After Blue Licks: Catherine Carpenter’s Life in Kentucky
In August 1782, Capt. William Caldwell led a loyalist force of soldiers and Native American warriors into Kentucky in an effort to maintain British control of the Ohio River Valley. On August 16, 1782, Caldwell’s force laid siege to Bryan’s Station near Lexington. When word of the siege reached Col. John Todd, commander of the local militias, he mobilized a patriot force to confront the invaders. Daniel Boone, the famous backwoodsman and explorer of Kentucky, was one of many who responded to Todd’s call.1
Illustration of Daniel Boone at the Battle of Blue Licks, ca. 1919. Francis Samuel Drake, Indian History for Young Folks (Harper & Brothers, 1919), 328.
When Caldwell learned of Todd’s approach, he ended his siege and withdrew his force north to the Licking River, specifically an area known as the Lower Blue Licks. It was there on August 19, 1782, that the two opposing forces clashed in one of the final battles of the American Revolution. Indeed, the Battle of Blue Licks occurred nearly a year after Lord Charles Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia on October 19, 1781.
The battle was small in scale and rather short, but it lacked nothing in intensity. According to Daniel Boone’s account, after only fifteen minutes of combat, Caldwell routed Todd’s force from the field. Todd’s command, containing only 182 men, sustained 54 percent casualties during the fight. At least sixty men died, including Daniel Boone’s son, Isaac, who fell early in the fighting. Todd himself was killed during the battle. After the battle, Caldwell continued his march through the Ohio River Valley. His campaign was cut short, though. Eleven months later, representatives from the British Crown and Continental Congress agreed to end hostilities via the Treaty of Paris (1783), solidifying the birth of the United States.2
While Blue Licks proved to be an inconsequential battle in the grand scheme of the American Independence movement, the lives lost there were earth-shattering for families that had to adjust to a new reality without a brother, father, or son claimed in the violence.
Catherine Frye was one such person whose life the events at Blue Licks transformed significantly. Her husband, John Frye, was killed during the fighting, leaving her widowed in her early twenties. To make matters worse, the couple had a young child, Leah, and Catherine was pregnant with the couple’s second child at the time of his death. Thus, Catherine faced the challenge of raising her children and maintaining her household, all the while processing the tragic loss of her husband.3
Catherine had not resided in Kentucky for long before the violence of the Revolution disrupted her life.
Originally from Virginia, John and Catherine married in 1775. As a reward for his service to the British Crown during Lord Dunmore’s War (1774), John was granted approximately 400 acres of land in present-day Lincoln County, Kentucky.3 When the Wilderness Road, a combination of Native American footpaths and animal trails, opened to white settlers in the late 1770s, John relocated his family from Virginia to his lands in Kentucky, doing so around 1780. Catherine’s sister, Elisabeth Spears Carpenter, her husband, John Carpenter, and his brothers, Adam and Conrad, also traveled with them.
Map of "Kentucke," 1784. This map by John Filson of depicts Carpenter's Station in Lincoln County. Map Collection, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort.
Migration during this period was typically a family affair. It eased financial costs and lessened the burden of creating households in a new place. The voyage itself could be quite dangerous and, thus, larger parties offered migrants greater security.4
Migration also meant separation from friends, family, and community. Despite the gravity of the choice, Catherine and her sister probably had little say. The legal demands of couverture in eighteenth-century North America required a wife to obey her husband totally. At this time, a married woman essentially had no legal standing or rights. They could not own property, sue, make contracts, or own businesses. More intimately, married women did not have a legal right to their children or even their own bodies (sexual consent was implied via marriage). That said, women found ways to negotiate their husbands’ power over them.5
Nonetheless, Catherine and Elisabeth followed their husbands to Kentucky and settled in an area near present-day Hustonville, which eventually became known as Carpenter’s Station. After the journey came the work of cultivating a homestead. For Catherine and Elisabeth, this meant cooking, cleaning, raising children, and making clothes, among other chores. Women were also often called upon to perform “men’s work,” such as farming, felling trees, or even defending the homestead from attack. This gender bending reflected the demands of settlement in the hinterlands of North America.6
Poor conditions also exacerbated the already strenuous work of homesteading. In the initial stages, settlers could often muster only rudimentary log cabins, most of which had dirt floors and were poorly insulated against insects and the elements. Summers were unbearably hot in these structures, and winters were brutally cold.7
Obviously, the loss of a spouse further complicated the settlement process. Catherine’s situation, unfortunately, was a common one. Many women who migrated west during and after the Revolution found themselves alone to fend for their children after their spouses’ deaths. Death, to a degree, was a common part of the colonial and early republic period. Diseases, accidents, and violence often claimed men, women, and children.8
People were resilient and forced to adapt when tragedy struck. Widowed women utilized any marketable skills they possessed to scratch out a living. In fact, they performed essential services in hinterland communities, including what historian Honor Sachs calls “social reproduction” work. That is, laundering, cooking, and raising children, all of which were critical to a community’s economic growth.9
Catherine was quite industrious. To earn a living, she produced textiles, concocted medicines from local plants, and distilled whiskey. Since the couple did not have male children, Catherine inherited John’s estate, valued in 1783 at £144.12, or approximately $30,000 in today’s currency—a good sum of money. From the estate, she acquired livestock and miscellaneous belongings, some of which she sold, further insulating her family financially. Ironically, John’s death allowed Catherine’s entrepreneurial talent to thrive. Whereas married women were prohibited from public affairs, Catherine’s status as a widow permitted her entry into this male-dominated space in the eighteenth century.10
Sour Mash Whiskey Recipe by Catherine Carpenter, 1818. Carpenter Family Papers, 1780–2003, MSS 47, Box 1, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort.
