BETTS, MARY E. WILSON
After the move, about 50 percent of the membership was lost, partly because of transportation issues. There was no parking lot in Covington, and those who had walked to church there experienced problems with a commute to Erlanger, about eight miles south of their Covington homes. The new Bethany Lutheran Church’s building at 3501 Turkeyfoot Rd., was dedicated in December 1974; an addition was dedicated on September 15, 2007. This location suffered from road-widening between 2003 and 2006, and several members were lost over this interruption. The Bethany Lutheran Church had 110 members at the most recent count. “Bethany Church to Build Home,” KP, August 31, 1936, 1. “A Big Day in Covington, Kentucky,” Lutheran Women’s Missionary Endeavor Quarterly, Central District Missouri Synod, 10 (First Quarter, January 1938): 2. “Congregation Files into New Bethany Church,” KP, November 29, 1937, 3. Dedication Day Program, Bethany Evangelical Lutheran Church, November 28, 1937. Covington, Ky., Bethany Evangelical Lutheran Church, 1937. Etter, Rev. Mark. Interview by Melinda Motley, Erlanger, Ky., October 4, 2006.
Melinda G. Motley
BETHEL BAPTIST CHURCH. Maysville’s Bethel Baptist Church is the oldest continuing church organization founded for an African American congregation in Mason Co. Its early history is linked with history of its founder, Rev. Elisha Green. Green was a former slave who established the church in 1844 to serve the slave and free black populations of the town. He was granted official permission to preach on May 10, 1845, 18 years before the abolition of slavery in 1863. There were 385 free blacks and 4,000 slaves living in Mason Co. in 1850. For some 50 years, Green pastored the congregation; it first met in homes and then in a frame building that also served as the African American school in Maysville. Baptisms were conducted in the Ohio River. On May 17, 1875, an impressive brick meetinghouse, built by the members, was dedicated on Fourth St. in Maysville, along what was once part of the original buffalo trace followed by pioneers traveling in and out of the area. Donnard Morrison helped lay the foundation for the building, and while the men primarily did the construction work, the ladies helped and prepared food. Sunday School was organized in 1845, under the management of such leaders as Beatrice Jackson Lewis; she and other leaders at the church stressed serious study, with exercises, and gave diplomas for the completion of the course of study. Lizzie Mundy was the first to be married in the church; her wedding took place on December 8, 1875. Her son, James Mundy, who left Maysville in 1912 and became a nationally renowned choir director in Chicago, was an organist for the church. Bethel Baptist Church supported him in his education at Simmons University in Louisville. After Green’s death, a succession of pastors served the church for brief periods until Robert
Jackson arrived in 1911 and stayed until 1925. During this time the church held two revivals each year, and a baptistery, new windows, pews, and an organ were added to the church. The 1925 revival, led by Dr. W. H. Moses of New York City and organized by the new pastor, A. F. Martin, was so popular that it was moved to the county courthouse. The church’s parsonage was destroyed by fire on February 6, 1940, and a new parsonage was built and dedicated on September 12, 1940, at a cost of $2,800. The church sponsored many organizations, including the Baptist Training Union, the Bethel Missionary Society, the Church Aide, the Fidelis Club, the Lily of the Valley Club, the May Flower Club, and the Sewing Circle. The Church Aide is still in operation. Bethel Baptist Church was a strong supporter of the African American schools in Maysville. The principal of the John G. Fee Industrial High School in the 1940s, Professor W. H. Humphrey, was a deacon of the church, and the Fidelis Club gave assistance to needy children of the school. From the late 1950s until his death in 1964, Rev. M. L. Jackson was the pastor of the church. His community activism and outreach work was important to the church and community during the changing racial climate of the times. The church building that had served the congregation for a century was destroyed by arson on January 19, 1977, along with all the church records. The congregation purchased the Forest Avenue School building in Maysville and, after remodeling was completed, dedicated the new facility in 1978. Bethel Baptist Church is affi liated with the Consolidated District and the Kentucky General Association. Centennial Celebration of Bethel Baptist Church. Booklet. Maysville, Ky., Bethel Baptist Church, 1945.
