REBECCA BOONE AND KENTUCKY FRONTIER WOMEN
BLUEGRASS HERITAGE MUSEUM, WINCHESTER, MAY 13, 2010
Searching for evidences of women in the history of Kentucky is like pushing
through the lush Kentucky cane, taller than a woman on horseback, in the beautiful
Bluegrass. Reasonably, many resources are at hand – but most show evidences of
men’s lives and thoughts. Where are the women? We can find Rebecca Bryan
Boone and other women of our state’s early years in the census and tax records.
Let’s review the few facts we know about Rebecca: she was born in Virginia
on January 9, 1738, to Joseph Bryan, Sr. and Alee Linville. Her mother died
shortly after she was born. When she was ten, Rebecca moved with her Quaker
grandparents, Morgan and Martha (Strode) Bryan, to the Yadkin River valley in
the backwoods of North Carolina. Meanwhile Daniel Boone and his family settled
near the Bryans in North Carolina. The two families knew each other well.
Rebecca and Daniel began their courtship in 1753 and married three years later on
August 14, 1756. Frontier women’s lives were rough and violent, and Rebecca’s
was no different. From the first time the Boones fled trouble (the first time during
the Cherokee War in 1759) until her death, Rebecca set up house at least 15 times.
Their marriage lasted fifty-six years. Together they had ten children‹-six sons and
four daughters.
Rebecca moved many times during her lifetime. She created homes in North
Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, and finally Missouri where she spent the last
1
fourteen years of her life. We know that Rebecca Boone died at the age of 75 on
March 18, 1813, at her daughter Jemima Boone Callaway's home near the village
of Charette (near present day Marthasville). She was buried at the Bryan family
cemetery nearby overlooking the Missouri River, reinterred and buried again in
Frankfort, Kentucky.
Rebecca Bryan Boone has always been spotted at the edges of historical
narratives published about her iconic husband – even during her own lifetime. John
Filson’s 1784 publication of The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone1 refers to
her only in passing – thus maintaining her proper role of respectable matron. The
earliest and most influential portrait of her was in the 1833 Memoir of Daniel
Boone,2 largely written by Timothy Flint. Flint described her as the Victorian
Age’s ideal woman: meek yet courageous, and her husband’s affectionate friend.
In 1852, Elizabeth Ellet’s Pioneer Women of the West3 dropped the meekness but
emphasized her domestic skills, leaving readers to think that she worked near the
hearth raising children and forgetting that her husband said she had “transported
my family and goods, on horses, through the wilderness, amidst a multitude of
dangers”4 and that she hunted well enough to feed her large extended family and
others (as her husband recounted). Many tell the same stories based on Flint and
Ellet over and over with slight variations as evidence more of her place in revered
legends of pioneer Kentucky than in history.
2
Can’t we do better for Rebecca Boone and other women like her? When
historians choose to look for primary sources by or about women of Kentucky,
there are many: in letters, memoirs and celebratory speeches; in tax records, store
ledgers and overseers’ farm reports; in pamphlets, newspapers and even in our
earliest printed books. But Rebecca, the daughter of a Welsh Quaker in North
Carolina backcountry without formal education, who was an experienced midwife,
leather tanner, sharpshooter and linen-maker – resourceful and independent in the
isolated areas she and her large, combined family often found themselves – is
rarely mentioned. Try finding illiterate, rural Kentucky women in our history
books – a few pioneers, some slaves, lots of belles and wealthy white women. The
same stories told long ago filter through to the current day history books, and each
time they are resurrected often without question. The task before us then is to look
more carefully at the way that the early documentation portrays women – to
examine the “lens” of history used by those who recorded women’s deeds and
aspirations of their time.
