Bluegrass State boasts bounty of weird history
WHEN PEOPLE THINK OF KENTUCKY, a lot of fairly standard images come to mind. Horses and bourbon. Bluegrass and basketball. KFC and Abraham Lincoln. But Kentucky’s history is much more eclectic than that, harboring interesting oddities and hard-to-believe happenings that have intrigued both citizens and nonresidents for centuries.
Kurt Gohde, art professor at Transylvania University, realized just how deep Kentucky’s peculiar roots are when he began working at the university nearly three decades ago. Always fascinated by the unusual and unnatural, he learned of Transylvania’s extensive medical archive that housed objects like a large hairball from a cow’s stomach.
“We have a lot of really interesting and weird things that were gifted to the university,” Gohde says. “But we also have a lot of weird and interesting things that were purchased by the university because, as a medical school without a river or a big hospital, we had to find ways to get people to come here. We needed world-class teaching aids.”
But the Bluegrass State’s eccentricities extend far beyond Transylvania’s medical collection. From prehistoric animals to blue-skinned people to meat showers, there’s no limit to the weirdness that you can find buried in Kentucky’s history books. You just have to know where to look.
It’s raining … meat?
It was March 3, 1876, when Rebecca Crouch heard what sounded like rain falling while standing near the front porch of her home in Olympia Springs in Bath County. But the weather conditions were clear, and the soft thwap, thwap, thwap noise of something hitting the ground gave her pause. Was that really rain or something else? Upon further inspection, what had fallen from the heavens was—meat.
The shower lasted only a few minutes, leaving sizable chunks of flesh scattered around the Crouches’ yard and boggling the minds of the family in the process. What was this mysterious meat that had dropped from the clouds, and why, of all places, did it land on their farm? Was this some sort of omen? When word began to spread about the meat shower, two locals volunteered to taste the bits of flesh, declaring that it wasn’t beef but instead tasted like deer or sheep meat.
Rebecca Crouch reported the mysterious phenomenon that became known as the Kentucky meat shower. Photo: Bath County History Museum
The unusual weather phenomenon garnered the interest of several national publications, including The New York Times and Scientific American. Many scientists conducted detailed investigations into the source of the meat and how it fell. But no one could come up with a definitive explanation of the Kentucky meat shower, and according to Gohde, the locals of Olympia Springs seemed to be more than OK with the mystery being unsolved.
“The world was so comfortable not knowing things. There were so many things we didn’t know,” Gohde says. “I don’t think they would have gone to ‘the only possible explanation is a sign from God,’ as quick as we might now if something completely unexplainable happened, because we’ve sort of scienced all the mystery of life away. In 1876, they hadn’t yet done that. People died mysteriously. All sorts of mysterious things happened.”
While there are plenty of theories about the meat shower, the most probable was advanced by Dr. L.D. Kastenbine, a Louisville chemistry professor, in 1876. His theory? The meat was vomited by a flock of vultures that were flying overhead. Apologies to the guys who ate it.
Less plausible—but more colorful—explanations abounded. Gohde’s favorite theory suggests the meat had a cosmic source. “The New York Times wrote a story about potentially this was exploded animals from an exploded planet and that the meat rained in a different place than the busted-up stone from the planet,” he explains. “That’s my all-time favorite because it’s, by today’s standard, so impossible.”
Transylvania University still has a preserved piece of flesh from the Kentucky meat shower in its collection of gifts and medical oddities and occasionally lends it for exhibits and events about the 1876 occurrence. The mystery shrouding the cause and origin of the Kentucky meat shower makes it one of the most intriguing natural phenomena in all of Bluegrass history.
Mastodons, mammoths and sloths
Native Americans knew about Big Bone Lick—in what is now Boone County—long before it was discovered by Europeans in the 1700s. The area was a popular big-game hunting ground for indigenous people and had a natural salt spring that drew both humans and animals to the region in prehistoric times.
