WHITE’S RUN BAPTIST CHURCH
underlying all other political issues was the question of slavery. Antiforeign sentiment had been seen in Kentucky politics as early as 1847. By summer 1854, however, secret fraternal lodges associated with the growing nativist movement in America were forming in the state’s larger cities. To the political confusion were added temperance supporters, who were speaking of running a candidate for governor (among those mentioned was Norvin Green of Carrollton). Defectors from their parties to the temperance ranks hurt both Democrats and Whigs, but in particular Whigs seemed to provide the majority memberships of both the nativists and the temperance movement. After the local election successes of the nativist Know-Nothing movement nationally and throughout Kentucky in late 1854 and early 1855, Whig leaders reluctantly acknowledged the death of the Whig Party and attempted to maintain a political presence by taking over the Know-Nothing Party machinery. Some benefit was gained by this strategy, as 26 former Whigs were elected in slave states to the national legislature in 1855. Switching party allegiance to survive politically was common in the 1850s. John W. Menzies’s political history illustrates the phenomenon. Named as clerk to the Council in Covington in 1848, Menzies was a Whig; however, by 1855 he had become a member of the Know-Nothings and was elected that year to the Kentucky legislature representing Kenton Co. Cole, Arthur Charles. The Whig Party in the South. Reprint. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1962. “Complete List of Senators,” CJ, September 29, 1849, 1. Holt, Michael F. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999. Howe, Daniel Walker, ed. The American Whigs: An Anthology. New York: John Wiley, 1973. Poage, George Rawlings. Henry Clay and the Whig Party. Reprint. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965. “The Popu lar Vote,” CJ, August 11, 1855, 2. “Representatives Elected,” CJ, September 28, 1849, 1. Volz, Harry August. “Party, State, and Nation: Kentucky and the Coming of the American Civil War,” PhD diss., Univ. of Virginia, 1982.
J. T. Spence
WHITE, CLARENCE CAMERON (b. August 10, 1880, Clarksville, Tenn.; d. June 30, 1960, New York City). Clarence White, the son of James W. and Jennie Scott White, was a world-renowned African American opera composer and director. White studied at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (Oberlin, Ohio) and later spent the years 1908–1911 in London, England, with the black British composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. White also traveled to Paris, France. He began his teaching career in the public schools of Washington, D.C., and then served as director of music at West Virginia State College at Institute, W.Va. In 1937 he was named a music specialist for the National Recre-
ation Association, established by President Franklin Roosevelt (1933–1945) under the Works Progress Administration. The association offered aid in organizing community arts programs. In November 1938 White visited Covington to head a music institute for African Americans in Northern Kentucky. During the mornings, he conducted several institutes on music at Covington’s Lincoln-Grant School. The purpose of the institute was to advance the musical interests of the community and to develop choral and instrumental group participation. Mrs. Sadye L. Dunham, director of the Negro Youth Recreation Association of Northern Kentucky, was instrumental in bringing White to the community. To keep the community involved, training sessions were held nightly at the First Baptist Church and the Ninth St. Baptist Church. The training period resulted in a public concert in which African American spirituals were featured. In 1960, after a long and successful career in the opera composition, White died at the Sydenham Hospital in New York City. His most acclaimed composition was his 1932 opera Ouanga, which was first performed that year by the American Opera Society of Chicago. “Clarence White, Composer, Was 79,” NYT, July 2, 1960, 17. “Famed Negro Composer Heads Music Institute,” KP, November 30, 1938, 2. Notable Black American Men. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Research, 1999.
Theodore H. H. Harris
WHITE BURLEY TOBACCO. The first boatloads of Kentucky tobacco went to New Orleans in the 1780s. By 1839 Kentucky ranked second only to Virginia in the quantities of locally stemmed and packed tobacco shipped to England. Sometime during 1858–1859, Bracken Co. grower Laban J. Bradford found a mutated plant that appeared much lighter in color and texture than the original dark leathery leaf known as red burley. He saved the seeds and the following year sowed them in a separate patch. Over the next four years, Bradford selected only the sturdiest plants in that patch for new seeds. He called the distinct variety white burley and gave some of the seeds to a neighbor, George W. Barkley. While Bradford was serving as president of the Kentucky State Agricultural Society from 1862 until 1863, he noted that Kentucky had become the largest tobacco-producing state in the nation. In spring 1864, Joseph Fore and George Webb came across the Ohio river from Brown Co., Ohio, to Augusta, Ky., to obtain tobacco seeds. Barkley gave the men some white burley seeds, which they planted on land rented from Capt. Fred Kautz. Months later, Fore and Webb noticed that their new tobacco plants had a dirty yellow hue and light texture. This normally was a sign that plants were diseased, and so they burned that crop. The next year, however, when Webb saw the tobacco growing from the Kentucky white burley seeds he had brought back from Kentucky, he recognized that instead of being caused by a disease, the color and texture represented a definite new variety of tobacco. Webb
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also found that the new crop developed neither mold nor rot as red burley tobacco plants did. Better yet, he could cut down the entire plant, rather than picking each leaf as it ripened. Webb produced a crop of 20,000 pounds that commanded top dollar at the Cincinnati tobacco market in 1866. The following year, he went to the St. Louis Fair and won a first prize and a second prize in tobacco-crop competitions. When Webb tried to patent what he believed was a new tobacco strain, he failed because Bracken Co. White burley had already become common in the Ohio and Kentucky region. This adaptable tobacco leaf revolutionized the industry, and for a brief time, Augusta became a clearing port for Central Kentucky’s production of white burley tobacco and the biggest market in the district. Steamboats lined the levee at Augusta for a mile and a half, and Cincinnati soon replaced Louisville as the region’s foremost distributor for Central Kentucky’s tobacco crops. “Bracken County Cradle of the White Burley,” Bracken County Chronicle, October 23, 1930. Clowes, Jack. “ ‘My Lady Nicotine’ Becomes Cash Crop with Aid of Frankfort’s Founder,” Lexington Herald-Leader, August 10, 1969. An article based on an 1873 article in the Frankfort Commonwealth in which Bradford described his role. Collins, Lewis, and Richard Collins. History of Kentucky. 2 vols. Reprint, Berea: Kentucky Imprints, 1976. Heimann, Robert K. Tobacco and Americans. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960. Van Willigen, John, and Susan C. Eastwood. Tobacco Culture: Farming Kentucky’s Burley Belt. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1998.
Donald A. Clark
WHITE’S RUN BAPTIST CHURCH. In March and April 1810, the Ghent Baptist Church sent John M. Price and Mordicah Jackson as helpers to constitute a new church at White’s Run, along Ky. Rt. 36 in Carroll Co. At least six of the new church’s charter members came from the church at Ghent. The White’s Run Baptist Church held its first worship ser vice on April 12, 1810. Meetings for worship and church business were held in the homes of members at first. A log structure was then built on an acre of land donated by the Easterday family out of the Whitehead land grant, in the community now known as Easterday. Members brought their slaves to church, and the first baptism of a slave, named Nicy, was in July 1812. Baptisms in the early years were conducted either in the Ohio River or in White’s Run Creek. It appears that during this period the church obtained money to pay expenses not through the practice of tithing but by levying a tax on members; male members usually paid a higher rate than females did. The early church believed in disciplining any member whose behavior was considered to be contrary to Christian beliefs. One of the early controversies occurred at the end of 1822, when charges were brought against two men for joining a Masonic Lodge. The church declared that the teachings of Jesus Christ were not compatible with the teachings of the Masons.