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OLD STONK HOMESTEAD.

THE BLUE-GRASS
REGION OF KENTUCKY
AND OTHER KENTUCKY ARTICLES
BY JAMES LANE ALLEN. ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
M DCCC XCII

Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserzied.

E g" k 3 8

PREFACE

THE articles herein reprinted from HARPER'S and The
Century magazines represent work done at intervals dur
ing the period that the author was writing the tales al
ready published under the title of Flute and Violin.
It was his plan that with each descriptive article should
go a short story dealing with the same subj'ect, and this
plan was in part wrought out. Thus, with the article en
titled " Uncle Tom at Home" goes the tale entitled " Two
Gentlemen of Kentucky;" and with the article entitled
" A Home of the Silent Brotherhood " goes the tale en
titled " The White Cowl." In the same way, there were
to be short stories severally dealing with the other subjects
embraced in this volume. But having in part wrought out
this plan, the author has let it rest — not finally, perhaps,
but because in the mean time he has found himself en
gaged with other themes.

CONTENTS

PAGE
THE BLUE-GRASS REGION  i
UNCLE TOM AT HOME  45
COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY .... 87
KENTUCKY FAIRS  127
A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD ... 169
HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS  199
THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK . 229
MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND . . .269

ILLUSTRATIONS

Tobacco Patch

PAGE

Old Stone Homestead . . Frontispiece
Blue -grass . 5
Sheep in Woodland Pasture 9
Negro Cabins . . 15
Cattle in a Blue -grass Pasture 21
Hemp Field 25

•21)

Harrodsburg Pike 33
A Spring -house . 41
The Mammy 59
The Cook 65
Chasing the Rabbit 77
The Preacher . 81
Wet Goods for Sale — Bowling Green . . cji
Concluding a Bargain .... . 93
Court-house Square, Lexington, Kentucky . . . 97
The "Tickler" . IOi
The Quack -doctor . 105
Auctioning a Jack J09
Lords of the Soil . . n 3
Swapping Horses  117

x ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE
Gentlemen of Leisure . . . . . • • • .121
Corn -husking . . .... 131
Militia Muster . ... .... 135
Products of the Soil  139
Cattle at Lexington Fair  143
Harness Horses  147
The Modern Tourney  151
The Judge's Stand — The Finish  155
A Dinner-party  157
The Race -course — The Finish . 159
Stallions  . . 163
Mules . . . . 165
Office of the Father Prior .... 177
Within the Gates .... . . 181
A Fortnightly Shave  187
The Garden .  197
Old Ferry at Point Burnside . 233
"Damn me if them ain't the damnedest beans I ever seen!" 237
Moonrise on Cumberland Ridge 239
Cumberland Falls . 243
Native Types . . . 247
Interior of a Mountaineer's Home . . .251
Mountain Courtship . ... 255
A Family Burying -ground . . . 259
A Mountaineer Dame . . '. 261

Old Corn -mill at Pineville
Map Showing Mountain Passes of the Cumberland
Cumberland Gap 
Ford on the Cumberland .
Kentucky River from High Bridge .

265277
281297 309

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION

I
INE might well name it Saxon grass, so
much is it at home in Saxon England,
so like the loveliest landscapes of green
Saxon England has it made other land
scapes on which dwell a kindred race in America,
and so akin is it to the type of nature that is
peculiarly Saxon : being a hardy, kindly, beautiful,
nourishing stock; loving rich lands and apt to find
out where they lie ; uprooting inferior aborigines,
but stoutly defending its new domain against all
invaders ; paying taxes well, with profits to boot ;
thriving best in temperate latitudes and checkered
sunshine ; benevolent to flocks and herds ; and ally
ing itself closely to the history of any people whose
content lies in simple plenty and habitual peace —
the perfect squire-and-yeoman type of grasses.
In the earliest spring nothing is sooner afield to
contest possession of the land than the blue-grass.
Its little green spear-points are the first to pierce
the soft rich earth, and array themselves in countless
companies over the rolling landscapes, while its roots
reach out in every direction for securer foothold.
So early does this take place, that a late hoar-frost

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION

will now and then mow all these bristling spear-
points down. Sometimes a slow -falling sleet will
incase each emerald blade in glittering silver; but
the sun by-and-by melts the silver, leaving the blade
unhurt. Or a light snow-fall will cover tufts of it
over, making pavilions and colonnades with white
roofs resting on green pillars. The roofs vanish
anon, and the columns go on silently rising. But
usually the final rigors of the season prove harmless
to the blue-grass. One sees it most beautiful in the
spring, just before the seed stalks have shot upward
from the flowing tufts, and while the thin, smooth,
polished blades, having risen to their greatest height,
are beginning to bend, or break and fall over on
themselves and their nether fellows from sheer lux
uriance. The least observant eye is now constrained
to note that blue-grass is the characteristic element
of the Kentucky turf — the first element of beauty
in the Kentucky landscape. Over the stretches of
woodland pasture, over the meadows and the lawns,
by the edges of turnpike and lane, in the fence cor
ners — wherever its seed has been allowed to flourish
— it spreads a verdure so soft in fold and fine in text
ure, so entrancing by its freshness and fertility, that
it looks like a deep-lying, thick-matted emerald moss.
One thinks of it, not as some heavy, velvet-like car
pet spread over the earth, but as some light, seam
less veil that has fallen delicately around it, and that
might be blown away by a passing breeze.

After this you
will not see the
blue-grass so beau
tiful. The seed ripens in June.
Already the slender seed stalks
have sprung up above the uni
form green level, bearing on
their summits the fuzzy, plu
my, purplish seed-vessels ; and
save the soft, feathery undu
lations of these as the wind
sweeps over them, the beauty of the blue-grass is
gone. Moreover, certain robust and persistent weeds

' • K'V'^v^r*..

BLUE-GRASS.

6 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
and grasses have been growing apace, roughening
and diversifying the sward, so that the vista is less
charming. During July and August the blue-grass
lies comparatively inactive, resting from fructifica
tion, and missing, as well, frequent showers to tem
per the sunshine. In seasons of severe drought it
even dies quite away, leaving the surface of the
earth as bare and brown as a winter landscape or
arid plain. Where it has been closely grazed, one
may, in walking over it, stir such a dust as one
would raise on a highway ; and the upturned, half-
exposed rootlets seem entirely dead. But the mod
erated heats and the gentle rains that usually come
with the passing of summer bring on a second vig
orous growth, and in the course of several weeks
the landscape is covered with a verdure rivalling
the luxuriance of spring.
There is something incongruous in this marvellous
autumnal rejuvenescence of the blue-grass. All nat
ure appears content and resting. The grapes on the
sunward slopes have received their final coloring of
purple and gold ; the heavy mast is beginning to
drop in the forest, followed by the silent lapse of
russet and crimson leaves; the knee-deep aftermath
has paled its green in the waiting autumn fields;
the plump children are stretching out their nut-
stained hands towards the first happy fire -glow on
chill, dark evenings ; and the cricket has left the
sere, dead garden for a winter home at the hearth.

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 7
Then, lo ! as if by some freakish return of the spring
to the edge of winter the pastures are suddenly as
fresh and green as those of May. The effect on
one who has the true landscape passion is trans
porting and bewildering. Such contrasts of color
it is given one to study nowhere but in blue-grass
lands. It is as if the seasons were met to do some
great piece of brocading. One sees a new meaning
in Poe's melancholy thought — the leaves of the
many-colored grass.
All winter the blue-grass continues green — it is
always green, of course, never blue — and it even
grows a little, except when the ground is frozen.
Thus, year after year, drawing needful nourishment
from the constantly disintegrating limestone below,
flourishes here as nowhere else in the world this
wonderful grass.
Even while shivering in the bleak winds of March,
the young lambs frolicked away from the distent
teats of the ewes, with growing relish for its hardy
succulence, and by-and-by they were taken into mar
ket the sooner and the fatter for its developing qual
ities. During the long summer, foaming pails of
milk and bowls of golden butter have testified to the
Kentucky housewife with what delight the cows
have ruminated on the stores gathered each plentiful
day. The Kentucky farmer knows that the distant
metropolitan beef-eater will in time have good rea
son to thank it for yonder winding herd of sleek

8 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
young steers that are softly brushing their rounded
sides with their long, white, silky tails, while they
plunge their puffing noses into its depths and tear
away huge mouthfuls of its inexhaustible richness.
Thorough -bred sire and dam and foal in paddocks
or deeper pastures have drawn from it form and
quality and organization : hardness and solidity of
bone, strength of tendon, firmness and elasticity of
muscle, power of nerve, and capacity oflung. Even
the Falstaff porkers, their eyes gleaming with glut
tonous enjoyment, have looked to it for the shaping
of their posthumous hams and the padding of their
long backbones in depths of snowy lard. In winter
mules and sheep and horses paw away the snow to
get at the green shoots that lie covered over be
neath the full, rank growth of autumn, or they find
it attractive provender in their ricks. For all that
live upon it, it is perennial and abundant, beautiful
and beneficent — the first great natural factor in the
prosperity of the Kentucky people. What wonder
if the Kentuckian, like the Greek of old, should wish
to have even his paradise well set in grass ; or that,
with a knowing humor, he should smile at David for
saying, " He maketh his grass to grow upon the
mountains," inasmuch as the only grass worth speak
ing of grows on his beloved plain !

SHEEP IN WOODLAND PASTURE.

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION

II
But if grass is the first element in the lovely Ken
tucky landscape, as it must be in every other one, by
no means should it be thought sole or chief. In
Dante, as Ruskin points out, whenever the country
is to be beautiful, we come into open air and open
meadows. Homer places the sirens in a meadow
when they are to sing. Over the blue-grass, there
fore, one walks into the open air and open meadows
of the blue-grass land.
This has long had reputation for being one of the
very beautiful spots of the earth, and it is worth
while to consider those elements of natural scenery
wherein the beauty consists.
One might say, first, that the landscape possesses
what is so very rare even in beautiful landscapes —
the quality of gracefulness. Nowhere does one en
counter vertical lines or violent slopes ; nor are there
perfectly level stretches like those that make the
green fields monotonous in the Dutch lowlands.
The dark, finely sifted soil lies deep over the lime
stone hills, filling out their chasms to evenness, and
rounding their jagged or precipitous edges, very
much as a heavy snow at night will leave the morn
ing landscape with mitigated ruggedness and softer

12 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
curves. The long, slow action of water has further
moulded everything into symmetry, so that the low
ancient hills descend to the valleys in exquisite folds
and uninterrupted slopes. The whole great plain
undulates away league after league towards the dis
tant horizon in an endless succession of gentle con
vex surfaces — like the easy swing of the sea — pre
senting a panorama of subdued swells and retiring
surges. Everything in the blue -grass country is
billowy and afloat. The spirit of nature is inter
mediate between violent energy and complete re
pose ; and the effect of this mild activity is kept
from monotony by the accidental perspective of
position, creating variety of details.
One traces this quality of gracefulness in the
labyrinthine courses of the restful streams, in the
disposition of forest masses, in the free, unstudied
succession of meadow, field, and lawrn. Surely it is
just this order of low hill scenery, just these buoyant
undulations, that should be covered with the blue-
grass. Had Hawthorne ever looked on this land
scape when most beautiful, he could never have said
of England that '' no other country will ever have
this charm of lovely verdure."
Characteristically beautiful spots on the blue-grass
landscape are the woodland pastures. A Kentucky
wheat field, a Kentucky meadow, a Kentucky lawn,
is but a field, a meadow, a lawn, found elsewhere ;
but a Kentucky sylvan slope has a loveliness unique

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 13
and local. Rightly do poets make pre-eminently
beautiful countries abound in trees. John Burroughs,
writing with enthusiasm of English woods, has said
that " in midsummer the hair of our trees seems to
stand on end; the woods have a frightened look, or
as if they were just recovering from a debauch." This
is not true of the Kentucky woods, unless it be in
some season of protracted drought. The foliage of
the Kentucky trees is not thin nor dishevelled, the
leaves crowd thick to the very ends of the boughs,
and spread themselves full to the sky, making, where
they are close together, under-spaces of green gloom
scarcely shot through by sunbeams. Indeed, one
often finds here the perfection of tree forms. I
mean that rare development which brings the ex
tremities of the boughs to the very limit of the curve
that nature intends the tree to define as the peculiar
shape of its species. Any but the most favorable
conditions leave the outline jagged, faulty, and un
true. Here and there over the blue-grass landscape
one's eye rests on a cone-shaped, or dome-shaped, or
inverted pear-shaped, or fan-shaped tree. Nor are
fulness of leafage and perfection of form alone to be
noted; pendency of boughs is another distinguishing
feature. One who loves and closely studies trees
will note here the comparative absence of woody
stiffness. It is expected that the willow and the elm
should droop their branches. Here the same char
acteristic strikes you in the wild cherry, the maple,

14 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
and the sycamore — even in great walnuts and ashes
and oaks ; and I have occasionally discovered ex
ceeding grace of form in hackberries (which usually
look paralytic and as if waiting to hobble away on
crutches), in locusts, and in the harsh hickories —
loved by Thoreau.
But to return to the woodland pastures. They are
the last vestiges of that unbroken primeval forest
which, together with cane-brakes and pea-vines, cov
ered the face of the country when it was first beheld
by the pioneers. No blue -grass then. In these
woods the timber has been so cut out that the re
maining trees often stand clearly revealed in their
entire form, their far-reaching boughs perhaps not
even touching those of their nearest neighbor, or
interlacing them with ineffectual fondness. There
is something pathetic in the sight, and in the thought
of those innumerable stricken ones that in years
agone were dismembered for cord-wood and kitchen
stoves and the vast fireplaces of old-time negro
cabins. In the well kept blue-grass pasture under
growth and weeds are annually cut down, so that the
massive trunks are revealed from a distance ; the
better because the branches seldom are lower than
from ten to twenty feet above the earth. Thus in its
daily course the sun strikes every point beneath the
broad branches, and nourishes the blue-grass up to
the very roots. All savagery, all wildness, is taken
out of these pastures; they are full of tenderness and

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THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 17
repose — of the utmost delicacy and elegance. Over
the graceful earth spreads the flowing green grass,
uniform and universal. Above this stand the full,
swelling trunks — warm browns and pale grays —
often lichen-flecked or moss-enamelled. Over these
expand the vast domes and canopies of leafage. And
falling down upon these comes the placid sunshine
through a sky of cerulean blueness, and past the
snowy zones of gleaming cloud. The very individ
uality of the tree comes out as it never can in denser
places. Always the most truly human object in still,
voiceless nature, it here throws out its arms to you
with imploring tenderness, with what Wordsworth
called "the soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs."
One cannot travel far in the blue -grass country
without coming upon one of these woodland strips.
Of the artistic service rendered the landscape of
this region by other elements of scenery — atmos
phere and cloud and sky — much might, but little
will, be said. The atmosphere is sometimes crys
talline, sometimes full of that intense repose of daz
zling light which one, without ever having seen
them, knows to be on canvases of Turner. Then,
again, it is amber- hued, or tinged with soft blue,
graduated to purple shadows on the horizon. Dur
ing the greater part of the year the cloud-sky is one
of strongly outlined forms ; the great white cumuli
drift over, with every majesty of design and grace
of grouping; but there come, in milder seasons,

18 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
many days when one may see three cloud belts in
the heavens at the same time, the lowest far, far
away, and the highest brushing softly, as it were,
past the very dome of the inviolable blue. You
turn your eye downward to see the light wandering
wistfully among the low distant hills, and the sweet
tremulous shadows crossing the meadows with timid
cadences. It is a beautiful country; the Kentucky
skies are not the cold, hard, brilliant, hideous things
that so many writers on nature style American skies
(usually meaning New England skies), as contrasted
with skies European. They are at times ineffably
warm in tone and tender in hue, giving aerial dis
tances magical and fathomless above, and throwing
down upon the varied soft harmonious greens of the
landscape below, upon its rich browns and weath
ered grays and whole scheme of terrene colors, a
flood of radiance as bountiful and transfiguring as it
is chastened and benign.
But why make a description of the blue -grass
region of Kentucky ? What one sees may be only
what one feels — only intricate affinities between
nature and self that were developed long ago, and
have become too deep to be viewed as relations or
illusions. What two human beings find the same
things in the face of a third, or in nature's ? De
scriptions of scenery are notoriously disappointing
to those whose taste in landscape is different, or who
have little or no sentiment for pure landscape beauty.

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 19
So one coming hither might be sorely disappointed.
No mountains ; no strips of distant blue gleaming
water nor lawny cascades; no grandeur; no majesty;
no wild picturesqueness. The chords of landscape
harmony are very simple ; nothing but softness and
amenity, grace and repose, delicacy and elegance.
One might fail at seasons to find even these. This
is a beautiful country, but not always ; there come
days when the climate shows as ugly a temper as
possible. Not a little of the finest timber has been
lost by storms. The sky is for days one great blank
et of grewsome gray. In winter you laugh with
chattering teeth at those who call this " the South,"
the thermometer perhaps registering from twelve to
fifteen degrees below zero. In summer the name is
but a half-truth. Only by visiting this region during
some lovely season, or by dwelling here from year to
year, and seeing it in all the humors of storm and
sunshine, can one love it.

Ill
But the ideal landscape of daily life must not be
merely beautiful: it should be useful. With what
may not the fertility of this region be compared ?
With the valleys of the Schuylkill, the Shenandoah,
and the Genesee; with the richest lands of Lorn-

20 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
bardy and Belgium ; with the most fertile districts of
England. The evidences of this fertility are every
where. Nature, even in those places where she has
been forced for nearly a hundred years to bear much
at the hands of a not always judicious agriculture,
unceasingly struggles to cover herself with bushes
of all sorts and nameless annual weeds and grasses.
Even the blue-grass contends in vain for complete
possession of its freehold. One is forced to note,
even though without sentiment, the rich pageant of
transitory wjld bloom that will force a passage for
itself over the landscape: firmaments of golden dan
delions in the lawns ; vast beds of violets, gray and
blue, in dim glades ; patches of flaunting sunflowers
along the road-sides ; purple thistles ; and, of deeper
purple still and far denser growth, beautiful iron-
weed in the woods; with many clumps of alder
bloom, and fast-extending patches of perennial black
berry, and groups of delicate May-apples, and whole
fields of dog-fennel and golden-rod. And why men
tion indomitable dock and gigantic poke, burrs and
plenteous nightshade, and mullein and plantain, with
dusty gray-green ragweed and thrifty fox-tail ? — an
innumerable company.
Maize, pumpkins, and beans grow together in a
field — a triple crop. Nature perfects them all, yet
must do more. Scarce have the ploughs left the
furrows' before there springs up a varied wild growth,
and a fourth crop, morning-glories, festoon the tall

CATTLE IN A BLUE-GRASS PASTURE.

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 23
tassels of the Indian corn ere the knife can be laid
against the stalk. Harvest fields usually have their
stubble well hidden by a rich, deep aftermath. Gar
den patches, for all that hoe and rake can do, com
monly look at last like spots given over to weeds
and grasses. Sidewalks quickly lose their borders.
Pavements would soon disappear from sight; the
winding of a distant stream through the fields can
be readily followed by the line of vegetation that
rushes there to fight for life, from the minutest creep
ing vines to forest trees. Every neglected fence
corner becomes an area for a fresh colony. Leave
one of these sweet, humanized woodland pastures
alone for a short period of years, it runs wild with a
dense young natural forest ; vines shoot up to the
tops of the tallest trees, and then tumble over in
green sprays on the heads of others.
A kind, true, patient, self-helpful soil if ever there
was one ! Some of these lands after being culti
vated, not always scientifically, but always without
artificial fertilizers, for more than three-quarters of
a century, are now, if properly treated, equal in pro
ductiveness to the best farming lands of England.
The farmer from one of these old fields will take two
different crops in a season. He gets two cuttings
of clover from a meadow, and has rich grazing left.
A few counties have at a time produced three-fourths
of the entire hemp product of the United States.
The State itself has at different times stood first in

24 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
wheat and hemp and Indian corn and wool and to
bacco and flax, although half its territory is covered
with virgin forests. When lands under improper
treatment have become impoverished, their produc
tiveness has been restored, not by artificial fertil
izers, but by simple rotation of crops, with nature's
help. The soil rests on decomposable limestone,
which annually gives up to it in solution all the
essential mineral plant food that judicious agricult
ure needs.
Soil and air and climate — the entire aggregate of
influences happily co-operative — make the finest
grazing. The Kentucky horse has carried the repu
tation of the country into regions where even the
people could never have made it known. Your ex
pert in the breeding of thoroughbreds will tell you
that the muscular fibre of the blue-grass animal is to
that of the Pennsylvania-bred horses as silk to cot
ton, and the texture of his bone, compared with the
latter's, as ivory beside pumice-stone. If taken to
the Eastern States, in twelve generations he is no
longer the same breed of horse. His blood fertilizes
American stock the continent over. Jersey cattle
brought here increase in size. Sires come to Ken
tucky to make themselves and their offspring fa
mous. The people themselves are a fecund race. Out of
this State have gone more to enrich the citzenship
of the nation than all the other States together have

HEMP FIELD.

been able to send into it. So at least your loyal-
hearted Kentuckian looks at the rather delicate sub
ject of inter -State migration. By actual measure
ment the Kentucky volunteers during the Civil War
were found to surpass all others (except Tennessee-
ans) in height and weight, whether coming from the
United States or various countries of Europe. But
for the great-headed Scandinavians, they would have
been first, also, in circumference around the fore
head and occiput. Still, Kentucky has little or no
literature. One element that should be conspicuous in fertile
countries does not strike the observer here — much
beautiful water; no other State has a frontage of
navigable rivers equal to that of Kentucky. But
there are few limpid, lovely, smaller streams. Won
derful springs there are, and vast stores of water in
the cavernous earth below; but the landscape lacks

26 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
the charm of this element — clear, rushing, musical,
abundant. The watercourses, ever winding and
graceful, are apt to be either swollen and turbid or
insignificant; of late years the beds seem less full
also — a change consequent, perhaps, upon the denu
dation of forest lands. In a dry season the historic
Elkhorn seems little more than a ganglion of pre
carious pools.

IV
The best artists who have painted cultivated
ground have always been very careful to limit the
area of the crops. Undoubtedly the substitution
of a more scientific agriculture for the loose and
easy ways of primitive husbandry has changed the
key-note of rural existence from a tender Virgilian
sentiment to a coarser strain, and as life becomes
more unsophisticated it grows less picturesque.
When the work of the old-time reaper is done by a
fat man with a flaming face, sitting on a cast-iron
machine, and smoking a cob pipe, the artist will leave
the fields. Figures have a terrible power to destroy
sentiment in pure landscape ; so have houses. When
one leaves nature, pure and simple, in the blue-grass
country, he must accordingly pick his way circum
spectly or go amiss in his search for the beautiful.
If his taste lead him to desire in landscapes the

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 27
finest evidences of human labor, the high artificial
finish of a minutely careful civilization, he will here
find great disappointment. On the other hand, if
he delight in those exquisite rural spots of the Old
World with picturesque bits of homestead architect
ure and the perfection of horticultural and unobtru
sive botanical details, he will be no less aggrieved.
What he sees here is neither the most scientific
farming, simply economic and utilitarian — raw and
rude — nor that cultivated desire for the elements in
nature to be so moulded by the hand of man that
they will fuse harmoniously and inextricably with
his habitations and his work.
The whole face of the country is taken up by a
succession of farms. Each of these, except the very
small ones, presents to the eye the variation of
meadow, field, and woodland pasture, together with
the homestead and the surrounding grounds of or
chard, garden, and lawn. The entire landscape is
thus caught in a vast net-work of fences. The Ken-
tuckian retains his English ancestors' love of enclos
ures; but the uncertain tenure of estates beyond a
single generation does not encourage him to make
them the most durable. One does, indeed, notice
here and there throughout the country stone-walls
of blue limestone, that give an aspect of substantial
repose and comfortable firmness to the scenery. But
the farmer dreads their costliness, even though his
own hill-sides furnish him an abundant quarry. He

2S THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
knows that unless the foundations are laid like those
of a house, the thawing earth will unsettle them, that
water, freezing as it trickles through the crevices,
will force the stones out of their places, and that
breaches will be made in them by boys on a hunt
whenever and wherever it shall be necessary to get
at a lurking or sorely pressed hare. It is ludicrously
true that the most terrible destroyer of stone -walls
in this country is the small boy hunting a hare, with
an appetite for game that knows no geological im
pediment. Therefore one hears of fewer limestone
fences of late years, some being torn down and su
perseded by plank fences or post-and-rail fences, or
by the newer barbed-wire fence — an economic device
that will probably become as popular in regions
where stone and timber were never to be had as in
others, like this, where timber has been ignorantly,
wantonly sacrificed. It is a pleasure to know that
one of the most expensive, and certainly the most
hideous, fences ever in vogue here is falling into
disuse. I mean the worm-fence — called worm be
cause it wriggled over the landscape like a long
brown caterpillar, the stakes being the bristles along
its back, and because it now and then ate up a noble
walnut-tree close by, or a kingly oak, or frightened,
trembling ash — a worm that decided the destiny of
forests. A pleasure it is, too, to come occasionally
upon an Osage orange hedge-row, which is a green
eternal fence. But you will not find many of these.

TOBACCO PATCH.

It is generally too much to ask of an American, even
though he be a Kentuckian, to wait for a hedge to
grow and make him a fence. When he takes a
notion to have a fence, he wants it put up before
Saturday night.
If the Kentuckian, like the Englishman, is fond of
fencing himself off, like the Frenchman, he loves
long, straight roads. You will not find elsewhere in
America such highways as the Kentuckian has con
structed over his country — broad, smooth, level,
white, glistening turnpikes of macadamized lime
stone. It is a luxury to drive, and also an expense,
as one will discover before one has passed through
many toll-gates. One could travel more cheaply on

30 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
the finest railway on the continent. What Richard
Grant White thought it worth while to record as a
rare and interesting sight — a man on an English
highway breaking stones — is no uncommon sight
here. All limestone for these hundreds of miles of
road, having been quarried here, there, anywhere,
and carted and strewn along the road-side, is broken
by a hammer in the hand. By the highway the
workman sits — usually an Irishman — pecking away
at a long rugged pile as though he were good to
live for a thousand years. Somehow, in patience, he
always gets to the other end of his hard row.
One cannot sojourn long without coming to con
ceive an interest in this limestone, and loving to
meet its rich warm hues on the landscape. It has
made a deal of history: limestone blue -grass, lime
stone water, limestone roads, limestone fences, lime
stone bridges and arches, limestone engineering
architecture, limestone water-mills, limestone spring-
houses and homesteads — limestone Kentuckians !
Outside of Scripture no people was ever so founded
on a rock. It might be well to note, likewise, that
the soil of this region is what scientists call seden
tary — called so because it sits quietly on the rocks,
not because the people sit quietly on it.
Undoubtedly the most picturesque monuments in
the blue-grass country are old stone water-mills and
old stone homesteads — landmarks each for separate
trains of ideas that run to poetry and to history.

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 31
The latter, built by pioneers or descendants of pio
neers, nearly a hundred years ago, stand gray with
years, but good for nameless years to come; great
low chimneys, deep little windows, thick walls, mighty
fireplaces; situated usually with keen discretion on
an elevation near a spring,, just as a Saxon forefa
ther would have placed them centuries ago. Haply
one will see the water of this spring issuing still
from a recess in a hill -side, with an overhanging
ledge of rock — the entrance to this cavern being
walled across and closed with a gate, thus making,
according to ancient fashion, a simple natural spring-
house and dairy.
Something like a feeling of exasperation is apt to
come over one in turning to the typical modern
houses. Nowhere, certainly, in rural America, are
there, within the same area, more substantia], comfort
able homesteads. They are nothing if not spacious
and healthful, frame or brick, two stories, shingle
roofs. But they lack characteristic physiognomy;
they have no harmony with the landscape, nor with
each other, nor often with themselves. They are
not beautiful when new, and can never be beautiful
when old ; for the beauty of newness and the beauty
of oldness alike depend on beauty of form and color,
which here is lacking. One longs for the sight of a
rural Gothic cottage, which would harmonize so well
with the order of the scenery, or for a light, elegant
villa that should overlook these light and elegant

32 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
undulations of a beautiful and varied landscape. It
must be understood that there are notable excep
tions to these statements even in the outlying dis
tricts of the blue -grass country, and that they do
not apply to the environs of the towns, nor to the
towns themselves.
Nowhere does one see masses of merely beautiful
things in the country. The slumbering art of in
terior decoration is usually spent upon the parlor.
The grounds around the houses are not kept in the
best order. The typical rural Kentucky housewife
does not seem to have any compelling, controlling
sense of the beautiful. She invariably concedes
something to beauty, but not enough. You will find
a show of flowers at the poorest houses, though but
geranium slips in miscellaneous tins and pottery.
But you do not generally see around more prosper
ous homes any such parterres or beds as there is
money to spend on, and time to tend, and grounds
to justify.
A like spirit is shown by the ordinary blue-grass
farmer. His management strikes you as not the
pink of tidiness, not the model of systematic thrift.
Exceptions exist — many exceptions — but the rule
holds good. One cannot travel here in summer or
autumn without observing that weeds flourish where
they harm and create ugliness; fences go unrepaired;1*
gates may be found swinging on one hinge. He
misuses his long-cultivated fields ; he cuts down his

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION

33

scant, precious trees. His energy is not tireless, his
watchfulness not sleepless. Why should they be ?
Human life here is not massed and swarming. The
occupation of the soil is not close and niggard. The
landscape is not even compact, much less crowded.
There is room for more, plenty for more to eat. No
man here, like the ancient Roman praetor, ever de
cided how often one might, without trespass, gather
the acorns that fall from his neighbors' trees. No
woman ever went through a blue-grass harvest field
gleaning. Ruth's vocation is unknown. By nature

HARRODSBURG PIKE.

34 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
the Kentuckian is no rigid economist. By birth,
education, tradition, and inherited tendencies he is
not a country clout, but a rural gentleman. His
ideal of life is neither vast wealth nor personal dis
tinction, but solid comfort in material conditions,
and the material conditions are easy: fertility of soil,
annual excess of production over consumption, com
parative thinness of population. So he does not
brace himself for the tense struggle of life as it goes
on in centres of fierce territorial shoulder -pushing.
He can afford to indulge his slackness of endeavor.
He is neither an alert aggressive agriculturist, nor a
landscape gardener, nor a purveyor of commodities
to the green-grocer. If the world wants vegetables,
let it raise them. He declines to work himself to
death for other people, though they pay him for it.
His wife is a lady, not a domestic laborer ; and it is
her privilege, in household affairs, placidly to sur
round herself with an abundance which the life
long female economists of the North would regard
with conscientious indignation.
In truth, there is much evidence to show that this
park-like country, intersected by many beautiful rail
roads, turnpikes, and shaded picturesque lanes, will
become less and less an agricultural district, more
and more a region of unequalled pasturage, and
hence more park-like still. One great interest abides
here, of course — the manufacture of Bourbon whis
key. Another interest has only within the last few

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 35
years been developed — the cultivation of tobacco,
for which it was formerly thought that the blue-grass
soils were not adapted. But as years go by, the stock
interests invite more capital, demand more attention,
give more pleasure — in a word, strike the full chord
of modern interest by furnishing an unparalleled
means of speculative profit.
Forty years ago the most distinguished citizens of
the State were engaged in writing essays and prize
papers on scientific agriculture. A regular trotting
track was not to be found in the whole country.
Nothing was thought of the breeding and training
of horses with reference to development of greater
speed. Pacing horses were fashionable ; and two
great rivals in this gait having been brought togeth
er for a trial of speed, in lieu of a track, paced a
mighty race over a river -bottom flat. We have
changed all that. The gentlemen no longer write
their essays. Beef won the spurs of knighthood. In
Kentucky the horse has already been styled the first
citizen. The great agricultural fairs of the State
have modified their exhibits with reference to him
alone, and fifteen or twenty thousand people give
afternoon after afternoon to the contemplation of his
beauty and his speed. His one rival is the thorough
bred, who goes on running faster and faster. One
of the brief code of nine laws for the government
of the young Kentucky commonwealth that were
passed in the first legislative assembly ever held

36 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
west of the Alleghanies dealt with the preservation
of the breed of horses. Nothing was said of educa
tion. The Kentuckian loves the memory of Thomas
Jefferson, not forgetting that he once ran race
horses. These great interests, not overlooking the
cattle interest, the manufacture of whiskey, and the
raising of tobacco, will no doubt constitute the fut
ure determining factors in the history of this country.
It should not be forgotten, however, that the North
ern and Eastern palate becomes kindly disposed at
the bare mention of the many thousands of turkeys
that annually fatten on these plains.

