Beautiful Jim Key

by Mim E. Rivas

  Stanley promised to get around to going through the two steamer trunks that held much more of Dr. Key’s collection. For the past four decades, the trunks had been in a storage area in the back of his veterinary offices. Busy as he was, he had never gotten a chance to go through them.

  Before he returned to Brockton, Archibald Rogers went with Stanley Davis to have a look at where Jim was still buried in front of the house on Bethany Lane, and Monk somewhere behind it, then on to the Willow Mount cemetery to stand at William Key’s grave as Archie meditated quietly on that one, simple word: PEACE.

  When Albert Rogers died five months later, on March 31, 1946, Archibald was grateful that he had given his father a feeling of comfort before he departed this world by delivering his fond impressions of Shelbyville, Tennessee, in the year 1945, where and when people still remembered Beautiful Jim Key.

  10

  After History

  TO THE UNSUSPECTING TRAVELER driving on the stretch of country road that meanders through Shelbyville, it’s easy to miss the curious memorial about three miles south of the Bedford County Courthouse that rests on top of a low grassy grade on Himesville Road overlooking Tullahoma Highway.

  Many who live in the area know nothing about either the horse or the man, even those who regularly notice the tall, colored enamel sign with its representation of a horse holding a piece of chalk in his mouth as he writes the name Jim in script upon a chalkboard. For the curious or daring who do venture out of their cars to come closer (there is some local lore about the haunted horse grave), only a hint of the remarkable history is suggested by the inscription on the large stone marker: “Famous Arabian Hambletonian Educated Horse: Beautiful Jim Key 1889–1912,” or by the caption, “Be Kind to Animals,” on the signpost inside a horseshoe, or the reminder on the back of the sign that says “Kindness, Justice, and Mercy to All Creatures.”

  The most telling feature of the site is the headstone with its engraved caption, “Jim’s Dear Friends,” underneath the three photographic inlaid porcelain cameos of Dr. William Key, Albert Rogers, and the scruffy stray dog Monk (shown in the plaque riding Jim). Their various gazes seem to peer at you from the past, asking you to seek out the truth of their existence, to know more, to piece together their journey here in this life, to remember them.

  Though I grew up in Tennessee a hundred or so miles east of Shelbyville, and may have passed by the Jim Key memorial on more than one occasion, it took me many years and many miles to catch this story. Actually, it caught up with me a century after its main events, all the way on the other side of the country in California, where I’d been transplanted for too long. It arrived on my doorstep in the form of a casual e-mail from a cousin who sent it to me on behalf of a colleague. That man was David Hoffman, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and entrepreneur whose passions include uncovering great American stories.

  Hoffman had uncovered this great American story when he paid a visit to an antique bookstore, the Coventry Bookshop in Coventry, Connecticut, in the early 1970s. The store had recently acquired the contents of an even older New Hampshire bookstore that had been around since before the Civil War. After making the wintry trek to the Coventry Bookshop on the last day of a month-long sale of its overabundant inventory, Hoffman was not disappointed and made several purchases. One of the items he bought was something that he found in a stack of yellowing papers in an otherwise overlooked upstairs back room. In that pile was a quaint pamphlet from the early 1900s; on its pale green-tinted cover was a photograph of a handsome mahogany bay in thoughtful profile. Coincidentally or not, this wasn’t his first sighting of the famous turn-of-the-century horse. In fact in the early 1950s, when David was a young boy and a fledgling collector, one of the turn-of-the-century Beautiful Jim Key pennies that had been minted by the Women’s Pennsylvania Humane Society had come into his possession, and he had held on to it all his life. At first he didn’t make the connection between his penny and the pamphlet. But over time he did, and he also realized that some of the postcards he had collected had the same distinctive horse on them. Clearly, the story was trying to get his attention.

