Mills, Michael Clinton
Cassette Tape Content Outline
Cassette Tape No. 2000/1
Knox Historical Museum Oral History Project Special Collection: History of the Museum Specific Topic: Historic photographs
Date of Interview: 22 September 2000
Date of Transcription: 23-28 September 2000
[PW\OH\MILLSMK.OH]
[Last Update: 28 Sept 2000]
MICHAEL CLINTON MILLS (Born December 18,1945)
Cassette Tape dated September 22, 2000 on file at Knox Historical Museum, Barbourvi1le, KY. Notes by C.R. Mitchell.
Interviewed by Charles Reed Mitchell at the Knox Historical Museum, Barbourville, KY on September 22, 2000, Michael Clinton Mills discusses his work on historical photographs of the Knox County and Barbourville, Kentucky area and his teaching career and publications.
One sixty-minute cassette. Total playing time: 50 minutes. Open. Release signed and on file at the Knox Historical Museum.
Almost complete transcript. Most repetitions, false starts, incomplete sentences, encouraging remarks and affirmations irrelevant to the data, and interruptions have been edited out. Summaries replace sections that are deemed of peripheral interest. Some grammatical adjustments have been made without notice.
Mills is the son of Reed Mills (no middle name), b. February 7, 1925 at Hammond, KY, and Mary Ruth Mayo Mills, born at Himyar, KY, Knox County. His two brothers are Larry Mills (b. 1945) and Terry Mills (b. 1948). He is married to Darlah Jane Detherage Mills (b. Sept. 24,1948) and has two children: Kimberly Jo (b. May 14, 1968) and David Michael (b.April 13,1971). He has a family entry in Knox County, Kentucky: History and Families (1994).
SIDE 1
CRM. We're going to be talking about your work in publishing history of Knox County, primarily through photographic images. Let's begin with a little of your background. Where did you go to school?
MCM. I'm a local boy. I went to school at Knox Central High School and graduated in '63, and from there went to Cumberland College, and studied Sociology and received a degree in 1966 from Cumberland College and a Master's Degree a few years later from Union College.
CRM. Then did you go directly into teaching?
MCM. Went directly into teaching and taught for the first four years at Lynn Camp High School in the Knox County system and continued teaching until I had taught thirty years, the remaining years being at Knox Central High School.
CRM. What did you teach in high school?
MCM. I had a major in sociology, my minor was in biology, so for a few years I taught general science and biology and eventually moved into my general field of sociology and taught sociology primarily for most of the years that I taught high school.
CRM. I think you said previously that you taught history only in summer sessions.
MCM. Yes, during summer school I taught some American history, and I always had an interest in local history.
CRM. How did you get into local history? What turned you on to that subject?
MCM. As I think back, I remember of couple of things. I remember in my freshman year in college doing an assigned project on our home town. Living in the county all my life I really wasn't connected to the town except that my grandmother lived inside the city limits. A teacher at Cumberland College required all his students do a little essay on their home town, and I remember sketching out a little map of the city of Barbourville and looking at its boundaries and the railroad and became quite interested doing this paper as far as the geographical layout of the county, where it was in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains, its proximity to Cumberland Gap. So that kind of stirred my interest, and then later while teaching at Knox Central I remember a student bringing in a collection of old photographs. They were rolled up in a ball. They were 8' X 10.' They were kind of in poor quality but they were very historic looking, and later T found out they were the collected photographs of Governor Sampson when he staged the bicentennial celebration in 1950 for Thomas Walker. The photographs showed the covered wagons and parades going around the court square . . . and you could see the old buildings, and right away you'd see some buildings that housed businesses that I didn't know ever existed there. I saw, for example, the A & P was on the court square at one time. And just looking at those pictures and having an interest from sociology, I started reading and became quite proud of the fact that our town is in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains and would soon learn the historical significance of the population of our city in the early 1840s up through the early 1900s.
CRM. What level did you teach most of the time?
