How a Gravedigger Became a Hero: King Solomon and the 1833 Cholera Epidemic

On this episode of Our American Stories, in the summer of 1833, Lexington, Kentucky, was brought to its knees by a cholera outbreak. Entire families were lost in a matter of days, and fear spread faster than the disease itself. When the dead outnumbered the living willing to bury them, one man stepped forward. His name was Solomon. Most people in town dismissed him as a drunk gravedigger. But in the middle of the crisis, he dug without stopping, gave the dead their dignity, and kept the city from collapsing under the weight of its own fear. Kentucky journalist Sam Terry tells the story of King Solomon, the unlikely hero whose redemption came in the middle of one of the deadliest epidemics in American history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on the show,
including your story. Send them to our American Stories dot com.
There's some of our favorites. And this next story comes
to us with the help of John Elfner, a high
school history teacher and a regular contributor to our show.
Kentucky journalist Sam Terry tells the story of the man

(00:33):
they called King Solomon.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
In November of eighteen fifty four, the Reverend William M.
Pratt recorded in his diary, I preached the funeral today
of old King Solomon, seventy nine years old. He was
born the same year with Henry Clay, and had drunk
whiskey enough to float a man o war. He was
once a person of considerable enterprise and business, but he

(00:58):
had been given to drink a great many years, and
yet was inoffensive and of great integrity. Quite a number
of citizens attended his funeral, and he had a good
coffin worth thirty dollars, and some seventeen carriages processed to
the cemetery. The deceased was William King Solomon, a Virginia

(01:19):
native who claimed to have been a boyhood acquaintance of Harry,
as he called Henry Clay, jesting that his own work
as a digger of sellers and cisterns was less elevated
than the famous statesman. His loyalty to Clay was unprecedented.
When one of Clay's opponents for reelection offered strong drink

(01:41):
to Solomon in exchange for his vote, Solomon took him
up on the offer and then proceeded to vote for Clay.
When asked if he had voted as agreed, Solomon replied,
you may have been foolish enough to try to bribe me,
but I'm not foolish enough to vote for you. During
Solomon's lowest time of life, his wife died and his

(02:04):
son ran away, sending him into a liquor filled existence
that reduced him to a vagabond whom Lexingtonians nicknamed King Solomon.
By eighteen thirty three, Solomon's existence, living on the streets
and intoxicated led a local judge to sell him as
a servant for a period of nine months. Solomon's purchaser

(02:27):
was the least likely of buyers. Aunt Charlotte, was a
free black woman who had apparently known Solomon in Virginia
when he was a free white male, and she was
an enslaved black female, her owners having given her freedom
and bequeathed her some land. She supported herself by selling

(02:49):
baked goods. At Solomon's auction. Two Transylvania Medical College students
bid on Solomon, viewing him as being near the end
of his life and a future cadaver for their studies.
Aunt Charlotte was the winning bidder for Solomon. Her exact
bid remains a mystery. Some sources say she paid thirteen cents,

(03:12):
while others claim it was thirteen dollars, and yet another
maintains it was fifty cents. Whatever the price, King Solomon
the White Vagrant became the temporary property of Aunt Charlotte,
the free woman of Color, setting in motion one of
Kentucky's renowned tales of the past. Aunt Charlotte freed Solomon,

(03:35):
and true to his addiction, he managed to acquire some
liquor before wandering back to her home, where he passed out.
When Solomon awakened, he found the town of Lexington in distress,
with people dying of cholera, one of the most feared
maladies of the early decades of the nineteenth century, referred

(03:56):
to as asiatic cholera due to its origin in the
Far East. Cholera is contracted by ingesting the Vibrio choleria
microbe via water that is contaminated with human feces. Now
at this time in eighteen thirty three, the town branch
ran through Lexington, and heavy rains caused its banks to overflow,

(04:21):
while privies overflowed into the ground, creating a deadly mixture
that poured into sinkholes, only to emerge through springs and
other sources of drinking water. A single bucket of contaminated
water from a well or public pump had the power
to wipe out an entire household. Naive individuals unaware of

(04:45):
the contamination soon became victims, stricken with voluminous diarrhea after
drinking even a small quantity of infected water. There was
little help for the victims. Lexington's only the hospital at
the time was the Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum. The town's

(05:05):
physicians were principally faculty members at Transylvania's Medical College. Three
of the physicians died, another was out of town and
learning of the epidemic, chose not to return, and yet
another rendered himself useless after a fall. While trying to
care for the sick and the dying, The Lexington Observer

(05:27):
and Reporter published the names of more than five hundred
victims in a town with a population of six thousand.
The hungover Solomon found that Aunt Charlotte, like most Lexington residents,
was packing to evacuate the town. Historians have pondered how
Solomon could have managed to avoid contracting cholera, most drolly

(05:51):
concluding that his body was so well fortified with alcohol
he was immune to the disease. Solomon, however, refused to leave,
and he began burying the dead as the grave diggers
had left. Along with thousands of other residents. Victims of
cholera were not afforded the luxury of funerals or even coffins,

(06:12):
with many bodies being wrapped in the bed linens on
which they had died. Dozens of casualties were piled up
near the old Episcopal burying ground on Third Street. Discerning
the need, Solomon began digging graves to bury hundreds of
bodies and in turn becoming the hero of Lexington. King

(06:34):
Solomon continued to live in Lexington until his death in
eighteen fifty four. He was buried in the Lexington Cemetery,
not far from the towering monument marking the grave of
his boyhood friend Henry Clay. In nineteen eight a large
monument declaring King Solomon a Hero was placed at his grave,

(06:57):
and Kentucky author James Lane Allen included the tale of
King Solomon of Kentucky in his eighteen ninety one book
Flute and Violin and Other Kentucky Tales. The rest of
Aunt Charlotte's story, however, remains unknown.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
And a special thanks to Kentucky journalist Sam Terry, and
thanks as always to John Elfner the story of William
King Solomon. Here on our American Stories, leeh Habib Here,
as we approach our nation's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary,
I'd like to remind you that all the history stories

(07:36):
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