A Texan who moved to Hopkinsville when he was 19 years old to work for Cumberland Telephone Co. created the city’s first colored electric lights for an outdoor Christmas display. Thomas Jefferson Baugh made a string of lights and dipped each clear bulb into buckets of paint for a Christmas tree in Peace Park. The lights were turned on a few days before Christmas of 1915.
Although electric lights had been introduced by General Electric a dozen years earlier, they were expensive and most Americans still did not have lights on their trees when Baugh started tinkering with the idea of color. In Hopkinsville, many homes still did not have electric power.
According to several sources, Baugh was an inventor and remained active well into his late 70s.
He was born in Texas in 1880. His family settled in Franklin, Tennessee, when he was young. Baugh moved to Hopkinsville in 1899 to take a job with the telephone company, Charles Meacham wrote in “A History of Christian County: From Oxcart to Airplane.” His father, Lovey Baugh, was a Confederate veteran. In 1901, the younger Baugh married Willie Dotha Davis, the daughter of a Union veteran. Meacham, who in addition to writing the city’s history also served as mayor and published a newspaper, wrote that the old Civil War veterans frequently met to “bury the hatchet.”
After several years with the telephone company, Baugh started his own company, Baugh Electric.
In an Athenaeum Society paper presented in 1997, Christian County Historian William T. Turner noted that Baugh invented a directional signal for automobiles in 1931. The U.S. Patent Office also has at least two other applications from Baugh for devices used in electrical work.
The Louisville Courier-Journal published a featured story about Baugh as an avid golfer in February 1959. One photo with the story showed him golfing on snowy greens at the Hopkinsville Golf and Country Club.
He golfed almost every day of the year, regardless of the weather, and usually wore sneakers because he didn’t like the feel of “walking on nails” in traditional golf shoes.
Baugh liked to puff on cigars while he golfed and said it improved his concentration, but he didn’t drink alcohol so he usually went to the clubhouse for a ginger ale or hot chocolate, depending on the weather, after he left the course.
When the Courier-Journal found him, he was carrying an old canvas golf bag stamped with the year 1916. It had belonged to a friend, and Baugh bought it at auction after the other man died.
He invented a stand for the bag using steel rods. It came in handy because he often golfed in the kind of weather that caddies wouldn’t tolerate.
Baugh died in 1964. He is buried at Riverside Cemetery.
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.
