Producer: Donna Ross

Dressing the Troops

Costumer Deb Rogers

Deb Rogers of Lexington has long enjoyed participating in reenactments of Civil War battles and events. Soon she turned her talents as a costume designer to the cause and made a business of turning out patterns for period uniforms and ball gowns. In this segment, we visit her shop as well as a ballroom and a battlefield to see some of her creations being put to use.

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For more information:
• Janice Holt Giles & Henry Giles Society, P.O. Box 932, Columbia, KY 42728

Producer: Kelli Summers

An Old Kentucky Home Restored

Janice Holt Giles House

Readers of Janice Holt Giles’ novels, including 40 Acres and No Mule and The Enduring Hills, feel they’re in familiar surroundings when they first visit the writer’s Adair County farm, since it figures so prominently in her stories. A group of citizens from the area has been working to restore the cabin where she wrote and turn the farm into a nature center and writer’s retreat.

An Arkansas native, Giles had attended Transylvania University in Lexington in the 1920s and moved to Kentucky for good in 1941. She and her second husband, Henry, moved to the small farm near Knifley in 1949. She died 30 years later at the age of 74 and is buried in the nearby Caldwell Chapel Cemetery.

Giles’ historical novel The Believers, set inside the Shaker community at South Union, was the September 2002 selection for bookclub@ket.

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For more information:
• Downtown Henderson Project, 230 2nd St., Suite 207, Henderson, KY 42420, (270) 827-0016

Producer, videographer: David Brinkley

Historic Houses

Victorian mansions in Henderson

In the late 19th century, the city of Henderson in Western Kentucky was a bustling Ohio River port, a hub for shipments of tobacco and coal from Kentucky’s western fields. The town became one of the wealthiest in the state—and the nation—and that wealth was reflected in the many mansions that lined its streets.

In this segment, we visit several of those stately Victorian neighborhoods, which survive today largely because of some fortunate geography: Because it is built on high bluffs overlooking the river, Henderson escaped the periodic flooding suffered by other river cities. In fact, it was the only city along the length of the Ohio, from Pittsburgh to Cairo, IL, that did not suffer major damage in the devastating flood of 1937.

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