  In and around Shelbyville, Jim’s story had been similarly haunting a handful of writers and collectors who stumbled upon it every now and then, managing to stir some interest. In September 1946, one of Shelbyville’s leading horse authorities, W. J. McGill, shared the scrapbook he had kept on Dr. Key and Jim with the Gazette, which resulted in a lengthy article. Twelve years later, the Nashville Tennessean brought the story out of retirement again, and it was soon picked up by the New York Herald. Even before that, newspaper articles in local papers and tributes during the Tennessee Walking Horse Celebration did much to air out the musty story.

  But researchers were chronically blocked by the lack of documentation. This was mainly because of lost records resulting from the fact that there had been five different County Courthouse buildings over the last 150 years. The first had been Mrs. Payne’s house in 1809, replaced by a bona fide courthouse in the square, which was ruined by a tornado in 1830, followed by the destruction of the next building by fire during the Civil War. In 1873, Bedford County erected one of the most impressive and expensive courthouses in the state, which endured until 1934. In December of that year, six days before Christmas, a lynch mob assembled outside the courthouse with the intent of lynching Earnest K. Harris, a twenty-two-year-old African-American who was preparing to stand trial for allegedly assaulting a fourteen-year-old white female. Prentice Cooper, later to become Tennessee’s first three-term governor, had been appointed as defense attorney for young Harris and had apparently established a strong alibi for the defendant, who was said to have been at work and later at the pool hall at the time of the alleged incident. With jury selection in progress that morning—and word out that Harris might be acquitted—the seething mob had grown in numbers enough that Tennessee National Guardsmen were called in.

  After tear gas was used to prevent the crowd from storming the courthouse, Cooper requested a change of venue but was denied by the judge. At noon a local police officer arrested one of the mob’s organizers and held him inside the city hall, prompting the crowd to break down the main door and force his release. An hour later, the unarmed mob fought off guardsmen using tear gas, riot bombs, bayonets, and army pistols. By midafternoon, after the crowd’s attempts to batter through the south and east entrances, one man had been killed and five others wounded. Inside, though jury selection had been completed, the judge finally ordered a mistrial, delaying proceedings for a month.

  Aware that if Harris remained in the courthouse jail he would be murdered, Prentice Cooper forged a plan to smuggle the defendant out by disguising him in a uniform and gas mask as a guardsman. Cooper saw to it that Harris was safely transported to a Nashville jail, and a change of trial venue was subsequently arranged. A local newspaper reported:

  Guardsmen left the city shortly after the Negro was taken away. They abandoned four trucks which were parked facing Shelbyville, rather than take time to turn them around. There would likely have been further violence. The trucks were a blazing bon fire a few minutes later…. Machine guns were mounted on upper verandas of the courthouse. They were later placed in entrances to the courthouse but were not fired, though at one time pistol and gun fire was so rapid that they sounded like machine guns.

  By 7:30 that night, the mob turned its wrath on the courthouse and soon engulfed it in flames. “It is feared that most, if not all, county records are lost,” the newspaper account continued. As the article reported on Thursday, December 20, 1934, “One of the finest and most imposing structures of any county in the state is today in a heap of ruins.”

  When Cooper was able to secure a Nashville venue for Harris’s trial two months later, the defense was taken over by an N.A.A.C.P.-appointed attorney. With four hundred armed guards standing ready outside the second criminal courthouse, the alibi witnesses either were too afraid to testify or changed their stories to say he was not at work or
at the pool hall that day. The jury took seven minutes to deliberate before coming back with a guilty verdict, and twenty-two-year-old Earnest K. Harris was sentenced to die in the electric chair. Despite the defense’s request for a new trial—on grounds that the court officers allowed members of the jury to leave the courthouse and observe the guardsmen, thus influencing the verdict—the motion was denied. Harris was executed by electrocution on May 27, 1935.

  Governor Prentice Cooper later remarked that he took on Harris’s defense because he believed that Harris was entitled to a fair trial. Cooper swore then, “I don’t ever want to see a time like that again.” The courthouse was rebuilt at a cost of $175,000 and has managed to avoid further calamity to date.

