Kentucky's Historic Farms

TURNER PUBLISHING COMPANY

P.O. BOX 3101

PADUCAH, KY 42002-3101

(502) 443-0121

Kentucky’s Historic Farms

Turner Publishing Company

Copyright © 1994. Turner Publishing Company.

All Rights Reserved.

This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of the Publisher.

Turner Publishing Compagny’Staff

Douglas Sikes. Publishing Consultant

Trevor W. Grantham. Project Coordinator

The Publisher gratefully acknowledges financial support for

This publication from the Kentucky Heritage Council.

Contributing Authors

Thomas Clark, Ph. D.

Durwood W. Beatty, Ph. D.

C. Ardell Jarratt

Christine Amos

Karen E. Hudson

Kentucky’s Historic Farms was compiled using available information. The Publisher is not responsible for errors, omissions or inaccuracies contained herein.

Library of Congress

Catalog Card Number: 93-61857

9781618584748

Printed in the United States of America

Limited Collector’s Edition. Copies may be purchased

directly from Turner Publishing Company of Paducah, KY.

The Publisher is grateful to the following contributors for their photographs which were included in this publication: The Kentucky Historical Society

The University of Kentucky Agricultural Communications

The University of Kentucky Library and Archives

Cover photo: Horses at sunrise photographed in Bourbon

Co., where many Kentucky champions have been sired, foaled and raised. (© Dell Hancock Photography, Claiborne

Farm, Paris, KY.)

Endsheet: Map of Kentucky, with a portion of Tennessee, showing the railroads, rivers, mountains, etc. (From Harper’s Weekly, Feb. 8, 1862)

Photo, this page: Courtesy of the University of Kentucky

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Letter from the Governor

Letter from the Commissioner

Kentucky Heritage Council

Publisher’s Message

Preface

200 YEARS OF KENTUCKY AGRICULTURE

THE JACKSON PURCHASE REGION

THE PENNYROYAL REGION

THE BLUEGRASS REGION

THE APPALACHIAN REGION

APPENDIX - THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

THE HISTORIC FARMS PROGRAM

CREDITS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

GENERAL INDEX - KENTUCKY’S HISTORIC FARMS

Letter from the Governor

Letter from the Commissioner

Harvesting Bell Peppers. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications)

Popcorn on the Burns farm, Daviess County, Kentucky. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications)

Kentucky Heritage Council

Publisher’s Message

Victory Stride, thoroughbred horse at UK’s Coldstream Farm. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications)

Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications

Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications

Preface

One of Kentucky’s strengths is its history. Over the years, another strength has been the people’s attachment to the land and to their home places. This work combines both elements as it provides the historical context to a long-established agrarian tradition. Within these pages, various authors address the diverse parts that comprise two centuries of Kentucky agriculture. Historical milestones across the years, state agricultural similarities and differences, farm buildings, the effects of climate, geography, finances, transportation, technology, and so much more—all that is here. Subjects covered vary from hog killing to hemp growing, from silos to sleds, from cribs to crafts, from labor to log buildings, from Night Riders to the New Deal. Each region of the state is examined in depth and unique facts about each area are presented. In sum, this work tells us an important story about a crucial aspect of the Commonwealth.

A special feature of Kentucky Historic Farms is, obviously, the farms being featured. In a joint venture of the Kentucky Department of Agriculture and the Kentucky Heritage Council, the Historic Farms Program was initiated to identify those farms with special historical significance. Bicentennial farms have been owned by the same family for two centuries, sesquicentennial farms for 150 years, and centennial farms for a hundred years. Heritage Farms contain farmhouses or outbuildings over a century old. Simply identifying such historic places would have been an important achievement; presenting them (often with photographs) allows all Kentuckians to become a part of that process, and to share in the joy of discovery.

Most of all, this book celebrates the people who live on the land. From the earliest times, agricultural pursuits have demanded much hard work, concerted effort, and not a little luck. The farmer on the frontier cleared the land, worked it with a crude plow, and then planted crops that would grow and start an almost unending cycle. For the present day counterpart of that person, the details may differ (as those working with a tractor instead of a horse know), but much of the pattern remains part of that continuous harmony. People still try to tame the land, to recap its benefits, to feed their families, or a nation. As before, they cope with changing markets and fickle nature. Most of all, those of agrarian ways continue to have that strong sense of place that is born out of an intimate connection to the land. They feel the history all around them, every day, as they walk the soil of Kentucky.

The historic homes and outbuildings all reinforce the knowledge that the past is constantly a part of their present. Those historic farms, coupled with the essays in this book, stress over and over that the state’s heritage is rich and complex. The Commonwealth’s culture and quality of life cannot be separated from that past. Indeed, citizens live fuller and better lives as a result of recognizing that very fact.

When people stand near a historic farm home, and as they look out across land that has been worked for decade after decade, they know a heritage that is real and alive. The smell of the earth, the scents in the breeze, combine with the historical context to produce the sense of place about which farmer-essayist Wendell Berry wrote. Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, he noted, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. By preserving that knowledge, so it can be passed on to future generations, this work ably honors those who came before. It makes certain that this part of history, this sense of place, this Kentucky, will long endure.

Dr. James C. Klotter,

Director and State Historian

Kentucky "Historical Society

Henry County, KY farmer Nick Coleman still uses draft horses for all of his farm work. He has been working with horses since he was six years old and has no intention of changing. (Photo by Charles Bertram, Lexington Herald-Leader.)

Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications

Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications

Popcorn on the Burns farm, Daviess County, Kentucky. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications)

200 YEARS OF KENTUCKY AGRICULTURE

By Thomas Clark, Ph.D.

