Mac and Tina, Mayfield, KY
With a little imagination, one can see the state of Kentucky as a slightly misshapen stone arrowhead, the point of which lies to the far west of the state. Rather than being known as “The Kentucky Arrowhead” or some such moniker, it is instead known as the Jackson Purchase, so named because it was purchased from the Chickasaw Indians by Andrew Jackson in 1818. Covering just over 3,000 square miles, the region is bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to the north and west, and by Kentucky Lake to the east, and it is home to a remarkable population of Americans.
Agriculture – America’s triumvirate of “Beans and Corn and Wheat” – dominates the landscape of The Purchase. Fields of the great American row crops straddle the two lane state and county highways threading the region, slowly undulating in the breeze or being whipped to a sideways frenzy by the occasional passing tractor trailer. Such is a landscape familiar throughout the American heartland.
Wheat Field, East of Fancy Farm, KY
Just as familiar are the scattered towns dotting the map between the expanses of fields. Jackson Purchase down towns range from dying to thriving. The relatively thriving towns in the Jackson Purchase, mostly in the eastern edge of the arrow head, swell to the low five digit populations. Life in these towns includes greater amenities – an array of restaurants and drive-ins, barber shops and retail stores – as well as greater diversions, including parks and recreation facilities. But to varying degrees these towns also play host to the range of familiar American issues, the run-down and abandoned residential lots some locales harbor revealing resident poverty and drug use.
By contrast, the more westerly towns in the Jackson Purchase are much like those in other parts of the middle of the country: they feel more dead than sleepy. Attuned visitors can almost hear each town sigh with resignation at the loss of people and local businesses. What remain are the few resilient shops and cafes interspersed amongst the closed store fronts. Surrounding these down towns are networks of streets with a range of housing stock, from trailer homes, to small apartments, to two story frame houses. Meticulously maintained homesteads sit cheek-to-jowl with collapsing shacks on neglected lots. According to some residents of the western towns, the government in Frankfurt ignores their edge of the state and the residents’ needs. As one resident put it, “the State thinks Western Kentucky ends at Paducah.”
Bobby and his Pit Bull Rosco, Possum Trot, KY
Despite the ups and downs of life in the Jackson Purchase, its people are not a shrinking bunch. To the contrary, quiet confidence permeates the Jackson Purchase, largely dispensing with need for overt political proclamations. Rancorous partisan yowling through lawn signs, billboards and bumper stickers is less prevalent here than elsewhere in the heartland. Same is true for symbolic patriotism. The people of the Jackson Purchase are undoubtedly American, but they know it without having to prove it, as if the fields of beans and corn were sufficient attestation.
None of which is to say that the inhabitants of The Purchase are without political opinion. To the contrary, the independence of the Purchase supports strong beliefs, perhaps best illustrated by the push for regional independence during the Civil War. Back then, portions of the region more closely aligned with the South than the North grew so frustrated with the State of Kentucky’s wartime equivocation that many Jackson Purchase residents pushed, in vain, to secede from Kentucky in favor of joining the Confederacy. Calls for cessation are not heard today, and casual conversation with Jackson Purchsonians rarely slips into the political on its own accord, but when such topics are broached, say, by a traveling journalist, people readily share their views without mincing words. The discourse is decidedly non-vitriolic, though, even subdued, as if the region’s confidence and independence mean there is no need to shout.