County Clerk’s office. Beverly Calvert directed their efforts, which helped guarantee the long term preservation of their county’s heritage. Ms. Calvert and Judge/Executive Johnny Hobdy made sure the “Cholera Papers” received special attention. They had KDLA clean, de-acidify, and encapsulate the records so that the public can enjoy these wonderful documents. KDLA returned them to the clerk’s office in 2005.
Monday, December 3, 2007
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
COPPER SILVICULTURE
By J. Trace Kirkwood
When I’m out on the road, I never know what type of people I’m going to encounter. I would be lying if I said that the constant travel wasn’t a bit fatiguing. It is. If I’ve been on the road a lot during the week, I find myself nodding off around 8:30 on a Friday night because the miles and time and uneven rhythm of the road all converge upon me by that hour. At times I’m torn, though. The road can be wearing, but I shudder at the thought of being confined in some fluorescent lighted hell-hole office in some non-descript building in some smog-blanketed city somewhere.
I’m free out there on the road, but it is not really the freedom that invigorates me. It’s the people. I work with a lot of fantastic people, and they all are very kind to me. That helps a lot, but sometimes I find complete strangers who make me thankful I’m not pinned up in an office.
John VandenBrook is one of those strangers, and I met him on Tuesday (Nov. 20, 2007) while working at the Fulton County Courthouse in Hickman, Kentucky. I noticed John and his family early in the day. He was helping his wife and daughter pore through old marriage and estate records in the county clerk’s office while I was helping the staff move old records out of the attic in preparation for a move. I was busy, and they were busy, so I did not speak to them.
When I was pulling out of the parking lot in the afternoon, I noticed VandenBrook sitting in the back of his family’s mini-van with a fistful of tiny copper wires that went off in all different directions out of his hand. My curiosity got the best of me, so I stopped and asked him what and the heck he was doing. A big smile came across his face, and he said, “I’m making my trees.”
I got out of my car and found him sitting next to a box of intricately crafted trees made of copper wire and colorful beads and crystals fastened to quartzite rocks. Only, he doesn’t just stick the colorful trees to the rocks, he crafts the root system just as intricately as the branches and leaves so that it looks like the roots are clinging onto and into the stone. They were beautiful. And, there Mr. VandenBrook was twisting and bending tiny strands of copper into another one of his fantastic creations. He was very at ease with what was doing, and I was at ease watching him. I’ve always found watching artists and craftsmen doing their work to be very relaxing.
“Oh, I got a little bored in there,” VandenBrook told me, “so I came out here to make another tree. I always carry my supplies with me.” He pointed to another small box in the back of the van.
It looked to me that his supplies were nothing more than some copper wire, beads, crystals, a few large rocks, and his hands. Before my very eyes those four components were coming together in the form of another tree to be placed on a flashing piece of stone full of flecks of mica. I wondered if he was forming the big maple tree in front of the courthouse or some tree from the corners of his imagination.
The whole time he talked to me, his hands worked those wires, pulling off five or ten of the small strands to fashion a branch or a series of stems.
Even though he struggled in his high school art classes, VandenBrook always considered himself to be an artist. His creations in high school didn’t exactly conform to the curriculum the art teachers had in mind, but he developed his talent in sculpting wire into trees later in life. While he worked in a machine shop in Missouri, he started crafting spiders and other bugs and fastened them to the sides of the machines so they looked as if they were crawling on them.
One day he took some of the copper and fashioned it into a tree. A fellow employee took it and asked if he could make another. Soon, most of his fellow workers were asking if he could make them one of his trees. It resulted in the classic success story. VandenBrook ended up doing a private show for a group of wealthy women in Montgomery, Alabama, which is near where he lives. Now, his artwork is in galleries in Alabama, Missouri, and Kentucky. He also travels to art shows throughout the South.
Not all of his creations fit in the palm of a person’s hand. He has made trees as large as six or eight feet tall, and his father displays one of the trees in his front yard in Missouri.
While he and I were talking he explained that he gives a lot of his artwork away to charitable organizations to auction. “God gave me this talent,” he said, “so, I figure I should use for some good.”
