GASDORF MUSIC PUBLISHING COMPANY
which later gave way to the largest farm machinery dealership in Pendleton Co., were also operating in Gardnersville. In the late 1800s the town had a saloon where customers could bring their own bottles and have them fi lled with whiskey directly from the house barrel. The buggy shop manufactured and sold buggies and also did repairs. In the early 1900s, this shop became an automobile garage and upholstering shop where Model T Fords were fitted with new tops, curtains, and glass windows. Gardnersville once had two doctors, an undertaker, a cemetery, two church houses, and three tobacco warehouses. The largest of the warehouses was a two-story building, built during the period when the nightriders roved through Pendleton Co. burning tobacco. In 1911 the old Simpson School on Center Ridge Rd. was replaced by a new school building, which eventually included a two-year high school program. This school was replaced by the Portland School, built in the mid-1930s, which burned in the 1960s. Several wool buyers were located in Gardnersville, as were two automobile garages and, at various times, four gasoline dealers. Modern times have changed the little village. At present there are two churches, a cemetery, one store, and a farm machinery dealership. Belew, Mildred Boden. The First 200 Years of Pendleton County. Falmouth, Ky.: M. B. Belew, n.d. [ca. 1994].
GARNER, JOHN “MACK” (b. December 23, 1898, Centerville, Iowa; d. Oct. 28, 1936, Covington, Ky.). Jockey Mack Garner, a 1969 inductee into the Racing Hall of Fame, was the son of T. F. “Dode” and Sarah Clements Garner. Mack’s greatgrandfather, grandfather, father, and five brothers were also jockeys. In 1915, at age 17 (not 15, as is often mistakenly asserted), Garner led the nation’s jockeys in wins, by achieving 151 wins, and in money won. He also was top money winner in 1929, winning $314,975, a record at the time. Garner won the 1929 Belmont Stakes aboard Blue Larkspur, the Belmont again in 1933 aboard Hurry Off, and the Kentucky Derby in 1934 riding Cavalcade. A regular rider at Covington’s old Latonia Racecourse, Garner’s greatest triumph there occurred in November 1923 when he guided Carl Wiedemann’s horse In Memoriam to victory over that year’s Derby champion, Zev. Garner married Willis M. Leslie of Covington in 1920, and the couple eventually moved into a home in Covington that belonged to his father-in-law. On October 28, 1936, after riding four races (one of which he won) at River Downs in Cincinnati, Garner had two heart attacks at his home. He died during a third attack at Covington’s St. Elizabeth Hospital (see St. Elizabeth Medical Center) and was buried in Covington’s Linden Grove Cemetery. He was survived by his wife and four children. In a 21year career, Garner rode 1,346 winners and 2,358 other mounts that finished in the money. Claypool, James C. The Tradition Continues: The Story of Old Latonia, Latonia, and Turfway Racecourses. Fort Mitchell, Ky.: T. I. Hayes, 1997.
“Veteran Saddle Artist Dies of Heart Attack,” CP, October 29, 1936, 20.
