San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Tornado destroys whole chunks of Ky. town’s history
MAYFIELD, Ky. — The Graves County Courthouse in downtown Mayfield, with its tornado-shorn clocktower, has become a symbol of both damage and resilience from an unprecedented storm system — a visual cue marking a major historical tragedy.
It’s fate however, remains uncertain, as Graves County JudgeExecutive Jesse Perry’s office said it’s too early to tell if the building will be torn down and rebuilt or if it will be rehabbed using its existing components.
But for many in the Mayfield community, the courthouse already held chief importance to the city’s history.
John Davis pointed out that it was where former Graves County sheriff John Roach was shot, making his wife Lois the state’s first female sheriff — and, Davis claims, the country’s first elected female sheriff. Davis himself held the post for 12 years after he was Mayfield’s chief of police.
The courthouse plot was also the site of an earthen Civil War fort, where Union infantry fended off Confederate guerrilla soldiers. That same group kidnapped Lucian Anderson, an abolitionist who became one of Mayfield’s native U.S. congressmen and about whom local historian Berry Craig wrote a book.
“This town was extremely Confederate,” Craig, a retired professor of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah, said. “This part of Kentucky was the only region where there was a Confederate majority in Kentucky, called the South Carolina of Kentucky. Anderson was an abolitionist, which in Mayfield was like being a communist in the 1960s.”
Circling the courthouse square just days after the tornado completely leveled many historic buildings and left several others in disrepair, Craig pointed out the history still standing.
For instance, the courthouse square is also where sympathizers to the Confederacy burned down the courthouse that came after the war ended; a new one was built in the 1880s, according to Craig. The current iteration of the courthouse’s annex was built as a New Deal project in the mid-20th century.
Within a block, the historical significance is more personal.
The Methodist Church, whose pale white ionic columns once dominated their corner of 8th, was where Craig took his polio vaccine.
When Ford came out with a special “1963 and a half ” Ford Galaxie hotrod, Craig couldn’t resist a trip to the nearby downtown dealership.
“My friend and I would get on our bicycles and ride up here from our houses to go in and sit in that thing and shift it ’til they would run us off. That’s a Mayfield memory,” Craig said.
Story of decline
The First Presbyterian Church was almost completely wrecked by the tornado. It’s also where Craig attends, and where the congressman Anderson and two other representatives went: William Voris Gregory and Nobel Jones Gregory.
Davis’ First Baptist Church miraculously made it through the storm despite its proximity to every other wrecked building, including at least seven other downtown churches. He guessed that it had something to do with a brick inlay underneath the church’s imposing stone exterior.
The 72-year-old was for five years a worship leader there, having sung in the choir since he was just 3 years old. The position was part fulfillment of a promise he made to God as a teenager, he said.
“When I was a junior in high school doing a revival one night, I went down front and told the pastor that I felt like I’d been called to the music ministry,” Davis said. “… After law enforcement, God caught me and put me in the leadership position that I promised to God in 1966.”
Author of a book titled “Mayfield — As I Recall,” Davis pointed out that much of the downtown history he valued had already fallen to the wayside because of disinvestment and decay.
“On the East side of our court square, where the CVS is, that was a historic block of businesses,” Davis said. “But it was near the point of collapse itself, and actually one of the buildings did collapse. So that knocked our history on that side.”
The south side of the court square, which is now a blank patch of grass, is a similar story of decline. Craig said he wasn’t sure about the integrity of the only traditional storefront side remaining, which President Joe Biden visited during his tour of Mayfield last
week.
Craig agreed, adding that he’s witnessed a slow decline since the days of his youth where downtown could suit all a family’s needs.
“Mayfield is typical of a lot of small towns: kids grow up, they go to college and they don’t come back because there’s no opportunities here … all the jobs in this town for professionals would be like a dentist or a doctor or lawyer. But as far as anything else … there’s nothing to do here.”
‘It doesn’t look like home’
Heading North on 6th Street from the court square, Craig encountered the remnants of the Hargrove & Foster law office, where only a small interior closet and a shelf still replete with neatly lined law books remained.
Another law office, on a side street between 6th and 7th streets, Mayfield City Attorney Bo Neely was surveying the remnants of his private law firm’s building.
The exterior was mostly ravaged, but a prized staircase in the middle of the historic office stood mostly intact. Neely’s family has been practicing law in that office since 1962 when his grandfather started there. His father and grandfather held the city attorney role for a collective 66 years.
The night of the tornado, Neely and a friend tried to get to the area to help in any way they could, but the Mayfield native hardly knew where he was.
“We came down as far as we could, to mid-town, and then we started walking down Broadway,” Neely said. “I said ‘where in the hell are we?’ We didn’t recognize anything.”
Further up 6th Street, Craig ran into a pocket park dedicated to Anderson’s family, which includes town founder John Anderson and “beloved member of the community” Martha Nell Anderson, who died in 2014. All that remained of the park were three small monuments dedicated to them.
At the northern end of the street is where Davis plans to be buried when his time comes. Maplewood Cemetery, Mayfield’s oldest, is home to grave dating back to 1831, according to Davis.
His father bought 12 plots, including his own, in the 1960s for $50.
Travel a few miles south on 6th Street and you’ll run into where Craig has a plot reserved at Highland Park Cemetery.
Davis said that he hoped a high percentage of damaged historical buildings could be rehabbed instead of torn down and rebuilt, citing the prominent Hall Hotel, which dominated the downtown skyline. But he wasn’t optimistic about the hotel’s future because of concerns about its integrity, nor was he optimistic about other properties.
“Mayfield will be here in another 100 and however many years, but the history of Mayfield will be just memories because there’s nothing you can actually reach out and touch. That’s what bothers me,” Davis said.
“We’ll still be here, and we’ll be stronger for it. It just won’t look like home anymore — it doesn’t look like home anymore.”
Craig said the relief efforts in Mayfield brought hope that the town would become whole again, but he worried that the attention on such efforts would fade with time.
“It’s almost like a funeral,” Craig said. “Everybody comes to a funeral to visit and talk. Then, a week later, you’re on your own … this tragedy is going to just keep going in Mayfield.”