Duncan Hines (5 page)

Hines's mother, Eliza Cornelia Duncan, was born in Warren County, Kentucky, of which Bowling Green is the county seat, on 10 August 1846. She was the daughter of Joseph Dillard Duncan and Jane Covington Duncan. Eliza, known as Cornelia, was raised near Warren County's Browning, Kentucky.
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The story of how Cornelia met her husband is an interesting one. During the Civil War Edward Hines was riding with some troops across a field and Cornelia, running an errand for her mother, was walking to a neighbor's house. When Edward and his men came upon her and stopped her, he noticed the bottle of cordial she was holding in her hand. The bottle was destined for a neighbor's mother who was ill. Edward asked her to hand it over, Cornelia refused. When he sternly repeated his demand, she persisted in her refusal, telling him the liquid was not intended for him or his troops but for a sick neighbor. When he realized she would not hand it over; he took his horse by the reins and proceeded down the road on horseback with his fellow soldiers-in-arms. As they rode away, he confided to one soldier that he was “going to come back some day and marry that girl.” And he did. After the war's conclusion, and after a romantic courtship, Edward Ludlow Hines and Eliza Cornelia Duncan married at the residence of J. D. Duncan in Bowling Green, Kentucky
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on 11 November 1869.
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A reception in a house on College Street followed, and an account of the wedding was published in the local newspaper the following day.
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Before the Civil War and after, Edward Hines sporadically attended school at various locations in Warren County and eventually graduated from Bowling Green's Warren College.
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A career in law interested him, but since Warren College did not
grant law degrees, Hines most likely read law with a local attorney and passed a bar exam to obtain his law license. To support his wife and his budding family, he was appointed to several positions, one of them being the master commissioner and clerk of the Warren County Circuit Court, a position he held for several years.
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With the exception of his time as commissioner and clerk of the county court, Edward Hines seems to have never been employed at any job for any considerable length. This circumstance undoubtedly was due to the stomach wounds he received during the war and which gradually worsened with each passing decade. In fact, as he grew older, the wounds eventually led to the deterioration of his health. During the time he served in his capacity as the Warren County circuit court clerk, he continued to practice law, but because of the precarious state of his health, he never handled more than one case at a time.
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As an extracurricular avocation, Edward Hines was active with Warren County's local Civil War Veterans group. When Jefferson Davis died in 1889, he wrote a letter to the local newspaper asserting what a fine and great man was the former President of the Confederacy.
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Hines was “an old time Democrat,”
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as was just about everyone from the South who fought on the Confederate side during the Civil War.
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He was widely regarded as an educated man by the community, and everyone knew, especially his family, of the high priority he put on reading. The elder Hines even wrote a few long, interesting treatises. One of these tracts was a combination biography and war memoir; another volume by his hand explicated his personal philosophy; still another told of his world and times. He also wrote many long, philosophical letters to members of his family.
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Edward Hines kept himself busy with one activity or another, especially when it involved Bowling Green. Regardless of his activities or whatever occupied his attention, this state of affairs remained in place until the late 1890s, when he retired to a home he had built at the mouth of the Gasper River, 10 miles northwest of Bowling Green in rural Warren County. It was in this idyllic spot that he spent his last years in comfortable contemplative isolation.
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The marriage of Edward and Cornelia Hines produced five sons and a daughter, plus four other siblings who died in infancy—not an uncommon occurrence in those days.
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Duncan Hines's oldest brother, Hiram Markham Hines, was born 9 March 1871.
