No I meant the region not the music!

The Heart of the Bluegrass A Population History of Lexington, and its Appalachian Hinterland Lyman Stone Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 19, 2017 Recently, journalist Chris Arnade had a tweetstorm in which he discussed the cultural difference between “Back Row” people/places, where staying close to home is assigned moral worth and value, versus “Front Row” people/places, where, he says, a high degree of residential mobility is an absolute necessity for success. Now, he gets a key set of facts wrong about migration: with the rise of technological, globalized, liberal cosmpolitanism in America, we have seen an associated decline in residential mobility. So it’s just not true that “Front Row” elites are some hyper-migratory group. They migrate less than the parents of “Back Row” people did. But that’s not my topic for today. As an aside to that thread, Nolan Gray, a Lexington native, tweeted this: Historical migration commentary about a non-major geographic region? That sounds like a job for me. So here’s what I want to do. I’ve written about Kentucky migration extensively in the past. Here’s one focused on migration since 1990. Here’s a detailed discussion of the history of slavery in Jessamine County. Here’s an old post mapping some basic migration trends for major KY regions. Here’s a detailed discussion of the Bluegrass region, and another of Inner Appalachia. I’ll repeat some material from those posts, revise some, and do some totally new stuff. But basically, I want to ask two questions: Why does Lexington exist and why has it grown historically? What has Lexington’s relationship to Appalachian Kentucky been?

Streetview image of McConnel Springs.

Lexington’s Early Economic History Lexington was founded because of a spring. The area was fertile and frontiersmen arrived at McConnell Springs, a good water source that is preserved in a park today. There, they received word of American victory at Lexington in 1775, so they named their settlement Lexington. By 1779, a permanent “blockhouse” or fortified dwelling was built at Bryan Station. By 1789, Transylvania Seminary had been launched, and in 1792 the Kentucky legislature began meeting in Lexington. Below is a map showing, from left to right, the locations of McConnell Springs, Transylvania Seminary, and Bryan Station, overlaid on the modern city. The downtown grew up largely south of Transylvania University, around the courthouse, some churches, and a number of early taverns. The city had a number of major businesses, but most revolved somehow around high-value services like education, religion, and government, or else providing services to the surrounding slave-based agricultural system. Lexington was a major slave market for the surrounding area. These services gave Lexington economic strength for a while, and as the regional population increased, fueled by the growth of the slave-labor economy, the city’s population rose as well. In the 1830s there were attempts to build a railroad west to Louisville, but they had failed by 1840. Finally, by 1852, Lexington was connected to Louisville by rail. By 1860, Lexington was the terminal rail connection in central Kentucky. No railroad existed further east, and the only railroads that went further south ran much further west near Bowling Green. Lexington had previously been a major junction for roads like the Maysville Road and the Cumberland Gap Road. Essentially, when settlers came to Kentucky, if they came overland, the central Kentucky region around Lexington was the first really fantastic place to live and farm that they would reach. If they came via the Ohio River, there were more options. And in central Kentucky, Lexington reigned supreme. But Lexington had another advantage that would come to be more important with time: education. As I said, Transylvania Seminary was founded very early on, and the presence of educational institutions serving the region, and the wider south, was a key factor in early growth. Transylvania University had one of the only medical schools in the south, a large seminary, and the density of local educational establishments, combined with Kentucky’s incredibly robust early democratic traditions of participatory government, earned the city the name, “Athens of the West.” Here’s a map of every higher educational institution that existed in Kentucky in 1860 of which I am aware:

Interesting, right? And note that many of these schools were founded at a time when the towns around them were miniscule; that is, they predate significant urbanization in many cases. We can also look at the Census of 1850, which gives us the number of college students and teachers per county. It doesn’t quite exactly match, to my frustration, but you get the gist of it: It’s not just Lexington, of course. The trick is that the whole Lexington metro area happens to have had lots of schools. Here it is by 1900:

There are more universities in the east by this point, but most are founded as junior colleges or advanced high schools, or else as missionary institutions, not necessarily full-scale universities. The Lexington area, meanwhile, managed to double its number of institutions and one of those was the University of Kentucky. So after the Morill Land Grant Act of 1862 transferred the revenues of Federal lands to the state to launch a university, where did they chose to launch it? Why, in Lexington, of course. And why Lexington? Well, a college associated with Transylvania University (then called Kentucky University) had recently folded in 1857. One of its graduates, John Bryan Bowman, wanted to charter a new university under the Disciples of Christ denomination. Through some wrangling and a series of mergers, Kentucky University (now Transylvania) became DoC-affiliated. Bowman was also a disciple and student of Henry Clay, who was affiliated with Transylvania University, and so when Bowman wanted to expand his new Kentucky University under the land grant act, he already knew where to host its students: Henry Clay’s old house, Ashland. With such elite pedigree and connections to Kentucky’s established educational and political elite, Bowman won the day, and the Agricultural School was established as an arm of Kentucky University, though it was spun off as the University of Kentucky eventually, and Kentucky University re-adopted its old name, Transylvania. The choice to fold a land grant institution into an existing religious university was not politically neutral. It was a product of wartime politics, elite domination of the legislature, expediency, and idiosyncratic individual personalities. It would prove fateful.

