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It was Motley who demonstrated that all real history is of
necessity a ‘‘story,’’ and it can be said
without any resultant charge of provincialism that the history
of Monroe county is peculiarly so. The history of the
establishment of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic civilization in the valley
west of the great river teems with romance, but in no instance
is the romance in question more real, more virile or more
alluring than in connection with the settlement and
development of Monroe county.
Monroe
county was settled by the Virginia-Kentucky-Tennessee strain,
which had a genius for war, politics and story-making, and no
county in the state has so preserved its racial solidarity or
more effectually kept to its traditions. Most of its people
came from half a dozen counties in Kentucky—Clark, Boyle,
Madison, Jassamine, Woodford and Mercer—and their
descendants for the large part occupy today the fat prairies
and the fine woodland farms their grandsires subjugated,
repelling unconsciously alien intermixture, and emigrating, as
in the case of Texas and Oklahoma, only to return. They have,
of course, been modernized, all the towns and the country as
well being abreast of twentieth century civilization, but the
Brahmin instinct persists despite. A
Kentucky or Virginia pedigree is still the highest social
guarantee—the best that earth affords, though others are not
despised. It is one of the typical Bourbon counties imbued
with an essentially modern spirit.
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