V
" In Kentucky," writes Professor Shaler, in his
recent history, "we shall find nearly pure English
blood. It is, moreover, the largest body of pure
English folk that has, speaking generally, been sep
arated from the mother country for two hundred
years." They, the blue-grass Kentuckians. are the
descendants of those hardy, high-spirited, picked
Englishmen, largely of the squire and yeoman class,
whose absorbing passion was not religious disputa
tion, nor the intellectual purpose of founding a
State, but the ownership of land and the pursuits
and pleasures of rural life, close to the rich soil, and

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 37
full of its strength and sunlight. They have to this
day, in a degree perhaps equalled by no others liv
ing, the race qualities of their English ancestry and
the tastes and habitudes of their forefathers. If one
knows the Saxon nature, and has been a close stu
dent of Kentucky life and character, stripped bare
of the accidental circumstances of local environ
ment, he may amuse himself with laying the two
side by side and comparing the points of essential
likeness. It is a question whether the Kentuckian
is not more like his English ancestor than his New
England contemporary. This is an old country, as
things go in the West. The rock formation is very
old ; the soil is old ; the race qualities here are old.
In the Sagas, in the Edda, a man must be over-
brave. " Let all who are not cowards follow me !"
cried McGary, putting an end to prudent counsel'
on the eve of the battle of the Blue Licks. The
Kentuckian winced under the implication then, and
has done it in a thousand instances since. Over-
bravery! The idea runs through the pages of Ken
tucky history, drawing them back into the centuries
of his race. It is this quality of temper and concep
tion of manhood that has operated to build up in
the mind of the world the figure of the typical Ken
tuckian. Hawthorne conversed with an old man in
England who told him that the Kentuckians flayed
Tecumseh where he fell, and converted his skin into
razor-strops. Collins, the Kentucky Froissart, speak-

38 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
ing of Kentucky pioneers, relates of the father of
one of them that he knocked Washington down
in a quarrel, and received an apology from the
Father of his Country on the following day. I have
mentioned this typical Hotspur figure because I
knew it would come foremost into the mind of the
reader whenever one began to speak with candor
of Kentucky life and character. It was never a
true type : satire bit always into burlesque along
lines of coarseness and exaggeration. Much less is
it true now, except in so far as it describes a kind
of human being found the world over.
But I was saying that old race qualities are appar
ent here, because this is a people of English blood
with hereditary agricultural tastes, and because it
has remained to this day largely uncommingled with
foreign strains. Here, for instance, is the old race
conservatism that expends itself reverentially on es
tablished ways and familiar customs. The building
of the first great turnpike in this country was op
posed on the ground that it would shut up way-side
taverns, throw wagons and teams out of employ
ment, and destroy the market for chickens and oats.
Prior to that, immigration was discouraged because
it would make the already high prices of necessary
articles so exorbitant that the permanent prosperity
of the State would receive a fatal check. True,
however, this opposition was not without a certain
philosophy ; for in those days people went to some

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 39
distant lick for their salt, bought it warm from the
kettle at seven or eight cents a pound, and packed it
home on horseback, so that a fourth dropped away
in bitter water. Coming back to the present, the
huge yellowish-red stage-coach rolls to-day over the
marbled roads of the blue-grass country. Families
may be found living exactly where their pioneer an
cestors effected a heroic settlement — a landed aris
tocracy, if there, be such in America. Family names
come down from generation to generation, just as a
glance at the British peerage will show that they
were long ago being transmitted in kindred families
over the sea. One great honored name will do
nearly as much in Kentucky as in England to keep
a family in peculiar respect, after the reason for it
has ceased. Here is that old invincible race ideal of
personal liberty, and that old, unreckoning, trucu
lent, animal rage at whatever infringes on it. The
Kentuckians were among the very earliest to grant
manhood suffrage. Nowhere in this country are the
rights of property more inviolable, the violations of
these more surely punished: neither counsel nor
judge nor any power whatsoever can acquit a man
who has taken fourpence of his neighbor's goods.
Here is the old land-loving, land-holding, home-stay
ing, home-defending disposition. This is not the
lunching, tourist race that, to Mr. Ruskin's horror,
leaves its crumbs and chicken-bones on the glaciers.
The simple rural key-note of life is still the sweetest.

4° THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
Now, after the lapse of more than a century, the
most populous town contains less than twenty
thousand white souls. Along with the love of land
has gone comparative content with the annual in
crease of flock and field. No man among them has
ever got immense wealth. Here is the old sense of
personal privacy and reserve which has for centuries
intrenched the Englishman in the heart of his es
tate, and forced him to regard with inexpugnable
discomfort his neighbor's boundaries. This would
have been a densely peopled region, the farms would
have been minutely subdivided, had sons asked and
received permission to settle on parts of the ances
tral estate. This filling in and too close personal
contact would have satisfied neither father nor
child, so that the one has generally kept his acres
intact, and the other, impelled by the same land-
hunger that brought his pioneer forefather hither,
has gone hence into the younger West, where lie
broader tracts and vaster spaces. Here is the old
idea, somewhat current still in England, that the
highest mark of the gentleman is not cultivation of
the mind, not intellect, not knowledge, but elegant
living. Here is the old hereditary devotion to the
idea of the State. Write the biographies of the
Kentuckians who have been engaged in national or
in local politics, and you have largely the history
of the State of Kentucky. Write the lives of all its
scientists, artists, musicians, actors, poets, novelists,

A SPRING-HOUSE.

and you find many weary mile -stones between the
chapters. Enter the blue-grass region from what point you
choose — and you may do this, so well traversed is it
by railways — and you become sensitive to its influ
ence. If you come from the North or the East, you
say : " This is not modern America. Here is some
thing local and unique. For one thing, nothing
goes fast here." By-and-by you see a blue-grass
race-horse, and note an exception. But you do not
also except the rider or the driver. The speed is
not his. He is a mere bunch of mistletoe to the
horse. Detach him, and he is not worth timing.
Human speed for the most part lies fallow. Every
man starts for the goal of life at his own natural

42 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
gait, and if he sees that it is too far off for him to
reach it in a lifetime, he does not run the faster, but
has the goal moved nearer him. The Kentuckians
are not provincial. As Thoreau said, no people can
long remain provincial who have a propensity for
politics, whittling, and rapid travelling. They are
not inaccessible to modern ideas, but the shock of
modern ideas has not electrified them. They have
walled themselves around with old race instincts
and habitudes, and when the stream of tendency
rushes against this wall, it recoils upon itself in
stead of sweeping away the barrier.
The typical Kentuckian regards himself an Amer
ican of the Americans, and thinks as little of being
like the English as he would of imitating the Jutes.
In nothing is he more like his transatlantic ancestry
than in strong self-content. He sits on his farm as
though it were the pole of the heavens — a manly
man with a heart in him. Usually of the blond
type, robust, well formed, with clear, fair complexion,
that grows ruddier with age and stomachic develop
ment, full neck, and an open, kind, untroubled coun
tenance. He is frank, but not familiar; talkative, but
not garrulous ; full of the genial humor of local hits
and allusions, but without a subtle nimbleness of
wit ; indulgent towards purely masculine vices, but
intolerant of petty crimes; no reader of books nor
master in religious debate, faith coming to him as
naturally as his appetite, and growing with what it

THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 43
feeds upon ; loving roast pig, but not caring particu
larly for Lamb's eulogy ; loving his grass like a
Greek, not because it is beautiful, but because it is
fresh and green ; a peaceful man with strong pas
sions, and so to be heartily loved and respected or
heartily hated and respected, but never despised or
trifled with. An occasional barbecue in the woods,
where the saddles of South Down mutton are roast
ed on spits over the coals of the mighty trench, and
the steaming kettles of burgoo lend their savor to
the nose of the hungry political orator, so that he be
comes all the more impetuous in his invectives; the
great agricultural fairs; the race-courses; the month
ly county court day, when he meets his neighbors
on the public square of the nearest town ; the quiet
Sunday mornings, when he meets them again for
rather more clandestine talks at the front door of
the neighborhood church — these and his own fire
side are his characteristic and ample pleasures.^ You
will never be under his roof without being touched
by the mellowest of all the virtues of his race — sim
ple, unsparing human kindness and hospitality.]
The women of Kentucky have long had reputa
tion for beauty. An average type is a refinement
on the English blonde — greater delicacy of form,
feature, and color. A beautiful. . Kentuckj[jwornanjs
apt to be exceedingly_beautiful. Her voice is low
and soft ; her hands and feet delicately formed ; her
skin pure and beautiful in tint and shading; her

44 THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
eyes blue or brown, and hair nut brown or golden
brown; to all which is added a certain unapproach
able refinement. \It must not for a moment be sup
posed, however, that there are not many genuinely
ugly women in Kentucky.

UNCLE TOM AT HOME

I
IN the outskirts of the towns of central
Kentucky, a stranger, searching for the
picturesque in architecture and in life,
would find his attention arrested by cer
tain masses of low frame and brick structures, and by
the multitudes of strange human beings that inhabit
them. A single town may have on its edges several
of these settlements, which are themselves called
" towns," and bear separate names either descriptive
of some topographical peculiarity or taken from the
original owners of the lots. It is in these that a
great part of the negro population of Kentucky has
packed itself since the war. Here live the slaves of
the past with their descendants ; old family servants
from the once populous country-places; old wagon-
drivers from the deep-rutted lanes ; old wood-chop
pers from the slaughtered blue -grass forests; old
harvesters and ploughmen from the long since aban
doned fields ; old cooks from the savory, wasteful
kitchens ; old nurses from the softly rocked and
softly sung-to cradles. Here, too, are the homes of
the younger generation, of the laundresses and the
barbers, teachers and ministers of the gospel, coach-

48 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
men and porters, restaurant-keepers and vagabonds,
hands from the hemp factories, and workmen on the
outlying farms.
You step easily from the verge of the white popu
lation to the confines of the black. But it is a great
distance — like the crossing of a vast continent be
tween the habitats of alien races. The air seems all
at once to tan the cheek. Out of the cold, blue
recesses of the midsummer sky the sun burns with
a fierceness of heat that warps the shingles of the
pointed roofs and flares with blinding brilliancy
against some whitewashed wall. Perhaps in all the
street no little cooling stretch of shade. The un-
paved sidewalks and the roadway between are but
undistinguishable parts of a common thoroughfare,
along which every upspringing green thing is quickly
trodden to death beneath the ubiquitous play and
passing of many feet. Here and there, from some
shielded nook or other coign of vantage, a single
plumy branch of dog-fennel may be seen spreading
its small firnrament of white and golden stars close
to the ground ; or between its pale green stalks the
faint lavender of the nightshade will take the eye as
the sole emblem of the flowerinof world.
A negro town! Looking out the doors and win
dows of the cabins, lounging in the door-ways, lean
ing over the low frame fences, gathering into quickly
forming, quickly dissolving groups in the dusty
streets, they swarm. They are here from milk-white

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 49
through all deepening shades to glossy blackness ;
octoroons, quadroons, mulattoes — some with large
liquid black eyes, refined features, delicate forms;
working, gossiping, higgling over prices around a
vegetable cart, discussing last night's church festival,
to-day's funeral, or next week's railway excursion,
sleeping, planning how to get work and how to es
cape it. From some unseen old figure in flamboyant
turban, bending over the wash-tub in the rear of a
cabin, comes a crooned song of indescribable pathos ;
behind a half-closed front shutter, a Moorish-hued
amosoro in gay linen thrums his banjo in a measure
of ecstatic gayety preluding the more passionate mel
odies of the coming night. Here a fight; there the
sound of the fiddle and the rhythmic patting of hands.
Tatters and silks flaunt themselves side by side. Dirt
and cleanliness lie down together. Indolence goes
hand in hand with thrift. Superstition dogs the slow
footsteps of reason. Passion and self-control eye
each other across the narrow way. If there is any
where resolute virtue, round it is a weltered muck of
low and sensual desire. One sees the surviving types
of old negro life here crowded together with and con
trasted with the new phases of "colored" life — sees
the transitional stage of a race, part of whom were
born slaves and are now freemen, part of whom have
been born freemen but remain so much like slaves.
It cannot fail to happen, as you walk along, that
you will come upon some cabin set back in a small
4

SO UNCLE TOM AT HOME
yard and half hidden, front and side, by an almost
tropical jungle of vines and multiform foliage: patch
es of great sunflowers, never more leonine in tawny
magnificence and sun -loving repose; festoons of
white and purple morning-glories over the windows
and up to the low eaves ; around the porch and
above the door-way, a trellis of gourd-vines swinging
their long-necked, grotesque yellow fruit ; about the
entrance flaming hollyhocks and other brilliant bits
of bloom, marigolds and petunias — evidences of the
warm, native taste that still distinguishes the negro
after some centuries of contact with the cold, chast
ened ideals of the Anglo-Saxon.
In the door-way of such a cabin, sheltered from
the afternoon sun by his dense jungle of vines, but
with a few rays of light glinting through the flutter
ing leaves across his seamed black face and white
woolly head, the muscles of his once powerful arms
shrunken, the gnarled hands folded idly in his lap —
his occupation gone — you will haply see some old-
time slave of the class of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom.
For it is true that scattered here and there through-
out the negro towns of Kentucky are representatives
of the same class that furnished her with her hero ;
true, also, that they were never sold by their Ken
tucky masters to the plantations of the South, but
remained unsold down to the last days of slavery.
When the war scattered the negroes of Ken-
tucky blindly, tumultously, hither and thither, many

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 51
of them gathered the members of their families
about them and moved from the country into these
" towns ;" and here the few survivors live, ready to
•testify of their relations with their former masters
and mistresses, and indirectly serving to point a
great moral : that, however justly Mrs. Stowe may
have chosen one of their number as best fitted to
show the fairest aspects of domestic slavery in the
United States, she departed from the common truth
of history, as it respected their lot in life, when she
condemned her Uncle Tom to his tragical fate. For
it was not the character of Uncle Tom that she great
ly idealized, as has been so often asserted ; it was
the category of events that were made to befall him.
As citizens of the American Republic, these old
negroes — now known as " colored gentlemen," sur
rounded by " colored ladies and gentlemen " — have
not done a great deal. The bud of liberty was in
grafted too late on the ancient slave -stock to bear
much fruit. But they are interesting, as contempo
raries of a type of Kentucky negro whose virtues
and whose sorrows, dramatically embodied in litera
ture, have become a by-word throughout the civilized
world. And now that the war-cloud is lifting from
over the landscape of the past, so that it lies still
clear to the eyes of those who were once the dwellers
amid its scenes, it is perhaps a good time to scan it
and note some of its great moral landmarks before
it grows remoter and is finally forgotten.

a

52 UNCLE TOM AT HOME

II
These three types — Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom, and
the Shelbys, his master and mistress — were the out
growth of natural and historic conditions peculiar
to Kentucky. " Perhaps," wrote Mrs. Stowe in her
novel, " the mildest form of the system of slavery is
to be seen in the State of Kentucky. The general
prevalence of agricultural pursuits of a quiet and
gradual nature, not requiring those periodic seasons
of hurry and pressure that are called for in the busi
ness of more southern districts, makes the task of the
negro a more healthful and reasonable one ; while
the master, content with a more gradual style of
acquisition, had not those temptations to hard-heart-
edness which always overcome frail human nature,
when the prospect of sudden and rapid gain is
weighed in the balance with no heavier counterpoise
than the interests of the helpless and unprotected."
These words contain many truths.
For it must not be forgotten, first of all, that the
condition of the slave in Kentucky was measurably
determined by certain physical laws which lay be
yond the control of the most inhuman master. Con
sider the nature of the country — elevated, rolling,
without miasmatic districts or fatal swamps ; the

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 53
soil in the main slave-holding portions of the State
easily tilled, abundantly yielding; the climate tem
perate and invigorating. Consider the system of
agriculture — not that of vast plantations, but of
small farms, part of which regularly consisted of
woodland and meadow that required little attention.
Consider the further limitations to this system im
posed by the range of the great Kentucky staples —
it being in the nature of corn, wheat, hemp, and
tobacco, not to yield profits sufficient to justify the
employment of an immense predial force, nor to re
quire seasons of forced and exhausting labor. It is
evident that under such conditions slavery was not
stamped with those sadder features which it wore
beneath a devastating sun, amid unhealthy or sterile
regions of country, and through the herding together
of hundreds of slaves who had the outward but not
the inward discipline of an army. True, one recalls
here the often quoted words of Jefferson on the rais
ing of tobacco — words nearly as often misapplied
as quoted ; for he was considering the condition of
slaves who were unmercifully worked on exhausted
lands by a certain proletarian type of master, who
did not feed and clothe them. Only under such
circumstances could the culture of this plant be de
scribed as "productive of infinite wretchedness," and
those engaged in it as " in a continual state of exer
tion beyond the powers of nature to support." It
was by reason of these physical facts that slavery in

54 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
Kentucky assumed the phase which is to be dis
tinguished as domestic ; and it was this mode that
had prevailed at the North and made emancipation
easy. Furthermore, in all history the condition of an
enslaved race under the enslaving one has been
partly determined by the degree of moral justifica
tion with which the latter has regarded the subject
of human bondage ; and the life of the Kentucky
negro, say in the days of Uncle Tom, was further
modified by the body of laws which had crystallized
as the sentiment of the people, slave-holders them
selves. But even these laws were only a partial
exponent of what that sentiment was; for some of
the severest were practically a dead letter, and the
clemency of the negro's treatment by the prevailing
type of master made amends for the hard provisions
of others.
It would be a difficult thing to write the history
of slavery in Kentucky. It is impossible to write a
single page of it here. But it may be said that the
conscience of the great body of the people was al
ways sensitive touching the rightfulness of the in
stitution. At the very outset it seems to have been
recognized simply for the reason that the early set
tlers were emigrants from slave-holding States and
brought their negroes with them. The common
wealth began its legislation on the subject in the
face of an opposing sentiment. By early statute

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 55
restriction was placed on the importation of slaves,
and from the first they began to be emancipated.
Throughout the seventy -five years of pro -slavery
State-life, the general conscience was always troubled.
The churches took up the matter. Great preach
ers, whose names were influential beyond the State,
denounced the system from the pulpit, pleaded for
the humane and Christian treatment of slaves, ad
vocated gradual emancipation. One religious body
after another proclaimed the moral evil of it, and
urged that the young be taught and prepared as
soon as possible for freedom. Antislavery publica
tions and addresses, together with the bold words of
great political leaders, acted as a further leaven in
the mind of the slave-holding class. As evidence of
this, when the new constitution of the State was to
be adopted, about 1850, thirty thousand votes were
cast in favor of an open clause in it, whereby grad
ual emancipation should become a law as soon as
the majority of the citizens should deem it expedi
ent for the peace of society ; and these votes repre
sented the richest, most intelligent slave-holders in
the State.
In general the laws were perhaps the mildest.
Some it is vital to the subject not to pass over. If
slaves were inhumanly treated by their owner or not
supplied with proper food and clothing, they could
be taken from him and sold to a better master.
This law was not inoperative. I have in mind the

56 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
instance of a family who lost their negroes in this
way, were socially disgraced, and left their neighbor
hood. If the owner of a slave had bought him on
condition of not selling him out of the county, or
into the Southern States, or so as not to separate
him from his family, he could be sued for violation
of contract. This law shows the opposition of the
better class of Kentucky masters to the slave-trade,
and their peculiar regard for the family ties of their
negroes. In the earliest Kentucky newspapers will
be found advertisements of the sales of negroes, on
condition that they would be bought and kept with
in the county or the State. It was within chancery
jurisdiction to prevent the separation of families.
The case mav be mentioned of a master who was
tried by his Church for unnecessarily separating a
husband from his wife. Sometimes slaves who had
been liberated and had gone to Canada voluntarily
returned into service under their former masters.
Lest these should be overreached, they were to be
taken aside and examined by the court to see that
they understood the consequences of their own ac
tion, and were free from improper constraint. On
the other hand, if a slave had a right to his freedom,
he could file a bill in chancery and enforce his
master's assent thereto.
But a clear distinction must be made between the
mild view entertained by the Kentucky slave-holders
regarding the system itself and their dislike of the

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 57
agitators of forcible and immediate emancipation.
A community of masters, themselves humane to
their negroes and probably intending to liberate
them in the end, would yet combine into a mob to
put down individual or organized antislavery efforts,
because they resented what they regarded an inter
ference of the abolitionist with their own affairs, and
believed his measures inexpedient for the peace of
society. Therefore, the history of the antislavery
movement in Kentucky, at times so turbulent, must
not be used to show the sentiment of the people re
garding slavery itself.

Ill
From these general considerations it is possible
to enter more closely upon a study of the domestic
life and relations of Uncle Tom and the Shelbys.
" Whoever visits some estates there," wrote Mrs.
Stowe, " and witnesses the good-humored indulgence
of some masters and mistresses and the affectionate
loyalty of some slaves, might be tempted to dream
of the oft-fabled poetic legend of a patriarchal insti
tution." Along with these words, taken from Un
cle Toms Cabin, I should like to quote an extract
from a letter written me by Mrs. Stowe under date
of April 30, 1886:

58 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
" In relation to your letter, I would say that I never lived in Ken
tucky, but spent many years in Cincinnati, which is separated from
Kentucky only by the Ohio River, which, as a shrewd politician re
marked, was dry one-half the year and frozen the other. My father
was president of a theological seminary at Walnut Hills, near Cin
cinnati, and with him I travelled and visited somewhat extensively
in Kentucky, and there became acquainted with those excellent
slave-holders delineated in Uncle Tom's Cabin. I saw many coun
terparts of the Shelbys — people humane, conscientious, just and gen
erous, who regarded slavery as an evil and were anxiously consider
ing their duties to the slave. But it was not till I had finally left
the West, and my husband was settled as professor in Bowdoin Col
lege, Brunswick, Maine, that the passage of the fugitive-slave law
and the distresses that followed it drew this from me."
The typical boy on a Kentucky farm was tenderly
associated from infancy with the negroes of the
household and the fields. His old black " Mammy "
became almost his first mother, and was but slowly
crowded out of his conscience and his heart by the
growing image of the true one. She had perhaps
nursed him at her bosom when he was not long
enough to stretch across it, sung over his cradle at
noon and at midnight, taken him out upon the vel
vety grass beneath the shade of the elm -trees to
watch his first manly resolution of standing alone in
the world and walking the vast distance of some
inches. Often, in boyish years, when flying from
the house with a loud appeal from the incompre
hensible code of Anglo-Saxon punishment for small
misdemeanors, he had run to those black arms and
cried himself to sleep in the lap of African sym
pathy. As he grew older, alas ! his first love grew
faithless ; and while " Mammy " was good enough in

THE MAMMY.

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 61
her way and sphere, his wandering affections settled
humbly at the feet of another great functionary of
the household — the cook in the kitchen. To him
her keys were as the keys to the kingdom of heaven,
for his immortal soul was his immortal appetite.
When he stood by the biscuit bench while she,
pausing amid the varied industries that went into
the preparation of an old-time Kentucky supper,
made him marvellous geese of dough, with farina
ceous feathers and genuine coffee-grains for eyes,
there was to him no other artist in the world who
possessed the secret of so commingling the useful
with the beautiful.
The little half-naked imps, too, playing in the dirt
like glossy blackbirds taking a bath of dust, were
his sweetest, because perhaps his forbidden, compan
ions. With them he went clandestinely to the fatal
duck-pond in the stable lot, to learn the art of swim
ming on a walnut rail. With them he raced up and
down the lane on blooded alder-stalk horses, after
wards leading the exhausted coursers into stables
of green bushes and haltering them high with a
cotton string. It was one of these hatless chil
dren of original Guinea that had crept up to him
as he lay asleep in the summer grass and told
him where the best hidden of all nests was to be
found in a far fence corner — that of the high-tem
pered, scolding guinea-hen. To them he showed
his first Barlow knife; for them he blew his first

62 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
home-made whistle. He is their petty tyrant to-day;
to-morrow he will be their repentant friend, dividing
with them his marbles and proposing a game of hop
scotch. Upon his dialect, his disposition, his whole
character, is laid the ineffaceable impress of theirs,
so that they pass into the final reckoning-up of his
life here and in the world to come.
But Uncle Tom ! — the negro overseer of the place
— the greatest of all the negroes — greater even than
the cook, when one is not hungry. How often has
he straddled Uncle Tom's neck, or ridden behind
him afield on a barebacked horse to the jingling
music of the trace-chains ! It is Uncle Tom who
plaits his hempen whip and ties the cracker in a
knot that will stay. It is Uncle Tom who brings
him his first young squirrel to tame, the teeth of
which are soon to be planted in his right forefinger.
Many a time he slips out of the house to take his
dinner or supper in the cabin with Uncle Tom;
and during long winter evenings he loves to sit be
fore those great roaring cabin fireplaces that throw
their red and yellow lights over the half circle of
black faces and on the mysteries of broom-making,
chair-bottoming, and the cobbling of shoes. Like
the child who listens to " Uncle Remus," he, too,
hears songs and stories, and creeps back to the
house with a wondering look in his eyes and a
vague hush of spirit.
Then come school-days and vacations during

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 63
which, as Mrs. Stowe says, he may teach Uncle
Tom to make his letters on a slate or expound to
him the Scriptures. Then, too, come early advent
ures with the gun, and 'coon hunts and 'possum
hunts with the negroes under the round moon, with
the long-eared, deep-voiced hounds — to him delicious
and ever-memorable nights ! The crisp air, through
which the breath rises like white incense, the thick
autumn leaves, begemmed with frost, rustling under
foot ; the shadows of the mighty trees ; the strained
ear ; the heart leaping with excitement ; the negroes
and dogs mingling their wild delight in music that
wakes the echoes of distant hill-sides. Away ! Away !
mile after mile, hour after hour, to where the purple
and golden persimmons hang low from the boughs,
or where from topmost limbs the wild grape drops
its countless clusters in a black cascade a sheer two
hundred feet.
Now he is a boy no longer, but has his first love-
affair, which sends a thrill through all those suscep
tible cabins; has his courtship, which gives rise to
many a wink and innuendo ; and brings home his
bride, whose coming converts every youngster into
a living rolling ball on the ground, and opens the
feasts and festivities of universal joy.
Then some day " ole Marster " dies, and the ne
groes, one by one, young and old, file into the dark
ened parlor to take a last look at his quiet face. He
had his furious temper, " ole Marster " had, and his

64 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
sins — which God forgive ! To-day he will be bur
ied, and to-morrow " young Marster " will inherit his
saddle-horse and ride out into the fields.
Thus he has come into possession of his negroes.
Among them are a few whose working days are
over. These are to be kindly cared for, decently
buried. Next are the active laborers, and, last, the
generation of children. He knows them all by
name, capacity, and disposition ; is bound to them
by life -long associations; hears their communica
tions and complaints. When he goes to town, he is
charged with commissions, makes purchases with
their own money. Continuing the course of his fa
ther, he sets about making them capable, contented
workmen. There shall be special training for spe
cial aptitude. One shall be made a blacksmith, a
second a carpenter, a third a cobbler of shoes. In
all the general industries of the farm, education shall
not be lacking. It is claimed that a Kentucky ne
gro invented the hemp-brake. As a result of this
effective management, the Southern planter, looking
northward, will pay him a handsome premium for his
blue-grass slave. He will have no white overseer.
He does not like the type of man. Besides, one is
not needed. Uncle Tom served his father in this
capacity ; let him be.
Among his negroes he finds a bad one. What
shall he do with him ? Keep him ? Keeping him
makes him worse, and moreover he corrupts the

THE COOK.

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 67
others. Set him free ? That is to put a reward
upon evil. Sell him to his neighbors ? They do
not want him. If they did, he would not sell him to
them. He sells him into the South. This is a
statement, not an apology. Here, for a moment,
one touches the terrible subject of the internal slave-
trade. Negroes were sold from Kentucky into the
Southern market because, as has just been said, they
were bad, or by reason of the law of partible inherit
ance, or, as was the case with Mrs. Stowe's Uncle
Tom, under constraint of debt. Of course, in many
cases, they were sold wantonly and cruelly ; but
these, however many, were not enough to make the
internal slave-trade more than an incidental and
subordinate feature of the system. The belief that
negroes in Kentucky were regularly bred and reared
for the Southern market is a mistaken one. Mrs.
Stowe herself fell into the error of basing an argu
ment for the prevalence of the slave-trade in this
State upon the notion of exhausted lands, as the fol
lowing passage from The Key to Uncle Toms Cabin
shows :
" In Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky slave-labor long
ago impoverished the soil almost beyond recovery and became en
tirely unprofitable."
Those words were written some thirty-five years
ago and refer to a time long prior to that date. Now,
the fact is that at least one-half the soil of Kentucky
has never been under cultivation, and could not,

68 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
therefore, have been exhausted by slave-labor. At
least a half of the remainder, though cultivated ever
since, is still not seriously exhausted ; and of the
small portion still left a large share was always nat
urally poor, so that for this reason slave-labor was
but little employed on it. The great slave-holding
region of the State was the fertile region which has
never been impoverished. To return from this di
gression, it may be well that the typical Kentucky
farmer does not find among his negroes a bad one;
for in consequence of the early non-importation of
slaves for barter or sale, and through long associa
tion with the household, they have been greatly ele
vated and humanized. If he must sell a good one,
he will seek a buyer among his neighbors. He will
even ask the negro to name his choice of a master
and try to consummate his wish. No purchaser
near by, he will mount his saddle-horse and look for
one in the adjoining county. In this way the ne
groes of different estates and neighborhoods were
commonly connected by kinship and intermarriage.
How unjust to say that such a master did not feel
affection for his slaves, anxiety for their happiness,
sympathy with the evils inseparable from their con
dition. Let me cite the case of a Kentucky master
who had failed. He could pay his debts by sacri
ficing his negroes or his farm, one or the other. To
avoid separating the former, probably sending some
of them South, he kept them in a body and sold his

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 69
farm. Any one who knows the Kentuckian's love
of land and home will know what this means. A
few _years, and the war left him without anything.
Another case is more interesting still. A master
having failed, actually hurried his negroes off to
Canada. Tried for defrauding his creditors, and
that by slave-holding jurors, he was acquitted. The
plea of his counsel, among other arguments, was the
master's unwillingness to see his old and faithful
servitors scattered and suffering. After emancipa
tion old farm hands sometimes refused to budge
from their cabins. J Their former masters paid them
for their services as long as they could work, and
supported them when helpless. I have in mind an
instance where a man, having left Kentucky, sent
back hundreds of dollars to an aged, needy domes
tic, though himself far from rich ; and another case
where a man still contributes annually to the main
tenance of those who ceased to work for him the
quarter of a century ago.
The good in human nature is irrepressible. _Sla^_
yery_, evil as it was, when looked at from the remote
ness of human history as it is to be, will beadjudged
an institution that gave development to certainjioble
types of character. Along with other social forces
peculiar to the age, it produced in Kentucky a kind
of farmer, the like of which will never appear again.
He had the aristocratic virtues: highest notions of
personal liberty and personal honor, a fine especial

70 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
scorn of anything that was mean, little, cowardly.
As an agriculturist he was not driving or merciless
or grasping; the rapid amassing of wealth was not
among his passions, the contention of splendid liv
ing not among his thorns. To a certain careless-
ness of riches he added a certain profuseness of ex
penditure; and indulgent towards his own pleasures,
towards others, his equals or dependents, he bore
himself with a spirit of kindness and magnanimity.
Intolerant of tyranny, he was no tyrant. To say of
such a man, as Jefferson said of every slave-holder,
that he lived in perpetual exercise of the most bois
terous passions and unremitting despotism, and in
the exaction of the most degrading submission, was
to pronounce judgment hasty and unfair. Rather
did Mrs. Stowe, while not blind to his faults, discern
his virtues when she made him, embarrassed by
debt, exclaim : " If anybody had said to me that I
should sell Tom down South to one of those rascal
ly traders, I should have said, ' Is thy servant a dog
that he should do this thing?' "

IV
But there was another person who, more than the
master, sustained close relationship to the negro life
of the household — the mistress. In the person of

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 71
Mrs. Shelby, Mrs. Stowe described some of the best
traits of a Kentucky woman of the time ; but per
haps only a Southern woman herself could do full
justice to a character which many duties and many
burdens endued with extraordinary strength and va
ried efficiency.
She was mistress of distinct realms — the house
and the cabins — and the guardian of the bonds be
tween the two, which were always troublesome, often
delicate, sometimes distressing. In those cabins
were nearly always some poor creatures needing
sympathy and watch-care : the superannuated moth
ers helpless with babes, babes helpless without moth
ers, the sick, perhaps the idiotic. Apparel must be
had for all. Standing in her door-way and pointing
to the meadow, she must be able to say in the words
of a housewife of the period, " There are the sheep ;
now get your clothes." Some must be taught to
keep the spindle and the loom going ; others trained
for dairy, laundry, kitchen, dining-room ; others yet
taught fine needle-work. Upon her fell the labor of
private instruction and moral exhortation, for the
teaching of negroes was not forbidden in Kentucky.
She must remind them that their marriage vows
are holy and binding; must interpose between moth
ers and their cruel punishment of their own off
spring. Hardest of all, she must herself punish for
lying, theft, immorality. Her own children must
be guarded against temptation and corrupting in-

72 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
fluences. In her life no cessation of this care year
in and year out. Beneath every other trouble the
secret conviction that she has no right to enslave
these creatures, and that, however improved their
condition, their life is one of great and necessary
evils. Mrs. Stowe well makes her say : " I have
tried — tried most faithfully as a Christian woman
should — to do my duty towards these poor, simple,
dependent creatures. I have cared for them, in
structed them, watched over them, and known all
their little cares and joys for years. ... I have taught
them the duties of the family, of parent and child,
and husband and wife. ... I thought, by kindness
and care and instruction, I could make the condi
tion of mine better than freedom." Sorely over
burdened and heroic mould of woman ! Fulfilling
each day a round of intricate duties, rising at any
hour of the night to give medicine to the sick, liable
at any time, in addition to the cares of her great
household, to see an entire family of acquaintances
arriving unannounced, with trunks and servants of
their own, for a visit protracted in accordance with
the large hospitalities of the time. What wonder
if, from sheer inability to do all things herself, she
trains her negroes to different posts of honor, so
that the black cook finally expels her from her own
kitchen and rules over that realm as an autocrat of
unquestioned prerogatives ?
Mistresses of this kind had material reward in the

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 73
trusty adherence of their servants during the war.
Their relations throughout this period — so well cal
culated to try the loyalty of the African nature —
would of themselves make up a volume of the most
touching incidents. Even to-day one will find in
many Kentucky households survivals of the old
order — find " Aunt Chloe " ruling as a despot in the
kitchen, and making her will the pivotal point of the
whole domestic system. I have spent nights with a
young Kentuckian, self-willed and high-spirited,
whose occasional refusals to rise for a half-past five
o'clock breakfast always brought the cook from the
kitchen up to his bedroom, where she delivered her
commands in a voice worthy of Catherine the Great.
" We shall have to get up," he would say, " or there'll
be a row !" One may yet see old negresses setting
out for an annual or a semi-annual visit to their for
mer mistresses, and bearing some offering — a basket
of fruits or flowers. I should like to mention the
case of one who died after the war and left her two
children to her mistress, to be reared and educated.
The troublesome, expensive charge was faithfully
executed. Here, in the hard realities of daily life, here is
where the crushing burden of slavery fell — on the
women of the South. History has yet to do justice
to the noblest type of them, whether in Kentucky
or elsewhere. In view of what they accomplished,
despite the difficulties in their way, there is nothing

74 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
they have found harder to forgive .in the women of
the North than the failure to sympathize with them
in the struggles and sorrows of their lot, and to real
ize that they were the real practical philanthropists
of the negro race.

V
But as is the master, so is the slave, and it is
through the characters of the Shelbys that we must
approach that of Uncle Tom. For of all races, the
African — superstitious, indolent, singing, dancing,
impressionable creature — depends upon others for
enlightenment, training, and happiness. If, therefore,
you find him so intelligent that he may be sent on
important business, so honest that he may be trusted
with money, house, and home, so loyal that he will
not seize opportunity to become free ; if you find
him endowed with the manly virtues of dignity and
self-respect united to the Christian virtues of humil
ity, long-suffering, and forgiveness, then do not, in
marvelling at him on these accounts, quite forget his
master and his mistress — they made him what he
was. And it is something to be said on their behalf,
that in their household was developed a type of
slave that could be set upon a sublime moral pin
nacle to attract the admiration of the world.

