Browse Items (24 total)
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Portrait of "Fanny" Frances Latham Slaughter
"Fanny" Frances Latham Slaughter was a wife and a mother who had strong ties with her family as seen through letters sent to her daughter and other relatives. "Time passes away tedious and heavy" writes Frances Latham Slaughter to her daughter (who left home) on 12 October 1816. Women who were separated from family and friends often experienced loneliness on the frontier. -
Portrait of Abigail Oldham Churchill
Abigail Oldham Churchill came from a lineage of wealthy and prominent early Louisvillian settlers. She was just two years old when her father, Colonel William Oldham, died in the Battle of Wabash. Her mother, Penelope Pope, a twenty-two-year-old widow with four children, remarried into the Churchill family. In 1802, two weeks after her fourteenth birthday, Abigail married Samuel Churchill, her step-father's twenty-four-year-old brother. She gave birth to their first child when she was fifteen and had a child almost every other year over a span of thirty years. She had her last of fifteen children when she was forty-four years of age. -
Portrait of Samuel Oldham Churchill
Samuel Churchill moved from Virginia to Kentucky when he was eight years old. He owned 415 acres of land along Beargrass Creek. The Churchills enslaved thirty-six individuals whose labor created economic advantage and comfort for the family. He had an interest in horse breeding and was president of the Louisville Association for the Improvement of Breed of Horses. Samuel Churchill was one of seven founding trustees of the Oakland Racecourse in Louisville in early 1832, which was located on fifty-one acres of land purchased from Samuel and Abigail Churchill, as well as from other landholders. His sons, John and Henry, inherited land from Samuel, which they leased to his nephew Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr., founder of a new racecourse known today as Churchill Downs. -
Portrait of Jemima Pearsall Castleman
Jemima Pearsall Castleman married Johannes "Lewis" Castleman in Frederick, Virginia, in 1765, when she was approximately fifteen years of age. She was the mother of eight children that were born between 1770 and 1797. She came to the frontier with her husband sometime between 1787 and 1800. They lived on a farm along Clear Creek in Woodford County that included a tannery and a distillery that made apple brandy. The Castlemans enslaved ten persons in 1810 and eighteen persons in 1819.