That’s part of the beauty of this world. A man can get bored and sit in the parking lot of a Kentucky courthouse and twist simple copper wire into magnificent artistic creations.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
AN AFTERNOON AT JOE'S
By J. Trace Kirkwood
Recently, two of my best friends and I met with our friend and mentor – a retired algebra teacher named Troy Lovett – for lunch at a restaurant called Joe’s. Joe’s is in Lyndon, which is one of many little satellite suburban cities that ring the City of Louisville. A cold and gray November rain washed down on the streets and sidewalks of the suburban town and stole all the color from the houses and buildings and trees. It felt colder than it was, and the rain felt like it fell harder than it really did.
When we entered Joe’s, we all shook off the cold and the wet. I didn’t give the impromptu luncheon any chance of being more than a quick meal and a series of oaths to get together again before a few more of our hairs turned gray. We all seemed tired. Russ, a salesman, checked messages on his Blackberry. Todd, a journalist, seemed pre-occupied with his next assignment, and Mr. Lovett was mentally preparing for a math class he teaches at a local college. I was worn down from being at a convention in downtown Louisville where I had to meet with a succession of local politicians from around the state. It was fun but fatiguing. I’m not even sure if I’m classifying the feelings of my friends correctly because I may have projected my fatigue onto them.
I grew up in Lyndon. My family moved there from Miami, Florida, in 1972, and I was just a little boy. We lived on a dead end street just east of the little town that still maintained its own identity – far enough from Louisville for residents to still write “Lyndon, KY” in the addresses of our mail. Farm fields and large tracts of woods still existed just east of where we lived and left over asparagus and other vegetables sprung up in our yards and fields, a ghostly reminder of the truck farms that once were located where the first seeds of suburban sprawl had taken root.
Lyndon had its own grocery, hardware, gas station, elementary school, five-and-dime, and bowling alley. It even had a post office, an Ehrler’s Ice Cream Shop, and a Mario’s Pizza at the corner of Lyndon Lane and LaGrange Road.
My mother sometimes sent my sister Mary Kay and me to the store to pick up some ingredient she forgot to get while buying the week’s groceries. Mary Kay was 15 when we moved to Lyndon, and she was 5’10” tall with long and straight blonde hair. On our walks to “Downtown Lyndon” I had trouble keeping up with her striding gait.
To the terror of my sister, we had to pass a little shack of a bar called “Joe’s,” which was on the north side of LaGrange Road. We always walked along a concrete sidewalk on the south side of the highway. It was an awful looking dump of a place that looked like it had once been a nice little house. Two big trees stood out in front of it, and the partially dead branches were filled with green tufts of mistletoe, which were even visible in the summer. The gravel and dirt parking lot went right to the door of the shack, and a patch of grass was under the two big trees. Picnic tables were placed helter-skelter in that patch, and there were always a group of rough looking men sitting on them drinking beer – butts on the table tops and boots on the benches.
Every time we walked past that place those men hooted and hollered and whistled at my poor sister – awkward at 15 and uncomfortable with her height and her looks. I felt sorry for her, and I always wanted to run across the highway and slap those men upside their heads. As soon as it was possible she and I ducked behind the Lyndon Fire Station and continued on a shortcut to the grocery. Mary Kay always just told me to ignore them.
Joe’s was always an intimidating place with equally intimidating men loitering on those old crappy picnic tables. They seemed to never change. Mary Kay, however, got her driver’s license and no longer had to endure their hooting and whistling and lewd comments from across the road. Other girls from our neighborhood took my sister’s place, but those men were always the same. I knew their vehicles, and I knew their voices.
When I was about 12, our neighbors had a “block party” in the driveway in front of their garage. In the planning stages, they decided to buy a keg of beer, and they charged my father with retrieving the big aluminum barrel and bringing it to the party. I went with dad and had no idea where someone went to get a keg of beer. When he pulled his big ole Oldsmobile into the gravel parking lot at Joe’s I was surprised and a little scared. It was Saturday morning, so the usual crowd of unshaven desperados hadn’t taken their roost on the picnic tables in the grass.
Dad got out of the car and motioned for me to come with him. I trembled at the thought of going into Joe’s, and I was convinced that a group of men would meet us just inside of the door and do us harm. Somewhere in my mind I heard Charlie Daniels singing “Uneasy Rider,” and anytime I hear that song I picture the Joe’s in Lyndon around 1975.
