Especially piquant is McCalla’s note on the ticket for Thomas F. Brennan,
M’Calla’s editor at The Kentucky Gazette ~ ”Killed by Charles Wickliffe 1829.”
Under the pseudonym ”Dentatus,” M’Calla in 1829 published comments critical
of Robert Wickliffe. Wickliffe’s son, Charles, went to the Gazette office, and, in a
bitter exchange with Brennan, attempted to discover the author of the column.
Unsuccessful, Wickliffe drew out his pistol and shot Brennan, who died the next
day. ”The whole,” wrote Robert Wickliffe to his fellow Whig, Henry Clay, ”has
been the work and villainy of the prince of Villains, John M’Calla.”2 Tried for
murder, the young Wickliffe was defended by Clay, and the jury took only five
minutes to return a judgment of not guilty. Later in 1829 appears a notice for the
funeral of the hot—blooded Charles Wickliffe, killed in a duel with another editor,
George J. Trotter, who later went mad.21

Only one of the invitations is clearly for a black person, Mrs. Rachel Bleu,
who died in August of 1835. Formerly a slave of Mrs. James Morrison, she was

' emancipated by her husband, Rolla or Rolly, on 1 August 1825.22 One, that for
Mrs. Anne Armstrong, gives an age — 80 years. There are numerous
announcements for the funerals of infants — 36 (8%) in total; and this does not
include others who were children or minors. Overall, 238 (55%) are for males,
191 (45%) for females. The survey ends with 1846, the year M’Calla moved to
Washington, DC.

At a time when there was no governmental charge to gather statistics,
M’Calla no doubt saw the saving of these funeral notices as the creation of a
valuable record of the community. The Kentucky Gazette was established in

' August of 1787, but the first published death notice for a Lexingtonian, a
newsworthy case of suicide, appears in the Gazette of 28 June 1789; the second,
for an execution, appears on 30 May 1795, six years later. The coverage of early
local deaths appears to have been notably irregular, perhaps because of an
assumption that such nearby events were generally well known within the town.
Even the practice of circulating funeral notices was comparatively uncommon
until the early 18205, if evidence from surviving examples provides a

‘ representative sampling.

While General M’Calla’s extensive collection of Lexington funeral
invitations was finding form, another and ultimately larger collection was being
gathered by Cyrus Parker Jones, a black huckster who worked in the Market
House downtown. Cyrus Jones was called on to deliver many of the notices, and
he took care to keep a copy of each in his own scrapbook, located today in the
Lexington Public Library. 3 M’Calla appears at first to have kept his pieces in
loose form, making a book of them in Washington during the Civil War, when he
was almost seventy years old. At the beginning of the album is the note:
”Mortuary of Lexington, Kentucky. Register of deaths in Lexington and Fayette
county Kentucky, beginning in the year 1802, and containing the names Of
various other persons who died elsewhere; with an Index, Compiled by Jno. M.
M’Calla September 10“1 1862.” Although there is significant duplication between
the two collections, the M’cCalla collection extends several years further back in
time, and it also contains notices not in the Jones collection. Where M’Calla

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