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As a young man Markham worked in Bowling Green for a time before moving out west. There are two theories as to why he left Kentucky. One is that he was always in poor health, and traveling west for any disorder, then as now, was the cure prescribed. The other theory was that he was engaged to a woman in Auburn, Kentucky, who died of typhoid fever; this incident left Markham a very sad young man, and he may have left after his loved one's death. Regardless of the cause for departure, Markham's act to leave Bowling Green in the late 1880s, set an example for his younger siblings, most of whom would follow in his footsteps to seek their fortune. While Markham spent his years on the western frontier, he wrote his father and siblings frequently, often detailing for them the outlaws he had seen and the adventures he had experienced. It was a thrill for his younger brothers and sister when the postman approached the house and handed them a letter containing new stories from the land beyond the Mississippi River. When news from Markham would arrive at the Duncan household, Joseph Duncan would reply to his grandson with a letter, often allowing little Duncan to scribble notes to his older brother at the bottom of the page. One cute surviving comment from Duncan, characteristic of a boy his age, had him asking his brother to shoot a jackrabbit for him. Very little is known about Markham Hines. He moved frequently, eventually returning to Bowling Green to enter the Spanish-American War of 1898. At the war's conclusion, most of his time was spent caring for his aging and ailing father.
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His own health was in perilous shape as well, and at age 46 on 10 October 1917, Markham Hines died in his father's home.
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A year after Markham's birth, a second son was born to Edward and Cornelia Hines on 8 April 1872; unfortunately, the child died on 13 May. The boy was never named.
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Annie Duncan Hines, Edward and Cornelia's only surviving daughter, was born on 5 April 1873. Following her mother's death,
she went to Frankfort to live with her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Duncan; later she attended a finishing school for girls, the Ward Seminary in Nashville. She had many suitors but only one caught her attention, a young Bowling Green grocery merchant and distant cousin, Arthur Scott Hines. After a short courtship, they were married on 23 December 1896, in Nashville, Tennessee. Their union produced three children, two of whom bore the name Duncan. Throughout the years of their marriage, Annie and Scott Hines lived in two houses in Bowling Green, one on upper Main Street and one at 902 Elm Street; the latter residence would figure prominently in Duncan Hines's later years. Scott Hines was a popular figure in Bowling Green, and was twice elected its mayor (1925-1929, 1941-1942). He died on 19 May 1942, and Annie followed his death with her own on 4 December 1951.
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. Annie, as a sister, was protective of her brothers, but particularly of her younger brother, Duncan, and throughout her life showed much concern for his safety and welfare.
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Edward and Cornelia's fourth child was named after his father. Edward Ramsey Hines was born on 14 November 1874. Like Markham, as soon as his education had been completed Ed Hines also pulled up stakes and journeyed westward. He first moved to Arizona in 1890 at the age of sixteen, but prospects for a successful life there did not materialize as he had hoped, and he later returned to Bowling Green, where he accepted a job in the Warren County Court Clerk's office under the supervision of Captain W. H. Edley. It was thought he would stay in this position, but, again like his brother, he was restless and was soon in search of another city to call home. He eventually settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he became a legal adviser to the Railroad Terminal Association, a position he held until his death on 5 December 1935.
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At the time of his death, Ed Hines's siblings had come to think of him as the most distinguished member of the clan. Ed had made a success of his life, and his brothers and sister were proud to claim him as one of their own.
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The fifth child from Edward and Cornelia's marriage, a son, William Warner Hines, was born in Bowling Green on 23
December 1875. Warner, as he came to be known, attended local public schools, St. Columba Academy, and Ogden College before serving in the Spanish-American War as a member of Company B in the Third Volunteer Infantry. Warner and his brother Markham were one of eleven sets of brothers serving in Company B.
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After the war he married Martha Hampton Porter at her home on Upper State Street in Bowling Green on 7 October 1905.
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Although their marriage produced no children, they adopted a son, who was already named William.
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Warner Hines was engaged in many forms of employment over the years, most of them related to the insurance industry. He worked for the Lamar Life Insurance Company of Jackson, Mississippi, a real estate firm in New Orleans, as an investment broker in Lexington, Kentucky, and an outfit that sold oil in Texas.
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Later he moved to New York to work for another insurance company. In 1932, he moved from New York to Nashville where he became an executive with the Spur Oil Distributing Company, a company that owned a chain of gas stations throughout the South. Warner, a quiet, retiring Southerner, was now not far from his boyhood home, Nashville being only an hour's drive away. After his retirement from the oil giant in 1944, Warner Hines returned to Bowling Green, where he lived out his remaining years.