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 75
Attention is fixed on Uncle Tom first as head-
servant of the farm. In a small work on slavery in
Kentucky by George Harris, it is stated that masters
chose the crudest of their negroes for this office.
It is not true, exceptions allowed for. The work
would not be worth mentioning, had not so many
people at the North believed it. The amusing thing
is, they believed Mrs. Stowe also. But if Mrs. Stowe's
account of slavery in Kentucky is true, Harris's is
not. It is true that Uncle Tom inspired the other
negroes with some degree of fear. He was censor
of morals, and reported derelictions of the lazy, the
destructive, and the thievish. For instance, an Uncle
Tom on one occasion told his master of the stealing
of a keg of lard, naming the thief and the hiding-
place. " Say not a word about it," replied his master.
The next day he rode out into the field where the
culprit was ploughing, and, getting down, walked
along beside him. "What's the matter, William?" he
asked, after a while ; " you can't look me in the face
as usual." William burst into tears, and confessed
everything. " Come to-night, and I will arrange so
that you can put the lard back and nobody will ever
know you took it." The only punishment was a
little moral teaching; but the Uncle Tom in the
case, though he kept his secret, looked for some days
as though the dignity of his office had not been
suitably upheld by his master.

76 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
It was Uncle Tom's duty to get the others off to
work in the morning. In the fields he did not drive
the work, but led it — being a master-workman — led
the cradles and the reaping-hooks, the hemp-break
ing and the corn -shucking. The spirit of happy
music went with the workers. They were not goaded
through their daily tasks by the spur of pitiless
husbandry. Nothing was more common than their
voluntary contests of skill and power. My recollec
tion reaches only to the last two or three years of
slaver)^ ; but I remember the excitement with which
I witnessed some of these hard-fought battles of the
negroes. Rival hemp-breakers of the neighborhood,
meeting in the same field, would slip out long before
breakfast and sometimes never stop for dinner. So
it was with cradling, corn-shucking, or corn-cutting —
in all work where rivalries were possible. No doubt
there were other motives. So much work was a
day's task ; for more there was extra pay. A capital
hand, by often performing double or treble the re
quired amount, would clear a neat profit in a season.
The days of severest labor fell naturally in harvest-
time. But then intervals of rest in the shade were
commonly given ; and milk, coffee, or, when the prej
udice of the master did not prevent (which was not
often), whiskey was distributed between meal -times.
As a rule they worked without hurry. De Tocque-
ville gave unintentional testimony to characteristic
slavery in Kentucky when he described the negroes

CHASING THE RABBIT.

as "loitering" in the fields. On one occasion the
hands dropped work to run after a rabbit the dogs
had started. A passer-by indignantly reported the
fact to the master. " Sir," said the old gentleman,
with a hot face, " I'd have whipped the last d  n
rascal of 'em if they hadnt run 'im !"
The negroes made money off their truck-patches,
in which they raised melons, broom-corn, vegetables.
When Charles Sumner was in Kentucky, he saw
with almost incredulous eyes the comfortable cabins
with their flowers and poultry, the fruitful truck-
patches, and a genuine Uncle Tom — " a black gen
tleman with his own watch !" Well enough does
Mrs. Stowe put these words into her hero's mouth,
when he hears he is to be sold : " I'm feared things
will be kinder goin' to rack when I'm gone. Mas'r
can't be 'spected to be a-pryin' round everywhere as
I've done, a-keepin' up all the ends. The boys means
well, but they's powerful car 'less."

78 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
More interesting is Uncle Tom's character as a
preacher. Contemporary with him in Kentucky was
a class of men among his people who exhorted, held
prayer-meetings in the cabins and baptizings in the
woods, performed marriage ceremonies, and enjoyed
great freedom of movement. There was one in near
ly every neighborhood, and together they wrought
effectively in the moral development of their race.
I have nothing to say here touching the vast and
sublime conception which Mrs. Stowe formed of
" Uncle Tom's " spiritual nature. But no idealized
manifestation of it is better than this simple occur
rence : One of these negro preachers was allowed by
his master to fill a distant appointment. Belated
once, and returning home after the hour forbidden
for slaves to be abroad, he was caught by the patrol
and cruelly whipped. As the blows fell, his only
words were : " Jesus Christ suffered for righteous
ness' sake ; so kin I." . Another of them was recom
mended for deacon's orders and actually ordained.
When liberty came, he refused to be free, and con
tinued to work in his master's family till his death.
With considerable knowledge of the Bible and a
fluent tongue, he would nevertheless sometimes
grow confused while preaching and lose his train of
thought. At these embarrassing junctures it was
his wont suddenly to call out at the top of his voice,
"Saul! Saul! why persecutest thou me?" The effect
upon his hearers was electrifying ; and as none but a

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 79
very highly favored being could be thought worthy of
enjoying this persecution, he thus converted his loss
of mind into spiritual reputation. A third, named
Peter Cotton, united the vocations of exhorter and
wood - chopper. He united them literally, for one
moment Peter might be seen standing on his log
chopping away, and the next kneeling down beside
it praying. He got his mistress to make him a long
jeans coat and on the ample tails of it to embroider,
by his direction, sundry texts of Scripture, such as :
"Come unto me, all ye that are heavy laden !" Thus
literally clothed with righteousness, Peter went from
cabin to cabin preaching the Word. Well for him if
that other Peter could have seen him.
These men sometimes made a pathetic addition
to their marriage ceremonies: "Until death or our
higher powers do you separate !"
Another typical contemporary of Uncle Tom's
was the negro fiddler. It should be remembered
that before he hears he is to be sold South, Uncle
Tom is pictured as a light-hearted creature, capering
and dancing in his cabin. There was no lack of
music in those cabins. The banjo was played, but
more commonly the fiddle. A home-made variety
of the former consisted of a crook-necked, hard-shell
gourd and a piece of sheepskin. There were some
times other instruments — the flageolet and the tri
angle. I have heard of a kettle-drum's being made
of a copper still. A Kentucky negro carried through

80 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
the war as a tambourine the skull of a mule, the rat
tling teeth being secured in the jawbones. Of
course bones were everywhere used. Negro music
on one or more instruments was in the highest
vogue at the house of the master. The young Ken
tuckians often used it on serenading bravuras. The
old fiddler, most of all, was held in reverent esteem
and met with the gracious treatment of the minstrel
in feudal halls. At parties and weddings, at picnics
in the summer woods, he was the soul of melody;
and with an eye to the high demands upon his art,
he widened his range of selections and perfected
according to native standards his inimitable tech
nique. The deep, tender, pure feeling in the song
"Old Kentucky Home" is a true historic interpre
tation. It is wide of the mark to suppose that on such a
farm as that of the Shelbys, the negroes were in a
perpetual frenzy of discontent or felt any burning
desire for freedom. It is difficult to reach a true
general conclusion on this delicate subject. But it
must go for something that even the Kentucky
abolitionists of those days will tell you that well-
treated negroes cared not a snap for liberty. Ne
groes themselves, and very intelligent ones, will give
you to-day the same assurance. It is an awkward
discovery to make, that some of them still cherish
resentment towards agitators who came secretly
among them, fomented discontent, and led them

THE PREACHER.

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 83
away from homes to which they afterwards returned.
And I want to state here, for no other reason than
that of making an historic contribution to the study
of the human mind and passions, that a man's views
of slavery in those days did not determine his treat
ment of his own slaves. The only case of mutiny
and stampede that I have been able to discover in
a certain part of Kentucky, took place among the
negroes of a man who was known as an outspoken
emancipationist. He pleaded for the freedom of the
negro, but in the mean time worked him at home
with the chain round his neck and the ball resting
on his plough.
Christmas was, of course, the time of holiday mer
rymaking, and the " Ketchin' marster an' mistiss
Christmus gif ' " was a great feature. One morning
an aged couple presented themselves.
" Well, what do you want for your Christmas
gift ?"
" Freedom, mistiss !"
" Freedom ! Haven't you been as good as free
for the last ten years?"
" Yaas, mistiss ; but — freedom mighty sweet !"
" Then take your freedom !"
The only method of celebrating the boon was the
moving into a cabin on the neighboring farm of
their mistress's aunt and being freely supported
there as they had been freely supported at home.
Mrs. Stowe has said, " There is nothing pictu-

84 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
resque or beautiful in the family attachment of old
servants, which is not to be found in countries where
these servants are legally free." On the contrary, a
volume of incidents might readily be gathered, the
picturesqueness and beauty of which are due wholly
to the fact that the negroes were not free, but slaves.
Indeed, many could never have happened at all but
in this relationship. I cite the case of an old negro
who was buying his freedom from his master, who
continued to make payments during the war, and
made the final one at the time of General Kirby
Smith's invasion of Kentucky. After he had paid
him the uttermost farthing, he told him that if he
should ever be a slave again, he wanted him for his
master. Take the case of an old negress who had
been allowed to accumulate considerable property.
At her death she willed it to her young master
instead of to her sons, as she would have been al
lowed to do. But the war ! what is to be said of the
part the negro took in that? Is there in the drama
of humanity a figure more picturesque or. more pa
thetic than the figure of the African slave, as he
followed his master to the battle-field, marched and
hungered and thirsted with him, served and cheered
and nursed him — that master who was fighting to
keep him in slavery? Instances are too many; but
the one may be mentioned of a Kentucky negro
who followed his young master into the Southern
army, stayed with him till he fell on the field, lay

UNCLE TOM AT HOME 85
hid out in the bushes a week, and finally, after a long
time and many hardships, got back to his mistress
in Kentucky, bringing his dead master's horse and
purse and trinkets. This subject comprises a whole
vast field of its own ; and if the history of it is ever
written, it will be written in the literature of the
South, for there alone lies the knowledge and the
love. It is only through a clear view of the peculiar
features of slavery in Kentucky before the war that
one can understand the general status of the ne
groes of Kentucky at the present time. Perhaps
in no other State has the race made less endeavor
to push itself into equality with the white. This
fact must be explained as in part resulting from, the
conservative ideals of Kentucky life in general. But
it is more largely due to the influences of a system
which, though no longer in vogue, is still remem
bered, still powerful to rule the minds of a naturally
submissive and susceptible people. The kind, af
fectionate relations of the races under the old regime
have continued with so little interruption that the
blacks remain content with their inferiority, and
lazily drift through life. I venture to make the
statement that, wherever in the United States they
have attempted most to enforce their new-born
rights, they have either, on the one hand, been en
couraged to do so, or have, on the other, been driven
to self-assertion by harsh treatment. But treated

86 UNCLE TOM AT HOME
always kindly, always as hopelessly inferior beings,
they will do least for themselves. This, it is be
lieved, is the key-note to the situation in Kentucky
at the present time.

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY

I
i HE institutions of the Kentuckian have
deep root in his rich social nature. He
loves the swarm. The^ very motto of
the State is a declaration of good-fellow
ship, and the seal of the commonwealth the act of
shaking hands. Divided, he falls. The Kentuckian
must be one of many; must assert himself, not
through the solitary exercise of his intellect, but the
senses; must see men about him who are fat, grip
his friend, hear cordial, hearty conversation, realize
the play of his emotions. Society is the multiple
of himself.
Hence his fondness for large gatherings : open-air
assemblies of the democratic sort — great agricultural
fairs, race-courses, political meetings, barbecues and
burgoos in the woods — where no one is pushed to
the wall, or reduced to a seat and to silence, where
all may move about at will, seek and be sought, make
and receive impressions. Quiet masses of people
in-doors absorb him less. He is not fond of lect
ures, does not build splendid theatres or expend
lavishly for opera, is almost of Puritan excellence in

90 COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
the virtue of church-going, which in the country is
attended with neighborly reunions.
This large social disposition underlies the history
of the most social of all his days — a day that has
long had its observance embedded in the structure
of his law, is invested with the authority and charm
of old-time usage and reminiscence, and still enables
him to commingle business and pleasure in a way
of his own. Hardly more characteristic of the
Athenian was the agora, or the forum of the Ro
man, than is county court day characteristic of the
Kentuckian. In the open square around the court
house of the county-seat he has had the centre of
his public social life, the arena of his passions and
amusements, the rallying-point of his political dis
cussions, the market-place of his business transac
tions, the civil unit of his institutional history.
It may be that some stranger has sojourned long
enough in Kentucky to have grown familiar with
the wonted aspects of a county town. He has re
marked the easy swing of its daily life : amicable
groups of men sitting around the front entrances of
the hotels ; the few purchasers and promenaders on
the uneven brick pavements ; the few vehicles of
draught and carriage scattered along the level white
thoroughfares. All day the subdued murmur of
patient local traffic has scarcely drowned the twit
tering of English sparrows in the maples. Then
comes a Monday morning when the whole scene

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY

91

changes. The world has not been dead, but only
sleeping. Whence this sudden surging crowd of
rural folk — these lowing herds in the streets ? Is it
some animated pastoral come to town ? some joyful
public anniversary? some survival in altered guise
of the English country fair of mellower times ? or
a vision of what the little place will be a century
hence, when American life shall be packed and
agitated and tense all over the land ? What a world
of homogeneous, good-looking, substantial, reposeful
people with honest front and amiable meaning!

WET GOODS FOR SALE — BOWLING-GREEN.

92 COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
What bargaining and buying and selling by ever-
forming, ever-dissolving groups, with quiet laughter
and familiar talk and endless interchange of domes
tic interrogatories ! You descend into the street to
study the doings and spectacles from a nearer ap
proach, and stop to ask the meaning of it. Ah ! it
is county court day in Kentucky; it is the Kentuck
ians in the market-place.

II
They have been assembling here now for nearly
a hundred years. One of the first demands of the
young commonwealth in the woods was that its vig
orous, passionate life should be regulated by the
usages of civil law. Its monthly county courts, with
justices of the peace, were derived from the Virginia
system of jurisprudence, where they formed the aris
tocratic feature of the government. Virginia itself
owed these models to England ; and thus the influ
ence of the courts and of the decent and orderly
yeomanry of both lands passed, as was singularly
fitting, over into the ideals of justice erected by the
pure-blooded colony. As the town meeting of Bos
ton town perpetuated the folkmote of the Anglo-
Saxon free state, and the Dutch village communi
ties on the shores of the Hudson revived the older

CONCLUDING A BARGAIN.

ones on the banks of the Rhine, so in Kentucky,
through Virginia, there were transplanted by the
people, themselves of clean stock and with strong
conservative ancestral traits, the influences and ele
ments of English law in relation to the county, the
court, and the justice of the peace.
Through all the old time of Kentucky State-life
there towers up the figure of the justice of the peace.
Commissioned by the Governor to hold monthly
court, he had not always a court-house wherein to
sit, but must buy land in the midst of a settlement
or town whereon to build one, and build also the
contiguous necessity of civilization — a jail. In the
rude court -room he had a long platform erected,
usually running its whole width; on this platform

94 COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
he had a ruder wooden bench placed, likewise ex
tending all the way across ; and on this bench, hav
ing ridden into town, it may be, in dun-colored leg
gings, broadcloth pantaloons, a pigeon-tailed coat, a
shingle-caped overcoat, and a twelve-dollar high fur
hat, he sat gravely and sturdily down amid his peers ;
looking out upon the bar, ranged along a wooden
bench beneath, and prepared to consider the legal
needs of his assembled neighbors. Among them
all the very best was he ; chosen for age, wisdom,
means, weight and probity of character ; as a rule,
not profoundly versed in the law, perhaps knowing
nothing of it — being a Revolutionary soldier, a pi
oneer, or a farmer — but endowed with a sure, robust
common- sense and rectitude of spirit that enabled
him to divine what the law was ; shaking himself
fiercely loose from the grip of mere technicalities,
and deciding by the natural justice of the case; giv
ing decisions of equal authority with the highest
court, an appeal being rarely taken ; perpetuating
his own authority by appointing his own associates :
with all his shortcomings and weaknesses a notable,
historic figure, high-minded, fearless, and incorrupti
ble, dignified, patient, and strong, and making the
county court days of Kentucky for wellnigh half a
century memorable to those who have lived to see
justice less economically and less honorably admin
istered. But besides the legal character and intent of the

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY 95
day, which was thus its first and dominant feature,
divers things drew the folk together. Even the jus
tice himself may have had quite other than magis
terial reasons for coming to town ; certainly the
people had. They must interchange opinions about
local and national politics, observe the workings of
their own laws, pay and contract debts, acquire and
transfer property, discuss all questions relative to
the welfare of the community — holding, in fact, a
county court day much like one in Virginia in the
middle of the seventeenth century.

Ill
But after business was over, time hung idly on
their hands; and being vigorous men, hardened by
work in forest and field, trained in foot and limb to
fleetness and endurance, and fired with admiration
of physical prowess, like riotous school-boys out on
a half-holiday, they fell to playing. All through the
first quarter of the century, and for a longer time,
county court day in Kentucky was, at least in many
parts of the State, the occasion for holding athletic
games. The men, young or in the sinewy manhood
of more than middle age, assembled once a month
at the county-seats to witness and take part in the
feats of muscle and courage. They wrestled, threw

96 COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
the sledge, heaved the bar, divided and played at
fives, had foot-races for themselves, and quarter-
races for their horses. By-and-by, as these contests
became a more prominent feature of the day, they
would pit against each other the champions of dif
ferent neighborhoods. It would become widely
known beforehand that next county court day " the
bully " in one end of the county would whip " the
bully " in the other end ; so when court day came,
and the justices came, and the bullies came, what
was the county to do but come also ? The crowd
repaired to the common, a ring was formed, the little
men on the outside who couldn't see, Zaccheus-like,
took to the convenient trees, and there was to be
seen a fair and square set-to, in which the fist was
the battering-ram and the biceps a catapult. What
better, more time- honored, proof could those back
woods Kentuckians have furnished of the humors in
their English blood and of their English pugnacity?
But, after all, this was only play, and play never is
perfectly satisfying to a man who would rather
fight;, so from playing they fell to harder work, and
throughout this period county court day was the
monthly Monday on which the Kentuckian regular
ly did his fighting. He availed himself liberally of
election day, it is true, and of regimental muster in
the spring and battalion muster in the fall — great
gala occasions; but county court day was by all
odds the preferred and highly prized season. It

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY 99
was periodical, and could be relied upon, being writ
ten in the law, noted in the almanac, and registered
in the heavens.
A capital day, a most admirable and serene day
for fighting. Fights grew like a fresh-water polype
— by being broken in two : each part produced a
progeny. So conventional did the recreation be
come that difficulties occurring out in the country
between times regularly had their settlements post
poned until the belligerents could convene with the
justices. The men met and fought openly in the
streets, the friends of each standing by to see fair
play and whet their appetites.
Thus the justices sat quietly on the bench inside,
and the people fought quietly in the streets outside,
and the day of the month set apart for the conserva
tion of the peace became the approved day for indi
vidual war. There is no evidence to be had that
either the justices or the constables ever interfered.
These pugilistic encounters had a certain law of
beauty: they were affairs of equal combat and of cour
age. The fight over, animosity was gone, the feud
ended. The men must shake hands, go and drink
together, become friends. We are touching here
upon a grave and curious fact of local history. The
fighting habit must be judged by a wholly unique
standard. It was the direct outcome of racial traits
powerfully developed by social conditions.

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY

IV
Another noticeable recreation of the day was the
drinking. Indeed the two pleasures went marvel
lously well together. The drinking led up to the
fighting, and the fighting led up to the drinking;
and this amiable co-operation might be prolonged
at will. The merchants kept barrels of whiskey
in their cellars for their customers. Bottles of it
sat openly on the counter, half-way between the
pocket of the buyer and the shelf of merchandise.
There were no saloons separate from the taverns.
At these whiskey was sold and drunk without
screens or scruples. It was not usually bought by
the drink, but by the tickler. [ The tickler was a
bottle of narrow shape, holding a half -pint— ^just
eriough to tickle, j On a county court day wellnigh
a whole town would be tickled. In some parts of
the State tables were placed out on the sidewalks,
and around these the men sat drinking mint-juleps
and playing draw poker and " old sledge."
Meantime the day was not wholly given over to
playing and fighting and drinking. More and more
it was becoming the great public day of the month,
and mirroring the life and spirit of the times — on
occasion a day of fearful, momentous gravity, as in

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY 101
the midst of war, financial distress, high' party feel
ing; more and more the people gathered together
for discussion and the origination of measures deter
mining the events of their history. Gradually new
features incrusted it. The politician, observing the
crowd, availed himself of it to announce his own
candidacy or to wage a friendly campaign, sure,
whether popular or unpopular, of a courteous head
ing; for this is a virtue of the Kentuckian, to be
polite to a public speaker, however little liked his

THE "TICKLER."

102 COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
cause. In the spring, there being no fairs, it was
the occasion for exhibiting the fine stock of the
country, which was led out to some suburban past
ure, where the owners made speeches over it. In
the winter, at the close of the old or the beginning
of the new year, negro slaves were regularly hired
out on this day for the ensuing twelvemonth, and
sometimes put upon the block before the Court
house door and sold for life.
But it was not until near the half of the second
quarter of the century that an auctioneer originated
stock sales on the open square, and thus gave to the
day the characteristic it has since retained of being
the great market-day of the month. Thenceforth
its influence was to be more widely felt, to be ex
tended into other counties and even States ; thence
forth it was to become more distinctively a local
institution without counterpart.
To describe minutely the scenes of a county
court day in Kentucky, say at the end of the half-
century, would be to write a curious page in the
history of the times ; for they were possible only
through the unique social conditions they portrayed.
It was near the most prosperous period of State life
under the old regime. The institution of slavery
was about to culminate and decline. Agriculture
had about as nearly perfected itself as it was ever
destined to do under the system of bondage. The
war cloud in the sky of the future could be covered

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY 103
with the hand, or at most with the country gentle
man's broad-brimmed straw-hat. The whole atmos
phere of the times was heavy with ease, and the
people, living in perpetual contemplation of their
superabundant natural wealth, bore the quality of
the land in their manners and dispositions.
When the well-to-do Kentucky farmer got up in
the morning, walked out into the porch, stretched
himself, and looked at the sun, he knew that he
could summon a sleek kindly negro to execute
every wish and whim — one to search for his mis
placed hat, a second to bring him a dipper of ice-
water, a third to black his shoes, a fourth to saddle
his horse and hitch it at the stiles, a fifth to cook
his breakfast, a sixth to wait on him at the table, a
seventh to stand on one side and keep off the flies.
Breakfast over, he mounted his horse and rode out
where " the hands " were at work. The chance was
his overseer or negro foreman was there before him:
his presence was unnecessary. What a gentleman
he was ! This was called earning one's bread by
the sweat of his brow. Whose brow ? He yawned.
What should he do ? One thing he knew he would
do — take a good nap before dinner. Perhaps he
had better ride over to the blacksmith-shop. How
ever, there was nobody there. It was county court
day. The sky was blue, the sun golden, the air de
lightful, the road broad and smooth, the gait of his
horse the very poetry of motion. He would go to

104 COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
county court himself. There was really nothing else
before him. His wife would want to go, too, and the
children. So away they go, he on horseback or in the fam
ily carriage, with black Pompey driving in front and
yellow Caesar riding behind. The turnpike reached,
the progress of the family carriage is interrupted or
quite stopped, for there are many other carriages on
the road, all going in the same direction. Then pa,
growing impatient, orders black Pompey to drive
out on one side, whip up the horses, pass the others,
and get ahead, so as to escape from the clouds of
white limestone dust, which settles thick on the
velvet collar of pa's blue cloth coat and in the deli
cate pink marabou feathers of ma's bonnet : which
Pompey can't do, for the faster he goes, the faster
the others go, making all the more dust; so that pa
gets red in the face, and jumps up in the seat, and
looks ready to fight, and thrusts his head out of the
window and knocks off his hat ; and ma looks nerv
ous, and black Pompey and yellow Caesar both look
white with dust and fear.
A rural cavalcade indeed ! Besides the carriages,
buggies, horsemen, and pedestrians, there are long
droves of stock being hurried on towards the town
— hundreds of them. By the time they come to
gether in the town they will be many thousands.
For is not this the great stock-market of the West,
and does not the whole South look from its rich

THE QUACK-DOCTOR.

plantations and cities up to Kentucky for bacon and
mules ? j By-and-by our family carriage does at last
get to town, and is left out in the streets along with
many others to block up the passway according to
the custom.
The town is packed. It looks as though by some
vast suction system it had with one exercise of force
drawn all the country life into itself. The poor
dumb creatures gathered in from the peaceful fields,

7—2

106 COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
and crowded around the Court-house, send forth,
each after its kind, a general outcry of horror and
despair at the tumult of the scene and the unimag
inable mystery of their own fate. They overflow
into the by-streets, where they take possession of
the sidewalks, and debar entrance at private resi
dences. No stock-pens wanted then ; none wanted
now. If a town legislates against these stock sales
on the streets and puts up pens on its outskirts,
straightway the stock is taken to some other market,
and the town is punished for its airs by a decline in
its trade.
As the day draws near noon, the tide of life is at
the flood. Mixed in with the tossing horns and nim
ble heels of the terrified, distressed, half-maddened
beasts, are the people. Above the level of these is
the discordant choir of shrill-voiced auctioneers on
horseback. At the corners of the streets long-haired
— and long-eared — doctors in curious hats lecture to
eager groups on maladies and philanthropic cures.
Every itinerant vender of notion and nostrum in the
country-side is there ; every wandering Italian harp
er or musician of any kind, be he but a sightless
fiddler, | who brings forth with poor unison of voice
and string the brief and too fickle ballads of the
time, " Gentle Annie," and " Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt."
Strangely contrasted with everything else in physi
cal type and marks of civilization are the mountain
eers, who have come down to " the settlemints "

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY 107
driving herds of their lean, stunted cattle, or bring
ing, in slow-moving, ox-drawn " steamboat " wagons,
maple-sugar, and baskets, and poles, and wild mount
ain fruit — faded wagons, faded beasts, faded clothes,
faded faces, faded everything. A general day for
buying and selling all over the State. What pur
chases at the dry-goods stores and groceries to keep
all those negroes at home fat and comfortable and
comely — cottons, and gay cottonades, and gorgeous
turbans, and linseys of prismatic dyes, bags of Rio
coffee and barrels of sugar, with many another
pleasant thing ! All which will not be taken home
in the family carriage, but in the wagon which Scipio
Africanus is driving in ; Scipio, remember ; for while
the New Englander has been naming his own flesh
and blood Peleg and Hezekiah and Abednego, the
Kentuckian has been giving even his negro slaves
mighty and classic names, after his taste and fashion.
But very mockingly and satirically do those victori
ous titles contrast with the condition of those that
wear them. A surging populace, an in-town holiday
for all rural folk, wholly unlike what may be seen
elsewhere in this country. The politician will be
sure of his audience to-day in the Court-house yard :
the seller will be sure of the purchaser; the idle
man of meeting one still idler ; friend of seeing dis
tant friend ; blushing Phyllis, come in to buy fresh
ribbons, of being followed through the throng by
anxious Corydon.

108 COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
And what, amid this tumult of life and affairs —
what of the justice of the peace, whose figure once
towered up so finely? Alas! quite outgrown, pushed
aside, and wellnigh forgotten. The very name of
the day which once so sternly commemorated the
exercise of his authority has wandered into another
meaning. " County court day " no longer brings up
in the mind the image of the central Court-house
and the judge on the bench. It is to be greatly
feared his noble type is dying. The stain of venali
ty has soiled his homespun ermine, and the trail of
the office-seeker passed over his rough-hewn bench.
So about this time the new constitution of the com
monwealth comes in, to make the autocratic ancient
justice over into the modern elective magistrate, and
with the end of the half-century to close a great
chapter of wonderful county court days.
But what changes in Kentucky since 1850! How
has it fared with the day meantime ? What devel
opment has it undergone ? What contrasts will it
show ?
Undoubtedly, as seen now, the day is not more in
teresting by reason of the features it wears than for
the sake of comparison with the others it has lost.
A singular testimony to the conservative habits of
the Kentuckian, and to the stability of his local in
stitutions, is to be found in the fact that it should
have come through all this period of upheaval and
downfall, of shifting and drifting, and yet remained

AUCTIONING A JACK.

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY in
so much the same. Indeed, it seems in no wise lia
ble to lose its meaning of being the great market
and general business day as well as the great social
and general laziness day of the month and the State.
Perhaps one feature has taken larger prominence —
the eager canvassing of voters by local politicians
and office-seekers for weeks, sometimes for months,
beforehand. Is it not known that even circuit court
will adjourn on this day so as to give the clerk and
the judge, the bar, the witnesses, an opportunity to
hear rival candidates address the assembled crowd?
And yet we shall discover differences. These peo
ple — these groups of twos and threes and hundreds,
lounging, sitting, squatting, taking every imaginable
posture that can secure bodily comfort — ;are they in
any vital sense new Kentuckians in the new South ?
If you care to understand whether this be true, and
what it may mean if it is true, you shall not find a
better occasion for doing so than a contemporary
county court day.
The Kentuckian nowadays does not come to
county court to pick a quarrel or to settle one. He
has no quarrel. His fist has reverted to its natural
use and become a hand. Nor does he go armed.
Positively it is true that gentlemen in this State do
not now get satisfaction out of each other in the
market-place, and that on a modern county court
day a three-cornered hat is hardly to be seen. And
yet you will go on defining a Kentuckian in terms

112 COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
of his grandfather, unaware that he has changed
faster than the family reputation. The fighting
habit and the shooting habit were both more than
satisfied during the Civil War.
Another old-time feature of the day has disap
peared — the open use of the pioneer beverage.
Merchants do not now set it out for their custom
ers ; in the country no longer is it the law of hospi
tality to offer it to a guest. To do so would com
monly be regarded in the light of as great a liberty
as to have omitted it once would have been consid
ered an offence. The decanter is no longer found
on the sideboard in the home ; the barrel is not
stored in the cellar.
Some features of the old Kentucky market-place
have disappeared. The war and the prostration of
the South destroyed that as a market for certain
kinds of stock, the raising and sales of which have
in consequence declined. Railways have touched
the eastern parts of the State, and broken up the
distant toilsome traffic with the steamboat wagons
of the mountaineers. No longer is the day the gen
eral buying day for the circumjacent country as
formerly, when the farmers, having great households
of slaves, sent in their wagons and bought on twelve
months' credit, knowing it would be twenty -four
months' if they desired. The doctors, too, have
nearly vanished from the street corners, though on
the highway one may still happen upon the peddler

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY 115
with his pack] and in the midst of an eager throng
still may meet the swaying, sightless old fiddler,
singing to ears that never tire gay ditties in a
cracked and melancholy tone.
Through all changes one feature has remained.
It goes back to the most ancient days of local his-|
tory. The Kentuckian will come to county court
"to swap horses;'' it is in the blood. In one small
town may be seen fifty or a hundred countrymen
assembled during the afternoon in a back street to
engage in this delightful recreation. Each rides or
leads his worst, most objectionable beast ; of these,
however fair-seeming, none is above suspicion. It
is the potter's field, the lazar-house, the beggardom,
of horse-flesh. The stiff and aged bondsman of the
glebe and plough looks out of one filmy eye upon
the hopeless wreck of the fleet roadster, and the
poor macerated carcass that in days gone by bore
its thankless burden over the glistening turnpikes
with the speed and softness of the wind has not the
strength to return the contemptuous kick which is
given him by a lungless, tailless rival. Prices range
from nothing upward. Exchanges are made for a
piece of tobacco or a watermelon to boot.
But always let us return from back streets and
side thoughts to the central Court-house square and
the general assembly of the people. Go among
them ; they are not dangerous. Do not use fine
words, at which they will prick up their ears uneasi-

116 COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
ly ; or delicate sentiments, which will make you less
liked ; or indulge in flights of thought, which they
despise. Remember, here is the dress and the talk
and the manners of the street, and fashion yourself
accordingly. Be careful of your speech ; men in
Kentucky are human. If you can honestly praise
them, do so. How they will glow and expand !
Censure, and you will get the cold shoulder. For
to them praise is friendship and censure enmity.
They have wonderful solidarity. Sympathy will on
occasion flow through them like an electric current,
so that they will soften and melt, or be set on fire.
There is a Kentucky sentiment, expending itself in
complacent, mellow love of the land, the people, the
institutions. You speak to them of the happiness
of living in parts of the world where life has in
finite variety, nobler general possibilities, greater
gains, harder struggles ; they say, " We are just as
happy here." " It is easier to make a living in
Kentucky than to keep from being run over in
New York," said a young Kentuckian ; and home
he went.
If you attempt to deal with them in the business
of the market-place, do not trick or cheat them.
Above all things they hate and despise intrigue and
deception. For one single act of dishonor a man
will pay with life-long aversion and contempt. The
rage it puts them in to be charged with lying them
selves is the exact measure of the excitement with

fflmk 5

SWAPPING HORSES.

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY 119
which they regard the lie in others. This is one of
their idols — an idol of the market-place in the true
meaning of the Baconian philosophy. The new
Kentuckian has not lost an old-time trait of charac
ter: so high and delicate a sense of personal honor
that to be told he lies is the same as saying he has
ceased to be a gentleman. Along with good faith
and fair dealing goes liberality. Not prodigality;
they have changed all that. The fresh system of
things has produced no more decided result than a
different regard for material interests. You shall
not again charge the Kentuckians with lacking ei
ther " the telescopic appreciation of distant gain," or
the microscopic appreciation of present gain. The
influence of money is active, and the illusion of wealth
become a reality. Profits are now more likely to
pass into accumulation and structure. There is
more discussion of costs and values. Small econo
mies are more dwelt upon in thought and conversa
tion. Actually you shall find the people higgling
with the dealer over prices. And yet how signifi
cant a fact is it in their life that the merchant does
not, as a rule, give exact change over the counter !
At least the cent has not yet been put under the
microscope. _
Perhaps you will not accept it as an evidence of
progress that so many men will leave their business
all over the country for an idle day once a month in
town — may, oftener than once a month; for many

120 COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
who are at county court in this place to-day will at
tend it in another county next Monday. But do not
be deceived by the lazy appearance of the streets.
There are fewer idlers than of old. You may think
this quiet group of men who have taken possession
of a buggy or a curb-stone are out upon a costly
holiday. Draw near, and it is discovered that there
is fresh, eager, intelligent talk of the newest agri
cultural implements and of scientific farming. In
fact the day is to the assembled farmers the seed
time of ideas, to be scattered in ready soil — an in
formal, unconscious meeting of grangers.
There seems to be a striking equality of stations
and conditions. Having travelled through many
towns, and seen these gatherings together of all
classes, you will be pleased with the fair, attractive,
average prosperity, and note the almost entire ab
sence of paupers and beggars. Somehow misfort
une and ill-fortune and old age save themselves here
from the last hard necessity of asking alms on the
highway. But the appearance of the people will
easily lead you to a wrong inference as to social
equality. They are much less democratic than they
seem, and their dress and speech and manners in
the market-place are not their best equipment. You
shall meet with these in their homes. In their
homes, too, social distinctions begin and are enforced,
and men who find in the open square a common
footing never associate elsewhere. But even among

GENTLEMEN OF LEISURE.

