Jim Town, Kentucky

My cousin Laurie, my mom's brother's daughter, lives in Riverside, California. She recently e-mailed me saying she had found some photos from a trip our grandparents took from the Boston suburb of Alston to Calera, Oklahoma back in the early 1950's. She is sending me the photos! I'm eager to see them - for my mom says this was the only time she ever visited with her father's extended family in Oklahoma. She remembers that her mother was dead set against taking this "foolish, money wasting" trip to see some folks she didn't care to know. My grandfather, stubborn as a always, said, "He was a'goin' and if she didn't git in the car she was a'goin' to be left behind!"

So Granny relented and got in the car - which broke down somewhere in New York state - and after a couple days, they were back on the road to Oklahoma - all the while my Grandmother was saying, "See John, that's what happens when you do these things, things break and cause trouble."

My mom and her nephew Larry didn't seem to care - they were going to see their grandmom. My mom remembers meeting a whole bunch of aunts and uncles and cousins and left me with a bunch of names to follow up with - but it is slow going since those strange "Okies" seem to call each other exclusively by nicknames and no one seems to know what their proper names were! Lowell Lloyd Bush, was called Tack, and his son Lloyd Frank Bush was called Bubie. Ugh!

My cousin Laurie has also been looking at this old Bush family reunion photograph (here) and we've worked out "who is who" for nearly all of them.

But.. what I started to post about was Laurie asked me to find the old Barlow-Bush Cemetery (she said, it might be the Bush-Barlow cemetery, she wasn't sure) in Jim Town, Kentucky... She had found out that several of our mutual ancestors were buried there - and that the cemetery was in rough shape and on private property. She wanted to know who the current owner was - and exactly where the cemetery was - her only clue was... "it is in Jim Town, Kentucky, that is what an old family Bible says."


Suitably challenged, I started doing some digging... and one of the first things I found out was there is no town currently named Jim Town in Kentucky. There is a Jamestown but it wasn't in the right place - and as I dug some more - I found references to a Barlow-Bush cemetery in Fountain Run, Kentucky.


Frowning a bit, I redoubled my efforts to determine what had become of "Jim Town". After an hour or futile searching, I stumbled across a historical account of "Jim Town". It was apparently named after a James Barlow. I figured I was getting warm since it was the Barlow-Bush (or Bush-Barlow) cemetery I was looking for...

...and in this historical account, the author told of how the name was changed, first to Jamestown, which the post office objected to since there was already a Jamestown (the one that I had found previously) so the town's postmaster Dr. James R Duncan decided to name it Fountain Run in 1847. Ah ha!


Fountain Run is located in Monroe County near the point where Allen, Monroe, and Barren Counties come together, hence its nickname, the "Crossroads of Three Counties." It is near the oxymornic sounding, Barren River Lake.


While looking around at old photos from the area - I found this one of a little boy sharing his ice cream cone with a dog. I would have done this search for the cemetery just to find this picture!

I made contact with a volunteer at the local historic society and she told me about a distant cousin of mine, Kay Bush, that lived near the Barlow-Bush cemetery and that she would put her in contact with me.

...and all of this led to the next discovery... concerning the Daughters of the American Revolution... and my next post.