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Chapter 2. The Move to Rural Jefferson County
- The University Press of Kentucky
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2 The Move to Rural Jefferson County On September 22, 1902, Niles’s father moved the family away from Louisville to Inverness Farm in rural Jefferson County. There are various possible reasons for this change in lifestyle. It might have been an attempt by Tommie Niles to improve his financial affairs. John Jacob Niles indicated that his father had “a huge load of debts” at this time.1 Or perhaps it was an attempt to escape the cholera epidemics. Probably it was the best way to provide a larger space for the rapidly expanding family. This must have been a challenging move, away from the close-knit Reisch family, away from friends and relations, away from the neighborhood, and away from the culture and comforts of the city. For Niles, who was ten, this must have been a particularly difficult transition to a completely different life style; piano lessons in the city were exchanged for daily chores such as milking cows. As difficult as the transition was, the move to rural Jefferson County provided Niles with a range of experiences that were later useful. Life lived in both city and country prepared Niles for folk collecting experiences at isolated mountain farms as well as for elegant receptions following Women ’s Club concerts. In the future he proved to be equally comfortable in rural or urban settings, whether it be the rustic John C. Campbell Folk School in the North Carolina mountains or New York City’s bohemian Greenwich Village. Later in life, gatherings at his Boot Hill Farm in Clark 26 I Wonder as I Wander County reflected a remarkable mix of elegant earthiness in which local farmers freely mingled with sophisticated European émigrés. Boot Hill conversations could run the gamut from blue mold on the tobacco crop to the latest opera production in Paris. Symbolically, the elevated wooden floor in the farmhouse’s spacious living room served as both a salon stage and a root cellar. Growing up on the subsistence farm, Niles had his feet solidly planted on the earth, but his head still floated in the clouds. In between chores and schoolwork, he found ample time to dream, invent, and follow his musical instincts. In 1905 he left school for a year to work the farm, but he also devised a perpetual motion machine, successfully implemented a crop-fertilization technique, collected ballads and composed anthems for church, constructed an airplane, and developed plans for an automobile brake light. Niles’s inventive ability to create whatever was needed from the materials at hand is reflected in his brake-light anecdote. His notebook 45/1 presents a detailed diagram for constructing the light, and he explains in his autobiography: Two early-model Cadillac automobiles arrived in Louisville. . . . Not far from the Confederate monument on south Third Avenue, the first of the Cadillacs stopped suddenly, and the second one (following too closely) crashed into it with a resounding bang. Parts of both bodies were bent, and the drivers bawled at one another . I joined some of the curious public. About sundown that afternoon I went out with an apple and a carrot to bait my rabbit traps. They were box traps, the kind with a small door sliding up and down at one end. The door is held up by a fulcrum that is released if a rabbit or other unfortunate smallish creature happens to go into the trap and nibble on the bait. The automobile accident I had observed a few hours earlier flashed before my eyes. I realized that I could contrive a lightweight wooden box quite like my rabbit trap, put an oil lantern in it, provided with a red lamp shade, which would be covered by the lowered door in normal driving and exposed in emergencies, by attaching the fulcrum to the foot and/or hand brake. Later that evening I explained my plan to my father, who [44.222.125.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:14 GMT) The Move to Rural Jefferson County 27 encouraged me to make such a signal box and send it to Mr. R. E. Olds, who was then one of the leading automobile makers in the country. The “signal box” was sent off, and about a month later a letter arrived from the great Mr. Olds. He congratulated me because I had come upon the idea at such an early age, and advised me to go to engineering school and become an accredited mechanical engineer. He said...