On August 5, 1977, Robert Rennick interviewed historian Lon Carter Barton at his home in Mayfield for over four hours discussing the history of community names in Graves County and the Jackson Purchase. On this final recording, Barton continues to discuss his weekly radio program “Remember When,” the public library in Mayfield, former Assistant Attorney General M. B. Holifield, and the story of Columbus, Kentucky being once considered as the capital of the United States. Rennick was touring Kentucky researching the place names of villages, towns, and cities throughout the Commonwealth for a forthcoming publication. Below is the transcription of the sixth of six audio cassettes recorded that day.
Barton: … they counted that as a safety and put two points on the board for Tilghman. He was the guy that got tackled and giving Tilghman two points, and he also kicked a field goal which gave Mayfield three points. Well, he scored all five points and we scored … nobody else scored except him. And that went to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and I got it still here …
Rennick: When was this?
Barton: This was in 1925.
Rennick: What does he do now?
Barton: He’s retired. I don’t know what sort of work he did before he retired, I think he was in insurance or real estate or something. They call him Yates. Just little things like that … I enjoyed doing it myself and I gave about a two-week run down on Camp Beauregard down here. A Civil War park, I mean, memorial … Confederate memorial. As I say, I’ve done a little bit on the Jackson Purchase and early settlement period and beginning … There just wasn’t any continuity to it, I didn’t start with the start and start from the beginning and come home with a certain way about it. I just jumped around … first in one way then another. If I can do it, a little different than I like too, I’d get a tape like this one here and make the tapes here at home and make eight or ten of them.
Rennick: Would they let you do that?
Barton: I don’t know, I never did discuss that with them. I would just always go down there every week and that kind of got to be a problem cause the station itself is down here near to Hickory. It was … you know where the tire plant is … General Tire?
Rennick: Yes.
Barton: Well, it’s right in front of the General Tire Plant, except it’s off the road and then up a gravel road and way back up around and up on the hill there. It’s kind of … there’s no big deal to get to it but it’s six- or eight-miles round trip. And then somehow the last trip, for at the time I was to go around there, of course, I was there around wintertime … and it would seem like a conflict would develop or arrive. But actually, for some weird reason, I have a tendency to be able to work a little there when there’s … from a scheduled … then when I do, when I just … like I am in the summer when I’m just free sitting at home, and I can do what I want to do, and sometimes I shall get it done, and I don’t know why that is. Not self-disciplined, I guess. I’ve mentioned on the radio a few times, at the beginning, that I like to hear from people that have information to give – subjects that they liked to …
Rennick: Do you get much response?
Barton: No, I don’t get very much. Now, I’ve had some. But I’ve not gotten, of course, I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t know whether I would get any or not. But I had hoped to get information like this, you know. In fact, I did a program one time on some place names that I thought was very interesting … like Feliciana. So yeah, I made a real feel … I got several calls on Sedalia. They all said the same thing.
Rennick: Sedalia?
Barton: Sedalia. I told them on the radio, I said now, if anybody knows about how Sedalia was named, I wished they’d call me and let me know … I tried to find out, but I haven’t been able to. So, I ain’t been home ten minutes that day and the phone rang … and she said I know how Sedalia was named and she gave me the story and I said thank you. I heard that but I didn’t know if that was it. You look, she said, that’s it. And she was certain … final. Hey, you could do a whole program about that but … and I got three or four calls on top of that. I think that might have been the best response I had. Of course, I don’t know if this radio station covers an awful lot of our county. I don’t know, it’s brand new and just started here …
Rennick: What call letters is it?
Barton: It’s WYMC. And it’s a real good station…
Rennick: Is that FM?
