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Coming up on Kentucky Life, once roaring with fire and activity, iron furnaces across Kentucky produced the metal that helped shape the state and the nation.

We'll explore the legacy of one of America's most important literary voices, Pulaski County native Harriette Simpson Arnow.

We'll explore the setting for this week's show, the Beargrass Creek State Nature Preserve in Louisville.

And we'll look at how the Underground Railroad in Kentucky provided shelter for escapees from slavery and helped send them to freedom.

All that's next on Kentucky Life.

[music playing] Hey, folks, and welcome to Kentucky Life.

I'm your host, Chip Polston.

It's good to see you again.

Our travels this week have brought us to Beargrass Creek State Nature Preserve in Louisville.

If you've ever been to the Louisville Zoo, the preserve is not too far from that.

The nearby Louisville Nature Center helps manage this area and uses it as an outdoor classroom for hands-on environmental education.

The preserve boasts 2 miles of walking trails, 180 species of trees, shrubs, and wildflowers, and more than 150 species of birds have been spotted here.

We'll learn a little more about the preserve later in our show.

But first, scattered across Kentucky's hills and forests are monuments to a once thriving industry.

Spanning from the 18th century into the 20th, iron furnaces transformed the state's natural resources into the tools, equipment, and products that helped build a nation.

While many of them have faded into history, the surviving furnaces stand as enduring reminders of Kentucky's industrial past.

[music playing] Ironmaking was one of the industries helping shape life on the frontier of America.

Kentucky's abundant forests, streams, and iron ore deposits made the Commonwealth an ideal place for this process.

The process began with three essential ingredients: iron ore mined from the earth, limestone gathered from local quarries, and charcoal produced from hardwood forests.

Workers layered these materials into the towering stone furnaces.

As the ore melted, impurities were drawn away into slag, leaving molten iron at the base of the furnace.

Slag is a rocky waste whose color varies by region and is found scattered around furnaces today.

The glowing metal was then tapped into sand molds, producing pig iron that could be cast into kettles, tools, and machinery parts.

Pig iron got its name because the cast ingots resembled piglets nursing from their mother.

[music playing] But to understand Kentucky's iron industry, we must start at the beginning.

In the Red River region of eastern Kentucky, Jacob Myers built Old Slate Furnace, the first charcoal iron furnace west of the Allegheny Mountains in 1791, before Kentucky was even a state.

During the War of 1812, it produced iron used for cannonballs and other military supplies.

The furnace closed in 1838.

Over two centuries later, its stone stack still stands, surrounded by a public park south of Owingsville in Bath County.

Also, in Bath County, the Clear Creek Furnace was built in 1839.

The furnace went idle in 1857 and was rebuilt and utilized steam power from 1872 to 1875 due to the growing railroad industry.

Iron for railroad car wheels were produced during this time.

Like many furnaces, the remains of a community were discovered surrounding the furnace through archaeological excavations.

This included homes, workshops, and stores.

[music playing] The Between Rivers region, now known as the Land Between the Lakes in the western part of the state, had eight different furnaces firing during the mid-1800s.

Just across the Kentucky-Tennessee state line, the Great Western Furnace is one of the two still standing today.

This one was built in 1854 by Brien, Newell & Company, and operated for about two years.

And then it closed in 1856.

Cited as fear of slave insurrection, but the reality was it was probably closed because of an economic bubble that just burst.

But this area is actually unique geologically.

In between the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, the very rivers that allow for good transport of iron ore also created the geology.

There's three types of iron ore here.

There's hematite, limonite, and magnetite, and they were able to mine it right out of these hills here in the area within a mile or two of this furnace.

I think one of the things that saved this furnace is its proximity to the road.

It became a point of pride for the locals.

The initial community was called Great Western Furnace, then it was called Bass, and then later it was called Model.

But the road was always here.

Its sister furnace just a few miles away, Iron Mountain, looked exactly like this one, and there's nothing left of it.

Back across the state line in Trigg County, the Center Furnace was one of the longest-running furnaces, operating intermittently from 1852 and ending production in 1912.

It was built by Daniel Hillman and Thomas Tennessee Watson.

While it's not as picturesque as some of the other furnaces, the site has provided insight into life in the 19th century.

We've done quite a bit of work at the Center Furnace for a couple of reasons.

One, we kind of know where the community was.

We have a map that was hand-drawn by people that lived there, and they were still living there in the early 1900s.

Initially, the furnace is what brought people here, other than the farming.

Two prominent furnaces reside in Estill County.