Land was the magnet which drew an almost endless stream of humanity westward in the latter quarter of the eighteenth century. In a veritable parade of human actors there came adventurers, long hunters, land speculators, and land hungry settlers. Surely Gabriel Arthur, captive of the Shawnee Indians and the first white man of note to have scaled Cumberland Gap, observed somewhere along the Great Warrior’s Path the potential of the wilderness. Possibly no historian now can completely unravel Indian rumors, legends of long hunters, and the speculator myths about the sprawling trans-montagne littoral. What can be established as objective fact, however, is that the region inside the Pine Mountain fold held the promise of becoming an American agricultural eden.

An early settler in the West. (Biographical sketches by John McDonald, Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society.)

A slave cabin behind the Richardson house, circa 1890, Mason County. Photo provided to An Ohio River Portrait Collection by James L. Pyles, Maysville, KY. (Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

In no decade of Kentucky history has land ceased to have a bearing on the course of human life. This is true in the marked diversity of the sections and geographical conditions. From the planting of the first settlement, the diversity of topography and soil fertility has shaped pockets of human personality and reactions to the environment. In writing about Kentucky agriculture almost every statement has to be based upon this assumption. Through two and a quarter centuries the rural-agrarian experience of Kentucky has been both diverse and localized. By the same token the onslaught of change has ever revised and modified the conditions of rural life.

In treating Kentucky’s agricultural and agrarian history, just as with every other aspect of the Commonwealth’s past, there needs to be an awareness of the particular forces shaping it. The collective agricultural system has been gathered under a common shield of statutory laws, and presented as general statistical forms, but neither recognizes the sharp diversities of Kentucky farming. The experiences of a farmer in one section often have had only a loose similarity to those in other sections.

There runs through some of Kentucky’s agricultural history a scarlet thread of lawlessness and resistance, ever excused by assertions of isolation and poverty. The excise tax levied in 1791 on whiskey upset both western Pennsylvania and Kentucky farmer-distillers. Kentuckians argued that whiskey was the most satisfactory exportable commodity of their land, and the tax threatened them with ruin. There stemmed from this controversy, and western isolation, the illicit activity which was to become an intimate part of Kentucky’s popular image. There has prevailed a continuity in the plea of isolation and poverty as a justification for breaking the law. During the closing decade of the twentieth century the sub rosa production of marijuana has driven the hill billy moonshiner into oblivion, capturing from him front page recognition of the Kentucky newspaper press. Maybe this shadowy, but profitable, phase of Kentucky agricultural history is in fact an eloquent documentation of the wide diversity of agricultural pursuits in Kentucky.

Once the high drama of long hunting, tracing out the buffalo and Indian trails, hacking out vague metes and bounds land claims, testing both northern and southern Indian resistance had drawn to a conclusion, the central theme of Kentucky history became that of pastorally-oriented Anglo-American civilization in the western country. The act of settlement necessitated the formalization of land claiming, surveying, and of deed registry. From the outset all of these procedures were carelessly informal, and chaotic. In 1792 the new Commonwealth was saddled by the vacuities of the old world plan of metes and bounds procedures of physically locating and marking land boundaries. The voluminous files of Kentucky court records abound with land disputes. No historian can even venture to guess the costs in emotions, angers, and even violence in the area of settling farm boundaries. It is doubtful that any appreciable number were settled and maintained without some question as to their precise and retraceable boundaries.

So chaotic did the early Kentucky land claims become that Virginia was forced to create a special court to deal with them. After 1792 the early sessions of the Court of Appeals was occupied almost solely with disputed land claims. Certainly the deed books are reflective of the vagaries of local land boundaries and quaintly recorded descriptions.

Marijuana has become the moonshine of the late 20th Century, burgeoning into Kentucky’s top illegal cash crop.

Rural farm scene depicting farm life in the early 1900s. Photo provided to An Ohio River Portrait Collection by Mary Edith Pritchett, Henderson, KY. (Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

Three or four cardinal historical facts influenced the establishment of farmsteads in Kentucky. First, the initial inflow of settlers quickly laid claims to most of the central bluegrass region. Here the frontier phase was of short duration. Fields and meadows became almost immediately productive of surplus commodities. As has been fairly consistent throughout Kentucky’s agricultural history, there was in the central region an almost equal balance between crop and livestock production. As settlement and farming advanced there arose a pressing necessity for outlets to market. Livestock could be transported afoot overland, but field crops depended almost solely upon water transportation.

For three quarters of a century Kentucky farmers were highly dependent upon free access to the western rivers, a fact which early involved the western country in an embittered international dispute. When a fickle Spanish Crown, in 1783, threatened to close the Mississippi River to American access for twenty-five years, Kentucky’s farmers were threatened with ruin. This question became a major subject of debate in at least three of the Danville separation conventions, 1785-1787. Had the fledgling United States Government sanctioned the so-called Jay-Gardoqui Treaty Kentucky farmers would have been defeated at the doors of their corn cribs.

Emigrants passing down the Ohio. (By Walter Spooner, Courtesy of the KY Historical Society)

A romantic chapter in Kentucky history are the accounts of the antics of the western river flatboatmen. There was an intimate bond between the Kentucky farm and the flatboat. Later the steamboat cemented further this bond. Down river Natchez and New Orleans were as vital to the Kentucky agricultural trade as were Lexington and Louisville. Not only was the ever increasing river trade in farm products of prime economic importance, it bonded Kentucky socially and culturally to the Old South, this was to have enormous political and economic meaning in the future.

