Kentucky's Historic Farms

Description

A fascinating agricultural resource, Kentucky's Historic Farms: 200 Years of Kentucky Agriculture showcases some of the most grand historic farmlands in the country, with roots as far back as two centuries. Written by Thomas Dionysius Clark, this collector’s edition includes photographs, bibliographical references, and an index.

Sujets

• Histoire
• History of Kentucky
• Thomas D. Clark
• History
• Kentucky

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781618584748
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

TURNER PUBLISHING COMPANY
P.O. BOX 3101 PADUCAH, KY 42002-3101 [phone]
 
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.
 
 
 
L and 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 dr