Tag: Darnell

DARNELL FAMILY COLORIZED PHOTOS

On By donlkincaidIn Darnell, Old PicturesLeave a comment

This photo of my grandmother Sallie Darnell was taken in about 1940 in front of their home on Coyle St. in Owingsville.  Mr. Jeff must have been at work at the bank.  In the background you can see three buildings still in use on Slate Ave. in Owingsville.

Apparently the photo was a specialty picture of some kind.  I’ve been told it started as a black and white, was colored in and then photographed again.

This picture was apparently taken the same day.  On the left is my mother, Doris Louise Darnell. Just guessing I think she was about 15. I think in the middle is my great grandmother Mrs. Rose A. Darnell, wife of Isaac R. Darnell.  She died in 1941. On the right is Donovan L. Darnell, my uncle. When I was a kid he jokingly called me Jack.  I’m proud to be named for him. ~ Don

A Letter From Donovan Darnell, Dated 1933

On By Ginger Karrick KincaidIn Darnell, Old PicturesLeave a comment
Donovan Darnell as a child.  He would grow up to serve in WWII, graduate from Morehead State, teach Industrial Arts in Greensboro, N.C. and, most importantly, start a beautiful family (even though they do sometimes root for the wrong team in basketball!).  
 
Happy 2015!  Our first post of this new year is an old letter written by Donovan Darnell.  “Uncle Don,” as we all called him, was not only the brother of Doris Darnell Kincaid (Don & Bill’s mother), but also a lifelong best friend of Mr. Burl.  In fact, Burl and Donovan were close friends long before Burl and Doris got involved romantically. Don Kincaid is named after Donovan Darnell, but “Uncle Don” disliked his name and called his nephew “Jack” for years.
 
In the following letter dated 1933, Donovan would have been 15 years old.  Miss Sallie, his mother, was sick and in some sort of treatment center (perhaps a sanatorium – Uncle Ruby also went to one and we’ll share his postcards later) and he has written his beloved mother, filling her in on what’s going on at their home on Coyle Street in Owingsville (see pictures of Coyle Street at end of this post).  Doris, by the way, would have been 7 years old and due to contracting polio when an infant, was left with lifelong health problems.  She always said her parents, especially her father, spoiled her because of that, and it was often left to her brother to discipline her.  
 
Owingsville, Ky
April 30, 1933
 
Dear Mother:
          I hope you are feeling much better by this time.  We certainly have missed you since you have been gone and are anxious for you to get well so that you can come home.
         How is Aunt Rosa?*
         We are all well at home now.  Doris had a sick spell last week and missed three days of school but she is allright now.  She said if she could have an ice cream cone all the time she would not get sick. Mamma** has not been feeling so awfully good.  Daddy and I are allright though.
         Mrs Tanner is feeling better and today she is sitting out in the yard. Martha is awfully cute. The other day she walked over to Mrs. Palmer’s*** back porch and knocked on the door.
         I went to the union play Friday night and it was certainly good.  I wish you could have seen it.
        They have already started working on the cess pool in the chicken lot. The kitchen sink and basement both lead into it.
         They are still working on the new house Mr. Denton is going to build. They almost have the foundation ready.
         Daddy took Mrs. McCarty home again Saturday afternoon.  We wanted Doris to take a nap before she went but she said she didn’t want to. About an hour before daddy came home we brought Doris in for her to lay down a little while. Mamma said it was to late for her to take a nap and didn’t want her to lay down. In a  little bit she laid down and went to sleep herself. 
         Doris stayed at home the day daddy came in.  He came in at 11 o’clock. At dinner I saw Miss Inez. She said she knew Doris was glad to see daddy come home for she would tell about both of you being gone and the big tears would roll down her cheeks.
         Everybody I see nearly asks me when I have heard from you, how you are and when we are expecting you to come home.
         It is time for dinner now so I must say
        Goodbye,
        Donovan
P.S. Tell Aunt Rosa hello for all of us.
 
*Rosa Jones
**The letter is written to his mother – we’re not sure who “Mamma” is, although our guess is his grandmother.
***Mrs. Palmer lived in the house on Coyle Street right by the Baptist Church.
 
We don’t know who the other people are or where Mr. Denton’s house would have been.  Please leave a comment or let one of us know if you have information you want to share.
 

