Maysville, Kentucky

“ If the road facilitates, in a considerable degree, the transportation of the mail to a considerable portion of the union, and at the same time promotes internal commerce among several states, and may tend to accelerate the movement of armies, and the distribution of the munitions of war, it is of national consideration. Tested by this, the true rule, the Maysville road was undoubtedly national. It connects the largest body, perhaps, of fertile land in the union, with the navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and with the canals of the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. ”

“ The inhabitants are noted for industry and sobriety. Population, one thousand eight hundred and fourteen.
Maysville, in Mason county, Kentucky, on the Ohio, stands on a narrow bottom below the mouth of Limestone creek, and has considerable trade and manufactures. It is the principal commercial depot for the north-east portions of the state. It is a very busy and flourishing town. Population, two thousand seven hundred and forty.
Middlebury, in Addison county, Vermont, situated on Otter creek, has a college, two academies, several churches, and manufactures of cotton, iron, and marble. ”

“ Maysville is the greatest shipping port on the Ohio, below Pittsburgh, but it is merely such, not being a place of much business itself, but only serving as the principal port for the north eastern part of the state {149} of Kentucky, as Louisville does for the south western. It has not increased any for several years, and contains only about sixty houses. It is closely hemmed in by the river hills, over which the most direct road from Philadelphia through Pittsburgh and Chilicothe leads to Lexington, and thence through the state of Tennessee to New Orleans. ”

“ Brother Davis was born in Maysville, Ky., January 17, 1840, and was educated in the public schools of that city, with one term in the old Maysville Seminary, leaving that institution at the age of fourteen. He learned the printing business in Louisville and Memphis, Tenn., from 1855 to 1858, when he went to Philadelphia, where he enlisted in 1861 in the famous Pennsylvania Reserve Corps, from which he was discharged for disability. ”

“ The women of Kentucky have never been known to falter whatever demand duty might make upon them; yet at no period in the history of our commonwealth has there been any more severe test of the courage of her daughters than occurred on the morning of August 15, 1782, at a point about five miles northeast of Lexington on the present road from that city to Maysville. ”

“ In Virginia and Kentucky there are Pittsburg, Charleston, Wheeling, Limestone (Maysville) , and Louisville; and on the old-time Indian Side are Beaver (Fort McIntosh) , Wellsburg, Marietta (Fort Harmar) , Gallipolis, Manchester, Columbia, Cincinnati; and Madison and Clarksville, Indiana. By 1800 there are forty-five thousand inhabitants in the entire Northwest Territory, of which probably twenty-five thousand are in the Ohio Valley. Kentucky contains a population of over two hundred thousand; not such a large fraction are on the Ohio however, as is true in the Northwest Territory. ”

“ At Bardstown, Maysville, Tompkinsville, Cynthiana, and Paducah, the two sides met in deadly conflict. At the latter place the daring Confederate cavalryman, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, entered with his troops. Here also General A.P. Thompson, while gallantly leading his troops in a charge on Fort Anderson, fell pierced by a cannon ball.
At Murfreesboro, Missionary Ridge, Chickamauga, Vicksburg, Donelson, Shiloh, Baton Rouge, Stone River, indeed, on almost every battlefield, Kentucky courage was tested and never found wanting. ”

“ Colonel Crittenden was captured by the Cubans, shot, and his brains beaten out. Before the shots were fired he was requested to kneel, but he made his now famous reply: "A Kentuckian kneels to none except his God, and always dies facing his enemy!" When, in her far-away Kentucky home, Mrs. Betts learned of Crittenden's fate, she wrote her tribute to the memory of the gallant son of Kentucky, which was first printed in the Maysville Flag. The editor introduced the little poem thus: "The lines which follow are from one of Kentucky's most gifted daughters of song. ”

“ The company was incorporated in Kentucky to build a road from the Cumberland Road at Tanesville, Ohio, to Florence, Alabama, on the Tennessee River, which had been surveyed by U. S. engineers in 1827. Maysville, through which the road was to pass, was on the south side of the Ohio River, and did considerable trade in Kentucky and Tennessee. A census was taken of the existing road, admitted to be in bad condition, showing an average daily traffic of 351 persons, 33 carriages and 51 wagons. ”

“ He says he sold forty odd horses in one year. Since he has lived in Kentucky, over two hundred, which you know is over fifty per year. From Maysville I crossed the river through the Sciota region, by the way of Portsmouth, then to Chillicothe; from there on to Zanesville, from there to Wheeling, and then to Washington, Pennsylvania; returned to Wheeling, then to Parkersburgh. I did not call at Marietta; there has some difficulty taken place in that region. From Parkersburgh to Charleston, Kanhaway, with but little delay. Our saline friends are great dealers in "coney." ”

