Original Hayswood Mansion

Hayswood Seminary, which was given in 1906 by Mrs. Mary Wilson to the city for use as a hospital. While she lived, it was called Wilson Hospital, but the time of her death it became Hayswood Hospital. This building was replaced in 1925 by a new hospital building on the site that with several additions served the city until it was closed in 1983.

November 25, 1931

Images found on Ebay. Click to enlarge

Destination Limestone

General Josiah Harmar had noticed the large number of flatboats descending the Ohio and ordered the officer of the day to take an account of the number of boats that passed the garrison. From the tenth of October 1786, until the 12th of May 1787, 127 boats, 2,689 souls, 1,333 horses, 756 cattle and 102 wagons passed Muskingum bound for Limestone (Maysville, Ky.), and the Rapids (Louisville, Ky.). An average of 3000 flatboats descended the Ohio River every year between 1810 and 1820. At Limestone the boats became so numerous that they frequently were set adrift in order to make room for others. General Harmar noted that he had purchased at Limestone from 40 to 50 flatboats at the moderate price of from $1 to $2 each, to be used in the construction of Fort Washington at Cincinnati.

Robert Rankin

Photo of Cemetery at Cold Spring, Texas

RANKIN, ROBERT (1753-1837). Revolutionary War veteran Robert Rankin was born in the colony of Virginia in 1753. He entered the service of the Continental Army in 1776 with the Third Regiment of the Virginia line and participated in the battles of Germantown, Brandywine, and Stony Point, as well as the siege of Charleston, where he was captured; he remained a prisoner of war until exchanged, at which time he received a promotion to lieutenant. On October 1, 1781, during a furlough, he married Margaret (Peggy) Berry in Frederick County, Virginia. He returned to active duty on October 15 and served until the war's end. Robert and Margaret Rankin had three daughters and seven sons, one of whom was Frederick Harrison Rankin. The family moved to Kentucky in 1784. In 1786 Rankin was named by the Virginia legislature as one of nine trustees for the newly established town of Washington, in Bourbon County (later Mason County), Kentucky. In 1792 he served as a delegate from Mason County to the Danville Convention, which drafted the first constitution of Kentucky. He also became an elector of the Kentucky Senate of 1792. The last mention of Rankin in Mason County, Kentucky, is in the 1800 census.

Timothy David Hurley

Hurley, Timothy David was born Aug. 31, 1863, Maysville, KY; died July 22, 1926, Evanston, IL. Lawyer; president of Visitation and Aid Society; president of Illinois State Council of the Catholic Benevolent Legion.

Old Washington Courthouse

Mrs. Lula Reed Bass of Maysville, Ky., has written a well-researched paper entitled “Mason County’s First Temple of Justice.” The temple was Mason County’s first courthouse located in Washington, which had been established as a town in 1786 by an act of the Virginia Legislature. Made “of brick and stone,” the building was opened on 26 October 1796, Mrs. Bass wrote. On the outside of the building, in an area called “publick grounds,” there was a section fenced off for “stray pens” where lost or stray livestock were placed for owners to identify and recover. Another outdoors section was the pillory or whipping post where culprits received 20 lashes as punishment. After 115 years, lightning struck the courthouse (Friday, 13 August 1909) and burned the building. The Hixon Papers at the Maysville Public Library talk about a bill passed in 1847 to remove the court from Washington to Maysville. Before 1847, the court appointed a committee of farmers to report on adding a room to the courthouse in Maysville.

Cogan's Woods by Maysville Native Ron Ellis

The tale begins with author and his father journeying from their home in a white Mercury to a largely fictional land beyond Maysville, Kentucky, where both father and son were born. This annual commute is ostensibly for the purpose of hunting squirrels, but they are seeking more, and in doing so they discover solace and legends in those wet, foggy woods above the Ohio River and in the lovable characters they discover there and in the nearby town of Persimmon Gap.

Cogan's Woods offers a fond look back at 1960s small-town America: sweating red metal Coca-Cola coolers filled with bottled soft drinks whose caps are imbedded outside the store in "an asphalt apron paved with hundreds of flattened bottle caps, country stores where "old timers of various shapes and sizes leaned into their stories," fresh-picked tomatoes that were "still warm and tasted of the sun," and legendary baseball teams like the Undefeated Persimmon Gap Bobcats."


Ellis offers lasting images and sensory paintings, all gleaned from this land where he and his father traveled, hunted, and rested. In the end, it is this simple mantra, offered first by a gravedigger and later by his dying father that settles into the boy's heart: "It's important to remember, it's so important to remember."

The book is available at several web sites

Stanton & Pierce, Maysville, kY

MHS Class of 1944 Discovered On Ebay

Printed in the Public Ledger. Click To Enlarge
Is there a parent or other relative in this photo ?

G.W. Rogers & Co Maysville Year Unknown

Maysville, Kentucky, liquor jug, G.W. ROGERS & CO / WHOLESALE LIQUOR DEALERS / 127 MARKET ST / MAYSVILLE

Maysville Explosion 1854

THE MAYSVILLE EAGLE - Extra
Description This describes a devastating explosion which occurred in the Maysville Powder Magazine. Maysville suffered extensive damage and the town of Aberdeen, Ohio across the Ohio River was also damaged. Rewards were offered but the solution to the cause of the explosion was never learned.
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150th Anniversary of the Founding of the Town of Washington KY

Edna Hunter Best, 1936, for the 150th Anniversary of the
Founding of the Town of Washington
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Stanton & Pierce Proprietors, Maysville, kY

UPPER / BLUE / LICK / WATER and back with STANTON & PIERCE / PROPRIETORS / MAYSVILLE KY. 10" light cobalt blue oval shaped bottle sold on eBay by jarguy for $1,213.

