James Hall Gets Washed Out

The Lyons-Nichols Partnership in the Danville Laundry
At James Hall, the origin of the enduring enterprise of the Danville Laundry & Dry Cleaning Co. Inc. rested in the partnership of its two founders, the Lyons family and the Nichols family. The Lyons family were Jewish clothing merchants from Cincinnati. They joined with the third and fourth Kentucky generation of the Nichols family, Danville pioneers originally from Massachusetts. Upon the deaths of brothers Henry & Samuel Lyons, the laundry fell into the hands of John M. Nichols and his sons. Nichols already managed and operated the business on a daily basis with his sons. The Nichols hold on the Danville Laundry proved as enduring as did the Nichols family’s hold on the County Clerk’s office of the Boyle County Courthouse to the rear of James Hall. For decades and through four generations following, a member of the Nichols family has served Boyle County as county clerk.
“Henry Lyons was born in the City of Cincinnati, Ohio, in the year 1849, and was a son of Mr. and Mrs.Isaac Lyons, both of whom passed the closing years of their lives at Danville, Kentucky, where their sons Henry and Samuel had cared for them with earnest filial devotion in the gracious evening of their lives. The remains of the parents and both of the sons rest in the Jewish Cemetery at Cincinnati, Ohio. The sons were closely associated in business for many years and both were numbered among the most honored and influential citizens of Danville, to whose civic and material advancement and prosperity they had contributed in generous measure. In his youth, Henry Lyons profited fully by the somewhat limited educational advantages that were afforded him, and he early gained full fellowship with honest toil and endeavor. In 1866 he came to Danville, Kentucky, and as a youth of seventeen years here formed a partnership with Samuel Straus, his cousin, and opened a clothing store. Within a short time thereafter he assumed full ownership of the business, which he continued individually and with marked success until 1887 when he was succeeded by his brother Samuel, who had long been associated with him in the enterprise. He then went to California for a period of rest and recuperation, as his health had become much impaired, and upon his return to Danville, about four months later, in April 1887, his physical powers were up to good standard and he was ready to enter once more the field of vigorous business. He resumed his alliance with his brother, and they soon enlarged the scope of their business by opening a second store. They conducted these two mercantile establishments with characteristic ability and attending success until 1895 when they sold their clothing store to J. L. Frohman & Company, the members of which firm came to Danville from the City of Chicago, Illinois. The mercantile business had been conducted by the brothers under the firm name of Henry & Samuel Lyons. On the 10th of June, 1895, a partnership was formed by Henry and Samuel Lyons and John M. Nichols, and they established the Danville Steam Laundry, with modern equipment and service. They developed this enterprise into one of the most important and successful of the kind in the state. On the 4th of October, 1902, the large and prosperous business was incorporated under the title of the Danville Steam Laundry, and since June 19, 1909 the present corporate title has obtained — the Danville Laundry and Dry Cleaning Company. Samuel Lyons became president of the company, Henry Lyons, the secretary and treasurer, and John M. Nichols, the general manager. Henry Lyons, as before noted, died on the 9th of December, 1912, and his namesake, Henry Lyons Nichols, succeeded him as secretary and treasurer of the company. The personnel of the executive corps of this corporation thereafter continued unchanged until the sudden death of Samuel Lyons, the honored president, on the 25th of July, 1920, and with the necessary reorganization then entailed the present officers were chosen, as here noted: John M. Nichols, president; W. [Walter] Barrett Nichols, vice-president and assistant secretary; R.[Richard] Bush Nichols, manager; and Henry Lyons Nichols, secretary, and treasurer. Henry Lyons became one of the substantial capitalists and loyal and influential citizens of this section of Kentucky, and both he and his brother Samuel were foremost in the field of worthy charity and philanthropy, as well as in that of civic liberality and progressiveness. Of their varied activities and benefactions, more specific mention will be found in the memoir to Samuel Lyons, which immediately follows this review. The brothers played a large part in the business and social life of Danville and honored the state of their adoption by their generous, kindly and noble lives.”
Source: History of Kentucky, Volume 5. William Elsey Connelley, Ellis Merton Coulter. American Historical Society, 1922, pp.146-147.

