Appalachian Figures
A Grave on the Hill Above Town
On a rise above Williamsburg, Kentucky, Highland Cemetery looks out over the Cumberland foothills and the town that grew up along the Cumberland River. Cemetery listings and gravestone transcriptions for the old section record one of the most controversial names in Kentucky politics: Charles Finley, born in Williamsburg in 1865 and buried there in March 1941.
To many outside the mountains, Finley survives mainly as a line in the story of Governor William Goebel’s assassination in 1900, when newspapers across the country labeled him a suspect and a fugitive. Yet for Whitley County and the Cumberland Plateau he was also a son of a powerful local family, Kentucky’s first elected secretary of state, and the last representative of the old Eleventh Congressional District in Washington.
His life ties together courthouse politics in Williamsburg, a constitutional shift in Frankfort, one of the most bitter election crises in United States history, and the long reach of mountain Republicanism into the New Deal era.
A Whitley County Political Inheritance
Charles Finley came into a family already woven into Whitley County public life. His father, Hugh Franklin Finley, was born at Tyes Ferry in 1833, studied law, and built a career as a lawyer, Commonwealth’s Attorney, circuit judge, and eventually a Republican member of Congress. The Biographical Directory of the United States Congress identifies Charles explicitly as Hugh’s son, and notes that both men spent most of their lives in and around Williamsburg.
Local memory preserved the relationship. When Judge H. F. Finley died in 1909, a Lexington Herald notice, later reprinted in Whitley County obituary compilations, called him “the father of Charles Finley, former Secretary of State.” It is a small line, but it captures how people in the Cumberland foothills understood the younger Finley. He was not just a name from Frankfort or Washington. He was Hugh’s boy from town, heir to a Republican and Unionist tradition that had taken root in the mountain counties after the Civil War.
The Biographical Directory and the House of Representatives’ History, Art, and Archives site agree on the basics of Charles’s early life. He was born in Williamsburg on March 26, 1865, attended local “common and subscription schools,” then studied at Milligan College in Tennessee before returning to Whitley County as a coal operator, banker, and newspaper publisher. By the early 1890s, the younger Finley had already followed his father into the bar and into Republican politics.
First Elected Secretary of State
Finley entered statewide politics through the General Assembly. He won election to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1893 and represented a district that included Knox and Whitley Counties from 1894 to 1896. In November 1895, after the 1891 constitution changed how the office of secretary of state was chosen, voters across Kentucky went to the polls not only for governor but also to choose that key administrative officer directly.
According to the Kentucky Secretary of State’s own historical summary, the constitution of 1891 shifted the office from gubernatorial appointment to popular election, and the first person chosen under the new rules was Charles Finley of Whitley County. He took office in January 1896 and served through the administration of Governor William O. Bradley, the first Republican governor in Kentucky history.
The Biographical Directory credits Finley with multiple roles at once during these years. He served as secretary of state from 1896 to 1900, attended Republican state conventions, and continued to build his business interests in mining and banking. For mountain Republicans in the Cumberland Plateau, his rise showed that a man from a small county seat on the southern border could help steer state government in Frankfort.
That success would soon be overshadowed by one of the ugliest political crises in Kentucky history.
The Goebel Election and Conspiracy Allegations
The gubernatorial election of 1899 pit Republican William S. Taylor against Democrat William Goebel in a contest that combined machine politics, contested returns, and weeks of legal maneuvering in Frankfort. Goebel, a hard edged reformer from the Bluegrass, claimed that Democratic controlled boards had the right to throw out enough Republican votes to give him the governorship. Taylor insisted that he had been fairly elected. The dispute dragged on through the winter while armed partisans filled the capital.
On January 30, 1900, as Goebel walked toward the statehouse, a shot from a nearby building struck him in the chest. He was sworn in as governor on his sickbed the next day, then died shortly afterward, making him the only sitting state governor in United States history to die by assassination.
Investigators quickly focused on Taylor’s circle, which included several men from the eastern Kentucky mountains. Charles Finley had just finished his term as secretary of state and was identified in newspaper accounts as an “ex Secretary of State” allied with Taylor. Grand juries indicted multiple defendants. Among those named as alleged conspirators were Taylor himself, Caleb Powers, Finley, and other Taylor loyalists from the mountain counties.
