Kentucky was not what I was expecting. I can’t say that I’d thought about what it might be like much before. Maybe if I had I wouldn’t have been surprised by what I found - horses and bourbon.
The legend that has grown up around President Lincoln is that he started life as part of a poor family. The truth is, that they were landowners. Abraham, the President’s grandfather, bought a treasury warrant for land in what is now Kentucky from Virginia in 1782 for three thousand six hundred and thirty pounds. That was a considerable sum.
The family worked hard on their farm. When the elder Abraham died, everything passed down to his first son Mordecai. Thomas, Mordecai’s brother, and the eventual father of the President got nothing. Nonetheless, Thomas worked hard and was able to save up enough money to eventually buy several farms of his own.
The Lincoln family lived in log cabins simply because they were never anywhere long enough to build something more substantial. The land lease laws in the Kentucky territory were vague and a unified system of surveying had yet to be created so there were often title disputes. Thomas had the misfortune to be on the losing side of many of them. That was why they ended up moving so often. Mordecai, on the other hand, had a very nice, established, two-story house just down the road from his brother. It’s still standing today. It looks like a place that any of us would happily live in.
The Lincolns weren’t poor, but they lived humbly and worked hard. Young Abraham was largely self-taught because he couldn’t be spared from the day’s labor to go off to school. Thomas kept working, he eventually became a cabinetmaker and a carpenter, skills he passed down to his son who would become President.
I grew up in the suburbs of New York and ended up living in one of the most metropolitan places on the planet. The prejudice that took hold in my mind was that farming equals poverty. For most of my life, I have assumed that my father’s family must have all been poor because so many of them were farmers. What I have finally realized, now having visited Alabama, rural North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky, was that owning a farm puts you in a completely different economic bracket than you’d be in if you only worked on somebody else’s farm. Almost to a person, the ancestors I have uncovered so far all owned the land they worked on.
Some of my ancestors may have lived lives that we, today, might consider humble, but they were anything but poverty-stricken. Many owned slaves, who worked alongside them in the fields. My grandfather Morris’s family remained mostly uneducated until my great-grandfather Albert mangled his hand in a mill and became useless as a laborer. Only then was he sent off to school. The rest of his siblings never finished school because their labor was needed. Albert’s father, “Chess,” far from being impoverished, was able to keep buying up new pieces of land to add to what he had. When he died, he left a sizeable amount of property. A lack of schooling did nothing to diminish his farming skills.
My grandmother Eunice’s family, although farmers as well, did send their children to school. Her father was a Wilson, and her mother was a Mastin. Both families were landowners.
Buck Hester was a pioneer in Alabama. He and his son Roling were the first to clear some of the land that became accessible after Andrew Jackson cut a road through what had been Indian Territory to get there. The Mastins, however, lived in Kentucky for some generations before. By the time my grandmother, and even her parents, came along, the family was firmly established and successful.
The Wilsons had a large farm in Ellenton, South Carolina that had been in the family for several generations. My great-great-grandfather, however, Reuben Bailey Wilson, doesn’t seem to have been cut out to be a farmer. He gave it up and tried several times to become a shopkeeper in different places throughout the South. He was never able to keep one open. After several false starts, he ended up in Kentucky
Reuben and his wife Elizabeth had fifteen children including my great-grandfather, Fred. After Reuben died, his eldest son, Ben, took over raising the family. Ben owned a livery stable in Lexington Kentucky. When he was old enough, Fred started working for him there. Horses.
Lexington, Kentucky, today, is home to countless thoroughbred racing horse farms. There is a great deal of money to be made in racing horses and that is reflected in the many pristine farms with their running black fences that curve endlessly around the gently rolling hills of Kentucky Blue Grass country.
I got into a long conversation with a woman working at the Horse Park in Lexington about its history. Kentucky sits on top of a lot of limestone. Mammoth Cave, which is a couple of hours’ drive away to the southwest of Lexington, was created by water running through that limestone and dissolving it. Mammoth Cave has over four hundred miles of passageways. There are plenty of other cave systems running below the surface of the state. As a result, the blue grass Daniel Boone saw when he made his way through the Cumberland Gap has an unusually high concentration of calcium. The groundwater is full of it. Wealthy gentlemen farmers from Virginia realized the value of that grass right away and bought up land to breed their horses on it. The more calcium in the grass, the stronger your horses’ bones will be. The stronger their bones, the more they can endure racing and become champions.
My father remembers visiting his grandmother in Versailles, which is just to the west of Lexington when he was about eight. That would have been in about 1931. He was taken to a stud farm to see the legendary Derby-winner Man O’ War. He never forgot it. There are several famous thoroughbreds stabled at the Kentucky Horse Park, today. I happened to be in the paddock at the time when they were giving Funny Cide, the winner of the Kentucky Derby in 2003, a bath.
I think I can understand why seeing Man O’ War made such a deep impression on my dad. Stardom is an interesting thing. It is a contract between the star and their audience with an agreement that the star is special in some way and deserving of attention. While there are certainly some people who are so charismatic that you can’t help but be drawn to them regardless of whether they accomplish anything or not, there are also plenty of others we are drawn to because we’ve agreed to be drawn to them. They are set apart in some way. If we aren’t aware of their fame, we might not notice them. If we don’t know them but are in a crowd of people who do, suddenly that energy is there. The crowd and the star generate it together. You could feel it around Funny Cide.
