The Museums of Historic Hopkinsville-Christian County have partnered with the Hoptown Chronicle to present a history series featuring museum artifacts, titled "Snapshots in Time," and curated by executive director Alissa Keller. Austin Carter speaks to Keller about February's featured artifact.
Christian County was formed in 1797, Keller begins, and she says there would have been some form of a courthouse built at this time. Two courthouses had been built and replaced by the 1830s until the county's first "elaborate and stately courthouse" was constructed between 1836 and 1838. Confederate soldiers burned the courthouse during the Civil War, and a new one was built directly on top of the old building's remnants.
When the museum was digging a shaft in the basement to install a new elevator, workers uncovered remnants of the Civil War-era courthouse. Using the old, charred ironwork, Keller was able to reveal a deeper layer of Christian County history.
"The courthouse was burned by General Hylan Lyon, a confederate officer," Keller explains. "He was making a raid back into Kentucky to try to get troops and lure union troops away from Nashville. The federal army was holding Nashville, and they were trying to distract a little. [Lyon] was from Lyon county, so he comes back here to his old stomping grounds and has some skirmishes. Nothing major, but engaged federal troops and burned several courthouses in the process—one of them being the one in Christian County."
Christian County was split between those who supported secession and those who vehemently did not," Keller continues. "We always hear about 'brother against brother,' and here in southern Kentucky on the state line, you really get that happening. I used this artifact to see if Hylan Lyon burned it just because federal troops were there or if he was just on a rampage through western Kentucky. I had heard anecdotally, without any documented evidence, that union troops at the time were recruiting African American men into the army at the courthouse. So that might have been an even bigger reason why confederate troops wanted to get rid of the site to make a statement in a bigger way."
"The courthouse represents civility, and it legitimizes the community," Keller says. "We're still on the western side of the United States at this point. By putting these courthouses in, you're tapping into this bigger national system and really legitimizing that you're a place. It gives that sense of authority to the community and a sense of ownership, too, for better or for worse. Targeting courthouses is ripping all of that away."
Keller explains that she began researching specifically whether the union troops were trying to recruit African American men in Christian County. In Kentucky, she says, African American men were still considered enslaved. "The Emancipation Proclamation was issued officially on January 1, 1863, but it was only to the states in rebellion. Kentucky was not in rebellion, so for all intents and purposes, enslaved people in Kentucky were still considered just that. When, in 1863, the federal government started recruiting African American soldiers, they even exempted Kentucky from that in hopes of not upsetting white slaveowners. It's not until 1864 that Kentucky really starts sending men of African descent into the union army."
Keller says that prior to 1864, African American men who wanted to join the union army would have to travel north toward Ohio or travel south to Union-occupied Clarksville, Gallatin, and Nashville. She says she only found two references that referred to a "Negro recruiting station or office" in Hopkinsville. She has yet to find any documents that provide a physical location of the office.
"The other thing I did was I looked at who we know from Christian County served in the union army that were African Americans that would have been serving in the U.S. colored troops. In the 1870 census, about 500 men who had served in the U.S. colored troops listed their birthplace as Christian County. We can name 52 of those men right now that had some connection to Christian County based on burial records and some other documentation that we've been able to find. Of those, we have not figured out where they all enlisted."
"We know it happened. We still don't know where it happened, but we have this piece of burned, charred, rusty ironwork that got pulled out of the ground a few years ago that led us on this quest to discover the history there."
You can read more featured stories about Christian County history in the Hoptown Chronicle. For more information on the museum, visit its website.
