from The Encyclopedia of Kentucky//Luke Wortley
from The Encyclopedia of Kentucky
Shelby County. Shelby county, the twelfth in order of formation, located somewhere in the minds of countless sons who still chew long-leaf dipped in bourbon and peach juice. Their buzz is bordered by constant attention to length of the fescue, memory of heat pulverized into their bones the first time they felt their oats and challenged their old man, and mothers whose strained faces ran slick as algae. It has an area of 385 square miles. The county was formed in the coiled fists of failed harvest and was named in honor of Kentucky’s first and fifth governor of the Commonwealth, Isaac Shelby.
The topography of Shelby County is rolling with burning lungs of those sons sneaking out and treading the gravel bends on their way to a tryst with moonlight and whiskey distilled from the water muttering beneath them at Clear Creek, filtered through the skeletal limestone bedrock. Corn, hemp, and wheat were the primary crops before The War. In 2005 the county produced its first fatality of a high school student inside the school building when a sophomore boy was murdered at his locker by a freshman who had brought an axe to school. Tobacco, hay, isolation, fentanyl, and divorcees are now the principal products. Shelby County is well known for its division of communities based on which side of the railroad tracks you live, ties sunk deep into the limestone-shale-embedded soil. Generational alcoholism in 1990 occupied nearly half of homes, and 14 percent of farmland was frayed to sell topsoil illegally. In 1990 the county ranked first in the state in male descendants who were most likely to question whether or not progeny was a fundamental datum of their existence, 60 percent of whom were also documented to have admitted to standing on the bridge overlooking Floyd’s Fork at some point, nipping a plastic bottle of Kentucky Gentleman and imagining themselves in the nickel smell of roiling fluxes headed to the ocean, someday.
The first settlers arrived near Eminence, Ky. in 1779. Later settlers would include an influx of suburbanite corporate types who would buy up swathes of guilt-ridden loam, county landmark trees sweating artillery rounds and all the stockpiled, sonic heat of younger sisters’ cries as they heaved through another night riddled with heat lightning. In August 2002, on Conner Station Rd, Teal Wisshe’s youngest son was killed by a massive ash bough as his father held the chainsaw while wearing khakis and shooting goggles.
Since September 1862 until the present, Civil War skirmishes are still being fought in Shelby County. Each summer, a band of actors reenacts the gallantry of Capt. David Martin, nicknamed “Black Dave,” who served under Brigadier General John Morgan. As an independent cavalry officer, he led an attack on the Shelbyville courthouse to do his duty, despite his own wife and children being sheltered in a nearby home by Confederate sympathizers.
Infidelity expenditures in the county totaled approx.. $350,000 in 2014, a 14 percent increase over the previous year; attractions include Baptist Urgent Care and Physical Therapy Center, the Old Stone Inn, and Marimba Mexican Restaurant. Thousands of families grit their teeth through the Shelby County Fair and Horse show, whose gaited event is among the highest concentration of heartbroken daughters and doomed sons in the state. There are two prominent lakes, 100-acre Lake Shelby and 350-acre Guist Creek Lake. Fishing, water-skiing, and pistol hunting for snapping turtle are available, along with massive welts due to incidents with a potato gun. The birthplace of Ben Holloway, an unpublished American novelist documenting generational trauma in the rural South, is located on top of Todd’s Point. The majority of the county’s industry used to be manufacturing of swivel chairs, futons, and reclining chair parts as well as Purnell’s “Old Folks” Country Sausage. Simpsonville, Finchville, and Pleasureville are home to three thoroughbred boarding stables specializing in international show horses and wealth disparity.
The population of Shelby County was 42,074 in 2010, with a depression prevalence rate nearly double the national average among young men aged 18-35. See Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (Louisville, Ky., 1902); Historic families of Kentucky. With special reference to stocks immediately derived from the valley of Virginia; tracing in detail their various genealogical connexions and illustrating from historic sources their influence upon the political and social development of Kentucky and the states of the South and West (Cincinnati, Oh., 1889); Some Old Time History of Shelbyville and Shelby County (Frankfort, Ky., 1974).
Luke Wortley is a writer living in Indianapolis, IN and online. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Cincinnati Review, HAD, The Florida Review, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook PURGE (Workhorse, 2022) and the full-length SHARED BLOOD (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 2023), both collections of prose poetry.