For almost all of its two and a quarter centuries of existence Kentucky has remained intensely rural and agrarian in so many phases of its public life. A majority of its earlier political, professional and social leaders were farmers. Among them were Isaac Shelby, James Garrard, Nathaniel Hart, Green and Henry Clay, Robert Aittcheson Alexander, and Elisha Warfield. Even the local industries were farm related, none more so than the exploitation of the forests. Among the industries which were little more than adjunct to farming were the rope walk and baggage mills, the iron furnaces, cabinet-making, distilling, meat packing, and flour and meal milling. There were few or no agriculturally-unrelated industries in Kentucky until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

From the opening settlement farming became the central way of life in Kentucky, whether it be on a fertile bluegrass tract or on a humbler subsistence farm tucked away in an Appalachian Highland cove, or in a bend of the Green River. One has only to turn through the pages of the Kentucky Gazette or the other early Kentucky newspapers, to determine this fact.

In a vein, seldom if ever associated with Kentucky’s agrarian past, is the fact that rural roots have burrowed deep into the institutional and cultural life of the state. For two centuries the weekly newspaper press with its news reports and editorials has been an integral element in rural Kentucky life. The land, the farmstead, and rural folk ways have ever been newsworthy. So they have generated the themes of the more sophisticated fictional writings. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century James Lane Allen of the Bluegrass and John Fox, Jr. of Appalachia gave popular national exposure to two layers of Kentucky culture. Succeeding them in this century the talented authors, Elizabeth Chevalier, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Robert Penn Warren, Irvin Cobb, Harriett Arnow, Jesse Stuart, James Still, and Janice Holt Giles have sounded the depths of Kentucky rurality. Plowing both the fields of fiction and factual writing, Harry Caudill, Lynwood Montell, Bobby Ann Mason, and others have viewed Kentucky’s rural-agrarian life from fresh perspectives. In their writings the more recent authors have indicated that Kentucky’s rural agrarian life is slowly but surely eroding into the historically brackish social and economic worlds between rural and urban-industrial orientation.

Kentucky led in hemp production until well into the 20th century. (Courtesy of UK Archives)

Too often historians have written about Kentucky’s traditions in terms of personalities, politics, economics, industry, and rising urbanism, or they have overemphasized one trait at the expense of the others. The general subject, however, is too complex to be interpreted in terms of the history of any one section. Throughout its entire agricultural history, Kentucky has been home to the predominantly important subsistence farmer garnering a livelihood from limited acres. Actually it has been around this type of farmer and his rural homestead that much of the folklore and traditions of rural life have been centered. The Kentuckian’s subsistence farm background has, in fact, been central on his love of land and place, his dream of the good and simple way of life, the source of his food tastes, and to his toleration of the harsh realities of fickled seasons and the fortunes they have produced. The Kentucky subsistence farm has been a bedrock of conservatism and a clinging to the old ways of doing things. Kentucky politicians have ever cast their solicitations and promises in keeping with the interests of farmers. For a politician to have advocated radical changes in the rural way of life, to raise taxes, or to speak derogatorily of farming would have been to commit an act of prime political folly. When Kentucky politicians have proclaimed in raucous breast-pounding declarations the will of the people, they have had in mind almost exclusively the rural voter.

The dream of making new beginnings on the opening Kentucky frontier was as mixed as were the personalities of the dreamers. When those settler calvacades passed through Cumberland Gap or drifted down the Ohio River, they passed through an enormous geographical trap door which largely severed their relations with the places of their immediate origins, and certainly from the mores of the old world. They were the first Americans to plant themselves behind an isolative mountain barrier, and to be thrust largely upon their own ingenuity and moral and social resources in developing a fresh regional economy and a realigned society.

Though the open virgin country and the rise of the self-contained homestead characterized early Kentucky settlement the institution itself was of ancient origins. The pioneering type of family farm in early Kentucky set a pattern in perpetuity as a source of livelihood, a family centralizing center, and to hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians, their identification with place. Historically it has been the scene of demanding labor, and, sometimes, of creative work. To succeeding generations homesteads of extended occupation and ownership have been places where family roots are deeply embedded, and where unerasable memories have been generated. No matter the pluses and minuses of the fortunes of farm operation, the folk attachments have been the precious treasures of rural-agrarian Kentucky.

Threshing grain, circa 1900. Family, friends & neighbors gather to help. (Photo by Gretter. Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

Again, the old established Kentucky farm has reached out far beyond its deeded boundaries. It has existed inseparably from the country church, the family graveyard, the country store, doctor’s office, school, and fourth class post office. The family farm and these institutions have been interdependent. The economic and social impact of the Kentucky farm permeated every element of country town life. In fact, main streets, historically, have been little more than knotted stretches in rural roads.

Once the decennial census programmers expanded the categories for information gathering it became easier for historians, economists, and sociologists to reconstruct, at least in statistical profile, the advancement of Kentucky agriculture and rural society. Too, the Commonwealth itself began (in the 1830s) gathering bodies of pertinent property data through the state auditor’s office. There exists a rather extensive file of this data, but obviously it is of a minimal nature because it involved property assessments.

The range of quality of Kentucky homes ranged from the most elegant pillared Greek Revival mansion seated on a pleasant bluegrass knoll to the most primitive one-room-shedroom back country cabin. Household furnishing followed the same quantitative and qualitative curve as that of houses. Amazingly many a rural Kentucky housewife established a reputation as a superb cook, often having the use of only limited numbers and types of kitchen utensils. All of them cooked on wood stoves, and many even used open fireplaces. Recorded estate executor’s reports on file in county clerks’ offices throughout the Commonwealth document this fact. Large families were born and reared in meagerly furnished homes, homes which lacked both labor-saving features and sanitary facilities. Yet this fact seems never to have clouded generations of Kentuckians’ nostalgic memories and attachments to their rural-agrarian backgrounds.