Barton: No, but it’s about a twenty-two-hour regular broadcast station. They run until about 11 o’clock … I think they run until midnight. They come on about six in the morning and run until midnight. There’s fine people down there … and they’ve done a good job. They’ve picked up a lot of these local events that otherwise wouldn’t get covered, I don’t guess, like the softball tournament. Out here at the library, every Thursday night they have a free open-air concert. Not a rock concert there usually but they had one rock concert here at the time but … they mix it up. The last time they had the Fort Campbell Army Band. The first night they had a Dixieland jazz combo from Union City over here. Last night they had, as I said, the band from Fort Campbell plus three musicians that were sort of classicalists from (University of Tennessee at Martin) Martin University in Tennessee … Martin branch over there. Then they did have one group, a rock group, which was a local bunch … sort of like, I don’t know who they were now. But anyway, WMYC puts them in there. They’ve done a lot of local programs and done good. I think that idea of a little local history exposure has been [fun] … but I do believe to have something called “Remember When” might be more accurate cause I’ve told many things that many people don’t remember, except for the football game and recent elections. I did get some response on this, I used my (Mayfield) Monitors, a good bit, to go back a like hundred years ago on what was happening in Mayfield in the 1876. It’s one of my first issues, when it started. And I find some kind of thing I can likely talk about tonight … some of these are public relations … what we call public relations boosts, chamber of commerce type things now. You know, like Mayfield will be the metropolis of the Purchase, the town is full of beautiful girls and clever women, I mean clever men … sociable men, clever girls, beautiful women, or something like that … sort of corny sounding stuff. And then I read a good many of the old advertisements, especially the medicine ads which were rather funny really for here. They just made all sorts of outlandish claims for various kinds of medicines that’ll cure anything … and everything. And I got a good bit of response from those, people seem to enjoy hearing about that. So, if I go back to that – that’s probably what I’ll use pretty much … the (Mayfield) Monitors. They may not want me to come back now. I told them I’d be back on the 15th of June, and this is the 15th of August, and I haven’t been able to get down there yet. I called the station manager here recently and I told him, I said, well, I’m tentative to be back with you all long before now but I just haven’t got around to it. And he laughed, and he said it’ll be alright. Of course, I’m not on their payroll so I’m sure they don’t care.
Rennick: Now, your local library here across the street from the restaurant …
Barton: A right good one…
Rennick: It used to be an old mansion …
Barton: Yeah, the Ed Gardner home. He was the banker here that had claimed in his will to be … A beautiful place. Tomorrow morning you should go over there if you’re going to be around.
Rennick: It doesn’t open until 10:00 though …
Barton: I don’t know what time that …
Rennick: According to the sign outside, I checked.
Barton: Oh well, I see, that you don’t need to get to Fancy Farm until 2:00.
Rennick: Until 2:00? Okay.
Barton: You need to be there at 2:00, that’s when the speeches begin. If you want to eat dinner, you got to get there at 1:00. So, if you can just go on and take one look at the Holifield Room that may be worth running by there.
Rennick: Have they a historical collection?
Barton: Yeah, Holifield. You see this fellow (Marvin Bertie) Holifield, that I mentioned earlier, was the Assistant Attorney General for years and years. No administration can do without him in Frankfort. He was such an outstanding lawyer, that Republicans needed him, Democrats needed him of all kinds. You know, the [Chairman] Democrats, the anti-[Chairman] Democrats. So, this Holifield lived here in about 1929 or 1930, sometime in there, and he stayed in Frankfort until he died although he always claimed this as his home, and he comes back here to vote and [lock] down to vacation. He was a wonderful old fellow. And he came from that area near … that town, or community, called Holifield. I’m sure he must have.
Rennick: It wasn’t named for him, was it?
Barton: No. His grandfather was one the early settlers, and I think that his name was Tom Holifield. I think it was Tom B., or something, Holifield. But anyway, he just had a mania about books – he just collected books like nobody’s business. His special interest was the Confederacy. His father was a Confederate soldier. He was very much interested in the Civil War. He was very much interested in Kentucky history. His interests though, were not just all together political, he was a very devote Baptist Sunday school teacher. He was interested in religion. He had a fair interest in science, especially astronomy, and he of course, had an outstanding collection of law books. Well, when he died, he left his law books to the University of Kentucky, and he left all of his other books to Mayfield. So, they have a room in the library on the second floor called the Holifield Room that contains all these books. I don’t think they ever bothered … I don’t think they ever cataloged them. But any book that deals with Kentucky and the Civil War, that I guess was published from 1915 or 1916, along in there, and the time General Holifield died – he had in that collection.
