Appalachian Figures
On a cold December day in 1927 thousands of Kentuckians crowded into Frankfort to watch a mountain lawyer from Barbourville take the oath as the Commonwealth’s forty second governor. Born in a Laurel County log cabin and educated at Union College and Valparaiso University, Flemon Davis “Flem” Sampson carried into office both the ambitions of Knox County Republicans and the suspicions of Bluegrass Democrats.
His four year term unfolded in a tangle of highway patronage fights, textbook scandals, and a bitter struggle over whether to dam Cumberland Falls for hydroelectric power. As unemployment climbed in the eastern coalfields and Harlan County miners organized, Sampson sent the Kentucky National Guard into the mountains after the Battle of Evarts, a decision that etched his name into the long memory of the Harlan County mine wars.
For Appalachia, Flem D. Sampson was more than a governor in a marble capitol. He was a Laurel County schoolteacher, a Barbourville attorney, a Knox County judge and circuit judge, and later an aging jurist whose portrait still hangs on tours of Union College and along Knox County history trails. This story draws on letters, court opinions, photographs, and local folklore to follow his path from log cabin to courthouse square to the Governor’s Mansion and back again.
This is the story of the “plain old Flem” who never stopped thinking of himself as a Barbourville man.
From a Laurel County Log Cabin to Union College
Flem Sampson’s life began in a log cabin near London in Laurel County on 23 January 1875, the ninth of ten children born to Joseph and Emoline Kellam Sampson. When he was thirteen the family moved across the county line to Barbourville, tying his boyhood to a small courthouse town that would shape his politics and his career.
As a teenager he taught at a one room school on Indian Creek in Laurel County, part of a web of subscription and public schools that served scattered mountain neighborhoods. He then enrolled at Union College in Barbourville and later at Valparaiso University in Indiana, where classmates remembered him as an active student leader who completed a classical course of study in 1894 and earned a law degree under the school’s pattern of combining campus work with office reading.
Returning to Knox County, Sampson read law, passed the bar exam in 1895, and opened an office on or near Barbourville’s public square. He became city attorney, helped organize local utilities, and served as president of the First National Bank and the Barbourville Water Works Company, an early example of the way mountain professionals moved easily between law, finance, and public service.
In 1897 he married Susie Steele of Knox County. Studio portraits in the University of Louisville’s photographic collections show her as a fashionable young woman in flapper era beads and finger waves, labeled simply “wife of governor” on the back of one 1928 print. Together they raised three daughters, Pauline, Emolyn, and Helen Katherine, whose images appear alongside their parents in Herald Post photos of the family in a driveway in the late 1920s.
Lawyer, Judge, and a Knox County Reputation
Sampson’s political career began at the county level. Voters elected him Knox County judge in 1906, putting him in charge of roads, taxes, and county government at a time when the coming of coal and railroads was beginning to change southeast Kentucky. In 1911 he moved up to the circuit bench in the Thirty Fourth Judicial District, hearing both civil and criminal cases for a region that included Knox and, eventually, some of the coal counties to the east.
One surviving letter from 1909, preserved in the Filson Historical Society’s collections, shows Sampson’s voice from his years as a local judge. Writing from Barbourville to an institutional superintendent about a Knox County boy named Foster Hale, he challenged the suggestion that the boy was “feeble minded” and argued that, in his view, the youth’s behavior reflected environment and opportunity more than innate incapacity. It is an early glimpse of a jurist trying, however imperfectly, to navigate the period’s crude language about disability and juvenile justice.
Contemporaries in Knox County also turned Sampson into a figure in local folklore. A poem titled “The Bootlegger” in a Knox County folklore collection, later highlighted in The Knox Countian, portrayed “Flem D. Sampson, now Circuit Judge of Knox County” alongside the moonshiners and bootleggers who crowded his docket. The verses both teased and praised him, suggesting that mountain communities understood his strict enforcement of liquor laws as part of the everyday drama of courthouse life.
By 1916 Sampson’s legal career had carried him to Frankfort. Elected to the Kentucky Court of Appeals, then the state’s highest court, he soon became a familiar name in law reports. In 1923 he was elevated to chief justice and re elected to the court the following year. For a time he stood as the rare Appalachian Republican who had reached the top of the state’s judicial hierarchy.