  In addition to his public service as a World War I veteran, district attorney general, state legislator, three-term Tennessee governor, and ambassador to Peru under the Truman administration, Prentice Cooper, a Shelbyville native, was a lifelong fan and friend of Beautiful Jim Key. Cooper’s father, William Prentice Cooper, and his mother, Argentine Shofner Cooper (namesake of Shelbyville’s Argie Cooper Public Library), were some of the most prominent names in Bedford County and had been contemporaries of Dr. William Key. Prentice, who was born in 1895, grew up with Jim Key as a local celebrity and saw him perform on several occasions in the years when the horse’s star was on the rise. In 1904, nine-year-old Prentice Cooper traveled with his family to the St. Louis World’s Fair, where they were welcomed by their hometown heroes and where he was able to see multiple performances by Beautiful Jim Key in his unforgettable Silver Horseshoe Building on the Pike.

  It would not be an overstatement to claim that the Smartest Horse in the World had a profound, lasting influence on the future governor, who was himself educated at Webb School, Vanderbilt, Princeton, and Harvard Law School, and was, like Jim Key, a Democrat. When Prentice was raising his three sons, born to him and his wife, the beautiful Hortense Hayes Powell Cooper—who gave me a gracious welcome during a visit to the governor’s mansion in Shelbyville, a historic landmark—he spoke often of the Educated Arabian-Hambletonian. In fact when I had the honor of meeting Congressman Jim Cooper in Washington, D.C., in June 2004, he recalled that his father had talked more about Jim Key than about the burning of the Bedford County Courthouse, and more than about all his experiences as governor and ambassador.

  A true storykeeper of the legacy left by the horse and man from Shelbyville, Prentice Cooper died in 1969 at age seventy-four, when his son Jim was only fourteen. Jim, also a Democrat, who went on to become a champion of civil rights, literacy, and improving services for veterans, and a much-loved United States congressman now serving the Nashville area, admitted that he never knew if all those stories his father had told him were true or not. It had always sounded to him like something of a fairy tale that his father, old enough to have been his grandfather, had spun to entertain him.

  The same sentiment of having heard a fairy tale was expressed by Marie Davis Harris, the daughter of Dr. Stanley Davis. Even though Stanley had witnessed Jim Key’s journey from start to finish, as the years went by he had trouble convincing others that it had actually happened as he remembered it. Then, in 1967, the potential for preserving the saga was dealt a further blow with Stanley’s death. He had been suffering for years from glaucoma. The father of four, including two sons whom he lost, Dr. Davis had been one of Bedford County’s only veterinarians for many years and had become as beloved as Dr. Key had been in his time, an extraordinary accomplishment. But much to the anguish of his daughters, Marie and Harriette, the segregated Bedford County convalescent home of that era barred him from receiving medical treatment. Local civil rights activists, white and black, were appalled. Marie Davis Harris, the wife of Sidney Harris, a prominent black educator for whom the black high school was eventually named, was later consoled when her father was posthumously inducted into the Bedford County Hall of Fame.

  With both Stanley and Sam gone, Essie Davis realized that there would be no one to tend to Jim Key’s gravesite on the Bethany Lane property, which was now for sale. The Queen of the County took action. Moving quickly, she hired Thomas Johnson Sr., an employee of Uniroyal who also moonlighted as a gravedigger, to dig up Jim’s bones and move them to a new grave out at her place, aka Jim Key Farm.

  His then eleven-year-old son, Thomas Johnson Jr., recalled to me during my visit to Shelbyville that his dad had come in to wake him up, saying, “C’mon, June bug, we got to go dig a grave for a horse.”

  Young Thomas had heard fireside ghost stories from his aunt Cora Campbell, many that she swore were true, about a horse from Shelbyville who could read and write and do seemingly supernatural things that anybody with any sense knew horses couldn’t do. When he went with his father to exhume the horse’s remains, he hardly thought to connect Aunt Cora’s stories with the white chalky bones that he helped Johnson Sr. dig up and place in a pine coffin, which they transported out to Himesville Road and Tullahoma Highway and buried on the low rise not far from Essie’s house. The connection soon came, however, with a sudden wave of press coverage. And the story had only begun to haunt Thomas Johnson.