MCM. I taught high school. It was usually sophomores through seniors.
MCM. In the early 1970s to add a little spice to sometimes boredom textbooks, I would have my students study the local businesses. We would do studies of pricing at grocery stores, and soon I talked with Charley Hopper, who was a local funeral home director, and arranged when we would study death education to take my students to the funeral home, and he would give us a history of the funeral business. A bit later I had my students become interested in genealogy and their own backgrounds, and this caused a lot of material to come in. The students would bring in not only the documents documenting their family history but they'd bring in the old cardboard and tintype pictures of their ancestors. So we began to copy those. The school bought a camera for that purpose, and I would copy them and amassed a pretty good collection of genealogy pictures and at the same time a lot of early school photographs of school groups and things. As I collected these pictures and things, I guess in my mind I looked for opportunities to display or to at least show them off. I guess this was the beginning of wanting to make things available for other people to see.
CRM. You said that you did this in the early '70s. That sort of takes you into Knox Historical Society, doesn't it?
MCM. It does. The Knox Historical Society started I believe about '76. I remember Charley Dibble, who was a former citizen here, and Susan Arthur, who works here in the museum here, and Jakalyn Jackson, Sonya Burnette, Sol Warren—I don't know if I can name everybody—but there was a pretty good group of us that just saw the need. There was just a desire to have a some type of a history organization in our county because Sol had published a History of Knox County, a very fine book, through the Daniel Boone Festival Committee, and a lot. of these ladies I mentioned, such as Susan Arthur, comes from a very distinguished early family in Knox County. We all had discussed the fact that, we had not only artifacts but information. One thing led to another, and I think Charley Dibble was the organizer, and Susan Arthur, Sonya Burnette, and Jakalyn Jackson were the early movers in that organization, so we began to meet at Union College and officially formed the Knox County Historical Society.
CRM. About how long did that society exist?
MCM. I think it was going pretty much through '79 - '30, when our numbers kind of dropped and we had kind of exhausted our genealogies back and forth with one another, but there was a lot of accomplishments, and, even though it didn't last a long time, a lot of these accomplishments we can still see the fruit of. We researched several cemeteries in Knox County and published some cemetery books, and that was the beginning of publications that could be housed in libraries or sold, and some of those still exist. You can find them at the local library and at certainly at. the Knox Historical Museum. It provided some publication in the local newspaper about some of the activities and events and I'm sure led to a lot of other people donating materials.
CRM. The Society also published a newsletter, Mountain Ancestry. Was this made up primarily of just individual pieces by individual members?
MCM. It was, and primarily was genealogical in nature, but anything that becomes published lasts out there. It's harder to find copies of those. There's some here at the Knox Museum. I think that also led to the foundation of the local museum. We can go back look around at a group of people who are still around, like Susan Arthur that worked in both of them and is here as a dedicated volunteer at the museum.
CRM. Can you tell us about the Knox County Genealogical Society and its relation to that original organization?
MCM. It was already going on. I don't think I became that interested in it until we were having a conference connected to the local historical society one weekend; I don't remember the date. One of the featured speakers were the girls from the genealogical society. People find it surprising that they are headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. For a long time they published a weekly column in the local paper which would give genealogical backgrounds. I remember the first time they published one on the Mills family. It stirred a lot of my interest in genealogy. I didn't start out beginning being interested in my genealogy when I became interested in history. But those were certainly two of the earliest and the most important historical organizations in the '70s, the local historical society and the Knox County Genealogical Society.
CRM. Tell something about some of your publications.