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Warner had suffered from a heart ailment for years, and at 9:30 on Wednesday morning, 17 August 1948, a heart attack claimed his life. He was buried in Bowling Green alongside his brothers.
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The Hines's sixth child, Porter, was born in Bowling Green on 24 March 1878. Porter's birth came within the walls of the Hines home, in “a house in the 1200 block of College Street.” His given full name was John Porter Hines but he was always referred to by both family and friends as “Porter”.
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Named after a Civil War friend of his father,
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Porter went to the Bowling Green public schools and spent a year at St. Columba Academy, the local Catholic school, followed by a year at the Southern State Normal School. Porter, by his own admission, received inadequate
schooling because he so frequently moved between the homes of both relatives and friends.
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From 1894 onward Porter Hines held a wide variety of jobs over the years, most of them involving river navigation along Kentucky's Barren, Green, and Ohio rivers. In February 1927 Porter Hines joined the staff of Bowling Green's Western Kentucky State Teachers College, a school that eventually metamorphosed into Western Kentucky University, where he became the school's chief mechanical engineer. He must have enjoyed this line of work immensely, because he remained with this job for twenty-eight years, until 1 January 1956, when he retired at age 77.
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In 1958 Porter Hines suffered a heart attack and remained in poor health until he died at age 83 on 18 June 1961.
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Of all Duncan Hines's siblings, Porter Hines was the one that he was closest to, probably because of the close proximity in their ages. When they grew to be men, they were quite different in their demeanor. Porter grew to be a soft-spoken Southern gentleman while Duncan became the gregarious urbanite with scarcely a trace of Southern accent. While Porter was the picture of relaxation, Duncan was energetic, outgoing, always able to make everyone with whom he came in contact feel at ease. Like his older brothers, Porter would not use the strong language that Duncan was sometimes wont to blurt out in selected moments of exasperation.
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The birth of Porter Hines in 1878 was followed by Cornelia giving birth a seventh time, to a daughter, on 5 May 1879. As was the case with the Hines's second child, the girl died three months later and was not named. While Duncan Hines was Edward and Cornelia's eighth child, there were two others: a ninth child, another unnamed daughter, born on 18 June 1881 who lived only three days, and a tenth child, another unnamed son who was born on 7 November 1882 in Colorado, and lived only a day.
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The family that Edward and Cornelia had produced was irreparably upset when at 10:30
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on the Monday evening of 29 December 1884, Cornelia Hines died of pneumonia in Bowling Green at the age of 38.
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Her death caused much unrest among the
Hines household; Edward Hines, due to his war wounds, was unable to effectively look after the brood Cornelia had left behind. Being concerned for their health and welfare, he made arrangements for his children to live elsewhere. Some went to live with members of his family; others were ensconced into the homes of friends. Indeed, the Hines household was soon scattered all across the Kentucky landscape. Duncan, then only four years old, was sent to live with his grandparents in nearby Browning, Kentucky, a village in Warren County, and it was here that his love for excellent food and his first adventure in good eating began.
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Born on 26 March 1880 in the 1200 block of Adams Street
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in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Duncan Hines was the youngest of the six surviving children of Edward Ludlow Hines and Cornelia Duncan Hines.
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Joseph Dillard Duncan (1814-1905) and Jane Covington Duncan (1817-1900) lived on a sizable farm near the Morgantown pike 15 miles from Bowling Green, then an agricultural town with light industry of about 5,000.
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It was in this home that Duncan Hines and his brother Porter spent a large part of their childhood. The two boys usually stayed at their grandparents' house for the winter, sometimes remaining there a year before they went home for the summer to live a few weeks with their father.
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Joseph and Jane Duncan, who raised the boys as if they were their own, owned plenty of land on which much livestock could always be found grazing. They were both well-educated, well-to-do citizens, who were active in the community's affairs.
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