Women who came to start a new life in Kentucky brought with them the
cultural expectations of womanhood - both white and black. For white and free
black women, the political and cultural messages of the earlier part of this time
period under study reflected the ideal of the ancient world’s Spartan mother who
gave up everything to raise her son to be a good citizen of the republic. Called
3
“republican motherhood” by historians today,5 the ideal expected of a good woman
was to use her powers to draw wayward men into more pious and moral
approaches to republican virtue – and to use her maternal influence and intellectual
powers to teach her sons to become a model citizen of the Republic. For most
Black women, the life of a bonded servant left few opportunities, even in the
American backwoods. Whether a field hand or a domestic, a Black woman’s
physical strength and careful negotiation skills were critical for her survival.
Considered less than human by white communities, yet highly prized for her
versatility in skills – and fertility – a black woman on the Kentucky frontier sought
out her own communities to support her rather than remain the only slave for hire
or owned by a white family struggling for basic subsistence. The women of the
backcountry Virginia and Pennsylvania, usually second generation immigrants,
knew of these expectations and brought them with them as they traveled down the
Ohio River or through the Cumberland Gap.
Kentucky women during the frontier days participated in crafting a social,
economic and political world that was unique and noteworthy in a new nation. The
Kentucky frontier had begun to transform in the 1790s to an economic locus for
those journeying down the Ohio River or up through the Cumberland Gap and
north into the rich Ohio Valley lands or further west to the new lands and
profitable markets of New Orleans. While scholars agree that most women moved
4
west reluctantly, yet Kentucky women, slave and free, served key roles in the early
history of Kentucky as entrepreneurs, artists, farm managers, laborers and artisans
– as well as wives and mothers, sisters and daughters. African American women,
here as early as 1777 at Fort Harrod, lived a more difficult life, lonely for their kin
and community back east. They are part of the untold stories evidenced in the
quick successes of Kentucky’s early stations and homesteads. Many frontier
homes were mere shacks clustered together for military support during attacks
(certainly not as neat as this image by Colonel Henderson) and quickly abandoned
once the conditions in the station or fort worsened. Since most men served as the
local military and did not stay at home for very long, their wives had to manage
their economic futures on the farm. The violence of the frontier meant that there
were many young widows, but they rarely stayed single. A frontierswoman
succeeded economically and socially if she married at some point in her life. The
Virginia law of coverture continued on the frontier and this meant that married
women had few rights in property ownership or even in the guardianship of their
own children. In practical terms, though, women often had strong personal control
over their lands and family -- and widows could serve as the heads of household .
This power greatly increased if the woman had a strong kin network to support her.
Records of early Kentucky women’s wills and land transactions show that women
were able to accumulate great wealth and exercise a legal independence unknown
5
in the former British colonies across the mountains. Scanning the earliest lists of
Kentuckians’ personal tax lists, I found 31 women’s names – and seven of them
are slave owners. Another four women paid taxes on bonded servants. We don’t
know if these women were white or if they spoke English as their first language,
though it is probably the case. Kentucky women joined together, white and black
separately, in leadership roles in churches and schools – and many were strong
advocates for temperance or the abolition of slavery. However, illiteracy – since
too many families moving into the Southern frontier did not choose to or have the
opportunity to teach their girls to read – bound many women in Kentucky to a legal
and often physically dependent status.6
We can see if we look closely an implicit leadership by women in communal
food gathering, growing and processing. Male settlers on their own squandered
much of the natural resources with the indiscriminate killing of buffalo and other
wild game, and they often were late in planting crucial food crops since they
showed more interest in hunting, warfare and adventures than farming. Visitors
and potential settlers of Kentucky traveled through a hardwood forest of walnuts,
maples, oaks, ash, and beech, and the meadows of rustling canebrakes in which
wild game and hunters could hide. The fertile area, rich with natural springs,
streams and ponds, provided an abundance of river mussels, fish and turtle easily
gathered by those who knew where to look. It also yielded nuts, seeds, fruits, and
6
squash and during the eighteenth century enterprising settlers in the area had
already introduced corn, beans and other crops raised by Native American women.
