Portrayed by
Angela Bartley
Louisville, KY 40205
502/387-6680
asbartley@insightbb.com

Mary Todd Lincoln
First Lady from Lexington
1818—1882

     Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln were both Kentuckians, but their backgrounds were vastly different. In contrast to Abe’s hardscrabble farm upbringing, Mary was the privileged daughter of the prominent Lexington businessman and politician Robert Todd. Mary gained an early love of politics from talking with Henry Clay and other statesmen who visited the Todd home. After completing a very fine education, she moved to Springfield, Illinois to live with her sister, who was married to a former governor of Illinois. At one of her sister’s parties, Mary Todd met the young lawyer and politician Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was not the most polished of her suitors, but she astutely judged him to have the greatest political potential. They were married in November 1842.
     Reportedly stormy at times, the Lincolns’ marriage knew triumph (the presidency), controversy (Mary’s costly redecoration of the White House, for one), and tragedy (the deaths of three sons and Lincoln’s assassination). Struggling with financial problems and poor health, Mary Todd Lincoln spent the final years of her life in France, returning home shortly before her death.

Portrayed by
Angela Bartley
Louisville, KY 40205
502/387-6680
asbartley@insightbb.com

Rose Will Monroe
Rosie the Riveter
1920—1997

Rosie the Riveter was World War II's best-known female icon, the home front equivalent of GI Joe. Rosie was the creation of songwriters and artists, but eventually found flesh-and-blood embodiment in actual riveters named Rose. One of them, a native of Pulaski County, Kentucky, was Rose Will Monroe, who portrayed Rosie on film.
     Monroe was a young widow with two children when she joined the thousands of Kentuckians who left their rural homes during World War II and headed north in search of good-paying defense jobs. She was working as a riveter at the Willow Run bomber factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan when actor Walter Pidgeon arrived to make a film promoting war bonds. He asked Monroe to appear in his film. Capable and attractive, Monroe embodied the mythical Rosie the Riveter's can-do spirit. She also portrayed Rosie in a commercial film, but her moment of fame did not lead to a career in show business. She lived out her life in the Louisville area as an entrepreneur.
     Optional Equipment Note: LCD projector and screen requested, but not necessary.

Portrayed by
Haley S Bowling
P. O. Box 30
McKee, KY 40447
606/627-1047
haleybowling@yahoo.com

Anna Mac Clarke
Military Pioneer
1919—1944

Anna Mac Clarke didn't put up with second-class treatment from anybody, including the U.S. Army. A native of Lawrenceburg, Clarke graduated from Kentucky State College in 1941. Rejecting domestic work—the only job a black college graduate could get in Lawrenceburg in those days—she left Kentucky to work at a Girl Scout Camp in New York state.
     After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Clarke volunteered for the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (renamed Women's Army Corps in 1943). During officer's training in Iowa, she led the successful opposition to a proposal to segregate black soldiers into their own regiment. At Douglas Army Airfield in Arizona, Lieutenant Clarke made history when she became the first black WAC officer to command a white unit. And she made national news after her protest against segregated seating in the base theater convinced the commanding officer to ban segregation on the base. Just a few weeks later, Clarke died of complications from a ruptured appendix. She was 24.

Portrayed by
Erma J Bush
Scheduling contact: Juanita White
10203 Cambrie Court
Louisville, KY 40241
502/327-7885

Miss Dinnie Thompson
No Ordinary Woman
1857—1939

  In a way, Miss Dinnie Thompson was ordinary, a workaday person who was never rich or famous. But, as a representative of all those black Kentucky women who worked to make a living in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries despite prejudice and hardship, she is anything but ordinary. Dinnie was born a slave in the household of a member of Louisville's renowned Speed family. Her mother was a freedom-loving woman who hid Dinnie away on several attempts to escape across the Ohio River. They were caught every time.
     After emancipation in 1865, Miss Dinnie worked for almost thirty years as a laundress. Then, for twenty-six years, she was a maid at Louisville's Neighborhood House, which helped European immigrants adapt to American life. There she became friends with a young social worker named Elizabeth Wilson. Through their friendship, Miss Dinnie Thompson's extraordinary story has been preserved as a testimony to the memory of thousands of "ordinary" women like her.