Hidden in the Daniel Boone National Forest, the Cottage Furnace, built in 1854 by John C. Mason and Samuel Wheeler, operated until 1879.

Over 3,000 artifacts have been excavated from around the furnace, documenting the iron plantation, including evidence of families of higher and lower socioeconomic status.

The world-famous Fitchburg Furnace in Ravenna, Kentucky, was designed by Frank Fitch and built by Scottish stonemason Sam Worthley.

So, Fitch was a businessman.

He was a speculator.

When he came down here, his eyes literally lit up when he realized how close the iron ore was to here.

Fitch had to draw every stone of this furnace out.

This is nothing but a big, giant puzzle.

This is a double stacker, one of the few in the world.

We claim it to be the largest in the world, and no one's been able to prove us wrong.

They would run these furnaces until you ran out of ore or it broke down.

You're having heat anywhere from 1,200 degrees to 3,000 degrees.

Something happens to this furnace, and it shuts down.

You may be down a month.

So, the theory here is, if this stack goes down, we have another furnace right here, so we can just go ahead and fire it up and have a continuous running process.

This furnace fired up in 1870.

It ran for four years and was very productive.

This place would have been a combination between an anthill and a beehive.

You had people, you had charcoal makers, you had iron ore diggers, over 1,200 people that lived in this valley from all over the world.

But in 1874, we had a recession.

So, this furnace is not profitable.

It loses money.

The investors make no money.

So, what does he do?

He goes to Birmingham with the rest of the world and builds another furnace.

Although stacks no longer glow with molten iron, these furnaces still stand as landmarks of Kentucky's industrial heritage.

They remain as testament to the workers, natural resources, and ingenuity that transformed iron ore into the products that helped build a state and a nation.

[music playing] Many writers have emerged from Kentucky, often sharing the uniqueness and beauty that the state has to offer.

Pulaski County native Harriette Simpson Arnow did just that, capturing the oneness of rural Kentucky with remarkable honesty and character.

Let's explore the legacy of one of America's most important literary voices.

[music playing] [music playing] Harriette Simpson Arnow writes in her own style.

She is a unique author.

She's very independently minded.

She never declares herself a spokeswoman for the region, but I think that she just feels the need to imbue Appalachians with dignity and imbue them with integrity.

Harriette Arnow was a Kentuckian, born in Pulaski County, raised in Burnside, educated for a couple of years at Berea College, and then as a graduate of what is now the University of Louisville.

She also was employed by the Federal Writers' Project during the Depression and made her life as a writer in writing stories about Appalachia, but often outside of Appalachia.

She starts writing when she lives in Kentucky as a teacher.

Then she does something quite unusual in the midst of the Depression in 1934.

She leaves her teaching job and moves to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she takes a job as a waitress, but for the most part, she lives alone and teaches herself how to write.

She also worked in a New Deal organization called the Works Progress Administration in Cincinnati.

Some of the really core American understandings of that era come from WPA writers.

She also met her husband there, who was a journalist and a newspaper man, and that really shaped where her life would go from Cincinnati.

They returned to Pulaski County for a short time and then ended up in Detroit, which is where most of her writing took place.

She gets up 4:00, 5:00 every morning, writes for two hours, then gets her children and husband ready for school and work, but she does that grind day after day.

She finds her own voice in that time, and within a few years she is publishing in prestigious literary journals like the Southern Review, and within 10 years she is a nationally known author.

All of her writing is influenced by her time in Appalachian Kentucky.

She wanted to talk about her region, or some people would call it fictional realism.

Times and places were mingled in my head.

The past was part of the present, close as the red cedar water bucket in the kitchen, or the big cherry press put together with pegs, or the parched corn a grandmother now and then made for us.

This was the same as the parched corn from the old days, or the cornmeal mush we sometimes ate, no different at all from the mush in the stories.

An old shirt in a trunk upstairs, square-armholed, stitched by hand of cotton grown and woven and spun on the big south fork of the Cumberland, could have been the same as that worn by some old grandpa with many greats before his name.

My people loved the past more than their present lives, I think, but it cannot be said we lived in the past.

Two things tied all time together.

These had run through most of the old stories to shape the lives of men, and so did they shape our lives and the lives of the people about us.

These were the land and the Cumberland.

The Dollmaker is probably her best-known work.

The Dollmaker is set in Detroit, Michigan.

It's about a family who has migrated to seek work.

So, they've gone from Appalachia to urban Michigan.