I don’t follow horse racing, so I’d never heard of him. The people around me, however, knew exactly who he was and flocked around him. I’ve seen movie stars suddenly turn it on when they are recognized, but I’d never seen an animal do it. Before now. Funny Cide is a star. I know who Man O’ War is. He was a far more famous horse than Funny Cide is. I’m betting that seeing him in the flesh was a remarkable experience – especially for an eight-year-old.
I am writing this on a plane on my way out to do a Patti LuPone concert in Palo Alto which is probably why I am thinking about this. I have worked with Patti for so many years that I don’t experience the rush of stardom with her when we’re together. I did when we first met, but we’ve gotten used to each other. Even during sound check when she’s singing, she’s just Patti. She is still warming up. She’s not “on,” she’s working. Come time for the concert, though, when she first walks out onstage to a crowd that is eagerly waiting for her, it’s something else entirely. It’s electric. Even after all these years, I can always feel it.
But I digress. Ben Wilson couldn’t do much to educate his younger brother because he had his hands full schooling his own kids. Great-grandfather Fred mostly educated himself. He had plenty of access to books and time enough to pursue his interests. He also had ambition, which is something, I think, that must be learned. The Hesters weren’t in an environment where they could see the possibilities for living a different life. Fred was. Working for his successful brother who in turn, supplied the wealthy people of Lexington, must have instilled in him the desire to be wealthy, himself.
My great-grandmother Jennie’s brother Robert Jr. also owned a horse breeding stable in Lexington. I have a postcard of it with him sitting on a horse in front of it. He looks very dapper. And well off.
My great-grandmother Jennie is buried in Lynchburg, Virginia, but her parents and all four of her grandparents are in the Versailles Cemetery. My great-grandfather Fred is buried in Lexington alongside his parents. His stone is one designed for veterans of the Spanish-American War. They all seem to have had plenty of money for nice grave markers and more than enough for each of them to have been photographed in a studio.
The house my grandmother grew up in, is still there in Versailles. It’s a pretty house, well kept up, in a pretty neighborhood in a pretty town.
While I was out front looking at it, a neighbor saw me and walked over. I said hello and explained that my grandmother had grown up there. He started asking me all sorts of questions about when she was born and when her parents were born. Then he asked me when I was born. I told him and he closed his eyes for a minute and started muttering to himself. After a beat, he said, “You were born on a Saturday.” He was right. He told me that he had a kind of autism that made him able to remember dates and numbers.
He said I should knock on the door and tell the people in the house who I was. I couldn’t quite explain to him why I didn’t want to do that. I think it’s because seeing the outside of the house was a general enough experience that I could imagine my family living there. Seeing the inside of the house with another family’s stuff strewn around would have made that harder. Standing out on the street was enough.
I searched in vain to find a small cemetery where a set of one of my 5th great-grandparents is supposed to be buried. Amos Farra and his wife Margaret Ann Whiteman would have been my great-grandmother Jennie’s great-great-grandparents. Amos died in 1825 and Margaret died in 1834. Amos was another family member who fought in the American Revolution. He worked as a wheelwright in the Pennsylvania militia in Captain John Jordan’s company in Colonel Benjamin Fowler’s regiment. Even though I was able to find pictures of his wife’s and his headstones online, I couldn’t, for my life, find where they were. I was, however, able to find the family graveyard of one of Amos’s sons, Aaron Farra. Aaron would have been the brother of one of my 4th great-grandmothers, Hannah Farra. The marker said that the people buried in the plot all died between 1826 and 1866.
The graves had all been moved to their current location in 2008. Where they had been is now a gigantic shopping mall. The little cemetery now sits to the right of the mall’s access road near a huge Kohl’s store. Time certainly keeps moving forward.
Horses and bourbon. Michael likes bourbon so I got him a nice bottle made in Versailles. There’s a strange law in Kentucky that you can’t ship bourbon out of state. The place where I got it could ship out of their store in D.C. but not from there. The store in D.C., however, didn’t have the small batch bottles that I had my eye on. So, I got one and put it in my suitcase wrapped in a pilfered hotel towel and my dirty laundry and checked it. Success.
The limestone in the water does something to the corn that grows there that gives bourbon its distinctive taste.
Horses and bourbon.
If the places I visit were all as I imagined them, there wouldn’t be any reason to go. My family keeps surprising me. Nothing beats standing in a place where one of them may have once been. Visiting their graves and knowing that they are lying in a box six feet below me is an oddly profound experience. I have no wish to be buried myself, but I’m strangely grateful that they were.
Suddenly seeing their names in a graveyard is a bit like realizing that you are standing behind OJ Simpson in line at a movie theatre. It’s fascinating and unsettling at the same time.
So enjoy these stories…Kentucky is beautiful. I think I mentioned my great uncle was a Trappist monk at Gethsemani in Bardstown. Another small world moment, Joe Thalken is cousin to my dear friend and neighbor Meg Thalken. I am guessing you know him too as he accompanies Patti on the piano. The Thalken family has some interesting stories too, but they were from Texas and Ogallala. Happy travels and thanks an always for not only sharing stories, but giving them context.
As always, a fascinating read.