Lexington, Kentucky ยท The Cholera Year
King of the Dead
The True Story of Lexington's Gravedigger King
a novel by J.B. Fox
When the doctors, the preachers and even the gravediggers fled, the town drunk stayed, with a borrowed wagon and a Methodist mule, and buried the town that had turned its back on him.
Who Was William Solomon?
William Solomon was real. He came to Lexington from Virginia, said to be from a respectable family, and fell into drink after the death of his wife and the flight of his son.
Early in the cholera year he was judged a vagrant, and his labor was sold at public auction. Medical students bid on him. A free woman of color known as Aunt Charlotte, who sold baked goods and did work for the town trustees, outbid them. What she paid is disputed to this day.
When cholera reached Lexington in late spring, after a season of heavy rain, it killed a large share of the town within weeks, most of them in the first days of June. Solomon stayed and buried the dead, chiefly in the old Episcopal Burying Ground on Third Street. The town later honored him, and he lies in Lexington Cemetery under a monument raised long after his death.
The Minister Who Stayed
London Ferrill, born into slavery in Virginia, became pastor of the First African Baptist Church of Lexington and was one of the few ministers who stayed through the epidemic to care for the sick. By mid-century his congregation was said to be the largest church in Kentucky, black or white. He is recorded as the only Black person buried in the Old Episcopal Burying Ground.
Charlotte
What became of Charlotte is not known. A public housing development in Lexington, Charlotte Court, bears her name.
The Irony
Physicians of the day blamed cholera on bad air, bad habits and strong drink. It is in fact carried in water fouled by the sick.
In the year of Solomon's death, London physician John Snow traced an outbreak to a single public pump and noticed that brewery workers who drank their beer allowance instead of the pump water were spared.
Legend says a young Jefferson Davis dug graves beside Solomon that summer. It is only legend; Davis was serving as an army officer elsewhere.