March is Women’s History Month, and there are several stories of Hopkinsville women to highlight at this time. Here are four notables in local history:
A name claimed too late
One of the earliest of these stories occurred during the period of white settlement in Christian County, when the eventual county seat was almost officially named for a woman.
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Town founder Bartholomew Wood, who claimed a 1,200-acre land grant as a Revolutionary War veteran in 1796, intended to name the town for his eldest daughter, Elizabeth.
But when the town was incorporated in 1804, another community — in Hardin County — had already been recognized as Elizabethtown. So the Kentucky General Assembly instead chose the name Hopkinsville after a Revolutionary War veteran from Henderson County, Gen. Samuel Hopkins.
An attorney and suffragist
Born on Oct. 12, 1885, Mary Edmunds Bronaugh was admitted to the Kentucky Bar to practice law in 1915 — making her one of the state’s earliest female lawyers. She was a 1913 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School.
A stalwart in the women’s suffrage movement in Kentucky, Bronaugh was a founding member and the first chairwoman of the Kentucky League of Women Voters.
A Kentucky Historical Society marker recognizing Bronaugh was dedicated on Dec. 5, 2023, outside the Christian County Justice Center. It was the 22nd state historical marker erected in Christian County and the first to a woman.
The only woman elected Hopkinsville mayor
Jeffers Bend Environmental Center — a nature preserve on the north side of Hopkinsville comprised of 40 acres of grassland, a 1-acre lake and a 2.7-mile walking trail — is named for the late Sherrill Caroline Lackey Jeffers.
Widely known as Sherry Jeffers, she was Hopkinsville’s mayor from 1982 through 1985. No other woman before or since has been elected mayor of Hopkinsville.
Prior to becoming mayor, Jeffers was a Christian County magistrate. She held several leaderships positions, including chairwoman of the local Industrial Development Authority, and served on the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence. She was also an interim president for the local Chamber of Commerce.
Jeffers died in 1997 at age 58. Her father, Frederick Ernest “Dutch” Lackey, was also a Hopkinsville mayor.
A young delegate
Nineteen-year-old Gail McHenry was home on summer break from Indiana University in 1968 when she was chosen to be a Kentucky delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
As one of the country’s youngest presidential delegates, McHenry was featured in several newspaper and magazine stories. Ebony magazine published a three-page article about McHenry, which included photos of her mother, Eleanor McHenry, and sister, Linda, who accompanied her in Chicago.
Protests, some violent, bordered the convention, which occurred in the midst of opposition to the war in Vietnam and followed the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In a 2020 interview with Hoptown Chronicle, Gail McHenry Waters recalled security measures taken to protect the delegates. The convention hall was surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire.
After the convention, she told Ebony: “I’ll remember everything, including the treatment of people both inside and outside the convention hall — a treatment, a brutality that wasn’t much different from what black people have gone through for so many years in the South.”
Walters and her siblings returned to Hopkinsville last summer for a 60th anniversary event celebrating their late father, civil rights attorney Louis P. McHenry, and his role in founding Hopkinsville’s Human Rights Commission.
Read more women’s history stories in the Hoptown Chronicle archives.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