History of Danville Laundry & Dry Cleaning Co. Inc.
Danville’s Advocate-Messenger newspapers recalled the following history of the firm on July 10, 1940.
“The Danville Laundry and Dry Cleaning Company was established in June 1895, in part of the building now occupied by the Company, by John M. Nichols and the late Henry and Sam Lyons.
“At that time there was no Family Wash business in any commercial laundry, nor was there a dry cleaning department.
“The Family Wash Department was added some years later and many years afterward the dry cleaning department was added.
“The firm was originally known as the Danville Steam Laundry and in 1910 changed its charter and became the Danville Laundry and Dry Cleaning Co.
“When the plant was opened seven people were employed; today the number of employees is slightly in excess of one hundred. The labor turnover is very small; some employees have been with the firm for forty years, and ten year’s service is very common.
“At one time this firm did the largest shipping business in the state of Kentucky. That was before the days of trucks. Business has changed, now necessitating the operation of firm-owned truck into the territories served. Outside of Danville there are operated trucks to Lancaster, Stanford, Hustonville, Liberty, Junction City, Perryville, Springfield, Harrodsburg, Burgin, Versailles, Nicholasville, and Lawrenceburg.
“At the death of Mr. Henry Lyons in 1913 his namesake, Henry Lyons Nichols, was made Secretary-Treasurer, and at the death of Mr. Sam Lyons in 1920, the two brothers came into the firm, it now being composed of John M. Nichols, President; W. Barret Nichols, Vice-president, R. Bush Nichols, Manager and Henry Lyons Nichols, Secretary-Treasurer.
“New departments are constantly being added, the latest being two air-conditioned storage vaults and a fur remodeling department.
The firm has tried always to keep abreast of the times and give the people of Danville and vicinity the Laundry and Dry Cleaning service they may expect from an up-to-date plant.“

James Hall Today – A Site Forgotten

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Stray Leaves welcomes black families with the surname of James to submit their Y-chromosome DNA results for comparison and inclusion in our family. Our James family already includes the discovery of black families and even an indigenous Aboriginal family. Of particular interest are any black families whose ancestry came through the Forks of the Road slave market in Natchez, MS, black enslaved of Choctaw and Chickasaw families, and black people with ancestry who came through the Cochran slave market of Alexandria, VA. We are sure there are more of us yet to find.
www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2021/02/19/black-families-slavery-dna-oral-histories/4094494001/?f...
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Black families using DNA, genealogy to fill in historical gaps left by slavery
www.usatoday.com
Inspired by the 400th anniversary of the 1619 African landing, more Black people are researching their roots and tracing their ancestry.
Are any of them named James?
www.cnet.com/news/1-6-million-year-old-mammoth-dna-uncovers-lineage-we-never-knew-existed/?fbclid...
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1.6-million-year-old mammoth DNA uncovers lineage we never knew existed
www.cnet.com
The breakthrough research reveals an entirely new lineage of mammoth, previously unknown to science.
Theater advertisements for plays appeared like this in newspapers. This ad for Bloomer Girl appeared in August of 1845. Bloomer Girl was the product of Daniel Lewis James Jr. and principally his wife Lilith Stanward. The following excerpt about them appears in JJSL:
Written against the backdrop of World War II, when blacks were moving out of the South into an industrial workforce, and women also were moving out of the home into the workplace, Bloomer Girl is set in the pre-Civil War era, interweaving themes of black and female equality, war and peace, and politics. The play’s principal character, Dolly, is based upon the inventor of the bloomer, Amelia Bloomer, a contemporary of an acquaintance of Vassie James and Susan B. Anthony. As a fighter in the suffragette movement for women’s rights, Bloomer advocated, “Get rid of those heavy hoop skirts; wear bloomers like men; let’s get pants; let’s be their equal.” In the play, Dolly politicks for gender equality, as her rebellious niece Evelina politicks her suitor, a Southern slaveholding aristocrat, for racial equality. As the play’s librettist, Yip Harburg, stated,
Bloomer Girl was about “the indivisibility of human freedom.”