Frontier conditions in many sections of Kentucky prevailed until near the end of the nineteenth century, and in some cases, well into this one. Illustrative of the economic location of Kentuckians at the opening of the exciting mid-century decade 1850-1860, there were 74,777 farms with the rather astonishing average acreage of 274, or 16,974,379 acres of the total state acreage of 25,860 classed as improved. There was a sharp contrast in the improvement of land across Kentucky. In 1850 Bourbon County had 734 farms containing 168,891 improved acres, and 1,111 unimproved as compared with Breathitt County which had 433 farms with 13,517 improved acres, and 274,043 still in a virginal state. Woodford County had 580 farms cultivating 108,898 acres with only 7,347 acres unimproved. This latter condition contrasted with that of Simpson County which had 686 farms with the marked imbalance of 45,296 improved acres, and 72,419 unimproved. The ratio of improved to unimproved lands showed that the frontier retreated slowly in Kentucky. In another category the number of dwellings almost equaled that of families, documenting the fact that Kentuckians like a high degree of isolated independence, and perhaps their privacy. The even balance between family numbers and dwellings in 1850 emphasized further the fact that home and farm were central places of sentimental and physical attachment in rural Kentuckians’ lives.

The Country Store. (From Conquering The Wilderness . . ., by Col. Frank Triplett, 1883. Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

Corn in field at Princeton Education & Research Center. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications)

Up to the closing decade, 1830-1840, Kentucky farmers operated on a rigidly independent basis completely oblivious to any scientific advances which were being made in the fields of agricultural and livestock breeding, despite the fact that some central Kentucky farmers had imported improved livestock, and were engaged in a rising mule breeding industry. To a small group of farmers it seemed clear in 1840 that the methods and procedures of Kentucky farming had to be improved. Some of these bluegrass farmers met in Lexington in 1838 to discuss the means by which agriculture in the Commonwealth could be advanced both politically and scientifically. There they discussed several projects which they believed would lead to a more progressive age of farming in the state. Among them they proposed the organization of a state geological survey, the pursuit of a plan to organize a college of agriculture, the holding of annual fairs and livestock exhibits, and seeking enactment by the General Assembly of laws beneficial to farmers.

Cassius Clay home, near Richmond, KY. (UK Agricultural Communications)

The General Assembly responded in 1856 when it enacted a comprehensive law chartering the Kentucky State Agricultural Society. The commissioners designated in the law were representative of the pioneer crusaders who had met in Lexington in 1838. The purposes of the newly created organization were to hold annual exhibitions of farm products, livestock, and domestic arts, to demonstrate and display improved farm implements, and generate a decent list of prizes and awards. A prize was to be awarded the best essay of agriculture submitted during the year. The law authorized the society commissioners to draw on the state treasury in the sum of $5,000.

Servants quarters, Cassius Clay home, near Richmond, KY. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications)

The law of 1856 recognized an obvious geographical fact, it mandated that Kentucky should be divided into three districts that would conform to topographical divisions within the state. In each district there were organized annual fairs. To a considerable extent the more progressive local farmers and their families demonstrated considerable interests, not only in the social aspects of the fairs, but in the exhibits. The Kentucky country fairs drew rural people together in a common interests in the enterprise of farming. The annual events were designed to point to a brighter future for the farmer and break the tedium of arduous farm labor. Fortunately, records were kept of the fair meetings and of awards to farmers and their wives.

Party at the Pyles farm, 1898. (Provided by James L. Pyles, Maysville. Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

Surely the seminal decade, 1850-1860, must be considered one of the most promising in Kentucky agricultural history. Markets, north and south, for Kentucky farm products and livestock flourished. Farms had reached the highest level yet of productivity, and remarkable progress had been made in the importation of purebred livestock, and of greatly expanding the native industry. It perhaps would be reasonable to assert that in every national statistical category of production pertinent to the Kentucky farm, the state ranked high. What had begun as a slow and arduous flatboat trade with the Lower South at the opening of the nineteenth century had, after 1820, grown rapidly in the steamboat era. By 1852 farm production and trade had grown to such proportions that pressures developed to build railway connections to the South. In that year, the great Louisville and Nashville Railroad was chartered.

A.C. Norris tent at fairground in Frankfort. (Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

Sheep on Unversity of Kentucky’s Coldstream Farm. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications)

Horsedrawn combine or thresher, with workers, circa late 1800s or early 1900s. (Photo by Gretter, Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

No historian can describe precisely what damage the Civil War did to Kentucky agriculture. What can be asserted, however, is that those four years marked an economic and political watershed in the field of agriculture and the Kentucky farm. At the outset of the war, Kentucky became a key political and military objective both for the Union and the Confederacy. Kentucky farm resources were of vital importance to the Confederacy especially. In the first year of the war repeated attempts were made by the Confederacy to occupy central Kentucky’s productive farming area.

Clearly the Civil War stimulated a rising competition to Kentucky farmers by those in the expanding northwestern states. The extension of the east-west national railway system created ruinous competition in capturing the eastern Atlantic seaboard markets, and the war devastated Kentucky’s southern market. Never again, after 1865, did Kentucky agricultural enterprises show such favorable comparative standings in the national statistical tables.

The post Civil War era in Kentucky can be described as virtually stagnated and isolated in many parts of the state. This truly became an age of the small subsistence farmer dredging a livelihood from ever shrinking acres. In the half century, 1865-1910, the number of farms in Kentucky increased dramatically from approximately 150,000 in 1870 to 259,180 in 1910. The average acre per farm dropped substantially from 119.4 to 85.6. By the latter date 64 percent of the state’s landed area was described loosely as improved. As indicative as these elementary statistics are, the social implications are much greater.

There occurred between 1900 and 1940 a dramatic subdivision of Kentucky farms. As family members multiplied, and offsprings settled near their old home places farms grew smaller in acreages. As a matter of fact the Farm Security Administration during the latter part of the Great Depression was of the opinion that land in certain areas of Kentucky would become so badly subdivided that families would be unable to produce a living on it. This might well have been true had there not been a great out-migration of population, especially from the Appalachian counties. Finally, the average Kentucky subsistence farm produced too little capital to justify the purchase and operation of modern implements. Thus thousands of Kentucky farmers, down until the post-depression years, were left suspended in a vacuous condition between the vanished frontier and the emergent scientific-mechanized future.

