KYKentucky Famous People

Two presidents born a hundred miles apart

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one room cabin at Sinking Spring Farm outside Hodgenville in Larue County. Jefferson Davis was born on June 3, 1808, at Fairview on the Todd and Christian county line, about a hundred miles west. Eight months and an afternoon's drive separate the birthplaces of the wartime president of the United States and the president of the Confederacy. Both families left while the boys were small, Lincoln's for Indiana in 1816, Davis's for Mississippi.

The two sites make an odd pair today. Hodgenville has a granite memorial building dedicated in 1911 that encloses a symbolic log cabin at the top of 56 steps, one for each year of Lincoln's life. Fairview has a concrete obelisk 351 feet tall, finished in 1924. Kentucky holds a third presidential claim as well: Zachary Taylor, president from 1849 to 1850, was born in Virginia in 1784 but raised from infancy at Springfield, the family plantation outside Louisville, and is buried in the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery on Brownsboro Road.

Cassius Clay of Louisville

Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. in Louisville on January 17, 1942. He started boxing at twelve after someone stole his red Schwinn outside the Columbia Auditorium and a police officer named Joe Martin, who ran a gym in the building's basement, told him to learn to fight before going looking for the thief. He won light heavyweight gold in Rome in 1960, took the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston in 1964, refused induction in 1967, and lost nearly four years of his prime to the ban that followed. He is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery, a couple of miles from where the bicycle was taken.

The music came out of very small counties

Bill Monroe was born at Rosine in Ohio County on September 13, 1911, and named his band the Blue Grass Boys after the state he came from. The band's name became the name of the genre, which makes bluegrass one of the few musical forms named after a place by accident. Loretta Lynn was born on April 14, 1932, in Butcher Hollow near Van Lear, a coal camp in Johnson County, and turned that address into a book and a film.

Rosemary Clooney was born in Maysville in 1928; her nephew George Clooney was born in Lexington in 1961 and grew up in Augusta on the Ohio River. Dwight Yoakam was born in Pikeville in 1956, and the Judds came out of Ashland.

Writers who argued with their own state

Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie on April 24, 1905, wrote All the King's Men, remains the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and poetry, and became the first US Poet Laureate in 1986. Wendell Berry, born in Henry County in 1934, has farmed the same hillside at Port Royal above the Kentucky River since 1965 and built a lifetime of essays out of it. bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville in 1952, took her great grandmother's name as a pen name, and returned to Kentucky in 2004 to teach at Berea College. Hunter S. Thompson was born in Louisville on July 18, 1937, and the article usually treated as the start of gonzo journalism was his 1970 account of the Kentucky Derby.

Kentuckians whose origin surprises people

Johnny Depp was born in Owensboro on June 9, 1963. Jennifer Lawrence was born in Louisville on August 15, 1990, and was still a Kentucky teenager when she was cast in Winter's Bone. Diane Sawyer was born in Glasgow in 1945 and raised in Louisville. Harland Sanders is claimed by the state and was actually born in Henryville, Indiana, in 1890; he began selling chicken from a service station in Corbin, and Governor Ruby Laffoon made him a Kentucky colonel in 1935.

Whitney M. Young Jr., born at Lincoln Ridge in Shelby County in 1921, ran the National Urban League from 1961 to 1971 and helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. Carl Brashear, born in Tonieville in 1931, became the first Black master diver in the US Navy and kept the rating after losing a leg. Pee Wee Reese, born in Ekron in 1918, captained the Brooklyn Dodgers through Jackie Robinson's first seasons.

Common questions about Kentucky natives

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