Kentucky's Frontier Highway

While reading Kentucky's Frontier HIghway: Historical Landscapes Along the Maysville Road by geographer, Karl Raitz and anthropologist, Nancy O' Malley, I was confronted by the nemesis of every avid reader, an unknown word skulking in the shadows of my consciousness.  You know what kind of word I'm talking about.  I passed it by many times before without looking it up because the context in which I first encountered the word "palimpsest" allowed me to continue reading without losing any comprehension. Thus, I never really learned its meaning.

But not this time.  When  Raitz and O'Malley introduce the stretch of road examined in this November, 2012 publication from University Press of Kentucky, they characterize the road that stretches between Maysville and Lexington as both "a palimpsest and a puzzle."  After reading Part I--which explores modes of traveling the Maysville Road from pioneer times to the present and Part II--which delineates the evolution of the road from a trace to a modern highway-- I still hadn't figured out the meaning of "palimpsest" from context clues. For those of you who know the definition of this word, I apologize for my stubbornness. For when I finally looked up the definition of "palimpsest"-- after meeting it twice in the narrative--I had to agree from the accounts presented, that the Maysville Road--known in various time periods as Smith's Waggon Road, the Limestone Trace, The Maysville, Washington, Paris, and Lexington Turnpike, and U.S. Highways 68, 62, and 27--is indeed a palimpsest, both literally and figuratively.

Part I of this book explains how modes of travel affected the road's physical aspects over time.  So literally, the road becomes an archeological site with many layers to be examined, one meaning of a palimpsest. Some 12,000 years ago, mega fauna shuffled wide paths from salt lick to salt lick, carving out the traces that pioneers would later follow after stepping off their flatboats from the Ohio River. Once they landed at Limestone(now called Maysville) and made the one-day journey up the steep incline to Old Washington, pioneer travelers would spend the night at an inn while their horses rested.  Then, early travelers often spent another eight days traveling the 64 miles to Lexington along treacherous terrain which required them to ford rivers. Once wagons and stagecoaches took to the roads, there was demand for better surfacing  while bridges and accommodations sprung up along the way.  Lexington and Washington became early population centers because the Limestone Trace was the major route to the rich bluegrass region for those seeking land, or those moving goods into these new population centers in the early 1800s.  Once steamboat travel became prevalent in the 1820s and 30s, river cities like Louisville and Cincinnati also gained economic prominence and increased population.  

Part II of this book examines the evolution of the road from trace to pioneer road to turnpike to parkway and finally to state and federal highway.  With each iteration, the road reveals another meaning of palimpsest, that of a parchment scraped away of its older writings to make way for new.  Part II discusses the social and economic complexities of rebuilding a road that will withstand the demands of each century.  Responsibility for building and maintaining roads in Kentucky lagged far behind engineering advances in Europe largely because of a shortsighted tendency to see roads as a local convenience and not as a state or national conduit for a growing economy.  There are interesting stories about Andrew Jackson's refusal to aid state governments in building roads and vignettes about how roads were engineered from broken stone, or macadam, named for the Scottish engineer, John McAdam. Plus, there are many first-hand accounts of travelers who used the road during each stage of its evolution.

For me, the most interesting part of Kentucky's Frontier Highway is Part III, which is a mile by mile cataloguing of the Maysville Road from Lexington to Maysville.  The cataloguing includes historic locations, photos of present day sites, neighborhood diagrams, and maps.  If someone wanted to take a Sunday driving tour of the Maysville Road, Raitz and O'Malley have provided an information-packed tour guide of this palimpsest.  You can get a sense of the road's history  by locating surviving landmarks along the mile markers and read about what was "written" on older layers of this metaphorical parchment.  There is even a chapter on the importance of the Maysville Road to the Underground Railroad.

Raitz and O'Malley close their discussion of the Maysville Road with a short section, Part IV, which takes a look at the relationship between roads and American culture in general.  This passage sums up why the study of old roads proves fascinating to the authors:

"…roads are windows into past aspirations, technologies, politics and economies. Transportation, in turn is the linchpin of America's economy and social life--freedom and ubiquity of movement lie at the very core of America's national culture."

