Appalachian Figures
When racing fans see the red and white Ramsey silks flash past the finish line at Churchill Downs or Keeneland, they are watching a global operation that grew from some very small places on the Cumberland. The story of Kenneth Lee and Sarah Kathern Ramsey usually gets told in the language of purse money, Eclipse Awards, and Breeders’ Cup wins. It is also a Knox County story.
Before there was Ramsey Farm in Jessamine County, there were coal camp houses at Bimble and Artemus. Before Kitten’s Joy, there was a one room school on Jeff’s Creek, a young couple driving back over the mountains from Lexington, and a pair of Knox County children who kept sending money home and then, in time, began sending whole buildings.
This is a look at Ken and Sarah Ramsey through the lens of Appalachia and Knox County: a coal miner’s daughter and a TVA mechanic’s son whose names now greet students every day on the hill above Union College.
Bimble and Artemus
Sarah Kathern Broughton entered the world in 1939 at Bimble, an unincorporated community a few miles east of Barbourville. Knox Funeral Home’s obituary places her there as the daughter of Jim Tom and Myrtle Mills Broughton and notes that she was always proud to call herself a coal miner’s daughter.
Coal shaped that part of Knox County in obvious and less obvious ways. Mines dotted the hills, and wages from underground work paid for school clothes, church suppers, and college tuitions that would carry some children away from the county while others stayed close to home. In Sarah’s case, her father’s work helped launch a life that would range from Jeff’s Creek to Nicholasville and yet always bend back toward Barbourville.
A few miles away in Artemus, another Knox County child was growing up in a house that, as one writer later put it, did not even have indoor plumbing. Ken Ramsey’s father worked as a mechanic for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and his parents did not have the family connections you expect to see behind a Kentucky horse farm. The Congressional Record tribute that Congressman Hal Rogers entered into the House records him simply as the son of a TVA mechanic from Artemus, the kind of small coal town that appears on road signs near Barbourville.
From Artemus, the nearest he came to horses in his boyhood was an uncle’s pair of mules. Yet the racing world had already started to tug at him. In an interview with the Northern Kentucky Tribune, he remembered persuading an aunt to take him to Churchill Downs on a Christmas shopping trip to Louisville, so that he could at least peer through the gate at the Twin Spires.
By the time he finished high school, Ramsey had pushed his way to the top of his class. The New Yorker later told the story of how he discovered that he was half a grade point ahead of another student for valedictorian and resolved to keep the lead, encouraged by a father who valued education even though he never finished the eighth grade. That drive to stay just ahead of the competition would become a lifelong habit.
Hometown sweethearts and a Jeff’s Creek school
Ken and Sarah grew up in the same small Knox County world. Later profiles describe them as “hometown sweethearts” from tiny Artemus, a phrase that captures both the scale of the place and the length of their partnership.
They married on 6 September 1958, a date preserved in funeral home and newspaper obituaries. Before their story became a national racing saga, it was a familiar Knox County pattern. Ken went off to the Navy, then to college on the GI Bill. Sarah headed to Union College in Barbourville, part of a generation of local students who walked up to the hilltop campus and into classrooms that had drawn Knox County families for decades.
She completed her degree with the Union College class of 1962. Her first teaching job kept her in the county, not far from where she had grown up. The Knox Funeral Home obituary remembers her starting her career in a one room school on Jeff’s Creek, teaching grades one through eight.
That classroom placed her in the last years of an older Appalachian school system. The one room school had been standard across Knox County for generations, and by the early 1960s those buildings were slowly closing as consolidation and bus routes reshaped rural education. Jeff’s Creek was remote enough that the old model lingered there a little longer. For Sarah, it meant walking into a tiny building each morning and facing a room of children whose family lives looked a lot like the one she had grown up in herself.
While Sarah taught, Ken’s path took him from Artemus to the wider world. He joined the Navy, then used the GI Bill to complete his college degree at the University of Kentucky, balancing classes with work and horse racing trips to Keeneland that would change the course of his life.
“I made a little bit of money”
Most racing stories pick up the Ramseys’ tale when they are already wealthy. The Appalachian parts of the story sit just below that surface. In the ESPN profile that followed him to the Breeders’ Cup in Texas, Kenny Rice sketched out the sequence. Ken Ramsey grew up in Artemus, won a scholarship as valedictorian, served in the Navy, married his hometown sweetheart, and then came home to work for a trucking company before branching out into real estate and eventually the cellular phone business.