It is likely that white women gathered and cultivated some leftover variants when
they arrived in this area. Sketches of stations or forts where women lived showed
evidence of their presence, even when the written records did not. One good
example of this, a sketch of Constant’s Station in 1785 as remembered by one of
its residents, shows where fields included hemp for women to process for clothing
and cordage.7 In the 1780s the frontierswomen of Strode’s Station (nearby
Winchester in Clark County) worked together to produce thirty yards of hemp
linen for an old widower – this was recorded in an oral history interview by
Reverend John Dabney Shane when he interviewed William Clinkenbeard.8
Pioneer families often planted flax and hemp right away for domestic production
of clothing, cordage, bagging and paper for family consumption or for barter.
Women traditionally managed the textile production in the rural home. The richer
the pioneer, the more hemp could be grown, manufactured and sold for a hefty
profit – and women, whether black or white, took advantage of this opportunity in
the new frontier. The Wickliffe Preston Papers at UK show that slave women on
Fayette County farms in the 1790s worked long past their task rate and earned
extra money producing bolts of jean cloth for sale both locally and to ship down
river. Tax lists for the 1780s and 90s show a surprising number of early pioneer
7
women as well as men owned slaves or had indentured servants who could do the
back-breaking work in the hemp and flax fields. With the opening of the
Mississippi River in the late 1790s, hemp became an important export commodity
and manufacturers of good quality hemp products on a reliable basis made more
money by shipping large quantities down river to New Orleans.
Most pioneer farmwomen (especially those with extensive kin networks as
Rebecca Bryan Boone did) felt obligated to -- though didn’t always succeed in -maintaining the trappings of civilization in the midst of the complex and horrific
violence of the Kentucky frontier.9 One of the stories of the Boone family
carefully handed down through the years leaves us a clue. Rebecca insisted that her
boy, caught on the Great Warriors Path, tortured and finally killed by Indians (one
of whom he had known), be buried wrapped up in one of her handmade linen
sheets. Even though her son would never see home again, she made sure he was
encased in one of her most precious domestic possessions as a sort of protection
against the wilderness.
For many, Daniel Boone is an iconic figure in Kentucky history, and the
impact of his Wilderness Road remains huge. Before 1800 more than two hundred
thousand people, many of them slaves, had come to Kentucky over the Wilderness
Road, the route first explored, marked and laid out by Boone.10 The earliest stories
of Kentucky and the American frontier included biographies of Boone, and his
8
wife was the pioneer woman venerated by all. In 1852 George Caleb Bingham
painted an epic portrait of Boone escorting settlers through the Cumberland Gap.
Rebecca Boone plays the part of the romantic Madonna, this time completed in
interpretive ways with a faithful hunting dog and her husband leading the noble
charger. She represented all pioneer women who by the mid-nineteenth century
were idealized and celebrated.
In a memorial to the early Kentucky frontier women, the Lexington Chapter
of the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a wall around a spring five
miles out on Bryan’s Station Pike on August 16, 1896,. It is said to be the first
monument funded and erected “by women – for women.” The inscription reads:
“In Honor of the Women of Bryan’s Station who on 15th of August, 1782, faced a
Savage Host in Ambush and With Heroic Courage and a Sublime Self-Sacrifice
that will remain Forever Illustrious Obtained from this Spring the Water that made
Possible the Successful Defense of that Station.” The stories describe the sixteen
younger women at first as scared and reluctant, but convinced in their heroic duties
by the older women. Led by Jemima Suggett Johnson, twenty-eight girls and
women made “the resolute march to the spring,” and even – so they say – laughed
as they passed within shooting range of the enemy, filled their buckets and
returned to the stockade.11 This physical act of protest against the British and their
Indian allies became early on a cherished moment in Kentucky history.