Before this summer is over, I plan to take a ride down the Maysville road guided by my copy of Kentucky's Frontier Highway.  Don't worry. I'll plan this ride with a responsible Sunday driver, so I can ride shotgun and read about  the mile-by-mile points of interest.

***This review aired originally on WVXU's Around Cincinnati.  Listen to it here.

Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia

While watching a U.S. military official apologize to Afghans on the news over the unfortunate burning of copies of the Koran, I was taken aback by the characterization of the Afghan protestors as "primitive." The official seemed to be attributing the protestors' reaction to the gaffe as illogical or intrinsic-- the kind of behavior one might expect from a people who are not totally civilized.

Yet, on our own soil, areas of the United States have been characterized over our history as innately more dangerous and primitive because of their supposed isolation or cultural proclivity toward violence. In Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia, Bruce E. Stewart, assistant professor of history at Appalachian State, collects essays from experts in the fields of political science, history, and literature to question the supposedly innate brutality of the Appalachian people. Published in January by University Press of Kentucky, this book examines cases of violence in the mountains from the late 18th Century through the early 20th Century, making the case that violence in the hills is not isolated or inbred, but reflective of deeper problems within the United States itself.

In his introduction to the essays, Stewart shares prevalent explanations offered by early scholars and writers about the causes of violent behavior in Appalachia. Among those discussed are rugged frontier individualism caused by living in the wilderness, Scotch-Irish descent, and geographic isolation.

Arnold J. Toynbee, in his 1946 work, A Study of History, characterized the (quote) "barbarizing effect of the American frontier" (end quote) on Appalachian residents. Toynbee's explanation follows the late nineteenth century popularization by novelists, missionaries, and scholars of a violent and lawless Appalachia. Toynbee argued that mountain violence was a product of living on the frontier. Forced to live in "the wilderness" where they had to defend themselves against Native Americans, Appalachian whites were thought to have lapsed into savagery, a condition that future generations presumably failed to rise above, according to this theory.

Many early twentieth century writers, however, argued that the Appalachian mountains were peopled largely with descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers who carried with them a "border culture" that included clannish behavior, and a cultural propensity to break the law and fight to defend property. Horace Kephart wrote in 1921, "They--the Scotch-irish--are a fighting race."

Stewart cites the most popular explanation for mountain violence accepted among early scholars as geographic isolation . By the turn of the twentieth century, most writers, educators and missionaries asserted that the mountains served as physical barriers keeping civilization out. C.T. Revere wrote in 1907 that mountain people "had never come in contact with the outside world, and are amazingly ignorant of anything which happens outside their immediate neighborhood." Revere and other writers of the time supposed that this isolation resulted in a peculiar mountain culture where highlanders became "extreme individualists."

Stewart goes on to present more recent challenges to these early theories about mountain violence, including the 1978 work of Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind. In his book, Shapiro wrote that the notion of Appalachia as out of step with the rest of America was a post-Civil War construct to make Appalachia "the other," a fictional place filled with natural beauty and populated with backward people who did not embrace progress. This notion gave crusading Victorian Americans the incentive to intervene in the lives of the deprived other, uplifting them toward the civilized world of industrialization.

Shapiro's work inspired other scholars to take a closer look at the cultural explanations for violence in Appalachia. Studies found the region to be more culturally diverse than described earlier with inhabitants who had ancestors from not just Scotch-Irish descent, but also from Welsh, English, German, Italian, Native American, and African lineages, thus debunking the theory of a homogeneous Scotch-Irish "border culture" that espoused violence.

The thirteen essays in this collection serve to cast each instance of Appalachian violence under the prism of history, examining each for complex causes including racial tension, economic inequality, governmental instability, class struggles, politically-motivated infighting, and land disputes. In other words, the kinds of forces that have caused violence throughout our nation at large were also at work in the mountains.