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY 123
the best of the new Kentuckians will you hardly
observe fidelity to the old social ideals, which ad
judged that the very flower of birth and training
must bloom in the bearing and deportment. With
the crumbling and downfall of the old system fell
also the structure of fine manners, which were at
once its product and adornment.

VI
A new figure has made its appearance in the
Kentucky market-place, having set its face resolutely
towards the immemorial Court-house and this peri
odic gathering together of freemen. Beyond com
parison the most significant new figure that has
made its way thither and cast its shadow on the
people and the ground. Writ all over with prob
lems that not the wisest can read. Stalking out of
an awful past into what uncertain future ! Clothed
in hanging rags, it may be, or a garb that is a mosaic
of strenuous patches. Ah L-Pompey, or Caesar,, or
Cicero, of the days of slavery, where be thy_ family
carriage, thy master and mjstre.ss, now?
He comes into the county court, this old African,
because he is a colored Kentuckian and must honor
the stable customs of the country. He does little
buying or selling; he is not a politician ; he has no

124 COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
debt to collect, and no legal business. Still, example
is powerful and the negro imitative, so here he is at
county court. It is one instance of the influence
exerted over him by the institutions of the Ken
tuckian, so that he has a passion for fine stock, must
build amphitheatres and hold fairs and attend races-
Naturally, therefore, county court has become a great
social day with his race. They stop work and come
in from the country, or from the outskirts of the
town, where they have congregated in little frame
houses, and exhibit a quasi-activity in whatever of
business and pleasure is going forward. In no
other position of life does he exhibit his character
and his condition more strikingly than here. Al
ways comical, always tragical, light-hearted, sociable;
his shackles stricken off, but wearing those of his
own indolence, ignorance, and helplessness; the wan
dering Socrates of the streets, always dropping little
shreds of observation on human affairs and bits of
philosophy on human life ; his memory working with
last Sunday's sermon, and his hope with to-morrow's
bread ; citizen, with so much freedom and so little
liberty — the negro forms one of the conspicuous
features of a county court day at the present time.
A wonderful, wonderful day this is that does thus
always keep pace with civilization in the State, draw
ing all elements to itself, and portraying them to the
interpreting eye. So that to paint the scenes of the
county court days in the past is almost to write the

COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY 125
history of the contemporary periods ; and to do as
much with one of the present hour is to depict the
oldest influences that has survived and the newest
that has been born in this local environment. To
the future student of governmental and institutional
history in this country, a study always interesting,
always important, and always unique, will be county
court day in Kentucky.

KENTUCKY FAIRS

I

¦^^S^HE nineteenth century opened gravely for
the Kentuckians. Little akin as was the
spirit of the people to that of the Puri
tans, life among them had been almost as
granitic in its hardness and ruggedness and desolate
unrelief. The only thing in the log- cabin that had
sung from morning till night was the spinning-wheel.
Not much behind those women but danger, anxiety,
vigils, devastation, mournful tragedies ; scarce one
of them but might fitly have gone to her loom and
woven herself a garment of sorrow. Not much be
hind those men but felling of trees, clearing of land,
raising of houses, opening of roads, distressing prob
lems of State, desolating wars of the republic. Most
could remember the time when it was so common
for a man to be killed, that to lie down and die a
natural death seemed unnatural. Many must have
had in their faces the sadness that was in the face
of Lincoln.
Nevertheless, from the first, there had stood out
among the Kentuckians broad exhibitions of exuber
ant animal vigor, of unbridled animal spirits. Some
singularly and faithfully enough in the ancestral
9

130 KENTUCKY FAIRS
vein of English sports and relaxations — dog-fighting
and cock-fighting, rifle target -shooting, wrestling
matches, foot-racing for the men, and quarter-racing
for the horses. Without any thought of making
spectacles or of becoming themselves a spectacle
in history, they were always ready to form an im
promptu arena and institute athletic games. They
had even their gladiators. Other rude pleasures
were more characteristic of their environment — the
log-rolling and the quilting, the social frolic of the
harvesting, the merry parties of flax-pullers, and the
corn-husking at nightfall, when the men divided into
sides, and the green glass whiskey-bottle, stopped
with a corn-cob, was filled and refilled and passed
from mouth to mouth, until out of those lusty
throats rose and swelled a rhythmic choral song
that could be heard in the deep woods a mile or
more away : at midnight those who were sober took
home those who were drunk. But of course none
of these were organized amusements. They are
not instances of taking pleasures sadly, but of at
tempts to do much hard, rough work with gladness.
Other occasions, also, which have the semblance of
popular joys, and which certainly were not passed
over without merriment and turbulent, disorderly
fun, were really set apart for the gravest of civic and
political reasons: militia musters, stump-speakings,
county court day assemblages, and the yearly July
celebrations. Still other pleasures were of an eco-

KENTUCKY FAIRS 133
nomic or utilitarian nature. Thus the novel and
exciting contests by parties of men at squirrel-shoot
ing looked to the taking of that destructive animal's
scalp, to say nothing of the skin ; the hunting of
beehives in the woods had some regard to the scarc
ity of sugar; and the nut gatherings and wild-grape
gatherings by younger folks in the gorgeous autum
nal days were partly in memory of a scant, unvaried
larder, which might profitably draw upon nature's
rich and salutary hoard. Perhaps the dearest pleas
ures among them were those that lay closest to
their dangers. They loved the pursuit of maraud
ing parties, the solitary chase ; were always ready to
throw away axe and mattock for rifle and knife.
Among pleasures, certainly, should be mentioned
the weddings. For plain reasons these were com
monly held in the daytime. Men often rode to
them armed, and before leaving too often made
them scenes of carousal and unchastened joculari
ties. After the wedding came the " infare," with
the going from the home of the bride to the home
of the groom. Above everything else that seems to
strike the chord of common happiness in the society
of the time, stands out to the imagination the pict
ure of one of these processions — a long bridal caval
cade winding slowly along a narrow road through
the silent primeval forest, now in sunlight, now in
the shadow of mighty trees meeting over the way ;
at the head the young lovers, so rudely mounted, so

134 KENTUCKY FAIRS
simply dressed, and, following in their happy wake,
as though they were the augury of a peaceful era
soon to come, a straggling, broken line of the men
and women who had prepared for that era, but
should never live to see its appearing.
Such scenes as these give a touch of bright, gay
color to the dull homespun texture of the social
fabric of the times. Indeed, when all the pleasures
have been enumerated, they seem a good many.
But the effect of such an enumeration is mislead
ing. Life remained tense, sad, barren ; character
moulded itself on a model of Spartan simplicity and
hardihood, without the Spartan treachery and cun
ning. But from the opening of the nineteenth century
things grew easier. The people, rescued from the
necessity of trying to be safe, began to indulge the
luxury of wishing to be happy. Life ceased to be a
warfare, and became an industry ; the hand left off
defending, and commenced acquiring; the mould
ing of bullets was succeeded by the coining of
dollars.

II
It is against the background of such a strenuous
past that we find the Kentucky fair first projected
by the practical and progressive spirit that ruled

;>-_- ' j V; ; ;r

MILITIA MUSTER.

among the Kentuckians in the year 1816. Noth
ing could have been conceived with soberer pur
pose, or worn less the aspect of a great popular
pleasure. Picture the scene! A distinguished sol
dier and honored gentleman, with a taste for agri
culture and fine cattle, has announced that on a
certain day in July he will hold on his farm a
" Grand Cattle Show and Fair, free for everybody."
The place is near Lexington, which was then the
centre of commerce and seat of learning in the

136 KENTUCKY FAIRS
West. The meagre newspapers of the time have
carried the tidings to every tavern and country
cross-roads. It is a novel undertaking; the like has
never been known this side of the Alleghanies.
The summer morning come, you may see a very re
markable company of gentlemen: old pioneers, Rev
olutionary soldiers, volunteers of the War of 18 12,
walking in picturesque twos and threes out of the
little town to the green woods where the fair is to
be held; others jogging thitherward along the by
paths and newly -opened roads through the forest,
clad in homespun from heel to head, and mindful
of the cold lunches and whiskey -bottles in their
coat-pockets or saddle-bags; some, perhaps, drawn
thither in wagons and aristocratic gigs. Once ar
rived, all stepping around loftily on the velvet grass,
peering curiously into each other's eyes, and offer
ing their snuffboxes for a sneeze of convivial aston
ishment that they could venture to meet under the
clear sky for such an undertaking. The five judges
of the fair, coming from as many different counties,
the greatest personages of their day — one, a brilliant
judge of the Federal Court; the second, one of the
earliest settlers, with a sword hanging up at home
to show how Virginia appreciated his services in the
Revolution ; the third, a soldier and blameless gen
tleman of the old school ; the fourth, one of the few
early Kentuckians who brought into the new society
the noble style of country-place, with park and deer,

KENTUCKY FAIRS 137
that would have done credit to an English lord ; and
the fifth, in no respect inferior to the others. These
" perform the duties assigned them with assiduity,"
and hand over to their neighbors as many as fifteen
or twenty premium silver cups, costing twelve dol
lars apiece. After which, the assemblage variously
disperses — part through the woods again, while part
return to town.
Such, then, was the first Kentucky fair. It was a
transplantation to Kentucky, not of the English or
European fair, but of the English cattle -show. It
resembled the fair only in being a place for buying
and selling. And it was not thought of in the light
of a merry-making or great popular amusement. It
seems not even to have taken account of manufact
ures — then so important an industry — or of agri
culture. Like the first was the second fair held in the
same place the year following. Of this, little is and
little need be known, save that then was formed the
first State Agricultural Society of Kentucky, which
also was the first in the West, and the second in the
United States. This society held two or three an
nual meetings, and then went to pieces, but not be
fore laying down the broad lines on which the fair
continued to be held for the next quarter of & cen
tury. That is, the fair began as a cattle - show,
though stock of other kinds was exhibited. Then
it was extended to embrace agriculture ; and with

138 KENTUCKY FAIRS
branches of good husbandry it embraced as well
those of good housewifery. Thus at the early fairs
one finds the farmers contesting for premiums with
their wheats and their whiskeys, while their skilful
helpmates displayed the products — the never-sur
passed products — of their looms : linens, cassinettes,
jeans, and carpetings.
W7ith this brief outline we may pass over the next
twenty years. The current of State life during this
interval ran turbulent and stormy. Now politics,
now finance, imbittered and distressed the people.
Time and again, here and there, small societies re
vived the fair, but all efforts to expand it were un
availing. And yet this period must be distinguished
as the one during which the necessity of the fair be
came widely recognized ; for it taught the Kentuck
ians that their chief interest lay in the soil, and that
physical nature imposed upon them the agricult
ural type of life. Grass was to be their portion
and their destiny. It taught them the insulation
of their habitat, and the need of looking within
their own society for the germs and laws of their
development. As soon as the people came to see
that they were to be a race of farmers, it is impor
tant to note their concern that, as such, they should
be hedged with respectability. They took high
ground about it ; they would not cease to be gentle
men; they would have their class well reputed for
fat pastures and comfortable homes, but honored as

M

"" r J

1

w

PRODUCTS OK THE SOIL.

well for manners and liberal intelligence. And to
this end they had recourse to an agricultural litera
ture. Thus, when the fair began to revive, with
happier auspices, near the close of the period under
consideration, they signalized it for nearly the quar-

14° KENTUCKY FAIRS
ter of a century afterwards by instituting literary con
tests. Prizes and medals were offered for discov
eries and inventions which should be of interest to
the Kentucky agriculturist; and hundreds of dollars
were appropriated for the victors and the second
victors in the writing of essays which should help
the farmer to become a scientist and not to forget
to remain a gentleman. In addition, they some
times sat for hours in the open air while some emi
nent citizen — the Governor, if possible — delivered
an address to commemorate the opening of the fair,
and to review the progress of agricultural life in the
commonwealth. But there were many anti-literari-
ans among them, who conceived a sort of organized
hostility to what they aspersed as book-farming, and
on that account withheld their cordial support.

Ill
It was not until about the year 1840 that the fair
began to touch the heart of the whole people. Be
fore this time there had been no amphitheatre, no
music, no booths, no side-shows, no ladies. A fair
without ladies ! How could the people love it, or
ever come to look upon it as their greatest annual
occasion for love-making ?
An interesting commentary on the social decorum

KENTUCKY FAIRS 141
of this period is furnished in the fact that for some
twenty years after the institution of the fair no wom
an put her foot upon the ground. She was thought
a bold woman, doing a bold deed, who one day took
a friend and, under the escort of gentlemen, drove in
her own carriage to witness the showing of her own
fat cattle ; for she was herself one of the most practi
cal and successful of Kentucky farmers. But where
one of the sex has been, may not all the sex — may
not all the world — safely follow ? From the date of
this event, and the appearance of women on the
grounds, the tide of popular favor set in steadily
towards the fair.
For, as an immediate consequence, seats must be
provided. Here one happens upon a curious bit of
local history — the evolution of the amphitheatre
among the Kentuckians. At the earliest fairs the
first form of the amphitheatre had been a rope
stretched from tree to tree, while the spectators stood
around on the outside, or sat on the grass or in their
vehicles. The immediate result of the necessity for
providing comfortable seats for the now increasing
crowd, was to select as a place for holding the fair
such a site as the ancient Greeks might have chosen
for building a theatre. Sometimes this was the head
of a deep ravine, around the sides of which seats
were constructed, while the bottom below served as
the arena for the exhibition of the stock, which was
led in and out through the mouth of the hollow. At

142 KENTUCKY FAIRS
other times advantage was taken of a natural sink
and semicircular hill-side. The slope was sodded
and terraced with rows of seats, and the spectators
looked down upon the circular basin at the bottom.
But clearly enough the sun played havoc with the
complexions of the ladies, and a sudden drenching
shower was still one of the uncomfortable dispen
sations of Providence. Therefore a roofed wooden
structure of temporary seats made its appearance,
designed after the fashion of those used by the trav
elling show, and finally out of this form came the
closed circular amphitheatre, modelled on the plan
of the Colosseum. Thus first among the Kentucki
ans, if I mistake not, one saw the English cattle-
show, which meantime was gathering about itself
many characteristics of the English fair, wedded
strangely enough to the temple of a Roman holiday.
By-and-by we shall see this form of amphitheatre
torn down and supplanted by another, which recalls
the ancient circus or race-course — a modification
corresponding with a change in the character of the
later fair.
The most desirable spot for building the old cir
cular amphitheatre was some beautiful tract of level
ground containing from five to twenty acres, and
situated near a flourishing town and its ramifying
turnpikes. This tract must be enclosed by a high
wooden paling, with here and there entrance gates
for stock and pedestrians and vehicles, guarded by

KENTUCKY FAIRS 145
gate-keepers. And within this enclosure appeared
in quick succession all the varied accessories that
went to make up a typical Kentucky fair near the
close of the old social regime; that is, before the out
break of the Civil War.
Here were found the hundreds of neat stalls for
the different kinds of stock ; the gay booths under
the colonnade of the amphitheatre for refreshments;
the spacious cottages for women and invalids and
children; the platforms of the quack-doctors; the
floral hall and the pagoda-like structure for the
musicians and the judges ; the tables and seats for
private dining; the high swings and the turnabouts;
the tests of the strength of limb and lung; the gaudy
awnings for the lemonade venders ; the huge brown
hogsheads for iced-water, with bright tin cups dan
gling from the rim ; the circus ; and, finally, all those
tented spectacles of the marvellous, the mysterious,
and the monstrous which were to draw popular at
tention to the Kentucky fair, as they had been the
particular delight of the fair -going thousands in
England hundreds of years before.
For you will remember that the Kentucky fair
has ceased by this time to be a cattle-show. It has
ceased to be simply a place for the annual competi
tive exhibition of stock of all kinds, which, by-the-
way, is beginning to make the country famous. It
has ceased to be even the harvest-home of the Blue-
grass Region, the mild autumnal saturnalia of its

146 KENTUCKY FAIRS
rural population. Whatever the people can discover
or invent is indeed here ; or whatever they own, or
can produce from the bountiful earth, or take from
orchard or flower-garden, or make in dairy, kitchen,
or loom-room. But the fair is more than all this
now: It has become the great yearly pleasure-
ground of the people assembled for a week's festivi
ties. It is what the European fair of old was — the
season of the happiest and most general intercourse
between country and town. Here the characteristic
virtues and vices of the local civilization will be
found in open flower side by side, and types and
manners painted to the eye in vividest colorings.
Crowded picture of a time gone by ! Bright glan
cing pageantry of life, moving on with feasting and
music and love-making to the very edge of the awful
precipice, over which its social system and its richly
nurtured ideals will be dashed to pieces below! — why
not pause an instant over its innocent mirth, and
quick, awful tragedies ?

IV
The fair has been in progress several days, and
this will be the greatest day of all : nothing shown
from morning till night but horses — horses in har
ness, horses under the saddle. Ah ! but that will be

HARNESS HORSES.

KENTUCKY FAIRS 149
worth seeing! Late in the afternoon the little boys
will ride for premiums on their ponies, and, what is
not so pretty, but far more exciting, young men will
contest the prize of horsemanship. And then such
racking and pacing and loping and walking! — such
racing round and round and round to see who can
go fastest, and be gracefulest, and turn quickest !
Such pirouetting and curveting and prancing and
cavorting and riding with arms folded across the
breast while the reins lie on the horse's neck, and
suddenly bowing over to the horse's mane, as some
queen of beauty high up in the amphitheatre, trans
ported by the excitement of the thousands of specta
tors and the closeness of the contest, throws her
flowers and handkerchief down into the arena ! Ah,
yes ! this will be the great day at the fair — at the
modern tourney !
So the tide of the people is at the flood. For
days they have been pouring into the town. The
hotels are overflowing with strangers ; the open
houses of the citizens are full of guests. Strolling
companies of players will crack the dusty boards to
night with the tread of buskin and cothurnus. The
easy-going tradespeople have trimmed their shops,
and imported from the North their richest mer
chandise. From an early hour of the morning, along every
road that leads from country or town to the amphi
theatre, pour the hurrying throng of people, eager to

150 KENTUCKY FAIRS
get good seats for the day; for there will be thou
sands not seated at all. Streaming out, on the side
of the town, are pedestrians, hacks, omnibuses, the
negro drivers shouting, racing, cracking their whips,
and sometimes running into the way-side stands
where old negro women are selling apples and gin
gerbread. Streaming in, on the side of the country,
are pedestrians, heated, their coats thrown over the
shoulder or the arm ; buggies containing often a pair
of lovers who do not keep their secret discreetly;
family carriages with children made conspicuously
tidy and mothers aglow with the recent labors of the
kitchen : comfortable evidences of which are the
huge baskets or hampers that are piled up in front
or strapped on behind. Nay, sometimes may be
seen whole wagon-loads of provisions moving slowly
in, guarded by portly negresses, whose eyes shine
like black diamonds through the setting of their
white-dusted eyelashes.
Within the grounds, how rapidly the crowd swells
and surges hither and thither, tasting the pleasures
of the place before going to the amphitheatre : to the
stalls, to the booths, to the swings, to the cottage, to
the floral hall, to the living curiosities, to the swinish
pundits, who have learned their lessons in numbers
and cards. Is not that the same pig that was shown
at Bartholomew's four centuries ago ? Mixed in
with the Kentuckians are people of a different build
and complexion. For Kentucky now is one of the

THE MODERN TOURNEY.

KENTUCKY FAIRS 153
great summering States for the extreme Southern
ers, who come up with their families to its watering-
places. Others who are scattered over the North re
turn in the autumn by way of Kentucky, remaining
till the fair and the fall of the first frost. Nay, is
not the State the place for the reunion of families
that have Southern members ? Back to the old
home from the rice and sugar and cotton plantations
of the swamps and the bayous come young Ken
tucky wives with Southern husbands, young Ken
tucky husbands with Southern wives. All these are
at the fair — the Lexington fair. Here, too, are
strangers from wellnigh every Northern State. And,
I beg you, do not overlook the negroes — a solid
acre of them. They play unconsciously a great part
in the essential history of this scene and festival.
Briskly grooming the stock in the stalls ; strolling
around with carriage whips in their hands ; running
on distant errands ; showering a tumult of blows
upon the newly-arrived "boss" with their nimble,
ubiquitous brush-brooms ; everywhere, everywhere,
happy, well-dressed, sleek — the fateful background
of all this stage of social history. /
But the amphitheatre ! Through the mild, chast
ened, soft-toned atmosphere of the early September
day the sunlight falls from the unclouded sky upon
the seated thousands. Ah, the women in all their
silken and satin bravery ! delicate blue and pink and
canary-colored petticoats, with muslin over-dresses,

154 KENTUCKY FAIRS
black lace and white lace mantles, white kid gloves,
and boots to match the color of their petticoats.
One stands up to allow a lemonade-seller to pass ;
she wears a hoop-skirt twelve feet in circumference.
Here and there costumes suitable for a ball; arms
and shoulders glistening like marble in the sunlight;
gold chains around the delicate arching necks. Oh,
the jewels, the flowers, the fans, the parasols, the rib
bons, the soft eyes and smiles, the love and happi
ness ! And some of the complexions ! — paint on the
cheeks, powder on the neck, stick-pomatum plaster
ing the beautiful hair down over the temples. No
matter; it is the fashion. Rub it in! Rub it in
well — up to the very roots of the hair and eyebrows !
'Now, how perfect you are, madam ! You are the
great Kentucky show of life-size wax-works.
In another part of the amphitheatre nothing but
men, red-faced, excited, standing up on the seats,
shouting, applauding, as the rival horses rush round
the ring before them. It is not difficult to know
who these are. The money streams through their
fingers. Did you hear the crack of that pistol ?
How the crowd swarms angrily. Stand back ! A
man has been shot. He insulted a gentleman. He
called him a liar. Be careful. There are a great
many pistols on the fair grounds.
In all the United States where else is there to be
seen any such holiday assemblage of people — any
such expression of the national life impressed with

KENTUCKY FAIRS

155

local peculiarities? Where else is there to be
seen anything that, while it falls far behind, ap
proaches so near the
spirit of uproarious mer-
riment, of reckless fun. ,

THE JUDGE'S STAND — THE FINISH.

which used to intoxicate and madden the English
populace when given over to the sports of a ruder
age? These are the descendants of the sad pioneers —
of those early cavalcades which we glanced at in
the primeval forests a few minutes ago. These
have subdued the land, and are reclining on its
tranquil autumn fulness. Time enough to play
now — more time than there ever was before; more
than there will ever be again. They have estab
lished their great fair here on the very spot where
their forefathers were massacred or put to torture.
So, at old Smithfield, the tumblers, the jesters, the

156 KENTUCKY FAIRS
buffoons, and the dancers shouldered each other in
joyful riot over the ashes of the earlier heroes and
martyrs. It is past high noon, and the thousands break
away from the amphitheatre and move towards a
soft green woodland in another part of the grounds,
shaded by forest trees. Here are the private dinner-
tables — hundreds of them, covered with snowy linen,
glittering with glass and silver. You have heard of
Kentucky hospitality ; here you will see one of the
peaceful battle-fields where reputation for that virtue
is fought for and won. Is there a stranger among
these thousands that has not been hunted up and
provided for? And such dinners! Old Pepys
should be here— immortal eater — so that he could
go home and set down in his diary, along with other
gastronomic adventures, garrulous notes of what he
saw eaten and ate himself at the Kentucky fair.
You will never see the Kentuckians making a better
show than at this moment. What courtesy, what
good-will, what warm and gracious manners! Tie a
blue ribbon on them. In a competitive exhibition
of this kind the premium will stay at home.
But make the most of it — make the most of this
harmony. For did you see that? A father and a
son met each other, turned their heads quickly and
angrily away, and passed without speaking.
Look how these two men shake hands with too
much cordiality, and search each other's eyes. There

A DINNER-PARTY.

is a man from the North standing apart and watch
ing with astonishment these alert, happy, efficient ne
groes — perhaps following with his thoughtful gaze
one of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Toms. A Southerner
has drawn that Kentucky farmer beside a tree, and is
trying to buy one of these servants for his planta
tion. Yes, yes, make the most of it ! The war is
coming. It is in men's hearts, and in their eyes
and consciences. By-and-by this bright, gay pageant
will pass so entirely away that even the thought of
it will come back to one like the unsubstantial rev
elry of a dream. By-and-by there will be another
throng filling these grounds: not in pink and white
and canary, but in blue, solid blue — blue overcoats,
showing sad and cold above the snow. All round
the amphitheatre tents will be spread — not covering,
as now, the hideous and the monstrous, but the sleep-

158 KENTUCKY FAIRS
ing forms of young men, athletic, sinewy, beautiful.
This, too, shall vanish. And some day, when the
fierce summer sun is killing the little gray leaves and
blades of grass, in through these deserted gates will
pass a long, weary, foot-sore line of brown. Nothing
in the floral hall now but cots, around which are
nurses and weeping women. Lying there, some
poor young fellow, with the death dew on his fore
head, will open his shadowy eyes and remember this
day of the fair, where he walked among the flowers
and made love.
But it is late in the afternoon, and the people are
beginning to disperse by turnpike and lane to their
homes in the country, or to hasten back into town
for the festivities of the night ; for to-night the spirit
of the fair will be continued in other amphitheatres.
To-night comedy and tragedy will tread the village
boards ; but hand in hand also they will flaunt their
colors through the streets, and haunt the midnight
alleys. In all the year no time like fair-time : parties
at private houses ; hops, balls at the hotels. You
shall sip the foam from the very crest of the wave of
revelry and carousal. Darkness be over it till the
east reddens ! Let Bacchus be unconfined !

THE RACE-COURSE — THE FINISH.

KENTUCKY FAIRS 161

V
The fair languished during the war, but the peo
ple were not slow to revive it upon the return of
peace. Peace, however, could never bring back the
fair of the past : it was gone forever — gone with the
stage and phase of the social evolution of which it
was the unique and memorable expression. For
there was no phase of social evolution in Kentucky
but felt profoundly that era of upheaval, drift, and
readjustment. Start where we will, or end where
we may, we shall always come sooner or later to the
war as a great rent and chasm, with its hither side
and its farther side and its deep abyss between, down
into which old things were dashed to death, and out
of which new things were born into the better life.
Therefore, as we study the Kentucky fair of to
day, more than a quarter of a century later, we must
expect to find it much changed. Withal it has
many local variations. As it is held here and there
in retired counties or by little neighborhoods it has
characteristics of rural picturesqueness that suggest
the manners of the era passed away. But the typ
ical Kentucky fair, the fair that represents the lead
ing interests and advanced ideas of the day, bears
testimony enough to the altered life of the people.

162 KENTUCKY FAIRS
The old circular amphitheatre has been torn
down, and replaced with a straight or a slightly
curved bank of seats. Thus we see the arena turned
into the race -course, the idea of the Colosseum giv
ing way to the idea of the Circus Maximus. In
front of the bank of seats stretch a small track for
the exhibition of different kinds of stock, and a large
track for the races. This abandonment of the old
form of amphitheatre is thus a significant concession
to the trotting -horse, and a sign that its speed has
become the great pleasure of the fair.
As a picture, also, the fair of to-day lacks the Ty
rolean brightness of its predecessor ; and as a social
event it seems like a pensive tale of by-gone merri
ment. Society no longer looks upon it as the occa
sion of displaying its wealth, its toilets, its courtesies,
its hospitalities. No such gay and splendid dresses
now; no such hundreds of dinner-tables on the
shaded greensward. It would be too much to say
that the disappearance of the latter betokens the
loss of that virtue which the gracious usages of a
former time made a byword. The explanation lies
elsewhere. Under the old social regime a common
appurtenance to every well-established household
was a trained force of negro servants. It was the
services of these that made the exercise of gener
ous public entertainment possible to the Kentucky
housewife. Moreover, the lavish ideals of the time
threw upon economy the reproach of meanness;

KENTUCKY FAIRS

163

and, as has been noted, the fair was then the univer
sally recognized time for the display of munificent
competitive hospitalities. In truth, it was the sharp
ness of the competition that brought in at last the
general disuse of the custom ; for the dinners grew
more and more sumptuous, the labor of preparing
them more and more severe, and the expense of
paying for them more and more burdensome. So
to-day the Kentuckians remain a hospitable people,

STALLIONS.

164 KENTUCKY FAIRS
but you must not look to find the noblest exercise
of their hospitality at the fair. A few dinners you
will see, but modest luncheons are not despicable.
and the whole tendency of things is towards the un
derstanding that an appetite is an affair of the pri
vate conscience. And this brings to light some
striking differences between the old and the new
Kentuckians. Along with the circular amphithea
tre, the dresses, and the dinners, have gone the mis
cellaneous amusements of which the fair was ere-
while the mongrel scene and centre. The ideal
fair of to-day frowns upon the side-show, and dis
cards every floating accessory. It would be self-
sufficient. It would say to the thousands of people
who still attend it as the greatest of all their organ
ized pleasures, " Find your excitement, your relaxa
tion, your happiness, in a shed for machinery, a floral
hall, and the fine stock." But of these the great
est attraction is the last, and of all kinds of stock
the one most honored is the horse. Here, then, we
come upon a noteworthy fact : the Kentucky fair,
which began as a cattle-show, seems likely to end
with being a horse-show.
If anything is lacking to complete the contrast
between the fair in the fulness of its development
before the war and the fair of to-day, what better
could be found to reflect this than the different
morale of the crowd ?
You are a stranger, and you have the impression

KENTUCKY FAIRS 167
that an assemblage of ten, fifteen, twenty thousand
Kentuckians out on a holiday is pervaded by the
spirit of a mob. You think that a few broken heads
is one of its cherished traditions ; that intoxication
and disorderliness are its dearest prerogatives. But
nowadays you look in vain for those heated, excited
men with money lying between their fingers, who
were once the rebuke and the terror of the amphi
theatre. You look in vain for heated, excited men
of any kind : there are none. There is no drinking,
no bullying, no elbowing, or shouldering, or swearing.
While still in their nurses' arms you may some
times see the young Kentuckians shown in the ring
at the horse-fair for premiums. From their early
years they are taken to the amphitheatre to enjoy its
color, its fleetness, and its form. As little boys they
ride for prizes. The horse is the subject of talk in
the hotels, on the street corners, in the saloons, at
the stables, on county court day, at the cross-roads
and blacksmiths' shops, in country church -yards be
fore the sermon. The barber, as he shaves his
morning customer, gives him points on the races.
There will be found many a group of gentlemen in
whose presence to reveal an ignorance of famous
horses and common pedigrees will bring a blush to
the cheek. Not to feel interested in such themes is
to lay one's self open to a charge of disagreeable ec
centricity. The horse has gradually emerged into
prominence until to-day it occupies the foreground.

A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD

I
|ORE than two hundred and fifty years
have passed since the Cardinal de Riche
lieu stood at the baptismal font as sponsor
to a name that within the pale of the
Church was destined to become more famous than
his own. But the world has wellnigh forgotten
Richelieu's godson. Only the tireless student of bi
ography now turns the pages that record his extraor
dinary career, ponders the strange unfolding of his
moral nature, is moved by the deep pathos of his dy
ing hours. Dominique Armand-Jean le Bouthillier
de Ranee ! How cleverly, while scarcely out of
short- clothes, did he puzzle the king's confessor
with questions on Homer, and at the age of thirteen
publish an edition of Anacreon ! Of ancient, illus
trious birth, and heir to an almost ducal house, how
tenderly favored was he by Marie de Medicis; happy-
hearted, kindly, suasive, how idolized by a gorgeous
court! In what affluence of rich laces did he dress;
in what irresistible violet-colored close coats, with
emeralds at his wristbands, a diamond* on his finger
red heels on his shoes ! How nimbly he capered
through the dance with a sword on his hip ! How

I] 2 A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
bravely he planned quests after the manner of
knights of the Round Table, meaning to take for
himself the part of Lancelot ! How exquisitely,
ardently, and ah ! how fatally he flirted with the
incomparable ladies in the circle of Madame de
Rambouillet ! And with a zest for sport as great
as his unction for the priestly office, how wittily —
laying one hand on his heart and waving the other
through the air — could he bow and say, " This
morning I preached like an angel; I'll hunt like the
devil this afternoon !"
All at once his life broke in two when half spent.
He ceased to hunt like the devil, to adore the flesh,
to scandalize the world ; and retiring to the ancient
Abbey of La Trappe in Normandy — the sponsorial
gift of his Eminence and favored by many popes —
there undertook the difficult task of reforming the
relaxed Benedictines. The old abbey — situated in
a great fog-covered basin encompassed by dense
woods of beech, oak, and linden, and therefore
gloomy, unhealthy, and forbidding — was in ruins.
One ascended by means of a ladder from floor to
rotting floor. The refectory had become a place
where the monks assembled to play at bowls with
worldlings. The dormitory, exposed to wind, rain,
and snow, had been given up to owls. In the
church the stones were scattered, the walls un
steady, the pavement was broken, the bell ready to
fall. As a single solemn reminder of the vanished

A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD 173
spirit of the place, which had been founded by St.
Stephen and St. Bernard in the twelfth century, with
the intention of reviving in the Western Church the
bright examples of primitive sanctity furnished by
Eastern solitaries of the third and fourth, one read
over the door of the cloister the words of Jeremiah :
" Sedebit solitarius et tacebit? The few monks who
remained in the convent slept where they could, and
were, as Chateaubriand says, in a state of ruins.
They preferred sipping ratafia to reading their brev
iaries ; and when De Ranee undertook to enforce
reform, they threatened to whip him for his pains.
He, in turn, threatened them with the royal interfer
ence, and they submitted. There, accordingly, he
introduced a system of rules that a sybarite might
have wept over even to hear recited; carried into
practice cenobitical austerities that recalled the
models of pious anchorites in Syria and Thebais;
and gave its peculiar meaning to the word " Trap-
pist," a name which has since been taken by all Cis
tercian communities embracing the reform of the
first monastery.
In the retirement of this mass of woods and sky De
Ranee passed the rest of his long life, doing nothing
more worldly, so far as is now known, than quoting
Aristophanes and Horace to Bossuet, and allowing
himself to be entertained by Pellisson, exhibiting
the accomplishments of his educated spider. There,
in acute agony of body and perfect meekness of

174 A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
spirit, a worn and weary old man, with time enough
to remember his youthful ardors and emeralds and
illusions, he watched his mortal end draw slowly
near. And there, asking to be buried in some deso
late spot — some old battle-field — he died at last, ex
tending his poor macerated body on the cross of
blessed cinders and straw, and commending his poor
penitent soul to the mercy of Heaven.
A wonderful spectacle to the less fervid Benedic
tines of the closing seventeenth century must have
seemed the work of De Ranee in that old Norman
abbey! A strange company of human souls, at
tracted by the former distinction of the great abbot
as well as by the peculiar vows of the institute, must
have come together in its silent halls ! One hears
many stories, in the lighter vein, regarding some of
its inmates. Thus, there was a certain furious ex-
trooper, lately reeking with blood, who got himself
much commended by living on baked apples ; and a
young nobleman who devoted himself to the work
of washing daily the monastery spittoons. One
Brother, the story runs, having one day said there
was too much salt in his scalding-hot broth, immedi
ately burst into tears of contrition for his wickedness
in complaining; and another went for so many years
without raising his eyes that he knew not a new
chapel had been built, and so quite cracked his
skull one day against the wall of it.
The abbey was an asylum for the poor and help-

A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD 1 75
less, the shipwrecked, the conscience-stricken, and
the broken-hearted — for that meditative type of fer
vid piety which for ages has looked upon the clois
ter as the true earthly paradise wherein to rear the
difficult edifice of the soul's salvation. Much noble
blood sought De Ranee's retreat to wash out its ter
rifying stains, and more than one reckless spirit
went thither to take upon itself the yoke of purer,
sweeter usages.
De Ranee's work remains an influence in the
world. His monastery and his reform constitute
the true background of material and spiritual fact
against which to outline the present Abbey of La
Trappe in Kentucky. Even when thus viewed, it
seems placed where it is only by some freak of his
tory. An abbey of La Trappe in Kentucky! How
inharmonious with every element of its environment
appears this fragment of old French monastic life !
It is the twelfth century touching the last of the
nineteenth — the Old World reappearing in the New.
Here are French faces — here is the French tongue.
Here is the identical white cowl presented to blessed
St. Alberick in the forests of Burgundy nine hun
dred years ago. Here is the rule of St. Benedict,
patriarch of the Western monks in the sixth century.
When one is put out at the way -side station, amid
woodlands and fields of Indian -corn, and, leaving
the world behind him, turns his footsteps across the
country towards the abbey, more than a mile away,

176 A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
the seclusion of the region, its ineffable quietude,
the infinite isolation of the life passed by the silent
brotherhood — all bring vividly before the mind the
image of that ancient distant abbey with which this
one holds connection so sacred and so close. Is it
not the veritable spot in Normandy ? Here, too, is
the broad basin of retired country; here the densely
wooded hills, shutting it in from the world; here the
orchards and vineyards and gardens of the ascetic
devotees; and, as the night falls from the low,
blurred sky of gray, and cuts short a silent contem
plation of the scene, here, too, one finds one's self,
like some belated traveller in the dangerous forests
of old, hurrying on to reach the porter's lodge, and
ask within the sacred walls the hospitality of the
venerable abbot.