James C. Claypool
GARNER, MARGARET (b. 1833, Boone Co., Ky.; d. 1858, Mississippi). Margaret Garner and her children were slaves owned by the Gaines family on Maplewood Farm near Richwood, Boone Co. Her husband, Robert, and his parents were owned by the Marshall family on an adjoining farm. On the cold, wintry night of January 28, 1856, with the temperature hovering around 10 degrees Fahrenheit, the Garner family (as well as 9 other Northern Kentucky slaves, a total of 17) escaped on a large sled, which they abandoned along Pike Street in Covington, and crossed the frozen Ohio River on foot into Cincinnati. The Garners fled to the Mill Creek home of Elijah Kite, a former slave and a cousin of Margaret’s. The 9 other fugitive slaves were successful in their escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad. The slave owners and a posse soon found the Garners at the Kite home. Rather than allow her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Mary to be returned to slavery, Margaret killed her with a butcher knife and attempted to kill the other children. The Garners were overpowered and taken into custody. The Garners stood trial as fugitive slaves in a Cincinnati federal courtroom. The trial provoked near-riots on the streets of Cincinnati and captured national attention. The fugitive Slave Law was upheld and the Garners were returned to their owners. Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio sent a requisition to Governor Charles Morehead (1855–1859) of Kentucky for the return of Margaret to Ohio to stand trial for murder, but it arrived after the Garners had been sent down the river to other Gaines brothers. No requisition was ever sent to any other Southern state. The Garners were forgotten and peace was restored to the streets of Cincinnati. For abolitionists, the Garner case illuminated all that was wrong with slavery. It was also a states’ jurisdiction issue. The case juxtaposed federal law (the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850) and states’ rights (Ohio law for murder). Federal law took precedence over state law. Chase, the Ohio governor and an abolitionist, was personally torn because he was entrusted with enforcement of federal law and had to return the Garners to Kentucky. This incident was one of several during the 1850s that, along with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, popu larized the plight of African American slaves. For Margaret the death of her children was preferable to slavery. Although the Garners failed in their quest for freedom, it was Northern Kentucky’s best-known slave escape. Hundreds of abolitionists could not do as much for the antislavery cause as the Garners did, fanning the flames that eventually erupted into the Civil War. Toni Morrison was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature for Beloved, a novel based on this event, and the Cincinnati Opera Company was commissioned to produce Margaret Garner: A New American Opera, which debuted in three cities in 2005.
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“Boone Farm Confirmed as Slave Home,” KE, October 9, 1958, B3. Brunings, Ruth Wade Cox. “Slavery and the Tragic Story of Two Families—Gaines and Garner,” NKH 12, no. 1 (Fall–Winter 2004): 37–45. “Escape of Slaves,” CJ, February 2, 1856, 2. Margaret Garner. “Margaret Garner: A New American Opera.” www.margaretgarner.org (accessed September 20, 2006). Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. “New Opera Will Tell Ky. Slave’s Tragic Story,” KP, February 20, 2003, 14A. Weisenburger, Steven. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child Murder from the Old South. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. Yanuck, Julius. “The Garner Fugitive Slave Case,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40, no. 1 (June 1953): 47– 61.
GASDORF MUSIC PUBLISHING COMPANY. This Newport-based fi rm was owned by Alfred Gasdorf, who was born October 30, 1883, in Newport to Conrad and Elizabeth Machinot Gasdorf. By the fi rst decade of the 20th century, Alfred Gasdorf was composing and publishing ragtime music for the company. He became one of several Northern Kentuckians involved with ragtime music, which flourished from 1897 to 1920. Alfred’s father and brothers also played and performed music locally, when they were not working in their whitewash business. Alfred performed on the stately Island Queen steamboat, which sailed out of Cincinnati to Coney Island Amusement Park, and he was known to manipulate its famous calliope. He also played in theater orchestras in Cincinnati and other cities. His ragtime compositions include “Sic’ ’Em Prinz: March & Two-Step” (1905), “Coney Island Tickle” (1906), “Mississippi Rag” (1913), and “The Queen of Coney Island: March and Two Step” (1904). By 1910 Gasdorf was living in Denver, Colo.; in about 1918 he began touring the United States with a concert group. In 1920 he had a San Francisco address, but later he settled in Los Angeles, where he died on December 6, 1957. The family’s musical tradition continued well into the 1950s, when Newport’s Merle Gasdorf, apparently a relative of Alfred, as a young boy played the drums on the old Ted Mack Amateur Hour television show around 1955. There were at least three other notable contributors to the ragtime era who resided in Northern Kentucky. In 1905 Louis H. Mentel, who lived in Covington, wrote and published “A Daisy Girl,” one of the 10 rags he composed; in 1910 Covington’s William M. Hickman wrote “Diplomat Rag”; and the most famous of this region’s songwriters, Haven Gillespie, crossed over to collaborate with Lloyd Kidwell and Louis R. Strong in “Kyra: An Oriental One-Step,” in 1918. Northern Kentucky, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Indianapolis were centers of ragtime, as this musical art form (one of the few meldings of German American and African American cultures) was performed on the vessels that traveled up and down the Ohio River and in so many of the communities on or near the river’s banks.