9
Their bravery stands in the face of a fear of a “fate worse than death” – rape
and slavery in an Indian community – a marker for the racist beliefs of the day but
which also arose from a very real threat. The Shawnee continued to raid Kentucky
settlements after the other Indians had given up, and even threatened a pan-Indian
uprising during the War of 1812. In the antebellum stories of Daniel Boone, there
inevitably came a version of the story when a band of four Shawnee and Cherokee
kidnapped his thirteen-year-old daughter Jemima and her girlfriends as they
avoided work back at the fort with a pleasure ride on the river. Here is the 1852
lithograph by Karl Bodmer and Jean-Francois Millet, “The Abduction of the
Daughters of Boone and Callaway” in which the image of the “savage” is clearly
represented in terms of potential rape. The stories that come down to us from that
incident include an aura of this fear – and storytellers emphasized that the girls
were not injured. A descendent of Jemima remembers how embarrassed the girls
said they were when their male relatives (and Jemima’s future husband) found
them with their skirts chopped off above the knees – despite the fact the Shawnee
had given them leggings and moccasins to hide their legs.12 This lithograph,
painted by George Fasel and published in an 1851 book titled Heroic Deeds of
Former Times, depicts Daniel Boone rescuing his teenage daughter, Jemima, from
captivity (note Boone’s famous wide brimmed beaver felt hat) and she returned to
marry a boy from her frontier settlement home.
10
Women who helped build the frontier forts, homesteads, villages and cities
of Kentucky however did not always remain tied to a domestic role as prescribed
and valorized in the ideal of the republican mother or submissive slave. Records
include stories of women evidence military valor during their lives of constant
warfare. Most women had to take on the role of frontier warriors but preferred to
remain anonymous in the process, and a more acceptable role was publicly to
shame men not adequate in their roles in the defense of the community. Women
retained the responsibility then for turning the frontier into the civilization of
domesticity they once knew or wanted to emulate. (Here is a double log cabin still
standing in the late 19th century for a nostalgic photo opportunity – even log cabins
could be upgraded when a family hoped to become more respectable.) Mostly of
the middle-class and married (since poor or working-class women could not often
afford the expensive trip to the west), they brought with them or ordered from
relatives or favorite stores back East the respectable white doilies, elegant china
and plated silver for their tables. While Kentucky frontier women kept having
babies, working in the fields to clothe and feed their families, they also started up
schools when forted and made sure that preachers held church services when they
could. But it is difficult to see these women as simply one thing or another. Daniel
Trabue remembered some women traveling from Forts Harrod and Logan went on
a shooting spree but transformed into “Ladys” when they celebrated in fancy dress
11
at George Roger Clark’s new Fort Nelson at the Falls of the Ohio in 1779.13
Kentucky women sent their men off to war regularly throughout the early
years in the hopes of a safer, more civilized life. Colonel John Todd who built the
Lexington fort had brought his Virginia wife and slaves to join him during these
dangerous times. Jane Hawkins Todd held tea parties while still living in the fort,
though as one woman remembered her mother telling it, she had “nothing but tea
and dried buffaloe (sic) meat.”14 Todd brought her genteel manners and worldview
with her from Virginia and crafted her world of parlor politics even in the midst of
frontier violence. In Kentucky shanties or log cabins were the norm, but in the
early towns brick houses and elegant Federal-style houses sprang up. Young
ladies’ academies became popular in this time period and the practical value of
women who knew history, empirical science, political theory and moral philosophy
could best prepare their children for the new nation. At the same time, the
academy’s curriculum must include the fine arts so that the educated lady could
entertain her husband and his friends upon their return from the new battles of
capitalism and electoral politics. Lexington had three schools for girls before
1800. Around 1793 Mrs. Ann Walsh opened a school just for girls where they
would learn spelling, reading and needle-work. In 1797 Mrs. Lucy Gray
established an academy at her country home four miles out from town where
lessons included Italian and arithmetic. The next year Mr. James W. Stevens rented
12
the upper story of Montgomery Bell’s storehouse to use as a young ladies academy
“in order to prevent an indiscriminate intercourse of the sexes so injurious to the
morals, and incompatible with the delicacy of the ‘fair’ for the purpose of
conferring the degree of a classical education.”15 The conscious effort to create an
educated and enlightened society makes a case for perceiving the ideal of
womanhood in Kentucky to be more active than passive, more literate and
important consumers in the frontier economy. Some may have learned also to
become more assertive in genteel company conversation contributing also to
heated political debates, and surely not all of them growing up to be pliant wallflowers as shown in the fashionable images of the day.