II
For nearly a century after the death of De Ranee
it is known that his followers faithfully maintained
his reform at La Trappe. Then the French Revo
lution drove the Trappists as wanderers into various
countries, and the abbey was made a foundery for
cannon. A small branch of the order came in 1804
to the United States, and established itself for a
while in Pennsylvania, but soon turned its eyes tow
ards the greater wilds and solitudes of Kentucky.

A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD

177

OFFICE OF THE FATHER PRIOR.

For this there was
reason. Kentucky was
early a great pioneer
of the Catholic Church
in the United States.
Here the first episco
pal see of the West
was erected, and Bards-
town held spiritual
jurisdiction, within cer
tain parallels of lati
tude, over all States
and Territories between the two oceans. Here,
too, were the first Catholic missionaries of the
West, except those who were to be found in the
French stations along the Wabash and the Missis
sippi. Indeed, the Catholic population of Kentucky,
which was principally descended from the colonists
of Lord Baltimore, had begun to enter the State as
early as 1775, the nucleus of their settlements soon
becoming Nelson County, the locality of the present
abbey. Likewise it should be remembered that the
Catholic Church in the United States, especially
that portion of it in Kentucky, owes a great debt to
the zeal of the exiled French clergy of early days.
That buoyancy and elasticity of the French charac
ter, which naturally adapts it to every circumstance
and emergency, was then most demanded and most
efficacious. From these exiles the infant missions of

178 A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
the State were supplied with their most devoted la
borers. Hither, accordingly, the Trappists removed from
Pennsylvania, establishing themselves on Pottinger's
Creek, near Rohan's Knob, several miles from the
present site. But they remained only a few years.
The climate of Kentucky was ill suited to their life
of unrelaxed asceticism ; their restless superior had
conceived a desire to christianize Indian children,
and so removed the languishing settlement to Mis
souri. There is not space for following the solemn
march of those austere exiles through the wilder
nesses of the New World. From Missouri they
went to an ancient Indian burying-ground in -Illi
nois, and there built up a sort of village in the heart
of the prairie; but the great mortality from which
they suffered, and the subsidence of the fury of the
French Revolution recalled them in 18 13 to France,
to reoccupy the establishments from which they had
been banished.
It was of this body that Dickens, in his American
Notes, wrote as follows:
Looming up in the distance, as we rode along, was another of
the ancient Indian burial-places, called Monk's Mound, in memory
of a body of fanatics of the order of La Trappe, who founded a des
olate convent there many years ago, when there were no settlements
within a thousand miles, and were all swept off by the pernicious
climate ; in which lamentable fatality few rational people will sup
pose, perhaps, that society experienced any very severe deprivation.
This is a better place in which to state a miracle

A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD 179
than discuss it; and the following account of a
heavenly portent, which is related to have been
vouchsafed the Trappists while sojourning in Ken
tucky, may be given without comment:
In the year 1808 the moon, being then about two-thirds full, pre
sented a most remarkable appearance. A bright, luminous cross,
clearly defined, was seen in the heavens, with its arms intersecting
the centre of the moon. On each side two smaller crosses were also
distinctly visible, though the portions of them most distant from
the moon were more faintly marked. This strange phenomenon
continued for several hours, and was witnessed by the Trappists on
their arising, as usual, at midnight, to sing the Divine praise.
The present monastery, which is called the Abbey
of Gethsemane, owes its origin immediately to the
Abbey of La Meilleraye, of the department of the
Loire -Inferieure, France. The abbot of the latter
had concluded arrangements with the French Gov
ernment to found a house in the island of Martin
ique, on an estate granted by Louis Philippe ; but
this monarch's rule having been overturned, the plan
was abandoned in favor of a colony in the United
States. Two Fathers, with the view of selecting a
site, came to New York in the summer of 1848,
and naturally turned their eyes to the Catholic
settlements in Kentucky, and to the domain of the
pioneer Trappists. In the autumn of that year,
accordingly, about forty -five "religious" left the
mother-abbey of La Meilleraye, set sail from Havre
de Grace for New Orleans, went thence by boat to
Louisville, and from this point walked to Gethsem-

i8o A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
ane, a distance of some sixty miles. Although scat
tered among various countries of Europe, the Trap
pists have but two convents in the United States —
this, the oldest, and one near Dubuque, Iowa, a
colony from the abbey in Ireland.

Ill
The domain of the abbey comprises some seven
teen hundred acres of land, part of which is tillable,
while the rest consists of a range of wooded knobs
that furnish timber to the monastery steam saw-mill.
Around this domain lie the homesteads of Kentucky
farmers, who make indifferent monks. One leaves
the public road that winds across the open country
and approaches the monastery through a long, level
avenue, enclosed on each side by a hedge -row of
cedars, and shaded by nearly a hundred beautiful
English elms, the offspring of a single parent stem.
Traversing this dim, sweet spot, where no sound is
heard but the waving of boughs and the softened
notes of birds, one reaches the porter's lodge, a low,
brick building, on each side of which extends the
high brick-wall that separates the inner from the
outer world. Passing beneath the archway of the
lodge, one discovers a graceful bit of landscape gar
dening — walks fringed with cedars, beds for flowers,

A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD

pathways so
thickly strewn
with sawdust
that the heavi- Hj
est footfall is
unheard, a soft
turf of green,
disturbed only
by the gentle
shadows of the
pious-looking Bene die tine
trees : a fit spot
for recreation
and meditation.
It is with a sort
of worldly start
that you come
upon an enclos
ure at one end
of these grounds wherein a populous family of white-
cowled rabbits trip around in the most noiseless
fashion, and seemed ashamed of being caught living
together in family relations.
Architecturally there is little to please the aesthetic
sense in the monastery building, along the whole
front of which these grounds extend. It is a great
quadrangular pile of brick, three stories high, heated
by furnaces and lighted by gas — modern appliances

WITHIN THE GATES.

i»2 A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
which heighten the contrast with the ancient life
whose needs they subserve. Within the quadrangle
is a green inner court, also beautifully laid off. On
one side are two chapels, the one appropriated to
the ordinary services of the Church, and entered
from without the abbey-wall by all who desire; the
other, consecrated to the offices of the Trappist or
der, entered only from within, and accessible exclu
sively to males. It is here that one finds occasion to
remember the Trappist's vow of poverty. The vest
ments are far from rich, the decorations of the altar
far from splendid. The crucifixion-scene behind the
altar consists of wooden figures carved by one of the
monks now dead, and painted with little art. No
tender light of many hues here streams through
long windows rich with holy reminiscence and artis
tic fancy. The church has, albeit, a certain beauty
of its own — that charm which is inseparable from
fine proportion in stone and from gracefully disposed
columns growing into the arches of the lofty roof.
But the cold gray of the interior, severe and unre
lieved, bespeaks a place where the soul comes to lay
itself in simplicity before the Eternal as it would
upon a naked, solitary rock of the desert. Else
where in the abbey greater evidences of votive pov
erty occur — in the various statues and shrines of the
Virgin, in the pictures and prints that hang in the
main front corridor — in all that appertains to the
material life of the community.

A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD 183
Just outside the church, beneath the perpetual
benediction of the cross on its spire, is the quiet cem
etery garth, where the dead are side by side, their
graves covered with myrtle and having each for its
head-stone a plain wooden crucifix bearing the re
ligious name and station of him who lies below — Fa
ther Honorius, Father Timotheus, Brother Hilarius,
Brother Eutropius. Who are they ? And whence ?
And by what familiar names were they greeted on
the old play-grounds and battle-fields of the world?
The Trappists do not, as it is commonly under
stood, daily dig a portion of their own graves.
When one of them dies and has been buried, a new
grave is begun beside the one just filled, as a remind
er to the survivors that one of them must surely take
his place therein. So, too, when each seeks the cem
etery enclosure, in hours of holy meditation, and,
standing bareheaded among the graves, prays softly
for the souls of his departed brethren, he may come
for a time to this unfinished grave, and, kneeling, pray
Heaven, if he be next, to dismiss his soul in peace.
Nor do they sleep in the dark, abject kennel, which
the imagination, in the light of mediaeval history, con
structs as the true monk's cell. By the rule of St.
Benedict, they sleep separate, but in the same dor
mitory — a great upper room, well lighted and clean,
in the body of which a general framework several
feet high is divided into partitions that look like
narrow berths.

184 A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD

IV
We have acquired poetical and pictorial concep
tions of monks — praying with wan faces and up
turned eyes half darkened by the shadowing cowl,
the coarse serge falling away from the emaciated
neck, the hands pressing the crucifix close to the
heart ; and with this type has been associated a cer
tain idea of cloistral life — that it was an existence of
vacancy and idleness, or at best of deep meditation
of the soul broken only by express spiritual devo
tions. There is another kind of monk, with the
marks of which we seem traditionally familiar: the
monk with the rubicund face, sleek poll, good epi
gastric development, and slightly unsteady gait, with
whom, in turn, we have connected a different phase
of conventual discipline — fat capon and stubble
goose, and midnight convivial chantings growing
ever more fast and furious, but finally dying away
in a heavy stertorous calm. Poetry, art, the drama,
the novel, have each portrayed human nature in or
ders ; the saint-like monk, the intellectual monk, the
bibulous, the felonious, the fighting monk (who loves
not the hermit of Copmanhurst ?), until the memory
is stored and the imagination preoccupied.
Living for a while in a Trappist monastery in

A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD 185
modern America, one gets a pleasant actual expe
rience of other types no less picturesque and on the
whole much more acceptable. He finds himself, for
one thing, brought face to face with the working
monk. Idleness to the Trappist is the enemy of the
soul, and one of his vows is manual labor. What
ever a monk's previous station may have been, he
must perform, according to abbatial direction, the
most menial services. None are exempt from work ;
there is no place among them for the sluggard.
When it is borne in mind that the abbey is a self-
dependent institution, where the healthy must be
maintained, the sick cared for, the dead buried, the
necessity for much work becomes manifest. In fact,
the occupations are as various as those of a modern
factory. There is scope for intellects of all degrees
and talents of wellnigh every order. Daily life, un
remittingly from year to year, is an exact system of
duties and hours. The building, covering about an
acre of ground and penetrated by corridors, must be
kept faultlessly clean. There are three kitchens —
one for the guests, one for the community, and one
for the infirmary — that require each a coquinarius
and separate assistants. There is a tinker's shop
and a pharmacy ; a saddlery, where the broken gear
used in cultivating the monastery lands is mended;
a tailor's shop, where the worn garments are patched ;
a shoemaker's shop, where the coarse, heavy shoes
of the monks are made and cobbled ; and a barber's

186 A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
shop, where the Trappist beard is shaved twice a
month and the Trappist head is monthly shorn.
Out-doors the occupations are even more varied.
The community do not till the farm. The greater
part of their land is occupied by tenant farmers, and
what they reserve for their own use is cultivated by
the so-called "family brothers," who, it is due to say,
have no families, but live as celibates on the abbey
domain, subject to the abbot's authority, without be
ing members of the order. The monks, however,
do labor in the ample gardens, orchards, and vine
yard, from which they derive their sustenance, in the
steam saw-mill and grain-mill, in the dairy and the
cheese factory. Thus picturesquely engaged one
may find them in autumn : monks gathering apples
and making pungent cider, which is stored away in
the vast cellar as their only beverage except water ;
monks repairing the shingle roof of a stable ; monks
feeding the huge swine, which they fatten for the
board of their carnal guests, or the fluttering multi
tude of chickens, from the eggs and young of which
they derive a slender revenue ; monks grouped in
the garden around a green and purple heap of tur
nips, to be stored up as a winter relish of no mean
distinction. Amid such scenes one forgets all else while en
joying the wealth and freshness of artistic effects.
What a picture is this young Belgian cheese-maker,
his sleeves rolled above the elbows of his brawny

Ksr^"*- a^- ,7y-

A FORTNIGHTLY SHAVE.

/kPua plu>Co«ri.v4*.-

A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD 189
arms, his great pinkish hands buried in the golden
curds, the cap of his serge cloak falling back and
showing his closely clipped golden-brown hair, blue
eyes, and clear, delicate skin! Or this Australian
ex-farmer, as he stands by the hopper of grist or lays
on his shoulder a bag of flour for the coarse brown-
bread of the monks. Or this dark old French opera
singer, who strutted his brief hour on many a Euro
pean stage, but now hobbles around, hoary in his
cowl and blanched with age, to pick up a handful of
garlic. Or this athletic young Irishman, thrusting
a great iron prod into the glowing coals of the saw
mill furnace. Or this slender Switzer, your attend
ant in the refectory, with great keys dangling from
his leathern cincture, who stands by with folded
hands and bowed head while you are eating the pa
gan meal he has prepared for you.
From various countries of the Old World men
find their way into the Abbey of Gethsemane, but
among them are no Americans. Repeatedly the
latter have joined the order, and have failed to per
severe up to the final consecration of the white cowl.
The fairest warning is given to the postulant. He
is made to understand the entire extent of the obliga
tion he has assumed; and only after passing through
a novitiate, prolonged at the discretion of the abbot,
is he admitted to the vows that must be kept un
broken till death.

190 A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD

V
From the striking material aspects of their daily
life, one is soon recalled to a sense of their subor
dination to spiritual aims and pledges ; for upon
them, like a spell of enchantment, lies the sacred
silence. The honey has been taken from the bees
with solemnity; the grapes have been gathered
without song and mirth. The vow of life-long si
lence taken by the Trappist must of course not be
construed literally; but there are only two occa
sions during which it is completely set aside — when
confessing his sins and when singing the offices of
the Church. At all other times his tongue be
comes, as far as possible, a superfluous member; he
speaks only by permission of his superior, and al
ways simply and to the point. The monk at work
with another exchanges with him only the few low,
necessary words, and those that provoke no laugh
ter. Of the three so-called monastic graces, Sim-
plicitas, Benignitas, Hilaritas, the last is not his.
Even for necessary speech he is taught to substi
tute a language of signs, as fully systematized as the
speech of the deaf and dumb. Should he, while at
work, wound his fellow-workman, sorrow may be ex
pressed by striking his breast. A desire to confess

A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD 191
is shown by lifting one hand to the mouth and
striking the breast with the other. The maker of
cheese crosses two fingers at the middle point to
let you know that it is made half of milk and half
of cream. The guest-master, whose business it is
to act as your guide through the abbey and the
grounds, is warily mindful of his special functions
and requests you to address none but him. Only
the abbot is free to speak when and as his judg
ment may approve. It is silence, says the Trappist,
that shuts out new ideas, worldly topics, controversy.
It is silence that enables the soul to contemplate
with singleness and mortification the infinite per
fections of the Eternal.
In the abbey it is this pervasive hush that falls
like a leaden pall upon the stranger who has rushed
in from the talking universe. Are these priests
modern survivals of the rapt solitaries of India ?
The days pass, and the world, which seemed in
hailing distance to you at first, has receded to dim
remoteness. You stand at the window of your
room looking out, and hear in the autumn trees
only the flute-like note of some migratory bird, pass
ing slowly on towards the south. You listen with
in, and hear but a key turning in distant locks and
the slow- retreating footsteps of some dusky figure
returning to its lonely self-communings. The ut
most precaution is taken to avoid noise ; in the
dormitory not even your guide will speak to you,

192 A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
but explains by gesture and signs. During the
short siesta the Trappists allow themselves, if one
of them, not wishing to sleep, gets permission to
read in his so-called cell, he must turn the pages of
his book inaudibly. In the refectory, while the meal
is eaten and the appointed reader in the tribune
goes through a service, if one through carelessness
makes a noise by so much as dropping a fork or a
spoon, he leaves his seat and prostrates himself on
the floor until bidden by the superior to arise. The
same penance is undergone in the church by any
one who should distract attention with the clasp of
his book.
A hard life, to purely human seeming, does the
Trappist make for the body. He thinks nothing of
it. It is his evil tenement of flesh, whose humors
are an impediment to sanctification, whose propensi
ties are to be kept down by the practice of auster
ities. To it in part his monastic vows are addressed
— perpetual and utter poverty, chastity, manual labor,
silence, seclusion, penance, obedience. The perfec
tions and glories of his monastic state culminate in
the complete abnegation and destruction of animal
nature, and in the correspondence of his earthly life
with the holiness of divine instruction. The war of
the Jesuit is with the world ; the war of the Trap
pist is with himself. From his narrow bed, on
which are simply a coarse thin mattress, pillow,
sheet, and coverlet, he rises at 2 o'clock, on certain

A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD 193
days at i, on others yet at 12. He has not un
dressed, but has slept in his daily garb, with the
cincture around his waist.
This dress consists, if he be a brother, of the
roughest dark-brown serge-like stuff, the over-gar
ment of which is a long robe ; if a Father, of a simi
lar material, but white in color, the over- garment
being the cowl, beneath which is the black scapular.
He changes it only once in two weeks. The fre
quent use of the bath, as tending to luxuriousness,
is forbidden him, especially if he be young. His
diet is vegetables, fruit, honey, cider, cheese, and
brown -bread. Only when sick or infirm may he
take even fish or eggs. His table-service is pewter,
plain earthenware, a heavy wooden spoon and fork
of his own making, and the bottom of a broken bottle
for a salt-cellar. If he wears the white cowl, he eats
but one such frugal repast a day during part of the
year ; if the brown robe, and therefore required to do
more work, he has besides this meal an early morning
luncheon called " mixt." He renounces all claim to
his own person, all right over his own powers. " I
am as wax," he exclaims ; " mould me as you will."
By the law of his patron saint, if commanded to do
things too hard, or even impossible, he must still
undertake them.
For the least violations of the rules of his order;
for committing a mistake while reciting a psalm,
responsory, antiphon, or lesson ; for giving out one
13

194 A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
note instead of another, or saying dominus instead
of domino; for breaking or losing anything, or com
mitting any fault while engaged in any kind of work
in kitchen, pantry, bakery, garden, trade, or business
— he must humble himself and make public satis
faction forthwith. Nay, more : each by his vows is
forced to become his brother's keeper, and to pro
claim him publicly in the community chapter for the
slightest overt transgression. For charity's sake,
however, he may not judge motives nor make vague
general charges.
The Trappist does not walk beyond the enclosures
except by permission. He must repress ineffably
tender yearnings that visit and vex the human heart
in this life. The death of the nearest kindred is
not announced to him. Forgotten by the world, by
him it is forgotten. Yet not wholly. When he
lays the lashes of the scourge on his flesh — it may
be on his carious bones — he does it not for his own
sins alone, but for the sins of the whole world ; and
in his searching, self-imposed humiliations, there is a
silent, broad out-reaching of sympathetic effort in
behalf of all his kind. Sorrow may not depict itself
freely on his face. If a suffering invalid, he must
manifest no interest in the progress of his malady,
feel no concern regarding the result. In his last
hour, he sees ashes strewn upon the floor in the
form of a cross, a thin scattering of straw made over
them, and his body extended thereon to die ; and

A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD 195
from this hard bed of death he knows it will be
borne on a bier by his brethren and laid in the
grave without coffin or shroud.

VII
But who can judge such a life save him who has
lived it? Who can say what undreamt-of spiritual
compensations may not come even in this present
time as a reward for bodily austerities ? What fine
realities may not body themselves forth to the eye of
the soul, strained of grossness, steadied from worldly
agitation, and taught to gaze year after year into the
awfulness and mystery of its own being and deep
destiny ? " Monasticism," says Mr. Froude, " we be
lieve to have been the realization of the infinite love
liness and beauty of personal purity ; and the saint
in the desert was the apotheosis of the spiritual
man." However this may be, here at Gethsemane
you see one of the severest expressions of its faith
that the soul has ever given, either in ancient or in
modern times ; and you cease to think of these men
as members of a religious order, in the study of
them as exponents of a common humanity strug
gling with the problem of its relation to the Infinite.
One would wish to lay hold upon the latent ele
ments of power and truth and beauty in their sys-

196 A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
tern which enables them to say with quiet cheerful
ness, " We are happy, perfectly happy."
Excepting this ceaseless war between flesh and
spirit, the abbey seems a peaceful place. Its rela
tions with the outside world have always been kind
ly. During the Civil War it was undisturbed by
the forces of each army. Food and shelter it has
never denied even to the poorest, and it asks no
compensation, accepting such as the stranger may
give. The savor of good deeds extends beyond its
walls, and near by is a free school under its control,
where for more than a quarter of a century boys
of all creeds have been educated.
There comes some late autumnal afternoon when
you are to leave the place. With a strange feeling
of farewell, you grasp the hands of those whom you
have been given the privilege of knowing, and step
slowly out past the meek sacristan, past the noise
less garden, past the porter's lodge and the mis
placed rabbits, past the dim avenue of elms, past the
great iron gate-way, and, walking along the seques
tered road until you have reached the summit of a
wooded knoll half a mile away, turn and look back.
Half a mile ! The distance is infinite. The last
rays of the sun seem hardly able to reach the pale
cross on the spire which anon fades into the sky;
and the monastery bell, that sends its mellow tones
across the shadowy landscape, is rung from an im
memorial past.

It is the hour of the Compline, the Salve, and the
Angelus — the last of the seven services that the
Trappist holds between 2 o'clock in the morning
and this hour of early nightfall. Standing alone in
the silent darkness you allow imagination to carry
you once more into the church. You sit in one of
the galleries and look down upon the stalls of the
monks ranged along the walls of the nave. There
is no light except the feeble gleam of a single low
red cresset that swings ever-burning before the altar.
You can just discern a long line of nameless dusky
figures creep forth from the deeper gloom and glide
noiselessly into their seats. You listen to the cantus

198 A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD
plenus gravitate — those long, level notes with sorrow
ful cadences and measured pauses, sung by a full, un
faltering chorus of voices, old and young. It is the
song that smote the heart of Bossuet with such sad
ness in the desert of Normandy two and a half cen
turies ago.
Anon by some unseen hand two tall candles are
lighted on the altar. The singing is hushed. From
the ghostly line of white- robed Fathers a shadowy
figure suddenly moves towards the spot in the mid
dle of the. church where the bell-rope hangs, and
with slow, weird movements rings the solemn bell
until it fills the cold, gray arches with quivering
sound. One will not in a lifetime forget the im-
pressiveness of the scene — the long tapering shadows
that stretch out over the dimly lighted, polished floor
from this figure silhouetted against the brighter light
from the altar beyond ; the bowed, moveless forms
of the monks in brown almost indiscernible in the
gloom ; the spectral glamour reflected from the
robes of the bowed Fathers in white ; the ghastly,
suffering scene of. the Saviour, strangely luminous
in the glare of the tall candles. It is the daily
climax in the devotions of the Old World monks at
Gethsemane.

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS

I

ENTUCKY is a land of rural homes. The
people are out in the country with a per
ennial appetite and passion for the soil.
Like Englishmen, they are by nature no
dwellers in cities ; like older Saxon forefathers, they
have a strong feeling for a habitation even no better
than a one- story log- house, with furniture of the
rudest kind, and cooking in the open air, if, only, it
be surrounded by a plot of ground and individual
ized by all-encompassing fences. They are gregari
ous at respectful distances, dear to them being that
sense of personal worth and importance which comes
from territorial aloofness, from domestic privacy,
from a certain lordship over all they survey.
The land they hold has a singular charm and
power of infusing fierce, tender desire of ownership.
Centuries before it was possessed by them, all ruth
less aboriginal wars for its sole occupancy had re
solved themselves into the final understanding that
it be wholly claimed by none. Bounty in land was
the coveted reward of Virginia troops in the old
French and Indian war. Hereditary love of land
drew the earliest settlers across the perilous mount-

202 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
ains. Rapacity for land caused them to rush down
into the green plains, fall upon the natives, slay, tort
ure, hack to pieces, and sacrifice wife and child,
with the swift, barbaric hardihood and unappeasable
fury of Northmen of old descending upon the softer
shores of France. Acquisition of land was the de
terminative principle of the new civilization. Liti
gation concerning land has made famous the de
cisions of their courts of law. The surveyor's chain
should be wrapped about the rifle as a symbolic epit
ome of pioneer history. It was for land that they
turned from the Indians upon one another, and
wrangled, cheated, and lied. They robbed Boone
until he had none left in which to lay his bones.
One of the first acts of one of the first colonists was
to glut his appetite by the purchase of all of the
State that lies south of the Kentucky River. The
middle class land -owner has always been the con
trolling element of population. To-day more of the
people are engaged in agriculture than in all other
pursuits combined ; taste for it has steadily drawn a
rich stream of younger generations hither and thith
er into the younger West; and to-day, as always, the
broad, average ideal of a happy life is expressed in
the quiet holding of perpetual pastures.
Steam, said Emerson, is almost an Englishman ;
grass is almost a Kentuckian. Wealth, labor, pro
ductions, revenues, public markets, public improve
ments, manners, characters, social modes — all speak

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS 203
in common of the country, and fix attention upon
the soil. The staples attest the predominance of
agriculture; unsurpassed breeds of stock imply the
verdure of the woodlands ; turnpikes, the finest on
the continent, furnish viaducts for the garnered
riches of the earth,- and prove the high development
of rural life, the every-day luxury of delightful riding
and driving. Even the crow, the most boldly char
acteristic freebooter of the air, whose cawing is often
the only sound heard in dead February days, or
whose flight amid his multitudinous fellows forms
long black lines across the morning and the evening
sky, tells of fat pickings and profitable thefts in in
numerable fields. In Kentucky a rustic young
woman of Homeric sensibility might be allowed to
discover in the slow -moving panorama of white
clouds her father's herd of short-horned cattle graz
ing through heavenly pastures, and her lover to see
in the halo around the moon a perfect celestial race
track. Comparatively weak and unpronounced are the
features of urban life. The many little towns and
villages scattered at easy distances over the State
for the most part draw out a thin existence by rea
son of surrounding rural populations. They bear
the pastoral stamp. Up to their very environs ap
proach the cultivated fields, the meadows of brilliant
green, the delicate woodlands; in and out along the
white highways move the tranquil currents of rural

204 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
trade; through their streets groan and creak the
loaded wagons; on the sidewalks the most conspicu
ous human type is the owner of the soil. Once a
month county-seats overflow with the incoming tide
of country folk, livery-stables are crowded with horses
and vehicles, court-house squares become market
places for traffic in stock. But when emptied of
country folk, they sink again into repose, all but
falling asleep of summer noonings, and in winter
seeming frost-locked with the outlying woods and
streams. Remarkable is the absence of considerable cities,
there being but one that may be said truly to reflect
Kentucky life, and that situated on the river fron
tier, a hundred miles from the centre of the State.
Think of it! A population of some two millions with
only one interior town that contains over five thou
sand white inhabitants. Hence Kentucky makes no
impression abroad by reason of its urban population.
Lexington, Bowling Green, Harrodsburg, Winches
ter, Richmond, Frankfort, Mount Sterling, and all
the others, where do they stand in the scale of
American cities ? Hence, too, the disparaging con
trast liable to be drawn between Kentucky and the
gigantic young States of the West. Where is the
magnitude of the commonwealth, where the ground
of the sense of importance in the people ? No huge
mills and gleaming forges, no din of factories and
throb of mines, nowhere any colossal centres for

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS 205
rushing, multiform American energy. The answer
must be: Judge the State thus far as an agricultural
State ; the people as an agricultural people. In
time no doubt the rest will come. All other things
are here, awaiting occasion and development. The
eastern portions of the State now verge upon an era
of long-delayed activity. There lie the mines, the
building-stone, the illimitable wealth of timbers; there
soon will be opened new fields for commercial and
industrial centralization. But hitherto in Kentucky
it has seemed enough that the pulse of life should
beat with the heart of nature, and be in unison with
the slow unfolding and decadence of the seasons.
The farmer can go no faster than the sun, and is
rich or poor by the law of planetary orbits. In all
central Kentucky not a single village of note has
been founded within three-quarters of a century,
and some villages a hundred years old have not
succeeded in gaining even from this fecund race
more than a thousand or two thousand inhabitants.
But these little towns are inaccessible to the criti
cism that would assault their commercial greatness.
Business is not their boast. Sounded to its depths,
the serene sea in which their existence floats will re
veal a bottom, not of mercantile, but of social ideas;
studied as to cost or comfort, the architecture in
which the people have expressed themselves will ap
pear noticeable, not in their business houses and
public buildings, but in their homes. If these towns

206 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
pique themselves pointedly on anything, it is that
they are the centres of genial intercourse and polite
entertainment. Even commercial Louisville must
find its peculiar distinction in the number of its
sumptuous private residences. It is wellnigh a rule
that in Kentucky the value of the house is out of
proportion to the value of the estate.
But if the towns regard themselves as the provin
cial fortresses of good society, they do not look down
upon the home life of the country. Between coun
try and town in Kentucky exists a relation unique
and well to be studied : such a part of the popula
tion of the town owning or managing estates in the
country; such a part of the population of the country
being business or professional men in town. For it is
strikingly true that here all vocations and avocations
of life may and do go with tillage, and there are none
it is not considered to adorn. The first Governor of
the State was awarded his domain for raising a crop
of corn, and laid down public life at last to renew his
companionship with the plough. " I retire," said Clay,
many years afterwards, " to the shades of Ashland."
The present Governor (1888), a man of large wealth,
lives, when at home, in a rural log-house built near
the beginning of the century. His predecessor in
office was a farmer. Hardly a man of note in all
the past or present history of the State but has had
his near or immediate origin in the woods and fields.
Formerly it was the custom — less general now —

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS 207
that young men should take their academic degrees
in the colleges of the United States, sometimes in
those of Europe, and, returning home, hang up their
diplomas as votive offerings to the god of boundaries.
To-day you will find the ex-minister to a foreign
court spending his final years in the solitude of his
farm-house, and the representative at Washington
making his retreat to the restful homestead. The
banker in town bethinks him of stocks at home that
know no panic ; the clergyman studies St. Paul amid
the native corn, and muses on the surpassing beauty
of David as he rides his favorite horse through green
pastures and beside still waters.
Hence, to be a farmer here implies no social in
feriority, no rusticity, no boorishness. Hence, so
clearly interlaced are urban and rural society that
there results a homogeneousness of manners, cus
toms, dress, entertainments, ideals, and tastes.
Hence, the infiltration of the country with the best
the towns contain. More, indeed, than this : rather
to the country than to the towns in Kentucky must
one look for the local history of the home life.
There first was implanted under English and Vir
ginian influences the antique style of country-seat ;
there flourished for a time gracious manners that
were the high-born endowment of the olden school ;
there in piquant contrast were developed side by
side the democratic and aristocratic spirits, work
ing severally towards equality and caste ; there was

208 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
established the State reputation for effusive private
hospitalities ; and there still are peculiarly cherished
the fading traditions of more festive boards and
kindlier hearthstones. If the feeling of the whole
people could be interpreted by a single saying, it
would perhaps be this : that whether in town or
country — and if in the country, not remotely here
or there, but in wellnigh unbroken succession from
estate to estate — they have attained a notable stage
in the civilization of the home. This is the common
conviction, this the idol of the tribe. The idol itself
may rest on the fact of provincial isolation, which is
the fortress of self-love and neighborly devotion ; but
it suffices for the present purpose to say that it is
an idol still, worshipped for the divinity it is thought
to enshrine. Hence you may assail the Kentuckian
on many grounds, and he will hold his peace. You
may tell him that he has no great cities, that he does
not run with the currents of national progress ; but
never tell him that the home life of his fellows and
himself is not as good as the best in the land. Do
mesticity is the State porcupine, presenting an
angry quill to every point of attack. To write of
homes in Kentucky, therefore, and particularly of
rural homes, is to enter the very citadel of the popu
lar affections.