Campaigning as “Plain Old Flem”
In the 1920s Kentucky politics revolved around more than party labels. Prohibition, gambling on horse races, and a proposed severance tax on coal divided Democrats and Republicans alike. When Sampson sought the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1927 he drew support from a coalition of eastern Kentucky Republicans and the powerful “Jockey Club” machine that wanted to protect parimutuel betting at the tracks.
The Democrats nominated former governor and senator J. C. W. Beckham, a prohibitionist whose opposition to racetrack betting alarmed Louisville and Lexington business interests. The Louisville Herald Post responded with a lavish broadside titled “From Log Cabin to Capitol: Judge Flem D. Sampson,” tracing the Knox County judge’s rise from Laurel County cabin to chief justice and presenting him as a morally upright, self made mountain man who would still look kindly on Kentucky’s signature industry.
On the stump Sampson leaned into that image. As later historians have noted, he contrasted his origins with Beckham’s more aristocratic profile and invited voters to “come into my office and say ‘Howdy Flem’,” a line that signaled both accessibility and mountain informality. His opponents mocked him as “Flem Flam Flem,” but the insult did little harm in deeply Republican eastern Kentucky.
In November 1927 Sampson won the governorship by more than thirty two thousand votes even as every other Republican on the statewide ticket lost by narrow margins, a pattern that fueled rumors of artfully targeted vote fraud but produced no successful legal challenges. It also meant that he entered office with a Democratic lieutenant governor, James Breathitt Jr., and a Democratic legislature, an arrangement that would dominate his four years in Frankfort.
Governing with His Hands Tied
The 1928 General Assembly gave Sampson a limited list of accomplishments. Legislators created the Kentucky Progress Commission, an early state economic development agency, and designated “My Old Kentucky Home” as the state song, but they largely ignored his policy agenda. Kentucky historian James C. Klotter later described the session as almost a “do nothing” meeting, a judgment that reflected how little of Sampson’s program survived Democratic scrutiny.
After the session, a grand jury indicted the governor for allegedly accepting gifts from textbook publishers. The charges came in the wake of an earlier scandal over how the State Textbook Commission had adopted schoolbooks, a controversy already familiar from the short governorship of James D. Black. The indictment against Sampson was eventually dismissed, yet the affair fed a narrative that tied Republican administrations to textbook companies and old style patronage.
At the same time, legal battles over appointments to the textbook commission landed in the Kentucky Court of Appeals under captions like Bell v. Sampson and McChesney v. Sampson. The court’s opinions wrestled with what should happen when a governor made appointments that the Senate never confirmed, and whether a governor could revoke an appointment once an appointee had entered office. In one ruling the judges held that non action by the Senate did not count as confirmation and that such appointments lapsed at adjournment, creating vacancies the governor could fill. In another they limited the governor’s power to remove appointees who had already qualified and begun to serve. Together those cases turned Sampson himself into a test of how far Kentucky’s executive power could reach under the state constitution.
The fiercest fight concerned highways. Sampson’s predecessor, Democrat William J. Fields, had appointed former congressman Ben Johnson, a Democratic political boss, as highway commissioner. The department controlled nearly half of the state budget, so control of its jobs and contracts meant enormous patronage power. Sampson had promised to keep Johnson in exchange for support, but by late 1929 he removed him and installed his own choice. The Democratic legislature retaliated in 1930 with a law that transferred appointment of the highway commissioner to a three person board composed of the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, effectively outvoting Sampson. When the governor vetoed the bill, lawmakers overrode him and restored Johnson to office.
By the end of the 1930 session the General Assembly had stripped Sampson of many of his appointment powers, including most control over the textbook commission. Klotter and other historians note that with state boards and commissions moved beyond his reach, Lieutenant Governor Breathitt emerged as the effective head of state government while Sampson remained governor in name.
Textbooks, Dams, and the Cumberland Falls Fight
If textbooks and highways defined one set of battles, conservation and power generation defined another. In 1929 and 1930, utilities magnate Samuel Insull pursued a plan to dam Cumberland Falls on the Cumberland River and harness its drop for hydroelectric power. Sampson, aligned with business and utility interests, argued that the project would bring jobs and investment to a state already feeling the first shocks of the Great Depression.