But while this status offered an escape from the restrictions of coverture, marriage offered Catherine and her children long-term financial security, social standing, and protection.
Two years after John’s death, Catherine married Adam Carpenter, her sister’s brother-in-law. The union was financially fruitful (love in this period was not a prerequisite for marriage). The couple invested in land and went about raising livestock and cultivating cash crops. Catherine continued her personal business endeavors as well. Over time, the Carpenters boasted of a wealthy estate, including five thousand acres of land, numerous livestock, and several enslaved people whose labor helped to expand the Carpenters’ wealth and influence.
In 1806, Adam died, and Catherine once again found herself a widow. Her situation this time was completely different. Over twenty-two years of marriage, Catherine gave birth to 10 children who could support her in her old age. Catherine also received about one-third of Adam’s estate, or about 667 acres of land, a share of livestock, and perhaps as many as twenty enslaved people.11
It is important to note that the people whom Catherine enslaved, ironically, granted her an incredible amount of economic and social freedom. In short, a source of her freedom came from the enslavement of others. Further, the wealth Catherine obtained from slavery was eventually passed down to her children, establishing a successive inheritance of generational wealth rooted in human bondage.
For the rest of her life, Catherine continued to manage her estate and hawk whiskey. Thankfully, she was a meticulous record keeper. Her files are now part of the Catherine Carpenter collection held at the Kentucky Historical Society. Of note, the collection includes Catherine’s recipes for medicinal remedies. One such recipe details a cure for “canser,” or cancer. The recipe calls for bark and roots from local trees, notably black oak, dogwood, sassafras, and persimmon, to be removed from the north side of the trees and boiled until the contents are “thick as tar.”12 Presumably, the tar was then ingested or applied to the cancerous area.
Catherine died at the age of eighty-seven, leaving behind twelve children and, reportedly, sixty-seven grandchildren. Her estate and personal belongings were divided between her heirs. Interestingly, Catherine allocated $700 in her will toward the emancipation of an enslaved man she owned, Joseph. The gesture did not extend to the other nineteenth people that Catherine enslaved whose lives were likely greatly impacted by her death.13
Carpenter’s story of loss and resilience is well-documented and indicative of the situation many women who migrated west in the eighteenth century found themselves in after the death of a spouse. Yet, Catherine’s experience bears revisiting, for it gives us a detailed glimpse into the lives of women in early Kentucky. Women were not only present but vital to the success and growth of the commonwealth during the settlement period. They endured the demanding, uncertain, and often violent world of hinterland North America during the eighteenth century, just as men did, and should be remembered for doing so.
Additional references:
“Colonial Kentucky, 1774–1792,” A New History of Kentucky, 2d, by James C. Klotter and Craig Thompson Friend (University Press of Kentucky, 2018).
Women in Early America, ed. by Thomas A. Foster (New York University Press, 2015).
Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, and Development in the Preindustrial Era, ed. by Robert D. Mitchell (University Press of Kentucky, 1991).
John M. Trowbridge, “‘We are all Slaughtered Men’: The Battle of Blue Licks,” Kentucky Ancestors 42, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 57–73.
Linda Grant De Pauw, Founding Mothers: Women of America in the Revolutionary Era (Houghton Mifflin, 1975).
NOTES
[1] Neal O. Hammon, Daniel Boone and the Defeat at Blue Licks (The Boone Society, Inc., 2005)
[2] Hammon, Daniel Boone and the Defeat at Blue Licks; Elizabeth A. Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (University of North Carolina Press, 168.
[3] Andy Dickson, “Marker #917: John Fry,” Kentucky Historical Society, https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/1007.
[4] Mildred Leedy Armao, “The Untraveled History of the Wilderness road,” Kentucky Historical Society, https://history.ky.gov/kentucky-ancestors/the-untraveled-history-of-the-wilderness-road; Marie Basile McDaniel, “Immigration and Migration (Colonial Era),” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/immigration-and-migration-colonial-era/; Virginia Tyler Carpenter, The Carpenters of Carpenter’s Station: Lincoln Co., Ky. Near Hustonville, Ky., 2d (Kentucky Historical Society, 1976; Reprint, 2001).
[5] Catherine Allgor, “Coverture: The Word You Probably Don’t Know But Should,” National Women’s History Museum, 4 September 2014, www.womenshistory.org/articles/coverture-word-you-probably-dont-know-should.
[6] Sandra L. Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800–1915 (University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 160; Perkins, Border Life, 145.
[7] Perkins, Border Life, 63; Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 146.
[8] Honor Sachs, Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (Yale University Press, 2015), 20–22.
[9] Sachs, Households, Manhood, and National Expansion, 58.
[10] “Inventory and Appraisement, March 13, 1793,” MSS47_Box1_F2_005_001, Catherine Carpenter Collection, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, https://kyhistory.com/digital/collection/MS/id/25923/rec/6.
[11] “Division of the estate of Adam Carpenter, ca. 1810,” FF1_315_F2_001, Catherine Carpenter Collection, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, https://kyhistory.com/digital/collection/MS/id/28510/rec/39.
[12] Carpenter Family Papers, 1704-2003, MSS_47, Catherine Carpenter Collections, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, https://kyhistory.com/digital/collection/LIB/id/1909/rec/1; Conrad Carpenter, Recipe for “the cure” and recipe “for a canser,” undated, MSS47_Box1_F17_004_001, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/collection/MS/id/26267/rec/1.
[13] Catherine Carpenter’s Will, 1846 (Probated 1848), MSS47_Box1_F14_002_001, Catherine Carpenter Collection, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, https://kyhistory.com/digital/collection/MS/id/26466/rec/61.