In his own telling, Ramsey likes to underplay the turning points. In the Northern Kentucky Tribune piece, he talked about making “a little bit of money” in real estate before buying his first racehorse, which turned out to be a blind claimer named Red Redeemer who never won a race for him.
The failure did not slow him down. Through the 1970s and 1980s, he built a patchwork of trucking, real estate, and media investments. The Kentucky Directory of Business and Industry later listed him as chief executive officer of Mountain Advocate Media Inc. in Barbourville, tying him directly into the ownership of the county’s long running newspaper.
Cell phones became the real pivot. America’s Best Racing notes that the Ramseys developed a cellular telephone business, built it across several states, and then sold it in 1994 for around thirty nine million dollars, money that would go into Kentucky land and bloodstock.
That sale marked the moment when two Knox County kids had the capital to buy one of the most storied farms in the Bluegrass.
Almahurst and the making of Ramsey Farm
The land they bought in 1994 already carried more than a century of Kentucky horse history. Almahurst Farm, along Harrodsburg Road near the Jessamine Fayette line, grew from Revolutionary War land grants awarded to James Knight and had become famous for producing the 1918 Kentucky Derby winner Exterminator and the Standardbred trotting star Greyhound.
Jessamine County historical work and racing writers both emphasize Almahurst’s layered past: a mix of trotting stock, Thoroughbred foals, and a long family tenure under the Knights before later owners carried it into the twentieth century. By the time Ken and Sarah arrived, the farm had passed through several hands and contained a mix of aging barns and valuable pasture.
In 1994 they purchased a large piece of Almahurst and promptly recast it as Ramsey Farm. They did not erase the property’s Kentucky history so much as layer their own onto it. The Almahurst historic marker still stands on the land and the old highway nearby is now called Almahurst Lane, a reminder that earlier eras remain under the Ramsey name.
Over the next two decades, the Ramseys expanded their holdings until the farm sprawled over more than two thousand acres, and in 2015 they added the neighboring historic estate Chaumiere du Prairie, a nineteenth century house and acreage that BloodHorse highlighted when Ken submitted the winning bid.
From the outside, the transformation looked like a typical Bluegrass success story: a businessman from Eastern Kentucky makes good, buys into horse country, and builds a massive farm. For Knox County, the purchase felt more like one of its own moving farther out into the world while still carrying Artemus and Bimble along.
Kitten’s Joy and a Knox County name in the record books
The horses are what fixed the Ramseys’ names into the racing record books. Their racing operation has been covered in countless profiles, but a few themes stand out when you read them beside Appalachian and Knox County sources.
They built their stable around Kitten’s Joy, a chestnut colt foaled in 2001 from a mare named Kitten’s First. The mare’s name reached back to the couple’s courtship in Knox County. “Kitten” was Ken’s nickname for Sarah when they were dating in the 1950s, and the Chicago Sun Times obituary notes that Sarah’s nickname inspired not only Kitten’s First but the entire naming convention that followed.
Kitten’s Joy became the 2004 American champion turf horse and later a leading sire in North America. The Ramseys made the unusual decision to support him largely with their own broodmares, many of them purchased out of claiming races, which let them keep control over large numbers of his offspring. That in turn led to whole race cards where horses with “Kitten” in their names seemed to fill the program.
The horses with Knox County roots in their names carried the Ramseys to the very top of the sport. America’s Best Racing summarizes their record this way. The couple have won four Eclipse Awards as leading owners in North America and two more as leading breeders. Churchill Downs statistics and racing coverage make clear that they have been leading owners at the track for entire seasons at a time, setting records for wins at both Churchill and Keeneland.
When Sarah died in 2022, Associated Press coverage noted that the Ramseys had 2,241 winners and more than ninety eight million dollars in purse earnings, figures drawn from Equibase and repeated in the racing press.
Their Breeders’ Cup record tells the same story. Horses like Furthest Land, Bobby’s Kitten, and Stephanie’s Kitten turned the red and white silks into familiar sights in the winner’s circle at Santa Anita and Keeneland.
Yet Ken Ramsey often explained his attitude toward all of that in the same language that made sense in Knox County. In one interview he joked that when you are on the bottom, the only way to go is up, and he described his outlook simply as a “winning culture” built from trial, error, and stubbornness.