Rennick: When did he die?
Barton: He died in 19, he died about 19 and 57, 6 or 7, along in there. And he remained very alert right until the end of his life. He was a wonderful old fellow. He argued cases in the Supreme Court on behalf of the State, whenever the State had a theoretical encounter with the Supreme Court over anything. They always selected him to go to Washington to deliver the State’s position. He was the leader of the Attorney’s General in the South that brought about the Supreme Court ruling, I don’t … I should know the name of it and the year. Anyway, it was the ruling of the Supreme Court which ended that discriminatory freight rate system that used to prevail where a company in the North would send its goods to a market, that was also in a given geographical area, say the Midwest or far west, for less than the cost for them to send that same product a much shorter distance geographically across the Ohio River. It seems that the Ohio was the boundary line of the so-called northern market and southern market. Of course, for a long time that was an impediment to southern development of raw materials and manufactured goods to where it was more of a financial burden on the producer, or the supplier, or the manufacturer in the North to trade with the South then it was to trade west or east or anywhere else. So, Mr. Holifield told me one time about this case, and I don’t remember enough about it to, you know … The jest of it was that they got together and presented it as a violation of the 14th Amendment in the equal justice section and pleaded it as an example of discrimination by the railroad companies. Then a sort of a holdback on southern economic growth and all that, this is in the third or maybe fourth [section], and they won their case, and the freight rates were leveled and equalized. I’m sure that’s dinner… Besides such things as that, he delighted in doing … he had a legalistic mind that would not stop. He was very [handed] at details. I wrote him one time and asked him a simple question that he could of have answered back on a card, or a postcard, and said yes or no. And he wrote me about four pages, single spaced, typed letter telling me the background to this thing, how it all came about, and what he thought about it. I said was it true, or is it true, that Columbus was at one time considered as a possible place to put the United States capital. I always heard this – this is folklore, but I never had seen votes in Congress on it or anything resembling that, you know. Well, I went to Holifield, we call him General, because he was the Assistant Attorney General, and for all practical purposes he ran the office, I think. General Holifield could have written back yes or no and that would have ended it, but he wrote me a four-page letter, single space typed, wrote it himself, and he went all the way back to the charter of the queen for the colony of Virginia and lord I was … He explored it from the beginning and the upshot of it was that he didn’t think there was anything to it. He supported what he thought with all this [in a] legal paragraph, you know.
Rennick: Was that letter ever published?
Barton: No. I got it still, but I never did publish it.
Rennick: Yeah, I’d like to see it.
Barton: Yeah, I would like for you to see it, but if I can find it. I’ve got it in the room right above here … there must … You couldn’t find it unless it’s in the middle of the room. I’ve got papers and boxes and all kinds of documents, letters, and everything else up there. At some time, I’ll have to go up there and sort out a lot of that stuff.
Rennick: Now, there was a student a few years ago from UK who did a thesis …
Barton: Is that right?
Rennick: Well, let’s see. History … the answer’s someplace … on this very thing.