“Kinda a redneck lookin’ joint
Called the Dew-Drop-Inn”
I followed dad through the door of that place as if I were a hostage following a captor. At first, I stayed very close to his side to the point of irritating him. The inside was dingy, lit only by a light behind a short wooden bar and the windows across the front. A few dirty tables were scattered in a small sitting area in front of the bar, and a colorful collage of liquor bottles stood behind it. I looked through the windows and had a different view of my little town. I had other angles on the same old buildings. The woods across the highway seemed thick and dense, and the little cinder block fire station looked like it was by itself. The buildings looked old and the big trees out front kept me from seeing very much. For a second, I imagined my sister, Mary Kay, walking the sidewalk on the other side of the highway, and I imagined her goofy toe-headed little brother racing to match her stride.
The bartender loaded the beer keg into the back of dad’s car, and we pulled out of the parking lot with the limestone rock groaning beneath the weight of that Oldsmobile. I looked back at the squatty little house, which had been kidnapped and made into a bar, and felt like I had crossed some threshold between childhood and adulthood.
Joe’s underwent a transformation in the years after 1984, when I left Lyndon. They cut down the old dead trees, made a large addition on the rear of that old house, and paved the parking lot. The picnic tables, I’m sure, were chopped into firewood, and the beer drinking rednecks were all shooed away to either climb into their coffins or roost at some other seedy tavern.
When my friends and I decided to get together for lunch near where Mr. Lovett has an office, we decided to eat at Joe’s. I thought it would be interesting to lunch not at an old haunt but at an old place that haunted me.
I’m not going to recount our conversation that day, but it was one of those times when friends get together and build their friendship by talking, listening and laughing together. In terms of friends, Russ and Todd and Mr. Lovett are both old an new. I don’t know them from the days of childhood in Lyndon. I know them from college, and we started our friendships during those goofy years at WKU in Bowling Green, where I now live. We’ve flourished as friends through the trials of careers, starting families and marriages, and as we’ve stepped down from the stage of our youth. Our world has changed, but the fraternal love we have for one another is steady. We’ve been friends for more than two decades, and afternoon’s like the one we spent at Joe’s makes me realize that we’ll be friends for the rest of our lives.
My friends from my Lyndon days are still around, but different interests and careers were too much for childhood friendships. We broke apart, yet I still love each and every one of those old friends and neighbors, and they played an immeasurable role in my life. They’ve evolved into short phone calls and Christmas cards, though. I miss those careless childhood days I spent with those guys and girls from my old street. I still feel a bond to them, but the stage lights have faded on them. It is comforting that they are still around, but I don’t think a lunch at Joe’s would result in a moving two hour long conversation.
When we concluded our lunch that day to go off into our different directions I felt as if two very important parts of my life converged while sitting in the once seedy and redneck infested confines of Joe’s Bar. I looked through the front windows of Joe’s, just as I did all those years ago when my father still drove Oldsmobiles and still had jet black hair and was unafraid to walk into a juke joint with his little boy. This time I saw a world that had changed. The woods that once stood are now an office building and a hot tub store. The Lyndon Fire Station is a massive brick edifice, and the old grocery store has been torn down and replaced by a glitzy, neon-lighted drug store.
Yes, the Lyndon of the 1970s is all but gone. It is not as sad to me as one might think. The world changes and there is little we can do to stop it. Buildings and streets and sidewalks crumble and succumb to the blade of the bulldozer, but if we put our faith in those that we love, the world and its temporariness is unimportant. The dreamy days of childhood lured me while at Joe’s, but I am thankful to be able to stack the lasting friendships I have today onto the ones from my childhood.
Recently, two of my best friends and I met with our friend and mentor – a retired algebra teacher named Troy Lovett – for lunch at a restaurant called Joe’s. Joe’s is in Lyndon, which is one of many little satellite suburban cities that ring the City of Louisville. A cold and gray November rain washed down on the streets and sidewalks of the suburban town and stole all the color from the houses and buildings and trees. It felt colder than it was, and the rain felt like it fell harder than it really did.
