Localocracy

My new column for KyForward, Jeffrey Scott Holland's Kentucky, can be found every Friday on their Localocracy section (look for it in the upper right corner of their index page). The first entry is a bit about the Hunt-Morgan House and some of the folks who have dwelt there.

Naked Civil War Battle

An interesting historical anecdote about a nude combat skirmish involving John Hunt Morgan, from the Washington Times:

"The Union pickets didn't know what to think of soldiers fighting as naked as jaybirds," Confederate Lt. Bennett H. Young wrote in an unusual report to his superiors about a skirmish between Union and Confederate forces on the Cumberland River in western Kentucky on July 2, 1863.

In late June, Morgan's men scouted the rain-swollen Cumberland River marking the border between Tennessee and Kentucky. The normally placid river was now half a mile wide, choked with floating logs and other storm runoff. Anxious to get his raid on the road, Morgan began crossing his men on July 2 when the river was still overflowing its banks. He had more than 2,500 with him, 1,000 more than his orders authorized.

The impetuous Morgan should have waited for the swirling river to fall, as it was an impediment to keeping his men together, but because of the flood conditions, the Federals on the Kentucky side had relaxed their patrols. The Federals believed no one would try such a dangerous crossing.

Morgan's men carefully wrapped their cap-and-ball weapons and paper cartridges in rubber blankets and tossed them into make-shift rafts and leaky boats. Many forgot modesty, stripping off their clothes to keep them dry. They jumped into the river, literally swimming bareback or holding onto their horses' tails.

It is hard to hide 2,500 men, scores of wagons and hundreds of mules swimming a river. Union patrols discovered the crossing and rushed to the bank to start shooting at the men in the boats that they could see. What they could not see was that hundreds of Confederates had already landed and were now hidden from view by the bank's slope and trees.

Nineteen-year-old Lt. Bennett Young of Morgan's command, who would gain fame the following year for leading a raid on St. Albans, Vt., remembered: "Those who had clothing on rushed ashore into line. Those who swam with horses, unwilling to be laggard, not halting to dress, seized their cartridge boxes and guns and dashed upon the enemy. The strange sight of naked men engaging in combat amazed the enemy."

The Testicles of Black Bess

John Hunt Morgan (he of the Hunt-Morgan House) is honored for his Civil War service with an ostentatious statue in downtown Lexington (Which is rather odd, since he fought for the Confederacy). Created by Italian sculptor Pompeo Coppini, it depicts the General atop his beloved horse, Black Bess.

As you might surmise from her name, Black Bess was female. Yet Coppini, for reasons opaque to me, declared that it would be more heroic if Morgan was astride a stallion instead of a mare - and so took the extreme artistic license of giving Black Bess prominent testicles.

James Loewen, in his book Lies Across America, wrote about the quaint tradition among UK frat-boys to paint Black Bess' testicles blue and white, and relayed an old, clunkily-written anonymous poem passed along as local folklore:

So darkness comes to Bluegrass men —
Like darkness o'er them falls —
For well we know gentlemen should show
Respect for a lady's balls.

Black Bess was probably named after the English highwayman Dick Turpin's horse, even though some say that Black Bess was strictly fictional, invented for William Harrison Ainsworth's novel 1834 Rookwood and pulp fiction like Black Bess or the Knight of the Road, published in 254 weekly installments beginning in 1867.

The Hunt-Morgan House

Lexington's haunted Hunt Morgan House, a.k.a. "Hopemont", is at 201 N. Mill Street, the corner of N. Mill and W. Second.


It was built in 1814 by millionaire John Wesley Hunt,who died of Cholera in 1849 and left it to his daughter Henrietta and her husband Calvin. Their son John Hunt Morgan, went on to become a noted Brigadier General in the Civil War. He was killed in Greeneville, TN, shot in the back by Union soldiers.

John Hunt Morgan's nephew, geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan, was born here in 1866 and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933. (He is, incidentally, the only Kentuckian so far to have won the Nobel Prize.)




Supposedly, the house is haunted by John Wesley Hunt himself (who has been allegedly sighted walking the halls), and by Mammy Bouviette James, the nursemaid of John Hunt Morgan's children. There are various online reports of her apparition being seen on the third floor, where the nursery had been located.