MCM. As I mentioned, as a result of school projects in collecting photographs and especially those of that early bicentennial celebration, then I started to collect as many photographs as I could of the city. I remember one of the earliest publications I saw was a 1909-10 publication by the Barbourville Trade Board, put together by Scotty Hudson, which pictured some of the early buildings of B.B.I. and an early courthouse picture and many early residences. Those became kind of the groundwork of putting together an item of what our city looked like that early, as early as 1910. Of course, we'd like to find images earlier than that. Taking that collection of photographs, and then an early book I came by was called Too Short the Days by Edgar Bruce Wesley, where a young boy came to school at Union College, which was a high school academy at that time that he came to. He discusses in a little book about his life after he'd become an older man in California. He talks about his early days in Barbourville, Kentucky. In it he gives a vivid description of getting off the train at the depot early in the morning and boarding the old streetcar. And as the old streetcar takes him toward the town he talks about being impressed by street lights, things you don't expect to find that early back in the early nineteen hundreds. He discusses going to Union. He discusses in later chapters of that' book going to early churches, such as Swan Pond. He talks about being a young boy and witnessing the hanging of Jesse Fitzgerald in 1907 or 1906. He gives a vivid description of going to the dentist [office] of Dr. Parker upstairs over the First National Bank. So you put these early images that come together of pictures and early descriptions by people who write things later of what it was like to live here at that time led me to put together the photographs in a collection and—I'm not a writer, I never say that I am—but to come up with a text to try to say what these pictures are. As more people saw the collection just out of boxes, [they would say] " oh, this is interesting." Everyone seemed to enjoy them. In 1976 I started with my class in sociology. I said, ''Let's see what we can collect and put together and come up with some kind of layout or outline." [I] talked to a book company who did yearbooks for Knox Central, and so we just decided to go for it and come out with some kind of a book we could sell and at least pay for the project. It resulted in a big hardback book, similar to a yearbook size at the time, and the outline of photographs covered everything from residences to business sections downtown. As we would go out and collect [photos], I would interview people, such as Governor Black's daughter, and some of the elderly citizens who would allow me to come to their home and show me their photographs would tell me things like, ''Did you know that one of the last hangings in the state of Kentucky took place right, here?" So I wanted to collect photographs pertaining to that of which we only had one at that time for that publication. The streetcar was always brought up, so we have several photographs of that, even though today we have many more. The book was pretty much a layout of residences, and business places, early transportation, the courthouse.... And at the end of the book we put several personalities, people who everyone remembered. The book was quite successful. I remember when we received the book in the fall and winter it was received very well. When one person would buy one and take it back to the court house or somewhere, here'd come a whole lot of people [saying], "I've got to have one of them," especially if some of their family were in there, or [if] they were politicians, they wanted the old court house collection. That was a big hardback book, and we never sold one for over ten dollars and fifty cents. At that time it cost me ten dollars to have two photographs reproduced at Engle Studio to send to the book company, so it was quite a bit of an expense, much more, so than today. But the book was quite successful, and my scare was over when I assumed the massive amount to pay the book company. I thought I had plenty of books, but within a couple of years they were all sold out, and even today I have people write all the time who want a copy, and I have to say, ''The only way you can get one is find someone who has one who'll sell you theirs," because I'd say for the last five or six years it's not been possible to find copies of it. [I'm] proud it was done because it preserved a lot of photographs that I guess today if I had to go find the originals to those, those people are dead and gone, photographs have been scattered and lost. So that's my goal, if I can just preserve something that'll be there when we're gone.
CRM. The book we're talking about is Barbourville, Kentucky: A Pictorial Look Back.
MCM. Published in 1977.
CRM. And you published it yourself. You didn't go through the Boone Committee or historical society?
MCM. No, I did that myself. I had the backing of the people at the school, of my principal, Charles Black, who was very encouraging to me, and he, himself coming from a very historical family here in Barbourvi1le, was able to turn me in the right direction for that project and back me as I did put that together at the school. But I really winged that by myself. The books came in and bill and I thought, ''Will they sell?"
CRM. Who was the publisher? What was the printing company?
MCM. The printing company was the company who printed the yearbooks at that time, and they were out of Kansas City.
CRM. What was your press run?
MCM. I think I did one thousand even of that book.
CRM. And there was one printing?