Portrayed by
Erma Bush
Scheduling contact: Juanita White
10203 Cambrie Court
Louisville, KY 40241
502/327-7885

Margaret Garner
Death before Slavery
c. 1833—1858

  Margaret Garner was a Kentucky slave who ran away and got caught—a common story. We remember Garner because she was the runaway who killed one of her own children rather than see the child returned to slavery. The story began in January 1856 when seventeen northern Kentucky slaves made a mass escape across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, where they took refuge in the house of Elijah Kite, a former slave who had once been their neighbor. Before Garner and her family—husband Robert and four children—could leave to head farther north, the slave owners and several deputies surrounded the Kite house. After a gun battle, the slaves were subdued, but not before Margaret had cut her daughter Mary’s throat and tried to kill her other children. She later said she wanted to end their suffering rather than have them “taken back to slavery and be murdered by piece meal.” The case drew national attention. Instead of being tried in Ohio, Garner was sent to a Covington jail and later sold down the river. She died in Mississippi.

Portrayed by
L. Henry Dowell
329 Biloxi Drive
Nicholasville, KY 40356
859/553-2059
lhenryd@yahoo.com

Dr. Ephraim McDowell
Frontier Surgeon
1771—1830

On Christmas Day 1809, a thousand miles away from the nearest hospital and thirty-five years before the discovery of anesthesia, Dr. Ephraim McDowell removed a 22-pound ovarian tumor from the abdomen of a 46-year-old woman. It was the world’s first ovariotomy, and it eventually brought McDowell worldwide acclaim as the Father of Abdominal Surgery. The patient, Jane Todd Crawford, had ridden three days on horseback to reach McDowell’s home in Danville, Kentucky, to have the operation. The medical authorities of the day were convinced that opening the abdomen meant certain death, so McDowell was far from sure that the surgery would succeed. He told Crawford he would proceed only if she “thought herself prepared to die.” She said she was ready, but they needn’t have worried. She came through with flying colors and in less than a month was on the way home to Green County. She lived another 32 years. Dr. McDowell’s boldness had saved Crawford’s life, and paved the way for surgeries that have since saved untold numbers of lives.

Portrayed by
Mel Hankla
106 Bunny Trail
Jamestown, KY 42629
270/343-3081
melhankla@kentuckylongrifles.com
http://americanhistoricservices.com

George Rogers Clark
Revolutionary War Hero
1752-1818

George Rogers Clark, a tall, talented Virginian,
came to Kentucky as a surveyor, but it was as a military leader during the Revolutionary War that he made his mark. In 1777 Clark won approval from Virginia governor Patrick Henry (Kentucky was then a Virginia county) for a secret mission to attack British posts north of the Ohio River. Clark’s party—175 soldiers and a small band of settlers—set up camp on Corn Island near the falls of the Ohio River in May 1778. The next month Clark launched a brilliant campaign into present-day Illinois and Indiana, defeating the British and their Indian allies and securing the Northwest Territory for the young United States. 
     Meanwhile, the settlers Clark had brought along moved from Corn Island to the Kentucky shore, founding the city of Louisville in late 1778. His war exploits marked the peak of Clark’s career. Plagued by debts, drinking and poor health, he spent his later years living in Louisville. Overshadowed by his brother William, of Lewis and Clark fame, he never got the credit he thought he had earned.
     For a short preview of Hankla's presentations visit his website at http://www.kentuckylongrifles.com.

Portrayed by
Mel Hankla
106 Bunny Trail
Jamestown, KY 42629
270/343-3081
melhankla@kentuckylongrifles.com
http://www.kentuckylongrifles.com

Simon Kenton
Frontiersman
1755—1836

Thinking he had killed another boy in a fight over a girl, Simon Kenton fled west from Virginia at age 16. He was wrong—he had only knocked his rival unconscious—but the incident launched him on a life of high adventure. By the time he was 20, Kenton had fetched up on the Kentucky shore of the Ohio River in what is now Mason County. From there, he proceeded to carve out a remarkable career as an explorer and frontiersman. A compatriot of Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark, Kenton was a legendary Indian fighter, and became Kentucky’s self-appointed welcomer-in-chief. From his post in Mason County, he personally greeted early settlers as they arrived in what was then the far west.
     Kenton was married twice and had ten children. He became a wealthy man, but lost his hand. Unable to read or write, he spent his final years in poverty in Ohio.
      For a short preview of Hankla's presentations visit his website at http://www.kentuckylongrifles.com.