“ He was buried on the banks of the Monongahela, and Kenton, with the remainder of the family, arrived at the settlement in the winter of 1784.
Kentucky was rapidly filling up with emigrants at this time, though, as is well known, the Indians were very troublesome. Kenton saw that the land was certain to become valuable, and he determined to occupy the fertile section around his old camp near Maysville, which he had occasion to remember so well.
He made the venture in the summer of 1784, with a company of pioneers; but the Indians were so dangerous that they were forced to retire for the time. ”

“ Here, where the hand of violence shed the blood of the innocent; where the horrid yells of savages and the groans of the distressed sounded in our ears, we now hear the praises and adorations of our Creator; where wretched wigwams stood, the miserable abodes of savages, we behold the foundations of cities laid, that, in all probability, will equal the glory of the greatest upon earth. And we view Kentucky, situated on the fertile banks of the great Ohio, rising from obscurity to shine with splendor, equal to any other of the stars of the American hemisphere. ”

“ A population of some two millions with only one interior town that contains over five thousand white inhabitants. Hence Kentucky makes no impression abroad by reason of its urban population. Lexington, Bowling Green, Harrodsburg, Winchester, Richmond, Frankfort, Mount Sterling, and all the others, where do they stand in the scale of American cities? Hence, too, the disparaging contrast 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? ”

“ 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 ancestors effected a heroic settlement—a landed aristocracy, 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. ”

“ 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. Domesticity 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 popular affections. ”

“ It is enough, however, to embalm their memory in our hearts, and to connect their names with the imperishable memorials of our early history, that they were the first adventurers that plunged into the dark and enchanted wilderness of Kentucky—that of all their contemporaries they saw her first—and saw her in the pride of her virgin beauty—at the dawn of summer—in the fullness of her vegetation—her soil, instinct with fertility, covered with the most luxuriant verdure—the air perfumed with the fragrance of flowers, and her tall forests looming in all their primeval magnificence. ”

“ When Kentucky came to have a legislature of its own, it decreed that each of the counties in the state should receive six thousand acres of land wherewith to start a seminary; and that all these county seminaries were to train students for this long-dreamed-of central institution. That they might not be sent away—to the North or to Europe. When, at the end of the Civil War, a fresh attempt (and the last) was made to found in reality and in perpetuity a home institution to be as good as the best in the republic, the people rallied as though they had never known defeat. ”

“ In woodcraft he was{107} acknowledged to be the first among men. This led him to love solitude, and to hover on the frontier, with no abiding place, accompanied by the wife of his youth, who was the companion of his long life and travel. When, at last, death put them both to rest, Kentucky reclaimed their bones from their graves far up the Missouri; and now they lie buried on the hill above the cliffs of the Kentucky River, overlooking the lovely valley of the capital of that commonwealth. Around them are emblems of wilderness life; the turf of the blue grass lies lightly above them ”

“ Of the children, the only one essential to this narrative is he who gave his name to the teacher as Oliver A. Carr—better known in his family and among his young companions as "Ollie."
The year was 1857. Of all the proud towns of Kentucky—proud of blood and wealth—no city was prouder than May's Lick. Not even Lexington, five counties to the southwest, thought more of her high birth, her fine horses, her opulence, than did this little May's Lick of Mason County. The schoolmates of the Carrs were the children of the wealthy. ”

“ 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 Kentuckians have had to seek pursuits of this character in other quarters, thus establishing a constant draining 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 enterprise. More than all this has that great barrier wall done for the history of Kentucky. ”

“ 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 inferiority, no rusticity, no boorishness. Hence, so clearly interlaced are urban and rural society that there results a homogeneousness of manners, customs, 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. ”

“ 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] 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 toning down of colors, without the tender memorials of mosses and lichens, and of the whole race of clinging things. ”

“ Away back in 1780, while every man, woman, and child in the western wilderness ness was in dire struggle for life itself, those far-seeing people had induced the General Assembly of Virginia to confiscate and sell in Kentucky the lands of British Tories, to found a public seminary for Kentucky boys—not a sectarian school. These same broad-minded pioneers had later persuaded her to give twenty thousand acres of her land to the same cause and to exempt officers and students of the institution from military service. ”

“ 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 creates an unapproachable wilderness not only in southeastern Kentucky, but in East Tennessee, western Virginia, and western North Carolina—the largest extent of country in the United States remaining undeveloped. ”

“ 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, ignorant, lawless population, whose increasing numbers, pauperism, and lawlessness, whose family feuds and clan-like vendettas, have for years been steadily gaining for Kentucky the reputation for having one of [276] the worst backwoods populations on the continent, or, for that matter, in the world. ”