The Mystery of Ailsy Savoree; or, A Story of Color the National Park Service Chooses to Suppress

The Mystery of Ailsy Savoree

By G. Dean Gardner,

 Independent Scholar of Southern History & Arts

My title today might infer a wee bit of criticism. I mean it to. Despite talking a good talk, the National Park Service seems hesitant to manifest its own goals regarding diversity in its interpretations. Their disdain for independent research is apparent, as is their blindness toward the ironies of history that make it fascinating. Worse still, they project an utter unwillingness to explore the greater story of African-American contribution and influence.  Think a moment on this.  Had Abraham Lincoln never seen a slave, never grown up in their midst observing their labors, their joys and their sorrows, and never having had the chance to simply observe their humble day to day existence, how might that differing background have influenced his career, his Presidency, and his ultimate drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation?  The thing is, Black Americans were a vital component of the society Lincoln was born into.  Those memories did impact his thoughts, and his actions.  Sadly, that part of the Lincoln story may never be explained to visitors at his Birthplace.  Visitors may never understand the poignancy of the "Cradle of Emancipation", the site where not only was a President born, but the breath of freedom was inhaled in that winter of 1809.  A child started on a journey that ended with recognition of all men as simply men, neither in bondage to the other.

The story of this place holds even more significance in the story of freedom when explored after the time of the Lincolns.  It was then, in those following years, that a little cabin took on a new, more profound meaning.  By its becoming a slave dwelling, Lincoln's cabin rightfully attained status as a symbol of the changes we can wrought for all of mankind.  What troubles my heart is that we don't wish to tell this full story.  We don't wish to explain the full impact.  We don't care now to tell the story of the "nameless who toiled" as an act of attrition so that others might be remembered, and recalled, and theirs names uttered for generations to come. 

Today I want to utter a name, one long lost to the undulating folds of time.  Please read, please remember, and please utter the name of a simple woman whose existence makes real for us the great price of freedom.  Her name, no longer forgotten, was Ailsey.

The graveyard of Nolin Baptist is a picturesque setting where early founders of the community lie for eternity, segregated in death from African-American congregants of the church whose graves lie across the road in total neglect. 

By all oral accounts she was born, as her stone at Nolin Baptist Church indicates, a free black citizen of LaRue (then Hardin) County, Kentucky around 1819 or 1821.  There in the church yard of the 1803 congregation, in sight of the white burials but separated from them, her simple stone confirms that she was both “colored and born free.”  From the moment of her humble birth, Ailsy Savoree (Savory) maintained a unique position in local society, and was likely as misunderstood in her own time as she remains today.  Blacks, as slaves, had co-existed with whites since the earliest exploration of Kentucky, not to mention since the settlement of her native county, but relatively few gained their freedom, fewer still were born free, and virtually none were women that owned title to land in their own name.  Because of her unusual racial status, her gender, and the scarcity of comprehensive records from nearly two centuries ago, the mystery of Ailsy has been a challenging one to solve.  Much has been lost, as has most history of early black Kentuckians.

The solitary Black grave in the white section of the cemetery, Ailsey's stone today is found set off to itself, seemingly to acknowledge her mixed-race status, not entirely black, not entirely white.

Her story began with the man who was clearly her paternal grandfather, the Bluegrass politician and landed aristocrat John Savory.  John, a native of Lyon, France, fled the turmoil and dangers for nobility in his native country and came to America sometime around 1783 via Pittsburgh.  Journeying southwest down the Ohio River like many others, Savory settled prior to 1795 in the small Millersburg community of Bourbon County, Kentucky, deep within the already famed Bluegrass region of the Virginia territory, where he became a successful merchant and land speculator, acquiring holdings in the Commonwealth as far to the south as Allen County along the Barren River.  It is unknown just when or how he obtained title to his tract of land on the South Fork of the Nolin River, but an agent on his behalf, John Rowland of North Carolina (Savory’s god-daughter’s father), maintained his title to the land in 1810 per the Hardin County tax records.

It was probably at this same period of time that Savory’s slave and mulatto son, Amos (perhaps properly named John Amos as records would indicate), was sent to the neighborhood of Burlington between Hodgen’s Mill and Mather’s Mill, a fringe settlement of the growing town south of Elizabethtown, to tend the Savory farm there.  Here Amos would have become well acquainted with his immediate neighbors like the flamboyant Richard Mather, the orator Rev. John McDougal, the aristocratic LaRue’s, the industrious Hodgens’, and the county’s finest cabinetmaker who resided nearby with his wife and a new-born son.  Being as well one of the only house joiners in the vicinity, Thomas Lincoln may well have helped to build the Savory home.