 

Donovan, Sallie, and Jefferson Darnell, 
standing on the Coyle St. sidewalk with
 Ida Jones’s house behind them. The Jones house is no longer there.

 

Sallie Darnell on Coyle Street in Owingsville, KY.  Note the old car in the background, pointing towards Slate Avenue. 
Family Drugs is currently located in the building on the left.

 

Sallie Darnell (in center) with two unknown women.  If you know who they are, please leave a comment or send us an email.

 

Cousins Donovan Darnell and Darnell Snedegar on a day trip to White Oak.  They were driven by Jeff Darnell (Donovan’s son) to a
   cemetery located on the back of what was once the family farm.  

 

Jefferson Lee Darnell (Mr. Jeff to most everybody) with Sallie and one of the children. Jeff Darnell was a banker and  also evidently a big softie when it came to sick little girls! He built several houses on Coyle Street and was mayor of Owingsville in the 50’s.

Jefferson Darnell’s driving goggles.  “Mr. Jeff” left home for Colorado at one point, aiming to start a business there, but ended up coming back home.  These goggles now belong to his great-grandson Jacob Kincaid, who has left home for China.  He didn’t wear the goggles!

 

Old Photographs and Funeral Notices

On By Ginger Karrick KincaidIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
Jefferson Dawson Brother, 1875 – 1975.  Nephew of John William Dawson, below.  He married Elizabeth Prewitt.  We have a letter he wrote while in Germany during WWI that we will share soon.
John W. Dawson 1849-1910.  Son of Jefferson Dawson and Eliza Rice.  Father of Emma, Elbert,  Nancy Jane (WBK, Jr.’s mother),  Ashby, Mary, and Stella.  This image was scanned from a reduced copy of the original, which we have.


Yes, that is Isaac’s hair!

On Confederate Markers and Ancestors

On By Ginger Karrick KincaidIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
Don Lee Kincaid by his great, great uncle’s burial place in the Owingsville Cemetery.   On the ground in front of Don is a Confederate marker.  T.L. (Thomas) was the brother of Isaac, who was the father of Jefferson Lee Darnell, Don’s grandfather.  The names Jefferson and Lee point to what were at one time the family’s Confederate sympathies. 
 In the South, we learn to make peace with our heritage, and that is not always an easy thing to do.

This week, William Burl Kincaid, III (Bill) makes his blogging debut, sharing his thoughts on the Confederate markers in the Owingsville Cemetery: 


                A few steps east of where our parents are buried in the Owingsville Cemetery stands a statue of a Confederate soldier, six feet tall on a seven-foot base and, of course, facing northward. I sometimes wonder if he ever makes eye contact with the Union soldier facing southward that stands atop a massive war memorial in downtown Indianapolis, where my family and I have lived for the last six years.
                The Owingsville monument has stood sentinel since 1907 and I have looked at it dozens of times. Others have too, I know. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, so it’s probably garnered a good bit of attention over the years.
                Imagine a bright, warm afternoon in the early part of the twentieth century. A parade forms. School lets out early so girls and boys can join the festivities and, in some cases, participate in them by singing songs and reading essays written for the occasion. The parade stops at the center of town for the unveiling and dedication of the monument.
                As we know from Owingsville, sometimes the monument landed elsewhere, like a cemetery. Or, in the case of Kentucky’s largest Confederate memorial, it stands at what is now one of the primary entrances to the University of Louisville campus.
                I don’t know if a parade or other public events accompanied the dedication of the Confederate soldier in Owingsville, but what I have described occurred in towns and cities across the South when the well funded and extremely well organized Daughters of the Confederacy unveiled their monuments.
                Until a couple of years ago, my impression of the Daughters of the Confederacy was that of a genteel group of tea-sipping, hat-wearing Southern belles who gathered occasionally to enjoy each other’s company and to tell stories of another era.
                The Daughters were interested in telling stories alright, but with a particular angle. (I should say “are interested.” Numerous chapters exist today, including several in northern and western states.) And I’m sure they exuded remarkable grace and charm, but make no mistake about it, they were a force to be reckoned with.
                The Daughters believed that their ancestors’ defeat in the Civil War represented a terrible disgrace. Worse, in their view, was that those same ancestors and most people in the South had been completely discredited and even demeaned in the years subsequent to, as the Daughters would have termed it, the War of Northern Aggression. The Daughters made it their mission to revive and preserve Confederate culture. More so than the men in many cases, the Daughters crafted and promoted the Lost Cause myth through an extensive organization and with various efforts.
                The monuments are probably the best known of those efforts today, but the Daughters also distributed Confederate flags, developed curriculum that promoted Southern values for white children in public schools, provided portraits of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee to be hung in those schools, built hospitals and nursing homes, and offered scholarships to college-bound Confederate descendants.
                My reading about the Daughters has been both fascinating and troubling, especially as the Daughters attempted to preserve racial discrimination and exclusion even as many people in the country were working tirelessly to improve race relations. In her book Dixie’s Daughters, Karen Cox contends that the Daughters’ efforts set back the acceptance and inclusion of African-Americans in this country by several decades, even to the point of undermining the work of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, a full century after the close of the Civil War.
                When I read that I thought of the African-Americans with whom I went to school, grew up and played ball. I also think of the many African-Americans with whom I now work. And even though I find the Owingsville Cemetery one of the dearest and most peaceful places in the world, it now holds a different kind of sadness than it did before. 
  ~Bill Kincaid