There is an interesting discussion of feuding in T.R.C. Hutton's essay, "Assassins and Feudists: Politics and Death in the Bluegrass and Mountains of Kentucky" where politicians found it expedient to blame political violence on the reputation of "bloody Breathitt" in order to hide corruption. A very compelling account of the state of Franklin which was formed briefly in the 1780s from western North Carolina also makes for interesting analysis. On the surface, the secession of Franklin from North Carolina seemed to be over a federal law requiring states with substantial western lands to cede them to the federal government. But in a closer examination of the historic forces, Kevin T. Barksdale reveals clashes for land with the Overhill Cherokee and a "divide and conquer" policy by one of North Carolina's governors to be instrumental in the bloodshed that eventually ensued. Bruce Stewart's own contribution, to the collection involves the negative image of moonshiners painted by writers of the local color genre in the 1870s.

In fact, many of the contributors to Blood in the Hills credit national press and literary genres with perpetuating the stereotypes of mountain violence. By providing a more complete picture of one region where violence has been exaggerated and misunderstood, Stewart gives the reader a better understanding of violence throughout the entire United States.

This review originally aired on Around Cincinnati on March 11, 2012, WVXU 91.7. You may listen to the archived review at the audio link to the right of this blog.

Let Freedom Sing--a review

This review aired on WVXU's Around Cincinnati on March 28, 2010. You can listen to the review by going to the audio link to the right of this blog.

Let Freedom Sing: of 19th Century Americans by Vivian B. Kline is a treasure chest of historical research wrapped up in the packaging of a novel. Published in 2009 by Outskirts Press, this imaginative work earned Kline the “Innovator, Educator, Writer Award” at the NAACP’s 54th Annual Dinner in Cincinnati. Besides illuminating the struggle for freed slaves during the difficult Reconstruction period, the author presents a fascinating look at Cincinnati’s role in the art, music, commerce, politics and social change agenda of the late 1800s.

Kline’s premise--and major structural device for the novel--is that a group of 21st Century students have gathered in their Cincinnati classroom to do research on the travels of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in order to eventually turn their collective work into a musical. In this frame story structure, the students are free to write about their findings in any form they find comfortable and are encouraged by their facilitator/teacher to work collaboratively. The historical narrative takes the form of diary entries from Ella Sheppard, letters between Maria Longworth Nichols and Susannah Gilbert, linked together with some actual narrative passages where characters interact in person. Kline frames the students’ project work with their meetings about what they intend to do, how it’s progressing, and what they finally think about the prospects of turning their historical research into a musical.

At first, I was skeptical that couching this history in multiple viewpoints would work for me as a reader. Fond as I am of unifying, distinctive voices like that of narrator, Jack Crabb, in Little Big Man, I feared I was in for a bumpy read. But Kline is so careful to get her frame story students writing in the language of the era and the stories themselves are so appealing to anyone who cares about local history, that I soon found myself discussing many of these historical figures and events with my friends and family. I was hooked in by the beginnings of baseball and totally captivated by the high-powered literary salons hosted in New York City by the Cary sisters of North College Hill.

And there are plenty of colorful characters to discuss. Here’s a partial list for your consideration: Jenny Lind, the Nightingale Singer, P.T. Barnum, promoter extraordinaire,Horace Greeley who ran unsuccessfully against Grant for the Presidency, Nicholas Longworth the Cincinnati arts patron and wine maker, Mary Todd Lincoln portrayed here as a grieving wife, Frederick Douglass the orator, Robert Duncanson the artist, and the first woman to ever run for President, Vicky Woodhull, among many others. The exciting part about the story for me was finding out the role Cincinnati and Cincinnatians had in shaping the future of Fisk University, a school located all the way down in Nashville.

Vivian B. Kline was led to write this novel when she made a puzzling addition to her collection of historic picture postcards. When no one in our area was able to identify the group of black performers photographed in
antebellum clothing, Mrs. Kline set out to find the story behind the postcard.
A library in Harlem ultimately identified the group as the first Jubilee Singers who traveled the country--and eventually parts of Europe-- to raise funds for their struggling Fisk University. This post card sent Kline on her remarkable research mission that resulted in Let Freedom Sing: of 19th Century Americans which has the interesting subtitle: An Historical Novel, or Could it Be a Musical? With the author already transforming these historical events into dramatic vignettes, letters, and diary entries and the Fisk Jubilee Singers leaving behind a published repertoire of spirituals, can a musical be far behind? Imagine the costumes!