MCM. One printing. I knew going in that in order to set that press up to do that book the cost would be too great, so I knew there would not be the possibility of reprinting that book. Technically it could be done, but it would be a very expensive process.
CRM. The next book is Looking Back with Michael Mills and the Knox County Historical Society, Inc. What's the year on that one?
MCM. I think—it didn't have a year printed in it.— I think that was printed about '79. That book, I want to say right up front, was the result of the work of the Knox County Historical Society. I've mentioned some of the people before, Sonya [Burnette] and Jakalyn [Jackson] and Susan Arthur and those ladies. It was their idea to come out with a book, and they wanted to include a lot of genealogy but didn't have enough genealogy to make a book. So when they talked with me I had the collection of school photographs that I'd been collecting. For about two years I had put the pictures in the local paper almost weekly of an old school with the kids out front and tell the names of all of them that people could name at that time. That was a run of about two years that I collected those, and they were in the paper, and I kept the photographs or copies of them and the negatives. I had that collection of photographs and then had some genealogical pictures of my own, and so we put that together and they graciously titled it Look Back with Michael Mills, because I guess most of the book is of school photographs, and then was able to add quite a bit of genealogy and. some from even the people who put the book together, and it became a very popular book. It was a smaller printing, and the last few copies the museum inherited from the old historical society when it went under, and I think they're gone now. I don't think you can find copies of those unless you can find someone who owns one. It's kind of a mix of genealogy, and I guess I have more letters come to me about that book from people who are interested in genealogy. [They] want to know if we have pictures of the old families. We did go out to houses in the county and talk to people who had the big picture on the wall of great grandma and grandpa, and sometimes we'd just have to take photographs of those. They were too large to bring back. I can point out that this book, like the '77 book, required borrowing pictures, taking them to Elmer Engle's Studio, having the pictures sent off-- sometimes that would take them two weeks; hopefully they didn't lose any—you'd get the pictures back, and you'd take the originals and return them as quick as possible. It cost three or four dollars a photograph, so there again it was a valuable collection of photographs. That book didn't last long, but it's a good book and will be there when we're gone.
CRM. Was this printed by a different company?
MCM. Yes, it was. Again it was a yearbook connection, but it was a company out of Lexington this time. I can't remember the exact name. I knew the fellow. He was a Tuttle, and he had some Knox County connections and did this book a little differently. It's not as thick a book as the '77 book, but he did it in a more historical look. It's kind of tinted looking pictures. We have Daniel Sutton on the cover, who was an old shoe cobbler, preacher; he was a character himself. It was a classic photograph of him sitting in his shoe cobbler shop around a old coal stove, and from there you go right into some old family photographs and pictures. [The press run was less than a 1000 but MCM was not involved in the business end of the publication.]
CRM. I guess that leads you to your current book, published this year, 2000, Barbourville and Knox County. Is that the correct title? I always refer to it as Barbourville and Knox County, comma, Kentucky, but I don't think that's in the title.