For those frontier women outside of the wealthy elite, an important locus of
power became the great religious revivals of Kentucky which started in the
summer of 1800. Even before then, frontier families would travel for miles to
attend a Sunday preaching marathon that would last two to three hours. Few
churches had pews, but the early churches all segregated their congregations by sex
and race. The service would end with a family picnic and important social and
political interactions that served as “welcome relief from the toil and loneliness of
frontier life.”16 During the in-migrations of the 1790s the established frontier
churches couldn’t keep up, and the historical records emphasize the obsession with
salvation and redemption in the white and black communities during this time of
13
transition. Informal “fast and prayer” societies came into vogue, and religious tract
publishers made big profits. Little is known about the more informal activities in
women’s homes, but historians acknowledge that these then fueled the attendance
for the camp revivals as well as the temperance, abolitionist and Sunday School
movements that are well documented. A good example is Margaretta Mason
Brown who came to Frankfort in 1801. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister
from New York City, she married the Kentucky Senator John Brown who had read
law with Thomas Jefferson. Influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman, she was fiercely anti-slavery and a dedicated mother to her
boys. She led study circles for young women in her home (often held in the lovely
orchard behind the house), and in 1810 established the first Sunday school west of
the Allegheny Mountains. Her work came to fruition with the formation of the
First Presbyterian Church of Frankfort.
Other women who fueled the religious fervor of Kentucky were those who
traveled the rough trails of the backcountry to attend camp revivals and then
retreated to communal life. For example, there were those who were recruited at
the revivals to join the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming –
the Shakers at South Union and at Pleasant Hill (near Harrodsburg). These
converts promised to live a “virgin life” and abstain from any forms of lust,
especially sex. For rural women who lived a life of endless work, constant
14
pregnancy and degradation in a violent world of men, the Shaker communal life
must have seemed a haven.17 There they could learn a trade, become educated,
worship ecstatically and be a part of a community that respected them as human
beings. Their simple, functional designs for household and farming tools and
furniture, their breed stock and specially hybridized seeds, their music and
dancing, and self-published books became popular in secular culture. The idea of
Mother Ann Lee as the second half of Jesus, the female form of Christ, must have
been truly radical and empowering for those who regularly heard from their regular
preachers of the evils of women as daughters of Eve and Jezebel.18 Working
women in central Kentucky were the norm, whether free or slave, so the hard work
was nothing new to their recruits.19 Women’s lives in the rural southern
backcountry of the nineteenth century meant isolation and loneliness, and the
social gatherings that reinforced kin networks, religious beliefs or political
agendas, served as wonderful diversions from the usual drudgery of subsistence
farming.20
Central Kentucky is unique in the agrarian norm for this time period, and
though not much research has been done on the status of women in the Lexington
environs, it is worth exploring. American post-colonial society began to see a
change in the expectations for their women. The household economy of eighteenth
century farms in which women and men worked together to be self-sufficient
15
changed with the rise of cities and international trade along the Atlantic coast.
Sweatshops and the new age of the machine transformed American labor systems
and birthed a market economy that devalued household-centered work. Society
expected women to perform domestic labor in their own or as bonded labor in
someone else’s home, while men became the preferred labor force for the new
factories, workshops and offices. Slater’s Mill in Rhode Island, the first
commercially successful cotton-spinning mill with a fully mechanized power
system in America, started operating in 1793; Central Kentucky entrepreneurs
within a decade had mechanized the carding and spinning of cotton, hemp and
linen. According to the 1806 Lexington directory, John Wesley Hunt, one of the
first millionaires west of the Alleghenies had a “Duck (canvas) manufactory” that
employed 40-50 “hands” – very likely young girls or boys between eight and
sixteen years of age. Society expected married women to perform domestic labor
in their own or someone else’s home – and this contribution to the labor force
became less valued by the new nation which focused on the new demands for labor
in the new factories and offices.