Conservationists in Kentucky, including Courier Journal editor Tom Wallace, organized a statewide campaign to save the falls. They favored an alternative proposal by DuPont heir T. Coleman du Pont, who offered to buy the land and donate it to the state for use as a park. Legislative hearings and national press coverage painted Sampson as sympathetic to the power companies. A Time magazine “National Affairs” column recounted how he testified alongside allies for Insull’s plan while critics warned of private control over a scenic wonder.
The General Assembly ultimately voted to accept the du Pont offer and passed legislation giving the State Park Commission authority to use eminent domain to secure the site. Sampson vetoed the bill, but legislators overrode him. In 1931 Cumberland Falls opened as one of Kentucky’s early state parks. Later tourist histories make a point of noting that it came into public hands over the objections of a Republican governor from the mountains who had favored a dam.
Coal, the National Guard, and the Battle of Evarts
As political battles raged in Frankfort, the coalfields of eastern Kentucky sank into crisis. By 1930 unemployment in some counties reached forty percent. Mine owners cut wages and resisted unionization, while the United Mine Workers of America tried to organize miners who were desperate for bargaining power.
In Harlan County a tense standoff grew between union miners, coal operators, and local officials. The sheriff added dozens of deputies who acted as mine guards and helped enforce blacklists against union members. Union leaders petitioned Governor Sampson to remove the sheriff and county judge, arguing that local officials were using the law to crush organizing efforts, but Frankfort did not intervene.
Violence escalated in the spring of 1931. On 5 May gunfire erupted near the town of Evarts as armed guards and miners clashed along a mountain road. Three guards and one miner were killed in what newspapers soon called the Battle of Evarts. Two days later Sampson ordered the Kentucky National Guard into Harlan County with instructions to disarm both miners and mine guards and to restore order. All of the strike’s key leaders were arrested on various charges, and the union drive collapsed.
Carletta A. Bush’s dissertation on miner preachers and the Harlan County mine wars uses state records and press reports to argue that Sampson’s decision effectively aligned the state with coal operators. The Guard’s presence disarmed individual guards, but the broader effect was to remove armed protection from strikers while leaving the economic power of the companies intact. In the coalfields, memories of “Governor Sampson” became part of a longer story about governors who sent troops into Harlan County during periods of unrest.
Letters, Photographs, and the View from the Archives
Much of what we know about Sampson’s voice and image comes from manuscript collections and photographic archives scattered across Kentucky and beyond. The Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives preserves his gubernatorial papers, including executive journals and formal messages to the General Assembly, as well as correspondence that shows his daily work with appointments, pardons, and administrative crises during the early years of the Great Depression.
At Western Kentucky University, Manuscripts Collection 342 contains family correspondence between Sampson, his wife Susie, their daughters, and extended kin. The letters range from affectionate family notes to discussions of travel, finances, and the strain of public life. One separate letter, in the Henry Cherry Papers, records his 1930 correspondence with Western Kentucky State Normal School president Henry Hardin Cherry, likely about state support for higher education during the downturn.
The Filson Historical Society in Louisville holds a folder of letters between Sampson and writer Young Ewing Allison, written around 1930 and 1931. Those letters touch on politics, patronage, and the Cumberland Falls fight, revealing a governor who defended his choices fiercely while keeping one eye on his standing among Louisville opinion makers. The same institution’s archive of the 1909 Foster Hale letter preserves his concern for a single Knox County boy caught in the machinery of a distant institution.
Sampson also left a paper trail in his own publications. A 1929 pamphlet titled “Abraham Lincoln – the Kentuckian,” printed from an address he delivered to the National Republican Club in New York, shows him claiming Lincoln as a Kentucky son and using the martyred president’s story to argue for moral citizenship and Republican principles during his own administration. His congratulatory letter on the centennial of Greek independence, reproduced in Kentucky Ancestors Online, offered praise for Greece and promised that Kentuckians of Greek birth would receive fair opportunity, linking the State Progress Commission’s work to immigrant communities at home.
