Museum Newsletter - 29 September 2012

Friends of the Bullitt County History Museum
E-Newsletter
September 29, 2012 (Volume 8, Number 9)

Dear Friends,

Announcements...

>>Bullitt County Genealogical Society meeting October 27. The Bullitt County Genealogical Society (the parent organization of our museum) will have its next monthly meeting on Saturday, October 27. (NOTE that this is a 4th Saturday rather than the usual 3rd. The date is changed due to a special Louisville Genealogical Society Book Fair on the 20th that many members like to attend.) Regular meeting time and place: 10:00 a.m. at the Ridgway Memorial Public Library Meeting Room, 127 North Walnut Street, in Shepherdsville. Genealogical expert Betty Darnell will be giving a presentation about mining the newly-released 1940 Census for information.

>>Louisville Genealogical Society meets Tuesday October 9. 1 p.m. Mel Arnold will speak on explorer Simon Kenton. Details can be found here.

>>Louisville Genealogical Society Seminars and Book Fair will be held Saturday October 20. Details can be found here.

>>Museum Closed October 15 for the day. The Museum will be closed Monday, October 15, due to building repairs. The courthouse, in which the museum is housed, will be doing electrical work thus will need power turned off. Hopefully everything can resume as normal on Tuesday.

>>Civil War display will be going away by end of year...Visit it while you can! Probably around the first of the year, I expect to rotate out the majority of our museum display about the Civil War, changing it to a new long-term display about telephones coming to the county, and about communication in general. The museum remains very limited in size, so we often have to rotate exhibits and make hard decisions about what we can display. I am looking forward to the coming exhibit though! A key part of it will be Kevin Mooney's phone exchange that was once in Pitts Point...a town which itself no longer exists except in record and memory.

So visit the Civil War while you can!

By the way, I am still hoping to find a "beige brick" cell phone for the display, if anyone has one they can lend us.

Activity...

>>Noah C. Summers, County Clerk. Allen Luthy recently sent this photo of a painting. Allen tells us that the painting is of Noah C. Summers, Bullitt County Clerk for 26 years (1824-1850) until his retirement. The painting dates around 1840 and has been passed down generation to generation for the past 175 years. Allen's mother has had it for 50. It is currently at an art gallery being restored, and Allen thought someone might have an interest in seeing the image.

Thank you for sharing it with us!

>>I attended the reunion meeting of the Lebanon Junction High School and St. Benedict Schools and picked up several great stories. Thanks, everyone, for putting up with the attendance of a non-alum!

>>Museum Booth and Bowman Valley Booth at Showcase Bullitt County. Our museum hosted an informational booth at this event in which many hundreds of students and parents attended. Volunteers Barbara Bailey, Mark Milliner, and I worked at the booth. This photo shows Mark Milliner talking with visitors at the booth. Tammy Ott also hosted a booth about the Bowman Valley School restoration project and picked up several new volunteers for that project.

>>Web Site Additions. Some interesting additions to our web site this month, as always. Click on the line to go to the page.

Donations...

>>Camera System. Museum Volunteer Bob Cline has donated a Kodak digital camera system with stand, printer & the works to the museum for use by the Cemetery Documentation Team or for use by museum as needed. Thank you Bob!

>>Photo of St. Xavier. Donna Peak recently donated this nice photo of the old St. Xavier Catholic Church in Mt. Washington. This little building was long-since replaced with a much nicer one further west on Highway 44, and then one after that just a couple of years ago. This building was located on Highway 44, almost immediately east of Main Street (Old Bardstown Road), where a small shopping center is now. The cemetery remains. Donna, who had been doing research with me on St. Aloysius in Shepherdsville for its 100th anniversary, also gave the museum a substantial collection of files and photos about that church.

>>Book. A new book, Friends United Forever, History of St. Catherine Parish and School 1844-2012 was donated to the museum by Roseann Cahoe, who helped create it. St. Catherine is in New Haven, Nelson County.

>>Yardsale Fundraiser. Thanks to Volunteer Beverly Owen for hosting a space at a neighborhood yardsale recently, with funds going to the Genealogical Society. $144.80 was raised.

>>A 1928 sports paper about Bullitt County schools was donated by Elizabeth Bealmer. It has been archived in our schools cabinet. (Did you know that Margaret Newman won the spelling bee that year, with Thelma Moore of LJ winning second place?) And it must have been a good year for Shepherdsville High School, which defeated E-town (boys & girls) and St. Joe at Bardstown.

For Your Information.....

>>"Death and the Civil War" is a fascinating "American Experience" documentary about how the horrendous number of deaths in the American Civil War changed how the military, and how Americans, deal with death and burials. Did you know, for example, that armies did nothing for the dead, not even sending the bodies home, until the Civil War? It was considered an obligation of the family. I think this excellent public television show is a must see. If not playing on your local TV station, you can watch it here on the PBS site.

>>New Web Address. The Kentucky Genealogical Society has created a new web address at www.KentuckyGenealogicalSociety.org .

Finally...

As I sit writing this month's newsletter to you, I watch the clean pure rains of Fall bathing the countryside, preparing it for its long Winter's nap.

The long, hot Summer has ended, and refreshing cool breezes have taken its place. The green lushness of Kentucky has returned, if only for a season before the grayness of Winter sets in.

The hills of Bullitt County, covered with deciduous trees such as Maple, Oak, and Ash, are starting to turn their beautiful golds, reds, and yellows. It all takes on the aura of a grand oil painting. The leaves become so bright that, along with the low setting autumn sun, the very air takes on a golden hue. Long evening shadows fill the valleys. Mists fill the mornings.

Everything in Nature seems to be giving out one long sigh.

Bonnie and I have begun harvesting our pears and apples and enjoying the taste that only fresh-ripened fruit can give.

My hands are stained greenish-brown from harvesting black walnuts, but that's OK. Breathing the clean, crisp air while I work...even the smells of the last fresh-cut grass of the year, is one of many rewards of living "in the country". Black Walnuts are not really worth the trouble to me anymore...I have become too "citified" for them. I just gather them to give them away.

Black Walnuts have a long tradition in "the country." The nuts are very hard to crack, and the outer hull is tough and messy (pioneers and Confederate Civil War soldiers even used the stain as a dye for their clothes and uniforms).

People who live on a gravel rural road might lay the nuts on the road on purpose, letting passing cars run over them, busting and removing the outer hull but not breaking the tough inner shell.

I used to do the same on my gravel driveway.

Looking back, it made a nasty looking mess, but the winter rains would eventually clean it up soon enough. Now the road is paved and my driveway is a nice white concrete. My wife, and maybe my fellow-citified neighbors, would not be happy with a big nasty stain in the middle of all that. Meanwhile, falling nuts from trees naturally growing along the roadways stain even the paved roads brown.

And the squirrels enjoy it all, packing and preparing their harvest for Winter as well.

Nature, like all of us, needs to slow down a bit once in a while and take a breath. Fall seems a little like that sometimes.

May you have a pleasant and peaceful Fall wherever you live.

Thank you for being a Friend of the Bullitt County History Museum.

David Strange
Bullitt County History Museum
Executive Director
Museum Phone: 502-921-0161
E-Mail address: David.Strange@BullittCountyHistory.org