Long-Term Economic Trends in Kentucky To understand where this story is going, you need to understand at least the broad outlines of Kentucky’s historic economic geography. By and large, Kentucky’s historic industrial cores were in the immigrant-dense Ohio River cities like Louisville or the Cincinnati suburbs. Lexington, of course, also developed its share of industry, but never on the scale of the major riparian settlements. Here’s a map of manufacturing wages per capita in 1900, which roughly shows you places where manufacturing was a big thing: As you can see, while Fayette County definitely had a substantial manufacturing economy for inland Kentucky, it wasn’t anywhere close to the big Ohio River counties like Jefferson, Boyd, McCracken, Kenton, or Campbell. Indeed, Fayette County didn’t even have the highest manufacturing wages per capita in inland Kentucky! Bell County, deep in Appalachia, did. Many other parts of Kentucky had higher manufacturing output. I want to fast forward here and compare the map above to per capita personal income in 1969 (earliest data I have) and 2015 (most recent). But to do this, I will also include county-level expenditures on farm labor in 1900. Here are personal incomes per capita by county, 1969 and 2015, each represented as a percentage of the statewide average. As you can see, Kentucky’s personal income per capita is substantially less geographically specific in 2015 than it was in 1969, and 1969 was substantially less so than 1900 manufacturing wages. Next up, we can compare to output in 1900. One simple way to guess what per capita income may have been in 1900 is to take total expenditures on farm labor by county and add them to total manufacturing wages. This will miss the service sector, investment returns, and farm profits, which are probably substantial, but it’s a reasonable-ish proxy. Here’s a map of that combined manufacturing-and-farm-labor income per capita, again represented as a ratio of state average, on the same scale: Again, you can see the huge differences here. Some of this is probably just because small farms have less hired labor, so much of the economic product goes unaccounted in wages. But broadly speaking, this map helps us see where the market economy existed in Kentucky. And we can see that it maps onto prosperity in 1969 or 2015 fairly well. We can then take the Z-score for each county (i.e. how many standard deviations they are from the mean in each year) and compare them. Here’s 1900 vs. 2015, for example. As you can see, there’s a reasonably good association between 1900 and 2015 incomes. Some counties woefully underperform, like Jefferson, Boyd, or Bell Counties, having much higher relative income in 1900 than they had in 2015. Other counties substantively overperform, like Oldham, Carroll, or Carlisle Counties. The map below shows the change in income relative to state average from 1900 to 2015. And that, my friends, is what we call convergence. Poor areas became relatively richer, and rich areas became relatively poorer, as the market economy and modern economic growth spread throughout Kentucky during the 20th century. The biggest gains were observed in eastern Kentucky or in some of the counties in the west. Never let someone tell you the modern market economy exacerbated regional inequalities! It didn’t! It flattened them! But we can actually step back even further. Interestingly enough, we have manufacturing labor cost data by county from 1850, similar to wage data. Here it is: This map looks very similar to the map in 1900. No surprise: Overall, if we track the indicators that best predict the next time period, in 1850 it’s manufacturing value, in 1900 its combined manufacturing and farm wages, and my only correlate with 2015 income here is 1969 income. The point here is simply to show that these variables are probably reflecting something real about underlying economic prosperity. We can also map the value of all farm and manufacturing output by county in 1850: Here we see that true economic production per capita was not as spiky as manufacturing was, unsurprisingly. But still, the value of all output in eastern Kentucky was critically low even in 1850. In other words, Eastern Kentucky has been poor since it was first settled. There’s nothing new about Appalachian poverty. It existed before it was popularly discovered after the Civil War. Although, it should be noted that Democrats swept to power in Kentucky after the Civil War and undid many of the laws past by the Unionist wartime government. Kentucky didn’t ratify the 13th-15th amendments until the 1970s. But one of the most terrible outcomes of the Civil War was feuding. Kentucky as a battlefield of constant guerrila warfare throughout the war, and most of the famous feuds of Kentucky history reflect the fact that these types of ruralized wars are nasty, intergenerational affairs. Thus, when the Civil War ended at Appomattox, it continued in Kentucky for decades to come. Consider, for example, the actions of General