Barton: Oh, is that right? How about that. Well, as I say …
Rennick: Back in the …
Barton: The thought was firmly entrenched on me at one time that after the capital had been burned during the War of 1812 and after the post-war period resulted in considerable expansion of Kentucky, that was when the Jackson Purchase was made in 1818, that one of the visionaries of that day thought that moving the capital inland to the Mississippi River would be a fine thing to do. And according to the stories that they … I guess … and what he did … settled on the town of Columbus. Maybe he even gave it that name because of this potential future development as a national capital and all that sort of thing. Well, General Holifield didn’t think much of that … he knew about it of course, and he had studied and read about it. He had researched it, as I say, he could have just said the law and end it, but the letter was long, long, long, long … I’ll get that letter though and copy it and send it, because I still think I know about where it is. I don’t know the exact box but it’s in one of them. I know it’s one of them upstairs, a whole box. Well, you just go out there and go on and see the whole Holifield collection. I believe they keep it locked. You’ll have to ask a librarian to take you up there, and the books aren’t circulated. But there are all kinds of references to the Civil War, to the Confederacy, to the Reconstruction, and just [stuff] on the South in general. Plus, these religious books – plus these scientific books, but not as many, I guess his interest didn’t run quite as deep in this direction … He did have several that are on the physical sciences. And the thing that impresses me about the books, as much as anything else, is that they were obviously read. It wasn’t for stage props, or for looking at, or to fill and mix in the wall, or something. And he was … nearly all of them … he had written down in the margins … notes that… and he underlined passage after passage and underlined whole pages. And you know it showed that he had been there, that he had read this book and read it [completely]. Otherwise, you know, there are people that are a little bit bibliophilic but just like to collect books. And they like to put them on their shelf, so people get the impression that they’re fairly educated and literate, but really they haven’t read half of them. For Mr. Holifield, I don’t know where he kept them in his house. I doubt he kept them in a prominent place, for that matter. But he had read them, he knew what he read. Oh, he was a great lawyer.
Rennick: Now at that library, do they have a vertical file or manuscript files on local history?
Barton: Not a very good one. They do have a vertical file and there are some [ruffles] …
Rennick: Clippings and all …
Barton: There are references in there, but I don’t think they’ve done much on keeping it current. Some of the stuff they’ve got is pretty old, I think. Newspaper clippings and things like that, but they do have some. In the Holifield Room there are scrapbooks which the UDC (United Daughters of the Confederacy) here made of some of the people in the UDC … made back, well from, the late 1960s and on back. And after they set this room up there, they decided there wasn’t any better place to put their scrapbooks than up there, because he was such a great Confederate, and all this sort of thing. So, there are some scrapbooks that are basically Civil War stuff. Some of the things in the scrapbooks besides … some, even some [Civil War survivor] lists, Babe Ruth and some of the sports personalities of the 1920s and 30s and there in there. See these scrapbooks go way on back, I don’t know how far they … they run up to the 1960s, but they run back to about the 1920s.
Rennick: They’re put out by the UDC?
Barton: Yeah, the UDC ladies here clip this stuff and made these scrapbooks year after year after year. The UDC been around a lot here and most of the people that were in it died. It … they became pretty much unable to go to the meetings and decided to put the scrapbooks in the library and they decided the Holifield Room would be the likely place to put it. So, they got them all up there. So, I wish you could go by and take a quick look at it.
Rennick: I could actually. So, let me see, the best time to get to …
Barton: Fancy Farm…
Rennick: Would be … say 1:00?
Barton: Well, are you going to have dinner out there? If you want to eat dinner, the best time to get there would be around one o’clock. That is to be in line at one o’clock. You have to get to the picnic grounds by 12:30, so you can get a place to park and line up and all that.
Rennick: So, how long does it take to get there?
Barton: Oh, about ten minutes … maybe fifteen. Tomorrow might be a little slower driving for you, but it’s only ten miles out here. It’s straight-out Highway 80 – left, straight out. I think I’ll try to get out there tomorrow afternoon for the speeches … to see who’s speaking … maybe if everything works out, but I don’t think I’ll get out there to eat. They did have a tremendous picnic, I mean barbeque. You can just eat, eat, eat.
Rennick: I’ll stop by.
Barton: Four dollars will buy you a pig and it’s the best one you’ll ever eat … the [links], everything is made and it’s good too … often good.
Rennick: Where do the proceeds go?
Barton: To the church, it’s a church picnic. Everything is put on by the church and everything comes back to the church. Well, I guess they have some expenses too, I don’t reckon … I’m sure all these political speakers go on without any … they don’t charge anything, in other words. I guess they have to pay or buy the meat. They have to pay … probably have to pay some of the cooks, or whether they’re all local folks or whether they’re … I think there are one or two professional barbequers. You going?
Rennick: I tell you what, let me leave these lists with you. I have copies on me.
Barton: Okay. Now, I’ll try to get these out like with the others and if you can … I imagine that it would be September.
Rennick: The next meeting …
Barton: The members, I mean, the next meeting will be in September.