MCM. This book is published by Arcadia Press down in Charleston, South Carolina, and it is part of a series they're doing nationwide called ''Images of America." [Later MCM explained that the company's policy is to omit the state name on the front cover but to locate the state on a state map on the back cover.] So when they contacted me because they had heard that I had amassed a good collection.... A lot of people [have been] asking me about the photographs in this book, and they are a result of the other two books. People could see finally what we were going to do with the photographs, and they'd say, "I had a better photograph of the courthouse than that," and so I give the credit to the other two books, causing people to say, "I didn't furnish this the last time, but I can see what a nice book comes out and how they're preserved." So as I said, where I might have had three or four courthouse pictures in the book in '77, now you know here at the museum we have I guess ten or fifteen different versions of our courthouse. One photograph of the Jesse Fitzgerald hanging in '77, and we have ten or twelve now, so the other two books caused things to surface. So I began to collect them and put them together and say ''This is a better photograph of this." And then new things come along, like great, photographs of the Mitchell and Magic Theatres that we didn't have came by mail. And so we started to put those together, and then, when the local Knox Historical Museum became a reality, I started to bring collections of photographs and things here, because my wife was saying, ''You're going to have to get those things out of the house." So we started to bring them here, and people started to send materials here also, and we put all of this together and have amassed a pretty good collection, much better material than is in the other two books. And now we're coming into the days of the computers and digital cameras, and photographs can be zapped across the air waves. I just thought we have these photographs in albums for lack of a better classification system, which we're going to do better. I thought before we do that, it might be a good time to take these materials and put. them together and come out with something new, because the other two books were gone, and I still receive phone calls and letters from people wanting the old books, and so I just decided we'd put that together. As you know, I talked to you about it. We looked at our material and we found that we have more than enough material to do a book. When I looked at the Arcadia book—I happened to be in a book store in Lexington--I found that as close as London, Kentucky had published a book in this series called just London. There's one called Laurel County. I thought we have a greater collection of photographs than I see in these books, and Barbourville deserves another book. I talked with my secretary at work, and she said, "I'LL type the text for you." And that's scary. I said, "I'LL try to come up with the caption material, so we just laid it out in scrapbook form and followed some of the format of the old book. We tried to show early residences. We didn't overdo it. I think we showed four of the most classic examples that you had highlighted in local museum's quarterly. And the courthouse, rather than just do scattering of pictures, we had received an earlier picture from the Filson Club of a late 1800s version of our courthouse. [I] put those together and called it the courthouse scene—you could never do a history of Barbourvi1le and Knox County without the courthouse. And [I] chose our best photographs of the streetcar and added some early cars and buses, did a section on the hanging, which I said our collection had grown from one photograph to ten or twelve and so we were able to do that, in more detail. Scattered some personalities in this book. Was able between the printing of this bock and the last one here at the museum and through the work being done here to find photographs of the six congressmen that, had been elected from this area from the late 1800s up through the early 1900s. Governor Silas Woodson, Samuel Miller and some of the more famous personalities in our town's history, we were able to find photographs of them. So we were able to put that in there. The medical doctors, we collected everything from group photographs to Logan and Burnside and some of the earlier doctors, some early dentists, so we've got a scattering of professional people as well as places. The book has just come out. We're had it here probably in Barbourville maybe five or six weeks. It's doing real great. Everybody's helping me with it. I tell everybody my first, goal is to recoup the money that I have a bill for and am in the process of doing that. It's going real well. I hope to have the overhead paid within the next week or two.
CRM. You didn't have to cough up any money up front, did you?
MCM. No, and that was another reason to go with this company because this is a national series. They're in the hunt for people who have photo collections. So I get a percentage of what they sell, a better percentage early, and then later they'll market this book nationwide. That's fine with me because after they're paid my goal is still, like the old books, to see that we preserve the photographs. We have them out there. If nothing more, we have them in the museum. I might say the Knox Historical Museum made possible all the of our materials coming together. Any [fragments (freaks?)] from the early work of Sherman Oxendine, Sol Warren, the early founders of the Knox Historical Society, the pulling of all this together here at the museum and the good job that you all do here is leaving Knox County something that just was not there in the early '70's. When we studied history in my classes, we didn't have much to study locally. We'd go look at the school books, and they'd hardly mention our area. As a result of all the early work now collected and housed [here] and the work that's been done by this museum, I dare say that this community has the best collection of its early history of any mountain community that I know of.
CRM. Well, thank you for that.
SIDE 2
[CRM and MCM mention MCM's writings in The Knox Countian, ''Death by Hanging," ''Knox County U.S. Congressmen," and various series in the Advocate on the courthouses (because of the new addition), a series on B.B.I. for a few weeks, a series on the streetcar because of the effort to build a replica, a series on recreation locations, such as theatres, drive-in restaurants etc.]