Burbidge, the “Butcher of Kentucky,” whose strategy to crush Confederate guerrilla activities was that whenever an unarmed civilian was murdered, he would haul out four captured Confederate guerrillas from prison and shoot them on the spot. Effective or not, it’s easy to see how this kind of governance didn’t make Kentuckians like each other very much post-war. The Hatfield-McCoy feud began when West Virginia-based Confederate Home Guards associated with the Hatfields murdered returning Appalachian-Kentuckian Union soldier, Asa McCoy. Other famous feuds, like Stamper-Underwood and Martin-Tolliver, likewise found their origin in Civil War guerrilla combat. While outsiders may see these feuds as symptomatic of cultural backwardness, and certainly cultural factors are a component, they also reflect an unwillingness by the Redeemer government of Kentucky to crack down on violence by former Confederates. In 1899, a German-American elected governor of Kentucky (through corruption and cronyism, but I digress) as assassinated by a state militia sniper under orders from a pretender Republican governor. SCOTUS confirmed the legitimacy of the Democrat and his successor, so the Republican fled to Indiana, and was indicted. When coal mining moved into the region, it just adopted the local norms of violence, guerrilla combat, and dubiously legitimate law enforcement. These norms had pre-Civil War origins, but were reinforced by the Civil War, and then further reinforced by state governments unwilling or unable to crack down with force and hold local officials accountable. Pro-Confederate mobs of “Regulators” were chastised but not crushed, while Rowzee’s Band of anti-Regulators were quelled with state militia. Kentucky’s tiny counties meant that every powerful family could legalize their personal fiefdom by capturing local offices. And of course, the since the state government was dominated by central and western Kentuckian interests, the state government was not terribly concerned about reinvestment in Appalachia.

19th Century Lexington Population With that presentation of Kentucky’s regional economic history, let’s look at Lexington’s population growth until 1900. It turns out this task is tricky. Before 1790, Kentucky hadnearly its full present-day territory allocated into just 3 counties: Lincoln, Jefferson, and Fayette. By 1790, the first Census, it had 8 counties. But as counties were formed, they were often carved out of multiple other counties through segmented mergers. And furthermore, the present-day Lincoln County is not even close to the size or location of the original Lincoln County, and the same is true for most KY counties. So, for example, if you assign Bourbon and Woodford Counties to the Lexington metro area, or the Bluegrass region, that would be accurate after 1900. But in 1790, here’s what Kentucky’s county map looked like: Bourbon County reaches aaaaaallll the way from its present location on the NE border of Fayette County to the Virginia border. And Woodford County reaches all the way from its present location as that narrow split between 1790-Fayette and 1790-Mercer all the way up to the Cincinnati suburbs. In other words, it is very easy to get kind of ridiculous county definitions as long as county-formation continued, as it did until the 1910s. By the 1870s most of the big changes are done and new counties have small effects, but before 1860, tracking these changes is a bear. So what I’ve done is assign KY counties to regions based on their 1790 counties. All Indian Lands are one county as well. In other words, I’m tracking what “original” Fayette County population would have been, 1790–1900. There are some errors where counties grew then shrank again and because there are counties that form across 1790 boundaries, so this method is imperfect, but for line-straddling counties I’ve tried to assign based on where their likely population center was at the time of county formation. Here’s a map of modern counties, as I’ve assigned them to 1790 regions: Here’s the resulting population trends: As you can see, Lincoln County is by far the most populous, which is no surprise since it was also by far the biggest. Jefferson County is next, basically tied with Mason, with the population centers of both regions being along the Ohio River. Then comes Nelson County, including Owensboro, along the Ohio River west of Louisville. Then comes Woodford County, representing the central and western Bluegrass. Then comes Indian Territory, predominantly the Jackson Purchase area in the west, and then Bourbon County, including the Eastern Bluegrass and a swathe down to the Virginia border. After that is Madison County in western Appalachia. Finally we get to diminutive Fayette County and Mercer County, the two smallest of the original counties. Let’s represent this data again, but as a share of state population. Here we can see the rising prominence of Jefferson County, the sharp increase in Lincoln County population as the western counties were settled, and