COUNTY COURT HOUSES--GRASS ROOTS OF HISTORY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO NELSON COUNTY, KENTUCKY BY FRANCES FAIRLEIGH Hopkinsville, Kentucky A paper read before The Filson Club, November 7, 1955 To most people a County Court House is a strange building. They visit it once or twice in a lifetime for a marriage license; once a year to pay their taxes; or once in two years for a driver's license. But to lawyers, surveyors, genealogists, and historians, a county court house is a fascinating--if dirty--place. I was surprised to find that a county court house, such as we have in the United States, is an American Institution. There were county courts meeting every four weeks in England from the time of Alfred the Great to Henry the Second. Then they fell into disuse. But they were not Courts of Record. In 1846 an act was passed in England re-establishing county courts, with the view of making justice cheaper and more accessible• But they were not courts of record, per se. 1 In the United States we have county court houses, with Courts of Justice and records of court• These are concomitant with the estab- lishment of a county. County court houses are our fundamental safeguard against tyranny. As an eminent jurist once said, "All of us know that liberty does not survive of its own accord. It must be renewed with each generation • . Americans in every generation must guard their priceless heritage of freedom, created and established by our Colonial forefathers, and largely purchased by their blood and sacrifices.''2 How much easier it is for us to preserve our priceless heritage of freedom when we have a Temple of Justice just a short distance from our hearth, containing records to guide and guard our footsteps• It is on the subject of these Court House Records--the Grass Roots of History--that I wish to speak this evening, with special reference to Nelson County, Kentucky. Throughout French history until the Revolution, court records were closely guarded, inaccessible to any save the highest officials or favorites. of the king. Following the French Revolution--for the first time-- the public was given access to court documents• The dossiers of the lettres des cachets were most illuminating--and pathetic. These hidden chronicles gave rise to the fascinating mystery of the "Man in the Iron Mask," and were open to French scholars only after the fall 141 142 The Filson Club History Quarterly [Vol. 30 of the Bastille. A secret such as le masque de fer would not have been possible in free America with its open records. Voltaire could never have used this evasive character as a symbol of monarchical tyranny if the public had had access to the French Archives, as I found out the first time that I went to Paris to delve into that famous mystery. But Miss Polly Warren, of the University of Kentucky Libraries, and I encountered no such red tape when we decided to microfilm the county records of Nelson County, Kentucky. The County Court Clerk, the late Charles Roby, welcomed us, put every facility at our disposal, and showed a keen interest in every historical find. Mr. John Muir, of Bardstown, graciously assisted us with his inexhaustive knowledge of Bardstown and Nelson County history. Mrs. Robert Dudley Taylor of Winchester, president of The Na- tional Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Common- wealth of Kentucky, had appointed me the chairman of the Society's Historical Activities Committee, with a limited budget at my disposal. Mrs. Taylor recognized the value of my dream of microfilming the records in county court houses, to make them easily available to the general public, and she encouraged and sustained our committee in all its work. So I had the dream. I had the budget. I knew which court house 1 wished to microfilm. But I didn't know how to go about it. Upon the advice of Miss Mabel C. Weaks, the famous archivist of The Filson Club, whose calendaring of the Draper Papers is an outstanding achievement of historical source material, and upon the advice of Mrs. Dorothy T. Cullen, curator, and Judge Richard H. Hill, secretary of The Filson Club, I wrote to Doctor Lawrence Thompson, director of Libraries at the University of Kentucky. Because the University is a public institution and has an outstanding department of microfilming, Doctor Thompson was delighted to co-operate with the Historic Activities Committee, and loaned us Miss Polly Warren and her mobile camera. We have paid the expenses, and the master film has become the property of the University of Kentucky. Copies of the film will be furnished to libraries in the state at cost. By May, 1955, we had filmed seven-tenths