“Never forgot their roots in Knox County”
As the horses won in New York, California, Dubai, and the Caribbean, the Ramseys kept their names in circulation back home.
The strongest statement of that comes in Hal Rogers’s 2012 tribute. During a series of regional meetings in his district, the congressman presented Ken Ramsey with a framed copy of the Congressional Record entry honoring him as a Union College trustee and successful thoroughbred owner. The press release that accompanied the visit pointedly noted that Ken and Sarah “never forgot their roots in Knox County” and had donated time and resources to promote progress at Union College and across southern Kentucky.
The Congressional Record entry itself, printed that same year, paints an Appalachian biography in the formal language of Congress. Rogers describes both Ken and Sarah as natives of Artemus in Knox County. He notes his father’s work as a TVA mechanic and her father’s work in the coal mines, emphasizes that Ken used the GI Bill to finish college, and highlights their role in transforming Almahurst into Ramsey Farm. He also stresses their philanthropy, particularly to Union College.
Union College documents show how that philanthropy took shape. Ken Ramsey appears on trustee lists in the college catalog, and a 2022 news release celebrating the renewal of President Marcia Hawkins’s contract credits the Ramseys as key figures behind the Ramsey Center for Health and Natural Sciences.
That building, for which the couple are the namesakes, occupies the former Knox County Hospital property that loomed above Barbourville for much of the twentieth century. Union alumni publications have noted that Ken Ramsey helped secure the old hospital property for the college so that it could become a home for health and science programs.
Today the Ramsey Center houses state of the art classrooms and labs along with the Edna Jenkins Mann School of Nursing. Student life pages on Union’s website matter of factly list offices and dining services located inside the building, a small everyday reminder that a Knox County coal camp romance now anchors the physical plant of the county’s historic college.
Genealogy, reunions, and keeping Bimble and Artemus together
If Ken built the horses and the towers, Sarah built the family tree. Local sources are clear that she did not see her work at Ramsey Farm as separate from her work as a genealogist and family historian.
The Knox Funeral Home obituary devotes an unusual amount of space to her decades of genealogical research. It notes that she devoted “countless hours” to tracing both her Broughton and Mills lines and the Ramsey families, work that took her all the way to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. Legacy.com versions of her obituary underline the same habits and add that she organized family reunions on the farm and in Knox County, making sure cousins from Artemus, Bimble, and beyond stayed in touch.
Those details matter for understanding how she understood her own life. In racing coverage she appears as co owner, co breeder, and the quietly smiling woman beside Ken in winner’s circle photos, sometimes in a wheelchair after a major stroke in 2007. In local sources she appears as teacher, genealogist, matriarch, and alumna of Union College’s business program, inducted into the Union College Business Hall of Fame and honored in Kentucky sports circles as part of a record breaking ownership team.
For Knox County families who appear in her files, the big numbers from Equibase mattered less than the way she kept track of who was buried where, who had moved to which state, and which branch of the Broughtons or Ramseys someone belonged to. That kind of quiet historical work is a familiar Knox County habit, usually carried on in church basements and living rooms rather than at Churchill Downs.
Tracing the Ramseys through Knox County records
For anyone who wants to dig further into the Ramseys’ Knox County story, several record series offer promising paths.
Union College holds a rich run of yearbooks, commencement programs, catalogs, and alumni magazines. Those records can place Ken with the class of 1953 and Sarah with the class of 1962, document their later service on the board of trustees, and trace the planning and dedication of the Ramsey Center for Health and Natural Sciences.
The Mountain Advocate’s archives in Barbourville likely hold clippings on Ken’s school days in Artemus, early mentions of his business career, and coverage of the Ramsey Center’s opening and Hal Rogers’s 2012 visit. The Kentucky Directory of Business and Industry confirms his later role with Mountain Advocate Media Inc., which helps tie business records to the human story.
Knox County vital records and deed books should preserve the couple’s 1958 marriage license and early property transactions, while Jessamine County deeds would track the expansion of Ramsey Farm and the purchase of Chaumiere du Prairie.
Church records add another layer. The Legacy obituary lists Sarah as a member of Southern Heights Baptist Church and notes that her funeral was conducted at East Barbourville Baptist Church with burial in Barbourville Cemetery. Registers from those congregations and the cemetery’s plot records can help future researchers pin down dates, kinship connections, and the local religious world that framed their lives.
