Memories of "Stringtown on the Pike in Kentucky"
Everyone has memories of growing up. The hometown story or adventure may not be exciting, yet it is reminiscent of an earlier time when we cared not for the rigors of adulthood. Life was simple.
Some forty years later, I visited my old home, expecting to look once again at the huge ballfield in my backyard. Yet, to my surprise, it was a small yard!
Samuel Drew, a professor of chemistry at the University of Stringtown, tells the following story from Stringtown on the Pike, a tale of northernmost Kentucky (1901) by John Uri Lloyd:
“When I think of my boyhood, memories of the Kentucky Pike arise, and I recall his boyhood experiences as a barefooted child who, in August's heat, dared to walk barefooted on the road up the hill between noonday and mid-afternoon raised his feet quickly.
“I know of which I speak, for I often relieved my blistering soles by slipping aside into the weed-lined by-paths, preferring them, even if they passed near the honey-locust tree, under which danger lurked in the great brown thorns that always menace the barefooted boy of Kentucky. That pike is yet vivid to memory. Again, I see the dust of ancient times. Again, the sun’s fierce rays force me to be more lazy. Often, I seek a shade tree at the roadside to find the grassy brink of a grateful spring. Leaning over the turf, I bury my face in the hard limestone water, drinking deep and long. Then, thoroughly content, I sit on the overhanging sod in the shadow of the tree and spatter the cool water with my toes, bathing a stone bruise in the very fount from which I drank. With nose-tip close to the water's surface, I eye the flitting cloud shadows, scan the reflected tan freckled face, and watch the water bugs and crawfish. Deep in the limpid pool, they stir the sand in the mouth. Finally, I turn my back and gaze into space, dreaming of nothing, thinking of nothing.
From my earliest school days, chemistry excited my keenest interest. When I was a child, I sat absorbed in the experiments made by the teacher while he instructed the advanced class the advanced class in chemistry at our country school. By chance, I finally obtained a copy of” Comstock’s Chemistry, and day by day, I kept up-to-date with the students who recited in that subtle science. Either luck or fate made a chemist of me, luck because the subject chanced to be taught in my room; or fate, because u what is to be will be.” I could not carry a rule in Brown’s Grammar from one day to another. I still detest the word “grammar” because of those twenty-six artificial rules.
“If I committed to memory some portions of history, in a week thereafter, I mixed the incidents unless they were connected with something of chemical significance. I could not have remembered from day to day whether Gustavus Adolphus fought in the War of the Roses or conducted the Thirty Years conflict. Of everything but chemistry, my head seemed vacant. All else slipped through as a wind-struck fog flew through a leafless woodland. The result was that, though other subjects filtered out of my brain as through a sieve, chemistry remained securely caught by the mind meshes.
Chemistry served as a nucleus of attachment. My one-sided mind caught the chemistry of a subject and bound to it or blended it with all connected matters, as alcohol blends ether and water.
“The teacher scolded me often for indifference to other subjects. I was one of the blockheads; at least, he seemed to regard me as such, not appearing to know anything of my one talent. The little boys of my row each learned something concerning everything, as do all mediocre brains, and one by one passed beyond me, and I, in humiliation, sat conspicuously among younger children, absorbed in the one unreached study that was destined in after years to wreck my life. Chemistry! Would to God I could blot out the word!”
Interesting tidbits of family information are available in the old wills and estates. An extensive collection for Boone County, Kentucky, is available for family history researchers on