When we entered Joe’s, we all shook off the cold and the wet. I didn’t give the impromptu luncheon any chance of being more than a quick meal and a series of oaths to get together again before a few more of our hairs turned gray. We all seemed tired. Russ, a salesman, checked messages on his Blackberry. Todd, a journalist, seemed pre-occupied with his next assignment, and Mr. Lovett was mentally preparing for a math class he teaches at a local college. I was worn down from being at a convention in downtown Louisville where I had to meet with a succession of local politicians from around the state. It was fun but fatiguing. I’m not even sure if I’m classifying the feelings of my friends correctly because I may have projected my fatigue onto them.
I grew up in Lyndon. My family moved there from Miami, Florida, in 1972, and I was just a little boy. We lived on a dead end street just east of the little town that still maintained its own identity – far enough from Louisville for residents to still write “Lyndon, KY” in the addresses of our mail. Farm fields and large tracts of woods still existed just east of where we lived and left over asparagus and other vegetables sprung up in our yards and fields, a ghostly reminder of the truck farms that once were located where the first seeds of suburban sprawl had taken root.
Lyndon had its own grocery, hardware, gas station, elementary school, five-and-dime, and bowling alley. It even had a post office, an Ehrler’s Ice Cream Shop, and a Mario’s Pizza at the corner of Lyndon Lane and LaGrange Road.
My mother sometimes sent my sister Mary Kay and me to the store to pick up some ingredient she forgot to get while buying the week’s groceries. Mary Kay was 15 when we moved to Lyndon, and she was 5’10” tall with long and straight blonde hair. On our walks to “Downtown Lyndon” I had trouble keeping up with her striding gait.
To the terror of my sister, we had to pass a little shack of a bar called “Joe’s,” which was on the north side of LaGrange Road. We always walked along a concrete sidewalk on the south side of the highway. It was an awful looking dump of a place that looked like it had once been a nice little house. Two big trees stood out in front of it, and the partially dead branches were filled with green tufts of mistletoe, which were even visible in the summer. The gravel and dirt parking lot went right to the door of the shack, and a patch of grass was under the two big trees. Picnic tables were placed helter-skelter in that patch, and there were always a group of rough looking men sitting on them drinking beer – butts on the table tops and boots on the benches.
Every time we walked past that place those men hooted and hollered and whistled at my poor sister – awkward at 15 and uncomfortable with her height and her looks. I felt sorry for her, and I always wanted to run across the highway and slap those men upside their heads. As soon as it was possible she and I ducked behind the Lyndon Fire Station and continued on a shortcut to the grocery. Mary Kay always just told me to ignore them.
Joe’s was always an intimidating place with equally intimidating men loitering on those old crappy picnic tables. They seemed to never change. Mary Kay, however, got her driver’s license and no longer had to endure their hooting and whistling and lewd comments from across the road. Other girls from our neighborhood took my sister’s place, but those men were always the same. I knew their vehicles, and I knew their voices.
When I was about 12, our neighbors had a “block party” in the driveway in front of their garage. In the planning stages, they decided to buy a keg of beer, and they charged my father with retrieving the big aluminum barrel and bringing it to the party. I went with dad and had no idea where someone went to get a keg of beer. When he pulled his big ole Oldsmobile into the gravel parking lot at Joe’s I was surprised and a little scared. It was Saturday morning, so the usual crowd of unshaven desperados hadn’t taken their roost on the picnic tables in the grass.
Dad got out of the car and motioned for me to come with him. I trembled at the thought of going into Joe’s, and I was convinced that a group of men would meet us just inside of the door and do us harm. Somewhere in my mind I heard Charlie Daniels singing “Uneasy Rider,” and anytime I hear that song I picture the Joe’s in Lyndon around 1975.
“Kinda a redneck lookin’ joint
Called the Dew-Drop-Inn”
I followed dad through the door of that place as if I were a hostage following a captor. At first, I stayed very close to his side to the point of irritating him. The inside was dingy, lit only by a light behind a short wooden bar and the windows across the front. A few dirty tables were scattered in a small sitting area in front of the bar, and a colorful collage of liquor bottles stood behind it. I looked through the windows and had a different view of my little town. I had other angles on the same old buildings. The woods across the highway seemed thick and dense, and the little cinder block fire station looked like it was by itself. The buildings looked old and the big trees out front kept me from seeing very much. For a second, I imagined my sister, Mary Kay, walking the sidewalk on the other side of the highway, and I imagined her goofy toe-headed little brother racing to match her stride.