Tragically, the great mass of Kentuckians was intellectually unprepared to face a challenging scientific-mechanized future. Illustrative of this fact was the slowness with which they accepted the new agriculture. Always the state of education has been an issue in any discussion of Kentucky history. In the decades prior to World War I the Commonwealth was a fecund place. In 1918 there were 707,766 children under eighteen years of age out of a population of 2,416,630. Only 533,355 children went through the motion of enrolling in school, and only 314,992 (less than half the school age population) maintained an attendance of 150 days. In a population so inadequately educated, the great body of Kentucky farmers in 1920 lacked the most elementary capability of accepting and practicing the new methods in farming and livestock breeding. To the unschooled mass the act of farming was still a labor intensive enterprise which required more muscle than mind.

The well on the porch provided water before municipal utilities. (Photo provided to An Ohio River Portrait Collection by Mary E. Pritchett, Henderson. Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

In the past century and a quarter several dramatic discoveries and advances were made in Kentucky agricultural. All of these advanced the science of farming onto a new plateau of change and progress. Possibly the most dramatic incident to occur in the latter half of the nineteenth century was the introduction of burley tobacco. This event occurred in the latter year of the Civil War. No one seems to know the specific origin of the plant, but it is reasonable to speculate that it was a genetically bred offspring from the light tobacco type of the Carolinas and Virginia. Seeds for the original burley came from the United States Bureau of Agriculture to Bracken County, Kentucky, no doubt they were distributed by a congressman. They were distributed from Bracken County to Brown County, Ohio. At that point there was no historical mystery about the rapid spread of the plant across Kentucky. Tenants of Fred Kautz’s farm in Brown County in 1864 crossed the Ohio River to borrow seeds from Garrett Barkley in Bracken County. The plants grown from those seeds were of an unattractive dirty yellow appearance, and most of them were destroyed. Fortuitously some survived. In 1867 hands of burley were exhibited in the St. Louis Fair and Exposition where they won first and second prizes. In a remarkably short time burley became a staple cash crop on an ever-growing number of Kentucky farms.

Though Kentucky took advantage of the Morrill Act, it did not do so until the last possible moment in February 1865. This act brought about the establishment of the land grant college which is now the University of Kentucky. In many respects this was a realization of the dream of those pioneers of 1838. The creation of the college, the Kentucky Experiment Station, and the extension service was to bring about a slow but certain revolution in Kentucky agricultural practices. The opening decades of the twentieth century were seminal years in the introduction of new methods of farming, of soil management, plant breeding, and livestock production. At last the ancient folk ways of extracting a living from the land were giving away to the new sciences and mechanical inventions. Even the turn of the rural-agrarian mind was conditioned by the changes which came rapidly in this century.

Part of our show at County Fair, 1892. (Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

Through the application of science and scientific methods to almost every phase of Kentucky farming none, however, had a significance than that of genetically improving staple field crops. In a single instance the hybridization of corn completely changed the yield of that crop. In 1920, 270,676 farms produced 100,650,000 bushels. In contrast 101,000 farms produced 149,000,000 bushels on 81,000 farms, or an average of 100 bushels per acre. Just as significantly plant geneticists in the 1930s successfully rescued the burley tobacco crop from extinction by breeding disease resistant stock. The success of this effort came just in time to assure an ample supply of tobacco in World War II. Between 1921 and 1945, the Experiment Station staff under the leadership of W.B. Valleau largely produced genetically tobacco plants which could resist the ravages of death dealing viruses.

In the order of importance of the top five major Kentucky field crops hay had moved well up in the scale. Grasses rivaled corn and tobacco for top ranking. The saga of the discovery genetically improved grasses which were adaptable throughout the Commonwealth is dramatic chapter in the history of Kentucky agriculture. That of Kentucky fescue 31 alone is a revolutionary one. In 1931 E.N. Fergus of the Kentucky Experiment Station went to Frenchburg in Menifee County to judge a sorghum festival. He was told of an unusual field of grass and went to see it. He carried back to Lexington seed samples which were planted in all the stations. It proved adaptable everywhere and grew vigorously. Because this grass was first identified in 1931 it was given the name 31. The original native plant, however, had a toxic quality which caused adverse reaction in cattle who grazed on it. Plant geneticists in time were able to produce a plant without the toxic content. Quickly fescue 31 became the universal Kentucky grass instead, of the fabled bluegrass.

The post World War II era experienced phenomenal changes in every aspect of American life, but in none more so than Agriculture. Some degree of mechanization occurred on every farm, if it was nothing more than the use of a pick up truck. This vehicle, plus the tractor, sealed the doom of the horse and mule. Every stage of agricultural advance after 1945 in some way reduced the demand for a large body of farm laborers, and the age saw literally hundreds of thousands of farm workers desert the fields for industrial and service employment.

Glenville, circa 1918. Tractor and wheat thresher. (Photo provided to An Ohio River Portrait Collection by Henry B. Cravens, Utica. Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

A somewhat forlorn victim of the new agricultural age was the family farm. The new sciences and mechanization placed it in an entirely new relationship to the rising urban-service-industrial Kentucky community. More and more the features of the urban way of life crept onto the farm. There came the Rural Electric Administration which brought light, power, news, and recreation to the loneliest farmstead. In time the historic spring was rapidly being replaced by co-operative rural water lines, and, in the more modern age of environmental concerns the disposal of solid waste and garbage became matters of community concern.

Just as geneticists and plant breeders have wrought vital changes in field crops, livestock breeders have wrought their own changes. Over the past half century the modern importations of cattle, especially, have carried on the traditions of the early nineteenth century. There have come the immigrants Charolais, Simuthals, Santa Gertrudis, Brahas, and a new German breed. They grazed meadows where once the famous old Kentucky aristocratic shorthorns held court.

