Sherry Chandler

More on Nancy Hanks (the trotting horse)

Back at the end of June, I made a post about how developers were digging up Nancy Hanks to make room for a super Wal-Mart. Nancy Hanks was a world-famous trotting horse and her grave was on the old Hamburg farm. In that post, I recounted an anecdote about some tourists who went to Nancy Hanks’s grave thinking they were visiting a shrine to Abraham Lincoln’s mother.

Now Don Daniels writes to point out that the horse may have been named for another Nancy altogether.

The following excerpt from July 1955 United States Trotting Association Hoof Beats magazine:

NANCY HANKS
…The general belief is that the filly was named after the mother of Abraham Lincoln, one of Kentucky’s greatest sons. In the old records, however, there is a dissenting voice. It seems there had been a family living near the old farm. The beautiful daughter Nancy had fallen in love with a young man of the neighborhood. The head of the family didn’t care for the youthful swain and broke up the romance as well as the impending marriage. Nancy, in a fit of despondency, hung herself. Kentuckians were great hands for folk songs and it was not long before there was a ballad about the sad affair and the ill-fated maiden was not given her family name but was called Nancy Hanks. The latter part of the name coming from the rope that was the instrument of departure.

More information in Don’s comment at the original post.

I looked “hank” up. One of its definitions is “a coil of rope” and maybe the word was part of common parlance back in those days. The theory seems a little overcomplicated to me, but folk wit is strange sometimes. Anybody know anything about this old folk song?

On a related note, I see in this week’s Citizen Advertiser that Historic Paris and Bourbon County is seeking to compile a list of horse graveyards. Well, they call them “cemeteries.” Since we are about to get a super Wal-Mart of our own, I suppose this is a wise precaution.

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