Portrayed by
Sandy Harmon
843 Watson Lane
Henderson, KY 42420
270/827-2983

Lily May Ledford
Coon Creek Girl
1917—1985

  When Lily May Ledford was a young girl growing up in a musical family in eastern Kentucky's Red River Gorge, she wanted a fiddle so badly that she traded her most precious possession—a box of crayons—for a broken-down instrument that didn't have strings, tuning pegs or a bow. She eventually became better known for banjo picking than fiddling, but that old fiddle helped launch a career that brought Lilly May and her Kentucky mountain music to a national audience.
     In 1936, Ledford went to Chicago to perform on WLS Radio's National Barn Dance. The next year her manager, John Lair, assembled a string band featuring Ledford's distinctive banjo style. Called the Coon Creek Girls, it was the first all-female string band. In 1939, the group began an eighteen-year run on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance radio show. That same year they played at the White House for President and Mrs. Roosevelt and their guests, the King and Queen of England. The king tapped his toe in spite of himself. The Coon Creek Girls disbanded in 1957.

Portrayed by
Danny W Hinton
P.O. Box 171
Livingston, KY 40445
606/453-4045
dandchinton@wmconnect.com

Dr. Thomas Walker
Pioneer Physician
1715—1794

Dr. Thomas Walker didn’t come to Kentucky for his health. A politically well-connected physician, Walker was also a land speculator, and that’s why he led the first organized English foray into Kentucky in April, 1750. He and his five companions hoped to discover farmland ripe for settlement.
     They returned home to Virginia three months later, much disappointed. Never quite making it out of eastern Kentucky into the gentle terrain of central Kentucky, they had found only forested mountains teeming with game, not farmland.
     Walker considered his Kentucky exploration a failure, but it paved the way for Daniel Boone nineteen years later, and countless others after that. Walker himself returned to Kentucky several times, most notably in 1779–80 as head of the surveying party that extended the Virginia-North Carolina line—the southern border of our future Commonwealth—to the Tennessee River. By that time settlers were streaming into Kentucky, and the unspoiled wilderness Walker first saw in 1750 would soon be lost forever.

Portrayed by
David Hurt
125 Cherry Road
Berea, KY 40403
859/986-5304
elkhorndave@hotmail.com

John C. C. Mayo
Coal Baron
1864—1914

Controversy still swirls around the life and legacy of John Caldwell Calhoun Mayo, but there’s no debate about one thing: for better or worse, his work in the coal fields transformed eastern Kentucky, with consequences that are still felt today. John C. C. Mayo was born on a mountain farm in Pike County, but it was not until he was in college in the 1880s that he learned just how vast eastern Kentucky's mineral resources are. 
     He started teaching, but soon turned to buying mineral rights from landowners, ultimately purchasing options on the coal that lay under hundreds of thousands of acres.  Mayp amassed a vast fortune by selling these mineral rights to large out-of-state corporations.  His influence in business and politics reached far beyond Kentucky's borders.  When he died at age 49, he was the richest man in Kentucky. At his funeral, Mayo was eulogized as a visionary, but almost ninety years later his legacy is shadowed by long-standing controversy over the broad form deed and other practices of the coal industry he helped create.

Portrayed by
David Hurt
125 Cherry Road
Berea, KY 40403
859/986-5304
elkhorndave@hotmail.com

Grandpa Jones
Country Musician and Comic
1913—1998

  Louis Marshall Jones, better known as Grandpa, was the son of Henderson County sharecroppers. Hard times drove the family north to Akron, Ohio in the late 1920s. Jones, who had a repertoire of songs learned from his parents and the radio, won a talent contest that led to regular work on an Akron radio station. That launched a career that lasted more than sixty years. It was during tours with country music star (and fellow Kentuckian) Bradley Kincaid in the 1930s that Jones developed the Grandpa persona he used the rest of his life.
     Jones wrote many of his most popular songs. Like many old-time musicians, he struggled during the rock-and-roll craze of the '50s—he toured Canada and tried his hand at early television. Beginning in 1969, television brought Jones fame as a member of the original cast of Hee Haw, which showcased his skills as a vaudeville comic. Grandpa Jones was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1978. He never retired, suffering a fatal stroke after a performance at the Grand Ole Opry in 1998.