Thomas Darnell’s marker is just one of  many markers placed by the Daughters of the Confederacy in the Owingsville Cemetery.  
We’ll post pictures of the rest of the markers in the future.

 He stands facing north – on eternal lookout for Yankees.

Mrs. Charles Darnell’s Orange Cake Recipe

On By Ginger Karrick KincaidIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Might be a good dessert for the holidays.  I haven’t tried this recipe and have copied it just like it is written in Jane Kincaid’s cookbook.


Orange Cake

Juice of one large orange.
1/2 cup white sugar put in juice, dissolve this mixture and let stand while mixing and baking.
1/2 cup butter or crisco (scant)
1 cup white sugar
2 whole eggs
2/3 cup sour milk
2 cups flour
1 level teaspoon soda (put in sour milk)
1 orange peel grated
1 cup raisins put through a food chopper with orange peel.
Add raisins and orange peel to butter and sugar after they have been well creamed, add milk and flour then the eggs last.
Beat yellows and whites together.
When done and first taken out of the stove, pour juice over cake and let stand in skillet until cold.
In pouring the juice over the cake be careful not to let the juice run down the sides of cake.
Have stove pretty hot.

Mrs. Charles Darnell
From the Electric Cooking School

Fallin’ Weather, Jefferson (Mr. Jeff) Darnell, and Tom Turner

On By Ginger Karrick KincaidIn Local Tales1 Comment

Last night as we were standing in our backyard getting something out of our car, we noticed that we could hear the sounds from the drag strip over the hill very clearly, as well as the ones from the football game on the other end of town.   Don said, “It’s fallin’ weather.”  Woke up this morning to rain and lots of it.  Fallin’ weather it is!

From the journals:
      Fallin’ weather – just what does that mean?  It is an old expression that folks used when they were more or less trying to predict the weather.  If you heard a train whistle close to Preston or Olympia and you were in Owingsville, it meant to an old-timer that rain or snow was imminent.
      When someone would observe smoke from a chimney hovering close to the ground and not rising, then he or she would predict rain or snow.
      These days, there are no C&O trains running through the county,  but if you do not live far from I-64 or other busy highways, you may make your predictions based on the volume of the sounds emanating from these thoroughfares.   If the sounds of cars and trucks increase substantially in volume, it is a good indicator of ‘fallin’ weather’ – so they say.
 
On a side note, everyone in my family was saddened by the passing of Mr. Tom Turner.  He always had a smile for everyone he met, and I think he was one of those people who deliberately chooses happiness and kindness and what a blessing that is when a person like that is a part of your life and community.
 
When my oldest son, Jacob, worked at the IGA while in high school,  Tom would talk to him there and tell him stories about his (Jacob’s) great-grandfather Jeff Darnell (father-in-law of William Burl Kincaid, Jr.).   Tom would also tell my husband these stories.  In a very real way, my husband and sons got to know “Mr. Jeff” just a bit better because of Tom Turner, and when you think about it, that’s what small town living is all about – weaving those kinds of threads that make everyone a bit closer.   – Ginger
Jefferson Lee Darnell (“Mr. Jeff” to most folks – when he was vice president of the Farmer’s Bank, he kept a loaded shotgun by his desk when word got to him that banks in neighboring communities were being robbed.  I don’t know if that’s a story passed down in the family or one from Tom Turner – probably both.)