In a more intimate and personal way Kentucky countrymen have never lost their fondness for smokehouse cured ham and fried chicken, even though the family smokehouse has tumbled down in decay and the place where it stood has been leached of salt and become overgrown with grass. The packinghouses, chain groceries, and fast food stands have made gestures at capturing the true flavor of these favorites. Even the family cemeteries, where departed farmers have remained on the land as silent overseers of its turnings have been neglected by the thousands. Except on Decoration Day when tombstones are crowned with wreaths of plastic non-biodegradable flowers.

Smoke House still standing on the Allen Farm in Woodford Co. KY. (Courtesy of D. Allen)

Family gravesite in Woodford Co. KY. (Courtesy of Peg Snyder)

One drives across the Kentucky countryside and wonders where did all those farmers who occupied 259,000 plus farms in 1920 go? What finally were the ends of the horses and mules, the wagons and the buggies, and that great symbol of family pride, the surrey? How many of the timeworn and outmoded disc harrows, mowing and threshing machines, and turning plows found their way into the making of guns and tanks in Japan in the great scrap iron harvest in the late 1930s? Some, however, remained behind to rust out in lonely back fields or barn lots.

The modern era of the motor car, of good roads, and the rise of filling stations brought onto the Kentucky farm the ubiquitous p/u truck. This vehicle, no matter how many glitzy bangles their owners plaster on them, can never conjure up the soulful pride a Kentucky farmer had in a well matched pair of mules fitted out with brass riveted blind bridles, extended shiny knobbed hames, and fancy backbands.

Thus in two and a quarter centuries the tide of time and change has flowed on unceasingly for the Kentucky farmers. The waves of fortune and of depression have billowed in a continuous pattern of history with each succeeding decade producing its own peculiar web of nostalgic moments and monuments. None, however, has been more spiritually cherished in memories than farm homes, no matter how humble, whether atop a wooded and grassy knoll, or one crammed into the wedge of a highland cove. Home of memory for the rural Kentuckians has ever been more than a structure of wood and stone, it was a family shrine, a place where childhood evolved into man- and womanhood, where triumphs and tragedies came at unheralded moments, and, finally, it was the centrifugal eye of breeding, birthing, planting and harvesting.

The sentimental image of the historic Kentucky farm would be barren indeed without the inclusion of its satellite buildings. These were comprised the chickenhouse, the smokehouse, wagon shed, corn crib, and hog lot. Most important of all was the big old long waistee barns, some of log construction, many of riven paling boards, and all with their hallways, harness rooms, tool sheds, stables, and gaping hay lofts. There could be no clearer documentation of the past than the tottering old barns, slowly but surely giving way to the ravages of age and neglect. Gone from their hallways are the mules and horses who once occupied their stables. The hay loft is little more than a foggy memory, and the wagon, buggy, and surrey sheds were long ago shunted into oblivion by the automobile. Until the advent of the truck and automobile the Kentucky wagon and carriage makers produced enough vehicles to move the entire state population to Chicago and back.

Farmers Tobacco Warehouse Frankfort, KY. (Photo by Gretter. Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

Winter at Pleasant View Farm. (Courtesy of Alex G. Herndon)

Feed and fertilizer lab at the University of Kentucky. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications)

Kentucky Pecans. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications)

With the advent of two world shaking wars, and the Great Depression, Kentucky farming underwent phenomenal changes, some subtle and many revolutionary. There entered the field the chemists, the agricultural engineer, the geneticist, and the marketing specialist, all of whom contributed materially to changing the fundamentals of the ancient Kentucky way of agrarian life. At last the College of Agriculture, the Experiment Station, and the Extension Service began to realize the dreams of their creators. A major part of that dream was to bring the American farm and farmer out of the pastoral-subsistence frontier stage, and to convert farming into an efficient business-like way of social and economic life. The very heart of the latter twentieth century agrarian revolution was a revision of man’s relationship to the land itself.

So long as Kentuckians consume bread and meat there will be farms and farmers. Because of the geographical nature of the Commonwealth a few subsistence farms will survive in isolated places. These will be owned and operated largely by farmers who wish to live simply and close to the land and the traditional agrarian way of life. Some may even use a semi-subsistence farm as part-time employment with industrial and service employment. The past two centuries of Kentucky agricultural history was an era in which changes came slowly, and one in which many areas were largely shielded from the impact of unsettling economic forces. The world in the past half century has grown progressively smaller in the fields of transportation, communication, trade, international competition, and politics. French farmers producing an oil-yielding crop compete with Kentucky soy bean growers. Argentinean cattle growers ship meat products to Kentucky grocery stores, and vegetable growers in Mexico produce green products to fill in the winter void. Tobacco farmers from Turkey to Africa vie for a share of the world’s tobacco trade.

Farm and Home Week at the University of Kentucky. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications)

Turn of the century farmers celebrating harvest at a picnic. (Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

In the closing decade of the twentieth century an agricultural historian might well speculate on what kind of agrarian-rural Kentucky life will the coming age produce? What social and sentimental monuments and rural mores will the new age of farm families create? How will they respond to new terminology, agri-business, no-till, hybridization, and, most importantly, mechanization and capitalization. At the closing of Kentucky’s second century the more pertinent human and emotional question may be whether at the close of the third century will there be any tri-centennial, bicentennial, centennial or fifty year farm occupants to receive certificates documenting their fortitude and will to survive?

A farmer cultivating Kentucky Tobacco, 1959. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications

Editor’s Note: Kentucky’s broad topographical and agricultural diversity has provided both distinct and ambiguous agricultural regions and sub regions across the state. For the purpose of practical discussion we have divided the state into the four regions.