the relative decline of Fayette and Mercer Counties. It’s worth pursuing in somewhat greater detail what happened with Fayette County as I define it. Below are the populations of the three counties I include as part of “Original” Fayette County: Fayette, Jessamine, and Clark Counties: As you can see, population increases occur, except for where boundary changes impact estimates, until about 1830. But the 1830s until the 1850s show population stagnation or decline. I’m not 100% sure why this is, but it’s likely that a core component was the basic problem of plantation slave economies like Kentucky’s: big, efficient plantations buy all the land, and small farmers, who represent most potential population increase, can’t support themselves. Now, if you have a big manufacturing or urban sector, you can compensate for that. But Fayette County didn’t have nearly the manufacturing base of Louisville, especially in 1850. It was the last stop on the railroad, and so had modestly elevated foreign-born population, but nothing to write home about. No surprise then that the major agricultural places like Jessamine County and Clark County declined, while somewhat-more-urban Fayette County eked out stagnation before the Civil War. But headline population is just one indicator. We can also look at the enslaved share of each of the old counties from 1790–1860. Here’s that data: Now you see why I’ve been emphasizing Fayette County’s slave economy. It’s because, well, it was a slave economy. And it wasn’t really getting any less so. The Jackson Purchase area (Indian Territory) was becoming more enslaved. Mercer County, adjacent to Fayette County, also had a stable enslaved share, as did the vast farmlands of Lincoln County, but the Fayette County area was really the slave capital of Kentucky, with similar enslavement rates as might be observed deep in the cotton, sugar, or rice belts of states much further south. The state on the whole was becoming less slave-dominated because of Eastern Kentucky counties like Mason, Madison, and Bourbon, as well as counties that including growing Ohio River immigrant hubs, like Jefferson, Woodford, Nelson, and Mason. It’s no surprise that Mason County, representing the eastern hills that had poor conditions for plantation agriculture and the immigrant-dense Ohio River towns of Ashland, Maysville, and Campbell County, had the lowest enslaved share. Abraham Lincoln kept the map below in his office, which shows the enslaved share of each county in the US in 1860, with 1860 county-lines.

That shows fairly clearly what was going on. But we can also, inaccurately but perhaps still somewhat informatively, map the enslaved share using current county borders. Every county in Kentucky had at least one enslaved person in it; nowhere was innocent of the execrable commerce. But some places sure had a lot more. Central Kentucky around Lexington was a particular hotspot for Kentucky’s slave economy, along with southwestern Kentucky. Where we observe far less slavery is in eastern Kentucky. The aree was hilly and populated by poorer settlers, thus plantation agriculture never really got going. The other major group we’ll want to think about is immigrants. Here’s the immigrant share of the population for the old counties from 1820–1900. Data from before 1850 involves some extrapolations about the size of the naturalized foreign-born population, since the only data we have is about the non-naturalized population. As you can see, a few places dominate the pre-1900 foreign-born scene. Jefferson County leads, obviously, thanks to the presence of the manufacturing hub at Louisville. Woodford County does well too, thanks to its inclusion of the German neighborhoods across the river from Cincinnati. Mason County likewise exceeds the state average, thanks to German neighborhoods in Campbell County, but also the Ohio River cities of Maysville and Ashland. Then you get the rest of Kentucky. Fayette County had a comparatively robust foreign-born share for a non-Ohio-River area. And, interestingly, it did not decline as quickly as the state average did at least through 1880. The whole state saw rapid growth in the foreign born population beginning in the 1840s, but especially the 1850s as that growth began to reach even far-inland Madison County and Lincoln County, and places like Lexington, Bourbon, and Mercer Counties. As before, I can offer you an imperfect map of the distribution of the foreign-born population. I’ve elected to use the same scale for the foreign-born population to illustrate that the foreigner share was far smaller than the enslaved share throughout the state. The only places where you can even discern the presence of the foreign-born population is along the Ohio River and, ever so dimly, around Fayette County. If we add these together, we can get the enslaved-or-foreign share of the population, as follows: Obviously, slavery dominates this map, but immigration is influential in areas as well. We end up seeing a few little lightly-colored