They have to go from a life of self-sufficiency in Kentucky to a setting where you have housing projects, and it's about really the main character, Gertie Nevels.

Gertie has to hold her family together.

She has to be the backbone of the family while making this adjustment and also holding on to her integrity.

The significance of the Dollmaker, I think, is that it was 1954.

It's in the midst of the migration of Appalachians to urban centers.

At the time, there were no resources that teachers or educators or social workers in the North had to understand Appalachian migrants.

She really captured that early migration in a way that no other American writer has.

I think she's always thinking about home.

I think dignity is a theme that runs throughout Arnow's canon.

She also was particularly careful in describing women, and she really placed a lot of value on making sure that women's lives were captured in her writing in a way that was true to the women she knew.

I think that she is a strong historian as a novelist, and the way that she emphasizes the roles of women in Appalachian history, she's very ahead of the game.

She's taking pains to get every word right, to get every description right, to make sure that scenes flow into the next one.

So, it's just this absolute dedication to the craft and dedication to the higher purpose of, again, imbuing Appalachian characters with dignity.

Often, Appalachia at the time is treated as folklore, as something that's at best quaint.

So, I think by portraying mid-century Appalachians in mid-century, showing that they are part of the nation, that they are part of our fabric of society, showing that they do have great values like a work ethic, a belief in family, a belief in personal integrity.

I think that she's making this very valuable intervention, saying, “We're not yesterday's people.

We have a place.

We have a role in modern society.

You shouldn't sell us short.” Her capturing of the Appalachian diaspora in a way that treats people with kindness and with strength and that centers women is something to be honored and something that we should celebrate.

[music playing] [music playing] Our travels today have brought us to the Louisville Nature Center.

It really is a beautiful place.

This is Rebecca Minnick.

She's the executive director here.

Rebecca, thanks so much for letting us be here.

Yes, thanks for coming.

So, on the border of the park is Beargrass Creek, which is well-known here in Louisville.

It really is a big defining point and makes the nature preserve what it is, doesn't it?

Tell me about it.

Yes, so we have 80 uninterrupted acres of forest.

And while that seems small, the fact that it's uninterrupted and the fact that we have the creek as the border creates a really good place for wildlife, in particular migratory birds.

The water is essential for them, as well as the forest with lots of food and places to take coverage.

And this really is a diamond in the rough here in Louisville.

There's an urban area around here, but this is just a nice little oasis here, right?

Yeah, the fact that it's uninterrupted forest means we see a lot more birds and wildlife that you might otherwise see in a city park.

The Louisville Nature Center, which is part of this as well, you do a lot of educational outreach here in Louisville.

Tell me what you're able to do there.

So, we work with about 4,500 kids a year doing education programming.

In addition, we estimate about 40,000 people come and hike our trails each year.

But the programming is great.

We have the Swallowtail Forest School, which is an outdoor nature preschool here.

We just opened a second outdoor classroom this fall, so right now, we have 60 kids enrolled.

We hope to fill both classrooms, which would have about 90 kids enrolled.

So, they're outside pretty much all the time with the exception of thunder, lightning, freezing rain, temperatures below 20, they spend time inside and out.

Kids out in this all summer, I can't imagine how much fun that would be.

Oh, they have a blast, and they really develop resiliency, and they learn how to take risks, assess risks on their own, and they go home covered in mud, just like when we were kids.

We were outside all the time.

But that's when you know it's a good day.

Yes, yes.

For somebody who hasn't been here before and they're going to come for the first time, what would you want them to really make sure that they experience and get to see when they're here?

Well, we just want people to go out and connect to nature, and that looks different for a lot of different people.

My favorite thing to do is to go and hike really, really slowly and count all the different bird songs I'm hearing.

Sometimes I get out my Merlin app, and I can hear 15 different bird songs.

For some people, it's checking out the plants, and it's different every season.

So, this time of year, the snakeroot's just about to start blooming, and the whole forest will be covered in this white, frothy-looking plant.

So really, we just want people to go outside and enjoy it.

And this is a great place to do that.

Rebecca, thanks so much for letting us be here today.

Yeah, thank you.

[birds chirping] The history of slavery in the United States stretches back to 1607 when the first slaves were brought to the New World.

The colonies, both North and South, allowed the practice of this institution.

It was after the Revolutionary War that slavery would end in the North, but not in the South.

As the nation advanced toward the Civil War to end slavery, Kentucky would find itself in the middle, as a border state with a main corridor for the enslaved escaping on the Underground Railroad.