Finally, the audiovisual record is unusually rich. The Keeneland produced video “Thoroughbred Owners: Kenneth L. and Sarah K. Ramsey” and later interviews capture Ken telling much of this story in his own words, with Sarah at his side. Paired with the Congressional Record and local obituaries, those videos serve as primary documents for how the couple wanted their story told during their lifetimes.
Knox County in the winner’s circle
In racing coverage, Ken Ramsey often appears as a larger than life character. Writers emphasize his bright red jackets, his habit of leading his own horses into the winner’s circle, and his relentless desire to be first in every standings table. Read beside local sources from Knox County and Union College, that public persona looks like the outgrowth of something more familiar.
He is the Artemus valedictorian whose father promised him fifty dollars if he finished first in his class. She is the Bimble coal miner’s daughter who taught in a one room school on Jeff’s Creek and then spent her spare time piecing together a family tree that stretched across Appalachian hollers and Bluegrass farms.
Their lives followed a trajectory common to many Appalachian families born in the mid twentieth century. Military service and the GI Bill opened doors. Trucking and real estate work pulled them toward regional centers like Lexington. New technologies, in this case cellular telephones, allowed them to convert hard work and careful risk taking into wealth far beyond what a coal miner or TVA mechanic could have imagined.
What makes the Ramsey story particularly Appalachian is the way it loops back. Their money and their horses operate on a national and international scale, but their philanthropy and much of their identity remain tethered to Knox County and to a small college campus above Barbourville.
Students who swipe their ID cards at the Ramsey Center today may never have heard of Bimble, Artemus, or Jeff’s Creek. For those who know where to look in the records, though, every time the red and white silks flash across a television screen, they carry a little bit of Knox County with them.
Sources & Further Reading
Knox Funeral Home, “Ramsey, Sarah Kathern (1939–2022)” obituary, Barbourville, Kentucky, with details on her birth at Bimble, teaching career, genealogical work, and family connections.Knox Funeral Home
Legacy.com and Lexington Herald Leader obituary entries for “Sarah Kathern Ramsey,” which expand on her teaching, church membership, genealogical research trips, and extended family ties in Artemus and Knox County.Wikipedia+1
Hal Rogers, “Rogers Shares Legislative Update and Presents Awards During Regional Meetings,” press release, 22 October 2012, and associated Congressional Record tribute to Kenneth L. Ramsey, documenting the couple’s Artemus origins, careers, racing achievements, and philanthropy to Union College.U.S. Congressman Hal Rogers+1
Union College catalogs and news releases regarding the Ramsey Center for Health and Natural Sciences, including trustee lists and summaries of how the former Knox County Hospital property was converted into a nursing and science complex.Explore Kentucky History+3Explore Kentucky History+3Open Plaques+3
Jessamine County historical writing on Almahurst Farm, especially the Kaintuckeean article “Almahurst Farm” and related Paulick Report “Kentucky Farm Time Capsule” pieces, which trace the farm’s history from the Knight family and Derby winner Exterminator to its purchase and expansion as Ramsey Farm.The Kaintuckeean+2Paulick Report+2
Tom Pedulla, “An Extraordinary Path to Top for Ramseys,” America’s Best Racing, 1 January 2021, for a narrative overview of their rise from Artemus to leading owners and breeders, their cell phone business, Kitten’s Joy, and their Eclipse Awards.America’s Best Racing
Liane Crossley, “Ever the optimist, Ramsey likes chances with likely longshot but ‘fearless’ International Star,” Northern Kentucky Tribune, 20 April 2015, for Ken’s own memories of Artemus, Churchill Downs, and the purchase of Almahurst.NKyTribune
James Scully, “Ramsey & Kitten’s Joy in Breeders’ Cup spotlight,” Brisnet, 26 October 2013, on their Breeders’ Cup runners and the development of Kitten’s Joy as a stallion.Brisnet
Kenny Rice, “Owner Ramsey should feel right at home in Texas,” ESPN, 19 October 2004, and Igor Guryashkin, “The Most Successful Owner at Churchill Downs,” The New Yorker, 1 May 2015, for biographical sketches that emphasize Artemus, education, and Ken’s competitive personality.ESPN.com+1
Beth Harris, “Top thoroughbred breeder and owner Sarah Ramsey dies at 83,” Associated Press (Chicago Sun Times and other outlets), 2022, summarizing the Ramseys’ racing statistics, Equibase figures, and their partnership as co owners and breeders.