Vicki Bolden and John Klee
BETHEL CHURCH. Bethel Church was located roughly four miles north of Falmouth along modern U.S. 27 in Pendleton Co. According to William Bradford’s 1876 will, his estate was to be divided between his wife and his children except for one and one-half acres, which were to be used by the Bethel community for a church and a graveyard. Two Baptists and two Methodists supervised the construction; the building was built by them with donated help from both men and women. The Bethel Church was dedicated in 1881 and named by Mrs. T. J. Campbell. Rev. Spillman, a Baptist minister, preached the first sermon. The first regular minister was Gabriel C. Mullins, a Baptist. The first Methodist minister was S. A. Day. Both denominations jointly used the church for several years. The cemetery was plotted for one acre on the west side of the church. At first no one paid for grave sites, but in 1895, after Alex Emerich fenced off the graveyard, graves were sold, and church members and families of the deceased were expected to help keep the cemetery in good shape. When the new Mount Moriah Christian Church was built in 1911, many Bethel Church members joined it. No list of charter members of Bethel
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Church is available, since the church and cemetery papers were all destroyed in a fire some years ago. Belew, Mildred Boden. The First 200 Years of Pendleton County. Falmouth, Ky.: M. B. Belew, n.d. [ca. 1994].
Mildred Belew
BETTS, MARY E. WILSON (b. January 1824, Maysville, Ky.; d. September 16, 1854, Maysville, Ky.). Poet Mary E. Wilson Betts was the daughter of Isaiah and Hannah Wilson. Educated in Maysville schools, Betts grew up to be a prolific writer whose poems were widely published in newspapers across Kentucky, as well as in Moore’s Western Magazine, published in Cincinnati, where she was affectionately nicknamed by the editor “our Up River Pet.” In William Coggeshall’s book The Poets and Poetry of the West, he called her “one of the most popu lar of the younger writers of the State [Kentucky].” Betts’s best-known poem, the four-stanza “A Kentuckian Kneels to None but God,” published originally in the Maysville Flag, was inspired by the last words of Col. William Logan Crittenden, a graduate of West Point, who grew up in Shelbyville, Ky., and had fought with distinction in the Mexican War. In 1851 Crittenden joined a force led by Narcisco Lopez to free Cuba from Spain, but on August 16 of that year, Crittenden was captured with 50 of his men and marched to Castle Altares in Havana to be executed. The men were forced to kneel, five at a time, with their backs to the firing squads, but Crittenden refused to kneel when his turn came. Instead, he spoke the now-famous words “A Kentuckian kneels to none except his God, and he always dies facing the enemy” and then was executed. In introducing Betts’s poem, the editor of the Maysville Flag wrote, “The lines which follow are from one of Kentucky’s most gifted daughters of song.” The poem was reprinted widely and in various forms. Fifty years later, during the Spanish-American War (see National Guard, Spanish-American War) in 1898, it was revived as a morale booster. The Kentucky Gateway Museum Center in Maysville has in its permanent collection a scrapbook of Betts’s handwritten poems, donated by Bess Lindsay Bell Barnes, Betts’s great-grandniece. Included are many poems composed during the 1840s and published in a variety of newspapers and in “New York publications” other than newspapers; the book also contains a collection of sonnets and writings that may never have appeared in print. In the summer of 1854, Mary Wilson was married to Morgan L. Betts, editor of the Detroit News. That same fall, she died at age 30 of congestion of the brain. Her husband died several weeks later, in October. Calvert, Jean. “Museum Musings,” Maysville Ledger Independent, January 25, 1978. Coggeshall, William T. The Poets and Poetry of the West. Columbus, Ohio: Follett, Foster, 1860. Collins, Richard H. History of Kentucky. Vol. 1. Covington, Ky.: Collins, 1882. Townsend, John Wilson. Kentucky in American Letters. Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1913.