Bloomer Girl opened on Broadway on October 5, 1944. Dan (Daniel Lewis James) insisted Lilith’s (Dan’s wife) name come first in the show’s credits. The play was an instant hit, lasting 654 performances. Dan remained modest about the show’s success, considering his contribution a failure. “...I seem not to have given full credit to my collaborators on the 1944 musical comedy Bloomer Girl...The facts, in brief, are as follows: the originator of the story idea from which the musical grew was my wife, Lilith James, who charmingly chose the perversities of Fashion to dramatize the early struggles of the Women's Rights movement. She also developed the principal characters. I joined her in writing a first draft of the libretto. It failed to satisfy our lyricist, E. Y. Harburg, and Harold Arlen, the composer. It also failed to satisfy us. An impasse developed at which point all agreed to call in the team of Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy who were experienced writers in the field of musical comedy. They reworked the material to the satisfaction of everyone but Lilith and myself, who had hoped to invade Gilbert & Sullivan territory, with what we thought was a light-hearted paradoxical look at history. What I took for a personal artistic failure for which I blamed, first of all, myself, went on to become a lavish entertainment which played on Broadway for eighteen months and has since often been revived in summer theater. If I was not delighted, audiences certainly were and full credit for this should be given to Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy (now deceased) without whom the production would never have taken place...”
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YOU CAN'T HELP BUT WONDER...What might have happened if Alan Pinkerton assigned Kate Warne to track and capture Jesse James?In 1856, twenty-three-year-old widow Kate Warne walked into the office of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Chicago, announcing that she had seen the company’s ad and wanted to apply for the job. “Sorry,” Alan Pinkerton told her, “but we don’t have any clerical staff openings. We’re looking to hire a new detective.” Pinkerton would later describe Warne as having a “commanding” presence that morning. “I’m here to apply for the detective position,” she replied. Taken aback, Pinkerton explained to Kate that women aren’t suited to be detectives, and then Kate forcefully and eloquently made her case. Women have access to places male detectives can’t go, she noted, and women can befriend the wives and girlfriends of suspects and gain information from them. Finally, she observed, men tend to become braggards around women who encourage boasting, and women have keen eyes for detail. Pinkerton was convinced. He hired her.
Shortly after Warne was hired, she proved her value as a detective by befriending the wife of a suspect in a major embezzlement case. Warne not only gained the information necessary to arrest and convict the thief, but she discovered where the embezzled funds were hidden and was able to recover nearly all of them. On another case she extracted a confession from a suspect while posing as a fortune teller. Pinkerton was so impressed that he created a Women’s Detective Bureau within his agency and made Kate Warne the leader of it.
In her most famous case, Kate Warne may have changed the history of the world. In February 1861 the president of the Wilmington and Baltimore railroad hired Pinkerton to investigate rumors of threats against the railroad. Looking into it, Pinkerton soon found evidence of something much more dangerous—a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln before his inauguration. Pinkerton assigned Kate Warne to the case. Taking the persona of “Mrs. Cherry,” a Southern woman visiting Baltimore, she managed to infiltrate the secessionist movement there and learn the specific details of the scheme—a plan to kill the president-elect as he passed through Baltimore on the way to Washington.
Pinkerton relayed the threat to Lincoln and urged him to travel to Washington from a different direction. But Lincoln was unwilling to cancel the speaking engagements he had agreed to along the way, so Pinkerton resorted to a Plan B. For the trip through Baltimore Lincoln was secretly transferred to a different train and disguised as an invalid. Posing as his caregiver was Kate Warne. When she afterwards described her sleepless night with the President, Pinkerton was inspired to adopt the motto that became famously associated with his agency: “We never sleep.” The details Kate Warne had uncovered had enabled the “Baltimore Plot” to be thwarted.
During the Civil War, Warne and the female detectives under her supervision conducted numerous risky espionage missions, with Warne’s charm and her skill at impersonating a Confederate sympathizer giving her access to valuable intelligence. After the war she continued to handle dangerous undercover assignments on high-profile cases, while at the same time overseeing the agency’s growing staff of female detectives.
Kate Warne, America’s first female detective, died of pneumonia at age 34, on January 28, 1868, one hundred fifty-three years ago today. “She never let me down,” Pinkerton said of one of his most trusted and valuable agents. She was buried in the Pinkerton family plot in Chicago.
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