Lexington’s early industrial workforce included women and girls, both slave
and free, on farms and in the city. The importance of the hemp and other textiles to
early Kentucky has been documented. Around 1810 for example there were two
steam mills for both flour and cotton manufactory, two cut nail factories, four hat
16
factories, thirteen rope-walks, five bagging factories, two sail-duck factories, four
cotton and two wool spinning factories, a spectacle factory that mounted glasses,
soap and candlemaking industries, a tobacco factory, a piano manufactory, an oil
mill and a paper mill. Of the five wool carding factories, the newly invented
machinery run by horse power was touted as being so simple that “any child could
run it.”21 The Lexington Manufactory of 1816 advertised for women, girls and
children over nine years to work - alongside their call for twenty men and boys
from fourteen to twenty-one years of age.22 Ropewalks, bagging and weaving
factories needed the dexterous hands of women and children.
Women’s role in the northern textile industries has been well documented
and analyzed, but rarely have historians looked at the female workforce in early
Southern urban areas. Lexington most likely attracted girls into the urban
workforce for the personal wages and different types of work than on the farm.
Wendy Gordon compared the “independent migration” of young, unmarried and
unchaperoned girls in England, Scotland and the U.S. northeast to the urban mills
and marketplaces. Women’s supportive networks in these manufacturing centers
helped to attract and retain women workers – though women alone and outside
family relationships were viewed with suspicion, Gordon posits that this migration
was the woman’s own choice in moving out of the home in order to transition to
adult responsibilities.23
17
Women also took important economic roles in the several marketplaces in
early Lexington: there were at least six market houses in antebellum Lexington,
and in 1813 the watchman polled the town’s housekeepers to determine their
preferences for market days.24 Women of all classes were important in early
Lexington as consumers.25 Besides the regular markethouses, women likely
worked as street vendors and upon-demand service providers such as laundresses,
cooks, midwives, charwomen and prostitutes. Likely places for successful women
entrepreneurs were at the many stagecoach taverns and train depots in and around
Lexington26 and the county courthouse in the center of town.
The life of a black woman in Kentucky was hard and fraught with dangers,
even if she were free (and free women were very few). Women domestic servants
and well as those in Kentucky fields were almost always in the near vicinity of
whites, had more chance of being subjected to racial violence. The ultimate
resistance to slavery was to run away, and women did. Of the advertisements in
Kentucky newspapers for women who ran away, most included references to those
women being with men and some carrying children with them.
Kentucky’s women were a vital part of its success in these early years of its
history. Like Rebecca Boone, somehow our women lost this status in the midtwentieth century, and the professional women of today are fighting the same
cultural prejudices as all Kentuckians but one step down. Our future success as
18
Kentuckians can best be measured by the status of women in Kentucky . We have
not yet found Mrs. Boone as she once must have been: strong, talented, resourceful
and at the center of a civilized world of her own making. Gerda Lerner wrote that
history should be seen as a necessity, and in crafting good history we must ask
ourselves questions that can only be answered by including both men’s and
women’s activities and ideas.27 What were women doing while men were doing
what the books tell us they were doing? What were women experiencing while
men were doing what the textbook tells our children were important activities?
The nation knows only that today our women are poor, disfranchised, pregnant
from an early age, illiterate and in ill health. Where is the entrepreneurial Kentucky
woman we once had? Surely, studying our women’s past can help our young girls
and boys of today create a better tomorrow.
19
Women’s Names in Personal Tax Lists of Fayette County, 1787-91
This is an abridged version of the personal tax lists, focusing only on those names that seemed to be for women.
Part Second – State Enumerations of Heads of Families, Virginia & Kentucky.“First Census” of Kentucky 1790.
Prepared under the supervision of Charles Brunk Heineman. Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co., Inc., 1993 (orig.
pub. Washington D.C.: Gaius Marcus Brumbaugh, 1940).
