King Solomon: The Story of the Grave Digging Drunk-Turned Hero

On this episode of Our American Stories, King Solomon was a gravedigger who may have saved the town of Lexington during the Cholera epidemic of 1833. Kentucky journalist Sam Terry tells the story of the man they called “King Solomon.”

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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 re election offered strong

(01:41):
drink 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

(02:03):
died and his 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

(02:25):
nine months. Solomon's purchaser 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

(02:47):
herself by selling 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

(03:11):
paid thirteen cents, 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

(03:34):
freed Solomon, 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 to as asiatic cholera due to

(03:59):
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

(04:19):
its banks to overflow, 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.

(04:42):
Naive individuals unaware of 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

(05:03):
Lunatic Asylum. The town's 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,

(05:26):
The Lexington Observer 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

(05:48):
contracting cholera, most drolly 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

(06:11):
or even coffins, 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

(06:31):
of Lexington. King 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

(06:55):
placed at his grave, 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. Folks, if you
love the stories we tell about this great country, and
especially the stories of America's rich past, know that all

(07:38):
of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith, are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
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free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to learn more.