A deep dive into Christian County history reveals an Alexander Graham Bell connection

When brothers and pastors Henry T. and Robert T. Anderson migrated to Christian County in about 1837 and 1839, respectively, the county was just moving out of its frontier beginnings and quickly emerging as a center of business in an agrarian and increasingly slaveholding area. By the time New York City author Eve M. Kahn followed their trail and visited the same area in June 2024, it would have been completely unrecognizable to the brothers.

Kahn, a Harvard-educated journalist, lecturer, former columnist for the New York Times and published author, contacted the Christian County Historical Society in early 2020 looking for someone who might be interested in conducting local research for a book she was writing about the life of New York City journalist Zoe Anderson Norris, who died in 1914 following a colorful life.

Originally from Kentucky, Zoe was born in 1860, the 11th of 13 children of Henry T. Anderson and his second wife, Henrietta Ducker Anderson, who was a Christian County native. Zoe was a prolific writer of novels and newspaper and magazine articles. She was also a social justice crusader known for dressing in rags and going out as a beggar — and then running accounts of her treatment by others in her bimonthly magazine The East Side, which she wrote and published from 1909 until her death.

Zoe railed against labor issues and conditions of the poor, drawing attention to the plight of immigrants, women and people overlooked by society. The twice-married and divorced mother of two became known as the “Queen of Bohemia,” a moniker she eventually embraced.

Eve Kahn, herself the granddaughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who fled Eastern European pogroms for hopes of a better life in New York, became interested in Zoe Anderson Norris when a friend showed her several copies of Zoe’s magazine. They were filled with Zoe’s stories about the Lower East Side and living in a building filled with Jewish immigrants.

“She was writing about my people, writing about their lives and struggles, without any of her era’s common antisemitic stereotypes in any of her writings,” Kahn said.

Brothers and ministers

Zoe’s father, Henry Anderson, had served as an early pastor of the Hopkinsville Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) from about 1837 to 1844, when he moved on first to Louisville and then to Harrodsburg, where Zoe was born. He also pastored the Pembroke Christian Church during this era.

During the years of Henry’s leadership, the Hopkinsville church initially shared a building with the Cumberland Presbyterians on Virginia Street between Fifth and Sixth streets (near present-day Grace Episcopal Church).

The Disciples of Christ church was one of several denominations formed out of the Second Great Awakening, a time of renewed religious fervor, characterized by days-long tent revivals, from the 1790s into the first three decades of the 1800s. Alexander Campbell, one of the founders of the Disciples of Christ, visited the Hopkinsville church several times during the 1830s and ‘40s, including during Henry’s tenure as pastor.

After Henry’s family had settled in Harrodsburg, his eldest son, Clarence, returned to Hopkinsville and opened a photography studio at Eighth and Main streets. Many of the wonderful early photos we have of Hopkinsville and its residents bear the stamp of Clarence Anderson’s studio.

Henry Anderson’s elder brother, Robert, migrated to Hopkinsville and pastored the New Hope (now First) Baptist Church from 1839 to 1841. He also pastored at Pleasant Hill Baptist, West Union Baptist at Bell View (near present-day Gracey), South Union at Church Hill, Locust Grove Baptist near Beverly, and Olivet Baptist at Garrettsburg.

An early boarding school

Robert Anderson was also a schoolteacher, and in the early 1840s opened a boarding school on his property, a wooded 100 acres just north of Garrettsburg, along present-day Kentucky 117. The 1850 census enumerated his family and eight students, two of whom were noted to be “deaf & dumb.” Robert Anderson died in June 1854 after contracting an illness while preaching a wintertime revival near Princeton. Years later, his burial site and that of his close family remained elusive.

Elusive, until this past March.

While William T. Turner, Christian County historian, and those of us who research local history had been aware of Robert Anderson as a teacher in the Garrettsburg precinct of South Christian, and knew him to have been a Baptist pastor and brother of Disciples of Christ pastor Henry Anderson, we were not previously aware of his work with deaf students at his Garrettsburg school. (The old Garrettsburg community is in southernmost Christian County between LaFayette and Oak Grove.)

Teaching deaf students

Eve Kahn’s research into the Anderson family had unearthed this part of the story in the A.G. Bell Association’s archives, and she generously shared that information with us. Anderson’s method of teaching deaf students to speak vocally was so innovative for his time that Alexander Graham Bell, a noted elocutionist and teacher of deaf students before gaining fame as the inventor of the telephone, read as much as he could about Anderson’s techniques and efforts.

Bell also sent a researcher on an extended fact-finding excursion in 1905 to gather information, notes, stories and photos pertaining to Anderson and his school and techniques. Bell’s mother and wife were both deaf, and his lifelong pursuit to improve their ability to communicate led to his invention of the telephone, which revolutionized the modern world.

Mary Breckinridge, herself a teacher of deaf students, visited family members and former students, collecting notes and ephemera for a planned but never-written book by Bell. Her research included visiting Robert Anderson’s grandson John Metcalf Anderson, and visiting the former Robert Anderson farm. Breckinridge, a nurse midwife, is best known for establishing the Frontier Nursing Service in Eastern Kentucky.

In her letters to Bell, Breckinridge described the buildings and gardens and the family cemetery with its single obelisk marker. The items collected by Breckinridge and her notes and letters have survived in a warehouse collection of Bell’s Volta Bureau, now known as the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Washington, D.C.

Following up on the leads offered in the Breckinridge/Bell papers supplied by Kahn, we traced the land through a number of ownership changes since 1854, platted the deed on software, compared it to satellite images, and contacted the current land owner for permission to look for any sign of the cemetery as described in 1905.

Finding an old burial site

In March of this year, before corn was planted, we discovered the base of the described obelisk in that field. While a few landowners over the last century have surely known the stone likely marked someone’s grave, the knowledge of who rested there or the groundbreaking work and achievements accomplished there had gone unknown for decades. We hope this fall after corn harvest to locate the upper part of the marker, likely in the earth in the vicinity of the base stone, and have it repaired and protected.

Since then, having stayed in contact with Kahn regarding developments on both ends, she informed us that she would be speaking about Zoe Anderson Norris at Harrodsburg’s 250th anniversary celebration, and we made plans to attend and meet her in person. She came back to Hopkinsville afterwards with us, and we spent a Saturday visiting Anderson/Ducker family sites in Christian County, viewing a Henry Anderson memorial stained glass window at First Christian Church, visiting Robert Anderson’s gravesite, and sharing some Western Kentucky barbeque (and of course burgoo) at Knockum Hill in Herndon, before she departed for home in Manhattan.

Her book on Zoe’s colorful life is slated for release next year. We also plan to petition to have a historical roadside marker placed in the area so the knowledge of what Robert Anderson achieved in the near-wildnerness that was 1840s South Christian cannot be lost again to time.