of a mile of records. We had made 72,000 exposures. I have illustrated this amount by stating that if one started at the Memorial Auditorium at Kentucky and Fourth streets in Louisville, and unrolled the film along the Fourth Street sidewalk, it would stretch to St. Paul's Episcopal Church at Fourth and Magnolia. Since October of this year Miss Warren has filmed 500 feet more. A list of available records will be published eventually in The Filson Club History Quarterly. Some of the Nelson County records are: 1956] County Court Houses 143 (1) Marriage Bonds--1785-1845. (2) Indices of deeds, grantor and grantee--1785-1875. (3) Will Books A, B, C, D, and Parts 1 and 3 of E (Part 2 is gone). Also an unnumbered will book which precedes A--June 1784 to February 1790--found by Miss Warren in another old book. (4) Chancery Court Cases, 1785-1815. (5) Order Books of the Nelson County Court to 1859. (6) Order Books of the Court of Quarter Sessions. I selected Nelson County as the first county for microfilming for several reasons. It was the fourth county to be organized in the Virginia County of Kentucky (1784). Therefore it contained invalu- able pioneer history. The three earlier counties, Jefferson, Fayette, and Lincoln, seemed to have other organizations interested in preserv- ing their records. Nelson seemed to need a champion. Fortunately Nelson County has not suffered a fire or flood, and many of these records have not been touched for 160 years--or more. Opening these packages of canned history is a thrill that only a certain peculiar type of person can experience. The enthusiasm shown by my co-workers, Mrs. Robinson S. Brown, St., Mrs. Charles Ewell Craik, Jr., and Mrs. David Fairleigh, was that of a winner on a long shot at the Derby. l am still excited at the memory of it. Can you imagine the emotion one feels when a bundle is untied and a sheepskin parchment unfolds, showing a patent to land given and signed by Henry Lee, governor of Virginia, "Light Horse Harry" Lee, father of Robert E. Lee? Or the drama I felt when I found a promissory note signed by George Rogers Clark ? I took the Clark note downstairs and showed it to Mr. Roby. He was duly impressed. Then he said plaintively, "Is it genuine?....I'm not good at forgery," I replied. I'm not certain he believed me, for the next morning Mr. Jack Muir came to the court house armed with a facsimile of George Rogers Clark's signature. Mr. Muir pronounced our find genuine. For some strange reason from that time onward we received respectful attention from the powers-that-be in Nelson County. George Rogers Clark had opened the door. After Mr. Muir's visit that morning we received calls from Judge R. Lee Beeler, County Judge, and Mr. W. H. Fulton, County Attorney. They looked long and earnestly at the signature on the note; at a letter written by George Mason's son, George; and at our collection of warrants and patents signed by some of the early governors of Virginia and Kentucky. 144 The Filson Club History Quarterly [Vol. 30 I thought of the stories that lie behind these little scraps of paper in the court houses. I had just been reading a biography of George Rogers Clark. And looking at the documents we had found, that promissory note of George Rogers Clark brought back a flood of memories, stories of his tragic life. It made me realize that each record in a court house is not a dull statistic, not a cold fact or figure, but a record of a human life, a chronicle of joy or sorrow, of ambition achieved or of failure suffered. During the Revolution George Rogers Clark had been the con- queror, for the infant United States, of all the territory from the Alle.gheny Mountains to the Mississippi River. In spite of his patriotic services, the stripling government had unjustly and cruelly failed to give him financial aid, which forced him to impoverish himself in financing his campaign, the campaign which kept open the back door, by way of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, for supplies for Washington and the Continental Army. The promissory note of George Rogers Clark, which we found, had been given to one Dorsey Pentecost of £ 116 17/6 "in lawful current money of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.''3 It was dated 21st of March, 1793. Dorsey Pentecost had been an influential person in Yohogania County, Virginia. And the records show that on the first day of the sitting of the Court of Quarter Sessions of Yohogania County, Virginia, December 23, 1776, "Dorsey Pentecost Esquire was unanimously chosen and appointed their Clerk.''4 My favorite finds in the Nelson Coufity records are two items from Yohogania County, Virginia.