MCM. I'm not a writer but I hope to do more caption material. I think people will see in this new book there's quite a bit more of captions and trying to let the material flow like a story. This new book has been [well] received not only because of the pictures that's being preserved in it, but I've had several people say they enjoyed the narrative this time, how it went in sort of a story form from the early county, early city. Hopefully here at the museum we can follow up this project and do another book, maybe with this company. I'd like to see one with more personalities, more of our people in it.
CRM. Have they told you what the press run is for this current book?
MCM. No, they did tell me that they were very impressed with the quality of the material we have for the book, and they did project it would be one of their biggest sellers, and they have already contacted me about any update material, like if I've found anything in the book I would like to change, so they're already planning reprint materials, so I assume it's doing real well. I know I have checked with a few stores around, Corbin bookstores and Middlesboro, that have the book.... I just ask them about it. That's being handled by the book company. I don't deal with that, and they've said it's been very popular. If it's doing as well out there as it's doing here, it's doing very well.
CRM. You mentioned the photograph column in the Advocate that you ran last year and some into this year as well. You also did one in the middle '70s, I think you mentioned, for about two years?
MCM. Yeah. I think it went about two years, and it was primarily of school groups that came in. This allowed you to list a lot of people. If someone gives you a picture, for example, of an old school up on Stinking Creek, and there's twenty youngsters, and they can name practically all of them, that's somebody's grandpa and grandma, and mom and dad, and that caused that to be a popular column. People would send those in, and we'd copy them and get them in there and get them back to them. There's more of that to do. I've often thought in the early 70s if I had just had a way to pay my bills so that I could just have got up every morning and, instead of going to school and working, just visited houses all over this county, copied their ancestors' pictures, and their old school pictures. There's a lot of history out there still in the closets, in the attics, and in the old Bibles and the old shoe boxes.
CRM. That brings us to talking about sources of photographs. You've discussed in some detail individual sources for your photographs, but what are some other sources that you can think of—businesses, social organizations? What businesses were able to provide you with photographs?
MCM. Right off the bat I'd like to mention the files of the Advocate, which is very generous to share the old back photographs and images, and Bert Scent in particular. And David Cole when he was at the Advocate was always very good to us to provide us with any material that they had stored in boxes or from the files of the Advocate. That was a very welcome source, and they've always been good to help me. I guess statewide there's nothing better than the Filson Club in Louisville, KY. Mot a lot of photographs from there, but I remember one trip I made there in the 70s and where I saw my first photograph of the courthouse other than the old gray stucco building when I went back to the late 1800s [in] these photographs. I was able to find several area courthouses and a few county pictures. The Filson Club's pictures are used not only by us, but other historical organizations in the area use them in a lot of books. The Kentucky Historical Society collects material that you can go to. Sometime during putting together the '77 book, I was contacted by Alice Lloyd College, since I had the materials, [and] they had the photograph lab. They were able to copy the photographs on the spot and not have to send them off like I did. So I was taking some classes at Union, and I was contacted, and a student who was doing back and forth work from Alice Lloyd and Union said, ''What about letting me take these over there and copy for you, and I'll bring you back a copy, and we'll file them away." So [there are! a lot of photographs over there from Knox County. That's a good source to go to for anything mountain. Berea College, you and I have visited there, and they really didn't have as many as we thought. Locally, the two high schools, the college, the Advocate so far as organizations, and other than that, prominent people's ancestors, Governor Black's family, Governor Sampson's family, people who have made history back there in the early 1900s. Their descendants are still around, and they're a good source to get materials, and they have been good to the museum also as far as finding artifacts.
CRM. Just to discuss an particular photograph, an interesting story you can tell us is about locating a photograph of Silas Woodson, Governor of Missouri who came from Barbourville and was born in Knox County.