Amos’ servitude to his master and father would be short-lived, however.  John Savory, by then a politically ambitious state representative to the Kentucky House of Representatives from Bourbon County, died in 1814, apparently freeing his enslaved son Amos Savory and deeding him nearly 100 acres of the tract he owned near Nolin Church & the historic Mather’s Mill.  Now a landed, and lone, free black man, Amos avoided later emancipation laws which would have forced him out of  the state, and took up permanent residence in his own new home, just about two miles due west of the place where a man named John Welsh would later farm after the Thomas Lincoln family sold out & moved to the north end of the county due to a land title dispute with their powerful neighbor, Richard Mather.  Having obtained freedom, home and hearth, Amos set his thoughts now to beginning a family.  Little did he know the impact his future neighbor would have in this regard.

After reaching a hard fought title settlement through the courts, Richard Mather was vindicated in his claims, much to the dismay of Lincoln and the other litigants involved.  The farm in dispute was ultimately sold with good title to John Welsh.  The site of Welsh’s personal residence is unrecorded, but he took possession of the old Mather-Lincoln place, known locally since that time as the “Sinking Spring farm” for its spring which flowed year-round from the mouth of a small cave, sometime just prior to 1816 when Amos Savory married Welsh’s slave, Lucy.  For at least that short period of time until Savory took Lucy as his wife (and likely for some years afterward, as we don’t have a complete record of Welsh’s slave holdings), the iconic log cabin in which a future President was born served as the domicile for the slaves of the Welsh family, and an irony of history added even more depth of meaning to this venerable, age-old symbol of the rise from poverty to empowerment.  With a new understanding of all who took shelter in it, this crude log structure no longer represented the potential of one race alone, but rather that of all who fall among “the annals of the poor” as Lincoln himself once quipped, and strive for something better for themselves and their families. 

Lucy Welsh Savory’s freedom may have been purchased at the time of her marriage or shortly thereafter, for she would be listed as a member of Amos’ free black household in the 1820 census for Hardin County.  It seems four children were born to the couple in those years prior to the formation of LaRue County, of which only two survived childhood.  By the first LaRue County property tax of 1843, the year the county separated from Hardin, Amos is shown with 96 acres on Nolin.  In 1850, the farm was owned jointly by him, his son John, and his daughter “Aley.”  The date of Lucy’s death, seemingly prior to 1850, is unrecorded.  Due to the times considered, it is likely that Lucy was buried across the road from Nolinn Church in the designated slave cemetery for that congregation, despite her status as a free person of color.  If any marker was placed upon her grave, it was only a field stone.

 Amos himself would die soon afterwards, sometime between May of 1851 and May 1852 at the age of at least 71 years (and possibly a few years older), joining his beloved Lucy in a burial site that today remains unmarked.  For the remainder of the antebellum period in Kentucky, a free black brother and sister would maintain the home place of their distinguished white grandfather, a slaveholder, literally within sight of the hill-top birthplace cabin of the man who would eventually free their entire race in the South.  Such was the irony of life in that “Cradle of Emancipation” called LaRue County, where slaves still labored in the fields once played in by their future liberator.  What a shame we don’t know the thoughts of Ailsy Savory on the struggles of the slaves she would have viewed at work around her almost daily.  Some may have even been her mother’s relations.  Sadly, little oral history survived Ailsy.  The Savory siblings resided in their father’s house throughout the American Civil War, tilling the fields along a vital north-south artery as both armies marched past them.  Her brother John died without other heirs after the 1880 census where they were recorded as still sharing a household, enumerated as the “mulatto” neighbors in their otherwise strictly white community along the “Tanner” Road.  Ailsy continued to farm alone until her health declined to such a point in 1887 that she deeded her property to relatives, likely a niece and nephew of her mother.  Eli Welch (Welsh) and his sister Nancy gained full title to the Savory farm and heritage when “Aunt Ailsy” passed away in February of 1888.  Even then, over two decades after slavery, it was remarkable news in the papers that Ailsy was a black woman of property, the size of her estate something of speculation locally.

It’s hoped that someday further details might be obtained regarding the Savoree family in early Hodgenville.  If their turn of the 18^th century home survived past 1888, its exact location has been forgotten.  It was probably situated on or just off Tanner Road before approaching what was then Mather’s Mill, also now a distant memory.  In 1887, Ailsy’s immediate neighbors were David J. Thurman, Richard V. Thurman, D. D. Miller, Mrs. Samuel Hill, and “Cony” Mather, all of whose farms bordered the Savory property.  Regardless of whether a physical marker can be preserved at such a late date, the significant contribution of Ailsy Savory lies in her silent determination to persevere.  Despite the obstacles and challenges of her day, which are beyond the full understanding of our generation, Ailsy co-existed in her community in peace and developed a sense of mutual respect with those around her.  She set the bar for all who have come after her.  A mere footnote in history?  I suppose.  But better a footnote that documents the bigger story than to be eradicated completely by the harshness of time.  Ailsy may be but a faint memory, but she is a mystery no longer.