A Peculiar Procession in the Purchase
Mayfield offers an interesting mix of monuments, museums and history

Though common knowledge proclaims you can’t take it with you, one long-forgotten Mayfield man did the next best thing. Though his was not an illustrious life, horse breeder and foxhunter Col. Henry G. Wooldridge commissioned life-sized sandstone and marble statues made in the late 1890s of himself and various relatives.

“The Wooldridge Monuments are so unusual,” says Wendy Hunter, director of the Mayfield-Graves County Tourism Commission. “There are all these statues and only one man buried there. He has his dogs, horse, sheep, deer and a fox. You don’t usually see those in a cemetery.”

Dubbed “The Strange Procession That Never Moves,” the 18-figure grouping is one of the county’s 12 historical markers, and has been a draw for years at north Mayfield’s Maplewood Cemetery. It even made an episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not TV show in 1984. Two likenesses of the never-married Wooldridge – one astride his favorite horse, Fop, and the other atop a lectern – stand taller than the rest of the somber crowd of statuary, all of whom face east, ensconced within a wrought iron fence.

Art and agriculture
However, this Graves County seat of 10,349 is noted for far more than its dearly departed. The hometown of novelist Bobbie Ann Mason, Mayfield also claims bragging rights in agriculture, history, politics and art.

Its original red-brick Ice House, beautifully renovated, provides space for two disparate displays. For years, tobacco was king in this Purchase District county, and the Western Kentucky Museum is a treasure of items and info about dark fired tobacco. Grown nowhere else in the world besides western Kentucky, this is not the smoking variety, but type 123 tobacco sold only overseas and used as snuff for chewing.

Company buyers would come to bid on local tobacco at huge warehouses or “floors” and mark their purchased bales using brass or copper stencils, which you can see in the museum, along with hefty hauling carts, scales and farmers’ payment tickets.

“There are still a few warehouses standing and some dark fired tobacco is still grown here, but not as much is sold,” Hunter says.

Sharing the Ice House with the museum’s agricultural artifacts, the Mayfield-Graves County Arts Gallery features local and regional paintings and sculptures, two juried shows a year, plus one fairly offbeat event. Each October, the nonprofit Art Guild hands out gourds to folks who apply paint and bring their fancy creations back to the gallery for a fundraising sale called a “Gourdathon.”

Fancy Farm Picnic
Rumor has it that any Kentucky politician who doesn’t speak at the Fancy Farm Picnic doesn’t have a prayer come election time. Held the first Sunday of August in this primarily Catholic community of 600, the annual gathering began in 1834 as a family picnic under the limbs of the old “Lying Oak.” Suspended in 1861 for the Civil War, the event resumed in 1880 as a prime chance for politicians to stump before election day.

The Fancy Farm Picnic these days serves some 10 tons of barbecue to thousands of attendees. Any candidate running for state or national office can speak and anyone can attend.

During the 1940s, Graves County native and former U.S. Vice President Alben C. Barkley held forth here regularly. Perennial presidential candidate George C. Wallace and former U.S. Senator and Vice President Al Gore have shown up.

Though you never know which politicians might be there, the day’s schedule remains constant. Carnival games start at 10 a.m., with live bluegrass and country music until 2 p.m. Politicking then rolls till 4:00, when music flows until 11:00 and the winner of a new car raffle is announced. From start to finish, it’s a down-home kind of event. And that, says Hunter, is part of the area’s charm.

“Mayfield is just a friendly little town where you can still get a country breakfast, read the newspaper and stop on the sidewalk to talk with people,” she explains. “It has a true small-town atmosphere and its share of small town legends.”

For further information, contact the Mayfield-Graves County Tourism Commission at (270) 247-6101. When you visit, be sure to stop in its office at the former public library, Edana Locus, a stately 14-room mansion with walnut woodworking and a spiral staircase built entirely of cement in 1926 by local bank owner Ed Gardner. Once an itinerant house painter, the philanthropist, whose 1958 net worth of $12.5 million surpassed that of Howard Hughes, left a trust that continues to feed, clothe, house and educate the county’s poor and needy.

Katherine Tandy Brown is a staff writer for The Lane Report.
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