MCM. I knew the story of Silas Woodson, who was born here in Knox County, became a very famous lawyer here and then ending up moving to Missouri and becoming elected governor. I didn't know a lot more about that until I came up to the museum one day. It was during a period that I wasn't very active with the museum, and the museum was really tearing up Jack around here as far as putting together material, and I remember coming up and seeing Samuel Miller's picture on the wall. Lois Morris was instrumental in finding that picture, and she did a column in the local quarterly of the museum telling about him. I thought his law partner was Silas Woodson, sc we tried to find a picture of him. And lo and behold we couldn't find one. We started contacting the historical organizations around the state, and we can't come up with one, and we think, well, surely we'll get one in Missouri, so we contact Missouri and the historical societies all over, and they don't have one. [The Missouri State Historical Society had only a woodcut and drawing.] So anyway I'd about given up, and a friend of mind, Fred Jones, I was telling him the story of Silas Woodson, and he's active in the Masons. He said, "I think he was one of our--" whatever they call their early leaders. ''There's a picture of him hanging on the wall in the Masonic lodge." I said, ''Well I doubt it, but I'd like to see. So he arranged to get the key and take me up there one day, and I look up on the wall and there's a whole wall full of 8 by 10 photographs of the early leaders of the Masonic Lodge here in Barbourville. So I start going by the dates, and about the third by date is a beautiful eight by ten of Silas Woodson. That, just opened a whole new ballgame. So we were able to copy that, contact the state historical society of Missouri and give them one, which we're always trying to share the pictures. Then the Mike Mills who is with the Masons now allowed you and I to go up and look at all the photographs, and several of the early leaders of our community are pictured up there, and it gives us another good source of pictures. The Masons have been real good to cooperate with us also.
CRM. It's interesting that that's one source that we never dreamed of.
MCM. That's in the fourth [third?] floor of the Lawson Building, which is one of our largest buildings. I don't know how many steps, but it's a long way to climb up there. It makes you wonder how much history's been up in these upper levels of these buildings around the square for generations that we didn't know about.
CRM. What can we learn from photographs in your opinion that we-can't learn from written history and documents?
MCM. Who made the statement that one picture is worth a thousand words? Myself, I'm bad to look in the background of photographs just to find what things looked like during periods I do read. If someone's writing about something in the early '20s or back to 1900, if I can see something in the back of a photograph, even a business place that has the sign out front of someone who occupied that space in 1920 or 1900, that's a gold mine to me. I even made some effort to take some of my pictures and say, ''What did the public square in Barbourville look like in 1930 or 1940 or 1950?" I was able to picture that from a 1950s collection of post cards that surfaces all the time for us, where some photographer had gone around and made pictures. We know that Wilson Bros., one of our oldest businesses, and Jack Wilson did some early photography work and took the pictures for the early post card series. In those photographs you can go right, around the court, square, and that's three different views, and you can see the businesses all named different. The post office, the two high schools, that's quite a series; early Daniel Boone Festival, Union College, the churches, that is a good collection of 1950s Barbourville. I got to looking at the pictures, and I could almost match those positions in 1940 and in 1960. We've not done anything much Ion today's Barbourville], even this new book pretty much comes up to 1950, and after that there's a lot of history since 50. If I do another book in this series, I want to do a lot. of what is net history to me--I lived it--but now it's history to our kids and grandkids of Barbourville and what businesses were here in 1960 and '70s and '80s.
CRM. This next question was partially answered by what you just said, but what kind of photographs are you looking for when you go into somebody's house? What determines whether you consider a photograph historic as opposed to being just primarily of family or private interest?
