Reminiscences of 'Aunt Betty' Hummons: Written in 1927 (Lexington During the Civil War)

Larkspur Press, Monterey, KY (1st Edition, 1999). #104 of 150 copies. Flat signed by both authors on title page. Hardcover with dust jacket. Dust jacket shows very little wear; minute closed tear at top of back cover. Book is clean and unmarked; the binding is tight. ABOUT THE BOOK: Aunt Betty's stories retold: The wise and colorful old Irishman James Roche held a running seminar in local history in his quarters in the Old Northern Bank Building at Lexington's Short and Market streets in the 1920s. At his instigation, Elizabeth "Aunt Betty" Hummons wrote a brief, reminiscent account of her observations in Lexington during the Civil War. She actually saw little of the military activities aside from seeing Gen. John Hunt Morgan and his men dash down Main Street after the so-called Battle of Ashland. She noted that Union forces had fired harmlessly on the town. At 77, "Aunt Betty" recorded her memories. There is the glow of age and some romance in her observations of local people and places. Though she was a slave during the war, the property of Dr. D. J. Ayres, she enjoyed a remarkable amount of freedom and access to family life in the town. "Aunt Betty," in this brief memoir, at least opened a peephole into the social activities of Lexington. She described briefly the mode of social entertaining, of people and their homes. After she was freed from slavery, she became in many respects a post-war matron for both races. The Milwards, father and son, have given a higher validity to the Hummons memoir by the addition of copious footnotes in which they identify people and places. These notes actually have as high validity as the text itself. Typographically this keepsake book is a fine example of master printing and production from metal type and old-style press work. The end papers are facsimiles of the Hummons memoirs. Larkspur Press, owned and operated by Gray Zeitz in Monterey (Owen County), has produced a handsome piece of the all-but-forgotten art of graceful printing. Review in the Lexington Herald-Leader by Thomas D. Clark, Kentucky's historian laureate (1999).