areas in central, northern, or western Kentucky, but not that many. But the entirety of eastern Kentucky manages to have few enslaved people and few foreign-born. It was a place for free native-born people. Interestingly, the eastern counties also tended to have a larger share of domestic migrants. In 1850, over 20% of the population of the eastern counties were born outside of Kentucky but in the US. Just 7% of the population of the central Bluegrass region were domestic inflows, just 15% of the Louisville area, and only about 14% of the Old Lincoln County area. To be clear, this doesn’t mean Appalachia was a hotbed of positive migration: it reflects Appalachia as being later-settled. It’s worth noting, in 1870, Kentucky’s governor wanted to start a state Immigration and Statistics Office. At the time, most immigration law was managed by states (yep). States had the power to deport, set residency rules, and even had vital roles in naturalization. But the legislature rejected this idea; apparently they didn’t want to promote immigration into Kentucky. I have to say, this decision frustrates me deeply. Not just because more migrants would have made Kentucky richer and more politically powerful, but because having a state statistical office from 1870 onwards would have been a treasure trove of population data. But when we tie all of this together, we can construct an interesting population history for Old Fayette County. Here, I’ll provide the whole time series for the foreign-born, up to 2015, so you can see the usefulness of using these historically-consistent regional definitions. This gives us a pretty neat story. Fayette County in the 19th century was a heavily slave-dependent economy, far more so than the state that surrounded it, and it wasn’t really becoming any less so. Meanwhile, it had a below-average foreign-born share despite a meaningful urban hub and above-average manufacturing. But over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fayette County’s foreign-born share didn’t fall as fast as the state’s on the whole and, indeed, it eventually began to rise and outpace the rest of the state. Today, as it turns out, the Old Fayette County region has the highest foreign-born share in Kentucky, having surpassed the old Ohio River gateways in the 1960s. This reflects the shift in international migration from old industrial hubs towards educational hubs. For comparison, here’s Mason County: As you can see, except for an anomaly 1790, Mason County had a much lower enslaved share of the population, and by 1860 actually had more foreigners than slaves. But Mason County’s trend was the opposite: it transitioned from a high-immigrant area, thanks to Maysville, Ashland, and Campbell County, to an anomalously low immigrant area. A major reason why is, of course, the region has very, very few universities or higher educational institutions. Its industrial profits were never invested in enduring institutional projects. Remember these facts. Keep in mind that northeastern Kentucky was a comparatively immigrant-dense location before the Civil War! Then we can pivot to Jefferson County, a particularly interesting case. Jefferson County had elevated levels of both enslaved people and foreigners until 1860, when its enslaved ratio dipped just below the state average thanks to the rapidly-growing foreign-born population inflating the denominator. But unlike Mason or Fayette Counties, Jefferson has maintained an above-average foreign-born share continuously since 1820. Jefferson County had lots of manufacturing early on, and has lots of educational institutions today. But one factor you may have noticed in all of these charts was the decline in the foreign-born population after 1860. This is odd. Immigration did not slow down appreciably; it continued at a rapid pace throughout the late 19th century. Population growth didn’t slow down; Kentucky actually experienced a population boom, partly thanks to rising coal mining employment in the east, which ought to have been well-suited to immigrant employment. But nonetheless, throughout Kentucky, the foreign-born population fell. It seems possible there were political or social discouragements to foreign-born settlement, though a German-American led the Democratic party in the 1890s and was elected governor…. oh wait, yeah, then he was assassinated. We can also do the usual treatment of Lexington’s population history I do for pretty much all cities. Lexington and Fayette County merged in 1974, hence that big break in series. To be honest, the most interesting thing to me is the long-run stability of Lexington’s surrounding counties. As late as the 1950s some of Lexington’s nearby suburbs and exurbs had declining populations, and it wouldn’t be until after 1960 that the non-Fayette-County portion of the metro area broke its previous population record. That’s fairly remarkable. Lexington pulled huge growth out of an immediate regional environment of stagnation, malaise, and decline. How did Lexington do it?