MCM. I'm very interested in places, more so than I am people in the long run, and so old store buildings, old school buildings, the streetcar—I think we've about exhausted the pictures there—maybe the hanging, but the courthouse, there's nothing brand new that's come up in a long while. Every now and then, maybe it will be one time a year, a picture will surface of an old business place on the square, or on streets leading from the square, up Cumberland Avenue, around the Depot, the old jail, the old movie theatres. It's not as obvious as you might think that these are available. You're a good example. Your family has been the movie theatre family for this community. We have a photograph of the old National Theatre and a good one of the Mitchell Theatre and a good one of the Magic. We don't have one of the Knox Drive-In theatre, [not] a real good one and you don't either. So maybe somebody will hear this and surface with one. But places, if someone called me and said I've got an old picture, my biggest interest is, is it an old school building, an old church, an old store building, a logging scene, something of general interest to people and not just of genealogical interest. Now, if it's one of the old tintypes or one of the old big round pictures that we remember in our grandmother's houses, [then] it's just a classic example of what our people looked like at the time, or an old coal mining picture, those you want. As in this last, book I did a few more pictures out in the county. We find in our area many pictures of the city because it's the hub of the county, and everybody does their business in town and takes pictures. Don't find as many of the old general stores and the old depots out in the counties and old schools—there's more schools than other things. Right now I really have an interest in our county—it did include most of southeast. Kentucky—and anything even in our surrounding counties that would show people today and tomorrow what we looked like in this county in Knox County in the depression on up really interests me.
CBM. What would you like to see done with the photograph collection at the Knox Historical Museum? What plans do you have for the future about sharing this material?
MCM. I would like, and I've discussed it with the mayor and we've talked about it here, and of course we're very grateful for the space that is furnished by the city of Barbourville. I would like to have another room to just house photographic archives, where we can put away our valuable originals but also put on the wall copies so that anybody could see, ''What do you have, what, has this Knox Historical Museum amassed, say on the streetcar or on the hanging or on the courthouse?" We could have copies displayed but yet have the originals safely put away. [The museum has been looking into filing and accessing systems for photos and intend to keep better records.] Hopefully, we could do that in the next year or so and have a room where people could come up, and, after they tour the museum, they could just come into the photo room. We could have that lacked separately, always have someone in there when people are in there looking, but knowing that what they are seeing are copies, and we've do have the originals for safe keeping for the future.
CRM. What about the possibility of issuing a set of post cards the way they used to back in the 30s and 40s? Do you suppose that might be a feasible project?
MCM. I think that should be the next project here at the museum. I've toyed with the idea and did put together a mock up of a calendar for this past year. It was a hard job because you can only choose twelve pictures out of all we have, to try to choose the twelve best. We never did go ahead and do the calendars. We still can. That would be a good little project for us. But the post cards are invaluable because this set that we talked about in the 1950s is a big section of a lot of these early books. If we leave it like it looks now [i.e., take photos of the city today], 20, 30 or 50 years down the road, somebody can use those and update the books we do. We have a great collection of history. People out there might not know, one of the best books of all is the Knox Historical Museum's big history book that you did here at the museum. I think about that as I'm out selling my book that a lot of people don't know about that book. That is a huge book, covers genealogy and the general history and has photographs and all that. It's not the type of book like mine that you want to take out and put out on store shelves, because it's a big valuable and very expensively and well done book. It's available here at the museum. You can visit any of the counties around us, and I often say their history only goes back to when they were sliced off of Knox County. We know we go back to 1799. I'm quick to say this to young people, that if your were in school or you lived in one of our surrounding counties and you wanted to do a detailed sturdy of your history, you'd reach a date back there when you wouldn't exist any more, you'd become Knox County, Kentucky. So southeast Kentucky's history in general is Knox County history. I think we've done a good job of getting our history documented back in pictures to the late 1800s, but there's probably more out there in the surrounding counties. We like to visit their historical organizations just, in hope. Your and I went to Cumberland Gap and spent a day dreaming that we would go to their photo archive and find tons of Knox County pictures. They gave us a Cumberland Gap picture during the Civil War, which was more close to what it looked like when it was Knox County than what it looks like now that it's Bell County. We're all the time out there searching for that elusive photograph of our area.
CRM. I thank you. I guess that's about all we need to talk about unless you want to add something else.
MCM. I'd just like to plug the local museum. The work done here in a short number of years is invaluable to this county and southeast Kentucky, and I'm sure it will be recognized one day. Anybody out there that doesn't have anything to do, we need help. Thank you.
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