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The photographs in the library's collection are donated from a variety of individuals. 

The Ashland-McDowell Collection shows an unknown gathering of friends and family at the Ashland estate, taken circa 1894, which included a parade of the estate’s horses.  Thoroughbreds Impetuous, King Reine, Oratorio, Argentina, and Bracegirdle are all being proudly shown at this event.   Photos also show members of the McDowell family in attendance, including Major McDowell and his wife, and their daughters Nanette, Julia, and Madeline.  The author John Fox Jr. was a frequent guest of the McDowells at Ashland and can be seen in one image playing a banjo on the lawn.

The Lena Hart Tobey Collection contains 12 photos. Lena Hart Tobey (1869-1939) was born in Mississippi to Thomas and Susan Watson Hart. In the 1890s, she attended school in Lexington, Kentucky. She married Ellis Tobey in 1896 and died in 1939 in Arkansas. After Lena Hart Tobey's death, her daughter Myrtis inherited a collection of photographs in a scrapbook. The family donated the Lexington, Kentucky marked cabinet cards to the Lexington Public Library in 2001. Some of the young adults in the photos have been named, though most have not.

The other images are miscellaneous photos donated from different sources.

The Brown-Hocker Collection is a community collection of photos and realia from African American events and people in Lexington and Kentucky history.

The objects in the collection are primarily for events in African American schools and churches. Several items also involve to civil rights activism in Kentucky. The 1964 March on Frankfort, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jackie Robinson, attracted over 10,000 marchers. The two volumes of “The Kentucky Club Woman” were published by the Kentucky Association of Colored Woman’s Clubs, which represented over 100 Kentucky clubs across the state. There are also several objects honoring the life and legacy of Whitney M. Young, Jr. (1921-1971).

The Constitution School and Booker T. Washington Elementary School were both segregated schools for African American children in Lexington. The Constitution School closed in 1972, but Booker T. Washington Elementary is still in use today.

Letters from and/or about Father William T. Punch and the Punch family. Donated by a Lexington resident to Lexington Public Library. Father Punch was instrumental in building the 3rd St. Peter Catholic Church on Barr Street in Lexington, KY. 

The first Kentucky almanacs were printed by John Bradford, on the same printing press that published the Kentucky Gazette. The Kentucky almanacs in the library's collection contain monthly calendars containing weather predictions, zodiac changes, and significant events, as well as the schedule of Kentucky court days, anecdotes, recipes (receipts), and essays on a variety of topics.

The Black Community News Collection compiles searchable newspaper articles and ads for local Black community events, schools, social gatherings, church events, obituaries, and wedding announcements in older local newspapers in the library’s collection. In addition to Lexington news, the articles contain information about people in many surrounding communities, as well.

In 1898, Lexington’s evening paper, the Leader* began publishing specific news columns about the local Black community and society events. Early columns were scattered and not consistently named; they were titled “Weldon” or “Welden” after the first Black columnist, “In Colored Circles,” “In Colored Society,” and later, became a more standard column titled, “Colored News” and “Colored Notes.” The other local paper, the morning Herald, began publishing a similar column in the 1920s. Lexington at that time had a weekly Black newspaper, the Lexington Standard, that ran from 1892-1912, when it briefly became the Lexington Weekly News before it folded.

The first reporter/columnist of Black social news in the Leader was John Weldon Jewett, a local educator later appointed to the IRS; he would often sign announcements with “Weldon” or “Welden” or “JW.” After his death in 1905, columns were contributed by William Henry Ballard, who opened the first Black pharmacy in Kentucky in 1893, and others. In 1925, the Herald appointed a separate department managed by Lucy J. Cochran, which was housed separately from the general newspaper office, and after multiple editors, D. I. Reid took over in 1934 and ran it until his death in 1950.

Community groups began to challenge the term “colored” and the “Colored Notes” being a separate news column in the 1950s, but Black community news was not integrated with the rest of the newspaper until 1969.

The only surviving issues of the Lexington Standard and the Lexington Weekly News can be found on Chronicling America.

Information about the Lexington newspapers and early Black editors was compiled from:

NKAA Database entry “Colored Circles, Colored News Notes, Colored News, General Colored News, and Colored Notes (Lexington Newspapers)”
Biographical sketches of prominent Negro men and women of Kentucky by W. D. Johnson, (1897)
*The Leader began as the Kentucky Leader in 1888, and several years later became the Daily Leader and the Sunday editions labeled as The Sunday Leader. It became the Lexington Leader in 1901, began sharing Sundays with the Lexington Herald in the 1950s, and eventually fully combined with the Herald to become the Lexington Herald-Leader in 1983.

Collection Content
Years Available:

The Leader: 1898, 1899

The Judge Kenneth Lyons collection consists of an atlas, a journal, and letters. The atlas features copies of letters written on the blank pages of the atlas. The journal contains family and local history recorded by a Robert K. Bryan. The earliest date of the letters is 1863. Items are from Bourbon and Nicholas Counties, Kentucky.

Compiled by Cyrus Parker Jones, a man formerly enslaved by the Parker family, these funeral notices cover 667 funerals of individuals in Lexington, including seven free blacks. The funeral notices cover the years 1806-1886. Jones donated his collection to a trustee of the Lexington Public Library prior to his death in 1887, who then added some notices and donated the collection to the Lexington Public Library in 1900.

The collection consists of an image, homemade brochures, flyers, pamphlets, and programs covering LGBTQ+ events and places from 1983 to 1999 in both Lexington and Louisville. Subjects include Leigh Angelique and other drag queens, Sweet Evening Breeze, Henry Faulkner, Greg Butler, the Royal Sovereign Imperial Court of All Kentucky and its Coronations, the Bungalow, the LMNOP, Jezebel’s, The Bar Complex, Crossings, Disco Circus, the Bluegrass C.O.L.T.S., AIDS Volunteers of Lexington, Johnny Angel’s, The Loft, and Trixie’s Hide and Seek.​

The collection is named in honor of Tina Belle Green Winters Simpler Young, known as Tiny, a sex worker who in the 1920s and 30s sent $5.00 a week home to support her sister. For a time, she worked in the Crawl section of Frankfort, then moved to Lexington, and finally lived the rest of her life in Cincinnati.

The queerness of sex work, a marginalized woman using sex to support family, provides context both to this collection bearing her name and to the LGBTQ+ community that has historically formed families on the social margins.

The Lexington Weekly Press was published every Wednesday in Lexington, Kentucky, and contained local, state, and foreign news. The paper focused on Central Kentucky’s “agriculture, manufactures and fine stock”, as well as literary and scientific news, market reports, and serial stories. Local weddings, deaths, community events, and elections for Lexington and the surrounding region. The paper was sent anywhere in the United States at a cost of one dollar per year.