A group exploring this unsettled part of the United States in the mid-1700s first stumbled upon the fossilized remains of elephant-like creatures that roamed the landscape during the Ice Age, and several scientists and history enthusiasts at that time had various theories about what the large animals were and whether they still existed.
A mastodon skull is among the fossils on display at Big Bone Lick State Historic Site. Photo: Sarah Kellam
It was Frenchman Georges Cuvier who first asserted that some of the bones belonged not to mammoths, which often frequented Big Bone Lick, but rather another creature he referred to as a mastodon. While both look like they could be part of the elephant family, a mastodon’s skeleton, head shape and teeth are structured much differently than those of mammoths and modern elephants President Thomas Jefferson was fascinated by the fossilized remains that were unearthed at Big Bone Lick and sent William Clark of Lewis and Clark fame to conduct a paleontological dig there in 1807. Clark sent Jefferson the bones and fossils that he managed to collect, and Jefferson then made donations to several institutions so the remains could be studied to prove the bones were from different animals.
Mammoths and mastodons weren’t the only creatures that lived around Big Bone Lick. In 1831, Richard Harlan found giant sloth bones on the property and named the new species he discovered Megalonyx laqueatus. The animal is now known as Paramylodon harlani, or Harlan’s ground sloth.
Claire Kolkmeyer, park interpreter at Big Bone Lick State Historic Site, says this northern Kentucky landmark played a critical role in the development of modern archaeology and paleontology in the early days of the United States.
Harlan’s ground sloth is named after Richard Harlan, who discovered the fossil at Big Bone Lick in 1831. Photo: Kentucky State Parks
“First described in 1739 by a French military party, Big Bone Lick was a place like no other yet discovered in North America,” Kolkmeyer explains. “Enormous bones of unknown beasts protruded from the ground like the ruins of a beach-washed shipwreck. These bones would lead to the unearthing of various new species, unravel the mystery of how they met their demise, and start the beginning of understanding North America’s past through paleontological excavations across the United States. Our understanding of extinction today is directly connected to the early discoveries made at Big Bone Lick.”
Today, a sign that reads “The Birthplace of American Vertebrate Paleontology” greets visitors to Big Bone Lick State Historic Site, which hosts an annual Salt Festival highlighting the location’s colorful past.
Blue Fugate Family
Bleeding blue is something many Kentuckians say about their support of University of Kentucky athletics, but did you know there was a family of Kentuckians whose skin was actually blue?
Frenchman Martin Fugate and his wife, Elizabeth, lived near Hazard, Kentucky, in the early 19th century, and both possessed a rare genetic abnormality that caused some of their children to have blue-colored skin. As their offspring grew up and began families of their own, the Fugate family genes—and the color that came with them—were passed down through the generations and created what was seemingly an entire race of blue people.
Walt Spitzmiller painted a scene of the Fugate family, based on period photos, to accompany an article by Cathy Trost in Science 82. Painting: Walt Spitzmiller
But no one would know until the 1960s exactly what made the skin of the Fugate family blue. Nearly a century and a half after Martin Fugate put roots down near Hazard, Dr. Madison Cawein attributed the Fugate descendants’ oddly hued appearance to a blood condition called methemoglobinemia, which affects how well oxygen circulates throughout the body. By giving the blue members of the family a type of salt known as methylene blue, Cawein was able to return their skin to a more typical color, effectively curing those in the Fugate lineage of their abnormality.
Few images exist of the Blue Fugates, with the black and white photography of the time disguising any trace of the family’s shared medical oddity. But a 1982 painting of the family by Walt Spitzmiller, based on period photos, imagines how they might have appeared and serves as one of few reminders of the blue people that called Hazard home.
There are plenty more stories just like these that lurk in Kentucky’s past, buried in dusty tomes on bookshelves all across the state, waiting to be rediscovered by fans of the odd and unexpected. This snapshot of Kentucky’s compelling oddities is reminder that most interesting bits of history can sometimes be found in your own backyard.