The bartender loaded the beer keg into the back of dad’s car, and we pulled out of the parking lot with the limestone rock groaning beneath the weight of that Oldsmobile. I looked back at the squatty little house, which had been kidnapped and made into a bar, and felt like I had crossed some threshold between childhood and adulthood.
Joe’s underwent a transformation in the years after 1984, when I left Lyndon. They cut down the old dead trees, made a large addition on the rear of that old house, and paved the parking lot. The picnic tables, I’m sure, were chopped into firewood, and the beer drinking rednecks were all shooed away to either climb into their coffins or roost at some other seedy tavern.
When my friends and I decided to get together for lunch near where Mr. Lovett has an office, we decided to eat at Joe’s. I thought it would be interesting to lunch not at an old haunt but at an old place that haunted me.
I’m not going to recount our conversation that day, but it was one of those times when friends get together and build their friendship by talking, listening and laughing together. In terms of friends, Russ and Todd and Mr. Lovett are both old an new. I don’t know them from the days of childhood in Lyndon. I know them from college, and we started our friendships during those goofy years at WKU in Bowling Green, where I now live. We’ve flourished as friends through the trials of careers, starting families and marriages, and as we’ve stepped down from the stage of our youth. Our world has changed, but the fraternal love we have for one another is steady. We’ve been friends for more than two decades, and afternoon’s like the one we spent at Joe’s makes me realize that we’ll be friends for the rest of our lives.
My friends from my Lyndon days are still around, but different interests and careers were too much for childhood friendships. We broke apart, yet I still love each and every one of those old friends and neighbors, and they played an immeasurable role in my life. They’ve evolved into short phone calls and Christmas cards, though. I miss those careless childhood days I spent with those guys and girls from my old street. I still feel a bond to them, but the stage lights have faded on them. It is comforting that they are still around, but I don’t think a lunch at Joe’s would result in a moving two hour long conversation.
When we concluded our lunch that day to go off into our different directions I felt as if two very important parts of my life converged while sitting in the once seedy and redneck infested confines of Joe’s Bar. I looked through the front windows of Joe’s, just as I did all those years ago when my father still drove Oldsmobiles and still had jet black hair and was unafraid to walk into a juke joint with his little boy. This time I saw a world that had changed. The woods that once stood are now an office building and a hot tub store. The Lyndon Fire Station is a massive brick edifice, and the old grocery store has been torn down and replaced by a glitzy, neon-lighted drug store.
Yes, the Lyndon of the 1970s is all but gone. It is not as sad to me as one might think. The world changes and there is little we can do to stop it. Buildings and streets and sidewalks crumble and succumb to the blade of the bulldozer, but if we put our faith in those that we love, the world and its temporariness is unimportant. The dreamy days of childhood lured me while at Joe’s, but I am thankful to be able to stack the lasting friendships I have today onto the ones from my childhood.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
KISS IT GOODBYE
By J. Trace Kirkwood
The smoke stacks for the Tennessee Valley Authority’s steam generation plant lord over the part of Muhlenberg County once known as Paradise. In a great ironical twist, the steam plant now carries the name “Paradise.” Today, when a soul is in Paradise, he cannot escape the omnipresent concrete and steel exclamation points that jab their way into the Kentucky sky. They are the megalo-modern world’s exclamation, shouting over a world long since gone. Orangish yellow smoke and white steam rush from the tops of those stacks into the blue sky, reminiscent of when a booted foot stirs the silt from the bottom of a clear flowing creek. Only in Paradise, the image is inverted. The choking haze leaps into the sky above everything and everyone.
A few years ago, my wife and I were twiddling our way through the Green River Valley killing a day off from work. At some point we found a large official looking sign proclaiming in large letters “TVA PARADISE.” I snapped a photograph of Dana standing in front of the sign. In the photo she is braced against the wind and her hands are pulling the collar of her raincoat up around her neck. Behind the sign the TVA plant smokes and steams in a cold autumn rain. A rain drop splattered the camera’s lens just as I triggered the shutter, as if a tearful angel somehow tried to stop me from documenting a lost Paradise.
I could not resist the bleak poetry of the image before me. Paradise. It seemed to prove the truism Don Henley professed in the Eagles’ song Providence, “you call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.”