THE JACKSON PURCHASE REGION

By Durwood W. Beatty, Ph.D.

Early Settlement and Agricultural History

Located at the extreme western end of the state, the Jackson Purchase is the youngest area of the state in terms of settlement as well as its admission to the commonwealth. Thus, there are no bicentennial farms in the Purchase area. Nevertheless the agriculture of the region has made significant contributions to the agricultural history of the state.

The Jackson Purchase was acquired from the Chickasaw Indians in 1818. In 1821 the entire territory was organized as Hickman County, with Columbus as the county seat. In 1821 Calloway County was formed, with Wadesboro as its county seat. There, for the purpose of selling government territory the Land Office was established a wave of immigration followed. Eventually Marshall, Fulton, Carlisle, Ballard, Graves and McCracken Counties were formed.

The family farm provided a stable mechanism by which to transfer continuity of family principle, ethic, industry, wealth and station transcending generations. (Courtesy of UK Archives)

Early settlers were mostly American-born. They found that much of the area was originally heavily timbered, with oak and hickory being the major species. Soil organic matter was low, and soils were medium to strongly acidic. They found parts of the region covered with tall grasses. Indeed, remnants of the native grasses, big bluestem, Andropogon gerardii, and indiangrass, Sorghastrum nutans are found today in isolated parts of the region. But in no way did the tallgrass vegetation produce the rich soils so commonly developed under grasses in the Prairie States. Common crops on the newly cleared land were corn and tobacco. Corn was a staple food item. Tobacco was hauled to Paducah and shipped to New Orleans for export. Other common crops were wheat, rye and oats. River transportation was especially important in the marketing of tobacco, the chief cash crop. Initially most agriculture in the region was subsistence agriculture. Leading forage crops were red clover and timothy, redtop and rape.

The early pioneers were a hardy and resourceful people that used every possible by-product in their farming. For example, livestock hides provided leather for such essential items as harnesses and shoes. The tanning of leather was at first a home business with a number of tanneries springing up later. Ashes were used for dehairing the hides. Bark, obtained from oak trees that had been felled for lumber, provided a source of tannin. Leather blackening was made from carbon black and lard. Their resourcefullness was further exhibited in the production of domestic textiles. Their garments were made from cotton, flax and wool. Walnut hulls were used for brown dye, hickory bark for yellow, and moss for green.

Buildings

Early buildings in the Jackson Purchase were of log construction because of the abundance of material, the lack of roads and lack of nearby sawmills. Large square hewn logs were used, often with a one foot face. They were secured on the ends by various types of notches. Since log architecture had been common in America for a century and a half, it was a well known craft, thus, these buildings were well constructed and durable. The homes or cabins were cool in the summer and easily heated in the winter. Heat was usually provided by a fireplace because of the abundance of wood and the scarcity and expense of metal stoves. The fireplace also served as the center (hearth) of the home—food preparation, evening activities and entertainment often occured while seated around the fireplace.

Threshing at harvest time. (Courtesy of UK Archives)

Gaps between the logs were chinked with a mixture of clay, straw, and hog’s hair. The hogs hair gave flexibility to the mixture, preventing cracking of the clay. Where large gaps did occur, thin limestone rocks, wood shingles, or poles were inserted.

Early houses were usually single room cabins as the primary construction unit. Later a room could be added on one of the ends. Sometimes a lean-to would be constructed on one side, with sawed lumber. Often these log houses were a story and a half with overhead space for sleeping or storage. Usually there was no overhead ceiling; the log rafters being handy for hanging items for food drying or storage.

Several basic designs of these log houses prevailed in the Purchase Region. One cabin design featured a roof that extended over the chimney end to protect the stick and clay chimneys from the weather. Another style of house commonly appearing in the Purchase was the dogtrot house. It usually had two approximately square rooms opening into a central breezeway or dogtrot. This area was used as a wash area and for hanging garments and storage of firewood. Sometimes in the rear there was a kitchen, not sharing a common wall with the house.

Another house variation was the saddleback house It consisted of two rooms back to back against a stone chimney that served two fireplaces, one on each side. All of these house styles were commonly built of logs. Attesting to the durability of logs is the Wadesboro court house mentioned earlier. It was the first public building in the Purchase and was constructed of rough hewn logs with half dovetail notch construction. Many years later this building, by then a house in Murray, was rediscovered and rebuilt to became part of the Murray-Calloway Park where it now stands, 170 years after it’s original construction!

The tenant house became popular in the late 1800s. It is a variation of the saddleback house. It usually was 1 1/2 stories tall and of frame construction covered with weatherboard siding. This house had a central chimney that served two stoves rather than fireplaces. These frame houses often were painted with whitewash derived from a mixture of lime mixed into a slurry with water or buttermilk. The earliest settlers brought with them or obtained fruit trees and landscaped their homes with lilac, forsythia and spirea.

Physical Setting

Mrs. Watson - Forks of Road - chickens. (Photo by Cusik. Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

Soils ultimately determine the value of a region’s agriculture. The Jackson Purchase consists of two major soil regions. The Mississippi River floodplain occurs primarily in Fulton, Hickman and Carlisle Counties, covering approximately two hundred square miles. Soils are level and fertile but are poorly drained. Farms are large and 85% of the area is in farmland. Today, corn and soybeans are the major crops, cotton having been important in earlier years.

Much of the remaining part of the Purchase is a thick loess (wind blown silt) belt, covering about 2,100 square miles. Soils having developed into a thick layer of loess attributed to the Mississippi River flood plain deposits. Because this area is gently rolling, soil erosion is a problem. Too, many of the soils have a fragipan or hardpan at a depth of 24-36 inches, limiting crop root growth and ultimately limiting crop yields.