Old Orangeburg Resident Map

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Old Sardis Resident Map

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Kentucky's Story - Survival of a People

Life in pioneer Kentucky was austere, rugged, and fatiguing-not for the delicate or faint-hearted. Nevertheless, those willing and able to endure the hardships worked hard to convert the wilderness into a Garden of Eden. Land was cheap; timber was plentiful; the woods teemed with game; and life was relatively free from the confining laws and mores of eastern society. Families strove to become self-sufficient, yet freely shared their goods and energies with needy neighbors. The developing frontier molded a lifestyle
which easterners made fun of but which nevertheless became an important part of the nation's history and folklore. The bulk of Kentucky's early residents were poor, land hungry settlers who came from western portions of Virginia, North Carolina; Pennsylvania, and Maryland, traveling in flatboats or wagons filled with essential tools, a minimum of household goods, and a few head of livestock. Possessing warrants (received for military service) that entitled them to a few hundred acres, or using squatter; sovereignty, they scattered across the wilderness and staked their claims along Kentucky's many streams and waterways. Survival depended on the immediate' acquisition of shelter for man and beast. A lean-to or a cave sufficed until a cabin could be built. Once a site was selected and cleared, a more permanent abode was erected. The backwoods home, typically a one room cabin, served as the hub of family life. A mud and stone fireplace dominated one wall of the cabin, providing illumination and heat warm its inhabitants and a place to cook their food; over the fireplace hung a rifle and powder horn. Furnishings generally were
sparse and crude-a few chairs or split log benches, perhaps a couple of tables made from logs, a bedstead or two (under which the axe and scythe were stored at night during Indian unrest), a cradle, maybe a cup board or chest for storing bedding and clothing, spinning wheel, and a loom. Kitchen utensils consisted of a few iron pots and skillets, tin or pewter plates (or perhaps wooden plates and cups made from gourds or tree knots), and wooden or tin spoons. The appearance of such luxuries as curtains, mirrors, bedspreads, rag rugs, and china dishes heralded the arrival of relative affluence.
An awesome number of tasks were necessary to sustain the family, and the women-an overworked but ingenious lot-and the children performed most of them. They made candles and soap from animal fats, ground corn into meal, dried fruits and vegetables for winter, salted down meats, churned butter, made cheese, and fashioned the family's clothing from animal hides they tanned a from yarns they spun, dyed, and wove into cloth. They also carried water from the nearby stream, gathered firewood, stoked the hearth, cooked the meals, and cared for the family stock. The man of the family generally prepared the land for planting (using a mattock and axe to rid the virgin soil of roots and a scrub brush and a plow and hoe to cultivate the earth); the women and children usually attended and weeded the garden. The major crop was corn, but most families also had a truck patch planted in wheat, oats
beans, squash, turnips, potatoes, and melons. With a minimum of effort, Kentucky's fertile soil yielded sixty to eighty bushels of corn per acre. In addition to providing meal and liquor (which frontiersmen produced for their own consumption as well as to sell), the cornstalks provided fodder for the stock to eat during the winter. Although game and garden produce served as diet mainstays, other foodstuffs titillated pioneer palates. In the early spring, maple trees could be tapped for their sap, which boiled down into a thick, sweet syrup or a granular sugar. Honey was also available for those daring enough to brave the bees. Wild berries were gathered in the early summer and made into pies.
Nuts and autumn fruit such as wild grapes and crab apples, added a welcome change to the diet. During the early frontier years, a man's worth was measured not only by his skill with an axe but also by his accuracy with a rifle. The former was imperative in clearing the land and erecting buildings, but a family's safety and food supply depended on the latter. Because of its precision at a 200-300 yard range, the frontiersmen adopted the long-barreled, small-bored rifle developed in Pennsylvania and they elevated sharp shooting to an art unsurpassed by their contemporaries in the east. Each gun was designed carefully for the height of its owner, so that he could load and fire it and clear the barrel of carbon without ever taking his eyes off his target. A rifle, a gunpowder-filled buffalo horn, a pouch of lead bullets, greased doeskin patches, and a wooden ramrod were as much a part of the backwoods-man's garb as were his buckskin jacket and leather or woolen leggings. Although essential tasks left little time for frivolity, the Kentucky pioneers found occasions to combine work with play and to relieve the monotony and isolation that characterized their lives. Hunting contests provided an opportunity to exhibit marksmanship as was to socialize. At a community squirrel hunt, men, boys and their dogs spent the day ridding the area of the rodents that played havoc with their gardens while, at the same time acquiring meat for a community feast. The team that lost the contest did the cooking. At such events, braggarts gloried in their real and imagined sporting skills. Some boasted they only shot squirrels through the right (or left) eye, for the meat hit anywhere else caused indigestion; a few cocky nimrods claimed they preferred to "bark"

Early Lewisburg Residents

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Early Mason County School Bus

Kentucky Dog Tax 1865

Dog Tax
The Kentucky General Assembly passed an act for the protection of sheep, approved January 31, 1865, that included a tax of $1.00 for each dog over six months of age, except that “each bona fide housekeeper shall be allowed to keep two (2) dogs free of tax.” The sheriff in each county was charged with collecting the tax, which was to go to support of the common schools.

“Black” Lou Bullock, known as a huntsman in the Orangeburg, Mason County area, with his prize dog, circa 1890. Photo contributed to An Ohio River Portrait Collection by Jean Clark Smoot. KHS Collections.

Simon Kenton Memorial Bridge

The Simon Kenton Memorial bridge ranks 96th in the world at 323 feet in length of span. It is also the 5th oldest bridge in the top 100 built in 1931. It has famous company. The George Washington Bridge in New York City and the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia are older. The I-35 bridge in Minneapolis was 458 feet.