Portrayed by
George McGee
Georgetown College
Georgetown College
Box 198
Georgetown, KY 40324
502-863-8162
george_mcgee@georgetowncollege.edu
http://georgetowncollege.edu

Henry Clay
Kentucky's Great Statesman
1777—1852

Above all, Henry Clay wanted to be president of the United States. Despite never quite making it—he ran and lost three times between 1824 and 1844—Clay played a large role in the history of his country, which he served as a Senator, as Speaker of the House, and as Secretary of State.
     Born and educated in Virginia, Clay moved to Kentucky and set up a law practice in Lexington in 1797. Elected to the state legislature in 1803, he took a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1810. For more than forty years he was a major player on the national political scene, renowned for his oratory and devotion to the Union. Slavery posed a great political and personal quandary for Clay. A slaveholder himself, he advocated gradual emancipation and colonization in Africa. He opposed extension of slavery into the new western states, but argued Congress had no right to interfere with slavery where it already existed. Attacking abolitionists in 1839, he said he would "rather be right than president." The speech cost him the 1840 Whig presidential nomination.

Portrayed by
Robert K. Rambo
50 Sterling Drive #206
Cullowhee, NC 28723
276/608-6152
robertkrambo@yahoo.com

Atta kul kulla
Cherokee Peace Chief
c. 1715—1780

     Atta kul kulla was the Peace Chief of the powerful Cherokee Nation from 1758 until his death around 1780. Called the “most important Indian of his day,” Atta kul kulla learned English ways (and met King George II) during a visit to London while still a teenager. He developed into a skilled and sophisticated diplomat whose ability to build alliances and treaties caused the English to dub him The Little Carpenter. Many of his policies and actions are still controversial, but he did manage to unite his people, a difficult political feat that laid the foundation for the long-term survival of the Cherokee Nation on a continent that was rapidly filling up with European immigrants.

Portrayed by
Jim Sayre
1495 Alton Station Road
Lawrenceburg, KY 40342
502/839-7191
lincolna@dcr.net

Abraham Lincoln
"I, too, am a Kentuckian."
1809—1865

Born on a farm in what is now Larue County, Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln spent his early years in the Commonwealth. His family moved to Indiana when he was seven, partly because of his father’s opposition to slavery, and never returned. But as his native brilliance and burning political ambition carried him to the presidency and greatness—a panel of historians recently chose him as the most influential American who ever lived—Lincoln always had connections with his native state.

Portrayed by
Suzi Schuhmann
1310 Cherokee Road
Louisville, KY 40204
502/454-3042

Sallie Ward
Queen of Society
1827—1896

Sallie Ward was born to the role of Southern belle and she played it incomparably. The daughter of a wealthy family, she grew up in a Louisville mansion and, after attending a French finishing school in Philadelphia, embarked on one of the nineteenth century's most memorable social careers. Pretty, quick-witted, unconventional, and spoiled, Ward enjoyed widespread popularity not only in Louisville but in fashionable haunts along the eastern seaboard and in Europe. Her behavior could be scandalous—she once wore bloomers to a Boston ball—but was often trendsetting. She introduced fancy dress balls and opera glasses to Kentucky, and was once one of the first ladies of high station to use cosmetics. 
     Married four times—divorced once and widowed twice—Ward found time to hold frequent benefit balls for the poor.  Her doings were hot news for more than half a century.  She enjoyed it all, and advised her family not to bury her until three days after her death, in case she was just resting.

Portrayed by
Suzi Schuhmann
1310 Cherokee Road
Louisville, KY 40202
502/454-3042

Catherine Conner
Political Powerhouse
1900—2002

Catherine Conner was dynamite. In the 1920s, in addition to actually selling explosives for a living, she managed to parlay her connections in Nelson County into membership on the Democratic National Committee. That was the start of a political career that took this talented Kentuckian to the top of the Democratic and Republican parties . . . and the social ladder. Her four husbands included a millionaire and a movie mogul. 
     In 1932, Conner was a big fund-raiser for Democrat Franklin Roosevelt’s winning presidential campaign. She became part of his White House inner circle and remained close to Roosevelt until 1940, when they broke over his decision to seek a third term. After World War II she became a Republican, helping Dwight Eisenhower win the presidency in 1952. He sent her to Europe as a roving promoter for U.S. business and tourism.
     Always looking to help Kentucky, Conner was instrumental in saving the property that became My Old Kentucky Home State Park in Bardstown, and she helped establish The Steven Foster Story, the popular outdoor drama that’s still playing at the park.