[music playing] And in the aftermath of the Revolution, many of the northern states, and eventually all of the northern states, gradually removed the institution of slavery.

And this really sets up a geographic division.

If you follow the Mason-Dixon line all the way from Delaware to the Ohio River, and Kentucky as it becomes a state out of Virginia, you have this clear separation of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon line.

And immediately to the south of this Mason-Dixon line were border states, states caught between the South, where slavery existed, and the North, where it did not.

For Kentuckians, both sides of the issue existed in the Commonwealth.

Lexington was home to one of the nation's main slave markets, Cheapside, where many were sold to owners as far south as Louisiana.

But with its northern border being the Ohio River, Kentucky was also home for those trying to escape the bonds of slavery to the states north of the Mason-Dixon line.

It became part of the Underground Railroad.

It's hard to pin down how the Underground Railroad gets its name.

Some point to an article in 1839 that talks about an enslaved person who ran away from Virginia, a young boy who took some type of Underground Railroad to Boston.

To get to the land of the free, many needed help, for the trip was perilous.

There are slave patrols.

There are white individuals who are trying to prevent enslaved individuals from fleeing.

You don't know who will, or if anyone will, help you, where you'll get food.

And the biggest obstacle is the Ohio River.

Before the Civil War, there is no bridge that extends across the Ohio River.

So, if you're going to cross the river, you need some type of boat to convey you across.

Many Kentuckians would help these black refugees escape slavery, providing stopovers for food and rest.

One of these stops was the Rothier House in Covington, designed with a tunnel that led escapees to the shore of the Ohio River.

In Lexington, Kentucky, stands another stop that was built just a short distance from the Cheapside Slave Market.

The historic St.

Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church was established in 1820, with the cornerstone of the building being laid in 1826.

The church had great community support for its purpose of helping those fleeing slavery.

We had builders here and painters, plasters, skilled trade.

So, they were able to build this building as they designed it for the purpose of rescuing and moving the enslaved.

These enslaved runaways would climb a stairway to hide in an upstairs room, waiting for Kentuckians to lead them to their next stop.

In another action to help these escapees from being recaptured, the church made a purchase.

Next door was where they parked their animals, and they had the sludge and stuff, and that was utilized.

As the slaves were leaving, they would go through that to be able to hide their scent from the people who were after them.

And it was dangerous for the people who would help them, both the men and women who were conductors on this railroad.

Two such conductors, Calvin Fairbank and Delia Webster, would discover how dangerous, while helping an enslaved man from Lexington, Lewis Hayden, escape with his family.

Webster and Fairbank are going to help Lewis Hayden, his wife Harriet, and their son escape.

They will ride them up through Blue Licks to Maysville, across the Ohio River into Ripley.

There's some problems along the way.

The Haydens are noticed as having escaped.

Questions start getting asked, and people connect the dots that Webster and Fairbank were involved.

Both of them get arrested and tried.

Delia Webster is convicted for a sentence to two years in jail, Fairbank for 15, and he's pretty much tortured and beaten almost every day while he's in the state penitentiary.

Maysville, Kentucky, along the Ohio River, is home to what was another stop for the Underground Railroad that stands today, the Bierbower House.

The Underground Railroad was a system of natural highways and byways in these rural areas that slaves used to avoid and elude capture, aided by people and places and things.

This house on West Fourth Street is at the base of the Buffalo Trace.

And where we are on the hill in Kentucky, it overlooks the Ohio.

The Bierbower family were a family that came from Pennsylvania.

They came here around the 1830s.

And the oral history is that they hid slaves in the lower level of their house.

Today, the Bierbower House is home to the National Underground Railroad Museum, a remembrance of people and families who risked everything for freedom.

The number one reason why slaves ran away was to keep their families together.

When you can say that people cared enough for their freedom to keep their families together, they wanted to keep them together, that's universal.

And this museum tells of fellow Kentuckians who helped these families find their freedom on the Underground Railroad.

[music playing] We've had a great time here today at the Beargrass Creek State Nature Preserve in Louisville.

It really is a hidden gem in an otherwise pretty developed part of Louisville, and it's a terrific place to escape the city.

Be sure to check it out sometime if you get a chance.

Now if you've enjoyed our show, be sure to like the Kentucky Life Facebook page or subscribe to the KET YouTube channel for more of what we like to call Kentucky Life Extras, where you'll have access to lots of other great videos.

Until next time I'll leave you with this moment.

I'm Chip Polston, cherishing this Kentucky life.

[birds chirping] [birds chirping] [music playing]