The Pilot, a Catholic newspaper published in Boston, carried a story in April 1900 summarizing testimony by Henry Youtsey, a clerk in the state government who turned state’s evidence. The paper reported that Youtsey placed Gov. Taylor, Secretary of State Caleb Powers, and “an ex Secretary of State” named as Charles Finley among those who had agreed “in the conspiracy to remove Goebel.” Youtsey’s account, reprinted and paraphrased across the national press, became the backbone of the prosecution’s theory.
Taylor and Finley did not wait to test that theory in a Kentucky court. They fled to Indiana, where sympathetic Republican governors refused to honor Kentucky’s extradition requests. From Frankfort’s perspective, the former secretary of state had become a wanted man. From the vantage point of many Republicans in the lower Midwest, he was something closer to a political exile.
An African American newspaper captured that tension sharply. The Indianapolis Recorder, a Black weekly, referred in August 1900 to “Hon. Charles Finley, ex Secretary of State of Kentucky, but now a fugitive from injustice and a resident of the loyal State of Indiana.” In the Recorder’s hands, Finley’s story became a way to talk about regional loyalty and the legacies of the Civil War. Kentucky might still be wracked by partisan violence, but Indiana was presented as a safe harbor.
For nearly a decade Finley lived under the cloud of those indictments. Trials in the Goebel case dragged on. Powers and others were convicted and later retried, while appeals and political shifts slowly undermined the prosecution’s case.
Pardoned but Never Tried
The end of Finley’s exile came not through acquittal but through clemency. In 1909, Republican Governor Augustus Willson issued sweeping pardons to Taylor, Finley, and the remaining defendants who still faced charges in the Goebel case. Contemporary coverage in the Louisville Courier Journal, echoed by later summaries, described the move as a bold decision that effectively closed the legal chapter of the assassination story.
Historical Crime Detective’s survey of the Goebel case, drawing heavily on original court records and newspapers, notes that Youtsey’s confession implicated “ex Secretary of State Charles Finley” alongside Taylor and Powers, but that the 1909 pardons freed all of them except Youtsey from the possibility of trial or imprisonment. Finley returned to Kentucky with his legal status cleared yet his public reputation forever entangled with a murdered governor.
Back home in Williamsburg, however, he slipped back into a more familiar role as a Republican organizer and businessman. Political reference works such as The Political Graveyard list him as chair of the Republican executive committee for the Eleventh Congressional District from 1912 to 1928, a position that kept him at the center of mountain Republican strategy.
Finley v. Rose and Local Power
Finley’s name also surfaces in Kentucky appellate reports during this middle period. In an early twentieth century case styled Finley v. Rose, County Judge, et al., the Kentucky Court of Appeals heard an appeal out of Whitley County with Finley listed among the plaintiffs. Later courts summarized the ruling as a decision about how to handle deficiencies in printed ballots and the authority of local officials to supply replacements when ballots ran short.
Even without delving into every procedural detail, the case fits a broader pattern. Finley remained deeply involved in the legal and political mechanics of elections in his home county, and he was willing to take disputes from the courthouse to the state’s highest court when he believed local authority had overstepped or state law had failed to anticipate real conditions on the ground.
From Suspect to Congressman
In 1930, three decades after he had fled to Indiana to avoid arrest, Finley’s career took one more sharp turn. When John M. Robsion resigned his seat in Congress to accept appointment to the United States Senate, Republicans in the Eleventh District turned to Finley as his replacement.
The Biographical Directory and House historical summary agree that Finley won the special election to fill the vacancy in February 1930, then secured a full term later that year. He served in the House of Representatives through March 3, 1933, when redistricting eliminated the Eleventh District. In a neat bit of historical symmetry, the last congressman from Kentucky’s Eleventh District was the same man who had chaired its Republican committee for years and who had once been driven from the state over a contested election.
During his short tenure in Washington, Finley aligned with the conservative wing of the Republican Party that resisted many New Deal style expansions of federal power. A glimpse of his thinking comes from a January 23 speech recorded in the Congressional Record and later quoted in a 1933 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. Introducing a discussion of defense and spending, the journal reproduced his opening line from the House floor: “Mr. Speaker, they say that wealth makes a nation conservative.”
The sentence is brief, but it captures a theme that ran through Depression era debates. For Finley and other mountain Republicans representing poor but fiercely self reliant districts, federal spending could look like both threat and opportunity. The full speech, preserved in the Congressional Record, wrestles with questions of preparedness and economy in the shadow of the First World War and the economic collapse of 1929.
