This word cloud pretty well summarizes the talk I’m giving at Henry Clay’s Hemp Symposium later today at the Ashland estate. I’ll be discussing the ways in which hemp and Clay helped bind the Bluegrass to the Atlantic economy. The other three images demonstrate some of the major points of the talk. The photo of the man working the hemp brake probably conveys a better idea of how it worked than my oral description and the hemp bagging wrapped around the bales of cotton on the dock awaiting export helps to visualize the connection between the two crops. All three come from the Ronald Morgan postcard collection at the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort.