  Essie Davis not only commissioned the headstone and sign to immortalize Beautiful Jim Key and his three best friends, Dr. Key, Albert Rogers, and Monk, but also made sure that her niece Essie Mott Lee, a veteran educator and writer, went to work on the biography of Dr. Key. Drawing from her aunt’s personal remembrances and scrapbooks that had belonged to Dr. Key and Albert Rogers, author Lee honored her aunt’s dearest wish by writing the biography that was eventually titled Dr. William Key: The Man Who Educated a Horse. Archibald Rogers not only made sure that Essie Lee had his father’s scrapbook but also made a contribution to the Jim Key Memorial Fund. The fund, whose purpose was to preserve the monument, was set up by Essie Mott Lee and her sister, fellow educator, writer, and musician Annie Mott Whitman. The Mott sisters were Campbells on their mother’s side and were related to the Davises and Dr. Key by marriage. In another coincidence, Annie’s husband, David Whitman, was related on his mother’s side to Dr. Key’s first two wives, the Davidson sisters. These three beautiful, brilliant, and plucky women, Essie Davis, Essie Mott Lee, and Annie Mott Whitman, deserve most of the credit for the preservation of the legacies of horse and man.

  With the death of Essie Davis in 1974 and the death of Archibald Rogers in 1976, the last eyewitnesses close to the history were gone. Essie Mott Lee passed away in 1998, leaving her sister Annie to be custodian of the scrapbooks and all that was left of the family’s oral histories of Dr. Key and Jim—all of which she generously contributed to my research.

  In the meantime, a new generation of secondhand eyewitness reports came forward. Wonderful accounts were published in Tennessee newspapers and discussed in area historical societies with authorities like Bob Womack, a revered Middle Tennessee State professor and author, and Dick Poplin, a much-loved local historian and newspaper columnist. Bob Womack had been so steeped in Dr. Key and Jim Key stories while growing up that in writing his newspaper pieces he had accumulated several files of research about them. Dick Poplin had featured stories about the Keys and a tribute to Dr. Stanley Davis in his Shelbyville Times-Gazette column, inspired by his own belief in the values of kindness and tolerance, his love of animals, and the anecdotes his father had passed on to him.

  In 1992, when David Hoffman and his daughter Jeannie began research on a documentary about Jim Key and first started looking into the claims of the pamphlet he had found twenty years earlier, Dick Poplin was one of the first authorities they located. He had written to David back then:

  I have always been glad my father W. A. J. (Billy) Poplin saw Jim at the Tennessee Centennial in Nashville in 1897 when he was 17 years old. (He was born Dec. 1, 1879.) It made a great impression on him how Jim took pride in being a Democrat and could pick out the pretty girls.

  In the spring of 2003, at the Mid-Way Café on the Murfreesboro Pike—the same road that becomes North Main Street as you head int
o town—David Hoffman and I had the pleasure of sitting down to talk with a group that included Dick Poplin and Bob Womack. We were not far from the property that was once a farm owned by John W. Key where William Key grew up as a slave, and even closer to the part of town where Keystone Driving Park helped bring Hambletonian blood to Middle Tennessee. The atmosphere was as warm and friendly as any I’d known growing up in East Tennessee. My impression was that Shelbyville was still as independent minded as the town had been 150 years earlier, where despite disagreements about matters political and social, people got along because they knew one another by name and could always find common ground to talk about convivially. The story of Dr. Key and Jim was our commonality, as they had been for a nation.

  Bob Womack, a winning raconteur with a cherubic smile, tearfully recalled the African-American horseman who worked on his family’s land and virtually raised him, and his father figure’s stories of Bill and Jim Key. With the same emotion, Dick Poplin could remember how badly he felt when, as a boy, he lost his temper with his mule, something that still saddened him and made him wish for an object lesson of kindness and patience for kids growing up now.