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS 209

II
At first they built for the tribe, working together
like beavers in common cause against nature and
their enemies. Home life and domestic architecture
began among them with the wooden-fort community,
the idea of which was no doubt derived from the
frontier defences of Virginia, and modified by the
Kentuckians with a view to domestic use. This
building habit culminated in the erection of some
two hundred rustic castles, the sites of which in
some instances have been identified. It was a sin
gularly fit sort of structure, adjusting itself despe
rately and economically to the necessities of envi
ronment. For the time society lapsed into a state
which, but for the want of lords and retainers, was
feudalism of the rudest kind. There were gates for
sally and swift retreat, bastions for defence, and
loop-holes in cabin walls for deadly volleys. There
were hunting-parties winding forth stealthily without
horn or hound, and returning with game that would
have graced the great feudal halls. There was siege,
too, and suffering, and death enough, God knows,
mingled with the lowing of cattle and the clatter of
looms. Some morning, even, you might have seen
a slight girl trip covertly out to the little cotton-
14

210 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
patch in one corner of the enclosure, and, blushing
crimson over the snowy cotton-bolls, pick the where
withal to spin her bridal dress ; for in these forts
they married also and bore children. Many a Ken
tucky family must trace its origin through the tribal
communities pent up within a stockade, and dis
cover that the family plate consisted then of a tin
cup, and, haply, an iron fork.
But, as soon as might be, this compulsory village
life broke eagerly asunder into private homes. The
common building form was that of the log-house. It
is needful to distinguish this from the log-house of
the mountaineer, which is found throughout eastern
Kentucky to-day. Encompassed by all difficulties,
the pioneer yet reared himself a better, more en
during habitation. One of these, still intact after
the lapse of more than a century, stands as a sin
gularly interesting type of its kind, and brings us
face to face with primitive architecture. " Mulberry
Hill," a double house, two and a half stories high,
with a central hall, was built in Jefferson County,
near Louisville, in 1785, for John Clark, the father
of General George Rogers Clark.
The settlers made the mistake of supposing that
the country lacked building-stone, so deep under the
loam and verdure lay the whole foundation rock;
but soon they discovered that their better houses
had only to be taken from beneath their feet. The
first stone house in the State, and withal the most

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE GRASS 21 1
notable, is " Traveller's Rest," in Lincoln County,
built in 1783 by Governor Metcalf, who was then a
stone-mason, for Isaac Shelby, the first Governor of
Kentucky. To those who know the blue-grass land
scape, this type of homestead is familiar enough,
with its solidity of foundation, great thickness of
walls, enormous, low chimneys, and little windows.
The owners were the architects and builders, and
with stern, necessitous industry translated their con
dition into their work, giving it an intensely human
element. It harmonized with need, not with feel
ing ; was built by the virtues, and not by the vanities.
With no fine balance of proportion, with details few,
scant, and crude, the entire effect of the architecture
was not unpleasing, so honest was its poverty, so rug
ged and robust its purpose. It was the gravest of
all historic commentaries written in stone. Varied
fate has overtaken these old-time structures. Many
have been torn down, yielding their well-chosen sites
to newer, showier houses. Others became in time
the quarters of the slaves. Others still have been
hidden away beneath weather-boarding — a veneer of
commonplace modernism — as though whitewashed
or painted plank were finer than roughhewn gray-
stone. But one is glad to discover that in numerous
instances they are the preferred homes of those who
have taste for the old in native history, and pride in
family associations and traditions. On the thinned,
open landscape nothing stands out with a more

212 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
pathetic air of nakedness than one of these stone
houses, long since abandoned and fallen into ruin.
Under the Kentucky sky houses crumble and die
without seeming to grow old, without an aged ton
ing down of colors, without the tender memorials of
mosses and lichens, and of the whole race of cling
ing things. So not until they are quite overthrown
does Nature reclaim them, or draw once more to her
bosom the walls and chimneys within whose faith
ful bulwarks^ and by whose cavernous, glowing re
cesses, our great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers
danced and made love, married, suffered, and fell
asleep. Neither to the house of logs, therefore, nor to
that of stone must we look for the earliest embodi
ment of positive taste in domestic architecture.
This found its first, and, considering the exigencies
of the period, its most noteworthy expression in the
homestead of brick. No finer specimen survives
than that built in 1796, on a plan furnished by
Thomas Jefferson to John Brown, who had been his
law student, remained always his honored friend,
and became one of the founders of the common
wealth. It is a rich landmark, this old manor-place
on the bank of the Kentucky River, in Frankfort.
The great hall with its pillared archway is wide
enough for dancing the Virginia reel. The suites
of high, spacious rooms ; the carefully carved wood
work of the window-casings and the doors ; the tall,

HOMESTEADS OF THE . BLUE-GRASS 213
quaint mantel-frames ; the deep fireplaces with their
shining fire-dogs and fenders of brass, brought labori
ously enough on pack-mules from Philadelphia ; the
brass locks and keys ; the portraits on the walls — all
these bespeak the early implantation in Kentucky
of a taste for sumptuous life and entertainment.
The house is like a far-descending echo of colonial
Old Virginia.
Famous in its day — for it is already beneath the
sod — and built not of wood, nor of stone, nor of
brick, but in part of all, was " Chaumiere," the home
of David Meade during the closing years of the last,
and the early years of the present, century. The
owner, a Virginian who had been much in England,
brought back with him notions of the baronial style
of country-seat, and in Jessamine County, some ten
miles from Lexington, built a home that lingers in
the mind like some picture of the imagination. It
was a villa -like place, a cluster of rustic cottages,
with a great park laid out in the style of Old World
landscape-gardening. There were artificial rivers
spanned by bridges, and lakes with islands crowned
by temples. There were terraces and retired al
coves, and winding ways cut through flowering
thickets. A fortune was spent on the grounds; a
retinue of servants was employed in nurturing their
beauty. The dining-room, wainscoted with walnut
and relieved by deep window-seats, was rich with
the family service of silver and glass; on the walls

214 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
of other rooms hung family portraits by Thomas
Hudson and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two days in the
week were appointed for formal receptions. There
Jackson and Monroe and Taylor were entertained;
there Aaron Burr was held for a time under arrest ;
there the old school showed itself in buckles and
knee-breeches, and rode abroad in a yellow chariot
with outriders in blue cloth and silver buttons.
Near Lexington may be found a further notable
example of early architecture in the Todd home
stead, the oldest house in the region, built by the
brother of John Todd, who was Governor of Ken
tucky Territory, including Illinois. It is a strong,
spacious brick structure reared on a high foundation
of stone, with a large, square hall and square rooms
in suites, connected by double doors. To the last
century also belongs the low, irregular pile that be
came the Wickliffe, and later the Preston, house in
Lexington — a striking example of the taste then
prevalent for plain, or even commonplace, exteriors,
if combined with interiors that touched the imagina-
tion with the suggestion of something stately and
noble and courtly.
These are a few types of homes erected in the
last century. The wonder is not that such places
exist, but that they should have been found in Ken
tucky at such a time. For society had begun as
the purest of democracies. Only a little while ago
the people had been shut up within a stockade.

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS 215
Stress of peril and hardship had levelled the ele
ments of population to more than a democracy : it
had knit them together as one endangered human
brotherhood. Hence the sudden, fierce flaring up
of sympathy with the French Revolution ; hence
the deep re-echoing war-cry of Jacobin emissaries.
But scarcely had the wave of primitive conquest
flowed over the land, and wealth followed in its
peaceful wake, before life fell apart into the extremes
of social caste. The memories of former position,
the influences of old domestic habits were powerful
still ; so that, before a generation passed, Kentucky
society gave proof of the continuity of its develop
ment from Virginia. The region of the James Riv
er, so rich in antique homesteads, began to renew
itself in the region of the blue-grass. On a new
and larger canvas began to be painted the picture
of shaded lawns, wide portals, broad staircases, great
halls, drawing-rooms, and dining-rooms, wainscot
ing, carved wood-work, and waxed hard-wood floors.
In came a few yellow chariots, morocco- lined and
drawn by four horses. In came the powder, the
wigs, and the queues, the ruffled shirts, the knee-
breeches, the glittering buckles, the high-heeled slip
pers, and the frosty brocades. Over the Allegha-
nies, in slow- moving wagons, came the massive ma
hogany furniture, the sunny brasswork, the tall silver
candlesticks, the nervous -looking, thin legged little
pianos. In came old manners and old speech and

216 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
old prides : the very Past gathered together its
household gods and made an exodus into the Future.
Without due regard to these essential facts the
social system of the State must ever remain poorly
understood. Hitherto they have been but little con
sidered. To the popular imagination the most fa
miliar type of the early Kentuckian is that of the
fighter, the hunter, the rude, heroic pioneer and his
no less heroic wife: people who left all things behind
them and set their faces westward, prepared to be
new creatures if such they could become. But on
the dim historic background are the stiff figures of
another type, people who were equally bent on being
old-fashioned creatures if such they could remain.
Thus, during the final years of the last century and
the first quarter of the present one, Kentucky life
was richly overlaid with ancestral models. Closely
studied, the elements of population by the close of
this period somewhat resembled a landed gentry,
a robust yeomanry, a white tenantry, and a black
peasantry. It was only by degrees — by the dying out
of the fine old types of men and women, by longer
absence from the old environment and closer contact
with the new — that society lost its inherited and ac
quired its native characteristics, or became less Vir
ginian and more Kentuckian. Gradually, also, the
white tenantry waned and the black peasantry waxed.
The aristocratic spirit, in becoming more Kentuck
ian, unbent somewhat its pride, and the democratic,

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS 217
in becoming more Kentuckian, took on a pride of
its own; so that when social life culminated with the
first half-century, there had been produced over the
Blue-grass Region, by the intermingling of the two,
that widely diffused and peculiar type which may be
described as an aristocratic democracy, or a demo
cratic aristocracy, according to one's choosing of a
phrase. The beginnings of Kentucky life repre
sented not simply a slow development from the
rudest pioneer conditions, but also a direct and im
mediate implantation of the best of long-established
social forms. And in nowise did the latter embody
itself more persuasively and lastingly than in the
building of costly homes.

Ill
With the opening of the present century, that
taste had gone on developing. A specimen of early
architecture in the style of the old English mansion
is to be found in " Locust Grove," a massive and en
during structure — not in the Blue-grass Region, it is
true, but several miles from Louisville — built in
1800 for Colonel Croghan, brother-in-law of Gen.
George Rogers Clark; and still another remains in
"Spring Hill," in Woodford County, the home of
Nathaniel Hart, who had been a boy in the fort at

218 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
Boonesborough. Until recently a further represent
ative, though remodelled in later times, survived in
the Thompson place at "Shawnee Springs," in Mer
cer County.
Consider briefly the import of such country homes
as these — " Traveller's Rest," "Chaumiere," " Spring
Hill," and "Shawnee Springs." Built remotely here
and there, away from the villages or before villages
were formed, in a country not yet traversed by lime
stone highways or even by lanes, they, and such as
they, were the beacon-lights, many-windowed and
kind, of Kentucky entertainment. " Traveller's
Rest " was on the great line of emigration from Ab
ingdon through Cumberland Gap. Its roof-tree was
a boon of universal shelter, its very name a perpetual
invitation to all the weary. Long after the country
became thickly peopled it, and such places as it, re
mained the rallying-points of social festivity in their
several counties, or drew their guests from remoter
regions. They brought in the era of hospitalities,
which by-and-by spread through the towns and over
the land. If one is ever to study this trait as it
flowered to perfection in Kentucky life, one must look
for it in the society of some fifty years ago. Then
horses were kept in the stables, servants were kept
in the halls. Guests came uninvited, unannounced;
tables were regularly set for surprises. " Put a
plate," said an old Kentuckian of the time with a
large family connection — "always put a plate for the

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS 219
last one of them down to the youngest grandchild."
What a Kentuckian would have thought of being
asked to come on the thirteenth of the month and
to leave on the twentieth, it is difficult to imagine.
The wedding-presents of brides were not only jewels
and silver and gold, but a round of balls. The peo
ple were laughed at for their too impetuous civilities.
In whatever quarter of the globe they should hap
pen to meet for the hour a pleasing stranger, they
would say in parting, "And when you come to Ken
tucky, be certain to come to my house."
Yet it is needful to discriminate, in speaking of
Kentucky hospitality. Universally gracious towards
the stranger, and quick to receive him for his indi
vidual worth, within the State hospitality ran in cir
cles, and the people turned a piercing eye on one'
another's social positions. If in no other material
aspect did they embody the history of descent so
sturdily as in the- building of homes, in no other
trait of home life did they reflect this more clearly
than in family pride. Hardly a little town but had
its classes that never mingled ; scarce a rural neigh
borhood but insisted on the sanctity of its salt-cellar
and the gloss of its mahogany. The spirit of caste
was somewhat Persian in its gravity. Now the
Alleghanies were its background, and the heroic
beginnings of Kentucky life supplied its warrant ;
now it overleaped the Alleghanies, and allied itself
to the memories of deeds and names in older States.

220 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
But if some professed to look down, none professed
to look up. Deference to an upper class, if defer
ence existed, was secret and resentful, not open and
servile. The history of great political contests in
the State is largely the victory and defeat of social
types. Herein lies a difficulty : you touch any point
of Kentucky life, and instantly about it cluster an
tagonisms and contradictions. The false is true ;
the true is false. Society was aristocratic ; it was
democratic ; it was neither ; it was both. There
was intense family pride, and no family pride. The
ancestral sentiment was weak, and it was strong.
To-day you will discover the increasing vogue of an
heraldica Kentuckiensis, and to-day an absolute dis
regard of a distinguished past. One tells but partial
truths. Of domestic architecture in a brief and general
way something has been said. The prevailing in
fluence was Virginian, but in Lexington and else
where may be observed evidences of French ideas in
the glasswork and designs of doors and windows, in
rooms grouped around a central hall with arching
niches and alcoves ; for models made their way from
New Orleans as well as from the East. Out in the
country, however, at such places as those already
mentioned, and in homes nearer town, as at Ash
land, a purely English taste was sometimes shown
for woodland parks with deer, and, what was more
peculiarly Kentuckian, elk and buffalo. This taste,

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS 221
once so conspicuous, has never become extinct, and
certainly the landscape is receptive enough to all
such stately purposes. At " Spring Hill " and else
where, to-day, one may stroll through woods tHat
have kept a touch of their native wildness. There
was the English love of lawns, too, with a low matted
green turf and wide-spreading shade- trees above —
elm and maple, locust and poplar — the English fond
ness for a home half hidden with evergreens and
creepers and shrubbery, to be approached by a leafy
avenue, a secluded gate-way, and a gravelled drive;
for highways hardly admit to the heart of rural life
in Kentucky, and way-side homes, to be dusted and
gazed at by every passer-by, would little accord with
the spirit of the people. This feeling of family se
clusion and completeness also portrayed itself very
tenderly in the custom of family graveyards, which
were in time to be replaced by the democratic ceme
tery ; and no one has ever lingered around those
quiet spots of aged and drooping cedars, fast-fading
violets, and perennial myrtle, without being made to
feel that they grew out of the better heart and fos
tered the finer senses.
Another evidence of culture among the first gen
erations of Kentuckians is to be seen in the private
collections of portraits, among which one wanders
now with a sort of stricken feeling that the higher
life of Kentucky in this regard never went beyond
its early promise. Look into the meagre history

222 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
of native art, and you will discover that nearly all
the best work belongs to this early time. It was
possible then that a Kentuckian could give up law
and turn to painting. Almost in the wilderness
Jouett created rich, luminous, startling canvases.
Artists came from older States to sojourn and to
work, and were invited or summoned from abroad.
Painting was taught in Lexington in 1800. Well
for Jouett, perhaps, that he lived when he did ; bet
ter for Hart, perhaps, that he was not born later:
they might have run for Congress. One is prone
to recur time and again to this period, when the
ideals of Kentucky life were still wavering or un
formed, and when there was the greatest receptivity
to outside impressions. Thinking of social life as it
was developed, say in and around Lexington — of
artists coming and going, of the statesmen, the
lecturers, the lawyers, of the dignity and the energy
of character, of the intellectual dinners — one is in
clined to liken the local civilization to a truncated
cone, to a thing that should have towered to a sym
metric apex, but somehow has never risen very high
above a sturdy base.
But to speak broadly of home life after it became
more typically Kentuckian, and after architecture
began to reflect with greater uniformity the charac
ter of the people. And here one can find material
comfort, if not aesthetic delight; for it is the whole
picture of human life in the Blue-grass Region that

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS 223
pleases. Ride east and west, or north and south,
along highway or by-way, and the picture is the
same. One almost asks for relief from the monot
ony of a merely well-to-do existence, almost sighs for
the extremes of squalor and splendor, that nowhere
may be seen, and that would seem so out of place if
anywhere confronted. On, and on, and on you go,
seeing only the repetition of field and meadow, wood
and lawn, a winding stream, an artificial pond, a sun
ny vineyard, a blooming orchard, a stone-wall, a
hedge-row, a tobacco barn, a warehouse, a race-track,
cattle under the trees, sheep on the slopes, swine in
the pools, and, half hidden by evergreens and shrub
bery, the homelike, unpretentious houses that crown
very simply and naturally the entire picture of ma
terial prosperity. They strike you as built not for
their own sakes. Few will offer anything that lays
hold upon the memory, unless it be perhaps a front
portico with Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian columns;
for the typical Kentuckian likes to go into his house
through a classic entrance, no matter what inhar
monious things may be beyond ; and after supper
on summer evenings nothing fills him with serener
comfort than to tilt his chair back against a classic
support, as he smokes a pipe and argues on the im
mortality of a pedigree.
On the whole, one feels that nature has long wait
ed for a more exquisite sense in domestic architect
ure ; that the immeasurable possibilities of delightful

224 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
landscape have gone unrecognized or wasted. Too
often there is in form and outline no harmony with
the spirit of the scenery, and there is dissonance of
color — color which makes the first and strongest
impression. The realm of taste is prevailingly the
realm of the want of taste, or of its meretricious and
commonplace violations. Many of the houses have
a sort of featureless, cold, insipid ugliness, and inte
rior and exterior decorations are apt to go for nothing
or for something worse. You repeat that nature
awaits more art, since she made the land so kind to
beauty ; for no transformation of a rude, ungenial
landscape is needed. The earth does not require to
be trimmed and combed and perfumed. The airy
vistas and delicate slopes are ready-made, the park
like woodlands invite, the tender, clinging children
of the summer, the deep, echoless repose of the whole
land, all ask that art be laid on every undulation and
stored in every nook. And there are days with such
Arcadian colors in air and cloud and sky — days with
such panoramas of calm, sweet pastoral groups and
harmonies below, such rippling and flashing of wa
ters through green underlights and golden inter
spaces, that the shy, coy spirit of beauty seems to be
wandering half sadly abroad and shunning all the
haunts of man.
But little agricultural towns are not art-centres.
Of itself rural life does not develop aesthetic percep
tions, and the last, most difficult thing to bring into

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUL-GRASS 225
the house is this shy, elusive spirit of beauty. The
Kentucky woman has perhaps been corrupted in
childhood by tasteless surroundings. Her lovable
mission, the creation of a multitude of small, lovely
objects, is undertaken feebly and blindly. She may
not know how to create beauty, may not know what
beauty is. The temperament of her lord, too, is
practical : a man of substance and stomach, sound
at heart, and with an abiding sense of his own re
sponsibility and importance, honestly insisting on
sweet butter and new-laid eggs, home-made bread
and home-grown mutton, but little revelling in the
delicacies of sensibility, and with no more eye for
crimson poppies or blue corn-flowers in his house
than amid his grain. Many a Kentucky woman
would make her home beautiful if her husband
would allow her to do it.
Amid a rural people, also, no class of citizens
is more influential than the clergy, who go about
as the shepherds of the right ; and without doubt
in Kentucky, as elsewhere, ministerial ideals have
wrought their effects on taste in architecture. Per
haps it is well to state that this is said broadly, and
particularly of the past. The Kentucky preachers
during earlier times were a fiery, zealous, and au
stere set, proclaiming that this world was not a
home, but wilderness of sin, and exhorting their
people to live under the awful shadow of Eternity.
Beauty in every material form was a peril, the
15

226 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
seductive garment of the devil. Wellnigh all that
made for aesthetic culture was put down, and, like
frost on venturesome flowers, sermons fell on beauty
in dress, entertainment, equipage, houses, church
architecture, music, the drama, the opera — every
thing. The meek young spirit was led to the creek
or pond, and perhaps the ice was broken for her
baptism. If, as she sat in the pew, any vision of her
chaste loveliness reached the pulpit, back came the
warning that she would some day turn into a
withered hag, and must inevitably be " eaten of
worms." What wonder if the sense of beauty pined
or went astray, and found itself completely avenged
in the building of such churches ? And yet there
is nothing that even religion more surely demands
than the fostering of the sense of beauty within us,
and through this also we work towards the civiliza
tion of the future.

IV
Many rural homes have been built since the war,
but the old type of country life has vanished. On
the whole, there has been a strong movement of
population towards the towns, rapidly augmenting
their size. Elements of showiness and freshness
have been added to their once unobtrusive architect-

HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS 227
ure. And, in particular, that art movement and
sudden quickening of the love of beauty which swept
over this country a few years since has had its in
fluence here. But for the most part the newer
homes are like the newer homes in other American
cities, and the style of interior appointment and dec
oration has few native characteristics. As a rule
the people love the country life less than of yore,
since an altered social system has deprived it of
much leisure, and has added hardships. The Ken
tuckian does not regard it as part of his mission in
life to feed fodder to stock ; and servants are hard
to get, the colored ladies and gentlemen having de
veloped a taste for urban society.
What is to be the future of the Blue-grass Region ?
When population becomes denser and the pressure
is felt in every neighborhood, who will possess it?
One seems to see in certain tendencies of American
life the probable answer to this question. The small
farmer will be bought out, and will disappear. Es
tates will grow fewer and larger. The whole land will
pass into the hands of the rich, being too precious
for the poor to own. Already here and there one
notes the disposition to create vast domains by the
slow swallowing up of contiguous small ones. Con
sider in this connection the taste already shown by
the rich American in certain parts of the United
States to found a country-place in the style of an
English lord. Consider, too, that the landscape is

228 HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS
much like the loveliest of rural England; that the
trees, the grass, the sculpture of the scenery are
such as make the perfect beauty of a park ; that the
fox, the bob -white, the thoroughbred, and the deer
are indigenous. Apparently, therefore, one can fore
see the distant time when this will become the re
gion of splendid homes and estates that will nourish
a taste for out-door sports and offer an escape from
the too-wearying cities. On the other hand, a power
ful and ever-growing interest is that of the horse,
racer or trotter. He brings into the State his in
creasing capital, his types of men. Year after year
he buys farms, and lays out tracks, and builds
stables, and edits journals, and turns agriculture
into grazing. In time the Blue-grass Region may
become the Yorkshire of America.
But let the future have its own. The country will
become theirs who deserve it, whether they build
palaces or barns. One only hopes that when the old
homesteads have been torn down or have fallen into
ruins, the tradition may still run that they, too, had
their day and deserved their page of history.

THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK

I
jRESH fields lay before us that summer
of 1885. WTe had left the rich, rolling
plains of the Blue-grass Region in central
Kentucky and set our faces towards the
great Appalachian uplift on the south-eastern bor
der of the State. There Cumberland Gap, that high-
swung gate-way through the mountain, abides as a
landmark of what Nature can do when she wishes
to give an opportunity to the human race in its mi
grations and discoveries, without surrendering con
trol of its liberty and its fate. It can never be too
clearly understood by those who are wont to speak
of " the Kentuckians " that this State has within its
boundaries two entirely distinct elements of popu
lation — elements distinct in England before they
came hither, distinct during more than a century of
residence here, and distinct now in all that goes to
constitute a separate community — occupations, man
ners and customs, dress, views of life, civilization.
It is but a short distance from the blue-grass coun
try to the eastern mountains ; but in traversing it
you detach yourself from all that you have ever ex
perienced, and take up the history of English-speak-

232 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
ing men and women at the point it had reached a
hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago.
Leaving Lexington, then, which is in the midst
of the blue-grass plateau, we were come to Burnside,
where begin the navigable waters of the Cumber
land River, and the foot-hills of the Cumberland
Mountains. Burnside is not merely a station, but a mountain
watering-place. The water is mostly in the bed of
the river. We had come hither to get horses and
saddle-bags, but to no purpose. The hotel was a
sort of transition point between the civilization we
had left and the primitive society we were to enter.
On the veranda were some distinctly modern and
conventional red chairs ; but a green and yellow
gourd-vine, carefully trained so as to shut out the
landscape, was a genuine bit of local color. Under
the fine beeches in the yard was swung a hammock,
but it was made of boards braced between ropes,
and was covered with a weather-stained piece of. tar
paulin. There were electric bells in the house that
did not electrify ; and near the front entrance three
barrels of Irish potatoes, with the tops off, spoke for
themselves in the absence of the bill of fare. After
supper, the cook, a tall, blue-eyed, white fellow, walk
ed into my room without explanation, and carried
away his guitar, showing that he had been wont to
set his sighs to music in that quarter of the prem
ises. The moon hung in that part of the heavens,

OLD FERRY AT POINT BURNSIDE.

THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK 235
and no doubt ogled him into many a midnight frenzy.
Sitting under a beech -tree in the morning, I had
watched a child from some city, dressed in white
and wearing a blue ribbon around her goldenish
hair, amuse herself by rolling old barrels (potato
barrels probably, and she may have had a motive)
down the hill-side and seeing them dashed to pieces
on the railway track below. By-and-by some of the
staves of one fell in, the child tumbled in also, and
they all rolled over together. Upon the whole, it
was an odd overlapping of two worlds. When the
railway was first opened through this region a young
man established a fruit store at one of the stations,
and as part of his stock laid in a bunch of bananas.
One day a mountaineer entered. Arrangements
generally struck him with surprise, but everything
else was soon forgotten in an adhesive contempla
tion of that mighty aggregation of fruit. Finally
he turned away with this comment: "Damn me if
them ain't the damnedest beans / ever seen !"
The scenery around Burnside is beautiful, and the
climate bracing. In the valleys was formerly a fine
growth of walnut, but the principal timbers now are
oak, ash, and sycamore, with yellow pine. I heard
of a wonderful walnut tree formerly standing, by
hiring vehicles to go and see which the owner of
a livery-stable made three hundred and fifty dollars.
Six hundred were offered for it on the spot. The
hills are filled with the mountain limestone — that

236 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
Kentucky oolite of which the new Cotton Exchange
in New York is built. Here was Burnside's depot
of supplies during the war, and here passed the
great road — made in part a corduroy road at his
order — from Somerset, Kentucky, to Jacksborough,
over which countless stores were taken from cen
tral Kentucky and regions farther north into Ten
nessee. Supplies were brought up the river in small
steamboats or overland in wagons, and when the
road grew impassable, pack-mules were used. Sad
sights there were in those sad days: the carcasses
of animals at short intervals from here to Knoxville,
and now and then a mule sunk up to his body in
mire, and abandoned, with his pack on, to die. Here
were batteries planted and rifle-pits dug, the vestiges
of which yet remain ; but where the forest timbers
were then cut down a vigorous new growth has long
been reclaiming the earth to native wildness, and
altogether the aspect of the place is peaceful and
serene. Doves were flying in and out of the corn
fields on the hill-sides ; there were green stretches
in the valleys where cattle were grazing ; and these,
together with a single limestone road that wound
upward over a distant ridge, recalled the richer
scenes of the blue-grass lands.
Assured that we should find horses and saddle
bags at Cumberland Falls, we left Burnside in the
afternoon, and were soon set down at a station some
fifteen miles farther along, where a hack conveyed

THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK 237

us to another of those mountain watering-places that
are being opened up in various parts of eastern
Kentucky for the enjoyment of a people that has
never cared to
frequent in large
numbers the At
lantic seaboard.
As we drove on,
the darkness was
falling, and the
scenery along the
road grew wilder
and grander. A
terrific storm had
swept over these
heights, and the
great trees lay up-
torn and prostrate
in every direction,
or reeled and fell
against each oth
er like drunken
giants — a scene of
fearful elemental
violence. On the
summits one sees
the tan-bark oak ;
lower down, the "DAMN ME IF THEM AIN'T THE DAMNEDEST
white oak; and beans i ever seen!"

238 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
lower yet, fine specimens of yellow poplar ; while
from the valleys to the crests is a dense and va
ried undergrowth, save where the ground has been
burned over, year after year, to kill it out and im
prove the grazing. Twenty miles to the south-east
we had seen through the pale-tinted air the waving
line of Jellico Mountains in Tennessee. Away to
the north lay the Beaver Creek and the lower
Cumberland, while in front of us rose the craggy,
scowling face of Anvil Rock, commanding a view
of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. The utter
silence and heart -oppressing repose of primeval
nature was around us. The stark white and gray
trunks of the immemorial forest dead linked us to
an inviolable past. The air seemed to blow upon
us from over regions illimitable and unexplored, and
to be fraught with unutterable suggestions. The
full-moon swung itself aloft over the sharp touchings
of the green with spectral pallor; and the evening-
star stood lustrous on the western horizon in depths
of blue as cold as a sky of Landseer, except where
brushed by tremulous shadows of rose on the verge
of the sunlit world. A bat wheeled upward in fan
tastic curves out of his undiscovered glade. And
the soft tinkle of a single cow-bell far below marked
the invisible spot of some lonely human habitation.
By-and-by we lost sight of the heavens altogether,
so dense and interlaced the forest. The descent of
the hack appeared to be into a steep abyss of gloom ;

MOONRISE ON CUMBERLAND RIDGE.

then all at once
we broke from |
the edge of the woods
into a flood of moon
light; at our feet
were the whirling, foaming rapids of the river ; in
our ears was the roar of the cataract, where the
bow-crowned mist rose and floated upward and
away in long trailing shapes of ethereal lightness.
The Cumberland River throws itself over the
rocks here with a fall of seventy feet, or a perpen
dicular descent of sixty-two, making a mimic but
beautiful Niagara. Just below, at Eagle Falls, it
drops over its precipice in a lawny cascade. The
roar of the cataract, under favorable conditions, may
be heard up and down stream a distance of ten or
twelve miles. You will not find in mountainous
Kentucky a more picturesque spot.
While here, we had occasion to extend our ac
quaintance with native types. Two young men
came to the hotel, bringing a bag of small, hard
peaches to sell. Slim, slab-sided, stomachless, and

240 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
serene, mild, and melancholy, they might have been
lotos-eaters, only the suggestion of poetry was want
ing. Their unutterable content came not from the
lotus, but from their digestion. If they could sell
their peaches, they would be happy; if not, they
would be happy. What they could not sell, they
could as well eat; and since no bargain was made
on this occasion, they took chairs on the hotel ve
randa, opened the bag, and fell to. I talked with
the Benjamin of his tribe :
" Is that a good 'coon dog ?"
"A mighty good 'coon dog. I hain't never seed
him whipped by a varmint yit."
"Are there many 'coons in this country?"
" Several 'coons."
" Is this a good year for 'coons ?"
"A mighty good year for 'coons. The woods is
full o' varmints."
" Do 'coons eat corn ?"
" 'Coons is bad as hogs on corn, when they git
tuk to it."
"Are there many wild turkeys in this country?"
" Several wild turkeys."
" Have you ever caught many 'coons?"
" I've cotched high as five 'coons out o' one tree."
"Are there many foxes in this country ?"
" Several foxes."
" What's the best way to cook a 'coon ?"
" Ketch him and parbile him, and then put him in

THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK 241
cold water and soak him, and then put him in and
bake him."
" Are there many hounds in this country ?"
" Several hounds."
Here, among other discoveries, was a linguistic
one — the use of "several " in the sense of a great
man}', probably an innumerable multitude, as in the
case of the 'coons.
They hung around the hotel for hours, as beings
utterly exempt from all the obligations and other
phenomena of time.
"Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?"
The guide bespoken the evening before had made
arrangements for our ride of some eighteen miles —
was it not forty? — to Williamsburg; and in the after
noon made his appearance with three horses. Of
these one was a mule, with a strong leaning towards
his father's family. Of the three saddles one was a
side-saddle, and another was an army saddle with
refugee stirrups. The three beasts wore among
them some seven shoes. My own mincing jade had
none. Her name must have been Helen of Troy
(all horses are named in Kentucky), so long ago had
her great beauty disappeared. She partook with
me of the terror which her own movements inspired;
and if there ever was a well-defined case in which
the man should have carried the beast, this was the
16

242 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
one. While on hervback I occasionally apologized
for the injustice of riding her by handing her some
sour apples, the like of which she appeared never to
have tasted before, just as it was told me she had
never known the luxury of wearing shoes. It is
often true that the owner of a horse in this region
is too poor or too mean to have it shod.
Our route from Cumberland Falls lay through
what is called " Little Texas," in Whitley County — ¦
a wilderness some twenty miles square. I say route,
because there was not always a road ; but for the
guide, there would not always have been a direction.
Rough as the country appears to one riding through
it on horseback, it is truly called " flat woods coun
try;" and viewed from Jellico Mountains, whence the
local elevations are of no account, it looks like one
vast sweep of sloping, densely-wooded land. Here
one may see noble specimens of yellow poplar in the
deeper soil at the head of the ravines ; pin-oak, and
gum and willow, and the rarely beautiful wild - cu
cumber. Along the streams in the lowlands blooms
the wild calacanthus, filling the air with fragrance,
and here in season the wild camellia throws open its
white and purple splendors.
It was not until we had passed out of " Little
Texas " and reached Williamsburg, had gone thence
to Barbourville, the county -seat of the adjoining
county of Knox, and thence again into Bell County,
that we stopped at an old way-side inn on the WTil-

CUMBERLAND FALLS.

THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK 245
derness road from Kentucky through Cumberland
Gap. Around us were the mountains — around us
the mountaineers whom we wished to study.

II
Straight, slim, angular, white bodies ; average or
even unusual stature, without great muscular robust
ness ; features regular and colorless ; unanimated
but intelligent ; in the men sometimes fierce ; in the
women often sad ; among the latter occasional beau
ty of a pure Greek type ; a manner shy and deferen
tial, but kind and fearless ; eyes with a slow, long
look of mild inquiry, or of general listlessness, or of
unconscious and unaccountable melancholy; the key
of life a low minor strain, losing itself in reverie ;
voices monotonous in intonation ; movements unin
formed by nervousness — these are characteristics of
the Kentucky mountaineers. Living to-day as their
forefathers lived a hundred years ago ; hearing little
of the world, caring nothing for it; responding fee
bly to the influences of civilization near the high
ways of travel in and around the towns, and latterly
along the lines of railway communication ; but sure
to live here, if uninvaded and unaroused, in the same
condition for a hundred years to come; lacking the
spirit of development from within ; devoid of sym-
16*

246 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
pathy with that boundless and ungovernable activity
which is carrying the Saxon race in America from
one state to another, whether better or worse. The
origin of these people, the relation they sustain to
the different population of the central Kentucky
region — in fine, an account of them from the date
of their settling in these mountains to the present
time, when, as it seems, they are on the point of
losing their isolation, and with it their distinctive
ness — would imprison phases of life and character
valuable alike to the special history of this country
and to the general history of the human mind.
The land in these mountains is all claimed, but
it is probably not all covered by actual patent. As
evidence, a company has been formed to speculate
in lands not secured by title. The old careless way
of marking off boundaries by going from tree to
tree, by partly surveying and partly guessing, ex
plains the present uncertainty. Many own land by
right of occupancy, there being no other claim. The
great body of the people live' on and cultivate little
patches which they either own, or hold free, or pay
rent for with a third of the crop. These not un-
frequently get together and trade farms as they
would horses, no deed being executed. There is
among them a mobile element — squatters — who
make a hill-side clearing and live on it as long as
it remains productive ; then they move elsewhere.
This accounts for the presence throughout the coun-

^JSC

NATIVE TYPES.

THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK 249
try of abandoned cabins, around which a new forest
growth is springing up. Leaving out of considera
tion the few instances of substantial prosperity, the
most of the people are abjectly poor, and they ap
pear to have no sense of accumulation. The main
crops raised are corn and potatoes. In the scant
gardens will be seen patches of cotton, sorghum,
and tobacco ; flax also, though less than formerly.
Many make insufficient preparation for winter, lay
ing up no meat, but buying a piece of bacon now
and then, and paying for it with work. In some
regions the great problem of life is to raise two
dollars and a half during the year for county taxes.
Being pauper counties, they are exempt from State
taxation. Jury fees are highly esteemed and much
sought after. The manufacture of illicit mountain
whiskey — "moonshine" — was formerly, as it is now,
a considerable source of revenue ; and a desperate
sub-source of revenue from the same business has
been the betrayal of its hidden places. There is
nothing harder or more dangerous to find now in
the mountains than a still.
Formerly digging " sang," as they call ginseng)
was a general occupation. For this China was a
great market. It has nearly all been dug out ex
cept in the wildest parts of the country, where en
tire families may still be seen " out sangin'." They
took it into the towns in bags, selling it at a dollar
and ten cents — perhaps a dollar and a half — a pound.

250 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
This was mainly the labor of the women and the
children, who went to work barefooted, amid briers
and chestnut burs, copperheads and rattlesnakes.
Indeed, the women prefer to go barefooted, finding
shoes a trouble and constraint. It was a sad day
for the people when the "sang" grew scarce. A
few years ago one of the counties was nearly depop
ulated in consequence of a great exodus into Arkan
sas, whence had come the news that " sang " was
plentiful. Not long since, during a season of scarci
ty in corn, a local store-keeper told the people of a
county to go out and gather all the mandrake or
"May-apple" root they could find. At first only
the women and children went to work, the men
holding back with ridicule. By-and-by they also
took part, and that year some fifteen tons were gath
ered, at three cents a pound, and the whole country
thus got its seed-corn. Wild ginger was another
root formerly much dug ; also to less extent " gold
en-seal " and " bloodroot." The sale of feathers from
a few precarious geese helps to eke out subsistence.
Their methods of agriculture — if methods they may
be styled — are the most primitive. Ploughing is
commonly done with a " bull-tongue," an implement
hardly more than a sharpened stick with a metal
rim ; this is often drawn by an ox, or a half-yoke.
But one may see women ploughing with two oxen.
Traces are made of hickory or papaw, as also are
bed-cords. Ropes are made of lynn bark. In some

THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK 251
counties there is not so much as a fanning- mill,
grain being winnowed by pouring it from basket to
basket, after having been threshed with a flail, which
is a hickory withe some seven feet long. Their
threshing-floor is a clean place on the ground, and
they take up grain, gravel, and dirt together, not
knowing, or not caring for, the use of a sieve.
The grain is ground at their homes in a hand
tub-mill, or one made by setting the nether mill
stone in a bee-gum, or by cutting a hole in a punch-

INTERIOR OF A MOUNTAINEERS HOME.

252 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
eon-log and sinking the stone into it. There are,
however, other kinds of mills : the primitive little
water-mill, which may be considered almost char
acteristic of this region ; in a few places improved
water-mills, and small steam-mills. It is the coun
try of mills, farm-houses being furnished with one
as with coffee-pot or spinning-wheel. A simpler
way of preparing corn for bread than by even the
hand-mill is used in the late summer and early au
tumn, while the grain is too hard for eating as
roasting-ears, and too soft to be ground in a mill.
On a board is tacked a piece of tin through which
holes have been punched from the under side, and
over this tin the ears are rubbed, producing a coarse
meal, of which " gritted bread " is made. Much
pleasure and much health they get from their " grit
ted bread," which is sweet and wholesome for a
hungry man.
Where civilization has touched on the highways
and the few improved mills have been erected, one
may see women going to mill with their scant sacks
of grain, riding on a jack, a jennet, or a bridled ox.
But this is not so bad as in North Carolina, where,
Europa like, they ride on bulls.
Aside from such occupations, the men have noth
ing to do — a little work in the spring, and nine
months' rest. They love to meet at the country
groceries and cross-roads, to shoot matches for beef,
turkeys, or liquor, and to gamble. There is with

THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK 253
them a sort of annual succession of amusements.
In its season they have the rage for pitching horse
shoes, the richer ones using dollar pieces. In con
sequence of their abundant leisure, the loneliness
of the mountains, and their bravery and vigor, quar
rels are frequent and feuds deadly. Personal en
mities soon serve to array entire families in an atti
tude of implacable hostility ; and in the course of
time relatives and friends take sides, and a war of
extermination ensues. The special origins of these
feuds are various : blood heated and temper lost
under the influence of "moonshine;" reporting the
places and manufacturers of this ; local politics ; the
survival of resentments engendered during the Civil
War. These, together with all causes that lie in the
passions of the human heart and spring from the
constitution of all human society, often make the re
mote and insulated life of these people turbulent,
reckless, and distressing.
But while thus bitter and cruel towards each oth
er, they present to strangers the aspect of a polite,
kind, unoffending, and most hospitable race. They
will divide with you shelter and warmth and food,
however scant, and will put themselves to trouble
for your convenience with an unreckoning, earnest
friendliness and good-nature that is touching to the
last degree. No sham, no pretence ; a true friend,
or an open enemy. Of late they have had much
occasion to regard new-comers with distrust, which,

254 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
once aroused, is difficult to dispel ; and now they
will wish to know you and your business before
treating you with that warmth which they are only
too glad to show.
The women do most of the work. From the few
sheep, running wild, which the farm may own, they
take the wool, which is carded, reeled, spun, and
woven into fabrics by their own hands and on their
rude implements. One or two spinning-wheels will
be found in every house. Cotton from their little
patches they clean by using a primitive hand cotton-
gin. Flax, much spun formerly, is now less used.
It is surprising to see from what appliances they
will bring forth exquisite fabrics : garments for per
sonal wear, bedclothes, and the like. When they
can afford it they make carpets.
They have, as a rule, luxuriant hair. In some
counties one is struck by the purity of the Saxon
type, and their faces in early life are often hand
some. But one hears that in certain localities they
are prone to lose their teeth, and that after the age
of thirty-five it is a rare thing to see a woman whose
teeth are not partly or wholly wanting. The reason
is not apparent. They appear passionately fond of
dress, and array themselves in gay colors and in
jewelry (pinchbeck), if their worldly estate justifies
the extravagance. Oftener, if young, they have a
modest, shy air, as if conscious that their garb is
not decorous. Whether married or unmarried, they

MOUNTAIN COURTSHIP.

THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK 257
show much natural diffidence. It is told that in re
moter districts of the mountains they are not al
lowed to sit at the table with the male members of
the household, but serve them as in ancient soci
eties. Commonly, in going to church, the men ride
and carry the children, while the women walk.
Dancing in some regions is hardly known, but in
others is a favorite amusement, and in its move
ments men and women show grace. The mount
ain preachers oppose it as a sin.
Marriages take place early. They are a fecund
race. I asked them time and again to fix upon the
average number of children to a family, and they
gave as the result seven. In case of parental op
position to wedlock, the lovers run off. There is
among the people a low standard of morality in
their domestic relations, the delicate privacies of
home life having little appreciation where so many
persons, without regard to age or sex, are crowded
together within very limited quarters.
The dwellings — often mere cabins with a single
room — are built of rough -hewn logs, chinked or
daubed, though not always. Often there is a punch
eon floor and no chamber roof. One of these mount
aineers, called into court to testify as to the house
hold goods of a defendant neighbor, gave in as the
inventory, a string of pumpkins, a skillet without a
handle, and "a wild Bill." "A wild Bill" is a bed
made by boring auger-holes into a log, driving sticks
17

258 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
into these, and overlaying them with hickory bark
and sedge-grass — a favorite couch. The low chim
neys, made usually of laths daubed, are so low that
the saying, inelegant though true, is current, that
you may sit by the fire inside and spit out over the
top. The cracks in the walls are often large enough
to give ingress and egress to child or dog. Even
cellars are little known, potatoes sometimes being
kept during winter in a hole dug under the hearth
stone. More frequently a trap-door is made through
the plank flooring in the middle of the room, and
in a hole beneath are put potatoes, and, in case of
wealth, jellies and preserves. Despite the wretched
ness of their habitations and the rigors of mountain
climate, they do not suffer with cold, and one may
see them out in snow knee-deep clad in low brogans,
and nothing heavier than a jeans coat and hunting-
shirt. The customary beverage is coffee, bitter and
black, not having been roasted but burnt. All
drink it, from the youngest up. Another beverage
is " mountain tea," which is made from the sweet-
scented golden-rod and from winter-green — the New
England checkerberry. These decoctions they mol
lify with home-made sorghum molasses, which they
call " long sweetening," or with sugar, which by con
trast is known as " short sweetening."
Of home government there is little or none, boys
especially setting aside at will parental authority;

sit*

;- -fig

>!:¦>

j^f^-f^l

r~ - -

^N^-

" f*
y
feSSsSsSM
A FAMILY BURYING-GROUND.
but a sort of traditional sense of duty and decorum
restrains them by its silent power, and moulds them
into respect. Children while quite young are often
plump to roundness, but soon grow thin and white
and meagre like the parents. There is little desire
for knowledge or education. The mountain schools
have sometimes less than half a dozen pupils during
the few months they are in session. A gentleman
who wanted a coal bank opened, engaged for the
work a man passing along the road. Some days
later he learned that his workman was a school
teacher, who, in consideration of the seventy-five
cents a day, had dismissed his academy.
260 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
Many, allured by rumors from the West, have mi
grated thither, but nearly all come back, from love
of the mountains, from indisposition to cope with
the rush and vigor and enterprise of frontier life.
Theirs, they say, is a good lazy man's home.
Their customs respecting the dead are interest
ing. When a husband dies his funeral sermon is
not preached, but the death of the wife is awaited,
and vice versa. Then a preacher is sent for, friend
and neighbor called in, and the respect is paid both
together. Often two or three preachers are sum
moned, and each delivers a sermon. More peculiar
is the custom of having the services for one per
son repeated ; so that the dead get their funerals
preached several times, months and years after their
burial. I heard of the pitiful story of two sisters
who had their mother's funeral preached once every
summer as long as they lived. You may engage
the women in mournful conversation respecting the
dead, but hardly the men. In strange contrast with
this regard for ceremonial observances is their neg
lect of the graves of their beloved, which they do
not seem at all to visit when once closed, or to dec
orate with those symbols of affection which are the
common indications of bereavement.
Nothing that I have ever seen is so lonely, so
touching in its neglect and wild, irreparable solitude,
as one of these mountain graveyards. On some
knoll under a clump of trees, or along some hill-side

THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK 261
where dense oak-trees make a mid -day gloom, you
walk amid the unknown, undistinguishable dead.
Which was father and which mother, where are
lover and stricken sweetheart, whether this is the
dust of laughing babe or crooning grandam, you
will never know : no foot - stones, no head - stones ;

A MOUNTAINEER DAME.

262 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
sometimes a few rough rails laid around, as you
would make a little pen for swine. In places, how
ever, one sees a picket- fence put up, or a sort of
shed built over.
Traditions and folk-lore among them are eva
nescent, and vary widely in different localities. It
appears that in part they are sprung from the early
hunters who came into the mountains when game
was abundant, sport unfailing, living cheap. Among
them now are still-hunters, who know the haunts of
bear and deer, needing no dogs. They even now
prefer wild meat — even "'possum" and "'coon'' and
ground-hog — to any other. In Bell County I spent
the day in the house of a woman eighty years old,
who was a lingering representative of a nearly ex
tinct type. She had never been out of the neigh
borhood of her birth, knew the mountains like a
garden, had whipped men in single-handed encoun
ter, brought down many a deer and wild turkey with
her own rifle, and now, infirm, had but to sit in her
cabin door and send her trained dogs into the depths
of the forests to discover the wished-for game. A
fiercer woman I never looked on.

THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK 263

III
Our course now lay direct towards Cumberland
Gap, some twenty miles southward. Our road ran
along the bank of the Cumberland River to the ford,
the immemorial crossing-place of early travel — and a
beautiful spot — thence to Pineville, situated in that
narrow opening in Pine Mountain where the river
cuts it, and thence through the valley of Yellow
Creek to the wonderful pass. The scenery in this
region is one succession of densely wooded mount
ains, blue -tinted air, small cultivated tracts in the
fertile valleys, and lovely watercourses.
Along the first part of our route the river slips
crystal - clear over its rocky bed, and beneath the
lone green pendent branches of the trees that crowd
the banks. At the famous ford it was only two or
three feet deep at the time of our crossing. This is
a historic point. Here was one of the oldest settle
ments in the country ; here the Federal army de
stroyed the houses and fences during the Civil War;
and here Zollikoffer came to protect the Kentucky
gate that opens into East Tennessee. At Pineville,
just beyond, we did not remain long. For some rea-v
sons not clearly understood by travellers, a dead-line
had been drawn through the midst of the town, and

264 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
not knowing on which side we were entitled to stand,
we hastened on to a place where we might occupy
neutral ground.
The situation is strikingly picturesque: the mount
ain looks as if cleft sheer and fallen apart, the peaks
on each side rising almost perpendicularly, with mas
sive overhanging crests wooded to the summits, but
showing gray rifts of the inexhaustible limestone.
The river when lowest is here at an elevation of nine
hundred and sixty feet, and the peaks leap to the
height of twenty-two hundred. Here in the future
will most probably pass a railroad, and be a popu
lous town, for here is the only opening through Pine
Mountain from " the brakes " of Sandy to the Ten
nessee line, and tributary to the watercourses that
centre here are some five hundred thousand acres of
timber land.
The ride from Pineville to the Gap, fourteen miles
southward, is most beautiful. Yellow Creek becomes
in local pronunciation " Yaller Crick." One cannot
be long in eastern Kentucky without being struck
by the number and character of the names given to
the watercourses, which were the natural avenues
of migratory travel. Few of the mountains have
names. What a history is shut up in these names !
Cutshin Creek, where some pioneer, they say, dam
aged those useful members; but more probably where
grows a low greenbrier which cuts the shins and rid
dles the pantaloons. These pioneers had humor.

OLD CORN-MILL AT PINEVILLE.

They named one creek " Troublesome," for reasons
apparent to him who goes there ; another, " No
Worse Creek," on equally good grounds ; another,
" Defeated Creek ;" and a great many, " Lost Creek."
In one part of the country it is possible for one to
enter " Hell fur Sartain," and get out at " Kingdom
Come." Near by are " Upper Devil " and " Lower
Devil." One day we went to a mountain meeting
which was held in "a school-house and church-house"

266 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
on " Stinking Creek." One might suppose they would
have worshipped in a more fragrant locality; but
the stream is very beautiful, and not malodorous. It
received its name from its former canebrakes and
deer licks, which made game abundant. Great num
bers were killed for choice bits of venison and hides.
Then there are "Ten -mile Creek" and "Sixteen-
mile Creek," meaning to clinch the distance by
name ; and what is philologically interesting, one
finds numerous " Trace Forks," originally " Trail
Forks." Bell County and the Yellow Creek Valley serve
to illustrate the incalculable mineral and timber re
sources of eastern Kentucky. Our road at times
cut through forests of magnificent timbers — oak
(black and white), walnut (black and white), poplar,
maple, and chestnut, beech, lynn, gum, dogwood, and
elm. Here are some of the finest coal-fields in the
world, the one on Clear Creek being fourteen feet
thick. Here are pure cannel-coals and coking-coals.
At no other point in the Mississippi Valley are iron
ores suitable for steel-making purposes so close to
fuel so cheap. With an eastern coal-field of 10,000
square miles, with an area equally large covered
with a virgin growth of the finest economic tim
bers, with watercourses feasible and convenient, it
cannot be long before eastern Kentucky will be
opened up to great industries. Enterprise has al
ready turned hither, and the distinctiveness of the

THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK 267
mountaineer race already begins to disappear. The
two futures before them are, to be swept out of
these mountains by the in -rushing spirit of con
tending industries, or to be aroused, civilized, and
developed. Long before you come in sight of the great Gap,
the idea of it dominates the mind. While yet some
miles away, it looms up, 1675 feet in elevation, some
half a mile across from crest to crest, the pinnacle
on the left towering to the height of 2500 feet.
It was late in the afternoon when our tired horses
began the long, winding, rocky climb from the val
ley to the brow of the pass. As we stood in the
passway, amid the deepening shadows of the twilight
and the solemn repose of the mighty landscape, the
Gap seemed to be crowded with two invisible and
countless pageants of human life, the one passing in,
the other passing out ; and the air grew thick with
unheard utterances — primeval sounds, undistinguish-
able and strange, of creatures nameless and never
seen by man ; the wild rush and whoop of retreat
ing and pursuing tribes ; the slow steps of watchful
pioneers ; the wail of dying children and the songs
of homeless women ; the muffled tread of routed
and broken armies — all the sounds of surprise and
delight, victory and defeat, hunger and pain, and
weariness and despair, that the human heart can ut
ter. Here passed the first of the white race who
led the way into the valley of the Cumberland ; here

268 THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
passed that small band of fearless men who gave the
Gap its name ; here passed the " Long Hunters ;"
here rushed the armies of the Civil War; here has
passed the wave of westerly emigration, whose force
has spent itself only on the Pacific slopes ; and here
in the long future must flow backward and forward
the wealth of the North and the South.

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND

1

^^iHE writer has been publishing during the
last few years a series of articles on Ken
tucky. With this article the series will
be brought to a close. Hitherto he has

*o-

written of nature in the Blue-grass Region and of
certain aspects of life ; but as he comes to take
leave of his theme, he finds his attention fixed upon
that great mountain wall which lies along the south
eastern edge of the State. At various points of
this wall are now beginning to be enacted new
scenes in the history of Kentucky ; and what dur
ing a hundred years has been an inaccessible back
ground, is becoming the fore-front of a civilization
which will not only change the life of the State
within, but advance it to a commanding position in
national economic affairs.
But it should not be lost sight of that in writing
this article, as in writing all the others, it is with
the human problem in Kentucky that he is solely
concerned. He will seem to be dealing with com
mercial activities for their own sake. He will write
of coals and ores and timbers, of ovens and tun
nels and mines ; but if the reader will bear with

272 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
him to the end, he will learn that these are dealt
with only for the sake of looking beyond them at
the results which they bring on: town-making in va
rious stages, the massing and distributing of wealth,
the movements of population, the dislodgment of
isolated customs — on the whole, results that lie in
the domain of the human problem in its deepest
phases. Consider for a moment, then, what this great wall
is, and what influence it has had over the history of
Kentucky and upon the institutions and character
istics of its people.
You may begin at the western frontier of Ken
tucky on the Mississippi River, about five hundred
miles away, and travel steadily eastward across the
billowy plateau of the State, going up and up all the
time until you come to its base, and above its base
it rises to the height of some three thousand feet.
For miles before you reach it you discover that it is
defended by a zone of almost inaccessible hills with
steep slopes, forests difficult to penetrate, and nar
row jagged gorges ; and further defended by a sin
gle sharp wall-like ridge, having an elevation of
about twenty- two hundred feet, and lying nearly
parallel with it, at a distance of about twenty miles.
Or, if you should attempt to reach this wall from
the south, you would discover that from that side
also it is hardly less hostile to approach. Hence it
has stood in its virgin wilderness, a vast isolating

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 273
and isolated barrier, fierce, beautiful, storm -racked,
serene ; in winter, brown and gray, with its naked
woods and rifts of stone, or mantled in white ; in
summer, green, or of all greens from darkest to palest,
and touched with all shades of bloom ; in autumn,
colored like the sunset clouds ; curtained all the
year by exquisite health-giving atmospheres, lifting
itself all the year towards lovely, changing skies.
Understand the position of this natural fortress-
line with regard to the area of Kentucky. That
area has somewhat the shape of an enormous flat
foot, with a disjointed big toe, a roughly hacked-off
ankle, and a missing heel. The sole of this huge
foot rests solidly on Tennessee, the Ohio River
trickles across the ankle and over the top, the big
toe is washed entirely off by the Tennessee River,
and the long-missing heel is to be found in Virginia,
never having been ceded by that State. Between
the Kentucky foot and the Virginia heel is piled up
this immense, bony, grisly mass of the Cumberland
Mountain, extending some three hundred miles north
east and south-west.
It was through this heel that Kentucky had to be
peopled. The thin, half-starved, weary line of pio
neer civilizers had to penetrate it, and climb this ob
structing mountain wall, as a line of travelling ants
might climb the wall of a castle. In this case only
the strongest of the ants — the strongest in body, the
strongest in will — succeeded in getting over and

274 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
establishing their colony in the country far beyond.
Luckily there was an enormous depression in the
wall, or they might never have scaled it. During
about half a century this depression was the difficult,
exhausting entrance-point through which the State
received the largest part of its people, the furniture
of their homes, and the implements of their civiliza
tion ; so that from the very outset that people repre
sented the most striking instance of a survival of
the fittest that may be observed in the founding of
any American commonwealth. The feeblest of the
ants could not climb the wall ; the idlest of them
would not. Observe, too, that, once on the other
side, it was as hard to get back as it had been to
get over. That is, the Cumberland Mountain kept
the little ultramontane society isolated. Being iso
lated, it was kept pure-blooded. Being isolated, it
developed the spirit and virtues engendered by iso
lation. Hence those traits for which Kentuckians
were once, and still think themselves, distinguished
— passion for self-government, passion for personal
independence, bravery, fortitude, hospitality. On ac
count of this mountain barrier the entire civilization
of the State has had a one-sided development. It
has become known for pasturage and agriculture,
whiskey, hemp, tobacco, and fine stock. On account
of it the great streams of colonization flowing from
the North towards the South, and flowing from the
Atlantic seaboard towards the West, have divided

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 275
and passed around Kentucky as waters divide and
pass around an island, uniting again on the farther
side. It has done the like for the highways of com
merce, so that the North has become woven to the
South and the East woven to the West by a con
necting tissue of railroads, dropping Kentucky out
as though it had no vital connection, as though it
were not a controlling point of connection, for the
four sections of the country. Thus keeping out
railroads, it has kept out manufactures, kept out
commerce, kept out industrial cities. For three-
quarters of a century generations of young Ken
tuckians have had to seek pursuits of this character
in other quarters, thus establishing a constant drain
ing away from the State of its resolute, vigorous
manhood. Restricting the Kentuckians who have
remained to an agricultural type of life, it has
brought upon them a reputation for lack of enter
prise. More than all this has that great barrier
wall done for the history of Kentucky. For, within
a hundred years, the only thing to take possession
of it, slowly, sluggishly overspreading the region of
its foot-hills, its vales and fertile slopes — the only
thing to take possession of it and to claim it has
been a race of mountaineers, an idle, shiftless, igno
rant, lawless population, whose increasing numbers,
pauperism, and lawlessness, whose family feuds and
clan-like vendettas, have for years been steadily gain
ing for Kentucky the reputation for having one of

276 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
the worst backwoods populations on the continent,
or, for that matter, in the world.
But for the presence of this wall the history of the
State, indeed the history of the United States, would
have been profoundly different. Long ago, in virtue
of its position, Kentucky would have knit together,
instead of holding apart, the North and the South.
The campaigns and the results of the Civil War
would have been changed; the Civil War might nev
er have taken place. But standing as it has stood, it
has left Kentucky, near the close of the first century
of its existence as a State, with a reputation some
what like the shape of its territory — unsymmetric,
mutilated, and with certain parts missing.
But now consider this wall of the Cumberland
Mountain from another point of view. If you should
stand on the crest at any point where it forms the
boundary of Kentucky ; or south of it, where it ex
tends into Tennessee ; or north of it, where it ex
tends into Virginia — if you should stand thus and
look northward, you would look out upon a vast area
of coal. For many years now it has been known
that the coal -measure rocks of eastern Kentucky
comprise about a fourth of the area of the State,
and are not exceeded in value by those of any other
State. It has been known that this buried solar
force exceeds that of Great Britain. Later it has
become known that the Kentucky portion of the
great Appalachian coal-field contains the largest

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND

277

area of rich cannel-coals yet discovered, these hav
ing been traced in sixteen counties, and some of
them excelling by test the famous cannel-coal of
Great Britain ; later it has become known that here
is to be found the largest area of coking -coal yet
discovered, the main coal — discovered a few years
ago, and named the "Elkhorn" — having been traced
over sixteen hundred square miles, and equalling
American standard coke in excellence.
Further, looking northward, you look out upon
a region of iron ores, the deposits in Kentucky
ranking sixth in variety and extent among those
to be found in all other States, and being better
disposed for working than any except those of Vir
ginia, Tennessee, and Alabama. For a hundred
years now, it should be remembered in this connec
tion, iron has been smelt
ed in Kentucky, been
and been an import-

MAP SHOWING MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND.

278 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
ant article of commerce. As early as 1823 it was
made at Cumberland Gap, and shipped by river to
markets as remote as New Orleans and St. Louis. At
an early date, also, it was made in a small charcoal
forge at Big Creek Gap, and was hauled in wagons
into central Kentucky, where it found a ready market
for such purposes as plough-shares and wagon tires.
Further, looking northward, you have extending
far and wide before you the finest primeval region
of hard-woods in America.
Suppose, now, that you turn and look from this
same crest of the Cumberland Mountain southward,
or towards the Atlantic seaboard. In that direction
there lie some two hundred and fifty thousand square
miles of country which is practically coalless ; but
practically coalless, it is incalculably rich in iron ores
for the manufacture of iron and steel. You look out
upon the new industrial empire of the United States,
with vast and ever-growing needs of manufactures,
fuel, and railroads. That is, for a hundred miles you
stand on the dividing line of two distinct geological
formations: to the north, the Appalachian coal-fields;
to the south, mountains of iron ores ; rearing itself
between these, this immense barrier wall, which cre
ates an unapproachable wilderness not only in south
eastern Kentucky, but in East Tennessee, western
Virginia, and western North Carolina — the largest
extent of country in the United States remaining
undeveloped.

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 279
But the time had to come when this wilderness
would be approached on all sides, attacked, pen
etrated to the heart. Such wealth of resources
could not be let alone or remain unused. As re
spects the development of the region, the industrial
problem may be said to have taken two forms — the
one, the development of the coal and iron on oppo
site sides of the mountains, the manufacture of coke
and iron and steel, the establishment of wood-work
ing industries, and the delivery of all products to the
markets of the land ; second, the bringing together
of the coals on the north side and the ores through
out the south. In this way, then, the Cumberland
Mountain no longer offered a barrier merely to the
civilization of Kentucky, but to the solution of the
greatest economic problem of the age — the cheapest
manufacture of iron and steel. But before the press
ure of this need the mountain had to give way and
surrender its treasures. At any cost of money and
labor, the time had to come when it would pay to
bring these coals and ores together. But how was
this to be done? The answer was simple: it must
be done by means of natural water gaps and by tun
nels through the mountain. It is the object of this
paper to call attention to the way in which the new
civilization of the South is expected to work at four
mountain passes, and to point out some of the re
sults which are to follow.

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND

II
On the Kentucky side of the mighty wall of the
Cumberland Mountain, and nearly parallel with it,
is the sharp single wall of Pine Mountain, the west
ernmost ridge of the Alleghany system. For about
a hundred miles these two gnarled and ancient mon
sters lie crouched side by side, guarding between
them their hidden stronghold of treasure — an im
mense valley of timbers and irons and coals. Near
the middle point of this inner wall there occurs a
geological fault. The mountain falls apart as though
cut in twain by some heavy downward stroke, show
ing on the faces of the fissure precipitous sides wood
ed to the crests. There is thus formed the cele
brated and magnificent pass through which the
Cumberland River — one of the most beautiful in
the land — slips silently out of its mountain valley,
and passes on to the hills and the plateaus of Ken
tucky. In the gap there is a space for the bed of
this river, and on each side of the river space for a
roadway and nothing more.
Note the commanding situation of this inner pass.
Travel east along Pine Mountain or travel west, and
you find no other water gap within a hundred miles.
Through this that thin, toiling line of pioneer civil-

or1

i ¦ y

sitl*

'7;

: ' -A V-h'-i-i

CUMBERLAND GAP.

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 283
izers made its way, having scaled the great outer
Cumberland wall some fifteen miles southward. But
for this single geological fault, by which a water gap
of the inner mountain was placed opposite a depres
sion in the outer mountain, thus creating a continu
ous passway through both, the colonization of Ken
tucky, difficult enough even with this advantage,
would have been indefinitely delayed, or from this
side wholly impossible. Through this inner portal
was traced in time the regular path of the pioneers,
afterwards known as the Wilderness Road. On ac
count of the travel over this road and the controlling
nature of the site, there was long ago formed on
the spot a little backwoods settlement, calling itself
Pineville. It consisted of a single straggling line of
cabins and shanties of logs on each side of a road
way, this road being the path of the pioneers. In
the course of time it was made the county-seat. Be
ing the county-seat, the way-side village, catching
every traveller on foot or on horse or in wagons, be
gan some years ago to make itself still better known
as the scene of mountain feuds. The name of the
town when uttered anywhere in Kentucky suggested
but one thing — a blot on the civilization of the State,
a mountain fastness where the human problem seems
most intractable. A few such places have done more
to foster the unfortunate impression which Kentucky
has made upon the outside world than all the towns
of the blue-grass country put together.

284 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
Five summers ago, in 1885, in order to prepare an
article for Harper's Magazine on the mountain folk
of the Cumberland region, I made my way towards
this mountain town, now riding on a buck -board,
now on a horse whose back was like a board that
was too stiff to buck. The road I travelled was
that great highway between Kentucky and the South
which at various times within a hundred years has
been known as the Wilderness Road, or the Cumber
land Road, or the National Turnpike, or the " Kain-
tuck Hog Road," as it was called by the mountain
eers. It is impossible to come upon this road with
out pausing, or to write of it without a tribute. It
led from Baltimore over the mountains of Virginia
through the great wilderness by Cumberland Gap.
All roads below Philadelphia converged at this gap,
just as the buffalo and Indian trails had earlier con
verged, and just as many railroads are converging
now. The improvement of this road became in
time the pet scheme of the State governments of
Virginia and Kentucky. Before the war millions
of head of stock — horses, hogs, cattle, mules — were
driven over it to the southern markets ; and thou
sands of vehicles, with families and servants and
trunks, have somehow passed over it, coming north
ward into Kentucky, or going southward on pleasure
excursions. During the war vast commissary stores
passed back and forth, following the movement of
armies. But despite all this — despite all that has

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 285
been done to civilize it since Boone traced its course
in 1 790, this honored historic thoroughfare remains
to-day as it was in the beginning, with all its sloughs
and sands, its mud and holes, and jutting ledges of
rock and loose bowlders, and twists and turns, and
general total depravity.
It is not surprising that when the original Ken
tuckians were settled on the blue-grass plateau they
sternly set about the making of good roads, and to
this day remain the best road-builders in America.
One such road was enough. They are said to have
been notorious for profanity, those who came into
Kentucky from this side. Naturally. Many were
infidels — there are roads that make a man lose faith.
It is known that the more pious companies of them,
as they travelled along, would now and then give up
in despair, sit down, raise a hymn, and have prayers
before they could go farther. Perhaps one of the
provocations to homicide among the mountain peo
ple should be reckoned this road. I have seen two
of the mildest of men, after riding over it for a few
hours, lose their temper and begin to fight — fight
their horses, fight the flies, fight the cobwebs on
their noses, fight anything.
Over this road, then, and towards this town, one
day, five summers ago, I was picking my course, but
not without pale human apprehensions. At that
time one did not visit Pineville for nothing. When
I reached it I found it tense with repressed excite-

286 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
ment. Only a few days previous there had been a
murderous affray in the streets ; the inhabitants had
taken sides; a dead-line had been drawn through
the town, so that those living on either side crossed
to the other at the risk of their lives ; and there was
blue murder in the air. I was a stranger; I was in
nocent ; I was peaceful. But I was told that to be
a stranger and innocent and peaceful did no good.
Stopping to eat, I fain would have avoided, only it
seemed best not to be murdered for refusing. All
that I now remember of the dinner was a corn-bread
that would have made a fine building stone, being of
an attractive bluish tint, hardening rapidly upon ex
posure to the atmosphere, and being susceptible of
a high polish. A block of this, freshly quarried, I
took, and then was up and away. But not quickly,
for having exchanged my horse for another, I found
that the latter moved off as though at every step ex
pecting to cross the dead-line, and so perish. The
impression of the place was one never to be forgot
ten, with its squalid hovels, its ragged armed men
collected suspiciously in little groups, with angry,
distrustful faces, or peering out from behind the
ambush of a window.
A few weeks ago I went again to Pineville, this
time by means of one of the most extensive and
powerful railroad systems of the South. At the
station a 'bus was waiting to take passengers to the
hotel. The station was on one side of the river,

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 287
the hotel on the other. We were driven across a
new iron bridge, this being but one of four now
spanning the river formerly crossed at a single ford.
At the hotel we were received by a porter of metro
politan urbanity and self-esteem. Entering the ho
tel, I found it lighted by gas, and full of guests from
different parts of the United States. In the lobby
there was a suppressed murmur of refined voices
coming from groups engaged in serious talk. As
by-and-by I sat in a spacious dining-room, looking
over a freshly-printed bill of fare, some one in the
parlors opposite was playing on the piano airs from
"Tannhauser" and " Billee Taylor." The dining-
room was animated by a throng of brisk, tidy, white
young waiting -girls, some of whom were far too
pretty to look at except from behind a thick napkin ;
and presently, to close this experience of the new
Pineville, there came along such inconceivable flan
nel-cakes and molasses that, forgetting industrial and
social problems, I gave myself up to the enjoyment
of a problem personal and gastric; and erelong, hav
ing spread myself between snowy sheets, I melted
away, as the butter between the cakes, into warm
slumber, having first poured over myself a syrup of
thanksgiving. The next morning I looked out of my window
upon a long pleasant valley, mountain-sheltered, and
crossed by the winding Cumberland ; here and there
cottages of a smart modern air already built or

288 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
building; in another direction, business blocks of
brick and stone, graded streets and avenues and
macadamized roads ; and elsewhere, saw and planing
mills, coke ovens, and other evidences of commercial
development. Through the open door of a church
I saw a Catholic congregation already on its knees,
and the worshippers of various Protestant denomi
nations were looking towards their own temples.
The old Pineville, happily situated farther down the
river, at the very opening of the pass, was rapidly
going to ruins. The passion for homicide had
changed into a passion for land speculation. The
very man on whose account at my former visit the
old Pineville had been divided into two deadly fac
tions, whose name throughout all the region once
stood for mediaeval violence, had become a real-
estate agent. I was introduced to him.
" Sir," said I, " I don't feel so very much afraid of
you." " Sir," said he, " I don't like to run myself."
Such, briefly, is the impression made by the new
Pineville — a new people there, new industries, new
moral atmosphere, new civilization.
The explanation of this change is not far to seek.
By virtue of its commanding position as the only
inner gateway to the North, this pass was the cen
tral point of distribution for south-eastern Kentucky.
Flowing into the Cumberland, on the north side of
the mountain, is Clear Creek, and on the south side

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 289
is Strait Creek, the two principal streams of this
region, and supplying water-power and drainage.
Tributary to these streams are, say, half a million
acres of noble timber land; in the mountains around,
the best coals, coking and domestic ; elsewhere, iron
ores, pure brown, hematite, and carbonates ; inex
haustible quantities of limestone, blue-gray sand
stone, brick clays ; gushing from the mountains,
abundant streams of healthful freestone water; on
the northern hill-sides, a deep loam suitable for
grass and gardens and fruits. Add to this that
through this water- gap, following the path of the
Wilderness Road, as the Wilderness Road had fol
lowed the path of the Indian and the buffalo —
through this water-gap would have to pass all rail
roads that should connect the North and South by
means of that historic and ancient highway of traffic
and travel.
On the basis of these facts, three summers ago a
few lawyers in Louisville bought 300 acres of land
near the riotous old town of Pineville, and in the
same summer was organized the Pine Mountain
Iron and Coal Company, which now, however, owns
about twenty thousand acres, with a capital stock of
$2,000,000. It should be noted that Southern men
and native capital began this enterprise, and that al
though other stockholders are from Chicago and
New England, most of the capital remains in the
State. Development has been rapidly carried for-
19

290 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
ward, and over five hundred thousand dollars' worth
of lots have been sold the present year. It is pleas
ant to dwell upon the future that is promised for
this place ; pleasant to hear that over six hundred
acres in this pleasant valley are to be platted ; that
there are to be iron-furnaces and electric lights, con
crete sidewalks and a street railway, more bridges,
brick-yards, and a high-school ; and that the seventy-
five coke ovens now in blast are to be increased to
a thousand. Let it be put down to the credit of
this vigorous little mountain town that it is the first
place in that region to put Kentucky coke upon the
market, and create a wide demand for it in remote
quarters — Cincinnati alone offering to take the daily
output of 500 ovens.
Thus the industrial and human problems are be
ginning to solve themselves side by side in the
backwoods of Kentucky. You begin with coke
and end with Christianity. It is the boast of Pine
ville that as soon as it begins to make its own iron
it can build its houses without calling on the outside
world for an ounce of material.

