History of Mason family and their ancestral home

 Week 7 Blog Entry

Roy Mason

            When you ask someone from Kentucky where they live, instead of the usual response of the name of a town or city, there is a good chance they will respond with the name of their county. I was raised in Mason County, Kentucky, in a small town of two hundred, named May’s Lick. Mason County was formed in 1788 by the Virginia Legislature and named after George Mason, the “Father of the Bill of Rights.” The county was so large, that nineteen counties would subsequently be formed from its original charter. The same year a small group of pioneers from New Jersey founded the town of May’s Lick, named after William May. It got the “Lick” part of the name from a nearby deer saltlick that provided salt to the settlers. I can tell you that the area, when I was a kid in the 1950s, was beautiful, with rolling hills, pristine forests, lots of game, and soil so rich, my dad used to say it could grow anything you dropped on the ground. This is where the Mason family settled about two hundred and thirty-eight years ago.

            The Mason family immigrated to Kentucky about 1787. Our family records, kept in the family bible, only go back to the birth of John W. Mason in 1852. His son, Charles Harrison Mason was born in 1888, and my father, Wayne Alvin Mason, was born in 1926. While I have few close kin left, about all of them, but me, remain in Mason County or the adjacent Lewis County. My family’s home was built about five miles outside of May’s Lick in the 1830s and remains in the family to this day. The two-hundred-acre farm has been deeply involved in the growing and harvesting of tobacco since the early 1800s.

Our home was built of brick with twelve-foot ceilings downstairs and seven-foot ceilings upstairs that hug the contour of the roof; the ceilings dropped to about four feet in the front and back of the upstairs rooms. Cracking your head by straightening up too fast while getting out of bed was common. The walls inside are about sixteen inches wide with beautiful ornate wood trim. The hallway running down the center of the house is about six feet wide, seventy feet long, and runs from the front door to the back door. The house had no bathroom, running water, or central heating. Our warmth in the winter came from seven fireplaces stoked with coal; ice would form about an inch thick on the inside of the lead pane windows during the coldest months. We had a cistern next to the house, where we drew our water, and a three-hole outhouse about a hundred feet away from the back of the house, always stocked with Sears and Robuck catalogs to finish the job. The root cellar, where we kept all the canned goods and potatoes, had a couple of rings remaining on the wall to chain up slaves; slaves comprised about a third of the population of May’s Lick just before the Civil War. The night sky was amazing because the nearest neighbor and any light source was a couple of miles away. This is the home I was raised in until the day I left at about fifteen. My little brother who lives there now has all the modern amenities of running water and a bathroom, something that would be hard to imagine life without today.

“The Red Barn,” as we call it, is a tobacco barn with twenty-foot-tall shutters along the sides to facilitate air circulation, about three stories tall, seventy feet long, and forty feet wide. It housed tobacco, our main source of income, until it cured enough to take to market in Maysville, Kentucky. Raising tobacco was a labor of love for my father. The farmers in the area took immense pride in raising tobacco. Every step of the process was meticulously cared for. The rows of tobacco had to be arrow straight with nary a single weed to be found. The fields were fertilized and limed to adjust the PH balance and keep the soil fertile. We never raised the crop in the same fields more than two years in a row. Tobacco is an extremely labor-intensive crop requiring great care in planting, harvesting, and curing. I have two pictures showing a group of men hanging the tobacco in the Red Barn. The pictures were taken about a hundred years apart. The only difference in the photographs is one wagon was pulled by a horse, and in the more recent picture, the wagon was pulled by a tractor. The tobacco housing process was exactly the same.

Our spiritual needs were met by four churches in May’s Lick. We attended the Baptist Church, which was founded in 1789, the first church in May’s Lick. We had a Presbyterian Church founded in 1850, a Christian Church founded in 1841, and a Catholic Church, where I learned to box, founded in 1864. There was not much difference really, no competition for congregations. Families just went to the church that their family had always gone to. When the local school was damaged by fire in the 1950s, we attended classes in the basements of all the churches until it was repaired. We knew our way around every church regardless of denomination. That is about all the information I can cram into a short blog, but I could go on about living on the farm for a book or two. Thank you.

 

Bibliography:

Kleber, John E, Kentucky Bicentennial Commission, and Frank And. The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. 614.

Oldwashingtonky.com. “Maysville Tobacco Market – Old Washington KY,” 2025. https://oldwashingtonky.com/?page_id=2049.

Wikipedia Contributors. “Mays Lick, Kentucky.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, March 3, 2024.

Masoncountykentucky.us. “Welcome to Mason County, KY,” 2024. https://masoncountykentucky.us/.

Perrin, W. H. “The Evening Bulletin. [Volume] (Maysville, Ky.) 1887-1905, October 17, 1896, Image 3.” Loc.gov, no. 1896/10/17 (2024). info:lccn/sn87060190.

“Wayne Alvin Mason (1926-1994) - Find a Grave...” Findagrave.com, 2017, www.findagrave.com/memorial/257100202/wayne_alvin-mason. Accessed 25 Feb. 2025.