Taxpayer Head of Household
Ann Baker
Sarah Bush
Joanne Campbell
Eliz. Clemons
Eliz. Curtner+
Mary Davison
Marget Drake
Eliz. Ewart
Mary Gibson
Mary Harper
Rebecca Hunter
Jane Huson
Martha Johnson
Eliz. Jones
Grace Jones
Mary McConnell
Elizabeth McCorkle
Marget McGuire
Eliz. Mair
Rosanna Mitchell
Elizah Poage
Mary Richardson
Mary Spaw
Jane Todd+
Jane Tompson
Jane Venable
Marget Ward
Ester Wilson
Jane Wilson
Margaret Wilson
Mary Wilson
1787 Tax List for Fayette County,
Virginia
 (2 slaves)
 (1 slave)
1788 Tax
List


1789/90/91 Tax Lists
Fayette 1/11/1790
Fayette 6/30/1789
Woodford 5/29/1790



 (5 slaves)


Fayette 1/11/1790

Fayette 1/11/1790
Bourbon 3/1791




 (Elliot*)
 (9 slaves; John and Francis*)



Fayette 1/11/1790
Fayette 3/19/1790



?
 (John*)

 (1 slave)
 (Michael Capiday*)
 (5 slaves)
Fayette 1/11/1790



 (1 slave)

Fayette 1/11/1790
Fayette 2/26/1790

+ - In 1783, the Lexington trustees distributed town lots to 3 women in addition to men: Jane Todd, “Widow
McDonald,” and “Widow Kirtner” (could be Curtner?).
* - additional white tithables
++ - Maybe this is the same Jane Thompson listed in the Lexington station Trustee book as receiving a town lot on
December 26, 1781. Also, a Jane Thompson married John Scott on September 11, 1792 at Walnut Hill Presbyterian
Church in Fayette County, according to the Papers of Rev. James Crawford, in the Rev. John Dabney Shane
Manuscript Collection of the Presbyterian Historical Association, 28th Reel, Vol. 5.
Female Heads of Household: Women’s Names in Early Lexington Directories
(Free Black women are numbered in parentheses when identified as of color in the directory.)
Occupations
Boardinghouse
Boot/shoe trimmer
Cart Proprietor
Confectioner & Fancy Goods
Dressmaker
Fancy Store
Grocer
Hat Trimmer
Laundress
Midwife
Mattress Maker
Milliner
Morocco Manufacturer
Music Teacher
Schoolmistress
Seamstress
Shoe Binder
Tailoress
Weaver
Women with no occupation listed or
identified as “gentlewoman” or “widow
of …”
TOTAL
1806
1818
3
2
1838 & ‘39
8
1
1
(1)
9
1
2
1
(13)
1
2
3
2
2
1
1
12
23 (1)
1
3
1
1
2
3 (2)
(1)
6
(1)
67
18 of
266 names
6.7%
35 of
541 names
6.5%
124 of
902 names
13.7%
Note:
The single black woman listed in the 1818 directory is Esther Underwood on Mulberry, “widow of Sam”
(vs. such designations as “Mrs. Eliza Trotter,” “southern suburb,” and “widow of Gen George Trotter”).
The 1818 Fayette County tax list shows “Underwood, heirs of Samuel (colored)” but no occupation
listed; the entry under sex is “ha”; two inlots valued at $1200; two horses valued at $100; one cow valued
at $10; one (4WH_N) valued at $150 and under the Other Tax “cart” valued at $40, 1 house, 1 stable, 1
death, total blacks 4, no specific address listed for the directory. The 1820 census lists her in the list for
“free colored persons residing in Lexington” as (En(r?)ster Underwood) with three in her household.
Sources:
Charless, Joseph. Lexington Directory, Taken For Charless’ Almanack, for 1806.[Lexington, Ky., 1806].
MacCabe, Julius P. Bolivar. Directory of the City of Lexington and County of Fayette for 1838 & ‘39. Lexington,
Ky.: J.C. Noble, 1838.
Worsley and Smith, Lexington, Ky. Directory of the Town of Lexington, for 1818.[Lexington, Ky., 1818]
ENDNOTES
John Filson, “The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone, Containing a Narrative of the
Wars of Kentucke” appended to The Discovery and Settlement of Kentucke (Wilmington, Del.:
James Adams, Printer, 1784).