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 291

III
Middlesborough ! For a good many years in
England and throughout the world the name has
stood associated with wealth and commercial great
ness — the idea of a powerful city near the mouth of
the Tees, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, which
has become the principal seat of the English iron
trade. It is therefore curious to remember that near
the beginning of the century there stood on the site
of this powerful city four farm-houses and a ruined
shrine of St. Hilda ; that it took thirty years to
bring the population up to the number of one hun
dred and fifty-four souls ; that the discovery of iron
stone, as it seems to be called on that side, gave it a
boom, as it is called on this ; so that ten years ago
it had some sixty thousand people, its hundred and
thirty blast-furnaces, besides other industries, and an
annual output in pig-iron of nearly two million tons.
But there is now an English Middlesborough in
America, which is already giving to the name an
other significance in the stock market of London
and among the financial journals of the realm ; and
if the idea of its founders is ever realized, if its pres
ent rate of development goes on, it will in time rep
resent as much wealth in gold and iron as the older
city.

292 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
In the mere idea of the American or Kentucky
Middlesborough — for while it seems to be meant for
America, it is to be found in Kentucky — there is
something to arrest attention on the score of origi
nality. That the attention of wealthy commoners,
bankers, scientists, and iron-masters of Great Britain
— some of them men long engaged in copper, tin,
and gold mines in the remotest quarters of the
globe — that the attention of such men should be
focussed on a certain spot in the backwoods of Ken
tucky ; that they should repeatedly send over ex
perts to report on the combination of mineral and
timber wealth ; that on the basis of such reports
they should form themselves into a company called
" The American Association, Limited," and purchase
60,000 acres of land lying on each side of the Cum
berland Mountain and around the meeting-point of
the States of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky;
that an allied association, called " The Middlesbor
ough Town Company," should place here the site of
a city, with the idea of making it the principal seat
of the iron and steel manufacture of the United
States ; that they should go to work to create this
city outright by pouring in capital for every need
ed purpose ; that they should remove gigantic ob
stacles in order to connect it with the- national
highways of commerce ; that they should thus ex
pend some twenty million dollars, and let it be
known that all millions further wanted were fdrth-

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 293
coming — in the idea of this there is enough to make
one pause.
As one cannot ponder the idea of the enterprise
without being impressed with its largeness, so one
cannot visit the place without being struck by the
energy with which the plan is being wrought at.
" It is not sufficient to know that this property pos
sesses coal and iron of good quality and in consid
erable quantities, and that the deposits are situated
close together, but that they exist in such circum
stances as will give us considerable advantages over
any competitors that either now exist or whose ex
istence can in any way be foreseen in the near
future." Such were the instructions of these Eng-
lish capitalists to their agent in America. It was
characteristic of their race and of that method of
business by which they have become the masters of
commerce the world over. In it is the germ of
their idea — to establish a city for the manufacture
of iron and steel which, by its wealth of resources,
advantages of situation, and complete development,
should place competition at a disadvantage, and thus
make it impossible.
It yet remains to be seen whether this can be
done. Perhaps even the hope of it came from an
inadequate knowledge of how vast a region they
had entered, and how incalculable its wealth. Per
haps it was too much to expect that any one city,
however situated, however connected, however de-

294 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
veloped. should be able to absorb or even to con
trol the development of that region and the distri
bution of its resources to all points of the land. It
suggests the idea of a single woodpecker's hoping
to carry off the cherries from a tree which a noble
company of cats and jays and other birds were
watching; or of a family of squirrels who should
take up their abode in a certain hole with the idea
of eating all the walnuts in a forest. But however
this may turn out, these Englishmen, having once
set before themselves their aim, have never swerved
from trying to attain it; and they are at work devel
oping their city with the hope that it will bring as
great a change in the steel market of the United
States as a few years ago was made in the iron mar
ket by the manufacture of Southern iron.
If you take up in detail the working out of their
plan of development, it is the same — no stint, no
drawing back or swerving aside, no abatement of
the greatest intentions. They must have a site for
their city — they choose for this site what with en
tire truthfulness may be called one of the most
strategic mountain passes in American history.
They must have a name — they choose that of the
principal seat of the English iron trade. They
must have a plant for the manufacture of steel by
the basic process — they promise it shall be the
largest in the United States. They want a tan
nery — it shall be the biggest in the world. A creek

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 295
has to be straightened to improve drainage — they
spend on it a hundred thousand dollars. They will
have their mineral resources known — they order a
car to be built, stock it with an exposition of their
minerals, place it in charge of technical experts, and
set it going over the country. They take a notion
to establish a casino, sanitarium, and hotel — it must
cost over seven hundred thousand dollars. The
mountain is in their way — that mighty wall of the
Cumberland Mountain which has been in the way
of the whole United States for over a hundred
years — they remove this mountain ; that is, they dig
through it a great union tunnel, 3750 feet long, be
ginning in Kentucky, running under a corner of
Virginia, and coming out in Tennessee. Had they
done nothing but this, they would have done enough
to entitle them to the gratitude of the nation, for it
is an event of national importance. It brings the
South and the Atlantic seaboard in connection witlv,
the Ohio Valley and the Lakes; it does more to
make the North and the South one than any other
single thing that has happened, since the close- of
the Civil War.
On the same trip that took me to Pineville five
summers ago, I rode from that place southward tow
ards the wall of Cumberland Mountain. I wished
to climb this wall at that vast depression in it
known as Cumberland Gap. It was a tranquil
afternoon as I took my course over the ancient

296 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
Wilderness Road through the valley of the Yellow
Creek. Many a time since, the memory of that
ride has come back to me — the forests of magnifi
cent timbers, open spaces of cleared land showing
the amphitheatre of hills in the purple distance, the
winding of a shadowy green-banked stream, the
tranquil loneliness, the purity of primeval solitude.
The flitting of a bird between one and the azure
sky overhead was company, a wild flower bending
over the water's edge was friendship. Nothing broke
rudely in upon the spirit of the scene but here and
there a way-side log-cabin, with its hopeless squalor,
hopeless human inmates. If imagination sought re
lief from loneliness, it found it only in conjuring from
the dust of the road that innumerable caravan of life
from barbarism to civilization, from the savage to the
soldier, that has passed hither and thither, leaving the
wealth of nature unravished, its solitude unbroken.
In the hush of the evening and amid the silence
of eternity, I drew the rein of my tired horse on the
site of the present town. Before me in the mere dis
tance, and outlined against the glory of the sky, there
towered at last the mighty mountain wall, showing
the vast depression of the gap — the portal to the
greatness of the commonwealth. Stretching away
in every direction was a wide plain, broken here and
there by wooded knolls, and uniting itself with grace
ful curves to the gentle slopes of the surrounding
mountains. The ineffable beauty, the vast repose,

FORD ON THE CUMBERLAND.

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 299
the overawing majesty of the historic portal, the
memories, the shadows — they are never to be for
gotten. A few weeks ago I reached the same spot as the
sun was rising, having come thither from Pineville
by rail. As I stepped from the train I saw that the
shadowy valley of my remembrance had been incred
ibly transformed. Some idea of the plan of the new
town may be understood from the fact that Cumber
land Avenue and Peterborough Avenue, intersecting
each other near the central point of it, are, when
completed, to be severally three and a half or four
and a half miles long. There are twenty avenues
and thirty streets in all, ranging from a hundred feet
to sixty feet wide. So long and broad and level are
the thoroughfares that the plan, as projected, sug
gests comparison with Louisville. The valley site
itself contains some six thousand available acres.
It should be understood that the company owns
property on the Tennessee side of the gap, and that
at the foot of the valley, where a magnificent spring
gushes out, with various other mineral springs near
by — chalybeate and sulphur — it is proposed to es
tablish a hotel, sanitarium, and casino which shall
equal in sumptuousness the most noted European
spas. As I stood one day in this valley, which has al
ready begun to put on the air of civilization, with its
hotel and railway station and mills and pretty home-

300 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
steads, I saw a sight which seemed to me a complete
epitome of the past and present tendencies there at
work — a summing up of the past and a prophecy of
the future. Creeping slowly past the station — so
slowly that one knows not what to compare it to un
less it be the minute-hand on the dial of a clock —
creeping slowly along the Wilderness Road towards
the ascent of Cumberland Gap, there came a mount
ain wagon, faded and old, with its dirty ragged can
vas hanging motionless, and drawn by a yoke of
mountain oxen which seemed to be moving in their
sleep. On the seat in front, with a faded shovel-hat
capping his mass of coarse tangled hair, and wearing
but two other garments — a faded shirt and faded
breeches — sat a faded, pinched, and meagre mount
ain boy. The rope with which he drove his yoke
had dropped between his clasped knees. He had
forgotten it ; there was no need to remember it.
His starved white face was kindled into an expres
sion of passionate hunger and excitement. In one
dirty claw-like hand he grasped a small paper bag,
into the open mouth of which he had thrust the
other hand, as a miser might thrust his into a bag
of gold. He had just bought, with a few cents, some
sweetmeat of civilization which he was about for the
first time to taste. I sat and watched him move
away and begin the ascent to the pass. Slowly,
slowly, winding now this way and now that across
the face of the mountain, now hidden, now in sight,

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 301
they went — sleeping oxen, crawling wagon, starved
mountain child. At length, as they were about dis
appearing through the gap, they passed behind a
column of the white steam from a saw-mill that was
puffing a short distance in front of me; and, hidden
in that steam, they disappeared. It was the last of
the mountaineers passing away before the breath of
civilization.

IV
Suppose now that you stand on the south side of
the great wall of the Cumberland Mountain at Cum
berland Gap. You have come through the splendid
tunnel beneath, or you have crawled over the summit
in the ancient way; but you stand at the base on
the Tennessee side in the celebrated Powell's River
Valley. Turn to the left and follow up this valley, keeping
the mountain on your left. You are not the first to
take this course: the line of human ants used to
creep down it in order to climb over the wall at the
gap. Mark how inaccessible this wall is at every
other point. Mark, also, that as you go two little
black parallel iron threads follow you — a railroad,
one of the greatest systems of the South. All along
the mountain slope overhanging the railroad, iron
ore; beyoqd the mountain crest, timbers and coals,

302 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
Observe, likewise, the features of the land: water
abundant, clear, and cold; fields heavy with corn
and oats ; an ever-changing panorama of beautiful
pictures. The farther you go the more rich and
prosperous the land, the kinder the soil to grains
and gardens and orchards ; bearing its burden of
timbers — walnut, chestnut, oak, and mighty beeches;
lifting to the eye in the near distance cultivated hill
sides and fat meadows ; stretching away into green
and shadowy valley glades ; tuneful with swift, crys
tal streams — a land of lovely views.
Remember well this valley, lying along the base
of the mountain wall. It has long been known as
the granary of south-west Virginia and east Tennes
see ; but in time, in the development of civilization
throughout the Appalachian region, it is expected to
become the seat of a dense pastoral population, sup
plying the dense industrial population of new mining
and manufacturing towns with milk, butter, eggs,
and fruit and vegetables. But for the contiguity of
such agricultural districts to the centres of ores and
coals, it would perhaps be impossible to establish in
these remote spots the cities necessary to develop
and transport their wealth.
Follow this valley up for a distance of sixty miles
from Cumberland Gap and there pause, for you come
to the head of the valley, and you have reached an
other pass in the mountain wall. You have passed
out of Tennessee into Virginia, a short distance from

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 303
the Kentucky border, and the mountain wall is no
longer called the Cumberland : twenty miles south
west of where you now are that mountain divided,
sending forth this southern prong, called Stone
Mountain, and sending the rest of itself between the
State line of Kentucky and Virginia, under the name
of the Big Black Mountain. Understand, also, the
general bearings of the spot at which you have ar
rived. It is in that same Alleghany system of mount
ains — the richest metalliferous region in the world —
the northern section of which long ago made Pitts-
burgh ; the southern section of which has since cre
ated Birmingham ; and the middle section of which,
where you now are, is claimed by expert testimony,
covering a long period of years and coming from
different and wholly uninterested authorities, to be
the richest of the three.
This mountain pass not being in Kentucky, it
might be asked why in a series of articles on Ken
tucky it should deserve a place. The answer is
plain : not because a Kentuckian selected it as the
site of a hoped for city, or because Kentuckians
have largely developed it, or because Kentuckians
largely own it, and have stamped upon it a certain
excellent social tone ; but for the reason that if the
idea of its development is carried out, it will gather
towards itself a vast net-work of railways from east
ern Kentucky, the Atlantic seaboard, the South, and
the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, which will pro-

304 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
foundly affect the inner life of Kentucky, and change
its relations to different parts of the Union.
Big Stone Gap! It does not sound very big.
What is it ? At a certain point of this continuation
of Cumberland Mountain, called Stone Mountain,
the main fork of Powell's River has in the course of
ages worn itself a way down to a practical railroad
pass at water-level, thus opening connection between
the coking coal on the north and the iron ores on
the south of the mountain. No pass that I have
ever seen — except those made by the Doe River in
the Cranberry region of North Carolina — has its
wild, enrapturing loveliness ; towering above on each
side are the mountain walls, ancient and gray and
rudely disordered ; at every coign of vantage in
these, grasping their precipitous buttresses as the
claw of a great eagle might grasp the uttermost
brow of a cliff, enormous trees above trees, and amid
the trees a green lace-work of undergrowth. Below,
in a narrow, winding channel piled high with bowl
ders, with jutting rocks and sluice-like fissures — be
low and against these the river hurls itself, foaming,
roaring, whirling, a long cascade of white or lucent
water. This is Big Stone Gap, and the valley into
which the river pours its full strong current is the
site of the town. A lofty valley it is, having an ele
vation of 1600 feet above the sea, with mountains
girdling it that rise to the height of 4000 — a valley
the surface of which gently rolls and slopes towards

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 305
these encircling bases with constant relief to the
eye, and spacious enough, with those opening into
it, to hold a city of the population of New York.
This mountain pass, lying in the heart of this re
served wilderness of timbers, coals, and ores, has al
ways had its slender thread of local history. It was
from a time immemorial a buffalo and Indian trail,
leading to the head-waters of the Cumberland and
Kentucky rivers; during the Civil War it played its
part in certain local military exploits and personal
adventures of a quixotian flavor; and of old the rich
farmers of Lee County used to drive their cattle
through it to fatten on the pea-vine and blue-grass
growing thick on the neighboring mountain tops.
But in the last twenty-five years — that quarter of
the century which has developed in the United
States an ever-growing need of iron and steel, of
hard -woods, and of all varieties of coal; a period
which has seen one after another of the reserve tim
ber regions of the country thinned and exhausted —
during the past twenty-five years attention has been
turned more and more towards the forests and the
coal-fields in the region occupied by the south Alle
ghany Mountain system.
It was not enough to know that at Big Stone Gap
there is a water-gap admitting the passage of a rail
way on each side at water-level, and connecting con
tiguous workable coals with ores; not enough re
peatedly to test the abundance, variety, and purity

306 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
of both of these ; not enough to know that a short
distance off a single vertical section of coal-measure
rocks has a thickness above drainage level of 2500
feet, the thickest in the entire Appalachian coal
field from Pennsylvania to Alabama; not enough
that from this point, by available railroad to the
Bessemer steel ores in the Cranberry district of
North Carolina, it is the shortest distance in the
known world separating such coke and such ores ;
not enough that there are here superabundant lime
stone and water, the south fork of Powell's River
winding about the valley, a full, bold current, and
a few miles from the town the head -waters of this
same river having a fall of 700 feet ; not enough
that near by is a rich agricultural region to supply
needed markets, and that the valley itself has a nat
ural drainage, delightful climate, and ideal beauty —
all this was not enough. It had to be known that
the great water-gap through the mountain at this
point, by virtue of its position and by virtue of its
relation to other passes and valleys leading to it,
necessitated, sooner or later, a concentration here of
railroad lines for the gathering, the development,
and the distribution of its resources.
From every imaginable point of view a place like
this is subject to unsparing test before it is finally
fixed upon as a town site and enters upon a process
of development. Nothing would better illustrate the
tremendous power with which the new South, hand

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 307
in hand with a new North, works with brains and
capital and science. A few years ago this place was
seventy miles from the nearest railroad. That road
has since been built to it from the south ; a second
is approaching it from a distance of a hundred and
twenty miles on the west ; a third from the east ; and
when the last two come together this point will be
on a great east and west trunk line, connecting the
Ohio and Mississippi valleys with the Atlantic sea
board. Moreover, the Legislature of Kentucky has
just passed an act incorporating the Inter- State
Tunnel Railroad Company, and empowering it to
build an inter-State double-track highway from the
head-waters of the Cumberland and Kentucky rivers
to Big Stone Gap, tunnelling both the Black and
Cumberland Mountains, and affording a passway
north and south for the several railways of eastern
Kentucky already heading towards this point. The
plan embraces two double -track toll tunnels, with
double -track approaches between and on each side
of the tunnel, to be owned and controlled by a stock
company which shall allow all railroads to pass on
the payment of toll. If this enterprise, involving the
cost of over two million dollars, is carried out, the
railroad problem at Big Stone Gap, and with it the
problem of developing the mineral wealth of south
west Virginia and south-east Kentucky, would seem
to be practically solved.
That so many railroads should be approaching

308 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
this point from so many different directions seems
to lift it at once to a position of extraordinary im
portance. But it is only a few months since the nearest one
reached there ; and, since little could be done tow
ards development otherwise, at Big Stone Gap one
sees the process of town-making at an earlier stage
than at Middlesborough. Still, there are under con
struction water-works, from the pure mountain river,
at an elevation of 400 feet, six miles from town, that
will supply daily 2,500,000 gallons of water; two
iron -furnaces of a hundred tons daily capacity; an
electric-light plant, starting with fifty street arc lights,
and 750 incandescent burners for residences, and
a colossal hotel of 300 rooms. These may be taken
as evidences of the vast scale on which develop
ment is to be carried forward, to say nothing of a
steam street railway, belt line, lumber and brick and
finishing plants, union depot, and a coke plant mod
elled after that at Connellsville. And on the whole
it may be said that already over a million dollars'
worth of real estate has been sold, and that eight
land, coal, and iron development companies have
centred here the development of properties aggre
gating millions in value.
It is a peculiarity of these industrial towns thus
being founded in one of the most beautiful mount
ain regions of the land that they shall not merely
be industrial towns. They aim at becoming cities

KENTUCKY RIVER FROM HIGH BRIDGE.

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 311
or homes for the best of people ; fresh centres to
which shall be brought the newest elements of civ
ilization from the North and South; retreats for
jaded pleasure-seekers ; asylums for invalids. And
therefore they are laid out for amenities and beauty
as well as industry — with an eye to using the ex
quisite mountain flora and park-like forests, the nat
ural boulevards along their watercourses, and the
natural roadways to vistas of enchanting mountain
scenery. What is to be done at Middlesborough will
not be forgotten. At Big Stone Gap, in furtherance
of this idea, there has been formed a Mountain
Park Association, which has bought some three
thousand acres of summit land a few miles from
the town, with the idea of making it a game pre
serve and shooting park, adorned with a rambling
club-house in the Swiss style of architecture. In
this preserve is High Knob, perhaps the highest
mountain in the Alleghany range, being over four
thousand feet above sea-level, the broad summit of
which is carpeted with blue-grass and' white clover
in the midst of magnificent forest growth.

312 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND

Suppose once more that you stand outside the
Cumberland or Stone Mountain at the gap. Now
turn and follow down the beautiful Powell's Valley,
retracing your course to Cumberland Gap. Pass
this, continuing down the same valley, and keeping
on your right the same parallel mountain wall.
Mark once more how inaccessible it is at every
point Mark once more the rich land and prosper
ous tillage. Having gone about thirty miles beyond
Cumberland Gap, pause again. You have come to
another pass — another remarkable gateway. You
have travelled out of Kentucky into Tennessee, and
the Cumberland Mountain has changed its name
and become Walden's Mountain, distant some fif
teen miles from the Kentucky State line.
It is necessary once more to define topographi
cal bearings. Running north-east and south-west is
this Cumberland Mountain, having an elevation of
from twenty -five hundred to three thousand feet.
Almost parallel with it, from ten to twenty miles
away, and having an elevation of about two thou
sand feet, lies Pine Mountain, in Kentucky. In
the outer or Cumberland Mountain it has now been
seen that there are three remarkable gaps : Big

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 3l3
Stone Gap on the east, where Powell's River cuts
through Stone Mountain ; Cumberland Gap inter
mediate, which is not a water-gap, but a depression
in the mountain ; and Big Creek Gap in the west,
where Big Creek cuts through Walden's Mountain
— the last being about forty miles distant from the
second, about ninety from the first. Now observe
that in Pine Mountain there are three water-gaps
having a striking relation to the gaps in the Cum
berland — that is, behind Cumberland Gap is the
pass at Pineville; behind Big Stone Gap and be
yond it at the end of the mountain are the Breaks
of Sandy; and behind Big Creek Gap are the Nar
rows, a natural water -gap connecting Tennessee
with Kentucky.
But it has been seen that the English have had
to tunnel Cumberland Mountain at Middlesborough
in order to open the valley between Pine and Cum
berland mountains to railroad connections with the
south. It has also been seen that at Big Stone
Gap it has been found necessary to plan for a vast
tunnel under Big Black Mountain, and also under
Pine Mountain, in order to establish north and
south connections for railroads, and control the de
velopment of south-east Kentucky and south-west
Virginia. But now mark the advantage of the sit
uation at Big Creek Gap : a water-gap at railroad
level giving entrance from the south, and seventeen
miles distant a corresponding water-gap at railroad

314 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
level giving exit from the south and entrance from
the north. There is thus afforded a double natural
gateway at this point, and at this point alone — an
inestimable advantage. Here, then, is discovered a
third distinct centre in Cumberland Mountain where
the new industrial civilization of the South is ex
pected to work. All the general conditions else
where stated are here found present — timbers,
coals, and ores, limestone, granite, water, scenery,
climate, flora; the beauty is the same, the wealth
not less.
With a view to development, a company has
bought up and owns in fee 20,000 acres of coal
lands and some seven thousand of iron ore in the
valley and along the foot-hills on the southern
slope of the mountain. They have selected and
platted as a town site over sixteen hundred acres of
beautiful valley land, lying on both sides of Big
Creek where it cuts through the mountain, 1200
feet above the sea-level. But here again one comes
upon the process of town-making at a still earlier
stage of development. That is, the town exists
only on paper, and improvement has not yet begun.
Taken now, it is in the stage that Middlesborough,
or Big Stone Gap, was once in. So that it should
not be thought any the less real because it is rudi
mentary or embryonic. A glance at the wealth
tributary to this point will soon dispel doubt that
here in the future, as at the other strategic mount-

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 315
ain passes of the Cumberland, is to be established
an important town.
Only consider that the entire 20,000 acres owned
by the Big Creek Gap Company are underlain by
coal, and that the high mountains between the Pine
and Cumberland contain vertical sections of greater
thickness of coal-measure rocks than are to be found
anywhere else in the vast Appalachian field ; that
Walnut Mountain, on the land of the company — the
western continuation of the Black Mountain and
the Log Mountain of Kentucky — is 3300 feet above
sea, and has 2000 feet of coal-measures above
drainage ; and that already there has been devel
oped the existence of six coals of workable thick
ness above drainage level, five of them underlying
the entire 20,000 acres, except where small portions
have been cut away by the streams.
The lowest coal above drainage — the Sharpe —
presents an outcrop about twenty feet above the
bed of the stream, and underlies the entire pur
chase. It has long been celebrated for domestic
use in the locality. An entry driven in about sixty
feet shows a twelve-inch cannel-coal with a five-inch
soft shale, burning with a brilliant flame, and much
used in Powell's Valley; also a bituminous coal of
forty-three-inch thickness, having a firm roof, cheap
ly minable, and yielding a coke of over 93 per cent.
pure carbon.
The next coal above is a cannel-coal having an

316 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
outcrop on the Middle Fork of Big Creek of thirty-
six inches, and on the north slope of the mountains,
six miles off, of thirty-eight inches, showing a per
sistent bed throughout.
Above this is the Douglass coal, an entry of forty
feet into which shows a thickness of fifty inches,
with a good roof, and on the northern slope of the
mountains, at Cumberland River, a thickness of sixty
inches. This is a gas coal of great excellence, yield
ing also a coke, good, but high in sulphur. Above
the Douglass is an unexplored section of great
thickness, showing coal stains and coals exposed,
but undeveloped.
The uppermost coal discovered, and the highest
opened in Tennessee — the Walnut Mountain coal
— is a coking variety of superior quality, fifty- eight
inches thick, and though lying near the top of the
mountain, protected by a sandstone roof. It is min
able at a low cost, admirable for gas, and is here
found underlying some two thousand acres.
As to the wealth of iron ores, it has been said
that the company owns about seven thousand acres
in the valley and along the southern slopes of Cum
berland Mountain. There is a continuous outcrop
of the soft red fossiliferous, or Clinton, iron ore, ten
miles long, nowhere at various outcrops less than
sixty inches thick, of exceptional richness and pu
rity, well located for cheap mining, and adjacent to
the coal beds. Indeed, where it crosses Big Creek

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 317
at the gap, it is only a mile from the coking coal.
Lying from one to two hundred feet above the
drainage level of the valley, where a railroad is to
be constructed, and parallel to this road at a dis
tance of a few hundred feet, this ore can be put on
cars and delivered to the furnaces of Big Creek
Gap at an estimated cost of a dollar a ton. Of red
ore two beds are known to be present.
Parallel and near to the red fossiliferous, there
has been developed along the base of Cumberland
Mountain a superior brown ore, the Limonite — the
same as that used in the Low Moor, Longdale, and
other furnaces of the Clifton Forge district. This —
the Oriskany — has been traced to within ten miles
of the company's lands, and there is every reason to
believe that it will be developed on them. At the
beginning of this article it was stated that iron of
superior quality was formerly made at Big Creek
Gap, and found a ready market throughout central
Kentucky. Parallel with the ore and easily quarriable is the
subcarboniferous limestone, one thick stratum of
which contains 98 per cent, of carbonate of lime ;
so that, with liberal allowance for the cost of crude
material, interest, wear and tear, it is estimated that
iron can here be made at as low a cost as anywhere
in the United States, and that furnaces will have
an advantage in freight in reaching the markets of
the Ohio Valley and the farther South. Moreover,

318 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
the various timbers of this region attain a perfection
seldom equalled, and by a little clearing out of the
stream, logs can be floated at flood tides to the Clinch
and Tennessee rivers. To-day mills are shipping
these timbers from Boston to the Rocky Mountains.
Situated in one of the most beautiful of valleys,
1 200 feet above sea-level, surrounded by park-like
forests and fertile valley lands, having an abun
dance of pure water and perfect drainage, with
iron ore only a mile from coke, and a double water-
gap giving easy passage for railroads, Big Creek
Gap develops peculiar strength and possibilities of
importance, when its relation is shown to those cities
which will be its natural markets, and to the systems
of railroads of which it will be the inevitable outlet.
Within twenty miles of it lie three of the greatest
railroad systems of the South. It is but thirty-eight
miles from Knoxville, and eight miles of low-grade
road, through a fertile blue-grass valley, peopled by
intelligent, prosperous farmers, will put it in connec
tion with magnetic and specular ores for the making
of steel, or with the mountain of Bessemer ore at
Cranberry. Its coke is about three hundred miles
nearer to the Sheffield and Decatur furnaces than
the Pocahontas coke which is now being shipped to
them. It is nearer St. Louis and Chicago than their
present sources of supply. It is the nearest point to
the great coaling station for steamships now building
at Brunswick. And it is one of the nearest bases

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 319
of supply for Pensacola, which in turn is the nearest
port of supply for Central and South America.
No element of wealth or advantage of position
seems lacking to make this place one of the control
ling points of that vast commercial movement which
is binding the North and the South together, and
changing the relation of Kentucky to both, by mak
ing it the great highway of railway connection, the
fresh centre of manufacture and distribution, and the
lasting fountain-head of mineral supply.

VI
Attention is thus briefly directed to that line of
towns which are springing up, or will in time spring
up, in the mountain passes of the Cumberland, and
are making the backwoods of Kentucky the fore-front
of a new civilization. Through these three passes in
the outer wall of Cumberland Mountain, and through
that pass at Pineville in the inner wall behind Cum
berland Gap — through these four it is believed that
there must stream the railroads carrying to the
South its timbers and coals ; to the North its tim
bers, coal, and iron; and carrying to both from these
towns, as independent centres of manufacture, all
those products the crude materials of which exist in
economic combinations on the spot.

320 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
It is idle to say that all these places cannot be
come important. The competition will be keen, and
the fittest will survive ; but all these are fit to sur
vive, each having advantages of its own. Big Stone
Gap lies so much nearer the East and the Atlantic
seaboard ; Big Creek Gap so much nearer the West
and the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and the Lakes;
Cumberland Gap and Pineville so much nearer an
intermediate region.
But as the writer has stated, it is the human,
not the industrial, problem to be solved by this de
velopment that possessed for him the main interest.
One seems to see in the perforation and breaking up
of Cumberland Mountain an event as decisive of the
destiny of Kentucky as though the vast wall had
fallen, destroying the isolation of the State, bringing
into it the new, and letting the old be scattered until
it is lost. But while there is no space here to deal
with those changes that are rapidly passing over
Kentucky life and obliterating old manners and cus
toms, old types of character and ideals of life, old
virtues and graces as well as old vices and horrors
— there is a special topic too closely connected with
the foregoing facts not to be considered: the effect of
this development upon the Kentucky mountaineers.
The buying up of the mountain lands has unset
tled a large part of these people. Already there has
been formed among them a class of tenants paying
rent and living in their old homes. But in the main

MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 321
there are three movements among them. Some de
sert the mountains altogether, and descend to the
Blue-grass Region with a passion for farming. On
county-court days in blue-grass towns it has been
possible of late to notice this peculiar type mingling
in the market-places with the traditional type of blue-
grass farmer. There is thus going on, especially
along the border counties, a quiet interfusion of the
two human elements of the Kentucky highlander
and the Kentucky lowlander, so long distinct in
blood, physique, history, and ideas of life. To less
extent, the mountaineers go farther west, beginning
life again beyond the Mississippi.
A second general tendency among them is to be
absorbed by the civilization that is springing up in
the mountains. They flock to these towns, keep
store, are shrewd and active speculators in real es
tate, and successful developers of small capital. The
first business house put up in the new Pineville was
built by a mountaineer.
But the third, and, as far as can be learned, the
most general movement among them is to retire at
the approach of civilization to remoter regions of the
mountains, where they may live without criticism or
observation their hereditary, squalid, unambitious,
stationary life. But to these retreats they must in
time be followed, therefrom dislodged, and again set
going. Thus a whole race of people are being scat
tered, absorbed, civilized. You may go far before

322 MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND
you will find a fact so full of consequences to the
future of the State.
Within a few years the commonwealth of Ken
tucky will be a hundred years old. All in all, it
would seem that with the close of its first century
the old Kentucky passes away; and that the second
century will bring in a new Kentucky — new in many
ways, but new most of all on account of the civiliza
tion of the Cumberland.

THE END

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