| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
In Old Kentucky r r
Home" was actually written, Kentucky* has every sentimental right to its official State song.
4-
It is most probable that the genesis of the song traces back to a great novel of the era, Uncle Tom's Cabin* Both were written in the early 'fifties, but both had their origin in material drawn by their authors from Ohio-Kentucky backgrounds in Cincinnati days before 1850.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was a Cincinnati resident during the 1846-1850 period when Stephen was there, and for fourteen years earlier. In her account of how she came to write Uncle Tom's Cabiny M.rs. Stowe recorded that she "had for many years lived in Ohio on the confines of a slavery State, and had thus been made familiar with facts and occurrences in relation to the institution of American slavery."17 Concerning Kentucky and its people she wrote in friendly fashion, showing certain of the slaveholders there as
* It is quite possible that Stephen was familiar also with a different section of Kentucky. The tradition in another branch of the Foster family is that both Stephen and Dunning, sometime during the Cincinnati years, visited a second cousin, Fannie Foster Green, near Danville. She was the daughter of a William Foster (not, of course, Stephen's father), and the wife of Alexander Green, who had a flour and feed mill on the Dix River.15
* This relationship has been indicated by E. Jay Wohlgemuth, John Tasker Howard, and Professor Thomas D. Clark of the University of Kentucky. See references cited in Notes 9,16 and 24. |
||