2
Timothy Flint, Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky
(Cincinnati: N & G Guildford, 1833).
3
Mrs. [Elizabeth Fries] Ellet, Pioneer Women of the West (New York: Charles Scribner,
1856), pp. 42-57.
4
Filson, p. 8.
5
On the expectation for white women in the new nation to be a good mother in order to
fulfill her citizenly duties, see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and ideology
in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); and, Mary
Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 17501800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).
6
Margaret Ripley Wolfe, Daughters of Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women (Lexington:
The University Press of Kentucky, 1995), p. 37.
7
Elizabeth A. Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio
Valley (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press), p. 72.
8
Lucien Beckner, ed., “Reverend John Dabney Shane’s Interview with Peioneer William
Clinkenbeard,” The Filson Club History Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 3 (April 1928) p. 119.
9
Wolfe, Daughters of Canaan, p. 69.
10
John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992), p. 351.
11
Reuben T. Durrett, Bryant’s Station and the Memorial Proceedings Held on its Site
under the Auspices of the Lexington chapter, D. A. R., August the 18th, 1896, in honor of its
heroic mothers and daughters. Filson Club publications; no. 12. Louisville, Ky.: J. P. Morton and
Company, printers, 1897.
12
Nathan Boone, My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone,
edited by Neal O. Hammon (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), pp. 47-51; and,
Michael A. Lofaro, Daniel Boone: An American Life (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2003), pp. 68-74.
13
Chester Raymond Young, ed., Westward into Kentucky: The Narrative of Daniel
Trabue (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), pp. 55-56.
14
Quoted in Elizabeth Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the
Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 105.
15
Kentucky Gazette (February 21, 1798), p. 3.
16
John B. Boles, Religion in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1976), p. 15.
17
Married women’s lives in Kentucky’s rural areas were rough and violent. See for
example Honor R. Sachs, “The Myth of the Abandoned Wife: Married Women’s Agency and the
Legal Narrative of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Kentucky,” Ohio Valley History 3 (Winter
2003): 3-20.
18
See Karen Kay Nickless, “‘A Good Faithful Sister’: The Shaker Sisters of Pleasant
Hill, Kentucky,” (Dissertation, Ph.D., University of South Carolina, 2004); Edward D. Andrews,
The Community Industries of the Shakers (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, Inc., 1972); Thomas
1
D. Clark and F. Gerald Ham, Pleasant Hill and Its Shakers (Harrodsburg, KY: Pleasant Hill
Press, 1983); and, Flo Morse, The Shakers and the World’s People (Hanover, NH: University
Press of New England, 1987).
19
For the importance of researching rural women’s lives, see John Mack Faragher,
“History from the Inside Out: Writing the History of Women in Rural America,” American
Quarterly 33 (1981): 537-57.
20
See Margaret Ripley Wolfe, Daughters of Canaan: A Saga of Southern Women
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), esp. pp. 62-65. See also, Richard Sears,
“Working Like A Slave: Views of Slavery and the Status of Women in Antebellum Kentucky,”
Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 87 (Winter 1989): 1-39.
21
Kentucky Gazette, March 25, 1813.
22
Kentucky Gazette, February 12, 1816.
23
Wendy M. Gordon, Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women’s Independent Migration
in England, Scotland and the United States, 1850-1881 (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2002), pp. 2, 156-157.
24
Kentucky Gazette (August 3, 1813), p. 1.
25
See Elizabeth Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio
Valley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
26
Nancy Levinson wrote that white, black and Native American women were not only
employed in car-cleaning and other domestic services jobs for the railroads in the 1830s, but they
also served water to passengers or sold fruit to women traveling in ladies’ cars. Levinson, She’s
Been Working on the Railroad (Dutton: Lodestar Books, 1997). See also the description of the
amenities available at The Villa, a train rest stop in Versailles on the way from Lexington to
Frankfort in the Lexington Observer & Reporter, (May 23, 1833), p. 4, col. 4.
27
Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), p. 119.