- "The Historical Society has removed to Massachusetts":Edward Jarvis and the First Kentucky Historical Society
I. Introduction
Between 1837 and 1842, Edward Jarvis left his beloved wife, community, and bleak career prospects as a physician in Concord, Massachusetts, to hang his shingle near the Ohio riverfront in a swiftly growing Louisville, Kentucky.1 Hopeful to practice medicine in that more lucrative market, Jarvis devoted much time during these years to the first iteration of the Kentucky Historical Society (KHS) as its librarian and leading booster. Three decades later, ailing, he looked back on his archival work west of the Allegheny Mountains, which he dictated to his wife, Almira, in a draft autobiography based on the diary of his younger self. "To this," she recorded for him in the third person, "Dr. Jarvis gave his mind, hand, and heart."2 To judge by his [End Page 5] multiple accounts of the society, he certainly had. But what he gave he also withdrew. Upon his return to Massachusetts in 1842, the society lost its greatest proponent and dwindled. It would not be reinvigorated for another three decades.
The early KHS survived but briefly and left few archival traces. Such a fate was common throughout the U.S., where dozens of historical societies formed and disbanded in the decades prior to the Civil War. Of the fifty-eight documented historical societies organized in this period, almost half did not survive it.3 However, in contrast with long-lasting historical societies in the northeast and mid-Atlantic states, those in the western states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, and Ohio struggled to motivate members, generate public support, build an archival and library collection, and solidify as institutions. This regional trend distinguished the KHS from major historical institutions such as the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), which Jarvis admired, belonged to, and corresponded with throughout his years in Louisville. Unsurprisingly, the literature on historical societies, historical consciousness, and historical writing in this period tends to focus on the most prolific and enduring eastern institutions, which built larger archives, counted leading historians among their members, and regularly commemorated their own pasts through speeches and publications.4 [End Page 6]
This poses a challenge to any attempt to reconstruct the history of the antebellum KHS, which the spare accounts of the institution make clear.5 The bulk of evidence about the society's early history comes from the pen of Jarvis himself, a New Englander who consistently cast his contributions to the KHS in a flattering light. In private, published, and unpublished accounts written in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1870s, Jarvis praised his contributions to the society and lamented the failure of Kentuckians to support it. Toward the end of his time in Louisville, he boasted to his diary that, according to many, "Dr. Jarvis is the Kentucky Historical Society."6 Such immodesty from the Yankee doctor may raise eyebrows. Nonetheless, to understand the rise and decline of the first major institutional effort to preserve, narrate, and promote popular engagement with Kentucky history, we must listen to Jarvis, its busiest and most voluble advocate.
In crossing the Allegheny Mountains, Jarvis cast into relief the similarities and differences between this fledgling western institution and those in most eastern states. The effort to build and maintain an archive in Louisville reveals as much about the historical record and characteristics of Kentucky as the brimming archives of the MHS, [End Page 7] for instance, reveal about Massachusetts. Although Jarvis and the society's other backers articulated a narrative of Kentucky history that resonated with many in the state and the wider region, the want of lively public support, the relative scarcity of historical materials, and the departure of the society's core members hampered its development. The evanescence of the early KHS was due to these deficits as well as the failure of Jarvis and others to make an argument for the importance of such an institution within the civic life of the city.
For Jarvis, this reflected a fundamental difference in the historical consciousness and culture in different regions of the expanding nation. "[The men of the Western States] are men of the present...