The Sulphur Well Correspondent

This is a local history of a small farming community, Sulphur Well, in Kentucky seen through the eyes of a correspondent to the Jessamine Journal from 1887 to 1905.  It contains the ancestry of the Miller and Hendren families and their close relatives in that community, and their burial sites.  It also describes travel and westward migration of Kentucky families to Oklahoma around the turn of the 20th Century, and how politics, religion, and education worked in a small farming community.  Correspondents for local newspapers filled a need to tie individuals to their own and other communities.  In this time people traveled more, read more, wrote more, and thought more than most people today would believe. The more isolated communities and individuals were, the greater their need to connect with others outside those areas.  Village correspondents met that need by personalizing local events, telling others of residents’ visiting relatives, attending expositions, working, suffering hardships, enjoying milestones such as weddings and births, as well as grieving over family tragedies.  People in other communities, and other states were interested in these events.

This story covers the last part of the nineteenth century, beginning in 1877, and ending in the twentieth century, about 1905 (with epilogue, 1921).  This was a time of incredible change, a time when the Sulphur Well correspondent wrote about events of this time. The United States was a relatively young, growing and developing country.  There was a rapid population growth, instigated by European migration from 1850 to 1920.  There were still free western lands, and many opportunities for people to move west.  Technology led to great changes in the development of the country.  Steam power was by the 1870’s very important for the industrial development in the east.  Later electrical power emerged.  Petroleum was found at Titusville in the 1850's, and kerosene provided the fuel for the coal-oil lamp.  Gas became important in 1880 when it was discovered to be a by-product of coke, and thus became the fuel for the first central lighting system.

The people of Kentucky, Jessamine County, and Sulphur Well, were deeply involved in race relations, politics and religion.  The Civil War had been over only twelve years when the journal begins.  Many people who served in the war were alive and active in society, as well as many African Americans who had been slaves.  The political parties were shaped by the Civil War and the Reconstruction period.  Religion was a major building block in society.  The journal dictates ways of thinking about extra-marital relations, use of alcohol, working on Sundays, and relations among people of different races and genders.  In other words, suffrage, prohibition, "blue laws", and racial attitudes are interrelated with religion and politics, and are reflected in everyday living.

Ray Miller Ware Ph.D., is a retired professor of Economics and Business at Transylvania University, Lexington Kentucky