Paradise was a real place at one time. Legend states that a young couple traveling the Green River with their hopelessly sick child woke to discover the baby had regained its health. Allegedly one of them proclaimed, “This truly must be Paradise.” It is not important how Paradise got its name. There is little doubt that this idyllic little town was a paradise to the people of that part of Muhlenberg County before the destructive hand of the modern world clenched its fist around that blissful place. It overlooked a ferry crossing on Green River from a knoll once topped with houses, stores, trees, and people.
The little town probably owed its life, at least its heyday, to the extraction of minerals from the Muhlenberg countryside. Ironmasters and miners flocked to Paradise to capitalize on the precious minerals tucked in black veins beneath the life giving land.
Scottish immigrants bankrolled by the limitless wealth of Robert Sproule Crawford Aitchison Alexander failed at smelting iron ore into even greater wealth a mile down stream at Airdrie Hill. R.S.C.A. Alexander was descended from Scottish kings, and only royal blood could carry around that many names. The Alexander family is more famous for the Airdrie Stud Farm in Woodford County, a place where their descendants still lord over the land.
Later, General Don Carlos Buell came to Paradise. In the Civil War the priggish little general achieved fame when he saved Ulysses S. Grant’s forces at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee. Later, however, Buell’s reluctance or inability to pursue Confederate forces after the Battle of Perryville in Boyle County resulted in the army removing him from command. Many contended that the career soldier was a Confederate sympathizer, and although an investigative committee cleared his name, the taciturn man resigned his commission.
In 1866, Buell came to Muhlenberg County in search of oil and leased thousands of acres at Airdrie Hill near Paradise to search for it. Buell never found oil, and one could contend that he never found his own paradise. After coming up dry in the oil business, he started a coal mining operation at Airdrie, which was successful for a number of years, but even in that business Buell found only anguish. In 1868, the Kentucky General Assembly chartered the “Green and Barren River Navigation Company” and charged it with keeping the river and locks open to navigation. The company managed the river with great zeal, quickly discovering its own power as a monopoly. Their high freight rates and unfair business practices soon forced Buell’s company to near insolvency. By the 1880’s, Airdrie produced no coal, and the paradise Buell sought there turned into a hellish denouement for an old general.
The black veins remained under Paradise. Everyone knew what was beneath the ground under their feet, but they had no way of knowing that the future held anguish for their locality. The seams of coal beneath the area were three and six feet thick and posed problems for underground mining. It was not until the 20th Century that man created an efficient way to extract the coal in eastern Muhlenberg County. Mining companies used massive machines to gouge through the land, which they carelessly called “overburden,” to get to the black veins below. Iron claws powered by steam, Diesel, and electricity gnawed at the Muhlenberg countryside for decades leaving behind a tormented landscape and a little fragment of Paradise. Then, Paradise sat by itself along Green River and its kinsman, the iron furnace, stood as a stony skeleton beneath a mined out rise once called Airdrie Hill.
The modern world was not through with Paradise. In 1962, the TVA began constructing the Paradise Steam Generation Plant, which, for a time, co-existed with the paradisiacal little remnant of Muhlenberg’s past. Angst filled the co-existence, though. The few people left in Paradise found the belching smokestacks and the endless delivery of coal to fulfill the world’s insatiable appetite for electricity to be unbearable.
In 1967, the TVA purchased Paradise and removed all of its inhabitants. Then, it allowed the Pittsburgh and Midland Mining Company to bring in their heavy equipment and towering shovels and punishing drag buckets to strip out Paradise for the black coal beneath it. The very thing that had once provided life for Paradise now killed it.
People continuously try to blame the TVA, P&M Mining, and the Peabody Coal Company for the loss of Paradise. We can very well blame their attitudes, but it is impossible to place it entirely on them without also looking at the sum of the world in which we live, the world man has created for himself.
Do we not use up a little bit of Paradise each time we flip on a light bulb or boot up a computer?
Yep. “You call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye.”
A few years ago, my wife and I were twiddling our way through the Green River Valley killing a day off from work. At some point we found a large official looking sign proclaiming in large letters “TVA PARADISE.” I snapped a photograph of Dana standing in front of the sign. In the photo she is braced against the wind and her hands are pulling the collar of her raincoat up around her neck. Behind the sign the TVA plant smokes and steams in a cold autumn rain. A rain drop splattered the camera’s lens just as I triggered the shutter, as if a tearful angel somehow tried to stop me from documenting a lost Paradise.
