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I am willing to guarantee you have spent at least half an hour of life doing the activity that I have commanded you to undertake in the title of this post. The opportunity has invariably presented itself to almost everyone who has received any type of education, whether at a local museum, writing a paper, or through a book in your local library. However, I am also willing to guarantee that unless you are a distinguished historian of Kentucky history like McConnell Center Fellow John Kleber, author of the Kentucky Encyclopedia, you have not spent enough time doing so. Spurred by a project for a class on Urban Studies this semester, I was recently thrust into the complexities of the surprisingly dramatic backstories of the sleepy land that I was raised in. Yet, even after combing through hours of websites, and even purchasing a few books at a local drugstore, I have hardly broken the surface of the stories of my native county. Regardless, in hopes of inspiring you to take the time to start researching the setting of your own backstory, I would like to list some of the chapters of the history of Logan County, the setting of mine.
I will limit myself to one chapter for each year I have called Logan County home:
1. Against the common myth of Kentucky as uninhabited hunting grounds, early French explorers noted several expansive Mississippian Native American mound complexes located on the banks of the Muddy River in what would become Logan County, they are now all lost or destroyed.
2. In 1783, on the run from the Spanish colonial government, prominent counterfeiter Philip Alston founded a settlement on the banks of the Red River in what would become Logan County, producing the bulk of the coinage used on the American western frontier from a small fort called Alston’s station. Later on, he fled north to a creek less than a mile away from my house before escaping the British authorities further west.
3. Logan County, at its founding in 1792, encompassed all of the land between the Barren and Mississippi River, or almost one-third of Kentucky. From this land, 28 counties were later carved.
4. Russellville was home to Presley O’Bannon, the first man to raise an American flag on foreign soil during war times as a Lieutenant in the Barbary Wars.
5. On the banks of the same Red River, before his Presidency, President Andrew Jackson shot and killed a man in a duel. Jackson travelled here as duelling was illegal in Tennessee, and was legal in Logan County, Kentucky.
6. At the Red River Meeting House, once again on the same river, the Second Great Awakening drew its first breaths in the Revival of 1800. The Awakening remains one of the most important religious movements in American history. The Gasper and Muddy River congregations were also part of this Awakening.
7. In South Union, a few miles away from my house, a Shaker Village stands as a museum to the utopian ideas which drove the religious radicals to move to Logan County to pursue. The dorms and chapels they resided in, and gained their famous denotation from, are empty in testament to their chastity.
8. Russellville, the county seat of Logan County, and the town I first lived in, was the location of the first newspaper to report the death of Merriwether Lewis on the famous Lewis and Clark expedition west.
9. Logan County is one of the world’s largest producers of Tobacco, and in the early 1900s was part of the bloody Black Patch Tobacco Wars, which was part of the start of the Antitrust movement, and was also used as part of the cover by the Ku Klux Klan to undertake dozens of racially motivated lynchings in Logan County over the course of decades.
10. John J. Critttenden, the prominent Governor, Senator, and Attorney General, who famously led efforts to avert the Civil War, began his legal career in Logan County.
11. Crittenden had two sons in Russellville, both of who went on to serve as generals during the Civil War, but for different sides.
12. At the start of the Civil War, representatives from most Kentucky counties met in Russellville to declare a provisional Confederate government in Kentucky, and declared Kentucky’s secession from the union, forming a counter-government against the pro-neutrality Frankfort government.
13. Following the loss of the South in the Civil War, famous outlaw, robber, and Confederate sympathizer Jessie James and his brothers robbed the Southern Deposit Bank in Russellville.
14. As part of reconstruction from the Civil War, the Freedmen’s Bureau sought to build a school for newly freed Black folks in Auburn, my hometown. However, these efforts were halted by an armed white mob.
15. Logan County's schools remained legally segregated until 1965, but in reality remain segregated to this day, with a city and county school system that ensures the separation of students of color and white students, well into the 21st century. Several statistics point to Logan County as one of the most segregated counties outside of the urban centers of Jefferson, Fayette, and Warren counties.
16. Attending the segregated school of Russellville, Knob City High School, Alice Allison Dunnigan went on to become the first Black woman admitted to the press corps of both the White House and Congress. She later advised then-candidate John F. Kennedy during his successful 1960 presidential campaign on Civil Rights matters, helping to push him to the decision to support the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King Jr.
17. Terrence Willcut, now serving as a safety director at NASA, was born in Logan County. He served as an astronaut on four Space Shuttle missions.
18. Logan County was home to countless governors and legislators of both Kentucky and other states, it was the birthplace of dozens of Olympians, NBA players, NFL players, and other prominent athletes.
19. So, so, so much more history has been, and awaits discovery.
You may think you already know everything there is to know about where you are from. If this is the case, you simply have not looked deep enough yet. Research your hometown, your state, your region, your continent, whatever you think of as home. Perhaps even pieces of your home region no one before you have found remain to be discovered. But in manuscripts retrieved from a library in Arkansas, or inside a dirty volume on a table in a local coffee shop, the chapters, people, places, and events are waiting to change your perspective on the place that raised you. If you’ve been waiting for a sign, this is it, go research your homeland.
The working title for this post was “Google Your Homeland”, which was the exact call to action of the piece. However, for fear of copyright infringement, and out of respect for the almighty technology barons of Silicon Valley, I have chosen a less colloquial title. Please, however, feel free to use Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or any other informal research agent to assist your quest. Books are good too though! Happy Trails!
Tanner Morrow is a McConnell Scholar in the class od 2023. He is studying Asian studies, political science, Chinese, and Russian at the University of Louisville.