Climate

Climate of the area is temperate. The growing season, defined as the time between the last freezing temperature in the spring and the first freezing temperature in the fall, will range up to about 180 days or more in the southwest and along the Ohio River. From December through February afternoon temperatures average will 50 degrees or more on about 11-16 days per month. Precipitation averages about 50 inches per year, and is normally well distributed.

Natural Resources

The Purchase is blessed with abundant supplies of groundwater as well as being surrounded on three sides by a good supply of water from the Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee Rivers. The rivers have provided an excellent method of transportation. Grain terminals along the river system provide access for marketing the area’s produce. River transportation is of increasing importance with the decline of the railroad industry.

Limestone is abundant for use in construction and for liming the soil. Local, inexpensive and abundant limestone has played an important part in the development of the Region’s agriculture. An abundant supply of gravel is said to have allowed the building of a greater percentage of all-weather type roads in the Purchase in contrast to other regions of the state.

Agricultural Production

Calloway was one of the first counties to have a soil survey. Published in 1945, the survey lists the following yields per acre for best practical management on level Grenada Silt Loam, one of the common soils of the region: corn, 30 bu; wheat, 15 bu; redtop hay, 0.9 ton and fire-cured tobacco 1,000 1b. Today crop yields in the region are commonly over three times as high. The above figures, from 1945, clearly illustrate improved agricultural methods and resources that have been developed. These yield increases have been due primarily to technology in the form of fertilizers and pest control. Increased liming of soils dramatically boosted agricultural production of the region.

On the subsistence farm, cold weather inevitably brought the annual Hog Killin, which provided meat for the family. (Courtesy of the Kentucky Historical Society)

Barn reflects the changing architectural style of the 20th Century. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications

As in much of the rest of the state, hay is an important crop. Release of the KY 31 variety of tall fescue in 1942 proved to be a boon to forage production throughout Kentucky and the southeastern United States, but was especially important for the fragipan soils of the Purchase Region. This grass thrived on the wet winter soils and was moderately hardy in drought during the summer. It has provided a strong base for the region’s livestock industry.

High soybean prices in the late sixties and early seventies triggered removal of fencerows and expansion of row crop farming. Dairying has declined in the region since the mid sixties. Today, field crops account for about 70 percent of the farm cash receipts in the region. The Purchase counties account for nearly one-fourth of the state’s soybean production and about fourteen percent of the corn production. Expanded bean and grain production have given rise to metal grain storage bins for on-farm storage. More than half of the state’s dark fired tobacco is produced in the Purchase counties. Tobacco has been and is the leading crop in terms of dollar value. Dark tobacco has been a most significant mainstay of many farming operations while burley production is important here and throughout the state. Production quotas make tobacco a supplemental cash crop on many farms while the chief employment may depend on another crop or a non-farm job in town.

Changes in Facilities and Practices

Dark tobacco barns are perhaps the most unchanged of all farm buildings. Newer style barns have become commonplace for the curing of burley tobacco. In recent years there has been some movement toward the growing of tobacco transplants in floating beds or modified greenhouses rather than the traditional ground beds. These greenhouses may find additional uses during the off season, further transforming the region’s agriculture..

The addition of a major broiler processing plant at Mayfield boosted the amount of the state’s broiler income from $1.87 million in 1990 to $24.9 million in 1991 and further expansion plans were initiated in 1993. This type of development has provided an excellent market for locally grown corn. In the late 1980’s winter type canola (rape) was introduced into the Purchase area. The combination of wet soils, diseases and a lack of suitable winterhardiness prevented the crop from achieving major crop status at that time.

Corn in field at Princeton Education and Research Center. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications)

Higher Education and Research

Higher education and research has played an important role in keeping agriculture up-to-date. Findings from research at the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture have extended to all parts of the state. The nearby West Kentucky Research and Education Center at Princeton has enabled researchers to extend their research into the Purchase Area for the benefit of the region’s farmers. For over sixty years the agriculture program at Murray State University in Murray has provided opportunities for upgrading the agricultural expertise of the vast agribusiness complex that is agriculture.

Farmers of the Jackson Purchase Region are innovative and willing to accept new ideas that are profitable and labor saving. In the last twenty-five years they have rapidly adapted to no-tillage farming, double cropping soybeans after small grains, use of large round hay bales and use of tobacco float systems. Undoubtedly, the Regions farmers will continue to adapt for the future.

Popcorn on the Burns farm, Davies County, Kentucky. (Courtesy of UK, Agricultural Communications)

THE PENNYROYAL REGION

By C. Ardell Jarratt

The Pennyroyal region, bordered by the Ohio River on the north, Tennessee on the south, the outer Bluegrass and coal fields on the east and the Purchase to the west, encompasses 33 of Kentucky’s 120 counties. Logan is the oldest of the 33, having been established in 1792; Webster and Metcalfe are the youngest, both created in 1860. The area is one of the most fertile in the Commonwealth, second only to the extended Bluegrass region. The Western Coal Field, a major subregion, stretches in an oval pattern across nine counties and dips into seven more. While industrialization led to a shift in the population from rural to urban areas, agriculture is still a primary part of the Pennyroyal’s economy, and farming is the predominate form of land use. From the late 1700s to the present, agriculture has shaped the region’s landscape.

Modern construction materials, such as steel, have replaced wood as a siding treatment. (Courtesy of H. Simmons)

The topography and soil qualities of the individual counties within the region vary greatly. This variation from level river bottoms to undulating hills to hilly ridges provides a backdrop for the diversity found within the region. For out of the geographic differences grew subregional farming patterns established in the early 1800’s which persisted into the twentieth century. Because agriculture provided the economic basis for the area’s residents, the established patterns contributed to the cultural landscape and the built environment as well.

However, early settlements throughout the region probably shared many common characteristics. Rather than building in isolated locations, settlers joined with one another