In 1610, in Jamestown, Virginia, a group of eleven men met and swore a compact to each other. They were adventurers and planters, willing to gamble their futures in a new world, and willing to entrust those futures to each other. They had no guarantee that they were not simply throwing their lives away. They swore anyway. One of those men was John Jackson, an ancestor of Katherine Jackson French’s.1
Or so avers Katherine Jackson French’s version of family history, which includes a family tree that traces back to Charlemagne. A different family history, written by Jarvis Jackson in 1882, paints John Jackson, the original immigrant, in a less than flattering light. This John ran out on his apprenticeship, deserting his master, and abrogating his contract. He indentured himself to a ship’s captain, came to America, and married a woman named Jarvis (or Gervaise) while they were both still servants. “That constitutes the start of the Jackson family of America,” concludes Jarvis in a matter-of-fact manner. Uncontested, however, is the fact that one John Jackson was born in 1762. Twenty years later, this John Jackson married Mary Hancock, whose father, Stephen, was the nephew of John Hancock, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. John was awarded land in Madison County in payment for serving in the Revolutionary War under Baron von Steuben. He and Mary were married in Richmond, Kentucky, and theirs was the first bond of marriage written in Madison County. The newlyweds bought ten thousand acres of land in Laurel County, Kentucky, and settled in the northern part of what was to become London. John, Mary, and their son Jarvis thus became known as the founders of London. John and Mary had eight children; the youngest son, Stephen, was born in 1810. Little is known of Stephen except that his wife was named Minerva and that his son, William Harvey Jackson, was born on March 7, 1830. William was Katherine’s Jackson’s father; at the age of twenty-seven, he married Maria Louisa McKee, who was a cousin of Sam Houston’s.2
London, Kentucky, 1870s. Courtesy of Laurel County Historical Society.
This genealogy, warts and all, is necessary to understand a basic aspect of Katherine Jackson’s family. They understood themselves to be a first family and not merely a first family of London but one of the first families of America.3
Katherine Jackson’s father had a life like many small-town Kentucky boys in the nineteenth century. He worked at various occupations in London into his early twenties. When he was twenty-three, he helped drive a herd of cattle from Keokuk, Iowa, to California, assisting Captain Will Garrard. He returned to London after that and, at the age of twenty-seven, married Maria Louisa McKee.4
By 1870 William Jackson had established a store in London. He developed the square where his store was located, and it became the town’s business center and a hub of activity. He rented out space to the London post office, a dry goods store, and a barber shop. In short, anyone who went to London for any kind of business transaction went to a space owned by Jackson.5
Katherine Jackson, age four. Courtesy of Kay Tolbert Buckland.
Jackson was a successful man with a growing family (which would eventually include eight children) and a growing business in a growing town. It was into this environment that Minerva Katherine Jackson entered the world on January 18, 1875.6 She was born in the family cabin at Raccoon Springs, near Lily, a humble location for the beginning of a remarkable life.7
Early Years
Minerva Katherine Jackson was the Jacksons’ sixth child. Presumably named for William’s mother, the young Minerva Katherine, or Kittie as she was called by friends and family, attended the Laurel public school and Laurel Seminary.8
Laurel Seminary was the first institution of its kind in southeastern Kentucky. It opened in 1858. Students came from Laurel County and beyond. The curriculum included courses in algebra, arithmetic, English literature, English grammar, Latin, deportment, and history. Many Laurel Seminary graduates were trained to become teachers. After the Civil War, the school “helped people come back from the degradation into which the evil influences consequent upon war had lowered them.”9
There is little information on Jackson’s childhood other than her school attendance and the fact that her brother Jarvis died in 1884 when Jackson was nine. The only surviving photograph shows a serious-looking little girl of four staring intently into the camera with a furrowed brow. From local accounts of her father, however, we can glean certain details about the town in which Jackson spent her formative years.10
William Jackson’s business ventures were well attested in the public record during the time of Katherine’s childhood. “Jackson and McKee have ice-cold soda water at their Brick Drug Store,” trumpeted one large ad in the local London paper, the Mountain Echo. Mr. Jackson was an aggressive marketer, which no doubt contributed to his financial success and local fame. Every resident of London knew his name. The Brick Drug Store was the center of all things commercial in London. A picture taken of the building in 1888, when Jackson was thirteen, shows a large, solid structure hovering over dirt streets and dominating the immediate area, an impressive building for a small town. William was doing well, and this enabled Katherine to have a financially secure childhood.11
Some of the activities that took place on the town square were musical. The London Brass Band, headed by “Professor Chiesman,” played there periodically as early as 1877. “The brass band is here and the boys knock us out of our boots every night. O, gracious! Somebody hold us!” cried the Mountain Echo in July of that year.12 In 1890, a bandstand was erected on the public square specifically for that group. In 1893, the floor over Jackson’s store became the London Opera House Office. Space over the drugstore became the headquarters of the London Cornet Band.13
It appears that William Jackson (and perhaps his wife, Maria) had an interest in music and that Katherine would have grown up in an environment in which music had a hefty presence, a circumstance that came to figure prominently later in her life. Music seemed to run in the Jackson family. Katherine’s sister Mamie went on to attend the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and then return to London to teach music at Laurel Seminary.14 As Erica Rumbley notes: “As the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth, music became the most popular of the ornamental studies and gradually became accepted as a respectable career path for cultivated ladies of the middle and upper classes. Most well-bred ladies during this era received musical instruction.”15 It seems likely that, if Mamie was afforded the opportunity to study piano, as many daughters of upper-middle-class families did, Katherine was too. The adult Jackson owned collections of piano music and vocal scores; she also knew how to handle music dictation and notation. In addition, she occasionally noted in her diary that she “played” for guests, though she did not indicate which instrument, and that she played the organ in church. It is likely that, in addition to growing up surrounded by music, she had some music training during her childhood, as did most young women raised in similar circumstances.16
Expanding Horizons
William’s success as a merchant enabled the family to send Katherine to Science Hill Female Academy in Shelbyville, from which she graduated in 1893 having followed the diploma course. It is here that we begin to get hints about the mind-set of her parents, and it is here that the arc of her education first begins to rise.17
Most southern preparatory schools in the 1890s existed to mold girls into what Joan Marie Johnson characterizes as the “traditional southern lady ideal: domesticity, purity, submissiveness, piety … charm, dependence, grace, manners”: “Southern educators believed that the southern lady ideal