Finley left Congress in 1933, choosing not to run again as the district map changed and Democratic strength grew. He retired from business and public life in Williamsburg.
Highland Cemetery and Local Memory
On March 18, 1941, Charles Finley died in Williamsburg at the age of seventy five. Secondary sources, drawing on a Louisville Courier Journal obituary titled “Goebel Slaying Suspect, Charles Finley, Dies,” note that the headline still tied his name more strongly to the 1900 assassination than to his later congressional service.
Records from the House of Representatives and biographical directories agree that he was buried in Highland Cemetery above town. Cemetery surveys and online memorials list other Finleys in the same ground, including extended family and neighbors from Williamsburg’s professional class.
In that hillside cemetery, the tangled strands of his life come back together. The grave site marks him as a local businessman and public servant from Whitley County. Congressional and genealogical references remember him as the son of Judge Hugh F. Finley, part of a family that helped shape Republican politics in southeastern Kentucky across two generations. National narratives about the Goebel assassination freeze him in an earlier moment as a suspect who never stood trial.
For Appalachian historians, paying attention to all three stories at once reveals something important about the region. Men like Finley did not fit neatly into the stereotype of isolated mountaineers. They operated in local courts and banks, statewide offices, interstate exile, and finally Congress, all while anchored to a particular small town that claimed them in life and in death.
Why Charles Finley’s Story Matters in Appalachia
Charles Finley’s trajectory from Williamsburg schoolboy to secretary of state, indicted exile, and Depression era congressman offers a window into how Appalachian communities intersected with state and national politics. His rise shows the strength of a Republican tradition rooted in Unionist loyalty and family networks in the mountain counties. His fall into suspicion during the Goebel crisis highlights how those same networks could be painted as dangerous when partisan violence erupted.
The fact that he returned home after a gubernatorial pardon, resumed local influence, and ultimately won election to Congress reminds us that political reputations in the mountains were shaped as much by personal ties and local loyalties as by big city headlines. Highland Cemetery’s hillside, dotted with Finley stones, stands as a physical record of that continuity.
Telling his story from the vantage point of Williamsburg and Whitley County does not settle every question about his role in the Goebel affair or his views in Congress. It does, however, place him back where he began and ended his life, in an Appalachian town whose people knew him as more than a fugitive’s name in a distant newspaper.
Sources & Further Reading
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress entries for Hugh F. Finley and Charles Finley, including the consolidated PDF volume covering “FINLEY, Charles,” and the modern Bioguide Retro listing, which provide baseline dates, offices, and family relationships.GovInfo+3Bioguide Retro+3GovInfo+3
U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art, and Archives, “FINLEY, Charles,” which summarizes his Williamsburg origins, business career, service in the Kentucky House of Representatives, tenure as secretary of state, and later congressional service, as well as his burial in Highland Cemetery.History, Art & Archives+1
Kentucky Secretary of State, “A History of the Office of the Secretary of State,” and “Trivia – Secretary of State,” which explain the shift from appointed to elected secretaries under the 1891 constitution and identify Charles Finley of Whitley County as the first person chosen to the office by popular vote.Secretary of State+1
Contemporary newspaper coverage and later syntheses of the William Goebel assassination, including the Pilot’s “The Murder of Gov. Goebel,” African American reporting in the Indianapolis Recorder, and modern narrative summaries such as Historical Crime Detective’s “The Murder of Kentucky Governor William Goebel, 1900,” all of which highlight how witnesses and prosecutors placed “ex Secretary of State Charles Finley” among the alleged conspirators and how Governor Augustus Willson’s 1909 pardons freed him from trial.Grunge+4BC Newspapers+4Hoosier State Chronicles+4
U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, “Professional Notes,” March 1933, which quotes the opening line of a House speech by “Hon. Charles Finley of Kentucky” and points back to the underlying Congressional Record for his remarks on national wealth and conservatism during his term in the Seventy second Congress.U.S. Naval Institute+1
Whitley County cemetery records, genealogical compilations such as Find a Grave’s Highland Cemetery listing, Kozee’s Early Families of Eastern and Southeastern Kentucky, and Whitley County obituary transcriptions, which together confirm the burial of both Hugh F. Finley and Charles Finley near Williamsburg and preserve local memory of their family ties and public careers.Political Graveyard+4Find a Grave+4KygenWeb+4