Visual sources deepen this portrait. The University of Louisville’s Herald Post Collection includes studio portraits of Sampson in white and dark suits, images of him seated at his desk signing papers, and a dramatic photograph labeled “Delivering message to General Assembly, January 16, 1930,” taken from the gallery above the House floor. Other photographs show him wearing a sash and carrying a small American flag at a 1930 event, standing with his wife and daughters outside a residence, and greeting delegations of civic visitors brought to Frankfort by railroad booster clubs.
Closer to home, the Knox Historical Museum has highlighted photographs of Governor Sampson at the Barbourville Horse Exposition in July 1928, smiling from the grandstand as horses circle the track at the Minton Fairgrounds. Local historians also point to a Knox Countian article on “Flem D. Sampson and ‘The Bootleger,’ A Poem,” underlining how the community remembered him both as a governor and as the judge whose courtroom shaped their stories.
Elder Statesman of Barbourville
Sampson’s time as governor ended in December 1931, when Democrat Ruby Laffoon took the oath of office. He returned to Barbourville and was elected again as circuit judge, resuming the work that had first carried him into statewide prominence. In 1940 he tried to regain a seat on the Kentucky Court of Appeals but lost the Republican primary to Eugene Siler, another mountain lawyer whose career would eventually lead to the federal bench.
Even in retirement Sampson remained part of public life. In the 1950s he joined a Citizens’ Advisory Highway Committee and, in 1959, received the Governor’s Medallion for distinguished public service. At ninety one he sat on a State Constitutional Revision Committee, a reminder that he had spent most of his adult life thinking about how Kentucky’s basic law distributed power between governor, legislature, and courts.
Sampson died on 25 May 1967 at Pewee Valley in Oldham County, where he had been living with family. Biographical references and genealogical compilations agree that his body returned to the mountains for burial in Barbourville Cemetery, where his grave appears in photographs on political graveyard and heritage tourism sites.
Today a Kentucky Historical Society roadside marker on the courthouse lawn in Barbourville sums up the story for passersby. It notes that this Kentucky governor was born in Laurel County, attended Union College, practiced law in Barbourville with Caleb Powers, served as county, district, and appellate judge, and faced the problems of the Great Depression as governor before returning to law practice and being buried in Barbourville Cemetery. ExploreKYHistory’s Knox County tour frames him alongside fellow Knox Countians James D. Black and Union College, inviting visitors to see how one small Appalachian county produced multiple governors and a regional college that shaped their careers.
For Appalachian history, Flem D. Sampson’s life illustrates the complicated dance between mountain communities and statewide power. He was at once a local judge who worried over the fate of one troubled boy, a governor who tried to balance economic development against conservation, and a political figure who sent troops into Harlan County at a critical moment in the coal wars. From Laurel County log cabin to Barbourville cemetery, his story helps explain how the people and politics of Appalachia shaped Kentucky, and how Kentucky in turn shaped the mountains.
Sources and Further Reading
Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Governors’ Papers and related records for Flem D. Sampson, including executive journals, appointment files, and messages to the General Assembly from 1927 to 1931.Wikipedia+1
MSS 342, “Sampson, Flemon Davis, 1875–1967,” Western Kentucky University, Manuscripts and Folklife Archives, family correspondence and personal papers of Flem D. Sampson and his immediate family.TechDico
Henry Cherry Papers, Western Kentucky University, Depression era correspondence, including a 21 August 1930 letter from Governor Flem D. Sampson to President Henry Hardin Cherry concerning education and state finances.CORE
Young Ewing Allison Papers, The Filson Historical Society, box 17, folder 112, correspondence between Governor Flem D. Sampson and Young Ewing Allison, 1930 to 1931, discussing politics, patronage, and Cumberland Falls.Filson Historical Society+1