I could not resist the bleak poetry of the image before me. Paradise. It seemed to prove the truism Don Henley professed in the Eagles’ song Providence, “you call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.”
Paradise was a real place at one time. Legend states that a young couple traveling the Green River with their hopelessly sick child woke to discover the baby had regained its health. Allegedly one of them proclaimed, “This truly must be Paradise.” It is not important how Paradise got its name. There is little doubt that this idyllic little town was a paradise to the people of that part of Muhlenberg County before the destructive hand of the modern world clenched its fist around that blissful place. It overlooked a ferry crossing on Green River from a knoll once topped with houses, stores, trees, and people.
The little town probably owed its life, at least its heyday, to the extraction of minerals from the Muhlenberg countryside. Ironmasters and miners flocked to Paradise to capitalize on the precious minerals tucked in black veins beneath the life giving land.
Scottish immigrants bankrolled by the limitless wealth of Robert Sproule Crawford Aitchison Alexander failed at smelting iron ore into even greater wealth a mile down stream at Airdrie Hill. R.S.C.A. Alexander was descended from Scottish kings, and only royal blood could carry around that many names. The Alexander family is more famous for the Airdrie Stud Farm in Woodford County, a place where their descendants still lord over the land.
Later, General Don Carlos Buell came to Paradise. In the Civil War the priggish little general achieved fame when he saved Ulysses S. Grant’s forces at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee. Later, however, Buell’s reluctance or inability to pursue Confederate forces after the Battle of Perryville in Boyle County resulted in the army removing him from command. Many contended that the career soldier was a Confederate sympathizer, and although an investigative committee cleared his name, the taciturn man resigned his commission.
In 1866, Buell came to Muhlenberg County in search of oil and leased thousands of acres at Airdrie Hill near Paradise to search for it. Buell never found oil, and one could contend that he never found his own paradise. After coming up dry in the oil business, he started a coal mining operation at Airdrie, which was successful for a number of years, but even in that business Buell found only anguish. In 1868, the Kentucky General Assembly chartered the “Green and Barren River Navigation Company” and charged it with keeping the river and locks open to navigation. The company managed the river with great zeal, quickly discovering its own power as a monopoly. Their high freight rates and unfair business practices soon forced Buell’s company to near insolvency. By the 1880’s, Airdrie produced no coal, and the paradise Buell sought there turned into a hellish denouement for an old general.
The black veins remained under Paradise. Everyone knew what was beneath the ground under their feet, but they had no way of knowing that the future held anguish for their locality. The seams of coal beneath the area were three and six feet thick and posed problems for underground mining. It was not until the 20th Century that man created an efficient way to extract the coal in eastern Muhlenberg County. Mining companies used massive machines to gouge through the land, which they carelessly called “overburden,” to get to the black veins below. Iron claws powered by steam, Diesel, and electricity gnawed at the Muhlenberg countryside for decades leaving behind a tormented landscape and a little fragment of Paradise. Then, Paradise sat by itself along Green River and its kinsman, the iron furnace, stood as a stony skeleton beneath a mined out rise once called Airdrie Hill.
The modern world was not through with Paradise. In 1962, the TVA began constructing the Paradise Steam Generation Plant, which, for a time, co-existed with the paradisiacal little remnant of Muhlenberg’s past. Angst filled the co-existence, though. The few people left in Paradise found the belching smokestacks and the endless delivery of coal to fulfill the world’s insatiable appetite for electricity to be unbearable.
In 1967, the TVA purchased Paradise and removed all of its inhabitants. Then, it allowed the Pittsburgh and Midland Mining Company to bring in their heavy equipment and towering shovels and punishing drag buckets to strip out Paradise for the black coal beneath it. The very thing that had once provided life for Paradise now killed it.
People continuously try to blame the TVA, P&M Mining, and the Peabody Coal Company for the loss of Paradise. We can very well blame their attitudes, but it is impossible to place it entirely on them without also looking at the sum of the world in which we live, the world man has created for himself.
Do we not use up a little bit of Paradise each time we flip on a light bulb or boot up a computer?
Yep. “You call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye.”
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