Firefighter's Funeral

Tuesday afternoon I walked out of Bakery Square in Butchertown to find all Washington Street lined with fire trucks and police cars, all with lights flashing. Thinking some disaster had just occurred, I started taking pictures and tried to find out what was going on. As it turned out, I ran into a friend who's with the Florence, KY police department and he explained that a memorial service was taking place at St. Joseph Catholic Church for a well-loved firefighter, and they were giving him the full send-off in style.

Hobbs Chapel Facade

Like the Heigold Facade, the Hobbs Chapel facade is the remaining front entrance to a building that no longer exists. The original church was built on this site in Anchorage in 1876, and destroyed by a fire in 1954.


Note the Tudor Roses on the front entry gateposts.



Somewhere along the way, someone decided to rescue the abandoned remains of the church and rehabilitate it. The area is now a public park, and a charmingly spooky one at that.


It would appear that the base of this birdbath is actually a piece of debris salvaged from the church.



The sign says "Hobbs Chapel and Cemetery", and I'd always wondered where the heck the graves are. I just did a Google search, and lo and behold, the cemetery is in the woods further back behind the park area, about 300 yards. Guess now I gotta go back and check that out too.

Haunted Christian Science Church?

There's a ghost story that perenially makes the rounds of, well, those who pass along ghost stories, regarding a haunting on the steps of Louisville's magnificent First Church of Christ, Scientist at 1305 South Third Street.

As the legend goes, a woman in 1918 paced around the front steps of the church, which was the prearranged place where she was to meet her husband. When her husband, who was a soldier stationed at nearby Camp Taylor, never arrived, she took it as a sign that he no longer cared for her.

Okay. That's the first part, and there's something of a leap on logic, rather like a poorly-constructed plot, between that and the next bit: unbeknownst to the woman, her husband had actually died of Spanish Flu, and then she herself died of that very same disease a week later.

Furthermore, the story is sometimes embroidered with the factoid that the woman and her soldier boy were actually not married, and that they had made secret plans to elope to Chicago that very night. But if they were secret plans, and they both died, how did anyone know this and how did that info become part of the story?

And, of course, the tale has the inevitable punchline that even to this day, late at night when the moon is just right, you can sometimes see her ghost still pacing around the steps of the Christian Science church. Yada yada yada.

(I'm pretty sure David Dominé deals with the subject in great detail, and probably much more accurately than the specious and sketchy online accounts I've perused, but I've misplaced my copy. When I find it, and if better data is to be gleaned, I'll update this post.)

I wonder what the parishioners of the First Church of Christ Scientist must think about all this. Apparently some local "ghost tours" take people by the church so they can gawk and hear the hearsay and say "golly, Martha, sure am spooky."

I'm not exactly certain what the Christian Science position is regarding ghosts, but I do know they don't believe in Heaven per se, at least not in the conventionally understood manner. (On the other hand, the term "Holy Ghost" does appear in their writings often.) The faith's founder, Mary Baker Eddy, stated in her autobiography that from the age of eight, she began hearing disembodied voices.

Often confused with The Church of Scientology, the Christian Science religion was formed in February 1866, after Eddy had a severe fall which caused a major spinal injury. According to her own account, Eddy unexpectedly made a full recovery after reading Matthew 9:2. She subsequently claimed to have helped to heal others via Bible Study, and also to have taught others in the precise way to do it most effectively. By 1875, this belief system was fully formed and expressed in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.

Today, Christian Science reading rooms can be found all over the world, and most people have come to look at their newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, as one of the best sources of journalism available.

The Christian Scientist radio program can be heard every Sunday in Louisville at 8:00-8:30am on WAVG-AM 1450, and 9:00-9:30am on WKJK-AM 1080.

Christian Country Cowboy Church

Whizzing down 146 in Oldham County this morning, a sign caught my eye that I'd never noticed before. Its words still echoed in my head as I drove on - "Cowboy Church". Did it really say that? Cowboy Church? Awesome.

I turned around immediately and went back.

The sign is at the top of a gravel road that branches out in several different directions, including a local American Legion hall and various buildings related to the Oldham County Fairgrounds. I didn't see any building that had a "Cowboy Church" sign on it, but I'm hoping it's this barn with horse murals painted on it.




When I got home, I Googled it. I found out that the CCCC is, like apparently everyone in the Universe except me, on Facebook. I also discovered that there's a huge nationwide network of these Cowboy Churches, which originated in Texas. According to Wikipedia:

"Cowboy churches are local Christian churches within the cowboy culture that are distinctively Western heritage in character. A typical cowboy church may meet in a rural setting in a barn, metal building, arena, sale barn, or old western building, have its own rodeo arena, and a country gospel band. Baptisms are generally done in a cattle tank. The sermons are usually short and simple. Some cowboy churches have covered arenas where rodeo events such as bull riding, team roping, ranch sorting, team penning and equestrian events are held on weeknights."

As a fan of anything rustic and retro in American culture, and especially anything that glorifies a frontier spirit in today's homogenous nutrasweet styrofoam culture, I wholeheartedly approve and endorse the Cowboy Church concept. Let me go put on my big purple Hawkshaw Hawkins outfit and I'll see you in church this Sunday.