Letter from Flem D. Sampson to an institutional superintendent regarding Foster Hale, 8 October 1909, Filson Historical Society digital collections, expressing concern over the classification of a Knox County boy and revealing his views on juvenile justice.Filson Historical Society
Knox County folklore collection, poem “The Bootlegger,” as referenced in The Knox Countian index entry “Flem D. Sampson and ‘The Bootleger,’ A Poem,” offering a contemporary local verse portrait of Sampson as circuit judge.Knox Historical Museum+1
“From Log Cabin to Capitol: Judge Flem D. Sampson,” Louisville Herald Post broadside, 30 October 1927, Western Kentucky University PastPerfect catalog, a campaign era profile tracing his rise from Laurel County cabin to gubernatorial candidate.westernkentuckyuniversity.pastperfectonline.com+1
University of Louisville Photographic Archives, Herald Post and related collections, especially images of Governor Flem D. Sampson delivering a message to the General Assembly on 16 January 1930, seated at his desk in Frankfort, and posing with family and visitors.digital.library.louisville.edu+2digital.library.louisville.edu+2
“Abraham Lincoln – the Kentuckian,” 12 February 1929, address by Governor Flem D. Sampson to the National Republican Club, printed as a pamphlet and preserved in the Monaghan Lincoln Collection, University of Iowa Libraries.history.ky.gov
State Progress Commission materials, including Sampson’s congratulatory letter on the centennial of Greek independence reproduced in “History Mystery: State Progress Commission,” Kentucky Ancestors Online, which shows him linking economic development to immigrant communities.Kentucky Ancestors+1
Court of Appeals decisions such as Bell v. Sampson, 232 Ky. 376 (1930), and McChesney v. Sampson, 232 Ky. 395 (1930), which interpret gubernatorial appointment and removal powers in direct response to actions taken during Sampson’s administration.Casemine+2Casemine+2
ExploreKYHistory and Kentucky Historical Society roadside marker 1884, “Flem D. Sampson (1875–1967),” located on the courthouse lawn in Barbourville, summarizing his life from Laurel County birth and Union College education to the governorship and burial in Barbourville Cemetery.explorekyhistory.ky.gov+1
Lowell H. Harrison, “Sampson, Flem D.,” in The Kentucky Encyclopedia (University Press of Kentucky, 1992), and his related treatment in Harrison and James C. Klotter, A New History of Kentucky, which synthesize Sampson’s rise from mountain lawyer to governor and his struggles with a hostile legislature.Wikipedia+1
Robert F. Sexton, “Flem D. Sampson,” in later editions of Kentucky’s Governors (University Press of Kentucky / Kentucky Historical Society), providing an extended narrative of his administration, including the Jockey Club alliance, textbook controversies, and Cumberland Falls fight.ir.library.louisville.edu
James C. Klotter, Kentucky: Portraits in Paradox, 1900–1950 (1996), chapter on Sampson’s administration, for analysis of the 1927 campaign, legislative conflicts over highways and appointments, and the broader context of interwar Kentucky politics.ir.library.louisville.edu+1
Carletta A. Bush, “Faith, Power, and Conflict: Miner Preachers and the United Mine Workers of America in the Harlan County Mine Wars, 1931–1939” (Ph.D. dissertation, West Virginia University), for detailed discussion of Sampson’s decision to deploy the National Guard after the Battle of Evarts and its impact on the strike.Wikipedia+1
National Governors Association, “Governor Flem Davis Sampson,” and LinkNKY’s “History of Kentucky’s Governors (1919–1931),” for concise biographies and timelines that emphasize his judicial background, gubernatorial tenure, and later public service.Wikipedia
“History Mystery: State Progress Commission,” Kentucky Ancestors Online (Kentucky Historical Society), for context on the State Progress Commission and reproductions of Sampson’s letter to Greek officials during the centennial of Greek independence.Kentucky Ancestors+1
N. G. Huffman, “Tom Wallace and the Cumberland Falls Fight, 1926–1931” (University of Louisville thesis), and related conservation histories that recount Sampson’s support for Insull’s dam proposal and the General Assembly’s choice to accept T. Coleman du Pont’s gift instead.ir.library.louisville.edu+1
Knox Historical Museum, The Knox Countian (especially the 2013 photo feature on Sampson at the Barbourville Horse Exposition and the 1996 index entry on “Flem D. Sampson and ‘The Bootleger,’ A Poem”), for local perspectives on his life as a Knox County judge, lawyer, and “distinguished man” of Barbourville.Knox Historical Museum+2Knox Historical Museum+2