WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

When the Federal Writers’ Project compiled its guide to Kentucky, the editors set themselves a harder task than a road book ordinarily requires. A commonwealth, the volume’s preface argues, expresses itself most truly through its people, and Kentuckians have long admitted — sometimes with pride, sometimes with a flash of arrogance — that they are not the same as the neighbors who face them across the Ohio River. A guide that hoped to be faithful to the state would therefore have to do more than catalog climate, products, and history. It would have to catch the indefinable spirit that turned Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home” into something close to a national ballad, tender and a little mournful, carrying personal weight for people who had never set foot in the Bluegrass.

Published in October 1939 under the sponsorship of the University of Kentucky, the book opens with a foreword by the university’s president, Frank L. McVey, who saw the American Guide Series as eventually furnishing a volume for every state and saw Kentucky in particular as a crossroads of migration. Settlers had poured in from the seaboard and from Europe as the frontier moved west and south, some staying, some passing through, but each leaving a contribution; the traveler, McVey noted, would meet not only the marks of pioneer settlement and a half-century of progress but traces of a far older prehistoric occupation. These guides, he insisted, were more than guidebooks — they were wide-angle reference works, meant for schools and libraries as much as for the glove compartment.

The contents bear that double ambition out. Part I sketches the general background — the Kentuckians themselves, the natural setting, archeology, history, agriculture, transportation, mining, labor, religion, education, the Thoroughbred, and the folklore and folk music that give the state much of its voice — in chapters drafted with the help of volunteer specialists such as the architectural historian Rexford Newcomb and the historian Thomas D. Clark. Part II turns to seven cities, from Ashland and Covington in the north to Louisville, Lexington, and Paducah. Part III, the longest, lays out twenty numbered motor tours and their lettered branches, threading the whole state from the Cumberland Gap to the Mississippi and detouring into Mammoth Cave and Cumberland Falls. A closing set of appendices adds a chronology, a selective bibliography, and an index.

State director U. R. Bell, signing the preface, conceded that no guidebook can say everything it would wish to say, or say it as well as it would like; the book is offered, he wrote, with modesty and with intimate satisfaction in the cooperation that made it possible. Read today, the Kentucky volume is at once a usable period guidebook and a primary document of the state on the eve of the Second World War — a portrait of a largely rural commonwealth, its single great city perched on its northern edge, surrounded by the “rocks and rills” of an only partly tamed country.