Knob Creek Church of Christ

For our purposes here, the Knob Creek Church of Christ in Graves County has three key points of interest going for it:

For one, it's located in Dukedom, Kentucky, which I've always thought is one of the greatest Kentucky place names. It's not a word that comes up in casual conversation unless you're an ardent anglophile or you're singing Gene Chandler's "Duke of Earl". Only by calling it "Fiefdom" could the community's founder have made a wackier move.

The church is historically important for being the first Restoration Movement church to use the name "Church of Christ" (even though Barton W. Stone's church is sometimes miscredited with this honor.)

But what's truly noteworthy to me about this place is the fact that the building itself literally straddles the KY-TN state border, and the dividing line runs between the pulpit and the pews. Therefore, the minister is delivering his sermons in Kentucky but his congregation is in Tennessee!

St. Mary’s Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption

Not to be confused with Louisville's Cathedral of the Assumption, this is a Catholic Basilica located in Covington. The structure, laden with gargoyles, is one of our state's most amazing religious and architectural treasures.

The cathedral project was begun in 1984 by the Diocese of Covington's Bishop Camillus Paul Maes. Oddly, the construction was terminated in 1915, and remains incomplete and unfinished to this day. It is one of only 35 minor basilicas in the United States - Pope Pius XII elevated St. Mary's Cathedral to the rank of Minor Basilica on December 8, 1953. (There are only four Major Basilicas, all of which are in Rome.)

The interior of the cathedral contains murals by the great Kentucky artist Frank Duveneck, born in Covington.


Flickr user ucb411 has some truly amazing photos of the Basilica, apparently done in time-lapse so that the clouds seem to be moving, and at dusk for heightened contrast with the evening lighting. An example is below; click here to see more!

Cathedral of the Assumption

I was up on the 6th floor of the Republic Building in downtown Louisville the other day, and took a few shots of the adjacent Cathedral of the Assumption from a hallway window.



The Cathedral was nearly destroyed during the Bloody Monday Riots of 1855. George D. Prentice, the openly racist and bigoted editor of the Louisville Journal (which later merged with the Louisville Morning Courier to form the Courier-Journal of today) used his paper to foment inflammatory anti-Catholic, anti-Irish and anti-German sentiments, and accused these groups of fixing elections. According to Wikipedia:

The rioters, led by Know-Nothing political figures who bolstered their ranks with paid thugs brought to Louisville for the express purpose of causing trouble, targeted Irish Catholics and Germans (primarily Catholics but Protestants and even German Jews were also caught up in the melee — the key being that they were German). By the time it was over, more than one-hundred businesses, private homes and tenements had been vandalized, looted and/or burned, including a block long row of houses known as Quinn's Row. Conservative estimates place the death toll at 22, while more realistic estimates, including those of Bishop Martin Spalding of Louisville, placed the death toll at well over 100 with entire families consumed in the fires. Citizens were dragged from their homes, attacked on the streets and in their place of work. Weapons, arms and later bodies of the dead, were stored in Louisville Metro Hall (the old Jefferson County Courthouse, now the Mayor’s Office), a Know-Nothing stronghold at the time. Sporadic violence and attacks had occurred in the year and months leading up to August 6 and continued for some time afterward...

Only by Louisville Mayor John Barbee's intervention — himself a Know-Nothing — was the bloodshed and property destruction brought to an end, including his personal intervention that saved two Catholic churches, the new German parish of St. Martin of Tours and the Cathedral of the Assumption from destruction by the mob. No one was ever prosecuted in connection with the riots. The legitimately elected Mayor of Louisville, James S. Speed, had been ousted in June by a court order. Speed, who upon his marriage, had converted to Catholicism, would leave Louisville for Chicago never to return.

The riots had a profound impact on immigration to Louisville, causing literally more than ten thousand citizens to pack and leave for good, most to St. Louis, Chicago and Milwaukee, and a large group who left in 1856 for Prairie City, Kansas).

Since 1988, the Cathedral has been undergoing extensive renovation, not only restoring it to its antebellum glory, but making it even more majestic than ever. The grand re-opening of the Cathedral of the Assumption was celebrated in 1994, with a completely renovated Cathedral space, and further improvements are still ongoing. You can check out an interesting audio tour of the building on their website.

They also operate the School of Spiritual Growth, which periodically deliver lectures on various topics of interest to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. This very evening, in fact, they're holding one entitled "What Are We Learning About God From Our Universe?" at 7pm in the Cathedral Undercroft for a $5 fee.


I'm increasingly interested in taking pictures from windows and rooftops of tall buildings and structures, getting seldom-seen views - especially using the zoom lens to catch high-up architectural details that are virtually invisible from the street. I'll use the high views tag to mark these in the future. Below's another shot from the same Republic Building window, but pointed down at 5th street.

St. Patrick's, Taylor Mill, 1885

Found this lovely old photo, circa 1885, of St. Patrick Church located in Taylor Mill, KY (just outside of Covington). Submitted to Rootsweb via Mary Hammill.