Portrayed by
Betsy B. Smith
209 South Miller Street
Cynthiana, KY 41031
859/235-0225
859/588-4019
kesda@georgetowncollege.edu

Emilie Todd Helm
Rebel in the White House
1836—1930

  As the sister of Mary Todd Lincoln and the wife of Confederate General Benjamin Hardin Helm, Emilie Todd Helm had a front row view of history during and after the Civil War. She and her husband knew the Lincolns very well. Benjamin Helm turned down a personal offer from Lincoln to become paymaster of the Union Army with the rank of major, choosing instead to join the Confederacy and become the president’s “rebel brother-in-law.” After Helm was killed at Chickamauga, President and Mrs. Lincoln invited Emilie to come to the White House. As a southern loyalist and widow of the commander of the famous Orphan Brigade, her presence in the While House aroused protests. Lincoln defended his right to have anyone he chose as his guest, but Helm soon departed for Kentucky, where she lived out her long life.

Portrayed by
Edward B. Smith
209 South Miller Street
Cynthiana, KY 41031
895/235-0225
502/863-8042
edward_smith@georgetowncollege.edu

Adolph Rupp
The Coach
1901—1977

During the 42 years he coached the University of Kentucky basketball team, Adolph Rupp raised the game to near-religious status in the Commonwealth. Basketball took its place next to horses, coal, and bourbon as Kentucky cultural icons. Rupp's teams won 880 games, four national championships, and one Olympic gold medal. There was a flip side to all this success—the team was suspended for the 1952-53 season after a point-shaving scandal, and Rupp was heavily criticized for taking too long to integrate the Kentucky basketball program.
     Adolph Rupp grew up in Kansas, the son of immigrant farmers. He played three years of varsity basketball at the University of Kansas, but never scored a point. He began his coaching career in Kansas, but soon moved on to high schools in Iowa and Illinois. The University of Kentucky hired him in 1930. Rupp's genius for public relations and his team's winning ways combined to make Kentucky basketball a statewide phenomenon, a point of pride around which Kentuckians of all stripes still rally.

Portrayed by
Ethan S. Smith
209 S. Miller Street
Cynthiana, KY 41031
859/235-0225
edward_smith@georgetowncollege.edu

Price Hollowell
Black Patch War Hero
1895—1975

When the Night Riders attacked the Hollowell farm in Caldwell County on the night of May 2, 1907, one of them boasted, "We Night Riders fear no judge or jury!" Young Price Hollowell, who saw everything they did, made them eat those words in one of the most remarkable episodes of the Black Patch War, a western Kentucky conflict that featured mayhem and murder not seen in those parts since the Civil War.
     Low tobacco prices caused the Black Patch War, named after the dark leaf grown in west Kentucky and Tennessee. The American Tobacco Company was paying less for dark tobacco than it cost farmers to grow it. The farmers fought back by form-ing the Planters' Protective Association, whose members withheld their tobacco from the market. When this strategy did not produce higher prices, some members—the Night Riders—resorted to violence against farmers, like the Hollowells, who refused to honor the boycott. The Night Riders ran the Hollowells out of the state, but they returned, filed a federal lawsuit, and, thanks in large part to Price's testimony, won damages of $35,000.

Portrayed by
Dick Usher
194 Capp Springs Road
Benton, KY 42025
270/354-8058
ushmd01@yahoo.com

Pee Wee Reese
Hall of Famer
1918—1991

Harold Henry Reese got his famous nickname Pee Wee from a marble he used when he was a boy. The name fit because he did turn out to be a man of modest stature, but by every measure you could apply to an athlete—teamwork, leadership, determination, winning, grace under pressure—Pee Wee Reese was a giant. Born in Meade County, Kentucky, Reese grew up in Louisville. At 19, he quit his job at the telephone company to play professional baseball for the Louisville Colonels. By 1940, he had reached the big leagues, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers at storied Ebbets Field. As captain, shortstop and lead-off man, he led the Dodgers to seven pennants and, in 1955, a World Series win over the New York Yankees. Inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY in 1984, his plaque there also records the powerful example he set when Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947 as the major leagues’ first black player. Reese’s acceptance and support of Robinson were instrumental in breaking down baseball’s color barrier.